The American Experiment

James MacGregor Burns

Contents

The Vineyard of Liberty

PROLOGUE The Vineyard

PART I • Liberty and Union

CHAPTER 1 The Strategy of Liberty

THE GREAT FEAR

A RAGE FOR LIBERTY

PHILADELPHIA: THE CONTINENTAL CAUCUS

CHAPTER 2 The Third Cadre

THE ANTI-FEDERALISTS

THE COURSE IS SET

VICE AND VIRTUE

CHAPTER 3 The Experiment Begins

THE FEDERALISTS TAKE COMMAND

THE NEW YORKERS

THE FEDERALIST THRUST

THE DEADLY PATTERN

DIVISIONS ABROAD AND AT HOME

CHAPTER 4 The Trial of Liberty

PHILADELPHIANS: THE EXPERIMENTERS

QUASI-WAR ABROAD

SEMI-REPRESSION AT HOME

THE VENTURES OF THE FIRST DECADE

SHOWDOWN: THE ELECTION OF 1800

PART II • Liberty in Arcadia

CHAPTER 5 Jeffersonian Leadership

“THE EYES OF HUMANITY ARE FIXED ON US”

TO LOUISIANA AND BEYOND

CHECKMATE: THE FEDERALIST BASTION STANDS

CHAPTER 6 The American Way of War

“THE HURRICANE …NOW BLASTING THE WORLD”

THE IRRESISTIBLE WAR

WATERSIDE YANKEES: THE FEDERALISTS AT EBB TIDE

FEDERALISTS: THE TIDE RUNS OUT

CHAPTER 7 The American Way of Peace

GOOD FEELINGS AND ILL

ADAMS’ DIPLOMACY AND MONROE’S DICTUM

VIRGINIANS: THE LAST OF THE GENTLEMEN POLITICIANS

THE CHECKING AND BALANCING OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

JUBILEE l826: THE PASSING OF THE HEROES

CHAPTER 8 The Birth of the Machines

FARMS: THE JACKS-OF-ALL-TRADES

FACTORIES: THE LOOMS OF LOWELL

FREIGHT: THE BIG DITCHES

THE INNOVATING LEADERS

PART III • Liberty and Equality

CHAPTER 9 The Wind from the West

THE REVOLT OF THE OUTS

THE DANCE OF THE FACTIONS

JACKSONIAN LEADERSHIP

CHAPTER 10 Parties: The People’s Constitution

EQUALITY: THE JACKSONIAN DEMOS

STATE POLITICS: SEEDBED OF PARTY

MAJORITIES: THE FLOWERING OF THE PARTIES

CHAPTER 11 The Majority That Never Was

BLACKS IN BONDAGE

WOMEN IN NEED

MIGRANTS IN POVERTY

LEADERS WITHOUT FOLLOWERS

PART IV • The Empire of Liberty

CHAPTER 12 Whigs: The Business of Politics

THE WHIG WAY OF GOVERNMENT

THE ECONOMICS OF WHIGGERY

EXPERIMENTS IN ESCAPE

CHAPTER 13 The Empire of Liberty

TRAILS OF TEARS AND HOPE

ANNEXATION: POLITICS AND WAR

THE GEOMETRY OF BALANCE

CHAPTER 14 The Culture of Liberty

THE ENGINE IN THE VINEYARD

RELIGION: FREE EXERCISE

SCHOOLS: THE “TEMPLES OF FREEDOM”

LEADERS OF THE PENNY PRESS

ABOLITIONISTS: BY TONGUE AND PEN

PART V • Neither Liberty Nor Union

CHAPTER 15 The Ripening Vineyard

THE CORNUCOPIA

THE CORNUCOPIA OVERFLOWS

“IT WILL RAISE A HELL OF A STORM”

THE ILLINOIS REPUBLICANS

CHAPTER 16 The Grapes of Wrath

SOUTH CAROLINIANS: THE POWER ELITE

THE GRAND DEBATES

THE POLITICS OF SLAVERY

CHAPTER 17 The Blood-Red Wine

THE FLAG THAT BORE A SINGLE STAR

MEN IN BLUE AND GRAY

THE BATTLE CRIES OF FREEDOM

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

The Workshop of Democracy

PART I • The Crisis of Democracy

CHAPTER 1 The War of Liberation

MANNING THE FRONT

FORGING THE SWORD

THE SOCIETY OF THE BATTLEFIELD

“LET US DIE TO MAKE MEN FREE”

CHAPTER 2 The Reconstruction of Slavery

BOUND FOR FREEDOM

A REVOLUTIONARY EXPERIMENT

“I’SE FREE. AIN’T WUF NUFFIN”

PART II • The Business of Democracy

CHAPTER 3 The Forces of Production

INNOVATORS: THE INGENIOUS YANKEES

INVESTORS: EASTERN DOLLARS AND WESTERN RISKS

ENTREPRENEURS: THE CALIFORNIANS

INDUSTRIALISTS: CARNEGIE, ROCKEFELLER, AND THE TWO CAPITALISMS

PHILADELPHIA 1876: THE PROUD EXHIBITORS

CHAPTER 4 The Structure of Classes

UPPER CLASSES: THE NEW RICH AND THE OLD

THE MIDDLE CLASSES: A WOMAN’S WORK

THE FARMER’S LOT

WORKING CLASSES: THE CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE

SOCIAL CLASS AND SOCIAL OUTCAST

CHAPTER 5 The Power of Ideas

DINNER AT DELMONICO’S

THE BITCH-GODDESS SUCCESS

“TOILING MILLIONS NOW ARE WAKING”

THE ALLIANCE: A DEMOCRACY OF LEADERS

CHAPTER 6 The Brokers of Politics

THE OHIOANS: LEADERS AS BROKERS

POLITICS: THE DANCE OF THE ROPEWALKERS

THE POVERTY OF POLICY

SHOWDOWN 1896

TRIUMPHANT REPUBLICANISM

PART III • Progressive Democracy?

CHAPTER 7 The Urban Progressives

THE SHAPE OF THE CITY

THE LIFE OF THE CITY

THE LEADERS OF THE CITY

THE REFORMATION OF THE CITIES

WOMEN: THE PROGRESSIVE CADRE

CHAPTER 8 The Modernizing Mind

THE PULSE OF THE MACHINE

THE CRITICS: IDEAS VS. INTERESTS?

ART: “ALL THAT IS HOLY IS PROFANED”

WRITING: “VENERABLE IDEAS ARE SWEPT AWAY”

“ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR”

CHAPTER 9 The Reformation of Economic Power

THE PERSONAL USES OF POWER

FOREIGN POLICY WITH THE TR BRAND

REFORM: LEADERSHIP AND POWER

CHAPTER 10 The Cauldron of Leadership

TAFT, TR, AND THE TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES

WILSON AND THE THREE DEMOCRATIC PARTIES

ARMAGEDDON

PART IV • Democracy on Trial

CHAPTER 11 The New Freedom

THE ENGINE OF DEMOCRACY

THE ANATOMY OF PROTEST

MARKETS, MORALITY, AND THE “STAR OF EMPIRE”

CHAPTER 12 Over There

WILSON AND THE ROAD TO WAR

MOBILIZING THE WORKSHOP

“NOUS VOILÀ, LAFAYETTE!”

OVER HERE: LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY

CHAPTER 13 The Fight for the League

THE MIRRORED HALLS OF VERSAILLES

THE BATTLE FOR THE TREATY

1920: THE GREAT AND SOLEMN REJECTION

PART V • The Culture of Democracy

CHAPTER 14 The Age of Mellon

“THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA …”

BANKERS AND BATTLESHIPS

THE VOICES OF PROTEST

CHAPTER 15 The Commercialized Culture

THE WORKSHOP OF EDUCATION

THE PRESS AS ENTERTAINMENT

ENTERTAINMENT AS SPECTATORSHIP

THE WORKSHOP AND THE DEMOS

CHAPTER 16 The Vacant Workshop

LIFE IN THE DEPRESSION

THE CRISIS OF IDEAS

“ONCE I BUILT A RAILROAD, MADE IT RUN”

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Crosswinds of Freedom

PART I • What Kind of Freedom?

CHAPTER 1 The Crisis of Leadership

THE DIVIDED LEGACY

THE “HUNDRED DAYS” OF ACTION

“DISCIPLINE AND DIRECTION UNDER LEADERSHIP”?

CHAPTER 2 The Arc of Conflict

CLASS WAR IN AMERICA

“LENIN OR CHRIST” OR A PATH BETWEEN?

THE POLITICS OF TUMULT

APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE

CHAPTER 3 The Crisis of Majority Rule

COURT-PACKING: THE SWITCH IN TIME

CONGRESS-PURGING: THE BROKEN SPELL

DEADLOCK AT THE CENTER

THE FISSION OF IDEAS

THE PEOPLE’S ART

PART II • Strategies of Freedom

CHAPTER 4 Freedom Under Siege

THE ZIGZAG ROAD TO WAR

THE WAR OF TWO WORLDS

THE PRODUCTION OF WAR

THE RAINBOW COALITION EMBATTLED

CHAPTER 5 Cold War: The Fearful Giants

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

THE LONG TELEGRAM

THE SPIRAL OF FEAR

THE PRICE OF SUSPICION

CHAPTER 6 The Imperium of Freedom

THE TECHNOLOGY OF FREEDOM

THE LANGUAGE OF FREEDOM

DILEMMAS OF FREEDOM

CHAPTER 7 The Free and the Unfree

THE BOSTON IRISH

THE SOUTHERN POOR

THE INVISIBLE LATINS

THE REVOLUTIONARY ASIANS

PART III • Liberation Struggles

CHAPTER 8 Striding Toward Freedom

ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

MARCHING TO WAR

WE SHALL OVERCOME

CHAPTER 9 The World Turned Upside Down

PEOPLE OF THIS GENERATION

ROLLING THUNDER

INTO THE QUICKSAND

SONGS OF THE SIXTIES

CHAPTER 10 Liberty, Equality, Sisterhood

BREAKING THROUGH THE SILKEN CURTAIN

THE LIBERATION OF WOMEN

THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

PART IV • The Crosswinds of Freedom

CHAPTER 11 Prime Time: Peking and Moscow

FINDING CHINA

PEACE WITHOUT PEACE

FOREIGN POLICY: THE FALTERING EXPERIMENTS

CHAPTER 12 Vice and Virtue

WATERGATE: A MORALITY TALE

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

CARTER: THE ARC OF MORALITY

GUN AND BIBLE

CHAPTER 13 The Culture of the Workshop

THE DICING GAME OF SCIENCE

THE RICH AND THE POOR

CROSSWAYS, LAND AND SKY

PART V • The Rebirth of Freedom?

CHAPTER 14 The Kaleidoscope of Thought

HABITS OF INDIVIDUALISM

KINESIS: THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIANS

SUPERSPECTATORSHIP

THE NEW YORKERS

THE CONSERVATIVE MALL

CHAPTER 15 The Decline of Leadership

REPUBLICANS: WAITING FOR MR. RIGHT

THE STRUCTURE OF DISARRAY

REALIGNMENT? WAITING FOR LEFTY

A REBIRTH OF LEADERSHIP?

MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE: A PERSONAL EPILOGUE

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

The American Experiment

The Vineyard of Liberty

James MacGregor Burns

To the vital cadres of history—the archivists, librarians, research assistants, and secretaries—who make possible the writing of history

I sought in my heart to give myself unto wine; I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me vineyards; I made me gardens and orchards, and pools to water them; I got me servants and maidens, and great possessions of cattle; I gathered me also silver and gold, and men singers and women singers, and the delights of the sons of men, and musical instruments of all sorts, and whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them; I withheld not my heart from any joy. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and behold! all was vanity and vexation of spirit! I saw that wisdom excelleth folly, as light excelleth darkness.

From Ecclesiastes, as quoted by Thomas Jefferson, 1816

Contents

PROLOGUE The Vineyard

PART I • Liberty and Union

CHAPTER 1 The Strategy of Liberty

THE GREAT FEAR

A RAGE FOR LIBERTY

PHILADELPHIA: THE CONTINENTAL CAUCUS

CHAPTER 2 The Third Cadre

THE ANTI-FEDERALISTS

THE COURSE IS SET

VICE AND VIRTUE

CHAPTER 3 The Experiment Begins

THE FEDERALISTS TAKE COMMAND

THE NEW YORKERS

THE FEDERALIST THRUST

THE DEADLY PATTERN

DIVISIONS ABROAD AND AT HOME

CHAPTER 4 The Trial of Liberty

PHILADELPHIANS: THE EXPERIMENTERS

QUASI-WAR ABROAD

SEMI-REPRESSION AT HOME

THE VENTURES OF THE FIRST DECADE

SHOWDOWN: THE ELECTION OF 1800

PART II • Liberty in Arcadia

CHAPTER 5 Jeffersonian Leadership

“THE EYES OF HUMANITY ARE FIXED ON US”

TO LOUISIANA AND BEYOND

CHECKMATE: THE FEDERALIST BASTION STANDS

CHAPTER 6 The American Way of War

“THE HURRICANE …NOW BLASTING THE WORLD”

THE IRRESISTIBLE WAR

WATERSIDE YANKEES: THE FEDERALISTS AT EBB TIDE

FEDERALISTS: THE TIDE RUNS OUT

CHAPTER 7 The American Way of Peace

GOOD FEELINGS AND ILL

ADAMS’ DIPLOMACY AND MONROE’S DICTUM

VIRGINIANS: THE LAST OF THE GENTLEMEN POLITICIANS

THE CHECKING AND BALANCING OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

JUBILEE l826: THE PASSING OF THE HEROES

CHAPTER 8 The Birth of the Machines

FARMS: THE JACKS-OF-ALL-TRADES

FACTORIES: THE LOOMS OF LOWELL

FREIGHT: THE BIG DITCHES

THE INNOVATING LEADERS

PART III • Liberty and Equality

CHAPTER 9 The Wind from the West

THE REVOLT OF THE OUTS

THE DANCE OF THE FACTIONS

JACKSONIAN LEADERSHIP

CHAPTER 10 Parties: The People’s Constitution

EQUALITY: THE JACKSONIAN DEMOS

STATE POLITICS: SEEDBED OF PARTY

MAJORITIES: THE FLOWERING OF THE PARTIES

CHAPTER 11 The Majority That Never Was

BLACKS IN BONDAGE

WOMEN IN NEED

MIGRANTS IN POVERTY

LEADERS WITHOUT FOLLOWERS

PART IV • The Empire of Liberty

CHAPTER 12 Whigs: The Business of Politics

THE WHIG WAY OF GOVERNMENT

THE ECONOMICS OF WHIGGERY

EXPERIMENTS IN ESCAPE

CHAPTER 13 The Empire of Liberty

TRAILS OF TEARS AND HOPE

ANNEXATION: POLITICS AND WAR

THE GEOMETRY OF BALANCE

CHAPTER 14 The Culture of Liberty

THE ENGINE IN THE VINEYARD

RELIGION: FREE EXERCISE

SCHOOLS: THE “TEMPLES OF FREEDOM”

LEADERS OF THE PENNY PRESS

ABOLITIONISTS: BY TONGUE AND PEN

PART V • Neither Liberty Nor Union

CHAPTER 15 The Ripening Vineyard

THE CORNUCOPIA

THE CORNUCOPIA OVERFLOWS

“IT WILL RAISE A HELL OF A STORM”

THE ILLINOIS REPUBLICANS

CHAPTER 16 The Grapes of Wrath

SOUTH CAROLINIANS: THE POWER ELITE

THE GRAND DEBATES

THE POLITICS OF SLAVERY

CHAPTER 17 The Blood-Red Wine

THE FLAG THAT BORE A SINGLE STAR

MEN IN BLUE AND GRAY

THE BATTLE CRIES OF FREEDOM

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

PROLOGUE

The Vineyard

AS AMERICANS GAINED THEIR liberty from Britain in the 1780s, they had only the most general idea of the great lands stretching to the west. But the scattered reports from explorers had indicated abundance and diversity: a huge central plain and valley drained by a river four thousand miles long; beyond that, an endless series of mountain ranges rising to rocky peaks and interspersed with burning deserts; and then a final mountain range sloping down to a green coastal fringe on the Pacific. There were stories of boundless physical riches in the bottomlands of the rivers, the herds of buffalo stretching for hundreds of miles, primeval forests so thick that migrating geese could fly over them for a thousand miles and never see a flash of sunlight on the ground below.

People living in the thirteen states in the east savored these reports, but they savored even more the diversity and abundance of their own regions. They too could boast of lush valleys and lofty mountain ranges, ample farmlands and invigorating climate. New Hampshire farmers could still be battling blizzards while Virginians saw their first tobacco plants breaking through the red soil. And their own explorers spoke of the matchless beauties of the east. One of these was Thomas Pownall, an eminently practical young Englishman who had helped plan the war against the French and Indians, and in the 1750s had been rewarded with the governorship of Massachusetts.

A tireless traveler along the seaboard and into the mountains, Pownall set about making a map of the “middle British colonies.” A no-nonsense type, he ended his map at the Mississippi and dismissed most of the topography of central Pennsylvania as “Endless Mountains.” But Pownall, in doing his work, was constantly distracted by the charm and luxuriance of the land he charted—the wild vines and cherries and pears and prunes; the “flaunting Blush of Spring, when the Woods glow with a thousand Tints that the flowering Trees and Shrubs throw out”; the wild rye that sprouted in winter and appeared green through the snow; above all, by the autumn leaves: the “Red, the Scarlet, the bright and the deep Yellow, the warm Brown,” so flamboyant that the eye could hardly bear them.

Pownall was eager for Americans to learn from European experience with the cultivation of crops. But he was cautious about trying to transplant European vines to the American climate, with its extremes of dry and wet, its thunderous showers followed by “Gleams of excessive Heat,” when the skins of “Exotic grapes” might burst. Better, he said, that Americans try to cultivate and meliorate their native vines, small and sour and thick-skinned though the grapes be. Given time and patience, even these vines could grow luxuriant and their grapes delicious.

Some ten thousand years ago or more, big-game hunters from Siberia crossed over the Bering Strait and pushed down along an ice-free corridor through Canada to the grasslands below. These were the first Americans. As they fanned out to the south and east they hunted down and killed countless bison, mastodons, mammoths, and other game with their grooved spears. It took the descendants of these onetime Mongols about a hundred and fifty years to reach the present-day Mexican border and the Atlantic coast, and another six hundred to cross the Isthmus into South America. By that time, they had killed off almost all the big game and had mainly turned to growing maize and other grains.

By the 1780s, Americans living along the Atlantic—immigrants from the opposite direction, the east—had lived with the Indians, as they were misnamed, for a century and a half. Whites tended either to idealize red people as noble savages or to fear and despise them as shiftless, thieving, cruel, ignorant, and Godless. Actually, the Indians were as polyglot and diverse in character as were the European Americans three centuries after Columbus had arrived in the New World with his ship’s company of Spaniards, Italians, Irishmen, and Jews.

At this time, all the land west of the Mississippi—and hence the Indians occupying it—lay under the dominion of Spain. The French had once owned much of the plains to the immediate west of the Mississippi, and the Russians had infiltrated down the Pacific coast, so that to varying degrees the Indians felt the impact of three European cultures. Closest to Spanish influence were the theocratic Pueblos of present-day New Mexico and Arizona, including the Hopi clinging to the crests of high mesas and the Rio Grande Pueblos with their adobe houses. In the northwest, stretching up to present-day British Columbia and Alaska, the Kwakiutl, Nootka, and other tribes typically lived off fishing, hunting, and berrying. Residing in plank houses, they fashioned totem poles as family crests and maintained a class system consisting of chiefs, commoners, and slaves. These northwestern people, backed up against precipitous mountain ranges, felt close to the sea. “When the tide is out,” said the Nootka, “the table is set.”

The great expanse of land running from the plateau of Idaho and Montana through the plains to the prairie region of the upper midwest was occupied by a variety of tribes that one day would become famous: the Blackfeet, Crows, Sioux, and Cheyenne of the plains, and the Pawnees, Osage, and Illinois of the prairies. The more eastern of these peoples farmed and lived in permanent villages, from which they might hunt buffalo. The farther west a tribe lived, the more likely it was to be nomadic, dependent on horses for travel, buffalo for meat, and tipis for shelter. Plains Indians had a reputation for being warlike.

Yet the first Americans defied generalization. Some, like the Kwakiutl, had sharply defined classes based on ostentatious possession of wealth; others, like the Zuñi, did not. Some were religious and others not, and the religions embraced an enormous variety of gods, priests, rites, practices, and forms of magic. Many, though not all, were creative in crafts, art, and music. Their personalities and cultures varied widely. One scholar has differentiated among the controversial Pueblos, the egocentric northwest coast men, the manly-hearted plains people, the aggressive but insecure Iroquois.

Indians had no common speech. When Europeans arrived with their own dozen or so languages, American Indians were speaking in at least two thousand separate tongues. Few Indians of one speech could understand that of others; the languages were mutually unintelligible. Within four centuries, at least half of those languages would be extinct—in part because the tongues carrying them were to be silenced for good.

The plight of the first Americans in the east was far different, in the 1780s, from that of the Indians in the central and western regions. The hand of the Spanish in the great west, and of the French in the Mississippi Valley, had been relatively light; they were mainly explorers and trappers, soldiers, missionaries. The seaboard settlers had come to settle and to stay—often on the tribal lands of the Indians. Almost from the start, a civil war had existed between native and new Americans—a civil war less of arms than of disease. Two little islands told the story. “When the English first settled Martha’s Vineyard in 1642,” Howard Zinn writes, “the Wampanoags there numbered perhaps three thousand. There were no wars on that island, but by 1764, only 313 Indians were left there. Similarly, Block Island Indians numbered perhaps 1,200 to 1,500 in 1662, and by 1774 were reduced to fifty-one.”

By 1790, most of the Indians on tideland and piedmont had died or been killed off or confined to reservations. In Maine, a small village of Penobscots lay on the edge of the unmapped wilderness between the white settlements and British Canada. Except for the Herring Ponds and Wampanoags, still largely undisturbed on Cape Cod, only a handful of purebloods remained from the tribes of southern New England. New Jersey and South Carolina also maintained reservations for a few hundred red people, while just over a thousand Delawares, Munsees, and Sopoones held the north branch of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania.

Pioneers in most states had driven the Indians away from the edge of the frontier, but in New York a famous confederation still stood between the white communities and the unvanquished western tribes. The six Iroquois nations—Mohawks, Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Tuscaroras—had been powerful allies of the British for more than a century. Chiefs like Joseph Brant moved with assurance in both white and Native societies; he met with noblemen and dined off crystal in his own fine mansion, yet donned the traditional deerskin mantle to lead his people against the rebelling Americans. But many of the rank-and-file Iroquois suffered for their loyalty to the Crown. When British defeat brought the burning of their frame houses and orchards, many fled to Canada. By 1790 only four thousand of these tribesmen remained within the United States.

Beyond the Iroquois lived the Great Lakes tribes: Miamis, Wyandots, Shawnees, and a dozen others. These forest Indians resembled the natives whom the first colonists encountered upon the Atlantic shore almost two hundred years earlier. They dwelt in substantial houses of bark and plastered straw set upon a framework of poles. While the women tended fields of corn and pumpkins, the men hunted deer for the larder, and beaver to trade for guns, axes, and trinkets. The civil war between white and Native Americans burned fiercely as these red warriors exchanged depredations and murders with the struggling settlements on the north bank of the Ohio. The Indians received British aid, but the white Americans had more devastating allies—disease and whiskey.

While the forest tribes of the north slowed the white advance, the five southern nations seemed capable of halting it altogether. Years of desultory warfare between northern and southern Indians had left a no-man’s-land between the Ohio and Tennessee rivers into which white settlers moved in force during the 1780s, but in the rich lands between the Mississippi and the Altamaha the power of the Chickasaws, Choctaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles remained unbroken. The United States government recognized the strength of these southern tribes. To the Cherokees, Congress promised that they might “send a deputy of their own choice, whenever they think fit, to Congress,” an offer tantamount to statehood under the Articles of Confederation. Congress also deferred to the Creek-Seminole confederacy, whose six thousand warriors constituted the largest standing army in North America outside of the Spanish Empire. These braves could hardly doubt their ability to protect their land against the white men advancing from the east.

The population center of the United States in 1790 lay twenty-three miles east of Baltimore. Of the four million persons in the original thirteen states at this time, the vast majority lived on farms within a hundred miles or so of the Atlantic. The population of the country towns was remarkably uniform, running typically between one and three thousand souls, for farming imposed its own restrictions on numbers. A few seeming metropolises did exist—Philadelphia with 42,000 inhabitants, New York with 33,000, Boston 18,000, and Charleston 16,000. But 95 percent of the people dwelt in towns with fewer than 2,500 persons.

Looking west, people living along the Atlantic coast in the 1780s saw a fragmented and vulnerable America. Somewhere beyond the Appalachians lay a small fringe of frontier dwellers and new settlers in a land that might still be coveted by Britain or France or some other European power. Beyond the Mississippi stretched a great unexplored territory claimed by the Spanish king. Sticking out from the southeast was Florida—not merely claimed but possessed by Spain—and between Georgia and Florida lay almost impassable swamps. The northern boundary of Maine was in dispute with Britain. Of the country’s 820,000 square miles, less than a third was settled. Western Pennsylvania and New York were wilderness.

Americans were united by common fears of Indians and foreigners, shared rural needs and environments, memories of the Revolution, a powerful belief in independence and liberty—but little else. Of the four million, about 750,000 were black, and of these, 700,000 were slaves and the rest “free.” Slavery had been largely abolished in the North during and after the Revolutionary period, but many indentured servants were in a state of virtual, if temporary, bondage. A full-bodied caste system existed in the South, with black slaves at the bottom of the steeply graded pyramid. Americans were not yet drawn together by a common experience of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Nor were Americans, though overwhelmingly Protestant, drawn together by a common religious view. In 1775, Congregationalists were estimated to number around 575,000 souls, Anglicans 500,000, Presbyterians 410,000, the German churches 200,000, Dutch Reformed 75,000, Baptists and Roman Catholics 25,000 each, Methodists 5,000, and Jews 2,000. From the start the colonies had been alive with religious controversies, doctrinal disputes, sectarian splits and secessions, revivalism and evangelism, the importation of new creeds and dogmas from Europe, along with their carriers—alive also with rationalistic, deistic, and atheistic counterattacks on religion. Roman Catholics early gained a foothold in Maryland and elsewhere, but could not win their political and religious rights against the overpowering Protestant majority. Only one force united all these believers, disbelievers, mystics, pietists, schismatics, dissenters, establishmentarians and disestablishmentarians: a belief in religious liberty.

The long Atlantic coastal plain, with its multitude of rivers and swamps, tended to keep Americans apart, and transport hardly made up for it. In 1790 many sections of the country had no real roads at all; what might be shown on maps as highways were often little more than bridle paths or blazed trails. Stagecoaches and heavy wagons could travel only on highways connecting major cities. A few roads—notably the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky—penetrated the mountain barriers to the west. Bostonians had just completed in the late 1780s a great engineering feat in the Charles River Bridge, then the longest in the world. But many rivers and most streams had no bridges at all and had to be forded.

Setting out on a journey, a man carried not “American” currency but the most common coin, the Spanish “milled dollar” or “piece of eight.” Or he might possess English pounds and pence, or French guineas, or Portuguese johannes or “joes.” Visiting Virginia, he would be wise to acquire paper notes called “tobacco money”—public warehouse receipts for the tobacco placed there. Everywhere the traveler’s paper banknotes would be regarded with suspicion. If he wanted to feel at home away from home, his best resort might be either the local church or the tavern. The latter—named perhaps the Bag o’ Nails or the Goat and Compass or the Silent Woman—would serve familiar grog, and a lot of it. Americans loved to drink. An estimated four million gallons of rum, brandy, and strong spirits was imported in 1787, along with a million gallons of wine and three million gallons of molasses, for making rum—all aside from the fruits of local vineyards.

Cutting across all the differences and divisions was the most fundamental of all—that between North and South. The two areas diverged in climate, farm economy, and social system, and in dependence on slaves. The ties between Charleston and London and between Boston and London were closer than those between Charleston and Boston. “I am not a Virginian but an American,” Patrick Henry had declaimed when the Revolution broke out. But he was always a Southerner.

Americans had saving graces—a sense of humor, a degree of tolerance, a love of song. They delighted in their tall stories, practical jokes, high jinks. When Congregationalist John Thayer returned from Rome a converted Roman Catholic and held a mass in Boston, the local Protestants did not chase him out of town; rather, they were so curious about the ceremony that they bought tickets to attend. And everywhere Americans expressed their joys and sorrows in song.

In the mission of San Carlos, near Monterey, a mass might be said outdoors under bells swinging from a beam, or a young man might sing to his sweetheart in an adobe hut, under a thatched roof:

Lo que digo de hoy en día,

Lo que digo le sostengo,

Yo no vengo a ver si puedo,

Yo no vengo a ver si puedo,

Yo no vengo a ver si puedo,

Sino porque puedo, vengo!

On the banks of the upper Missouri, an Omaha chief, leading a peace delegation to the neighboring Sioux, celebrated his mission in verse:

Shub’dhe adhinhe ondonba i ga ho…

Shub’dhe adhinhe ondonba i ga ho…

Shaonzhinga ha, dhadhu anonzhin ondonba ga, he…

Wakonda hidheg’dhon be dho he…dhoe.

On a northern river a French-born voyageur, paddling back with his furs and dreaming of the old Norman homestead, drowsily hummed:

Fringue, fringue sur la rivière, Fringue, fringue sur l’aviron.

In his Virginia mansion a tobacco planter stood by the window and sang an old Scots ballad:

Oh! send Laurie Gordon hame,

And the lad I daurna name;

Though his back be at the Wa’,

Here’s to him that’s far awa’.

In Salem the congregation hymned from the old Bay Psalm Book:

The earth Jehovahs is,

And the fullness of it:

The habitable world, & they

That thereupon doe sit.…

From the slave quarters of a South Carolina plantation came the deep, throaty lament:

De night is dark, de day is long,

And we are far from home.

Weep, my brudders, weep!

A MAP

of the

UNITED STATES of AMERICA

As settled by the Peace of 1783.

PART I

Liberty and Union

CHAPTER 1

The Strategy of Liberty

WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS, LATE January 1787. Down the long sloping shoulders of the Berkshire Mountains they headed west through the bitter night, stumbling over frozen ruts, picking their way around deep drifts of snow. Some carried muskets, others hickory clubs, others nothing. Many wore old Revolutionary War uniforms, now decked out with the sprig of hemlock that marked them as rebels. Careless and cocksure they had been, but now gall and despair hung over them as heavy as the enveloping night. They and hundreds like them were fleeing for their lives, looking for places to hide.

These men were rebels against ex-rebels. Only a few years before, they had been fighting the redcoats at Bunker Hill, joining General Stark in the rout of the enemy at Bennington, helping young Colonel Henry Knox’s troops pull fifty tons of cannon and mortars, captured from the British at Ticonderoga, across these same frozen wastes. They had fought in comradeship with men from Boston and other towns in the populous east. All had been revolutionaries together, in a glorious and victorious cause. Now they were fighting their old comrades, dying before their cannon, hunting for cover like animals.

The trouble had been brewing for years. Life had been hard enough during the Revolution, but independence had first brought a flush of prosperity, then worse times than ever. The people and their governments alike struggled under crushing debts. Much of the Revolutionary specie was hopelessly irredeemable. People were still paying for the war through steep taxes. The farmers in central and western Massachusetts felt they had suffered the most, for their farms, cattle, even their plows could be taken for unpaid debts. Some debtors had been thrown into jail and had languished there, while family and friends desperately scrounged for money that could not be found.

Out of the despair and suffering a deep hatred had welled in the broad farms along the Connecticut and the settlements in the Berkshires. Hatred for the sheriffs and other minions of the law who flung neighbors into jail. Hatred for the judges who could sign orders that might wipe out a man’s entire property. Hatred for the scheming lawyers who connived in all this, and battened on it. Hatred above all for the rich people in Boston, the merchants and bankers who seemed to control the governor and the state legislature. No single leader mobilized this hatred. Farmers and laborers rallied around local men with names like Job Shattuck, Eli Parsons, Luke Day. Dan Shays emerged as the most visible leader, but the uprising was as natural and indigenous as any peasants’ revolt in Europe. The malcontents could not know that history would call them members of “Shays’s Rebellion.” They called themselves Regulators.

Their tactic was simple: close up the courts. Time and again, during the late summer and early fall of 1786, roughhewn men by the hundreds crowded into or around courthouses, while judges and sheriffs stood by seething and helpless. The authorities feared to call out the local militia, knowing the men would desert in droves. Most of the occupations were peaceful, even jocular and festive, reaching a high point when debtors were turned out of jail. Most of these debtors were proud men, property owners, voters. They had served as soldiers and junior officers in the Revolution. They were seeking to redress grievances, not to topple governments. Some men of substance—doctors, deacons, even judges—backed the Regulators; many poor persons feared the uprisings. But in general, a man’s property and source of income placed him on one side or the other. Hence the conflict divided town and country officials, neighbors, even families.

Then, as the weather turned bitter in the late fall, so did the mood of the combatants. The attitude of the authorities shifted from the implacable to the near-hysterical. Alarmists exaggerated the strength of the Regulators. Rumors flew about that Boston or some other eastern town would be attacked. A respectable Bostonian reported that “We are now in a State of anarchy and confusion bordering on a Civil War.” Boston propagandists spread reports that British agents in Canada were secretly backing the rebels. So the Regulators were now treasonable as well as illegal. The state suspended habeas corpus and raised an army, but lacking public funds had to turn to local “gentlemen” for loans to finance it. An anonymous dissident responded in kind:

“This is to lett the gentellmen of Boston [know?] that wee Country men will not pay taxes, as the think,” he wrote Governor Bowdoin in a crude, scrawling hand. “But Lett them send the Constabel to us and we’ll nock him down for offering to come near us. If you Dont lower the taxes we’ll pull down the town house about you ears. It shall not stand long then or else they shall be blood spilt. We country men will not be imposed on. We fought of our Libery as well as you did.…

Country people and city people had declared for independence a decade before. They had endorsed the ideals of liberty and equality proclaimed in the declaration signed by John Adams and others. But now, it seemed, these ideals were coming to stand for different things to different persons. Fundamental questions had been left unresolved by the Revolution. Who would settle them, and how?

THE GREAT FEAR

Through the autumn weeks of 1786, George Washington had been savoring the life that he had hungered to return to years earlier, during the bleak days of Boston, Valley Forge, Germantown. Mornings he came downstairs past the grandfather’s clock at the turning, strode through the long central hall and out the far door, to stand on the great porch and gaze at the Potomac flowing a mile wide below him, and at the soft hills beyond. Later he usually “rid” to the plantations that flanked the mansion, fields called Muddy Hole, Dogue Run, and Ferry, where he closely supervised his white work hands and his slaves—“the People,” he liked to call them—as they planted the fall crops of wheat and rye, “pease” and Irish potatoes. As commanding a figure as ever, with his great erect form and Roman head, he would readily dismount to supervise rearrangement of his plows and harrows breaking up the soil sodden with the heavy rains of that autumn.

On returning to the mansion he might find a goodly company of neighbors, or of old political and military comrades from distant parts; these he entertained in a manner both friendly and formal. After the years of harrowing struggle with Britain and of earlier bloody combat against Frenchmen and Indians, with the possibility of slave uprisings often in mind, Washington luxuriated in the sense of order that enveloped Mount Vernon, with its formal gardens, greenhouses, deer park, and graceful drives. He took heart also in the political calm that now seemed to have settled on Virginia. Then the news of disturbances to the north came crashing in on this serenity. Washington’s first reaction was of sheer incredulity.

“For God’s sake tell me what is the cause of all these commotions,” he implored a friend late in October; “do they proceed from licentiousness, British-influence disseminated by the Tories, or real grievances which admit of redress.” If the latter, why were the grievances not dealt with; if the former, why were the disturbances not put down? “Commotions of this sort, like snow-balls, gather strength as they roll, if there is no opposition in the way to divide and crumble them.” Most mortifying of all to the general was the likely reaction in London; the Tories had always said that the Americans could not govern themselves, and how London would scoff at this anarchy.

Anxiously Washington tried to discern what was actually happening in Massachusetts. Distrusting the vague and conflicting reports in the newspapers, he depended heavily on his old companion-in-arms General Henry Knox, who had been asked by Congress to investigate the disorders. The rebels would annihilate all debts public and private, Knox warned Washington, and pass agrarian laws that would make legal tender of unfunded paper money. “What, gracious God, is man!” Washington cried out to another friend, “that there should be such inconsistency and perfidiousness in his conduct? It is but the other day, that we were shedding our blood to obtain the…Constitutions of our own choice and making; and now we are unsheathing the sword to overturn them.” He felt that he must be under the illusion of a dream.

An impudent rebellion, an impotent Congress, a jeering Europe—these were the catalysts for George Washington, and hundreds of others like him, who believed that national independence and personal liberty could flourish only under conditions of unity and order. If government could not check these disorders, Washington wrote James Madison, “what security has a man for life, liberty, or property?” It was obvious that, in the absence of a stronger constitution, “thirteen Sovereignties pulling against each other, and all tugging at the federal head will soon bring ruin on the whole.” No one knew better than the commanding general of the Continental armies the price of division and weakness in Congress, and he had been as little impressed by the nation’s leadership in the years since the war.

Washington saw one sign of hope, in September, commissioners from five of the middle states had met in Annapolis to discuss vexing restrictions on commerce among them. They had proposed a larger convention to be held in Philadelphia in May of the coming year. But what could such a convention accomplish, given the strange fears and distempers abroad in the land?

In London, in the fall of 1786, John and Abigail Adams also waited anxiously for news from Massachusetts. As American minister to the Court of St. James’s, Adams presided over a large house in Grosvenor Square near Hyde Park, which Abigail pictured to her relatives back home as rather like Boston Common, only “much larger and more beautified with trees.” Maddening weeks passed without word from home, across the wayward Atlantic; then a fever of excitement took over the house when the butler or a footman brought a tray full of letters to the little room, off the formal drawing room, that Abigail Adams had made into a parlor. Tea and toast would turn cold as the family tore open their letters and drank in family and political news.

The political news seemed more and more clouded. Not only was Congress as irresolute and slow-moving as ever, but the unrest in Massachusetts appeared to be getting out of hand. What in earlier letters had been termed “disturbances” now were verging on anarchy and civil war. The state authorities seemed helpless to put down the commotion; the legislature dawdled, and the governor, reported Adams’ son John Quincy from Harvard, was called the “Old Lady.” His friends left John Adams in no doubt about the true nature of the rebels. They were violent men who hated persons of substance, especially lawyers. Some were of the most “turbulent and desperate disposition,” moving from town to town to enflame the locals. They would annihilate the courts, and then all law and order. Among the leaders there were no persons of reputation or education. Not one of Adams’ correspondents sympathized with the rebels, or even explained their hardships, except as the result of speculation and prodigality.

Isolated in London’s winter smoke and fogs, Adams seethed in his frustration. This was his state that was setting such a bad example; it was the state, in fact, of whose constitution he was the main author. But there was something he could do, even in London; he could warn his countrymen of the dangers ahead. “The Sedition in Massachusetts,” Abigail Adams wrote John Quincy at Harvard, “induced your Poppa to give to the World a book” contending that “salutary [?] restraint is the vital Principal of Liberty,” that turbulence could bring only coercion.

A sense of desperate urgency possessed Adams. He had to rebut the erroneous notions of such men as Tom Paine and the French thinker Turgot; he had to demolish false ideas before his fellow Americans made further decisions about their system of government. Snatching every available minute from his official duties, barring his study door to all but his wife, surrounding himself with the works of the greatest philosophers and historians, he scribbled so quickly that his hand turned sore, so fast that his work was disorganized, strewn with errors, packed with badly translated quotations. But it was also a powerful argument that the new institutions in America must be built properly to last thousands of years; that free government, with all its woes, was superior to even the wisest monarchy; that the tendency of republics to turbulence could be curbed by a system of checks and balances within government; and that men were equal in the eyes of God and under the law but manifestly unequal—and always would be—in beauty, virtue, talents, fortune.

Aware that he himself, with his medium height, balding pate, and pointed features set oddly in a soft and rounded head, hardly met the popular image of the leader, Adams had no doubt that he possessed the wisdom and virtue necessary to the natural aristocracy that republics too must zealously protect.

In Paris, in the spacious town house that he had rented on the Champs-Elysées, just within the city wall, the American minister, Thomas Jefferson, pondered early reports of the disturbances in Massachusetts. He felt not so much alarmed as mildly embarrassed, for he did not expect independent farmers to disrupt law courts and abolish debts—or so he had explained to European friends.

Later that fall more portentous reports arrived, and Jefferson hardly knew whether to be more concerned about the alarums or the alarmists. The Adamses in London in particular seemed to want to share their concern with Jefferson. He enjoyed cordial relations with both. He had taken a great fancy to the sprightly and knowledgeable Abigail; he and John had toured English towns and estates earlier that year. Although the Virginian had been more interested in the layout of roads and ponds and in contraptions like an Archimedes’ screw for raising water, and the Bostonian more attracted to places where Englishmen had fought for their rights—Adams had actually dressed down some people in Worcester for neglecting the local “holy Ground” where “liberty was fought for”—the two men had got along famously.

Still, Jefferson was uneasy at the turn that his correspondence with the Adamses was taking. John had reassured him in November, stating that the Massachusetts Assembly had laid too heavy a tax on the people, but that “all will be well.” But in January, when the Shaysites seemed more threatening, Abigail wrote a letter that troubled him. “Ignorant, wrestless desperadoes, without conscience or principals, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretense of grievences which have no existance but in their immaginations. Some of them were crying out for a paper currency, some for an equal distribution of property, some were for annihilating all debts.…Instead of that laudable spirit which you approve, which makes a people watchfull over their Liberties and alert in the defense of them, these mobish insurgents are for sapping the foundation, and destroying the whole fabric at once.…”Jefferson knew that Abigail was speaking for John as well as herself. Indeed, her views were shared in varying degrees by the most important leaders in America—by Washington, John Jay, Rufus King, Alexander Hamilton, by powerful men in every state.

Jefferson, almost alone among America’s leadership, rejected this attitude toward insurgency. The spirit of resistance to government was so important that it must always be kept alive. It would often be exercised wrongly, but better wrongly than not exercised at all.

“I like a little rebellion now and then,” he wrote Abigail Adams late in February 1787. “It is like a storm in the Atmosphere.” Yet he knew that the problem was not this simple. He did not really approve of rebellion, certainly not a long and bloody one; he simply feared repression more. The solution, he felt, lay in better education of the people and in the free exchange of ideas. Unlike Washington, he believed in reading the newspapers, not because the press was all that dependable, but because a free press was vital to liberty. If he had to choose, he said, he would prefer newspapers without a government to a government without newspapers. Still, Jefferson had to recognize that liberty was impossible without order, just as one day he would prefer to run a government without certain newspapers. The problem now was to reconcile liberty—and equality too—with authority. As summer approached, he wondered whether the planned convention in Philadelphia could cope with this problem that had eluded so many previous constitution-makers.

But he would not yield to the panic over rebellion. Had they not all been revolutionaries? Months later, he was still taking the line he had with the Adamses:

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

Back in western Massachusetts, in January 1787, people were suffering through the worst snowstorms they could remember. But weather could not stop the insurrection. For months both government men and Regulators had been eyeing the arsenal at Springfield, with its stores of muskets and ammunition. Late in January, Captain Shays led one thousand or more of his men, in open columns by platoons, toward the arsenal. General William Shepard, commanding the “loyal” troops, sent his aide to warn the Regulators to stop. Shays’s response was a loud laugh, followed by an order to his men, “March, God damn you, march!” March they did, their muskets still shouldered, straight into Shepard’s artillery. A single heavy cannonade into the center of Shays’s column left three men dead and another dying, the rest in panic. In a few seconds the rebels were breaking rank and fleeing for their lives.

What now? The Regulators were not quite done. Those who gathered in friendly Berkshire towns after the long flight west calculated that the mountain fastness to the north and the long ranges stretching south provided natural havens for guerrilla resistance. But they underrated the determination of the government to stamp out the last embers of rebellion. The well-armed militia ranged up and down the county, routing the rebels. Hundreds of insurgents escaped into New York and Vermont, whence they sent raiding parties into Berkshire towns.

One of these towns was Stockbridge, where people had been divided for months over the insurgency. For hours the rebels roamed through the town, pillaging the houses of prominent citizens and “arresting” their foes on the spot. At the house of Judge Theodore Sedgwick, an old adversary, they could not find the judge but they encountered Elizabeth Freeman, long known as “Mum Bett.” Arming herself with the kitchen shovel, Mum let them search the house but forbade any wanton destruction of property, all the while jeering at their love for the bottle. She had hidden the family silver in a chest in her own room. When a rebel started to open it, she shamed him out of it, according to a local account, with the mocking cry, “Oh, you had better search that, an old nigger’s chest!—the old nigger’s as you call me.”

Soon the raiders streamed out of town to the south. They had time to free some debtors from jail and celebrate in a tavern. Then the militiamen cornered them in the woods, killing or wounding over thirty of them.

The uprising was over. Some Regulators felt that they had gambled all and lost all. As it turned out, they had served as a catalyst in one of the decisive transformations in American history. Though their own rebellion had failed, they had succeeded in fomenting powerful insurrections in people’s minds. Rising out of the grass roots of the day—out of the cornfields and pasturelands of an old commonwealth long whipped by religious and political conflict—they had challenged the “system” and had rekindled some burning issues of this revolutionary age:

When is rebellion justified? Granted that Americans had the right to take up arms against the Crown, which had given them taxation but no representation, were people who felt cheated of their rights justified in a republic in turning to bullets rather than ballots?

If decisions were indeed to be made by ballots, how would ballots count? By majority rule—by a majority of the voters in an election or of their representatives in a legislature? Or would the minority be granted special rights and powers in order to protect elites against the populace? And under either system would all people—all adult men, women, poor persons, Indians, black people—have an equal voice and vote?

If the rebellion had touched people’s basic fears about their safety and security, what price stability and unity? The response of the social and political elites to the rebellion was drastic: build a stronger national government that could cope with domestic unrest and fend off foreign foes. What local and regional rights would be swallowed up in the new Leviathan? Would precious personal liberties be engulfed by the new federal government? Or might they be better protected and enhanced by it?

If the immediate goal was a wider union, what was the ultimate purpose and justification of this union? Was it essentially for internal harmony and national defense? Humankind had higher needs—for individual liberty and self-expression, for a sense of sharing and fraternity, for the equal rights and liberties proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. How would such aspirations and expectations be fulfilled?

To these questions Americans—rebels and elites, common and uncommon—would bring vast experience, a big stock of common sense, a large assortment of misconceptions and prejudices, boundless optimism, and a quality less evident in some of the older nations of Europe: a willingness to experiment. Americans were accustomed to being tested, in their churches, on their farms, out in the wilderness. They were used to trying something, dropping it, and trying something else. They were good at figuring, probing, calculating, reasoning things out. The American people, Alexander Hamilton would soon be writing, must decide “the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Americans were willing to test themselves on this issue.

Some Americans thought of their country, or at least of their new young republic, as a received design, as a sanctified destiny, as a sacred mission for a selected people. Others saw it as a venture in trial and error, as a gamble, above all as an experiment. Sacred Mission or Grand Experiment—by what yardstick, by what purposes or principles or moral values, would American leadership be measured?

A RAGE FOR LIBERTY

In Philadelphia, in early 1787, Benjamin Franklin busied himself with adding some rooms to his house on High (later named Market) Street. Now eighty-one, he found dealing with glaziers, stonecutters, timber merchants and coppersmiths a bit fatiguing, but, as he wrote a friend in France, building was an “Old Man’s Amusement” and “Posterity’s advantage.” He still had time for his main pleasures: cribbage, playing with his grandchildren, exercising with his dumbbell, and reading while soaking in his boot-shaped copper tub. Surrounding him were mementos from his years as a printer, Philadelphia politician and official, colonial agent in London, spokesman in Paris for the new nation. His library, to which he would retreat from the children’s tumult, was lined ceiling-high with books from Europe and America, including his own world-famous Poor Richard’s Almanack. He made use of his own inventions too—his “Franklin stove,” a freestanding fireplace, lightning rods atop the house, and a mechanical device to pick books off the top shelves, a device later adapted for use by grocers to reach cans and boxes.

In his years in France, Franklin had become an international celebrity, so popular that crowds followed him as he passed along Paris streets. He had returned to Philadelphia in 1785 to equal acclaim. Cannon boomed; bells rang out; the town fathers waited on him; and shortly, he was elected president of Pennsylvania. He did not cut a dramatic figure; visitors found “a short, fat trunched old man in a plain Quaker dress, bald pate, and short white locks,” often sitting hatless under a mulberry tree in his garden on a warm day. But mentally he was as acute and wide-ranging as ever, shifting easily in correspondence and conversation from politics to diplomacy to types of thermometers to agriculture to gossip to the constitutional questions that would arise at the convention to be held in Philadelphia in the spring.

Despite the gout and kidney stone that tormented him, the patriarch occasionally made his way about town, often in a sedan chair. Much of Philadelphia was a monument to him. He could proceed down High Street toward the public landing on the river, passing nearby Christ Church, which he had served thirty years earlier as a manager of a lottery to raise money for the steeple. On the way back he could observe Presbyterian churches and Friends’ meeting houses he had often attended. Or he could head over to the American Philosophical Society, which he had helped found and over which he had presided for years. If he chose to turn down High Street in the opposite direction, he might come to City Hall on the corner of Fifth and Chestnut and then to the Library Company, the first subscription library in America, which he had conceived in 1731. If he turned right at the corner of Fifth and Chestnut, he encountered the long facade of Independence Hall, the most famous building in the city, indeed in America.

To this building—formerly the State House—Franklin’s life also had been linked. Here he had been a delegate to the Second Continental Congress, where he supported the petition to the King for a redress of grievances, drew up a plan of union, and organized the first post office; it was Franklin, naturally, who was appointed the first postmaster general. In this building too he had signed the Declaration of Independence, after serving on the drafting committee with Adams and Jefferson and others. Here he was alleged to have said, “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Franklin was in Paris when the Articles of Confederation were signed in this building but now he was back, and in the spring of 1787 Independence Hall was being readied for the grandest occasion of all—the convening of the Constitutional Convention.

Atop Independence Hall stood the Liberty Bell, which had rung out the news of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and of Revolutionary War victories. The tocsin had had a flawed existence. It had been cast in England, for no colony could make a bell like this, weighing over a ton. It was cracked on arrival and had to be crudely recast by a local firm. It was spirited out of Philadelphia and ignominiously submerged in a New Jersey river when the redcoats threatened the city. But now it was back in place, and still girdled by a noble sentiment: “Proclaim Liberty throughout the land, and to all the inhabitants thereof.”

Proclaim Liberty! No bell need ring it out; the idea had transfixed Americans for generations, and never more than in the last twenty years. Liberty had been the clangorous rallying cry against the British. It was the Sons of Liberty who had denounced the Stamp Act, conducted funerals of patriots killed in street brawls, tarred and feathered Tory foes and American renegades. It was the Liberty Poles around which the Sons had assembled to pledge their sacred honor to the cause, the Liberty Tree in Boston from which they had hanged Tory officials in effigy, only to see the redcoats cut down the noble elm and convert it into firewood. Although Liberty was not the only goal for Americans in the 1770s and 1780s—they believed also in Independence, Order, Equality, the Pursuit of Happiness—none had the evocative power and sweep of Liberty, or Freedom—two terms for the same thing. To preserve liberty was the supreme end of government.

Liberty, indeed, was more than a cause or a symbol; it was a possession and a passion. Sober men referred to the “sweets of liberty”; it was a treasure, a “precious jewel.” No wonder Alexander Hamilton spoke darkly of the “rage for liberty.” If liberty had an uncertain future in America, it

had emerged from a glorious past in England. Once upon a time, it was thought, liberty had flourished among the Saxons, a simple and virtuous people, only to be assaulted by the barbaric Norman invaders. Liberty had flowered and wilted in other countries, as in Denmark and Italy. It was almost crushed out in England. So liberty was not only precious but pure, virginal, vulnerable. It must be rescued in the New World from its chains in the Old.

Liberty was many-sided. The ideal of liberty of conscience—the most sacred, the most unalienable liberty of all—had been fired and burnished in the crucibles of colonial experience. Many Americans had fled religious oppression in Europe only to find religious establishments somehow surviving in the New World. They were usually mild compared to the British, perhaps, but even in America clerics seemed to plot against a man’s liberty. In one New England town the Baptists, claiming to be the first settlers, balked at paying taxes to support the established Congregationalist church. The Congs, as the disrespectful called them, had then rallied at the town meeting, outvoted the Baptists, and confiscated their property, on the ground that the Baptists were raging schismatics, their church “a sink” for the “filth of Christianity.”

Victories for religious tolerance were all the sweeter for this. During the First Continental Congress in 1774 John Adams and other Massachusetts delegates were invited to Carpenters’ Hall to do “a little business.” On being seated, they discovered facing them across a long table some solemn Baptists flanked by Quakers who looked even more somber under their broad-brimmed beavers. John Adams found himself trying to explain how the Massachusetts men squared their establishment of religion with their paeans to liberty. The grandest victory of all came a month before the Declaration of Independence, when Virginia passed a Declaration of Rights calling for “free exercise of religion according to the dictates of conscience.”

An equally vital liberty was freedom of the press. Despite the vaunted liberations in the New World, free and unlicensed newspapers hardly existed for the first hundred years after Plymouth. The first free newspaper, appearing in Boston in 1690, was promptly suppressed. Newspaper editors fought for their rights against colonial governors; in 1735 John Peter Zenger was jailed on a charge of criminal libel, for his attacks on the colonial government, only to win his freedom after a brilliant defense. At the age of sixteen Benjamin Franklin was claiming in the New-England Courant, the editor of which—Ben’s brother James—was already in jail, that there was “no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another.” It should suffer no other check. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing free speech and the free press.

Liberty had to be grounded, according to practical Americans like Franklin, in something real and dependable, namely the right to hold property. Not only was “property surely a right of mankind as really as liberty,” in John Adams’ words; each buttressed the other. Property—especially his house and land and tools—was something a man could fall back on, if liberty was threatened; it was the threat of loss of property through foreclosures, leaving them as less than free men, that had so enflamed the Massachusetts Regulators. Yet the close marriage of liberty and property seemed, in the eyes of some sharp observers, to embrace a potential evil, or at least a strain. Could property become the enemy of liberty? Must society, “to secure the first of blessings, liberty, “strangle wealth, the first offspring of liberty, to safeguard liberty itself? A member of the Continental Congress summed up the “sad dilemma in politics”: if the people forbade wealth, it would be through regulations “intrenching too far upon civil liberty.” But if wealth was allowed to accumulate, “the syren luxury” would follow on its heels and contaminate the whole society.

The ugliest form of property in America in the 1780s was slavery. Nothing posed so sharply the issue of the nature of liberty, of the relationship of liberty and property, of the linkage and tension between liberty and equality, as the 700,000 Negroes in the seaboard South, 96 percent of whom were slaves, or the 50,000 in New England, over a fifth of whom were slaves. And nothing was more embarrassing for Americans who boasted of their liberties and compared them to the tyranny of benighted Europe.

“How is it,” Samuel Johnson growled, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Preachers, editors, and a few politicians, especially in the northern states, made the same charge of hypocrisy. By the mid-seventies, slavery was under attack in some northern areas as a cruel and un-Christian institution, but only Pennsylvania achieved an act of gradual abolition. Despite all the oratory, the other states could not act, or would not. The institution of slavery survived, essentially intact, both the Revolution and the Articles of Confederation.

Still, American whites somehow were able collectively to love liberty, recognize the evils of slavery, and tolerate slavery, all at the same time. The spreading stain of bondage did not blot out the American self-image of a chosen people engaged in a grand experiment. In the seventeenth century the colonists had carried the “spirit of Liberty” from England, where it had been perverted and corrupted, to the wilderness, where it had taken root and flowered. “To our own country,” Americans were told, “must we look for the biggest part of that liberty and freedom that yet remains, or is to be expected, among mankind.” This self-image battened on enlightened Europe’s view of a people, “in the vigour of youth,” as Richard Price put it, “inspired by the noblest of all passions, the passion for being free.” This people, virile and virtuous if a bit rustic and bumptious, basked in its sense of a special mission. “The Eyes of Europe, nay of the World,” proclaimed South Carolina’s President John Rutledge, “are on America.”

Such was the sustaining, the elevating, the euphoric self-image of most Americans during the Revolution and for a few years after. Then came a time of disillusionment and, by 1787, a pervasive feeling that the new nation had fallen into “evils and calamities” that were precipitating a profound crisis.

On the face of it, the crisis was simply the Confederation’s seeming ineffectiveness and near-paralysis. Even in their private correspondence men like Washington, Hamilton, and Madison spoke in the most urgent terms of the lack of a strong central government. The “mortal diseases of the existing constitution,” Madison wrote Jefferson in March 1787, “… are at present marked by symptoms which are truly alarming, which have tainted the faith of the most orthodox republicans, and which challenge from the votaries of liberty every concession in favor of stable Government not infringing fundamental principles.” By this time, Gordon Wood found, most reformers were seeking some change in the structure of the central government as the best, and perhaps the only, solution to the nation’s problems. Anti-Federalists of the day—and some historians since—contended that the failures of the Confederation were grossly exaggerated and its successes, such as the return of some prosperity, minimized. But few Americans perceived these achievements, and if they did, the successes led to heightened expectations that were soon to be crushed in the oil of early 1787.

A far more profound crisis—a crisis of mind and morality—lay behind the failure of institutions, centering in the palpable need for liberty and the increasing doubts and confusion over it. Five years after the Revolution Americans were discovering that it was not enough to apotheosize liberty; it was increasingly necessary to define it, and to see its linkages with other values. What kind of liberty? Whose liberty? Protected by whom, and against whom? Above all, how did liberty relate to other great aims? Some Americans felt that the pursuit of liberty ultimately would safeguard other values, such as order and equality; others saw order and authority as prior goals in protecting liberty.

The crisis of liberty was often seen too as a crisis of property. Thus John Quincy Adams, who was by no means a young fogy, devoted his Harvard graduation speech of 1787 to a dramatic portrait of a nation in which the “violent gust of rebellion” had hardly passed and the people were groaning under the burden of “accumulated evils” such as luxury and dissipation, but where the root problem appeared to be a decline in the punctual observance of contracts and in that public credit upon which historically “the fabric of national grandeur has been erected.”

By the mid-1780s both sides were disillusioned. The pursuers of liberty feared that the nabobs were conspiring to restrict their freedom, perhaps in that ominous constitutional convention to be held in Philadelphia; in any event, the achievement of liberty had not brought them more prosperity or security or equality. Those who hungered for order and stability were in even greater despair. The capture of the Rhode Island legislature by cheap-money men, unrest in other states, the fear of violence at the hands of Indians and even slaves, the inability of government to maintain order, and above all the shocking rebellion in Massachusetts—all these were warnings that liberty was safe neither under the state governments nor under the Confederation. Glumly they recalled the apparent lessons of history: that republics had disintegrated as they descended the fateful road marked by steps leading from LIBERTY to DISORDER to ANARCHY to POPULAR DESPOTISM and finally to TYRANNY.

Historians are wary of the notion that, at a critical point in history, a heroic figure, galloping to the rescue, snatches victory from the jaws of defeat and changes the destiny of a nation. In real life the hero’s horse loses a shoe and he fails to arrive; or if he does arrive, it is at the wrong place at the wrong time, and it makes no difference anyway. Historians are especially skeptical of the decisive role of intellectual heroes. The intellectual may not be able to find his horse in the first place, or may have neglected to have it shod; in any event, intellectuals are part of a long, complex, and tumultuous stream of innovation, conflicts, and borrowings of ideas, a process in which individual influence is usually hard to identify. Yet if any American may be included in that small company that plays a critical role at a pivotal point in history, it was James Madison, who almost literally did gallop across the New Jersey flatlands in 1787 to take the lead in confronting and resolving, for a time at least, the dilemma of “liberty versus order.”

Madison’s leadership would have been impossible without magnificent collegiality from brilliant thinkers and actors, impossible without magnificent “followership” from the people who would one day vote to accept or reject the new constitution. The generation of Americans coming into leadership in the late 1780s had gone through a series of laboratory exercises of unmatched diversity. Collectively they had experimented with British rule in its many forms, with a variety of state constitutions, with revolutionary regimes during the War of Independence. They had tried weak executives and strong, governors appointed by the Crown, by the legislatures, by the “better people” in councils or upper chambers, by “all the people,” by various combinations thereof. They had tried bicameral legislatures and unicameral; legislatures elected in a variety of ways, under a variety of suffrage arrangements, holding a variety of legislative, executive, and even judicial powers. They had experimented with conventions that sprang directly from the people and bypassed legislatures.

These men, self-conscious and thoughtful experimenters, had not merely observed the laboratory exercises; they had conducted them, suffered from them, learned from them. Madison himself had helped draft the Virginia Constitution of 1776; served in the Continental Congress for three years and in the Virginia House of Delegates for two; and attended the Annapolis Convention. By 1787 he was back in Congress, now convened in New York. Many of his colleagues could boast of even broader experience, including service in executive and military establishments.

Learning illuminated experience. Rarely has a generation of activists been so thoroughly schooled in classical political thought as that of Madison and Adams. For them the works of the Greeks and Romans constituted neither dead languages nor dead learning. Many read Montesquieu in his own language. They liked to cite the great English thinkers—Hobbes and Locke and Hume—against English rule itself. Polemicists clinched their arguments by citing chapter and verse. The result of the ferment was an outpouring of broadsides, sermons, addresses, and above all pamphlets. “Almost every American pen” was at work, it was noted. Even “peasants and their housewives in every part of the land” had begun “to dispute on politics and positively to determine upon our liberties.” To a degree perhaps hardly matched in Western history, Americans of the 1780s thought their way through a thicket of political problems—and then acted.

Others matched Madison in their grasp of these problems, but no one equaled him in preparations for the convention in Philadelphia. A man of both action and thought, he had busied himself in New York City during the spring helping to win congressional authorization of a convention to revise the Articles of Confederation, then organizing a caucus of fellow Virginians and sorting out his own thoughts. To Jefferson in Paris he wrote a long analysis of the need for reform, resorting to their private code when he touched on controversial matters. Madison kept George Washington closely informed of events; he was pleased to have the general’s endorsement of the need for “thorough reform of the present system,” and even more pleased to learn that Washington, after much wavering, had decided to attend the convention. Sensing that Governor Edmund Randolph was too busy with state affairs to bone up on national constitution-making, Madison carefully coached him on tactics and substance, and urged him to get to Philadelphia early so that the Virginians could help prepare some “materials” for the other delegates, even if it meant that Mrs. Randolph, who was pregnant, could not accompany her husband.

Madison failed to organize the whole delegation. Patrick Henry had been elected to it and had declined, for the reason, Madison conjectured, that he would feel freer to oppose the new charter if he disliked it. George Mason, another delegate, was less politically ambitious than Henry, but Madison suspected him of anti-Federalist tendencies.

Madison had spent many a long evening in New York refining his own views, jotting them down in his small, even handwriting. It was easy for him to list the faults of the Confederation—weakness, instability, and inability to control the factious, rambunctious states—and he did so in a three-thousand-word essay bluntly entitled “Vices of the Political System of the U. States.” But what would take the Confederation’s place? By the time Madison left Manhattan early in May and took the open boat that ferried him over to Paulus Hook, he had fashioned a plan that would provide the central strategy for the delegates who would assemble in Philadelphia.

The journey itself provided Madison with occasions for reflection. As his boat plowed slowly across the mouth of the Hudson he could see packets and schooners bearing products—Madeira and rum, perhaps, or machinery and ironware—that would be taxed as imports from abroad not by the Confederation but by New York State. Traveling across the pleasant New Jersey countryside in his towering, deep-bellied stagecoach, the “American Flyer,” he could reflect that in New Jersey too the farmers and debtors had compelled the state legislature to issue paper money. Pulling up at the Nassau Tavern in Princeton the first evening of the trip, he must have recalled earlier days when he and the other students, crowded around the stages to hear the latest news from New York and Philadelphia. He might have recalled too his first reading in Aristotle and Polybius, Locke and Montesquieu. Out of the writings of such men, out of his own and his comrades’ political experiences, Madison had forged his theories of government.

Fundamental to these theories was an assumption that men inevitably tended toward conflict and struggle. The latent causes of faction, he had concluded, were sown in the nature of man. “All civilized societies,” he had written in New York that spring, “are divided into different interests and factions, as they happen to be creditors or debtors—rich or poor—husbandmen, merchants or manufacturers—members of different religious sects—followers of different political leaders—inhabitants of different districts—owners of different kinds of property, &c &c.” Even where there was no actual basis for conflict, frivolous and fanciful differences could excite passionate hatreds.

How protect liberty and order against these factions? Especially under a republican government, where the majority of the people was supposed to rule, how thwart a majority united by some passion or interest from crushing minority or individual rights? Faith? Doctrine could lead to dogma and then to oppression. Enlightened self-interest? Leaders with vision would not always be at the helm. Public opinion? The average man—even the average legislator—pursued local interests. Did a Rhode Island assemblyman, Madison asked, care what France or even Massachusetts thought of his paper money?

How then control selfish factions, oppressive local majorities, popular follies and passions? Madison’s answer went straight to the heart of the grand strategy of the men who would come to be known as Federalists. The solution was not to try to remove the causes of faction, for a free society would always produce differences among men and a good republican must respect those differences. The solution was to dilute the power and passion of local factions by enlarging the sphere of government into a nation of many regions, interests, and opinions. Like a careful cook, Madison would blend indigestible lumps and fiery spices in the blander waters of a large pot.

It was this plan to “enlarge the sphere” that Madison brought to Philadelphia in his luggage as the “Flyer” rattled over the pebble stones of Chestnut Street and pulled up at the Indian Queen Tavern.

PHILADELPHIA: THE CONTINENTAL CAUCUS

The eager Madison was the first delegate to show up; no one else arrived for ten days. He had time to settle into rooms in Mary House’s celebrated lodgings at Fifth and Market, to talk tobacco prices with the local merchant who handled the crop from Madison’s fields at Montpelier, to pay a visit to Benjamin Franklin, and to work on final details of the plan that Governor Randolph would present to the convention. The delegates straggled in over the next few weeks, most of them after long and hard journeys.

General Charles C. Pinckney brought his young bride with him from Charleston; both of them had been miserably seasick as their packet beat its way up the coast to Delaware Bay. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts also brought his young wife, along with their infant child, despite Yankee doubts about the pestilent fevers of southern cities like Philadelphia; shortly, he sent them off to stay with in-laws in New York City. William Samuel Johnson of Connecticut had traveled mainly overland, south on the post road along the Connecticut River, through the populous area around Hartford, and then down the much-traveled Boston Post Road along the coastline into Manhattan, whence he probably followed the same route as Madison into Philadelphia. Johnson had stopped in Hartford long enough to collect two hundred pounds from the state treasury for his expenses, and in New York to receive news that he had been chosen president of the newly reorganized Columbia College. Delegates from New Hampshire did not arrive for eight weeks because, it was rumored, the state was too poor to pay their expenses. Delegates from Rhode Island did not arrive at all, because the legislators of Little Rhody were as suspicious of the convention delegates as the delegates were contemptuous of them and their cheap-money ways.

On May 13 there was a great commotion outside Mrs. House’s lodging house: General Washington had arrived, escorted by the City Light Dragons and hailed by the pealing of the Liberty Bell, the booming of artillery, the flashing of sabers, and the huzzahs of a great throng. Mrs. House had tidied up her best rooms for the general, only to see the financier Robert Morris carry him off to his fine brick mansion, leaving her to hope that she could fill the rooms with Baptists, Cincinnati, or abolitionists, who were also then conventioneering in the nation’s first city.

Washington had to wait twelve fretful days before a quorum was present, but Madison helped fill the time with caucus meetings of the Virginia delegates at the Indian Queen—to form, as Mason put it, “a proper correspondence of sentiments.”

The Virginians got off to a good start when the assembly finally convened on May 25, a rainy Friday. Washington was unanimously elected president of the convention on the nomination of Morris and with the backing of Franklin, Washington’s only rival for world fame—a nice expression of unity at the start. Madison secured a seat up front, where he took a leading role in debate and, at the same time, kept the best and fullest record of the proceedings. He soon impressed the delegates with his lucid, low-voiced exposition of constitutional and political problems; he blended together, a Georgia delegate noted, “the profound politician with the scholar.” The prudent delegates devoted two days to laying out rules and procedures, the most important of which was absolute secrecy about the debates. During these days they had an opportunity to begin taking the measure of their associates.

What manner of men were these? The “bar of history” has rendered changing verdicts during two centuries of hindsight. For a hundred years or more the Framers were virtually deified, or seen at least as Olympians rising above petty self-interest and local prejudice to produce what Prime Minister William Gladstone would call, on the occasion of the Constitution’s centennial, “the most remarkable work known to me in modern times to have been produced by the human intellect, at a single stroke (so to speak), in its application to political affairs.” Then, in the iconoclastic Progressive era of the early twentieth century, the heroes were pulled off their pedestals and found to be crass conservatives who wanted to curb agrarian radicals and debtors, men of property who calculated that their holdings of land and securities and slaves would be safer under a national government judiciously removed from direct control by the masses. Interpretation followed interpretation. Marxists saw the Framers as products of class background and interest. Political theorists viewed them as ideologues responding to the dominant values of the time. Recently, political “realists” have analyzed them as state politicos maneuvering in the convention for regional advantage. Others have regarded them as nationalists and continentalists, still others as bold engineers engaged in a grand experiment. Two centuries later, the jury of history has rendered no final verdict from among these various theories.

How did the men of Philadelphia view themselves? To see them as they appeared to one another in that hot chamber in the Pennsylvania State House is to raise them from immortality to mortality. All of them were unabashedly and even proudly political men to some degree, or they would not have been chosen by their state legislatures. Most of them were ambitious. Clinton Rossiter estimated that as a group they had had more political experience than any gathering of the leaders of a newly independent nation at any time in history. They were mainly youngish, averaging in their early forties. Almost all were wealthy, or at least comfortably off. Most were from established families. They had the correct formal education: nine were products of (now) Princeton, four each of William and Mary and Yale, three each of Harvard and (now) Columbia.

At least a dozen were planters or farmers on a big scale; another dozen, lawyers; still another dozen, state officeholders; and some were all three of these. Most had married women of social standing. Over a third owned slaves. They were almost all at least nominally religious, ranging from robust Christians to the tolerantly ecumenical or broadly secular. Most were war veterans, or at least had known military life.

The poor, the back-country people, the agrarian debtors, the uneducated, the non-voters, and of course women, Indians, and blacks were inconspicuously unrepresented.

So this was a convention of the well-bred, the well-fed, the well-read, and the well-wed. But the men of Philadelphia were neither solely defined nor wholly confined by these identities. Transcending these interests and occupations and affiliations was their sense of a compelling goal, a strategy to achieve that goal, and a host of notions about how to make that strategy work. The delegates did not see themselves as merely landowners or merchants or lawyers. They conceived of themselves as engaged in a grand “experiment”—a word they often used—the outcome of which would shape their nation’s destiny, and hence their own and their posterity’s, for decades to come. They saw themselves—in a word they would never have used—as pragmatists, as men thinking their way through a thicket of problems, in pursuit of that goal.

That goal was liberty—liberty with order, liberty with safety and security, liberty of conscience, liberty of property, liberty with a measure of equality, but above all, liberty. They defined this term in many different ways, they had varying expectations of it, they differed over its relationship to other values, and later these differences would help spawn a series of tragedies. But conflict over this supreme goal did not deter the delegates at the time. Rather, liberty served as a unifying symbol and goal around which practical men could rally. Reading the convention debates, some historians have remarked on the absence of ideological conflict. The Framers did not need to argue over ideology; they had their ideology of liberty, with all its kindling power and glowing, confusing, contradictory implications for the future.

And even as the delegates gathered, further news from Massachusetts caused them to fear all the more for the future of liberty. Beaten on the field of battle in the winter, the rebels in the spring had turned to the state elections despite an act disqualifying former Regulators from voting for a year. The “malcontents” helped defeat Governor Bowdoin for re-election and replaced him with the more populistic John Hancock. “Shaysites” picked up seats in the state senate in April and the lower house in May. Madison warned that the election crisis would bring “wicked measures” from the Massachusetts legislature. To some, the spring news was worse than the winter’s: it was easy to castigate men who took up arms, but what about men who took up ballots?

If the Framers by and large were agreed on the goal of liberty and the nature of the threat to it, the strategy of protecting and augmenting it posed a potentially more divisive challenge. Almost all the Framers shared Madison’s crucial premise that liberty and order and property could not be safeguarded by relying on education or religion or the basic goodness of man; liberty must be protected and expanded through the careful building of institutions. Almost all agreed that liberty and order were in danger from popular movements or legislative majorities in the states and hence that the new institutions necessary to protect liberty, and the order and stability without which liberty could not survive, must be national in scope and power. But all agreed too that the new national government would be a government elected by, representative of, and responsible to, the people—it would be, in short, a republic.

And here was the rub. If the people were ultimately to control, what would stop radical and “leveling” popular majorities from taking over the new national government as they had threatened to do in certain states? What would stop the “scum,” as conservatives like Benjamin Rush liked to call the malcontents, from rising to the top of the national stew as well as the local? It was in confronting this problem—how to solve, on a national basis, republican ills with republican remedies, as Madison put it—that the genius of the Framers was most sorely tested.

The Virginians’ answer to this problem lay at the heart of the plan that Governor Randolph presented to the delegates on the first day of real business, May 29. Randolph, gaining the initiative that Madison hoped for, put the “Virginia Plan,” as it came to be called, first on the agenda and thus made it the point of departure for the deliberations. Randolph’s audience anticipated his proposals that the Articles of Confederation be “corrected & enlarged,” that the new national legislature consist of two chambers; that a national executive be chosen by the legislature; that a national judiciary be established. But many were disturbed when Randolph proposed that the new Congress be empowered “to negative all laws passed by the several States, contravening in the opinion of the National Legislature the articles of Union,” and if necessary use military force to back up that negative.

The delegates at the moment could hardly see Madison’s logic—or at least the logical extension of his belief in checks and balances—that the national government must have a check on state governments just as each branch of government would have a check on the others. All the delegates could envisage was a radical threat to the very existence of their constituencies. And all they could see was Randolph—himself the governor of a state—threatening to submerge New Jersey and New Hampshire and the other proud little republics in a great national pool. Did the Virginians really want this? When Randolph reiterated his proposals the following day, Charles Pinckney rose to ask whether the governor “meant to abolish the State Governments altogether.”

Randolph did not, of course, but the gauntlet had been thrown down. For the next two weeks the Virginians and their allies—James Wilson of Pennsylvania, along with several of the South Carolina delegation and others—pressed their arguments, while their opponents questioned them and attacked them whenever they could get the floor. Madison demonstrated his parliamentary skills in keeping control of the agenda; when he sensed that it would be premature for the assembly to discuss representation of the slave population in Congress, he smoothly moved that that matter be postponed.

The Virginians had powerful assistance from other delegates. The Pennsylvanians were especially helpful, especially prestigious, and especially nationalistic. Franklin, though so feeble that he sometimes asked others to speak his sentiments for him, intervened at critical moments. James Wilson, a Philadelphian born and educated in Scotland, had helped lead the cause of independence and later had become heavily involved—some said overextended—in banking and business investments. Portrayed by William Pierce of South Carolina, who wrote down pithy evaluations of his colleagues, as a “fine genius…well acquainted with Man and…all the passions that influence him,” and as “no great Orator” but “clear, copious, and comprehensive,” Wilson took an almost uncompromising position for a powerful national government. He was supported by the two wealthy and sophisticated Morrises, Robert and Gouverneur, and by several other members of a strong delegation, including Thomas Fitzsimmons, a merchant and banker and one of two Catholics among the delegates.

A noted man at the convention was the head of the Delaware delegation, John Dickinson, a distinguished lawyer, member of several Congresses, and the author of Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, a widely read tract, in the years just prior to the Revolution, on the proper and improper powers of Parliament. Massachusetts could not send its ablest sons to the convention—John Adams was in London, Samuel Adams was aging, James Bowdoin bereft of his governorship, General Knox in New York serving as Secretary of War—but the Bay State was nevertheless able to contribute four gifted moderate nationalists: Nathaniel Gorham of Charlestown, Caleb Strong of Northampton, Rufus King of Newburyport, and Elbridge Gerry of Marblehead. This quartet was matched in prestige and articulateness by South Carolina’s trio of the experienced planter-lawyer John Rut-ledge, the eminent lawyer-general Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and his second cousin Charles Pinckney, deeply experienced in law, politics, and soldiering for a man still in his twenties. The strangest delegation was New York’s, consisting of the ambitious continentalist Alexander Hamilton “chaperoned”—and outvoted—by two cautious anti-Federalists.

On the face of it, the cardinal question facing the convention seemed simple: how much power to yield to the new federal government at the expense of the states? This “division of powers” was closely related, however, to “separation of powers.” How should power be divided up among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the new federal government? And these two questions were related in turn to extraordinarily complex issues of representation: by what persons should members of the two houses of Congress, the executive, and the judiciary be appointed or elected, for terms of what length, and with what checks or vetoes upon one another? And attitudes toward all these questions were closely affected by delegates’ calculations of local and regional advantage; by personal experience, interest, and ideology; by concern for the likely impact of the new constitution on issues such as slavery, western expansion, foreign relations, economic policy; by faith—or lack of it—in the people’s intelligence and in majority rule. The delegates had to think in terms of literally hundreds of possible permutations and combinations, with every new decision possibly upsetting positions previously arrived at.

The Virginia Plan provided a focus that helped avert parliamentary anarchy. Day after day Madison and his allies mustered the votes to put through major parts of their program, at least provisionally. By the second week of June, however, the opponents of the Virginia Plan were organizing a counterattack. The immediate issue was the most divisive that faced the convention: how the small states and the big states would be represented in Congress. And this issue was inseparable from the question of how much power Congress would wield.

On June 15 William Paterson of New Jersey rose to join battle—a gentleman of “about 34 ys. of age, of a very low stature,” Pierce noted, and of rather modest appearance and presence, but “one of those kind of Men whose powers break in upon you, and create wonder and astonishment.” He offered a counterplan to the Virginians’, supported by men who were less famous throughout America than delegates like Madison and Hamilton, but well known and highly regarded in their states, nonetheless: men like Roger Sherman, a Connecticut politician, self-taught lawyer, Yale treasurer; Luther Martin, Princeton graduate, a lawyer, a patriot, but tending toward both the bottle and the battological; John Lansing of Albany, owner of a vast tract of land in upstate New York, a friendly, good-looking man who generally took the anti-nationalist line. Paterson and his colleagues seemed to challenge the Virginia Plan on almost every point, especially in their plea for a new national Congress of one chamber that would represent the large and the small states equally.

With the issue of confrontation clear, the convention moved on to new heights of oratory and argumentation. Emotions rose to such a pitch that there were veiled warnings of walkouts, and indeed of a separation of states and disintegration of the Union. But the convention was never in serious danger. The New Jersey Plan had accepted the major premises of the Virginia Plan: expanded power for the national government; the authority of that government to act directly on individuals and not merely on states; the national executive to have coercive authority over the states if necessary to enforce the law. Committees of compromising politicians were set up and the rival plans were adjusted to each other. Historians have generally written that the “Connecticut compromise” came to the rescue of the beleaguered convention, but in fact the main feature of the compromise—election of an upper chamber on the basis of equality between large and small states, and election of a lower chamber through popular representation—had been foreshadowed in the convention deliberations almost from the start. It was a natural compromise, granting both the Virginians and the New Jerseyites the kind of representation they wanted.

Because the vast majority of the delegates were so agreed on one fundamental concept, further agreements were reached during the remaining weeks of the convention. That concept was checks and balances. One might have expected the proponents of both plans to be disgruntled by the final compromise, because each chamber of Congress was given an absolute veto over the other, which meant that a “small state” Senate might block a “large state” House of Representatives, or vice versa. But neither side seemed to have this fear, mainly because all they wanted for their small states or large states was a “negative veto” to protect their existing liberties, not a positive power to join with other branches to use government in attempts to expand people’s liberties. This attitude and this decision would come back to haunt the future conduct of American public affairs.

It was also because of this fundamental agreement between large- and small-staters that the convention was able to resolve, for the time being at least, some of the other knotty problems before it. One of these was the national executive. The issue arose early in the convention, and it soon became clear that the delegates had highly mixed feelings about the mechanics of the executive. After Charles Pinckney called for a “vigorous executive” but feared that it might exercise powers over “peace and war” more appropriate to a monarchy, and after Wilson moved that the executive consist of a single person, a considerable pause ensued, and Rutledge remarked on the “shyness of gentlemen” on this subject. They were less shy than uncertain. Sherman considered the “Executive magistracy” to be nothing more than an agency for carrying out the will of the new Congress. Gerry wanted a council annexed to the executive, “in order to give weight and inspire confidence.” Randolph condemned “a unity in the Executive” as the “foetus of monarchy.” Wilson replied: No, it would be the best safeguard against tyranny. Madison suggested mildly that before choosing between a unity and a plurality in the executive, they might fix the extent of executive authority.

On this matter too, the delegates’ differences were largely on points of detail. Certainly the executive should have some kind of veto over the legislative; should exercise initiative and assume responsibility in the making of foreign policy; should possess considerable control over his own executive branch, through the appointive power and the like. The President would be given authority to conduct war as Commander in Chief, but not the unilateral power to declare or make war; he would have no general prerogative to exercise emergency powers, although it was assumed he would act for the national self-defense. The Framers argued at length over some of these questions but did not sharply disagree, because they all wanted to grant the President a balanced and limited set of powers within the overall framework of the strategy of checks and balances.

The men of Philadelphia showed a far less firm grasp on the question of how to elect the executive. Knowing today the crucial differences between the parliamentary and presidential forms of government, we read the convention debates almost suspensefully as the delegates teeter back and forth between selection of the President by Congress and election by the state legislatures or by the voters. The delegates were more impressed by the dilemma than by the drama. Gerry opposed legislative selection of the President on the ground that Congress and the presidential candidates would constantly “intrigue” and “bargain and play into one another’s hands.”

In the end, the Framers decided on a jerry-built institution called the electoral college, designed to create a bulwark between the aroused passions of the people and the office of the chief executive and, in the spirit of the checks and balances, to make the executive and legislative branches responsible to different constituencies. The common assumption that George Washington would be the first President nourished agreement on the presidential election process.

On the national judiciary, most of the delegates were agreed as to its general shape and role but divided over mechanics. The judicial power would be vested in one supreme tribunal, and Congress would have authority to establish inferior federal courts. The question of the reach of the judiciary was left obscure; most delegates assumed, however, that the Supreme Court would at least be able to invalidate acts of the states and probably also acts of Congress. Both powers would fit neatly into the checks and balances strategy. So should the manner of choosing the judges, though here the delegates disagreed. In one early session, James Wilson opposed congressional selection on the grounds that “Experience shewed the impropriety of such appointmts. by numerous bodies,” according to Madison’s notes. “Intrigue, partiality, and concealment were the necessary consequences.” But “Mr. Rutlidge was by no means disposed to grant so great a power to any single person. The people will think we are leaning too much towards Monarchy.” Madison was inclined to give the power to the Senate. Franklin “in a brief and entertaining manner” reminded the delegates of the “Scotch mode”—lawyers were given the power to nominate, and they always selected the ablest “in order to get rid of him, and share his practice [among themselves].” Eventually the delegates took advantage of the planned separate entities of the President and the Senate, the first of whom would propose, and the second confirm, appointments to the Supreme Court for life.

On the festering and rankling issue of slavery the delegates compromised from start to finish. Indeed, the delegates were already compromised before the start of the convention, for the “federal ratio” of three-fifths “representation” for slaves had been established under the Confederation and still reflected a crude balance of sections, ideology, and interests. Facing the delegates was not merely the stark issue of slavery itself; intertwined with it was the question of whether representation should be based on persons alone or also on property. Not only Southerners but Northerners like Rufus King and Gouverneur Morris believed in extra representation for property, and in the eyes of the law slaves were property, not persons.

For these white men the black man was always a brooding and unsettling presence (the black woman, even more than the white woman, was beyond the pale, beyond calculation). For the black man, the white man deciding on slave representation could be a cause only of sardonic reflection. For the issue never was slave representation, slave votes, slave power; it was whether slaves would not count in the representation of the South at all, or whether a slave owner would enjoy a three-fifths increment of representation for every slave he owned. On this latter choice the slave could reflect that he had been granted three-fifths symbolic manhood. William Paterson told the delegates bluntly that slaves were “no free agents, have no personal liberty, no faculty of acquiring property, but on the contrary, are themselves property” and hence like other property “entirely at the will of the master.”

For the black man, exclusion from the reach of liberty and equality, even on solemn occasions glorifying liberty and equality for “all men,” was already an old story. In his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson had indicted King George for the horrors of the slave trade, only to have this clause struck out from the final draft on the insistence of South Carolinians and other seacoast Southerners. And even in Massachusetts, where slaves had been “freed,” emancipation was accomplished by judicial decree rather than legislative action. What white workers really wanted, in Donald Robinson’s words, “was not the emancipation of the slaves, but their removal from the state.”

Throughout the heated debates that followed, the three-fifths formula stuck. Another seeming compromise was reached on the issue of the slave trade: abolition not before 1808, with a powerful extradition clause written into the Constitution. What the delegates did not do was more important than what they did: “they did not themselves outlaw slavery,” Rossiter noted, “nor in any way seek to mitigate its effects; they did not give Congress the power to outlaw slavery in the states; they made provision neither to help nor hinder free Negroes in the attempt to win the status and rights of citizenship.” The reason was obvious to all: a stronger stand on slavery would probably have led to rejection of the Constitution in the South, and eventually to disunion.

Union and order and national strength were far more important to most of the Framers than were the rights or liberties of black men and women. For only in union and order, most of them believed, could their own liberties be protected.

And so the men of Philadelphia persevered through the hot July and August days, filling out the details now that the grand design had been set in the Connecticut compromise, sawing boards to make them fit, as Benjamin Franklin said. Some of the boards required much sanding and smoothing, as the delegates thrashed out irksome but vital aspects of the relations between the national and state governments, the enumerated powers of Congress, the jurisdiction of the courts, the reach of impeachment, the amending clause, and procedures for ratifying the Constitution itself. They endured hundreds of roll-call votes as they polished clause after clause of the new charter. They debated the “details” of the Constitution as if they foresaw that someday vital outcomes would turn on such matters as the availability of impeachment or the scope of judicial review. They deliberated as if the eyes of the world were on them. “With Grave Anxiety, my dear friend, I wail for the Result of the Convention,” Lafayette had written John Jay, who was keeping in touch with delegates from his post in New York. Hour after hour the delegates toiled, six days a week, with hardly a break, except for a ten-day recess during which a committee on detail consolidated the work of the convention, while the rest of the delegates dined out, tackled their correspondence, took excursions into the countryside, and went fishing. Philadelphia offered few temptations; nights were given over to further talk in taverns and in the delegates’ hot and crowded quarters.

There were diversions. One was the spectacle of Alexander Hamilton taking the floor for six hours one day to orate brilliantly on the need for a powerful national government and a President of almost monarchical cast. The delegates listened avidly, then returned to their mundane carpentry. Another was John Fitch’s steamboat, which the inventor demonstrated down at the river. Watching the ungainly, heaving, panting contraption, the delegates could hardly have dreamed that steam would transform the very society and economy they were seeking to tame.

CHAPTER 2

The Third Cadre

THE STORY HAS OFTEN been told of the final conciliatory moment of the convention, on September 17—of Benjamin Franklin’s remark, as the last members were signing, that during the vicissitudes of the proceedings he had often looked at the president’s chair, on which a sun happened to be painted, and wondered whether it was a rising or a setting sun; but now, he said, he knew that it was rising. The delegates later repaired to the City Tavern on Second Street near Walnut, where they “dined together,” Washington reported, “and took a cordial leave of each other.”

Nevertheless, the convention adjourned amid extensive disagreements and misgivings. Three delegates—Randolph, Mason, and Gerry—refused to put their names on the document. Others signed mainly to present a show of unity. A number of delegates lamented especially the absence of a bill of rights. When Charles Pinckney and Elbridge Gerry had proposed in convention that the “liberty of the Press should inviolably be observed,” Sherman had replied, “It is unnecessary—the power of Congress does not extend to the Press,” and the proposal was voted down. Sherman’s argument had sat badly; how could a constitution fashioned to protect liberty omit a guarantee of liberty? Still, delegates felt that this omission and other failures in the charter could be remedied through extensive use of the amendment process that they had fashioned so carefully. Some calculated that adding a bill of rights could be made the price of accepting the new charter.

Still, the delegates had passed a hard test of leadership in Philadelphia. The question in the fall of 1787 was whether these leaders could pass the far harsher test of winning support for the new charter in the ratifying conventions to be held in the states. At the start, prospects looked good for the “friends of the Constitution.” They were led by Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and others who had demonstrated their political skills year after year, in struggle after struggle. They had both an evocative symbol and a stalwart leader in George Washington. They had access to clergymen, editors, state officials. They could boast of a reserve team of leaders who had not attended the convention but who matched the Federalists at Philadelphia in their political experience and acumen—men like John Adams of Boston and London, Thomas Jefferson of Charlottesville and Paris, John Jay of New York, John Marshall and Edmund Pendleton of Virginia, Dr. Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania, Edward Rutledge and Henry Laurens of South Carolina.

The Federalist plan was to push quickly through Congress, in which they were well represented, a resolution transmitting the draft Constitution on to the states with a recommendation in favor of ratification. But the national legislature, still cautious to the point of inertia, would not commit itself; and the Federalists had to be satisfied with a resolution that the document “be transmitted to the several legislatures in order to be submitted to a convention of delegates chosen in each state by the people thereof.” Richard Henry Lee of Virginia complained to his fellow anti-Federalist George Mason that the Federalists had made much of the Congress unanimously transmitting the Constitution to the states, “hoping to have it mistaken for an unanimous approbation of the thing…[but] no approbation was given.” The Federalist tacticians also saw to it that the legislatures had to call conventions in their states, and that the Constitution would go into effect—for the ratifying states—after endorsement by conventions in any nine of the thirteen states. The new order would not wait for unanimity.

For a time the critics of the Constitution seemed thrown off balance by the Federalist momentum. But the anti-Federalists had a general strategy too. If the strength of the Federalists lay in their power to dominate the central and secret conclave in Philadelphia, that of their foes was to rally the opposition in the separate states. If the strength of the Federalists lay also in possessing a positive plan that would catalyze the amorphous political groupings in America, that of their foes was to unite the opponents of the Constitution, despite their own disagreements, in efforts to delay, amend, or repudiate the charter in the battle arenas of the states. The anti-Federalists were not overawed by the eminence of their leading opponents. One of them, annoyed by the incessant prating about the demigods of Philadelphia, remarked that he would not make invidious comments about their characters, “but I will venture to affirm, that twenty assemblies of equal number might be collected, equally respectable both in point of ability, integrity, and patriotism.” The foes of the Constitution could point to their own leadership in the convention—Mason, Gerry, and the others—and to their remarkable second team throughout the country, with state leaders such as Richard Henry Lee, Governor George Clinton of New York, Samuel Adams, and above all, the formidable Patrick Henry of Virginia.

Among the Federalist leaders, none was more active than Alexander Hamilton, now barely thirty-two years old. During the summer of 1787, as Robert Yates and John Lansing returned from Philadelphia and spread rumors that a consolidated national government was being contrived, he fell into a row with Governor Clinton, who was already busy rallying the opposition in New York State. Hamilton was at his worst in this encounter. Choosing the dangerous pseudonym “Caesar,” indulging freely in personal attacks, he took such an elitist position in favor of a strong national government, in which popular passions would be curbed to defend the people’s own liberties, that he confirmed the anti-Federalists’ worst suspicions. So Hamilton turned to a mere cerebral approach—a collaborative series of reasoned and trenchant essays on the Constitution, to be published in New York newspapers, and he had the wit to involve in this enterprise James Madison and John Jay, both of whom were in New York City at this time. By late October, Hamilton had struck off the first number of the Federalist—written, it has been said, on a vessel proceeding up the Hudson—in which the author called for moderation and then went on to argue that “a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people, than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government.” The vigor of government was essential, he argued, to the “security of liberty.”

It was a remarkable collaboration. So agreed were the authors on their ends and their means, so similar was their background in ancient and contemporary classics, that readers could not recognize the particular author of a paper. Hamilton evidently had hoped that the three authors could meet regularly at his house at the corner of Broadway and Wall Street to unify the papers, but the trio were all too busy for this. He wisely chose Jay, still Secretary of Foreign Affairs, to write on foreign policy, Madison to philosophize on the shape and structure of the new government, and himself to demonstrate the inadequacies of the Confederation—a subject on which Hamilton viewed himself as an expert.

The authors wrote in secrecy, using the benign pseudonym “Publius”; Washington was one of the few to know something about the authorship. Throughout the late fall and winter of 1787-88 the papers appeared in the New York Packet on Tuesdays and Fridays and in the Independent Journal Wednesdays and Saturdays. Another newspaper ran some of the essays, but dropped the series after anti-Federalists aroused pressure from subscribers. So avidly were the essays sought after by “politicians and persons of every description,” the publishers John and Archibald McLean reported, that they issued a collected edition in March 1788, long before the end of the struggle over ratification.

Not even the enthusiastic McLeans could guess that a later publisher would be able to say with good reason that the Federalist was “America’s greatest contribution to political philosophy.” What attracted attention to the papers even at the time was the enlarged vision and the sophisticated analysis that the authors brought to their pitch for the new system. Although the essayists—especially Madison—drew heavily on their own earlier writings, they seemed to grow intellectually as they struck off the papers, sometimes as the printer waited impatiently.

Madison obviously liked his own earlier comments about the human tendency of liberty toward factionalism; the need nonetheless to protect liberty and find some other way to curb faction, which was sown in the very nature of man; the many varieties of faction, including the frivolous but most of all the economic (“the various and unequal distribution of property”). He contended still that the causes of faction could not be removed, and hence the only remedy was to control its effects, and that this could be accomplished by submerging factions in a wider sphere—namely, under a new, strong, national government. These ideas appeared in the 10th paper.

But Madison went far beyond his earlier writings intellectually in facing the supreme dilemma—the possibility that powerful factions, whether minority or majority, might capture the new national government just as they had come close to dominating state governments. No one has ever described the ultimate remedy—separation of House, Senate, executive, and judiciary, with each branch responsible to its own unique, competing constituency—as cogently and compellingly as Madison did in the 51st paper. “To what expedient then,” he asked after a long survey of the dilemma, “shall we finally resort for maintaining in practice the necessary partition of power among the several departments, as laid down in the constitution? The only answer that can be given is, that as all these exterior provisions are found to be inadequate, the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government, as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.” Each department must be as separate as possible, with a will of its own. Then came the imperishable words:

“But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defence must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to controul the abuses of government. But what is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controuls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to controul the governed; and in the next place oblige it to controul itself. A dependence on the people, is no doubt, the primary controul on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

It was Madison’s capacity to combine deep political and psychological understanding—as in his summary statement of the strategy of “supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives”—that would justify his reputation as both the intellectual and political father of the Constitution.

THE ANTI-FEDERALISTS

The opponents of the Constitution still declined to yield to this Federalist display of political and intellectual power. They had their own strength to fall back on, their own networks of friendly preachers, politicians, and newspaper editors. The anti-Federalist leaders were far less celebrated nationally than Washington, Franklin et al., but Madison himself was struck by the large number of “respectable names” he found among his adversaries. They had their own ideological strategy—to charge the framers of the Constitution with not only ignoring the needs of liberty but actively conspiring against it—and they polished their political tactics of dividing and eviscerating their adversaries as the struggle over the Constitution dissolved into numberless state and local encounters, so that the great national issue would be sucked into the whirlpools of local and state politics. Attacking parts of the Constitution rather than the whole charter, the anti-Federalists demanded not the repudiation of Philadelphia but the right of state conventions to pass amendments to the Constitution and in effect to gain a second convention. Nothing distressed the Framers more than this prospect. To return to Philadelphia for another session would throw them on the defensive, inundate them in a sea of incompatible amendments, and produce a far weaker national charter. The Federalists would accept recommendations for the new Congress under the Constitution to consider, but amendments to the existing draft—never!

And so the issue was put to the American people in the late fall of 1787—put not to a great mass public, though large numbers of voters would turn out to elect state convention delegates, put not to small national or state elites, though established leaders would exercise heavy influence in many of the contests, but put to about 1,200 delegates who would be elected to the state conventions in hundreds of tiny contests across the thousand-mile length of the American states. A first cadre in Philadelphia had written a charter; a second cadre of state leadership was quick to join the battle; now the issue would depend on a third cadre, composed largely of local politicians from the American backlands—the western counties, the farm area, the piedmont, the mountain valleys—as well as from the urban and cosmopolitan areas. These men must analyze a complex document, follow the debates in press and pulpit and public house, and manage also to get elected as delegates. The future of the republic would turn on the perspicacity and vision of country politicians, circuit-riding lawyers, money-minded men of commerce, cracker-barrel philosophers—on a critical mass of men who would have to lift their sights above gables and chimney pots and see their way into the possibilities of nationhood.

The Federalists exulted over smashing victories in several of the smaller states that acted early on ratification. The Delaware convention voted unanimously for the new charter on December 7, 1787, followed by similar votes in the New Jersey and Georgia delegations within a month. But Pennsylvania had acted in the meantime, and the fate of the Constitution in this big state, considered to be heavily pro-Federalist, warned the friends of the Constitution that trouble lay ahead. In no state had the charter been more intensely debated than in Pennsylvania, with its plethora of newspapers and of printers eager to publish pamphlets and broadsides. In no state was the press more one-sidedly pro-Federalist, nor were so many thousands of petitions submitted in behalf of the new plan of government. But the anti-Federalists were organized too, prepared to employ the tactics of dissection and delay, and they seized on a procedural incident to pose a moral argument against the Framers.

The incident came the day after the Congress, still sitting in New York City, voted to transmit the Constitution to the states. An express rider galloped through the night to put the resolution into the hands of the Pennsylvania Assembly, with its impatient Federalist majority. The opponents of the Federalists were also prepared, armed with a provision of the Pennsylvania constitution that required two-thirds of the members, rather than the usual majority, to make up a quorum. When the Assembly met that morning the Federalists found the enemy absent—hence no quorum. Indignant, the majority ordered the sergeant at arms to “collect the absent members.” The sergeant and his minions proceeded to track down the errant assemblymen in the streets and boardinghouses of Philadelphia. Two men were finally cornered, hustled by the sergeant and some zealous citizens into the Assembly hall, and thrust into their seats. When one made a bolt for the door, his way was blocked by a mob. Armed now with their quorum, the Federalists pushed through a measure for the election of convention delegates within six weeks and the holding of the convention two weeks after that.

It was a skirmish won by the Federalists, at the risk of losing the battle. Reading about the affair in the newspapers or in letters from Philadelphia, anti-Federalists charged that the Framers were trying to shove the new instrument through without adequate popular discussion. Why the rush? The Pennsylvania Federalists, sure of their majority, pressed ahead in the hope that Pennsylvania would be the first large state to ratify the Constitution. Obscured by the clamor was the fact that the Pennsylvanians were conducting an intensive and searching analysis of the charter throughout the fall, in the long process of calling the convention, choosing a new Assembly, electing convention delegates, and debating the Constitution in the convention. In mid-December the convention voted to ratify the Constitution, 46-23, but the Federalist cause was tarnished again when rioting broke out in Carlisle, where James Wilson was burned in effigy and hundreds of militiamen advanced on the town with a threat to liberate political prisoners.

It was no surprise that Wilson—the only delegate to the national constitutional convention who took part in the Pennsylvania ratifying convention—should have exhibited his brilliance as he marshaled support for the charter. The test was whether the “average” person could adequately cope with a document of such complexity. Robert Whitehill was typical of the plain-spoken, clear-minded men from all parts of the country who stood up and debated with the more celebrated. The new Constitution, he told his fellow delegates, would lead to a consolidated government dangerous to the people’s liberties. The words “We the people of the United States,” he said, proved that “the old foundation of the Union is destroyed, the principle of confederation excluded, and a new unwieldy system of consolidated empire is set up upon the ruins of the present compact between the states…It is declared that the agreement of nine states shall be sufficient to carry the new system into operation, and, consequently, to abrogate the old one. Then, Mr. President, four of the present confederated states may not be comprehended in the compact; shall we, sir, force these dissenting states into the measure?” Wilson and the other Pennsylvania delegates had been authorized to strengthen the Confederation Congress but “they have overthrown that government which they were called upon to amend.” So forcefully did Whitehill—long viewed as a run-of-the-mill politician—pose the issue of liberty under the new Constitution that Wilson, in answering him, argued on Whitehill’s ground.

With the ratifications by four middle and southern states, the epicenter of the struggle moved north as New England states prepared to hold conventions. Delegates gathered in the imposing Hartford State House during the first week of January for a session that the ruling Federalists planned to convert into a demonstration of strong leadership, as a model for the Yankees farther north. A demonstration it was, as the friends of the Constitution massed their strength in the convention, 128-40, while the anti-Federalists complained that they had been “brow beaten by many of those Cicero’es as they think themselves & others of Superior rank” who had indulged in “Shuffleing & Stamping of feet, caughing Halking Spitting & Whispering.”

Massachusetts would be a different story. In no state save Virginia did the two sides seem so well matched at every level of leadership: A solid phalanx of Federalists—former Governor Bowdoin, Theodore Sedgwick of Stockbridge fame, Fisher Ames, Francis Dana, and three delegates fresh from Philadelphia—confronted a locally prestigious cohort of anti-Federalists such as Elbridge Gerry, Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives James Warren, and, it was expected, the renowned Samuel Adams with his riding friend Governor John Hancock.

Gerry especially was to be feared: he had served in the constitutional convention, he had heard all the arguments, he had rejected the charter. Adams was an enigma. A Harvard graduate, an organizer of the Sons of Liberty, agitator for independence, longtime politician, he was both ideologue and wire puller, both a government man and an agitator for the cause of liberty against government. Hancock was a trimmer. The first delegate to sign the Declaration of Independence, the first governor of the state of Massachusetts, he had become immensely popular in Boston, where he was probably the richest man of his generation, and in the hinterland, on which he had bestowed free Bibles in abundance. Arrayed behind the noted leaders of both sides was the “third cadre” of county and local politicians, lawyers, judges, convention delegates, and others who had sharpened their political rhetoric and perceptions in twenty years of almost continuous disputes over issues of revolution, independence, Regulation, state constitution making, and now constitution ratifying for the nation.

Gerry opened with a letter to the Massachusetts legislature that intoned the familiar litany of the dangerous blending of executive, legislative, and judicial power, lack of provision for rotation of office, senators virtually appointed for life—but returned again and again to charges of lack of protection for rights of conscience, liberty of the press, trial by jury—in short, the lack of a bill of rights. Gerry’s style was “too sublime and florid” for certain of the “common people,” some Albany Federalists said. But his attack on the alleged chicanery, intrigue, duplicity, and imbecility of the framers of the Constitution opened the Massachusetts struggle on a note of rancor.

Boston—commercial, cosmopolitan, seafaring, internationalist Boston—was a hotbed of Federalist agitation. Most of its eight newspapers steadily praised the new Constitution, ranging from sober analysis of its provisions to castigations of its opponents as ignorant, shortsighted, weak-headed, bad-hearted, wicked. It was an age of invective, and few paid particular attention when a Federalist denounced opponents as “blind, positive, conceited sons of bitches” who deserved roasting in hell. When the American Herald broke the press phalanx and attacked the Constitution, Federalist merchants pulled out their advertising and Federalist readers canceled their subscriptions. Why should we finance attacks on our own opinions? one of them asked.

The opponents of the Constitution in Massachusetts were part of a nationwide network, though far less extensive than the Federalists’. As if he needed any coaching, Samuel Adams received letters from Richard Henry Lee urging that the new Constitution “be bottomed upon a Declaration or bill of Rights.” Lee felt free to press his views on Adams because he had “long toiled with you my dear friend in the Vineyard of liberty…” Like the Federalists, critics of the Constitution had their own pulpits—the town meetings that would elect convention delegates from the country areas of Massachusetts, often with instructions on how to vote. Anti-Federalist feeling ran strong in scores of towns in western and central Massachusetts, where the grievances that erupted in Shays’s Rebellion (as it had come to be called)—and the memories of its suppression—still rankled. Sometimes the Federalists prevailed in the hinterland only to be accused of ramming the Constitution down the “throats of others” in the spirit of Pennsylvania. In Sheffield the leading Federalist was accused of a hat trick: “Instead of setting it”—the hat for collecting ballots—“fair & open on the Table as usual,” he “held it in his Left hand Pressed Close to his breast…” The pattern of seacoast Federalism and inland opposition also appeared in Maine, then part of Massachusetts. The election of convention delegates reflected this split. Federalists scored so heavily in eastern towns that Gerry himself was beaten in Cambridge, and James Warren in Milton, but a “cloud” of anti-Federalists were elected inland, and Adams and Hancock won in Boston.

In mid-January—just a year after troops had moved west to subdue Shays and his men—350 delegates were arriving in Boston by carriage and sleigh. The meeting house on Milk Street had been enlarged to seat several hundred spectators, with a special gallery for newspaper reporters. The audience watched a Federalist minority led by skillful publicists and parliamentarians outmaneuver an apparent anti-Constitution majority. Evidently considering Gerry safer within the convention hall than outside, the friends of the Constitution acquiesced in a motion by Samuel Adams that Gerry be permitted a seat on the floor to supply information “that possibly had Escaped the memory of the other Gentlemen of the general Convention.” The Federalists treated Gerry so rudely, however, that he quit the floor in a huff. Without him the anti-Federalist leadership seemed to falter, though some of the country delegates performed brilliantly.

Samuel Nasson, a Maine saddler and storekeeper, rose to “beg the indulgence” of the convention while he made “a short apostrophe to liberty. O, liberty! thou greatest good! thou fairest property! With thee I wish to live, with thee I wish to die!” He shed a rhetorical tear over the perils to which liberty was exposed, first at the hands of British tyranny and now before the power of Congress. Nasson and his colleague John Taylor peppered the Federalists with more prosaic objections too: questions about the Constitution’s mechanics, attacks on its concessions to slavery, and arguments in favor of the annual election of legislators.

Still facing the possibility of defeat, the friends of the Constitution adopted the stratagem of accepting their opponents’ most convincing amendments—especially those relating to the absence of a bill of rights—and of urging that they be proposed not as the condition of ratifying the Constitution but as amendments recommended to the future Congress. Further, the Federalists induced John Hancock—on the promise, it was said, of supporting him for Vice-President of the new Union, or even for President, if Virginia stayed out—to offer this amendment procedure to the convention.

The dismayed anti-Federalists, now turning to the tactic of delay, moved that the convention adjourn so that the towns could discuss the proposed amendments. This effort failed by a lopsided vote. The convention then ratified the Constitution with the recommended amendments, 187-168, a narrow vote that gave the Federalists pause. They had possessed the advantage of the ablest leadership, strong press support, backing from Congregationalist leaders, the symbolism of George Washington and of Union. The anti-Federalists, on the other hand, suffered from faltering leadership at the top and some bad luck. Yet the foes of the Constitution had almost won, testifying to the strength of their leadership corps at the grass roots. The country politicians and farmers and lawyers had risen to the challenge, sometimes to heights of oratory. The near-defeat also warned the Federalists that the American hinterland was still to be heard from.

And heard it was, all across New England. In New Hampshire during January, meeting after meeting in the hilly upland towns elected anti-Federalist delegates to that state’s convention. Viewing the proceedings, a man in Maine reported that “it is with them as it was with us the Country Members Mostely against the Traiding Towns for it.” The seaboard towns were not numerous enough to counteract the interior. The New Hampshire Federalists, seizing on a device they had denounced elsewhere, managed to stave off defeat by gaining a recess of the convention until June. In Rhode Island the country leaders in the legislature spurned a convention and called a popular referendum, which the Federalists boycotted; their adversaries won overwhelmingly. This was in late March, the nadir of hopes for the new charter.

Support for the Constitution was much warmer toward the south. In Maryland in April the Federalist near-oligarchy won overwhelming control of the convention in the delegate elections and arranged for a brief sitting, where they allowed their foes to talk, declined to debate against them, brushed aside recommendatory amendments, ratified the Constitution by a 63-11 vote, and adjourned—all in four working days. In South Carolina the delegate elections produced the usual split between the seacoast and the western counties, with Charleston almost solidly pro-Constitution. Just as effectively as their counterpart in Maryland, but with more elegance, the Federalist oligarchy arranged to hold the ratifying convention in Charleston, where in May they plied country delegates with sherry and Madeira, squelched an effort to postpone the session until October, accepted some recommendatory amendments, and won ratification by a 149-73 vote. In both cases the anti-Federalist leadership failed to measure up to its opponents.

On June 21,1788, the postponed New Hampshire convention approved the charter by a close vote, the ninth ratification. The new Constitution was now in effect. The Federalists did little celebrating, however, since two key states had not acted: Virginia, the link between north and south and the home of Washington and other heroes; and New York, the hinge between the middle and northern states, and a vital commercial center, with its great port and long, slow-flowing river.

THE COURSE IS SET

No state surpassed Virginia in its array of talent on both sides of the ratification struggle. Its celebrated leaders—Washington, Madison, Randolph, and Mason—were flanked by a leadership corps of hardly less esteem—John Marshall, Henry Lee, and Edmund Pendleton—for the Constitution. Poised against them were Richard Henry Lee, James Monroe, William Grayson, John Tyler, and Benjamin Harrison, but towering over the anti-Federalist group was Patrick Henry, impassioned orator, oracle of liberty, first governor of the state of Virginia.

At fifty-two Henry—bespectacled and slightly stooped, his thinning hair topped by a nomadic wig—had lost a little of his fire. But he still drew crowds when word flashed through the countryside that he was speaking in the local courthouse. As a recent settler in Prince Edward County, Henry had close connections with Kentuckians coming from southern Virginia who were convinced that Northerners would jeopardize settlement of the vast lands to the west. They feared men like John Jay, who had made supine agreements with Spain, holder of the southern Mississippi. Patrick Henry, a bowed figure in clothes made on his own loom, set off for Richmond at the end of May in a simple, topless gig.

He did not disappoint the spectators gathered in Richmond. As in other states, Federalist leaders, better prepared than their foes, quickly gained control of the organization and agenda of the convention. But nothing could control Henry. Stating flatly that he considered himself to be his fellow Virginians’ “sentinel over their rights, liberty, and happiness,” he sought to pre-empt the supreme issue of liberty for the anti-Federalists. “The rights of conscience, trial by jury, liberty of the press, all your immunities and franchises, all pretensions to human rights and privileges are rendered insecure, if not lost, by this change,” he told the congregation. “Liberty, the greatest of earthly possessions—give us that precious jewel, and you may take everything else! But I am fearful I have lived long enough to become an old-fashioned fellow. Perhaps an invincible attachment to the dearest rights of man may, in these refined, enlightened days, be deemed old-fashioned; if so, I am contented to be so.…”

Some able Federalists were ready to answer Henry—Governor Randolph, who at last had come down on the side of the Constitution, Pendleton, Henry Lee, and a rising young lawyer from Richmond, John Marshall. But the center of attention was James Madison. The congressman had remained in New York throughout the winter, writing a string of Federalist papers, tending to what little business Congress had, and indefatigably planning tactics and exchanging intelligence with friends throughout the states. He had supposed he might not need to attend the Virginia convention, until he was warned that Henry and his allies were inflaming the public against the Constitution.

Madison was even threatened at home. An anti-Federalist candidate had announced for convention in Madison’s county; “his unwared Labours Riding his Carquits [circuit] & the Instrements he makes use of to Obtain his Election,” a friend wrote Madison, “misrepresents things in such Horred carrecters that the weker clas of the people are much predegessed agains it.…amoungs his Friends appears, in a General way the Baptus’s, the Prechers of that Society are much alarm’d fearing Relegious liberty is not Sufficiently secur’d:…” Madison had returned home and beaten this opponent by a four-to-one vote.

Now he was facing the formidable Henry, without Henry’s oratorical power. In a low voice that sometimes failed to carry to the packed hall, he bluntly confronted Henry’s main argument. “He told us, that this constitution ought to be rejected, because it endangered the public liberty, in his opinion, in many instances.” He wished the honorable gentleman would give details rather than vague assertions, Madison went on. “He has suggested that licentiousness has seldom produced the loss of liberty; but that the tyranny of rulers has almost always effected it. Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people, by gradual and silent ancroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations: but, on a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism.” Madison went on to specify the various means whereby nations had lost their liberties.

It took all the resources the Federalists could muster—not only Madison’s matchless knowledge of the letter and spirit of the Constitution, but Randolph’s new support for the charter, the bluntness of “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, advice from out-of-state eminences such as the two Morrises from Pennsylvania, and the pervading sense that the spirit of George Washington was present—to keep Henry and his stalwarts from cutting into the slight margin that the friends of the Constitution had gained in the election of the convention delegates. One anti-Federalist viewed the convention as evenly divided, with “one half of her crew hoisting sail for the land of energy, and the other looking with a longing aspect on the shore of liberty.” Day after day the delegates debated every major aspect of the charter.

A timely concession by the Federalists swung the balance. Yielding to Henry’s impassioned calls for the protection of liberty, Madison and his allies accepted recommendations for a number of amendments that would constitute a bill of rights, including freedom of religion, speech, and assembly; no excessive bail or cruel and unusual punishment; and retention of the jury system. It was the Massachusetts formula, and it convinced wavering delegates in Richmond as it had earlier in Boston.

Unappeased, Henry took the floor for a climactic assault. Amid darkening skies outside and the crackling of thunder, he warned of the “awful immensity of the dangers” in the Constitution, castigated Randolph, and clung to his role of sentinel of liberty.

The Federalist ranks held firm, but the convention was still closely divided between tidewater and northern counties for ratification, and southern Virginia and Kentucky opposed. The decision lay with the sixteen delegates from the Alleghenies, between the Shenandoah Valley and the upper Ohio. These frontiersmen appreciated the philosophical arguments for liberty—their leader, George Jackson of Clarksville, had taught himself to read by painstakingly working his way through Coke and Blackstone—but they made their choice on grounds of practical local interests: a strong federal government, they hoped, would clear their lands of Indians. The Allegheny men voted 15-1 in favor; the Constitution passed 88-80.

The Federalists did not celebrate with abandon; it had been too close-run a thing. And it would have been impossible without the presence of Washington at Mount Vernon. James Monroe wrote Jefferson: “Be assured his influence carried this government.”

The climax of the ratification struggle was now approaching in New York, where the ratifying convention was already in session. In many respects this struggle paralleled those in other states: the same rough split between the commercial-cosmopolitan leaders on the urban seacoast and the rural and small-town politicians in the interior; the same lively debate dominated by criticism of the absence of a bill of rights; the same division within, as well as between, cadres of leadership. But in New York State the Federalists were supported not only by the coastal interests but also by the great patroons and landlords in the Hudson Valley, and their opponents by laborers, tenants, artisans, and small tradespeople, led by their champion, Governor George Clinton. The convention would be another showdown—perhaps the final one—between Clinton and Hamilton.

A “self-made man,” the son of an Irish immigrant, George Clinton had served as a lieutenant of rangers in the French and Indian wars and as a brigadier general in the Revolution. Not yet fifty, he had already had a long career in political office, including ten years as governor of New York. As in other states, the two rivals were flanked by able leaders—Hamilton by John Jay, Chancellor Livingston, James Duane, Isaac Roosevelt; Clinton by John Lansing, General John Lamb, and, not least, Melancton Smith, a prominent merchant-lawyer.

Both sides had thrown themselves into the battle for convention delegates. The anti-Federalists in New York City organized the Federal Republican Committee, which distributed widely copies of Mercy Warren’s attack on the Constitution. They were accused of “daily going about to poison the Tenants” on the large estates. Each side hinted secession—the anti-Federalists of New York State from the Union, the Federalists of New York City from the state. Hamilton himself was not above ethnic politics. In a campaign broadside he was one of fifty-five New Yorkers who assured “Friends and Countrymen, that the SCOTSMEN of this City, with very few Exceptions, are friendly to the New Plan of Government.” Each side bombarded the other in the press. A Clintonian complained that the opposition “instead of arguments, spit out a dozen mouthful of names, epithets, and interjections in a breath, cry Tory! Rebel! Tyranny! Centinel! Sidney! Monarchy! Misery! George the Third! Destruction! Arnold! Shays! Confusion! & c. & c.”

The election results had mirrored the city-hinterland split; the Federalists won heavily in the four lower counties of the state, the anti-Federalists sweepingly elsewhere. Clinton, prudently running from both the city and Poughkeepsie, lost in the former and won in the latter. He had astutely arranged for the convention to be held in Poughkeepsie, away from the contaminating influence of Manhattan. But the voters seemed to be turning against the Federalists. The “elections have gone wrong,” Hamilton wrote Gouverneur Morris even before the final results were in.

By June 16, when two sloops left New York City for Poughkeepsie, one carrying Federalists and the other opposition delegates, Hamilton and his friends knew that only a heroic effort could salvage a convention victory. “How are the mighty fallen!” a Clintonian gloated; not since the Revolution had the “well born” seemed so lacking in influence. But this view did not allow for Federalist talent. In Poughkeepsie, Hamilton gave the virtuoso performance of his career. While Clinton stayed mainly in the background, letting Melancton Smith lead the anti-Federalists in debate, Hamilton dominated the floor and still found time to buttonhole and proselytize delegates in Poughkeepsie’s taverns and boardinghouses. He was waiting for the word from Virginia, and had arranged for riders to bring the tidings in relays of horses. After the express rider burst in on the convention with news of Virginia’s ratification, John Jay could write Washington, “I congratulate you my dear Sir!…That Event has disappointed the Expectations of Opposition here, which nevertheless continues pertinacious.”

The pertinacious Clintonians were not to be stampeded; they still had the votes. By now it was becoming clear to Hamilton that he could win ratification only by isolating the opposition extremists who were insisting on conditional amendments from moderates who might settle for recommendatory amendments. Hamilton had to step carefully between wings of his own party—Madison was insisting that the Constitution required “one adoption in toto and for ever”—in exploiting potential division among his foes. A number of Clintonians were won over on the promise that the host of amendments they had proposed, including bill of rights liberties, would be sent to other states with a plea for a second constitutional convention. Ratification with these non-binding amendments was voted through on July 26, by a vote of 30-27; the Federalists had recruited just enough support. Jay, whose conciliatory tactics contrasted with Hamilton’s asperity, had played a key role in reaching out to wavering anti-Federalists.

The collapse of the Clintonians is still shrouded in some obscurity. Perhaps it was Hamilton’s seizure of the middle ground, or the renewed threat of secession by New York City, or some failure of nerve or will, or the realization, after Virginia, that New York without ratification would be economically and politically isolated in the new Union. The end came quietly, without histrionics or serious recriminations.

If the Poughkeepsie convention ended calmly, it was the quiet of the eye of the storm. Elsewhere New Yorkers were aroused and pugnacious. An anti-Federalist parade in Albany on the Fourth of July had ended in a bloody, drunken brawl, with a dozen or so casualties. Later in the month a Federalist mob in New York City broke into a printer’s shop, spilled ink, and upset type cases, closing down an opposition newspaper. Next day a great Federalist parade made its way up Broadway. Carpenters and shipyard workers towed a magnificent miniature ship they had made, its full canvas rippling in the wind and brushing the buildings on both sides of the street. The ship was named Alexander Hamilton and a heroic effigy of the young leader stood in the prow. At some point, however, Hamilton’s arm was broken off—the arm that held aloft a copy of the Constitution. What kind of omen was this?

VICE AND VIRTUE

Mercy Otis Warren would have savored this omen, if she had heard of it. As a dramatist who had amused Bostonians with her satirical portraits of Massachusetts Tories, she would have delighted even more in caricaturing Hamilton—a true-blue native Tory, in her view—as a would-be dictator with an arm of straw. As a political writer, she welcomed the chance to inveigh against the foes of liberty.

Of all the “women of the republic” who had a pervasive private role in public affairs, Mercy Warren was perhaps the most remarkable, save for her good friend Abigail Adams. Almost sixty at the time of the Philadelphia convention, she had grown up in a family deeply immersed in the revolutionary currents of the 1770s. Denied—as a female—a formal education, she sat in on her brother’s lessons, explored an uncle’s library, and took part in vigorous family debates. Her idolized older brother, James Otis, had helped tutor her in politics until he was set upon by British crown officers, sabered on the head, and left deranged. Married to James Warren—a Plymouth merchant and farmer—and the mother of five sons, she had somehow found time to write verse and a half-dozen dramas. Her stock characters probably never saw the stage, for Massachusetts forbade theatrical performances; it is believed that Mercy Warren the playwright never saw a play.

Family duties and Boston blue laws, however, were not the main bar to her political expression; it was rather the solidly established idea that woman’s place was in the home. Few men in Massachusetts had a better right than Mercy Warren to serve in the state’s ratifying convention, but it was inconceivable that she or any other woman would attend that or any other convention, just as it was barely conceivable that women would help elect the male delegates who did attend. Mercy Warren did not challenge this masculinism. What she did was to explore the farther political reaches of the domain of the home.

A woman could write there, and Mercy Warren composed copious letters to the statesmen of the day, as well as her political plays and tracts. She could educate her sons in republican ideas and virtue; she was lucky in that all five sons grew to adulthood, unlucky in that she and her husband survived all but two of them. Even more, she could begin to construct for less advantaged women, in Linda Kerber’s words, “a rationale that would permit women to attend to political matters without abandoning their domestic responsibilities, as men did.” During the Revolution and after, women had often used the right of petition—a right that implied the subordination of the petitioner. Mercy Warren attacked establishments also with the play, the broadside, and the pamphlet—and it was a pamphlet she employed against the proposed Constitution. Confiding her authorship to her good friend the British historian Catharine Macauley, she used the pseudonym “A Columbian Patriot.”

She began with a dire prediction: someday, when Americans would be asked what had become “of the flower of their crop, and the rich produce of their farms,” they would answer as had the Man of La Mancha, “The Steward of my Lord has seized and sent it to Madrid,’” or more literally, tax collectors of the new national government had seized that produce and transmitted it to the “Federal City.” Columbian Patriot went on to a blistering attack on the “many-headed monster”—its centralizing tendencies, dangerous blending of legislative and executive functions, excessive judicial power, congressional control of elections, its provision for standing armies, “the nursery of vice and the bane of liberty.” She castigated the charter even more for its lacks—no provisions for rotation in office or for annual elections, and above all no bill of rights. Nor did she like the way the Constitution was drawn up in “secret conclave,” or the method of ratification.

Over and over—at least a score of times—Mercy Warren portrayed the Constitution as a direct threat to liberty, freedom, personal rights. That the new government might protect individual rights appeared to carry no weight with her. The way to keep government safe was to tie it directly to the popular will, through frequent elections, rotation in office, and local and states’ rights. Anticipating Jefferson, she wrote that the “most indubitable enemy to the publick welfare” was not sedition but despotism.

In essence, Mercy Warren was a majoritarian who would depend on the wisdom and virtue of the electorate. That such an electorate would not include a single woman did not seem to disturb her. Far more significant was her faith in popular government at a time when she had to recognize, as a daughter of Puritans and Calvinists, that vice was deeply seated in the “breasts of Americans.” She quoted with approval the Abbé de Mably’s observation that “the virtues and vices of a people when a revolution happens in their government, are the measure of the liberty or slavery they ought to expect—An heroic love for the publick good, a profound reverence for the laws, a contempt of riches, and a noble haughtiness of soul, are the only foundations of a free government.” But all around her Mercy Warren saw sycophancy, intrigue, preferment, corruption, insolence of office, and other weaknesses of character.

“Liberty delights the ear and tickles the fond pride of man,” she wrote Catharine Macaulay about this time, “but it is a jewel much oftener the plaything of his imagination than a possession of real stability.” A person acquiring it today “probably will barter it the next hour as a useless bauble to the first officious master that will take the burthen from his shoulders.” Mercy Warren saw tendencies toward vice mainly in the people who were coming to be known as Federalists. But what if the populace as a whole, on which she depended for majority rule and representative government, should also develop tendencies toward selfishness, obsequiousness, expensive pleasures, and the like? A republic was critically dependent on virtue in the great populace that had power under the republic. It was this question that Madison and the others confronted so brilliantly in their “Federalist papers”—and that Mercy Warren failed to deal with in her “anti-Federalist” paper.

The Framers had to play on a far more complex constitutional chessboard than did Mercy Warren. She—and most of the anti-Federalists—wanted to protect and nurture liberty and equality mainly by keeping government relatively weak, small, open, and close to the people. The Framers calculated in terms of a multi-dimensional set of ends and means. They too wanted to safeguard liberty and equality—but not an unbridled liberty or a leveling equality. They wanted to create also a governmental structure that would prevent tyranny from developing within it and hence would provide no moral justification for the Shayses of the land to mount a rebellion against it. They wanted a system of representation that would respond to the legitimate needs of the people but curb their passions and their greed. They wanted to gain safety for their fledgling republic and security for its people by creating a broader union, strengthening the federal government, and charging it with the duties of maintaining external defense and internal harmony. They wanted to combat vice and encourage virtue among both leaders and followers.

In planning against tyranny the Framers had to recognize that it took many forms—tyranny of opinion, governmental tyranny, tyranny by a popular majority. They could thwart the first of these by opposing an established church or any other monopolistic fount of opinion, by safeguarding religious and political liberty in the state bills of rights and in the national bill of rights that would be added to the Constitution—in short, by safeguarding political and social pluralism. They could thwart the second kind of tyranny through ensuring the right to vote, frequent elections, and specific procedures such as impeachment and judicial appeal. But the third kind of tyranny—majority tyranny—was far harder to guard against, because of the Framer’s fundamental commitment to rule by popular majorities. How could a constitution thwart an oppressive majority bent on taking control of government? The solution was several-fold: a federal system, so that such a threatening majority would have to seize control of both the federal government and a host of state governments—a daunting prospect to any demagogue; staggered elections for President, House, and Senate, so that a majority could not seize control all in one swoop; an elaborate separation of powers, so that a majority winning one office, such as the presidency, would face a Senate or House in hostile hands. Thus conflict was built into a fragmented government to prevent majority tyranny.

Still, representation posed the most challenging intellectual problem for the Framers. They wanted to achieve a balance of interests in government without risking disruption or oppression by excessive factionalism. How achieve this in a republic representing the public? They could not rely on the balance of orders and classes that was understood to protect liberty in Britain and elsewhere. As Charles Pinckney reminded his fellow delegates at Philadelphia, the new republic would “contain but one order…the order of Commons.” They could not depend on the wisdom and prudence of the people as a whole, because they saw popular majorities as well as elites all too prone toward selfishness, rashness, aggrandizement, and hostility to other people’s liberties. The basic solution was to pass the expressed interests and passions of the voting populace through a filter of overlapping and mutually checking representative processes and bodies—again, staggered elections, separation of powers, accountability of rulers to fragmented, conflicting, competing, and overlapping voting constituencies, and all the rest of the formidably intricate system of eviscerated powers and checks and balances. In order to govern, representatives would have to bargain with one another ceaselessly in a vast system of brokerage and accommodation that would give something to everybody—liberty to the individual, desired laws or appropriations to groups, and governmental balance and stability to the whole.

If the separation of powers among and within the three federal branches was the most exacting intellectual problem for the Framers, the new division of powers between the federal and state governments was the toughest political one. Too many people made the simple equation—the more centralized a government, the greater its threat to liberty. Too many shared Mercy Warren’s fear of the “hydra-headed monster” in “federal city” sinking its fangs into the states. For their part the Framers feared that the states might be taken over by local demagogues or overzealous majorities. They could not forget Shays and his threat to Massachusetts. The Framers’ most telling argument was that all Americans would gain far more safety and security from foreign threats—from the great powers lodged on their frontiers—under a stronger national government. The basic issue was settled by compromise—in 1787 and for centuries thereafter.

The more the two sides argued over process and power in these grand debates, the more they appealed to purpose and principle. To what ends were all these means directed? Both sides invoked the Declaration of Independence and its call for the supreme values of liberty and equality. But what kind of liberty and equality? Equal political liberty? Individual economic opportunity? These were considered necessary but far from adequate. Government must be strong enough to protect individual liberty but not strong enough to suppress it—but what kind of government was that? In ancient times liberty had meant the right to participate in government; now it meant freedom from government—was that progress? The grand debates did little to clarify these grand issues. And the issue that would become the grandest question of them all—the extent to which government should interfere with some persons’ liberties in order to grant them and other persons more liberty and equality—this issue lay beyond the intellectual horizons of virtually all the debaters of the time.

If the questions were not settled, the battle was—the “Feds” had won at Philadelphia. In winning they had imposed on themselves and others an enormously heavy burden of leadership. Under the new system, men must become expert brokers and dexterous improvisers so that they could operate successfully across the many vertical and horizontal boundaries separating governments. They must be masterly transactional leaders. But at times when people felt that they had lost their way, or needed new goals, leaders would have to transcend brokerage and provide a sense of unity and direction. And in times of real crisis, when people’s fundamental wants and needs, aspirations and expectations, were unmet, and when people hungered for action—any action—the system would depend on men who could reshape the political and intellectual environment; in short, the new Constitution must not altogether inhibit masterful transforming leadership.

But the Framers wanted even more than this—they wanted virtue in both leaders and citizens. By virtue they meant at the least good character and civic concern; at the most—with Abbé de Mably—a heroic love for the public good, a devotion to justice, a willingness to sacrifice comfort and riches for the public weal, an elevation of the soul. One reason the Framers believed in representation was that it would refine leadership, acting as a kind of sieve that would separate and elevate the more virtuous elements. Others—most notably Jefferson—believed that virtue must be nurtured at the bottom, among the “little republics” of the states, where, as he wrote later, “every man is a sharer in the direction of his ward-republic, or of some of the higher ones, and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day; where there shall not be a man in the State who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.” Thus Jefferson proposed local public forums where the “views of the people,” in Jean Yarbrough’s words, “could be refined through deliberation before they were made known to their representatives.” The people, in short, would refine and elevate themselves; it was on the civic virtue of this cadre that the moral leadership of higher cadres would be founded.

In late 1788, however, it was the top cadre—the fifty or so national leaders and nationally known state leaders who had written or indirectly shaped the Constitution—who had the power and responsibility of leadership. Now that they had won a constitution, they must win a government. This meant organizing elections and choosing leaders at the same time that they were creating the offices the winners would occupy. If the federal leadership seemed undaunted by their tasks, it was in part because they had agreed so closely, planned so creatively, built so carefully. It was even more because they were not proclaiming a thousand-year Reich but rather inaugurating an experiment and expecting a period of trial and testing. They were undertaking a set of experiments in majority rule, minority rights, balanced representation, separation of powers, checks and balances. They were beginning the profoundest experiment of all—that of forming a “more perfect Union,” in order to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty” to themselves and their posterity.

CHAPTER 3

The Experiment Begins

AROUND TEN O’CLOCK ON the morning of April 16, 1789, George Washington and two companions climbed up into a carriage standing outside the great hall at Mount Vernon. One of these fellow travelers was his aide David Humphreys, the other Charles Thomson, longtime secretary of the Congress then meeting in New York City. Two days earlier Thomson had ridden into Mount Vernon to inform Washington of his election as President of the United States.

“I have now, sir, to inform you,” Thomson had said at the climax of his short announcement, “that the proofs you have given of your patriotism and of your readiness to sacrifice domestic separation and private enjoyments to preserve the liberty and promote the happiness of your country did not permit the two Houses to harbour a doubt of your undertaking this great, this important office to which you are called not only by the unanimous vote of the electors, but by the voice of America.…”

Now the President-elect was leaving Mount Vernon with little ceremony. Indeed, he wrote in his diary, he was departing with “a mind oppressed with more painful and anxious sensations” than he could express, but ready to answer his country’s call. Evidently few witnessed the leave-taking. Since Washington’s carriage had to cut north through Muddy Hole Farm before turning northeastward toward Alexandria, and since he had only recently instructed his plantation manager that all able-bodied laborers, male or female, were to work diligently from dawn to dark, slaves working in the tobacco fields must have looked up, comprehending or not, as the carriage sped by.

Two hours later the little party pulled up in the busy town on the banks of the Potomac. “Federal to a man,” Washington had called Alexandria not long before, and now the Alexandrians had political as well as personal reasons to greet their old neighbor. Indeed, the President-elect found himself among creditors as well as friends. A few weeks earlier he had borrowed £500 in Alexandria—something “I never expected to be driven to—that is, to borrow money on interest,” owing to “short crops and other causes,” including the expenses of his trip to New York. But now he was being escorted to Mr. Wise’s tavern for a celebratory dinner. Toast after toast—thirteen in all—punctuated the meal, and if Alexandrians followed their custom, each lifting of glasses was followed by the boom of cannon. Along with the new toasts to the people of the United States and to the federal Constitution, “may it be fairly tried,” and the conventional toasts to the Congress, friendly nations, heroes of the Revolution, there were salutes of a more pointed nature:

“May party spirit subside, and give place to universal zeal for the public good”…BOOM!

“May religion, industry, and economy constitute the national character of the United States”…BOOM!

“The American ladies; may their manners accord with the spirit of the present government”…BOOM!

A sugary tribute to Washington by the mayor brought an address of saccharine modesty by the general.

Next day Washington, his escorts, and his carriage were ferried across the Potomac to Georgetown. There, and at Spurrier’s Tavern that evening, and in Baltimore next day, guards of honor met and fell in with him—a tribute that, along with the felicitous addresses, pleased the President-elect but so delayed him that he resolved from then on to start his daily journey at sunrise and travel all day long. He could not forget that Congress was awaiting him. Among the officers who greeted him he often found comrades from wartime, and his route lay near old bivouacs and battles, but the general seemed more occupied with thoughts of the tasks ahead than with remembrances of the darker days hardly more than a decade past.

At the outskirts of Philadelphia the military escort gave way to outpourings of persons who crowded around the general’s carriage. When Washington, seated on a superbly caparisoned white horse, crossed the Susquehanna, he found “every fence, field, and avenue” lined with cheering onlookers. Twenty thousand people choked the central streets of the city. In Trenton—another reminder of earlier, sadder times—matrons and girls scattered blossoms before him as they sang a specially composed ode beginning “Welcome, mighty Chief!” and ending “Strew your Hero’s way with flowers!” In Princeton and New Brunswick and Elizabeth Town large throngs turned out amid clamorous church bells and thunderous salutes.

The little procession out of Mount Vernon was turning into a triumphal promenade of democracy. A people frustrated by years of war and uncertainty and hardship, a people starved for leadership and direction, citizens denied the power of directly choosing their President and often denied any vote at all—these persons were now voting with lungs and legs for their leader, a man on a white horse, a republican hero.

A gleaming new barge festooned with red curtains, its twenty-six oars manned by the finest pilots in New York, rowed Washington across Newark Bay toward Manhattan. A long tail of sloops and smaller craft formed as the barge moved off the Battery on Staten Island. A familiar tune sounded across the water from a sloop crowded with singers; it was “God Save the King,” with the words changed to form an ode to Washington. A Spanish warship, its yards manned and rigged and bedecked with the colors of nations, fired off a salute. As the barge neared the southern end of Manhattan Island, Washington could make out masses of people crowded along the waterfront and stretching up the streets behind. Once the barge was secured, the general mounted carpeted steps to receive a delegation of officials headed by Governor Clinton. A parade was formed, but it had such trouble threading its way through the cheering crowd that it took half an hour to move from the dock to the Franklin House at 3 Cherry Street, assigned to the President-elect.

Washington was emotionally satiated. He wrote in his diary: “The display of boats …the decorations of the ships, the roar of cannon, and the loud acclamations of the people…filled my mind with sensations as painful (considering the reverse of this scene, which may be the case after all my labors to do good) as they are pleasing.”

A week later—on April 30, 1789—Washington left Cherry Street in a grand coach drawn by four horses, preceded by troops and accompanied by carriages filled with officials. He was wearing a dark brown suit of “superfine American Broad Cloths” that he had seen advertised in the New York Daily Advertiser; white stockings and shoes with silver buckles; and a steel-hilted dress sword. Milling crowds surrounded the procession. Along Queen Street to Great Dock Street, then north toward Wall Street and along Broad Street the long column wound its way to Federal Hall, an imposing building with its massive Doric columns. There, in the handsome Senate chamber, John Adams had been encouraging a last-minute debate over protocol—how should the President and the members of the lower house be greeted? There had been much reference to English practice, to the annoyance of republicans present. By the time Washington entered the crowded chamber, Adams seemed almost speechless. But finally he led the President-elect out of the chamber onto a small, partly enclosed portico overlooking Broad and Wall.

A great cheer broke out from below. Chancellor Livingston administered the oath of office; Washington, looking grave, repeated the words and then lifted the Inaugural Bible to his lips.

“It is done!” Livingston cried out, and turning to the crowd, shouted, “Long live George Washington, President of the United States!” Above the roar of the crowd and the chorus of church bells came the thunder of salutes from the Battery and the harbor. Washington bowed, turned back into the Senate chamber, seated himself next to the Vice-President, waited until the senators and representatives took their seats, and rose to deliver his Inaugural Address. His voice trembled a bit, his words at times came slowly and indistinctly, he seemed not to know what to do with his hands, but he sounded a note of profound eloquence. After the usual modest disclaimers and supplications to the “Almighty Being who rules over the Universe,” he came to the heart of the matter:

“There is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity: Since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained; And since the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

THE FEDERALISTS TAKE COMMAND

And now to the task of governing. The “old general”—still only fifty-seven—and the politicians who would launch the new republic had been gathering slowly in New York throughout the winter. The alchemy of ambition and duty had brought to the temporary capital hordes of job applicants along with elected legislators. One man who had not been eager for his job was George Washington. So often, indeed, had he informed friends during the past year that he preferred to stay in private life, and would take on public service only if duty absolutely required it, that he might have been fighting his own personal devil—a relish less of power than of fame and acclaim and deference. He had not raised a hand to influence the electors of 1789. He announced in his Inaugural Address that he would renounce any presidential salary—perhaps out of a fear of tainting his image of patriotic disinterestedness.

Washington’s election had gone so smoothly as to arouse no controversy. Electors had been chosen in popular elections in some states, by legislatures in others, and by other methods in several others; in New York the two houses fell into a quarrel over procedure and chose no electors at all. But wherever or however they were chosen, the electors acted on only one mandate—to cast their ballot for the Revolutionary leader.

The vice-presidency was a different matter. Shrewd politicians had already sized up the office as vibrant with hope but barren of power. Still, the post had interested leading candidates, the most notable of whom was John Adams, who with Abigail had returned to their beloved Braintree home after their public service abroad. Vowing even more insistently than Washington that he preferred tending his farm to another stint of politics, he yet watched narrowly as the vice-presidential jockeying began. Washington made clear that while he esteemed Adams, he would be happy to accept whomever the electors chose to choose. Into this little political vacuum Alexander Hamilton moved with gusto. He could not deny Adams’ experience and distinction, but he had long disliked his frigid and dogmatic ways, his civilian suspicion of the military during the Revolution (in which Adams had not served as a soldier), and his only slightly veiled coolness to General Washington.

Hamilton’s weapon was right at hand: by warning friends in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and elsewhere that Adams might actually beat out Washington for the presidency, and playing on fears that a thwarted Adams might become the pawn—or the head—of anti-Federalists, Hamilton persuaded a number of electors to withhold their second-choice votes from the Bostonian. Adams won the office, but his 34 votes fell far short of the unanimous 89 that Washington won. Belatedly he discovered that Hamilton had engineered the “dark and base intrigue.” Throwing away votes was a breach of honor, a perjury. He would get revenge. He would “drag out to public infamy both dupers and dupes” and “make those men repent of their rashness.” But Adams would have to wait.

Choosing the first Congress had also been conflict-ridden and a bit manipulative. State legislatures met for the double task of choosing senators and setting up districts for electing representatives. Once again the pros and cons of the Constitution were argued across the land, as anti-Federalists backed candidates who would seek to amend the Constitution, perhaps even convene a second constitutional convention.

Nowhere were the contests watched more closely than in Virginia. While Washington followed developments closely but silently from Mount Vernon, and Madison apprehensively from New York, Patrick Henry in Richmond rallied his followers, and dominated the selection of two senators and the rejection of Madison for the upper chamber. He engineered an appeal to Congress for an immediate second convention, and helped draw the lines for the new congressional districts in a manner that would put Madison in an anti-Federalist district. This “Henry-mander” antedated the famous “Gerrymander” in Massachusetts.

Though fearful of seeming too eager for election and afflicted with piles, Madison returned home by stagecoach and two-wheeled chair. There he found himself pitted against a rising young politician, James Monroe. The two rivals were longtime friends, however, and agreed to tour the district together to debate the issues. Madison picked up votes by granting that additional safeguards to liberty, in a bill of rights, were necessary; and his firm backing for religious freedom helped him with the Baptist vote. His defeat of Monroe—their friendship continued unimpaired—helped Virginia send a majority of pro-Federalist representatives to New York.

Federalists won in most of the other states too, though in some cases only after a pitched battle. In Pennsylvania as elsewhere, continuing dispute over the Constitution closely affected the elections. Pennsylvanians demonstrated that they knew election artifice too; the pro-Constitution leaders put through an election law calling for the statewide rather than districtwide election of representatives, on the calculation that they would do better statewide. Both sides “ticketed” candidates and took stands on the Constitution at “conventions” or conferences before the final voting. And both sides appealed to the crucial German vote.

When the elections finally ended, it was clear that Washington would have a pro-Administration majority—though the general’s direct influence on the outcome was minimal, except perhaps in Virginia.

By April the new men were settling into their New York City houses and hostelries. Invited by Governor Clinton to stay at the Governor’s House, Washington had politely declined, adding that he would hire lodgings until a presidential house could be provided. To Madison he explained that he wished not to be placed early in a situation where he must entertain. In fact, Washington wanted a house and style befitting his station. Toward the end of May, Martha Washington arrived from Mount Vernon, after a trip that had turned out to be a kind of triumphal procession of its own. Soon she was cultivating close relationships with Administration wives, especially with Abigail Adams. The Adamses had taken a somewhat run-down but pleasant house on Richmond Hill, from which Abigail gazed with rapture at the “noble” Hudson, dotted with small boats bearing produce to Manhattan. Madison settled back into the Manhattan life he had known for years. Hamilton and Jay had homes convenient to Federal Hall, the temporary location of Congress.

Congress—the “first wheel of the government,” Washington called it—had got off to a dull start on March 4, 1789, after a long wait for newly elected senators and representatives to make their way to New York through the winter snow. Not until early April was a quorum finally mustered in the House. The Senate was enlivened by a dispute between its presiding officer, John Adams, and a Pennsylvania democrat, William Maclay. Puffed up a little by his new status, “His Rotundity,” as some critics called Adams, seemed almost obsessed by questions of parliamentary practice and protocol, especially English practice and protocol. Maclay, a frontier lawyer, tall and broad and rustic, scoffed at his pretensions and punctilio and concluded that New Englanders were too parochial to get along with anyone save their close neighbors.

Matters came to a head when Adams wished to refer to the President’s Inaugural Address as “his most gracious speech.” Maclay rose. “Mr. President, we have lately had a hard struggle for our liberty against kingly authority. The minds of men are still heated: everything related to that species of government is odious to the people. The words prefixed to the President’s speech are the same that are usually placed before the speech of his Britannic Majesty. I know they will give offense.” He moved that they be struck out. Adams professed to be astonished: he was for a dignified and responsible government; if he had thought during the Revolution it would come to this, he never would have drawn his sword. A weeks-long quarrel then developed in the Senate over the President’s title—should he be referred to as “His Highness” or “His Elective Highness,” or the like? Good republicans claimed to be shocked by such monarchical instincts. Despite Adams’ admonition that a man could be “President” of any little organization, the final title would be simply “The President of the United States.”

The tripartite structure of the new federal government was completed in September 1789, when Congress passed the Judiciary Act establishing a Supreme Court to consist of a Chief Justice and five associates, three circuit courts, and thirteen district courts. Washington soon nominated John Jay, who was acting as Secretary of State until Jefferson’s arrival, as the first Chief Justice of the United States. An immensely experienced man as a legislator, former chief justice of New York, and diplomat, Jay was widely regarded as learned and judicious, but by the end of the 1780s he was seen by republicans as an arch-Federalist who believed in British precedents, centralized government, and presidential power. While Washington called the new judicial department the “key-stone of our political fabric,” Jay found major cases slow in coming and spent many months working with his fellow justices to set up circuits, designate judges to ride them, appoint clerks, and ensure that the new federal judges would be received in the states with proper respect.

President and Congress were engaged in the everyday business of government as well. They could hardly escape it; problems of taxes, imports, Indians, foreign relations engulfed them. Washington started out with only two assistants, David Humphreys and Tobias Lear, but soon he had to recruit several other aides. Hamilton worked closely with him on political matters, Madison on legislative. Washington did not have to construct a federal executive from scratch. The Confederation had bequeathed him a Foreign Office run by John Jay and two clerks, a Treasury Board with no treasury, and a War Department with no war. A scattering of federal officers—lighthouse keepers, postmasters, tax collectors, troop commanders, diplomats—manned a long thin line of federal power. Washington’s major appointments were geographically balanced—Thomas Jefferson of Virginia (still in Paris) for Secretary of State, Alexander Hamilton of New York for Secretary of the Treasury, his old comrade-in-arms Henry Knox of Massachusetts for Secretary of War, another Virginian, Edmund Randolph, for Attorney General.

The middle and minor offices gave Washington, Adams, and the department heads the most trouble. Little had they anticipated the stream of job applicants and applications into New York. Washington had to fend off jobseekers months before the electors were even due to meet. The Administration leaders knew how to deal with place-warmers, but many job-seekers were overqualified, if anything, and some were personal friends and even family members. To Adams applied General Benjamin Lincoln, of Shays’s Rebellion fame, Samuel Otis, Robert Treat Paine, and his close friend and adopted “brother,” Richard Cranch. When his and Abigail’s good friend Mercy Warren wrote poignantly on behalf of her husband, Adams responded that he had no patronage and, if he had, neither her children nor his own could be sure of it. Similarly, President Washington wrote to his nephew Bushrod Washington, a young lawyer hankering to be appointed United States district attorney for Virginia, that he was too inexperienced for the post, that the President must stand on principle against nepotism, and that as a practical matter he could not be partial to friends and relations, “for the eyes of Argus are upon me.”

It was with relief as well as pride that the President of the United States could write to Gouverneur Morris, on October 13, 1789, that the “national government is organized.…

Two days later, the President left on a formal tour of the “Eastern” states—Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. He had “hope of perfectly reestablishing my health,” he wrote Jefferson, which a “series of indispositions”—mainly anthrax—“has much impaired.” How a trip into the New England states, in a carriage jolting over rocky roads and disgorging its passengers at every large river and quagmire, could restore haleness only a military man and plantation rider could understand. Actually, Washington had other reasons for his journey: he wanted to make a show of federal authority and leadership among people who had not yet fully accepted the new Constitution; and he was curious about agriculture and manufacturing and the “face of the Country.” Accompanied by Hamilton, Knox, and Jay for some distance out of the city, he continued with his retinue of two secretaries and six servants.

It was rainy, that first day, and the road was rough and stony as the party proceeded through New Rochelle and Mamaroneck, but Washington was impressed by the droves of fine beef cattle and the flocks of sheep on the way to the New York market, the Indian corn and pumpkins lying yet ungathered in the fields, and widow Haviland’s “neat and decent Inn” in Rye, where they put up for the night. But next day, crossing over into Connecticut, he was even more taken by the superb landscapes on the road from Stamford to Norwalk and Fairfield, though saddened by “the Destructive evidences of British cruelty”—burned-out houses with gaunt-chimneys still standing. He noted that vessels of seventy-five tons or so could make their way up rivers to many of the towns through which he passed. The ports served mainly a coastal and West Indian trade, as local farmers bartered their grain and meat for imported articles.

Washington took the lower road into New Haven and hence missed the usual delegation braced to greet him with flowery speeches of welcome, but he found a bustling town with several Episcopalian and Congregational churches, a number of manufactories, and Yale College, then numbering 120 students. Among those welcoming him were members of the small elite who ran the town, merchants, clerics, and college faculty, but this Federalist political leadership was already beginning to meet opposition. At the bottom of the social ladder was a body of slaves—over four hundred in New Haven County—who worked mainly in fields and households but also helped in lumbering, whaling, and fishing. The slave trade, but not slavery, had been abolished in Connecticut. President Ezra Stiles of Yale would found an antislavery society the year after Washington’s visit.

Daily the Virginia planter noted the quality of the crops, the nature of the roads, the number of bushels of wheat or corn the farmers were getting from their acres, the gristmills and sawmills, the quality of the food and beds in the taverns. In Wallingford he was fascinated to “see the white Mulberry growing, raised from the seed, to feed the silkworm,” he wrote in his diary. “We also saw samples of lustring”—a glossy, heavy silk—“(exceeding good) which had been manufactured from the Cocoon raised in this Town, and silk thread very fine. This, except the weaving, is the work of private families, without interference with other business, and is likely to turn out a beneficial amusement.”

Hartford had furnished Washington with his inaugural suit, and the President was eager to see Colonel Wadsworth’s “Woolen Manufactory.” Escorted by the colonel himself, he found a lively establishment that, after years of coping with untutored workers, inadequate machinery, and heavy mortgages, was now producing 5,000 yards of woolen goods a year at $5 a yard. Washington had been trying to encourage Americans to buy clothes made in the United States, but he had to admit that domestic “Broadcloths” were not of the best quality, though good enough, as were the “Cassimeres” and serges. Indeed, he purchased a suit of broadcloth to be sent to him in New York. Hartford also had cotton and paper mills, and a glass factory that had fallen on hard times and whose losses had to be made up through a lottery.

Hugging the western bank of the Connecticut River, and moving across the state border into Massachusetts, the President proceeded through more rain into Springfield, a town in many ways like Hartford. While dinner was being readied at the famous tavern of Zeno Parsons, Washington toured the federal arsenal—probably the same one that Shays’s men had attacked less than two years before. He found the brick powder magazine in good repair and the powder dry.

The next morning he headed along another rocky road, through forests of pine and oak, to Palmer and Spencer and Worcester. Isaac Jenks’s tavern in Spencer, which Washington noted down as a “pretty good Tavern,” was fairly typical of the inns in which Washington stayed; it charged 14p for tea, cider, punch, lodgings, and a dinner of roast beef, vegetables, and tankards of ale. Washington found the supper “only passable,” but “one could scarcely complain.”

Through his carriage window, Washington constantly studied the unfolding countryside. He had noted a “great equality in the People” as he passed through Connecticut and the Connecticut Valley. “Few or no opulent men—and no poor….” The land was generally more stony and sandy as he traveled east through Massachusetts. Rocky and hilly and infertile indeed was much of New England land, resulting in steady migration to more fructuous country to the west. Parents and children labored in the fields from dawn to dusk during the long spring and summer days. The small farm, a historian observed, was an unsurpassed school for boyhood but an intellectual prison for manhood.

Welcoming escorts multiplied as Washington and his party passed through Worcester and neared Boston. Doubtless he expected the usual protocol as he entered that metropolis, but he could hardly have anticipated the mock comedy that ensued. Both the town fathers of Boston and the state authorities of Massachusetts—the latter headed by the redoubtable lieutenant governor, old Sam Adams—were at hand at the Boston line to greet the President. An unseemly quarrel broke out between city and state as to who held the right to offer the welcome. While the President waited, mounted officials crowded in around him, endangering children who were to take part in the ceremony; only after Washington climbed upon his horse and threatened to ride off did the state officials give way to the local.

Worse was to come. Washington had declined John Hancock’s invitation to stay at the Governor’s House on the ground that he had resolved on leaving New York not to put private individuals to any trouble; and he had declined to review the state militia on the ground that he should not establish even the faintest precedent of a President reviewing a state’s troops. Whether out of personal pique or out of his own anti-Federalist proclivities, Governor Hancock, pleading an attack of the gout, failed to call on the President after Washington was settled in his lodgings. The President, in turn, promptly canceled his earlier acceptance of Hancock’s invitation to dine, and settled down to dinner in his own lodgings with John Adams. President or governor had to yield, and it was the governor. Next day four husky men carried Hancock, swathed in bandages, and profuse with apologies, across Washington’s threshold.

Behind these seemingly trivial episodes lay momentous conflicts over the respective powers and status of the federal and state governments, and behind those conflicts lay even deeper issues of principle and power. It was not surprising that a contest between state and local officials, and a showdown between national and state officials, should take place in Boston, for in no city in the nation had passions run so high, or memories of past battles continued more unclouded. With its many newspapers, its associations of tradesmen, its numerous churches, its humane societies, its great number of factories making dozens of products, Boston sustained a vigorous political culture. And Boston could boast of Harvard, next door in Cambridge. Founded in 1636, Harvard had more than sixty years’ lead over Yale (1701) and more than a century over Brown (1764) and Dartmouth (1769). College curricula had broadened after the Revolution to include extensive studies in the natural and physical sciences, modern foreign languages, law, rudimentary social science, and even a premedical program for future doctors.

North of Boston was one of the most developed stretches on the American coast. After a final, exhausting tour of a cotton duck mill, a playing card factory (“63,000 pr. of Cards in a year,” Washington noted), and huge French gunships in Boston Harbor, Washington struck out north over the famous bridge in Charlestown. Rapidly, he moved through Lynn, which claimed to turn out 175,000 pairs of shoes a year; through Marblehead, where eight hundred men and boys and over a hundred vessels were engaged in fishing; through Salem, already a historic town, now exporting fish and lumber in the East India trade; to Beverly. In this last town the President visited John and George Cabot’s cotton manufactory and studied for some time the precision machinery that could spin eighty-four threads at a time, double and twist threads for particular cloths, wind cotton from the spindles and prepare it for the warp, and turn out what seemed to the President to be superior cotton goods. He made no mention of the Beverly labor force in his diary; in Boston he had noted that “girls of Character” along with “daughters of decayed families” worked ten hours a day on a piece-rate basis. Some girls turned the wheels for twenty-eight looms, while others were spinning with both hands, the flax fastened to their waists.

Soon Washington was off again, to Newburyport, in the northeastern corner of Massachusetts, and to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, twenty miles beyond. Both these towns were noted for shipbuilding. New England shipbuilders bragged that their vessels, while smaller than English or European, sailed faster, beat well to the windward, could hug the shores better, and were generally safer. But the Yankees admitted that they had sold a lot of ships, especially before the Revolution, that had not been constructed of seasoned timber. Hemp, cordage, sailcloth, fittings, and much else were often imported from Europe. The problem in both cases, shipbuilders contended, was capital. Thus New Hampshire had iron ore and ironworks, but they were not sufficiently developed. Builders knew that they should season their timber, as the English did, but they could not afford to store it for long months before use. Portsmouth had taverns, ropeworks, a sawmill—but no bank.

After a boat ride around the Portsmouth anchorage, a brief stop in Kittery, Maine—his farthest point north—and more entertainment, receptions, and addresses, the President started back toward New York. He was weary of travel, and the return trip seemed long and trying—especially because of the New England ban on Sunday travel—but there were some diversions. In Andover he visited a small private school and in Lexington he viewed the Green, “the spot on which the first blood was spilt in the dispute with Great Britain, on the 19th of April, 1775.” The President could observe interesting contrasts in the Andover and Lexington schools. Phillips Academy of Andover had opened in 1778 in a “rehabilitated carpenter’s shop.” Its several dozen students boarded with local families, paid a modest entrance fee, and studied such an array of “the Liberal Arts, Sciences, or Languages as opportunity and ability may hereafter admit.” Lexington had a “free school,” but not altogether free; pupils had to pay a small charge and furnish two feet of wood annually for the fire. There was a separate “Dame’s School” for girls, who had far less educational opportunity than boys. New England was still the only region that could claim anything resembling a public school system. Massachusetts had just established a district-by-district school system, but sparsely settled areas were ill served. Teaching consisted mainly of memorization, recitation, and repetition.

On Friday, November 13, 1789, Washington was back in New York, where he found Martha and the rest of the family well. There was a towering pile of mail.

THE NEW YORKERS

The national government had begun its life in a noble building surrounded by stir and squalor.

Federal Hall was the hub of government. Even in 1789 this was already a historic place. Built as City Hall at the start of the century, it had housed New York’s Revolutionary government until the British Navy arrived off Staten Island. It was here that the Provincial Congress had met, and here that General Washington had made a famous speech in which he assured New Yorkers worried about a military dictatorship that he and his soldiers would “rejoice with you in that happy hour when the establishment of American Liberty” would enable the soldiers to return to their private stations. The Confederation Congress had met in this hall, and now the first Congress of the United States occupied its remodeled rooms. Each house had its chamber. The representatives met in a spacious octagonal room with fireplaces and large windows, under Ionic columns and pilasters. Their chairs and desks ranged semicircularly facing the Speaker’s chair. The Senate chamber was smaller, and superbly carpeted and marbled.

Outside pounded the beat of people’s daily lives and work. In the area of Broad and Wall streets, the day would start with the cry of “Milk, ho! Milk, ho!” from milkmen or milkmaids who brought their produce by boat from Long Island or New Jersey and now carried it in two buckets hanging from a yoke. Then there might come chimney sweeps calling out “Sweep, ho! Sweep ho!” After that might appear knife grinders, lamp menders, orange girls, ragmen, wood vendors, all with their distinctive cries. Hogs rooted through the garbage-clogged gutters, cows wandered up and down Broadway, horses’ hooves clattered on the cobbled streets. People bustled out of boardinghouses and into taverns and groceries, into the shops of tailors, cobblers, tobacconists, wigmakers, haberdashers, hatters, attorneys. Sometimes the racket was so great that it drowned out the debate in Congress and forced the closing of windows in Federal Hall.

At the close of their deliberations each day, senators and representatives threaded their way through the clamorous streets to coffeehouses, taverns, and boardinghouses. Turning left down Wall Street would take the hungry lawmaker past the Bank of New York to Tontine’s, where he would find food and drink and also encounter brokers trading in securities and in loaf sugar, Jamaica rum, and other commodities. Or he could stroll down Broad Street—as wide as its name suggested—to Fraunces’ Tavern and then on to Battery Park and South Ferry. More often he would turn west from Federal Hall and head toward the newly rebuilt Trinity Church and then move north on Broadway toward Maiden Lane and the theater and recreation districts. Along the way he had a choice of taverns to stop by for newspapers, gossip, and travelers’ reports from Philadelphia and Boston.

Packed into this area of barely one-half square mile was the political leadership of the young nation and the financial center of much of the Northeast. The most celebrated leader, George Washington, lived and worked at 39 Broadway; after ten months at his Cherry Street house, he decided to move to a more commodious and convenient mansion downtown. While professing to disdain “the glare which hovers around the external trappings of elevated office,” he continued to work hard and with relish at establishing the presence of the presidency.

A formal procession by the President to Federal Hall to address Congress was a sight to behold: two uniformed military aides on prancing white horses, then Washington’s magnificent coach-and-six, followed by another aide and then by carriages containing the Chief Justice and cabinet members. Afternoons, when his work was done and the weather seemed fine, Washington promenaded on the Battery along with other notables. His Friday-evening receptions were rather stiff and formal, but his social dinners were the talk of the town—especially the one at which a lady’s ostrich plumes caught fire from a chandelier and were rescued by an aide-decamp. On social occasions the President would enter dressed in black velvet and satin, his diamond knee buckles gleaming, his wig well powdered, a military hat on his head, and a dress sword hanging at his side.

Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton lived at 58 Wall Street at about this time, Secretary of State Jefferson on Maiden Lane, Secretary of War and Mrs. Knox on lower Broadway, where Attorney General Randolph and his wife also resided. The John Jays, who were second only to the Washingtons as social arbiters of the federal capital, had a three-story dwelling farther north on Broadway. The cabinet members worked at home or in law offices; there was no central executive headquarters. John and Abigail Adams continued to enjoy their Richmond Hill mansion on the southeast corner of Varick and Charlton streets, amid old oaks and flowering shrubs. Most of the government clerks, copiers, attorneys, customs house employees, and military officers, along with congressmen with lesser social connections, lived in rented rooms and boardinghouses throughout southern Manhattan.

Sundays the President set an example for his Administration officials by worshipping at Trinity Church, once it had been restored after a devastating fire. While Trinity was being rebuilt the President attended St. Paul’s Chapel, farther up Broadway, where he had a pew. Samuel Provoost, bishop of New York and chaplain of Congress, conducted special services at the church. Trinity had a political history: “pro-Tory” leaders had tried to keep control of the church after the Revolution, but their Loyalist rector had been ousted by patriots, who then installed Provoost.

New Yorkers also worshipped at Dutch Reformed, Presbyterian, and German Calvinist Reformed churches. Quakers were a small but influential sect. During English rule Catholics had worshipped secretly in a Jesuit father’s home, but after the Revolution, buoyed by the repeal of anti-Catholic measures, Father William O’Brien raised funds in Mexico and elsewhere to build St. Peter’s Church. Jews too had suffered disabilities during the colonial period, and many had fled to Philadelphia during the British occupation, but now they were returning and building a small but enduring congregation under the leadership of Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas.

Taverns, groggeries, and porterhouses—over four hundred in the whole city—vastly outnumbered the churches, but these were far more than tippling havens. They served as public meeting houses, polling places, club and society headquarters, centers for news about ships, foreign events, commodity prices. Taverns catered to all tastes, prices, and classes. Some were the scenes of formal entertainments and public celebrations, attended by the fashionable; the City Tavern, on Broadway, was respectable enough to house court sessions. Others offered—illegally—games of cards and dice, billiard tables, shuffleboards, and cockfighting. Some hotels and taverns provided board and lodging for eight dollars a week.

The rich found their entertainments in formal balls and dinners, three o’clock tea parties, summer drives down Broadway to the Battery breezes. The theater, though undistinguished, attracted the socially prominent, not least George Washington. Music, equally undistinguished, was also patronized by the social elite. Peter Van Hagen, a skillful violinist who had taken political refuge from Holland, taught their children, promoted concerts, and wrote compositions for the theater. The wealthy commissioned portraits of themselves. Washington sat for the noted portraitist John Trumbull on several occasions.

The Revolution had hardly altered old class lines. Thirty years after the British evacuated New York an observer was identifying “three distinct classes”: the first of divines, lawyers, physicians, principal merchants, and propertied persons; the second of small merchants, retail dealers, clerks, petty officials; and the third of “inferior orders of people.” Upper-class ladies advertised their standing by their dress: elaborate coiffures, costly silk gowns, hooped skirts, enormous hats. The poor found their amusements in traveling acrobats, jugglers, and comedians, in circuses, menageries, and equestrian shows, in waxworks, freaks, and “natural curiosities” from exotic places, inventors’ mechanical contrivances.

Outdoors, people of all classes could attend horse racing near Bowery Lane, hunt small game in woods and swamps over on the west side, fish off Sandy Hook, bathe in the East and North (Hudson) rivers, take excursions to Long Island and Governors Island. On snowy winter days they could skate on Collect Pond two blocks off Broadway or ride sleds and sleighs on the rutted snow. In all seasons promoters offered fistfights and eye-gouging as attractions. Thousands attended the baiting of bulls, dogs, bears, even panthers. Gangs of young toughs, flaunting names like “Smith’s Fly” and “Broad Way,” fought one another with stones and slingshots.

New York City in 1790 was a Federalist town. Anti-Federalists had considerable weight in state politics, with George Clinton now in his fourteenth year as governor, and a potentially strong Republican movement was organizing in New York City, but during the year and a half that the national government was headquartered in Manhattan, it was the Federalist command post of the nation. For more than a century Manhattanites had been experiencing a remarkably intensive, competitive, factious, and increasingly sophisticated political life. The New Yorkers around Washington had become expert in the Federalist style of politics. Now they had new advantages: the momentum of the new Constitution and government, the patriotic glow that surrounded Washington, a clear sense of the program and policies they wanted from the new government. These were youthful and vigorous men. Hamilton was thirty-four at the time of Washington’s inaugural, Jay forty-four, Rufus King thirty-four. They had the backing of influential newspapers, the most notable of which was John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States. And the Federalists had access to money, for the city was an expanding financial center.

The Bank of New York, founded by Hamilton and others in the mid-1780s, by 1791 was paying stock dividends of 7 percent and lending money to the city, state, and federal governments. Men of wealth were joining to found other financial institutions, as “Bancomania” began to sweep the city. Banks helped fuel a robust expansion of commerce and manufacturing in New York. Many merchant princes and shipowners lived on State Street overlooking the Battery; from their homes and offices they could watch the signal flags on top of Dongan Hills and gather the first intelligence on cargo vessels starting their passage through the Narrows. By 1790 exporters were shipping out of the city each year over $2 million worth of wheat, flour, beef and pork, furs, raw hides, lumber, and livestock.

The habits of the New York merchants reminded a visiting English actor of his friends back home. “They breakfasted at eight or half past, and by nine were in their counting houses, laying out the business of the day; at ten they were on their wharves, with aprons round their waists, rolling hogsheads of rum and molasses; at twelve at market, flying about as dirty and as diligent as porters; at two back again to the rolling, heaving, hallooing and scribbling. At four they went home to dress for dinner; at seven, to the play; at eleven, to supper, with a crew of lusty Bacchanals who would smoke cigars, gulp down brandy, and sing, roar, and shout in the thickening clouds they created, like so many merry devils, till three in the morning. At eight, up again, to scribble, run, and roll hogsheads.…”

Manufacturing was not far advanced in New York by 1790, but individual craftsmen turned out hats, chairs, cabinets, coaches, and rope. By 1790 a new factory on Liberty Street off Broadway employed 130 spinners and 14 weavers. One of the spinners was Samuel Slater, who soon would move to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to found the first successful cotton factory in America.

New York City’s biggest resource, however, lay in its people, in their numbers, variety, vigor, and talents. In 1790, with a population of 33,000, New York City had overtaken Philadelphia’s 28,500 (exclusive of suburbs), thus becoming the largest city in the nation. The city was already turning into the human salmagundi of the new nation. Its numbers included about 29,700 whites, 2,400 slaves, and 1,100 “free persons other than whites.” Old Dutch families with names like Verplanck, Beekman, and Stuyvesant were still prominent in the city’s social and financial affairs. So many exiles from France had settled in Manhattan that newspapers printed some advertisements in their language. Germans and British—especially Irish—were landing by the boatload, sometimes 400 at a time, in the “slips” protruding from lower Manhattan.

Inevitably old families, immigrants, and free black persons tended to settle in their own communities and organize their own societies. It did not take the Irish long to establish the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick. Black people soon formed Protestant churches of various denominations. Scots held their parades and their flings. But these were all communities, not feudal enclaves. The Dutch, to be sure, were accused of segregating themselves along the Hudson in their yellow brick houses, from which they watched the changes in the city through “rolling waves of smoke from their melancholy pipes,” and Irish Catholics experienced the usual suspicion; but New York did not yet contain a ghetto for blacks, Jews, Irish, or any other race or nationality.

Leaders tended more to build bridges among communities than to seal them off. It was not surprising that the political and economic notables of the city were in close touch; living so closely together in the crowded city, they could hardly avoid bumping into one another in law offices, taverns, shops, or in the street. The social elite mingled at the theater, horse races, charity balls, the President’s receptions, splendid parties in their mansions. The first families were considerably interrelated. Hamilton was married to the daughter of Philip Schuyler, the general and politico who had been an inspiration for the young Hamilton. James Duane, New York’s first federal district judge, had married into the influential Livingston family, as had Postmaster General Samuel Osgood, who was also related to the Clintons. John Jay’s wife was a Livingston.

Group leaders outside the social elite reached out to the rest of the city. Rabbi Gershom Mendes Seixas not only led the Jewish community but had served as a Columbia College trustee and a leader in education. Another Seixas helped found the New York Stock Exchange. Free blacks in Manhattan had built their own church and congregation and Samuel Fraunces, a West Indian, opened the tavern bearing his name. At Fraunces’ Tavern General Washington had bidden farewell to his officers after the Revolution. “Black Sam,” as Philip Freneau called him, won such a reputation as a good manager and as a connoisseur of wine that President Washington installed him in his Manhattan household as steward. Fraunces’ daughter Phoebe became the Washingtons’ housekeeper. She was lucky; aside from socially prominent ladies who were active in charity, most women found few channels of opportunity or influence.

A nondescript, two-story “Wigwam” on Broad Street was doubtless the best mixing place in Manhattan for all but the most fashionable. Here met the Society of St. Tammany. Founded hardly two weeks after Washington’s inauguration, Tammany at this time was a benevolent and fraternal organization dedicated to liberty, patriotism, and republicanism. Its goals, a New York newspaper reported, were “the smile of charity, the chain of friendship, and the flame of liberty.” While the society attracted both Federalists and anti-Federalists, it was a clear reaction against the high Federalists and the detested Cincinnati, a fraternal society of Revolutionary officers, who retaliated by dubbing the Wigwam the “Pig Pen.”

In place of social distinctions—or was it to mock them?—Tammany leaders took the titles of Grand Sachem, Sagamore (master of ceremonies), and Wiskinskie (doorkeeper). Men of the middle and working classes were welcome as members; if ex-officers dominated the Cincinnati, former enlisted men found a haven in the Wigwam. Fraternity was embellished in strong drink, but Tammany’s sons loved above all to parade. Wearing buck tails in their hats as symbols of liberty, often sporting full Indian regalia and war paint, the tribes marched to public ceremonies in solemn procession. On initiating new members the brothers sang out their credo:

Sacred’s the ground where

Freedom’s found,

And Virtue stamps her name;

Our hearts entwine at Friendship’s shrine,

And Union fans the flame.…

Tradesmen were especially active in Tammany. The first Grand Sachem, William Mooney, was a paperhanger and upholsterer. Another charter member, John Stagg, served as president of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen. Lacking unions or any kind of working-class organization, mechanics and laborers might join Stagg’s society or Tammany, but neither was politically militant in 1790. Workers probably found more rousing republican talk at one of their favorite taverns, Martling’s on Nassau Street.

Cincinnati and Tammany, white and black, Quaker and Jew, merchant and tough—all these were New Yorkers. Somehow, in fine mansions and reeking grog houses, amid a jungle of crooked streets, shop fronts, hitching posts, refuse piles, dingy stoops, amid the sledges and derricks and carts and barrows of construction sites, amid the smells of hogs and goat manure and outhouses, and out of the pushing and hauling of ambitious legislators, aroused interest groups, rival factions, elitist manipulations—the government of a young republic emerged. It is impossible to measure the effect of its New York environment on the nature of that new government. But it must have been of some significance that the men who were drawing up new tariffs, spending, taxing, banking, and other financial measures lived, worked, and played cheek by jowl with merchants, financiers, shipowners, tradesmen, ferry and stagecoach operators, real estate speculators, commodities investors, importers and exporters—of some significance, in short, that the new government was born in a bawling, innovative, expansive, competitive society, in an ugly-beautiful, capitalistic and cosmopolitan environment.

THE FEDERALIST THRUST

Washington’s travels had brought him face to face with tens of thousands of his fellow citizens. His magisterial appearance, his clothes and equipage, his superb presence in ceremonial situations, and above all, his ability to seem to hover far above the squalid politics of party and parochialism—all this delighted many Americans and alarmed others. Among the most pleased was John Adams, who had a profound, even philosophical faith in “the efficacy of pageantry.” Ceremony was necessary to secure the authority and dignity of government; but even more, the people wanted it. Even in the meanest families, Adams said, “you will find these little distinctions, marks, signs, and decencies which are the result of nature, feeling, reason which are policy and government in their places as much as crowns and tiaras, ceremonies, titles, etc., in theirs.”

Washington wanted government—especially this new, frail, vulnerable government—to be respectable and dignified. It was for this reason, and because he appeared increasingly to enjoy display for its own sake, that he drove about Manhattan with a carriage and six cream-colored horses; kept fourteen white servants and seven slaves in his house on Broadway; put on large and elaborate dinners, with powdered lackeys standing by; ordered champagne and claret by the dozens of dozens. Occasionally he rode about town on a white steed with leopard-skin housing and saddlecloth bound in gold.

The President and his fellow Federalists held full command of the government, substantive as well as symbolic. At least half of the members of the first Congress had taken part in forming and adopting the Constitution; over half the members of the 1787 convention were serving as administrators, legislators, or judges in the new government. These men were not Federalists in a formal or party sense; they were Federalists because they had wanted a government that could act quickly and decisively for the whole nation, especially in promoting banking, commerce, and industry. What they had conceived in the summer of ’87 they now wished to nurture, to provide with flesh and bone.

This was the work not of one man, not of Washington or Hamilton or Madison alone, but of a large fraternity. They had their differences; some were more concerned with commerce, others with banking and credit, others with manufacture. Later, these and other differences would harden and deepen. But now the leaders were united on the need for rapid economic development of the new nation. And they had the votes in both the first and second sessions of the Congress.

James Madison had made economic policy the very first order of business in the first session when on April 8, 1789—three weeks before the nation even had a President—he stood up in the House of Representatives and called for an economy that was balanced, equitable, and above all independent of control by other nations. For these ends, and also to raise badly needed revenue, and to promote manufacturing, he proposed an elaborate system of duties. Those first tariff measures—like countless others that would follow in the next two centuries—aroused a furious and interminable debate. Senators and representatives sprang to the protection of their local interests. Rum, beer, molasses, sugar, cocoa, coffee suddenly became hot political items, as tea had been sixteen years before. In jousting with some of his old comrades and with rising young men such as Fisher Ames of Massachusetts, in coping with faction in the House, and in facing up to the opposition of the Senate, Madison the practical legislative leader was also confronting Madison the “speculative philosopher” who had led in fashioning a federal government of limited, balanced, and checked powers.

Throughout the first year of Congress members were clamoring to get on with the major task of securing the credit of the new United States. Public creditors, especially in Pennsylvania, were demanding support of the national credit, and a committee of sixteen in the House backed them up. This was all the encouragement needed by Hamilton, who had become Secretary of the Treasury in mid-September 1789, to prepare reports on the broadest dimensions of the American economy. Hamilton saw a vital need to honor debts, quicken the national economy through expanded currency and credit, and strengthen the Union by giving businessmen, as well as the educated and professional persons, a vested interest in the political and financial strength of the new government.

As lively, generous, and charming as ever, at least within his own circle, Hamilton continued to impress his fellow politicians with his habit of command, his eloquence, his darting imagination, his ability to stick to principle despite concessions to expediency. He had not only an instinct for leadership but a theory of it. He believed that the leader must risk and dare, venture and strive; that great men could influence history; that the mass of people could not act on their own, but only in response to forceful initiatives and bold innovations from a few men; that in his own case, he could lead best not by appealing to the masses—an idea he detested—but by galvanizing his immediate followers, who in turn would carry his purposes and ideas to the people. Hamilton was the supreme political venturer; consciously or not, a biographer noted, he seemed to follow Machiavelli’s case for boldness: “for fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force; and it can be seen that she lets herself be overcome by the bold rather than by those who proceed coldly.” Hence fortune, like a woman, was a friend to the young, because they mastered her with greater ferocity. And Hamilton was young.

Certainly his Report on Public Credit was audacious. Not only did he repudiate the idea of repudiating the debt, on the ground that failure to repay was a rejection of public morality and an invitation to anarchy or despotism. He also proposed that the federal government assume the states’ debts contracted during the Revolution, as well as those of the Confederation. And—most provocative of all—he urged that those presently holding securities, rather than the original buyers, be compensated. Thus the foreign and domestic debt would be funded at par, allowing creditors to swap depreciated securities for new interest-bearing bonds at face value. The bearers of these securities had a property right in them, Hamilton said, as in “their houses or their lands, their hats or their coats.” Hamilton had not dreamed up his proposals out of his fertile imagination alone. He had drawn heavily from European and especially British experience, from the writings of philosophers and economists, from extensive correspondence with other leaders, including James Madison. He had won the backing of the President, who had commended the resolve for support of the public credit in his January message to Congress.

It was not enough. The House of Representatives was so dubious about the forthcoming report, and so wary of Hamilton’s persuasiveness with a small body of his peers, that he was not permitted to introduce the report in person, or to answer questions. Soon his proposal to pay off current securities holders was opening partly healed wounds. All the old fears of a dominating national government, of a moneyed elite, of a paradise for speculators, were revived. It was the people against the money men. “America, sir,” cried James Jackson of Georgia, “will not always think as is the fashion of the present day; and when the iron hand of tyranny is felt, denunciations will fall on those who, by imposing this enormous and iniquitous debt, will beggar the people and bind them in chains.” For weeks a steaming debate occupied the House. Hamilton, always the realist, could not have been surprised by a revival of the old issues that had divided Federalists and anti-Federalists. But he was astonished when Madison—Madison, his collaborator on the Federalist; Madison, his partner in conceiving and setting up the new government—turned against major parts of his report. A “perfidious desertion” of principles Madison had sworn to defend, this seemed to Hamilton. But the two men had been drawn into different political and philosophical orbits since the days of the Federalist; they now held clashing views over the nature, role, and scope of government.

Dominating the debate too was the politics of sectionalism, for the Southerners, and especially the Virginians, felt that Hamilton’s proposals favored “Eastern” interests over their own. And it was the politics of sectionalism that also rescued the bill. By July, Hamilton’s forces had sustained a series of setbacks in Congress. The arrival of “anti-Federalist” congressmen from North Carolina after that state’s belated ratification further darkened Hamilton’s prospects. Now the political gambler decided to play a strong card. For months New Yorkers, Philadelphians, and Southerners had been jockeying over possession of the permanent site of the nation’s capital. Hamilton now decided to offer support for a “southern” location in exchange for support of his proposals.

It was not easy for the New Yorker to make this concession. He had dreamed of seating the federal government permanently amid the banking and trading community of Manhattan; moreover, he would have to modify his proposals further if the Southerners were to accept the deal. But once Hamilton did decide, the deal was made almost overnight. In August 1790 the essence of Hamilton’s Report on Public Credit was approved by Congress, though by a narrow margin. And the capital would move to Philadelphia for ten years, and then be relocated permanently on the banks of the “Potoumac.”

With the nation’s credit narrowly assured, to Hamilton’s satisfaction but at no little political cost, he moved forward resolutely to the linchpin of his grand economic design—establishment of a powerful national bank. In this field too, the young Secretary was no novice. He had studied with admiration the august Bank of England; he had read the great economists, including Adam Smith, whose Wealth of Nations his sister-in-law sent him from abroad; he had been deeply involved in New York banking. In December 1790, Hamilton submitted to the President and to the Congress the second of his carefully drawn reports. Typically he took not a narrow banking approach but a broad fiscal one. Crucial to his plan was assigning to the new bank power over the issuance of bank notes. Money, Hamilton had long argued, was the lifeblood of the economy, and he calculated that a central bank would be strong enough to maintain the necessary supply of money without letting matters get out of hand. The nation’s capital would be augmented by increasing the amount of notes in circulation, by providing wider use of individual notes, and by collecting individual deposits. At the heart of the plan was a marriage of government and private bankers. The two were so intertwined, in a system of mutual support, that the one was financially and legally implicated with the other. To ensure that the bank would not fall into improper hands—that is, into the hands of radicals who would pump out paper money—Hamilton provided for private stockholders to control most of the stock in the bank and appoint the great majority of directors.

Once again Congress split into warring factions, as Washington glumly watched the further erosion of his government of national unity. The most fiery issue was private control of the bank. The agrarians in Congress raised the old warnings of corruption, control by the rich and wellborn, higher taxes, a mania of speculation. Some also complained that Hamilton’s reports were simply too intricate and complex to be understandable. But part of Hamilton’s task was the education of a people who were still dominated by the notions of small-town economics; and Hamilton’s journalistic supporter John Fenno answered for him:

The Secretary makes reports

Where’er the House commands him;

But for their lives, some members say

They cannot understand him.

In such a puzzling case as this

What can a mortal do?

’Tis hard for ONE to find REPORTS

And understanding too.

Many of the more moderate Republicans and anti-Federalists had to grant Hamilton’s case for a national bank and a stronger system of currency and credit; they too were concerned about the supply and stability of money. Some of them fell back on the constitutional issue—all the more appropriately, perhaps, now that Congress was meeting in Philadelphia, at the site of the constitutional convention itself. The attack on the proposed bank’s constitutionality was led by Madison himself. Speaking in his quiet precise way, but with unsurpassed authority, he reviewed the Constitution and found in it no “power to incorporate a bank”—no power under the authority to lay and collect taxes, none under the power to borrow money, none under the power “to pass all laws necessary and proper to carry into execution those powers.” He reviewed at length the writing and the ratifications of the Constitution and concluded that “the power exercised by the bill was condemned by the silence of the Constitution; was condemned by the rule of interpretation arising out of the Constitution; was condemned by its tendency to destroy the main characteristic of the Constitution; was condemned by the expositions of the friends of the Constitution…; was condemned by the apparent intention of the parties which ratified the Constitution; was condemned by the explanatory amendments proposed by Congress themselves to the Constitution; and he hoped it would receive its final condemnation by the vote of this House.”

It did not. Beating off crippling amendments, facing down the charges of the irrepressible Jackson that the bill would help the mercantile interests at the expense of “the farmers, the yeomanry of the country,” surmounting almost solid southern opposition, the Federalists held their ranks firmly enough to pass the bill in its essentials. The problem indeed seemed to lie less in Congress than in the President himself. Washington had been troubled by the arguments of his fellow Virginian Madison. Always—and proudly—dependent on the advice of men he respected, the President referred the question of constitutionality to two other Virginians, the Secretary of State and the Attorney General. Both Jefferson and Randolph promptly agreed with Madison that the Constitution gave the federal government no power to establish a banking corporation and that no such authority could be implied in any power expressly given. Washington turned back to Hamilton.

The Secretary rose supremely to the occasion. Undaunted by the constitutional authorities arrayed against him, he wrote one of the notable state papers in American history, boldly laying out a broad construction of the Constitution, calling the bank vital to the collection of taxes and the regulation of trade and other functions clearly within the ambit of federal authority, and—even more sweeping—arguing in effect that the federal government as a sovereign entity had the right to use all means “necessary and proper” to realizing such objectives as were not forbidden by the Constitution. His state paper, written with verve and passion, was a direct link between Hamilton the nationalist of 1787 and the Hamiltonian system that the Secretary was seeking to establish. If sustained, his position could be a precedent for later constitutional decisions. But would Washington sustain it? The President, Hamilton had once said, “consulted much, resolved slowly, resolved surely.” Now Washington, delaying as long as he could, resolved in favor of Hamilton and signed the bank bill.

Though this was a striking victory for Hamilton, the bank still represented only one part of the Federalist thrust in America’s political economy. The House of Representatives had also asked the Secretary of the Treasury for a plan “for the encouragement and promotion of such manufacturers as will tend to render the United States independent of other nations for essential, particularly for military supplies.” As usual, Hamilton interpreted his mandate in the broadest terms, and in December 1791, after almost two years of collecting and analyzing economic data, he submitted to Congress nothing less than an economic plan for the United States. Protection of struggling young industries—a central concern for the congressmen—was only a part of the plan, and the smaller part to boot. Hamilton and his brilliant Assistant Secretary, Tench Coxe, took an elaborate inventory of the nation’s capacities and needs, evaluated its existing and potential manpower, machinery, energy resources such as water power, and proposed economic measures that would guarantee the nation’s economic unity and industrial power for decades to come. His key proposals were for a variety of governmental aids to business, ranging from bounties for inventions and subsidies to business, to modernized transport and other internal improvements.

Hamilton did not feel bound by dogma; he borrowed from Adam Smith while rejecting most of his laissez-faire philosophy. Nor was he handicapped by sentiment. Coldly but approvingly he evaluated the potential of labor by women and children in factories. Better off there than on the farm! He counted especially on the availability of women for the cotton factories.

It was a superb piece of economic planning. But did it reach the fundamental wants and needs, hopes and expectations of the great mass of Americans, especially in the hinterland, and of the rival politicians who would respond to those basic needs?

Thousands of Americans indeed did not see Hamilton’s program as meeting their deepest needs and hopes. Their primary concerns were rather the religious and political liberties that had brought their forefathers to America, liberties that had received some protection under state bills of rights, liberties they wanted to protect against any possible threat from the new federal government.

Madison turned to drafting a bill of rights as quickly as he could in the first Congress, partly in response to the intense demand, partly to head off anti-Federalists who were pressing for a second general convention. Why not use the new amending process? Madison asked. This alternative required passage by a two-thirds vote in both House and Senate and endorsement by three-quarters of the states—a cumbersome procedure, but Madison was confident that the groundswell of support for a bill of rights would push the amendments through. First he and his colleagues in the House had to deal with more than two hundred amendments submitted by state ratifying conventions. These made up a mixed bag. Many simply wanted to restrict federal power in general. A few were anti-civil liberties; thus from New England came one claim that the prohibition of religious tests in the Constitution would enable “Jews, Turks and infidels” to infest the new government. Others were eloquent on the popular demand for procedural and substantive rights. Out of the grist House leaders refined seventeen amendments. After Senate consideration, a conference between senators and representatives to adjust differences, and consideration by state legislatures, ten amendments emerged. Two of them—the ninth and tenth—reaffirmed the reservation of rights to the states and to the people. Others would secure the right of people to bear arms, to be secure in their homes, to enjoy a host of procedural rights in courts and outside. But the heart of the Bill of Rights lay in the bold and absolute provisions of the first article:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The amendments were ratified by the end of 1791. The American people had their Bill of Rights. What would they do with it?

Newspaper editors knew what to do with it. By 1790 the nation had almost a hundred newspapers, most of them weeklies, but a few semi-weeklies and eight dailies. Pressed down a page at a time on a crude block of type by human labor, printed on rough rag paper with a drab grayish or bluish cast, produced at the rate of about two hundred copies an hour, these two- or four-page newssheets were not much to look at. Many papers were short-lived, as editors found they could not make up with job printing for lack of subscribers, high costs of paper and mailing. But these newspapers had an immense vitality. They played up foreign and national news at the expense of local, in part because filching material from foreign newspapers and quoting verbatim from congressional debates were cheap ways of filling their columns. The result was the spread of an immense amount of political news throughout the states.

These newspapers were by no means “objective.” While few editors published their views as editorials, their biases so infused their news columns as to stamp most papers as clearly Federalist or Republican. Many editors were themselves politicians, or unabashedly sponsored and even financed by politicians. The most famous of these arrangements came to be Jefferson’s sponsorship of Philip Freneau’s National Gazette and Hamilton’s of John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States. Hamilton saw to it that his Gazette received printing contracts from the Treasury Department; and Jefferson arranged for the publication of his Gazette by providing Freneau with a State Department post that allowed for plenty of time off. Each stung by the gibes in the other man’s paper, both Hamilton and Jefferson appealed to Washington, who admonished his two cabinet members to make “mutual yieldings.” Neither Hamilton nor Jefferson would yield. They were operating amid rising political tensions. The editors were not encouraging a politics of accommodation. Raucous, venal, often libelous, yet committed and strong-minded, they went their way, now shielded by the Bill of Rights.

The early 1790s were indeed a period of political tumult, but even more, of political paradox. George Washington presided over a government of national unity, but his administration was rife with internal conflict. Men addressed one another face to face or in correspondence in the most exquisitely courteous terms—one gentleman writing to another would end his letter, even if he hated his correspondent, with a painfully written out “I have the honor to be with the highest respect, sir, Your most Obedt. & mot: hble Servant”—but public political discourse was conducted in the most extreme language. The men around Washington were building a national governmental structure in a cooperative, soldierly, and workmanlike way, yet they differed violently over banks, tariffs, slavery, fiscal policy, foreign policy, presidential power, congressional prerogative, the permanent location of the national capital, and over a multitude of philosophical issues, such as representation, revolution, responsibility, and the protection of liberty.

Above all, political leaders at local, state, and national levels were buttressing freedoms of speech and press and assembly, without a clear concept of just how these liberties related to the role of government and opposition, faction and interest, majority and minority party. The leaders in fact feared, spurned, and despised the idea of faction and party even as they took part in factions and shaped embryonic parties. They did not consider and firmly articulate the role of government party and opposition party. Leaders as varied in outlook as Washington, Paine, Adams, Jefferson, and Henry agreed on one thing—the evil of organized factional or party opposition. Such an opposition, indeed, took on a strongly sinister, subversive cast, and became an alien threat to republican government and hence something to be extirpated. The political leadership, in short, had no theory of party. Hence the future of parties would be shaped far more by events than by design.

One of the more benign of these events occurred in May 1791, when Jefferson and Madison took off on a “botanical expedition” up the Hudson. After tarrying in New York City a couple of days, they left for Albany by carriage and boat. New York Federalists eyed them narrowly. What could these two Republicans be up to? Practical politicians could not believe it, but the two Virginians were actually interested mainly in the flowers and fish, the trees, game, insects, soil, streams, lakes, scenery, and battlefields rather than in the political flora and fauna. However, they probably did visit Governor Clinton in Albany, before pursuing their journey up Lake George to Champlain, down through Vermont to Bennington, overland to the Connecticut Valley, and finally across the Sound to Long Island. They had a chance to compare notes on Republican politics in the “Eastern” states, and doubtless word seeped out to the surrounding countryside that the celebrated Virginians had passed through.

It was evident that as long as George Washington stayed in office political conflict would be kept within bounds, and by late 1792 it was evident that he would be President for another four years. He had talked much about quitting after his first term, but when leaders in the different factions urged him to run again—“North & South will hang together, if they have you to hang on,” Jefferson told him—the President allowed electors to be chosen for him. His popularity was still at a high pitch, and he had bolstered it even more when he took a sea voyage to Rhode Island, where he spoke in favor of tolerance to representatives of the Jewish Congregation of Newport, and when he toured Georgia and the Carolinas in 1791.He carried the electoral college unanimously the following year. John Adams was also re-elected, but once again votes were diverted from him, this time mainly by Republicans. Washington, managing as always to stay above the election battle, did not intervene to help his Vice-President.

The hero worship for Washington had its limits. When it was proposed in Congress that the head of the President be stamped on the new coin of the United States, republicans warned of monarchical tendencies and future Caesars, Neros, and Caligulas, and the move was defeated. Instead Congress ordered that the coins be adorned with the female figure of LIBERTY.

THE DEADLY PATTERN

George Washington seemed to be a relaxed and happy man at the ball given in his honor on the occasion of his sixty-second birthday, ten days before the second inaugural. With military bearing and punctilio, he marched in with Martha Washington at his side, to the airs of “The President’s March.” He liked the Philadelphia belles who were there, he liked the words “Long live the President” in Latin or French they had woven into their hair bandeaux, and he liked his old friends from Revolutionary days, among whom he moved easily, remembering old campaigns and humorous war stories. Political talk he brushed aside. Precisely at the moment of the ball’s end, he and the First Lady rose, the band struck up a reprise of “The President’s March,” and the couple paraded out, amid cheers.

The President had good reason to feel content. He had wanted above all to nurture and symbolize a united nation, and he seemed to have done so, in appointing a balanced Cabinet, in his travels, and always in furbishing his carefully shaped image of benign authority. He had followed up his northeastern tour with a journey to the South in the spring of 1791, where as usual he had been showered with endless tributes but where he had also talked with farmers and woodsmen in the taverns along the way. He concluded: “Tranquility reigns among the people.”

The man who took the oath of office ten days later, however, seemed a changed man, almost an angry man. He proceeded to the Senate alone in a coach, entered the chamber with minimal ceremony, gave an address of 136 words in which he said that if he knowingly violated the Constitution he should be impeached and upbraided, took the oath of office, and returned to his residence. The reason, rumor had it, was an attack in Freneau’s National Gazette on the birthday ball as a “monarchical farce” promoted by sinister types close to the President and opposed to freemen’s liberties. More likely, the attack reminded Washington of more basic divisions in the country—of the party and factional rivalries that had broken out even within his official family, the hostility to Hamilton’s excise tax out in the hinterland, the battles between the first Americans and the settlers that erupted fitfully along the long frontier to the west.

Increasingly the West was exciting the interest of the public and posing problems for the government. Settlers were moving toward the Ohio and the Mississippi, with the help of the land speculators. About the time of Washington’s first inaugural certain citizens of Pennsylvania and New Jersey were receiving, on a confidential basis, an “invitation” that read:

“Several Gentlemen who propose to make settlements in the Western Country mean to reconnoitre & survey the same the ensuing winter. All farmers, Tradesmen &c of good characters, who wish to unite in this scheme & to visit the Country under my direction, shall be provided with boats & provisions for the purpose, free of expence, on signing an agreement.…The boats which will be employed on this expedition are proposed to be from 40 to 60 feet long, to row with 20 oars each, & to carry a number of Swivels. Each man to provide himself with a good firelock or rifle, ammunition & one blanket or more if he pleases. Such as choose tents or other conveniences must provide them themselves. Every person who accompanies me on this undertaking shall be entitled to 320 acres of land, at 1/8 of a dollar per acre.… All persons who settle with me at New Madrid, & their posterity will have the free navigation of the Mississippi & a Market at New Orleans free from duties for all the produce from their lands, where they may receive payment in Mexican Dollars for their flour, tobacco &c.…”

Buffalo and other game would be plentiful in the area, it was promised; settlers would be helped in clearing ground, building a house, and obtaining livestock; schoolmasters would be engaged and ministers encouraged to come. The new city would be built on a high bank of the Mississippi, near the mouth of the Ohio, in the “richest & most healthy part of the Western Country.”

This kind of advertisement was helping swell a vast movement of population over the Appalachians and into the West. Amid intense state jealousies and fierce political combat, the original states had been adjusting to the pressures of western expansion. Before and after the Revolution, Virginians and Marylanders were moving as far as the forks of the Ohio, joining Pennsylvanians and others. New Englanders and New Yorkers were also moving west. After the Revolution the streams of settlers swelled to torrents.

State lands were reorganized as people legislated with their feet. In 1783 Virginia had agreed to cede its lands north of the Ohio, provided it could reserve for itself a district to satisfy military grants made during the Revolution. Virginia had held back its land south of the Ohio, which would be organized as the state of Kentucky. In 1785 Massachusetts gave up its claim to a stretch of land crossing the (present) states of Michigan and Wisconsin, and the following year Connecticut ceded some of its western land, withholding a tract in northern Ohio—the Western Reserve—for the relief of Connecticut victims of destruction of property by the British. Other states too let go of their lands, which gave to the Confederation—and later to the United States—a huge public domain.

Into this domain swarmed the settlers, crowding the roads year after year, especially during the months of spring to fall, moving singly, by families, or by groups. Usually it was a family, its belongings packed into one covered wagon, leading a horse or cow or mule. Others traveled by two-wheeled carts, still others on horseback or even on foot. With luck they could boat down rivers, but sometimes luck failed, as overloaded craft upset in rapids or “savages” shot arrows from the high banks. Preceding, accompanying, or following the migrants were other possible dangers—claim jumpers, squatters and fugitives from justice, merchants and other middlemen looking for quick profits in monopolistic situations, and land sellers and speculators not unwilling to lure poor farmers and mechanics west with grandiose promises of cheap land, rich harvests, and big money. On the face of it, the “invitation” to New Madrid looked like such a real estate scheme.

But James Madison put a far more ominous gloss on the document when he sent a copy of it to George Washington late in March 1789. “It is the most authentic & precise evidence of the Spanish project that has come to my knowledge.” The Spanish project! For decades Spaniards, Frenchmen, and Englishmen had contended for control of the lower Mississippi. For years Americans on the southwest frontier had chafed under Spanish control of the lower Mississippi and had resented the Northeasterner who seemed to care so little about settlers’ rights in the Southwest. Patrick Henry, trying to mobilize Kentuckians against the 1787 Constitution, charged that the new federal government would surrender navigation of the Mississippi to Spain in exchange for concessions that would mean little to the frontiersmen. James Wilkinson, a Revolutionary War general, actually accepted Spanish gold in return for information and other services to the Spanish. By the end of the 1780s the Southwest was a conspiracy theorist’s heaven, alive with intrigue, suspicion of the new federal government, and plots for secession. Land speculators were believed to be aiding and abetting the conspiracies.

The question of the Southwest was one more flammable issue in the politics of the 1790s, and one more stimulus to party rivalry, with Republicans generally more sympathetic to southwestern fears and hopes than were Federalists based in the Northeast. The Southwest intensified rather than transcended political conflict. And the Southwest—indeed the whole frontier from Florida through the Southwest and up through the Northwest to the Canadian border in the Northeast—involved another “foreign power” who aroused among some Americans the deepest anxieties and hatreds of all—the American Indian.

For years the main device for dealing with this “foreign power” had been the treaty, as in the case of the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws in the South in the mid-1780s. “The principle was adopted of considering the Indians as foreign and independent powers, and also as proprietors of lands,” John Quincy Adams wrote later. “As independent powers, we negotiated with them by treaties; as proprietors, we purchased of them all the land which we could prevail on them to sell; as brethren of the human race, rude and ignorant, we endeavored to bring them to the knowledge of religion and of letters.”

This sentiment was typical of the ambivalent policy of Americans toward Indians—paying for the Indians’ land as they ousted them, uplifting them as they uprooted them. Washington and other Federalist leaders rejected the policy many frontiersmen called for—all-out conquest of the Indians. They chose policies of negotiation, a show of liberality, guarantees of protection from encroaching whites, trade, and education. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, passed by Congress in one of its final and most important actions under the Confederation, stated that the “utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent….” and “laws founded in justice and humanity shall, from time to time, be made, for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.…”

Noble words—and genuinely meant by many of those who uttered or legislated them—but the frontiersmen and settlers hardly heard and rarely heeded these words; their actions were based on practical needs for more land, on fear and suspicion of the “redskin,” on the latest scalping incident, no matter who provoked it. Inevitably, the fierce combat that followed led to bigger battles.

It was the same old deadly pattern of white advance, Indian defense, white retaliation. In 1790 Kentucky militiamen and federal regulars burned deserted Indian villages near the Maumee River in Ohio; later a combined force of Chippewas, Miamis, Shawnees, Ottawas, and other tribes, under the leadership of Chief Little Turtle, slaughtered six hundred men commanded by General Arthur St. Clair. Vengeance was delayed when Washington invited fifty chiefs of the Six Iroquois Nations, old allies of the British but also friendly to the Americans, to journey to Philadelphia for a parley. The whites wished to awe the Indians with their wealth and numbers, satisfy some of the minor Indian grievances, and persuade them to go as emissaries to Little Turtle. After a month of being wined and dined in the best Philadelphia style, the guests were flattered but not deceived. Their chief, Red Jacket, suggested that since the red men were being manipulated by both Britain and the United States, only an agreement between the two powers would bring order to the frontier. But he did promise to try to soothe his western brethren.

That task fell to Captain Hendrick Aupaumut, a Mohican chief who had served under Washington at the Battle of White Plains. To the Delawares, one of Little Turtle’s allies, Aupaumut pictured Washington’s policy of friendship. Since the Americans now had their own liberty, “now they endeavor to lift us up…from the ground, that we may stand up and walk ourselves.” The British, on the other hand, would just cover them “with blanket and shirt every fall,” so that they would remain “on the ground and could not see great way.”

Little Turtle’s followers, however, already felt uplifted enough by their victories, and what they could see close at hand was not liberty but more encroachment. They would not yield. Then came the vengeance: Three years after St. Clair’s disaster, General Anthony Wayne decimated Ottawas, Shawnees, and other Indians at the Battle of the Fallen Timbers. Next year a thousand red men from thirteen tribes gathered at Fort Greenville, Ohio, and ceded over 25,000 square miles of eastern and southern Ohio for $25,000 in goods and a $9,500 annuity.

Whether standing fast and dying, retreating west, or remaining to barter and be educated in white ways, Indians might well wonder how they were making out on the other side of the American experiment. They may have read a hint of the future on the medal that General Washington had conferred on Red Jacket: it depicted the general in martial array presenting a peace pipe to an Indian chief while, in the background, a white man broke the land with a plow.

News of Wayne’s victory came to President Washington not in Philadelphia but twenty-five miles to the northwest, where he was conducting his own war, not against red men but against whites. With him was Alexander Hamilton, who more than any other man was the cause of the trouble.

As part of the Secretary’s plan to fund the national debt, Congress had in 1790 imposed a small excise tax on the production of liquor, as well as on such other genteel indulgences as snuff and sugar loaf. From the start, anti-Federalist congressmen had denounced the whiskey excise as “odious, unequal, unpopular, and oppressive” and predicted that it would “convulse the Government.” Even though Washington had moved to ease Hamilton’s tax, Pennsylvania farmers west of the Alleghenies were not to be mollified. They had long been “intoxicated with liberty,” a French traveler had noted, and their definition of liberty was freedom from the tax collector. This particular levy they loathed. With the Mississippi closed off to western trade, the farmers made more profits from shipping wheat and rye over the mountains in liquid form rather than bulk. The excise had to be paid in cash, which was so scarce in the western counties that jugs of home brew were used for currency. Worst of all, since the tax was levied at the still head, farmers had to pay tax on what they saved for their own refreshment. In practice, the home brewers were masterly at foiling the tax men, whether state or federal, but it was the principle of the thing. They defied the federals.

For George Washington, it was the principle of the thing too. Defiance in the West brought back unhappy memories of the revolt of Shays’s men hardly seven years before. Why had the federal government been established, if not to put down defiance of law and order? The President suspected further that local “Democratic” societies, composed of admirers of the French Revolution and foes of Freemasonry, Alexander Hamilton, and the Society of the Cincinnati, were inspiring resistance. In fact, events were not marching to a plan but awaiting the inevitable incident, and this came in the form of an eruption of gunfire, and two deaths, at the home of a local excise collector. Disorder spread as mobs destroyed excise offices.

Federalists in Philadelphia greeted the disturbances with fear and rage, demanding that the “white Indians” be put to the sword. Seeing an opportunity to discredit and destroy Democratic societies, Hamilton called for immediate military action. The President concurred; if “the laws are to be so trampled upon with impunity,” he said, “and a minority, a small one too, is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put, at one stroke, to republican government.” He called up the militia of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey and was vastly relieved when thirteen thousand men responded to the order to put down their fellow citizens. The President himself took to the field—and with him rode the original excise man himself, target of the hatred of rebel and republican alike, Secretary Hamilton. Washington had proceeded as far as Trappe when the good news arrived from General Wayne.

This great show of force was mounted on the assumption of a real threat from the whiskey rebels. Certainly there was much talk—and occasional examples—of tarring and feathering local tax collectors, smashing the stills of those who paid the excise, and burning the barns of particularly obnoxious officials. But the Whiskey Rebellion was never a true rebellion. It was oratory, mass meetings, and whiskey itself that largely kept the rebels going. While there was talk that rebel leader David Bradford, the popular prosecuting attorney of Washington County, might lead the Monongahela counties to independence, the rebels were scattered, their leadership divided. Moderates counseled moderation, and some property holders joined the revolt mainly to deflect it from any further violence. The strength and the involvement of the Democratic societies as a whole proved to have been much overrated.

For there was no civil war in Pennsylvania, no fighting to speak of. Like the Shaysites of old, Bradford and other leaders fled, leaving the rest of the population meekly to submit to a new loyalty oath. Some rebels were arrested, two were convicted of treason—and Washington pardoned them both. A triumphant President wrote to a friend that the Europeans would now see that “republicanism is not the phantom of a deluded imagination: on the contrary, that under no form of government, will laws be better supported, liberty and property better secured, or happiness more effectually dispensed to mankind.” Order was necessary to liberty.

Washington was as angry as he was relieved. In a letter to his brother-in-law, Burgess Ball, he fulminated at the Democratic societies—could “any thing be more absurd, more arrogant, or more pernicious” than these “self-created bodies” telling a representative government what to do? In his next annual address to Congress he denounced the role of “certain self-created societies” for actions smacking almost of sedition. Republicans were indignant; they had largely followed a hands-off attitude toward the rebellion, though Jefferson had derided the campaign against it as “an armament against people at their ploughs.” When Jefferson had been a member of the Cabinet, he had warned Washington that an attack on the Democratic societies would make the President appear as “the head of a party instead of the head of the nation.” Now Madison saw Washington’s speech to Congress as putting him “ostensibly at the head of the other party.”

That was the last thing General Washington wanted. And if ever there was a case for the presidency as a symbol of unity and nonpartisanship, it was in the mid-1790s, as the European powers squared off and drew the New World into war.

DIVISIONS ABROAD AND AT HOME

In September 1792 the French revolutionaries proclaimed the French Republic. Four months later they executed their king. Ten days after that they declared war on Great Britain, Spain, and Holland. The news of these events fell like hammer blows on American opinion. Since 1789 the sons and daughters of the American Revolution had been watching the French revolutionaries with ardent hope and sympathy. Lafayette had even sent Washington the key to the Bastille. To old soldiers in taverns and hostelries, it seemed sublime that the people who had aided the American Revolution should embark on their own, and indeed they took credit for exporting the idea across the Atlantic. “Liberty,” proclaimed the Boston Gazette, “will have another feather in her cap.” Speakers broke into song and verse as they rapturized the revolutionary upsurge in Paris and the start of “freedom’s glorious reign.”

Jefferson was still in Paris during those early events; he even helped draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man. He was optimistic. “I have so much confidence in the good sense of man,” he wrote a friend, “that I am never afraid of the issue where reason is left free to exert her force; and I will agree to be stoned as a false prophet if all does not end well in this country.…Here is but the first chapter of the history of European liberty.” He was not uncritical; he sent home acute observations on France’s halting progress toward self-government.

John Adams had a more measured reaction. He hoped that the French Revolution, he wrote a friend, would favor “liberty, equity, and humanity.…” But he had “learned by awful experience to rejoice with trembling,” he wrote another friend, Dr. Price. “I know that Encyclopedists and Economists, Diderot and D’Alembert, Voltaire and Rousseau have contributed to this great event more than Sidney, Locke, or Hoadley, perhaps more than the American Revolution; and I own to you I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.…” Adams could not disguise his bias in favor of the English. Nor could Hamilton: friendship with Britain was at the heart of the Secretary’s foreign policy, not least because of his admiration for English legal and economic practices.

“We think in English,” Hamilton said. But the cause of France, Republicans said, was the cause of man.

Soon, however, the cause of man seemed to falter in France. The rise of the Jacobins, the execution of the king and queen, the endless devouring of new cadres of leaders, the horrifying rounds of the tumbril, produced a revulsion among some Americans. “When will these savages be satiated with blood?” John Adams demanded. Jefferson deplored the fate of the Terror’s victims, but there were higher stakes—the “liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest.” Others cared not a whit about the guillotining of the king and queen—they even celebrated it. At a Philadelphia banquet the head of a pig, representing Louis XVI, was passed around while the feasters, decked out in caps of liberty, mangled it with their knives. At a tavern between Chester and Wilmington the innkeeper exhibited a sign showing a decapitated female, her dripping head lying by the side of the trunk, until the public forced him to withdraw this grim effigy of the late queen.

Thus the Terror drove a wedge between Americans, and France’s war on Britain and Spain drove the wedge in deeper. The impact of the war stretched to the West Indies, to the Mississippi, to Canada, to the southwest frontier, to the posts on the northwest border still occupied by the British—areas of cardinal importance to the Americans. As American interests were touched and American attitudes enflamed, fierce disputes over foreign policy became linked with domestic disputes.

With dismay Washington observed the rising feeling. He had, above all, wanted to preside over a united government that could transcend “local prejudices, or attachments,” and “party animosities.” Before the end of his first term he was noting the “internal dissensions” that were “harrowing and tearing our vitals.” To Hamilton and Jefferson he sent separate pleas for mutual forbearance and compromise. All he got for his pains was a complaint from his Secretary of State that Hamilton was intruding into foreign policy, a charge that his rival’s policies were directly opposite to his own, and an indication of intent to resign; and from his Secretary of the Treasury, a response that it was he—Hamilton—who was the “deeply injured party,” a charge that Jefferson’s “machinations” were subverting the government, and an offer that both he and Jefferson resign.

If the two men acted like paranoids, at least they had real enemies in each other. Within a few weeks of assuming office Hamilton had been indulging in secret negotiations with a British diplomat, to whom he described Madison as “very little Acquainted with the world.” Anglophile himself, fearful of Jefferson’s Francophilism, Hamilton in effect aided the British in countering the efforts of the Secretary of State. Jefferson, on his part, fought Hamilton through political channels. He appealed to Madison: “For God’s sake, my dear Sir, take up your pen, select the most striking heresies and cut him to pieces in the face of the public.” Soon Madison was thwacking Hamilton hip and thigh.

Washington stood firm amid the turbulence. He kept both men in his Cabinet, and he judiciously selected from among the views of both. He rejected Hamilton’s pleas that the American treaties of commerce and alliance with France be suspended. But he declared American neutrality as between France and Britain—a move that angered Republicans who could not forget France’s vital aid in their own revolution.

Into this unstable equilibrium intruded the figure of Edmond Genêt. A youthful diplomat turned revolutionary, Citizen Genêt had been sent to America to shore up the cause of France, diplomatically, commercially, and militarily. Landing in Charleston in April 1793, he journeyed north to such celebration and acclaim that he arrived in Philadelphia with a head, if not crowned by a liberty cap, certainly swollen with hopes of winning a popular acclaim that would surpass even Washington’s, of enlisting Americans to conduct military adventures against Louisiana and Florida and thus engaging France’s old ally fully in the “cause of man.” Soon he was commissioning privateers in American ports to bring in fat British prizes off the Delaware capes.

Warmly greeted by Jefferson, received even by Washington, and enthusiastically feted by Philadelphia Republicans, Genêt soon wore out his welcome with his vainglorious efforts to conduct his own foreign policy abroad. Even Jefferson cooled when Genêt renamed a captured British brigantine Petite Democrate, smuggled cannon and men aboard her in Philadelphia, and slipped her down the river, past Mud Island, and out to sea before Washington, visiting Mount Vernon, could take action. Soon the Hamiltonians were organizing mass meetings and adopting resolutions upholding Washington’s neutrality policies and condemning Genêt. In Virginia the Madisonians retaliated through public meetings attacking the Federalist “Cabal.” The result was the direct and deep involvement of large numbers of people in the making of foreign policy.

Genêt’s dénouement was inglorious: Washington demanded his recall to Paris, but the Citizen, discovering that in his absence he had been converted from a radical to a reactionary in the deadly bouleversement of French politics, chose to stay in America, to wed Governor Clinton’s daughter and retire to private life. But this tragicomedy of 1793 was a fitting prelude to the crisis of 1794. That crisis was precipitated by the collision of France and Britain over possession of the seas—and by American illusions that somehow a small nation, three thousand miles away, could remain unentangled in the struggle of the great powers.

Diplomatically, that struggle provoked the usual cynical game of sham neutrality on the high seas. Britain, possessing a mighty navy, wished to cut off the trade lines to France. France, weaker on the seas and dependent on American shipping to its home ports and to the West Indies, proclaimed its adherence to the doctrine of freedom of the seas. The United States stood on its “neutral rights.” Yet even the French violated their own doctrine when, in the face of an American neutrality that for a time seemed to be favoring Britain, it seemed expedient to confiscate American ships and cargoes.

The British did not bother to be hypocritical. Hoping to starve France into submission, they proclaimed a blockade of that country, ordered the seizure of all neutral vessels transporting cargo to France, and—most threatening of all to the American merchant marine—extended their naval and seizure operations directly into the Caribbean. These decisions having been made in secret, the British Navy was able to fall on the big American trade to the Caribbean and to snare more than two hundred American ships.

As news of these depredations trickled into American ports, a wave of anti-British feeling swept through the nation. Anger mounted on reports that the English were up to other heinous acts—arming Indians on the northwest frontier, helping Barbary pirates to prey on American shipping. There were calls for war, for a second struggle for independence. Never mind that the United States had practically no army or navy; Madison suggested that the Portuguese Navy be hired. Or perhaps the British lion could be brought to its knees by commercial action. The issue cut deep into the structure of American opinion, inflaming Republican Anglophobia even further, deepening the North-South conflict, dividing even the Federalists among themselves. Deserted by some of his more martially inclined Federalist brethren, Hamilton stood staunchly against commercial retaliation against London. Britain, after all, was the main prop of his whole fiscal system.

Once again the figure of Washington—outwardly imperturbable, inwardly distressed—stood in the breach. He now lacked the official advice of Jefferson, for his Secretary of State had resigned, by prearrangement, at the end of 1793, to be succeeded by another Virginian in whom Washington had less confidence, Edmund Randolph. Moving quickly to fill the semi-vacuum, Hamilton urged the President to dispatch a minister plenipotentiary to London, and Washington agreed. The choice fell on Chief Justice John Jay. Hamilton himself drafted Jay’s instructions. The move came barely in time to head off a bill passed in the House for non-intercourse with Britain; the measure failed in the Senate only on a tie-breaking negative vote cast by Vice-President Adams.

The bill had been an effort for peace, aborted if only for a time, for Republicans were skeptical of Jay’s mission. A Federalist judge acting on Federalist instructions: this, they felt, would mean the path toward appeasement. Skepticism turned to indignation and wrath when copies of the treaty—two of which had to be thrown overboard from the ship carrying them when a French privateer intercepted it on the high seas—reached Philadelphia. Jay had secured admission of United States ships to British East Indian ports on a nondiscriminatory basis, as well as the opening of the West Indies trade, but only to small American ships carrying a limited number of staples. But the northeast boundary question and British and American claims and compensation questions were left open—they were referred to a joint commission to be established—and British trade with the United States was placed on a most-favored-nation basis. Nothing was settled with regard to the impressment of seamen, to the slaves “stolen” and liberated by the British, to the Indian question.

In effect, Republicans claimed, Jay had surrendered the “freedom of the seas.” The opposition would appeal to the people. Soon protest meetings were held, Hamilton was hooted down when he tried to defend the treaty, and an impeachment move was launched against Jay, who was accused of selling out to British gold. The clamor against the treaty, Washington said, was “like that against a mad-dog.” Jay himself remarked that he could have made his way across the country by the light of his burning effigies. And once again it was the stolid figure of Washington that calmed the political tempest. In the face of rising Republican opposition, an untimely renewal of ship seizures by the British, and his own—and Hamilton’s—doubts about certain aspects of the treaty, he overrode opposition within his Cabinet from Randolph and insisted on Senate ratification. The senators complied, after striking out the tepid compromise on West Indies trade.

Washington also stood firm against Republican opposition in the House. Madison and his colleagues, exercising power over appropriations necessary to put the treaty into effect, were insisting on their right to look at presidential papers involving the treaty, but the President denied that they had that right. As the appropriations issue came to be fully debated in the House, once again the party leaders turned to the people for petitions, support at rallies, and enthusiasm. Party lines tightened in the country, and especially in the House, where voting along Federalist-Republican lines increased, and both sides met in what were the first party caucuses held in Congress. An immensely effective speech by Federalist Fisher Ames, and the defection of Republican Frederick Muhlenberg, Speaker of the House (for which defection he would shortly be stabbed by his brother-in-law, a fanatical Republican), defeated the move to withhold appropriations for the treaty.

As if argument over policy were not enough to keep the parties divided, the Administration and its opponents fought hard over power and procedure. The President’s claim of sole authority to proclaim neutrality, and of his right to withhold treaty papers, his bold assertion that treaties signed by the President and ratified by the Senate were the supreme law of the land (subordinating the role of the House)—these and other presidential and congressional claims led to furious debates between Federalist and Republican. The men of ’89 knew that they were creating vital precedents in resolving the ambiguous decisions of the men of ’87—and the fact that many of these were the same men did not temper their feelings. Indeed, when Washington said that he knew what he was talking about because he had taken part in the constitutional convention, Madison and his friends retorted that that piece of parchment in itself was “nothing but a dead letter, until life and validity were breathed into it by the voice of the people” in the state ratifying conventions. The man who would come to be known as the Father of the Constitution would not accept lessons in constitutional law from the man who would become known as the Father of His Country.

Thus were Washington’s hopes dashed for a foreign policy that would rise above party and sectional and group politics. Not only were Federalists and Republicans divided over the year-to-year strategy and the everyday tactics of foreign policy, they were profoundly divided over ideology, sentiment, and in their sympathies for Britain and France; over the kind of nation they were trying to build; over the kind of people Americans should become; over America’s political and symbolic place in the world. Ordinarily attitudes over foreign and domestic policy are not congruent; persons combining with one another over domestic issues often split with one another over foreign. In the 1790s, however, congruence was intensifying among both Federalists and Republicans over the two sets of policies.

The result was a sharpening and hardening and deepening of attitudes separating and polarizing the Federalist and Republican groupings—a polarization that helped produce enormous popular participation in the debates over foreign policy. The further result was to lay the foundations for a powerful two-party politics, the shape of which could not be fully divined in the 1790s.

CHAPTER 4

The Trials of Liberty

IN THE SUMMER OF 1796 two farmers were busy improving their estates. In Quincy, Massachusetts, John Adams supervised the building of a large barn, using red cedar that he and his hands had cut from a grove in the lower township and hauled home behind a team of oxen. Every day he inspected his fields of barley and oats and rye and corn; the main problem this summer was the corn, attacked by worms. With special pleasure he rode across his once thin and stony fields, now rich from years of treatment with his special compost of salt hay, seaweed, cow dung, and horse manure, interlaid with lime.

He did not neglect his moral duties. Sundays he attended church morning and afternoon, and he reflected on the Christian teachings of love and brotherhood. Weekdays he struggled for the soul of his hired man Billings, a good worker when sober, but prone to spending days swilling brandy, wine, and cider, “a beast associating with the worst beasts in the neighborhood.” Sick and dizzy, he would return to the farm, seize the hoe Adams thrust at him, and stagger from hill to hill slashing weeds and cornstalks alike. Finally Adams set about carrying enormous stones with Billings in order to sweat him out, only to provoke the man into threatening to quit, after ranting about Adams’ hardness, his endless lecturing, his treating him like a hired beast. Morality won out; taken to Abigail to be paid off, Billings reconsidered, haggled a bit, and agreed to stay on at forty-five pounds a year—and to take the pledge against hard liquor.

In Monticello, Thomas Jefferson was busier than ever with the endless remodeling of his house. He had found that the interior timbers of the upper part of the house were decaying and shaky, and soon seven workmen were prying bricks loose by the thousands. Now Jefferson was planning to replace the attic with an octagonal dome that would enclose a mezzanine balcony around the interior. On the ground floor he established his own suite, with a bed alcove between his dressing room and study, which were directly connected when he drew the bed up into the recessed ceiling during the day. Outside the house two long terraces, linked by an all-weather passageway, would cover kitchen and servants’ rooms on the south, and stables, carriage house, and laundry on the north. And beyond this little estate on its mountaintop stretched Jefferson’s fields, the paths he called “roundabouts,” and the huts that housed his 150 slaves, now mortgaged to the hilt from his heavy spending. While his home was roofless during the rebuilding, Jefferson and his family camped out under the “tent of heaven.”

The two men were tending their gardens—and keeping their eyes cocked on Philadelphia, New York, and Charleston. In Philadelphia, the President had firmly decided against running for a third term and indeed was contemplating an elaborate Farewell Address. Madison and other Republican leaders were quietly preparing the way for Jefferson to run for President, though they had received little active encouragement from him. Supporters of John Adams, hoping for the united backing of their fellow Federalists, were maneuvering in the critical mid-Atlantic states. From New York, Alexander Hamilton was looking for a pliable southern Federalist who might have a chance against Adams, whom he had found unresponsive, stubborn, and occasionally weak in his Federalism.

In New York too, an ambitious, forty-year-old Republican, Aaron Burr, was hoping to win the vice-presidency—and perhaps more eventually—as Jefferson’s running mate. In Charleston, Thomas Pinckney, brother of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and second cousin of Charles Pinckney, was hoping that his recent success in gaining navigational freedom on the Mississippi from Spain would make him appear to be the kind of southern Federalist that the northern Federalists were seeking. And complicating the calculations of all the politicians was the strange presidential election system that required each elector to cast his ballot for two presidential candidates, with the man receiving the most votes winning the presidency, and the runner-up settling for the political booby prize, the vice-presidency.

The main actors were true to form. Despite his sighs for Quincy, Adams desperately wished to be President, but the custom of the day allowed him to do no campaigning, so his supporters conferred with him in Quincy and then, acting mainly on their own, organized rallies, wrote campaign pamphlets, and arranged newspaper offensives. Even less active than his rival, Jefferson told Rutledge, “I have no ambition to govern men; no passion which would lead me to delight to ride in a storm.” All he wished was to plant his corn and peas “in hills or drills as I please.…” While this attitude in part was a pose, Jefferson was genuinely torn between politics and plantation, and even more, between the call of public service and his right to a private life. Few would believe it, he told his son-in-law, but he “sincerely” wished to run second in the electoral college. Yet he did not discourage his backers, among whom Burr was active in mobilizing support from Tammany Republicans in New York.

Once again Hamilton was trying his hand at the game of “wastage” that was invited by the presidential election system. To win the game he must elect his kind of Federalist, which meant keeping Adams—and of course Jefferson—out of the presidency. His main card was any ambitious politician who could be tempted into running, and his main tactic was withholding votes from a front-runner so that his own man could come in. But he had to play a strong card, and his calculating eye first fell on Patrick Henry in Virginia. It seemed an unlikely choice, although Henry, now sixty, had mellowed in his opposition to the federal Constitution while hardening in his opposition to the Jefferson-Madison faction in Virginia politics. But ill and weary, he declined the honor, and Hamilton turned to Pinckney. Soon word was quietly going out to Federalist electors in the North to vote for Adams and Pinckney, and to electors in South Carolina to vote unanimously for the Charlestonian but waste a few of Adams’ votes. Never mind that this maneuver might elect Jefferson, defeat the richly experienced and world-famous Adams, and disrupt the Federalist party. Hamilton played his cards coolly—but perhaps too openly or obviously, for New England Federalists, playing their own game of wastage, withheld electoral votes from Pinckney.

The result was a hairbreadth victory for Adams over Jefferson, 71 electoral votes to 68, the elevation of Jefferson to the vice-presidency—and a naked sectional split. Jefferson won not a single vote in New England, Adams only two in the South. Of the eighteen votes that Jefferson picked up north of the Potomac, fourteen came from Pennsylvania, where Republican politicians had been especially active. Most significant, twelve of the sixteen states gave their votes either wholly to Adams or wholly to Jefferson.

The close vote and the power of section reflected a rising polarization among political leaders. In his Farewell Address, Washington inveighed against quarreling over section and party. Everyone agreed and everyone kept on quarreling. The President himself was no longer a figure above the battle. The Republican editor of the Philadelphia Aurora, Benjamin Bache—nicknamed “Lightning Rod Junior” because he was the grandson of Benjamin Franklin and liked to apply electric shocks to Federalists—charged that Washington had deceived and debauched the nation, and had taught it that “no man may be an idol” and that “the mask of patriotism may be worn to conceal the foulest designs against the liberties of the people.” Nor did Jefferson stay above the battle by distancing himself from the campaign. Indiscreet talk and letters on his part came to Washington’s notice; the President, angry at Jefferson’s supporters and now cooling toward his fellow Virginian, charged that every act of his administration had been tortured by the grossest misrepresentations, in terms that “could scarcely be applied to a Nero; a notorious defaulter; or even to a common pickpocket.” Citizen Adet, a new “political diplomat” from France, hardly helped matters when he appealed in the press to the American people to elect Jefferson President and make friends with France again.

The election left the main contestants at odds—Adams furious over Hamilton’s machinations, Jefferson none too happy about having to quit Monticello to preside over the Senate, Pinckney sorely disappointed, and Burr suspicious that he had been done in by shenanigans in Virginia.

With the coming of Inaugural Day, however, the differences were papered over, and Adams began his administration amid a glowing sense of harmony. He and Jefferson had been quoted as saying nice things about each other, and while neither believed that the other really meant them, the gestures were appreciated. Washington, profoundly happy to be returning to Mount Vernon for good, was attentive and congratulatory. Republican editors—even Bache himself—hailed Adams’ Inaugural Address, perhaps with the thought that they might draw this proud and independent man, with his hostility to high Federalists like Hamilton, into the Republican camp.

They did not know their man. While he disliked the crass money-grubbers and speculators among the high Federalists, Adams detested even more the egalitarian Republicans with their “leveling” doctrines. Viewed as a conservative enslaved to rigid doctrine, and as a fussy, vain, self-pitying, pompous man, Adams in fact was a deeply emotional and even passionate person, almost as critical of himself as of his adversaries. He simply lacked the sublime—or sentimental—faith in the people found among so many of his fellow revolutionaries. Adams saw humankind as irredeemably quarrelsome, perverse, illogical. Still, they must govern themselves. The institutional solution was balance—balance of power among rich and poor, balance between rulers and ruled, balance between Congress and presidency, balance between order and liberty. The human solution was education, strong and selfless leadership, faith, and patience. The moral solution was private and public virtue.

Like many of his contemporaries, Adams believed in liberty, but it was a restricted brand of liberty, limited mainly to white adult males and protected against turbulent mobs, popular majorities, crass materialists, fiscal uncertainty—and the Republican “levelers.”

PHILADELPHIANS: THE EXPERIMENTERS

By January 1797, when John Adams was laying plans for his presidency, the federal government had resided in Philadelphia for over six years. George Washington had created a government in New York City; at the end of the 1790s the capital would move to Washington, and there the government would create a city. But Adams inherited both a government and a city. For years members of Congress, federal judges, and bureaucrats had been living in hotels and boardinghouses, visiting Philadelphia’s historic buildings and monuments, exploring its city life. Few could escape the influence of a city noted for its cosmopolitan urban life, its heritage of philosophical debate and practical experimentation.

Even congressmen from the great cities of New York and Boston, and from the rival city of Baltimore, could envy the spaciousness of the new federal capital. Compared with the narrow lanes and twisting alleys of other places, Philadelphia, with its broad parallel avenues and neatly laid out cross streets, was a planned city. Congressmen were well acquainted with the county courthouse, where they met in what was now renamed Congress Hall, and with the old city hall, taken over by the Supreme Court. They could visit again the Old State House (Independence Hall), where the new federal government had been conceived under its Liberty Bell in the previous decade. They could admire Franklin’s mansion on Market Street, now completed, with its ten-foot arched passageway providing direct access from the street to the courtyard, where he had built a two-story printshop and newspaper for his grandson. And they could retire after vigorous congressional debating to the City Tavern, called by John Adams the most “genteel” tavern in America. Here, in May 1774, after Paul Revere had arrived with news that Parliament had passed a bill closing down the port of Boston, a great company of Philadelphians gathered and, after a tumultuous debate, sent word to Boston asserting Philadelphia’s “firm adherence to the cause of liberty.”

Congressmen from rural areas were plunged into the urban splendors and enticements of the second most populous city in America. Some, bringing their rustic spectacles with them and hobnobbing mainly with men from their own hinterlands, looked at city life with suspicious eyes. Others, more willing to explore and exploit the capital, found a city bursting with intellectual activity. Philadelphians gloried especially in the subscription libraries, and if these were increasingly open to men of all classes, they were still closed to women, who had turned to reading rooms and to circulating libraries like the one established several decades earlier by William Bradford. Men of the upper and middle classes participated in the numerous scientific societies, in the spirit of the first one founded by Benjamin Franklin and joined by a glazier, a shoemaker, and a carpenter, as well as by professional men. “The poorest labourer upon the shore of the Delaware,” a minister said some years later, “thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiments in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or scholar.”

Philadelphians had, indeed, long been debating a fundamental intellectual and educational issue: to what extent should students—especially poor students—be given a classical or a “practical” education? William Penn himself had complained that “we are in pain to make them scholars but not men; to talk rather than to know….We press their memory too soon, and puzzle, strain, and load them with words and rules to know grammar and rhetoric, and a strange tongue or two” that would never be used, while leaving uncultivated “their natural genius to mechanical, physical, or natural knowledge.” Anglican and liberal Quaker members of the city’s elite had argued for a classical education along European lines. Later, Franklin worked out a compromise on the question, only to see the Latin division of the new Academy of Philadelphia exceed the English division in popularity under the leadership of teachers like Francis Alison and William Smith. Women, blacks, and the poor were taught largely by private masters, but they could also attend night schools for working people, both male and female. Philadelphia by 1790 could claim that almost complete literacy had been achieved in the city.

Philadelphians had formed societies for promoting agriculture and for “Encouraging the Manufacture of Useful Arts” only a few years before the city became the federal capital, and they founded the University of Pennsylvania two years afterwards. But the proudest boast of the city’s intellectuals was still the American Philosophical Society. Modeled closely on the Royal Society of London, the APS originally was a small group of scientifically minded men like Franklin, and it was overshadowed by “The American Society for Promoting and Propagating Useful Knowledge.” The two groups had competed for prestige until 1769, when they consolidated under the name of “The American Philosophical Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge.” Severely restricted during Revolutionary times, the society flourished in the postwar years and had completed building its official home, Philosophical Hall, just two years before the federal government moved to Philadelphia.

The city was also famous for medical education. Its doctors had begun lecturing on anatomy and obstetrics in the absence of formal medical training, and later founded a medical college and a medical society. Dr. William Shippen, Jr., in 1767 established the first lying-in hospital in the colonies and offered courses in prenatal care to pregnant women. The press helped cultivate medical education; printers not only supplied information about lectures and clinical programs but published full accounts of medical discoveries that helped dispel some of the popular suspicion of physicians.

Congressmen from single-interest districts such as tobacco-growing could marvel at the cultural variety and vigor of Philadelphia. Interest in literature had grown sharply during the prosperous middle years of the eighteenth century. English works, like those by Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith, sold well, but magazines and newspapers eagerly printed the efforts of local writers. The verses of William Smith and of the multi-talented Francis Hopkinson became well known. Since the Quakers were more interested in civic and humanitarian projects than in the fine arts, upper-class Anglicans tended to take the leadership in patronizing painting and sculpture.

The desire of the wealthy to preserve their images for posterity prompted many a sign painter to turn portraitist, but later a more refined realism both in portraiture and in landscapes replaced the clumsier efforts of earlier days. After previous successes in London and Ireland, Gilbert Stuart in 1794 set up a studio in Philadelphia, where he made his first two life portraits of George Washington. Wealthy merchants also subsidized architecture by building country houses; architects tended to ape the Georgian style of England, but at least they adapted the style to local materials, to the stone and brick, the white pine and oak of the Philadelphia area.

Some of the cultural offerings were scarcely highbrow. Congressmen had their choice of numerous theaters, such as the Southwark on South Street, and traveling circuses offered pantomimes and farces. Except for the Quakers, the churches had begun to use organs in their services, but popular airs and folk tunes constituted the “people’s music.” Visiting countrymen found ample opportunity for betting on horse racing and cockfights. Congressmen could be sure of invitations to levees, dancing assemblies, balls, formal dinners, card parties, and summer sojourns on country estates. Not all of them could wholly resist the “aristocratic embrace,” or wanted to.

A vigorous and partisan press mirrored the cultural vitality of the city. During the late 1790s Philadelphia had more newspapers than any other city in the country. Typically consisting of about four medium-sized pages, they usually ran advertisements of merchandise and real estate on the front and back, along with news of departure and arrival of sailing vessels, notices of runaway slaves, stagecoach schedules, announcements of the publication of books and pamphlets. Some newspapers covered moral and religious news, printed poems and book reviews, and reported on scientific and medical discoveries. The inside pages usually carried letters from abroad and reports on state and congressional activities, with comments by the editor and by readers.

News was not always abundant. When the federal government moved into Philadelphia the editor of the Aurora complained: “As to domestic politics, no party disputes to raise the printer’s drooping spirits; not a legislative sitting to furnish a few columns of debates, not even so much as a piece of private abuse to grace a paper—Zounds, people now have no spirit in them….Now not even an accident, not a duel, not a suicide, not a fire, not a murder.” The arrival of a President, a Cabinet, and a few dozen congressmen soon made up for some of these lacks.

On the surface, Philadelphia did indeed appear to be tranquil. In fact, the “City of Brotherly Love” was undergoing rapid change and experiencing severe tension and conflict, and these too would affect the nation’s as well as the city’s future.

The history of the city was shot through with contradictions. In founding the city as a “Holy Experiment” for persecuted Quakers, William Penn had made Philadelphia an open city for all believers and nonbelievers, because “no people can be truly happy, though under the greatest Enjoyment of Civil Liberties, if abridg’d of the freedom of their Consciences as to their Religious profession & Worship.” This benign open-door policy inevitably helped bring a flood of immigrants—Irish, French, Dutch, and Swedish, with their various religions and sects—to the point that the Quakers were vastly outnumbered, with the result that they protected themselves by maintaining control of the Pennsylvania Assembly, with the help of a sharply limited suffrage.

On the whole, immigrant groups got along together reasonably well, but this was in part because they were considerably segregated, with the Mulberry and upper Delaware areas heavily populated by Quakers and Germans, and the southern areas, especially along the docks, by the Irish. A powerful tradition of tolerance persisted, but in 1770 a mob, inflamed by rumors that Dr. William Shippen had stolen bodies from a local cemetery for medical research, attacked his home. In the same year that the constitutional convention met in Philadelphia, a woman suspected of being a witch was killed by a city crowd.

The fundamental conflict in Philadelphia, however disguised, was economic. The brotherly city was also a class-ridden one. On the top of the social and economic pyramid sat several hundred wealthy merchants, many of whom had made their fortunes in complex triangular trading—importing and selling sugar, rum, and molasses from the slave plantations of the Caribbean, using the profits to buy manufactured goods from Britain and France, and reselling these in the city at another profit. Often these merchants maintained dockside houses that were as unimposing as their mansions in the country were elegant. Attached to this economic elite were ministers, scholars, lawyers, and other professional men. In the middle ranks of the class pyramid stood large numbers of artisans: carpenters, shipwrights, sailmakers, millers, carriage makers, blacksmiths, harness makers, tanners, tailors, boot makers, cordwainers, and others. This stratum had its own internal class structure comprising men of differently valued skills, such as those of master craftsman and ordinary artisan, of journeymen and apprentices, who often lodged in their master’s home and ate at the family table, and of women in a variety of trades and occupations. At the bottom of the pyramid were laborers, indentured servants, itinerant workers, recently arrived immigrants unable to speak English, carters, stable boys, sailors, servants, and—somewhere below but outside the pyramid—blacks.

The condition of the blacks in particular challenged fraternal shibboleths. Black people had been part of Philadelphia’s history from the very start; indeed, W. E. B. Du Bois noted in his monumental study The Philadelphia Negro that the Dutch “had already planted slavery on the Delaware when Penn and the Quakers arrived in 1682. One of Penn’s first acts was tacitly to recognize the serfdom of Negroes by a provision of the Free Society of Traders that they should serve fourteen years and then become serfs—a provision which he himself and all the others soon violated.” Long divided over the issue, the Quakers finally condemned slavery in 1758 and later, on the eve of the Revolution, excluded slaveholders from fellowship in the Society of Friends. During the century before, the Pennsylvania legislature had passed harsh laws directed at blacks; one, providing for execution, castration, and whipping as punishments, and barring the meeting together of more than four blacks, was disallowed by the Queen in Council. Emancipation was restricted on the ground that “free negroes are an idle and slothful people” and tended to become public burdens, but free blacks were hardly better off than slaves, since competition for jobs brought them into conflict with white laborers. It was not until 1780, amid the liberating impulses of the Revolutionary War, that an act for “the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” was passed. The initial result, Du Bois noted, was widespread poverty and idleness.

Inequality in Philadelphia was visible, palpable, inescapable. At one glance an observer could rate the social status of hired laborers wearing linen shirts and striped trousers, mechanics with their leather aprons, skilled craftsmen with their respectable, sober attire, and rich young men decked out in the latest fashions from London. The distribution of wealth was not unlike that in other American cities: by the end of the century less than a quarter of the taxpayers owned more than three-quarters of the taxable property valued at over $50; but of a labor force of more than 10,000, over 3,000 were not taxable.

About half of Philadelphia’s working class lived at or just above subsistence levels. The results were, as usual, appalling: at least a third of Philadelphia was ill housed, ill clothed, and ill nourished. The city was divided, said a contemporary observer, into several classes of company: “the cream, the new milk, the skim milk, and the canaille.…” This loose class structure did not produce sharp class conflict, however, in part because the working poor lacked the leadership that might have aroused them to political consciousness.

The merchants of Philadelphia were not heartless exploiters. Compared to their ilk in other American and European cities, they were in many cases unusually benevolent. This very fact, however, helped involve them in a fundamental ambiguity. They were, first of all, entrepreneurs in a city bent on enterprise and profit-making. “Under the American tradition, the first purpose of the citizen,” Sam Bass Warner, Jr., said in introducing a study of Philadelphia, “is the private search for wealth; the goal of a city is to be a community of private money makers.” But many merchants were also public men. They had invested large amounts of money and time in humanitarian endeavors—founding a university and medical college, subsidizing education for the poor, blacks, and women, establishing libraries, promoting the arts, easing the plight of prison inmates, improving health and sanitation, devoting themselves to cultural and philosophical matters, serving in public office. Not only the elites but the middle classes were trying to advance themselves: laborers to get better pay, apprentices to become journeymen, artisans to become master craftsmen who could control their own work, time, and future. So a deep concern for the public welfare pervaded much of Philadelphia. But where did the private man leave off, the public man begin?

This question was part of a broader, more complex one. How could a community be organized to advance the general welfare while protecting individual rights—while making the pursuit of individual rights, indeed, part of the means of achieving the general welfare? As the federal men governed in Philadelphia during the 1790s, there seemed to be less time for these questions to be decided, before events would make the decision. For change was accelerating in Philadelphia. The city was experiencing the full impact of the altered economic patterns and social relations reshaped during the War of Independence. Profits were becoming bigger and more tempting in the widening economic prosperity. The city was bursting at the seams as immigrants flooded in; the black population almost doubled in the last decade of the century.

The first question—public service versus private gain—would largely be left to the consciences of wealthy men. The second question—promoting liberty and the general welfare—occupied the best minds in Philadelphia for a century.

In April 1789 Benjamin Franklin, who had lived through eight-and-a-half decades of that century, lay mortally ill in the bedroom of his Market Street house. Although racked by fevers and his stone, only partly dulled by opiates, he was still philosophical; “what are the pains of a moment,” he said to a friend, “in comparison with the pleasures of eternity?” Until almost the end he pursued his political inquiries; the American Philosophical Society held its meetings in his home when he could no longer even be moved into his sedan chair. And he remained the empiricist, the inquirer, the experimenter, in matters political as well as scientific. “We are, I think, in the right road of improvement,” he had said the year before the constitutional convention met in his city, “for we are making experiments.”

Franklin and his fellow Philadelphians had conducted the most radical of political experiments ten years before, an experiment in sharp contrast with that of 1787. Inspired by the revolutionary acts against Britain in Massachusetts and angered by the conservatism of the Pennsylvania government, a group of Philadelphians early in 1776 had used their control of the militia, the committees of correspondence and public safety, and other extralegal revolutionary organizations to overthrow the authority of the Assembly. The radicals who had engineered this coup were a very different lot from the sound and substantial men who had dominated Philadelphia’s politics. Thirty-year-old Benjamin Rush led a multi-faceted life as a doctor, a professor of chemistry at the College of Philadelphia, and a sermonizer for temperance and exercise, and also as a political reformer, a millenarian who expected Christ’s Second Coming, and a revolutionary Christian Utopian who advocated the abolition of slavery. Forty-six-year-old Timothy Matlack was an apostate Quaker, a failed shopkeeper, a gambler, horse racer, fistfighter, bull baiter, and cockfighter whose prized bantams fought a famous match with cocks brought to Philadelphia by a New York blueblood. A habitué both of Philadelphia groggeries and of the Philosophical Society, Matlack had a remarkably wide acquaintanceship with men rich and poor, black and white. There were other notables: evangelical republicans like Christopher Marshall, artists like Charles W. Peale, deists like Thomas Young, highly skilled artisans like Owen Biddle, and the self-taught scientist David Rittenhouse. But the political and intellectual luminary was Thomas Paine.

Born of a Quaker father and an Anglican mother in a market town seventy miles northeast of London, Tom Paine rose from apprentice to journeyman to master stay maker in only a few years, and then won a post as an excise taxer, only to be dismissed for agitating for higher pay for excisemen. Married and already separated at the age of thirty-seven, he struck out for America and a new start. Arriving in Philadelphia in 1774 with letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, he had intended to establish an academy for the education of young men, but was quickly swept up in the revolutionary euphoria of the city. Soon he wrote and published Common Sense, a sweeping attack on the Crown’s interference with American trade, and a bold call to American independence. Common Sense scored an immediate success, running through twenty-five editions and selling well over 150,000 copies, an astonishing number for those days. This tract—the most brilliant written during the American Revolution and one of the most brilliant ever written in the English language, in Bernard Bailyn’s judgment—had a quick and profound impact on public opinion.

The force of that impact was due not only to Paine’s clear and blunt language, his assault on the English monarchy, his clarion call for independence; other tracts had such qualities. The impact came from his repudiation of the established thinking of centuries on the question of liberty. For most Americans, and certainly for most Philadelphians—heirs to the fine Quaker tradition of liberality and tolerance—the great issue of the 1770s was the protection and nurturing of liberty. This was also the main principle and goal of most enlightened Englishmen. The question was how to achieve this goal without sacrificing other major values such as order, stability, and virtue.

Englishmen of Whiggish persuasion were convinced that, after decades and centuries of thought and travail, the British constitution had come to represent the best way to achieve that goal. Drawing heavily from Greek and Roman thinkers who had affirmed the need of mixed government in order to achieve balance and harmony among social classes, the English had achieved such a balance of social power among king, lords, and commons that a political balance of power would be counterpoised among these powerful estates. Social equilibrium in short would produce political equilibrium, which in turn would prevent the kind of immoderate government that might interfere in men’s liberties. This elaborate edifice was based on the theory that men, being naturally selfish, irrational, aggressive, greedy, and lustful, had to be not only protected in their liberty from government but protected from one another by government. The “Interest of Freedom,” Marchamont Nedham had written in the mid-1650s, “is a Virgin that everyone seeks to deflower.”

Paine and his fellow radicals rejected this view of human nature and the Whiggish apparatus that went with it. Perhaps the people of the Old World, divided into unequal estates and corrupted by their rulers, were prone to depravity and unreason, they granted, but Americans were different. Farmers and mechanics and all others who wore “leathern aprons,” being more equal and fraternal and less grasping and competitive, were more reasonable and virtuous. Because of his faith in human nature and the perfectibility of man, as Eric Foner has said, “Paine could reject the need for governmental checks and balances.”

What kind of system, then, did the radicals want? Simple, the radicals answered—a government directly representing the people, a government mirroring the wants of the people, a government that could act quickly to meet the needs of the people, a government constantly renewed by the people so that it would never become remote from them. Under a people’s government the people’s liberty would be secure. It was Mercy Warren’s kind of polity.

How establish such a government? The Philadelphia radicals had scored a decisive coup by waging a grass-roots, populist campaign and thus gaining control of the Pennsylvania constitutional convention held in 1776 as part of the breakaway from Britain. Then they proceeded to write perhaps the most democratic, most directly representative constitution of the founding period. The new charter granted the right to vote to every white male over twenty-one. It abolished property qualifications for officeholding. It gave the state assembly control over the government of Philadelphia. And—by far the most important—it established a unicameral legislature, elected annually, with rotation in office. The new assembly would be open to the press and people, its votes published weekly, its records available to the public. In one sweep the colonial gentry had lost its political power.

The implications of the radicals’ constitution were frightening to Whig and conservative alike. Any year they were so minded, a majority of the voters in Pennsylvania—perhaps a majority made up of the uneducated and the unwashed—could pass whatever laws it wished, with no power in the executive to veto or in the judiciary to void. Conservatives feared the powerful currents of egalitarianism loose in Philadelphia in this first year of independence. What if the many ganged up on the few? Did not the new constitution itself bar the imprisonment of debtors not guilty of fraud, allow people to hunt on unenclosed land, provide for schools with low fees throughout the state? What other “leveling” measures might be passed?

The radicals rejected these fears as groundless in a free society. How could any kind of republican object to putting power squarely into the hands of the directly elected representatives of the people? Indeed, the new constitution placed a limit on the number of terms a legislator could serve; that, plus annual elections, would cause legislators to be constantly refreshed by immersion in the grass roots and thus maintain their ties to the people. And if they did, the radicals contended, the Pennsylvania legislature would be a safe depository of power because it would directly reflect and embody the people’s virtue, sense of good, concern for the whole public, willingness to sacrifice for the benefit of all. These public virtues grew out of people’s private virtues of tolerance, understanding, benevolence, enlightenment. How could an assembly representing such virtues be harmful to the public interest?

Opponents of the new constitution flatly rejected this whole premise. They simply did not share the radicals’ faith in the people’s wisdom, virtue, and benevolence. So the radicals would lodge supreme power in the people? But any sovereign power must be guarded against; whether “that power is lodged in the hands of one or many, the danger is equally great.” The new constitution presupposed “perfect equality, and equal distribution of property, wisdom and virtue, among the inhabitants of the state.” The anti-radicals would not assume this. They argued that the people would deprive themselves of their own liberty, as well as others of theirs. Behind this contention was a deep fear of the people—of their leveling tendencies, their ignorance, their bumptiousness, their eternal desire for more.

None expressed these doubts better than Benjamin Rush, who soon began to have reservations about the radical constitution. “Absolute power should never be trusted to man,” Rush wrote the year after adoption of the new constitution. He actually meant men, no matter how many, for there was no safety in numbers. “Although we understood perfectly the principles of Liberty,” Rush wrote in 1787, “yet most of us were ignorant of the forms and combinations of power in republics.”

Such fears led to a relentless drive against the 1776 constitution throughout the following decade. To destroy the “constitution of the people” the anti-constitutionalists went to the people themselves. Meeting in the City Tavern to plan strategy, they organized a grass-roots effort to call a new constitutional convention. The press was enlisted; one newspaper warned that Philadelphia would not be chosen as the federal capital if the state legislature remained unicameral. The anti-constitutionalists recruited candidates for the convention, organized election tickets, and won control of the convention. Soon Pennsylvania had a new constitution, replete with separation of powers and checks and balances—most notably, with a bicameral legislature and a strong, independently elected governor.

So Pennsylvania’s brief experiment in popular government, in majority rule, had come to an end, as did the reign of the radicals. It would live on only as a memory that might be invoked in some future era of conflict and crisis. That rule in Pennsylvania had seen no tyranny of the majority, nor had the reign of the radicals brought radical government. Property had not been confiscated, churches leveled, merchants taxed to death. Life had gone on pretty much as before. Perhaps the radicals should have changed things more fundamentally. By the time the federal government was established in Philadelphia it was too late. Pennsylvanians lived under both state and federal governments hemmed in by checks and balances. They were doubly safe against the tyranny of the people.

But Philadelphia would be experiencing more change in the 1790s. Its population continued to expand. Craft workers started to unite in local unions. Voting participation doubled. Local political cadres began to organize grass-roots parties. For almost a decade congressmen and federal officials lived among memories of old conflicts and amid the pressures of new ones. The new conflicts challenged the Constitution of 1787, with its carefully separated powers. It remained to be seen whether a constitutional system so fragmented and inhibited could deal with rising change and conflict on a national level.

The nation would also confront formidable power abroad—and that would raise the question whether the President of the United States would need more executive authority in dealing with prime ministers and potentates.

QUASI-WAR ABROAD

John Adams entered the presidency at a time when relationships with the French were rapidly deteriorating. Washington had sent James Monroe to Paris with the hope that he could reconcile the French to Jay’s treaty, but even as good a Virginia Republican as Monroe could not placate the increasingly xenophobic and bellicose French government. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney had taken Monroe’s place, but Adams had been in office only ten days when he was informed that the Directory had sent Pinckney packing too. The new President had already made clear in his Inaugural Address that the government would be in peril when a single vote could be influenced by “foreign nations, by flattery or menaces; by fraud or violence; by terror, intrigue, or venality”—an obvious thrust at the likes of Genêt and Adet. Now with the rebuff to Pinckney, and more news of French seizure of American ships in the West Indies, Adams faced a dire choice between peace and war.

He first turned to his Cabinet—a natural move, except that this was not his Cabinet but Washington’s and increasingly Hamilton’s. In order to unite Federalist ranks and strengthen himself with the Hamiltonian wing of the party, Adams had asked Washington’s Cabinet to stay on. This meant keeping on such high Federalists as Secretary of State Timothy Pickering, a Salem lawyer and merchant as proud and haughty as the Cabots though not as rich; Secretary of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, a Connecticut farmer and banker, who had proved himself a good administrator under Washington; and Secretary of War James McHenry of Maryland. When members of the Cabinet promptly turned to Hamilton in New York for advice on how to respond to the President, he seemed more concerned with domestic Federalist party strategy than with foreign policy. Hamilton urged his friends to press for further negotiations with Paris in order to combat Republican charges that the Federalists wanted war with France. They passed on this advice as though it were their own. Assured of backing from leaders of both parties, Adams convened a special session of Congress, which he asked to enact and fund defense measures and to approve a special mission to France.

Making up that mission was in itself an exercise in diplomacy for the new President. For the sake of weight and balance the mission should consist of three persons—but what three could undertake such a crucial and delicate assignment? It was agreed that Pinckney would be sent back, and Adams would have liked to appoint both Hamilton and Madison, but he encountered resistance to this idea. John Marshall of Virginia, an experienced lawyer and moderate Federalist, was agreed on, despite his lack of diplomatic experience. The third place Adams filled with a curious choice: Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Considered by some Federalists as unreliable and even a “hidden Jacobin,” but too much of a gentleman to enjoy the company of Massachusetts fishermen and rural Republicans, Gerry followed an independent course—which was the main reason Adams trusted him and turned to him for advice.

Awaiting the mission in Paris was Count Talleyrand, Minister of Foreign Affairs, a man who personified all that Americans suspected in the diplomats of the Old World. A former bishop in the Catholic Church, Talleyrand had won a reputation as a promiscuous, pleasure-loving rake, without scruples or morals—a “cloven footed Devil,” a diplomat’s wife had called him. He had spent two years in prudent exile in the United States and professed to know Americans well—perhaps too well, as he claimed that they pursued gold far more than liberty. On gold the French foreign minister was something of an expert, for he had amassed tens of millions of francs by shaking down European kings, dukes, and even a grand vizier.

Talleyrand did not disappoint. After being allowed to cool their heels for days, and after being informed that the Directory was outraged by Adams’ Inaugural Address, Pinckney and company were approached by Talleyrand’s agent, who whispered that in order to sweeten the Directory, a small douceur of twelve million livres or more would be necessary. The Americans rejected the proposition. Later, when the agent threatened war, Marshall replied that his country would defend itself.

“You do not speak to the point,” Talleyrand’s man exclaimed. “It is expected that you will offer money…What is your answer?”

“It is no; no;” Pinckney said; “not a sixpence.” Later a newspaperman converted this remark into a grander retort: “Millions for defense, but not one cent for Tribute.”

The long months of awaiting the Pinckney mission’s report had been a wretched time for John Adams. The Republicans in Congress fought almost every proposal he made, and he could not depend on Federalists or even his Cabinet, as Hamilton continued to interfere in Administration affairs from New York. Bache and other Republican editors flogged him in print as hard as they had Washington, and even though Adams pretended not to notice the scribblers, he in fact read them and was incensed by them. His relationship with Jefferson cooled again as the Vice-President, confined in Philadelphia by his Senate duties, was drawn more and more into the role of party leadership. Lacking firm congressional, party, or even cabinet backing, Adams turned for support to Abigail Adams.

He had begun his presidential days without his lady, as Washington had done without his wife, but like Washington he soon brought his wife to the capital. More outspoken than John, at least to her friends, more likely to suspect plots, even more aroused than he by the venom of Bache and the other “Jacobins,” the First Lady followed events closely and conducted a wide correspondence, while managing the President’s house and even the farm in Quincy from afar. There was hardly an important matter the President failed to discuss with her, though she served mainly to comfort his raveled ego and bolster his views. In their closeness they still managed to keep a little distance. On coming to his office one morning she found him reading a letter to her from Mary Cranch; she promptly lectured him on the sanctity of private correspondence.

The political doldrums in Philadelphia ended suddenly in early March 1798 with the arrival of the first dispatches from the Pinckney mission. Reading them, Adams did not know whether to be more furious at the French or at the emissaries for their “timorous” behavior—a result, obviously, of sending amateurs abroad. The President drafted a war message to Congress that flayed French and Republicans alike, but he had second thoughts. His Cabinet urged caution, and Adams feared that publishing the mission’s dispatches would overstimulate the public, and even jeopardize the lives of the three emissaries in France. In a mild final version he rebuked the French and called for stepped-up coastal defenses and protection of American shipping, including the arming of merchantmen.

Adams’ action was far too little for the high Federalists, far too much for the Republican opposition. At this point the Republicans fell into a trap largely of their own making. Not satisfied with blocking some of Adams’ defense measures, they demanded to see the actual dispatches from the mission in Paris, on the grounds that the saber-rattling Adams had exaggerated the hostility of Talleyrand and the Directory. While some Federalists baited the trap by joining in the call for the papers, and while some of the shrewder Republicans held back fearing a ruse, the bulk of the Republicans in the House voted through a demand for the documents. Forced to do what he had wanted to do from the start, Adams sent the dispatches to Congress after substituting the letters, X, Y, and Z for the names of Talleyrand’s agents.

Publication of the documents not only raised a political storm throughout the country, it achieved the seemingly impossible—it made John Adams popular. In Philadelphia, merchants held a meeting to prepare a special letter of thanks to the President, and the French cockades that had adorned many a Republican hat suddenly disappeared. The wave of approval rolled through the sixteen states and brought to the President’s house hundreds of addresses of approval from colleges, grand juries, militia companies, and meetings in small towns. The song “Adams and Liberty” was on everybody’s lips. Adams, who earlier could have entered and left the theater in Philadelphia without attracting much notice, was now greeted by great shows of approval. Abigail Adams attended the theater incognito to hear a noted actor sing “The President’s March,” and rushed home to tell John that the audience had demanded four encores to the song and at the end broke forth in the chorus, singing and clapping so loudly that her head rang.

What could the President do with his newfound popularity? John Adams needed no lessons in the volatility of public opinion. He knew that a declaration of war while the iron was hot would be immensely popular, especially with members of his own party, but he held back. Gerry had lingered in Paris, much to the indignation of high Federalists, and Adams could not be sure whether he was softening up the French or going beyond the mission’s instructions; doubtless he heard about Pickering’s quip, uttered with the gallows humor of an old Salemite, that if the French would only guillotine Gerry it would be a great favor. Adams also judged that France might suddenly declare war on the United States—and the President preferred, if war must come, that the French take the initiative. So Adams contented himself with an innocuously spread-eagling message to Congress announcing that he would “never send another minister to France without assurances that he will be received, respected, and honored, as the representative of a great, free, powerful, and independent nation.”

With passions unreined, events were in the saddle. A quasi-war in effect came to exist on the Atlantic and in the Caribbean as French warships continued their depredations and American sea captains, conducting their own military policy, responded on the high seas. As the war fever waxed, Congress created a Navy Department, enlarged the Army, authorized naval retaliation against French sea marauders, abrogated the 1778 and 1788 treaties with France, and finally—in July 1798—authorized naval operations on all the seas.

Still Adams paused. Marshall returned home to a hero’s welcome from the Federalists, but the envoy told Adams privately that the Directory did not really want war—only to intimidate the United States into yielding. Taken aback by the American reaction, Talleyrand seemed to be having second thoughts and with his usual dexterity was sending out peace feelers through Gerry and others. The President’s main concern was the Federalist wing that, still heated with war fever, was hoping to use the quasi-war as a way of conducting expeditions into the Southwest against Spain and France, and as a pretext for crushing the Republican opposition at home once and for all.

A single problem converted this whole issue into a thorn in his side. With the Army expanding, the President decided that only one man could lead it as commander in chief and hence symbolize America’s unity and determination: George Washington. The old general would not come out of retirement, however, without a second-in-command who could get things done as the general wished them done—and that man was Alexander Hamilton. While Adams was urging others on Washington such as Knox and Pinckney, who had more seniority and circumspection, Pickering, McHenry, and others in his administration were conspiring with Hamilton to persuade Washington to stand fast for the New Yorker. He did, and the President, unwilling to brook the high Federalists and the ex-President, put his worst party enemy in effective command of the American Army.

The summer of 1798 had been the most gloomy of his life, Adams wrote Pickering later. He and Abigail had been able to escape the Philadelphia heat after Congress adjourned in July, but the trip north was slowed by endless dinners and addresses to the now popular President, and Abigail, arrived home so ill that she was bedridden for weeks and her life for a time despaired of. The epidemic sweeping Philadelphia was claiming the lives of friend and foe alike, including that of John Fenno, the Federalist editor. Such piteous reports arrived of poor persons camped on the Philadelphia common and orphans taking refuge in almshouses that Adams sent $500 to be distributed anonymously among the poor.

Yet, in a way that few discerned at the time, this was Adams’ time of greatness because of what he did not do—he refused to succumb to those demanding all-out hostilities against France. Events, to be sure, came to his aid. Naval defeats at the hands of Admiral Horatio Nelson convinced the French that they could do with fewer enemies, and American commercial interests active in the lucrative trade with the French West Indies were a force for peace. But there were long periods during which Adams could have seized on any day as “the day we went to war,” to the great enthusiasm of the populace. Instead, the “day he did not go to war” stretched into weeks and months and brought the young republic to the end of its first decade in a state at least of quasi-peace.

SEMI-REPRESSION AT HOME

The panic and jingoism of early ’98 left behind strange fruit—strange at least in a nation that had recently adopted a national bill of rights and seemed to worship the goddess of liberty. In one four-week period in the early summer of that year, Congress passed measures—later to be called the Alien and Sedition Acts—that threatened liberty of the press and of speech and challenged the whole conception of a legitimate or “loyal” opposition in a republic.

That men like Washington, Adams, Hamilton, and Marshall, and hundreds of other leaders who had fought for liberty as revolutionaries, could turn about only seven years after the passage of the first ten amendments and punish the kind of acts they had once committed—such as erecting a Liberty Pole—served long after as a source of surprise and dismay to later generations trying to understand the founding period. Only those able to “think their way” back into the era of the late 1790s could understand how this reversal came to pass. For this was a time when Americans were engaged in a quasi-war with France, when a full shooting war was believed imminent from day to day, when extremist Republicans were seen not only as mistaken and evil-minded but as secretly aiding and abetting the French enemy, when Republican editors in fact wrote the most scurrilous and inflammatory lies about Federalist leaders, when rumors abounded that French spies and infiltrators would attack America from within, burn down the churches, free the slaves, ravish women in the streets, and erect guillotines in town squares.

It was a time too of escalating domestic conflict, when pro-Constitution Republican leaders like Madison feared that the monstrous “consolidated government” they had dreaded was actually coming to pass, that John Adams was really trying to set up a monarchy or at least an aristocracy, that in taking on France the Administration was fighting the wrong war at the wrong time against the wrong nation, that the Federalists were using the war scare as an occasion for suppressing criticism and destroying the whole Republican party.

Buoyed by popular feeling, sure of their majorities in both houses, the Federalists pushed through four measures. Though innocuously entitled and phrased in dry eighteenth-century legalese, these bills laid bare the passions and conflicts of the time. An “act to establish an uniform rule of naturalization” increased the period of probationary residence for immigrants from five to fourteen years. For years Federalists had been looking with disdain and fear on the disaffected and even “revolutionary” Scotch and Irish fleeing British oppression, and especially on the “hordes of wild Irishmen” who had come to America to disturb her tranquillity after failing to overthrow their own governments. For years Republicans had been welcoming the political support of these same immigrants—another reason for Federalist anger.

An act “concerning Aliens” gave the President the power to deport aliens in time of peace, and another act “respecting Alien Enemies” in time of war was passed. Because no formal war occurred, the latter act did not come into effect, but the former hung like a sword over the heads of aliens and was branded by Jefferson as a “detestable thing” that was “worthy of the 8th or 9th century.”

The “act for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States”—the Sedition Act—would fine and jail those found guilty of writing, publishing, or saying anything of “a false, scandalous, and malicious” nature against either house of Congress or the President, with intent to defame them, bring them into contempt or disrepute, or excite against them “the hatred of the good people of the United States.” Those prosecuted under the act were allowed to offer evidence supporting the truth of the matter charged as libel, and a jury was empowered to decide the law and facts of the case. This measure, sweeping and harsh as it seemed, was a milder version of an earlier bill, which declared the people and government of France to be enemies of the United States and levied the death penalty on any citizen giving them aid and comfort. Since few governments or politicians have ever existed who did not feel that criticism of them was defamatory and liable to arouse hatred against them, the act was a clear declaration by the Federalists that opposition to a particular group of leaders in power was in fact opposition to the whole government and an effort to subvert the Constitution.

A new corps of leaders came to the fore in the congressional debates over these bills. Dominating the high Federalist effort in the House was a group of New Englanders, including such activists as young Harrison Gray Otis, whose ardent ambition disturbed some of the older Federalists, and Samuel Sewall, chairman of the House Defense Committee, both from Massachusetts, and Connecticut men like John Allen and Samuel Dana. An aroused group of Republicans opposed the bill in both houses; their leader in the lower chamber was Albert Gallatin. An immigrant from Switzerland, onetime Harvard instructor, frontier trader, and western Pennsylvania farmer, Gallatin had a special interest in the question of naturalization, for he had been denied a United States Senate seat to which he had been elected in 1793 because he had not been a United Stales citizen for nine years. Most of the voting on the Alien and Sedition bills was sharply sectional. The Sedition Act itself won the votes of only two representatives from south of the Potomac.

The “old revolutionaries” in both parties followed the efforts of the younger cohorts with mixed feelings, but mainly with approval. George Washington supported the acts in general, but made no direct defense of the Sedition Act. Alexander Hamilton opposed the earlier, harsher version of the Sedition Act but strongly approved the bill as signed. President Adams had little if any hand in framing the Sedition Bill, but he both approved it in principle and approved it in fact with his all-important signature at the bottom of the bill. Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, thoroughly opposed the acts as steps toward tyranny, but his main objection seemed to be that this was federal rather than state control of the press.

Some waited to see the actual impact of the legislation before making up their minds. The general effect of the acts was mixed. The force of the Naturalization Act was diluted by the fact that some states had their own naturalization laws, which differed from the federal and carried their own authority. Secretary of State Pickering was put in charge of administering the Alien Act; the zealous Secretary would send Adams blank warrants to sign, but the cautious President would not delegate his authority and hence refused to comply. Still, the mere existence of the act evidently caused some French agents and a number of other persons to flee the country.

The Sedition Act had by far the most dramatic and controversial impact. Adams had no compunction about giving the indefatigable Pickering full rein to interpret the vague and sweeping law as broadly as he wished. The President felt strongly about the calumnies inflicted on him—almost as strongly as did Abigail Adams, who noted that Bache in his paper called her husband “old, querilous, Bald, blind, crippled, Toothless Adams”; the First Lady consistently favored passage of the Sedition Act, its harsh enforcement, the suppression of traitorous Republican newspapers, and the arrest of erring editors. Pickering and others moved ahead with a series of indictments and arrests. Usually the safeguards in the act—especially the prosecution’s obligation to prove the malicious intent of writers and the use of truth as a defense in criminal libel—faltered in courts run by zealous Federalist judges. The fact that sixteen of the seventeen federal proceedings were set in Federalist-dominated New England and middle states indicated the importance of such judges, and of the pressure of popular attitudes in the area. Only one verdict of “not guilty” was returned in the prosecutions instituted under the Sedition Act.

Individual cases told the story of personal liberty in the America of the late 1790s. Most poignant was that of “Lightning Rod” Bache. Still in his twenties, Bache had contributed his share of vituperation and abuse to the national debate. But he had also suffered more than his share of retaliation from the powerful Federalists in Philadelphia. He had been barred from the floor of the House of Representatives, assaulted in the streets, surrounded by mobs in his home. Federalist merchants had withheld advertising, and his adversaries urged that he should be treated “as we should a TURK, A JEW, A JACOBIN, OR A DOG.” When Bache’s Aurora took advantage of a “leak” to print a conciliatory message from Talleyrand to American envoys, members of the Administration, outraged by this blow at their war policy, concocted a clumsy plot to implicate the young editor in “treasonable correspondence.” The ploy failed, but in defending himself against the charge Bache made such strong statements that those statements were then seized upon by the prosecutors as the basis for bringing Bache into court on a new charge of “libelling the President & the Executive Government in a manner tending to excite sedition.…”

The trial was set for the October term; meantime Bache kept up his defense and wrote a brilliant editorial on liberty. In the balance of liberty and order, he wrote, the effort to protect the security of the state had gone so far as to threaten the liberty of the individual. “One of the first rights of a human is to speak or to publish his sentiments; if any government founded upon the will of the people passes any ordinance to abridge this right, it is as much a crime as if the people were, in an unconstitutional way, to curtail the government or one of the powers delegated to it.”

Early in September the fever sweeping Philadelphia accomplished what the Federalists never had: the silencing of Bache. He died in the plague of ’98.

A case as comical as Bache’s was dolorous involved one Luther Baldwin of Newark. Old Luther, a bit tipsy already, was headed into John Burnet’s dram shop in that New Jersey city just after President and Mrs. Adams had driven down Broad Street, followed by the boom of cannon fire. When another customer said to Baldwin, “There goes the President and they are firing at his a—,” Baldwin replied that he didn’t care if “they fired through his a—!” That was seditious, the dram keeper exclaimed, and turned the scoundrel over to the authorities. “Here’s Liberty for you,” a Newark newspaper gibed, and the case soon became a national joke. It was no joke for Baldwin, however, when he and his crony were tried, found guilty of “sedicious words tending to defame the President…,” sentenced to a total of $200 in fines, and committed to federal jail until fines and fees were paid.

A more typical case, though involving an unusual man, was that of Thomas Cooper, editor of the Northumberland (Pa.) Gazette. An English radical who was also a textile mill owner in Manchester and a lawyer, Cooper had escaped the oppressive English atmosphere of the mid-1790s by moving to Pennsylvania, where he practiced both law and medicine. He became good friends with another removed Englishman, the famous scientist and Unitarian minister Joseph Priestley, who had long corresponded with John Adams. Evidently finding himself with not enough to do, Cooper began to edit the Gazette and to imply that President Adams was a threat to liberty, popular sovereignty, and the rights of man. Reprinted in the Philadelphia Aurora, and distributed by Dr. Priestley in handbill form, the attack was soon denounced by the Federalists as demagogic and subversive. It was a “libel against the whole government,” Adams said, “and as such ought to be prosecuted.”

He would not use the Alien Act against his old friend Priestley, however, because he had simply been misled by Cooper. Indicted for sedition, Cooper had the misfortune to come before Associate Justice Samuel Chase of the Supreme Court. Widely viewed as a “hanging judge,” Chase acted more as prosecutor than judge. By his rulings he largely prevented Cooper from making truth a defense; he barred admission of evidence that might have helped the defendant; and he informed the jury flatly that bad intent had been proved. Relieved of much of the burden of judging, the jury brought in its guilty verdict in twenty minutes. Chase sentenced him to six months in prison and a fine. Cooper served his time—and promptly renewed his attacks on the Administration.

These and other trials attracted national attention and aroused furious debate. That debate, however, generated more heat than light. It was conducted mainly at two levels. On the grand level of national principles and values, the Federalists simply argued that order was indispensable to liberty, that false and exaggerated attacks fomented disorder, that there was ample freedom for calm and temperate criticism of the Administration—and that, after all, there was virtually a war on. They pointed out, moreover, that the Sedition Act was far more permissive than the common law under which sedition had long been prosecuted, for under the common law truth was not a defense and malicious intent need not be proved. The Sedition Act, Federalists contended, was “remarkable for its lenity and humanity: No honest man need to dread such laws as these.” Republicans, scoffing at this picture of the Sedition Act as virtually a reform law, noted its repressive features and its dependence on fair-minded judges and juries. They charged the Federalists with seeking to establish an all-powerful “consolidated” government, in which the loyal opposition would have no rights. This debate over moral principles remained unresolved.

On a second level, the debate concerned the constitutionality of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Republicans argued that in particular the Sedition Act flagrantly violated the recently adopted Bill of Rights. Federalists contended that federal courts had jurisdiction over so-called common-law offenses against the nation, by virtue of Article III of the Constitution and the Judiciary Act of 1789. Here the Federalists perhaps had the best of the argument, for at the time the First Amendment did not appear to cancel federal power over the press in all circumstances.

Between the level of passionate invocation of principle and the level of constitutional and legal exegesis, however, something was missing in what should have been the Grand Debate over the liberty of Americans. All too often the argument on both sides was couched in vast stereotypes, grandiloquent symbols, and unexceptionable goals, rather than based on systematic analysis and concrete, disciplined thought. If liberty was the supreme goal, some of the unanswered questions were: What kind of liberty? Liberty for whom? Liberty from whom? Liberty expressed through what kinds of channels or vehicles (press, church, assembly, or other)? Liberty in what kind of context (war or peace, a crowded street or a philosopher’s study)? Liberty expressed through—or protected from—what level of government (state or national) and what branch of government (executive or legislative or judicial)? And the toughest question of all—to what degree, and in what way, should public authority be used to protect individual liberty against private power, such as that of a corporation or a tavernkeeper? Or a slaveowner?

Both the top leadership corps—the Adamses and the Jeffersons—and a second cadre of leadership—the new generation in Congress—had failed to grapple with the question of liberty in all its dimensions, complexities, and paramountcy. The question by decade’s end was whether the third cadre of leadership in cities and towns and villages and hamlets throughout the nation would rise to the occasion. Their power to make a brute decision with one blow, between the Federalist and Jeffersonian approaches to liberty, lay in the approaching presidential election of 1800. But in the spring and summer of 1798 that election seemed a long way off. Would liberty in America expire in the meantime?

Extremism begets extremism. As they watched the Federalists seemingly bent on extinguishing liberty of speech and the press—and hence the power to oppose—some Republicans reverted to the old idea of nullification and even secession. Passions were running so high in 1798 that it seemed possible the young republic might be rent apart and the great experiment brought to an end amid disunion and even civil war. National leaders like Hamilton and Jefferson were already talking in extreme terms. All would depend on the mass of citizens and their local elected and unofficial leadership in the states and counties and towns. To an extraordinary degree, that leadership responded to crisis by recognizing its severity, but also by advocating radical but not irresponsible action.

The Alien and Sedition Acts aroused protest throughout the nation, but nowhere was the response more instant or intense than in Kentucky. Even when the House of Representatives in Philadelphia was first considering alien and sedition legislation, the Lexington Kentucky Gazette printed the text of an early bill, and a week later the paper was featuring a call for a mass meeting in Lexington to consider “the present critical situation of public affairs.” State politicians quickly took leadership of a powerful rising feeling against the alien and sedition legislation, as the Gazette continued to print texts of new bills and speeches in Congress. On the Fourth of July the militia at a meeting in Lexington provocatively toasted liberty of speech and press. The protest was contagious; soon meetings were being held in other Kentucky counties.

Jefferson and Madison watched these developments somberly. The Vice-President, who could hardly expect to be protected by the Sedition Act against scurrilous Federalist attacks on him as a government official, pondered what action to take. His answer took the form of a series of resolutions contending that the new federal government was merely a compact among the states; that the federal government held only narrowly delegated powers; hence that “whensoever the general government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.” Because Jefferson had close ties with a number of Kentucky politicians, his resolutions were eagerly adopted by the Kentucky legislature, but with one important tactical change—the resolutions were to be transmitted to the Kentucky delegation in Congress. Jefferson had opposed this procedure—his whole strategy now was to appeal to the states, not the national government—but the legislature preferred to follow the lead of the county politicians who favored the appeal to Congress. Thus, notes James Morton Smith, “the struggle over the alien and sedition legislation would be waged at the level of practical politics organized in national parties; political infighting rather than theoretical consideration of federal-state relations would dominate the great debate.”

The Kentuckians of course hoped that other states would follow their lead. Virginia, where county and local meetings had protested the Alien and Sedition Acts, was the obvious state to pursue the battle. Jefferson as usual was in touch with Madison, who in turn worked with state politicians, especially John Taylor of Caroline, a brilliant agrarian thinker, scientific farmer, and lawyer. The Federalists were stronger in Virginia than in Kentucky, and the Virginia resolution was correspondingly milder than the Kentucky resolve. The latter would assert the right of each state to judge whether the national government had exceeded its powers; the Virginians asserted the power of the states. Even so, the Virginia resolution made a bold assertion: “In case of a deliberate, palpable and dangerous exercise of other powers not granted by the said compact, the states, who are parties thereto, have the right and are in duty bound to interpose for arresting the progress of the evil, and for maintaining within their respective limits the authorities, rights and liberties appertaining to them.”

The hopes of the resolvers were now pinned to endorsement in other states, but what happened was—nothing. All the states north of the Potomac, all being Federalist-dominated, emphatically disapproved the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions by formal legislative action. The central argument of the resolutions—that the Union was simply a compact among states—was simply ignored. South of the Potomac the Republicans were strong enough to block disapproval, but they could not gain approval. Everywhere the resolutions were condemned as leading toward secession and disunion. Many of the resolutions’ adversaries contended that not the states but the federal judiciary was the proper authority to pass on the constitutionality of federal laws—a hint of a major political and constitutional battle to come within five years.

It was not surprising that George Washington regretted “extremely” the resolutions, or that Abigail Adams referred to them as “mad,” or that Hamilton considered them a rebellious act and suggested marching troops through Virginia. What was remarkable was that hundreds of state legislators, county officials, local editors, and other leaders should have recognized the Alien and Sedition Acts as the threat to liberty that they were, that this cadre of state and local leaders should have responded with resolutions equally extreme and dangerous, and that national, state, and local leaders, after a strenuous grass-roots debate, nullified the grand strategy of Kentucky and Virginia, as ultimately they would reject the Sedition Act. That rejection would have to await the coming political showdown of 1800.

THE VENTURES OF THE FIRST DECADE

On December 12, 1799, George Washington rode out as usual to oversee his plantations. Snow began to fall, then hail, then a “settled cold Rain,” as he noted in his diary. He returned home with his head covered with snow and rain but made light of it, and went to dinner without changing. The next day was colder, and Washington, more and more hoarse as the day wore on, stayed home. In the early hours of the next morning he awoke Martha Washington to say that he was unwell. She summoned doctors, who bled him four times. He steadily became weaker. Late on the fourteenth he asked his wife to go to his desk and fetch his will, drawn up in his own hand six months before. For a time he studied the document—the watermark portrayed the goddess of agriculture with a staff topped by a liberty cap, and the text freed his slaves on his wife’s death—before handing it to his wife for safekeeping.

The old general knew he was dying. During the long hours, as the doctors applied blisters and poultices to his legs and feet, and forced molasses and vinegar through his almost closed throat, he uttered no word of complaint. He seemed to wish only to go to his death with dignity, with his affairs in order, with the least bother to those around him. Coolly he monitored his own death. Toward midnight of the fourteenth he took his pulse for the last time, his fingers fell away from his wrist, and he died without a sound.

Thus passed the American leader who, perhaps more than any of his peers, viewed the new Constitution as a grand experiment that must prove itself in action. Like hundreds of others of his generation, he had lived through a series of witting or unwitting ventures in government—in the 1750s and 1760s under British monarchical and parliamentary rule, in the late 1770s under a revolutionary regime, in the 1780s in a confederation of largely independent states, in the 1790s in a strange hybrid of national and state power, of legislative and executive authority. Rarely have cadres of leadership been able to test their ideas in such spacious political laboratories.

These leaders had witnessed other experiments too. Farmers in Massachusetts and in Pennsylvania had had a fling at rebellion. Many Southerners and a few Northerners had flirted with notions of secession. Federalists had tried their hand at repression. Jefferson and Madison had proposed nullification. Rhode Islanders had tried separatism. Through all these Washington had lived, but he died as another great experiment was coming to a head—an experiment of which he heartily disapproved. He had warned in his Farewell Address against nothing more solemnly than “the baneful effects of the Spirit of Party, generally.” But as the general was laid to rest in the family plot, overlooking the fields and the river he loved, the nation was on the eve of an election year—and the spirit of party was in command.

A supreme paradox lay behind that spirit. By the end of the 1790s the American people had started to build the foundations of a powerful two-party system. But: they did not fully know what they were doing. Nor did they believe in what they were doing. The strategy of 1787, that of checks and balances and the fragmenting of power, had been designed to prevent Americans from establishing parties. The received wisdom of the day—especially that of the most noted political and intellectual leaders—was absolutely hostile to political parties. And historians to this day have differed as to how these party foundations were built, despite the obstacles. But built they were.

The strategy of 1787 had been shaped first by a brilliant and masterful elite corps of leaders and then had been reshaped and ratified by a second cadre of nascent republicans and a “third cadre” of grass-roots leaders throughout the states. That strategy had been achieved in a few stunning acts—in Philadelphia in 1787, in the state ratifying conventions, in the framing of the Bill of Rights by Congress and the state legislatures. That strategy had been clear and purposeful; the Framers and their friends and opponents well knew what they were up to. The strategy of party emerged out of gropings and fumblings, short-run needs and narrow interests, local and state as well as national rivalries. It emerged less from national conventions and congresses than from taverns and coaching houses, local clubs and caucuses, town and state debates and elections, dram-shop rows and fisticuffs. If the constitutional strategy of the 1780s was founded on consensus, the strategy of the 1790s grew out of conflict.

The wise men of the day hated the very thought of unbridled factions and parties. “If I could not go to heaven but with a party,” Jefferson said, “I would not go there at all.” They had a theory of constitutions, but they had no theory of parties. To men in power, the opposition party was not a benign adversary that someday, through the ordinary rotation of “ins” and “outs,” would come to power. The opposition party was at best divisive, factious, destructive, at worst illegitimate, conspiratorial, subversive, and, if allied secretly with the British or French, utterly traitorous. Federalists and Republicans alike looked on the other’s activities as partisan and hence as malign, their own as transcending party and faction and hence benign. Each perceived the other, whether in Congress or state legislatures, as regimented as Prussians, itself as composed of free spirits. Typically Federalists and Republicans wanted less to compete with one another than to destroy the other, or at least absorb the other.

The Constitution had been designed to balance, fragment, and overwhelm the play of party power. Staggered elections, fragmented constituencies, the separation of powers between President and Senate and House, the division of powers between nation and states—all were intended to compel conciliation among and between parties and factions, to break the thrust of popular majorities, to submerge small conflicts in a higher consensus, to promote bargaining and compromise. George Washington marvelously symbolized and practiced the constitutional strategy of consensus.

How, then, did the Americans of the 1790s build the foundations of a party system under national leaders who feared parties, under a national Constitution designed to thwart them? Historians, speaking from different schools of thought, have offered a variety of explanations. Some see the origins of American parties in the old divisions between patriots and Tories, between foes and friends of the Constitution of 1787, between early Federalists and Republicans; other historians find the origin in the searing domestic and foreign policy issues of the 1790s; others in the state and local issues of that decade; others in the elections that pitted against one another candidates who had to find campaign allies and in the process forged factional and party links with other candidates; still others in the economic, regional, ethnic, and ideological forces that divided rich and poor, Northerner and Southerner, Congregationalist and Quaker, yeoman and slaveowner.

The question, perplexing enough in itself, has been further complicated by the tendency of historians, like blind men feeling the elephant, to confuse different aspects of the party beast with the whole. They variously perceive party as merely the existence of strong conflict over issues; or of elections and election mechanics; or of clubs or associations or movements that took on certain party forms; or of national activity such as a congressional caucus or presidential leadership of a majority; or of state and local political organizations like Tammany; or of simple contests for power between the ins and the outs. Historians have not always made clear whether they were speaking of a condition of one-party domination over a disorganized opposition, or of a two-party balance with rotation in office, or of a multi-party or multi-factional array, or of a two-party system embracing presidency, congressional majorities or minorities, state party organizations, and electoral constituencies.

Complex though they were, the origins of the American party system need not be left in a twilight zone of historical understanding. National parties seem to have originated in conflict in Congress, as Federalist and Republican factions polarized more and more around the burning questions of the day—issues between commercial and agrarian interests, between North and South, between “Anglophiles” and “Francophiles,” all of which issues came to a head in the Jay treaty, with its implications for both foreign and domestic policy. As Federalists and Republicans each developed “party lines” that tied their positions on these issues together, party rivalry in Congress became heated. At the same time rudimentary state and local parties were rising out of conflict over local issues, in turn stemming from economic needs and aspirations, competition for government jobs, continuing debate over “states’ rights” under the new Constitution. As national, state, and local politicians seized variously on national, state, and local issues for their political advantage, the levels of party development “hooked” in with one another. National issues debated in Congress ricocheted back into the states, enhancing party competition in the more politically advanced areas and helping mobilize latent conflict in the less advanced.

All these party growths did not amount, however, to a party system—that is, to two national-state-local integrated, hierarchical party structures, each firmly seated in mass partisan electorates, local leadership cadres, electoral organizations, governmental office, and popular understanding and acceptance of party conflict. The reasons party systems did not develop were not only intellectual; they were also social and cultural. American politics at the grass roots in the 1790s was still largely a politics of deference—family-centered, client-oriented, job-motivated. It was still mainly the politics of local elites, social status, patron-client dependency, acquiescence in the influence of local notables. The making of a party system would wait for the rise of widespread local cadres of issue-minded activists who would mediate between rulers and citizenry and who would constitute the foundations of lasting party structures.

The catalyzing force in early party development was leadership—the congressional leadership of James Madison and others, state leaders who fought their electoral battles over issues old and new, as well as the local leadership—county politicians, professional men, tavernkeepers, state legislators, business and religious activists, newspaper editors—who divided, coalesced, and redivided over issues old and new. The local leaders may have learned a vague fear of party from their intellectual elders, and certainly they had to overcome the politics of deference, but they were influenced mainly by the practical need to win the next election and seize the spoils of office.

The more zealous local leaders had their forums—the thirty or forty Democratic or Republican societies that sprang up in Pennsylvania and most of the other states during the early 1790s. Nothing could have been calculated to alarm and infuriate high Federalists more than these political clubs. Modeled on American revolutionary societies such as the Sons of Liberty, inspired by the euphoria of the French Revolution in its early stages, these societies reached out to city mechanics and country yeomen alike and drew them further into the Republican embrace, thus providing counterweight to the quieter organizational efforts of Hamilton. Even more, some of the leaders aped French revolutionary ways, addressed one another as “Citizen” and “Citizeness,” and even burst into the “Marseillaise” as well as patriotic American songs. They passed countless resolutions against the Washington administration in general and Hamilton’s policies in particular. Suspecting that they had helped foment the Whiskey Rebellion, Washington had left his nonpolitical perch to denounce these “self-created societies” publicly and privately and to warn that they were a “diabolical attempt” to destroy the “fabric of human government and happiness.”

These political clubs soon withered, for they lacked the support of national leaders like Madison and Jefferson and were not geared into the slowly forming party machinery. The crucial political development of the mid-1790s was the shift of popular interest from mainly local issues to the rising national controversy over questions like Jay’s treaty and Hamilton’s bank. The retirement of Washington and the election of Adams focused the attention of state and local leaders increasingly on the nation’s capital. With Jefferson still withdrawn from divisive politics, the rising national conflict was carried to the people by a host of senators, representatives, and others. Not all these were the gladiators of history. Consider the case of the “Spitting Lyon.”

On the floor of the House of Representatives, Roger Griswold, Connecticut Federalist, disparaged the military record of Matthew Lyon, Vermont Republican. Lyon shot a stream of tobacco juice into Griswold’s face. After the House refused to expel Lyon, Griswold strode to Lyon’s desk and beat him with a cane. Lyon seized a pair of fire tongs and beat Griswold. The two men grappled and rolled on the floor until forcibly separated by other congressmen.

“Spitting Lyon” became an instant hero to Republicans, but to Federalists he was a “brute,” an “unclean beast,” “Ragged Mat, the Democrat.” A Bostonian mourned that “the saliva of an Irishman”—Lyon had been born in the old country—“should be left upon the face of an American & he, a New Englandman.” Later, not wholly by coincidence, Lyon was indicted under the Sedition Act for allegedly libelous attacks on President Adams. A Federalist justice of the Supreme Court jailed him after the jury brought in a guilty verdict. From his prison cell Lyon sent a stream of protesting articles and letters that were gleefully reprinted by the Republican press. Hailed as a martyr, the Vermonter ran again for Congress while still in jail in 1798, and won triumphant re-election.

Two years later he would enjoy the sweetest vengeance a politician could dream of; meantime, men who might not understand the philosophical differences between Jefferson and Hamilton could at least follow the case of high Federalists versus the Spitting Lyon.

By the late 1790s, thanks to Lyon and a host of other contentious politicians, conflict over issues had become nationalized. But no national party existed, except in Congress. John Adams had built a personal following within the Federalist administration, but it was not organized as a national party. Hamilton had developed a personal network reaching into the Administration and into Federalist centers throughout the states, but for party support he depended mainly on New York Federalists. James Madison had built a congressional party, organized in an informal caucus of Republican members, held together by rough party doctrine and enmity toward Federalists, and fashioned shallowly on networks of followers in congressional constituencies, but Madison retired to Virginia in 1797 just as Jefferson entered the vice-presidency.

This left Jefferson in titular command of the national Republicans, but the new Vice-President had little stomach for party leadership. The office was hardly an engine for organizing a national party, even if Jefferson had wanted to. Considering the Federalists’ sponsorship of the Alien and Sedition Acts, there was a grave question whether the Adams administration would tolerate an opposition party strong enough to win the presidency.

But the main obstacle to Jefferson’s party leadership was not political or even personal; it was intellectual and conceptual. He still had little understanding of the possibilities of a nationally organized party that would seek to rally a majority of the people behind a Republican platform, win the presidential and congressional elections, and then translate Republican doctrines into law through control of the presidency and Senate and House majorities. The extent of Jefferson’s confusion is clear from his leadership in promoting the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. With their bent toward nullification, states’ rights, and even secession, those resolutions were the very antithesis of the idea of majority rule through national party organization. They were also the antithesis of the strategy of party opposition, which calculated that the way to overcome a bad national administration was not to pull out of national politics and act like Chinese warlords, but to win enough votes at the next national election to drive the Federalists out of power.

If leaders such as Adams and Jefferson failed to understand the strategy of national parties, could anyone else have done so? We know of only one man who did—William Manning, a farmer and tavernkeeper in North Billerica, Massachusetts. Around 1797 Manning wrote a tract entitled “The Key of Libberty.” To counter the organized upper-class power of merchants, lawyers, ministers, and doctors, he called for a “Society to be composed of all the Republicans & Labourers in the United States” and organized on a class (educational), town, county, state, “Continental,” and even international basis. The associations would be composed of only those who “Labour for a living.” After intense political education in small classes with access to a library and magazines, the associations would mass their power against the elite at the polls. The “ondly Remidy” against existing evils, he wrote, “is by improveing our Rights as freemen in elections,” as long as “we ware posesed of knowledge anough to act rationally in them.” Manning concluded his tract with a constitution that spelled out the structure and powers of the new association.

The annals of the poor. All we know about Manning is that he marched to Concord on a famous April day but arrived too late to fight at the bridge, that he later served two terms as a Billerica selectman, and that he wrote one of the most prescient tracts in American history. And we know one other thing about him—that he submitted his manuscript, with the words formed one by one as though by a child, and with countless misspellings, to the Independent Chronicle, the only pro-Jefferson newspaper in Boston. The newspaper did not publish “The Key of Libberty,” however, for the editor about this time was arraigned for seditious libel under the Sedition Act. The editor died before his trial came on; his brother and clerk went to jail. By chance Manning’s papers survived.

We will never know how many other village intellectuals were thinking in as radical and creative terms as Manning, while the nation’s political leaders were occupied by thoughts of repression and secession. The nation would wait many years before finding another untutored thinker who would unite so brilliantly the concepts of thought and action, knowledge and power.

If, as Presidents and historians agreed, a dominant theme of the early republic was “the idea of America as an experiment, undertaken in defiance of history, fraught with risk, problematic in outcome,” how was the experiment faring by the end of the first decade? That question had to be asked, for experimentation, no matter how unwitting or radical, must not only tolerate testing in terms of certain general criteria—it requires such testing. Otherwise experiments would serve only as mindless leaps into the dark. But by what criteria—by what general values, principles, purposes—could the experiment be assayed? New generations would advance new standards of judgment, but the initial criteria for the early republic had to be those of early Americans themselves.

The first was of course sheer survival, as a people, as a nation. The Declaration of Independence, in trumpeting the unalienable rights of man, listed “life” before liberty, “safety” before happiness. The Constitution was carefully framed to gain the economic and military strength of a larger republic without threatening the security of individual states. Some Americans had greeted this effort with skepticism. To convert a continent into a republic, said Patrick Henry, was “a work too great for human wisdom.” It was impossible, said another doubter, “for one code of laws to suit Georgia and Massachusetts.” The constitutional solution was a radical and previously untested challenge to traditional republican thought, one that, in Benjamin Barber’s recent words, “turned the nation’s early years into an unprecedented historical experiment,” and one that could be met only by a people that, according to James Madison, had not allowed “a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names, to overrule the suggestions of their own good sense, the knowledge of their own situation, and the lessons of their own experience.” For a decade, at least, the experiment in federalism had survived, despite efforts toward nullification and secession—and despite, as well, unrest and some violence at home, bloodshed along the western borders, and conflict with two great powers abroad.

National survival required economic strength. Agriculture continued to be the main American production during the 1790s, and agriculture continued to boom. Stimulated by better techniques of fertilization, crop rotation, erosion control, and other improvements, crop output skyrocketed in some places. Cotton exports from the Carolina coast rose from about 10,000 pounds a year at decade’s start to 8 million pounds by decade’s end. Wheat and corn production expanded in the North and West.

Commerce also grew. Exports rose strongly from an average of $20 million annually in the early 1790s to four times that by decade’s end. Imports increased about fivefold during the 1790s. With population surging in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, the sinews of continental strength were evident in the growth of manufactories, the expansion of trade especially along the big rivers, and the blossoming of ports like New Orleans. While road conditions typically ranged from fair to poor, and most rivers still had to be forded, men were building more bridges and establishing ferries. By 1800 New Yorkers were boasting of their Cayuga Bridge, more than one mile long and three lanes wide.

National strength gained from a burgeoning population. Between 1790 and 1800 the population spurted from about 3.9 million to about 5.3 million. Ohio and Mississippi were among the fastest-growing areas. Most of the rise was due to the fecundity of Americans, especially of American farm parents needing sons to help till the fields; immigration probably amounted to only about 50,000 persons for the whole decade.

Of the immigrants, those from the British Isles still predominated. But among the newcomers were people from less-known places—Oyo, Dahomey, Benin, Biafra, usually by way of Barbados and other Caribbean islands. These were African slaves. Kidnapped from their villages, sold often by other Africans to European traders for cloth or liquor or guns, herded in chains onto slave ships, they had survived the horrors of the Atlantic passage—heat, filth, stench, disease, hopeless efforts at resistance to be herded into slave-trading ports for sale mainly to planters.

National security, individual safety, economic well-being—as these fundamental needs were to a substantial degree satisfied for much of the population, other, “higher” needs were created or enhanced. Probably the most powerful of these in the 1790s was for individual liberty. Here the record was mixed. Congress had passed, and the states had ratified, a Bill of Rights of wide scope and noble sentiments. The flush of prosperity doubtless had broadened economic opportunity and liberty of choice for many Americans. The passage and enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Laws, however, had shown how frail was the defense of these liberties. The enactment of these laws could be explained, but to explain is not to excuse. The Sedition Act lay like a blot across the luminous pages of the Bill of Rights.

Equality, like liberty, was as powerful in its appeal to early Americans as it was amorphous in meaning. “All men are created equal,” proclaimed the Declaration of Independence, before even mentioning the ideal of liberty. But informed Americans had little thought that the ideal of equality required collective action to help equalize the conditions of men born in poverty, ignorance, disease, malnutrition, and despair; they would have been aghast at the notion, if indeed they could even grasp it. Rather the term meant to most Americans the idea that men were created equal only in their God-given natural rights to life, liberty, and property.

It was obvious that men in fact—much less women and children—were most unequal in their conditions at birth and that they remained unequal in intellectual and physical endowment, economic status, intelligence, appearance, and social rank, though a few fought their way out of poverty to high position, and a few of the undeserving stumbled down the primrose path to inferior rank and disgrace. As in the case of liberty, few Americans asked the tough explicit questions about the meaning of equality: What kind of equality—legal, political, economic, social? Equality to be achieved how—by the natural workings of the social and economic order, by religious teachings, by the deliberate intervention of the community, perhaps even through government? And above all, equality for whom? All men, rich and poor? Between men and women? Between adults and children? Equality for Indians, immigrants, aliens? Equality for black people?

By the 1790s, slavery had become a peculiarly southern phenomenon. Most of the northern and central states had abolished it by legislative or judicial action. Not that the freedmen enjoyed much liberty or equality; they were usually denied their political and social rights, and discriminated against. “But when we compare them to the slaves of the South,” a French traveler had observed, “what a difference we find!—In the South, the Blacks are in a state of abjection difficult to describe.” Nine out of ten Afro-Americans lived in the South, and almost all of these—about 96 percent—were enslaved. Accounting for over a third of the South’s population, they outnumbered whites in many southern counties, though in no southern states.

Afro-Americans were better off in the upper South than the lower, under more affluent planters, in prosperous times. In a miniature class system encouraged by the masters, household workers and artisans were usually better treated than field hands, and men better than women, because often women not only worked from sunup to sundown in the fields but also were responsible for their families’ cooking and parenting. Conditions on the plantations of even the “better” masters could be harsh. Washington resorted to the whip to maintain order, and a Polish poet visiting Mount Vernon in 1798 found the “negroes’ huts…far more miserable than the poorest of the cottages of our peasants.” In general, the life of the enslaved Afro-American was nasty, poor, brutish, and often short.

But even aside from the enslaved, life under the new republic was heavily inegalitarian, even by late-eighteenth-century standards in America and Western Europe. Gross differences among men abounded in income, property, education, speech, and social status. Women lay outside the pale. Custom, men’s attitudes, the English common-law heritage, and the teachings of the Protestant churches overwhelmed the efforts of the few women conscious of this inequality. Abigail Adams was one of them. “I will never consent,” she wrote her sister, “to have our sex considered in an inferior point of light. Let each planet shine in their own orbit. God and nature designed it so—if man is Lord, woman is Lordess—that is what I contend for.” It was about the same time that John Adams wrote his son Thomas: “The source of revolution, democracy, Jacobinism…has been a systematical dissolution of the true family authority. There can never be any regular government of a nation without a marked subordination of mothers and children to the father.” But he asked Thomas to keep these words from his mother. If she heard of his views, he said, it would “infallibly raise a rebellion.”

Liberté, égalité—the third great value in the revolutionary war cry of the 1790s was fraternité. The idea of fraternity—of a close bond based on fellowship, affection, shared goals, mutuality of interest, and loyalty—was by no means new to Americans, whether of Pilgrim or recent immigrant stock. But those who aped the latest Parisian fashion and addressed one another as “Citizen” or “Citizeness” did not always understand the true meaning of fraternity or its relationship to the two other norms in the revolutionary trinity. In fact, the three ideas could clash with one another as well as reinforce one another. “I love liberty, and I hate equality,” the corrosive John Randolph of Roanoke exclaimed, and this sentiment was backed by many Americans who saw the two concepts as opposites. In practice, it is true, the three values could be mutually reinforcing, depending on their definition and application; but explicit definition of this kind of value was not in intellectual fashion in the 1790s.

Even if it were, and even though the revolutionary trinity had considerable kindling power among leaders of the new republic, the three great symbols were still not enough for many Americans. They groped for something more, for some loftier myth or purpose that would transcend the Lockean heritage of individualism and narrow equality. This myth was religious, ethical, spiritual; the purpose was to rise above self-interest and to take part in a collective effort of mutual help, fellowship, citizenship, community. The impetus was frankly religious and moralistic, even in a republic that had disestablished religion. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity,” Washington asserted in his Farewell Address, “Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and cherish them.”

Two things were necessary to create the republic of virtue, one of them obvious at the time, the other less clear. The first was education. “The Knowledge nesecary for every freeman to have is A Knowledge of Mankind,” William Manning wrote in his tract, and “Larning is of the greatest importance to the seport of a free government,” but the tavernkeeper added that the few were “always crying up the advantages of costly collages, national acadimyes & grammer schools, in ordir to make places for men to live without work,” but were always opposed to “cheep schools and woman schools, the only or prinsaple means by which learning is spred amongue the Many.” The other great requisite was leadership—the kind of leadership that, after meeting and hence extinguishing men’s basic wants and needs, could raise followers to higher levels of need and value—to levels of individual self-expression and self-actualization, of collective equality, dignity, and justice, of civic virtue and ethical commitment. Such leadership was lacking in the second half of the decade of the 1790s.

These early Americans, to be sure, had enormous energy and boundless optimism. They labored, each for himself, in the vineyard of liberty. But a vineyard, in eighteenth-century usage, was also a sphere of moral activity, and the new century might tell whether these Americans were laboring only for themselves, or also for humankind.

SHOWDOWN: THE ELECTION OF 1800

On the eve of the last year of the century, American leaders were intent more on political prospects than moral. The looming national elections were tending to focus their minds. The decisive figure in this election would be Thomas Jefferson. But Jefferson hardly appeared decisive at the time. His political course during the late 1790s had mirrored the political uncertainties and party gropings of those years. Tentatively he looked for some kind of North-South combination.

“If a prospect could be once opened upon us of the penetration of truth into the eastern States; if the people there, who are unquestionably republicans, could discover that they have been duped into the support of measures calculated to sap the very foundations of republicanism, we might still hope for salvation,” Jefferson had written Aaron Burr some weeks after Adams’ inauguration in 1797. “…But will that region ever awake to the true state of things? Can the middle, Southern and Western States hold on till they awake?” He asked Burr for a “comfortable solution” to these “painful questions.”

Immensely flattered, Burr requested an early meeting with the Vice-President in Philadelphia. Jefferson now became more active as party leader, working closely with Madison in Virginia and with Gallatin in the House of Representatives. Following the election setbacks to Republicans in 1798, he redoubled his efforts especially as a party propagandist. He asked every man to “lay his purpose & his pen” to the cause; coaxed local Republican leaders into writing pamphlets and letters to editors; stressed the issues of peace, liberty, and states’ rights; turned his office into a kind of clearinghouse for Republican propaganda. “The engine is the press,” he told Madison.

Hundreds of other men too were busy with politics, but like Jefferson earlier, in an atmosphere of uncertainty and suspense. Intellectual leaders—clergymen, editors, and others—were still preaching against the whole idea of an open, clear-cut party and election battle. Party formations were still primitive in many areas. Even fiercer than the conflict between Federalists and Republicans was the feuding between factions within the parties—especially between the Adams following and the Hamilton “cabal.” Certain high Federalists were hinting at the need for armed repression of the opposition, particularly in the event of war, and Jefferson and Madison were openly pushing the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions—a strategy of nullification and even secession still in flat contradiction to the idea of two-party opposition and rotation in power. All these factors enhanced the most pressing question of all—could the American republic, could any republic, survive a decisive challenge by the “outs” to the “ins”? Or would ballots give way to bullets?

Not intellectual theorizing but heated issues, fierce political ambitions, and the practical need to win a scheduled national election compelled the political testing of 1800.

In Philadelphia, John Adams contemplated the coming test with apprehension and anger. Political and personal affairs had gone badly for him since the euphoria of ’98. Abigail was ill a good part of the time, and his beloved son Charles, a bankrupt and an alcoholic, was dying in New York. As proud, captious, sensitive, and sermonizing as ever, he hated much of the day-to-day business of the presidency, and he longed to take sanctuary in Quincy; but he desperately wanted to win in 1800, to confound his enemies, to complete his work. He tried to lend some direction and unity to the Federalists, but he was handicapped by his concept of leadership as a solitary search for the morally correct course, regardless of day-to-day pressures from factions and interests. He sensed, probably correctly, that his party should take a more centrist course to win in 1800. But his own moderate positions on foreign and domestic policy left him isolated between high Federalists and moderate Republicans.

The Fries “rebellion” epitomized his difficulty. A direct federal tax on land and houses, enacted by Congress in 1798, touched off the next winter an uprising by several hundred Pennsylvanians—and especially by the women, who poured scalding water on assessors who came to measure their windows. John Fries, a traveling auctioneer, led a band of men to Bethlehem, where they forced the release of others jailed for resisting the tax. The President promptly labeled the act treasonable and ordered Fries and his band arrested. Unlucky enough to be tried before Justice Samuel Chase, the auctioneer was convicted of treason and, amid great hubbub, sentenced to die. Later the President, without consulting his Cabinet, pardoned Fries—only to arouse the fury of high Federalists. Not the least of these was Alexander Hamilton, who, his biographer says, would have preferred to load the gibbets of Pennsylvania with Friesians and viewed the pardon as one more example of Adams’ petulant indecisiveness.

By the spring of 1800 Adams’ wrath against the Hamiltonians in his Cabinet—especially Pickering and McHenry—was about to burst out of control. Politically the President faced a dilemma: he wished to lead the Federalists toward the center of the political spectrum, in order to head off any Republican effort to pre-empt the same ground, but he feared to alienate the high Federalists and disrupt his party when unity was desperately needed. His uncertainty and frustration only exacerbated his anger. One day, as he was talking with McHenry about routine matters, his anger boiled over. He accused the frightened McHenry to his face of being subservient to Hamilton—a man, he went on, who was the “greatest intriguant in the world—a man devoid of every moral principle—a bastard and as much a foreigner as Gallatin.” Adams accepted McHenry’s resignation on the spot. A few days later he demanded that Pickering quit. When the Secretary of State refused, Adams summarily sacked him. Oddly, he did not fire Secretary of the Treasury Wolcott, who was Hamilton’s main conduit to the high Federalists in Adams’ administration.

Thomas Jefferson, watching these events from his vice-presidential perch, had the advantage of being close to the government, if not inside it, with little of the burden of power and none of the responsibility. By early 1800 he was emerging clearly as the national leader of the Republicans. Gone were the doubts and vacillations of earlier days. He was eager to take on the “feds,” as he called them, to vanquish their whole philosophy and practice of government, to establish his party and himself in control of Congress and the presidency. He consciously assumed leadership of his party. Unable to campaign across the country—stumping was contrary to both his own nature and the custom of the day—he cast political lines into key areas through letters and friends.

His meeting with Burr paid off handsomely. The dapper little New Yorker set to work uniting New York Republicans against the divided Federalists. Then he organized his lieutenants tightly on a ward-by-ward basis; had the voters’ names card-indexed, along with their political background, attitudes, and need for transportation on election day; set up committees for house-to-house canvassing for funds; pressed more affluent Republicans for bigger donations; organized rallies; converted Tammany into a campaign organization; debated Hamilton publicly; and spent ten hours straight at the polls on the last day of the three-day state election. He won a resounding victory in the election of state assemblymen—and got full credit for it from Republican leaders in Philadelphia.

The New York victory buoyed Jefferson’s hopes. He recognized the critical role of the central states, and how they hung together. “If the city election of N York is in favor of the Republican ticket, the issue will be republican,” he had instructed Madison; “if the federal ticket for the city of N York prevails, the probabilities will be in favor of a federal issue, because it would then require a republican vote both from Jersey and Pennsylva to preponderate against New York, on which we could not count with any confidence.” What Jefferson called the “Political arithmetic” looked so good after the New York victory that he shrugged off the Federalist “lies” about him. He would not try to answer them, “for while I should be engaged with one, they would publich twenty new ones.” He had confidence in the voters’ common sense. “Thirty years of public life have enabled most of those who read newspapers to judge of one for themselves.”

Doubtless Jefferson was too optimistic. The Federalists in 1800 were still a formidable party. While they were losing some of the vigorous younger men to the Republicans, they were still the party of Washington and Adams and Jay and Pinckney and Hamilton, and the vehicle of a younger generation represented by men like John Marshall and Fisher Ames. The Federalists had never been a purely mercantile or urban party; their strength lay also in rural areas and along the rivers and other avenues of commerce into the hinterland, such as the Connecticut Valley. Adams as President had immense national prestige, if not always popularity, and his “move toward the middle” broadened the party’s appeal. Stung by losses in New York, the Federalists rallied their forces in other states. In New Jersey, where women were not expressly barred from voting, they “marched their wives, daughters, and other qualified ‘females’ to the polls,” in one historian’s words, and won the state’s seven electoral votes.

Not only was the parties’ popular support crucial, but also the manner in which that support was translated into presidential electoral votes. The selection of presidential electors was not designed for accurate translation. For one thing, state legislatures set selection of electors on a statewide basis or on a district basis, or took on the task themselves, according to a guess by the party dominating the legislature as to which system would help that party’s candidate. More and more legislatures moved to choose electors themselves, rather than by popular vote. Electors were supposed to exercise some independent judgment. But more important in 1800, the electoral system was still so novel as to be open to flagrant rigging, such as changing the method of choosing electors. Broaching to John Jay such a scheme for New York, Hamilton said that “in times like these in which we live, it will not do to be over-scrupulous.” It was permissible to take such a step to “prevent an atheist in religion, and a fanatic in politics, from getting possession of the helm of state.” Jay was not impressed.

And so the presidential campaign proceeded, in its noisy, slightly manipulated, but nonviolent way. During the summer candidates for state legislatures toured the districts and talked to crowds where they could find them—“even at a horse race—a cock fight—or a Methodist quarterly meeting.” Then a shocking event broke in on the game of politics.

Through the darkness and the driving rain they made their way, some on horseback but more on foot, most armed with clubs and scythes, hearth-wrought swords and crossbows, a few with guns and homemade bullets. Streaming in from all directions—some from Richmond, others from farms and plantations in the county, still others from more distant places—they gathered at a “briery spot” near a brook six miles outside the Virginia capital. These black men, perhaps a thousand strong, were fired by a common purpose: to wrest liberty from the white slavocracy. The election was as remote to them as they were remote to the politicians counting and recounting electoral odds. They were the voteless, the politically impotent, the socially outcast. But they could not be immunized against the contagious idea of liberty. A few years after the Revolution an enslaved Afro-American, using the pseudonym “Othello,” had demanded: “After a long, successful, and glorious struggle for liberty,” could Americans “meanly descend to take up the scourge?”

Against the stinging whip, the “nigger boxes,” the violation of their women, the disruption of their families, the black people had found little protection. They safeguarded one another in their families where their families remained intact. They formed plantation communities that were in many respects extended families or kin networks carried over from the original African culture. Black leaders organized secret associations to meet communal needs. Black preachers ministered to both the survival and the moral needs of their people. “The Preacher is the most unique personality developed by the Negro on American soil,” Du Bois noted. “A leader, a politician, an orator, a ‘boss,’ an intriguer, an idealist.” Preachers and congregations met, often secretly, to celebrate life, ease suffering, and talk of deliverance from subjection in this life or hereafter.

Black men and women found other ways of defying their masters or sealing off their own lives. They tried slowdowns and stoppages, truancy and self-injury; they pretended illness or pregnancy. They boycotted work entirely, hid out in woods or swamps, pilfered food, destroyed tools and crops, committed arson, assaulted and sometimes killed owners or overseers, fled North. But none of these worked for large numbers over time, as the slavocracy mobilized sheriffs, overseers, posses, dogs, sometimes the gibbet and usually the whip. Resistance and whipping came to be locked together in a brutal symbiosis; some masters tried to reduce their dependence on the whip, but found it essential to the system.

For black leaders there was one other way. In 1791, the same year that the Bill of Rights had been adopted—but not for the enslaved—news trickled into slave quarters about the black uprising in St. Domingue. This electrifying example of black liberation, combined with the contagious rhetoric and values of the American and French revolutions, powerfully raised the expectations and aspirations of enslaved Afro-Americans. Throughout the 1790s rumors of black plots to burn and kill kept white officials on edge in Virginia and elsewhere. Late in 1797 three black men were executed on suspicion of having conspired to set Charleston afire.

Then, early in 1800, black leaders in the Richmond area began secretly to plan their own insurrection. Most active of the group was Gabriel Prosser, a tall, twenty-four-year-old blacksmith, “a fellow of courage and intellect above his rank in life,” a contemporary wrote. Other leaders were Jack Bowler, four years older and three inches taller than Gabriel and a ditcher by trade, who had been hired out to a white woman who lived about fifty miles from Richmond. In an election called by Bowler, Prosser was chosen “General” by the black rebels and Bowler “captain of light horse.” Activity centered in Gabriel’s family circle on the plantation of Thomas Prosser, alleged to be an unusually harsh master. Gabriel’s brother Solomon, also a blacksmith, helped make swords and other crude weapons, and his wife, Nanny, and Martin, another brother and a preacher, helped organize the revolt. Moving stealthily between plantations, reconnoitering the city with the aid of forged passes, the rebels were able to reach a large number of black people in southeastern Virginia. They recruited supporters at funerals, prayer meetings, barbecues.

Powerful forces lay behind even this slender effort. An economic depression in the South had resulted in more hardship on the plantations and in extensive selling and leasing of black people. Prosser and his fellow rebels were mostly artisans and domestic workers, more removed from the field and the lash but also more marginal in their work and more likely to be uprooted. They were also more exposed to the cries of liberty and equality echoing throughout the Western world. At one meeting a rebel leader threw his arms around another and exclaimed, “We have as much right to fight for our liberty as any men.” Having achieved a little status, insecure though it was, they were motivated by needs for more status, prestige, self-esteem—one reason for the hunger for military titles that were awarded to the more active recruiters. They knew their Bible, and brother Martin quoted from Scripture to prove that delay bred danger and that, as he told the leaders, God had said that “five of you shall conquer an hundred, and a hundred a thousand of our enemies.”

So now the one thousand huddled near the brook, already rising fast from the downpour, and awaited the command to move across the bridge to the city. The plan was to attack the Capitol, the magazine, the penitentiary, and the governor in his house; to seize large quantities of ammunition and warehouse goods; then to set houses on fire. As the white residents tried to put out the conflagration, the rebels would fall upon them. The conquest of Richmond, the leaders expected, would ignite a chain reaction of local uprisings. Civil war would engulf the nation as free blacks, mulattoes, Catawba Indians, French troops, and even poor whites joined the cause. White women were to be spared, as were Quakers, Methodists, and French persons, for the rebels “conceived of their being friendly to liberty.” French warships would land troops on the coast to help fight the slavocracy, as they had done a quarter century before to fight the British oppressors.

But none of this dream was to be. The rainstorm raged through the night, turning more ferocious by the hour, washing away the only bridge the rebels could use to get to Richmond. Neither God nor good fortune seemed on the side of the smaller battalions. Even if the bridge had remained, Governor James Monroe and his troops were ready in Richmond, for Gabriel and his men had been betrayed by a black man on the day the revolt was to happen. Quickly Monroe had fortified the Capitol with cannon, called up six hundred troops, and sent the alarm to militia commanders throughout Virginia. Retribution was swift and hard. A number of rebel leaders were quickly rounded up and executed. Gabriel escaped on a schooner but was apprehended and brought back to the capital in chains.

Monroe had vainly hoped to minimize the affair, for fear of uprisings elsewhere and of Federalist efforts to exploit the revolt in the presidential campaign. Soon a Philadelphia newspaper was proclaiming that the insurrection, which was seen as organized on “the true French plan,” must be decisive for Adams. Monroe turned to the Republican candidate for advice. When, he asked Jefferson, should one “arrest the hand of the Executioner?” The sage of Monticello was ambivalent. He could well understand how some would want to extend the executions. But: “Even here, where everything has been perfectly tranquil, but where a familiarity with slavery, and a possibility of danger from that quarter prepare the general mind for some severities, there is a strong sentiment that there has been hanging enough. The other states & the world at large will forever condemn us if we indulge a principle of revenge, or go one step beyond absolute necessity.”

But, added the presidential candidate, “I hazard these thoughts for your own consideration only, as I should be unwilling to be quoted in the case.”

Gabriel went to his death in silence, even when he was brought before the governor to explain his act; “he seemed to have made up his mind to die,” Monroe said later. Another rebel did speak on facing the judge. He had nothing more to offer in defense than what George Washington would have had to offer, he said, had he been taken by the British and put to trial by them. “I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and am a willing sacrifice to their cause.” He asked only to be led at once to execution.

By fall the presidential race was reaching a climax. Slander on both sides was uncontained—and the politicos of the day were masters at it. Adams was called a would-be dictator and a “monocrat” who would make the country a monarchy and his children successors to the throne. Even Adams could smile at a story that he had sent a United States frigate to England to procure mistresses for himself. The Federalists gave even better than they got. Jefferson was an infidel, a “howling” atheist, an “intellectual voluptuary” who would “destroy religion, introduce immorality, and loosen all the bonds of society” at home. The Jacobin leader was the real debauchee, Federalists whispered, having sired mulatto children at Monticello. Somehow the voters groped their way through the invective to a sense of the genuine issues. They faced a real choice. Jefferson was still silent as a candidate, but he had repeatedly made clear his stands for a frugal government, a small Navy and Army, states’ rights, the Bill of Rights liberties, a small diplomatic establishment. The Federalists had made their positions clear through legislation they had passed, or tried to pass. The election would be a showdown between men, platforms, and ideologies.

Slowly the returns came in as electors met and voted in their states. The Federalists had a moment of euphoria as Adams picked up some unexpected support. By late November the two parties were running neck and neck. For a time Federalist hopes were pinned on South Carolina, on whether Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Adams’ running mate, could deliver that state’s eight electoral votes. But Pinckney could not even deliver all the Pinckneys, least of all Charles Pinckney, leader of the Republican branch of the family, who through generous offers of jobs under a Republican administration, managed to persuade enough members of the state legislature to choose a pro-Jefferson slate of electors.

By late December the total vote was in. It was Jefferson over Adams, 73 to 65. But it was also Burr over Pinckney, 73 to 64, with one of Pinckney’s votes diverted to John Jay.

The Republicans had won, but Jefferson had not been elected. Burr had an equal constitutional claim to the presidency. Something new and extraordinary had happened in American politics: the parties had disciplined their ranks enough to produce the same total (73) for the two Republican, running mates and an almost equal tally (65 to 64) for the two Federalists. In order to prevent votes from being thrown away, each party caucus had pledged equal support to both candidates on the ticket. To do this was to run the risk that, under the Constitution, a presidential tie vote would go to the House of Representatives for decision. Both parties knowingly ran that risk. But the politics of the lower chamber would be quite different from the politics of the electoral groups meeting separately in the state capitols. The presidential race would now be focused in the nation’s capitol; it would take place in a lame-duck, Federalist-dominated House of Representatives; and each state delegation in the House, whether large or small, would have a single vote.

The remarkable result was that the Federalists had lost the presidency, but in the Congress they had the power to throw the election to either Jefferson or Burr, or possibly stall indefinitely. What would they do with this exquisite consolation prize? Most of the congressional Federalists feared Jefferson the ideologue more than they hated Burr the opportunist. “They consider Burr as actuated by ordinary ambition, Jefferson by that & the pride of the Jacobinic philosophy,” high Federalist George Cabot wrote Hamilton. “The former may be satisfied by power & property, the latter must see the roots of our Society pulled up & a new course of cultivation substituted.” If Burr was ambitious, slippery, and even venal, well, perhaps the Federalists could make use of such qualities; “they loved Burr for his vices,” John Miller has noted. Other Federalists disagreed. No matter how much they hated Jefferson, they were not going to put into the presidency a man they considered a knave and a blackguard.

The competing forces were so counterpoised that the House of Representatives went through thirty-five ballotings, all resulting in a vote of eight states for Jefferson, six for Burr, and two divided. The stalemate lasted as long as the representatives stuck to their convictions, or biases; it ended when three men—Jefferson, Burr, and Hamilton—acted out of character. Jefferson, no longer the relaxed and diffident philosopher, responded to the looming crisis with anger, but also with decisiveness and determination. He began to act like the President-elect as soon as the unofficial returns were in; thus he wrote Robert R. Livingston to ask him to serve as Secretary of the Navy—the New Yorker declined—and incidentally to discuss the bones of a mammoth that had been found near New York. He wrote Burr, congratulating him on the election results but implying ever so delicately that Jefferson expected him to serve as Vice-President. He wrote Burr again to warn that the “enemy” would try to “sow tares between us,” and branding as a forgery a letter purportedly by Jefferson that criticized Burr. At the same time Jefferson subtly let out word that, while he would not make deals—he knew that Burr could outdeal him—he could be counted on to act moderately as President, to be “liberal and accommodating.”

Hamilton had no time for subtleties. His clear hierarchy of animosities—he resented Adams, hated Jefferson, and despised Burr—helped him to decide early that if the choice lay between Jefferson and Burr, he would thwart the latter. While Jefferson was only a “contemptible hypocrite,” crafty, unscrupulous, and dishonest, Hamilton told his Federalist friends, Burr was a “most unfit and dangerous man,” a Jacobin who would overthrow the fiscal system, a rogue who would “employ the rogues of all parties to overrule the good men of all parties,” and above all a Catiline who would take over the government as Napoleon had just done in France. Hamilton had little influence with the Federalist “high-flyers” (as Jefferson called them) in Congress, but his principled view that his party must not bargain with the likes of Aaron Burr carried weight with national Federalist leaders such as John Jay.

Burr played a waiting game. He assured Jefferson and his friends so convincingly that he would not deal with the enemy and balk the real will of the people that Jefferson confided to his daughter: “The Federalists were confident, at first, they could debauch Col. B from his good faith by offering him their vote to be President,” but his “conduct has been honorable and decisive, and greatly embarrasses them.” Burr’s behavior was curious all the way through. He evidently did spurn a deal with the Federalists, but he did not take the honorable course of simply withdrawing; he never made perfectly clear that he would not serve as President if elected; he apparently allowed some of his friends to put out feelers on his behalf; and his best strategy in any event would have been inaction, since the Federalist bloc in Congress was cemented to his cause as a result of their hatred and fear of Jefferson. Still, the long-drawn-out constitutional crisis afforded Burr countless opportunities to undercut Jefferson and perhaps to win the presidency—but he remained in Albany, attending to his law practice.

Twelve weeks passed as Jefferson remained resolute, Hamilton busy, Burr inactive, and the election stalemated. There is no record of all that happened in the last confused, crisis-ridden days; in particular we know little of the role of less visible but influential politicians. John Marshall evidently angled for his own selection as President should the deadlock persist. But this much seems clear: during the final weeks the nation veered toward disunion and civil war, as Republicans threatened to bring in state militias from Pennsylvania and Virginia if the Federalists further thwarted the “popular will.” The crisis revealed not merely two parties in combat but four party factions: Jeffersonians, Burrites, high Federalists mainly centered in Congress, and a group of moderate Federalists led on this occasion by Hamilton and nurtured in the nationalist, moderate leadership of George Washington.

As March 4, 1801, approached and tension mounted two developments staved off a constitutional and perhaps military debacle. Jefferson, all the while asserting that he would not “receive the government” on capitulation, that he would not go into it “with my hands tied,” told a Federalist intermediary that the public credit would be safe, the Navy increased, and lesser federal jobholders left in their places. And ingenious mediators worked out an artifice that enabled Jefferson to be elected President without a single Federalist voting for him. A number of Federalists cast blank ballots, and a single congressman from Vermont now cast his state’s vote for Jefferson. That congressman was “Spitting Matt” Lyon.

The crisis was over—Thomas Jefferson was elected President of the United States. Much would be made in later years of this unprecedented example of a peaceful shift from one party to another, of the avoidance of violence and bloodshed, of the example Americans had set for other constitutional republics. But it had been a close-run thing. If Jefferson had not been firm in his ambition, Hamilton not principled in his hatred, Burr not inactive; if moderates in both parties had not been in control, or if fewer politicians had respected the Constitution, the American republic probably would have lived a briefer life than many republics before and since. Perhaps most decisive in the whole episode was the willingness of state and local leaders, Federalist and Republican, to wait for the crisis to be resolved rather than break into local magazines, gather arms, and march on the Capitol. Once again “followers” had acted as leaders.

The suspense of the election quickly changed into excitement over the coming of a new President, a new party, a new government, a new program. Later Jefferson would argue that the “Revolution of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principles of our government as that of 1776 was in its form.” But whether 1800 would be a real revolution—that is, a transformation of ideological, economic, social, and political structure—would depend on the leadership of a man who glorified revolution in theory but exercised moderation in practice.

PART II

Liberty in Arcadia

CHAPTER 5

Jeffersonian Leadership

CONRAD & MCMUNN’S Boarding House, near Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, March 4, 1801. President-elect Thomas Jefferson, surrounded by friends and fellow lodgers, prepares to leave for his Inaugural. Virginia militiamen are parading up and down the street, and somewhere artillerymen are firing off blank salvos, but everything is low-keyed. The President elect hardly cuts a heroic figure. A tall, lean, loosely framed man, “all ends and angles,” he feels ill at ease in a crowd, even though people are attracted by his freckled, open countenance and pleasing manner. He has no wish to be a hero. No coach-and-eight is waiting to carry him to the Capitol, nor even a white horse. Rather he will walk. Shortly before nine, accompanied by a motley throng of officials, members of Congress, and Republican politicos, he sets out for the north wing of the unfinished Capitol building.…

Thus began an epoch in American history that would come to be known as the “Jeffersonian Era” but was felt at the time—after the anxious days of February—to be a moment of relief, triumph, and hope.

Several hundred persons had crowded into the Senate chamber to witness the shift of authority from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson. The President-elect’s old Virginia adversary, Chief Justice John Marshall, stood before him to administer the oath; Vice-President-elect Aaron Burr, a man Jefferson hardly knew, waited nearby. Conspicuously absent from the proceedings was John Adams, who had quietly left Washington before dawn. After the oath-taking, Jefferson turned to the audience.

“Friends & Fellow Citizens.” At this, some good Federalists in the crowd must have stirred. “Citizen”! This was the language of Paris revolutionaries.

The President proceeded in such a low, flat tone of voice that many in the audience could hot have made him out if the National Intelligencer had not scored a beat and published the address ahead of time. In any case, the speech held few surprises. After the usual modest disclaimers and tributes to a “rising nation spread over a wide & fruitful land,” he went on to lay out Republican positions: “Equal & exact justice to all men” … friendship with all nations, “entangling alliances with none”… support for state governments as bulwarks of republicanism … “Economy in public expense, that labor may be lightly burdened” …the payment of public debts…“Encouragement of Agriculture, & of Commerce as it’s handmaiden…” These principles, he said, speaking from abbreviated notes, “form ye bright constlln wch hs gone before us, & guidd our steps, thro’ an age of Revoln and Reformn: The wisdom of our Sages, & blood of our Heroes, have been devoted to their attainment…”

Yet embedded in the address were words that doubtless stirred his audience more than did hallowed principles. These amounted to a powerful plea for conciliation.

“…every difference of opinion, is not a difference of principle. We have called, by different names, brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans: we are all federalists.

“If there be any among us who wish to dissolve this union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it….

“I know indeed that some honest men have feared that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm on the theoretic & visionary fear that the government, the world’s best hope may want energy to preserve itself?”

All would bear in mind, Jefferson had said earlier in the address, “the sacred principle that if the will of the Majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable: that the Minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, & to violate would be oppression.

“Let us then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart & one mind; let us restore to social intercourse that harmony & affection, without which Liberty, & even Life itself, are but dreary things.…”

The celebration over, President Jefferson walked back to his lodgings at Conrad’s. He left behind him at the Capitol some puzzled politicians, Federalist and Republican alike. What kind of leadership did the Inaugural words portend?

Upon leaving for the Inaugural that day, John Marshall had been in the middle of a long letter to Charles Pinckney in Charleston. “Today the new political year commences, the new order of things begins,” he wrote. He hoped that public prosperity and happiness would not be diminished under democratic guidance. “The democrats are divided into speculative theorists and absolute terrorists. With the latter I am not disposed to class Mr. Jefferson.…” If he was a terrorist, the country faced calamity, he added, but if not, the terrorists would become his enemies and calumniators. At this point Marshall laid down his pen and left his boardinghouse to administer the oath; he had promised Jefferson that he would be punctual. Returning later to his lodgings, he picked up his pen again. He had just administered the oath to Jefferson, he told Pinckney. The speech seemed conciliatory. “It is in direct terms giving the lie to the violent party declamation which has elected him, but it is strongly characteristic of the general cast of his political theory.”

The new President’s political theory—this was the puzzle. The election of this amiable and diffident patrician, and of a Republican Congress, had produced Federalist invective betraying a deep fear that he would inflict some alien and despotic creed on the people. A Republican regime would mean the “ascendancy of the worthless, the dishonest, the rapacious, the vile, the merciless and the ungodly,” said a letter in the Gazette. Fisher Ames foresaw the “loathsome steam of human victims offered in sacrifice.” President Timothy Dwight of Yale prepared an oration in which he warned of a “country governed by blockheads and knaves…the ties of marriage…severed; our wives and daughters thrown into the stews.” Even John Adams, in his hurt and bitterness, said, “A group of foreign liars, encouraged by a few ambitious native gentlemen, have discomfited the education, the talents, the virtues and the property of the country.” His Boston homeland seemed especially outraged. A Federalist newspaper there ran an epitaph within a black border: “YESTERDAY EXPIRED Deeply regretted by MILLIONS of grateful Americans And by all GOOD MEN, The FEDERAL ADMINISTRATION” etc. Little old ladies in Boston, it was said, hid their Bibles under mattresses on the inauguration of the Virginia “atheist.”

Those who knew Jefferson best scoffed at the Federalist portrait of him as a Jacobin dogmatist—or radical ideologue. If criticize him they must, they would have pointed to just the opposite qualities. Jefferson’s mind seemed as loose and many-jointed as his big rambling frame. Although he had proudly belonged to the American Philosophical Society for many years after having helped to found it, and although he had the philosopher’s bent for reflective speculation, he had never been a systematic philosopher or written a comprehensive work that could compare with—say—John Adams’ Defense of the Constitution. His interest in nature and in science was not that of the methodical investigator but of a man fascinated by rocks, birds, flowers, trees, vegetables, crops, inventions, household contrivances, gadgets. He wrote his daughter: “Not a sprig of grass shoots uninteresting to me.”

So quickly did Jefferson shift, in conversation and correspondence, from politics to farming to law to flora to seeds to literature, that it was hard to discern any focus in the man. His more superficial beliefs had to be peeled off, like the layers of an artichoke, to find the core of conviction. He was accused of being deceptive, disingenuous, even dishonest, and to a degree he was, because he tried to protect his privacy, because he feared that his personal letters would fall into the hands of his adversaries, because he adapted to the person he was talking to and the situation confronting him. Beyond all this, a central ambivalence in him was evident to some.

There seemed to be at least two Jeffersons by 1801, his fifty-eighth year. One apotheosized harmony and conciliation; viewed the small rural property holder and agriculture in general as the foundation for the good society; believed in sharply limited government, especially at the federal level; feared a consolidated national government; saw cities in general and city mobs in particular as the “panders of vice and the instruments by which the liberties of a country are generally overturned”; loathed the prospect of urbanization, industrialization, centralized finance, a landless proletariat; warned against entangling alliances abroad; ultimately embraced states’ rights to such a degree that he could sponsor the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. This was Jefferson the ideologue.

Another Jefferson, however, saw conflict among men as inevitable and called for a rebellion every generation or so; enjoyed the splendor and intellectual brilliance of big cities like Paris and Philadelphia; easily fit into Washington’s administration, which began the “consolidation” and invigoration of the federal government; warned against secessionist tendencies of Federalists; and spent a good part of his life “entangling” America with foreign nations, especially France.

Jefferson was a practical philosopher; he was even more a philosophical practitioner, who saw the needs of the immediate situation and drew from his vast learning the ideas that were relevant to that situation. He had grown up in the Virginia tradition of public service; won a seat in the House of Burgesses at twenty-six; served none too happily as wartime governor of Virginia; represented the new nation in France; and served under the new federal government as Secretary of State, Vice-President and presiding officer in the Senate. Rarely had he allowed ideology to interfere with the practical requirements of office.

Thus the defender of revolution had, as Secretary of State, signed the proclamation against the Whiskey Rebels; the apostle of liberty had, as presiding officer of the Senate, signed the warrant for arrest of William Duane, for seditious contempt of that body. Apparent paradoxes in his views, Marshall Smelser has said, can be reconciled “by remembering that liberty was his navigating star, even though there were cloudy nights in his career when he steered in another direction.” But he refused to elevate specific institutions, traditions, and practices into dogmas. All these would change, while certain principles were eternal. And now he was entering the highest office in the land, once held by his fellow Virginian George Washington, and the test again would be whether he could stand by those principles and at the same time meet the day-to-day demands of transactional leadership.

His friends had few doubts. They spent the inaugural days celebrating rather than cerebrating, although much of the festivity had a political edge. In Virginia an inaugural pageant depicted Liberty as a comely virgin, threatened by a king and a bishop and other assailants, until a trumpet sounded and a messenger proclaimed that Jefferson was President, whereupon the evil men took flight and sixteen beautiful women, one for each state, protected the virgin Liberty. Perhaps the most splendid inaugural festivity took place in Philadelphia. There sixteen horses, driven by a youth dressed in white, pulled a carriage bearing the resplendent schooner Thomas Jefferson. Toasts were drunk to Liberty and the Rights of Man. “Jefferson and Liberty,” termed “A Patriotic Song, for the Glorious Fourth of March, 1801,” and consisting of fourteen stanzas, began:

O’er vast Columbia’s varied clime;

Her cities, forests, shores and dales,

In shining majesty sublime,

Immortal Liberty prevails.

Rejoice. Columbia’s sons, rejoice!

To tyrants never bend the knee

But join with heart, and soul, and voice,

For JEFFERSON and LIBERTY.

“THE EYES OF HUMANITY ARE FIXED ON US”

His Republican friends might sing and toast and parade, but President Thomas Jefferson continued to shun grandiosity and rodomontade. Following the Inaugural, he settled back into the life of the boardinghouse, where he ate at table—and sometimes at the foot of it—with thirty or so other officials and politicos. For two weeks he transacted business in his small parlor there, before moving to the President’s house, but he stayed in the big new sandstone building less than two weeks before leaving for Monticello, where he remained almost a month. But even after that, presidential affairs seemed to go slowly. There were no balls in the mansion, no parades to Capitol Hill—all part of a consciously cultivated image of republican simplicity. The President had decided to abandon Washington’s and Adams’s policy of addressing Congress in person; nine months passed before he sent his formal written message to the legislature.

All this was just what some of his Federalist critics expected of Jefferson—an easygoing, haphazard, aimless, even careless approach to the business of the federal government, in sad contrast to the activism and purposiveness of the two Federalist administrations. In fact, from the day of his Inaugural the new President acted according to a carefully conceived “grand political strategy” that dominated his handling of administrative, legislative, and party affairs.

In shaping this grand strategy Jefferson enjoyed the sense of writing on a clean slate. “This whole chapter in the history of man is new,” he wrote his revered friend Dr. Priestley. “The great extent of our Republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new.” He continued to view the American experiment as the supreme human venture. “The storm through which we have passed,” he wrote another friend, “has been tremendous indeed. The tough sides of our Argosie have been thoroughly tried. Her strength has stood the waves into which she was steered, with a view to sink her. We shall put her on her republican tack, & she will now show by the beauty of her motion the skill of her builders.” Nor were they acting alone, he wrote later to a governor, “but for the whole human race. The event of our experiment is to shew whether man can be trusted with self-government. The eyes of suffering humanity are fixed on us with anxiety as their only hope.”

Jefferson’s grand political strategy was simple though daring in conception: to separate moderate Federalists from their “monarchical leaders”; to draw those Federalists into a new and broadened Republican majority; meanwhile to keep his own Republican following content and united through a judicious application of loaves and fishes; to forge a new party majority coalition that would sustain his policies; to kill off the high Federalists as a political power; to expect—and to try to tolerate—a new opposition rising from within the ranks of his consolidated majority party. This strategy was not simply fabricated later by Jefferson or rationalized by Republican historians post hoc; it was shaped by the President before he took office and was expressed time and again in communications to his friends. Thus despite his conciliatory statements in his Inaugural Address, which were cited ever after as a lofty expression of nonpartisanship, he did not design to unite all Federalists with Republicans—only those he felt he could win over to his purposes.

Noble sentiments alone did not impel Thomas Jefferson. He acted partly out of a deep and abiding anger toward the Hamiltonian and other high Federalists. It was hard for Jefferson to hate anyone, but even after attaining the psychological and political security of the presidency, he began referring to his old enemies as a “ravenous crew,” as witch burners, gross liars and slanderers, “tyrannical.” Granted that Jefferson designed some of these words to gratify Republican correspondents more extreme than he; still, they reveal that he had been seared by Adamsites and Hamiltonians far more deeply than he had admitted to others, or perhaps to himself.

To a somewhat smaller circle Jefferson confided his plan to detach moderate Federalists from their “monarchical” leaders and consolidate them in a new Republican party coalition. A week before his inauguration he was noting that “patriotic” Federalists, alarmed by the specter of dissolution during the election crisis of February 1801, “separated from their congressional leaders, and came over to us.” But his purpose was clear. “If we can but avoid shocking their feelings by unnecessary acts of severity against their late friends, they will in a little time cement & form one mass with us, & by these means harmony & union be restored to our country…,” he wrote a friend three weeks after the inauguration. In midsummer he was advising a Massachusetts lieutenant that the “Essex junto, & their associate monocrats in every part of the Union” must be stripped of all the means of influence.

His determination only rose as the high Federalist chorus swelled against him. By early the next year he was telling Du Pont de Nemours that the session of Congress had indeed consolidated the “great body of well meaning citizens together, whether federal or republican, heretofore called.” But, he added, “I do not mean to include royalists or priests. Their opposition is immovable. But they will be vox et preterea nihil, leaders without followers.”

Did Jefferson, then, want the Federalist party to die? He not only wanted it, he expected it and planned for it. He predicted that by the end of his second year in office the “federal candidate would not get the vote of a single elector in the U.S.” in a straight party fight. He even feared that the Senate would become too Republican in the next election, for “a respectable minority is useful as censors.” He did not want this to be a Federalist opposition, “being the bitterest cup of the remains of Federalism rendered desperate and furious by despair.” But it was not clear just how the new opposition would come into being.

Jefferson was as skillful and hardheaded in carrying out his grand strategy as he was brilliant and determined in conceiving it. That strategy dominated his first executive action, the choice of a Cabinet. Picking James Madison for Secretary of State was inescapable: the two men had worked together in marvelous and creative harmony for decades. Madison was pre-eminently a moderate Republican, the kind Jefferson liked; as commanding in intellect as he was unimpressive in bearing and appearance, he had an understanding of legal and constitutional nuances, and perhaps of diplomacy, that Jefferson lacked.

Apart from this Virginian, the President was determined to bring to his Cabinet Republican leaders from the middle and eastern states. The choice of Albert Gallatin for Secretary of the Treasury seemed almost as obvious as that of Madison: the Pennsylvanian had effectively marshaled Republican support in the House after Madison’s departure; he took a proper Republican approach of frugality and prudence to spending and other fiscal matters; he was only forty and energetic; and the “Frenchified” aspect of the man—his Geneva birth, pronounced accent, and “Gallic features”—that provoked his enemies was no deterrent to the President. But for his other two cabinet appointments Jefferson was determined to reach into the Federalist heartland of New England, even at the expense of choosing less notable men, so that he might achieve political and geographical balance and also attract moderate Federalists to his cause. He picked Levi Lincoln of Worcester, Massachusetts, an experienced Republican politician, for Attorney General, and Henry Dearborn, an old Revolutionary soldier of Maine (still part of Massachusetts), for Secretary of War. The President had such trouble finding a Secretary of the Navy—who would want to head a navy destined for Republican shrinkage?—that the post remained unfilled for some time.

A harsher test of Jefferson’s strategy of coalition and consolidation was patronage, or what he called “appointments & disappointments.” As usual, the latter seemed far to outnumber the former. It was hard enough to ascertain dependably which high Federalists should be removed, which good Republicans should be hired without, as Jefferson said, “me donn [ant] un ingrat, et cent ennemis.” The best he could do was to ask the simple questions “Is he honest? Is he capable? Is he faithful to the Constitution?” It was much harder to avoid alienating moderate Federalists whom the President wished to bring over to his party, without antagonizing Republican stalwarts hungry for loaves and fishes. Angry though he was over the near-exclusion of Republicans from office under Washington and Adams, and furious over Adams’ packing Federalists into administrative and judicial offices just before leaving the presidency, he dismissed relatively few men from office, but usually waited for the slow process of death and resignation to do its work before installing Republicans. Still, he picked only Republicans.

The President’s removal of a collector in New Haven roused a great furor. New Haven “was the Vatican City of New England Federalism,” Smelser has written, “under Pope Timothy Dwight,” president of Yale, whose younger brother had described respectable Republicans as “Drunkards and Whores / And rogues in scores.” Answering a protest from New Haven merchants over the removal, Jefferson wrote: “This is a painful office; but it is made my duty, and I meet it as such. I proceed in the operation with deliberation & inquiry, that it may injure the best men least, and effect the purposes of justice & public utility with the least private distress; that it may be thrown, as much as possible, on delinquency, on oppression, on intolerance, on incompetence, on ante-revolutionary adherence to our enemies….” The President did not exaggerate his effort; he spent endless hours corresponding about possible appointments, weighing qualifications, but always with an eye to their place in his political strategy.

Jefferson made no pretense of one-man leadership. He gave his Cabinet a central role in decision making, especially in foreign relations. He worked so closely with his Secretaries of State and of the Treasury that this troika provided a case study in collective leadership. Madison and Gallatin were important to him in different ways. While he consulted with Madison on almost all major political and diplomatic matters, he felt thoroughly at home in foreign policy; he saw Gallatin less often, but depended on his expertise more, for Jefferson would never have tried to serve as his own Secretary of the Treasury. Cabinet members in turn worked closely with congressional leaders and with party heads both in Washington and in the states. But no one doubted who was chief of government.

The President derided the notion that public administration had to be complex and obscure. “There are no mysteries in it,” he said; when difficulties arose, “common sense and honest intentions will generally steer through them.” His administrative technique appeared to be simplicity itself: canvassing of opinion outside the mansion, intensive consultation with cabinet and staff members, clear instructions couched in polite but firm language. He did not care for formality. Forms, he said, “should yield to whatever should facilitate business.”

Certainly the President’s mansion was more a place of business than of pomp and circumstance during these Republican years. It stood bulky and Ionic, without the porticos that later gave it more style and proportion. The great stone house was “big enough for two emperors, one pope and the grand lama in the bargain,” a newspaper observed, and Jefferson, his steward, his housekeeper, several servants, and his small executive staff hardly filled it. The President worked quietly in his library at the southwest corner of the main floor, amid tables large and small, a few chairs, and a letterpress which made copies of the letters that Jefferson wrote with his own hand. For a time his main aide was Meriwether Lewis, a young army officer from Albemarle County in Virginia.

No First Lady graced the President’s house, as Martha Washington had in New York, or hung her clothes out to dry in downstairs rooms, as Abigail Adams had in Philadelphia. Jefferson occupied the house for almost a year before his daughters visited him there. James and Dolley Madison stayed with him for a few weeks before setting up housekeeping on their own, and Jefferson had other guests and held some grand dinners, but most of the time the place stood cold and quiet. Federalists charged that he collected rent from his guests. Jefferson’s only consolation lay in frequent visits to Monticello. Accustomed to the breezes on his mountain, he positively refused to stay in the malarial and bilious “tidewater” of Washington during the hot summer months.

Washington, Jefferson wrote a friend, “may be considered as a pleasant country-residence, with a number of neat little villages scattered around within the distance of a mile and a half, and furnishing a plain and substantially good society.” He was happy to be free, he wrote his son-in-law, “from the noise, the heat, the stench and the bustle of a close built town.” Few would have agreed with the President’s view of either the city or the social life. One “village” consisted of the President’s house and an unsightly collection of temporary government buildings and private houses extending west into Georgetown. Flanking the mansion were the brick Treasury building and the combined State and War building. A mile and a half to the east was another “village,” dominated by the huge but incomplete Capitol and radiating out in a corona of avenues, most of which were still muddy trails lined by rows of stumps.

Pennsylvania Avenue, connecting the two governmental villages, was a “streak of mud newly cut through woods and alder swamps,” in Irving Brant’s words. In years to come that avenue would come to symbolize a large distance between the executive and legislative branches, as Pierre L’Enfant had planned in laying it out. In 1801 it symbolized the closeness of the two branches, contrary to a Constitution designed to separate them, and the legislative supremacy of a man who had long extolled the importance of checks and balances between President and Congress.

On the face of it, the legislative tasks facing Jefferson seemed far less daunting than those confronting his predecessors. Washington and Adams had needed congressional support for major fiscal programs and foreign policy initiatives. Jefferson’s immediate goals were to repeal much of what had been done—to cut federal spending and the national debt, to repeal the Judiciary Act of 1801, to break away from alliances that might entangle the nation in foreign affairs, to alter Hamilton’s banking program. Yet even this task of alteration and demolition would call for unity and discipline among congressional Republicans, some of whom liked particular fiscal policies, especially military spending in their own districts. The trouble was, the President complained to his friend Du Pont de Nemours, Hamilton’s policies had departed from “true principles” at the very start. “We can pay off his debt in 15 years: but we can never get rid of his financial system.” He would do the best he could.

Federalists warned of the Jeffersonian “phalanxes” in Congress but the Republican majorities in each house were mainly composed of fiercely independent, individualistic, and often unruly men. They had been accustomed to fighting the executive, not cooperating with him, a posture that was indeed an article of their Republican faith. Other factors encouraged disunity in Congress: “weak party organization,” as Robert Johnstone says, “a high rate of turnover, divergent constituency obligations, an eighteenth-century ethos of independence from party control, rules of procedure that encouraged dissent, and ‘patterned social avoidance’ among men of different regions.” Members of Congress were cut off from one another as a result of living in small boardinghouses scattered through the city, another scholar has pointed out, and acoustics were so bad in the House that representatives could not always hear one another when they did convene. Some time later, John Quincy Adams described the “typical” Republican legislator as “a mixture of wisdom and Quixotism.…His delight was the consciousness of his own independence, and he thought it heroic virtue to ask no favors. He therefore never associated with any members of the Executive and would have shuddered at the thought of going to the drawing room.”

How could the new President unify a group of men so sovereign in outlook, so dependent on their state parties and local constituencies, so independent politically of him? Here again, Jefferson had carefully worked out his tactics: to gratify the self-esteem of legislators by deferring to the doctrine of legislative supremacy; in fact to insert himself in the life of legislators and the crucial phases of legislation and thus to become the real “chief legislator”; to do so not by seeking to influence Congress from the outside as chief executive but from inside as “chief of party” by involving himself centrally in the Republican leadership and loyalties of the two houses; and to do all this so quietly and adroitly, by working through congressional and party leaders and asking them to keep his involvement secret, that Federalists would not be aroused, nor Republicans feel threatened.

It was not hard for Jefferson to treat Congress and congressmen with exquisite courtesy and deference; it was his natural style. As a Republican long pledged to the doctrine of the legislature as the “first among equals” in the tripartite balance, he found it easy to defer to Congress in his official posture. “Guided by the wisdom and patriotism of those to whom it belongs to express the legislative will of the nation,” he had said in response to the notification of his election, “I will give to that will a faithful execution.” He consulted with individual legislators at length, to gain their views and information as well as to influence them, and he cleared with them letters that came to the mansion from their districts. If he had few jobs to disburse, he had another means of pleasuring congressmen far from the comforts of home—his dinners. These were superb in cuisine and especially in wines, for the President had an excellent French chef, a large collection of French and Italian recipes, and a penchant for introducing new foods from Europe. But even more, the dinners were occasions for lively talk, for Jefferson planned them that way. He brought together officials, visitors from abroad, diplomats, scientists, and senators and representatives carefully chosen from different boardinghouses to create the most fruitful blend, politically and intellectually—though he did not mix Republicans and Federalists, and invited the latter strictly by boarding-house bloc.

Few enjoyed Jefferson’s dinners more than John Quincy Adams, the increasingly independent Federalist, or made better reports of them. “I had a good deal of conversation with the President,” he wrote after a dinner in 1804. “The French Minister just arrived had been this day first presented to him, and appears to have displeased him by the profusion of gold lace on his clothes. He says they must get him down to a plain frock coat, or the boys in the street will run after him as a sight.” Three years later Adams reported on “one of the agreeable dinners I have had at Mr. Jefferson’s,” among a company chiefly of congressmen. The talk ran from wines to philosophy to Fulton’s steamboat and torpedoes to “oils, grasses, beasts, birds, petrifactions, and incrustations.” “Mr. Jefferson said that the Epicurean philosophy came nearest to the truth, in his opinion, of any ancient system of philosophy, but that it had been misunderstood and misrepresented. He wished the work of Gassendi concerning it had been translated.…I mentioned Lucretius. He said that was only a part—only the natural philosophy. But the moral philosophy was only to be found in Gassendi.”

The President’s involvement in congressional policy making was continuous and pervasive. He and his officials provided congressmen with “material” ranging from information to actual drafts of bills. Department heads testified before congressional committees and remained to help draft bills in executive sessions. And of course the President always had the right to veto legislation, but the practice of a veto on purely policy grounds was not yet established, and Jefferson did not exercise it or—evidently—threaten to exercise it. More important, he worked closely with congressional and party leaders on the Hill, calling them into frequent conferences, helping them deal with obstacles, talking with other politicians who might help the congressional leaders and hence him. The President encouraged likely Republicans to run for Congress and to try for leadership positions. By no means did things always go smoothly, especially in the first year or two. But he achieved unsurpassed cooperation in Congress by throwing into the balance every ounce of his political skill, his personal charm, and his moral authority—authority all the greater because this was Jefferson who was asking for support.

The President covered his political hand by planning on secrecy and by insisting on it. His obsession with secrecy might have been considered pathological if he had not experienced serious political setbacks in earlier days when letters of his had been intercepted and exposed. Repeatedly he asked his political lieutenants not to trust the confidentiality of the post office and to keep his letters to themselves, or share them only with trusted persons. He concealed his interference in Congress mainly, however, by intervening indirectly through his leaders there. And those leaders well knew, from correspondence and conversations, what the President wanted.

To conclude that Jefferson dominated the legislative process largely because he dominated the Republican party in Congress—that he was chief legislator mainly because he was party chief—is to assume that the Republican party itself was strong and united in both House and Senate. Historians have long debated this question. In the last century, influenced by Federalist politicians and journalists who suspected that the President was marshaling his legislative troops like a Prussian drillmaster, chroniclers saw a powerful party caucus at work. More recent and more sophisticated analysis has challenged this conclusion, but may have overreacted to the previous Federalist bias. Certainly the party systems both in the nation and in Congress were primitive affairs compared to those that emerged later. The congressional party did not openly elect leaders and whips and other officials, or impose formal discipline, or choose policy or steering committees. But an informal congressional party has been identified, comprising Republican senators and representatives powerfully committed to certain values and policies, a group of congressional leaders in close touch with the rank and file in both houses and with the President, and a rudimentary but influential caucus system. Those caucuses were so informal, and they met so secretly because of the bias against “party machinations,” that evidence of their existence has been elusive and scattered. But some kind of meeting was held—serving the function of a caucus without being labeled by that name—to unify the positions of Republican lawmakers before major legislative actions on the Hill. A formal flow chart is not necessary, as Johnstone says, for a group of persons to act as a cohesive and effective force. It was largely through this loosely organized but zealous and well-led majority of Republican senators and representatives that Jefferson exerted his legislative leadership. He was chief executive and chief legislator among a collective of executive and legislative chiefs.

TO LOUISIANA AND BEYOND

Europe savored a moment of peace at the start of the new century. During the lull France and England, the great mobiles of European politics, swung in uneasy balance with each other. Surrounding these central mobiles were lesser ones, Spain, Holland, Naples, Prussia—suspended in arrays of alliances and animosities.

Each mobile was a cluster of satellite mobiles, a quivering balance of domestic politics embracing royal pride and ambition, party and leadership rivalries, military chieftains, religious establishments, parliamentary combat, economic interests. Conflict within satellite mobiles often set the parent mobile to trembling and pulsating, causing disturbances throughout the system. Usually the arching balances of the whole system righted themselves, but there was always the threat that the tempest of war would leave the balance of mobiles shattered.

A far-off mobile in this precarious array of balances was the land called Louisiana. In the very different perspective of Americans, Louisiana was their western borderland, nearby but mysterious, filled with endless forests and swamps, peopled by roving Indian tribes, and rich in fertile land for settlers moving west. Fronting this area was the legendary Mississippi, rising somewhere in the far north, swelling miles-wide and shallow as it approached the Gulf of Mexico, and providing a boulevard to the world for husbandmen and flatboatmen throughout the area. To Westerners, Madison said, the Mississippi was everything—“the Hudson, the Delaware, the Potomac, and all the navigable rivers of the Atlantic States, formed into one stream.” And at the foot of the Mississippi lay New Orleans, a place of exotic peoples and erotic temptations, a commercial center vitally necessary to American traders for depositing their goods for transshipment abroad—and a city owned by the Spanish and ruled over by a formidable Spanish intendant.

The vast area both to the east and the west of the Mississippi was “Republican country.” As Virginia landowners bought and sold “Western” acres by the tens of thousands, as Virginia frontiersmen and settlers moved down the long valleys into Kentucky and Tennessee and western Georgia, Republican ideas and politics had moved with them. Virginia politicians had cultivated ties with the Kentuckians who were seeking political self-government and economic development. Jefferson had always had a “peculiar confidence in the men from the western side of the mountains,” in his words, as they had had in him. Kentucky had become a state in 1792, and Tennessee in 1796, but western Georgia was far behind. Not until 1802 would Georgia cede to the nation the whole region between its present western border and the Mississippi, thus creating most of the states of Alabama and Mississippi.

Virginia Republicans in 1801 were watching with hope the rising new empire to the west, watching with scorn the quarrelsome old empires to the east. But sometimes to see west they had to look east. In his Inaugural Address, Jefferson had expanded complacently on America’s favored situation: “Kindly separated by nature, and a wide ocean, from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe.…Possessing a chosen country, with room enough for all descendants to the 100th & 1000th generation.…” Within three weeks he was writing a friend, “It ought to be the very first object of our pursuits to have nothing to do with the European interests and politics.…we have nothing to fear from them in any form.” Within a few weeks the President was reading reports that Spain was ceding Louisiana and the Floridas to the French. Napoleon on our rear borders! The Atlantic suddenly did not seem so wide.

“It is a policy very unwise in both, and very ominous to us,” the President wrote Governor Monroe. A French reacquisition of Louisiana would make the area a pawn of the fiercest rivalry in the West—that between France and England. It would place French armies athwart America’s western frontier—French armies now under the control of a man Jefferson increasingly detested, Napoleon Bonaparte. It would enable the French to choke off American commerce in New Orleans or farther north.

Jefferson already had reason to fear Bonaparte’s imperial ambitions. The First Consul was organizing an expedition to Saint Domingue in order to overthrow the regime of General Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black leader who had seized power after a bloody slave rebellion. Jefferson did not object to the attempt to suppress Toussaint—he feared the implications of an independent black republic—but would Bonaparte stop there? If the French ruler could send 20,000 soldiers to the West Indies, could he not dispatch other armies to Louisiana, a far greater temptation? And if France regained Louisiana, would there be no reaction from England, which had driven them out of the area years beforehand which still commanded the seas?

Federalists demanded that the President take aggressive action to forestall French and English imperial ambitions on the western frontier, but Jefferson preferred the methods of diplomacy. He had dispatched the seasoned New York Republican leader and diplomat Robert Livingston to Paris as Minister to France, with instructions to dissuade the French from acquiring Louisiana if the deal with Spain had not already gone through, or, if it had, to look into the possibility of American acquisition of Spanish Florida. Livingston found Talleyrand elusive and evasive. By April 1802, when the cession of Louisiana to France seemed definite, Jefferson instructed Livingston to warn the French government that the “day that France takes possession of N. Orleans” is “the moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” The President now was practicing diplomacy with a mailed fist. Never wholly captive to his pacifist yearnings, he was during this period quietly strengthening American outposts along the western borders.

Even so, Jefferson was hardly reckoning with the imperial ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte. Frustrated by the British in the east, the First Consul was turning west to redeem French territory lost by the Bourbons and not recovered by the bellicose revolutionaries of the 1790s. His expedition to Saint Domingue had met with initial success; even Toussaint was now in French hands, albeit as the result of trickery. With that island and other parts of the West Indies back under French control, Napoleon’s “New France would extend its sheltering arms round the whole Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, taking in not only the islands but also Louisiana and the Floridas,” in Oscar Handlin’s summation. “Resting on a fulcrum at New Orleans, the two great areas of the empire could balance one another.” During the summer of 1802 Napoleon organized in Holland an armada to carry a huge army and his ambitions into Louisiana. He was delayed, however, by machinations within the Spanish court; only after Napoleon had promised Italian lands to the Queen’s brother was Louisiana ceded by Spain and the expeditionary force told to prepare to depart.

In the autumn of 1802, while this fleet was mobilizing, word reached Washington of an event in New Orleans that catalyzed American fears about the future of Louisiana. The Spanish intendant there had suddenly revoked the right to deposit goods in the city while awaiting their sale or shipment. It could be a potentially fatal blow to American exports. Mississippi traders and boatmen were wrathful, and Washington politicians indignant—and curious. Why had the intendant acted at this moment? Obviously, it must be part of the French plot. Later it was learned that the intendant was acting on orders from Spain. According to one theory, Napoleon was stalling on his promises to the Spanish court, offering the Queen not the province she wanted but other Italian lands, and to be turned over not to her brother but to her nephew; and the Queen was happy to find a way to complicate Napoleon’s future in Louisiana. Another view is simpler: the intendant was furious at American smugglers. But such reasonable views had little standing at the time. If Napoleon was organizing an expedition in Holland, he certainly would not be above provocations in the territory he hoped soon to occupy.

Jefferson and Madison stepped up their diplomatic counteroffensive by dispatching James Monroe to Paris to bolster Livingston’s efforts. This move would also placate some of the western firebrands, for Monroe, who was just ending his term as governor, had big landholdings in Kentucky, many friends and allies there and farther south and west, and a reputation as a spokesman for Westerners. The Federalists were already exploiting the situation by demanding action, so the President’s move could head them off as well. Monroe was about to leave for Kentucky to look after his interests there when the urgent presidential summons arrived:

Washington, Jan. 10, 1803

DEAR SIR,—I have but a moment to inform you that the fever into which the western mind is thrown by the affair at N. Orleans stimulated by the mercantile, and generally the federal interest threatens to overbear our peace. In this situation we are obliged to call on you for a temporary sacrifice of yourself, to prevent this greatest of evils in the present prosperous tide of our affairs. I shall to-morrow nominate you to the Senate for an extraordinary mission to France, and the circumstances are such as to render it impossible to decline; because the whole public hope will be rested on you.…

No Virginian could resist such a call, least of all Monroe. Soon he was receiving instructions—formal from Madison, informal but authoritative from the President. When Monroe, after waiting several weeks for Congress to authorize and finance the mission, finally sailed from New York early in March 1803, he carried with him instructions to offer almost $10 million for New Orleans, if need be, or at least to regain some advantages for American traders on the Mississippi.

On reaching Paris, however, the envoy extraordinary found the situation remarkably changed. Livingston had been patiently working on the French with offers and veiled threats, but with little effect; suddenly, to his astonishment, Talleyrand was sounding him out as to what the American government would pay for the entire colony. Napoleon had received two pieces of staggering news: his fleet had become icebound in Holland just as it was to sail for the occupation of Louisiana; and his army in Saint Domingue had been almost annihilated by yellow fever. With his hopes for a western empire vanishing, Napoleon was turning back to his main enemy, England. In one blow he could diminish the possibility of an Anglo-American alliance, perhaps gain a potential ally against Britain, and in any event pick up some much-needed cash.

Quickly Livingston and Monroe arranged terms with Napoleon’s Finance Minister: $11,250,000 for all of Louisiana, the United States to set aside $3,750,000 to pay for American claims against France; protection for Indian rights and for some commercial privileges for French traders. These terms—indeed, buying Louisiana at all—greatly exceeded the envoys’ instructions, but they had no doubt of Jefferson’s and the nation’s approbation. The Republican National Intelligencer, getting the news just before Independence Day, declared that this Fourth of July was a proud day for the President; not simply because of gaining vast and rich lands, but because “We have secured our rights by pacific means: truth and reason have been more powerful than the sword.”

This was Jefferson’s proudest boast too; “Peace is our passion,” he wrote an English friend. Federalists were skeptical and suspicious. “We are to give money of which we have too little for land of which we already have too much,” “Fabricus” wrote the Boston Columbian Centinel. This “great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians,” would be cut up into numberless states, so that Virginia could continue to lord it over all the other states—and all that cheap and fertile land would further depress land values in New England.

A “great waste,” unpeopled by whites—just where and what was Louisiana anyway? No one knew for sure. The tract lay between the Mississippi and the Rockies; it comprised over 800,000 square miles, and it would double the size of the United States. But the legal boundaries were those of whatever the French had ceded to Spain forty years before, and neither the French nor the Spanish could be, or would be, very precise. It was not clear at all whether the cession included West Florida and Texas. But for the moment Americans did not fuss over details; they celebrated one of the biggest real estate transactions in history with festivals and feasts, toasts and songs.

Jefferson’s brilliant success left him with a political boon and a constitutional dilemma. The Constitution contained no grant of authority to acquire territory, or to admit a territory to the Union and its inhabitants to citizenship. And Jefferson headed the party of strict and narrow construction of the Constitution. As usual, the President consulted widely on the matter, but his Cabinet was divided, Attorney General Lincoln doubting the power to acquire and Treasury Secretary Gallatin affirming an “inherent right” to do so. His friend Tom Paine took a view Jefferson might have expected from a man of eminent common sense: “The cession makes no alteration in the Constitution; it only extends the principles of it over a larger territory, and this certainly is within the morality of the Constitution.…

Jefferson did not agonize long about the right to acquire; the need to act was vital and palpable. “A strict observance of the written laws,” he wrote some time later, “is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.…”

The constitutional question of citizenship and statehood was harder to settle, especially now that the Federalists, originally the party of broad construction, were taking a narrow view, while many Republicans were switching to the opposite side. Jefferson drafted some proposed amendments, one of which read simply, “Louisiana as ceded by France to the U.S. is made a part of the U.S. Its white inhabitants shall be citizens, and stand, as to their rights & obligations, on the same footing with other citizens of the U.S. in analogous situations.” Slowly he swung away from the idea of a constitutional amendment as he faced several imperative facts. Livingston warned that Napoleon—who had the dictator’s luxurious power of being able to shift his nation’s strategy from east to west almost overnight—was growing impatient with delay. The amending process laid out in the Constitution was long and tricky. Few seemed deeply concerned about the constitutional problem—even the Federalists were moving to different grounds—and his party was pressing for action. With a final bow to constitutional scruples, the President said he was prepared, “if our friends think differently,” to “acquiesce with satisfaction, confident that the good sense of our country will correct the evil of construction when it shall produce ill effects.”

Congress was eager to act. The Senate, after four days’ debate, approved the treaty by a vote of 24 to 7. Both houses of Congress shortly passed, by heavy majorities, a measure authorizing the President to take possession of the Louisiana territory. But now Jefferson too, with the formalities over, was eager to move ahead. And he was consumed with curiosity about the new land—its soil, appearance, vegetables, animals, mountains, climate, Indian population, minerals, everything. The nation had bought Louisiana; now someone would have to find out just what had been acquired.

It was a lackluster start for an expedition destined to become an epic. Three workaday boats bobbed gently on the Missouri: a fifty-five-foot keelboat, carrying one square sail and twenty-two oars, and decked over at the bow, with a cabin astern; and two low, open boats called pirogues, one of seven oars and the other of six. During the day a gang of American soldiers and French rivermen finished packing the boats with 14 bales of presents for Indians, arms and ammunition, 28 bushels of “parch meal,” 20 barrels of flour, seven barrels of salt, 50 kegs of pork, 50 bushels of meal, drugs and medicine, tools and scientific instruments. The co-leader of the expedition, Captain Meriwether Lewis, was not even there; he had gone to St. Louis on official business and, it was said, to dally with the girls in a final fling. But “Captain” William Clark—he was actually a lieutenant—was very much there, closely directing operations. Also present were Clark’s slave York, a handsome man colored a deep ebony, Private Cruzat and his violin, one sergeant, one corporal, 27 men, “7 French,” and Clark’s dog Scannon, a Newfoundland.

The expedition did not get under way until late afternoon of this day, May 14, 1804, and even with the help of a “jentle brease” moved upstream only four miles. That night it rained, leaving all fires extinguished, and “Some Provisions on the top of the Perogus wet,” as Clark wrote in his journal. The army landlubbers had loaded the boats heavily in the stern, so that the bow stuck up and ran up on logs and other snags in the river. But soon the weather turned fair, the boats were reloaded, Lewis rode overland to join the company, and the craft were passing between high bluffs and forested banks, all of which Lewis and Clark duly noted.

At last the dream was being realized—the dream of countless Frenchmen, Englishmen, and Spaniards, the dream of striking west from the northern reaches of the Missouri to the distant and mysterious alps, conquering these heights, and then moving down the coastal rivers to the Pacific. Rivermen, soldiers, trappers, and traders had penetrated the prairie lands, and Indians already lived there, but no one had broken through to the Pacific and brought back a record of the trip. For years Jefferson too had dreamed the dream, and now that he was President, and the issue of Louisiana and the western lands was coming to a head, he could act. Months before the purchase of Louisiana became a real possibility, he asked Congress for an appropriation of $2,500 “for the purpose of extending the external commerce of the United States.” His purpose rather was multifold: he wished to gain for America the English and French trade in “furs and peltry” but he was interested also in the political and military uses of an expedition, and as a naturalist he was eager to know more about the vast territory and to share his findings with other members of the American Philosophical Society.

Only resourceful and skillful men could lead such an expedition, and Jefferson felt he had found the ideal combination in Lewis and Clark. Both were young and vigorous Virginians, and experienced woodsmen, and both were good Republicans—Lewis ardently so. Of Lewis the President wrote long after that he was of “courage undaunted; possessing a firmness and perseverance of purpose…; careful as a father of those committed to his charge, yet steady in the maintenance of order and discipline; intimate with the Indian character, customs, and principles; habituated to the hunting life…honest, disinterested, liberal, of sound understanding, and a fidelity to truth.…” Jefferson could speak almost as warmly of Clark, whose family he knew well. They were men the President could guide, and he issued elaborate instructions for the expedition.

“The object of your mission,” he wrote Lewis on June 20, 1803, “is to explore the Missouri river, & such principal stream of it, as, by it’s course & communication with the water of the Pacific Ocean may offer the most direct & practicable water communication across the continent, for the purposes of commerce.” The mission, Jefferson said, had been communicated to the ministers in Washington from Spain, Britain, and France, the new owner of Louisiana. Beginning at the mouth of the Missouri, the explorers were to note the details of geography and river transportation; of the inhabitants’ possessions, languages, traditions, monuments, occupations, food, clothing, diseases and remedies, physical circumstances, religion, and morality; of the soil, produce, animals, minerals, climate, “the dates at which particular plants put forth or lose their flowers, or leaf, times of appearance of particular birds, reptiles, or insects.” The expedition was to be entirely pacific; Lewis was to “err on the side of your safety” in case of confrontation with superior forces, and to bring back his party safely, even if it be with less information.

Lewis spent months preparing for the expedition. He bought scientific instruments and medicine in Philadelphia, even consulting the famous Dr. Rush, had an iron boat built at the arsenal of Harpers Ferry, bought some dubious “portable soup,” and amassed hundreds of brooches, rings, earrings, beads, looking glasses, and even scalping knives as presents to Indians. He also acquired an air gun, an English import that, after being pumped up with air, could eject bullets more quickly than a Kentucky rifle could be loaded, wadded, and primed, but with power more to stun than to kill. From everyone he met he collected information on the western country. From frontier army posts he handpicked his men, most notably his co-commander William Clark, an old friend who had probably talked with Daniel Boone himself. Boating down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh, he gathered up more men, including Clark at Louisville, and then turned out of the Ohio and up the Mississippi to the St. Louis area, where the party spent the winter of 1803-04 building boats.

And now, in the spring of 1804, they were pushing their way west against the current of the mighty Missouri. It was hard going. Boats continued to snag on invisible obstacles. Tow ropes parted. A mast broke. Mosquitoes drew blood. Stomachs upheaved and boils broke out. Shore parties fought their way through dense forests and thickets as they hunted game and botanical specimens and herded the expedition’s horses. At night the party usually camped in tents by the river, after trading and dickering with friendly Indians. It was not a company of saints or heroes. Men returned to camp drunk from nearby forays, spoke “disrespectfully” to their commanders, went about without leave, slept on guard duty, stole whiskey from the company keg, even deserted. But this was an army unit and discipline was swift and sure. After courts-martial, men were lashed with switches 25 to 100 times on their bare backs. And painfully, steadily, determinedly, they moved upstream through the Dakotas.

The expedition stopped repeatedly for long powwows with Indian chiefs. Lewis had clear instructions from Jefferson about dealing with the natives: to “treat them in the most friendly & conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit; allay all jealousies as to the object of your journey, satisfy them of it’s innocence, make them acquainted with the position, extent, character, peaceable & commercial dispositions of the U.S., of our wish to be neighborly, friendly & useful to them, & of our dispositions to a commercial intercourse with them.” A chief wishing to visit Washington would be conveyed there at public expense. If any of the chiefs “should wish to have some of their young people brought up with us, & taught such arts as may be useful to them, we will receive, instruct & take care of them.” Visits of chiefs or young people “would give some security to your own party,” Jefferson added.

In fact, the explorers found the Indians on the whole friendly but most perplexing. Otos, Omahas, Missouris, Sioux, Pawnees, Poncas, Arikaras…the tribes seemed of endless number and variety, and many were divided into complex subgroups. The tribes along the river seemed to coexist in near-anarchy; Sioux chiefs thought they were at war with twenty tribes and at peace with eight, but they were not sure. To the unknowing Americans, Indian behavior seemed erratic and unpredictable. Some of the natives were friendly, some hostile; some thieving and some honest; some abstemious, some sottish; some communicative, some not. At best communication was poor, in part because of the numberless dialects. Lewis had a set technique for dealing with the natives: to announce at a parley that he had been sent by the great white father to assert American sovereignty and to receive the fealty of the red children; then to distribute American medals and flags and lavish gifts of beads, cloth, trinkets, and badges.

But two cultures were meeting along the banks of the Missouri, and they often clashed. The whites were appalled by the natives’ craving for the more putrid meat, even the intestines and offal of long-decaying animals; appalled and delighted by their definition of hospitality as providing guests with food, presents, and “temporary wives,” most often the sisters or spouses of their hosts; amazed by their ability to play, stark naked, lacrosse on ice at 25 degrees below zero. The Indians for their part gaped at these creatures with white skins and hair all over their faces; and gaped even more at the black man York. In village after village natives crowded around the slave; some would wet their fingers and try to rub away his blackness to find the “natural” color underneath. The Indians were dismayed by some of the whites’ behavior. An Arikara chief said, after watching a flogging, that it was wrong to humiliate persons like that; the chief said that in his nation, according to Clark’s report, they “never whiped even their Children from their burth.” In such cases, the chief added, they would simply put the man to death.

After wintering in well-fortified huts at the great bend of the Missouri in (present) North Dakota, the Americans struck out in the spring of 1805 toward the western mountains. The going became more and more arduous and perilous as the river narrowed. The big pirogue had to be abandoned, as the men continued in canoes and keelboats. They coped with fearsome grizzlies, rattlesnakes, exhausting portages around falls, overturned boats, deep-biting mosquitoes, scanty game and hence inadequate food. They were now in almost unknown country, and desperately anxious to find the best route to avoid being caught in the high mountains in the winter. They were guided by long reconnoiters of Missouri tributaries and also by a new member of the party, Sacagawea, the very young wife of a Frenchman who also joined the expedition. Captured by the Minnetarees a few years earlier and traded from warrior to warrior and finally to the white trader, the squaw-wife vaguely remembered some of the territory of the upper reaches of the Missouri. Pregnant at the time, she bore her baby stoically on the trip and carried him until the end.

Toiling up through the mountain valleys, desperately making friends with Indian tribes to gain information on passages west, the explorers in a final convulsive effort made their way through the mountain passes of the continental divide, and groped for and found the tributaries of the Columbia River. Boating down the roaring Columbia was perilous but at least comparatively rapid, and by late fall the party reached the coast and stared, elated, at the Pacific. After enduring a wet and depressing Oregon winter, they headed back east over the Rockies and then split in two, as Lewis followed the Missouri back and Clark led a party along the Yellowstone, all in an attempt to bring back to Mr. Jefferson as many observations and specimens as possible. Hardly a day on the return trip, as on the outward one, was free of troubles—illness, skirmishes with Indians, lost or stolen horses, encounters with animals, bad falls from horses or cliffs—but the two parties reunited on the Missouri and then moved rapidly down the muddy river to St. Louis, and home.

The expedition had been extraordinarily successful, an almost unbelievable combination of planning, skill, resourcefulness, courage, persistence, faith, and colossal luck. Despite the endless perils, ranging from grizzly bears to venereal disease, not a man had been lost, save for a victim of what was apparently appendicitis. The trip was a rare act of leadership on the part of Lewis and Clark, the kind of leadership that challenges, inspires, goads, and finally elevates followers, until they too become leaders. The two men, operating in remarkable harmony as coequals, turned out to be near-perfect choices to head the expedition, but success lay too with “ordinary” men who could make their own boats and shelter and moccasins and clothes and ammunition, with a slave who could cook, with a young Indian squaw who could help guide and translate. The journey was a monument to the potentials of the common people whom Jefferson idealized.

In St. Louis, early on the day after arriving, Lewis tore some blank sheets from his journal and wrote to the President:

“In obedience to your orders we have penetrated the Continent of North America to the Pacific Ocean and sufficiently explored the interior of the country to affirm that we have discovered the most practicable communication which dose exist across the continent.” Lewis had journeyed east, to Charlottesville, before he received Jefferson’s reply:

“I received, my dear sir, with unspeakable joy your letter of Sep. 23 announcing the return of yourself, Capt. Clarke & your party in good health to St. Louis. The unknown scenes in which you were engaged, & the length of time without hearing of you had begun to be felt awfully.…” The President did not exaggerate. As the months had passed and fears mounted that the whole expedition had been lost to cold or starvation or Indians, he had grieved over his responsibility for the probable fate of these young men. Now they were back—and with all those specimens!

CHECKMATE: THE FEDERALIST BASTION STANDS

As good Virginia Republicans, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were pleased to find on returning home in 1806 that their party and their patron had prospered. The Republican party was dominant in the presidency, in Congress, and in most of the state executive offices and legislatures. Unanimously renominated by the Republican congressional caucus early in 1804, Jefferson had gone on to defeat Charles Cotesworth Pinckney by the lopsided vote of 162 to 14. The Federalist candidate had lost his own state and all of New England save for Connecticut. Yet if most of the old Federalist strongholds were in ruins, a most powerful bastion of a different kind remained for the party of Washington and Adams and Pinckney. There the President had sustained a defeat, the magnitude of which was hardly recognizable even to Jefferson himself.

That defeat had begun with an incident during the days of transition between Presidents Adams and Jefferson. In his famous “midnight appointments,” Adams stayed up late—probably to about 10 P.M.—on the eve of Jefferson’s Inaugural, busily signing commissions that would provide jobs for a host of deserving Federalists. The next day, after John Marshall swore Jefferson into the presidency, the Chief Justice at the request of the new President stayed on briefly as Secretary of State until James Madison could take over. And so it happened that a good Federalist still was running the State Department when John Adams’ “midnight” commissions came over to the department to be duly sent out to the waiting appointees. But Marshall had never been wholly attentive to detail, and there was much on his mind that day, since he was in the remarkable situation of serving as both Chief Justice and chief cabinet member. He neglected to send out a number of the commissions, and some time later Jefferson, who happened to be at the State Department, found the commissions there, still lying on a table.

With elation the President realized what he held in his hands. He was already angry at Adams’ last-minute effort to pack the government with Federalists—the “one act of Mr. Adams’s,” he later wrote Abigail Adams, which “ever gave me a moment’s personal displeasure.” He was also provoked by the fact that neither Washington nor Adams had appointed a single Republican to the entire federal judiciary, and by the judiciary Act of 1801, which the Federalists had rushed through Congress just before Adams left office and the Federalists lost control of the legislature. That act had relieved the justices of circuit court duty, created sixteen new circuit court judges, and reduced the number of Supreme Court justices from six to five at the next vacancy—which meant that the new President would be delayed indefinitely in making his first high court appointment. What to do about this kind of court packing? Jefferson resolved to have the Judiciary Act repealed as soon as possible. He would make a few recess appointments of his own. And he would issue pardons to persons punished under the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Meantime, here were these undelivered commissions. Why deliver them? He instructed Secretary of State Madison not to. Of all Jefferson’s countermoves against his foes’ judiciary packing, this seemed the easiest and most innocuous. It turned out to be the most consequential.

At this point Republican leadership suspected that the high Federalists, beaten at the polls, were already plotting under Marshall to entrench themselves in the judiciary. The Republicans were quite right, except that this was no secret plot but rather an open, deliberate, carefully worked out strategy. And certainly Marshall was the leader. Even apart from his hostility to Republicans—especially Republicans in his own state of Virginia—he had long hoped that the federal judiciary would take its rightful place as one of three coordinate but independent branches of the new government. Somehow that had not happened. The first Chief Justice, John Jay, was an illustrious Federalist leader who had felt that serving as United States Minister to the Court of St. James’s and even campaigning (successfully) for governor of New York were wholly compatible with holding his high judicial office. His successor, Oliver Ellsworth, had also been Minister to France. No harm had seemed to result, since the court heard few cases and rarely sought to exercise much influence. But Marshall was resolved to change all this. And now he had tenfold reason to do so, for the fanatical Republicans had taken over both the executive and legislative branches, and as his fellow Federalist Gouverneur Morris admitted, in “a heavy gale of adverse wind” they could hardly “be blamed for casting many anchors to hold their ship through the storm.” The biggest anchor would lie in the Supreme Court, until the Federalists could regain control of both presidency and Congress.

Thus the scene was laid for a collision between Marshall and Jefferson. People marveled that two men so alike—both lawyers, Virginians, ex-revolutionaries, politicians, and blood cousins to boot—could so dislike each other. But political ambition and ideology can be thicker than blood. As a nationalist and conservative Marshall had been drawn steadily into the Federalists’ orbit, while Jefferson had clung to the party of states’ rights and popular sovereignty. Determined though he was to assert judicial independence, however, the Chief Justice knew that he had to move with care. Unlike the President, he had no troops, no arms. Unlike Congress, he and his brethren were not chosen by the voters.

At least he could take comfort from the justices, stout Federalists all, who flanked him on the high court. The most senior associate justice, William Cushing of Massachusetts, had faced down Shays’s rioters years before and was one of the few American judges still to wear a wig, English style. William Paterson of New Jersey, main author of the famous compromise between the large and small states in the 1787 constitutional convention, was a former governor of his state. Samuel Chase of Maryland, a “high Federalist” if there ever was one, a former Son of Liberty, long a nationalist, was a brilliant ideologue who had already mapped out the frontiers of national power in court decisions. Alfred Moore of North Carolina was a soldier and lawyer. Bushrod Washington was the first President’s nephew and an old and close friend of Marshall’s.

The Chief Justice could marshal and mobilize his brethren; he could not manipulate them. Like any leader of a political collectivity, he had to pick his way between the wings of his court. Chase, the judicial firebrand, warned him that his conscience had to be satisfied on the question of judicial power, even though “my ruin should be the certain consequence,” while the moderates on the court urged him to be cautious in antagonizing the political branches. Carefully the Chief Justice analyzed the way in which he could establish the dignity and power of the high court. Dignity was hard to come by, for the brethren convened in a drab room, with a small fireplace, in the Senate wing of the Capitol. But Marshall would bide his time and pick his judicial ground, however insignificant the particular case might be, for establishing the power of the court against the political branches.

Jefferson’s political position somewhat resembled Marshall’s. He too sought to mobilize the power of his party in the two political branches, but he also had to pick his way between the wings of his party in and outside Congress. Exhorting him to take on the Federalist judicial stronghold in direct political combat were a group of “sweeping Republicans” centered especially in the House. One of the most militant leaders, William Branch Giles of Virginia, warned that the great revolution was “incomplete, so long as that strong fortress is in possession of the enemy.” Judicial—and hence Federalist—power must be extirpated root and branch. Then too, party loyalists were demanding jobs, and nothing was more enticing than a lifelong judicial appointment.

On the other hand, moderate Republicans were loath to assault the judiciary, in part because they respected a measure of judicial independence, in part because they had little stomach for confronting John Marshall. Jefferson, moreover, was still intent on winning over and retaining the support of moderate Federalists, and nothing would drive them back into the hands of the Federalist party faster than a determined attack on the Supreme Court.

Typically, the President faced this problem by taking one step at a time. The first was obviously to repeal the partisan Federalist Judiciary Act of 1801. When Senator John Breckinridge of Kentucky, an old ally of Jefferson’s from the days of the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, introduced a repeal bill in January 1802, a furious battle broke out, as the Federalists accused their adversaries of seeking to destroy the independence of the judiciary. Clearly the Federalists would defend their bastion to the last man, but in the Senate voting the Republicans had the last man on the floor, as the bill passed 16 to 15. Giles and Randolph mobilized a strong vote for the bill in the House. Republicans in Congress relied not only on traditional arguments against “judicial tyranny” but on the fact of Jefferson’s clear support for the measure; this was the President’s bill.

The Republicans’ next step was even more controversial—a bill that by manipulating the scheduling of Supreme Court terms would in effect delay the next session of the high court for over a year, until February 1803. This maneuver would thwart any effort by the court to invalidate the repeal act before it could take effect. This bill passed too. Incensed and indignant, the justices considered the extreme step of refusing again to ride circuit and thus declaring the act unconstitutional. Chase in particular wanted to fight back, on the ground that this kind of meddling by President and Congress in the internal functions of the court would cripple it. Marshall was tempted to follow the strategy of defiance, but other members of the court took a more conciliatory position, he needed a united bench behind him, and he had to be sure of his ground. He waited for a better opportunity to strike back.

That opportunity was already developing in the form of a routine plea by a Washington-Federalist named William Marbury. An applicant for the position of justice of the peace, Marbury had had the misfortune to be one of Adams’ midnight appointments, the commission for which had fallen into Jefferson’s hands. What could be more natural for Marbury than to turn for relief to the court headed by the very man, John Marshall, who had neglected to deliver him his commission? Marbury went directly to the high court with a plea that the court order the Secretary of State—now James Madison—to deliver him his commission, on the ground that the original Judiciary Act of 1789 authorized the court, in situations when federal officials were not carrying out required “ministerial” acts, to issue writs of mandamus requiring those officials to perform the said duties.

Marshall pondered his dilemma. If he granted Marbury’s plea and issued the mandamus, Jefferson and Madison could ignore or reject it, on the grounds that the judicial branch was now interfering in the executive’s internal affairs. The court would then be powerless—no court official could make Madison deliver up a commission—and the federal judiciary would appear more impotent than ever. But if the court refused to issue the writ of mandamus, it would seem even more impotent, unable to perform one of its most elementary functions. What could Marshall do? Only a supreme judicial strategist could snatch victory from such a weak position.

On February 24, 1803, the members of the high court took their seats in the dingy basement chamber. “Oyez, oyez, oyez!” cried the clerk, as he admonished all gentlemen having business with the court to draw near and give attention. The clerk concluded sonorously: “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.” Marshall was about to do the latter. The Chief Justice was hardly a striking presence, with his tall, meager frame, sober dress, and hard, dry voice, but to many his logic seemed commanding. He began to read.

After a perfunctory start he reviewed the facts of the case. Then he posed three questions: Did Marbury have a right to the commission? If he had such a right, did he have a remedy under law against Madison’s denial? And if he had such a remedy, was it a mandamus from the Supreme Court? Marshall’s answer to the first two questions came in an hour-long lecture in which, using judicial language, he scolded the President and the Secretary of State for failing to conform to the law. Withholding of Marbury’s commission was an act “not warranted by law,” the Chief Justice stated flatly, “but violative of a vested legal right.” And certainly Marbury had a remedy. “The very essence of civil liberty” consisted in the “right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury,” Marshall intoned. Presidents and Secretaries of State, in short, had to obey the law just like anyone else. That raised the third question: Could the Supreme Court properly demand that Madison turn over the commission to Marbury?

The answer obviously seemed yes, and the moment seemed to have come for a dramatic confrontation between Jefferson and Marshall, between Republicans and Federalists, between the elected branches of the government and the appointed. But no; Marshall appeared to be off on another tack. Marbury had brought his case under an article of the 1789 Judiciary Act giving the Supreme Court original jurisdiction in certain cases. The Constitution, however, granted original jurisdiction to the court only in very limited kinds of cases and this, said Marshall, was not one of them. If the court followed the act, he said, it had jurisdiction, but if the court followed the Constitution, it did not have jurisdiction. Then the Chief Justice proceeded to what struck his Republican auditors as a patriotic stump speech, filled with self-evident statements and self-answering questions, all of which served his political purposes.

The people, he said, had “an original right to establish, for their future government, such principles as, in their opinion, shall most conduce to their own happiness.” In short, the people had a right to draw up a constitution. “The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written.” No one had doubted this. In a series of positive and sweeping sentences, the Chief justice argued the obvious—that the law must give way to the Constitution—and he largely assumed the far less obvious—that it was up to the courts to rule whether another branch of the government had exceeded the Constitution. As J. W. Peltason has written, in typical fashion Marshall stated the question in such a way that the answer was obvious. Should the Supreme Court enforce an unconstitutional law? Of course not. Should the Supreme Court decide, when Congress or President had violated the Constitution? Of course. So: Congress in the Judiciary Act of 1789 had sought to grant the court a power prohibited by the Constitution; that section of the act was unconstitutional; thus the court had no power to act in this situation, even though Madison had acted improperly; case dismissed.

There were two immediate and sharp reactions to the opinion. One was Marbury’s; the poor wretch had been denied his commission once because of Marshall’s evident negligence; now he was being denied his commission again, even though Marshall said he had a right to have it. The other was that of Republican leaders, and it was pure indignation. Jefferson and Madison could hardly be oblivious to their young rival who, from the sanctity of the bench, was lecturing them as to how they should conduct their executive department. The sharpest reaction came from the Republican press, which also saw Marshall’s opinion simply as a Federalist attack on the two Republican-controlled branches.

“The efforts of federalism to exalt the Judiciary over the Executive and Legislature,” said the Boston Independent Chronicle, “and to give that favorite department a political character & influence, may operate for a time to come, as it has already, to the promotion of one party and the depression of the other, but will probably terminate in degradation and the disgrace of the Judiciary.…The attempt of the Supreme Court of the United States, by a mandamus, to control the Executive functions, is a new experiment. It seems to be no less than a commencement of war between the constituted departments. The Court must be defeated and retreat from the attack; or march on, till they incur an impeachment and removal from office.”

But the Chronicle, and most Republicans, had missed the point. The court had not invaded the executive, only upbraided it. Indeed, it had invalidated the congressional act granting power to the court to take original jurisdiction in certain matters. What the Chief Justice had done was far more important, and its significance dawned only slowly on many Republicans. Marshall, in voiding an act of Congress signed by the President that gave the court a small power, was creating the great precedent of judicial invalidation of congressional action, and—the supreme strategic triumph for Marshall—was doing so in a way that the executive could not thwart. If Marshall had demanded that the executive take certain action, such as giving that commission to Marbury, Jefferson and Madison could have—and probably would have—coolly refused. But how could Jefferson & Co. stop the court from declining to exert power? The Republicans were helpless. To add salt to their wounds, the action of the court in reviewing one of its own alleged powers even comported with Jefferson’s notion of coordinate constitutionality by each branch in its sphere.

Of course, Marbury was only a weak precedent for judicial invalidation of laws passed by Congress and signed by the President. But that precedent was destined to become a time bomb, ticking away for half a century, until it would explode amid the most grievous crisis in American history.

It was ironic that it was Jefferson who should have failed to overcome the judicial bastion, for otherwise he was displaying a brilliance of political leadership that would hardly be matched in two hundred years of nationhood. If that brilliance blinded some Republicans to potential weaknesses in his leadership, its full import would not be evident for some years.

Jefferson led, first of all, as chief executive. Those who feared—or hoped—that the relaxed, ruminating, casual Virginia aristocrat would let others run his administration could hardly recognize the decisive figure in the White House. Jefferson did not need to bestride a white charger or bark out orders to assume the role of chief executive. He had a quiet air of authority, a steadfastness of purpose, a superb sense of timing, and the capacity to look ahead. His historic actions, such as the purchase of Louisiana, turned on many smaller decisions. Thus in sending Monroe abroad he did not waste time asking his friend whether he would like to go; knowing of Monroe’s public-spiritedness, he informed the retiring Virginia governor that public necessity demanded he go, that he was putting his nomination through the Senate, and that he expected to see him in Washington promptly. In moving quickly to dispatch Lewis and Clark to an area beset by imperial ambitions, he was risking heavy censure if the explorers met some disaster, but the luck of the audacious was with the President as well as with the expedition.

He defended executive independence and executive prerogative—withholding certain presidential papers, for example—as compatible with the system of checks and balances, and indeed as required by it. Only the President could command the necessary overview of the government, he felt; the President alone provided a “regulating power which would keep the machine in steady movement.” He demanded unity within the executive. He asked understanding from those who did not, like the chief executive, “command a view of the whole ground.” No Hamiltonian, he held as firm a conception of executive leadership as did Hamilton.

Still, this was collective executive leadership, with the President soliciting and responding to the advice of his Cabinet. Years later he boasted that his Cabinet of six persons had presented an example of harmony without parallel in history. “There never arose, during the whole time, an instance of an unpleasant thought or word between the members.” Harmony was produced by a modifying of one another’s ideas. “But the power of decision in the President left no object for internal dissension, and external intrigue was stifled in embryo by the knowledge which incendiaries possessed, that no division they could foment would change the course of the executive power.”

The leadership of the legislative branch that Jefferson had so indirectly but firmly exerted during his first two years in office carried on through the rest of his term. The basis of that leadership continued to be party solidarity, and the role of party was expanded after the Republicans gained strength in the “off-year” elections midway through the term. Party membership was still a bit ambiguous, but Jefferson estimated that Republicans outnumbered Federalists 103 to 39 in the House and 25 to 9 in the Senate. He continued to exert party influence more by persuasion than dictation, far more by skillful use of patronage and the party press than by public efforts to impose his ideas. He picked his way through the minefields of schismatic state politics by tolerating differences. “His ability to hold the Republican party together nationally when it was rocked by state party divisions and to retain the attachments of virtually all sides involved in the internal divisions of state politics,” Noble Cunningham concludes, “was an accomplishment that only a superb politician could achieve.”

The Jeffersonians’ party strategy continued to be the pre-emption of the middle ground, where all but “sweeping” Republicans and the highest of “high Federalists” could meet and join hands. The President carefully doled out appointments to Republican moderates, while leaving Federalist moderates in office where feasible. But Jefferson’s appeal transcended party. His ultimate political strategy was to turn to the people—or at least the active citizens among them—because he respected them and believed in them and expected much from them. He was one of those rare leaders who, in responding to people’s fundamental wants and needs, aspirations and expectations, and in pursuing some powerful vision or goal, transcend the passing eddies of public opinion, and even more, educate the popular will, sensing authentic but unexpressed wants and needs in the people. That is the ultimate engagement between leader and led, and that kind of leadership Jefferson demonstrated in his program, his methods, and his persona.

Yet, the very success of the Jeffersonian leadership carried the seeds of new crisis. Great leadership is forged in the crucible of conflict, as the careers of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams had so amply demonstrated. What happens, then, when leadership succeeds so well, by mobilizing the support of so many of the people, that conflict either dwindles or is displaced into extra-constitutional, even violent arenas? What happens, in the Jeffersonians’ case, when leadership draws such wide support across the party spectrum that opposition shrinks and threatens to crumble, and conflict exists only between the great mass of moderates and the extreme or the desperate?

Jefferson’s answer to this question was that once the moderate Federalists were won over and the high Federalists crushed, the ballooning Republican party would split into two moderate, responsible, competitive parties. “We shall now be so strong,” the President wrote a friend in May 1802, “that we shall certainly split again; for freemen thinking differently and speaking and acting as they think, will form into classes of sentiment, but it must be under another name, that of federalism is to become so scouted that no party can rise under it.…the division will substantially be into whig and tory, as in England, formerly.…” But Jefferson had to admit that no “symptoms” of a new party split had shown themselves, nor would they until after the midterm election. And the President developed a disturbing tendency to equate the Republican party with the whole nation.

As Federalist strength declined at midterm and still more in the 1804 presidential election, no significant division developed in the Republican party. Perhaps Jefferson was too skillful a conciliator. Was the new young republic becoming a one-party state?

A startling event made this question more urgent. One man Jefferson had not conciliated—and intensely distrusted—was Vice-President Aaron Burr. Rumors abounded among the Jeffersonians about Burr’s striving for the presidency during the crisis of February 1801, just as Burr and his friends suspected that Jefferson had finally won out through a secret deal. The President had virtually ignored Burr on patronage matters and instead dealt with the latter’s adversaries in New York, the Livingston and Clinton factions. Although Jeffersonians suspected that Burr would work out a coalition with the Federalists, the Vice-President was still a mortal enemy of the titular leader of that party, Alexander Hamilton. When Burr, weary of his frustrating job as Vice-President, decided to run for governor of New York, Hamilton was furious at the notion that some of his more opportunistic fellow Federalists would support this ambitious little man. He so attacked Burr’s character that the duelists’ code required a confrontation. It occurred on July 11, 1804, at a secluded spot across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Hamilton, it is thought, intended to miss in the hope that Burr intended likewise. Burr sought to kill. Hamilton died of a bullet in his vertebrae, after hours of intense suffering. The remaining great hope of the Federalist party was gone, along with any hope that Burr could draw the Federalists into a new alliance.

Thus Jefferson was left as head of a burgeoning party, confronting an opposition dwindling both in Congress and in elections. He was the leader of an organized majority. He was a firm believer in majority rule as the practical expression of government by the people, but he also recognized that majority rule must not mean extremist rule. “All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle,” he had said in his Inaugural Address, “that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable: that the Minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, & to violate would be oppression.” Implicit in this doctrine of majority rule were certain assumptions. One was that the majority would necessarily embrace so many diverse interests, sections, and attitudes, in a pluralistic nation, that the majority would pursue a moderate and balanced program; a second was that the majority would represent the great mass of people. Both these assumptions could be questioned: under certain conditions a majority could become as oppressive and fanatical as a minority; and Jefferson’s majority even at best encompassed only free, male, and largely property-owning Americans. Crucial to Jefferson’s belief in majority rule was his belief in the minority’s “equal rights,” but what politically would guarantee those rights? A strong opposition party, but Jefferson lacked a firm understanding of the role of party opposition.

It was precisely here that Jeffersonian theory left an intellectual gap—a gap that Marshall’s judicial theory brilliantly filled. For if there was inadequate political check on the majority—that is, on the government—there must be an adequate constitutional check institutionalized within the governmental structure. And clearly that vital check on the popular majority must be the judiciary, itself protected against the immediate power of the electorate.

Aaron Burr’s bullet, it was said, had blown the brains out of the Federalist party. This was a half-truth at best; Federalist brains remained very much intact in the heads of John Marshall and his brethren entrenched in the federal judiciary. Marshall, in particular, had a better grasp than Jefferson of the constitutional scope and political implications of various kinds of judicial review. The most minimal kind of judicial review—and one that Jefferson respected because he believed that each branch of government should be independent—was the power of the courts to protect their own existence and manage their own internal affairs. A somewhat higher form of judicial review was that of state legislation, and most Americans at the turn of the century agreed that the federal courts must exercise this power in order that there be an “umpire of federalism.” A still broader form of judicial review was that of presidential action; for centuries Englishmen and Americans oppressed by kings or royal governors had been turning to the courts for relief. The fullest form of judicial review was that of congressional action—the awesome authority to invalidate laws passed by the elected representatives of the people. This was an enormous power, and an anomalous one in a “government by the people.”

Seizing on Marbury’s complaint, Marshall had used that most minimal form of judicial review in order to create the vital precedent for the largest form. Practically, there was nothing Jefferson could do about this, but it is doubtful that intellectually he grasped the enormous implications of what Marshall was about. Ostensibly the Chief Justice was simply protecting the independence of the federal judiciary, at the same time that he was refraining from interfering in the executive’s domain; in fact, he was actually denying a power granted to the Supreme Court by the Congress. Rarely has such potentially vast power been so nicely disguised.

If Marshall had placed a check on the Republican President and Congress, he had established a potential checkmate on popular majorities for years to come. But would that checkmate, in a nation destined to pass through ceaseless social change and violent political conflict, in a nation still encircled north and south and on the oceans by foreign powers, turn out to be that most dangerous condition for a democracy: stalemate?

CHAPTER 6

The American Way of War

THE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE Dame, Paris, December 2, 1804. Before a dazzling array of marshals, ecclesiastics, and nouveaux princesses, Napoleon Bonaparte places a fake Carolingian crown on his head and proclaims himself Emperor of France. Behind him sits a glum Pius VII, who has joined Napoleon and Josephine in wedlock only the night before—the couple had neglected to be married in church—in order to legitimate the coronation. At the ceremony Napoleon does not prostrate himself before the Pope, nor will he take communion. The Corsican will bow to no authority, except that of the people, who in a plebiscite hardly a week before have “elected” him emperor by a vote of 3,500,000 to 2,500. He is the new Caesar, the new Charlemagne.…

Three days later the Emperor presented his colonels with their new battle standards: imperial eagles that would symbolize his leadership in creating a new Roman Empire, though hardly a Holy one. By spring his Grand Army was pressing east, while England desperately organized a defensive alliance of Russians, Prussians, and Austrians. In October 1805 Napoleon’s spirited troops routed the Austrians at Ulm and the Emperor was soon sleeping in the palace of Schönbrunn in Vienna. Six weeks later, at Austerlitz, in a classic maneuvering of massed but mobile troops, Napoleon outgeneraled the combined forces of Alexander of Russia and Francis of Austria, cut the enemy in two, killed or wounded 26,000 men, and sent the rival emperors into headlong retreat. It was at this battle that Andrei Bolkonsky, in Tolstoi’s War and Peace, lying wounded on his back, reflected on the nature of war, leadership, and history.

In London, an aging monarch contrasted drably with the military hero of France. “Mad” George III reigned in the forty-fifth year of his kingship. Not insane but afflicted with porphyria, he was at times so wild and delirious that his doctors, applying the standard treatment of the day, tied His Majesty to his bed or even strapped him into a “waistjacket.” For months his subjects had stood on the alert while Napoleon built flotillas of flat-bottomed boats big enough to carry infantry, field pieces, and horses into the coves and beaches of southern England. But the Royal Navy stood in the way, and Napoleon turned back to his land conquests.

Londoners had hardly received the bleak news from Ulm when an electrifying report arrived from the Navy. Admiral Horatio Nelson, victor over Napoleon’s fleet in the Battle of the Nile some years earlier, had decoyed the combined French and Spanish armada out into Atlantic waters off the Cape of Trafalgar, broken the heavily gunned allied line, and routed the enemy. Englishmen thrilled to the news that Nelson had signaled from his flagship, “England expects every man to do his duty,” then grieved over the report that Nelson had fallen before a musket ball. When Napoleon triumphed at Austerlitz a few weeks later, the shape of the military chessboard in the West was set for almost a decade: France was master of the Continent, England mistress of the seas.

In Washington, Jefferson and Madison followed these events with a sense of both involvement and detachment. They suspected the intentions of both the major powers and saw no need to take sides; the revolutionary France that Jefferson had welcomed had now been compromised and betrayed by a man whose militaristic flamboyance and Machiavellian statecraft he detested. But the President knew too that, however much he and the other Republican leaders wished to maintain strict neutrality, decisions in London and Paris, and at other points in the swaying mobiles of global politics, would closely touch Americans on the high seas and indeed in their ports and farms and factories. The Jeffersonians had reason to fear involvement: a republican disdain for the machinations of the courts of Europe; the vulnerability of a secondary power to the fleets and armies of a major, coupled with the military unpreparedness of the young nation. The President also feared involvements that would allow events to be controlled more by accident than by leaders, more “by chance than by design.”

Jefferson also had some sense of insecurity about dealing with the veteran diplomats of Paris and London. “An American contending by stratagem against those exercised in it from their cradle would undoubtedly be outwitted by them,” he observed to Madison; the President was referring to Minister Robert Livingston but knew that he himself was widely charged with gullibility in diplomacy. Jefferson had had extensive diplomatic experience, of course; his main handicap was his hope to apply morality to foreign relations. Talleyrand suffered no such encumbrance.

The President had learned early in his first term that, no matter how eager he might be to follow an independent course, the affairs of the New World would be entangled with the Old as long as American ships sailed the seas. That reminder had come from the rulers of Algiers, Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli, the “Barbary pirates” who had been seizing American ships and their “infidel” crews. American rulers had preferred to pay tribute rather than build a navy big enough for a transatlantic expeditionary force against the pashas’ ships and moated fortresses. When Barbary avarice and truculence seemed to mount at the turn of the century, Jefferson dispatched the Constitution and a few other vessels to bring the pirates to book.

The results were a comic-opera combination of disaster—the Philadelphia ran aground chasing pirates and was taken by the buccaneers—and some heroic actions, exemplified by young Lieutenant Stephen Decatur, who boldly piloted a captured ship into Tripoli harbor and put the torch to the Philadelphia. Unable to take Tripoli by sea, the Americans now attacked by land. A small band of Arabs, Greek soldiers, and seven Marines marched for an arduous month from Alexandria through the desert, stormed Derna in a brief action, and jolted Pasha Yusuf into making peace, at the additional cost of a $60,000 sweetener for his court. The whole Barbary adventure ended with a few gains: at least temporary peace with Yusuf and the other pashas; training in seamanship, especially with the cheap, shallow gunboats that parsimonious Republicans preferred; and a fine line in a grand Marine song.

If this was a lesson in Old World involvement from the east, events to the west showed that the most sensitive domestic rivalries could become entangled with foreign relations.

The event makers were two remarkable men who had lived half inside, half outside, the young nation’s political and military leadership. One was Aaron Burr, who at the conclusion of his vice-presidency in 1805 was still an object of excitement, distrust, and mystery. A descendant of rigorous Presbyterians, including the great scholar-moralist Jonathan Edwards, he had come to reject the moral and political codes of his day. Short, balding, “persuasive” of eye and tongue, he pursued women so indefatigably and successfully as to qualify him for the title of an American Casanova. An able officer in the Revolution and a brilliant political organizer, he seemed to discipline all except himself. Yet if Burr was prepared in 1805 to betray his nation, he felt betrayed by the established leaders—by the Republicans, who had failed to re-elect him as governor of New York in 1799 and closed ranks against him in the presidential competition of 1801, and by the Federalists, who would never forgive him for killing Hamilton on that dubious field of honor, the dueling ground. Even before he left the vice-presidency Burr was conspiring to undertake his fantastic venture: to invade Mexico, a colony of Spain, seize western territories of the United States, and create a new nation headed, presumably, by himself.

James Wilkinson, the man Burr conspired with, was an even stranger combination of opposites. At the age of twenty a brevetted brigadier general in the War of Independence, he was implicated in a move to unseat Washington as commander in chief. He nevertheless rose to the top of the American military establishment, winning appointment as military governor of Louisiana in 1803. He was also a paid secret agent of Spain—the “most consummate artist in treason,” Frederick Jackson Turner called him, “that the nation ever possessed.” If Burr’s weakness was women, Wilkinson’s was gold, gold from any source, English, Spanish, or American. He was also a faithless ally. At the climactic moment, after Burr had organized men and boats all along the Ohio River for a rendezvous in New Orleans and the presumed attack on Mexico, Wilkinson decided to sell Burr out in order to maintain his own standing with both the American and Spanish governments.

Burr had talked with so many persons—politicians, soldiers, rivermen, adventurers—that Jefferson had long known he was up to something—but what? Only on receiving from Wilkinson a report filled with horrendous portents and alarums did the President issue a proclamation warning of a “military expedition or enterprise against the dominions of Spain,” though saying nothing of secession. He issued a blanket order to federal and state officials to search out and apprehend the villains. A few weeks later Burr arrived in Natchez with a ragtail collection of men and boats, only to learn that Wilkinson had denounced him and ordered his arrest. Burr surrendered, then jumped bail and raced toward Spanish Florida, but was intercepted and taken to Richmond, there to await trial on a charge of treason.

Burr had tried to draw scores of western politicos—Ohioans, Kentuckians, Tennesseeans, Louisianans—into his conspiracy. The fact that so few had responded—indeed, state and local officials had tried to thwart his boat-collecting efforts and to indict Burr himself—showed the durability of a young republic in the face of the kind of adventure that had brought earlier republics to ruin. Burr had also tried to lure Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Spaniards into his web. If he had attacked Mexico, Washington’s relations with Paris and London, as well as Madrid, would have been affected. The mobiles were separate but interdependent. But by now the Jeffersonians were in far more direct confrontation with the colossi of Europe.

“THE HURRICANE…NOW BLASTING THE WORLD”

By 1806 Britain and France were locked in deadly embrace, but they could not find a place to fight. After Trafalgar the French crocodile could not venture into the water; after Austerlitz the English sea lion could not venture out of it. For a time the two powers fought a mainly economic war. British naval might had swept much of France’s shipping off the high seas, while Napoleon tried every means of stopping neutral trade into England. The French allowed American shippers to trade with the West Indies, while Britain sought to cut off the economic lifelines between the islands and France. Yankee skippers battened on this arrangement by bringing cargos from the French West Indies into American ports, “Americanizing” the cargo by landing it and paying duties on it, and then reloading it and carrying it to ports still under French control.

For a time, the English tolerated this subterfuge of the “broken voyage.” But, as pressure mounted from British shippers furious over the fast-rising profits and trade monopolizing of the rapacious Yankees, and as the English economic war against the French faltered, a London admiralty judge conveniently ruled that the non-continuous voyages were actually continuous; shortly British warships seized scores of American merchantmen, especially in the West Indian trade. The British sought to settle another grievance. For hundreds of years the Royal Navy had manned its “floating hells” by sending out press gangs to snatch able-bodied young men out of grog shops and off the streets. British seamen fled from their vile living conditions and the cat-o’-nine-tails by shipping in the American naval or merchant services. At times His Majesty’s ships could not leave port because of desertions. Ordered to fetch the fugitives, English sea captains hung off Atlantic ports, boarded American ships, and searched for English deserters. Quarterdeck justice was often harsh, as officers ruled that some seaman pronouncing “peas” as “paise” was an Irishman and hence a British subject, while if he talked through his nose he was probably a Yankee.

Inevitably, these incidents set off explosions of rage in American ports. When a British warship fired a careless shot across the bow of an American sloop and splintered the main boom instead, killing the mate, the victim’s mangled body was carried to New York and paraded through the streets on a raised platform. Washington and London exchanged protests, but the English public was so angered by the Yankees “stealing” both trade and sailors, and the Royal Navy was concentrating so single-mindedly on its economic war against France, that no basis of compromise could be found. James Monroe, resident minister in London, backed up by William Pinkney, a Maryland lawyer, extracted a treaty from the Foreign Office that was so weak on the question of impressment that Jefferson refused to submit it to the Senate.

Slowly Britain and France tightened their economic nooses on each other. When London declared a blockade of the European coast from Brest to the river Elbe, Napoleon counterattacked by establishing, under the so-called Berlin Decree, a complete blockade of the British Isles. As decree followed decree, zealous English captains pressed their efforts against American commerce and English “deserters.”

Then occurred the incident. When on July 2, 1807, the American frigate Chesapeake was hailed off the Virginia coast by the British frigate Leopard, the American commander, assuming the Leopard was bent on an innocent errand, allowed her to draw near without piping his own men to quarters or bothering to have the loggerheads heated red-hot for firing his guns. The English captain requested permission to board and search the Chesapeake, but its commander refused—the English were allowed to search merchantmen, not warships. The Leopard promptly poured three broadsides into the defenseless Chesapeake, hulling her twenty-two times and killing or wounding twenty-one seamen. The search party found only one genuine deserter, who was court-martialed and hanged from the yardarm. Three other sailors, two of them black and all three American citizens, were seized and held by the British.

Anger swept the Atlantic coast after the Chesapeake labored into Norfolk. British stores were destroyed and seamen roughed up, as editors and mass meetings declared war on the enemy. The Chesapeake seemed to symbolize innocent, defenseless America. Not since the battle of Lexington, Jefferson said, had he seen the country in such a state of exasperation. “The British had often enough, God knows, given us cause of war before; but it has been on points which would not have united the nation,” he wrote William Duane. “But now they have touched a chord which vibrates in every heart.” But what to do?

For a while the President temporized, hoping that London would offer some concessions on impressment in the wake of the Chesapeake. But by the end of 1807 he knew he must act. Many still called for war, but Jefferson quailed at the prospect. While no pacifist, he dreaded the bloodshed and waste inevitable in a war against Britain, the financial cost for the government, the divisions it would cause between Anglophiles and Francophiles. Another alternative was arming American warships or merchantmen, or both, to protect trade. But these half-measures would have mixed results and might precipitate a war in any event. The only other course was an embargo on all trade with Britain, thus putting the English on short rations. By December the President had concluded that the choice lay among “War, Embargo, or Nothing.”

In mid-December the President asked Congress for an embargo act, and both House and Senate responded quickly and enthusiastically. The Embargo Act prohibited virtually all land and seaborne trade with foreign nations. American vessels were forbidden to leave for foreign ports; coasters were required to post a huge bond as guarantee that cargos would not be shipped abroad. Foreign vessels could not carry goods out of American ports. It was a desperate, sweeping measure—but even more remarkable was Jefferson’s almost fanatical effort to make the act work. When widespread smuggling and other evasions and violations occurred along the thousands of miles of Canadian border and Atlantic coast, the President’s response was to tighten the act and to strengthen executive control to the degree that he was wielding unprecedented presidential power.

The Embargo Act was designed to cut and batter the British economy but to be tolerable to the American. It had virtually the reverse effect. The impact on Atlantic ports was immediate and severe, as hundreds of ships and thousands of seamen were idled. “Ships rotted at the wharves; forests of bare masts were silhouetted in the harbors; grass grew on hitherto humming wharves; bankruptcies, suicides, and crimes increased; soup kitchens were established,” Thomas Bailey noted. Ironically, many Yankee sailors sought employment in the British merchant marine, thus easing the need for impressment. The political effects were also emphatic, as the coastal cities in particular rallied against the “dambargo.” Sang a New Hampshire poet in Dover:

Our ships all in motion,

Once whiten’d the ocean

They sail’d and return’d with a

Cargo;

Now doom’d to decay

They are fallen a prey,

To Jefferson, worms, and

EMBARGO.

The sluggish Federalist party came to life in protest against Jefferson’s “Quaker-gun diplomacy.” Even high Federalists could now appear to be friends of jobless sailors and other workers.

The strategy of the embargo was that the hurting English economy would cause public opinion to pressure the ministry into compromises. But the persons most affected—workers reduced to pauperism in the English textile industry dependent on American cotton, and people suffering privation in Newfoundland and the West Indies—were the ones with least influence on British policy. The military and business establishments, intent on challenging America’s rising mercantile power, pressed the ministry to stand firm.

Jefferson had uncharacteristically launched the embargo without full support from his colleagues; Gallatin, for one, preferred war to a permanent embargo. Republican state leaders, especially in the Northeast, were thrown on the defensive. Yet the President pursued his policy with relentless determination, and at cost to some of his basic principles of government. As evasions mounted, he received power to employ the militia freely in enforcing the law. Authority to call out the regular army and navy was granted to collectors, who were placed under the President’s direct policy control. Under the pressure, something of the spirit of “Jeffersonianism” seemed to escape from Jefferson himself, as he verged on embracing guilt by association, condemning whole communities instead of individual violators, and, on one occasion, supporting an effort to indict some embargo violators on the charge of treason; the case was thrown out of court by a Jeffersonian judge.

An impervious Britain, a stubborn President, a restive party and Congress, a mounting opposition—something had to give. The tightened embargo rules set off new paroxysms of rage in New England. The Massachusetts legislature threatened to disobey the law, amid talk of secession. The President was pictured as both arbitrary and weak. In Massachusetts a budding thirteen-year-old poet, William Cullen Bryant, touched on all of Jefferson’s vulnerabilities, including his alleged black mistress:

When shall this land, some courteous angel say,

Throw off a weak, and erring ruler’s sway?…

Oh wrest, sole refuge of a sinking land,

The sceptre from the slave’s imbecile hand!…

Go, wretch, resign the presidential chair,

Disclose thy secret measures foul or fair…

Or where Ohio rolls his turbid stream,

Dig for huge bones, thy glory and thy theme,

Go scan, Philosophist; thy ****** charms,

And sink supinely in her sable arms.

A group of Republicans unexpectedly broke the impasse by a vote to repeal the embargo. A “sudden and unaccountable revolution of opinion took place the last week, chiefly among the New England and New York members,” the President wrote his son-in-law early in February 1809. The defectors set the date of repeal on the day of Jefferson’s retirement. Thus was a deeper quagmire averted. The President was bitter about the desertions. The “hurricane which is now blasting the world, physical and moral,” he wrote a friend “has prostrated all the mounds of reason as well as right.” But he made no great effort to save the embargo. He too seemed to feel the game was played out. Certainly he felt played out; sixty-five years old in his last year in office, he was desperately eager to return to Monticello for good.

Jefferson had staked so much on the success of the embargo that he seemed to leave office a defeated man. Some said that he had “fled” Washington. This was the view of many contemporaries. As years passed, it became clear that in most respects his presidential leadership had been as effective in his second term as in his first. Save for the embargo, he had continued to demonstrate, in his close collaboration with Madison, Gallatin, and other administration officials, that collective executive leadership was possible under the Constitution. Again save for the embargo, he had exercised firm, though unobtrusive, direction of the Republicans in Congress and, to a lesser extent, of the Republican party through the nation. While he had seen no need to present Congress with a comprehensive program of proposed legislation, the measures he did support usually passed smoothly through the two houses. Often the President had to draw on the resources of his personal leadership—especially on the infinite respect and love Republican leaders had for him—in order to mediate factional disputes among Republicans.

Still, even this benign and potent leader came up against constraints on presidential power. The impeachment of Justice Samuel Chase suggested one of those constraints—the independence of the judiciary. A hard-line Federalist, Chase had turned his courtroom into a forum for intemperate attacks on the President and the Republican party. It was one thing when he lambasted the administration as weak and incompetent, something else when he condemned the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801—an act validated by Chase’s own court—as a blow for “mobocracy.” Jefferson indirectly, and the Republican leadership in Congress directly, organized impeachment proceedings against Chase, but they could not mobilize the necessary two-thirds vote in the Senate, and the justice was acquitted, amid the huzzas of high Federalists.

Chase was small game compared to Jefferson’s real bête noire in the judiciary. Mustering majorities on critical issues, using his superb judicial and political mind to influence his brethren, the unassailable John Marshall continued to preside magisterially over the Supreme Court. The looming treason trial of Aaron Burr brought the two Virginians again into direct confrontation. Deeply disturbed over the “conspiracy,” Jefferson threw himself into the investigation and proceedings in the case. But the Chief Justice’s zeal for Burr’s punishment did not match the President’s. Marshall released two of Burr’s accomplices for lack of evidence of treason, claimed (but did not try to enforce) the right to subpoena the President to appear in court, and sharply narrowed the definition of treason. Burr was acquitted; when the New Yorker was presented with a new treason charge, Marshall allowed bail. Jefferson, who in his zeal had openly prejudged Burr’s guilt, was appalled—and helpless. He could find some vindication but little comfort when Burr jumped bail, fled to France, and tried to interest Napoleon in making peace with England in order to organize an Anglo-French invasion of the United States.

Jefferson’s preoccupation with the prosecution of Burr and the latter’s acquittal clouded the final year or two of his presidency. But he was even more preoccupied with the embargo, and though this failed too, he was satisfied with his stewardship. Indeed, he felt that he had protected the nation’s internal security by his vigilant reaction to Burr’s adventurism, just as his economic war against Britain had saved the nation from both war and humiliation. He had served the people’s most basic need—security—and had done so without war. In March 1809 he left the presidency as he came in, a man of peace.

The final test of Jefferson’s power and leadership lay in the choice of his successor. Few in the Republican establishment doubted that this would be James Madison. For more than three decades the two men had worked so closely together that their adversaries could attack Madison for being Jefferson’s cat’s-paw or Jefferson’s mastermind with equal plausibility. A battle for the Republican party nomination loomed when James Monroe returned from England still smarting over Jefferson and Madison’s repudiation of the agreement he had signed with the British. With dismay the President saw a fight break out in his own party as John Randolph and other anti-Administration Republicans turned to Monroe in an attempt to head off Madison. “I see with infinite grief a contest arising between yourself and another, who have been very dear to each other, and equally so to me,” Jefferson wrote Monroe. “…I have ever viewed Mr. Madison and yourself as two principal pillars of my happiness.” He knew that the behavior of his two friends would be “chaste,” but he warned Monroe against letting “your friends” exacerbate passion and acrimony. In vain; while the rivals did not campaign, their friends fought a vitriolic battle in pamphlets and newspaper columns.

The President gave quiet but powerful support to his Secretary of State. When Madison’s conduct of foreign affairs was attacked, Jefferson released hundreds of documents attesting to Madison’s patriotic firmness with Britain and France. Election polemics turned mainly on foreign policy, especially the embargo; no one contended that “politics stops at the water’s edge.” The contest was further enlivened when the Federalists again chose a ticket of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina and Rufus King of Massachusetts and New York, and when the aging Vice-President, George Clinton, simultaneously ran for President and Vice-President. In the end, Jefferson’s and Madison’s long years of leadership paid off. Madison bested Monroe handily both in Virginia and in the congressional caucus, and went on to defeat Pinckney in the electoral college, 122 to 47. Clinton won only six votes—all from New York—but hung on to his vice-presidency.

The man who entered the President’s mansion in March 1809 had stood so long in Jefferson’s shadow that for a time even his friends found it hard to accept him as chief executive. As unawesome as ever in appearance and demeanor, Madison was as poor a speaker as Jefferson and also lacked his intellectual versatility and spacious imagination. What he did bring to the presidency was a penetrating understanding of both the theory and practice of American government, a thorough grasp of Republican doctrine, a mastery of party and legislative mechanics, and long experience in the conduct of foreign relations, though he was criticized for never having served abroad. And if he was also faulted for his stiff and sometimes frigid manner, he had—Dolley.

Raised as a Quaker, widowed by a young lawyer who died of the plague, Dolley Payne Todd had grown into a woman of great charm and striking figure when she married James Madison, then forty-three and already famous. In the White House, as the mansion was just coming to be called, she was soon holding spirited levees and refurbishing the drab interior with the help of the queenly sum of $26,000 granted by Congress.

THE IRRESISTIBLE WAR

The new First Lady displayed her sense of diplomacy at the very start, when at dinner before the Inaugural Ball in Long’s Hotel she maneuvered her full and exuberant self between the English and French plenipotentiaries, thus fending off unpleasantness. Her action was symbolic as well as skillful. Her husband had entered office at a time when the struggle between Britain and France was engulfing more and more Europeans, with the United States now set on a relentless march toward war. It would be a poor war, and a poorly understood one. It was a war that Americans did not win—a fact ignored by latter-day patriots claiming that America had never lost a war or won a peace conference. Mislabeled as the War of 1812, it was actually the War of 1812-15. Misjudged in history as the outcome of drift and indecision and bungling and chance, it was rather an irresistible war—irresistible because Americans were caught up in ineluctable circumstances, irresistible because some Americans did not want to resist it.

The central circumstance towered over Madison’s first term as it had over Jefferson’s second: America was a third-rate power caught in the jaws of Great Power conflict because of her desire to sail on the high seas and to trade in foreign ports. Conflict was not a result of Washington misjudging the positions of London and Paris. It was clear to all that Britain continued to view her maritime supremacy, including the right of impressing her subjects on foreign ships, as absolutely vital to her national security and to the immediate purpose of fighting France. Napoleon was just as intent on excluding neutral ships from trading with Britain. After the failure of the embargo, the United States was insistent on its right to trade. Aside from the delays of several weeks in transatlantic messages, the diplomats of the three nations had no serious problem of communication. Literally thousands of hours were consumed in lengthy correspondence and face-to-face discussions. The nations were in conflict not because of ignorance but because they had conflicting interests.

Even if there had been some decisive way out of the impasse, Madison might have lacked the power to take advantage of it. He was not destined to be a strong President. At the very start he was denied the right to choose his own Cabinet. Having worked long and fruitfully with Secretary of the Treasury Gallatin, the new President wanted to promote the Pennsylvanian to Secretary of State. When a group of anti-Gallatin senators headed by Samuel Smith of Maryland warned Madison against this step, the President capitulated by shifting Smith’s brother Robert from the Navy Secretaryship to the top cabinet position. Gallatin nobly stayed on at Treasury.

Factionalism was rife in the Republican party as Jefferson’s harmonizing hand fell away. John Randolph, who had broken with Jefferson years before but muted his attacks on him, now turned on Madison in cold fury. Descended from a family long noted for its idiots, geniuses, neurotics, and eccentrics, Randolph lived alone on his plantation named Bizarre, excluded women from his intimate life, enjoyed bringing his hunting dogs onto the House floor—and was probably the most brilliant and ferocious orator in Congress. By this time Randolph headed a small but active band of “old Republicans” who came to be known as the “Quids.”

With his party divided between numerous Francophiles and a few Anglophiles such as Randolph, Madison groped for a foreign policy that would defend his nation’s rights and honor without embroiling it in a shooting war with Britain or France or both. The Non-Intercourse Act, which replaced the Embargo Act in March 1809, forbade trade with the two powers until they ceased violating neutral rights. This act seemed only to provoke the French into more ship seizures and the British into more impressments. In May 1810 Madison and the Republicans tried a new tack—a measure authorizing the President to reopen trade with Britain and France, with the remarkable proviso that if either nation ceased violating America’s neutral rights, the President could prohibit trade with the other.

The Administration and Congress clearly were looking for the first sincere bidder, but this was a situation made to order for the Machiavellian ruler of France. Napoleon promised ambiguously to revoke his decrees against American shipping on condition that Washington would break off trade with Britain unless London ceased its interference with American ships. The President, eager for some way out of the impasse, seized this bait. On the understanding that Napoleon actually had canceled his earlier decrees, Madison prematurely issued a proclamation reopening trade with France and halting commerce with Britain. The Emperor in fact had not changed his policy, and at times there seemed to be a nightmarish possibility that the United States, France, and Great Britain might be engaged in a unique three-cornered war of all against all.

For a time the mobiles stayed in unsteady equipoise as Paris contended that it had in effect revoked its restrictive decrees, London claimed that the French had not, and Madison was left in an anti-British position because of his impetuous proclamation. Early in 1811 the President, convinced that his Secretary of State, Robert Smith, was both indiscreet and disloyal as well as incompetent, decided to strengthen his administration by appointing James Monroe in his place. The appointment had to be handled delicately, for Monroe had so deeply resented Madison’s earlier rejection of his treaty—and the “succession politics” of 1808—that he had broken off his relationship with his old friend. With the quiet help of Jefferson, communication between the two men was restored; it had not escaped the ambitious Monroe that both Presidents Jefferson and Madison had served earlier stints as Secretary of State. More Anglophilic than most Republicans, Monroe hoped to ease relations with Britain, but he found London to be intransigent.

By the fall of 1811 Washington seemed pinioned diplomatically between France and Britain, politically between Federalists opposing war with Britain and Republicans ready for it, or at least resigned to it. What could tip the balance? The answer came from the West. Some Easterners doubted that the settlers in the distant hinterland, in those obscure regions along the Ohio and the Mississippi, would feel much involved in a conflict over ships and men on the high seas.

“We, whose soil was the hotbed and whose ships were the nursery of Sailors,” the Boston Columbian Centinel protested later, “are insulted with the hypocrisy of a devotedness to Sailors’ rights…by those whose country furnishes no navigation beyond the size of a ferryboat or an Indian canoe.” In fact those ships often carried western produce, those impressed sailors might hail from Ohio or Kentucky or Louisiana, and men used to protecting themselves with guns on the lawless frontier argued that the nation should do the same on the high seas. The Westerners had more proximate concerns. On the southwest lay West Florida, stretching west from the Mississippi to the Perdido River, a Spanish dominion that had been seized by southern adventurers in 1810 and later claimed by Madison on the grounds that West Florida had been included in the Louisiana Purchase. Spain was not strong enough to defend this strategic territory, with its navigable rivers reaching up into American territory, but Westerners feared that it might be seized by Spain’s ally, Britain.

To the northwest lay an even more vulnerable territory, in Westerners’ eyes. As more and more hunters, trappers, and land-hungry settlers moved into Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, they encroached onto the living space of tens of thousands of Indians who, the settlers suspected, were being supplied with guns and ammunition by the English. For the most part, the Indians had been passive in the face of white intrusion, as some of their chiefs bartered away land rights for liquor, baubles, and pensions. But out of tribal demoralization had risen a new leader, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh, who, with his brother the “Prophet,” began to organize a broad tribal confederacy against the westward sweep of the white man. The two leaders established their capital in Prophet’s Town, Indiana, at the juncture of the Tippecanoe and Wabash rivers. In the fall of 1811 the governor of Indiana Territory, General William Henry Harrison, marched about a thousand men to the Tippecanoe and provocatively encamped about a mile from the Indian capital. Tecumseh and his warriors attacked the encampment at dawn; Harrison’s troops beat them off, at a heavy price in casualties, destroyed their food supplies, and then fired the settlement. As a wave of indignation passed through the Northwest, the cry arose that the English were behind the “Indian troubles” and must be driven out of Canada.

No voice expressed western feeling more eloquently than that of a thirty-four-year-old Kentuckian, Henry Clay. Born in Virginia and admitted to the bar there, he had traveled west through the Cumberland Gap to Lexington, where he soon prospered among the gambling, hard-drinking, land-speculating gentry of the bluegrass region. After serving two unexpired terms in the United States Senate—the first when he was barely thirty—he was elected a member of Congress in the summer of 1811 and chosen Speaker the very day he showed up in the House. As a senator he had become the leader of a young, militant, even martial group of legislators who were eager for a war against England. In their anger Westerners had turned to him. “Will Congress give us war this winter?” Thomas Hart Benton had written Clay from Tennessee. “Or, will the majority…wait for chance or destiny to mend our condition?” And in contrast to the cautious Madison, Clay took the kind of cocky, pugnacious stance they liked.

“The conquest of Canada is in your power,” Clay had told the Senate. “I trust I shall not be deemed presumptuous when I state, what I verily believe, that the militia of Kentucky are alone competent to place Montreal and Upper Canada at your feet.…” As Speaker, Clay renewed his pressure on the Administration to go to war.

But war against whom? Britain was the wrong enemy, Federalists were asserting; the French were preying on American commerce—especially ships bound for eastern ports of Europe with lucrative cargos of grain. Members of Congress were attacking both governments. “The Devil himself could not tell, which government, England or France, is the most wicked,” Nathaniel Macon exclaimed. For a time the Administration actually contemplated a triangular war. The whole “business is become more than ever puzzling,” Madison wrote Jefferson late in May 1812. “To go to war with Engd and not with France arms the federalists with new matter, and divides the Republicans some of whom with the Quids make a display of impartiality. To go to war agst both, presents a thousand difficulties, above all, that of shutting all the ports of the Continent of Europe agst our Cruisers who can do little without the use of them.” The Federalists, he feared, would exploit such difficulties. The only argument for “this triangular war as it is called” was that it might hasten a settlement with one of the two nations. But Madison was doubtful even of this. Jefferson and other cooler heads could hardly imagine war with both powers. Britain had been by far the more provocative, and the more recently provocative. And Britain was an old enemy, France an old ally.

So it would be war with Britain, and Britain alone. Madison was determined to act, and he was strongly backed by the Secretary of State. “Our wrongs have been great; our cause is just.…Let war therefore be forthwith proclaimed against England,” Monroe wrote anonymously in the Republican party’s newspaper, the Washington National Intelligencer. But Madison and Monroe knew that for such a drastic step the Administration must have the united support of Congress, and the Federalists were waiting for a ship to arrive from England with London’s final answer to America’s protests. But when H.M.S. Hornet sailed into New York Harbor, she brought few signs of British conciliation.

On June 1 Madison sent his war message to Congress. After a long statement of trade and impressment grievances he concluded: “Such is the spectacle of injuries and indignities which have been heaped on our country, and such the crisis which its unexampled forbearance and conciliatory efforts have not been able to avert.” Madison had prudently canvassed the Congress to be sure of a war measure, and young “war hawks” such as Clay and John C. Calhoun, the South Carolinian who headed the House Foreign Affairs Committee, guided the measure through Congress. Even so, the results betrayed deep division in the Congress, as the House voted for the war bill 79 to 49, and the Senate, after several days’ intensive debate, by only 19 to 13. The tally was strongly partisan, as about three-quarters of the Republicans present in the House voted for war, and the Federalists there voted against. The result had a sectional cast too, as Westerners voted almost solidly for the war bill, Southerners did so strongly, aside from John Randolph and a half dozen mountain Virginians and North Carolinians, and the central Atlantic states voted heavily for the bill. But the northern states—even the northern seaboard—were not solidly against the measure. Indeed, so many economic, xenophobic, expansionist, geographical, and particularist (land hunger, hostility toward Indians) factors seemed to be interwoven in the congressional vote that the pundits of the day, and historians ever since, have debated the causal forces.

Cutting through all these forces, and possibly the most powerful but certainly the least measurable of them all, was ideology. Almost all Americans were deeply angered by Britain’s maritime policies, and especially by impressment, and they were angered by impressment because it struck blatantly at the heart of a most solemn credo. Two astute observers of the day understood this. Said John Quincy Adams: “The State, by the social compact is bound to protect every one of its Citizens.…The principle for which we are now struggling is of a higher and more sacred nature than any question about taxation can involve. It is the principle of personal liberty, and of every social right.” Said John C. Calhoun: “This is the second struggle for our liberty.” Individual liberty from the slavery of impressment, and national honor and independence from Britain—these were fused in the public mind. A Fourth of July toast in Boston captured this feeling best: “The War—The second and last struggle for national freedom—A final effort to rescue from the deep the drowning honor of our country.”

By the summer of 1812 James Madison not only had a military struggle on his hands; he also had a political one. This was a presidential election year, and Madison, like his three predecessors, was running for a second term. In May, at the height of the fever for war, he had been unanimously nominated by the congressional caucus, composed of Republican members of Congress. But later that month, New York Republican legislators, rebelling against the Virginia dynasty in their party, nominated De Witt Clinton for president. Nephew of Vice-President George Clinton, who had just died in office, De Witt was typical of the new breed of young, opportunistic politicos who were challenging Republicans and Federalists of the old school.

Clinton’s nomination put the Federalists into a dilemma. If they chose a true-blood Federalist of the John Marshall caliber—and Marshall was sounded out—they still could not hope to defeat an incumbent President at the polls (Marshall declined to swap a chief-justiceship in hand for a presidency in the bush). At a party convention in New York—the first “grass roots” nominating convention in America—the Federalists, amid much misgiving, left the way open for state Federalist parties to support Clinton. Soon Clinton’s supporters were appealing to antiwar New Engenders with such slogans as “Madison and War! or Clinton and Peace!” while promising voters farther south that the New Yorker as President would prosecute the war with vigor. Since electors would be chosen during the summer and fall, Madison was under constant pressure to provide military victories.

Rarely, however, have military pretensions and military resources diverged more sharply. The Administration’s strategy was aggressive: to strike north into Canada, to join hands with Canadians believed to be eager to throw off the British yoke, and to seize Montreal after isolating it from the west. To accomplish these aims, Madison could muster an assortment of army officers who had never commanded men under fire but who had won posts through connections in Washington or through election by troops in the field; a regular army of about 12,000 men scattered in outposts around the nation’s borders; a potentially large militia, but currently under state control and unavailable in most of New England because of hostility there to the war; a small but professional navy; all too few engineers and other experts; and an almost nonexistent command structure, so that each ship and every army in the field would have to operate virtually on its own. During the long months and years of deteriorating relations with Britain and France, Congress had never faced up to the need for a major defense program. Canada’s forces were small and scattered too, but they were well trained, with experienced officers.

Amid great expectations General William Hull led several regiments of regulars and volunteers north from Dayton through Ohio swamps and wilderness to Detroit. From Detroit he dispatched troops across the frontier into Canada, then issued a proclamation advising Canadians either to come over to the American side or to stay at home; white men found fighting with Indians, he added, would not be taken prisoner but shot. Facing Hull on the Niagara frontier were Canadian troops and “Tecumseh’s revenge.” Biding his time after Tippecanoe, the Indian chief had mobilized over a thousand warriors to support the Canadians.

Tecumseh was to prove Hull’s undoing both militarily and psychologically. While the American dawdled, fast-moving Indian braves harassed his long communication line to the south. The British commander, having intercepted American dispatches, adroitly played on Hull’s mounting fear that he and his men would be cut off and turned over to the mercy of the redskins. More and more distraught over the plight of the civilians, who included his daughter and grandchildren, Hull lost his nerve. He surrendered without firing a shot. He was later court-martialed, sentenced to death for cowardice, and pardoned by Madison for earlier bravery.

A hard-riding horseman brought the shocking news to the President while he was en route to Montpelier for relief from the Washington heat. Madison immediately turned back to the capital and summoned a cabinet meeting. More bad news was arriving from the north. Hull had sent a young captain to Fort Dearborn (on the present site of Chicago) to evacuate the post. Several hundred Potawatomies fell upon the small band of soldiers and civilians and massacred over half of them. The Indians beheaded the youthful commander, cut out his heart, and ate it.

Gloom in Washington was relieved only by news from Boston. About 750 miles off the coast, the Constitution, under Captain Isaac Hull (a nephew of the disgraced general), had caught up with H.M.S. Guerrière, closed with her, poured in heavy broadsides of round and grape, and reduced her to such a gaping hulk that the British surrendered and the Guerrière, useless even as a prize, was put to the torch. This small but electrifying victory at sea, and the repulses all along the Canadian frontier, epitomized the course of the war during its first year.

Now under heavy criticism from Federalists and antiwar Republicans, Madison and his Cabinet laid their plans for 1813. A heavier effort would be mounted both in the North and on the Atlantic. Congress boosted soldiers’ pay, expanded the regular army, and authorized more warships. Madison decided to sack his Secretary of War, William Eustis, a Massachusetts physician and Republican politico with little war experience, as well as his Secretary of the Navy, who was reported often to be in his cups by midday. New secretaries, Madison hoped, would weed out the incompetents among the high command.

Would the commander in chief himself be sacked? By fall Madison’s foes were seizing on every blunder and mishap to fortify their arguments about unpreparedness and Washington fumbling. They made much too of the congressional caucus as undemocratic, even aristocratic. “The current Elections,” Madison wrote Jefferson, “bring the popularity of the War or of the Administration, or both, to the Experimentum crucis.” With New England leaning toward Clinton and the South and West toward Madison, New York and Pennsylvania were the swing states. In New York, where electors were chosen by the state legislature, the Federalist floor manager, a young and inexperienced state senator from Kinderhook named Martin Van Buren, so brilliantly outmaneuvered the Republicans that he won a clear majority in the legislature—and hence all of New York’s 29 electoral votes—for Clinton. In Pennsylvania’s popular balloting for presidential electors, the Clinton men capitalized on dissatisfaction over the war effort in the western mountain country, but Madison swept the more populous areas. Pennsylvania’s 25 electoral votes for the President were decisive in the electoral college, which Madison carried by only 128 to 89. The President began his second term—and his stepped-up war effort—with a dubious vote of confidence.

The Administration planned to make 1813 a year of decision in the North by building up its land, water, and amphibious forces across the long frontier stretching from Detroit along Lakes Erie and Ontario and up the St. Lawrence to Montreal. Madison now had a new War Secretary in John Armstrong, a New York politician and diplomat, and a new Navy Secretary in William Jones, a Philadelphia merchant-politician, but his key appointment was General William Henry Harrison, of Tippecanoe fame, as senior officer in the Northwest. Harrison’s early efforts to retake Detroit, however, ended in one bloody defeat and one ambush by his old adversary, Tecumseh. Harrison prudently went on the defensive while Commodore Isaac Chauncey built warships on Lake Erie to control this crucial waterway. Chauncey had the help of a twenty-eight-year-old naval officer, Captain Oliver Hazard Perry, a Rhode Islander who had gone to sea at eleven and had already fought the Barbary pirates. The British too were feverishly building up their fleet strength on the lakes, but vital supplies were slow in coming from a far-off motherland now in mortal conflict with France.

By summer’s end Perry’s ships were strong enough to risk engagement with the Royal Navy. The small fleets met off the island of Put-in-Bay in the bloodiest naval fight of the war. Earlier in the year, after the British frigate Shannon had crippled the Chesapeake off Boston, the dying American captain had murmured, “Don’t give up the ship.” Perry had this last order inscribed on the colors of his flagship, the Lawrence, but after the Lawrence was smashed almost to pieces, with 80 percent of her men casualties, Perry coolly shifted his flag to another ship and directed the demolition of the British fleet. Then he sent to Harrison another memorable war cry, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”

Otherwise, 1813 did not turn out to be very decisive in the north. To be sure, Perry’s triumph allowed Harrison to move 4,500 men across Lake Erie to Fort Maiden, south of Detroit, and to force the British, over Tecumseh’s protest, to evacuate Detroit, and move east, where Harrison caught up with the British force on the north bank of the Thames, taking almost 500 prisoners and killing Tecumseh. But the crucial drive northeast to Montreal faltered in the face of powerful resistance. The Americans occupied York (Toronto), the capital of Upper Canada, and burned the Assembly houses and other public buildings, but this proved a Pyrrhic victory.

For two years the adversaries had looked like a couple of roustabouts fighting in a barnyard, each throwing wild haymakers at the other, drawing much blood but not coming close to knocking the other out. Would the third year be any different? The global balance of mobiles was swaying as Napoleon, after repeated defeats at the hands of the Prussian and Austrian and Russian troops he had once beaten so decisively, abdicated his throne and departed for Elba. For Americans this meant that crack British regiments would soon be shipping out of Bordeaux and other French ports for America. But the American Army was becoming more professionally led too, as Madison and Armstrong replaced older generals with men like Jacob Brown, George Izard, Andrew Jackson, and Winfield Scott. During 1814 combat in the north focused on the Niagara area between Lakes Erie and Ontario; fighting to the west dwindled into raids and skirmishes. Scott led well-drilled troops to a victory over the British at Chippewa, an engagement treasured ever since by West Pointers because of the English commander’s surprised cry: “Those are Regulars, by God!” Three weeks later, in the heaviest ground action of the war, Scott’s and Brown’s men were so badly mauled in the Battle of Lundy’s Lane that they fell back on Fort Erie, which the British promptly put under an unsuccessful siege.

Frustration and stalemate also characterized the action much farther east, on Lake Champlain. In a combined land-sea offensive for which they were becoming famous, British troops drove down the western shore of the lake, in coordination with a large fleet headed toward American warships and troops concentrated at Plattsburgh. Captain Thomas Macdonough was ready for the attack and after a furious engagement destroyed all the enemy vessels except for several gunboats. Their dream of an advance south along the Hudson shattered, the British pulled back to Canada.

For the Americans, sadder events were at hand to the south. Powerful British fleet units had been ranging for months up and down the Atlantic coast, blockading major ports, putting in landing parties to raid and burn small ports, bottling up a good part of the American fleet in well-protected harbors. Single American warships and privateers, cruising far across the Atlantic and even into the Pacific, won some glorious victories, but these were hardly more than pinpricks to the Royal Navy, augmented after Elba by reinforcements from European waters. During the early summer of 1814, rumors reached Washington that the Royal Navy planned a massive attack up the Chesapeake. Madison and his generals, doubting that enemy assault troops would move very far from their warships, and not sure just where the British would strike, took disorganized half-measures for defense.

In mid-August, news arrived that a mighty British armada of warships and transports had suddenly appeared at the mouth of the Patuxent River. Then came reports that several thousand enemy troops were marching toward Washington. In a nightmare of misjudgments as to enemy plans, poor communication among state militias intent mainly on protecting their own turf, and mediocre generalship, a large but separated collection of American defense forces was overcome one by one. The British assault at Bladensburg, a few miles east of Washington, sent the militias streaming back toward the capital. The President, who with Monroe had been closely reconnoitering the defense of Washington, escaped into the Virginia countryside. There he met up with Mrs. Madison, who had managed to send off documents, plate, and the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington, hastily torn out of its frame, before she fled from the White House with dinner still set on the table. When the President and his party returned to Washington after the British withdrew, they found the White House and the Capitol building in smoking ruins. The British also had run a few warships up the Potomac and exacted a king’s ransom of vital military stores from the merchants of Alexandria as the price of leaving the city unburned.

Washington burned—the first family sent scurrying to safety—Alexandria humiliated: a wave of mortification and anger swept through the country, even into New England. Nonetheless, the British raid on Washington turned out to be more important psychologically than militarily. The American war effort by the end of 1814 was still so decentralized that the head could be cut off for a time without harming local efforts by mainly state militias: Indeed, when the British amphibious army moved on up the Chesapeake to Baltimore, it was bloodily repulsed by the militia. But these events in the heart of the country excited a patriotic nerve, and it was perhaps this nerve that was touched when Francis Scott Key, after watching the bombardment of Baltimore forts through the night, strained to see whether the flag was still there—and, assured that it was, wrote a star-spangled anthem.

But this was also a time of disillusion and disenthrallment for the Americans. By the end of 1814 military prospects looked so bleak that the Administration was willing to settle for the status quo ante as the basis of a peace negotiation with Britain. In purely strategic terms, the war was a standoff at this time, but if one measures war achievements by war aims, the United States had lost, for there was little sign that Britain was prepared to yield any of its “rights.”

If American military aspirations were deflated, however, the American way of war was even more directly challenged. American leaders had not been pacifists; Washington and Adams, Jefferson and Madison, were naïve neither about the bellicose tendencies of humankind nor about the likelihood of clashes among nations in a world of independent sovereign states. They recognized that national security was a prime responsibility of government. The Constitution listed the “common Defense” even before the “general welfare” as the power and duty of Congress; and in the Federalist John Jay wrote that, of all the people’s needs, “providing for their safety seems to be the first.”

The problem, especially in a republic, was how to maintain a military establishment strong enough to protect the people’s safety but controlled enough not to invade their liberties—in short, how to harness the war beast. No easy solution was possible in a world of shifting mobiles and in a young nation led by men who could not agree even on the definition of liberty, as the Alien and Sedition Acts had demonstrated. This dilemma left the nation ambivalent over both the theory and the practice of war. Ideologically, most Americans opposed heavy defense expenditures, large standing armies, centralized military decision making and administration, military professionalism in the form of a permanent officer class. In practice they knew the need for protection from predator nations on their borders. The upshot was reliance on defensive measures such as coastal fortifications, scatteration of the federal troops among many ports and posts, heavy dependence on state militias, the building of gunboats as the prime naval weapon, and acceptance of a small but professional navy as “safer” than a professional army. Such half-measures proved woefully inadequate in the War of 1812. Typically the state militias lacked—at least until they were well blooded—adequate discipline, professionalism, and soldierly skills; and commanders lacked the necessary generalship. The United States Military Academy had been founded at West Point in 1802, but the nation still had no considered strategic doctrine or even a native military literature. The Royal Navy proved to be skillful in evading the coastal defenses, and the scores of gunboats, while occasionally useful in shallow water, could not begin to cope with the great British ships of the line. The nation did have a strong potential of military arms. During the 1790s Rhode Island and Maryland “furnaces” had begun casting and boring cannon for fortresses and frigates, and by the turn of the century the Springfield Armory, established by the government, could produce over 5,000 muskets a year. It was the government’s need for quantities of guns that enabled Eli Whitney in New Haven to finance and organize mass production through development of power tools, interchangeability of parts, and mass assembly.

Even so, the fact that the United States was a third-rate military power centrally affected its pretensions, whether in peace or war. While General Hull marched on Canada with 900 men, Napoleon was invading Russia with an army of half a million. Fourteen hundred sailors fought in the decisive battle for Lake Champlain, a mere tenth of the number present at Trafalgar. Napoleon’s taking of Moscow and his bitter, death-ridden retreat had far more to do with the future security of the United States than the British capture of Washington. Once Napoleon was defeated, the United States had little chance of victory.

The greatest lack in the American way of war was a leadership that could define and pursue a set of national ends that had some relation to the needs and aspirations of the people and the political and military capabilities of the nation. American involvements and interests abroad—most notably a world trade that brought American ships and sailors into dangerous waters—far outran American commitments and capabilities. The men who organized the governmental system so brilliantly for the effective but prudent conduct of domestic affairs did not shape an equivalent strategy for the conduct of military and other foreign affairs. Indeed, the genius of the former strategy—the dispersion of power—ran counter to the commanding military need for concentration of power and speed of deployment. And the military failure lay largely in the ideology of peace.

If Americans had been abjectly defeated in the War of 1812, out of desperation they might have shaped a new strategy of war, as other vanquished nations had done. But they were not so defeated. And then, in January 1815, came stunning news that left Americans in euphoria and put the whole war in a happier light. For some months a major general of the Tennessee militia, Andrew Jackson, had been warring against the Creek Indians—who earlier had been aroused by a visit from Tecumseh, encouraged by the British, and armed by the Spanish. After wiping out a Creek force of 900 braves at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Jackson turned to the defense of New Orleans, which the British were planning to capture in order to control the Mississippi. Jackson was ready for the redcoats when they marched against his breastworks on January 8. Within an hour American cannon and rustic sharpshooters cut down over 2,000 men. American casualties were reported to be twenty-one. The British retreated to their ships.

The Battle of New Orleans came too late to affect the terms of a treaty of peace that was being completed in far-off Europe even as the British advanced on Jackson’s redoubts. That treaty reflected the nation’s low military estate before Jackson’s victory. It also reflected the shifting balance of political forces in Britain and America—especially the rising opposition of English trading and manufacturing interests to the war, and the continuing criticism and foot dragging of a declining but still potent group of antiwar Federalists, mainly along the New England coast.

WATERSIDE YANKEES: THE FEDERALISTS AT EBB TIDE

In mid-December 1815 a small group of genteel, prosperous-looking men filed into the tall and spacious council chamber of the Connecticut State House, a majestic building designed by Charles Bulfinch and located not far from the Connecticut River. This was a group of potential rebels, meeting amid great excitement. Angry over the British occupation of part of Maine, fearful that Washington would not protect the New England coast against the British, and resentful above all toward the Virginia dynasty and its embargoes and other interferences with New England commerce, this company of New England Federalists was meeting to consider drastic, though nonviolent, action against Washington. Federalist newspapers in Boston, including the respectable Columbian Centinel, were calling for actions that bordered on secession. In Washington, Secretary of War Monroe was concerned enough to send to Hartford a confidential agent, in the guise of an army recruiting officer, to report back intelligence on this dangerous group, but the officer was not able to get into the secret sessions. Monroe was alarmed enough to authorize federal troops in New York to take prompt action in the event of an uprising.

Monroe need not have worried. What was happening in Hartford was not a lunge for power by a fearsome party cabal. It was something far less portentous and far more poignant—a final convulsive effort, half protest, half death cry, of a movement slowly passing out of existence. The plight of the Federalists was doubly ironic. A political force that had been organized by men who were militantly anti-British and anti-Tory was now dying in part because its leaders were considered American Tories and pro-British. And its leaders, seemingly reluctant to demand freedom of the seas for American shipping, were the political descendants of an earlier generation of men who had emerged from the port cities of America to assert their maritime rights against the British navy.

The waterside Yankees who survived as political forces after the Revolution had been a formidable crowd, even in their second ranks. George Cabot—born of a North Shore merchant, dropped from Harvard in his freshman year for rebelliousness and neglect of studies, and soon thereafter the master of a schooner in the transatlantic trade—believed in an ordered, hierarchical, deferential, inegalitarian society run by the best people, like himself. Timothy Pickering, born in Salem, was a cantankerous, outspoken elitist, so politically outrageous and personally unpopular that Federalist party leaders kept their distance from him. Theophilus Parsons, born in Byfield, a few miles southwest of Newburyport, practiced law in the latter city and then in Boston, opined that the whole government, not just the Senate, should be under elitist control, and later became chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, where he was dubbed “The awfullest Parsons” by young lawyers. Samuel Sewall, born in Boston, practiced law in Marblehead before moving to Maine, and later succeeded Parsons as chief justice. Stephen Higginson, born in Salem, later an import merchant in Boston and a naval officer, took an openly elitist position in his writings and frowned on the politicking of younger Federalists.

Some Federalists of the old school stood a bit apart from these men. Fisher Ames, born in Dedham, was so egregiously alarmist and pessimistic about the dangers of democracy, indeed so “lethargic, raving, sanguine and despondent,” as he described himself, as to embarrass other Federalists. And Harrison Gray Otis, born of an eminent Boston family, combined his elitist views with such elegance of bearing and moderation of political tactics as to give him a special role in linking old-school and new-school Federalists.

The Federalists meeting in the port city of Hartford were the financial and political heirs of merchant shippers, whalers, shipbuilders, fishermen, sailmakers, and hosts of others engaged for over a century in trading and shipping out of the ports of the northeastern seaboard. Some of these men operated out of inland towns, such as Hartford and Poughkeepsie, that could be reached by oceangoing vessels tacking back and forth up wide rivers. But most presided over their offices, countinghouses, wharves, and shipping fleets in the string of coastal ports stretching from Portsmouth to New York City and points south. And what a coastline this was—gnarled and wrinkled and scoured by sea and ice, battered by suddenly gathering summer storms and winter tempests, and broken by small rivers that invited a wharf to be built along the low banks and flatlands where they joined the Atlantic.

To a returning sea captain most of the port towns presented familiar sights. He would emerge from a forest of ship’s masts and furled sails to pick his way through a maze of bags and boxes, barrels and chests alongside warehouses, sail lofts, mast yards, and rope walks, until he came to the closely packed houses of artisans, small merchants, and single or widowed women shopkeepers. He would walk along the streets here, where ground-floor shops opened up on the sidewalks and living quarters nestled in the overhanging upper stories, with their peaked gables, tiny-paned windows, and hand-split clapboards darkened by a century of salt and rain. Heading farther into town, he would come onto High Street, flanked by three-story square-built brick homes of the wealthier merchants. When he entered one of these houses to report on his voyage, the captain would find objects imported from previous Voyages: china from the Far East, furniture from England and France, hangings from Spain, souvenirs from West Africa. And climbing to the widow’s walk, captain and merchant could scan a wide panorama from the busy harbor below to the fields and blue hills disappearing into a summer haze to the west.

These ports had their distinctive features too. In the Massachusetts crescent stretching from Cape Ann to Cape Cod, Salem was the largest, grandest city to the north, the sixth city in the United States in1790. No one has pictured the Salem of that year better than Samuel Eliot Morison: “Her appearance was more antique even than that of Boston, and her reek of the salt water, that almost surrounded her, yet more pronounced. For half a mile along the harbor front, subtended by the long finger of Derby Wharf, ran Derby Street, the residential and business center of the town. On one side were the houses of the gentry, Derbys and Princes and Crowninshields, goodly gambrel or hip-roofed brick and wooden mansions dating from the middle of the century, standing well back with tidy gardens in front. Opposite were the wharves, separated from the street by counting-rooms, warehouses, ship-chandlers’ stores, pump-makers’ shops, sail-makers’ lofts; all against a background of spars, rigging, and furled or brailed-up sails.…”

Close by Salem—and long viewed by Salemites as the town of people who were “rude, swearing, drunken, and fighting” and, worst of all, poor—lay Marblehead, the leader in the Yankees’ great cod-fishing industry. Long before the Revolution, Marblehead had a fleet of 120 fishing schooners sailed by more than a thousand hands. Sloops or schooners with seven or eight men could make four or five round trips a year to fine fishing grounds such as Georges Bank off Cape Cod, and a fisherman kept an eye cocked for mackerel and herring as well. A string of fishing towns to the south of Boston—Cohasset, Plymouth, Cape villages, reaching around to Nantucket and New Bedford—kept hundreds of ships in the fishing trade. Plymouth soon would become less noted for her fishing, or even as the Pilgrims’ landing place, than as a center for rope making.

In the center of the Massachusetts crescent, and at its heart, lay Federalist Boston. With its total tonnage several times larger than that of any rival, Boston was not only the great port of the Commonwealth but its financial, intellectual, political, and cultural center. It was pre-eminently a city of the sea, drawing much of its wealth and its sustenance from Atlantic waters, by which it was virtually isolated when the spring tides reached far inland on the flats west of Beacon Hill. As one approached the city by the Charles River Bridge, Boston seemed “almost to stand in the water, at least to be surrounded by it, and the shipping, with the houses, trees, and churches, having a charming effect.” Boston boasted of its fine buildings, and especially of the man who designed many of them, Charles Bulfinch, but not of its maze of streets, which were reputed to be almost as muddy and rutted as the original cow paths, and just as narrow and tortuous. Outside the harbor stood probably the most famous lighthouse in America, “Boston Light,” founded almost a century before, repeatedly devastated by fire, destroyed in turn by each side during the Revolution, but always rebuilt.

Boston was the financial hub of New England and of much of the Northeast, as well as of her own state. Providence, along with such Connecticut ports as New Haven and New London, had harbors deep enough to ship goods directly across the Atlantic, but Hartford and other, shallower ports dispatched their goods to Boston for transshipment overseas. Produce from Springfield, Northampton, and other towns north of the rapids above Hartford had to be sent down the Connecticut River on barges to Hartford, for transferal to deep-water harbors. Logs from the Vermont and New Hampshire banks of the river were floated down to shipbuilders perched along the lower reaches of the Connecticut.

Boston also transshipped goods from north of Cape Ann—from the old docks of Newburyport and Portsmouth and Portland. The execrable roads inland made it easier for some of these ports to trade by sea with Boston than by land with towns not far inland. Boston merchants had long enjoyed close commercial relationships with their northern neighbors “down east”; Boston indeed was the capital of Maine for many years. But the northern Yankees valued above all their independence from London or Boston. When Portland refused to ship her highly prized masts for use of the British fleet during the first year of the Revolution, the Royal Navy bombarded the city and burned much of it to the ground. Established societies in Bangor and Portsmouth enjoyed looking down on the vulgar nouveaux riches of Boston.

Yankee merchants were profit takers. They made money—and lost it—by buying, swapping, shipping, and selling goods in whatever way seemed most profitable. For this purpose they bought, built, used, and sold not only merchant ships but fishing boats, coasters, whalers, privateers, and smaller craft. They traded in whatever commodity would turn a likely profit: fish, bricks, butter, timber, hay, brooms, buckets, molasses, in exchange for mahogany, coffee, sugar, cocoa, tea, spices, nails, machinery, fashions, silks—hundreds of things from scores of ports around the world. Sometimes they dealt also in rum, opium, and human flesh. “Commerce occupies all their thought,” a foreign observer wrote in 1788, “turns all their heads, and absorbs all their speculations.” When they felt that conditions permitted or required it, the Yankees smuggled goods and sent out privateers to prey on “enemy” ships.

To take profits the merchants took risks. Their ships were sunk off Cape Hatteras or Cape Horn, burned by accident, captured or destroyed by French or British men-o’-war, seized by pirates off Morocco. Seamen took much greater risks—of life itself—with little profit. “A mariner’s life was the most dangerous calling a man could choose during the age of sail,” according to three historians of the period. “…Sunken ledges and sandy shoals reached out from the scenic New England coast to impale hundreds of hapless ships driven before a winter gale or lost in a thick summer fog.” Of Salem’s four hundred widows in 1783, most had finally waited in vain on the widow’s walks atop their mansions, or in a dwelling down by the wharf.

Merchants were the social and political, as well as economic, leaders of their ports. They presided over a pervasive class system of merchants, veteran sea captains, and professional men at the top, master artisans and clerks in the middle, and dock laborers and seamen at the bottom. The merchants sent their sons to Harvard or out to sea eventually to become sea captains, imported the finest silver and linens from abroad, had their wives and daughters painted by Copley and adorned in the latest London fashions, maintained mansions both near their businesses and out in country seats. The lower classes did none of these things. The merchants set themselves off by their manner of dress—perhaps a scarlet broadcloth coat, fancy ruffles, and sword—and by their demand for deference from their inferiors, in the form of a finger to the brow or the tipping of a hat.

A deferential society, and also a deferential politics—at least for a time. Before the Revolution the “best people” in Salem and Newburyport and other ports ran community affairs; voting participation was low, and dominated by the elite. Political conflict tended to be factional, personal, local, and subdued. New England merchants turned to political action less in defense of their theoretical than their economic rights. They led the Revolution—or at least financed it—not out of political or social radicalism but because Britain was threatening their maritime interests. But revolution drew in other elements—men who called themselves Sons of Liberty, mobs that seemed to have little regard for property, editors none too respectful of the gentility. Although the Yankee merchants survived the war with their social and political system largely intact, the ranks of the economic elite had been breached. At the end of the century in Newburyport, for example, an ex-cordwainer, an ex-chaise maker, and an ex-leather dresser had risen to the economic top. How would the conservative Yankees of the New England ports make out in the new, extended republic?

If the Yankee ports were economically adventurous and cosmopolitan, politically and intellectually they tended to be conservative and even stagnant. While Portland and Salem and Hartford doubtless were too small to support lively and innovative cultures, Boston and Cambridge together comprised almost a metropolis, but most of the ruling Bostonians and Cantabrigians were rich, Whiggish, status-minded, and dignified. Some knew how to live in magnificent style, Van Wyck Brooks noted: “The Cushing house in Summer Street was surrounded with a wall of Chinese porcelain. Peacocks strutted about the garden. The Chinese servants wore their native dress. The older folk, sedate, a little complacent, dwelling in the solid garden-houses that stood about the Common, each with its flagged walk and spacious courtyard, filled with fragrant shrubs, shaded by its over-arching elms, were genial and pleasure-loving, as a rule. Harrison Gray Otis, at the age of eighty, after forty years of gout, breakfasted every morning on pâté de fois gras.”

Although these cosmopolitans liked to call their town the Athens of America if not indeed the hub of the universe, their intellectual life, Brooks observed, was timid, cautious, and highly derivative from English culture. Things were no better in Cambridge, despite the dominant intellectual role of Harvard College. Indeed, Harvard too was parochial, complacent, more tolerant of eccentricity than innovation. It could boast a few remarkable professors, such as Levi Hedge, who had devoted fourteen years of his own and drafted adult members of his family to completing his Elements of Logic, and Dr. Henry Ware of Divinity, who had nineteen children; but classes were usually dull recitations, and the standard of learning at Harvard was not high.

Still, one could detect cultural stirrings in these port towns. Even the smaller had their literary societies and historical associations. Religious and political disputes were often more heated than ever. Exciting young men were coming to Harvard to teach. But only the most doting parent or perspicacious teacher could have detected the potential genius of the chubby Emerson boy in Boston, the solitary, fatherless young Nathaniel Hawthorne of Salem, the frail farm youth, John Greenleaf Whittier, in Haverhill reading the poems of Robert Burns, the little orphan Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston, precocious young Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of Portland.

Jeffersonian Republicans held dark suspicions about the New England Federalists—even more the Boston brand, and above all the Essex Federalists, who were reported to be the aggressive and conspiratorial heart of Federalism. Federalists were indeed loosely organized in the “Essex Junto.” Lying north of Boston between the promontory of Cape Ann and the farmlands of Peabody, bounded on the north by Newburyport, on the east by Gloucester, and the south by Salem, Essex County was the heartland of fashionable waterside society. If foreigners called all Americans Yankees, and if Southerners called all Northerners Yankees, and if New Englanders called eastern Massachusetts men Yankees, then the true heartland of Yankeedom lay in this country “north of Boston.” Old-school Federalists were aided by two other forces. One was the party leadership in the cities and towns along the Connecticut from southern Vermont and New Hampshire to the Atlantic; often these Federalists were more papal than the Pope. The other was the Congregationalist leadership of New England, and the Federalist press in the seaports, which week after week followed a high Federalist line and provided powerful ideological buttressing to the views of the old school.

But despite the suspicion of powerful juntas meeting secretly to spin out their diabolical plots against innocent victims, the Essexmen had little political influence, at least after the turn of the century. They constituted a tiny minority of the Federalist party, which kept its distance from them when elections had to be won or legislation passed. Their strength lay chiefly in their absolute ideological commitment to reaction; the “Essex-men,” according to David Fischer, “were conservative in the double sense that they resisted change and sought to restrict the power of the people; their conservatism was ideological, for they defended not merely a fixed position but fixed principles.” Those principles were the fundamental inequality of men and especially women, the sanctity of property and of contracts, social deference, the necessity of upper-class leadership, the danger of popular rule and of devices that would facilitate popular rule. All these principles were anathema not only to the rising body of Jeffersonian Republicans but to moderate Federalists as well.

So ideologically committed were the Essexmen, and so socially prestigious, that their pronunciamentos, amplified by press and pulpit, loomed like a small but ever-threatening thundercloud over the turn-of-the-century political scene. By taking a position so far to the right, the Essexmen moved the political spectrum in their direction. Still, their influence was sharply limited. For one thing, few Essexmen were willing to plunge into the political arena that they disdained, or saw the need to. But even more, their ideology, as they applied it, had a hypocritical ring to it. Much as they prated about public service, self-sacrifice, the public good, and the like, most Essexmen were ultimately committed to protecting their own commercial interests. They were too devoted to “personal and selfish views,” John Quincy Adams said. And the occasions when the Essexmen fought hardest in politics were times when the national government took actions that seemed to hurt their maritime and commercial interests, although they were astute enough to flesh out the proclamation of their position with ardent denunciations of “mobocrats” and Francophiles.

Buffeted by the winds of revolution, tempered in the stresses of the founding period, the elitist and capitalistic ideas of the Yankee merchants flowed into three great currents of Federalist thought and action at the turn of the century. One of these currents brought an authentic expression of Anglo-American conservatism. Another contributed indirectly to the evolution of an enduring party system. The third led to Hartford.

No one in America embodied and practiced the first brand of conservatism more zealously than John Adams. Born and brought up amid the Massachusetts maritime economy, educated in the lecture halls of Harvard and the courtrooms of Boston, steeped in the New England heritage of Calvinistic Puritanism combined with a Unitarian faith in reason as a means of finding the true meaning of God, Adams stood by those conservative ideas as tenaciously as any man could who lived for—and off—appointment and election to high office for most of his working life. The power of his philosophy lay in the way in which his theories of the ineluctable nature of man linked with his views on the proper ends of man, and both of these undergirded his ideas as to the proper organization of government. “Aim at an exact Knowledge of the Nature, End, and Means of Government,” he instructed himself early in his career. “Compare the different forms of it with each other and each of them with their Effects on public and private Happiness. Study Seneca, Cicero, and all other good moral Writers. Study Montesque, Bolinbroke.…” Study them he did, and any other work he could get his hands on.

He grimly, yet happily, rejected all notions of the natural goodness of man. Neither totally depraved nor totally innocent, men had natural tendencies toward corruption, pride, faction, folly, and ambition. Men would constantly be tested, and must resist temptation. By no means did he exempt himself from this internal struggle.

“Which, dear Youth, will you prefer?” he addressed himself—a life of “Effeminacy, Indolence and obscurity, or a life of Industry, Temperance, and Honour?…Let no…Girl, no Gun, no Cards, no flutes, no Violins, no Dress, no Tobacco, no Laziness, decoy you from your Books.…” He chastised himself for waking up late, so that by ten in the morning his “Passion for knowledge, fame, fortune or any good” was too languid for him to apply with spirit to his books.

The existence of evil tendencies in men made all the more necessary a spirit of moral reform, of public virtue in the community. “There must be a positive passion for the public good, the public interest, honor, power and glory, established in the minds of the people, or there can be no republican government, nor any real liberty.…” The enemy of public virtue was individual self-interest. Americans respected the “rights of society” over “private pleasures, passions and interests” as much as any other people, but even in New England he had “seen all my life such selfishness and littleness.” The “spirit of commerce” above all corrupted “the morals of families” and threatened the purity and nobility necessary in a great republic. Virtue in a people was necessary but not adequate.

What, then, could safeguard and express virtue, could suppress the evils of ambition, faction, selfishness, corruption, self-indulgence? The solution lay in a properly designed government—a government carefully balanced among popular, aristocratic, and monarchical elements through an institutionalized equilibrium of executive, upper legislative chamber, lower chamber. Left alone, each of these elements “ran headlong into perversion in the eager search by the rulers, whether one, few, or many, for more power,” Gordon Wood has summarized this view. “Monarchy lunged toward its extremity and ended in a cruel despotism. Aristocracy, located midway on the band of power, pulled in both directions and created ‘faction and multiplied usurpation.’ Democracy, seeking more power in the hands of the people, degenerated into anarchy and tumult. The mixed or balanced polity was designed to prevent these perversions.”

Adams wished above all to protect the power of the executive in such a balanced system. Legislatures, representing both popular and aristocratic forces, tended to outbalance the executive—a tendency dramatically manifested in the state constitutions adopted during the Revolution. The American President, he felt, should hold absolute power of making federal appointments, framing treaties, and even declaring war. “You are afraid of the one—I of the few,” he wrote Jefferson a few months after the Constitution was framed.

No wonder that Adams was appalled by the Pennsylvania constitution of 1776: A unicameral legislature; a weak, practically nonexistent executive; annual rotation in office; But what else would one expect from the likes of Franklin and Paine?

The animating force behind all Adams’ ideas was his belief in liberty and his abhorrence of equality. It was a love of universal liberty, he said, that had “projected, conducted, and accomplished the settlement of America.” But there preyed on his mind the constant fear that liberty would degenerate into licentiousness and anarchy. And here Adams’ fear of equality sapped his love of liberty. He loathed the very thought of “leveling,” of mob action, of the rabble taking over. Extend the vote in Massachusetts, he warned, and “new claims will arise; women will demand a vote; lads from twelve to twenty-one will think their rights not closely enough attended to; and every man who has not a farthing will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state.”

Under the press of events Adams’ defense of liberty often was reduced to that of property. “Property,” he said, “is surely a right of mankind as really as liberty.” He drew lurid pictures of a majority of the poor attacking the rich, abolishing debts, dividing all property among them, and all this ending in idleness and debauchery. The idea of property as liberty was shared by many of Adams’ fellow citizens, even by good republicans, but Adams never made clear where personal or private liberty in property left off, and commercial or corporate liberty of property began. In the end—as most cruelly demonstrated by the Alien and Sedition Acts—he was willing to sacrifice liberty of speech before he would give up the right of property.

It is not granted to many leaders to carry out in practice what they had conceived in theory. Adams had that privilege—and that misfortune. A popularly elected House to represent the people, an indirectly chosen Senate to protect property, a strong executive to make appointments and conduct foreign relations, an expansion of national over state power, all expressed in a stable, respectable, high-toned federal government—Adams rose with this kind of government as Vice-President and President, and fell with it when the Republicans swept to electoral victory in 1800. But intellectually the ultimate victory was his, for he left a bequest of thought and action on which American leaders long would draw.

FEDERALISTS: THE TIDE RUNS OUT

Almost two hundred years later the fall of the Federalist party is still something of a mystery. The Federalists assumed power so readily and exercised it so effectively during the 1790s that one might have expected a long one-party rule like those in many other post-revolutionary regimes. In Washington, Adams, and Hamilton the party possessed unsurpassed political leadership, and this trio was backed up by scores of brilliant congressional and state leaders. Whatever their day-to-day blunders and miscalculations, the Federalists worked out in that decade a strategy of government and policy that seemed well attuned to the long-term needs of the American people.

Yet at century’s turn Washington was dead, Adams defeated, Hamilton compromised, the party repudiated. These misfortunes and setbacks need not have been fatal, but in fact the party never again won the presidency or lasting majorities in Congress and finally it died. Why? Not because it had become—in 1800—a merely sectional party, shrunken to its New England enclaves; the Federalists still had large constituencies in New York, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas. Not because it stagnated organizationally; the Federalists experimented with party machinery that served as models for the party systems that developed later. Not because its leadership died away; in the void left by the defeat of the party in 1800, a host of new, young, vigorous, practical leaders came forward to rejuvenate the party—and to constitute another major current of Federalism.

Despite all this, the party could not re-establish itself in the new century. The Federalists scored some signal successes in various states over the next decade and a half, and they maintained their opposition role in Congress for a time, but in the electoral college, even allowing for its artificial inflations of majorities, their string of defeats was awesome: 1804—Jefferson 162 to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney 14; 1808—Madison 122 to Pinckney 47; 1812—Madison 128 to (Federalist-supported) De Witt Clinton 89; 1816—Monroe 183 to Rufus King 34. It is not easy to kill off a great political party, as later political history has attested; how did the Federalists accomplish such a convincing demise?

The problem was partly one of leadership. The Federalists had always been peculiarly dependent on elevated leadership; Washington, Hamilton, and the rest helped compensate for the Federalist lack of grass-roots organization. Yet high Federalists had an anomalous relationship with the men who had to build coalitions and win votes. John Adams’ “curious relationship” with the “gentlemen of the old school,” in David Fischer’s words, illustrated the problem. Not only did Adams scorn the Boston merchants’ preoccupation with moneymaking, and warn against diverting people “from the cultivation of the earth to adventures upon the sea.” As a vote-seeking politician Adams was difficult for the high Federalists to figure out. “With regard to Mr. A.,” wrote an Amherst Federalist, “it is impossible to calculate upon him. It would puzzle the angels to develop the motives of his conduct.” Angered by old Federalists’ hostility, Adams accused them of “stiff-rumped stupidity.”

As with father, so with son. The mentality of the Essex Junto was manifested in the apostasy of John Quincy Adams. With John Adams safely retired to Quincy and somewhat protected against the slings and arrows of outraged Federalists, his son proceeded to make himself equally unpopular by his posture of being above party politics. Adams had openly supported some of Jefferson’s policies and he differed with the pro-British stance of the Essex Junto. Aroused by the Chesapeake affair, young Adams, although a United States senator ostensibly elected as a Federalist, met openly with Republican leaders to plan strategy against British depredations. The Essexmen were angry when Adams supported the embargo, and furious when he attended a Republican congressional caucus for the presidential nomination for 1808. Federalists moved smoothly to the task of party discipline. Six months before the normal time for choosing senators, they replaced John Quincy Adams with one of their own. Instructed also to oppose the embargo, he promptly resigned. Following the old Massachusetts political admonition of “Don’t get mad, get even,” he used his new Republican party affiliation to counterattack Federalism and win the presidency a generation later.

A major reason for Federalist party decline lay in their hallowed but increasingly anachronistic beliefs in the stewardship of gentlemen of learning and virtue, in the need to protect the rights of property, in order as a prerequisite to liberty, in the natural hierarchical order among citizens, in the need for balance and harmony among classes and interests. These ideas were becoming increasingly incompatible with the expanding market society, the growing materialism and acquisitiveness of Americans, the scuffle of persons and interests for self-advantage. Their ideas were not necessarily wrong, but rather mean and elitist and outdated at the time of rising democratic sentiment. The high Federalists’ crabbed view of liberty contrasted with the broader Jeffersonian concept. Thus Federalist judge Samuel Chase: “liberty…did not consist in the possession of equal rights, but in the protection by the law of the person and property of every member of society, however various the grade in society he filled.” Samuel Lyman, Massachusetts congressman: “a higher degree of liberty cannot exist without endangering the whole …nothing is so unequal as equality.” Samuel Sewall, Massachusetts judge: “Liberty is security, destroy security, therefore, and you destroy liberty.”

Fisher Ames could even joke about the matter. “I derive much entertainment from the squabbles in Madam Liberty’s family,” he wrote. “After so many liberties have been taken with her, she is no longer a miss and a virgin, though she still may be a goddess.”

The younger generation of Federalist leaders, however, put modern organization ahead of old ideas. The Federalists had ended the century a disorganized as well as a defeated party. “The Federalists hardly deserve the name of a party,” Fisher Ames complained. “Their association is a loose one, formed by accident, and shaken by every prospect of labor or hazard.” For a time Federalists mocked the organizational efforts of their Republican foes. A Federalist satire, “The Grand Caucus,” presented four Jeffersonians—“Will Sneakup, Esq., Obedumb Bragwell, Esq., Squire Quorom, Esq., and Lord Cockedoodledoo”—constituted as a “self-created convention” which after various shenanigans came up with that very same foursome as its candidates for office.

But nothing succeeds like failure. As the Federalists suffered defeat after defeat, they imitated the Republicans’ organizational efforts and innovated on their own. They experimented with state legislative caucuses, some of which became increasingly open, with panoplies of state, county, city, ward, and town caucuses, committees, and committees of correspondence. These grass-roots organizations raised money, published pamphlets and broadsides, and above all—their distinguishing feature as a party mechanism—nominated candidates for office. Some of the old-school Federalists were appalled by such political organizing, with all its implications for popular appeal and politicking. Jeremiah Smith frowned on the picture of “half a score of red hot feds well stuffed with brandy and conceit all talking together.…”

All these were state efforts. Could the Federalists build a national party? The incentive was enormous, since the Republicans’ control of the presidency and Congress cast shadows over the whole political scene. The Federalists were assisted by national developments—most notably the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment, which changed the procedure in the electoral college so that each elector, instead of voting for two candidates without indicating which he wanted for President, would cast separate votes for President and Vice-President. This was the Republicans’ retroactive solution to the Jefferson-Burr impasse of l800, but it meant that the Federalists would not encounter a similar crisis erupting between two leaders or factions of their party. Federalists also experimented with rudimentary “conventions,” as they called them, comprised of delegates from a number of states who “nominated” a presidential candidate—a nomination that was not binding, but had some credibility and impact.

Given time, the younger Federalists might have built a national organization strong enough to overcome its twin problems of leadership and credo—the former by supplying stable grass-roots support for national candidates and officials, the latter by recruiting a far greater variety and number of third-cadre activists through local caucuses and other party machinery. But history did not allow the Federalists time. Not only were the Republicans moving ahead with their own remarkable leadership, improved organization, and popular appeal, but the Federalists also found themselves on the unpopular side of foreign-policy issues. Inflamed by Jefferson’s “Frenchified” foreign policy as well as by the Louisiana Purchase, Senator Timothy Pickering played with the notion of a Northern Confederacy including the five New England states, New York, and New Jersey. Secession! The idea appealed to some of the Essexmen who had already given up on the new nation; but it outraged others—including leaders of the Junto itself—who had not worked so hard for Union to see it dissolve within twenty years. The “plot” got nowhere—but a few high Federalists talking about it tainted the image of the whole party.

As the iniquitous Republicans kept their grip on the presidency and Congress during the Jefferson and Madison years, waterside Yankees of the Essex Junto credo and temperament grew desperate about the public interest and security and their own. Feeling had risen to a pitch when ships and sailors stood idle on the heels of Jefferson’s embargo of late 1807. If they could not control or measurably influence the Washington government, what alternatives were there for high Federalists but submission or defiance? Yankee merchants had not grown powerful and prosperous through submission, but whom or what could they defy? A grand precedent stared them in the face—the effort of the Jeffersonians themselves to challenge the legitimacy of the Alien and Sedition Acts. There was more talk of secession on the part of some Essexmen—to the tune of patriotic denunciations by Republicans. Fearing divisive action by the old guard, moderate Federalists diverted much of this feeling into the presidential politics of 1808. Then the War of 1812 brought a far more serious crisis—the Maine coastline occupied, Madison’s war effort faltering, New England ships and commerce devastated.

Now—at last—the high Federalists acted. Pressured by the waterside Yankees and by their commercial, legal, and political allies along the Connecticut River and its reaches, the Massachusetts legislature invited the New England states to send delegates to a convention in Hartford. The maritime states of Rhode Island and Connecticut supplied members; from New Hampshire and Vermont came only delegates of southern counties bordering the Connecticut. A climactic political event seemed at hand—and the testing of a third, and politically dangerous, brand of Federalism.

What followed illustrated the crucial difference in politics and history between what politicians do and what people perceive them as doing. In fact moderates were in control of the convention process from start to finish. Not Pickering or Sedgwick and the other extremists, but sober and responsible men such as George Cabot and Nathan Dane and, above all, the pleasantly soothing Harrison Gray Otis attended. Of the twenty-six delegates at Hartford, twenty-one were lawyers, five merchants. While the convention did call for state interposition “in cases of deliberate, dangerous and palpable infractions of the Constitution, affecting the sovereignty of a State and liberties of the people”—shades of the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions!—no fiery proclamations or threats of secession emerged from the secret meetings; on the contrary, such safe outcomes as denunciations of Republican rule and calls for constitutional amendments to limit commercial embargoes, trade restrictions, and presidential power in general. The convention “recommended” adoption of such amendments by state legislatures or by conventions of the people.

The popular image of the proceedings was quite different. Highly embroidered by a gleeful Republican press, a picture emerged of a small cabal of New England arch-conservatives meeting in secret in a Federalist town to plot secession and the disruption if not the overthrow of the republic. Opposition to the rising egalitarianism of the day, a devotion to their selfish interests over the public welfare, and, worst of all, friendship for the British—all this put the Federalists in the worst possible political posture. The Republican leadership, however, was genuinely concerned about the meeting. Madison was found by a visitor to look “heartbroken,” his mind full of the “New England sedition,” and Jefferson was stirred enough in his retirement to demand that the “Essex Junto” be stripped of power.

Things could hardly have ended worse for the Hartford Federalists. News of the Treaty of Ghent and of Jackson’s victory at New Orleans left the conventioneers looking both foolish and defeatist. It became easy to caricature them as traitors and subversives who put “blue lights” up off the Connecticut shore to signal British privateers. The impression of selfishness, reaction, and subversion was too heavy a load for the Federalists, as they began their protracted death watch.

CHAPTER 7

The American Way of Peace

IN THE SLEEPY FLANDER town of Ghent, in the late summer and fall of 1814, five Americans met, quarreled with one another, parleyed with the enemy—and wrote a treaty that helped keep Americans and British at peace with each other for a century, and in close alliance for decades after that.

The Americans in Ghent made up a prodigious quintet. The most senior, though still in his early fifties, was Albert Gallatin, happy to be free of his long tour as Secretary of the Treasury, as sagacious, tactful, and reasonable as ever. The most famous was the young Speaker of the House of Representatives, Henry Clay, the Kentucky “war hawk,” as pacific now as he had been bellicose, but no less a spokesman of the West. There were two experienced diplomats, James Bayard of Delaware, still remembered for having helped Jefferson win the presidency in the crisis of February 1801, and Jonathan Russell, a New Englander. And there was the formal head of the delegation, John Quincy Adams.

Gallatin was the real leader of the delegation, and it took all his diplomacy to keep the diplomats together. The five men lodged in bachelor quarters in a genteel residence. They usually ate together, save for Adams, who arose early, dined at one, and morosely noted that the others did not fall to until four. “They sit after dinner and drink bad wine and smoke cigars, which neither suits my habits nor my health, and absorbs time which I cannot spare.” Finally Gallatin persuaded him to dine with the others. Sometimes Adams would be rising just as Clay came in from a night of drinking and card playing. The fact that Clay spoke for western interests, and Adams for New Englanders such as fishermen, while both had their eyes on the presidency, did not make for harmony, but Gallatin smoothed matters over with his plea, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, we must remain united or we will fail.…”

The Americans faced daunting circumstances. Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria were planning a Quadruple Alliance to protect the victorious allies against a resurgent France, which was described to Clay by the American minister in Paris as “a political volcano, ready to explode whenever the match shall be applied.” Napoleon had been packed off to Elba. The Royal Navy now ruled the seas, the Duke of Wellington bestrode Europe. His crack troops were already shipping out of Bordeaux and sailing toward America, where they could join the drives down the Hudson or into the mouth of the Mississippi. The confident English had allowed Adams & Co. to cool their heels for weeks before dispatching their delegation, which on arrival struck the Americans as a collection of nonentities. Even meeting in Ghent was on British sufferance, for the area was occupied by redcoats. “What think you of our being surrounded by a British garrison?” Clay wrote a friend.

Hardly deigning to conceal their sense of mastery, the British negotiators presented the Americans with stiff demands: the United States to be forbidden fortifications and armed vessels on the Great Lakes; a vast territory south of the lakes to be created for England’s Indian allies, and as a buffer against American expansion; the United States to cede lands in eastern Maine, northern New York, and west of Lake Superior. The Americans were staggered by these proposals, but especially by the notion that they should surrender the whole of the Northwest Territory, comprising the (present) states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois, and much of Indiana and Ohio, according to the calculations of Gallatin’s son James.

“Father mildly suggested that there were more than a hundred thousand American citizens settled in these States and territories,” son James noted in his diary. “The answer was: ‘They must look after themselves.’”

The Americans—all but the poker-playing Clay, who felt he knew a bluff when he saw one—prepared to pack their bags. But the parley did not end, for neither side was wholly happy with this ignominious war. Negotiations for peace had actually started within a few weeks of the commencement of the war, and had continued in various guises until Ghent. What each nation expected of a peace treaty had been closely affected by the turns of fortune on the battlefields.

Early in October news reached Ghent that Washington had been sacked, but then came the report of Macdonough’s brilliant victory on Lake Champlain. This repulse of the British thrust toward the Hudson, combined with Perry’s and other earlier naval victories, critically influenced the thinking of the pre-eminent English military leader, Wellington. Offered the command in Canada, the Iron Duke bluntly informed his political superiors that he could not promise much in the light of American naval power on the Lakes, and what’s more, they were in no position to demand territorial concessions from America. No ministry could ignore such advice from the hero of Waterloo.

Both sides at Ghent accordingly modified their proposals. The Americans long since had given up their key demand for the end of impressment, but this was made easier by the knowledge that the defeat of France made impressment no longer vital to the Royal Navy. The British dropped their claim of a huge buffer land—their Indian “allies” could hardly press them on this matter as much as their Canadian brothers could on others—and modified their call for territorial concessions. A last-minute hitch loomed when the British suddenly challenged long-held American fishing rights off Newfoundland. If New England mariners wanted to fish in Canadian waters, Englishmen should have the right to navigate the Mississippi. Clay was furious when Gallatin and Adams supported such a deal. He would sign no treaty, he proclaimed, that granted Mississippi navigation rights to the enemy.

“A dreadful day,” young Gallatin wrote in his diary. “Angry disputes on the contre-project. ” His father and Adams wanted the deal. “Mr. Clay would not hear of it.…Nothing arrived at.” By now, however, Gallatin knew that peace was likely, for he had received, according to his son, a private note from Wellington assuring him of the Duke’s good offices. When young James started to copy this note, his father snatched it from him and burned it.

By the day before Christmas 1814, all issues had been agreed on, or postponed. Essentially the parties settled for the status quo ante. It was, as Thomas Bailey later judged, a truce of exhaustion rather than of persuasion, with important boundary issues left for later arbitral commissions. The treaty was signed December 24, 1814. The Americans invited their late adversaries to a dinner at which Adams toasted “His Majesty the King of England!” The British did the honors on Christmas Day, inviting the Americans to a dinner that included roast beef and plum pudding straight from England. The band, young Gallatin recorded, first played “God Save the King,” followed by a toast to the King, and “Yankee Doodle,” with a toast to the President.

GOOD FEELINGS AND ILL

Three thousand miles away that President anxiously awaited word of the terms of peace. Madison need not have worried. News of the Treaty of Ghent arrived about the same time as reports of the triumph of New Orleans. The two events seemed to become mixed together in the popular mind. “GLORIOUS NEWS!” proclaimed Niles’ Weekly Register. “Orleans saved and peace concluded.” Bells were rung, guns fired, holidays proclaimed, pupils liberated from school. The public feeling of joy and happiness, reported the New York Evening Post, showed how “really sick at heart” people of “all ranks and degrees” were of the war. “Broadway and other streets were illuminated by lighted candles,” the newspaper reported; “the city resounded in all parts with the joyful cry of a peace! a peace!” Boston was reported to be in a “perfect uproar of joy.” Amid the euphoria the Senate ratified the treaty without a dissenting vote—one of the most popular ever negotiated by the United States.

But there was some ill feeling too. Bellicose Americans still wanted to attack Canada, especially after General Jackson had shown what could be done on the Mississippi. Some Federalists argued that the war should not have been fought in the first place. Many Canadians felt deserted by the English. And many Britishers felt sold out by their government; their sentiments found a voice in the Times of London, which saw the British as retiring from the combat with “the stripes yet bleeding on our backs,” and lamented that the treaty “betrays a deadness to the feelings of honour.”

Like all wars, that of 1812-15 extinguished some problems and heated up others. One of the latter was the border with Canada, which remained to be negotiated with London. The Great Lakes, where costly naval battles had been fought, were the critical area. For years American leaders—notably John Adams in Paris and John Jay in London—had dreamed of a permanent disarmament of the Lakes. Now the opportunity had come. The House of Representatives led the way, though partly out of reasons of economy, by authorizing the President to have the fresh-water navy laid up or sold, after first preserving their “armament, tackle, and furniture.” Would Britain follow suit? John Quincy Adams, now minister in London, sent word that the Cabinet was determined not only to maintain but to increase their naval power on the Lakes. Monroe instructed him to propose a mutual limitation of armed vessels.

With negotiations well under way, Madison could turn to pressing domestic problems. At war’s end, he had only two more years to serve. His annual message to Congress in December 1815 was the first he was able to devote mainly to domestic issues. It was a paradoxical occasion. Congress was ignominiously meeting in the Patent Office, the only major federal building spared by the British, but its leadership had never been more lustrous: Calhoun, Webster, Pickering, Clay. The Kentuckian had been re-elected to the Speakership the first day he returned to the House after his year and a half abroad as a peace commissioner. The secondary leadership was hardly less impressive: Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, William Lowndes of South Carolina, Samuel D. Ingham of Pennsylvania, all Republicans, and a small band of articulate Federalists. But most remarkable was Madison’s message.

It started out by claiming victory—not over the British, but over Algiers, where Captain Stephen Decatur had recently exacted a peace agreement from the Dey after a brilliant attack and had gone on to gain similar guarantees from Tunis and Tripoli. If this pleased the members of Congress, the mood swiftly changed as the President came to his proposals. He called for expanded defense, “both fixed and floating,” and for more skilled and disciplined state militias. He asked for tariff protection for young manufacturing establishments. He talked about the need for the “General Government” to build roads and canals, and to make rivers more navigable, provided that such steps were—or could be made—constitutional. And he said, in words that were as startling in substance as mild in form, “If the operation of the State banks cannot produce this result”—a uniform national currency—“the probable operation of a national bank will merit consideration.”

Stepped-up defense in peacetime? Tariffs? Internal improvements? A national bank? What heretical doctrine was this? And from the pen of James Madison, second only to Jefferson among Republican founding fathers? Then and later the “old Republicans” brought out their sacred texts. “The evil of the times is a spirit engendered in this republic, fatal to Republican principles; fatal to Republican virtue;”, cried John Randolph, “a spirit to live by any means but those of honest industry; a spirit of profusion;…a spirit of expediency not only in public but in private life.…There are very few who dare to speak truth to this mammoth. The banks are so linked together with the business of the world that there are very few men exempt from their influence.”

Only a few congressmen realized that they were witnessing a profound shift in the Republican party—a shift that would alter the nation’s politics for decades to come. In its many rooms, the mansion of Republicanism had always had a place for activist, mercantilist policies of government support for economic development. Gallatin, in a series of masterly reports in the last year of Jefferson’s presidency, had called for a national transportation and communications network as part of a ten-year plan that, William Appleman Williams has commented, “made Hamilton appear a fumbling amateur.” Then had come war, always the forcing house of economic change. The federal government had become deeply involved in raising and spending money, promoting industry such as iron foundries and ship manufacture.

Younger, more entrepreneurial Republicans like Henry Clay shucked off the old Republican bias against federal economic action. Madison himself, under the pressure of war, shifted his ground. “Altho’ I approve the policy of leaving to the sagacity of individuals, and to the impulse of private interest, the application of industry & capital,” he wrote a correspondent a few months after leaving the White House, “I am equally persuaded, that in this as in other cases, there are exceptions to the general rule, which do not impair the principle of it. Among these exceptions, is the policy of encouraging domestic manufacturers, within certain limits, and in reference to certain articles.”

Out of the old Republican party a new political force was arising, more nationalist, more entrepreneurial, more interventionist than the old. Politicians were switching sides. Madison, who had vetoed a bank bill in January 1815, signed, hardly fifteen months later, a measure creating the Second Bank of the United States, capitalized with the huge sum of $35 million. Calhoun had introduced the bill; Clay, who five years before had argued that such a bill was unconstitutional, left the Speaker’s chair to explain why he had changed his mind; and Federalists, advocates of the first United States bank only two decades before, largely voted against it. So many “old” Republicans joined Federalists against the bill as almost to defeat the measure in the House. The bank began operating at the start of 1817.

More was involved in all this than economic and political change. The very spirit and character of the nation seemed altered after the war. In part this was a matter of self-satisfaction and celebration. “I can indulge the proud reflection that the American people have reached in safety and success their fortieth year as an independent nation,” Madison said in his last message to Congress, in December 1816; “that for nearly an entire generation they have had experience of their present Constitution,” and “have found it to bear the trials of adverse as well as prosperous circumstances; to contain in its combination of the federate and elective principles a reconcilement of public strength with individual liberty, of national power for the defense of national rights with a security against wars of injustice.…”

The “reconcilement of public strength” and “individual liberty”—this was the essence of the political achievement. But the spirit of 1816 and 1817 went beyond this. It was a feeling of self-confidence, of having won—or so it was thought—America’s “second war of independence.” It was the boast that America now had established herself in the family of nations as a power that must be respected. It was the notion that at last Americans had achieved a sense of self-identity, of spirit, of earned esteem and hence of self-esteem. “A great object of the war has been attained in the firm establishment of the national character,” Clay told officials of the city of Washington on returning from Europe in September 1815.

Few Americans embodied this spirit more visibly than James Monroe, the heir apparent to the presidency. “The experiment” of war, he said, “was made under circumstances the most unfavorable to the United States, and the most favorable to the very powerful nation with whom we were engaged. The demonstration is satisfactory that our Union has gained strength, our troops honor, and the nation character, by the contest.” Now in his late fifties, Monroe, with his big strapping frame, erect bearing, and plain, deep-lined face, looked more like a leader of the Virginia gentry than of the “Virginia dynasty.” Less reflective, philosophical, or profound than his mentors Jefferson and Madison, he was known as a man of common sense, good judgment, and courage. He was deeply experienced, as Revolutionary officer, Continental Congressman, United States senator, diplomat, governor of Virginia, and Secretary of State doubling as Secretary of War during the final critical months of the war. Monroe’s thinking had changed considerably since the days when he opposed the Constitution because it vested too much power in the chief executive. Now he looked forward to being a strong President of a strong nation.

Not all supported this ambition. Even in Virginia, the foundation of Monroe’s support, “old Republicans” were hostile to his candidacy. Once again the party’s nomination would be decided by “King Caucus,” the traditional meeting of Republican members of Congress, but here Monroe faced formidable opposition in Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford. In turn senator from Georgia, Minister to France, and Secretary of War, before taking over Treasury, Crawford was almost as experienced as Monroe; even more, the tall, ruddy-faced Georgian was the kind of orator, superb storyteller, and genial handshaker that endeared a leader to politicians in both houses. He also benefited from a widespread feeling that it was time to curb the Virginia dynasty and Virginia influence. This feeling was strongest in the Empire State, which had provided the nation with neither President nor emperor, but New Yorkers were divided between supporters of the politico and reformer De Witt Clinton and of the rising young state politician Martin Van Buren.

The machinations of 1816 are still not wholly clear, but it probably was the Crawfordites who posted an anonymous notice calling Republican senators and representatives to a nominating session. Monroe’s supporters boycotted this rump caucus, which attracted so embarrassingly few members that it could only summon a second caucus. At this point Crawford seems to have experienced a failure of nerve. It was not easy to take on the senior member of the Cabinet; moreover, at the age of forty-four, the Georgian felt he could wait a presidential term or two and run again in 1824 at the latest. At the second caucus Monroe beat him by the unimpressive margin of 65 to 54.

The Federalist party was so weak in 1816 that Monroe’s nomination was tantamount to election. The party of Washington and Hamilton chose the veteran New York politician Rufus King, and then failed to unite its thin support even behind him. Monroe vanquished him in the electoral college, 183-34, with the shrunken Federalists monotonously clinging to their majorities in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware. The Virginia dynasty stood fast.

“The American people,” President James Monroe said in his Inaugural Address, “…constitute one great family with a common interest.” The government had been in the hands of the People. The People had built and sustained the Union. Only when “the People become ignorant and corrupt” did they become the “willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin.” Hence: “Let us, by all wise and constitutional measures, promote intelligence among the People, as the best means of preserving our liberties.”

To many, this paean to the People was so much Republican oratory. But Monroe was not just indulging in cant. He had a plan based on a hypothesis that, as he wrote Andrew Jackson, “the existence of parties is not necessary to free government.…” His plan was no less than to rid the nation of party rivalry. Inheriting Jefferson’s theoretical dislike (though actual utilization) of party, Monroe would go far beyond him. Whereas Jefferson proposed to win over moderate Federalists, isolate “monarchical” types, and build a new party, Monroe proposed to offer the Federalists the chance to “get back in the great family of the union,” thus to broaden the Republican ranks, and then to govern on behalf of the whole People, the American Family, the national consensus.

“The nation has become tired of the follies of faction,” Nicholas Biddle said after the election.

To raise his administration above party rivalry, to speak for the American family, to act on the national consensus, Monroe resolved on a glittering ministry, a Cabinet of all the talents, a leadership from all the sections. From the East, for Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams. From the West, for Secretary of War, Henry Clay. From the South, for Secretary of the Treasury, William H. Crawford. But not all the leaders were willing to crowd into the new President’s tent. In particular Henry Clay, sorely disappointed that he had not been proffered State, declined War. Unable to find for this post another Westerner of sufficient stature or caliber, Monroe appointed the brilliant young Southerner John Calhoun, who was rising to an eminence that would rival Clay’s. All these men were Republicans. Where were the Federalists in this non-party administration? Monroe said he wanted to give the opposition a chance for reconciliation but he appointed few Federalists, mainly out of fear of alienating Republicans. Federalists did not protest unduly. They could forgo Republican patronage, they calculated, as long as Monroe seemed to embrace Federalist policies.

If Americans were now to be one family with the President as their father, a grand tour seemed a fine way to demonstrate popular support for the new leader. Three months after his inauguration, Monroe, accompanied by a small party, set off for New England. He was greeted by friendly crowds and subjected to parades, reviews, and tours all the way up the eastern seaboard, but enthusiasm rose to a pitch in Boston. Was the old city making up for its long coolness to Virginia dynasts? Forty thousand persons, it was estimated, lined the streets and filled every window as the presidential party moved through the streets to Boston Common. Over the next few days Monroe inspected defenses, greeted delegations, reviewed troops, toured the Watertown arsenal and a Waltham cotton factory, heard Edward Channing orate in Faneuil Hall and William Ellery Channing preach a Unitarian sermon, visited Bunker Hill and “Old Ironsides,” and drove to Harvard, where he received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree amid much pomp and circumstance. Just as he hoped, Federalists—including even his old foe Timothy Pickering—greeted him warmly. Indeed, the main political problem was the unseemly jockeying between Republican and Federalist leaders to honor the President; even this kind of party rivalry disturbed the grand harmonizer.

So Monroe could reign; could he rule? Madison had bequeathed him some issues that did not admit of easy conciliation. One was the bank, which actually began operations only a few weeks before Monroe took office and generated controversy by its mere existence. Another was federally subsidized internal improvements, especially roads.

Westerners in particular had been clamoring for better connections with the market centers of the eastern seaboard. The typical inland road of the time was still a rough and meandering strip of rutted earth that often might turn into a bog that could swallow carriage wheels, or into a streambed that could break them. In his last annual message to Congress, Madison had favored a federally financed network of roads and canals, but he believed that a constitutional amendment was necessary before the federal government could undertake such a project. Calhoun, arguing that internal improvements were sanctioned by the general welfare clause of the Constitution, had helped push a bill through a closely divided House and Senate, only to see Madison veto it the day before he left the White House. Early in Monroe’s presidency George Tucker of Virginia presented a report by the House Committee on Internal Improvements affirming the power of Congress to construct roads and canals. Monroe anxiously consulted with ex-President Madison.

This time it was Henry Clay of Kentucky who took on a foot-dragging Virginia President. Rarely had “Harry of the West” so brilliantly commanded the floor of the House. Treating his foes with exquisite courtesy, mixing heavy constitutional arguments with stiletto thrusts, he touched on Monroe’s regal tour, with his loyal subjects rising to salute the “entrance of the sovereign,” and he sarcastically exploited Monroe’s inconsistencies and the inadequacies of his constitutional arguments. The President, he said, had given the House only “an historical account of the operations of his own mind.” Friends of the Administration rose to rebut him, but he brushed them off like so many flies. His constitutional arguments were hardly new; they were the Hamiltonian case for federal power. But Hamilton, the proponent of executive power, would hardly have accepted Clay’s attack on Monroe’s supporters for ascribing “imperial powers” to their chief.

Clay bluntly attacked Monroe’s idea of rising above party. “We are told,” the Speaker said acidly, “that in these halcyon days there is no such thing as party spirit; that the factions by which the country has been divided, are reduced to their primitive elements, and that this whole society is united by brotherly love and friendship.…Sir, I do not believe in this harmony, this extinction of party spirit, which is spoken of; I do not believe that men have ceased to be men, or that they have abandoned those principles on which they have always acted hitherto.”

The President hardly needed Clay to remind him of the difficulties of partyless government. It was soon clear that if men did not divide into two parties, they would divide into countless factions within parties. To govern without party support, moreover, meant that the President lacked allies when he needed them. And he needed them most when the going was rough—most notably after the Panic of 1819.

The causes of that panic were manifold—worldwide readjustments after the Napoleonic wars, overexpansion of credit, low prices of imports from Europe—but the debtors of Kentucky and South Carolina and other western and southern states did not look for remote sources of their troubles when their loans were called in or their mortgages were foreclosed. Nor did the tradespeople and laborers who lost their jobs. The culprit was tangible and visible—the United States Bank. Though the bank’s desperate efforts to save itself were a sign more of weakness than of strength, this was a time for hyperbole. “All the flourishing cities of the West are mortgaged to this money power,” said Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri later. “They may be devoured by it at any moment. They are in the jaws of the monster!” Someone else said: “The Bank was saved, and the people were ruined.”

An even harsher challenge to the “era of good feelings” came shortly—a flare-up over slavery. This issue, it was true, had not yet achieved formidable proportions, and even now it did not rise as an issue in itself, but was suddenly projected into Washington politics when the Missouri Territorial Assembly petitioned Congress for statehood. At this time the twenty-two states in the Union were equally divided between slave states and free. This was no coincidence, since the respective political weight of North and South had been carefully balanced by the alternate admission of free and slave states. Despite the three-fifths rule, the free states had 105 votes in the House, the slave states 81. But the Southerners counted on the equal vote in the Senate to sustain the political balance.

Maintaining that balance was the central thrust of the political efforts of 1820 that later came to be known as the Missouri Compromise. The legislative path to compromise was long and tortuous, as northern legislators tried to limit slavery in Missouri and to the west, and were beaten back by southern lawmakers. Representative James Tallmadge of New York sought to amend the Missouri statehood legislation by prohibiting the further introduction of slaves into the state and requiring that all children born of slaves in Missouri be freed at the age of twenty-five. The House passed this amendment; the Senate killed it. When the organization of Arkansas Territory came before Congress, John W. Taylor of Saratoga County, another New York congressman who shared Tallmadge’s moral objection to the extension of slavery, moved to prohibit its further expansion. This was defeated, and Congress admitted Arkansas with no curb on slavery. After Maine had freed itself of Massachusetts and petitioned for admission, Maine was used as a counter to Missouri. When the Senate coupled the admission of Maine and Missouri, Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois proposed an amendment providing that Missouri be admitted as a slave state but that, in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase, slavery be barred north of latitude 36º30?. This amendment the Senate passed, but the House balked. After considerable attitudinizing, confronting, foot dragging, and dickering, Maine was admitted as a free state, Missouri as a slave state, and the northern boundary of slavery was fixed at 36º30?.

This was the “Missouri Compromise,” but the compromising was not over. Missourians soon met in convention in St. Louis and adopted a constitution empowering the legislature to exclude free Negroes and mulattoes from the state. Feeling betrayed, the compromisers for the North, with the powerful help of Henry Clay, arranged the “Second Missouri Compromise,” stipulating that Missouri would not finally be admitted until the legislature promised that nothing in her constitution could be interpreted as sanctioning the abridgment of the privileges and immunities of United States citizens. On that basis Missouri was admitted. Later, the state repudiated this undertaking.

This trading and brokering took place amid a curious vacuum. Despite much editorializing, the country was not deeply aroused. Northern feeling against slavery had not developed strongly, nor did the slaveholders yet feel mortally threatened. Congress was less a scene of grand confrontation between the two sides than an arena for guerrilla warfare, as small factions clung to protected positions on the ideological battlefield. The compromise was not so much a solemn compact between North and South, as Glover Moore said, as “merely an agreement between a small majority of the Southern members of Congress and a small minority of the Northern ones.” Aside from a sweeping attack by Rufus King on the whole moral and philosophical case for slavery, debate was mainly legalistic. Any transcending moral issues fed into the fragmented machinery of Congress were divested of their ethical content by endless constitutional logic-chopping, then quietly enervated in the backstairs trading and brokering that produced the compromise.

The debate aroused no great confrontation between the two parties, because there were no longer two parties, only a bloated conglomeration of Republicans and a dying band of Federalists. The debates aroused no dramatic encounter between President and opposition party leader, for the latter did not exist and the former wanted things as they were. Monroe was essentially passive throughout the long course of the debates. He feared that the issue might get out of hand and intrude into his re-election campaign in 1820, but he won a second term with only a single elector in opposition, and some wondered whether he might have expended more of his political capital on such a major issue.

To Jefferson the debates came “like a fire bell in the night.” But the fire bell seemed to awaken few outside the politicians and the press, in part because the politicians mainly wanted it that way. Perhaps the fire bell aroused the Virginia conscience, but Jefferson used a more apt figure when he said, in noting the lack of considered measures for dealing with slavery, “We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”

ADAMS’ DIPLOMACY AND MONROE’S DICTUM

Stretching two thousand miles to the west of the United States at the end of the War of 1812-15, and five or six thousand miles to the south, lay the vast possessions of Spain and Portugal. Rooted in the culture and heritage of Britain and northern Europe, most Americans had a poor and contorted understanding of the empire that flanked them from California along the Pacific shores of Mexico through the Caribbean, to the long shoulder of Brazil jutting far out into the Atlantic. Of heroic stories of Columbus and Cortes and Pizarro, North Americans learned in their infancy. Sailors and traders brought back tales of exotic and erotic adventures in great ports such as Havana, San Juan, Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, of frightful tempests and endless storms off Cape Horn, of pleasant trading places like Acapulco and San Francisco. But little was known, outside the ranks of diplomats and a few scholars, of the Latin cultures that had begun to flourish in Central and South America during the sixteenth century while North America was peopled by native Indians and a few white settlers.

North Americans knew little of the glories of a Spanish America that was enjoying a kind of Indian summer in the early nineteenth century—of the creative patronage of the arts, of the brilliant circles of learning, of the astronomical observatory in Bogotá, of the already ancient university in Santo Domingo, of the school of mines in Mexico City. Most yanquis comprehended only dimly a polity of Spanish state rule from the Crown in Madrid through a great pyramid of viceroyalties, such as New Granada, Peru, New Spain (Mexico), down through presidencies, captain-generalcies, and audiencias. And even less did they understand or appreciate the Church that, now stern and now benign, spread its spiritual arms over Spanish and Indian alike and often, to a far greater extent than northern missionaries, made an effort not merely to convert the Indians but to understand and accommodate their language, customs, and needs. Nor did most Latin Americans know or care much about the small republic to the north, with its Protestant culture and often bumptious diplomacy.

The two cultures confronted each other along a hazy boundary from the northern reaches of the Floridas to Louisiana and then across the southwestern desert. The Administration ended the war with a good deal of ill feeling toward the Spanish. He had been looking at some official Spanish documents, President Madison told the chief clerk of the State Department, and they backed up all the earlier accounts “of the extreme jealousy & hatred of us prevailing in the Spanish Court, and prove that after the fall of Napoleon, there was a project entertained, for taking advantage of our war with England, and the expected succour of the latter to Spain, to settle all territorial matters with the U.S. according to Spanish wishes.” For years the Floridas had lain like a pistol aimed at the Mississippi, the central artery of American commerce, with East Florida the butt and West Florida the barrel, Samuel Flagg Bemis noted; now, with sections sliced off earlier by the United States, the pistol looked more truncated. But it was still dangerous, and must be muzzled.

Who would do the muzzling, and how? The military action was undertaken by Andrew Jackson, but the guiding hands were those of James Monroe, and especially of John Quincy Adams, in a brilliant display of American Realpolitik.

While Monroe was still Secretary of State, and Adams Minister to Britain, Adams in London had confronted the British Foreign Minister, Lord Castlereagh, with Washington’s suspicions that Spain had secretly ceded Florida to Britain.

“As to that,” Castlereagh said, “I can set you at ease at once. There is not and never has been the slightest foundation for it whatsoever. It never has been even mentioned.”

“I am sure the American government will receive with much pleasure the assurance given me by your Lordship that no such cession has been made,” Adams said.

“None whatever,” Castlereagh continued. “It has never been mentioned, and, if it had, it would have been decisively declined by us. Military positions may have been taken by us during the war, of places which you had taken from Spain, but we never intended to keep them. Do you also observe the same moderation. If we should find you hereafter pursuing a system of encroachment upon your neighbors, what we might do defensively is another consideration.”

“I do not precisely understand what your Lordship intends by this advice of moderation,” Adams said smoothly. “The United States have no design of encroachment upon their neighbors, or of exercising any injustice toward Spain.”

Castlereagh’s warning did not deter Monroe and Adams from taking a strong line toward Spain on Florida when they became President and Secretary of State in 1817. The United States held certain advantages. The Louisiana treaty had left quite vague the boundary west of the Mississippi. Spain’s military grip on Florida had weakened as she siphoned off troops to fight insurgents in South America. Florida had become a haven for privateers and runaway slaves; even more, Seminole Indians, harboring resentments against the Americans, had thrust across the border to “pillage, burn, and murder.” For its part, Madrid was less interested in keeping the disorderly settlements and treacherous swamps of Florida than in securing its holdings to the west. The Spanish minister in Washington, Don Luiz de Onís y Gonzales, was instructed to defer any cessions of the Floridas until Washington compromised on Texas. Onís was happy to drag his heels, but events would not permit this, for Americans in lower Georgia were clamoring for a punitive expedition into Florida against both the Seminoles and the Spanish.

Who could do the job better than Andrew Jackson, long a frontier nationalist and harrier of Indians and Spaniards, and already in place as commander of the Southern Division? All that was needed was an incident, and this had been conveniently provided when, in November 1817, American troops burned a Seminole border village and the Indians in retaliation ambushed an American hospital ship and killed forty-five soldiers, women, and children. Jackson urged on Monroe that the “whole of East Florida be seized and held as indemnity for the outrages of Spain upon the property of our Citizens.” The government need not be implicated, the general added. “Let it be signified to me through any channel…that the possession of the Floridas would be desirable to the United States, and in sixty days it will be accomplished.” Jackson received no direct reply to this letter; all he did receive was murky instructions from Washington that left him just where he liked to be: on his own.

Early in March 1818, Jackson crossed the border with about two thousand men. Acting with his usual dash and elan, in a few weeks’ time he chased Indians, seized Pensacola and other key Spanish posts in Florida, confiscated the royal archives, court-martialed and executed two British subjects suspected of aiding the enemy, deposed the Spanish governor, and declared in force the revenue laws of the United States. After howls of indignation in London and Madrid, he expressed regret only for failing to hang the Spanish governor.

Patriotic Englishmen reacted with predictable wrath to the “murder” of their fellow countrymen. The press, exhibiting Jackson in their street placards, denounced him as a tyrant, ruffian, and murderer, United States minister Richard Rush reported from London. There was even talk of war. Patriotic Americans responded to Jackson’s incursion with predictable delight. Public dinners offered toasts to the man who had vanquished Spanish, Indians, and British all in one stroke, and gained real estate to boot. Niles’ Weekly Register reported that the general’s popularity in the West was unbounded—at his call 50,000 warriors “would rise, armed, and ready for any enemy.” Tammany Hall resolved that the “manly” general was justified by the “law of nations” and approved of his teaching “foreign emissaries that the United States was not to be outraged by spies, traitors, and lawless adventurers.” New York awarded the hero the freedom of the city—in a golden box. In Washington, Onís demanded an explanation, while Congress, after wrangling over Jackson’s actions in a month-long debate, during which the galleries were crowded almost to suffocation and cuspidors overturned in the rush for seats, decisively defeated resolutions condemning the hero’s conduct.

The crucial move lay with President Monroe and his Cabinet. All seemed to agree that the general had exceeded his orders. Secretary of War Calhoun, stung by what he saw as Jackson’s defiance of his own orders not to challenge the Spaniards, wanted him court-martialed. Secretary of the Treasury Crawford joined in the condemnation. Both men had their eyes on the next election—and on Henry Clay, who was making capital against both Jackson and the Administration. The President as usual looked for a consensus, and he might have had one, except for his Secretary of State.

John Quincy Adams did not like Andrew Jackson; the Tennesseean was not his kind of man. Nor did he approve of the general’s excesses in Florida. But Adams saw an opportunity that transcended personalities, an opportunity to exercise American statecraft, to advance his dream of a transcontinental nation, and to promote his rising hopes of a second Adams presidency. Instead of allowing the Jackson incursion to be elevated to a moral issue forcing the United States on the defensive, he treated it as a fait accompli that put Washington in a stronger position in dealing with Madrid over the whole transcontinental border. “On the receipt of Genl. Jackson’s report of his proceedings there,” Monroe wrote ex-President Madison a few weeks after, “we had three great objects in view, first to secure the constitution from any breach, second to deprive Spain and the allies of any just cause of war, and third to turn it to the best account of the country.” The third responsibility was peculiarly Adams’. In his instructions to the United States minister in Madrid, Adams took the offensive. He charged Spain with having failed to restrain her Indians and in fact with encouraging them; he defended the execution of the two Britons; he demanded the punishment of the guilty Spanish officers and—audacity of audacities—he laid claim to an indemnity for the cost to the Americans of pursuing the Indians.

Having established a strong bargaining position, Adams proceeded to negotiate with Onís in Washington. They had long been discussing the western boundary; now they sought a total settlement. As a sweetener, Spain’s posts seized by Jackson were returned to her, though her demand that Jackson be punished was rejected. Week after week, Adams and Onís shuffled maps and haggled over territory, as large tracts of land hung on day-to-day agreements over tentative boundaries based often on vague information about the location of mountain ranges or the configuration of rivers.

Onís was no equal to Adams as a negotiator, in part because of inferior ability, in part because his king, the repellent Ferdinand VII, had a reputation for exiling his envoys to distant monasteries for exercising too much latitude in bargaining. In the end, after Monroe delivered a near-ultimatum to the foot-dragging Onís, the Adams-Onís treaty was signed in February 1819. Spain renounced all her claims to West Florida and ceded East Florida to the United States; the United States repudiated its claims to Texas; the western boundary was defined as running from the mouth of the Sabine River, then northwest along the Red and Arkansas rivers and the 42nd parallel, from which it proceeded due west to the Pacific. In essence, the Spanish claims to the Pacific Northwest were surrendered to the United States in exchange for the equally immense territory in the Southwest.

On February 22, 1819, Adams and Onís affixed their signatures to the treaty. “It was, perhaps, the most important day of my life,” Adams wrote in his diary. He had secured Florida. But he forbade exultation—it was the “work of an intelligent and all-embracing Cause.” Two days later, the Senate unanimously advised and consented to the treaty. Spain’s pistol to the south had been removed. Few asked whether its cannon had been entrenched two thousand miles to the west.

Even while Adams was negotiating with Spain, the old mobiles of international politics were beginning to shudder before the gusts of powerful forces that were bringing new groups to power in Latin America. By some common alchemy of the human spirit, people across the long reach of the Latin world were seeking to transform their lives by rebelling against autocratic rulers and ancient laws. The Holy Alliance, formed in part to put down the revolutionary spirit, suddenly confronted rebellions in Naples, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. Long-fermenting unrest in Latin America swelled into liberation movements led by the spirited young Venezuelan Simón Bolívar, by the Mexican priest and patriot Miguel Hidalgo, by the Argentinian general José de San Martín, and many others. Two years before Adams signed the treaty with the old regime in Madrid, San Martín crossed the Andes to defeat the Spanish at the Battle of Chacabuco and thus helped bring about the liberation of Chile. Two years after that treaty, Bolívar won the last major battle of the war in Venezuela, and Mexico gained its independence; a year after that, the Brazilian Empire was declared independent under Pedro I.

Americans watched admiringly as patriots came to power who used the Declaration of Independence as sacred writ and George Washington as a model. Americans watched apprehensively as the Holy Allies agreed to mandate Austria to put down the republican revolution in Naples and in the Piedmont, as the allies approved French military intervention in Spain to suppress the new constitutional government there: The European leaders invited Britain to share these sacred responsibilities, but by now Castlereagh was frustrated by his involvement in the alliance. The servant of a dynasty that owed its throne to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, he could hardly embrace with passion an anti-revolutionary entente. Moreover, influential English opinion was turning away from the embrace of reactionary, absolutist regimes toward flirtation, at least, with political liberalism and a freer commerce. Beset by these and other pressures, Castlereagh went mad, cut his throat with a penknife, and thus made possible the succession to the Foreign Ministry of his fierce rival, George Canning, who also feared the reactionary power of the Holy Allies and sought to build a balance of power against them.

Why should not the “two chief commercial and maritime states of both worlds,” as Canning described Britain and the United States, be part of that counterbalance? Thus the swaying mobiles of the Western world could be brought back to an equilibrium. Canning broached the idea to Minister Rush, who passed it on to Washington. President Monroe treated the question as one of the gravest of his career. Would this be a departure from the doctrine of non-involvement in European affairs—a doctrine sanctified by Washington and engraved in his Farewell Address? Typically ambivalent in his own reaction, eager for a collective judgment, Monroe turned first to the bearers of the Virginia tradition. Both Jefferson and Madison counseled cooperation with Britain in what Madison called the “great struggle of the Epoch between liberty and despotism.” Reassured, Monroe called a meeting of his Cabinet. By the time it convened, the Russian minister had advised that the Tsar would not receive agents from any of the rebellious governments in America and congratulated Washington on its neutral attitude toward those governments. Were the Holy Allies planning some effort to restore his former colonies to Ferdinand?

At first, the Cabinet seemed to favor a joint declaration with Canning against interference in the Americas by the Holy Alliance, even if it should commit the United States never to take Cuba—long coveted by none other than Jefferson—or Texas. Britain had the power to seize both Cuba and Texas, Calhoun observed, and thus would be pledged equally with the United States against such action. Adams demurred. He wanted no action that would bind the Administration’s hands if Texas or Cuba wished to join the Union, or in case of emergency. He was averse, the President replied, to any course that would appear subordinate to that of Britain. Adams wanted to take advantage of the Russian note.

“It affords a very suitable and convenient opportunity,” he told the Cabinet, as he remembered the discussion, “for us to take our stand against the Holy Alliance and at the same time to decline the overture of Great Britain. It would be more candid, as well as more dignified, to avow our principles directly to Russia and France, than to come in as a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.” All seemed to agree. As the meeting broke up, Adams cornered the President. The answers to the British, the Russians, and the French “must all be parts of a combined system of policy and adapted to each other. “

In meetings that followed, the Cabinet hammered out a policy, with Monroe and Adams taking the lead. The policy was the dual one of disclaiming any interference in the political affairs of Europe and declaring an “expectation that the European powers would equally abstain from seeking to spread their ideas in the American hemisphere,” or to take any part of it by force. The United States had already said “Hands Off” to further colonization of the New World; now it would say the same to further conquest or intervention.

It was an enormous step forward from non-colonization to non-intervention, but Adams was ready to accept the restraints required by this position. When Monroe proposed a message to Congress that would state these policies but would go on to reprove France for invading Spain and acknowledge the rebelling Greeks as an independent nation, Adams objected. This suggested entanglement in European affairs—why defy the powers? He finally brought the President around, but it was Monroe who decided to enunciate the doctrine in a message to Congress rather than in diplomatic communications to other capitals. Even so, he did not dramatize his message but rather embedded it in widely separated places in his message of December 2, 1823:

The “occasion has been judged proper for asserting…that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.…

“We owe it…to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere.…

“Our policy in regard to Europe, which was adopted at an early stage of the wars which have so long agitated that quarter of the globe, nevertheless remains the same, which is, not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers.…”

Monroe’s doctrine hardly fell as a bombshell on Capitol Hill, but there was widespread satisfaction with it inside Congress and among the press and public outside. British and European conservatives generally were outraged. “Blustering”—”arrogant”—”monstrous”—were some of the words used. It merited only “the most profound contempt,” according to the tsarist government. Chancellor Metternich dismissed it as “indecent.” Liberal Europe was pleased. The aged Lafayette congratulated Monroe on his “manly message” and his bold stand against the “Hellish Alliance.” Across the South Atlantic, Latin Americans, including the great Bolívar himself, generally applauded Monroe. But they were not sure just what he meant, or just how the United States would carry it out. Would European imperialism simply be replaced by North American?

Or would both be replaced by an ascendant capitalism? After the dislocations of the Napoleonic wars and the postwar readjustments, the 1820s were bringing an enormous expansion of trade and manufacture in both the United States and Britain. Fundamental to Canning’s desire for Anglo-American political cooperation was his awareness of the need of British manufacturing interests for access to the growing American market. Free trade pressure in Britain was bursting the bonds of the old mercantilist system. Why quarrel with a huge source of customers? It was this need for commercial reciprocity with Washington that explains London’s refusal to respond aggressively to Monroe’s dictum. The United States in turn needed good trade relations with Britain because of the markets it controlled—and the great navy London could deploy along the trade routes of the world. And Washington’s interest in the new nations of Latin America was a commercial as well as a political and moral one.

In due course, Monroe’s dictum would be sanctified and converted into the Monroe Doctrine. Some Americans had reservations. The message was flamboyantly unilateral. Having cold-shouldered Canning, the President was not inviting any other nation to share the burden of preventing the hemisphere from being further tainted by Europe. No consultations were held with Latin American governments. Indeed, the doctrine called for self-restraint on the part of the United States, but in Europe, not in Latin America; presumably the yanqui could intervene to the south as much as he wished. Efforts by some Latin American representatives to convert the doctrine into a defensive alliance for American security were rebuffed in Washington. Facing Europe, the doctrine was isolationist; facing south, it could be deeply interventionist, allowing Washington to act against European intervention—and Latin American revolutions?—at will. It became apparent later that the Holy Allies lacked the means, and perhaps even the necessary will, to intervene effectively against Latin American revolutionaries.

In many ways the doctrine was simply a reassertion of old policies, such as Washington’s warning against “entangling alliances,” and the No-Transfer principle, which had forbidden the transfer, by one European power to another, of any possession in the New World. Yet it embraced new and even revolutionary potentials, both generous and ominous, especially in a revolutionary age, for it contained the seeds of future pan-Americanism and the recognition of the rights of revolutionaries. Much would depend on Washington’s interpretation, evolution, application, and enforcement of the doctrine. None could foretell all this, but it might at least have been possible for a Latin American critic to say in the 1820s what Salvador de Madariaga wrote in 1962: “I conclude that the Monroe Doctrine is not a doctrine but a dogma…not one dogma but two, to wit: the dogma of the infallibility of the American President and the dogma of the immaculate conception of American foreign policy.”

John Quincy Adams, of course, would have agreed with neither proposition. For him, foreign policy emerged not out of pure, ethical considerations, but out of the most hardheaded analysis of a nation’s true self-interest. And foreign policy making was not merely a presidential effort, but the product of intensive discussion and collaboration among cabinet members, congressmen, and diplomats—the product of collective leadership.

Even these precepts, however, were not enough to define the American way of peace in the 1820s. The founders of the American republic during the half century after the start of the Revolution had shouldered the double burden of organizing the constitutional foundations of a lasting republic and of developing a strategy for protecting the existence and future expansion of that republic in a predatory world. The first effort resulted in a written constitution, the second in a series of precedents, actions, laws, speeches, understandings, and diplomatic notes. By the 1820s these constituted a body of thought and action embracing the principles and practices of sovereign independence to protect the liberties of free peoples, abstention from the everyday alliances and collisions of European affairs, freedom of commerce and navigation on the high seas, self-determination of peoples, especially in Latin America, and non-intervention and other ideas contained in Monroe’s dictum. But leaders of American opinion—teachers, theologians, ministers, scholars, editorialists, assorted reformers and humanitarians, including some men in government—believed also in certain moral precepts, such as international arbitration, pan-Americanism, globalism, anti-imperialism, suppression of the international trade in slaves, and, above all, aid to people seeking liberation from tyranny.

The political dilemma for American policy makers was not in choosing between a hardheaded, “practical” strategy and a moralistic or idealistic one; it was all too easy for them to pursue policies of narrow national self-interest and clothe them in the rhetoric of benevolence and altruism, as Western leaders had done for centuries. Rather, the dilemma lay in how to follow narrow policies of self-protection when large sections of public opinion wanted not only to protect their nation but also to help other peoples—especially people apparently struggling for liberty—mainly out of altruism but also on the theory that in the long run such help might serve their own nation’s paramount interests. Jefferson was the very model of a President who spoke in moral terms, but he acted often on the basis of the most Realpolitik if not ruthless conception of national self-interest. Alexander Hamilton won an early and deserved reputation as a theorist and practitioner of Realpolitik, but even Hamilton had to allow for consideration of Americans’ values. Thus, in rebutting those who wanted to help revolutionary France against England because they felt that America should be faithful to treaty obligations, grateful to a country that had helped Americans gain independence, and helpful to French republicans and revolutionaries, Hamilton argued that nations help other nations mainly out of self-interest, that the rule of morality between nations was different from that between individuals, that nations should indulge the “emotions of generosity and benevolence” only within strict bounds. But even Hamilton had to grapple with the issue of “how far regard to the cause of Liberty ought to induce the United States to take part with France in the present war”—which he did by questioning whether the cause of France was truly the cause of liberty, and whether the liberty of Americans would truly be at stake in the event of the fall of France. Thus, the issue was not the value of national safety versus the value of liberty, but establishing priorities, institutions, mechanisms, and rationales in serving both the value of safety and the value of liberty.

It was the genius of John Quincy Adams, and to a lesser extent James Monroe, to know just where they stood on this issue. Adams’ great accomplishment lay not so much in shaping the essentials of what would become known as the Monroe Doctrine, for those essentials grew out of earlier American doctrine and practice, but in drawing the line between protecting the immediate national interest and intervening, if only rhetorically, in European affairs in defense of Greek, Spanish, and Italian rebels and liberationists. In Adams, as Hans Morgenthau later wrote, we are “in the presence of a statesman who had been reared in the realist tradition of the first period of American foreign policy, who had done the better part of his work of statecraft in an atmosphere saturated with Jeffersonian principles, and who had achieved the merger of these two elements of his experience into a harmonious whole.”

Still, Adams could resolve the apparent dilemma of realism versus moralism in part because he had a somewhat shrunken and attenuated concept of liberty; as Morgenthau said, between his “moral principles and the traditional interest of the United States there was hardly ever a conflict.” How would the American way of peace fare when men in power had a more generous view of the necessary dimensions of liberty, when continental and global expansion would bring the nation into closer involvement with the self-interest of other nations and the wants and needs and aspirations of other peoples, when the nation’s self-interest and self-esteem would become—not least in the eyes of leaders including Adams himself—entangled with the burning issue of the slave trade, and when many Americans sought, even under new conditions, to return to the “old” Virginians’ ample view of America as primarily the vineyard of liberty, as a decisive experiment for mankind?

VIRGINIANS: THE LAST OF THE GENTLEMEN POLITICIANS

James Monroe’s own venture in a government of harmony, far above the din of party combat, ended badly. Not only did the Republican party dissolve into numberless factions fiercely contending for power and pelf in the presidential elections of 1824; Monroe could not even keep the peace in his own official family. During his last weeks in office he had a visit from Treasury Secretary Crawford. Long ailing, and now bitter over his frustrated presidential hopes, the Georgian pressed Monroe hard over some customs officials Crawford wanted appointed in northern ports. Why was the President procrastinating? he demanded. When Monroe explained that members of Congress had asked for a delay in order to supply some information, Crawford erupted in accusations of presidential dilly-dallying and indecisiveness. The President heatedly demanded that Crawford treat him with respect. Crawford raised his cane as if to strike the President, crying out, “You damned infernal old scoundrel!”

Monroe seized tongs from the fireplace, holding Crawford at bay and threatening to have him turned out. The Secretary suddenly backed down, made his apologies, and departed. The two left office on March 4, 1825, without having spoken to each other again.

Evidently his Virginia birth had not made Crawford into a Virginia gentleman, but in any event the Virginia presidential dynasty ended that March day when Monroe left office. A few months later the pilgrimage to Monticello of General Lafayette, the Guest of the Nation, brought a final, and poignant rallying of the dynasty. Jefferson and Madison were there. Never having really retired, both had been feverishly involved in collecting a small but illustrious faculty for the new university in Charlottesville. Planning the architecture and pedagogy of the university had given Jefferson a brief golden autumn in his life. “He is now eighty-two years old, very little altered from what he was ten years ago, very active, lively, and happy, riding from ten to fifteen miles every day, and talking without the least restraint, very pleasantly, upon all subjects,” wrote a visitor, a young Harvard professor. Jefferson had become much feebler a few months later when he greeted Lafayette, Madison, and Monroe at Monticello, in the stifling Virginia heat of August, but the talk of American and French life and politics ran until late at night.

Perhaps the three Virginia ex-Presidents sensed that this was the last time they would meet, but they could hardly have known that the Virginia dynasty was at an end. For half a century or more, the Old Dominion had supplied cadre after cadre of luminous national leadership—from the earlier generation of Washington, George Mason, Patrick Henry, George Wythe to the last one of James Monroe and his contemporaries. During that half century the commonwealth had incubated not only four Presidents for a total of thirty-two years, and a Chief Justice who would last thirty years, but a host of secondary leaders—cabinet members, congressional luminaries, diplomats, scientists, generals, explorers, judges, political theorists, envoys—who expressed, politically and intellectually and culturally, the collective genius of Virginia both in the commonwealth and in the country. And undergirding this elite were, as Richard Beale Davis found, “at least several hundred” persons who developed “the political mind through which Virginia made herself felt.”

Suddenly this rich vein of creative genius came to an end. Never since, during the past century and a half and more, has a Virginia leader been elected President. Men from other states made up the new cadres of governance. How explain the Old Dominion’s sunburst of leadership during the nation’s founding years?

Intellectual leadership may flourish in cultures where at least a few persons enjoy enough leisure and enough security from economic harassment to allow the fruitful reading, conversing, corresponding, writing, and reflecting necessary for disciplined and creative thought. The plantation life of Virginia provided such a culture for the masters. Neither the long trips by horseback or jolting carriage nor the slowness of the post stopped the elite from exchanging ideas by mail or in meetings, or from striking sparks off one another. Intellectual leadership in Virginia was a collective enterprise. Not only the Jeffersons and Madisons but the run-of-the-plantation Virginia gentlemen took pains to be well educated and informed. Robert Carter III subscribed to British and American journals and built a library of 1,500 volumes, ranging in subject from music to religion to politics; he read avidly and lent his books to his friends. John Bernard, visiting the young republic in 1797, had found men “leading secluded lives in the woods of Virginia perfectly au fait as to the literary, dramatic, and personal gossip of London and Paris.” Wrote one planter to an English friend, better “never born than ill bred.”

The country lives of these gentlemen embraced a “curious contradiction,” as Louis Morton observed. Carter and his friends thoroughly enjoyed the rich offerings of Virginia’s rural life—hunting, racing, fishing, riding, drinking, gambling, cockfighting. But Carter’s Nomini Hall overflowed with the sounds of learned discussions and lively music, of polite socializing and stately dancing. There was a deeper contradiction. The sons of the Virginia elite grew up in gracious homes, accustomed to the services of slaves and to the finest imports: Irish and Scotch linens, Madeira wine, German beer, French silks, shoes, and hats. But tobacco, the underpinning of much of this wealth, was notoriously unstable in price and unpredictable in yield. Some planters relied on their Scottish stewards—“factors”—to handle their business affairs, but many others employed their own intellectual resources to meet the challenge. Tales of Jefferson’s scientific farming are commonplace—but Jefferson himself regarded Madison as Virginia’s best farmer. Robert Carter devoted long months to personal supervision of his sprawling estates, as did John Randolph, one of the few planters ever to clear himself of debt.

Perhaps the contradiction itself—the interest in intellectual pursuits and the need to master prosaic business matters—helps explain the full flowering of the cultural life and the political genius of the Virginia elites. The conflict between the two ways of life helped produce a brilliant hybrid, enabling the scientific minds and philosophical pens of Randolphs and Jeffersons and a host of less-known men to turn out treatises on animal husbandry and crop rotation, as well as on literature, government, and public affairs.

It took powerful feelings of duty, moral and religious responsibility, and self-efficacy and purposefulness to draw youths away from the diverse and diverting life style of the Old Dominion. Here their education often played a key role. These Virginians, said Henry Adams in an unusual tribute from the hub of the intellectual universe, “were inferior to no class of Americans in the sort of education then supposed to make refinement.…Those whom Liancourt called ‘men of the first class’ were equal to any standard of excellence known to history.” Colonial gentlemen believed in rigorously educating their sons in mathematics, classics, modern languages, perhaps some history and philosophy. The Virginia scion was favored with much individual attention; it was common, Edmund S. Morgan observed, for students to be educated up to the level of their particular needs and abilities. Sometimes planters would send their sons to small private schools—there were no public ones. Others would hire a young tutor to live in, sharing the family’s meals and social activities, and occupying an ambiguous position between social equal and mere employee. Some sons went abroad to study at Cambridge or Oxford; more often they went off to Harvard or Yale or Princeton, or to William and Mary, which gave its students considerable choice in their plan of study and rightfully boasted of its diverse and brilliant faculty. In the South as in the North, women had little share in such educational opportunity.

Perhaps the best school for young Virginians was the commonwealth itself. If great leadership emerges out of pervasive social and political conflict, Virginia was an ideal breeding ground for future Presidents and congressmen. Fierce battles had raged between burgesses and royal governors over local autonomy, but the conflict dividing most Virginians most sharply during the late eighteenth century was the status of the Anglican establishment and, after it was disestablished, that of its successor, the Protestant Episcopal Church. Following years of struggle and frustration the dissenters managed to get lands given to the Episcopalians reclaimed—others said confiscated—by the state. But the dissenters were by no means united, except against the common “Anglican” enemy. Old-line Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists genteelly proselytized unbelievers and competed for constituents. New-Light Presbyterians and Separate Baptists, opposing the “establishments” in their own denominations, ranged the valleys seeking to restore Christians to the literal reading of the Bible. Regional conflicts—especially between piedmont and tidewater—variously sharpened and cut cross the religious ones. Polemical and partisan newspapers amplified these and other voices of dissent. And a generation after the War of Independence echoes of the fierce Revolutionary disputes in Virginia had not wholly died away.

Exposed to an environment of conflict, these proud, educated, opinionated, and articulate men did not fit easily into two political and intellectual camps called Republican and Federalist. They divided, intersected, and overlapped to the degree that almost every Virginian politician-intellectual made up a party of one. But a rough four-party pattern emerged out of the bi-factional divisions within each party. The followers of Jefferson and Madison and Monroe dominated Republican politics and maintained a powerful base there for half a century, but this presidential and congressional leadership, modifying its ancient principles to meet day-to-day exigencies, faced mounting opposition from the “pure” Republicans headed by John Randolph, John Taylor, William Branch Giles, and many others. They felt pure because they had stuck to the ancient faith of minimal government as the means of protecting liberty, of strict construction of the Constitution, of states’ rights, of legislative supremacy over both executive and judicial branches and state militias over standing armies, all embedded in agrarianism as a way of life and anti-mercantilism as a way of thought. The Republican establishment in Virginia often feared the polemics of these adversaries, variously called the old Republicans, radicals, or the Quids or Tertium Quids, more than that of the Federalists.

Leader of the Quids was one of the most extraordinary figures in American politics, John Randolph of Roanoke. Having survived at nineteen a mysterious illness that left him impotent and beardless, with a rich soprano voice, he seemed to compensate with clothes of Revolutionary buff and blue, his superb aplomb as he swaggered through the halls of Congress booted and spurred and whip in hand, and above all his devastating oratory. “For hours on end his shrill but flute-like voice irritated and fascinated,” Dumas Malone wrote, “pouring upon his audience shafts of biting wit, literary allusions, epigrams, parables, and figures of speech redolent of the countryside.” His meteoric rise in the House of Representatives had been matched by a hard fall, as he turned against the Jefferson circle and later lost his seat to Jefferson’s nephew, John W. Eppes. Randolph was a man of contradictions: scion of a great aristocratic family but dwelling in a rather shabby house, possessor of several hundred slaves on 8,ooo acres but knowing in his heart that slavery was wrong, yearning for the land and home he loved but often lonely and miserable there, and sodden with drink. But on one matter Randolph was consistent: he took and clung to the most extreme view of liberty as personal independence and autonomy, as a jewel to be protected against power and corruption and the temptations of office, as a sacred right to be free of “all encroachment, State or Federal…” He summed up his philosophy in six words: “I love liberty, I hate equality.”

At the opposite end of the Virginia spectrum sat John Marshall, in the middle of the high bench. During the years after Marbury the Chief Justice assumed just the judicial posture that his Federalist mentors would have hoped for. Where Randolph virtually equated liberty with states’ rights, Marshall took a broadly expansive view of national power. In a long series of decisions he led the court to a broad construction of the Constitution. In M’Culloch v. Maryland in 1819, he not only struck down a Maryland law that taxed the Baltimore branch of the Second United States Bank; he proclaimed that the powers of the national government were derived from the people and were directly exercised on them, that the powers of the national government were supreme within the orbit assigned to it, and opined—echoing Hamilton years earlier—“Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the constitution, are constitutional.” In Gibbons v. Ogden five years later, Marshall and his court voided a monopoly granted by New York for operation of steamboats between New York and New Jersey and broadly interpreted the nature and scope of congressional power under the commerce clause. That power, he said, “does not stop at the jurisdictional lines of the several states.” For Randolph and his fellow Quids the worst of it was that, while they had to throw themselves on the mercy of the voters every two years or so, John Marshall sat there blandly issuing these nationalistic decisions—and could do so for life.

On the whirling merry-go-round of American politics, sometimes a congressman could strike back at a President, only to be countered in turn by a Chief Justice. Such was the case with Randolph, Marshall, and Jefferson in the seamy affair of the Yazoo land fraud. In 1796 the Georgia legislature had revoked a grant of 35 million acres in its unorganized western territories along the Yazoo River, charging that the land companies receiving the land had bribed legislators into voting for it. After Georgia ceded the territories to the federal government, the Yazoo claims fell to President Jefferson and Secretary of State Madison. The two Virginians preferred to settle with the politically powerful New England land companies that had bought the disputed titles; in the House, however, John Randolph rose in his wrath. Denouncing the pro-Yazooists as “unblushing advocates of unblushing corruption”—and privately relishing the slap he administered to Madison and, indirectly, to Jefferson—Randolph stopped bills to compensate the claimants in three sessions of Congress.

In desperation, the Yazooists turned to the third branch of the government. One of the claimants brought against another a suit so contrived as to test all the questions involved in Georgia’s repeal of the grant. A stellar lineup of Federalists argued this case of Fletcher v. Peck before the high Federalist Chief Justice Marshall. John Quincy Adams, Robert Goodloe Harper, and Joseph Story presented the Yazooist arguments; Luther Martin, tacitly in sympathy with his opponents, made a weak case for Georgia—and was so drunk, to boot, that the court had to be adjourned until he sobered up. But for all the atmosphere of contrivance and force, John Marshall handed down a marble-sheathed decision. The land grants were contracts between Georgia and the land companies, he ruled, and the legislature had reneged on its part of the bargain. As a “member of the American Union,” Georgia was bound by Article I, section 10, of the Constitution, which forbids the passage of laws impairing the right of contract. Georgia could not legally rescind the grants once they were made; the federal government would have to compensate the claimants. Defeated, Randolph could only rage—while Marshall, in ruling that states were bound by the contract clause of the national Constitution, erected another pillar of federal power in the temple of American law.

Standing at the extremes of Virginia’s political and ideological continuum, Randolph and Marshall had only small followings of their own. The tiny faction of disaffected men around Randolph shrank to an impotent remnant after their brief threat to party unity. John Marshall towered over his Federalist colleagues, who were successful mainly at winning minor offices when they won them at all. Far more potent in day-to-day Virginia politics were Jefferson and Madison’s combined followings, and the “Richmond Junto,” numbering such state and local leaders as William Wirt, Spencer Roane, Cary Nicholas, and Thomas Ritchie of the influential Richmond Enquirer. But the powerful appeals of Marshall and Randolph lived on far beyond them, and for generations constituted the heart of the debate about state versus national power.

The Virginia planter-politicians—much more than the activists in any other state—had taken a clear lead nationally in conceiving, framing, establishing, and inaugurating a radically new political system. They had tried an experiment in popular self-government, in “government by the people,” in republicanism—an experiment that inevitably turned into a series of particular experiments as new leaders took command in legislature, executive, and judiciary, and at various levels of governments. George Washington’s experiment in magisterial, consensual government, combined with executive leadership by an activist Cabinet, had been followed by John Adams’ venture in a government of presidential initiatives balanced by a gathering party opposition. Jefferson’s experiment in combined executive, legislative, and party leadership had given way to Madison’s frustrating experience with governmental and political checks and balances—an experience he had anticipated in his Federalist papers. Monroe had tried a strategy of subordinating party spirit, only to be swallowed up in the bitter politics of a divisive factionalism. The states had been trying out new constitutions of their own.

Convinced that scientific inquiry could be applied to politics just as much as to physics or astronomy, political leaders in Virginia and other states closely monitored the governmental experiments taking place in the numerous laboratories of American politics. After fifty years of experience with revolution and revolutionary governments, including a period of weak national government and then the adoption and implementation of a new federal Constitution and a dozen or so state constitutions, the time might have seemed appropriate for an assessment of this experience. Indeed, such a reassessment might have been deemed urgent because, on the eve of the nation’s fiftieth birthday, constitutional and political questions of profound importance remained unresolved.

The most obvious of these questions was the central one around which the convention of 1787 had revolved—state versus federal power. On several occasions powerful regional groups—most notably Virginians and Kentuckians in 1798 and waterside Yankees in 1814-15—had challenged federal authority in a dramatic, even menacing fashion, but the political issues had been mediated by moderate men without any resolution of the burning question of whether states could ultimately challenge the moral and constitutional authority of the central government. The Constitution had proved flexible enough to accommodate some broadening of federal power—as in the establishment of a national bank—at least as the Supreme Court had interpreted that charter. But the actual division between federal and state power remained clouded. Few doubted that the usual economic and sectional issues would continue to be worked out by the ordinary processes of bargain and compromise. But what if issues of unusual intensity arose, requiring extraordinary leadership and decision? Already South Carolinians were beginning to be restive enough about past and prospective tariff policy to question federal authority and even to raise the specter of secession and disunion. A few warned that slavery itself might become such an issue.

The other key question that the Framers had faced in 1787—the distribution of power among separated departments of government—was in an equivalent state of indeterminacy after fifty years of experience. Once again the Constitution had shown itself marvelously adaptable to the shifting patterns of congressional and executive influence and interaction, from the executive leadership of Washington and Adams to the party leadership of Jefferson and Madison and the non-party rule of Monroe. Certain constitutional provisions had been defined enough and agreed on enough to be foreclosed—for example, the absolute veto of the House and Senate over each other, and the power of the Supreme Court to invalidate congressional enactments signed by the President, as well as state legislation deemed unconstitutional.

But crucial questions remained open. The President’s veto power had hardly been used; was this to remain a weapon-in-waiting, to be employed only when the President’s own constitutional authority was threatened? The Supreme Court had long ago in Marbury vetoed an act of Congress and had got away with establishing this mighty precedent because the vetoed act gave minor power to the court; what would happen if the Supreme Court voided a major congressional act closely touching intensely flammable regional, economic, social, or political interests? Grave issues of checks and balances, moreover, often interacted closely with issues of states’ rights. What would happen, for example, if the power and prerogatives of a branch of the federal government, such as the Senate, were closely attached to the pride and interest of a major region?

Such issues had mainly been ignored. If the immediate reason for this evasion was political—the ability of politicians to defuse potentially explosive moral and constitutional issues by converting them into political and legal issues amenable to brokerage—the deeper reason was intellectual. The heirs of the 1820s to the creative political and constitutional leaders of the 1770s and 1780s were failing to live up to the intellectual vision of the founding fathers.

The main failure lay in the Jeffersonians’ reluctance to exploit the experience in actually running a republican government, in reassessing the theoretical and practical problem that had occupied them in framing the 1787 Constitution. That problem was the prevention of tyranny on the part of the rulers from within government and on the part of the people outside. “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective,” Madison had written in Federalist 47, “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” He saw each problem as having a solution. Tyranny within the government could be curbed through putting pieces of governmental power—legislative, executive, and judicial—into separate hands: into Congress, the presidency, and the courts. Tyranny from outside the government—from aroused popular minorities or majorities—could be blocked by the social checks and balances resulting from “extending the republic” to cover a multiplicity of interests.

Under Jefferson the Republicans themselves had run an experiment that might well have resolved Madisonian fears of government and majority tyranny. For six years Jefferson had largely held legislative and executive leadership in his own hands; for six years a rough, inchoate popular majority had governed itself through that leadership. The constitutional heavens had not fallen; Jefferson, Madison & Co. had not indulged in tyranny within the government, nor had the popular majority used its control of government to suppress the liberty of minorities or individuals. John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts were indeed a reminder that no government, even with checks and balances, was wholly safe. But the main lesson of the first fifty years was that government in an authentic republic need not be tyrannical. Pennsylvanians had even tried in their state an experiment in popular rule unbridled by checks and balances, with no apparent danger to their lives or fortunes.

The main lesson of those years, on the contrary, was quite different—that government could not long continue to be unresponsive to the basic needs of the great number of people—of white males, even aside from women, slaves, Indians, and the poor. But the thinkers of Virginia and other enlightened states could not see this because of their narrow and negative definition of liberty, and here lay the real—the ultimately moral—failure of the Virginians. American thinkers were still imprisoned in the old Lockean conception of liberty as an individual “natural right” to be protected against government—that is, against collective action by fellow human beings—rather than as an opportunity for mutual help in self-enhancement and self-fulfillment. The tragedy of the Virginians was that in their treatment of black people—and to a lesser extent white women—they violated even their own narrow conception of liberty.

The intellectual leadership cadre of the 1820s took an equally stunted view of the other great moral value of the era, equality, affirming abstractly the equal rights of all Americans, except slaves and perhaps women, to liberty and property without grappling with the questions of how, concretely, institutions could be devised in a republic, and measures passed, to help persons realize genuine social and economic and psychological equality, without putting undue strain on the republic. Expecting the second generation of thinkers to solve such problems, which still largely elude us today, would, of course, be unrealistic; but it was precisely the genius of the earlier generation of thinkers at least in conceptualizing moral and constitutional issues, and in shaping institutions to try to deal with such issues, that marked the difference between the 1780s and the 1820s.

If Virginia had led that earlier generation, it seemed most impoverished by the time of the second. Perhaps the end of the dynasty of the thinking gentlemen politicians of Virginia reflected underlying social and economic changes—the decline of the tobacco economy, the failure of Virginia to develop economically compared with the other middle states, the drift of potential leaders over the mountains to the West. Or perhaps that decline had long been fated. The incandescent glow of the Virginians had always been shadowed by their defense of the persisting system of social deference and hierarchy, the genteel subordination of women, the unavailability of schooling for great numbers of black and white children, and above all the blight of slavery. In these subordinate ranks lay concealed much of the potential social and moral and political grass-roots leadership of the Virginia of the next generation but that potential was left immobilized, and never to be realized, on the blind side of the leaders of the Old Dominion.

THE CHECKING AND BALANCING OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

It had been clear for months, even years, that 1824 would bring no ordinary election. Monroe’s campaign effort in the previous presidential election had been such a tepid enterprise—fewer than 1 percent of the whites in his own state of Virginia bothered to go to the polls—that even at that time politicians were less excited by the current “race” than by the battle royal in prospect four years hence. The one elector who had voted against Monroe in 1820—William Plumer, of New Hampshire—had cast his ballot for John Quincy Adams as a way of publicizing Adams’ availability four years later. Monroe’s administration was hardly under way when Adams and the congressional politicians were busy electioneering.

Eagerly the press looked forward to the battle of the titans. Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford, widely considered the heir to the Virginia dynasty even though he was a Georgian, seemed an early front-runner, but for just that reason he attracted opposition from his rivals. Secretary of State Adams had reason to feel that he had rights of succession by virtue of holding the office that Madison and Monroe had used as a springboard to the White House. A “worm preying upon the vitals of the Administration within its own body,” was Adams’ reasoned view of Crawford’s role in the Monroe Cabinet. Henry Clay had quit the House of Representatives in order to concentrate on his lucrative law practice; he returned to the House in 1823, immediately won re-election as Speaker, and let his friends organize support for him in the states. As impressive as ever for his quick intelligence, compelling personality, and baffling combination of political daring and compromise, Clay calculated that he could win enough electoral votes to place among the top three candidates and then win election in Congress. John Calhoun was demonstrating, as Monroe’s Secretary of War, that his executive skills matched his parliamentary talents. Still at this point a nationalist who favored protectionism and internal improvements, Calhoun hoped that his support in the North, however spotty, combined with southern-backing, would at least gain him the magic circle of three. And Senator Andrew Jackson, an outsider temporarily inside, reckoned that his reputation as router of redcoats and redskins guaranteed him a personal popularity that could be converted into an electoral college majority.

None of these four men liked Adams, and the feeling was more than mutual. Adams feared his opponents too, to the point where he urged Monroe to give them diplomatic appointments that would take them out of the country—Clay to Colombia (or Chile, or Argentina), Jackson to Mexico, and De Witt Clinton, another possible rival, to wherever. All declined.

Soon the election race became a surly free-for-all, a far-flung game of King of the Rock—and a strident and ironic cacophony during the “era of good feelings.” Candidates’ followers spread spiteful whispers about their opponents. No candidate or party put out a program, or saw the need to. Every candidate ran on his record, though most voters were hardly aware of that record, save in the case of Adams and perhaps Clay. Each candidate organized, or at least attracted, a personal following that carried his message to state and local political leaders. Each candidate coped with the mélange of state or local party conventions, legislative caucuses, mass meetings, and of course the congressional caucus, and each argued for the special legitimacy of that portion of the electoral process that favored his own candidacy.

And that electoral process was slowly changing. The congressional caucus had come into increasing disrepute; those who took part usually had been elected at least two years earlier, and the states and districts not represented by a party in Congress perforce were not represented in its caucus. King Caucus was giving way to the mixed caucus, which did seek to be more representative, and then to party conventions designed to mirror the party constituency. And more and more persons were voting in party and state elections as the suffrage was slowly broadened.

Crawford fell victim to these changes when his supporters convened the congressional caucus and only sixty-six members showed up. Burdened also by ill health, Crawford slowly lost ground. Earlier, Calhoun had quit the presidential sweepstakes, and nimbly joined the vice-presidential, after he was beaten by Jackson forces in the Republican state convention in Harrisburg. The followers of Adams, Clay, and Jackson redoubled their efforts, especially in state legislative caucuses. Maintaining their posture of being above the battle, the candidates acted through their newspapers and circulars, committees of correspondence, and key state and party leaders to mobilize support. Soon it became evident that the more “popular” the selection process, the more evident was Jackson’s grass-roots support. Rivermen, miners, farmers, and mechanics endorsed Jackson in a Harrisburg mass meeting and sent their “nomination” in a letter penned by a local barkeep. A schoolteacher wrote from Cincinnati: “Strange! Wild! Infatuated! All for Jackson!…” It was like the “influenza,” and “I regard Mr. J. as the most independent of the southern gentry, one on whom they will be least likely to unite.…” If the influenza passed off soon, “the patients will vote coolly and dispassionately for the best man—Mr. Adams.”

The combat between Clay and Jackson was especially intense. Both “Harry of the West” and the Hero of the West protected their state turfs while eyeing each other’s. Jackson flared up when he heard that the governor of his own state of Tennessee was conniving with Clay. Conceding New England to Adams, the Speaker and the general fought for support in the middle states. Inevitably they were entangled in the local rivalries of politicians who were more intent on controlling state patronage than the national presidency. In the imperial politics of New York State, Martin Van Buren and other chieftains of the Regency led “Bucktails” against De Witt Clinton. The Regency supported Crawford, but as the Georgian’s prospects declined, other candidates looked to the Empire State for support. Elsewhere the Republicans were even more fragmented, as followers mobilized around a congeries of state as well as presidential candidates. Federalists, with little to divide over, were hardly heard from; their party as an organization was defunct.

The electoral college results nicely mirrored the fragmentation of Republicanism: Jackson 99, Adams 84, Crawford 41, Clay 37. Jackson’s popular vote of about 153,000 almost equaled the combined vote for Adams and Crawford. Adams won all of New England’s electoral votes, most of New York’s, and a surprising degree of support in the South. Jackson picked up Pennsylvania’s solid block of 28 votes, plus an expected good share of the South. Crawford drew his strength mainly from the South, including Virginia, and Clay from the West. Once again the faulty presidential electoral system was to bedevil American politics, as the election was thrown into Congress, where each delegation, whether as large as New York’s (36) or as small as Illinois’ or Delaware’s (3), had the same single vote. And Henry Clay, the trailer in the electoral college, looked like a winner in the Congress, for he could now do some shopping about.

And that is evidently what he did. “The friends of Jackson, Adams, and Crawford watched him in dismay as—gay, insouciant, and somehow menacing—he wandered from boardinghouse to boardinghouse, from banquet to banquet, not a candidate but a kingmaker,” according to George Dangerfield. But Adams, if less mobile, was no less political. He neglected not a single opportunity to win over a state to his support, Bemis concludes. Jackson’s and Crawford’s supporters were also on the move. Who would make the winning deal with whom? In mid-December, Robert P. Letcher, a Kentucky congressman and intimate friend of Clay, had several talks with Adams. Long used to such negotiations, the Secretary of State offered some conciliatory remarks about the Speaker. But what Clay’s friends wanted to know was whether Adams would assure Clay of a central role in his administration. Adams gave the necessary assurances. Later he and Clay met for hours and talked about the future, on the premise of those assurances. Clay was satisfied.

No outright deal was made. No definite promise was given or contract signed. The two men traded in the soft currency of subtle implications and raised expectations, knowing that this currency was backed up by the hard political cash of agreed-on perceptions of shared interests. The effect on Clay’s thinking was magical. Having written to one friend on December 13, 1824, that he was not sure whether he would swing his support to Jackson or Adams—“And what an alternative that is!”—Clay was writing on December 28 to another friend that he had definitely decided for Adams.

“What I would ask,” Clay wrote, “should be the distinguishing characteristic of an American statesman? Should it not be a devotion to civil liberty?” He could not, he added, on principle support a military man.

On February 9, 1825, the House of Representatives, voting by states, elected John Quincy Adams President of the United States. He had done his work well. He won not only Clay’s three states (in the electoral college) of Kentucky, Ohio, and Missouri, but also Jackson’s states of Louisiana, Maryland, and Illinois. He won New York too when the longtime Federalist Stephen Van Rensselaer cast the delegation’s decisive vote either because Adams had promised him understanding treatment of Federalists, through the mediation of Daniel Webster, or because, as Van Rensselaer said later, he bowed his head in prayer when his turn came to vote and saw an Adams ballot on the floor.

Said John Randolph: “It was impossible to win the game, gentlemen; the cards were packed.”

Within two days President-elect Adams offered Clay the Secretaryship of State. “So you see,” Andrew Jackson wrote, “the Judas of the West has closed the contract and will receive the thirty pieces of silver.”

Far north, the town of Quincy still awaited the election news. When the patriarch John Adams was awakened with a horseman’s report, his heart swelled with pride. He was sad only that Abigail had not lived to see her firstborn become “guardian of his country’s laws and liberties.” The father seemed far happier than the son. When Daniel Webster came to Adams’ F Street house and formally notified him of his election, it was said that Adams stood shaking, sweat pouring down his face, as if considering the specter of all the un-Adams-like deals and compromises he had made to get to the top of the greasy pole.

Well might Adams shake and sweat. Rarely has the character of a presidential election had such a direct impact on the presidency that followed—and perhaps on the President himself—as that of 1824.

His hopes and goals he deeply felt. Rising above party and faction, he would serve as the steward of the people in an effort to enact and administer a program carefully designed to bring economic progress and political and social unity to the nation. His goals were founded squarely on his moral and political principle of personal liberty and property to be protected not merely from government but through government. This government would include the federal government, which Adams did not fear and which he liked to term the National government, always with a capital N. Echoing some of Hamilton’s ideas, his program was an extension of Monroe’s and Clay’s—internal improvements, wise use of federal lands in order to pay for those improvements, the fostering of science and education, “cautious” tariff protection of industry as a means of safeguarding the nation’s independence. After winning the reluctant support of his Cabinet for this program, the President wrote in his diary that the “perilous experiment must be made.”

Perilous it was, largely because Adams lacked the political resources for a positive program. Amid heavy pressures from all sides he tried to create a broad-based Cabinet, but Gallatin would not return to Treasury because he preferred State, Jackson would not accept the War Department, and the new Vice-President, John Calhoun, attacked the new Cabinet as not sufficiently representing the South. Highly dependent on congressional support, Adams was pleased that his supporter John W. Taylor of New York was elected Speaker to succeed Clay, but in the Senate Calhoun gained influence over key committees and busied himself jockeying for a future Calhoun presidency rather than the existing Adams administration. Then, at mid-term, Taylor lost the Speakership to Andrew Stevenson, a Virginian unfriendly to the President. A negative and ungainly leadership coalition of Calhoun, Van Buren, Jackson, and others, united only by their distaste for Adams and eagerness to succeed him, dominated Washington’s politics.

It soon became apparent that Adams had only the intentions of a good steward, not the qualities of a great leader. He was, for one thing, a true son of Puritan Boston—and of John Adams—when it came to political pleasantries. It was hard to make conversation with him as he presided at a White House dinner, and he had a genius for putting politicians off—and his foot in his mouth—on his brief trips into the country. He was inept at communicating his hopes and proposals to Cabinet and Congress, much less the voting public. But his personal failings were the lesser problem. Like Monroe, he lacked the foundation of party leadership and followership that might have helped him at crucial moments, and Adams possessed neither the desire nor the means of strengthening his party. Indeed, he was so profoundly anti-party that he refused even to use patronage to strengthen his position. And he had not developed the personal backing of party leaders throughout the country—the kind of leaders that Madison and Jefferson had converted into a new and powerful political organization. Rather, a new party was forming against him. Adams was also defeated by his theory of government. He knew that leadership must be a collective enterprise, but he also believed in the constitutional checks and balances designed to thwart such leadership. Never a transforming leader, neither was he skillful as a transactional one.

All Adams’ difficulties came to a head during the last two years of his term, in the congressional effort to enact tariff legislation. A moderate measure had been passed in the final year of Monroe’s administration; now the protectionists were back, eager to boost levies on iron, hemp, flax, and other commodities. Meetings of wool growers and manufacturers in Harrisburg, Poughkeepsie, and elsewhere reflected rising protectionist feeling in the country. Adams was so apprehensive about tariffs—“Beware of Trap doors,” he said of them to a son taking a seat in the Massachusetts legislature—that he gave his Secretary of the Treasury, Richard Rush, the job of defending them. But even the suspicious Adams could hardly anticipate what lay ahead. Van Buren and the group of Jacksonians who dominated the House Committee on Manufactures concocted a tariff bill full of provisions that favored the agrarian Northwest and Middle States, while giving short shrift to the manufacturing interests of New England. If Adams signed it, he would alienate the South and strain his own credibility, and if he vetoed it, he would antagonize both agrarian and manufacturing interests in the rest of the country. Either way, the crucial Middle States would be drawn into the Jacksonians’ camp.

With shrewd bargaining by Van Buren, the bill passed Congress, as New Englanders like Webster salvaged what they could for industrial interests, and Adams signed the “abominated” tariff, though he knew full well that he was jeopardizing his southern support. He detested the squalid legislative deals that produced such a bill, but could he object to such cynical brokerage when he had made his own political deals to win the White House?

So the administration of the lofty John Quincy Adams came to an end in the wake of a wild free-for-all, a scramble for special advantages, a legislative battle whose main relevance to manufacture, as John Randolph said, was the “manufacture of a President of the United States.” This “democratic” nationalism of popular interests was a far cry from Adams’ planned, rational, centralized, collective, “economic” nationalism. “Nothing could be less in keeping with the custodial philosophy of President Adams,” Dangerfield said, “or less adjusted to the centralizing system of Henry Clay” than the “Tariff of Abominations.” Still, he signed it.

He signed it because, by early 1828, the tariff, and Adams’ own political fortunes, had been swallowed up in the gathering battle over the presidency. He signed it, knowing that the South would denounce it to the point of murmuring about seceding. His “perilous experiment” of presidential stewardship and collective national effort had given way to the haphazard, competitive play of economic and sectional interests. And these interests in turn both reflected and generated powerful economic forces changing the face of America in the 1820s and 1830s—forces that one day would hold many a politician in their iron grip.

JUBILEE 1826: THE PASSING OF THE HEROES

“Ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants thereof; it shall be a jubilee unto you.” Americans were happy to obey the biblical admonition in celebrating the half century of the Declaration of Independence. As he entered his second year in office, John Quincy Adams had taken pleasure in plans for a celebration in Washington—and even more for a jubilee in Boston, to which his father would be invited. And it was hoped that another signer of the Declaration—indeed, the drafter of it—could journey from Monticello to the festivities in the nation’s capital.

For John Adams and Thomas Jefferson still lived, the one in his ninety-first year, the other in his eighty-third. A few years earlier Jefferson had broken his arm and wrist in a fall at Monticello, and a stiffened hand combined with other ills of old age left him in severe pain for months on end, but he had recovered enough to ride several miles a day. Adams was failing. “I am certainly very near the end of my life,” he wrote in January 1826. Whether death would simply mean the end, which he did not believe, or transit to life under a constitution of the Universe, “I contemplate it without terror or dismay.”

Adams had shared these private thoughts with his old adversary. For fourteen years the two heroes of the Revolution had been writing each other in what turned out to be a magnificent correspondence. Before that the two men had been politically so estranged that it took the best diplomatic efforts of intermediaries to persuade each that the other wished to restore the friendship of Revolutionary days. The correspondence had started awkwardly when Adams wrote Jefferson that he was sending him separately a packet containing “two Pieces of Homespun,” since the Virginian was a “Friend of American Manufactures.” Jefferson responded with a long letter about the relative lack of machinery in Virginia, except for the “Spinning Jenny and loom with the flying shuttle” that could be managed in the family. When the “homespun” arrived, it turned out to be a copy of John Quincy Adams’ lectures on “Rhetoric and Oratory” while he was a Harvard professor. Jefferson found them a “mine of learning and taste,” he wrote the proud father.

From there the correspondence took off, ranging across religion, history, Indians, the essence of aristocracy, Napoleon’s character, the influence of women, the perfectibility of human nature, and soaring into the realms of philosophy and theology. The two men refought old battles, straightening out history, each to his own satisfaction. Jefferson did not take sharp issue with Adams, however, and he was wise in this, for the latter was extremely defensive about his place in history. Years before, when Mercy Warren published her account of the Revolution, Adams had been outraged by her conclusion that his revolutionary principles had been corrupted by his long stay in London, and that he leaned toward monarchy and was inordinately proud and ambitious. Angry exchanges had followed for weeks, terminated only, by the intervention of Elbridge Gerry and the exchange of loving letters and locks of hair. Adams still had the last word, observing to Gerry, “History is not the province of the ladies.”

But now John Adams had mellowed, and he professed his affection for Jefferson even while debating him. There was much talk of family and friends—especially of old comrades dead or dying. Adams was inordinately proud of his numerous progeny, even though he granted that children have “cost us Grief, Anxiety, often Vexation and sometimes humiliation.” Abigail Adams occasionally added a friendly line, until she died of typhoid fever in her seventy-fourth year. Words were in vain, Jefferson wrote the inconsolable Adams, but they both could look forward to “an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again.”

And so the two men, constantly professing their friendship, wept and sparred and totted up historical accounts together, Adams with his palsy hardly able to write, Jefferson laboriously penning his gracious but spirited letters. Nothing lay outside the play of their minds. Adams was still unyielding on matters of prime importance—and to him this included how governments were constituted. His experience with the Constitution had not changed his old views of the arrangement of powers. “Checks and Ballances, Jefferson, however you and your Party may have ridiculed them, are our only Security, for the progress of mind, as well as the Security of Body.” There had always been party differences, Jefferson argued, and there always would be, for “every one takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few, according to his constitution, and the circumstances in which he is placed.…” Yes, replied Adams, it was precisely because parties had always existed and fought each other with ridicule and persecution that the Science of Government was the least advanced of all the sciences.

They argued briefly about the nature of liberty, but with no more acuteness or imagination than their fellow Americans. The principles of liberty were unalterable, Adams said. Then later he wondered, “Is liberty a word void of sense?” If it was, there could be no reward or punishment. Perhaps at “the bottom of the gulph of liberty and necessity” there might be the key to unlock the universe, but only God held the key. One thing was clear, though: without virtue there could be no political liberty. Jefferson was discreetly reserved on questions of liberty and equality, so enkindling were they to his friend.

The correspondence faltered as the Jubilee year neared. In June 1826 a committee of Bostonians waited on John Adams to invite his honored attendance at the celebration, but he was too weak to make the carriage ride. Instead, he wrote a letter in tribute to the Declaration of Independence, adding that despite man’s folly and vanity he could see hope for improving the condition of the human race. Though Jefferson was eager to go to Washington, he knew he could not; he wrote that the Declaration would be “the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government…the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion.…”

In Washington, on the Fourth of July 1826, President John Quincy Adams and Vice-President John Calhoun rode in their carriage amid a grand parade along Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. There a Revolutionary War veteran read the noble words of the Declaration. A plea was made to subscribe money to keep Monticello from being put up for sale. In New York, Governor Clinton put on a feast of roast, oxen and ale for ten thousand guests. Bostonians so crowded into Old South Church that they were “squeezed to a hot jelly,” except in the galleries reserved for women. Philadelphia, where it had all happened, contented itself with a parade and a program in Independence Hall. In Charlottesville a student at the University of Virginia read the Declaration of Independence.

Its author was not there. On his hilltop nearby, he had awakened from a long sleep the night before to ask only, “This is the Fourth?” and he died around midday, as the celebrations were under way. About this time in Quincy, John Adams awoke as from a coma, muttered “Thomas Jefferson survives,” and died before the setting of the sun.

CHAPTER 8

The Birth of the Machines

LOUNGERS ON A LOWER Manhattan pier in the fall of 1792 might have noticed a well-dressed, elegantly spoken young man board a sailing vessel for Georgia. This was Eli Whitney. A Yankee tinkerer, inventor, and jack of all trades, Whitney had learned mechanical skills growing up on a Massachusetts farm. In this, his first trip South, he found himself in the company of Catherine Greene, the young widow of the Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. She was traveling to her rice plantation, Mulberry Grove, twelve miles outside of Savannah, Georgia, while Whitney was drifting into his first job as a tutor to children on a neighboring plantation. Reserved, serious, churchgoing, young Whitney was dazzled on the long trip by the flirtatious Mrs. Greene; when she invited him to visit Mulberry Grove, he accepted. Her world of carefree parties and gay entertainments was beyond his understanding and experience. The “moral world,” he said, “does not extend so far south.”

He heard serious discussion of only one topic from the planters who gathered at Mulberry Grove to sip port and Madeira: their need for a machine to clean the seeds from short-staple inland cotton. Whitney determined to meet this need. Planters were seeking a staple to lift agriculture out of depression. The main crop south of the Mason-Dixon Line in 1800, tobacco, had brought low prices on the international market for a decade and was exhausting the soil. Rice and indigo sales were realizing only small profits, thus threatening the large capital investments in slaves in the rice districts of Georgia and South Carolina and the tidewater of Virginia and Maryland. With an almost static population, the South was attracting few new settlers from the North or from overseas. Most farmers worked their small subsistence farms of from 100 to 300 acres with their families as the only labor. Planter and small farmer alike were looking for a cash crop to reap larger profits.

Eli Whitney had never seen a cotton boll. When he examined one, he found the fiber intertwined with seeds covered “with a kind of green coat resembling velvet.” Whitney later wrote his father that he “involuntarily happened to be thinking on the subject and struck out a plan of a Machine in my mind.” Spurning an offer of 100 guineas for his “little model,” he decided to quit school and perfect an engine to clean cotton of its seeds. For six months Whitney labored behind locked doors in a basement room of the plantation house. By April 1793, he had designed a gin (short for engine) that used rotating wires in a cylinder to pull the lint through holes too small to pass the seed. Brushes revolving in an opposite direction cleaned the cotton from the wires. One man, using a hand crank, could produce fifty pounds of cleaned cotton a day.

Granted a patent in February 1793, Whitney formed a partnership with Phineas Miller, the manager of Mulberry Grove, to exploit the gin. They offered to clean any quantity of cotton at sites throughout the South for the price of one pound of clean cotton for every five pounds delivered with seed. By mortgaging the Greene estate, the partners secured enough money for Whitney to equip and man a workshop in New Haven to manufacture the gins. But the cotton gin was so simple that any competent mechanic could duplicate it; and many did. Whitney had to spend his small earnings fighting infringements on his patent. He never profited in proportion to the cotton gin’s impact on the national economy.

The most consequential innovation of the day, Eli Whitney’s cotton gin removed a bottleneck between the planting of cotton and exporting it to the voracious factories of Britain. Expanding sixtyfold from 1790 to 1815, the cotton trade caused an economic revival in the Old South and hastened settlement of the Southwest. Cotton was to replace all other crops in profitability. Supply did not catch up with British demand for years, and the price of cotton reflected the demand, staying at ten cents a pound except for 1811 and 1812, years of tension and then war between the United States and Britain.

Some sensed that a different kind of price might have to be paid. The “inventions of the cotton-gin, the carding machine, the spinning-jenny, and the steam-engine,” a southern journal noted, “combined to weave that net-work of cotton which formed an indissoluble cord, binding the black, who was threatened to be cast off, to human progress.”

Merchants in northern port cities began to share in cotton profits and in the general trade prosperity. With Britain and France at war, American merchant-shippers sold both countries produce of northern farms close to the coast—wheat, rice, flour, barreled beef and pork, and rum. Wagons brought farm products into New York City, soon to lead all other ports in trade owing to its auction sales of British manufactures; its regularly scheduled shipping service; and later its resident agents with branch offices in all the major cotton ports to supply credit, shipping, and maritime insurance to the cotton planter. Oxcarts laden with produce, rolled into Philadelphia, located on two waterways with an outlet to the sea, and into Boston, leader in the China trade, with a large harbor where five hundred ships could dock, load, and sail for world ports. By the turn of the century Yankee ships had become familiar in harbors the globe, over.

It was a grand period for innovators and entrepreneurs. A merchant prince of Boston, Francis Cabot Lowell, profited first in the European trade by entering business with his wealthy merchant uncle, William Cabot. Willing to assume heavy risks, Lowell took charge of valuable cargo on his uncle’s ships. In 1795 British sailors boarded his ship to search for goods destined for France; they found no evidence of blockade running—but Lowell’s cargo found its way to France. The adventurous Lowell sent out eight ships to vie for world trade.

Lowell was typical of many merchant-shippers in Boston and New York. Their agents maintained contacts with village storekeepers who dickered for the produce of outlying northern farms. City merchants with their warehouses, overseas contacts, and easy access to credit could ship, insure, and sell northern farm produce or the tobacco and cotton of the southern planter, and planters boosted their profits by consigning their crop to an agent who would hold it, watch prices, and sell it at a favorable time. The merchant or his agent could advance credit to the large planter until the next crop came. It was a barter economy with scarce money. Credit in goods was extended to carry farmers from crop to crop by the storekeeper or merchant.

Lowell’s interests were wide-ranging—cotton trading, banking, and real estate with his building of India Wharf in Boston Harbor in 1808. Nervous, high-strung, inclined to overwork, he was known as a hardheaded businessman with family connections through intermarriage to the wealthiest and most prominent merchant families of Boston. He was also an economic leader who turned the merchant wealth of Boston from overseas shipping into cotton textile manufacture after the embargo in 1807-08 cut off trading ventures with Britain and France and after exports of agricultural products fell sharply. Merchants soon began to look for other profitable enterprises. Sensing that one day industry would rank as high as trade, Lowell led other Boston merchants to shift from overseas trade to the manufacture of textiles.

Moving crops to merchants in the cities was a central problem of the agricultural economy of America in 1800, especially in the North. In the South, planters could ship cotton and other products to port on numerous waterways, while in the North highways radiated from the principal eastern cities. Oxcarts from Concord, only twenty miles from the sea, could travel to Boston from the backcountry to supply city dwellers as well as to load ships bound for foreign ports. But farther inland, only a few roads might run from the interior to a waterway. With construction and maintenance of roads in the hands of local officials, a basic road in 1800 was a cleared path through the trees, an improved one was crowned high with dirt and edged by a gutter. Farmers could profitably haul freight only very short distances. One wagonload of goods sent from Augusta, Maine, to Savannah, Georgia, took almost four months, at a cost of $1,000. The northern farmer who was not close to a market or a river exchanged his surplus crops for necessities for his family in the village store. He did not try to expand production; there was no market in which to sell.

Once again, it took some innovators and tinkerers to see the potential of steam as a source of power. Since that day during the Philadelphia convention when John Fitch had experimented with his boat Perseverance, traveling at a snail’s pace on the Delaware River, James Rumsey had also launched a steamboat on the Potomac River in 1787, and John Stevens of Hoboken, New Jersey, took the lead farther north. Toward the close of the eighteenth century, “a sort of mania began to prevail…for impelling boats by steam-engines.”

Two decades passed before steamboats began to operate on western waters; by then leadership in steamboat building and operating had passed to two men who brilliantly solved the problems of boat construction, business security, and profits. The resources and organizational talents of both Robert R. Livingston, New York manorial farmer, and Robert Fulton, mechanical genius, would make the steamboat a reality on the western waters of America.

By facilitating upstream travel on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, the steamboat opened up the fertile country of the Northwest Territory stretching from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River. Settlers who homesteaded in the West after the War of 1812 could market their surpluses. Interregional trade changed local, self-sufficient economies to one commercial economy with each region producing its specialties for the national market—foodstuffs in the Northwest, cotton in the South, and capital, ships, and manufactured goods in the East. A traveler who knew the Northwest Territory wrote in 1817: “The center of population and wealth is rapidly inclining westward; and within a very few years hence it will ‘cross the mountains’ …I look forward to the time, as at no great distance, when the great western rivers and lakes shall be covered with hundreds of steam boats, performing regular voyages between New Orleans and the numerous ports on the Mississippi and its great tributaries.…”

FARMS: THE JACKS-OF-ALL-TRADES

It was sheep-shearing time on Chancellor Robert Livingston’s estate, in the spring of 1810, and he had invited friends to drive over and admire his fine merinos. Elegant phaetons wound their way up a long avenue bordered by feathery locust trees and deposited the guests at the manor house. Outside the visitors could admire the breathtaking view of the jagged Catskills across the Hudson River; inside, the tapestry, silver, and fashionable French furnishings that the chancellor had collected when he had been Jefferson’s Minister to France. After a lavish dinner in the greenhouse, among large ornamental plants, the guests strolled along grassy lawns and orchards to a park devoted to the care and feeding of merino sheep. Then they watched while fleece was cut from the merinos in great fluffy swaths. Some of the sheep were sold, at prices ranging from $40 to $1,000 a head.

The chancellor was a prime leader of the New York Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures, organized in the early 1790s by seventy-two farmers who had large holdings, time to keep abreast of writings on farming, and funds to experiment with promising agricultural methods. Descended from a family that owned over 300,000 acres originally granted by the Dutch, Livingston pursued his experiments on lands that bordered the Hudson for twelve miles and stretched east toward Massachusetts. One of the first scientific agriculturalists to urge the use of gypsum as a fertilizer, he built a mill to grind the substance. Writing in the society’s Transactions on soil conservation, he showed how sowing grass and clover on worn-out fields could restore fertility. But his passion was merino sheep, which he had discovered in France and imported to his own country. His first tiny flock—two merino rams and two ewes—were dirty brown in color, their wool greasy and closely curled, but after cleaning the wool seemed whiter and softer than any other. The society proudly circulated 1,000 copies of Livingston’s “Essay on Sheep.” After the trade embargo of 1808 helped produce a kind of merino sheep craze, Livingston and other gentlemen farmers expanded their flocks and built several woolen mills, to their further profit.

Livingston and his friends wanted to do more than improve their own knowledge, however; they sought to improve the farm practices of their tenants. But the gulf was too deep. Most of their tenants could not read, and those who could would hardly have studied the Transactions. The tenants on the feudal estates of the large New York landowners were even less productive and more slovenly in their farming practices than many freehold farmers. They tried to extract everything they could from the land at the moment. The average farm on the Clermont estate comprised about 70 acres of leased land, with usually about one-third of the acreage under cultivation. Rent for the land was twenty-five bushels of winter wheat, four hens, and one day’s “riding” for the landlord with a team of horses or oxen. The chancellor possessed all milling and mining rights to the land and exacted a “quarter-sale”—one-third of the selling price—if the tenant tried to sell his improved farm to another. Though many of the chancellor’s acres were vacant, he hoped the lands would fill up, values would increase, and he could sell at a large profit. But very often new settlers bypassed New York and went on to the western states where land was open for settlement and a farmer could buy cheaply from the government.

Farther north, life for the farm owner could be less benign. Thomas Coffin battled nature in 1825 to wrest a living from New England’s rocky soils. Summers could bring temperatures of 90 degrees and drenching rains that would rot ripening crops in the fields of his farm in Boscawen, New Hampshire. Winter was worse with temperatures as low as 20 to 30 degrees below zero and snows of two feet deep, forcing Coffin and his neighbors to break out roads to haul wood for his fifty-year-old frame house on Water Street. For heat northern farmers needed large quantities of wood—fifteen cords a year, on the average—so that constant cutting of wood, along with threshing and winnowing the wheat crop in the barn and washing the yearlings with soap, kept Coffin working all winter long.

Springtime brought plowing, using the common New England wooden plow with an iron colter to cut the sod. With this plow and strong oxen an acre was a good day’s work, given the rough, rocky soils of the farm. Coffin and his sons then harrowed the ground to break up roots. The next task was to sow seeds of barley, oats, and peas, followed by a brushing to cover the scattered seed. Coffin’s sons dropped corn and potato seeds by hand into small holes they had dug. Potatoes were an important part of the agricultural economy of the North. Thomas Coffin could produce 500 bushels of potatoes a year—enough for his family plus seed for next year and a surplus to sell or trade in Boscawen.

Coffin’s was a prosperous northern farm like many others of about 100 to 200 acres worked by the owner’s family. Farmers knew little about seed selection, soil composition, or fertilizers; waste was taken for granted; and land was plentiful; so most farmers would rather do as their fathers had always done rather than farm “by the book.” Typically, they planted only a small amount in crops, perhaps six out of one hundred acres. A little more land would be in meadow and about the same in weeds, brush, or woodland range. The rest of the farm lay fallow until the farmer had exhausted his tilled acreage and had to cultivate a new section. He then let the exhausted land return to weeds and brush, which would supposedly bring it to fertility once again.

Tools were simple, yet ingenious. In summer Coffin and his sons hoed crops by hand, pulled weeds, mowed and raked hay and brought it under cover. They reaped rye with a smooth-bladed reaping hook or a long, narrow-bladed sickle, cradled oats, and mowed wheat and barley with a scythe. Shortage of labor for harvesting wheat was a crucial problem for northern farmers. Thomas Jefferson noted in 1793 that “every laborer will manage ten acres of wheat, except at harvest.” The farmer sowed only as much in the spring as he could harvest in late summer with the cradle, the long scythe blade paralleled by a rack of wooden fingers. An expert cradler could earn a dollar a day at harvest. If a man with a sickle could cut one-half to three-quarters of an acre a day, a man with a cradle could cut two to three acres a day. Only the later invention of the reaper removed the bottleneck on wheat growing.

Coffin fed livestock all winter long with hay cut and cured in summer. Cutting was by scythe, followed by raking, drying, and loading into wagons hauled by oxen to the haymow of the barn. It took tremendous energy and muscle to swing the scythe for hours. Coffin wrote in his diary one July day: “uncommon warm for three days, we mowed, raked, got in three small jags [loads], we are almost sick.” Although Coffin sometimes hired extra hands at from six to nine dollars a month to help him bring hay under cover before rain, the average northern farmer with poor or uncleared land could not afford permanent help. Shortage of farm labor, according to Timothy Dwight, contributed to neglect of the soil, failure to rotate crops, and inattention to fertilizers or other soil-improving minerals.

Harvest was the time to hunt up the cattle in the summer pasture. The average farm had ten to twenty sheep, fifteen head of cattle, including five dairy cows. It also had fifteen pigs which often ran wild in the woods, fed only just before slaughter. One English agriculturist reported in 1798: “The real American hog is what is termed the wood-hog…they are long in the leg.…You may as well think of stopping a crow as those hogs. They will go a distance from a fence, take a run, and leap through the rails, three or four feet from the ground, turning themselves sidewise. These hogs suffer such hardships as no other animal could endure.”

New England farms differed from fertile Pennsylvania and New York farms in that much of the soil was thin and stony and the growing season shorter. The Connecticut Valley and the Champlain area of Vermont were exceptional areas in New England for farming. Maize was the largest crop on the mixed farms owned by most of the New England farming population. Thomas Coffin could support his family with the products of his farm—flax and wool for clothing; barley and wheat for his livestock; peas, potatoes, corn, and vegetables for his table; plus milk, dairy products, veal, beef, pork, lamb, and mutton—all raised on his self-sufficient farm.

Coffin marketed surplus pork, veal, cider, and cheese in Boscawen, but his home and farm had been in his family for generations, so he did not need to buy on credit to clear or maintain his farm. Coffin could also sell trees on his farm. New England farmers hauled logs on great sleds to a “brow,” a landing place by the river. In the spring, upon ice-out, the logs on the brow would float off to a mill. To the nearby Merrimack River Coffin brought logs that would be used in building Manchester factories. “If by hard labour and frugal economy,” one observer noted, “the common independent Yankee farmer, such as the traveller meets with anywhere in New England, lays up annually from four to seven hundred dollars, he is a thriving man and ‘getting rich.’”

Like most New England farmers, Coffin had to be a jack-of-all-trades. He was a carpenter, mechanic, wheelwright, cooper, well digger, woodcutter, cider maker, maple-tree tapper, fence builder, drover, paperhanger, rudimentary blacksmith, harness maker. (He was also a diarist, to history’s benefit.) He not only repaired tools; he sometimes made them, or adapted them to his own purposes. Coffin was not equally skillful at all these tasks; but few farmers were more versatile than this Boscawen husbandman. No wonder he was a “thriving man.”

Mixed farming in New England was a year-round, time-consuming occupation absorbing all the energies of Coffin and his wife, Hannah, who washed, cooked, sewed, and cleaned while rearing six children. Large families of from six to eight children were the rule on New England farms. Farm women spun and wove all the family’s clothing out of flax or wool, and they made soap and candles. The period between 1775 and 1815 was the high point of home industry.

If close to a market in a village or city, farm women wove textiles or produced shoes to sell. Daughters entering the new textile mills then rising in New England and Pennsylvania often returned part of their earnings to needy parents, who tried to finance the migration of some of their children to the West while keeping their farm intact. The surplus property, livestock, and equipment were rarely enough for families on even good-sized northern farms to give each child a farm. Only in the 1830s did farm families start limiting the number of children they had, thus providing fewer offspring with more land. Farm land values in New England were generally high, owing to the large population and numerous towns; a good spread in Connecticut in 1807-08 brought between $40 and $50 an acre. These high land values encouraged landless young families to emigrate to the West.

Down South, population was also shifting westward, especially after the War of 1812. Farmers and planters had turned to raising cotton, which had a high value in relation to its weight, and with the invention of the gin, planters could profitably raise and process cotton for the market. New machines and processes lowered costs of cotton textiles, encouraging their substitution for woolens and linen. After the embargo and the War of 1812, England needed cotton to supply its textile mills and prices soared. Not until 1827 did supply begin to overtake demand, with the price of cotton in the New York market dropping back from thirty cents a pound to nine. At the same time the price of slaves rose, and cotton planters, dependent on the North and West for foodstuffs and manufactured goods, found they needed more working capital as the yield of their worn-out tobacco and wheat lands declined. Large planter and small farmer alike began the trek toward more promising lands of the Southwest. Between 1816 and 1820 the combined population of Alabama and Mississippi leaped from 75,000 to 200,000. Other states with cotton lands experienced similar growth. Louisiana had 76,000 settlers in 1810, 143,000 in 1820, and 215,000 by 1830.

Thomas Smith Gregory Dabney was one of the men who moved west. Lured by the rich profits to be made in cotton, he left his model plantation, Elmington, in Virginia to lead his family and slaves to 4,000 acres of prime cotton land he bought from several small farmers in western Mississippi. When wealthy planters like Dabney migrated, they purchased the best cotton lands for low prices in the rich soil of Alabama and Mississippi. The small farmer found he could not compete with the large planter and was usually willing to sell out if the planter made him an attractive offer. Good cotton land sold for five to ten dollars an acre; clearing cost eight to fifteen dollars an acre; fencing, three to six. Small farmers could not meet these expenses, build the necessary home, and subsist until returns from the cotton crop came in, so many sold out and migrated farther west. Dabney had capital. With a labor force of 500 slaves, he brought his new land into production at the rate of 100 acres a year.

During the mild southern winters slaves cleared land, chopped logs, and rolled them for new fences. Plowing of new land began in February; soon field hands would be keeping the plows constantly in action “listing up” new ground. In April slaves began planting cotton. A narrow plow pulled by a single horse opened a ridge; the sower then followed with a sack from which he threw the cotton seed, scattering twenty grains for every stalk that would grow. A field hand with a harrow followed the sower, covering the seeds lightly. Each set of three hands—plower, sower, and harrower—planted ten to fifteen acres a day between early April and the middle of May.

After the plants sprouted, thinning out or “scraping” began, and every hand came into the field with a hoe. A plow first ran a light furrow on each side of the row of cotton plants, and the hands “scraped” or thinned out the extra plants in the rows. Slaves then cultivated the ground around the plants all summer.

Cotton picking began in late August and might continue until the end of December. At dawn bells awakened slaves, men and women alike, so they could be in the fields by first light, and they would remain there until dark. Each slave, wet from the cold dew, brought a large basket and two coarse cotton bags strapped to the neck. The slave left the basket at the end of the row and proceeded to pick; when her two bags were full, she went back to her basket and dumped the cotton into it. At nightfall, she took the basket on her head to the scaffold yard for weighing. The overseer met all hands at the scales with lamp, slate, and whip. He then weighed each basket and entered the weight beside the slave’s name on his slate. A slave might not know beforehand if she had met the quota. According to one observer acquainted with the labor practices of overseers, on some plantations “those who are found to have brought in less than their usual quantity” received ten, twenty, or fifty stripes with the whip.

Overseers usually came from the small-farmer or landless classes of the region. Responsible to many absentee planters, they knew that their jobs and reputation rested on one thing only—how many bales of cotton they could produce from each acre of the planter’s land. It was usually of little concern to the owner how the overseer secured a large crop, although the planter did want his investment in workers maintained in efficient operating condition.

Cold and haughty in appearance, Dabney himself supervised the 200 slaves at Burleigh, his plantation, wearing gloves as he rode horseback through the fields. The other three sections of his estate Dabney regularly assigned to overseers. Field slaves on the Burleigh plantation picked cotton on a piece-rate system, with 400 pounds considered a good day’s output, although many picked 500 pounds according to the memory of Dabney’s daughter, who wrote about Burleigh several years later. One Southerner said in 1825 that to pick 400 or 500 pounds a day “requires such brisk and incessant motion that it could not be done two days in succession without danger of life or health; and is only attempted for a wager or such like reason.” He maintained that the average weight picked by all hands on a place, including children, was 150 to 160 pounds a day. Each hand could produce five or six 400-pound bales a year. Dabney’s overseers weighed each slave’s output three times a day and entered the number of pounds picked by field hands opposite their names on a slate.

To maintain his slaves in their most efficient working condition, Dabney provided them food, clothing, medical care and supervision; two woolen suits in winter and two in summer made by household servants on the plantation; and about five pounds of pork and other rations each week. Dabney felt his slaves worked harder if they received half of Saturday and all of Sunday off from field work.

Like other planters, Dabney tried to make his estate as self-sufficient as possible. He required twenty-seven servants to wait upon his family in the plantation house as well as other trained slaves to conduct plantation operations—carpenters, blacksmiths, millers, seamstresses, laundresses, and cooks. Dabney raised sheep, pigs, horses, and mules on the plantation and butchered from 150 to 175 pigs each year, since pork was the mainstay of his slaves’ diet. He cured his own hams and kept a herd of forty cows for dairy products for the household. But the alluvial lands of the Mississippi delta did not favor corn, so most planters imported large quantities of corn and pork from northwestern farmers.

Like Livingston, Dabney tried to improve the yields from his land. He studied better farming practices, published numerous articles in the Mississippi Farmer, and served as president of the State Agricultural Society. Versatile in his way, he investigated the new agricultural implements such as better plows and advocated their use. But he was working his land with forced labor, which often quietly resisted his best management efforts. Slaves were not interested in diversifying crops, improving livestock, or developing new techniques and machinery to enrich the master. They had little incentive to use better tools and at times deliberately broke or lost them. They had their own ways of evading the overseer. One observer wrote of the weighing of cotton picked by slaves, “It is not an uncommon occurrence for an overseer, who is even vigilant, amid the crowd of negroes and baskets, with only one lamp, held close to the scales and slate, to weigh some of the heavier baskets several times, their exact weight being changed by taking out, or putting in a few pounds; while the lighter ones pass entirely unnoticed.”

A technological backwardness pervaded the region. Investment in agriculture for large planter and small farmer alike meant investment in slaves. Even small farmers moving west usually invested in slaves rather than in improved implements or techniques. One northern journalist, Joseph Ingraham, observing some small farmers in 1833 at the port of Natchez, Mississippi, wrote: “Seated in a circle around their bread and cheese were half a dozen as rough, rude, honest-looking countrymen from the back part of the state as you could find in the nursery of New England’s yeomanry. They are small farmers—own a few negroes—cultivate a small tract of land, and raise a few bales of cotton, which they bring to market themselves. Their carts are drawn around them forming a barricade to their camp, for here, as is customary among them, instead of putting up at taverns, they have encamped since their arrival. Between them and their carts are their negroes.…”

These small farmers worked isolated, hilly regions and lived a backward, self-sufficient way of life. Lacking capital, they could not buy industrial products, nor could they easily move their surplus crops to market without a transportation system. In turn, manufactures in the southern states declined after 1810, owing to a lack of good transportation, a rural market, and free labor not tied to the land.

Many of the planters of the time were absentee owners. Dabney spent the long, hot summer months on the Gulf coast away from his plantation. In the fall he supervised the picking and the ginning on his plantation. Field hands could gin about three to four bales of cotton a day and press about ten to twelve bales a day with a steam press. Dabney accompanied the cotton to market, riding with the wagons to the shipping point about sixty miles away. New Orleans and Mobile were major ports for shipping cotton to the Northeast and to England. In 1822, New Orleans received 161,000 bales; in 1830, 428,000 bales. Sugar shipments rose from 30,000 hogsheads in 1823 to 186,000 in 1845. By 1830 leadership in cotton production had passed from the Atlantic states to the Gulf states.

Planters sold their cotton directly to resident New York factors who, as agents of New York banks, could advance them long-term credit to buy more land and slaves. “The system of credit in this country is peculiar,” a New England journalist observed. “From new-year’s to new-year’s is the customary extension of this accommodation, and the first of January, as planters have then usually disposed of their crops, is a season for a general settlement throughout every branch of business. The planters have their commission merchants in New Orleans and Natchez, who receive and ship their cotton for them, and make advances, if required, upon succeeding crops. Some planters export direct to Liverpool and other ports, though generally they sell or consign to the commission merchants in Natchez, who turn cotton into gold so readily, that one verily would be inclined to think that the philosopher’s stone might be concealed within the bales.”

The system fostered careless business methods. The planter, having sold his crop at the port, did not have to check on shipping, the price of imported goods, insurance, or freight. He left these concerns to New Yorkers, who dominated the financial life of the South. Planters even developed a certain disdain for business and for the labor that maintained it. Factors made loans to keep them in funds until the next crop, at an interest rate of 8 to 12 percent, to which they added a brokerage fee of 1 to 2.5 percent. Cotton profits flowed to the Northeast for services and manufactured goods and to the West for food, leaving little investment capital in the South. Southern banks, which were usually controlled by powerful planters, largely financed the extension of the slavery system, as did Britons who invested in the Southwest to increase the cotton trade.

The southern agricultural system was inherently wasteful. Large amounts of land were controlled by absentee planters and worked by forced, unwilling slaves driven by overseers intent on extracting as much as possible from the worker and the land. Instead of crop rotation or fertilization, planters abandoned worn-out land to weeds and cleared more until it too was sterile. Overseers made few efforts to restore fertility to the soil by plowing clover or peas; instead they plowed up and down on slopes for cotton rows and cultivated them, leading to serious soil erosion. By 1839, one writer in Georgia observed that thousands of acres of Georgia land were nothing but “sterile red clay, full of gullies.” Cotton growing rested on exploitation—of both soil and slaves.

No transportation system went into the interior, where yeomen farmers remained isolated, self-sufficient, and backward. Canals, turnpikes, and local roads would transform northern agriculture from subsistence to commercial farming. In the South, where planters dominated the state legislatures as well as the banks, expanding income had little multiplier effect. It flowed instead to the North and West for services, manufactures, and foodstuffs.

By 1830, American agriculture had not changed significantly from what it was in 1800. Heavy farm machinery, university agricultural schools, and experiment stations would come later in the century. But improvements were taking place almost daily under the leadership of gentlemen farmers like Livingston who had the capital and the time to diversify crop production, experiment with fertilizers, improve livestock through better breeding, and import new stock such as the merino sheep. In the North, the iron plow of Jethro Wood came into widespread use through the leadership of the gentlemen farmers. Wood perfected a plow in 1819 with both wooden and cast-iron parts, and sold it for a modest price. The iron plow, according to one historian, reduced the labor required in plowing by about half. In 1844, a Southerner visiting the New York State Agricultural Fair wrote that “the best models of the plow, perhaps in the world,” were there, enabling northern farmers to plow more deeply and raise crops in “greater abundance…in comparison with ours.”

In the South, improvements in processing took place largely through applying horsepower and later steam power to cotton gins on large plantations. Steam presses also increased the amount of cotton made into bales on plantations. Once settlers had migrated over the mountains into the Southwest to raise cotton, demand for farm products increased, while laborers moving into the factories of the cities also expanded the market for farm products.

The general rise in demand, coming after long decades of nearly constant markets, stimulated the research and experimentation that eventually bore fruit in the agricultural inventions of the 1840s and 1850s. As improved transportation began to link the nation’s sections, farmers had an incentive to produce for a growing national market.

FACTORIES: THE LOOMS OF LOWELL

Eli Whitney’s financial losses in 1796 with the cotton gin were a heavy blow. He was still looking, at thirty-one years of age, for a way to make a good living. “Bankruptcy & ruin were constantly staring me in the face & disappointment trip’d me up every step I attempted to take.…Loaded with a Debt of 3 or 4000 Dollars, without resources and without any business that would ever furnish me a support, I knew not which way to turn.” Troubles multiplied. His workshop in New Haven where he was making cotton gins had burned to the ground. And all the while, the image of Catherine Greene “so possessed him” that “he was unable to give himself to another woman.” She was remarried in 1796—to Whitney’s partner in the cotton gin manufacture, Phineas Miller. It would be twenty years—Whitney would be fifty-one and Catherine in her grave—before he could bring himself to marry another woman.

But Whitney’s tenacity never lessened, nor did his initiative and enterprise. After analyzing his financial problems he turned from Mulberry Grove to the federal government, from making cotton gins to manufacturing small arms. He had no experience in producing guns and no gun factory, but no matter. He knew that he could solve his financial problems if the Treasury would pay for his workshop. He also knew that the outbreak of war in Europe in the 1790s made it essential for the American government to acquire guns for defense.

Whitney sent Secretary of the Treasury Wolcott a bold proposal to manufacture on a “new principle” 10,000 muskets—a fantastic number in those days—to be delivered to Washington within twenty-eight months. Granted a contract for $134,000, Whitney used an advance of $10,000 to start building an armory. He already had the workers, having recruited them from Massachusetts to make cotton gins. After buying a suitable water-power site on the Mill River outside New Haven, consisting of two hundred acres with three old houses, he added a new barn, five stone dwellings for workmen, a stone store, plus a dam and bridge. Since mills and armories had to rely on water for power, Whitney like other early industrialists located his mill in a rural area and purchased a “mill privilege”—the right to control all or part of the available power.

Whitney worked closely with his men, who in turn were dependent on him for their jobs and houses. Somewhat isolated in their environments, workers generally found it hard to move away when employers like the ironmasters in Pennsylvania and the mill operators of Rhode Island paid wages not in cash but in credit at the company store. “My intention is to employ steady, sober people and learn them the business,” Whitney wrote. “I shall make it a point to employ persons who have family connections and perhaps some little property to fix them to the place.”

Westward settlement was already tightening the scarce labor supply of the northeastern states. From the rugged hill farms of western New England, the abundance of western land drew away many potential workers who might otherwise have migrated into the towns or cities to form a more abundant labor force. Whitney had gone for his labor supply to his home area of western Massachusetts, the area of southern New England called “the northern hive,” from which youngest sons and then whole families migrated to western New York and Pennsylvania. Manufacturing had to attract labor from the farming frontier or else draw new hands such as women and children into the labor market.

Whitney sought young, unskilled workers for training but he found that he must “be present during the formation of every Pattern, Model, Mold, etc.,” as he wrote to explain why he could not fulfill the government contract for guns in the specified lime. To mechanize the manufacturing process, Whitney had to invent an elaborate system of guides, patterns, templates, gauges, and jigs so that his unskilled workers could produce, in large numbers, a musket from a model that skilled craftsmen had previously made. It took him ten years to deliver 10,000 arms.

Armorers averaged thirty-two dollars a month, the skilled iron workers in Pennsylvania, twenty to twenty-four dollars. Unskilled workers such as the coal miners of Pennsylvania made five to 10 ten dollars a week, whereas laborers working in construction work, woodcutting, and road building, where the demand for unskilled labor was low, earned from sixty to ninety cents a day. Work in the mines or on construction was intermittent, however, so unskilled laborers seldom earned a full month’s wages. Arms making generally paid armorers by piece rates according to the skill required by the job.

A man’s working day depended on the speed he could apply to his individual task. At the Harpers Ferry Armory in Virginia, many diversions interrupted the working day. Armorers quit work to share a cup of whiskey, or they might move to the armory yard to watch dogfights, cockfights, and bloody matches between co-workers, usually placing bets on the outcome. Evangelists, orators, and peddlers drew armorers away from work, as did holidays, barbecues, and celebrations.

The craft ethic caused many armorers to resist mechanization of the industry, on the grounds that an armorer’s task was to make a complete product—lock, stock, and barrel. To learn the craft, a son worked with his father or an apprentice with his master for at least five years to learn such arts as barrel making, lock forging, or filing, stocking, and finishing a musket. The center of the craft tradition in arms making was Philadelphia, where German-born craftsmen served apprenticeships in Pennsylvania gun shops, often migrating to Harpers Ferry at later times. The push for interchangeable parts came not only from gifted arms contractors like Whitney who were eager to cut costs and replace craft skills with machinery, but also from the government, which wanted soldiers to be able to replace broken parts of a musket in the field. Whitney never mastered complete interchangeability before his death, but his methods were adopted and improved upon by other independent arms makers such as John Hall at Harpers Ferry and Simeon North, who were able to assemble rifle components in a case-hardened state as early as 1824.

The system of interchangeable parts manufacture begun by Whitney and others in the small-arms industry changed the life and work of many craftsmen, such as Johann Ludwig Eberhardt, a clockmaker of Salem, North Carolina. Members of the Moravian Church migrating from Germany had settled first in Pennsylvania and then, after receiving a grant of 100,000 acres in 1766 in the North Carolina piedmont, moved on to the area to be called Salem. Their settlement was never to be a frontier farming settlement but a center for trades and crafts. They drew up plans for a gristmill and sawmill, brewery and distillery, a store, apothecary shop, tanyard, pottery, gunsmith, blacksmith, gunstock maker, tailor shop, shoemaker, linen weaver, saddlery, bakery and carpenter, joiners, masons, and a tavern. The people of Salem, a town of two hundred people, also needed a clockmaker, and on November 29, 1799, the community imported Johann Ludwig Eberhardt, a strong-willed, impetuous, impatient forty-one-year-old clockmaker from Germany.

In Salem, all admitted had to conform with rules about morals, religion, and behavior established by the Board of Elders. The Elders objected to Eberhardt’s excessive indulgence “in the use of spiritous drink,” but he had come to Salem to settle down and at age forty-one approached the Elders for permission to marry. The Elders Conference rejected the first woman Eberhardt proposed to; his second choice was put to the Lot, a small wooden bowl containing three paper cartridges: “Ja” or “Nein” or a blank, which meant the question required further consideration. The Lot said “Nein” to Eberhardt’s second choice, requiring him to choose a third woman, favored at last by the Elders Conference and the Lot.

A supervisory committee exercised as much control over business and property as did the Elders Conference over morals. The committee decided which crafts and trades should function, how many craftsmen could do business in each, what prices should be charged, what wages paid. Eberhardt had to ask permission to buy a house for his residence and his shop, and the committee assigned him other duties such as winding and tending the town clocks in the church, ringing the noon bell, and repairing broken clocks. Eberhardt’s business was typical of clock shops of the early nineteenth century, requiring a variety of other skills such as working in metals, smithing, and casting. After importing most parts from England via Philadelphia, Eberhardt filed, scraped, and polished plates and wheel blanks for his clocks, assembling the final individual, handcrafted clock. He made an average of eight clocks per year, charging forty to sixty dollars apiece. His business was an exacting, one-man operation. Though he had apprentices, he could not get along with them and eventually let all of them go.

Eberhardt’s death in 1839 marked the end of an era of craftsmanship. He was the last clockmaker in Salem. Handmade clocks gave way to Eli Terry’s and Seth Thomas’ machine-made versions. Like Whitney, Terry began to use guides, patterns, templates, gauges, and jigs in the making of his wooden clocks in the Connecticut Valley. With the installation of machinery he was able to turn out clocks in lots of one to two hundred which he peddled about the countryside on horseback for fifteen dollars a clock. His thirty-hour shelf clock, patented in 1816, changed the business. By 1852, the year of his death, he was producing 10,000 to12,000 metal clocks a year which sold for five dollars apiece.

Industrialists Eli Terry, Eli Whitney, Samuel Colt, and Simeon North tirelessly experimented with machines to cut metal into precise shapes and produce interchangeable parts in clocks and small arms. The problems confronted by these manufacturers were similar technologically to those in a number of other industries, such as sewing machines and agricultural implements. Unlike Eberhardt, who looked upon himself as responsible for a complete, one-of-a-kind product, the industrialists were flexible and experimental tinkerers who improved the manufacturing process by mechanizing it step by step. Their incentive to adopt labor-saving techniques to cut costs was heightened in an expanding economy and population. Farmers with land and a transportation network to market farm products could do well, but in spite of the scarcity of skilled and unskilled labor, workers, whether craftsmen, skilled workers, or common laborers, did not share in the profits of industrialization to the extent the manufacturer did.

With a new war starting in 1812, Whitney signed a bigger contract with the government to deliver 15,000 muskets. He was able to complete the contract in two years owing to his use of filing jigs, milling machines, and other devices. Little was new in the process. Interchangeable parts manufacture developed much earlier in Europe, but men like Whitney applied machines and methods to manufacture products in a nation where demand for machine-made goods and ability to buy were greater than in many countries in Europe. Whitney died a rich man, leaving an estate of more than $130,000 in savings and personal notes held by him. At this time a skilled millwright or carpenter earned eight dollars a week and a canal laborer four dollars a week, often paid partly in board.

The leader in industrial expansion between 1815 and 1860 was the cotton textile industry, and the leader in cotton textiles was the man who set up the first integrated cotton textile factory, Francis Cabot Lowell. Merchants in the carrying trade had grown rich, with profits during good times averaging $50 to $70 million dollars annually. But the carrying trade dwindled within a few years because of the Embargo Act of 1807 and the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809, as the United States struck back at French and British attacks on American sea commerce. Some merchants began to look for more secure areas to invest their profits. The cotton gin had helped boost American consumption of cotton from 1,000 to 90,000 bales a year, as merchants with warehouses, easy access to credit, resources to purchase raw material in large lots, and experience in merchandising turned to cotton textile manufacture as a way of making large and steady profits.

Fifteen of Samuel Slater’s cotton mills had started up by 1807 in Rhode Island. Slater had been an apprentice in England to a partner of Richard Arkwright, an early inventor of cotton textile machinery. In his head Slater had carried the plans of the Arkwright machinery to New York in 1789; this memory feat, his friends claimed, outfoxed English customs officials enforcing the law forbidding the export of machinery plans or apprentices. Slater came to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, at the invitation of the wealthy Providence merchant Moses Brown to build a cotton spinning frame of twenty-four spindles. Textile production took two steps—spinning, in which the spindle stretches and twists fibers into yarns, and weaving, by which fabric is made by the interlacement of groups of yarns at right angles to each other. Slater’s mills did only the first stage—spinning. The yarn from the mills went to hand weavers who wove the yarns into cloth in their farm homes.

Lowell, unlike Slater, saw the possibilities for profit in bringing the whole process for making cloth into the factory, where unskilled workers could produce by machinery. This would lower costs, for hand weaving was expensive. In 1810, overworked, ill, and exhausted from his ventures in real estate and commerce, he sailed for Edinburgh for a rest cure with his wife, Hannah Jackson Lowell, and his sons. Patrick Tracy Jackson, Lowell’s brother-in-law, managed his affairs and the trading fortune during his absence. Never able to stay idle long, Lowell toured the factory of a large iron manufacturer and then visited the Manchester, England, cotton mills for several weeks. There he observed the Horrocks and Johnson power loom, which incorporated a machine for “dressing” the warp with a starch coating to make it strong enough for power weaving.

Returning to Boston in 1812, Lowell sought the help of an Amesbury mechanic, Paul Moody, to construct a power loom. Together they fashioned a successful one operated by a camshaft. There was nothing remarkable in their power loom—other manufacturers were close to building one as efficient as Lowell’s and later even superior to it; but none of the small partnership and family-owned enterprises of southern New England could match Lowell’s command of investment capital to establish new factories, power systems, and machines on a big scale.

Lowell persuaded Jackson and Nathan Appleton, a wealthy Boston merchant, to join him in raising $400,000 for the venture, including purchase of the power rights on the Charles River in Waltham, with its ten-foot waterfall. An elbow of land jutting into the Charles River and linked by the Great Sudbury Road to Boston provided an excellent factory site. The Boston Associates, as they were called, eventually included the most prominent merchant families in the city—Jackson, Appleton, Lawrence, Cabot, Dwight, Amory, Lyman, and Lowell, all linked by marriage. Lowell designed the buildings for the Waltham mill, including a machine shop where the spinning, carding, and weaving machinery would be made, a small mill with about 2,000 spindles in operation by 1816 and a larger one of 3,500 spindles in operation a few years later.

It was easier to buy machinery than to hire workers, but Lowell had the foresight to attract a new factory labor force of young women from the large New England farm families whose hilly land could not support all its young people. The Waltham system was to be different from the poverty and misery of the English system of labor, different also from the Slater mills that employed large families and put small children into the mills. Too complicated for children to operate, the power looms did not require strength so much as dexterity, and some women knew weaving from work at home. When young men became agricultural laborers, tenant farmers, or moved west, young farm women often went into the factories. Nowhere else could they make as much money. The “mill girls,” as they called themselves, were a temporary labor force. Expecting to work for three or four years and return to the farms or get married, they were not at first eager to demand better working rules.

By 1826 the Waltham mills employed five hundred operatives, who were paid from two to four dollars a week, from which $1.25 for room and board was deducted. The power loom saved considerable labor cost over the hand-loom weaving method. In the machine shops, skilled machinists received fifty cents to two dollars a day, while the superintendent earned two dollars a day. One of the chief attractions of the Waltham mills was that they paid their workers in cash.

The venture was an immediate financial success, paying dividends of from 8 to 13 percent on investments. Lowell and his associates were experienced merchandisers, having already shipped British and Indian cloth, and when the British dumped cotton goods in the United States after the War of 1812, the fine English cotton textiles did not drive out the coarse cotton products of Waltham. In 1816, Lowell had gone to Washington to lobby for a new tariff of 6¼ cents a square yard which would protect the Waltham product against cheap cotton goods from India but would not protect Rhode Island manufacturers of hand-woven calico from imports of fine English cottons.

New England offered a more advantageous environment for factory development, for it had few craftsmen and skilled weavers to resist the machines turning out coarse, unbleached sheeting. With its big water supply and the ample labor force from the poor hill farms of Massachusetts, Waltham was an excellent site for the complete cotton factory. The only comparable locality for cotton mills was Philadelphia, the city to which skilled spinners and weavers had migrated during the colonial period, but unskilled workers were not plentiful there, as the farms of eastern Pennsylvania were fertile and migration to the West was easy.

By 1820 Moody had harnessed the power of the Charles River, so the Boston Associates looked elsewhere for a new supply of power to build mills from the profits of Waltham. Appleton, Jackson, and Moody selected the community of East Chelmsford, where the Concord and Merrimack rivers came together at Pawtucket Falls—a falls of thirty-two feet from a large watershed that could provide over 3,000 potential horsepower, enough for fifty mills like the two in Waltham. Agents quickly bought four hundred acres from unsuspecting farmers in 1821 and gained control over the entire power of the Merrimack. The community was named Lowell in honor of the financial leader, who had died in 1817 at only forty-two. By 1839, nine textile companies were in operation. The population of Lowell expanded from 200 in 1820 to 30,000 by 1845.

Women made up by far the larger part of this population explosion. A long, low black wagon, called a “slaver,” cruised along Vermont and New Hampshire farm roads in charge of a “commander” who received a dollar a head for any girl he could “bring to the market.” Lowell and the other mill towns made factory work respectable by providing strictly chaperoned boardinghouses and requiring church attendance on Sunday. Female labor constituted over two-thirds of the factory labor force.

The mills of the paternalistic Boston Associates instituted a set of regulations to protect the young women and ensure discipline and compliance. An employee had to remain with the company for at least twelve months once she began work, and to give the company at least two weeks’ notice before she could quit, or her name would go on a blacklist. She was to work fourteen hours a day, six days a week. While she could attend the church of her choice in Lowell, Sunday school was often taught by her overseers.

Lucy Larcom, one of five thousand Lowell girls, began work in 1835, changing the bobbins on the spinning frames when she was eleven years old. After her mother had been widowed and left alone with nine children, she too came to Lowell to work as a boardinghouse matron. During or after work, it was a life without privacy. In the boardinghouses the girls ate in a large communal dining room and slept six to a room, two to a bed. The inmates were locked in their boardinghouses at ten o’clock. In the factory Lucy worked from five in the morning to seven at night, with thirty minutes allowed for lunch and for dinner. Lucy found the work tedious, but there were moments of relief. While the girls could not read on company time—literature in the mills was strictly forbidden—they enjoyed a good deal of camaraderie. And an overseer allowed Lucy to sit in the window and watch the flow of the Merrimack River.

The mill owners were proud of their productive mills, constantly improved machinery, efficient labor force. They conceived of Lowell as a social experiment “that would be a shining example of those ultimate Yankee ideals: profit and virtue, doing good and doing well.” Visitors were impressed by the boardinghouse system, the chattering, vivacious mill girls, and especially by the educational opportunities of Lowell—by the Lowell Library, begun in 1825 with five hundred dollars from the company, and the Lyceum, also built by the company, which offered twenty-five lectures a year for fifty cents each, as well as night courses. Visitors wrote glowing—and often misleading—reports of busy mills and happy mill girls.

As the success of the Lowell and Waltham mills attracted new investors, the Boston Associates built mills on eight of New England’s best water-power sites—Chicopee, Holyoke, and Lawrence in Massachusetts; Dover, Manchester, and Nashua in New Hampshire; Biddeford and Saco in Maine—eventually comprising one-fifth of America’s cotton textile industry, all centrally controlled with other ventures in finance, insurance, and railroads. The protective tariff of 1816 allowed American industrialists to monopolize the market for the mass-produced, inexpensive, low-grade cotton cloth so much in demand by western settlers. The gin had lowered the price of cotton far below that of flax or wool, so the industrialist could buy cheap raw cotton, manufacture it into cloth, and sell it in a rapidly expanding internal market. The American standard of living was rising faster in this period than that of any other nation in the world.

Other industries such as firearms, woolens, iron, agricultural machinery, shoes and leather products expanded also, but no other industry rose so fast in the early years of 1816 through 1830 as did the cotton textile industry. The total number of factory spindles reached 1,750,000 by 1835. By 1840 mills employed 100,000 people, compared with 5,000 in 1816. The pioneering methods of the cotton textile industry influenced the methods of other industries. Men employed in developing machinery for the cotton textile industry supplied the skills and know-how for other mechanizing industries.

The innovating leaders needed more than machines and manpower; they needed money. Lack of capital was the principal problem of businessmen in the early nineteenth century. As the Napoleonic wars made the United States the major neutral carrier with a corresponding rise in mercantile fortunes, northeastern states with competing seaports promoted their cities and tried to attract capital in various ways, such as awarding charters to businesses to incorporate. Savings banks arose rapidly in the northern and middle states and became capital suppliers to commercial banks either by redepositing deposits or by stock investments and loans to rising industries.

States had no requirements for reserves, so clearinghouses for interbank claims were developed through the leadership of the Boston Associates. They were the directors of the Suffolk Bank of Boston, which in 1822 began to clear notes from country banks for the city banks of Boston, requiring country banks to maintain a five-thousand-dollar deposit in the Suffolk Bank and enough besides to redeem each of its notes. Lowell had received a corporate charter from the Massachusetts legislature and was able to draw on the profits of the Boston mercantile community. These merchants, with profits from the overseas trade, were people to look to for capital when banks would not take the risk.

Many of his friends and relatives had thought the plan of Francis Cabot Lowell for a cotton textile mill “a visionary and dangerous scheme.” Lowell’s leadership had convinced them otherwise.

FREIGHT: THE BIG DITCHES

The August day was hot and sultry when the extraordinary contraption, appearing to be a raft topped by a furnace, fired up in the Hudson River at New York City. On board were forty passengers—all members of the Livingston clan—who huddled together trying to avoid sparks and soot from the steamboat’s engine. Undercurrents of “I told you so; it is a foolish scheme; I wish we were well out of it,” grew louder. The steamboat’s inventor, Robert Fulton, later wrote, “There were not perhaps thirty persons in the city who believed that the boat would ever move one mile an hour….” Two men had no doubts: Chancellor Robert R. Livingston, an avid student of steam navigation, Fulton’s mentor and financier, and Fulton himself, mechanical genius and inventor.

Fulton had no time for talk, being too busy trying to find out why his steamboat was steaming but not moving. Soon he solved the problem, and the boat left New York City bound for the chancellor’s Clermont estate. As news of the boat’s voyage moved up the Hudson faster than its speed of five miles per hour, people lined the shore to gape at the clanking, splashing craft, shooting a fiery shower of sparks as it panted its way. It was a frightening spectacle to some who watched from shore—the coming of the end. A few ran to their homes and locked the doors in fright, but the North River Steamboat of Clermont, later known as just the Clermont, roared on to Livingston’s Hudson River estate, finishing the distance of 110 miles in twenty-four hours. The steamboat traveled forty miles to Albany on the following day.

“The power of propelling boats by steam is now fully proved,” the elated inventor wrote of his triumph. “…It will give a cheap and quick conveyance to the merchandise on the Mississippi, Missouri, and other great rivers, which are now laying open the treasures to the enterprise of our countrymen.” Fulton intended to use his steamboat on western waters and make upstream navigation possible on the Mississippi. His experiment was but one in a long string of successes. Tall, handsome, and forty-one, with curly black hair and dark eyes, he looked like an English gentleman who had married into the Livingston clan and been accepted, as indeed he had. Nothing if not confident, Fulton had a talent for persuading wealthy investors to finance his imaginative adventures. His first patron, Joel Barlow, a radical and cosmopolitan poet living in France, had introduced him to Livingston.

Fulton had traveled to Europe in 1787 to study miniature painting and did not return to the United States for twenty years. In Europe he came to be fascinated by transportation and the building of steamboats. Soon he was corresponding with Boulton and Watt in England about the purchase of a suitable steam engine for boat propulsion. A voracious reader of studies about steam navigation—especially the work of John Fitch, John Stevens, and Oliver Evans, all of whom had launched workable steamboats—as well as theoretical works on hull design, Fulton wrote a treatise of his own on the improvement of canal navigation. He moved to France in 1799 to confer with the French Directory about another dream of his, submarines. Encouraged by the French government, at war with England, Fulton perfected a submersible in which he and a crew of three, aided by a compressed-air tank, could submerge as deep as twenty-five feet and stay under for four and one-half hours. The French government agreed to reward him handsomely if he destroyed one of the British warships blockading the French coast, but Fulton never engaged a British ship. The French lost interest, and Fulton turned to his other pursuits.

Fulton became acquainted with Livingston while in France. The improvement of transportation through steam-powered vessels was a lifelong obsession of Livingston, as it was with other landowners of the period. In 1798, the Hudson grandee had a bill presented to the New York Assembly repealing an act of 1787 that gave John Fitch the sole right to use steamboats on the Hudson River and now awarding Livingston the privilege for twenty years, provided he could build within a year a boat of twenty tons and propel it by steam at the rate of four miles an hour.

Financed by Livingston, Fulton set to work late in 1802 to build an experimental boat to navigate on the Seine River of France. Since the inland navigation of American waters was their purpose, however, they both agreed to shift the experiments to the United States. After buying and shipping home a steam engine and boiler made by Boulton and Watt of England, Fulton designed a vessel for it in the shipyards at Paulus Hook Ferry. It was a long and narrow boat—150 feet by 13 feet—with a flat deck and open machinery, planned for eventual use on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

Since a steamboat, in comparison with a textile factory, required little capital to build—$900 to $1,200 for the smaller boats and later $5,000 to $40,000 for the ferries—competition was stiff. Rivals sought advantages in state monopoly grants and expensive patent suits. Livingston won a second and third extension of the New York state monopoly, thus gaining the exclusive privilege to operate steamboats in New York waters and to have the privilege extended by five years for each additional boat built—the whole time not to exceed thirty years. Livingston felt he had every right to the monopoly since he had supplied leadership and capital, through the sale of some of his lands, to a project which would eventually benefit the nation as a whole. He supplied the inventor with a state monopoly and commercial advantage, for Livingston brought the steamboat to the attention of his merchant friends in New York City who would want to use a steamboat service. Livingston also brought stability and direction to the partnership, constantly summoning Fulton back from his other canal and submarine interests to the completion of the steamboat in 1807. “Mechanicks is my hobby horse,” he wrote.

Fulton, in turn, gave his engineering talents and inventiveness to the partnership. The North River Steamboat was by no means original, for many others had built workable steam vessels (though none had lasted). Fulton approached the problem by studying the errors and successes of others, keeping careful records of his readings and experiments, and constructing trial models before going full-scale. Although his European training had taught him to study all aspects of a subject scientifically rather than tinkering, he wanted a practical and commercial success more than he wanted the claim of originality. Expanding his factory at Paulus Hook Ferry, he built another steamboat in 1810 and was offering ferry service from New York to Albany twice a week. He also turned to the area which had always been his object—the Mississippi River. Here the steamboat would transform the inland transportation system of the United States.

Walled off by the Appalachian Mountains, the Northwest was not easily accessible to manufactured goods from Europe and the Northeast, and the Northwest in turn could not profitably export to the East because of the high cost of wagon transport. As migrants poured over the Appalachians after the War of 1812 to settle and farm, they began to produce a surplus of heavy staples—grain, meat, whiskey, lumber, and livestock. How to market and transport this surplus? Heavy farm items such as wheat and flour could not absorb the freight charge of thirteen dollars a barrel to move from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia when the flour itself sold for ten dollars. Horses could draw loaded wagons about twenty miles a day, or two miles an hour.

Highways were still primitive, even though states had awarded monopolies to turnpike builders to encourage the construction of better roads. The national government itself built a highway partially from the sale of Ohio public lands to connect Ohio with the Atlantic. In 1818 this “National Road” opened for traffic from Cumberland on the Potomac River through the lower western corner of Pennsylvania, to Wheeling. Although the new highway boasted a fine-stone surface and heavy bridges, traffic was so heavy as to wear it out in places. Maintained for the most part by local authorities, state roads were poor; only the best were comparable to the improved backcountry roads of today. The traveler could expect anything on local ways, even the building of fences across them. As late as 1841 one traveler found that a settler needing clay for his house chimney had dug a big hole in the middle of an Illinois state road used by the mail stage. The few improved highways such as the Pennsylvania Turnpike and the National Road did not lower the cost of freight transportation, which, to be at all profitable, had to go by water.

With his usual shrewdness Fulton sized up the steamboat possibilities of the Mississippi. Carrying freight by flatboat or keelboat was essentially one-way, time-consuming, and expensive. Farmers floated their products downstream to New Orleans on flatboats, sold off their boats for a pittance, and then usually had to walk home to Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana over the Natchez Trail to Nashville and points north. The miracle of steam would enable boatmen to breast the current and convert the Mississippi into a huge two-way traffic link. With Livingston and Nicholas Roosevelt, Fulton organized the Mississippi Steamboat Company in 1809 to navigate the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Natchez.

Fulton and Livingston sent Nicholas Roosevelt west in the same year to study navigation opportunities on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and then build a steamboat at Pittsburgh. In April 1811, their company persuaded the territorial legislature of Louisiana to grant them the exclusive use of the lower Mississippi River for steamboats. Once again Livingston’s influence helped secure a steamboat monopoly—in this case because of his key role in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. The partners awarded Roosevelt a contract to build the Mississippi steamboat. Construction began in 1811 on the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh amid endless difficulties. Fifty mechanics had to be imported from New York City, materials were in short supply, and the Boulton and Watt engine did not arrive, forcing substitution of an earlier engine.

The adventurous Roosevelt and his pregnant wife, Lydia, decided to make the first trip with no passengers. A crowd assembled as the New Orleans hissed and clanked down the Monongahela River, reaching Cincinnati by the second day. Bystanders lined the wharves of the Ohio River as the boat pushed its way behind the gentle current. By the fourth day, the New Orleans reached Louisville, where the boat docked because the falls on the Ohio River were too shallow for passage. The indomitable Lydia used this interval to have her baby. Then the couple renewed their journey; as if the baby were not enough, they had also taken on a Newfoundland dog. The steamboat tied up to shore at regular intervals to allow the crew to chop wood for the boiler. By the time the boat reached Natchez, thousands were lining the shore to see it, but the steamboat pushed on to New Orleans, reaching there by mid-January with wife, baby, dog, and husband still intact.

The denouement was anticlimactic. Fulton kept the New Orleans in service only between New Orleans and Natchez, never going back upriver. Two years later, the New Orleans hit a snag and sank.

Other steamboats quickly replaced it in the river trade. These vessels for the western waters had to be lighter in order to navigate through greater hazards of low water, falls, and floods, compared with steamboats on the protected northeastern waterways. Mississippi boats used high-pressure steam, which brought on more explosions and other accidents. The average life of western steamboats was four years, whereas boats using low-pressure steam in the Northeast lasted seven. Shifting sandbars and snags, rupturing boilers, and obstacles caused numerous casualties. More intense competition and higher operating expenses owing to heavier depreciation and costs seemed to be the lot of Mississippi steamboats.

The steamboatmen were undaunted. Four years after the maiden voyage of the New Orleans, the Washington, piloted by Henry M. Shreve, a veteran keelboat captain, did make the return trip upstream to Louisville. A keel-boat with a cargo of from ten to forty tons and a crew of eight to twenty men had done well to pole six miles a day upstream, taking three to four months to reach Louisville from New Orleans. Shreve made the upstream trip to Louisville in twenty-five days. By 1817 seventeen steamboats, averaging about 190 tons each, were operating on western rivers; three years later there were sixty-nine. Fulton’s audacity and practicality had paid off.

Despite all their theatrics, steamboats were slow to affect transportation as a whole. The early vessels were unreliable, dependent on the stage of the river, and too expensive to transport low-value heavy freight such as coal, lumber, and iron, which continued to go on keelboats until the middle 1830s. With more and better vessels, the value of goods received at New Orleans rose from $10 million in 1816 to $17 million by 1819, but the difference was not all due to steamboats, since the number of flatboats and the amount of freight they carried also rose. A dramatic effect of the steamboat, however, was on the lives of flatboatmen. Instead of one trip a year, midwestern farmers could now make four.

One of them, a nineteen-year-old Indiana boy named Abe Lincoln, contracted with a farmer in April 1828 to take a flatboat full of farm produce to New Orleans. With another youth Lincoln left Rockport, Indiana, and floated down the Ohio and the Mississippi trying to avoid snags and sandbars along the 1,200-mile journey. Seven slaves set upon their flatboat as it lay at anchor near a river plantation outside Baton Rouge, where they had stopped to trade part of their produce for sugar, cotton, and tobacco. The youths were barely able to fight off their attackers and pull anchor. When Lincoln reached New Orleans, he gaped at the crowded wharves where over a thousand flatboats were tied up while farmers and slaves unloaded produce which would be reloaded on sailing ships bound for northeastern cities and for Europe. Returning home by steamboat, Lincoln landed in Rockport with twenty-five dollars in his pocket for three months’ labor.

Steamboats also lowered passenger rates for upstream travel, from about one hundred dollars from New Orleans to Pittsburgh to less than half of that. Some farmers saved even this fare by working their way home. The drop in rates made it more profitable for northwestern farmers to raise and sell their produce at New Orleans since now this produce could pay for more eastern manufactures. Farmers had an incentive to expand production for the market; and settlement in the Midwest increased. Before the steamboat, it cost seven to ten dollars per hundred pounds to ship manufactures to Cincinnati or Pittsburgh; the steamboats carried freight for two or three dollars and then as low as one dollar per hundred pounds.

As competition increased in western waters, the Fulton-Livingston monopoly, with no means to enforce it, collapsed by 1817. Their monopoly of New York State waters was also challenged. In 1824, John Marshall’s Supreme Court declared the New York grant an unconstitutional invasion of the right of the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. Steamboats on the Hudson River carried passengers and expensive freight, and after the opening of the Erie Canal, they pulled barges slowly along the canal as rates fell.

As internal commerce expanded, each region of the country specialized—the South in cotton; the Northwest in foodstuffs; the Northeast in manufactures—with a growth of the internal market and diminishing dependence on Europe. Steamboats on western waters solved one bottleneck to the development of the Northwest—lack of markets for western farm products. Southwestern planters specializing in cotton production for national and international markets needed foodstuffs, and an important river trade, stimulated by steamboats, developed between the two regions. The southwestern planter found it more profitable to devote his slave labor to cotton; and the small farmer of the Northwest supplied the planter with the corn and pork he needed to feed his labor force. A host of cities were springing into existence—Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville on the Ohio; Memphis, Vicksburg, Natchez, and New Orleans; St. Louis, Clinton, Dubuque, and St. Paul on the Mississippi.

By the 1820s the newest form of transportation—steamboats on inland, waterways—was coming into competition and combination with one of the oldest forms—canalboats pulled by horses or mules. While steamboats on the Mississippi and other western rivers were binding the South and West together in trade, the Northeast had lain isolated from the Northwest, locked behind the broad Appalachian range. Then, in a daring act of imagination, planning, and execution, some resourceful New Yorkers created a new waterway to the West that would transform the northern transportation system, and alter the whole pattern of American economic and social development.

For years New Yorkers had dreamed of an opening to the West, centered on the Mohawk-Oswego water route running through a fifty-mile break in the Appalachian chain. It took men of vision—dreamers, even—just to conceive of a huge ditch that would run 360 miles from the Hudson to Buffalo, a ditch that would have to be cut through swamps, solid rock, dense forest; that would have to scour out some rivers and bridge others; that would have to climb hills and descend dales; that would need tens of thousands of men to build and thousands to maintain; and that would cost millions of dollars.

Such a visionary was Elkanah Watson. Born in Plymouth, indentured as a servant to the wealthy Brown family in Providence, young Watson had later been entrusted with messages and money from the colonies to Benjamin Franklin in Paris during the Revolution. Fascinated by the Dutch canal system, Watson returned home, settled in New York, and organized the Bank of Albany. After persuading several leading businessmen and landowners to tour central New York with him in 1788, he helped win from the New York legislature a canal law authorizing the surveying of the Mohawk route. Watson was a director of two canal companies that improved that route, but it became evident that private enterprise could not alone build the big canal. Either the state or federal government must handle the job, but Jefferson and Madison were not interested in spending money on a prodigal northern ditch.

A politician picked up the failing standard. De Witt Clinton was a man of parts—a patron of schools, charities, and the arts, a founder of the New-York Historical Society, an amateur scientist and horticulturalist. A commanding figure and orator, dubbed “Magnus Apollo,” he was also a politician who wanted to realize dreams. As mayor of New York City, canal commissioner, and later governor, he drove the canal measure through the legislature and into realization over the opposition of local interests favoring different routes, Tammany parochialism, and assorted naysayers.

Every step of the authorizing, financing, planning, and building of the canal came hard and dearly. New York lacked trained engineers for such a project, so men like James Geddes and Benjamin Wright and unstoried experimenters and tinkerers had to learn on the job. Canal builders lacked excavating machinery, so ditches were dug by crowds of men with shovels and crude derricks. Hundreds of “Irish bogtrotters” and other untrained laborers were kept at work for long hours amid the muck, and at peace among themselves. Yet the engineering and craftsmanship had to be of the first order. Canal walls and bottoms must be sealed against muskrats and boat wash; this was done by using local muck that was found to set “as hard as stone.” Scores of locks, with their long, stone-lined channels and huge wooden gates, must be built in places with water plentiful enough to fill and empty a basin scores of times a day. Bridges and aqueducts had to be erected high over rivers and impossible terrain, and strong enough to support boat, crew, and cargo. Some of the aqueducts were architectural glories.

Finally the job was done—a canal 363 miles long, 4 feet deep, 28 feet wide at the bottom and 40 at the top, with 83 locks lifting boats to a height of almost 600 feet, and costing over $7 million. Such a feat called for celebration, and the New Yorkers did not fail the occasion. On a morning late in October 1825 the canalboat Seneca Chief nosed into the canal at Buffalo carrying two kegs of the “pure water of Lake Erie,” Governor Clinton and other dignitaries, and a giant portrait of Clinton in Roman toga. The Seneca Chief and its escorting canalboats—one of which carried two Indian youths, two bears, two fawns, two birds, etc., and of course was named Noah’s Ark—traveled east, reaching Rochester the following afternoon, Syracuse two days later, Utica the next day (where the passengers stopped for church), Schenectady on Tuesday, and Albany the next day, just a week after departure.

Gun salutes, speeches, parades, and official banquets greeted the little fleet at these stops, but the climax came in New York City. Scores of decorated vessels put on a “Grand Aquatic Display,” followed by the “wedding of the waters” consummated when Governor Clinton poured a keg of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic. A huge parade in Manhattan featured a solid mile and a half of bands, military units, trade guilds, and floats representing butchers, tanners, cordwainers, and even a working press mounted on a high wagon and turning out leaflets with verses:

Tis done, ’tis done! The mighty chain

Which joins bright Erie to the Main

For ages shall perpetuate

The glories of our native State.

Philadelphians had followed the progress of the Erie Canal with feelings of admiration, envy, and commercial competitiveness. If the New Yorkers could overcome hundreds of miles of wilderness and inclines, why could not Pennsylvanians conquer the towering mountains to the west? Merchants, bankers, and promoters persuaded the state legislature in 1826 to authorize a canal between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Living up to the heritage of Franklin and Gallatin, the Pennsylvanians built a railroad from Philadelphia to Columbia on the Susquehanna; then, to cross the 2,291-foot-high Allegheny ridge, they fashioned the remarkable Allegheny Portage Railroad. Canalboats were floated onto cradles, which were then pulled out of the water and up a series of five inclined planes by stationary engines; at the top of each plane horses pulled the cradle onto a level stretch. Once over the top, the cradles were eased down inclined planes on the other side by horses, and deposited into a river and canal system headed west to Pittsburgh.

Brilliantly successful engineering—but faulty economics. Canalboatmen on the Pennsylvania found the route slower and more expensive than the Erie. The former had twice the number of locks as the latter, and a complex system of railroad and canal technology, depots, and agents had to be maintained. Virginia canal builders were unable even to overcome the western heights. Promoters of the Potomac and James routes to the West ran into too many problems of local scrambles for canal routes, lack of capital, and inadequate technology to span the Alleghenies and marry with the Ohio.

Still, the success of the big Erie ditch had touched off a kind of canal mania. By 1840 the states had built a total of over 3,000 miles of canals, at a cost of around $125 million, but the credit systems of three states were almost bankrupted. Canal builders had to be gamblers. When the Indiana “legislature in the mid-1830s authorized construction of more than 1,200 miles of canals, the state bonded itself for $10 million, a debt of twenty dollars for every inhabitant. The construction led to near-disasters. Laborers on the canals were mainly Irish, half from northern Ireland and half from the southern counties. In Indiana’s own “Irish war,” fighting broke out near the present city of Wabash, and the state militia had to be called. Despite floods, cholera, and numerous other difficulties, Indiana’s canal reached the Ohio, but the tolls failed to pay even for its maintenance.

By the 1840s the United States had a canal system—three systems, actually, comprising short tidewater canals along the coast from New England to South Carolina; “trunk line” canals that reached into the mountains and in two cases—the Erie and Pennsylvania—crossed them; and interior canals branching out from the Ohio and from Lakes Michigan and Erie. By the end of the 1830s canal and river boats were the kings of American transportation, but their reign was to be short. Canal transport was slow and cumbersome. At four cents per ton per mile, freight was not cheap. In the North, the waters lay frozen several months a year. Yet the canal system was far more developed in the North than in the South, leading to a regional imbalance. As economic connections developed among the Northeast, the Great Lakes, the Ohio, the Mississippi cities, and New Orleans, the southeastern states were bypassed.

And at its height, the reign of water transport was threatened by a new noisy monster, one that might invade the most sylvan scene—the steam engine on rails. But not for another decade or two would this monster become king.

THE INNOVATING LEADERS

Early in 1808 Joshua Forman, a New York State assemblyman and Erie Canal enthusiast, heard that Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin had just issued a report calling for a national system of roads and canals, including some kind of canal connecting the Hudson and Lake Erie. Gallatin had even proposed three millions of federal dollars for the Erie project. Elated, Forman journeyed to Washington and, through the good offices of a New York congressman, gained an interview with President Jefferson. To his dismay he found the President rather cool, even surprised that Forman would be trying to tap the federal treasury so quickly. And for once Jefferson’s mind was on more parochial matters.

“Why, sir,” Jefferson said to Forman, “here is a canal for a few miles, projected by George Washington, which if completed would render this [Washington] a fine commercial city, which has languished for many years because the small sum of 200,000 dollars necessary to complete it, cannot be obtained from the general government, the state government, or from individuals—and you talk of making a canal 350 miles through the wilderness—it is little short of madness to think of it at this day.”

Madness! But the crazy New Yorkers pushed that canal through the wilderness, and afterwards De Witt Clinton could not resist twitting Jefferson about that conversation with Forman. The old man confirmed the conversation, adding, “Many, I dare say, still think with me that New-York has anticipated, by a full century, the ordinary progress of improvement.” Jefferson mused further:

“This great work suggests a question, both curious and difficult, as to the comparative capability of nations to execute great enterprises.” Did New York, he wondered, have an economic advantage? “This may be;—or is it a moral superiority? a sounder calculating mind, as to the most profitable employment of surplus, by improvement of capital, instead of useless consumption. I should lean to the latter hypothesis, were I disposed to puzzle myself with such investigations; but at the age of 80, it would be an idle labour, which I leave to the generation which is to see and feel its effects.”

Others wondered at the time, and have questioned since, how a small nation with a rudimentary economic system could have embarked on such bold and costly efforts, whether successful as in the case of the Erie, or less so as with the Pennsylvania project, but always difficult, expensive, and risky. The ultimate source of the economic changes lay in material needs for better and cheaper food, clothes, and homes, and in requirements for psychic and material security. But we lack the data to measure those needs in the early nineteenth century, and can only assume that they existed among the Americans of that day as they do among all peoples, in various combinations and degrees. How did such needs become translated into economic change and progress in an isolated, mainly rural nation, lacking capital, organized technical training and expertise, and experience in the management of big enterprises?

Perhaps the most striking aspect of economic change during this period was the extent to which innovating leaders with “sounder calculating minds,” in Jefferson’s phrase, stepped forward to experiment, invent, organize, and manage. The exploits of lone, daring men have come down through history. Certainly the tenacity of a Whitney, the creative daring of a Francis Lowell, the imaginative patronage of a Livingston played a major part in technological change and progress. Certainly, too, the involvement of men of affairs like De Witt Clinton, and of republican aristocrats like Livingston, was crucial in particular moments. But innovating leadership was essentially a collective effort. For one thing, the seemingly solitary innovators were often members of large and influential families, such as the Browns of Providence and the Dwights of Chicopee, that collectively involved themselves in new ventures. Francis Cabot Lowell’s father, John, had married in turn a Higginson, a Cabot, and a Russell, and had sired offspring by all three, so it was not surprising that Francis’ efforts were aided and abetted, and occasionally impeded, by a plethora of in-laws and other members of an extended family that helped form a local and regional community which, in Robert K. Lamb’s words, closely affected “the processes by which certain decision-makers at strategic points in the social structure contribute to economic, political, and social change.”

But even more, innovating leaders emerged from a variety of groups and situations. Many farmers were as much inventors as husbandmen, eternally tinkering, patching up, imitating others, swapping tales of their experiments and experiences. Homely contrivances and techniques were handed down from father to son. Untrained mechanics improved methods of spinning and weaving, of running steam engines and railroad portages and canal locks. In building the Erie Canal the diggers improvised on the spot. European canal experience had left no manuals for dealing with stretches of swamp near Syracuse that, with their snarled and matted roots, were harder to cut through than rock, where at least hand drills and gunpowder could be used. “Sharp plows were devised for cutting the tangled roots,” according to Broadus and Louise Pearson Mitchell. “Horse-drawn scoops were substituted for shovels. A cable, a wheel, and an endless screw permitted a man, aided by the power of one horse, to pull over the largest trees.” Stumps were twisted and torn out of the ground by an ungainly contraption—a cable pulled by a horse and attached to a great wooden wheel, inside of which was fastened a smaller drum wound about by a cable attached to the stump.

These collective acts of innovators were spurred by the most influential leadership collectives in America during the 1820s and after—the state governments. With power to intervene in and regulate economic life left largely to the states under the federal Constitution, legislators and governors became the target of promoters seeking legislation, subsidies, and other kinds of help and sponsorship—and often the promoters were as much inside the government as outside. The granting and withholding of monopolistic rights and other privileges, the subscription to the stock of new corporations, the regulation of enterprises through charters issued by the state, the subsidy of private ventures but again with strings attached, the direct establishment and financing of public enterprise by the state—all these brought the collective action of the states directly into the economic life of Americans. This was especially true of transportation: the states played the main role in initiating, planning, and financing most of the canals and many of the roads and turnpikes.

Innovating leadership thus proceeded from the most variegated sources—from state governments, from European experience and manuals, from the studies and experiments of innovators with wealth and status like Livingston, from fathers and mothers, from the exchanges of ideas in professional societies and local groups, from fellow tinkerers and improvisers on the job, often under the lash of dire necessity. To be sure, much of this innovation was contained within class lines; poor farmers, mill girls in Lowell, and Irish bogtrotters along the canals were victims of existing technology rather than agents for changing it. But among the more educated, mobile, skilled, and affluent classes, innovations in one place soon fertilized developments elsewhere. Elkanah Watson, a gentleman farmer in Albany and member of the New York Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures, modeled his farming practices on Livingston’s. After purchasing 250 acres near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Watson bought a pair of merino sheep from the chancellor and put them on exhibition in the Pittsfield town square. Farmers flocked to the scene. “Even women,” wrote Watson, “were excited by curiosity to attend this first novel, and humble exhibition.” Watson became the first president of the Berkshire County Agriculture Society, which held an annual fair. County fairs became an easy means for farmers to learn about, and display, the latest agricultural practices and to put their prize stock on sale.

The rapid spread of innovations and inventions seemed inexorable in retrospect but most of these changes were charged with conflict. Many Americans had aesthetic and even philosophical objections to the invasion of machines into quiet farmyards and waterways. Many farmers shunned innovation because they liked the old ways of doing things, or simply feared change. The innovators themselves had to overcome obstacles at every turn. The small profits Whitney made from his cotton gin he had to use in fighting infringements on his patent. For years Fulton kept up a running quarrel with rivals who impugned the novelty of his own steamboat innovations.

But the political conflict transcended the personal. The extent to which government—federal, state, or even local—promoted innovation and development was a matter of fierce partisan and regional debate. If Pennsylvanians competed with New Yorkers in digging their way west, cities within the states fought with one another about the location of turnpikes and canals. Furious debates broke out among engineers and laymen as to the relative advantages of turnpikes, riverways, canals, and (later) railroads. The use of taxpayers’ money as against private investors’ was another bone of contention, though it came to be widely recognized that only the federal or state governments could finance vast projects like the Erie Canal.

Conflict over such matters produced a higher consciousness of ways and means, methods and goals. Sometimes conflict aroused direct mobilization of the populace, producing grass-roots leaders who further aroused the people to political consciousness. When Clinton was removed from the New York City mayoralty by pressure from Tammany Hall, and Erie Canal prospects seemed doomed, this energetic New Yorker fought back. Working closely with a few associates, he decided to “go to the people” in a final effort to mobilize support for the canal. First he held a meeting of a hundred prominent men in New York City; then he sent material from this meeting throughout the state; then rallies were held in scores of cities and villages along the proposed route; finally, petitions with over 100,000 signatures were sent to the legislature.

It was a superb political operation, directed squarely at the key economic interests. “Wealthy Federalists—large landholders in the west and great merchants in the cities—as well as western farmers were attracted to Clinton’s banner,” Julius Rubin wrote. “The Irish, whose numbers had recently increased greatly, rallied to Clinton because of past favors and in reaction to Tammany’s nativist policy.…Large merchants and western farmers, aristocratic landholders and poverty-stricken immigrants—all united behind Clinton and his great canal project.” The Erie, like most great projects, was conceived not in benign consensus but aroused consciousness that enabled men to fight—and win—the political battle.

The changes in farming, manufacturing, and transportation accelerated in the 1820s and later produced a quickening of commerce in the cities and along the roads and waterways of America. A territorial division of labor developed among the three great regions of the Union, with the South producing plantation staples for the foreign markets, the East increasingly engaged in making goods and capital and selling both to the South and West, and the West growing grain and livestock that supplied the rising needs of the South and East. The old-time triangular maritime commerce before the Revolution had given way by 1830 to a new triangle, creating an “intersectional indebtedness,” in Louis Schmidt’s words, “the West paying for its manufactures from the East with its sales to the South in somewhat the same manner that New England paid for its manufactures from the mother-country during the Colonial period by the sale of its commodities to the West Indies.” The huge, lopsided commerce, moving south down the Mississippi to New Orleans, eastward and northward along the Gulf and Atlantic seaboards to the northern seaports, and westerly toward the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes area, would help produce a political imbalance as well.

To a large extent these changes in the pattern of economic growth were the product of millions of tiny decisions by farmers, manufacturers, traders, and transporters who had little knowledge about, interest in, or control of the gigantic economic forces that would come to grip the nation before the end of the century. These persons were intent on immediate gain, perhaps even sheer financial survival, from buying and selling goods and services. They were variously the beneficiaries and the victims of “impersonal” forces that dominated the marketplace—of supply and demand, technological change, population growth and change, rises and falls in commodity and retail prices. In such a context even the larger and more aggressive buyers and sellers were essentially barterers and brokers—that is, “transactional leaders”—in an economic environment beyond their power of individual or, for a time at least, collective control.

But at times certain innovating leaders managed to transcend their environment and even transform it. The most conspicuous cases were doubtless men like Slater and Lowell, Livingston and Clinton, and their close associates. But the farmer who experimented with new seeds or crop rotation or tinkered out in the barn, the canal digger who discovered how to clear away trees and stumps, the southern planter who worked out more efficient methods of large-scale farming, the mechanic who tried out a new pulley arrangement on the banks of the Connecticut—all these in their different ways were altering the world in which they and their children would live. Some of these innovating leaders were acting for immediate self-interest, whatever the broader impact of their feats. Others were acting also for a broader purpose, even for a vision. The Erie Canal, the work of hundreds of New York State leaders supported by thousands of aroused followers, was a brilliant act of economic and technical planning—an act designed to achieve vast socioeconomic changes, an act that achieved them. Men like Francis Cabot Lowell and De Witt Clinton demonstrated that daring economic and political plans could be achieved in the 1820s just as they had been by leaders two generations earlier, in the 1780s.

If all this was something less than Jefferson’s “moral superiority,” it was something more than a “sounder calculating mind”—purposeful action aimed at explicit goals in response to human needs, somehow fashioned in the disheveled, conflict-ridden arena of American democracy. This remarkable physical and economic creativity almost matched the boldness of vision, genius of invention, and willingness to experiment of the founding fathers. The “economic miracles” of the 1820s and 1830s had their roots to some degree in the “political miracle” of the 1780s—the creation of a reasonably effective federal government operating in a liberated national economy. But the economic miracle had not been matched by constitutional creativity in the years of Monroe and the second Adams; rather the governmental system seemed static. The Framers had responded to the political and ideological imperatives of their time; the question fifty years later was how the leaders would respond to the imperatives rising out of Whitney’s cotton gin, Clinton’s ditch, Lowell’s textile mills, Fulton’s Clermont, and the innovations of thousands of other experimenters, inventors, and builders.

PART III

Liberty and Equality

CHAPTER 9

The Wind from the West

AMERICANS WERE MOVING west. Restless, hopeful, yearning for another big chance somewhere out in the distant fields and plains where the rich soil ran six feet deep, so it was said, families sold off possessions from the “old place,” loaded up horses and wagons, spoke farewells to a circle of envious, skeptical neighbors, and left to fulfill dreams of independence and abundance. People often moved in short jumps, from state to next-door state; sometimes they meandered up or down a fertile valley; but the great current flowed inexorably along parallel lines toward the nation’s heartland, with the setting sun as its pole star.

Up-country yeomen of the Old South struck out for cheap and good land in Tennessee and Kentucky. Planters, their soil exhausted, moved through the Gulf states looking for new acreage to meet the demand for cotton stimulated by the gin, South Carolinians through the Saluda Gap into eastern Tennessee, Georgians into southern Alabama and Mississippi along two main routes linked at Fort Mitchell. They were helping to found a new cotton kingdom to the west of the Old South. Middle-staters used the Wilderness Road and the Cumberland Gap Road to debouch into the Ohio Valley and the farmlands of Indiana and Illinois. New Englanders spread westward in a steady stream into upper and central New York State, northern Pennsylvania, northeastern Ohio, and beyond into Michigan and even Wisconsin, planting churches and schools along the way.

For years the queen of the roads across the Alleghenies was the Conestoga wagon, with its four to six horses, its broad wheels to cope with muddy roads, and, between a high aft and stern, its ample low bed that kept families and goods from spilling out as the wagon pointed up and down steep hills. Many settlers had to do with less. Journeying along the National Road through Pennsylvania in 1817, Morris Birkbeck noted that with many families a “small waggon (so light that you might almost carry it, yet strong enough to bear a good load of bedding, utensils and provisions, and a swarm of young citizens,—and to sustain marvelous shocks in its passage over these rocky heights), with two small horses, sometimes a cow or two, comprises their all; excepting a little store of hard-earned cash for the land office of the district; where they may obtain a title for as many acres as they possess half-dollars, being one fourth of the purchase money. The waggon has a tilt, or cover, made of a sheet, or perhaps a blanket. The family are seen before, behind, or within the vehicle, according to the road or the weather, or perhaps the spirits of the party.” Birkbeck noted also that some families traveled only with horse and packsaddle, and often “the back of the poor pilgrim bears all his effects, and his wife follows, naked-footed, bending under the hopes of the family.”

In later years some families traveled in far grander style, as transportation improved on the waterways. Certainly the most extraordinary trip west was via the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Nothing really could compare with awakening in one’s own canal barge on top of an Allegheny mountain. “The whole family was comfortably located in the cabin of their boat, which appeared to glide up the heights of the Alleghenies, unconscious of its being a fish out of water, whilst some of the family were preparing the coming meals and others were lying on their downy pillows,” the Hollidaysburg Aurora wrote enthusiastically of the first trip. Next day “our boat and crew left the sunny summit and smoothly glided down her iron way to Johnstown, astonishing the natives.” Another editor compared the mountaintop barge to Noah’s Ark on Ararat. Even without hyperbole the portage railroad, with its huge hoists with stationary engines, carefully inclined planes, and elaborately balanced ascending and descending cars carrying barges, soon became world-famous.

But for most travelers the lasting memory was passage along the Erie Canal: gliding along mile after mile, watching the boy driver ahead manage the horses and keep the towline taut and untangled, talking with lockkeepers and farmers as the great basins were filled and emptied, stopping off in canal shops, showboats, and floating saloons, matching wits with thimblerig experts, gypsy fortune tellers, peddlers of tempting goods,…hearing the double blast of the cow horn as a packet captain signaled that he was “coming through,”…chatting with the tobacco-chewing steersman as he kept his craft off-angle while avoiding rocks and abutments,…and enjoying a good meal prepared by a canalboat chef. And always the slowly passing scenery: the blue smoke in the morning rising from cottages and shanty boats, farmers pulling out stumps or sowing their cleared land with great sweeping movements of their arm, the “gentle slap of water against the boats, the riffle of towropes, the swish of wind in the water grass, the splash and murmur of widening circles when a muskrat slid into the canal, the warning horns of craft coming in from the feeders…the gentle tinkle of cowbells across open fields, the song of fiddle and jew’s-harp, riding the wind, punctuated by the measured plop-plop of oxen hoofs as they plodded westward,” in Madeline Sadler Waggoner’s words. And always the excited talk with other passengers about the adventures and opportunities lying ahead “out west.”

Not all canal passengers traveled elegantly or comfortably. There was a kind of caste system among boats. The grandee of the Erie was the long and lean canal packet, carrying only passengers and hand luggage and offering good meals, “settles” on top of the cabin from which passengers could enjoy the canal scenery, and separate sleeping spaces for men and women. The emigrant’s boat, or line boat, took on families and their furniture and stoves and chickens, and provided sleeping space on the floor at best. Next down in the hierarchy came the freighter, whose owner might live on board with the horses he carried along the canal; the cabin boat, built by the migrants to carry their families west; the shanty boat, a one-room hovel on a flatboat, which housed thousands of canallers along the Erie and moved occasionally by hitching a ride on another craft; and, lowest in caste of all, the timber raft, a collection of piles of logs lashed together and topped by a shanty for the crew.

But sometimes all passengers were tumbled into one existence, when the steersman’s warning of “low bridge ahead,” or bad weather, drove the nabobs out of their “settles” and into the cabin below. Because of the narrow beam of canalboats, the cabin was usually a jumble of clothes, bags, blankets, food, clotheslines, and people. Passengers had to sleep on foot-wide berths that appeared to Charles Dickens to be “hanging bookshelves, designed apparently for volumes of the small octavo size.” Like most natives, the famous English visitor found he could get into his shelf, which was the bottom one, only by lying on the floor and rolling in. Dickens could cope with this, but not with the habits of his fellow passengers. “All night long, and every night, on this canal,” he complained, “there was a perfect storm and tempest of spitting.”

Spitting. This “filthy custom,” as Dickens called it, repelled other visitors from abroad as well. “It was a perfect shower of saliva all the time,” Fanny Kemble noted on her boat. Tobacco-chewing Americans seemed to spit everywhere—in carriages, boardinghouses, law courts, the Capitol, even on carpets in living rooms—but especially in the raw new towns of the West. Americans were slouchers too; they seemed to slouch sitting down. The “bearing and attitudes of the men” at the theater struck Mrs. Frances Trollope as “perfectly indescribable; the heels thrown higher than the head, the entire rear of the person presented to the audience, the whole length supported on the benches, are among the varieties that these exquisite posture-masters exhibit.” Her remarks on slouching became so famous that American theatergoers spotting an egregious sloucher in the pit would set up the cry, “A trollope! a trollope!”

Americans, especially frontier Americans, were vulgar: this was the report brought back from the inscrutable continent to the west by many of the scores of visiting Europeans. Americans were also materialistic, avaricious, selfish, boastful, rude, gluttonous, cruel, violent. Yet other travelers—sometimes the same travelers—returned with different observations about the American character, especially on the frontier: “Jonathan” was friendly, generous, helpful, natural, unspoiled, hospitable, affectionate. Americans, in short, were complicated and contradictory.

Frontier people had a way of destroying generalizations and shibboleths. Not only European observers but also eastern Americans traveling into the West came to conclusions only to have them invalidated. American frontier people were long painted as rugged individualists, but these individualists were also resolute collectivists, or at least cooperators, in joining with their spouses and children in clearing land and building homesteads, with their townspeople in cabin raisings, logrollings, law enforcing, with the authorities in laying roads, fighting Indians, erecting forts, financing schools. Western settlers, supposed to be materialistic, set up schools and churches, libraries and literary societies, almost as fast as they established saloons and stables. Western frontier people were, on the whole, more daring, more restless, more mobile, more “middle-income” (the rich had the money to go West but little motive, the poor had the motive but no money) than the rest of the population. They were also generally outsiders who, it was said, had “sought the West to escape a society in which distinctions of birth and possession had put them at a disadvantage.”

Their hallmark was diversity. They were diverse in their environments, for people were “settling in” behind a constantly moving frontier while hunters and trappers were advancing ahead of it. They were diverse in occupation: speculators, merchants, lawyers, farmers, riverboatmen, blacksmiths, flour millers, road builders, printers, distillers, teachers. They were self-contradictory, now friendly and now suspicious, generous and stingy, religious and blasphemous, nationalistic and parochial, hard-working and self-indulgent, rowdy and respectable. They were ambitious but lacking in lofty ambition, observers concluded. “They talked up liberty but restricted its practice.…They loved change but dreaded revolution.…They were avid readers but preferred newspaper gossip to literature. They were in a constant ‘election fever’ but cold to political principles. They had appetites but no passions.” They knew how to make money but not how to spend it. They were, in short, bundles of complexities, contrarieties, and possibilities.

Out of the frontier rose a man—a migrant, an outsider, a hard worker, but also a man on the make—who embraced its contradictions. Born poor and fatherless in the Carolina uplands, Andrew Jackson rebelled from the start against schools, restrictions, and his mother’s plans for him to become a Presbyterian minister. Foul-mouthed, mean-tempered, and combative even as a child, he grew into a wild youth who led his companions in wrestling, foot-racing, drinking, card playing—and in carting off neighbors’ gates and outhouses. When provoked or thwarted, he choked with rage and could hardly speak. His mother, who had lost her husband four months before Andrew was born, suddenly left her last-born when he was fourteen in order to nurse American prisoners of war in far-off Charleston, and died there. This ultimate desertion left the boy more bellicose, restless, and mischievous than ever.

Yet there was always another side to Andrew Jackson. If he swore, he swore with style. If he bullied, he was the kind of bully who could win followers and even admirers. And if he was cruel and violent, it was the only way he knew how to cope with the wild frontier around him until it too could be mastered. He experienced that environment at a remarkably young age. A guerrilla at thirteen, he fought the British in bitter skirmishes; captured by the enemy, he was slashed across the head when he refused to clean a British officer’s boots and demanded to be treated as a prisoner of war. Thrown into a prisoner-of-war camp, he was robbed of his clothes and, ravaged by smallpox, he was freed in an exchange, only to lose his remaining brother to the pox.

Somehow the youth was steeled by these ordeals rather than broken. At eighteen he read law; a year later he was practicing as a licensed attorney; and a year after that he was the public prosecutor for western North Carolina. Then he moved west, finally settling in Nashville, where he continued to prosper: attorney general for the Moro district at twenty-four, delegate to the Tennessee constitutional convention four years later, elected the first member of Congress from Tennessee at twenty-nine, United States senator at thirty, a judge in the Supreme Court of Tennessee a year later. During this meteoric rise, however, a wild outsider seemed to be struggling with the insider on the make. For years he and his after-work cronies acted the hooligans, stealing outhouses. He courted the vivacious Rachel Robards before she was divorced. He speculated recklessly in land, traded in slaves and cotton, brawled and quarreled incessantly, flirted with the Burr conspiracy, coolly and deliberately killed a man in a duel, fought others with cane, fists, and gun; maintained smoldering hatreds for Indians, Spanish, and Englishmen. He owned about eighty black men and women.

To old Republicans like Jefferson, Jackson was a dangerous man, a demagogue, utterly unfit to be President. Among those close to him, he could be elaborately courteous to men, gentle and courtly to women, and generous to a fault—he was often in debt for signing shaky notes for friends. To plain Americans, Jackson became—after the Indian campaigns and New Orleans—the nation’s hero. If his views were hazy, his image was clear—a lean, ramrod figure topped by a seamed and wrinkled face, a hard-set lantern jaw, piercing eyes, under a corona of bristling white hair.

THE REVOLT OF THE OUTS

The simplest definition of politics is the conflict of outs versus ins. This is also the most simplistic definition, for the battle between those who hold office and those who seek it becomes enmeshed with ideological, policy, ethnic, geographical, religious, and other conflicts that may turn the contest into something more fundamental than a struggle to keep or seize power and pelf; some persons, indeed, reject office out of conviction. If ever a political contest was reduced to the simplest definition of politics, however, it was Jackson’s campaign against John Quincy Adams in 1828, when a coalition of “insiders” united around a few great national issues was assailed by a coalition of outsiders agreed on hardly any issues at all.

Since the election sharpened not merely major policy issues but personal and psychological ones, it turned into the ugliest presidential contest in a generation. However divided, the outsiders were agreed on the man they wanted—Andrew Jackson—and they were united by the conviction that they had been excluded from the citadels of the political and financial system, from the centers of social status and deference. They were Westerners and Southerners incensed against the East; growers and consumers angered by abominable tariffs; mechanics and small businessmen indignant over “monopoly”; farmers hostile to middlemen and speculators.

Listen to young Congressman James K. Polk inveigh against what had come to be known as Adams’ and Clay’s American System: “Since 1815 the action of the Government has been…essentially vicious; I repeat, sir, essentially vicious.” The American tripod was a “stool that stands upon three legs; first, high prices of the public lands…sell your lands high, prevent thereby the inducements to emigration, retain a population of paupers in the East, who may, of necessity, be driven into manufactories, to labor at low wages for their daily bread. The second branch of the system is high duties…first, to protect the manufacturer, by enabling him to sell his wares at higher prices, and next to produce an excess of revenue. The third branch of the system is internal improvements, which is the sponge which is to suck up the excess of revenue.”

All of which sounded like the poor man against the rich, the People against the Elite, the rebels against the Establishment, until one looked at the Jacksonian leaders. They were—most of them—not mechanics or farmers or paupers but capitalists, planters, traders, landowners and speculators, slave owners, lawyers, journalists, and indeed men, like Jackson himself, who had already enjoyed the fruits of office as legislators and administrators. Still, they had acute feelings of political and psychological exclusion. And nothing had aroused both feelings as forcibly as Adams’ and Clay’s “deal” of January 1825—the deal that they were certain had kept Andrew Jackson out of the White House.

The campaign of 1828 began just after the “corrupt bargain” became known, when Jackson, fuming over the Judas of the West, resigned his Senate seat and started home. Neither time nor travel assuaged his feelings. He was weeping for his country’s experiment in liberty, he wrote a friend, when “the rights of the people” could be bartered for promises of office! By the time he reached his Hermitage home he was talking darkly of “usurpation of power” and the “great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people” against it. Soon men in Nashville and Virginia and Washington and New York were laying plans for 1828.

A motley group was gathered behind the Old Hero—its acknowledged leader, Martin Van Buren. Small, amiable, plumpish, cautious, calculating, urbane, the New Yorker seemed almost the antithesis of the Hero, but both had made their way without much education, knew what it was to be on the outs with dominant factions in their states, and shared prejudices about bankers, entrenched federal officials, and Easterners unaware of the need to settle the western lands. Van Buren had shown himself a master political broker and coalition builder, as a leader of the “Albany Regency” and United States senator.

Jackson’s old-time advisers had been mainly Westerners: Major John H. Eaton, a Florida land speculator and Tennessee politico; William B. Lewis, also of Tennessee, who had helped him as political lieutenant and fixer; Judge John Overton, an old confidant and loyalist. The most colorful by far was Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. Expelled from the University of North Carolina for thieving from his roommates, he had moved to Tennessee, gained admission to the bar, won a seat in the state senate, served as Jackson’s aide-de-camp, then moved to Missouri and within five years won election as United States senator. He and Jackson, who earlier had brawled ferociously in Tennessee, were now reconciled. A handsome, solidly built man, of considerable intellectual power, Benton had a vanity so grand and serene that friends came to accept it, like a national monument.

These men and their allies across the nation slowly worked out a simple but formidable double strategy to elect Old Hickory President. They would broaden out Jackson’s personal coalition and entrench it solidly in the democratic and agrarian ranks of the old Republican party. Crucial to the first strategy was winning support from southern leaders disaffected by Adams, and the key man in this region was Vice-President Calhoun, who had broken with the President and plumped for Jackson. Although Calhoun had been elected Vice-President in 1824, he had been disturbed by the flouting of the popular will in Adams’ selection by the House—and even more disturbed that two Adams terms, followed by two terms for the heir apparent, Henry Clay, would close off the presidency for sixteen years. Calhoun was already in his mid-forties. Within two years of Adams’ (and his own) inauguration, having moved solidly into Jackson’s camp, the dour South Carolinian was sending the Hermitage optimistic reports about 1828 prospects.

“Every indication is in our favor, or rather I should say in favor of the country’s cause,” he wrote Jackson in January 1827. “The whole South is safe, with a large majority of the middle states, and even in New England strong symptoms of discontent and division now appear, which must daily increase.” He looked forward to the triumph of “the great principles of popular rights, which have been trampled down by the coalition.” Within another year the general’s lieutenants had extended their counter-coalition throughout the twenty-four states. The heart of this strategy was what Van Buren called an alliance between the “planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North.”

An even more crucial task was to build a firm foundation of popular support beneath the broadening cadre of Jackson’s leaders. Van Buren & Co. decided on the bold strategy of the “substantial reorganization of the Old Republican party”—in plainer words, to build a Jackson party within the disheveled ranks of the cumbrous party of Monroe, Adams, and Clay. The key to this effort was unprecedented political organization. In Nashville, Jackson himself established and supervised a central committee composed of stalwarts like Lewis and Overton. In Washington, an informal caucus of members of Congress safeguarded Jackson’s interests on Capitol Hill. Throughout the states, Hickory Clubs organized parades and barbecues and rallies, printed up handbills, pamphlets, and leaflets, and canvassed the voters in their homes. The Jackson men, ostentatiously taking their case “to the people,” established an extraordinary number of new dailies and weeklies to combat the established newspapers that spoke for Adams and Clay. All this required money, but the Jacksonians seemed to have plenty of it. Edward Pessen estimated that the election of Jackson cost about one million dollars—a formidable sum in 1828.

The contest was largely devoid of issues, and it was meant to be. Jackson did not rally the masses by appeals to ideals of justice and equality; he stayed home and stayed quiet, except for occasional pieties and ambiguities. In vain did Adams supporters try to raise questions like the tariff and internal improvements. “The Hurra Boys” were all for Jackson, one Administration man sneered, but he had to admit that they constituted a “powerful host.” The “National Republicans”—as the anti-Jacksonians came to be called—seemed unable to compete with a Hickory Leaf in every hat and hickory-pole raisings in every town square. Increasingly, the Jacksonians themselves were becoming known as “Democratic-Republicans,” or simply “Democrats.”

Slander and abuse pushed aside issues. Adams was called a monarchist, squanderer of the taxpayers’ dollars on silken fripperies, Sabbath breaker, pimp. Partisans of the President in turn labeled Jackson as blasphemer, bastard, butcher, adulterer. As usual, the invective had a tiny morsel of truth. John Quincy Adams a pimp? Well, it seemed that in St. Petersburg, corrupted as he was by his long service in sinful foreign capitals, he had “prostituted a beautiful American girl to the carnal desires of Czar Alexander I.” A fiction, of course, but a rumor to be handled only by attributing even baser acts to Jackson. The Old Hero an adulterer? Well, Jackson had indeed married Rachel Robards before she was divorced, and he may have done so knowingly, but the Jackson men had to put out sworn statements as to his innocence.

In a contest of invective and personality, no Adams could win out. Jackson beat him in the popular vote, 647,292 to 507,730. The general won the electoral college 178 to 83; Adams carried only New England and parts of the central Atlantic region. Jackson brought off a clean sweep of the rural hinterland west of New Jersey and south of the Potomac. Swept out of office by this gale of southern and “western” ballots, the National Republicans saw the results as presaging ominous changes, as their political fathers had twenty-eight years before. “Well,” said an Adams backer, “a great revolution has taken place…” Another wrote: “It was the howl of raving Democracy.”

It was, at least, the howl of the outsiders. With the approach of Inauguration Day 1829, plain people by the hundreds descended upon Washington, crowding the lodging places and thronging the streets. They massed in front of the Capitol to hear their hero pledge reform to all and the ending of the national debt. Then they followed the new President down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House, pushed into the mansion, and fought their way toward the punch and the ice cream. As the visitors trampled on the chairs and carpets of the house just vacated by an Adams of Boston, as they smashed china and glasses, it seemed as though a new day had dawned in Washington. Truly the outsiders were now inside the citadel of power.

A political tempest had blown in from the west. Now the nation awaited Jackson with anticipation and apprehension. Nobody knew what he would do when he arrived in Washington, Webster wrote to friends in Boston. “My opinion is, that when he comes he will bring a breeze with him. Which way it will blow, I cannot tell.…My fear is stronger than my hope. ” Old John Randolph of Roanoke, as passionate and apocalyptic as ever, cried that the country was ruined past redemption. “Where now could we find leaders of a revolution?”

Thousands of job seekers throughout the country had their idea of a good revolution: rotate the ins out of federal office, and rotate the outs in. Some stayed home in hopes of taking over as postmasters or customs collectors, but hundreds flocked to Washington, settled down in hotels and boardinghouses, and haunted the White House and the departments. “Spoilsmen” put heavy political pressure on the Administration. “I take it for granted that all who do not support the present administration you will not consider your friends, and of course will lose your confidence,” a New York politico wrote to Van Buren. “The old maxim of ‘those not for us are against us,’ you have so often recognized that its authority cannot be denied.” Arriving late in Washington to join the Administration, Van Buren was besieged by applicants who followed behind him into his room. Reclining ill on a sofa, he patiently heard them out.

A wave of fear passed through Washington officialdom. “The great body of officials,” James Parton wrote, “awaited their fate in silent horror, glad when the office hours expired at having escaped another day.…No man deemed it safe and prudent to trust his neighbor, and the interior of the department presented a fearful scene of guarded silence, secret intrigue, espionage, and tale-bearing.” From Braintree, Adams heard that a clerk in the War Office had “cut his throat from ear to ear, from the mere terror of being dismissed,” and that another clerk had “gone raving distracted.”

Two Kentucky job seekers ran into each other in Washington. “I am ashamed of myself,” one said, “for I feel as if every man I meet knew what I came for.” The other replied: “Don’t distress yourself, for every man you meet is on the same business.” Despite the furor, the number of actual removals was not large—less than 10 percent after the first eighteen months of the new administration. Probably a somewhat larger number of non-college men of lower socioeconomic station got hired. Some of the clerks and agents had been Jackson men; others had been neutral. Many other changes resulted simply from death or retirement. But a few removals were enough to put Washington in shock.

Jackson defended the removals on the ground of principle, not party. Men long in office, he said, were apt to become indifferent to the public interest: “Office is considered as a species of property, and government rather as a means of promoting individual interests than as an instrument created solely for the service of the people.…The duties of all public officers are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.…In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another.” Pitching his case on the level of good republicanism did not endear the President to Washington bureaucrats—or win support from old Jeffersonians like Madison, who privately criticized rotation.

The new President’s inaugural address had given little concrete idea of his plans, aside from revamping of the civil service. He had straddled the issues of internal improvements, the tariff, the currency, all in a voice so low that it reminded veteran Washingtonians of Jefferson’s inaudible remarks twenty-eight years before. Jackson did promise a proper regard for states’ rights, economy in government, and a “just and liberal” policy toward Indians, but this was standard politicians’ fare. Nor did his cabinet-building offer many clues. The two principal appointees, Van Buren as Secretary of State and Samuel D. Ingham at Treasury, came from the swing states of New York and Pennsylvania. John Eaton, Jackson’s old Tennessee friend, was the new Secretary of War; other appointees came from North Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky. Pro-South in substance, anti-Clay in sentiment, the Cabinet hardly looked like an instrument for governing. It met infrequently, usually on major occasions, but less to deliberate than to hear Jacksonian pronouncements worked up in the inner circle. Administrative policy questions were usually settled by the President and department heads in private conferences. The Cabinet rarely discussed major policy issues in the manner of a council of state.

It was the “kitchen cabinet” that both expressed and shaped the President’s program. This was not a cabinet, nor of course did it meet in the kitchen; it was, rather, a shifting group of advisers on whom Jackson called as he needed them. The most influential was Amos Kendall. Born on a poor Massachusetts farm in 1789, Kendall had attended Dartmouth, taught at Groton, and studied law; unrequited by both the girl and the profession he loved, at the age of twenty-five he moved to Kentucky, where he was befriended by Mrs. Henry Clay and made tutor to the Clays’ children. Later he turned to newspaper work and soon became editor of the Argus of Western America in Frankfort. For years a supporter of Clay and Adams, Kendall finally was caught between the Clay and Jackson factions. For reasons of both opportunism and principle he broke with Clay, moved to Washington, and was taken on as fourth auditor of the Treasury.

Another key adviser—and another former Kentuckian—was Francis Preston Blair. He looked like Kendall’s political clone, having broken with Clay, embraced Jacksonian oppositionism, and succeeded Kendall as editor of the Argus. He was brought to Washington to edit the new Democratic paper, the Washington Globe, whose columns he filled with “demonstrations of public opinion” drawn from remote country newspapers that allegedly he penned himself. Less close to Jackson was Isaac Hill, born of an impoverished New Hampshire family, a scourge of the New Hampshire squirearchy as editor of a small Concord weekly, until he moved to Washington.

It was an unlikely-looking lot: Kendall, nearsighted, asthmatic, prematurely white-haired, bundled up in a white greatcoat even on a blazing hot day; Hill, short, cadaverous, and lame; Blair, with an elfin body of hardly a hundred pounds. They had been outsiders to a society that prized good appearance in face, form, manners, and speech. But they were the perfect instruments to a President who needed men both committed and skeptical, both articulate and polemical, to help him with his speeches and papers, and often with his decisions. Many a morning the President would lie in bed, under a portrait of his lost Rachel, blurting out his ideas, chewing and spitting or puffing out great clouds of acrid smoke from his long pipe, while Kendall or others would take down the words, smooth them out, read them back over and over until their chief was satisfied. Several other aides helped too—Lewis and others from the old Tennessee days carried on for a time—and Van Buren had a most powerful triple role as the leading cabinet member, head of the foreign-policy-making establishment, and member of the inner group.

Personal and social squabbles in Jackson’s first year were harbingers of the storm to come. A few weeks before the Inaugural, Secretary of War John Eaton had married Margaret (Peggy) O’Neale Timberlake, the vivacious daughter of a Washington tavernkeeper and the widow of a navy purser who had recently committed suicide. Rumors were put out—by Jackson’s political enemies, it was said—that Timberlake had cut his throat on discovering Peggy’s involvement with the wealthy young Eaton. Jackson had approved the marriage as a way of stilling the rumors, but the enamored pair waited only four months after the purser’s death. Tongues waggled faster than ever as Washington watched to see if the wife of John Eaton would be received in society. Floride Calhoun, consort of the Vice-President, proceeded to shun Peggy Eaton, and the cabinet wives followed suit. It was the kind of situation—as Jackson’s enemies should have known—guaranteed to tap his unbounded concern for young women treated cavalierly, as he believed his wife Rachel had been. For Jackson’s adored—and in his view maligned—wife had died only a few weeks before he was inaugurated.

“I did not come here,” he asserted, “to make a Cabinet for the Ladies of this place, but for the Nation.” Van Buren, himself a widower, moved into the breach by acting the gallant toward Peggy, while the President blamed first Clay, and then Calhoun, for the embarrassment.

The great battles of Jackson’s presidency began with the congressional session that got under way in December 829. From then on, the President took on the barons of the Senate—Clay, Hayne, and the others—his own Vice-President, his own Cabinet, the opposition party, the banking elite, the Supreme Court, secessionists. At the end, Clay himself would cry out that Jackson had “swept over the Government, during the last eight years, like a tropical tornado.” But if Jackson’s presidency was filled with conflict, it was in large part because he embodied it, and so did the men he confronted. It was a blast out of the west that precipitated the sectional storm that would dominate the rest of Jackson’s first term.

THE DANCE OF THE FACTIONS

The chamber of the United States Senate, noon, Tuesday, January 26, 1830. An air of high expectancy hangs over the packed hall, as Washington personages push their way in from the blustery cold outside and crowd into the aisles and vestibules. A score or more fashionably dressed women, their round bonnets trimmed with drooping plumes, look down from the front row of the balcony. They are watching Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a full, almost portly figure in his old-fashioned long-tailed coat with bright gilt buttons, buff waistcoat, and large white cravat. Webster is looking toward the Vice-President of the United States, John Calhoun, in the presiding chair, erect and stern. All the Washington notables seem to be here, except for the distant man in the White House—famous senators like Hayne of South Carolina, Benton of Missouri, Woodbury of New Hampshire, celebrities of the past like John Quincy Adams and Harrison Gray Otis still haunting Washington, and so many visitors from the House that little business can be done there.

The occasion is Webster’s reply to Hayne of South Carolina. A week earlier, Webster had dropped into the Senate, after finishing his legal business in the Supreme Court just a few steps away, in time to hear the South Carolina senator call for an alliance of the West and the South against the “selfish and unprincipled” East. Over the next few days, while Benton, Hayne, Webster, and other senators argued over the usual questions of national politics—public lands, internal improvements, the tariff—Webster became aware that a far more ominous set of issues was dominating the debate: those of nullification, secession, the very nature of the American Constitution. Even so, the famous orator, affluent and successful, recently remarried after the death of his first wife, might have shunned the battle except that Hayne, unusually impassioned, sarcastic, and aggressive for a young man ordinarily so moderate and courteous, had dealt him some punishing blows.

Now Webster would answer Hayne’s climactic speech. Hayne’s supporters were so elated by their champion’s performance that Webster’s own backers became apprehensive. But not Webster. When his friend Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story called on him to offer help, he replied, “Give yourself no uneasiness, Judge Story! I will grind him as fine as a pinch of snuff.” And the next morning, asked on entering the Senate whether he was “well charged”—a reference to the four fingers of powder needed to charge a muzzle-loading gun—the orator replied jauntily, “Seven fingers!”

The long-gathering conflict now culminating in this debate was explosive enough. It had its main source in dramatic social and economic changes in the South—especially in South Carolina—which had set that section in a radically different direction from the North. A decade or two before, South Carolinians had exhibited much the same constellation of interests and attitudes as most other states in the Union. Highly nationalistic, they gloried in the fame and achievements of John Calhoun and the other southern war hawks of 1812. As consumers of products from abroad, they hated tariffs, but many South Carolinians grew or made their own products that needed protection, and they also accepted tariffs as strengthening American manufactories in the event of war.

As for slavery, most members of the South Carolinian delegation in Congress favored the compromise of 1820. To be sure, old Charles Pinckney—the same Charles Pinckney who had brought his young bride to Philadelphia in 1787 and helped write the Constitution there—warned that if Congress was ever accorded the right even to consider the subject of slavery, “there is no knowing to what length it may be carried,” but most of the state’s political leaders shared the moderate attitudes of nationalists like Calhoun and William Lowndes.

Then—almost overnight, it seemed later—the mood of South Carolina had altered sharply. For rice and cotton growers, the 1820s were a time of rapid economic change, price and demand instability, credit squeezes, and depression, all tending toward a rising sense of social and economic insecurity, which in turn fostered a powerful parochialism and sectionalism. The Tariff of 1828 excited the worst southern fears; it was to them literally a tariff of abominations, to be despised and shunned. In a decade of peace they could no longer accept the tariff as a defense measure. Federal policy on internal improvements and other questions also continued to antagonize South Carolinians. But behind all the old issues always loomed the specter of northern interference with slavery. An alleged slave conspiracy, led by Denmark Vesey of Charleston, along with rumors of other planned slave revolts, aroused dread over threats from inside; the stepped-up efforts of the American Colonization Society in the North aroused fears over threats from outside.

By the late 1820s the balance of South Carolina politics had changed. If the cleaving issue in the state, and in much of the South, had been nationalism versus sectionalism, that issue now was: what kind of sectionalism? to be carried how far? and how accomplished? Steadily shifting away from his old nationalism, Calhoun still had to deal more with fire eaters who wanted secession than with moderates who wished to attain South Carolina’s aims within the Union. News of the abominable tariff catalyzed powerful forces already building. Calhoun wrote a brilliant tract—the South Carolina Exposition—in which he flayed national tariff policy as unconstitutional and oppressive, “calculated to corrupt the public virtue and destroy the liberty of the country”; contended that no government based on the “naked principle” of majority rule could “preserve its liberty even for a single generation”; and claimed the right of “interposition” by state governments—that is, to declare null and void “unconstitutional” acts of the national government. If the federal government did not recognize the constitutional powers of the states, South Carolina would claim the right of nullification. South Carolinians had waited through Jackson’s first year, hopeful that he—a slave owner himself, after all—would redress their grievances, but in vain. Hayne’s hard line in the Senate, reflecting Calhoun’s arguments, showed that southern patience was running out.

So now, Webster waited to take the floor. The chamber hushed as the Vice-President recognized him. Standing majestically as he faced the chair, resting his left hand on his desk while swinging his right hand up and down, he spoke in a low but compelling tone. The orator held the floor for three hours, pausing only once or twice to consult some notes. He ridiculed Hayne’s fear of federal tyranny. “Consolidation!—that perpetual cry, both of terror and delusion—consolidation!” The federal government, he declared, was the instrument not of the will of the states but of “We the People”; the national interest was the controlling one; the effort of a state to nullify a law of Congress was a revolutionary and illegal act. As Webster warmed to the attack, his granite face seemed to come alive; his eyes burned with fervor; his “mastiff-mouth” bit off his sentences with the finality of a spring trap. A connoisseur of all the arts of oratory, he moved from exposition to argumentation to irony to banter to scorn to eloquence to pathos. When he said, “I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusetts; she needs none,” but proceeded to do so, Bay State men clustered in the gallery were said to “shed tears like girls.” Webster had never felt an audience respond more eagerly and sympathetically. His peroration would soon be on New England schoolboys’ lips:

“When my eyes shall be turned to behold, for the last time, the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance, rather, behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, not a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as, What is all this worth? Nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first and Union afterwards; but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”

A few weeks later, Calhoun & Co. received another oratorical setback. The Webster-Hayne debate had been an interparty encounter, and politically the Massachusetts senator could be dismissed as a New Englander and an old Federalist. But what was the attitude of Andrew Jackson, a Southwesterner and a Democrat? Rather rashly, states’ rights Democrats organized a celebration of Jefferson’s birthday for April 13, 1830, in Washington to glorify their cause and symbolize the Democratic party alliance between East and West. Jackson and Van Buren attended, along with an array of other party leaders. The banquet in Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel was hardly over and chairs pulled back from the board when the Southerners launched into speeches and toasts that evoked the Jefferson of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Defying Jackson to his face, George Troup, a Georgia planter-politician and states’ rights extremist, toasted the government of the United States as more absolute than the rule of Tiberius, but as less wise than that of Augustus, and less just than that of Trajan.

All eyes turned to Jackson. Scowling at Calhoun as he signaled the crowd to rise, the old general toasted, “Our Federal Union—it must be preserved. ” Van Buren, who had climbed up on a chair to witness the scene, saw the noisy company turn utterly silent, dumbfounded. Calhoun’s hand shook, spilling a little wine down the side of his glass. But he was ready with his answering toast: “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear.…”

A great Virginia reel of politics was under way, as politicians chose partners and changed them, in a dance of sections and interests, issues and ideologies. Not for half a century had the nation possessed such compelling sectional leaders—the spare, consecrated Calhoun, champion of the South; the droll, sparkling, restless Clay, still “Harry of the West”; New England’s hero, the imposing, magnetic Webster, “the great cannon loaded to the lips,” as Emerson pictured him; the consummate politician Van Buren, keen, dexterous, opportunistic, the supple representative of New York and the other swing states. But these men were more than leaders of sections. They were statesmen with a vision of the national purpose, and they were politicians who hungered for the presidency. Hence they had to protect their standing in their state and section, while gaining national recognition and building national coalitions. They were trapped in the rising sectional feeling of Americans. And they had to deal with the unpredictable, prickly, opinionated man in the White House.

The speeches of Webster and Hayne in the Senate, the toasts of Calhoun and Jackson at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, were the opening salvos of the 1832 presidential election campaign. Van Buren had attached his fortunes firmly to the President’s, and the political foxiness of the “Little Magician,” combined with the leonine presence and power of the President, made an invincible combination. Jackson struck first at Clay, his old western rival. The issue was the venerable one of internal improvements. In his December 1829 message to Congress, Jackson had questioned the constitutionality and the desirability of federal aid to roads and other projects. When Congress passed a bill authorizing government subscription of stock in a turnpike connecting Maysville and Lexington and lying wholly within Kentucky, the President vetoed it. Clay was outraged. Not only was he the author of the “American System” but only the year before he and his family had spent four days negotiating the steep curves and bottomless mud of the existing Maysville road. Still, the deliberate slap administered by Jackson helped confirm Clay as the National Republican candidate for President. Webster backed him too.

“On the whole, My Dear Sir,” Webster wrote Clay two days after the veto, “I think a crisis is arriving, or rather has arrived. I think you cannot be kept back from the contest. The people will bring you out, nolens volens. Let them do it.…”

Jackson’s most dangerous enemy was still Calhoun. Each man thought the other was plotting against him. If there was a “plotter,” it was Van Buren, who had every reason to widen the break between the President and Vice-President. In fact, political issues, temperaments, and ambitions were the main dividers, but the Secretary of State was quick to take advantage of them. The Peggy Eaton business sputtered along for some time, as she was ostracized not only by Floride Calhoun and cabinet wives but even by Emily Donelson, the wife of Jackson’s nephew, who served as White House hostess for the President. Van Buren went out of his way to accept the Eatons. He coyly made his chief privy to the proceedings. “Tell Mrs. Eaton,” he wrote Jackson, “if she does not write me I will give her up as a bad girl.”

Even more divisive was the resurrection of decade-old charges that Calhoun as Secretary of War had wanted General Jackson to be censured for improper conduct in pursuing Seminole Indians during the invasion of Florida. The President now asked Calhoun for an explanation. Incensed that this old issue would be revived by his enemies, Calhoun properly challenged the right to question his conduct as Secretary of War; but he wrote fifty more pages trying to defend his action. Having prejudged the affair, Jackson coldly ended any further discussion of it. If Calhoun seemed paranoid about attempts to isolate him, he really did have enemies. Blair was chosen to set up the Washington Globe as a Jackson organ, to counter the United States Telegraph, edited by Duff Green, a Calhounite. Federal officials were told to take the Globe or lose their jobs. They took the Globe.

With the Jackson-Calhoun feud heating up, and with the Peggy Eaton wounds still throbbing, Van Buren made an adroit move, offering to resign from the Cabinet so the President could refashion it. Realizing that he could thus eliminate the Calhoun influence in his inner circle, Jackson agreed, on condition that Van Buren become Minister to Great Britain so that the Calhounites would gain no satisfaction. The plan worked. Jackson was now able to create a Cabinet of past and future notables: Edward Livingston as Secretary of State; Louis McLane, Treasury; Lewis Cass,War; Levi Woodbury, Navy; Roger B. Taney, Attorney General. Calhoun got a brief revenge when Van Buren’s nomination as minister came before the Senate; as presiding officer, he cast the deciding vote against the New Yorker.”

“It will kill him, sir, kill him dead. He will never kick sir, never kick,” Calhoun said to a friend. But he was quite wrong. On hearing of the rejection, Jackson erupted into a stream of denunciations of the South Carolinian. And he planned his own revenge: the substitution of Van Buren for Calhoun as Vice-President.

Calhoun had a more portentous situation to deal with in his home state. Anti-tariff and anti-abolitionist feeling had steadily been rising in South Carolina; polarization between unionists and nullifiers had sharpened to the point that the two factions called each other “submissionists” and “secessionists” and even held separate Fourth of July celebrations. No longer could the Vice-President bridge the gap. He was a leader; he must go with his state, or his followers would abandon him. Under intense pressure from the nullifiers, he wrote his “Fort Hill Letter”—an announcement to the nation that he was taking his stand for nullification. For Calhoun, in William Freehling’s words, “the collapse of presidential prospects was a shattering experience. The bright young man who had always enjoyed success at last endured the agony of overwhelming setback. The signs of his despair were visible everywhere: in the slouch of his shoulders as he paced the Senate corridors; in his increasing tendency to make conversations into soliloquies, in his long dirges on the decline of the Republic.” Still, he would be the southern candidate for President, if only to strengthen the hand of the nullifiers.

Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams’ successor as head of the National Republican party, proposed to be the national candidate for President. On the eve of 1832 his party met in convention in the saloon of the Atheneum in Baltimore, with 155 delegates present from virtually all the states outside the Deep South. Former Democrat Peter Livingston of New York placed Clay’s name in nomination in what was probably the first nominating speech in convention history. Clay was unanimously chosen. At another convention in Washington several months later, Clay accepted the nomination, in a speech warning that “the fate of liberty, throughout the world, mainly depends upon the maintenance of American liberty.” Proudly the National Republicans presented their credo: against the spoils system, executive tyranny, and Jackson’s treatment of the Indians; in favor of American capitalism in general, and in particular, of a protective tariff to foster American industry—which they defended as protecting workers as well as owners—internal improvements at federal expense, the use of public land revenues for such improvements, the maintenance of the national banking system and a stable and uniform currency.

The Democrats also met in convention in Baltimore, but the large number of delegates—334, from every state save Missouri—compelled a move to a Universalist church. The convention, did not nominate Jackson; it simply “concurred,” amid much enthusiasm, in a nomination already made in many states. The delegates adopted a two-thirds rule for the nomination of a Vice-President—the only real issue before the convention—and a unit rule, authorizing the majority of each delegation to cast the entire vote of the state. Van Buren easily scored far more than two-thirds of the votes on the first ballot. They did not need a positive platform; Jackson and Van Buren would run against the bank and the “aristocratic influences” favored by the National Republicans.

So the two parties confronted each other, but each was beset by factional problems. Calhoun threatened to draw votes from Jackson; and the leaders of the Webster faction, while publicly supporting Clay, were privately pessimistic about his chances and looking forward to a Webster candidacy in 1836, if not somehow in 1832. But the greatest threat to Clay lay in the strangest faction of all, a movement that called itself the Anti-Masons. For years Americans had been suspicious of secret societies, including the Masons, even though Washington and other heroes had been members. In the fall of 1826, an upstate New Yorker named William Morgan, an apostate Mason who had threatened to “expose” the secrets of Masonry, had been spirited away in a yellow carriage, driven to the Niagara frontier, and so disposed of that no trace of him was ever found.

The resulting uproar precipitated an explosive movement of moral protest, centered in New York but radiating powerfully throughout the Northeast. The movement received much of its force from antislavery and temperance New Englanders and New Yorkers, and much of its direction from a remarkable array of leaders including William H. Seward, Thurlow Weed, and Thaddeus Stevens. Even before the National Republicans and the Democrats had convened in Baltimore, the Anti-Masons had met there, in the first presidential nominating convention in history, and chosen as their candidate William Wirt, a dignified sixty-year-old Virginia Republican of the old school. Wirt had been on his way to the National Republican convention, ready to vote for Clay; he claimed to be shocked at his nomination by the Anti-Masons, but nonetheless accepted the honor.

Which of the presidential candidates could pull enough factions and sub-factions together to win a majority in the electoral college? As the campaign heated up during 1832, it became apparent that Jackson was in control. For one thing, the Democrats in the states seemed far more enthusiastic and organized than the followers of Calhoun, Clay, or Wirt. For another, the President proved himself a master in taking a moderate but clear-cut position on the issues that left other candidates appearing to be extremists. As the election campaign neared, the Administration took a more benevolent view toward reducing the tariff, lowering the cost of public lands, and even toward internal improvement.

Jackson even seemed conciliatory toward nullification, as a curious episode suggested. For years land-hungry Georgia settlers had been encroaching on Indian lands, and for years the Cherokees in particular had been resisting the tide, even to the point of setting up a kind of independent state under treaties with the federal government. Georgia refused to recognize Cherokee autonomy. Two New England missionaries were convicted and sentenced to four years at hard labor when they defied a Georgia law that compelled white residents in the Cherokee country to obtain a license and to take an oath of allegiance to the state. On the condemned men’s appeal to the Supreme Court, old John Marshall, speaking for the majority, held that the national government had exclusive jurisdiction and that the Georgia law was unconstitutional. The prisoners were ordered released. When Georgia defied the decision; Jackson aided and abetted the nullifiers. “John Marshall has made his decision,” he was reported to have said, “now let him enforce it. ”

Still, mollifying nullifiers and other factions was not much of a campaign strategy. What Jackson needed was a single, compelling issue that would transcend the ordinary play of interests and sections—an issue that would mobilize an electoral majority behind his cause. And he found it, by conviction and by contingency, in Nicholas Biddle’s Second National Bank of the United States.

The first and second banks had always been a staple of Republican party controversy, and few were surprised when Jackson, determined as he said to “prevent our liberties” from being “crushed by the Bank,” challenged the bank’s constitutionality in his first message to Congress in 1829. With the bank’s charter not due to expire until 1836, the President was content to ask Congress to curb the power of the bank and thus to delay a showdown with it until the second term. He knew that Biddle was a power in the politics of Pennsylvania and other key states. Webster and Clay knew this too, and for that reason they advised Biddle to call Jackson’s hand before the 1832 election by forcing him either to support the bill for recharter or to face the power of the bank at the polls. The bank chief initiated hostilities by having a recharter bill introduced in Congress, which passed it by strong majorities after a long and angry debate.

Visiting Jackson in the White House, Van Buren found the old general lying on a couch looking pale and exhausted. “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me,” he said, “but I will kill it. ”

Kill it he did, with a veto and a bristling message that attacked monopoly and special privilege and boldly accepted the challenge of the “rich and powerful” to make the bank the central issue of the campaign. His own appeal would be to the “humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers—who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors for themselves.” Thus the people would decide. This was the first time, according to Robert Remini, that a President “had taken a strong stand on an important issue, challenging the electorate to do something about it if they did not approve his position.” Even Jackson was surprised by the popularity of his stand on the bank. “The veto works well,” he said, “instead of crushing me as was expected and intended, it will crush the Bank.” Calhoun and his fellow nullifiers handed Jackson the other great national issue of the campaign. As feeling about the tariff and slavery issues boiled over in South Carolina during 1832, the nullifiers won a legislative majority in favor of a state convention that would adopt an ordinance canceling national tariff legislation. Hayne prepared to resign as United States senator, to be elected governor; Calhoun would resign as Vice-President, to succeed Hayne in the Senate. Jackson, after taking military precautions in South Carolina, prepared a “Proclamation to the People of South Carolina” that termed nullification an “impracticable absurdity” and ended flatly, “Disunion by armed forces is treason. ”

The Jacksonians versus Philadelphia bankers and southern nullifiers—how could the Democrats lose? The response of the voters was decisive. Sweeping the electoral college over Clay, 219 to 49, Jackson won the electoral votes of sixteen of the twenty-four states and ran well ahead of Clay in the popular vote, 687,000 to 530,000. Jackson polled strongly in the South (except in South Carolina), well in the West, fairly well in the middle Atlantic states, and decisively in the swing states of Pennsylvania and New York. Aside from his own Kentucky, Clay’s main strength lay in southern New England. Still, considering Jackson’s position as national hero, and his brilliant positioning of his administration on the issues of the day, as well as the siphoning off of National Republican votes by the Anti-Masons, Clay had done well in the popular vote—a harbinger of the day when a revitalized Whig party would rise out of the ashes of the National Republicans.

Armed with his election mandate, Jackson now moved against nullification. The reaction of Carolina hotheads against his proclamation—the “mad ravings of a drivelling dotard,” Congressman George McDuffie called it—only hardened his will. Although the nullifiers put up a show of resistance, enlisting 25,000 volunteers and even setting up a cannonball factory, it was clear that they were not eager for a military confrontation, especially after learning that the rest of the South opposed drastic action. In mid-January 1833 the President asked the Congress for a “Force” bill that would allow him to enforce the revenue laws by military action if necessary, but the bill actually tried to avert the use of force by working out procedures, including “floating customs houses” off Charleston, to avert encounters in the city.

The Force bill produced in the Senate another brilliant debate, rivaling the Hayne-Webster forensics. This time Webster took on Calhoun, who had been liberated from the silence of the presiding chair, and the remorseless logic-chopping of the new senator from South Carolina was judged to have bested the fulsome rhetoric of the New Englander. John Randolph, sitting in the gallery, found his view obscured by a lady’s bonnet. “Take away that hat,” he bleated, “I want to see Webster die, muscle by muscle.”

A combination of forces was working now against an explosion. Calhoun was pulling back from his earlier extremism, Van Buren was restraining Jackson from exercising his dearest wish of trying and hanging the secessionist leaders, and—most important of all—Henry Clay, the old compromiser himself, was coming in with a tariff bill designed to conciliate the Carolinians. The President signed both the Force bill and the compromise tariff bill on March 2, 1833, two days before he took the oath of office for a second term. Once again he had shown a masterly ability both to manipulate factions and to rise above them, to take a national and presidential posture, and to know when to stand firm and when to compromise.

But Andrew Jackson of Nashville was in no mood to compromise on the other great national issue. Nor was Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia.

Only a historical novel, not history itself, could have plausibly pitted Jackson against so contrasting an antagonist. Born into an affluent old Quaker family of Philadelphia in 1786, Biddle entered the University of Pennsylvania at the age of ten; denied a degree three years later because of his youth, he gained admission to Princeton and won his degree there at fifteen. Successively a traveler in Europe, secretary to Minister James Monroe in London, and a Philadelphia lawyer, politician, and litterateur, he had married an heiress and moved into and upward through Philadelphia banking circles. He was everything Jackson was not: wellborn, superbly educated, urbane, genteel, and young. But both men were leaders, one in the world of politics, the other in that of economics.

Before confronting Biddle, the President decided on a trip north into the old Federalist hinterland. Like presidential heroes before him, he received the cheers of Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, but this presidential party traveled by steamboat, canal barge, and train—Jackson’s first train ride. The party even invaded Boston, where they expected the coolest of receptions. Greeted at the Massachusetts border by young Josiah Quincy, who had reluctantly accepted the duty of escorting the dragon, Old Hickory so charmed Josiah and other Bostonians that the young man’s father, President Quincy of Harvard College, called his overseers together and voted Jackson a degree of Doctor of Laws. Overseer John Quincy Adams boycotted the ceremony in Harvard Yard. He would not be present to watch Harvard’s disgrace, he said, in conferring “her highest literary honors upon a barbarian who could not write a sentence of grammar and hardly could spell his own name.” Despite serious hemorrhaging of the lungs, Jackson moved on up the North Shore to Lynn and Salem and finally Concord, New Hampshire, where he collapsed and had to be borne back to Washington by steamer.

He was not too sick, however, to resume the project he had got under way soon after his inauguration: removing the government deposits from Biddle’s bank. Why did Jackson pursue the bank further, after his “veto victory” of ’32? In part because he feared that Biddle might use the three years remaining before charter expiration to manipulate money and politicians to gain recharter, or even to precipitate a financial panic just before the 1836 election and thus help pro-bank candidates. Withdrawing the sizable government deposits in the bank would be a body blow to Biddle’s “monster” financially—and a symbol around which Jackson men could rally.

But the President’s decision had a deeper, more personal source. He was immovably, fanatically, emotionally committed to breaking Biddle’s bank. Delegations of businessmen and bankers who came to ask him for relief could hardly get their first sentence out of their mouths before he would break in with his harangue. “Relief, sir!” he would burst out. “Come not to me, sir! Go to the monster.…You would have us, like the people of Ireland, paying tribute to London.…” Would to God all the “stockjobbers, brokers, and gamblers [were] swept from the land!” He always came back to the monster. “I’ve got my foot upon it and I’ll crush it.” Over and over again he declaimed that he would never—never—never give in. Jackson’s fanaticism, Michael Rogin has theorized, issued from a ferocious inner struggle that had its sources in childhood deprivation and adult trauma and conflict.

And he was officially almost alone. Treasury Secretary McLane had made clear from the start that he was against removal, so he was smoothly shifted to Secretary of State in the spring. Vice-President Van Buren, facing every day the full panoply of Democratic party factions arrayed in front of his Senate rostrum, dragged his heels, concerned as he was with the implications of the new struggle for party harmony and his own presidential ambitions. Jackson chose William J. Duane, a Philadelphia lawyer, to carry on the fight for repeal, only to discover that his new Treasury Secretary had no stomach to take on his fellow Philadelphian. The President sacked him, and substituted Attorney General Taney, who, along with Kendall and other members of the “kitchen cabinet,” had been a close adviser on the program. Late in September, Taney instructed federal tax collectors in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston to stop using the bank as a depository within five days. That was the kind of action Jackson liked.

Somberly Nicholas Biddle watched these proceedings from deep within the bowels of his marble, Corinthian-columned temple on Chestnut Street. Fighting desperately on both the political and economic fronts, he saw to it that his banking friends and allies inundated Congress with clamoring delegations and a shower of petitions, memorials, and letters. He worked so closely with Webster politically that the senator, after much consultation back and forth, often served as his Washington agent, so closely financially that Webster borrowed from the bank and complained at the height of the removal battle that “my retainer has not been renewed, or refreshed, as usual.” (Webster asked Biddle to burn all letters; Biddle replied primly that he did so “scrupulously,” but only when asked.) Through the Massachusetts senator Biddle had access to free legal advice from a United States Supreme Court justice, Webster’s friend Joseph Story.

Biddle’s loftiest political hope was that the great Senate triumvirate of Webster, Clay, and Calhoun would amalgamate their forces against the “banditti” in the White House. “I only repeat what I have said again & again that the fate of this nation is in the hands of Mr. Clay Mr. Calhoun & yourself,” he wrote Webster. “It is in your power to save us from the misrule of these people in place, but you can only do it while you are united.” He added that the enemies of the bank were hanging on every whisper of hostility among them. Here Biddle miscalculated. The celebrated trio were too far apart on major issues like slavery and the tariff, too self-protective of their own presidential ambitions, too suspicious of one another, to organize a grand coalition behind the bank. At most they managed to organize some committees hostile to Jackson in the new Congress that met in December 1833.

On the economic front Biddle could move on his own, and more boldly. During late 1833 the bank initiated a credit reduction that was in part a response to the Treasury’s deposit removals, but even more, enemies charged, an effort to put pressure on the government through the whole credit structure. The money, pressure in the business world became so acute that leading Boston and New York merchants met with Biddle and charged to his face that the contraction gave no protection to the bank and represented a transparent effort to extort a new charter from the government. Soon the bank returned to expansion.

The last act of the drama took place in the Senate. No one there had been more dismayed by Jackson’s exercise of presidential power than his great rival from the West, Henry Clay. The day after Christmas 1833 the Kentucky senator rose to offer resolutions of censure of the President. Jackson, Clay said, had seized powers not granted him under the Constitution, powers dangerous to popular liberty. He had abused the right of veto, made arbitrary appointments and removals, treated the judiciary with contempt, and had made the Treasury Secretary responsible to himself rather than to Congress. At this rate, he said, the great republic would become an elective monarchy, “the worst of all forms of government.” He closed with stirring and portentous warnings—of approaching tyranny, of a land filled with spies and informers, where people no longer spoke “in the fearless tones of manly freedom, but in the cautious whispers of trembling slaves.” Unless Congress acted quickly, “we shall die—ignobly die! base, mean and abject slaves—the scorn and contempt of mankind—unpitied, unwept, unmourned!”

After three months’ debate, during which the Jacksonians tried to pose the key issue as rechartering the bank rather than the Constitution, the Senate passed censure by decisive majorities. The President was furious, but bided his time. Then the Democrats swept the congressional elections of 1834, increasing their majority in the House. The result was seen as a test of Jackson’s bank policy; Biddle’s bank was now doomed. But the President tasted the full sweets of victory only when his fellow Democrats pulled the obnoxious resolution out of the archives, directed that heavy black lines be drawn around the offending words, and ordered the censure EXPUNGED.

JACKSONIAN LEADERSHIP

Like all strong leaders, Jackson became the target of ferocious criticism. His National Republican foes, showing a new skill at cartooning, pictured him as a maniacal king sitting on a crumbling throne beside a hovering bat and behind deserting rats; as a doctor, scalpel in hand, lancing Uncle Sam, with blood and specie flowing from the wound; as a tyrant receiving a crown from Van Buren and a scepter from the devil.

Inevitably, he divided the American people and polarized American politics. More than any other President, more even than Jefferson, he was loved and he was hated, and many of those who had loved Jefferson and were still living—though by no means all—also loved Old Hickory. Like all great leaders, he not only caused conflict, he cultivated it and embodied it.

Jackson’s divisive impact was so powerful, indeed, as to serve as the catalyzing force in a reordering of parties. Twice beaten at the polls, the National Republicans were demoralized after his re-election, but the Jacksonian “tyranny” helped bring them back to life in the mid-1830s as the Whig—and proudly Whiggish—party. Unable to agree on slavery or tariffs or internal improvements or even the bank, the Whigs could unite against “King Andrew.” A hodgepodge of old-time Federalists, conservative Democrats, staunch National Republicans, and opportunistic Anti-Masons, eastern capitalists and labor, conservative midwestern farmers, southern merchants and planters, the Whigs could unite against the city rabble, the backwoodsmen, the spoilsmen, the non-gentlemen who, they felt, dominated the Democratic party.

But what could the Whigs unite for? Could they get behind a candidate, a platform, and a major effort to win control of the federal government? One resource the Whigs possessed in abundance was leadership, or really a cornucopia of leaders. Aside from the “Big Three,” all of whom were still politically in their prime, the Whigs could boast of a second cadre of men of keen political insight: Senator Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee, onetime friend of Jackson’s, a strict constructionist of the old school, a critic and rival of Van Buren; Edward Everett, magnetic preacher and orator who had been chosen pastor of Unitarianism’s Brattle Street Church before he was twenty, then had become an influential congressman, in sentiment pro-bank and anti-“Levellers,” as he termed them; William Henry Harrison of Ohio, famed Indian fighter, hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, more recently a United States senator and diplomat; Supreme Court Justice John McLean, some kind of Republican-Democrat-Whig, now sheltered from partisanship by the court, but available.

Jackson’s expected choice of Van Buren as his heir apparent brought the Whig leaders into a fleeting unity. Not yet a truly national party, even more sectional than the Democrats, the Whigs decided on an ingenious strategy for winning in 1836: running several candidates who were strong in their states and who could capitalize on regional hostility to Jackson and Van Buren. Collectively, they hoped, the Whig candidates would rack up enough electoral votes to throw the issue into the House of Representatives, where they could combine against the Jacksonians. Henry Clay, still ambitious for the White House but doubtful of beating Van Buren, stood apart from these strange proceedings, as a nationalist and unifier. Heavily pressured by Webster’s friends, a caucus of 315 Whig members of the Massachusetts legislature unanimously nominated Webster for the presidency. A caucus of anti-Jackson congressmen in Tennessee nominated White, who accepted the call despite threats from Jackson that he would ruin this apostate Democrat if he did. A Whig state convention in Pennsylvania endorsed William Henry Harrison. By early 1836 all the Whig parties were off and running.

Under Jackson’s stern eye, and with Van Buren’s manipulative hand, the Democrats had little difficulty in uniting their forces. Unlike the Whigs, who declined to hold a national party convention because it would have dramatized their divisions, the Democrats were happy to convene in Baltimore in May 1835 to eulogize Old Hickory and anoint his successor. But the meeting was more than a celebration; it was an opportunity for 600 or more third-cadre Democrats—town and county notables, local professional men, farm and business leaders—to come together, exchange views and information, and then return to their home bailiwicks ready to do their part in the battle ahead.

It was not much of a battle, with several regional candidates providing scant direct confrontation to the “Little Magician.” Since personalities abounded, the campaign became largely one of invective. The young Whig leader in New York, William H. Seward called Van Buren “a crawling reptile, whose only claim was that he had inveigled the confidence of a credulous, blind, dotard, old man.” Van Buren’s running-mate, Senator Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, though billed by the Democrats as the personal slayer of Tecumseh, was pilloried by southern Whigs as a man who had taken up with a mulatto woman and, when she ran off with an Indian (Tecumseh’s revenge?) and was recaptured, had her sold down the river while he moved on to her sister. Still, some of the orators and editorial writers were able to rise above invective and to present the voters with a fairly coherent sense of choice between Whiggism and Jacksonianism.

The election outcome demonstrated anew that political leaders, like military ones, must unite their armies. Van Buren won 170 electoral votes, a clear majority over the combined total of Harrison with 73, White with 26, Webster with only 14. Political analysts noted the electoral strength of Harrison, the weakness of the celebrated senator from Massachusetts. Van Buren carried the popular vote by 763,000 to 736,000 over his combined opponents—a narrow margin, but well distributed. Democrats and Whigs each picked up some strength in the opposition’s areas, helping produce a “converting election,” as Gerald Pomper called it, that reflected a shifting voter coalition and heralded the shape of presidential contests to come. For the moment, at least, sectional politics seemed to be declining, national party politics rising.

On Inaugural Day, Jackson and Van Buren rode together to the Capitol in a gleaming carriage behind four splendid grays. People were struck by the contrast between the two men as they alighted at the entrance to the Capitol, the one gaunt, careworn, ailing, the other half a foot shorter, plump, bouncy, but looking all his fifty-four years with his once reddish hair receding and his sideburns turning gray. The crowd seemed little stirred by the new President’s inaugural words, which stressed the need for forbearance and harmony, but it still appeared mesmerized by Jackson; when he moved slowly down the steps to his carriage bystanders broke into thunderous applause and cheers. Watching from a side window, Thomas Hart Benton was transfixed. Most such pageants were unreal and fleeting, empty and soulless, but “this was reality,” as Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Benton’s feeling, “the living relations between a man and his people, distilled for a pause in the rhythm of events, rising for a moment of wild and soaring enthusiasm, then dying away into the chambers of memory.”

Could Van Buren as leader engage his followers as Jackson had done? Buffed and burnished in his long years of state and national politicking, a believer in the political system in which he had risen steadily as Columbia County surrogate, state senator, New York state attorney general, United States senator, and, briefly, governor, a canny operator in the New York Regency, he had come to look on government as a vast network of pulls and pressures that needed only constant oiling for the clanking machinery and balm for the harried operatives. Thus he was above all a transactional leader—harmonizer, conciliator, consolidator, a man who, unlike Jackson, believed in dampening fires rather than kindling them. He saw the Democratic party as a means of unifying disparate groups and bringing them into accord behind a national program. Since Van Buren did not want or expect much action from the national government, he would not put much pressure on the political system. Clearly this kind of leadership would not engage the hearts and souls of Democrats. But could it cope with change and crisis?

The answer came with brutal impact within weeks of Van Buren’s Inaugural. He had hardly had time to collect a Cabinet around him—he kept most of Jackson’s men—when a financial disaster struck the nation. For some time danger signals had been warning that the boom conditions of the mid-1830s—the expansion of banks and bank loans, the mounting debts of planters and merchants alike, the dizzying rise of prices, especially for farmland—would tumble into financial chaos. Even as Van Buren took office, jobless New Yorkers were protesting against high rents and fuel and even sacking the city’s flour warehouses. In May the jerry-built state banking system favored by Jackson collapsed under the pressure for specie. Banks closed their doors; bustling ports along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts fell idle; men lost their jobs and crops rotted in the fields. The country seemed stunned; the conquest of the land by a foreign power, the British minister wrote home, could hardly have produced a wider sense of “humiliation and grief.”

Here was a dramatic test of leadership for the new President, but already there were signs that Van Buren would fail it. During his last year in office Jackson had issued a “Specie Circular” providing that payment to the government for public lands would be mainly limited to gold and silver. The circular was a clear expression of Jackson’s and “Old Bullion” Benton’s hard-money policy. As pressure on the state deposit banks rose during late 1836, Whigs helped push a rescinding of the circular through the Senate and House, but Jackson pocket-vetoed the measure. Now Van Buren was President, and pressure mounted on him to repeal the circular. Wavering between the pro and con arguments, Van Buren seemed haunted by Old Hickory, who from the Hermitage made known his opposition to repeal. The new President gave in to the old.

What then to do? With both his Cabinet and his party divided over possible measures, Van Buren decided to convene a special session of Congress. He cast about for a solution to the continuing panic, now flattening down into a depression. To ask for a rechartering of the national bank was unthinkable for a Jacksonian Democrat; to propose a tidying up of the state bank deposit system, which now lay almost in ruins, was equally unthinkable. But he hit upon a scheme advanced by William M. Gouge, a young Philadelphia editor and economist, who in his popular History of Paper Money and Banking had proposed that public funds should be kept in public custody and not deposited in private banks. This idea—the divorce of the government “from all connection with Banks”—Van Buren made the centerpiece of a spate of reforms that he presented to Congress.

For a time, prospects in Congress for the Independent Treasury, as it was called, seemed auspicious. Van Buren made the proposed divorce of Treasury and bank a party issue, and the Democrats seemed firmly in control of both chambers. In the Senate, Silas Wright, the plain-spoken Regency leader and longtime cohort of Van Buren, presided over the Finance Committee. In the House, another young New Yorker and ally of the President’s, Churchill C. Cambreleng, chaired the Committee on Ways and Means, and loyalist James Polk was Speaker. On the face of it, moreover, the Independent Treasury bill seemed the answer to a Democrat’s prayers. It carried on the hard-money tradition of the party; it blunted the charge that the Democrats were unduly influenced by state banks; it refreshed the Democrats’ claim that they spoke for the great number of people. Thus Cambreleng argued that the bill would keep the government “in the hands of the planting, farming, and laboring classes and save it from becoming a mere gambling machine to fill the country as in England with ‘palaces, poorhouses, and prisons.’”

Led by their forensic gladiators, Clay and Webster, the Whigs put up a furious resistance to Democratic dogma. Not only did they offer specific arguments that the Independent Treasury bill would draw specie out of circulation, unduly restrict loans and credits, and of course provide the Democrats with more patronage jobs. They maintained that government had positive obligations to help the people—to establish and maintain a sound currency, to secure and stabilize the nation’s financial system, and certainly not, in Webster’s words, to confine the constitutional obligation of government to the “mere regulation of the coins” and the care of its own revenues. He felt that “this could not be America when I see schemes of public policy proposed…leaving the people to shift for themselves. …”

In the end, though, it was Democrats rather than Whigs who doomed the divorce of state and bank. All along Van Buren had been forced to fight a rearguard action against a group of Democratic Conservatives who were clinging stubbornly to old Jacksonian hard-money positions. Led by Senator William Cabell Rives, a patrician Jeffersonian from Virginia, and Nathaniel P. Talmadge of New York, the conservatives denounced the Independent Treasury as really a new national bank in disguise, a Biddle-type institution that would threaten the rights of the states. The divorce bill passed the Senate by a comfortable vote, but failed in the House as Democratic conservatives voted with the Whig opposition. In two years an Independent Treasury bill would pass both houses and receive Van Buren’s signature, but by then it would be too late for the President and his party.

Somehow Van Buren had failed to find a transcending issue in the economic crisis, one that would raise Congress and the people above the lesser questions dividing them in order to grapple with the kind of central question—or visible enemy—that Jackson had so brilliantly dramatized. Van Buren had found himself harmonizing myriad factions that could not easily be brought together, mediating among ideologies that did not want conciliation. Democrats were split sectionally, doctrinally, ideologically; even the small band of conservatives were divided. Some of the financial issues, hideously complex, were easy prey to facile simplification and demagoguery. And looming ominously over all the debate was the old, unresolved, and bitter issue of states’ rights, and behind that, the question of slavery.

A Calhoun Democrat from South Carolina, Francis Pickens, stoked the suppressed fire when he was allowed to give the first speech in the House on Van Buren’s Treasury scheme. Expected to reiterate Calhoun’s defense of the divorce bill in the Senate, the thirty-two-year-old congressman almost ignored the Treasury bill and, as “if drawn by some ineluctable force,” in James Curtis’ words, went on to a tirade against the North and a passionate defense of slavery. The whole banking system in the North, he declared, “is a political substitute for the standing armies of Europe.…We are not compelled to resort to those artificial institutions of society by which non-slave-holding regions seek to delude and deceive their victims. No, Sir, we avow to the world that we own our black population, and we will maintain that ownership, if needs be, to the last extremity!” Few in the House that day could have doubted the resolution of this young owner of several hundred slaves.

He could see in Jackson an approaching tyranny, Henry Clay had cried out during his Senate call for the censure of the President. “The land is filled with spies and informers; and detraction and denunciation are the orders of the day.…The premonitory symptoms of despotism are upon us; and if Congress do not apply an instantaneous and effective remedy, the fatal collapse will soon come on.…”

Every senator knew what Clay was talking about. Jackson had indeed swept into Washington like a tropical tornado. By the end of his two terms not only did Clay’s censure resolution lie expunged but Jackson had forced on Congress the key policies he wanted and vetoed those he did not; his twelve vetoes, indeed, would serve as the presidential record until the regime of the beleaguered Andrew Johnson. Jackson was no less a tornado to his Cabinet, breaking and remaking it almost at will, or to the bureaucracy, forcing officials out of office and putting his own men in. He got rid of one Vice-President and chose a new one, and even in the most delicate area of all, “states’ rights,” he recognized the claims of Georgia and denied those of South Carolina.

Andrew Jackson was one of the nation’s “strongest” Presidents, most historians agree, and probably one of the six or seven “greatest.” Some observers at the time viewed him as a dictator, some as the tool of Kendall or Van Buren or others, and historians have supported both arguments. But it took someone of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s insight to write: “Surely he was a great man, and his native strength, as well as of intellect as of character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him the sharper tool.” Most of the public at the time saw him either as Tyrant or as Hero; there was little middle ground. The Jacksonian model of the presidency would become for at least a century and a half the model for the “strong” President.

But for what purposes was the Jackson presidency used? With what results? In terms of what vision or values or fundamental goals? If historians agree about the Jacksonian model of the strong President, they sharply disagree over the central thrust of the Jacksonian leadership. Were the Jacksonians mainly a great coalition of poor farmers and eastern labor against entrenched capitalists? Or were they capitalists themselves, seeking only to share more of the booty of an expanding prosperity? Or were they mainly agrarians, dreaming the Jeffersonian dream of the small, independent, simple yeoman farmer who would constitute the base of a virtuous, limited, decentralized republic—a dream already being punctured by the cotton gin and the steam engine? Above all, was the climactic struggle between Jacksonians-Democrats and Federalists-National Republicans-Whigs a battle between equality and laissez-faire liberty, between People and Property?

The answers to these questions have been elusive because Jacksonian leaders operated at three levels of political discourse and action, and the middle level—the vital “linking” level—is still hazy and vacuous. At the upper level of rhetoric and declamation, the Jacksonian message came across with power and clarity. To denounce Biddle and the “monster bank,” the southern nullifiers, the Whiggish “aristocrats,” came easily to the “outsiders” and nationalists from the West. Through their rallies and conventions and newspapers, moreover, the Jacksonian leaders knew how to carry their message back to the voters in their communities and homes. Van Buren, indeed, believed in a deliberate strategy of bypassing old party leaders and directly mobilizing the “mass of the parties” in order to substitute out leaders for in.

At the bottom level, the level of day-to-day policy making and administration, the positions of the Jacksonian leaders were also clear. Absolute opposition to soft money, destruction of the national bank, guarded and opportunistic opposition to high tariffs, limited support of internal improvements, opposition to privileged corporate charters, fear of public debt, doubt about public enterprise, antagonism to monopoly—these positions were solidified in congressional debate, executive action, party platform, and press. While the Jacksonians often compromised policy in the play of pressure-group and party faction, both their positive and negative policies left an indelible imprint on governance.

But few Jacksonian leaders had a comprehensive, consistent philosophy that could support a coherent program. Like their Jeffersonian forebears, they believed in liberty and equality, but it was not clear how these supreme values would be achieved—by strengthening government or minimizing it, by curbing business or favoring it, by protecting property or regulating it or destroying it. These general questions became specific options in the everyday consideration of practical policies—questions, for example, of how to deal with what kind of business or property, owned by whom, serving whose interests, with what actual economic or social effects—but explicit, substantive principles to guide these options were deficient. Jacksonianism was full of ambiguities. Thus a powerful belief in laissez-faire gripped the Jacksonian leadership, as it had the Jeffersonian. But these agrarian individualists feared business power as much as they did governmental. “Instead of setting man free,” Amos Kendall said, business power had “only increased the number of his masters.”

Jacksonian confusion over philosophy and program was reflected in his veto message returning the recharter bill to Congress. “It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes,” the President said. “Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions.” He inveighed against governmental award of exclusive privileges that would “make the rich richer and the potent more powerful.…” He went on: “There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine itself to equal protection, and, as Heaven does its rains, shower its favors alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an unqualified blessing.” But how turn government, which the Jacksonians controlled, into at least a qualified blessing? Should the government give special protection to the “humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers,” as Jackson called them, if Heaven and nature and the rich alike did not?

So in the end, the Jacksonian “wind from the west” blew noisily but left the structure of American capitalism largely intact. Nor did it move that other citadel of power, the slavocracy. Jackson and Van Buren carried the old North-South axis of the Republican party into the Democratic—the alliance built largely by Virginians and New Yorkers and devoted to Jeffersonian agrarianism, individual liberty, states’ rights, and non-interference with liberty. Western leaders and voters did not upset this political balance; rather they fortified it. Thus the southern Democrats were left with a veto against any effort, gradual or radical, to curb slavery and possibly head off an explosion. Such was the price of Democratic party union, the price of national Union—a price that could not yet be calculated.

The Whigs were hardly more coherent in their own political philosophy, in part because as a party of opportunistic anti-Jacksonians they took on much of the ideological eclecticism of their Jacksonian opponents, a movement originally of opportunistic outsiders, as the two parties tangled—and became entangled—with each other. Like the Democrats, Whigs could deliver grand rhetoric through the mouths of their Websters and Clays, and like the Democrats, they advanced a spate of concrete policies. But the middle, linking level was absent here too. If the Jacksonian leaders lacked a foundation of philosophical radicalism, the Whigs lacked that of philosophical conservatism. The materials of a class system—the aristocracies, peasantries, and proletariats—that had empowered European ideologies were absent in the United States; much of the combat on the American terrain lined up entrepreneurs against entrepreneurs. No wonder Louis Hartz was reminded of “two boxers, swinging wildly, knocking each other down with accidental punches.”

Still, Jacksonianism embodied an explosive force that Whiggism lacked. The Democratic leaders posed democracy itself as the ultimate issue and pitched their appeal to the masses. Jackson as an outsider “went to the people,” and as a popular hero he easily mobilized support from the masses. Van Buren contended that those “who have wrought great changes in the world never succeeded by gaining over chiefs; but always by exciting the multitude. The first is the resource of intrigue and produces only secondary results, the second is the resort of genius and transforms the face of the universe.” By the people the Jacksonian leaders still meant “adult white men only,” of course, but within those limits they were willing to guide and to follow the popular will as they defined it.

Sustained rhetoric, if honestly meant, has its own impact; orators may come to believe in what they say. As the leaders continued to apotheosize Mankind, the People, Popular Rule, the Majority of the People, and all the other targets of their windy appeals, they bound themselves politically and morally to respond to new popular majorities mobilizing behind rising new leaders.

Thus the Jacksonians were forced to look ahead. The Whigs, more skeptical of popular rule, more cautious about extending the suffrage to poorer persons, were less captive to their own rhetoric about Mankind. Hostile to presidential power, they rejected the kind of majority rule that could be most directly implemented through a plebiscitary presidency. They had a powerful rhetorical appeal of their own in “Liberty and Union,” but their notions of liberty were as cloudy as their foes’, and the two parties matched each other in their nationalistic appeals. During the 1830s the Whigs could find no national coalition builder to match Jackson or even Van Buren; indeed, they lost their own intellectual hero when John Marshall, still Chief Justice, died in July 1835.

It was said that the great bell in Philadelphia’s old State House—the bell that proclaimed “Liberty throughout all the land unto all the Inhabitants thereof”—was overtaxed as it tolled Marshall’s obsequies, leading to the fatal crack that appeared a decade later on Washington’s birthday. Symbolists could make of this what they wished. With his belief in national power, an independent judiciary, limited suffrage, rights of property, gradual abolition of slavery (while recognizing its constitutional validity), the old Federalist had become the Perfect Whig. Like the Whigs, he believed in “Liberty and Union,” in “ordered liberty,” but on the relation between these two—in a clear definition of these values in all their dimensions and amplitude, on the way in which these values could be realized so that they would broaden and strengthen rather than vitiate each other—on these matters of principle and purpose the Whig leadership was as divided and nebulous as were the Jacksonian leaders on the relationship of Liberty and Equality.

Lacking the political and intellectual leadership in either party that could engage with these transcending questions, the “People” one day might have to decide them, but again the question was posed—with ballots or bullets?

CHAPTER l0

Parties: The Peoples Constitution

CHARLES DICKENS WOULD NEVER forget his astonishment when, early, in January 1842, he opened the door of his stateroom on the steam packet Britannia and gazed inside at the tiny chamber hardly bigger than a cab, at the two horsehair seats fixed to the wall, the narrow slabs for sleeping, the pillows no thicker than crumpets. He could not believe that “this utterly impractical, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or connection with, those chaste and pretty, not to say gorgeous little bowers, sketched by a masterly hand, in the highly varnished lithographic plan hanging up in the agent’s counting house in the city of London.…” The world-famous author of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist suffered more disillusionments as the steam packet encountered terrible January storms that tore the planking out of the paddle wheels and left the usually exuberant Dickens prostrate with seasickness.

Although the steam packet was a British ship carrying Her Majesty’s mails to Halifax and Boston, she was also the start of Charles Dickens’ first tour of America, and the start of a long series of disenchantments he would undergo in the New World, of which he expected so much. Lionized on arriving in Boston, he liked much of what he first saw with his imaginative novelist’s eyes—the bright and gay houses with their “very red” bricks and “very white” stone and “very green” blinds and railings; the handsome State House and other public buildings; the quiet and benevolent and rational influence of the “University of Cambridge”; the healthy young factory girls of Lowell, with their serviceable bonnets, good warm cloaks and shawls, and clogs and pattens; Hartford, where the legislature, Dickens reported gleefully, once had enacted “Blue Laws” that barred a citizen from kissing his wife on Sunday; New Haven, the City of Elms; and finally New York Harbor, “a forest of ships’ masts, cheery with flapping sails and waving flags.”

Slowly the disenchantment took over. Dickens made a point of visiting prisons and insane asylums and, while often impressed by American innovations, he was shaken by the plight of the inmates he interviewed. Escorted by police officers, he prowled through the brothels and thieves’ dens of the Five Points section near the Bowery. In Philadelphia he was appalled by a “pioneering” and dreadful system of solitary confinement. His repulsion mounted in Washington, the region of “slavery, spittoons, and senators—all three are evils in all countries,” he wrote later. He was impressed by John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and some “noble specimens” from the West, but he hardly had time for the President of the United States, and he reserved his most impassioned criticism for members of Congress. Did he see an assembly of honest patriots trying to correct some of the vices of the Old World? Not at all.

“I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves.…in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and most unblushing form stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.…” So fierce and brutal was the strife of politics that “sensitive and delicate-minded persons” had to stand aloof, leaving the battle to the selfish.

For Dickens, the supreme evil was slavery, and the supreme hypocrisy that of men who shamelessly displayed the Declaration of Independence, “which solemnly declares that All Men are Created Equal,” and then would censure a member of Congress for having once risen up and called out to the lawmakers, “A gang of male and female slaves for sale, warranted to breed like cattle, linked to each other by iron fetters, are passing now along the open street beneath the windows of your Temple of Equality! Look!” Where now, asked Dickens, was the pursuit of Liberty and Equality?

Dickens traveled west, taking the canalboat across Pennsylvania and the famed portage railway over the Alleghenies. He was struck by Pittsburgh’s great ironworks—“like Birmingham”—and the “great quantity of smoke hanging about it.” He admired Cincinnati, the “prettiest place” he had seen save for Boston, and “honourably famous for its free-schools.” He marveled at the size of the Mississippi, an “enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour: its strong and frothy current choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees.” He admired the old French portion of St. Louis and fulfilled his “great desire to see a Prairie.” He was properly struck by Niagara Falls, and he took time to take a steamboat up the Hudson and then ride overland to Lebanon, where he inspected the Shakers and their austere community. But he had become increasingly fatigued and dispirited during the trip, and he seemed more repelled by the ugliness of the pious and “stiff-necked” Shaker matriarchs than impressed by their husbandry and fraternity.

Always his thoughts returned to the blight of slavery. He copied scores of advertisements from the newspapers: “Ran away, Negress Caroline. Had on a collar with one prong turned down”…“Ran away, a black woman, Betsy. Had an iron bar on her right leg”…“Ran away, the negro Manuel. Much marked with irons”…“Ran away, a negro boy about twelve years old. Had round his neck a chain dog-collar”…“Detained at the police jail, the negro wench, Myrna. Has several marks of LASHING, and has irons on her feet”…“Ran away, a negro woman and two children. A few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M”…“Ran away, a negro named Arthur. Has a considerable scar across his breast and each arm, made by a knife; loves to talk much of the goodness of God.”…

Reflecting on his travels in America, Dickens tried to sum up his estimate of the general character of the American people and their social system. He found Americans as a whole “frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate.” The more educated and refined, the more warm and ardent “to a most remarkable degree, which renders an educated American one of the most endearing and most generous of friends.” But these qualities were “sadly sapped and blighted” among the great mass of men. Americans as a whole were too distrustful of one another; overly practical and impressed by “smart men,” no matter how rascally; dull and gloomy in temperament; subject to a vicious and rapacious press; and always meanly suspicious of worthy public men.

“There’s freedom of opinion here, you know,” Dickens quoted Americans saying to him when he chided them on their suspicion of their governors. “Every man thinks for himself, and we are not to be easily overreached.” Dickens respected this independence, but he was appalled by the sweaty, stinking, spitting, venal, leveling tendencies of the American people.

This burning question—equality in America—excited the curiosity of scores of European visitors in the 1830s and 1840s. And Americans were even more curious about what the visitors reported about them. Europeans, after all, had a detachment, a perspective, and a basis of social comparison no American observer could match; they were virtually anthropological in their merciless dissection of American manners and customs. Frances Trollope, with her sharp eyes for domestic manners, missed little, nor did Harriet Martineau, despite her ear trumpet through which people had to shout, nor did Fanny Kemble, with her special concern with the lives of women. Unhappily, the findings of these and a hundred other visitors were quite mixed.

Americans were variously found to be friendly, generous, rude, vulgar, solemn, dull, cold, violent, selfish, boastful, thin-skinned, practical, curious, vigorous, unrefined, materialistic, anti-intellectual. But the findings were often so self-contradictory that the visitors seemed to be describing the human condition, not merely the American. In sum it was a portrait, in Edward Pessen’s words, “of a good-natured but essentially shallow man: clever but not profound, self-important but uncertain, fond of deluding himself, living almost fanatically for the flesh (although not knowing too well how), straining every fibre to accumulate the things he covets and amoral about the methods to be used, a hypocrite who strains at gnats and swallows camels, an energetic and efficient fellow albeit a small one, who takes comfort in—as well as his standards of behavior from—numbers.”

The visitors noted the cosmetics of equality, but no one probed behind the superficial manners and customs to cut to the social bone of the real questions about equality in America: What kind of inequality existed, economic, social, political, or other? What was the awareness of inequality, as against the existence of it? To what extent did a rigid class or caste system exist, to what extent was economic and social mobility eroding these systems? No one even tried to come to grips with such major questions, save for an unrenowned twenty-six-year-old French aristocrat who journeyed to America with a friend in the spring of 1831.

Born of noble parents who barely escaped the guillotine during the Revolution, Alexis de Tocqueville grew up in an aristocratic family that clung to the traditions of the Bourbons even while providing their son with a solid Catholic education, a fine library, and the opportunity to study the classics at the lycée at Metz and law in the courts of Paris. With a friend, Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville attended the lectures of François Guizot and absorbed the historian’s view that history was governed by inexorable laws and that the progress of bourgeois democracy was inevitable. Rejecting both the House of Bourbon and the Orléanist dynasty that came to power after the uprisings of 1830, the young lawyer, now a magistrate, decided with Beaumont on a long tour of the rising young republic to the west, ostensibly to study and report on the advanced penitentiary system that was believed to exist in the United States. They arrived in New York in mid-May 1831, during the growing conflict in Andrew Jackson’s first term over the question: Should “People” or “Property” rule?

EQUALITY: THE JACKSONIAN DEMOS

Looking for democracy and equality, Tocqueville plunged into a nation that was sharply unequal in its distribution of wealth. An hour’s carriage ride through any of the big cities of the East would show striking contrasts between the lives of the rich and the poor. Wealthy Americans lived in fine town houses; dined well on the best food served on imported china and silverware; spent lavishly for clothes, entertainment, travel. The very rich were attended by liveried servants. Not far away, in slums and stews, fifty or more poor families might live in a decaying tenement, with perhaps one privy. Scores of “destitute homeless wretches” had been seen “lying on bulks or under the sheds about the markets of New York and Philadelphia.” Debtors were still being thrown into jail. Five thousand paupers lived in the stews of Boston, not far from the mansions on Beacon Hill. In 1830 the most affluent 10 percent of the nation’s families probably owned at least two-thirds of the country’s total wealth.

How was it possible, then, for Tocqueville to report, in the very opening sentence of his Democracy in America, “Among the novel objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, nothing struck me more forcibly than the general equality of condition among the people”? How could he speak of equal conditions? In part because paupers and nabobs were relatively few; the great bulk of Americans lived somewhere between the two extremes. In part because the extremes of poverty and wealth that Tocqueville had witnessed in Europe made American inequality seem relatively benign. In part because Tocqueville, perhaps searching for a kind of Jeffersonian arcadia, perceived Americans as mainly rural, middle-class, homogeneous, agrarian, and he little noticed the beginnings of industrialization and urbanization, with their enormous implications for equality in America.

But the main reason Tocqueville and other observers underplayed the extent of inegalitarianism in America lay in the tendency of economic inequality to be tempered and cushioned, in both appearance and substance. The crucial fact was not the absence of class distinctions but the transcending of them, Henry S. Commager wrote; wherever men and women “met in typical gatherings—camp meetings, militia drills, Grange picnics, political conventions, church sociables, Chautauqua assemblies—they met on a basis of equality.” It almost seemed that the American male—in his typically slouching posture, in his eternal smoking and chewing and spitting in even the most refined places, in his constant and indiscriminate handshaking, in his habit of saying “Yes, sir,” to high and low—was trying to prove his membership in a great classless mass.

The most striking social buffer was the decline of deference. Free Americans would not bow or scrape or pull their forelocks, no matter whom they were addressing. On this score the relationship of master and servant particularly impressed Tocqueville. He had heard that in the North, especially in New England, in contrast with the slave domestic service of the South, servants performed their duties “without thinking themselves naturally inferior to the person who orders them.” The servants had enough respect for themselves not to refuse their masters the promised obedience; on their part, masters “do not ask for marks of respect…; it is enough that, as servants, they are exact and honest.” The free-and-easy egalitarian way of Westerners in dealing with visiting notables was widely known, and doubtless influenced behavior in the East.

It was not that Jacksonian America lacked classes. “There are upper classes and working classes,” John Quincy Adams told Tocqueville bluntly. Class distinctions were visible in dress, speech, grooming, carriages, housing, residence area, as well as in income, education, social status. Social lines grew rapidly in western cities too, Richard Wade noted, though not drawn as tightly as in the East. Seating in theaters was partitioned on the basis of class; even applause was given by class. The United States had the makings of a caste system, with black men enslaved in the South and segregated in the North, illiterate immigrants sealed off in the worst jobs and the poorest housing, women set apart politically and psychologically in their own class pyramid. Visiting the Tombs in the Bowery, Dickens asked a warden if he put men in the bottommost, unhealthy cells of this infamous jail, and was reassured: “Why, we do only put colored people in ’em.”

Save for the blacks and the very poor, what Jacksonian America as a whole lacked was a class system—a stratified social structure that set people off into separate and conflicting ideologies, economic statuses, rigid social structures. Most Americans behaved as though they existed in a culture of equality, even though they also existed in an economy, and to a considerable extent a society, of inequality. They responded, in their class roles, not directly to economic reality but to their perception of their class status, to their perception of others’ class status, and to their perception of others’ perception of their own class position.

Tempering tendencies toward class rigidity, to some degree, was the nation’s social inheritance: a large, open, bourgeois middle class, without an upper class of aristocrats or a lower class of proletarians. “The great advantage of the Americans,” Tocqueville observed, was that “they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution; and that they are born equal, instead of becoming so.” Born equal! The United States had no inherited nobility in the European sense; its farmers were not peasants in the French sense; its workers were not proletarians in the English sense. Tocqueville noted another reason for softened class lines—America’s vast lands and abundance: “Their ancestors gave them the love of equality and of freedom; but God Himself gave them the means of remaining equal and free by placing them upon a boundless continent.” Then too, poor Americans clung to the rags-to-riches myth. Stories were told of men who had struck it rich in land speculation, in banking, in manufacturing. A hard-working man could rise through the ranks, or if opportunity were closed to him, he could move west. “In America,” Tocqueville reported, “most of the rich men were formerly poor.”

The young Frenchman exaggerated. Neither social nor geographical mobility was as simple as he and many Americans thought. Wealth, jobs, and status were inherited by sons enjoying special access to colleges, family connections, social networks, their fathers’ wills. Going west and buying a farm required more money than most poor men had. But Tocqueville, with his usual insight, understood the myths that moved Americans, if not always the hard facts that validated or eroded the myths. And the heady idea of the self-made man was at the heart of the mystique of Jacksonian Democracy.

Tocqueville had come to America to see democracy at work, for in the young republic, he believed, “the demos ruled in its unadulterated state.” Democracy in America, he decided, was inexorably producing powerful egalitarian impulses and conditions, because democratic societies in general tended more and more toward equality and “dragged” everyone along with it. To some degree he welcomed this trend; “…after all,” he said, “it may be God’s will to spread a moderate amount of happiness over all men, instead of heaping a large sum upon a few.” But even more he feared probable consequences of egalitarianism: a vast leveling down, conformity, mediocrity, one large, homogeneous middle class without “poetry or elevation.” All this in turn would lead to something Tocqueville feared most of all—the “tyranny of the majority.”

Leveling and mediocrity also discouraged great leadership, Tocqueville felt. He wrote of the brilliant leadership, a generation earlier, of Thomas Jefferson and his Federalist adversaries. These were men of principle, with lofty ambitions for themselves and their country. But if America had once had great parties and leadership, she had them no longer; men were occupied by their petty, material ambitions, and the country “swarms with lesser controversies.” Doubtless Andrew Jackson in the White House seemed a narrow and quarrelsome figure to the young French aristocrat. He had to grant Jackson’s skill and tenacity, however, in standing by his policies and arousing popular support.

In fact, the nation had strong leadership in the first cadre of Jackson and the other national Democratic figures like Van Buren and Benton, and in their great Whig antagonists like Clay and Webster. It had a robust second cadre of congressmen, state officials, partisan newspaper editors, party managers, federal and state officials, who carried on healthy, partisan combat. The vital test of Tocqueville’s fears about leadership lay in the third cadre—the grass-roots activists who sustained and invigorated democracy at its foundation.

A remarkable mushrooming of grass-roots leadership occurred in a group that might have seemed least potent in a nation still mainly agricultural—the working people of the big eastern cities. Ever since the Revolution, craft unions had been organizing, agitating for better conditions, conducting strikes and boycotts, and then usually disappearing after a brief existence. Trade unionism revived in the more liberal and democratic climate of the 1820s. In 1824 weavers seeking higher wages left their looms in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in the first known strike of women workers. By this time tailors, carpenters, cordwainers, hatters, riggers, and other craftsmen had formed somewhat durable unions. Working people were reaching out toward wider unities. After fifteen Philadelphia unions in 1827 banded together to form the first city central trade council, unionists in a dozen other cities moved to organize their own.

Local union leaders became more and more aware, as Jackson and other national leaders battled over issues of concern to working people, that they could not realize their goals through trade union action alone, but must enter the political arena as well. Here again, Philadelphia workers led the way, forming a workingmen’s party out of the central trade council in 1828. Suddenly other movements, calling themselves workingmen’s parties, People’s Party, Farmer’s and Mechanic’s Society, or just Working Men, were springing into life in scores of cities in Pennsylvania, New York, New England, Ohio, and elsewhere. Typically these parties advanced a broad range of political demands: abolition of imprisonment for debt; equal, free, tax-supported, universal education; prohibition of licensed monopolies; equal taxation on property; revision or abolition of the militia system (which bore heavily on workers); and often a host of local needs, such as better working conditions and more “hydrant water” for the poor.

Leaders of these workers’ parties knew what they wanted; the question was how to get it. And here the parties took a drastic step that set them off from a multitude of other interests pressing their demands. This was to nominate their own candidates for office, and then elect them. Such a strategy not only required a massive electoral effort from relatively small organizations, but presented the leaders with endless practical and philosophical dilemmas. Should they operate completely separately from political parties—that is, maintain their doctrinal purity at the expense of being isolated, or at least outvoted, politically? If they cooperated with existing political parties, on what terms? To what extent should the workers’ parties broaden their own ranks beyond their own trade union members? To what extent should they press for policies that would benefit the general public, or at least the poor, and not unionists alone? Should the parties actually try to win elections, or act mainly as goads and gadflies to the existing major parties?

Bitter quarrels broke out over such issues. The question of including non-workers was especially vexing. Some workers wished to exclude lawyers, bankers, brokers, and employers. Others argued that the crucial factor was a man’s views, not his job. The Philadelphia party decided that while employers might be present at meetings, they should be barred from holding office. But a member complained, “If an employer superintends his own business (still more if he works with his own hands) he is a working man.”

Resolving such tough strategic questions—questions that have daunted all third parties before and since—required a rare degree of creative leadership, and this the workers’ parties did not possess. Although the various city organizations produced vigorous and committed local leaders, they were heavily localized movements incapable of elevating and supporting leaders who could plan a national strategy and mobilize workingmen behind it. The workers’ parties fell between stools—too inclusive in some places and too exclusive in others, too inexperienced in “practical” politics, too exposed to outside attack, too doctrinaire for some workers and yet too pragmatic for others. But their primary handicap was the readiness of the major parties—especially the Jacksonian Democrats—to appropriate their less controversial and less radical ideas as soon as it became politically expedient to do so. Within a few years the workers’ parties were declining and disappearing almost as quickly as they had arisen.

If the workers’ parties suffered from too few adequate leaders, radical movements of the day seemed to suffer from too many. Jacksonian leadership hastened popular ferment and protest, especially in New York City, a magnet to rebels looking for ways to spread their heretical ideas. These radicals were united by little but their hatred for the “haves” and their concern for the “have-nots.” In a book, Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth, Langdon Byllesby, contending that the laboring man shared almost none of the goods he produced, denounced both the credit system and labor-saving machinery. Thomas Skidmore attacked property that was not shared equally by the whole community; he urged that all existing land and goods be surrendered to the state and then reallocated equally as part of a “General Division.” Robert Dale Owen, son of the organizer of the innovative but paternalistic factory at New Lanark in Scotland and later of the community of New Harmony in Indiana, edited The Free Inquirer and argued for liberalized divorce laws, education for workers, and a fairer distribution of wealth. Another British native, George H. Evans, founder of the Working Man’s Advocate in New York, preached atheism, land reform, and the rights of wage earners.

The star of the New York radicals was a dedicated abolitionist, militant anti-cleric, popular lecturer, indefatigable social reformer—and a woman. Frances Wright had lived a remarkable life in Scotland even before she came to New York in 1830 to edit The Free Inquirer with Owen. Left without parents at the age of two, but with a large inheritance, she had traveled and written extensively while still in her teens, visited America in 1818 and again with General Lafayette in 1824, urged her plan of emancipation on Jefferson and Madison, and then carried out her own experiment in emancipation by purchasing slaves in the United States and colonizing them in Tennessee and, later, Haiti.

She was a tall, slender woman, whom Walt Whitman years later would call one of the sweetest of his memories, “graceful, deer-like…beautiful in bodily shape and gifts of soul.” An eloquent foe of religion and of the influence of the Church in politics, she opposed the existing American educational system based on authority and the denial of equal rights for women. For insisting that the legal obligation of marriage should be replaced by a union based only on moral obligation she was called the “great Red Harlot of Infidelity.”

Radical leaders in Massachusetts made up an even more variegated group. In the western hinterland of the state, where hard times and recalled mortgages reminded old men of the days of Shays’s Rebellion, Theodore Sedgwick had been a boy of hardly six in Stockbridge when some of Shays’s men ransacked the house of his father, Judge Sedgwick. Deserting his father’s conservative doctrines, except for a common belief in emancipation, the young man became increasingly sympathetic to the needs of wage earners, including improved working conditions, public education, and temperance. He became as committed and outspoken a radical Democrat as the judge had been a conservative Federalist.

Fifty miles to the northeast, in Northfield, a disillusioned ex-pastor and ex-congressman, Samuel Clesson Allen, who had begun protesting the plight of the local farmers after he quit Congress in 1829, soon discovered—and asserted—that not only farmers but all producing workers were cheated by the diversion of wealth to the wealthy. Poverty, he contended, resulted from artificial limits on production. “The natural limit of production,” he said, “is the wants of the consumers. Till these are supplied there is no reason why production should stop.” Allen had hopes for Jackson’s administration.

In Northampton, down the Connecticut River from Northfield, another kind of reformer was undergoing political transformation during the early thirties. The son-in-law of a wealthy Springfield capitalist, a Harvard-man, a member of the intellectual elite of Cambridge, George Bancroft had returned to Northampton to found a progressive school, and to write. For a time he played Whiggish politics while espousing radical and working-man doctrines, but then he took a position against Biddle’s bank, deserted the Whig party for good, and declared himself against the moneyed aristocracy, to the consternation of Springfield high society. In Boston a trio of radical Democrats—Frederick Robinson, William Foster, Theophilus Fisk—directed their reformist arguments both at fellow Democrats and at organized workingmen. Another Boston reformer, Robert Rantoul, had started life among Federalist Essexmen, attended Phillips Andover and Harvard, and settled among wealthy Whigs, only to veer sharply toward humanitarianism, Jacksonianism, workers’ rights, free markets, and a kind of genteel moralistic radicalism, including opposition to liquor and capital punishment.

These men—and this woman—had little in common except a burning sense of injustice. They divided over many social and moral questions; most of them were sympathetic to the wage earner’s plight and took part in workingmen’s parties, but were repelled by the revulsion of many a worker against their radical views on marriage, divorce, religion, women’s rights. Many of them worked closely with the Jackson Democrats but were offended by the compromises and evasions of major-party coalition building and electioneering. Most were high-minded moralizers who had to recognize that they would lose their working-class audiences unless they were also willing to talk the hard language of wages, hours, working conditions, strikes, and boycotts. On one cardinal question the radicals and reformers were united—in economics they were egalitarians. They helped to make equality the burning issue of Jacksonian democracy.

By the mid-1830s the outcome of the popular thrust toward equality still lay in the balance. Although in everyday social contacts the farmers and workers, having long since given up habits of deference, could mingle with upper-class men on the basis of almost easy familiarity, rich and poor were still separated by class distinctions, income, residing place, and style of life. Genuine equality of opportunity had been dramatically posed by radicals and Jacksonian Democrats as perhaps the transcending national issue, but equality of condition was still sharply limited and perhaps declining under the impact of industrial and agricultural changes. Equality before the law was guaranteed in the constitutions and formally protected in the courts, yet not always realized in concrete situations where poor men were pitted legally against rich. If economic and social and legal equality were, on balance, still largely unrealized in the Jacksonian “Age of Equality,” would the impetus of political equality be likely in the years ahead to broaden the other dimensions of equality?

Political equality meant that all men and women would have the right to vote. It meant that they would have the right to vote for all elective offices, at every level of government, local, county, state, and federal, on a regular, prescribed basis, at an appropriate time of year. It meant that the polls would be located reasonably near the voters; that voters would be subjected neither to corruption nor to intimidation; that they could vote in secret—which meant voting by paper ballots rather than orally, and with plain ballots that could be marked, folded, and deposited without anyone but the voter seeing them. It meant, more broadly, that voters could choose among candidates who took clear and forthright positions in competitive contests offering real alternatives, in elections the outcome of which would significantly affect the course of government, economic policy, social change.

Such political equality barely existed in America before the Revolution. A half century later, it was only partially achieved. It might never be wholly realized. Certain political equalities were hardly conceivable even in Jacksonian days. Women and slaves and Indians could not vote, nor could most freed Negroes in the North. Certain offices—especially the presidency and United States senatorship—were rendered by constitutions only indirectly subject to popular balloting. Certain elections would remain noncompetitive, no matter what the procedures. Even so, political equality was immensely expanded during the half century following the Declaration of Independence.

The central general issue was whether all adult white males should have the right to vote. The crucial specific issue was whether adult white males without property should have the right to vote. This issue aroused the most pressing philosophical, political, and practical questions. The powerful eighteenth-century doctrine of natural rights dictated that the franchise must be considered a fundamental right of all men. If all men were naturally endowed with reason, on what grounds could some be excluded from the process of self-government? In America, where “all men were created equal” and endowed with certain inalienable rights, this question took on a special urgency. Other philosophers argued, however, that only those men with a real and continuing economic stake in a society should vote, that the property-holding middle class must serve as the great stabilizing force, that men without property would, if given the ballot, ultimately turn democracy into dictatorship.

The practical question was how, if certain men were not allowed to vote, the criteria excluding them should be established. Should men be granted the right to vote on the basis of the money they had, the property they owned, or the taxes they paid? What if a man had property one year and lost it the next—did he lose the right to vote too? Critics of the property requirement liked to tell an old story of Tom Paine’s: “You require that a man shall have sixty dollars’ worth of property, or he shall not vote. Very well, take an illustration. Here is a man who today owns a jackass, and the jackass is worth sixty dollars. Today the man is a voter and he goes to the polls and deposits his vote. Tomorrow the jackass dies. The next day the man comes to vote without his jackass and he cannot vote at all. Now tell me, which was the voter, the man or the jackass?”

The political question was simpler: if the vote is given to these new voters, are they likely to vote for “our” side or the opposition? Related to this calculation, however, was an ingenious political argument used over and over again and with telling effect by opponents of full male suffrage. The argument was that if the right to vote was extended to the poor, the rich would buy the votes of the poor, and hence extending the vote to the poor was in reality extending it to the rich. Blackstone was solemnly cited as the great authority on the question—Blackstone who said that the “true reason of requiring any qualification with regard to property in voters, is to exclude such persons as are in so mean a situation as to be esteemed to have no will of their own.” This argument was directed particularly against the enfranchising of industrial workers, who were seen as especially vulnerable to pressure from their employers.

Historians like to tell stories with exciting beginnings and endings, and any chronicler of Jacksonian democracy would wish to picture a mounting grand finale to the Fight for the Ballot, with the villain named Property being undone at the height of the era. In fact, the fight was not one central struggle but thousands of tiny skirmishes in a score or more states over a long stretch of time. Dismantling property restrictions in particular was a lengthy effort, often with three steps forward, one back, and one sidewise. Half a dozen states had adopted suffrage reforms by the end of the Revolutionary era, when poor soldiers had shown that they could fight as bravely as the rich, but three states passed more conservative suffrage requirements. The framers of the Constitution forced suffrage reform into at least thirteen channels by ingeniously providing that members of the new House of Representatives would be elected by those voters eligible to elect the lower houses of the various state legislatures, thus leaving the struggle for the vote largely in the hands of the states.

Some suffrage restrictions fell during the Jeffersonian era, with its emphasis on equal rights, and during the war with England, when soldiers argued that “if they were good enough to fight they were good enough to vote.” Property requirements were replaced by taxpaying requirements, which in turn gradually faded away. Further extensions of male suffrage were pushed through the states during the Jacksonian era, but in Pessen’s summary, “Well before Jackson’s election most states had lifted most restrictions on the suffrage of white male citizens or taxpayers. Jackson was the beneficiary rather than the initiator of these reforms.” Still Virginia, Louisiana, and Mississippi lagged; in the Old Dominion the 1831 suffrage extension still left a third of the white male population without the vote.

Conservatives fought a desperate rearguard action against the “tyranny of numbers.” The state senate, declared the redoubtable conservative James Kent to the New York constitutional convention of 1821, “has hitherto been elected by the farmers of the state…by the free and independent lords of the soil.…We propose now to annihilate at one stroke all these property distinctions and to bow before the idol of universal suffrage.” He drew a dismal picture of the day when the “owners of the soil” would be impotent, the poor would plunder the rich, the debtor would ignore the obligation of contract, the majority would tyrannize over the minority, the “motley and undefinable population of the crowded ports may predominate in the assembly.” John Randolph, ravaged by drink, his eyes glowing with passion in a face of parchment white seamed by a mass of wrinkles, rose to heights of eloquence as he played perhaps his finest hour upon the stage. “I would not live under King Numbers,” he proclaimed to the delegates to the Virginia convention of 1829, evoking the Burkean ideas he exalted. “I would not be his steward, nor make him my task-master.…”

Rhode Island lagged behind in suffrage reform, and it suddenly gave the nation a sharp warning as to the price of such delinquency in an industrializing state with large numbers of propertyless workers. It had held out against joining the new union after 1787; now it was resisting the currents of suffrage reform sweeping other states. In 1840, at the end of the “Jackson decade,” Rhode Islanders were still operating under an archaic charter granted by King Charles more than 175 years before. Under a heavy freehold requirement, almost half the adult male white population could not vote. A rotten-borough system favoring the rural population left urban voters seriously underrepresented in the lower house. The charter lacked even a bill of rights. All this was accompanied by extensive corrupt influence at the polls.

The voteless men of Rhode Island needed their champion, and he came in the unlikely personage of Thomas Dorr, a wealthy young Exeter and Harvard graduate, of Whiggish disposition politically but philosophically a son of the Enlightenment. After trying vainly to work for reform within the charter system, Dorr led a move to draft a “People’s Constitution” that extended the vote to all adult white male citizens if resident in the state for one year; it boosted the representation of Providence and other urban areas in the lower house; it required the use of the secret ballot—but withheld the ballot from blacks and women, and left a property requirement for voting in city and town elections.

Conservatives responded by drafting a less reformist charter. Both charters were submitted to the people, who voted Dorr’s up and the conservatives’ down.

Soon bewildered Rhode Islanders had two governments, one under the establishment, the other under Dorr as the “People’s Governor.” Constitutional comic opera turned deadly serious when the old government began arresting leaders of the new. Dorr escaped to New York to enlist aid from reform and radical leaders, and returned with promises of military assistance, including the dispatch of a thousand men from New York to Rhode Island by steamboat. Soon the Dorrites, hardly two hundred in number, attacked the Providence Arsenal, but the desperate, vainglorious effort, reminiscent of Shays’s attack on the Springfield Arsenal, failed. Dorr’s men left for home, and the leader escaped over the border. When the old government put through a liberalized constitution, he returned despite the price on his head, only to be arrested, indicted for high treason, found guilty, and sentenced to solitary confinement at hard labor for life. But the old government had overreached itself, and by the act of a Democratic legislature, Dorr was released after a year’s confinement, and the oligarchy granted the people still another, and now heavily liberalized, charter. Decades late, Rhode Island had finally joined the parade toward full manhood suffrage.

It was because constitutions like Rhode Island’s archaic one—and even more, the Constitution of the United States—embodied fundamental compromises with human liberty that abolitionist leaders like William Lloyd Garrison rejected constitutional processes, even voting. Garrison opposed any concerted political action; rather, he proposed that truth and right would prevail by waging the moral struggle through meetings and newspapers, especially his Liberator. His strategy was to be absolutely uncompromising. The first issue had proclaimed, “I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not retreat a single inch—and I will be heard. ” By 1843 the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, under his influence, was resolving that the United States Constitution was a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.”

Another New England abolitionist leader, Theodore Dwight Weld, summarized the radical position. Slavery, he said, was pre-eminently a moral question, arresting the conscience of the nation. “As a question of politics and national economy, I have passed it with scarce a look or a word, believing that the business of the abolitionists is with the heart of the nation, rather than with its purse strings.” Such a stance cut this brand of radical off from others who believed philosophically that moral and economic and political forces must be seen in their interaction, and who calculated practically that persons suffering various forms of deprivations had to be brought together into some kind of alliance.

Another “solution” to the slavery problem isolated not only the reformers but the problem. This was the colonization of freed slaves and free blacks. Founded in 1817, the American Colonization Society within a decade or so bought hundreds of slaves and transported them and hundreds of other freed blacks to Liberia, with money raised from churches, state legislatures, and individual donors. People of means tried private experiments in emancipation and colonization. Frances Wright, increasingly concerned about the plight of the blacks, took $10,000, a third of her inheritance, and bought 2,000 acres of dry, rolling land in the densely forested area of western Tennessee. She also purchased five male slaves and three female slaves who were to work cooperatively on the land. Her plan was to raise $41,000 from supporters and eventually settle a hundred slaves. With the hope of eventual freedom before them, the blacks would work off their purchase price and then emigrate to a colony of their own. The settlement would grow until all slaves in the South would be free.

With several white friends, Wright moved into one of two cabins she had built, the blacks into the other. “We have raised buildings for immediate use, cleared and fenced round them, planted and fenced an apple orchard of five acres, planted in potatoes a vegetable garden—opened fifteen acres for corn and planted two of old ground in cotton.” The forest formed a thick, dark wall around the little settlement, and to one observer, it was “desolate.” But Frances Wright’s “mind was so exclusively occupied by the object she had then in view that all things else were worthless”; her enthusiasm for the project bordered on “religious fanaticism.” She had isolated the settlement deliberately, as many planters were hostile to her experiment.

The experiment failed. The forbidding mosquito-infested environment took its toll; Wright became ill and had to leave the management to associates, who allowed it to end in disrepute and failure. She eventually colonized in Haiti the slaves she had purchased.

STATE POLITICS: SEEDBED OF PARTY

By the 1840s, Jefferson’s “People,” the Jacksonian Demos, Hamilton’s “Beast,” had been enthroned—the white male half of it, that is. Not only had the suffrage been immensely broadened, but the electoral college—now chosen directly by the voters—and other institutions had been made more directly and democratically responsive to the electorate. Nevertheless, the rising Demos still needed political organization strong enough to throw the People’s collective power into the political scales, yet stable and firm enough to curb the Beast when occasion might demand. Americans required a political vehicle to organize and mass the people, to fight election contests, to unify their fragmented governments, to translate popular needs and aspirations into public policy and social change. For fifty years such a vehicle had been in the process of being invented and developed, a process as slow and halting as the extension of the suffrage. That vehicle was the political party.

In 1787 a few dozen men had met in Philadelphia and struck off a new constitution that soon was ratified in a dozen state conventions. During the half century after that year, many thousands of men (and lamentably few women), in tens of thousands of local, state, and national meetings, worked out a second charter that may be called a “party” or a “people’s” constitution. The contrasts between the formal Constitution of 1787and the party constitution of the 1780s to the 1830s are sharp and significant.

The Constitution was deeply rooted in centuries of intense moral, political, and legal thought in Europe and America; the party charter had impoverished intellectual roots. The former represented a central, strategic idea—an idea with the intellectual credentials of a Locke, a Montesquieu, a Harrington, and other philosophical giants, carefully applied to the needs and aspirations of the people of a young republic; the national party constitution was shaped without central plan or purpose, in opposition to the accepted wisdom of the day, in meetings held for more limited and parochial purposes. The Constitution was conceived and dedicated by the most illustrious and respectable leaders—men like Washington and Madison inside the Philadelphia convention hall, men like Adams and Jefferson outside. The party charter was spawned outside the establishment, often outside the law, and hence, born a bastard and growing up as a political orphan, it never became quite respectable.

The Constitution was accepted from the start, and indeed soon became a revered symbol of national unity and a mechanism of national unification. The party charter encountered sharp opposition from the established leadership of the new republic. Not only did leaders like Washington and Madison oppose parties as fractious, selfish, turbulent, divisive, but they also opposed or misconceived the essential theory of parties—the theory of majority rule, party rotation in office, party authority, party opposition, party distribution of power, the alternation of elites—that made the party charter in effect a constitution. The strategy of the Framers was to tame power by granting necessary authority to national officers responsible to conflicting constituencies, and to reserve authority to state and local officers who also had conflicting constituencies—all with an eye to curbing power by splitting it into pieces and balancing the pieces. The strategy of the party constitution was to control power by granting authority to electorally victorious parties that would have to compete against active opposition parties and be subjected to popular confirmation or repudiation in regular, open, and democratic elections. And that too was a difference—perhaps the fundamental difference—between the two constitutions.

To refer to the party charter as a general strategy and set of procedures would imply that a single central document existed somewhere, as the formal Constitution does under glass in the National Archives. In fact the party charter was more like the British constitution—a collection of laws, institutions, regulations, usages, understandings, traditions, to be found in diverse places. The party founders had no strategy shaped out of political theory; they found one later in practice.

The Constitution created a new national government and left the state governments in place, with their own constitutions and governments. But by fragmenting power, it made national parties necessary at the same time that it made them impossible—necessary because parties, with their coalition building and other unifying tendencies and machinery, could provide essential teamwork among the constitutionally separated branches of government, impossible because the existing parties (actually factions) were further fragmented and pulverized as they acted upon, and were acted upon by, those separated branches. By establishing two levels of constitutional and governmental authority—the national level and the state level—the Constitution also indirectly established two levels of party activity—in effect would create a party federalism as well as a constitutional and governmental federalism. Since state governments and political systems already existed (though somewhat altered after 1787), all this meant in effect that state political systems continued to exist for a time in roughly their pre-Constitution form while a new national political system slowly took shape.

Considering that both Federalist and anti-Federalist leaders opposed the idea of strong national parties, it was remarkable that a Federalist and a Republican party developed so quickly, even before Washington quit the presidency—remarkable that rudimentary state and national party organizations would be formed, rising leaders would exploit intensifying and widening conflict to sharpen two-party competition, Jefferson would assemble and lead a partisan administration, Congress would come to be organized roughly on party lines, the congressional caucus, established on a partisan basis, would become the central nominating mechanism for Presidents; and even the idea of a loyal party opposition would begin to be accepted, at least by some.

The party constitution was by no means fully shaped during the first twenty years of the new republic. Party leadership did not fully mobilize party followership, in part because the party leaders did not have a strategy of party, or even a commitment to it. Party organization was rudimentary; parties were not fleshed out with leaders, officials, whips, activists. Party feeling was often intense but also unstable, unevenly distributed, lacking in depth. There were parties, but not a party system, not an institutionalized party ramifying through leadership cadres, levels and branches of government, into mobilized mass followings. Hence it was possible for a partisan President like Jefferson to be succeeded by a lackluster partisan like Madison and in turn by a partyless man like Monroe. And it was perhaps inevitable that the party structure beginning to be erected by the end of John Adams’ presidency would be in decay by the start of John Quincy Adams’.

It was at the state level that the party charter continued to be shaped, parties persisted, party systems and structures began to develop. It was at this level that a fundamental transformation of American politics was precipitated.

New York State served as the great testing ground for party. If downstate Virginians had been the main intellectual fathers of the formal Constitution, upstate New Yorkers were the leading experimenters and shapers of the second, “people’s” constitution. Perhaps it was natural that this state, embracing social diversity and robust political life, should be the vanguard in the shift from the politics of the 1790s to the politics of the 1830s. New York was already a polyglot land, with its inflows of English and French and Rhinelanders, its Dutch Reformed, Huguenot, and other major religious groupings, its busy ports along the Hudson, capped by Albany and Troy; its spreading settlements on Long Island and in Westchester County; its estates of Dutch patroons and English squires; its enormous hinterland peopled by Indians, trappers, and traders; its vigorous, factious, independent, and dynamic politics reflecting the social and economic life of its people.

Even so, New York after the Revolution, continuing through the Federalist years and well into the Jeffersonian Republican epoch, epitomized not the politics of “modernity” but that of the mother country and its colonies. This was the politics of family and faction, patrician leaders and dutiful followers, hierarchy and deference. It was a politics of large patriarchal families controlling power and patronage in a narrow arena of governmental decision, and hence it was a politics of consensus within the upper socioeconomic stratum—in essence an upper-class politics, cloaked in a politics of compelling personality.

De Witt Clinton personified this kind of politics. Son of a Revolutionary War major general and nephew of George Clinton, the first governor of New York State, De Witt Clinton after graduating from Columbia rose quickly with his uncle’s help. At the age of twenty, “he had arrived at a position of considerable political influence without having been obliged to serve an apprenticeship in the humble ranks of party workers, a circumstance,” according to a biographer, “which may account for certain defects as a tactician which he showed in later life.” In the personalistic wars of the New York Montagues and Capulets, he took on the Livingston, Jay, and other patrician families, and bolted the Republican ranks to become Federalist candidate for President in 1812. He ended up in low repute with both parties. Aristocratic in bearing, snobbish in attitude, resentful of criticism, he was, however, just the man to capitalize on his own vision, elite status, and network of personal supporters to drive through the planning and building of the Erie Canal. Having switched back to Republicanism, he was rewarded with the governorship in 1820 and in 1822.

The man who was to take the measure of Clinton as a politician, and lead the way in dissolving for good Clinton’s kind of elitist, personalistic politics, hardly looked like a worthy challenger to the patrician six-foot “Magnus Apollo,” as Clinton was called. Small, smooth, sandy-haired, Martin Van Buren had become an astute judge of human nature listening to great talkers in his father’s tavern, but he had no advantage of social status or commanding presence. What Van Buren did possess was a new concept of democratic politics—the concept of party. And he had a group of followers who shaped with him a remarkable party organization that came to be known as the Albany Regency. These adherents—Silas Wright, William Marcy, Azariah Flagg, Franklin Butler, and perhaps a dozen others—were little known outside the Albany-Troy area where most of them lived and politicked. But they knew what they were against: Clinton and his whole system of politics.

And these “Bucktails” knew what they wanted: a united party organization, collective leadership and responsibility, strong party loyalty and discipline, competition between a majority party and a worthy opposition party, and an extensive party apparatus and network. Regency members subordinated their individual interests and even careers to the demands of party as determined by a majority in the legislative caucus. Editors of party newspapers, such as the famed Albany Argus or the New York National Advocate, were expected to follow the party line, and they generally did so; when editor Mordecai Noah of the Advocate quit over alleged interference with the business aspect of his work, he relented under pressure, returned to his post, and stated, “I yield, as I have ever done, with deference to the wishes of the party, when expressed through its accredited organs.” Regency Republicans in the legislature were also expected to vote the party position (when the party had a position), even at risk to their careers. When seventeen legislators stood against a popular measure opposed by the Regency, in response to Van Buren’s request that they “magnanimously sacrifice individual preferences for the general good,” the lawmakers deliberately staked their posts. A few actually failed of re-election. The only reward for these potential martyrs was a banquet where, as Marcy wrote Flagg, “something approaching to divine honors were lavished on the Seventeen.”

Party solidarity and loyalty came naturally to these men. They trusted one another, consulted with one another, respected one another’s opinions and advice. They played as well as worked together. “Their families interchange civilities,” it was noted, “their females kiss each other when they meet—their men shake each other heartily by the hand—they dine, or drink, or pray, or take snuff” with one another. As governor, Marcy read his proposed speeches to party colleagues in advance for their approval; Van Buren consulted closely with his associates. This kind of collective counsel was especially impressive in light of the quality of these men, no robots or pawns or party hacks but a group of unusually clear-headed, purposeful, thoughtful, honest men of considerable educational attainments and social standing.

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of these leaders was to shape, as much in practice as in advance theorizing, a formidable concept of party government and majority rule. That concept embraced the propositions that competition between two strong, unified, disciplined parties was not dangerous to a democracy but vital to its health and maintenance; that harmony and consensus were undesirable and undemocratic when fundamental issues divided the people; that the absence of parties, or the amalgamation of them, would sap the foundations of liberty, especially freedom of speech and press; that party competition, spirit, and discord stimulated popular interest and dispelled apathy; that the parties—a governing party monitored and checked by an opposition party—served as a vital, extra-constitutional set of checks and balances.

Party advocates also emphasized the role of parties as watchdogs. The organized parties, Governor Enos Throop said, “watch and scan each other’s doings, the public mind is instructed by ample discussion of ample measures, and acts of violence are restrained by the convictions of the people, that the prevailing measures are the results of enlightened reason.” Above all, the theorists believed in majority rule, within and between parties.

The ultimate question, however, was what parties stood for, as platform makers and policy shapers. It has long been supposed that Van Buren and other Regency leaders during these early years took radical, egalitarian positions on public issues. More recent analysis, however, shows that behind their rhetoric about “Democracy versus Aristocracy,” and “Republicans against Hartford Feds,” was a strongly conservative cast. The Regency’s loudest war cry, as late as 1830, was for states’ rights; Van Buren and associates took conservative positions on the leading reform issues of imprisonment for debt, free public education, and presidential electoral reform. Under the doctrine of party government and majority rule, the crucial test was not what parties were for or against at any particular time, but whether they could serve as vehicles for political leadership, popular mobilization, and governmental action in the face of new needs and changing public attitudes.

That test came suddenly in July 1832, with Jackson’s dramatic veto of the United States Bank recharter. For years the Regency had been accused of protecting its own “monsters”—its own state banks and Freemasonry. Now Jackson had handed it a new, far more spectacular, and easily hateable Monster, Biddle’s national bank. After the veto message showed the way, Lee Benson wrote, the Regency’s strategy was obvious: “Jump on board the antimonopoly bandwagon, guide it down the state rights road, and crush the Monster in its Greek temple on Chestnut Street, Philadelphia.” In effect the Democrats had “dished the Whigs”—had dished even more the Anti-Masons and Workingmen, who had sought to monopolize the egalitarian, anti-”Monster” thunder.

Thus a spectacular national act had catalyzed party conflict in New York State, with powerful implications for national party realignment and competition. Whether Jackson’s act, which immediately transformed 1832 presidential campaign strategy, would have a long-run effect on the American parties as a whole would depend on events also in other states.

Massachusetts, with its established patrician families and newly arrived Irish, its multitudes of farmers and factory hands and fishermen, its Beacon Hill and Brattle Street Brahmins who looked down on the social-climbing elites up and down the Atlantic seaboard, was almost as variegated as New York. The old commonwealth was developing industrially faster, probably, than any other state. Cotton mills were multiplying; railroads were radiating out from Boston; bankers and merchants were thriving and looking for places to put their money; Yankee captains and missionaries were searching for trade and heathen across the seven seas. If political families and factions were less contentious than in New York; religious groups were perhaps more so, as conservative and radical Unitarians debated each other, and orthodox Congregationalists held their ground against dissenting Baptists, Methodists, and Quakers; and all the Protestant sects closed ranks against the expanding Catholic population.

Massachusetts resembled New York and other states, however, in its passage from the old elitist politics of deference to the new politics of egalitarian rhetoric and wider political participation. The passage was illustrated by the contrast between Daniel Webster and the Jackson brand of politician. Webster, product of Exeter and Dartmouth, protégé of Boston notables, an admired insider in Beacon Hill society, Senate spokesman first of New England merchants and later of manufacturers, was the quintessential elitist transcending superficial popular favor. The widening of the suffrage and the rising winds of equality helped bring a new breed of politician to the fore.

David Henshaw was typical. Born not in Federalist Boston but in the hinterland near Worcester, apprenticed to a druggist at sixteen after a meager education in the village academy, he quickly rose in business and politics to become a powerful voice against the political establishment. Rewarded by Jackson with the patronage-rich collectorship of the port of Boston, Henshaw built a party machine not unlike the Albany Regency, especially in its appeal to rural voters outside the Yankee coastal region, and in its use of a party press, including Henshaw’s own paper, the Boston Statesman. A stocky man of medium height and two hundred pounds, Henshaw believed in party leadership, regularity, and loyalty. He was also a conservative, as were many of the early Jackson men in the Commonwealth, but here too Jackson’s bank veto catalyzed state Democrats and produced a swing toward radical rhetoric.

Massachusetts illustrated how, in a system that sustained party federalism as well as constitutional federalism, state politics refracted back upon national. The experience of Kentucky was quite different, but this frontier state also became part of an overall pattern of the decline of deference, the rise of grass-roots parties, and the complex interrelation of state and national politics.

Kentucky had seemed particularly vulnerable to boom and bust. All a Kentuckian needed to set up a bank during the post-1812 war years, some said, was a charter and a printing press. Land-hungry pioneers had borrowed from the state banks to buy more acreage; state banks expanded their circulation to meet demand; the newly re-established national bank in Philadelphia undertook its own liberal program of credit expansion, but then suddenly shifted toward contraction. The Panic of 1819 had left Kentucky with dozens of beleaguered state banks that in turn pressed their debtors harshly. Responding to desperate need, the legislature passed measure after measure to help debtors, most notably a “stay” law giving them an extra two years to pay off notes. Indignant creditors, turning to the courts for relief, won from circuit judge James Clark a ruling that a key debtor-relief law was unconstitutional.

Then followed a battle of Checks and Balances. A committee of the legislature denied the right of the judge to veto a deliberate measure of the government and recommended his removal. This move did not gain the needed two-thirds vote in the legislature. When the court of appeals sustained Clark, the legislature tried to remove the whole court, and failed again. A “relief party” then appealed to the people in the election of 1824. Showing a striking ability to organize a campaign and to engage with the needs and hopes of the voters, rejecting the old politics of deference in favor of mass campaign techniques, the relief party won the governorship and a majority in both houses of the legislature. Once again the reliefers tried to remove the erring judges from office, but could not secure the elusive two-thirds. Finally, arguing that if they could not remove the judges from their seats, they could remove the “seats from the judges,” the relief party in the legislature removed the old court and authorized the governor to appoint a new one.

Out of the crisis and conflict in Kentucky had arisen a whole new leadership cadre, headed by Amos Kendall and Francis Blair. An editor, slaveholder, and conservative Republican, Kendall had been cool to debt-relief measures, but later he changed his mind, especially when he had to borrow $1,500 from his old friend Henry Clay and several thousands more from his new friend Martin Van Buren. Once enlisted in the debtors’ cause, Kendall became its fiery leader. He pilloried the “court” party as a pack of conspirators and speculators, directed his appeals straight to the dirt farmers and the “common man”—and got chased in his editorial offices by an anti-relief lawyer brandishing a hickory stick. He and Blair also denounced high tariffs and federal improvements, thus widening the breach with their mentor Henry Clay.

The election year of 1828 brought Kendall his supreme opportunity to link up with Jackson. Bypassing the local elite, whose political power was based on a system of self-perpetuating county courts that controlled local appointments, he set up a central committee in Louisville to call for a state convention that would agree on a statewide ticket of Jackson electors. He organized mass meetings of Jackson voters who would meet in local conventions, as well as local committees headed by county and district leaders who reported to state committees.

Kendall, in short, built an integrated mass party in order to outflank the political dominance of the gentry. Where his own party following was inadequate he built alliances with Old Court men. It was only natural that, as the architect of Jackson’s big victory in Clay’s own state, Kendall would move to Washington and join his new mentor. And it was only natural that this fiery editorialist, who had won political influence by demagogic appeals to the common man, should make Jackson’s bank recharter veto message a political arrow that flew straight to the emotional heart of the electorate.

Behind all the sound and fury in Kentucky politics, historians have found a rational grass-roots demand for economic relief and change, a popular urge for meaningful democratic participation in politics, strong “social and economic aspiration burning in the hearts of Kentuckians.” Although Jackson would fail to carry Kentucky against native son Clay in 1832, the politics of the state had been changed for good, with an organized, competitive two-party system replacing the oligarchical politics of deference. Like Kentucky, each of the other states was unique but virtually all were forced to move toward Jacksonian democracy. And all the states, as they sent to Washington politicians like Henshaw and Kendall and a host of enterprising senators and congressmen, were helping to shape a new national political system, even while they were being shaped by it.

MAJORITIES: THE FLOWERING OF THE PARTIES

How and why Americans shaped a national party system—how they framed their second, or “people’s,” constitution—is one of the most complex and perplexing developments in American history. The storyteller would surely prefer to recount the wonderful tale of the great men who met in Philadelphia in 1787 and struck off their constitution in one glorious summer than to follow the labyrinthine process by which little-known men built parties in many places over a long period of time. Then, too, historians disagree about the nature of this party building, even though—or perhaps because—exceptionally talented scholars have pursued their historical studies in the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian period of party formation. They differ over basic questions of causation—whether the direction and shape that parties took during the first fifty years of the national existence was a product mainly of ideological forces, economic factors, intellectual effort, political calculation, institutional changes, chance, or interplay among some or all of these variables.

In exploring these causes it would be well to keep in mind that no economic development or institutional change or “great idea” in itself directly builds a political party. Transportation improvements, for example, helped make it easier for widely dispersed men to come together in party conventions, but no improved stagecoach or locomotive built parties. Party “as such is a product of human ingenuity and not simply a natural growth,” in William Chambers’ words. “It must be built by the efforts of skilled political craftsmen, including major leaders at the center and hundreds or thousands of lesser leaders in outlying localities, who must at least know that they are devising co-ordinated means to their immediate ends, although they may not be wholly aware of the fact that they are shaping a party in the process.” Those who built parties were neither the celebrities of the age nor local nobodies; party did not emerge as a result of mass action at the grass roots. Parties were formed by leaders experimenting with new ways of gaining office and power.

The first parties were largely networks of leaders, mostly notables. Born and bred in the old politics of colonial days, the political leaders of the 1790s still operated in a system of deference to established notables, of family “connections” and influence, of limited participation by “average” farmers, workers, and clerks, even less involvement by women, and none at all by black slaves and white paupers. How was it that leaders who embodied and personified the politics of elitism and deference could themselves be instruments for change? The answer lay in sharply growing issue conflicts that raised the political consciousness of millions of Americans. As long as Americans were broadly agreed about national policy, as they were during most of Washington’s presidential years, political competition was muted. Strong sentiments for or against Jefferson and Adams, and the burning issues over relations with the French and the British—issues that evoked powerful feelings and memories and loyalties—acted as catalysts cutting across regional and local attachments. The national Federalist and Republican parties were born out of this kind of conflict, which took on a new intensity with the War of 1812.

During this period Americans had national parties but not a national party system. Presidents, senators, and representatives typically acted and talked like good Federalists or good Republicans. The press was highly partisan. Congressional Republicans, at least, were well organized in their caucus. A few states had developed party organizations. But all this did not make a system: Parties were not generally seen as legitimate. Party leaders in office did not recognize the legitimacy of opposition parties. Party organization in most states was rudimentary. While many activists were highly partisan, settled party conviction and commitment among the electorate were limited to a few places in a few states. One could detect a “party in office,” in short, but only a feeble party organization nationwide, and limited party affiliation among the electorate. And linkages that might make for strong and persisting structures—integrated national-state-local machinery, unified electoral and organizational effort, strong and stable party memberships—were rudimentary or absent.

As dramatic conflict over national issues declined following the War of l812, so did the central role of national party leadership and organization. With the Federalist party almost dead outside New England, and with the Republican party reduced to state and factional in-fighting, Monroe’s presidency was a time of heightened factional dispute but blurred party division. Party was left in the care, sometimes benign and sometimes casual, of the states. National party unity and organization fell into disarray.

The congressional caucus for nominating Presidents and Vice-Presidents—potentially the most powerful agency of national party power—both fostered and reflected this disarray. The caucus had started as early as 1792, when some Republican congressmen, after taking soundings in the states, met in Philadelphia to choose George Clinton to run against Vice-President John Adams. The Republicans held no caucus in 1796 because Jefferson was the unquestioned choice. Four years later, forty-three senators and representatives meeting at Marache’s boardinghouse again agreed that Jefferson was pre-eminently their man, and formally endorsed Burr for Vice-President. The congressional caucus of 1804 routinely endorsed President Jefferson and substituted Clinton for Burr. In l808, when the Republicans chose Madison overwhelmingly over Monroe, at least the caucus had a decision to make, but in 1812 its re-endorsement of Madison was unanimous. The 1816 caucus was actually a contest, with Monroe besting Crawford in a relatively close vote, but hardly a fifth of the members even showed up at the 1820 caucus. In 1824 the caucus was unable to perform its most essential function of uniting support behind one candidate. The Federalists had had even less success with a congressional caucus.

The reign of “King Caucus” had been brief, its rule weak. It died during the period of consensual, partyless government under Monroe. Only a pervasive conflict could create the conditions of raised political consciousness within which party competition could flourish, and that conflict came with the nomination and election of Adams in 1824, as a result of intense opposition to him, the apparent deal against Jackson, and the growing and divisive influence of Old Hickory first as candidate, then as the tribune of the common man, and finally as the opponent of Biddle.

In what institutional form this rising political conflict and election competition would be expressed became the crucial question in the 1830s. The nation’s politics might have reverted to the “King of the Rock,” “Winner Take All” politics of earlier years—the elitist politics of faction, personal following, closed caucus, the politics of family influence, social class, economic elitism. Profound changes in the foundations of American politics, however, made such a reversion impossible. The egalitarian issues posed, by Jefferson and Jackson had permeated the electorate and immensely raised its political consciousness. The widening of the suffrage in the states, along with other measures of democratization, had expanded the number and broadened the class membership of voters that candidates had to attract. The very feel and aroma of politics had changed, with the new hucksterism and vote cadging, the decline of the gentry and of deference, the rise of the political professional who made politics his life and his living, the proliferation of patronage jobs, the profusion of small caucuses, conventions, election rallies, political parades and picnics and paraphernalia. All this amounted, in Richard McCormick’s words, to a “hidden revolution” in the political environment.

This hidden revolution was intellectual, too—an upheaval in leaders’ concepts of the role of faction, interest, party. The framers of the “Constitution” abhorred the ideas underlying the second, or people’s, constitution—government by parties—as tending toward faction, turbulence, selfishness. Consciously or not, they wrote a constitution that would pulverize and crush parties. Even in founding the Republican party Jefferson would not recognize the legitimacy of party opposition. It took hundreds of men, working at the state and local grass-roots of politics, to repudiate the anti-party doctrine of the Framers, whom they otherwise revered. They built their state and local parties against the prevailing elitist thought of the day.

One man stood out in his conceptualizing of the “party constitution”—Martin Van Buren. The “red fox of Kinderhook” may have been sly and slippery in some of his political machinations, but intellectually he was a hedgehog, in Archilochus’ terms as interpreted by Isaiah Berlin. Van Buren had one big idea, the concept of what party was and could be. Although lacking clear philosophical guidelines, he developed his ideas on a kind of ad hoc, day-to-day basis. In later years he fleshed out his views, just as the Framers did about the Constitution in their retirements, but as early as 1827 Van Buren was arguing that a general convention would be better than the congressional caucus to concentrate the anti-Adams vote. He maintained that a convention would lead to the “substantial reorganization of the Old Republican Party,” substitute “party principles” for “personal preference,” and strengthen Republicanism in New England and the Republican political coalition between North and South.

Ultimately Van Buren developed virtually an ideology of party as the essence of a democracy of liberty and virtue. In a most hedgehog-like fashion, he broadened his party concept in arguing that free competitive parties were essential to the public interest, inseparable from free government, necessary to prevent abuse of private power, and conducive to the moral discipline of institutional loyalty and personal self-restraint. He believed parties must pursue high principle as well as low patronage, must compete vigorously with one another, must generate a clash of platforms as well as personalities. Above all—the highest test of a believer in the second constitution—he not only accepted but welcomed the idea of a continuing, responsible, and legitimated opposition. If earlier the “fundamental cause for the failure to create a national organization was intellectual,” in James Chase’s words, the critical factor in the later formation of a national party system was also conceptual and intellectual.

The creation of the presidential nominating convention provided the keystone for the party arch. Here again New York and other states had experimented with ways of moving party nominations out of the relatively small and unrepresentative legislative caucuses into conclaves of delegates chosen in state and local meetings. By the mid-1830s state conventions were well established in the central states and in Ohio and Kentucky; conventions for local nominations were widely employed in New England; they were, however, slow to be established in most of the South. After the Anti-Masons experimented with the first presidential nominating convention in 1831, in Baltimore, the Democrats staged their own the next year in the same city for the renomination of President Jackson, and for the nomination—appropriately—of Martin Van Buren for Vice-President. This convention pioneered in adopting the two-thirds rule for nominations, and in agreeing to a non-binding unit rule that allowed a majority of delegates from a state to cast the entire vote of the state. These rules, little considered at the time, would become critical to the Democrats in later years. The Whigs, emerging out of the National Republican party that had held its national convention in 1831, were forced to adopt the presidential convention as a permanent fixture.

So by the late 1830s Americans had a party system. National, state, and local parties were linked through a pyramid of local, county, and congressional-district conventions sending delegates to state and national conventions. Party consciousness was high among both party leaders and party followers. Strong cadres of leaders developed at every level. Party competition was intense and strengthened partisan feeling on both sides. The parties were well balanced against each other not only nationally but also in most of the states—a degree of national political unity that would not be seen again for four decades. The linkage within and between parties was almost complete.

On the surface, at least, the two parties looked splendid, with their national conventions topping the pyramids of state, county, and local committees and caucuses and conventions, their sonorous platforms rhetorically thwacking their foes hip and thigh, their national and state leaders skilled in the arts of intra-party negotiation and compromise, their robust local activity full of parades and picnics and speechifying and occasional fisticuffs and barroom brawls. Behind the façade lay certain weaknesses, existing and potential.

It was not wholly clear by the end of the 1830s what the parties were, what they were for and against. More than ever the Democrats claimed to be the “party of the common man,” despite the fact that it did not engage with the average woman or the blacks or the really poor; nor did these people engage with the Democrats. The Jacksonians had made some effort to appeal to the expanding wage-earning class, especially in Van Buren’s executive order establishing a shorter working day on federal public projects, but the Democracy was still largely an agrarian party. The Whigs, an unstable coalition of old Federalists, Anti-Masons, mercantile and industrial elements, and a congeries of other groupings, found it much easier to denounce Jackson’s executive “usurpation” and Van Buren’s partisanship than to develop a positive program of their own. Both parties had weaknesses at their foundations. Political change and realignment had occurred so quickly during the 1830s that large numbers of Americans were left in a void between or outside the two major parties. State and local parties lacked organization and vigor in a number of areas, especially in the South and parts of the West.

The main weakness of party as the second, or “people’s,” constitution lay in its awkward embrace with the first. The organized two-party system of the late 1830s was potentially strong enough to be a vehicle for popular majority rule. Theoretically a winning majority party takes over the government and rules until at least the next election. But the Constitution was craftily designed to thwart majority rule. Winners of a presidential election could take over the White House but not necessarily the Congress. Representatives were elected out of their own, often independent constituencies; only a third of the senators were even chosen in the same year as the President. The Supreme Court, as John Marshall had demonstrated, lay beyond the reach of transient popular majorities. Even if one party achieved the feat of winning control of the whole federal government, a profusion of states, counties, cities, and towns had their own counterbalancing and conflicting constituencies.

The party “constitution,” in short, was designed to concentrate power, the formal Constitution to disperse it. Only a centrally organized and powerfully led and united party could overcome the separation of powers and checks and balances stitched into the American national and state constitutional systems, and neither the Whigs nor the Democrats were such a party. Thus the first constitution rent the second far more than the second constitution knit together the first. To a great extent, indeed, different parts of the two parties enhanced fragmentation by providing a local or state party foundation for the dispersed efforts of independent legislators or elected officials.

Still, the republic was only half a century old by the end of the 1830s; it was still young, changing, experimental. The question was the future potential for majority rule through party government. Voting turnout rose so strongly and dramatically during the 1830s as to seem to make the “people’s” constitution ultimately more viable. The participation of more and more low-income people in voting also made more possible a national party, whether Democratic or Whig or something else, that could provide the nation with a genuinely radical, democratic, popular national government that might, if given enough time and sense of commitment, unite the separated organs of government behind a comprehensive national effort to meet the needs and aspirations of the great number of lower-income people.

CHAPTER 11

The Majority That Never Was

SIXTY YEARS AFTER THE Declaration of Independence, Americans still had a revolutionary credo without a revolutionary movement, a radical rhetoric without a radical party. At the Fourth of July celebrations of 1836, during President Jackson’s last year in office, orators evoked the egalitarian phrases of the Declaration with little heed to the considerable inequality around them. The eras of Jefferson and Jackson would come to be described as “revolutions,” but these at most were political rather than economic or social overturns. During these eras men had been revolved in and out of office, legislative and bureaucratic elites joined and sometimes displaced by more plebeian and populist types, banking and other establishments challenged, smaller enterprisers given a better chance to rise to the top. But the structure of society and government remained unchanged.

So did the essential condition of freed and enslaved blacks, middle-class and lower-class women, and the urban and rural poor. Together these people comprised the great majority of the population. These blacks and women and poor could hardly have been more different from one another. They could barely communicate with one another or even recognize each other, much less sympathize with one another. Some would hate one another. Yet the three groups had some things in common—they were in many ways impotent, economically, socially, politically, legally. They all were living in a great republic that preached and practiced its own peculiar form of majority rule. And they, together with Indians both subjugated and unvanquished, made up a popular majority in contrast to the cadres of middle-class and upper-class white men running the affairs of the republic. In the expanding democratic consciousness of the 1830s and 1840s, was there any chance for some kind of collective revolutionary or radical or even reformist impetus from people who shared only their powerlessness?

Historians have enough trouble dealing with events that did happen without trying to consider events that might have happened but did not, or should have happened and could not. But occasionally, like the dog that did not bark in the night, supremely important developments that might have occurred, and in the eyes of many should have happened but in the end did not, must be considered in the balance accounts of history. This must be done not only to grant a kind of retrospective historical justice to such groups, but even more because in the stream of history the causal agents that are blocked or diverted are entwined with those that are intensified and accelerated. Knowing the potential forces that never came into being helps us understand those that did.

“If ever America undergoes great revolutions,” Tocqueville wrote, “they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition.”

The potential reformist or radical or revolutionary forces that never came to realization—how can they be measured? First by assessing the “objective” conditions of people suffering major deprivations. Then, and more difficult, by analyzing how people responded subjectively to the unsatisfied wants and needs arising from those conditions. Finally, and most difficult of all, estimating the leadership, institutional, ideological, and other external forces that influenced the motivation and ability of people to reform, radicalize, or revolt.

The capacity to measure “objective” conditions has been enormously enhanced by the joint efforts of historians, archivists, demographers, geographers, and others. Through memoirs, diaries, account books, tax rolls, and the like, sophisticated analysis has provided better insight into the everyday lives of lower-class persons than do some of the lurid and partisan accounts of the past. These latter reports have often described exceptional situations, because they were more easily dramatizable and publishable. But they ignore the experiences of the great number of persons studied—experiences that ultimately affected the course of history.

Consider, for example, the “slaver.” All too familiar are the horrifying tales of those floating slave pens whose smell of human squalor could be picked up miles downwind. On some slavers black persons sickened and died by the scores, were brutalized sexually and in other ways, thrown overboard on the approach of a naval vessel, left to die of thirst by deserting crews, were flogged, mutilated, hanged, and shot after any show of resistance. But for most slaves La Fortuna was a more typical introduction to life and death in America.

On La Fortuna, a ninety-ton schooner bound out of the Rio Pongo for Cuba, everything was efficiency, for maximum profit. Before embarkation the heads of all Africans, male and female, had been neatly shaven, and their bodies lightly branded with pieces of silver wire forming the recipient merchant’s initials. Given a final big “feed” in the African slave pens, they had been taken out to the ship in canoes and stripped naked. The men were sent into the hold, the women to a cabin, and children left on deck. At mealtime, rice or farina or yams or beans, depending on tribal origin, were served in a large tub. The slaves dipped into it and swallowed on commands from a monitor; to prevent “inequality in the appropriation of nourishment.” Every morning a dram was given to prevent scurvy, and thrice a week mouths were washed out with vinegar. At sundown the blacks were stowed below, in spoon position, each head in the next person’s lap. Shackles were used as little as possible, and only for full-grown men, as it was believed that the more a slave was ironed, the more he deteriorated.

This trip was profitable for Captain Canot. After deducting expenses of $10,900 for his human cargo, $6,200 for the ship and her outfitting, and the pay of officers and crew, he fetched $77,469 for his cargo and $2,950 for the ship, netting $41,439.

Data from rich and diverse sources enable historians to think their way back into the existential conditions even of those who left few formal records. Any retrospective view is partial, distorted, and limited by the cultural blinders of the twentieth-century Western mind, but enough is known about the “objective” circumstances of existence and deprivation to permit speculation about how persons experienced those circumstances at the time, and why they behaved as they did, why they acted or failed to act.

BLACKS IN BONDAGE

Reverend Charles Colcock Jones, the owner of Montevideo, a 941-acre rice and Sea Island cotton plantation on the coast of Georgia, liked things run in an orderly and efficient manner. On a summer morning, as sea breezes drifted through the gray Spanish moss bearding the majestic live oaks, magnolias, and cedars that surrounded the plantation settlement, a single blast of a horn broke the stillness in the slave quarters. The summer sun would be burning as forty or so slaves, after a hurried breakfast, walked from their quarters to the plantation gales. In the fields, Cato, the black foreman, directed the field hands and assigned tasks for the day. Reverend Jones and his family would have fled the summer heat for higher ground at Maybank. Only the slaves, with their white overseer, remained to work the canals, ditches, and dams of rice culture in the malarial, mosquito-ridden swamps.

Cato directed the slaves at a variety of tasks, such as “working the roads, raising the river dams, cutting new ground, making fences, overseeing carpentry, planting cotton, breaking in corn, rice, and hops.” Slaves had to be able to reach the most distant field in an hour’s walk—one reason why Jones and other planters had split their holdings into two or three separate plantations under separate white overseers. Planters often rated a faithful, experienced driver such as Cato more valuable than white overseers, who tended to move from plantation to plantation.

At noon, Cato ordered the slaves to break for dinner, always eaten in the fields; at night, he would tell them to quit. Like other black drivers and foremen, he maintained the agricultural equipment by checking it and noting which implements needed repair. The driver estimated the size of the crop his labor force would produce, supervised the ginning of cotton and the harvest of corn, kept the keys to the barn, dairy, smokehouse, cotton house, gin house, corn house, rice house, winnowing house, and mill house at Montevideo. He kept track of the cattle, poultry, and other livestock holdings of the plantation.

At night, after the day’s work was done, the driver policed the quarters, usually crudely built log cabins with dirt floors. Planters often crowded seven or eight slaves into the two-room cabins. Enlightened men like Jones supplied their slaves with sufficient though badly prepared and monotonous food—rice, fat pork, and clabber. After they had eaten their evening meal, the driver would blow a horn, signaling that every slave must be in for cabin check. Cato made a nightly report to the overseer.

The Montevideo slaves, like the majority of blacks in slavery, could support one another, maintain some community life, and build a certain group solidarity at work and at night in the slave quarters because they lived with other blacks in plantation units of twenty or more. By 1860 more than half of the 3,954,000 blacks listed as slaves lived with more than twenty other slaves; one-fourth of all the bondmen worked on plantations holding more than fifty slaves, while only one-fourth lived on small farms of ten slaves or less. The overwhelming white majority and superior white firepower would have made revolt suicidal, but blacks could maintain their own cultural and spiritual world within the group, and the group, in many cases, was led by one of their own—a black driver or foreman.

Slaves at Montevideo also gathered often in the small chapel built by Reverend Jones for religious meetings. “Your people all seem to be doing very well,” wrote Cato. “They attend praise and go to church regularly whenever there is preaching in reach.” Even in winter, Jones was often absent from Montevideo, preaching and teaching ecclesiastical history at a Columbia, South Carolina, theological seminary. In his absence, slaves received religious instruction from visiting white preachers who used Jones’s “slave catechism” and his widely circulated work, Suggestions on the Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the Southern States. Slaves often heard the favorite text of Reverend Jones: “Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eyeservice, as men pleasers, but in singleness of heart, fearing God. And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.…” Recalcitrant blacks were brought before the local minister, who “cited them in front of the next church service.”

Religion was as important to many slaves as it was to their white masters, if for different reasons. Reverend Jones could not understand the “extravagant and nonsensical chants, and hallelujah songs of their own composing” in the black praise meetings on his plantation. The cultural blend of African tribal customs with evangelical religion created a unique personal area for slaves that the white master could neither comprehend nor control. The singing of spirituals in praise meetings expressed and heightened the slaves’ sense of autonomy and hunger for liberty. Fearing religion as a potentially dangerous force, planters required white preachers such as Jones to lead the worship of slaves. To encourage slaves to listen to white ministers, owners often yielded to their demands for black assistant preachers in praise meetings and worship services. Black ministers formed a third cadre of black leadership, helping to hold their people together under duress.

Always in the consciousness of field hands loomed the “Big House,” with its white masters and black servitors. About one-fourth of all the slaves in the South were house servants, including coachmen and gardeners, Eugene Genovese has estimated. Reverend Jones’s body servant, Tom, dressed his master every morning and attended the family. Some body servants slept at the foot of their master’s bed so as to be ready for his call. Each member of the family had a personal servant. Jones’s son owned a body servant, George, who at times traveled alone on the railroad to Savannah, protected by a written pass from his owner.

Built upon a concept of blacks as inferior and childlike, slavery encouraged owners to promote feelings of dependence. “Will you please keep George, if convenient, with you on the island, about the house,” young Jones wrote to his father, “as I do not wish that he should forget his training. I want him to acquire a house look, which you know is not the acquisition of a day.” Young Jones asked his mother to have slaves make four shirts for George. Later he wrote, “The ‘general’s’ garments fit him admirably and he emphatically looks a little Corporal Trim.…He expects to excite by his fine raiments quite the jealousy of his own sex, and the admiration of the fair sex of kindred extraction.” In some slaves this kind of treatment produced virtual infantilization, but more often blacks only pretended to be dumb, childlike, and ignorant. Donning the grinning, head-bobbing, shambling role of Sambo was another way to resist oppression.

House servants enjoyed better food and clothing than field hands, because they received the leftovers from the master’s table and the family’s castoff clothing. Yet they had to pay a heavy psychological price for their greater material comforts. Living in such close proximity to whites, they were under constant surveillance. They had always to acknowledge their master’s supremacy by deference and docility. Some house servants were obsequious; others put on a mask of submissiveness and spied on the master and his family for their fellow slaves in the quarters. Others openly resisted. In such cases, the responsibility of the driver to discipline his own people for the benefit of the white master made his life ambiguous and difficult. Jane, an eighteen-year-old house servant of Reverend Jones, gave “constant trouble.” Jane’s mother and father, Phoebe and Cassius, had also “occasioned trouble” before. Cato had earlier reported that “Cash has given up going to prayers” and was “cited before the next Meeting” for swearing.

Mary Jones, Reverend Jones’s wife, wished to sell Jane because of her tendency to run away, but would not separate her from her family. Mary Jones especially valued Jane’s mother, Phoebe, an accomplished house servant. “Much as I should miss the mother,” Mary Jones wrote, “I will not separate them if I can help it.” Jane eventually did run away, took the name of Sarah, and with the help of black friends found work as a house servant in Savannah. She pretended that her master had allowed her to find work in the city and pay him her wages. This was known as “hiring her time.” The city constable learned of her runaway status and arrested her, receiving a thirty-dollar reward. On learning of her arrest, the Jones family had her sent to a slave broker and the auction block.

Slavery seriously compromised black family life. The power of owner over slave was absolute, and if a bondman ran away, the owner, not the law, administered punishment. Whether he administered it benevolently or harshly depended upon his nature. Rather than trifling with slaves who showed any inclination to flee, planters often sold them with or without their families, sometimes into the Deep South, where there was little or no chance for escape to freedom.

Since owners could sell slaves away from families at any time, there were no legal marriages among the bonded, and planters occasionally pressured a slave woman to cohabit with a black man not of her choice, to breed new slaves. Many years later, when she was in her nineties and blind, Rose Williams still hated a Texas owner, Hall Hawkins, who kept her family together but wanted her to “marry” a man she despised:

Dere am one thing Massa Hawkins does to me what I can’t shunt from my mind. I knows he don’t do it for meanness, but I allus holds it ’gainst him. What he done am force me to live with dat nigger, Rufus, ’gainst my wants.

After I been at he place ’bout a year, de massa come to me and say, “You gwine live with Rufus in dat cabin over yonder. Go fix it for livin’.” I’s ’bout sixteen year old and has no larnin’, and I’s jus’ igno’mus chile. I’s thought dat him mean for me to tend de cabin for Rufus and some other niggers. Well, dat am start de pestigation for me.

I’s look charge of de cabin after work am done and fixes supper. Now, I don’t like dat Rufus, ’cause he a bully. He am big and ’cause he so, he think everybody do what him say. We’uns has supper, den I goes here and dere talkin’, till I’s ready for sleep and den I gits in de bunk. After I’s in, dat nigger come and crawl in de bunk with me ’fore I knows it. I says, “What you means, you fool nigger?” He say for me to hush de mouth. “Dis my bunk, too,” he say.

“You’s teched in de head. Git out,” I’s told him, and I puts de feet ’gainst him and give him a shove and out he go on de floor ’fore he knew what I’s doin’. Dat nigger jump up and he mad. He look like de wild bear. He starts for de bunk and I jumps quick for de poker. It am ’bout three feet long and when he comes at me I lets him have it over de head. Did dat nigger stop in he tracks? I’s say he did. He looks at me steady for a minute and you’s could tell he thinkin’ hard. Den he go and set on de bench and say, “Jus’ wait. You thinks it am smart, but you’s am foolish in de head. Dey’s gwine larn you somethin’.”

“Hush you big mouth and stay ’way from dis nigger, dat all I wants,” I say, and jus’ sets and hold dat poker in de hand. He jus’ sets, lookin’ like de bull. Dere we’uns sets and sets for ’bout an hour, and den he go out and I bars de door.

De nex’ day I goes to de missy and tells her what Rufus wants and missy say dat am de massa’s wishes. She say, “yous am de portly gal and Rufus am de portly man. De massa wants yu-uns fer to bring forth portly chillen.”

I’s thinkin’ ’bout what de missy say, but say to myse’f, “I’s not gwine live with dat Rufus.” Dat night when he come in de cabin, I grabs de poker and sits on de bench and says, “Git ’way from me, nigger, ’fore I busts you brains out and stomp on dem.” He say nothin’ and git out.

De nex’ day de massa call me and tell me, “Woman, I’s pay big money for you and I’s done dat for de cause I wants yous to raise me chillens. I’s put yous to live with Rufus for dat purpose. Now, if you doesn’t want whippin’ at de stake, yous do what I wants.”

I thinks’bout massa buyin’ me offen de block and saving’ me from bein’ separated from my folks and ’bout bein’ whipped at de stake. Dere it am. What am I’s to do? So I ’cides to do as de massa wish and so I yields.

Rose had two children by Rufus and then left him. “I never marries,” she said later, “cause one ’sperience am ’nough for this nigger.”

The black infant mortality rate was almost double that of whites, yet the slave population between 1830 and 1860 grew by 23 percent every ten years. Slaves married earlier. Many slave women bore children when they were thirteen and fourteen years of age, so that by twenty some had produced five children. Planters gave bounties and prizes to women who boosted the slave population. Mothers had little opportunity to develop a real attachment to their children, since the usual practice was to press the mother back into service one month after childbirth and put the baby in the plantation nursery, where old slave women or slave children cared for the very young.

Because Reverend Jones considered marriage vows among blacks as sacred as among whites, he decided to sell the disobedient family of Phoebe and Cassius as a unit, for “we cannot consent to separate them.” The slaves would have brought much more money if sold separately, but Jones resolved to take an economic loss. Jones then priced the family: “Cassius, Senior, age 45, good field hand, $800; Phoebe, Mother, age 47, accomplished house servant, $1,000; Cassius, Junior, good field hand, age 20, $1,000; Jane, daughter, age 18, house servant, $900; son, field hand, age 16, $800; daughter, Victoria, age 14, active field hand; Lafayette, age 12, smart active boy.…”

Wright, the slave broker, returned much lower estimates to the Joneses for the slaves (approximately $750 apiece), saying: “The estimates given must necessarily be subject to greater or less modification. The size, soundness of teeth, etc. are all to be considered.” Jones wrote that he must have $800 for each, and they must be kept together. He had engaged a man to take them to Savannah by wagon: “Jackson says he will put them in a yard and feed them where he usually stops, and they will be safe, and at a trifling expense.”

Slaves were a large investment, and slave-trading was a profitable business. The price for prime field hands was $1,250 in Virginia and $1,800 in New Orleans by the late 1850s owing to the high demand for slaves in the new cotton fields of the Gulf states. Slave traders often earned commissions and profits of from 5 to 30 percent on the sale price of slaves.

Pressing for the speedy sale of his slaves, but wanting his price too, Jones wrote his son in Savannah to spruce up the appearance of the family for sale, as was the common practice. “You did right in procuring the shoes, and I wish you get of Mr. Lathrop striped Negro winter cloth the same as we bought for the people: six and a half yards apiece, and three yards of cotton homespun apiece and some buttons and thread, and have it given to them. Phoebe and Jane can make it up in a few days.” The expense of keeping them at Wright’s ran to $200 and Jones wrote his son to accept an offer of $4,000 supposedly from an up-country planter who would keep the entire family on his plantation. A professional slave trader, however, quietly bought the family through an agent and took them to New Orleans for separate sale.

Phoebe dictated a message from New Orleans to her adult daughters, Clarissa and Nancy, who, married with families of their own, were left behind on the Jones plantation. Her letter reveals the love that blacks held for their families. “Please tell them that their sister Jane died the first of Feby we did not know what was the matter with her.…Clarissa, your affectionate mother and Father sends a heap of Love to you and your Husband and my Grand Children Phebea. Mag. and Cloe. John. Judy. Sue.,” wrote Phoebe from the slave trader’s quarters in New Orleans. Many slaves, such as Jane, lost their lives in the slave trade. Others resisted. Some tried economic sabotage and covertly slowed down their work or maimed animals or broke tools or stole goods from the master. To run, to conspire, to revolt—these were the more dramatic ways of fighting back.

As a young slave, Nat Turner had fled a cruel and demanding overseer. He hid in the dark swamps of Southampton County, Virginia, to escape the slave patrols and bloodhounds. Thirty days later, Turner walked out of the swamps, not to freedom but back to slavery on the plantation of his master, Benjamin Turner. When asked why he returned, Nat Turner told his astonished fellow slaves, “The Spirit appeared to me and said I had my wishes directed to the things of this world, and not to the kingdom of heaven, and that I should return to the service of my earthly master.” He had returned to lead his people, as an “exhorter” at their religious gatherings. Five feet seven inches tall, slender at 150 pounds, Turner seemed to mesmerize with his blazing, deep-set eyes and spellbinding oratory.

In 1822, Nat Turner was sold away from his wife and children to a new master, Joseph Travis, who demanded heavy, backbreaking labor in the fields. He did allow Turner to preach on Sundays to meetings in neighboring slave churches, which enabled him to learn the Virginia countryside and to tell many free blacks of a judgment day when he and all of his followers “should arise and prepare myself and slay my enemies with their own weapons.”

Turner and his followers met, August 21, 1831, deep in the Southampton County woods to plan their revolt. It was a steamy, hot day, and they knew the whites would be tired that evening from a Sunday of visiting and drinking. The slaves waited. At midnight they struck, taking farm after farm by complete surprise. Beginning with Nat Turner’s own master and his family, the band killed seventy white men, women, and children within twenty-four hours. State and federal militia finally overpowered them and jailed them in Jerusalem, the seat of Southampton County. Slave-hunting patrols killed more than two hundred blacks, many of whom had no knowledge of Turner. He himself escaped into the woods again, but this time he was captured. On November 11, after a short trial, Nat Turner was hanged as an immense crowd watched.

Now the planters closed ranks. The southern slave system became so repressive that no more rebellions broke out after Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831. If he, a trusted slave, could mount such a terrifying rebellion, so might others. States enlarged their patrol and militia systems. Slaves caught without passes could expect twenty lashes from the patrols. The South passed laws abridging freedom of the press and speech for all. In Virginia, anyone printing or circulating literature for the purpose of persuading slaves to revolt was subject to prosecution. The slave codes tightened against not only bondmen but also free blacks throughout the South. In Mississippi, as in much of the lower South, no black person could own a grocery, inn, or tavern or any place where blacks could meet and plot rebellion. It was against the law for a free black to sell liquor or work in a printshop. If detected, the printer was liable to a fine, the black person to the death penalty.

In the North, free blacks managed a meager existence, often little better than in slavery. Northern whites segregated freedmen in the North even as they condemned slavery in the South. The number of free blacks North and South increased slowly from 434,000 in 1850 to 482,000 in 1860. Every new state admitted after 1819 restricted voting to whites. Only five New England states—Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont—provided for equal voting rights for black and white males. Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, and California prohibited black testimony in court if whites were a party to the proceeding. Massachusetts, though advanced in voting rights for blacks, banned intermarriage of whites with blacks and enforced segregation in hotels, restaurants, theaters, and transportation. A black man noted that “It is five times as hard to get a house in a good location in Boston as it is in Philadelphia, and it is ten times as difficult for a colored mechanic to get work here as in Charleston.”

Whatever the discrimination in the North, to thousands of slaves it was still the place of liberty, or at least of hope. A few escaped, traveling at night, sleeping in barns, stealing corn from fields along the way, sometimes taking weeks and even months to reach safety. Some escapes were carefully plotted. Slaves stole horses, forged identity cards, wore disguises, sometimes boldly traveled by steamboat or stayed at the best hotels. Some had themselves shipped in large wooden boxes and a few of these almost suffocated. Some escaped simply by walking north, at night following the North Star. Relatively few fugitives were assisted by the mysterious Underground Railroad. Reputed to speed thousands of slaves north through hidden depots, midnight journeys, telegraphed messages, this “railroad” consisted rather of sporadic local efforts, significant more for raising abolitionist morale than for channeling armies of slaves to freedom. Most slaves made it on their own, or through black communities with the help of other blacks, slave or free. Despite southern fears and abolitionist claims, probably not more than a thousand slaves escaped to freedom in a typical year.

One of these was Fred Bailey; his escape indicated the possibilities and problems facing a black seeking to flee even from a border state with a large population of freedmen. Brought up by grandparents, he had never known his father and barely known his mother. He had luck enough to be sent to Baltimore, where his mistress, a kind and pious woman, began to teach him his letters, until her husband angrily told her to stop, for reading would “spoil the best nigger in the world.” A chip of fate, Frederick was thrust back and forth from plantation and household, but in the process he learned to read, to teach other blacks, to become expert as a ship’s caulker, and even to stand his master off physically to avoid a beating. The master hired him out to a Baltimore shipyard, where white workers tolerated him only because his wages went to his owner. Becoming increasingly independent, self-reliant, and proud, he borrowed papers given to free black seamen coming ashore in southern ports, donned sailor’s clothes, and boarded a train for Philadelphia and freedom. Abolitionists in New York helped him move on to New Bedford and its shipyards.

Frederick Douglass, as he now called himself, could not ply his trade there because white workers threatened to strike, so he had to pick up odd jobs as a common laborer. Finding the Methodist Church segregated, he joined the Zion Methodists, where he became a class leader. Soon he was reading Garrison’s Liberator, attending abolitionist meetings, and talking with his friends at church.

In the summer of 1841, abolitionists held an antislavery convention on the island of Nantucket. Douglass attended—mainly for the holiday, he said later—and was invited to speak. How the crowd was electrified by this dynamic young man with his rich, commanding voice—how they were mesmerized by the story of his years in bondage—how he was hired on the spot to speak for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society—how he spent years on the abolitionist speaking circuit, with Garrison often sharing the platform—how he broke with Garrison and founded his own newspaper, North Star—how for years he gave other blacks a forum in his paper for their opinions—all this and much else became the stuff of one of the great personal histories of the nineteenth century.

Still, abolitionism was faltering even as Douglass, Garrison, and others were achieving their greatest renown. Nothing seemed to thwart Slave Power—not abolitionism or colonization or compromise or slave escapes or revolts. No single effort or strategy was enough to overcome the system of slavery. Could a united effort on the part of all major reformist and deprived elements overcome that system? Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Frederick Douglass, who might well have spent his life absorbed in the cause only of blacks, was that he reached out to other groups—especially to women and their rights.

WOMEN IN NEED

At about the same time that the horn was sounding outside the slave quarters of Montevideo, women on millions of farms throughout the nation were starting their day’s chores in kitchens and outside. Despite the rise of the factory system, most American working women by mid-century were still farm women, and most farm women were still drudges. While their husbands bought steel plows, mowers, threshers, seed drills, and cultivators, farm wives shared little in labor-saving advances. The box stove that came into use in the late 1830s freed some city women of certain vexatious aspects of cooking, but stoves were not yet common in the country. While city women could import Frederic Tudor’s ice from Boston, the country woman had no refrigeration except perhaps a nearby spring or family icehouse. Meat was preserved by curing and smoking it for thirty or forty hours. Milking, churning, pickling, preserving, and sun-drying of vegetables were also the lot of the country woman. On the frontier, women were scarce and hence highly valued but often had to shoulder men’s tasks. On wagon trains going west, they could be seen with ankle-length skirts often hanging in tatters as they yoked cattle, pitched tents, loaded wagons, lifted heavy iron pots onto crossbars over the campfires.

Along with the house and farm chores many country women still made clothes for their families, at least until ready-made clothing began to penetrate the more remote rural towns by the 1840s. Girls started weaving thread into cloth as early as their fifth year. An older and steadier hand was required to gauge the amount of flax to spin: if too thick, the thread would bunch up; if too thin, it would break. To spin enough for a single square yard of cloth required one full day. Weaving was faster, five or six square, yards a day. Women made sheets, blankets, towels, and rugs as well as the family clothing.

A farm woman typically was expected to rear six children on a two-and-one-half-year cycle of childbirth from her early twenties to her late thirties. The emotional and physical burden of repeated childbirth overwhelmed many women, resulting in ill health and premature aging if not in death. Although conscious family limitation was occasionally practiced, a historian noted, effective contraception was not available, and “custom, myth, religion, and men” acted to limit birth control. “I would it were not thus,” Millicent Leib Hunt, wife of a prominent Detroit settler, complained on the birth of still another child. “I love my liberty, my ease, my comfort and do not willingly endure the inconveniences and sufferings of pregnancy and childbirth,” but these were “God’s ways” and she reproached herself for daring to complain. Before the birth of each of her five children she expected that either she or the baby—or both—would die.

Mothers had constantly to confront illness and death in the home. Children by the thousands died in epidemics of scarlet fever, cholera, ague, bilious fevers: the younger they were, the more vulnerable. Of the deaths recorded in South Carolina one year, nearly one-half were children under the age of five, nearly one-fourth children under one year.

Some women managed to escape all this—at least for a time. The growing factories of the Northeast continued to recruit women. Immigrants and farm girls flocked to Lowell and other mill towns. The work they turned to liberated other women as well, for they could now replace a large part of their labor time with manufactured clothing. Every time a woman left home to work in the mills she expanded both the labor reserve and the market for the specific goods of her industry. Every worker who swelled the ranks of the mill dimmed the prospects of better working conditions or even the success of the whole lot. By the 1840s, the bloom was off the social experiment that was to have been a shining example of the Yankee ideal of profit combined with virtue.

Alterations in the means and mode of production lay at the root of the change. As the owners faced sharpening competition, the pressure came to be unrelenting, forcing heavier workloads on women who were paid at piece rates. In the 1820s and 1830s, each operator was expected to handle two looms, allowing some relief and rest; later they were compelled to handle three or four. In 1834 the Lowell management, taking advantage of the labor pool, announced a 15 percent wage cut. Hours had always been long; but the speedup combined with wage cuts made conditions in the mills almost intolerable. The women worked amid an infernal racket, in rooms polluted by flying lint particles and fumes from whale-oil lamps and kept oppressively warm and humid because the threads had to be damp to prevent breakage. Although the mill girls had been vaccinated against smallpox, nevertheless typhoid, dysentery, and especially tuberculosis took their toll in the crowded factories.

As textile operations expanded, the repressive aspects of the old Yankee paternalism persisted while the more personal and benign elements faded. Mill owners could ignore women’s problems of illness, exhaustion, restlessness, simple desire for change, because all knew that many workers would sooner or later be returning to homes elsewhere and would take these sorts of problems back with them. The fact that the owners’ concept of factory labor ultimately turned on the basic premise that they were simply buying one more object—human labor—became increasingly blatant. Stepped-up mechanization and widening routinization within the factories were beginning to produce a class of proletarians far removed from the early image of the happy mill girl.

Would the mill workers become conscious of their altered status? The historian usually was left to speculate about the “short and simple annals of the poor.” But in this case the factory women left a superb legacy of writings—not only letters and diaries but a “literature of the mill.” The best side of Yankee paternalism—the concern for “enlightening” and “elevating” the mill girl—had a remarkable effect. The night-school classes, Improvement Societies, Lyceum lectures given by Emerson, Everett, Horace Mann, Robert Owen, and other notables, the subscriptions to circulating libraries, even the Sunday-school classes, all helped produce an outpouring of writing in the operatives’ own magazine, the Lowell Offering, and elsewhere. They were exposed to all kinds of socialist, democratic, and Utopian thought, the labor movement, abolition, poverty, budding class consciousness. The editor of the Offering, Harriet Farley, was expected by management to maintain strict neutrality, but the feelings of the mill hands, and especially their rising consciousness of the nature of factory life, burst through.

Thus a “fictional” account of a mill girl’s first day at work:

“The next morning she went into the Mill, and at first the sight of so many bands, and wheels, and springs in constant motion, was very frightful. She felt afraid to touch the loom, and she was almost sure she could never learn to weave…the shuttle flew out, and made a new bump on her head; and the first time she tried to spring the lathe, she broke out a quarter of the treads.”

Letters also revealed feelings.

“Dear Friend,” wrote a mill worker to a confidante back home, “according to my promise I take my pen in hand to Write to you to let you no that i am A Factory girl and i wish you Was one i dont no But thaire Will be aplace For you in a fortnigh or three Weeks and as Soon as thaire is iwill let you no and as soon as you Can board With me We will have first rate fun getting up mornings in the Snow Storms.…Elisebeth is a lot of hansome fellows here….for pitty Sake dond Show this letter to any body for the girls are talking So that idont no What iWrite.”

“Dear Harriet,” wrote H. E. Back to a friend in New Hampshire. “With a feeling which you can better imagine than I can describe do I announce to you the horrible tidings that I am once more a factory girl! yes; once more a factory girl, seated in the short attic of a Lowell boarding house with a half dozen of girls seated around me talking and reading.…I almost envy you happy Sundays at home. A feeling of loneliness comes over me when I think of my home, now far away; you remember perhaps how I used to tell you how I spent my hours in the mill—in imagining myself rich and that the rattle of machinery was the rumbling of my charriot wheels but now alas, that happy tact has fled from me and my mind no longer takes such airy and visionary flights for the wings of my imagination have folded themselves to rest.…”

The writings of the mill girls mirrored their mounting unrest. Their feelings were often too strong for the Offering. An outspoken mill worker, Sarah Bagley, attacked the magazine for accepting corporation subsidies and presenting a rosy picture of life at Lowell. “One would suppose,” she wrote, “that the Lowell mills were filled with farmers’ daughters who could live without labor and who go there merely as a resort for health and recreation, instead of a large portion of poverty’s daughters whose fathers do not possess one foot of land, but work day by day for the bread that feeds their families.”

Workers complained more and more of the denial of their liberty. “The evils and abuses of the present system of factory labor,” Mehitable Eastman told her fellow workers in 1846, “have accumulated too rapidly to be passed by in silence. I have been employed by a manufacturing company, for eight years,—have been subject to its increasing heartlessness and cruelty, and from bitter experience can affirm that a change cannot be effected too soon.…We have witnessed from time to time the cruelties practiced by brutal Overseers and selfish agents upon defenceless operatives, while they dare not speak in self-defence lest they should be deprived of the means of earning their daily bread.…”

A poem, “The Factory Bell,” published in the Factory Girl’s Garland in Exeter, New Hampshire, remarks on the relentless ringing of the factory bell calling the workers, as it sometimes seemed, up to death’s door, which was equated with the factory gate:

… Sisters, haste, the bell is tolling, Soon will close the dreadful gate.…

The poem continues with a comment on the relentless ding-dong-ding all day long: bells for meals; bells for return to work; and, finally, “our toil is ended, Joyous bell, good night, good night.”

Lucy Larcom had loved her factory life at first—“even the familiar, unremitting clatter of the mill, because it indicated that something was going on. I liked to feel the people around me…I felt that I belonged to the world, that there was something for me to do in it, though I had not yet found out what….” But later she would put her feelings about the routine and the crowdedness into verse.

The persons who uttered their grievances, in prose and poetry, were the more articulate women, potential leaders of their sisters. Much depended on whether the Sarah Bagleys, Lucy Larcoms, and the like could arouse their fellow-operatives to full consciousness of their lack of liberty and equality. And here the owners’ system itself played into the militants’ hands. The homogeneity of the women—the great majority were native-born New Englanders—their segregation from the rest of the population, their closeness in age, their communal housing, and above all their mutual dependence on one another for social and psychological support—all strengthened the bonds of sisterhood. Although this closeness had its drawbacks in lack of privacy and tranquillity, and conformity was often the price of acceptance, “much of our happiness, nay, everything,” as Sarah Bagley said, “depends on our social existence.…Our whole life is interwoven, with each other, in a greater or lesser degree.…”

The test was whether the rank and file could be organized for economic action. Occasional sporadic strikes broke out. In the winter of 1834, eight hundred of Lowell’s female operatives turned out to protest the 15 percent wage cut. They marched on other mills and held an outdoor rally, to persuade fellow workers to join them. Their statement of principles, headed “UNION IS POWER,” invoked the spirit of our “Patriotic Ancestors” who had preferred privation to bondage, and asserted that the “oppressing hand of avarice would enslave us.” The mill owners were aghast. Describing the strikers’ procession as an “amazonian display,” the agent of the Lawrence Company complained that “a spirit of evil omen” had prevailed over the “friendly and disinterested advice” that had been given by the company to the “girls of the Lawrence mills.” The owners coolly waited, adamant, and the strike spluttered out as women returned to work or left town. Other walkouts were hardly more successful.

Turning to political action, women mill hands sought to achieve the ten-hour day through state legislation. The leader in this effort, the indefatigable Sarah Bagley, was described as a “fiery and persuasive leader, as effective in a small committee meeting as she was addressing a crowd.” Working closely with other militants such as Mehitable Eastman and Huldah Stone, Bagley founded the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association and soon attracted several hundred members. She edited The Voice of Industry, a labor newspaper originally published by the New England Workingmen’s Association but later purchased by the LFLRA. Hoping to build a united New England labor movement, LFLRA leaders began organizing branches in a half dozen mill towns in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

Their main target was the Massachusetts legislature in general and in particular William Schouler, chairman of the Committee on Manufactures. After the LFLRA had collected 2,000 signatures on a petition denouncing working conditions in Lowell and calling for the ten-hour day, Schouler headed an investigating committee that vaguely favored shorter workdays and better ventilation but concluded that “the remedy is not with us. We look for it in the progressive improvement in art and science, in a higher appreciation of man’s destiny, in a less love for money, and a more ardent love for social happiness and intellectual superiority.” When Schouler was beaten for re-election, the LFLRA claimed a victory and moved that the voters of Lowell be formally thanked for consigning Schouler to “the obscurity he so justly deserves.” Schouler then pursued a personal vendetta against Sarah Bagley in his paper, the Lowell Courier.

The fact that the women had to thank the voters of Lowell betrayed their central political weakness, for it was men they were thanking, men who had the vote. If women had their own concept of liberty—liberty from harsh working conditions, liberty to strike and protest—the political establishment had its concept: liberty of contract. When workers gained a ten-hour law in New Hampshire, the legislature included a free contract exemption at the request of the mill owners, who soon signed up women willing to work twelve hours. In Massachusetts, the indomitable Bagley finally gave up and faded from the labor scene. The Middlesex mills of Lowell again cut wages in 1850, by one-quarter, and this time the employers used the blacklist to punish protesters.

Factory women turned first to direct economic action, such as strikes, and only then to the political. Middle-class women stressed political action to meet their needs. Above all; leaders among middle- and upper-class women felt keenly their need and right of the ballot. In the heady political days of the mid-1830s, they had begun to organize, starting with charity clubs called “female fragment societies.” Their concerns tended to be more diffuse than those of the mill workers. Education was central, and they were proud of Emma Willard’s achievements in founding in 1821 a model school, the Troy Female Seminary, with a curriculum of science, mathematics, geography, and history said to equal that of the best men’s colleges, and a teacher-training program that was superior. Oberlin began to admit women to higher education in 1833, though this was admittedly to help meet the needs of male scholars for meals and laundry—and for high moral conduct that would shame the male students out of indulging in the depravities of “monastic society.” Middle-class women were also taking the lead in temperance movements, charity issues, and marital rights. But many focused on the two great political issues, slavery and the suffrage.

When the National Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women met in Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia in the spring of 1838, crowds hostile to the emancipation of slaves and women broke down the doors and set fire to the building. As the flames rose, the mob began to make its way to the home of Lucretia Mott, the demure Quaker preacher who had organized the Philadelphia branch. “I felt at the moment,” she wrote later, “that I was willing to suffer whatever the cause required.”

Several American antislavery societies sent women as delegates to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in June 1840. The convention refused to seat the women delegates with the men and assigned them seats in the gallery. Lucretia Mott, in her dove-gray coal and white cap, walked down Great Queen Street deploring this segregation arm and arm with another delegate, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a graduate of the Troy Seminary and a young bride of twenty-five, who had come to the convention with her abolitionist husband as part of their honeymoon. The two women agreed to hold a women’s rights convention on their return to America. It was almost eight years before Elizabeth Cady Stanton, by then living in Seneca Falls in upstate New York and feeling rather isolated, had a chance to take up the question with Lucretia Mott, who was attending a Quaker meeting in the area. They agreed to put an advertisement in the Seneca County Courier calling for a “Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious rights of women,” on July 19-20, 1848, in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls.

It was a faltering start. The chapel was locked when the organizers arrived—only by accident?—and Mrs. Stanton’s nephew had to be boosted through a window to unlock it. The meeting was to be for females only, but forty men turned up with the two hundred and fifty women and had to be admitted. This was just as well, because no woman present quite dared to preside over the meeting and Lucretia Mott’s husband, James, took the chair. Mrs. Stanton gave a maiden speech of ample proportions and noble sentiment.

In a brilliant stroke, the delegates proclaimed their principles in the form of a new Declaration of Independence for women: “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position…to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them.…We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.…The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Then the list of grievances: man had not permitted woman to vote; had compelled her to submit to laws in the forming of which she had had no voice; had “made her, if married, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead”; had taken from her all right in property; had passed grossly unfair divorce laws; had denied her a college education; had excluded her from the ministry. The convention passed resolutions calling for equal rights in trades, universities, and professions; equality in marriage; equal rights as to property, wages, and children; equal rights to make contracts and to testify in court. But the suffrage? That resolution carried by only a small majority. Lucretia Mott herself dared not support it.

Other women’s rights conventions followed: Rochester, Akron, Worcester, Syracuse. The journey to the voting booth would take far longer than the most pessimistic leader might have dreamed. Only one woman present at Seneca Falls would vote for President by living long enough to vote in 1920.

Of the score or more grievances proclaimed in their Seneca Falls declaration, middle-class women often felt most keenly their status as legally inferior in marriage. The wife “is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming…her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.” Feminists were outraged by the common law, under which a married woman was unable to contract with her husband or with third parties, could not convey real or personal property to or from her husband, and hence by extension could not lawfully engage in trade without her husband’s consent. While some of the harsher applications of common law were being corrected through equity jurisprudence on a state-by-state basis, the wife’s relationship to her husband was much like that of ward to guardian.

Despite the handicaps a woman assumed thereby, nearly all of them did marry: save as homemakers and housekeepers, how could they keep themselves? Perhaps by teaching school, but these positions were limited. Spinsters usually stayed at home to care for elderly parents, or paid for their keep by domestic labor in the kitchens of brothers and sisters. Marriages were permanent, if only because the alternative was hardly thinkable. Divorce was almost impossible; in many states it required a special legislative petition, as did Rachel Robards Jackson’s divorce. In most cases a woman relinquished property, home, and children to her ex-husband. While feminists had made some progress by mid-century in improving the status of married women—Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton helped persuade New York to recognize a wife’s right to her separate property—divorce remained almost immune to major reform.

For many middle-class women, the main block to self-realization was less the law than social and psychological circumstance. For some, rising affluence, and the goods and comforts that came with it, elevated their feelings of need rather than satisfied them. Family duties in particular barred them from rewarding occupations and professions. Millicent Leib Hunt in Detroit rebelled against her domestic chores, assuaging her anger by writing in a diary about her duty. She tried to deny her “selfish” wishes for pretty clothes. Of her husband she vowed “never to oppose his opinions but by gentle and affectionate reasoning.” She would always “offer him the choicest morsels at table” and manifest a “quick and ready compliance with his wishes.”

For a time, Lydia Maria Child seemed immune to this kind of problem. In her early twenties, she published two popular novels, earning a literary reputation. At thirty-one she wrote a tract, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, electrifying the antislavery world, but it lost her sales on her popular writing. Boston exacted its sternest penalty when the Atheneum canceled her free membership. Moving from Boston to New York, she edited during the 1840s the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a militant weekly. In her newspaper writings and numerous letters she displayed a penetrating intelligence and unusual compassion. She commented on everything—on the machinations of compromising party politicians, on abolitionist backsliders, on Fourier (“I think Fourier means that society ought to be so constructed that every passion will be excited by healthy action on suitable objects”), on the failings of the “Swig” hard-cider party, and always on the flowers and birds and trees that she loved. She knew and influenced the movers and shakers of reform.

But Lydia Maria Child was married—to David Lee Child, who shared her concerns and passions but apparently was frustrated in his own career and dependent on his wife. By 1850 she was writing a friend that the “experience of the last eight years has terribly shaken my faith in human nature” and “my own strong and electric nature.” She had all along hoped, she wrote two years later, after retiring to the country, that the time would come when household work and cares would leave her enough time to earn something again by writing. “But what with cooking, taking care of milk, making butter, picking and preparing vegetables, keeping the house tolerably clean, washing dishes, seeing that nothing moulds, ferments or freezes, ironing clothes, making and mending clothes, for myself and David, &c. &c. I find that the treadmill never stops.…Six weeks often passes without my even looking into a book or touching a pen.”

This was the vibrant voice of a middle-class woman. A few years earlier, Mehitable Eastman had spoken with equal feeling for working-class women: “Never while we have hearts to feel and tongues to speak will we silently and passively witness so much that is opposed to justice and benevolence…never, while we are conscious of powers undeveloped, affections hemmed in, energies paralyzed, privileges denied, usefulness limited, honors forfeited, and destiny thwarted…” Powers undeveloped, destiny thwarted—here spoke the authentic voice for the unfulfilled needs of women. But how could awareness of these needs be raised to a higher level of consciousness—and to a broader economic and political effort? It is a curious irony of life that the same conditions that create a potential for us and create our awareness of that potential, are the same conditions that stand most powerfully in the path of realizing that potential.

MIGRANTS IN POVERTY

When Frances Wright made her first trip to the United States, the voyage could hardly have been more pleasant, considering the conditions of ocean travel at that time. The twenty-three-year-old orphan and heiress was neither nervous nor seasick during the month-long crossing. She liked the kindly, weather-beaten old captain, the cheerful and obliging crew. Her ship—the American-owned packet Amity—was well named, she felt, as she never heard a dispute on board save for one evening when a young Scotsman fell into an argument with an older Englishman over the question of grace and predestination. She listened for a while, but “in the middle of a nicely drawn distinction on the part of the Englishman, between foreknowing and fore decreeing, I fell asleep, and waked to no other noise than the creaking of timber and lashing of the waves.”

Arrival in New York Harbor was even more pleasant. She stared in admiration at the “magnificent bay, whose broad and silver waters, sprinkled with islands, are so finely closed by the heights of the Narrows, which, jutting forward with a fine sweeping bend, give a circular form to the immense basin which receives the waters of the Hudson,” the purity of the air, the “forest of masts crowded round the quays and wharfs at the entrance of the East River.” She was much taken by the young men, as she saw them tall and slender and agile, their large white shirt collars unbuttoned and thrown back on their shoulders, their broad-brimmed hats shading their handsome, sunburned faces, who rowed out in the fast little boats to greet the Amity. She was even more pleased by the many active tars who sprang from the yards and rigging of nearby ships to help the passengers land, seemingly satisfied with a kind “thank ye.” Soon she was having tea and fruit in a boardinghouse and hearing with astonishment the chorus of katydids, crickets, and tree frogs outside.

Steerage life on the Oxford, a British cargo ship loaded with immigrants, was less appealing. The captain had packed three hundred people into rough pine bunks. Having prudently brought their own bedding and food, the immigrants lived below-decks for the forty or so days of passage, amid the fetid squalor of cooking food, tobacco smoke, straw mattresses, offal. If the Oxford passengers were unlucky, their death rate from typhus, cholera, or smallpox would be more than 10 percent, and they would risk death or injury when fire broke out from a man’s pipe or a cook’s candle. They paid fifteen or twenty dollars for the journey, compared with Frances Wright’s “thirty guineas, wines included.”

Debarkation in New York Harbor was a jolting experience for the immigrants. The Oxford had no sooner tied up at the dock than scores of rough-looking men who called themselves “runners” swarmed onto the ship to “help” the passengers with their luggage but in fact tried to inveigle them to boardinghouses that had promised the runners so much a head. On arriving at the boardinghouse the immigrant might be turned away, or robbed, or given false promises of employment. On the side, the runners profited greatly by stealing trunks from passengers—a game called “Trunkeloo”—and selling them “first class” canalboat tickets that turned out to be the worst accommodations on the slowest craft. It was to this aspect of American private enterprise that newcomers were first introduced.

The poorest of the poor immigrants—except for Africans, worse off than poor—were the Irish peasants who fled disease and death in the famine-ridden southern counties of Cork, Kerry, Galway, and Clare after 1835. They and others from the British Isles constituted about three-fourths of the 220,000 immigrants from Europe to the United States between 1815 and 1830. Immigration then soared; 2,500,000 people arrived between 1830 and 1850. During the fifties another 2,750,000 immigrants came; almost half of these were Irish. The Germans, the largest nationality group after the Irish, were more often skilled mechanics or thriving farmers who soon moved on to the Ohio Valley or Great Lakes region. The Irish were likely to stay in New York or eventually to work their way toward other cities in the Northeast.

New York was the big port of entry, for immigration routes tended to follow the shipping lanes. Most newcomers moved at once to neighborhoods where their fellow countrypeople lived, often settling in tenements abandoned by the slightly less impoverished. Needing to be close to work and lacking public transportation, immigrants flooded into tenement areas and shanty towns in lower Manhattan. Houses built for single families became multi-family, surrounded by flimsy new dwellings in backyards and alleys. The density of the seven lower wards of Manhattan rose from about 95 to about 164 people per acre between 1820 and 1850. By the end of the 1840s, 29,000 persons were living in cellars.

Fleeing poverty in the old country, plunged into squalor in the new, the newcomers struggled for jobs. New Jersey contractors recruited construction gangs among the Irish of New York City, and for sixty cents a day tens of thousands labored from sunrise to sunset in the swampy, disease-ridden lowlands. Some laborers turned to liquor, which was often near at hand because New Jersey contractors liked to pay off in whiskey. A doctor visiting New Jersey canal workers found a man in delirium. Was he in the “habit of drinking ardent spirits?” the doctor asked. “Nothing more than the allowance,” the man said. The allowance turned out to be five glasses per day.

Some of these new Americans, brought up in country towns and villages, could not cope with urban conditions and fled. Others fought, or drank. Some sought help and stayed.

A little aid came from local authorities concerned for immigrants mistreated, scorned, and swindled—to the amount of an estimated $2,500,000 in one year alone in New York City. After decades of abuse on the docks, the city commissioner of immigration leased an old fort at the foot of Manhattan known as Castle Garden and restricted immigrants to this one landing. Here, officials gave the newcomers travel advice, helped safeguard their belongings, aided them with lodging problems, and sold them valid tickets to their destinations. Immigrants also received a helping hand from families from the “old country” who had settled before them, and from their churches and church societies. Irish laborers turned to Irish contractors for jobs and loans. Mutual assistance and dependency bound the immigrant communities more and more tightly together.

In spite of the newcomers’ initial response to the need to survive which had forced them together, forming what could be characterized as tribal affiliations along ethnic and extended-family lines, however, the undertow of expanding potential for industrial and commercial enterprise was strong enough to provide impetus for reconstructing the class structure within the immigrant community. It was no coincidence that the notion of the “reserve army of the unemployed” arose during this period of intense competition, which characterized the supply side of the labor market at a time of meteoric expansion.

When the New Jersey canal workers struck against pay cuts and inhuman working conditions, the state militia moved in, a riot followed, and the strike leaders were jailed. Contractors brought in strike breakers from Manhattan to replace the malcontents. When canal work was completed, many of these Irish, striker and strike breaker alike, settled in nearby New Jersey towns, swelling the labor force of rising industrial cities like Newark and Trenton.

Immigrants who stayed in the city scrounged for jobs at the bottom of the pile. Blacks and whites competed not only for jobs on the docks but for menial jobs, serving New York’s wealthy. WANTED, read an advertisement in the New York Herald: “A cook, Washer, and Ironer, who perfectly understands her business; any color or country except Irish.” Many Irish worked in the clothing trades either in large warehouse-type factories or in piecework at home. Almost thirty thousand women, Irish and otherwise, made clothes, often working twelve to fifteen hours a day for thirty or thirty-five cents. A seamstress might produce six pairs of pants during the week and bring her bundle to a merchant’s door, to receive only $2.35.

In the eyes of many middle-class whites, the inner-city immigrants were mere paupers. Many, indeed, were paupers. Often society’s response was to group the poor with the crippled, diseased, helpless, dying—and to isolate as many as possible. For this purpose, New York had put up the largest structure in the city, an imposing gray-stone fortress called Bellevue, developed from a “Publick Workhouse and House of Correction” commissioned in 1734. The site had been purchased by the city in 1811 and was enclosed on three sides by an eleven-foot wall, with a fourth side bounded by the East River. Bellevue was built by debtors and convicts to warehouse the afflicted.

In 1860 the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, the first of its kind in the United States, was added but during the 1830s and 1840s the complex consisted of a penitentiary where paupers lived, two hospitals, a bakery, icehouse, greenhouse, soap factory, stables, and the city fire station. Here from one to four thousand feeble, diseased, and dying vagrants were put or took refuge at various times. Despite efforts by city officials to maintain order and cleanliness, smells of sickness and death pervaded the buildings.

As so often happens in institutions, a kind of class system prevailed. The superintendent separated paupers according to sex, health, “character,” and race. Blacks were incarcerated in the dark and noisome cellars of the penitentiary. No marriages or promiscuity was tolerated, in theory at least, nor was idleness allowed. Work, indeed, was considered the moral and practical cure for pauperism; hence the city installed a treadmill in Bellevue to force the poor to move heavy grindstones. All paupers had to work in the gardens, bakery, or factory buildings in order to provide their own food and clothing. Disobedient inmates lost meal privileges; they were assigned extra workloads or thrown into solitary confinement in the “Dark Room” on bread and water; or had to wear “an iron wing around their leg, with a chain and wooden block fixed thereto.”

Bellevue housed many children. Schoolteachers, sent by the Free School Society of New York City, taught young inmates spelling, reading, writing, and “the principles of religion and morality.” A Protestant minister was in attendance too, paid by the city to teach old and young alike and especially Irish Catholic immigrants the virtues of industry and sobriety.

Feeling isolated and beleaguered in a hard, punitive, work-oriented society, many immigrants turned back into their communal life—to their churches, schools, benevolent societies, social organizations. And they turned to politics. The Irish often took the lead on this score, not having to cope with a foreign language and having well-developed political instincts after a century of dealing with the English in their mother country. Banded together, soon they were electing city councilmen, who then might use the dole or outdoor relief to build support among the poor. They turned more and more to Tammany Hall, which during Jacksonian days was taking positions on such popular issues as abolition of imprisonment for debt and was distributing food and clothing to the immigrants and the poor of New York City while doling out patronage. By the 1840s, the stage was set for a showdown within Tammany between its remaining Protestant leaders, who still harked back to the old Jeffersonian days, and the rising Irish.

This conflict came to a head in l841; when a young Irishman named Mike Walsh challenged Tammany. Born in Ireland twenty-six years earlier, Mike had emigrated with his parents, who had apprenticed him to a printer. Rowdy and hard-drinking, Walsh had a talent for organization and a flair for leadership. His virtues, however, were not appreciated by the older Protestant leaders of Tammany, who saw him and his Irish battalions as a threat to their control. When the nominating committee of the Democratic party refused to choose Mike for a seat in the state legislature, he decided to appeal to the people at the county meeting. And when the committee there asked him not to speak, he threw down his hat from the platform and demanded to be heard. He had his “Spartan Band” with him to lend support.

To mingled shouts of “Go it, Mike” and “Turn him out,” he warned that he and his followers could disrupt other speeches if he was not allowed to give his own. In the end, the meeting rejected Walsh’s candidacy, but he continued to organize the Irish workingmen. In 1843 he founded his own newspaper, the Subterranean, where he carried on his abrasive brand of politics, going to jail twice for libel. Later in the decade he won the Tammany nomination for state legislator, and a few years after that he gained a seat in Congress, where he remained a spokesman for the poor. “The only difference between the negro slave of the South and the white wage slave of the North,” he told an icily hostile House, “is that the one has a master without asking for him, and the other has to beg for the privilege of becoming a slave.”

Many an immigrant who gave up the fight in the inner city and found a job on the canals or with the railroads or fled west could not escape conflict and discrimination. In 1842, Irish coal miners fought blacks in Pennsylvania for mining jobs; a decade later, armed black strike breakers replaced Irishmen on the Erie Railroad.

Some cities seemed more kindly than others to immigrants and other “paupers.” Philadelphia appeared more hospitable than Boston, in part because in that city, whose 300,000 inhabitants in 1840 more than doubled in the next twenty years, there were many jobs available. Mill towns on water-power sites outside the city had robbed Boston of some of its industry. Boston was also the city still of the Puritan. Bostonians were the loudest in talking about rights and abolition, but there as elsewhere orphan girls at the age of ten were bound out to wealthy families for eight years to do menial household labor. Mistresses expected such servant girls to be up at five and ready to labor until eleven in the evening six days a week, with one-half day on Sunday for rest.

Few immigrants had any contact with the one large group of white Americans who rivaled them in their poverty. These were the poor rurals of the hilly regions of Georgia, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Many of them, or their forebears, had once lived in tidewater areas or on the piedmont and tried to compete with the large slavery operations of the plantations. Some had tried to earn land, or at least a living, by working for large planters as slave overseers. But many gave up and moved west to the mountains, where they could live by hunting and fishing and marginal farming. Poor whites, they came to be called, or piney woods folks or sandhillers or clayeaters or rednecks or crackers. They might sell their game or fish or farm produce for cash, or “hire out” to labor on more prosperous farms at fifty cents a day. Or they might be paid in tobacco or whiskey. At the base of the class hierarchy lay the landless woodcutters, farm laborers, and squatters on the land.

Undernourished, uneducated, often afflicted by the parasitic hookworm, housed in crude log cabins or shanties, these rural whites were often too listless to scratch more than a bare existence from the red soil. But, like the immigrant, they needed someone to look down on, and this usually was the black. Despite their need for jobs, the poor whites refused to do certain tasks, such as waiting on table in the homes or working in the fields of nearby planters. Fearing the competition of black people if the slaves were freed, they opposed any talk of emancipation. One of their hopes, indeed, was to acquire slaves of their own.

Their one great solace was religion. Sundays and other times they would come down from their hollows, the women barefoot in the summer and wearing long homespun dresses, handkerchiefs spread over their shoulders, with men’s hats on their heads; the men in shirt sleeves and barefoot. After services, they would return home for middle-of-the-day dinners of fresh pork and sweet potatoes, cut up and served in one large tin pan.

Some poor whites turned to politics, as increasingly they gained the right to vote and as leaders grew among them, or came to them. One of the latter was Franklin Plummer, who emigrated from New England to the pineland belt of Mississippi and proceeded to build a political machine by cultivating poor whites. Illiterate themselves, they valued Plummer’s Massachusetts education, calling him a “walking encyclopedia.” He visited their log cabins, talked with the kinfolk, and seated the children on his lap to search for “redbugs and lice in their hair.” His cry of “Plummer for the people and the people for Plummer!” won him a seat in Congress, but the poor whites voted him out of office when he abandoned demagoguery to support the Natchez banking interests.

There were other poor in America: marginal New England farmers holding on to their rocky soil, frontier people, impecunious scholars, laborers at the bottom of the pile, and, always, Indians and blacks—a mélange. They were bound together in a great commonality of deprivation—denied good homes and food and clothes, good health and nutrition and education, and hence damaged in motivation, aspiration, and self-fulfillment. City “micks” and southern “crackers,” in particular, had in common an existential condition: contempt. They retreated into insularity and clannishness, and resorted to church and drink. The poor suffered many different types of poverty, however, stemming from diverse sources. They lacked the most essential quality that might have alleviated their plight: an awareness of the commonality of their suffering, a feeling of shared grievances, a sense of potential unity.

LEADERS WITHOUT FOLLOWERS

“We find ourselves oppressed on every hand—we labor hard in producing all the comforts of life for the enjoyment of others,” an “Unlettered Mechanic” protested to the “Mechanical and Working Classes” of Philadelphia in 1827, “while we ourselves obtain but a scanty portion, and even that in the present state of society depends on the will of employers.” After twenty-five members of the Union Society of Journeymen Tailors in New York were found guilty of conspiracy to restrain trade, a handbill proclaimed: “THE RICH AGAINST THE POOR! Judge Edwards, the tool of the aristocracy, against the people! Mechanics and working men! A deadly blow has been struck at your liberty!”

“The man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?” Sojourner Truth so addressed a women’s rights convention in Akron in 1851. A former slave who believed that she had been called by the Lord to travel the land testifying to the injustices against her people, she had claimed the floor after hearing ministers dwelling on the manhood of Christ and the lesser intellect of woman.

“Look at me!” she went on. “Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have born thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?…” Sojourner Truth’s voice was her weapon; she had never learned to read or write.

“David has signed my will and I have sealed it up and put it away,” Lydia Maria Child wrote to a close friend. “It excited my towering indignation to think it was necessary for him to sign it, and if you had been by, you would have made the matter worse by repeating your old manly ‘fling and twit’ about married women being dead in the law. I was not indignant on my own account, for David respects the freedom of all women upon principle, and mine in particular by reason of affection superadded. But I was indignant for womankind made chattels personal from the beginning of time, perpetually insulted by literature, law, and custom. The very phrases used with regard to us are abominable. ‘Dead in the law.’ ‘Femme couverte.’ How I detest such language! I must come out with a broadside on that subject before I die.”

The unfulfilled wants and needs of poor and enslaved Americans and of middle-class women in the early nineteenth century seem to have been psychological as well as material—problems of damaged self-esteem as well as of physical survival. Slaves and the very poor in city and country often had unbalanced, monotonous diets, leading to malnutrition, disease, and death; severe hunger and open starvation were uncommon. There is ample evidence that the manner in which people responded to their material situation—to poverty amidst plenty, to being excluded from the American cornucopia—was more crucial to how they ultimately behaved politically than was the “objective” situation itself.

The sense of deprivation and damaged self-esteem intensified in a nation whose ideologues preached liberty and equality. During the whole pre-Civil War period the preamble to the Declaration of Independence remained “the single most concentrated expression of the revolutionary intellectual tradition,” in Staughton Lynd’s estimate. Jefferson, Robert Owen, Garrison, and other spokesmen invoked it; Lincoln referred to the Declaration as the “standard maxim for a free society.” The sense of deprivation arose even more fundamentally from what Barrington Moore has called “a recurring, possibly pan-human, sense of injustice, which arises from the combined requirements of innate human nature and the imperatives of social living.”

Given such conditions of material and especially psychological deprivation, how could individual feelings be converted into some kind of collective action? This was initially seen as a task of consciousness raising. Reading over the speeches, tracts, protest novels, convention debates, street-meeting oratory, and knowing of the immense amount of grumbling that went on among activists within the ranks of the poor and the enslaved, one marvels at the power of the written and spoken word, the force of the appeals to scripture, the intellectual clarity and logic of many of the more formal writings, the ability of some radicals and reformers to appeal eloquently to common men and women. And the protesting leaders did penetrate to the hearts and minds of hundreds upon thousands of Americans.

But they penetrated far too little for the purpose of converting widespread feelings of injustice and deprivation into self-expressed feelings of need—into hopes and expectations, into feelings of entitlement that could then be converted into effective demands on the political system. Far too little to build a militant minority movement that might serve as both pressure on and alternative to the authorities in power. And certainly far too little to build an organized, lasting mass movement on the left, or radical political party, capable of gaining enough votes in elections to win majority control of the government.

Where, then, was the failure of leadership? Certainly not in the qualities—the commitment, imagination, compassion, acuteness, courage, and articulateness—of the leaders themselves. Women with the leadership capacity of a Stanton, Mott, Child, Wright, a Sojourner Truth; men with the skills of a Douglass, Garrison, Walsh, Weld, with all their diverse talents and aims, were nothing less than adornments to the nation, whether or not recognized at that time. And this top cadre was almost matched by a second cadre of regional and state leaders, operating within the various abolitionist, women’s, and other radical and reform organizations.

Some of the nationally known leaders sprang from unlikely roots. Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Emily Grimké, for example, were the daughters not of Boston abolitionists but of wealthy and conservative South Carolina aristocrats. Encouraged by Quakers to break away from the social and political constraints of Charleston, the sisters in turn broke with the Quakers over the Friends’ equivocal attitudes toward abolitionism. By the late 1830s, both had enlisted heart and soul with Garrison, Weld & Co., overcome their initial timidity on the lecture platform, and won national attention as speakers for women’s as well as black rights.

Nor could the national leaders of the various causes be faulted for failing to work, or at least communicate, with one another. Many noted feminists were also abolitionists. Frederick Douglass, after attending the Seneca Falls convention, wrote a North Star editorial in which, standing upon “the watch-tower of human freedom,” he claimed for women the same political rights as for men. The Grimké sisters not only corresponded at great length with Weld; Angelina Grimké married him. Communication—and sometimes confrontation—occasionally occurred in subtle and personal ways. Lydia Maria Child noted some gossip about the well-known actress Fanny Kemble, who had retired from the stage after marrying Pierce Butler, heir to a large Georgia plantation, and who had been deeply revolted by slavery. “It seems she keeps tugging at her husband’s conscience all the time, about his slaves,” Child wrote after the Butlers had spent a summer in Stockbridge.

“One day he begged her to spare him—saying, ‘You know, Fanny, we don’t feel alike on that subject. If I objected to it in my conscience, as you do, I would emancipate them all.’

“‘Pierce!’ exclaimed she, ‘look me full in the face, and say that in your conscience you think it right to hold slaves, and I will never again speak to you on the subject.’

“He met her penetrating glance for a moment, lowered his eyes,—and between a blush and a smile, said, ‘Fanny, I cannot do it.’”

Within a few years, Fanny Butler had left her husband.

There was amazingly good communication among the top leaders of the elite. The abolitionists and even the North and South thoroughly communicated, thoroughly knew one another’s views. They understood each other only too well. This close communication, and collaboration among top women’s rights leaders and abolitionist leaders—and their mutual understanding even when in full disagreement—was not matched, however, among large sectors of their movements. Thus it was symptomatic that abolitionists often excluded women or women’s representatives from their meetings. At the Akron meeting some women begged the chair not to let Sojourner Truth speak for fear “every newspaper in the land will have our cause mixed with abolition,” and one reason the ex-slave wanted to speak was that ministers at this meeting had opposed political rights for women “’cause,” as Sojourner Truth said, “Christ wasn’t a woman!” (“Where did your Christ come from?” she demanded in her speech. “From God and a woman!”) Many adherents of these two causes, as well as others such as temperance and Sabbatarianism, followed a “one issue” strategy—they feared dividing their own ranks by taking stands on other reform issues, even though, as others pointed out, they might have built at least a loose coalition behind a program of reforms.

By far the most fundamental reason for the failure of leaders lay in their inability to engage with the masses of people who did not see any connection between women’s or black rights and their own welfare. Only at the end of the long roll of middle-class women’s grievances in the Seneca Falls declaration was there a reference to a bread-and-butter question—“securing to women an equal participation with men in the various trades, professions, and commerce”—and this resolution was listed as merely having been offered and spoken to by Lucretia Mott. The declaration utterly ignored the plight of women in industry or the condition of the poor. There was virtually no organizational connection between the reform groups and the craft unions or even workers’ movements. Yet the potential for collaboration was there, if only because of the common feelings of deprivation and oppression. Thus a “Factory Tract” of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association protested:

“Much has been written and spoken in women’s behalf, especially in America, and yet a large class of females are, and have been, destined to a state of servitude as degrading as unceasing toil can make it. I refer to the female operatives of New England—the free states of our union—the boasted land of equal rights for all—the states where no colored slave can breathe the balmy air, and exist as such;—but yet there are those, a host of them, too, who are in fact nothing more nor less than slaves in every sense of the word!…”

Perhaps the connections that failed to be made at the higher level could have been achieved at the lower, in states and localities, where rank-and-file members of various organizations might have worked out local coalitions or at least collaborations. But there were relatively few members, in large part because the national organizations had not built, in contrast to the political parties, the kinds of local structures of leaders and activists—the “third cadres”—that ultimately were required for national leaders to build and engage with grass-roots constituencies.

Were there in the United States persons of rare potential leadership who might have transcended the differences among the reform and radical groups and built a coalition of the have-nots? We will never know, because such a leader did not arise. But that the potential existed was indicated by the career, among others, of the incomparable Frances Wright. She was a cosmopolitan who enjoyed the friendship of the most eminent men of her time—Lafayette, Jefferson, Madison, John Stuart Mill, Robert Owen. She was a rationalist who advocated universal education to perfect a democracy in which the inequalities of sex, color, and class would wither away. She was fearless, whether boating down rivers, traveling alone on horseback in the wilderness, or, dressed in a plain white muslin dress that adorned her like the drapery of a Greek statue, facing down howling mobs in lecture halls and in the streets.

For a time it seemed that Fanny Wright might attract a national following. In the great cities of America she lectured to as many as two thousand people at a time. In Cincinnati only a few people, and scarcely one woman, showed up at her first lecture; the house was full for her second, as word raced around town; and five hundred people had to be turned away from her third. She began publication of her own newspaper, The Free Enquirer, in New York, and built her own lecture building, the Hall of Science. She seemed equally concerned for the needs of the black, the poor, and the female, and she was active in the causes of all three.

But Fanny Wright and the people around her had audiences rather than followers. It was not only that her advocacy of greater rights for women, more liberal divorce laws, equal education, “free” marriage, and less church influence in politics made her so unpopular that several times she was nearly mobbed. Her undoing was that she could not win the support of activist women, blacks, and immigrants in sufficient numbers to make a difference, and that few cadres of rank-and-file leadership were available to link her national, inspirational appeal to local needs and thus raise the political consciousness of the deprived. Deeply concerned about all deprived groups, she was yet not a coalition-builder. Mainly she walked alone. And ultimately, so did women, blacks, and the poor.

Historians tend to doubt that a massive, nationwide, organized collaborative reform or radical movement was possible in the United States in the 1840s or 1850s. The ideological and social and political makings of such a movement simply were not there, in this view. They point to the powerful inhibitors to social action: the essential powerlessness of the deprived groups, as in the inability to vote; racist and sexist biases that kept radicals separated; the American “pragmatic” tradition, as it came to be called, emphasizing day-to-day efforts and step-by-step progress rather than collaborative long-range political action; the fragmenting and pulverizing effect of the American political system on nationwide mass movements; the inhospitability of an essentially agrarian society to urban radicalism; the ideology of individualism, self-help, self-promotion, individual advancement; the hospitality of the American economy to individual effort; the frontier as a social and political safety valve and escape hatch.

The issue, then, is not that the American reformers did not achieve power. The issue is that they fell so far short of achieving remedies for their objective situation, their sense of deprivation, and the gap between what they had and what they were entitled to, measured by the patriotic ideals of liberty and equality.

The second quarter of the nineteenth century, moreover, was a time of contagious intellectual and political ferment in much of the Western world. During the late 1840s, workers revolted in Paris; Louis Philippe abdicated; revolutions swept Berlin, Milan, Venice, Vienna; Emperor Ferdinand fled; Kossuth was proclaimed president of the Committee for National Defense of Hungary; Rome proclaimed a republic under Mazzini; the German national assembly framed a constitution; revolts broke out in Dresden and Baden; England enacted the Great Reform Bill after street riots and political tumult. Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto. The Western world boiled with Utopian, revolutionary, millennial, communitarian, reformist, anarchist, radical ideas and activity.

The dog that did not bark in the night was an American dog; it was the absence of that bark that had to be explained—and that suggested the different path Americans were taking from their forebears across the Atlantic.

PART IV

The Empire of Liberty

CHAPTER 12

Whigs: The Business of Politics

A BROAD VALLEY OUTSIDE Dayton, Ohio, September 10, 1840. Under sunny skies General William Henry Harrison, the Whig candidate for President, is addressing a vast throng packed together on the field around him. Excited newspapermen report that 100,000 persons have gathered to hear the general—the largest political rally in the half century of the republic. For days people have been streaming into Dayton, by carriages, wagons, and horses, by packets and freight boats via the Cincinnati canal. Hundreds of flags and streamers float from trees and housetops, proclaiming: HAIL TO THE HERO. Banners stretch 150 feet wide across Main Street: HARRISON AND TYLER—THE TYRANT’S FOES—THE PEOPLE’S FRIENDS. Others proclaim the union between industry and high tariffs. Curtis’ mill has strung its own banner across to the rifle factory: PROTECT US AND WE’LL CLOTHE YOU. The banner of Pease’s mill on one side demands no standing army, on the other proclaims: ETERNAL VIGILANCE IS THE PRICE OF LIBERTY. On the morning of the tenth a mammoth crowd surrounds the Hero as he rides his white charger to the speaking platform.

Though Old Tip looks slight and elderly, his voice seems to penetrate to the farthest edge of the crowd.

“I will carry out the doctrines of my party, although I will make no more pledges than Washington, Adams, or Jefferson would. I was never, ever a Federalist.”

The crowd breaks into cheering.

“I am a true, simple Republican, aghast that the ‘Government under “King Mat”’ IS NOW A PRACTICAL MONARCHY!”

Louder and longer cheering.

“As President I will reduce the power and influence of the National Executive”—ecstatic cheering—“At the end of one term in office, I will lay down…that high trust at the feet of the people”—cheering beyond the power of the reporter to describe—“And I will not try to name my successor”—nine cheers.

Old Tippecanoe cites his sponsorship of the Public-Land Act of 1800. “Was I a Federalist then?”—cries of NO, NO, NO—But “methinks I hear a soft voice asking: Are you in favor of paper money? I AM!”—shouts of applause—“It is the only means by which a poor industrious man may become a rich man without bowing to colossal wealth”—cheers—“But with all this, I am not a Bank man, although I am in favor of a correct banking system, able to bring the poor to the level of the rich”—tremendous cheering.

It was the climax of Harrison’s campaign. At first, he had refused to go on the stump. For a presidential candidate, campaigning was undignified, unthinkable; it had never been done. But his managers hoped to demonstrate that this gray-haired sixty-seven-year-old was fit to be President, that he would be a tribune of the people and not, as Van Burenites were charging, the tool of invisible party bosses. Soon Harrison was on his way to Columbus to show himself to the people. There, in a suddenly arranged speech from the steps of the National Hotel, he gave what was probably the first presidential campaign speech in American history. Once he started campaigning he would not stop; off went the presidential caravan to Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dayton, to more crowds and parades and speeches.

“This practice of itinerant speech-making,” old John Quincy Adams said glumly, “has suddenly broken forth in this country to a fearful extent.” No Adams had ever campaigned.

The Whig speechifying and ballyhoo camouflaged a most ingeniously run campaign. Whig leaders knew only too well the sorry fate of those Federalists and National Republicans who had allowed Jeffersonians and Jacksonians to pose as the “friends of the people.” Whigs would now be more populist than those populists, more pleasing to the people. And where were the people? In the countryside. America in 1840 was still overwhelmingly rural; only about a tenth of the populace lived in places with more than 2,500 inhabitants. The Whigs would strike directly into the rural hinterlands that had sustained the old Republican party.

So Harrison was transformed from an aged general-politico, who had been born into a distinguished Virginia family in a fine plantation manor, into a simple farmer. Transparencies—an exciting media device of the day—showed him seated in front of his log-cabin “birthplace,” a barrel of hard cider at his side. “Log-cabin boys” were organized to produce loud huzzas for the speechifying. Horny-handed farmers lumbered to the stage to present a pitchfork to Harrison.

The campaign brought marvelous theater into the villages and hamlets. Songs glorified the “Hero Ploughman” and his “Buckeye Cabin.” Hawkers sold Tippecanoe buttons, tobacco, lithographs, canes surmounted by a miniature barrel, whiskey bottles in the shape of log cabins. Whigs would have no truck with issues; their convention adopted no party platform. In the absence of genuine issues, invective flourished. Whigs routinely pictured “Old Van” as living in regal splendor, in a palace fit for Croesus, playing billiards with ivory balls. “Mr. Chairman,” demanded Congressman Charles Ogle, the Whigs’ chief billingsgate purveyor, “how do you relish the notion of voting away the HARD CASH OF YOUR CONSTITUENTS” for “SILK TASSELS, GALLON, GIMP AND SATIN MEDALLIONS to beautify and adorn the ‘BLUE ELLIPTICAL SALOON’?” Soon the crowds were chanting:

Let Van from his coolers of silver drink wine,

And lounge on his cushioned settee, Our man on a buckeye bench can recline,

Content with hard cider is he.

The Democrats, not to be outdone in bombast, attacked the Whigs as an unholy coalition of old Federalists and new abolitionists, scourgers of the poor and starvers of laborers. They charged that the victor of Tippecanoe was really “Old Tipler,” a “sham hero,” a “granny,” a blasphemer, the sirer of half-breed children by Winnebago squaws. Van Buren did not deign to take the stump, but the top cadre of the Democracy—veteran warriors like Thomas Hart Benton and Vice-President Richard Johnson, young stalwarts like James K. Polk and James Buchanan—counterattacked their Whig foes, and even feeble old Andrew Jackson was exhibited at balls and barbecues to remind the voters what a real hero looked like.

Still, it was a battle more of party than of personality. Behind the scenes parties compiled master mailing lists of voters, mobilized state and local campaign committees, mustered the patronage brigades, ground out posters, leaflets, and propaganda tracts. Fifteen hundred newspapers—most of them partisan weeklies—carried news of the party battle even to the frontier. Whig newspapers were especially ingenious in publishing campaign sheets. Horace Greeley’s Log Cabin, full of chatty news about Harrison and his campaign, quickly went through a first printing of 30,000 and then sold at a weekly rate of 80,000 copies. Stealing the tune of “Jefferson and Liberty,” the Log Cabin published sheet music with lyrics ending “For HAR-RI-SON and LIB-ER-TY!”

The result was the greatest outpouring of voters the nation had seen. Harrison beat Van Buren by about 53 percent to 47 percent, by 234 electoral votes to the Democrats’ 60. The Whigs carried the House elections, 133 seats to 102, and exactly reversed the Democrat’s previous margin in the Senate, 28 to 22. Harrison won the swing states of New York and Pennsylvania. The turnout was perhaps more remarkable than the election results. Almost two and one half million voted—about 80 percent of the eligibles, compared with less than 60 percent four years before. Every state reached new peaks of participation, according to William Chambers, with New York achieving a turnout of almost 92 percent. Not until the crisis year of 1860 would such a large proportion of the eligibles vote again. Campaign organization plus campaign hokum had mobilized the electorate.

THE WHIG WAY OF GOVERNMENT

In out-huckstering the Democracy, the Whigs had opportunistically outflanked the Democrats “on the left,” through the use of democratic symbols rather than democratic substance. Their rustic, populist strategy had worked, at least for the moment. But to win one battle, they had disregarded, perhaps even betrayed, the essential conservatism of developing Whig doctrine, the elitist attitudes of many of its leaders, the skepticism about populist majorities the Whigs had inherited from the old Federalist party. Whiggery had tried to turn the shank of history. But history—a moving, organic network of causally related events—is hard to outwit or outflank. History embodies a logic and momentum of its own with resistances, rewards, and penalties. History soon outwitted the Whigs and left them in its dustbin.

In picking the aged Harrison for President, the Whigs had sacrificed political conviction and clear policy positions for a largely media-created war hero. They had gambled on the health of an old soldier who would be seventy-two by the end of his term. History was cruel. The new President, after giving a vacuous Inaugural Address that promised presidential impotence and left policy up to Congress—a two-hour speech that found bored politicians roaming around the platform stamping their feet to get the blood running—moved into the White House and into the ceaseless importunings of Whigs hungry for office. Fatigued and dispirited, he caught cold one morning while shopping in Washington’s meat and fish markets, and the cold turned into pneumonia. Bled, blistered, cupped, leeched, and massaged, he died just one month after taking office. Vice-President John Tyler, ignored by Harrison, had been staying in Williamsburg in benign isolation. Summoned now to Washington, he arrived two days later after covering the 230 miles by boat and horseback.

So John Tyler was President. In Tyler, a Virginian of the old school, history resisted the Whigs’ effort to outflank it. Raised amid the aristocratic republicanism of the tidewater, graduated from the College of William and Mary at the age of seventeen, Tyler had climbed the political ladder from the Virginia House of Delegates to the national House of Representatives, and later to the governorship and the United States Senate. He had come to be known as a strict constructionist and a leading member of the southern states’ rights bloc in Congress; and as such he gave only tepid support to Jackson. Tyler shifted toward the Whigs when the Virginia legislature instructed him to vote for expunging the censure resolution of Jackson and Tyler resigned his seat rather than comply. Independent in doctrine and party, Tyler was as critical of Whiggish economic nationalism as he had been of Jacksonian executive power. He had remained close enough to Clay, however, and to his old states’ rights ideology, to be chosen by Whig leaders as a ticket balancer with Harrison—although only after those leaders had offered the vice-presidential nomination to several other, more noted politicians.

Tyler at fifty-one was still determined, on entering the White House, to stick to his conservative, old Republican principles. He immediately proved that he was indeed a strict constructionist. Soon labeled “His Accidency” by his Whig foes, he insisted on being considered the new, constitutional President, rather than a Vice-President acting as President, thus setting a precedent for all later Presidents elevated by chance. On the other hand, the new President decided to retain Harrison’s Cabinet intact—a Cabinet headed by Daniel Webster as Secretary of State and dominated by Webster, Clay, and other Whig senators and congressmen. Surrounded, as he said, by “Clay-men, Webster-men, anti-Masons, original Harrisonians, Old Whigs and New Whigs—each jealous of the others, and all struggling for the offices,” he resolved to move cautiously and to “work in good earnest” to reconcile “the angry state of the factions toward one another.”

It was not to be. The Whigs had plastered over their factional splits with thick gobs of campaign hokum. Now they split over hard policy choices. The battle erupted not merely between two wings of the party, but two wings ensconced in two institutions separated by the Constitution and by Pennsylvania Avenue.

Commander of the congressional wing clearly was Henry Clay. Now sixty-four years old, “Harry of the West” was still the engaging, impetuous, eloquent legislative leader who had electrified Congress three decades earlier in the days of the war hawks, though now more irascible and volatile. Clay was still cock of the walk in the Senate, chairman of the Finance Committee, policy spokesman for congressional Whigs, and leader of men occupying key positions in both houses. The Kentuckian had gone into a half-drunken rage when news of Harrison’s nomination had reached him at Brown’s Hotel in Washington. Pacing the room, shouting obscenities, he had denounced his friends as “not worth the powder and shot it would take to kill them,” and called himself the unluckiest man in party history—“always run by my friends when sure to be defeated, and now betrayed for the nomination” when sure of election.

Clay’s relationship with President Harrison deteriorated so rapidly that the two were at the point of a break when the general died. For a time it seemed that the senator and his old friend John Tyler might be able to work together despite their doctrinal differences. But history was remorseless: the Whigs’ campaign preference for rhetoric rather than policy positions that might serve as rough guides to party policy makers; the Whigs’ desire to balance their ticket even if it meant choosing a states’ rights doctrinaire; the Whigs’ antipathy to executive leadership, and their doctrine of legislative supremacy—all these combined to rob Whiggism of the fruits of its 1840 victory.

The crisis came over banking, still the most divisive political issue facing the nation. In accordance with the President’s states’ rights views, Tyler’s Secretary of the Treasury, Thomas Ewing, presented to Congress a bill for a “Bank and Fiscal Agent” to be chartered by Congress in its capacity not as the national legislature but as the local government for the District of Columbia, to be authorized to establish branches elsewhere but only with the consent of the states concerned. Thus elaborately were Tyler’s constitutional scruples cosseted. Clay was unimpressed. Like Tyler, he would repeal Van Buren’s Independent Treasury Act, but in its place he wanted an effective and truly national bank. Tyler’s idea for an agency that would have to beg a state to allow a branch to be set up within it—“What a bank would that be!” Clay wrote to a friend.

The two men—the President of the United States, who stuck gamely to his states’ rights dogmatism but felt that Congress should make policy, and the “Great Pacificator,” who considered himself a kind of prime minister—met in the White House. Neither would yield. The President’s amiability broke under Clay’s pounding.

“Go you now, then, Mr. Clay, to your end of the avenue, where stands the Capitol, and there perform your duty to the country as you shall think proper. So help me God, I shall do mine at this end of it as I shall think proper.”

Clay did modify his bill to provide that, while no branch of the proposed bank could be established without the consent of the state, such consent would be presumed automatically granted unless the state legislature specifically opposed it at the next session. It was a reasonable compromise, but Tyler would have none of it. Increasingly captive to a “Corporal’s Guard” of extreme states’-righters such as the Virginians Thomas W. Gilmer, Henry A. Wise, and Abel P. Upshur, he called Clay’s compromise a “contemptible subterfuge.” Tyler’s Cabinet—still Harrison’s Cabinet—wanted their chief to sign the bill.

Washington waited while Tyler teetered back and forth between assent and veto. His veto, on August 16, 1841, set off a tumultuous debate in the Senate. That evening Benton, Calhoun, and other Democratic senators of the old school, delighted by Tyler’s defiance of the congressional Whigs, came to the White House to celebrate with Tyler over cigars and brandy, but they were followed by a mob of Whig protestors who aroused the Tyler family with their clamor and disbanded only after burning the President in effigy.

The presidential and congressional Whigs mobilized against each other. Chastising Tyler on the Senate floor, Clay moved unsuccessfully to override the veto. In the deadlock that followed, presidential-congressional relations unraveled. Tyler allowed Webster and other cabinet members to involve themselves in a compromise bill that easily passed both House and Senate. “Give your approval to the Bill,” his Attorney General, John J. Crittenden wrote him, “and the success of your Administration is sealed.” Veto it, and “read the doom of the Whig party and behold it and the President it elected, sunk together, the victims of each other, in unnatural strife.” Again Tyler vetoed, and again a great hue and cry broke out, as Whig leaders throughout the country castigated the President, letter writers threatened assassination, and burning effigies swung from tree limbs.

Then, on a September afternoon, five of Tyler’s cabinet members strode into his office, one by one, and laid their resignations on his desk. The President knew well that the walkout was devised and coordinated by Clay in an effort to punish him—and even more, to force his resignation and bring into the White House the president of the Senate, a Clay lieutenant. Tyler became more determined to stay. One man who had not resigned that day was Daniel Webster. Busy with delicate foreign negotiations, reluctant to serve Clay’s interests, the “Godlike Daniel” saw his own opportunities in the Tyler-Clay hostilities.

“Where am I to go, Mr. President?” Webster asked his chief.

“You must decide that for yourself, Mr. Webster,” said the President, with his usual reserve.

“If you leave it to me, Mr. President,” the Secretary of State said, “I will stay where I am.”

“Give me your hand on that,” said Tyler, rising from his chair, “and now I will say to you that Henry Clay is a doomed man from this hour.”

Total war had erupted between the two wings of the Whig party. Rid of the Harrison and Clay men in the Cabinet, Tyler created a new one composed of conservative Democrats and states’ rights Whigs. The congressional Whigs struck back by officially expelling Tyler from the party. There followed a presidential-congressional battle in which constitutional checks served as the live ammunition. In place of Clay’s kind of national bank, Tyler proposed a nonpartisan “Board of Control” designed to limit White House authority over the “public Treasury” and to protect the rights of the states against its branches, a plan quickly tabled in Congress and later defeated. The Clay party brought out two tariff bills in the summer of 1842; Tyler vetoed both. Some extremist Whigs—not Clay—threatened the President with impeachment; Tyler toyed with the idea of a third-party movement. By the fall of 1842 the President and Congress were almost deadlocked, amid the most savage polemics and mutual buck passing. Clay had the votes, it was said, and Tyler had the vetoes; but, in fact, each side had a veto over the other,

Some bills did overcome the obstacle course. The Independent Treasury Act was repealed; a bankruptcy law was passed for the relief of hundreds of thousands of debtors spawned by the depression; and distribution and pre-emption acts gave settlers the right to “squat” on 160 acres of land and ultimately to buy it at low prices, with the proceeds from the sale of public lands to be distributed to the states. These enactments were due to “masterly logrolling,” in Glyndon Van Deusen’s words, among sectional blocs—logrolling that ultimately brought a new tariff compromise bill, the price of which was to decimate the distribution act.

Whig unity was fading so quickly now that Tyler welcomed a Democratic party sweep of the 1842 congressional election as “the greatest political victory ever won within my recollection.” Clay, still master of the Senate Whigs, had already quit the upper house to prepare to seek the presidency in 1844. Webster left the Cabinet hardly a year and a half after Tyler had retained him. By this time Tyler’s administration had been reduced to a caretaker government.

The Whigs never regained their verve and momentum after their failures in government. Clay won the party nomination in 1844 but once again he enjoyed a brief but empty victory when Democrat James K. Polk defeated him handily in the electoral college, though narrowly in the popular vote. Four years later, Clay lost the Whig nomination to General Zachary Taylor, who won the White House for the Whigs but died of cholera within two years. Having won the presidency twice by nominating military heroes who proceeded to die in office, the Whigs tried the same tactic again in 1852 with General Winfield Scott, who was beaten by Democrat Franklin Pierce. This time the general survived, it was said, but the Whig party did not.

How could a political party develop so strongly, win two presidential elections and almost a third, and then decline so quickly? The Whigs had brilliant leadership in Clay and Webster and in broad cadres of secondary and grass-roots leaders. At a time when the Democrats were enfeebled by their states’ rights and localistic leanings, the Whigs had a potentially powerful nationalistic doctrine of direct utility to the rising industrial and mercantile elites of the nation. Their rapid monopolization of the opposition to the Democrats, and equally rapid capture of the presidency and Congress, attested to an electoral appeal that seemed likely to give the Whigs political dominance for a generation or two.

But the heart of the Whig party often seemed to beat feebly behind the lively facade of senatorial gladiators and log-cabin appeals. Springing into existence after Jackson’s veto of the bank bill, the party attained true unity only in opposition to “presidential dictatorship”; no other doctrine could unite men so diverse in view and competitive in ambition as Clay, Webster, and Calhoun. Conceiving of party itself as more an occasion for oratory and camp meetings than a vehicle for policy leadership, most Whigs had little vision of the possibilities of partisan organization. Opposed to strong Presidents, the party allowed patronage and other political resources to slip into the hands of congressional leaders, and hence, in contrast to the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Jacksonian Democrats, a national party was never firmly built around the chief executive.

The party placed its future largely in the hands of Clay and his lieutenants, skillful in the give-and-take of group and sectional logrolling but far less adept in mobilizing the grand nationwide coalitions necessary for effective presidential politics. Ironically, the party that opposed executive power unwittingly demonstrated that strong Presidents are necessary to the existence of strong parties, just as strong parties comprise the political foundation for strong Presidents.

Certainly the Whigs had bad luck, both in the demise of their generalissimo-Presidents and in their felt need to appeal at the same time to plantation elites in the South and business elites in the North. But transcending leaders can turn misfortune to their own uses and avoid, or at least cope with, sectional entrapment—they can, in short, turn the shank of history. The Whig failure of leadership lay far deeper than in the presidential-congressional imbalance; it lay in the inability of the Whigs to break away from a bourgeois, genteel, respectable, establishment politics appropriate in an earlier day of social elitism and popular deference. The genius of that system lay in the character—the honor, dignity, responsibility, honesty, courage—of wellborn leaders. The genius of Jacksonian leadership lay in its appeal to numbers through the techniques of organization, propaganda, conflict, party discipline, and voter mobilization. The Whigs commanded neither the quality of the earlier leadership nor the quantity of the Jacksonian followership. The day of the independent public gentleman was over.

Challenged by the Jacksonians, the Whigs sought to unite all those who believed in the old kind of leadership, whether they were Calhoun nullifies or Clay nationalists. “In so doing,” according to Lynn L. Marshall, “they looked back longingly to a heroic era when leadership in politics was integral to leadership in society.…Thus was the party born dead in July 1832 and continued in that condition until 1836. Thereafter, however, a total transfusion of Jacksonian blood would bring it miraculously to life.” This miracle faded away as Democratic party leaders sought to build coalitions of voters even at the expense of older doctrines of liberty and equality, as new leaders of both parties calculated more in terms of a multiplicity of economic interests than of either republican or aristocratic leadership.

THE ECONOMICS OF WHIGGERY

Sometime during the 1830s and 1840s—we will never know more exactly—the American polity underwent an almost invisible but pervasive sea change. During the first three or four decades of the republic, political leaders in Washington and the state capitals had made the key decisions that closely molded the shape and direction of people’s lives. The brilliant constitutional planners of 1787, the state convention delegates voting thumbs up or down on the new Constitution, Washington and Adams and Jefferson and Madison and their hundreds of associates, the state leaders who made key political and economic decisions about the first canals and turnpikes and other enterprises, the early party builders—these men acted far more on doctrinal, and on political and practical grounds, than on narrowly economic. Jackson’s bank veto represented one of the last of the great political intrusions into economic life; later, politicians more reflective of specific economic interest increasingly dominated national and state politics. At least at the leadership level, Economic Man seemed to take over from Political Man.

The change was not dramatic. Economic interests had affected public decision-making from earliest colonial days. And large political considerations would continue to impinge on economic policy long after the 1840s. But the nation went through a significant shift from a condition where economics was a factor in politics to a condition where politics could be defined mainly as economic interest.

In short, the enterprisers—the go-getters, the boosters—were taking over. In earlier years a relatively few men had shown the way—men like John Jacob Astor in the fur trade and Eli Whitney in cotton ginning—and they had won their places in the history books. An entrepreneur like the “Ice King” of Boston would be lucky to occupy a footnote. Son of a wealthy Boston lawyer, brother of three Harvard men, Frederic Tudor in his teens had rejected academic life for business. When one of his brothers idly wondered at a Boston party why ice was not harvested from local ponds and sold in the Caribbean, the twenty-one-year-old Tudor took up the idea, invested in a huge shipment of ice to Martinique, and lost $4,000 when the cargo melted. For two decades Tudor set himself to buying up New England ponds and Caribbean icehouses; he promoted a demand for ice cream, iced drinks, and ice-preserved food; he tested a variety of insulating materials such as wood shavings, straw, blankets, and finally—and successfully—sawdust. Another young businessman, Nathan Jarvis Wyeth, invented a horse-drawn ice cutter, pulled on runners notched with saw teeth, that could gouge out parallel grooves, enabling men with iron bars to break the ice off in even chunks. The two men teamed up to de-ice Fresh Pond in Cambridge.

By the end of the 1840s, Tudor had achieved prodigious feats: trading in candles, cotton, claret, and a host of other commodities; digging for coal on Martha’s Vineyard off Cape Cod; devising a siphon for pumping out ships; designing a new hull for a ship; running a graphite mine; turning white pine into paper; setting up one of the first amusement parks in America; and bringing to New England the first steam locomotive, a toy affair of one-half horsepower. But above all, he remained the “Ice King” whose ships carried thousands of tons of packed chunks to the East Indies, China, Australia, India. He was a restless, flamboyant, imperious, aggressive promoter, no modest, prudent Horatio Alger hero, in Daniel Boorstin’s judgment, and he would pay for his recklessness by languishing in debtor’s jail. But he brought ice not only to equatorial lands but to millions of Americans; rid their homes of decaying meat and rancid butter; and permitted them fresh instead of dried food and salted meat, heavily spiced to disguise its age.

Other Bostonians were as resourceful with granite as Tudor was with ice. In earlier years they had built their stone churches by digging up huge boulders, heating them with fires, and smashing them with iron balls. Later they split off chunks of granite with gunpowder, and still later by drilling holes along a straight line and then splitting the stone along the holes. Granite built the sixteen locks of the Middlesex Canal from Boston to Chelmsford, where the hard stone was mined. By the 1830s, Charles Bulfinch and other fine New England architects were designing churches and public buildings built of granite from Massachusetts quarries.

Solomon Willard, a jack-of-all-trades, became the king of granite. Son of a country carpenter, he made his way to Boston, and soon to success as a builder of spiral stairs, wood carver, and self-taught architect. Summoned in 1825 to design the Bunker Hill monument in Charlestown, he scoured the countryside for suitable stone until he came upon the granite of Quincy. To cut huge, monumental blocks of stone from this quarry he devised lift jacks, hoists, and other machinery, and to move the massive blocks to Charlestown, he used a crude wooden track covered with iron plates and resting on stone crossties. When Daniel Webster delivered a splendid address at the dedication of the Bunker Hill monument in 1843, the event celebrated granite as well as the Revolutionary battle. For the flinty stone was now being used in the most famous public buildings and hotels in the country, as well as in drydocks; and when tough paving stone became necessary for heavy transport, Willard had the satisfaction of laying blocks of Quincy granite in front of Boston’s famous Tremont House.

Some of the powder used in quarrying doubtless came from the Du Pont Company far to the south, near Wilmington, Delaware. The Du Pont mills, separated by buffer zones to keep one from blowing up another, were strung for miles along the swift-flowing Brandywine Creek. Stone dams formed shallow pools that diverted water from the creek into canals running to the power machinery. The Du Ponts made their black gunpowder and blasting powder out of charcoal from nearby willow trees, sulphur from Sicily, and saltpeter from India. Founded by the son of Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours, the celebrated physiocrat who had fled revolutionary France to start a new life in America, the firm was already becoming a company town that owned the houses and dominated the lives of its employees.

Invention and innovation seemed to be accelerating during the thirties and forties. The electric dynamo in 1831, Cyrus McCormick’s reaper in 1834, John Deere’s steel plow in 1839, the magnetic telegraph in 1843, the sewing machine in 1846—all these and a host of other devices set off little agricultural and industrial revolutions of their own. One of the most remarkable inventors was Samuel Finley Morse, educated at Andover and Yale, a noted portraitist, as celebrated at home and abroad as he was underpaid for his paintings. He might have lived out his life as a professor of art in New York City had it not been for a chance conversation with a fellow passenger on a voyage back from Europe in 1832, about work on electricity abroad.

Morse had been curious about electrical phenomena ever since he had attended Benjamin Silliman’s lectures and demonstrations at Yale; now, his interest reawakened, he went to work on a contrivance to combine a sending device that would transmit signals by closing and opening an electric circuit; a receiving device, operated by an electromagnet, to record the signals as dots and spaces on a strip of paper moved by clockwork; and a code translating the dots and spaces into letters and numbers. At first the magnet would not operate at over forty feet, but with the help of a university colleague, Morse worked out a system of electromagnet renewers or relays. The artist-inventor went through several years of poverty, frustration, and even actual hunger before Congress voted for an experimental line from Washington to Baltimore, and more months of waiting and preparation before he transmitted to Baltimore from the Supreme Court room in the Capitol his famous declaration, “What hath God wrought!”

The most striking and significant of all the enterprises of this period came to depend heavily on Morse’s invention. This was railroading. Few ventures have been so much the product of trial-and-error gradualism and innovation, over so many years. Rails and roads were pioneered long before boilers and pistons. For hundreds of years beasts and men, women, and children had hauled coal cars on wooden rails in English and German mines. Flanges had to be devised to hold wheels on the tracks, and wooden rails plated with iron to keep them from splintering. The French and English developed fantastic steam engines for land transport—mechanical legs were even devised to push a car from behind—until it was discovered that the weighty iron locomotives needed smooth rails on a smooth track. By 1829 the English engineer George Stephenson had achieved success with his famous “Rocket.”

Much earlier an American steamboat inventor, John Stevens, had been transfixed by the vision of American railway development. Squeezed out of Hudson River steamboating by Livingston’s and Fulton’s monopoly, Stevens appealed to state legislatures up and down the east coast to pave the way for railroading. He had the temerity to urge a railroad on the Erie Canal Commission as cheaper to build. Railroads, answered Chancellor Robert Livingston, would be too expensive, dangerous, and impractical. The canal went ahead. Finally, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania legislatures passed railroad bills, but things moved so slowly that Stevens in 1825, at the age of seventy-six, built an experimental locomotive on his own estate in Hoboken. This, the first American-built locomotive, was never put into service on a railroad.

But all the while the tinkerers were innovating. When, in 1829, the Delaware & Hudson Canal and Railroad Company imported the “Stourbridge Lion,” a fine big English locomotive, to use at its western canal terminus, the machine ran forward and backward for a mile or two, amid the booming of cannon (one of which shattered a mechanic’s arm), but the six-ton “Lion” proved too heavy for American track and was hardly used again. Clearly, locomotives in America would have to be built lighter and more flexible, for frail wooden trestles and sharper curves. There were even experiments with locomotives decked out with sails and with a horse aboard working a treadmill to turn the wheels. Neither ran.

Then, in the winter of 1830-31, Horatio Allen, who at the age of twenty-seven had single-handedly operated the “Lion,” put the American-built “Best Friend of Charleston” into service between the South Carolina capital and Hamburg. The next year John B. Jervis brought in his locomotive, the “Experiment,” with a swiveling, four-wheel “bogie” truck under the front end of the boiler, allowing the machine to follow more easily the curves of the railroad. The “Experiment” worked.

American railroading was under way, with distinctly American problems. Unlike English locomotives, which ran on coal, the American engines feasted on the virgin timber cut down along the line. The wood-burners required a huge balloon stack, picturesque in etchings but menacing to dry forests, wooden bridges, and ladies’ parasols. The biggest challenge to American railroading was sheer distance. With a national mania for speed already evident, locomotives were invented that could cut through gardens, farms, and even towns—which meant in turn the devising of grade crossings, gates, bells, whistles, and cowcatchers. America’s technology of speed meant steeper grades, sharper curves, narrow gauges, fragile trestleworks—and hideous accidents.

The nation’s twenty-three miles of railroad track in 1830 multiplied over a hundredfold in the next ten years. As the inventors settled down to devising better wheels, pistons, cylinders, valves, steam boxes, boilers, couplings, roadbeds, a host of local boosters and big-city promoters plunged into the scramble for railroad extensions and rights-of-way. Rich Boston merchants, eager to head off the threat of New York and the Erie Canal to their western trade, pushed a railroad westward to Worcester and Springfield and through the sloping Berkshire Mountains to the Hudson. George Bliss, Jr., a Yale graduate and Massachusetts legislator, had to devise ways of securing rights-of-way, attracting customers, avoiding accidents, and maintaining discipline. Robert Schuyler, grandson of the great manor lord Philip Schuyler, became president of the New York and New Haven line, and of the New York and Harlem. Despite competition from Hudson River steamboats, the New York City railroad magnates extended their lines up to Peekskill, Poughkeepsie, and Hudson. Other roads radiated from Manhattan up through Connecticut to Massachusetts. Railroad fever spread up and down the coast.

Extending out from the main cities, the railroads were not yet amalgamated into a system, or even fully connected. Local nabobs were still more interested in competing, or at least expanding, than in combining. When President Schuyler of the New York and New Haven advised President Charles F. Pond of the Hartford and New Haven that the New York railroad wanted to connect with Pond’s, in order “to form the most expeditious as well as the most comfortable lines which circumstances permit,” Pond evidently agreed only on condition of access by his company to the entire passenger business of Schuyler’s road between New Haven and New York. “We cannot accept such arrangement as you wish” was Schuyler’s curt answer to Pond.

Railroad expansion in the 1840s symbolized a people on the make and on the move. As hundreds of thousands of immigrants entered during the forties, the total population rose from 17 million to over 23 million. People were continuing to move westward in huge numbers, for the West alone gained almost half that increase, the South only a fourth. Agriculture was still the dominant enterprise by far, but it was declining relatively to mining, manufacturing, and construction. By the 1840s the United States had a “domestic market truly national in its dimensions,” and economic growth sharply accelerated. If the country had not yet reached the point of an explosive takeoff, it was nearing the edge. The rise of an “American common market,” in Stuart Bruchey’s words, resulted, not merely from economic change but also from deliberate political action.

“Of all the parties that have existed in the United States,” Henry Adams said, “the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas.” Here again, the Whigs were cornered by history. Whiggery had respectable intellectual roots in men like Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall, with their belief in national power and private property, and their awareness of the links between the two. It had national spokesmen of the caliber of Horace Greeley and William Henry Seward, and state leaders creative in economic policy and development; Georgia Whigs, for example, promoted the building of railroads to link cotton planters to seaports.

During the 1840s, however, the Whigs had become as opportunistic in their national economic credo as in their log-cabin-and-cider campaign tactics. Their arguments varied, depending on circumstance. Some Whigs held that the interests of rich and poor had become identical. Said Robert Hare, the noted Philadelphia chemist: “Never was an error more pernicious than that of supposing that any separation could be practicable between the interests of the rich and the working classes.” The wealthy must serve the poor—and if “the labouring classes are desirous of having the prosperity of the country restored, they must sanction all measures tending to reinstate our commercial credit, without which the wealthy will be impoverished.”

Others proclaimed not the interdependence of classes but the absence of them. All Americans were workers, all were capitalists—or if not, could become so. The “wheel of fortune,” said Edward Everett, “is in constant motion, and the poor in one generation furnish the rich of the next.” Even so, the lot of the rich was not all that happy. The Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing wondered if the hardships of the poor were exaggerated. “That some of the indigent among us die of scanty food is undoubtedly true,” he said, “but vastly more in this community die from eating too much than from eating too little.” After all, he added, lawyers, doctors, and merchants had their struggles and disappointments, and as for women—“how many of our daughters are victims of ennui, a misery unknown to the poor, and more intolerable than the weariness of excessive toil!”

Whig writers even found a happy pastoralism in the lot of the sturdy working people. The Boston Courier ran an ode to the Factory Girl, who would leave her hearth and vineyard for a bucolic stint in the mills and then return home with her dowry:

… She tends the loom, she watches the spindle,

And cheerfully talketh away;

Mid the din of wheels, how her bright eyes kindle!

And her bosom is ever gay.

*****

O sing me a song of the Factory Girl!

Link not her name with the SLAVES.—She is brave and free as the old elm tree,

That over her homestead waves.

As a final strategy Whigs advanced a doctrine of personal, internal reform. Workers’ elevation, Channing said, “is not release from labour. It is not struggling for another rank. It is not political power. I understand something deeper. I know but one elevation of a human being, and that is Elevation of Soul.” Collective, organized action by the poor was unnecessary and undesirable. For conservative Whiggery, if religion was not the opiate of the masses, individual moral uplift was the sedative for the fractious.

The Whig doctrine of classlessness, or of class consensus or identity, was in part a political stratagem to gain worker support and divide the opposition. It was also a valid expression of a crucial reality in American society: the absence of deep-seated class conflict. As Louis Hartz argued in his astute study of American liberalism, there was no fixed aristocracy to revolt against, no persisting peasant class, no genuine proletariat that might form a revolutionary movement, but rather farmers who were incipient capitalists and workers who were incipient entrepreneurs. An instinct of friendship, Hartz said, “was planted beneath the heroic surface of America’s conflict, so that the contenders in it, just as they were about to deliver their most smashing blows, fell into each other’s arms. American politics was a romance in which the quarrel preceded the kiss.”

In the absence of large and genuine social conflict, American political combat dissolved into numberless skirmishes and scuffles, mainly over the elevating issue of who got what, when, and how in slicing up the expanding American pie. Tariff schedules, internal improvements, state subsidies, and even banking legislation provided ideal arenas for the politics of brokerage. Many Americans were in fact landless and jobless, or living in penury, but their voices were muted, or lost in the social euphoria and political complacency of a people that seemed to be realizing, most of them, the Lockean ideal of free individuals in a state of nature, the Jeffersonian dream of a nation of small property holders. Still, the spectacle of Americans scrambling for jobs, tariff protection, subsidies, and other financial goodies was not wholly edifying to moralists of the old school.

Inevitably, it seemed, the rich and the better-off gravitated toward the Whig party. New England industrialists, middle state commercialists, skilled native labor, farmers closer to markets, many big cotton, tobacco, and sugar planters tended to embrace Whiggery. In the Ohio Valley, Van Deusen found, “the pushing, ambitious, go-ahead bankers and businessmen, canal promoters, landowning interests, lawyers with an eye to the main chance, and farmers anxious for internal improvements” were more likely than not to be found in the Whig ranks. While individual enterprise was far too dynamic to be contained within party lines—plenty of Democrats were go-getters too—Whig elites were more closely linked with big money and property.

The wealth of Boston Whiggery was revealing. An 1846 study of 714 Bostonians reputed to be worth $100,000 or more—in some cases far, far more—indicated that the overwhelming majority of those identified by party were Whigs. They were not only partisans but active ones, contributing to the party’s war chest, serving as delegates to party conventions, running for office, and altogether exerting a pervasive influence on state and national policy. Wealthy New Yorkers also were heavily Whig. Democrats too, in these and other cities, numbered rich men—a fact that helped mute the conflict between parties—but to a far less degree than did the Whigs.

The economics of Whiggery pervaded a profession that was becoming more and more allied to business—the profession of law. On the Supreme Court, Justice Story had seconded Marshall in carving out the scope of national power; in Jackson’s day he returned to Massachusetts, mourning that “I am the last of the old race of judges.” Yet he continued to teach at Harvard, developing and adapting American common law in the areas of partnership, bills of exchange, promissory notes, and other areas vital to a growing commercial and industrial society. The ablest of Massachusetts judges was doubtless Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, who further adapted common law to business requirements, such as the need of railroads for land lying along direct routes, involving the right of eminent domain. Other lawyers, with the views if seldom the talents of a Story or Shaw, made the common law a powerful ally of business interests. Workers fared less well. Shaw developed a “fellow-servant rule” that relieved the employer of liability for damage to an employee harmed by another employee on the job—a rule that delayed the development of workmen’s compensation.

Whiggery did not lack other illustrious leadership. Edward Everett’s was an extraordinary success story: minister of the Brattle Street (Unitarian) Church—the largest and most prestigious in the Boston area—at twenty; occupant of the recently established chair of Greek literature at Harvard a year or so later; editor of the North American Review while still in his twenties; a commanding orator; member of Congress for five terms; governor of Massachusetts for four terms; minister to the Court of St. James’s from 1841 to 1845; president of Harvard; briefly Secretary of State and United States senator. Yet there was often a negative cast to Everett’s thinking, whether he was criticizing abolitionism, lecturing workers, or warning of a “war of Numbers against Property.” The intellectual leader William Ellery Channing served as a moral and religious influence on Whiggery, but Channing too, though liberal in theology, did not fully grasp the evils of slavery and advocated the kind of inward personal reform that was often both ephemeral and hostile to collective efforts toward social reform.

Men like Abbott Lawrence and Nathan Appleton were more typical of Whig economic leadership. Already a leading Boston merchant by the time he reached his early forties, Lawrence had the vigor and imagination to move into the thriving cotton and wool industry—he founded the textile city that would bear his name—and then took the lead in extending the Boston-Worcester railroad to Albany. An ardent Whig, he served in Congress as a Boston representative and provided a nexus between the party and the men of money. At a crucial moment he lent Harrison $5,000. Appleton too had made a fortune out of textiles, beginning with his involvement in Lowell’s power mill in Waltham, and he too went on to Congress, where he became a vigorous defender of protective tariffs and the American System. Of a very different cast was Thurlow Weed, the little-schooled son of a poor farmer, who began as a printer’s apprentice and became a newspaperman, Anti-Mason, Whig party leader and patronage dispenser in New York. Like many other Whig leaders, Weed was antislavery—and anti-abolition.

The pre-eminently typical Whig was always Daniel Webster—and much of the success and failure of Whiggery reflected his own. Once upon a time, as a Federalist leader of the old school, he had stood foursquare for a lofty, nationalist conception of the young republic, but as the years passed he had chosen to serve the growing commercial and industrial interests of his region rather than respond to the needs and aspirations of the poor throughout the nation. His loans and retainers from banks and businesses hardly affected the public decisions of a man who was, in a more philosophical sense, already bought. In calling for a consensus that could only be flabby, in condemning those Jacksonians who exploited recession in order to array class against class, the “Godlike Daniel” became a kind of caricature of the Whig politico who traded with any and every interest that might give him a small victory on the morrow, regardless of political doctrine.

Whiggery never seemed to have a real chance. Born in negativism, led by men who often divided it, politically unlucky as well as inept, faced ultimately with the power of a resurgent Democracy, the Whig party faded away as quickly as it began. History finally vanquished it. This was a pity, because Whiggery developed a positive, creative impetus, in its nationalism, in its frank engagement with expanding commercial interests, and above all, in its fecund concept that individual liberty could be protected not only against government, but through government, especially at the state and local level. Yet in the late 1840s and early 1850s the Whigs would have one more opportunity to take leadership in confronting the supreme moral issue of the time.

EXPERIMENTS IN ESCAPE

“Our farm is a sweet spot,” Sophia Willard Dana Ripley wrote a friend on an August day in 1840. Even “my lonely hours have been bright ones, and in this tranquil retreat I have found that entire separation from worldly care and rest to the spirit which I knew was in waiting for me somewhere. We are nearly two miles from any creature, but one or two quiet farmers’ families, and do not see so many persons here in a month as we do in one morning at home. Birds and trees, sloping green hills and hay fields as far as the eye can reach—and a brook clear running, at the foot of a green bank covered with shrubbery opposite our window, sings us to our rest with its quiet tune, and chants its morning song to the rising sun. Many dreamy days have been my portion here—roaming about the meads, or lying half asleep under the nut trees on the green knoll near by—or jogging along on my white pony for miles and miles through the green lanes and small roads which abound in our neighborhood.…”

Sophia Ripley was giving voice to a powerful longing of thousands of Americans during the second quarter of the nineteenth century—to escape from the increasingly busy, noisy, bustling, competitive, industrial, urban world into some pastoral retreat. This escapism was in part a reaction against Whiggery in both parties, but the rebels against prosperity and profit were influenced by Whig views more than they liked to admit, for they usually had to fight on their opponents’ intellectual battlefield.

The 1830s and 1840s were a time of ferment in much of the Western world, as workers and peasants, caught in the gears of the industrial revolution, attempted diverse experiments in social and political change. In France, working men and women fought alongside soldiers and students to force the abdication of the nation’s last divine-right monarch; the new king of the French was invited to reign. In England, businessmen, workers, liberal and radical intellectuals joined in demonstrations and mass meetings to force through a reform bill designed to abolish rotten boroughs and extend the vote. Belgians fought in the streets of Brussels to break away from the Dutch kingdom, but Italian protest was stamped out by the Hapsburgs and the Vatican, and Polish revolt by the Russians.

Americans did not revolt—they had no crown or aristocracy to revolt against. There was still no proletariat or peasantry to furnish the materials of revolution, only a slave population too disorganized to act as a militant class or caste. The high tide of Jacksonian radicalism had ebbed by the forties; the reform impetus now took several directions. Some Americans still carried the torch for revolutionary change, but they were small in number if large of voice. Many reform-minded Americans made gradual changes through their state and local governments. Some went west to new opportunities; some climbed up through the class system, still largely an open one. But some yearned to go back to the Arcadia of their childhood, when they lived and worked in their own pastures and vineyards, when Jefferson could say that those “who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God.” Most of all, they longed for a family, a home, a community.

Pastoral communitarianism was hardly new in America. Labadists, authoritarian in organization and fanatically anti-sexual in doctrine, had settled in Maryland in the late seventeenth century but dissolved in conflict within two or three decades. Early in the next century German Seventh-Day Baptists founded Ephrata, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where the monastic orders of Sisters and Brethren practiced their Pietist beliefs, and on the side ran grist and other mills, a tannery, a book bindery, and even a printing press. About the same time Moravians settled a permanent community at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and fanned out to the west and south.

Rappites, eager to submerge their individual interests in the social good in order to plant God’s kingdom on earth as a prelude to Christ’s return, moved across the Appalachians to establish their Harmony community at the head of the Ohio Valley; finding the soil there poor for vine and other cultivation, they founded a new “Harmonie” on the banks of the Wabash in Indiana. All of these communitarian sects, however, were dwarfed in size and duration by the Quakers and by the Shakers. Then, in the early nineteenth century, Americans witnessed a new phenomenon: the nonsectarian communitarian experiment. And they witnessed a phenomenal leader, Robert Owen of New Lanark, who arrived in America in 1824.

The son of an ironmonger and saddler, Owen soon had made his way to Manchester, the center of a burgeoning cotton-spinning industry in the 1780s, and with borrowed capital set up a factory for making cotton-spinning machinery. By the age of twenty he had become manager of one of the largest mills in Manchester, and within a few years the possessor of a sizable fortune. He was the boy wonder of English capitalism. But he was also an industrialist who cared deeply about the education and social welfare of his employees, especially the hundreds of pauper children who worked in his mills. As he steeped himself in the intellectual and reformist ferment of Manchester, he became more and more critical not only of the poverty and dismal working conditions of English mill hands, but of the whole system of government, religion, and family that sustained social misery. The target of biting attacks from Tory ecclesiastics and industrialists, he wanted a fresh start in America, where he could experiment with the reconstruction of society.

That reconstruction would be broad in vision but local in application. He had “come to this country,” Owen said, “to introduce an entire new State of society; to change it from the ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system, which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all cause for contest between individuals.” The object would be to secure the “greatest amount of happiness” for Americans and their children “to the latest posterity.” No principle, he said, had “produced so much evil as the principle of individdualism. ” The competitive scramble alienated men from their work, their families, their communities—ultimately themselves. Economic and social inequality pitted one against the other, skilled workers against unskilled, employers against employee, farmer against operative. Harmony, association, cooperation—Owen always returned to this ideal. Somewhere in America he would realize it.

Owen arrived in America as a celebrity. In New York, intellectuals, politicians, editors, and visionaries gathered around him to hear of his plan. He steamed up the Hudson to visit De Witt Clinton in Albany and to observe the Shaker establishment at Niskayuna. In Washington, he met President Monroe and Secretary of State Adams; lectured twice in the Hall of Representatives, with the nation’s most illustrious men arrayed in front of him; and on a return trip met Madison at Montpelier and Jefferson at Monticello—just a few months before the latter died. Meanwhile Owen traveled by stagecoach to Pittsburgh and by steamboat down the Ohio to Harmonie, which the Rappites had decided to abandon and for which he was negotiating. After surveying the Indiana village, with its 20,000 acres of woods and meadows, 180 houses of brick, frame, and log, and an assortment of shops and factories, the Englishman bought the whole settlement for $125,000. He renamed it New Harmony.

By April 1825 enough people had crowded into the little village for Owen to draw up his constitution for the “preliminary society.” No matter that the newcomers comprised what Owen’s son Robert Dale would later call a heterogeneous collection of “radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in.” Good workers and craftsmen had arrived too, hopes were high, and spring was in the air. Under Owen’s constitution, he would direct the experiment for a year, after which the members would begin to take control. They would provide their own household goods and small tools, invest their capital in the venture at interest, and would be credited on the books with any livestock they might contribute.

Reluctantly, Owen granted that there would have to be, for a time, “a certain degree of pecuniary inequality.” The society would advance each member a credit of fixed amount at the community store; at the same time, their daily labors would be computed and recorded, and they would be debited for goods consumed. All members were to render “their best services for the good of the society, according to their age, experience, and capacity,” but those who did not wish to work could buy credit by paying by cash in advance. Everyone, rich or poor, was enjoined to be “temperate, regular, and orderly,” and all were to have “complete liberty of conscience,” especially in religion.

For a time, life was good in New Harmony. People worked—not always too hard—at plowing, planting, vine culture, storekeeping, carpentry, hat making, and other pursuits. In the long soft evenings on the Wabash, people discussed their experiment as they gathered on the benches in front of the village tavern. Concerts, dances, sermons, and lectures filled the evenings. Advanced ideas were discussed at meetings of the Female Social Society and the Philanthropic Lodge of Masons. Doubtless the intellectual highlight of the first year was the arrival of the keelboat Philanthropist, bringing Thomas Say, the zoologist; William Maclure, geologist and educator; and a miscellany of artists and educators.

Above all, a heady feeling of toleration and liberty filled New Harmony. Visiting preachers of all persuasions vented their theologies in the village church, sometimes three on one Sunday. Maclure conducted exciting educational experiments in the classrooms. Owen welcomed the clash of ideas, and so did his followers. “I have experienced no disappointment,” William Pelham wrote. “I did not expect to find every thing regular, systematic, convenient—nor have I found them so. I did expect…to be able to mix with my fellow citizens without fear or imposition—without being subject to ill humor and unjust censures and suspicions—and this expectation has been realized—I am at length free—my body is at my own command, and I enjoy mental liberty, after having long been deprived of it.” A powerful sense of community and fraternity also pervaded New Harmony—and yet this noble venture was to last hardly more than a year.

In part, it was the inevitable falling off of novelty and esprit as the relative ease of summer gave way to winter discomfort and illnesses; in part, disillusionment with the workings of the complex system of credits and debits. So many individual exceptions were allowed that the entire system became suspect. New Harmony failed, however, primarily in its pretensions toward equality. Owen himself, while always hazy on the matter, was no extreme egalitarian. His concept of equality did not extend to “persons of color,” who might be received in the association “as helpers, if necessary,” but in his view might better go off to Africa or elsewhere.

Nor were all whites perceived as equal either. “No one is to be favored over the rest, as all are to be in a state of perfect equality,” wrote Mrs. Thomas Pears, reflecting the general sentiment of the community, but she went on to say in her very next sentence, “Oh, if you should see some of the rough uncouth creatures here, I think you would find it rather hard to look upon them exactly in the light of brothers and sisters.” This experiment in equality, Arthur Bestor concluded, had the paradoxical result of opening wide fissures in the community.

Young men began to grumble over favoritism to older members. Arguments broke out over land boundaries, extreme egalitarians contending that no one should have any property at all; one of them, Paul Brown, opposed the very existence of bookkeeping and decided that Owen was nothing but a “speculator in land, power, influence, riches, and the glories of this world.” Owen remained steadfastly committed to the great ideal, but he was away during a critical seven months, and when he returned the community was already splitting up. In its genteel way, New Harmony ended as a single community not in a grand upheaval but in a series of secessions as evangelical Methodists, then better-off “English farmers,” and later young intellectuals, split away. Owen benignly granted land to the secessionists, but soon he too slipped away from the experiment he had founded.

Thus New Harmony ended in disharmony. But it was not the end of Owen or his movement in America. Other Owenite communities were founded in Indiana, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania in the 1820s and 1840s. The establishment of communities of all sorts—Owenite, foreign-language sectarian, and religious—seemed to abate in the 1830s, as though Jacksonian leadership in the nation and states was absorbing reform energies. But in the 1840s came a spate of community founding, mostly by followers of an exotic philosophy spun out of the feverish imagination of a Frenchman named Fourier and imported by an American named Brisbane.

Rarely has an intellectual leader seemed so unlikely to find followers as Charles Fourier. Born in Besançon in 1772 to a cloth merchant of small means and bourgeois aspirations, he grew up hating the commercial world of “chicanery and fraud” in which he was employed, despising later the revolutionaries who had ruined his financial prospects, and detesting the whole classical and rationalist heritage of the philosophes of the Enlightenment. Living alone in poverty, a lifelong bachelor, he set himself, day after day and year after year, to expounding a philosophy of the passions. Into a series of enormous books lacking tables of contents, consecutive paging, or even any apparent order, he poured his views that men’s natural passions, arising out of deepest wants and needs, were fragmented, perverted, and crushed by bourgeois civilization. The more social institutions were made to respond to the true passions, he said, the more fulfilled and benign men would be.

Fourier was controversial enough with his view that sex was a fundamental passion to be expressed in all its infinite variations, from partners of two to orgies of ten, from heterosexuality to homosexuality, in complex networks of liaisons. He founded his philosophy on a cosmology that linked the history of the passions to tens of thousands of years of human history, to a future epoch of immensely expanded degrees of passionate gratification, to such phenomena as the transformation of the salty seas into a tangy sort of lemonade—ideas that invested Fourier’s writings with an air of happy madness.

Every day, precisely at noon, until his death, Fourier awaited the philanthropist who would agree to try out his system. No benefactor came. But one man who did come was Albert Brisbane, a young New Yorker who had studied Hegel in Berlin under the master himself, and dallied with the reformist ideas of Saint-Simon, until he discovered Fourier. After two years of indoctrination, Brisbane returned to America to propagate the faith. Fourierian wine lost some of its headiness in Brisbane’s importation. Purging the doctrine of such delightful fantasies as the fornication of the planets, Brisbane seized on his master’s detailed plan for Phalansteries, rural communes that would each allow their 1,600 members to live together in a harmonious, joyful, sensual life of love and passion.

Brisbane preached Fourierism from lecture rostrums, through the columns of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and in books on “association” and the reorganization of industry. Even so, it is not wholly clear how and why this young idealist cut so deeply into popular minds and aspirations. Evidently people were responding to Brisbane’s emphasis on association as an escape from capitalistic competition, industrial disorder, and social disarray. We do know that at least a score of Fourierian associations, phalanxes, unions, and colonies were founded in townships and villages throughout the Northeast and Midwest—none in the South—between 1840 and 1847. One of these was Brook Farm, where Sophia Ripley had communed so happily on an earlier August day. Some, communities like Oneida lasted for a few decades, but most succumbed within a year or two.

Why this record of failure? Critics pointed to mismanagement, poor planning, laziness, irresponsibility, thievery, fires and other catastrophes—and the inability of human nature to conform to the plans of Utopians. Others contended that communities stressing harmony, cooperation, sharing of profits and property, pastoral pursuits, agricultural produce, attention more to human needs than to human productivity, could not survive in a society tending more and more toward industrial productivity, urban growth, and competitive individualism.

Like poor persons’ names in village graveyards, the demise of these societies was often their only act recorded in history. Lost to history also were many of the happier days of communal people who at least for a summer or two, until the mortgage callers and rent or tax collectors swooped down, had a taste of true brotherhood, genuine sharing, social and religious tolerance, individual and collective fulfillment. We know only enough about these communities to generalize modestly: they were the final product of brilliantly creative intellectual leadership that knew how to envision but not how to plan. They were rural in nature, arcadian in heritage and nostalgia, mainly agricultural in sustenance. They were self-consciously experimental. And, despite all their concern with harmony, they usually broke up in conflict, secession, and mutual hostility.

It was a bitter denouement for the communitarians who had, in Horace Greeley’s admiring words, sought to achieve their goals not “through hatred, collision, and depressing competition; not through War, whether of Nation against Nation, Class against Class, or Capital against Labor; but through Union, Harmony, and the reconciling of all Interests, the giving scope of all noble Sentiments and Aspirations.…” It was precisely this aspiration of harmony, however, that was the target of criticism by a young German who had watched the communal experiments with interest. Karl Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels lauded Owenites and Fourierians for their attacks on competitive capitalism, on the treatment of employees as mere commodities, on the alienation of the worker from his labor and its product. But, in a document that would become far more famous and influential than anything Fourier or Owen ever wrote, Marx and Engels excoriated the communitarians for their very belief in harmony and unity:

“They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored,” Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto in 1848. “Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class.…

“Hence, they reject all political and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social gospel.…These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.”

Class conflict, not communal harmony, was to Marx the driving social force in history, but neither Marx nor the harmonious anticipated the fundamental conflict that soon would rend American society.

CHAPTER 13

The Empire of Liberty

THE QUARTER CENTURY FOLLOWING the War of 1812-15 was an era of relative quiet in American foreign relations. The big powers across the Atlantic were relatively pacific, as though they were restoring energies lost in the carnage and chaos of the Napoleonic wars. The nation’s leaders rejoiced in the benignity of international affairs. “There has, indeed, rarely been a period in the history of civilized man in which the general condition of the Christian nations has been marked so extensively by peace and prosperity,” said President John Quincy Adams in 1825. Americans seemed preoccupied with domestic problems and opportunities—especially the vast lands to the west. Still, American war hawks repeatedly brought the country to a fever pitch against both France and Britain—and doubtless the jingoes would have challenged the third great European power, Spain, if Mexico had not gained its independence.

The brush with France came close to comic opera. For years Washington had been trying to collect on claims against the French for American commercial losses during the French Revolution. Although in 1831 Paris finally agreed to pay, the French Finance Minister reneged on the first installment for the plausible reason that the legislature had not appropriated the necessary funds. A year later that body balked at paying at all. President Jackson—who had been compelled to stand by fuming as Biddle’s bank assessed his government $170,000 for having presented an unredeemed instrument—now exploded, shouting, so it is said, “I know them French”—he had never been abroad—“they won’t pay unless they’re made to.” He told Congress that if the money was not forthcoming the United States government should be authorized to seize French property. Chauvinistic excitement swept the nation. The French minister demanded his passport. The French legislature made the appropriation but withheld payment until the President explained his language.

“Apologize? I’d see the whole race roasting in hell first!” was Jackson’s apocryphal reply. Jingoes had a field day. “No explanations! No apologies!”

It was rumored that Jackson blew up when he saw a French note with the words je demande, not realizing that demande meant “request.” He ordered naval preparations. Paris assigned a squadron to the West Indies. By now the tiff had become so absurd as to fall of its own slight weight, and the British skillfully mediated. Jackson withdrew any possible imputation of insult to the French government in a way that enabled him to feel he had avoided apologizing. The French, their honor satisfied, arranged to pay the money. And the French chargé in Washington, Alphonse Pageot, who had indignantly departed for Paris with his little son, Andrew Jackson Pageot, returned triumphantly to Washington with his boy, name unchanged.

The encounter with the British was more serious. In 1837 Canadians led by William Lyon Mackenzie rebelled against British rule. Nothing could be calculated to appeal more to the hearts and minds of Americans—to their memories of their own insurrection, their missionary hope of bringing republicanism to their northern neighbors, the need of some for employment after the Panic of ’37. Incidents multiplied. Enlisting in the rebel cause, Americans raided United States arsenals and handed weapons over to their comrades. When they started to use a small steamship, the Caroline, to transport supplies to the insurrectionists, aroused Canadian loyalists rowed across the Niagara River, set the Caroline afire, and let it drift downstream. The ship had been sent over the falls with men trapped inside, American newspapers screamed. Actually the steamer had sunk above the falls, and only one man, Amos Durfee, had been killed, but this was enough. Durfee’s draped body was displayed in Buffalo. The Rochester Democrat demanded that the “outrage” be avenged “not by simpering diplomacy—BUT BY BLOOD.…”

Within a year tens of thousands of Americans, it was estimated, were active across the border from Vermont to Michigan, with the avowed goal of emancipating “the British Colonies from British Thralldom.” Organized in “Hunters’ Lodges,” equipped with cryptic signs, passwords, and badges, the Hunters planned to invade Canada. Meantime, diplomacy had been at work. President Van Buren, as firm in dampening the war fever as the jingoes had been in inflaming it, demanded that American volunteers in Canada return home, asked the governors of New York and Vermont to call their militias into service, and sent General Winfield Scott to pacify the sympathizers. At the end of 1838 several armed bands crossed the border; they were quickly broken up. Rensselaer Van Rensselaer, an American “general,” was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for violating the neutrality laws. Van Buren pardoned him—but only after his defeat in the 1840 election.

Feeling along the border eased a bit, only to flare up again late in 1840 when Alexander McLeod, a Canadian deputy sheriff, was picked up in New York State and incarcerated on the charge of having murdered Durfee in the Caroline raid. Downing Street formally demanded McLeod’s release, amid warnings of most serious consequences if the Canadian was not liberated. The State Department might have been conciliatory, but New Yorkers bridled—and they had the body. There was not gold enough in Britain to take McLeod out of Niagara County, a New York legislator proclaimed. London huffed and puffed in reply; McLeod must be surrendered alive, announced The Times, or avenged if dead. Although Webster, on taking office as Secretary of State, tried to calm the British, he could not overcome the stubborn fact that New York as a sovereign state was determined to try McLeod. Once again war cries echoed through the borderlands. The English tried vainly to understand a federal system that would allow a single state to determine a matter of such international concern while the national government was forced to watch helplessly. McLeod was tried before an American jury—and acquitted in twenty minutes—and the war threat dissipated.

People of good sense were more and more convinced that Anglo-American relations could not be left in the hands of mobs, adventurers, chauvinists, and the unexpected fair-mindedness of a New York jury. The coming to office of Robert Peel as Prime Minister, and the appointment of the more conciliatory Lord Aberdeen as Foreign Secretary in place of Lord Palmerston only a few months after Webster had taken office, set the stage for an attempt to resolve the knottiest issue between the two nations. This was the dispute over the northeastern boundary between Maine and New Brunswick.

For decades this poorly mapped area had been in dispute. In 1827, after Americans and Canadians competed for land grants along the Aroostook River, London and Washington agreed to submit the boundary differences to the King of the Netherlands for arbitration; but when the King submitted his compromise award, the British accepted and the Senate balked. A bloodless “war” broke out as Canadian lumberjacks invaded the disputed area; amid the usual alarms both Maine and New Brunswick called up their militias, and once again the hawks of Washington called for war rather than national dishonor. A truce was hastily patched together until the matter could be settled by negotiation, a task to test Daniel Webster’s vaunted skill at diplomacy. He was ready for it, having visited England in 1839 and met with its leaders. To parley with Webster, Aberdeen had chosen the agreeable Lord Ashburton, who had married an American belle and heiress, Anne Bingham of Philadelphia, during George Washington’s presidency.

Webster and Ashburton had little trouble working out a compromise; the problem was gaining acceptance by border chauvinists and by the British government, which insisted on a boundary that would allow the Canadians an overland route between Quebec and St. John. Rarely has an issue turned so much on accurate mapping, and rarely has mapping been so faulty or inadequate. Some old maps, one of which seemed validated by Benjamin Franklin himself, supported British and Canadian claims. In order to gain Maine’s support for his planned compromise with Ashburton, Webster sent the historian Jared Sparks to Maine to persuade the political leaders to accept the deal or risk something worse. Ashburton paid almost $15,000 for Sparks’s expenses. As it turned out later, authentic maps supported the original American claims; unlucky Maine had lost the battle of the maps.

All the parties gained from the treaty itself, however. After the protracted negotiations with commissioners from Maine and Massachusetts (which still had property rights in Maine after the separation of 1820), the treaty settled a wide range of issues. The St. John, Detroit, and St. Clair rivers and Lake St. Clair were open to navigation by both parties. An extradition article dealt with the old problem of fugitives gone to Canada. On an entirely different but intensifying problem, the two nations agreed to maintain a joint cruising squadron on the coast of Africa to help curb the slave trade, though Washington would not accept a mutual right of visit to ascertain the real identity of a suspected slaver. The heart of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, however, lay in its settlement of the old boundary question. The United States received about 7,000 of the 12,000 square miles in dispute, and gained most of its claim to about 200 square miles of land around the head of the Connecticut River.

The treaty was a major achievement at a time of ill feeling between Americans and British. Sixty years after the Revolution countless Americans still hated the British—hated them for their aristocratic condescension, their exactions as creditors, their endless criticism of Americans and American ways. To many Britishers, the United States was still the land of drunks, duelers, spitters, anarchists, lynchers, thieves, gamblers, slave drivers, cattle rustlers, bumptious boasters and yarn spinners. The English and American languages set them apart orally, and verbally too, as each side could read in the press the scurrilous attacks by the other.

Given such attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, it seemed remarkable that the two nations avoided a major shooting war. Britain and the United States were economically interdependent, of course, but such a relationship among nations had not always prevented war in the past. The explanation in large part lay with the nation’s foreign-policy and diplomatic leadership. Sixty years after the founding of the United States, it was still widely accepted that diplomats and negotiators must have a considerably free hand in parleys with other envoys, for a democratic foreign policy is not necessarily a pacific foreign policy; the popular mind was extremely touchy, suspicious, excitable, and belligerent. Time and again the leadership in Washington exercised restraint, but ultimately this leadership depended on the people for support. And the people were taking some leadership in foreign policy, not only with their votes, but with their feet, as they moved into Indian territories and into borderlands to the northwest or southwest, gazing across frontiers with envy, fear, greed, hostility, and often with a consuming missionary zeal.

TRAILS OF TEARS AND HOPE

Now these people were gazing toward the Far West. By the 1840s the trek west had lengthened considerably from the days of the first trans-Appalachian pioneers, with their Conestoga wagons and frontier stockades. The settlers of the plains bordering the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico also were more diverse, quicker to organize some kind of government, and more inventive in exploiting land than the Scotch-Irish piedmonters whom Daniel Boone had led through the Cumberland Gap. Boone had never known distances such as his grandchildren faced in the two-thousand-mile trek over the Oregon Trail. Undertaken primarily for private motives, the migration would have enormous public impact, as the settlements provided the rationale for a national war and tinder for a civil one.

Pioneers and settlers still tended to move along the latitudes. People from the Northeast headed toward the Great Lakes areas and the northern plains. Southerners traveled toward the Gulf seaboard but many turned northwestward in the direction of the lower tiers of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The migrants were caricatured back East as unscrupulous traders or frontier ruffians; many a Boston or New York salon was titillated by tales of bowie knife fights, eye-gouging brawls, and general drunken mayhem, engaged in by ruffians who styled themselves “ring-tailed roarers, half-horse and half-alligator.” But Tocqueville discovered a more literate pioneer; “Everything about him is primitive and wild, but he is himself the result of the labor and experience of eighteen centuries…acquainted with the past, curious about the future, and ready for argument about the present…a highly civilized being, who consents for a time to inhabit the backwoods, and who penetrates the wilds of the New World with the Bible, an axe, and some newspapers.”

Many were looking for a new start: New Englanders escaping from falling crop prices and the loss of farmland to sheep pasture; Carolinians and Tennesseeans displaced by plantations and “King Cotton”; Irish and Germans and others who had settled in port cities and now were on the move again. They might start their trip by one of a dozen or so railroads from the East. Or take the Erie Canal, switch to the Welland Canal around Niagara Falls to Lake Erie, and then catch a boat to Toledo, move along the Maumee River to Fort Wayne and Peru in Indiana, and branch off on canals running to Indianapolis and Terre Haute. Or take the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal from Georgetown to Cumberland, Maryland, and pick up the Cumberland Road to Columbus and Indianapolis and points west. Fares were falling; the New Orleans-Louisville steamboat trip cost fifty dollars in 1825, about half that a decade later, while Pittsburgh-Cincinnati dropped from about twelve dollars to about six.

In the great flat, fertile area extending down from the Great Lakes, Americans were no longer pioneers but settlers. Gone were the days when frontier communities had to experience long years of isolation and self-sufficiency. Settlers in the Michigan woods and Illinois prairie were now only a week or less, rather than months, from New York and Philadelphia. And the West was creating its own market centers. Cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Indianapolis were growing with dizzying speed along with the new transportation network. Miners, tanners, lumberjacks, plowmen, and craftsmen of a thousand different styles elbowed aside the old pioneer jack-of-all-trades in his rough homespun.

Farther south, in the “New Counties” organized from the Indian cessions in Alabama and neighboring states, life for the settler was more cramped. Land was quickly given over to growing cotton and rice. The yeoman farmer did not enjoy the variety of opportunities found farther north, but it was still a region of feverish change, “full of the ringing of axes and the acrid smoke of new-grounds,” wrote W.J. Cash. “Whirl was its king.”

A farmer with several acres of cotton and one or two slaves might strike it rich in a few seasons and then set himself up as an old tidewater planter. Imitating the Charleston elite, the planter would build a house of lumber sawn on the place—perhaps not a very grand house, sometimes “just a box, with four rooms, bisected by a hallway, set on four more rooms.…But it was huge, it had great columns in front, and it was eventually painted white, and so, in this land of wide fields and pine woods it seemed very imposing.” In good years the planter would acquire more land and slaves, broadcloth suits, silk dresses, and even a coach-and-six. North or South, the Yankee peddler made shoes, clocks, pails, patent medicines available to nearly everyone.

“The nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and continental element in the national mind,” Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, “and we shall yet have an American genius.…It is the country of the Future…a country of beginnings, of projects, of designs, of expectations.”

It was also a country of conflict, as the speed of change heightened the clash of economic interests natural to society. Replacing the three distinct waves of emigrants—the transient pioneer who occupied the land, the settler who cultivated it, and the man of capital and connections who fit it into a broader economic network—the entire progression now overlapped and intertwined in a single generation. Federal land policy after 1819 also served to heighten tensions among squatter, landowner, and capitalist, for the government’s refusal to sell land on credit left many farmers without the means of gaining title to the rich new lands, while other settlers who could afford to buy tracts often arrived to find squatters already on their spread.

Politics was a ready escape valve for simmering conflict. Everyone could talk about it, take part in it, denounce it. Almost everyone “expected at some time to be a candidate for something; or that his uncle would be; or his cousin, or his cousin’s wife’s cousin’s friend would be”; so that with frequent elections for numerous offices, people seemed constantly to be electioneering. Conflict also erupted in outright violence. Squatters chased owners off land, and in turn were driven off. In Illinois and Iowa, gangs of horse thieves and other outlaws fought little wars with the citizenry for control of land and even of county governments. The “slick law” of the vigilante ruled some of the New Counties of the South. In the western melting pot, violence was an accepted way to settle differences.

Violence was still the final arbiter in the civil war between red people and white. Gone were the days when President Jefferson could drink a toast to “The Red People of America—Under an enlightened policy, gaining by steady steps the comforts of the civilized, without losing the virtues of the savage state.” Some Americans did continue to idealize, and perhaps patronize, the Indian. A small group of artists and writers, led by the painter George Catlin among others, depicted and sometimes romanticized the noble savage. In their Washington finishing school, Mary Rapine and her classmates thrilled to the adventures of the Pawnee warrior Petalesharo. For more political reasons, men like Edward Everett and Theodore

Frelinghuysen rose in the Congress to demand that the government honor its commitments to the red nations.

But Henry Clay struck closer to the prevailing national attitude in his view, as interpreted by John Quincy Adams: “There never was a full-blooded Indian who took to civilization. It was not in their nature. He believed they were destined to extinction, and although he would never use or countenance inhumanity towards them, he did not think them, as a race, worth preserving.” Most settlers did not share even this benignly perverse, self-fulfilling attitude. Caught in the cycle of occupation, Indian retaliation, and white counter-retaliation, settlers hated the Indians and the pusillanimous, chicken-livered federals who made treaties with them.

Indians under Black Hawk learned once again the price of resistance. Removal of most of the northwestern tribes had proved easy, since their strength had largely been broken in the War of 1812-15. But Black Hawk, a man of such righteous dignity that he reminded Easterners of James Madison and even Sir Walter Scott, persuaded a number of tribesmen to remain by the fields and graves of their ancestors on the Illinois frontier. Forced over into Wisconsin by white depredations during the fall of 1831, Black Hawk found so little food and game there that he recrossed the Mississippi next spring with about a thousand of his tribe. When both state militia and regulars were called out, he tried twice to surrender, but each time his envoys were cut down by white volunteers. Trapped against the river, his people were driven into the water at bayonet point and shot as they struggled for air. At slaughter’s end, 150 of the original thousand remained alive.

All this time there thrived in the Southeast a wondrous collection of tribes that gave the lie to the stereotype, benign or malign, of the Savage. About 60,000 Indians—Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles—had established their own civilizations on some of the best lands in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. They had adopted both the best and the worst of white culture. The Cherokees of Georgia owned 22,000 cattle, 2,000 spinning wheels, 700 looms, 31 gristmills, 10 sawmills, 8 cotton gins, 18 schools—and 1,300 slaves. The wealth of the tribes proved their undoing, as land-hungry white Southerners eyed their fields and buildings and agitated for their removal to the West. But these native Americans were not nomads; pioneering in the wilds of Arkansas and Oklahoma did not interest them. Their prime spiritual value was oneness with the land they lived on: “The mountains and hills, that you see, are your backbone, and the gullies and creeks, which are between the hills and mountains, are your heart veins.”

In trying to resist removal, the Indians adopted another white device—formal, representative government. The forms of white rule—assemblies, voting, elected officials—were added to the old tribal structures. The Cherokees adopted a constitution and even applied for statehood. This tribe had some notable leaders, including Sequoyah, who invented a system of writing to fit the ancient tribal language and published a newspaper in Cherokee; and John Ross, who headed two delegations of protest to Washington and made his appeals with the eloquence of a Demosthenes.

All in vain. Federal treaties with the red people were ignored, federal agents assailed with threats and violence. Georgia barred Indian testimony in court, ruled that the tribal government was illegal, and sent the militia onto the Cherokee lands to enforce its decrees, seize the tribal press, and terrorize the Indians into submission. Ross was jailed when he tried to organize a third delegation to Washington. Both President Jackson and the state governor ignored a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the Cherokees. Protection of life, liberty, and property—freedom to organize and petition—the right to a free press and a fair trial—protection against government—the whole American conception of liberty was in shreds.

Savagely punished by the authorities, set upon with whips and clubs by poor whites, defrauded by officials and speculators, the Indians bade farewell to their beloved hills and mountains and struck out for “Indian territory” a thousand miles away through swamps and wilderness. It was a trail of tears. “I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes,” an army private wrote, “and driven by bayonet into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into wagons and started toward the west.” More than a quarter of the tribe died on the way to the banks of the Arkansas and Red rivers.

The epic might have ended there, west of the Mississippi. But the “Five Civilized Nations,” as they came to be called, were not yet defeated. They rebuilt their societies in the wilderness. Creeks and Cherokees retained their old governmental structures, modeled on the southern territorial governments. The Choctaws adopted some of the elements of Jacksonian democracy: every male Choctaw over twenty-one could vote to choose a chief and ten councilors in each district; measures passed by the council could be vetoed by the chiefs, subject to a two-thirds override. At the Choctaw Academy, students pursued not only the three R’s but geography, natural philosophy, history, algebra, and Latin.

The final end of the tragedy, however, had simply been delayed. The remorseless advance of the whites continued, and within a few years the Five Tribes were forced to cede land to settlers in Kansas and Arkansas. Soon these proud and accomplished people were removed to a “reservation” in Oklahoma.

During these years Texas was arousing national attention. As the Indians were forced west, whites were moving on toward the Southwest and Northwest, driven by high hopes and economic need. By the mid-1820s Stephen F. Austin was achieving in Texas a dream that his father Moses had hoped to realize when he secured a commission from the feeble government of New Spain to settle three hundred American families there. Settling in Bexar, Stephen Austin offered a guarantee of good conduct by the Americans in exchange for grants of land and promises of religious freedom from the Spanish, who wanted the empty land filled up as a buffer against Indians and marauding frontiersmen.

This deal, which threw Texas open to colonization by thousands of settlers seeking her rich bottomlands, worked well until it was threatened by Mexico’s revolution against the mother country. For more than a year Austin, ignorant of the language, the laws, and the leaders of the revolutionary government, haunted the chambers of the constantly changing officialdom in Mexico City. Receiving some concessions, Austin returned to Texas and served as a benign despot on his immense holdings, as well as a trusted adviser to the other empresarios. Almost 20,000 Americans flooded into the province. Operating nearly independently of Mexican authority hundreds of miles away, the Texans seemed to some to have virtually realized the Jeffersonian paradise of a small republic.

This near-idyll was shattered when the Mexicans, alarmed by an abortive effort to establish the “Republic of Fredonia,” barred the admission of additional Americans into Texas or the introduction of more slaves. After much agitation by the aroused Texans, a convention resolved that Texas must become an autonomous state within the Mexican federal union. Austin carried the resolves to Mexico City, only to be thrown into jail. By the time he was released months later, in the fall of 1835, war had broken out in Texas much as it had in Lexington and Concord sixty years before. Mexican soldiers had ridden into the hamlet of Gonzales with orders to confiscate a small brass cannon, which the Texans were determined to keep. They not only kept it but used it to fire on the Mexicans. The Texas struggle became one for independence, as Sam Houston, proclaiming that the “work of liberty has begun,” issued a call for volunteers.

Six thousand Mexicans under General Santa Anna marched against the rebels. Reaching San Antonio late in February 1836, they found a company of Texans holed up in the Alamo, under self-styled Colonel Buck Travis, a pugnacious soldier-politico only twenty-seven years of age. Travis appealed to the “People of Texas and All Americans in the World” for help “in the name of Liberty,” but no help came. With matchless determination and heroism the 187 Texans held off the assaulting force of 3,000 Mexicans for ten days, until they were overwhelmed and massacred. The bodies of Davy Crockett and James Bowie, as well as Travis, lay in the carnage. Santa Anna’s forces now swept on with sword and torch, overrunning American settlements and reaching Galveston Bay. After fleeing toward the United States border, the Texans rallied on the banks of the San Jacinto. With the cry of “Remember the Alamo!” on their lips, they overran a detachment of Mexicans they surprised in their beds, killed six hundred of the enemy, and captured Santa Anna.

With the surrender of Santa Anna, the war seemed over, and the way prepared for joining the United States. But Washington was cool to the Texas petition for annexation. President Jackson feared that merely recognizing Texas would hurt relationships with Mexico and disrupt the Democratic party. John Quincy Adams charged on the floor of the House that the Texas revolution was part of a proslavery conspiracy. Already entangled in the internal politics of the United States, the Texans would have to await further foreign and domestic developments before they could gain admission to the Union.

The white occupation of the Northwest was more peaceful but no less adventurous. Ever since the expedition of Lewis and Clark, the two thousand miles of plain and mountain between the Mississippi River and the Pacific had been the home of a peculiar breed of half-traders, half-explorers. These were the mountain men, whose lives were later glorified in the stories of Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and Jedediah Smith. A few of these pioneers had settled in Oregon and turned to farming under the watchful eye of Britain’s Hudson’s Bay Company, which controlled the territory north of the Columbia River. Others stayed in California, nominally a Mexican possession but in fact governed loosely by the local military. In California the mountain men were joined by a second group of Americans, Yankee merchants who arrived by sea. Prominent among these was “el Bostono,” Thomas O. Larkin, the American consul at Monterey. Skilled in both business and diplomacy, Larkin created from a five-hundred-dollar loan a sprawling coastal trade in California hides, Hawaiian sugar, and New England imports, while his quiet influence on the military commandant and other important citizens slowly moved the local Mexicans toward yearning for an independent California.

A new element loomed in the Pacific territories during the 1840s, thanks to the golden reports sent back by travelers and settlers. Imaginations throughout the American West were stirred by descriptions of a land where “perpetual summer is in the midst of unceasing winter…and towering snow clad mountains forever look down upon eternal verdure.” After many months of correspondence, several groups interested in emigration agreed to meet at Independence, Missouri. Most of the families who gathered at Independence that spring of 1843 and following years were fairly prosperous; they would start the year-long trek across the continent with all the wagons, stock, and household goods needed to homestead the new land. Other young couples and single men, drawn to the adventure but lacking means to make the trip on their own, hired themselves out to wealthier pioneers as teamsters and laborers.

As good frontier democrats, the travelers elected the officers of their wagon trains. Campaign techniques were impromptu; candidates mounted a barrel and spoke in their own praise, and then the voters literally lined up behind the man of their choice. “These men were running about the prairie, in long strings,” a journalist reported. “The leaders…doubling and winding in the drollest fashion; so that, the all-important business of forming a government seemed very much like the merry schoolboy game of ‘snapping the whip.’”

These boisterous elections seldom produced the sort of leaders who could stand up to the hardships of the trail. As the path grew steeper and rockier, the oxen fewer and leaner, the Indians more adept at robbing a camp or hamstringing a horse, the trains broke down into small groups or individual families—who found the going even harder alone. Winter typically saw the pioneers still high in the mountains above the Willamette and Sacramento valleys, and the older settlers left their cabins time and again to rescue the new emigrants. The travelers lost their stock, their wagons, sometimes all of their possessions along the trail. They arrived in the new land penniless but confident that they soon would make good.

Relations between Larkin and the newcomers were strained, for the untutored chauvinism of the Americans worried the native Californians and undermined Larkin’s scheme for independence. But another knowing settler, John Augustus Sutter, greeted their arrival with pleasure. But he had left Switzerland in the 1830s, drawn by the New World’s promise of wealth and freedom. His dream took shape on the banks of the Sacramento River, where his ranch and trading post made him the effective lord of northern California. But he was a lord without subjects; the only inhabitants of his “New Helvetia” were a handful of half-breeds and broken-down mountain men. Now the wagon trains would bring him tenants and customers. Perhaps when they arrived in force he would be able to complete his perennial project of building a mill on the Sacramento.

In the meantime, Sutter sent a few hired hands out to dig a ditch and test another location for the millrace.

ANNEXATION: POLITICS AND WAR

The 1840s brought an extraordinary conjuncture of popular attitudes, political leadership, and diplomatic and military opportunity, the outcome of which would add over 1,200,000 square miles to United States territory. Within one decade—indeed, within one presidential term—Americans fought a diplomatic war in the Northwest and a shooting war in the Southwest that expanded their lands by well over one-third. Nothing like this could or would ever happen again.

The popular idea lying behind this expansionism gathered force rapidly in the 1840s. Later called “Manifest Destiny,” it was a concept cloudy enough to appeal to many needs and hopes, compelling enough to sustain determined leadership. It meant expansion, legitimated by Heaven or the fates, inspired by economic interest, territorial greed, and missionary idealism—expansion toward the western coast, or over the whole North American continent, or perhaps even the whole hemisphere. Congressman Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois told Congress that he would “blot out the lines on the map which now marked our national boundaries on this continent, and make the area of liberty as broad as the continent itself.” That was the alleged purpose of Manifest Destiny—to bring the blessings of liberty and democracy, of Christianity and commercialism, to backward peoples. All this was mixed with boosterism. Said an Indiana congressman: “Go to the West and see a young man with his mate of eighteen,” and thirty years later “visit him again, and instead of two, you will find twenty-two. That is what I call the American multiplication table.”

The acolytes of Manifest Destiny were less creative or talented than they were dogged and determined. James K. Polk, their exemplar, was the oldest of ten children of a prosperous North Carolina farmer; he had been a frail youngster, a dutiful student at the University of North Carolina, and a hard-working Tennessee lawyer, before starting his climb up the political ladder, from state legislator to congressman to Speaker of the House to governor of Tennessee. A Jackson man from first to last, he had the old general’s aid in winning the Democratic party nomination in 1844 as the nation’s first dark horse.

“Who is James K. Polk?” the Whigs scoffed, but they found he was a President of plan and purpose. At the start of his administration he was determined to achieve four measures: tariff reduction; the independent treasury; settlement of the Oregon boundary question; and the acquisition of California. Backed up by an equally determined Cabinet and staff, supported in Congress, where he still had influence, Polk won these four measures—and then quit.

Oregon came as an early test of Polk’s determination. Both Britain and the United States had long laid claim to the magnificent spread of half a million square miles lying roughly between the 42nd and 54th parallels. Both claims were based mainly on early explorations—the British, most notably on George Vancouver’s of 1792; the American, on Lewis and Clark’s of 1803-06. So impressive was each side’s case, and so tangled the issues, that Webster and Ashburton avoided the dispute in their 1842 negotiations. But American settlers in Oregon, especially in the lush Willamette Valley, were pressing for a settlement, and the British wished to clarify the status of their Hudson’s Bay Company, which dominated the fur trade in the vast expanse.

The Americans had their champions in Congress. “Let the emigrants go on; and carry their rifles,” declaimed Thomas Hart Benton. “We want thirty thousand rifles in the valley of the Oregon…to annihilate the Hudson’s Bay Company, drive them off our continent, quiet their Indians, and protect the American interests.”

Elected on a Democratic party platform that had sharpened the issue by flatly claiming “our title to the whole of the Territory of Oregon is clear and unquestionable,” Polk proceeded to take a strong line in his public pronunciamentos while still trying to deal privately with London. The result was a deluge of jingoism as even small boys picked up the cry “Fifty-four Forty or Fight,” and the British attitude stiffened. Congress passed a resolution authorizing the President to terminate joint occupation of Oregon. Throughout 1845 there was talk of war—over territory three thousand miles from Washington and many weeks of sailing time from England.

Still, the foreign policy makers were able to transcend the war clamor they had helped create. Polk authorized his Secretary of State, James Buchanan, to offer the British a division at the 49th parallel. This was not the first time Washington had made this proposal, but now it failed to include a concession of free navigation of the Columbia River. Richard Pakenham, the British minister in Washington, rejected the proposal out of hand without referring it to London. He was disavowed by his government, which then proposed arbitration, but by now Polk had his back up. He would wait for Britain to make some substantial concession. The “only way to treat John Bull,” he told a congressman, “was to look him straight in the eye.”

A series of events, more than men’s statecraft, made a settlement possible. Stronger leadership by “little Englanders” in Britain, a decision by the Hudson’s Bay Company to move its main depot from Fort Vancouver on the Columbia to Vancouver Island (thus strengthening Aberdeen’s argument that a presence on the river was not crucial), and the rising concern over the gathering potato famine in Ireland, brought a new proposal of the 49th parallel from the British. Although Polk remained unyielding, most of his cabinet members wanted a settlement, urging the President to try a most interesting tactic—to refer the proposed agreement to the Senate for previous advice, rather than for ratification or rejection. This way, the senators would take the political heat, whichever way they decided. None too eagerly, Polk agreed.

The Senate took its advice-before-consent role seriously. Amid general surprise, the upper chamber advised the President to accept the British proposal as it stood. Polk complied. While by now the Oregon question had become entangled with slavery and Mexico, the simple result in the Northwest was that Americans had got neither “fifty-four” nor “fight” but a fair and lasting “forty-nine.”

Seventeen parallels south of the 49th lay Washington’s old treaty-line border with Mexico, and to the southeast of that line lay the great curving Rio Grande, flanking Texas. Tyler had hoped to turn Texas into the political rallying ground of his presidency, with nationwide support for annexation as the main prop of his re-election bid. But Calhoun, Secretary of State after the resignation of Webster and the death of his successor, Abel Upshur, chose to focus on protection of slavery as the main justification for annexation. The Senate rejected Calhoun’s narrow sectional case after a bitter debate, thus leaving the explosive issue of Texas for Polk. Even more than Oregon, it was a divisive question, cutting across parties, regions, and factions. Accusing Tyler of a slaveholders’ conspiracy to enlarge the dominion of bondage, abolitionists used the issue of annexation to arouse Northerners over slavery. In the election of 1844 Van Buren’s opposition to annexation alienated his mentor Jackson and thousands of other Democrats.

Henry Clay, the Whig nominee, typically tried to straddle the issue and typically came to be labeled “proslavery” by the abolitionists and “opportunistic” by the South. The Democrats had taken a forthright stand, calling for the “reannexation of Texas at the earliest practicable period.” And, with Polk, the Democrats had won.

Deserted by his party, lame duck John Tyler still had four months to go in the White House following the election, and he wanted to make the most of them. Fearing that an annexation treaty would again be defeated in the Senate, Tyler used the device of a joint resolution, requiring only simple majorities in House and Senate, to push through approval of an annexation agreement with Texas. Ignoring any need to gain Mexico’s consent, the resolution provided that, with the agreement of Texas, as many as four additional states might be formed from her territory; Texas could retain her own public lands but must also pay her own public debt; and the Missouri Compromise line of 36º30? would be extended to Texas.

Four days later Polk took the oath of office, and then the implacable escalation began.

March 28, 1845: Mexico breaks off diplomatic relations with the United States.

May 28: General Zachary Taylor receives orders to hold his troops in a state of readiness to advance into Texas.

June 15: Taylor is ordered to occupy a position on or near the Rio Grande.

July 4: A convention called by President Anson Jones of Texas accepts the annexation terms.

July 26: Taylor advances into Texas and establishes his base on the south bank of the Nueces.

The gathering crisis eased a bit in the autumn when the exhausted Herrera regime, beset by extreme nationalists, signaled a wish to parley. Mexican leaders, long concerned over Washington’s partiality to Texas, were naturally indignant at the annexation treaty and at threatening U.S. military moves. Polk sent John Slidell, a Spanish-speaking Louisiana politician, to Mexico City with instructions to offer Herrera $5 million for New Mexico, $25 million or more for California, and agreement on the Rio Grande as the northeastern boundary in exchange for American assumption of claims held by its own nationals against Mexico. Slidell arrived in Mexico only to learn that he would not be received as minister plenipotentiary, since the Mexicans wished to negotiate before officially resuming relations. Polk, however, refused to change Slidell’s status to that of a commissioner, and the Mexicans ignored the envoy. But Slidell’s presence had helped to turn public opinion against the Herrera government, and as 1845 ended the nationalist general Mariano Paredes launched a successful coup. Playing to popular fears that Slidell’s mission was not a gesture of conciliation but a foray to gain territory, Paredes declared he would fight for Mexico’s claim to all of Texas.

The leaders in Washington and Mexico City now made a fateful set of decisions. On January 13 the War Department ordered Taylor to occupy positions on the Rio Grande across from Matamoras, where Mexican forces were camped; a few days later, Paredes sent General Mariano Arista north with reinforcements and secret instructions to push Taylor back beyond the Nueces. As it took about two weeks for messages from the Rio Grande to reach either capital, the soldiers were on their own. Actions in Texas were following a separate course from events in Washington and Mexico City.

Then events seemed to take command:

March 28, 1846: The American regulars camp on the Rio Grande.

April 12: The Mexican command warns that Taylor’s is a hostile action.

April 15: Taylor blockades the mouth of the Rio Grande.

April 24: Arista arrives and orders the Mexican forces across the river.

April 25: Arista’s troops trap one of Taylor’s cavalry patrols and kill or capture sixty Americans. Taylor reports the situation to Washington and urgently requests reinforcements. The Mexican and American armies begin to maneuver for battle, as both commanders act on the assumption that war has begun.

Now Washington: May 9: Polk convenes the Cabinet and gains their approval for an immediate declaration of war. Only later that evening does Taylor’s message, describing the Mexican attack, arrive from the Rio Grande. The President spends the Sabbath drafting his speech, which is delivered two days later. “A cynic might have felt that Polk’s war message sounded as if it had indeed been written on Sunday, for it combined the self-righteous wrath of the Old Testament with the long-suffering patience of the New,” David Pletcher wrote. It “epitomized Polk’s whole policy toward Mexico since his inauguration, by assuming what was not yet proved, by thrusting forward to throw his adversary off balance, and by maintaining a show of reluctance and sweet reason to placate moderates and pacifists at home.…”

A few Whig congressmen called for time to consider the mass of evidence that accompanied Polk’s message, but heavy majorities in the House and Senate voted for war at once. Suddenly the War Department found itself without a war plan, despite the fact that hostilities had been predicted for months. A strategy was hastily improvised. General Taylor would conduct the main offensive across the Rio Grande into the lightly populated northern reaches of Mexico. The Navy’s Pacific squadron, which had standing orders to capture the port of Monterey if war broke out, would seize as much of the California coast as possible. General Stephen W. Kearny would launch an expedition into New Mexico and then California. Later General Winfield Scott would strike at Mexico City itself by way of Veracruz. The plan and its execution turned out to be a curious repetition of the War of l812-15: attacks along the northern border, battles in western waters and coastlands (in this case California), amphibious invasion from the eastern ocean, capture of the enemy’s capital. But this time the United States struck at the enemy heartland—and there was no Battle of New Orleans.

While Taylor, without even waiting for the congressional declaration of war, pushed the Mexicans back across the river with artillery barrages and bayonet attacks, General Kearny moved out toward Santa Fe. Another long march brought his small force to San Diego and Los Angeles, where it linked up with shore parties from the U.S. Pacific squadron and a group of local Americans led by the flamboyant Captain John C. Fremont.

In late September, Taylor drove the Mexican’s out of Monterrey after a four-day siege and stout opposition. Lieutenant Sam Grant was moved to pity by the plight of the conquered Mexicans: “Many of the prisoners were cavalry, armed with lances, and mounted on miserable little half-starved horses that did not look as if they could carry their riders out of town. The men looked in but little better condition.” The bankrupt Mexican government could not even begin to match the millions of dollars appropriated in Washington. The Americans did suffer from inadequate supplies, primitive provisions for sanitation and health, and other failings of a makeshift, volunteer army, but few American soldiers missed a meal or lacked a working gun; few Mexicans ever received either.

After Monterrey fell, Taylor concluded a local armistice with Santa Anna, subject to being disclaimed by either government. Polk promptly did disclaim it and added a reprimand. Now that Taylor was being mentioned by Whigs as a presidential possibility, the general suspected Polk was intriguing against him. His suspicions hardened when he heard that Scott would lead the attack on Veracruz. Acting largely on his own, Taylor pushed south toward a showdown with Santa Anna. At Buena Vista a vastly superior Mexican force attacked the 5,000 men under Taylor. Once again the Mexican soldiers fought valiantly but were let down by their leaders, who hesitated in the face of repeated charges by Jefferson Davis’ Mississippi volunteers. When Santa Anna tried to disengage, the battle was converted into a rout. Taylor’s success, however, only earned him another reprimand from Washington, so the general gave up his command and returned to the United States—where he gained a hero’s reception.

In February 1847 Scott struck at Mexico’s east coast in what would become a great military saga of the war. The soldiers in the small American armada faced the powerful fortress of Veracruz and, towering behind it, the mountain of Orizaba, whose white summit appeared to them “like a great liberty cap suspended in the air.” On March 9, as the setting sun dyed the snowy liberty cap blood-red, 10,000 soldiers streamed ashore in the first massive amphibious assault ever launched by Americans. As one lieutenant in the first wave wrote home with delight, all went smoothly. “As fast as they got in, the boats fell behind the frigate Raritan and held on her till the signal should be given to land. This, I think, was the most beautiful sight I ever saw, as the boats fell in their places, the colors flying, the bands playing, etc. When the signal was made to land, as the boats cast off and stood for shore the navy and the 2nd and 3rd lines sent up cheer after cheer that might have been heard for miles.” After five days of skillful maneuver and bombardment, the Americans forced the surrender of the fortress.

Then began the long advance to the west. In the midsummer heat Scott’s men moved through lowlands and trudged up through towering mountain passes to the central Mexican plateau. Though a heavy force of Mexicans stood at the canyons around Cerro Gordo, Scott’s young engineering officers—Joe Johnston, George McClellan, and the brilliant Major Robert E. Lee—found or built paths around the Mexican positions, flanking and routing the defenders. Scott pressed on to Jalapa and Perote, where the invasion ended in May. Disease and the departure of hundreds of men whose short-term enlistments had expired left Scott with only a few thousand effectives, and he had to pause for several months while reinforcements arrived piecemeal from the United States.

After the fall of Veracruz, Polk dispatched Nicholas P. Trist, chief clerk of the State Department, on a secret peace mission to Mexico. At first Trist had more difficulty parleying with the suspicious Scott than with the enemy, but after achieving an armistice with the general he negotiated a temporary one with the Mexicans. This effort soon collapsed, and Scott resumed the offensive. He had already routed the enemy in Contreras and overpowered them at Churubusco, with heavy losses on both sides. Mexico City lay just over the next rise: “The mists disappeared and there, before them, lay what Cortez’s lieutenants had seen…a great garden, dotted with bright lakes, fields of emerald and the white domes and glittering spires.…A valley fifty miles wide, dotted with six large extinct volcanoes far to the south, gleaming with snow—tiny Mexican lancers moving slowly among olive groves and straggling villages.”

Scott faced a hard choice between storming the heavily fortified stone causeways that led into the city across swamps from the south or using a route from the west defended by a height called Chapultepec. Though Lee recommended the former, Scott chose to assault Chapultepec and the fortress-palace that topped it. After a day of cannonading, assault groups clambered and shot their way up almost vertical slopes, through heavy musket fire, to a point where they could climb the palace walls with scaling ladders. Inside, “Los Niños,” the young cadets of the Military College, disregarded Santa Anna’s order that they be relieved, and stood their ground with the other defenders. The Americans could not be stopped. General Scott watched the assault with pride and wonder: “I am an idiot to bring artillery so far…when I have such soldiers.” A savage bayonet charge brought the fall of the fortress. Next day, Mexican troops in the rest of the city gave in after more heavy fighting, and the invading forces took control of the capital. Soon United States Marines were guarding the “halls of Montezuma.”

Although Trist had been ordered back to Washington, with the fall of Mexico City he stayed on without authorization. By the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico surrendered all claims to Texas above the Rio Grande and ceded California and New Mexico to the United States. Washington agreed to pay $15 million for the almost 1,200,000 square miles comprising those two states and Texas, and parts of what would become Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Colorado. Considering the length and daring of the military expedition, the price was not unduly high: 15,000 casualties out of about 120,000 men in the total force, of whom about 45,000 were regulars and Marines. Considering the Mexicans’ advantage of numbers and position, and the constant interference by Polk and other political luminaries, it was an unusually well-conducted war. Perhaps the principal reason was the quality of American military leadership that emerged among the officers in the field. Men like Lee, Sherman, Bragg, Longstreet, Meade, McClellan, and a score of others won their spurs in the battles with the Mexicans. Indeed, some of these West Point graduates regretted seeing the war end; Brevet Captain Ulysses S. Grant, for one, lamented that “there goes the last chance I ever shall have of military distinction!”

THE GEOMETRY OF BALANCE

The Mexican War had slashed through the body of the nation’s politics like a bayonet through a man’s belly, leaving severed connections and inflamed wounds. During the war Northerners and Southerners alike, it seemed, had been less concerned over the eventual land settlement with Mexico than over the status of slavery in the lands coming to the United States as territories and later as states. No sooner had Polk requested $2 million from Congress to negotiate peace with Mexico than a Pennsylvania Democrat, David Wilmot, had risen in the House to move that slavery be barred from any territory received from Mexico. Though the Wilmot Proviso never passed Congress, Wilmot kept pressing for it and in the process he united the South against its northern adversaries. Large planters sought more slave states in the Union to balance the North. Small southern farmers wanted this—they also wanted assurance that someday, if need be, they could take their slaves with them to serve as cheap labor if they migrated into the big open country of the Southwest.

But the war did more than sharpen North-South animosities. Its implications for the extension of slavery put heavy pressure on the delicate balance between Whigs who wanted to continue to be a national party, embracing a coalition of moderate supporters North and South, and those who shrank further and further from any involvement with “slave power.” The Democratic party too was increasingly divided over the slavery issue, but less so than the Whigs, for the national Democracy was more securely based in its old coalition of northern and southern Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, and Van Burenites.

The deepening polarization reached into the states, into the grass roots. The complex internal politics of New York, ordinarily revolving around mundane questions of taxation and trade and manufacture, was drawn into the vortex of national discord. The cleavage was even deeper in Massachusetts, where John Quincy Adams remarked on two divisions, “one based upon public principle, and the other upon manufacturing and commercial interests.” Adams himself would not be around to lend his national stature to moral leadership in the antislavery cause. While listening in the House to the reading of fulsome resolutions expressing the gratitude of Congress to various Mexican War generals—and preparing to oppose them—“Old Man Eloquent” suddenly collapsed at his desk. He died two days later.

In his own lifetime, having moved from the Federalist party into the Republican orbit and then into the Whig, having moved from high-minded disapproval of slavery to ardent hostility to it, but always short of abolitionism, having maintained ties with most party and factional leaders but always able to transcend them, Adams personified the shifting but sinewy bonds and balances that held the Union together. These came under enormous strain from the disruption of the war with Mexico and its settlement.

These elements of equipoise were constitutional, institutional, sectional, economic, philosophical, forming a complex geometry of balance. The provision in the Constitution for apportionment of southern representation based on the three-fifths rule may have seemed to John Quincy Adams “that fatal drop of Prussic acid in the Constitution, the human chattel representation,” but the provision nevertheless helped balance southern and northern power in Congress. Northern states held a clear majority in the House but only half the Senate seats, and the South would gain representation in both chambers from the new states carved out of the farmlands and deserts and mountain lands of the Southwest. If a northern majority should take over the Senate, Southerners could filibuster there. There were still warm memories of the fourteen-day filibuster against the United States Bank bill in 1842. And the Southerners had other built-in safeguards—their strength in the Supreme Court, for example, and, in Democratic national conventions, the two-thirds requirement for presidential nominations.

If the Supreme Court was not a southern court, it had a strong tilt toward Virginia republicanism of the old Jeffersonian school. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, appointed by Jackson partly in reward for Taney’s heroic aid in the fight against Biddle’s bank, presided over a court that had shifted markedly from the Federalist bias in favor of property rights and national power. In the Charles River Bridge case, he held that rights granted by charters must be construed narrowly. “While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded,” the Chief Justice pronounced for the court, “we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and well being of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation.” In a series of rulings on federal power he led the court in narrow interpretations that recognized the claims of “sovereign” states. In Luther v. Borden he used the doctrine of political questions to deny his court’s jurisdiction over a case that emerged from Dorr’s Rebellion in Rhode Island and involved rival claims to the government of the state. Abolitionists feared the day when this “southern Marylander” and his “southern court” would rule on a central question over slavery.

Political balances strengthened governmental ones. Both major parties had their roots in the South and North; both appealed to a variety of economic, social, sectional, and other interests besides the slavery and antislavery groups; both saw the need for building North-South coalitions if they were to realize their great objective—winning presidential elections. Hence each party was a big noisy machine for devouring, morselizing, and blending sharp ideological and local attitudes that otherwise might become indigestible. Each big party machine was a cluster of countervailing state and local parties, interests, classes. Inevitably such equipoises had a static, conservative bias toward the status quo. “Balance was organic,” for leaders like Webster, in Robert Dalzell’s words. “Its roots lay in the past. It grew and developed over time; continuity was its vital force.”

This nationwide equilibrium of rival and conflicting interests, delicately balanced in national institutions and state and local constituencies, was ordinarily flexible and durable, but it was vulnerable too, especially to the single overriding, highly controversial moral cause that, unlike the ordinary conflicts the system devoured, could not be morselized. That kind of moral conflict rather threatened to shred the machine. Other powerful forces could shock the system—wars, migration of population, severe economic depression. Two great forces, however, ordinarily provided elements of continuity and stability and predictability to the system of balances—the major parties; and the quadrennial presidential elections, which forced even the more extremist politicians to moderate their causes and their tongues, broaden their platforms, build coalitions with rival interests, and offer a candidacy of national appeal. Such an election seemed to be approaching in 1848.

1848! The equilibrium of Europe, at least, was sorely threatened as commotions and rebellions swept through Paris, Vienna, Prague, Venice, Milan. Suddenly established authority on the Continent was demonstrating its impotence. Louis Philippe abdicated; Emperor Ferdinand I escaped to Innsbruck, and then abdicated; Pius IX fled to Gaeta. New leaders were emerging, like Lajos Kossuth in Hungary and Louis Napoleon in France. And in London two men, little known except within international left-wing movements, put out a document called the Communist Manifesto. All this was a lesson to Americans that even the most venerable and seemingly stable institutions were open to change. But Americans were hardly listening, save for a fringe of humanitarians who focused their reform activism on the campaign against slavery.

Abolitionists had been agitating against slavery for decades; in the 1840s many resolved that the time had come for political action. It was not an obvious or easy decision. Purists in the movement had argued for years that the Constitution and the government themselves must be considered the enemy, that to take part in electoral and party battle was to be fatally compromised by the proslavery system it defended. And if antislavery militants did lead their movement into political action, further harsh strategic questions arose: Should antislavery men fight for abolition of all existing slavery, or simply for restrictions on the extension of slavery? Should they pursue the tactic of “one-ideaism”—concern themselves only with slavery—or work with reformers pursuing other and sometimes related causes, such as free education, temperance, women’s rights, penal reform? Should they form their own party, or work within one or both of the major parties? This last was perhaps the hardest question, for antislavery leaders knew of some Democrats and even more Whigs who were as hostile to slavery as they were.

By 1840 at least some antislavery leaders were ready for political action, if only because their nonpolitical activity had proved so unrewarding. Meetings of abolitionists organized a loose-knit “Liberty party” and nominated James G. Birney for President. Birney epitomized the problems and progress of antislavery. A onetime slave owner himself, he had moved to Alabama, entered politics, and advocated the use of legislative power to emancipate slaves and prohibit their interstate sale. Later he sold his plantation and slaves and became an agent for the American Colonization Society. Increasingly convinced that colonization would expand the slave trade, he returned to Kentucky, freeing his last few slaves, helped form the Kentucky Anti-Slavery Society, and called for united action against the evil. As an activist who favored working within the political system, he was a logical candidate for President in 1840. The Liberty-ites, however, polled barely 7,000 votes, and had minimal effect on the outcome. Four years later the party won almost ten times as many votes, but ironically it may have given the election to Polk by cutting into Clay’s Whig support in the crucial New York race.

By 1848 Texas, the war, Oregon, and calls for “Free Soil” had immensely enlarged the antislavery movement. In the Democratic party the movement now included the “Barnburners,” so named because they had repudiated a New York Democratic convention in 1847 rather than accept its conservative platform, on the model of the Dutch farmer who had burned his barn to get rid of the rats. This action had left “Hunkers”—conservative party regulars—in control of a diminished Democracy. As the radical wing of the party, Barnburners turned increasingly toward antislavery in their national posture.

The Whigs, based more in the North, were even more divided over slavery than the Democrats. For some years there had been developing within that party an antislavery movement enjoying the agreeable designation “Conscience Whigs.” Arrayed against them in increasing numbers were the “Cotton Whigs,” so called for their support of cooperation with southern moderates and their close financial and political connections with the cotton growers of the South. Spiritually and intellectually based in Boston’s Unitarianism and Concord’s Transcendentalism, Conscience Whiggery took a moral stand on slavery that aroused compassionate Americans throughout the North and Northwest. Leaders of the two Whig factions seemed often to hate each other more than the common Democratic foe. It was not a Democrat but a Whig who labeled Cotton Whig moderation as a conspiracy between “the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.”

As 1848 approached, antislavery leaders within and outside the major parties stepped up their efforts to offer a presidential candidate clearly opposed to the extension of slavery. What should be the strategy? Purist abolitionists clung to their policy of scorning parties and elections in favor of moral appeals. Old Liberty party leaders and anti-extension Democrats and Whigs began to think the unthinkable—abandoning their parties and joining a new movement pledged to the Wilmot Proviso. The old “Liberty men” faced difficult choices. Should they exchange the moral impact of their intense single cause for the wider electoral support they could gain through coalition? Under the leadership of Salmon P. Chase, a forty-year-old Cincinnati lawyer who had fought the 1793 fugitive-slave law up to the Supreme Court (and lost), many Liberty men moved toward a broad Free-Soil movement. They would pay the price of compromise through collaboration, for despite all their vaunted militancy the Free-Soilers would be, as Eric Foner has pointed out, the first major antislavery group to avoid the question of Negro rights in their national platform. But it was this kind of concession that made it possible for the Free-Soil movement to embrace strong anti-extensionists, moderate Conscience Whigs, and those Barnburners who were far more concerned with the impact of slavery on whites than on blacks. The desertion of their parties by anti-extension Democrats and Whigs eased tensions within the two major parties, which continued their middle-of-the-road strategy of conciliating pro- and anti-extension delegates in their presidential conventions.

With basic strategic choices made, presidential election politics now unfolded as if following a master scenario.

November 1847: The Liberty party convenes in New York and nominates Senator John P. Hale, New Hampshire apostate Democrat, for President.

May 1848: The Democratic national convention, fiercely divided over slavery extension, meeting in Baltimore, promptly splits apart over the question of seating contested delegations of Barnburners and Hunkers from New York; when compromise efforts fail, neither delegation sits in the convention. When the convention nominates Lewis Cass, veteran Democrat, ex-general, opponent of Free Soil, advocate of “squatter sovereignty,” the Hunkers pledge their support; the Barnburners pointedly do not.

Early June: The Whig national convention assembles in Philadelphia to decide among the often nominated but never elected Henry Clay and a choice of two generals of Mexican War fame, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. The Whigs, like the Democrats the month before, oppose congressional power to control slavery in the territories. They choose war hero Taylor.

Now into this scenario intrudes a new anti-extensionist leader but a moderate of yore—the old fox of Kinderhook, ex-President Martin Van Buren himself. As the master organizer and unifier of the Jacksonian Democratic party, Van Buren had always taken a soft position on slavery; in particular, he had fought the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, amid the taunts of the abolitionists. Since his defeat in 1840 he had reluctantly moved toward a strong anti-extension position. Old Democratic party comrades broke with him, but he had the support of his handsome and personable son John, who doubled as a kind of Democratic party Prince Charming and as an eloquent adversary of slavery. Could the old man now be trusted? Free-Soilers asked, and the verdict was generally yes. Besides, he was immensely available, with his big national reputation and following.

Late June: The seceding Barnburners hold their own convention in Utica and nominate Van Buren for President.

August: Liberty-ites, Barnburners and other antislavery Democrats, and Conscience Whigs hold the national convention of the Free-Soil party in a huge, broiling tent in Buffalo and also nominate Van Buren for President, after sidetracking Hale. The Free-Soilers proclaim their slogan: “FREE SOIL, FREE SPEECH, FREE LABOR, FREE MEN!”

November: Taylor defeats Cass by 1,360,000 to 1,220,000 in the popular vote, 163 to 127 in the electoral college.

A striking aspect of the 1848 results was the mottled voting pattern; Taylor carried eight slave states and seven free; Cass, eight free and seven slave. Hence the Whigs, like the Democrats under Polk and Van Buren, would govern with their political support and obligation fixed in slaveholding as well as anti-extension constituencies. Another key outcome was Van Buren’s failure to carry a single state with his 291,000 votes. His main role—ironic for the Democracy’s supreme organization man—was to help pull his old party down. The Barnburners were gleeful—they had set fire to a big barn and they had punished some proslavery rats. But to what avail was this, if a huge new log cabin packed with southern and Cotton Whigs stood in its place?

Americans had come to expect a period of calm following presidential elections. The arguments had been made; the people had spoken; let the new man show what he could do. But the election of 1848 seemed to bring little surcease. Late in January 1849, even before Taylor took office, a caucus of southern senators and representatives, under the leadership of John Calhoun, after heated debate issued a “Southern Address” that charged the North with “acts of aggression” against southern rights. If the North did not moderate its position on fugitive slaves and territorial slavery, the address proclaimed to the South, “nothing would remain for you but to stand up immovably in defense of rights, involving your all—your property, prosperity, equality, liberty, and safety.…” At heart the address legitimated the need for southern separatism on the ground that the North was bent on demanding emancipation and racial equality. When Congress convened in December the House immediately became the theater of a struggle between southern Democrats and northern Whigs over the Speakership. Only after sixty-three ballotings and bitter threats on both sides was Democrat Howell Cobb of Georgia chosen over Whig Robert C. Winthrop of Massachusetts.

Three thousand miles to the west, something had happened that would affect all the calculations of the geometry of balance. Sutter’s man James Marshall, boss of the mill, had looked into the stream and seen golden specks dancing amid the churning tailrace. Gold! Marshall rushed to Sutter, and soon the news was sweeping through the valley and out into the world.

Indians had often brought small quantities of gold dust to the Spanish missions in California, and white settlers in the early 1840s made two strikes that had aroused little excitement. But as the water coursed through the millrace near the Sacramento River, it led the way to a billion-dollar fortune. By midsummer of 1848, the U.S. military governor reported that “mills were lying idle, fields of wheat were open to cattle and horses, houses vacant, and farms going to waste” the entire length of the territory, as most of the population hurried to the gold fields. The prospectors pried nuggets from the ground with knives and picks, or built dams to uncover the grains of gold in the streambeds. They sifted heavy gold dust from the black river gravel with any tool from a pan to an elaborate wooden frame operated by several men. Word reached the East of yields of fifty or even a hundred dollars a day.

Easterners remained skeptical of the golden tales from California until December, when 230 ounces of almost pure metal arrived in Washington. Then newspapers, shipping lines, and thousands of citizens from every walk of life went wild. The gold seekers rushed to California by sea around Cape Horn, across Panama or Mexico by mule, over the Great Plains in wagons. More than 40,000 people arrived in 1849, with even more to follow in the succeeding years. In San Francisco Bay lay five hundred ships abandoned by their crews, while the sleepy village of San Francisco became a city of several thousand inhabitants in just a few months.

As adventurers from every state and a dozen nations scrambled to reap the golden harvest, law and order broke down. The white and Mexican Californians watched with anguish as the newcomers seized their lands, murdered and hanged one another, and trod over the local Indians in the race for gold. The territory needed government, and quickly. In August 1849 voters from each district met to choose delegates—lawyers, farmers, merchants, and a scattering of professional men—to a convention on statehood. When they gathered in Monterey in September, the town had no hotels and some of the state-makers had to sleep under the open skies. The delegates’ deliberations were brief and occasionally stormy. Everyone wanted the state capital to be located in his district; the Mexicans, remembering Fremont’s Bear Flag revolt, objected to the inclusion of a bear on the state banner. Nonetheless, all agreed to a constitutional provision that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude…shall ever be tolerated in this state.”

The Californians’ decision on slavery accelerated the conflict in Washington. President Taylor urged Congress to admit California into the Union with its free-state constitution. Southerners bridled at the idea of admitting a free state without compensation to southern rights. Debates in the House and Senate raged over slavery extension. When Representative Charles Allen, Massachusetts Free-Soiler, mocked the Southerners for their vain threats against the Union, asserting that “their united force could not remove one of the marble columns which support this Hall,” H. W. Hilliard of Alabama rebuked him: “I say to him and to this whole House, that the Union of these States is in great peril.” He had never known such deep and settled feeling in the South, Hilliard added. If the North persisted in its threats to the South, “THIS UNION CANNOT STAND.” The Northerners were accused of an act of aggression against the South. To many persons, North and South, the nation appeared on the verge of war.

By 1850 the great balances of the American system seemed to be collapsing. Constitution, parties, Congress, the presidency were no longer acting as resilient, stabilizing foundations for the flexible bonds of union. It was at this point of extreme crisis that two men who had embodied the spirit and calculus of compromise appeared on the scene for one last titanic effort.

Early on the evening of January 21, 1850, Henry Clay plodded through a Washington snowstorm to visit Daniel Webster in the latter’s house. Clay had a bad cough; he was leaner now, an old man entering his mid-seventies, but he was as courtly and charming as ever, and although the visit was unexpected, the two rivals fell into an intense discussion. Clay had a plan—to gather all the issues dividing Congress into one omnibus package of conciliation that might unite it. Clay would admit California as a free state, compel Texas to relinquish its claim to New Mexico but reward it with federal assumption of Texas’ unpaid debt, leave slavery untouched in the District of Columbia but abolish the slave trade in the District, enact a more effective fugitive-slave law, have Congress declare that it had no power to deal with the interstate slave trade, and, as for the rest of the territory acquired from Mexico, Clay would grant it territorial governments with no slavery provisions at all. For some time the two men talked—Clay lean and nervous, as a witness remembered, the play of emotion on his expressive face; Webster grave, intent, inscrutable. Encouraged by Webster’s response, Clay began planning his speech to the Senate.

Eight days later, Clay presented his omnibus proposal to the Senate. The chamber was so jammed with people that the temperature rose to 100 degrees. He had witnessed many periods of anxiety and peril, he said, but he had “never before arisen to address any assembly so oppressed, so appalled, so anxious.” Clay seemed almost like a death’s-head, with his long, iron-gray hair, sunken cheeks, pinched nose, and black costume. Yet he was able to talk for three hours that day and the next, presenting his plan in detail and beseeching Congress to rise above its sectional animosities. He admitted that the omnibus proposal offered more to the South than the North; the richer and more powerful North could afford to be generous. His final words were to “conjure gentlemen…by all their love of liberty” and for posterity to draw back from the precipice, and he implored Heaven that if the Union should dissolve, “I may not survive to behold the sad and heart-rending spectacle.”

Even the Great Pacificator’s oratory seemed inadequate now. Senators still put their own sectional claims above union, and Congress soon again dissolved into a war of factions. Abolitionists in the North and proslavery extremists in the South were loudly calling for dissolution. Most moderate southern Whigs and northern Democrats favored Clay’s plan, while northern Whigs stood by President Taylor in opposition. Jefferson Davis spoke for southern ultras: the South would yield nothing. On March 4 John Calhoun came to the Senate, though mortally ill. His speech had to be read for him, but the message came through strongly. If California should be admitted, it could only be “with the intention of destroying irretrievably the equilibrium between the two sections,” and the South would be forced to leave the Union.

Three days later, Webster rose in a chamber even more oppressive and crowded than when Clay had spoken. Fashionable women sat in any available chair and gathered around the steps leading to the rostrum. The nation’s notables were there: “Old Bullion” Benton, Clay, Lewis Cass, Davis, Stephen A. Douglas, and a flock of personages from the House. Webster thanked another senator who had yielded his place so that Webster could speak, and began:

“Mr. President, I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man, but as an American.…I speak to-day for the preservation of the Union. ‘Hear me for my cause.’…” It was a long speech, studded with historical allusions, references to increasing disunion such as the rift within the Methodist Church, constitutional arguments. On occasion Calhoun feebly intervened, but for the most part, peering out of cavernous eyes shrouded by a mass of snow-white hair, he sat in deathly stillness. Webster’s address was, in effect, a long historical essay, in which he handed out praise and blame variously to South and North, like some supreme arbiter. He ended on a personal note. What would happen if the Constitution actually were overthrown? What states would secede? What would remain American? Where would the flag remain? “What am I to be—an American no longer?” He ended with poetry’s tribute to his great love, Union:

Now, the broad shield complete, the artist crowned

With his last hand, and poured the ocean round;

In living silver seemed the waves to roll,

And beat the buckler berge, and bound the whole.

If Congress were good theater, the marvelously conciliating speeches of Clay and Webster and others would have come to an early climax in dramatic confrontations as final votes were taken on the omnibus proposal. But Congress was not good theater. Rather, through the complex, fracturing effect of powerful committees, legislative procedures, and personages, the omnibus was stripped apart and converted back into individual measures, which could be picked off in turn by shifting majorities. To make matters worse for the Unionists, President Taylor, while supporting some of the proposals individually, opposed Clay’s omnibus compromise as such. The proposals seemed headed for defeat when Taylor suddenly died of cholera a few days after taking part in the festivities of a Fourth of July celebration of the building of the Washington Monument. Eager to strengthen his relationship with northern Whigs, Taylor had been willing for Webster to be denounced by New Englanders as a traitor and moral renegade for his compromising stand.

The new President was Millard Fillmore, a conciliatory fifty-year-old New Yorker who had been pursuing a lackluster career as a state and congressional politico when he was tapped to balance a presidential ticket led by a southern soldier. Fillmore was more agreeable to the omnibus proposals than Taylor. Unlike his predecessor, he was not expected to veto a general compromise. By now Clay, tired and ailing, and Webster, newly appointed as Fillmore’s Secretary of State, were no longer the central figures on the congressional stage. The measures had passed into the hands of younger, more practical men who may have lacked the grand Union vision of a Clay or Webster but who knew how to bargain and maneuver, wheedle and pressure. The compromise that Clay and Webster, as supreme transactional leaders, had seen emerging from a carefully calculated geometry of balance, bringing sections and interests and ideologies into a stable and creative equilibrium, the new men saw as a matter of arithmetic, adding here, subtracting there, in a linear series of transactions. California admission, the fugitive-slave bill, and the other key measures went through in a rush in September 1850. The Great Compromise—tattered, battered, mutilated, but still a great compromise—was law.

Something of a lull followed. “There is rejoicing over the land; the bone of contention is removed; disunion, fanaticism, violence, insurrection are defeated,” Philip Hone wrote in his diary. “The lovers of peace, the friends of the Union” had sacrificed sectional prejudices and prevailed. The presidential election of 1852 had little of the excitement and conflict of 1848. The Democrats nominated a party wheelhorse, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, the Whigs another general, sixty-six-year-old Winfield Scott. Both parties supported the Compromise of 1850 and opposed any further agitation of the fugitive-slave question. After a campaign in which neither candidate spoke out on controversial issues, Pierce won the election, carrying all but four states.

California cast four electoral votes for Pierce in 1852, a reminder that the United States now truly did span the continent. Californians celebrated their entry into the Union with cannonades. Those who hoped that order would follow statehood were cruelly disappointed. In California, liberty often came to mean license for the strong and unscrupulous to seize property or pleasure. The individual, reckless and self-confident, was supreme—until he was murdered, as were 4,200 whites and uncounted numbers of Indians during the 1850s.

John Sutter watched, helpless, as prospectors stripped his wheat fields for feed for their horses, thieves butchered and sold $60,000 worth of his cattle, and business agents swindled him out of vast sums. Finally, one summer evening, fire struck the Sacramento office that held his land grants and deeds. A fire bell in the night mocked Sutter’s reliance on law.

Bitter debate in Washington; reckless individualism in California—would the flame burning in New England, kindled by a group of vigorous thinkers and writers, add to the heat of these other fires? Or would it light the way to a deeper understanding of the benefits—and the burdens—of liberty?

CHAPTER 14

The Culture of Liberty

“THERE WAS NOT A book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought” in Massachusetts from 1790 to 1830, Emerson noted with poetic license. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, however, a potent alchemy of human forces transmuted the flinty soil of New England thought into a seedbed for intellectual and artistic growth. New England, after undergoing the struggles first of a military revolution and then of an industrial one, seemed to be heeding John Adams’ admonition to himself: “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy…geography, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” At its height in the early 1850s the flowering of New England would bring forth Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, Thoreau’s Walden, and other notable works.

Only a convergence of powerful forces could produce such a transformation. One was economic. The same mercantile and industrial development that had turned people’s minds toward the shipyard and the counting-house had fostered a more diversified economy that in turn encouraged a more diversified culture, with room at its joints and in its interstices for dissent and experimentation. In particular, the ample fortunes of New England philanthropists, prodded by Puritan duty, made possible the founding of libraries, the patronage of artists, the endowment of academic chairs, the higher education of sons—and occasionally daughters—in painting, poetry, music, and other lively arts.

The maturing New England mind was seasoned and sharpened by conflict. Boston Federalists and their Whig descendants had thundered against the Jeffersons and Jacksons, the Van Burens and Polks, but the fiercest disputes arose over religious doctrine. Congregationalist Calvinism had long been wracked with disputes between conservative belief in literal scriptural and ecclesiastical authority, in the divinity of Jesus, in the depravity of man, and in revelation, as against an ethical-humanitarian Christianity that stressed the potential of individual reason as a guide to truth, the unity rather than the trinity of God, the individual as a source of reason and conscience, and the possibilities of the regeneration and even the perfectibility of man. For Bostonians this dispute had come to a head over a professorial appointment to the Hollis Chair of Divinity at Harvard in 1805. A pitched battle for support among the Harvard overseers had produced a narrow victory for the liberals and the appointment to the Harvard Divinity School of a string of Unitarian professors of theology. Outvoted, the conservative ministers seceded from Harvard and founded the Andover Theological Seminary, which proceeded to conduct genteel battle with the divinity school. Eloquent theologians reached far beyond their congregations to arouse students, businessmen, writers, and lawyers to higher doctrinal and political consciousness.

But affluence and conflict alone could not account for the flowering of the New England mind; rather they might have degraded or fractured it, save for one other decisive factor—the rise of an intellectual base, an institutional school that supported a system of collective intellectual and artistic leadership. This is what distinguished the collectivity of literary genius in the 1840s from the individual geniuses earlier in the century.

In that early period Washington Irving, growing up in New York City, found no literary companionship that might have lifted him above the level of his witty but superficial writing. Only in England and on the Continent, in Sir Walter Scott and lesser lights, did he find intellectual collegiality. After years abroad, he returned home a literary hero, but as Vernon Parrington wrote, he had “gently detached himself from contemporary America, and detached he remained to the end of a loitering life.” Nor had James Fenimore Cooper found in New York a milieu that drew on his highest intellectual and artistic powers. Born of a rich, manorial family in rural New Jersey, Cooper moved from Mamaroneck to Cooperstown to Scarsdale and then to New York. In 1826, after four years in New York, he left with his family to travel and write in Europe. Later he returned, alienated from his compatriots, to conduct a long running war with his critics and detractors. Affronted by the frontier squalor of America, its bumptious manners, vulgar egalitarianism, debased press and politics, he lived out his days, intellectually and politically isolated, in Cooperstown. William Cullen Bryant was another intellectual semi-isolate. Reared in a small country town in the western Massachusetts mountain land, he had a year’s education at Williams—then a college of four faculty members and a lean curriculum—before family penury forced him to give up higher education. In his early twenties he wrote a much-heralded poem—Thanatopsis—and, moving to New York, he soon emerged as the nation’s leading poet of nature. Still, his poetic range was narrow and his poetic creativity limited, essentially of a “self-pollenizing nature,” in Parrington’s words.

Boston and Cambridge, on the other hand, provided a luxuriant bower for its creative men and women—a shelter against the hostile world, a place for mutual artistic communication, criticism, and stimulation, an array of support services. Boston was full of works by the architect Charles Bulfinch, who had built the first theater before the turn of the century, the elegant State House with its portico and dome, and the Athenaeum housing a superb private library. Boston had the Handel and Haydn Society, the Anthology Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, a host of literary clubs, the magisterial North American Review.

Cambridge had Harvard and all that went with it. Many of the rising young literary figures had rubbed shoulders and crossed forensic swords in classes in the Yard. Cambridge was still a sedate country town where, it was said, on a quiet day one could hear the booming of guns from the Boston navy yard and the waves breaking on the ocean beaches a few miles away. Cambridge even had a small port on the Charles, where sloops deposited produce from the hinterland for Harvard tables and logs from the coast of Maine for Harvard fireplaces. Harvard had historians, moral philosophers, theologians, classicists. Above all it had great teachers who were intellectual leaders, acting as prods and mentors to a rising generation of literary geniuses.

The most colorful of these teachers was George Ticknor. The son of a wealthy Boston merchant who was himself a man of letters, the young Dartmouth graduate had toured the mideastern states and even visited Jefferson, and then in 1815—armed with letters of introduction from the sage of Monticello and accompanied by his friend Edward Everett—he left for Europe. There he met Byron, Chateaubriand, Goethe, Scott, Wordsworth, and a dozen other literary luminaries; he studied foreign languages assiduously. Appointed in absentia as the Smith Professor of Belles-Lettres at Harvard, he persuaded the college, on his return, to establish a program of modern languages and literature. At his stately Boston home overlooking the Common from Beacon Hill, Ticknor received students—including the daughters of his friends—in his huge library entered through a marble hall by a marble stairway. He displayed his literary opinions and his vast knowledge of the intellectual resources of Europe, and gave advice to aspiring students. Of equal stature to Ticknor was his traveling companion Edward Everett, who had been appointed to a Harvard chair of Greek literature even before he sailed, and in Europe received the first Ph.D. to be granted by Göttingen to an American. Back home, Everett came to edit the North American Review, even while he continued to hold his Harvard students spellbound. One of them was named Ralph Waldo Emerson.

But the greatest intellectual leader in Boston and Cambridge during this period was William Ellery Channing. A powerful intellect in behalf of Unitarianism, he had delivered an epochal sermon, “The Moral Argument against Calvinism,” roundly attacking the notion that human nature was fundamentally depraved and incapable of progress and moral improvement. Channing was sensitive to the quiet but powerful revolutionary changes at work throughout the world. Experience must not be the only guide, he warned; men must also experiment. “There are seasons in human affairs of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes and a new and undefined good is thirsted for. These are periods when the principles of experience need to be modified, when hope and trust and instinct claim a share with prudence in the guidance of affairs, when in truth to dare is the highest wisdom.”

So all these forces—affluent and benevolent families, religious and philosophical collegiality and conflict—produced a culture in which literary fellowship and artistic creativity could thrive. There was one other powerful, though often invisible or unnoticed force—the existence of liberty both as a means and as an end. It was because liberty existed in Massachusetts, in the form of tolerance of dissent and of constitutional and judicial protection of political and religious liberty (save occasionally for abolitionists and other militants), that teachers could teach as they wished and students could argue. But liberty was more than a means, a process. In the form of a noble individualism, of the capacity of a person for self-fulfillment, liberty was the ultimate goal, the loftiest value.

It was because he saw in man “a great nature, the divine image, and vast capacities, that I demand for him means of self-development, spheres for free action—that I call society not to fetter, but to aid his growth,” Channing said. But he saw eminently practical ways of teaching self-improvement along with preaching: learning to write good simple. English, for example. One of his students, Oliver Wendell Holmes, would not forget:

Channing, with his bland, superior look,

Cold as a moonbeam on a frozen brook,

While the pale student, shivering in his shoes,

Sees from his theme the turgid rhetoric ooze.

THE ENGINE IN THE VINEYARD

On a fall day in 1835, driving his chaise on dusty roads through groves of coloring maples and birches, Ralph Waldo Emerson brought his bride of one day from her house in Plymouth to their new home in Concord. Together Waldo and Lydia Emerson—whom he renamed Lidian because it seemed more poetic—looked at the place where he would dwell for forty-seven years, she for another ten years after that. And their new neighbors looked at them—at Waldo, thin and tall, with his tomahawk nose, large, deep-seated eyes, thin curving lips—and at Lidian, not a beauty, all agreed, but refined and unaffected. He was in his thirty-third year, she in her thirty-fourth.

Their house stood half a mile east of Concord center, at the junction of the Cambridge Turnpike and Lexington Road, along which the stages ran to Boston. On these roads sixty years earlier British troops had marched, occupying Concord center before their repulse by Revolutionary guerrillas at the North Bridge a mile to the west. A few weeks before marrying Lidian, Emerson had bought their house from John Coolidge for $3,500. Soon the couple made it their own. Sitting by a curving window in their second-floor bedroom, Lidian could see their garden, with its grape arbor, pear trees, and flower beds. On the first floor Emerson established his study, lined with hundreds of books in freestanding shelves that could be readily carried out in case of fire. Emerson worked at a round table, in front of a fireplace of black Italian marble. Sitting in his rocking chair, he could revolve the table as he filled drawers with his journals. But his greatest joy was the garden, which led down to a brook and to low meadowlands that stretched toward Walden Pond, two miles away.

Emerson was at home in Concord. His grandfather, the Reverend William Emerson, descended from the first minister in Concord during the mid-1600s, had been a Revolutionary patriot and builder of the Old Manse near the center of town. Young Waldo, as he came to be called, had grown up in Boston, where his father—another William—had been minister of the First Church. Waldo’s childhood had been scarred by frustration and tragedy. A mediocre, unsettled student, he lived in an aspiring family that set high demands on his scholarship and piety. He loved his rambles in Boston, picking up shells beside the wharves below Summer Street and exploring the North and South ends even at the expense of encountering bellicose Irish boys guarding their precincts, and he loved even more the trips to his ancestral home, where he explored the Concord River in the summer and followed the huge plodding ox teams clearing the snows of winter.

Life turned drear for the Emerson family when father William died and Waldo’s mother was forced into a hard, peripatetic life of moving from place to place taking in boarders. Admitted to Harvard at the age of fourteen, Waldo had to scratch out a living tutoring even younger students, waiting on table at Commons, and serving as errand boy for President Kirkland of Harvard, beneath whose study he lived for a time. His work at Harvard was scattered and irregular until he came under the influence of Channing, Ticknor & Co., who were prime forces moving him, as he said later, “from the Unconscious to the Conscious; from the sleep of the Passions to their rage.”

Graduated, Emerson still seemed unable to find himself. He taught at boys’ and girls’ schools, with little satisfaction, and attended divinity school in Cambridge, with less. He experienced rheumatic pains, serious loss of vision, lung troubles—psychosomatic perhaps, but no less painful for that. He traveled restlessly, preached evocatively, wrote feverishly—but could not find a center to his life. When the fetching girl he married at seventeen, Ellen Tucker, died of tuberculosis within seventeen months, he felt emptied of life. He quit the Unitarian ministry. By the time he remarried, a beloved brother was already dead of “consumption,” another dying of it.

Somehow Emerson steadied himself. After traveling in Europe and meeting his heroes Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, he resolved to break with his life in Boston and find the center of things in Concord. In the fall of 1834, a year before he brought his new wife to Concord, he and his mother had come there to board with grandfather Ezra Ripley in the Old Manse. In a corner room overlooking the river and the embattled bridge, under a great willow tree that tossed and “trumpeted” in the storms, he set himself to pulling together ideas gleaned from his musings, his travels, his readings—above all from his immersion in Kant, Swedenborg, Goethe, Coleridge, Carlyle. “Hail to the quiet fields of my fathers!” Emerson wrote in his diary. Moving across town to his new home, with Lidian and his mother, only brought him closer to the fields stretching toward Walden Pond. The result was Nature, a short book that became the clarion call for the small band of transcendentalists in Concord, Cambridge, and Boston.

Nature was, above all, a paean to Nature, the great organ through which the universal spirit speaks to the individual. If a man wishes not to be alone, stay not in his study but look at the stars; if a man would cast off his years, he must go to the woods, for in the woods, “we return to reason and faith.” The moral influence of nature on every person is that amount of truth that it illustrates to him. The “Supreme Being does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.”

A powerful secondary theme forces its way through these beatitudes—the central role and thrust of man. The power to produce the delight of fields and woods does not reside in nature, but in man, “or in a harmony of both.” The whole of nature is in fact a metaphor of the human mind. Nature’s dice are always loaded, but it also “offers all its kingdoms to man as the raw material which he may mould into what is useful” to man. “Who can set bounds to the possibilities of man?” Man, with access to the entire mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the finite. Emerson’s address “The Method of Nature” a few years later, panegyrized man, his talent, his genius. “O rich and various Man! thou palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses the morning and the night and the unfathomable galaxy; in thy brain, the geometry of the City of God; in thy heart, the bower of love and the realms of right and wrong. An individual man is a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form and ripen.…”

As the years passed, Emerson forged his doctrine of man into a compelling doctrine of transcendental individualism. True divinity lay in the soul of a person. “Every man had his magnetic needle,” as Van Wyck Brooks summed up his views, “which always pointed to his proper path, with more or less variation from other men’s. He was never happy or strong until he found it, and he could only find it by trusting himself, by listening to the whisper of the voice within him.” Emerson wrote on self-reliance: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.…Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.… Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. …Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. …on yourself; never imitate.” Within the divine whole of the universal, and in congruence with nature, each man was his own center, life-giving and life-receiving.

A circle of Transcendentalist thinkers formed around Emerson. The most unworldly of these was Amos Bronson Alcott. Born in a log cabin in Connecticut, meagerly educated, he went South to teach school but with little success. To Virginia planters, it was said, he owed a later courtliness of manner that never left him, and to North Carolina Quakers a faith in individual aspiration and transcendence that became the foundation of his life’s work. Returning North, Bronson taught school in a number of towns; an inveterate reformer, he introduced children’s libraries and the honor system, beautified the schoolrooms, and restricted the use of corporal punishment. In a Boston school he tried to draw rational ethical thoughts from his children instead of imposing doctrine on them. For these acts, and for his own extreme transcendental and mystical idealism, he attracted the wrath of Boston press and intelligentsia alike. His move to Concord in 1840, with his wife and growing family, brought him closer to Emerson, whom he both revered and criticized.

Equally controversial was the Transcendentalist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker. Grandson of the celebrated Captain John Parker who had fought the British at Lexington, young Theodore was largely self-taught in botany and astronomy until he walked to Harvard from Lexington, passed the entrance examination, and, too poor to enroll, was allowed to take the examinations. He had largely or wholly mastered twenty languages by the time he graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1836, but he was denied their pulpits by certain Boston ministers because of his demand that “we worship, as Jesus did, with no mediator, with nothing between us and the father of all.” Some of his sharpening social views, on slavery, war, divorce, education, and the like, made him as unpopular as did his call for a new creed of the perfection of God and the perfectibility of man.

The most remarkable member of the Transcendentalist circle was Margaret Fuller. Born in Cambridgeport near Boston, force-fed on Ovid at the age of eight, she came to be regarded by friends as a brilliant conversationalist, by a later Bostonian as “an unsexed version of Plato’s Socrates”—and by all as a critic and rebel. For a course of “conversations” she brought together a large group of intellectual Boston women—“gorgeous pedants,” Harriet Martineau called them—in Elizabeth Peabody’s room in West Street. With Emerson and others she founded The Dial, the organ of the New England Transcendentalists, thus enlarging Emerson’s circle even more. A passionate lover of women in general and in particular, Margaret Fuller brought out in 1844 Woman in the Nineteenth Century, in which she demanded sexual equality and spoke frankly about marriage, divorce, and physical passion, to the distress of Boston bluestockings. The Dial died in a few years, when she left Boston for New York.

All through the 1840s Emerson wrote, lectured, edited, corresponded—and as he developed in the fullness of his moral and intellectual powers, he gained fame throughout the United States—even in remote western towns—and Europe. His call for an enriching, fulfilling individualism lifted the hearts of his readers and listeners everywhere. Yet Emerson’s popularity magnified the impact of the ambiguities and ambivalences in his moral philosophy. His faith in individual self-realization could easily be twisted, during a period of rising entrepreneurship, into a defense of ruthless, dog-eat-dog competitiveness. Like Jefferson earlier in the century, his doctrines could be expropriated by leftists, centrists, rightists, by believers in collective political action and by philosophical anarchists. He left open the question: Is man to be fulfilled only to liberate himself from government, the church, society, or is he to be fulfilled in order to help liberate others—women, slaves, immigrants, Indians—and not merely liberate but help?

Emerson would not be dismayed by his ambivalences. It was, after all, the seer of Concord who wrote, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Still, it was disconcerting to some that the Panegyrist of Nature could accept so exuberantly the impact of technology, especially the railroad. Man “paves the road with iron bars,” he rhapsodized, “and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow, through the air.…” He saw inventions as proof of man’s power to impose his will upon history. Yet, in the end, Emerson seemed ambivalent about this too:

“Tis the day of the chattel,

Web to weave, and corn to grind;

Things are in the saddle,

And ride mankind.

There are two laws discrete,

Not reconciled,—

Law for man, and law for thing;

The last builds town and fleet,

But it runs wild,

And doth the man unking.

As Henry Thoreau was sitting in his hut one summer afternoon, looking out at Walden Pond, he could see hawks circling around his clearing, pigeons darting about and perching restlessly on the boughs of the white pines behind his hut, a fish hawk “dimpling” the glassy surface of the pond and bringing up a fish, the sedge bending under the weight of the reed birds as they flitted about. Here he could listen for sounds too, or remember them—the faint, sweet melody of the bells of Concord and Bedford, the distant lowing of a cow, the whippoorwills “chanting their vespers,” the hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo of owls, the trump of bullfrogs, the distant rumbling of wagons over bridges.

Thoreau could hear something else too: the rattle of railroad cars about a quarter mile away, and above the rattle the whistle of the locomotive, “like the scream of a hawk.”

In his rustic setting Thoreau pondered the sound of this railroad. He used its causeway so often to go into town that the railroad workers would “bow to me as to an old acquaintance,” taking him for “an employee; and so I am.” The whistle informed him that restless city merchants were coming into town, shouting their warning to get off the track.

“Here come your groceries, country; your rations, country-men!…And here’s your pay for them! screams the country-man’s whistle; timber like long battering rams going twenty miles an hour against the city’s walls, and chairs enough to seat all the weary and heavy laden that dwell within them. With such huge and lumbering civility the country hands a chair to the city. All the Indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. Up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woolen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them.…”

Thoreau cries out against the thundering “iron horse,” the defiantly snorting “fire-steed,” shaking the earth with his feet, breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils. Yet he is also enticed by it, as in the very use of the horse metaphor—by the engine’s “steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths,” by the electrifying atmosphere of the depot, by the precision of the passing of the cars, so that farmers set their clocks by them. It almost seemed as if a new race was arising worthy of this technology. But in the end the man of Walden drew back. All these were arresting means—but to what ends? The steam clouds were rising higher and higher toward heaven—while the cars were going to Boston. If the pastoral life was being whirled away, he must “get off the track and let the cars go by”—

What’s the railroad to me?

I never go to see

Where it ends.…

Thoreau was not so much against tools as he was opposed to people, becoming the “tools of their tools.” Implicit in his essays and journals, in Max Lerner’s summary, “is a devastating attack upon every dominant aspect of American life in its first flush of industrial advance—the factory system, the corporations, business enterprise, acquisitiveness, the vandalism of natural resources, the vested commercial and intellectual interests, the cry for expansion, the clannishness and theocratic smugness of New England society, the herd-mindedness of the people, the unthinking civic allegiance they paid to an opportunist and imperialist government.” Thoreau did not pretend that technology could be stopped. “We have constructed a fate,” he said of the railroad, “an Atropos, that never turns aside.” Rather he would escape it.

The way in which he escaped it was audacious and, in the long run, enormously effective. He turned a retreat—his retreat to Walden—into a mighty intellectual advance. When Thoreau borrowed an ax late in March 1845, cut down some tall young white pines on Emerson’s land at the edge of Walden Pond, bought the shanty of James Collins, an Irishman working on the railroad, for its boards, and put up his “tight shingled and plastered house, ten feet wide by fifteen long, and eight-feet posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trapdoors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite,” as he described it, he wanted to embrace nature, to front only the essential facts of a simple existence, “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” But he wanted to do much more. He desired to conduct an “experiment in human ecology” that, if successful, he would publicize in every way he could—in his writings, in his travels, in his dramatic and unconventional behavior. And that is just what he did.

The Concord gentry muttered that the Walden Pond hermit was not that much of a hermit. He sometimes stayed with his mother in town, he often dined at the Emersons’, he had a stream of visitors from the town and outside. He was eccentric; he could be seen gazing at clouds chasing clouds at two-thirty on a moonlit morning. Possibly he was dangerous; he had set off a woods fire by accident—or was it an accident? James Russell Lowell bluntly attacked Thoreau’s claim to solitude and autonomy. The “experiment” presupposed, Lowell complained, “all that complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He squatted on another man’s land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fishhooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state’s evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all.” But this was to miss the point—that Thoreau was an artificer in dramatizing his rebellion against industrialism through his return to nature.

Thoreau had always been different, something of a rebel. He was Concord-born, to be sure, and of course went to Harvard, but on graduating in 1837 had returned to teach in the town school, only to shock parents by trying to instill discipline not through the ferule but through moral suasion. When a member of the school committee protested, Thoreau suddenly whipped several pupils—to dramatize the absurdity of whipping—and that evening quit the school. To Concord farmers, Thoreau, with his usually unkempt whiskers, large sloping nose, rough, weather-beaten face, rustic, ill-fitting dress coat, hardly looked like—well, like Emerson. Concord suspicions came to a pitch the day that Henry went to jail.

That act of civil disobedience was almost comical in nature but it became the stuff of legend, influencing even Tolstoi and Gandhi. He had “declared war on the State” by refusing to pay his poll tax. The “State” waited some years but finally, one day when Thoreau was on his way to the cobbler, the State in the person of neighbor Sam Staples, the jail keeper, led him to the lockup. A veiled woman—it turned out to be Thoreau’s aunt, fearful that he might catch sight of her—rapped at the jail door and quietly paid the tax, but by that time Sam had got his boots off and was “sittin’ by the fire, and I wasn’t goin’ to take the trouble to unlock after I got the boys all fixed for the night.”

Thoreau had a pleasant and interesting night in jail, but the legends sprouted. The best of these was that Emerson came along and said, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” And Thoreau replied, “Waldo, what are you doing out there?”

By such symbolic acts—retreating to Walden, refusing to pay a tax—Thoreau would arouse men to consciousness of nature, of their place in nature, of the possibilities of a simple, natural existence and autonomy, of their capacity to take control of their lives, of their need for a spiritual awakening. And to arouse others to such consciousness, he had to arouse himself. Even the “economy” sustaining his life at Walden, like his withdrawal to nature, Sherman Paul observed, “was not an ultimate abdication from social life; it was only the means of the self-emancipation, which many, accepting social bondage as the inevitable condition of life, did not find necessary.” Walden, rather than a renunciation of society, was an affirmation of social responsibility. After two years on the pond he returned to his parents’ house, his experiment concluded.

He returned also—though he had never really left it—to the tight intellectual world of the Concord literati, and to the wider world of the town, almost as tight. Concord had its Lyceum, Social Library, its cracker-barrel philosophers, its temperance and antislavery societies. All the famous of Concord, including Emerson and Thoreau, lectured at the Lyceum, along with such visiting celebrities as Theodore Parker, Horace Greeley, and George Bancroft, the historian. But mostly the Concord greats talked to one another—and to themselves. They kept enormous diaries and journals, filled with profundities and trivia. They walked and dined with one another, criticized one another’s work—Margaret Fuller actually rejected an essay of Thoreau’s—and corresponded with one another during travels out of town. Thoreau’s relationship with Emerson, half disciple, half critic, continued to be close. Under an oak on the riverbank, Thoreau read Emerson chapters from a new work, “Excursions on Concord & Merrimack Rivers.” Emerson found the work invigorating, broad and deep, “pastoral as Isaak Walton, spicy as flagroot.”

Thoreau stayed at the Emersons’ after Walden, occupying a small room at the head of the stairs. A young writer named Nathaniel Hawthorne resided in the Manse with his bride. Bronson Alcott, with a houseful of lively and restless daughters, lived down the street. Margaret Fuller was in and out of town. Emerson liked having literary guests, provided they did not interrupt his inviolate mornings, when he wrote. He pleaded with a younger friend to visit him. “I cannot communicate with you across seventeen miles of woods and cornfields.”

A year or so before Thoreau at Walden had heard the locomotive’s whistle like a hawk’s scream, Nathaniel Hawthorne had walked out to Concord woods not far away called “Sleepy Hollow.” In his notebook he recorded meticulously what he could observe around him—a thriving field of Indian corn, a pathway “strewn over with little bits of dry twigs and decayed branches,” the sunshine glimmering through shadow and the shadow effacing sunshine. His ear was alert to rustic sounds too—mowers whetting their scythes, the village clock striking, a cowbell tinkling. “But hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive—the long shriek, harsh.…”

An eerie presaging of Thoreau’s experience—yet Hawthorne’s reaction was different from his friend’s. The whistle, he wrote, “tells a story of busy men, citizens from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in a country village; men of business.…” Hawthorne seemed to welcome the “startling shriek…in the midst of our slumbrous peace.” His reaction to such events would usually be different from Thoreau’s and Emerson’s. His background was different.

Hawthorne was born not in Boston or Cambridge or Concord but in Salem, and he attended not Harvard but Bowdoin. Like Emerson, he grew up in a bereaved family—his father, a shipmaster, had died of yellow fever on a distant trip—but unlike Emerson, in a depressed city stricken by the embargo and by the War of 1812. With his mother immobilized for years in her bedroom, Hawthorne lived for a time amid a “cursed” solitude. He had ample leisure to explore the port, with its old wharves and custom house, its drays and longboats smelling of tarred ropes and briny bilge water, its decaying, often deserted mansions behind. Salem was already an old town, full of ghosts and legends from the days “of the magistrates who awoke each morning to the prospect of cropping an ear or slitting a nostril, stripping and whipping a woman at the tail of a cart, or giving her a stout hemp necklace or a brooch in the form of a scarlet letter,” Van Wyck Brooks wrote. Young Hawthorne could ignore none of this: his great-great-grandfather had been a judge at the witchcraft trials. Out of the shadowy world of Salem, Hawthorne later formed his most powerful novel, The Scarlet Letter.

After years of solitary writing in Salem and restless travel, Hawthorne managed to land a job in the Boston Custom House and then, hoping to work close to nature but in an orderly, creative environment, he joined the Brook Farm community, the experiment in communal life in Roxbury.

Hawthorne had come to know the celebrated Peabody sisters, who had ancestral roots in Salem—Elizabeth, variously friend and aide to Channing and Alcott and the painter Washington Allston; Mary, engaged to Horace Mann; and the witty, artistic, charming linguist, Sophia, who became Nathaniel’s love. He married her and took her to live in Concord. There followed doubtless the happiest years of his life but Hawthorne, still restless and searching, and badgered by landlord and creditors, moved his family back to Salem, where he took a job in the custom house there. Here he wrote about Hester Prynne and the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth, about sin and guilt and justice, in the novel that made him famous. But Salem and success were not enough—or perhaps too much. Soon he moved to Lenox in the Berkshires, where he wrote The House of the Seven Gables and came to know Herman Melville, who was working nearby on a long, philosophical saga about a great white whale.

Hawthorne played up the pastoral theme of Emerson and Thoreau, but he went beyond it. He had been captivated, in a trip to the Berkshires in 1838, by the factory life of North Adams—by the mills, “supremely artificial establishments, in the midst of such wild scenery,” by the mill girls looking out at Greylock, the northern crown of the Berkshires, while the machinery whizzed behind them, by the factory steam engine “supposed to possess a malignant spirit,” that catches a man’s arm and pulls it off, or catches a girl by the hair and scalps her. The story Hawthorne wrote years later, “Ethan Brand,” pitted against the pastoral and mountain landscape an engine of a different sort—the fiery kilns on Greylock that converted white marble into lime.

But Hawthorne was pursuing here another, even more powerful dualism—the individual in society, individual self-realization amid collective aspiration, brotherhood versus ambition and alienation—ultimately, individual liberty in an increasingly industrialized, interdependent culture. The people in “Ethan Brand” were lonely, isolated people: the rude lime burner and his son, the alcoholic doctor, the ex-lawyer whose hand had been “torn away by the devilish grip of a steam-engine,” a shabby old man desperately looking for his runaway daughter, a Wandering Jew—and Ethan Brand himself, a former lime burner who had once loved both man and nature. After communing with a satanic figure that lurked in the lurid blaze of his kiln, Brand went forth to discover the nature of the Unpardonable Sin, and in the quest he became an educated man, an intellectual, indeed a world-renowned scholar. But in that quest too he lost his sense of brotherhood, his sympathy for mankind, his “hold of the magnetic chain of humanity.” Rather he became an ambitious, manipulative man, converting people into his puppets and coldly corrupting them, looking on them as merely “the subject of his experiment.”

And that—cutting himself off from humanity—was the Unpardonable Sin.

In a week or so, Herman Melville wrote Hawthorne in June 1851, he would go to New York, “to bury myself in a third-story room and slave on my ‘Whale’ while it is driving through the press.…

“By the way,” Melville continued, “in the last ‘Dollar Magazine’ I read ‘The Unpardonable Sin.’ He was a sad fellow, that Ethan Brand.…” As he wrote, Melville seemed to be connecting Hawthorne’s themes to his own. There was a “frightful poetical creed that the cultivation of the brain eats out the heart.…I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head. …The reason the mass of men fear God, and at bottom dislike him, is because they rather distrust His heart, and fancy Him all brain like a watch.…”

Melville scribbled on. In reading some of Goethe’s sayings, “so worshipped by his votaries,” he had come across this: “Live in the all.” Get out of yourself, Goethe was saying, spread and expand yourself, reach out to the flowers and woods, etc. “What nonsense!” Melville exploded. “Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. ‘My dear boy,’ Goethe says to him, ‘you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the all, and then you will be happy!’”Melville went on: “As with all great genius, there is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe, and in proportion to my own contact with him, a monstrous deal of it in me.” Melville added teasingly: “P.S. ‘Amen!’ saith Hawthorne.”

The man Hawthorne had come to know in Pittsfield and Tanglewood cut a different figure from the literary types of Salem and Concord. Born in New York in 1819, almost a generation behind Emerson and Hawthorne, into a distinguished but impecunious family, left without a father at twelve but with a mother who, he said, hated him, young Melville quit school at fifteen and knocked about in various jobs until he went to sea. His hard, daunting life on the Acushnet as a whaleman, followed by an idyll in the South Seas, left him with material for his feverish storytelling, and with an outlook both romantic and skeptic.

A number of specific and general themes run through Melville’s work: alienation of man from his life and work; authority, on a warship, at least, as a system of “cruel cogs and wheels” systematically grinding people up in one common hopper; existence as an ordinary seaman in a disciplined, totalitarian unit; the tendency of the Age of Machinery to transform men into objects; the rise of expansionist capitalism in an underdeveloped country. But the most significant theme was the role and rights of the individual in an increasingly technological, industrial, urban, and collective society. For Melville was inquiring, Q. D. Leavis has said, “what alternatives are available which allow one to combine some kind of social life with self-respect once one has perceived—as is essential—how fraudulent all relations and institutions generally are.” Or, in Leo Marx’s words, in the end in Moby-Dick as in Walden, the American hero is either dead or wholly alienated from society.

Ultimately the fame of Emerson and Thoreau, of Hawthorne and Melville, would come to turn on the manner in which they wrestled with transcending philosophical dualisms and ambivalences—good and evil, freedom and fate, order and change, technology and nature, “civilization” and “savagery,” guilt and innocence, appearance and reality, as well as the individual in society. They resolved none of these questions, but they posed them so dramatically, through such compelling essays and stories, as to bring their fellow Americans to a higher consciousness of the supreme moral and political choices facing them.

But those Americans—including the other writers who aped or criticized or ignored the celebrated authors—were not passive receptacles. Some of these moral and political issues reached straight to their physical and spiritual needs and others did not. Events too would be in the saddle, as domestic and foreign crises forced Americans to make choices. Those needs and those crises would make the general issue of individualism in society, of liberty under government, the central issue for the 1850s. The narrow issue would be the relationship of liberty and equality. Thousands of educators and editors and ministers, having read about Walden Pond and Brook Farm, about Hester and Ahab and (later) Billy Budd, would have to make their own moral judgments and political decisions in the days to come.

Still, on the central, perplexing issues of liberty, the celebrated writers of the day left a legacy of intellectual leadership that was as ambiguous in content as it was evocative in tone. Emerson’s individualism could be defined as an enriching self-fulfillment or as the liberty to climb over the backs of others to embrace the bitch-goddess success. Thoreau’s retreat to Walden could be seen as an effort to achieve a creative autonomy or as a device to deny his dependency on—and evade his responsibility to—the wider community. Hawthorne viewed the pursuit of self-interest as fundamental in human character but inadequate as the moral foundation of a stable community; on the other hand, reformers’ attempts to replace competition and social distinction with harmony and communal equality could end up doing more harm than good. These literary men had ambivalent feelings toward the railroads and factories, the authority and the discipline, that came with the Age of Machinery and would have colossal influence in both narrowing and broadening people’s liberties. Thus the literary culture of liberty gave out mixed signals to people trying to find the elusive border lines between individual freedom and communal needs.

RELIGION: FREE EXERCISE

A church somewhere in the “burned over” area of western New York, 1830. Charles G. Finney is preaching. His voice thunders; his great eyes seem to burn into the very souls of the hundreds watching him. He seems to be speaking to each and all directly, personally, assuring them that salvation is possible for all, not just for the limited elect; if they repent and embrace the Lord they could escape the terrible guilt and awful consequences of sin. Near Finney stands his famous “anxious seat,” waiting for sinners ready to undergo conversion. As Finney rises to a passionate climax, his tall body straight and erect and his great arms outflung in the image of the cross—and had not Finney’s life been threatened too?—people are crying out, bursting into tears, fainting, falling into trances.

While the pundits and philosophers of Concord and Boston were reaching thousands of persons through the printed word, the parsons and preachers of trans-Appalachia were attracting tens of thousands of persons through the spoken. New York’s “burned over” district was so called because it had been so often kindled and rekindled by flaming revivalists. Easterners viewed western religion with hope and dismay. Many of their own sons—Finney for one—had migrated, west. As wave after wave of settlers swept beyond the Appalachian frontier, eastern ministers had called for missionaries to take the gospel to them. Society there, Theodore Dwight Bozeman noted, was “‘in its forming state,’ lacking moral ligaments, susceptible to rank growths of ‘wild fanaticism,’ and painfully needing lessons in the security and quiet of good community.”

Reverend Timothy Dwight, president of Yale College, saw only three types of people on the frontier as he traveled through upstate New York in 1810: hunters and trappers “impatient of the restraints of law, religion, and morality; farmers who worked the land for a while and then moved on; and permanent settlers who stayed to prosper on the land.” Only the last group, wrote Dwight, were God-fearing, and they lacked pastors to guide them. The churches must sponsor religious missions to “soften and humanize” the hearts of western settlers and win them back to religion.

Easterners were used to the flowing and ebbing of worship. There had been a “very wintry season” for religion everywhere in America after the Revolution. Ninety percent of the people lay outside the churches. Political events eclipsed religion, as people concentrated on establishing the new nation and winning the War of 1812. The outstanding men of the country such as Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were statesmen, not ministers. Embracing the rationalism and deism of the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers instituted religious freedom and welcomed conflict among the churches as a positive good—as the way to differentiate truth from error.

Democratic ideals of the Revolution shaped religion. Nowhere else in the world, Protestants felt, did they enjoy the freedoms they had in America after the Revolutionary War—freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution. The First Amendment put first among its list of liberties: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Article VI of the Constitution prohibited religious tests “as a Qualification to any Office.” Revolutionary political beliefs had made state control of religion unacceptable, and the growing number of denominations made legal establishment of churches impossible. Earlier the churches had looked to the state for legal support in a wild and open land. When the Constitution separated church and state, choice of religion became an individual one. There seemed to be a price: With voluntary associations and denominations, and no exclusive national church, church attendance—even inherited membership—seemed to weaken as people moved to the frontier. Some feared that liberty had fatally impaired religion.

On the moving frontiers, each minister worked far from the power and status of his church; as civilization followed, ministers could join into Presbyteries, Ministeriums, Conventions, or Conferences. Ministers in America were persuasive and political. As Tocqueville learned, everywhere “you meet with a politician where you expected to find a priest.” Ministers in the colonial period had looked to the state for financial as well as legal underpinning, but as state after state disestablished the churches and withdrew funds for support, it seemed to many ecclesiasts such as Timothy Dwight that religion had suffered another hard blow. The laity provided a minister with support and a salary, but, according to Dwight, “a voluntary contribution, except in a large town, is as uncertain as the wind; and a chameleon only can expect to derive a permanent support from this source.”

As settlers cut themselves off from family roots and familiar surroundings to move to the frontier, they needed all the more a religious faith that could move with them and fortify them for their harsh battles with an unforgiving wilderness. Religion, by preparing people for another world, could make the troubles and hardships of the present one less burdensome. The churches were the key to neighborhood stability, ordered family life, and the education of children on the frontier, defenses against instability and indiscipline in an unsettled land.

Religion served as solace and security in the East too. Mill workers found it easier to work their twelve-hour shifts, the ministry believed, if they looked to religion for comfort. Factory owners erected churches in the mill towns, making Sunday attendance compulsory for their hands in the belief that churchgoing conveyed spiritual comfort—and greater stability in the work force. With the rise of the plantation, system, many a slave owner brought religious worship to his slaves—religious worship that counseled obedience to the master, for a slave’s obedience would mean entrance to heaven, that other world which promised to be so much better than the present one.

In 1800, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Baptists, and Methodists were all established denominations, but the largest and most powerful were the first two. Between them, Congregationalists and Presbyterians controlled half the total number of congregations in America. They had founded, or helped to found, six of nine colonial colleges. Their assertive ministers—men such as Timothy Dwight—supported order against universal manhood suffrage, labor unions, poor relief, public education, western disorder, and other facets of liberty and equality. They retained the strict Calvinism of the Puritans, teaching that humanity, sinful by nature since Adam’s fall, was inescapably predestined to eternal damnation. The death of Jesus Christ made atonement for sins and admission to heaven a free act of God’s sovereign grace, but only for a limited few who underwent a transforming “election experience” and maintained a consistent life afterwards. To Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists, this election experience, “being born again,” was the greater part of religious life, more important than good deeds or sacraments. These churches, gathered around the elect, carried the name “evangelical.”

Religious teachings and methods had to change before they could appeal to the frontier men and women who often disdained church hierarchies, formal worship services, and an intellectual clergy. Yet settlers on the frontier yearned for the stability, community, and comfort of religion. Presbyterians were the first Protestants to minister to western settlers, sending missionaries to the West during the French and Indian War of 1756. To bring people together from scattered settlements to listen to ministers, Presbyterians created the camp meeting. Two Presbyterian ministers, James McGready and Barton W. Stone, organized the famous Cane Ridge Revival in Kentucky.

It was the apogee of the Great Revival at the turn of the century—ten to twenty thousand people gathering in Bourbon County to hear dozens of preachers—Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist—all speaking together from platforms, wagons, stumps, and logs. Between one and three thousand people were “brought to the ground,” or experienced conversion, at Cane Ridge. Kentucky ministers carried the revival message and camp meeting method to the Western Reserve, where Baptists and Methodists, but not Presbyterians, drew the most converts from the Awakening.

The Presbyterians fell behind in the struggle to save souls on the frontier, but came to scorn the extreme emotionalism of the western revivals. Although the first to use the camp meeting, they required a trained and educated ministry and a rigid presbyterial polity. The presbyterial governance took disciplinary measures against ministers who led emotional meetings, and in 1837-38 Presbyterians split into Old School, or consistent Calvinists who clung to the doctrine of limited election, and New School, or Arminians who challenged the Old School on election and free will. Between 1834 and 1836, the church lost 27,000 members. Its influence, however, remained greater than its membership, for it appealed to the rising industrial and commercial classes.

Methodists and Baptists preached salvation for all. God would grant salvation if persons repented and pledged their lives to service. This emphasis on voluntary individual choice appealed to the independent frontiersmen, and found its most concrete and dramatic form in the revival, designed to stir sinners to repentance. The Methodists and Baptists had begun in America as dissenting churches, never enjoying state support. With clergy and workers from the frontier folk—Methodists employed itinerant ministers—they grew with the country.

The most visible churchman was the circuit rider. Of all the religious men on the frontier, he was among the best known and the best loved. With his wide-brimmed light fur hat, high collar, long waistcoat, short breeches, and stockings, he could be spotted a mile away as he galloped on horseback to cabins on his hundred-mile circuit. Each rider carried the Bible and Wesley’s Sermons, which he might read as he rode. Priding himself on being a graduate of “Brush College,” the school of practical experience, a rider boasted of knowing all the forests and streams of his area so that he could reach his destination on time. For four years, the devoted preacher had to ride his circuit, spreading the gospel and ministering to the people as he preached every day in the week, twice on Saturday, and twice on Sunday. The presiding elder kept track of the rider’s punctuality, for a crowd might be waiting, a crowd that would not return if a rider were late.

During the “harvest time of Methodism,” 1820, circuit riders held one thousand camp meetings throughout the country. Multitudes, trying to escape the loneliness of the frontier, would gather to sit on planks laid across tree stumps at the meeting place. Bonfires illuminated the night as visiting clergy preached. “The uncertain light upon the tremulous foliage…the solemn chanting of hymns swelling and falling in the night wind; the impassioned exhortations” were not the reasoned, written sermons of the eastern ministers but electrifying appeals to people with deep spiritual needs.

Baptists recruited local persons as clergy to reach frontier people, in the form of farmer-preachers who had “received the call” and been “raised up” by their churches with a license to preach. The Council of Brethren would then examine a preacher and ordain him by prayer. The preachers were unpaid, self-supporting, and mobile, able to move with their congregations to new areas or back into the unchurched older areas without financial support or direction except from the Baptist regional associations. The principal difference from Methodism was the adherence to baptism by immersion, but frontier preachers debated election, grace, and free will, at times widening the difference between denominations.

Peter Cartwright, a famous Methodist circuit rider, ministered to Methodist and Baptist frontier people. Cartwright had grown up in the wilds of Logan County, Kentucky. Though his mother was a devout Methodist, he had loved horse racing, card-playing, and dancing until his conversion at a camp meeting. Soon after receiving an exhorter’s license at age seventeen, he became a traveling preacher, riding the Red River Circuit in Kentucky, the Waynesville Circuit in Tennessee, the Salt River and Shelbyville Circuit in Indiana, and the Scioto Circuit in Ohio. He continued in Kentucky and Tennessee until 1824, when he requested the Sangamon Circuit in Illinois, owing to his hatred of slavery. During his fifty years of preaching Methodism against rival sects, he was forty-five years a presiding elder, twice a member of the Illinois legislature, and in 1846 ran for the United States Congress against Abraham Lincoln on the issue of Lincoln’s “infidelism.”

Cartwright wrote in his autobiography of the time he was to preach in an old Baptist church. “When I came,” Cartwright remembered, “there was a very large congregation. While I was preaching, the power of God fell on the assembly, and there was an awful shaking among the dry bones. Several fell to the floor and cried for mercy. …I believe if I had opened the doors of the Church then, all of them would have joined the Methodist Church.” But Cartwright had to ride on, and the Baptists sent three preachers to the place to retrieve Cartwright’s twenty-three converts. “For fear these preachers would run my converts into the water before I could come round,” the Methodists summoned Cartwright to return. He presented himself to the Baptist preacher for membership. “At the last moment, however, in the hearing of all, he declared that he still believed in infant sprinkling, forcing the Baptist minister to reject him. At the sight of his rejection, his twenty-three converts returned to the Methodist fold.” Theological controversy ran deep on the frontier. Evangelical Protestantism grew so strong on the frontier that by 1850 it was the national religion, claiming 4 million of a population of 27 million. The Methodists, with 1,324,000 members, were the largest denomination; the Baptists were second, with 815,000 members in primarily rural and southern areas—the ten most populous Baptist states were slave states in 1854. Presbyterians were third with 487,000 members; Congregationalists fourth with 197,000; Lutherans fifth with 163,000. In 1800, one of every fifteen Americans belonged to a church; by 1850, one of every six. New England experienced a Second Great Awakening, in the form of revivals, renewed spiritual seriousness, and new efforts at moral reformation. Settled ministers, not itinerants as on the frontier, conducted sober revivals before middle- and upper-class congregations. The region continued to produce brilliant ministerial leadership. Timothy Dwight, grandson of Jonathan Edwards, the New England divine who had begun the first Great Awakening, served as president of Yale College from 1795 until 1817 and won Yale over from rationalism to Calvinism. As a student he had tutored at Yale and had devoted himself to the dignified asceticism of the earlier Puritan ministers, eating only two mouthfuls of food at dinner, sleeping on the floor, studying long hours each day. His harsh regimen may have contributed to his almost total loss of eyesight. For even this he was thankful, saying it helped him develop the powers of observation he used to describe the people and country in his Travels in New England and New York, and also caused him to shift emphasis in his lectures to Yale students from doctrine and scholarship to pastoral care. There is a certainty man will sin, Dwight preached, but he has the power not to. He asked for a simple yes-or-no conversion decision from his students, managing to convert over one-third of Yale students to a religious life.

Dwight’s students carried the idea of revivals to their own churches. Nathaniel Taylor and Lyman Beecher, Dwight’s most famous students, and others led a Calvinistic revivalism in the Congregational colleges of New England. Their teachings had political implications, as they sought to preserve religion and morality against the threat they perceived in Jeffersonian Republicanism and the popular-democratic, egalitarian tendencies it embodied. Any change in the social order, according to Dwight, had to begin with the moral reform of the individual. He had founded what came to be called the New Haven theology to make Calvinism more approachable to those well versed in Christianity. Salvation, as Calvinism had stressed, was for the few.

Such doctrines had little appeal to urban workers, many of whom were Roman Catholic immigrants from Ireland. Catholics had numbered only about 25,000 at the time of the Revolutionary War. By 1850, the Roman Catholic Church in America numbered 1,750,000 adherents—preponderantly Irish, collected mainly in the great eastern cities, as the Irish, ravaged by land enclosure and the potato famine at home, emigrated to the United States.

Even Catholicism fragmented in the pluralistic American environment. In the early national period, the hierarchy of the Church was largely French owing to the influx of priests fleeing the French Revolution. The cultured, aristocratic French clerics distrusted the poor Irish immigrants who began to swell their congregations, and the Irish communicants liked French priests no better. They wanted their own clergy. Roman Catholic churches had followed the earlier Protestant model of putting parochial affairs—title to church property—under the control of the laity; Catholics felt they should also select their spiritual leaders. Rome refused to allow this “trusteeism,” but the Irish did not force the issue; their priests began to replace French clergy, in any case, as a consequence of their numbers. The hierarchy of the Church was a path of advancement to the ambitious Irish immigrant, with many an Irish man becoming a priest and many an Irish woman a nun.

Roman Catholics found religious freedom but not toleration in America. Native groups pressed them to assimilate, to abandon their alleged allegiance to a foreign potentate, even to renounce their Catholicism itself. In particular, the Irish immigrants—numerous, visible, filling the boarding-houses and tenements of the great eastern cities—were vulnerable to Protestant hoodlums. In 1831, a mob burned down St. Mary’s Catholic Church in New York City, and two years later another group attacked the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. The convent included a popular school run by cultured Ursuline nuns that had attracted the daughters of a number of wealthy Protestant families, particularly Unitarians rebelling against the rigid Congregationalism of the public school system. The popularity of the Ursuline school had angered the orthodox ministers of Boston, especially Lyman Beecher, pastor of Hanover Street Church, who directed such fiery sermons against Catholics that his church became known as the Brimstone Corner.

After a rumor circulated in Boston newspapers that a nun had tried to escape from the convent and been detained against her will, Beecher delivered three violently anti-Catholic sermons in three churches in Boston. Other clergy followed his lead. Next day a mob stormed the imposing brick convent school on Ploughed Hill in Charlestown and set it on fire. The following night the mob returned to burn fences and trees around the school. Troops were called in to prevent an assault on the nearby Catholic church.

Rioting against Catholics broke out in Philadelphia in 1844, leaving thirteen persons killed, many injured, a Catholic seminary, two churches, and blocks of Catholic homes in ruins. Outbursts continued into the 1850s; mobs killed ten men in St. Louis, Missouri, and one hundred Catholics on “Bloody Monday” in Louisville, Kentucky. The Know-Nothing political party was forming to oppose what they saw as the rise of Catholic influence in the schools and in politics.

Bigotry found other targets besides Catholicism. From the day that Joseph Smith, a moody teenager, told the clergy in his western New York town that he had seen a vision in the nearby woods, and had been instructed to join no church but wait for the fullness of the gospel to be revealed to him, he was treated with harsh words. In 1830 he established his own church with six members and published The Book of Mormon, reportedly drawn from golden tablets revealed to him from on high. As the little band slowly expanded amid the fast-changing, booming economy of the Erie Canal area, it aroused hatred for its doctrines and for its alien practices—baptism of the dead, marriage for eternity, rule by an ecclesiastical oligarchy, and above all its rumored polygamy. Moving to Kirtland, Ohio, and then to Missouri, the Mormons could not escape from persecution. The governor of Missouri announced that they must be treated as enemies and either driven from the state or exterminated. Now numbering 12,000 souls, the Mormons moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, where they built a large Mormon temple, mills, foundries, power and navigation dams, community farms, even hotels. Here Smith ruled grandly, and apparently took unto himself (though secretly) a number of wives. But his virile leadership began to deteriorate into megalomania, and when his private army destroyed the offices of a newspaper critical of the sect, he and his brother were thrown into a Carthage jail, surrounded by a mob, and shot dead. A year later a mob of 1,500 armed ruffians besieged Nauvoo and killed Mormons and non-Mormons alike. The surviving Mormons, now under the leadership of Brigham Young, fled as Illinois frontiersmen occupied and looted the ruined town. Young, who had grown up in western New York among the fiery revivals of the Methodists and then converted to Mormonism, organized the survivors for the long trek west to Utah. Only in this final chosen land did the Mormons find some refuge from religious hatred.

Clearly there were sharp limits to American tolerance of religious diversity, and boundaries to the effective reach of the First Amendment. Protestants beset Catholics; Methodists persecuted Mormons; the head of the Mormons assaulted an opposing newspaper; Protestant sects “stole” members from one another. Yet the vast number of Americans who attended church and camp meeting did so without harassment. The various sects seemed indeed to thrive amid competition—a competition, Sidney Mead wrote, “that helped to generate the tremendous energies, heroic sacrifices, great devotion to the cause, and a kind of stubborn, plodding work under great handicaps, that transformed the religious complexion of the nation.” Such competition could thrive only in an environment of liberty.

There was as well a latent but powerful strand of egalitarianism in American Protestantism. By the 1830s and the 1840s this moral tradition was confronting slavery more and more directly. Theodore Weld, a zealous convert of Charles Finney’s, had traveled to Ohio in 1829 as an agent of the Society for Promoting Manual Labor in Literary Institutions, looking for a site to build a western manual labor theological seminary. The place chosen in southern Ohio was Cincinnati, where the society established Lane Seminary and called as its first president Lyman Beecher.

While Beecher was absent on a fund-raising tour in 1834, several Lane students, led by Weld, conducted an antislavery revival meeting to debate immediate abolition or colonization. The decision was for emancipation. When Beecher returned to find the trustees angered over the meetings, he dissolved the antislavery society, and Lane rebels withdrew in 1835 to found Oberlin College. Charles G. Finney was its first professor of theology and later president. Weld’s band of followers also founded the Ohio State Abolition Society and determined to “burn down by backfires the city.” So aroused was the populace by revival meetings against slavery that within one year the Ohio State Abolition Society swelled to 15,000.

If to many church members slavery was a sin and an evil, for others abolitionism was worse. The issue began to divide churches into northern and southern wings, although the Roman Catholic Church stood largely aloof from the controversy. The main plank in the abolitionists’ platform asserted that slaveholding and even allowing slavery to persist were sins. “Faith Without Works Is Dead,” preached Weld, as abolitionists began to call more and more for action, for immediate repentance and immediate freedom for the slave. The Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier spoke for many church members when he wrote: “We do not talk of gradual abolition, because, as Christians, we find no authority for advocating a gradual relinquishment of sin. We say to slaveholders—Repent Now—today—Immediately; just as we say to the intemperate—‘Break off from your vice at once—touch not—taste not—handle not—from henceforth forever…’ Such is our doctrine of immediate emancipation. A doctrine founded on God’s eternal Truth—plain, simple and perfect.”

SCHOOLS: THE “TEMPLES OF FREEDOM”

The cultural change that touched and transformed most Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century was the emergence of a common, uniform, public school system. Two paradoxes marked this transforming change. It was an experiment in pure socialism, if socialism is defined as governmental ownership of certain facilities, and governmental hiring and firing of persons employed in those facilities, in order to carry out purposes of the state. The government was taking over not an impersonal service like a communications or transportation system, but the education of innocent and vulnerable children handed over by their parents to the tender mercies of Leviathan. In an era before socialism became an ideological issue within and among nations, this particular socialist experiment was conducted in other guises and for other purposes.

But what purposes? Herein lies a second paradox. The political, educational, religious, and intellectual leaders who brought about this transformation had diverse goals, so that a conflict of purpose centrally affected the formative period of education and has affected it ever since.

For some, common school education was intended to serve the political needs and purposes of the new republic. In his Farewell Address George Washington had urged the people to promote, “as an object of primary importance, Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” Jefferson made the point more pithily: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Some leaders stressed the practical need to educate the “jurors, magistrates, legislators, governors” who would run the new republic. It was argued too that as a matter of republican principle, “the education of the whole becomes the first interest of all. ” Or as Governor Edward Everett said, “…the utmost practicable extension should be given to a system of education, which will confer on every citizen the capacity of deriving knowledge, with readiness and accuracy, from books and documents.”

For others, however, education as part of the republican experiment raised a more profound question—what were the purposes of the republic? Those who answered with the classic goals of “liberty and equality,” as many did, believed that popular or universal education was vital to these purposes. Schoolhouses were seen as “Temples of Freedom,” as both the source and the guardian of liberty. Even higher hopes were held for education as a product and protector of equality, especially in the light of the educational privileges of the elites. William Manning, the Billerica tavernkeeper, went to the heart of the matter: “Larning is of the greatest importance to the seport of a free government,” he wrote, “& to prevent this the few are always crying up the advantages of costly collages, national aca-dimyes & grammer schooles, in ordir to make places for men to live without work, & so strengthen their party. But are always opposed to cheep schools & woman schooles, the ondly or prinsaple means by which larning is spred amongue the Many.” This view, which was too strong for even the Jeffersonian press to print, anticipated the egalitarian thrust of the 1830s.

Still others looked on schooling as a means of achieving diverse goals or changes: as the way toward moral regeneration, or at least curbing vice; as an agency for inculcating patriotic values; as a training ground for republican leadership; as a practical preparation for earning a better livelihood. Education for leadership had a special appeal to early republicans, in the absence of the kind of aristocratic system that took care of the training of princes in monarchies. In providing for three years of elementary public education for all children, Jefferson’s “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge” aimed at selecting potential leaders from the mass of the people.

Still other Americans, usually Federalist or Whig, sometimes Republican or Democratic, had a less elevated view of the purpose of schooling. Their aim was to control and discipline the children of an unruly, democratic people. Heirs to the Framers, who feared faction, disorder, and turbulence, these persons saw the public school less as a means of expressing and realizing the aspirations of the people, more as a means of carrying out the purposes of the state. Some radicals of the time understood this basic purpose. Defining the attitudes of certain of the workingmen’s groups of the 1830s, Rush Welter wrote: “Whereas republican educational institutions had been intended to serve the needs of the people, democratic institutions were much more likely to respond to their wants.”Doubtless too, many parents were happy to let the schools take over the function of discipline, or at least of inculcation of proper values.

The “Common School Awakening” of the 1830s reflected a sharp diversity of purpose. The upper-class leaders of the movement wanted to provide a free elementary education for all white children, to create a trained educational profession adhering to a single standard, and to establish state control over local schools. States could then create uniform criteria for buildings, curricula, and teachers. States could also enforce the attendance of children. While leaders wanted social control, supporters of the movement believed advancement would come with common schooling. In educational opportunity the lot of the worker had declined since colonial times. Colonial authorities had bound out orphans, children of indentured servants, and even four- and five-year-olds as apprentices to learn a trade with a master; but apprenticeship faded with the onset of mechanization in the North and slavery in the South. Finding their wages, businesses, and status undermined by industrialization, skilled workers and small shopkeepers wanted their children to attend better schools, if possible with the scions of the wealthy.

Labor leaders made free, equal, and state-supported schools their cardinal goal. Robert Dale Owen, fresh from the failure of New Harmony, became an inspirational leader in the New York labor struggles of the l830s and an advocate of common schools. In urging the Working Men’s party to place tax-supported schools at the head of the platform, Owen proposed an audacious system of education in which the state would lodge all children in boarding schools, providing them with equal food, clothing, and instruction. Only through boarding schools could the environment of every child be equalized.

“I believe in a National System of Equal, Republican, Protective, Practical Education,” Owen proclaimed, “the sole regenerator of a profligate age, and the only redeemer of our suffering country from the equal curses of chilling poverty and corrupting riches, of gnawing want and destroying debauchery, of blind ignorance and of unprincipled intrigue.” Clearly the schools for Owen would be another Utopia. His six essays on education received wide publicity, although his bold plan for boarding schools was far too visionary for the Working Men’s party.

Responding to their leaders’ calls for educational reform, craftsmen and small shopkeepers used their recently acquired suffrage to demand education for their children. In Pennsylvania, they argued the necessity of a free system of education, already established in Philadelphia. In 1834, a milestone bill providing for free education passed on a statewide level, only to meet violent opposition among the wealthy, who produced 32,000 signatures for repeal. When the Senate voted for another bill providing for free education of only the poor, Representative Thaddeus Stevens opposed it on the grounds that education should be free to all. After a denunciation of class hostility toward free public schools he carried the legislature, and the original act stood.

Although education had changed in colonial days from a dependence on family, church, and apprenticeship to more public, official arrangements, no part of the country before 1815 had a comprehensive school system. In New York and other middle Atlantic states, public funds had gone to benevolent organizations such as the Free School Society of New York City, which sponsored charity schools for the poor. To attend charity schools, children had to take pauper oaths, and the poor objected to charity schools so much that they boycotted them. As late as 1828, more than 24,000 children between the ages of five and fifteen received no education in New York City; in Delaware, New Jersey, and Maryland the number was even greater.

States had left responsibility for schools to local districts. The district schools received meager funds from local taxes, hardly enough to pay a teacher and maintain a schoolhouse. Parents were assessed rates according to the number of their children in school; those unable to pay could still send children as charity pupils. In Massachusetts, one-third of the districts, 1,000 in all, had no schoolhouses. By 1840, it is estimated, one-half of the schoolchildren of New England and the middle Atlantic states were receiving free education, as were one-sixth of those in the old Northwest.

Private schools for children whose parents could pay tuition flourished throughout the Northeast. Children of the wealthy attended private “dame schools,” to avoid associating with the poor. In both district and private schools, instruction was all recitation by rote—students memorized a page from the text and recited to the teacher. In district schools, there was no age grading, since all ages learned in the one-room schoolhouse. Nor did uniform school books exist, at least at first; teachers taught from whatever books were at hand. In the 1830s, however, William McGuffey, a professor of languages, developed the renowned McGuffey’s Readers, a series of six textbooks for the elementary grades. The Readers mingled entertainment with moral and patriotic lessons, and they became the chief introduction to learning for several generations of American schoolchildren.

Teachers usually had no direct training for their work. As one school board member wrote in 1847 of a teacher: “he thinks of turning peddler, or of working at shoemaking. But the one will expose him to storms, the other he fears will injure his chest.…He will nevertheless teach school for a meagre compensation.” Such problems were less prevalent in the better-funded private schools where children of the well-to-do studied classical languages. In 1837, the Connecticut educational leader Henry Barnard estimated that 10,000 wealthy children attended private schools, at an expense greater than all the funds appropriated for the other 70,000 children of the state.

But members of elite groups often led reform. Leaders of the common school movement in the several states shared similar backgrounds and views on the purpose of education. They were members of the established professions—law, medicine, education, religion—and members of the Whig party. Horace Mann of Massachusetts, Henry Barnard of Connecticut, and Calvin Wiley of North Carolina were Whig legislators before they became state superintendents of education. As Whigs, they supported an active role by government in industrial growth, protective tariffs, internal improvements—and education.

Reformers hoped to bring every child into school through the establishment of the “free school,” supported by taxes and state grants—free so that no child would be identified as pauper and the poor would attend, and free so that the rich would not object to mixed economic classes since they would be paying for the schools anyway through taxation. Raising taxes for schools was unpopular everywhere, and reformers had only limited success, as wealthy people who could educate their children privately often opposed common schools. It took a lawyer-educator-politician with the moral standing and political skill of a Horace Mann to enlist manufacturers in the common school movement in Massachusetts.

Mann contended that education would create better workers. “Education has a market value…it may be turned to a pecuniary account: it may be minted, and will yield a larger amount of statutable coin than common bullion.” Mann’s influence on educational thought and practice was immense through his use of publicity to popularize his beliefs. In 1837, at a financial sacrifice, he relinquished his seat in the Massachusetts legislature to become secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education. Two years later he secured the first state-supported American normal school at Lexington, Massachusetts, and by 1845 he had formed a state association of teachers in Massachusetts, as well as founding and editing the Common School Journal.

Mann’s accomplishments in Massachusetts were formidable. When he became secretary of the board of education, one-sixth of the children of the state were being taught in private academies, about one-third had no significant schooling at all, and in many districts the school term was only two or three months. Under Mann’s leadership, a minimum school year of six months was established by statute; schoolhouses and equipment were improved; teachers’ salaries raised by over a half; and the ratio of private school spending to public halved. The professional training of teachers was improved and educating by rote reduced.

Mann took on all comers. A Unitarian, he asserted that the Bible should be read in school, but without comment. A Puritan humanitarian with genuine sympathy for the poor and underprivileged, he believed that education would right the wrongs of society. The poor were miserable because of ignorance and lack of education, he felt, not because of injustice in the social system, and so the poor must work to better themselves. Democracy could succeed only if there was a free and universal school system teaching the work ethic; all should attend the public schools, and all would if the public schools surpassed the private schools in excellence. Inevitably Mann provoked fierce opposition not only from private schools but from many churchmen, who accused his board of education of creating a godless system of education.

Mann’s leadership was matched in southern New England by Henry Barnard, who centralized and improved common schooling in two states. Barnard had received an excellent private school education, followed by study at Yale and a year abroad. Elected to the Connecticut legislature, he introduced a bill in 1838 to centralize the school system with a state board of commissioners to oversee it. As secretary of the board, he carried out the law and worked to change public sentiment in its favor. Through public schools, Barnard maintained, rich and poor might achieve mutual understanding, and thereby reduce conflict. In 1842, he accepted the post of Commissioner of Public Schools in Rhode Island, where again he secured the passage of a school act. He wanted above all the “complete education of every human being without regard to the accidents of birth or fortune.” With an inheritance that permitted, him to spend $40,000 a year on educational publications, Barnard founded and edited the Connecticut Common School Journal. He went on to further leadership: chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, president of St. John’s College, and the first United States Commissioner of Education.

Leaders of the Common School Awakening in the South were moderate businessmen, former yeomen farmers, who supported internal improvements and greater economic growth for the region. Reformers wanted the South to build home industries and businesses with cheaper money and free itself from New York factors and shippers who were “strangling the South” by controlling the cotton shipment to England and the shipment back of manufactured goods. A better business environment could not grow in the South, they feared, as long as the planter class controlled the state legislatures, for planters disdained commerce and internal improvements. Education of the masses would help all to see through the planters’ values and allow the South to grow. Poor whites, if educated, would be less likely to follow demagogic leaders calling for war, and war was bad for business and economic growth.

“Let the sun of universal education shine upon it [North Carolina], and the matchless resources of the state, by works of improvement, be made to minister nutriment to its wants, and soon its bright blossoms will imparadise the soil from which its sturdy trunk has sprung, and its green, unfading foliage furnish umbrageous retreats for the weary of the earth,” wrote Calvin Wiley, superintendent of North Carolina schools in the North Carolina Reader. Wiley believed education would develop resources and found a new prosperity in North Carolina. A lawyer and newspaper editor, he was a member of the North Carolina state legislature in the early 1850s when he was elected superintendent of schools. He established the North Carolina Journal of Education and the first teacher-training institution in North Carolina.

Only state or local schools for paupers existed in most districts in the South. Children of planters received elementary education from private tutors; others had no education at all. The southern rate of illiteracy for whites was double that of the North in the period before the Civil War. In the 1840s the South made an effort to apply greater resources to education, but it fell behind other regions because it was the poorest section of the country. In 1860 a white child received approximately eleven days of schooling per year in the South, as compared to fifty in the North.

In the West, evangelical ministers advanced common schooling as part of a crusade against ignorance. Young Congregationalist ministers of the American Home Missionary Society who traveled to the Northwest frontier to convert the settlers were amazed at the illiteracy they found, and dispatched letters home to urge the society to send schoolteachers to the West. New England, priding itself on its educational heritage, sent forth numerous apostles of intellectual training.

For the first time, women began to serve as missionary teachers. Catharine Beecher, daughter of the eminent Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher, began to send circulars in 1835 to county newspapers and clergymen throughout the East asking for names of women who would serve as teachers. In the West she asked for the names of towns and villages where a teacher would be welcome. She organized local groups of church women to raise a one-hundred-dollar donation to train and place one teacher in the West. Carrying the endorsements of Horace Mann and Henry Barnard, Catharine Beecher would present her case to a town’s most eminent official, and after gaining his endorsement she would build a local committee. In Boston, the Ladies’ Society for Promoting Education at the West donated several thousand dollars to the cause. The Organization for Promoting National Education, Catharine Beecher’s committee, received funds from local committees, arranged a brief training period for the teachers, and eventually sent 450 teachers to the West.

Missionaries, schoolmasters, college presidents, and lecturers “swarmed out generally flying over the mountains and alighting beyond wherever there was a job, often trusting to the future to develop a salary.” Horace Mann spent the last four years of his life administering Antioch College in Ohio. The “Father of the Indiana School System,” Caleb Mills, was a minister who answered a call to save the West; he knelt in the snow one winter day in 1833 with the founders of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, to dedicate their lives to the cause of education and “the service of the Master whose followers they were.”

Born in Dunbarton, New Hampshire, in 1806, the son of a wealthy farmer, Caleb Mills, after studying at Dartmouth and Andover Theological Seminary, answered an advertisement in the Home Missionary Journal for a minister who could preach on Sundays and teach in a new college being organized in Crawfordsville, Indiana. In 1833 he went there with his wife and three young women whose purpose was to “go west to teach.” His preparatory class of twelve young men was the first class at Wabash, where Mills was professor of Greek and Latin until 1876.

Indiana had the highest rate of illiteracy of any northern state, and although numerous laws for common schooling existed, the school system was still only on paper. “One of the People” was the signature on the first educational message that Mills sent to the Indiana state legislature. In his six annual messages, 1846-51, he called upon the legislature to establish public schools. Mills popularized the argument of Horace Mann and other educational leaders that education of the common people would ensure the survival of the nation: “We can better meet the expense of the proper education of the rising generation, than endure the consequences resulting from the neglect of it.”

The messages and the resulting support brought forth a new bill before the legislature providing for compulsory taxation for schools, a central elementary system, uniform textbooks, and a superintendent of public instruction. The lawmaker who helped guide the bill through the legislature and spoke persuasively in its behalf was the ubiquitous Robert Dale Owen, the early leader of workingmen’s demands for education.

The founder of the Michigan system of public schools was also a Congregationalist minister, John Pierce: Born in Chesterfield, New Hampshire, Pierce lost his father when very young and was sent to live with a grandfather on his New England farm, where he received only eight weeks of schooling. Resolving at age twenty to earn an education, Pierce graduated from Brown University, and from Princeton Theological Seminary three years later; then, as an ordained minister, he accepted a call to serve as a missionary in the Michigan Territory.

At the constitutional convention that met to apply for Michigan’s statehood, Pierce helped persuade the chairman of the committee on education to support common schooling in the state. Appointed the first state superintendent of public instruction in 1836, he submitted a report for the organization and support of primary schools, for a University of Michigan with branches, and for disposing of the common school lands. Pierce’s report became the basis of the Michigan school system, although twenty years elapsed after the plan was adopted before free schools existed in the townships, and then only for three months a year. In 1838, Pierce began publication of the Journal of Education.

Religion was a powerful force in the Common School Awakening in urban areas. In New York City, pious men of the Public School Society, worried about the masses of poor people separated from the moral influences of the church, resolved to create an alternative influence to educate the people in morality and virtue. The society received state funds to staff eleven free schools for 20,000 children. The society claimed that the religious teaching offered in its schools was nonsectarian, and it opposed state money going to any schools maintained by religious denominations. Its schools were New York City’s only real public schools, but the increasing numbers of Roman Catholic immigrants boycotted them.

In 1834, Bishop John Hughes found across from the Roman Catholic cathedral in New York City a half-empty school run by the society. If he could supervise the teaching and the books used in the school so that anti-Catholic sentiment would be erased, Hughes promised to bring in Catholic children. Governor William Seward, valuing the discipline, socialization, and routine of education for poor children, supported Bishop Hughes. On this issue, Seward stood alone against his Whig party. The New York school law of 1842 provided for a New York City Board of Education to receive state funds, to tax, to build schools, and to distribute money to schools meeting certain requirements. No school with sectarian religious teaching would receive funds, but the Protestant Bible, viewed by the board as nonsectarian, could be used for instruction in the schools. The Catholics objected, and decided to create their own system of parochial schools.

Conflicting purposes continued to mark the movement for common schooling. Whig businessmen and reformers stressed the redemptive social purpose of education. Not only would common schooling create better workers to operate the new industrial system; it would fuse society together with shared morals and values. Some educational reformers, however, saw uneducated lower-class people as a threat to American democracy—and immigrants and the increasing numbers of factory laborers as a threat to the status quo. The powerful influence of schooling, they believed, was necessary to educate the poor in the values of hard work, individualism, thrift, and morality. Common schooling would relieve social problems without altering the social structure. The reformers focused on changing the person, not the society, as the root of the problem; the individual child was to conform to society’s values. The common school could, therefore, include everyone without large cost or threat to the privileged.

The “middling” classes who were in favor of the common school movement supported the reformers, voted for the extension of public educational services, and sent their children to the public schools, but they wanted an educational system that would set their children apart from the lower classes. With only elementary schools opened to all, they turned to the high school with its entrance and graduation requirements, its teaching of the classics and American values, as the institution to maintain the advantage of their children over the poor. The latter usually could not attend high schools, for by that age a child of poor parents had gone to work. The 80,000 elementary schools had 90,000 teachers and 3,300,000 pupils in 1850; in contrast there were only 6,000 secondary schools with 12,000 teachers and 250,000 pupils.

By the 1850s, another purpose was intruding into the consciences of reformers: improving the lot of the poor. How could the mass of people be informed or reformed, trained or restrained, when more than three million persons remained in bondage and ignorance? “Our motto used to be ‘the cause of education, the first of all causes,’” Horace Mann said in his farewell to Massachusetts teachers in 1844. “Recent events, however, have forced upon the public attention the great truth, that before a man can be educated, he must be a free man.” The movement for common education did not reach out to the children of slaves. Horace Mann could not wait for education to effect that change; in 1848 he resigned his educational office to win election to Congress and join the political battle for the liberty and equality of black people.

Could the schools expand liberty, increase prosperity, create better workers, safeguard property, prevent revolution, and at the same time blur class lines, lift the poor, foster equality? The contradictory purposes of the common school movement, with its lack of even a rough sense of priorities, were to plague education in the United States for years to come. Yet the movement, divergent and contradictory as it was, brought important gains in several states; a public school system, if only in skeleton form, was established; common schooling was a step away from a class system in the nation; the door of education partially opened to the middle classes and to the poor.

LEADERS OF THE PENNY PRESS

“What is the liberty of the press?” Alexander Hamilton had asked in the Federalist. It depended first of all on public opinion, answered this foe of revolution. Conditions in the 1830s, however, seemed ripe for a newspaper revolution. The egalitarian, individualistic, participatory temper of Jacksonian politics had quickened the interest of larger numbers of people in party combat, public issues, and political personalities—and quickened also their appetite for news of scandal, crime, disasters, sports, explorations, scientific discoveries. Liberty of speech and press was still largely honored in fact as well as in the national and state constitutions. Editors could freely assail the government, opposing parties and politicians, and one another. Newspaper editors who denounced politicos as crooks and liars, and one another as prostitutes and panderers, ran far greater danger of being knocked down or horsewhipped in the streets by their victims than of being taken off to jail by the local constable. Abolitionist editors, of course, were never safe from mob violence.

Other conditions were creating the potential for change. Newspapers, so needful of rapid transportation and communication, expanded along with the railroad and telegraph. The new journalism would be as dependent on a big-city environment as the Concord literati were on a village one, and this was a time of rapid urbanization. By the late 1840s Manhattan was approaching a population of 515,000, with another 97,000 people in Brooklyn. Newspapers needed a concentrated volume not only of readers but also of advertisers, pressmen, and craftsmen. New York alone employed 2,000 workers in printing and publishing by 1840.

The great mercantile dailies, serving primarily the business world through their ample coverage of ship arrivals and departures, stock and commodity prices, and business dealings, had hardly changed in decades. Subscribers purchased these papers by the year, at six cents a copy delivered to their homes; it was difficult to buy single numbers. The established newspapers were overdue for change. The presses themselves were about to be outmoded. In Britain the old-time hand press had been superseded by steam-powered cylinder presses that rolled back and forth over a flat type bed, and were capable of two to four thousand impressions an hour.

Innovating leaders and daring experimenters were needed as the catalysts for real change in journalism. The crucial act was an idea—the idea that tens of thousands of middle- and low-income people would buy newspapers if the papers were cheapened in content and price. This notion of a “penny press” came to a number of persons around the same time. Two of these were a brother and sister in Boston, Lynde and Cornelia Walter, who founded and established the Transcript at the low price of four dollars a year. But Boston, with a population in 1830 of only 61,000, was not the place for a mass-circulation paper. It took a metropolis like New York, and a man like Benjamin H. Day.

A onetime apprentice on Samuel Bowles’s Springfield Republican, Day had come to New York at the age of twenty and worked at the case in the offices of several papers until he could set up shop as a job printer. Cholera and a bank crisis cut into his business so badly that in desperation he decided to try out an idea he had flirted with since his days as a compositor—putting out a one-penny newspaper, to be sold on the streets. Almost single-handedly, working in a small room on William Street, Day got out his first issue of the Sun on September 3, 1833. Only eight by ten inches in size and four pages long, it was hardly a sensation. The left-hand of its three columns on the first page listed steamboat advertisements—to Albany for one dollar, to Hartford by the “splendid low-pressure steamboat WATER WITCH,” to New Orleans and Liverpool and Le Havre. Most of the rest of the front page offered the story of an “Irish captain.” But up on the right side of the masthead was the magic phrase “PRICE ONE PENNY.”

Day had sensed the great popular appetite for “human interest” stories, and soon the Sun was dishing them up. Most popular were young George Wisner’s police-court reports:

“…Bridget McMunn got drunk and threw a pitcher at Mr. Ellis, of 53 Ludlow St. Bridget said she was the mother of 3 little orphans—God bless their dear souls—and if she went to prison they would choke to death for the want of something to eat. Committed.”

“Catharine McBride was brought in for stealing a frock. Catharine said she had just served out 6 months on Blackwell’s Island, and she wouldn’t be sent back again for the best glass of punch that ever was made. Her husband, when she last left the penitentiary, took her to a boarding house in Essex St., but the rascal got mad at her, pulled her hair, pinched her arm, and kicked her out of bed. She…got drunk and stole the frock out of pure spite. Committed.”

“…Bill Doty got drunk because he had the horrors so bad he couldn’t keep sober. Committed.”

Soon the Sun had its imitators, the most notable and successful being James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald. Scottish-born, Bennett had knocked about as a teacher in Nova Scotia, bookstore clerk in Boston, reporter in New York, translator of Spanish-American newspapers in Charleston, and a Washington correspondent for the New York press, before resolving to publish his own newspaper. Two ventures failed before he began publication of the Herald in May 1835. Acting as editor, reporter, proofreader, and folder, he put out the first issue in a Wall Street cellar, with a plank across two flour barrels serving as business and editorial desk. His paper, he proclaimed, was “equally intended for the great mass of the community, the merchant, the mechanic, working people.…”

The Herald seemed at first as sensationalist as the Sun, but Bennett outdid Day as a newspaperman. He developed a first-class financial section, a lively letters column, a reasoned and informed editorial column, wide political, society, and sports coverage. He attacked Nicholas Biddle, and he took on a local financier so fiercely that twice the money man assaulted him in the street. He was not above devoting entire issues of his paper to sensational murder cases, as in the trial of a notorious man-about-town for the killing of a prostitute in a brothel. And he took on church, political, and financial establishments. Within a year the Herald boasted a daily circulation of 30,000.

As the penny press expanded, printing technology advanced with it, in turn making possible even larger and faster outpourings of newspapers. The Hoe “lightning press” of 1847 had a revolving printing surface, with type ingeniously locked into the curved cylinders by means of V-shaped column rules. Men stood on four tiers on both sides of the huge cylinder, feeding in pages from tilted tables. In 1849 Bennett installed a Hoe press with six cylinders capable of 12,000 impressions an hour. The cost of such presses—at least $20,000—threatened to end the days when young editors could start a newspaper for a few hundred dollars, and the cost also made advertising more important.

Innovating publishers competed feverishly to speed up their news gathering and distribution. They sent sloops out to meet ships bringing news from abroad. When one New York combine of publishers set up a semaphore system from the Sandy Hook sloop base to the Battery, a rival publisher ran a pony express between the two points. Sun reporters dispatched carrier pigeons out of a dovecote on top of their plant. The telegraph changed much of this. The first telegraphic dispatch published in a newspaper appeared in the Baltimore Patriot in May 1844, from Washington: “ONE O’CLOCK.—THERE HAS JUST BEEN MADE A MOTION IN THE HOUSE TO GO INTO COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE ON THE OREGON QUESTION, REJECTED,—AYES, 79; NAYS, 86.”

Selling the penny papers was even more competitive. Ragamuffin newsboys paid the publishers sixty-seven cents for a hundred copies and hawked them on the streets; their shrill cries became a vivid part of the urban clamor. Papers could be found in “every hotel, tavern, counting-shop,” in the hands even of porters and draymen and boys old enough to read. The post office distributed newspapers free, or at heavily subsidized rates, in rural areas—a beneficence that did not stop publishers from complaining of poor postal service. Reliance on the postal service had its risks too, as abolitionist editors discovered when southern postmasters refused to deliver their papers.

New York kept its leadership in the newspaper world, but the Baltimore Sun, founded in 1837, quickly won a reputation for excellent reporting from Washington—and a circulation of 12,000. The Philadelphia Public Ledger, established the next year, fearlessly attacked local corruption and abuses, at the cost of libel suits and even a mob attack. The Ledger carried on the Philadelphia image of tolerance by defending the rights of Catholics against rioters and those of abolitionists against lynchers. Boston’s new Daily Times gained a circulation of 12,000 in four months, in part by peddling its copies throughout eastern Massachusetts towns. The Boston Post continued as the great Democratic organ. Southern cities, especially Charleston, developed fine newspaper traditions.

The press had long followed flag and flatboat. “Wherever a town sprang up,” Frank Luther Mott wrote, “there a printer with a rude press and ‘a shirt-tail-full of type’ was sure to appear as by magic.” By the 1850s rapidly growing cities like Cincinnati and St. Louis had half a dozen or more papers each. In Chicago, in 1840, John Wentworth, an Exeter and Dartmouth graduate, had walked the lake beach into town with thirty dollars in his pocket; within three years he owned the weekly Chicago Democrat and a year later converted it into a daily. In 1847 three businessmen founded the Chicago Daily Tribune, which they sold a few years later to Joseph Medill, Alfred Cowles, and several partners. Newspapers were already sprouting in the territories to the west—in Green Bay and Milwaukee and “Du Buque,” in St. Paul and Sioux Falls and down in Leavenworth and Lawrence, Kansas.

Publishers adapted themselves to local conditions and crises. The first newspaper in Oklahoma was a Baptist missionary organ printed in an Indian dialect. The staff of the San Felipe Telegraph and Texas Register had fled for their lives on the approach of the Mexican army, which seized their printing press and threw it into a nearby bayou, but the Telegraph carried on with another press. The Santa Fe Republican published two pages in Spanish and two in English. The Weekly Arizonian had to suspend publication for two years when one of its publishers was shot for resisting arrest for a stage robbery. The Deseret News in Salt Lake City had great trouble obtaining a steady supply of paper over the mountains. California newspapers, stimulated by the gold rush, exploited the pony express—a total of seventy-five mustangs and their riders relaying mail and newspapers between stations fifteen miles apart, all the way from Missouri, in half the time that stagecoaches required.

The famous old newspapers of the East did not fold in the face of the rise of the penny press and the westward movement. Great mercantile dailies, often still charging six cents for home delivery, carried on. The even more noted partisan papers—the historic Democratic triumvirate of the Washington Globe, the Richmond Enquirer, and the Albany Argus, and such Whig organs as the National Intelligencer in Washington, the Springfield Republican, and the Louisville Journal—conducted a party debate that broadly set the shape of national political conflict. Americans were discovering once again that new ideas, institutions, and inventions did not have to replace the old; the country was vast enough for the old and new to live side by side.

The new, popular press did run into heavy criticism for its sensationalism, vulgarity, even blasphemy. Bennett’s Herald was a particular target. Ministers who hated him for his irreverent coverage of religious news, politicians who feared his editorial pen, and rival editors who envied his circulation triumphs—these and others opened up a “moral war” against this “venomous reptile,” this “obscene vagabond,” this “polluted wretch,” as one editor gently labeled him. After losing both advertising and readership—he saw a third of his circulation go, it was said—Bennett toned down some of his more strident coverage. His circulation climbed back toward 33,000 by 1849, in part because of the Mexican War, which enabled the Herald and other papers to demonstrate their news-gathering enterprise.

Critics of the penny press feared that its truckling to the baser instincts of the masses would enable it to drive out the quality ones, as cheap money drives out dear. Yet the penny papers, even while exploiting the popular appetite for news of crime and vice, also drew tens of thousands into the newspaper-reading habit. They awakened the aspirations and expectations of large numbers of lower-income and less-educated people, bringing them to political self-consciousness during and after the Jackson years. Indeed, fears of the degrading of the whole press by the penny press were soon quieted by the journalistic feats of one man: Horace Greeley.

He was an unlikely-looking editor in a profession that professed to be composed of gentlemen—“my clothes were scanty and seedy,” he remembered, “my appearance grim and unprepossessing.” But ever since his earliest years on a stony New England farm Horace Greeley had been in love with the printed word—he could “read fluently” at the age of four, he said later, “and quite passably with the book upside down—an absurd practice.” Arriving in New York with his personal possessions wrapped in a bandanna slung over his shoulder, he spent years in short-term jobs, one of which consisted of editing the Jeffersonian while steamboating up and down the Hudson, and another of typesetting, from which he was sacked because, it was said, the boss caught sight of him in the composing room and cried, “For God’s sake, fire him; let’s have decent-looking men around here, at least!” But through sheer doggedness, intense ambition, a fecund editorial imagination, and a good deal of experimentation, Greeley fought his way to the top of the tough, competitive world of Manhattan journalism. In April 1841, with his own savings and borrowed money, he launched the New York Tribune.

The Tribune would be a penny paper, but with a difference. Although Greeley had worked closely with Whig leaders for years, he wanted a paper free of “servile partisanship” as well as of “gagged, mincing neutrality.” He would shun sex and celebrity stories, scandals, quack medical advertisements, and police reports in favor of serious, responsible, high-minded journalism. Greeley’s list of causes was lengthy: liberty, egalitarianism, a vague form of socialism, the rights of labor, the agrarian movement, free distribution of government lands to settlers, certain women’s rights, internal improvements, cooperativism. He believed that leaders among the privileged should engage literally in Social Uplift: the “great, the all-embracing reform of our age,” he preached, “is the Social Reform—that which seeks to lift the Laboring Class, as such—not out of labor, by any means—but out of ignorance, inefficiency, dependence, and want.”

His list of dislikes was even longer: landlordism, capital punishment, human exploitation, monopoly, both wage and bond slavery, liquor, tobacco, and—alas—the theater, as a place of intoxication and assignation, full of “libertines” and “courtezans.” But he was much more than a moralist; a literary leader too, he assembled a brilliant staff, including Margaret Fuller, published major book reviews, book extracts, and lectures, and hired Karl Marx as a London correspondent. He was a trainer of younger writers, advising them never to publish a book until asked by a bookseller and offered “current cash of the realm,” and to remember that even though they might “write with an angel’s pen,” their writings would not sell unless they were known and talked about as authors. Hence they must write for the magazines; Mr. Emerson, he said, would have been twice as much read if he had done so, “just to let common people know of his existence.”

Certainly Greeley let them know of his; the Tribune picked up a circulation of 11,000 within seven weeks. He also published the weekly Tribune, whose national readership soared to over 100,000 by the mid-1850s.

As he became editorially and politically more powerful, Greeley did not bother to change his style to suit the fashionable. He remained “a strange, child-like figure,” in Vernon Parrington’s words, “with his round moon-face, eyes blinking through spectacles and a fringe of whiskers that invited the pencil of the cartoonist—yet carrying the sorrows of the world in his heart….” Nor did Greeley forget the poverty of his earlier days. A believer in Fourierism, he encouraged his staff to share in the profits of the paper. Writing was remunerative for only a very few at the time; young reporters were lucky to earn eight dollars a week. Most of the famous authors of the period, for that matter, lived on other income—Emerson on his lecturing, Hawthorne on patronage, Melville on a small bequest from his wife’s father.

The penny press was still an urban phenomenon. As people moved away from closed parochial communities—where everyone knew everyone else and what each was doing—into the impersonal city, the demand for penny papers grew. The anonymity of the environment whetted urban dwellers’ appetites for more newspaper coverage of events, more human-interest stories at a cheaper price. As the factory had made cheaper, mass-produced goods available to a growing market, so did the penny press make mass-circulation papers available to every urban dweller. Railroads and the Erie Canal opened the midwestern market as publishing became a big business centralized in the eastern cities.

Literary magazines proliferated, catering mainly to women; Godey’s Lady’s Book had 150,000 subscribers in 1860, the prestigious North American Review only a few thousand. Domestic novels written by women authors sold thousands of copies. The Wide, Wide World by Susan B. Warner launched the wave of best-selling novels by and for women, followed by The Curse of Clifton by Mrs. E. D.E.N. Southworth, The Lamplighter by Maria S. Cummins, and Tempest and Sunshine by Mary J. Holmes. The total sales of all the works of Hawthorne; Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman in the 1850s did not equal the sales of one of the more popular domestic novels.

The special journal flourished, as reform sentiment grew—Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation, William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, labor organs such as Frances Wright’s Free Enquirer and George Henry Evans’ Workingman’s Advocate. But the penny press, with its low price, high circulation, emphasis on human-interest stories, and advertisements, appealed most to the growing urban middle class in the Jacksonian age.

No matter how intent on mass circulation and moneymaking, or on exploiting freedom of the press in fierce local disputes, the press could not wholly escape the moral issue of slavery. And some editors did not want to. Elijah P. Lovejoy, son of a Congregational minister and student at Princeton Theological Seminary, published a religious paper, the St. Louis Observer. In 1836, he had to move his press from St. Louis to Alton, Illinois, twenty-five miles up the Mississippi River, after mobs attacked his newspaper for assailing injustices to blacks. Supported by prominent businessmen, Lovejoy continued his crusades in the Alton Observer, against intemperance, “popery,” mob violence, and slavery, as opposed to God’s law. By 1837, after mobs had destroyed two additional presses, Alton citizens called a public meeting, condemned the mob action, and pledged money for a new press. A third press was shipped for Lovejoy to a warehouse protected by sixty armed guards. But a mob broke through, smashed the new press, set the building afire, and killed the editor.

ABOLITIONISTS: BY TONGUE AND PEN

Lovejoy’s murder electrified the antislavery leadership. It was a “shock as of any earthquake throughout this continent,” said John Quincy Adams. To some, the mob had struck a blow not merely against the antislavery movement but against liberty for all. Never mind that Lovejoy himself was an anti-Catholic extremist who viewed slavery as a papist plot—bigots too had their rights. “To say that he who holds unpopular opinions must hold them at the peril of his life,” asserted the New York Evening Post, was “to strike at all rights, all liberties, all protection of law.” In Boston, William Ellery Channing, backed up by a committee of 100 notables, asked the city authorities for the use of Faneuil Hall, the “cradle of liberty,” to mourn Lovejoy’s death as a threat to liberty of tongue and pen. The mayor and aldermen turned him down.

“Has Boston fallen so low?” Channing implored in an open letter. “May not its citizens be trusted to come together to express the great principles of liberty for which their fathers died?” When Channing mobilized his influentials, the city gave way. After five thousand or more people crowded into Faneuil Hall to hear Channing’s declarations, the attorney general of the commonwealth of Massachusetts gained the floor to castigate Boston’s blacks as lions, tigers, hyenas, jackasses and monkeys, to praise the South for subjugating their own “wild beasts of the menagerie,” and to call the Alton mob as glorious as the Revolutionary patriots who had dumped John Bull’s tea into Boston Harbor. Authority would exercise its right to free speech too.

It was a challenge thrown into the teeth of the abolitionists in Faneuil Hall—Channing, Maria Chapman, Benjamin Hallet, and others lesser known. One of these was a handsome, sandy-haired young man named Wendell Phillips. Under the influence of Garrison—whom he had seen dragged through the streets of Boston by a rope—and of his abolitionist wife, Anne Greene, Phillips had embraced the antislavery cause, to the consternation of his aristocratic friends of Harvard, Beacon Hill, State Street, and the law. During the cacophony of applause and hoots that followed the attorney general’s speech, Phillips pushed his way forward through the crowd and leaped up on the platform. Speaking quietly, slowly gaining the attention of the crowd, Phillips seemed to intoxicate himself and the crowds.

“Sir, when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips”—here Phillips pointed to portraits of the apostles of liberty—“would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American—the slanderer of the dead.…” The audience burst into applause and catcalls. Channing’s resolutions carried and Phillips left the hall a celebrity. “Sublime, irresistible, annihilating,” Garrison called the speech.’

Abolitionism thrived on news of tragedy and martyrdom: the burning of abolitionist churches, the return of terrified fugitive slaves, the congressional ignoring of petitions, the murder of Lovejoy and others. By the 1840s the American Anti-Slavery Society numbered more than 1,200 societies in the national organization, with a membership of about a quarter million persons. As abolitionism expanded, the central questions of ends and means that once could be debated in isolation now took on enormous theoretical and practical importance. Literary and forensic abolitionists could find larger audiences for their speeches, books, and articles. Wendell Phillips quickly reached the first rank of the brilliant leadership of antislavery, and was one of the boldest and most articulate on questions of strategy.

These questions were as complex as they were compelling. They were questions of ultimate goals, of strategy, and of tactics in realizing strategy. Should abolitionists and other radicals concentrate on seeking equality and liberty for all deprived persons—women and Indians and newspaper editors as well as blacks—or focus on arousing public opinion only against the most dramatic and egregious sin, slavery? In either case, should abolitionism seek to accomplish its aims by gradually reforming society—that is, cleansing it of its impurities—or by reconstructing it? And in either of those cases, should radicals work within the existing system of political parties, elections, fragmented constitutional government, at the risk of being corrupted or compromised by it, or bypass the system and emphasize direct political action and propaganda?

Garrison and others had long denounced the constitutional compromise over slavery. Phillips saw the whole political system as biased toward certain outcomes. “Every government is always growing corrupt,” he said. Every Secretary of State was “an enemy to the people of necessity, because the moment he joins the government, he gravitates against that popular agitation which is the life of a republic.” Phillips held liberty to be as essential to a republic as a republic was to liberty; hence antislavery agitation was part of the machinery of the state. “The Republic which sinks to sleep, trusting to constitutions and machinery, to politicians and statesmen, for the safety of its liberties, never will have any.”

Phillips understood the clashing roles of reformer and politician. “The reformer is careless of numbers, disregards popularity, and deals only with ideas, conscience, and common sense,” he said. “…He neither expects nor is overanxious for immediate success. The politician dwells in an everlasting NOW. His motto is ‘Success’—his aim, votes. His object is not absolute right, but, like Solon’s laws, as much right as the people will sanction. His office is not to instruct public opinion, but to represent it.”

The abolitionists would instruct, preach, inspire, elevate public opinion; they were wary of electoral activity because even ad hoc alliances with other parties or movements for achieving practical, short-run ends through government, would help the enemy by legitimizing its institutions. “Moral influence,” said Lydia Maria Child, “dies under party action.” Because the militant abolitionists were above all moralizers and preachers, they impressed some of their contemporaries—and some historians—as dogmatic, humorless, rigid, aggressive, and even neurotic, responding more to their internal psychological needs than to the social and economic needs of the masses. They can better be understood as persons who, because of their social, educational, and religious backgrounds, took the values of liberty and equality with the utmost seriousness; saw slavery as the monumental repudiation of these values that it was; and cast about unceasingly for moral or political solutions to an evil that seemed to be spreading.

Inevitably, abolitionists tended to be earnest, committed, single-minded. Some, like the New York capitalist Lewis Tappan, often were morally arrogant, obstinate, cliquish, and abrasive. But many seemed notably reasonable, gentle, good-humored, personable. Maria Chapman was a beautiful person in almost every meaning of the phrase; Wendell Phillips showed all the graces of his birth and breeding; Lydia Maria Child’s devotion to justice was matched by her love of nature; the Grimké sisters were sensitive and compassionate, if determined; even Garrison revealed himself in his letters as a frequent conciliator and occasional wit. Aileen Kraditor saw them as “a group of people intensely earnest in their struggle against slavery but also capable of poking fun at their own seriousness and laughing at their own vagaries.”

The abolitionists lived amid conflict—conflict not only with proslavery opponents but among themselves. Their disagreements over gradualism versus immediatism, over moral agitation versus political coalition-building, over reconstructing society versus purifying it—these and other disputes erupted in meeting after meeting. But they were also distinguished by their ability to listen to one another. They corresponded among themselves indefatigably, editorialized in their own newspapers and wrote letters to their opponents’, talked and talked endlessly at their conferences. Debates went on within families too; James Russell Lowell and Wendell Phillips were but two who admitted the influence on them of their wives. “My wife,” said Phillips, “made me an out and out abolitionist.”

Dedicated to transcending leadership, educated and invigorated by conflict, united in a great intellectual collective, firmly grounded in a “third cadre” of rank-and-file activists throughout the Northeast and Midwest, the abolitionists of the 1830s and 1840s constituted a leadership group surpassed only by the men who earlier had built the nation’s political system. Rather than operating through institutions, however—especially after the failure of the Liberty party in the 1840s—these men and women appealed directly to the public, through their speaking and writing, in order to raise people’s consciousness of the evil of slavery. The object, said Lydia Maria Child, was “to change public opinion on the subject of slavery, by the persevering utterance of truth.” This change would then show itself “in a thousand different forms:—such as conflict and separation in churches; new arrangements in colleges and schools; new customs in stages and cars; and new modifications of policy in the political parties of the day.” Instead of staking their hopes on any of these developments, she said, abolitionism must control the public opinion that dominated them all. “The business of anti-slavery was, and is, to purify the fountain, whence all these streams flow; if it turns aside to take charge of any one of the streams, however important, it is obvious enough that the whole work must retrograde.”

Ultimately, the abolitionist leaders were strategists of propaganda. Since even their incessant editorializing and lecturing could not reach masses of people, much depended on men and women who could. To some degree the antislavery writings and sentiments of Emerson and Thoreau had penetrated the popular consciousness. James Russell Lowell’s poetry and prose—especially The Biglow Papers—and John Greenleaf Whittier’s poems against slavery expansion influenced public opinion, as did Richard Hildreth’s 1834 novel The Slave, or, Memoirs of Archy Moore. But their combined impact could hardly compare with that of a tiny woman, lately of Cincinnati, of a deeply religious family, who had been antislavery though not abolitionist, but who reacted passionately to the fugitive-slave provisions of the Compromise of 1850. The author earlier principally of books on housekeeping and “domestic science,” she now penned a sentimental novel about two well-meaning but negligent southern masters, a cruel, New England-born villain named Simon Legree, a faithful black couple called Tom and Eliza, and a little white child named Eva. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold three thousand copies on the day of publication, one hundred times that within a year, perhaps a million copies in Britain alone. Inspired by moral conviction and religious fervor, filled with gripping banalities, the book (and the play based on the book) became probably the most effective piece of propaganda in American history.

Whatever their differences and conflicts, antislavery people were united in their belief in moral persuasion and their opposition to the use of force. Some indeed made a fetish of nonviolence and “nonresistance.” By the advent of the 1850s, however, powerful antislavery propaganda, intensifying abolitionist feeling, deepening southern intransigence, and a constitutional and political system that seemed to satisfy neither side, combined to raise storm clouds on the horizon. Not only nonresisters had responded to Lovejoy’s murder. At a memorial meeting in Ohio a man of thirty-seven had risen at the end of the ceremonies to raise his hand and vow to consecrate his life to the destruction of slavery. His name was John Brown.

PART V

Neither Liberty Nor Union

CHAPTER 15

The Ripening Vineyard

IN OCTOBER 1852, IN his big house overlooking salt marshes stretching toward the Atlantic, hardly a dozen miles north of the Pilgrim landing, Daniel Webster lay dying of cirrhosis of the liver. His stomach and legs were swollen; he could barely sit up; he vomited blood even as five or six leeches sucked away. But the old warrior would die as he had lived, acting the parts of squire, orator, and statesman. Even prostrate on a sofa the Secretary of State seemed as imposing as ever in his blue coat, buff vest, black pantaloons, white cravat and turned-down collar. He spent hours watching as his ox and sheep were paraded, past his window, and he supervised the daily activities of house and farm, gazing raptly at the stars and stripes of a miniature Union flag fastened to the masthead of a tiny boat in his pond. Toward the end, after completing his will and assembling family and servants around his bed, he delivered an oration on immortality. Drowsily closing his eyes for a moment and then opening them, he cried out, “Have I—wife, son, doctor, friends, are you all here?—have I, on this occasion, said any thing unworthy of Daniel Webster?”

The old gladiator died in bitter political disappointment. Vexed and humiliated by the Whig convention’s nomination of General Winfield Scott earlier in the year, he had written his son that he was determined to quit as Secretary of State “and either go abroad, or go into obscurity…” President Fillmore kept him on until the end. Webster predicted that the Democrats under Pierce would sweep the country. As a “national party,” he said, “the Whigs are ended.”

But not only the Whig party was dying in the early 1850s; a way of government was dying with it. The three resplendent leaders who had, in their different ways, acted for union were gone. Calhoun had died within a few weeks of Webster’s great speech of March 7, 1850, still doubting that “two peoples so different and hostile” could “exist together in one common Union,” while hoping that the North might make the necessary concessions for the nation to continue. Henry Clay, the very symbol of union, had died only four months before Webster. During most of their public lives these three leaders had fought to save the Union, even at the sacrifice of high principles like liberty and equality, as they defined them.

But now, in the early 1850s, the air was filled with the voices of those who proclaimed that the Union was but a means to higher ends—and what lofty ends was this union serving? Ralph Waldo Emerson happened to be on the beach at Plymouth the Sunday morning when Webster died, looking out across the rough water whose spray was blowing onto the hills and orchards. Not since Napoleon, Emerson reflected, had Nature “cut out such a masterpiece” as Webster, a strong leader, the teacher of the nation’s legislators in style and eloquence, the model for young adventurers. “But alas!” as he wrote in his journal, “he was the victim of his ambition; to please the South betrayed the North, and was thrown out by both.”

At dawn that Sunday morning the great bell of the Marshfield parish church loudly rang out. People stood transfixed; someone had died. The bell tolled three times three strokes, the signal for the death of a male. Then, indicating his age, it pealed seventy times. Webster! Born a few years before Shays’ Rebellion and the drafting of the Constitution, he had, along with Clay and Calhoun, dominated the last forty years of Congress. A friend, walking around Webster’s farm with him, once noted that the Marshfield land was not rich by nature, but rich with the money and manure the senator had lavished upon it. Webster had made a fainéant national government work too, after a fashion. Emerson mused: “He brought the strength of a savage into the height of culture.”

THE CORNUCOPIA

By the 1850s in the upper Mississippi Valley, the endless work to clear and plow the land, the desperate struggles with bugs and blizzards, the risky financial gambles with machines and middlemen—all this effort was paying off. A twelve-year-old boy in Wisconsin, John Muir, would never forget the joys and woes of pioneer Wisconsin farm life: planting corn and potatoes and spring wheat while the nesting birds sang in the mild soothing breeze, the oaks behind “forming beautiful purple masses as if every leaf were a petal”; then the heavy summer work, sweaty days of sixteen or seventeen hours grinding scythes, chopping stove wood, fetching water from the spring, harvesting and haying under a burning sun; in the winter, rising in a bitterly cold house, squeezing throbbing, chilblained feet into soggy boots, hauling and chopping and fencing in the frozen wastes and yet still relishing the wonderful radiance of the “snow starry with crystals.”

Farming remained the main occupation of Americans—about three-quarters of the nation’s 24 million population were still “rural”—but the agricultural heartland was moving west. In what Allan Nevins called the Northwestern Surge, land-hungry settlers had broken through the Appalachians to seize the flat and later the rolling prairies to the west. Illinois began the 1850s with fewer people than Massachusetts and ended the decade with almost half a million more. Wisconsin jumped ahead of New Jersey. The population of Iowa soared from 200,000 to almost 700,000. With 2,340,000 inhabitants, Ohio became the third biggest state of the Union. The irresistible magnet was the soil, dark and black, fertile from age-old grassland vegetation and deep root systems, six and even ten or twelve feet deep. The climate, while occasionally cruel, was just about right for rich yields.

Improved farm machinery boosted production during the 1840s and 1850s. The steel plow was the decisive weapon in breaking up the prairie land, replacing eastern-type cast-iron plows that would not scour effectively. John Deere had fashioned his first steel plow from a saw blade in 1837; a decade later this plow, manufactured by the thousands in the East, was rapidly coming into use in the prairie region. In the late 1850s farmers even tried to substitute a steam plow for the ox-driven plow, but the ungainly contraption was not a success. The most dramatic change on the prairie came with the improvement of the reaper. Hussey’s reaper, the most widely known in 1840, was mounted on two large drive wheels from which extended a platform with its cutting knife on the forward edge. The grain fell on this platform and had to be quickly raked away by half a dozen men. With Cyrus McCormick’s improved reaper, the grain was raked from the side of the platform, thus forestalling the need to bind before the machine came around again. Reapers often were deployed together by the scores, with hundreds of men, women, and children harvesting the golden grain behind them.

Everything ultimately turned on the intelligence, daring, and persistence of the farm people. James Baldwin left a striking record of his farm days, as portrayed by Allan Nevins: “Here is a sober, hardworking Quaker farmer of Indiana, living in a log cabin with stick-and-clay chimney—but with the skeleton of a new frame house near by.” About it stretched the “big woods,” especially thick down by the watercourses, two large cornfields speckled by charred stumps, other fields marked for “tree dead-enin’,” and a full-grown orchard. “The farmer’s speech is Hoosier dialect. Yet like the Yankee squire he is proud of his shelf of books: the Journals of George Fox and John Woolman, Walker’s Dictionary, standard texts like Noah Webster’s blue-backed spelling book, Pike’s Arithmetic, and Lindley Murray’s English Reader; some volumes of McGuffey; old classics like Robinson Crusoe; and in due time Dickens. Though his daily dress is blue jeans, he has a ‘go to meetin’ suit of drab homespun and a gray beaver hat in which he takes on a mien of dignity.”

Out of this magical mix of men and machines and moisture with sun and soil was arising the granary of the world—a cornucopia of corn and wheat, of oxen and horses, of pork and beef, and later of poultry, and the products of grain, especially whiskey. At first corn was king, then wheat. The corn crop of 1839 came to 377 million bushels, while that of 1849 was almost 600 million. Wheat production in the next decade rose by 75 percent to about 175 million bushels, while the rate of increase of corn production fell somewhat. Illinois led the nation in corn and later in wheat. By the 1850s that state and Indiana and Wisconsin were far outstripping New York and Pennsylvania in wheat output. One stockman alone, B. F. Harris of Urbana, raised annually about 500 cattle and 600 hogs on his four-thousand-acre farm.

The prairie land seemed to pulsate with energy. The air was filled with the clatter of revolving wooden horse rakes, threshing machines, seed drills, corn planters, harrows, sulky plows, self-scouring disks, and—in the farmhouse—hand-washing machines and chain-bucket pumps. Farm people flocked to agricultural fairs to see new machines, inspect livestock and produce, hear political orators. Energy radiated outward. The railroads and canalboats that brought people and machines west returned east loaded with hogs and foodstuffs. Cattlemen trying to save money drove huge herds of steers overland, pasturing their beeves on roadside grass and in hired meadows, trying frantically to keep them out of farmers’ fields. With a sixty-day drive from Illinois to eastern cities, however, stockmen increasingly chose to sell their hogs and cattle in western cities instead. Alton and Peoria and especially Chicago were rapidly becoming the slaughtering centers of the nation.

This Northwestern Surge in agriculture produced a powerful social and economic undertow in the East. Farmers in the Northeast were accustomed to change; many had shifted from a self-sufficient home economy to a market economy as the seaboard cities expanded. Now they were faced with a more severe challenge as grain from the West cut heavily into the market for their cereals, and their holdings of swine and sheep fell off. The drovers of Long Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Westchester, who had once hustled their herds into the cattle market at Bull’s Head Village in-lower Manhattan, had to stand by helplessly as wholesale slaughterers brought in cattle and hogs by the hundreds of thousands via canals—especially the Erie—and railroads from the West. Some farmers could not make the transition, and they—or at least their sons and daughters—escaped to the city or to the West.

But others proved that Yankee resourcefulness was still alive. They stepped up their production of milk and apples and berries and market vegetables. They bred some of the best sheep and blooded horses and poultry and cattle—Guernsey, Durham, Devon, and other breeds. Upstate New Yorkers produced cheddar good enough for the export trade, and built more than a score of cheese factories during the 1850s. New England farmers made money out of the rich tobacco lands along the Connecticut River, out of maple sugar, cranberries, butter, vegetables. Canneries, using tin canisters—later “tin cans”—preserved lobsters, oysters, fruit jellies, peas, tomatoes, sweet corn, some of which was bought by whalers for their long voyages. The Yankees were quick to take advantage of farm fads. One of these was “hen fever”—unbridled speculation in blooded fowls. Shanghai chicks, Cochin Chinas, and other fancy Oriental poultry brought from $75 to $100 a pair at the Boston Fowl Show in 1852.

Many of these efforts were experimental, and not all ended well. Ephraim Bull of Concord spent years perfecting an early-ripening variety of the wild northern fox grape. After eleven years of planting, selecting, and testing his stock, he exhibited his “Concord grape” amid much acclaim in the Massachusetts Horticultural Hall. But Bull was better at inventing than profit-making, for commercial nurseries moved in on his trade in seedlings and bested him in competition. The embittered Bull at least had the last word. On his gravestone in Concord cemetery is carved the epitaph: “HE SOWED, OTHERS REAPED.”

While northwestern farming surged, and northeastern agriculture adapted, much of southeastern farming lagged behind. A South Carolinian in 1857 summed up the situation in an address to his state’s agricultural society, in much the same words of warning used by other farm leaders: “Our present system is to cut down our forest and run it into cotton as long as it will pay for the labor expended. Then cut down more forest, plant in cotton, plough it uphill and downhill, and when it fails to give a support leave it….Then sell the carcass for what you can realize and migrate to the Southwest in quest of another victim. This ruinous system has entailed upon us an exhausted soil, and a dependence upon Kentucky and Tennessee for our mules, horses, and hogs, and upon the Northern States for all our necessaries from the clothing and shoeing of our negroes down to our wheelbarrows, corn-brooms and axe-handles. ” The South was still self-sufficient in food, but already in 1859 the wheat and corn crops of Illinois and Ohio exceeded those of all seven states of the Deep South combined.

Slavery was keeping the South excessively rural, with an unbalanced economy dominated by dangerous speculation in cotton, tobacco, and sugar. Southerners could not break out of their economic prison, walled in by poor communication and transportation, depleted soils, limited capital, lack of diversification, a slower population growth, and, first and last, a great sluggish under-class of poor whites and under-caste of blacks. Moreover, the large plantation owners lacked an incentive to break out of the pattern, for the prices of cotton and tobacco rose steadily between 1850 and 1860, even while production doubled. King Cotton brought prosperity—at least to a few—and made it possible to ignore the underlying problems.

The southern “rim states” were somewhat more successful in agriculture. Northwestern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley produced heavy crops of wheat; small farms were thriving in Tennessee and Kentucky; Arkansas and Florida were boosting their cattle and hog production; the piedmont country of Virginia and North Carolina displayed agricultural diversity in its market gardening and livestock raising; Texas was rapidly becoming a livestock empire by itself. By 1856 Texans were driving their longhorns overland to the slaughterhouses of Chicago. By the end of the decade the “outer” South was, in agricultural diversification and innovation, leaving the “inner” far behind.

Agriculture North and South showed the defect of its own virtue of abundance—colossal waste. Land was depleted by inefficient plowing, waste or improper use of manure and other fertilizers, single-cropping of the same land year after year, heavy leaching. It was easy to squander a commodity that seemed in endless supply. Throughout the nation, however, were men aware of this waste and inefficiency. Long active in their own states, in 1852 they formed the United States Agricultural Society to represent and assist the nation’s agriculture and promote experimentation and education. As farm journals burgeoned—Prairie Farmer, American Agriculturalist, American Farmer, Farmer’s Register, and Cultivator—editors preached better fencing, fertilizing, plowing, draining, rotating. Greeley’s Tribune appointed an agricultural editor. The message was further spread at fairs and exhibitions. Scientific farming, however, remained in its infancy.

States began establishing agricultural courses, departments, and—in Michigan—a college of agriculture. The federal government largely stood aloof. Despite a tiny budget, the Patent Office promoted use of new seeds and new crops, such as sorghum cane, but bills to establish grants of public lands for higher education met a presidential veto. Agriculture—still the foundation of the American economy—was left primarily to private leadership and enterprise.

The British and Pennsylvania pig iron that helped mechanize much of the northwestern farmer’s work supplied also the thousands of miles of rails that bound him closer to the markets of the East. The railroad fever and expansion of the 1850s was producing a virtual revolution in transportation. Hardly a town or large city did not harbor ambitions that the rails would come its way, bringing investors, buyers, jobs, and access to the whole railroad gridiron developing in the Northwest. The eleven thousand miles of railroad in existence in 1852 almost tripled in length by the end of the decade. The north-central states led the way in this expansion, followed by the Northeast, the south Atlantic states, and the old Southwest.

America’s hundred-year romance with the railroad was well under way, although some people did not love the iron horse. “The railroad will leave the land despoiled, ruined, a desert where only sable buzzards shall wing their loathesome way,” cried an orator. A state legislator waxed more evangelical than environmental: “Canals, sir, are God’s own highway, operating on the soft bosom of the fluid that comes straight from Heaven. The railroad stems direct from Hell. It is the Devil’s own invention, compounded of fire, smoke, soot, and dirt, spreading its infernal poison throughout the fair countryside. It will set fire to houses along its slimy tracks. It will throw burning brands into the ripe fields of the honest husbandman and destroy his crops.…”

But, as Bismarck once remarked, it is not by speeches and parliamentary resolutions that the great questions of the day are decided but by blood and iron, and the iron rails continued to chop through the countryside, at a national average of almost forty miles a week. Each mile cost from $20,000 to $40,000, but capitalists and civic leaders in the big eastern cities and the growing inland towns raised the money, with aid from European financiers. The local citizen helped out too; during the 1850s Wisconsin farmers mortgaged their property for almost $5 million to invest in railroad building. Politicians and capitalists and townspeople alike felt well rewarded when the first iron horse arrived in town. Church bells rang, bands played, and politicos gave speeches as the hissing monster rumbled into the new depot. And when the Erie Railroad completed its 450-mile main line stretching from the Hudson to the Lakes in 1850, President Fillmore and Daniel Webster themselves rode the train—Webster seated on a rocking chair fastened onto an open flat car—to the end of the line at Dunkirk, where they were greeted by a parade, a barbecue, and a twenty-one-gun salute from the U.S.S. Michigan.

Cities wanted railroads—and railroads built cities. Chicago, perfectly situated at the center of the northwestern heartland, and at the southern tip of Lake Michigan around which east-west traffic to the north had to detour, had not a single railroad tie in 1850. Within five years it became the terminus for 2,200 miles and had 100 big trains arriving and departing each day. Its grain elevators, trackside warehouses, lake and canal facilities meshed with its railroads radiating out like spokes in a wheel. Soon trains out of Chicago were jumping the Mississippi into Iowa, steaming down to Cairo and points south, invading Missouri, and linking with the great northern arms of the Father of the Waters.

Lake Michigan served as a broad seaway south to Chicago, lapping the wilderness to the north; two other nautical boulevards, Lakes Ontario and Erie, pointed directly at Chicago from the east. But these inland seaways were not connected and hence could not serve heavy transportation until man intervened. As the constantly improved Erie Canal disgorged people and freight from the east, more and more Lake Erie steamers navigated its shallow and frisky waters. The opening of the Canadian-built Welland Canal enabled steamboats to pass around Niagara Falls between Ontario and Erie. But the most momentous development for Chicago and all the other Great Lakes cities was the extraordinary feat, conceived and engineered by a young Vermonter named Charles T. Harvey, of building the Sault Ste. Marie Canal to bypass the rapids between huge Lake Superior and Lake Huron. Soon lake steamers were toting vast quantities of copper and iron ore from the mines on Superior’s shores to points east. By the late 1850s Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and scores of smaller cities were battening off this new lake commerce, and ships were carrying western products from Chicago to Liverpool over the thousand-mile seaway stretching toward the northeast.

Not only grimy ore boats plied the lake waters. Fine lake steamers were built to carry first-class passengers in style, as well as immigrants below-decks. “The handsomest of the lake vessels by the middle fifties,” Nevins wrote, “the Western World, was 348 feet long, with powerful engines and beautiful interior fittings. She and her peers, the Plymouth Rock, the Western Metropolis, and others, with several hundred staterooms each, competed in luxury and entertainment for those who could pay. Down the green lakes they slipped with dancing, gambling, flirtation, and feasting, the musicians in the ballrooms thrumming their guitars,” to the chant:

Old Huron’s long, old Huron’s wide,

De engines keep de time.

Still, nothing could compete for romance with the river-boating a thousand miles south, on the Mississippi. Nevins pictured the river port scenes: “The mile-long expanse of boats smoking and throbbing at the St. Louis and New Orleans levees; the motley crowds of passengers—fur-traders, immigrants, soldiers, cotton-planters, land-speculators, gamblers, politicians, British tourists, Indians, and plain farmers; the avalanche of pork, grain, tobacco, cotton, and hides that the Illinois, the Cumberland, the Washita, the Arkansas, and the Red poured into the central Mississippi stream, cramming every deck; the lordly pilots, the hardbitten captains, the profane mates, the chanting roustabouts; the fierce races as the firemen tied down safety valves; the hands crammed fat-pine into the roaring furnaces, and the passengers cheered.…”

No lady, northern or southern, could ever forget those New Orleans riverboats—stepping down the long promenade deck with its view of hundreds of lights reflecting off the river water, or parading into the palatial dining saloon, with its glittering mirrors, shining candelabra, table settings of damask and silver, and bowers of fruits and flowers.

Romantic—but not altogether economic. The lower Mississippi was often a fickle and even faithless waterway as the water rose and fell unpredictably, channels silted up, and vessels grounded or waited for days in order to pass through. In St. Louis, crates, barrels, hogsheads of tobacco, bags of corn, and a great confusion of goods of all descriptions piled up for two miles along the winding riverbank, often delayed there by a water level that could rise or fall almost forty feet. St. Louis was far enough north to suffer from ice, far enough south to suffer from floods. Despite these difficulties the Missouri city, as well located among rivers as Chicago was among lakes, became by the 1850s one of the world’s biggest centers for breaking and transferring freight.

As northern canals grew wider and longer, northern steamers bigger and deeper, northern ports more mechanized northern capitalists bolder and richer, northern free workers more productive, the South fell behind in the competition to exploit the riches of the heartland.

Businessmen preferred economics to romance. They were making and selling and buying and importing their own cornucopia of goods. George W. Cable described a New Orleans wharf: “drays with all imaginable kinds of burden; cotton in bales, piled as high as the omnibuses; leaf tobacco in huge hogsheads; cases of linens and silks; stacks of rawhides; crates of cabbages; bales of prints and of hay; interlocked heaps of blue and red ploughs; bags of coffee, spices, and corn; bales of bagging; barrels, casks, and tierces; whiskey, pork, onions, oats, bacon, garlic, molasses, and other delicacies; rice, sugar—what was there not?…” Agriculture still dominated invention and production, but transportation and industry were becoming increasingly important. In 1854 the Patent Office issued fifty-six patents for harvesting implements, thirty-nine for seed planters, and sixteen for plows; in 1856 it issued forty for sewing machines, thirty-one for looms, and nineteen for locks.

Products that would become household names were being manufactured now in quantity: not only the McCormick reaper but the Colt revolver, the Remington rifle, Otis elevators, Goodyear’s India-rubber fabrics, Baldwin locomotives. Cities were already specializing in their output. Cincinnati produced more than 125,000 chairs a year by the mid-1850s; Chicago about $2.5 million in ready-made clothes; Lynn, Massachusetts, about 4.5 million boots and shoes. Americans were ingenious in making machines that helped make machines—drills, saws, pumps, belts, milling machines, turret lathes. The American system specialized in interchangeable parts. By the end of the decade, manufactories were turning out 300,000 iron stoves a year, with interchangeable panels, tops, lids, fireboxes.

It was the age of iron—iron locomotives, ships, railroad rails, bridges, farm machinery, pianos—and buildings. Substituting iron beams for wood, Americans made the first multi-story iron building frames. Cast-iron beams were enormously heavy, however, and soon Trenton was using specially designed machines to roll wrought-iron ones. These beams were used in building Cooper Union and Harper Brothers’ new building after the old one burned. James Bogardus’ Manhattan foundry for making iron was made of iron.

Merchant princes were catering to family buyers, especially women. H. B. Claflin earned a fortune out of the dry-goods business. Charles L. Tiffany sold fine jewelry and silverware. Visitors in New York gaped at the huge department stores, with their plate-glass windows and marble pillars. There were a hundred piano manufacturers in New York City alone. But women produced for themselves—books, selling in the hundreds of thousands. “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his friend the publisher William D. Ticknor, “and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.”

Fueled by enormous farm output, abundant natural resources, rising productivity, a thickening transportation grid, heavy inflows of cheap labor from abroad, and constant experimentation and innovation, the great economic boom roared on. Critical to expansion was the capital that flowed from foreign and eastern and—increasingly—western investors, from home savings, and from the nearly 27 million ounces of gold that were produced in the decade after James Marshall had looked into Sutter’s mill stream with a wild surmise. Commodity output in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and construction more than doubled during the two decades after 1840. Economic historians differ as to which decade brought the most significant economic “takeoff” or acceleration—the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, or 1850s—but without doubt all the earlier forces making for greater productivity came together most powerfully in the later years.

Such was the view from the top, but from the bottom Americans were still making little progress toward equalizing the average family’s share of this cornucopia of farm, freight, and factory. By the end of the 1850s masons, blacksmiths, stonecutters, and foremen or overseers were making about two dollars a day; teamsters, quarrymen, blacksmiths’ and boiler-makers’ helpers, and unskilled laborers about one dollar. The old patterns of discrimination persisted: male weavers received 93 cents a day, female weavers 65 cents. Women spinners got half a dollar a day. Some Americans romanticized that the early years of the republic had been golden years of equality, others that the labor and populist movements of the 1830s had had an egalitarian impact. Sober statistics indicated that inequality in the American republic in its first seventy years had simply been constant.

THE CORNUCOPIA OVERFLOWS

At the glittering Crystal Palace exhibition in London in 1851, the National Intelligencer reported proudly “our handled axes, hay rakes, grain cradles, scythes and snathes, three-tined hayforks, solid steel hoes, road-scrapers, posthole augers, fan-mills, smut-mills, sausage cutters, sausage stuffers, tin-man’s tools, permutation locks, wheel cultivators, carpenters’ tools, currycombs, corn-blooms, portmanteaus and trunks, ice-cream freezers, axletrees, paint-mills,” had established for American industry a “character independent of and unlike that of any other nation.” Most of these products betrayed the hold that agriculture still had on American industrial enterprise, but the Yankees also invaded the English market with sewing machines, clocks, and even the Hoe printing press.

Farm commodities—cotton, wheat, pork, and the like—made up by far the greater part of American exports across the Atlantic. Those exports were soaring; during the 1850s America’s foreign commerce more than doubled. In exchange for their commodities Americans were importing textiles, machinery, iron in the form of rods, bars, rails, and castings. Using the great export routes of the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence, as well as the Atlantic ports, Chicago and Cleveland and St. Louis and New Orleans were shipping out their flour and pork and bacon at the rate of tens of millions of dollars a year.

Eastern port cities boomed along with this commerce; so did the American merchant marine. The coastal trade flourished; richly decorated “floating palaces” were steaming along Long Island Sound to Connecticut ports, where passengers could link with the expanding railroad grid. New York City gained and held the lion’s share of foreign commerce, followed by Boston, and then by Philadelphia and Baltimore in close competition. The glory of all these ports was the American merchantman—especially the packet, the brig, and the clipper ship. The packet was the most versatile vessel, so dependable that it could run on regular schedules, able to carry cabin passengers, best-paying freight such as textiles and fine goods, and sometimes bulkier freight. The brigs, great square-rigged vessels with two or three masts, were the workhorses of the marine fleet, majestic in size and speed, thrilling to see amidst the spume of the Atlantic. But the pride and the boast of American sailors was the clipper ship, narrow of beam, daintily concave in sides and bow, low and clean of deck, slicing through the water at fifteen knots or more, under a panoply of sails reaching two hundred feet above water.

London liked the grain and the goods that arrived on the packets; it was less enthusiastic about some of the people. The 1850s were a bumptious period in American diplomacy. The new American minister in London, James Buchanan, received instructions from the new Secretary of State, William L. Marcy, to appear at court not in gold braid and ostrich feathers but “in the simple costume of an American citizen.” When Buchanan dutifully showed up in sober republican attire, aside from a dress sword he added so he would not be mistaken for a servant, a London newspaper upbraided the “puppyism” of “the gentleman in the black coat.” American visitors in Europe were invincibly boastful. They felt they had much to brag about—especially after 1851 when the New York yacht America won her cup off the Isle of Wight in a duel with British yachtsmen.

Behind Yankee vainglory lay a surge of organized popular feeling. Since the mid-1840s a movement known as Young America had risen, primarily in the western wing of the Democratic party. Inspirited by the defeat of Mexico and the acquisition of territory, exuberantly nationalistic but also keenly sympathetic to the republican and revolutionary movements of Europe, Young America enjoyed thwacking the “Old Fogeys” in the party hip and thigh. There had been a Young England, a Young Italy, a Young Germany, they pointed out—why not a Young America? Led by a man of dubious reputation named George Sanders, a wealthy Kentucky Democrat, Young America mixed nineteenth-century liberal idealism and crassly materialistic expansionism into a heady brew that for a short time helped raise popular consciousness of America’s “manifest destiny.” By supporting the Hungarian patriot Kossuth and others “who had suffered in the cause of liberty,” Young America both abetted and exploited a wave of popular feeling for Hungarian and other rebels against “oppression”—a feeling that amounted to a fad and even a Kossuth craze.

For these Americans too, the watchword was liberty. When Kossuth arrived in New York Harbor in December 1851, the health officer who boarded the ship saw fit to welcome “Noble Magyar! Illustrious Kossuth!” to the land of free speech and action, and as the hope and trust “of the friends of liberty in every nation and clime.” Said the New York Herald: “National glory—national greatness—the spread of political liberty on this continent, must be the thought and action by day, and the throbbing dream by night, of the whole American people, or they will sink into oblivion.” But liberty, as Americans defined it, seemed to have a variety of meanings and applications—liberty of speech and religion, liberty to take and exploit land, liberty of enterprise, liberty of foreigners to revolt against oppression, liberty of Americans to intervene in such revolts, liberty of Americans to spread liberty. And self-interest often seemed to lurk behind the lofty ideals. Thus William Seward could talk about the nation’s “divine purpose” of spreading democracy, and almost in the same breath, of farmers’ need of gaining markets for “our surplus meat and bread.” And, aside from the abolitionists, all the talk of liberty seemed to have no relevance to slaves.

It was this seeming hypocrisy that especially galled foreigners. Punch portrayed a diabolical, cigar-smoking American, pistol in hand, whip tucked under his arm, blowing smoke rings that displayed lynch law, repudiation, dueling, and slavery. The caption: “THE LAND OF LIBERTY.”

The mixed concepts of liberty as liberation, and liberty as exploitation, dominated the goals of American foreign policy in the early fifties. Everything seemed to conspire to make Cuba a tinderbox. This was a time, in the wake of the revolutions of ’48 and the counter-insurgencies, when American liberals, North and South, could grieve over the sufferings of subjugated Cubans as well as the oppression of Hungarians, Italians, French, or Irish. To southern planters, however, Cuba was a slave dependency where Madrid, under pressure from London and Paris, occasionally threatened to emancipate the slaves, thus creating a “free soil” area to the south. And to other Americans, Cuba was a large and profitable-looking piece of real estate.

This was also a time when the President of the United States, instead of being predisposed against going to war, was wholly prepared to do so if necessary to protect “American national interests.” Franklin Pierce, moreover, was a nationalist who had warned in his Inaugural Address that his administration would not be restrained “by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion.” He was close to southern and western expansionists who were gaining increasing influence in the Democracy, and to leaders of Young America who set the tone of much of the debate.

Yet Pierce had to proceed warily. He had to husband the support of northern and southern moderates on slavery and expansion, both in dealing with Congress and in seeking to retain the presidency. And he had to work with two men in his own administration who dreamed of entering the White House. Secretary of State Marcy was a venerable Democratic party wheelhorse, three-term governor of New York, and an anti-abolitionist, who had won some notoriety for saying that he could see “nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belongs the spoils.” James Buchanan, secretary of State under Polk, was modest and shrewd enough to accept the London ministry. Buchanan’s compliance with Marcy’s dress instruction was an early indication that neither man would allow the other—or the President—to outbid the jingo vote at home.

But the Cuban tinderbox lay waiting, and the spark that threatened to ignite it was struck early in 1854 when the Spanish authorities in Havana rather arbitrarily seized an American coastal steamer, the Black Warrior. The Spaniards had reason to feel edgy: For some years various filibusters, bearing the torches of liberty and realty, had been launching expeditions into Cuba expecting that the oppressed masses would rise against their overlords. Americans had been variously implicated in these efforts. Not for the first or last time, the Cubans failed to rise and welcome their deliverers. After the Havana authorities had executed a number of Americans among the invaders, a bellicose American mob assaulted Spaniards in New Orleans and sacked the Spanish consulate.

The Whig administration of the day had resisted demands for war and even offered Madrid an apology. But the patriotic Democrats were now in power, and they would not let the Spaniards off so easily. In Madrid itself there appeared one of the most remarkable products of American parochial politics ever to grace the diplomatic corridors of power: Pierre Soulé, a United States senator from Louisiana and a longtime leader of southern expansionists. Soulé was no swamp rat, but a well-mannered gentleman and fine conversationalist, a democrat who had fled monarchist France as a youth and developed ties with European radicals. Appointed Minister to Spain by Pierce, he arrived in Madrid amid much controversy, and promptly created a furor when the Duke of Alba and the French ambassador at a diplomatic grand ball made cutting remarks about Mrs. Soulé’s plump figure and low-cut costume, leading the aggrieved husband to cross swords with the duke and then to shoot the ambassador in the leg. Talk about these duels had hardly died down when Soulé was presented with the Black Warrior provocation.

For a time the stage seemed set for American annexation of Cuba and war with Spain. Pierce sent Congress a truculent message alleging longtime Spanish insults to American rights and honor, and demanding indemnity, failing which he was prepared to use any means for redress that Congress would grant him. Marcy more calmly instructed Soulé to demand satisfaction. The Louisianian was beside himself with hope and excitement. This seemed to him—and to his fellow annexationists at home—the ideal moment to strike, for the outbreak of the Crimean War would divert British and French attention to their eastern crisis, and Madrid itself was preoccupied by a domestic military revolt. Soulé did his part by exceeding Marcy’s instructions and bidding Madrid to agree to pay an indemnity and to dismiss the Havana officials—and to do so within forty-eight hours—or he would regard his demands as rejected.

But this was to be another day that a President did not go to war. Sensing that Soulé had overreached himself, the Spanish minister in Washington dealt directly with Marcy, while French and British diplomats closed ranks with the Spanish. Madrid, long expert at procrastination, used delay as a means of cooling tempers. The calls by southern press and politicians for seizure were matched by demands for a hands-off policy by Northerners aware of the proslavery implications of accession, and by some influential southern journals.

Frustrated, Pierce decided to convene a conference of his ministers in Madrid, London, and Paris. This trio—Soulé, Buchanan, and the Virginia expansionist John Mason—issued the Ostend Manifesto (actually neither a manifesto nor written in Ostend) calling for the American purchase of Cuba or, failing that, use of force to seize it. The manifesto turned out to be far too blatant, arousing a furor at home; “Manifesto of the Brigands,” the Tribune called it. Defeated in the fall congressional elections, Pierce drew back. Marcy repudiated the document and rebuked Soulé. The Louisianian resigned. The affair was over. It remained for the London Times to write its epitaph: “The diplomacy of the United States,” it observed, “is certainly a very singular profession.”

The expansionist energies of Young America and other nationalists did not flag on the shores of Cuba. Eight hundred miles farther south lay the Isthmus. For centuries Americans, North, Central, and South, had dreamed of a waterway that would link the Atlantic and the Pacific. The dream became even more compelling when gold-rushers to California, to avoid the long trip around Cape Horn, took the tortuous and disease-ridden overland mule trail from ocean to ocean. Britain, however, also had interests and possessions—notably British Honduras—in Central America. After some angry incidents and confrontations Zachary Taylor’s Secretary of State, John M. Clayton, and Britain’s minister in Washington, Henry Lytton Bulwer, had signed a treaty by which the two nations renounced territorial ambitions in Central America, agreed to cooperate in constructing an isthmian canal, and promised never to gain or exercise exclusive control over the canal.

Democrats were still denouncing the treaty as an ignominious surrender and repudiation of the Monroe Doctrine when the American minister in Greytown, in the British protectorate of the Mosquito Coast, had his face cut open by a broken bottle during mob disorders. When an American naval commander demanded reparation and it was not forthcoming, he bombarded the town. Tempers cooled, but British-American relations were further embittered when the American filibuster William Walker made himself dictator of Nicaragua and talked of forming a Central American federation, and when New England fishermen jousted with Canadian authorities over fishing rights along the Newfoundland and Labrador coasts. Other incidents followed; the absorption of the British in the Crimean War, and of Americans in the widening split between North and South, may have helped avert serious confrontations.

If the Atlantic had been for Americans an ocean of commerce and an arena of conflict—an arena of invasions, sea battles, blockades, privateers, filibusters—the Pacific had been pacific. What was known of the largest of oceans, aside from the reports of explorers, had been learned in pursuing the prodigious source of a few rather specialized products: sperm oil for the brightest, purest kind of light, as in lighthouse beacons; spermaceti, for the better grade of candles; whalebone, for corsets, stays, whips, and umbrellas; ambergris, for perfumes and aphrodisiacs. The source for all these was the whale—the humpback, the bowhead, the right, and above all the sperm whale.

In their two- and three-year journeys to the southern and northern and western Pacific, whalemen explored new routes and charted distant islands, reefs, and shoals. They also left way stations and repair ports, the most important of which was Honolulu. By the 1850s, several hundred whalers were visiting the Hawaiian port every year. Its ship-repair facilities made it a vital naval station; inevitably Pierce and Marcy included Hawaii as part of the nation’s manifest destiny. Whalemen from Massachusetts found on Hawaii a large and energetic band of missionaries from Boston, who had built out of coral blocks a large stone church, in the image of a New England meeting house, that served also as a landmark for sailors.

During this height of the era of whaling 600 whalers were bringing home over a quarter million barrels of sperm and whale oil a year, and 2.5 million pounds of whalebone. “Home” was a remarkably small number of ports—notably New Bedford and other New England seacoast towns and river ports like Poughkeepsie on the Hudson. Whaling flourished for a time in the island towns of Nantucket and Edgartown, but eventually they yielded ground to New Bedford. Collectively the whaling towns provided more than 15,000 men for crews and employed thousands more in building, outfitting, and repairing the slow, stubby, broad-beamed vessels strong enough to survive forty or more months of warring with wind, wave, and whale.

Herman Melville had shipped out of Fairhaven, across from New Bedford, on a whaler bound for the South Seas, and no one pictured the romance of whaling as evocatively as he did. The long-awaited, transcending moment of excitement came with the chase by the speedy little whale-boats:

…The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails.…

A short, rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew was half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together.…

This was a romantic view of the whaler’s life; the view from the forecastle was markedly different. The forecastleman shared the hardships of the ordinary seaman—sleeping and living in a tiny, stinking compartment, with swill and vomit washing about under the wooden bunks, with almost no ventilation or light during cold or stormy weather, with men of a dozen lands and tongues smoking, spitting, cursing, quarreling amid greasy pans, sea chests, soap kegs, in sweat-saturated underclothes. For the whalers, whose voyages were long, conditions were even worse than for ordinary seamen. Their water turned foul, butter rancid, meat rotten, with bread so full of worms that it became common practice to scald them out or—more agreeably—to pour half a pint of rum into the bread casket ahead of time. On the “Nantucket sleigh-ride” a man could drown or lose a limb. Pay was poor. Whalemen lived wretched, oppressed lives, second in misery only to the lot of Africans on the slaver.

The indomitable whalers sailed far beyond the Sandwich Islands to the Bonins, the South China Sea, and Japan. Ever since independence, and freedom from the British Navigation Acts, Americans had been conducting an active trade with the Chinese in tea and silks, working closely with the British, in the treaty ports of Canton, Shanghai, and other Chinese trading centers. A major obstacle in dealing with the Chinese was their conviction that the visitors were “foreign devils” and “barbarians,” while the Americans looked on the Chinese as quaintly mysterious. The inscrutable Orient and Occident had similar problems in Japan. Several American whaling men who had survived a shipwreck off the Kuriles were incarcerated by the Japanese for a year, and required to trample on a tablet picturing the Crucifixion.

Yet trade was growing, and the Fillmore administration decided on a bold step: dispatching Commodore Matthew C. Perry to Japan to work out commercial understandings. The expedition cleared Norfolk in November 1852. Six months later the Japanese were awed by the spectacle of Perry’s small fleet steaming up the Bay of Yedo (later Tokyo) against the wind. They were apprehensive too:

Thro’ a black night of cloud and rain,

The Black Ship plies her way—

An alien thing of evil mien—

Across the waters gray.

Through a skillful mixture of diplomacy and firmness, Perry worked out a convention for shipwrecked sailors. It was a small start, and disappointing to some traders at home, but within a few years the consul general, Townsend Harris, tactfully negotiated a commercial treaty that set the direction of Japanese-American diplomacy for another half century.

“IT WILL RAISE A HELL OF A STORM”

The railroads that forked out of Chicago and rolled across Illinois pointed toward Missouri and Iowa—and toward the vast Kansas-Nebraska Territory that lay beyond. Settlers particularly fastened their gaze on the sandy clay of the fertile river bottoms in eastern Kansas. Slave owners in northwestern Missouri, flanking the winding Missouri River north and south, dreamed of growing hemp and tobacco in the reaches southwest of the river. Land-hungry homesteaders throughout the north eyed the bottomlands and the rich clay loam of the upland prairies beyond.

The territory in itself posed a hot issue, for the question of slavery there was still open. The area was also bound to lie in the vortex of other pressures rising throughout the land: the old issue of federal disposal of lands; the question of local and national treatment of long-beleaguered Indian tribes; and, in the frenzied transportation boom of the 1850s, federal choice of the routes for the transcontinental railroads that would link Atlantic and Pacific. In 1820 American politicians and their political system had handled such factors through a compromise that barred slavery north of 36º30?, and hence, by implication, Nebraska. In 1850 another compromise had endorsed the expedient of popular (territorial) control of slavery while seeming to leave the 1820 compromise intact. But the pressures now were more explosive and centrifugal than ever.

Standing most exposed in this controversy was no Clay or Webster but the forty-year-old chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. Douglas looked like a giant who, beneath his great mane and high forehead, had been squashed flat into a broad swath of eyebrows, a wide mouth and neck, and dwarfed legs. Life indeed had tried to squash him flat. Fatherless shortly after his birth in Vermont, put out to farm work as a child by a taskmaster of an uncle, denied a full education, he wandered west, taking job after job, until he settled in Illinois to read law and enter politics. He lost a congressional election by thirty-five votes, and a Senate contest by five legislative votes, before winning a House seat in 1843 and a Senate seat four years later. In his one term in the upper chamber he had achieved a Senate and national reputation as a quick-witted, resourceful, and pugnacious debater and yet also as a conciliator between northern and southern Democrats. Trained as a boy in woodworking, in his short life Douglas had become a master craftsman in the more unruly fields of railroad promotion, tariff making, public land disposal, river and harbor subsidies.

Douglas had a most ingenious plan: to admit Nebraska as a territory, neither legislating slavery there nor legislating it out, leaving the decision on slavery to the people in the territory, and to do all this without openly repudiating the Missouri Compromise. This last requirement was crucial, because Douglas knew that millions venerated that compromise as virtually the holy writ of the Union, sanctified by Clay, Webster & Co. Yet Douglas could not act alone. He could only exert leverage among the great balances of the domestic mobile, and those balances were swinging against him as of January 1854. Two of these swung together: the growing southern influence over the machinery of Congress, and Pierce’s weak presidential leadership. Moreover, time did not lie on Douglas’ side; he was desperately eager to go about his principal business of organizing the Nebraska Territory before his enemies on both flanks could thwart him.

For a time, after Douglas introduced his Nebraska bill in the Senate early in January 1854, it seemed that he might pick his way through the thickets. Providing that Nebraska, when admitted as a state, should be received into the Union “with or without slavery,” as its “constitution may prescribe” at the time of admission, the measure neither affirmed nor repealed the Missouri Compromise—it simply ignored it. Antislavery leaders were not unduly upset; it was hard to argue against local “popular sovereignty,” and they doubted that the territory would be hospitable to slavery anyway. But now the leading proslavery senators swung into action, a formidable phalanx: Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, longtime disciple of Calhoun, champion of nullification, chairman of the Judiciary Committee; two states’ rights, proslavery Virginians, Robert M. T. Hunter and James M. Mason; and David R. Atchison of Missouri, a leader of the proslavery faction, chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, and bitter foe of Thomas Hart Benton, whom he had helped defeat for re-election in 1850. These senators lived and concerted together in Washington, in their famous “F Street Mess.”

The phalanx saw its chance to strike the Missouri Compromise its deathblow. With their chairmanships, big Democratic majorities, and complaisant President, they could hardly expect such an opportunity again. Douglas, startled when proslavery Senator Archibald Dixon of Kentucky brought up an amendment that directly repudiated the compromise of 1820, pleaded with Dixon in the Senate chamber to avoid such a drastic step. Later, when Douglas asked Dixon to join him in a carriage ride so they could talk undisturbed, Dixon was so persuasive—he had the votes—that Douglas not only agreed to support Dixon’s amendment but proposed to sponsor it.

“By God, Sir,” Douglas said, “you are right. I will incorporate it in my bill, though I know it will raise a hell of a storm.”

Why this flip-flop by the “Little Giant”? politicians wondered at the time, and historians ever since. To Douglas, it was not a change of heart but a recognition of where power lay in the Senate and House, of the need to placate that power in order to move ahead on railroad-building and western development. Critics charged that he yielded to the Southerners because of his presidential ambitions, but he was playing better short-term congressional politics than long-term presidential. Long before the term “pragmatist” became popular, Douglas was an expert in calculating short-run advantage and step-by-step movement. He had no strong feeling about slavery, and even less understanding of how others could feel so strongly on the matter. He preferred to leave the future of slavery up to “the laws of climate, and of production, and of physical geography.…” Material forces, not moral, would decide.

It remained only for Douglas and the Southerners to line up the Administration. Increasingly pressed for time, Douglas had only one day—a Sunday—to persuade the President, who would transact no business on the Sabbath. With the aid of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, Pierce’s reluctant assent was gained for a meeting with Douglas and a small group. Sensing that the measure would divide his party and the nation, but crippled by divisions within his Cabinet and within himself, the President could not resist the Senate junto; he even agreed in writing that the Missouri Compromise was inoperative. On January 23, 1854, Stephen Douglas brought in his Nebraska bill, embracing the fateful amendment.

Waiting for Douglas’ move was a trio of antislavery senators: Chase, Wade, and Sumner. Salmon P. Chase of Ohio had been born in New Hampshire and had, like Douglas, lost his father in his early years; the uncle who took him in was the Protestant Episcopal bishop of Ohio. Settling in Cincinnati, Chase gained fame as the “attorney-general for runaway negroes” in his ardent defenses of fugitive slaves. A one-man antislavery party, he deserted the Whigs to work for the Liberty party in 1840 and the Free-Soilers in ’48. The deaths of three wives, and of four of six daughters, seemed to deepen his compassion. His junior colleague from Ohio, Benjamin F. Wade, born in Massachusetts and in poverty, rough of mien and coarse of speech, was a Senate neophyte experienced nonetheless in Ohio politics. The most arresting of the trio was Charles Sumner, Boston-born, Harvard-educated, friend of his fellow Unitarians Channing, Longfellow, and Emerson. His longtime denunciations of the cotton Whigs as “the lords of the loom” still alienated him from Robert Winthrop and the rest of the Whig establishment in Boston. Well over six feet tall, large of frame, pedagogical and humorless of bearing, he spoke, said Longfellow, “like a cannoneer…ramming down cartridges,” pressing a single idea with such doctrinal fervor that Francis Lieber complained of his “Jacobinical abstraction” and Winthrop labeled him a “Jesuit of the first water.”

Chase and his Senate and congressional friends had ample time to prepare their counterattack. On January 24 Washington’s National Era blazoned forth with their “APPEAL OF THE INDEPENDENT DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.”

“We arraign this bill,” the appeal proclaimed, “as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.…”

This hyperbole set the tone for the whole manifesto. It offered little reasoned historical or legal analysis, or even a convincing attack on slavery, but rather paraded a series of horribles that would result from the bill: all unorganized territory would be open to slavery, territorial settlement would be slowed up, the transcontinental railroad would be sidetracked, the homestead law vitiated, the whole country placed under the “yoke of a slaveholding despotism.” Again and again the address returned to its main charge: the bill was a diabolical conspiracy against freedom, a plot contrived by a servile demagogue truckling to the South for the sake of his presidential ambitions. “Shall a plot against humanity and Democracy, so monstrous, and so dangerous to the interests of Liberty throughout the world, be permitted to succeed?”

Editors and preachers and merchants had already been thundering against the assault on the Missouri Compromise; now the sheer force of this address, printed also in the New York Times and other newspapers, set off detonations across the North. Never mind the rhetorical absolutes in the address, the exaggerations and distortions, the conspiracy theory—its transcending moral conviction, its timeliness, and above all its reverberating call for the defense of liberty struck home to men and women determined, whatever their specific position on slavery, that this barbaric insult to freedom not be extended to “free soil.” Horace Greeley in New York, Samuel Bowles in Massachusetts, Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, Theodore Parker in Boston, Horace White in Chicago, were only the most noted of those who used the occasion to hurl their own thunderbolts from press and pulpit.

Still underestimating the power of this moral tempest, Douglas predicted that the “storm will soon spend its fury.” It did not, because of its own intensity, because the bill lacerated the public as it wended its way through Senate and House, and because Douglas and his supporters, as well as the antislavery men and their allies, fought the congressional battle so furiously that the issue could not die. Douglas spent most of his time superbly managing the bill, but his angry speeches, laced with epithets, bristled in the press accounts. Greeley, fearing that the bill would “suffocate the moral force of liberty and equality within the young republic,” in Jeter Isely’s words, blasted the measure in a series of brilliant editorials—and watched his Weekly pick up another 35,000 readers nationwide during the first six months of 1854. The Tribune’s opposition could be expected; more significant was the spectacle of leading Democratic papers of Free-Soil tendencies—William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post, the Rochester Union, Buffalo Republic, Cleveland Leader, and others—almost overnight turning against the Democratic party leadership.

Would this wave of indignation pass over the North and then subside, like so many moral protests in the past? Or would it take form in some new and lasting political constellation? Looking back later, some historians saw an entire new movement and party spring to life as people mobilized against the Nebraska bill. Few did mobilize at the time, however. The editorial thunderbolts did not descend on people neatly arrayed in the Democratic and Whig parties. In the absence of strong party ideology or organization, Americans were perceiving and acting as members of a variety of subcultures.

They were divided not only over slavery but also over temperance, women’s rights, keeping the Sabbath, prison reform, free land, tariffs, immigration, schools, banks, foreign policy, foreign relations. People’s origins caused other divisions: natives and newcomers often hated one another, immigrants from the British Isles and continental Europe were wary of one another; German Catholics looked down on Irish Catholics; Irish resented Germans; and some Irish disdained other Irish.

The single most powerful antagonism in the early 1850s was native American hostility toward the newcomers who had been arriving each year by the hundreds of thousands—hostility toward their religion, their speech, their drinking, their very foreignness. And the fastest-growing party in the north was the Know-Nothing (or American) party, whose stated program was “Anti-Romanism, Anti-Bedinism, Anti-Pope’s Toeism, Anti-Nunneryism, Anti-Winking Virginism, Anti-Jesuitism, and Anti-the-Whole-Sacerdotal-Hierarchism with all its humbugging mummeries.…”

Cutting through this welter of distrusts and conflicting concerns were three dynamic forces that dominated the politics of slavery. One was abolitionism, rooted in New England preaching and writing and the Yankee diaspora into western New York and Ohio and the northwestern states, an abolitionism often expressed in a strident anti-southernism. The second was the defense and protection of slavery, often reflected in a militant anti-northernism. The third was an “anti-niggerism,” shared extensively by some Whigs and many Democrats and probably by most Know-Nothings—and even by some abolitionists, though it was hard for militant abolitionists to accept this fact. Not everyone who wanted to free the slaves was pro-black; millions of Americans were against slavery and also against “niggers,” because they saw the former as a moral wrong and the latter as a threat. This attitude was most clearly reflected in Free-Soilism. Many Free-Soilers strenuously resisted the Nebraska bill and its threat of allowing slavery onto free soil because they did not want blacks to invade “white” territory, put their children into white schools, and compete for while jobs. They did not want blacks next to them, slave or free.

These dominant groups defended their views in the name of liberty or freedom. Nativists wanted to pursue their lives and their work free of brawling, pushing, competitive Irishmen and Germans. Slave owners proclaimed their liberty to take their bondsmen into the new territories. Homesteaders wished to move into a Nebraska free of “niggerism.” Abolitionists continued to view slavery as the supreme affront to the whole ideal of liberty. Thus liberty as a value still served as a source of intellectual and political confusion rather than as a guide to coherent political action.

This disarray posed a severe problem for serious politicians. They could not operate within the bounds of neatly polarized conflict. They had to win state and local elections against rivals who could easily outdemagogue them in the emotional politics of the early fifties. They had to calculate in terms of possible coalitions, political balance sheets, electoral margins. They had to deal with Americans as they were—with millions of persons not logically arrayed in rational ideological combat but intent on immediate daily needs of survival and betterment and self-esteem, some alienated from politics or apathetic toward it, parochial in outlook, variously cursing Catholics, blacks, Southerners, Northerners, abolitionists, slave owners.

It would take, not a single event like the Nebraska bill, but a series of powerful hammerblows over a number of years before this jumble of attitudes could be heated and pounded into a viable political movement or party. For a time, as Americans turned against the Democratic party because of Nebraska, and the Whig because of its weakness and timidity, people were in a state of political confusion. Many nevertheless stayed with Whiggism or the Democracy. Others joined the Know-Nothings, either as a way station to some other political destination or as a place to settle down. Some met in “anti-Nebraska” meetings and simply formed anti-Nebraska groups. Some met and talked about organizing new Independent or People’s parties. Some pressed for a new Fusion party to embrace abolitionists, Know-Nothings, Conscience Whigs, Free-Soilers, Barnburners, and anyone else available for a coalition.

In Ripon, Wisconsin, fusionists proposed that merging anti-Nebraska groups adopt the name “Republican”; a plea was sent to the Tribune that it adorn its masthead with a Republican banner, but Greeley hedged. Thirty congressmen, meeting at Mrs. Cratchett’s boardinghouse in Washington, discussed a new party to stop slavery expansion. “Republican,” they thought, would make a good name for such a party. Meetings in Jackson, Michigan, and Worcester, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, held almost simultaneously, debated the need for a new party and agreed that “Republican,” evoking memories of Jefferson and popular rights, would be a fine name for a party designed to attract a large variety of people.

But all these efforts would atomize rather than mobilize protest unless events brought more hammerblows—and events did. In Washington the Senate battle raged on, as Douglas pleaded, demanded, goaded, orated, his sharp sentences going “straight to the mark like bullets, and sometimes like cannon-balls, crashing and tearing,” Carl Schurz wrote. As Douglas, the Southerners, and the White House mobilized all their influence, including party patronage, the anti-Nebraska forces lost battle after battle, including the final Senate roll call, when the bill passed 37 to 14. In the House, where the Administration applied whip and spur, and Douglas made his presence known, the tall, gaunt, shrill-voiced Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia applied his rapier-like logic and command of facts to win a closer victory for the measure, 113 aye to 100 nay. Each major event on the Hill, and especially the final roll calls, produced outbursts of delight, rage, threats, recriminations, and dire predictions among hundreds of editors, preachers, and politicians in the country.

The bill had hardly passed the House, in late May 1854, when the moral dimension of the issue was illuminated in Boston. Anthony Burns, a twenty-year-old slave and leader of his people on a Virginia plantation, had escaped by boarding a ship bound for Boston, been tracked down by his master, put in chains in a Boston jail, and subjected to the provisions of the Fugitive Act. This provided for not a jury trial but a summary hearing before a commissioner who could dispatch the fugitive back into slavery. While Burns awaited his hearing, Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker whipped up a Faneuil Hall crowd to a pitch of indignation. A mob tried to free Burns, only to be beaten off. By the time the commissioner ordered Burns returned to his master Boston was an armed camp, filled with cavalry, artillery, Marines, and police, and with outraged Bostonians and hundreds of protesters from Worcester and other towns. Church bells pealed and thousands watched in helpless fury as the trembling slave, his face scarred and a piece of bone projecting from a broken hand, was taken by cavalry and foot soldiers through flag-draped streets to his Virginia-bound ship. This was only the latest in a series of horrifying fugitive-slave recaptures, which in some cases had ended in the rescue of the runaway. But it was in the far-off territory itself that shocking events now would galvanize the nation and precipitate a transformation of party politics and ultimately of the American political system.

“Come on, then, Gentlemen of the slave States,” William H. Seward of New York had cried out on the Senate floor shortly after the Nebraska bill passed the House. “Since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.”

It was certain from the start of the Nebraska debate that the Kansas part of the territory would be a combat zone. To publicize Kansas as an arcadia for homesteaders and planters alike, and then to legislate that the people in the territory would decide the burning issue of slavery on the basis of squatter sovereignty, was to thrust two gamecocks into a rain barrel. Escalation began as soon as slavery men heard that the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society was sending Yankees into Kansas in order to convert it into a free state, and when antislavery men heard that Missouri planters were dispatching “border ruffians” into Kansas with the opposite purpose. Each side exaggerated the satanic purpose and effectiveness of the other.

Each side exploited its own advantages. When a territorial delegate was to be elected, hundreds of Missourians crossed the boundary in buck-boards and wagons, on horseback and on foot, to pick an anti-free-stater as delegate. Proslavery men proceeded to organize a proslavery legislature, which promptly passed anti-antislavery legislation, including penalties for antislavery agitation. Antislavery colonists held their own convention, declared the proslavery legislature illegal, asked admission to the Union as a free state, and later met in convention to frame the free-state Topeka constitution. By the end of 1855 Kansas had two governments—and two sides each arming itself rapidly, the antislavery men with “Beecher’s Bibles,” considered more practical in combat than the Good Book. As the last snows melted on the prairies in the spring, Kansas was headed for a showdown.

Then came the sack of Lawrence. Proslavery men had long considered the town a hotbed of abolitionism; armed with indictments against free-state leaders and two Lawrence newspapers—the Herald of Freedom and the Kansas Free State—sheriffs men and “border ruffians” occupied the town. Spoiling for a fight, furious at finding the leaders gone and the populace unresisting, the invaders threw printing presses into the river and bombarded the Free State Hotel into rubble. One man angered by the nonresistance to this invasion was John Brown, on his way to Lawrence with his small troop of Liberty Guards when he heard about the sacking. He resolved to take the drastic action that the cowardly antislavery people refused to take. Selecting a small band from his Liberty Guards, including several of his sons, exhorting them to “fight fire with fire,” he led them to the houses of proslavery men and, while wives and children watched, dragged the victims out and hacked them to death with cutlasses. With the fifth murder Brown stopped; he had avenged the killing of six free-state men during Kansas’ months of violence, including the one man who had died at Lawrence.

It is probable that, on the way to Lawrence, Brown was told of another assault by the “slave power,” far away in Washington. This news could hardly have tempered his passion, nor explained his action. Brown was an enigma to his neighbors in Pottawatomie Creek, and would remain so long after: was he a fanatical moralist who as a boy had seen a young slave beaten with a shovel by his master, a stern Calvinist who had dedicated his life to a merciless effort to extirpate the evil of slavery; or was he simply a homicidal lunatic from a family of lunatics?

Each incident in Kansas provoked storms of oratory in Congress as both chambers became caldrons of sectional hatred and hyperbole. “Truly—truly—this is a godless place,” Sumner lamented early in 1856. No one writhed under the oratorical lashes of Douglas and southern senators with a greater desire for vengeance than the Massachusetts lawmaker. Carefully he planned his climactic attack on the moral wickedness, the supreme sinfulness, of slavery. From his first words when he gained the floor in mid-May—”Mr. President, you are now called to redress a great transgression”—to his final reference to Virginia, “where human beings are bred as cattle for the shambles,” his speech, “The Crime Against Kansas,” was studded with provocative and offensive personal attacks on his foes. He attacked the phalanx, especially Butler, charging that the South Carolinian had chosen a mistress who, “though ugly to others, is always lovely to him…the harlot, Slavery.…” When Douglas answered him in kind, Sumner ranted: “…no person with the upright form of man can be allowed—” He paused.

“Say it,” Douglas shot back.

“I will say it—no person with the upright form of man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch out from his tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality. …The noisome, squat, and nameless animal, to which I now refer, is not a proper model for an American Senator. Will the Senator from Illinois take notice?”

“I will,” Douglas replied, “and therefore will not imitate you, sir.”

This was not the kind of grand Senate debate in which senatorial gladiators harangued each other on the floor and then walked through the cloakroom arm in arm. These adversaries loathed one another. As the bonds of civility snapped, as allies and constituents egged the antagonists on, Congress trembled on the edge of violence. Preston S. Brooks, a thirty-six-year-old congressman from South Carolina, a Mexican War veteran considered to be a moderate and agreeable man, had listened to some of Sumner’s remarks. Incensed by Sumner’s “insults” to South Carolina and to Brooks’s admired uncle, Senator Butler, Brooks carefully planned vengeance. He would not challenge Sumner to a duel, because that would imply acceptance of the Massachusetts man as his social equal. He would simply thrash him, as he would any other inferior guilty of wrongdoing.

After gallantly waiting for some women visitors to leave the Senate lobby, Brooks strode up to Sumner’s desk, where the senator was busy with correspondence, and rained twenty or thirty blows on Sumner’s head with a gold-knobbed gutta-percha cane. Sumner rose convulsively, wrenching his bolted desk from the floor, and reeled about as Brooks broke his cane on his head and kept on striking him, until bystanders dragged the assailant away. Almost insensible, his head covered with blood, Sumner, with the help of friends, stumbled out of the Capitol into a carriage a painful convalescence—and martyrdom.

THE ILLINOIS REPUBLICANS

Sacking a defenseless town, dragging helpless men out of their homes and hacking them to death, bloodying a United States senator pinioned under his desk—this explosion of baleful events sent new and irresistible shocks into the American conscience. Thirty months of rising conflict, culminating in these violent days of May, were arousing Americans to a consciousness of slavery as the supreme issue transcending all the others. The hurricane was whipping through the mainstream of American politics, washing out old waterways and carving new channels, wrenching people from ancient political moorings and leaving them adrift or clutching new ones.

Fundamental economic and social forces, as well as bitter conflict, seemed to be transforming America during the 1850s. The economic boom roared on through the middle of the decade, both satisfying needs and raising expectations. Population soared under the impact of foreign immigration and domestic fecundity. Rising prices altered long-established relationships among groups and classes. Massive immigration caused new anxieties and tensions. Intense railroad building not only was altering the face of the land but causing social dislocation, as the jobs of draymen and teamsters and rivermen evaporated in one place and employment for railroad builders and trainmen and telegraphers suddenly materialized hundreds of miles away.

The few Americans who were reading Karl Marx in the 1850s might have expected sweeping political change to follow economic and social, especially in the wake of the storm over slavery. A major political change indeed was in the making, as a few Americans tried a major political experiment—to create a new political party that would challenge the existing two-party system in elections. This had never been done. Earlier the Democratic party had gradually grown out of the old Republican party; the Whigs had never had to challenge a full-bodied Federalist party. Many politicians doubted that this new party—anti-Nebraska, or Fusion, or Republican, or People’s—would have any more success than Liberty-ites or Free-Soilers. Only a Republican zealot would have dreamed in 1854 that the isolated protest meetings of that year would start the formation of what would become the dominant party for three-quarters of a century.

The question for Republicans by the end of 1854, indeed, was whether their movement would even survive. They faced not only the familiar Whigs and Democrats, Free-Soilers and Know-Nothings, but “Temperance men, Rum Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, Hindoos, Hard Shell Democrats, Soft Shells, Half Shells,” and assorted others, in David Potter’s listing. Of the third parties, the Know-Nothings seemed most ascendant. In November 1854 they swept Massachusetts, scored well in New York and Pennsylvania, and elected a large number of representatives to the national House; after they won more victories the next year, some predicted that the nativists would take the presidency in 1856. Know-Nothings and anti-slavery representatives had enough in common in the new Congress to elect as Speaker Nathaniel P. Banks, a Massachusetts nativist and antislavery man who was once a Democrat, more recently a Know-Nothing, and now on his way to Republicanism.

All the parties indeed seemed immobilized by 1856. The Democrats, claiming to be the only truly national party, were bleeding at both ends as proslavery extremists deserted them in the South and “Free Democrats” seceded in the North. Whigs, still torn between conscience and cotton, were walking a tightrope on nativism, as they watched Democrats making inroads among immigrants and Catholics, and Know-Nothings exploiting bigotry. Some Whig leaders followed the high road; invited to address an anti-alien organization, Edward Everett not only declined but lectured his would-be host on the need to greet newcomers “in a spirit not of exclusiveness but of fraternal welcome.” Other Whig leaders were less high-minded. The Know-Nothings, even in the flush of their victories, comprised the weakest party of all, for they were deeply divided over slavery. When the party adopted a proslavery platform in its convention in June 1855, northern delegates withdrew, and the party was on the road to extinction.

The parties were immobilized because their top leadership was immobilized, and the leaders were immobilized because they were enmeshed in state and local politics. If the leaders could have fought in one great arena, some bold and committed spirit might have taken an advanced position against slavery—even in favor of emancipation—knowing that someday the people would catch up with him. But the national politicians of the day had to fight their battles within the states, and within key cities and counties in those states. Men like Sumner or Chase or Seward did take the lead, but only when local conditions permitted. No great national leader arose to rally Whigs or Democrats behind a daring commitment to halt and eventually abolish slavery; rather, month after month and year after year, state and sectional leaders calculated, advanced here, retreated there, compromised, adjusted, as they competed with rivals within and outside their parties, and tried to survive in the three-dimensional maze of American electoral and party politics.

The task of party invigoration, of creative political response to the hurricane of events and the social dynamics of the 1850s, would fall on a cadre of activists who, amidst all the murk, had a clear vision of what they believed in, where they wanted to go, and how they proposed to get there. No state demonstrated their problems and their progress more vividly than Illinois.

Illinois seemed the distillation of America. Though it opened on the Great Lakes to the north and flanked hundreds of miles of the Mississippi on its west, already it was the quintessential heartland. Both its industry and its agriculture were booming in the 1850s, the two meeting in Chicago’s grain elevators and McCormick’s reaper factory. Illinois embraced sections and cultures: Chicago teemed with Irish and Germans; northern Illinois was dotted with towns more Yankee than Dedham; southern Illinois, touching Kentucky and reaching farther south than Richmond, was a land of people who still talked and thought as Virginians and Kentuckians. No one—no European traveler, no nationally ambitious politician, no immigrant heading west along the northern routes, no businessman looking for profit—could ignore Illinois.

If Chicago was the economic capital of Illinois in the 1850s, Springfield was the legal and political. Like Bloomington and Peoria and a dozen other places in central Illinois, it was a boom town, with its brand-new railroad connection to Chicago and New York, its population that was doubling while land valuation tripled. This town smack in the middle of the state was also the capital, with a proud new statehouse built of buff-colored stone that had been dragged by teams of twelve oxen from a nearby quarry. Springfield was still in part an unfinished frontier town: on a wet day people could sink to their knees in the prairie mud of the unpaved sidewalks; hogs ran wild in the streets, and in the business district imposing three-story shops stood next to ramshackle houses. The public square was crowded with buggies and sometimes by “movers” headed west in their covered wagons. Yet Springfield also had its aristocracy, dominated by wealthy old Whig families like the Stuarts, Edwardses, and Todds.

One of the Todds, Mary, a small and refined woman of quick temper, had married below her station in accepting a local lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, a man of tall frame, easygoing manner, hollowed cheeks, huge arms and hands, coarse black hair, and dowdy garb. Even after Lincoln was making good money as a lawyer, he could be seen currying his horse and milking his cow.

If you wanted to find Abe Lincoln in Springfield, you would look for a battered sign, LINCOLN & HERNDON, swinging on rusty hinges outside an office building downtown. You would climb a narrow flight of stairs, cross a dark hallway, and enter an office filled with a long, creaking sofa, a few old cane-bottomed chairs, and desks piled high with papers that overflowed the pigeonholes. If Lincoln wasn’t there, his partner, William Herndon, might be. Billy seemed almost the opposite of Abe: youthful, nervous, verbose, something of a dandy, but admiring, of “Mr. Lincoln.” Lincoln might be down at the courthouse or the capitol, or visiting another law office, or some place where you might find him telling jokes that had a crowd in stitches—“he could make a cat laugh,” someone said—or he might be sitting by himself in a state of such utter melancholy that no one would dare approach him.

If Lincoln was not in town, he was probably out riding circuit. Gone were the days when he might ride horseback through rain and snow for thirty miles or so. Now he could take trains, with his free pass, or drive a horse and buggy. In earlier times he had been lucky to find a farmhouse where he could put up overnight in the extra room; now he could often stay at a newly built hotel. He often traveled with other lawyers, and with David Davis, circuit judge of the judicial district, a huge man of three hundred pounds, cherubic face, and sharp, penetrating mind. At night Lincoln might have to share a bed with another attorney, but the judge had his own bed, as tribute to the principle of separating bench and bar.

Life on the circuit was hard but educational. Lincoln, arguing every kind of case under every kind of law, constitutional, patent, admiralty, and common, came to know virtually every economic interest and human problem in the heart of Illinois.

He became a respected lawyer, trusted with important responsibilities, arguing many cases involving human problems, including divorce, rape, murder, and both sides in fugitive-slave cases. But most of his cases dealt with property: disputed wills, railroad rights-of-way, foreclosures, debt collection, patent infringements, trespass violations, mortgages, property damages. While early in his career he represented rivermen against bridge and railroad enterprises, later he took so many cases for railroads—he represented the Illinois Central in eleven appeals to the Illinois Supreme Court—that by the mid-1850s he was known as a railroad lawyer. Yet he also sued the Illinois Central when they offered him a fraction of the fee he billed them, and won. A Whig, a man of property, he prospered in the economic boom of capitalist Illinois. He believed in individual liberty, initiative, and enterprise. It was best, he said, “to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can.” Some would get rich, but a law to prevent that would do more harm than good.

But Lincoln was much more than an attorney for capitalism. A onetime state legislator, a Whig congressman in 1845-47, an unsuccessful candidate for the United States Senate, he had repeatedly subordinated his law practice to his desire to run for office. Herndon marveled at this man who could be so relaxed and casual at times but who seemed “totally swallowed up” in his greed for office. His ambition, Herndon said, “was a little engine that knew no rest.”

Politically ambitious—and yet the soul of political caution. When news of the Nebraska bill reached Springfield, and Herndon and other militant young Whigs wanted to use aggressive, even desperate means to defend the cause of freedom, Lincoln urged them to do nothing rebellious or illegal. People all around him were breaking away from Whiggism to the Know-Nothing or Republican or some other party, but Lincoln would have none of it. Above all he feared being linked with abolitionists or other extremists, but he dared not offend the radicals, for they voted too. When Republicans and other antislavery leaders invited him to a Springfield meeting to form a state organization, he contrived to be out of town; and when they elected him to their state central committee, he declined the poisoned chalice.

He was not sure where he stood. “I think I am a whig,” he wrote his friend Joshua Speed, “but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.” As a congressman he had voted for the Wilmot Proviso forty times, he went on, and he had never heard of anyone trying to “unwhig” him for that. He simply opposed the extension of slavery, he insisted to Speed.

“I am not a Know-nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” Americans seemed to be degenerating. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners and Catholics.’” At that point, Lincoln added, he would prefer to emigrate to some country like Russia, “where they make no pretense of loving liberty.”

If he was politically immobilized, at least he could speak for himself, and when Stephen Douglas returned to Illinois late in 1854, Lincoln’s competitive spirit was aroused by the man who had succeeded so brilliantly in politics as he had not. The Little Giant, after journeying to Chicago “by the light of my own effigy,” Douglas related almost pridefully, tried to defend his Nebraska role to a mass meeting, only to be howled down. Farther south he found his audiences more friendly. When he defined his position to a wildly cheering audience at the state fair in Springfield early in October, Lincoln was there, sitting directly in front of him and listening intently to every word; at the end he rose and announced that he would respond to Douglas the next day, at the same time and place. He did, before a crowd as enthusiastic as Douglas’, and the two men squared off again in Peoria—exchanges that would lead to a much more extended confrontation four years later.

Still, Lincoln continued to take a moderate position on slavery, far short of abolition, and to act as a conciliator among anti-Nebraska Whigs, fusionists, and others, not to take leadership and certainly not to join the controversial Republicans. Few other moderate antislavery leaders of statewide standing were willing to embrace Republicanism or radicalism. Yet within a year a strong Republican party was growing in Illinois. What had happened?

The persons who built the Republican party in Illinois were not national leaders—the Republicans still had none—nor were they noted state anti-slavery men—most of them were still standing by their old parties—but a “third cadre” of militant grass-roots activists. These were the people who organized meetings, put up posters, carried on antislavery correspondence, carried around petitions, got people to vote. One antislavery orator alone, a man named Ichabod Crane, subsidized by an anti-Nebraska fusion group in Chicago, spoke to more than a hundred rallies and probably many more than 100,000 persons during 1854, and to almost another hundred meetings during the next two years. The militants had a superb political vehicle—the city or county convention. No one could stop them from “issuing the call,” organizing and holding the convention, adopting rules of order, electing a chairman, conducting vigorous debate, passing resolutions, all before press and public.

Perhaps the most remarkable of the activists’ meetings was held in the winter of 1856 in Decatur by a group of anti-Nebraska newspaper editors, mainly old-line Whigs. Only one politician was present—Abraham Lincoln, who had just declined to serve as an Illinois delegate to a Republican national organizing convention in Pittsburgh. To Lincoln’s satisfaction, the Illinois editors took a moderate position, calling for restoration of the Missouri Compromise but acceding to slavery in the South and the fugitive-slave law. Acting boldly as men who were political leaders as well as editors, they called for a statewide convention, to take place in Bloomington in late May. While Lincoln was out of town, Herndon added his partner’s name to the call. Told by old-line Whigs that he had ruined Lincoln, Herndon anxiously wrote his partner: Did he approve?

“All right, go ahead,” Lincoln replied. “Will meet you, radicals and all.”

The Bloomington convention met in the wake of lurid accounts of the sack of Lawrence and the caning of Sumner. The grass-roots activists were still taking the lead; Lincoln came to Bloomington but was immensely relieved when old-line Whigs and bolting Democrats showed up along with radicals and abolitionists. At least he could play the role of conciliator. He and Judge Davis and old-line Whig Orville Browning worked strenuously behind the scenes to prevent splits among the polyglot delegations of Whigs, anti-Nebraska Democrats, Know-Nothings, German immigrants, and temperance reformers. The convention censured both the Nebraska bill and nativism. Soon the call rang out for “Lincoln, Lincoln” to give the concluding address. The normally analytical attorney seemed to catch fire as he spoke. Men sat enthralled, reporters listened with their pencils transfixed while Lincoln gave perhaps his most galvanizing speech—a speech lost to history because of those frozen pencils.

By this time the national parties were wheeling into line, in preparation for the presidential election battle of 1856. After the Know-Nothings split into their northern and southern wings earlier in the year, the “South Americans” prepared to do battle behind Fillmore, and the “North Americans” looked toward other parties, especially the Republicans. As nativists, they could hardly look to the Democratic party, with its hospitality to immigrants and Catholics. The Democratic national convention met in Cincinnati early in June.

Pierce hoped to be renominated, but his weakness as President and flabbiness as a leader had disappointed even his southern friends in the party. The Southerners would rather reward the Northerner who had taken leadership on the Nebraska bill, fought for it, and put it through—the Little Giant. Southern support now was Douglas’ undoing, however, for at this point the Democracy wanted to win a national election, not merely a congressional enactment, and a moderate safe-and-sane candidate was available in James Buchanan. The Pennsylvanian had worked closely with southern leaders, but less flamboyantly than Douglas. He had served in both House and Senate; he was experienced in foreign affairs as a former Secretary of State—and he had the great advantage of having been in London during the battle over Kansas. Keeping in close touch with the contest from Washington, Douglas learned over the telegraph of the successive ballots as Pierce fell behind and Buchanan forged ahead; then the Illinoisan, always a believer in party unity and discipline, asked that his name be withdrawn.

Two weeks later, in a fervency of moral indignation and high enthusiasm, two thousand Republican delegates and friends gathered in Philadelphia’s Musical Fund Hall. This crusading new party was already proclaiming itself as a national movement but one look at the state standards revealed that it was embarrassingly sectional—not a single southern delegation was present. Unswayed by Democratic charges that they were a single-issue party, the Republicans adopted a platform of nine planks, most of which took a strong stand against slavery extension, but they did not neglect to call for government-aided construction of a Pacific railroad “by the most central and practical route.” The convention quickly chose for President a man who seemed an ideal candidate—John C. Fremont, soldier, western explorer, famous as the “Pathfinder,” and a moderate on slavery. True, he was politically inexperienced but he was young and bold and determined, just the right candidate, in Nevins’ words, for a party that would be young, bold, and determined. The fact that he was married to the spirited Jessie Benton, daughter of the maverick Democratic senator from Missouri, seemed a fine little extra—until the senator announced that he was sticking by his party’s choice of Buchanan and, to boot, that he loved his son-in-law “like a son” but flatly opposed him for President. The presidency had now become such a glittering prize in American politics that parties were compelled to broaden their ranks and win over third parties. Already there were three parties in the 1856 field, but where were the Whigs and the North Americans? The latter threatened to hold their own convention and nominate their own candidate—a move that would divide the antislavery forces even further—until Thurlow Weed and other Republican managers contrived an adroit piece of political chess play. In a move that once again indicated the close affinity between Republicans and northern Know-Nothings, the leaders of the latter party had chosen Speaker Banks for President as a holding operation until the Republicans selected their own candidate. The maneuver worked; once Fremont was nominated by the Republicans, the North Americans soon dropped Banks and endorsed the Pathfinder.

The Whigs, broken as a major party, had their last hurrah in a September gathering of their leaders in Baltimore. There they fell back on their political and intellectual taproot—preservation of the Union. Denouncing both the Democratic and Republican parties as merely sectional and divisive, they endorsed Fillmore as a friend of the Union and of the Constitution, “without adopting or referring to the peculiar principles of the party which has already selected” him. So disappeared the northern leadership of the great Whig party in the bowels of the Know-Nothing party, for whose nativist prejudices it had little but contempt. It was the politics of nostalgia; these Whig “gentlemen,” a Republican journalist observed, “are evidently incapable of the idea that the process now going on in the politics of the United States is a Revolution. ”

By now the parties’ orators and foot soldiers—Fremont’s Republican-North Americans, Buchanan’s Democrats, and Fillmore’s Know-Nothing-Whigs—were locked in furious combat throughout the North. The Democrats were so strong in the South, the Fillmore forces so weak, and the Republicans so absent, that Buchanan won there by default, and the Democracy was able to deploy its finest southern orators in the battle of the North. That battle on the part of all three parties consisted, rhetorically, of systematic exaggeration and distortion of the positions of both foes. Although the Republicans in particular tried to moderate their position on slavery in order to capture the centrist vote, southern Democrats frightened the electorate with warnings of disunion and secession should Fremont win.

It was also a battle of cadres. Here the Democrats had the advantage, with their thousands of well-disciplined jobholders and their tens of thousands, of stalwarts who could not forget the glory days of Jackson and Van Buren. But the Republicans had the advantage of enthusiasm, as their militants used press, pulpit, parades, and personal proselytizing to transmit their new gospel. They could call on some of the most eminent literati. In Concord, a group of Republican neighbors had gone to Emerson’s house to ask him to join the Massachusetts delegation to the Republican national convention. They had done so in fear and trembling, for Emerson was known to be averse to “meddling with politics” in any partisan way. Though Emerson was not at home, Mrs. Emerson electrified her visitors by stating that of course Mr. Emerson would put aside his private affairs in this “momentous crisis.”

But this election would not be decided in Massachusetts—all New England, and New York too, were expected to go Republican—rather in the great swing states in the center. Foremost of these was Pennsylvania, with its twenty-seven electoral votes, and its bellwether state elections three weeks before the presidential. The Democrats poured in vast sums of money, some of it scourged out of New York merchants in the southern trade; the Republicans brought in less money but battalions of orators. The Democrats’ victory in the state election presaged Buchanan’s win in November. Still the Republicans fought on. Women and clergymen were so militant in the cause that Democrats sneeringly dismissed them as “Pulpit and Petticoats.” The militants took on a radical posture, appropriating the air of the “Marseillaise” and bringing audiences to their feet with the battle song:

Arise, arise, ye brave,

And let your war-cry be

Free speech, free press, free soil, free men,

Fremont and victory.

Illinois was the critical battleground of the West. Lincoln, Herndon, and other anti-Nebraska leaders canvassed the state, trying especially to bring old Whigs over to Fremont and the Republican state ticket. While Lincoln was disappointed in the outcome of the Republican national convention—Fremont was not conservative enough and Lincoln himself had lost as a favorite-son candidate for Vice-President—he was now enlisted in the Republican cause. Still, he was cautious and conciliatory. Even in 1856, he did not speak of the Republican party, for fear of alienating Free Democrats and old-line Whigs; he solicited votes for the anti-Nebraska or Fremont cause.

History and geography, more than campaigning, dictated the presidential election results. The South went for Buchanan, the upper tier of northern states for Fremont, and Maryland for Fillmore. But the Democrats carried Pennsylvania, Indiana—and Illinois. Republican disappointment was tempered by elation over their 1.3 million popular votes, second to the Democrats’ 1.8 million, but far ahead of Fillmore’s 870,000. Their “glorious defeat” had put them in the strategically crucial position of being the major opposition party.

Lincoln pondered the election results. Illinois, a microcosm, had gone Republican in the north and Democratic in the south, but had elected a Republican state ticket. Lincoln’s ability to moderate clashes among Free Democrats, old-line Whigs, disaffected Germans, unreconstructed Know-Nothings, and radical abolitionists left him as undisputed leader of the Illinois Republican party. But what about the national party? Could it both restrict slavery and preserve the Union?

“We don’t want to dissolve” the Union, he had warned his foes in a speech in Galena, “and if you attempt it, we won’t let you. ” The purse and the sword would not be in the Southerners’ hands, “We won’t dissolve the Union, and you shan’t.”

CHAPTER 16

The Grapes of Wrath

VIOLENCE IN KANSAS, MOBS in Boston—but the eye of the storm was in Washington. The city was calm as President-elect Buchanan, escorted by army regulars, Marines, and state militias, rode with Pierce to the Capitol. Buchanan’s Inaugural Address reflected the placidity and quietism of the capital. Clad in a well-publicized suit of rural homespun, he deplored the incessant agitation over the slavery issue, and offered the pious injunction that things would quiet down if the nation would allow the people in the territories to decide on slavery there, and leave the institution alone where it already existed.

For a capital already confronted by overwhelming questions of peace and war, it was a curiously unfinished city through which Buchanan and his escort paraded on their way to the White House. The Capitol was imposing, even noble, some felt, with its great classic dome and pillars and porticos, though two big wings, built to accommodate an ever-expanding House and Senate, were still uncompleted—great marble blocks lay scattered around the Hill, among pendant cranes. From the Capitol the Inaugural Day visitors could see a scattering of houses and shanties still surrounded by fields. The base of the new Washington Monument looked impressive but the shaft ended abruptly 150 feet up because funds had run out. Grand plans were under discussion to beautify the Mall, which still resembled a cow pasture. Pennsylvania Avenue, down which Buchanan rode, had gas lights; outlying streets did not. Washington was a city of magnificent avenues, patriotic monuments, and high pretensions; it was also a city where people threw swill and slops into the alleys, hogs scavenged in the roads and wallowed in the muck, and people gasped for breath, through handkerchiefs pressed to their faces, when winds whipped through the dirt roads during dry periods.

It was the unfinished capital of an unfinished government. Aside from the Capitol the most imposing building was the Patent Office, a center of attention for a people constantly tinkering, inventing, experimenting. If many of the other government buildings did not look like much, they did not do much. If the capital lacked focus and coherence, so did the federal government, which remained a collection of fragmented powers, traditional military and diplomatic functions and offices, a presidency and Congress often at odds with each other, a Supreme Court not yet confirmed in the fullness of its authority. The doctrine of states’ rights, the unceasing opposition of southern Democrats to a major federal role in internal improvements, and the vigor of some northern states in improving transportation and subsidizing industry, had left a federal government hardly able to cope with its ordinary duties, much less its extraordinary ones.

No city in America seemed more pinioned between North and South. Though the new Smithsonian building had just been built on the site of the old slave pens, Washington was still a city where one encountered slaves—where a visitor like Frederick Law Olmsted could find that the aged, bent, infirm, and overworked black man bringing in firewood for Olmsted’s hotel room was a slave hired by the hotel from the man who owned him. It was a city where “free” blacks applying for residence had to report within five days of arrival or risk a fine, the workhouse, and expulsion from the city; where secret meetings were forbidden; where after twenty-four “genteel colored men,” in the words of the police record, held a charitable, nonpolitical meeting, several were sent to the workhouse, others were fined, and one was ordered to be flogged.

If the nation’s capital appeared, all at the same time, to be monumental and unfinished, politically pretentious and socially diminished, the nation’s leadership, gathered in Washington for Buchanan’s inaugural, presented an equally mixed picture. The void left by Clay, Webster, and the other political monuments of the recent past had yet to be filled.

A still rising star, if no Calhoun, among the southern leaders in Congress was Jefferson Davis. Born in the closing year of Jefferson’s presidency, later heir to a small Mississippi plantation, Davis had led an unexceptional early life as an army officer on the northwest frontier, a tour of duty distinguished mainly by his elopement with the daughter of his commandant, Colonel Zachary Taylor. His young wife soon died of malarial fever, but Davis, after ten years as a planter and an abbreviated term in Congress, brilliantly led the Mississippi Rifles in Mexico, under the command of his former father-in-law. A states’-righter who wanted to fashion an autonomous South in an overarching Union, he won election to the Senate, backed Polk and expansion, served as Pierce’s resourceful Secretary of War, and in 1857 was about to return to the upper chamber. With his “slender, tall, and erect figure,” Carl Schurz remembered, “his spare face, keen eyes, and fine forehead,” he struck the editor with “the grace of his diction, and the rare charm of his voice—things which greatly distinguish him from many of his colleagues.” Though on Capitol Hill he was admired and feared for his lucidity, his temper, his aloofness, and his touchiness over criticism of the South, he possessed neither a philosophical vision that might have balanced his prickly sectionalism nor a Jeffersonian confidence in the ultimate good sense of the people.

Davis’ great rival from the North was William Henry Seward of New York. Short, rustic, seedy compared to the fastidious Mississippian, Seward was talkative, good-natured, and gay-hearted in dealing with fellow senators. Long a close associate of Thurlow Weed in New York’s turbulent politics, he had risen rapidly: state senator at twenty-nine, governor at thirty-seven, senator ten years later. As governor he had brooked nativist wrath by pressing for public schools in which immigrant children could be instructed by teachers speaking the same language and professing the same faith. Now fifty-six, he was famous as a strong antislavery man, an excellent constitutional lawyer, and a moralist who had fluttered Washington dovecotes when he called for abolition of the slave system by gradual, compensated emancipation and appealed to a “higher law than the Constitution.” He was also viewed as rash and unsteady in judgment, prone to shift erratically between moralistic pronunciamentos and devious party politics.

Charles Sumner and Stephen Douglas were doubtless the best-known senators, but Sumner was still convalescing from Brooks’s attack in March 1857, and Douglas had been left isolated by the victory of Buchanan & Co. There were others: the aged John J. Crittenden of Kentucky; whose passion was the Union; the high-minded Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, broad-minded in outlook but rather too stubborn in detail; the majestic-looking Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, as statesmanlike in Washington as deficient in popular appeal back home; the ancient warrior Lewis Cass of Michigan; the South Carolinian radical and secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett; and a score of others of almost equal rank among the second cadre.

It was difficult, though, to find in Washington leaders who were equal to the deepening crisis—men with the power to appeal to the hearts and minds, to the fundamental wants and needs and aspirations of the people, able to apply steady moral and intellectual standards to the issues confronting them, able to combine moral earnestness and moderation of temper, able to live up to the leadership heritage of the founding fathers they constantly apotheosized. Washington as a capital city seemed unable to inspire and sustain that kind of leadership. Rather, it rewarded the political brokers and technicians on the Hill, the opportunistic bureaucrats in the agencies, the middlemen operating out of the endless enclaves and interstices in a fragmented system of government.

Washington simply preferred peace and quiet to extremism of any kind. After years of Jeffersonian and Democratic rule, the capital was a southern-oriented city, under a congressionally controlled city government under, in turn, a Democratic-controlled Congress. “The fiercer the storm blew roundabout,” Constance McLaughlin Green wrote, “the greater the quiet at the center. It was like the stillness at the eye of a hurricane.” But the storm was steadily rising, among proslavery and antislavery firebrands South and North, among ambitious, anti-extension Republican politicans in the West, and among a little republic of Southerners who had long expected and hoped that that storm would burst.

SOUTH CAROLINIANS: THE POWER ELITE

Southern fire-eaters had exulted over Preston Brooks’s assault on the “blackguard” Sumner. While the South Carolina congressman was showered with tributes and gifts, northern editors and orators raged over this “ruthless attack” on “liberty of speech” and all decency. The House of Representatives passed a resolution of censure but failed to muster the two-thirds vote needed for expulsion. Brooks resigned anyway, ran in the special election in his district, won a smashing victory, and within two months was back in his old seat.

Brooks’s vindication surprised few Southerners. South Carolina had long been the most militant state in the South, the quickest to defend its honor, the proudest of its civilization, the spearhead for southern nationalism and romanticism. Brooks represented the district that had sent John Calhoun to Congress forty-six years before. Some Carolinians frowned on Brooks’s resort to violence; some of them wondered whether the congressman represented the Carolina they knew and loved.

That state defied the northern stereotype of it as merely a land of cotton plantations and slave drivers. Smaller than New York or Pennsylvania in area, South Carolina was at least as diverse physically. The most distinct section was the low country along the Atlantic, with its flatlands, placid rivers, endless tidal swamps, and sea islands strung along the coast. Thick growths of palmetto and cypress and gum, live oaks reaching out for sun and air, tangles of dangling vines and creepers, cascades of gray moss, all combined with stagnant pools and deep muck and bulbous cypress stumps to give the lowlands an air of haunting, mysterious, and ominous beauty. Fifty miles or so inland began the “middle country” of pine trees and freshwater swamps, a belt that slowly changed into a region of longleaf pine, sand hills, and a light sandy loam that made excellent cotton land. About the center of the state stretched the fall line, northwest of which lay the upland country of rolling prairies, steep hills, and rugged mountains.

South Carolinians and their economy were as variegated as their scenery. Up-country people, an independent lot who felt well removed from the coastal nabobs, raised fruit, small grains, horses and cattle, and whatever else was manageable and profitable in their valleys and hollows. In broad reaches of the piedmont region, onetime yeomen had turned to cotton, following the bonanza resulting from Eli Whitney’s gin. Typically owning few if any slaves, the piedmonters specialized in short-staple cotton. Some of these farmers, however, were entrepreneurs who had invested heavily in slaves in order to capitalize on the cotton boom. Their dreams and aspirations turned toward the coast, where the great rice and cotton plantations lay. The lowland planters specialized in fine luxury cotton, grown and harvested by gangs of slaves. Despite northern images of South Carolina as simply a cotton kingdom, many planters made their fortunes out of rice, which grew abundantly in those tidal swamps.

South Carolina’s social pyramid consisted largely of a planter elite; a fringe of merchants, doctors, lawyers, and other upper-middle-class professionals; piedmont farmers and upland yeomanry; white mechanics, clerks, overseers, and others; free blacks; and a slave caste divided between household servants and field hands. Its social dynamics lay at the top and the bottom of this pyramid. The cotton planters along the coast and the rice planters along the rivers made up a genuine social, economic, and political elite that almost lived up to the Yankee caricature of it. Aping the airs and refinement of the English squirearchy, the rich planters, in William Freehling’s portrait of them, smoked the best Spanish cigars and drank the choicest brandies and Madeira, hunted with hound and horn, frequented horse races and cockfights, and mixed with one another in ballrooms and drawing rooms, while their wives sang or performed on the piano, played chess, and lounged in living room or library. Comprising perhaps the most cosmopolitan group in America during the early decades of the century, the planters were well educated, having attended South Carolina College or a northern institution such as Yale or Princeton; they were well traveled, spending part of the winter in Philadelphia or New York, and summering in the mountains or in the North or in Europe; they were well read, especially in novels of chivalry and courage; and they conducted extensive correspondence among themselves and with friends in the northern states, Europe, and especially England. Many planters spent little time in their country seats, preferring to live in Charleston or points north, and most deserted their plantations entirely during the summer because of the heat and the swamp diseases.

The lives of the slaves on South Carolina plantations were much like elsewhere in the slave kingdom: organized, disciplined, hard, monotonous, occasionally benign, more often nasty, brutish, and short. But Africans in the Carolinian black belt were a special breed. After South Carolina, alone among the southern states, had allowed the reopening of the slave trade before the constitutional interdiction took effect, Yankee and southern slavers had brought in tens of thousands of blacks—so many that the slaves formed a huge work force in the rice swamps and, speaking to one another in their Gullah dialect, which was almost incomprehensible to whites, salvaged parts of their African heritage. Then too, after the Vesey conspiracy of 1822, South Carolina had been left with heightened fears and suspicions of its black population, both slave and free. But black people’s worst enemy in the swamplands was not their white masters but the malaria-carrying mosquito. One planter admitted that on his Savannah River plantation, slaves died faster than they were born.

Master and slave were locked in a forced embrace that brought out the worst qualities of each. Dependent on his bondmen for yields, many a planter left them to sicken and die in the swamps while he drank and gambled in northern and European cities. Too conscience-stricken to apply the lash himself, he left that task to his overseer. Unable either to endure their lot or to escape it, slaves resorted to devious means of coping. Frederick Law Olmsted, traveling through Marion County to the Great Pee Dee River, came across a line of slaves, mainly women, dressed in dirty gowns and pieces of blanket. As the overseer, carrying a rawhide whip, rode to one end of the line, the blacks at the other end stopped their heavy labor until the overseer returned.

“Clumsy, awkward, gross, elephantine in all their movements; pouting, grinning, and leering at us; sly, sensual, and shameless, in all their expressions and demeanor,” Olmsted wrote, adding that he had never seen anything so revolting as the whole scene.

The patriarchal planter held his family too in subjection, if a more privileged kind. Wealthy wives were ornaments placed on an artificial pedestal. Daughters were educated for a decorative and domestic role. Fathers wanted their sons to learn to be leaders and rulers, yet kept them dependent and subordinate.

Patriarchs made their house servants and even their field hands part of their “family,” to the point of conceiving mulatto children, but cotton pickers could still be literally sold down the river into the swamplands. Southern wives looked on, helpless but knowing. “Like patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines…” Mary Boykin Chesnut noted in her diary. “Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own.” Mary Chesnut had come into money from her father’s estate shortly after she was married, but it had gone to settle debts. She questioned why she should “feel like a beggar, utterly humiliated and degraded, when I am forced to say I need money.” She railed at the patriarch who posed as the “model of all human virtues” to his wife and daughters but ran a “hideous black harem.”

“You see,” she added, “Mrs. Stowe did not hit the sorest spot. She makes Legree a bachelor.”

Yet out of this patriarchal, caste-ridden, self-indulgent, elitist community had emerged one of the most cultivated and elegant societies in America. Its capital, Columbia, sitting astride the fall line over a hundred miles from the coast, was a city of handsome houses and gardens, wide, tree-lined streets, and sparkling social life. Thomas Cooper, aging but still vigorous, presided for years over the lively South Carolina College, which spread its maternal wings over the state and strengthened the ideological and political ties binding the Carolinian elite. The eminent political scientist Francis Lieber came to teach here. Small but brilliant groups of artists, scientists, architects, intellectuals, physicians thrived in the state, and many of these masters taught as well. By the mid-1850s educators had founded several women’s colleges that taught classics and not merely comportment.

Probably the most cosmopolitan people in Charleston were the East Bay merchants in the great export and import houses in the Cooper River docks area. Their traditional family and financial ties to Londoners and Parisians, New Yorkers and Philadelphians, their close links to planters needing goods and loans, their involvement in the system of elite power, enabled the merchants to serve as moderating and mediating influences among the powerful forces long building up in the Carolinian lowlands.

Charleston, Carolinians liked to say, was the Athens of America, and the boast was not wholly idle. Here at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers flourished an active press, the stimulating Southern Review, the respectable Literary and Philosophical Society, the Apprentices’ Association with its 10,000-volume library and lectures in science, about twenty-five churches, a bank, a theater, and a noted medical college. Here also were a slave auction house, jail with flogging block and treadmill, almshouse, orphan asylum, two arsenals, and noisome slums.

By the 1850s, however, some wondered whether the glory of Charleston and of the state lay in the past, in the eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth. Historians would differ as to just when the state seemed to mutate from the moderate and cosmopolitan community of old to the most bellicose, separatist, and politically homogeneous in the South, but the nullification crisis of the early 1830s seemed to lie at the center of this sea change. Perhaps it was only accidental that such cultural adornments as the Southern Review and the Academy of Fine Arts died during this crisis. The fact that many Carolinians were willing separately to take on General Jackson’s armies over the issue of the tariff seemingly a mere matter of dollars and cents—reflected the depth and intensity of the feeling. The tariff was not the real issue, of course; the South feared that national majorities could be turned against slavery, that northern firebrands might incite slave revolts. Ten years earlier, South Carolinians had exorcised from their midst Denmark Vesey and thirty-four other blacks by hanging them for planning a revolt that never took place; years later they could not exorcise the great fear that still perturbed them.

The bonds that would snap between North and South a quarter century later were already fraying between Carolinians and other Americans. Calhoun’s resignation as Jackson’s Vice-President, Hayne’s resignation as United States senator and selection as governor, and Calhoun’s election to replace him in the Senate marked the turning away of these men from national to sectional leadership. In South Carolina the nullifiers now were top dogs. Seeking always to strengthen Carolinian solidarity in the face of external threats, nullifier leaders almost put through a test oath that would require all state officers to swear primary allegiance to a sovereign South Carolina. Any possible ties between Carolina slaves and the North were attacked by laws that forbade slaves to learn to read and write and that taxed out of existence peddlers who might traffic in tempting ideas as well as goods. Thus the planter elites tried to suppress criticism and choke off opposition.

The leadership now governing South Carolina was as powerful and unified as any the nation had seen for half a century. Its power and unity flowed from a political system that reflected an ideological solidarity so strong as to render most questions merely tactical disputes over how best to carry out an agreed-on strategy. The Carolinian structure of government was remarkable in a nation that worshipped the checks and balances. An almost omnipotent legislature selected the governor for a two-year term, at the end of which the incumbent was ineligible for re-election. The legislature chose other key state officers and court clerks, as well as local officials. The governor lacked the power of veto. This centralization of power in legislative elites might not have been unusual if the legislators operated in a competitive two-party system, or at least could expect to face opposition, but such was not the case. The absence of a statewide-gubernatorial election that might stimulate grass-roots participation and unity, a doctrine of “virtual representation” that gave legislators wide leeway, the absence of a strong and continuing opposition party, the fear of any opposition at a time when Carolinians were mobilized against external and internal threats, the weakness of local government and voluntary associations, the partial diking off of state from national politics—all these intended and accidental factors drew South Carolina away from the mainstream of national competitive politics, immensely fortified the power of the slaveholding elites, and emasculated the old Unionist opposition.

Mightily sustaining the Carolinian power elites, and mightily sustained by them, was an ideology—a set of lenses through which the elites perceived the world, a system of doctrines by which they understood it, a hierarchy of values by which they measured it. South Carolinians needed such an ideology, a guide to political action and policy decision, and a way of rationalizing and justifying action taken. Under the intellectual leadership of John Calhoun, the Carolinians and Southerners allied with them shaped perhaps the single most potent ideology to appear in the nation since its founding—but an ideology so flawed at its very heart as to betray those who embraced it.

When Calhoun responded to President Jackson’s famous toast, “Our Federal Union—it must be preserved, ” with his own counter-toast, “The Union—next to our liberty the most dear,” the South Carolinian was expressing the central value of his ideology. From Jeffersonian roots Calhoun had drawn a relatively generous and expansive concept of this supreme value. To him liberty was the goal because, in Charles Wiltse’s words, “it was the liberty of the individual to seek his own betterment, to develop his own talents and skills, to realize his own fullest potentialities, that led to every advance in civilization and thereby improved the condition of the whole society.” While this was a highly individualistic theory of liberty, it flowed powerfully from the historic defense of the rights of man against authority as expressed in the English, American, and French revolutions.

Carolinians warmly embraced Calhoun’s idea of an elaborate mechanism to keep government off the back of the citizen—not only states’ rights in general but state nullification of abhorrent federal law, not only the traditional checks and balances but the requirement of a “concurrent majority”—that is, agreement of all major sections and interests—in order for the federal government to act. Calhoun wanted two Presidents, representing two major sections of the country and each having an absolute veto over the other. Calhoun’s was almost a caricature of the old notion of checks on government officials to stop them from interfering with individual liberty; once again the questions of checks against private abuse of individual liberty, and of the ready availability of “government by the people” to curb arbitrary use of private power, were left by the wayside, enveloped in a fog of theory.

The more, however, that Carolinians apotheosized liberty as individual opportunity, as defense against oppression, as the “unalienable right” written into the Declaration of Independence and signed by eminent Carolinians, the more they faced a flagrant political and intellectual contradiction—the subordination of women and especially of blacks in a caste society. Immensely sharpening this dilemma was the emphasis that Calhoun and others placed on the constant threat to liberty of excessive power, the tendency of those holding power to abuse it, the need to balance power with power. Where was the balancing power of slaves? For a century Carolinians had had to confront the taunting cry from the North: how could slaveholders talk about liberty?

It would take men of great intellectual power and resourcefulness to resolve this dilemma, and such men South Carolina had in abundance in the antebellum period. Calhoun had deposited his intellectual legacy with a group of thinkers who were at least as uncompromising as he and who criticized him, indeed, mainly for his expedient concessions to the North when he was seeking the presidency. There was William Gilmore Simms, a big, proud man with a bluff manner and slyly sarcastic tongue, shunned by the Charleston elite even after he “married into a good name.” There was Edmund Ruffin, an archetypal Yankee-hater, a Virginia-born and -raised agriculturalist who served for a time as agricultural surveyor for South Carolina. There was James Henry Hammond, well wed to a woman who brought him a plantation of 7,500 acres and 148 slaves, a onetime fire-eater who called slavery “the cornerstone of our Republican edifice.” An able politician and longtime champion of nullification and secession, Hammond started as the editor of a paper in Columbia, where he challenged one critic to a duel and horsewhipped another, and once advocated the death penalty for abolitionists. These men and other Carolinians, like Thomas Cooper, in intellectual communion with writers in other states, such as George Fitzhugh and Nathaniel Beverly Tucker of Virginia and William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, wrenched the concept of liberty out of its old moral foundations to make it serve new political purposes.

Thus, where Calhoun contended that people were not all “equally entitled to liberty” but had to earn it, Simms added that liberty was “not intended to disturb the natural degrees of humanity,” but was served only when a man was “suffered to occupy his proper place.” Where Calhoun warned that liberty should not be overextended to those not yet ready for it, Simms would grant only “such liberty as becomes one’s moral condition.” Slavery was a benign institutionalization of natural inequality. Liberty was often defined simply as states’ rights, in the Calhoun tradition, but this old doctrine too was flawed. If South Carolina demanded her freedom from national governmental control on the ground that she knew best how to govern her affairs, should not South Carolinians in their localities be guaranteed their liberty against state control—and how could that proposition be defended when the South Carolina legislature had almost total power over local officials?

There was a much simpler way to overcome the intellectual dilemma over liberty than reinterpreting and narrowing and trivializing it—to repudiate the concept entirely and with it the essence of Jeffersonian moral philosophy. “Liberty and equality are not only destructive to the morals,” said George Fitzhugh, “but to the happiness of society.” So much for the Declaration of Independence. Slavery, contended Albert Taylor Bledsoe, another non-Carolinian, was in effect liberty: “By the institution of slavery for the blacks, license is shut out, and liberty is introduced.…” It was even simpler to dispose of that dangerous concept of Mr. Jefferson’s that “all men are created equal.” Hammond simply denied it.

Whatever their attitude toward liberty in theory, Carolinians and other Southerners were unquestionably ready to abrogate it in fact. By the 1850s every southern state save Kentucky had passed laws limiting freedom of speech, press, and discussion. Hammond recommended “one way” to silence talk of abolition: “Terror—Death…” Even in Kentucky, Cassius Clay’s antislavery True American was suppressed by other means, as a mob dismantled his presses and sent them to Cincinnati: Most southern editors applauded this clamp-down on their fellow journalists. The failure of the press to challenge the proslavery litany reflected—aside from the ever-present threat of the duel—a failure of the southern imagination to see alternative possibilities for its society.

The dragnet covered even the universities. When in Chapel Hill a chemistry professor remarked that he would vote for the 1856 Republican ticket if it should be run in North Carolina, there was a public uproar. The Raleigh Standard called for his ilk to be “silenced or…be driven out,” students burned him in effigy, and he was hounded out of the university. The silencing of any independent critical voice, the absence of any of the “isms” sweeping the North, and the tendency of southern schools to become institutions of propaganda constituted crucial ways, in Clement Eaton’s words, in which the “Southern people set up an intellectual blockade, a cordon sanitaire.”

By the time that slavery boiled up again as a national issue in the mid-1850s, the intellectual effort to reconcile slavery and liberty had become so extremist and even gymnastic that a simple and straightforward defense of slavery seemed more useful to southern elites. This defense took many forms. Some arguments for slavery were essentially debating points: that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible; that the founding fathers had owned slaves; that most of the abuse of blacks took place in southern cities, at the hands of owners who had never before had slaves. Other proslavery arguments were essentially biological: black men were, innately inferior and even helpless, and needed white masters to look out for them. In a famous address to the United States Senate in 1858, Hammond argued that all societies required a “mud-sill” class of laborers and that Negroes were born inferior, while another Carolinian, William Henry Trescot, held that they were unfit to be educated. Still other arguments were philosophical: that the slaves were part of a “bygone pastoral Arcadia,” in David Donald’s words, that “had formerly flourished in the South before it was undermined by the commercialization of urban life on the one hand and by the increasing democratization and decentralization of the frontier on the other.” Could not agrarian community and hierarchy and order be saved?

By far the most telling southern argument, however, was not the defense of slavery, but the attack on northern capitalism as a system of “wage slavery” far less just and humane than black slavery. Better to be a slave at the mercy of a master who must take responsibility for him, wrote “a Carolinian,” than a wage worker subject to “no tyrant but the hard laws of demand and supply, stern and unchangeable.” Southern writers triumphantly contrasted the slave cared for by his master in illness and old age, in hard times and good, with the wage slave abandoned by his employer on a minute’s notice. As usual, Fitzhugh put the point the most tellingly, in his aptly titled tract Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters. Everywhere, he said, the strong took advantage of the weak—hence cannibals all—but the South had long recognized this and made provision for protecting the slave, while the North extracted full value from the worker and then tossed him into the ashcan. Capitalism, in short, was white slavery.

Candid Carolinians knew, however, that masters did not always provide for their bondspeople, as when planters for months left slaves to the mercy of overseers and malaria, or provided poor food or shelter, or sold off rebellious or inefficient field hands. Candid capitalists of the North knew that the “white slavers” were often as unjust as southern polemicists claimed. Behind the lofty pretensions of each lay an ignoble defense of the elite monopolization of property and profits. The tragedy of South Carolina was that, despite its possession of the finest intellects of the South, the defense of slavery was shallow and self-interested. The tragedy of the North was that it was too vulnerable to southern charges of “wage slavery” to be able to mount a respectable defense. The tragedy of both North and South was that neither fully engaged with the other, neither treated the value of liberty analytically and multidimensionally, and neither linked it to equality and other principles in a well-considered hierarchy of values. Where a war of words was so inadequate, a war of weapons would seem likely to follow.

THE GRAND DEBATES

“Oyez! Oyez!” intoned the court crier as the Supreme Court justices, gathering their black robes around them, seated themselves behind their long bench. It was the same cry that had opened the court session for Marbury v. Madison a half century before, and all the sessions since; the high court still met in a drab, ground-level basement room beneath the Senate chamber; and the Chief Justice was about to render a decision as portentous and controversial as Marbury. Otherwise things were different. It was March 6, 1857, two days after Buchanan’s inaugural. The court had grown from five members to nine. The case involved not a white clerk named Marbury, but a black slave called Dred Scott. And the court was about to invalidate not a minor procedural act of Congress, as in Marbury, but one of its towering achievements—the Missouri Compromise restriction on slavery.

The faces of the men behind the bench would have delighted Dickens: Taney’s deeply seamed countenance of parchment yellow, set among shaggy eyebrows and graying locks, highlighted by large, world-weary eyes; the stern and swarthy visage of Virginia’s apoplectic Peter V. Daniel; the genial and philosophical expression of John A. Campbell of Alabama; the dour, ruddy face of Robert C. Grier of Pennsylvania; the aristocratic features of the youthful Benjamin R. Curtis. Emerging out of the rough-and-tumble of American law and politics, the justices were mainly a collection of able, experienced mediocrities, notable more for their party and sectional background than their intellects. Flanking Taney were party men—six other Democrats, one Republican, and one Whig. Flanking him were sectional men—four other judges from slaveholding states, two men from the middle states, and one from Massachusetts. The last was the Whig Curtis, the ablest intellect among the associate justices. Dominating the scene and the court—was Taney, born of the Maryland planting gentry, appointed Chief Justice by Jackson after the fight against the national bank, a devout Catholic who had long since freed his own slaves. Taney had proved to be the perfect heir to the Jeffersonian states’ rights tradition, guiding the court away from the nationalist direction it had taken under Marshall’s leadership.

Holding papers in his thin, tremulous fingers, Taney briefly reported the facts of the case. Behind his flat recitation lay a small human drama. No one, not Dred Scott himself, knew when and where he was born—probably in Virginia, probably around the turn of the century. Short, dark, uneducated and illiterate, he had been picked up, used, and moved around by white people according to their convenience: raised by a family in St. Louis, purchased by an army surgeon, John Emerson, taken to Rock Island, Illinois, when Emerson reported for duty there, removed to Wisconsin Territory, married to a slave woman named Harriet, then taken back to Missouri by the surgeon. When Emerson died, he bequeathed his slave to his wife and daughter. Then something stirred in Dred Scott; evidently he tried to buy his freedom and failed. His original owners sued Mrs. Emerson for Scott’s freedom, on the ground that his earlier residence in Illinois and Wisconsin Territory—free soil—had made him free. That was the crucial issue that had brought the case to the high court, an issue that transcended slave and owner; as the case gained in importance, prestigious legal talent was enlisted on both sides.

Though his voice weakened and almost faded away, Taney went on for over two hours, but long before he ended proslavery people in the courtroom were exultant, and free-soil men indignant. Even while other justices were concurring and dissenting the next day, northern newspapers were headlining the essential results: SLAVERY ALONE NATIONAL—THE MISSOURI

COMPROMISE UNCONSTITUTIONAL—NEGROES CANNOT BE CITIZENS—THE TRIUMPH OF SLAVERY COMPLETE. The decision was infinitely complicated, but three results stood out: Dred Scott was still a slave (he was soon manumitted, lived a year, and died of consumption); no black person could be a United States citizen under the Constitution of 1787; and Congress had no power to bar slavery in federal territories and hence the Missouri Compromise restriction was unconstitutional.

A storm of protest swept through the northern press and pulpits. The decision, said the New York Tribune, carried as much moral weight as “the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington barroom.” Pointing to the Democratic court, the Democratic Administration, and the Democratic House and Senate, the protesters smelled a plot. Had not Buchanan and Taney held a whispered conversation during a pause in the inaugural ceremonies? Were not the President and at least two of the associate justices as thick as thieves? And had not Buchanan said in his Inaugural Address that he understood the Supreme Court would soon rule on the issue of slavery in the territories, adding piously, “To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be”? The hypocrite! He knew right then how the court would rule. So the protesters charged—and this time their conspiracy theory was justified. Two members of the court—and possibly Taney himself—had indeed given the President ample information in advance about the nature and timing of the decision.

Buchanan had done more: he had helped Taney “mass the court.” The southern members of the court wanted to strike a mortal blow at the Missouri Compromise—but they feared that the blow would not be mortal if only the five southern members inflicted it. There must be six. The President urged his fellow Pennsylvanian Grier to join in a strong decision, and Grier did so. He wrote the President that he would try to persuade the three other justices also to back a strong position.

A broad position it turned out to be—so broad and strong and sweeping as to alter central currents of American history. As a legislative decision it recast the law of the land affecting both enslaved blacks and free. As a political decision it upset the delicate balance between North and South, exacerbated antagonism between proslavery and antislavery Democrats, and destroyed that superb device of compromise, squatter sovereignty, that had allowed politicians to evade the moral dilemma of slavery by condemning it while prating about states’ rights or local popular authority. As a judicial decision, it was prospectively even more important, for the court now had struck down a major law enacted by the coequal legislative branch and endorsed by the coequal executive branch. The court’s power to invalidate state legislation that it deemed unconstitutional, as in Gibbons v. Ogden, and to protect its own internal arrangements and integrity, had long been accepted. Now it was invading the federal lawmaking domain reserved, under democratic theory, to the elected politicians of House, Senate, and White House.

Why, observers wondered, had the court inserted itself into the political storm whirling around slavery? In part because the cautious legislative and executive politicians had left a vacuum that some force was bound to fill. But mainly because the Southerners wanted to surround and control that whirlwind. The thrust of the Dred Scott decision did not result from chance or gradualism. Behind Taney’s penetrating, closely reasoned decision lay a deep rage against the antislavery men, a rage welling out of Taney’s roots in the tobacco lands of Maryland, out of his Jacksonian heritage, out of his distaste for northern capitalism and the hypocritical reformers it seemed to breed. The pressures in him, if not on him, were southern pressures. He wanted this sweeping decision—and so did the four other Southerners and the one “dough face” on the court.

What the Northerners were now witnessing was southern power massed in the federal government. Numerically Democrats controlled the Supreme Court, the House, the Senate, as well as the presidency and the Cabinet. Concentrated within those Democratic majorities was a southern plurality, organized, purposeful, disciplined. If there was no southern “conspiracy” in the polemical meaning, there was a group of men living and working and conferring together who cut across the formal lines separating executive and judiciary and legislature. Just as a power elite now controlled South Carolina politics, so a wider power elite dominated the federal system.

This was no simple conflict between North and South; many Southerners opposed the extension of slavery and some even slavery itself, and many Northerners hated the black man, cared little about slavery, or at least were willing to leave it in its place. It was a conflict of philosophies, parties, and policies. Dred Scott was ultimately far more than a legal decision; it was an intellectual statement, a party manifesto, a policy paper, with all the tendentious reasoning, legal error, and opinionated argument found in such documents. It was one of a series of grand debates, in Congress, in the courts, in the press, and on the stump. And ultimately it must be answered less by legal than by intellectual and political power—it must be answered by opposition leadership.

It is not given to more than a few voyagers in the stream of history to influence its basic direction. The flow of events, moving within the embankments set by geology, biology, and climate, now hurries along, now placidly twists and winds its way, through numerous channels, ultimately debouching into some broad and distant water. Destroying old landmarks, shaping new ones, the stream of history engulfs most people who stand in its way but raises some to its surface. Of these a few will breast the current and perhaps divert or even transform it, but a far greater number will seek only to survive, through agility, ingenuity, and luck.

James Buchanan stood on the crest of events when he entered the White House; the question for him was whether he would become a maker of history or a victim of it. He possessed the ingredients of power: the executive and foreign-policy authority of the presidency, a large pool of patronage jobs, power to appoint Supreme Court and other federal judges as well as cabinet members and other high officials, influence over legislation mainly through his party leadership, the visibility and prestige of the White House. What he lacked was the capacity to be both principled and propitiatory, both consistent and conciliatory, at the appropriate time for each. He strongly hoped, Edward Everett wrote the President-elect, that he could “give the country a vigorous and conciliatory administration to check the present centrifugal tendencies.” But Buchanan was not strong enough to contain the whirlwind. He dealt with slavery by evading it, in London, in his campaign, in his Inaugural Address.

But the issue of slavery could no longer be evaded. In Kansas the crisis would not simmer down. Ensconced in their rival “capitals,” proslavery and antislavery Kansans eyed one another belligerently and boycotted each other’s elections while the nation watched with excitement. Knowing that they were in the minority, the proslavery forces planned to hold a constitutional convention, rigged to overrepresent their side, that would protect slavery under the fundamental law. Held in Lecompton in the fall of 1857, this convention, recognizing that such a constitution would be defeated in a properly conducted popular vote, proposed to withhold the charter from the people and submit to them a special article that guaranteed the right of property in slaves. Even if the special article should be rejected, the right to hold property in slaves already in the territory would be protected. The proposition, a Kansan said, was “Vote to take this arsenic with bread and butter, or without bread and butter.”

Once again the Free Soilers erupted in indignation. “The Great Swindle,” thundered the Emporia Kansas News.

What would Buchanan do? He had sent to Kansas a governor, Robert J. Walker, who promised that any constitution adopted by a constitutional convention would have to be submitted to Kansans for a fair vote. Now he was in a box. He knew that by supporting Lecompton he would probably break his party into pieces. Yet southern ultras were demanding that the entire constitution be sent direct to Washington, where the Democratic Congress would legislate it and the Democratic President sign it. Most of the southern leadership, including Southerners in Buchanan’s own Cabinet, supported the Lecompton forces. Buchanan was dependent on southern support politically; of his 174 electoral votes in 1856, 112 had come from the South. He would need southern support if he ran again in 1860; he would need southern support in the Democratic convention, with its two-thirds rule; he would continue to need southern support to get his bills through Congress. And beyond all these practical concerns was his fear that the South would secede if it lost the game in Kansas—already proslavery firebrands were making threats. Yielding to this massed southern power, the President publicly endorsed the Lecompton plan.

Stephen Douglas was in a terrible dilemma. His political ambitions too depended on southern favor. Still aspiring to the presidency, he might—with backing from his southern friends—head off Buchanan for the Democratic nomination in 1860. But he was also the celebrated spokesman for “squatter sovereignty,” and now he waited only to know whether his doctrine had been violated. “The only question,” he wrote a friend, “is whether the constitution formed at Lecompton is the act & will…of a small minority, who have attempted to cheat & defraud the majority by trickery & juggling.” As chairman of the Committee on Territories, Douglas received constant intelligence from Kansas, and he did not have long to wait to learn the truth. The Lecompton plan, he decided, was a fraud, a mockery. He could not sanction it without “repudiating all the acts of my life.” But to attack Lecompton now, he knew, would break his ties with the President and with the South, lead to his being cast out of the Democratic party leadership, and jeopardize his committee chairmanship in the Senate. Returning to Washington, he hurried to the White House. A stiff confrontation followed.

“Mr. Douglas,” said Buchanan as the talk came to an end, “I desire you to remember that no Democrat ever yet differed from the Administration of his own choice without being crushed.…”

“Mr. President,” replied Douglas, “I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead, sir.”

The clerk had barely completed reading the President’s annual message to Congress, on December 8, 1857, when Douglas was on his feet to express his total dissent on the Lecompton issue. In his major address a day later the Illinois senator spoke once again for popular sovereignty. “I have spent too much strength and breath, and health, too, to establish this great principle in the popular heart, now to see it frittered away.” The packed gallery and lobby broke into a tumult as he concluded, “If this constitution is to be forced down our throats, in violation of the fundamental principle of free government, under a mode of submission that is a mockery and an insult, I will resist it to the last.”

Suddenly the Little Giant did not look so small to his old Republican and Unionist foes. A courtship followed, as Republican members of Congress called on Douglas and discussed common efforts against Lecompton. Horace Greeley visited him too, and speculation arose that more must have been discussed than parliamentary tactics. Would Douglas join the Republicans? Or could he persuade Republicans and old-time Whigs to swing over to his cause? In severing his ties with southern ultras, Douglas had bolstered his position as leader of the northern Democrats. While the southern junta laid plans to help defeat him in his Senate re-election race and to strip him of his chairmanship of the Committee on Territories, eastern Republicans talked openly of backing Douglas in his Senate race in 1858 and for the presidency in 1860.

These reports galvanized the Illinois Republicans into action. From Herndon in Springfield, Greeley in New York received an indignant letter. Was Greeley backing Douglas? Was he going to “sell us out” in Illinois “without our consent to accomplish some national political purpose”? Greeley should not raise Douglas over the heads of long-term and well-tried Republicans, who had never flinched. “We want the man that we want; and it is not for N. York—Seward—Mass—Banks or any other state or man” to tell Illinois Republicans whom they should have. “We want to be our own masters.”

It was a critical moment for Lincoln. Greeley’s Tribune was influential in Illinois, with a circulation rapidly heading toward 20,000 in that state alone. Stealing Douglas from the Democracy, Lincoln knew, was a tempting thought for Illinois Republicans. It was a critical moment for Illinois Republicans too, and it was they—the “third cadre” of grass-roots activists—who now took leadership. By mid-1858 the rank-and-file leaders had come to like and esteem the tall, humorous, sad, tolerant, thoughtful man from Springfield. They liked him also because by now he had firmly embraced the Republican party, not merely the antislavery movement. With Lincoln’s encouragement, but without his active leadership, Republicans meeting in scores of county conventions spontaneously called for him to be chosen to run against Douglas at the party’s state convention to be held in Springfield. There was no precedent for using a state party convention to nominate a candidate for United States senator, but the Illinois Republicans, in a burst of political creativity, did that on June 16, 1858, by designating Lincoln the party’s “first, last, and only choice” for senator.

“I want to see ‘old gentleman Greely’s’ notice of our Republican Convention,” Herndon wrote. “—I itch—I burn, to see what he says….” The Illinois Republicans had happily defied the patronizing and meddlesome eastern press that was trying to sacrifice them to its national coalition building. The men of Illinois had done much more. They had launched Lincoln on his national career; they had turned a shank of history; and they had set the stage for the most significant debate—and the most remarkable public intellectual encounter—in American history.

Lincoln moved to the attack within a few hours of his nomination by acclamation at the state convention. The 1,500 delegates adjourned for supper, then reconvened in the stifling Representatives Hall. Some in the perspiring crowd urged him to move the meeting out to the front steps, but Lincoln persuaded them to stay inside because his voice was not in the best condition to reach a crowd outside. This night he wanted to be heard. He had long been shaping this speech in his mind, working over its phrases, and he had even rehearsed it the previous night before Herndon and other friends, only to be told that it was too radical, too incendiary.

Now he stood before the delegates, a gangling figure in frock coat, bow tie, rumpled vest and trousers. He wasted no time on pleasantries:

“If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it.”

Lincoln was reading from a manuscript with underlined key words.

“We are now far into the fifth year, since a policy was initiated, with the avowed object, and confident promise, of putting an end to slavery agitation.” All recognized the reference to the Kansas-Nebraska act.

“Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only, not ceased, but has constantly augmented.

“In my opinion, it will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.

“‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’

“I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

“I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

“It will become all one thing, or all the other.…”

Free or slave. All one thing or all another. Suddenly this moderate, prudent man had started talking like an abolitionist. But Lincoln knew precisely what he was about. Intensely worried by the Republican flirtation with Douglas, he would destroy the middle ground on which Douglas was standing and indict the senator as part of a grand conspiracy to spread slavery throughout the nation. Lincoln’s purpose emerged in his very next sentence:

“Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South. ”

Lincoln spelled out the conspiracy he was alleging. With the repeal of the Missouri Compromise via the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the endorsement of that repeal by the Supreme Court, and the endorsement of the endorsement by President Buchanan, the plots, said Lincoln, lacked only “another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits.” Was it absolutely certain that Douglas and Pierce, Taney and Buchanan, had acted by “preconcert”? Well, said Lincoln, “when we see a lot of framed timbers” perfectly put together “by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance,” it was hard to believe that the four had not worked on a common plan “before the first lick was struck.”

Having centered his convention attack on Douglas and played down his own position, Lincoln kept on the offensive. To Douglas’ vast irritation, he continued to dog the senator’s footsteps, attend his speeches, and announce to Douglas’ throngs that a rebuttal would follow later in the day. Late in July, hoping to share a platform with Douglas rather than following him, Lincoln challenged Douglas to more than fifty debates in all the places—at least fifty—Douglas was scheduled to appear. Ready for combat but unwilling to share so many audiences with Lincoln, Douglas proposed they debate at a central point in each congressional district in the state, save for Springfield and Chicago, where each had already spoken. That would mean seven debates—in Ottawa, Freeport, Galesburg, Quincy, Jonesboro, Charleston, and Alton. Lincoln accepted.

The debates that followed were grand theater. They were also a striking display of political craftsmanship on both sides; and they represented the intellectual climax of the grand debates over slavery that had been echoing throughout the land for decades.

Douglas supplied most of the theater. Merely traveling from town to town, the senator was a sight to see. When he arrived back in Chicago from Washington, artillery roared a 150-gun salute; banners hung from windows and over the streets; flags fluttered on ships and buildings. When he journeyed down to Springfield, a flatcar on his special train carried a twelve-pound cannon that continually boomed out across the prairie. Rockets and fireworks climaxed his evening speeches. The intensive railroad building in Illinois was already affecting campaigning; Douglas could rest or receive delegations in his ornate private car between speeches, and regular and special trains brought listeners by the thousands.

Still, the pastoral folk memory of the debates was valid too—the memory of farmers arriving in buckboards, buggies, carriages, and carts, of roads so enveloped in dust as to resemble great smokehouses, of farmers in overalls and their wives in hoop skirts and young mothers with babies at their breasts standing in the burning sun for two or three hours. With his homespun face, hollowed cheeks, and tangled hair, Lincoln looked more like the hired hand in Sunday garb than the wealthy attorney that he was; Douglas, with his shiny black hair, shiny top hat, shiny black vest, and shiny black footwear, appeared every inch the city man, traveled and worldly. Each respected the oratorical prowess of his adversary. Douglas was all force, pacing up and down the platform, tossing his huge head and locks, blasting out cannonades of questions and accusations. Lincoln was supple, sinewy, tenacious. Douglas himself took the best measure of his opponent, when informed of Lincoln’s nomination:

“I shall have my hands full. He is the strong man of his party—full of wit, facts, dates—and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd, and if I beat him my victory will be hardly won.”

Like master chess players, each man tried to put the other on the defensive. In the first debate, in Ottawa, Douglas posed seven questions for Lincoln, centering mainly on the question of race. Here Douglas felt on safe ground, given the anti-Negro attitudes so widespread in the state. “I do not question Mr. Lincoln’s conscientious belief that the negro was made his equal, and hence is his brother, but for my own part, I do not regard the negro as my equal, and positively deny that he is my brother or any kin to me whatever.” Douglas’ belief in the innate inferiority of blacks was the key to his entire approach to slavery. It enabled him to consider the issue a matter of local preference, of popular sovereignty. To soothe the troubled consciences of Illinois free-soil sympathizers, who were expanding in numbers, the senator argued that popular sovereignty would keep slavery out of the territories, since slavery had already reached its natural limits and would not thrive where the soil and climate were inhospitable.

“Diversity, dissimilarity, variety in all our local and domestic institutions,” Douglas said, “is the great safeguard of our liberties.” Lincoln’s statement that the nation could not endure half slave and half free, said Douglas, would lead to a war of sections. “Why should the slavery agitation be kept up?” It only gave Republican politicians a hobbyhorse on which to ride into office.

Douglas’ exploitation of the race issue put Lincoln on the defensive. He made clear he was not talking about full Negro equality, but of the rights guaranteed all people by the Declaration of Independence. Blacks were equal in the “right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” in rights that extended beyond mere liberation from slavery, but they did not extend to full social and political equality. Lincoln made clear his opposition to intermarriage of blacks and whites, to blacks serving on juries, to blacks holding office or becoming citizens or voting in elections. Lincoln sought to keep Douglas on the defensive by pressing his accusation of a conspiracy to legalize slavery in every state in the Union. He charged Douglas with holding a “care not” position on slavery and of seeking to lull Northerners into moral indifference. Douglas indignantly denied the conspiracy charge.

And so the debates continued, lengthy, repetitious, with the audience chiming in with cheers, laughter, sharp comments, advice, cries of “good, good,” “we stand by that,” “you have him,” “that’s right,” all duly noted down by the reporters. “Put on your specs,” someone called out to Lincoln, who promptly obliged. The audience, indeed, was a vital part of the debates, responding, falling silent, audibly disapproving or doubting. A legend would grow that Lincoln vanquished his opponent, but each man really held his own. At one point Republican backers urged Lincoln to be more aggressive, and other orators were mobilized to assault Douglas. But as the debates proceeded, as charges were made and rebutted and specific questions raised and answered, the debates took on a broader moral and intellectual dimension, and here Lincoln emerged the superior leader, though a perplexed and flawed one.

Lincoln moved to a philosophical level in the debates in part because he was frustrated on the political. Douglas’ doctrine of popular sovereignty was simply too tough to handle. That doctrine made it all too easy for the senator to label blacks inferior and at the same time express his dislike of slavery, but in the next breath to say, what did it matter?—the question should be left to the people in the states and territories, and it was none of his business how they decided. On this issue Douglas had been absolutely, indeed heroically, consistent, especially after Dred Scott, as his break with the Administration proved. His was a virtually unassailable position. Who could object to popular sovereignty? Even Republicans like Greeley—to Lincoln’s acute political discomfiture—had to admit the force of this old Jeffersonian, Republican, states’ rights doctrine.

“Has Douglas the exclusive right, in this country, of being on all sides of all questions?” Lincoln demanded amid great laughter. Was he “to have an entire monopoly on that subject?”

Frustrated, Lincoln found it politically necessary to “rise above politics” to the philosophical level of good and evil, to the moral level of right and wrong. “The real issue in this controversy—the one pressing upon every mind—is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong.” The Republican party, he said, took the first position. “It is the sentiment around which all their actions—all their arguments circle—from which all their propositions radiate. They look upon it as being a moral, social and political wrong….”

Strong words. But the more Lincoln took this high ethical plane, the more he became trapped in a political and moral dilemma. Political, because he was seeking to hold a centrist position in the Republican party, because he was a constitutionalist who did not want to move outside the document bequeathed by the founding fathers, because he was a “process” Republican as well as a “principle” Republican. That is why in the very next words after the moral bugle call he had just sounded about “political wrong”—indeed, separated in the official transcript only by a semicolon—he went on: “…and while they contemplate it as such, they nevertheless have due regard for its actual existence among us, and the difficulties of getting rid of it in any satisfactory way and to all the constitutional obligations thrown about it.…” So what was the Republican party solution? “To make provision that it shall grow no larger. ”

And here lay Lincoln’s moral dilemma. If slavery was so evil, what about the millions of enslaved who would be left alone in their degradation? If, as Lincoln implied, slavery might not be extirpated under his policy of gradualism for another hundred years, what about the tens of millions of bondmen who would be trapped on southern plantations while the rest of the civilized world emancipated serfs and slaves? Lincoln believed in individual effort and growth, in room for talent—what about the potential for growth and creativity crushed in the minds and bodies of millions of persons who would otherwise have made the musicians and actors, the lawyers and doctors, the businessmen and politicians of the future? And what about the blacks already free, or who might be free? In the debates he saw a “physical difference between the black and white races” that would “for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” They could not intermarry or, presumably, otherwise integrate. But since Lincoln would also deny them the right of citizenship, the right to hold office, the right to vote, and the right to serve on juries, he was also denying them the political means of achieving greater liberty and equality, short of a century or so.

In effect, Lincoln would give black people economic rights, job rights, a property right in their own labor. Despite his reverence for the rights extended in the Declaration of Independence to all men—rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—he would narrow them in the case of blacks. “I agree with Judge Douglas,” he said in the Ottawa debate, that the Negro “is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. ” Great applause burst forth from this audience of farmers, just as they cheered and laughed, in a later debate, when Lincoln said, “I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife”—and proposed that, since only Illinois law could outlaw miscegenation, Judge Douglas’ fear of intermarriage could be allayed by placing him in the state legislature.

It was all very demeaning to blacks and to Lincoln himself, who must have sensed it. His defenses were that he was admittedly an ambitious man who wanted to win an election, and politics was the art of the possible; that he must work within the Constitution and the political system, which allowed only for gradualism; and that his greatest love was for the Union, in the spirit of the Framers and Webster and Clay, and that forcing the issue would disrupt the Union. Lincoln, despite his supple and leathery argumentation, did not grapple with the question that had eluded so many other leaders: what was the Union for, if not for the ideals of the Declaration of Independence? And if in the spirit of national Union liberty and equality were national values, and if slavery was a national evil that flatly contradicted these values, then there should be national action to confront the evil. But Lincoln did not propose compensated emancipation or any other national program, however difficult to accomplish, that might serve as a response worthy of the Union.

“The planting and the culture are over,” Lincoln said in a final speech, to friends back in Springfield; “and there remains but the preparation, and the harvest.” For Lincoln, the harvest was plentiful but inadequate. The Democrats won a majority of the contests for the state legislature, which could hence be expected to re-elect Douglas to the United States Senate. The Republicans, under Lincoln’s leadership, won elections for state treasurer and another statewide office, by popular vote. This did Lincoln no immediate good; once again he was a loser. But he had attracted wide attention; he had won praise as a fine debater of issues; and he had maintained his position in the dead center of the Republican party.

And if Douglas had ended as the political victor in the debates, Lincoln, with his finespun logic and his grasp of the complex relationships of ideas, institutions, and individuals, had emerged as intellectually the superior of the two. Neither emerged as a moral leader, capable of reaching into the minds and hearts of human beings, appealing to their more generous instincts, recognizing their fundamental wants and needs, and mobilizing their hopes and aspirations. Still, the American people were the real victors in this contest, for the Lincoln-Douglas debates became a model for vigorous but rational political discussion, and a treasure of the nation’s intellectual heritage.

THE POLITICS OF SLAVERY

The economic boom roared through mid-decade, fueled by foreign capital, especially British, and by $300 million worth of gold from California. The nation’s commerce, industry, and foreign trade expanded as they stimulated one another. There were booms in land, railroads, securities and commodities speculation—and in prices. When prosperity faltered a bit in 1854, the Crimean War boosted overseas orders for grains, metals, and livestock. Also fueling the boom were more than 1,300 banks, with an authorized capital of over $300 million. Trading on the New York Stock Exchange rose to a new intensity, as brokers, their arms swinging over their heads, bought and sold in their staccato lingo—“Sell ’em”—“Take ’em”—“Fifty More”—“I’ll take your lot, buyer four months”—“Done!” The boom brought the usual worries over the excesses of materialism. Moralists chided the ladies who crowded into Tiffany’s to buy diamonds, Stewart’s to buy laces, Ferrerro’s to buy bonnets, or even worse, bought imported silks and laces and wines, or, worst of all, journeyed themselves to Paris and purchased

Dresses for breakfasts, and dinners, and balls,

Dresses to sit in, and stand in, and walk in;

Dresses to dance in, and flirt in, and talk in;

Dresses in which to do nothing at all;

Dresses for Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall—

All of them different in color and shape,

Silk, muslin, and lace, velvet, satin, and crepe.

The surge in big fortunes, Emerson feared, might “upset the balance of man, and establish a new, universal Monarchy more tyrannical than Babylon or Rome.”

But not all was Babylon. While Kansas bled and business prospered, Thoreau published Walden, Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass, Longfellow Hiawatha, William H. Prescott the first volumes of his Philip II. At decade’s end, Hawthorne would bring out The Marble Faun and Emerson The Conduct of Life. The Atlantic Monthly, appearing in 1857 under the editorship of James Russell Lowell, promised to publish Emerson, Bryant, Prescott, Hawthorne, Melville, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wilkie Collins, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, and a score of other eminent authors. New York City was the book center of the country, with the big firm of Harper and Brothers issuing three million books a year; in New York State alone, books were distributed through four hundred or more booksellers or book outlets. Bibliophiles and litterateurs met at the Saturday Club in Boston, the Century Club in New York, Russell’s Bookshop in Charleston. The South no longer could boast an Edgar Allan Poe, though it was rich in storytelling. But there was little communication between southern and northern men and women of letters.

Late in 1857 a panic suddenly swept through the whole edifice of American banking and commerce. First an old flour and grain house failed; then a prestigious life insurance company tottered; soon railroads—including the huge Illinois Central—went down; securities prices collapsed; depositors flocked to their banks to find closed doors; financial houses toppled; and within weeks fear was running throughout the American money system and to bankers, merchants, and investors abroad. Much human shock and misery followed. Businessmen could not borrow money to keep going; farmers found their commodity prices dropping almost overnight; workers were laid off; established Boston families were suddenly impoverished; western merchants waited in vain for their remittances from New York and Pennsylvania. Although southern banks held up more sturdily than northern or western, much to the satisfaction of “southron” leaders, hardly a segment of the nation’s economy was left untouched.

So powerful were the forces sustaining the American economy, however—the resources, technology, enterprising workers and industrial leaders, the dependably high revenues from cotton, heavy demand from abroad, a continuing flow of gold from California—that the country had largely recovered by the summer of 1858. Still, the panic had left a residue of tension and ill feeling: farmers were angry at middlemen and eastern buyers, workers at coldhearted employers, depositors at faithless bankers. Farmers talked about laws restricting middlemen; workers in New York marched in militant processions demanding jobs; New England mill hands struck. There was little violence; the panic was too short-lived for that. Perhaps the deepest scar was left between North and South, as tobacco and cotton growers blamed the avaricious Yankee bankers, factors, and jobbers for robbing them of their profits.

Still, as prosperity returned late in 1858 and the election oratory quieted, sectional hostility seemed to soften a bit. The Kansas crisis faded away into anticlimax as Kansans finally and categorically rejected the Lecompton constitution, thus leaving themselves in territorial status. A “Southern Commercial Convention” in May 1859 urged the repeal of all laws illegalizing the foreign slave trade, but even the Buchanan administration opposed such a retrograde and extremist measure.

Then, in late October 1859, another act of violence disrupted the seeming calm. Unsatiated by his bloodletting in Kansas, John Brown had become more than ever possessed of a single fanatical vision—the liberation of the slaves. Somehow evading the “federal hounds” sent to track him down, he had moved from place to place throughout the North, raising a little money, collecting a few arms, and gathering another following. Monomaniacal, contemptuous of the cowards who fell by the way, he possessed a strange power of mesmerizing skeptics. After Boston abolitionists lionized him and Concord literati received him, he left New England scornful of all the extremist talk and, with a band that included two of his sons, ready for action.

His was a daring plan: to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, arm the slaves that would flock in from the whole area, and prepare for revolution, or at least for liberation. The seizure of the arsenal, early in the morning in the sleepy Virginia town, came easily. Then Brown and his band settled down to await the blacks. But the people who arrived in the morning were not black but white—first a half-drunken mob from the town, then some militia units, and finally federal troops under the command of Robert E. Lee. After Lee demanded unconditional surrender, and while Brown finally parleyed for safe escape, the federal troops suddenly stormed the arsenal. Brown, struck down by a Marine lieutenant, was saved only because the officer had absentmindedly brought his dress sword rather than his battle weapon. Brown’s two sons were killed in the action.

What were Brown’s true intentions? He did indeed intend to liberate the slaves; he had tried to persuade his friend, the great black leader Frederick Douglass, to come with him, but Douglass had refused, warning him that he would be “going into a perfect steel-trap” and would never emerge alive. But Brown was intent even more on martyrdom—martyrdom to prove to himself that he truly possessed the heroic qualities he esteemed in a man, and to send a bugle call across the land. In both he succeeded magnificently. So courageous was his bearing after his capture, so candid his statements, that he won the admiration of his southern captors and hero worship in the North. Lydia Maria Child, while disapproving of violence, asked the permission of Governor Wise of Virginia to visit Brown and bind his wounds, on the ground that he was not a criminal but “a martyr to righteous principles.” Wise politely turned down her request.

When Brown was hanged, church bells tolled across the North, black bunting was displayed from windows, gun salutes fired, offices closed, memorial meetings held. Emerson proclaimed that Brown would “make the gallows glorious like the cross”; Thoreau called him an “angel of light”; Wendell Phillips avowed that the “lesson of the hour is insurrection.” Moldering in his grave in North Elba, New York, the “crazy, deluded, monomaniacal, fanatical” old man would have been pleased to know of all this. Let them hang him, he had said: “I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose.” And on the way to the gallows, sitting bound on the coffin that would soon contain him, he handed out a message for his countrymen: the crimes of this guilty land would never be purged away, “but with Blood…”

Already Southerners were seeing blood. The more northern abolitionists canonized Brown, the more the defenders of slavery responded with wrath. Correspondence that Brown carelessly—or deliberately—left behind revealed that New England eminences had encouraged and aided the “murderer,” that leading abolitionists valued Brown as an abettor of disunion, that the bells tolling for Brown were proclaiming northern approbation of slave insurrection. The fact that Seward and Lincoln both repudiated Brown’s violence, that moderates like Edward Everett and other northern notables were calling for conciliation at Union meetings, that some of Brown’s backers thought he had planned liberation, not insurrection, had little effect on the rising feeling. The “Black Republicans” seemed to control northern politics. A spasm of fervent solidarity passed through the South. “Never before, Since the Declaration of Independence,” exulted a South Carolina paper, the Watchman, “has the South been more united in sentiment and feeling.”

It had long seemed likely that 1860 would be a year of conflict, perhaps even of showdowns between slavery and antislavery forces, between Democrats and Republicans, between moderate and militant factions within those parties. The passion sweeping the country contained an explosive combination of anger and fear. Anger, because conflict over slavery was becoming increasingly polarized as the old compromises crumbled, because thoughts of Kansas still burned in people’s minds, and now because of John Brown. Fear, because many Northerners suspected that the “slave power” was spreading its “tentacles”—and its peculiar institution—throughout the nation, and because, even more, many Southerners suspected that “Black Republicans” were threatening not only their way of life but their solidarity, by driving a wedge between slaveholders and poor whites and even, God forbid, between masters and slaves.

Anger was the keynote of the Thirty-sixth Congress, which convened on December 5, 1859, three days after Brown was hanged. The House was so divided that it took two months to elect a Speaker. Members of Congress talked freely of secession and disunion. They shouted one another down, obstructed legislative action, carried ill-concealed weapons onto the House floor. The Senate displayed hardly more civility. Republicans, bolstered in number in the 1858 elections, took the lead in pressing a homestead bill, a protective tariff bill, and a Pacific railroad bill; the first passed both chambers and was vetoed by Buchanan; the second passed the House and failed in the Senate; the third died in the legislative labyrinth. The lawmakers were now seeking sectional acclaim at the expense of practical policy-making.

Fears of Southerners for their own sectional unity were further aroused at this point by a bombshell in the form of a book—written by one of their own. Hinton Rowan Helper, son of a North Carolinian blacksmith, after travels throughout the North and West, had concluded that slavery was blighting the South, crippling its economic progress, and above all impoverishing and degrading the whites—especially the small farmers and skilled workers. He cared nothing for the plight of the slaves; they should be deported. He cared passionately about whites—all whites. He was long on convincing facts and figures, but also on moral concern. “Non-slaveholders of the South!” he wrote, “farmers, mechanics, and working-men…the arrant demagogues whom you have elected to offices of honor and profit, have hoodwinked you, trifled with you, and used you as mere tools for the consummation of their wicked designs….” Southern elites dreaded nothing more than a challenge to solidarity between rich and poor whites.

The solidarity was all the more important in the early months of this election year, for the unity of the organization that threw a great protective arm over the South, the Democratic party, was approaching a harsh test—the convention of 1860. Everything seemed to go wrong for the Democrats when they met in Charleston late in April. The city, crowded and intensely hot, had been made for finer things than this horde of Democracy’s raucous, quarrelsome grass-roots activists. Nor was the political arithmetic encouraging. Now clearly the choice of northern Democrats, Douglas had the votes to control the convention but not enough for the two-thirds needed to nominate. Despite the desperate efforts of Douglas men to conciliate delegates who would not be conciliated, and despite a Douglas-backed platform that even left the issue of squatter sovereignty open, delegation after delegation of Southerners walked out of the convention.

Even with much of their southern opposition gone, Democrats were unable to nominate their man in fifty-seven ballots. The Charleston conclave adjourned, to meet again for a new try in Baltimore six weeks later. There the tragicomedy was re-enacted, as Douglas reasserted control of the convention and the Southerners and other anti-Douglas delegates walked out a second time. Now at last the Little Giant had enough votes for nomination, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. The secessionists promptly met in a nearby-Baltimore hall, passed the proslavery platform that had been rejected in Charleston, and nominated John C. Breckinridge, Buchanan’s Vice-President and an old-time Whig from Kentucky, for President.

Amid the heat and anger of their conventions the northern and southern Democrats had tragically miscalculated each other’s conviction; the Douglas men, for example, had thought only a few southern ultras would walk out. Between the two Democratic conventions another party met, also in Baltimore, but with a harmony and purposefulness that the Democracy no longer could command. This was the Constitutional Union party, inheritor of the great Whig tradition, organized by Senator John J. Crittenden, Henry Clay’s successor both as a Kentuckian and as a Unionist. Delegates from twenty-three states agreed not to write a platform but simply to run—or stand—on the Constitution and on the Union. With Crittenden too old to campaign, the convention chose a ticket of John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Boston, both old-time Whigs.

And the Republicans? They were still a party of much promise and little performance, of compelling ideology but cloudy strategy. They were clearly now the antislavery party that wished to doom the evil to ultimate extinction nationally and let it wither in the South. They were increasingly the party of economic growth, expanding industrial capitalism, protection for business, western development through railroads and free homesteads; and most Republicans believed that liberty and equality could be achieved best through expanding the economic opportunity of the little man.

The Republicans, though, faced strategic dilemmas in the spring of 1860. To win the fall election they had to carry the swing states that had eluded them four years earlier, and to do that they must broaden their appeal not only geographically and economically but politically; they had to attract old Whigs, moderate nativists, antislavery Democrats, Fillmore men, all-out Unionists. But the more Republicans broadened their appeal, the more they would compete with opposition parties expert at compromise—Douglas’ northern Democrats and Bell’s Unionists. The alternatives were to move in a radical direction, in the hope that a militant program and candidate would bring out a huge, mobilized Free-Soil vote, but this course seemed risky judging from recent election returns; or to follow a strategy of political expediency, but 1860 was no time to divert this vigorous young party toward a fickle and shapeless opportunism.

Only moral, intellectual, and political leadership of the highest order could have readily solved such strategic problems, and the Republican party could claim no such leadership. The party did possess an array of presidential hopefuls, each of whom symbolized a plausible posture for the party. Seward was the front-runner. Although the New York senator was seeking to appear more conciliatory—he now spoke not of slave and free states but of “labor states” and “capital states”—he still symbolized the militant antislavery party that had its roots in the “upper” North. Toward the other end of the party spectrum, Edward Bates of Missouri stood for the Whiggish republicanism of old, with leanings toward nativism. Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio held a combination of low-tariff and antislavery views that made him less available than his rivals. Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania came from the most pivotal state of all, but his reputation was mainly that of an opportunistic machine politician.

And then there was Abraham Lincoln, seemingly the most unavailable contender of them all, a much defeated, regional politician who had never managed anything larger than a company of militia. On second look, he appeared more promising: he was popular in Illinois, which would be a pivotal state; he stood at the center of the Republican mainstream; he had a rural mien and background, an advantage in campaigning; he had won something of a national reputation in his debates with Douglas; and if he still was less known than Seward or Chase, his relative obscurity at least meant that he had fewer enemies in the party. Lincoln was aware of his need for wider recognition, especially in the East, and he readily accepted an invitation to speak in New York City. His address at the Cooper Union was largely a legal and historical argument that the Framers opposed slavery, but it was delivered with such logic and moral earnestness that he drew an ovation from a sophisticated audience that included Greeley and Bryant. By the time he had finished a speaking tour of New England he had won considerable national attention, at least as an orator.

To plan strategy as a party, rather than as a collection of rival tongs each looking for its own main chance, the Republicans needed a means of making a collective and democratic decision. As Lincoln had said, to defeat the enemy “we must hold conventions; we must adopt platforms…; we must nominate candidates, and we must carry elections.”

The convention was not only the key means of national party decision; by mid-century it had become virtually an American art form. The arrival of flag-bedecked trains carrying state delegations, the delegates’ march to the convention hall with bands playing and banners waving, the stentorian call to order in the bunting-draped hall, the points of order, the fiery debates over the platform, the deafening floor demonstrations for favorites, and then the suspense-ridden presidential balloting—suspenseful because the presidential choice was usually made in the balloting itself—were all firmly fixed in political folklore and practice. Conventions had a grimy side too—the flushed, sweating delegates who enjoyed their liquor as much as their politics, the pickpockets and prostitutes who infested the hotels and public places, the sordid deals—with both money and patronage jobs as currency—made with delegates.

Such, in all its tawdriness and grandeur, was the Republican conclave that opened in mid-May in the famous Wigwam convention hall in Chicago. Lincoln had been lucky in the choice of this city rather than an eastern one, and Illinois Republicans made the most of it. After Seward’s delegates pulled into the station in thirteen train cars filled with merrymakers, Lincoln’s men arranged for thousands of Illinoisans to flock in from Springfield, Peoria, and dozens of other towns. Seward had brought along someone else: Thurlow Weed, one of the most dexterous politicos of the day, widely experienced and connected, an old hand at conventions and convention deals. Lincoln’s men—his old friend Judge David Davis, Republican state chieftain and railroad entrepreneur Norman Judd, Jesse Fell, Leonard Swett, and others—were mainly novices at big-time politics.

The Republicans established themselves as a truly national party during the convention’s second day, when they voted through a platform with much wider appeal than the antislavery manifesto of four years earlier. Drafted by a group including Greeley and Schurz, the platform called for free homesteads, a tariff that would encourage industrial development, internal improvements, a Pacific railroad, Kansas’ immediate entry into the Union, and other antislavery planks. It was a moderate, even conservative platform—so much so that the white-haired veteran Free-Soiler Joshua Giddings felt compelled to add a reaffirmation of the truths of the Declaration of Independence. When he was voted down and began to leave the hall in chagrin, a New York delegate rose to urge “gentlemen to think well before, upon the free prairies of the West, in the summer of 1860, they dare to wince and quail before the assertions of the men of Philadelphia in 1776.” Shamed, the delegates now carried the motion unanimously, amid an explosion of cheers, and old Giddings resumed his seat.

Next day Seward led on the first ballot, as expected, but Lincoln was a strong second, as not expected. There followed a scramble for delegate votes, as Weed, Davis, and the other managers expended their political resources—patronage jobs, policy promises, future recognitions, even cabinet posts—in a wide-open distribution of loaves and fishes, using the hard currency of specific promises and the soft currency of hopes and expectations. “Make no contracts that will bind me,” Lincoln had said to his managers, but Judge Davis allegedly told his colleagues, “Lincoln ain’t here and don’t know what we have to meet!” All managers played this game, but Lincoln’s had the added advantage of handing out hundreds of counterfeit tickets in order to pack the Wigwam’s gallery and out-hurrah the Seward rooters.

In the end, though, it was a set of more serious political factors—above all, Lincoln’s “availability”—that brought him a surge of strength in the second ballot, and victory, as Cameron’s Pennsylvania shifted to him, early in the third. More delegates jumped onto the bandwagon, and the nomination was made unanimous. A quiet fell upon the Wigwam as the delegates contemplated what they had done, then the cannon boomed from the roof and Illinoisans in the streets outside were swept up in a happy pandemonium.

Lincoln was waiting nervously in his Springfield law office when a telegram arrived: “TO LINCOLN YOU ARE NOMINATED.” He studied it for long moments. “Well,” he said, “we’ve got it.”

What did Lincoln have? A worthless nomination, some said; he would probably lose, but if he won he would lose too, for the slave states would secede. Lincoln scoffed at this latter prospect. He and most of the other Republican leaders could not believe that the Southerners really meant secession and war. “He considered the movement South as a sort of political game of bluff, gotten up by politicians, and meant solely to frighten the North,” a friend wrote after talking with him. “‘They won’t give up the offices,’ I remember he said, and added, ‘Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.’” Seward and Schurz and others also were optimistic.

The Republican leaders were less dogmatic about winning. A four-party race was unprecedented and unpredictable. Some calculated that Lincoln would monopolize the antislavery vote and hence overcome the divided opposition. Others believed that Douglas and Bell would monopolize the moderate, pro-Union vote, especially if they could agree on fusion or coalition arrangements in some of the key states. In any event, Republican leaders agreed that their course was clear. Lincoln must “make no speeches,” as William Cullen Bryant said, “write no letters as a candidate.” Nothing must sully the image of Lincoln and his party as following a moderate, centrist path between the ultras of secessionism and the ultras of abolitionism.

Lincoln complied, publicly. Privately, he was busy meeting with party chieftains, bantering with reporters, sending out campaign suggestions, querying local politicos as to how the situation looked in their end of the “vineyard.” And he allowed his image to be sharpened as “honest Abe,” a son of the frontier, log cabin born, farm boy, rail splitter. The Republicans lived up to their Whig forefathers in organizing campaign processions carrying replicas of rails he had split, and presenting the “Wide Awakes,” who provided song and spectacle. But Lincoln stayed in Springfield.

Douglas would not be so constricted. Leading half a party, facing probable defeat, he decided on intensive tours North and South. In city after city he called for Union, denounced the ultras, pictured the Democratic party as the only remaining vehicle of North-South harmony. His audiences seemed as spellbound as ever by the Little Giant, but he won few conversions from the Republican party in the North or Breckinridge’s splinter party in the South. Douglas, who had spent so many years keeping his fences mended with the Southerners, was amazed by the hostility shown him in the slave states. He gave as good as he got, denouncing secessionist talk as traitorous. Early in October he was shocked to hear that Pennsylvania and Indiana had gone Republican in elections for state officials.

“Mr. Lincoln is the next President,” Douglas told his secretary. “We must try to save the Union. I will go South.” He was headed South anyway, but he intensified his efforts. Now he spoke for the Union rather than himself. The South must not secede. Aroused, desperate, as he saw his life’s political work being swept away, he followed a killing pace—literally killing, for in eight months he would be dead of accumulated fatigue, untended illnesses, campaign overwork, and the heavy drinking and smoking that went with it.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln won 1,866,000 votes; Douglas, 1,375,000; Breckinridge, 843,000; Bell, 590,000. Lincoln carried eighteen free states for 180 electoral votes, Breckinridge, eleven slave states for 72, Bell three border states for 39, and Douglas only Missouri, and three New Jersey votes, for 12. Studying the vote, newspaper editors could find some predictable patterns. Lincoln had won no electoral votes in the South, Breckinridge none in the North, though both had drawn huge popular votes in rural areas. The Democratic party now lay in fragments. Despite strong economic, ethnic, and religious views among the voters, the outcome was almost completely sectional. Geography was destiny.

But there was little time for analysis. On receiving news of Lincoln’s election, South Carolina’s legislature unanimously called for a state convention to be held in Columbia in late December. This convention declared without dissent that “the union now subsisting between South Carolina and the other States, under the name of the ‘United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”

On January 9 Mississippi seceded, the next day Florida, the next day Alabama, followed by Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. The Union was dissolved.

The Union was dissolved. The grand experiment seemed finished. Americans had created a union to achieve order, security, liberty, and equality. Now union was gone, and with it order and security. Liberty had been largely achieved, but not for blacks, Indians, or controversial ministers and editors. Equality had been partially achieved, but not for slaves, women, illiterates, masses of laborers in fields and factories. “The last hope of freedom in the old world is now centered in the success of the American Republic,” Douglas had said during the campaign. Now the Old World looked on in mingled pity and glee.

What had happened? What could have happened, in a nation that had been put together like a Swiss clock, with power and energy so nicely distributed and positioned and balanced, precisely so that the nation could absorb pressures from without and within? The first answers, in the heat of the conflict, offered conspiratorial or even diabolical explanations: the catastrophe was due to southern planters, northern abolitionists, agitators in general. In later years, the explanation would often reflect the political ideology or intellectual environment of the time. Secession and civil war were due to class rule North and South, cultural conflict, lack of communication and understanding, modernization surges and lags, ideological differences over slavery and the “unfreedoms” and inequalities that it caused.

Much of this inquiry was inconclusive, however, because it searched for single causes in what was a web of influences or a channel of causation. It failed to differentiate between the givens of history—the geographical, racial, and economic forces that were inextricable and inseparable from the past—and the somewhat more tractable decision-making situations, where leaders might have decided differently, for example, in permitting the slave trade or agreeing to a three-fifths rule, and the more “open” crossroads situations where men had considerable choice in arranging their political institutions and in making decisions within them.

The immediate cause of the Civil War lay in the derangement of the nation’s two political systems—the constitutional system of the 1780s and the party system of the 1830s—and in their interaction with each other. Both these systems rested on an intricate set of balances: the constitutional, on a balance between federal and state power and among the three branches of the federal government; the party, on a competitive balance between party organizations at the national and state levels. The genius of this double system lay in its ability to morselize sectional and economic and other conflicts before they became flammable, and then through incremental adjustment and accommodations to keep the great mobiles of ideological, regional, and other political energies in balance until the next adjustment had to be made. This system worked well for decades, as the great compromises of 1820 and 1850 attested. The system was flexible too; when a measure of executive leadership was needed—to make great decisions about the West, as with Jefferson, or to adjust and overcome a tariff rebellion, as with Jackson—enough presidential authority could be exerted within the system to meet the need. But the essence of the system lay in balances, adjustment, compromise.

Then, in the 1850s, this system crumbled. The centrifugal forces besetting it were so powerful that perhaps no polity could have overcome them; yet European and other political systems had encountered enormously divisive forces and survived. What happened in the United States was a fateful combination: a powerful ideology of states’ rights, defense of slavery, and “southern way of life” arose in the South, with South Carolina as the cutting edge; this was met by a counter-ideology in the urbanizing, industrializing, modernizing states, with Illinois as the cutting edge in the West. While many issues were involved in this ideological confrontation—the tariff, federal support for internal improvements, nativism, religious differences, western development, temperance—less and less these issues modified the growing issue of slavery, and more and more they helped deepen that division.

As these ideological differences grew, the double system began to falter, and the more it faltered, the more the ideological conflict intensified. The two-party system assumed that within each party moderate and “extremist” forces would grapple for control, but that the two parties would tend toward the center—and hence toward gradual adjustment and morselization—because of the need to win the support of centrist voters. The system in short depended on electoral competition in a diverse and balanced electorate. The 1850 election, however, began to throw the system askew. Because of weaknesses in the Whig party, which had never established itself at the grass roots to the degree the Democracy had, especially in the South, the Democrats won overwhelming control of Congress and Southerners won predominance within the party as a result of their unified control of caucuses, appointments of committee chairmen and memberships, parliamentary rules and processes. This was the background of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the passage of which showed the power of southern ultras and unsettled the system further.

If the “party constitution”—the competitive, two-party mechanism—had worked, the Democrats would have paid the political price in 1856: defeat at the hands of a moderate party that would have appealed to the voters for a mandate against southern extremism. But in 1856 the Whigs, plagued by their own sectional problems, and with their organizational heart beating feebly, were near the point of collapse, and the Republicans and Know-Nothings were minority parties. The Democrats won an undeserved victory, over splintered opposition, and this again played into the hands of the ultras. At the same time, the ultras virtually controlled the presidency, through the two-thirds rule in the convention and the choice of men, in Pierce and Buchanan, who were not expected to be strong. Presidents. Even the presidential veto could be negated when congressional leaders, invoking party discipline (their own), could override the White House. There was never a strong Administration party that could build a solid link with moderate elements in the North and the border states.

Under the rising ideological-sectional pressures, this system exploded and revealed in naked outline what had been for some years the actual power configuration—a four-party or multi-party system, with its inherent weaknesses. In the four-party showdown of 1860, the Republicans won with a minority of the popular vote. In that election Stephen Douglas was the real hero, as he decided to fight for the Union even at the expense of his own candidacy, bypassed the southern ultras, and made a final effort to reach the great grass-roots Democracy, North and South, that had kept the nation together.

Much would be said later about a “blundering generation” of leaders, but these men were operating within the system they knew, as best they could, only to find that the constitutional and party system could not cope with the power of ideology. Nor could they fully understand an ideological battle in which extremists did not act rationally and prudently, in which every politician was vulnerable to the man on his “far right or left.” Much would also be made later of economic and ethnic and religious forces that these leaders could not overcome, but these were precisely the forces that, as experienced transactional leaders, they had in the past overcome through gradual adjustment and accommodation.

At least the system did allow for a certain vital flexibility and potential—the coming to power of a strong President who could build his own presidential party and govern. As the southern states broke away from the Union, as the inauguration of a new President neared, eyes North and South turned toward the tall man in Illinois, and to another man in Mississippi, Jefferson Davis.

CHAPTER 17

The Blood-Red Wine

TWO WESTERNERS LEFT THEIR homes on February 11, 1861: Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln. They had much in common. Both had been born in Kentucky. Both had prospered in the trans-Appalachian region as that region had prospered. Both had become famous throughout the nation; indeed, both had recently been elected Presidents, and they were now setting forth toward their posts. Davis and Lincoln had something else in common: Neither would live to come home again.

The day before, Jefferson Davis, as spare and erect as ever but with his light hair now turning gray, was helping his wife prune rose bushes on Brierfield, their plantation near Vicksburg, when a messenger rode in with a telegram. Her husband’s face turned so desolate as he read the message that Varina Davis feared news of a death in the family. Davis was silent for long moments, then told her that he had just been chosen provisional President of the newly formed Confederate States of America. As an old soldier he had expected at most a military command, but as a good soldier he immediately packed to leave. Early next morning the plantation bell summoned the slaves of Brierfield to hear their master bid them farewell. Then Davis and his black manservant walked to a nearby Mississippi landing, rowed out into the river, and flagged a steamer for the ride north to Vicksburg.

Davis was beginning his long trip to Montgomery at a critical moment for the seven seceding states. Spurred as always by South Carolina’s leaders, they had organized a new government with remarkable speed and efficiency. Their new charter, the Confederate Constitution, provided for the “sovereign and independent” nature of the individual states and protected slavery, though slave importation was barred to appease French and British opinion. Davis had been chosen provisional President over such fire eaters as William Yancey and Robert Rhett, with Alexander Stephens, an old Whig turned Democrat, as Vice-President. All this was in response to wild enthusiasm in the lower South, as orators called for secession, old soldiers formed military companies, women sewed flags, preachers fulminated from the pulpit about the mortal peril to the South, and newspapers mirrored the intense feelings at the grass roots. But states of the upper South, so critical to secessionists’ hopes, were holding back.

Heading east, Davis could hardly ignore the geography of secession as he was forced to make a detour north into Tennessee—which still remained in the Union—southeast to Atlanta, and then doubled back southwest to Montgomery. Nor could he ignore the lower South’s shortage of east-west railroad links, ominous for a region heading toward war. Even this run had no sleeping cars, so the President-elect rested, fully dressed, on a camp bed set up in a regular coach. He was immensely buoyed, though, by the “approbation” of the people crowding into stations where he paused, by the booming guns and bonfires that marked his way. At each of his twenty-five stops Davis repeated that “no reconstruction” of the Union was now possible and urged his listeners to prepare for war.

Yet he could not forget the “cooperationists” who opposed separate secessions by the states, favored collective action by all the South, and in many cases were willing to negotiate with the Republicans in search of some kind of last-minute compromise, even while they insisted on southern rights and their determination to repel any Union assault. Rolling through Tennessee, he could not forget that two days before he left Brier-field the people of that state had voted decisively against calling a convention to consider secession; and that a few days before, Virginians had dashed secessionist hopes with their own foot-dragging. Without the prestigious Old Dominion little could be done; certainly a Gulf Coast Confederacy would not be enough.

In Montgomery a delegation from the Confederate constitutional convention waited to greet Davis. Yancey grandly introduced him to the station crowd: “The man and the hour have met.” Davis had only one day to prepare his inaugural address; then, as the strains of “Dixie”—played by a southern band for the first time—died away, he called the new nation the true embodiment of “the American idea that governments rest on the consent of the governed” and asserted that the southern people would preserve their political liberty at all costs. He hoped for good will between the Confederacy and the “Northeastern States of the American Union,” but warned that if “lust of domination should cloud the judgment or inflame the ambition of those States,” then the South would “maintain, by the final arbitrament of the sword, the position which we have assumed among the nations of the earth.”

“Upon my weary heart,” the new President recorded, “was showered smiles, plaudits, and flowers.” But ahead he saw “troubles and thorns innumerable.”

Lincoln had left Springfield amid a cold drizzle and an atmosphere of gloom. Umbrellas raised against the rain, a small crowd gathered around the rear platform of the single coach that, with engine and baggage car, comprised the President-elect’s special train. The day before, Lincoln had grasped Herndon’s hand and said, “If I live I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.” But he added, “I am sick of office-holding already.” Now, standing on the rear platform, he looked down, his face wreathed in sadness, then looked up and spoke a few words of farewell. The wheels of the stubby little locomotive began to turn.

Lincoln’s train meandered back and forth along the whole route to Washington, so that people and politicians could see him, and he them. As though strengthening himself for the ordeal ahead, he drew sustenance from encounters with Indiana farmers, Cincinnati immigrants, even traveling slaveholders; from Pittsburgh miners and ironworkers; from Albany Know-Nothings, New York merchants and pro-secessionists. Using a dozen different railroads, he rolled slowly across the country, zigzagging through the prairies and the Mohawk Valley, and down the flank of the Hudson. Sometimes he escaped the deluge of advice, admonitions, and job soliciting by withdrawing to his private quarters. His occasional melancholy was not shared by Mary Todd Lincoln, already aglow at the prospect of being the First Lady, or by their two young sons, whose pranks bedeviled train crew and passengers alike.

News from Washington told of drift, indecision, and paralysis, of a confusion of voices, proposals, manifestos, diatribes. With his Cabinet rid of Southerners, Buchanan could act more freely, but he hoped that Congress could solve the crisis, or that a new constitutional convention could be called, in the spirit of ’87. Congress was too divided to do more than discuss attractive but Utopian compromises.

The eyes of Washington were on the man who was still tacking back and forth as he headed east. But Lincoln had no solution either, and at first he seemed to play down the seriousness of the crisis. Conscious that the Inaugural Address would be his first major statement, he kept a draft of it in his pocket. To the crowds along the way he spoke from the train platform, groping for words, experimenting with various phrases. He told an Indianapolis gathering, “It is your business to rise up and preserve the Union and liberty, for yourselves, and not for me.” In Cincinnati he promised to treat neighboring Kentucky’s slaveholders just as “Washington, Jefferson, and Madison” had treated them. He argued to a Pittsburgh crowd that no crisis existed except an artificial one created by designing politicians. In Freedom, Pennsylvania, he invited a towering coal heaver up to the platform, and they stood back to back for the audience to judge who was taller.

In Philadelphia the President-elect raised a flag at Independence Hall and said: “I have often inquired of myself, which great principle or idea it was that kept this nation together. It was…something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.…It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”

The militant and vocal crowds seemed to stiffen Lincoln’s determination as he neared the capital. But Washington had little sense of this. It was boiling with contemptuous stories of Lincoln’s western gaucheries and with rumors that Seward or some other cabinet eminence would control the new administration. Nor did Lincoln boost his prestige when, to evade a rumored assassination plot in Baltimore, he abandoned his train and slipped into Washington unannounced. Ensconced in a fine suite in the popular Willard’s Hotel, he received border state delegations, giving them the pledges they wanted: that he would leave slavery intact and delay using force to bring the seceded states back into the Union. Acting in an atmosphere of heightened tension and polarization, Lincoln wanted to regain balance among the warring sides. But some Republicans in Congress were supporting a “Force Bill” to give the President full control over all federal and state troops—a measure almost certain to drive Virginia and other wavering states into secession with the lower South. Other Republicans, including Horace Greeley in his Tribune, were urging that the cotton states be allowed to “go in peace.”

In this supreme crisis Lincoln, however much he might talk about liberty and equality, was determined above all else to save the Union, as something precious in itself. The Union to him was more than an ideal—it was bone of his bone, the great protecting shield for his family, the legacy of his revered forefathers, the house for his home. To preserve the balances of union he had chosen a unity Cabinet, with the now moderate antislavery Seward of New York as Secretary of State; the forthright Chase of Ohio for the Treasury; a border state loyalist, Edward Bates of Missouri, as Attorney General; a New Englander, Gideon Welles, as Secretary of the Navy; another border state man, Montgomery Blair—a son of the old Jacksonian—as Postmaster General; Pennsylvania’s Simon Cameron as Secretary of War; and an Indianan, Caleb B. Smith, as Secretary of the Interior.

But on March 4 he had a speech to give, an oath to take from Chief Justice Taney. A statue of “Liberty,” waiting to be placed on the unfinished Capitol dome, lay on the grass before him as Lincoln delivered his Inaugural Address. He sought to reassure the South that neither he nor the Republican party threatened it. He quoted the Republican platform plank pledging not to interfere with slavery, and to enforce the fugitive-slave law rigorously. But secession he flatly rejected, for it was the essence of anarchy. “A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks, and limitations,” Lincoln said, was “the only true sovereign of a free people.”

Much of the address read like a lecture in constitutional law, but toward the end: “I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

But the Richmond Enquirer echoed almost every other southern paper in labeling the address as “the cool, unimpassioned, deliberate language of the fanatic.” It continued: “Sectional war awaits only the signal gun.”

THE FLAG THAT BORE A SINGLE STAR

At half-past four on the morning of April 12, 1861, a shell rose from a mortar battery at Fort Johnson, arched in a fiery red parabola through the dark air as its fuse spat out flame, and burst over tiny Fort Sumter in the neck of Charleston Harbor. For the next thirty-four hours Confederate batteries poured shot and shell into the fort occupied by federal troops. From their rooftops Charlestonians watched the explosions. Well-dressed ladies—if the Harper’s Weekly artist was to be believed—lay prostrate in tears, holding one another in their arms. And well they might. That mortar shell was the signal for war.

It was a signal desperately feared by some, ardently sought by others, long expected by almost all. For months now Sumter had loomed as a symbol of southern determination and northern defensiveness, of the clash between state and national sovereignty, of the collision between two cultures. It seemed only fitting that a fort off Charleston should be the fulcrum of conflict. Federal arsenals and garrisons throughout the South had yielded to the secessionists, but Charleston was too important as a port, and South Carolina too conspicuous in the leadership ranks of secession, for Washington to surrender Sumter. The pride of Unionists had been stirred when Major Robert Anderson of the regular army led his little force a mile across the water from vulnerable Fort Moultrie to Sumter, a half-completed square of masonry. Even Buchanan had summoned enough nerve to send an unarmed steamer in December with provisions for the garrison, but fire from the shore batteries drove it away. After that, the lame-duck President had been happy to leave the spiky problem to his successor.

By the time of Lincoln’s inauguration a South Carolinian “circle of fire” surrounded Sumter. Forty-three guns, manned by several hundred amateur cannoneers, supported by several thousand volunteer infantrymen, who in turn were backed by tens of thousands of militant Charlestonians, ringed the fort. But Sumter’s sixty cannons controlled the entrance to the harbor. Now time was running out for Anderson, as his provisions were low. Lincoln was torn between advisers counseling that the fort was indefensible and should be evacuated, or at least allowed to be honorably starved out, and others who urged that a relief expedition was both militarily feasible and politically necessary to back up the new President’s pledge to protect federal property and uphold the law.

As the Administration vacillated, rumors flew around Washington, hopes and fears rose and fell, militants North and South pressed for decision. Some Southerners preferred not to leave the issue of peace and war to Lincoln; Roger Pryor, a Virginia congressman, urged a Charleston crowd to “Strike a blow!”—promising that the “moment blood is shed, old Virginia will make common cause with her sisters of the South.”

By this time Lincoln had decided. On April 8 Governor Francis Pickens of South Carolina received presidential notice that a fleet was on its way to Sumter with food, and that it would fight its way into the harbor if fired upon. General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, commanding the forces besieging Sumter, wired Montgomery for instructions. Now it was Davis who had to face the issue of peace and war. Each side, North and South, preferred to have its way without war; each side would go to war if denied its way; each side wished the other to bear the onus of starting a war. But Jefferson Davis overrode the uncertainty in Montgomery. His orders sped back to Beauregard: the fort must surrender or be reduced before the relief fleet arrived.

The Confederate general sent a delegation of notables, including Pryor, to demand the fort’s capitulation; after Anderson refused, the four emissaries rowed directly to the nearest shore battery. When the battery commander offered to let Pryor open the bombardment, the congressman turned pale, saying, “I could not fire the first gun of the war.” But Edmund Ruffin, a Virginian who had become one of South Carolina’s most fiery extremists, had no such qualms. It was his shell that burst on Sumter and awoke Charleston to the coming of war.

As the Confederate fire intensified, the fort became an inferno of exploding shells, crashing masonry, and acrid smoke. The garrison’s stubborn defense won cheers from the Confederates, even from the Yankee-hater Ruffin. So skillfully did Anderson deploy his men that not one of them was killed. But the barracks caught fire several times, and even though the blazes were extinguished, Anderson feared that his powder magazine would be touched off and the whole place blown up. The surrender terms allowed the garrison to march out with drums beating and colors flying, to the ship that would take them to a hero’s welcome in New York. Anderson had also requested and been granted a hundred-gun salute to the American flag. On the fiftieth round a gun exploded prematurely and killed Private Daniel Hough. He was the only casualty of Sumter, the first of 600,000 deaths to come.

“Well, boys,” a New York farmer said, “it’s Massachusetts and South Carolina. I’m a-going to take the train to Boston and enlist.” Southern farm boys also rallied around the flag—a new Confederate flag that they christened with a song:

We are a band of brothers, And native to the soil,

Fighting for our liberty, With treasure, blood and toil;

And when our rights were threatened, The cry rose near and far,

Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag, that bears a Single Star.

The attack on Sumter did what words had failed to do: it united and galvanized the North. Lincoln’s call on April 15 brought 75,000 volunteers within a few days. People welcomed the end to the long weeks of indecision; “strange to say,” Congressman John Sherman wrote to his brother, the war “brings a feeling of relief: the suspense is over.” It seemed, said Allan Nevins, “a purifying hurricane which swept away all sordid aims. Idealists had been disheartened by the trickeries, bargains, and compromises of the past ten years; by the Ostend Manifesto, the Nebraska Act, the Lecompton swindle, the filibustering, the corruption, and the absorption in moneymaking. Now, they said, the flame of devotion to the principles of Washington, Hamilton, and Marshall was burning brightly again.”

But Washington and the Fathers stood for Union. Now the house was divided, the Union broken in half. Or rather it was broken into two-thirds and one-third, for the population of the twenty-three northern and border states was now 22 million, and that of the South 9 million, of whom 3.5 million were slaves. The North predominated in economic power too, with its modernizing agriculture, growing industry, substantial railroad grid and merchant marine. The South’s economy still depended on agricultural staples—especially cotton—and on banking capital that amounted to only one-third that of the North. But Montgomery had two vital military resources: an aroused citizenry with a great military heritage, and a brilliant officer corps, vastly augmented when Robert E. Lee declined Lincoln’s offer of the federal field command and accepted leadership of Virginia’s military forces.

Still, the two armies would be composed mainly of volunteers, officered by men who had seen little action, save for Indian expeditions, since the Mexican War. The Confederate volunteers ranged from the wealthy and wellborn members of the Washington Artillery Battalion, Louisiana’s most prestigious militia unit, to Carolina backwoodsmen in homespun and drab butternut. Wade Hampton of South Carolina raised, trained, and equipped his own private army of infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Another set of volunteers who joined freely but reluctantly were the regular army officers from the border states of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Albert Sidney Johnston left with his state—Texas—in secession. Others, however—Winfield Scott of Virginia, David Farragut of Tennessee—remained loyal to the Union, as did almost all the rank-and-file soldiers. Men from Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland faced harsh dilemmas, since both North and South organized units in their states. Here indeed were literal cases of brother against brother, even in the family of President Lincoln’s in-laws, the Todds.

While sergeants shouted orders on a thousand drilling fields, while quartermasters bought muskets and tents and britches and cannons, Lincoln and Davis and their commanders planned strategy. The northern plan as it developed was multi-pronged: to advance on Richmond in force; blockade southern harbors; and capture the Mississippi and Tennessee river reaches, in order to divide the Confederacy and isolate its main regions. Southern strategists planned to capture Washington and then strike north into Maryland and central Pennsylvania, whence they would seek to cut the Northeast off from the Northwest … Twelve thousand miles away a superior student of the tricks of history, a Russian nobleman, bustled around his study, jotting down notes for the first draft of what would become a monumental work of literature. In War and Peace Count Leo Tolstoi would describe the chaos of battle—the accidents, missed orders, mistaken identities, loss of control, impotence of leadership—just as the amateur American soldiers would experience it in the first major clash of the war. That encounter occurred at Bull Run, in late July 1861.

By summer, as the ranks of the armies swelled, the war was taking on a momentum of its own. Soldiers and civilians were demanding immediate and decisive action from their governments. One quick march to battle and victory would follow. Northern troops were rushed into Washington to defend the capital, while Virginia volunteers occupied Alexandria and Harpers Ferry on the Potomac. There the two forces were poised in June, while the clamor for action continued to grow.

Bull Run was a small, muddy stream running southeast through pasture and weeds. The Warrenton Turnpike, a main road leading southwest from Washington, crossed the Run at a stone bridge, but the stream also could be forded in several places. South of Bull Run lay Manassas Junction, where rail lines from Richmond and the Shenandoah met. These railroads would shape the coming battle.

General Winfield Scott, the aged and corpulent commander in chief of the United States Army—a Tolstoian figure himself—ordered General Irvin McDowell to collect Union regiments around Washington and advance them on July 8 to seize Manassas Junction, in the face of General Beauregard of Sumter fame. If Beauregard’s men retreated, McDowell could hold a grip on the railroads of northern Virginia; if not, then the public at least would have its fight. McDowell was reluctant to advance—his troops were green, his supply wagons too few, and his reinforcements not yet arrived. By July 16, however, he felt strengthened enough to start south with 30,000 men. As the Union columns marched through rolling hills and thick woods, Private Edwin Wyler of the 5th Massachusetts found blackberries to pick, milk to buy, and fresh lamb to purchase or “capture.” Aside from the obstacles left by the retreating “rebs” and the blacks encountered in small, run-down hamlets, it seemed to him more like a picnic near his native Woburn than an invasion of the mysterious, hostile South. The masthead of Greeley’s Tribune had exhorted: “Forward to Richmond!”—perhaps it would be this easy.

Outnumbered by McDowell three to two, Beauregard fell back to prepared defenses behind Bull Run. The old fire-eater Edmund Ruffin, now an infantry private in the 2nd South Carolina, recorded his comrades’ anger on being ordered to retreat before the Yankees, but their spirits rose when they drove back the first incautious Union probes into the Bull Run lines, and when reinforcements arrived. General Joseph Johnston had been guarding the Shenandoah Valley with 11,000 men against a force nearly twice that size led by General Robert Patterson. While Patterson fretted, hesitated, and exchanged bombastic telegrams with Scott in Washington, Johnston with astute timing slipped brigade after brigade along a single-gauge railroad to the east. Jackson’s Virginians, Bartow’s Georgians, Bee’s Mississippians and Alabamans were already joining Beauregard, as was Johnston himself.

McDowell’s plan was to send his strongest columns around Beauregard’s left flank, crossing the Run at and above the Stone Bridge. With an early start and a quick march, his men could seize Manassas Junction before Johnston could arrive by rail—or so the Union man thought. But things soon began to go wrong. Units became delayed and lost as they worked their way through jammed roads on the Confederate flank, so that the troops reached the battlefield exhausted. Once across the stream they encountered Colonel Nathan Evans’ lone brigade guarding the enemy flank. Reporter E. P. Doherty, covering the 71 st New York for the Times, noted that the Union men attacked bravely, but without much discipline, fighting in little knots and moving confusedly in and out of the smoke and underbrush. Soon a bloody stalemate developed.

Expecting McDowell to attack his right, and dismissing the noise of the mounting battle on his left as a diversion, Beauregard kept most of his troops guarding the crossings below the Stone Bridge. He did allow Johnston to shift several of his brigades to the left, much to the disgust of Johnston’s men, who were lusting for battle and expecting it on the right. Instead they found themselves in the thick of the fray on the left, arriving just in time to shore up Evans’ wavering line. Across the Run, Colonel William Sherman’s troops had been equally frustrated, as they marched back and forth as decoys around the bridge, while only a few hundred yards away Georgians and New Yorkers shot and impaled one another. Watching a farmer and his dog hunting in the fields and Confederate horsemen splashing back and forth across the stream, Sherman felt for a moment that he was back in peacetime. Finally, early in the afternoon, he was allowed to take his brigade across the Run, onto the flank of Bee’s and Bartow’s Valley brigades. Pushing Bee’s forces back, the Union troops advanced toward Henry Hill, the last position between them and the enemy’s rear. Holding Henry Hill, however, were Thomas Jackson’s 2,600 Virginians, and they were determined to stay. They did.

“See Jackson standing like a stone wall!” Bee shouted to his now fleeing men. “Rally behind the Virginians!” As the Mississippians closed ranks with their comrades, regiment after regiment of Union men were storming up the hill, only to break under the withering fire of the enlarged “Stonewall Brigade.” When McDowell ordered two batteries of regular artillery forward to blast Jackson’s men out of their positions, rebel cavalry charged down on the cannons but were driven away by Union infantry. Arthur Cummings’ 33rd Virginia, which was closest to the northern guns on the hilltop, wavered. Fearful that his men could stand up under the fire no longer, Cummings, without orders, shouted, “Charge!”

The Union artillerymen, shrouded in their own gun smoke and confused by the cavalry charge, saw gray-clad troops appear through the haze on their right. Friend or foe?—some regiments in both armies wore gray. Cummings’ men answered the question with a single volley that mowed down the gun crews and horses. The Confederates smashed through the battery, were thrown back, swarmed down again with the rest of Jackson’s brigade, yelling at the top of their lungs. The battle surged back and forth, in bloody hand-to-hand combat. Soldiers drifted in, attracted by the sound of fighting; others pulled out, unarmed and bloodied, spreading word that all was lost. It was the critical moment of the battle, but they could not know this either.

From a tower above the center of the Confederate position, Captain Edward Alexander could see men streaming to the rear, and others hurrying forward, as the two sides fought amidst the wrecked Union batteries. Then, off to the southwest edge of the fight, he could see a great cloud of dust raised by a fresh unit marching toward the sound and the fury. Was it Union or friendly? As he watched a shell burst over the northern lines. The blue-clad troops recoiled before the fresh onslaught. It was Kirby Smith’s brigade, just arrived from the Shenandoah. They had marched right from their trains into battle.

The Union soldiers, exhausted from fourteen hours of marching and fighting, now outnumbered and outflanked, had had enough. With little panic—but with little stopping—the Northerners retreated back across Bull Run. Some officers tried to hold them back with drawn sabers, to no avail. In a few places the retreat began to turn into a mad rout. Fearful that the rebels were right on their heels—actually, Beauregard’s men were themselves too exhausted and bloodied to follow—the Union soldiers streamed toward Washington, meeting political celebrities and sightseers who had come to watch the rout of the rebels. The powder-begrimed soldiers became locked in a hellish traffic jam with the civilians, whose spotless carriages were laden with fashionable ladies and sumptuous picnic lunches. The army’s retreat ended after a few miles, but the sightseers dashed back to the capital with wild tales of disaster.

Beauregard was left in possession of the battlefield. It was a scene of carnage. The dead, a Confederate noted, were scattered for three miles along the battlefield. “The countenances & postures generally indicated the suffering of agonizing pain.…Clotted blood, in what had been pools, were under or by almost every corpse. From bullet holes in the heads of some, the brains had partly oozed out.” Men’s faces had turned black, save for white froth on their mouths; horses lay about, tangled in their own intestines; as survivors approached, fly-covered corpses seemed to come alive as the flies sprang off together in a grotesque caricature of the dead. A terrible stench hung over the field.

Far from the battlefield, a wave of exultation swept through the South, while the sting of defeat produced shock, anger, and recriminations in the North. Horace Greeley, now castigated by his critics for his “Forward to Richmond” war cries in the Tribune, seemed to falter under the strain; he wrote Lincoln that after his “seventh sleepless night” he wondered if the Union could win, and that if the President felt it could not, he should ask for an armistice. Otherwise, “every drop of blood henceforth shed in this quarrel will be wantonly, wickedly shed, and the guilt will rest heavily on the soul of every promoter of the crime.….” Lincoln had lain awake too, on a sofa in the Executive Office, but he was already making plans for a broadening of the war effort.

Southerners indulged in some braggadocio. A “few more Bull Run thrashings” would bring the Yankees “under the yoke,” said the Louisville Courier-Journal, “as docile as the most loyal of our Ethiopian chattels.” The Confederates paid a price for their victory, however. Having won what was greeted as the decisive battle of the war, many recruits refused to re-enlist. But this was only a temporary loss. Their main problems were far more serious—problems of organization and ideology.

The difficulty was not simply that the Confederacy lacked adequate war factories, transport, medical supplies; this was partly made up by heroic effort and sacrifice, such as the donation of church bells to be recast into cannons. The trouble lay in a decentralized structure of government charged with prosecuting a war that increasingly demanded central direction and control. The Confederate constitution prohibited protective tariffs, spending for internal improvements, and export taxes, except by a two-thirds legislative majority, and it lacked a general welfare clause. Born and bred on the doctrine of states’ rights, the Southerners still took it very seriously. Thus, the governor of Florida charged that central control of the army would “sap the very foundation of the rights of states.” Davis’ astute War Secretary, Judah Benjamin, warned that the only way to defend the states was “by a concentration of common strength under one head.” But he was fiercely attacked for subverting the power of the states and for assuming dictatorial power.

Nor was the central government itself organized for war. The Congress was weak, and prone to argue over trivialities. The Cabinet was not strong as a unit, and the few effective members were occasionally at odds with the military, as in the case of Benjamin’s altercations with both Johnston and Stonewall Jackson. Inevitably, Davis had to exercise strong presidential direction—even to the point of treating cabinet heads like clerks—only to be accused of “executive usurpation.” In fact, Davis had to share his executive powers with the state governors, who also interfered in military operations. It was not surprising that the Confederacy was slow in furnishing arms to its men and in raising revenue. The Treasury fueled inflation by issuing much printed money—money printed on paper smuggled through the Union lines.

Behind a government in disarray lay an ideology in disarray. When the Southerners talked about defending their rights, they were referring to liberty in its various forms, constitutional, individual, local, sectional. All these liberties were defined negatively—as “leave us alone” against oppressive government, northern interference, and now the central Confederate government itself. Not only did the Southerners hold a limited and negative view of liberty, in common with most Americans of the day, and not only did their leaders offer little conception of the broad possibilities and creative dimensions of liberty, in common with virtually all intellectual leaders North and South; many Southerners confounded the problem even further by not comprehending the concessions they might have to make in wartime in order to protect even their own negative brand of liberty. Thus, libertarians railed against even Davis’ highly selective and limited suspensions of habeas corpus. “Away with the idea of getting independence first, and looking after liberty afterwards,” proclaimed Vice-President Stephens. “Our liberties once lost, may be lost forever.”

The issue came to a head in the spring of 1862, when, after a string of military reversals and a lag in volunteering and re-enlisting, Davis called for conscription. The call touched the rawest nerves of the South. It would make “free-born citizens” the “vassals of the central power,” alleged Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia. The Conscription Act, though passed by the Confederate Congress by more than two to one in mid-April, “brought into the open the deadliest conflict within the Confederacy,” in Charles Roland’s words, “that of state rights as opposed to Southern nationalism.” Critics virtually equated individual, local, and states’ rights, all defined as liberty or freedom from.

No one epitomized this confusion of thought better than Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina. Jealous of Davis, angry that he had been left out of the Cabinet after years of fighting for southern independence, Rhett from the start was critical of the President’s moderate policies. As time passed, he became increasingly strident in his attacks on what he characterized as the President’s trend toward executive usurpation and even military despotism. But Rhett wanted a stronger prosecution of the war and hence approved the presidential call for conscription. Essentially Rhett reflected the militance of South Carolinians, their pride at having led the way for the whole South, their fierce devotion both to liberty as they defined it and to Confederate victory as they envisaged it.

And for a time it seemed that they and the rest of the Southerners would have both. In the summer of 1862 the Confederate Army under Lee’s leadership went on to a series of brilliant victories. It was not clear at the time how a small, hastily established confederation, with all its economic and social weaknesses and organizational and ideological divisions, could mobilize and sustain one of the most versatile and telling military forces known to that time. It was still something of a mystery a century later. Perhaps a clue lay in the rural heartland of the South, upper and lower. Out of that heartland had come the votes for Breckinridge, just as Lincoln’s votes sprang from the rural areas of the North. Out of that southern heartland came the farm boys hardened to the rough-and-ready life of the outdoors, accustomed to handling guns and horses and wagons, used to the ways of rutted roads and treacherous swamps, protecting a southern culture and way of life as compelling as it was unsettled, defending the land they loved and knowing the land they defended.

MEN IN BLUE AND GRAY

War is a great engine of change; the more nearly total the war, the faster and broader the flow of change tends to be. But the shape and texture of that change, economic, social, political, ideological, depends on human beings and how they respond to the “impersonal” forces streaming around them—whether they succumb or adjust to them, or try to guide or transcend or even transform them. Responding to change is a supreme test of leadership.

A shift in the fortunes of war was all too evident to Abraham Lincoln as he looked out of the White House windows at the beaten and exhausted Union soldiers, swaying in their saddles or slumping down on the steps of houses, who trickled into Washington in the days after Bull Run. The crisis brought out the iron in Lincoln’s soul. “But the hour, the day, the night pass’d,” Walt Whitman wrote later. “The President, recovering himself, begins that very night—sternly, rapidly sets about the task of reorganizing his forces, and placing himself in the position for future and surer work.”

The war had already forced Lincoln to adapt his operational ideas to new conditions. As a Whig congressman he had opposed Polk’s vigorous use of presidential power. “Were I President,” he had said, “I should desire the legislation of the country to rest with Congress, uninfluenced by the executive in its origin or progress.…” Now, as President, he turned the Whig conception of the presidency upside down. In the first few months he did not dominate Congress—he governed without it, by the simple expedient of failing to call the lawmakers back to Washington for a special session until many weeks after Sumter. During those intervening weeks he expanded the Army and Navy, called for more volunteers, raised and spent money, declared a blockade, and suspended habeas corpus. This “great democrat, the exponent of liberty and of government by the people,” said James Randall seventy-five years later, “was driven by circumstances to the use of more arbitrary power than perhaps any other President has seized.”

But Lincoln knew what he was doing, and why. “Was it possible to lose the nation and yet preserve the Constitution?” he asked. “By general law, life and limb must be protected, yet often a limb must be amputated to save a life; but a life is never wisely given to save a limb.” The President also knew that he would be charged with executive usurpation. He was so pleased when Anna Ella Carroll, daughter of a former Maryland governor, wrote a pamphlet upholding his executive authority and charging Congress with despotic tendencies, that he helped her publish it and put copies into the hands of senators and congressmen.

By the time Congress met in late July, the impact of Bull Run united executive and legislature at least for a time. In seventy-six public acts in twenty-nine working days, Congress passed legislation of unprecedented scope, authorizing an army of one-half million troops and a budget of over $300 million. Lincoln had the support of some powerful senators pressing for a stronger prosecution of the war. With every military setback their voices became louder. Douglas had already helped rally Democrats behind the war in this, his last and finest hour, and had gone home to die; his support of the Union and the war effort had left a standard for others in his party to follow. In the House the blunt, salty Thaddeus Stevens, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, exhibited forceful legislative leadership in driving through the big financial bills.

To the Commander in Chief fell the responsibility for strategic planning, and Bull Run forced Lincoln to lay out explicitly what the North must do. Over several days and nights, sitting on the sofa in his office, or on the lounge in the cabinet room, he penciled a program for immediate action:

“Let the plan for making the Blockade effective be pushed forward with all possible despatch.

“Let the volunteer forces…be constantly drilled, disciplined, and instructed without more for the present.

“Let Baltimore be held as now, with a gentle but firm and certain hand. …

“Let the forces in Western Virginia act till further orders according to instructions or orders from General McClellan.

“[Let] General Fremont push forward his organization and operations in the West as rapidly as possible.…

“Let the forces late before Manassas…be reorganized as rapidly as possible in their camps here and about Arlington.…

“Let new volunteer forces be brought forward as fast as possible.…”

Four days later, the President developed his plans further:

“When the foregoing shall have been substantially attended to: 1. Let Manassas Junction (or some point on one or other of the railroads near it) and Strasburg be seized and permanently held. …2. This done, a joint movement from Cairo on Memphis, and from Cincinnati on East Tennessee.”

Lincoln projected that, by year’s end, the forces of the Union would be massed and the Confederacy cut off by sea. Northern columns were to reach eastern Tennessee and western Virginia, where Union sympathizers had organized to resist secession; another force would be poised in Memphis, ready to drive down the Mississippi River and cut the southern nation in two.

The President’s plan called for a collective effort far beyond anything the American pepple had known. General George McClellan was given the most exacting job: command of the Union forces massed around Washington. In West Virginia the thirty-four-year-old former railroad executive had defeated two small rebel detachments, the first northern victories to offset Sumter and Bull Run; now he was called to build and lead the largest army ever assembled on the American continent. McClellan’s first acts were to confine the troops to their camps, tighten discipline, and order a rigorous schedule of drills and parades. A few soldiers quit, and many volunteer officers unequal to the regular army routine found ways to get home, but the great majority of the men responded energetically to McClellan’s combination of harsh demands and winning personal charm. Within a few weeks of Bull Run, the fruits of the general’s labors were plain for all to see on the fields before Washington.

“Oh, but this is grand!” wrote one infantry captain. “Troops, troops, tents, tents, the frequent thunder of guns practising, lines of heavy baggage wagons, at reveille and tattoo the air filled with the near and distant roll of drums and the notes of innumerable bugles—all the indications of an immense army.…”

To provide all those drums and bugles—and rifles, rations, belt buckles, and the thousand other material requirements of McClellan’s Army of the Potomac as it grew to number almost 200,000 men—was another unprecedented undertaking. The job fell to the War Department, which was soon inundated with requests, complaints, and contracts. Simon Cameron, though a wily politician, proved hopelessly inadequate as an administrator; his main contributions to the war effort, Washingtonians complained, were to lose memoranda and to find special deals for his cronies from Pennsylvania. As northern farmers and industrialists churned out war goods, the tiny bureaucracy in Washington was able to feed and equip the main Union forces, but only amidst massive confusion and waste. The Army received a mishmash of supplies, many of them shoddy and few of them uniform. The cost of the purchases—inflated by unnecessary orders, overlapping contracts, and fraud—cut dangerously into the $300 million appropriated by Congress.

McClellan was given green troops and substandard equipment, but western generals complained of receiving nothing at all. The federal government focused its supervision on the army around Washington while draining the West of troops, guns, and skilled officers. Lincoln appointed John Charles Fremont to command the main Union force in Missouri because of his prominence within the Republican party; similarly, he would relieve Fremont later in the year after the general quarreled bitterly with the Blairs.

Left largely to their own devices, the Westerners muddled through. Fremont put up $75,000 of his own money and bought what rifles he could find. In St. Louis two wealthy businessmen, James Buchanan Eads and Charles Ellet, began building a gunboat fleet that would give the Union control of the western waterways. And further south at Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers joined, a small man, of uncommanding presence, was drilling a small body of troops. Ulysses S. Grant had left the Army in disgrace several years earlier, his Mexican War heroism overshadowed by tales of drunkenness. He returned to his wife and children in Missouri, took up the backbreaking work of farming, but went bankrupt; he tried a few business ventures, but they failed; when Sumter fell, he was working as a clerk in his father’s leather store. A local politician helped Grant to appointment as a colonel and then a brigadier in the new volunteer forces, but the job that he really wanted, on McClellan’s staff in Washington, was closed to him because of his reputation. So in the autumn of 1861 Sam Grant supervised the training of his Illinois troops and waited for a chance to redeem himself.

While the armies prepared and waited, the Navy acted. Lincoln’s head of the Navy Department, Gideon Welles, proved himself a superb organizer, his assistant, Gustavus Fox, a keen strategist, Having begun the war with 43 seaworthy ships, Welles bought or built 400 more of every size and description, from shallow-draft tugs to experimental ironclad gunboats. This motley array of vessels clamped a lid over the coast of the Confederacy, squeezing southern commerce until only a fraction of the prewar shipping was able to get through. Fox organized the Navy’s best ships into an amphibious task force that struck sharp blows against the South. On August 29, l861, an expedition seized Hatteras Island off North Carolina, and on November 7 a naval landing party hoisted the Stars and Stripes over Port Royal farther down the coast. These victories not only shook southern confidence and closed two ports; they gave the Navy advance bases from which it could tighten the blockade and strike again.

Lincoln, indeed, might be excused for thinking the Navy to be too aggressive, for one ship commander almost triggered a war with Britain. Captain Charles Wilkes had been patrolling the eastern Caribbean in the sloop San Jacinto, searching for Confederate commerce raiders, when he learned that two southern diplomats, James M. Mason and John Slidell, had slipped through the blockade and were on their way to Europe aboard the British mail steamer Trent. On his own initiative, and against the advice of his second-in-command, Wilkes intercepted the Trent in the Bahama Channel on November 8, stopped her with a shot across the bow, and sent a boarding party to bring Mason and Slidell back to the San Jacinto. The northern press applauded when Wilkes arrived in Boston with his prisoners, but the British government professed to be outraged. Lord Palmerston and his Cabinet tacitly sympathized with the Confederacy; the combination of southern cotton and northern insolence seemed an almost irresistible inducement to war. While the London Times breathed fire, and British troop transports prepared to sail for Canada, the Prime Minister demanded that the American government apologize and release the captive envoys.

The northern public, happy to turn against America’s old enemy, showered Wilkes with gifts and testimonials. Lawyers, congressmen, and editors called upon Lincoln to defy the British ultimatum. Secretary of State Seward seemed taken with the idea of bringing the South back into the Union by starting a war with Europe. “We will wrap the whole world in flames!” he told Times correspondent William Russell. But neither popular pressure nor diplomatic cleverness swayed Lincoln. The President, wanting just “one war at a time,” dictated a conciliatory reply to Palmerston. The note, although filled by Seward with references to Britain’s violations of American neutral rights during the Napoleonic wars, disavowed Wilkes’s action and “cheerfully” promised to release Mason and Slidell. In London, Charles Francis Adams adroitly presented the American case, and Queen Victoria worked for peace; the crisis subsided.

While meeting one challenge with soft words, Lincoln brazenly ignored another. As an emergency measure in the days after Sumter, Lincoln had authorized the Army to seize and hold suspected traitors without regard to the right of habeas corpus. This action embroiled the President and the military in a clash with the courts, as represented by the nation’s highest judicial official, still Chief Justice Taney. When soldiers from Fort McHenry arrested John Merryman, lieutenant in a secessionist militia company in Baltimore, Taney himself wrote out the writ of habeas corpus. He ordered the arresting officer to appear before him with Merryman, “certify and make known the day and cause of the capture and detention of said John Merryman,” and then “submit to and receive whatever the said Court shall determine upon” concerning the arrest.

General George Cadwalader, commandant of McHenry, declined to appear before Taney; a messenger who tried to serve the court’s writ upon the general was denied admission to the fort. The Chief Justice, having no troops of his own, could only dictate a scathing opinion. Congress, not the President, had the power to suspend habeas corpus under the Constitution; if Lincoln’s action went unchallenged, then “the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws.” Rather every citizen would hold “life, liberty and property at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district he may happen to be found.” Taney sent his opinion to the President, calling upon that “high official,” whose oath of office the Justice himself had administered only months before, “to perform his constitutional duty to enforce the laws; in other words to enforce the process of this Court.” Lincoln, knowing that the North held the Supreme Court in contempt because of Taney’s ruling in the Dred Scott case, serenely ignored the command; the Chief Justice was as powerless as John Marshall had been thirty years earlier, when Taney’s mentor Andrew Jackson had defied the court’s ruling in the Cherokee lands case.

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” James Madison had written—and his strategy was working even amid civil war, as the crisis brought the Congress as well as the judiciary into conflict with the President. The foundations for a permanently large and powerful chief executive were building under the stupendous wartime pressures. In the long run, the increased scope of presidential power and the magnitude of the issues at stake in the war guaranteed that President and Congress would clash.

The first foretaste of the conflict was evident in July, when the lawmakers approved Lincoln’s emergency measures only grudgingly and in part, in a last-minute rider tacked onto a military pay bill. Now in December, as they convened for the regular session, congressional leaders looked for ways to increase their influence on the war effort. In the House, the Committee on Government Contracts launched a series of investigations into the purchasing practices of the War Department, amassing eleven hundred pages of evidence of fraud and mismanagement. With these probes, and with its support of the civilian Sanitary Commission, which worked to improve conditions in the military hospitals and camps, Congress succeeded in saving money and lives.

Not all of the legislative initiatives were constructive. A group of radical Republicans led by Benjamin Wade and Zachariah Chandler organized a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, their goal being to push for a quick end to both the war and slavery. As the winter dragged on and the Union armies continued to drill, the Joint Committee began to question the loyalty of Union officers. General Charles Stone was imprisoned for six months at the committee’s behest; his “crime” had been to send a patrol across the Potomac that ended in disaster and death for several hundred northern men—including Edward Dickinson Baker, a former senator and a close friend of Lincoln. Another old soldier, bedeviled by congressional witch hunters, wrote bitterly about serving a government “where to be suspected, merely, is the same as to be convicted.”

Lincoln had to deal cautiously with the members of the Joint Committee; they had powerful support in Congress and in the country. The war had intensified the hopes of abolitionists across the North, and Wade’s group championed their cause. Lincoln had to fend off antislavery agitation even in the Army itself, canceling emancipation orders issued by Generals Fremont and Hunter. To attack slavery before the Union Army was able to take the offensive against the South, the President feared, would be to lose the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland—in his view, to lose both Union and abolition.

The radicals played into Lincoln’s hands. Cameron, already on shaky ground as the inefficiency of the War Department became exposed, made a play for the abolitionists’ support. Without White House consent he issued a call for the arming of freed slaves to help put down the rebellion. Racial war—the very thought terrified Unionist slaveholders and stiffened Confederate resolve. Cameron had overreached himself; Lincoln “reluctantly accepted his resignation,” sent him to Russia as American ambassador to the Tsar, and appointed Edwin Stanton as Secretary of War. Cameron’s interference with the war effort was ended, the radicals were temporarily discredited, and Lincoln gained some relief from congressional pressure.

The only way fully to satisfy Congress and the people, however, was to push the war to a victorious conclusion. In February of 1862 the northern forces finally began their offensive, advancing all across the broad front. The Navy led off, landing an amphibious force at Roanoke Island. In the West, a flotilla of gunboats and transports commanded by a saltwater sailor, Commodore Andrew Foote, carried Grant’s division down the Cumberland River into Tennessee. Fort Henry on the Cumberland surrendered to the gunboats, and Grant’s men trapped a small enemy army in Fort Donelson on the Tennessee River. The forty-year-old general became a national hero in mid-February when he accepted the “unconditional surrender” of 14,000 rebel soldiers at Donelson. A second northern force under Don Carlos Buell captured Nashville, and by the end of March most of Tennessee was in Union hands.

Confederate forces under Albert Sidney Johnston regrouped and counterattacked Grant’s column, which had grown to an army of 50,000 men by the beginning of April. Both sides were mauled in the two-day battle at Shiloh Church—Johnston and 40,000 men in blue and gray were gunned down—but the Confederates were forced to retreat. The northern onslaught resumed. New Orleans fell on April 25 to units of David Farragut’s fleet, which had run the batteries of the forts defending the city. Charles Ellet was killed when Confederate gunboats sortied to defend Memphis, but the ships that he had built for the Union cleared the way into that city. Farther west, a small Union army marched into Arkansas, destroying a mixed force of Confederates and Indians at Pea Ridge. On July 1 Farragut was able to sail upriver and join forces with the gunboat fleet at Vicksburg, the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi.

In the East, General Ambrose Burnside’s amphibious force crossed from Roanoke Island to the North Carolina mainland, seized the port of New Bern, and threatened the interior of the state. But the focus of attention was the Potomac, where McClellan began to move his army. The main Union force descended the river in transports and landed at the tip of the York peninsula, where Cornwallis’ surrender had ended the American Revolution years before. As McClellan pushed cautiously up the peninsula with 100,000 men, a second army occupied Manassas, while a third advanced into the Shenandoah Valley. By mid-May, the Union controlled most of northern Virginia, and the Army of the Potomac stood on the outskirts of Richmond.

Southerners responded to the Union invasion with éclat. They proved that the North had no monopoly on “Yankee ingenuity”; a single Confederate gunboat, its sides protected by several inches of iron plating, challenged the combined Union fleet at Vicksburg, crippled several ships, and escaped unscathed. A second ironclad, the rebuilt old frigate Merrimac, threatened to cut off McClellan’s army on the peninsula, until the Union ironclad Monitor checked it in a duel off Hampton Roads. Nathan Bedford Forrest and other Confederate cavalry commanders were able to tie down and halt the Union forces in the West by raiding behind their lines, burning supplies, and sending false messages on the occupying army’s telegraphs. The leadership of two men, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, saved the Confederate capital and finally reversed the spring tide of Union victory. Lee had fewer than 80,000 men to withstand the three advancing northern armies, yet he sent Jackson into the Shenandoah Valley with 18,000 men to divert what Union forces he could. Jackson and his soldiers performed brilliantly. Dancing around a cumbrous army twice their strength, they fought five battles in as many weeks, forced Lincoln to stop the Union force at Manassas from marching to join McClellan, and then rushed back to Richmond. At Jackson’s return, Lee launched another desperate gamble. Again dividing his forces, he attacked the isolated northern wing of the Army of the Potomac, drove it back, and bluffed McClellan into withdrawing his entire force. After seven days of continuous fighting, McClellan’s men found themselves back on the James River, camped on the plantation where President Harrison had been born; the bells of Richmond were no longer in earshot.

Presidents can plan, and generals can command, but the outcome of wars turns largely on the individual decisions of thousands of individual soldiers to advance or wait or retreat, to lead or follow or run. The men in blue and gray were, more often than not, still boys; the majority of them had not been old enough to vote in the election that precipitated the war. Charles Fair saw in the Civil War soldiers “a curious kind of naïveté,” as though each was “too unguardedly himself, the villains obviously and totally villainous, the virtuous cleareyed and straight as strings, the country boys so rustic and simple one cannot believe them.” That innocence would not survive four grinding years of war. In shaping the destiny of the Union, the soldiers—and through them the American people—would themselves be reshaped.

Most of the three-quarters of a million volunteers were farm boys. They brought with them their farm talk, their farm look, their farm knack of dealing with mules and horses. Since friends often enlisted together, they brought with them too their neighborhood associations and attitudes. The Army was a vast mosaic of neighborhoods and common interests. From Illinois alone came units of German immigrants, Galena miners, Bloomington teachers and students, and the “Preacher’s Regiment,” so called because it included many men of the cloth.

The men brought their own leaders too, for they often elected as captains and colonels popular local politicians from back home. Some proved utterly incompetent and were court-martialed; the soldiers themselves weeded out others. “We have forced ten resignations from officers,” a Wisconsin private wrote home, “and put better men in their places.” Some officers made speeches and courted votes, but civilian leaders often made poor military ones. Among the best leaders were the handful of West Point graduates. Thomas Jackson, wearing a shabby coat and a battered forage cap, drilled his men with spartan discipline and evangelical fervor; he considered “a gum cloth, a blanket, a tooth brush and forty rounds of cartridges as the full equipment of a gentleman soldier,” a southern volunteer complained. The soldiers called Jackson “Old Blue Light” until he led them to victory; then they called him “Stonewall.” Sam Grant’s men referred to him as the “quiet man.” When he took command of the 21st Illinois, the volunteers lined up to hear a speech. Grant gave them one: “Men, go to your quarters!”

Camp life as always was an organized bore: drilling, policing the camp, chopping wood for fires, eating salt pork and other staples. Most of the men lived in big tent cities; close quarters and poor sanitation left thousands ill and hundreds dead before the first battles were fought. Soldiers gambled, read, sang, listened to preachers, devised elaborate practical jokes. They came to know other men from very different backgrounds. Northerners who had hardly met a black man began to encounter the bondmen who crowded around the Union camps in Maryland and Missouri. The whites were not friendly, at least in the beginning. “I don’t think enough of the Niggar to go and fight for them,” wrote an Ohio volunteer.

The men spent most of their time talking; and mostly they talked about the impending warfare. Veterans of Bull Run pictured the fear and confusion, the awful carnage around the batteries on Henry Hill. When war came to many of these soldiers in the spring of 1862 it was initially like all wars: hurry up and wait. After exhausting marches through mud or across still-frozen fields, the regiment would halt, the men would scatter, pitch their tents, start fires for cooking—and wait. Suddenly the drums would beat the long roll, the soldiers would grab their rifles, deploy nervously—and then wait. Much of the fighting was at long range: marching through woods, firing across fields, glancing off an enemy unit, and then settling down for another long wait. Then, suddenly, infantry would find themselves in a bloody holocaust, shooting and stabbing at close quarters. Shiloh, a private remembered, was “one never-ending, terrible roar.”

In the summer of ’62 the war seemed to assume its old shape. Lee sent Jackson north again in August, this time toward Manassas. The Union troops had a second chance to fight at Bull Run—and once more they lost. Pushing his advantage, Lee united his forces and marched onward into Maryland. The stakes were piled high. Lincoln needed a victory in order to take a stronger posture against slavery and perhaps to save his administration; McClellan needed a victory to save his job; Lee had to find some way to finish off the North before its overwhelming weight of numbers and firepower could be brought to bear. As the two armies raced north, dodging and chasing and parrying each other, soldiers on both sides felt the mounting tension.

McClellan caught Lee’s army near the town of Sharpsburg, astride a little stream called Antietam Creek. He hammered the Confederate lines with artillery fire, then sent 75,000 men forward, in three disjointed frontal assaults. On the right the two sides fought over a tiny cornfield, leaving it so strewn with corpses that hardly a patch of ground was left bare. In the center, the Union men pushed forward to a worn-down road, the Sunken Lane; after three hours of fighting, some of it hand to hand, they held the road but were too exhausted to press on. To the left, a handful of Confederates slaughtered Union troops as they tried to cross the single narrow bridge over the Antietam. The Northerners finally carried the bridge, only to stop when they smashed into a rebel unit dressed in captured blue uniforms. The last hours before nightfall brought more attacks, more resistance, more slaughter—and no decision.

McClellan claimed victory at Antietam, for Lee’s forces were so battered they had to pull back to Virginia. Lee could claim a victory because he had saved his army despite being outnumbered two to one. But few soldiers were claiming victory the morning after the battle. They sprawled on the ground, averting their eyes from the dead and wounded lying amid the trampled cornstalks, bodies draped over the rubble of blasted stone walls, corpses floating in the watery muck of Antietam Creek. From 20,000 men flowed the vintage of blood.

THE BATTLE CRIES OF FREEDOM

This blood soaking into the mud of Antietam—why was it being shed? For food and clothing and shelter? The great majority of men on both sides had shared in the American cornucopia. For Union or Confederacy? Few of the soldiers wished to shed blood for a particular way of organizing the general government. For some supreme goal that transcended government—that was served by government? Yes, for liberty, freedom, justice—this is what the soldiers were told. But confusion still prevailed. Not only were Northerners and Southerners wholly at odds with each other as to what constituted liberty, who should enjoy it, how it could be safeguarded and broadened. The northern leaders seemed divided and unsure among themselves.

Lincoln was no exception. “This is essentially a People’s contest,” he had told Congress. “On the side of the Union, it is a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life….” But in answer to Horace Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Million,” in which the Tribune editor castigated the “preposterous and futile” idea of trying to put down a rebellion without extirpating the evil of slavery that caused it, the President wrote, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union….” Lincoln could hardly have stated his priorities more clearly, but what had happened to the priority of liberation—of elevating the condition of all men?

The imperatives of war did not allow the extended debate, philosophizing, legislating, compromising, adjusting inevitable in a pluralistic system of checks and balances. Decisions had to be made. Abolitionist pressure was mounting as the war lagged. European opinion—especially English liberal opinion—was waiting for Lincoln to take leadership against slavery. Senate and House might act if he did not; as early as August 1861 Congress had legislated for the emancipation of slaves who were used in arms or labor against the North, and within a year after that had acted to liberate slaves belonging to rebels or traitors. By midsummer 1862 the President had decided on some form of general emancipation. On July 22 Lincoln informed his Cabinet of his decision, adding that he had made up his mind on the main point but would hear suggestions as to details. As usual, the Cabinet was divided, but the President had to agree with the view that the emancipation proclamation must be issued only after a victory; otherwise it would seem an act of weakness and desperation—in Seward’s words, “the last shriek on our retreat….”

But where was the victory? Although a bitter disappointment to Lincoln, Antietam was enough of a victory to permit public announcement of his emancipation intention; thus the blood shed in that battle acquired some meaning. Late in September the President summoned his Cabinet. After reading a few pages from the humorist Artemus Ward, to the non-amusement of Seward and Chase, Lincoln said he would now announce the proclamation. The Cabinet divided again. Bates, dreading any move toward black equality, held that forced colonization should accompany emancipation. Seward privately feared that the proclamation might incite a slave rebellion in the South and alienate moderate opinion in the North, but he supported the President. Blair was still concerned about its possible impact on Union supporters in the border states. Chase approved the idea as a moral necessity, Welles as a military one. Next day the President published his decree, warning that in one hundred days—on January 1, 1863—all slaves in any states or area still in rebellion would be declared free.

“We shout with joy,” Frederick Douglass said, “that we live to record this righteous decree.” Other abolitionists were pleased, though wary; they would maintain pressure on the President. Moderate and conservative Republicans were apprehensive, most Democrats hostile, and Confederate spokesmen enraged and yet pleased to be vindicated in their warnings about the Republicans’ satanic intentions.

The “hundred days” proved the most harrowing in Lincoln’s life, and perhaps in the Union’s. Even as McClellan boasted of his “victory” at Antietam, the President was searching for a general who could fight, amid rumors of disaffection within the Union armies toward the Commander in Chief in the White House. There were more delays, stalemates, and reversals in western operations. The fall congressional elections went against the President. Republican senators were holding long and heated caucuses in which they criticized the President, denounced the moderates and incompetents around him, and discussed ways of gaining greater control of the war. Even worse, the Cabinet was split several ways, and, worst of all, factions within the Administration were tying in with congressional blocs. These centrifugal forces threatened to break the government apart. Then, in mid-December, came the frightful news of the slaughter at Fredericksburg, where Lee shattered Burnside’s army—almost 1,300 Union soldiers killed, another 10,000 wounded.

Fredericksburg precipitated a government crisis. Caucusing senators asked that the Cabinet be reorganized; they criticized Seward so sharply for his moderate attitude toward slavery and his alleged influence on Lincoln that the Secretary of State felt obliged to tender his resignation. At a meeting with Lincoln the senators demanded a more active role for a reorganized Cabinet, and especially for their friend Chase. Lincoln quietly heard them out, asked them to return the following evening, and called a cabinet meeting for the next day. In an open discussion Lincoln gained the agreement of all—including Chase—to his claim that the Cabinet had seldom disagreed on basic issues. When the senators arrived that evening, they found Lincoln there with his Cabinet save for Seward. After reasserting that his cabinet members were fundamentally in harmony, the President called on the members to vouch again for this position. Cornered, Chase now contradicted the statements he had made to the senators on the Hill. The Senate delegation was left in disarray, Seward in vindication, Chase in humiliation.

Shortly, Chase returned to the White House. He had prepared his resignation, he told the President.

“Where is it?” asked Lincoln. Chase produced a letter but seemed reluctant to part with it.

“Let me have it,” said the President, reaching out and snatching it. He was exultant. Now he had both Seward’s and Chase’s tenders. He would accept neither resignation. He had the balance he wanted. “I can ride now,” he said to a friend. “I’ve got a pumpkin in each end of my bag.”

It was a small triumph amid the gloom of December. Lincoln suddenly seemed drawn and aged. He spent hours waiting for news of battles, other hours in reflection, reassessing the course of the war. “The dogmas of the quiet past,” he told Congress in his annual message, “are inadequate to the stormy present.…As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

On New Year’s Eve, the night before the Emancipation Proclamation was to be signed, Lincoln “tossed in fitful sleep, dreaming of corpses on a distant battlefield in Tennessee, of guns flashing in the night, of silent troops lying exhausted in the rain, of crowds reading casualty returns at Willard’s Hotel.” Next day, after the President had greeted a long procession of guests, his arm seemed almost paralyzed, and his fingers trembled so that he had to take a firm grip on the gold pen. “If my name ever goes into history,” he said to the cabinet members and officials gathered around him, “it will be for this act.” It was not an impressive-looking document, with its detailed exemptions and its admonition to slaves to refrain from unnecessary violence. But five words stood out in the order: after January l, 1863, slaves in rebelling states and areas shall be “THEN, THENCE-FORTH, AND FOREVER FREE.”

A black preacher raced down Pennsylvania Avenue to read the proclamation to a crowd of blacks. They shouted, clapped, sang. Later, blacks and whites gathered in front of the White House and called for the President to appear. When he came to the window and bowed to them, ecstatic cheering broke out, and one black exclaimed that if he would only “come out of that palace, they would hug him to death.”

1863. Somewhere around a campfire a Union troop was singing:

Oh, we’ll rally ’round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again,

Shouting the battle cry of freedom;

We will rally from the hill-side, we’ll gather from the plain,

Shouting the battle cry of freedom…

We will welcome to our numbers the loyal, true, and brave.

Shouting the battle cry of freedom,

And although they may be poor not a man shall be a slave,

Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

Somewhere in the South soldiers were singing, to the same tune:

We’ll meet the Yankee hosts, boys,

With fearless hearts and true,

Shouting the battle cry of freedom,

And we’ll show the dastard minions

What Southern pluck can do,

Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

Somewhere the 1st Arkansas (Negro) Regiment heard the President’s proclamation.

See, there above the center, where the flag is waving bright,

We are going out of slavery; we’re bound for freedom’s light;

We mean to show Jeff Davis how the Africcans can fight,

As we go marching on!

Notes

PROLOGUE

[Pownall’s map]:T. Pownall, A Topographical Description of the Dominions of the United States of America (1776). Lois Mulkeam, ed. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1949), pp. 25-26; see also (as referred to in Pownall) Edward Anthill, “An Essay on the Cultivation of the Vine, suited to the different climates in North America,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (Wm. and Thomas Bradford, 1771), (O.S.) I, Section II, pp. 117-97.

[Origin of first Americans]: Harold E. Driver, Indians of North America. (University of Chicago Press, 1961), Ch. 1.

[Dispersion of Indian Americans across the continent]: Geoffrey Barraclough, ed., The Times Atlas of World History (Hammond, 1979), pp. 36-37.

[Nootkas on the tide]: quoted in Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History (Harper & Row, 1976), p. 10.

[Types of Indians]: Driver, Ch. 24.

[Decimation of Indians on Martha’s Vineyard and Block Island]: Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980), p. 16.

[Tideland and piedmont Indians]: Bureau of the Census, A Century of Population Growth (Government Printing Office, 1909), pp. 39-40.

[Joseph Brant and the Iroquois]: Katharine C. Turner, Red Men Calling on the Great White Father (University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), p. 19; Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), p. 71.

[Great Lakes tribes]: Debo, p. 13.

[Treaty with Cherokees]: U.S. Congress, House Committee on Indian Affairs, “Indian Territory, West of the Mississippi,” Reports of Committees, 30th Congress, 1st session, no. 736 ([Albany?]: Wendell and Van Benthuysen, [1848?]), p. 1.

[Creek-Seminole army]: Angie Debo, The Road to Disappearance (University of Oklahoma Press, 1941), p. 44·

[Population in the 1780s]: Bureau of the Census, A Century of Population Growth (Government Printing Office, 1909, 1976).

[Religious affiliation, 1775]: Morris, p. 824.

[Transportation and currency in the 1780s]: A Century of Population Growth, pp. 20-23.

[Taverns and drinking]: Frank J. Klingberg, The Morning of America (Appleton-Century, 94’) PP· 295-301.

[Patrick Henry as an “American”]: quoted in Oscar Handlin, The Americans (Little, Brown, 1963), p. 150.

[Catholic mass in Boston]: John Thayer, An Account of the Conversion of the Reverend Mr. John Thayer (J. P. Cochlan, 1787), as cited J. P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, 1788. Durand Echeverria, ed. (Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 88.

[Songs in America]: James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Little, Brown, 1931), pp. 70-71.

[Omaha leader’s song]: Alice C. Fletcher, Indian Story and Song from North America (Small, Maynard, 1906), pp. 24-25.

[Americans in the 1780s]: see also St. John de Crèvecoeur. Sketches of Eighteenth Century America (Yale University Press, 1925); Percy G. Adams, ed., Crèvecoeur’s Eighteenth Century Travels in Pennsylvania & New York (University Press of Kentucky, 1961); James Schouler, Americans of 1776 (Dodd, Mead, 1906); Marshall Davidson, Life in America (Houghton Mifflin, 1974), Vol. 1, passim; Marquis de Chastellux, Travels in North-America in the Years 1780-81-82 (White, Gallagher, & White, 1827).

1. THE STRATEGY OF LIBERTY

[Fiscal background of Shays’s Rebellion]: Jonathan Smith, “The Depression of 1785 and Daniel Shays’ Rebellion.” address before the Clinton, Mass., Historical Society, printed in pamphlet form by that Society (1905), and reprinted in William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 5 (January 1948), pp. 77-94; for a contemporary analysis, see Richard Cranch to John Adams, Oct. 7, 1786, John Adams Papers, Microfilm Reel 369, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

[Leadership of the rebellion]: On Shays’s role, reflected in a dialogue between him and General Rufus Putnam, as reported by Putnam to Governor Bowdoin, see Charles Oscar Parmenter, History of Pelham, Massachusetts (Carpenter and Morehouse, 1898), pp. 395-98.

[Collective nature of the rebel leadership]: Richard B. Morris, “Insurrection in Massachusetts,” in Daniel Aaron, ed., America in Crisis (Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), pp. 31-33.

[Reaction of Massachusetts authorities to the rebellion]: see especially extensive references in correspondence in the Henry Knox Papers and the Bowdoin-Temple Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; see also Van Beck Hall, Politics Without Parties: Massachusetts, 1780-1791(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), pp. 210-12, and references therein.

[Statement of “respectable Bostonian ”]: Joseph Warren to John Adams, Oct. 22, 1786, Adams Papers.

[Letter of anonymous Regulator to Gov. Bowdoin]: Bowdoin-Temple Papers, anonymous to Bowdoin, n.d. The records of the Regulators are virtually nonexistent as compared to those of the authorities. See, however, George Richards Minot, The History of the Insurrections in Massachusetts (originally written 1788), 2nd ed. (Books for Libraries Press, 1970), letter, Eli Parsons to “Friends and Fellow Sufferers,” Feb. 15, 1787, pp. 146-47; see also files of the many newspapers of the day. William Manning, The Key of Libberty (written in 1798), Samuel Eliot Morison, ed. (The Manning Association, 1922), offers the views of a “typical” farmer who was partial to neither authorities nor rebels.

[Other sources on Shays’s Rebellion]: Neville Meaney, “The Trial of Popular Sovereignty in Post-Revolutionary America: The Case of Shays’ Rebellion,” in Neville Meaney, ed., Studies on the American Revolution (Melbourne: The Macmillan Co. of Australia, 1976), pp. 151-216; Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution (Brown University Press, 1954); Josiah Gilbert Holland, History of Western Massachusetts (Springfield: Samuel Bowles & Co., 1855), Vol. 1.

The Great Fear

[Washington’s daily life at Mount Vernon, fall 1786]: John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Diaries of George Washington (Houghton Mifflin, 1925), Vol. 3, passim; see also Washington’s Map of Mount Vernon (reproduced in facsimile from the original). Introduction by Lawrence Martin (University of Chicago Press, 1932).

[Washington on the cause of the commotions]: Washington to David Humphreys, Oct. 22, 1786, in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Government Printing Office, 1939), Vol 29, p. 27; Knox to Washington, esp. quotation of Knox by Washington in Washington to James Madison, Nov. 5, 1786, ibid., p. 51.

[Washington on inconsistency of man]: Washington to David Humphreys, Dec. 26, 1786, ibid., pp. 125-26.

[Washington to Madison on “thirteen sovereignties”]: ibid., P 52.

[Letters of John and Abigail Adams’ correspondents, and the Adamses’ responses] Adams Papers, Microfilm Reel 369, Massachusetts Historical Society; see esp. exchanges with Rufus King, Cotton Tufts, James Warren, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams. [Abigail Adams on Hyde Park]: quoted in Page Smith, John Adams (Doubleday, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 642. [John Quincy Adams on the governor as “Old Lady”]: JQA to Abigail Adams, Dec. 30, 1786, Microfilm Reel 369. [AA to JQA on “Poppa’s” new work]: AA to JQA, Jan. 17, 1787, ibid. John Adams’ new work was published in his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, published in two volumes, 1787.

[Reports to Jefferson about Shays’s rebellion, and his response]: see Julian P. Boyd, ed. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton University Press, 1954-55). Vols. 9-11, passim; see also Dumas Malone, Jefferson and the Rights of Man (Little, Brown, 1951), pp. 156-66. [Jefferson’s and Adams’ English tour]: Boyd, Vol. 9, pp. 369-75; see also L. H. Butterfield, ed. Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Belknap Press, 1961), Vol. 3, pp. 184-86. [Abigail Adams to Jefferson on Shays’s rebellion]: AA to Jefferson, Jan. 29, 1787; and Jefferson’s reply, Feb. 22, 1787, Adams Papers, Microfilm Reel, 369, Massachusetts Historical Society. [Jefferson on revolution and the tree of liberty]: Jefferson to William Stephens Smith, Nov. 13, 1787, Boyd, Vol. 12, p. 356.

[The rebel attack on the Springfield arsenal]: see detailed reports in the Henry Knox Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; and a separate folder, “Lincoln-Bowdoin, Shays’ Rebellion Campaign, 1786-1787,” Massachusetts Historical Society, containing day-to-day reports from Gen. Lincoln to Bowdoin. See also General Shepard to Governor Bowdoin, Jan. 26, 1787, Massachusetts Archives, Vol. 190, pp. 317-18, reprinted in American Historical Review, Vol. 2, No. 4 (July 1897), pp. 694-95.

[Events in western Massachusetts after the Springfield arsenal encounter]: Robert J. Taylor, Western Massachusetts in the Revolution, pp. 162-63. [Stockbridge episode]: Electa F. Jones, Stockbridge, Past and Present (Samuel Bowles, 1854), pp. 193-98; newspaper clippings, Shays’s Rebellion, city and town libraries, Berkshire County; Robert A. Burns assisted in this research. See also Thomas Egleslon, The Life of John Paterson (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1894), pp. 198-99. Edward Bellamy. The Duke of Stockbridge (Silver, Burdett, 1900), offers a fictionalized version of some of these events. See also Marion L. Starkey, A Little Rebellion (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955).

[Alexander Hamilton on the question Americans must decide]: Federalist No. 1, Edward Mead Earle, ed., The Federalist (Modern Library, 1937), p. 5.

[Early Americans on their country as mission or venture]: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Address to the American Historical Association, Washington, DC, Dec. 29, 1976, reprinted under the title “America: Experiment or Destiny?” American Historical Review, Vol. 82, No. 3 (June 1977), pp. 505-22.

A Rage for Liberty

[Franklin’s home and addition in Philadelphia]: Franklin to M. le Veillard, April 15, 1787, in Albert Henry Smyth, ed. The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (Macmillan, 1907), Vol. 9, pp. 558-62; on aspects and artifacts of his home, see Robert D. Crompton, “Franklin’s House off High Street in Philadelphia,” Antiques, Vol. 102, No. 4 (October 1972), pp. 680-83; George B. Tatum, Penn’s Great Town (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961), p. 158 and illustration No. 15.

[Description of Franklin]: quoted in Carl Van Doren, Benjamin Franklin (Viking Press, 1938), p. 750.

[The Philadelphia of Franklin’s time]: Edwin Wolf 2nd, Philadelphia: Portrait of an American City (Stackpole, 1975); George B. Tatum, Philadelphia Georgian (Wesleyan University Press, 1976).

[Independence Hall]: David W. Belisle, History of Independence Hall (James Challen &Son, 1859). [Franklin on “hanging together”]: John H. Hazelton, The Declaration of Independence: Its History (Dodd, Mead, 1906), p. 209.

[Liberty as a precious jewel]: cited in Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Belknap Press: 1967), pp. 62, 114.

[Hamilton on the “rage for liberty”]: quoted in John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox (Harper & Brothers, 1959), p. 113.

[Saxon origin of liberty]: Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (University of North Carolina Press, 1969), pp. 31, 228.

[Congregationalism vs. Baptists]: Bailyn, pp. 264-66. [Baptists and Quakers vs. John Adams]: ibid., 268-69. [Virginia Declaration of Rights]: ibid., p. 260.

[Benjamin Franklin on “publick liberty “]: quoted in Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic (Harcourt, Brace, 1953), p. 299.

[John Adams on liberty and property]: from Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, quoted in Francis W. Coker, Democracy, Liberty, and Property (Macmillan, 1942), p. 125. [Continental Congressman on dilemma of liberty and luxury]: quoted in Wood, p. 65.

[Slavery in America, 1770s and 1780s]: Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). Chs. 3 and 4; [Samuel Johnson on “yelps for liberty “]: quoted in Robinson, p. 80. See also Edmund S. Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History, Vol. 59, No. 1 (June 1972), pp. 5-29.

[American self-image in the eighteenth century]: quotations from Wood, p. 99; Bailyn, pp. 138-39.

[“Evils and calamities” making for crisis]: John Jay to George Washington, June 27, 1786, John Jay Papers, Columbia University; also in Henry P. Johnston, ed., Correspondences and Public Papers of John Jay (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1891), Vol. 3, pp. 203-5.

[The “mortal diseases”]: James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, March 19, 1787, in Robert A. Rutland, ed., Papers of James Madison (University of Chicago Press, 1975), Vol. 9, p. 318.

[Wood on shift to institutional concern]: Wood, p. 463.

[John Quincy Adams on the crisis as one of credit and contracts]: quoted in Robert A. East, John Quincy Adams: The Critical Years: 1785-1794 (Bookman Associates, 1962), pp. 85-86.

[Contingency in history]: Sidney Hook, The Hero in History (John Day, 1943); Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (Alfred A. Knopf, 1962); Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (Simon and Schuster, 1970). The Americans’ “experiments” in different forms and powers of government have been described in detail by Wood, esp. Parts II-IV.

[“Almost every pen” at work]: quoted in Wood, p. 6. [Madison’s correspondence with fellow Virginians]: see esp. George Washington to Madison, March 31, 1787, Rutland, Vol. 9, pp. 342-44; Madison to Edmund Randolph, April 15, 1787, ibid, pp. 378-80; Madison to Washington, April 16, 1787, ibid., pp. 382-87. See also relevant letters, ibid.Vol. 10. [Madison’s suspicions of Patrick Henry and George Mason]: ibid., Vol. 9, p. 331, pp. 50, 55.

Madison’s Vices of the Political System of the United States is reprinted in Rutland, Papers, pp. 348-57. I have drawn information and whole sentences on Madison’s final weeks in New York and journey to Philadelphia from my The Deadlock of Democracy (Prentice-Hall, 1963), Ch. 1, and sources referred to therein.

Philadelphia: The Continental Caucus

[Pinckney’s trip to Philadelphia]: Marvin R. Zahniser, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (University of North Carolina Press, 1967), p. 87. [Gerry’s trip]: George Athan Billias, Elbridge Gerry: Founding Father and Republican Statesman (McGraw-Hill, 1976), p. 156. [Johnson’s trip]: George C. Groce, Jr., William Samuel Johnson (Columbia University Press, 1937), pp. 139, 172-73; see also Committee on Historical Publications, Roads and Road-Making in Colonial Connecticut (Yale University Press, 1933), Tercentenary Commission of the State of Connecticut, Pamphlet Series 1-15.

[Washington’s arrival in Philadelphia]: Clinton Rossiler, 1787: The Grand Convention (Macmillan, 1966), pp. 159-60.

[Mason on Madison’s early activities]: Burns, p. 14. [Blending of politician and scholar]: ibid., p. 15.

[Some major works on the character and background of delegates to the 1787 convention]: Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (Macmillan, 1929); Robert E. Brown, Charles Beard and the Constitution (Princeton University Press, 1956); Merrill Jensen, The New Motion (Alfred A. Knopf, 1950); Forrest McDonald, We the People (University of Chicago Press, 1958); Edmund S. Morgan, The Birth of the Republic. 1763-89 (University of Chicago Press, 1956); Cecilia M. Kenyon, “Men of Little Faith: The Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative Government,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 12, No. 1 (January 1955). Pp. 3-43; Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution (American Historical Association, 1962); Arthur Taylor Prescott, Drafting the Federal Constitution (Louisiana State University Press, 1941), a topical analysis.

[Gladstone on Constitution]: John Bartlett, Familiar Quotations (Little, Brown, 1943), p. 450.

[Biographical data on the delegates]: Rossiter, Ch. 8.

[Regulators in the Massachusetts elections]: Hall, Ch. 8.

[Madison on “wicked measures”]: Madison to Edmund Pendleton, April 22, 1787, in Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison, Vol. II (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), P· 354

[Malcontents as “scum”]: Wood, pp. 476, 498.

[Main sources on proceedings of the federal convention]: Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787. Vols. I-IV (Yale University Press, 1966); Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Journal of the Debates in the Convention Which Framed the Constitution of the United States (as recorded by James Madison), Vols. I—II (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908); Jonathan Elliot, comp., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution …, Vols. I-V (Lippincott, 1836), known as Elliots Debates.

[Randolph’s proposals.]: Farrand, Vol. I, pp. 20, 21.

[Pinckney on question of abolition of state governments]: ibid., pp. 33-34.

[Pierce on James Wilson]: Farrand, Vol. 3, pp. 91-92.

[Pierce on Paterson]: Ibid., p. 90.

[Paterson’s speech]: Farrand, Vol. 1, pp. 242 ff.

[Rutledge on gentlemen’s shyness in regard to the national executive]: ibid., p. 65. Pinckney, Sherman, Gerry, and Wilson discussion: ibid., pp. 65-66.

[Gerry on choosing the executive]: ibid., p. 80.

[National judiciary discussion]: ibid, pp. 119 ff.

[Appointment of judges]: ibid, pp. 118 ff.; Vol. 2, pp. 41 ff.

[Paterson on slaves as lacking personal liberty]: quoted in Robinson, p. 192 (note Robinson’s interpretation of Paterson’s statement).

[Robinson on white workers’ attitude toward slaves]: ibid, p. 28.

[Rossiter on the delegates and slavery]: Rossiter, p. 267.

[Franklin on sawing boards to make them fit]: Farrand, Vol. 1, pp. 489, 499.

[Lafayette to John Jay, August 4, 1787]: John Jay Papers.

[Hamilton on the need for a powerful national government]: Farrand, Vol. 1, pp. 282-311.

2. The Third Cadre

[Franklin’s remark at convention’s end]: Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 (Yale University Press, 1966), Vol. II, p. 648 (Sept. 17, 1787).

[Washington taking leave]: John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Diaries of George Washington (Houghton Mifflin, 1925), Vol. 3, p. 237.

[Roger Sherman on the power of Congress not extending to the press]: Charles Warren, The Making of the Constitution (Little, Brown, 1937), p. 508.

[Transmission of Constitution by Congress to states]: Clinton Rossiter, 1787: The Grand Convention (Macmillan, 1966), p. 275. [Lee’s comment on the “unanimous” transmission]: Richard Henry Lee to George Mason, Oct. 1, 1787, in James Curtis Ballagh, ed., The Letters of Richard Henry Lee (Macmillan, 1914), Vol. 2, p. 439.

[Anti-Federalist (Melancton Smith) on twenty assemblies being equally respectable]: Paul Leicester Ford, ed., Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1888), p. 115.

[Alexander Hamilton, Madison, and the Federalist]: John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox (Harper & Brothers, 1959), Ch. 12; see also James Madison to George Washington, Nov. 18, 1787, in Robert A. Rutland, ed., Papers of James Madison (University of Chicago Press, 1975), Vol. 10, p. 254; Irving Brant, James Madison: Father of the Constitution (Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), pp. 170-71; Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Federalist (Wesleyan University Press, 1961), Introduction, pp. xi-xviii; Marvin Meyers, “Founding and Revolution: A Commentary on Publius-Madison,” in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKilrick, eds., The Hofstadter Aegis (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974). PP 3-35.

[Dropping of the Federalist by one newspaper]: Cooke, p. 600.

[Publishers on demand for Federalist]: Cooke, p. xiv.

[Federalist as America’s greatest contribution to political philosophy]: ibid., jacket cover.

The Anti-Federalists

[The anti-Federalist network]: Robert Allen Rutland, The Ordeal of the Constitution (University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), Ch. 3. See also Jackson Turner Main, The Antifederalists (University of North Carolina Press, 1961), passim.

[Madison on “respectable names” among his adversaries]: Madison to Archibald Stuart, Oct.

30, 1787, Rutland, Madison Papers, Vol. 10, p. 232.

[Ratification of the Constitution in Pennsylvania]: the definitive source is Merrill Jensen, ed., Ratification of the Constitution by the States—Pennsylvania, Vol. 2 of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976).

[Remarks of Robert Whitehill]: ibid, pp. 393-98.

[Shuffling and stamping of feet in the Connecticut convention]: Rutland, Ordeal, p. 85.

[Ratification in Massachusetts]: Van Beck Hall, Politics Without Parties: Massachusetts, 1780-1791 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), Chs. 9 and 10; Rutland, Ordeal, Chs. 5 and 6; George A. Billias, Elbridge Gerry (McGraw-Hill, 1976), Ch. 14; Robert Ernst, Rufus King (University of North Carolina Press, 1968); John C. Miller, Sam Adams (Stanford University Press, 1936); Samuel Bannister Harding, Contest over the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in the State of Massachusetts (Longmans, Green, 1896).

[Gerry’s style as too sublime]: Ford, p. 1.

[Federalist and anti-Federalist invective]: quoted in Rutland, Ordeal, p. 73.

[Richard Henry Lee to Samuel Adams on toiling in the “Vineyard of liberty”]: Richard Henry Lee to Sam Adams, Oct. 5, 1787, and Sept. 2 (?), 1787, Samuel Adams Papers, New York Public Library.

[Incident in Sheffield]: Rutland, Ordeal, p. 79.

[Gerry incident]: Rutland, Madison Papers, Vol. 10, pp. 345, 376, 400-1; Billias, pp. 213-14; Rutland, Ordeal, p. 96.

[Nasson on liberty]: Debates and Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1788 (William White, 1856), pp. 235-36. On the third-cadre leaders in Massachusetts, see also Harding, pp. 63-65.

[Maine observer]: quoted in Rutland, Ordeal, p. 118.

[Ratification in Maryland]: Philip A. Crowl, “Anti-Federalism in Maryland, 1787- 1788,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 4, No. 4 (October 1947), pp. 446-69.

The Course Is Set

[Ratification in Virginia]: Rutland, Madison Papers, passim; Fitzpatrick, Washington Diaries, passim; John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Government Printing Office, 1939), passim; Robert D. Meade, Patrick Henry: Practical Revolutionary (Lippincott, 1969).

[Patrick Henry’s speech to Virginia convention]: quoted in Meade, p. 356.

[A friend’s warning to Madison to come home to run for election ]: Joseph Spencer to Madison, Feb. 28, 1788, Rutland, Madison Papers, Vol. 10, pp. 540-41.

[Madison’s answer to Henry]: Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), Vol. 5, pp. 125-26.

[Anti-Federalist on “energy” and “liberty”]: Rutland, Ordeal, p. 231.

[Henry’s final speech]: ibid., pp. 248-49.

[Vote of the Allegheny men in favor of the Constitution]: Dorothy Davis, John George Jackson (McClain Printing, 1976), pp. 13-18, 346 n. 44.

[Monroe to Jefferson on Washington’s influence]: Rutland, Ordeal, p. 253.

[Ratification in New York]: Miller, Hamilton, Ch. 14; E. Wilder Spaulding, His Excellency George Clinton (Macmillan, 1938), Ch. 13; anon, (taken in shorthand), The Debates and Proceedings of the Convention of the State of New York (Francis Childs, 1788); Frank Monaghan, John Jay (Bobbs-Merrill, 1935); Linda Grant DePauw, The Eleventh Pillar: New York and the Federal Constitution (Cornell University Press, 1966).

[Invective against anti-Federalists “daily going about to poison the tenants”]: quoted in Rutland, Ordeal, p. 204.

[Hamilton’s appeal to Scotsmen]: Harold C. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (Columbia University Press, 1962), Vol. 4, pp. 645-46.

[A Clintonian on opponents’ invective]: quoted in Rutland, Ordeal, p. 203.

[Hamilton on elections going wrong]: Hamilton to Gouverneur Morris, May 19, 1788, Syrett, p. 651.

[A Clintonian on the “wellborn” lacking influence]: James M. Hughes to John Lamb, June 18, 1787; John Jay Papers, Columbia University.

[John Jay to Washington on Virginia victory]: July 4, 1788, John Jay Papers.

[Madison insists on “one adoption”]: Miller, Hamilton, p. 214.

[AntiFederalists’amendments]: John Jay to Washington, July 18, 1787, and July 23, 1787, John Jay Papers.

[The parade in New York City]: Miller, Hamilton, p. 213.

Vice and Virtue

[“Women of the republic”]: term from Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

[Women’s roles during this period]: see Kerber, esp. Chs. 4 and 9; Mary Sumner Benson, Women in Eighteenth-Century America: A Study of Opinion and Social Usage (Columbia University Press, 1935); Pauline Maier, The Old Revolutionaries (Alfred A. Knopf, 1980).

[Mercy Otis Warren]: Vera O. Laska, “Remember the Ladies”—Outstanding Women of the American Revolution (Commonwealth of Massachusetts Bicentennial Commission, May 1976), pp. 36-60; Notable American Women; Kerber, Chs. 3 and 8.

[Warren as a playwright who probably never saw a play]: Laska, p. 45.

[Warren’s rationale for wider participation by women]: quoted in Kerber, pp. 83-84.

[Warren’s authorship of attack on the Constitution]: Mercy Warren to Catharine Macaulay, Sept. 28, 1787, and Dec. 18, 1787, Mercy Warren Letterbook, Massachusetts Historical Society; Charles Warren, “Elbridge Gerry, James Warren, Mercy Warren and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution in Massachusetts,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, Vol. 64 (June 1932), pp. 143-64.

[Warren’s attack]: “Observations on the new constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions. By a Columbian Patriot,” Richard Henry Lee, ed. (Quadrangle Books, 1962), pp. 1-19.

[Quotations from “Observations …”]: pp. 1, 8, 19, 3, resp.

[Warren on “liberty delights the ear”]: Mercy Warren to Catharine Macaulay, July 29, 1779, Mercy Warren Letterbook, Massachusetts Historical Society.

[Framers defend social pluralism]: Madison to Jefferson, Oct. 24, 1787, Hunt, Vol. 5, pp. 17-41.

[Governmental tyranny]: George W. Carey, “Separation of Powers and the Madisonian Model: A Reply to the Critics,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 72, No. 1 (March 1978), pp. 151-64.

[Pinckney on the one order of Commons]: Charles C. Tansill, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States (Government Printing Office, 1927). p. 273.

[Problem of representation in the Constitution]: Jean Yarbrough, “Thoughts on the Federalist’s View of Representation,” Polity, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Fall 1979), pp. 65-82; see also Robert A. Goldwin, ed., Representation and Misrepresentation (Rand McNally, 1968); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, I776-1787 (University of North Carolina Press, 1969), passim; The Federalist, passim; Richard W. Krouse, “Two Concepts of Democratic Republicanism: Madison and Tocqueville on Pluralism and Party in American Politics,” paper prepared for delivery at the 1977 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., Sept. 1977.

[Values of Federalists and anti-Federalists]: Irving Kristol, ed., The American Commonwealth (Basic Books, 1976), esp. Martin Diamond, “The Declaration and the Constitution: Liberty, Democracy and the Founders,” pp. 39-55;Jean Yarbrough, “Republicanism Reconsidered: Some Thoughts on the Foundation and Preservation of the American Republic,” Review of Politics, Vol. 41. No. 1 (January 1979), pp. 61-95; George W. Carey and James McClellan, “Towards the Restoration of the American Political Tradition,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 38, No. 3 (August 1976), pp.110-27.

[Jefferson on ward republics]: Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, Feb. 2, 1816, quoted in Yarbrough, “Republicanism Reconsidered,” p. 89.

[Yarbrough on Jefferson’s proposed local public forums]: ibid., p. 90.

[Virtue]: John Agresto, “Liberty, Virtue and Republicanism,” Review of Politics, Vol. 39, No. 4 (October 1977), pp. 473-504; Yarbrough, “Republicanism Reconsidered”; Douglass Adair, “Fame and the Founding Fathers,” in Harold Trevor Colbourn, ed., Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair (W. W. Norton. 1974). pp. 2-26. See, in general, Austin Ranney, “‘The Divine Science’: Political Engineering in American Culture,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 70, No. 1 (March 1976), pp. 140-48.

3. The Experiment Begins

[Washington informed of his election]: Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954), Vol. 6, p. 164.

[Washington “oppressed with … anxious sensations”]: Jared Sparks, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Little, Brown, 1858)., p. 461. Quote is from missing diary entry for April 16, 1789.

[Washington on Alexandria]: Washington to Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. June 28, 1788, in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Government Printing Office, 1939), Vol. 30, p. 9.

[Washington forced to borrow money]: John C. Fitzpatrick, ed. The Diaries of George Washington, 1748-1799 (Houghton Mifflin. 1925), Vol. 4, p. 7.

[Alexandria celebration]: Pennsylvania Packet, April 23, 1789.

[Washington’s haste and preoccupation with the tasks ahead]: Freeman, Vol. 6, pp. 167-68.

[Crowd at Susquehanna crossing]: ibid., p. 172.[Ode at Trenton]: ibid., pp. 175-76.

[Washington on entry into New York]: Washington Irving, Life of George Washington (Putnam, 1857), Vol. 4, p. 511.

[Washington’s inaugural suit]: Frank Monaghan, “Notes on the Inaugural Journey and the Inaugural Ceremonies of George Washington as First President of the United States” (New York Public Library, 1939), passim.

[Debate over protocol]: James T. Flexner, George Washington and the New Nation (1783-1793) (Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 182-83.

[Livingston announces “it is done”]: Freeman, Vol. 6, p. 192.

[Washington’s Inaugural Address]: Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, Vol. 30, pp. 281-96.

The Federalists Take Command

[Washington’s ambivalence about serving as President]: Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, Vol. 30, passim.

[Presidential election of 1788-89]: Congressional Quarterly, Presidential Elections Since 1789 (Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1975); Merrill Jensen and Robert A. Becker, eds., The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections (University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), Vol. 1, p. xi.

[Hamilton’s interference in the vice-presidential election]: Hamilton to James Wilson, Jan. 25, 1789, in Harold C. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (Columbia University Press, 1962), Vol. 5, pp. 247-49; see also Hamilton to Theodore Sedgwick, Jan. 29, 1789, ibid., pp. 250-51.[Reaction of John Adams]: Page Smith, John Adams (Doubleday, 1962), Vol. 2, pp. 759-60.

[Electing the 1st Congress]: Jensen and Becker, Vol. 1, esp. Chs. 1 and 2.

[Madison’s election]: James Madison to George Washington, Jan. 14, 1789, in Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), Vol. 5, pp. 318-21; see also Madison to Thomas Jefferson, March 29, 1789, ibid, pp. 333-38.

[Pennsylvania elections]: Jensen and Becker, pp. 227-429.

[Washington on obtaining lodgings]: Washington to Madison, March 30, 1789, Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, Vol. 30, pp. 254-56. [Abigail Adams at Richmond Hill]: Smith, p. 770.

[Washington on Congress as “the first wheel of government”]: draft of proposed address to Congress [April? 1789], in Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, Vol. 30, pp. 299-300.

[Maclay vs. Adams on reference to President’s address]: Edgar S. Maclay, Journal of William Maclay (D. Appleton, 1890), pp. 10-11; Smith, pp. 750-51.

[Washington on the judicial branch as keystone of the national polity]: Washington to John Jay, Oct. 5, 1789, Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, Vol. 30, pp. 428-29. [John Jay’s early activities as Chief Justice]: correspondence with Justice Cushing, Nov. and Dec. 1789, and Jay to Richard Law, March 10, 1790, John Jay Papers, Columbia University.

[Organizing and manning the new government]: see, in general, Leonard D. White, The Federalists (Macmillan, 1948).

[Adams’ denial of patronage to friends]: Smith, p. 762. [Washington on nepotism]: Washington to Bushrod Washington, July 27, 1789, in Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, Vol. 30, p. 366.

[Washington on national government being organized]: Washington to Gouverneur Morris, Oct. 13, 1789, ibid., p. 442.

[Washington on reasons for his trip]: ibid., pp. 446-47. [Basic sources for information on the trip]: ibid., pp. 450-56; Fitzpatrick, Washington Diaries, Vol. 4, pp. 20-52; William Spohn Baker, Washington after the Revolution, 1784-1799 (Lippincott, 1898), pp. 150-61; Freeman, Vol. 6, pp. 240-45; Flexner, pp. 227-31.

[Roads and taverns in New England, 1789]: see esp. George F. Marlowe, Coaching Roads of Old New England (Macmillan, 1945), and Forbes and Eastman, Taverns and Stagecoaches of Old New England (State Street Trust Co., 1954), 2 vols. See also the relevant portions of Fitzpatrick, Washington Diaries.

[Ports and farmers]: Rollin C. Osterweis, Three Centuries of New Haven, 1638-1938 (Yale University Press, 1953). p. 17l Richard J. Purcell, Connecticut in Transition (American Historical Association and Oxford University Press, 1918), pp. 98-99, 120.

[New Haven c. 1789]: Purcell, pp. 120-21; Albert P. Van Dusen, Connecticut (Random House, 1961), p. 175. On the changing character of town politics in this period, see Edward M. Cook, Jr., The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), esp. p. 191.

[Slavery in Connecticut]: Robert A. Warner, New Haven Negroes: A Social History (Yale University Press, 1940), p. 5.

[Washington’s remark at Wallingford, Connecticut]: Fitzpatrick, Washington Diaries, Vol. 4, p. 26.

[Colonel Wadsworth’s “Woolen Manufactory”]: William B. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, 1620-1789 (Riverside Press, 1891), Vol. 2, p. 853.

[Manufacturing in Hartford]: Purcell, pp. 120-21, which comments as well on the state of manufacturing throughout Connecticut at this time.

[Springfield and its arsenal]: Weeden, Vol. 2, p. 792; Marlowe, p. 49.

[IsaacJenks’s tavern]: Marlowe, pp. 42-43. [Washington quote on houses in the Connecticut Valley]: Fitzpatrick, Washington Diaries, Vol. 4, p. 30.

[Massachusetts agriculture during this period]: Flexner, p. 229; James T. Adams, New England in the Republic, 1776-1850 (Little, Brown, 1926), pp. 84, 186-88, 190. [The small farm]: Adams, p. 191.

[The incident at the Boston town line]: Justin Winsor, ed., The Memorial History of Boston, l630-1880 (Ticknor, 1886), Vol. 3, pp. 197, 573; for Washington’s own remarks, see Fitzpatrick, Washington Diaries, Vol. 4, pp. 33-34, along with the appended footnotes.

[Washington vs. Hancock]: Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, Vol. 30, pp. 451-53; Baker, pp. 154-55. For a description of Hancock, see Winsor, Vol. 3, p, 201; for skepticism concerning his “gout,” Smith, Vol. 2, p. 782, and Harold and James Kirker, Bulfinch’s Boston, 1787-1817 (Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 104.

[Life in Boston at the time of Washington’s visit]: Jean Pierre Brissot, “Boston in 1788,” Old South Leaflets (The Directors of the Old South Work, n.d.), Vol. 6, pp. 2-10; Weeden, Vol. 2, pp. 848, 851-52, 863; Marjorie Drake Ross, The Book of Boston: The Federal Period (Hastings House, 1961), pp. 46, 49, 68; Samuel Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860 (Houghton Mifflin, Sentry Edition, 1961), PP· 30, 43.

[Harvard in 1780]: Brissot, pp. 7-8. [Higher education in New England]: “Education,” Dictionary of American History, rev. ed. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976), Vol. 2, pp. 394-95· 397.

[Washington on playing-card factory]: Fitzpatrick, Washington Diaries, Vol. 4, p. 38. [Shoe manufacturing in Massachusetts]: B. E. Hazard, Organization of the Boot and Shoe Industry (1921), passim. [Fishing and whaling]: Morison, pp. 32, 134-35, 141, 396 (table). [Commerce and trading in New England as a whole]: Walter B. Smith and Arthur H. Cole, Fluctuations in American Business, 1790-1860 (Harvard University Press, 1935), p. 4.

[Cotton in Beverly]: Robert W. Lovett, “The Beverly Cotton Manufactory: Or, Some New Light on an Early Cotton Mill,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, Vol. 26, No. 4 (December 1952), pp. 220-37.

[Washington on the “factory girls”]: Fitzpatrick, Washington Diaries, Vol. 4, pp. 37-38.

[Newburyport and Portsmouth in 1789]: Joshua Coffin, A Sketch of the History of Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury (1845) (Peter E. Randall, 1977), pp. 260-61; Benjamin W. Labaree, Patriots and Partisans: The Merchants of Newburyport, 1764-1815, (Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 66-67, 70-71 84, 89; Nathaniel Adams, Annals of Portsmouth (C. Norris, 1825), pp. 288-89.

[Sources on New England shipbuilding]: reports on the industry submitted to Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton; see esp. Joseph Whipple to Hamilton, Dec. 19, 1789, Syrett, Vol. 6, pp. 19-24; Benjamin Lincoln to Hamilton, Dec. 22, 1789, ibid., pp. 27-31; and an unknown citizen of Massachusetts to Hamilton, Oct., 1789, ibid..Vol. 5, pp. 479-81. See also J. T. Adams, p. 201.

[New Hampshire industry]: George D. Nash, Issues in American Economic History-(D. C. Heath, 1964), p. 117; Rolla M. Tryon, Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640-1860 (University of Chicago Press,1917), p. 135

[ Washington’s visit to Andover]: Fitzpatrick, Washington Diaries, Vol. 4, p. 47; see also the entries under “Phillips, Samuel’” in Dictionary of American Biography, Dumas Malone, ed. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934), Vol. 14, p. 543, and The National Cyclopedia of American Biography (James T. White, 1900), Vol. 10, p. 94.

[Phillips Academy in 1780]: Mary E. Brown and Helen G. Brown, The Story of John Adams, a New England Schoolmaster (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900), pp. 36, 45, 53-54

[The Lexington school]: D. Hamilton Hurd, comp., History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts (J. W. Lewis, 1890), Vol. 2, p. 621.[State of American schools in 1789]: “Education,” pp. 394-97.

[Lexington c. 1789]: Hurd, pp. 614, 630-31, 634, and Charles Hudson, Abstract of the History of Lexington, Massachusetts (T. R. Marvin & Son.. 1876), p. 22.

The New Yorkers

[Major sources on New York City, 1780-90]: Sidney I. Pomerantz, New York: An American City, 1783-1803 (Columbia University Press, 1938); Frank Monaghan and Marvin Lowenthal, This Was New York (Doubleday, Doran, 1943).

[Federal Hall]: Bruce Bliven, Jr., “Federal Hall” (National Park Service, 1975); Pomerantz, passim; Monaghan and Lowenthal, passim.

[ Washington’s assurances against a military dictatorship ]: Address to the New York Legislature, June 26, 1775, Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, Vol. 3, p. 305.

[Daily life in lower Manhattan]: Monaghan and Lowenthal, passim, and sources cited below. Mrs. Ellen Yager assisted me in identifying sources and conducting research in New York City libraries and archives.

[Washington on the trappings of office]: quoted in Freeman, Vol. 6, p. 252.

[Where leaders lived in New York City]: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, New York: Old and New (Lippincott, 1909), Vol. 1, pp. 270-73.

[Federal officials and employees]: White, Ch. 24.

[Samuel Provoost]: James Grant Wilson, ed., Memorial History of the City of New York (New York History Co., 1893), Vol. 3, p. 100; Rev. Morgan Dix, Trinity Church Bicentennial Celebration (J. Pott, 1897), p. 31. On religious life generally in New York City, see Pomerantz, pp. 372-95.

[New York City tavern life]: W. Harrison Bayles, Old Taverns of New York (Frank Allaben Genealogical Co., 1915), pp. 346-47, 356-57, 376-77.

[Social life and organization]: Bayard Still, Mirror for Gotham (New York University Press, 1956), esp. pp. 58-69; the observer of “three distinct classes” is cited on p. 60 of this work.

[Entertainment]: Pomerantz, Chs. 8 and 10.

[Competitive, factious background of New York politics]: Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York (Columbia University Press, 1971) and sources cited therein.

[New York merchants observing ships starting through the Narrows]: Maxwell F. Marcuse, This Was New York (LIM Press, 1970), pp. 145-46.

[Visiting English actor on daily life of merchants]: Hugh E. Macatamney, Cradle Days of New York (Drew & Lewis, 1909), p. 124; Still, p. 69.

[Manufacturing in New York]: Pomerantz, pp. 194-99.

[Alleged Dutch exclusiveness]: Macatamney, p. 124.

[Jewish leadership]: Pomerantz, pp. 386-87; Encyclopaedia Judaica.Vol. 12 (Macmillan, 1971), p. 1070.

[Black leaders]: Dictionary of American Biography, passim.

[Tammany in 1789-90]: Gustavus Myers, The History of Tammany Hall (published by the author, 1901); M. R. Werner, Tammany Hall (Doubleday, Doran, 1928]: the initiation song is quoted from Werner, p. 12.

[Tammany goals]: Werner, p. 10.

The Federalist Thrust

[John Adams on the need for ceremonial]: Smith, p. 754.

[Washington’s display in New York City]: Freeman, Vol. 6, pp. 226-27.

[Mercantile interests among the Federalists]: William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (World, 1961), pp. 149-62; see also Fred Moramarco, “Hamilton and the Historians: The Economic Program in Retrospect,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 1967), pp. 34-43.

[Madison’s tariff proposals]: “Speeches in the First Congress—First Session, Duties on Imports,” Hunt, Vol. 5. pp. 339-55.

[Machiavellian aspect of Hamilton]: John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox (Harper & Brothers, 1959), P· 227.

[Sources of Hamilton’s economic proposals, and earlier correspondence]: Syrett, Vol. 5, pp 439, 464-65, 538-57; ibid. (1962), Vol. 6, pp. 51-65; see also Miller, Ch. 16.

[Jackson’s attack]: Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton: The National Adventure (Macmillan, 1962), p. 78. [Madison’s “desertion”]: John C. Miller, The Federalist Era (Harper &Row, 1960), p. 41. On assumption of state debts, see Whitney K. Bates, “Northern Speculators and Southern State Debts: 1790,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 19, No. 1 (January 1962), pp. 30-48.

[Hamilton’s banking policy]: see in general Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America (Princeton University Press, 1957]: Thomas Francis Gordon, War on the Bank of the United States (Burt Franklin, 1967); Herman E. Krooss, ed., Documentary History of Banking and Currency in the United States (McGraw-Hill, 1969), Vol. 1.

[Text of Hamilton’s report on a National Bank]: Syrett, Vol. 7, pp. 236-342

[John Fenno’s poem]: Gazette of the United States, Feb. 23, 1793, quoted in L. Michael Golden, “Precedent, Conflict, and Change: A Case Study of the National Banking System” (Williams College, 1978).

[Madison on Hamilton’s national bank proposal, February 2, 1791]: Hunt, Vol. 6, p. 36.

[Jackson on the harmful effect of the bill]: quoted in M. St. Clair Clarke and D. A. Hall, Legislative and Documentary History of the Bank of the United States (Gales and Seaton, 1832), p. 37.

[Hamilton’s defense of the constitutionality of the bank bill]: Syrett, Vol. 8, pp. 97-134.

[Washington’s deliberateness]: Miller, The Federalist Era, p. 58.

[House request for Treasury Plan]: The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States (Gales and Seaton, 1834), Vol. 1, p. 1058.

[Hamilton’s inventory]: Mitchell, Ch. 8; see in general Williams, pp. 162-70.

[Proposed anti-civil-libertarian constitutional amendments]: Miller, The Federalist Era, p. 21.

[Adoption of the Bill of Rights]: See in general Irving Brant, The Bill of Rights (Bobbs- Merrill, 1965); Rutland.

[Newspapers in 1790]: Donald H. Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (State University of New York Press, 1969), Ch. 1.

[Washington’s mediation between Hamilton and Jefferson]: Miller, The Federalist Era, p. 95; Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, Vol. 32, pp. 130-31, 185-86.

[Lack of theoretical understanding of potential role of parties in a republic]: Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System (University of California Press, 1969), passim; Daniel Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), esp. Ch. 2.

[Jefferson and Madison’s “botanical” expedition of 1791]: James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 26-27, and sources cited therein.

[Jefferson urges Washington to stay on]: Jefferson to President, May 23, 1792, in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895), Vol. 6. p. 5.

[Coinage with figure of liberty instead of Washington]: Miller, The Federalist Era, p. 8.

The Deadly Pattern

[Washington’s birthday ball]: James T. Flexner, George Washington: Anguish and Farewell 1793-1799) (Little, Brown, 1969), pp. 13-14. [“Tranquility reigns”]: Freeman, Vol. 6, p. 321. [National Gazette attack]: Flexner, Anguish and Farewell, p. 15.

[“Invitation” to settle in the Southwest]: Madison to Washington, March 26, 1789 (enclosure), in Hunt, Vol. 5, pp. 331-33.

[John Quincy Adams on policies toward Indians]: quoted in George Dewey Harmon, Sixty Years of Indian Affairs (University of North Carolina Press, 1941), p. 362. [President Washington’s policy]: Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years (Harvard University Press, 1962), esp. pp. 43-50. [Wars with Indians]: Keith Irvine, general ed., Encyclopedia of Indians in the Americas (Scholarly Press, 1974).

[Red Jacket’s remarks]: Katharine C. Turner, Red Men Calling on the Great White Father (University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), p. 12. [Aupaumut’s plea]: ibid, p. 25. [Image on medal]: ibid, p. 15.

See also Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (University of Oklahoma Press, 1970); Dale Van Every, Disinherited: The Lost Birthright of the American Indian (William Morrow, 1966).

[Congressmen oppose excise]: Leland D. Baldwin, Whiskey Rebels (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1939), pp. 64-65. [Washington on minority threat]: quoted in John A. Carroll and Mary W. Ashworth, George Washington. Vol. 7: First in Peace (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), pp. 186-87. [Bradford described]: ibid., p. 185. [Role of Democratic societies in Whiskey Rebellion]: Eugene Perry Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790-1800 (Octagon Books, 1973). pp. 145-48 and passim.

[Washington on Republicanism]: Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, Vol. 34, pp. 98-99. [Washington to Ball]: ibid., Vol. 33, p. 506. [“Self-created societies”]: ibid., Vol. 34, p. 29. [Jefferson on whiskey campaign]: Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time (Little, Brown, 1962), Vol. III, p. 188. [Jefferson to Washington]: Entry for Aug. 2, 1793, in Thomas Jefferson, “The Anas,” in Ford, Vol. I, p. 253. [Madison on speech]: Hunt, Vol. 6, p. 223.

Divisions Abroad and at Home

[Another feather in liberty’s cap]: Boston Gazette, Sept. 7, 1789, quoted in Charles Downer Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1897), p.142 (Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, Extra Vol. 16).

[Jefferson on the French Revolution]: Jefferson to Diodati, Aug. 3, 1789, Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton University Press, 1958), Vol. 15, p. 326.

[Adams on French Revolution]: quoted in Smith, Vol. 2, pp. 785-86.

[Hamilton on thinking in English]: Hamilton conversation with George Beckwith, Oct. 1789, Syrett, Vol. 5, p.483. [Cause of France as cause of man]: Republican leader quoted in Miller, The Federalist Era, p. 130.

[John Adams on later revolutionary developments]: quoted in Hazen, p. 254.

[Jefferson on the higher stakes]: quoted in Miller, The Federalist Era, p. 127. [Celebration of the executions of king and queen]: Hazen, pp. 183, 258.

[Washington on transcending party animosities (in Inaugural Address)]: Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, Vol. 30, p. 294. [Washington on “Internal dissensions” and pleas for harmony]: Washington to Jefferson, Aug. 23, 1792, and Washington to Hamilton, Aug. 26, 1792, ibid, Vol. 32, pp. 128-34.

[Hamilton as “deeply injured party”]: Hamilton to Washington, Sept. 9, 1792, in John C. Hamilton, ed., The Works of Alexander Hamilton (John F. Trow, 1851), Vol. 4, p. 303.

[Hamilton on Madison as little acquainted with the world]: Hamilton to George Beckwith, Oct. 1789, in Syrett, Vol. 5, p. 488. [Jefferson’s appeal to Madison]: Letter of July 7, 1793, Ford, Vol. 6, p. 338.

[Citizen Genêt’s activities]: Harry Amnion, The Genêt Mission (W. W. Norton, 1973); see also, especially for domestic political implications: Harry Ammon, “The Genêt Mission and the Development of American Political Parties,” Journal of American History, Vol. 52, No. 4 (March 1966), pp. 725-41.

[The Jay Treaty ]: Jerald A. Combs, The Jay Treaty (University of California Press, 1970). [Washington on reception of the Jay Treaty]: Private letter to Hamilton, July 29, 1795, Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, Vol. 34, p. 262.

[Washington on his knowledge of the Constitution]: address to the House of Representatives, March 30, 1796, in Worthington C. Ford, ed., The Writings of George Washington (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), Vol. 13, pp. 177-80. [Madison’s response]: speech in Congress, April 6, 1796, Hunt, Vol. 6, p. 272.

[Other sources]: Paul A. Varg, Foreign Policies of the Founding Fathers (Michigan State University Press, 1963); Alexander DeConde, Entangling Alliance (Duke University Press, 1958); Gilbert L. Lycan, Alexander Hamilton and American Foreign Policy (University of Oklahoma Press, 1970); Albert H. Bowman, “Jefferson, Hamilton and American Foreign Policy,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 71, No. 1 (March 1956), pp. 18-41.

4. THE TRIALS OF LIBERTY

[John Adams in Quincy]: Page Smith, John Adams (Doubleday, 1962),Vol. 2, pp. 894-97. [Thomas Jefferson at Monticello]: Nathan Schachner, Thomas Jefferson (Appleton·Century-Crofts, 1951), p. 576.

[Jefferson’s alleged lack of ambition to govern men and his hope to come in second to Adams]: Jefferson to Rutledge, December 27, 1796, in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), Vol. 7, p. 94.

[Hamilton’s effort to “waste” Adams’ support]: Leonard Baker, John Marshall: A Life in Law (Macmillan, 1974), p. 212; George A. Billias, Elbridge Gerry (McGraw-Hill, lg76), pp. 249-53.

[Bache on Washington]: quoted in Smith, p. 909.

[Washington on criticism of himself]: Letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 6, 1796, in John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Government Printing Office, 1939), Vol. 35, pp· 118-22.

[President John Adams]: Zoltan Haraszli, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Harvard University Press, 1952); John Adams, Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787), 2 vols.; John Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Smith, passim.

[Adams’ view of liberty]: Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (Henry Regnery, 1953), pp. 86-87.

Philadelphians: The Experimenters

[Philadelphia background]: Louis B. Wright, The Atlantic Frontier (Alfred A. Knopf, 1947); Frederick B. Tolles, Meeting House and Counting House (University of North Carolina Press, 1948); Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955); Carl and Jessica Bridenbaugh, Rebels and Gentlemen (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942); James Lemon, “Urbanization and Development of Eighteenth Century Southeastern Pennsylvania and Adjacent Delaware,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 24, No. 4 (October 1967), pp. 501-42.

[Adams on City Tavern]: Smith, p. 168.

[Philadelphia’s “firm adherence” to liberty]: Richard B. Morris, “Independence,” Government Printing Office (for National Park Service), 1976.

[The historic city]: Richard B. Morris, “Independence” (Government Printing Office, 1976). [Franklin Court]: Robert H. Wilson, Franklin Court (Swarthmore Press, 1976).

[Minister quoted on outspoken laborers]: Jacob Duché, quoted in Bridenbaugh, p. 99.

[William Penn on education]: quoted in Wright, p. 245.

[The Philadelphia press]: Margaret Woodbury, Public Opinion in Philadelphia, 1789-1801 (Seaman Printery, l9l·9)·

[Aurora editor on no news in Philadelphia]: quoted in ibid., pp. 7-8.

[William Penn on need of civil liberties]: quoted in Jack P. Greene, ed., Settlements to Society, 1584-1763 (McGraw-Hill, 1966), p. 170, reprinted from Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania, Vol. 2, pp. 56-59.

[Du Bois on the condition of blacks in Philadelphia]: W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (first published 1899) (Benjamin Blom, 1967), pp. 11, 15.

[Income distribution in Philadelphia]: Richard G. Miller, Philadelphia—The Federalist City (Kennikat Press, 1976), Ch. 1.

[Division of the classes into “the cream, the new milk …”]: quoted in Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884 (L. H. Everts, 1884), Vol. 2, p. 910; see also Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia, 1800-1850 (Temple University Press, 1980).

[Warner on the private search for wealth]: Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Private City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), p. x.

[Franklin on the pains of the moment]: quoted in Bernard Fay, Franklin: The Apostle of Modern Times (Little, Brown, 1929), p. 511.

[Franklin on making experiments]: quoted in Verner W. Crane, Benjamin Franklin and a Rising People (Little, Brown, 1954), p. 201.

[Tom Paine and his fellow radicals]: Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (Oxford University Press, 1976), passim; Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (Citadel, 1945). 2 vols.; see also Joseph Dorfman, “The Economic Philosophy of Thomas Paine,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 3 (September 1938), pp. 372-86; Howard Penniman, “Thomas Paine—Democrat,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 37, No. 2 (April 1943), pp. 244-62.

[Bailyn on Paine’s Common Sense]: Bernard Bailyn, “Common Sense,” American Heritage, Vol. 25, No. 1 (December 1973), p. 36.

[English constitutional thought and the social and political balances]: aside from the standard editions of Hobbes, Locke, Filmer, etc., and of secondary and tertiary thinkers such as Charles Herle and Marchamont Nedham, see W. B. Gwyn, The Meaning of the Separation of Powers (Tulane University Press, 1965) and M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Clarendon Press, 1967).

[Nedham on freedom]: quoted in Gwyn, p. 22.

[Farmers and “leathern aprons” being more reasonable]: quoted in Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 86.

[Foner on Paine’s rejection of governmental checks and balances]: Eric Foner, p. 91.

[The colonial gentry’s loss of power]: Miller, p. 20.

[Radical and anti-radical debate over the Pennsylvania constitution of 1776]: quoted in Wood, pp. 442, 431, 441, 430; the last two citations refer to quotations of Benjamin Rush.

[Pennsylvania’s struggle over the Constitution of 1776]: Miller, Ch. 2.

Quasi-War Abroad

[Foreign affairs at the time John Adams entered the presidency]: Alexander DeConde, The Quasi-War (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966), Ch. 1. See also Alfred L. Burt, The United States, Great Britain and British North America, 1783-1812 (Yale University Press, 1940).

[Adams’ inaugural warning]: Walter Lowrie and Matthew St. Clair Clarke, eds., American State Papers, Foreign Relations (Gales and Seaton, 1832), Vol. 1, p. 39.

121[Adams’ Cabinet]: Manning J. Dauer, The Adams Federalists (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), esp. pp. 121-24; Gerard H. Garfield, Timothy Pickering and American Diplomacy, 1795-1800 (University of Missouri Press, 1969); Bernard C. Steiner, The Life and Correspondence of James McHenry (Burrows Brothers, 1907).

[Hamilton’s advising of Adams’ Cabinet]: Harold C. Syrett, ed., The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (Columbia University Press, 1962), Vol. 20 (fall 1796 and early winter 1797).

[Mission of Pinckney, Marshall, and Gerry]: Dauer, pp. 124 ff.; DeConde, Ch. 1. [On Elbridge Gerry]: Billias; Samuel Eliot Morison, “Elbridge Gerry, Gentleman-Democrat,” By Land and By Sea (Alfred A. Knopf, 1953). [John Marshall]: Baker; [C. C. Pinckney]: Marvin R. Zahniser, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (University of North Carolina Press, 1967).

[Talleyrand as a “cloven footed Devil”]: quoted in DeConde, p. 179. [Pinckney’s response to Talleyrand]: Alexander DeConde, A History of American Foreign Policy (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1963), p. 68; Lowrie and Clarke, Vol. 2, pp. 161-62.

[John and Abigail Adams at home]: Smith, Ch. 72.

[Pickering on Gerry]: John C. Miller, The Federalist Era (Harper & Row, 1960), p. 214.

[Adams’ message to Congress]: Lowrie and Clarke, Vol. 2, p. 199.

[Hamilton as Washington’s second-in-command]: see Washington to the Secretary of War, July 4, 1798, Fitzpatrick, Vol. 36, pp. 304-1l, plus other references in the Washington and Hamilton papers.

[John Adams’ gloomiest summer]: Smith, p. 985.

Semi-Repression at Home

[Political invective and extremism of 1790s]: James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters (Cornell University Press, 1956), pp. 101-4, 116.

[Naturalization Act]: ibid., p. 435. Appendix includes entire act. [Federalist fear of immigrants]: John C. Miller, Crisis in Freedom (Little, Brown, 1951), p. 44. [Jefferson denounces Alien Bill]: Smith, Fetters, p. 53.

[Sedition Act]: ibid., pp. 441-42. Complete act in appendix.

[Ardent ambition of Harrison Gray Otis]: Samuel E. Morison, Harrison Gray Otis, 1765-1848: The Urbane Federalist (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 101.

[Washington supports acts in general]: Marshall Smelser, “George Washington and the Alien and Sedition Acts,” American Historical Review, Vol. 59, No. 2 (January 1954), pp. 322-34, esp. p. 333; see also Washington to Alexander Spotswood, Nov. 22, 1798, Fitzpatrick, Vol. 37, pp. 23-24.

[Hamilton’s attitude toward Sedition Act]: John C. Miller, Alexander Hamilton: Portrait in Paradox (Harper & Brothers, 1959), p. 484. [Adams and Jefferson, on act]: ibid.

[Bill induces some foreigners to leave]: Frank M. Anderson, “The Enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Laws,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1912, pp. 115-26.

[Abigail Adams resents Bache]: Smith, Fetters, p. 9.

[Act enforced in New England]: ibid., p. 187. [High percentage of convictions]: Leonard W. Levy, Legacy of Suppression (Belknap Press, 1960), p. 131.

[Bache case]: Smith, Fetters, pp. 188-204, quoted at pp. 192, 198, 203.

[Baldwin case]: ibid., p. 271, italics added. [Newark newspaper on liberty]: ibid., p. 272.

[Cooper case]: Miller, Crisis, pp. 202-10. [Adams on Cooper’s “libel”]: Smith, Fetters, p. 311.

[Federalists on Sedition Act]: Miller, The Federalist Era, p. 231.

[Debate over constitutionality of Alien and Sedition Acts]: see Mark D. Howe, review of Smith’s Freedom’s Fetters, in William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 13, No. 4 (October 1956), pp. 573-76.

[Kentucky Gazette calls for mass meeting]: James M. Smith, “The Grass Roots Origins of the Kentucky Resolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 27, No. 2 (April 1970), p. 222.

[Jefferson on nullification of assumed, undelegated powers]: Schachner, Vol. 2, p. 611. [Smith on “practical politics”]: Smith, “Grass Roots,” p. 239.

[Virginia resolution]: Irving Brant, James Madison: Father of the Constitution. 1787-1800 (Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), p. 461.

[Central argument of the resolutions]: Frank M. Anderson, “Contemporary Opinion of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions,” American Historical Review, Vol. 5, No. 2 (December 1899). pp. 225-52.

[Washington on Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions]: Fitzpatrick, Vol. 37, p. 87 (confidential letter to Patrick Henry, Jan. 15, 1799). [Abigail Adams on “mad” resolutions]: Smith, John Adams, Vol. 2, p. 998. [Hamilton suggests sending troops]: Hamilton to Theodore Sedgwick, Feb. 2, 1799, Syrett, Vol. 22, pp. 452-53.

See also Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System (University of California Press, 1969), Chs. 2 and 3; Richard Buel, Jr., “Freedom of the Press in Revolutionary America: The Evolution of Libertarianism, 1760-1820,” in Bernard Bailyn and John B. Hench, eds., The Press and the American Revolution (American Antiquarian Society, 1980), pp. 59-97.

The Ventures of the First Decade

[George Washington’s death ]: John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Diaries of George Washington (Houghton Mifflin, 1925), Vol. 4, p. 320; James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man (Little, Brown, 1969), pp. 392, 396-402.

[Origins and early shaping of the American party system]: Major sources consulted include: Hofstadter; Roy F. Nichols, The Invention of the American Political Parties (Macmillan, 1967); Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans (University of North Carolina Press, 1957); Joseph Charles, The Origins of the American Party System (Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1956]: Morton Borden, Parties and Politics in the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1967); William Nisbet Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation (Oxford University Press, 1963); a collection of essays, Norman K. Risjord, The Early American Party System (Harper & Row, 1969).

[Jefferson on not going to heaven but with a party]: Jefferson to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789, Ford, Vol. 5. pp. 75-78.

[Rise of national parties in Congress]: John F. Hoadley, “The Emergence of Political Parties in Congress, 1789-1803,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 74, No. 3 (September 1980), pp. 757-79; Rudolph M. Bell, Party and Faction in American Politics: The House of Representatives, 1789-1801 (Greenwood Press, 1973); Mary P. Ryan, “Party Formation in the United States Congress, 1789 to 1796: A Quantitative Analysis,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 28. No. 4 (October 1971), pp. 523-42. Cf. Ronald P. Formisano, “Federalists and Republicans: Parties, Yes—System, No,” typescript, 1980, 62 pp.

[Politics of deference]: Ronald P. Formisano, “Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic’s Political Culture, 1789-1840,” American Political Science Review, V0L 68, No. 2 (June 1974), pp. 473-87; and in one state, Richard R. Beeman, The Old Dominion and the New Nation, 1788-1801(University Press of Kentucky, 1972).

[Democratic and Republican societies]: Eugene P. Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790-1800 (Columbia University Press, 1942).

[Washington on the Democratic societies]: quoted in Miller, The Federalist Era, p. 161.

[Case of Matthew Lyon, the “Spitting Lyon”]: Henry Adams, The Life of Albert Gallatin (Lippincott, 1879), pp. 191-92; Miller, The Federalist Era, pp. 208-9.

[The Virginia and Kentucky resolutions as contradiction of two-party strategy ]: James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 31-32.

[Manning’s tract]: William Manning, The Key of Libberty (The Manning Association, 1922). On Manning himself, see Foreword to this volume by Samuel Eliot Morison.

[Idea of America as an experiment]: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Address to the American Historical Association, Washington, D.C., Dec. 29, 1976, reprinted under the title “America: Experiment or Destiny?” American Historical Review, Vol. 82, No. 3(June 1977), pp. 505-22, quoted at p. 514.

[Patrick Henry on “work too great for human wisdom”]: quoted in Benjamin R. Barber, “The Compromised Republic: Public Purposelessness in America” (Kenyon Public Affairs Forum, Kenyon College, 1976), p. 6.

[Impossibility of one code of laws]: ibid.

[Barber on experiment]: ibid., p. 9.

[Madison on lessons of experience]: ibid.

[French traveler on slaves]: J. P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America (J. S. Jordan), p. 284.

[Polish poet at Mount Vernon ]: Julian Niemcewicz, quoted in Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (Columbia University Press, 1943), p. 125.

[Abigail Adams on women as “Lordess”]: quoted in Smith, John Adams, Vol. 2, p. 1006.

[John Adams on the subordination of women and children]: ibid., pp. 1016-17.

[John Randolph’s credo]: quoted in Robert Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph (W. W. Norton, 1979), p. 32.

[Washington on religion and morality]: Fitzpatrick, Writings of Washington, Vol. 35, p. 229.

[William Manning on education]: Manning, pp. 61, 20-21.

Showdown: The Election of 1800

[Jefferson to Aaron Burr on the “Eastern” states]: Jefferson to Burr, June 17, 1797, Ford, Vol. 7, pp. 147-48.

[Jefferson on laying purpose and pen to the cause]: Jefferson to James Madison, Feb. 5, 1799, ibid., p. 344.

[Intra-party factionalism]: Daniel Sisson, The American Revolution of 1800 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), pp. 363 ff.

[Hamilton on Adams’ pardon of Fries]: Miller, Alexander Hamilton, p. 507. [Adams to McHenry on Hamilton]: quoted in Smith, John Adams, pp. 1027-28.

[Burr’s election activities]: Burns, p. 34.

[Jefferson on role of the central states]: Jefferson to Madison, March 4, 1800, Ford, Vol. 7. P· 434.

[Jefferson’s refusal to answer “lies”]: Jefferson to James Monroe, May 26, 1800, ibid., p. 448.

[Marching women and children to the polls]: Miller, The Federalist Era, p. 264.

[Hamilton on not being overscrupulous]: Hamilton to John Jay, May 7, 1800, in Henry Cabot Lodge, The Works of Alexander Hamilton, Constitutional Edition (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [1917]), Vol. 10, pp. 371-74; Frank Monaghan, John Jay: Defender of Liberty (Bobbs-Merrill, 1935), pp. 419-21.

[Electioneering in l800]: Burns, p. 34.

The section on Gabriel’s revolt of 1800 was drafted jointly by the author and Stewart Burns.

[Gabriel’s revolt]: See in general Aptheker, pp. 219-26; Nicholas Halasz, The Rattling Chains (David McKay, 1966), pp. 87-100; Thomas W. Higginson, Black Rebellion (Arno Press, 1969), pp. 185-214; Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (Oxford University Press, 1972), passim; Willie Lee Rose, A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 107-14.

[“Othello” on liberty]: Carter G. Woodson, ed., Negro Orators and Their Orations (Associated Publishers, 1925), pp. 14-15.

[Du Bois on “the Preacher”]: quoted in Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Pantheon Books, 1974), p. 258.

[Black resistance and while controls]: Aptheker, pp. 140-49; Raymond A. Bauer and Alice H. Bauer, “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery,” in Robert V. Haynes, ed., Blacks in White America before 1865 (David McKay, 1972), pp. 235-57.

[Gabriel Prosser described]: Aptheker, p. 219. [Election of leaders by slaves]: Mullin, p. 148.

[Rebel leader on right to fight for liberty]: Aptheker, p. 220. [Brother Martin quotes Scripture]: Rose, p. 114.

[Rebels to spare those “friendly to liberty”]: ibid.

[Insurrection organized on “true French plan”]: Higginson, p. 199. [Monroe seeks advice]: Monroe to Thomas Jefferson, Sept. 15, 1800, in Stanislaus M. Hamilton, ed., The Writings of James Monroe (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900),Vol. 3, p. 209.

[Jefferson on execution of rebels]: Jefferson to James Monroe, Sept. 20, 1800, Ford, Vol. 7., pp. 457-58.

[Monroe on Gabriel’s stoicism]: Monroe to Colonel Thomas Newton, Oct. 5, 1800, Hamilton, Vol. 3, p. 213. [Rebel on endeavor for liberty]: Aptheker, p. 224.

[Story about Adams’ mistresses]: Smith, John Adams, p. 1034.

[Invective against Jefferson in 1800 campaign]:Charles O. Lerche, Jr., “Jefferson and the Election of 1800: A Case Study in the Political Smear,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 5, No. 4 (January 1948), pp. 467-91; see also Cunningham, p. 239.

[Jefferson’s political stands during election of 1800]: Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, Jan. 26, 1799, Ford, Vol. 7, pp. 327-29.

[George Cabot to Hamilton, on Burr and Jefferson]: letter of Aug. 10, 1800, Syrett, Vol. 25, pp. 63-64.

[Miller on the feeling for Burr]: Miller, The Federalist Era, p. 269.

[Jefferson’s letters after receiving election results]: Jefferson to Robert R. Livingston, Dec. 14, 1800, Ford, Vol. 7, pp. 462-66; Jefferson to Aaron Burr, Dec. 15, 1800, and Feb. 1, 1801, ibid., pp. 466-68 and 485-86, resp.

[Jefferson as a moderate]: Sisson, p. 407.

[Hamilton on Burr]: quoted in Miller, The Federalist Era, p. 270.

[Jefferson on the Federalist effort to “debauch” Burr]: Jefferson to Mary Jefferson Eppes, Jan. 4, 1801, Ford, Vol. 7, p. 478.

[Burr and the election of 1800]: works cited above; Sisson; John S. Pancake, “Aaron Burr: Would-be Usurper,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 8, No. 2 (April 1951), pp. 204-13.

[Marshall’s angling toward presidency in 1800 elections]: Albert J. Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall (Houghton Mifflin, 1916), Vol. 2, pp. 540-43.

[Jefferson’s indirect assurances to Federalists about his presidency]: Jefferson to Benjamin Smith Barton, Feb. 14, 1801, Ford. Vol. 7. pp. 489-90; Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress, Vol. 109, p. 18739; Matthew L. Davis, Memoirs of Aaron Burr (Harper & Brothers, 1858), Vol. 2, pp. 129-33; Schachner, p. 658.

[Jefferson on the “revolution” of 1800]: quoted in Sisson, p. 21.

5. JEFFERSONIAN LEADERSHIP

[Conrad & McMunn’s boardinghouse]: Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President (Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 3, 29;James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800-1828 (Columbia University Press, 1966), Ch. 5, esp. pp. 100-1.

[Jefferson as “all ends and angles”]: Marshall Smelser, The Democratic Republic (Harper &Row, 1968), p. 1.

[Jefferson’s Inaugural Address]: Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), Vol. 8, pp. 1-6.

[John Marshall’s Inaugural Day letter to Charles Pinckney]: quoted in Leonard Baker, John Marshall: A Life in Law (Macmillan, 1974), pp. 359-60.

[Reactions by opposition leaders and publicists to Jefferson’s assumption of office and Inaugural Address]: Malone, pp. 4-5; Smelser, pp. 18-19.

[Jefferson on the “sprig of grass”]: quoted in James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 25; see general sources quoted therein, in Sources, on Jefferson. I have used occasional sentences or phrases from this work in describing Jefferson.

[Smelser on liberty as Jefferson’s guiding star]: Smelser, p. 13.

[Celebrations of Jefferson’s inaugural]: Malone, pp. 29-32.

“The Eyes of Humanity Are Fixed on Us”

[Jefferson on the newness of things]: Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, March 21, 1801, Ford, Vol. 8, p. 22.

[Jefferson on the storm through which the “Argosie” had passed]: Jefferson to John Dickinson, March 6, 1801, ibid., p. 7.

[Jefferson on the “event of our experiment”]: Jefferson to Governor Hall, July 6, 1802, ibid, p. 156.

[Jefferson’s attempt to heal party schisms while expecting new opposition to arise from within Republican ranks]: Jefferson to John Dickinson, July 23, 1801, ibid., pp. 75-77; Jefferson to Wilson C. Nicholas, March 26, 1805, ibid, pp. 348-49; Jefferson to Thomas Cooper, July 9, 1807, ibid., Vol. 9, pp. 102-3.

[Jefferson’s desire to unite Federalists and Republicans he felt he could win to his purpose]: see Jefferson to Horatio Gates, March 8, 1801, ibid., Vol. 8, pp. 11-12.

[Jefferson’s characterizations of his high Federalist adversaries]: ibid., pp. 41, 147, 169.

[Jefferson on separating “patriotic” Federalists from their congressional leaders]: Jefferson to Thomas Lomax, Feb. 25, 1801, ibid., Vol. 7, p. 500. [Jefferson on avoiding shocking Federalist feelings]: Jefferson to William B. Giles, March 23, 1801, ibid, Vol. 8, p. 26. [Jefferson on the “Essex Junto”]: Jefferson to Levi Lincoln, July 11,1801, ibid., p.67. [Jefferson to Du Pont de Nemours on consolidating great body of people]: ibid., Jan. 18, 1802, p. 126 n.

[Jefferson on likely extinction of Federalist party]: Jefferson to Du Pont de Nemours, Jan. 18, 1802, ibid.

[Relationship of Jefferson and Madison]: Adrienne Koch, Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration (Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), passim.

[Jefferson on “appointments and disappointments”]: Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, March 24, 1801, ibid., p. 31. [Jefferson on making ingrates and enemies]: Jefferson, Jan. 13, 1807, quoted in Leonard D. White, The Jeffersonians (Macmillan, 1951), p. 349· [Jefferson on simple questions]: Jefferson, July 12, 1801, quoted in White, p. 352. See White for extensive discussion of Jefferson’s personnel and patronage policies.

[Smelser on New Haven as the Vatican City of Federalism]: Smelser, p. 49.

[Jefferson on his “painful office”]: quoted from his answer to the remonstrance of a committee of the merchants of New Haven, Jefferson to Elias Shipman and others, July 12, 1801,whole text in Ford, Vol. 8, pp. 67-70; see also White, pp. 351-52.

[Collective leadership of Jefferson with his Cabinet]: Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Process of Government Under Jefferson (Princeton University Press, 1978, Chs. 2-3.

[Jefferson on public administration as simple]: White, p. 4; Jefferson to James Monroe, May 29, 1801, Ford, Vol. 8, p. 59.

[Newspaper description of President’s house]: Alexandria Advertiser, quoted in Malone, p. 38.

[Federalist charge that Jefferson collected rent from his guests in the President’s house]: Irving Brant, James Madison: Secretary of State (Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), p. 42.

[Jefferson on Washington, DC, as pleasant country residence]: Jefferson to Joel Barlow, May 3, 1803, Ford, Vol. 8, p. 150. [Jefferson to son-in-law on same]: Jefferson to T. M. Randolph. June 4, 1801, quoted in Brant, p. 42.

[Pennsylvania Avenue as “streak of mud”]: Brant, p. 41. See also Young.

[Jefferson on paying off “Hamilton’s” debt]: Jefferson to Du Pont de Nemours, Jan. 18,

1802, Ford, Vol. 8, p. 127 n.

[Johnstone on causes of Republican disunity in Congress]: Robert M. Johnstone, Jr., Jefferson and the Presidency (Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 119.

[Significance of congressmen living in separate boardinghouses]: Young, esp. Ch. 6. See also Cunningham, pp. 282-86.

[John Quincy Adams on typical Republican legislator]: quoted in Johnstone, p. 118.

[Jefferson’s views on the role of the legislature in a tripartite balance]: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia (Harper Torchbooks, 1964), pp. 110-24; Jefferson to James Madison, June 20, 1787, Ford, Vol. 4, pp. 390-96; Jefferson to Spencer Roane, Sept. 6, 1819, ibid, Vol. 10, pp. 140-43; Jefferson to Abigail Adams, Sept. 11, 1804, in H. A. Washington, ed. The Works of Thomas Jefferson (Townsend Mac Coun, 1884), Vol. 4, pp. 560-62.

[Jefferson’s pledge to carry out the legislative will]: reply to notification of election, Feb. 20, 1801, in Saul K. Padover, ed., The Complete Jefferson (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1943), p. 383.

[Jefferson’s dinner invitations to Republicans and Federalists]: Young, p. 169.

[John Quincy Adams on his 1804 dinner with Jefferson]: Charles Francis Adams, ed, Memoirs of John Quincy Adams (Lippincott, 1874), Nov. 23, 1804, Vol. 1, p. 316.

[Adams on his later dinner]: Memoirs, Nov. 3, 1807, quoted in Francis Coleman Rosenberger, ed., Jefferson Reader (E. P. Dutton, 1953). pp. 60-61.

[Johnstone on flow chart]: Johnstone, p. 121.

[Jefferson’s party leadership]: See in general Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power (University of North Carolina Press, 1963), esp. Ch. 4. For a sharply dissenting view, see Young.

To Louisiana and Beyond

[Madison on the Mississippi]: quoted in Malone, p. 266.

[Jefferson’s “peculiar confidence” in western men]:Jefferson to J. P. G. Muhlenberg, Jan. 31, 1781, in Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson (Princeton University Press, 1951), Vol. 4, p. 487.

[Jefferson on America’s favored international position, in Inaugural Address]: Ford, Vol. 8, p. 3 (text here spelled out from abbreviated form in Ford).

[Jefferson on having nothing to do with European interests]: Jefferson to George Logan, March 21, 1801, Ford, Vol. 8, p. 23.

[Jefferson on “unwise” French policy of regaining Louisiana]: Jefferson to James Monroe, May 26, 1801, ibid., p. 58.

[The Jefferson administration’s reaction to French policy in Saint Domingue]: Carl Ludwig Lokke, “Jefferson and the Leclerc Expedition,” American Historical Review, Vol. 33, No. 2 (January 1928), pp. 322-28. [Jefferson’s fear of implications of independent black republic]: Arthur Burr Darling, Our Rising Empire (Yale University Press, 1940), pp. 415-16; Lokke, p. 324.

[Jefferson’s warning to France against taking possession of Louisiana]: Jefferson to Robert R. Livingston, April 18, 1802, Ford, Vol. 8, p. 145.

[Jefferson’s military preparations in response to recession of Louisiana]: Mary P. Adams, “Jefferson’s Reaction to the Treaty of San Ildefonso,”Journal of Southern History, Vol. 21, No. 2 (May 1955), pp. 173-88.

[Handlin on New Orleans as a fulcrum]: Oscar Handlin, “The Louisiana Purchase,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1955, p. 47.

[Louisiana policy of the Spanish court]: ibid., pp. 48-49.

[Jefferson’s notification to Monroe of his appointment]: Jefferson to Monroe, Jan. 10, 1803, Ford, Vol. 8, p. 188. For the formal communications and instructions from the Administration to Livingston and Madison, see Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), Vol. 7, passim.

[Monroe’s inability to resist the call to duty]: Harry Ammon, James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity (McGraw-Hill, 1971), pp. 204-5.

[National Intelligencer on Louisiana treaty, July 8, 1803]: quoted in Malone, p. 297.

[Jefferson on peace]: Jefferson to John Sinclair, June 30, 1803, quoted in ibid, p. 295.

[“Fabricus” in the Columbian Centinel, July 13, 1803]: quoted in ibid., p. 297.

[Paine on constitutionality of power to acquire territory]: Paine to Jefferson, Sept. 23, 1803, in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (Citadel, 1945), Vol. 2, pp. 1447-48.

[Jefferson on “written laws”]: Jefferson to John Calvin, Sept. 20, 1810, Ford, Vol. 9, p.

279.

[Jefferson’s draft of a proposed constitutional amendment]: quoted in Malone, p. 316.

[Jefferson’s willingness to acquiesce in not following constitutional amendment route]: Jefferson to W. C. Nicholas, Sept. 7, 1803, quoted in Johnstone, p, 73.

[Jefferson’s curiosity about soil, fauna, etc., of Louisiana Territory]: Jefferson to Meriwether Lewis, April 27, 1803, Ford, Vol. 8, pp. 193-199; see also references to remainder of this section.

[The Lewis and Clark expedition]: the key documentary sources are the notes and diaries of the two leaders. Of the several editions, I have used James K. Hosmer, ed., History of the Expedition of Captains Lewis and Clark 1804-5-6., - reprinted from the edition of 1814 (A. C. McClurg, 1902), Vols. 1 and 2; and Ernest Staples Osgood, The Field Notes of Captain William Clark, 1803-1805 (Yale University Press, 1964). John Bakeless, Lewis & Clark: Partners in Discovery (William Morrow, 1947), usefully summarizes these and other sources.

[Jefferson’s concern about the fur trade]: Ralph B. Guinness, “The Purpose of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 20, No. 1 (June 1933), pp. 90-100.

[Jefferson on Meriwether Lewis]: from “Life of Captain Lewis by Thomas Jefferson” (written in 1813 and included in Hosmer, Vol. 1, pp. xli-lvi, at xlvi).

[Jefferson’s instructions to Lewis]: Jefferson to “Merryweather” Lewis, June 20, 1803, ord, Vol. 8, pp. 194-99.

[Indian chief on not whipping Indian children]: quoted in Bakeless, p. 124.

[Jefferson-Lewis exchange at end of expedition]: Lewis to Jefferson, Sept. 23, 1806, quoted in Bakeless, p. 376; Jefferson to Lewis, Oct. 20, 1806, Ford, Vol. 8, p. 476.

Checkmate: The Federalist Bastion Stands

[Major sources on judicial review and the Marshall Court]: Robert K. Carr, The Supreme Court and Judicial Review (Farrar and Rinehart, 1942); Gottfried Dietze, ed., Essays on theAmerican Constitution (Prentice-Hall, 1964), esp. Ch. 1; Edward S. Corwin, John Marshall and the Constitution (Yale University Press, 1921); Richard E. Ellis, The Jeffersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (Oxford University Press, 1971); Robert Kenneth Faulkner, The Jurisprudence of John Marshall (Princeton University Press, 1968); Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History (Little, Brown, 1924), Vol. 1; Benjamin F. Wright, The Growth of American Constitutional Law (Houghton Mifflin, 1942).

[Jefferson’s reaction to Federalist “courtpacking”]: Jefferson to William B. Giles, March 23, 1801, Ford, Vol. 8, pp. 25-26; Jefferson to William Findley, March 24, 1801, ibid., pp. 27-28; Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, March 24, 1801, ibid, pp. 31-33; Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, March 29, 1801, ibid., pp.40-43. [The “one act of Mr. Adams’s” that displeased Jefferson]: Jefferson to Abigail Adams, June 13, 1804, ibid., Vol. 8, pp. 306-8.

[Gouverneur Morris on Federalists’ need to cast anchors]: quoted in Johnstone, p. 172.

[Justice Chase on judicial power]: quoted in Baker, p. 379.

[Jefferson’s designation “sweeping Republicans”]: cited in Schachner, p. 683.

[Giles on the Federalist “fortress”]: William B. Giles to Jefferson, June 1, 1801, Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.

[Jefferson’s involvement in repeal of Judiciary Bill]: Johnstone, p. 175.

[Reaction of Supreme Court justices to Republican judicial measures]: Baker, pp. 378-79.

[Marshall opinion in Marbury v. Madison]: William Cranch, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme, Court of the United States, known also as Cranch Reports (Banks Law Publishing Co., 1911), Vol. 1, pp. 152-80. [Withholding of Marbury commission]: ibid., p. 161. [Peoples “original right”]: ibid., pp. 175-76.

[Peltason on Marshall stating the question so that the answer was obvious]: Jack W. Peltason and James MacGregor Burns, Government by the People (Prentice-Hall, 1952), p. 107.

[Boston Independent Chronicle on Marbury]: quoted in Baker, pp. 409-10.

[Jefferson’s executive leadership and his quotations thereon]: Johnstone, pp. 86, 56.

[Jefferson on harmony in his Cabinet]: Jefferson to Destutt de Tracy, Jan. 26, 1811, Ford, Vol. 9, p. 307.

[Jefferson on President’s power of decision]: ibid., p. 308.

[Cunningham on Jefferson as Republican party unifier]: Cunningham, Jeffersonian Republicans in Power, p. 304.

[Jefferson’s moderate appointment policy]: Ellis, p. 234.

[Jefferson on likelihood that Republican party would split]: Jefferson to Joel Barlow, May 3, 1802, Ford, Vol. 8, p. 150.

[His tendency to equate the Republican party with the nation]:Jefferson to William Duane, March 28, 1811, ibid., Vol. 9, pp. 310-14.

[Hamilton-Burr duel]: Milton Lomask, Aaron. Burr (Farrar, Straus Sc Giroux, 1979), pp. 346-55.

[Jefferson on majority rule in his Inaugural Address]: Ford, Vol. 8, p. 2 (reprinted in abbreviated note form in Ford).

6. THE AMERICAN WAY OF WAR

[Coronation of Napoleon]: Frederic Masson, Napoleon and His Coronation (Lippincott, [1907]), pp. 171-240; Vincent Cronin, Napoleon Bonaparte: An Intimate Biography (William Morrow, 1972), pp. 246-54.

[French attack to the east]: Theodore A. Dodge, Napoleon, Vol. 2 in Great Captains series (Houghton Mifflin, 1904).

[British court and politics]: John Brooke, King George III (Constable, 1972).

[Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar]: David Walder, Nelson (Dial Press, 1978), Ch. 33.

[Jefferson on “chance”]: Jefferson to Barnabus Bidwell, July 5, 1806, quoted in Robert M. Johnstone, Jr., Jefferson and the Presidency (Cornell University Press, 1978), p. 132.

[Jefferson on inexperience of American diplomats]: cited by Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President (Little, Brown, 1970); Vol. 4, p. 299, as Jefferson to Madison, March 19, 1803; cited in ibid., Vol. 5, Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809, p. xviii, as of date of Nov. 19, 1803.

[Barbary pirates]: Louis B. Wright and Julia H. MacLeod, The First Americans in North Africa (Princeton University Press, 1945); Ray W. Irwin, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with the Barbary Powers (University of North Carolina Press, 1931).

[Burr, Wilkinson, and western adventurism]: Thomas P. Abernethy, The Burr Conspiracy (Oxford University Press, 1954); James Ripley Jacobs, Tarnished Warrior (Macmillan, 1938); Nathan Schachner, Aaron Burr (Frederick A. Stokes, 1937); Isaac J. Cox, “Hispanic American Phases of the ‘Burr Conspiracy,’” Hispanic American Historical Review; Vol. 12, No. 2 (May 1932), pp. 142-75.

[Frederick Jackson Turner on Wilkinson]: quoted in John A. Garraty, ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography (Harper & Row, 1974), p. 1204.

[Jefferson’s proclamation against the conspiracy]: Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), Vol. 8, pp. 481-82 (Nov. 27, 1806).

“The Hurricane … Now Blasting the World”

[The “broken voyage”]: A. L. Burl, The United States, Great Britain, and British North America from the Revolution to the Establishment of Peace After the War of 1812 (Yale University Press, 1940), pp. 218-24; see generally Eli F. Heckscher, The Continental System (Humphrey Milford, 1922).

[Identifying English deserters on American ships]: Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (F. S. Crofts, 1941), p. 112; James F. Zimmerman, Impressment of American Seamen (Longmans, Green, 1925), passim.

[Jefferson on public opinion following the Chesapeake incident]: Jefferson to Du Pont de Nemours, July 14, 1807, cited in Bailey, pp. 116-17; Jefferson to William Duane, July 20, 1807, Ford, Vol. 9, p. 120.

[Jefferson and the embargo]: Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: Second Term, 1805-1809 (Little, Brown, 1974), Ch. 26; Louis Martin Sears, Jefferson and the Embargo (Duke University Press, 1927).

[Impact of the embargo and New Hampshire song]: Bailey, pp. 119-120, quoted from p. 119.

[Jefferson’s failure to elicit full support for the embargo from his colleagues]: Johnstone, p. 266.

[Jefferson’s “un-Jeffersonian” behavior in enforcing embargo]: ibid., p. 284.

[Poetic attack on Jefferson by William Cullen Bryant]: William Cullen Bryant, The Embargo, “By a Youth of Thirteen” (Printed for the Purchasers, 1808); quoted in part in Malone, Jefferson: Second Term, p. 606.

[Jefferson on the sudden unaccountable revolution]: Jefferson to Thomas Mann Randolph, Feb. 7, 1809, Ford, Vol. 9, p. 244.

[Jefferson on “hurricane…now blasting the world”]: Jefferson to Caesar Rodney, Feb. 10, 1810, ibid, p. 271.

[Impeachment of Justice Chase]: Johnstone, pp. 182-87. [Chase on “mobocracy”]: quoted in Nathan Schachner, Thomas Jefferson (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951), Vol. 2, p.

778.

[Jefferson as political leader]: Johnstone, passim; Dumas Malone, Thomas Jefferson as Political Leader (University of California Press, 1963).

[The Marshall court]: Albert J. Beveridge, The Life of John Marshall (Houghton Mifflin, 1919), Vol. 3; Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History (Little, Brown, 1924), Vol. 1.

[Trial of Aaron Burr]: Richard B. Morris, Fair Trial (Alfred A. Knopf, 1952); Francis F. Beime, Shout Treason: The Trial of Aaron Burr (Hastings House, 1959); cf. Julius W. Pratt, “Aaron Burr and the Historians,” New York History, Vol. 26, No. 4 (October 1945). PP 447-70.

[Jefferson on the Madison-Monroe friction]: Jefferson to Monroe, February 18, 1808, Ford, Vol. 9, p. 17, 7-78.

[Election of 1808]: Irving Brant, “Election of 1808,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., cd., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 1971), Vol. 1, pp. 185-246.

The Irresistible War

[Dolley Madison’s interposition between the French and English ministers]: Irving Brant, The Fourth President (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 404.

[Origins of War of 1812]: Bradford Perkins, Prologue to War, 1805-1812 (University of California Press, 1961); George R. Taylor, “Agrarian Discontent in the Mississippi Valley Preceding the War of 1812,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 39, No. 4 (August 1931), pp. 471-505; William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (World, 1961), pp. 192-96. Roger H. Brown offers a somewhat different analysis in The Republic in Peril: 1812 (Columbia University Press, 1964).

[War of 1812]:Patrick C.T. White, Nation on Trial: America and War of 1812 (John Wiley & Sons, 1965); Reginald Horsman, The War of 1812 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1969); Harry L. Coles, The War of 1812 (University of Chicago Press, 1965).

[John Randolph as legislative leader]: William Cabell Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), Vol. 1, Ch. 7.

[Tension earlier between Madison and Monroe]: Harry Ammon, James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity (McGraw-Hill, 1971), Ch. 15; Brant, The Fourth President, Ch. 40.

[Monroe’s appointment as Secretary of State]: Ammon, pp. 454-56; Irving Brant, James Madison the President (Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), Ch. 18.

[Boston Columbian Centinel on western “hypocrisy”]: quoted in Bailey, p. 135.

[Benton on question of war]: Thomas Hart Benton to Henry Clay, Feb. 7, 1810, in James F. Hopkins, ed., The Papers of Henry Clay (University Press of Kentucky, 1959), Vol. l, p. 447.

[Clay on conquest of Canada]: ibid., p. 450.

[Macon on the governments of England and France]: quoted in Bailey, p. 137.

[Madison on going to war against England and/or France]: James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, May 25, 1812, Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), Vol. 8, p. 191.

[Monroe’s anonymous letter]: Washington National Intelligencer editorial, April 14, 1812, Hopkins, Vol. 1, p. 645; originally thought to have been written by Clay, it has been proved to be the work of Monroe.

[Madison’s war message]: Hunt, Vol. 8, p. 198.

[John Quincy Adams on impressment]: Perkins, p. 428. [Calhoun on same]: ibid, p. 434.

[Fourth of July toast]: ibid., p. 435.

[Election of 1812]: Norman K. Risjord, “The Election of 1812,” in Schlesinger, pp. 249-72.

[Madison on “Experimentum crucis”]: Madison to Thomas Jefferson, Oct. 14, 1812, Hunt, Vol. 8, p. 220.

[English commander on regulars]: Coles, p. 157.

[The American way of war]: Merle Curti, Peace or War: The American Struggle, 1636-1936. (W. W. Norton, 1936); Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Macmillan, 1973); Walter Millis, Arms and Men (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1956).

[Jay on the supreme need for safety]: Federalist No. 3, in Edward Mead Earle, ed., The Federalist (Modern Library, n.d), p. 13.

[Relative size of American and European military efforts]: John K. Mahan, The War of 1812 (University of Florida Press, 1972), p. 325.

Waterside Yankees: The Federalists at Ebb Tide

[The Hartford Convention]: Henry Adams, History of the United States, 1813-1817 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), Vol. 2; James M. Banner, Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789-1815 Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); David H. Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism (Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 177-78 and passim; Samuel Eliot Morison, Harrison Gray Otis (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), esp. Ch. 17.

[Monroe’s effort to monitor the convention]: Ammon, pp. 341-42.

[Waterside Yankee leaders]: my portraits are drawn mainly from Fischer’s brief biographies of old Federalists in Fischer, pp. 245-59. [Ames as “lethargic, “etc.]: ibid., p. 21.

[Salem in 1790]: Samuel Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts (Houghton Mifflin, 1921), p. 79.

[Marblehead]: Samuel Eliot Morison, By Land and By Sea (Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), p. 183.

[Other ports]: Robert C. Albion, William A. Baker, and Benjamin W. Labaree, New England and the Sea (Wesleyan University Press, 1972), passim; see also David T. Gilchrist, ed., The Growth of the Seaport Cities, 1790-1825; (University Press of Virginia, 1967).

[Plymouth rope making]: Samuel Eliot Morison, The Ropemakers of Plymouth (Houghton Mifflin, 1950).

[The sight of Boston]: quoted by Morison from unnamed source, in Morison, Maritime History of Massachusetts, p. 42.

[Connecticut Valley trade]: Margaret Elizabeth Martin, Merchants and Trade of the Connecticut River Valley, 1750-1820 (Smith College Studies in History, Vol. 24, October 1938-July 1939).

[Yankee merchants]: Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution, 1763-1776 (Longmans, Green, 1918); see also George E. Brooks, Jr., Yankee Traders, Old Coasters and African Middlemen (Boston University Press, 1970).

[Yankee merchants’ preoccupation with commerce]: Brissot de Warville, 1788, quoted in Morison, Maritime History of Massachusetts, p. 43.

[Mariner’s life]: Albion, Baker, and Labaree, p. 86.

[Social deference in the port towns]: Fischer, p. xiv; for a broad view of a specific social order, that of the merchants of Newburyport, see Benjamin W. Labaree, Patriots and Partisans (Harvard University Press, 1962); see also Albion, Baker, and Labaree, pp. 50-53.

[Boston and Cambridge cultural scenes around 1815]: Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865, E. P. Dutton, 1936), Chs. 1-2, quoted at p. 8. See also Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (Harcourt, Brace, 1930). Vol.2, Book 3, Part I.

[The Essex Junto]: David H. Fischer, “The Myth of the Essex Junto,” William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 21, No. 2 (April 1964). pp. 191-235.

[Essexmen as conservatives]: Fischer, “Myth of the Essex junto,” p. 199.

[John Quincy Adams on Essexmen’s selfishness]: J. Q. Adams to Josiah Quincy, Dec. 4, 1804, cited in Edmund Quincy, Josiah Quincy (Fields, Osgood, 1869), p. 64.

[John Adams’ instructions to himself on the proper pursuit of knowledge]: L. H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Belknap Press, 1961), Vol. 1, p. 73 (diary notation of a Tuesday in Jan. 1759).

[Adams’ moral instructions to himself]: ibid., p. 72 (same date).

[Adams on individual self-interest versus public virtue]: quoted in Page Smith, John Adams (Doubleday. 1962), p. 234.

[Wood’s summary of reasons for balanced government]: Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (University of North Carolina Press, 1969), p. 198.·

[John Adams on executive power]: see Manning J. Dauer, The Adams Federalists (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953), esp. Ch. 3.

[Adams’ fear of the few]: Adams to Jefferson, March 1, 1778, Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston.

[Adams quoted on liberty]: Smith, pp. 78-79.

[Adams on equality]: quoted in Smith, Vol. 1, p. 259, from Charles Francis Adams, ed., Works (Little, Brown, 1854), Vol. 9, pp. 375-78 (Adams to James Sullivan, May 26, 1776).

[Adams on properly as a liberty]: quoted in Dauer, p. 42.

[Adams’ views in general]: see also Zoltán Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Crosse t& Dunlap, 1964); Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955).

Federalists: The Tide Runs Out

[Federalist party]: Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism, passim; see also Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent (Cornell University Press, 1970); Shaw Livermore, Jr., The Twilight of Federalism (Princeton University Press, 1962).

[Fischer on Adams’ “curious relationship”]: The Revolution of American Conservatism, p. 7.

[Adams’ puzzling motives]: Ebenezer Mattoon to Thomas Dwight, March 2, 1801, quoted in Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism, p. 18.

[Adams on his Federalist foes’ “stiff·rumped stupidity”]: John Adams to John Quincy Adams, Dec. 14, 1804, Adams Family Papers, Reel 403, Massachusetts Historical Society.

[John Quincy Adams’ alienation from the Federalist party in Massachusetts]: Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), pp. 138-50.

[Samuel Chase on liberty]: Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism, p. 358.

[Samuel Lyman on nothing so unequal as equality”]: ibid., p. 251.

[Sewall on security]: ibid., p. 256.

[Ames on “Madam Liberty”]: ibid., p. 26.

[Ames on disorganization of Federalists]: ibid, p. 53.

[Federalist satire of the “Grand Caucus”]: ibid., p. 57.

[Federalist attempts to organize a party mechanism]: See in general Linda K. Kerber, “The Federalist Party,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties (Chelsea House, 1973), Vol. 1, pp. 3-29. See also Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism, Ch. 3.

[Jeremiah Smith on “red hot feds”]: ibid., p. 64.

[Pickering’s secession “plot” of 1804]: Fischer, “The Myth of the Essex Junto,” pp. 229-32.

[Hartford Convention finale]: Banner, Ch. 8; Morison, Harrison Gray Otis; review of Banner by Fischer in American Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 6 (October 1970), pp. 1778-79.

[Hartford Convention report]: quoted in Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History, rev. ed. (Harper & Brothers, 1961), p. 153.

[Madison on hearing of the proposed Hartford Convention]: Brant, The Fourth President, p. 582.

[Jefferson on Hartford Convention]: Ford, Vol. 8, p. 67.

7·THE AMERICAN WAY OF PEACE

[Gallatin at Ghent]: Henry Adams, The Life of Albert Gallatin (Lippincott, 1879), pp. 508-48.

[Negotiations at Ghent]: A. L. Burt, The United States, Great Britain, and British North America (Yale University Press, 1940), Ch. 15; Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Foundations of American Foreign Policy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), Chs. 9 and 10.

[J. Q. Adams on his colleagues’ drinking and smoking habits]: Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams (Lippincott, 1874), Vol. 2, p. 656 (diary entry of July 8, 1814).

[Albert Gallatin as peacemaker]: Viscount Bryce, ed., A Great Peace Maker: The Diary of James Gallatin (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), p. 28.

[France as a political volcano]: William H. Crawford to Henry Clay, May 15, 1814, in James F. Hopkins, ed., The Papers of Henry Clay (University Press of Kentucky, 1959), Vol. 1, p. 911.

[Clay on being surrounded by a British garrison]: Clay to William H. Crawford, July 2, 1814, ibid., p. 939.

[Gallatin on the lot of 100,000 American citizens in the proposed buffer area]: Bryce, p. 28 (diary entry of Aug. 8, 1814).

[Wellington on American naval power on the Great Lakes]: Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (F. S. Crofts, 1941), p. 150 (Wellington to Castlercagh, Nov. 9, 1814).

[“Dreadful day” and Wellington’s alleged note to Gallatin]: Bryce, p. 34 (diary entry of Nov. 28, 1814); see also pp. 34-35 (diary entry of Dec. 12, 1814).

[Bailey on the treaty as a truce of exhaustion]: Bailey, pp. 151-52.

[Concluding festivities]: Bryce, pp. 35-36 (diary entries of Dec. 24, 1814, Christmas Day, 1814); see also Adams, Memoirs, Vol. 3, pp. 127, 131, 137-39.

Good Feelings and Ill

[Niles’ Weekly Register and New York Evening Post on the news from Ghent]: quoted in Bailey, pp. 154-55. [The treaty of Ghent as one of the most popular of treaties]: ibid, p. 155.

[London Times laments treaty]: quoted in Glenn Tucker, Poltroons and Patriots (Bobbs-Merrill, 1954), Vol. 2, p. 671.

[Disarmament of the Great Lakes]: Burt, quoted at p. 388.

[Madison’s message to Congress]: December 5, 1815, Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), Vol. 8, pp. 337-38.

[John Randolph versus a national bank]: quoted in William Cabell Bruce, John Randolph of Roanoke (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1922), Vol. 1, p. 431.

[Williams on Gallatin’s reports]: William Appleman Williams, The Contours of American History (World, 1961).

[Madison’s shifting economic views]: Madison to D. Lynch, June 27, 1817, Hunt, Vol. 8, P· 392

[The Second United States Bank]: Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America (Princeton University Press, 1957), esp. Ch. 9.

[Madison on America’s fortieth year as an independent nation]: Eighth Annual Message, Dec. 3, 1816, Hunt, Vol. 8, pp. 375-85, 383-84.

[Clay on the establishment of the national character]: Clay to Officials of the City of Washington, Sept. 18, 1815, Hopkins, Vol. 2 (1961), p. 63.

[Monroe on the experiment of war]: quoted in Harry Ammon, The Quest for National Identity, (McGraw-Hill, 1971), p. 344.

[New York State politics]: Shaw Livermore, Jr., The Twilight of Federalism (Princeton University Press, 1962).

[Monroe’s Inaugural Address, March 4, 1817]: Stanislaus Murray Hamilton, ed., The Writings of James Monroe (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), Vol. 6, pp. 6-16.

[Monroe on parties as unnecessary]: Monroe to Andrew Jackson, Dec. 14, 1816, Hamilton, Vol. 5, p. 346.

[Monroe on inviting Federalists to rejoin the “family of the union”]: Rives Papers, July 27, 1817, Library of Congress, quoted in Ammon, p. 377.

[Biddle on the follies of faction]: quoted in Ammon, p. 367.

[Clay on “entrance of the sovereign”]: Henry Clay, “Speech on Internal Improvements,” March 7, 1818, Hopkins, Vol. 2, p. 452.

[Clay on Monroe’s constitutional arguments]: ibid, March 13, 1818, p. 483.

[Clay on Monroe’s anti-party beliefs]: ibid., March 7, 1818, p. 452.

[Bank politics and comments]: Hammond, Chs. 9 and 10, quoted at p. 259.

[Politics of slavery]: Clover Moore, The Missouri Controversy (University Press of Kentucky, 1966); Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).

[Role of Rep. James Tallmadge]: James Tallmadge Papers, New-York Historical Society; see also John W. Taylor Papers, New-York Historical Society.

[Moore on the nature of the North-South agreement]: Moore, p. 111.

[Jefferson on the fire bell in the night and having the wolf by the ears]: Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, in Paul Leicester Ford, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), Vol. 10, p. 157.

Adams’ Diplomacy and Monroe’s Dictum

[Madison on Spanish hostility toward his administration]: Madison to John Graham, circa June 1, 1816, Hunt, Vol. 8, p. 345.

[East and West Florida as a pistol aimed at the Mississippi]: Bemis, p. 302.

[Conversation between Adams and Castlereagh]: Bemis, p. 304. I have used Bemis’ rendition of Adams’ indirect quotation of these (and other) conversations into direct quotations, drawn from Adams’ Memoirs. I have also retained Bemis’ italics.

[Turmoil in Florida]: Bailey, pp. 167-68.

[The Seminoles]: see Robert Spencer Cotterill, The Southern Indians (University of Oklahoma Press, 1954); Edwin C. McReynolds, The Seminoles (University of Oklahoma Press, 1957); John R. Swanton, Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 73 (Government Printing Office, 1922).

[Jackson to Monroe on seizing Florida]: quoted in George Dangerfield, The Awakening of American Nationalism (Harper & Row, 1965), p. 46; see also Bemis, pp. 313-14.

[Rush reports English resentment toward Jackson]: Bailey, pp. 169-70.

[Niles’ Weekly Register on Jackson’s popularity]: ibid., p. 170.

[Clay’s views]: see esp. Clay’s speech in the House of Representatives on the Seminole War, Jan. 20, 1819, Hopkins, Vol. 2, pp. 636-60.

[Monroe on his three main goals after the Florida incursion]: Monroe to James Madison, Feb. 7, 1819, Hamilton, Vol. 6, pp. 87-88.

[Adams-Onís negotiations]: see Philip Coolidge Brooks, Diplomacy and the Borderlands: The Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 (University of California Press, 1939).

[Adams on the most important day of his life]: Adams, Memoirs, Feb. 22, 1819, Vol. 4, p. 274.

[Internal British politics and foreign policy prior to the Monroe Doctrine]: Dangerfield, Ch. 5, passim. See also Bemis, Ch. 18.

[Canning’s proffer of Anglo-American cooperation]: see esp. Richard Rush to John Quincy Adams, Sept. 19, 1823, Hamilton, Vol. 6, pp. 377-86.

[Madison on liberty and despotism]: Madison to Jefferson, Nov. 1, 1823, ibid., pp. 395-96.

[Cabinet discussion of proposed Anglo-American cooperation]: Adams, Memoirs, Vol 6, pp. 177-81, as rendered by Bemis, pp. 384-85. Italics are Bemis’.

[Expectation that European powers will not interfere in America]: Adams, quoted in Bemis, p. 387.

[Key provisions of the Monroe Doctrine]: Hamilton, Vol. 6, pp. 328, 340, italics added.

[European response to enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine]: quoted in Dangerfield, p. 190; in Bailey, p. 189 (Metternich); in Bemis, p. 403 n. (Lafayette to John Quincy Adams).

[Economic aspects of the Monroe Doctrine]: Williams, esp. pp. 215-18.

[The Monroe Doctrine]: Dexter Perkins, A History of the Monroe Doctrine (Little, Brown, 1955); Donald Marquand Dozer, The Monroe Doctrine: Its Modern Significance (Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); Worthington C. Ford, “John Quincy Adams and the Monroe Doctrine,” American Historical Review, Vol. 7, No. 4 (July 1902). pp. 676-96; William S. Robertson, “The Monroe Doctrine Abroad in 1823-24,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 6, No. 4 (November 1912), pp. 546-63; Marie B. Hecht, John Quincy Adams (Macmillan, 1972), Ch. 15.

[Salvador de Madariaga on the Monroe Doctrine]: quoted in Dozer, p. vii.

[Sources and dilemmas in American foreign policy and strategy]: Hans J. Morgenthau, in Defense of the National Interest (Alfred A. Knopf, 1952); Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address (Princeton University Press, 1961); Paul A. Varg, Foreign Policies of the Founding Fathers (Michigan State University Press, 1963); Robert E. Osgood, Ideals and Self-interest in America’s Foreign Relations (University of Chicago Press, 1953).

[Hamilton on morality of nations]: quoted in Morgenthau, pp. 14-18, italics in original.

[Morgenthau on John Quincy Adams]: Morgenthau, p. 22.

Virginians: The Last of the Gentlemen Politicians

[The Crawford incident]: diary entry of John Quincy Adams. Dec. 14, 1825, Adams, Memoirs, Vol. 7, pp. 80-81; Samuel L. Southard to Samuel L. Gouverneur, Sept. 3, 1831, quoted in Ammon, pp. 543-44.

[Description of Jefferson in his last years]: quoted in Nathan Schachner, Thomas Jefferson (Thomas Yoseloff, 1951), p. 997.

[The Virginia environment and history]: Matthew Page Andrews, Virginia: The Old Dominion (Doubleday, Doran, 1937); Edmund S. Morgan, Virginians at Home (Colonial Williamsburg. 1952); Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Virginia (W. W. Norton, 1977); Richard L. Morton, Colonial Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, i960). Vol. 2.

[Virginia, social and political aspects]: Robert E. Brown and Katherine Brown, Virginia 1705-1786: Democracy or Aristocracy? (Michigan State University Press, 1964); Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage (University of North Carolina Press, 1947).

[Collective intellectual leadership in Virginia]: Richard Beale Davis, Intellectual Life in Jefferson’s Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 1964), p. 4.

[Robert Carter’s library]: Louis Morton, Robert Carter of Nomini Hall (University Press of Virginia, 1945), pp. 214-16. [Bernard visit]: ibid., p. 216.

[Never be born than ill bred]: quoted in Davis, p. 8; see also Andrews, p. 255, on private schools.

[Morton on “curious contradiction”]: Morton, p. 214.

[Henry Adams on the excellence of upper-class education in Virginia]: quoted in Davis, p. 1.

[Individual education]: Morgan, pp. 16-18.

[William and Mary]: Andrews, p. 323.

[School of Virginia Federalists]: David H. Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism (Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 370-87.

[Life of John Randolph ]: Robert Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph (W. W. Norton, 1979.

[Malone’s description of Randolph]: Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American Biography (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), Vol. 8, p. 366.

[Randolph’s philosophy]: Dawidoff, pp. 32-33.

[Marshall in McCulloch v. Maryland]: quoted in Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History, rev. ed. (Harper & Row, 1961), p. 158. [Ruling in Gibbons v. Ogden]: ibid,, p. 489.

[The Yazoo claims and Fletcher v. Peck]: C. Peter Magrath, Yazoo: Law and Politics in the New Republic (Brown University Press, 1966).

[Randolph denounces Yazooists]: ibid., p. 46.

[Marshall on Georgia’s obligations]: ibid., p. 78.

[Madison’s definition of tyranny]: James Madison etal, The Federalist (E.P. Dutton, 1937), No. 47, p. 245.

[First- and second-generation intellectual leadership in Virginia, in relation to constitutional experimentation and development]: Davis, passim; Brown and Brown, passim; John T. Agresto, “Liberty, Virtue, and Republicanism: 1776-1787,” Review of Politics, Vol. 39, No. 4 (October 1977), pp. 473-504; George W. Carey, “Separation of Powers and the Madisonian Model: A Reply to the Critics,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 72, No. 1 (March 1978), pp. 151-64; Richard W. Krouse, “Two Concepts of Democratic Republicanism: Madison and Tocqueville on Pluralism and Party in American Politics,” paper prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., Sept. 1977; Clinton Rossiter, The American Quest, 1790-1860 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).

This section was written with the assistance of Jeffrey P. Trout.

The Checking and Balancing of John Quincy Adams

I have used this same title as a section title to describe James Madison’s presidency, in The Deadlock of Democracy (Prentice-Hall, 1963). I now consider this title more appropriate for John Quincy Adams’ presidency.

[William Plumer’s electoral vote for John Quincy Adams in 1820]: Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union (Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 12.

[J.Q. Adams on William Crawford as a “worm,” etc. ]: ibid., p. 16, or Adams, Memoirs, Vol. 5, p. 315. ·

[Preliminary developments, election of

1824]: James F. Hopkins, “Election of 1824,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections (McGraw-Hill, 1971), Vol. 1, pp. 349-409; Hecht, Ch. 16; Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, Ch. 2; Hopkins, Vol. 3, passim.

[Schoolteacher’s comment on the election]: Henry D. Ward to Ephraim Cutler, April 14, 1824, quoted in Dangerfield, p. 220.

[Results of 1824 presidential election]: Svend Petersen, A Statistical History of the American Presidential Elections (Frederick Ungar, 1963), pp. 17-18.

[Dangerfield on Clay’s boardinghouse electioneering]: Dangerfield, p. 224.

[J. Q Adams’ campaigning for support]: Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, pp. 36-37.

[Clay to correspondents on the electoral situation]: Adams to James Erwin, Dec. 13, “1824, Hopkins, Vol. 3, p. 895; Clay to George McClure, Dec. 28, 1824, ibid., p. 906.

[Webster’s mediation]: Schlesinger, p. 380; see Smith (cited below), p. 185.

[Randolph on election]: Dangerfield, p. 228.

[Jackson on the “Judas of the West”]: Jackson to William B. Lewis, Feb. 14, 1825, John S. Bassett, ed., Correspondence of Andrew Jackson (Carnegie Institute, 1928), Vol. 3, p. 276.

[John Adams’ reaction to election]: Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, p. 48.

[Notification of J. Q. Adams of his election]: ibid., p. 51; see Margaret Bayard Smith, The First Forty Years of Washington Society, Gaillard Hunt, ed. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), p. 186.

[Adams’ use of the term “National” government]: Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, p. 61.

[Adams on the “perilous experiment”]: Adams, Memoirs, Vol. 7, p. 63 (diary entry of Nov. 26, 1825).

[Congressional politics]: Tallmadge Family Papers, New-York Historical Society; John W. Taylor Papers, New-York Historical Society.

[President Adams’ lack of political support]: Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, Ch. 5; Hecht, Ch. 18; Dangerfield, Ch. 9; Adams, Memoirs, passim.

[J. Q Adams to his son on bewaring of “Trap doors”]: Adams to George Washington Adams, Dec. 31, 1826, quoted in Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, p. 88.

[Politics behind the “tariff of abominations”]: Robert V. Remini, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (Columbia University Press, 1959). pp. 170-85. See also Dangerfield, pp. 275-87; see generally Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (Viking Press, 1946), Vol. 2, Ch. 22; Frank W. Taussig, Tariff History of the United States (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931), pp. 82, 92.

[Congressional tariff role]: Robert V. Remini, “Martin Van Buren and the Tariff of Abominations,” American Historical Review, Vol. 63, No. 4 (July 1958), pp. 903-17; Williams, pp. 230-35.

[John Randolph on manufacturing a President]: quoted in Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, p. 90.

[Dangerfield on Adams’ signing of the “tariff of abominations”]: Dangerfield, p. 283.

Jubilee 1826: The Passing of the Heroes

[Biblical admonition to celebrate the half-century]: Leviticus 25:10.

[John Adams on his life drawing to an end]: Adams to Jefferson, Jan. 14, 1826, in Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (University of North Carolina Press, 1959), Vol. 2, p. 613.

[Adams-Jefferson exchange on the “homespun”]: ibid., pp. 290-93.

[John Adams’ exchanges with Mercy Warren]: Page Smith, John Adams (Doubleday, 1962), Vol. 2, pp. 1087-88; “Mercy Otis Warren,” Dictionary of American Biography (including Adams’ comment on history as not the province of ladies).

[Adams and Jefferson on children and on Abigail Adams’ death]: Cappon, pp. 508, 529.

[Adams-Jefferson exchanges on checks and balances, parties, liberty]: ibid., pp. 334, 337, 340, 351, 534, 550.

[Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence]: quoted in Fawn M. Brodie, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History (W.. W. Norton, 1974), p. 468.

[Celebrations of the Fourth of July in 1826]: John Murray Allison, Adams and Jefferson (University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), Ch. 7.

[Death of Jefferson]: Brodie, p.468. [Death of Adams]: Smith, pp. 1136-37; Allan Nevins, ed., The Diary of John Quincy Adams (Frederick Ungar, 1951), pp. 360-61.

8. THE BIRTH OF THE MACHINES

[Whitney’s trip to Georgia]: Jeannette Mirsky and Allan Nevins, The World of Eli Whitney (Macmillan, 1952), pp. 50-55.

[Eli Whitney on “moral world”]: Whitney to Josiah Stebbins, quoted in ibid., p. 130.

[Southern agriculture in 1790]: John Allen Krout and Dixon Ryan Fox, The Completion of Independence (Macmillan, 1944), pp. 7-8.

[Whitney on cotton boll]: letter of Eli Whitney to Eli Whitney, Sr., quoted in Mirsky and Nevins, p. 66.

[Whitney’s “little model”]: ibid.

[Whitney’s fight to protect rights to his cotton gin]: ibid., pp. 93-97.

[Impact of the cotton gin on the American economy]: Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860 (Prentice-Hall, 1961), p. 8.

[Rise of the price of cotton and expanding cotton production in the South]: Paul W. Gales, The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture, 1815-1860 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 8.

[Southern journal on “indissoluble cord”]: De Bow’s Review, quoted in Paul S. Taylor, “Plantation Laborer before the Civil War,” Agricultural History, Vol. 28. No. 1 (January 954). p. 3.

[Trade of New York City, Philadelphia, and Boston]: Krout and Fox, pp. 11-22.

[Early career of Francis Cabot Lowell]: Hannah Josephson, The Golden Threads (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1949), pp. 15-17.

[Lowell’s leadership in cotton manufacture]: Robert K. Lamb, “The Entrepreneur and the Community,” in William Miller, ed., Men in Business: Essays on the Historical Role of the Entrepreneur (Harper & Brothers, 1951), pp. 106-7.

[Early difficulties of transportation]: Edward C. Kirkland, A History of American Economic Life (Meredith, 1969), p. 133.

[Early experiments in steam navigation]: described in Krout and Fox, pp. 229-30.

[“Mania” for steam engines]: ibid., p. 230.

[Traveler in Northwest Territory]: Samuel Williams of Chillicothe to Samuel W. Young, Esq., of Hillsboro, Virginia, in Niles’ Weekly Register, Vol. 11, No. 324 (January 11, 1817), quoted in Roscoe Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815-184o (Indiana Historical Society, 1950), Vol. 1, p. 57.

Farmers: The Jacks-of-All-Trades

[Description of sheep shearing at Clermont]: Elkanah Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution, or Memoirs of Elkanah Watson (Dana, 1857), p. 394, quoted in George Dangerfield, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, 1746-1830 (Harcourt, Brace, 1960), p. 434. Description of Clermont estate: Alf Evers, The Catskills: From Wilderness to Woodstock (Doubleday, 1972), p. 239.

[Average tenant farm and rent on Clermont estate]: Dangerfield, p. 190.

[Excerpts from the diary of Thomas Coffin]: Robert H. George, “Life on a New Hampshire Farm, 1825-1835,” Historical New Hampshire, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Winter 1967), pp. 3-5.

[Amount of wood needed by farmers each winter]: Paul W. Gates, “Problems of Agricultural History, 1790-1840,” Agricultural History, Vol, 46, No. 1 (January 1972), p. 37.

[Spring tasks on New England farm]: listed in George, p. 9.

[Description of average northern farm and farming methods]: Krout and Fox, pp. 92-93.

[Jefferson on production of laborers]: James A Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1 (January 1978), p. 18.

[Limits placed on farm production by rudimentary implements]: Gates, The Farmer’s Age, p. 287.

[Coffin’s comment on haying day in July]: George, p. 6.

[Report of English agriculturist on American hogs]: Paul Leland Haworth, George Washington, Farmer (Bobbs-Merrill, 1915), p. 57.

[Traveler’s comment on Yankee farmers]: Joseph Holt Ingraham, The South-West. By a Yankee (Harper & Brothers, 1835), Vol. 2, p. 89.

[Economic pressures on New England farm families]: Henretta, p. 7.

[New England farm land values]: Gates, The Farmer’s Age, p. 29.

[Cotton prices, 1815-27]: Stuart Bruchey, ed., Cotton and the Growth of the American Economy: 1790-1860 (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), Table 3-A.

[Population growth in the Gulf stales]: Stuart Bruchey, The Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607-1861 (Harper & Row, 1965), p. 156.

[Crowding of small farmers by planters migrating to the Southwest]: Gates, The Farmer’s Age, p. 9.

[Description of cotton planting by slaves]: Dr. J. W. Monett, “The Cotton Crop,” in Ingraham, p. 281.

[Tendency of overseers and planters to use the whip as discipline]: Monett, p. 287, and Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Pantheon, 1974). pp. 64-65.

[Cotton-picking on the Dabney plantation]: Susan Dabney Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter, Fletcher M. Green, ed. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), pp. 53-55.

[Estimate of average amount of cotton picked by a field hand]: Monett, p. 287.

[Dabney’s efforts to make his plantation self-sufficient]: Smedes, pp. 55-60.

[Evading of overseer by slaves]: Monett, p. 286.

[Small farmers in Mississippi]: Ingraham, p. 26.

[Statistics on cotton shipments to New Orleans]: Bruchey, Roots, p. 156.

[New England journalist on commission merchants]: Ingraham, p. 93.

[Shortage of investment capital in South]: Bruchey, Roots, p. 40.

[Georgia writer quoted on sterility of land]: Cates, The Farmer’s Age, p. 142.

[Historian on the iron plow]: Clarence H. Danhof, quoted in Bruchey, Roots, p. 178.

[Southern visitor to New York State fair on importance of iron plow]: Gates, The Farmer’s Age, p. 283.

[Growth of national market for farm products]: Bruchey, Roots, pp. 153-60.

Factories: The Looms of Lowell

[Whitney on his debts and business setbacks]: Mirsky and Nevins, pp. 145-46.

[Whitney’s heartbreak over Catherine Greene]: ibid., p. 284.

[Description of Whitney’s first factory, Mill River]: ibid, p. 313.

[Whitney’s altitudes toward his laborers]: ibid., p. 190.

[Need to supervise every detail]: ibid., p. 225.

[Wages for armorers]: Felicia Johnson Deyrup, Arms Making in the Connecticut Valley (George Shurnway, 1970), p. 242.

[Summary of average wages for unskilled workers in Pennsylvania]: William A. Sullivan, The Industrial Worker in Pennsylvania, 1800 1840 (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1955), p. 75.

[Diversions at Harper’s Ferry armory described]: Merrill Roe Smith, Harper’s Ferry Armory and the New Technology (Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 65.

[Contributions of John Hall and Simeon North to interchangeable parts manufacture]: Smith, p. 325.

[Community of Salem, North Carolina, in 1799]: Frank P. Albright, Johann Ludwig Eberhardt and His Salem Clocks (University of North Carolina Press, 1978), pp. 3-6.

[Control which the Elders Conference exercised over morals in Salem]: ibid., pp. 12-13.

[Dependence of Salem on Philadelphia wholesale houses for manufactured articles]: ibid., p. 64.

[Eli Terry’s methods of producing clocks by machine]: Dirk J. Siruik, Yankee Science in the Making (Little, Brown, 1948), p. 147.

[Value of Whitney’s estate]: Mirsky and Nevins, pp. 312-13.

[Slater’s introduction of cotton-spinning machinery into the United States]: Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (Vintage Books, 1965), p. 27.

[Power loom adopted by Lowell for cotton mills]: Robert Brooke Zevin, “The Growth of Cotton Textile Production after 1815,” in Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Reinterpretation of American Economic History (Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 139-41.

[Site of the Waltham mills described]: Steve Dunwell, The Run of the Mill (David R. Godine, 978), pp. 30-33.

[Building of Lowell]: Lamb, p. 107.

[Lucy Larcom and conditions in Lowell factories]: Lucy Larcom, An Idyll of Work (James R. Osgood, 1875), passim. See also Dunwell, pp. 42-49.

[Lowell as a social experiment]: Benita Eisler, ed., The Lowell Offering (Lippincott, 1977), p. 15, quoted in Anna D. Socrates, “The Women of Lowell: A Study in Leadership and Consciousness-Raising” (Williams College, Nov. 1979).

[Merchants’ pursuit of stable investment returns from the Waltham-Lowell system]. Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., “The Rise of the Waltham-Lowell System and Some Thoughts on the Political Economy of Modernization in Ante-bellum Massachusetts,” Perspectives in American History, Vol. 9 (1975). pp. 229-68.

[Skepticism of Cabots and Lowells toward Francis Cabot Lowell’s plans for a textile mill]: Ferris Greenslet, The Lowells and Their Seven Worlds (Houghton Mifflin, 1946), p. 156.

Freight: The Big Ditches

[Maiden voyage of the Clermont]: Dangerfield, pp. 407-9, and John S. Morgan, Robert Fulton (Mason/Charter, 1977). pp. 140-43; see also Robert R. Livingston, “The Invention of the Steamboat,” Old South Leaflets; Vol. 5, No. 108 (Old South Meeting House, 1902), pp. 161-76 (which includes letters by Robert Fulton).

[Skepticism about the steamboat]: quoted in Morgan, p. 140.

[Speed of the Clermont and the reactions of amazed bystanders]: ibid., p. 142.

[Fulton on his plans to use steamboat on the Mississippi River]: ibid., p. 143.

[Fulton’s early interest and training in navigation]: ibid, pp. 41-42.

[Livingston’s New York State monopoly on steam navigation]: Dorothy Gregg, “John Stevens, General Entrepreneur,” in Miller, p. 135.

[Description of building the Clermont]: Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Waters (Harvard University Press, 1949), p. 66.

[Comparatively low cost of steamboat construction]: Gregg, p. 133.

[Livingston’s interest in steam navigation]: Dangerfield, p. 287.

[Fulton’s careful study of records of other inventors in steam navigation]: Morgan, pp. 156-58.

[Prohibitive cost of freight transport by wagon]: Kirkland, p. 136.

[Settler digging clay from the middle of the road]: Buley,· p. 459.

[Livingston’s influence in securing a monopoly of steam navigation on the lower Mississippi]: Dangerfield, p. 417.

[Roosevelt’s difficulties in building the Mississippi steamboat]: Morgan, pp. 168-69.

[Sinking of the New Orleans]: Morgan, p. 170.

[Speed of the Washington as compared to keelboats]: Buley, p. 413.

[Steamboats’ failures in transporting heavy freight]: Buley, p. 427.

[Lincoln’s flatboat trip to New Orleans]: Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None (Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 14-15·

[Rise of cities on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers]: Louis Bernard Schmidt, “Internal Commerce and the Development of National Economy before 1860,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 47, No. 6 (December 1939), pp 798-801.

[“Wedding of the waters” at Erie Canal celebration]: Ronald E. Shaw, Erie Water West: A History of the Erie Canal, 1792-1854 (University Press of Kentucky, 1966), pp. 186-91.

[Song “’Tis done… ”]: Madeline Sadler Waggoner, The Long Haul West (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958), p. 128.

[The Pennsylvania Canal]: Kirkland, pp. 146-47; Waggoner, Ch. 11.

The Innovating Leaders

[Forman’s interview with Jefferson]: David Hosack, Memoir of De Witt Clinton (J. Seymour, 1829), p. 347; Jefferson to Clinton, Dec. 12, 1822, ibid., pp. 347-48.

[Robert Lamb on role of extended family in decision-making process]: Lamb, p. 93.

[Broadus and Louise Mitchell on root-cutting technique]: Broadus Mitchell and Louise Pearson Mitchell, American Economic History (Houghton Mifflin, 1947), p. 353.

[Role of state governments in economic development and promotion]: Carter Goodrich et al., Canals and American Economic Development (Columbia University Press, 1961), passim; Roger L. Ransom, “Interregional Canals and Economic Specialization in the Antebellum United States,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, Second Series, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Fall 1967), pp. 12-35.

[Elkanah Watson]: Hugh M. Flick, “Elkanah Watson’s Activities on Behalf of Agriculture,” Agricultural History, Vol. 21, No. 4 (October 1947), pp. 193-98; Watson is quoted at p. 194.

[Appeal of Erie Canal proposal to group interests]: Julius Rubin, “An Innovating Public Improvement: The Erie Canal,” in Goodrich, quoted at pp. 53-54.

[The new triangle of trade]: Schmidt, p. 821; see also Douglass C. North, “The United States in the International Economy, 1790-1850,” in Seymour E. Harris, ed., American Economic History (McGraw-Hill, 1961), pp. 181-205.

[“Impersonal” economic forces dominating the marketplace]: Zevin, passim.

9. THE WIND FROM THE WEST

[Migration west]: Oscar Handlin, The Americans (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1963), Ch. 14; Harry J. Carman, Harold C. Syrett, and Bernard W. Wishy, A History of the American People (Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), Vol. 1, Ch. 12; Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion (Macmillan, 1960).

[Morris Birkbeck on the small family wagons]: quoted in Carman, Syrett, and Wishy, p. 361.

[Hollidaysburg Aurora on the Allegheny Portage Railroad trip]: quoted in Madeline Sadler Waggoner, The Long Haul West (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958), pp. 196-97.

[Sights and sounds of the Erie Canal]: Waggoner, p. 155; my description of passing through the canal is mainly drawn from this work; and from Ronald E. Shaw, Erie Water West (University Press of Kentucky, 1966).

[Dickens on canal-barge life]: Waggoner, pp. 152, 153.

[Spitting]: Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Dorsey Press, 1969), p. 23. [Mrs. Trollope on shucking]: ibid., p. 23.

[Individualism on the frontier]: Ray Allen Billington, The American Frontier Thesis: Attack and Defense (American Historical Association, 1958), p. 36.

[ Westerners as outsiders]: Frederic Austin Ogg, The Old Northwest: A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond (Yale University Press, 1919), pp. 101-2; see also Robert E. Riegel and Robert G. Athearn, America Moves West, 4th ed. (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), pp. 78-80.

[Contradictions of frontier people]: Pessen, pp. 34-35.

[Character of frontier people]: see also Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier (Indiana University Press, 1955); Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion (Stanford University Press, 1957); Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Turner and the Socialogy of the Frontier (Basic Books, 1968); Robert E. Riegel, Young America, 1830-1840 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1949); Dale Van Every, The Final Challenge (William Morrow, 1964).

[Andrew Jackson’s life and character]: Marquis James, Andrew Jackson: Portrait of a President (Bobbs-Merrill, 1937); Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975); Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767-1821 (Harper & Row, 1977)

The Revolt of the Outs

[Polk on the “American tripod”]: James K. Polk, in the House of Representatives, March 29, 1830, 21st Congress, 1st session, Register of Debates, pp. 698-99, quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Little, Brown, 1945), p. 62.

[The Jackson men as insiders and outsiders]: Pessen, Ch. 8, passim. See also Sydney H. Aronson, Status and Kinship in the Higher Civil Service (Harvard University Press, 1964).

[Jackson’s comments on the “corrupt bargain”]: Jackson to John Coffee, Feb. 19, 1825, in John Spencer Bassett, ed., Correspondence of Andrew Jackson (Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1928), Vol. 3, pp. 277-78; Jackson to James Buchanan, June 25, 1825, ibid., p. 287.

[Election of 1828]: Robert V. Remini, The Election of Andrew Jackson (Lippincott, 1963); Edward Pessen, New Perspectives on Jacksonian Parties and Politics (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1969); Robert V. Remini, “Election of 1828,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 1971),Vol. 1, pp. 413-92. On New York State and national aspects of the campaign. I have used the John W. Taylor Papers, New-York Historical Society: the Amariah Flagg Collection, Columbia University Library; and the A. C. Flagg Papers, New York Public Library For a Massachusetts Whig view, see the Edward Everett Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Box 3, Folders 1 and 2.

[Calhoun on prospects for 1838]: Calhoun to Jackson, Jan. 24, 1827, Bassett, Vol. 3, p. 332.

[ Van Buren on a North-South coalition and reorganization of the old Republican party ]: Remini in Schlesinger, Elections, Vol. 1, p. 417.

[“Hurra Boys” for Jackson]: Remini, Election, p. 111.

[Campaign slander and abuse]: Remini in Schlesinger, passim; Clyndon G. Van Deuscn, The Jacksonian Era (Harper & Brothers, 1959). pp. 26-27.

[Jackson’s marriage to Rachel Robards]: Remini, Jackson and the Course of American Empire, Ch. 5.

[Reactions to the 1828 election outcome]: Remini, in Schlesinger, Elections, p. 434.

[Webster on Jackson’s “breeze”]: Daniel Webster to Ezekiel Webster, inclosure, Feb. 1829, in C. H. Van Tync, ed., Letters of Daniel Webster (McClure, Phillips, 1902), p. 142.

[Randolph on finding leaders of a revolution]: John Randolph to J. Brockenbrough, Jan. 12, 1829, Feb. 9, 1829, in Hugh A. Garland, Life of John Randolph of Roanoke (D. Appleton, 1855), Vol. 2, p. 317.

[New York politico on patronage]: William L. Mackenzie, The Lives and Opinions of Benj’n Franklin Butler… and Jesse Hoyt (Cook, 1845), pp. 51-52.

[Van Buren besieged by job seekers]: Martin Van Buren, The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren (Government Printing Office, 1920), Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1918, Vol. 2, pp. 231-32.

[Parton on wave of fear]: James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson (Mason Brothers, 1860), Vol. 3, p. 212.

[Adams on the officialdom in terror]: Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams (Lippincott, 1876), Vol. 8, p. 144 (April 25, 1829).

[Conversation of two job seekers]: Amos Kendall, Autobiography, William Stickney, ed. (Lee and Shepard, 1872), p. 308.

[Jackson’s appointment policy]: Aronson, passim.

[Jackson’s defense of removals]: James D. Richardson, Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Bureau of National Literature, 1897), Vol. 2, pp. 1011-12 (Dec. 8, 1829).

[Madison on rotation]: Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1910), Vol. 9, pp. 539-40 (Aug. 29, 1834).

[Jackson’s Cabinet]: Leonard D. White, The Jacksonians (Macmillan, 1956), Ch. 5.

[Jackson’s “kitchen cabinet”]: Richard P. Longaker, “Was Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet a Cabinet?” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 44, No. 1 (June 1957), pp. 94-108.

[Blair filling columns with “public opinion”]: Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (Harper & Brothers, 1838), Vol. 1, p. 155.

[Jackson on not making a cabinet for the ladies]: Jackson to J. C. McLemore, April 1, 1829, Andrew Jackson Papers, Library of Congress, 2nd Series.

[Clay on Jackson sweeping over the government like a tornado]: Register of Debates (Gales and Seaton, 1837), Vol. 13, 24th Congress, 2nd session, Jan. 16, 1837, p. 438.

The Dance of the Factions

[The Webster-Hayne debate]: Claude M. Fuess, Daniel Webster (Da Capo Press, 1968), Vol. 1, Ch. 15; Theodore D. Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne and His Times (Macmillan, 1909), Chs. 9-14; Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, Nullifier,1829-1839 (Bobbs-Merrill, 1949), Ch. 4.

[Hayne on “selfish and unprincipled” East]: ibid., p. 365.

[Webster’s statements before the climactic debate]: quoted in Fuess, pp. 372, 374.

[Economic, social, and political change in South Carolina]: Charles S. Sydnor, The Development of Southern Sectionalism, 1819-1848 (Louisiana State University Press, 1948), passim; William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War (Harper & Row, 1965), Part 1.

[Pinckney on slavery]: Freehling, p. 109.

[Calhoun’s “South Carolina Exposition ”]: Richard K. Crallé, ed., Reports and Public Letters of John C Calhoun (D. Appleton, 1855), Vol. 6, pp. 1-59 (consisting of original draft of the Exposition, adopted with alterations by the South Carolina Legislature, Dec. 1828), passim.

[Webster on the cry of “Consolidation.”]: The Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster, National Edition (Little, Brown, 1903), Vol. 5, p. 257.

[Webster’s sense of audience response in the Senate]: Webster to Jeremiah Mason, Feb. 27, 1830, in Charles M. Wiltse, ed., The Papers of Daniel Webster, Correspondence 1830–1834 (University Press of New England, 1977), Vol. 3, pp. 18–19; Fuess, Vol. 1, p. 374. [Bay State men cry over “encomium upon Massachusetts”]: Fuess, p. 378.

[Webster’s climactic words]: Register of Debates (Gales and Seaton, 1830), Vol. 6, 21st Congress, 1st session, Jan. 27, 1830, pp. 58-80.

[The toasts at the Indian Queen Hotel]: Van Buren, Autobiography, pp. 413-17; Freehling, p. 192.

[Emerson on Webster]: The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes (Houghton Mifflin, 1912), Vol. 7, p. 87.

[Henry Clay and the Maysville Turnpike]: Clement Eaton, Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics (Little, Brown, 1957). pp. 10, 96-97.

[Webster on the coming crisis]: Webster to Clay, May 29, 1830, in Wiltse, Papers of Daniel Webster, Vol. 3, p. 80.

[Van Buren on Mrs. Eaton]: Van Buren to Jackson, July 25, 1830, quoted in John A. Munroe, Louis McLane: Federalist and Jacksonian (Rutgers University Press, 1973). p. 293·

[The break between Jackson and Calhoun]: Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, Ch. 6; Van Deusen, p. 45·

[Calhoun: “It will … kill him dead”]: quoted in Thomas H. Benton, Thirty Years’ View (D. Appleton, 1856), Vol. 1, p. 219.

[Freehling on the collapse of Calhoun’s presidential hopes]: Freehling, pp. 226-27.

[Clay on the fate of liberty throughout the world]: quoted in Schlesinger, Elections, Vol. 1, p. 507.

[Nomination of Wirt by Anti-Masons]: John P. Kennedy, Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt (Lea and Blanchard, 1850), Vol. 2, pp. 299-315.

[The authority of Georgia in Cherokee territory]: Worcester v. Georgia (6 Peters 515), in Richard Peters, Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in the Supreme Court of the United States (Banks Law Publishing, 1917), Vol. 6, pp. 515-47.

[Jackson on Worcester v. Georgia]: quoted in Horace Greeley, The American Conflict (Case, 1866), p. 106; Greeley claims that the remark was related to him by Congressman George N. Briggs of Massachusetts.

[Jackson on preventing liberties from being “crushed by the Bank “]: quoted in Schlesinger, Elections, Vol. 1, p. 499. On the origins of the bank war, see Donald B. Cole, Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800-185i (Harvard University Press, 1970), Ch. 5.

[Clay and Webster urging Biddle to call for bank recharter]: Daniel Webster to Nicholas Biddle, Dec. 18, 1831, in Wiltse, Papers of Daniel Webster, Vol. 3, p. 139; Eaton, p. 99.

[Jackson on killing the bank]: Van Buren, Autobiography, p. 625.

[Jackson’s appeal to the “humble members of society”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Elections, Vol. 1, p. 500. [Remini on Jackson’s stand on issues]: ibid., p. 500.

[Jackson on the veto working well]: ibid., p. 510.

[Nullification proclamation]: Richardson, Messages and Papers, Vol. 2, pp. 1203-19.

[Election of 1832]: Schlesinger, Elections, Vol. 1, p. 574.

[Reaction of South Carolina extremists to nullification proclamation]: Freehling, pp. 267-78; McDuffie quoted, p. 267.

[John Randolph on seeing Webster die, “muscle by muscle”]: quoted in Wiltse, John C. Calhoun, p. 194.

[Contrast between Biddle and Jackson]: James, pp. 250-52.

[Jackson’s trip through the Northeast to New England]: James, pp. 340-49. [John Quincy Adams on Jackson as a Harvard degree recipient]: quoted in John T. Morse, John Quincy Adams (Houghton Mifflin, 1899), p. 241.

[Jackson’s reasons for renewing the bank war after his re-election]: Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, p. 98.

[Jackson’s response to visiting delegations]: ibid., p. 109 ; Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America (Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 430.

[Rogin on Jackson’s fanaticism]: Fathers and Children, Ch. 9.

[McLane shifted to State Department]: Munroe, Ch. 12.

[Relationship of Biddle and Webster]: Wiltse, Papers of Daniel Webster, Vol. 3, passim; on the retainer, Webster to Biddle, Dec. 21, 1833, p. 288; [on burning letters]: ibid. and Biddle to Webster, Dec. 25, 1834 (actually 1833), p. 292; [on the need for unity among Webster, Clay and Calhoun]: Biddle to Webster, Dec. 15, 1833, p. 285.

[Henry Clay’s censure speech against Jackson in the Senate]: Register of Debates, 23rd Congress, 1st session, Dec. 26 and 30, 1833, pp. 58-94; Calvin Colton, ed., The Works of Henry Clay (Henry Clay, 1896), Vol. 5,pp. 576-620.

Jacksonian Leadership

[The Whig party]: Eber M. Carroll, Origins of the Whig Party (Duke University Press, 1925); see also studies of state and sectional origins.

[Edward Everett]: Edward Everett Papers, Box 2, 1819-27, Massachusetts Historical Society.

[Drafting of Webster]: Sydney Nathans, Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 91-92.

[Jackson’s threats to Hugh Lawson White]: Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American Biography (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), Vol. 10, p. 106.

[Seward on Van Buren]: New York Evening Post, Nov. 2, 1836, quoted in Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, p. 214.

[Election of 1836]: Schlesinger, Elections, Vol. 1, p. 640.

[Pomper on 1836 as a “converting election”]: Gerald M. Pomper, Elections in America (Dodd, Mead, 1968), pp. 112-13.

[Schlesinger on “the living relations” between leader and followers]: Age of Jackson, p. 215.

[Van Buren and his administration]: James C. Curtis, The Fox at Bay (University Press of Kentucky, 1970); Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795-1848 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1876), Vols. 9-10; and other works cited previously in this chapter.

[British ministers report on public reaction to the panic]: quoted in Curtis, p. 73.

[Jacksonian finance]: John M. McFaul, The Politics of Jacksonian Finance (Cornell University Press, 1972); Curtis; Hammond; Walter B. Smith, Economic Aspects of the Second Bank of the United States (Harvard University Press, 1953).

[Cambreleng on the Independent Treasury bill]: Cambreleng to Van Buren, Nov. 18, 1837, quoted in Van Deusen, p. 126.

[Webster statements]: Congressional Globe, 25th Congress, 1st session, Sept. 28, 1837, Appendix, p. 169; ibid., 25th Congress, 2nd session, Jan. 31, 1838, Appendix, p. 606.

[Pickens on northern banking and southern slavery]: ibid, 25th Congress, 1st session, Oct. 10, 1837, Vol. 5: Appendix, p. 178, quoted in Curtis, p. 106.

[Clay on “symptoms of despotism”]: Senate speech of Dec. 26 and 30, 1833, in Colton, Vol. 5, p. 620.

[Jackson’s veto record]: Richard M. Pious, The American Presidency (Basic Books, 1979), p. 207; William M. Goldsmith, The Growth of Presidential Power (Chelsea House, 1974), Vol. 1, pp. 329-31.

[Historians’ evaluation of Jackson]: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Paths to the Present (Macmillan, 1949), Ch. 5; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Our Presidents: A Rating by 75 Historians,” The New York Times Magazine (July 29, 1962), p. 12.

[Hawthorne on Jackson]: quoted in Clinton Rossiter, The American Presidency (Harcourt, Brace, 1956), p. 150.

[Controversy among historians over Jacksonianism]: Pessen, Jacksonian America, pp. 384-93; see also Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion (Stanford University Press, 1957), pp. 2-3; McFaul, Ch. 1; Charles G. Sellers, Jr., “Andrew Jackson versus the Historians,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 44, No. 4 (March 1958), pp. 615-34.

[Van Buren’s strategy of directly mobilizing followers]: Notebook, Martin Van Buren Papers, Library of Congress, cited in Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, p. 51.

[Kendall on business power limiting man’s freedom ]: quoted in Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, p. 319, from the Washington Globe, Sept. 24, 1840.

[Jackson’s philosophy as reflected in his veto of the recharter bill]: quoted in Richard Höf-stadter, The American Political Tradition (Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 62.

[Jacksonians and the North-South axis]: Richard H. Brown, “The Missouri Crisis, Slavery, and the Politics of Jacksonianism,” South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 65 (1966), pp. 55-72.

[Hartz on the parties as wildly swinging boxers]: Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Harcourt, Brace, 1955). p. 90.

[Van Buren on those who had wrought great changes in the world]: Van Buren Papers, quoted in Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, p. 51.

10. PARTIES: THE PEOPLE’S CONSTITUTION

[Dickens on his Britannia stateroom]: Charles Dickens, American Notes (Chapman and Hall, 1891), p. 5.

[Dickens on Boston and on New York City harbor]: ibid., pp. 23, 64-65.

[Dickens on “slavery, spittoons, and senators”]: Dickens to Charles Sumner, March 13, 1842, quoted in Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, Dickens: A Life (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 120.

[Dickens on Congress]: American Notes, p. 98.

[Dickens on slavery and the Declaration of independence]: ibid., p. 97.

[Dickens on Cincinnati]: quoted in Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, p. 123.

[Dickens on western cities]: American Notes, pp. 131, 137, 140.

[Dickens’ quotations from advertisements for runaway slaves]: ibid., pp. 184-85.

[Dickens on the general character of the American people]: ibid., pp. l93-94.

[Pessen’s summary of Europeans’ collective portrait of Americans]: Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Dorsey Press. 1969), p. 34.

[Tocqueville]: Jacob Peter Mayer, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biographical Essay in Political Science (Viking Press, 1940); George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (Oxford University Press, 1938).

Equality: The Jacksonian Demos

[The plight of the destitute and the debtors]: Pessen, p. 48. [Distribution of wealth]: Daniel E. Diamond and John D. Guilfoil, United States Economic History (General Learning Press, 1973). p. 82; Herman E. Krooss, American Economic Development (Prentice-Hall, 1955), p. 24.

[Tocqueville on equality of conditions]: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), Henry Reeve Text, Phillips Bradley, ed., Vol. 1, p. 3.

[Tocqueville’s underestimation of the beginnings of industrialization and urbanization]: Irving M. Zeiilin, Liberty, Equality, and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville (Little, Brown, 1971), pp. 12, 58.

[Commager on everyday social equality ]: Henry Steele Commager, The American Mind (Yale University Press, 1950), p. 14.

[Tocqueville on self respecting servants]: Tocqueville, Vol. 2, p. 183.

[John Quincy Adams to Tocqueville on legal equality]: quoted in Pessen, p. 50.

[Richard Wade on class lines in western cities]: quoted in ibid., p. 53.

[Caste system in the Tombs]: Dickens, American Notes, p. 68.

[American classes]: of the “revisionist” literature on stratification, see esp. Lloyd A. Fallers, Inequality (University of Chicago Press, 1973).

[Tocqueville on Americans as born equal]: quoted in Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Harcourt, Brace, 1955), p. i.

[Tocqueville on American abundance]: quoted in David M. Potter, People of Plenty (University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 92.

[Tocqueville on most rich men as having formerly been poor]: quoted in Pessen, p. 51.

[Tocqueville’s belief that unadulterated democracy ruled in America]: Zeitlin, p. 11.

[Tocqueville on “Gods will” about more equality]: Tocqueville to M. Stoffels (Paris), Feb. 21, 1835, quoted in Tocqueville, Vol. 1, p. xx.

[Tocqueville on egalitarianism, majority rule, leveling, etc.]: ibid., Vol. 1, Chs. 15, 16; Vol. 2, passim.

[Tocqueville on great parties, ambition, and leadership]: ibid., Vol. 1, pp. 174 ff.; Vol. 2, p. 247.

[ Workingmen’s politics]: Walter Hugins, Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class (Stanford University Press, 1960); Nathan Fine, Labor and Farmer Parties in the United States, 1828-1928 (Rand School of Social Science, 1928); Pessen, pp. 191-215.

[Question of employer as a “working man”]: quoted in Pessen, p. 210.

[Radical leaders]: J. R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History (University of California Press, 1978), Ch. 5; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Little, Brown, 1945), passim; Hugins, passim; Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American Biography (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936).

[Walt Whitman on Frances Wright]: quoted in Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, p. 181

[Wright as “Red Harlot”]: New York Courier and Enquirer, quoted in Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, p. 182.

[Samuel Clesson Allen on the “natural limit of production”]: quoted in ibid., p. 153.

[Robert Rantoul]: Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion (Stanford University Press, 1957) Ch. 10.

[The jackass as voter]: story told by a delegate to the Massachusetts constitutional convention, 1853, cited in James MacGregor Burns and Jack Walter Peltason, Government By the People, 2nd ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1954), p 251.

[Blackstone on property qualifications]: quoted in Chilton Williamson, American Suffrage from Property to Democracy, 1760-1860 (Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 11.

[Pessen on the suffrage situation before the Jacksonian era]: Pessen, p. 155.

[James Kent and the conservative rearguard action against the “tyranny of numbers ”]: John T. Horton, James Kent: A Study in Conservatism, 1763-1847 (Appleton-Century, 1939), pp. 256-57.

[Randolph on “King Numbers”]: Robert Dawidoff, The Education of John Randolph (W. W. Norton, 1979), p. 276.

[The Dorr Rebellion]: Arthur M. Mowry, The Dorr War (Preston & Rounds, 1901); Williamson, Ch. 13.

[First issue of Liberator]: John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Little, Brown, 1963), p. 128.

[Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society denounces Constitution]: quoted in Russel B. Nye, William Lloyd Garrison and the Humanitarian Reformers, Oscar Handlin, ed. (Little, Brown, 1955), p. 143.

[Weld on abolitionism]: quoted in Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 144.

[Frances Wright’s experiment in emancipation]: Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin, “The Nashoba Plan for Removing the Evil of Slavery: Letters of Frances and Camilla Wright, 1820-1829,” Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol. 23, No. 3 (July 1975), and No. 4 (October 1975). See also William Randall Waterman, “Frances Wright,” Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, Vol. 115, No. 1 (Columbia University Press, 1924), pp. 92-133.

State Politics: Seedbed of Party

[Pre- and post-Revolutionary New York State politics]: Patricia U. Bonomi, A Factious People (Columbia University Press, 1971); Carl Lotus Becker, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1960); Alfred F. Young, The Democratic Republicans of New York: The Origins, 1763-1797 (University of North Carolina Press, 1967).

[The rapid rise of De Witt Clinton]: quotation from Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 2, p. 221; see also, on Clinton, Dixon Ryan Fox, The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York (Columbia University Press, 1919).

[New York State party development]: Michael Wallace, “Changing Concepts of Party in the United States: New York, 1815-1828,” American Historical Review, Vol. 7, No. 2 (December 1968), pp. 453-91. See, in general, Edward Pessen, “Reflections on New York and Its Recent Historians,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 2 (April 1979), pp. 145-56; John W. Taylor Papers, New-York Historical Society.

[The Albany Regency]: Robert V. Remini, “The Albany Regency,” New York History, Vol. 39, No. 4 (October 1958), pp. 341-55; A. C. Flagg Papers, Columbia University Library and New York Public Library; Charles H. Ruggles, Papers, New York Public Library.

[Submission to party by the Advocate’s Mordecai Noah]: Wallace, pp. 464-65, quoted at p. 465.

[The “martyrs’ “banquet]: ibid., p. 465.

[Close association of Regency families]: quotation from James Gordon Bennett, in Remini, pp. 350-51.

[Regency leaders’ conception of political party]: Wallace, pp. 481-91, Throop quoted at p. 488.

[Regency conservatism]: Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 30, 39, 66.

[Benson on the Regency strategy]: quoted in ibid., p. 55.

[Early Massachusetts state politics]: Van Beck Hall, Politics Without Parties (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972); Paul Goodman, The Democratic-Republicans (Harvard University Press, 1964); manuscript sources: Massachusetts Historical Society; Boston Public Library; Widener Library, Harvard University; Library of Congress.

[Aspects of political transition of Massachusetts]: Arthur B. Darling, “Jacksonian Democracy in Massachusetts, 1824-1848,” American Historical Review, Vol. 29, No. 2 (January 1924), pp. 271-87; Pessen, Jacksonian America, pp. 238-40.

[David Henshaw]: Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, pp. 146-47; Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 8, pp. 562-63.

[Kentucky political developments]: Lynn L. Marshall, “The Genesis of Grass-roots Democracy in Kentucky,” Mid-America, Vol. 47, No. 4 (October 1965), pp. 269-87; Thomas B. Jones, “New Thoughts on an Old Theme,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 69, No. 4 (October 1971), pp. 293-312; Billie J. Hardin, “Amos Kendall and the 1824 Relief Controversy,” ibid., Vol, 64, No. 3 (July 1966), pp. 196-208; Duff Green Papers, Nicholas Trist Papers, Library of Congress.

[Historians on rational, popular demands and aspirations in Kentucky]: Marshall, pp. 273, 284, quoted at p. 284.

On party development in the South as a whole, see Burton W. Folsom II, “Party Formation and Development in Jacksonian America: the Old South,” Journal of American Studies, Vol. 7, No. 3 (December 1973). pp. 217-29.

Majorities: The Flowering of the Parties

[Chambers on the building of parties]: William Nisbet Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation (Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 49.

[Role and decline of deference in early politics]: Ronald P. Formisano, “Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic’s Political Culture, 1789-1840,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 68, No. 2 (June 1974), pp. 473-87.

[“Party in office” as distinguished from national party organization and affiliation among the electorate]: Frank J. Sorauf, “Political-Parties and Political Analysis,” in William Nisbet Chambers and Waller Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems (Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 33-55, esp. pp. 37-38.

[The congressional caucus]: Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., “The Ascendance and Demise of the Congressional Caucus, 1800-1824,” paper prepared for conference, “The American Constitutional System Under Strong and Weak Parties,” sponsored by Project 87 (Washington, D.C.), April 27-28, 1979, pp. 1-36 (typescript).

[McCormick on the “hidden revolution ” ]: Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System (University of North Carolina Press, 1966), p. 343.

[Intellectual attitudes toward the party system]: Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System (University of California Press, 1969); see also Austin Ranney, The Doctrine of Responsible Party Government (University of Illinois Press, 1962).

[Berlin on Archilochus’ hedgehog]: Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (Simon and Schuster, 1970).

[Van Buren’s view of party]: Martin Van Buren to Thomas Ritchie, Jan. 13, 1827, Martin Van Buren Papers, Library of Congress; see also Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, pp. 223-26.

[Chase on intellectual failure in party organization]: James S. Chase, Emergence of the Presidential Nominating Convention, 1789-1832 (University of Illinois Press, 1973). p. 17.

[Inter-party balance in the states]: McCormick, p. 341.

[Party and constitution]: Theodore J. Lowi, “Party, Policy, and Constitution in America,” in Chambers and Burnham, pp. 238-76.

11. THE MAJORITY THAT NEVER WAS

[Revolutionary, radical, and reformist movements, their emergence, non-emergence, and suppression]: Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton University Press, 1970); Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (M. E. Sharpe, l978); James Chowning Davies, ed., When Men Revolt and Why (Free Press, 1971); Bob Jessop, Social Order, Reform and Revolution (Herder and Herder, 1978); the works of Marx, Weber, Dahrendorf, and other theorists from which much of the recent analysis is drawn.

[Tocqueville on revolution in America]: quoted in Irving M. Zeitlin, Liberty, Equality, and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville (Little, Brown, 1971), p. 41.

[The slave trade]: John R: Spears, The American Slave-Trade (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900); W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade (Longmans, Green, 1904); Julius Lester, To Be a Slave (Dial Press, 1968).

[Voyage of La Fortuna]: Brantz Meyer, ed., Captain Canot, an African Slaver (Arno Press, 1968), pp. 99-106. [Canot’s accounting]: ibid, p. 101.

Blacks in Bondage

[Description of Montevideo]: Robert Manson Myers, ed., The Children of Pride (Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 17-19; for another large plantation (Georgia), see Pierce Butler Papers, Pennsylvania Historical Society.

[Letter of Cato to Charles Colcock Jones, Sept. 3, 1852]: Robert S. Starobin, ed., Blacks in Bondage (New Viewpoints, 1974), pp. 47-50.

[Statistics on number of slaves living on large plantations and small farms]: Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 31.

[Cato to Charles Colcock Jones]: Starobin, pp. 47-50.

[Reverend Jones on religion for slaves]: Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Pantheon Books, 1974), p. 208. [Importance of religion and black preachers to slaves]: John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community (Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 64-76.

[Genovese on proportion of house servants]: Roll, Jordan, Roll, p. 328.

[Charles Colcock Jones Jr.’s letter about his body servant, George]: Myers, pp. 306-7.

[Behavior of house servants]: Blassingame, pp. 200-1.

[Letter of Cato to Charles Colcock Jones, March 3, 1852, on behavior of Phoebe and Cassius ]: Starobin, p. 54.

[Rose Williams and Rufus]: quoted in Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery & Freedom, 1750-1925; (Pantheon Books, 1976), pp. 84-85.

[Statistics on infant mortality and increase of slave population ]: Stampp, pp. 318-21.

[Charles Colcock Jones to Charles C Jones, Jr.; Oct. 2, 1856, on pricing of blacks for eventual sale]: Myers, p. 244.

[Charles Colcock Jones to Charles C. Jones, Jr., Nov. 17, 1856, on purchase of new cloth for better appearance of family for sale]: ibid., pp. 263-64.

[Phoebe to children, March 17, 1857]: Starobin, p. 57.

[Early life of Nat Turner]: Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of Jubilee (Harper & Row, 1975), pp. 28-41.

[Capture and hanging of Nat Turner]: ibid., pp. 125-26.

[Restrictions on free blacks in the South]: Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), Vol. 1, pp. 518-32.

[Restrictions of northern states on civil rights of blacks]: Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 1961), pp. 63-91. See, in general, Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters (Pantheon Books, 1974).

[Restrictions on blacks in Boston]: The Liberator, March 16, 1860,.and quoted in Litwack, p. 110.

[Escape to liberty]: Larry Gara, The Liberty Line: The Legend of the Underground Railroad (University Press of Kentucky, 1967); Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (John Snow, 1855).

[Frederick Douglass’ early career]: Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, “Written by Himself” (Collier Books, 1962); Nathan Irwin Huggins, Slave and Citizen: The Life of Frederick Douglass (Little, Brown, 1980); Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Benjamin Quarles, ed., Frederick Douglass (Prentice-Hall, 1968).

Women in Need

[Household tasks of women]: R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest (Indiana Historical Society, 1950), p. 223.

[Statistics on the size of families]: Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women (Hill & Wang, 1979), p. 57.

[Millicent Hunt’s discontent]: quoted in Horace Adams, “A Puritan Wife on the Frontier,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 27, No. 1 (June 1940), pp. 67-84; see also, on “custom,” Anne Firor Scott, “Women’s Perspective on the Patriarchy in the 1850’s,” Journal of American History, Vol. 61, No. 1 (June 1974), p. 55.

[Infant mortality]: Scott, p. 55.

[The Lowell Offering]: Philip S.. Foner, The Factory Girls (University of Illinois Press, 1977), pp. 26-29.

[“Fictional” account of first day at work]: quoted in Thomas Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills: ‘The Oppressing Hand of Avarice Would Enslave Us,’” in Milton Cantor and Bruce Laurie, eds., Class, Sex, and the Woman Worker (Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 45.

[Mill worker’s letter]: quoted in Lise Vogel, “Hearts to Feel and Tongues to Speak: New England Mill Women in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Cantor and Laurie, pp. 65-66.

[H. E. Back’s letter]: ibid., pp. 66-68.

[Sarah Bagley on Lowell Offering]: quoted in Foner, p. 57.

[Mehitable Eastman on denial of liberty]: address to Manchester Industrial Reform Association, Sept. 1846, quoted in Vogel, p. 70.

[“The Factory Bell”]: author unknown, quoted in Lise Vogel, “Their Own Work: Two Documents from the Nineteenth-Century Labor Movement,” in Signs Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring 1976), pp. 793-94.

[Lucy Larcom’s initial liking for factory]: ibid., p. 778.

[Sarah Bagley on mutual dependence]: Foner, p. 172.

[Lowell strike of 1834]: Dublin, pp. 51-55.

[Lowell Female Labor Reform Association]: ibid., pp. 57-61.

[Schouler concludes that “the remedy is not with us”]: W. Elliot Brownlee and Mary M. Brownlee, Women in the American Economy (Yale University Press, 1976), p. 169.

[“Female fragment societies”]: Richard D. Brown, “The Emergence of Urban Society in Rural Massachusetts, 1760-1820,” Journal of American History, Vol. 61, No. 1 (June 1974), p. 39.

[Emma Willard and the Troy Female Seminary]: Anne Firor. Scott, “What, Then, Is the American: This New Woman?”Journal of American History, Vol. 65, No. 3 (December 1978), pp. 679-703.

[Women at Oberlin]: Jill K. Conway, “Perspectives on the History of Women’s Education in the United States,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring 1974). pp. 1-11.

[Emergence of women’s rights movement within abolitionism]: Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism (Pantheon Books, 1967), pp. 11-39.

[Lucretia Mott and National Anti-Slavery Convention]: Otelia Cromwell, Lucretia Mott (Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 58.

[Exclusion of women from World’s Anti-Slavery Convention]: Mari Jo and Paul Buhle, The Concise History of Woman Suffrage (University of Illinois Press, 1978), pp. 78-87.

[Seneca Falls convention]: Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle (Harvard University Press, 1975), Ch. 5. [Seneca Falls declaration]: text in Miriam Schneir, ed., Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings (Vintage Books, 1972), pp. 77-82.

[Lucretia Mott]: Margaret Hope Bacon, Valiant Friend (Walker, 1980); Anna Davis Hallowell, ed., James and Lucretia Mott, Life and Letters (Houghton Mifflin, 1884).

[Legal status of wives]: Richard B. Morris, Studies in the History of Early American Law (Columbia University Press, 1930), Ch. 4; Mary R. Beard, Woman as Force in History (Macmillan, 1946), pp. 113-21; Peggy Rabkin, “The Origins of Law Reform: The Social Significance of the Nineteenth-Century Codification Movement and Its Contribution to the Passage of the Early Married Women’s Property Acts,” Buffalo Law Review, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Spring 1975), pp.683-760; Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 1980), Ch. 5.

[Difficulty of divorce]: Kerber, Ch. 6.

[Millicent Hunt]: diary quoted in Adams, pp. 67-84.

[Lydia Maria Child]: Patricia G. Holland and Milton Meltzer, eds., The Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child, 1817-1880, Guide and Index to the Microfiche Edition (Kraus Microform, 1980); “Biography of Lydia Maria Child,” ibid., pp. 23-38; Collections of Lydia Maria Child papers and correspondence in the Schlesinger Library, Harvard College, and in the New York Public Library.

[Women’s rights and blacks’ rights]: see, in general, Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds its Past (Oxford University Press, 1979); Kerber.

[Mehitable Eastman on “hearts to feel”]: quoted in Vogel, “Hearts to Feel and Tongues to Speak,” p. 64.

Migrants in Poverty

[Frances Wright’s voyage to America]: Alice J. G. Perkins and Theresa Wolfson, Francis Wright: Free Enquirer (Harper & Brothers, 1939), quoted at pp. 26-29.

[Voyage of the Oxford]: Edwin C. Guillet, The Great Migration (Thomas Nelson, 1937), p. 78; Thomas W. Pate, “The Transportation of Immigrants and Reception Arrangements in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 19, No. 9 (November 1911), pp. 732-49.

[Reception of immigrants at docks]: Guillet, pp. 185-86; Nevins, Vol. 2, p. 285.

[Irish emigration after 1835]: Oscar Handlin, Boston’s immigrants (Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 51. [Statistics on immigration]: David Ward, Cities and Immigrants: A Geography of Change in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 63.

[Concentration of immigrants in tenement neighborhoods]: Ward, p. 107.

[Incident of doctor and canal worker]: Rudolph J. Vecoli, The People of New Jersey (Van Nostrand, 1965), p. 81.

[Swindling of immigrants]: Nevins, Vol. 2, pp. 282-85.

[Irish in New Jersey]: Vecoli, passim.

[Competition between Irish and blacks]: Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City (King’s Crown Press, 1949), pp. 66-68.

[Bellevue]: Raymond A. Mohl, Poverty in New York, 1783-1825, (Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 84-85.

[Work as deterrent to welfare]: ibid., p. 225.

[Mike Walsh and Tammany]: William V. Shannon, The American Irish (Macmillan, 1963), pp. 51-54. [Walsh on “negro slaves and white wage slaves”]: quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Little, Brown, 1945), p. 490.

[Poor whites of the rural South]: Clement Eaton, The Growth of Southern Civilization, 1790-1860 (Harper & Row, 1961), pp. 168-76; J. Wayne Flynt, Dixie’s Forgotten People (Indiana University Press, 1979).

[Franklin Plummer]: Reinhard H. Luthin, “Some Demagogues in American History,” American Historical Review, Vol. 57, No. 1 (October 1951), pp. 22-46, esp. pp. 25-26; Edwin A. Miles, “Franklin E. Plummer: Piney Woods Spokesman of the Jackson Era,” Journal of Mississippi History, Vol. 14 (January 1952), pp. 2-34.

Leaders Without Followers

[Protest of “Unlettered Mechanic”]: quoted in Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980), p. 216; [handbill against the “rich”]: ibid., p. 218.

[Protest of Sojourner Truth]: quoted in Schneir, pp. 94-95.

[Lydia Maria Child on drawing up her will]: Lydia Maria Child to Ellis Gray Loring, Feb. 24, 1856, reprinted in Letters of Lydia Maria Child (Houghton Mifflin, 1882).

[Staughton Lynd on the Declaration of Independence]: Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (Pantheon Books, 1968), p. 4.

[Barrington Moore on the recurring sense of injustice]: Moore, p. 77.

[Angelina Emily Grimké and Sarah Moore Grimké]: Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina (Houghton Mifflin, 1967); Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, 1822-1844, 2 vols. (Peter Smith, 1965).

[Theodore Weld]: Benjamin P. Thomas, Theodore Weld (Rutgers University Press, 1950).

[Frederick Douglass in the North Star on the Seneca Falls convention]: quoted in Schneir, p. 85.

[Lydia Maria Child on Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler]: Lydia Maria Child to Ellis Gray Loring, Dec. 5, 1838, Lydia Maria Child Papers, New York Public Library.

[Exchanges at the Akron meeting]: Schneir, pp. 93-95.

[Seneca Falls declaration and economic issues]: ibid., p. 82.

[FLRA “Factory Tract”]: reprinted in Vogel, “Their Own Work,” p. 795.

[Frances Wright]: Perkins and Wolfson; William Randall Waterman, “Frances Wright,” Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law, Vol. 115, No. 1 (Columbia University Press, 1924), pp. 92-133: Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin, “The Nashoba Plan for Removing the Evil of Slavery: Letters of Frances and Camilla Wright, 1820-1829,” Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol. 23, No. 3 (July 1975), and No. 4 (October 1975).

12. WHIGS: THE BUSINESS OF POLITICS

[The Whig rally in Dayton]: Ohio State Journal, Sept. 16, 1840, p. 2; Dayton Log Cabin, No. 12, Sept. 18, 1840, p. 1.

[William Henry Harrison’s speech, Dayton, Ohio, Sept. 10, 184o]: Cincinnati Gazette, Sept. 12, 1840; Dayton Log Cabin, No. 12, Sept. l8, 1840; text published by the Whig Republican Association, reprinted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 1971), Vol. t, pp. 737-44. The version quoted is paraphrased from Schlesinger, pp. 678-79.

[Harrison’s “first presidential campaign speech”]: Robert Gray Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign (University Press of Kentucky, 1957), pp. 164-65.

[John Quincy Adams on “itinerant speech-making”]: John Quincy Adams, Memoirs (Lippincott, 1876), Vol. 10, p. 352, entry for Sept. 24, 1840.

[Invective]: Schlesinger, pp. 671-74; Gunderson, passim.

[Voter turnout, 1840]: William Nisbet Chambers, “Election of 1840,” Schlesinger, p. 680; see also William Nisbet Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation (Oxford University Press, 1963), Ch. 1.

The Whig Way of Government

[Harrison’s inaugural]: Robert Seager II, And Tyler Too (McGraw-Hill, 1963), p. 144.

[Harrison’s illness]: Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Jacksonian Era: 1828-1848 (Harper & Brothers, 1959), p. 153.

[Tyler on Whig factions]: Seager, p. 149.

[Clay’s anger]: ibid., p. 134.

[Dilemma of the Whigs in Congress]: John E. Fisher, “The Dilemma of a States’ Rights Whig,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 81, No. 4 (October 1973), pp.

387-404.

[Ewing’s bank bill]:Clement Eaton, Henry Clay and the Art of American Politics (Little, Brown, 1957), p. 146. [Clay’s reaction]: ibid., p. 147.

[Tyler’s retort to Clay]: Seager, p. 154.

[“Corporal’s Guard” of Virginians]: ibid, p. 159.

[Tyler on Clay’s compromise]: ibid, p. 155.

[Veto celebration and protest]: ibid., p. 156.

[Crittenden’s warning]: ibid., p. 159.

[Webster and Tyler]: Van Deusen, p. 159.

[Van Deusen on “logrolling”]: ibid., p.

[Tyler welcomes Democratic victory of 1842]: Seager, p. 171.

[Whigs nominating generals]: James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 60-61.

[Politics of Whiggery]: William R. Brock, Parties and Political Conscience: American Dilemmas, 1840-1850, (KTO Press, 1979); Daniel Walker Howe, Political Culture of the American Whigs (University of Chicago Press, 1979); Lynn L. Marshall, “The Strange Stillbirth of the Whig Party,” American Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (January 1967), pp. 445-68; Sydney Nathans, Daniel Webster and Jacksonian Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)·

[Marshall on Whig nostalgia for a “heroic era” of leadership]: “Stillbirth of the Whig Party,” p. 463.

The Economics of Whiggery

[Frederic Tudor, the “Ice King”]: Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (Random House, 1965), pp. 11-16; Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American

Biography (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), Vol. 19, pp. 47-48.

[Nathan Jarvis Wyeth]: Boorstin, pp. l3-14.

[Solomon Willard]: ibid, pp. 18-19; Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 20, pp. 241-42.

[Du Pont Company]: Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and Stephen Salsbury, Pierre S. du Pont and the Making of the Modern Corporation (Harper & Row, 1971).

[Samuel Finley Morse]: Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 13, pp. 247-51.

[Railroad development and leadership]: Thomas C. Cochran, Railroad Leaders, 1845-1890: The Business Mind in Action (Harvard University Press, 1953); Roger Burlingame, March of the Iron Men (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., ed., The Railroads (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).

[Railroad expansion]: Chandler, p. 13.

[Boston and New York City railroad promoters and magnates]: Cochran, pp. 263-64.

[Schuyler-Pond exchange]: Robert Schuyler to Charles F. Pond, Dec. 1, 1848, reprinted in Cochran, p. 457.

[Population growth and economic growth]: Stuart Bruchey, The Roots of American Economic Growth, 1607-1861(Harper & Row, 1965), p. 91.

[Adams on Whigs]: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Little, Brown, 1945), p. 279.

[Whigs and economic development]: Robert Kelley, The Cultural Pattern of American Politics (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 154-55.

[Hare on unity of interests]: Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, p. 270.

[Everett on “wheel of fortune”]: ibid., p. 271.

[Channing on hardships of the rich]: ibid., p. 272.

[“Ode to the Factory Girl”]: ibid.

[Channing on “Elevation of Soul”]: ibid., p. 273.

[American politics a “romance”]: Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Harcourt, Brace, 1955), p. 140.

[Van Deusen on Ohio Whigs]: Van Deusen, p. 96.

[Wealth of Boston Whiggery]: Robert Rich, “‘A Wilderness of Whigs’,” Journal of Social History. Vol. 4 (Spring 1971), pp. 263-76.

[Justice Story]: Hartz, p. 104. [Shaw and “fellow-servant rule”]: Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History, rev. ed. (Harper & Brothers, 1961), p. 778.

[Everett on “Numbers against Property”]:Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, p. 110.

[Lawrence’s loan to Harrison]: Seager, p. 145.

[Daniel Webster as typical Whig]: Irving H. Bartlett, Daniel Webster (W. W. Norton, 1978).

Experiments in Escape

[Sophia Ripley letter]: Sophia Willard Dana Ripley to John S. Dwight, Aug. 1, 1840, in Zoltán Haraszti The Idyll of Brook Farm (Trustees of the Boston Public Library, n.d), pp. 12-13.

[Jefferson on laboring in the earth]: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, Thomas P. Abernethy, ed. (Harper & Row, 1964), p. 157.

[Owenite and other communitarian associations]: Arthur Eugene Bestor, Jr., Backwoods Utopias (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950); John F.C. Harrison, Quest for the New Moral World (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969); V. F. Calverton, Where Angels Dared to Tread (Bobbs-Merrill,1941); William E. Wilson, The Angel and the Serpent (Indiana University Press, 1964); Everett Webber, Escape to Utopia (Hastings House, 1959); Donald E. Pitzer, ed., Robert Owen’s American Legacy (Proceedings of the Robert Owen Bicentennial Conference) (Indiana Historical Society, 1972). 440

[Owen’s goals]: quoted in Calverton, p. 180.

[Evil of individualism]: Bestor, p. 8.

[New Harmony purchased]: Harrison, p. 164.

[New Harmony members]: Webber, p. 139.

[“Pecuniary inequality”]: Bestor, p. 120.

[Regulations for members]: Wilson, p. 118.

[Arrival of Philanthropist]: ibid., p. 138.

[Pelham is “free”]: quoted in Bestor, p. 167.

[“Persons of color”]: Wilson, p. 118.

[Mrs. Pears on equality]: Bestor, p. 175.

[Bestor on paradox of experiment]: ibid.

[Brown denounces Owen]: ibid, p. 188.

[Decline of New Harmony]: ibid., pp. 197-201.

[Fourier and Fourierism]: Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, The Teaching of Charles Fourier (University of California Press. 1969); Mark Poster, ed., Harmonian Man (Doubleday, ‘97’]: Charles Gide, Intro., Design for Utopia: Selected Writings of Charles Fourier (Schocken Books, 1971)

[Fourier on commercial world]: Poster, p. 3.

[Fourierist associations in America]: Bestor, pp. 238-40.

[Brook Farm]: Edith Roelker Curtis, A Season in Utopia (Thomas Nelson, 1961); Haraszti.

[Failure of communal societies]: Maren L. Carden, Oneida: Utopian Community to Modern Corporation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), p. 20.

[Intellectual leaders who could not plan]: Webber, pp. 192-99.

[Greeley’s admiration]: quoted in Bestor, p. 10. [Marx and Engels]: quoted in ibid., p. 11.

13. THE EMPIRE OF LIBERTY

[Adams on peace and prosperity]: quoted in Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, 9th ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 191.

[Jackson denounces French]: ibid., p. 195. [Refusal to apologize]: ibid., p. 197.

[Andrew Jackson Pageot]: ibid., p. 198.

[Rochester Democrat demands revenge]: ibid., p. 200. [Vow to liberate Canada]: ibid, p. 201.

[Ashburton pays Sparks’s “expenses”]: Samuel F. Bemis, A Diplomatic History of the United States, 5th ed. (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), p. 263.

Trails of Tears and Hope

[Frontier ruffians]: Ray A. Billington, Westward Expansion (Macmillan, 1960), p. 482.

[Tocqueville’s pioneer]: Theodore R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star (Macmillan, 1968), pp. 103-4.

[Immigrant population]: Billington, pp. 301-2, 308.

[Steamboat fares]: Richard B. Morris, Encyclopedia of American History, Bicentennial Edition (Harper & Row, 1976), p. 602.

[Economy of the Northwest]: Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 293-95, 321-46-

[“King Whirl”]: Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South (Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), pp. 11-12.

[Plantation house]: ibid., pp. 15-16.

[Items bought by Southerners]: Rohrbough, pp. 309, 315; Thomas D. Clark, Three American Frontiers, Holman Hamilton, ed. (University Press of Kentucky, 1968), p. 33.

[Emerson on West]: quoted in Frederick J. Turner, The United States, 1830-1850 (Henry Holt, 1935), p. 378.

[Three waves of settlers]: Frederick J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in George R. Taylor, ed., The Turner Thesis Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History, rev. ed. (D. C. Heath, 1956), pp. 9-10.

[Everyone involved in politics]: Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, “A Meaning for Turner’s Frontier, Democracy in the Old Northwest,” in Taylor, p. 104. [Slick law]: Rohrbough, p. 307.

[Jefferson’s toast]: Katharine C. Turner, Red Men Calling on the Great White Father (University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), p. 39. [Mary Rapine and Petalesharo]: ibid., pp. 51-57.

[Henry Clay on Indians]: Diary of John Quincy Adams, cited in Frederick Merk, History of the Westward Movement (Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), p. 186.

[Black Hawk and Easterners]: Katharine C. Turner, p. 90.

[Massacre of Indians]: Billington, pp. 300-1; see also Milo M. Quaife, ed., Life of Black Hawk (Lakeside Press, 1916).

[Cherokee wealth]: Billington, p. 314.

[Indian spiritual values]: Eufaula Harjo, a Creek sage, quoted in Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (University of Oklahoma Press, 1970); p. 4.

[Ross’s eloquence]: Grant Foreman, Advancing the Frontier, 1830-1860 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1933), p. 322.

[Mistreatment of tribesmen]: Grant Foreman, Indian Removal (University of Oklahoma Press, 1932), pp. 131, 114, 272; see also Flora W. Seymour, Indian Agents of the Old Frontier (Appleton-Century, 1941), pp. 3-14.

[Army private’s account]: Debo, pp. 108-9.

[Choctaw government]: Grant Foreman, The Five Civilized Tribes (University of Oklahoma Press, 1934). pp 32-33. [Choctaw Academy]: ibid., p. 66.

[Austin’s arrangement]: Fehrenbach, pp. 135-37.

[Austin in Mexico City]: Eugene C. Barker, The Life of Stephen F. Austin (Lakeside Press, 1949), pp. 43-44.

[Jeffersonian paradise]: Fehrenbach, p. 166.

[Houston’s call]: Llerena Friend, Sam Houston: The Great Designer (University of Texas Press, 1954), p. 63.

[Travis’ appeal]: Fehrenbach, p. 208.

[“EI Bostono”]: David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Oregon, and the Mexican War (University of Missouri Press, 1973), p. 92.

[California description]: Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision: 1846 (Houghton Mifflin, 1942), p. 45.

[Wagon train election]: Frederick Turner, United States, p. 367.

[Larkin’s scheme for Californian independence]: Billington, pp. 570-72.

[Sutter and the new arrivals]: Julian Dana, Sutter of California (Macmillan, 1936), passim.

Annexation: Politics and War

[“Manifest Destiny”]: Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 24. [Douglas on “area of liberty”]: ibid., p. 28. [“American multiplication table”]: ibid, p. 29.

[“Who is Polk?”]: Eugene I. McCormac, James K. Polk (University of California Press, 1922), p. 248; see also Charles Sellers, James K. Polk: Continentalist, 1843-1846 (Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 105.

[Benton on Oregon]: Bailey, p. 224.

[Claim to Oregon “unquestionable”]: ibid., p. 225. [Looking John Bull in the eye]: ibid, p. 228.

[“Reannexation of Texas” in Democratic platform]: quoted in Charles Sellers, “Election of 1844,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 1971), Vol. 1, p. 773.

[Slidells status]: George Meade, The Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), Vol. 1, p. 65.

[Sequence of events on Rio Grande]: George W. Smith and Charles Judah, Chronicles of the Gringos (University of New Mexico Press, 1968), pp. 61-62.

[Polk’s decision for war]: Allan Nevins, ed., Polk: The Diary of a President,1845-1849 (Longmans, Green, 1929), pp. 81-83.

[War message]: Pletcher, p. 386.

[Mexican prisoners]: Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U S. Grant (Webster, 1885), Vol. 1, pp. 117-18.

[Mexicans at Buena Vista]: Justo Sierra, The Political Evolution of the Mexican People, Charles Ramsdell, trans. (University of Texas Press, 1969), pp. 241-42.

[Liberty cap]: soldier quoted in Lloyd Lewis, Captain Sam Grant (Little, Brown, 1950), p. 194.

[Amphibious assault described]: Correspondence of John Sedgwick, Major-General (De Vinne Press, 1902), Vol. 1, p. 71.

[Valley of Mexico]: Lewis, p. 225.

[Scott’s choice]: De Voto, pp. 489-90.

[Scott on Chapultepec assault]: quoted in Sedgwick, p. 113.

[American casualties]: K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846-1848 (Macmillan, 1974), p. 397.

[Grant’s lament]: Lewis, p. 261.

The Geometry of Balance

[Post-Mexican War politics in general]: William R. Brock, Parties and Political Conscience: American Dilemmas, 1840-1850 (KTO Press, 1979); Roy Franklin Nichols, The Democratic Machine, 1850-1854, (Longmans, Green, 1923); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties (Chelsea House, 1973), Vol. 1; Roy F. Nichols, The Stakes of Power, 1845-1877 (Hill & Wang, 1961).

[John Quincy Adams on internal Whig divisions]: Charles Francis Adams, ed., Memoirs of John Quincy Adams (Lippincott, 1877), Vol. 12, p. 274.

[John Quincy Adams on three-fifths rule as fatal drop of prussic accid]: quoted in Brock, p. 233.

[Justice Taney on community rights]: quoted in Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American Biography (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), Vol. 18, p. 292.

[Dalzell on balance as organic]: Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., Daniel Webster and the Trial of American Nationalism, 1843-1852 (W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 14.

[Strategic questions facing antislavery movement]: Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850, (Pantheon Books, 1969).

[Liberty party]: Theodore C. Smith, The Liberty and Free Soil Parties in the Northwest (Longmans, Green,1897), Vol. 6 of Harvard Historical Studies; Joseph G. Rayback, “The Liberty Party Leaders of Ohio: Exponents of Antislavery Coalition,” Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly, Vol. 57 (April 1948), pp. 165-78; Betty Flade-land, James Gillespie Birney: Slaveholder to Abolitionist (Cornell University Press, 1955).

[Liberty party in New York election of 1844]: Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy (Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 134, 209-13.

[Conscience Whigs]: Kinley J. Brauer, Cotton versus Conscience (University Press of Kentucky, 1967); Martin B. Duberman, Charles Francis Adams, 1807-1886 (Houghton Mifflin, 1961); David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 1960); Frank Otto Gatell, John Gorham Palfrey and the New England Conscience (Harvard University Press, 1963); and biographies of Conscience Whig leaders.

[Cotton Whigs]; Thomas H. O’Connor, Lords of the Loom: The Cotton Whigs and the Coming of the Civil War (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968).

[Free-Soil party]: Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers (University of Illinois Press, 1973); Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (University Press of Kentucky, 1970); Theodore C. Smith; Aileen S. Kraditor, “The Liberty and Free Soil Parties,” in Schlesinger, History of U.S. Political Parties, Vol. 1, pp. 741-61 and appendices.

[Eric Foner on Free-Soil party evasion of Negro rights issue]: Eric Foner, “Politics and Prejudice: The Free Soil Party and the Negro, 1849-1852,”Journal of Negro History, Vol. 50, No. 4 (October 1965), p. 239.

[1848 presidential election]: Flagg Papers, Columbia University Library, esp. correspondence with John A. Dix.

[Lewis Cass]: Frank B. Woodford, Lewis Cass (Rutgers University Press, 1950).

[1848 election results]: Svend Petersen, A Statistical History of the American Presidential Elections (Frederick Ungar, 1963), pp. 31-32.

[The Southern Address]: Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun Sectionalist, 1840-1850 (Bobbs-Merrill, 1951), quoted at p. 385.

[Gold discovered]: Dana, pp. 296-302.

[Population hurries to mines]: Col. Richard B. Mason, letter in John C. Fremont, The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California (Derby, 1851), p. 427.

[Prospectors’ methods]: Milo M. Quaife, ed., Pictures of Gold Rush California (Lakeside Press, 1949), pp. 192-234.

[Gold rush]: Quaife, Pictures, pp. xx-xxv.

[San Francisco]: Dana, p. 353.

[Statehood convention]: Dana, pp. 342-49.

[Slavery prohibition]: ibid., pp. 347.

[Remarks on slavery by Representatives Allen and Hilliard]: Congressional Globe, 31st Congress, 1st session (Appendix), Dec. 12, 1849 (speeches of Dec. 12, 1849, and Dec. 13, 1849), pp. 33-35.

[Extremist feelings in 1849-1850]: Claude M. Fuess, Daniel Webster (Da Capo Press, 1968),

Vol. 2, pp. 20l-2.

[Clay’s meeting with Webster on omnibus proposal]: ibid, pp. 204-5; Dalzell, p. 173; Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Life of Henry Clay (Little, Brown, 1937), p. 399.

[Clay “never before arisen to address any assembly … so anxious ”]: Congressional Globe, Feb. 5 and 6, 1850, p. 115.

[Clay’s presentation of his omnibus proposal to the Senate]: ibid., pp. 115-27, quoted at p. 127.

[Calhoun’s speech]: quoted in Dalzell, p. 174 (March 4, 1850).

[Webster’s speech]: Congressional Globe, March 7, 1850, pp. 269-76, quoted at pp. 269, 276.

[Philip Hone on post-Compromise rejoicing]: quoted in Brock, p. 315.

[California lawlessness]: Dana, pp. 367-68 and passim.

14. THE CULTURE OF LIBERTY

[Emerson on the limited culture of Massachusetts]: The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes (Houghton Mifflin, 1912), Vol. 8, p. 339 (Oct. 1852).

[John Adams on the generational sequence of studies]: James T. Adams, The Adams Family (Literary Guild, 1930), p. 67.

[New England cultural development in general]: F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1941); Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958), Vol. 2: The Romantic Revolution in America; Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England (E. P. Dutton, 1936); Russell Blaine Nye, The Cultural Life of the New Motion (Harper & Brothers, i960); Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965).

[Harvard conflict over religion]: Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard (Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 187-90.

[Parrington on Washington Irving’s detachment from literary America]: Parrington, p. 203.

[Parrington on William Cullen Bryant’s “self-pollenizing nature”]: Parrington, p. 239.

[Harvard in the early nineteenth century]: Morison, pp. 224-30; Brooks, Ch. 2.

[William Ellery Channing on experience and experiment]: Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 4 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), p. 7.

[Channing on the “great nature” and “divine image” of man]: quoted in Parrington, p. 334.

[Oliver Wendell Holmes on Channing’s “bland, superior look”]: quoted in Brooks, p. 43.

The Engine in the Vineyard

The title of this section is adapted from Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford University Press, 1967), which is a major source of ideas for this chapter.

[Emerson’s return to Concord with Lidian]: Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), pp. 222-24.

[The Emersons’ home in Concord]: Stephanie Kraft, No Castles on Main Street (Rand McNally, 1979), Ch. 11.

[Emerson’s early life]: Rusk, Chs. 1-10; Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 3, pp. 132-34.

[Emerson on moving “from the Unconscious to the Conscious”]: quoted in Rusk, p. 66.

[Emerson’s return to Concord in 1834, with his mother]: ibid., pp. 208-9.

[Emerson’s Nature]: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (Munroe, 1836). Quoted on nature, pp. 77, 9, 12, 53, 79; quoted on man, pp. 14, 41, 50-51, 80.

[Emerson on man’s talent and genius]: quoted in Perry Miller, ed., The American Transcendentalists (Anchor Books, 1957), p. 58, from Emerson’s lecture, “The Method of Nature,” Waterville College, Maine, Aug. 11, 1841.

[Emerson on man’s magnetic needle]: quoted in Brooks, p. 206.

[Emerson on self-reliance]: “Self-Reliance,” in Mary A. Jordan, ed., Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson (Houghton Mifflin, 1903), quoted at pp. 86, 88, 111.

[Theodore Parker on worshipping with no mediator between people and the father of all]: quoted in Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 7, pp. 239-40.

[Margaret Fuller as “unsexed version of Plato’s Socrates”]: Barrett Wendell, A Literary History of America (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), p. 300; see also Marie Mitchell Olesen Urbanski, Margaret Fuller’s “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” (Greenwood Press, 1980).

[Harriet Martineau on Margaret Fuller’s circle of women intellectuals]: quoted in Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 4, p. 64.

[Emerson on a “foolish consistency”]: Jordan, p. 93.

[Emerson on technology]: quoted in Marx, p. 230.

[“Things are in the saddle … ”]: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Ode Inscribed to W. H. Channing,” Richard Ellmann, ed., The New Oxford Book of American Verse (Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 67-69. On Emerson and his circle, see also Joel Porte, Representative Man (Oxford University Press, 1979).

[Henry Thoreau at Walden Pond]: Henry D. Thoreau, Walden (Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 114-16; see also Marx, pp. 249-55; R·W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (University of Chicago Press, 1955), pp. 20-27; Henry Beetle Hough, Thoreau of Walden (Archon Books, 1970); James Mcintosh, Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist (Cornell University Press, 1974).

[Thoreau on the railroad]: Walden, pp. 115-22.

[Lerner on Thoreau]: Max Lerner, “Thoreau: No Hermit,” from Max Lerner, Ideas Are Weapons (Viking Press, 1939), p. 45·

[Thoreau on the railroad as an Atropos]: Walden, p. 118.

[Thoreau’s description of his house]: Walden, p. 48.

[Thoreau’s “experiment in human ecology”]: so described by Stanley Edgar Hyman, “Henry Thoreau in Our Time,” in Sherman Paul, ed., Thoreau (Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 26; this essay, p. 26, is also the source of Thoreau’s statement about living deep. See also Sherman Paul, The Shores of America (University of Illinois Press, 1958).

[James Russell Lowell on Thoreau’s “experiment ”]: quoted in Leon Edel, Henry D. Thoreau (University of Minnesota Press, 1970), p. 29.

[Sam Staples on Thoreau’s jailing]: quoted in Milton Meltzer and Walter Harding, A Thoreau Profile (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962), p. 158.

[Thoreau’s exchange (apocryphal) with Emerson]: ibid., pp. 161-62.

[Sherman Paul on Thoreau’s means of self-emancipation]: Sherman Paul, “A Fable of the Renewal of Life,” in Paul, p. 103.

[Emerson on Thoreau’s “Excursions on Concord & Merrimack Rivers ”]: Emerson to Charles K. Newcomb, July 16, 1846, Emerson Papers, Concord Free Public Library.

[Emerson on communicating across seventeen miles]: Emerson to Newcomb, Aug. 16, 1842, ibid.

[Nathaniel Hawthorne on Sleepy Hollow]: Randall Stewart, ed..The American Notebooks by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Yale University Press, 1932), pp. 102-4.

[Hawthorne’s life]: Nina Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (Cornell University Press, 1976); Newton Arvin, Hawthorne (Little, Brown, 1929); Hyatt H. Waggoner, Nathaniel Hawthorne (University of Minnesota Press, 1962).

[Van Wyck Brooks on the ghosts and legends of Salem]: Brooks, p. 212.

[Hawthorne on the “supremely artificial establishments”]: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from The American Note-Books (Houghton Mifflin, 1900), p. 156.

[Hawthorne interpretation]: Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (Alfred A. Knopf, 1958); A. N. Kaul, ed., Hawthorne (Prentice-Hall, 1966).

[Ethan Brand on humanity as the subject of an experiment]: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Ethan Brand,” in Hawthorne’s Works (Houghton Mifflin, 1887), Vol. 3, p. 495.

[Melville on his “Whale” and Hawthorne’s “Unpardonable Sin”]: Melville to Hawthorne,

June 1?, 1851, in Merrell R. Davis and William H. Oilman, eds., The letters of Herman,

Melville (Yale University Press, 1960), pp. 126-31.

[Melville on “cruel cogs and wheels”]: quoted in Marx, p. 286.

[Leavis on Melville]: Q. D. Leavis, “Melville: The 1853-6 Phase,” in Faith Pullin, ed., New Perspectives on Melville (Kent State University Press, 1978), p. 214.

[Marx on the American hero]: Marx, p. 364.

[Philosophical themes and dualities in Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville]: works cited above, esp. Levin, Marx, Parrington; Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self (Alfred A. Knopf, 1971); Lewis, The American Adam; Stephen E. Whicher, Freedom and Fate (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953).

Religion: Free Exercise

[Finney’s sermon]: Bernard Weisberger. They Gathered at the River (Little, Brown, 1958), pp. 101, 109, 239.

[Concern of eastern ministers about lack of religion on the frontier]: Theodore Dwight Bozeman, “Inductive and Deductive Politics: Science and Society in Antebellum Presbyterian Thought,” Journal of American History, Vol. 64, No. 3 (December 1977), p. 708.

[Timothy Dwight]: Clifford S. Griffin, Their Brother’s Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800-186; (Rutgers University Press, 1960), p. 17.

[“Very wintry season” for religion after the Revolution]: R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest: Pioneer Period, 1815-1840 (Indiana Historical Society, 1950), Vol. 2, p. 420.

[Tocqueville on everywhere meeting “a politician where you expected to find a priest”]: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), Henry Reeve Text, Phillips Bradley, ed. Vol. 1, pp. 306-7.

[Dependence of American ministers on laity for support after disestablishment]: Sidney E. Mead, “The Rise of the Evangelical Conception of the Ministry in America (1607-1850),” in H. Richard Niebuhr and Daniel D. Williams, eds., The Ministry in Historical Perspectives (Harper & Brothers, 1956), p. 217.

[Timothy Dwight on uncertainty of voluntary contributions for support of ministry]: Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, 4 vols. (T. Dwight, 1821-22), Vol. 3, p. 3.

[Dominant religious groups in colonial America]: Sidney E. Mead, “Denominationalism: The Shape of Protestantism in America,” Church History, Vol. 24 (December 1954), p. 294.

[Early missionary work of Presbyterians on the western frontier]: William Warren Sweet, Religion in the Development of American Culture, 1765-1840 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), pp. 148-49.

[Cane Ridge revival described]: Bulcy, p. 421.

[Presbyterian split into Old School and New School]: Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Dorsey Press, 1969), p. 82.

[Methodist circuit riders]: Buley, pp. 450-52.

[Description of camp meeting]: John Allen Krout and Dixon Ryan Fox, The Completion of Independence, 1790-1830 (Macmillan, 1944), p. 173.

[Peter Cartwright’s account of frontier proselytizing]: Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 443-44.

[Ahlstrom on dramatic confrontation over “infant sprinkling”]: ibid., p. 444.

[Membership statistics of churches in 1850]: Will Herberg, Protestant-Catholic-Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Doubleday, 1955), p. 119.

[Second Great Awakening in New England]: Ahlstrom, p. 417.

[Timothy Dwight’s asceticism]: Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (Avon Books, 1977), p. 173.

[Numbers of Roman Catholics in America in colonial era]: Herberg, p. 151. [Numbers of Roman Catholics in America in 1850]: Ahlstrom, p. 542.

[Issue of “trusteeism” in Roman Catholic Church]: Herberg, pp. 152-54.

[Anti-Catholic rioting in 1830s and 1840s]: Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (Macmillan, 1938), pp. 68-70; see also Herberg, p. 155.

[The beginning of the Mormon Church]: Leonard J. Arlington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). p. 204.

[Mormons expelled from Missouri and Illinois]: Bernard De Voto, The Year of Decision: 1846 (Houghton Mifflin, 1942), pp. 75-101, 327-30.

[Brigham Young growing up amidst “fiery” Methodist revivals]: in Arlington and Bitton, p. 86.

[Mead on competition]: Mead. “Denominationalism,” p. 316.

[Evangelical antislavery activities of Lane rebels]: Buley, p. 617.

[Whittier on antislavery]: quoted in Anne C. Loveland, “Evangelicalism and ‘Immediate Emancipation’ in American Antislavery Thought,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 32 (1966), pp. 187-88.

Schools: The “Temples of Freedom”

[George Washington on the need for “general diffusion of knowledge”]: “Farewell Address,” John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings of George Washington (Government Printing Office, 1940), Vol. 35, p. 230.

[Thomas Jefferson on need for education]: Jefferson to Charles Yancey, Jan. 6, 1816, in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (C. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), Vol. 10, p. 4.

[The need to educate jurors, etc., in the “first interest of all”]: Charles Stewart Davis, “Popular Government,” reprinted in Joseph L. Blau, ed., Social Theories of Jacksonian Democracy (Hafner, 1947), pp. 45-46.

[Edward Everett on “the utmost practicable extension … to a system of education ”]: Lawrence A. Cremin, The American Common School (Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1951), p. 32.

[Schools as “Temples of Freedom”]: J. Orville Taylor, quoted in Rush Welter, Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America (Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 43.

[William Manning on “larning”]: William Manning, The Key of Libberty (The Manning. Association, 1922), pp. 20-21.

[Welter on republican and democratic educational institutions]: Welter, p. 57.

[Leaders and goals of the Common School Awakening]: Robert L. Church and Michael W. Sedlak, Education in the United States: An Interpretive History (Free Press, 1976), pp.

55-57.

[Undermining of status of skilled craftsmen and the decline of the apprenticeship system]: Merle Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935), p. 25.

[Leadership of Robert Dale Owen in Working Men’s party demands for education]: Richard William Leopold, Robert Dale Owen: A Biography (Octagon Books, 1969), p. 93; Joseph G. Rayback, A History of American Labor (Macmillan, 1959), p. 66; Welter, p. 45.

[Owen on need for national system of education]: Cremin, p. 33.

[Leadership of Thaddeus Stevens in passage of common school law in Pennsylvania]: Carl Russell Fish, The Rise of the Common Man, 1830-1850 (Macmillan, 1927), p. 217.

[Colonial education]: Bernard Bailyn, cited in Carl F. Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System (Harvard University Press, 1973), p. viii.

[Estimates of number of children without education in middle Atlantic states]: Curti, p. 28.

[Statistics on free education in Massachusetts, New England, and the middle Atlantic states]: ibid., pp. 27-28.

[Complaint of school board member on a teacher’s lack of dedication]: Stanley K. Schultz, The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789-1860 (Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 76. See also Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform (Harvard University Press, 1968).

[Henry Barnard’s estimates on better funding of private schools in Connecticut]: Curti, p. 27. [Horace Mann on the money value of education]: ibid., p. 112.

[Views of Henry Barnard on education]: ibid., pp. 139-68, and in Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 1, p. 623.

[Leaders of the Common School Awakening in the South]: Church and Sedlak, pp. 123-27.

[Calvin Wiley on universal education]: Curti, p. 71.

[Educational effort of the South before the Civil War]: Church and Sedlak, pp. 122-23.

[Teacher training program of Catharine Beecher]: Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (Yale University Press, 1973), p. 183.

[Missionary effort of New England ministers “swarming out” to save the West]: Fish, p. 224.

[Caleb Mills and the founding of the Indiana school system]: R. E. Banta, Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-1916 (Wabash College, 1949), p. 221; Charles W. Moores, Caleb Mills and the Indiana School System (Indiana Historical Society Publications, Vol. 3, No. 6, 1905), pp. 363-78; Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850-1880 (Indiana Historical Bureau and Indiana Historical Society, 1965), pp. 461-65.

[Mills on advisability of meeting the expense of “proper education “]: Thornbrough, pp. 462-63.

[John Pierce and the establishment of the Michigan educational system]: Buley, Vol. 2, p. 368, and in Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 14, p. 583.

[Religious leaders’ founding of public schools described]: Timothy L. Smith, “Protestant Schooling and American Nationality, 1800-1859,”Journal of American History, Vol. 53, No. 4 (March 1967), pp. 679-95.

[Religious issues in New York City schools]: Church and Sedlak, pp. 158-68.

[Conflict of purposes in common school movement]: ibid., pp. 186-89. See also Selwyn K. Troen, The Public and the Schools (University of Missouri Press, 1975); Kaestle.

[High school movement]: Church and Sedlak, p. 182.

[School attendance figures]: Fish, p. 224.

[Mann on the need to be free before being educated]: Curti, p. 136.

Leaders of the Penny Press

[Hamilton on liberty of the press]: Federalist No. 84.

[Rise of the penny press]: Frank L. Mott, American Journalism (Macmillan, 1962), Ch. 12; Edwin Emery, The Press and America (Prentice-Hall, 1972), Ch. 11; Sidney Kobre, Foundations of American Journalism (Florida State University, 1958), Ch. 13.

[Newspapers dependent on big-city environment]: Allan R. Pred, ed., The Spatial Dynamics of U.S. Urban-Industrial Growth, 1800-1914 (MIT Press, 1966), pp. 174-175, 202-3.

[Police-court reports of the Sun]: Mott, p. 223.

[Bennett’s New York Herald]: Kobre, Ch. 15, quoted at p. 259; Mott, pp. 229-35.

[Hoes “lightning press”]: Emery, pp. 201-2.

[Impact of cost of large presses]: Kobre, p. 289.

[Telegraph dispatch]: Molt, p. 247.

[Papers in every tavern]: ibid., p. 241.

[Refusal of southern postmasters to deliver abolitionist papers]: ibid., p. 306.

[New papers in the East]: Kobre, pp. 302-3; Moll, pp. 238-41. [New papers in the West]: Mott, Ch. 16, quoted at p. 282.

[Attacks on Bennett]: Kobre, pp. 269-71.

[Coverage of the Mexican War]: Emery, p. 194.

[Horace Greeley’s description of himself]: Greeley Papers, New York Public Library, 1844-47 folder.

[Greeley’s boss’s desire for “decent- looking men”]: Mott, p. 219 n.

[Greeley’s ideal of a paper]: Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (J. B. Ford, 1868), p. 137.

[Greeley on reform]: Mott, p. 272.

[Criticism of “libertines”]: ibid., p. 271.

[Advice to Emerson and other young writers]: Greeley Papers, 1844-47 folder.

[Readership of the Tribune]: Kobre, p. 285.

[Parrington’s description of Greeley]: Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought, Vol. 2. p. 257.

[Young reporters’ income]: Kobre, p. 291.

[Melville’s source of income]: Matthew J. Bruccoli, ed., The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800-1870: The Papers of William Charvat (Ohio State University Press 1968), p. 196.

[The penny press in a democratic market society]: Michael Shudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (Basic Books, 1978), pp. 43-60.

[Subscribers to Godey’s Lady’s Book and North American Review]: Douglas, p. 275.

[Domestic novels ]: John T. Frederick, “Hawthorne’s ‘Scribbling Women,’” New England Quarterly, Vol. 47 (June 1975), pp. 231-40.

[The special journal devoted to reform]: Bernard A. Weisberger, The American Newspaperman (University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 86.

[Elijah Lovejoy]: Buley, p. 623.

Abolitionists: By Tongue and Pen

[Reactions of Adams, New York Evening Post, and Channing to murder of Lovejoy]: Lawrence Lader, The Bold Brahmins: New England’s War Against Slavery, 1831-1863, (E. P. Dutton, 1961), p. 82.

[Lovejoy as bigot]: Louis Filler, The Crusade Against Slavery (Harper & Brothers, 1960), p. 78.

[Faneuil Hall protest meeting]: Lader, pp. 82-85; Irving H. Bartlett, Wendell Phillips (Beacon Press, 1961), Ch. 4.

[Attorney General’s castigation of blacks]: Lader, p. 83.

[Phillips joining antislavery cause]: Bartlett, Ch. 3.

[Speech of Phillips]: Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Negro Universities Press, 1968, orig. pub. 1884), pp. 1-10, quoted at p. 3.

[Garrison on Phillips]: Bartlett, p. 51.

[Early antislavery sentiment]: David B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Cornell University Press, 1975).

[Questions of goals, strategy, and tactics]: Aileen Kraditor. Means and Ends in American Abolitionism (Pantheon Books, 1967), passim; Gerald Sorin, Abolitionism (Praeger, 1972), passim; Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (Pantheon Books, 1968), Chs. 4-5; William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848 (Cornell University Press, 1977).

[Garrison on the Constitution]: Filler, p. 216.

[Wendell Phillips on government and the safety of the Republic’s liberties]: Wendell Phillips, “Public Opinion,” speech of Jan. 28, 1852, reprinted in Speeches, pp. 53-54; Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), Ch. 6.

[Phillips on roles of reformer and politician]: Hofstadter, p. 136.

[Lydia Child on moral influence and party action]: Lydia M. Child, “Talk About Political Party,” reprinted from The National Anti-Slavery Standard in The Liberator, Aug. 5, 1842, quoted in Kraditor, p. 163.

[Characterization of abolitionists]: Sorin, Ch. 1; see also Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists (Greenwood, 1971), Ch. 1.

[Lewis Tappan]: Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Atheneum, 1969), p. viii.

[The Grimké sisters]: Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina (Houghton Mifflin, 1967), passim.

[Kraditor on abolitionists]: Kraditor, p. x.

[Influence of Phillips’ wife]: Hofstadter, p. 139.

[Lydia Child on changing public opinion]: Kraditor, p. 160.

[James Russell Lowell]: Martin Duberman, James Russell Lowell (Houghton Mifflin, 1966), passim.

[Hildreth, and antislavery themes in American literature]: Lorenzo D. Turner, Anti-Slavery Sentiment in American Literature Prior to 1865 (Kennikat Press, 1929).

[Harriet Beecher Stowe]: Robert Forrest Wilson, Crusader in Crinoline (Lippincott, l940.

[Sales figures for Uncle Tom’s Cabin]: Filler, p. 210; Wilson, pp. 281, 341.

[John Brown in Ohio]: Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood (Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 41-42.

15. THE RIPENING VINEYARD

[Webster’s death]: George Ticknor Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster (D. Appleton, 1870), Vol. 2, pp. 664-705; Claude M. Fuess, Daniel Webster (Little, Brown, 1930), Vol. 2, Ch. 30; Peter Harvey, Reminiscences and Anecdotes of Daniel Webster (Little, Brown, 1878), Ch. 12.

[Description of Webster]: Harvey, p. 432.

[“Any thing unworthy of Daniel Webster”]: Curtis, p. 698.

[Webster’s determination to resign]: Webster to Fletcher Webster, July 4, 1852, Edward Everett Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

[Webster’s prediction that “the Whigs are ended”]: Curtis, p. 693.

[Calhoun’s death]: Gaillard Hunt, John C. Calhoun (George W. Jacobs, 1907), Ch. 20; Margaret L. Coit, John C. Calhoun (Houghton Mifflin, 1950), Ch. 28.

[Calhoun on “two peoples so different”]: Franklin Jameson, ed., Correspondence of John C. Calhoun, Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1899 (Government Printing Office, 1900), Vol. 2, p. 784.

[Clay’s death]: Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Life of Henry Clay (Little, Brown, 1937), Ch. 25.

[Emerson’s musings on Webster]: Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, eds. E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes (Houghton Mifflin, 1912), entry for Oct. 25, 1852, Vol. 8, pp. 335-36.

The Cornucopia

[John Muir’s boyhood life in Wisconsin]: John Muir, “Scotch Pioneers in Wisconsin,” in David B. Greenberg, ed., Land That Our Fathers Plowed (University of Oklahoma Press, 1969), pp. 87-95, 9, quoted at pp. 88, 89.

[Nevins on the Northwestern Surge]: Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union: A House Dividing, 1852-1857 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), Vol. 2, p. 160.

[Population growth of states in the Northwest]: U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission, The United States on the Eve of the Civil War, as Described in the 1860 Census (Government Printing Office, 1963), p. 61.

[The farmers and the land]: Allan G. Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt (University of Chicago Press, 1963).

[Introduction and improvement of farm machinery]: Percy Wells Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States (Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1925), Part IV; Leo Rogin, The Introduction of Farm Machinery in Its Relation to the Productivity of Labor in the Agriculture of the United States During the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 1931).

[James Baldwin’s farm life]: summarized in Nevins, p. 162.

[Production of corn, wheat, and livestock]: ibid., pp. 169-71.

[Stockman B. F. Harris]: ibid., p. 171.

[Agricultural change in New England]: Percy W. Bidwell, “The Agricultural Revolution in New England,” American Historical Review, Vol. 26, No. 4 (July 1921), pp. 683-702.

[Ephraim Bull of Concord]: Nevins, p. 174.

[South Carolinian on southeastern farming]: J. Foster Marshall, pamphlet, Nov.11, 1857, quoted in Nevins, pp. 182-83.

[Relative size of wheat and corn crops]: The United States on the Eve of the Civil War, pp. 70-71.

[Southern farming]: Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860 (Peter Smith, 1958), originally published by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Publication No. 430, Vol. 2.

[Prosperity under “King Cotton”]: The United States on the Eve of the Civil War, pp. 43, 45.

[Farming, general aspects]: Paul W. Gates, The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture, Vol. 3 of The Economic History of the United States (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960).

[Denunciations of the railroads]: quoted in Stewart H. Holbrook, The Story of American Railroads (Crown, 1947), pp. 40-41.

[Transportation changes]: George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, Vol. 4 of The Economic History of the United States (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1951); Caroline E. MacGill, History of Transportation in the United States Before 1860 (Carnegie Institution of Washington, reprinted by Peter Smith, 1948).

[Mortgaging of property by Wisconsin farmers for railroad investment]: Taylor, p. 98.

[Railroad development]: Albert Fishlow, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-bellum Economy (Harvard University Press, 1965); Robert W. Fogel, Railroads and American Economic Growth (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964); Paul Wallace Gates, The Illinois Central Railroad and Its Colonization Work (Harvard University Press, 1934).

[Nevins on lake vessels]: Nevins, p. 228.

[Nevins on Mississippi riverboats]: ibid., p. 214.

[George Cable on the New Orleans dock scene]: George W. Cable, Dr. Sevier (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1887), p. 52.

[Industrial innovation and enterprise]: Joseph and Frances Gies, The Ingenious Yankees (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976); Thomas C. Cochran and William Miller, The Age of Enterprise (Macmillan, 1947).

[Interchangeable parts]: Gies, Ch. 13.

[Hawthorne on the “scribbling women ”]: quoted in John T. Frederick, “Hawthorne’s ‘Scribbling Women,’” New England Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 2 (June 1975), pp. 231-40, at p. 231.

[Economic expansion of the 1850s]: Stuart Bruchey, The Roots of American Economic Growth (Harper & Row, 1965); Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States (Prentice-Hall, 1961); Charles H. Hession and Hyman Sardy, Ascent to Affluence (Allyn and Bacon, 1969).

[Differences among economic historians as to period of greatest expansion]: Bruchey, Ch. 4.

[Inequality in the 1850s]: Lee Soltow, “Economic Inequality in the United States in the Period from 1790 to 1860,” Journal of Economic History, Vol. 31, No. 4 (December 1971), pp. 822-39; Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War (D. C. Heath. 1973).

[Workers’ wages]: Edgar W. Martin, The Standard of Living in 1860 (University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 409 (Appendix).

[Inequality as constant]: Soltow, p. 839.

The Cornucopia Overflows

[American exhibits at the Crystal Palace]: National Intelligencer, Feb. 3, 1852, quoted in Nevins, p. 254.

[“Floating palaces” in the coastal trade]: William H. Ewen, “Steamboats to New England,” The Log of Mystic Seaport, Vol. 32, No. 2 (Summer 1980), pp. 43-50.

[Eastern ports, relative standing]: Robert Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), Appendix I, p. 389.

[American ships]: Taylor, Ch. 6.

[Marcy’s instructions an diplomatic dress]: Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (F. S. Crofts, 1941). pp. 282, 283. [America’s cup]: “Yachts and Yachting,” in Encyclopedia Americana, International Edition (Americana Corporation, 1977), Vol. 29, p. 635.

[Young America]: Merlo E. Curti, “‘Young America,’” American Historical Review, Vol. 32, No. 1 (October 1926), pp. 34-55.

[Support for those “who had suffered in the cause of liberty”]: ibid., p. 48.

[Kossuth’s reception in New York Harbor]: Bailey, p. 286.

[Seward on democracy and markets]: quoted in William Appleman Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire (Random House, 1969), p. 99.

[Punch cartoon]: reproduced in Bailey, p. 283.

[Pierce on expansionism]: James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Literature, 1913), Vol. 4, p. 2731.

[Marcy on the spoils system]: quoted in Dumas Malone, ed,. Dictionary of American Biography (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), Vol. 12, p. 275.

[Cuba and the Black Warrior incident]: Nevins, Ch. 10.

[Soulé]: Amos A. Eltinger, The Mission to Spain of Pierre Soulé, 1853-1855 (Yale University Press, 1932).

[Tribune on Ostend Manifesto]: quoted in Nevins, p. 362.

[U.S. diplomacy as a “singular profession”]: London Times, March 24, 1855; see also Eltinger, pp. 406-10, for other foreign commentary.

[incidents in Central America]: Bailey, pp. 290-95.

[American whalers]: Elmo Paul Hohman, The American Whaleman (Longmans, Green, 1928); Edward A. Ackerman, New England’s Fishing industry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941); Marshall B. Davidson, Life in America (Houghton Mifflin, 1951), Vol. 1, pp. 340-45.

[Whaling statistics]: Hohman, Appendixes.

[Melville on the whale chase]: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (Hendricks House, 1962), pp. 222, 223-24.

[Chinese trade]: John King Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast, 2 vols. (Harvard University Press, 1953); Hallelt Abend, Treaty Ports (Doubleday, Doran, 1944).

[The Matthew Perry expedition to Japan]: Francis L. Hawks, comp., Narrative of the Expedition of an American Squadron to the China Seas and Japan (D. Appleton, 1856); Official Report, “Commodore Perry’s Landing in Japan, 1853,” Old South Leaflets No. 151 (Directors of the Old South Work, n.d.), Vol. 7, pp. 1-28; Arthur Walworth, Black Ships off Japan (Archon Books, 1966).

[Japanese lament about the black ship]: quoted in Bailey, p. 330.

“It Will Raise a Hell of a Storm ”

[Stephen Douglas]: Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (Oxford University Press,1973); Robert W. Johannsen, ed., The Letters of Stephens. Douglas (University of Illinois Press, 1961).

[Douglas’ Nebraska bill]: Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, pp. 405-8.

“It will raise a hell of a storm”]: quoted in David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861(Harper & Row, 1976), p. 160.

[Douglas on leaving slavery to the laws of climate, etc.]: quoted in ibid., p. 172.

[Salmon P. Chase]: Albert B. Hart, Salmon P. Chase (Houghton Mifflin, 1899).

[Charles Sumner]: David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 1960).

[Longfellow, Lieber, and Winthrop on Sumner]: quoted in ibid., pp. 214, 227, 212, resp.

[“Appeal of the Independent Democrats”]: see the New York Times, Jan. 24, 1854, p. 2.

[Douglas on the storm soon spending its fury]: Stephen A. Douglas to Howell Cobb, April 2, 1854, in Johannsen, ed., Letters of Stephen A. Douglas, p. 300.

[Greeley on the Kansas-Nebraska bill]: Jeter Allen Isely, Horace Greeley and the Republican Party (Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 49.

[Press reaction to Kansas-Nebraska bill]: Nevins, Ch. 9; Isely, passim.

[Rise of the Know-Nothings]: Michael F. Holt, “The Politics of Impatience: The Origins of Know Nothingism,” Journal of American History, Vol. 60, No. 2 (September 1973), pp. 309-31.

[Know-Nothing party’s stated purpose]: quoted in Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853-1892 (University of North Carolina Press, 1979). p. 68.

[Anti-Negro prejudice, 1850s]: Kenneth M. Stampp, The Imperiled Union (Oxford University Press, 1980), esp. Ch. 4; C. Vann Woodward, American Counterpoint: Slavery and Racism in the North-South Dialogue (Little, Brown, 1971), Ch. 5; Nevins, passim; Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790—1860 (University of Chicago Press, 1961); Eugene H. Berwangcr, The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (University of Illinois Press, 1967).

[Early fusion and Republican meetings]: Hans L. Trefousse, “The Republican Party, 1854-1864,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties (Chelsea House, 1973), p. 1145; Isely, p. 84.

[Douglas’ speeches like “cannon-balls”]: Carl Schurz, Reminiscences (McClure, 1907), Vol. 2, p. 30.

[Burns incident in Boston]: Nevins, pp. 150-52.

[Seward on competition for Kansas]: Congressional Globe, 33rd Congress, 1st session. Appendix, p. 769.

[The struggle for Kansas]: James C. Malin, The Nebraska Question, l852-1854 (University of Kansas Press, 1953); James A. Rawley, Race &Politics: “Bleeding Kansas” and the Coming of the Civil War (Lippincott, 1969).

[John Brown at Pottawatomie]: Slephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood (Harper & Row, 1970), Ch. 10.

[Sumner on Congress as a “godless place”]: quoted in Donald, p. 278.

[Sumner’s speech “The Crime Against Kansas”]: Congressional Globe, 34th Congress, 1st session, Appendix, pp. 529-47. [Exchange of insults between Sumner and Douglas]: ibid., p. 547.

[Brooks’s assault on Sumner]: Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism (Louisiana State University Press, 1953); see also Robert L. Meriwether, ed., “Preston S. Brooks on the Caning of Charles Sumner,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, Vol. 12, No. 2 (April 1951).

The Illinois Republicans

[Potter’s listing of diverse rivals of the Republicans]: Potter, p. 249.

[Edward Everett’s admonition to nativist leader]: Edward Everett to W. B. Weiss, Feb. 14, 1853, Reel 14, Edward Everett Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

[Antebellum Springfield]: Paul M. Angle, “Here I Have Lived”: A History of Lincoln’s Springfield (Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, 1935) pp. 1-84; Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln:

The Prairie Years (Harcourt, Brace, 1926), Vol. 2, passim.

[The Lincoln-Herndon law office]: David Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon (Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p.72; Sandburg, passim.

[Lincoln riding circuit]: Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), Ch. 5; Sandburg, passim.

[David Davis]: Willard L. King, Lincoln’s Manager, David Davis (Harvard University Press, 1960).

[Lincoln’s law practice]: Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None (Harper & Row, 1977), esp. pp. 95-105.

[Lincoln on acquiring property]: quoted in Williams, p. 296.

[Lincoln “swallowed up” in greed for office]: from Herndon’s lectures on Lincoln, quoted in Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon, p. 202. [“Ambition was a little engine that knew no rest”]: William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Abraham Lincoln (D. Appleton, 1917), Vol. 2, p. 44.

[Reaction of Whig junto to passage of Kansas-Nebraska bill]: Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon, pp. 81-82.

[Lincoln to Speed on his political views]: quoted in Thomas, pp. 163-64.

[Douglas-Lincoln confrontations, 1854]:Johanssen, Stephen A. Douglas, pp. 456-59; Oates, With Malice Toward None, pp. 113-18.[Douglas journeys home “by the light of my own effigy”]: Johanssen, Stephen A. Douglas, p. 451.

[The Republican “third cadre” in Illinois]: Victor B. Howard, “The Illinois Republican Party,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer 1971), Part I: “A Party Organizer for the Republicans in 1854,” pp. 124-60. See also Paul Selby, “Genesis of the Republican Party in Illinois,” Transactions of the Illinois State Historical Society, 1906, No. 11 (Springfield, Ill., 1906), pp. 270-83, and Paul Selby Collection, Illinois State Historical Society. Dee Ann Montgomery conducted field research in Illinois on the Illinois Republicans.

[Meeting of anti-Nebraska editors]: Howard; Part II: “The Party Becomes Conservative, 1855-1856,” pp. 297-99.

[Lincoln’s response to Herndon in regard to the call]: quoted in Thomas, p. 165: see also Donald, Lincoln’s Herndon, p. 84.

[Bloomington convention]: Howard, Part II, p. 303.

[Douglas’ situation in the Democratic national convention, 1856]: Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, pp. 515-22.

[Republican platform]: Nevins, p. 461.

[Nevins on Fremont as a candidate]: ibid., p. 462; see also Allan Nevins, Fremont, Path- marker of the West (D. Appleton, 1939). pp. 425-32.

[Benton opposes Fremont]: Nevins, Pathmarker of the West, p. 448.

[The Whigs’ last hurrah]: Roy F. Nichols and Philip S. Klein, “Election of 1856,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, 1889-1968 (Chelsea House, 1971), Vol. 2, pp. 1007-33.

[Republican reporter’s comment on Whigs]: ibid., p. 1031.

[1856 campaign]: Schlesinger, Elections; Nevins, Ordeal of the Union; Don C. Seitz, Lincoln the Politician (Coward-McCann, 1931); Kleppner.

[Mrs. Emerson and the Republican delegation]: Report of the Wayland, Mass., delegation to the Republican National Convention, 1856, from the 8th Congressional District meeting at Concord, Mass., June 2. 1856, Emerson Papers, Concord Free Public Library.

[The Republicans’ battle song]: Wilfred E. Binltley, American Political Parties: Their Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 219.

[Lincoln’s Galena speech]: quoted in Thomas, p. 168.

16. THE GRAPES OF WRATH

[Washington at the time of Buchanan’s inaugural Address ]: Constance M. Green, Washington, Village and Capital, 1800-1878 (Princeton University Press, 1962), Ch. 7, “The Eye of the Hurricane, 1849-1860.”

[Description of Washington ]: Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (Dix & Edwards, 1856). Ch. 1; Daniel D. Reiff, Washington Architecture, 1791-1861 (U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, 1971), pp.113-18; Green; Robert Sears, Pictorial Description of the United States (Robert Sears, 1849), p. 282, 301; John Hayward, A Gazetteer of the United States of America (Case, Tiffany, 1853), pp. 612-15; John W. Reps, Monumental Washington (Princeton University Press, 1967).

[Olmsted’s black servant]: Olmsted, pp. 4-5.

[Arrest of “genteel colored men”]: ibid, pp. 16-17; Green, pp. 186-87.

[Marriage of Jefferson Davis and Sarah Taylor]: Holtnan Hamilton, Zachary Taylor: Soldier of the Republic (Bobbs-Merrill, 1941), Vol. 1, Ch. 7.

[Carl Schurt on Jefferson Davis]: Carl Schurz, Reminiscences (McClure, 1907), Vol. 2, p. 21.

[Seward on “higher law than the Constitution”]: quoted in Thornton K. Lothrop, William Henry Seward (Houghton Mifflin, 1896), p. 86.

[Green on the “eye of the hurricane”]: Green, p. 180.

South Carolinians: The Power Elite

[Preston Brooks’s assault and vindication]: David H. Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), pp. 297-311; Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848-1861 (Louisiana State University Press, 1953), pp. 228-36.

[South Carolina]: Louis B. Wright, South Carolina (W. W. Norton, 1976); Rosser H. Taylor, Ante-Bellum South Carolina: A Social and Cultural History (University of North Carolina Press, 1942); William A. Schaper, “Sectionalism and Representation in South Carolina,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1900 (Government Printing Office, 1901), Vol. 1, pp. 245-58; William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War (Harper & Row, 1965), Ch. 1; Olmsted, Ch. 6.

[Freehling’s portrait of planters]: Freehling, pp. 11-13.

[Slaves’ lives]: Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross (Little, Brown, 1974), esp. pp. 202-9, 220-21.

[Savannah River planter (Hammond) on slave mortality]: Freehling, p. 71,

[Olmsted’s description of slave scene]: Olmsted, p. 388.

[Patriarchal nature of planter families]: Michael P. Johnson, “Planters and Patriarchy: Charleston, 1800-1860,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 46, No. 1 (February 1980), pp. 45-72.

[Mary Boykin Chesnut on planters and “their concubines ”]: quoted in ibid., p. 45.

[On feeling “like a beggar”]: ibid., p. 51.

[On “hideous black harem”]: ibid., p. 71. This diary was rewritten after the Civil War.

[Columbia]: Freehling, p. 20; Wright, passim. [Intellectual life in Columbia]: Wright, Ch. 8.

[Charleston]: George C. Rogers, Jr., Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys (University of Oklahoma Press, 1969), pp. 147-48 and passim; William Oliver Stevens, Charleston (Dodd, Mead, 1939), passim; Hayward, p. 321.

[Death of cultural adornments during nullification crisis]: Rogers, p. 160.

[Attempt to require test oath]: Freehling, pp. 310 ff.

[Unique ideological solidarity and structure of government in South Carolina]: James M. Banner, Jr., “The Problem of South Carolina,” in Stanley M. Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds., The Hofstadter Aegis (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), pp. 76-78 and passim.

[Doctrine of “virtual representation”]: Kenneth S. Greenberg, “Representation and the Isolation of South Carolina, 1776-1860,” Journal of American History, Vol. 64, No. 3 (December 1977), pp. 723-43.

[Weakness of local government]: Ralph A. Wooster, The People in Power (University of Tennessee Press, 1969), pp. 88, 92.

[Definition of ideology]: James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 249-50.

[Wiltse on Calhoun’s concept of liberty]: Charles M. Wiltse, John C Calhoun: Sectionalist, 1840-1850 (Bobbs-Merrill, 1951), p. 425. See also Charles G. Sellers, Jr., “The Travail of Slavery,” in Charles G. Sellers, Jr., ed., The Southerner as American (University of North Carolina Press, 1960), pp. 40-71.

[Intellectual leaders in the defense of slavery]: William S. Jenkins, Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (University of North Carolina Press, 1935); Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); David Donald, “The Proslavery Argument Reconsidered,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (February 1971), pp. 3-18; Kenneth S. Greenberg, “Revolutionary Ideology and the Proslavery Argument: The Abolition of Slavery in Antebellum South Carolina,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 42, No. 3 (August 1976), pp. 365-84; Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (Pantheon Books, 1969); Clement Eaton, The Mind of the Old South (Louisiana State University Press, 1964); Jesse T. Carpenter, The South as a Conscious Minority (New York University Press, 1930).

[Hammond on slavery as “cornerstone”]: letter to Thomas Clarkson, Jan. 28, 1845, printed in The Proslavery Argument (Walker, Richards, 1852), p. 109.

[Calhoun on people not being all “equally entitled to liberty”]: John C. Calhoun, “A Disquisition on Government,” in Richard K. Cralle, ed., The Works of John C. Calhoun (D. Appleton, 1854), Vol. 1, p. 55. [Simms on liberty]: William Gilmore Simms, “The Morals of Slavery,” in The-Proslavery Argument, pp. 256, 258; Faust, pp. 84, 120.

[Contradictions in states’ rights doctrine]: Greenberg, “Representation and the Isolation of South Carolina,” passim; William W. Freehling,’ “Spoilsmen and Interests in the Thought and Career of John C. Calhoun,” Journal of American History, Vol. 52, No. 1 (June 1965), p. 38.

[Control of state legislature over local officials]: Wooster, pp. 88, 92.

[Rejection of Jeffersonian moral philosophy]: Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Harcourt, Brace, 1955), passim.

[Fitzhugh on destructiveness of liberty and equality]: George Fitzhugh, “Sociology for the South,” in Eric L. McKitrick, ed., Slavery Defended (Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 40.

[Bledsoe on slavery and liberty]: quoted in Jenkins, p. 113.

[Hammond’s repudiation of Jefferson’s dictum]: letter to Clarkson, in The Proslavery Argument, pp. 109-10.

[Southern abrogation of freedom of discussion]: Clement Eaton, Freedom of Thought in the Old South (Duke University Press, 1940); Russell B. Nye, Fettered Freedom (Michigan State University Press, 1963).

[Hammond’s “one way” to silence talk of abolition]: Nye, p. 177.

[Suppression of the True American]: Eaton, Freedom of Thought, pp. 185-93.

[Chapel Hill professor (Hedrick) forced to leave]: ibid., pp. 202-5; Nye, pp. 92-94.

[Eaton on southern intellectual blockade]: Eaton, Freedom of Thought, pp. 209, 316.

[For a survey of other defenses of slavery]: see Donald, “Proslavery Argument.” See also Jenkins, passim.

[Hammonds “mud-sill” address]: U.S. Senate, March 4, 1858, Congressional Globe, 35th Congress, 1st session, Part I, pp. 952-62.

[Trescot’s assertion that blacks were not fit for education]: Greenberg, “Revolutionary Ideology,” p. 372.

[Donald on “pastoral Arcadia”]: Donald, “Proslavery Argument,” p. 16.

[“A Carolinian” (Edward J. Pringle) on slave as compared to wage worker]: “A Carolinian,” Slavery in the Southern States (J. Bartlett, 1852), pp. 25-27, quoted in Greenberg, “Revolutionary Ideology,” p. 383.

[Fitzhugh on “wage slavery”]: George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters, C. Vann Woodward, ed. (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960). See also Stanley M. Elkins. “The Right to Be a Slave,” Commentary, Vol. 30, No. 5 (November 1960), pp. 450-52.

The Grand Debates

The main source for the Dred Scott decision is Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case (Oxford University Press, 1978), and major works cited therein.

[Chief Justice Taney]. Carl Brent Swisher, Roger B Taney (Macmillan, 1935); Samuel Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, LL.D (John Murphy, 1876). [Other Justices]: Carl B. Swisher, History of the Supreme Court of the United States, Vol. 5: The Taney Period, 1836-1864, (Macmillan, 1974), pp. 46-48, 53-55, 58-70, 229-40, 242-44.

[Headlines reporting the Dred Scott decision]: cited in Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), Vol. 1, p. 92.

[New York Tribune comment on Dred Scott decision]: quoted in Fehrenbacher, p. 3.

[Procedural aspects of Dred Scott]: Walter Ehrlich, “Was the Dred Scott Case Valid?” Journal of American History, Vol. 55, No. 2 (September 1968), pp. 256-65; F. H. Hodder, “Some Phases of the Dred Scott Case,” Mississippi Galley Historical Review, Vol. 16, No. 1 (June 1929), pp. 3-22.

[Buchanan informed by Justices as to probable nature and timing of Dred Scott decision ]: Fehrenbacher, pp. 311-14.

[Importance placed on “massing the court” against Missouri Compromise]: David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis (Harper & Row, 1976), p. 274.

[Taney’s rage against the antislavery movement]: Fehrenbacher, pp. 311, 388, 557, 561.

[Taney’s legal errors in Dred Scott decision]: ibid., pp. 337-64, 367-88.

[Everett’s hope for a “vigorous, and conciliatory administration”]:Edward Everett to James Buchanan, Jan. 19, 1857, Edward Everett Papers, Reel 16, Massachusetts Slate Historical Society.

[Kansan on Lecompton constitution vote]: Nevins, Vol. 1, p. 236. Emporia Kansas News: ibid.

[Douglas querying validity of Lecompton constitution]: Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (Oxford University Press, 1973). pp. 581-82.

[Exchange between Buchanan and Douglas]: ibid., p. 586.

[Douglas’ rejection of the Lecompton constitution and reaffirmation of popular sovereignty]: ibid., PP· 590-91.

[Machinations of Republicans and Democrats concerning Douglas in 1858]: Potter, p. 331.

[Herndon to Greeley on “selling out” Illinois Republicans]: William H. Herndon to Horace Greeley, April 8, 1858, Greeley Papers, New York Public Library. See also Abraham Lincoln to Elihu B. Washburne, April 26, 1858, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Rutgers University Press, 1953), Vol. 2, pp. 443-44; Abraham Lincoln to Elihu B. Washburne, May 27, 1858, ibid., p. 455.

[Nomination of Lincoln at state party convention]: Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the l850s (Stanford University Press, 1962), Ch. 3. [Herndon on wanting to see “old man Greely’s” notice of the convention]: ibid., p. 50.

[Lincoln’s preparations for speech]: Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None (Harper & Row, 1977), p. 142.

[Opening of Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech]: Basler, Vol. 2, p. 461.

[On the “House Divided” speech]: Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, Ch.4; Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided (Doubleday, 1959), passim.

[“Ultimate extinction ” or victory of slavery in “all the States”]: Basler, Vol. 2, pp. 461-62. [“Another Supreme Court decision” preventing a state from outlawing slavery]: ibid., p. 467. [Douglas, Taney, Pierce, and Buchanan conspiring “before the first lick was struck”]: ibid., pp. 465-66.

[Lincoln following Douglas around the state]: Johannsen, p. 662.

[Theatrics of the debates]: ibid., pp. 631, 655.

[Douglas on Lincoln]: ibid, pp. 640-41.

[Douglas on inequality of blacks]: Basler, Vol. 3, p. 10.

[Douglas on diversity as the “safeguard of our liberties”]: Johannsen, p. 642.

[Lincoln’s views on the rights of blacks]: Basler, Vol. 3, pp. 16, 145, 222.

[Lincoln’s accusation that Douglas held a “care not” attitude]: ibid, pp. 233-34.

[Audience participation in the debates]: ibid., passim.

[Lincoln asking if Douglas could be “on all sides”]: Basler, Vol. 3, p. 298. [Republican party view of slavery as “a moral, social and political wrong”]: ibid., pp. 312-13. [Solution of providing that slavery “grow no larger”]:, ibid., p. 313.

[Lincoln on “physical difference” between blacks and whites]: ibid., pp. 145-46.

[On the equality of the black to “every living man” in right to fruits of his labor]: ibid., p. 16.

[Lincoln on economic rights basic to liberty]: Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 10, 21, 32.

[“Because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife”]:Basler, Vol. 3, p 146.

[Lincoln on waiting for the harvest]: ibid., p. 334

The Politics of Slavery

[Intense trading on the New York Stock Exchange]: Nevins, Vol. 1, p. 181.

[Verses on ladies’ trips to Paris]: ibid., pp. 179-80.

[Emerson on American materialism]: The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Houghton Mifflin, 1911), Vol. 5, p. 285.

[Vitality of American literary life in the 1850s]: Nevins, Vol. 1, Ch. 2.

[Frederick Douglass’ refusal to join John Brown]: Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood (Harper & Row, 1970), p. 283.

[Lydia Maria Child’s request to visit John Brown]: Lydia Maria Child to Henry A. Wise, Oct. 26, 1859, Lydia Maria Child Papers, Schlesinger Library.

[Northern acclaim for John Brown]: Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, p. 318; “A Plea for John Brown,” Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Houghton Mifflin, 1893), Vol. 10, p. 234; “Harper’s Ferry,” speech of Nov. 1, 1859, Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Negro Universities Press, 1968), p. 263.

[Brown on his martyrdom]: Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, p. 335.

[On the need to purge “with Blood”]: ibid., p. 351.

[Repudiation of Brown by Republican notables]: Nevins, Vol. 2, pp. 105-6; Oates, With Malice Toward None, p. 168; Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood, p. 353.

[Unity of South in “sentiment and feeling”]: Nevins, Vol. 2, p. 110.

[Background on the opening session of the 36th Congress]: ibid., Ch. 4.

[Hinton Rowan Helper]: Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (Burdick Brothers, 1857), quoted at p. 120.

[Democratic convention of 1860]: Robert W. Johannsen, “Douglas at Charleston,” in Norman A. Graebner, ed., Politics and the Crisis of 1860 (University of Illinois Press, 1961), pp. 61-90; Austin L. Venable, “The Conflict Between the Douglas and Yancey Forces in the Charleston Convention,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 8, No. 2 (May 1942). pp. 226-41.

[Dilemmas facing Republican party in shaping an identity in 1860]: Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Republican Decision at Chicago,” in Graebner, pp. 32-60; Foner, Politics and Ideology, Chs. 1-3; Hans L. Trefousse, “The Republican Party, 1854-1864,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties (Chelsea House, 1973), Vol. 2, pp. 1141-72.

[Seward’s attempts to appear conciliatory at convention]: Potter, p. 420.

[Lincoln on how to defeat the enemy]: Basler, Vol. 3, pp. 460-61.

[Reaffirmation of the Declaration of Independence at 1860 Republican convention ]: Nevins, Vol. 2, p. 254.

[The convention in general]: Fehrenbacher, “Republican Decision at Chicago,” passim.

[“Lincoln ain’t here … ”]: Henry C. Whitney, Lincoln the Citizen (Current Literature, 1907), p. 288. The authenticity of this quotation is questionable, however.

[Lincoln informed of nomination]: Oates, With Malice Toward None, p. 179.

[Friend on Lincoln’s view of southern “political game of bluff”]: Donn Piatt, Memories of the Men Who Saved the Union (Belford, Clarke, 1887), pp. 28-30.

[William Cullen Bryant on maintaining Lincoln’s image]: Nevins, Vol. 2, p. 278.

[Douglas’ presidential campaign]: Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, Ch. 29

[Douglas in the South]: Robert W. Johannsen, “Stephen A. Douglas and the South,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 33, No. 1 (February 1967), pp. 26-50.

[Douglas’ attempt to “save the Union”]: Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, pp. 797-98.

[Election results of 1860]: Ollinger Crenshaw, “Urban and Rural Voting in the Election of 1860,” in Eric F. Goldman, ed., Historiography and Urbanization: Essays in American History in Honor of W. Stull Holt (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941), pp. 43-63; Peyton McCrary, Clark Miller, and Dale Baum, “Class and Party in the Secession Crisis: Voting Behavior in the Deep South, 1856-1861,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Winter 1978), pp. 429-57; cf. Robert P. Swierenga, “The Ethnic Voter and the First Lincoln Election,” in Frederick C. Luebke, ed., Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln (University of Nebraska Press, 1971), pp. 129-50; Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853-1892 (University of North Carolina Press, 1979), passim; Walter D. Kamphoefner, “St. Louis Germans and the Republican Party, 1848-1860,” Mid-America, Vol. 57, No. 2 (April 1975), pp. 69-88.

[South Carolina secession ordinance]: quoted in French Ensor Chadwick, Causes of the Civil War, 1859-1861(Harper & Brothers, 1907), p. 138.

[Douglas on America as the “last hope of freedom ”]: Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, p. 789.

[Explanations of advent of the Civil War]: Swierenga; McCrary, Miller, and Baum;

Crenshaw; Albert C. E. Parker, “Beating the Spread: Analyzing American Election Out comes,” Journal of American History, Vol. 67, No. 1 (June 1980), pp. 61-87.

[Theories of causes of the Civil War]: Foner, Politics and ideology, Chs. 1-2.

[The southern ideology]: Carpenter; Craven; David M. Potter, The South and the Sectional Conflict (Louisiana State University Press, 1968), Part I; Rollin G. Osterweis, Romanti- cism and Nationalism in the Old South (Yale University Press, 1949); Foner, Politics and Ideology, passim; cf. C. Vann Woodward, American Counterpoint (Little, Brown, 1964), esp. Ch. 5; Kenneth M. Stampp, The Imperiled Union (Oxford University Press, 1980), esp. Ch. 4.

[General sources on the politics of slavery]: Foner, Politics and Ideology, Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1970); Potter, The South and the Sectional Conflict; Potter, Impending Crisis; Woodward, American Counterpoint; Craven; Don E. Fehrenbacher, “Comment on ‘Why the Republican Party Came to Power,’” in George H. Knoles, ed., The Crisis of the Union (Louisiana State University Press, 1965), pp. 21-29; Carpenter; Staughton Lynd, Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967); James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Prentice-Hall, 1963), Chs. 3-4; Steven Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (Simon and Schuster, 1970); William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1828-1856 (Louisiana State University Press, l978);James A. Rawley, Race and Politics (Lippincott, 1969); Edward

Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power Before the Civil War (D. C. Heath, 1973); Harold S. Schultz, Nationalism and Sectionalism in South Carolina, 1852-1860 (Duke University Press, 1950).

17. THE BLOOD-RED WINE

[Davis’ journey to Montgomery]: Shelby Foote, The Civil War, A Narrative: Fort Sumter to Perryville (Random House, 1958), p. 17; Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis, American Patriot: 1808-1861 (Harcourt, Brace, 1955), pp. 401-7.

[Montgomery convention]: Ellis M. Coulter, The Confederate States of America, 1861-1865 (Louisiana State University Press, 1950), pp. 19-26.

[Confederate Constitution]: text in Edward A. Pollard, The First Year of the War, reprinted from the Richmond corrected edition (Charles B. Richardson, 1863), pp. 363-78.

[Public “approbation” of Davis]: Jefferson Davis to Varina Davis, Feb. 20, 1861, in Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches (Mississippi Dept. of Archives and History, 1923), p. 54.

[Davis’ speeches]: Strode, p. 406.

[Yancey introduces Davis]: Strode, p. 407.

[inaugural address]: text in Rowland, pp. 49-53.

[Davis on reception of address]: Rowland, p. 54.

[Lincoln’s journey to Washington]: Foote, pp. 35-37; Benjamin P. Thomas. Abraham Lincoln (Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), pp. 239-44; Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (Harcourt, Brace, 1939), Vol. 1, Ch. 2.

[Lincoln’s farewell to Herndon]: William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Abraham Lincoln (D. Appleton, 1917), Vol. 2, p. 194.

[Buchanan’s hopes and indecision]: Thomas, pp. 228-29.

[Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh speeches]: see Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Rutgers University Press, 1953), Vol. 4, pp. 194, 199, and

211, resp.

[Speech at independence Hall]: ibid, p. 240.

[Lincoln before the inauguration]: see Sandburg, Ch. 3.

[Greeley on peaceful acquiescence]: quoted in David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (Harper & Row, 1963), p. 524.

[Lincoln’s feelings for the Union]: George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (W. W. Norton, 1979), passim.

[Lincoln’s Inaugural Address]: Basler, Vol. 4, pp. 262-71.

[Richmond Enquirer reacts to Inaugural Address]: Sandburg, p. 137.

The Flag That Bore a Single Star

[General sources on Sumter]: Frank Barnes, Fort Sumter, No. 12 in the National Park Service Historical Handbook Series (Government Printing Office, 1962). passim; Robert U. Johnson and Clarence C. Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (Century, 1884), Vol. 1, pp. 40-83; William A. Swanberg, First Blood (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), passim.

[Charleston rooftop scene]: Barnes, opposite p. 1.

[Sumpter as a symbol]: Potter, p. 541.

[Conflicting counsels in Washington]. Sandburg, Ch. 7.

[Pryor’s exhortation]: quoted in Sandburg, p. 207.

[Pryor’s reluctance]: Battles and Leaders, Vol. 1, p. 76.

[Ruffin fires the first shot]: Sandburg, p. 209. (There is some controversy on this point, however.)

[New York farmer choosing sides]: quoted in Fletcher Pratt, Ordeal by Fire (William Sloane Associates, 194S), p. xvi.

[The “Bonnie Blue Flag”]: Richard Crawford, ed., The Civil War Songbook (Dover, 1977), pp. 18-19.

[Sherman on end to indecision]: John Sherman to William T. Sherman, April 12, 1861, in Rachel Sherman Thorndike, The Sherman Letters (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), p. 110.

[Nevins on “purifying hurricane”]: Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, Vol. 1: The Improvised War (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), p. 75.

[Disparity between northern and southern resources]: Charles P. Roland, The Confederacy (University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 34-37.

[Confederate volunteers]: Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb (Bobbs-Merrill, 1943), pp. 15-27, 108-10; William C. Davis, Battle at Bull Run (Doubleday, 1977), pp. 18-28.

[Battle of Bull Run]: Davis, passim; Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record (G. P. Putnam, 1862), Vol. 2, pp. 36-37, Documents pp. 1-116; William K. Scarborough, ed., The Diary of Edmund Ruffin (Louisiana State University Press, 1976), Vol. 2, pp. 68-75; Edward P. Alexander, Military Memoirs of a Confederate (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907), pp. 13-51.

[Union advance a “picnic”]: sec Alfred S. Roe, ed., The Fifth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (Blanchard Press, 1911), pp. 79-80; also Charles C. Coffin, Four Years of Fighting (Ticknor and Fields, 1866), pp. 17-21; Rebellion Record,Vol. 2, p. 55.

[Greeley’s masthead]: Harlan H. Horner, Lincoln and Greeley (University of Illinois Press, 953), p. 226.

[Ruffin on southern morale]: Scarborough, pp. 69-77.

[Doherty on Union courage in attack]: Rebellion Record, Vol. 2, p. 90.

[Sherman’s frustration]: Mark A. D. Howe, ed., Home Letters of General Sherman (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), pp. 205-6.

[Bee’s rallying cry]: quoted in Alexander, p. 36.

[Cummings’ order to charge]: James I. Robertson, Jr., The Stonewall Brigade (Louisiana State University Press, 1963), p. 40.

[The Union retreat]: Oliver O. Howard, Autobiography of Oliver Otis Howard (Baker and Taylor, 1907), Vol. 1, pp. 159-62.

[Carnage on the battlefield]: Scarborough, pp. 92-93. See also Howe, p. 208.

[Greeley’s letter to Lincoln]: Homer, pp. 233-34.

[Southern braggadocio]: Nevins, p. 222.

[General sources on the Confederacy]: Coulter; Clement Eaton, A History of the Southern Confederacy (Macmillan, 1954); Frank L. Owsley, States Rights in the Confederacy (University of Chicago Press, 1925); Roland.

[Florida governor on central control of army]: quoted in Roland, p. 59. [Benjamin on need to centralize]: quoted in Owsley, pp. 30-31.

[“Executive usurpation” by Davis]: Pollard, p. 265.

[Printing of Confederate money]: Sandburg, pp. 239-40.

[Stephens on liberties coming first]: quoted in Coulter, p. 402.

[Brown on conscription]: quoted in James G. Randall and David Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction, and ed. (D. C, Heath, 1969), p.269. [Roland on “deadliest conflict”]: Roland, p. 59.

[Attitude of Rhett]: Roland, pp. 53, 58.

Men in Blue and Gray

[Lincoln watching soldiers return from Bull Run]: Thomas, p. 272.

[Whitman on Lincoln recovering himself]: Richard M. Bucke, Thomas B. Harned, and Horace L. Traubel, eds., The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902), Vol. 4, p. 36.

[Lincoln on limited presidential power]: fragment of House speech, 1848 (July 1?), in John G. Nicolay and John Hay, eds., Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, enlarged edition (Century, 1894), Vol. 2, p. 56.

[Randall on Lincoln’s use of arbitrary power]: James G. Randall, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln (D. Appleton, 1926), p. 513. See also Wilfred E. Binkley, President and Congress (Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 126.

[Lincoln on choice between life and limb]: Nicolay and Hay, Vol. 10, p. 66.

[Anna Ella Carroll]: Sandburg, pp. 410-11.

[Lincoln’s program for action]: Basler, Vol. 4, pp. 457-58.

[Union sympathizers in Virginia and Tennessee]: Carleton Beals, War Within a War: The Confederacy Against Itself (Chilton Books, 1965), passim.

[McClellan in Washington]: Sandburg, pp. 314-20; Nevins, pp. 237-39. [Captain on military panorama]: quoted in Nevins, p. 239.

[Cameron and the War Department]: A. Howard Meneely, The War Department, 1861 (Columbia University Press, 1928), esp. Ch. 9; Fred A. Shannon, The Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861-1865 (Arthur H. Clark, 1928), Vol. 1, passim; Sandburg, pp. 425-35.

[Washington neglects the West]: Nevins, Ch. 16.

[Union gunboat fleet]: Battles and Leaders, Vol. 1, pp. 358-61; Allan Nevins, The War for the Union, Vol. 2: War Becomes Revolution (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), pp. 70-73.

[Sam Grant in peace and war]: Lloyd Lewis, Captain Sam Grant (Little, Brown, 1950), Chs. 17-23; Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South (Little, Brown, 1960), Chs. 1-3.

[Cairo in 1861]: Coffin, pp. 52-53.

[The Union Navy]: Bern Anderson, By Sea and by River: The Naval History of the Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), pp. 3-66; Battles and Leaders, Vol. 1, pp. 611-91.

[The Trent affair]: Battles and Leaders, Vol. 2, pp. 135-42.

[“Wrap the whole world in flames”]: Sandburg, p. 363.

[“One war at a time”]: ibid., p. 365.

[Writ of habeas corpus for Merryman]: Sandburg, p. 279.

[Taney’s opinion in Ex parte Merryman]; Randall, p. 121.

[Taney calls upon Lincoln to perform his duty]: ibid., p. 162; Sandburg, p. 280.

[Madison on ambition]: Federalist No. 51.

[Congress grudgingly approves emergency acts]: Randall, pp. 128-29.

[Committee on Government Contracts]: Sandburg, pp. 425-27.

[Sanitary Commission]: Nevins, Improvised War, P· 283.

[Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War]: Nevins, Improvised War, p. 387.

[Soldier bitter at government suspicion]: General Charles F. Smith, quoted in Bruce Catton, America Goes to War (Wesleyan University Press, 1958), p. 99.

[Cameron and the antislavery radicals]: Burton J. Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet (Little, Brown, 1946), pp. 219-35.

[Course of the war in 1862]. Foote; Nevins, War Becomes Revolution: Battles and Leaders, Vol. 2, pp. 22-89.

[Boys in blue]: Bell I. Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Bobbs-Merrill, 1951).

[Boys in gray]: Wiley, Johnny Reb.

[Fair on naïveté of Civil War soldiers]: Charles Fair, From the Jaws of Victory (Simon and Schuster, 1971), p. 223.

[Composition of Illinois regiments]: Victor Hicken, Illinois in the Civil War (University of Illinois Press, 1966), pp. 7-8.

[Elected officers]: see Catton, America Goes to War, p. 38 and passim.

[“Purge” in Wisconsin regiment]: Nevins, Improvised War, p. 280.

[Soldier complaining about Jackson]: quoted in Davis, Battle at Bull Run, p. 18.

[“Old Blue Light”]: ibid.

[Grant as the “quiet man ”]: Lewis, p. 428.

[“Go to your quarters!”]: ibid., p. 430.

[Northern soldiers and blacks]: Wiley, Billy Yank, Ch. 5; Catton, America Goes to War, pp. 24-25.

[Ohio soldier on blacks]: quoted in Wiley, Billy Yank, p. 109.

[Holocaust of Shiloh]: Leander Stillwell, The Story of a Common Soldier (Franklin Hudson, 1920), p. 48.

[Antietam]: Bruce Catton, The Army of the Potomac: Mr. Lincoln’s Army (Double- day, 1951), Part VI; John W. Schildt, Drums Along the Antietam (McClain Printing,. 1972).

The Battle Cries of Freedom

[Lincoln on the war as a people’s war]: Message to Congress in Special Session, July 4, 1861, in Basler, Vol. 5, p. 438.

[Greeley’s “Prayer of Twenty Million”]: Horner, pp. 263-67.

[Lincoln on putting the Union first]: Lincoln to Horace Greeley, Aug. 22, 1862, in Basler, Vol. 5, pp. 388-89.

[Early congressional measures for emancipation]: Harman Belz, “Protection of Personal Liberty in Republican Emancipation, Legislation of 1862,” Journal of Southern History, Vol. 42, No. 3 (August 1976), pp. 385-400.

[Seward on the “last shriek on our retreat”]: quoted in Thomas, p. 334.

[Frederick Douglass on the proposed emancipation proclamation]: quoted in Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None (Harper & Row, 1977), p. 320.

[The December cabinet crisis]: Hendrick; Thomas, pp. 352-54.

[Lincoln on “the dogmas of the quiet past”]: Annual Message to Congress, Dec. 1, 1862, in Basler, Vol. 5, p. 537.

[Lincoln’s dream the night before the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation]: quoted from Oates, pp. 331-32. [Lincoln: “if my name ever goes into history”]: Oscar and Lillian Handlin, Abraham Lincoln and the Union (Little, Brown, 1980), p. 159.

[Final Emancipation Proclamation]: Philip Van Doren Stern, ed., The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln (The Modern Library, 1940), pp. 746-48 (capital letters added). [Gathering in front of the White Home]: Oates, p. 333.

[Battle songs of freedom]: Irwin Silber, ed., Songs of the Civil War (Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 17-20, 26.

Sections of this chapter were drafted jointly by the author and Jeffrey P. Trout.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IN MY STUDIES IN political history I have found it useful to conceive of three levels of leadership: the galaxy of presidents, nationally known senators and governors, intellectual and economic and cultural power wielders at the top; a second level of influential state and metropolitan notables, editors, preachers, heads of state and national interest groups, issue groups, and idea groups; and a third layer of grass-roots activists in government, political parties, interest groups, racial, religious, and ethnic organizations, and economic and social enterprises who serve as crucial transmission links between the upper echelons and the mass public. Volumes—sometimes whole libraries—are written about the galaxies; the intermediate notables often make their way into the Dictionary of American Biography or Notable American Women; the activists at the third level down are lucky to win biographical coverage in the local obituary pages.

While the “third cadre” of activists is, in my view, the one most crucial to democracy, the “second cadre” offers by far the most fascinating personalities. At least, this seems to have been true during the seventy-five-year period the present work covers, from the great constitution-making years of the 1780s to the crises of 1862. I doubt that any country has produced a more brilliant array of men and women leaders in politics, literature, women’s rights, business enterprise, from such a small population during such a short period. I wish I could have done justice to this creative second cadre, but then the present work would be far more encyclopedic than it is.

Instead, I have examined certain personages—Lydia Maria Child, for example—at some length, as exemplars of countless other second-cadre leaders. I have tried also to reach into especially important subcultures to give some sense of the smell and feel and sound of the place as representative of certain sections of the country at certain times. In order to sink these historical drill holes into particular areas, and in order to capture significant personages in the second cadre of leadership, I have benefited from researches undertaken at the following archives and libraries, to whose staffs I express appreciation: Albany State Library, California Historical Society, Columbia University Library, William R. Perkins Library of Duke University, Emory University Library, Filson Club of Louisville, Library of Congress, Louisiana State University Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, New York Historical Society, New York Public Library, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, South Carolina Historical Society, South Carolina Library of the University of South Carolina, Tulane University Library, Virginia State Library, University of Virginia Library, Widener Library, Earl Gregg Swem Library of the College of William and Mary, Williams College Library, and a number of local archives and libraries as indicated in the notes. Dee Ann Montgomery conducted research also at the Illinois State Historical Library and other libraries in Illinois.

I was privileged, in writing key sections of this work, to have the collaboration of exceptionally gifted research associates and the benefit of the work they have done in particular fields of study. Stewart Burns collaborated in planning and drafting material on major aspects of black history and of social history more broadly; Dee Ann Montgomery, in social history, especially women’s history, and in political party history; and Jeffrey P. Trout, in military history—particularly the Civil War—and political history. I am responsible for the final writing, including any errors of omission and commission; I would be grateful to be informed of any such errors at Williams College, Williamstown, Mass., 01267. David Coolidge, Virginia Earll, Ann F. Hickey, and Ellen Yager also assisted with research. Robert A. Burns investigated Shays’s Rebellion in western Massachusetts libraries and archives. Peter A. Meyers assisted me on conceptualization and data on some major theoretical problems. Michael Beschloss, Maurice Greenbaum, and Lisl Cade helped me in important ways. Deborah Burns designed the endpapers in collaboration with Betty Anderson. Jay Leibold worked intensively on manuscript preparation.

Because I have ranged through many periods and dimensions of American history, I solicited critical reviews of the manuscript from scholars far more expert than I. Linda K. Kerber, Ronald P. Formisano, Robert M. Johnstone, Jr., and Robert F. Dalzell, Jr., generously responded with stringent and constructive criticism on the basis of their diverse areas of scholarship. Richard B. Morris and Charles B. Dew kindly reviewed portions of the manuscript. I am grateful to these scholars for taking time from their own teaching and writing.

I am indebted to Ashbel Green and his colleagues at Alfred A. Knopf for constant encouragement on this long-term project, and to Ashbel Green also for wise editorial suggestions. I am also grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for financial support of the national, state, and local political party research and analysis that was indispensable to the work. My longtime editorial friend and critic, Jeannette Hopkins, helped significantly in clarifying both the ideas and the language in the work. Deborah Burns, Milton Djuric, Daniel Frank, Jack Lynch, Melvin Rosenthal, and Wendy Severinghaus provided indispensable help in guiding the manuscript through its final stages. My wife and fellow author, Joan Simpson Burns, was as always the source of unending support and encouragement.

J.M.B.

Index

A  |  B  |  C  |  D  |  E

F  |  G  |  H  |  I  |  J

K  |  L  |  M  |  N  |  O

P  |  Q  |  R  |  S  |  T

U  |  V  |  W  |  X  |  Y  |  Z

Aberdeen, Lord, 447, 459

abolitionists, 366-7, 393-4, 412-13, 459, 466, 473, 479, 518-22, 548-9, 565, 577; attacks against, 514, 518, 519, 522; and Brown, 589-91; and Civil War, 620, 625-6; and fugitive slaves, 393, 522; and Kansas-Nebraska Territory, 544 545-9, 551-2; newspapers of, 511, 514, 518, 521; political action by, 467-70, 521, 562; and religion, 500-1; strategy of, 519-22; women, 400, 403, 412-13; see also slavery

Adams, Abigail, 16-19, 58, 68, 69, 78, 106, 122, 123, 125, 128, 133, 143, 145, 168, 183, 268, 271-2

Adams, Charles, 145

Adams, Charles Francis, 619

Adams, Henry, 257, 433

Adams, John, 16-18, 24, 28, 35, 43, 66, 78, 91, 138, 161, 191, 227, 235, 267-8, 270-3, 368, 377, 378, 419, 476, 519; approves Alien and Sedition Acts, 125, 127, 138, 226, 263; character of, 106, 109, 146, 224-7, 228, 269; correspondence with Jefferson, 18-19, 226, 271-2; criticism of, 122, 128-30, 138, 271; death of, 273; and Declaration of Independence, 15, 23, 272; election of 1796, 107-9; election of 1800, 145-7, 151-3, 227; and foreign affairs, 100, 120-6; on government, 17-18, 109, 224-6, 272; midnight appointments of, 166, 183-4, 186; presidency of, 109-10, 120-33, 137, 145-6, 147-8, 159, 164, 168, 215, 260, 261, 370, 428; on property rights, 25, 226; reaction to Shays’s Rebellion of, 17-19; vice-presidency of, 68, 69-70, 71, 74, 83, 92, 103; war policy of, 121-6, 128; and XYZ Correspondence, 123

Adams, John Quincy, 17, 169, 170, 209, 232, 259-60, 324, 326, 327, 338, 352, 356, 420, 455; election of 1824, 264-8, 321, 378; election of 1828, 320-3; on Essexmen, 224; in Ghent treaty negotiations, 232-4; Indian policy of, 95, 452; as Minister to England, 235, 245; and Monroe Doctrine, 250-4; and morality in foreign affairs, 253-4; politics of, 228, 269; presidency of, 268-70, 272, 311, 370, 445; and property rights, 27, 268; as Secretary of State, 239, 245, 247-8, 252-4, 264, 440; on slavery issue, 465, 518; and tariff issue, 269-270

Adams, Samuel, 35, 43, 49-51, 74

Adams, Thomas, 143

Adams-Onis Treaty (1819), 248

Adet, Citizen, 109, 121

agriculture, 3-4, 72-3, 256, 274-5, 362, 433, 535; absentee ownership in, 283, 286; competition in, 528-9; and county fairs, 286-7, 308, 528; credit in, 13-14, 276, 285-6; depression in, 274, 328-9, 589; expansion of, 140-1, 526-9, 534; experiments in, 140-1, 278, 284, 286, 529, 530; farm families, 73, 141, 281-2, 293, 394-5; machinery and tools for, 275, 280, 282, 284, 286-7, 295, 307, 308, 394, 430, 527, 530, 533-4, 535; and protective tariff, 269-70; and slavery, 274, 275, 282-5, 301, 302; tenant farmers, 278-9; transportation of products, 276-7, 285, 286, 287, 299, 301-2, 528; see also individual regions

Alabama, 173, 450, 452, 468; migration to, 282, 315; secession of, 597

Alamo, 454-5

Alba, Duke of, 338-9

Albany, NY, 57, 91-2, 296, 298, 304, 370, 440, 603

Albany Argus, 371, 515

Albany Regency, 321, 343, 371-3

Alcott, Amos Bronson, 482, 487, 489

Alembert, Jean le Rond d’, 100

Alexander, Capt. Edward, 611

Alexander I, Tsar of Russia, 194

Alexandria, Va., 64-5, 214, 609

Algiers, 195, 236

Alien and Sedition Acts (1798), 125-33, 138, 141, 184, 215, 226, 230, 263, 330; see also Kentucky resolution; Virginia resolution

Alison, Francis, 111

Allegheny Portage Railroad, 304, 316, 352

Allen, Charles, 472

Allen, John, 127

Allen, Samuel Clesson, 361

Allston, Washington, 489

Alton, Ill., 518-19, 528, 583

Alton Observer, 518

American Colonization Society, 329, 366, 468

American Indians, 4-7, 176, 178, 333, 370, 451-4, 621; as ally of Britain, 6, 96, 207, 216, 233-4; culture and governments of, 452-4; depredations against and removal of, 449, 450, 452-4; and federal government, 5-6, 55, 95-7, 180, 451-4, 543; inequality, political and social, of, 362, 383, 410, 453-, 519, 597; of Latin America, 244; uprisings by and wars with, 6, 27, 93, 94, 95-7, 207, 452, 456; in War of 1812, 211, 212-13, 216-17, 452; in West, 178-83, 207, 471; see also individual peoples

American national character, 8-9, 21; chauvinism in, 207-9, 237-5, 445-9, 454, 457, 458, 536, 538; Dickens’ assessment of, 317, 353; escapism in, 438, 443; Europeans on, 317-18, 353-4, 448, 536-7; on frontier, 207, 317-18, 477; ideological divisions in, 547-8; self-image of, 26, 237; speed mania in, 432; Tocqueville’s assessment of, 355-7, 449-50

American Philosophical Society, 22, 111, 116, 161, 179

American Revolution, 6, 13, 23, 25, 28, 99-100, 149, 220-1, 222, 480, 571

Ames, Fisher, 49, 84, 104, 147, 161, 218, 229

Anderson, Maj. Robert, 606-7

Andover Theological Seminary, 477, 508

Anglicans, 7, 111, 112, 257, 494

Annapolis Convention (1786), 16, 28

Antietam Creek, Battle of, 624

Anti-Federalists, 26, 29, 60-2, 68, 79, 82, 85, 89, 369; and ratification of Constitution, 43-4, 46-58; see also Republican party (Jeffersonian)

Anti-Masons, 334, 336, 341, 373, 380-1, 423, 437

antislavery movement, see abolitionists Brown, John; Conscience Whigs; Free Soil movement; Republican party; Stowe, Harriet Beecher; and other individuals and organizations

Appleton, Nathan, 292, 294, 437

Archilochus, 379

architecture, 106-7, 112, 430

Argus of Western America, 326

Ankara Indians, 180-1

Arista, Gen. Mariano, 461

Aristotle, 29

Arizona, 464

Arkansas, 242, 453, 530, 608, 621

Arkwright, Richard, 291

armaments industry, 216, 287-9, 290-1, 534

arms, 179-80; right to bear, 90

Armstrong, John, 212-13

Army, U.S., 124, 201, 215; in Indian wars, 96, 452; in Mexican War, 460-4; in War of 1812, 210-11, 212-13, 214; see also Union Army Articles of Confederation, 6, 23, 25, 39, 85, 261; Congress under, 16, 17, 43, 76, 96; faults of, 26, 29, 44; proposed Revision of, 28-9, 34, 49,

Ashburton, Lord, 447-8, 458

assembly, freedom of, 55, 90, 91, 130

Astor, John Jacob, 429

Atchison, David R., 544

Atlantic Monthly, The, 588

Aupaumut, Capt. Hendrick, 96

Austerlitz, Battle of, 194-5, 197

Austin, Moses, 454

Austin, Stephen F., 454

Austria, 194, 213, 232, 249

Bache, Benjamin, 108-9, 122, 128-9

Back, H. E, 397

Bagley, Sarah, 397-400

Bailey, Thomas, 200, 234

Bailyn, Bernard, 117

Baker, Edward Dickinson, 620

Baldwin, James, 527

Baldwin, Luther, 129

Ball, Burgess, 99

Baltimore, Md., 65, 259, 333-4, 337, 342, 380, 393, 431, 469, 536, 560, 592-3, 604, 616, 619; in War of 1812, 214-15

Baltimore Patriot, 513-14

Baltimore Sun, 514

Bancroft, George, 361, 487

banking, 14, 80, 285-6, 295-6; and federal government, 86, 424-5, legislation, 339-40, 424-6, 435; and Panic of 1857, 588-9; state system, 236, 344-5· 373, 374, see also United States Bank

Bank of New York, 80

Banks, Nathaniel P., 553, 560

Baptists, 7, 24, 257, 373, 439, 494-5, 496-7, 514

Barbary pirates, 195-6, 212

Barber, Benjamin, 140

Barlow, Joel, 297

Barnard, Henry, 505-7

Barnburners, 468-70, 549

Bates, Edward, 593-4, 604, 626

Bayard, James. 232-3

Beaumont, Gustave de, 354

Beauregard, Gen. Pierre G. T, 606, 609-11

Bee, Gen. Barnard, 610

Beecher, Catharine, 507-8

Beecher, Henry Ward, 546

Beecher, Lyman, 497-500, 507

Belgium, 438

Bell, John, 593, 596-7

Bellevue, N.Y.C., 407

Bemis, Samuel Flagg, 245, 267

Benjamin, Judah, 612-13

Bennett, James Gordon, 513, 515

Benson, Lee, 373

Benton, Thomas Hart, 208, 242, 321, 327-8, 343-4, 358, 421, 425, 458, 473, 544, 560

Berlin, 416

Berlin, Isaiah, 379

Bernard, John, 256

Bestor, Arthur, 442

Bethlehem, Pa., 146, 439

Biddle, Nicholas, 239, 335, 337-9, 340, 347, 361, 373, 378, 445, 46, 513

Biddle, Owen, 117

Billings (Adams’s hired man), 106

Bill of Rights, 89-90, 91, 125, 130, 134, 141, 493, 511; absence of, in Constitution, 42, 50, 51, 53-5, 57, 59, 60, 69; in state constitutions, 60, 89, 134, 511

Birkbeck, Morris, 315-16

Birney, James G., 468

Bismarck, Otto von, 531

black Americans, 7, 81; African culture of, 149, 387, 568; colonization of, 360, 366-7, 394, 468, 500, 626; education of, 111, 115; and Emancipation Proclamation, 625-8; employment of, 406, 408, 409; equal rights for, 510; inequality of and prejudice against, 114, 142, 263, 356, 362, 365, 383, 384, 392-4, 407, 410, 469, 510, 519, 548, 564, 572, 576, 584-7, 597, 623; leadership of, 149-51, 387, 391-2, 394-5, 415; suffrage for, 392; urban, 80-1, 114, 116; see also slavery

Black Hawk, 452

Blackstone, Sir William, 363

Blair, Francis Preston, 326, 332, 375

Blair, Montgomery, 605, 626

Bledsoe, Albert Taylor, 573

Bliss, George, Jr., 432

Bloomington, Ill., 555, 558, 622-3

Bogardus, James, 534

Bolivar, Simon, 248, 251

book publishing, 588

Boone, Daniel, 180, 449

Boorstin, Daniel, 429

Boscawen, N.H., 279, 281

Boston, 7, 8, 50, 235, 240, 337-8, 339, 361, 403, 429-30, 480, 508, 512, 514, 518-19, 529, 549-550, 589: Dickens on, 351, 352; as financial center, 220, 296; Jubilee of 1826 in, 270, 273; politics in, 74, 161, 220, 435-5, 545; as port city, 220, 276, 373, 374, 432, 536; religion in, 476, 483, 499; society and culture in, 14, 220-21, 222-3, 355, 393, 408-9, 435-7, 478, 481, 482, 589; Washington’s visit to, 73-4; see also New England

Boston American Herald, 50

Boston Associates, 292-6

Boston Courier, 434

Boston Daily Times, 514

Boston Gazette, 99

Boston Independent Chronicle, 139, 188-9

Boston Post, 514

Boston Statesman, 374

Boston Transcript, 512

Boulton, Matthew, 297, 300

Bowdoin, James, 14, 33, 35, 49

Bowie, James, 455

Bowler, Jack, 149-50

Bowles, Samuel, 512, 546

Bozeman, Theodore Dwight, 492

Bradford, David, 98

Bradford, William, 110

Bragg, Braxton, 464

Brant, Irving, 168

Brant, Joseph, 6

Brazil, 244, 249

Breckinridge, John, 186

Breckinridge, John C, 592, 597, 614

Bridger, Jim, 455

Brisbane, Albert, 442-3

British Honduras, 540

Brook Farm, Mass., 443, 489, 491

Brooks, Preston S., 552, 565, 566

Brooks, Van Wyck, 222, 482, 488

Brown, Jacob, 213

Brown, John, 522, 551, 589-91

Brown, Joseph, 613

Brown, Moses, 292

Brown, Paul, 442

Brown College, 74

Brown family, 302, 307

Browning, Orville, 558

Bruchey, Stuart, 433

Bryant, William Cullen, 201, 547, 588, 594, 596; Thanatopsis, 477

Buchanan, James, 421, 458; and Dred Scott decision, 577-8, 582-3; in election of 1856, 559-62; Minister in London, 536, 538, 539; presidency of, 563, 578-80, 589, 591, 599, 603, 606

Buell, Don Carlos, 621

Buena Vista, Mexico, 462

Buffalo, N.Y., 302-3, 446, 470, 532

Buffalo Republic, 547

Bulfinch, Charles, 217, 220, 430, 478

Bull, Ephraim, 529

Bull Run, Battle of, 609-12, 615, 623, 624

Bulwer-Lytton, Henry, 540

Bunker Hill, Mass., 240, 430

Burnet, John, 129

Burns, Anthony, 549-50

Burns, Robert, 223

Burnside, Gen. Ambrose, 621, 626

Burr, Aaron: duel with Hamilton, 192, 193, 196; and election of 1796, 107-9; and election of 1800, 145, 147, 152-5, 196, 230, 378; treason trial of, 202-3; as vice-president, 159, 192; western conspiracy of, 196-7, 319

business, 533-5; criticism of, 485; investment in, 531, 534; and law profession, 436; and Panic of 1857, 588-9; and political parties, 427, 435-7, 593; power of, 347-8; see also capitalism; industry; labor

Butler, Andrew P., 544, 551-2

Butler, Franklin, 371

Butler, Pierce, 413

Byllesby, Langdon, 360

Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 478

Cable, George W., 533

Cabot, George, 75, 153, 218, 231

Cabot, John, 75

Cabot, William, 276

Cabot family, 292, 307

Cadwalader, Gen. George, 619

Cairo, Ill., 532, 616, 617

Calhoun, Florida, 326, 332

Calhoun, John C, 427, 459, 525-6; in Congress, 235, 237, 240, 339, 346, 425, 470-1, 566, 570; debate with Webster, 337; feud with Jackson, 332-3, 334, 570; and nullification, 329, 330-1, 333, 336, 337, 544, 571-3; presidential ambitions of, 264-5, 268, 331, 333, 339, 572; and secession, 473-4; as Secretary of War, 239, 247, 264, 332; South Carolina Exposition of, 329; as vice-president, 268, 272, 322, 326-7, 332-3; and War of 1812, 209, 328

California, 392, 455-6, 515; admitted as free state, 472, 473, 475; gold rush in, 471, 475, 515, 534, 539, 587, 589; under Mexican rule, 455, 458, 460, 464; Mexican War in, 461-2

Calvinism, 78, 476, 479, 494, 497-8

Cambreleng, Churchill C 344-5

Cambridge, Mass., 51, 74, 222, 478, 481

Cameron, Simon, 594-5, 605, 617, 620

Campbell, John A., 575

Canada, 540; boundary disputes with, 7, 103, 235, 447-8; rebellion against British, 446-7; and War of 1812, 207-8, 210-11, 213, 234

canals, 236, 240-1, 286, 302-5, 309, 352, 528, 531; caste system on, 317; financing of, 302-3, 306, 309; labor on, see also Erie Canal; internal improvements

canneries, 529

Canning, George, 249, 251

Canot, Captain, 385

capitalism, 224, 333, 451, 574, 577

competition in, 438, 440, 443-4, 483, 491-2; expansion of, 251, 491, 593; and Jacksonian democracy, 347-8; see also business; industry; labor

Caribbean Sea, 102, 113-14, 124, 174, 244, 618

Carlisle, Pa., 48

Carlyle, Thomas, 481

Carroll, Anna Ella, 615

Carson, Kit, 455

Carter, Robert, III, 256

Cartwright, Peter, 496-7

Cash, W. J., 450

Cass, Lewis, 332, 469-70, 473, 565

Castlereagh, Viscount, 245, 249

Catawba Indians, 150

Catholic Church, 7, 78, 81, 373, 498-9, 500, 547, 554, 559; in Latin America, 244; persecution of, 498-9, 500, 509, 548; schools of, 509

Catlin, George, 451

cattle ranching, 528-9, 530

Central America, 244; isthmian canal in, 539-40, and Monroe Doctrine, 251-2; rebellions in, 248-9, 252; U.S. expansionist interest in, 539-40

Cerro Gordo, Mexico, 463

Chacabuco, Battle of, 248

Chambers, William, 376, 422

Chandler, Zachariah, 620

Channing, Edward, 240

Channing, William Ellery, 240, 434-6, 479, 481, 489, 518-19, 545

Chapman, Maria, 519-20

Chapultepec, 463-4

Charles River, 292-3, 478

Charles River Bridge case, 466

Charleston, S.C., 7, 52, 101, 107, 149, 319, 329, 337, 393, 412, 450, 514, 567, 569, 592; and Civil War, 605-7

Charlestown, Mass., 75, 430, 497

Charlottesville, Va., 182, 255, 273

Chase, James, 380

Chase, Salmon P., 469, 545-6, 554, 565, 594, 604, 626, 627

Chase, Samuel, 129-30, 146, 185, 186, 202, 228-9

Chateaubriand, François René de, 478

Chauncey, Comm. Isaac, 212

checks and balances: in Constitution, 34-5, 37, 38-9, 61, 63, 134-5, 168, 190, 193, 269, 368, 381, 605; in a republic, 17-18, 34, 118, 120, 134, 260-1, 262-3, 272, 372, 625

Cherokee Indians, 6, 95, 335, 452-3

Chesapeake, U.S.S., 199, 212, 228

Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, 450

Chesnut, Mary Boykin, 568

Chicago, Ill., 211, 450, 514, 528, 530-5 passim, 543, 555, 583, 594-6

Chicago Daily Tribune, 514

Chicago Democrat, 514

Chickasaw Indians, 6, 95, 452

Chicopee, Mass., 295, 307

Child, David Lee, 403, 411

Child, Lydia Maria, 402-3, 411-13, 520-1, 588, 590

Chile, 248

China, 542

Chippewa, Battle of, 213

Chippewa Indians, 96

Choctaw Indians, 6, 95, 452-3

Christianity, 457, 476; see also individual sects and denominations

Churubusco, Mexico, 463

Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 225

Cincinnati, Ohio, 266, 300, 301-2, 352, 415, 420, 450, 500, 514, 545, 559, 573, 603, 604, 616

cities, 162, 302; competition among, 309; population of, 7, 80, 511; port, 218-23, 275-6, 295-6, 310, 344, 370, 528, 535-6; society in, 78-83, 115, 125, 355-6, 405-9

Civil War: battles, 605-7, 609-12, 621-2, 624, 626; blockade, 615, 618; causes, 449, 598-600; and Joint Committee ofCongress, 620; see also Confederate Army; Union Army

Claflin, H. B., 534

Clark, James, 374-5

Clark, William, 178-83, 190, 458

Clay, Cassius, 573

Clay, Henry, 239, 241, 268, 325, 326, 352, 358, 375, 427, 452, 525-6, 587, 593; American System of, 270, 320, 331; and censure of Jackson, proposed, 340, 346; and Compromise of 1850, 472-5; election of 1824, 264-7, 321; election of 1832, 331, 333-6, 376; in Ghent negotiations, 232-4; presidential ambitions of, 232, 264-7, 322, 331, 339, 341, 423-4, 426, 459, 468, 469; in Senate, 327, 337, 339, 345, 423-6; as Speaker of the House, 207, 235, 236-7, 243, 247, 264; as spokesman for West, 207-8, 232; and War of 1812, 207-8, 209

Clayton, John M., 540

Clayton-Bulwer Treaty (1850), 540

Clermont (steamboat), 296, 311

Cleveland, Ohio, 420, 532, 535

Cleveland Leader, 547

Clinton, Iowa, 302

Clinton, De Witt, 210, 212, 227, 238, 265, 266, 273, 370-1, 440; and Erie Canal, 303-11 passim, 371

Clinton, George, 43-4, 55-7, 66, 69, 79, 92, 102, 192, 204, 210, 370, 378

clockmaking, 289-90

clothing trades, 406, 534

Cobb, Howell, 471

Coffin, Hannah, 281

Coffin, Thomas, 279-81

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 481

Collins, James, 485

Collins, Wilkie, 588

Colombia, 244, 265

Colorado, 464

Colt, Samuel, 290, 534

Columbia, S.C., 569, 572, 597

Columbia College, 31-2, 81

Columbian Centinel (newspaper), 176, 206-7, 217

Columbia River, 458-9

Columbus, Ohio, 420, 450

Commager, Henry S., 355

common law, 130, 143, 402, 436

Common Sense (Paine), 117-18

Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 416, 444, 467

communitarianism, 439-44

Compromise of 1850, 472-5, 522, 543, 598

Concord, Mass., 276, 529, 561; literati of, 468, 479-81, 483-8, 489, 590

Concord, N.H., 326, 338

Conestoga wagons, 315-16, 449

Confederate Army, 607, 614, 622-5, 628; in battle, 605-7, 609-12, 621-2, 624, 626; conscription in, 613-14; strategy of, 608

Confederate Navy, 621-2

Confederate States of America, 608, 612, 618, 626; border states in, 602, 604, 606, 608, 620, 626; constitution of, 601, 612; Davis as president of, 600-3, 606, 608, 612-14, 628; government of, 612-13; negative brand of liberty in, 613; states’ rights in, 612-14

Congregationalists, 7, 24, 52, 223, 373, 476, 494, 497-8, 507

Congress, U.S., 6, 76-7, 84-9, 97, 110-12, 146, 175, 199-201, 237, 240-1, 250-1, 259, 269-70, 301, 458, 459-60, 564; Alien and Sedition Acts, 125-33, 141; under Articles of Confederation, 16, 17, 43, 76, 96; bank issues, 335, 339-40, 344-6, 424-6; brokerage in, 61, 62, 243, 263, 270, 426, 427, 475, 565; caucus system in, 171-2, 183, 204, 210, 212, 228, 238, 265, 369, 378, 379; in Civil War, 615, 619-21, 626-7; Dickens on, 352; enumerated powers of, 38-9, 40, 152, 188, 215, 619; and Mexican War, 461, 465; and national defense, 210, 215, 235, 236; negative veto in, 37, 262; and nullification and secession, 327-31, 336-7, 603, 605; political parties in, 104, 136, 145, 171-2, 369, 377; representation in, 36-7, 61, 62-3, 465-6; and slavery issue, 242-3, 345-6, 464, 465-6, 470-1, 472-5, 543-7, 549-50, 551-2, 591, 625; in War of 1812, 206, 208-9, 211, 328; see also House of Representatives; legislative branch; Senate

Connecticut, 49, 72-3, 94, 280, 282, 288, 290, 351, 433, 505, 506, 528, 536; politics in, 183, 231, 239

Connecticut compromise, 37, 40

Connecticut River, 220, 223, 231, 310, 448

Conscience Whigs, 468-70, 549

conservatives, 345, 372, 374, 422; fear egalitarianism, 118, 224; for suffrage restrictions, 226, 364, 365; see also Essex. Junto

Constitution, U.S., 38, 61, 135, 215, 252, 261, 366, 379, 465, 493, 520, 615; amending, 40, 42, 89-90, 177; broad construction of, 87-8, 177, 259, 261: and citizenship and statehood, 176-7, 576; debates over interpretation of, 104, 240; and federalism, 34-5, 40, 61, 135, 136, 140, 260, 262, 369, 374, 598; and impeachment, 40, 60; intellectual roots of, 28, 29, 368; ratification of, 40, 42-59, 89-90, 104, 134, 367, 428; strict construction of, 177, 258, 423, 466; see also Bill of Rights; checks and balances; separation of powers

Constitution, U.S.S., 196, 211

Constitutional Convention, 16, 19, 23, 27-42, 49, 62, 104, 134; see also Framers of Constitution

Constitutional Union party, 593

construction industry, 405, 406, 433, 534

Continental Congresses, 23, 24, 28

contracts, sanctity of, 27, 260, 400

Contreras, Mexico, 463

conventions, see nominating conventions

Coolidge, John, 480

Cooper, James Fenimore, 477

Cooper, Thomas, 129-30, 569, 572

Cooperstown, N.Y., 477

Cooper Union, N.Y.C., 594

Copley, John Singleton, 221

cotton, 141, 274-5, 276, 277, 282-7, 302, 315, 318-9, 450, 529-30, 567, 589, 608, 618; see also textile industry

cotton gin, 275, 282, 287-8, 291, 295, 308, 311, 315, 347, 567

Cotton Whigs, 468, 470, 545

courts, 14, 39, 55, 70, 90, 130, 184, 375, 392; equality in, 17-18, 453; see also judicial branch

Cowles, Alfred, 514

Coxe, Tench, 89

Cranch, Mary, 122

Cranch, Richard, 71

Crane, Ichabod, 558

Crawford, William H., 238-9, 247, 254-5, 264-7, 378

Creek Indians, 6, 216-17, 452-3

Crimean War, 539-40, 588

Crittenden, John J., 425, 565, 593

Crockett, Davy, 455

Cuba, 249; U.S. interest in, 537-9

culture: of liberty, 476-522; in New England, 476-92; urban, 78-9, 81, 110-11, 112, 115, 220, 222-3; Virginia, 255-7, 263-4, 482

Cumberland, Md., 299, 450

Cummings, Arthur, 610-11

Cummins, Maria S., 517

Cunningham, Noble, 190

Curtis, Benjamin R., 575

Curtis, James, 346

Cushing, William, 185, 222

Dabney, Thomas Smith Gregory, 282-5

Dalzell, Robert, 466

Dana, Francis, 49

Dana, Samuel, 127

Dane, Nathan, 231

Dangerfield, George, 267, 270

Daniel, Peter V., 575

Dartmouth College, 74, 478

Davis, David, 556, 558, 595

Davis, Jefferson, 462, 473, 564-5; as president of Confederacy, 600-3, 606, 608, 612-14, 628; as Secretary of War, 545, 564

Davis, Richard Beale, 255

Davis, Varina (Mrs. Jefferson), 601

Day, Benjamin H., 512-13

Day, Luke, 14

Dayton, Ohio, 210, 419-20

Dearborn, Henry, 166

Decatur, Ill., 558

Decatur, Capt. Stephen, 196, 236

Declaration of Independence, 15, 21, 23, 40, 49, 62, 140, 142, 249, 270, 272-3, 352, 383, 411, 572, 573, 584, 586-7, 595, 604

Declaration of the Rights of Man, 99

Deere, John, 430, 527

Defoe, Daniel, 112; Robinson Crusoe, 527

Delaware, 47, 239, 504

Delaware Indians, 6, 96

democracy, 118, 225, 457; and education, 502, 506, 510; equality in, 19, 20-1, 354-8, 361-2, 383, 411, 416, 525; Jacksonian, 347-50, 354-8, 361-2, 363-4, 376, 453, 511; work ethic in, 506, 510; see also republic

Democracy in America, see Tocqueville, Alexis de

Democratic party, 343, 358, 373, 435-6, 466-7, 515, 525, 536, 554; and Civil War, 615; in Congress, 340, 344, 566, 577; convention and election of 1860, 592-3, 596-7, 600; election of 1832, 331-6, 380; election of 1836, 341-2; election of 1840, 421-2; election of 1848, 468-70; election of 1856, 559-62; factions in, 330, 338, 345, 360, 361, 425, 427, 466, 468-71, 553-4; fiscal policies of, 344-6, 347; formation of, 322-3; lack of political philosophy in, 348-9; as majority, 576-8, 579, 599; and “manifest destiny,” 458, 459, 538-40; slavery issue in, 348-9, 465, 467, 468-71, 473, 547-8, 554, 558, 626; in South, 559, 560-2, 564, 576-8, 579-80, 592-3, 599; state, 373, 374, 408; see also Jackson, Andrew: and Democratic party

Denmark, 24

Derna, Libya, 196

Deseret News (Salt Lake City), 515

Detroit, Mich., 210, 212-13, 450, 532

Dial, The (journal), 483

Dickens, Charles, 317, 351-3, 356, 527, 575

Dickinson, John, 35

Diderot, Denis, 100

District of Columbia, 424, 470, 472

divorce, 360, 361, 402

Dixon, Archibald, 544

Doherty, E. P., 610

Donald, David, 574

Donelson, Emily, 332

Dorr, Thomas, 365

Dorr’s Rebellion, 466

Douglas, Stephen A., 457, 473, 565, 580-1, 615; in convention and election of 1860, 592-3, 596-8, 600; debates with Lincoln, 557, 581-7, 594; election of 1856, 559; and Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 543-7, 549, 551-2, 557; popular sovereignty doctrine of, 544, 550, 577, 579-80, 584-5, 592

Douglass, Frederick, 393-4, 412-13, 590, 626

Duane, James, 56, 81

Duane, William, 162, 199, 339

Du Bois, W. E. B., 14, 149

Dubuque, Iowa, 302

Du Pont Company, 430

Du Pont de Nemours, Pierre Samuel, 165, 169, 430

Durfee, Amos, 446-7

Dutch, 81, 113, 114; canal system, 302 Dutch Reformed Church, 7, 78, 370

Dwight, Timothy, 161, 167, 280, 492, 493, 494, 497-8

Dwight family, 292, 307

Eads, James Buchanan, 617

East, the, 86, 277, 309, 355, 356, 494, 528-9; see also New England; North, the

East Chelmsford, Mass., 294

East Indies, British, 103

Eastman, Mehitable, 398-9, 403

Eaton, Clement, 573

Eaton, Maj. John H., 321, 325-6

Eaton, Peggy (Mrs. John), 326-7, 332

Eberhardt, Johann Ludwig, 289-91

economy, 140-1; change in, and internal improvements, 302, 306-11; credit in, 276, 285-6, 339-40, 360, 374, 434, 451; and equality, 361-2; expanding, 29, 433, 533-5, 553, 587-9, 593; federal action in, 84, 236-7; and politics, 428-9; see also banking; fiscal policies; Panic

education, 111-12, 115, 407, 441, 453, 476, 482, 486: classical, 28, 44, 111; and democracy, 502, 506, 510; parochial, 509; private, 75-6, 504-6, 507; public, 76, 352, 358, 360, 372, 467, 498, 501-11, 565; and religion, 497-8, 506, 507-9; in a republic, 19, 109, 144, 501-2

Edwards, Jonathan, 196, 497

election campaigns, 107, 147, 265-7, 375, 378-9, 419-22, 583, 596; see also political parties

Electoral College, 38, 67, 107-8, 148, 152, 227, 266, 367; and Twelfth Amendment, 229-30

Ellet, Charles, 617, 621

Ellsworth, Oliver, 184

Emancipation Proclamation, 625-8

Embargo Act (1807), 199-203, 205, 228, 230, 276, 278, 282, 291, 488

Emerson, Dr. John, 576

Emerson, Lidian (Mrs. Ralph Waldo), 479-80, 481, 561

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 223, 331, 396, 451, 476-88, passim, 491, 517, 522, 526, 545, 561, 588, 590; Conduct of Life, The, 588; Nature, 481-2

Emporia Kansas News, 579

Engels, Friedrich, 416, 444, 467

England, 249, 368, 416, 431, 438, 477, 625; liberty in, 23-4, 61, 117, 571; manufacturing, 200, 217, 251, 275, 282, 285-6, 291-2, 293, 439; trade, 249, 251, 506; see also Great Britain

Enlightenment, 493

Ephrata, Pa., 439

Episcopalians, 257

Eppes, John W, 258

equality, 142-3; economic, 361-2, 440; inegalitarianism, 143, 355-6, 383-4, 440, 441-2, 535, 597-8; and Jacksonian democracy, 347-8, 350, 354-8, 361-2; legal, 17-18, 362, 453; and liberty, 25, 143, 226, 228-9, 258, 263, 272, 347-8, 491, 500, 520, 571-3, 575, 587, 593; political, 362-3, 378, 584; social, 362, 440, 584; see also democracy: equality in; liberty

Eric Canal, 301, 302-4, 305, 431, 432, 450, 499, 517; financing and construction of, 302-3, 306-7, 309; grass-roots support for, 309, 310; passengers and freight on, 316-17, 528, 532

Erie Railroad, 408, 531

Essex Junto. 165, 223-4, 228, 230-1, 361

Europe, 16, 26, 172, 249, 252; culture in, 477, 478, 483; Holy Alliance in, 248-52; investments in U.S. from, 531, 534, 587; reaction to Monroe Doctrine in, 251; revolutionary movements in, 254, 416, 438, 467, 536-7, 538; see also Napoleonic wars

Eustis, William, 211

Evans, George H., 360, 517

Evans, Col. Nathan, 610

Evans, Oliver, 297

Everett, Edward, 341; 396, 434, 436, 452, 478, 501-2, 554, 578-9, 591, 593

Ewing, Thomas, 424

executive branch, 36, 37-8, 168, 187-9, 193, 226; see also President

factionalism, 91, 92, 93, 239, 241, 261, 502; and liberty, 29-30, 45, 54, 60-1

Fair, Charles, 622

Fairhaven, Mass., 541

Fallen Timbers, Battle of the, 97

Farley, Harriet, 396-7

farming, see agriculture

Farragut. David, 608, 621

federal government, 83, 383; bureaucracy of, 71, 78, 324-5, 346, 565, 617; factions in, 91, 92, 93, 502; geometry of balance in, 465-7, 472-5, 544, 598-9; and liberty, 62, 263, 491, southern power elite in, 576-8; strong, support for, 21, 26, 30, 34-7, 41, 42-58, 60, 126, 226, 241, 350, 433, 436; supremacy of, 259, 335; weak, support for, 43-4, 46-60, 61, 162, 258, 347; see also states’ rights: vs. federal government

federalism, 369, 374; see also Constitution, U.S.: and federalism

Federalist, 44-6, 60, 215, 261, 262, 511

Federalist party, 109, 137, 138, 164-6, 223, 227-31, 357, 369, 377; and Alien and Sedition Acts, 126-34, 138, 230; antiwar position in, 206, 208-9, 210, 217-18, 230-1, 235; in Congress, 122, 136, 153-4, 186, 190, 202, 209, 227, 235, 237, 378; control of judiciary by, 128, 183-6, 193; decline and fall of, 191-2, 217-18, 227-31, 239, 243, 266, 377, 420; election of 1796, 107-8; election of 1800, 145-8, 151-5, 227; election of 1804, 183, 227; election of 1808, 203-4, 227, 230; election of 1812, 210, 227; election of 1816, 227, 238-9; and foreign affairs. 102-4, 121, 123, 124, 174-7, passim, 200, 230, 231; Hartford convention of, 217, 218, 224, 231, 261; state, 210, 227, 229; view of liberty in, 226, 228-9, 231, 347; see also Essex Junto

Federalists (supporters of new Constitution), 30, 60-3, 69, 79-80, 82, 83-9, 98, 369; and ratification of Constitution, 42-58

Fell, Jesse. 595

Fenno, John, 80, 87, 90, 135

Ferdinand I, Emperor of Austria, 416, 467

Ferdinand VII, King of Spain, 248-9

Fillmore, Millard: in election of 1856, 559-62; presidency of, 474, 525, 531, 542

Finney, Charles C, 492, 500

First Amendment, 493, 500

fiscal policies, 8, 13, 84-7, 97, 168-9, 344-7, 419-20, 457, 589; see also Hamilton, Alexander: as Secretary of Treasury

Fischer, David, 223, 228

fishing industry, 219-20, 234, 540

Fisk, Theophilus, 361

Fitch, John, 41, 277, 297

Fitzhugh, George, 572-4

Fitzsimmons, Thomas, 35

Flagg, Azariah, 371

Fletcher v. Peck (1810), 259

Florida, 452, 530, 597, 612

Florida, Spanish, 7, 173-4, 176, 207, 244-8; Jackson’s campaign in, 245-7, 320, 332

Foner, Eric, 118, 469

Foote, Comm. Andrew, 621

Force bill (1833), 337

foreign affairs; chauvinism in, 207-9, 237-8, 445-9, 458, 536, 538, and Constitution, 38, 61; disputes over, and domestic disputes, 99-105; expansionism, 536-40; interventionism, 251-4; leadership in, 252, 449; and liberty, 537; neutrality, 101-4, 195, 198, 205-6, 249, 254, 446; non-interventionism, 250-2; Realpolitik in, 245, 253; self-interest vs. morality in, 195, 252-4; see also Mexican War; War of 1812; and individual countries and residents

Forman, Joshua, 305-6

Forrest, Gen. Nathan Bedford, 622

Fort Dearborn, 1

Fort Donelson, 621

Fort Erie, 213

Fort Greenville, 97

Fort Henry, 621

Fort Johnson, 605

Fort Maiden, 213

Fort McHenry, 619

Fort Moultrie, 606

Fort Sumter, 605-7

Foster, William, 361

Fourier, Charles, 403, 442-4, 517

Fox, George, 527

Fox, Gustavus, 618

Framers of Constitution, 28-42, 83, 104, 262, 311, 364, 368, 428, 493, 565, 574, 587, 594; and absence of bill of rights, 42, 50, 51, 53-5, 57, 59, 60, 69; and checks and balances, 34-5, 37, 38-9, 61, 63, 368; and foreign and military affairs, 216, 252; oppose political parties, 13, 134, 379; and separation of powers, 36, 61, 63, 216, 261, 368; slavery compromise of, 39-40; see also Constitution, U.S.

France, 4, 5, 18, 80, 95, 99-100, 113, 124, 150, 162, 179, 232, 249, 250, 275, 297, 354, 416, 431, 438, 442, 467, 539; American sympathy for, 104, 109, 205, 208, 377; attacks U.S. shipping, 102, 121, 124, 205-6, 208, 291, 445; blockade of, 198-9; and Confederacy, 601; quasi-war with, 120-5, 127, U.S. claims against, 445-6; war declaration (1792) of, 99-102, 125; XYZ Correspondence, 123; see also Napoleon I

Francis I, Emperor of Austria, 194

Frankfort, Ky., 326

Franklin, Benjamin, 21-3, 30, 108, 111, 116, 117, 226, 302, 304, 448; at Constitutional Convention, 31, 35, 39, 40, 42; and liberty, 24-5

Franklin, James, 24

Fraunces, Phoebe, 81

Fraunces, Samuel, 81

Fraunces’ Tavern, NYC, 77, 81

Fredericksburg, Battle of, 626

Freedom, Pa., 604

Free Enquirer, The; 415, 517

Freehling, William, 333, 567

Free Inquirer, The, 360

Freeman, Elizabeth, 20

Free Soil movement (and party), 468-70, 545, 547-9, 553, 579, 584, 593

Frelinghuysen, Theodore, 452

Frémont, Jessie Benton (Mrs. John C), 560

Frémont, Capt. John C, 462, 472, 616, 617, 620; in election of 1856, 559-62

French Revolution, 98, 99-100, 149, 445, 498, 571; American sympathy for, 99-101, 126, 137, 253

Freneau, Philip, 8, 1, 90, 93

Fries, John, 146

frontier, the, 7, 93, 94, 95-6, 395, 410, 416, 421, 449, 450, 507; American character on, 207, 317-18, 477; religion on, 492-7; see also West, the

Fuller, Margaret, 483, 487, 516

Fulton, Robert, 170, 277, 296-301, 308, 311, 431

Galena, 111, 562, 622

Gallatin, Albert, 127, 145, 166-7, 177, 200, 202, 205, 232-4, 236, 268, 304-5

Gallatin, James, 233-4

Gandhi. Mohandas K., 486

Garrison, William Lloyd, 366, 394, 411-12, 517, 519-21

Gassendi. Pierre, 170

Gazette of the United States, 80, 90

Geddes, James, 303

Genêt, Edmond, 101-2, 121

Genius of Universal Emancipation (journal), 517

Genovese, Eugene, 387

George III, King of England, 40, 194

Georgetown, 65, 168, 450

Georgia, 47, 92, 173, 246, 274, 286, 385, 409, 433, 597; Indians of, 452-3; states’ rights in, 335, 346; Yazoo land fraud, 259-60

German immigrants, 80, 113, 289-90, 405, 439, 450, 547, 549, 555, 622

Germany, 416, 431

Gerry, Elbridge, 121-4, and

Constitution, 31, 35, 38, 42, 43, 49-51

Ghent, Treaty of, 231-5

Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), 259, 577

Giddings, Joshua, 595

Giles, William Branch. 185-6, 258

Gilmer, Thomas W., 424

Gladstone, William, 32

Godey’s Lady’s Book, 517

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 478, 481, 490

gold, see California: gold rush in

Goldsmith, Oliver, 112

Gonzales, Tex., 454

Goodyear, Charles, 534

Gorham, Nathaniel, 35

Gouge, William M., 344

government: Adams on, 17-18, 109, 224-6, 272; Jackson on, 348; Madison on, 29-30, 45-6; see also democracy; republic

grain products, 528, 529-30

granite, 429-30

Grant, Ulysses S., 462, 464, 617, 621, 623

Grayson, William, 53

Great Britain, 80, 141, 179, 222, 246, 247, 275, 297, 319, 405, 446, 512, 530, 539, 540, 542, 547, 587, American opinion of, 101-4, 205-6, 228, 231, 377, 445, 448; American possessions of, 95, 100, 173-4, 245, 455, 458-9, 540; attacks U.S. shipping, 102-3, 291; Canadian rebellion against, 446-7; and Confederacy, 601, 618-19; France declares war on (1792), 99-102, 125; and Ghent treaty, 232-5; and Holy Alliance, 249-50; impressment of seamen by, 103, 198-200, 203-9 passim, 228, 233-4; Indian allies of, 6, 96, 207, 216, 223-4; and Monroe Doctrine, 251; Royal Navy, 102, 194-5, 198, 205, 211, 212-14, 216, 220-1, 232, 234, 235, 251; and U.S.-Canadian boundary dispute, 7, 103, 235, 447-8; in War of 1812, 208-15, 216-17; see also Napoleonic wars

Great Lakes, 212-13, 233, 235, 305, 532; region, 310, 405, 449-50

Greece, 248, 250, 254

Greeley, Horace, 421, 433, 443-4, 487, 515-17, 530, 609, 612; and slavery, 546-7, 549, 580-1, 585, 594-5, 604, 625

Green, Constance McLaughlin, 566

Green, Duff, 332

Greene, Catherine, 274, 275, 287

Greytown, Mosquito Coast. 540

Grier, Robert C„ 575, 577

Grimké, Angelina and Sarah, 412-13, 521

Griswold, Roger, 138

Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 464

Guerrière, H.M.S., 211

Guizot. Francois, 354

habeas corpus, Civil War suspension of, 613, 615, 619

Haiti, 360, 367

Hale, John P., 469-70

Hall, John, 289

Hallet, Benjamin, 519

Hamilton, Alexander, 19, 21, 23, 36, 68, 69, 72, 77, 81, 122-7 passim, 131, 133, 138, 146, 191, 227, 268, 433, 511, 607; duel of, with Burr, 192, 193, 196; and election of 1796, 107-9; election of 1800, 145, 147, 148, 153-5; and foreign affairs, 100-1, 103, 121, 253; and Jefferson, 90-1, 101; opposition to, 85-7, 93, 137; as Secretary of Treasury, 71, 79-80, 84-9; 90-1, 97-8, 168-9; supports strong central government, 26, 41, 42, 44-5, 55-S, 236, 246, 259

Hammond, James Henry, 572-4

Hampton, Wade, 608

Hampton Roads, Va., 622

Hancock, John, 33, 49, 51, 74, 519

Handlin, Oscar, 174

Hare, Robert, 434

Harmony, Ind., 439-40

Harper, Robert Goodloe, 259-60

Harper and Brothers, 588

Harpers Ferry, Va., 179, 289, 590, 609

Harper’s Weekly, 605

Harrington, James, 368

Harris, B. F., 528

Harris, Townsend, 542

Harrisburg, Pa., 265-6, 269

Harrison, Benjamin, 53

Harrison, William Henry, 207, 212-13, 341-2, 437, 622; election and presidency of, 419-22, 424, 468

Hartford. Conn., 31, 73, 218, 220, 222, 351; Federalist convention in, 217, 218, 224, 231, 261

Hartford and New Haven Railroad, 433

Hariz, Louis, 349, 435

Harvard College, 32, 74, 218, 221-4, 240, 255, 257, 271, 338, 351, 436, 477-8, 480-1, 483, 486, 519

Harvey, Charles T., 532

Havana, Cuba, 244, 538

Hawaii, 540-1

Hawkins, Hall, 389

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 223, 347, 487-90, 491, 517, 534, 588; Scarlet Letter, The, 476, 488-9

Hawthorne, Sophia (Mrs. Nathaniel), 489

Hayne, Robert Y 327-31, 336-7, 570

Hedge, Levi, 222

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 443

Helper, Hinton Rowan, 592

Henry, Patrick, 8, 29, 43, 53-5, 68, 91, 95, 108, 140, 255

Henshaw, David, 374, 376

Herald of Freedom (newspaper), 551

Herndon, William, 555-6, 558, 561, 580-1, 603

Herrera, José Joaquin, 460

Hidalgo, Miguel, 248

Higginson, Stephen, 218

Hildreth, Richard, 522

Hill, Isaac, 326

Hilliard, H. W., 472

history: causal agents in, 383-4, 422, 598; on Jackson, 346-7; original records in, 384, 396; stream of, 578

History of Paper Money and Banking (Gouge), 344

Hobbes, Thomas, 28

Hoe printing press, 535

Holland, 99, 172, 174, 175, 176, 447

Hollidaysburg Aurora, 316

Holmes, Mary J., 517

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 479, 588

Holyoke, Mass., 295

Hone, Philip, 475

Honolulu, Hawaii, 540

Hopkinson, Francis, 112

Horrocks and Johnson power loom, 292

Horseshoe Bend, Battle of, 217

Hough, Pvt. Daniel, 607

House of Representatives, 152-5, 266-7, 322, 408, 440; election to, 36-7, 61, 68, 364, 381; and foreign affairs, 103-4, 123; see also Congress

Houston, Sam, 454

Hudson River, 91, 172, 213, 233, 278, 296-7, 301-2, 305, 352, 370, 431-3

Hudson’s Bay Company, 455, 458-9

Hughes, Bishop John, 509

Hull, Capt. Isaac, 211

Hull, Gen. William, 210-11, 216

Hume, David, 28

Humphreys, David, 64, 70

Hungary, 416, 467, 536-7

Hunkers, 468-9

Hunt, Millicent Leib, 395, 402

Hunter, Gen. David, 620

Hunter, Robert M. T., 544

Hussey’s reaper, 527

ice industry, 429

Illinois, 299, 392, 452, 496, 499-500, 528, 529, 543, 554-5, 576, 599, 622-3;

migration to, 207, 315, 449, 450, 451, 527; politics in, 267, 556-9, 561-2, 580-7, 594-5

Illinois Central Railroad, 556, 589

immigrants, 141, 395, 404-9, 415, 433, 450, 530, 534, 553; and Alien Act, 126, 127-8; in cities, 80-1, 113, 114, 116, 356, 404-9; education of, 509-10, 565; employment of, 405-6, 408-9; and nativism, 547-8, 553-4, 559: and politics, 407-8, 554, 559

impressment, see Great Britain: impressment of seamen by indentured servants, 7, 114, 503

Independence, Mo., 456

Independent Journal, 44

Independent Treasury Act (1840), 344-6, 424, 426

Indiana, 207, 315, 392, 449, 496, 508, 527-8; canal system in, 305; communitarianism in, 439, 440-2; politics in, 562, 597, 603

individual rights: ideology of, 143, 415-16, 435, 437, 440, 479, 571-3; vs. community, 30, 115-16, 475, 491-2; see also liberty; man

industry, 433, 438; capital for, 80, 295-6, 534, 587; and equality, 355, 362; expansion of, 141, 251, 291, 295, 485, 533-5· 587-9, 599; and government, 84, 88-9, 236-7, 287-8, 291, 505, 564; and individual liberty, 485-7, 489-90, 491-2; machinery for, 216, 282, 288-9, 290-1, 295, 307, 396, 430, 533-4, 535; tariffs for, 236, 269-70, 293, 295, 347, 437, 505; see also business; capitalism; labor; textile industry

Ingham, Samuel D., 235, 325

Ingraham, Joseph. 284-5

Intellectuals, 27, 145, 442, 444, 477; of Virginia, 255-64 passim

internal improvements: competition for, 308-9; government subsidies for, 236, 240-1, 307-8, 309, 329, 331, 347, 505, 506, 564; as political issue, 320, 333, 334, 375, 435, 599; see also transportation

interstate commerce, 259, 301

Iowa, 392, 451, 527, 532

Ireland, 405, 407, 459

Irish immigrants, 80-1, 113, 126, 305, 309, 373, 405, 406, 407-8, 450, 480, 498, 547, 548, 555

iron, 530-1, 534

Iroquois Indians, 5, 6, 96

Irving, Washington, 477

Isely, Jeter, 547

Italy, 24, 174-5, 254, 416, 438

Izard, George, 213

Jackson, Andrew. 239, 268, 318-19, 343,-421, 453, 459, 580; and Calhoun, 332-3, 334, 570; censured by Senate, 340, 346, 423; and Congress, 247, 327, 346; and Democratic party, 323, 341, 340, 347-9, 359, 363-4, 381, 455, 457; in election of 1824, 265-7, 321, 378; in election of 1828, 320-3, 375-6; election of 1832, 331-6, 380; Florida campaign of, 245-7, 319, 332; and foreign affairs, 445-6, 455; kitchen cabinet of, 325-6, 339; nullification policy of, 329, 330-1, 335, 330-7, 346, 348, 357; presidency of, 323-41, 344, 345, 346-7, 358, 359, 361, 378, 383, 428, 575, 598, 619; spoils system of, 324-5, 333, 346, 374; supporters of, 269, 320-4, 349, 358, 423; tour of, 337-8; and United States Bank, 335-6, 338-40, 347, 373, 374, 375, 428, 466; in War of 1812, 213, 216-17, 231, 235, 319; see also democracy: Jacksonian

Jackson, George, 55

Jackson, James. 85, 88

Jackson, Patrick Tracy, 292, 294

Jackson. Rachel (Mrs. Andrew), 319, 323, 326-7, 402

Jackson, Gen. Thomas (Stonewall), 610-11, 613, 622, 623, 624

Jalapa, Mexico, 463

Japan, 542

Jay, John, 19, 41, 43, 44-5, 53, 56-7, 69, 70, 71, 72, 78, 79, 103, 147, 148, 152, 154, 184, 215, 235

Jay, Mrs. John, 81

Jay family, 370

Jay treaty (1794), 103-4, 120, 226, 137

Jefferson, Thomas, 18, 26, 43, 55, 77, 162, 231, 260, 319, 325, 340, 347, 357, 360, 368, 377, 414, 419, 435, 439, 478, 483, 493; Alien and Sedition Acts opposed by, 126, 127, 131-2, 184, 230, 330; and Burr conspiracy, 197, 202-3; and canals, 303, 305-6, 310; character and philosophy of, 62-3, 161-3, 165, 168, 170, 171, 238, 501, 502; and Congress, 165, 167, 168-72, 202, 263; correspondence with Adamses, 18-19, 226, 271-2; and Declaration of Independence, 23, 40, 272, 411; in election of 1796, 107-9, 378; election of 1800, 144-7, 151-5, 378; in election of 1804, 183, 227; and Embargo Act, 199-202, 203, 230; and foreign affairs, 162, 167, 168, 173-5, 195-201, 230, 249, 253; and French Revolution, 99-100; and Hamilton, 90-1, 101; and judiciary, 183-9, 193, 202; and Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, 131-2, 134, 139, 145, 162; and Lewis and Clark expedition, 178-83, 190; and Louisiana Purchase, 176-8, 189, 230; and Madison, 28, 91-2, 203-4, 206, 208, 212, 255; at Monticello, 106-7, 163, 168, 201, 255, 256, 270-3, 440; and political parties, 90, 99, 135, 239, 279; political strategy and appointments of, 161, 164-7, 186, 190-2, 239; presidency of, 159-72, 183-93, 195, 205, 215, 228, 259, 260, 261, 263, 378, 383, 428, 598; on rebellion, 18-19, 162; and Republican party, 122, 137, 138-9, 145, 146-7, 159, 164-7, 169-72, 173, 184, 185-6, 190-2, 202, 258, 262-3, 269, 369, 498, 549; as Secretary of State, 71, 88, 90-1, 101, 103, 162; and slavery issue, 151, 243; as vice-president, 108-9, 122, 138, 146, 162

Jerusalem, Va., 392

Jervis, John B, 432

Jews, 7, 78, 81, 92

Johnson, Andrew, 346

Johnson, Richard M., 235, 342, 421

Johnson, Samuel, 25

Johnson, William Samuel, 31

Johnston, Gen. Albert Sidney, 608, 621

Johnston, Gen. Joseph, 463, 609-10, 613

Johnstone, Robert, 169, 172

Jones, Anson, 460

Jones, Charles Colcock, 385-8, 390-1

Jones, Mary (Mrs. Charles Colcock), 388

Jones, William, 212

Jubilee of 1826, 270, 272-3

Judd, Norman, 595

judicial branch, 36, 38-9, 40, 60, 128, 183-6, 193, 619; independence of, 184-9, 193, 202, 350, see also courts; Supreme Court judicial review, 40, 133, 187-9, 93, 202, 577

Judiciary Act: of 1789, 70, 130, 186-9; of 1801, 168, 183-4, 186, 202

Kansas, 453; Lecompton plan, 579-80, 589, 607; slavery issue in, 543, 550-2, 579-80, 591; Topeka constitution in, 550

Kansas Free State (newspaper), 551

Kansas-Nebraska act, 543-52 passim, 582, 599, 607

Kant, Immanuel, 481

Kearny, Gen. Stephen W., 461-2

Kemble, Fanny, 317, 354, 413

Kendall, Amos, 325-6, 339, 346, 348, 375-6

Kent, James, 364

Kentucky, 94, 96, 131, 175, 208, 315, 331, 468, 495, 496, 529-30, 573, 601, 608, 620; economic problems in, 241, 374-6; politics in, 173, 267, 336, 374-6, 380, 604

Kentucky Gazette (newspaper), 131

Kentucky resolution, 131-3, 134, 139, 145, 162, 261

Kerber, Linda, 58

Key, Francis Scott, 215

King, Rufus, 19, 35, 39, 79, 203, 227, 239, 243

“King Caucus,” 238, 265, 378

Kirtland, Ohio, 499

Know-Nothing (American) party, 499, 547-9, 553-4, 557, 558, 599, 603; split in, 559-62

Knox, Henry, 13, 16, 35, 71, 72, 77-8, 124

Kossuth, Lajos, 416, 467, 536-7

Kraditor, Aileen, 521

Labadists, 439

labor: child, 89, 288, 293, 439, 503; class structure in, 114, 115; craft traditions and unions, 120, 289-90, 358, 414; immigrant, 405-6, 408-9; industrial, 75, 89, 287-95, 489, 494, 503, 510, 574, 597; and politics. 358-9, 361, 373, 503; radical movements for, 360-1, 502, 535; strikes and boycotts by, 358, 398-9, 406, 589; trade unions, 358-9, 498; unemployment, 344, 406, 446, 589; working conditions, 358, 381, 395-400, 406, 535; see also women: in labor force; working class

Lafayette, Marie Joseph Paul, Marquis de, 40-1, 99, 251, 255, 360, 414

La Fortuna (slave ship), 384-5

Lake Champlain, 213, 216, 233

Lake Erie, 212-13, 303-5, 450, 532

Lake Michigan, 305, 531-2

Lake Ontario, 212-13, 532

Lamb, Gen. John, 56

Lamb, Robert K., 307

Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, 500

Lansing, John, 36, 44, 56

Larcom, Lucy, 294, 398

Larkin, Thomas O., 455-6

Laurens, Henry, 43

law, profession of, 436

Lawrence, Kan., 551, 558

Lawrence, Mass., 295

Lawrence, U.S.S., 212

Lawrence, Abbott, 437

Lawrence Company, 399

leadership: and democracy, 357-8; and economic change, 305-11, 429-33; grass-roots, 264, 309, 310; political, 137, 311, 358, 369, 373, 376-7, 379, 380, 428, 554; and rebellion, 384; in republic, 21, 62-3, 84-5, 109, 131, 143, 144, 191, 262-3, 269, 600; and war, 216, 614; see also Framers of Constitution

Lear, Tobias, 70

Leavis, Q. D., 491

Lee, Henry, 53-4

Lee, Richard Henry, 43, 50, 53

Lee, Robert E., 463, 464, 590, 608, 614, 622, 624, 626

legislative branch, 36, 168, 226; andjudicial review, 187-9, 193; see also Congress, U.S.

L’Enfant, Pierre, 168

Lenox, Mass., 489

Leopard, H.M.S., 199

Lerner, Max, 485

Letcher, Robert P., 267

Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (Dickinson), 35

Lewis, Meriwether, 168, 178-83, 190, 458

Lewis, William B., 321-2, 326

Lewis and Clark expedition, 178-83, 190, 458

Lexington, Ky., 131, 207, 331

Lexington, Mass., 75-6, 199, 482, 505

Liberator (Garrison), 366, 394, 517

Liberia, 366

liberty: belief in, 7, 15, 21, 23-7, 33-4, 62, 142, 411, 416, 548, 624-5; and Bill of Rights, 89-90; culture of, 476-522; and equality, 25, 143, 226, 228-9, 258, 263, 272, 347-8, 491, 500, 520, 571-3, 575, 587, 593; and factionalism, 29-30, 45, 54, 60-1; and general welfare, 115-16; and government, 62, 263, 491; and Indian policy, 453; and individualism, 485-7, 489-92; and Jacksonian democracy, 347-8, 350; linkage with other values, 26, 33, 130-1; and “manifest destiny,” 457, 537; and national security, 253-4; negative brand of, 263, 613; and order, 16, 19, 26-7, 34, 98-9, 109, 128-9, 130, 228, 350, 494, 597; and political parties, 372, 379; and property rights, 25, 26-7, 45, 131, 226, 228-9, 263, 268; protection of, through institutions, 34, 45, 59, 60, 209, 263, 268, 437; and public education, 502; in 1770s, as issue, 117; and slavery, 25, 40, 148-51, 263, 366, 387, 510, 520, 572-3, 587; threats to, 33-4, 125-33, 141, 215

Liberty party, 467-7· 521, 545, 553

libraries, 22, 110, 115, 396, 476, 482

Lieber, Francis, 546, 569

Lincoln, Abraham, 301, 411, 496, 555-6; on black equal rights, 584-7; debates with Douglas, 557, 581-7, 594; in election of 1860, 594-7, 600-1; Emancipation Proclamation, 625-8; habeas corpus suspended by, 615, 619; and preservation of Union, 604-5, 625; presidency of, 603-8, 612, 614-20, 622, 624-7; and Republican party, 561-2, 581-7, 605; and slavery issue, 556-9, 586-7, 590, 620, 624, 625

Lincoln, Gen. Benjamin, 71

Lincoln, Levi, 166, 177

Lincoln, Mary Todd (Mrs. Abraham), 555, 603, 608

literature, 112, 451, 517, 534, 588; of New England, 476-91

Little Turtle, Chief, 96-7

Livingston, Edward, 332

Livingston, Peter, 333

Livingston, Robert R., 56, 66, 153, 174-7, 192, 195, 277-8, 284, 286, 296-9, 301, 306-8, 310, 431

Livingston family, 81, 278, 296, 297, 370

local government, 74, 91, 439, 504, 514; and Alien and Sedition Acts, 131-3; and ratification of Constitution, 46-58

Locke, John, 28, 29, 100, 368

Log Cabin (campaign journal), 421

London, England, 400, 535, 536, 539

London Times, 235, 447, 539, 618

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 223, 545; Hiawatha, 588

Long Island, N.Y., 370, 528

Longstreet, James, 464

Louis XVI, King of France, 100

Louisiana, 244, 267, 282, 364, 597, 608

Louisiana Purchase, 174-8, 189, 207, 230, 242, 245, 299

Louisiana Territory, 172-5

Louis Philippe, King of France, 416, 467

Louisville, Ky., 180, 300, 302, 375, 450, 499, 515

Louisville Courier-Journal, 612

Louisville Journal, 515

Lovejoy, Elijah P., 518-19, 522

Lowell, Mass., 295, 307, 351, 395-400

Lowell, Francis Cabot, 276, 291-6, 306-7, 310-11, 437

Lowell, James Russell, 486, 521-2, 588; Bigelow Papers, The, 522

Lowell, John, 307

Lowell and Moody’s power

loom, 292

Lowell Courier, 399

Lowell family, 292, 307

Lowell Female

Labor Reform Association

(LFLRA), 399, 414

Lowell Offering, 396-7

lower class, 221, 407-10; in cities, 79, 355, 405, 509-10; education of, 111, 115, 407, 504, 506, 507, 509-11; and inegalitarianism, 357, 358, 359, 383-4; and newspapers, 512, 515, 516-17; poor whites, 409-10, 507, 530, 591, 592; voting by, 382, 409-10; see also poverty

Lowndes, William, 235, 328

Lucretius, 170

Lundy, Benjamin, 517

Lundy’s Lane, Battle of, 213

Lutherans, 497

Luther v. Borden, 466

Lyman, Samuel, 229

Lynd, Staughton, 411

Lynn, Mass., 75, 338, 534

Lyon, Matthew, 137-8, 154

Mably, Abbé Gabriel de, 59, 62

Macauley, Catharine, 59

Macdonough, Capt. Thomas, 213, 233

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 85

machines: interchangeable parts in, 216, 289, 290-1, 534; inventors of, 307, 429-30, 484; opposition to, 308, 360; see also agriculture: machinery and tools for; industry: machinery for; technology

Mackenzie, William Lyon, 446

Maclay, William, 69-70

Maclure, William, 441

Macon, Nathaniel, 208

Madariaga, Salvador de, 252

Madison, Dolley, 168, 204, 214

Madison, James, 16, 95, 101, 102, 121, 168, 172, 231, 238, 244-5, 247, 249, 256, 303, 325, 360, 414, 440, 452, 493, 619; in Congress, 68-9, 71, 89, 104, 137; and Constitution, 27-31, 33-9, 42, 44-6, 53-5, 57, 368; and economic policy, 84-6, 87-8; in election of 1808, 203-4, 227, 378; in election of 1812, 209-10, 211-12, 227, 378; and Jefferson, 28, 91-2, 203-4, 206, 208, 212, 255; and Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, 131-2, 134, 145; presidency of, 204-6, 211-12, 215, 235-7, 240-1, 260-1, 369-70, 428; and Republican party, 99, 107, 137, 138, 145, 147, 204, 236, 258, 269; as Secretary of State, 165-6, 167, 175, 183-4, 186-9, 95· 202-7 passim, 259, 203, 264; supports strong central government, 26, 30, 34-9, 44-6, 126, 140; theories of government of, 29-30, 45-6; on tyranny, 262-3; War of 1812, 204-15, 230, 234

Madrid, 538

magazines, 517

Maine, 5, 51, 217, 220-1, 230, 242, 295, 392, 478; boundary dispute, 447-8

majority rule, 36, 63, 160, 193, 349, 383, 422, 605; and suffrage restrictions, 20-1, 364; tyranny of, 30, 34, 54, 60-1, 119-20, 192, 262-3, 329, 357, 364; see also political parties: majority rule

Malonc, Dumas, 258

man: consciousness-raising of, 396-403, 412, 415, 491, 515, 521-2; natural rights of, 142, 263, 363, 571; and nature, 481-3, 487, 489; nature of, 29-30, 45-6, 109, 117-8, 215, 224-5, 479, 483; needs of, 21, 263; in society, 482, 489, 491-2; virtue in, 60, 62-3, 109, 118-19, 225, 272; see also society

Manassas Junction, 609-10, 616, 621, 622, 624

Manchester, England, 292, 439

Manchester, N.H., 295

“manifest destiny,” 457-8, 536-40

Mann, Horace, 396, 489, 505-8, 510

Manning, William, 139-40, 144, 502

Marblehead, Mass., 75, 218-19

Marbury, William, 186-9, 93

Marbury v. Madison (1803), 186-9, 193, 258, 262, 575

Marcy, William, 371-2, 536, 538-9, 540

Marines, U.S., 196, 464

marriage, 360, 361, 394-5, 400-3, 411, 568-9

Marshall, Christopher, 116

Marshall, James. 471, 534

Marshall, John, 43, 53-4, 121-3, 124, 125, 147, 154, 160-1, 210, 350, 433, 436, 607; as Chief Justice, 159, 183-9, 193, 202, 258-60, 301, 335, 381, 436, 575, 619

Marshall. Lynn L., 428

Martin, Luther, 36, 260

Martineau, Harriet, 354, 483

Marx, Karl, 444, 516, 553; Communist Manifesto, 416, 444, 467

Marx, Leo, 491

Maryland, 8, 52, 98, 216, 227, 267, 274, 439, 504, 562, 608, 620, 624

Mason, George, 29, 42-3, 53, 255

Mason, James M., 544, 618

Mason, John, 539

Massachusetts, 40, 49-52, 58, 73-6, 94, 201, 360-1, 392-3, 399-400, 433, 448, 465, 479, 502, 505-6, 540-2; industry in, 292-5, 373, 429-30, 476; politics in, 231, 239, 373-4, 465, 553; see also Boston; New England; Shays’s Rebellion

Matamoras, Mexico, 460

materialism, 228, 358, 536, 588

Matlack, Timothy, 116

Maysville, Ky., 331

Mazzini, Giuseppe, 416

McClellan, Gen. George, 463-4, 616-17, 621-2, 624, 626

McCormick. Cyrus, 430, 527, 534, 555

McCormick. Richard, 379

M’Culloch v. Maryland (1819), 259

McDowell, Gen. Irvin, 609-10

McDuffie, George. 336

McGready, James, 495

McGuffey, William Holmes, 527

McHenry, James, 121, 124, 146

McLane, Louis, 332, 338

McLean, Archibald, 44-5

McLean, John, 44-5, 341

McLeod, Alexander, 447

Mead, Sidney, 500

Meade, George Gordon, 464

Medill, Joseph, 514

Melville, Herman, 490-1, 517, 541, 588; Moby Dick, 476, 489, 491

Memphis, Tenn., 302, 616, 621

merchant marine, 536, 608

merchants, 14, 75, 112-16, 218-22, 224, 228, 230-1, 275-6, 291, 295-6, 339, 373, 432, 455, 534, 569, 589; see also trade and commerce

Merrimac (frigate), 622

Merryman, Lt. John, 619

Methodists, 7, 150, 257, 373, 393-4, 442, 474, 494-6, 497, 500

Metternich, Prince Klemens von, 251

Mexican War, 449, 460-4, 465, 468, 514-15, 536, 564

Mexico, 196-7, 454-5, 458-64; gains independence, 248-9, 445, 454

Mexico City, Mexico, 244, 454, 460-4

Miami Indians, 6, 96

Michigan, 207, 315, 450, 508-9, 530

middle class, 79, 82, 110-11, 114, 115, 318, 355-7, 363, 383, 400, 402-3, 407, 411, 414, 497, 510-11, 512, 518

Middlesex Mills, Lowell, 400

Milan, 416, 467 military establishment, 169, 195, 210, 236, 464, 623; in a republic, 215-16

Mill, John Stuart, 414

Miller, John, 153

Miller, Phineas, 275, 287

Mills, Caleb, 508

mining, 288-9, 408, 431, 433, 532, 534

Minnetaree Indians, 181

minorities: consciousness-raising in, 412, 415; psychological deprivation in, 411-12, 414, 416; in a republic, 20-1, 30, 54, 63, 98-9, 160, 165, 192, 262-3

Mississippi, 141, 173, 282-5, 315, 364, 392, 409-10, 452, 597

Mississippi River, 180, 206, 234, 284, 352, 532-3; trading on, 172, 174, 175, 245, 277, 296, 299-301, 310, 535

Missouri, 267, 321, 499, 515, 532, 608, 617, 620; slavery issue in, 242-3, 543, 550

Missouri Compromise (1820), 242-3, 328, 460, 543-6, 558, 575-8, 582, 598

Missouri River, 178, 179, 180-2, 296

Mitchell, Louise Pearson and Broadus, 307

Mobile, Ala., 285

Monitor, USS, 622

Monroe, James, 53, 55, 69, 120, 151, 173, 175-6, 189-90, 198, 203, 237-8, 255, 258, 378, 440, 493,consensual partyless government under, 239-42, 247, 254, 261, 370, 377, 378; in election of 1808, 203-4, 378; in election of 1816, 227, 238-9, 378; in election of 1820, 243, 264; Monroe Doctrine, 249-54, 540; presidency of, 239-5, 254-5, 261, 264, 265, 268, 269, 311; as Secretary of State and War, 206, 208, 214, 217, 235, 238, 245-7, 264; tour of 240, 241

Monterey, Calif., 455, 461, 472

Montesquieu, 28-9, 225, 368

Montreal, 208, 210, 212-13

Moody. Paul, 292, 293-4

Mooney, William, 82

Moore, Alfred, 185

Moore, Barrington, 411-12

Moore, Glover, 243

morality, 143-4, 225, 491, 498, and education, 502, 509-10; in foreign affairs, 195, 252-4; and the poor, 435

Moravians, 289-90, 439

Morgan, Edmund S., 257

Morgan, William, 334

Morgenthau, Hans, 254

Morison, Samuel Eliot, 219

Mormons, 499-500

Morris, Gouverneur, 35, 39, 54, 56, 71, 184

Morris, Robert, 31, 35, 54

Morse, Samuel Finley, 430-1

Morton, Louis, 256

Mott, Frank Luther, 514

Molt, James, 401

Mott, Lucretia, 400-2, 412, 414

Muhlenberg, Frederick, 104

Muir, John, 526

Murray, Lindley, 527

Naples, 172, 248-9

Napoleon I, Emperor, 153, 194, 203, 213, 232, 244, 271; and Louisiana Purchase, 172-7

Napoleonic wars, 172, 176, 194-5, 197-9, 204-6, 212, 216, 234, 251, 295, 445, 618

Nashville, Tenn., 299, 319, 321-2, 621

Nasson, Samuel, 51

Natchez, Miss., 197, 284-5, 300, 302

national character, see American national character

National Gazette, 90, 93

national security, 141, 203, 209, 215; and liberty, 253-4

nativism, 547-8, 553-4, 559, 560, 565, 594, 599

Naturalization Act (1798), 126, 127

natural resources, waste of, 485, 529-30

nature, 489, 491; Emerson on, 481-2, 489; and Thoreau, 485-7, 489

Navy, U.S., 124, 166, 196, 201, 215, 235; in Civil War, 615, 617-18, 621-2; in Mexican War, 461-3; in War of 1812, 210, 211, 212-14, 216, 233

Nebraska, 543-9, 556-9

Nedham, Marchamont, 118

Nelson, Adm. Horatio, 125, 195

Nevada, 464

Nevins, Allan, 526-7, 532, 560, 607

Newark, N.J., 129, 406

New Bedford, Mass., 220, 393, 541

Newburyport, Mass., 75, 220, 222

New England, 6, 24, 25, 71-6, 234, 240, 366, 392, 475, 485, 488, 497-8, 507, 540, 594; agriculture in, 72-3, 279-82, 410, 450, 529; commerce of, 201, 217-22, 230-1, 275, 455, 476; culture of, 476-92; industry in, 73, 75, 80, 269-70, 281, 291-5, 302; politics in, 266, 322, 323, 334, 336, 358, 380; port towns of, 218-23, 54; see also Boston; Federalist party

Newfoundland, 200, 234, 540

New Hampshire. 31, 52, 75, 220, 223, 231, 279-81, 295, 392, 399-400

New Harmony, Ind., 360, 440-1

New Haven, Conn., 72, 166-7, 216, 220, 275, 287-8, 351

New Haven theology, 498

New Jersey, 6, 29, 47, 98, 405, 406, 431, 504, 528; politics in. 147-8

New Jersey Plan, 36-7

New Lanark, Scotland, 360, 439

New London, Conn., 220

New Mexico, 460, 461, 464, 472

New Orleans, 141, 172, 173-4, 175, 197, 285, 299-302, 305, 310, 391, 450, 532-3, 535, 538, 621; Battle of, 231, 234, 320

newspapers: mercantile dailies, 511, 515; penny press, 512-18; see also press

New York City, 7, 28, 56-7, 76-83, 198, 234-5, 247, 273, 298, 304, 337, 339, 344, 354, 393, 403, 404-8, 415, 430, 433, 440, 469, 504, 509, 511, 512-14, 516, 534, 588; Dickens on, 351-2, 356; as federal capital, 66-7, 69, 76-7, 79, 82-3, 86, 110; as financial center, 77, 80, 86, 285-6, 506; politics in, 79, 107, 108, 309, 408, 436; as port city, 80, 275-6, 404-5, 528, 536; radical movements in, 359-60, 365, 410, 589; society and culture in, 78-83, 355, 406

New York Evening Post, 234-5, 528, 547

New York Herald, 406, 513, 515, 537

New York State, 6, 29, 53, 55-7, 72, 141, 288, 315, 364, 370, 402, 442, 465, 492, 500, 504; agriculture in, 278-9, 280, 286-7, 528-9; and Canadian rebellion, 446-7; Erie Canal, 302-4, 306, 310, 432; politics in, 79, 147-8, 210, 212, 227, 238, 266, 267, 321, 325, 334, 336, 343, 348, 358, 370-3, 380, 421-2, 437, 465, 468, 469, 553, 565, 603; steamboat monopoly in, 259, 297, 298, 301

New York Stock Exchange, 81, 588

New York Sun, 512-13

New York Times, 546, 610

New York Tribune, 443, 516-17, 530, 539, 547, 549, 570, 581, 604, 609, 612, 625

Niagara Falls, 213, 352, 446, 532

Nicholas, Cary, 260

Niles’ Weekly Register, 234, 246

Noah, Mordecai, 371

nominating conventions, 210, 230, 265, 333-4, 342, 380, 594; of 1860, 592-6; and sectionalism, 466, 469-70, 592-3, 599

Non-Intercourse Act (1809), 205, 291

North, the, 302, 305, 459, 465, 521, 531, 564, 574, 577, 578; agriculture in, 72, 141, 269, 275-7, 279-82, 286, 528-9, 608; black Americans in, 114, 142, 356, 362, 392-4, 406, 407, 408; and Civil War, 607, 608, 612, 617, 619, 620; and trade, 217-22, 275-6, 506; see also New England; sectionalism

North, Simeon, 289-90

North American Review, 436, 478, 517

Northampton, Mass., 220, 361

North Carolina, 86, 92, 227, 319, 409, 482, 507, 530, 608, 621

North Dakota, 180, 181

Northfield, Mass., 361

Northwest Ordinance of 1781, 96

Northwest Territory, 207, 233, 248, 454, 455, 504, 507, 526-8;agriculture in, 299, 301, 302, 526-8; Oregon boundary settlement, 457-9; transportation in, 277, 298-9, 531; see also West, the nullification, 140; and Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, 131, 134, 139, 145; Webster-Hayne debate on, 327-30; see also states’ rights: and nullification

Oberlin College, 400, 500

O’Brien, Father William, 78

Ogle, Charles, 421

Ohio, 141, 299, 315, 392, 405, 442, 449, 496, 511, 527, 529; politics in, 267, 358, 380, 435, 545

Ohio River, 94, 180, 197, 206, 277, 298, 299-302, 304-5

Oklahoma, 454, 514

Olmsted, Frederick Law, 564, 568

Oneida commune, 443

Onís y Gonzales, Don Luiz de, 246-8

Oregon, 182, 455; boundary settlement with Britain, 457-9, 468

Osgood, Samuel, 81

Ostend Manifesto, 539, 607

Otis, Elisha Graves, 534

Otis, Harrison Gray, 127, 218, 222, 231, 327

Otis, James. 58

Otis, Samuel. 71

Ottawa Indians, 96-7

Overton, John, 321-2

Ovid, 483

Owen, Robert, 396, 411, 414, 439-42, 444

Owen, Robert Dale, 360, 440, 503, 508

Pageot, Alphonse, 446

Paine, Robert Treat, 71

Paine, Thomas, 17, 91, 177, 226, 363; Common Sense, 117-18

painting and sculpture, 79, 112, 451, 476

Pakenham, Richard, 458

Palmerston, Lord, 447, 618

Panic: of 1819, 241-2, 374; of 1837, 343-4, 446; of 1857, 588-9

Paredes, Gen. Mariano, 460-1

Paris, 18, 22, 99-100, 416, 467, 539, 588

Parker, Capt. John, 482

Parker, Theodore, 482-3, 487, 546, 549

Parrington, Vernon, 477, 517-18

Parsons, Eli, 14

Parsons, Theophilus, 218

Panon, James, 324

Paterson, William, 36-7, 39-40, 185

patriotism, 144, 214-15, 502, 536-9

Patterson, Gen. Robert, 609

Paul, Sherman, 487

Paulus Hook, N.J., 29, 298

Pawtucket, R.I., 80, 292, 358

Peabody, Elizabeth, 483, 489

Peabody, Mary, 489

peace: in 1820s, 252-4; ideology of, 216

Peale, Charles W., 116-17

Pea Ridge, Ark., 621

Pears, Mrs. Thomas, 441-2

Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil, 249

Peel, Robert, 447

Pelham, William, 441

Peltason, J. W., 188

Pendleton, Edmund, 43, 53-4

Penn, William, 111, 113, 114.

Pennsylvania, 6, 25, 47-9, 84, 113, 114, 120, 280, 281, 288, 293, 299, 315, 408, 431, 442, 503-4, 528-530; canal system in, 304, 305, 352; Fries rebellion in, 146; politics in, 69, 108, 147, 212, 266, 325, 335, 336, 342, 358, 421, 553, 561-2, 594, 595, 597; radicals’ constitution in, 118-20, 226, 263 Whiskey Rebellion; in, 97-8

Peoria, Ill., 528, 555, 595

Perote, Mexico, 463

Perry, Comm. Matthew C., 542

Perry, Capt. Oliver Hazard, 212-13, 233

Pessen, Edward, 322, 354, 364

petition, right of, 58, 90

Phalansteries, 443

Philadelphia, Pa., 7, 22, 41, 65, 80, 110-20, 125, 129, 162, 163, 168, 179, 273, 275, 289, 293, 299, 304, 328, 337, 339, 350, 358, 359, 393, 400, 408, 410, 469, 499, 503, 514, 536, 559, 604; Dickens on, 352; as federal capital, 86, 87, 92, 96, 107, 110-12, 120; political radicals in, 116-20; society and culture in, 110-16, 355

Philadelphia Aurora, 108, 113, 128-9

Philadelphia Negro, The (DuBois), 114

Philadelphia Public Ledger, 514

Phillips, Anne (Mrs. Wendell), 519, 521

Phillips, Wendell, 519-21, 549, 590

Phillips Academy, Andover, 75-6

Pickens, Francis, 346, 606

Pickering, Timothy, 121, 124-5, 127-8, 146, 218, 230-1, 235, 240

Pierce, Franklin, 426-7, 475, 525, 540, 559, 563, 599· and Cuba, policy on, 537-9; and Kansas-Nebraska bill, 544, 545, 582-3

Pierce, John, 508-9

Pierce, William, 35

Pinckney, Charles, 35-7, 42, 61, 107, 152, 160-1, 328

Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth, 30-1, 35, 107, 120-3, 124, 152, 183, 203-4, 227

Pinckney, Thomas, 107-9

Pinkney, William, 198

Pittsburgh, 180, 299, 301-2, 304, 352, 440, 450, 558, 603, 604

Pius VII, Pope, 194

Pius IX, Pope, 467

Pletcher, David, 461

Plumer, William, 264

Plummer, Franklin, 409-10

Plymouth, Mass., 220, 479, 526

Poe, Edgar Allan, 223

Poland, 438

political parties, 343, 361; constitutions and development of, 367-70, 376-82; and issues, 135-40, 362, 377, 379, 380; of labor, 358-9, 361, 373, 503; leaders of 369, 373, 376-7, 379, 380, 428; and liberty, 372, 379; linkage with state and local parties, 374, 377, 380, 381, 466, 598; and majority rule, 139, 192-3, 368, 372-3, 381-2; opposition to, 91, 99, 108, 134-5, 145, 239, 269, 272, 368, 369, 379; origins of, 91, 134-40; and patronage, 137, 166, 185, 240, 266, 169, 379, 408, 549: third parties, 358-9, 412, 547-9, 553, 560, 599; two-party system, 105, 134-9, 241, 368, 369, 371, 372, 378, 379, 380, 381, 599-600; see also nominating conventions; presidential elections

political parties, local, 120, 169, 230, 265-6, 342, 347, 381, 548, 554, 558; leadership in, 137, 155, 379; linkagewith national party, 377, 380, 381, 466; origins of, 134-6, 374-6

political parties, state, 169, 229, 265, 548, 554; charters and development of, 369-78; leadership in, 137, 155, 379, 380: linkage with national party, 374, 377, 380, 381, 466, 598; origins of, 134-6

politics, 407-8, 428-9; defined, 320; equality in, 362-3, 378, 584; factionalism in, 91, 93, 239, 241, 261; grass-roots, 62-3, 118-19, 139-40, 210, 227-8, 229-30, 266, 309, 347, 349, 358, 451, 600; see also leadership: political

Polk, James K., 320, 344, 421, 468, 538; and “manifest destiny,” 457-8, 564; Mexican War, 460-4; presidency of, 426, 457-60, 614-15

Pomper, Gerald, 342

Pond, Charles F., 433

popular sovereignty, 544, 550, 577, 579-80, 584-5, 592

population, 7, 80, 120, 141, 291, 433, 511, 527, 553, 607-8; slave, 390

populism, 420, 422, 535

Portland. Me., 220, 222

Portsmouth, N.H., 75, 218, 220-1

Portugal, 244, 248

Potomac River, 172, 214, 277, 299, 304, 323; in Civil War, 609, 621

Pottawatomie Indians, 211

Potter, David. 553

Poughkeepsie, N.Y., 56-7, 218, 269, 433, 541

poverty, 114, 361, 411-12, 414, 434-5, 498; rural, 409-10; urban. 115, 125, 355, 405-9; see also lower class

power; balance of, 109, 117-18, 135, 225-6, 572, 598; and judicial review, 189, 193; private, and liberty, 131; in republics, 118-19, 225-6, 262; see also separation of powers

Pownall, Thomas, 3-4

Prague, 467

Presbyterians, 7, 78, 257, 494-5, 497

Prescott. William H., 478

Philip II, 588

President (presidency), 38, 70, 564; election of, 38, 61, 107-8, 229-30, 362, 372; strong, 346-7, 427, 598, 614-15, 619; veto power of, 38, 171, 262, 599-600; see also executive branch

presidential elections: campaigning in, 107, 147, 265-7, 419-22; cost of, 322; issues in, 320, 322, 333, 334-6; nomination by congressional caucus, 183, 204, 210, 212, 228, 238, 265, 369, 378; and political balance, 467; slander in, 151-2, 265, 323, 342, 421; see also nominating conventions

press, 44, 47, 50, 57, 90-1, 112-13, 243, 482, 499, 546-7, 576; freedom of, 19, 24-5, 42, 90-1, 125, 127, 130, 131, 372, 392, 511, 573; and politics, 80, 90-1, 108-9, 161, 171, 188-9, 190, 217, 223-4, 231, 246, 264, 322, 332, 358, 371, 374, 377, 421, 515; prosecutions of, under Sedition Act, 128-30, 139; see also newspapers

Price, Richard, 26

Priestley, Dr. Joseph 129, 164

Princeton University, 32, 257, 337., 567

prisons, 115, 351, 354, 356, 407, 467

property, right of, 39-40, 350, 360, 401, 402, 433, 556; and liberty, 25, 26-7, 45, 226, 228-9, 263, 268; vs. people, 347, 348, 354, 466; and suffrage, 363-4, 365

Prosser, Gabriel, 149-51

Protestants, 7-8, 81, 143, 244, 373, 407, 408, 493, 498, 500, 509; evangelical, 492, 494-7, 507; see also individual denominations

Providence, R.I., 220, 292, 302, 365

Provoost, Samuel, 78

Prussia, 172, 194, 213, 232

Pryor, Roger, 606

Public-Land Act (1800), 419

public lands, 344, 543; as campaign issue, 320, 333, 334; speculation in, 93-5: squatters on, 426, 451, 469, 550

public opinion, 123, 191, 253, 501; and abolitionists, 519-22

Punch, 537

Quakers (Friends), 24, 78, 111-17 passim, 50, 373, 412, 439, 482

Quids, see Republican party:

Quids

Quincy, Mass., 106, 228, 267, 430

Quincy, Josiah, 338

radical movements, 359-62, 365, 383-4, 412, 414, 502, 535, 589; see also reform movements

railroads, 304, 305, 309, 373, 408, 433, 437, 450, 484, 488, 492, 511, 517, 528, 543, 556, 589; in Civil War, 602, 608, 609-10; development of, 431-3, 436; expansion of, 531-2, 536, 553, 559, 583, 593; Thoreau on, 484-5

Raleigh Standard, 573

Randall, James, 615

Randolph, Edmund, 29, 30, 34-5, 38, 42, 53, 54-5, 71, 78, 88, 103-4

Randolph, John, 143, 186, 203, 205, 209, 236, 256, 258, 259-60, 267, 270, 324, 337, 364

Rantoul, Robert, 361

Rapine, Mary, 451

Rappites, 439-40

rebellion, 143, 248-50; assistance for, 253-4; Jefferson on 19, 162; potential, 384, 438; right to, 20-1, 252; see alsorepublic: opposition in

Red Jacket, Chief, 96-7

reform movements, 365, 372, 383-4, 394, 397-403, 436, 438-9, 467, 505-11; failure of leadership in, 412-16; lack of collaboration among, 414-16; and literature, 481-92; power in, 415-16; see also abolitionists; radical movements

Regulators, see Shays’s Rebellion

religion, 143-4, 409, 476, 492-501; and education, 497-8, 506, 507-9; freedom of, 7-8, 24, 55, 69, 89-90, 113, 130, 441, 479, 493, 500, 599; on frontier, 492-7; see also individual religions and denominations

Remington, Eliphalet, 534

Remini, Robert, 336

republic: checks and balances in, 17-18, 34, 118, 120, 134, 260-1, 262-3, 272, 372, 625; education in, 19, 109, 144, 501-2; experiments in government of, 21, 25-7, 28, 33-4, 63, 67, 133-4, 140, 164, 254, 260-1, 311, 597-8; judgment of American, 140-4, 197, 237, 261; leadership in, 21, 62-3, 84-5, 109, 131, 143, 144, 191, 262-3, 269, 600; military in, 215-16; opposition in, 20-1, 30, 98-9, 125-33, 134-5, 138-9, 145, 191-3; power in, 118-19, 225-6, 262; voting in, 20-1, 60; see also democracy; majority rule

Republican party, 557, 580-1, 599, 620; in Congress, 580, 605, 606; convention and election of 1860, 593-7, 600; election of 1856, 559-62; formation of, 549, 553; issues in, 593, 595, 605; slavery issue in, 558, 559, 560-1, 566, 591, 593-7, 602, 605, 626

Republican party (Jeffersonian), 99, 137, 173, 229-30, 322, 369, 377, 379; Alien and Sedition Acts opposed by, 127-33; in Congress, 122, 123, 136, 145, 161, 164-5, 169-72,, 183, 185-6, 202, 209, 210, 228, 235-7, 258, 322, 377, 378; in election of 1796, 107-9, 378; in election of 1800, 145-8, 151-5, 227, 230, 378; in election of 1804, 183, 227, 378; in election of 1808, 203-4, 227, 378; in election of 1812, 210, 227, 378; in election of 1816, 227, 238-9, 378; in election of 1824, 264-8, 378; in election of 1828, 322-3; in election of 1832, 331-6; factions in, 145, 154, 166, 185-6, 190-1, 202, 205, 236, 254, 258, 266, 322, 334, 377; and foreign affairs, 101-4, 121, 123, 125-6, 177, 200-1, 205-6; as majority, 164-5, 169, 183, 184, 188-9, 190-2, 229, 230, 243, 262-3; National, 323, 331, 333-6, 340-1, 347, 380, 420; Quids, 205, 208, 258, 259; state, 183, 190, 210, 265, 371, 377; view of liberty in, 109, 258; see also Jefferson, Thomas: and Republican party; Whig party

Revere, Paul, 110

revivalists, 492, 494-7, 500

Rhett, Robert Barnwell, 565, 601, 613-14

Rhode Island, 27, 31, 52, 92, 134, 216, 231, 466, 506; industry in, 288, 291-2, 293; suffrage reform in, 364-5, 392

rice, 274, 328-9, 450, 567, 568

Richmond, Va., 53, 197, 260; and Civil War, 608, 609, 621-2; slave uprising in, 148-51

Richmond Enquirer, 260, 515, 605

Ripley, Ezra, 481

Ripley, Sophia Willard Dana, 438, 443

Ritchie, Thomas, 260

Rittenhouse, David, 117

Rives, William Cabell, 345

roads, 8, 141, 220, 236, 240-1, 276-7, 286, 299, 305, 309, 315, 331, 450

Roane, Spencer, 260

Robinson, Donald, 40

Robinson, Frederick, 361

Rogin, Michael, 338

Roland, Charles, 613

Roosevelt, Isaac, 56

Roosevelt, Lydia (Mrs. Nicholas), 300

Roosevelt, Nicholas, 299-300

Ross, John, 453

Rossiter, Clinton, 32, 40

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 100

Royal Navy, see Great Britain

Rubin, Julius, 309

Ruffin, Edmund, 572, 606-7, 609

Rumsey, James, 277

rural areas, 409-10, 526-7; politics in, 47, 597, 614

Rush, Dr. Benjamin, 34, 43, 116, 119, 79

Rush, Richard, 246, 249, 269

Russell, Jonathan, 232-3

Russell, William, 618

Russia, 4, 194, 213, 216, 232, 249-50, 438, 557, 620

Rutledge, Edward, 43

Rutledge, John, 26, 35, 37-8, 39

Sacagawea, 181-2

St. Clair, Gen. Arthur, 96

Saint Domingue, 176; black uprising in, 49, 173-4

St. Louis, Mo., 178, 180, 182, 352, 499, 514, 518, 617; as port city, 302, 532-3, 535

St. Paul, Minn., 302

Saint-Simon, Comte de, 443

Salem, Mass., 75, 219, 221, 222, 338, 488-9

Salem, N.C., 289-90

Sanders, George, 536

San Felipe Telegraph and Texas Register,

San Francisco, Calif., 244, 471

San Martin, Jose de, 248

Santa Anna, Gen. Antonio Lopez de, 454-5, 462, 464

Santa Fe Republican, 515

Sault Ste. Marie Canal, 532

Savannah, Ga., 277, 388, 390-1

Say, Thomas, 441

Schlesinger, Arthur, 343

Schmidt, Louis, 309-10

schools, see education

Schouler, William, 399

Schurz, Carl, 549, 564, 595-6

Schuyler, Gen. Philip, 81, 433

Schuyler, Robert, 432-3

Scotch immigrants, 81, 126

Scott, Dred, 575-8

Scott, Sir Walter, 452, 477-8

Scott, Gen. Winfield, 213, 426, 446, 461-4, 469, 475, 525, 608

secession, 140, 201, 217, 261, 328, 598-602, 605; and election of 1860, 592-3, 596-7; and Essex Junto, 230; and Kentucky and Virginia resolutions, 131-2, 134, 139, 145; and ratification of Constitution, 56, 57; and slavery issue, 261, 329, 473, 591

sectionalism, 8; economic, 86, 270, 589, 598; and foreign affairs, 103-5, 209; leaders in, 331, 565, 570; political, 86, 104, 108, 127, 135, 320, 426, 427, 466, 468-71, 598-600; and slavery issue, 242-3, 329, 333, 346, 348-9, 459, 464-75, 540, 544-54, 570, 574-8, 591-7, 599, 602; Webster-Hayne debate on, 327-30

Sedgwick, Theodore, 20, 49, 231, 360

Sedition Act (1798), 126-33, 138, 139, 141; see also Alien and Sedition Acts

Seixas, Rabbi Gershom Mendes, 78, 81

Seminole Indians, 6, 245-6, 247, 332, 452

Senate: election to, 36-7, 61, 68, 362, 381; filibuster in, 466; Jackson censured by, 340, 346, 423; treaty ratifications in, 104, 177, 235, 248, 459; Webster-Hayne debate in, 327-30, 337; see also Congress, U.S.

Seneca Chief (canal boat), 303-4

Seneca Falls Convention, 401-2, 413-14

separation of powers, 120, 216; in Constitution, 36, 45, 61, 63, 120, 134-5, 168, 261-2, 368-9, 381, 598

Sequoyah, 453

Sewall, Samuel, 127, 218, 229

Seward, William H., 334, 342, 433, 509, 537, 550, 554, 565, 591, 593-6; as Secretary of State, 604, 618, 625-7

Shakers, 352-3, 439-40

Shattuck, Job, 14

Shaw, Lemuel, 436

Shawnee Indians, 6, 96-7, 207

Shays, Daniel, 14, 19-20, 51, 61, 185, 360, 365

Shays’s Rebellion, 13-15, 19-20, 25, 27, 33, 50-1, 61, 185, 360, 365; reactions to, 15-19, 97-8

Shepard, Gen. William, 19

Sherman, John, 607

Sherman, Roger, 36, 38, 42

Sherman, William T., 464, 610

Shiloh Church, Battle of, 621, 623

shipbuilding, 75

Shippen, Dr. William, Jr., 111, 113

Shreve, Henry M, 300

Sidney, Sir Philip, 100

Silliman, Benjamin, 431

Simms, William Gilmore, 572

Skidmore, Thomas, 360

Slater, Samuel, 80, 291-2, 293, 310

Slave, or The Memoirs of Archy Moore (Hildreth), 522

slavery, 7, 80, 114, 301, 362, 383, 385-92, 409, 410-2, 438, 563, 564, abolition of, 25, 114, 142, 350, 620, 625-8; and agriculture, 274, 275, 282-5, 286, 301, 302; brutalization in, 142-3, 149, 353, 384-5, 392, 574; and Compromise of 1850, 472-5, 522, 543; and Constitution, 39-40, 366, 465, 520; Dickens’s criticism of, 352, 353; extension of, 242-3, 459, 464-70, 557, 559, 578, 586; family life under, 388-91; fugitives from, 112, 245, 353, 388, 393, 394, 469-75, passim, 519, 522, 545, 549-50, 558, 605; and liberty, 25, 40, 148-51, 263, 366, 387, 510, 520, 572-3, 587; plantation life under, 10, 142-3, 149, 150, 385-92, 567-9; population growth under, 390; and religion, 149, 150, 386-7, 391-2, 494; southern defense of, 573-4; trade in, 40, 72, 141, 221, 253, 254, 352, 384-5, 388, 390-1, 448, 468, 472-3, 568, 574, 589, 601; uprisings against, 27, 148-51, 73-4, 329, 392, 394, 568, 570, 591, 626; see also abolitionists; Missouri Compromise; sectionalism: and slavery issue; South, the

Slidell, John, 460, 618

Smelser, Marshall, 162-3, 166-7

Smith, Adam, 86, 89

Smith, Caleb B., 605

Smith, James Morton, 132

Smith, Jedediah, 455

Smith, Jeremiah, 229

Smith, Joseph, 499

Smith, Gen. Kirby, 611

Smith, Melancton, 56

Smith, Robert, 205-6, 208

Smith, Samuel, 205

Smith, William, 111-12

societies: democratic, 98-9; political, 137; scientific, 111; secret, 334

society, 347, 357, 383, 438, 439; absence of conflict in (as theory), 434-5; agrarian, 7, 258, 347, 348, 415, 420, 438, 574; class distinctions in, 79, 113-16, 143, 221-2, 228-9, 348, 349, 354-7, 362, 434-5, 451, 498, 506, 510, 511; and individualism, 482, 489, 491-2; and technology, 484-5, 489-90, 491-2; urban, 78-83, 110-15, 415, see, also American national character; lower class; man; middle class; upper class; working class

Society of the Cincinnati, 82, 98

Sons of Liberty, 23, 49, 137, 185, 222

Soulé, Pierre, 538-9

South, the, 506-7, 514, 573; agriculture in, 141, 274-5, 276, 277, 282-7, 302, 309, 450-1, 529-30, 608; black Americans in, 392, 393, 409, 567-8; congressional influence of, 544-5; economic problems in, 150, 241-2, 274, 529-30, 533, 608; limitation of civil liberties in, 392, 573; politics in, 322, 325, 380, 381, 559, 560-2, 564, 576-8, 579-80, 592-3, 599; slavery issue in, 39, 242-3, 348-9, 465; solidity in, 591-2; tariff issue in, 261, 269-70, 328-9, 333, 337, 570; see also Confederate States of America; secession; sectionalism; slavery

South America, 244, 251-2; rebellions in, 245, 248-9, 252

South Carolina, 6, 7, 52, 92, 152, 227, 241, 261, 274, 307-9, 392, 395, 409, 529, 566-75; in Confederacy, 597, 601, 605-7, 614; ideology of liberty in, 571-3, 599; nullification proposed in, 329-30, 333, 336-7, 346, 569-70, 571; power elite of, 570-5

South Carolina College, 567, 569

Southwest, the, 275, 282, 287, 302, 454; see also Mexican War; Spain: Southwest possessions of

Southworth, Mrs. E. D. E. N., 517

Spain, 99-100, 172-5, 179, 195, 196-7, 248, 249, 250, 254; and Cuba, 537-9; and Latin America, 244, 248-9; negotiations with Adams, 245, 247-8; possession of Floridas, 7, 173-4, 176, 207, 244-8; Southwest possessions of, 4, 5, 7, 53, 95, 107, 124, 176, 216, 244-8, 445

Sparks, Jared, 448

speech, freedom of, 24-5, 55, 90, 91, 372, 511, 519; threats to, 125, 131, 226, 392· 573

Speed, Joshua, 557

Springfield, Ill., 555, 557, 583, 587, 595-6, 603

Springfield, Mass., 19-20, 73, 216, 220, 361, 432, 512, 515

Springfield Republican, 512, 515

Squatter, 313

sovereignty, see popular sovereignty

Stagg, John, 82

Stanton, Edwin. 620

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 400-2, 412

Staples, Sam, 486-7

Stark, Gen. John, 13

States, 68, 94; and Alien and SeditionActs, 131-3; banks, 236, 344-5; and (U.S.) Constitution, 90, 260, 262; constitutions of, 28, 60, 89, 134, 226, 261, 511; debts of, assumption of, 85; and education, 503-11; governments of, 28, 34, 45, 62-3, 74, 91, 120, 148, 439; internal improvements subsidized by, 307-9, 435, 505; and judicial review, 193, 577; militias of, 74, 201, 210, 214, 215, 236, 258, 358, 392, 446, 452, 453; ratify Constitution, 42-3, 46-59, 89-90, 104, 134, 428; and suffrage, 364; see also federalism

states’ rights, 231, 258, 259, 345-6, 348, 372; in Confederacy, 612-14; vs. federal government, 34-5, 36, 40, 74, 135, 136, 259-60, 261, 262, 447, 563-4, 569-73, 599, 605; Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, 132-3, 139, 162, 261; and Nullification, 329-31, 333, 335, 336-7, 346, 544; and popular sovereignty, 544, 550, 577, 579-80, 584-5; and Supreme Court, 466, 469, 575-8

steamboats, 41, 277, 296-302, 311, 433, 450; lake, 532; on Mississippi, 277, 296-7, 299-301, 532-3; monopolies in, 259, 297, 298, 299, 301, 431

steam locomotives, 429, 431-2, 484-5, 488

steam power, 275, 277, 287, 347, 489, 512

Stephens, Alexander H., 549, 565, 601, 603

Stephenson. George, 431

Stevens, John, 277, 297, 431

Stevens, Thaddeus, 334, 503-4, 615

Stevenson, Andrew, 268

Stiles, Ezra, 72

Stockbridge, Mass., 20, 360, 413

Stone, Barton W., 495

Stone, Gen. Charles, 620

Stone, Huldah, 399

Story, Joseph. 260, 328, 339, 436

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 522, 569, 588; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 522

Strong, Caleb, 35

Stuart, Gilbert, 112, 214

Suffolk Bank of Boston, 296

suffrage: broadened, 265, 364-6, 367, 374, 378, 392-3, 409, 498, 503; and equality, 362-3; limited, 21, 59, 226, 349, 350, 362-5, 377, 392, 399, 415; and women, 148, 400, 401-2

Sumner, Charles, 545, 551-2, 554, 558,

Supreme Court, 38-9, 70, 187-8, 193, 259, 261, 453, 466, 469, 564, 575-8; Dred Scott decision, 575-8, 582, 585, 619; and judicial review, 187-9, 193, 262, 577; under Marshall, 184-9, 193, 202, 258-60, 301, 335, 381, 436, 575; and supremacy of federal government, 259, 335

Sutter, John Augustus, 456-7, 471, 475

Swedenborg, Emanuel, 481

Swell, Leonard, 595

Swift, Jonathan, 112

Talleyrand, 121-2, 123, 124, 128, 174, 76, 195

Tallmadge, James, 242

Talmadge, Nathaniel P., 345

Tammany Hall, 81-2, 108, 136, 147, 246, 303, 309, 408

Taney, Roger B., 332, 339, 466, 575-7, 582-3, 605, 619

Tappan, Lewis, 520

Tariff, 84, 426; of Abominations (1828), 269-70, 320, 329; as political issue, 320, 333, 334, 336, 375, 435, 457, 599; see also industry: tariffs for; South: tariff issue in taxation: for education, 504, 505, 508, 509; property, 146, 358; and Shays’s Rebellion, 13-14, 18; on whiskey, 93, 97-9

Taylor, John, 51, 132, 258

Taylor, John W., 242, 268

Taylor, Nathaniel, 497

Taylor, Zachary, 460-2, 564; election and presidency of, 426, 469-70, 472, 473-4, 540

technology, 484-5, 489-90, 491-2, 512, 513; see also machines

Tecumseh, 207, 211-13, 216, 342

telegraph, 430-1, 511, 513-14

temperance movement, 360, 361, 400, 414, 467, 558, 599

Tennessee, 216, 315, 360, 366-7, 496, 529-30, 602, 608, 616, 621; politics in, 173, 266, 319, 321, 341

Terry, Eli, 290

Texas, 472, 530, 597, 608; annexation of, 459-60, 464, 468; under Mexico, 454-5, 459-64; under Spain, 176, 246, 248, 249-50

textile industry, 73, 75, 80, 276, 291-6, 311, 373, 396, 408-9, 437, 489; English, 200, 275, 282, 285-6, 291-2, 293, 439; labor in, 75, 89, 281, 288, 292-5, 351, 358, 395-400, 434, 589; machinery for, 282, 291-3, 295, 396, 534; paternalism in, 294-5, 396-8

Thayer, John, 9

theater, 79, 112, 356, 516

Thomas, Jesse B., 242

Thomas, Seth, 290

Thomson, Charles, 64

Thoreau, Henry, 484-7, 491, 517, 522, 590; and civil disobedience, 486-7; “Excursions on Concord & Merrimack Rivers,” 487; and the railroad, 484-5; Walden, 476, 487, 491, 588

Throop, Enos, 372

Ticknor, George, 478, 481

Ticknor, William D., 534

Tiffany, Charles L., 534, 588

Tippecanoe, attack at, 207, 211

tobacco, 8, 256, 264, 274, 276, 282, 529-30, 589

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 354-8, 384, 449-50, 493

Tolstoi, Count Leo, 486; War and Peace, 194, 608

Tories, 16, 23, 58, 218, 439

Toronto (York), 213

Toussaint L’Ouvenure, General, 173-4

towns, 7, 218-23, 430, 541

trade and commerce, 125, 195, 216-22, 225, 275-6, 361, 455, 457, 506; attacks on U.S. ships, 102, 121, 123, 124, 205-6, 208, 291, 445; effect of Embargo Act on, 200-1; expansion of, 80, 141, 179, 251, 275, 534, 535, 587; foreign. 216, 276, 535-6, 542, 587-8; internal, 141, 277, 286, 299-302, 309-10, 432, 450, 536; during Napoleonic wars, 198-9, 205-7, 295; triangular, 113-14, 309-10; and War of 1812, 205-7, 208, 218, 230; see also Mississippi River: trading on; tariff

Transcendentalists, 468, 481, 482-3

transportation, 89, 296-305, 308, 533, 564; for food market, 276-7, 285, 286, 287, 299, 301, 528; for migrants, 315-17, 449-50

Travis, Col. Buck, 454-5

Travis, Joseph, 391-2

treason, 202, 336

Treaty of Ghent (1814), 231-5

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), 464

Trenton, N.J., 65, 406

Trescot, William Henry, 574

Tripoli, 195-6, 236

Trist, Nicholas P., 463-4

Trollope, Frances, 317, 353

Troup, George, 330

Troy Female Seminary, 400

True American (newspaper), 573

Truth, Sojourner, 410-13

Tucker, Ellen, 481

Tucker, George, 241

Tucker, Nathaniel Beverly, 572

Tudor, Frederic, 394, 429

Tunis, 195, 236

Turgol, Anne Robert Jacques, 17

Turner, Benjamin, 391

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 197

Turner, Nat, 391-2

Twelfth Amendment, 229

Tyler, John, 53, 419, 422; bank proposal of, 424-5; presidency of, 422-6; states’ rights endorsed by, 423, 424-6; and Texas annexation, 459-60

Ulm, Battle of, 194-5

Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 522

Underground Railroad, 393

unemployment, 344, 406, 446, 589

Union, the: dissolved, 597, 607; efforts to preserve, 327-30, 472-5, 525-6, 596-7, 600, 615; Lincoln on, 562, 582, 587, 604-5, 625

Union Army, 607, 614-17, 619-25, 628; in battle, 605-7, 609-12, 621-2, 624, 626; of the Potomac, 617, 621-2; strategy of, 608, 615-16

Unitarians, 373, 468, 477, 479, 481, 482-3, 498, 506

United States Bank, 86-8, 261, 344; First, 137, 168, 335; Second, 236-7, 240, 241-2, 259, 335, 361, 374, 445, 466; see also Jackson, Andrew: and United States Bank

United States Military Academy, West Point, 213, 215, 464, 623

United States Patent Office, 530, 533, 563

University of Virginia, 255, 273

upper class, 223-4, 255-7, 362, 400, 434, 450, 497; in cities, 78-9, 81, 110-16 passim, 222, 355-7, 406, 409; and education, 503-5; influence of, 348, 383; and politics, 370-4, 377, 378, 497-8, 435-7

Upshur, Abel P., 424, 459

urbanization, 355, 438, 511, 517-18, 599; see also cities

Ursuline Convent,

Charlestown, 497

Utah, 464, 500 Utica, NY., 303, 470

Van Buren, John, 470

Van Buren, Martin, 212, 238, 268-70, 331,, 335, 338-9, 341, 358, 375, 446; and Democratic party, formation of, 322; in election of 1836, 341-2; in election of 1840, 421-2; Independent Treasury Act, 344-6, 424, 426; and Jackson, 266, 321, 322, 324, 346, 459; and politics, 347, 349, 350, 371-2, 379-80; presidency of, 343-6, 381; as Secretary of State, 325-32 passim; and slavery issue, 469-70; as vice-president, 333, 334, 337, 338, 380

Vancouver, George, 458

Van Deusen, Glyndon, 426, 435

Van Hagen, Peter, 79

Van Rensselaer, Rensselaer, 446

Van Rensselaer, Stephen, 267

Venice, 416, 467

Veracruz, Mexico, 461-3

Vermont, 92, 223, 231, 280, 392; and Canadian rebellion, 446

Vesey, Denmark, 329, 568, 570

Vice-President (vice-presidency), 68, 107, 229-30, 334

Vicksburg, Miss., 302, 601, 621

Victoria, Queen of England, 619

Vienna, 194, 416, 467

Virginia, 24, 94, 98, 151, 159, 163, 173, 176, 274, 364, 390, 391-2, 409, 530, 602, 604, 606, 608, 621; and Constitution, 28-9, 31, 34-5, 36-7, 53-5, 57; “dynasty,” 162, 210, 217, 238-9, 240, 255-64; politics in, 68, 227, 257-60, 266, 321, 348; society and culture of, 255-7, 263-4, 482

Virginia Plan, 34-5, 36-7

Virginia resolution, 132-3, 134, 139, 145, 162, 261

Voltaire, François Marie Arouet de, 100

voting, 120, 362, 365, 377, 382, 421-2; in a republic, 20-1, 33, 60, 362

Wabash College, 508

Wade, Benjamin F., 545, 620

Wade, Richard, 356 Wadsworth, Colonel, 73

Waggoner, Madeline Sadler, 316

wagon trains, 456

Walden Pond, 480, 481, 484, 485-7, 491

Walker, Robert J., 579

Walker, William, 540

Walsh, Mike, 408, 412

Walter, Lynde and Cornelia, 512

Waltham mills, 240, 292-3, 295, 437

Walton, Isaak, 487

Ward, Artemus, 626

War Department, 460-1, 617, 620

Ware, Dr. Henry, 222

Warner, Sam Bass, Jr., 115

Warner, Susan, 517

War of 1812, 234-5, 237-8, 291, 328, 377, 452, 461, 488, 493; battles of, 210-15, 216-17, 233; events leading up to, 204-9, Napoleon’s defeat, effect of, on, 213, 214, 216: negotiations to end, 215, 217, 231-5; see also Federalist party: antiwar position in

Warren, James, 49, 51, 58, 71

Warren, Mercy, 56-61, passim, 71, 118, 271

Washington, DC, 86, 110, 431, 514; British raid on, 214, 233; during Civil War, 608, 609, 614; Dickens on, 352; as federal capital, 159, 168, 180, 270, 272-3, 321, 563-6

Washington, Bushrod, 71, 185

Washington, George, 15, 26, 65-7, 92-3, 112, 124, 125, 127, 133, 142-3, 147, 227, 255, 306, 334, 419, 607; and Constitution, 28-9, 31, 42, 44, 52-7 passim, 368; criticism of, 108-9, 122; and economic policy, 85, 86-8; elected to presidency, 64-7; Farewell Address of, 107, 108, 134, 143, 249, 501; and foreign affairs, 100-4, 120, 249, 254; as model for revolutionaries, 151, 249; at Mount Vernon, 64, 133-4, 423; in New York, 76-9, 81, 83; political parties, opposed to, 91, 99, 108, 134, 368; presidency of, 38, 67-76, 77-8, 83-109 passim, 135, 137, 154, 162-8 passim, 215, 260, 261, 369, 377, 428; reaction of, to Shays’s Rebellion, 15-16, 97-8; tours of, 71-6, 92, 93; and Whiskey Rebellion, 97-9

Washington, Martha, 69, 76, 92-3, 122, 133, 168

Washington Globe, 326, 332, 515

Washington National Intelligencer, 159, 176, 208, 515, 535

water power, 288, 292, 293-4, 295

Watson, Elkanah, 302-3, 308

Watt, James, 297, 300

Wayne, Gen. Anthony, 97-8

wealth, 25, 588; unequal distribution of, 115, 355-7, 360, 361

Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 86, 89

Webster, Daniel, 235, 267-8, 270, 324, 332, 335, 339, 345, 358, 373-4, 427, 430, 437, 466, 525-6, 587; and Compromise of 1850, 472-5; debate with Calhoun, 337; debate with Hayne, 327-30, 337; presidential ambitions of, 331, 334, 339, 341; as Secretary of State, 423, 425, 426, 447-8, 458, 459, 474, 525, 531

Webster, Noah, 527

Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842), 448

Weed, Thurlow, 334, 437, 560, 565, 595

Weld, Theodore Dwight, 366, 412-13, 500

Welland Canal, 450, 532

Welles, Gideon, 604, 617-18, 626

Wellington, Duke of, 233-4

Welter, Rush, 502

Wentworth, John, 514

Wesley, John, 495

West, the, 3-5, 53, 141, 173-4, 207, 232, 240, 246, 445, 450, 457, 492, 494-7, 507-8, 514-15, 589, 599; agriculture in, 141, 277, 286, 309, 451; Burr’s conspiracy in, 196-7; Civil War in, 616, 617, 621, 622; class distinctions in, 356, 451; economic problems in, 241-2, 451; land speculation in, 93-5; Lewis and Clark expedition, 178-83; nationalists in 347, 348-9; politics in, 173, 266, 381, 451, 566; and War of 1812, 206-9; see also frontier, the; Northwest Territory; Southwest, the

Westchester County, NY., 370, 528

West Indies, French, 102, 103-4, 121, 125, 173-4, 198, 200, 446

West Virginia, 616

whaling industry, 540-2

Whig party, 336, 344-5, 373, 380, 435-7, 457, 459, 462, 466-7, 505, 509-10, 515, 538; and classlessness, doctrine of, 434-5; in Congress, 423-6, 427, 461, 526; decline of, 426-8, 433, 525, 599; economic nationalism of, 423, 427, 433-7; in election of 1836, 341-2; in election of 1840, 419-22; in election of 1848, 468-70; in election of 1856, 559-62; factions in, 341, 423-8, 437, 468-71, 545, 548-9, 553-4; formed against Jackson, 341, 427, 437; lack of political philosophy in, 349, 381; leadership in, 341, 422, 427-8, 433, 437, 554; liberty, view of, 347, 350, 525; and patronage, 422, 427, 437; populist strategy of, 420, 422; slavery issue in, 465, 467, 468-71, 473, 556-8, 580, 585-6; and states’ rights, 423, 424-6, 427

Whiskey Rebellion, 97-9, 137, 162

White, Horace, 546

White, Hugh Lawson, 341-2

Whitehill, Robert, 48-9

Whitman, Walt, 360, 517, 588, 614; Leaves of Grass, 588

Whitney, Eli, 306; armaments

manufacture, 216, 287-8, 289, 290-1; cotton gin, 274-5, 387, 308, 311, 429, 567.

Whittier, John Greenleaf, 223, 501, 522

Wiley, Calvin, 505, 507

Wilkes, Capt. Charles, 618

Wilkinson, James, 95, 196-7

Willard, Emma, 400

Willard, Solomon, 430

William and Mary College, 32, 257, 422

Williams, Rose, 388-90

Williams, William Appleman, 236

Wilmot, David, 464-5

Wilmot Proviso, 464, 469, 557

Wilson, James, 35, 37-9, 42, 48-9

Wiltse, Charles, 571

Winthrop, Robert C, 471, 545-6

Wirt, William, 260, 334

Wisconsin, 315, 452, 526, 528, 531, 576

Wise, Henry A„ 424, 590

Wisner, George, 512

Wolcott, Oliver, 121, 146, 287

Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 483

women, 142, 146, 149, 150, 483, 507-8, 517, 534; education of, 76, 111, 115, 400, 401, 476, 569; on farms, 394-5; inequality of, 58-9, 81, 110, 143, 257, 263, 264, 356, 360, 362, 365, 383, 394-403, 410-11, 434, 467, 519, 535, 572, 597; in labor force, 75, 89, 114, 281, 288, 293, 294-5, 351, 358, 395-400, 401, 406, 414, 434, 489, 535; leaders, 398-403, 412-13, 415; marriage and families of, 394-5, 400-3, 411-13, 568-9; political action by, 399-400; radical movements for, 360, 361; rising consciousness of, 396-403; and suffrage, 148, 400, 401-2

Wood, Gordon, 26, 225

Wood, Jethro, 286

Woodbury, Levi, 327, 332

Woolman, John, 527

Worcester, Mass., 73, 401, 432, 549, 550

Wordsworth, William, 478, 481

working class, 82, 114-15, 356, 360, 361-2, 363, 381, 403, 434-5; 436, 503, 510; see also labor

Working Men’s Party, 358, 503

Wright, Benjamin, 303

Wright, Frances, 360, 366-7, 404, 412, 444-5, 517

Wright, Silas, 344, 371

Wyeth, Nathan Jarvis, 429

Wyler, Pvt. Edwin, 609

Wythe, George, 255

XYZ Correspondence, 123

Yale College, 32, 72, 74, 161, 167, 257, 431, 492, 497, 506, 567

Yancey, William Lowndes, 572, 601-2

Yarbrough, Jean, 63

Yates, Robert, 44

Yazoo land fraud, 259-60

Young, Brigham, 499-500,

Young, Thomas, 117

Young America, 536-9

Yusuf, Pasha, 196

Zenger, Peter, 24

Zinn, Howard, 5

PERMISSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE FOLLOWING ILLUSTRATIONS HAVE been reproduced with the kind permission of the institutions indicated:

[FRONT ENDPAPER] Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society: “Spooler and Stand,” advertisement for E. C. Cleaveland & Co. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society: The New-York Packet, April 7, 1789; The New-York Packet, Federalist #51, February 8, 1788; View of boats navigating the Mohawk; View from Rushonga Tavern, 5 miles from Yorktown on the Baltimore Road. Courtesy of the New York Public Library: American Log-House, 1826 (Rare Books & Manuscripts Division); Federal Hall, 1790 (Phelps-Stokes Collection of American Historical Prints); “Join, or Die,” Pennsylvania Gazette, May 9, 1754 (Rare Books & Manuscripts Division); “Mad Tom in a Rage” (Prints Division); Map of the United States in 1783 (Map Division); Map of Kentucky in 1784 (Map Division); Second Street North from Market Street, Philadelphia (Phelps-Stokes Collection); Se-Quo-Yah (Rare Books and Manuscripts Division).

[BACK ENDPAPER] Courtesy of John Deere & Co.: Advertisement for Centre-Draft Plow. Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society: Advertisement for Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Charleston Mercury Extra: “Union Dissolved”; Clipper Ship Flying Cloud; Group of Workmen on the Union Pacific Railroad; “Ho! for the Gold Mines!”; Principal Street of San Francisco. Courtesy of the New York Public Library: “Am I not a man and a brother?” (Prints Division); Clinton Line Barge (Prints Division); Kansas City, 1853 (Phelps-Stokes Collection); The Modern Balaam and His Ass, 1837 (Prints Division). Courtesy of the Worcester Art Museum: “Conquering Prejudice, Fulfilling a Constitutional Duty with Alacrity.”

The endpapers were designed and executed by Deborah Burns and Sara Reynolds.

[PART TITLE ILLUSTRATIONS] Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society: “Spooler and Stand,” advertisement for E. C. Cleaveland & Co. Courtesy of the Bettmann Archive, Inc.: “Am I not a woman and a sister?,” Garrison’s Liberator, 1849; The Modern Balaam and His Ass, 1837, Courtesy of John Deere & Co.: Advertisement for Centre-Draft Plow. Courtesy of the New York Public Library: Federal Hall, 1790 (Phelps-Stokes Collection).

The map of the United States in 1783 that follows page 10 is reproduced with the kind permission of the New York Public Library. The map of the United States in 1857 by J. H. Young, Philadelphia, that follows page 416 is reproduced with the kind permission of the Newberry Library, Chicago.

The Workshop of Democracy

The American Experiment, Volume II

By James MacGregor Burns

For Kurt Tauber and my other Williams College colleagues who teach in the tradition of Mark Hopkins and Robert L. Gaudino

Contents

PART I • The Crisis of Democracy

CHAPTER 1 The War of Liberation

MANNING THE FRONT

FORGING THE SWORD

THE SOCIETY OF THE BATTLEFIELD

“LET US DIE TO MAKE MEN FREE”

CHAPTER 2 The Reconstruction of Slavery

BOUND FOR FREEDOM

A REVOLUTIONARY EXPERIMENT

“I’SE FREE. AIN’T WUF NUFFIN”

PART II • The Business of Democracy

CHAPTER 3 The Forces of Production

INNOVATORS: THE INGENIOUS YANKEES

INVESTORS: EASTERN DOLLARS AND WESTERN RISKS

ENTREPRENEURS: THE CALIFORNIANS

INDUSTRIALISTS: CARNEGIE, ROCKEFELLER, AND THE TWO CAPITALISMS

PHILADELPHIA 1876: THE PROUD EXHIBITORS

CHAPTER 4 The Structure of Classes

UPPER CLASSES: THE NEW RICH AND THE OLD

THE MIDDLE CLASSES: A WOMAN’S WORK

THE FARMER’S LOT

WORKING CLASSES: THE CONDITIONS OF EXISTENCE

SOCIAL CLASS AND SOCIAL OUTCAST

CHAPTER 5 The Power of Ideas

DINNER AT DELMONICO’S

THE BITCH-GODDESS SUCCESS

“TOILING MILLIONS NOW ARE WAKING”

THE ALLIANCE: A DEMOCRACY OF LEADERS

CHAPTER 6 The Brokers of Politics

THE OHIOANS: LEADERS AS BROKERS

POLITICS: THE DANCE OF THE ROPEWALKERS

THE POVERTY OF POLICY

SHOWDOWN 1896

TRIUMPHANT REPUBLICANISM

PART III • Progressive Democracy?

CHAPTER 7 The Urban Progressives

THE SHAPE OF THE CITY

THE LIFE OF THE CITY

THE LEADERS OF THE CITY

THE REFORMATION OF THE CITIES

WOMEN: THE PROGRESSIVE CADRE

CHAPTER 8 The Modernizing Mind

THE PULSE OF THE MACHINE

THE CRITICS: IDEAS VS. INTERESTS?

ART: “ALL THAT IS HOLY IS PROFANED”

WRITING: “VENERABLE IDEAS ARE SWEPT AWAY”

“ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR”

CHAPTER 9 The Reformation of Economic Power

THE PERSONAL USES OF POWER

FOREIGN POLICY WITH THE TR BRAND

REFORM: LEADERSHIP AND POWER

CHAPTER 10 The Cauldron of Leadership

TAFT, TR, AND THE TWO REPUBLICAN PARTIES

WILSON AND THE THREE DEMOCRATIC PARTIES

ARMAGEDDON

PART IV • Democracy on Trial

CHAPTER 11 The New Freedom

THE ENGINE OF DEMOCRACY

THE ANATOMY OF PROTEST

MARKETS, MORALITY, AND THE “STAR OF EMPIRE”

CHAPTER 12 Over There

WILSON AND THE ROAD TO WAR

MOBILIZING THE WORKSHOP

“NOUS VOILÀ, LAFAYETTE!”

OVER HERE: LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY

CHAPTER 13 The Fight for the League

THE MIRRORED HALLS OF VERSAILLES

THE BATTLE FOR THE TREATY

1920: THE GREAT AND SOLEMN REJECTION

PART V • The Culture of Democracy

CHAPTER 14 The Age of Mellon

“THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA …”

BANKERS AND BATTLESHIPS

THE VOICES OF PROTEST

CHAPTER 15 The Commercialized Culture

THE WORKSHOP OF EDUCATION

THE PRESS AS ENTERTAINMENT

ENTERTAINMENT AS SPECTATORSHIP

THE WORKSHOP AND THE DEMOS

CHAPTER 16 The Vacant Workshop

LIFE IN THE DEPRESSION

THE CRISIS OF IDEAS

“ONCE I BUILT A RAILROAD, MADE IT RUN”

NOTES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Here, then, was the explanation of her restlessness, discontent, ambition,—call it what you will. It was the feeling of a passenger on an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he has been in the engine-room and talked with the engineer. She wanted to see with her own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government. She cared little where her pursuit might lead her.…

Democracy, by Henry Adams

I have seen America spread out from th’ Atlantic to th’ Pacific, with a branch office iv th’ Standard Ile Comp’ny in ivry hamlet. I’ve seen the shackles dropped fr’m the slave, so’s he cud be lynched in Ohio … an’ Corbett beat Sullivan, an’ Fitz beat Corbett…. An’ th’ invintions … th’ cotton-gin an’ the gin sour an th’ bicycle an’ the flyin’-machine an’ th’ nickel-in-th’-slot machine an’ th’ Croker machine an’ th’ sody-fountain an’—crownin’ wurruk iv our civilization—th’ cash raygister.

Mr. Dooley, 1897

PART I

The Crisis of Democracy

CHAPTER 1

The War of Liberation

BELCHING CLOUDS OF STEAM and hazy blue smoke, the stubby little locomotive chugged along the iron rails that wove through the low Allegheny Mountains. While the fireman heaved chunks of walnut and cherry into the roaring firebox, the engineer looked out through his narrow window past the small boiler, the polished brass fittings, the stovepipe-shaped smokestack, watching for the village stations along the way: Relay House, Lutherville, Timonium…. In a rear coach sat Abraham Lincoln, regaling cronies with droll stories and listening imperturbably to politicians who climbed aboard to exhort and complain, while a little party of diplomats silently watched this loose-framed man who, with his seamed face, deep-sunk eyes, and rough cut of a beard, appeared in mourning even as he told his small-town anecdotes.

Love’s Station, New Freedom, Jefferson Station, Hanover Junction …“This is all very pleasant,” Lincoln told his listeners, but he had to work on his speech. Retiring to a closed drawing room in the rear of the coach, he sat watching the red-brown mountain slopes and hollows slip by his window. He could see farmers still harvesting grain in the lush Pennsylvania fields. Few young men were visible; these farmers and their fellows all across the North had seen their sons off to war. Lincoln could share their feelings: a year before, his own Willie had sickened and died, while he just now had left his second son, Tad, ill in the White House with Mrs. Lincoln almost hysterical with worry and memories.

That morning—November 18, 1863—the President had left a capital deeply enmeshed in the business of war. At the War Department, Secretary Edwin M. Stanton was following telegraphed reports from the Union forces in Virginia, which were cautiously advancing, and from those in Tennessee, which were readying an attack. The Ordnance Bureau announced that it would accept bids for the manufacture of 71,000 heavy-artillery shells. Navy Secretary Gideon Welles was working on his annual report to Congress. Chief John Ross, whose Cherokee tribe had been exiled for a quarter century in Oklahoma, visited the Indian Bureau with reports and petitions. The Treasury Department announced the next issue of new national banknotes, this time with better printing and paper. The President himself had just proclaimed a place in the city of Omaha as the starting point for the Union Pacific Railway.

Now, in the swaying compartment of the presidential train, Lincoln scratched some more words on a sheet of foolscap. He was bound for Gettysburg, the battlefield where 40,000 Northern and Southern men had been lost to death or wounds less than five months before. He had not much looked forward to the occasion, had found it difficult to compose his thoughts, and his Cabinet had not been keen to accompany him. Secretary of State Seward had come; Treasury Secretary Chase, who was being talked up as Lincoln’s likely antagonist in the 1864 election, remained in Washington. People seemed to be playing old-fashioned politics and economics in this dire crisis.

Had Americans become so engrossed in the everyday business of running the war, the mechanics of war, that they had forgotten the goals? Had they lost sight of the values that were being tested, of the purpose of the great experiment that Washington and Hamilton and Jefferson had launched eighty-seven years before? Forced like the Founding Fathers to play politics, Lincoln would transcend the routine play of the political game. Confronted at a cemetery by common people who had lost fathers and brothers, sons and husbands, he would ask them to renew the American experiment in liberty and equality. Asked to dedicate a battlefield, he would reconsecrate a nation.

It was dusk when the presidential special pulled into Gettysburg, which already was overflowing with thousands of visitors. Lincoln and his party were driven to the home of Judge Wills, where they met up with Edward Everett, who was to give the main address. Everett was everything Lincoln was not: a Harvard graduate, governor of Massachusetts, Minister to the Court of St. James’s, president of Harvard, senator from Massachusetts, and a member of Boston’s social elite. He was also not President, having run on the tail end of John Bell’s Constitutional Union ticket in 1860. Now he was best known as probably the most brilliant of Union orators. After chatting with Everett and the other distinguished guests, Lincoln retired, only to be summoned to his window by revelers who wanted a speech. Lincoln offered a few words so self-deprecating that the grumbling crowd headed off in search of Seward to coax a few purple passages from him. Lincoln meantime resumed copying the second draft of his closing sentences.

Next morning, what was to be a grand parade of pomp and pageantry turned into a struggling procession of democracy. Lincoln, dressed in black and wearing a tall hat and white gauntlets, his huge frame draped over a little horse, led the procession, behind blue-clad soldiers; soon he was slouched down, sometimes shaking the hands that were extended to him, at other times appearing to be lost in thought. Then came politicians, dignitaries, religious committees, telegraph men, a hospital corps, Knights Templar, Masons, Odd-Fellows, literary and scientific representatives, the press, firemen, and citizens. Soldiers with bandages and crutches limped alongside. After an hour the bloated and disorganized column had wound its way uphill to the cemetery. Then there was more confusion when Everett could not be found. While bands played, Lincoln waited patiently and people milled about. Everett finally showed up, the meeting started, the invocation was offered. Then America’s most respected orator rose.

With rolling periods and many a classical allusion, Everett re-created the drama of the three-day battle. He could see the battlefield itself over his listeners’ heads. There ahead, on that fateful July morning, in the distance, Union cavalry on Seminary Ridge had begun the fighting. A little closer lay the town itself, through whose twisting streets the blue-clad infantry had fled as the first day’s fighting ended. A sweep of Everett’s left arm took in the Peach Orchard, where reinforcements in blue and gray had clashed on the second day. There, on the slopes of Little Round Top, boys from Maine and Alabama had rushed up to club one another. There, amidst the rocks of Devil’s Den, other men had been blown to pieces by cannons firing point-blank.

Glancing right, the orator could see Culp’s Hill, where Ewell’s Louisianans had almost turned the Union flank that second day. And ahead, beneath that copse of trees visible a half mile away, the battle had reached its climax. Fifteen thousand Virginians, led by ringlet-haired George Pickett, had stormed across the wheatfields, across the lower slopes of Cemetery Ridge and Hill, up, up toward the center of the Union lines. Shells, canister, bullets cut down the charging Confederates, but here the survivors broke through. And then they wavered. Assailed from front and flank, they finally turned to flee. The last great assault of Robert E. Lee’s army had washed back down from the crest, and now Edward Everett stood there, speaking at the high-water mark of the Confederacy.

While a hymn was sung, Lincoln drew from his pocket the two pages of his own speech and adjusted his spectacles. The dignitaries behind him shifted in their seats. Then the audience quieted.

“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new Nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Lincoln’s words, spoken in a high, almost metallic tone, carried to the farthest reaches of the crowd. He held his manuscript in both hands but hardly glanced at it.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that Nation or any Nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We are met to dedicate a portion of it as the final resting-place of those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.”

The President’s words were carrying over the crowd to the battlefield itself, still littered with broken guns, scattered bits of uniforms, shattered caissons, stripped trees, thousands of spent bullets, the carcasses of unburied horses. The air stank of rot and death.

“It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract.” Here the President’s voice broke, and his hands seemed to tremble. “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

“It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work that they have thus far so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that the dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation shall, under God, have a new birth of freedom; and that Government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Manning the Front

Twenty-eight months earlier, in July 1861, Lincoln had peered out the White House windows at pale ghosts of soldiers, caked with the grime of battle, stumbling along Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol, at glassy-eyed cavalrymen swaying slack in their saddles—a beaten army, reduced almost to a rabble. These were the bloodied survivors of the first battle of Bull Run. During the next few days, as he sat in the cabinet room talking with generals and foot soldiers or tossed fitfully at night on the sofa in his office, the President had penciled the rudiments of a grand strategy. Before then, he and his generals had not bothered much with broad war planning, for the struggle was expected to be brief, but Northern illusions had died on that battlefield soaked with the blood of hundreds of Billy Yanks.

Tighten the blockade of Southern ports—drill and discipline the existing volunteer forces—hold insecure, divided Baltimore with a “gentle, but firm, and certain hand”—step up organization and operations in the West—reorganize the forces in northern Virginia as rapidly as possible: these were the essentials of the President’s immediate strategy. Behind it lay a grand strategy for a massive, collective military and economic effort: simply to overpower the South along the vast land and sea fronts, ultimately to divide and dismember it. Topography dominated Northern strategy. Sprawling from northern New England to northern Alabama, the vast Appalachian chain cut the eastern states into two huge theaters of combat, with few connections between them for large armies; to the west, across the Mississippi, lay another theater.

In the Confederate capital at Richmond, planning and calculating in his own “White House,” President Jefferson Davis had fully understood the advantages topography gave the South. Union troops would have a hard time fighting their way south through the bristling Virginia defenses, across six muddy rivers running west-east, while Confederate forces could easily move west and north along the wide Shenandoah Valley, a natural route of invasion toward Pennsylvania and Maryland. Farther west, on the other hand, the river and valley system favored the Union. “The Cumberland and Tennessee rivers were highways of invasion into Tennessee, northern Mississippi, and northern Alabama,” in James McPherson’s summation, “while the Mississippi River was an arrow thrust into the heart of the lower South.” Southern generals were also superior to Northern, Davis felt. And he could hardly avoid comparing the two commanders-in-chief—he with his West Point training, background in Southern military exploits and traditions, Mexican War combat, secretaryship of war, as against Lincoln’s three months of inglorious service against Indians—which Old Abe himself mocked.

Above all, Davis would exploit the South’s military advantage in not needing to invade the North or destroy its armies. He could stand on the defensive—the Yanks had to come to him. “We seek no conquest,” he had told the Confederate Congress in the first days of the war, “no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the States with which we were lately confederated.” He seemed to find a moral superiority in the South’s defensive posture. “All we ask is to be let alone.”

To preserve the Union—his highest immediate goal—Lincoln could not let the secessionists alone. Month after month he had pressed his generals to carry the fight to the enemy in Virginia and Tennessee. By the beginning of 1863, after a series of ferocious encounters, capped by a second battle of Bull Run that again sent the Union forces reeling, the war had settled into a bloody stalemate. Union naval squadrons had closed most Southern ports, but numerous small vessels slipped through, and a handful of Confederate cruisers harried Northern merchant ships on the high seas. All three main Union armies were bogged down in the winter mud, far from their objectives. The Army of the Potomac sprawled in its northern Virginia camps after its most recent rebuff. In central Tennessee, the Army of the Cumberland lay at Murfreesboro, decimated by a “victory” in which a quarter of its ranks had fallen. And on the Mississippi, the Army of the Tennessee, which had advanced farthest into the Southern heartland, seemed the most hopelessly mired. The blue-clad soldiers shoveled, shivered, and sickened in the Mississippi swamps, while their commander vainly sought a way around the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg.

Northern prospects had seemed bright enough toward the end of 1862 for Lincoln to move ahead on his supreme political act of the war—emancipation. But even as the President was readying his final proclamation of January 1, 1863, Lee’s men at Fredericksburg had virtually massacred a much larger Union force, arousing the anger of Northerners against their own military and political leadership. Exclaimed Lincoln, on hearing the outcome at Fredericksburg, “If there is a worse place than Hell, I am in it.”

In the North, talk had grown of compromise and peace. “Copperheads,” as their detractors called them, organized to resist the draft and force Washington to end the war. On the floor of the House, Clement Vallandigham of Ohio charged Lincoln with despotism and failure. A wave of desertions swept through the Northern armies. Some of the farmboys-turned-soldiers resented Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Why should they fight and die for “niggers”? Some soldiers felt their officers were incompetent. Finding the war meaningless as well as miserable, and knowing the heavy burdens falling on their womenfolk on the farm, thousands simply walked away from camp and headed home. The Army of the Potomac alone reported 85,000 men absent. Some were caught, and gunfire occasionally punctuated the quiet of the Union camps throughout the winter of 1862–63 as alleged deserters were shot.

Would spring mean new hope? Northern power was mounting as masses of men and matériel were thrown into the fray, but somehow superior numbers and munitions did not bring victory. The problem was leadership. Lincoln had run through a string of generals—McDowell, Pope, McClellan, Burnside. He wanted a man who could fight and win.

Such a commander was emerging in the West. Stumpy, plain-dressed, constantly smoking or chewing on a cigar, forty-one-year-old Major General Ulysses S. Grant hardly cut a heroic military figure. To some he was known mainly as a sometime drunk within the army and a failure outside it. Rival generals dismissed his February 1862 victory at Fort Donelson, the North’s first striking success in the war, as a fluke; scandal-hungry reporters overlooked his calm courage at the battle of Shiloh and charged him with being drunk on the field.

Urged that Grant be removed from his western command, Lincoln answered with jokes, but to a Pennsylvania politician he responded with feeling: “I can’t spare this man—he fights.” A Confederate general took the measure of the man: not a genius, but “clear-headed, quick and daring.” One of Grant’s officers summed him up as neither bully nor bon vivant, but only a “plain business man of the republic.” As 1863 dawned, the next piece of business was seizing the fortress of Vicksburg.

Vicksburg in early 1863 was still a frustrating target. Perched on a bluff above the east bank of the Mississippi, the city was protected by swamps and strong fortifications to the north, while shore batteries seemed to block any assault via the river. As the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi—even more, the last link between the eastern and western halves of the Confederacy—it was fully manned. Still, General John Pemberton held Vicksburg with a force slightly smaller than the Union besiegers, which made it all the more galling for the Northern commanders that during the winter they had tried six different means of getting at Pemberton’s army and all had failed. In despair, William Tecumseh Sherman of the Army of the Tennessee had suggested a retreat back to Memphis for regrouping, but Grant had demurred. The Northern people, Grant said, would not countenance another setback. “There was nothing left to be done,” as he later put it, “but to go forward to a decisive victory.”

Sometimes fortune favors the bold. This time Grant would move south of the fortress and then try to beat the Rebels in detail. The notion of deliberately marching troops deep into enemy territory, with an insecure supply line and with two enemy columns ready to pounce on them, appalled Sherman and his fellow officers, but they had confidence in Grant. As the rains began to ease off in mid-April, the Army of the Tennessee moved down the muddy roads of the west bank, opposite the fortress. Admiral David Porter, after running his gunboats past the Confederate batteries at night, ferried the Union army piecemeal across the river.

In trapping the enemy had Grant and Porter become trapped? Some thought so: the Unionists were on the dangerous side of the river, under Confederate guns. But Grant was just where he wanted to be—on dry ground and within grappling reach of the enemy. He pushed his army, a compact triangle of about 43,000 men, forward between Pemberton and the veteran Rebel general, Joseph Johnston, who commanded a newly assembled force in Jackson, to the east. On May 14 one prong of the mobile triangle stabbed into Jackson, putting Johnston to flight. While a Union detachment stayed behind destroying rail lines and military stores, the other two prongs of Grant’s main force cut back to grasp Pemberton, who was advancing cautiously out of Vicksburg. After twice pushing their foe back toward the fortress, Grant’s men attacked Vicksburg itself.

The assault failed, but the battle had been won. Pemberton’s army now was trapped in Vicksburg; Johnston’s reinforcements were scattered on roads and troop trains for many miles around; the Army of the Tennessee, now resupplied, had a tight grip on the river stronghold. Sherman, riding with Grant to inspect the lines, was jubilant: “This is a campaign; this is a success if we never take the town.”

The war was more than a campaign, however; it was a conflict in many theaters, and back on the eastern front the Federals were floundering after another defeat. In late April a refurbished Army of the Potomac, under a breezily confident new commander, Joseph Hooker, had marched forth to do battle once again with Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Hooker hoped to maneuver behind Lee, trap him at Fredericksburg of recent sad memory, and then crush him with the Union’s superior numbers. Instead, Lee met Hooker’s thrust head-on, blocking it for a time near the hamlet of Chancellorsville. At first, the Union men seemed to be winning the fight as the gray-clad troops slowly fell back through thick forest and tangled underbrush.

Lee, badly outnumbered, seemed at last to be cornered, but he was setting a trap of his own. While his men slowly retreated, Lee sent “Stonewall” Jackson with 28,000 men on a fourteen-mile march, circling far around Hooker’s right flank. At dusk on May 2 Jackson’s men burst screaming out of the shadowy underbrush, routing an entire Union corps and knocking the Federals back toward the Rappahannock. Darkness, Northern reinforcements, and the accidental wounding of Jackson by his own men stopped the attack. Hooker still had strong forces left, but Lee simply outgeneraled him during the next two days, and the remaining Federals pulled back to the north bank of the Rappahannock.

“My God!” an ashen-faced Lincoln had exclaimed on getting the news of Chancellorsville. “What will the country say?” Once again the South felt a surge of pride, tempered by the news of Stonewall Jackson’s death after the amputation of an arm and the onset of pneumonia. Lee’s textbook victory made him the military hope of the Confederacy. A son of Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee of Revolutionary War fame, a West Point graduate, married to the great-granddaughter of Martha Washington, a gallant officer in the Mexican War, Lee had seemed the natural choice as commander of Virginia’s armed forces when he chose his native slate over the Union at the start of the war. He had directed such a slow and fumbling campaign in western Virginia during the first months of the war, however, as to be called “Granny Lee” and almost lose his reputation before he could win it. But then, in battle after battle, he had developed such qualities of resourcefulness, mobility, audacity, imagination, resoluteness, and an almost intuitive understanding of enemy plans as to make him the supreme tactician of the war.

A tactician—but now the South needed a strategist. Grant had Vicksburg in his grasp, thus threatening to cut the Confederacy in two. The blockade was tightening. Union forces were threatening to attack in central Tennessee, even launch a joint army-navy operation into Charleston. Now, in May 1863, Confederate leaders took anxious counsel together. Some wanted to strike west, liberate Tennessee, and break Grant’s grip on Vicksburg and the Mississippi. But Lee pressed for a more daring plan—to reinforce the Army of Northern Virginia and then strike north through the Shenandoah Valley into the fertile Pennsylvania countryside, thus lightening the pressure on Richmond and forcing the Union to pull troops from the west; this would inspire the Peace Democrats in the North, perhaps win recognition from European powers, and possibly even result in the capture of Washington. The tactician had turned strategist.

In June, in search of the decisive victory of the war, Lee slipped his army toward the Shenandoah Valley and plunged northward. Things went handily at first. Confederate columns scattered Union detachments in the valley, crossed the Potomac, speared through Maryland and southern Pennsylvania, and reached the outskirts of Harrisburg. Hooker proposed to the President that, while Lee moved north, the Federals should move south and seize Richmond; Lincoln responded drily, “I think Lee’s army, and not Richmond, is your true objective point.” Still looking for a fighter, the President accepted Hooker’s resignation and chose George Gordon Meade as commander of the main Union forces in the East. In Pennsylvania, Lee was already finding that instead of encouraging Peace Democrats, his advance—especially his seizure of livestock and food, and the capture of Pennsylvania Negroes and dispatch of them south to slavery— had aroused Northern anger to a new pitch.

So stupendous odds had turned on the outcome of the battle that erupted in the little town of Gettysburg on July 1, as commanders deployed their troops and sent them forward into a cauldron of noise and heat and smoke, of fear and pain and sudden darkness; as artillery pounded away, soldiers shot and stabbed and clubbed one another on Little Round and the Wheat Field and Cemetery Ridge, and famous regiments once a thousand strong melted away. Waiting in the War Department’s telegraph room, Lincoln finally received the message he so desperately wanted: Lee was defeated, his troops moving back toward Virginia. Then came word from the Army of the Tennessee: Vicksburg had surrendered to Grant on the Fourth of July. Telegraph lines flashed the news across a joyous North.

“We have at last got the harpoon into the monster, but we must now look how we steer,” Lincoln had said earlier, “or with one flop of his tail he will send us all into eternity.” His words seemed more apt than ever as Meade allowed the bulk of Lee’s troops to retreat south. Gideon Welles had never seen the President so upset and discouraged. “We had them in our grasp,” Lincoln kept saying. “We had only to stretch forth our hands and they were ours.” Further confirming his fears, the seesaw of war again teetered as autumn neared. General William Rosecrans’s Federals captured Chattanooga in southeast Tennessee, but Braxton Bragg’s Confederates counterattacked at Chickamauga, cracked and broke the Union line, pushed the Union forces back to Chattanooga, and laid the city under siege.

The whale’s tail was still flopping, but the Northern harpoon was sinking deeper. Given command of the armies of the west, Grant drove Bragg’s men off Lookout Mountain and then off Missionary Ridge, in a battle won by soldiers who stormed the ridge on their own, ahead of orders. Lincoln got the news a few days after returning from his Gettysburg Address trip. With Union ships once again plying the Mississippi, Bragg’s troops retreating into Georgia, and Grant’s divisions poised to break through the mountains and advance on Atlanta, the President was on the eve of achieving his great strategic aim of breaking the Confederacy in two.

Confederate hopes ebbed after Gettysburg and Vicksburg. “We are now in the darkest hour of our political existence,” Jefferson Davis said. Wrote a Confederate private captured at Vicksburg: “We have Lost the Mississippi and our nation is Divided and they is not a nuf left to fight for.” A Southern veteran of Gettysburg wrote his sister: “We got a bad whiping…. They are awhiping us … at every point.” He hoped the South would make peace so that he could “get home agane” alive.

In Richmond the Confederates’ diarist-at-large, Mary Chesnut, began her January 1, 1864, entry, “God Help My Country.” She had almost become used to social occasions attended by men without arms, without legs, men unable to see, unable to speak. “Gloom and unspoken despondency hang like a pall everywhere.” As she looked out on the endless Richmond rain, her main hope now was that the enemy would become bogged down. “Our safeguard, our hope, our trust is in beneficent mud, impassable mud.”

General Mud. But there was also General Industry, General Supply, General Transport, General Manpower—and General Grant.

Forging the Sword

Late in the afternoon of March 8, 1864, a train carrying Ulysses S. Grant, his teenage son, and two aides steamed into the Washington railroad station. No one was on hand to greet the man who was about to take command of the most powerful army the world had ever seen—and who had never set foot in his nation’s capital or met his commander-in-chief. Making his way to Willard’s Hotel on 14th Street, the general waited there until after nine in the evening, when he left for the White House. There, at one end of the Blue Room, Lincoln was greeting guests at one of his large receptions. Hearing a rising buzz of conversation at the other end, the President moved through the crowd toward the man who had just entered. “Why, here is General Grant!”

While the two men exchanged a few amiable words, other guests crowded in around them or climbed chairs and tables to get a better view. If some were disappointed in the appearance of this small scrubby man of forty-two, with his slight stoop and the wart on his right cheek, they did not show it. They needed a hero, and here was the Hero of the West. The next day the President commissioned Grant a lieutenant general, commanding all the armies—the rank previously given in full only to George Washington.

Leaders choose strategies, and strategies choose leaders. Grant was not only a proven fighter and winner but a general who could be counted on to carry out Lincoln’s long-frustrated strategy of attacking the enemy on all fronts simultaneously. Grant also could be expected to wage a continuous battle of attrition: instead of engaging the foe in one major struggle at a time and then pulling back to prepare for the next encounter—the pattern so far of the Civil War and of most wars—he would hammer the Confederates unceasingly, hanging on like a bulldog, grinding and wearing down the South to the point of exhaustion.

Southern leaders had taken their measure of the man. “He fights to win, that chap,” they were saying in Richmond. “He is not distracted by a thousand side issues. He does not see them. He is narrow and sure, sees only in a straight line.”

As Grant came to grips with Lee in Virginia during the spring of 1864, the new general-in-chief found not only that a strategy of attrition was correct but that he had no alternative. For the new strategist-in-chief under Lincoln could not outgeneral the master tactician. Time and again Lee outmaneuvered Grant, and when the two armies came to grips with each other—in the horrifying Battle of the Wilderness, at Spotsylvania, at Cold Harbor—the Union’s casualties totaled nearly 60,000 men, almost twice the Confederate losses. By mid-June Grant was moving his troops south of the James River to Petersburg, where he planned to cut Lee’s transport to the south and attack Richmond from the rear. When Petersburg fought off the Union attacks, inflicting heavy Federal losses, Grant settled down to a long siege. It would last nine months. Meanwhile, strong Union attacks continued in the west.

Lincoln’s strategy of exerting pressure on all fronts, combined with Grant’s bulldog tactics, required a massive Northern effort in production, manpower, and transport—and called forth a forceful Southern response. Since the early months of the war, when men had first streamed to the colors on a three-month or (in the South) twelve-month basis, both commands had been struggling to keep their ranks filled. Facing threatened Yankee offensives in the spring of 1862, the Confederate Congress moved boldly to make all able-bodied white males between eighteen and thirty-five liable to military service for three years. Only a year later did the United States Congress pass a draft act, which made all men twenty to forty-five liable to military service, unless they paid a $300 commutation fee or found a substitute who would enlist for three years. These and later measures on both sides were heavily inegalitarian, allowing both Northerners who were wealthy enough and many Southerners with upper-class occupations—including the owner or overseer of any large plantation—to avoid the draft.

“A rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” some had grumbled, and now they felt they had proof. To fight the war for the rich man—and even worse, for the “niggers” who were already taking jobs from whites— aroused muttering across the North. Nowhere did the first drawings catalyze feeling more than in the simmering working-class districts of Northern cities and the “secessionist” areas of the Midwest. In Manhattan, mobs of working people, mainly Irish, roamed the streets for four days, burning draft headquarters, pillaging homes, attacking Greeley’s New York Tribune building, putting the Colored Orphan Asylum to the torch, and hunting down, torturing, and lynching blacks. Troops had to be brought in from the Gettysburg campaign to quell the riots.

“No measure of the war was a more stunning disappointment” than the North’s conscription of 1863, Allan Nevins concluded. Inequitable and inefficient, the draft fostered a hive of bounty jumpers, substitute brokers, emigrant runners, collusive doctors. The draft act did, however, stimulate “volunteering,” so, paradoxically, a small fraction of the Union army finally was supplied through this measure. In the South the draft met little open resistance, but as Confederate fortunes sagged, men took to the hills or woods instead of reporting, or hid with family or friends. Some Southerners contended that conscription was unconstitutional, a threat to personal liberty and states’ rights, the very things they were fighting for. Several governors defied Richmond’s efforts to enforce conscription within their borders. Still and all, both North and South mobilized an immense number of men—about a million and a half in the Union army, it is estimated, and almost a million in the Confederate.

To supply these men was, in some respects, an even more exacting task. Suddenly in 1861 there were hundreds of regiments to begin to equip—five hundred on the Union side alone. The records of a high quartermaster officer in the Army of the Potomac showed him, according to Nevins, “receipting within a short period for 39 barrels of coal, 7½ tons of oats, 23 boxes of bandages, 31 of soap, 4 of lanterns, 80 beef cattle and 450 sheep, 180 mules, a miscellany of ropes, nails, rags, forges, lumber, and wagons, rolls of canvas, shipments of stoves, parcels of wire, ‘sundries,’ and sacks—how the army needed sacks!”

Despite enormous confusion, incompetence, and corruption, the rich agricultural North could easily supply such needs; by the end of 1864 Lincoln could report that the national resources “are, then, unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible.” The economic expansion of the 1850s had laid the foundation for a factory as well as a farm spurt. A prime need was shoes, the things that armies literally travel on. By 1860 over 100,000 persons worked in the boot and shoe industry, in their homes or in factories where machines sewed the seams of the uppers, which were then sewn by hand, or pegged, to the sole. A Massachusetts inventor, Lyman Reed Blake, developed a machine to sew the soles to the uppers, then he traveled through New England teaching workers how to use it. Within two years of Sumter the new machines had stitched 2.5 million shoes. The Confederacy lagged behind, resulting in its troops often going bootless into battle—though Union men too, on occasion, had to march and fight without shoes.

Beset by the loss of Southern goods and markets and with swiftly changing needs, some Northern industries faltered early in the war, then experimented, improvised, and recovered. While cotton textiles declined, woolen mills hummed away, soon doubling production. Both iron and coal production dropped at first and then rose to the highest levels ever. Here again, the South fell behind badly. “The South lacked factories, raw materials, machines, managers who knew how to organize production, and skilled laborers,” in T. Harry Williams’s summation. “The largest ironwork in the section, and the only big installation of any kind, the Tredegar plant in Richmond, Virginia, had to operate at half or less of its capacity throughout the war because it could not procure sufficient supplies of pig iron,” and because it was also short of trained workers.

The Northern munitions industries experimented and innovated as they expanded lustily. Armies and armories throughout the North and South had about half-a-million smoothbore muskets when Sumter fell, and 30,000 or so rifles or rifled muskets. Immensely outproduced, Richmond was in many respects more innovative and daring than Washington in both spurring and undertaking war production. Needing desperately to make up for their industrial disadvantages, the Confederates centralized war production to a degree that would not be seen again until 1917. Their war and navy departments in Richmond directed rail traffic, spurred iron production, constructed ships—including twenty-two ironclads and an experimental submarine—and built up vast stocks of munitions. Even the home spinning of cloth by Southern women was coordinated by local quartermaster depots. Ironically, the Confederacy would run out of funds before it ran out of bullets.

With the Harpers Ferry armory lost when fighting began, the North had only its small federal establishment in Springfield, Massachusetts. A wild scramble for rifles on the part of competing states and armies produced a spate of orders for foreign arms and a burst of production at home. Slowly production was shifted from smoothbores to rifles, from the old muzzle-loaders to breech-loaders, from single-shot carbines to repeaters, amid much confusion, skepticism in the Ordnance Bureau, and wasted time. Artillery too was improved, but infantrymen on both sides often preferred their supporting gunners to use old-fashioned canister or grape that could mow down advancing enemy troops like a “huge sawed-off shotgun.”

Moving these immense masses of men and munitions put enormous demands on boats, trains, and—all along the front—horses. After the lower Mississippi was cut off early in the war, river transport expanded to support the Union armies above Vicksburg, and west-east grain and other traffic grew so robustly that the Erie Canal carried a quarter more tonnage than in the feverish fifties. Ship builders at the same time were able to double their production of merchant tonnage for the high seas. At the other end of the long transport lines, quantities of horses were needed to draw wagon trains, ambulances, and artillery. By late 1862 the Army of the Potomac was receiving 1,500 horses a week and demanding more.

It was the iron horse, though, that most consequentially joined the colors, to a degree never before known in war. Despite all the other demands on iron and machinery, and despite the destruction of vast stretches of track in the South, the four years of war added 4,000 miles to the railroad network, though growth was slower than in the 1850s. Railroad men double-tracked major lines, built hundreds of bridges, standardized railroad gauges, fashioned efficient new terminals for transferring freight and passengers. Whole new railways were built, most notably the Atlantic & Great Western, which cut through Pennsylvania and Ohio to points west. Patriotism was not the only motive. “At no former period,” Horace Greeley’s Tribune noted, “has the whole Northern railroad system been so prosperous.”

Nothing seemed to daunt the railroad builders. After the Confederates had destroyed a key bridge, Herman Haupt, a forty-five-year-old railroad genius, set to work to span Potomac Creek at top speed. Soldier-workmen labored in a bone-chilling rain. “While one crew hoisted and locked up the notched crib logs, others went into the dripping woods to cut and trim selected saplings and fetch the long poles to the bridge site,” George Edgar Turner wrote. “Men, tools and time were too scarce to strip them of their bark. Above the cribs three stories of trestlework were to be erected…. At the second-story level of the trestle a new difficulty presented itself. Very few of the men had the ability or the courage to clamber about on the wet and slippery ropes so far above the rock-strewn bed of the gorge.” Some men had to climb farther up to the eighty-foot level. But within two weeks the track was laid and the first engine pulled across inch by inch with ropes to see if the wooden crosspieces would hold up. They did.

Visiting the bridge, Lincoln seemed almost ecstatic. “That man Haupt has built a bridge across the Potomac Creek 400 feet long and nearly 100 feet high,” he told war officials on returning to Washington. “Upon my word, gentlemen,” he added, “there is nothing in it but beanpoles and cornstalks.”

Men, matériel—and money. War’s appetite for the last was as voracious as for manpower and munitions. Ultimately the war would cost the Confederacy $2 billion, the Union more than $3 billion—unimaginable figures at the start of the conflict. At war’s outbreak, money seemed short everywhere: the federal government was running a deficit, the seceding states had tiny financial resources, businessmen north and south suffered from disrupted trade, and even private citizens lacked cash. By the end of 1861 Ralph Waldo Emerson was complaining that his plight was as hard as that of his fellow countrymen.

“The 1 January [1862] has found me in quite as poor plight as the rest of the Americans. Not a penny from my books since last June—which usually yield 5, or $600.00 a year,” he wrote his brother William. “The Atlantic Bank omitting its dividends: My Mad River & Lake Erie Bonds (Sandusky) which ought to pay $140 per ann. now for several years making no sign. Lidian’s Plymouth House now for 3 years has paid nothing and still refuses.… Then lastly, almost all income from lectures has quite ceased….” They were economizing, and he was trying to sell a woodlot. But better this “grinding” than any peace restoring the “old rottenness.”

Expecting a short war, both Richmond and Washington had improvised desperately during the first years of the struggle. Inexperienced in finance, Chase had resorted to short-term funding, plunging into a huge loan program and then into the issuance of greenbacks, as they would come to be called, through the Legal Tender Act of February 1862. He opposed the one device that would have permitted a pay-as-you-go strategy—heavy income and excise taxation—and only strong congressional leadership had produced by August of 1861 an income tax of 3 percent on incomes over $800 and 5 percent over $10,000. Southern lawmakers, wary of general tax measures, relied first on bond issues and then on the issuance of several hundred millions in treasury notes—an invitation to soaring inflation.

By mid-1863 Northern finances had considerably improved, after extensive experimenting driven by iron necessity. Greenbacks steadily depreciated in value, but not nearly so much as Richmond’s treasury notes. The Confederate Congress at last passed a general tax bill, embracing an 8 percent sales tax on consumer goods, a 10 percent profits tax, and even a graduated income tax, but these taxes were highly unpopular and poorly enforced. In the North, by contrast, the income tax was producing almost 20 percent of total federal receipts, and manufacturers’ and sales taxes were bringing in even more, by the end of the war. Still, the Northern public debt was heading toward almost $3 billion by mid-1865.

This colossal expansion virtually transformed the nation’s finances. Before the war, operating in what Bray Hammond has called a “jungle” of laissez-faire, 1,600 state banks circulated several thousand different kinds of banknotes. But the old Jacksonian hostility toward a centralized banking structure could not survive the heavy demands of near-total war. Early in 1863 Congress passed the National Bank Act, a vital first step toward a national banking system. Backed, predictably, by most congressional Republicans and opposed by virtually all the Democrats, the measure provided for the chartering of national banks, with authority to issue bank notes up to 90 percent of their United States bond holdings. Toward the end of the war, Congress drove state banknotes out of circulation through a 10 percent tax on them. Soon national far outnumbered state banks.

A spate of other national measures reached into people’s lives to an unprecedented degree. The 1862 Homestead Act granting citizens—virtually free—160 acres of surveyed public domain after five years of continuous residence; the Morrill Act giving each loyal state 30,000 acres for every member of its congressional delegation in order to endow agricultural and mechanical colleges; the Pacific Railway Acts authorizing a transcontinental railroad and providing huge grants of land for railroad rights-of-way; a homestead bonus for soldiers—these and other measures, combined with state and city actions, were propelled both by wartime necessity and by private interests vigorously represented in the Capitol and White House lobbies. For the first time—and it would be for only a short time—the federal government became a presence in people’s lives.

Few escaped the long reach of near-total war. Booming war industries absorbed tens of thousands of immigrants still flooding into American ports. Many thousands of women went to work in textile and other factories, hospitals, government offices, and Sanitary Commission projects in the North. During the war, it is estimated, the proportion of women in the manufacturing labor force—mainly textiles and garment-making—rose from about a quarter to at least a third. As usual, women’s wages lagged behind men’s. Toward the end of the war, a New York City woman using a sewing machine and furnishing her own thread, working fourteen hours a day, made 16 ¾ cents a day, while a male “common laborer” could make $1.25.

To the newcomers threatening their jobs—especially to immigrants and youths—white male workers reacted with fear and anger, all the more so because of the sharp decline in real wages during the war. In the first heady days, whole local unions of workers had gone off to war. “It having been resolved to enlist with Uncle Sam for the war,” the secretary of a Philadelphia local recorded in the minutes, “this union stands adjourned until either the Union is safe or we are whipped.” Later in the war, unionists were marching off to picket lines as well. Some of their strikes helped white males to keep ahead of inflation; a few were broken up by Union troops.

So feverish was much of the nation’s activity during the war, both north and south, that it spawned a grand myth: the Civil War as the economic “takeoff,” as the creator of a new industrial nation, as the “second American revolution,” as indeed “a social war,” in Charles Beard’s words, “ending in the unquestioned establishment of a new power in the government, making vast changes in the arrangement of classes, in the accumulation and distribution of wealth, in the course of industrial development, and in the Constitution inherited from the Fathers.” More sober analysis has shown that the war brought mixed and uneven development. Some economic activity was spurred, some depressed; some people’s earnings—especially makers of war goods—rose, those of others dropped; some moneylenders prospered, most did not. On the whole, industrial capitalists thrived, finance capitalists suffered, from wartime inflation. The great decade of innovation and expansion had been that of the 1850s; in the sixties the war brought relatively few key technological advances, uneven expansion of production, but in some cases—such as boots and shoes—rapid mechanization, often involving interchangeability of parts.

Yet, about halfway through the war, the nation seemed to pass from one economic and social watershed to another. By this time—mid-1863—soldiers by the hundreds of thousands were mixing with men of different origins, backgrounds, religions; the public’s attention was riveted on a national effort as never before; newspapers were giving more attention to far-off battle actions than local dogfights. The mystic chords of union were being fashioned along the endless supply lines and battle lines, north and south. Sections of the economy were being accelerated, modernized, consolidated, if not revolutionized. Change was both slow and dynamic, always uneven and chaotic. The Confederacy experimented with various forms of state control, the North encouraged or permitted extremes of laissez-faire, including extensive private-enterprise trading across enemy lines. Perhaps if one word, improvisation, sums up the national effort during the first half of the war, mobilization sums up the second—a social and economic mobilization that had its roots in the 1850s and before, and its chief impact during the stupendous economic expansion that would come in the North after the war.

Just as old soldiers chinning in veterans’ halls would later argue which campaign or strategy had been decisive, so historians have searched for the decisive causal forces in Southern indomitableness and final Northern success. In the seamless web of history, every effort was critical. Yet some factors are more critical than others, and the supreme paradox of the Civil War is that agriculture was probably most critical. The economy was still founded on agriculture; no sector of the economy was not linked in some way with agriculture. Farm boys provided much of the soldiery on both sides, and countless farm women took their places in the fields. Farm products were still the main source of vitally needed foreign revenue. The great canal and railroad networks had been shaped to meet agricultural needs. And if agriculture was decisive positively in the North, it was negatively so in the South. The shortage of farm labor was more acute there. Unlike his Northern counterpart, the Southern farmer found labor-saving machinery cut off; so were his outlets to Europe as the Northern blockade tightened.

While the war was becoming increasingly a mobilization of men, money, machinery, and munitions, to an astonishing degree it was finally won and lost on the grain fields of the North and the cotton fields of the South.

The Society of the Battlefield

As for his spirits, Private John N. Moulton wrote his sister from his camp near Vicksburg early in 1863, “I cannot Boast of their being very high. There is the most down cast looking set of men here that I ever saw in my life.…” Six weeks later he felt no better. “I am lonesome and down hearted in Spite of my Self. I am tired of Blood Shed and have Saw Enough of it.”

A soldier in Nashville reflected bitterly, “When we Enthusiastically rushed into the ranks at our Country’s call, we all Expected to witness the last dying struggles of treason and Rebellion Ere this.” But his hopes had been dashed. “Over 200,000 of our noble soldiers sleep in the silent grave. Almost countless millions of treasure has been Expended in the Unsuccessful Effort of the Government to put down this Rebellion. But after all this sacrifice of valuable life and money, we are no nearer the goal…than we were at the first booming of Sumter’s guns.”

From a camp opposite Fredericksburg, M. N. Collins, a Maine officer, wrote: “The newspapers say that the army is eager for another fight; it is false; there is not a private in the army that would not rejoice to know that no more battles were to be fought. They are heartily sick of battles that produce no results.”

Soldiers railed against their leaders. The men, said Moulton, were beginning “to talk openly and to curse the officers and leaders and if the[y] go much farther I fear for the result. They are pretty well divided and nothing But fear keeps them under.…” Wrote a Maine soldier stationed in Virginia just before Christmas 1862, “All though I am wel and able to do duty I am in a very unhapy state of mind.” His “delusive fantom of hope” had at last vanished. “The great cause of liberty has been managed by Knaves and fools the whole show has ben corruption, the result disaster, shame and disgrace.” He was always ready to do his duty but “evry thing looks dark, not becaus the south are strong but becaus our leaders are incompitent and unprincipled.” A Massachusetts private wrote of “incompetent leaders & ambitious politicians.”

What were they fighting for? For Union and patriotism, but this did not seem enough. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation did not help most white soldiers. He was thoroughly tired of the war, a Pennsylvanian wrote in February 1863, and if he had known that the issue would become freeing the slaves, as it seemed to have become, he “would not have mingled with the dirty job.” An Illinois soldier belittled the Administration’s yielding to radicals favoring emancipation and Negro recruiting: “I have slept on the soft side of a board, in the mud & every other place that was lousy & dirty … drunk out of goose ponds, Horse tracks &c for the last 18 months, all for the poor nigger, and I have yet to see the first one that I think has been benefited by it.” Other soldiers’ comments on emancipation were even harsher.

If most Southern soldiers were fighting against emancipation, and few Northern men fully supported it, black people north and south were enlisted in the struggle, and on both sides. The drain of white manpower to the front made Southern agriculture heavily dependent on slave labor, while nearly 180,000 former slaves enlisted in the Union armies. Organized into separate “Colored” regiments officered mostly by whites, the black soldiers appeared to suffer fewer morale problems than whites—doubtless because they saw their stake in the outcome more clearly. “When God made me, I wasn’t much,” one black recruit said, “but I’s a man now.”

Many white soldiers desperately sought a way out. Some shot off their toes or trigger fingers, until discharges were no longer given to self-maimers. Others hoped for a compromise peace, any kind of peace that would enable them to go home. Even in his regiment, out only five months, wrote a Massachusetts man, “I don’t believe there are twenty men but are heartily sick of war & want to go home.” Wrote the Nashville soldier: “Many of the boys here are in favor of a Compromise, some are of the opinion that the Southern Confederacy will soon be recognized by the U.S. Alas! for our beloved Republic!”

Just about the time this Yankee in Nashville was exhibiting his brand of defeatism, a Confederate soldier from Alabama was displaying his. “If the soldiers were allowed to settle the matter,” John Crittenden wrote his wife, “peace would be made in short order.” On the average, Confederate spirits were probably a bit higher than Unionist, but from the early flush days of martial ardor and Southern pride, morale fell as the months and years passed. A Georgian home on sick leave wrote his brother that if he did not receive a third extension of his furlough he would stay home anyway. “There is no use fighting any longer no how,” he wrote, “for we are done gon up the Spout the Confederacy is done whiped it is useless to deny it any longger.” The men from North Carolina, another Georgian wrote his wife from his post with Lee’s army, were threatening to rejoin the Union and “the men from Ga say that if the enemy invade Ga they are going home….” Perhaps the worst blows to Confederate morale came from wives’ letters telling of hunger and cold at home.

How to persuade such men to reenlist when their terms expired? President Davis and other leaders visited the camps to boost morale. Grand parades and even sham battles were held, patriotic speeches intoned. While a conscription law was ultimately passed, compelling reenlistment, some officers wanted to carry on the spirit of volunteerism. A favorite stratagem, Bell Wiley found, was to assemble men for dress parade, deliver a patriotic speech, move the Stars and Bars up a few paces ahead, and then urge all the patriots in the ranks to step up to the colors and reenlist for the duration. Few could resist such blandishments—but many regretted their action later.

On both sides it was the wretched life in camp, rather than the days of combat, that crushed soldierly spirit. For most soldiers the Civil War was both an organized and a disorganized bore. Days of dull routine, during which the men could at least build tiny nests of creature comforts, were punctuated by sudden and often inexplicable departures, followed usually by long marches to a new camp and the old tedium. Rain was the enemy—rain that seeped through tent sides and shed roofs, turned campgrounds into quagmires, penetrated every boot and uniform. A Union colonel, John Beatty, recited the daily routine of his camp—and of all camps: reveille at five, breakfast call at six, surgeon’s call at seven, drill at eight, recall at eleven, dinner at twelve, drill again at four, recall at five, guard mounting at five-thirty, first call for dress parade at six, second call at six-thirty, tattoo at nine, taps at nine-thirty. “So the day goes round.”

Soldiers occupied their spare hours in time-honored ways: grumbling, gambling, sleeping, reading, foraging, cleaning equipment, washing clothes. Confederate men, it was said, had a special love for singing. Eating was another diversion, but not a very pleasant one. During the early years of the war, soldiers lived mainly on the old army ration of salt pork or beef, hard bread or hardtack, coffee, dried peas or beans, and in the South, grits. Hardtack was a grim joke; it could hardly be broken by teeth or hand, and was best mastered by soaking in soup or water. Especially in the North, as the Union commissary became better organized, the old rations were supplemented with vegetables and fruit. After authorities sent appeals throughout the Northwest for food to prevent scurvy, hundreds of barrels of vegetables, jellies, and dried fruit were soon on their way down the Mississippi to Grant’s regiments. Both Yanks and Rebs lived off the country, picking berries in season, stealing from orchards and gardens, buying from the ever-present sutlers. Cooking was often improvised.

Improvising, indeed, was the test of the good soldier—resourcefulness in adjusting to new conditions, ingeniously rigging up devices for keeping warm, cooking food, procuring clean water, washing clothes, warding off insects. He was a jack-of-all-trades, mending his clothes, tending to horses, cutting wood, digging fortifications, rigging up shelters, keeping his rifle clean by greasing it with a piece of bacon. Sometimes he had to rise to heights of inventiveness, as when Pennsylvania volunteers ran an entire mining operation, from surveying the ground to setting the charges, or when other infantrymen—mostly landlubbers—took over an enemy riverboat and ran it.

The army, above all, was a school for practical affairs, where men learned the arts of survival through organization, self-discipline, leadership, followership, collective and cooperative effort. The war had an immense nationalizing and homogenizing impact, bringing together not only Westerners and Easterners but farmers and industrial workers, teachers and storekeepers, college students and common laborers. The war was a geography lesson in which men from Maine occupied islands off Texas, men from Florida marched through the fields of Pennsylvania, men from New Orleans discovered snow and snowballs. The war was a regional exchange in which accents, attitudes, habits collided, coexisted, even coalesced. To a degree the war was a leveling process, though racial and class conflicts persisted and occasionally erupted. Ultimately habits and outlooks were reshaped that would prove indispensable in the organization of the nation’s industrial and financial life in later years. Future workshops of peace were being shaped in the workshops of war.

Well before dawn, sergeants roused men lying in tents and hutments or in the open. Soldiers stumbled about in the dark as they choked down hardtack, collected their rifles, buckled on their cartridge boxes. Slowly, in thick underbrush, in ravines, out on open fields, men came into formations, answered roll calls, made contact with flanking units. Behind, cannons began to rumble, firing into the darkness ahead. Men waited, fear collecting in their stomachs.

As dawn broke, officers galloped along the lines. They wheeled about to bring regiments in line, paused to exhort the soldiers standing with rifles at the ready: “Do your duty today like brave men.” Then the command: “Load at will—load.” The roar of battle mounted, sweeping down the lines like the rush of thundershowers across the hard ground of a stubble field, a soldier remembered.

Then the command to attack. The infantrymen moved out, at first almost perfectly dressed as officers and noncoms ranged back and forth, herding them like sheep. Soldiers’ hearts strengthened as they marched onto the field of battle and saw endless formations of their comrades to the left and right, moving, as one noted, in great billowing waves, their gun barrels and bayonets shining like burnished steel.

It was after watching such a scene as this at Fredericksburg—in the rear, row after row of artillery spurting flame and smoke, columns of thick black smoke rising far up into the sky, “the massed formations of more than a hundred thousand infantry,” in Nevins’s words, their uniforms and rifles glistening in the sun, with “endless orderly parks of white-topped wagons and ambulances” behind—that Lee remarked to General James Longstreet, “It is well that war is terrible, or we would grow too fond of it.”

As the attackers marched toward the enemy and fell, officers continued to dress the lines in order to keep contact and intensify the shock effect on the foe. As enemy fire intensified and the attacking lines broke, officers organized short rushes and little flanking attacks. Rarely did men get close enough to use the bayonet. Under withering fire soldiers crawled into holes, pulled back in panic, disappeared in the smoke and dust of battle. Panting, cursing, shouting, their faces caked with sweat and grime, men cried out to one another, but few words could be heard in the inferno of gunfire, cannon roar, whinnying horses, shrieks and groans of wounded men. Soon the battle broke down into numberless tiny encounters in the dust and smoke, without apparent shape or meaning. “Nobody sees a battle,” a soldier reflected.

In this hell the rifleman was king. Heavy artillery usually failed to soften up defenses—though small pieces on the line spewing out canister could be effective, and cavalry attacks were dramatic and might turn an enemy’s flank. But nothing could substitute for the foot soldier. He did not feel like a king, except that as the struggle swayed back and forth, he tried to build a tiny realm of his own by scooping out a shallow hole or kneeling behind a tree. Here he had a chance to rearm his muzzle-loader by pulling a paper-wrapped cartridge from his box or pouch, tearing open the paper with his teeth, pouring the powder down the barrel and pushing a bullet after it, punching both down with his ramrod, then half-cocking the hammer, putting a percussion cap on the nipple, cocking the hammer, aiming, firing. Most of this he might do while lying on his back, amid the whine of bullets.

By evening the once-virgin fields, now reeking of the stink and smoke of battle, were littered with discarded rifles, cartridge boxes, knapsacks, mess kits, canteens, parts of uniforms—were strewn also with dead and wounded men and stricken horses. The only sign of earlier formations might lie in the disposition of the dead; at Gettysburg a Confederate officer was sickened to find seventy-nine of his comrades “laying dead in a straight line … perfectly dressed … the feet of all these dead men were in a perfectly straight line,” though some had fallen forward and some back.

Through the night, wounded men begged piteously for water and succor. But help to the wounded was slow to come, and heavy-handed when it did. Battlefield treatment was chaotic, according to McPherson. “Regimental musicians (many of them younger than eighteen), cooks, teamsters, and other noncombatants were detailed as stretcher-bearers; and civilians were frequently employed as ambulance drivers. More often than not, these men and boys bolted in panic when the fighting became hot, leaving the wounded to lie untended for hours or days.” But nothing could match the torment awaiting those who needed surgery. Amid flickering candles in borrowed wagon sheds or cow barns, men lay on stretchers or on the floor, the cut, maimed, and dying mixed together, some with open wounds covered with flies or maggots, some crying “help” or “doctor” or “God,” others silent but following the doctors’ movements with their pleading eyes. Off to the side stood the surgeons, their gowns and bare arms soaked in blood, cutting and sawing away flesh and bone, as assistants held the patients down and applied ether, chloroform, or whiskey. To the side lay little piles of fingers, feet, legs, arms.

Gangrene often developed from battlefield conditions, infected instruments, pus-stained coats, sheets, surgical silk. Even with all these battlefield deaths, however, twice as many soldiers died of diseases as in battle. Camp conditions were often atrocious—bad water and food, mosquitoes, poor sanitation. Flies and rats abounded. Soldiers relieved themselves in an open trench or a few feet from their tents. Knowing little if anything about bacteria, officers and men allowed garbage, slops, refuse, horse manure to pile up around camps. Men would go weeks without changing their clothes or even bathing. Countrymen suffered more from illness than city boys, evidently because the latter had already been exposed to more diseases, and the death rate from disease was almost twice as high among black soldiers as white.

Soldiers’ health improved toward the end of the war, but far more in the North than in the South. The key to this difference was the work of the United States Sanitary Commission, and central to the Commission was the work of women. No mere “sanitation” agency but a huge national effort embracing thousands of local auxiliaries and led by men of such diverse talents as Henry W. Bellows and Frederick L. Olmsted, the Commission raised millions of dollars, recruited nurses and doctors for army hospitals, bought and distributed huge quantities of food, clothing, and medicine, staffed and operated hospital boats and trains—and taught soldiers why and how to use latrines and purify water. Organized in the teeth of hostility from some of the “old army” functionaries but applauded in Congress and in the ranks, the Commission led in the modernization and vast extension of the hospital and ambulance system and in the appointment of an outstanding Surgeon General, William A. Hammond.

Inspired by the dauntless Florence Nightingale of the Crimean War—a bloodletting in which the ratio of disease to battle deaths was four to one—American women brooked male and female hostility, army bureaucracy, and the dangers of hospital life to bring both professionalism and compassion to the care of sick and wounded. Over 3,000 women served as army nurses in the North, despite an edict by the first head of female nurses, Dorothea Dix, longtime reformer of insane asylums, barring all applicants for nursing who were under thirty and not “plain of appearance.” While slave women served in Southern army hospitals from the start, the Confederacy was slow to authorize women nurses. Roman Catholic Sisters of Charity trained a host of nurses for the Northern army.

Women worked in general hospitals and—more glamorously and dangerously—in field hospitals just behind the front. Eliza Howland helped convert the Patent Office in Washington into an improvised general hospital. Women nurses and their aides made beds out of large tables, spreading mattresses also on the floors, amid glass cases filled with patent churns, cogwheels, waterwheels, clocks, and mousetraps. Provisions had to be hoisted up outside the building, and Washingtonians gaped at baskets of vegetables and huge chunks of bread creeping up the marble face of the building. Inside, on a Sunday afternoon, Eliza Howland nursed a soldier through a delirium during which he called her Betty—“and, to our surprise, got well, went home, and at once married the Betty we had saved him for.”

If soldiers north and south feared anything more than becoming wounded, it was being taken prisoner—unless it was being wounded and captured. All the usual miseries of poor sanitation and shortages of food, shelter, and medicine were compounded in the prisoner-of-war camps. About 15 percent (30,000 men) of the Union prisoners died in their foe’s camps, about 12 percent of the Confederates. Part of this difference was due to declining Confederate supplies during the course of the war. Exchanges of prisoners ran up against fierce Southern opposition to treating black Federals as prisoners of war; rather, Richmond warned, they would be turned over to state authorities for possible execution. Toward the end of the war, however, exchanges mounted to almost a thousand a day, and the desperate Confederacy began to enlist slaves in its own armies.

Lurid tales of prison conditions north and south inflamed passions on both sides. Thirteen thousand Union men died of exposure, malnutrition, disease, and neglect at the most notorious prison, Andersonville. Mainly, though, prison life was nasty, dull, brutish, and long. There were occasional moments of hope, even euphoria. Union soldiers in Libby Prison in Richmond had been thrown into despair on hearing from their jailers that the Confederates had won a great victory at Gettysburg. Then a black man bringing in food whispered that in fact the Union had won, leaving the enemy scattered. As the joyful word raced around the room, prisoners leaped to their feet in a paroxysm of delight, shouting and embracing one another. Chaplain Charles McCabe had read Julia Ward Howe’s new “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the Atlantic Monthly. Raising his powerful voice, he began:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

Men were joining in the chorus, faces aglow as McCabe rendered the mighty lines: the “fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel … sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat … Oh! be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet.” Then:

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.

“Let Us Die to Make Men Free”

By mid-1864, with Grant’s and Lee’s troops locked in tortured embrace around Petersburg, audacious generals on both sides broke loose elsewhere for spectacular forays.

Hoping to take some of the pressure off the Northern siege of his Richmond-Petersburg bastion, Lee had sent his fellow Virginian, General Jubal A. Early, into the Shenandoah Valley, where Early routed a Union army and found his way open to the North—and Washington. Breaking through light Federal defensive forces, Early with 14,000 hardened troops crossed the Potomac and neared the northwest defenses of the Union capital. On an appeal from Lincoln, Grant dispatched a heavy force to drive the invaders out of the area; the President himself rode out to watch the impending battle and came briefly under fire. But Early, like a cool fox, retired with his strength largely intact, after levying a $220,000 tribute on Hagerstown and Frederick and burning Chambersburg when its citizens refused to cough up half-a-million. Appointed to a new Shenandoah command, General Philip Sheridan caught up with Early’s forces in the early fall, striking severe blows, and then proceeded to carry out Grant’s orders to ravage the Shenandoah.

On May Day 1864 another general who preferred dash and maneuver, William Sherman, had stood poised five hundred miles southwest of Richmond behind a steep ridge twenty-five miles below Chattanooga, facing a smaller army under Joseph Johnston. Suddenly Sherman struck, not at the strongly entrenched Confederates but around them. There followed one of the most masterly campaigns in the history of war. Manipulating three armies as lightly as bayonets, feinting Johnston out of position, cutting back from right to left to center to right again, sideslipping around the enemy’s flanks but never too far from the little single-track railroad that meandered toward Atlanta, Sherman repeatedly forced Johnston to fall back toward the key economic and political center of Georgia. By mid-July, Sherman’s men were nearing the capital.

Furious over Johnston’s retreats, fearful that this Confederate general, with whom he had long feuded, would give up Atlanta without a real fight, Jefferson Davis sacked him and named a more aggressive commander, John Bell Hood, thirty-three years old and already half crippled from earlier battles, to hold the line. Hood struck forcefully at Sherman’s approaching columns, but to no avail. Soon Union troops enveloped Atlanta by swinging fifteen miles to the south of it, and occupied this key hub. But now it was Sherman’s turn to be frustrated. Although Sherman wired Washington, “So Atlanta is ours, and fairly won,” Hood managed to keep his force intact and eventually moved north of Atlanta, where he threatened Sherman’s railroad line. By early fall it seemed to many in the North that Sherman was as tied down in the Atlanta area as Grant was in Petersburg.

But the view from Richmond was far from sanguine. Grant’s and Meade’s troops were being held east of Petersburg—they had blown a tremendous hole in the Confederate lines with four tons of gunpowder, only to bungle their attempt to rush through the breach—but the men in blue were slowly edging their way across Lee’s communication lines south of the city. The Union blockade of Southern ports grew ever tighter. Inflation raged throughout the South; civilian morale sank; the men in gray lacked clothing, food, even shoes. By September President Davis admitted that two-thirds of his soldiers were absent, most of them “without leave.” Davis was threatening the vaunted liberties of his countrymen by stepping up suspensions of habeas corpus, and shocking them by proposing the arming of slaves.

And in the major cities, the endless trains arrived bearing the dead and dying and wounded. Mary Chesnut was now back in her native state of South Carolina and worked mornings in the Columbia hospital. She could hardly stand the sight of the “loathsome wounds, distortion, stumps of limbs exhibited to all and not half cured.” But she marveled at the men’s spirit. When she told one soldier, his arm taken off at the socket, that he should quit the army, he flared: “I am First Texas. If old Hood can go with one foot, I can go with one arm. Eh?”

Nor could Lincoln in the White House escape the anguish of war. Day after day onto wharfs along the Potomac, boats disgorged the walking, tottering wounded, followed by men carrying pine coffins or stiff forms under sheets. There they were swallowed up among throngs of anguished relatives, ambulance men and volunteer nurses, undertakers looking for business. From the river and from the train stations, ambulances carried the wounded to a dozen or so makeshift hospitals, where nurses and surgeons waited. One of the volunteers was Louisa May Alcott, working in an old Georgetown hotel. Like Mary Chesnut, she was repelled by the running, pus-ridden wounds and the amputations without ether, but she carried on. Walt Whitman wrote his mother about the soldiers broken down after years of exposure and bad food and water. “O it is terrible, & getting worse, worse, worse.”

Thin, gaunt, his face deeply lined and his eyes shadowed, Lincoln himself seemed one of the casualties of war by the summer of 1864. This fourth year of the war had been expected to be a time of culmination for the President and his cause, but it had turned out a period of dashed hopes, frustration, war weariness, and widespread gloom. Lincoln had a special anxiety—this was an election year. Not a single respected voice had been raised against the fantastic notion that the people should actually pass judgment on their commander-in-chief—should fire or rehire him—at the height of a war for survival. Certainly Lincoln, a republican to the core, would not have dreamed of it. Still, by late 1864, it seemed likely that he would lose the battle of the ballots if not that of the bullets—so likely, indeed, that the President himself took out a sheet of stationery late in August and wrote: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.” Thus Lincoln was reaffirming a noble democratic idea—peaceful transfer of power to the succession, even a hostile succession.

Was it conceivable, though, that a President at the height of his powers—a commander-in-chief who seemed finally to be winning the war though still losing some battles, the leader who embodied Northern hopes and expectations—that this man could lose an election in which the old southern bastion of the opposition Democratic party could not even vote? The fact that Lincoln was a masterly operator of the governmental and party machinery only sharpened the question.

Lincoln’s political management was based on the strategy of balance, in which he alone acted as master balancer. He had built a Cabinet and Administration in which radicals were counterpoised against moderates. When that balance threatened to collapse during the dark days of late 1862, the President had secured letters of resignation from both Secretary of State Seward and Treasury Secretary Chase, and then retained both Cabinet members, exclaiming to a friend, “I can ride now. I’ve got a pumpkin in each end of my bag.” Foes of the Secretary of State continued to arouse public pressure against him by gaining signatures for petitions demanding “reconstruction of the cabinet,” but Lincoln fended them off. He had just the balance he wanted in his official family.

The President strove for this balance throughout his Administration. He pitted general against general, governors of border states against radical senators, party faction against faction, congressional bloc against bloc, border states against the “Solid North.” He coached his subordinates on being balancers themselves, instructing a new general that if either both local political factions “or neither shall abuse you, you will probably be about right. Beware of being assailed by one and praised by the other.” He used patronage and other presidential resources expertly to maintain the balance. He knew how to be ambiguous when need be; he knew how to time his actions, waiting for political forces to become identifiable and measurable before striking. He knew how to slow down, taking one problem at a time. He was a political acrobat, proceeding step by step along a swaying tightrope, balancing a pole along which danced politicians, generals, lobbyists, officials, businessmen.

Nowhere was Lincoln’s managerial touch more delicate than in foreign policy. In the first year of the war, after Navy captain Charles Wilkes stopped the British mail steamer Trent on the high seas and seized two Confederate envoys on their way to Europe, the President had given a conciliatory reply to a British demand for an apology, amid an anti-British uproar throughout the North. Lincoln was not about to war on the South and on Britain at the same time. Rather, he concentrated on his key objective—persuading Britain and France not to recognize or aid the Confederacy. Lincoln’s policy began to pay off within a few months of Union victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. The British government forbade Confederate “Laird rams”—floating fortresses with formidable wrought-iron “piercers”—under construction in Liverpool to leave that port, and Napoleon III ordered several naval vessels under construction for Richmond to be sold to European governments. By 1864, as Union fortunes rose, Confederate hopes for foreign recognition faded.

So, as a practical manager of captains and kings, of ships and shoes and cabbages and many other things, Abraham Lincoln had shown endless dexterity and persistence. Hence it was all the more remarkable that the President by 1864 had lost the confidence of some key leaders in his own party. The “most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President,” Richard Henry Dana reported earlier from Washington. “He has no admirers, no enthusiastic supporters, none to bet on his head.” Republican critics, David Donald was to note, called the President unfit, a political coward, a dictator, timid and ignorant, pitiable, too slow, uneducated, dazed, utterly foolish. Many important Republican leaders, Donald found—Chase, Sumner, Greeley, Thaddeus Stevens, Thurlow Weed, among others—doubted the advisability of a second term for Lincoln.

The criticisms came from all sides and often were mutually inconsistent. Some flayed the President for being ignorant of economics, diplomacy, the military arts; others for meddling too much. Some wanted a stronger hand on the tiller, others charged tyranny. Charles Francis Adams, Lincoln’s minister in London, called Jefferson Davis “in some respects superior to our President.” Fierce criticism erupted not only from Peace Democrats and War Democrats, but from radical Republicans. To them, Lincoln’s resourcefulness was feckless improvisation, his deliberateness was indecision and drift, his balancing sheer juggling. Above all, they differed with Lincoln over postwar reconstruction—especially over his plan to recognize Southern state governments as soon as 10 percent of the 1860 electorate took the oath and the state agreed to emancipate; and when Lincoln pocket-vetoed the Wade-Davis Bill embodying their own plan of requiring a majority of each state electorate to take an oath of past as well as future loyalty, the radicals’ hostility rose to white heat.

Above all, Republican leaders feared losing office. Could a man in Lincoln’s political straits win both nomination and reelection? The ease with which the President dominated the Republican presidential convention in Baltimore in June was a revealing indication of the reach of his balancing and managing skills. So adroitly had he handled the considerable patronage at his disposal, so delicately had he steered through intrastate factional politics, that Lincoln easily headed off booms for Chase and for the colorful and controversial general Ben Butler. More threatening had been a radical thrust behind General John C. Frémont, the 1856 Republican candidate; the President parried this by favoring a platform plank that called for continuing the war until the South’s “unconditional surrender.” Almost as easily as he won his own renomination, Lincoln put through the vice-presidential nomination of Andrew Johnson, his military governor in Tennessee, a stalwart Unionist and War Democrat.

The choice of Johnson symbolized Lincoln’s strategy of a Unionist coalition against the Democrats. In typical major-party fashion the Democrats, convening in Chicago late in August, tried a different kind of coalition—a War Democrat running on a peace platform calling for cessation of the war “with a view to an ultimate convention.” The Democrats chose a formidable candidate in General George B. McClellan, still a hero to many Northerners, but he was fatally compromised by a platform that, in the view of the Richmond Examiner, “floats between peace and war.” It did not help the general that Clement Vallandigham, the notorious Ohio leader of the “Copperheads,” as Peace Democrats were called by their foes, had made his way back into the North via Canada after Lincoln had banished him to the Confederacy. In vain did the general shift from his “peace before reunion” position to reunion as a condition for peace. The Northern voters had moved ahead of him.

Lincoln’s popular-vote victory in the fall, 2.2 to 1.8 million, resulted from a number of factors beyond his control—the absence of the Southern states, the grass-roots strength of his party, the tendency of voters to coalesce behind their leadership during wartime. His victory also was due to a number of forces over which he had partial control: his selection of Grant, the military mobilization of the country, and the exhilarating September announcement that Atlanta at last had fallen. Not least was victory due to the willingness of the commander-in-chief and his generals to grant soldiers timely furloughs by the tens of thousands, enabling them to cast a vote that all knew would be heavily pro-Lincoln.

But beyond all this, Lincoln won a victory over himself greater than his victory over McClellan. All his life a unionist who had put the Union before every other issue, including emancipation, he had come to realize that union could not be an end in itself but must be a crucial means to the nobler ends of liberty and equality. “From 1861 to 1865,” McPherson says, “Lincoln had moved steadily to the left: from limited war to total war; from gradual, compensated emancipation to immediate, universal abolition; from opposition to the arming of blacks to enthusiastic support for it, … from the colonization of freed slaves to the enfranchisement of black soldiers and literate blacks.” From union first and then emancipation, to union and emancipation and indeed union for emancipation—that was Lincoln’s supreme strategic shift.

Perhaps Lincoln’s finest moment as a leader came during his darkest hour; about the time he expressed the August surmise that he probably would not be reelected. Henry J. Raymond, chairman of the Republican National Committee and editor of the New York Times, had urged him to appoint a commission to offer Richmond peace on the sole condition of reunion, with all other issues—notably slavery—to be settled afterward. Sorely tempted, the President drafted a letter in effect feeling out Jefferson Davis on reunion, with the slavery question to be adjusted later. But Lincoln never sent the letter nor appointed the commission. Such a move, he decided, would be bad politically, for it would alienate antislavery Republicans but, even more, it would be wrong morally, for it would violate the “solemn promise” of the Emancipation Proclamation.

So, in the end, when all his famed political wiles had won him the support of his party, it was his capacity to transcend bargaining and brokerage and to embrace a politico-military strategy, to stick with it, to find the right men to carry it out, and to win with it, that characterized Lincoln’s leadership. A fox by training and instinct, in the end he rose to the stature of Herodotus’s hedgehog which knew one big thing—and of Machiavelli’s lion that could command followers and frighten wolves.

Once again fortune seemed to favor the bold. Hardly were all the election returns in when Sherman struck from Atlanta toward the sea. He had won the reluctant consent of Grant to conduct a campaign that shocked the orthodox military mind as even madder than the Vicksburg gamble. Convinced that his armies must crush the Confederates’ morale and economy in order to make them “sick of war” for generations to come, Sherman would cram his soldiers’ knapsacks with rations, restrict his regiments to one wagon each, cut his troops loose from their Atlanta base, and march two hundred miles toward Savannah on the coast, in a campaign of total war. And this is precisely what he did, after leaving General George Thomas to hold Hood northwest of Atlanta. Cutting a swath sixty miles wide, Sherman’s men engulfed military stores, cotton gins, farms, factories, warehouses, railroads, all the time foraging, burning, pillaging, destroying. By the new year, 1865, they were consolidating their position on the sea. Then Sherman turned north to rampage through South Carolina.

By Lincoln’s second Inaugural Day on March 4, the Confederacy lay prostrate, cleft in two places but still fighting valiantly, its armies, always semi-autonomous, protecting their state bastions. The Union blockade was still tightening, especially after Admiral David Farragut’s defiance of Confederate torpedoes and his dramatic sortie into Mobile Bay the previous August, and the closing of the key North Carolina port of Wilmington in February. Thomas had virtually destroyed Hood’s army in Tennessee. Sherman’s men were roaring through South Carolina, leaving Columbia in flames, capturing Charleston intact, making “Sherman neckties” out of rails by heating them over bonfires and wrapping them around trees. As Sherman drove northward, closing in on Johnston’s defense forces, Lee tried to break through Grant’s besieging army by attacking east of Petersburg. After an initial penetration his drive failed. The men in gray could still hold off the men in blue when on equal terms, but now the Union forces had such overwhelming numbers that they could check the Confederates on a broad front and still send powerful forces around the flanks.

Cornered, General Lee slipped out of Petersburg and Richmond toward the west, with 35,000 men, in a desperate effort to link up with Johnston’s forces to the south. Grant’s 80,000 men followed in hot pursuit, with General Philip Sheridan’s cavalry and mobile infantry corps racing on Lee’s left to prevent him from turning south. In a sharp engagement Lee lost 7,000 men captured, with minimal Federal casualties. “My God, has the Army dissolved?” Lee exclaimed as he watched the action. By now his hopes had, and his supply lines were cut. On April 9, he met Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.

It was a poignant encounter between the two adversaries, Lee with dress sword and red sash, Grant in faded campaign blouse and muddy boots—two old soldiers who had met during the Mexican War but not seen each other since. Because Grant would offer only terms of surrender and Lee knew he had no choice, the parley went smoothly, except when Lee asked that his cavalrymen and artillerists be permitted to keep their horses, which they owned. Grant demurred; only officers, he said, were allowed to keep their “private property” under the terms. Then he relented, reflecting that most of the men in the ranks were small farmers who would need their horses to put their spring crops in.

News of the meeting sped through both armies. Some on both sides disbelieved that Lee had actually surrendered. Said a Union colonel who had fought in Virginia for three years, “I had a sort of impression that we should fight him all our lives.”

Grant telegraphed Lincoln: “General Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia this morning.” The President and Stanton threw their arms around each other; the austere Secretary of War, someone reported, “was trotting about in exhilarated joy.” The booming of guns aroused Washingtonians in the morning. Newspapers appeared with huge headlines. Welles wrote in his diary, “Guns are firing, bells ringing, flags flying, men laughing, children cheering, all, all are jubilant.” Lincoln had a few days of celebration as he spoke to hundreds gathered around the White House, turned his thoughts to reconstruction, granted some pardons and reprieves, joyously greeted General Grant, and had him meet with the Cabinet. The President had never seemed more cheerful than on that day of the Cabinet meeting. His son Robert was back after serving on Grant’s staff; the President and First Lady planned to attend the theater in the evening. It was Good Friday, April 14.

The next day telegraph lines clacked out the dread news—the President in the rear of the box, the audience intent on Our American Cousin, the shot ringing out in the dark, the wild-looking man in black felt hat and high boots leaping from the box and catching his spurs on a regimental flag, the tumult in the theater, the President breathing laboriously, carried across the street to the house of a tailor, the room crowded with spectators, the slow death. And then the legend—of the Great Emancipator, of Father Abraham, of the ungainly fellow who told crude stories to relieve the tension within him, of the practical politician who had come to believe in union and liberty, of the men who hated him, including a man named Booth, of the unerring course of the assassin’s bullet, of a threnody by Whitman, and the grief of a people.

Guns were still booming as Lincoln’s funeral train set out for the north and west, but soon Johnston and the other Confederate generals surrendered. The Confederacy was dead, and with it an experiment that few in the South had time to mourn and few in the North wanted to. It had been an experiment in extreme decentralization, in radical states’ rights, in a confederation in which each state was sovereign. The central government could not impose tariffs or make internal improvements or of course interfere with slavery, except perhaps in wartime. Other powers, such as levying export duties or making appropriations not requested by the executive board, it could not exercise without a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress. It was the great misfortune of the confederationists that they had to run such a dispersed system under the pressing conditions of war, which on the one hand tended to compel central direction and control and on the other aroused, temporarily at least, feelings of state rather than Confederate solidarity. President Davis was chronically in despair over the refusal of sovereign states to cooperate in the war effort, and South Carolina, living up to the heritage of John Calhoun, virtually nullified an act of the Confederate Congress authorizing Richmond to impress goods and services.

The North was ending an experiment too—in stepped-up national power. Upon the secession of the South and the departure of Southern Democratic members of Congress, Republicans and War Democrats controlled the White House and Congress. Thus they were able to put through the Homestead Act and other great measures including, early in 1865, the vital Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery. Could Northern Republicans and antislavery Democrats sustain their power through the harsh trials of reconstruction that seemed almost certain to lie ahead? In his second Inaugural, Lincoln had said in his compelling peroration: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right…. let us strive … to bind up the nation’s wounds” to achieve “a just, and a lasting peace.” Could the national government, however, keep a creative balance between firmness and compassion? Could it extend the fruits of liberty and equality to millions of freed men and women?

But as Lincoln’s funeral train wove its way through Manhattan and up along the Hudson and across New York State to Cleveland, to Indianapolis and Chicago, and then at last to Springfield, Americans were not asking these questions. They were simply pouring out their grief, none more so than Walt Whitman:

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring….

Here, coffin that slowly passes,

I give you my sprig of lilac.

CHAPTER 2

The Reconstruction of Slavery

DOWN BY THE BUSH spring on a Virginia plantation a young black woman jumped up from the ground, crying out, “Glory, glory, hallelujah to Jesus! I’s free! I’s free!” She looked around fearfully, then rolled on the ground and kissed it, calling out her love and thanks to “Masser Jesus.” A few minutes before, in the mansion, she had found the white family in tears over a rumor that Jefferson Davis had been captured. After getting permission for another black servant to wait on table while she fetched water from the bush spring, she had walked tight-lipped, then run all the way to the spring, flung herself to the ground, and indulged in a paroxysm of rejoicing. To her, freedom meant one overwhelming hope—that she could rejoin her husband and four children, sold several years earlier to a slave dealer.

Other jubilees were more public. When reports of Lee’s surrender reached Athens, Georgia, blacks danced around a liberty pole in the center of town, until whites cut it down in the evening. In Charleston, several thousand black people paraded through the streets, while other thousands of blacks cheered. A mule pulled a cart carrying two women, beside whom a mock slave auctioneer shouted, “How much am I offered?” Then came sixty men tied together like a slave gang, followed by another cart carrying a black-draped coffin with letters proclaiming SLAVERY IS DEAD. Blacks from many trades—carpenters, tailors, butchers, masons, wheelwrights—along with Union soldiers and religious leaders, made up the long procession that slowly wound its way through town.

Many years later, freed people would often recall “just like yistiday” the moment they heard that freedom had come. For most, however, the day of jubilee was more a day of confusion, worry, and uncertainty. How and where they heard the news of final Southern defeat, who told them and when, not only varied widely but carried omens of future frustration and tragedy.

Often blacks heard the news from Union soldiers passing through the neighborhood. “We’s diggin’ potatoes,” remembered a Louisiana ex-slave, “when de Yankees come up with two big wagons and make us come out of de fields and free us. Dere wasn’t no cel’bration ’bout it. Massa say us can stay couple days till us ’cide what to do.” Sometimes a black who was “a good reader” would report the news from a newspaper. Most often slaves were assembled and told of their new freedom by their masters. Some masters in more remote areas waited weeks, even months, before informing their blacks, meantime using them to bring in the crops. Some planters accompanied their announcement with threats and warnings, demanding in some cases that the blacks stay and work and in others that they clear out at once. Occasionally a Union officer arrived to proclaim liberty; one such Yank had hardly left a Louisiana plantation when the planter’s wife emerged from the house to tell the newly freed blacks, “Ten years from now I’ll have you all back again.”

Nor did the freed people always greet the news with jubilation. After the dashed hopes of recent years, they were above all wary and uncertain. Talking gravely among themselves in their quarters, they discussed rumors—that the federal government would not back up their newly found freedom, that the Yankees might sell them to Cuba in order to pay for war costs, that the whole thing was a giant piece of deception. “You’re joking me,” Tom Robinson told the master who said he was now a free man. He spoke with some slave neighbors to see if they were free too. “I just couldn’t take it all in. I couldn’t believe we was all free alike.” But above all the blacks felt confused and disoriented. “We jes’ sort of huddle ’round together like scared rabbits,” an Alabama woman remembered about hearing the news, “but after we knowed what he means, didn’ many of us go, ’cause we didn’ know where to of went.” Some blacks stayed on to help their former master or mistress, out of a feeling of compassion, affection, or obligation. Few exacted any real vengeance, but many were hostile. A story came down through generations of one black family about their great-grandmother Caddy, who had been badly treated.

“When General Lee surrendered,” so the story went, “that meant that all the colored people were free! Caddy threw down that hoe, she marched herself up to the big house, then, she looked around and found the mistress. She went over to the mistress, she flipped up her dress and told the white woman to do something. She said it mean and ugly. This is what she said: Kiss my ass!”

The attitudes and actions of the newly freed were closely affected by those of the planters, who were variously angry, heartsick, resigned, vengeful, helpless, and helpful. Many were already grieving over sons, plantations, and fortunes taken by war; losing their blacks was the final heartbreak. Some masters whipped and even shot and hanged blacks who asserted their freedom. “Papa Day,” a Texas planter, told his hands, after reading the official proclamation, that the government did not need to tell them they were free because they had been free all along, that they could leave or slay, but if they left, most “white folks would not treat them as well as he had.”

Myrta Lockett Avary, daughter of a Virginia slaveholder, could never forget how her father had assembled his people one evening in the backyard. “You do not belong to me any more,” her father said in a trembling voice. “You are free. You have been like my own children. I have never felt that you were slaves. I have felt that you were charges put into my hands by God and that I had to render account to Him of how I raised you.” Looking out at a sea of uplifted black faces, illuminated by flaring pine torches, the master reminded them how he had fed them, clothed them, housed them, nursed them, taken care of their babies and laid away their dead. He wanted to keep them on by paying wages, but he hadn’t finished thinking things out. He wanted to know how they felt. “Ben! Dick! Moses! Abram! line up, everybody out there. As you pass this porch, tell me if you plan to stay….” All indicated they would remain. “Law, Marster!” said Uncle Andrew the patriarch, “I ain’ got nowhar tug go ef I was gwine!”

Other slaveholders were glad to be rid of at least some of their slaves so that they need not take care of them; they would keep the good workers and turn out the very old and the very young, the ill and the inefficient— just like the Yankee capitalists!—to “root, pig, or die.”

Many planters hardly knew how to liberate; many slaves hardly knew how to be liberated. Master and slave had lived in mutual dependency too long. Some planters almost felt relieved—they felt that their slaves had owned them—but others seemed to sicken and die. Mistresses in particular felt helpless when their servants disappeared. It was even harder for the blacks. “Folks dat ain’t never been free don’ rightly know de feel of bein’ free,” said James Lucas, a former slave of Jefferson Davis. “Dey don’t know de meanin’ of it….” An old slave rejected the idea of a wage: “Missis belonged to him, & he belonged to Missis.” Blacks knew how to work hard, said one of them, “but dey didn’t know nothing ’bout how to ’pend on demselves for de livin’.” Parke Johnston, a former slave in Virginia, recalled “how wild and upset and dreadful everything was in them times. It came so sudden on ’em they wasn’t prepared for it. Just think of whole droves of people, that had always been kept so close, and hardly ever left the plantation before, turned aloose all at once, with nothing in the world, but what they had on their backs, and often little enough of that; men, women and children that had left their homes when they found out they were free, walking along the road with no where to go.”

Still, it was far more a time of hope than fear. “That the day I shouted,” a former slave in Texas remembered. “Everybody went wild,” a Texas cowpuncher recalled. “We all felt like horses….WE was free. Just like that, we was free.”

Out in Bexar County a cowpuncher heard blacks singing:

Abe Lincoln freed the nigger

With the gun and the trigger;

And I ain’t goin’ to get whipped any more.

I got my ticket,

Leavin’ the thicket,

And I’m a-headin’ for the Golden Shore!

Bound for Freedom

In the lush green spring of 1865 the Golden Shore seemed to stretch just across the horizon. An intoxicating sense of freedom filled the air. Defeated and despairing Southerners could at least be free of Northern assaults on their homeland and burnings of their cities. Whatever their continued suffering, black people still could hold high hopes for the future. Liberated from military duty and disciplines, soldiers and sailors were returning home by the tens of thousands. Onetime farm boys, having mastered the great engines of war, were drifting back to the simpler tasks and the old rhythms of the arcadian world they had known.

Many Northerners felt free in a more positive sense. They had beaten the enemy on the transcendent moral issue of the time. They could face up to the burdens of freedom not only with enhanced military and economic power, but with a formidable array of leaders. Out of the conflicts of the 1850s and the crucible of war had emerged politicians, generals, agitators, intellectuals, journalists tested by adversity, hardened by experience, committed to making the system work for freedom—a system they now controlled.

In the vanguard of the moral leadership of the nation stood Charles Sumner. After his heavy caning by Preston Brooks and his long, self-imposed exile, the Massachusetts senator had returned to Washington with the somewhat insecure status of minor martyr. But he soon reestablished his moral standing through his burning conviction about the responsibility lying on the Republican party, his absolute commitment to protecting the rights of freed people, and his uncompromisingly radical stand on the central issues. He was fifty-four years old at war’s end, and the mass of nut-brown hair that hung loosely over his massive forehead, shading his deep blue eyes, was turning an iron gray; but he was still a commanding presence in the Senate as he rose to his full six feet two, broad of chest and a bit heavy of paunch. Many senators loathed the man from Boston for his eternal pomposity, his endless hectoring, his thunderous self-righteousness. Many respected him for his intellectual grasp and political integrity—and for his uncanny capacity for being right several years ahead of others. No one could ignore him.

At the opposite end of the long Capitol building, Thaddeus Stevens led the Radical Republicans in the House of Representatives with the same moral fervor as did Sumner in the Senate. Now seventy-three years old, the Pennsylvanian had climbed to the top after a long career in politics: anti-Mason state representative; two-term Whig member of Congress; an organizer of the Republican party; Republican member of the House of Representatives since 1858; and chairman of Ways and Means, the tax committee. Just as friends of Sumner speculated that the senator’s boyhood inability to meet the demands of an exacting father and unloving mother had left him eternally dissatisfied with his own—and his associates’—endeavors, so people wondered if Stevens’s clubfoot, his early poverty, and his desertion by a jobless and alcoholic father had produced a need both to compensate for a sense of inferiority and to chastise deserters, whether of the Union or of himself. Others had simpler explanations: both men found leadership against slavery morally fulfilling and politically rewarding.

Other congressional leaders were often more effective than Stevens or Sumner in the give-and-take of legislative politics. Benjamin F. Wade, Massachusetts-born and -bred, had moved to Ohio at the age of twenty-one, joined the abolitionist ranks, and after thirty years in politics won his Senate seat in 1851. Now a veteran of the upper chamber, he was still a bit rough in manner and coarse in speech, but politicians liked him for his honesty and affability. Zachariah Chandler of Michigan was another New Englander who had moved west and prospered, in his case as a merchant banker and land speculator. A founder of the Republican party, he seemed to feel no strain between his conservative business interests and his close association with radical Republicanism. One of the ablest leaders of the moderate Republicans was Senator Lyman Trumbull, an old friend and foe of Lincoln in Illinois politics, firmly opposed both to slavery and to a radical reconstruction policy, and a powerful voice on both issues as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. To Trumbull’s right stood Orville H. Browning, the man who had succeeded to Stephen Douglas’s seat—a longtime critic of Lincoln, consistently opposed to abolitionism in the old days and now equally opposed to a strong reconstruction program.

In the House, Stevens had some equally capable associates in such men as George W. Julian of Indiana—successively a Whig, Free-Soiler, and Republican, but always a firm egalitarian—and William D. Kelley of Philadelphia, a zealous humanitarian who would become an ardent protectionist. Julian was notable among these men for his firm belief in equality between the sexes. These men and the other Republican leaders quarreled with one another and sometimes despised one another but, in Martin Mantell’s words, collectively they “were able to define new basic policy positions that met the needs of rapidly changing times while maintaining the essential unity of their own party organization.” In the forcing house of Reconstruction the Republicans were shaping a party loyalty that would tilt the balance of American politics for decades to come.

The great unknown in the existing balance, in the spring of 1865, was the new President, Andrew Johnson. A Tennesseean who won attention as the only Southern senator to speak out against secession, a slaveholder who boasted that he had never sold slaves but only bought them, the running mate of Lincoln in 1864 but lacking in ties to the Republican party, a believer in both equal rights and states’ rights and hence caught in the tension between them, Johnson had risen to fame outside of the social and political establishments—and he was proud of it. He boasted of his plebeian Carolina origins, though somewhat less of his father, a hotel porter who had died without reward after rescuing two boozing gentlemen from an icy stream. As an impoverished young man, hardly literate, Johnson had moved with his mother and stepfather, their scanty belongings in a two-wheeled cart, to Tennessee, where he had set up as a tailor and moved successfully into politics. Yet his mudsill origins seemed to oppress him, provoking a resentment in particular against the pontificators, like Sumner, who wore their learning on their sleeves. He had had a bad press, especially after he gave a rambling, drunken vice-presidential inaugural speech, in which he had scolded the attending Diplomatic Corps for its “fine feathers and gewgaws.” He had always been, on the national stage, a secondary, even shadowy figure. Now he was President.

What kind of President? On the day after Lincoln’s assassination Wade, Chandler, Julian, and other Radical Republicans met in Washington to reassess the situation and plan strategy. They grieved over the loss of their friend the commander-in-chief, but they seemed to share a sense of relief. Lincoln had brilliantly held the Union together, even while emancipating the slaves, but he had seemed to many Radicals too conservative on the question of postwar Negro rights, too conciliatory toward the South. Johnson appeared to be a different breed: tough, uncompromising, a fiery foe of Southern “aristocrats,” a champion of the small white farmer in the South, a firm and even zealous war governor of Tennessee. Radicals visiting the new man in the White House came away vastly reassured. He seemed one of them. Even Sumner overrode his usual suspiciousness. Wade was almost euphoric.

“Johnson, we have faith in you,” he greeted the President on one occasion. “By the gods, there will be no trouble now in running the government!” Responding in kind, Johnson said, “I hold that robbery is a crime; rape is a crime; murder is a crime; treason is a crime, and crime must be punished.”

Prepared to mobilize behind a firm and comprehensive reconstruction policy was a relatively solid phalanx of Republican radicals and moderates. Often differing over means, they were fundamentally united over ends— to dissolve the old Confederate leadership, to provide national protection for the civil and political rights of freed people, to give the black people a chance to make out on their own. In seeking these goals, Radicals had extensive support among the electorate and powerful support from the intellectual leadership of the day—from thinkers and scholars like Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Lothrop Motley; from editors like Horace Greeley and Whitelaw Reid; from poets like Whittier, Whitman, and Lowell; from theologians and scientists; from leaders of the movement for women’s rights. The Radicals had also the advantage of long reflection over Reconstruction issues. From the start of the war they had been anticipating difficulties, analyzing ways and means, debating political strategies. They had collected extensive information about Southern conditions from newspaper reports, government investigations, military intelligence, the Freedmen’s Bureau, the resources of Northern universities.

The Republican leaders had, it seemed, one other signal advantage in organizing Reconstruction: they could proceed without constitutional constraints to a degree not possible since the founding days. Not only did the Constitution of 1787 authorize and even require the federal government to guarantee basic rights of American citizens, but the Republicans, through their large majorities in Congress and most of the Northern state legislatures, were able to put through constitutional amendments as long as these changes satisfied both moderate and radical Republicans. The Republican Administration and the Republican Congress, in short, possessed an extraordinary battery of military, political (especially party), economic, intellectual, and constitutional resources to make a whole new beginning for democratic republicanism in the South. These advantages were, it is true, offset by grave institutional and intellectual weaknesses. But when Charles Sumner, the political curmudgeon incarnate, could leave the White House beaming over Johnson’s militant posture on Reconstruction, even the most pessimistic could indulge in high hopes for the future.

Within six months these hopes were dimming. Within one year the President and the Republican leadership were at odds. Within three years a President was being impeached, the North was aroused, the South inflamed. Within a decade a great experiment in liberty and equality was coming to an end, the blacks abandoned. By century’s end the freed people were restored to a condition of virtual servitude, Northern blacks were still suffering discrimination, Northern whites had turned away from the quest for equality, Southern whites had won a Pyrrhic victory, the South was still mortgaged to the past, and racism lay like a blight across the land.

What happened in late 1865 and early 1866 to disrupt a Northern leadership apparently united on Reconstruction, and to turn the freed people of the South—and indeed all Southerners—back toward the path leading ultimately to reconstruction of the old racial tragedy? The question has long been debated. Since the first histories are usually written by the victors, the early postwar historians laid the blame largely on Johnson and the men immediately around him, on their alleged ineptness, narrowness, conservatism, vindictiveness, even wickedness. A later generation of historians shifted the blame to the Radical Republicans, accusing them of the same failings, plus extreme fanaticism. Still later, the failure was seen to stem from psychological, economic, institutional, and other complex sources, or even from sheer stupidity—the notion that the politicians of the 1860s happened to comprise a leadership generation of unusual ineptness.

All these factors doubtless had some part to play, for the great wrenching movements of history spring out of a profusion of forces. But the more recent historians, rising above the passions of olden times, have pointed to the psychological and other forces that tend directly to shape the actions of political leadership. The crises of the late 1850s and early 1860s brought to the top leaders of bounding political hopes and expectations and of considerable political skill. Not only had these men learned to operate the machinery of groups and parties, nominations and elections, legislatures and bureaucracies, and to calculate in terms of the arithmetic of nominations and elections; they possessed as well a heightened sense of the geometry of politics—of the new policy that had arisen during the Civil War, of a new nationalized and centralized system that, in Morton Keller’s words, created and allocated power as the economy allocated and created wealth. Even more, they would act openly and boldly on the basis of values and purposes that had been hardened in the fires of civil conflict.

Andrew Johnson possessed more power than any of these men, but less grasp of the strategic factors. In the spring of 1865 he had much the same political advantage that Lincoln had held four years earlier—he could take the initiative in an unresolved political situation until Congress convened in December. He had an unparalleled political opportunity, if he would but grasp it—to follow a conciliatory mid-course between Radical Republicans and old-time War Democrats, enabling him to “command the center” and isolate his rivals on each flank. Then he could dismantle the old Southern secessionist leadership—men he had long hated—and mobilize a new leadership acting for the people he had always loved, the Southern white yeomanry, at the same time protecting the civil rights of Southern blacks, as he was pledged to do. Ultimately he could reunite South and North on a new basis of popular democracy. “The only safety of the nation,” he said, “lies in a generous and expansive plan of conciliation.”

Perhaps Johnson could have become the “great unifier,” even if this required building a regenerated Union party that would unite moderate Democrats and Republicans, incidentally giving him a presidential term “in his own right” in 1868. It was not clear, though, that he had the comprehensive vision, the political skill of isolating politicians and playing them off against one another, the finesse at political management of his own followers, or the ability to rise above his seething resentments over the slights of “aristocratic” Southerners and of moralizing, condescending Northerners, to bring off such a realignment of parties and leaders.

He got off to a quick start in the late spring of 1865, leaving congressional leaders on the sidelines. In a series of proclamations and executive actions he struck at the old Southern leadership by granting amnesty to Confederates who took the oath of allegiance, except for large property holders and other influentials. Members of such excepted categories could, however, apply for special pardons. The President empowered provisional governors to call conventions made up of delegates elected by eligible voters; the conventions would then arrange elections for state offices and for Congress. Conspicuously absent from this plan was any provision for black suffrage.

Congressional Republicans were by no means idle during these spring days of 1865. With Congress out of session, they could not shape grand strategy, but at first they felt little need to because of their continuing confidence in Johnson. Sumner himself was so untypically trusting that he wrote to a friend that on “the question of colored suffrage the President is with us.” Indeed, one of the Radicals’ main reservations about Johnson at this time was that he was too vengeful toward the old Southern leaders. Many Radicals felt that the issue was far less the punishment of Confederate “traitors” than the combining of civil, political, social, and economic reforms as necessary for the freed people truly to achieve freedom. The more Johnson remained silent on these crucial matters, the more uneasy many party leaders became. And the more he seemed to be following a policy of vengeance against the old Confederate leadership, the more he appeared to be astride two horses that were beginning to buck in opposite directions.

Which horse would Johnson stick with? As it turned out, he was left with little choice, for his increasing involvement with Southern leaders and Northern conservatives entangled him in a “pro-Southern,” pro-states’ rights constellation of forces, while it was temperamentally impossible for him—and, he doubtless felt, politically unrewarding—to work with the Radical leaders whom, in his hierarchy of hatreds, he loathed even more than most Copperheads. As he moderated his policies in the South, as he recognized Southern state governments that met his requirements, as he received endless delegations pouring out their grievances and playing on his vanity, as he issued thousands of special pardons to onetime Confederate leaders, he slowly became tied to the Southern structure of leadership and power that he had hated. He became, in Kenneth Stampp’s words, virtually the prisoner of the men he had set out to destroy. Thus he lost his chance to mobilize a new leadership among Southern yeomanry and Unionists.

And Southern leadership was ready to assert itself. As provisional state governments were established under Johnson’s plan, their legislatures, elected by whites only, began to pass “Black Codes” that gave freed people some basic legal rights, such as to marry and make contracts, but that also included vagrancy and apprenticeship provisions designed to keep blacks virtually in a condition of peonage. If Johnson felt politically embarrassed by the Southern leadership, he hardly showed it. He urged the legislatures to liberalize their racial policy, but he barely demurred when they defied him. Nothing was done for the Negro’s basic needs and education. Carl Schurz, whom the President himself sent on a fact-finding tour of the South, reported that hundreds of times he was told that “learning will spoil the nigger for work” and that the elevation of the blacks would be the “degradation” of the whites. Johnson ignored his reports.

Sumner visited Johnson just before Congress convened. For two and a half hours the men sparred warily. Complaining that the “freemen” of Georgia and Alabama were mistreated by the “rebels,” Sumner accused the President of throwing away the victories of the Union army. Johnson bridled.

“Mr. Sumner, do murders ever occur in Massachusetts?”

“Unhappily yes, Mr. President.”

“Do people ever knock each other down in Boston?”

“Unhappily yes, Mr. President, sometimes.”

“Would you consent that Massachusetts should be excluded from the Union on this account?”

“No, Mr. President, surely not.” The breach between the two men was unbridgeable—especially after the senator, on leaving, picked up his silken tophat from where he had laid it on the floor and discovered that Johnson, in his excitement, had used it for a spittoon.

By the time Congress convened in early December 1865, the South was busy reconstructing its old political, social, and economic system and the President was actively abetting it under the banner of states’ rights. Moderate as well as radical Republicans were furious—but no longer frustrated, for now they could take the initiative away from the White House. The legislators did so through the classic weapons of parliamentary battle: controlling entrance into their own ranks, holding up the executive’s program, and using congressional investigations as a form of attack. At the opening of the session, the Clerk of the House simply omitted from the roll call the names of men elected from formerly seceding states. Now it was the Southerners who were furious—and helpless.

The Republicans, solidly in control of both chambers, proceeded to set up a fifteen-member Joint Committee on Reconstruction to plan and assert the role of Congress in Southern policy. The President could do nothing to stop this. Under the stinging parliamentary whip of Stevens and the moral lash of Sumner, the Radical Republicans along with many moderates began to act with unprecedented unity on procedure. On policy Republicans as a whole were still fundamentally divided, as later events would demonstrate; probably the only major issue on which all of them agreed was the end of slavery, and it was symbolic that the Thirteenth Amendment, passed earlier by two-thirds majorities in House and Senate, and then ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures, was proclaimed in effect two weeks after Congress convened. At last, black emancipation was part of the United States Constitution.

Emancipation—but not freedom. And on this distinction turned some portentous differences among Republicans. Some felt that simply eradicating slavery was enough, while the vast majority recognized that the federal government must guarantee the freed people’s legal and civil rights. A lesser number of Republicans would protect the blacks’ political rights, especially their right to vote. Some Republicans—mostly Radicals—were eager to provide land, sustenance, and education on the premise that in the long run the blacks’ civil and political liberties had to be buttressed by social and economic freedom; to some Republicans this notion was radical and dangerous. These differences over the substance of policy were multiplied by differences over the execution of it—whether the federal or state governments should direct Reconstruction, whether Congress or the President should control federal policy, how much power should be granted the Freedmen’s Bureau or other bureaucracies, how much authority should be left in the hands of federal and state judges.

With all these permutations and combinations, it was a tribute both to the resolve of the Republicans and to the strength of their caucuses that the party remained united in the early months of 1866. Moving quickly to protect the freed people’s civil rights through the use of military courts, Congress voted to extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau and enlarge its powers. Though moderate Republicans favored the bill and radicals felt it was far too limited, the President vetoed it. Earlier, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act granting citizenship to the newly freed—thus overturning Dred Scott—and granting equal civil rights to all persons born in the United States, with the notable exception of Indians. Johnson vetoed this bill as an invasion of states’ rights. Congress passed both bills over his vetoes.

Thus were the great constitutional catapults of Congress and President wheeled into position; the test now, as debate among press, politicians, and public rose to white heat, was one of leadership. Politicians were already maneuvering for advantage in the congressional elections of 1866, which they viewed as both an immediate sounding of public opinion and as a prelude to 1868 and beyond. Bypassing the President, the Joint Committee drew up a proposed Fourteenth Amendment in order to secure blacks’ civil rights and to thwart any effort by the Supreme Court to invalidate the Civil Rights Act. This proposal was a supreme test of the Republicans’ solidarity—especially over the issue of states’ rights, for the proposed amendment barred the states from passing laws “which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” or from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” or of the “equal protection of the laws.” Republican ranks held firm, but at a price—the amendment did not firmly grant the black man the right to vote.

Excluded from the Joint Committee at the start for his “extremism,” Sumner infuriated congressional Republicans by opposing the amendment on highly political grounds—he had to deal with moderate Republicans back home—but he redeemed himself with a fervent five-hour address, “The Equal Rights of All,” which concluded: “Show me a creature, with erect countenance looking to heaven, made in the image of God, and I show you a MAN, who, of whatever country or race, whether darkened by equatorial sun or blanched by northern cold, is with you a child of the Heavenly Father, and equal with you in all the rights of Human Nature…. It is not enough that you have given Liberty. By the same title that we claim Liberty do we claim Equality also…. One is the complement of the other….”

The state of liberty and equality in the South three years after the Emancipation Proclamation was not good. At the end of April 1866, following three months of almost daily hearings, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction reported its findings. Well over a hundred witnesses, including Freedmen’s Bureau agents, Southern unionists, and a few black men, had testified that floggings and killings of freed people continued, with many of the crimes not prosecuted or even disclosed. The celebrated Clara Barton, reporting with a nurse’s precision, testified that a young woman, black and pregnant, had come to her for help; she had been whipped for not “spinning properly”—whipped with a “lash half as large as my little finger,” whipped to the bone, the flesh completely cut out along most of the gashes. Southerners charged the committee with bias, but Northerners were horrified, and they were further aroused by news of race riots in Memphis and New Orleans; in each case more than a hundred blacks were killed or injured by white police and civilians who had gone on a rampage of shooting, stabbing, burning, and lynching.

Johnson watched in dismay as the country polarized, for the mounting division threatened his “middle way.” But instead of dampening the fires, he poked them up with intemperate statements. Responding to a group of serenaders on the White House grounds, he branded the Joint Committee as an “irresponsible central directory”; he had fought traitors in the South, he thundered, and was prepared to fight them in the North. Goaded into naming names, he listed Stevens, Sumner, and Phillips. He could not veto the Fourteenth Amendment, but he could and did urge Southern states not to ratify it. As moderates as well as radicals broke away from him, he tried all the harder to rally the forces of the center. He not only replaced moderates in his Administration with more conservative types—including the supplanting of postmasters by the hundreds—but he summoned a National Union Convention to meet in Philadelphia to launch his new party. The convention made a fine show of unity, symbolized by Massachusetts and South Carolina delegates marching into the hall in pairs, but potential Democratic supporters held back, largely because they wanted to protect the standing of their state and local parties in the North. The still potent New York Democracy, in particular, preferred to concentrate on electing its own to state offices rather than backing an apostate Republican President.

Johnson fought on. In August he set out on a daring venture—a “swing around the circle”—to arouse support. Warned by a supporter, Senator James R. Doolittle, that he would be “followed by the reporters of a hundred presses who do nothing but misrepresent you”—who indeed might report one of his “outbursts”—the President was undeterred. He assembled a glittering presidential party headed by Secretary Seward, General Grant, and Admiral Farragut. The party took the old “presidential route” to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, journeyed by yacht up the Hudson, then turned west for stump speeches along the Erie Canal. In the Eastern cities Johnson attracted huge, fervent crowds, who emboldened him to new attacks on the rump Congress, disunionists and “traitors,” the “subsidized and mercenary press.” But in the Midwest, as Johnson gave his one set speech over and over again, the press grew bored and hostile and crowds turned ugly, Grant deserted the presidential party, the President fell into shouting matches with hecklers, riots broke out, platforms collapsed, Seward came down with cholera and almost died. The “swing” was judged a disaster; the President had fired up issues without defining them, asked support for pro-Administration candidates without naming them, sought some kind of middle way without explaining it.

Most “off-year” elections, lacking the focus of a presidential contest, produce sketchy results; 1866 turned out to be a dramatic exception. Republicans carried every gubernatorial contest and every state legislature in the North. They would command huge majorities in the Fortieth Congress—42 to 11 in the Senate, 143 to 49 in the House. To the jubilant radicals, the results were as meaningful as they were decisive. The campaign had been vituperative on both sides, but it had sharply defined the lines of conflict. After years of isolation and frustration the radicals not only had a mandate; with their two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress they now had power.

A Revolutionary Experiment

For a brief fleeting moment in history—from late 1866 to almost the end of the decade—radical senators and congressmen led the Republican party in an audacious venture in both the organization and the goals of political power. To a degree that would have astonished the constitution-makers of earlier years, they converted the eighty-year-old system of checks and balances into a highly centralized, majoritarian system that elevated the legislative branch, subordinated the executive and judicial branches, and suspended federalism and “states’ rights” in the South. They turned the Constitution on its head. The aims of these leaders were indeed revolutionary—to reverse age-old human and class relationships in the South and to raise millions of people to a much higher level of economic, political, social, and educational self-fulfillment. That such potent means could not in the end produce such humane and democratic ends was the ultimate tragedy of this revolutionary experiment.

This heroic effort was not conducted by men on white horses, but rather by quarrelsome parliamentarians—by a Congress that seemed to one of its members as never “more querulous, distracted, incoherent and ignoble.” In the Senate, Sumner had good reason to be distracted, for he had married a woman half his age shortly before the election and was preoccupied first by marital bliss and very soon by marital distress as he and his wife found themselves hopelessly incompatible. His colleagues found him more remote and unpredictable than ever. In the House, Stevens worked closely with his Radical allies, but he was now desperately anxious to move swiftly ahead, for he knew that time was running out for him and perhaps for his cause. Rising on the House floor, he now presented the countenance of death, with his dourly twisted mouth, deeply sunken eyes, parchment skin, and a body so wasted that he often conducted business from a couch just outside the chamber. But the old man never lost his ferocious drive to dominate; as he spoke, his eyes lighted up in a fierce gleam and his croaking voice turned thunderous, while he stretched his bony arm out in a wide sweep and punctuated his arguments with sudden thrusts of his long yellow forefinger.

The strength of the Republican party lay in the advanced positions of these two men but even more in the quality and commitment of other party leaders in both houses. Some of these men—John Sherman, James A. Garfield, James G. Blaine—would gain fame in the decades ahead. Others, with such names as Thomas D. Eliot, John A. Bingham, James M. Ashley, Samuel Shellabarger—would fade into the mists of history. Occupying almost every hue on the party rainbow, these men differed sharply and disputed mightily, but they felt they had a clear election mandate to establish civil and other rights in the South; they had a strong sense of party solidarity; and they had the backing of rank-and-file senators and representatives and of party organizations throughout the North.

They also had a common adversary in Andrew Johnson. The President stewed over his election defeat, but he would make no fundamental change in his political and legislative strategy. Setbacks seemed only to mire him more deeply in his own resentments. Karl Marx had noted that behind Johnson’s “affectation of severity against single persons,” such as Jefferson Davis, he tended to be “extremely vacillating and weak in substance”; certainly Johnson was more flexible in day-to-day tactics than in overall strategy. He received little independent advice from his Cabinet, which appeared to believe that the beleaguered President needed above all their loyalty. Stanton dissented on occasion but, characteristically, Johnson did not wholly trust him. As the President stuck to the disintegrating political center and the Republicans moved toward a radical posture, the legislative stage was set for drama and conflict.

The upshot was a burst of legislative creativity in the “hundred days” of winter 1866–67:

December 14, 1866: Congress enacts black suffrage for the District of Columbia, later reenacts it over Johnson’s veto. January 7, 1867: the House adopts Ashley’s resolution instructing the Judiciary Committee to “inquire into the conduct of Andrew Johnson.” January 22: Congress grants itself authority to call itself into special session, a right recognized until now as belonging only to the President. March 2: all on the same day, Congress passes a basic act laying out its general plan of political reconstruction; in effect deprives the President of command of the army; and enacts the Tenure of Office Act barring the Chief Executive from removing officials appointed by and with the advice of the Senate, without Senate approval. March 23: Congress passes a supplementary Reconstruction Act requiring military commanders to start registering “loyal” voters.

The heart of congressional strategy to democratize the South lay in the first Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867, as clarified, strengthened, and implemented in later acts. With the ostensible purpose of restoring social order and republican government in the South, and on the premise that the existing “Johnson” state regimes there could not realize these ends or even protect life or property, the South was divided into five military districts subject to martial law. The commanders were empowered not only to govern—to suppress disorder, protect life and property, remove civil officeholders—but to initiate political reconstruction by enrolling qualified voters including blacks, and excluding the disloyal. To be restored to the Union, the Southern states must call new constitutional conventions that, elected under universal manhood suffrage, in turn must establish new state governments that would guarantee black suffrage and ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. These states would be eligible for representation in the national legislature only after Congress had approved their state constitutions and after the Fourteenth Amendment had become part of the Constitution.

It was a radical’s dream, a centralist’s heaven—and a states’-righter’s nightmare. Congress held all the governmental strings in its hands. No more exquisite punishment could have been devised for secessionists than to make them conform to national standards in reconstructing their own state governments and gaining restoration to the Union. Congress did not stop with upsetting the division of powers between nation and states; it overturned the separation of powers among the three coordinate branches of the national government. Radicals could defend the Tenure of Office Act against this charge by contending that its main purpose was not to undermine presidential power in general but to thwart any effort of Johnson to sack Secretary of War Stanton. But the effort of Congress to interfere with the hitherto near-sacred independence of the judiciary left little question as to the willingness of the Radicals to experiment with changes in the checks and balances.

Under Salmon P. Chase, the old-time abolitionist leader and Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary until appointed Chief Justice in 1864, the Supreme Court had recovered some of the moral standing and political influence it had lost under Roger Taney. In general, the Chase Court had upheld national and congressional power, but in April 1866, just before the congressional Republicans took control of Reconstruction, the justices, in a preliminary ruling, struck down resort to martial law where the civil courts were operating. If it were possible to bring a civilian before a military court in a state that was not a theater of war, the Court ruled in Ex parte Milligan, “there is an end of liberty regulated by law.” Stung by this decision, Stevens called it more dangerous to the “lives and liberties of the loyal men of this country” than even Dred Scott. Radicals recognized that the decision might hamstring Reconstruction, for the Court’s argument, in William R. Brock’s words, would now apply directly in the South, where war no longer existed, the civil courts were functioning, and the jurisdiction of military courts had been enlarged.

Radical fears rose again in the spring of 1867 when the Court invalidated a wartime measure requiring lawyers practicing before federal courts to take loyalty oaths. When the Republican leaders learned that the Court had agreed to review a case much like Milligan but involving a military court in Mississippi, Congress took direct action through a measure depriving the Court of jurisdiction over this kind of case. Some members of the Court wished to mobilize judicial power against congressional; but Chase, experienced in the balances and nuances of power, called them off, warning against a “collision” between Court and Congress. The Court then rebuffed two Southern states seeking to enjoin executive enforcement of the Reconstruction Acts. Once again the legislature emerged triumphant.

The most potent and dramatic congressional weapon against the President lay tucked away inconspicuously in Section 3 of Article I of the Constitution: “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: and no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present. Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.”

No President had been impeached; the congressional weapon lay unused, a loaded gun neither cocked nor fired. Perhaps it was unfortunate that Congress had not seriously considered impeaching a President, for the ancient process had not been tested as part of the constitutional checks and balances. Some hoped that now it would be. When impeachment of Johnson neared, a friend of Congressman Garfield wrote him that the “next great question to be decided in our history is this—is the National Legislature to be as omnipotent in American politics as the English is in English politics. The struggle through which we pass in reaching an answer to that question will be the parallel to that through which the British people passed in the time of the Stuarts.… May we not anticipate a time when the President will no more think of vetoing a bill passed by Congress than the British crown thinks of doing the same thing?” Others were quick to point out that the Framers had devised an American system of separated powers rather than a unified one like the British. But this question had not been directly faced or tested.

Impeachment could also have been used as a grand confrontation between President and Congress over the fundamental strategy and substance of Reconstruction. In essence Johnson wanted a soft, conciliatory posture toward the South, with full deference to states’ rights. Republicans, both moderates and radicals, wanted a hard policy, to be shaped and enforced by national power. The most clear-cut difference on substantive issues between the President and the Republican leadership was over federally guaranteed or sponsored black suffrage, although Johnson camouflaged his opposition to “niggers” voting by leaving it up to the (Southern, white-dominated) states. There were other grave issues. But impeachment failed to pose them in a manner that encouraged rational debate either in Washington or in the country at large.

The decision to impeach had come far more in response to personal and political events than to a desire to clarify constitutional and policy issues. It was clear after the 1866 congressional elections that legislature and executive would follow divergent reconstruction strategies, but most members of Congress shrank from the perilous experiment of impeachment. They feared making a martyr of Johnson, opening up new wounds among the Republicans, and giving Senator Benjamin Wade, a Radical, a soft-money man, and a supporter of women’s rights as well as black suffrage, a leg up on the 1868 presidential nomination, for Wade as Senate president pro tem would move to the White House if Johnson should be removed. During 1867, an effort to recommend impeachment to the House failed, amid general ridicule. Even after the President in December pugnaciously told Congress that in certain cases he “would be compelled to stand on his rights, and maintain them, regardless of consequences,” the House voted down an impeachment resolution two to one.

It was Johnson himself—a man with the courage of his convictions and the conviction of his innocence—who precipitated the battle of ’68. He did so by sacking his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton. The President had suspended Stanton in August 1867, and thus kept within the letter of the Tenure of Office Act. Now he flagrantly defied that act—and Congress. The House responded by resolving, 126 to 47, “That Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, be impeached of high crimes and misdemeanors in office.”

The impeachment and trial of Andrew Johnson might have been the climactic stages of a great political and constitutional drama, but not one of the acts of this drama was well conceived or well played. When Johnson suspended Stanton, the President induced General Grant to serve as the temporary Secretary of War, on some kind of understanding that the general would help him make the Tenure of Office Act into a great constitutional test case. When, however, the Senate expressed disapproval of Stanton’s ouster, Grant withdrew in favor of the sacked secretary, amidst mutual recriminations that brought out the worst in each man. After Johnson found an alcoholic, foppish general to serve as Secretary of War, Stanton held on to his job by posting a guard and barricading himself all night in his office.

Rumors circulated that Johnson would suppress Congress through a military coup—or that the Radicals would take over the White House with the help of their friends in the military. There was much whispering of money passing hands for the conviction or exoneration of the President.

Probably the most sordid episode was the resurrection of the case of Mary E. Surratt. The mother of a man who had been implicated in the Lincoln assassination plot and then fled the country, Mrs. Surratt had been convicted on flimsy evidence and in large part, it seemed, on the hope that her son would return when he heard of her imminent hanging. He did not and Mary Surratt, fainting and sobbing, was led to the gallows within sight of her open grave. Now, over two years later, a War Department subordinate of Stanton’s abetted publication of a statement that President Johnson had signed her death warrant with a clemency recommendation from the military court staring him in the face. As the statement was blazoned across the nation’s front pages, Johnson reacted with wrath and vengefulness against Stanton. Many believed that this incident precipitated Johnson’s first move against the secretary.

The last act of impeachment was played out in the Senate starting on March 5, 1868, still without high drama. The chief protagonist, the President of the United States, was not present. He was well represented by William M. Evarts, a leading New York attorney, assisted by an ex-Supreme Court Justice and Johnson’s just-resigned Attorney General. The President was fortunate too in the low caliber of the impeachment managers appointed by the House. Stevens was feebler than ever, and the prosecution fell into the hands of Ben Butler, whose prosecutorial manner, courtroom bombast, and general highhandedness did his cause little good. Moreover, the managers had a hard case to present, for the House had impeached Johnson on a farrago of charges ranging from preventing the execution of the Tenure of Office Act to bringing “disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach” on Congress. If Johnson’s foes were trying the old prosecutor’s trick of “throwing everything in the book” at the President with the hope that something would stick, the tactic failed, for senators were able to use the sheer variety of charges as means of evading them.

The pseudo-drama was robbed even of a final suspenseful scene, for it was widely expected that the President would win a narrow exoneration. Narrow it was, as the Senate, on the critical eleventh article—whether the President was guilty of high misdemeanors as charged—voted 35 for conviction and 19 for acquittal, one vote short of the two-thirds necessary for removal. Not only was the close acquittal predictable, it was probably contrived; and some senators, favoring acquittal but feeling the pressure to convict, voted against the President in the expectation of acquittal. Nor was there much Senate heroism on display, notwithstanding later efforts to glorify the seven Republican senators who voted to uphold Johnson despite intense constituency pressure. Several of the “Republican Seven” were subsequently denied reelection, but others felt that their political positions had been strengthened by their independent stand.

Thus ended a political struggle masquerading as a judicial performance. Were great constitutional stakes involved? “Once set the example of impeaching a President for what, when the excitement of the hour shall have subsided, will be regarded as insufficient cause,” said Senator Trumbull, one of the “Republican Seven,” “and no future President will be safe who happens to differ with a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate on any measure deemed by them important.” Quoting these words, Kenneth Stampp disputed them, on the ground that Johnson’s ouster, if achieved, would more likely have been a curiosity of American political history than a precedent for future action. In later years, following another struggle between President and Congress, the verdict on impeachment might shift again.

At the time, at least, the struggle left unchanged the paramount question of legislative versus executive authority over policy. It left unchanged even the lesser question of the political and moral authority of a President who had been chosen Lincoln’s running mate as a former Democrat and present Unionist—and who had then come into office by chance—against the authority of a Congress that had very recently been elected to office. But there was little further debate about impeachment in 1868 as politicians turned away from it with relief, to more pressing matters of politics and policy. Many, indeed, would soon repent of their actions, but not Johnson. He served out his term as contentious as ever, but taking care not unduly to provoke Congress. He won his way back to the Senate in 1875—appropriately, as a Democrat—gave one major speech in the Senate against his old enemy Grant, and died the same year. He was buried, as he requested, with his head on a copy of the Constitution. It was his personal copy of the Constitution, very much thumbed and worn—very much his Constitution.

Johnson’s near-removal had left Ulysses S. Grant as the most prominent national figure.

For a man who had hardly known politics before the Civil War, who had failed as a farmer and clerk and had been reduced in the late 1850s to peddling wood in the streets and even to pawning his watch, Grant had shown astonishing talents as a Washington politician following the war that had made him a national hero. He had walked the political tightrope both between Johnson and the congressional Republicans and between dutiful subordination to the commander-in-chief and accommodations with the Radicals. In contrast to his garrulous rivals on Capitol Hill, he had made silence into a political weapon, insisting when it suited him that a soldier must not intrude into politics. He had managed to move toward the winning side by keeping his lines into the congressional party, and he seems genuinely to have shifted toward a more militant posture on Reconstruction as the 1868 election neared. Following a rash of endorsements in the party press, the Republicans, meeting-in Chicago, brushed aside such availables as Chase and Wade and chose Grant on the first ballot.

The old tradition that presidential candidates remain mute Grant found wholly to his liking; he remembered the summer and fall of 1868 as “the most quiet, pleasant time” since the start of the war. He let the Republican party platform speak for him; but on the paramount question of black suffrage that platform spoke with a delicately forked tongue: “the guaranty by Congress of equal suffrage to all loyal men at the South was demanded by every consideration of public safety, of gratitude, and of justice, and must be maintained; while the question of justice in all the loyal States properly belongs to the people of those States.” In short, black suffrage for the South, but not necessarily for the North. The platform did uphold Reconstruction policy on “equal civil and political rights to all” and railed against Johnson for his “treachery” and “usurpation.”

For President the Democrats nominated Horatio Seymour, a former governor of New York long active in national politics, and as his running mate Frank P. Blair, Jr., of Missouri, a former Union general and Republican party organizer who had turned violently against the Radicals. Soon the parties were locked in combat, the Democrats labeling Grant a drunkard, anti-Semite, military bungler, and potential despot, and the Republicans pillorying their foes as madmen and traitors and bigots. Black voting became a key issue as the Democrats taxed their opponents with favoring Negro equality and pursuing a balance-of-power role for blacks in the South. The Democracy (as Democrats called themselves) encountered such hostility in the North that Seymour and Blair offered to step down and be replaced—and leading Democrats seriously considered the idea in the final weeks of the campaign. But it was too late to switch the donkey’s riders.

Grant swept the electoral college, 214 to 80, winning all the Northern states save for New York, New Jersey, and Oregon. The popular vote was closer: 3 million to 2.7 million, a majority of 52.7 percent for Grant. Although the Democrats achieved a net gain of eleven seats in the House, the Republicans retained their two-thirds supremacy in that chamber. The North remained loyal to the memory of Lincoln. The Republican party, hardly more than a dozen years old, had already developed a remarkably stable vote of about 55 percent above the Mason-Dixon Line. The Southern and Border states, which divided between the two sides, were more checkered and volatile. Overall, the Republicans had clearly established themselves as the majority party, just as an earlier Republican party had done. But that had been a different brand of republicanism.

“I’se Free. Ain’t Wuf Nuffin”

Some Radicals now were more optimistic than ever. Grant’s election, they felt, provided a supreme and perhaps final opportunity to reconstruct the South. Now the Republicans had their own men in the White House; they still controlled both houses of Congress; they had established their supremacy over the Supreme Court; they had considerable influence over the federal military and civilian bureaucracy in the South. They still had the power to discipline the Southern states, by admitting them to the Union or expelling them. The Republicans had pushed through the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. They still possessed the ablest, most experienced political leadership in the nation. Stevens had died during the campaign, but Sumner had been handsomely reelected in Massachusetts. “So at last I have conquered; after a life of struggle,” the senator said.

Other Radicals were less sanguine. They knew that far more than Andrew Johnson had thwarted Reconstruction. The national commitment to black equality was weak, the mechanisms of government faulty, and even with the best of intentions and machinery, the connecting line between a decision in Washington and an actual outcome affecting a black family in Virginia or Mississippi was long and fragile. Time and again, voters had opposed black wrongs without favoring black rights. Before the war, they had fought the extension of slavery but not slavery where it existed. During the war, they had come to approve emancipation only after Lincoln issued his proclamation. After the war, in a number of state elections—especially those of 1867—Northerners had shown that they favored black suffrage in the South but not at home.

Spurred by effective leaders, Americans were moving toward racial justice, but the journey was agonizingly slow and meandering. “It took America three-quarters of a century of agitation and four years of war to learn the meaning of the word ‘Liberty,’” the American Freedman editorialized. “God grant to teach us by easier lessons the meaning of the words ‘equal rights.’” How quickly and firmly Americans moved ahead on black rights could turn significantly on continuing moral and political leadership.

The crucial issue after Grant’s election was the right of blacks to vote. Republican leaders in Congress quickly pushed ahead with the Fifteenth Amendment, which declared in its final form that the “right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It was a noble sentiment that had emerged out of a set of highly mixed motives. Democrats charged, with some reason, that the majority party was far less interested in legalizing the freedman’s vote in the South than in winning the black vote in the North. But the Republican leadership, knowing that countless whites in the North opposed black voting there, were responding to the demands of morality as well as practicality. Senator Henry Wilson reminded his colleagues that the “whole struggle in this country to give equal rights and equal privileges to all citizens of the United States has been an unpopular one; that we have been forced to struggle against passions and prejudices engendered by generations of wrong and oppression.” He estimated that that struggle had cost his party a quarter of a million votes. Another Republican senator, however, contended that in the long run adherence to “equality of rights among men” had been not a source of party weakness but of its strength and power. Most Republicans, the historian Michael Les Benedict has concluded, did not face a hard choice between expediency and morality, “for to a large extent the political fortunes of the Republican party were best served by fulfilling its liberal ideological commitments.”

If political morality in the long run meant political practicality, the Fifteenth Amendment nevertheless bore all the markings of compromise. To gain the two-thirds support constitutionally required in each chamber, the sponsors were compelled to jettison clauses that would have outlawed property qualifications and literacy tests. The amendment provided only that Congress and the states could not deny the vote, rather than requiring them to take positive action to secure black suffrage; nor was there any provision against denial of vote by mobs or other private groups. And of course the amendment did not provide for female voting—and so the National Woman Suffrage Association opposed it.

Still, radicals in and out of Congress were elated when the Fifteenth cleared Congress, elated even more when the measure became part of the Constitution in March 1870, after Republican state parties helped drive it through the required number of legislatures. Some of the old-time abolitionists were euphoric too. Their prestige and influence now at a peak, they basked in the adulation they received in the press, their mail, and the hundreds of appearances they made every year in cities and towns throughout the country. Wendell Phillips was especially impressive on the lecture circuit. “Impracticable? Fanatical?” an Iowa editor wrote after hearing him. “Why, he is one of the most entirely plain, common-sense, practical and practicable men we ever heard.” Henry Raymond’s moderate New York Times had to admit that what the radicals “propose today may be law tomorrow.” To the Democratic New York World the radicals were a marching army: “Mr. Weed lags in the rear; Mr. Raymond is only six months behind Mr. Greeley, and Mr. Greeley is only six weeks behind Thad Stevens, and Thad Stevens is only six days behind Wendell Phillips, and Wendell Phillips is not more than six inches from the tail and the shining pitchfork of the master of them all.”

So euphoric were some abolitionists about the Fifteenth Amendment that they saw their task as done. The Fifteenth, resolved the American Anti-Slavery Society, was the “capstone and completion of our movement; the fulfillment of our pledge to the Negro race; since it secures to them equal political rights with the white race, or, if any single right be still doubtful, places them in such circumstances that they can easily achieve it.” Other radicals were more cautious, even cynical. Lydia Maria Child feared that the Fifteenth might “yet be so evaded, by some contrivance, that the colored population will in reality have no civil rights allowed them.” Phillips converted his Anti-Slavery Standard into The Standard, dedicated to racial equality, labor reform, temperance, and women’s rights.

The legal right of blacks to vote soon produced a phenomenon in Southern politics—black legislators, judges, superintendents of education, lieutenant governors and other state officials, members of Congress, and even two United States senators. These, however, made up only a fraction of Southern officeholders: in none of the legislatures did blacks hold a majority, except briefly in South Carolina’s lower house. Usually black leaders shared power with “carpetbaggers”—white Northerners who came south and became active in politics as Republicans—and “scalawags”—white Southerners who cooperated with Republicans and blacks. While many black leaders were men of “ability and integrity,” in Kenneth Stampp’s view, the whites and blacks together comprised a mixed lot of the corrupt and the incorruptible, moderate and extreme, opportunistic and principled, competent and ignorant. The quality of state government under such leadership also was mixed, but on the whole probably no worse than that of many state and local governments of the time. The state governments in the South bore unusually heavy burdens, moreover—demoralization and poverty in the wake of a devastating war, the need to build or rebuild public services throughout the region, the corrupting influence of contractors, speculators, and promoters seeking subsidies, grants, contracts, franchises, and land.

Far more important than the reality of black-and-white rule in the South was the perverted image of it refracted through the distorted lenses of Southern eyes. It was not easy for the white leadership to see newly freed men, some of them illiterate, aggressive, and loutish, occupy positions of prestige and power; and it was perhaps inevitable that they would caricature the new rulers to the world. A picture emerged of insolent boors indulging in legislative license, lording it over downtrodden whites, looting the public treasury, bankrupting the state, threatening white traditions, womanhood, and purity. As sober an observer as Lord Bryce, writing almost a generation later, reported that such a “Saturnalia of robbery and jobbery has seldom been seen in any civilized country”; since “the legislatures were reckless and corrupt, the judges for the most part subservient, the Federal military officers bound to support what purported to be the constitutional authorities of the State, Congress distant and little inclined to listen to the complaints of those whom it distrusted as rebels, greed was unchecked and roguery unabashed.”

The worst fear of the old white leadership—that black-and-white rule would produce a social revolution—turned out to be the least warranted of all. The mixed rule of blacks, scalawags, and carpetbaggers produced a few symbolic and actual changes: rhetoric drawn directly from the Declaration of Independence proclaiming liberty, “equality of all persons before the law,” various civil and political rights; a mild effort in two or three states to integrate certain educational institutions; a feeble effort at land reform. Constitutions were made somewhat more democratic, legislative apportionment less discriminatory, more offices elective; “rights of women were enlarged, tax systems were made more equitable, penal codes were reformed, and the number of crimes punishable by death was reduced,” in Stampp’s summation. The constitution of South Carolina—the state that had served as the South’s political and ideological heartland, and the state that now paradoxically had elevated the most blacks to leadership positions—was converted almost into a model state charter, with provisions for manhood suffrage, public education, extension of women’s rights, and even the state’s first divorce law. Shades of John C. Calhoun!

But what the black-and-white leadership failed to do was of far more profound consequence than what it did. Both radicals and moderates understood that education was a fundamental need for Southern blacks, but the obstacles were formidable and progress slow. Even the best educational system could hardly have compensated for decades of illiteracy and ignorance. “The children,” James McPherson noted, “came from a cultural environment almost entirely devoid of intellectual stimulus. Many of them had never heard of the alphabet, geography, or arithmetic when they first came to school. Few of them knew their right hand from their left, or could tell the date of their birth. Most of them realized only vaguely that there was a world outside their own plantation or town.” In the early years, teachers sponsored by “Freedmen’s Aid” and missionary groups met the challenge, often finding to their surprise that black children had a passion to learn, could be taught to read as quickly as white children, and might be found laboriously teaching their own parents the alphabet and the multiplication table.

These private educational efforts were never adequate, however, to teach more than a fraction of the South’s black children. The question was whether the reconstructed black-and-white state governments would take over the task in a comprehensive way, and here they failed. The difficulties were at least as great as ever: inadequate facilities, insufficient money, lack of teachers, inadequate student motivation, discipline problems (black teachers tended to be the harsher disciplinarians). But the biggest hurdle was the constant, pervasive, and continuing hostility of many Southern whites to schooling for blacks. “I have seen many an absurdity in my lifetime,” said a Louisiana legislator on observing black pupils for the first time, “but this is the climax of absurdities.” A Southern white woman warned a teacher that “you might as well try to teach your horse or mule to read, as to teach these niggers. They can’t learn.”

Behind these white Southern attitudes toward schooling for black children lay a host of fears. One was their old worry that blacks would be educated above their station and out of the labor supply. “To talk about educating this drudge,” opined the Paducah (Kentucky) Herald, “is to talk without thinking. Either to ‘educate,’ or to teach him merely to read and write, is to ruin him as a laborer. Thousands of them have already been ruined by it.” Even more pervasive was the white fear of integration, although most black leaders made it clear that their main interest was education, whether segregated or not. Southern fears often took the form of harassing and humiliating teachers or, more ingeniously, depriving them of white housing so that some teachers lived with blacks—and hence could be arrested as vagrants. Defending the arrest of a freedmen’s teacher, the mayor of Enterprise, Mississippi, said that the teacher had been “living on terms of equality with negroes, living in their houses, boarding with them, and at one time gave a party at which there were no persons present (except himself) but negroes, all of which are offenses against the laws of the state and declared acts of vagrancy.” Black-and-white governments could not overcome such deep-seated attitudes.

To many blacks, even more important than education was land—“forty acres and a mule.” During the war, when workers on a South Carolina plantation had rejected a wage offer from their master, one of them had said, “I mean to own my own manhood, and I’m goin’ on to my own land, just as soon as when I git dis crop in.…” Declared a black preacher in Florida to a group of field hands: “It’s de white man’s turn ter labor now. He ain’t got nothin’ lef’ but his lan’, an’ de lan’ won’t be his’n long, fur de Guverment is gwine ter gie ter ev’ry Nigger forty acres of lan’ an’ a mule.” Black hopes for their own plots had dwindled sharply after the war, when Johnson’s amnesty proclamation restored property as well as civil rights to most former rebels who would take an oath of allegiance. His expectations dashed, a Virginia black said now that he would ask for only a single acre of land—“ef you make it de acre dat Marsa’s house sets on.”

Black hopes for land soared again after the congressional Republicans took control of Reconstruction in the late 1860s, only to collapse when Republican moderates—and even some radicals—refused to support a program of land confiscation. Black hopes rose still again when black-and-white regimes took over state governments; some freedmen heard rumors that they need only go to the polls and vote and they would return home with a mule and a deed to a forty-acre lot. But, curiously, “radical” rule in no state produced systematic effort at land redistribution. Some delegates to the Louisiana constitutional convention proposed that purchases of more than 150 acres be prohibited when planters sold their estates, and the South Carolina convention authorized the creation of a commission to buy land for sale to blacks, but little came of these efforts. One reason was clear: Southern whites who had resisted black voting and black education would have reacted with even greater fury to as radical a program as land redistribution, with all its implications for white pride, white property— and the white labor supply.

Black leaders themselves were wary of the freedmen’s lust for “forty acres and a mule.” In part, this caution may have been due to the class divisions between the black Southern masses and their leaders, many of whom had been artisans or ministers, had been free before the war, and had never experienced plantation life and closeness to the soil. Some of these leaders were, indeed, virtually middle-class in their attitudes toward property, frugality, “negative” liberty, and hard work, and in their fear that radical blacks might infuriate white power elites by talking “confiscation.” Such leaders preferred to bargain with the white power structure rather than threaten its control over land and other property. Prizing liberal values of individual liberty, the need for schooling, and above all the right to vote, they played down the economic and social needs of the blacks. And they based their whole strategy on the suffrage, arguing that all the other rights that blacks claimed—land, education, homes—were dependent on their using the potential power inherent in their right to vote.

Would black voting make the crucial difference? Of the three prongs of black advance in the South—schools, land, and the vote—the limited success of the first and the essential failure of the second left black suffrage as the great battlefield of Southern reform. Certainly Southern whites realized this and, as the Republican commitment faltered during the Grant Administration, they stepped up their efforts to thwart black voting. They used a battery of stratagems: opening polling places late or closing them early or changing their location; gerrymandering districts in order to neutralize the black vote; requiring the payment of a poll tax to vote; “losing” or disregarding black ballots; counting Democratic ballots more than once; making local offices appointive rather than elective; plying blacks with liquor. These devices had long been used against white Americans, and by no means did all Southern whites use them now, but fraud and trickery were especially effective against inexperienced and unlettered blacks.

When nonviolent methods failed, many Southern whites turned to other weapons against voting: intimidation, harassment, and terror. Mobs drove blacks away from the polls. Whites blocked polling entrances or crowded around ballot boxes so blacks could not vote. Rowdies with guns or whips followed black voters away from the polling place. When a group of black voters in Gibson County, Tennessee, returned the fire of a band of masked men, the authorities put the blacks in jail, from which an armed mob took them by force to a nearby riverbank and shot them down. Fifty-three defendants were arrested by federal authorities and tried, none convicted.

Some of this violence erupted spontaneously as young firebrands, emboldened by liquor, rode into polling areas with their guns blazing. But as the stakes of voting rose, terrorists organized themselves. Most notable was the Ku Klux Klan, with its white robes and hoods, sheeted horses, and its weird hierarchies of wizards, genii, dragons, hydras, ghouls, and cyclopes. Proclaiming its devotion to “Chivalry, Humanity, Mercy, and Patriotism,” the Klan proposed to protect the “weak, the innocent, and the defenseless”—and the “Constitution of the United States.” The Klan had allies in the Knights of the White Camelia, the White Brotherhood, and other secret societies.

Incensed by mob violence, the Republicans in Washington tried to counter it with legislation. The Enforcement Act of May 1870 outlawed the use of force, bribery, or intimidation that hindered the right to vote because of race in state and local elections. Two more enforcement acts during the next twelve months extended and tightened enforcement machinery, and in April 1871 Congress in effect outlawed the Klan and similar groups. But actual enforcement in the thousands of far-flung polling places required an enormous number of marshals and soldiers. As army garrisons in the South thinned out, enforcement appropriations dwindled, and the number of both prosecutions by white prosecutors and convictions by white juries dropped, black voting was more and more choked off.

After his election to a second term Grant tried vigorously though spasmodically to support black rights for the sake of both Republican principle and Republican victories. In a final effort, the Republicans were able to push through the Civil Rights Act of 1875, designed to guarantee equal rights for blacks in public places, but the act was weak in coverage and enforcement, and later would be struck down by the Supreme Court.

By the mid-seventies Republicanism, Reconstruction, and reform were all running out of steam. Southern Democrats were extending their grip over political machinery; the Republican leadership was shaken by an economic panic in 1873, and the party lost badly in the 1874 midterm elections. The coup de grace for Reconstruction came after Rutherford Hayes’s razor-thin electoral-college victory in 1876 over Samuel J. Tilden. Awarded the office as a result of Republican control over three Southern states where voting returns were in doubt, and as a result too of a Republican majority on the Electoral Commission, Hayes bolstered his position by offering assurances about future treatment of the South. While these were in the soft political currency of veiled promises and delphic utterances, the currency was hard enough for the Democrats—and for Hayes as well. Within two months of his inauguration, he ordered the last federal troops out of the South and turned over political control of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida to the Southern Democracy.

…

And what of the objects of this long political struggle—the black people of the South? The vast majority were in the same socioeconomic situation as ten years before, at the end of the war. They had gained certain personal liberties, such as the right to marry, and a modicum of legal and civil and political rights, including the right to vote in certain areas; but their everyday lot was much the same as before. Most still lacked land, property, money, capital; they were still dependent on the planters, sometimes the same old “massa.” It was not a black man but a prominent white Georgian who said of the freedman late in 1865: “The negro’s first want is, not the ballot, but a chance to live,—yes, sir, a chance to live. Why, he can’t even live without the consent of the white man! He has no land; he can make no crops except the white man gives him a chance. He hasn’t any timber; he can’t get a stick of wood without leave from a white man. We crowd him into the fewest possible employments, and then he can scarcely get work anywhere but in the rice-fields and cotton plantations of a white man who has owned him and given up slavery only at the point of the bayonet.…What sort of freedom is that?”

Many a freedman had exchanged bondage for a kind of bargaining relationship with employers, but his bargaining position was woefully weak. If he held out for better terms, he could be evicted; if he left, he might be denied work elsewhere and arrested for vagrancy; if he struck, he had no unions or money to sustain him. So the “bargains” were usually one-sided; contracts sometimes literally required “perfect obedience” from employees. Some blacks had had the worst of both worlds—they had left the security of old age and sickness in bondage, under masters who cared for them because they were valuable property, for a strange “free-market” world in which they developed new dependencies on old masters.

Could Reconstruction have turned out differently? Many have concluded that the impotence of the blacks was too deeply rooted, the white intransigence too powerful, the institutions of change too faulty, and the human mind too limited to begin to meet the requirements of a genuine Reconstruction. Yet the human mind had already conducted a stupendous social revolution with the blacks. For a hundred years and more, Southern planters, assisted by slave recruiters in Africa, masters of slaving ships, various middlemen, auctioneers, and drivers, had been uprooting blacks by the hundreds of thousands out of far-off tribal civilizations, bringing most of them safely across broad expanses of water, establishing them in a new and very different culture, and converting them into productive and profit-creating slaves. Somehow the human mind seemed wholly capable of malign “social engineering,” incapable of benign.

Yet there were some Americans who did understand the kind of broad social planning and governmental action that was needed to reconstruct genuine democracy in the South and truly to liberate the freed people. Wendell Phillips understood the depth of the problem, the need for a “social revolution.” He said: “You must plant at the South the elements which make a different society. You cannot enact four millions of slaves, ignorant, down-trodden, and despised, into personal equals of the old leaders of the South.” He wanted to “give the negroes land, ballot and education and to hold the arm of the Federal government over the whole Southern Territory until these seeds have begun to bear fruit beyond any possibility of blighting.” We must see to it, said Senator Henry Wilson, that “the man made free by the Constitution is a freeman indeed; that he can go where he pleases, work when and for whom he pleases; that he can sue and be sued; that he can lease and buy and sell and own property, real and personal; that he can go into the schools and educate himself and his children.…” Douglass and Stevens and Sumner took similar positions.

These men were not typical of Republicans or even of Radical Republicans, but many other radicals and moderates recognized that the freed people needed an array of economic, political, social, and legal supports, and that these were interrelated. Congressman George Hoar lamented that blacks had been given universal suffrage without universal education. Some radicals believed that voting was the black’s first need and others that land or sustenance came first, but most recognized that no single “solution” was adequate. Antislavery men, said Phillips, “will believe the negro safe when we see him with 40 acres under his feet, a schoolhouse behind him, a ballot in his right hand, the sceptre of the Federal Government over his head, and no State Government to interfere with him, until more than one-half of the white men of the Southern States are in their graves.”

Did the fault then lie with the political system? The checks and balances among President, Senate, and House; the curious nomination and election devices that brought in an “anti-nigger” Vice-President to succeed the Great Emancipator; the clumsy, fragmented federal system; the need for both houses to muster two-thirds votes on crucial issues; the underlying thinness and instability in the popular support for Reconstruction—all these testified to the inability of the national government to develop firm, comprehensive, consistent, and durable programs of reconstruction. On the other hand, the Republicans did get rid of Johnson; they enjoyed two-thirds majorities in Congress at intervals; they won popular support for Reconstruction programs in every national election for a decade; and federalism was largely suspended during Reconstruction. Never was the “system” so adaptable to high purposes as during Reconstruction.

The critical failure of Reconstruction probably lay far more in the realm of leadership—especially that of opinion-makers. Editors, ministers, and others preached liberty and equality without always comprehending the full dimensions of these values and the means necessary—in the South of the 1870s—to accomplish such ends. The radicals “seemed to have little conception,” according to Stampp, “of what might be called the sociology of freedom, the ease with which mere laws can be flouted when they alone support an economically dependent class, especially a minority group against whom is directed an intense racial prejudice.” Reconstruction could have succeeded only through use of a strategy employed in a number of successful postwar reconstructions of a comprehensive nature—a strategy of combining ideological, economic, political, educational, and institutional forces in such a firm and coordinated way as truly to transform the social environment in which Southerners, both black and white, were trying to remake their lives after the Civil War. And such a strategy, it should be noted, would have imposed heavy intellectual, economic, and psychological burdens on the North as well.

Not only would such a strategy have called for rare political leadership—especially for a leader, in William Gillette’s words, able to “fashion a means and then persevere in it, bending men to his purpose by vigorous initiative, skillful influence, and masterful policy.” Even more it called for a rare kind of intellectual leadership—political thinkers who could translate the component elements of values such as liberty and equality into policy priorities and operational guidelines. But aside from a few radicals such as Phillips, most of the liberals and many of the radicals had a stunted view of the necessary role of public authority in achieving libertarian and egalitarian purposes. The Nation, the most influential liberal weekly in the postwar period, under Edwin L. Godkin shrank from using the only means—government—that could have marshaled the resources necessary for genuine reconstruction. “To Govern Well,” The Nation proclaimed, “Govern Little.” A decisive number of otherwise liberal-minded and generously inclined intellectual leaders held similar views. Thus, leaders like Phillips and like Sumner, who said that “whatever you enact for Human Rights is Constitutional,” were left politically isolated. There were many reasons for the failure of Reconstruction, but the decisive one—because it occurred in people’s conceptualizing and analyzing processes and not merely in ineluctable social and economic circumstances—took place in the liberal mind. Most of the liberals were effective transactional leaders, or brokers; few displayed transforming leadership.

That liberal mind seemed to have closed itself off even to the results of practical experimentation. During the war, General Sherman had set aside for freedmen several hundred thousand acres on the Sea Islands south of Charleston and on the abandoned rice lands inland for thirty miles along the coast. Each black family was to receive its forty acres until Congress should rule on their final disposition. Federal officials helped settle 40,000 blacks on these lands. When the whole enterprise was terminated by Johnson’s pardon and amnesty program, and land turned back to former owners, the black farmers were incredulous. Some had to be driven off their land by force. The program had lasted long enough, however, to demonstrate that freed people could make a success of independent farming, and that “forty acres and a mule” could serve as the foundation of Reconstruction. But the lesson seemed lost on Northerners who shuddered at the thought of “land confiscation.”

Thus the great majority of black people were left in a condition of dependency, a decade after war’s end, that was not decisively different, in terms of everyday existence, from their prewar status. They were still landless farm laborers, lacking schooling, the suffrage, and self-respect. They achieved certain civil and legal rights, but their expectations had been greatly raised too, so the Golden Shore for many seemed more distant than ever. Said a black woman: “De slaves, where I lived, knowed after de war dat they had abundance of dat somethin’ called freedom, what they could not eat, wear, and sleep in. Yes, sir, they soon found out dat freedom ain’t nothin’, ’less you is got somethin’ to live on and a place to call home. Dis livin’ on liberty is lak young folks livin’ on love after they gits married. It just don’t work.”

Or as an Alabama freedman said more tersely when asked what price tag he bore—and perhaps with two meanings of the word in mind:

“I’se free. Ain’t wuf nuffin.”

PART II

The Business of Democracy

CHAPTER 3

The Forces of Production

HE MUST STUDY POLITICS and war, John Adams had said, so that his sons might have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain. But it did not quite work out that way. A son, John Quincy, took up not philosophy but diplomacy, politics, and the presidency. A grandson, Charles Francis Adams, embraced not painting and porcelain but law, diplomacy, and Republicanism. And a great-grandson, Charles Francis Jr., took up not poetry and music but war, law, business—and railroads.

“I endeavored to strike out a new path,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., said later, “and fastened myself, not, as Mr. Emerson recommends, to a star but to the locomotive-engine.”

A locomotive engine! How could this young Adams, inheriting the Adams disdain for money-grubbing, choose business over public service and the professions? Because he was restless in that tradition; because as a young Harvard graduate he felt hopelessly adrift and socially and politically inept, felt that he made the worst kind of “Adams impression”—of hauteur and gracelessness—even when he wanted to be liked; because railroads to him meant not only investments but the kind of railroad regulation that would occupy him during the best years of his life. Above all because, by the 1850s and 1860s, business and industry, with their constant innovations, hair-raising speculation, huge losses and dizzying profits, were coming into their own as respectable occupations for the privileged—and even more, as a form of intellectual adventure and personal liberation.

The world into which Adams graduated from Harvard in the 1850s, and the world to which he returned after war service in the 1860s, seemed to beckon the free-enterprising spirit. The smell of individual opportunity, the sense of boundless economic possibilities, the idea of unlimited progress seemed to pervade the very air men breathed. The well-established mid-century businessmen had grown up in an earlier era of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian individualism. Many had imbibed doctrines of personal and political liberty, individual enterprise, laissez-faire, limited government. The roaring prosperity of the flush 1840s and 1850s, the exploding technology, the cornucopia of farm and factory goods had whetted their appetites for more prosperity and profits.

Never mind that most Jeffersonians had been as suspicious of big business as of big government, that the federal government in fact built roads, made grants for canals and railroads, improved rivers and harbors, passed tariffs to help American exporters and shippers. No matter that some state governments launched almost an orgy of public enterprise, subsidizing banks and even establishing them, building and chartering turnpikes, canals, and railroads, providing bounties to farmers who grew certain crops, experimenting with numerous social reforms. The ethic of individual responsibility, of personal progress, of economic self-fulfillment, prevailed. Had not Emerson himself preached a need for the self-reliant man of affairs?

Adams plunged into an economic arena in which technology paced the growth of productive forces and production was the measure of all things economic. As early as the 1820s American patents had averaged three times those in Britain, the production center of the world; of course, as Englishmen pointed out, Washington had far easier patent requirements than London. “Machinery has taken almost entire possession of the manufacture of cloth,” an observer noted in 1844; “it is making steady—we might say rapid—advance upon all branches of iron manufacture; the newly invented machine saws, working in curves as well as straight lines.” The planing and grooving machines, and the tenon and mortise machine, were also impressive. In no field did technology move faster than in Charles Adams’s own, railroads. And not least of the forces for expanded production was the collective talent of the young men in Adams’s war generation who had mobilized, organized, and transported armies of machines and men.

By the late 1860s the nation was poised for another huge economic takeoff that would make it, within a quarter century, world leader in the production of timber and steel, meat packing, the mining of coal, iron, gold, silver. The only circumstances that seemed able to slow American production were depression or panic. The fifty years before the Civil War had seen periodic boom-and-bust: a small boom during the War of 1812–15 followed by speculation, a collapse in foreign market prices and land values, amid numerous bank failures; a boom in railroad and canal building in the mid-thirties followed by a drop in stock and commodity prices and an acute bank crisis; a big expansion in business in the early 1850s followed once again by overspeculation in railroads and land and then by a brief but sharp panic.

The remorseless sequence of boom-and-bust seemed to pick up again after the Civil War. In the wake of an overextension of railroad securities and the failure of the banking house of Jay Cooke and Co. in September 1873, banks failed, brokers went bankrupt, and prices dropped drastically. There followed two decades of steady rise in industrial investment, marred by downturns in the mid-eighties and at the end of that decade. The panics had their human cost, not least among the capitalists themselves. “Am going through a period of such stress—Bluest kind of a blue day—Stocks tumbling—I am caught and must bow my back to the burden—Took a cogitating sleigh ride—I’m trying to get sail in,” young Adams jotted down in his diary day by day during the troubles of ’83.

But Adams’s woes could not compare with those of the masses of men thrown out of work in every depression or major panic—a fact well appreciated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. And no capitalist was more concerned about the forces of production, and the failures of production, than the author of Capital. Not only was production an initial material test of the capacity of an economy to perform; even more, the forces of production—by which Marx meant workers, raw materials, technology, and organization—essentially determined the productive relations of classes, which in turn conditioned intellectual and political forces. His conception of history, he wrote in The German Ideology, started from “the material production of life itself” and the need to “comprehend the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this (i.e., civil society in its various stages), as the basis of all history; further, to show it in its action as State, to explain the whole mass of different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc., etc., and trace their origins and growth by which means, of course, the whole thing can be shown in its totality (and therefore, too, reciprocal action of these various sides on one another).” The mass of productive forces, not “idealistic humbug,” was crucial.

“The bourgeoisie,” he and Engels asserted in the Communist Manifesto, “cannot exist, without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”

Karl Marx. Twenty years after the Communist Manifesto of 1848, few Americans had heard of him or the blazing summons to the world proletariat, even fewer of his partner Friedrich Engels or of the recently published Capital. Some Americans had read his January 1865 letter to Lincoln, asserting that the “anti-slavery war” would bring the ascendancy of the working class just as the Revolutionary War had brought that of the middle class, and foreseeing the inexorable fate of the Emancipator—the “single-minded son of the working class”—to lead that struggle. Marx’s views were doubtless better known to good bourgeois readers of the New York Daily Tribune than to American toilers, for Marx, with Engels’s help, had written nearly five hundred articles on American, European, and Asian politics for the Tribune between 1852 and 1862, until Horace Greeley became disturbed by his views and dropped him.

Nor would most Americans have been impressed by the man himself, living and working in a grimy London flat among dense tobacco fumes, piles of newspapers and manuscripts, the heady talk of visiting revolutionaries. His family was blighted by illness and poverty; one child died, then another, and the father was afflicted with liver troubles, hepatitis, a facial ulcer, coughing spells, carbuncles. He spoke of the “wretchedness of existence.” But, by sheer force of will and intellect, he and Engels were impressing their views on the quarreling, floundering revolutionaries of Europe.

Marx had long been fascinated by far-off America, by its economic dynamism, its vast frontier that could drain off steaming social pressures, its socioeconomic classes that seemed to him to “continually alter and mutually exchange their component parts,” and above all by its “feverish and youthful movement of a material production” that “has to appropriate a new world [but] has left neither time nor opportunity for the abolition of the old spiritual world.” The intensity of that production meant to Marx that—in contrast to his mentor Hegel’s view of the United States as “outside history”—Americans had moved within history by the mid-nineteenth century. And production was crucial; he credited the bourgeoisie with freeing productive forces, accomplishing “wonders far surpassing the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.” American railroads especially impressed Marx, for they would bring class unity.

For both communist and capitalist, in short, Production was king. And for both, technology was his sword.

Innovators: The Ingenious Yankees

The Hoosac Mountains, northwest Massachusetts, the late 1860s:

Technology is a wholly practical matter to several hundred men slowly boring a tunnel through the Hoosac mountain range of northwest Massachusetts during the late 1860s. Knee-deep in muck, soaked to the skin, they have to attend to their drilling and blasting while staying on guard against falling rock, floods, suffocating dust and smoke, premature explosions. A hundred or more men have died in small accidents since the digging started; still more will die before the toilers glimpse their goal, the “pinprick of light.” These are hardy men. Some have recently arrived from Canada, Ireland, and Italy; others are old Yankees whose forefathers might have included some of “Shays’s rebels” who had stumbled over the Hoosac range through the bitter winter of 1787 as they fled from the state militia.

Over four miles in length, the most direct link between Boston and the busy Troy factories on the Hudson, the Hoosac would be the longest bore in the United States when completed. But when would this be? Originally proposed in 1819, actually started in 1851, the tunnel project had repeatedly run out of funds. The men had not faltered, only the machines. At the start, amidst much pomp and ceremony, “Wilson’s Patented Stone-Cutting Machine,” weighing seventy-five tons, had been hauled from South Boston and wheeled into the east portal of the bore. Its huge revolving iron cutters were expected to grind out a circle of rock; then black powder would blast out the center. While visiting legislators watched with delight, the monster crunched into the rock for about ten feet. Then it ground to a halt, never to run again, defeated by the Hoosac gneiss and schist.

Not for twenty-five years would the Hoosac barrier be pierced—and then only because of clever innovations. In the early years, the tunnelers used simple gunpowder to split the rock. One man held the star-pointed hand drill while his workmate whacked it three or four feet into the rock with a twenty-pound double-jack hammer. Next the powder—a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal—was tamped into the drill hole and ignited by a goose-quill fuse; then the igniter sprinted for safety while his mates cowered behind heavy wooden parapets. In later years a “safety fuse” made of powder thread spun in jute yarn and coated with coal tar was attached. Still later compressed-air rock drills, with holes in the center through which water was pumped to cool the bits and clear the dust, considerably quickened progress.

Even more important was the replacement of gunpowder with nitroglycerin. In a two-story factory in North Adams, at the west portal, glycerine was mixed, drop by drop, with nitric and sulfuric acids, in a solution bathed in ice and stirred continuously. Several times more powerful than black powder, nitro was also far more volatile. It had such a reputation for killing workers that its shipment was regulated abroad, and interstate in America, but it continued to take its toll among Hoosac men. One day, C. P. Granger was hauling a load of nitro to the bore when his sleigh skidded over a snowbank. Granger jumped into the snow and awaited the blast; hearing none, after a time he collected the now frozen cartridges, only to discover that they could not be detonated until thawed. Thereafter nitro was carried frozen.

Most of the technological progress, however, was due more to determined experimentation than to luck. New ideas and machines at first were imported from abroad, after Yankee engineers had scoured England and the Continent—especially Italy and France—for the latest tunneling techniques. In turn the Hoosac innovators, and others like them, fertilized inventions in other fields. In particular, the new drilling and detonating methods stimulated innovation in the coal and iron mines to the west. Coal production was soaring as more and more mines opened west of the Alleghenies and, as coal went, so went the flourishing iron industry, with its rolling mills and puddling furnaces. By the early 1870s, Henry Clay Frick was buying up extensive coal lands in southwest Pennsylvania, building thousands of beehive ovens, introducing machines for drawing coke from the ovens—a fuel that when fired produced far greater heat than raw coal—and shipping coke by the trainload to the Pittsburgh iron mills.

The American Iron Age had long before dawned as Missouri ore mountains were opened up and then the rich Marquette range in the 1840s. Transportation had been the bottleneck in the Lake Superior region—even sleds and sailboats had been used—until the federal government built a canal at the Sault Sainte Marie rapids in 1856 and steamboats and railroads took over the big hauling jobs. Civil War ironclads had dramatized the power of the dense metal. The reign of Iron really began as rock drills replaced the picks of earlier days, steam shovels scooped up the ore from the stockpiles and dumped it into the shipping cars, and the elongated ore ships, built of iron too, carried the huge loads on the long trip to the hungry furnaces. Just as Hoosac workers had been lowered through shafts to the bore below, the iron miners were let down in steel cages to the mining areas as these were tunneled ever deeper.

Technology paved the way for all this, and no technology was more pivotal than machine tools. Just as Hoosac tunnelers and Marquette drillers had to wait for their compressed-air drills and other equipment, manufacturers of a hundred products had to wait on the innovations of “ingenious Yankees” in the famous old firms of New England, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Gone were the earlier days when Americans had to borrow from the English engineer-entrepreneurs who had developed boring machines and planers mainly for the making of British steamships and locomotives; gone too were the days when American ingenuity seemed devoted primarily to the arms industry. Now, after the Civil War, “Yankee inventors” were brilliantly carrying forward their earlier progress in precisely formed, smoothly machined interchangeable parts.

Milling machines, developed intensively in national armories, served as the cutting edge of this cutting-edge industry. By 1880, thousands of these versatile machines had been built to fashion tools to make arms, clocks, sewing machines, and more machine tools. Turret lathes, which held a cluster of tools that performed a precise sequence of operations without needing resetting or removing of the workpiece, had virtually revolutionized the production of large quantities of small components such as screws; now the revolution was renewed through the automatic turret lathe, which “was eventually to make possible all modern automatic lathe operations.” Other machinery had to be perfected—hard, durable, precise ball bearings, for one thing—as bigger and speedier machinery was put on the market.

By the late nineteenth century, celebrated American firms and their famous inventors were becoming the talk of the business world, even of industrial exhibitions abroad. At the old Brown and Sharp firm in Providence, J. R. Brown, son of the founder, produced the first micrometers to be manufactured commercially. Pratt and Whitney in Hartford perfected interchangeability of parts by developing a standard system of gauges, a comparator accurate to one fifty-thousandth of an inch, and finally a standard measuring machine. In Philadelphia, William Sellers developed a standardized system of screw threads, nuts, and boltheads that was to be adopted even in Europe. The most imaginative of the innovators was Frederick W. Taylor, who worked at a steel company headed by Sellers. A Harvard Law School graduate who climbed his way up from common laborer to chief engineer, Taylor became the genius-inventor of automatic grinders, forging and tool-feeding mechanisms and the biggest practical steam hammer ever built in the United States; later he introduced a steel alloy that vastly improved the efficiency of cutting tools at high temperatures.

Machines, like men, need one another. As drilling and cutting machines helped stimulate coal and metal production, innovations in iron and steel production made possible the development of tougher high-speed machinery. With the development of the Bessemer process, iron and steel technology moved a long way from the days of the blacksmith’s forge or the puddler’s mold. Into the Bessemer converter, which looked like a great pear-shaped egg, air was blasted from the bottom and molten pig iron poured from the top, with the effect of volatilizing the carbon, silicon, and other impurities in the iron ore. Slow to adopt the Bessemer process, American steel makers forged ahead rapidly after the Civil War as they built vaster—and vastly more efficient—blast furnaces.

Bursting into a volcano of sparks in the stygian gloom of the huge steel plants, the Bessemer converters became a symbol of the fiery age of iron and steel. Few could forget their first sight of the process: the seething pig iron in the converter—the flames flashing out of the pot as the air roared into the bottom—the dazzling explosion of sparks that rained down among the workers—the brawny steelmen, expressionless behind their heavy glass goggles, tilting the converter to pour out the molten steel, amid another shower of sparks. Almost as dramatic were the next steps, as the ingot castings were moved to the forge where enormous hammers molded them almost like butter, or to the rolling mills that flattened them into blooms and billets and then rolled them into rails, rods, bars, slabs, and strips.

Some of these rods and strips went into iron and steel’s most conspicuous achievements—the bridges that spanned the nation’s widest rivers. For some years American engineers, borrowing heavily from European experience, had been putting up suspension bridges which, aside from such brilliant achievements as John Roebling’s Niagara span, had a tendency to collapse. Waiting to be bridged in the early 1870s was the mighty Mississippi—mighty in its width, in its depth, in its 200,000 cubic feet moving ten feet a second in high-water time, in the massive ice fields that drifted down from the north, in the deep mud that made abutments insecure. Waiting to bridge the Mississippi at St. Louis was a remarkable engineer, Captain James Eads. Little schooled except in the price of technological progress—he had arrived in St. Louis in 1833 at the age of thirteen in a steamboat that burst into flames as it docked, and he made his first fortune on the Mississippi salvaging wrecked steamboats with a diving bell—Eads had built ironclads during the Civil War, and now was responding to the pleas of St. Louis businessmen weary of having to ferry goods across the river.

Advised by experts to build either a suspension bridge or a standard multiple-span iron truss, Eads decided instead on the old arch form—but built of steel rather than stone or iron. He designed a center arch of 515 feet, attached to two piers resting in bedrock, with side arch spans of 497 feet running from the piers to shore abutments. These abutments had to be built down to a depth never before achieved. Borrowing from French experience, Eads devised a caisson down whose center spiral stairs diggers descended to the river floor. Emerging from work at the 76-foot depth, the crews began to complain of stomach pains caused by the change in pressure. From a depth of 93 feet, a man climbed to the top feeling fine, only to drop dead ten minutes later; five more men died of the bends in the next few days. Working with his personal physician, Eads hit on the solution—gradual decompression. With his deepest abutment solidly planted 103 feet below the surface, Eads then could turn to the task of cantilevering his arches out from the piers and joining the arch halves high over the river. The bridge opened for vehicles and locomotives in June 1874—and still stands today.

Better steel and steel-making were already putting within reach the improved farm equipment that would in turn swell the farm produce that the long freight trains would now haul across the Mississippi. Steel would make possible a new harrow with long, curved spring teeth that could cope better than iron tines with hard roots and rocks. Another new harrow with discs of varying shapes and sizes, automatically scraped clean as they revolved, came into wide use. New American grain drills, with devices that fed seed into furrows opened up mechanically by fluted hoes, won praise abroad—even a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1878.

One innovation, the twine binder, hardly looked imposing enough to revolutionize harvesting, but so it did. Men had for centuries walked behind reapers and rake, binding the straw into bundles—a slow and costly task. Then a new mechanical wire binder delighted farmers, until they discovered that bits of wire were showing up in cattle straw and even in flour. The twine binder, made of imported Manila jute and sisal rather than wire and employing an automatic knot-tying device, solved this problem so well that Cyrus McCormick sold over 15,000 of the new product in the single year of 1882.

Tunnels and mines—iron and steel—jute and sisal: still other fields would attract the innovators. During the first decade after the Civil War, Samuel Van Syckel installed an oil pipeline near Titusville, Pennsylvania; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened with fifteen students; Congress legalized the metric system (but did not require its use); Maria Mitchell became, at Vassar College, the nation’s first woman professor of astronomy; America’s first refrigerated railroad car was built in Detroit; the American Naturalist magazine was founded; George Westinghouse invented air brakes; the Federal Meteorological Service was established as part of the United States Army Signal Corps; Luther Burbank undertook experiments with plant breeding; Popular Science Monthly began publication; Louis Agassiz founded the first American school to concentrate on oceanography. During the following decade, James Sargent and Halbert Greenleaf patented a time lock for bank vaults; Josiah Willard Gibbs applied the laws of thermodynamics to physical chemistry in his On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances; the American Chemical Society was founded; Asaph Hall, astronomer, discovered two moons of Mars; America’s first copper refinery was established in Connecticut; George Eastman patented a process for making dry photographic plates; the Archeological Institute of America was founded in Boston and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in New York; Hiram Maxim invented a machine gun and a self-regulating electric generator; surgeons began to use silk sutures instead of catgut; Lewis E. Waterman patented a practical fountain pen; smokeless gunpowder was developed; and all through this decade Thomas Edison and others were patenting invention after invention in the field of electricity, culminating in the decking out of the Statue of Liberty with electric arc lamps as she waited to be dedicated in New York Harbor.

Americans seemed to be bursting with ideas, experiments, inventions, enterprises, projects. And why not? The nation offered an almost ideal setting for ambitious young men, inventive tinkerers, innovating leaders, risk-taking entrepreneurs. Its “relatively open and uncluttered scene,” in economist John E. Sawyer’s words, “the abundance of natural resources, the availability of labor and capital from abroad, the timing of 19th Century American expansion in relation to the long evolution of technology and of the institutions of market capitalism in the Western world—these constituted a set of conditions and objective possibilities without historical parallel….” A fluid social structure, largely unorganized labor, and a generally noninterfering national government doubtless helped. And the fact that white Americans were perhaps the best-educated population in the world helped even more; the investment in popular schooling in the 1840s and 1850s was now paying off.

Marx, Engels & co. were not surprised by all this. They knew that the very heart of bourgeois rule was its technological dynamism, its incentives for higher productivity, its capacity to exploit scientific knowledge in manipulating the natural environment so as to satisfy human wants, whatever its colossal human cost in the end. There was a law, Marx said in Wage-Labor and Capital, a law of competition that gave capital no rest and continually whispered in its ears: “Go on! Go on!”

If capitalistic incentive was the mainspring of progress, experimentation was the method. The test of successful experimentation was simple: What worked? And the test of what worked was simple, on the face of it: that which satisfied economic demand reflecting human wants and needs. This practical, empirical, utilitarian test had long been familiar, going back to Benjamin Franklin and his contemporaries. While paying tribute to Franklin’s earlier emphasis on things that were “useful,” Jefferson had complimented Thomas Cooper on the practicality of Cooper’s chemistry, in contrast to the chemists who had not, Jefferson felt, been attentive “to domestic objects, to malting, for instance, brewing, making cider… bread, butter, cheese, soap….” He hoped Cooper would make his chemistry “intelligible to our good house-wives.”

It was the old American tradition of practical experimentation—but it held possible dangers to longer-run progress. Technological development in America had typically consisted of experimental, step-by-step advances, conducted “by guess and by God,” in specific, narrow fields calling for mechanical skill and ingenuity. The tinkerers and inventors had not conceptualized outside their fields because of the tradition of practicality, the immediate needs of hoped-for investors and customers, and the fact that their technical educations had been in the shop rather than in the science laboratory or lecture hall. “Our greatest thinkers,” a practical man boasted, “are not in the library, nor the capitol, but in the machine shop.” This view was understandable; before 1870 the nation had no journal wholly devoted to the subject of chemistry. But it meant that inventors might become imprisoned within specialities becoming obsolete, like mechanics improving the horse carriage while ignoring the advent of steam.

Alexis de Tocqueville had glimpsed the problem. Americans, he said, “always display a clear, free, original, and inventive power of mind.” But hardly any of them, he went on, “devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge,” to the “loftier spheres of the intellect.” Still, he granted, all the “energy and restless activity” could “bring forth wonders.”

That Americans were developing a capacity both to bring forth wonders and to exploit broader scientific concepts began to be apparent, however, toward the end of the nineteenth century. It occurred in a world far beyond that of the horse, the steamboat, the locomotive; it occurred in the mysterious field of electricity. Early in the century, André Marie Ampère of France and Michael Faraday of England had pioneered with theories of electromagnetism. The main early work in the United States was carried on by men who came to be entranced by electricity and spent their lives studying and applying it. Thus Joseph Henry of Albany advanced the technology of the electromagnet as he increased the magnetic power of its core by means of thickened insulation. Thomas Davenport, a Vermont blacksmith, without training in electricity or any science, for “some unaccountable reason” saw in a new magnet a possible source of power, built a crude little machine with four battery-powered electromagnets, fixed two of the magnets in a wheel, and found that he could revolve the wheel as he applied current. This discovery made possible the first commercially successful electric motor.

Alexander Graham Bell had been following still another tune, and one that at the start had little to do with electricity. Son of an Edinburgh phonetician who specialized in acoustics and teaching speech to deaf children, Bell had emigrated with his family to Ontario in 1870 and soon moved on to Boston, where he began to conceive a way to transmit the actual sound of the human voice through an electric current. For many months Bell and an assistant, Thomas A. Watson, experimented with pairs of telegraph instruments until one day, when Bell was in one room, routinely tuning the receiving reeds, and Watson was in another, plucking the transmitting reeds to send the right pitch, Watson tapped a stuck transmitter to start it vibrating. Suddenly Bell heard a “twang” on his receiver that he knew instantly to be sound from the vibration induced by a current over the wire from Watson. Amid mounting excitement, Bell had Watson pluck the reed again and again while Bell held the variously tuned receiver reeds against his ear.

By the end of that afternoon, Bell knew that speech could be transmitted electrically. But nine more months of experimentation passed before the two men could transmit intelligible words at their true pitch and loudness. After many tests of more sensitive transmitters and receivers, Bell, one Friday in March 1876, made his last adjustment—adding a speaking-tube mouthpiece—and shouted into the mouthpiece to Watson two rooms away: “Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.” When Watson burst into his room, Bell was delighted but still not sure. Repeat my words, he told his assistant. Watson: “You said, ‘Mr. Watson—come here—I want to see you.’” Then Bell knew for sure.

By the late seventies, it appeared that the man who might eclipse Bell and all other Americans in the field of electricity was the practical experimenter par excellence: Thomas Alva Edison. Everything in Edison’s early life had seemed to conspire to make him a mere tinkerer. He was born to a family so little concerned about his formal education that his parents let him leave school at about age twelve to do odd jobs around Port Huron, Michigan, and sell newspapers and candy on the local railroad. With his rumpled clothes, his cowlick, his rough speech (partly because of early deafness), and his tobacco chewing and spitting, he became a kind of Huck Finn of the railroads as he knocked about the Midwest. All the while, he showed a devouring interest in mechanics, saved his money to buy chemicals and batteries, developed an amazing facility both in mastering telegraphy and in turning an unused smoking compartment into his own personal laboratory, and patched up the crude machines of the day. Within a few years he devised improved telegraphy, a legislative vote recorder, a stock ticker, a carbon telephone transmitter, and—most originally—a phonograph.

Nowhere was Edison’s empirical style of innovation more vividly illustrated than in his search for a practical incandescent lamp. In the 1870s, Americans were already lighting their city streets, department stores, hotels, and factories with arc lamps. Consisting essentially of two electromagnets between which an arc flared when voltage was applied, these lamps produced such an intense light that people came from miles around to watch them turned on, and even fell to their knees in fear and awe. Their intensity and size, however, along with a tendency to flicker, made arc lamps unsuitable for less public places; what was needed was a moderate, steady, easily controlled light. For years, inventors had been experimenting with incandescent lights, but they could not find a filament that would glow with a white heat and not be quickly consumed.

Edison’s search for this filament became one of the great sagas of empirical investigation. “Somewhere in God Almighty’s workshop,” he is reported to have said, “there is a dense, woody growth with fibers almost geometrically parallel and with practically no pith, from which excellent strands can be cut.” He and his associates tested thousands of plants and grasses—even hairs clipped from the beards of staff members—and sent investigators to the jungles of South America and Asia until a species of Japanese bamboo seemed to work. More successful was a carbonized cotton filament that burned for forty hours.

All through this and succeeding experiments—on electrical distribution, on a fluoroscope, on the magnetic separation of iron, on the storage battery, on a dictating machine and a mimeograph and a moving picture machine—Edison continued to pride himself on being the practical experimenter, to poke fun at theoretical scientists, to disdain the upper-class pretensions of the academic elite. Yet he had read deeply in Faraday and other scientists, he openly exploited scientific ideas, and he employed a mathematical scientist in his laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey. In effect he was an innovative and imaginative “man of science,” if not a man of strikingly original theoretical ideas. Perhaps more than any other inventor of note, he personified the marriage of science and technology in late nineteenth-century America—a marriage that would spawn both benign and malignant progeny in the century ahead.

Investors: Eastern Dollars and Western Risks

It was not easy to be an investor, even in the heyday of American capitalism and even when you inherited money. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., as he commuted between his idle and cheerless Boston law office and the ancestral home in Milton that could only remind him of his famous ancestors, alternated between periods of boring aimlessness and acute anxiety. His life was empty, “dull as ditchwater,” he confided to his diary. At times he felt like “tearing things.” Especially agonizing were the financial panics that periodically threatened his—and his wife’s—small fortunes.

Adams felt too that he lacked courage, combativeness, the capacity to take risks and enjoy doing so. With sneaking admiration as well as disdain, he had written after visiting the New York Stock Exchange that he had seen “men as nature made them, with every affectation cast aside.”

Investing called for more than available funds; it called also for a daring, an imagination, and an unquenchable confidence that were still remembered from the Boston of old and set the style for new entrepreneurs elsewhere. Men who had long sought their fortunes around the periphery of the Atlantic, in the Near East and the Far East, now turned to the uncharted resources of the American Midwest and West. And if the investors tended to define the West as anything the other side of the Connecticut River, or even of Dedham, they had overcome problems of terrain and technology, as in piercing the Hoosac barrier, that would anticipate greater challenges across the Appalachians and, later, the Rockies.

“A happy New Year to you, my beloved husband!” Susan Sedgwick of Stockbridge had written in the early days of 1828 to Theodore Sedgwick, who had just proposed the building of the Boston & Albany Railroad at state expense. “May it preserve to you all your blessings, multiply your strawberries, extend your grapes, & build your RAILROAD!” Amid failing health and jeering skepticism, Sedgwick had seen the line extended from Worcester to Springfield before he died.

Not even the trials and tribulations of railroading, however, could compare with the agonizing problems and dizzying profits of Boston’s greatest feat—opening up the copper lodes of Michigan. Mined by Indians for arrowheads and ornaments long before Columbus, the copper deposits lay in a small peninsula jutting out into Lake Superior. Everything seemed to conspire against profitable investment: the isolation of the copper country; the cost of shipping copper by lighters and shallow vessels on Superior’s waters, and then of unloading and reloading at Sault Sainte Marie; crude mining techniques that had miners digging by candlelight, hauling carts by their own labor, climbing up and down 100-foot ladders. But the Bostonians persevered, raising more capital and enlisting governmental aid. Their men on the peninsula installed steam hoists and pumps, modernized stamping and washing processes through “much trial-and-error fumbling” in William B. Gates’s words, and eventually solved the “special problems of the native, low-content rock.” Nevertheless, a host of old Bostonians lost their starched shirts as mines folded in the face of heavy costs and unstable world demand.

Then persistence paid off for some in the discovery of sensational lodes at the Calumet and Hecla properties, later combined. Louis Agassiz, already renowned as a Harvard naturalist, reported to his brother-in-law, Quincy Adams Shaw, that with some of the lodes yielding an incredible 15 percent of copper, the value of Calumet and Hecla was “beyond the wildest dreams of copper men.” Between 1867 and 1872 the percentage of Michigan copper shipped by Calumet and Hecla rose from 8 to 65.About eight hundred predominantly Boston stockholders waxed for years on Calumet and Hecla dividends; owning C & H became a mark of financial perspicacity and a badge of social status. Some of the shareholders were far more equal than others in the huge fortunes they extracted from the mines; for decades the Shaws alone mined yearly dividends of almost $300,000 from the distant lodes on Superior.

Still, it was railroading that seemed most to arouse the avarice and passions of Boston investors. John Murray Forbes, who had returned home from China at the age of twenty-four after making a fortune in Canton representing a Boston countinghouse, came to exemplify the bold “general entrepreneur” defined by Thomas C. Cochran as owning a big share in many ventures but tying himself down to none. Reluctant at first to break away from the world of seafaring and trading, he eventually plunged into railroad investment, led a group of capitalists in buying the unfinished Michigan Central Railroad from that state for $2 million, pushed the Central to Lake Michigan and then to Chicago, and thereafter carried his little empire farther West to the Mississippi River and across Iowa.

Some of these railroad leaders were self-made men; Chester W. Chapin, with only a few years of schooling, owned an ox team, tended bar, and operated steamboats on the Connecticut, before making enough money to promote western New England railroads and head the Boston and Albany. Most of the railroaders, however, were “college men” knit by family membership or close friendship into the economic and social elite of Boston. Many did their investing through Lee, Higginson, which in itself united a host of old New England families. It was to Henry Lee Higginson, a fellow Union officer who proudly bore a Confederate saber cut on his face, that Charles F. Adams, Jr., would turn for solace and advice.

Within a decade or two of Appomattox, however, the old entrepreneurial spirit seemed to be dying out in Boston. Thomas Gold Appleton honored his father Nathan for building a vast fortune out of shipping and textiles, but he could not emulate him. Thomas, a Harvard man, had no interest in moneymaking and liked to spend his time abroad writing poetry, painting, and composing essays. His despairing father might well have wondered: Would John Adams have approved of this kind of third generation? Capital tied up in family trusts, according to Frederic Jaher, was often unavailable for new and bold business ventures. Men now concerned more with promoting education, religion, and the arts were increasingly distanced from the rough and grimy world of railroads, copper, and iron. Perhaps the most poignant symbol of all this was the fate of Daniel Waldo Lincoln, Chapin’s successor at the Boston and Albany, who fell from the observation train while watching the Yale-Harvard boat race in 1880 and died.

Financial Boston seemed to be stagnating too, by the 1870s. The “hub” had long since lost out to New York and Philadelphia as a capital market. Manhattan’s booming savings banks, insurance companies, and large and efficient investment banking and brokerage agencies had made it the real financial hub of the nation. The availability of ready “call money” in New York attracted millions of speculative dollars. Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston, with their own ports and transportation facilities, shared in the expanding prosperity while Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and other “western” cities were racing ahead of the old New England centers.

It was A. Lawrence Lowell, himself a descendant of brilliant entrepreneurs, who had the last word, remarking to his fellow Brahmin George Cabot, “I’m getting rather worried about the Lowell Family, George. There’s nobody in it making money any more.”

Some persons seemed to have a special knack for making money—and also for losing it. These were the private bankers of New York and Philadelphia and other cities, an old-fashioned breed of men who were taking on new importance and becoming known as investment bankers. Private banking had long attracted entrepreneurs. Jacob Barker, a New York merchant and shipowner, at the age of thirty-six had founded the Exchange Bank on Wall Street with a capital investment of $250,000—a bank of which he was the sole owner—during the dying months of the War of 1812. During that war also, Stephen Girard of Philadelphia, another sea trader, became one of the nation’s first investment bankers when he helped underwrite a government loan. Following in his footsteps, Nicholas Biddle undertook a full-fledged investment banking business by contracting and negotiating securities. Some of these and other ventures flourished, some failed, but by mid-century the investment banker—essentially a middleman between corporations and governments issuing securities and those corporations, banks, and insurance companies needing long-term capital funds—had become a vital part of the financial system.

War vastly swells the demand for big money quickly raised, and the Civil War was no exception. The need called forth the man—Jay Cooke. Son of an Ohio congressman, Cooke had left school at fourteen, probably more from ambition than need, to clerk in a general store in Sandusky, then in a wholesale house in St. Louis, a transportation company in Philadelphia, and a banking house in the same city. There, on New Year’s Day in 1861, he opened his own banking house, Jay Cooke and Co. Through old Ohio and family connections with Secretary Chase, he gained an option to sell a $2 million bond issue in Pennsylvania. He did this so successfully that he was picked to peddle war bonds for the federal government.

Cooke soon proved to be a genius at the mass merchandising of these bonds. Immensely self-confident, still in his early forties, he used patriotic appeals, newspaper advertisements, and a large corps of field agents to sell “five-twenties”—a 6 percent loan payable between five and twenty years. He took the lead in raising half a billion dollars by 1864, and another $600 million in 1865. Perhaps a million Americans took shares in the public debt. A “creative entrepreneur,” in Fritz Redlich’s words, he vividly demonstrated the potential role in big government and business for multitudinous small pools of savings.

Private banking mushroomed after the war, enormously expanding the pool of investment money. By the early 1870s, over five hundred private banks were established in New York City, over a hundred more in Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore together, and hundreds more throughout the country, with a remarkably high number in the western states. Many of these were tiny local banks, but increasingly dominant were the big investment bankers, centered in Wall Street, who alone or with other houses could float whole issues of securities. Some of these firms bore “old” names, such as Morton, Bliss & Co., with roots in ancient mercantile establishments. Others sported new names; the field seemed open to anyone with money and daring. Then there were the “Jewish” houses, as they were viewed, such as J. and W. Seligman and Co. and Kuhn, Loeb, with major foreign contacts. Attracting more and more attention in Wall Street by the 1870s was “young” J. P. Morgan, scion of the famous Junius Morgan of London, the American banker who had won world fame when he coolly placed a $50 million loan for the French during their war with Prussia, in the face of thunderous warnings by Bismarck.

Far more typical of American firms was Morton, Bliss, which left extensive records of its week-to-week activities in the letters of junior partner George Bliss to his senior, Levi P. Morton, who liked to linger in London and Newport. Life at Morton, Bliss was one of constant vigilance—following the securities market, closely watching competitors, picking up rumors, mingling with the bigger financiers, keeping an eye cocked on Washington. The firm had major foreign connections through its English partner, Sir John Rose. Like many other financiers, Morton doubled as a politician; he ran three times for Congress and won twice, and established close ties to the Grant Administration. (He would later serve as Minister to France, Governor of New York, and Vice-President.) But Presidents were temporary conveniences, not permanent allies. When Hayes succeeded Grant, Bliss wrote a friend that “our position with the new administration” would be “not less favorable (and it should be stronger) than with the last.”

Financiers lived day and night in the heady world of Wall and Broad Streets. After feverish bidding in the exchange, men would repair to Delmonico’s for more talk of finance, or they might thread their way through the long narrow alley that led to the plain but fashionable Dorlon’s and its oysters. When the exchange closed at four, some would move uptown for decorous carriage-riding in the new Central Park, or for spirited trotting up in Harlem Lane. But, from fear and excitement and avarice, the financiers could not escape the market; many would return around six to the “Gold Room,” a combination informal exchange and Republican party headquarters, where they kept on trading, sometimes around the clock.

These were enormously self-confident men. However watchful and even fearful they were from day to day in the market, they were also confident of the system that needed only their dynamic leadership. They could take pride, if they paid attention, in the tributes of old adversaries as well as new. “The bourgeoisie,” the Communist Manifesto had proclaimed, “during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”

From the perspective of a half-century later, Joseph Schumpeter would picture, as the true economic leaders, the entrepreneurs of this creative period of capitalism. They had to overcome environmental resistances ranging from simple refusal to finance a new thing to “physical attack” on the man who tried to produce it. “To act with confidence beyond the range of familiar beacons and to overcome that resistance requires aptitudes that are present in only a small fraction of the population and that define the entrepreneurial type as well as the entrepreneurial function,” Schumpeter said. “This function does not essentially consist in either inventing anything or otherwise creating the conditions which the enterprise exploits. It consists in getting things done.”

The investors got things done. In particular, they largely financed the expanded “forces of production” that Marx celebrated. But did they innovate better products, or better ways to make products? Critics charged that the investors were reluctant to subsidize innovation, that they preferred the safe old ways. The trend toward bigger businesses, Thorstein Veblen said later, and toward control by men with commercial rather than technical skills had led to a failure to innovate. Others disputed this view. But what does seem clear is that investment in innovative industry was on the whole safer than many of the entrepreneurs realized. The individual investor did run risks; but collectively the bankers and other investors could hardly fail in late nineteenth-century America.

One reason for this was the tariff, which was designed particularly to protect “infant industries.” Another was the patent system. Hardly an entrepreneur operated in this period save in a flurry of patent applications, patent claims, and patent suits. Patents, to be sure, were also a source of uncertainty, with some judges defining patents held without use as deserving little recognition in law and none in equity, and others defining them as an inviolable property right whether the discovery was used or not. But the patent system at least set up rules of the game that gave some protection to capitalists financing innovation. What primarily made risk-taking safe in post-Civil War America, however, was the enterprise system itself and the environment in which it operated. That system established multiple channels for investors: if one venture failed, another would succeed. And the environment minimized “interference risks” from a government that largely kept hands off, a labor force that was largely passive, and consumers who were largely unorganized.

Railroad issues continued to fuel the speculative market during this period, and “western” railroads in particular called forth all that was best and worst in the American entrepreneurial spirit—its daring, imagination, ability to get things actually done, along with its greed, lack of scruples, capacity to tarnish and corrupt everything it touched.

The extra-wide rails of the Erie, twisting and winding their way through the southern tier of New York, epitomized Americans’ bittersweet romance with the railroad. Built with an unusual six-foot gauge in order to hinder interchange of traffic with the rival Pennsylvania and Baltimore roads, the Erie swallowed millions of dollars from American and foreign investors—and from New York taxpayers—before reaching Dunkirk on Lake Erie, then Buffalo, and finally Chicago, on the eve of the Civil War. During the 1850s, following one of the Erie’s periodic money crises, Daniel Drew had taken control of the railroad’s finances. An old-time Hudson Valley cattle driver and horse trader, Drew combined sharp wits and a lack of scruples with a “sanctimonious devotion to Methodism.” “Shrewd, unscrupulous, and very illiterate,” Charles Francis Adams, Jr., later described him—“a strange combination of superstition and faithlessness, of daring and timidity.” Promptly living up to his reputation, Drew began to manipulate the Erie stock.

His competitive instincts had long before pitted Drew against an even more formidable figure, Cornelius Vanderbilt. As pleasure-loving and calculating as Drew was somber and bold, the “Commodore” had spent most of his sixty-odd years operating sailing ships, ferries, and steamboats on waterways ranging from New York Harbor and the Hudson to the Atlantic and Pacific routes to gold-feverish California. He first came into competition with Drew when the onetime horse trader ran “antimonopoly” boats against him on the Hudson and forced down the fares. The two men squared off again after Vanderbilt bought control of the Harlem Railroad in the late 1850s. In a famous “corner” in 1864, Drew “was outwitted,” according to Allan Nevins, “went short on large commitments as the stock rose in five months from 90 to 285, and lost a half million dollars, an episode which left him eager for revenge.”

Revenge was only a few years in coming, in what would be known as not merely another contest among capitalists but as the “Erie War.” Both sides had prepared for combat. Using every political and financial resource he could muster, Vanderbilt had won control of the Hudson River Railroad and the New York Central; now, if he succeeded in adding the Erie to his rail network, he would monopolize the profitable grain freight from the west. His primary weapon was a long-tested one—the kind of vast financial resources he had used to buy out other lines.

Now, however, he faced not only the small but commanding figure of Daniel Drew but two lieutenant-generalissimos—and a most remarkable pair at that. Through skill, guile, and knavery Jay Gould had worked his way up from a blacksmith’s forge and a country-store clerkship to the ownership of railroads and then of a Wall Street brokerage house. The other, James Fisk, onetime hotel waiter, circus ticket seller, traveling salesman, and dry-goods jobber, was a comic-opera figure in behavior and appearance—a plump, brassy, jovial voluptuary who wore the garish uniform of a purchased national guard colonelcy, sported diamond bosom pins and lavender gloves, and liked to parade around Manhattan in a four-in-hand flanked by footmen in livery. He had the “instincts of fourteen,” Henry Adams wrote. Fisk was not a buffoon, though, but rather a canny and unscrupulous showman who believed it was a duty of the rich to provide entertainment to the poor.

The trio had one key weapon—possession of the Erie itself. Vanderbilt struck first, buying tens of thousands of shares of Erie stock. He knew his foes could not match his resources with money. But they could with chicanery. The trio issued to themselves $10 million of convertible bonds, changed them into stock, and dumped them on the market. After Vanderbilt replied with a New York contempt-of-court ruling against their issuing more watered stock, they made a retrograde movement across the Hudson to Newark, freed themselves from New York law, and then bribed the New Jersey legislature to legalize their stock issue. After this, Vanderbilt threw in his hand, and the Erie War ended tepidly in a division of the spoils.

Most of the railroad investing was conducted on a far higher plane than this, but often the issuance of rail securities reeked of collusion and fraud, with railroads despoiled and bankrupted in the process. The corruption of the railroads tainted the rest of the financial and political system. Soon it would be revealed that a group of railroad leaders had in effect bribed United States senators and representatives by giving them shares of stock, in a scandal that would come to be known as Crédit Mobilier.

Charles Francis Adams, Jr., observed all this; indeed, he wrote a searching and authoritative study, “A Chapter of Erie.” He did not hesitate to call Fisk a “damned rascal” and Gould a “moral monstrosity.” Yet Adams himself, as head of the Union Pacific, later was willing to pay $50,000 to a Kansas senator to gain his support of a Union Pacific funding bill. Feeling guilty, he blamed himself less for planning corruption than for ineptly failing to bring off the bribe. He justified his action as his duty to the stockholders; if he could not bribe the senator, he reflected, “it was questionable whether I had any right to retain my place as President.”

The great-grandson of John Adams had indeed fastened himself not to a star but to a locomotive engine.

Entrepreneurs: The Californians

It was a grand sight from the valley of Lake Donner, at eventide, a traveler reported, “to look up a thousand feet upon the overhanging cliffs where the workmen were discharging their glycerine blasts.” In the dusk, great fiery blasts shook the mountainsides amid dense clouds of smoke. “Huge masses of rock and debris were rent and heaved up in the commotion; then anon came the thunders of the explosion like a lightning stroke, reverberating along the hills and canyons, as if the whole artillery of heaven were at play.”

The time was 1868; the place, the east end of Summit Valley near Lake Donner; the occasion, the building of the Central Pacific Railroad east, through some of the most rugged mountainland in America, to meet the Union Pacific advancing west.

The men up on the cliffs earlier had brought the railroad across the Central Valley east from Sacramento, and were now blasting and digging their way through the high Sierras. Above, men were lowered down the sheer sides of cliffs, where they drilled holes, lighted the fuses, and tried to move out fast, with the American River raging more than a thousand feet below. It was even worse in the valleys, especially during the appalling winter of 1866–67, when snow lay fifteen feet deep by Christmas and one hundred feet or more later. Workers, living in deeply buried shacks, tunneled through the snow as much as two hundred feet to reach the railroad bore they were cutting. At day’s end they dragged themselves back through their labyrinth of snow corridors to wash in powder kegs filled with hot water, dine on rice, dried fish, pork, pickled vegetables, and tea, and then perhaps to have a turn at fan-tan and a pipe of opium before throwing themselves down for sleep. But day after day, month after month, they pressed on, at best cutting through twenty-seven inches of granite in a whole day.

The men who were building the Central Pacific made up perhaps the most extraordinary work force in American history. They had fled from poverty, misery, and civil war in their homeland. They had traveled 8,000 miles to an American shore, but from the west, not the east. Their Taoist and Confucian beliefs were about as far from the Catholic faith and Puritan ethic of their fellow Californians as could be imagined. With their oriental appearance, costumes, language, and pigtails, they were the most harshly treated immigrant group in America. They were segregated both at work and at home, and thus formed one more caste in “classless” America.

The Chinese had not been wanted by either the railroad builders or the labor trades. They were considered too small for the heavy work, averaging hardly one hundred pounds, and were said to be addicted to gambling and opium; good enough to be laundrymen and farmhands … but railroad laborers? Moreover, the other workers—usually summed up as “the Irish” —hotly opposed the Chinese and their lower wages. But the “Irish,” many of whom were miners of old, were prone to quit after payday, especially on news of a gold strike in the hills. At first taken on as potential strikebreakers—another red flag to union men—the Chinese proved such willing workers that several thousand were hired, many of them brought over directly from China.

And so here in the mountain passes and later on the burning sands of Nevada the dream of a transcontinental railroad was being carried out by a strange partnership of Sacramento capitalists and pigtailed “Celestials,” as they were called. The dream was an old and grandiose one. A transcontinental railroad, it had been argued in the 1840s, would be a strategic as well as economic boon; it would place on the West Coast naval power that could dominate the Pacific and even the Chinese seas. Only the coming of the Civil War had broken the long deadlock over a northern versus a southern railroad, and it was during the war that Congress had passed the legislation, Lincoln had signed it, and the Sacramento group had laid the first rails.

In charge of the enormous undertaking was a quartet of capitalists who would come to be known as the Big Four. The acknowledged, though not unchallenged, leader was the president of the Central Pacific, Leland Stanford of Sacramento. A majestic figure with his burly frame, ramrod posture, and thick beard and hair, he had amassed a small fortune as a Placer County merchant and then served as Unionist governor of California before he reached forty. The CP’s hard-driving construction boss was another big, burly young man with chin whiskers, Charles Crocker; two of its key capital raisers were the hardware merchant Mark Hopkins and a partner of Hopkins, Collis P. Huntington. Missing by now was the man who most of all had dreamed the great dream, Theodore Judah, a brilliant leader in conceiving the transcontinental route, lobbying the railroad bill through Congress, and raising money. He had died of yellow fever after crossing Panama.

As the Chinese threaded the railway through the mountain passes and over trestle bridges, Stanford’s office in Sacramento became a kind of GHQ. The generalissimo recruited thousands of workers and horses and flung them into the battle, brought locomotives and other heavy weapons around the Horn and up the Sacramento River to the railhead, shipped quantities of food and other supplies to the front-line troops (but expected them to live off the land too), communicated with Crocker in code, fought the wretched weather, made visits to what he called “the Front.” He had to deal with local nabobs commanding their territory, most notably with the imperious Mormon leader, Brigham Young. And he had to deal with labor shortages, to the point where the partners considered importing blacks from the East or even Confederate war prisoners.

Crocker was field commander. Spurred by messages from Stanford to “double his energy” or “move forward to north pass,” he shuttled back and forth in his private car, or rode on his sorrel mare. “There was no need for sympathy for those men,” he later told the historian H. H. Bancroft. “Why I used to go up and down that road in my car like a mad bull, stopping along the way wherever there was anything amiss and raising old Nick.” When the Chinese workers finally lost patience and struck for a pay increase to $40 a month and an eight-hour day in the tunnels—“Eight hours a day good for white men, all the same good for Chinamen,” their circular explained—Crocker put it down in a week, “I stopped the provisions on them,” he said later, “stopped the butchers from butchering, and used such coercive measures.” This was food the Chinese had already bought.

But the dread enemy was not strikers or slackers or Indians—it was the Union Pacific spearing its way west. Stanford and Crocker picked up rumors that the foe was stealing their supplies and even their men. Desperately they threw every reserve into the battle, hauling locomotives on sleighs and even on logs, working shifts of men through long days, goading their men to faster progress along the Nevada flats. When word arrived that the Union Pacific had laid 7.5 miles of track in a long, twenty-hour day, a Central Pacific crew put 10 miles down in thirteen hours. Seeking above all else the huge federal land grants, the two companies fought for exclusive rights-of-way and even graded 100 miles of parallel roadbed.

In the end, though, the two armies met peacefully at Promontory Point near Ogden, Utah. The CP’s “Jupiter,” wood-burning engine No. 6o, proudly stood, cowcatcher to cowcatcher, facing the UP’s coal-burner, No. 119. While the chief engineers of the rival roads shook hands, workers on the cowcatchers held out champagne bottles to each other. Stanford and his UP counterpart, Thomas C. Durant, used silver sledges to drive home the golden spikes. Both men missed the spike a few times, but no matter: America had its first transcontinental railroad.

The poet Bret Harte wondered what the engines said, head to head, each with half the world behind its back:

You brag of your East! You do? Why, I bring the East to you!

All the Orient, all Cathay,

Find through me the shortest way; And the sun you follow here

Rises in my hemisphere.…

After the ceremony of the golden spikes, the men who had built the Union Pacific, mostly Irish, could just keep “headed west,” now traveling on the road their Chinese counterparts had built. The CP’s Chinese workers (who are hardly evident in a photograph of the ceremony) drifted off to mining camps or headed back to California, some of them perhaps riding on the rails they had hauled into place. Newcomers and locals alike, they—and later a mellow philosopher from Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson—could share in the glories of the trip: immense numbers of ducks settling in the northern shallows of the Great Salt Lake, purple mountains beyond, and snow-covered ranges in the distance. Emerson was fascinated by the constantly shifting tints and lights of this landscape.

For Easterners, the terrain seemed incredibly varied. At one moment the train would be steaming through irrigated fields where corn, wheat, potatoes, and diverse fruits grew luxuriantly. Then the engine would be chugging through the canyons of the Humboldt River—“torn, jagged, barren rocks and cliffs, that looked as if wasted by a hundred centuries of lightning and storm,” a traveler with Emerson later remembered; “then through an alkaline region, where the surface of the ground was white like a city street that has been watered with salt water; but the alkali was thicker.” All of this reminded Emerson of biblical lands. Then they were pounding through country without trees, nothing but sagebrush and a “prickly shrub, and a sort of Scotch broom,” with small plumes of steam in the distance marking hot springs. Then finally the “grand stormy rush” down the Sierras and onto the Sacramento plain.

One sight above all electrified the passengers, causing some to get off and try their fortune—gold mining. They could see men spraying powerful jets of water against the gravel sides of mountains, washing away the earth so that the yellow ore might be exhumed. Long flumes carried the water, often for miles along the tracks. Almost the whole distance, indeed, mining towns were visible, perched on hills or straggling through canyons, and enveloped by once-barren hillsides covered with miners’ tents and gear. Everything in these towns appeared to revolve around minerals, including quartz; everyone in town seemed to own a gold or quartz claim, almost the way Easterners owned gardens. A visitor in one of these towns, during much excitement about a coming circus, observed “little urchins going out to the fields beyond the town with their mothers’ tin kitchen-pans” to “pan out enough to pay their entrance-fee to the circus.”

Passengers riding the Central Pacific to Sacramento found a bustling little town, proud of its position as the state capital and the hub of Central Valley agriculture, at the head of the tidewater on the Sacramento River. Many passengers left the train here to take the riverboat west to San Francisco; others traveled south on the new Southern Pacific railway. Often these included Chinese and Irish who would find jobs on the railroad itself. Spearing south along the San Joaquin River, through the immense burning prairie between the Sierras and the coast, the Southern Pacific connected with lovely towns like Stockton, which seemed to one traveler aflutter with windmills which irrigated domestic gardens. At Merced, tourists could turn east to view the mountains, gorges, and waterfalls of Yosemite. It was in this spectacular area that Emerson in 1881 encountered a young botanist and sawmill worker who told him excitedly of the local flora and of his long rambles through the mountains he loved. This was the “father of the wilderness,” John Muir.

Renewing their trip through the Central Valley as it widened out, travelers crossed a farmland of almost limitless expanse and diversity. At first, settlers from the east had found it hard to adjust their farming ways to the new seasonal rhythms of California. They had sown when the rains ended in May or June, only to see their crops turn brown in the long dry California summer. As time passed they found the grass on the plains to be abundant and nutritious, curing naturally in the summer sun and providing ample feed for sheep and market cattle. Only workhorses and oxen required grain. Plowing early in December and sowing and planting in March, farmers could grow six and even eight crops of alfalfa.

The rub was always water. Farmers often joined hands to build reservoirs and canals, windmills and artesian wells. Be more careful in buying water than land, old-timers advised.

It was a world of Spaniards and Indians. As travelers moved south, they could tell at a glance who lived in the houses along the way. “If the house is of reeds and straw, the owner is an Indian; if it is of adobe, it is a Spaniard who lives there; if it is of frame, be sure it is an ‘American,’” noted a visitor from the East. It was a peaceful land. A traveler through the lonely southern counties reported he had “stopped to cook my dinner in the Indian huts, asked for a night’s lodging at Spanish ranchos, slept sometimes on the green grass, with my horse staked out, my feet near a fire, and wrapped in overcoat and blanket; and journeying thus day after day, I had not even a revolver with me, and no arm larger than a pocket-knife.”

It was also a land of big ranches. A Spanish padrone might own 40,000 acres, 1,500 or so young colts, several thousand sheep, and so many cattle he could not count them until after the annual rodeo. This was the big event of the year. After the stock in a large district had been driven onto one great plain, vacqueros would pick out each owner’s cows, break them up into separate herds, brand the calves that innocently followed their mothers, and either turn the whole mass loose again or drive them home. The señor often lived in a house of adobe, perhaps with a store in front from which he sold dry goods and grape brandy to his Indian hands. Beyond the house might be a clay oven for baking bread, and beyond that the shanties for Indians and their roosting chickens. Many Spanish homes had earthen floors covered with expensive rugs, reflecting the new wealth of these landowners after the Gold Rush demand for beef made cattle owners rich.

The great Spanish landowners owned most of California, a traveler noted; the land, the cattle, the horses, the sheep were theirs. No-fence laws assured ranchers of almost unlimited range for their cattle. They had good relations with their hands, and in return “no vacquero addressed the master without either touching or taking off his hat.” But they “were not business men; they liked to live free of care; and they found it easy to borrow money….They knew nothing of interest” and they often squandered their money. This old, easy, bucolic life could not escape the currents surging through southern California in the 1870s.

In particular, the town of Los Angeles was just about to emerge from its drowsy, indolent past when one might, on driving into El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, encounter market wagons full of “oranges, pumpkins, a lamb, corn, green peas in their pods, sugar-cane, lemons and strawberries” and one-story, dilapidated houses whose inner courtyards were lovely gardens of flowers and fruit. The Southern Pacific came to the town in 1876, however, after the railroad exacted large subsidies from the city fathers. Los Angeles was not ready to be consigned to a backwater of progress, which was the fate of other cities that resisted the Southern Pacific’s strong-arm tactics.

Soon the railroad began shipping to the east wine, paper-wrapped oranges packed in ice, lemons, walnuts, and other products of the area’s new irrigated intensive farming. A growing emphasis on agriculture ended once and for all the cattle ranchers’ rule over the range, for cattle now had to be fenced in to prevent their trampling freshly planted fields or ripening harvests.

Young entrepreneurs were helping transform the city. One of these was Phineas Banning, who had begun to make carriages at the port of Wilmington, south of Los Angeles, built a wharf and warehouses, and developed a stage connection with the city. Banning was said to be the first to use a wireless telegraph in the area, the first to dig an artesian well, and the first to have an oil well. But now a spectacular real estate boom was about to begin, one that would transform the city and its environs. The old Los Angeles of flowers and vineyards would no longer exist. After years of struggles with the Southern Pacific, Banning would sell out to it.

The most direct route from Los Angeles to northern Californian ports in the 1870s was still by steamer or packet. Beating their way north, passengers could watch the great Pacific rollers breaking on the sands, the wooded and craggy coastal ranges, and sometimes the snow-covered Sierra peaks in the distance. It was always a breathtaking moment when the ship entered the Golden Gate and turned starboard to the fabled city on the hills.

San Francisco! With its fog-shrouded mornings, steep dunelike hills, busy, picturesque harbor, and lusty yet cultivated style, the city was still a magnet for the richest rich and the poorest poor, for immigrants from west and east, for Chinese, Irish, Yankees, Italians, and more Spanish from the south. It was now the economic capital of the West, and a cultural and social center as well. The Big Four had not remained long in Sacramento after their Central Pacific was built and making money. In the mid-seventies Stanford, his wife, and his son moved into a $2 million mansion that was greeted in the local press as “Stanford’s Palace, the Finest Private Residence in America.” The place was a great pile with marble steps, bay windows, billiard room, picture gallery, “Pompeian reception room,” ballroom, and forty or so other rooms, decorated in the Italian and other styles, and topped by a glass dome illuminating the entrance hall seventy feet below. Natives and visitors alike gawked at this and other ornate mansions built on Nob Hill.

While the Big Four ran their railroad empire out of their Southern Pacific offices, also long since removed from Sacramento, their wives and daughters dominated the social life of the city. For a wealthy young woman like Lucy S. Jones, niece of a high railroad executive, life in San Francisco in the 1870s was a weekly round of social calls, dress fittings, parties, cultural events, and church. Her brothers took singing lessons while she studied French. Her carefree life was shadowed only by the illnesses that coursed through San Francisco—influenza, consumption, scarlet fever. One young friend died, others were home in bed, the cook and Chinese servant were too ill to come to work, and Lucy and her aunt battled recurrent colds. “So many are going now,” she wrote in her diary after one friend’s death, and then crossed it out, as if it were bad luck.

Down in Chinatown, not many blocks north and east of Nob Hill, lived the people at the bottom of the social pyramid, in “dark and dingy garrets and cellars, steaming with air breathed over and over, and filled with the fumes of opium,” according to a newspaper report. By the mid-eighties the Chinese quarter had become known as an inner city of brothels, opium dens, and gambling halls, described by the historian H. H. Bancroft as “closely packed with some 25,000 souls, nearly all males, with a sprinkling of loose females.” This dense honeycomb was mostly owned by white absentee landlords. The Chinese experienced both discrimination and segregation, both legal and illegal harassment. “Negroes, Mongolians, and Indians” were excluded from the public schools. It was illegal to bring Chinese women into the country unless they were persons of “correct habits” and good character. In fact, estimated Bancroft, of 116,000 Chinese in California in 1876, 6,000—or 5 percent—may have been women, further arresting Chinese assimilation in California.

Feeling against the Chinese had mounted on the return of thousands of railroad workers from the Sierras. Whites reviled them for their willingness to accept low wages and harsh conditions, their alien ways, their pigtails, their Taoist stoicism, their habit of sending to the “old country” both their money and the bones of their dead. Labor leaders held mass meetings, formed “anti-coolie” clubs, organized mobs to climb Nob Hill and shout “the Chinese must go” outside the mansions of the magnates deemed responsible for bringing in Chinese labor. To win the labor vote, Democrats often passed planks against the Chinese.

The opposition of labor was especially telling, for San Francisco was already becoming a “labor town.” Most of the trades had been organized since the fifties. Building trades were especially strong, in line with San Francisco’s construction boom. In 1868 unions won the eight-hour day, but the following year labor faced its biggest challenge, the incoming flood of unorganized workers discharged from the Central Pacific Railroad.

Anti-Chinese sentiment became the binding force in the labor movement. Such organizations as the Knights of St. Crispin, shoemakers directly competing with a major Chinatown industry, and the Plumbers’ and Carpenters’ Eight-Hour League organized spectacular mass meetings throughout the 1870s, demonstrations that often exploded into riots and the burning and looting of Chinatown. Out of these meetings also erupted the meteoric Workingmen’s Party, led by the fiery Denis Kearney and fueled by economic frustration—a drought, a decrease in mining returns, a depression, and railroad strikes in the East. In June 1878, Workingmen won one-third of the seats in the state’s second constitutional convention, even against a coalition of Democrats and Republicans.

Fixed as it was on the issue of ending Chinese immigration, however, the Workingmen’s Party’s participation in the convention proved to be its undoing. Within a year of ratification of an anti-Chinese article of the new constitution, the United States Circuit Court declared that virtually all of its provisions violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

In the 1870s San Francisco was outliving its reputation as a frontier town full of saloons, opium dens, and gold seekers and other philistines. The city was becoming a place for thinkers like Henry George, poets like Bret Harte, historians like Bancroft, musicians, artists. The patronage of the rich was providing symphony orchestras, opera houses, museums, galleries. For years, Tivoli maintained a twelve-month opera season. Newspapers in seven languages offered a peculiarly western brand of humor, developed by Mark Twain and others. Edwin Booth broke all attendance records for American theater when he played for eight weeks in the city. Lillian Russell, appearing in Babes in the Woods wearing purple tights and high-buttoned shoes, delightfully shocked the city. Lucy Jones’s cultural life included Shakespeare and Wagner.

Yellow and black and white, rich and poor, Yankee and Indian, Mexican and Spanish, Californians made up the most diverse population in the Union. They boasted of their extremes—the highest mountains and the lowest deserts, the worst floods and the longest droughts, the biggest trees and the fiercest forest fires. Californians grew silk—not very successfully—and grain; the state ranked second in wheat production by 1890. By century’s end, San Francisco was a kind of experiment in good living, for whites, at least, one of the most agreeable and bucolic cities in the world. It seemed that this way of life, barring some act of God, might continue forever.

Industrialists: Carnegie, Rockefeller, and the Two Capitalisms

American capitalism had its saints as well as its rascals. Its finest leader and role model in the late nineteenth century was heroic in almost everything except appearance: five foot three, broad of face and nose, so youthful in features that even after he became a railroad superintendent and was clearing up a train wreck, a burly Irishman in a busy work crew picked him up and carried him to the side, saying, “Get out of my way, you brat of a boy.” In his career and achievements Andrew Carnegie was a Hero of Capitalist Production.

That career read as though it had been contrived by a master scenarist of Victorian dramas full of clichés and stereotypes. Rags to riches: he was born in the attic of a Scottish weaver’s cottage and died in his eighty-fourth year the owner of one of Manhattan’s finest mansions and one of Scotland’s most ostentatious castles. Poverty-stricken but determined mother: Margaret Carnegie tried for a time to shore up the family earnings by binding shoes and other cottage work, then bundled up her husband and sons and belongings, borrowed twenty pounds, and took passage to America. The rungs of the ladder of success: bobbin boy (at $1.20 a week) to engine tender, to telegraph messenger boy, to telegraph operator, to personal secretary to the superintendent of the western division of the Pennsylvania Railroad, to superintendent himself, to Civil War head of transportation and communications, all by his early forties.

There was, however, a far more extraordinary side to Carnegie’s life. He came from a family of fiery Scottish Chartists who for years had been agitating for political liberty, human rights, and religious toleration; his uncle had been arrested for “seditious activity.” When his father’s linen hand-loom weaving succumbed to the factory system, young Andrew would never forget his coming home in despair, saying, “Andra, I can get nae mair work.” But the father and an uncle had time to educate the boy in Scottish lore, the plebeian poetry of Robert Burns, and the evils of the Monarchy and Established Church. As a boy in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, where the immigrant family settled, he became an ardent reader and a letter writer to the New York Tribune, especially on slavery. His whole early life—his roots in poverty and radicalism, his long trip to America across the Atlantic and then up the Hudson and along the Erie Canal and by lake and canal to Allegheny, his daily work in Pittsburgh among factory boys and railroad laborers—he had converted into a self-schooling in democracy.

None of this, however, seemed to slow Carnegie’s determined rise through the capitalistic system. Observant, quick, steady, resourceful, everlastingly competent, he may not have rescued the boss’s daughter from a runaway horse, but he was able on one occasion, when all the trains in his division were held up because of a wreck and his boss was late, to unscramble the whole mess on his own initiative and get the trains running. He was then not yet twenty. His passion was to make things work. When wrecked freight cars blocked service, he coolly ordered them burned—an act that astonished his colleagues but later became standard procedure with the Pennsylvania Railroad.

In 1865, at the age of thirty, Carnegie left the Pennsylvania to branch out into other fields. He invested his railroad income shrewdly in oil, sleeping cars, bridges, and other railroads, as steel became a kind of common denominator in his investments. In Europe, he came to know Sir Henry Bessemer and the Bessemer process. Already Carnegie was showing the daring and imagination that attracted attention from his rivals in Pittsburgh and abroad. Bridges especially challenged him; with Captain Eads he shared the agony and glory of building the first great bridge over the Mississippi. By 1872, staking his hopes on Bessemer and other improved technology, he was ready to make an irreversible commitment to steel.

The story of Carnegie’s rise to czar of steel is the story of organization, cost-cutting, and competition. Take away his steel mills, his ores, his railroad lines, his coal, he liked to say, but leave him one thing and he would repeat his success. That one thing was organization, by which he meant picking skilled subordinates such as Captain “Bill” Jones, Henry Clay Frick, and Charles M. Schwab, and by which he also meant something that was still revolutionary in American industry—vertical integration. By such moves as acquiring massive iron deposits in the Mesabi range and buying railroads that linked Pittsburgh with the northwest water routes, Carnegie by the end of the century came to control raw materials, transportation, manufacturing, distribution, and finance. He stood astride the whole steel process, from mining ore to delivering railroad cars, boilers, nails, wires.

Cost-cutting was virtually an obsession at Carnegie Steel. The boss watched every nickel. “I cannot understand Lime,” he complained; “13 tons of lime used to each ton of metal. It can’t be lime, that is certain, half rock—I suspect.” Or: “I am surprised at two items in cost. Coke 1/2 ton per ton rails—8 bushels should smelt the pig and certainly 4 bushels the Spiegel. How do you account for the remainder?” He fretted over labor costs. “Profits, for Carnegie, were always tangential to and a mere consequence of reduced costs of production,” in Joseph Wall’s estimate. “To reduce costs, he would quickly scrap a new machine, a new process, or an entire mill in favor of more efficient operations. Labor was simply another item of cost, but if wages were low, so also were salaries of management.” Carnegie’s salary, however, was not low.

All this made Carnegie a ferocious competitor. His attitude toward his rivals was, “Come, let’s compete.” He said this in absolute confidence that he would outcompete them, and so he did. He fought not only with rival steel makers but also with railroads. His old association with the Pennsylvania Railroad did not deter him from forcing down its ore, coke, and limestone rates. “What are you fighting the Pennsylvania Railroad for?” a Pennsylvania chief asked him. “You were brought up in its service. We were boys together.” In answer, Carnegie handed him a list of his competitors’ rates.

The growth of American steel-making was simply phenomenal. In just a few years, Carnegie and the others far outstripped Britain, long the heart of world iron- and steel-making. American steel production quadrupled in the last thirty years of the century. Benefiting from economies of scale, in 1870 the industry produced 60 pounds of metal for each dollar invested; in 1900, 112 pounds. Carnegie did far better than the rest, more than doubling his per-dollar production between 1880 and 1900. In those same twenty years he cut his cost per ton of rail from $28 to less than $12.

All through these years, however, the “other” Carnegie seemed to hover over the steel magnate, reminding him of youthful dreams and ideals. At the age of thirty-three, in the first flush of success, he had promised himself: “By this time two years I can so arrange all my business as to secure at least 50,000 per annum. Beyond this never earn.” The reason? “No idol more debasing than the worship of money.” Yet Carnegie continued to worship that idol, as he built a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars even while preaching the “Gospel of Wealth”—the doctrine that making money was laudable, but only if the rich used their money to help the poor and benefit the whole community.

The most extraordinary manifestation of the “other Carnegie” appeared each spring when Carnegie returned to Scotland and England and reasserted his old Chartist faith. He had forgotten none of it during all the years of moneymaking. During the 1880s he bought out or into seven British dailies and ten weeklies and converted them into muckraking organs against the British monarchy, hereditary privileges, and limitations on the right to vote. He bored his radical friends and outraged his conservative foes with his fulsome tributes to American democracy. So stridently did Carnegie’s newspapers attack the aristocracy that even Carnegie’s liberal friends, including Prime Minister William Gladstone himself, felt embarrassed and heaved a sigh of relief when their American friend left for home every fall. Still, they could not help wondering at the man who supported radical political change, equality, and even striking coal workers on one side of the Atlantic, only to return to the Republican and capitalistic fold on the other.

Despite failures and frustrations, Carnegie never lost his Chartist faith—in the British Isles. Especially rewarding to him were the literary friendships he made among Britain’s intellectual elite. Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer, and John Morley, among other littérateurs, befriended Carnegie intellectually in Britain and were entertained by him royally on their trips to America. Carnegie wrote articles for the Fortnightly Review and letters to The Times. He rarely resisted an opportunity to mount the platform, from which he excoriated special privilege, lauded America’s form of democracy, and seemed far less the calculating capitalist than the arm-pumping radical—which in England he was.

By the end of the century, Andrew Carnegie was crowned in the press as the world’s richest man, succeeding Jay Gould. But waiting to assume the golden throne was a man who differed from Carnegie in almost every way except in the ability to make—and to give away—hundreds of millions of dollars. John D. Rockefeller was the son not of a poor Scot but of a roving upstate New York salesman, speculator, spurious physician, and apparent bigamist. Sometimes absent for months, the father was home often enough to teach his son the importance of money, the sanctity of contracts, and how to make a profit. In his early boyhood, it is said, John bought candy by the pound and sold it piece by piece to his siblings at a profit.

After a good high school education and a business college stint, young Rockefeller drew up a list of sound Cleveland firms, made the rounds of all of them seeking a job, and was stolidly starting around the circuit a second time when he got a job in a commission house as a bookkeeper. A frugal, industrious, deeply religious young man, Rockefeller loved bookkeeping—meticulously checking and rechecking figures, handling thousand-dollar bills, and learning every aspect of the firm’s business. Three months before his twentieth birthday, he and a young partner opened their own commission house. The firm prospered during the Civil War boom.

At the same time, Rockefeller and his associates became involved in the oil refineries that were springing up around Cleveland. Sensing that Cleveland could never outbid Chicago for the grain and meat trade, but that its railroad facilities would enable it to dominate oil-refining, he struck out boldly on his own. Slowly, methodically, he expanded his operation, taking advantage of the continuing oil boom. As his firm grew bigger, he found it easier to dictate terms to suppliers and railroads, and to profit from petroleum by-products. But Rockefeller came to fear and detest the chaos of the oil industry—the hundreds of tiny firms that sprang up in boom times and then folded, the ferocious competition of railroads and cities for business, the collapse of rates and prices to the point of bankruptcy for many firms. By 1870, when Rockefeller and his partners organized the Standard Oil Company (Ohio), the refining industry’s capacity was three times the demand.

Rockefeller’s answer to this problem was not Carnegie’s kind of competition but his own brand of order and stability, achieved through alliances, “voluntary” associations, combinations, and ultimately trusts. Rockefeller did not talk much at the time—a kind of aggressive silence was one of his main weapons—but later he bluntly argued the case for combination over competition.

“We wanted a new idea to prevail,” he said, “we wanted the old struggle to cease in the ugly forms it had assumed…. [We wanted] men to take their full share of the business, to be content with a fair share … and thus work together for the economies and enjoy together the success…. I think that it is fair to say that the strong men who were competitors in the oil refining business, the aggressive men …were the men who were most likely to take up the idea of cooperation…. The thing that caused the effort to be made to centralize the business was the exercise of this uncontrolled freedom for every man to have his own way in utter disregard of the rights of his neighbors.”

How Rockefeller effected these combinations aroused as much controversy as the combinations themselves. His basic strategy was not to out-compete his rivals but to eliminate them, in the name of a higher cooperation. He denied using pressure tactics, but his critics said he did not need to—he had the power, and everyone knew it. Quiet, soft-spoken, even polite, he could suddenly intimidate his rivals with his “gunpowder eyes” and, even more, his ample funds. Through cost-cutting, favorable rebates, a big marketing organization, purchase of competitors, occasional price-cutting, Rockefeller and allied firms developed common ownership of refineries, lubricating oil plants, pipelines, cooperage companies. The Standard Oil combination of firms came to control about nine-tenths of the oil industry by 1881.

For all their differences—and their contrasting capitalisms—Carnegie and Rockefeller ended up with one great interest in common: philanthropy. Of the several hundred million dollars that Carnegie made, he gave $350 million for libraries, education, and world peace. Of Rockefeller’s fortune of over $800 million, the oil tycoon gave over $550 million for medical research, education, religion, and, especially in the South, agricultural improvement. Neither man questioned the need for such giving; each considered it a duty. To radicals’ charges that they had exploited the masses, skimmed off enormous profits, and kept much for themselves, they would have answered—if they condescended to answer—that they had given the public something it needed more than material improvement: they had given it education, health, more assurance of world peace, greater opportunity for spiritual and moral development.

As for the argument of Marxists and others that, while of course the masses did have higher needs than the economic, it was up to the people as a whole, not their economic overlords, to define those needs, probably neither Carnegie nor Rockefeller would have understood the argument, and certainly neither would have deigned to answer it.

Steel and oil were not the most important forces in the late-nineteenth-century production boom, only the most dramatic. Flour production, lumber production, and tobacco products roughly doubled between 1870 and 1890; paper almost tripled. American textile mills consumed 797,000 bales of cotton in 1870, over thrice that in 1891. “Using the year 1899 as a standard,” according to John Garraty, “the output of manufactured goods increased from an index of 25 in 1870 to 30 in 1877, 42 in 1880, 71 in 1890, and 79 in 1892.” By 1890 the billion-dollar textile industry led in capitalization, followed by iron and steel and by lumber; textiles also led in number of workers (824,000) followed by lumber and by iron and steel, while the latter, with its skilled workers, had the highest wage bill. Food processing had the highest “value of product”—a stupendous $1.6 billion.

Expansion was uneven. Industry continued to be heavily centered in the northeast and north-central regions, with 85 percent of the manufactured goods produced there in 1890. But the regional balance was slowly righting itself. California doubled the value of its manufactures during the eighties alone. Minnesota was specializing in flour milling, Michigan and Wisconsin in lumbering, Illinois in meat packing and farm equipment. To a lesser but still marked degree, the South shared in the boom. Already, New England textile and textile-machinery firms were expanding south of the old Mason-Dixon Line.

If American production was the wonder of the world, success lay primarily in a combination both lucky and calculated, of seemingly inexhaustible raw materials, a fast-developing transportation system, a vigorous and talented labor force, massive foreign and domestic capital, an ethic of expansion, and brilliant innovators. Capitalism’s power of “creative destruction” was already evident. America’s rapidly expanding railroad system was pacing the booming economy and in the process supplanting many an expensive canal system—and supplanting countless canal workers too.

The third decade after the Civil War (1886–95) continued the diverse innovation of the first two. The new Westinghouse Electric Company built the nation’s first commercially successful power plant in Buffalo. The United States Forest Service was established in the Agriculture Department. The Pennsylvania Railroad operated an electrically lighted train between Chicago and New York. William S. Burroughs patented a commercially successful adding machine. The National Geographic Society was founded, and the nation’s first seismograph installed at the Lick Observatory in California. The Pullman Car Company built an electric locomotive for hauling freight; Singer marketed electric sewing machines; Otis Brothers installed an electric elevator in Manhattan. William Osler published Principles and Practice of Medicine. Westinghouse standardized alternating current at 60 cycles per second. A North Carolina chemist produced acetylene gas. The American Psychological Association was established, and the Journal of Geology first published. Chlorine was used to treat sewage in Brewster, New York, Boston schoolchildren began to receive medical examinations, and the world’s first antitoxin clinic was opened in New York City. Pneumatic rubber tires were manufactured in Hartford, and pasteurized milk was produced commercially.

Not only was industry innovative—innovation was being industrialized. The benign figure of Thomas A. Edison, industrialist, loomed as a prime example. By the late eighties Edison was still the creative inventor, experimenting now with a Kinetoscopic camera. But he was more than this—while creating manufacturing establishments to market his inventions, he had become one of America’s best-known small industrialists, employing between two and three thousand skilled and unskilled workers. He was an industrialist in an even more profound sense: in an era that recognized and rewarded systematically organized production, Edison was probably the first to found the “scientific” factory, one devoted to the production of scientific inventions rather than consumer or producer goods.

To a degree, Edison became a kind of “captive scientist”—captive to the entrepreneurs who could supply capital and to the marketplace. In creating Menlo Park as a scientific factory, he obtained funds before his next inventions were anything more than an idea or perhaps a quick sketch in his or one of his partners’ lab books. As in a factory, work was subdivided among Edison’s gifted inventors and technicians, a division of labor prevailed, and a bureaucratic organization evolved. And as in any other private enterprise, “practicality” ruled. Edison would not work on a project unless it would meet a present or future need and make money.

“A scientific man busies himself with theory,” Edison said to a reporter. “He is absolutely impractical. An inventor is essentially practical. Anything that won’t sell I don’t want to invent….”

Working around the clock in his rumpled clothes, taking catnaps on laboratory tables, smoking twenty cheap cigars a day, gouging chaws out of huge hunks of chewing tobacco he shared with his associates, leaving the floor around him covered with spittle, Edison hardly appeared a heroic figure. He was something more important. While winning a reputation as an independent and single-minded inventor—“my business is thinking,” he liked to say—he was in fact, as Norbert Wiener pointed out, a transitional figure who pointed the way toward the big, bureaucratically organized research of the technological age to come.

Philadelphia 1876: The Proud Exhibitors

The crowd gaped at the massive engine towering over it—at the gleaming cylinders pointed skyward, at the huge, delicately balanced walking beams above, responding at one end to the ten-foot stroke of the cylinders and from the other plunging down to the thirty-foot flywheel. Two diminutive figures down on a platform, Ulysses S. Grant and Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, on command gently turned some wheels and the walking beams began to rock majestically, the flywheel to turn, and now the engine’s 1,500 horsepower was moving along leather belts to other mechanical showpieces—sewing machines, circular saws, presses, carpet looms, and thousands of other machines crowding the exhibition halls.

It was May 10, 1876, the opening day at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. The rain seemed not to dampen the spirits of thousands pouring into Fairmount Park and jamming the pie stalls, lemonade stands, beer gardens, ice cream parlors, P. T. Barnum’s “Wild Man of Borneo,” and other attractions lining the approaches to the huge exhibition halls. But the keenest interest by far was in the exhibits. In the industrial exhibits: lathes, power looms, pumps, milling machines, a section of wire cable from John A. Roebling’s Niagara suspension bridge, a model showing how the steel arches of Eads’s St. Louis bridge had been formed, a 7,000-pound pendulum clock by Seth Thomas, Westinghouse’s air brake, Philadelphia-and Hartford-made machine tools, “sober black iron monsters whose varied steel edges could cut, chip, stamp, mold, grind, and otherwise shape metal,” in Joseph and Frances Gies’s words. In the agricultural exhibits: reapers and mowers and horse rakes and fruit dryers and steam road rollers and gang plows.

Most exciting and baffling were the electrical exhibits, including “multiplex” telegraph devices. The Exhibition actually produced a historic event when Emperor Pedro II, who had met Alexander Graham Bell while visiting the Boston School for the Deaf, ran into the inventor at a Western Union exhibit and insisted on inspecting his “harmonic telegraph.” The emperor electrified the crowd when he pressed his ear to Bell’s receiver while the inventor declaimed Hamlet’s soliloquy from some distance away.

“I hear, I hear!” the emperor cried. “To be or not to be!” The incident gave Bell the recognition he sorely needed. Other activities and exhibits at the exposition also portended a strange new future—most notably an internal combustion engine displayed by Langen & Otto of Germany. Perhaps many of the Exhibition’s visitors felt as John Greenleaf Whittier did when he wrote in his “Centennial Hymn”:

Our fathers’ God! from out whose hand

The centuries fall like grains of sand,

We meet to-day, united, free,

And loyal to our land and Thee,

To thank Thee for the era done,

And trust Thee for the opening one.

CHAPTER 4

The Structure of Classes

SNORTING AND BAWLING, THEIR beady eyes glittering with fear, the cattle were driven out of the railroad cars by men with spiked poles and prodded down wooden ramps into the Chicago stockyards. Other men on horses herded the steers to pens that lay along alleys and streets, in blocks as regular as in the best-laid-out town. All was meticulously organized. Cowboys in the western ranges had rounded up their stock and driven them to towns like Abilene and Kansas City, Atchison and Hannibal, where they had been loaded into stockcars. Despite the length and frequent heat of the journey, stockmen usually delivered the cattle in good shape, since five dollars a head could be deducted for sick or damaged steers. Daily, the stockcars also disgorged thousands of hogs and sheep. They took their own places in pens that covered hundreds of acres on Chicago’s west side.

After traders on horseback, trotting from pen to pen, bought and sold the stock, sealing their oral deals with quick handshakes, the beasts were driven into the nearby slaughterhouses. Here they were surveyed—“laid off like a map”—and delivered to the “chain.” Workers hoisted them by nose or feet to an overhead belt, which moved them steadily and inexorably to other men with knives who slit their throats and sliced off their skin, men who bashed their brains in with hammers, men who cleaved backbones with axes, men who sometimes plunged a still palpitating carcass into a vat of boiling water. “Everything of the pig was used except the squeal,” a meat packer boasted. A Chicago humorist noted, “A cow goes lowin’ softly in to Armour’s an’ comes out glue, gelatine, fertylizer, celoo-loid, joolry, sofy cushions, hair restorer, washin’ sody, littrachoor an’ bed springs so quick that while aft she’s still cow, for’ard she may be anything fr’m buttons to pannyma hats.”

The workers—Poles, Germans, Slovaks, Irishmen—with their special tasks and chainlike organization were as regimented as the beasts. Signs in several languages enforced the rules. But this did not keep them from having fingers or hands sliced off as they grappled with carcasses and cutting machines on blood-soaked sawdust floors. Workers were often left with tubercular lungs, rheumatic bodies, hands scarred from the acid used to loosen wool from the skins of sheep.

This scene in the Chicago stockyards would not have surprised Karl Marx. In the late 1880s, the first English translations of the first volume of Capital, edited by Friedrich Engels, were reaching radical circles in the United States. Under capitalism, Marx had written, “all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the producers; they mutilate the labourer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy any remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange him from the intellectual potentials of the labour-process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they distort the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour-process to a despotism the more hateful for its meanness; they transform his lifetime into working-time, and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.…”

“Capital is dead labour,” Marx had written, “that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” Marx’s passions seemed to rise as he wrote. “You rob me,” he had the worker telling his boss, “every day of 2/3 of the value of my commodity…. You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and in the odour of sanctity to boot; but the thing that you represent face to face with me has no heart in its breast.” Labor was hardly above the level of cattle, Marx implied; indeed, cattle had perhaps a higher status for, in its fattening, cattle was a raw material and at the same time a means of producing manure.

Industrial labor under capitalism, Marx contended, was degraded into the status of a commodity, transformed into the cog of a machine, converted into an urban proletariat. This was its tragedy, but in this also lay its great potential for liberation. Labor’s common status at the bottom of the heap, its sharing of work experiences, its proletarianization, established a solid foundation for a common consciousness of its status, for united protest, for joint political action. Did American workers have such a potential? Marx lived in a city where in 1880, for example, “63 of every 100 Londoners were native to that city, 94 coming from England and Wales, and 98 from Great Britain and Ireland,” according to Herbert Gutman, while in the same year the vast majority of the persons living in America’s biggest cities were immigrants or the children of immigrants.

For that matter did the United States, with its capitalists concentrated not in one center like London but spread out in old and new industrial and financial centers across the country, possess even the potential for a “ruling class”?

Upper Classes: The New Rich and the Old

About three miles from the noisome stockyards, Philip D. Armour rose every morning at five in his home on fashionable Prairie Avenue, breakfasted at six, and soon, seated in his Goddard buggy drawn by two fast trotters and driven by a liveried coachman, he was on his way to his LaSalle Street office. He liked to get down to work, he would say, “before the boys with the polished nails show up.” Soon the place was a beehive of activity, as Armour leaned back in his swivel chair summoning messenger boys, sending out telegraphic instructions to distant posts in his business empire, talking and moralizing at length to his associates. At six, no matter what business lay before him, he left for home and by nine was in bed.

One of six sons of New Englanders who had settled in the Mohawk Valley, Armour had traveled overland to California, panned gold and built sluices in the Sacramento River, returned home with several thousand dollars, and then had gone west again, plunging into the soap business in Cincinnati, selling hides in St. Paul, and moving on to grain dealing and meat packing in Milwaukee. During the Civil War, he made at least $2 million by agreeing to deliver, for $30 to $40 a barrel, pork that he was able to buy for $18 through a shrewd estimate of the likely fall of pork prices in the wake of Union victories. Soon he moved to Chicago, which had replaced Cincinnati as the pork-packing center of the nation. There, he pioneered in bringing live hogs to the city, slaughtering them, using the waste products, and refrigerating his shipments.

A big, thickset man with thinning sandy hair and reddish whiskers, Armour was a proudly “self-made” entrepreneur who did not pretend any interests except meat packing and moneymaking. Asked by a reporter, “You have made your pile; why not clear out?,” he said, “I do not love the money. What I do love is the getting of it.” He had no interest in art or music, and he was reputed to have read only one book in his life—David Harum, about the horse trader who liked to say, “Do unto others as they would like to do unto you, only do it fust.” Armour enjoined his associates to “stick to facts” and avoid theory. But he liked to moralize about the value of hard work and rugged competition.

Despite his rough speech and appearance, and his occasional early-morning visits to the stockyards, Armour moved among a select circle. All of his five brothers worked for him. He sent his sons to private schools and made a place for them in his business. He had a paternalistic way with his subordinates, rewarding them with $100 handouts on the spot when they pleased him, bullying them when they did not. He had no stomach for labor unions and collective bargaining.

Even more select were the other notables on Prairie Avenue and environs: the millionaire merchant Marshall Field; his friend George M. Pullman, the sleeping car tycoon who lived in a palatial mansion down the street; the piano maker W. W. Kimball; and other meat packers, including Armour’s arch-rival, Gustavus Swift, another self-made man and a specialist in beef. Such men as these often lunched together at the “Millionaires’ Table” of the Chicago Club, or at the Palmer House, with its staircases of Carrara marble, its gigantic Egyptian chandelier over the reception desk, its “voluptuous Venetian mirrors” on the landings. Scattered around the North Side were other extraordinary edifices, with dining rooms sporting carved panels that portrayed rabbits, ducks, and prairie chickens; libraries of walnut and ebony set off with silver and curtained with raw silk lambrequins; music rooms with Gobelin tapestries and satinwood. In the sandstone mansion of Cyrus Hall McCormick, a fresco on the dining room ceiling pictured the emblem of the Legion of Honor, some sheaves of grain, and the McCormick reaper.

A thousand miles to the east, proper Bostonians liked to talk about the Chicago pork barons and their vulgar mansions, about the pork barons’ wives in their silk hair nets with bangles of gold and silver braid and their frantic social rounds that seemed little short of stampedes. Chicago liked to talk about the Brahmins, too. A favorite story told of the Chicago banking house that asked Lee, Higginson in Boston about a certain Mr. Smith, a young Bostonian who had applied for a job in the banking house. The man at Lee, Higginson could hardly contain his enthusiasm for the young man. Mr. Smith, he wrote the banker, was a descendant of Peabodys, Cabots and Lowells, Saltonstalls, Appletons, and even Winthrops. Back came a brief letter from the Chicago banker. There seemed to have been a mistake, he wrote: “We were not contemplating using Mr. Smith for breeding purposes.”

Bostonians called this story apocryphal, but they could not dispute the truth that lay behind it. As the old Brahmin elites faced intensifying economic competition from Chicago, New York, and myriad other centers, and as a flood of immigrants and outsiders overran Boston tenements and even Boston business offices, the Bostonians drew in among themselves economically, socially, culturally. What the new elites saw as an arrogant snobbishness, the old elites viewed as a discriminating exclusiveness. They retired into a bastion as many-walled as a feudal fortress. They tied their money up in trusts guarded by formidable attorneys. They sealed themselves off in organizations—the Massachusetts Society of Colonial Dames, the Society of Mayflower Descendants, genealogic societies—that no parvenu could crash. They sent their sons to select private schools and then to Harvard. Surrounded and besieged in the city, they retired to social citadels in the country. One family—the Forbeses—owned a good-sized island off Martha’s Vineyard, all for themselves.

Above all, they protected their bloodlines through intermarriage. “In one Cabot family,” according to Cleveland Amory, “out of seven children who married, four married Higginsons. In a Jackson family of five, three married Cabots. In a Peabody family of four boys and two girls, two of the boys and a girl married Lawrences. In one family of Boston Shaws, there were eleven children. Nine married members of other Boston First Families, one died at the age of seven months, and the eleventh became a Catholic priest.” First Families had a penchant for marrying cousins, especially first cousins.

And then there was the fabled “Boston woman.” Attired in sensible shoes and remarkable hats, often inherited, she spent her days in culture and good works, rushing from bookstore to church to symphony, from lecture to charity tea to indignation meeting. But she was not all this easily stereotyped, and she prided herself on her individuality. Most individualistic of all was Mrs. Jack Gardner, who publicly drank beer rather than tea, embraced Buddhism rather than Unitarianism, paraded down Tremont Street with a lion on a leash, told risqué stories in mixed company, had John Singer Sargent paint her in a costume that had all Boston talking, attired her coachman and two footmen in full livery—and left Boston an imported Florentine palace of pink marble with a fine art collection.

No wonder a Beacon Hill lady, questioned as to her disdain for travel, asked, “Why should I travel when I’m already here?” No wonder many a Boston man who did travel kept Boston time on his big Waltham watch. But the Boston elites that retreated into apartness did not descend into impotence. While they could no longer dominate Boston’s electoral politics—before the Civil War seven mayors of Boston had held Brahmin status—men like Charles Francis Adams, Jr., chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Railway Commissioners and moderator of Quincy town meetings, held important posts in state and local government. In business, according to F. C. Jaher, “Brahmins maintained a vigorous entrepreneurial role and continued to control an appreciable segment of the great individual and corporate wealth in Boston.” And the old Brahmin families—the Cabots, Higginsons, Lees, and the rest—maintained a firm grip on the city’s cultural and charitable organizations, such as the Boston Symphony, the Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Somerset Club, the Massachusetts General Hospital, the Board of Overseers of Harvard, the North American Review. For many with old wealth, these and family demands took most of their waking hours.

Other elites along the Atlantic seaboard displayed the same solidarity and exclusiveness as the proper Bostonians, but with local variations. Philadelphia society had long since moved from the old Independence Hall-Second Bank area a few blocks west of the Delaware to the Rittenhouse Square region a few blocks east of the Schuylkill. In this square and the blocks around it the banking, merchant, railroad, iron, coal, and—later—oil families built their mansions, held their balls, retreated to their clubs (Rittenhouse and Philadelphia), attended their Episcopalian churches (St. Mark’s and the Church of the Holy Trinity), sponsored the arts (Academy of Music, Academy of the Fine Arts), discussed their Republican politics (Union League Club). Not only Biddies but Baldwins (locomotives), Disstons (steel and saws), Bromleys (textiles), Wideners (traction and utilities), Cramps (ships), and Elkinses (traction and oil) who lived in the square and its environs “definitely felt themselves to be different, aloof and apart, from the rapidly developing heterogeneity of the rest of American society,” according to E. Digby Baltzell. “Their wives and children lived in a money-insulated world of the great houses, private schools and fashionable churches surrounding the Square.” Possibly, reflected Baltzell, this “privatization” went back to Andrew Jackson’s triumph over Nicholas Biddle.

If Philadelphia First Families numbered fewer eccentrics than did Boston—Rittenhouse Square frowned on the idiosyncratic—Philadelphians were no less self-conscious and backward-looking. “To mention Walnut Street to an Old Philadelphian,” wrote George Wharton Pepper, who was one, “is to awaken memories of a departed glory. On bright Sundays, after church, there was always an informal parade of fashion on the south side of this thoroughfare. There the city’s Four Hundred could be seen to great advantage. They were the blended congregation of half a dozen mid-city churches. They made upon the onlooker an impression of urbanity, of social experience and of entire self-satisfaction. If, during church-time, they had confessed themselves miserable sinners, by the time they appeared on parade their restoration to divine favor was seemingly complete.”

Woe to the family left out, especially the moneyed family who could not use poverty as the excuse for exclusion. A young Widener wrote a novel excoriating the snobs who had snubbed his mother for marrying across the tracks. A young Bullitt wrote a novel about the declining standards of the “Sacred Square.” The Square was unmoved.

New York society was different—richer, brassier, more diverse, more volatile, less cohesive. And it was run by women.

The New York elites were attuned to a dynamic economy and a fast-changing city. Manhattan was now the unchallenged hub of the nation’s finances, and itself challenged London as a center of world finance. The city was on the move. Arrivistes were crowding up against established wealth. Avenues were spearing far to the north in Manhattan, even into the Bronx. Looking north from Cortlandt Street and Maiden Lane in the early 1880s, one saw a forest of telegraph and telephone lines, a maze of shop signs, and a jumble of drays, streetcars, buggies, coaches, delivery wagons, all horse-drawn, in the streets. Walking up Fifth Avenue, one came upon the upthrust arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty—the great icon had not yet been put in place on Bedloe’s Island—and the fashionable temple, Emanu-El. Farther north, Broadway was called the Boulevard. But Society, entrenched in its enclave on lower Fifth Avenue, hardly looked past 42nd Street to the “wasteland” beyond.

While this Society could boast of plenty of old families—Brevoorts, Fishes, Schermerhorns, Livingstons, Roosevelts, Rensselaers, and other “Knickerbockers”—new money and big money meant more in Manhattan than in any other metropolis in the East. Up to around the 1880s, said Ward McAllister, the deputy arbiter of New York society, “for one to be worth a million of dollars was. to be rated as a man of fortune, but now … New York’s ideas as to values, when fortune was named, leaped boldly up to ten millions, fifty millions, one hundred millions, and the necessities and luxuries followed suit. One was no longer content with a dinner of a dozen or more, to be served by a couple of servants. Fashion demanded that you be received in the hall of the house in which you were to dine, by from five to six servants, who, with the butler, were to serve the repast…. Soft strains of music were introduced between the courses, and in some houses gold replaced silver in the way of plate….”

The center of action was the half-planned, half-mythical “Four Hundred,” an attempt by the old rich to orchestrate wealth, birth, and style into a coherent social system that soon succumbed to the pecking order of big money. Anointed by Mrs. William Astor—the Mrs. Astor, born Caroline Schermerhorn—and with access guarded by her powerful court chamberlain Ward McAllister, the actual membership was found to consist of a combination of old and new family wealth when McAllister gave it out to the New York Times. Spurred by acute status anxiety, the new rich struggled desperately to make the sacred list and the even more select “Patriarchs,” also monitored by Astor and McAllister. Bitter feuds broke out, as Fifth Avenue hostesses fought for their own status, even while conciliating factions among their guests.

“I understand,” said a character in William Dean Howells’s A Traveler from Altruria, “that in America society is managed even more by women than it is in England.” Entirely, he was told. “We have no other leisure class.”

The ultimate confrontation, as “ambitious hostesses alternately laid siege, launched frontal assaults, or conducted flanking maneuvers against the bastions of higher respectability,” occurred between Mrs. Astor, the acknowledged queen of the Four Hundred, and Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt. The Astors had looked down on the Vanderbilts as grandchildren of the self-styled “Commodore” Vanderbilt, who had been just a crude Staten Island ferryboat man, after all, and Mrs. Astor did not approve of railroad money. Vanderbilts in turn pointed to the Astors’ opium smuggling into Canton, and their defrauding of East Side slum dwellers and of Indians. The climax approached as the Vanderbilts, after outbuilding the Astors’ Newport “cottage,” Beechwood, with The Breakers, decided to erect a $2 million palace at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street. To the opening of this town house Mrs. Vanderbilt invited 1,200 persons—but not Mrs. Astor. A calling card bearing the legend “Mrs. Astor” had never been deposited on the salver of 66 Fifth Avenue, said Mrs. Vanderbilt, and how could she invite a perfect stranger? Intermediaries intervened, open hostilities were avoided, and a footman in the blue livery of the House of Astor duly presented a visiting card to a domestic in the maroon livery of the House of Vanderbilt. Mrs. Astor and her daughter attended the ball, in which dazzling young socialites with electric-lighted stars on their foreheads waltzed with men in baronial costumes.

If the Four Hundred felt beleaguered in their Fifth Avenue bastions, they could always retreat to mansions in Newport or the Berkshires or in the South or in Europe—or all of these—but here again the Vanderbilts seemed to gain the competitive edge, with their establishments in or near Asheville, North Carolina; Centerport, Long Island; Upper St. Regis Lake in the Adirondacks; and their endless yachting through the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. The Frederick W. Vanderbilts’ mansion in Hyde Park was perhaps the finest monument to the era. Built at a cost of over $2 million, in a time when a construction worker might earn a dollar a day, the mansion was erected on such an accelerated schedule that carpenters worked shoulder-to-shoulder. The result was an Italian Renaissance-style edifice, packed with art and furnishings from abroad, surrounded by superb grounds, trees, and with a view up and down the Hudson.

Guests allowed into the family quarters marveled at the master’s corner bedroom, with its single bed and no direct access to his wife’s bedroom, and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s boudoir, a reproduction of a French queen’s bedroom of the Louis XV period. The headwall of the bed was covered with hand-embroidered silk; the heavily napped rug weighed over a ton; and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s bed was separated from the rest of the room by a marble rail, like those behind which French courtiers had presented their petitions to the queen in olden times. Thus was symbolized the ultimate separation of the queens of society from the long hierarchy that stretched below them.

The class structures in other cities contrasted with that of New York and the other eastern metropolises. New Haven had lived for decades under a powerful patrician rule, which came to an end with the elevation of a long line of businessmen following the Civil War. The Richmond and Charleston elites were hardly altered in any fundamental way by the Civil War, while Springfield, Massachusetts, never developed an aristocratic leadership cohesive and powerful enough to hold back the young entrepreneurs.

Chicago of course accepted the rule of the arrivistes more readily than did even New York. But if Chicago scoffed at Boston, New York ignored Chicago. Mrs. Astor, an incessant traveler, had never even been there. To its balls each Patriarch might invite five gentlemen, four ladies, and two “distinguished strangers” from Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Charleston, or from London or the Continent—but not from Chicago or, for that matter, from any other city west of the Alleghenies.

The Middle Classes: A Woman’s Work

She rose before dawn to dress in a high-collared, long-sleeved dress over flannel and muslin petticoats, bustle, and whalebone corset. After lighting the kerosene lamp in the kitchen and kindling the coals in the firebox, she kneaded the bread dough left to rise overnight in a warm place by the iron range. From part of the dough she baked a basket of rolls before preparing the rest of the heavy meal middle-class Americans ate upon rising—steak, fried potatoes, hotcakes, and coffee roasted and ground at home. Soon her husband, imposing in his waistcoat and “burnsides,” would enter, followed by the children in sailor suits or frilly dresses, one child probably holding a baby brother or sister. After breakfast, she saw children and husband off to school and work, on horse-car or steam railroad.

Monday was always wash day: voluminous linen sheets, tablecloths, and napkins, yards of flannel or muslin petticoats, diapers, soaked in wooden tubs and then stretched across kitchen or backyard. “It was all the lifting that tired my back so,” one woman remarked—water had to be carried in from the pump, heated on the stove, carried to the washtub, and then emptied outside after each rinse. Petticoats, shirts, cuffs, and collars would be starched, while all else—even diapers—required ironing with a heavy iron reheated on the stove every half-hour or so. In summer, the kitchen would be sweltering; in winter, women risked chilblains while hanging freezing wet garments on the line outside.

Housecleaning usually took a week in the summer and another in the fall. Each room in sequence was turned upside down, the horsehair and mahogany furniture moved aside, and the carpet lifted for a clean, a mend, a dye and then reinstallation. Mirrors, pictures, china, and bric-a-brac were scrubbed and polished, textured wallpaper and heavy ornate curtains brushed, soot cleaned out of fireplaces and lamps. Insects and vermin infested even wealthy homes as a result of inadequate drainage and outdoor privies.

The sewing machine, by the 1870s essential equipment in every home, helped turn the chore of sewing into a housewife’s best chance for creativity. Many women took intense pride in the skill with which they remade old clothes, like “Hattie’s ‘opera cape’ made out of Warrie’s pink flannel baby cloak.” The family’s diverse activities stretched the housewife’s ingenuity—one woman made two-tone graduation dresses for her sisters and later found out that wearing them had been “life’s darkest hour” for the girls.

She might have time during the day to browse through her copy of Harper’s Weekly, with its rich mixture of articles, stories, reviews, and George William Curtis’s editorial comment, or through the Atlantic or the Nation or Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. If she had been brought up on Godey’s Lady’s Book—“The Only Magazine with Lady Editors”—she might now be reading The Mother at Home. Or if she had been brought up on The Lady’s Own, “Devoted to the Advocacy of Working Females” and costing only three cents an issue, she might now be following one of the many suffragist organs. Her children might read Home Companion: A Monthly for Young People which, after going through many transformations, would become the Home Companion, “a journal suited to the entire family and read by all,” and later the Ladies’ Home Companion. In most of these journals she could scan a plenitude of mail-order advertising, patent-medicine claims, and premium offers.

Family members returned for a dinner of roast and Indian pudding, and then spent the evening hours together in the parlor, reading aloud or playing cards by lamplight. While the wife mended or embroidered, daughters played the piano or received gentlemen callers, always with the family or a chaperone present. At an early hour the family retired, the wife putting out the milk can and the husband banking the fire and barring the shutters.

Many middle-class housewives hired live-in “help,” usually young women from small rural towns or newly arrived immigrants from Ireland, Sweden, or the Deep South. Housewives often proved exacting mistresses, grumbling audibly about newcomers’ slow adjustment to service—“She seemed to have all the faults, and none of the virtues of help”—and vigilantly alert for signs of stealing or shirking. The maid, the complaints went, used “the weapon of degraded races pretty freely—Deceit,” or “She is a slouch Poor white trash.” Friction between mistress and servant masqueraded as “the servant problem” and made some women decide to “do their own work”—which often meant, in fact, supervising a cleaning woman several days a week.

To find guidance through the crises, large and small, of domestic life, most middle-class women read manuals of housekeeping or “domestic science,” such as The Mother at Home, with recipes and tips on hygiene, physiology, nutrition, how to decorate, or how to get along with domestics. Educator Catharine Beecher explained how to have “Economical, Healthful, Beautiful and Christian homes.” These guides, which poured forth from publishers in the latter half of the century, were especially important to a mobile society in which many women lost the benefit of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ knowledge. They also set higher standards of cleanliness, household skills, and child-rearing, standards that often consumed as much time as was gained from the new labor-saving devices.

Mothers also lightened their burdens by training daughters of the house from an early age in the skills of home management. One woman wrote proudly that her daughter, just turned three, “sweeps and dusts and bakes and enjoys it very much.” At four, the little girl sewed a patchwork quilt for her dolls. All too often a young girl would have to leave school prematurely in order to take over management of the house—to substitute for a sick mother or to enable the family to concentrate all its resources on a son’s education. “Mother explained very regretfully, that she couldn’t afford the lessons which would be needed to train me for a (music) teacher,” one woman wrote. “She explained that she wanted David to have as much education as possible, so that if ever she, or father, couldn’t take care of us adequately he’d be able to help.” Much might depend on a daughter’s ability to hold the home together.

One subject a mother did not discuss with her daughter was sex. Canons of modesty and purity kept some women from completely undressing throughout their adult lives and convinced others that sexuality was for men alone. Clergymen and politicians claimed that corresponding to the male sex drive was women’s maternal instinct, a chaste tenderness never to be “tainted” with sex. “The full force of sexual desire is seldom known to a virtuous woman,” announced one male authority.

At the same time, women’s fashions were tending to maximize femaleness and limit freedom. “The poetry of dependence,” feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton called the combination of romance and restriction. The corset, a contraption of whalebone and steel tightly bound in back with laces in order to create a curvaceous form, was de rigueur, even for little girls, for almost a century. “It is no rare thing,” wrote one English visitor, “to meet ladies so tightly laced that they cannot lean back in a chair or sofa; if they did so, they would suffocate.” The tighter a woman’s waist, the more ladylike she was, as hinted by her frequent swoons and headaches.

Young women and men entered marriage with little understanding of each other’s sexual needs. Marriage often came as a shock to young brides who had only known their suitors through the formality of chaperoned courtship. “How many young hearts have revealed the fact,” wrote Catharine Beecher after a tour, “that what they had been trained to imagine the highest earthly felicity, was but the beginning of care, and disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering.” “I am nearly wrecked and ruined by … nightly intercourse,” one woman wrote. “This and nothing else was the cause of my miscarriage … he went to work like a man a-mowing, and instead of a pleasure as it might have been, it was most intense torture….” Thinking their wives “unaccommodating and capricious,” some men fled the house to visit prostitutes. And women turned to one another to find the intimacy and warmth they missed in marriage, developing a network of lifetime friends who exchanged diaries, sewed one another’s trousseaux, supervised one another’s pregnancies and childbirths, vacationed together, and shared chores, skills, and life’s major events.

The fear of unending pregnancies and prolonged motherhood may have contributed more than any crusading clergyman or insensitive husband to the female aversion toward sex. “Confinement” indoors during and after pregnancy, lack of fresh air and exercise, and the physiological effects of the viselike corset often made childbirth all but unbearable. The intensifying shift to a money economy made smaller families more desirable, especially in the urban middle-class home where children’s labor was less needed, and women were beginning to realize that by regulating their—and thereby, their husbands’—sexuality, they could augment their power within the family and also enjoy the autonomy that an endless parade of bawling infants denied them. The result of these developments was fewer, and healthier, babies.

Contraception was another unmentionable. After the passage of the “Comstock” law in 1873, it was illegal to advertise or distribute birth control material—“obscene literature and articles of immoral use”—through the mail. Male withdrawal, the most common method of birth control, was discreetly discouraged by male doctors as being unhealthy to the husband; the rhythm method, though popular, was ineffective due to ignorance of the female fertility cycle. Abortion was a last resort, often induced by patent medicines.

Defying all these obstacles, many women did enjoy happy sex lives. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in 1883, “Walt Whitman seems to understand everything in nature but woman. In ‘There is a Woman Waiting for me,’ he speaks as if the female must be forced to the creative act, apparently ignorant of the great natural fact that a healthy woman has as much passion as a man, that she needs nothing stronger than the law of attraction to draw her to the male.” Love and sex preoccupied young girls. “For such a person that I could so love, I would brave all—anything, I would give myself up soul and body,” wrote Harriet Burton at age fifteen, with the passionate intensity that would characterize her later speeches for suffrage.

Three-quarters of the women questioned, in a remarkable survey taken by a female physician at the end of the century, wrote that they desired and enjoyed sex. Many said they needed it for spiritual, even more than physical, fulfillment, and resisted the idea that sex was for reproduction alone. “My husband and I believe in intercourse for its own sake,” wrote one woman in 1893. “We wish it for ourselves and spiritually miss it, rather than physically, when it does not occur, because it is the highest, most sacred expression of our oneness.” But with even a slight risk of pregnancy, “we deny ourselves the intercourse, feeling all the time that we are losing that which keeps us closest to each other.”

Some middle-class women, including those of some affluence, found their prospects a source of despair. The feminist writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, great-niece of Catharine, Harriet, and Henry Ward Beecher, suffered a crippling depression in 1885 at the age of twenty-five. “I went to bed crying; woke in the night crying, sat on the edge of the bed in the morning and cried—from sheer continuous pain,” she wrote later. “Not physical—the doctors examined me and found nothing the matter.” Still later she would write The Yellow Wallpaper, a fictionalized look at her illness which compared the confinement of a mental patient with that of a wife.

Other notable, talented women, including Jane Addams and Margaret Sanger, endured the same experience. Alice James, brilliant sister of Henry and William, suffered a mysterious disease from the age of nineteen until she died of breast cancer at forty-two. “I think the difficulty is my inability to assume the receptive attitude, that cardinal virtue in women, the absence of which has always made me so uncharming to & uncharmed by the male sex,” she wrote, referring to her experiences with male doctors in particular. Countless other women, faced with a discrepancy between their potential, their dreams, and reality, took part in an epidemic of invalidism observed by Catharine Beecher as early as 1855. “…[T]he more I traveled, the more the conviction was pressed on my attention that there was a terrible decay of female health all over the land, and that this evil was bringing with it an incredible extent of individual, domestic, and social suffering, that was increasing in an alarming ratio.”

At the same time the “idle wife” was becoming a status symbol for many an upwardly mobile man. In her vivid, lavish dress, the better-off middle-class woman had become the “chief ornament” of her husband’s household, without the need—or ability—to work. An ideal of feminine beauty evolved in which the wife, pale and fragile, received visitors while languishing on a chaise longue. Charlotte Gilman for one considered a wife’s only work in such a household to be sex, and could see no difference between that and prostitution. In direct opposition to her great-aunt, Gilman believed the household should be less, not more, central to a woman’s life.

Doctors usually diagnosed the common complaints of these women as arising from disorders of the reproductive organs. Some even perceived a woman’s body as a battleground between the brain and the uterus—generally, they concluded, it was healthier for the uterus to control. Cures abounded, from water cures to bleeding and purges. Toward the end of the century, symptoms of these “female diseases” increasingly included episodes of hysteria. A Viennese physician, Sigmund Freud, stated that these physical symptoms could have a mental source.

A sensational charge of adultery in the early seventies lifted issues of sexuality out of the whispered gossip of the social elite and plunged them into open courtrooms and the public prints, and hence into middle-class consciousness. These charges pitted the most celebrated preacher of the day, Henry Ward Beecher, against the most notorious woman leader, Victoria Claflin Woodhull.

Beecher had grown up with every advantage that Woodhull had lacked. He was one of thirteen children of the thrice-married Lyman Beecher, the famous Presbyterian clergyman. Educated at Amherst College, Henry had gone through years of inner turbulence and doubt until he decided to devote his life and love to Christ and man, a decision highlighted by a mystic revelation one May day in the Ohio woods. Throughout, he had the support of his father and two remarkable sisters, Catharine and Harriet. For all his religious devotion, Beecher was no stiff-necked, sanctimonious moralist. A big, genial, rumpled man, with sensual features and the head of a lion, he possessed a warmth and exuberance that endeared him to a multitude of friends, especially women. But he preached all the middle-class virtues to the huge middle-class congregation he drew to his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn.

Victoria Claflin grew up in a small Ohio town, one of ten children of a mother suspected of mania and a father of pyromania. After the neighbors gave a benefit to help the family out of town, Victoria and her sister Tennessee roamed through Ohio as itinerant spiritualists and vendors of such patent medicines as Elixir of Life, until one of Tennessee’s “patients” died of cancer of the breast and the “healer” was indicted for manslaughter. Victoria, having married and divorced one Woodhull, and then one Colonel Blood, made her way to New York, with both men and her sister in tow. There the two sisters prospered. Tennessee, now plump and flirtatious, so entranced Commodore Vanderbilt with her “magnetic healing” that the aging tycoon wanted to marry her but settled for establishing the two sisters—with a check—as the “lady brokers” of Wall Street.

That was just the start. In April 1870, Victoria Woodhull announced her candidacy for President of the United States. Six weeks later she put out the first issue of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. Advertisements for bond issues and brokerage houses—including Jay Cooke & Co.—filled page one although, weekly, the masthead proclaimed, “Progress! Free Thought! Untrammeled Lives!” Inner pages advertised books on “The Physiology of Menstruation,” “Impregnation,” “Sexual Generation,” “Monstrosities,” “The Law of Sexual Intercourse.” Woodhull set up and headed the Victoria League, which had nothing to do with the British queen, and she won a big following in labor and socialist circles. Viewed askance by some of the more respectable woman leaders, she made such an eloquent plea for woman’s suffrage before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives that she was invited to sit on the platform with Susan B. Anthony and other suffragists then meeting in convention in Washington. Endorsed by her own Weekly and by the Equal Rights party in 1872, she marched to the polls but was denied a ballot—and was unlisted on the ballot she was denied.

Woodhull’s main concern, however, was always sexual freedom. Week after week her paper poured out pleadings, indignations, charges, and outrages. With the aid of Stephen P. Andrews, scholar, spelling reformer, spiritualist, and advocate of free love, she confronted the issues that middle-class Americans had ducked. Now that Negro slavery was overthrown, she said, “I intend to do all in my small power toward the overthrow of that other slavery, more deeply rooted, more subtle, more obscure and tenacious, and more demoralizing! than ever the slavery of the black man was.” She went on: “Whether it be agreeable to people to hear these questions of marriage, divorce, abortion and prostitution discussed or not, the time is coming, nay, is upon them, when they will not only be compelled to hear, but to decide.”

More and more she veered toward open advocacy of Free Love. At a tumultuous meeting in New York’s Steinway Hall, advertised by huge posters calling for “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” in the social as well as the political and religious sphere, she took her stand. Goaded by a heckler who shouted, “Are you a free lover?” she cried:

“YES! I AM A FREE LOVER! I HAVE AN INALIENABLE, CONSTITUTIONAL, AND NATURAL RIGHT TO LOVE WHOM I MAY, TO LOVE AS LONG OR AS SHORT A PERIOD AS I CAN, TO CHANGE THAT LOVE EVERY DAY IF I PLEASE!” The hall erupted in cheers, hisses, and catcalls, but Woodhull went on. Not only must no law interfere with this right, she declared, but “it is your duty” both to accord it and “see that I am protected in it.” By free love she did not mean “sexual promiscuity,” she explained that evening and thereafter, but “the highest kind of love” whose supreme “gratification comes from rendering its object the greatest amount of happiness.”

But, more than sexual promiscuity, Woodhull despised sexual hypocrisy, and increasingly the man she saw as its chief embodiment—Henry Ward Beecher. Through mutual friends she learned that Beecher had carried on an affair with one of his parishioners, Mrs. Theodore Tilton; the wounded husband himself not only complained to Victoria but had an affair with her for six months. Goaded by the insinuations of Beecher’s sister Harriet (long famous as author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), desperate over her weekly’s loss of advertising and readers, she revealed the whole story in the November 2, 1872, issue, in a long, detailed article that she hoped would “burst like a bombshell into the ranks of the moralistic social camp.” It did. In the same issue she told in most intimate detail how a prominent man-about-town—not related to the Beecher situation—had seduced two young virgins. This charge aroused to action Anthony Comstock, secretary of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and shortly not the alleged seducer but the two Woodhull sisters were thrust into the Ludlow Street jail.

Victoria, bailed out after four weeks, spoke on “The Naked Truth” and was arrested again. She and her sister were acquitted of printing obscene matter, and the alleged seducer lost his suit against them for libel. Later, Tilton filed a charge against Beecher for adultery with Mrs. Tilton; after a long and sensational trial Beecher got off with a hung jury. First his congregation, and then 244 representatives of Congregational churches, backed him to the hilt. His popularity hardly dimmed, Beecher continued as “spokesman for a middle-class America,” in the words of a biographer, though he was unquestionably an enlightened spokesman, defending women’s and Negro rights, evolution, science, reform in general.

To the glee of her critics, Woodhull’s Weekly failed; she was accused of using her lists of prostitutes’ middle-class clients for blackmail purposes; she was denied lecture halls for her free-love talks. When Cornelius Vanderbilt died in 1877 and his family contested his will, “Mrs. Satan” and her sister sailed to England amid rumors that Vanderbilt money had paid their way. But in England the sisters had their final revenge. Victoria married into a rich banking family, Tennessee into a viscountcy. Thus virtue was rewarded, as the two sisters, captivating as ever, escaped the American middle class by bounding into the English upper.

The Farmer’s Lot

Women migrating to the West would have scoffed at the “problems” of middle-class wives and mothers in eastern cities and suburbs. Often of middle-class status themselves, as they and their husbands had to possess some capital to strike out toward the prairie states and set up a new home, women pioneers and settlers were often reduced to a condition of labor that, by official finding, made them a vast and dispersed collection of sweated workers. “In plain language,” concluded a Department of Agriculture study in 1862, “a farmer’s wife, as a general rule, is a laboring drudge.” On three farms out of four, “the wife works harder, endures more, than any other on the place; more than the husband, more than the ‘farm hand,’ more than the ‘hired help’ of the kitchen.”

Once the settlers had finished camping out, usually under wretched conditions, while putting up their sod or frame house, farm women settled into their routine. For a time they might cook over an open hearth, bending low over the coals, until cast-iron, wood-burning stoves became available. In the postwar years, many farm women continued to spend hours at the spinning wheel, using flax and wool off the farm and buying a little cotton thread. They were still making soap by pouring boiling water into a hopper of hardwood ashes, collecting the lye in the trough below, stirring in kitchen fats and grease, and pouring the “come” soap into tubs or molds. On Mondays they heated water over hearth or stove, added the soap, pounded the clothes against a washboard, then rinsed them, wrung them out by hand, and hung them out on a line. Theirs was not only “inside” work. With the help of older children, women planted gardens, milked cows, cleaned out henhouses, helped the men butcher hogs and plant fields, along with cooking three big meals a day and bearing and nursing children. Rosie Ise, raising twelve children, not only had to wash clothes and cook meals for her Kansas family but care for frequent guests and churn butter to sell in town.

Conditions slowly improved in the homestead as farm women could buy factory goods and labor-saving devices. Yet, for many years, even a kitchen sink or a rotary egg beater were oddities. There was always a contrast between the husbands’ huge machines in the field and the wives’ primitive equipment in the home.

Somehow farm women coped—and some much preferred their rural way of life to that of the “old country” or the East. When E.B., a Missouri farm wife, complained in The Household in the late 1870s about a three-hour tussle with an “obstinate churn,” cooking first for plowboys and then for harvesters and then for wheat stackers, and taking care of her twelfth baby, and entertaining “Mrs. Elite and her sister Miss Stylish,” and “their nephew Bon Ton,” and working often from 4:30 in the morning almost to midnight, other women wrote the journal to upbraid, advise, or reassure her. “When she wrote that,” said one letter, “she must have had a fit of the blues, or her bread would not rise, or the cow had kicked over the milk pail.”

Whatever the tales of hardship and woe, Americans continued to trek west by the hundreds of thousands. Most of the settlers who poured into the Plains came from nearby states like Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri, but a large number arrived from Canada, Germany, Sweden, England, and Ireland. The westward expansion accelerated in the 1880s and became an unprecedented boom. Kansas attracted the greatest number of settlers during this period—though it lost the most in the 1890s. The legislatures of Kansas and other prairie states carved out new counties by the dozens and new cities and towns by the hundreds.

Some settlers were lured west by advertising campaigns. Eager to sell portions of the vast landholdings given them by the federal government—a total area larger than the state of Texas, or one-tenth of the entire United States—railroads wanted a flood of settlers to build up their freight and passenger income. The Homestead Act of 1862 and follow-up legislation were not so great a boon to the new settlers as their proponents had hoped—except for Northern Civil War veterans, who were given a number of special advantages. The railroads, speculators, and vast “bonanza” farms—which hired migrant labor—took most of the best land, leaving homesteaders quarter sections that were often rocky and distant from railroad lines.

The more fortunate pioneers bought or laid claim to land that was by a river or creek. They constructed their homes and barns out of nearby timber, or out of sod made into bricks and dried in the sun. Solid and well insulated, sod houses could be kept fairly warm even in the coldest months, often with the help of buffalo chips and sunflower stalks as well as firewood. Weather was a constant concern. From the Dakota Territory down through Texas, rainfall came in mysterious cycles, and in the more westerly portions of this region, where rain was always sparse, droughts were especially long-lasting and severe. Drought or not, hot scorching summer winds sometimes seared the wheat and corn in their husks. Farm families had to cope as well with prairie fires, dust storms, tornadoes, buffalo herds, and devastating invasions of grasshoppers.

Human adversaries were often more threatening than natural ones. Banks and mortgage companies proliferated in the prairie regions, fueled by a surplus of eastern investment capital. Although farmers had to pay exorbitant interest rates of up to 25 percent or more, they tended to borrow more and more to build new barns and fences, buy the latest equipment, and expand their domains. The ubiquitous loan agents secured mortgages first on the land and then on farm equipment, working stock, and other chattel. The farmer’s accelerating indebtedness soared over the years as the dollar appreciated, the currency contracted, and wheat and corn prices dropped.

The farmers might set out as did German immigrant Henry Ise in western Kansas, breaking up the sod with a hatchet in order to plant his corn, but new factories in the not-too-distant cities of Chicago, Rock Island, Moline, and Davenport mass-produced a cornucopia of newly developed farm machinery that alleviated the grueling toil. While some farmers in the Deep South continued to labor with hoes, shallow one-mule plows, and their bare hands, most farmers of the West cultivated the soil with disc gang plows and five-section disc harrows, planted wheat with grain drills and corn with “checkrowers,” and harvested the crops with newfangled haymaking, harvesting, and threshing machines, many of which were driven by steam. American-style silos were first developed in 1875, starting out square or rectangular, then mushrooming everywhere in their circular shape. Much of this equipment was quite expensive—a wheat binder, for instance, cost $235—and thus put the farmer further into debt.

As the Plains states became the “granary of the world,” the income of many farmers fell off. Despite an occasional good year, the prices for wheat and corn plummeted. Wheat which had gone for a dollar a bushel in 1870 sold for half that or less in the 1890s. Yet the markets for these grains kept growing steadily, particularly in Europe, which eventually consumed a third or more of the crop. With the shipping and marketing of their wheat, corn, and hogs to the East and across the Atlantic even more beyond their control than droughts and grasshopper plagues, farmers felt sorely exploited by railroads, trusts, “middlemen,” and other capitalists big and small.

Farmers living far from the railroads carried their crops in wagons across the muddy and rut-filled roads called “loblollies” to grain elevators along the railroad tracks. There buyers paid as little as possible for the grain; often they downgraded the quality of the wheat to avoid paying the higher price for “number one” wheat that was “sound, plump, and well cleaned.” Elevator companies, many of which were owned by the railroads, were notorious for discriminating against their smaller customers. And farmers who shipped directly found that the railroads charged them exorbitant rates—while giving rebates to their biggest customers—and regardless of the distance forced them to pay through rates to the train’s last stop. For the ordinary farmer, shipping grain from the Dakota Territory to Minneapolis was more expensive than sending the same grain from Chicago to Liverpool.

Life was a perpetual struggle on the prairie frontier, but for the first two decades after the Civil War enough good years canceled out the bad for most farm families to eke out a subsistence living. Then a series of dry years starting in 1886 precipitated a radical change in the farmer’s condition. Crops failed year after year, debts skyrocketed, loans went unpaid, eastern capital dried up, and credit tightened like a noose. Banks and mortgage companies foreclosed upon more and more farms, and more and more farm families became tenants on their own land, or gave up farming and moved back east. The percentage of tenant farmers in Kansas doubled between 1880 and 1890 to more than a third of all farmers, and tenancy in Kansas increased in the next two decades even more than in the South. Between 1888 and 1892, half the farm families of scorched western Kansas headed east, some of their covered wagons emblazoned with slogans like “In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.” In 1891 alone, 18,000 “prairie schooners” crossed the Missouri River from Nebraska back to Iowa.

But most farm families, particularly in the central and eastern parts of the Plains, stayed put and survived these hard times the best they could, with whatever ingenuity and resourcefulness they could muster. Susan Orcutt of western Kansas typified the plight of the worst-off. In 1894 she appealed for help from her Populist governor, Lorenzo Lewelling:

“I take my Pen In hand to let you know that we are Starving to death It is Pretty hard to do without any thing to Eat hear in this God for saken country we would of had Plenty to Eat if the hail hadent cut our rye down and ruined our corn and Potatoes I had the Prettiest Garden that you Ever seen and the hail ruined It and I have nothing to look at My Husband went a way to find work and came home last night and told me that we would have to Starve he has bin in ten countys and did not Get no work It is Pretty hard for a woman to do with out any thing to Eat when she dosent no what minute She will be confined to bed If I was In Iowa I would be all right I was born there and raised there I havent had nothing to Eat to day and It is three oclock.”

If misery loved company, western farmers could look south. With farms and markets often devastated by the war, most southern farmers, black or white, were unable to achieve anything close to prosperity. The malaise was deep-seated and multifaceted: wartime pillage and destruction of farms, fences, crops, and livestock; antiquated farming that produced low yields and rapid soil exhaustion; a racism that removed incentives and crushed aspirations of black farmers and sharecroppers; overproduction and the sharply declining price of cotton; and probably most important, the constant pressure from rural furnishing merchants and northern capital to cling to the one-crop economy of cotton rather than diversifying. Southern farmers were not even able to remain self-sufficient in food production, which fell by nearly half after the war, and the South became an increasing net importer of corn and other foodstuffs from the North and West.

“Cotton planting has been a mania,” one observer remarked. “The neglected corn field with all its consequences is a part of Southern history.” “A planter reported that ‘want and gaunt, haggard despair have prevailed everywhere in the Black Belt’ of Alabama,” according to C. Vann Woodward; “in Louisiana a farmer pointed to ‘old fields abandoned in every direction’ that he had seen cleared as a boy on the frontier as rich new land; in Mississippi, there was a poverty-driven exodus from the farm ‘so strong and wide as to threaten whole sections of our country with desolation’.…” Politician Benjamin Tillman spoke bitterly in 1886 of a “fatal lethargy” among the farmers of South Carolina: “our minds become benumbed, deadened.” Agrarian leader Tom Watson described Georgia farmers falling into peonage “like victims of some horrid nightmare … powerless—oppressed—shackled.’’

The emancipated black sharecroppers and tenants were by far the worst off of all Southerners—the most powerless, most oppressed, and still, though in new and different ways, most shackled. The defeated but still powerful planter class made a concerted effort to revive the plantation system immediately after the Civil War, signing contracts with blacks remaining on and near their lands to work much as they had before, except now for meager wages. After an initial burst of success—cotton prices were quite high for a couple of years after wartime shortages—the experiment of wage slavery collapsed. Save in Louisiana and a few pockets elsewhere in the Deep South, the old-style plantation was virtually dead by 1870.

Another experiment, sharecropping, was longer-lasting. Accepted by blacks who aspired to greater autonomy and even future landownership, or pushed by large planters who wanted to retain certain features of the plantation system and gain more control over black labor and labor costs than the wage contracts permitted, sharecropping often turned out a fraud for those blacks who perceived it as the next and higher rung on the ladder to liberation. Out of a variety of sharecropping arrangements, one form became nearly universal: the white landlord divided his holding into shares of up to fifty acres, each share usually to be farmed by one black family. The landlord supplied everything except food and clothing: housing, fuel, one or two mules or horses, feed, tools, seed, and fertilizer. Landlord and sharecropper split the crop fifty-fifty; “working on halves,” it was called. Annual renewal of the contract strengthened the landlord’s control over the labor of his “croppers.” Black sharecroppers thus achieved greater autonomy in form but not in substance. Landlords generally supervised them closely, in some cases even working them in gangs to cultivate the soil. The sharecropper was a landless laborer, perhaps even less autonomous than European serfs in the Middle Ages. It was “slavery under a new name.”

Ned Cobb grew up in a black sharecropping family in Alabama in the 1880s and 1890s. He learned the sharecropper’s trade at a very young age: “My daddy put me to plowin the first time at nine years old, right after my mother died…. And that country where we was livin was rough and rocky. And he—my poor old daddy is dead and gone but I don’t tell no lies on him—he put me to plowin a regular shift at twelve, thirteen years old. And I had to plow barefooted on that rocky country….”

As a boy, Cobb saw his father “cleaned up” twice, first by a white landlord who forced him to live and work on his land and then refused to share the crop with him; later by a furnishing merchant who seized all of his mortgaged belongings, including his horse, his new iron-axle wagon, and his “fattenin hog,” because the drought ruined his crop of corn and cotton that year. Booker T. Washington, eating and sleeping with sharecroppers around Tuskegee, Alabama, in1881, noted that in the plantation districts,

as a rule the whole family slept in one room, and that in addition to the immediate family there sometimes were relatives, or others not related to the family, who slept in the same room….

The common diet of the people was fat pork and corn bread. At times I have eaten in cabins where they had only corn bread and “black-eye peas” cooked in plain water. The people seemed to have no other idea than to live on this fat meat and corn bread,—the meat, and the meal of which the bread was made, having been bought at a high price at a store in town, notwithstanding the fact that the land all about the cabin homes could easily have been made to produce nearly every kind of garden vegetable that is raised anywhere in the country. Their one object seemed to be to plant nothing but cotton; and in many cases cotton was planted up to the very door of the cabin The breakfast over, and with practically no attention given to the house, the whole family would, as a general thing, proceed to the cotton-field. Every child that was large enough to carry a hoe was put to work, and the baby—for usually there was at least one baby—would be laid down at the end of the cotton row, so that its mother could give it a certain amount of attention when she had finished chopping her row….

All the days of the family would be spent after much this same routine, except Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday the whole family would spend at least half a day, and often a whole day, in town. The idea in going to town was, I suppose, to do shopping, but all the shopping that the whole family had money for could have been attended to in ten minutes by one person. Still, the whole family remained in town for most of the day, spending the greater part of the time in standing on the streets, the women, too often, sitting about somewhere smoking or dipping snuff. Sunday was usually spent in going to some big meeting….

The state had not been able to build schoolhouses in the country districts, and, as a rule, the schools were taught in churches or in log cabins. More than once, while on my journeys, I found that there was no provision made in the house used for school purposes for heating the building during the winter…. With few exceptions, I found the teachers in these country schools to be miserably poor in preparation for their work, and poor in moral character. The schools were in session from three to five months.

Sometimes black schools had to close for lack of funds while the white schools stayed open. Most black sharecroppers and their children were illiterate.

Some black farmers managed to break the barriers to renting and owning their own land, and their numbers increased, though unevenly, throughout the South. Unlike sharecroppers, renters, or “real tenants,” had considerable control over their labor, land, and crops, paying rent to the landlord either in cash or cotton at the end of the year. Like sharecropping, though, contracts were renewed annually. Neither renting nor owning by blacks was looked upon favorably by the white power structure, or by poor while tenant farmers and owners who competed with them. If black tenant farmers were always a minority of blacks on the land, black owners were even rarer. In the Black Belts of Georgia and Mississippi, the 1880 census reported, about one in a hundred black farmers owned their land; in other states the figures were a bit higher, especially in Virginia and South Carolina. By the turn of the century, a considerably higher percentage of blacks owned their farms, but they were still a small minority.

The obstacles to ownership were awesome. If blacks could scrape together enough cash to buy the land, tools, and working stock—no easy feat—they faced the active hostility of neighboring whites who often threatened violence against those offering land to blacks, or who engaged in “whitecapping”—terrorizing and forcibly expelling the blacks from their new property. Still, the aspirations of blacks for independence and dignity were powerful enough for some to realize their dream of ownership. Betty Powers, born a slave, recalled how her family felt when they finished building their cabin on land they had just bought: “Was we’uns proud? There t’was, our place to do as we pleases, after bein slaves. Dat sho’ am de good feelin’. We work like beavers puttin’ de crop in, and my folks stays dere till dey dies.”

While the fortunes of some black farmers improved, those of many white farmers in the South often moved in the opposite direction, as they started out as owners of small or medium-sized plots, sank increasingly into debt, losing their land to the furnishing merchant, and ended up as tenant farmers or sharecroppers. From the 1880s on, farmland more and more fell into the hands of merchants, loan agents, and some of the financially stronger farmers, most of whom were absentee landlords. By 1900, most white farmers were tenants or sharecroppers, mostly sharecroppers.

The average farm family, according to agricultural historian Fred Shannon, tended only about seventeen acres of cotton. This meant “that a five-or-six-thousand-bale crop was all that could be expected. At the upper limit, and with the price at the rare ten cents, the three-hundred-dollar return allowed the worker’s family a hundred dollars’ credit for the year’s living expenses, and this was spent at the weighted prices charged at the country store. On a cash basis the family, even when fairly large, probably got five dollars a month to spend for food, clothing, and incidental luxuries.”

The most characteristic and most harmful feature of post-Civil War Southern farming was the “crop lien system” with its ubiquitous furnishing merchant—a system that in Woodward’s view “came to be more widespread than slavery had been, for it was no respecter of race or class; and if it be judged objectively, by its economic results alone, the new evil may have worked more permanent injury to the South than the ancient evil.” A contemporary observer, Charles Otken, described it as a “vast credit system whose tremendous evils and exorbitant exactions have brought poverty and bankruptcy to thousands of families, … crushed out all independence and reduced its victims to a coarse species of servile slavery.”

As with sharecropping, the crop lien system was an invention of the postwar South, emerging out of the havoc of the war. Its prime causes were the lack of money and banks in rural areas of the South and the poor transportation facilities, especially the lack of good roads—all of which left farmers tied to purely local markets and suppliers. Originally serving black farmers mainly, particularly sharecroppers, the crop lien system spread throughout the South in tandem with the proliferation of cotton-growing, hooking in as many as 80 to 90 percent of all farmers, black and white, poor and middle class, without much distinction. Sometimes merchants became landlords to fifty or a hundred tenants as they gained title to more and more of their customers’ land to settle debts. Sometimes landlords moved into town, opened stores, and sold goods to their own tenants and croppers.

All too often the result was a local rural monopoly of credit, supplies, and marketing. Typically a farmer would sign a contract with the merchant in January or February, when it was time for the soil to be prepared for cotton planting. The farmer would agree to give the merchant a lien on the entire crop for the coming year as payment for the purchase on credit of all provisions. These contracts were strictly enforced under lien laws that were enacted by most Southern states after the war. Every week or two for the rest of the year, from spring planting until harvesting in the late fall, the farmer would ride into town and “buy” various supplies—food, such as cornmeal, pork, flour, and lard, most of which the farm family could have provided for itself; farm supplies like fertilizer and a plow point; possibly some calico or other clothing material. The credit prices charged by the merchant were generally 40 to 100 percent higher than if the farmer had paid in cash.

The merchant would make a note in the ledger for each transaction; the farmer would leave the store each time a little deeper in debt, not knowing exactly how much since only the merchant kept records. At “settlin’ up” time in November or December, the farmer brought the hard-earned cotton to the gin, where it would be ginned, bagged, tied, weighed, and handed over to the merchant, who would then deliver the verdict. Most often the farmer did not succeed in “paying out,” meaning that he would have to sign a new contract, thus sinking even deeper in hock to the “furnishing man,” one notch further into peonage.

Some Southerners defended the furnishing merchant as a pawn of Northern capital who had to pay exorbitant interest rates himself and took big risks in providing credit to farmers, especially in outlying areas; and though most merchants were moderately well off, few ever got rich. But the crop lien system must shoulder the blame for much of the South’s ills. For the furnishing merchants, who demanded that more and more cotton be grown despite its falling price, were the major force preserving the one-crop economy and preventing diversification into grains and other foodstuffs that clearly would have improved the conditions of Southern farmers. “No cotton, no credit” was law everywhere the crop lien system had dominion, and this led to the depletion and wreckage of both the soil and the men and women who cultivated it. Though blacks were hit hardest by the merchants, who undoubtedly discriminated against them one way or another, the agricultural stagnation afflicted everyone in the South to varying degrees. The more cotton was sown, the more poverty was reaped.

There was always a final way out. Matt Brown, a poor black farmer in Mississippi, contracted for supplies from the Jones store in Black Hawk from 1884 to 1901. His accumulating debt was nearing $500 when a final entry appeared in the ledger—”marking it off” for a coffin and burial costs.

Working Classes: The Conditions of Existence

Another escape was possible, especially for blacks: an overground move to the North and West. Blacks in Chicago numbered about 4,000 in 1870; within twenty years they multiplied over threefold. The newcomers came largely off the nation’s farms, and especially the farms of the South—part of a mighty population movement that would continue for decades and store up social dynamite for the future.

For white or black to migrate from country to city during the 1870s was not always to plunge into dark tenements and crowded streets. For years, over half the families in the coal and iron regions around Pittsburgh had chickens, livestock, or vegetable gardens next to their homes, and pigs and goats could be seen in abundance in Brooklyn and on the streets of Manhattan as far south as the forties.

The relentless tide of industrialism, however, engulfed these little farms and backyards and other green places, leaving blocks of unpainted or grimy brick tenements in their place. Small cities as well as big were transformed. Lynn, an old Massachusetts seafaring and shoe-making town, was changed from a community of gardened cottages to a city of boarding-houses and triple deckers first clustered on Main Street and then spreading throughout the factory area. Living places could never escape the noise or stench of the mill, for workers had to live close enough to hear the shriek of the factory whistle. As early as 1880, according to John Cumbler, Lynn historians were penning “nostalgic works on how the city had changed.”

As usual, the biggest city exhibited the most repulsive living conditions. We need not see these conditions only through late twentieth-century eyes; Jacob Riis saw at the time. Horrified as a thirteen-year-old. in Copenhagen by a tenement built over a river and infested with rats, Riis had come in 1870 to a New York City in which those conditions were worsened tenfold. After knocking about for a few years mining coal, laying bricks, farming, and peddling, and after many a night in noisome lodging houses, he landed a job with the Evening Sun as an investigative journalist (then called police reporter). Later, he took up a free-lance career of writing books and articles and giving lectures. His knack for being both factual and graphic, both compassionate and unsentimental, gave great force to his reporting.

Suppose we look into a tenement on, say, Cherry Street? he asked his readers in his first and perhaps most famous work, How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890:

“Be a little careful, please! The hall is dark and you might stumble over the children pitching pennies back there. Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet. They have little else. Here where the hall turns and dives into utter darkness is a step, and another, another. A flight of stairs. You can feel your way, if you cannot see it. Close? Yes! What would you have? All the fresh air that ever enters these stairs comes from the hall-door that is forever slamming, and from the windows of dark bedrooms….”

Riis had a special sympathy for tenement children, as though he had given up hope for their parents. He investigated the death rate of infants. In one tenement some years back, he noted, of 138 children born during a three-year period, 61 had died, most of them before their first birthday.

“Listen! That short hacking cough, that tiny helpless wail—what do they mean?” It was a baby dying.

“‘It was took all of a suddint,’ says the mother, smoothing the throbbing little body with trembling hands. There is no unkindness in the rough voice of the man in the jumper, who sits by the window grimly smoking a clay pipe, with the little life ebbing out in his sight, bitter as his words sound: ‘Hush, Mary! If we cannot keep the baby, need we complain—such as we?’” “Such as we,” Riis echoed.

He was sensitive to the city’s endless variety, even while he shared some of the stereotypes of the time. The Irishman, he noted, was the true cosmopolitan immigrant, sharing his lodging impartially with Italian, Greek, and “Dutchman.” A map of the city designating nationalities, he said, would show an extraordinary crazy quilt.

“The city on such a map would fall into two great halves, green for the Irish prevailing in the West Side tenement districts, and blue for the Germans on the East Side.” But intermingled was an odd variety of tints.

From down in the Sixth Ward, upon the site of the old Collect Pond that in the days of the fathers drained the hills which are no more, the red of the Italian would be seen forcing its way northward along the line of Mulberry Street to the quarter of the French purple on Bleecker Street and South Fifth Avenue, to lose itself and reappear, after a lapse of miles, in the ‘Little Italy’ of Harlem, east of Second Avenue. Dashes of red, sharply defined, would be seen strung through the Annexed District, northward to the city line. On the West Side the red would be seen overrunning the old Africa of Thompson Street, pushing the black of the negro rapidly uptown, against querulous but unavailing protests, occupying his home, his church, his trade and all, with merciless impartiality.

For many immigrants, black or any other color, home life was work life and work life was home life; they toiled for “sweaters.” A sweater’s shop, according to a reporter for Harper’s Weekly, “is generally one of the two larger rooms of a tenement flat, accommodating from six to fifteen or twenty ‘sweating’ employees—men, women, and children. In the other large room of the flat are his living, sleeping, and cooking arrangements, overflowing into the workroom. Employees whom he boards, who eat at their work, and who sleep on the goods, frequently complete the intimate connection of home and shop.” Many a New England textile mill—including some located in pristine valleys near running streams—housed whole families in wings attached to the plant itself, so that employees moved from home to work without ever passing through the green.

The unholy wedlock of home and shop made it all the easier to sweat women and children. But the condition of children could be appalling whether at home or in a factory and, indeed, they often took their parents’ jobs. Fannie Harris, thirteen, was interrogated in 1895 by a committee of the New York legislature. She had worked for six months in a necktie plant, earning $2 for a sixty-hour week.

What did she do with that two dollars? “Gave it to my mamma.”

Did her mamma give her anything to spend? “Yes, sir … two cents every week….”

Now, had she been to school in this country? “No.”

Could she spell cat? “I forgot.”

Did her mamma work? “Now she ain’t working because I am working, but before, when I didn’t work, she worked.…”

Her papa, she said, did not work because he was ill. When an “inspector” told her to quit work and go to school, her mother forbade it.

Dorothy Richardson, an orphan from rural Pennsylvania who had been a country schoolteacher and then sought a “genteel job” in New York City, finally gave up and decided to take almost any work she could get. She was turned away by two cigar factories for lack of experience; took a job as a learner in a book bindery at $3 a week but kept on looking; turned down a position in a small store at $3.50 for an eighty-seven-hour week; declined employment at $1.50 in an artificial flower sweatshop; and finally took a job at $3 in a paper box factory. Quitting this work, she went through the process all over again, ending up as a laundry “shaker” until the owner offered a promotion to the wrapping department, at the same time making “some joking remarks of insulting flattery,” and pinching her bare arm. She left.

Few women had it worse than those who lived among wealth and display—household domestics. Their work was generally back-breaking, tedious, and lonely, with few minutes of their own in sixteen-hour workdays. Attracted to the work by the promise of a comfortable home and good food, one found her room to be “a few hard chairs and two soiled quilts.” The food might be inadequate, the master of the house sexually aggressive, the mistress’s attitude demeaning. “You’re never sure that your soul’s your own except when you are out of the house,” one domestic commented.

In the 1880s, a maid typically worked seven days a week, started at six and finished at her bedtime, around ten—unless her mistress was entertaining, in which case she had to remain on call until the guests left, perhaps around midnight. She was allowed out one evening a week and every other Sunday afternoon and evening. “Thus she was,” according to Robert Smuts, “usually on call for over 100 hours a week,” with most of the labor a grinding, monotonous routine. The lack of privacy and autonomy was especially galling to the more spirited. Shops and factories like the New England textile mills regularly drew off the more ambitious and restless of these young women.

The city ghettos, the tenements, the sweatshops, the attics and the basements of great houses—these were not mere misery. Many of these sweated workers managed to cope, to endure, even to love and to laugh. Yet the social data of the time, however inadequate in exactness and scope, carry their own damning implications. Manufacturing wages, according to Clarence Long, rose from slightly more than a dollar a day in 1860 to a bit over a dollar and a half in 1890—a very gradual increase, considering the economic expansion of this period. Real wages rose at the same rate, since a steady decline in the cost of living made up for Civil War inflation. Adult men on the average received three-quarters more wages than adult women, and two and a half to three times as much as children and youths. At the same time, Philip Armour had a yearly income in excess of $1 million, John D. Rockefeller could count on $3 million annually just in Standard Oil dividends, and Andrew Carnegie—who once “couldn’t imagine” what to do with the princely salary of $35 per month—made as much as $25 million in a single year.

But even these statistics could hardly convey a sense of the enormous class disparity in income, food, housing, hours of toil, leisure, self-esteem—in happiness. Nowhere, perhaps, were the working and living conditions of the poor more sharply etched than in Pittsburgh.

Merely to enter the steel works was a daunting experience—the electric cranes moaning and rattling as they swept overhead; fiery tongues of molten slag hissing out from the hearths; the steel emerging from the blooming mill and moving to allotted places; and then the first encounter with the pit itself, brimming with red-hot steel brighter than the day outside. Men clustered around furnaces, prodding the molten masses until tiny streams of fire broke through, then jumped back in the nick of time as great ladles tilted back and spouted out a torrent of incandescent steel.

In this inferno, men stood on platforms so hot their spit sizzled; every so often they slapped their clothes to stop them from breaking into flames from the sparks; they recoiled from the maddening screech of cold saws biting into steel, leaving the air filled with particles that infested throat and lungs; poured out sweat that immediately dried in front of a dozen ovens each holding fifty or more tons of molten steel. They stood in recurrent danger of dying from hot metal explosions, falling into the pit, or encounters with cranes or locomotives. And they did this for hours on end, though with occasional rests as machines needed more time. Typically, steel mills operated twenty-four hours a day, so that the men had to work in either two shifts of twelve hours or three shifts of eight. Many men working twelve-hour days changed every two weeks from day work to night work or back, requiring them to work a terrible twenty-four hours straight at the “turnover.” The twelve-hour day lasted until well after the turn of the century.

“Home is just the place where I eat and sleep,” a steel worker said. “I live in the mills.” Wives had to rise at five or so to prepare breakfast, perhaps go to work themselves, then serve supper fourteen hours later to an exhausted husband still deafened from the roar of the mills. Each of the mill towns in the Pittsburgh area came to have its splendid Carnegie library, with especially generous collections of books on metallurgy and mechanical arts. But few steel workers had the time or energy to visit the steel magnate’s libraries.

Workers—particularly immigrants—lived in homes clustered around the mills along the rivers or hanging on the bluffs of the south side. Most of the steel hands, Stefan Lorant wrote, “lived in rickety shanties, ramshackle cottages, filthy, overcrowded tenements with primitive sanitation and toilet facilities.” Wages, never unduly high, dropped sharply during the early 1890s. Workers, however, were allowed to gaze across ornate iron fences at the steel bosses’ gingerbread mansions and other palaces, as expensive, ornate, and overstuffed as anywhere in America—homes such as Henry Clay Frick’s “Clayton,” four stories high with an enormous portico, Mrs. William Thaw’s “Lyndhurst,” the Phippses’ “Grandview,” the Westinghouses’ “Solitude.” Pittsburgh capitalists and workers had combined to make the city the steel capital of the world, outstripping Essen and Birmingham and all other American steel centers; but in the process the links between them, both on the job and in the community, were more and more frayed and broken.

In contemplating how the other half lived, Jacob Riis concluded that the source of most social evils lay in people’s housing and city environment. In the tenements, he decided, “all the influences make for evil; because they are the hot-beds of the epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike; the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts; that throw off a scum of forty thousand human wrecks to the insane asylums and workhouses year by year; that turned out in the last eight years a round half million beggars to prey upon our charities; that maintain a standing army of ten thousand tramps with all that that implies; because, above all, they touch the family life with deadly moral contagion. This is their worst crime, inseparable from the system….” It was the system above all that challenged Riis’s social imagination.

In Chicago, a very different sort of man came to somewhat the same conclusion. By the 1880s, George M. Pullman had built the greatest railroad car-building organization in the world. Son of a general mechanic in New York State, he had shown remarkable innovating and organizing abilities even in his early years. After inventing a sleeping car in which back and seat cushions could be joined to make a berth—a concept that has hardly changed to this day—he had gone on to develop the combined sleeping and restaurant car, the dining car, the chair car, the vestibule car. Convinced that good housing was essential to people’s well-being, he decided on a great experiment in a vacant area nine miles south of Chicago—a model city, centered on workshops, designed to refine and uplift his workers’ character. It was to be both a business and a community venture. A self-respecting, well-mannered worker, he calculated, would be both a happier person and a better employee.

Amid feverish activity the town was soon completed, adorned with lawns and shrubs, spacious factories, wide streets, and even “imitation-bronze street lamps with cone-shaped gloves and white porcelain shades.” Visitors came from near and far to admire; a French economist concluded that “some brain of superior intelligence, backed by long technical experience, has thought out every possible detail.” Here, as in the sweatshop ghettos, the distinction between work and home was blurred. Nothing in the town seemed apart from the workshop or workplace. Had George Pullman found the key to work-home integration, employer profit, employee happiness, and social progress?

Social Class and Social Outcast

“Now in all states,” Aristotle said, “there are three elements: one class is very rich, another very poor, and a third in a mean.” A city, he added, ought to be composed, as far as possible, “of equals and similars; and these are generally the middle classes.” A large middle class prevented the rich, the strong, and the lucky from dominating the poor, and the envious poor from plotting against the rich. “Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property; for where some possess much, and the others nothing, there may arise an extreme—either out of the most rampant democracy, or out of an oligarchy….”

Americans in the late nineteenth century could boast of a burgeoning middle class, but they could not deny gross disparities between the rich and the poor. Jacob Riis and others who wrote of these extremes did not exaggerate; sophisticated economic analysis many years later would demonstrate that the 1860s and early 1870s constituted one of the “highest income inequalities in American history,” comparable only to the 1913–1916 period and to the late 1920s, just before the collapse of stock prices. Combined regional and class disparities, as between Southern farm laborers and New York City craftsmen, were extreme indeed in the 1870s.

This glaring contrast between the lot of rich and of poor, a contrast that could be observed unforgettably within a mile’s walk in almost any big city—what did it mean to the Americans of the day? To the great majority, not very much. Like the dying child’s parents that Riis visited, they accepted their lot. Some harbored hopes: that they might still get a lucky break from the ever-turning roulette wheel of American capitalism; that their children would succeed if they did not; or that the virtuous poor would at least receive their reward in the Hereafter. Some of the poor also believed in the doctrine of rags to riches, the survival of the fittest; but the doctrine reflected more hope than reality. Even in Pittsburgh—reputedly the home of “shirtsleeve millionaires” like Carnegie—the iron and steel magnates “were largely the sons of businessmen, from upper-middle-class and upper-class backgrounds,” according to John Ingham. Yet the myth persisted.

The condition and outlook of industrial labor posed the cardinal questions of the 1880s. The creation of new and immensely larger units of production, along with modernized technology and constantly expanding mechanization, tended to homogenize and flatten the “level of existence” for hundreds of thousands of workers. The common work experiences that resulted laid the basis for the class solidarity that Marxists predicted. But powerful forces were working in other directions. The dynamism of technology in itself was a disruptive force, constantly interrupting work routines. The spread of technology varied widely, as a result of the play of the market and the availability of capital, with the result that some workers might be operating eighteenth-century machines while others were, technologically, entering the twentieth century. Thus skilled craft workers, accustomed to “controlling production” on the shop floor, often had to yield to the impersonal dominion of the machine.

The main divisive forces, however, lay more in the workers than in their machines. The American working class, Gutman reminds us, was continually being “altered in its composition by infusions, from within and without the nation, of peasants, farmers, skilled artisans, and casual day laborers who brought into industrial society ways of work and other habits and values not associated with industrial necessities and the industrial ethos.” These persons brought their own cultures into the factories and the factory towns. They lived in their own social and political worlds composed of churches, schools, unions, political “machines,” baseball lots, even libraries, and—ubiquitously—saloons or “beer gardens.” They were not suddenly divested of this world as they passed through the factory gate.

Amid this cultural diversity, immigrants and their offspring made up by far the most distinct and autonomous grouping. Of the 14,000 or so common laborers employed in the big Carnegie Pittsburgh plants, over 11,000 were Eastern Europeans. Underpaid, often given the meanest tasks, especially vulnerable to industrial accidents, these workers might have constituted a vast pool of militant opposition to the bosses. Sometimes they did—but more often they were the victims of illiteracy and misinformation, of intolerance and discrimination on the part of other employees as well as employers. Many, moreover, had no desire to stay in the United States. Often single, or married but with their wives left behind in the old country, they planned to save their money and return home. Their yearning for home was often sharpened by their work experiences. Wrote an Italian youth:

Nothing job, nothing job,

I return to Italy;

Comrades, laborers, good-bye;

Adieu, land of “Fourth of July.”

Immigrant or not, a few American workers could establish their own work routines. Some were able to create their own “five-day week,” for example, long before either legislators or employers established it. They did this through weekend celebrations so hearty that they would arrive at the shop on Monday in no condition for work. Employers sometimes responded by shifting payday from Saturday to midweek.

The impact of these many conflicting forces on working-class solidarity was inevitably a highly mixed one. In some cases, cultural influences reinforced solidarity—workers suffering discrimination in housing, for example, or sensing hostility to their religion, might well be reinforced in their class attitudes. But more typically in situations of “cross-pressures,” the heterogeneous forces won out, especially where immigrants peopled the work force. Radicals charged—often correctly—that corporation heads deliberately sowed disunity among their employees. But the main source of working-class division was a constellation of cultural forces—including the tendency of many workers to dream that they too could rise to the top of the industrial heap.

The myth of rags to riches was a potent one, for it answered the questions of those who pointed to Americans’ egalitarian creed, as set forth in the Declaration of Independence and other official scrolls, and asked: How come? The catechismal answer was, individual opportunity and reward. Only money separated the lower class from the upper classes; to rise to the upper classes, one had only to make more money. Anyone could do this.

Such answers ignored the fact that far more than money cut the lower classes off from opportunity: poor health, inadequate education, low motivation, crude speech and clothes, damaged self-esteem, dire poverty. Indeed, by the late nineteenth century something insidious and ominous was taking place in the vaunted land of liberty and equality—the continuation or creation of sets of social outcasts who comprised virtually an array of castes, who could not break out of their castes, and hence could hardly hope to rise through the class hierarchy.

Few Americans of the day would have admitted that the land of the free had a caste system. Castes were alien, something one found and deplored in India. Black slaves had formed a kind of caste before the Civil War, it was granted, but had they not been liberated? It slowly became evident, however, that a black caste not only persisted in the South after Emancipation but that other castes endured or were developing in the United States, if a system of castes was defined as a closed and tenacious structure of social inequality, both in perceived status and in access to needed goods—a structure from which it was virtually impossible to escape, no matter what talents and virtues a person might possess.

Some caste systems might be founded almost entirely on possessions or income, with the poorest so marked by physical and psychological want that they could not break out of their low caste, as in India. This was true to a degree in America, as in the case of impoverished immigrants. But caste in this country was largely ethnic and racial. Money was the warm solvent of social class, given enough time, but money could not wash away caste walls.

The wealthy Jews who settled Manhattan’s sixties and seventies, east of Fifth Avenue, could testify to this. These were the Seligmans, Loebs, Strauses, Lilienthals, Morgenthaus, Rosenwalds, and a score of other families of German origin. Such families, Stephen Birmingham judged, were the closest thing to “Aristocracy—Aristocracy in the best sense—that the city, and perhaps the country, had seen.” They had fine houses, servants, carriages, country estates, and of course lots of money. With their leadership in New York finance and their close ties to Washington, they had a measure of economic and political power.

But they could not join Manhattan’s Four Hundred or the exclusive men’s clubs or other select circles; in this sense they were social outcasts. As in centuries past, they took refuge in their own community and solidarity—in “our crowd,” with its active social life, in intermarriage among elite Jewish families, partnerships within the family, wills and trusts that tied generations together. They also took refuge in their own hierarchy. Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal had arrived in Manhattan as early as the mid-seventeenth century, some on a bark that came to be known as the “Jewish Mayflower.” Numbering Baruchs, Nathans, Cardozos, Hendrixes, they stood for old wealth, fine manners, and established Judaism. The Sephardim tended to look down on the more recently arrived German Jews, with their “pushy” ways, show-off clothes and jewelry, loud speech, and status insecurities. In their turn the Germans, proud of their own background, education, and culture, clung to their own clubs and ran down the hordes of other Ashkenazic Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, with their coarse speech, dress, and manners.

Even the upthrust hand of the Statue of Liberty, in its temporary home at Fifth Avenue and 26th Street, seemed to separate Sephardic Jews from the Germans. The latter, according to Birmingham, were put off by Emma Lazarus’s line, “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” They may have arrived penniless, but they were not human litter. Raising Jewish money to put Miss Liberty on Bedloe’s Island became largely a Sephardic effort.

Poor Jews in ghettos could not afford such fine airs. Fleeing the oppression and persecution in Eastern Europe—especially the pogroms that had erupted in Russia after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881—these immigrants had survived the adventurous crossing of Europe, the fetid Atlantic steerage, and the callous examination by immigration officials, only to land in a new ghetto in New York or other cities. Dumped ashore on the Battery, a youth of sixteen walked into the stench and noise of the Lower East Side, where dirty children played in the street and noisy, sweating Jews pushed peddlers’ carts, and wondered, “Was this the America we had sought? Or was it only, after all, a circle that we had travelled, with a Jewish ghetto at its beginning and its end?”

For most such Jews the Lower East Side was indeed a ghetto, and they too were social outcasts, taunted even by other immigrants. By 1890 over five hundred persons lived there per acre, a density greater than in the worst sections of Bombay; living conditions, in Irving Howe’s judgment, “were quite as ghastly as those of early-nineteenth-century London.” At least half the employed Jews worked in the garment industry, notorious already for its sixty- to eighty-four-hour workweek and its wages (in 1885) of $7 to $10 a week for men, $3 to $6 for women, and $12 to $15 for whole families. Even more depressing was the Lower East Side environment: the squalor, filth, and disease, the pushing and shoving, and the feverish quest for money that so affronted Jews imbued with older and more spiritual traditions.

And the Jews were so conspicuous, at least to Jacob Riis. “No need of asking here where we are,” he told his readers as he escorted them into “Jewtown.” The signs along the sidewalk, the manners and dress of the people, “their unmistakable physiognomy,” betrayed their race at every step, Riis said.

“Men with queer skull-caps, venerable beard, and the outlandish long-skirted kaftan of the Russian Jew, elbow the ugliest and the handsomest women in the land. The contrast is startling. The old women are hags; the young, houris. Wives and mothers at sixteen, at thirty they are old. So thoroughly has the chosen people crowded out the Gentiles in the Tenth Ward that, when the great Jewish holidays come around every year, the public schools in the district have practically to close up.” “Hebrews” were not only overflowing Jewtown, Riis said, but buying up or rebuilding the tenements. He noted the taunts that greeted the invaders. “But abuse and ridicule are not weapons to fight the Israelite with. He pockets them quietly with the rent and bides his time.”

In their living conditions, poor newly arrived Jews were probably no worse off than Irish and Italians. In a brotherhood of misery, all the “refuse” shared in the conditions of squalor, disease, overwork, and—above all—inescapable crowdedness. Immigration was rising to new peaks in the early 1880s—almost 3 million streamed in during the five years after 1880—and the vast majority settled in New York and other cities. From 1820 to 1900, 17 million arrived from Europe alone—6 million from Germany and Austria, almost 4 million from Ireland, over 3 million from Great Britain, a million and a half from Scandinavia, perhaps a million from Russia and Eastern Europe.

Invidious distinctions fragmented the fraternity of the poor newcomers. The British were mainly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and they spoke English, if not American. Northern Germans and northern Europeans were mainly Protestants, but did not speak English. Irish spoke English and Gaelic and were mainly Catholic. Most Italians were Catholic and did not speak any form of English. Eastern Europeans had compounded troubles. But no immigrant group was as segregated as the Jews, with their alien languages, customs, costumes, religion, and origins in the strange, far-off shtetls of Eastern Europe.

Still, all these ethnic groups were white. Whatever they had to overcome in the way of language, custom, low self-esteem, and bigotry, at least they did not have to overcome the color of their skin or a heritage of enslavement. At the bottom of the caste system lay, as usual, black workers and their families, although the conditions of their existence reflected the immense diversity of America.

Somewhat typical of American cities as a whole, but more harshly symbolic than any, were the work and life of blacks in the nation’s capital. In Washington, D.C., in 1870 there were. 133 black carpenters, 410 black waiters, and one black lawyer. Cheek by jowl with the big marble government buildings were the alleyways lined with brick hovels. Washington had its shantytowns too, such as “Murder Bay”—a “vile place, both physically and morally,” an official reported. Poor blacks were sharply segregated: by century’s end over 90 percent of all alley dwellers were black, making up more than one-fourth of the capital’s Negro population.

Writing on the “color line” in Manhattan, Jacob Riis observed, “There is no more clean and orderly community in New York than the new settlement of colored people that is growing up on the East Side from Yorkville to Harlem.” He noted particularly their “cleanliness”—in this respect, he said, the Negro was “immensely the superior of the lowest of the whites, the Italians and the Polish Jews, below whom he has been classed in the past in the tenant scale.” Even the Real Estate Record reported agents agreeing that Negro tenants were clean, orderly, and “profitable.” Why, then, did blacks have to pay higher rents for the “poorest and most stinted rooms”? Because whites would not live in the same house with blacks. “Once a colored house,” said the agents, “always a colored house.”

Race bias prevailed over objective facts. A Welshman traveling to the coal fields of West Virginia was warned that “the niggars were a most treacherous, devilish lot of people” who had to be kept down by being knocked down. On his way, however, he met two young black women of about eighteen, and they spoke to him so sweetly and melodiously that he said to himself, “By jove, if all the niggars are like these girls, I am jolly glad I came down here.” He came to be extremely fond of the blacks who worked in the mines and lived in shacks round about, and came to hate the “contemptible” and “ignorant” whites who treated the blacks so abominably on and off the job.

Not that the “niggar” was without faults, the Welshman added. “By nature he is an awful thief,” with chickens and turkeys his specialty, “but if you catch him in the act, he is not a vicious thief; he will only turn around and make up some cock-and-bull story to account for it.” He was “outrageously lazy,” and immoral to boot. “They eat, cook, and sleep all through and through—men, women, girls, and boys, makes no difference to them. Few of them go through the form of legal marriage but the greater number live in adultery and when they get tired of one another they change partners.” Still, he liked them.

Perhaps the most integrated workers in America, during the late nineteenth century, were the cowhands in the western cattle ranges. About one-third of the 35,000 men who traveled up the trail from Texas during the “heroic age” of the cattle industry, according to the least unreliable estimates, were “Negroes and Mexicans,” with the former outnumbering the latter perhaps two to one. Trailherd outfits often included a black cook, horse wrangler, and trail hand or two, out of a dozen or so men. Blacks were seen as having a special feel for horses and a knack for “singing” to the steers. Veteran black cowhands often showed the ropes to white greenhorns, as a black Cherokee did to a youngster named Will Rogers. In town, however, things were different. Black and white cowhands usually sat toward opposite ends of the bar; a black man might at best eat in the kitchen of a cafe; and a black would never, never enter a white house of prostitution. White cowhands, however, frequented black whorehouses.

Thus the color line wove its way through the complex fabric of human relationships. And that line deepened and hardened as the years passed. In New York, Riis noted that blacks were arriving from Southern cities bringing skills they could not use in the North, and even among native blacks the “colored barber” was disappearing. In the South, the caste system that had been shaken up by Civil War and Reconstruction was tightening toward the end of the century as a result of the rising Jim Crow system and attitudes of white supremacy. He doubted, said Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi, that the “coconut-headed, chocolate-colored, typical coon” who “blacks my shoes every morning” was fit for citizenship. Lynchings of blacks rose sharply after the early eighties.

Thousands of black workers moved into industrial cities, where they often took jobs as scabs and found themselves pitted against striking whites. Others moved west; the huge “Kansas Exodus” of 1879 brought thousands of Southern blacks to a state where, with mixed memories of “Bleeding Kansas,” their new neighbors might or might not be friendly. A few blacks moved into the Plains states and points farther west, joining the waves of migration reaching across the western half of the nation. There they encountered a race that was being compressed into another segregated caste—the native Americans called Indians.

In the 1860s and 1870s the old, grim sequence—migration by white settlers, Indian resistance, violent confrontations, military suppression of the red people, continued migration—was asserting itself as remorselessly as before the Civil War. Only the nature of the migration had changed: whites—and blacks—might now come by train as well as by Conestoga wagon.

From a high ridge, Cheyennes somberly watched one of the first Union Pacific trains running along new track laid into the Platte forks. Riding down to “see what sort of trail” the train had left, they ingeniously figured how to derail the next “big wagon” with a heavy stick forced into the rails. The next wagon turned out to be a tiny handcar pumped by five maintenance men. As the car jumped high into the air, the men spilled out and fled, only to be hunted down and killed by the Cheyennes. Elated, the Indians bent a rail and derailed a whole train, which they plundered. Soon they were racing over the prairies with bolts of muslin and calico tied to their ponies’ tails and unraveling behind them.

White men wanted the red people to “settle,” just like themselves. But Ten Bears, of the Comanches, refused to lead his people into a reservation. “I don’t want to settle,” he told a big Indian gathering. “I love to roam over the prairies. There I feel free and happy, but when I settle down I feel pale and die. A long time ago this land belonged to our fathers; but when I go up the river”—the Arkansas—“I see camps of soldiers on its banks. These soldiers cut down my timber; they kill my buffalo; and when I see that it feels as if my heart would burst with sorrow.”

The Sioux of the Great Plains fit the white stereotype, reflected in Hollywood Westerns and shown on Indian-head nickels, of the nomadic, warlike Indian, living off the open country and the buffalo. The Sioux, indeed, were the nouveaux riches among the western Indians, where wealth was measured not in money but in food and military prowess. They were a martial tribe, cultivating youthfulness, male strength, competitiveness, and individual achievement, as well as female beauty and purity. In their religious fervor, young men tortured themselves in exchange for supernatural power and social prestige. They danced to the point of exhaustion, and suspended themselves from cords and skewers which pierced their skin. A religiously inspired Ghost Dance was the last Sioux uprising. It ended in the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee.

The Sioux were true nomads. In their encampments the braves, wearing long buffalo skin robes, gathered in a circle at the center of the village. They clustered around a ring of buffalo skulls, over which the older men passed their weapons, prayed, and offered sacrifices. This ceremony prepared them for their imminent departure to seek buffalo for food and heavy winter furs. Then the camp broke. Baggage was loaded onto pack-horses, called “mystery dogs,” while the women walked. The women were responsible for everything but the kill itself and the spiritual rites of the kill—they butchered the downed animals, tanned the hides, dried the meat.

Other Indians were as settled as any white, though in their own traditions. The Pacific Indians of the Southwest—farmers, town-dwellers, weavers, potters—seemed almost the opposite of the Sioux. Related linguistically to the Aztecs of Mexico, the Zuni and Hopi shared many of their achievements. Dependent on the corn they grew and hence on water, they built elaborate irrigation systems—and organized religious ceremonies around the need for rain. The Hopis conducted their famed snake dance in the hope that the feted reptile would report to the gods such favorable treatment that rain would result.

These city-dwelling, or Pueblo, Indians lived in terraced apartment buildings made of adobe and supported by stones and wooden beams. The size and complexity of the pueblos reflected the engineering skills and social organization that were fixed in the Pueblo heritage. Some of these buildings were five hundred years old. Inheriting also a fine artistic tradition, the Pueblos fashioned marvelous pots and baskets and some of the finest rugs and blankets in the world. Since the men were not hunters—warriors were not honored and, indeed, were cursed by their victims—men as well as women spun, wove, potted, and farmed.

Not all the southwestern Indians were peaceful farmers. The Navajos and, to an even greater extent, the Apaches hunted and marauded as well as farmed. California Indians were generally agrarian, and the Kwakiutls, far up the Pacific coast, were ferociously competitive and even cannibalistic. The native Americans, indeed, were an extraordinarily diverse array of peoples. But this did not stop most Americans of the late nineteenth century from seeing them through dime-novel eyes, stereotyping all Indians as fierce, marauding, thieving aliens. This conception, coupled with the Indians’ fear of white aggression and their distaste for most white ways, appeared to justify to whites their instinct to cast the Indians aside, to segregate them or to massacre them.

Thus was there developed not only one more caste in the American caste system, but a caste that was completely cut off from other Americans experiencing poverty, discrimination, oppression, and segregation. Before the war, it had seemed at least barely conceivable that the great numbers of Americans denied their moral claims to “liberty and equality” might join hands to some degree, if only because there were leaders like Frances Wright and certain abolitionists who could imagine a coalition of the deprived. But later in the century, any kind of political or even symbolic alliance among Jews, blacks, Indians, and the ghetto poor was not only impossible; it was inconceivable. Not only were these castes segregated from one another, each hardly knew the others existed. The concept of unity seemed to be fading out just when the conditions of work and life should, according to Marxist calculations, have promoted class solidarity. Instead the power of ideas seemed to be pulling in very different directions.

CHAPTER 5

The Power of Ideas

LIBERTY! A HUNDRED FOURTHS of July broke loose yesterday to exalt her name, and despite the calendar rolled themselves into a delirious and glorious one,” rhapsodized the usually dour New York Times. “At daybreak the city stirred nimbly and flung a million colors to the heavy air, for the cloud king had covered the heavens and moved upon the waters; but she plumed herself and showered scarlet, and snow, and azure, and gold, defying the skies to darken her festival.”

Thus the Times pictured the dedication of the Statue of Liberty on a wet and foggy October 28, 1886. The massive icon represented a triumph of the human spirit as well as of the spirit of liberty. French intellectuals, struggling to establish a new republic out of the ruins of Napoleon III’s Second Empire, had conceived the mad notion of a joint French-American project to erect a colossal statue of liberty as a stimulus to both peoples to cherish and safeguard freedom. They sought the common denominator between “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” and “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Countless obstacles arose. Bartholdi, the sculptor, was noted more for his addiction to colossi than for his art. Viewing the project with suspicion, Congress granted funds for the dedication (but none for liquor) and for maintenance (as a lighthouse), and then cut off further aid. The public was importuned for funds, which the poor withheld because they viewed “Liberty” as a folly of the rich, but the rich did not give either. Still, some money was raised through auctions, benefit performances, and even a poetry contest, which attracted a reluctant contribution from one Emma Lazarus. And at a critical moment Joseph Pulitzer, an immigrant from Hungary, used his New York World and his St. Louis Post-Dispatch to pull in small gifts from over 100,000 donors, including countless schoolchildren.

So there the great figure stood, rising with her torch 152 feet above the pedestal on Bedloe’s Island, 300 feet above sea level. Troops, bands, Templars, veterans, dignitaries disgorged onto the tiny island from ferry, tug, and yacht. The rich, now enthusiastic, were there, while the contributing public watched from the shores or excursion steamers. Count de Lesseps presented the gift. A senator—William Evarts—was celebrating Franco-American love of liberty when Bartholdi, perched far above on the head of the statue, acted on a false signal through the mists, unveiled the figure, and set off a cacophony of shouts, whistles, drums, horns, applause, and booming guns that drowned out the rest of the senator’s remarks. A President—Grover Cleveland—accepted the gift, stating that “Liberty has here made her home” and would pierce the darkness of ignorance and oppression “until liberty shall enlighten the world.”

Liberty. The idea had doubtless lost some of its enkindling power of old, but it was still the central and most compelling value in the American ideology. The pennies and nickels that jangled in newsboys’ pockets still bore the magic word. Politicians still climaxed their declamations with appeals to the goddess of liberty, as did student orators evoking memories of the liberty of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and above all Daniel Webster—“Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”

In the post-Civil War years, the American idea of liberty was as complex, many-sided, and ambiguous as in the antebellum period, when diverse notions of freedom probably did more to divide than to unite Americans in dealing with the issue of slavery and its cure. Liberty still meant, most fundamentally, freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. It meant, even more powerfully, the right to own and use your “private” property as you wished. Property, John Adams had said, was “surely a right of mankind as really as liberty,” and this idea flourished in a booming era of huge agglomerations of property. Liberty was still viewed in largely negative terms, as liberty from church and state and other establishments; the idea of achieving broader liberties, economic and social, through collective efforts, especially through government, was a matter more of philosophical debate than of practical consideration.

Ideas have consequences, but not merely because they exist as abstractions. They must be evoked and articulated and sounded forth, like music from a score. The social and intellectual context of the 1870s and ’80s was such as to enhance the individualistic component of liberty—the emphasis on protection of individual rights, individual opportunity, private property as essential to a person’s security and dignity, the curbing of external obstacles on individual development. But this kind of “individualistic liberty,” or individualism, embraced a wide span of human thought and behavior—all the way, at least, from Emerson’s spacious concepts of personal growth and fulfillment, spiritual and intellectual, to the narrowest kind of material self-seeking and success.

In a curious way, the Statue of Liberty itself seemed to symbolize both the power and the ambiguity of the idea of liberty in America. Bartholdi and his fellow republicans in France had conceived of the icon as Liberty facing away from America and “enlightening the world”—especially reactionary Europe. Emma Lazarus’s noble words had Liberty turned toward arriving immigrants as persons seeking a new life away from the old country. Was Liberty more for export abroad or for internal use? And what did it mean, in this dedication year of 1886?

Across the Atlantic, in London, Karl Marx had viewed with scorn this kind of paean to liberty—bourgeois liberty. He had long since denounced bourgeois liberty as that “of man regarded as an isolated nomad, withdrawn into himself.” The right of liberty under capitalism was simply the right of private property—“the right to enjoy one’s fortune and to dispose of it as one will; without regard for other men and independently of society. It is the right of self-interest…. It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty….”

DINNER AT DELMONICO’S

Americans had long been world-famous for their competitive spirit and enterprising ways. A century and a half before Carnegie and Swift made their millions, young Benjamin Franklin was selling thousands of copies of his Poor Richard’s Almanack, which instructed that God helps them that help themselves, that Keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee, that The used key is always bright, that Early to bed, etc. In Franklin’s time and after, however, overly bumptious entrepreneurial spirit had been checked and balanced by elitist public leadership, intellectual authority, legal due process, and civic virtue. Then the “victory” of the Northern economy in the Civil War and the long economic boom of the postwar decades brought a dynamic combination of a quickened spirit of individual enterprise—and a recharged doctrine of laissez-faire economics.

Central to the whole concept of aggressive economic individualism was this doctrine of “government let be”—a doctrine that had gripped the British and continental business mind at the turn of the century. The physiocrats of eighteenth-century France had contended not only that land was the basis of all wealth but that the “natural order of liberty” would flourish best in a setting of absolute freedom of trade, full rights of property, and abolition of restrictive laws. These ideas had profoundly influenced Adam Smith, who planned at one time to dedicate his Wealth of Nations to François Quesnay, the founder and leader of physiocracy. In publishing this quickly famous volume in the same year as the Declaration of Independence, Smith issued an economic declaration of individualism—one that fell happily on the ears of businessmen frustrated by the old mercantilist regulations.

The brilliant (if by no means original) constellation of ideas—that the natural economic order tends to maximize individual well-being, that this order must not be interfered with, that collective as well as individual betterment results from that order, that if enterprisers were free to pursue self-interest, the “invisible hand” of commercial competition would be far more effective than the state as a regulator of economic behavior—closely influenced the practical policies of parties and politicians, especially in Britain. Smith’s notions received powerful support from Thomas Malthus’s contentions that population, especially among the lower classes, constantly tended “to increase beyond the means of subsistence,” and that not poor laws but only the poor themselves could meet this problem. Another corollary to laissez-faire doctrine was David Ricardo’s “iron” law of wages, decreeing that the total wage fund was fixed and hence any successful effort by workers to increase their wages simply robbed other workers of income.

These men were not scribblers in garrets but prestigious political and economic philosophers whose words carried enormous weight among ruling establishments. And they reached the minds of wellborn Americans at perhaps the most vulnerable stage of their lives—in their undergraduate years. Students at Brown University could listen to their president, Francis Wayland, defend the rights of property, proclaim that men should be allowed to use their capital as they wished, virtually equate the laws of laissez-faire economics with the laws of God; if the students missed Wayland’s sermons and lectures, they could read any of eighteen editions of his Elements of Political Economy. The men of Bowdoin could read a volume of the same title by their great preacher and teacher Samuel Phillips Newman, based on the principles of classical economics, just as the men of Harvard could peruse a textbook on the principles of political economy by their young philosopher-economist Francis Bowen, with similar conclusions, and the men of Williams could learn the same doctrines from their young political economist, Arthur Latham Perry.

Through teachers like these—and countless others north, south, and west—college men drank in the thoughts of Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, of Jean Baptiste Say and Harriet Martineau, thinkers who themselves had absorbed the great individualistic and libertarian doctrines of Locke and his successors. If the American teachers were sometimes more Smithian than Smith, more Malthusian than Malthus, their students hardly cared. The young men embraced with fervor doctrines that seemed so well to fit the times. Practical politicians were often less ardent as they weaved their course between governmental hands-off and governmental intervention in the economy, but the practical men too, perhaps unknowingly, were the intellectual slaves of various economic theorists, alive or defunct.

Individualism could be a spacious and noble doctrine; it could be a crabbed and selfish one. In America it was both. It was the individualism of Jefferson, of free and responsible persons rationally and collectively seeking the good life and the just society; it was also the individualism of the market economists, of those competitors in the economic arena seeking to make money and attain personal success, on the theory that a good society would arise out of the struggle for individual reward. The individualism of Jefferson had been an enormously liberating and democratizing force, encouraging movements for more social equality, suffrage for poor men, and even freedom for slaves.

What happened after the Civil War in American elitist and popular thought alike was the steady divesting of individual liberty’s broader, richer dimensions and their replacement by a narrow, egoistic individualism defined as competition, striving, and personal success. What Clinton Rossiter called the “Great Train Robbery of American intellectual history” became the means by which postbellum rugged individualists stole the word symbols of Jeffersonian liberalism, such as liberty, equality, progress, and opportunity, and glued them onto the platform planks of conservatism.

These refurbished planks would undergird American conservatism for at least a century. The higher, immutable laws of economics: anyone believing in a benevolent deity, said Edward Atkinson, must know that the operation of the higher law is “steadily, surely, and slowly working to the benefit of the great mass of the people.” Man as homo economicus: persons were defined by their economic self-interest rather than by their social or aesthetic needs. “Political Economy,” John Stuart Mill had written in 1844, “considers mankind as occupied solely in acquiring and consuming wealth.” The free market as regulator: rents, profits, wages, prices were to be determined by the laws of competition. Government as the enemy: no matter how representative and democratic, government was meddlesome, incompetent, corrupt. “Men may vote as they please,” said a theologian, “but the laws of production and of trade are as inexorable as the law of nature.” Liberty as economic individualism: liberty, said the noted political scientist John W. Burgess, “is the absence of government in a given sphere of individual or social action.”

Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard reincarnated, the Jeffersonian belief in lean government revised and revived, the laissez-faire classicists revisited—the resurgence of all these currents of economic thought should have been enough to empower economic individualists with all the intellectual authority they needed in order to press for their marketplace version of liberty. And so it did. Following the war, however, two English thinkers immensely fortified the convictions of American individualists.

Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had burst upon the British scene in 1859. The first edition sold out within the day. Superbly explicated and massively supported, his thesis grounded the old theory of evolution on the propositions that a struggle for existence rages among the prodigal issue of organisms, that variations in the offspring helped certain plants or animals to survive and reproduce, and that these mutations spread to the whole species during succeeding generations. Popularly interpreted as a theory that man was descended from the apes, “Darwinism” promptly set off blazing disputes with “creationists” who believed in the fall of Adam and original sin. Darwin’s theory was further popularized, and the argument extended, when Herbert Spencer dramatized the principle of natural selection as “the survival of the fittest.” In a profusion of writings including ten weighty works of “synthetic philosophy,” Spencer laid out an anti-statist doctrine that he had earlier embraced as a young editor at the London Economist.

Americans seemed cut off from these ideas by their absorption in the Civil War; then came the “Vogue of Spencer.” His views that nature put all on trial and that the mentally as well as the physically weak perished; that true liberty consisted of every man having “freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not on the equal freedom of any other man”; that state interference to protect the weak or deprived violated the process of natural selection; that public schools, state insane asylums, state poor-houses, state boards of health, even state post offices, were suspect; that, happily, government would decay as civilization progressed—these ideas, comprising the most radical defense of laissez-faire ever heard in America, fell with the tinkling melody of an intellectual aphrodisiac on the ears of the social and economic elites of America.

Why were they so incited by this far-off thinker—a man who had not even deigned to visit America—with his fastidious ways and intellectual arrogance, when they already had ample intellectual support in the “Manchester School” and other classic thought, in the laissez-faire view of some of their own Founding Fathers, in their own creed of individualism? In part because this was the Age of Science, and scientific discovery and thought had gripped the American mind as never before. Spencer, with his weighty treatises, seemed as scientific in applying the “survival of the fittest” to the social order as Darwin was in finding it in the natural.

There was a deeper reason. The great philosophical expounders of laissez-faire had often showed a deplorable tendency to “go soft” when it came to practical applications. Fundamentally humane and enlightened men, they ultimately balked at denying state aid to the poor and the helpless. John Stuart Mill, the great apostle of liberty, seemed to be turning almost socialistic in some of his thinking. But not Spencer—he supported the most rigorous application of laissez-faire not only as economically correct but as socially and morally valid, because the result would be the perfection of the human race and the eradication of social evils.

What a marvelous idea for the elites: to be individually selfish was to be socially sane and right! For these men, too, needed their ideas to be validated by some measure of higher morality, especially in this era when religious doctrine so often seemed old-fashioned and inadequate. Spencer, to boot, argued in strong dramatic terms understandable to every man, thus making him, as Hofstadter said, “the metaphysician of the homemade intellectual, and the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic.” In the last three decades of the century, Spencer’s American publisher, D. Appleton and Co., sold well over 300,000 copies of his writings. He was a philosopher, William James noted, who could be valued by those who had no other philosopher.

No wonder economic elites clutched Spencer to their austere bosoms. But the remarkable aspect of the Vogue of Spencer was the extent to which he was accepted and celebrated in the academic and religious worlds. A host of teachers of a variety of subjects preached Spencerism; indeed, the discipline of “political economy” was virtually equated with the doctrine of laissez-faire. While the scholars differed with one another on practical applications, as theorists, “free competition and denial of state interference was their dogma, economic liberty their slogan.” They wrote books and pamphlets, testified before legislatures, pontificated in the press, lectured from their platforms. The message was simple: Social evolution meant social progress.

By far the most famous and effective of the laissez-faire academics was William Graham Sumner of Yale. Brought up by his English immigrant father to venerate the Protestant economic values, especially thrift, Sumner divided his life between writing a systematic science of society and crusading for economic individualism inside his classroom and outside. The ‘‘strong” and the “weak,” he preached, were simply terms for “the industrious and the idle, the frugal and the extravagant.” If we do not like the survival of the fittest, he said, we will have the survival of the unfittest. Millionaires were the “product of natural selection”; hereditary wealth guaranteed the enterpriser that he might continue in his children the qualities that had enabled him to benefit the community. But millionaires should not be artificially aided by the government, any more than should the poor.

Students flocked to Sumner’s courses, looking for debate. One of them, William Lyon Phelps, later remembered Sumner’s exchange with a dissenter:

“Professor, don’t you believe in any government aid to industries?”

“No! it’s root, hog, or die.”

“Yes, but hasn’t the hog got a right to root?”

“There are no rights. The world owes nobody a living.”

“You believe, then, Professor, in only one system, the contract-competitive system?”

“That’s the only sound economic system. All others are fallacies.”

“Well, suppose some professor of political economy came along and took your job away from you. Wouldn’t you be sore?”

“Any other professor is welcome to try. If he gets my job, it is my fault. My business is to teach the subject so well that no one can take the job away from me.”

The most respectable men of God took up the tenets of Social Darwinism, though rarely did they utter the name of the controversial English biologist. No one, said Princeton’s clergyman-president James McCosh, was at liberty to deprive us of our property or to interfere with it; attempts to do so were “theft.” Love required the acquisition of property, said Williams’s clergyman-president, Mark Hopkins, and those who had done the most for our institutions had been men with a “strong desire of property.” In his renowned sermon Acres of Diamonds, Baptist clergyman Russell Conwell preached the gospel of success: “It is your duty to get rich. It is wrong to be poor.”

Some of the most respectable journals preached laissez-faire. Occasionally, it was a laissez-faire that attacked business as well as the poor for demanding aid from government. “The Government must get out of the ‘protective’ business and the ‘subsidy’ business and the ‘improvement’ and the ‘development’ business,” wrote Edwin Lawrence Godkin of the Nation. “It must let trade, and commerce, and manufactures, and steamboats, and railroads, and telegraphs alone. It cannot touch them without breeding corruption.” The government had as much as it could do, he added, just to maintain order and administer justice. Words like these were repeated in hundreds of dailies and weeklies.

The dream of individual striving and success resonated most dramatically in the well-thumbed pages of boys’ stories about “rags to riches.” Perhaps the single most influential writer of the late nineteenth century was a small, slight, diffident man, cursed by ill health and blighted romances, named Horatio Alger, Jr., who wrote about heroes—economic heroes. Youngsters and oldsters totaling tens of millions devoured his 106 books and voluminous other writings. Rarely could it more properly be said of an author that to read one of his works was to read them all. Whether it was Ragged Dick—the first of Alger’s famous works—or Tony the Hero or Dan the Detective or Tattered Tom, whether the theme was Luck and Pluck or Strive and Succeed or Do and Dare or Brave and Bold or Paddle Your Own Canoe, Alger’s novels followed a set format: the boy-hero is born poor, leads an exemplary life, faces up to poverty, shows a lot of pluck, and ends up rich, though usually not very rich. Yet Alger often departed from the mythology of the self-made man. His heroes sometimes rise from the middle class, not from poverty; they seem to depend as much on luck as pluck; and his rich men are often not good people. More curiously, as Richard Huber pointed out, his heroes are not self-made men but self-made boys. And only one of his heroes, Tattered Tom, was a girl, and she a tomboy—probably a reflection both of the sexism of the time and of the near-certainty that Horatio Alger, Jr., was a homosexual.

Others besides Alger, most notably William Makepeace Thayer, wrote success books, and rags-to-riches stories appeared in magazines as well as paperbacks. The most notable of the success magazines was Munsey’s. Frank Munsey himself not only read and printed Alger’s stories, wrote the same kind himself, and put the Alger stamp on every issue, but, according to Theodore Greene, “lived all his life in the fictional world” of Alger. He spent his life in a feverish search for what he called “riches, power, the world, the great big world,” and after perilous ups and downs that matched those of any Alger hero, he did indeed reach the top. There, however, he bought, merged, killed, and trivialized so many newspapers as to earn the obituary notice from a later editor, William Allen White: “Frank Munsey contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer and the manners of an undertaker.… May he rest in trust.”

Young would-be heroes did not even need to wait to read books and magazines. Many of their schoolteachers shared the same ethic. And staring at them from the early pages of the McGuffey Reader were the lines:

… If you find your task is hard,

Try, Try Again!

Time will bring you your reward,

Try, Try Again;

All that other folks can do,

Why, with patience, should not you: Only keep this rule in view;

Try, Try Again.

No one in America exemplified Horatio Alger’s type of hero better than Andrew Carnegie. He rose from near-poverty to enormous riches; he was industrious, neat, frugal, honest, lucky, and plucky; he was probably the biggest individual success of the late nineteenth century. And, by a fittingness all too rare in history, he was of all America’s great men the leading disciple of Herbert Spencer. “Before Spencer, all for me had been darkness,” Carnegie liked to say; “after him, all had become light—and right.” To Carnegie and many others, Spencer was the “master.”

People wondered when the master might visit the United States. A hypochondriac, Spencer had an aversion both to travel and to noisy adulation. He finally responded to the entreaties less of Carnegie than of his American publishers and his mass of American champions, who far surpassed his British devotees in both numbers and enthusiasm. He made the crossing in August 1882 on one of the finest Cunarders. By the time Spencer had been escorted by enthusiastic friends to Pittsburgh—where, despite a personal tour by Carnegie, he found the steel works stifling and the city repulsive—and then to a dozen other stops, he was physically exhausted and emotionally in a funk about the planned climax of the trip, a banquet at Delmonico’s where he was to be main speaker and guest of honor.

On the evening of November 9, 1882, a stream of broughams and victorias and daumonts dropped their passengers in front of the wide entrances of Delmonico’s, the most fashionable restaurant in Manhattan, at Fifth Avenue and 26th Street. In its banquet hall were gathering over 150 of the most distinguished men in America: political leaders like Carl Schurz and ex-Secretary of State William M. Evarts, intellectual celebrities such as Sumner and John Fiske, religious luminaries such as Lyman Abbott and Henry Ward Beecher, publishers including the Appletons, university presidents, a brace of business leaders. Carnegie himself escorted Spencer to the dinner and delivered him over to the head table. Spencer made clear that he was too exhausted for small talk.

When at 9:30 the bounteous meal was over, chairs pulled back, and cigars lighted, the distinguished audience was in for some surprises. Spencer, pulling himself together, spoke not on Social Darwinism but, rather, chided American businessmen that they worked too hard, passed their “damaged constitutions” on to their children, even started to turn gray ten years before their English counterparts did. Life was not for working but working for life, he said. Nor did the other speakers follow the Social Darwinist script. As Joseph Wall pointed out, “Schurz stressed Spencer’s moral and ethical probity, Carnegie stressed Spencer’s detestation of the military, Fiske announced that Spencer had contributed as much to religion as he had to science, while Henry Ward Beecher, carried away with his own rolling oratory, told the startled Spencer that they would meet once again beyond the grave in that great banquet hall in Heaven.” It was almost midnight and the air was dense with cigar smoke by the time Beecher rose to speak, but the world-famous pulpitarian spoke so brilliantly on the reconciliation of evolution and religion that men stood roaring their approval and waving their handkerchiefs at the conclusion.

Little had been said that clarified the tenets of Social Darwinism. Perhaps it was not necessary. The hardheaded businessmen there knew what they believed—in the gospel of rugged individualism in general but in countless exceptions in practice. Carnegie would go on venerating Spencer and favoring tariffs. Other industrialists would favor competition in general but not in their own fields of business. They believed in economic individualism but also in corporate, collective capitalism. Many a man of public affairs there wanted laissez-faire, except when it hurt the rich—or himself.

The delightful confusion of the evening was well expressed by Beecher during his remarks: “I had just as lief be descended from a monkey,” said he, turning to Spencer, “if I have descended far enough.”

The Bitch-Goddess Success

Hardly three weeks earlier, a quite different group of men had gathered at Delmonico’s to honor a man who was neither a captain of industry nor a world-famous intellectual, but a journalist: Henry George. Compared to Spencer’s hosts, the hundred or so men who lined up to greet George were a motley crowd, reflecting the vigorous and variegated mind of Gotham. Here were Perry Belmont, congressman and son of a longtime head of the national Democratic party; Felix Adler of the Ethical Culture Society; Thomas Kinsella, editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and educational reformer; Roger Atkinson Pryor, Confederate soldier-politician turned Manhattan lawyer; David G. Croly, modernist editor who had actually spoken for miscegenation; Thomas G. Shearman, corporation lawyer, tax reformer, and defender of Henry Ward Beecher against charges of adultery; and the ubiquitous Beecher himself.

The apolitical Delmonico’s did itself proud as usual, providing twenty-eight items of food and drink. The lion of the occasion hardly looked the part, with his slight build and scuffed shoes; but Henry George’s editorial growls had sounded across the Western world. He had indeed shown the kind of spunk and competitive drive that Spencer and Alger alike would have admired. Young George had left his middle-class home and school at thirteen to serve as an errand boy in a Philadelphia importing firm, then shipped out on long sea voyages as foremast boy. Between trips, a typesetting job drew him into the world of publishers and journalists. He drank deeply of his travel experiences—the life of the common sailor before the mast, the scramble for land in California, the horrifying contrast of wealth and poverty in Calcutta and New York. A voracious reader, he ranged through the works of French physiocrats and English classicists, American Whigs and Jeffersonians, religious prophets and radical intellectuals. For years, he lived hand to mouth as a California newspaper writer, shifting restlessly from job to job while he pursued his own success ethic—even as, opinionated and cantankerous, he quarreled incessantly with bosses and fellow workers.

It was in the yeasty economic and journalistic milieus of California that George grappled with the problem of poverty. He himself was so down-and-out at one point, with a half-starved wife and child at home, that he accosted the first prosperous-looking man he saw on the street and asked him desperately for five dollars, which the stranger gave him; if he had not, George said later, he was ready to knock the man down. But soon in a series of newspaper articles and finally in Progress and Poverty, he propounded his long-fermenting ideas: that the ownership of land brings control over society; that every man has a natural “labor right” to land; that when he rents privately held land from others he is robbed of some of that labor right; that the solution is to regain the public right to rent through a single tax on land.

Man’s right to himself, and to what he produced, George said, was accepted. “But man has also another right, declared by the fact of his existence—the right to the use of so much of the free gifts of nature as may be necessary to supply all the wants of that existence, and which he may use without interfering with the equal rights of anyone else; and to this he has a title as against all the world.”

Recognition came to George only after he had moved back to New York and then traveled abroad. In England, he met the socialist H. M. Hyndman; Helen Taylor, the stepdaughter of the late John Stuart Mill; the political reformer John Bright; the rising radical Joseph Chamberlain. He did not meet Karl Marx. Highly sympathetic to the Irish cause, George hobnobbed with the leaders of the Irish Land League, who were in turn entranced by his views on land. His fame soared at home and abroad when he was arrested during a trip to Ireland; indeed, so many American Irish leaders attended the Delmonico’s banquet that at least one of the diners thought they were welcoming a fiery rebel from Ireland.

George was perhaps the most arresting of a number of journalists whose ideas were agitating American opinion during the 1880s. Another inciter was Edward Bellamy, a struggling young editor who was beginning to taste success and fame during that decade of intellectual excitement. Raised in a western Massachusetts textile town, Bellamy attended Union College for a year, traveled abroad, studied law, worked for a time for the noted Springfield Union and the equally noted New York Evening Post, and then with his brother founded the Springfield Daily News. More and more drawn to social and political problems, Bellamy began publication in a country paper of The Duke of Stockbridge, a fictional treatment of Shays’s Rebellion. He had several more works of historical fiction to his credit by the time, in 1888, he published Looking Backward, which embodied an effort, he said later, to “reason out a method of economic organization” by which the republic might guarantee its citizens’ welfare “on a basis of equality corresponding to and supplementing their political equality.”

The story of Julian West, a young Boston millionaire who fell asleep in 1887 and awoke in 2000, the novel pictured through his eyes an orderly, affluent, egalitarian, rational Boston of 2000, in contrast with the cruel, class-ridden, and altogether bleak city of the late nineteenth century. The novel gained in force from powerful metaphors—notably of capitalism as a prodigious coach pulled uphill by “masses of humanity” driven by hunger, and crowded on top by travelers who called down to the toilers, urging patience and hinting at possible compensation in the next world—and remarkable prophecies, including music piped into drawing rooms (by telephone) according to published programs. But mainly the book gained from its portrait of a new world in which equitable “credit cards”—Bellamy’s term—had taken the place of money, a Boston without taxes or army or navy, without lawyers or law schools, a utopia of hierarchy and harmony and benign regimentation, in which women as well as men enjoyed liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Looking Backward was an instant hit. Not only did it sell by the tens of thousands, achieving finally a total sale of one million, but it produced a rash of Bellamy clubs formed to discuss the book and its implications. A decade later Bellamy wrote a sequel, Equality. Again the force of Bellamy’s ideas overcame his heavy dialogue. At the start of Equality, Julian West’s sweetheart Edith battered him with a cross-examination that Bellamy’s hero could not bear.

She couldn’t understand, said twenty-first-century Edith of nineteenth-century Boston, the gap between people’s pretensions then and the “shockingly unequal conditions of the people, the contrasts of waste and want, the pride and power of the rich, the abjectness and servitude of the poor, and all the rest of the dreadful story.”

“It is doubtful,” Julian acknowledged, “if there was ever a greater disparity between the conditions of different classes than you would find in a half hour’s walk in Boston, New York, Chicago, or any other great city of America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.”

“And yet,” says Edith, “it appears from all the books that meanwhile the Americans’ great boast was that they differed from all other and former nations in that they were free and equal. One is constantly coming across this phrase in the literature of the day.…”

They were supposedly equal before the law, Julian said, but he had to admit that in fact rich and poor were not. But they were equal in “opportunities.” Edith leaped on this. It seemed, she said, that they all had an equal chance to make themselves unequal. Was there any way in which people were equal?

“Yes, there was,” says Julian. “They were political equals. They all had one vote alike, and the majority was the supreme law-giver.”

Then, asked Edith, why did not a majority of the poor put an end to their inequalities?

“Because,” says Julian, “they were taught and believed that the regulation of industry and commerce and the production and distribution of wealth was something wholly outside of the proper province of government.”

Then, asked Edith, “if the people did not think that they could trust themselves to regulate their own industry and the distribution of the product, to whom did they leave the responsibility?”

“To the capitalists.”

“And did the people elect the capitalists?”

“Nobody elected them.”

“By whom, then, were they appointed?”

“Nobody appointed them.”

“What a singular system!” To whom then were the capitalists accountable?

They were accountable to nothing but their consciences, said Julian.

“Their consciences! Ah, I see!” In the end she forced Julian to grant that the people surrendered their power to capitalists in the name of “individual liberty,” that they did not obtain such liberty, that capitalists used the government to quell the “quenchless blaze” of “greed and envy, fear, lust, hate, revenge, and every foul passion” of the poor and of the degraded “outcasts.” And he admitted that the capitalists controlled the political as well as the economic government by buying votes with money and with “fireworks, oratory, processions, brass bands, barbecues,” and the like. And the worst thing, Julian admitted, was that the poor were kept in such degradation as to be “not morally any better than the rich.”

Rivaling George and Bellamy in the force of his protest against capitalism was still another journalist, Henry Demarest Lloyd. Brought up in a New York City family of radical Democratic sympathies, young Lloyd had plunged into the world of free traders, civil service reform, and anti-monopoly on his graduation from Columbia College in 1869. Hired by the Chicago Tribune as an editorialist, he moved steadily beyond political liberalism to a social radicalism that called for profound changes in the capitalistic system. In his writings, culminating in Wealth Against Commonwealth in 1894, he critically analyzed railroads and other corporations and championed small businessmen, consumers, and workers, including striking trade unionists. His repeated calls for social justice and his attacks on monopoly—especially the Standard Oil monopoly—brought him into virtually a personal confrontation with John D. Rockefeller.

Lloyd’s power lay less in his ideas, which were not especially original, than in the analysis that supported them. Like a good journalist, he pored through the records of court and legislative investigations of great corporations, and conducted on-the-spot investigations of conditions of coal miners. An activist, he helped organize Milwaukee streetcar workers, and he succeeded in gaining commutation of the death sentence of convicted “anarchists.” Unlike certain other radicals, Lloyd would not trade liberty for equality. He “insisted that the rehabilitation of individual and economic liberty so essential to further democratic advances,” according to Chester Destler, “must result from the progressive, experimental harmonization of individualism with social cooperation.” For Lloyd, individual liberty was both means and end.

Lloyd the social reformer, Bellamy the utopian, George the single-taxer—these were men of highly diverse personalities but also of striking similarities. Though men of ideas, they were not academic scholars; rather, they were largely self-taught, drawing their learning from books, experiences, and travels, especially their journeys to a Britain itself undergoing rapid social change. They came from deeply religious families. All three rose to success in the fiercely competitive world of American journalism. The lives of all three would become entangled in the climactic events of the 1890s. But what most typified them was what most divided them—their diverse solutions to the ills of capitalism and their largely separate followings.

Fundamentally, they disagreed with one another. George saw Looking Backward as building a “castle in the air” but also tending toward governmental paternalism. The youthful Lloyd called George a “quack” and dismissed Bellamy as too utopian. For his part, Bellamy felt that George’s notion of nationalizing land first, rather than last, would antagonize so many interests at the start as to jeopardize any major reform. Bellamy must have known that Lloyd had little regard for Looking Backward and for Bellamy’s creed of “Nationalism” and following of “Nationalists.”

“Mr. George,” Bellamy asked when the two happened to meet at a dinner, “why are you not a Nationalist?”

“Because I am an individualist,” George replied.

“I am a Nationalist,” said Bellamy, “because I am an individualist.”

Each of these thinkers had his own following as well as ideas: George’s single-taxers, Bellamy’s nationalists, Lloyd’s trade unionists. Each was a kind of politico of protest as well as entrepreneur of ideas. Each operated on his own success ethic. Nor did any of the three ground himself in doctrines of Marxist socialism that had a common foundation. Bellamy saw the word socialist as suggesting “the red flag with all manner of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion.” Marxists viewed Bellamy as a utopian, always a dangerous breed of reformer. To George, Marx was the “prince of muddleheads.” Marx put down Progress and Poverty as an effort to save capitalism and George as “utterly backward” as a theorist. Lloyd rejected Marxist “determinism” and felt that the labor theory of value had too many exceptions.

Thus the social rebels argued and divided. Nor were other voices more united. Washington Gladden, Congregational pastor and shaper of the new “social gospel,” favored trade unionism and public ownership of utilities but rejected socialism in favor of Christian compassion, love of justice, and social service. Ignatius Donnelly deserted conservative Republicanism to write a book proving the existence of a lost Atlantis, a second work contending that the earth had collided with a giant comet, a third demonstrating that Francis Bacon had written the works of Shakespeare, and a fourth—Caesar’s Column—that rivaled Looking Backward in theme and popularity. Then there were the communitarians—especially the Shakers—who wanted local reform but feared the grand national experiments of Bellamy and the rest. Their intellectual godfather, the Englishman William Morris, called Looking Backward a “horrible Cockney dream.”

Once upon a time, New England could have been depended on to focus the nation’s intellectual concerns, to reinvigorate its founding ideas and ideals, to turn the needle of its moral compass to true north. And indeed, for a time after the Civil War, Boston at least opened up shop again for its old intellectual business. Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, and the literary giants of the past still adorned the drawing rooms of Beacon Hill and tramped the paths of Harvard Yard. Not only did Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes once again preside as the “autocrat of the breakfast table,” but he and the giants and lesser luminaries still might converse at length—sometimes for eight hours straight over a long dinner—at the Saturday Club, without any lag or lapse in the brilliance of the discourse.

Yet, if New England was not “in decay,” it was clearly slipping into a long and languid Indian summer. Of Thoreauian Utopianism and Enlightenment vagaries and frontier bumptiousness it had had enough, Vernon Parrington wrote, “and so it turned back lovingly to the culture of earlier times and drew comfort from a dignified Federalism—enriched now by a mellow Harvard scholarship that was on intimate terms with Dante and Chaucer and Cervantes and Shakespeare—a Federalism that fitted the dignified Brahmin genius as comfortably as an old shoe.” The years of its intellectual leadership were coming to an end. Boston, said Henry Adams, had stopped believing in itself.

Once supremely creative, New Englanders now concentrated on remembering, recording, observing—and criticizing. Mark Twain, as he was about to lecture before a Boston audience for the first time, described his prospective listeners as “4000 critics.”

Above all, the spirit of reform seemed to be dying. Compared to the transcending and transforming issues of the past, the new ones—currency, tariffs, the debt, railroad land grants—seemed at once crass and complex. To the “terrible simplifiers” of New England, slavery had seemed a clear as well as a compelling issue; now, corruption and patronage offered less delectable indignation to the Puritan conscience. “Most of the old reformers were exhausted,” Van Wyck Brooks concluded. “They had no energy left for fresh campaigns, although Boston, prolific in causes, swarmed with friends of progress and new reformers rose with other movements, the cause of peace, the cause of woman’s suffrage, dietary reform and Darwinism, the cause of the short-skirts league and the short-haired woman who amused profane New York for a generation.”

In some, nonetheless, the old flame of reform still burned. The magnificent Wendell Phillips, who had braved the mobs of old in his bitter attacks on slavery, now hurled his moral thunderbolts in support of penal reform, prohibition, woman’s suffrage, the labor movement, justice to Indians. Elizabeth Peabody—onetime pupil of Emerson, longtime secretary and amanuensis of William Ellery Channing, sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and of Horace Mann, a founder of the Brook Farm community— embraced a variety of reforms, from education to Indian rights. Nor could any cause be launched, from peace or suffrage to pure milk for babies, without Julia Ward Howe, of “Battle Hymn” fame, and her husband Samuel. Boston had its cynics, too. Charles A. Dana, once a devotee of the renowned utopian experiment Brook Farm, was becoming a foe of civil-service purification and everything else reformers seemed to believe in. And had Brook Farm itself not been used as a Union army camp during the war?

For a decade or so after that war, Boston served as a place where the older, moneyed “men of letters” lingered, passing on their intellectual heritage and political ideas to younger men who would spend most of their lives in retreat from New England. Perhaps the most noted of these was the young Harvard historian Henry Adams. As bald, high-domed, and stocky as his illustrious President-ancestors, Henry, like his brothers Charles and Brooks, had to adjust his eighteenth-century heritage of intellectual independence and rocklike integrity to the realities of late nineteenth-century capitalism. Unlike Charles, who had ventured into that world and retreated from it in bitterness against the moneymaking, “bargaining crowd,” Henry had backed off from the start. At Harvard he taught medieval history, lecturing reluctantly to large classes that he tried to drive away, he boasted, with “foul and abusive” language. Leaving Cambridge for Washington in the late seventies, he retreated in his historical work to the Federalist-Jefferson era, while narrowly eyeing contemporary politicians in the nation’s capital; and in later years, amid much travel abroad, he retreated again, and most creatively, to the world of the twelfth century and its great cathedrals.

All the while, he possessed an intense and morbid interest in politics, in power. Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, the heroine of his novel Democracy, wanted not merely an understanding of the source and mechanics of power; what “she wanted,” Adams writes, “is POWER” itself. Adams himself wanted more than power—he wanted an intellectual comprehension, which of course might command power. He explored the great dualisms—morality and power, politics and statesmanship, the pastoral and the industrial, science and religion, the individual and the democratic mass, material progress and moral decline. Above all, he turned away from the multiplicity and volatility and materialism of the world in which he lived, for the harmony and stability, the maternal love and cathedral serenity of the glory days of Chartres and Mont-Saint-Michel. His choice was certain: the Virgin over the Dynamo.

Henry James did not reject the multiplicity of American types—indeed, he lived off it—but he too fled Cambridge after a dozen years, much interrupted by travel, of writing reviews and stories for the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly. Drawn to Europe since his boyhood journeys there, he was relieved to desert America—its excessive egalitarianism that diluted individuality, the “flatness” of its democracy, the vulgarities of the Gilded Age, the materialism of the rich, the “bitch-goddess success.” Nor did he miss Boston, or, especially, its reformers; he caused a flap in the Athens of America when, in The Bostonians, he appeared to lampoon Elizabeth Peabody with a character, Miss Birdseye, whom he judged a humorless, confused, credulous, discursive old woman. Yet Parrington’s later assessment has stood up: James “was concerned only with nuances. He lived in a world of fine gradations and imperceptible shades.” At his best, he was “pragmatizing,” as James later said, even before his brother William explained this “way of thinking.” But neither from Boston nor London did Henry James discern the “figure in the carpet” of the American experiment.

The void left in New England by these writers—and by countless others of the “best and brightest,” in John Hay’s words, who left for Michigan copper lodes or California gold mines or Pittsburgh steel works—was not redressed in any other region. New England indeed continued to influence intellectual life across the nation because of the heritage of Emerson, Hawthorne, & co., and because of the migration of its sons and daughters to other parts. As a publishing center, Boston could still reach into the hinterlands. William Dean Howells had come to Cambridge from a poor boyhood in Ohio via journalism and a campaign biography of Lincoln that helped bring a consulate in Venice, where he absorbed history and culture. He arrived in New England adoring Cambridge and all it stood for and, improbably, Cambridge loved this young man from the heartland—for his open, ingenuous manner, for his limpid writing and developing “realism,” and, not least, for his adoration of Cambridge. Adopted by the Brahmins and the whole Atlantic crowd, he quickly rose to its editorship.

Even so, Howells would leave Boston and the Atlantic after a decade and a half. Before doing so, however, he managed to open up the Atlantic to writers who otherwise might have been ignored by the Brahmins. One of these was Samuel L. Clemens, a former Mississippi pilot and California journalist who had first won note for a short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Howells accepted his reminiscences, “Old Times on the Mississippi,” the reception of which encouraged the narrator, Mark Twain, to go on to the exciting adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Jim on the river of American history.

For Twain, the great river was not history but life itself. She was indeed outside of history and of human control. She ran as she wished, changing course, moving villages from one side of the river to the other, following her natural freedom. Because the pilots were close to the river, Twain endowed them with mythical qualities: the pilots were childlike, brutish, spontaneous, and above all unfettered and independent.

The river was serene and beautiful, despite its occasional perils. “It was a monstrous big river down there—sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up.… The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t’other side; you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up way off, and warn’t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking.…”

Only man—especially his grasping, feuding, lynching representatives along the river—was vile: man and technology, whether guns or steamboats. Huck wishes to escape technology and regulation. He lights out for the Territory “because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” For him and for Jim, who is fleeing slavery, the raft means freedom. When the raft is smashed apart by a riverboat and when Huck discovers that Jim has been recaptured, the image of the river as freedom collides with that of society as cruel and confining. But Huck lives in that society, and when he is tempted to return Jim to slavery because he, Huck, must live by local rules and mores, “I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.” His decision for Jim’s liberty was a decision for his own—and for their equality and fraternity.

“NOTICE,” Twain proclaimed at the start of Huck, “Persons trying to find a motive, moral, or plot in this narrative would be, respectively, prosecuted, banished, or shot.” Twain in fact offered a motive in the desire for freedom, a moral in the curse of “sivilization,” a plot in the protection and eventual liberation of Jim. The book reflected Twain’s own hope for people’s liberation—a hope tempered by his realization that the currents of change, symbolized by Jim’s freedom on the river even as the raft floats deeper and deeper into the slave lands, are remorseless. With the passing years, Twain’s hopes for freedom and individuality dwindled as industrial “sivilization” advanced.

As the century neared its close, another novelist was exploring the external and internal forces that seemed to control human fate. Frank Norris’s McTeague pictured ordinary men and women caught and dragged down by their instinctual drives. Money plays a central role in that downfall. One character, overcome by her instinct for hoarding money, “makes love” to her gold coins. A dentist, told he can no longer practice because he lacks a license, degenerates into an animal run amok and murders his penny-pinching wife with his bare fists before he himself is trapped and killed in Death Valley.

In a more ambitious novel, The Octopus—the first of a planned trilogy entitled Epic of the Wheat—Norris moved to a wider canvas and drew a harsher portrait of society. The railroad is the villain. Impersonal and cold, it destroys anyone in its way. Popular rage against the California railroad culminates in the deaths of protesting farmers. The novel contrasts a rich man’s banquet and a starving mother and child. Wheat itself, though ample and life-giving, is impersonal and remorseless, literally engulfing and slaying a railroad functionary. Men are shot down, hearts broken, young girls “brought to a life of shame,” old women starved to death. “But the WHEAT remained,” a mighty world force, untouched, unassailable, indifferent, resistless.

Henry George and his fellow social critics, Henry Adams and the other intellectual legatees of the Brahmins, Twain and his fellow realists—what did they have in common? Nothing very definite or explicit. They differed not only in their answers but in their questions. But what comes through their writings, expressed in a diversity of ways, is a common repugnance to the materialism, acquisitiveness, competitiveness, the success ethic of the time—the very reverse of the ideals of Carnegie and Alger.

At the heart of the rising industrial force was the machine, and the machine that continued to symbolize both the great hopes and intrinsic evil of industrialism and urbanism was the railroad. Henry Adams’s brother Charles had been corrupted by it. The California wheat farmers were crushed by it. And Mark Twain’s steamboat had the soul of a locomotive when Huck heard her “pounding along,” not deviating an inch from her course, “looking like a black cloud with rows of glow-worms around it” and suddenly bulging out, “big and scary, with a long row of wide-open furnace doors shining like red-hot teeth, and her monstrous bows and guards hanging right over us.”

And then “she come smashing straight through the raft.”

“Toiling Millions Now Are Waking”

The voices of protest against mushrooming industrialism—the voices of reformers like George and Bellamy, of social critics like Adams and James, of radicals like Phillips and Peabody, of novelists like Twain and Norris—were even more mixed and diverse than those of the defenders of capitalism. Most of the critics themselves were of middle-class or even upper-class origin. Could a more coherent and unified voice arise from the workers themselves—from a class that was experiencing the ills of industrialism firsthand? From a class that needed both liberty and equality—needed freedom from the boss and the foreman and long hours and wage labor, needed more economic and social equality as well as political, needed equality of women with men and of blacks with whites?

Had not the Declaration of Independence promised both liberty and equality? The Declaration, declared Daniel De Leon, was the product of its age’s “experience and learning,” promising a “future of freedom” requiring the “collective society in America” to assume the “duty of guaranteeing to the individual a free field—EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY.” This kind of individual liberty—guaranteed to the individual by the state, rather than simply protected for the individual against the state—had a far more egalitarian and radical thrust than the individual liberty preached by the Social Darwinists.

Yet working-class unity of doctrine depended in large part on workers’ class-consciousness, which Marx and others found lacking in the United States. The American labor market, Marx said, was repeatedly emptied “by the continuous conversion of wages laborers into independent, self-sustaining peasants. The function of a wages laborer is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave in a longer or shorter term.” Others observed that the workers, like other Americans, were “infected” by Social Darwinism and domestic Algerism. And by the late 1860s the American working class itself was fundamentally divided between socialists calling for radical economic and political efforts to transform or replace capitalism, and trade unionists trying to improve their economic conditions within the existing system.

Orthodox Marxists expected that American workers would go through a period of trade unionism; then, bamboozled or broken by the bosses, the trade unions would convert into a socialist movement. Rather, the reverse happened. Militant socialism had its heyday during the seventies and eighties and then gave way to a bread-and-butter “business unionism” that was the bane of all good Marxist socialists.

To many Americans in these years, socialism was not a new idea. The communitarianism of Robert Owen and the futuristic utopianism of Charles Fourier had excited the avant-garde in the East and had helped stimulate the founding of socialistic and egalitarian communities, especially in western rural areas. In the East, socialist ideas had taken root among sections of the working class. Germans and other Europeans fleeing from the repressions after the unrest of ’48 had brought radical ideas across the Atlantic. By the 1870s, German socialists and trade unionists, swelled by arrivals now escaping from Bismarck’s antisocialist laws, were organizing “Educational and Defensive” associations to protect themselves against police and employer repression.

European radicals brought a good deal of experience and sophistication to American socialism, but they tended to be hopelessly divided over philosophy and doctrine. Marx and Engels transferred the International Workingmen’s Association from London to New York in 1872, not to find richer proletarian soil but to kill it off, for the first International had become, in their view, fatally infected with Bakuninist anarchism. Marxian socialists, under the leadership of Marx’s American lieutenant, Friedrich Sorge, pursued two political strategies, forming the Socialist-Labor party in 1877 but also operating through sections of the trade union movement, notably Adolph Strasser’s cigar-makers. Both Marxists and anarchists in turn jousted with Lasallean Socialists, followers of the great German revolutionary and romantic, who had been killed in a duel over a love affair in 1864 but whose belief in political action profoundly influenced his German-American followers.

In the tiny cauldrons of left-wing dispute, in the saloons and beer gardens and union halls of Chicago and St. Louis, of New York and Cincinnati and a dozen other cities, Marxist ideas collided and coalesced with these and other rival doctrines. Not only did Marxists compete with bread-and-butter trade unionists, with communitarians pursuing their dreams of brotherhood and sisterhood, with populists seeking relief for farmers, with native-grown socialists, with evangelical radicals, syndicalists, utopians of every hue, but these rival groups also divided among themselves over means if not ends—over political action versus economic, peaceful tactics versus violent, third-party tactics versus major-party collaboration, over internal organization and external propaganda, over questions of timing, leadership, money, secrecy, discipline.

Not only did many socialist battalions tend to be dominated by their talented German chieftains, thus alienating Irish, native Americans, and other groups, but they also attracted cranks, fanatics, charlatans, and polemicists. Doubtless the controversial Woodhull sisters were hardly socialism’s greatest asset in the early seventies, though they had earned their salt by publishing in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, for the first time in the United States, the Communist Manifesto. But socialism at this point scarcely needed the nostrums spouting from their editorial page—Pantocracy (universal government), Universology (universal science), Alwatol (universal language), cooperation of the Spirit-World with the Mundane Sphere, and “The Universal Formula of Universological Science—UNISM, DUISM and TRUISM.”

During these years, thousands of American workers were pursuing a dream of their own—organization into one great national union that could face powerful corporations on its own terms. In the late 1860s, fearing both the concerted opposition of employers and the competition of immigrants, leaders of machinists, carpenters, and other national brotherhoods organized the National Labor Union, which focused on local producers’ cooperatives and on national political action. The NLU helped win the eight-hour day in several states and for federal government laborers and mechanics. In 1872, the NLU had the audacity to convert itself into the National Labor Reform party and even to nominate Judge David Davis, Lincoln’s old crony, for President; Davis’s withdrawal doomed both the union and the party.

Labor organization, especially national, was still fixed in an old pattern: trade unionism—especially “business” unionism—seemed to thrive during good times, and then collapse in the face of depression as union members faded away along with their jobs. Many socialists, Marxists or otherwise, not only expected this but welcomed it, for workers must learn not to be so dependent on capitalism. Indeed, let “wage slavery” go on, they urged, let it expand so far as to leave wealth to “only two or three capitalists out of the millions of workers,” and then a large and united workers’ movement would take over. But most of the millions of workers preferred bread-and-butter unionism, step-by-step improvement.

The socialist strategy met a sharp testing in the mid-seventies. Only nine of thirty national unions survived the panic-induced depression of ’73; union membership was decimated, reaching a low point of 50,000 members in 1878. The aftermath was not an enlarged and united socialist movement turning to political action in order to transform society, but despair, demoralization, unrest, protest, violence, and terrorism. In Pennsylvania the “Molly Maguires,” an outgrowth of the anti-landlord Ancient Order of Hibernians in Ireland, terrorized the coalfields, systematically killing railroad bosses who ran the mines. Then, in 1877, wage cuts on the Baltimore & Ohio, the Pennsylvania, the New York Central, and other railroads brought a phenomenon few had expected in the United States— a “general strike” of railroad and other workers. As violence spread across the nation’s railways, America for a time seemed on the brink of revolution. Railroad strikers and others seized junctions and depots, burned hundreds of freight cars, looted stores, exchanged fire with troops, even tried to stop a militia regiment in Baltimore from sallying forth from its armory.

The response was quick and harsh. Federal troops crushed the strike in Pittsburgh, after twenty-six persons had been killed. The army “restored order” in Martinsburg, West Virginia. State legislatures revived their old anti-strike laws. Found guilty of murder on the testimony of a secret Pinkerton infiltrator, ten Molly Maguires were hanged. Capitalists of diverse views seemed to unite against labor. Earlier, when railroad engineers had struck the Boston & Maine, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., had called for decent wages and conditions for railroad workers, but since the lines were public utilities, he wanted strikes to be outlawed and militant strikers fined and jailed.

Then, out of this suffering and violence, there developed perhaps the grandest effort American workers ever made to build a nationwide union, militant yet responsible. It was an organization that called itself noble—the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor. Founded as a clandestine society at a tailors’ meeting in Philadelphia in 1871, the Knights shed their secrecy a decade later, opening their ranks to skilled and unskilled, men and women, immigrants and blacks—to all except saloon-keepers, gamblers, stockbrokers, bankers, lawyers, and doctors. Organized into local and district assemblies embracing workers of diverse crafts and skills, the Knights were a highly centralized but democratic organization, with their assemblies made responsible to the general executive board and to the Grand Master Workman. At last workers had “one big union.”

The Knights, responding to a deep economic and psychological need among workers, rose like a meteor from about 100,000 members in 1885 to almost 700,000 a year later. Under its longtime Grand Master, Terence V. Powderly—“part idealist, part politician, part mountebank,” in John Garraty’s view—the Knights favored the eight-hour day, the graduated income tax, prohibition of imported contract labor, consumers’ and producers’ cooperatives, an end to the monopoly power of railroads and banks. Officially the Knights were opposed to labor violence, class conflict, and socialism. “I hate the word ‘class,’” Powderly said, “and would drive it from the English language if I could.” But their language was often radical and their songs militant:

Toiling millions now are waking—

See them marching on;

All the tyrants now are shaking,

Ere their power’s gone.

Chorus: Storm the fort, ye Knights of Labor.

Battle for your cause;

Equal rights for every neighbor—

Down with tyrant laws!

While Powderly was still preaching cooperation, education, and reform, workers within the Knights of Labor and outside began striking in response to depression wage cuts and other ills. Thousands of unorganized workers walked off their jobs and joined the Knights. In the “great upheaval” of 1884, railroad union locals struck the whole southwestern system, controlled by Jay Gould. After the governors of both Missouri and Kansas backed up the strikers, Gould retreated. Wounding this capitalist dragon emboldened thousands more workers to join the noble order.

As the Knights of Labor burgeoned in numbers, however, it slackened in discipline. More strikes broke out, beyond the control of the Grand Worthies now running the organization. The Knights’ decline seemed as fleet as a falling star. In the fateful year of 1886, the Knights again struck the “blood-sucking corporations” of Gould’s southwestern system, only to give up the effort, amid violence and arrests, when the financier refused even to arbitrate. A general strike in Chicago for the eight-hour day collapsed. And the Knights suffered from the public hysteria following an incident in Chicago during the general strike.

This was the Haymarket Massacre. In origin it had nothing to do with the Knights, and involved a strike at the McCormick Harvester plant begun months before the general strike. After a violent clash at McCormick’s, a small group of anarchist revolutionaries put out a flammable circular in English and German charging that “your masters sent out their bloodhounds—the police—they killed six of your brothers” (one had been killed) and calling for a protest meeting in Haymarket Square. The much-advertised “revenge” meeting was a flop: the crowd was disappointingly low, the speeches turgid, the weather rainy. The last speaker, his beard dripping, had just told the few hundred people still lingering that his was the last speech and “then we’ll all go home,” when a phalanx of 180 policemen swung into the square. Their captain ordered the crowd to “peaceably disperse.” “Why, Captain,” said the speaker, “we are peaceable.”

There was a moment of tense silence, then a bomb burst among the police. Amid their dead and stricken comrades, the police re-formed ranks and opened fire on the crowd; workers fired back, then dragged their dead and wounded to friends’ homes. Seven policemen died, seventy more were wounded, workers’ casualties could never be calculated but doubtless were higher. Later, eight alleged anarchists were convicted on the charge of conspiracy and four were hanged.

1886 was a decisive year for American labor. Although the Chicago Knights of Labor denied any sympathy or connection with the “cowardly murderers” who had caused riot and bloodshed, the whole organization was tainted and its decline began. The battle brought the first major “red scare” in American history. It led some workers to abandon force, turned others into ardent revolutionaries. It created, in Henry David’s view, “America’s first revolutionary martyrs.” Reactions to Haymarket brought the drive for the eight-hour day temporarily to a halt.

1886 was also the year in which a whole new national labor organization was founded, an old economic and political strategy revitalized and broadened, and the socialist and other radical trade unions outflanked.

The American Federation of Labor was founded in December 1886 in Columbus, Ohio, by twenty-five labor groups representing perhaps 150,000 members, mostly skilled workers. Its origin lay in a remarkable craft union, the Cigarmakers’ International, which numbered many Germans of the “old schools,” both socialist and unionist. In part because the cigar-makers had to face new technology, such as cigar molds and bunch-breaking machines, that threatened their jobs, in part because they lived amid philosophical debate and indeed liked to make their cigars while someone read aloud from the classics, this union had to face all the urgent questions of organization, discipline, centralization, political action, craft exclusiveness that had challenged trade unionism from the start. Arguing bitterly, some stuck to their craft union, some joined the Knights of Labor. The cigar-makers were lucky to have leaders able intellectually to meet this challenge.

One of them was Adolph Strasser, a Hungarian immigrant who had proved a resourceful organizer of New York City cigar-makers. Strasser was all practicality, which he defined as advancing the interests of cigar-makers through patient negotiation, limited goals, and ample union benefits such as insurance. At a Senate committee hearing in 1883 on labor-capital relations a senator asked him:

“Do you not contemplate, in the end, the participation of all labor and of all men in the benefits of trades unions?”

“Our organization does not consist of idealists,” Strasser answered. “We do not control the production of the world. That is controlled by the employers. I look first to cigars.”

“I was only asking you in regard to your ultimate ends,” the senator persisted.

“We have no ultimate ends. We are going on from day to day. We are fighting only for immediate objects—objects that can be realized in a few years.”

At first, Samuel Gompers too looked only to cigars. Born in a London tenement in 1850, the son of a Jewish cigar-maker, at thirteen he had emigrated with his family to New York’s Lower East Side, where he and his father resumed cigar-making. Breathing in the heady New York atmosphere, he attended lectures at Cooper Union, read aloud, listened, and argued in the cigar-makers’ workrooms. At first, Gompers spouted “wild plans for human betterment,” as he recalled much later, but on the advice of a former Marxist who told him, “Study your union card, Sam, and if the idea doesn’t square with that, it ain’t true,” he veered toward business unionism. Chosen head of his local, he, with Strasser, centralized control, boosted membership dues, and organized unemployment, strike, sickness, and accident benefits.

It was these ideas that Gompers carried into the organization of a new national federation. A sturdy, outspoken man of inexhaustible enthusiasm and energy, he articulated better than any of his comrades the philosophy of pragmatic labor organization and action. He wanted practical results: wages, hours, safety, benefits. From such advances, workers could progress further in economic and moral education and in their understanding of ultimate ends. The first step was to improve conditions of work and life. “The more the improved conditions prevail, the greater discontent prevails with any wrongs that may exist. It is only … the enlightenment begotten from material prosperity that makes it at all possible for mental advancement.” This idea sharply separated Gompers’s strategy from the Marxists’.

Gompers, indeed, was almost a neo-Social Darwinist in his ideology. He accepted industrialization and free enterprise. Capitalism was progress, and profits were necessary to capitalism. As corporations and trusts gained more power, labor must do the same—through solidly based organization. In the organization of business unions, Gompers believed that, in order to protect the adult male wage, unskilled as well as skilled, women as well as men, blacks as well as whites, ought to take part, though on a subordinate basis. These were “practical” views, for he believed not that blacks were equal to whites but that they could take over white jobs and hence must be organized. The same applied to women and immigrants. All this was crucial to the ability of organized labor to compete with organized capital.

He was far more cautious in regard to political action. He fought off any involvement of the AFL with socialist parties, preferring to deal with the major parties on the basis of expediency. He gave clear priority to economic action over political. Workers should expect little from the government. “The only desirable legislation for the workers,” as a group of scholars later summarized Gompers’s and the AFL’s position, “is that which offers protection to their labor market by restriction of immigration, and which restrains government activities, such as the courts and police, from encroaching upon or hampering such union activities as strikes, picketing, and boycotts. The workers ought not to demand more positive legislation from the government…. Therefore such legislation as they need can be obtained more readily by opposing or supporting candidates of the two large parties rather than by organizing a separate labor party.” Above all, no long-range, visionary programs or tactics should be used. Government hands-off—broker politics—gradual betterment: this was Gompers’s and Strasser’s response to the Social Darwinism of the day; this was their own Social Darwinism. During the capitalist boom, it was an idea that seemed to work. While the Knights declined in leaps and bounds, the AFL moved ahead in numbers as slowly—and as steadily—as the tortoise. Its tests would come with hard times and in a political situation in which both “large parties” were conservative, and labor might have to look for allies on the left. By the late 1880s, such a potential ally seemed to be rising in America’s South and West.

The Alliance: A Democracy of Leaders

Somewhere in central Texas, sometime in the late eighties:

In the twilight splendor of the Plains, men and women march along dusty trails toward the glow of a campfire in the distance. Some walk; some ride horses or burros; some—whole families—jolt along on covered wagons or buckboards. With their creased, careworn faces, their poor gingham clothes, they might seem to be one more trek in the great western movement of American homesteaders. But not so. These people walk with hope and pride—even with exhilaration as they reach a hillcrest and see stretching for miles ahead and behind thousands of people marching with them, hundreds of wagons emblazoned with crude signs and banners. Soon they reach their encampment, not to settle down for the night but, in company with five or ten thousand comrades, to hear fiery speeches late into the evening.

These people will be part of an arresting venture in popular grass-roots democracy, part of the “flowering of the largest democratic mass movement in American history,” in Lawrence Goodwyn’s judgment. Ultimately they will fail—but not until they have given the nation an experiment in democratic ideas, creative leadership and followership, and comradely cooperation.

At first on the Texas frontier but soon in the South and Midwest, farmers in the mid-1880s collectively sensed that something was terribly wrong. In the South, farmers white and black were shackled by the crop lien system and the plummeting price of cotton. In the West, homesteaders were losing their mortgaged homes. Grain prices fell so low that Kansas farm families burned corn for heat. Everywhere farmers suffered from a contracting currency, heavy taxation, and gouging by railroads and other monopolies. As farmers perceived the “money power” buying elections and public officials in order to pass class legislation, some agrarian leaders and editors wondered if the farm areas trembled on the brink of revolution.

The crop lien system, tight money, and the rest of the farmers’ ills—these seemed remote and impersonal to many an eastern city dweller. But for countless Southern cotton farmers “crop lien” set the conditions of their existence.

It meant walking into the store of the “furnishing merchant,” approaching the counter with head down and perhaps hat in hand, and murmuring a list of needs. It meant paying “the man” no money but watching him list items and figures in a big ledger. It meant returning month after month for these mumbled exchanges, as the list of debts grew longer. It meant, as noted earlier, that the farmer brought in the produce from his long year’s hard labor, watched his cotton weighed and sold, and then learned that the figures in the ledger, often with enormously inflated interest, added up to more than his crop was worth—but that the merchant would carry him into the next year if he signed a note mortgaging his next year’s crop to the merchant. It meant returning home for another year’s toil, knowing that he might lose his spread and join the army of landless tenant farmers. From start to finish it meant fear, self-abasing deference, hatred of self and others.

Above all, the system meant loss of liberty, as the farmer became shackled to one crop and one merchant—loss of liberty for men and women raised in the Jeffersonian tradition of individual freedom in a decentralized agrarian republic, in the Jacksonian tradition of equality of opportunity in a land free of usurious banks and grasping monopolies. Their forefathers had fought for independence; was a second American revolution needed to overthrow a new, an economic, monarchy? “Laboring men of America,” proclaimed a tract, the voices of 1776 “ring down through the corridors of time and tell you to strike” against the “monopolies and combinations that are eating out the heart of the Nation.” But strike how? “Not with glittering musket, flaming sword and deadly cannon,” the pamphlet exhorted, “but with the silent, potent and all-powerful ballot, the only vestige of liberty left.”

One course seemed clear—people must organize themselves as powerfully against the trusts as the trusts were organized against them. But organize how? Economically or politically? Experience did not make for easy answers. Farmers had plunged into politics with Greenbackers and laborites and ended up on the short end of the ballot counts. The answer of the recently founded Farmers’ Alliance in Texas was to try both economic and political structures, but more intensively and comprehensively than ever before. Built firmly on a network of “suballiances”—neighborhood chapters of several dozen members meeting once or twice a month to pray, sing, conduct rituals, debate issues, and do organizational business—the state Alliance experimented with several types of grass-roots cooperatives, including stores, county trade committees to bargain with merchants, and county-wide “bulking” of cotton.

The key to Alliance power was not organization, though, but leadership—and not the leadership merely of a few persons at the top but of dozens, then hundreds, of men and women who were specially hired and trained to journey across the state visiting suballiances, helping to form new ones, and above all teaching members graphically and in detail about the complex political and economic issues of the day, both national issues like money and finance and local ones like the building and expanding of co-ops. These were the famed “lecturers,” who in turn were responsible to a state lecturer. The Alliance’s first state lecturer was William Lamb, a rugged, red-haired, thirty-four-year-old farmer. Born in Tennessee, he had traveled alone at sixteen to the Texas frontier, where he lived in a log hut until he could build a house, raise children with his wife, and learn to read and write at night.

Lamb soon emerged as one of the most creative and radical of Alliance leaders. When the Great Southwest Strike erupted against Jay Gould’s railroad early in 1886, Lamb defied the more conservative Alliance leaders by demanding that the Alliance back a Knights of Labor boycott. Though suballiances gave food and money to striking railroad workers, the strike collapsed. The Knights continued on their downward slide, but the Texas Alliance continued its phenomenal growth, with perhaps 2,000 suballiances and 100,000 members by the summer of that year.

Lamb and other lecturers also look leadership on another critical issue facing the Alliance. Wracked by scorching drought, crop failures, and increasing tenantry, Texas farmers by 1886 were meeting in schoolhouses and clamoring for a new strategy—political action. They were impatient with the old shibboleth that the Alliance must steer clear of politics because politics would kill it. The decisive turning point in the agrarian revolt came at the Alliance state convention in Cleburne in early August 1886. A majority of the disgruntled, rustic-looking delegates from eighty-four counties “demanded” of the state and federal governments “such legislation as shall secure to our people freedom from the onerous and shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and arrogant corporations”—legislation including an interstate commerce law and land reform measures. A conservative minority, opposing a proposal for greenbacks that defied the Democratic party, rejected the demands, absconded with the treasury, and formed a strictly “nonpartisan” Alliance.

At this critical moment Charles Macune, another leader fresh from the grass roots, stepped into the fray. Settled on the Texas frontier at nineteen after early years of poverty and wanderings, Macune had married, studied law and medicine, and practiced both. Developing into a skillful writer, compelling speaker, and innovative thinker, Macune had become well versed in farming matters and active in his county Alliance. And now this tall, magnetic physician-lawyer-farmer, buoyed by the rising militance of the delegates, proposed an ingenious compromise that was also a creative act of leadership.

Persuading the conservatives to give up their rival Alliance and the radicals to tone down their drive toward partisan politics, he proposed an expansion that was both geographic and functional. In his dazzling vision, a national network of state Alliance “Exchanges,” starting in Texas, would collectively market cotton and buy supplies and farm equipment. This giant farmers’ cooperative would not only achieve higher, more stable prices, but would provide the credit to free all farmers from the furnishing merchant and mortgage company. Thus, he proclaimed, mortgage-burdened farmers could “assert their freedom from the tyranny of organized capital.” At a statewide meeting at Waco in January 1887 the farmer delegates enthusiastically adopted Macune’s grand strategy, decided on merger with the Louisiana Farmers’ Union, and chose Macune as first president of the National Farmers’ Alliance and Cooperative Union. The state Alliance built a huge headquarters in Dallas even while doubling its membership and preparing a small army of lecturers to proselytize the South during mid-1887.

Even that army of enthusiasts seemed astonished by the response. “The farmers seemed like unto ripe fruit,” one reported from North Carolina. “You can garner them by a gentle shake of the bush.” He had held twenty-seven meetings in one county and left twenty-seven suballiances in his wake. With cotton down to eight cents a pound, farmers were desperate for relief. Together they and the lecturers set up trade committees, cotton yards, and warehouses in hundreds of counties, along with state exchanges. Georgia, with its big state exchange and its cooperative stores, gins, and warehouses, was the most successful. When manufacturers of the commonly used jute bagging organized a trust and doubled the price, the Georgia Alliance—and later other state groups—successfully boycotted the “jute trust,” using cotton or pine straw instead, while protesting farmers donned cotton bagging and even witnessed a double wedding in which both brides and both grooms were decked out in that finery.

The idea of farm cooperation swept into the Midwest. The Alliance came to be most deeply rooted in the corn and wheat fields of Kansas, where a great boom had busted in 1887 amid mounting debts and foreclosures. When political efforts failed the next year, farm leaders visited Texas and returned full of missionary zeal. The formation of suballiances and the building of cooperatives proceeded feverishly until the entire state boasted of over 3,000 local units. When the “twine trust” hiked by 50 percent the price of the twine used to bind wheat, Alliance staged a boycott. The trust lowered its price.

As early as 1889, however, Alliance leaders in Kansas were concluding that education and cooperation were not enough, that electoral political action was necessary too. The question was not whether to engage in politics but how—independent political action versus third-party efforts versus working through a major party; lobbying and pressuring established parties versus direct action to take power. The existing political landscape was barren. The Republican and Democratic parties both were sectional entities, appealing to lingering Civil War hatreds to win elections. Farmers who actually shared common conditions and needs were polarized by politicians who waved the bloody shirt. Though most farm leaders in Kansas spurned “partisan politics” at every turn, what they actually rejected was the familiar brand of party politics animated by sectionalism and penetrated by railroad and other monopolies. Many envisioned not just an alternative party, but an alternative kind of party that would overcome racial and sectional hatred and respond to grass-roots needs.

A county “people’s convention” that nominated—and elected—a “people’s ticket” for county offices against the trusts inspired Alliance leaders in Kansas to raise their sights to state action. A convention of industrial organizations in Topeka, with delegates from the Knights of Labor and the “single tax” movement as well as from Alliance groups, assembled in Representative Hall in the statehouse, formally set up the People’s Party of Kansas, and called a state convention to choose statewide candidates and adopt the first People’s Party platform.

Once again new leaders emerged out of this agitation and conflict. In the “Big Seventh” congressional district in southwest Kansas, a Medicine Lodge rancher and town marshal named Jerry Simpson quickly emerged as the most noted Kansas Populist. A sailor on the Great Lakes and later an Illinois soldier in the Civil War, Simpson had run a farm and sawmill in northeastern Kansas before turning to cattle-raising. After the harsh winter of 1887 killed his cattle and destroyed his life’s savings, he turned to the Alliance and the new political insurgency.

Simpson won his imperishable title as “Sockless Jerry” during his campaign in 1890 against Colonel James Hallowell. “I tried to get hold of the crowd,” Simpson recalled. “I referred to the fact that my opponent was known as a ‘Prince.’ Princes, I said, wear silk socks. I don’t wear any.” Hallowell, he went on, boasted that he had been to Topeka and had made laws. Picking up a book, Simpson recalled, he tapped on a page with his finger. “I said, here is one of Hal’s laws. I find that it is a law to tax dogs, but I see that Hal proposes to charge two dollars for a bitch and only one dollar for a son of a bitch. Now the party I belong to believes in equal and exact justice to all.”

Women leaders in Kansas attracted even more attention than the men. “Women who never dreamed of becoming public speakers,” wrote Annie Diggs, “grew eloquent in their zeal and fervor. Josh Billings’ saying that ‘wimmin is everywhere,’ was literally true in that wonderful picknicking, speech-making Alliance summer of 1890.” While most Alliance women did rather mundane tasks, a good number of them emerged as compelling leaders and stump speakers. Diggs herself had worked actively in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Kansas and as a lay preacher in the Unitarian Church when, in the mid-eighties, she journeyed east to become Boston correspondent for several Kansas papers. She returned to Kansas, worked with the Alliance, wrote on suffrage and temperance and Alliance issues despite a public disavowal by her Republican editor, and then joined Stephen McLallin, a leading Populist editor, as associate editor of the Topeka Advocate. Together they shaped it into the leading reform paper in the state.

There were other noted women leaders: Fanny McCormick, assistant state lecturer who ran for state superintendent of public instruction; Sarah Emery, author of the widely read Seven Financial Conspiracies and a spellbinding orator; Kansas-born Fanny Vickrey, another gifted orator. But attracting most attention of all was the indomitable Mary Lease.

Lease was born in Pennsylvania of parents who were Irish political exiles and grew up in a family devastated by the Civil War; her two brothers died in the fighting, her father in Andersonville prison. She moved to Kansas in the early 1870s, taught parochial school, raised a family, tried and failed at farming, studied law—“pinning sheets of notes above her wash tub”—became one of the first woman lawyers of Kansas, and began a tempestuous career as a speaker for Irish nationalism, temperance, woman’s suffrage, union labor, and the Alliance. A tall, stately woman, she had “a golden voice,” in William Allen White’s recollection, “a deep, rich contralto, a singing voice that had hypnotic qualities.” But she could also hurl “sentences like Jove hurled thunderbolts,” Diggs said, as she gave scores of speeches, some over two hours long, throughout Kansas. Pointing to the starving families of Chicago and the wasted corn piled along the railroad tracks or burned for heat, she exclaimed, “What you farmers need to do is to raise less corn and more Hell!”

Led by such women and men champions, propelled by acute needs and high hopes, the Kansas Populists roared to a sensational victory in 1890. They carried 96 of the 125 seats in the state’s lower house and swept five out of seven congressional districts, sending Sockless Jerry along with the four others to Washington.

“THE PEOPLE ON TOP!” headlined the Nonconformist. But were they? The Populists elected only one statewide official, their candidate for attorney general. The Republicans still controlled the state administration, the holdover Senate, and the judiciary. The House passed a woman’s suffrage bill but the Senate axed it. The Populists’ one victory was to oust a conservative United States senator and send Populist editor William Peffer to Washington in his place. And now they had a crucial issue—Republican subversion of the will of the people. The Kansas Populists conducted a repeat crusade in 1892 with massive parades and encampments. This time they elected the entire state ticket and most of their congressional candidates again, including Simpson, and gained control of the Senate—but lost their majority in the House, amid accusations of wholesale Republican fraud.

The “first People’s party government on earth” was inaugurated in Topeka at the start of 1893. After a spectacular parade through downtown Topeka the new governor, Lorenzo Lewelling, gave a stirring address—his “incendiary Haymarket inaugural,” a GOP editor called it—followed by Lease and Simpson. But the gala was shortlived. When the new legislature convened, the Populists organized the state Senate, but they and the Republicans each claimed a majority in the House. There followed a tug-of-war that would have been comic opera if the stakes had not been so high: each “majority” organized its own “House” with speaker and officers; neither side would vacate the hall, so they stayed put all night, with the two speakers sleeping, gavels in hand, facing each other behind the podium; finally Lewelling called up the militia—including a Gatling gun minus its firing pin—while the Republicans mobilized an army of deputy sheriffs, college students, and railroad workers. The GOP legislators smashed their way into the hall with a sledgehammer; and the militia commander, a loyal Republican like most of his troops, refused the governor’s order to expel the invaders.

Bloodshed was narrowly averted when the Populists agreed to let the Republican-dominated Kansas Supreme Court rule on the issue, and predictably the court ruled against them. The Populists then paid the price. Their legislators fared worse than in 1891, passing two election reform measures and putting suffrage on the ballot, but not accomplishing much else. Their chief priority, railroad regulation with teeth, was a direct casualty of the conflict. Clearly, under the American and Kansan systems of checks and balances, a movement could win elections but still not win power.

Alliance cooperation and Populist politics spread through other Northern states, moving west into the mountain states toward the Pacific, north into Minnesota and the Dakotas, east into the big corn spreads. Everywhere the new movement mobilized people and encountered Republican party power and entrenched elites. Thus “in sundry ways, at different speeds, at varied levels of intensity, and at diverse stages of political consciousness, the farmers brought the People’s Party of the United States into being,” in Goodwyn’s summarization. “In so doing, they placed on the nation’s political stage the first multi-sectional democratic mass movement since the American Revolution.”

It was in the South, however, that the Alliance continued to expand most dramatically and yet to encounter the biggest obstacles. The first of these obstacles was the Southern Democracy, which continued to live off its role as defender of the Lost Cause. The second, closely connected, was race— not simply race, as C. Vann Woodward has explained, but “the complexities of the class economy growing out of race, the heritage of manumitted slave psychology, and the demagogic uses to which the politician was able to put race prejudice.” Southern Populists reluctantly concluded that they could not achieve the subtreasury plan for credit and currency and other reforms unless they forged a biracial coalition of small landowners, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. This meant war with the Southern Democracy and potential division within Populism.

Georgia was an even more tumultuous battleground than Kansas. There one man, backed by the mass of poor farmers, personified the entire movement: Tom Watson. Descended from prosperous slaveholders, he had seen his father lose his forty-five slaves and 1,400 acres after Appomattox and end up as a tavern owner in Augusta. Young Watson managed to spend two years at Mercer University before running out of money. After years of poverty he turned to law, prospered, and won election to the Georgia lower house at twenty-six, but quit before his term ended.

“I did not lead the Alliance,” Watson recalled. “I followed the Alliance, and I am proud that I did.” After taking leadership in the “jute fight,” he decided to run for Congress as a Democrat with Alliance backing. The white Georgia Alliance sought to field its own candidates within the Democratic party and back non-Alliance candidates only if they endorsed the Alliance program—the “Alliance yardstick,” they called it. Alliance leaders took over the Democratic party state convention, wrote the party platform, won control of both houses of the “farmers’ legislature,” elected the governor and six of ten members of Congress. Watson trounced his Republican opponent almost ten to one in a fight as “hot as Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.”

Coalitions embody conflicts. The lines were now drawn between Alliance members who were mainly Democrats and Democrats who were mainly Alliancers. The national Alliance had urged that its members of Congress not join any party caucus that did not endorse the Alliance platform. The whole Southern delegation but one stayed with the majority Democratic caucus and elected a Georgian, Charles Crisp, to the speakership. The exception was Watson. He and Sockless Jerry Simpson introduced the Alliance platform into Congress, fighting especially hard for the subtreasury proposal. Virtually none of the platform was even reported out of committee except the subtreasury item, which finally came to the floor after Watson used every maneuver to pry it out of committee; by then it was too late for action.

Beaten in Washington, Watson flourished politically at home. This was a time when many black tenants and sharecroppers were becoming alienated from the GOP and were turning to the new party. Watson called on blacks as well as whites to overthrow the plutocracy that had used race hatred to bolster its rule. “You are kept apart,” he told black and white Georgians, “that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings.” Campaigning for reelection in 1892, now as leader of the Georgia People’s Party, Watson championed political equality for blacks, economic equality to a lesser extent—and social equality or “mixing” not at all. But despite both white and black Populist support, Watson was beaten for reelection in a campaign marked by massive election fraud and the killing of a score of Populists, most of them black.

Texas was having its own problems with the entrenched white Democracy and entrenched capital. The Texas Alliance Exchange, the linchpin of cooperative efforts, had gotten off to a flying start by selling vast amounts of cotton to eastern mills and abroad and buying supplies and equipment. Still, it could not break the enslavement of tenants and sharecroppers to the crop lien system, and increasingly it suffered from lack of capital. Banks in Dallas and elsewhere turned a cold face to requests for loans. Desperately the leadership turned to the suballiances themselves for money. In a remarkable popular mobilization, thousands of farmers marched to county courthouses to pledge help. It was not enough; a year later the Texas Exchange closed its doors for good.

The ever-resourceful Charles Macune now presented his subtreasury plan, providing treasury notes to farmers, as a means of financing cooperatives with public rather than private credit and thus enlisting the government in the struggle to raise agricultural prices. The indefatigable William Lamb fashioned this economic reform into a weapon of political revolt as he launched a full-scale lecturing campaign in each congressional district. The Texas Alliance won a stunning victory through the Democratic party in 1890, electing a governor and a legislature committed to most Alliance demands, but a host of Democratic “loyalists” opposed the subtreasury and bolted from the Alliance. Spurred by Lamb and other leaders, Alliance members decided to create the People’s Party of Texas. At the founding convention in August 1891 white and black delegates forged a remarkable coalition, with a commitment to political and economic equality for blacks.

As the presidential election year of 1892 approached, Alliance leaders were concluding that a national People’s Party was needed to consolidate the grand coalition of farmers and workers, strengthen the state parties, and seize control of the federal government. Plans were carefully laid. The Alliance organized a massive lecturing campaign, distributed vast quantities of books and pamphlets, including Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and formed a National Reform Press Association to coordinate the propaganda efforts of the one-hundred-strong Populist newspapers. A St. Louis conference of farm, labor, and women delegates drew up a platform and heard the Minnesota Populist orator and novelist Ignatius Donnelly give an unforgettable speech in which he charged: “Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.… The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes, unprecedented in the history of the world, while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two great classes—paupers and millionaires.”

Then came the national founding convention of the People’s Party, Omaha, July 4, 1892. The delegates adopted a platform that harked back to the “Cleburne demands” six years earlier and indeed to decades of labor, farm, and socialist manifestos: a flexible “national currency” to be distributed by means of the subtreasury plan; free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold; a graduated income tax; government ownership and operation of the railroads, telegraph, and telephone; barring of alien land ownership and return of land held by railroads and other corporations “in excess of their actual needs”; political reforms such as the direct election of United States senators. But the platform ignored labor’s most urgent needs and omitted mention of woman’s suffrage. The convention also took a moderate course in nominating for president James B. Weaver of Iowa, the reform editor and ex-Union general who had led the Greenbackers in 1880, balancing him with an ex-Confederate general as his running mate.

Plunging into the election campaign, the Populists unsheathed their thousands of lecturers, their orators such as Lease and Donnelly, their tactics in some states of opportunistic coalition-building with Republicans in the South and especially with Democrats in the West. Weaver and his wife were rotten-egged in the South—Mrs. Weaver to the point that, according to Lease, she “was made a regular walking omelet by the southern chivalry of Georgia.” The results were promising for a fledgling third party: Weaver polled over one million votes, actually carrying Kansas and four western states with twenty-two electoral votes. Populist governors were elected in Kansas, Colorado, and North Dakota. But in the Northeast, parts of the Midwest, and the South the party fared poorly. In Texas the Populists lost badly to the Democrats. It was with mingled hopes and an exhilarating sense of momentum that the Populists turned to the economic and political struggles ahead.

The idea of liberty had been the animating impulse behind the Alliance. But during the century soon to come to an end that idea had also guided organized capital and labor. Each group of course meant something different by “liberty”—businessmen meant freedom from interference with property, labor meant freedom from boss control of its working life, farmers meant freedom from furnishing merchants, banks, railroads, trusts. More than the other groups, however, the Alliance had made liberty into a positive idea—realizing and fulfilling oneself by gaining broader control of one’s working environment through participation in Alliance cooperatives. Along with industrial workers, Populist farmers had also preached the idea of equality—a real equality of opportunity. But the cooperators, with their denunciations of “selfish individualism,” had moved even more than labor toward the third great concept in the Enlightenment trinity— fraternity, or comradeship. The idea of cooperation had grown out of, and had sustained, the practices of sisterhood and brotherhood.

And if the Populists had realized all three values to a greater extent than any other large group, it was mainly because of a conscious effort toward the intensive use of massive numbers of second-cadre activists—35,000 or more “lecturers”—in rousing farmers to political self-consciousness. As in all deeply felt democratic movements, the great leaders were educators, and the great teachers were leaders.

CHAPTER 6

The Brokers of Politics

DEMOCRACY, RIGHTLY UNDERSTOOD, IS “government of the people, by the people, for the benefit of Senators,” scoffed Henry Adams. He reflected a cynicism with American politics and government that was pervasive by the 1880s. The wretched poverty in city and country, the widening gap between rich and poor, the growth of an elaborate class system and an almost fixed array of castes, the suppression of blacks, women, Indians, and others, the violations of people’s liberties and rights, the intensifying boom-and-bust, all seemed to blight the hopes and dreams of clement Americans. A democratic government, reflecting the needs—and the votes—of the great mass of citizens, was supposed to avert or alleviate such evils. But the situation seemed to be worsening, the cynicism deepening.

No one had embodied the aspirations of American democracy more exuberantly than a large, dreamy, sensuous, rustic-looking editor and writer in Brooklyn named Walt Whitman, who in 1855 had published at his own expense a volume of poetry that was tall and thin and a commercial failure. It was called Leaves of Grass. Looking at the world through his heavy-lidded eyes—eyes that Emerson had called “terrible” and John Burroughs “dumb, yearning, relentless”—Whitman seemed to miss nothing in the multihued world around him, or in his variegated, androgynous self. He wrote of ships, gardens, far-off places, children, trees, the Brooklyn ferry, nearby cities, stallions, women, beaches—everything and anything— and later of war and wounds and death.

He wrote of democracy. The very embodiment of the Enlightenment—“the poet and prophet of a democracy that the America of the Gilded Age was daily betraying,” Vernon Parrington said of him—he evoked glowingly the revolutionary trinity of liberty, equality, fraternity. Whitman was familiar with Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and its emphasis on freedom, and he had read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. “There must be,” the poet said, “continual additions to our great experiment of how much liberty society will bear.” He preached liberty from external restraints, especially from government, and he practiced it to the point of license.

Even more, he embraced equality, even the kind of “leveling” equality that conservatives derided. “I chant,” he wrote, “the common bulk, the general average horde.” He spoke of the “divine average.” For him, according to Roger Asselineau, the mere fact of living conferred a divine character upon even the most despicable person. He would not look down on anyone:

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,

No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them,

No more modest than immodest….

Whoever degrades another degrades me,

And whatever is done or said returns at last to me….

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the sign of democracy….

Again and again in the pages of the Brooklyn Eagle he protested the plight of poverty-stricken women in the garment industry, of young clerks having to work sixteen hours a day.

“Great is Liberty! great is equality!” the poet exclaimed, but perhaps most of all he personified the idea of fraternity. He rarely used that term, or “brotherhood,” preferring to call people—especially working people—“comrade.” An ardent reader of George Sand and Frances Wright, he also preached feminism, proclaiming in Leaves of Grass “the perfect equality of the female with the male.” Not that he idealized the virtues of men and women: he recognized that his “comrades” were mixtures of good and evil. But if the democratic promise was realized, the good in people would become dominant.

Perhaps it was inevitable that such exaggerated hopes would be dashed in the wake of the Civil War. Even Whitman rapidly succumbed to the postwar disillusionment. “Pride, competition, segregation, vicious wilfulness, and license beyond example, brood already upon us,” he wrote in Democratic Vistas. Quoting Lincoln on “government by the people,” he exclaimed, “The People! … Taste, intelligence, and culture, (so-called,),” he said, “have been against the masses, and remain so.” He railed against “pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity … everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed,” etc. He still had a basic faith in the people, but now he saw the need for the natural leaders of the race to teach and uplift the people, in contrast to his earlier criticism of Carlyle for scorning the average man and glorifying heroes.

Whitman’s ultimate hopes for American democracy lay in the future. Americans were perfectible; only materialism and repression had corrupted them. In London, Karl Marx had harbored the same expectation, though he had little regard for the American form of bourgeois republic. Classes in the United States had “not yet become fixed,” he wrote in the early 1850s, “but continually change and interchange their elements in a constant state of flux, where the modern means of production, instead of coinciding with a stagnant surplus population, rather supply the relative deficiency of heads and hands,” and where the “feverishly youthful movement of material production” had a “new world to make its own.” But later, with the rise of monopolistic capitalism, much would depend on the militant organization of the working class.

Even crusty Henry Adams confessed a hope for the future. After sardonic old Baron Jacobi in Democracy called the United States the most corrupt society he had known, one Nathan Gore, Massachusetts historian, burst out:

“I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it.” Democracy, he went on, “asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to higher intelligence than formerly.” He granted it was an experiment, but “it was the only direction that society can take that is worth taking.”

“And supposing your experiment fails,” said Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, “suppose society destroys itself with universal suffrage, corruption, and communism.”

“I have faith,” Gore exclaimed, “not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new ones; faith in human nature; faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest.…”

The Ohioans: Leaders as Brokers

Crosby’s Opera House, Chicago, May 21, 1868.

The President: “Is the convention ready? I await your pleasure.”

A hush falls over the hall. The Republicans have gathered to choose Andrew Johnson’s successor.

Mr. Logan of Illinois: “Is it the decision of the Chair that nominations are now in order?”

The President: “They are.”

Mr. Logan: “Then, sir, in the name of the loyal citizens, soldiers and sailors of this great Republic of the United States of America; in the name of loyalty, of liberty, of humanity, of justice; in the name of the National Union Republican party; I nominate, as candidate for the Chief Magistracy of this nation, Ulysses S. Grant.”

The hall erupts in a roar of cheers, shouts, whistles. Delegates flutter handkerchiefs and wave standards; some weep as the band plays “Hail to the Chief.”

The Secretary: “Alabama!”

The chairman of the Alabama delegation: “Mr. President, Alabama, through the chairman of her delegation, casts eighteen votes for U.S. Grant.”

The Secretary: “The State of Connecticut!”

“Mr. President, Connecticut unconditionally surrenders her twelve votes for Ulysses S. Grant….”

The Secretary: “The State of Ohio!”

“Mr. President, Ohio has the honor of being the mother of our great Captain. Ohio is in line, and on that line Ohio proposes following this great Captain, that never knew defeat; to fight it out through the summer, and in the autumn, at the end of the great contest, and to be first in storming the entrenchments, until victory shall be secured, and all the stars that glitter in the firmament of our glorious constellation shall again be restored to their proper order, and all the sons of freedom throughout the whole earth shall shout for joy. Ohio gives forty-two votes for U.S. Grant.”

Amid the red, white, and blue bunting, the perfervid oratory, the heat and sweat of the Chicago convention hall, the Republicans nominated for President the “fittest” man of the time, their Civil War hero, Ulysses S. Grant. Five more times in the next three decades a stentorian orator would successfully offer an Ohioan for “the next President of the United States”; Grant again in 1872, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, James A. Garfield in 1880, William McKinley in 1896 and again in 1900. Ohio would supply two more Presidents in the first two decades of the twentieth century, and during the whole period several Chief Justices and a host of second-cadre leaders—cabinet members, congressional leaders, military and civilian officers.

Thus rose the Ohio dynasty, successor to the Albany Regency earlier in the century and the brilliant Virginia leadership of the Founding period. How account for the dominance of the Ohioans? people wondered. Was it chance or—asked a journalist, tongue in cheek—a conspiracy? The explanation could be found less in smoke-filled rooms than in the nature of Ohio itself, in its history and makeup. Before the Civil War, Ohio, with its mix of militant abolitionists and Southern sympathizers, had been a microcosm of sectional politics. The great contrasts and divisions in the state mirrored the diversity of the Union. “The Ohioans,” Rollin Hartt observed, “are the United States in vertical section.”

Still the most striking division in Ohio after the Civil War was north versus south. The Western Reserve, where the winters blew in cold off the Great Lakes, had been settled largely by New Englanders, and the area still retained a Yankee flavor. Elm trees, colleges, and blue laws flourished in the northern tier of the state. Ohio’s “south” lay along the Ohio River and in the Appalachian counties of the southwest, where the southern counties were populated by transplanted Kentuckians, Virginians, and Carolinians. A river culture existed along the Ohio—life was warm, slow, agrarian. Travelers noticed the drawling accents, the sprawling plantation houses along the river, the crawling mosses on the cypress trees. In between lay a broad plain of farmland having more in common with the rest of the Midwest than with the rest of Ohio. The pace of the center counties was set by Columbus, “a neighborly place … flat as a hayfield,” whose quiet seemed to be broken only by the rumble of farm wagons. North, South, Midwest—Ohio “boxed the American compass.”

Other divisions cut across and softened the old geographic boundaries. Ohioans subscribed to a welter of religious persuasions—not just Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, but also Methodist, Baptist, Catholic, Jewish, Campbellite, Dunkard, Mormon. More important was the diversity of economic pursuits. “Northerners” were divided between farmers, merchants, gas drillers, the sailors and fishermen who lived off the Great Lakes. The railroads invaded the central plains, bringing manufacturing, competition for markets, and new crop patterns. While “Southerners” along the river farmed in much the same way as those along the Mississippi, their brethren in the Appalachian counties mined coal and iron, or scraped a meager living from the foothills.

Symbol and source of much of the change redrawing Ohio were the growing cities—“inchoate, restless, surging.” Walter Havighurst saw them as becoming the essence of Ohio. Cleveland and Cincinnati were heading toward populations of a quarter million people each by 1890, Columbus and Toledo toward a hundred thousand, while another sixteen cities would pass the 10,000 mark. The cities brought a new richness and variety to Ohio life. Cincinnati, “the Paris of America,” hosted an accomplished music academy and nationally acclaimed music festival, and nourished the writer Lafcadio Hearn, painter Frank Duveneck, sculptors Clement Barnhorn and Charles Niehaus. More prosaic Cleveland was mother to artists, but also to a baseball nine that won an invitation to the White House from Ohio’s own President Grant. The cities helped Ohio to sustain an educational system that was the envy of the nation—wide in variety, broad in reach to the populace, and foremost in experiments with coeducation.

Industry was the signature of the cities—and each was unique, both complementing and competing with her sisters. Sandusky on Lake Erie was a shipping point for lumber, limestone, and fish, as well as a maker of oars and wheels. Youngstown produced steel; Toledo, glass, pig iron, machinery, and—as the century ended—motorcars; Dayton, rubber. Findlay, center of the northern natural gas fields, celebrated its new prosperity with a Gas Jubilee, where 30,000 flaming jets lighted the city from end to end. In the Appalachian coal mines of the Hocking Valley, technology marched on; first mechanical buckets replaced wheelbarrows for bringing coal up from the shafts, and then bulky car-dumping machines appeared to empty and refill railroad coal carriers. The railroads, with some 10,000 miles of track laid by 1890, brought welcome changes, doubling farmers’ prices for flour, wheat, and corn during years when farmers in the South and West faced bankruptcy.

The growing industries brought hints of things to come. The winding Cuyahoga River was stained brown by the oil tanks, blast furnaces, sawmills, and coal bunkers that lined its marshy banks. Blazing oil slicks reached into Lake Erie, and a pall of smoke settled over Cleveland and other towns. But Hartt found Clevelanders willing to endure the outpouring of the smokestacks: “smoke means business, business means money, and money is the principal thing.”

The thriving cities acted as a magnet for Ohio’s blacks. By 1890, three-quarters of the state’s Negro population of 87,000 were city dwellers, a proportion almost exactly the opposite of that for the rest of the country. Most of the black immigrants came from the Ohio countryside, where the increasing costs and mechanization of farming were eroding chances for land ownership or even tenant labor by blacks. But little of the prosperity of the cities trickled down to the new black residents. Excluded from many industrial jobs by employer hostility and union suspicion, the urban-dwelling blacks were largely confined to menial day labor, domestic service, and “Negro” trades like barbering.

Ohio’s diversity made for change and conflict, which in turn made for a vigorous political leadership. The metamorphosis of the old Northwestern frontier—a “civilization resting on family, land and community”—to a society of feverish production and commerce threw up a new set of leaders closely in tune with the political and social flux of their state, and capable of dealing with change and conflict on the national level as well.

A number of common bonds drew these new Ohio leaders together. They were all young: the seven men who would dominate Republican politics on the state scene for a generation after the Civil War—Garfield, Hayes, Jacob Cox, Isaac Sherwood, Warren Keifer, Aaron Perry, and Edward Noyes—had averaged thirty-three years old in 1865. All of them had served as Union officers in the war, returning with habits of organization and command they could apply to the strife of commerce and politics. They were men on the make—college-educated, trained professionals in law or journalism, successful men attracted to the dynamism of Ohio’s cities. The economic takeoff of the 1850s had first opened doors for them; then the chaos of Civil War had propelled them early to dizzying heights of power over other men. They had, in Felice Bonadio’s view, a new faith “which was to be found in cities, in factories, in railroads.” That faith would be translated into political doctrine—and into political power.

Ohio provided economic leadership too. Jay Cooke shook up the nation’s finances; John D. Rockefeller reorganized industries; Thomas Edison transformed the world with his tinkering. But the attraction of politics proved too great for others. John Hay left a promising academic career to become a respected civil servant and, eventually, Secretary of State to an Ohio President. Whitelaw Reid evolved from historian to editor to party chieftain to diplomat over the course of thirty years. As in other states, politics and the law were intimately intertwined. Alphonso B. Taft won appointment as Attorney General while his son, William Howard, was becoming a popular young lawyer; William McKinley of Canton began dabbling in politics under the tutelage of Republican boss Mark Hanna; and, from a previous generation of leaders, Salmon P. Chase still sat as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. And topping them all were three lawyer-politicians who dominated the councils of the GOP for nearly twenty years—Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, and John Sherman.

With war and industrialization producing a set of new young leaders in every Northern state, perhaps it was only luck that the men from Ohio consistently came to the fore on the national scene. Perhaps it was the unique nature of the economic change in Ohio: the dynamic balance between agricultural boom and urban growth, the vast array of natural resources exploited and manufactures produced. Ohio was like none of her neighbors, yet she had tangible economic and social interests in common with all of them. Or perhaps the answer lay in Ohio’s politics, “dynamic, complicated, and treacherous” as one historian found them to be. In a state so evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, and with deep fissures weakening both parties from within, only the ablest political leaders could hope to survive. “It is utterly impossible to detect any nucleus of opinion,” despaired Jacob Cox. “It is every man for himself.” The men who climbed out of the thickets of Ohio politics were thus peculiarly suited to lead their colleagues through the jungles of Washington.

James Garfield exemplified the partisan skills of Ohioans. Although raised in straitened circumstances by his widowed mother, Garfield was able to earn enough money to get through the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute and Williams College. The hefty, bearded schoolteacher studied law on the side, ran for the Ohio Senate in 1859, and did yeoman service in raising troops when the Civil War began. At the end of 1863 he left the army to represent Ohio’s 19th District in Congress. He found Ohio Republicans, like those elsewhere in the North, still divided between ex-Whigs and ex-Democrats. The issue of slavery had brought them together to form the new party in the 1850s, but with slavery dead there was a very real danger that they would split again. Ohio Democrats, themselves badly factionalized, played skillfully on the former ties of the older Republicans.

Garfield and his younger colleagues, however, had no past loyalties to appeal to. Mobilized by the cause of preserving the Union, they had entered politics for the first time as Republicans, just before or during the war. Building on this base of support, Garfield moved quickly to check the disintegration of his party. If there was no “nucleus of opinion” among Ohio Republicans, he would replace it with a nucleus of organization. In the 19th District, Garfield built a tight hierarchy of local citizens’ committees, campaign workers, and elected officials. Up the hierarchy flowed money and votes; down from the top flowed patronage jobs and favors for the district from Columbus and Washington. Binding the entire structure was a growing party loyalty. Garfield too bound himself to party loyalty, stumping for fellow Republicans at home and in Washington with such fervor that he soon won a national reputation for glib bombast. It was a military model of organization that Garfield applied to politics—rigid structure, firm command, and mutual loyalty—and it served him well.

For several years Garfield crossed political swords with John Sherman, Ohio’s powerful Republican senator. Eventually, however, the two managed to work out an uneasy alliance, to the benefit of both themselves and the state party. While Garfield’s influence in the House slowly increased, Sherman used his seat on the Senate’s Committee on Finance to become the foremost representative of the Republican party’s new orientation toward economic rather than racial issues. In the Finance Committee he grappled with vexing questions of currency and tariffs, working to balance the inflationary interests of his Ohio constituents with a more conservative policy suited to what he perceived as the nation’s larger economic needs. Sherman strove to identify the Republicans in the public eye with business expansion and general prosperity; race relations he viewed as potentially fatal to party unity and public support.

The man whom Sherman and Garfield came to support for the governorship of their home state was of a somewhat different stamp. Rutherford B. Hayes tended not to become excited about partisan politics; he saved his passion for reform. A Harvard-trained lawyer and wounded veteran, Hayes was sent by the Republicans to Columbus in 1867 for the first of an unprecedented three terms as governor. “Not too much hard work, plenty of time to read, good society, etc.” was his self-effacing evaluation of the gubernatorial post, but in fact he pushed strenuously for asylum and prison reform, regulation of railroad abuses, lower taxes, and an end to “the appointment of unfit men on partisan or personal grounds.” Election to a third term, with the solid support of the entire Ohio GOP leadership, opened to Hayes the dizzying prospect of ascending to the presidency.

The Republican party desperately needed a candidate with strong reform credentials, for the mounting scandals of the Grant Administration threatened to swamp the GOP as 1876 drew near. “Grantism” had become synonymous with a degree of corruption and malfeasance unprecedented even by the relaxed standards of nineteenth-century American politics. Some of the scandals were mundane: the Secretary of War resigned when evidence surfaced that he had been involved in selling government contracts, and the Interior Secretary faced similar charges. Other gaffes were intercontinental: U.S. Minister to Paris Dan Sickles conducted an adulterous affair with the former Queen of Spain, Ambassador Robert Schenck lent his name to bogus western stocks being sold in London, and another political appointee enlivened his consulship in Egypt with duels, drunkenness, and dancing girls. Still other scandals reached right into the White House, as a presidential aide was found to be involved in covering up the bribery of Treasury agents by whiskey manufacturers.

Grantism threatened to soil even the “ermine of the Supreme Court.” When Chief Justice Chase died in 1873, Grant nominated his Attorney General to fill the center chair, only to see him charged with misusing Justice Department funds and selling immunity from prosecution. The President spent weeks seeking a more acceptable nominee. After several more missteps he settled on Morrison R. Waite, a relatively obscure Toledo attorney of limited political experience. Waite nonetheless won Senate approval, and, with scandals breaking all around him, ascended unscathed to the High Court. There he would preside, for fourteen years, over issues not of petty corruption but of fundamental rights for large groups of Americans.

The kind of leadership that Ohio produced in the late nineteenth century typified that of Northern Republicanism as a whole. It was a transactional leadership of barter and brokerage, both reflecting and shaping the competitive worlds of industry, finance, and commerce. As the political process was retooled following the war, the old ideological leaders, who had brought about a military and then a constitutional transformation of the nation, gave way to vigorous young politicos who operated within the constraints of the federal check-and-balance system. The young attorney Rutherford Hayes had written from Cincinnati: “Push, labor, shove—these words are of great power in a city like this.” The essence of politics indeed was to push and shove in a giant game of King of the Rock—but always in the end to compromise so that the game could go on another day. All this was closer to Whitman’s competition and “low cunning” than the experiment in a higher intelligence and the faith in democracy that Adams’s Mr. Gore called for. It was the survival of the fittest—but who were the fittest? And for what?

Only a leadership steeped in compromise and skilled at brokerage could have brought off one of the most fateful transactions in American history, in the wake of a political crisis that some feared might trigger another civil war. When the 1876 presidential election gave Tilden a quarter-million popular majority and a disputed electoral college majority, Ohioans and other political brokers in both parties agreed on setting up an electoral commission that would rule on the disputed election returns from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon. When the “swing vote” on the commission, the “independent” Supreme Court Justice David Davis of Illinois, suddenly—and with unexpected alacrity—resigned to accept election to the Senate, his place was taken by a most partisan Republican justice, Joseph Bradley. The commission then proceeded by straight party eight-to-seven votes to decide for Hayes in all the disputed returns.

Southerners cried foul amid rumors of a march on Washington by Confederate veterans. In fact the hands of the Southerners were tied because the establishment of the electoral commission—and by implication the acceptance of its verdict—was one part of a far-reaching compromise that embraced much more than the presidency. The political crisis of the early weeks of 1877, as Inauguration Day neared, has best been viewed not as a straight power fight but as a mammoth game of poker played by shrewd professionals, in which calculation, chance, bluffing, kibitzing, inside dealing, and miscalculation all had their role. The stakes were enormous—not only selection of a President but control of the national government, distribution of pork and patronage, the alignment of parties, and above all political control of the South.

Southern Democrats appeared to hold some low cards—the power to delay a final decision through filibustering and other congressional devices; the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives; vague threats of violence; and claim to the moral high ground of having “won the election.” Hayes, House Republican leader Garfield, and the other Northern Republicans held the high cards: the electoral commission decision; control of the presidency, the Senate, and the Supreme Court; and President Grant, who commanded the army and knew how to use it. But the test, as always in political struggles, was not only power resources but political objectives. What did the two sides want? Southern Democrats wanted more federal patronage after sixteen years in the cold. They wanted federal money to shore up their roads and canals and their levees—especially those of the ever-flooding Mississippi—and federal grants for their railroads and particularly for their dream of a southern route to the Pacific. But above all—far above all—they wanted, bitterly and passionately, “home rule,” an end to federal control of their region, the departure of the federal troops of “occupation.”

The poker game itself was so complex, involving so many players with so many sets of cards, as to challenge historical analysis of precise cause and effect for years to come. But certain aspects stood out even at the time. It was a wide-open game, with legislators, party politicians, and lobbyists taking part by the hundreds. It was a most public game. Lobbyists saw no need to lurk in corridors and crannies; scores of them invaded the floor of the House itself, while the Speaker vainly urged them to be off. It was a most widely observed game. The press followed the key developments astutely, often quite accurately, and kept the public informed as to the key political plays and players.

And at the end of this marathon game there was a clear winner—the Southern Democrats. Not only did they gain the key patronage position in Hayes’s Cabinet, the postmaster-generalship, and later their own railroad to the West; they also won their supreme goal of home rule, in whatever form this would eventually take. Winning the next biggest pot were the Ohioans and the other Republican party professionals. They saw their man Hayes securely into the White House and they could contemplate the possibility of re-creating the old Whig alliance of Northern and Southern property, as Southern entrepreneurs eagerly anticipated the uses of federal money and Northern investors saw new prospects in the South.

The losers, too, were painfully obvious. The Northern Democrats had had to stand by almost helplessly as their man Tilden was dealt out of the White House. Radical Republicans also stood by impotently as so much of what they had struggled for, on political and military battlefields for nearly a quarter century, was bargained away. But the main losers were never even close to the big poker game. These were the Southern blacks whose final hope of federal aid and protection for justice and dignity and jobs and land and life itself ebbed with the playing of the game. They had held no cards at all.

Politics: The Dance of the Ropewalkers

Radical caricaturists in the press pictured the poker players as in fact the puppets of the masters of industry and finance. It was not that simple. In fighting for home rule Southern Democrats acted more out of cultural heritage, regional pride, and psychological motivation than from narrowly economic considerations, just as Northern abolitionists once had put “conscience” before “cotton.” Still, the force of capital, the subtle influence of class, and above all the pervasive power of ideology increasingly dominated the stakes and the cards in the political game. While politicos declaimed, denounced, debated, and digressed, the economic barons decided investment policy, built railroads and factories, deployed masses of workers, imported immigrants by the tens of thousands, set incomes, financed science and invention. If they could not work their way through government they could turn to direct action. When Huntington was thwarted politically by railroad rivals, the Californian speared his Southern Pacific rails eastward across Arizona, then talked a complaisant President Hayes into endorsing his fait accompli.

“The statesman and the captain of industry complement each other well,” said Matthew Josephson of this era; “one talks, the other acts.”

The power of the dominant economic players in the political game, and the impotence of the nonparticipants, were both sharply revealed in the conversion of the Fourteenth Amendment from a bulwark of Negro rights to a bastion of corporate property. Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights Act of 1875, guaranteeing Negroes equal rights to public facilities, had represented the legislative high point of Reconstruction, at least after the law’s legitimation by the Fourteenth Amendment. Much depended on judicial interpretation. During the 1870s era of compromise the Supreme Court pinched the Fourteenth into a narrow measure barring overt discrimination by states and not adding, in Chief Justice Waite’s words, “anything to the rights which one citizen has under the Constitution against another.” The Court struck down an anti-Ku Klux Klan act by labeling it an invalid interference in the activities of private individuals. Then in a series of cases the justices invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on the same grounds. With no constitutional mandate for federal protection against de facto discrimination, Southern blacks were on their own.

What was the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment if not to protect black people? Despite universal understanding and categorical evidence that the Fourteenth had been passed to protect the freed slaves, attorneys for business interests argued that the “persons” protected by the amendment were in fact corporations—that the amendment was designed to bar governmental regulation of private enterprise. Roscoe Conkling, hired by Huntington and Stanford to protect their railroads against California regulation, had the cheek to imply that Congress from the start sought to benefit businessmen rather than blacks, thus giving rise to one of the juiciest conspiracy theories in American history. Soon the High Court, spurred by such politically partisan ideologues as Justices Joseph Bradley (that swing man in the electoral commission) and Stephen J. Field, transformed the Court in case after case into a trumpet box for laissez-faire and a mighty weapon for the protection of corporate property.

At least Negroes had the legal right to vote, some suffragists reflected bitterly; women as a whole were dealt completely out of the political game. Suffragists were indignant that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments—granting rights to all “citizens,” that is, “persons” born or naturalized in the United States—should be construed to mean “men only.” The ambiguous wording invited a test.

Through a blinding snowstorm in 1870, the indomitable eighty-year-old abolitionist Sarah Grimké led her sister Angelina and forty other women on foot to the voting booth in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, only to place their ballots in a separate box, where they were left uncounted. On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony and some women friends voted in Rochester, New York. Though her ballot was accepted, Anthony was arrested two weeks later for “voting knowingly without having the lawful right to vote.” She wanted her case to go to the Supreme Court, but the trial court judge allowed it to lapse. When a similar case—that of Virginia Minor—reached the High Court in 1874, Chief Justice Waite found for the Court that if the Framers had wanted women to vole, they would have said so and that the rights of citizenship did not necessarily include suffrage.

White males North and South, holding the high economic, political, and legal cards, seemed poised by the late 1870s to forge a new conservative coalition uniting men of corporate and landed property in a North-South party alliance rivaling the great Whig coalitions before the Civil War. “It is quite the fashion,” declared the Raleigh Observer, “to talk about reviving the old Whig party, and to make appeals to the old Henry Clay Whigs once more to come to the front.” Men of substance excitedly discussed the possibility of building a new party, of whatever name, that would draw conservative, business-minded elements from both the Democratic and Republican parties in order to protect property against the threats of urban radicals, western populists, and the like.

But this hope was to fade away, and its demise indicated again the difficulty of translating economic power directly into political, in the complex politics and polyglot culture of 1870s America. The two old parties lived on in the hearts and minds of Americans. Since the early decades of the century they had responded to deep-seated needs and aspirations among the people, had transformed the political landscape as surely as a magnet shapes tracings on a laboratory table. Civil war and reconstruction had left these parties not only broadly intact but in a condition of interlock, unable to extricate each from the other’s embrace. The Republicans, the party of the old Northwest, now had to compete with the Democrats for Ohio, Illinois, Indiana. The Republican “grand coalition” of business, labor, farmers, veterans, and blacks now had to cope with eastern financiers who gave money to the likes of Seymour and Tilden, farmers who shunned both parties, workers who were politically apathetic or alienated, and women and blacks who could not vote.

Above all the Republicans faced Democrats, and the Democracy had shown remarkable resilience and tenacity. Here was a party that had been on the “wrong side” of the Civil War, that emerged from the struggle with its Southern wing limp and shredded politically, that found no national leadership after Appomattox comparable with the great dynasty that had stretched from Jackson through Van Buren and Polk to Stephen Douglas, that had embraced much that was malodorous in American politics, whether Tammany in New York or lily-white county machines in the South. Yet even at the height of the war its presidential candidate, the somewhat discredited General George B. McClellan, had won 45 percent of the popular vote against Lincoln himself; four years later Horatio Seymour polled more than 47 percent of the popular vote; and in the disputed election of ’76, Tilden won a popular majority. Clearly, a party dominant for at least forty years before Sumter would not die quickly, if ever.

And so, with blaring trumpets and ferocious war dances, the two great parties confronted each other on almost equal terms; but the result was often a sham battle. Each party stretched across such a wide spectrum of interests and attitudes that clean-cut conflict over policy, program, and ideology was impossible. “The major parties reflected the national policy cleavage on the issues arising from the slavery controversy, and a geographical cleavage between North and South,” in James Sundquist’s overview. “But they could not reflect these cleavages and at the same time express new ones that cut across the electorate in quite a different direction, dividing voters within the North, within the South, within groups supporting Negro suffrage, and within those opposing it.” Inevitably the postwar parties “evaded and straddled and postponed” just as the prewar parties had done, especially on the big issues.

Instead of reflecting and intensifying a relatively clean-cut split between liberalism and conservatism or between left and right (whatever the actual labels) over the conditions and needs of workers or farmers or blacks or immigrants, each major party itself became the battleground in which such interests and ideologies skirmished. The result, in Keith Polakoff’s words, was a “politics of inertia” in the post-Civil War period. “Not only was factionalism practically the central characteristic of both parties, but the precise balance between the various factions remained remarkably stable; and no wonder: each faction had its own little constituency on which it could always depend.”

This almost static balance rested on both factions within the parties and interest groups and minor parties outside. Thus in policy or ideology Republicans split into ultra-radicals, “Stevens radicals,” Independent Radicals, moderates, and conservatives, in David Donald’s formulation. Geographically the Republicans were dominant in the northern tier running from most of New England across upstate New York into the “new” Northwest, while fighting close battles in more urban areas and in the “old” Northwest. Doctrinally the grand new party embraced the old abolitionist crowd, liberals preaching civil service and other reforms, and a rapidly expanding array of laissez-faire conservatives.

Ohio Republicans continued to boast of their leadership, organization, and principles. Older leaders recruited younger ones; in the 1880s Governor Joseph B. Foraker encouraged a blossoming young lawyer named William Howard Taft, who would flower in the next century. Civil War memories still inspirited the Ohio GOP, as its convention orators declaimed that the Grand Old Party would never “break up its battle formations” or “bury its wagon trains,” no matter how deep the “scars of battle.” The leaders still spoke for the black people, and some Negro politicians rose in its ranks. George A. Myers, the chief of barbers at Cleveland’s grand political hotel, became one of the most astute and literate Republican leaders, in part because he was at the hub of a political network. But the great commitment to black rights was slowly waning, giving way to the defense of property rights.

The Democrats too were highly pluralistic, ranging from old moderate elements still voting the “politics of nostalgia” from the 1850s, through Douglas and McClellan Democrats, to elements of a strange new organization of “Night Hawks” and “Grand Dragons” and “Grand Wizards,” calling itself the Ku Klux Klan and arising out of a Southland bent on “redemption.” Like the GOP, the Democracy was increasingly tending toward its own brand of economic conservatism, especially under the impact of leaders like Grover Cleveland.

Given the narrow front on which the two major parties contended, it was inevitable that third parties would rise to press for cherished ideas. One of the first of these in the postwar years, the Liberal Republicans, was quite remarkable. Deeply alienated from the Grant Administration because of its corruption, its spoils, its cronyism with big business, its all-round mediocrity, independent-minded Republicans joined with defecting Democrats and others to rout the regulars. The movement attracted a diversity of followers—in the words of John Sproat, “free traders and protectionists, conservative New England patricians and agrarian radicals, civil service reformers and unvarnished spoilsmen, advocates of Negro rights and Southern redeemers,” united only by their hatred of Grantism. The leaders were a diverse lot too—among them the Radical Republican and Missouri senator Carl Schurz, the Massachusetts blueblood and former diplomat Charles Francis Adams, the aged poet William Cullen Bryant, a host of editors, including notably Edwin Godkin of the Nation and Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune.

At an 1872 Cincinnati conclave sober in both speech and drink, the Liberal Republicans chose Greeley himself for President. Many reformers were as aghast as regulars were amused. With his big bald head and neck whiskers, his drooping spectacles and rumpled clothes, his high-pitched voice and awkward ways, the outspoken old editor was the delight of opposition cartoonists; even more, he had embraced so many causes, waxed hot and cold on so many issues, denounced so many leaders including Lincoln himself, that he was bound to antagonize more voters than he attracted. And so he did, dragging down not only the Liberal Republicans but the Democratic party, which, at the nadir of its own leadership, adopted him as its own candidate.

Still, the Liberal Republicans’ main problem was not Greeley but liberalism itself. Skeptical if not contemptuous of the mass public, conservative in economic policy, compromising on Negro rights; moralistic but not always moral, amateurish and dilettantish in political mechanics, the movement virtually caricatured the liberal tendency toward disunity, as leaders divided over the tariff, Reconstruction, women’s rights, and election strategy. With their narrow definition of liberty as economic and political individualism, their distaste in general for social egalitarianism or economic “leveling,” their antipathy toward centralized government, their half-hidden disdain for the “masses,” the Liberals both reflected and abetted the dominant ideology of Spencer and William Graham Sumner. Badly beaten by Grant in 1872, the Liberal Republicans’ party faded away—though not their causes.

Other minor parties too were as impotent at the polls as they were vocal in protest. Rising out of wide grass-roots agitation over deflation, lack of capital, and the working conditions of labor, and galvanized by the panic of 1873 and resultant hardships, farm spokesmen, labor reformers, frustrated entrepreneurs, and assorted inflationists established the Greenback (or Greenback Labor) party. Its orators and platforms denounced hard-money policies and demanded that greenbacks be given full legal tender status and be issued freely. The party gained only a scattering of votes in 1876 with its candidate, the New York philanthropist Peter Cooper; won over a million votes in the off-year elections two years later; but fared badly at the polls in 1880 with General James B. Weaver at the head of the ticket, and faded away.

The Greenbackers’ frustrations pointed up an endemic problem of third parties—disunity. Composed of diverse elements, the foes of hard money fought over reform issues and in particular over the age-old dilemma for issue movements: go it alone as a separate party or coalesce with the less unattractive of the two major parties. The Prohibitionists had less trouble with the “fission or fusion” problem, since they had long set their faces hard against the intemperate major parties, but the Prohibition leadership was often divided over which strategy to pursue—whether to concentrate only on liquor or to broaden their credo to appeal to woman suffragists and other reformers.

So the two big parties lumbered along, like two old stagecoaches, undaunted by guerrilla bands assailing them from right or left or threatening to cut them off at the pass. The net impact of third parties during this period may well have been to consolidate the major parties’ shoulder-to-shoulder position in the center of the political spectrum, for the “single-issue” parties isolated activists who might otherwise have agitated within the major parties and pushed them toward more programmatic politics. If any of the parties had been able to reach out into the two great untapped sectors of the potential electorate, the stable party gridlock might have been upset. But those untapped sectors still lay beyond the electoral pale —women and blacks.

Proud of their vital Civil War roles both North and South, women had emerged from the War all the more prepared, they felt, for full participation in the American democracy. Hence they were all the more indignant that rights were extended to more men—blacks, of course, but also immigrants and others—but not women. Most woman suffragists strongly supported Negro enfranchisement—many had been ardent abolitionists—but even that veteran campaigner Elizabeth Cady Stanton was provoked into referring to “Sambo” and the enfranchisement of “Africans, Chinese, and all the ignorant foreigners the moment they touch our shores.” Another veteran campaigner, Frederick Douglass, answered her a few weeks later at a meeting:

“When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts”—when their homes were burnt down over their heads, he went on, and their children torn from their arms—“then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot.”

“Is that not all true about black women?” came a cry from the audience.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Douglass exclaimed, “it is true of the black woman, but not because she is a woman but because she is black.”

Not only were many women rebels divided from blacks, but women suffragists were divided among themselves over priorities and tactics, and indeed split into the National Woman Suffrage Association, headed by such militants as Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by those old redoubtables, Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe. The former group concentrated on gaining a woman suffrage amendment to the United States Constitution, the latter on efforts in the states, whose legislatures controlled voting rights. Anthony et al. published The Revolution in New York, Stone et al. the Woman’s Journal in Boston. Not for twenty years would this breach be healed.

Neither farmers nor workers upset the equilibrium of the two stately parties after the Civil War. In the early seventies midwestern farmers, burdened by mortgages and angered by discriminatory policies of railroads, grain elevators, moneylenders, and other instruments of “corporate power,” converted the Patrons of Husbandry, founded in 1867 to improve agriculture, into a political movement. For a time the “Grangers” seemed irresistible, as they routed the Republicans in Illinois and won key elections in Kansas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and elsewhere under the banner of “Reform and Anti-Monopoly.” The farmers proved themselves skillful and sophisticated in working with, against, or between the state Republican and Democratic parties, but they paid a price for their opportunism, for they neither built lasting strength within a major party nor built a party of their own. By 1876, the farmers’ revolt had burned itself out and most of the activists were back in the major parties.

Nor did organized workers have a major disruptive influence on the major parties. Influenced by the Horatio Algerism of the era, splintered into crafts that stressed business unionism, disenchanted by their experience with separatist movements in earlier days, constantly tempted toward expedient coalitions with the major parties in state and local elections, workers on the whole bolstered either the Democracy or what was already becoming the “Grand Old Party.” Labor scored a few striking victories over their major-party foes, only to see their gains washed away in the next recession or the next presidential election.

Still, the major parties were not mere shapeless collections of interests, sections, and attitudes. Often powerful at the state and local levels, they also showed continuities of leadership and strategy in national elections. By nominating a string of New Yorkers for President—Horatio Seymour in 1868, Greeley in 1872, Tilden in 1876, and Grover Cleveland three times in a row—the Democrats focused their campaign efforts on the Empire State as the big bellwether in the East; the only exception, Winfield Hancock, came from neighboring Pennsylvania. That Seymour and Tilden and a host of its other national leaders had their political roots in the Albany Regency attested to the long-run political impact of Martin Van Buren and the other creative party builders of the 1830s and 1840s. That the Democracy turned to the Midwest—usually Missouri or Indiana—for vice-presidential candidates reflected its desire to carry balance-of-power states rather than recognize its electoral bastion in the South. By the same token, the Republicans typically balanced their string of Ohioans with running mates from the East.

The more the parties played the politics of interest-group brokerage, sectional balance, issue compromise, and ideological rhetoric without substance, and the more political debate turned on secondary issues of financial corruption, patronage, personality, “honesty,” the more outcomes were influenced by chance, luck, and trivia. The contest of 1884 between Cleveland and Blaine marked a low point in this tendency. As usual, the Republicans charged that the Democracy was controlled by Tammany, even though Cleveland had made his political reputation by opposing it; as usual, the Democrats taxed their foes with using federal troops to run state elections, even though the GOP had long since abandoned the South. The Democrats charged, correctly, that Blaine had been involved in dubious dealings with railroad promoters, epitomized by his instruction to one correspondent, “Burn this letter”; and the Republicans charged, also correctly, that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child, which the New Yorker admitted. The campaign was thus enlivened by two taunts at rival party meetings:

Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine,

The continental liar from the State of Maine,

Burn this letter!

Ma! Ma! Where’s my pa?

Gone to the White House,

Ha! Ha! Ha!

Blaine had the worst of it. He managed to sit through a meeting of Protestant clergymen, all Republicans, at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City, and was too weary to notice and later too slow to repudiate a pastor’s reference to “a party whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.” The Democrats adroitly exploited this gaffe, bringing some offended Catholics into their fold. And that very evening, the “Plumed Knight” attended a millionaires’ dinner at Delmonico’s, in the company of Jay Gould, Chauncey Depew, Astors, Vanderbilts, and the inevitable Evarts—a dinner that promptly was caricatured in the New York World as the “Royal Feast of Belshazzar Blaine and the Money Kings,” complete with a starving father, mother, and child begging for food.

Cleveland’s razor-thin victory not only broke the Republicans’ twenty-year hold on the White House; it signified the new power of independent voters, for many of the old liberal and reformist Republicans, now called “Mugwumps,” had deserted the GOP, portending a future cleavage in that party. It put the Democracy, confined for twenty years to the hinterland but still essentially conservative, at the center of the nation’s councils. Its return to power was symbolized by one small fact hardly commented on at the time: when Grover Cleveland took the oath of office on March 4, 1885, it was the first occasion that this former mayor of Buffalo and governor of New York had visited Washington.

The Poverty of Policy

Perhaps it was understandable that the New York governor had never visited his nation’s capital, since Washington was neither a major tourist attraction nor a power center—and certainly not a dispenser of funds to desperate governors. Twenty years after the Civil War the city was more like a storm center without the storm. Compared to New York, wrote a correspondent, where everything throbbed “with the chase for the almighty dollar,” Washington tended to “deaden, rather than quicken you into activity.” Although full of energy, wrote an English visitor, “Washington … is a city of rest and peace.” Virginia Grigsby, who had just taken a job in the dead-letter branch of the Post Office, wrote her brother, “We are fixed with every convenience, long desks, easy revolving chairs, footstools, plenty of servants and no specific work to be done.

“There are all ladies in this room,” she added, “and therefore they do as they choose, most of them bring dressing sacques and put them on to work in. Some even take off their corsets. You know Mama never wears any at home, perhaps she may be able to do all this in the Land Office.”

The White House in the mid-eighties was still a place where a job seeker could walk through the front door without being questioned, cross the big vestibule, climb a flight of winding stairs, present his card to a secretary, and expect to see the President. Lobbyists, cranks, deadbeats, pension lawyers, sightseers swarmed through the House of Representatives and crowded around the chamber itself, where members, their feet propped up on their desks and their pink-and-gold cuspidors at their side, conducted genial business in tobacco smoke so thick that ladies grew ill in the galleries above. Only a few elder senators took snuff, but they could still drink, even in the Capitol restaurant, where an order for tea, combined with a wink to the waiter, would produce a cup half filled with whiskey. Pennsylvania Avenue still connected—and separated—President and Congress. For years it was separated itself, by railroad tracks that cut across the Mall between the Capitol and the Treasury. Congress, which controlled the city government, time and again tried to compel the Pennsylvania Railroad to eliminate these grade crossings, without success. It seemed to Washington’s leading historian that the railroad controlled the public domain in the very heart of the nation’s capital.

What then did these legislators do? The most visible continuing struggle in the post-Civil War years was over the tariff, though this struggle more often resembled a giant game of kick-the-ball in which bands of players, now teaming with one group and then another, kicked a number of balls over a variety of goalposts, while the spectators tried vainly to keep score. Despite thunderous declarations in party platforms, there were no clear divisions between Democrats and Republicans over actual policy. Rather, the tariff was thrown into an arena of contending interests. Of foreign-policy interests: the need of western farmers for overseas markets and the national interest in friendly relations abroad, balanced against workers’ fears of “pauper” competition, and such ethnic factors as Irish hatred of English “imperialists.” Of regional interests: in general North versus South, save for contrary interests within each section; thus Louisiana sugar growers favored a protective tariff. Of economic interests: broadly, producers versus consumers, but many workers acted on the basis of their concrete palpable stake in a particular industry rather than their thin general interest as consumers and on balance favored protection, while some manufacturers and many merchants opposed it. Of ideological or intellectual divisions: protection seemed to challenge some of the hoariest ideas in the American pantheon—notably individual economic liberty, laissez-faire government, decentralization—but the power of protectionist interests easily overrode such ideas, in part because the ideas were ambiguous and ambivalent. Editorial lions roared: such organs as the New York Evening Post and the Louisville Courier-Journal favored lower tariffs; many others, like the Philadelphia Press and the New York Tribune, championed protection.

Amid the clash of rhetoric and the dust of battle the politicos of House and Senate calculated these contending interests almost with the accuracy of an apothecary’s scale. This was what they were good at. The result was a series of compromises, now skewed in certain directions, now in others, as senators, congressmen, and Presidents came and went. Both parties, according to Tom Terrill, promised “prosperity and social harmony without fundamentally altering the nation politically or economically.” The result was a series of “mongrel tariffs.”

Some expected that Grover Cleveland would upset this equipoise following his presidential victory in 1884 on top of sweeping Democratic gains in Congress two years before. On the argument that “it is a condition which confronts us—not a theory,” he demanded sweeping tariff reduction. But Cleveland faced a political condition—the fact that a band of Democratic congressmen had persistently opposed major tariff reduction. The President finally managed to corral almost all the House Democrats, but the measure ran afoul of the Republican majority in the Senate, the presidential race of 1888, and Benjamin Harrison’s victory. This issue too would be projected into the turbulent nineties.

Struggles over silver and gold also aroused great sound and fury, usually signifying little more than a free-for-all among a jumble of interests. After 1873, when Congress demonetized silver and left gold as the sole monetary standard, silverites began to denounce this “crime of ’73” as a gold conspiracy. Five years later agrarians opposed to deflation combined with silverites to pass over Hayes’s veto the Bland-Allison Act, which required the Secretary of the Treasury every month to buy between $2 million and $4 million worth of silver at the market price. In 1890, the Sherman Silver Purchase Act raised the purchase to 4.5 million ounces per month and authorized the Treasury to issue in payment legal tender Treasury notes redeemable in gold or silver by Treasury decision, but it did not provide for free silver.

The rhetoric seemed to reflect a titanic struggle between rich and poor, easterner and westerner, upper class and lower class, debtor and creditor, farmer and financier, or some combination thereof. But the currency issue was not clear and sharp enough—or presented clearly or sharply enough—to pit mammoth interests against one another. Rather, the groups were divided among themselves—manufacturing interests against financial interests, big farmers against tenant farmers, hard-money businessmen against soft-money businessmen, New England textile interests against Pennsylvania iron and steel.

It was the job of party leaders to disentangle these webs of interests and to seek popular majorities for group coalitions, but for some years after the Civil War the crosscutting forces were too hard to master. Instead of grand electoral battles, with clear winners and losers in the congressional struggle over policy, currency battles dissolved into numberless obscure skirmishes, and policy into weak compromises and even vacuity. A government of “intricate partisan maneuver and token legislation,” in Robert Wiebe’s words, “elevated certain types of leadership,” but the “apparent leaders were as much adrift as their followers. For lack of anything that made better sense of their world, people everywhere weighed, counted, and measured it.” What kind of force was necessary to reshape parties, interests, coalitions, and leadership in a way that would make possible a transcending conflict between moral principles, grand policy, clearly polarized leaderships?

Certainly the railroad issue would not polarize party politicians, even though this issue sharpened in the seventies as farmers, workers, merchants, shippers, in varied ways and for varied reasons, attacked railroad monopolies, rate-making rebates and other discriminatory practices, corruption, and employment policies. By 1884, both national parties endorsed federal regulation. So did even a number of railroad men themselves, though most, including the likes of Jay Gould, opposed such governmental “interference.” Having accepted huge public grants and subsidies from the start, railroad men could hardly escape the regulation that this would entail. Some railroad leaders welcomed moderate federal regulation in order to stave off “extremist” state controls. Their own efforts at self-policing—through rate agreements, pools, arbitration, and other forms of “cooperation”—had failed to work out practically and had aroused public hostility to boot.

Such a consensus for railroad regulation had developed by the 1880s that the House of Representatives, under the leadership of a Texas congressman expert in railroad transportation, John H. Reagan, was strongly supporting federal regulation. The national consensus for regulation had such frail and mixed foundations, however, as to diffuse the policy-making process itself. The Senate and House passed bills so diverse as to tie the measures up in conference committee for months. The outcome in 1887, the Interstate Commerce Act, was a compromise measure that did not set freight and passenger tariffs and was vague in key aspects, but it did prohibit the granting of rebates, higher rates for shorter distances over the same line, and pooling agreements, and it established a five-man commission to monitor the railroads and enforce the law through prosecutions in the federal courts.

The Interstate Commerce Commission itself soon fell victim to the diffusion of political and governmental power. Enjoying solid support neither in the government nor at the grass roots, it felt the shifting pressures of the various interests involved. The result was feeble enforcement of the law, considerable evasion of it, and a series of Supreme Court decisions that weakened federal regulation to the point of emasculation.

If federal regulation of railroads faltered, what about action by the states? Long before the Civil War the first efforts had indeed begun at this level, in the form of commissions that investigated and publicized conditions and later of state bodies that actually set maximum rates and prohibited exorbitant charges. But these bodies ran into the same difficulties that had long plagued state control of big enterprises: the impotence or incompetence of many railroad commissions, pro-railroad court decisions, the persuasiveness of railroad lobbyists clustered in state capitals, and above all the power of great railroad corporations operating across state lines combined with the competition of states and localities for railroad service. By century’s end, in Morton Keller’s summation, neither state nor federal supervision had “resolved the conflicts raised by the interplay of railroads, shippers, labor, and the public.”

Some states, indeed, were arenas for railroad extravaganzas rather than regulation. California was perhaps the extreme case. Having conquered the Sierras, the Big Four—the big burly Stanford as politician-in-chief, the big burly Crocker as chief of construction, the big burly Huntington as chief financier and lobbyist, and the tall, thin Mark Hopkins as chief administrator—plunged into a twenty-year battle for economic and political power in the state. They propagandized in newspaper ads and in speeches to their employees, bought out opposition papers, handed out free railroad passes, lobbied and probably paid off legislators. These men were not hypocrites. “It is a question of might,” Stanford told his stockholders, “and it is to your interest to have it determined where the power resides.”

The Big Four confronted economic rivals as well as political assailants. Stanford and Huntington had to fight off railroad invasions from the east, “taking possession,” Stewart Holbrook said, “of all the mountain passes.” The Big Four were able to buy out or otherwise overcome a number of small railroad ventures on the West Coast, but they met their match in Thomas Scott, a veteran railroader who had first learned his trade with the famous Allegheny Portage Railroad and later as the man who advised President-elect Lincoln to proceed secretly from Harrisburg to Washington. Now president of the powerful Pennsylvania Railroad and of the Texas & Pacific, Scott speared his rail lines through the Southwest, but encountered stout resistance from the Big Four’s Southern Pacific.

Huntington counterattacked his rivals in Congress and state legislatures as well as in the mountain passes. His comments and instructions to his agent minced few words: “I believe with $200,000 I can pass our bill.” “I do not think we can get any legislation this session for land grants, or for changing line of road unless we pay more for it than it is worth.” “Scott is prepared to pay, or promises to pay, a large amount of money to pass his bill.” The Big Four poor-mouthed about their profits, complained of the risks of western railroading and the lack of investment money, and attacked any and all “government interference,” but each amassed a fortune of several tens of millions of dollars.

This dramatic union of economic and political power—symbolized by Stanford’s election as United States senator in 1885 by the state legislature—was not, however, typical of the nation’s political economy as a whole. The American polity was dotted by numerous power centers, but far from a master power system in government or in business, there was a chaotic dispersion of influence. Even the Big Four had a serious falling-out among themselves over politics, and even the sprawling railroad baronies could not stop passage of the Interstate Commerce Act. Big business was powerful; it was by no means all-powerful.

Certainly big business was not powerful enough to bar legislative action against the acceleration of financial and industrial combinations, even if it had had a mind to. Rooted in hundreds of years of English and American common law, the antitrust movement was propelled by powerful forces: the early American belief in competition fortified by Social Darwinism; protests by small businessmen, farmers, and workers against big mergers that threatened their livelihood; regional feeling in the South and West against big eastern “monopolists.” Liberal organs like the New York Times joined in the attack, as did an acute foreign observer.

“The power of groups of men organized by incorporation as joint-stock companies, or of small knots of rich men acting in combination,” wrote Lord Bryce in 1888, “has developed with unexpected strength in unexpected ways, overshadowing individuals and even communities, and showing that the very freedom of association which men sought to secure by law when they were threatened by the violence of potentates may, under the shelter of the law, ripen into a new form of tyranny.” The wave of mergers surged on. The upshot was the Sherman Antitrust Act, passed without opposition in the House and by a 52 to 1 vote in the Senate, and signed by President Harrison in July 1890. This unusual harmony was testimony less to universal enthusiasm over the measure than to wide acceptance of the need to slow combination. Big business hardly found the act very threatening. Instead of providing explicit legal prohibitions, the measure simply outlawed “every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states, or with foreign nations.” Instead of establishing an ICC type of commission charged with single-minded enforcement of the act, Congress left enforcement in the hands of federal prosecutors, private litigants seeking triple damages, and U.S. circuit courts. Competition itself, people hoped, would make the law virtually self-enforcing.

An enfeebled government enabled a few to amass colossal riches; it had only marginal impact on the lives of the mass of people. Almost obscured in the din of battle over “tariff-for-revenue-only” and silver, for example, was the ironic fact that the federal government ran a surplus during many of these years and was embarrassed as to how properly to get rid of it. Grover Cleveland had a penchant for vetoing as “fraudulent” tiny pensions begged by impoverished widows of Union men. Cleveland’s successor, Benjamin Harrison, chose as Commissioner of Pensions a past commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, who took office with the war cry, “God help the surplus!” God didn’t.

Far more tragically, God did not favor the American Indian in the decades after the Civil War. Following a near-century of land seizures and cessions, Congress in 1871 ordered an end to treaty-making with Indian tribes. By then the early Americans, their old space on the Great Plains shrunk to the Indian Territory that would later become Oklahoma, could no longer follow the old and desperate strategy of simply “moving west.” In this vital human area too, federal action was marked by a volatility of policy operating through a weak and divided government, among a diffusion of interests. With no long-term program or principle behind it, policy shifted back and forth from treaty-making to subsidy to education to isolation to assimilation to relocation to force. The Interior and War Departments and the Board of Indian Commissioners fought for influence; President, Senate, and House differed; actual dealings with Indians were often controlled by settlers, traders, and local officials. For years the selection of Indian agents was left to the Catholic Church and various Protestant sects, until church officials fell to quarreling among themselves.

Reformers—among them old abolitionists like Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Wendell Phillips, and an eloquent new voice, Helen Hunt Jackson—criticized Indian policies, but western senators scoffed that the farther people lived from the Indians, the more they loved them. In 1887, however, Congress passed the Dawes Act, which dissolved Indian tribes as legal entities and allotted individual Indians portions of reservation land, in order to encourage both individual initiative and assimilation with the white culture. After twenty-five years Indians would have full ownership and the rights of United States citizenship. But however well intended, the act as administered substantially disrupted Indian tribal and communal organization and indeed virtually atomized Indian cultures.

Despite the severity of its policies, Congress never seemed to focus consistently on the Indian situation. Rather the legislators debated their future, in Wiebe’s view, “as it might have discussed taxes.” Almost none saw any connection between the plight of Indians and that of blacks. Congress treated Indians as the enemy with which to make treaties (for land cessions), to isolate, to “civilize,” and finally, when all else failed, to fight, in a series of brutal encounters that preoccupied the United States Army during the late nineteenth century.

The Indian wars on the Plains curiously resembled the political fights in Washington: there were no clear battle lines or decisive clashes, just three decades of skirmishes between a constantly shifting array of small forces. The red warriors rallied behind a string of charismatic leaders: the Sioux nation’s Sitting Bull, “of compelling countenance and commanding demeanor, quick of thought and emphatic in judgments”; wily Geronimo of the Apaches; the stoic Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé. Yet none of these tribal chieftains was able to reach across centuries-old clan rivalries to unite the 200,000 Plains Indians against the invaders from the east. Nor were the white generals successful in so maneuvering their disparate units of infantry, cavalry, and artillery as to pin the Indians down for a set-piece battle. Thus the “wars” were in fact a series of collisions, of regiment against tribe in hit-and-run raids, ambushes, and mounted clashes that usually ended in tactical draws—but ultimate strategic retreat for the native Americans.

As in the past, white settlers undercut federal efforts to contain the Indians on reservations. The army tried in vain to keep prospectors out of the Black Hills area assigned to Sitting Bull’s Sioux, but the gold rush accelerated in 1875, and within a year the Indians were on the warpath. Unscrupulous white traders sold the warriors ammunition and guns—including repeating rifles that were superior to the Civil War Springfields still being used by the army. But Indians too turned coats; individual warriors and sometimes whole clans helped the army to hunt down rival tribesmen.

At first the soldiers, many of them Civil War veterans, held the Plains warriors in contempt. One captain boasted that he could ride through the Sioux nation with just eighty men; within weeks, he and his entire command were dead. In 1876, the flamboyant George Custer, after chasing Crazy Horse’s warriors for six months, attacked the Sioux army at Little Big Horn; he and his force were annihilated. The truth was that the Indians were skillful fighters. Their culture centered on the horse, the hunt, and the honor of combat. Lightly equipped, deftly led, increasingly armed with modern weapons, the red warriors were “a match for any man,” as one cavalry general conceded.

But while the Indians could hold their own in battle, in defending their settlements and families they were at a disadvantage. Chief Joseph marched his entire tribe over 1,700 miles and outfought several columns of pursuers, only to be besieged in his camp and forced to surrender. In another camp, at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890, a brawl started between the surrounded Indians and soldiers of Custer’s old 7th Cavalry; two hundred Indians of all ages, and twenty-five white soldiers, were gunned down, and the last halfhearted resistance of the Sioux nation ended in tragedy. For a time small groups of fighters, like Geronimo’s Apache band, continued a guerrilla struggle, but the very foundations of the Indian way of life were disappearing. From on foot, horseback, and even train, whites slaughtered the vast buffalo herds upon which the Plains natives depended for food and shelter.

Meanwhile, settlers streamed into the Plains. By 1890, there were five times as many whites as Indians between the Missouri and the Rockies and the U.S. census reported that the western frontier had disappeared. Military stalemate had in fact spelled decisive defeat for the native Americans.

The army that held the Indians in check received little support and much criticism from Washington. The soldiers, thirty-six regiments of whites and four of blacks, were ill housed, ill clothed, ill fed; their discipline was harsh, their weapons mismatched and often shoddy, their tasks usually boring in the extreme. The drab life and grinding routine produced a hard set of men—“villins, loyars, teeves, scoundhrils and … dam murdhrers,” they called themselves with perverse pride. Easterners sympathetic to the Indians and horrified by the cruelty of the frontier wars branded the soldiers as butchers and barbarians. Still, the small professional army kept alive in the West those lessons of leadership, tenacity, and improvisation that the volunteers had learned so painfully in the Civil War. The veterans of the Indian wars would be formidable opponents to any foreign foe.

Of foreign foes, however, there were very few in those years. Spain had reoccupied Santo Domingo during the war but prudently withdrew in 1865. French Emperor Napoleon III, under the pretext of collecting debts owed European investors, invaded Mexico in 1861 and set up a puppet government headed by the young Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian. But, by 1867, the continued resistance of Mexican patriots led by President Benito Juárez, as well as the specter of a victorious American army on the Rio Grande, convinced Napoleon to pull out of the venture; Maximilian’s regime quickly collapsed, and the erstwhile emperor was executed by his subjects.

No leader had so few followers as Secretary of State William Seward, who met constant frustration in his attempts to revive the Manifest Destiny expansionism of antebellum days. Congress rejected his bids to acquire Hawaii, Cuba, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Iceland, Greenland, and parts of Canada. His treaty to buy Alaska from the Russians for just over $7 million was approved only after Seward undertook a massive campaign to educate the public as to the potential value of the territory—and after the Russian ambassador bribed key members of the House to appropriate money for the deal. Aside from this 1867 purchase of “Seward’s Icebox,” the only territory added to the United States after the Civil War was the tiny Pacific island of Midway.

But there was always John Bull. Britain still loomed as both friend and rival. English loans and English-built ships had buoyed the Confederates during the war; Yankee and Canadian fishermen clashed in northern waters; a border dispute in the Far West simmered on; Irish nationalists began raiding Canada from New York. Pressure for war built up in the Senate, where Chairman Charles Sumner of the Foreign Relations Committee rose to demand that Britain pay more than $2 billion in damages for its aid to the Confederacy—or else transfer Canada to the United States in lieu of payment. The British responded with disdain to the senator’s claims, and war seemed imminent on several occasions; but President Grant and his able Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish, eventually defused the crisis and hammered out an agreement. Fish and Grant also succeeded in resisting pressure to go to war with Spain, whose colony of Cuba was in the throes of a bloody revolt. After preserving the peace for eight years, the warrior-president left office in 1877—and immediately embarked on a triumphant tour of the world.

Grant’s two-year procession around the globe highlighted a subtle but important change at home. It was during this period that Americans began to look outward on the world with a new interest, a new understanding, and a new level of personal and economic involvement—all of which would help to reshape foreign policy in the 1890s and beyond. Sam Grant of Ohio, as he addressed crowds of English workers, discussed realpolitik with Germany’s Prince Bismarck, and shook the hand of the Emperor of Japan, was not the only American taken up with a desire to see the world. Each year the State Department issued as many as 30,000 passports for travel abroad. It was the age of the Cook tour, when low-fare steamships made Europe accessible to middle-class families. Well-to-do families like the Astors and the Roosevelts sent their children abroad as a matter of course; immigrants sought to revisit their old homes; archeologists went to dig, engineers to build and measure, and the ordinary tourists—in Henry James’s sour view—to “stare and gawk and smell, and crowd every street and shop.” The most numerous Americans abroad were the students and scholars—such as young Professor Woodrow Wilson of Princeton—who brought home European ideas.

In the books of traveled authors like Henry James and William Dean Howells, Americans encountering Europe was a recurring theme. Henry James based half-a-dozen novels on the idea, while Mark Twain made his own sardonic contribution with The Innocents Abroad. Magazines and newspapers, most of which boasted at least one foreign correspondent, filled in those Americans who lacked the money or the inclination to see things for themselves, as did the new picture postcards introduced by the Eastman Company. America’s new outward gaze was not fixed exclusively on Europe, however. For two decades, readers of the New York Herald could thrill to the adventures of the paper’s African correspondent, explorer Henry M. Stanley. Congress briefly overcame its parsimony to vote funds for several expeditions to the Arctic.

The Far East became a subject of special fascination. Americans helped to finance Japan’s first railroad and to modernize its education and farming methods. Lafcadio Hearn enlivened American literature with a dozen enthusiastic and sensitive books on oriental culture. The government became involved in this turn toward the East, sometimes in spite of itself. Commodore Robert Shufeldt was recalled from Korea after a political gaffe, but not before he opened that country to American merchants and diplomats. Congress ratified a series of reciprocal-trade agreements with Hawaii, and then strengthened ties with that island kingdom by leasing a naval station at Pearl Harbor in 1887. America’s involvement in Samoa nearly resulted in a war with Germany in 1889, until a hurricane sank the rival German and American fleets off the islands, giving peace efforts time to succeed.

In looking toward America’s nearest neighbors, however, the country’s gaze seemed to lack focus altogether. Pan-Americanism, sponsored by Benjamin Harrison’s Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, bore its first fruit in 1889 when delegates from eighteen North and South American states—including Andrew Carnegie for the U.S.—met in Washington. Yet Blaine came close to provoking war with Chile in late 1891 when a group of American sailors was assaulted in Valparaiso, and many Latin Americans were irked by the heavy-handedness of President Cleveland’s intervention on behalf of Venezuela in its 1895 border dispute with Britain’s colony of British Guiana. Nor could the various administrations in Washington make up their minds about the assorted schemes being discussed for a canal across Central America. Yankee investment in the southern nations—reaching several hundred million dollars by the end of the century—seemed the only consistent factor in U.S. policy toward Latin America.

The great corporations, however, had a most consistent foreign policy, as they reached out for new markets and new investments: Rockefeller’s Standard Oil began selling its products abroad in 1879; J.P. Morgan floated loans for Peru; Cyrus McCormick introduced his wire binder to Russia in the 1880s, just as the Equitable Company began selling life insurance to the Czar’s subjects. The impact of foreign sales reached down through the economy, to Pullman workers making railroad cars for England and to midwestern farmers raising wheat for Germany and hogs for Bulgaria.

“If all thim gr-great powers … was … to attack us,” Mr. Dooley said, “I’d blockade the Armour an’ Company an’ th’ wheat ilivators iv Minnysoty. I tell ye, th’ hand that rocks th’ scales in th’ grocery store is th’ hand that rules th’ wurruld.”

Neither commerce nor travel had much impact on the rhetoric of the age. Congressmen still courted votes with speeches that harked back to the isolationist dicta of Washington and Jefferson, while journalists sought to sell papers by calling for the abolition of the professional foreign service. “It is a costly humbug and a sham,” said the New York Sun, that “spoils a few Americans every year, and does no good to anybody.” But rather than disband the diplomatic corps, Congress and the State Department significantly strengthened it during the 1870s and 1880s. Businessmen in the burgeoning export trade—which grew from $13 million to $2 billion before the century ended—successfully pressured the government to upgrade the consular service, which in turn made available to merchants a wealth of detailed information on commercial opportunities abroad. The prestige and effectiveness of the professional diplomats were greatly enhanced when Congress created the rank of ambassador in 1893.

The government took one other step to put America on a par with its neighbors, after a long period of neglect. The Civil War had sparked revolutionary developments in naval warfare: ironclad warships; mines and torpedoes; revolving gun turrets and heavy rifled cannon; the central direction of fleets over long distances by telegraph. Yet, while the nations of Europe and South America rushed to apply and improve the new naval technology, the United States disbanded most of its wartime fleet and allowed its remaining ships slowly to rot. The steam-driven, armored warships of the other powers outclassed the wooden cruisers—many of which still relied on sails—and tiny ironclad monitors of the U.S. Navy. By the end of the 1870s, America was surpassed as a seapower by Chile, China, and ten other countries.

Studying the progress in ship design made by other navies, American officers struggled to train themselves in the use of weapons that they did not have. Pressure from the sailors—and from Republican politicians eager to get rid of the embarrassing budget surpluses generated by protective tariffs—finally bore fruit when President Chester Arthur agreed that “every condition of national safety, economy, and honor” demanded a “thorough rehabilitation of the Navy.” The first bill to pass Congress called for building three armored cruisers; over the next decade, money was granted for a dozen more cruisers, as well as for five battleships to be the equal of any fielded by the Europeans.

The armored war fleet that slowly took shape was a monument to American industrial progress. In the yards of the Bethlehem Steel Company first one behemoth and then another grew and took form: the four-hundred-foot hull, reaching up forty or more feet over the heads of workmen; the twin propellers, projecting out the stern from steam engines larger than Americans had ever before installed in ships; the long plates of rolled steel stretching along the deck and waterline. After being launched, the ship was fitted out with heavily armored turrets mounting eight- or twelve-inch guns, torpedoes newly designed by inventor Arthur Whitehead, electric searchlights, modern signaling devices, and—after 1892—an internal telephone system.

As more and better ships came off the ways, some men in the naval establishment began to think in terms of a broader role than home defense for the navy. Benjamin Tracy, Secretary of the Navy during most of the period of expansion, consistently advocated an oceangoing fleet capable of attacking the shipping and coasts of any potential foe, and at the new Naval War College Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan conducted an influential series of lectures on seapower and the need for coaling stations abroad. But Congress remained committed to a smaller, defensive fleet. The very names of the battleships spoke of the nation’s homeward-looking character: the Texas, the Indiana, the Maine.

Showdown 1896

Even as the nation’s economy pounded toward new peaks of investment and production in the early 1890s. men of affairs were assailed by doubts about the future. Suddenly the days were gone when an Andrew Carnegie could write his Triumphant Democracy and, when asked “What had become of the shadows?,” could answer that his book was “written at high noon, when the blazing sun overhead casts no shadow.” Now there were shadows—produced by strains in the economy, a persistent agricultural depression, racial and religious tensions, and, above all, ferment among farmers and workers. Editorialists worried about immigration, trusts, liquor, socialism, woman suffrage.

Though some feared a war between haves and have-nots, history would be less simple but more decisive. Few at the start of the 1890s could predict that the decade would produce social and political torrents that would wash over old lines of conflict, precipitate an electoral showdown, and leave in its wake a realigned and polarized party system that would dominate American politics for decades.

Still, a war between rich and poor seemed plausible as the rich in 1892 looked at the poor in farm and factory. In the West and South, the Populists were mobilizing for the 1894 elections with a militant campaign to seek out black support, even while toning down their radicalism to win urban and middle-class voters. In Georgia, Tom Watson ran again for Congress in 1894, after winning nomination in a Populist convention that was about one-third black—probably the peak of Southern black participation in the 1890s. The Populists increased their total vote in 1894 over the previous presidential election, but both Watson and “Sockless Jerry” Simpson were defeated, and widespread election fraud left the Populists in a bitter mood as they planned for 1896.

The labor front appeared even more ominous to economic elites, especially after the bloody struggle at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead steel works in July 1892. That summer Carnegie was reaching the height of his economic power and world celebrity. His was now the biggest steel company on the globe, able to produce half as much as all the British steel makers combined. A few years earlier, Carnegie had happily acquired the most modern of rail mills in Homestead, Pennsylvania—but with it he had less happily acquired several hundred members of the Amalgamated Iron, Steel and Tin Workers, one of the best-organized unions of skilled workers in the country. When Carnegie departed for Scotland in the spring of 1892, he left in charge of Homestead his forty-three-year-old managing partner, Henry Clay Frick. Named after his wealthy grandfather’s political hero, Frick from his tenderest years had epitomized the Horatio Alger ideal of pluck and luck. Through a fanatical commitment to the making and selling of coke he had made his first million by the age of thirty, and as the steel plants devoured more and more of the soft black “coal cake,” Frick had borrowed against his own future legacies, borrowed from his uncles, borrowed from his father—who mortgaged his small farm to raise the cash—to buy coal lands and build hundreds of coke ovens. Soon the “coke king” was invited to join Carnegie’s expanding empire.

Carnegie had defended unionism, especially in his preachings abroad, but behind his rhetoric it was weak, local unions he favored, not national organizations. Frick suffered no such ambivalence. Viewing the Amalgamated with implacable hostility, he sought a showdown that would break this union which was resisting his demand for a lower sliding wage rate. When their request for continued negotiations was denied, union workers closed down the plant. Refusing concessions, Frick surrounded the mill with a stockade of planks topped by barbed wire, ordered up three hundred Pinkerton guards as strikebreakers, and arranged for his hired private army to be brought by barges to Homestead and landed inside the stockade in the dead of night.

The events of July 6, 1892, would become a grim saga of American labor: the alarm sounded by sirens and factory whistles after union guards spotted the Pinkertons; the frantic efforts of workers to beat off the barge landings with hoes, guns, and fence staves; the Pinkerton strikebreakers, drifting offshore in the infernal heat of the barges, finally running up a white flag; the granting of safe-conduct to the Pinkertons so they could march away; and then the gory climax as workers and their wives, now a maddened horde bent on vengeance, fell on the Pinkertons, flailed at them with clubs and iron-filled stockings, jabbed at their eyes with umbrellas, tore off their bright-buttoned uniforms, and left three dead, a dozen injured, and the rest naked and bloodied.

In the end Frick and Carnegie won, of course, because they could summon superior force—in this case 8,000 state troops to open up the plant. Both men paid a price. A “Nihilist” immigrant from Lithuania, Alexander Berkman, burst into Frick’s office, shot him twice in the neck, and stabbed him repeatedly. Frick coolly wrote out telegrams to his mother and to Carnegie about the event, informed the press that the company’s anti-union policy would not be changed, and went home to recuperate. Carnegie, who had remained almost incommunicado in a Scottish retreat, was ridiculed in the British and American press for his autocratic practices as compared to his democratic preachings.

“Say what you will of Frick,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch trumpeted, “he is a brave man. Say what you will of Carnegie, he is a coward, and gods and men hate cowards.”

The Homestead violence had embarrassed the Republican party, which had an election to win against Grover Cleveland in 1892. A GOP emissary visited the convalescing Frick with a proposal to recognize the union and settle the strike. “I will never recognize the Union, never, never!” Frick burst out. President Harrison—even Carnegie himself—could not make him do this, he said. Later Harrison blamed Homestead for his defeat. But if Harrison hoped to prick the industrialists’ conscience, he did not know these men. They considered Cleveland safer than Harrison.

“Cleveland! Landslide!” Carnegie wrote Frick on hearing the returns. “Well we have nothing to fear and perhaps it is best….” He was quite right. Cleveland, in this his second White House stint, soon proved himself sounder than ever on gold, civil service, federal spending—everything save the tariff. He struck the theme of his Administration in his Inaugural Address with a denunciation of “paternalism.” The lesson must be learned, he said, “that while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their Government its functions do not include the support of the people.” He would teach that lesson.

Hosts of farmers facing debts and declining prices, workers toiling sixty hours a week, financiers skittish over bank failures abroad, and a President who barred his government from “supporting the people”—the combustibles were there for the igniting. The fuse was lighted in May 1893 when converging financial pressures produced a detonation on Wall Street that left prices sagging. By year’s end, almost six hundred banks and perhaps 15,000 businesses had failed. Within a few months stocks lost several hundred million dollars in value. At the depth of the depression, over a quarter of the nation’s railroad mileage was in receivership. Farm prices dropped further. Two and a half million persons, it was estimated, were left looking for work.

Cleveland’s response to the crisis was to cling even more tightly to orthodoxy. To stem the drain on the nation’s gold reserve the President forced repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act through Congress, amid the indignation of the silverites. He pressed for a lower tariff, then let a moderate bill become law without his signature. He was in no mood to make concessions to farmers desperate over mortgages or workers facing wage cuts and layoffs. Soon he faced both these specters.

By the spring of 1894, masses of men who had been wandering the countryside looking for work were beginning to cohere as leaders arose to channel their desperate needs into a political force. The self-appointed leader of the “Commonweal Army of Christ” was a thirty-nine-year-old Ohio Populist and factory owner named Jacob Coxey. Soon Coxey was leading his army, half-a-thousand strong, several hundred miles through Ohio and Pennsylvania to Washington to offer a living petition, a “petition in boots.” Arrested in the capital amid much publicity for “walking on the grass,” the army was forcibly dispersed. Coxey’s proposals for public works jobs through the issuance of paper currency were introduced in Congress—only to be ignored or jeered at by many of the lawmakers.

No one could laugh off the trouble that developed in Chicago in a conflict between a paternalistic employer and a militant union leader. By 1894, George Pullman had developed his Palace Car Company into a $36 million business employing 5,000 workers who built, serviced, and operated his plush and paneled sleepers. Pullman had also built a model town “bordered with bright beds of flowers and green velvety stretches of lawn,” as the company proclaimed, which Pullman’s men ruled with benevolent authority. “We are born in a Pullman house,” one worker said, “fed from the Pullman shop, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman church, and when we die we shall be buried in the Pullman cemetery and go to the Pullman hell.”

When the company laid off men, cut wages, and yet maintained rents during the spreading depression, the workers turned to Eugene Debs’s militant American Railway Union. Long active in the railroad brotherhoods, Debs had founded the ARU as a means of transcending craft rivalries and uniting the 150,000 railroad workers in the Midwest. When Pullman refused to negotiate with his workers, the ARU ordered a boycott of Pullman cars, the railroads began to fire any man who refused to switch Pullman cars, and soon 125,000 men on twenty railroads had quit.

Behind the issues of wages and rents was the central question of power—and the employers had far greater power resources. The General Managers Association, a militant organization of railroads, took command of the anti-strike effort. The ARU turned to the American Federation of Labor for support, but its president, Samuel Gompers, believed neither in industrial unionism nor in the prospects of an ARU victory. The AFL issued words of encouragement to the ARU but decided against a general strike. When some minor disturbances occurred along the tracks and an injunction was defied, Cleveland sent several thousand “special deputies” to restore order over the vociferous objections of Illinois Governor John P. Altgeld. Intensified violence followed, the strike was broken, and Debs was jailed.

The political pendulum oscillated wildly in response to the economic and social pressures of the early nineties. In the most volatile part of the country—the more heavily urban areas stretching from Wisconsin and Illinois through New England—the Republicans won 115 congressional seats to the Democrats’ 54 in 1888, lost to the Democrats 63 to 106 two years later, split 88 to 89 in 1892, and overwhelmed their foes 168 to 9 two years later. The Democrats lost a total of 113 seats in the 1894 congressional elections, the largest pendulum sweep since the Civil War. Former Republican Speaker Thomas B. Reed—who now would return to the speakership—had predicted such Democratic losses that the dead would be buried in trenches and marked “unknown.” He hardly exaggerated.

This midterm repudiation of Cleveland served mainly to harden the Administration in its economic policies. The Treasury now faced dwindling federal revenues, at the same time that gold reserves declined despite the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Desperately Cleveland turned to the big bankers for loans through bond issues, without much response; ultimately he was bailed out by a syndicate headed by J. Pierpont Morgan and August Belmont, Jr., which purchased 3.5 million ounces of gold.

With mounting indignation, silverites. Populists, and socialists watched Cleveland’s failure to cope with the depression, his hard-money policies, his “sellouts” to the Morgans and the rest of the hard-eyed bankers. He was so unpopular personally by now— “I hate the ground that man walks on,” declared an Alabama senator—as to have lost any hope for renomination in 1896, or even to have decisive influence in the convention. Richard (“Silver Dick”) Bland and other leaders of the silver bloc in the House framed an “Appeal of the Silver Democrats” asking immediate restoration of free and unlimited coinage of silver at the ratio of 16 to 1, but the Administration was adamant. As a party the Democrats were in disarray, with Cleveland and the old “Bourbon” element almost impotent, except in their veto power, the silverites tied to one issue and lacking a compelling leader, and the whole party confronted on the left by a militant populist movement.

The Populists, however, were facing a severe internal crisis. Sobered by their election defeats in 1894 and pressured by the growing clamor for “free silver,” Jerry Simpson and others resolved to make silver a magnet to draw the nation’s reform forces into the People’s party. Other Populist leaders held that narrowing their broad platform to free silver would mean dumping the rest of their reforms. “The scheme,” roared Tom Watson, “is a trap, a pitfall, a snare, a menace, a fraud.” It would mean “forever checking our advance toward government ownership of the railroads” and other key goals. Only as part of a broad set of measures could free coinage of silver do any good. A Populist party convention early in 1895 reaffirmed the whole sacred creed by a large majority, but it was clear that internal trouble lay ahead.

Times of heightened social pressures and political conflict often demand extraordinary leadership; the alternative may be chaos and worse. The mid-nineties produced not one but two remarkable leaders who were pitted against each other in one of the great dramas of American politics.

By this time, William McKinley had become an experienced and effective party politician and officeholder. Both political and personal setbacks had seasoned him. After six terms in the House, where he took leadership of tariff battles and served as chairman of Ways and Means, he was engulfed in the Democratic landslide of 1890, but he rebounded in 1891 by winning election as governor of Ohio. Then while governor he suddenly found himself nearly $130,000 in debt because an old friend who had once helped McKinley had failed in business and left notes countersigned by the governor. Wealthy friends bailed him out, with minimum publicity. One of the leaders in this effort was Mark Hanna, a Cleveland banker and traction magnate, who had consecrated himself to the mission of making McKinley President.

By 1896, as a leading spokesman for a Republican tariff, as a friend of Hanna and other men of money, and as a veteran legislator, executive, and party man coming from the most strategic of states, McKinley was the front runner for the Republican nomination. But his strength lay deeper than this. He had inherited, in H. Wayne Morgan’s words, “the political tendencies of a whole generation. The ideals of party unity and loyalty, outlined when Rutherford B. Hayes sat in the White House, found a logical spokesman in the man who championed every aspect of Republican nationalism, and mastered the arts of political leadership in a confused and fragmented era. He was fatalistic about success; an air of predestination hung about his apparent victory. But he and Hanna insured that destiny with years of hard work, cultivation of mass opinion, and close attention to a new, widened industrial constituency.”

As McKinley headed for a first-ballot nomination in the spring weeks of 1896, the press was anticipating a far more open convention for the Democracy. Increasingly, though, they were watching the rise of a young Nebraskan, William Jennings Bryan, who had taken vocal leadership of the silver Democrats. Like McKinley, he had been born and educated in the Midwest. Both men had started their professional careers as small-town lawyers and had turned to politics; and both, in Paul Glad’s view, “were steeped in the moralistic tradition of American Protestantism.” They had played congressional Box and Cox when Bryan had won appointment to the House Ways and Means Committee just after McKinley had left it. But there the resemblances ceased. Seventeen years younger than McKinley, Bryan had been only an infant during the Civil War. He differed sharply with the Ohioan on silver, tariff, and most other key issues. If both shared small-town moralities, Bryan was positively steeped in the rural virtues, in the agrarian myth of the independent, liberty-loving yeoman, in the Jeffersonian concept of simple, grass-roots democracy. And if McKinley was a good-looking, well-set-up man who fitted the image of a President, Bryan was positively charismatic— “a tall, slender, handsome fellow,” Robert La Follette remembered, “who looked like a young divine.”

Sure enough, the McKinley machine, well fueled by Hanna’s energy and ample funds, rolled to a smashing victory on the first ballot in the Republican convention in St. Louis. Assembling three weeks later in Chicago, the Democratic convention in form followed the traditional pattern of the great national enclaves: there was the usual crush of delegates, hangers-on, and spectators in a big overdecorated hall; the usual stentorian speeches; and the usual battle over the platform, with the silverites on this occasion winning a plank calling for the free and unlimited coinage of silver at the 16 to 1 ratio. But it was one of those occasions when none of this mattered very much, when a single event dominated the convention both at the time and in retrospect. That event was merely a speech—but a speech that itself became a mobilizer of people and a ganglion of history. Like most such events, it was an act carefully contrived and long rehearsed, an act taken boldly and at just the right moment.

Just the right moment was during the debate on the platform, when William Jennings Bryan sprang from his seat and bounded up to the rostrum, as a great wave of applause and exultation rolled across the floor and into the galleries. He stood before them dressed in his black sack suit of alpaca, a low-cut vest, trousers slightly baggy at the knees, his head thrown back, left hand on the lectern, his right hand free for grand gestures. The address contained little new of substance, but few present on that day would forget the magnificent sentences.

“I come to speak to you in defense of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty—the cause of humanity.

“With a zeal approaching the zeal which inspired the crusaders who followed Peter the Hermit, our silver Democrats went forth from victory unto victory until they are now assembled, not to discuss, not to debate, but to enter up the judgment already rendered by the plain people of this country.”

Bryan was speaking effortlessly, hardly raising his voice, yet reaching the farthest seats in the convention hush.

“We have petitioned, and our petitions have been scorned; we have entreated, and our entreaties have been disregarded; we have begged, and they have mocked when our calamity came. We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them.”

The crowd was now rising and shouting as Bryan drove his points home. When the gold men, he said, charged that the silver forces disturbed their business interests, “we reply that you have disturbed our business interests”—workers, attorneys, merchants, farmers, all these were as much businessmen as the “man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain.”

The crowd was in a near-frenzy as Bryan came to his peroration:

“Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

After a series of dramatic roll-call votes, Bryan bested Silver Dick Bland and went on to win the Democratic presidential nomination on the fifth ballot.

Bryan’s nomination left the Populists in bitter disarray. Fusionists, expecting the Democrats to cling to gold, had insisted on holding their convention after the Democrats so that they could scoop up the droves of Democrats who would desert the party of Cleveland. Now, with their plans turned topsy-turvy, they decided that they must nominate Bryan—and the Maine banker and railroad man Arthur Sewall, who had been chosen for Vice-President. Anti-fusionists saw Bryan’s nomination and the Democrats’ plagiarizing of the Populist platform as a plot to cripple both the Populist movement and party. And they could not stomach the “anti-labor” Sewall.

“If we fuse we are sunk,” Henry D. Lloyd summed up the dilemma: “If we don’t fuse, all the silver men we have will leave us for the more powerful Democrats.” At a convention racked with pandemonium and bitter debate, the fusionists won the nomination for Bryan, and—despite a telegram from the Commoner refusing the nomination unless he could run with Sewall —named Tom Watson for Vice-President. During the fall campaign both Bryan and the Populist hierarchy cold-shouldered Watson, who swallowed insult and ridicule as he barnstormed the country for Bryan and himself.

The other candidates followed their own strategy. McKinley remained in his hometown of Canton, receiving delegations as part of his front porch campaign. This was not a matter of sitting in a rocker and chatting with individual visitors. Rather, delegations poured into Canton by the hundreds, the thousands, the tens of thousands, marched to McKinley’s home behind clamorous bands and huge banners, and received in turn a short, carefully phrased talk from the candidate. On one day, he gave speeches to a total of 80,000 persons. All the while Hanna & co. saturated the country with millions of leaflets and pamphlets, 1,400 orators, and arguments against free trade and free silver. The national committee reportedly spent the unprecedented sum of $4 million, probably much more.

Bryan went to the “plain people” he apotheosized. Covering over 18,000 miles by train, speaking sometimes thirty or more times a day, he reached perhaps 5 million persons in twenty-seven states. He encountered an avalanche of criticism from the eastern press, which pictured him as an anarchist and revolutionist. For his part, Hanna was labeled “Dollar Mark,” and this hurt him. But the Republican party, deeply bottomed organizationally and mobilized for action, appealed directly to all members of its grand coalition—labor, farmers, small businessmen, veterans, blacks.

On election night, Bryan sat imperturbably in his home as three telegraph operators brought in bulletin after bulletin spelling his defeat. In Canton, McKinley sat at his desk analyzing returns, smoking cigar after cigar, and then heard the first sounds of crowds nearing to cheer and serenade him amid dazzling fireworks. A telegram arrived from Bryan: “We have submitted the issues to the American people, and their word is law.” At his home, Bryan told reporters: “The fight has just commenced.” Watson, emotionally broken, mourned the death of the Populist party. Fusion, he said, had killed it.

Triumphant Republicanism

When the newspapers proclaimed a great Republican victory next day, the outcome at first seemed to be merely another party switch—the fourth in the presidency since 1884. As more returns were telegraphed in from the rural West and North, however, it became clear that not only was the White House to change occupants but a momentous shift had occurred in party fortunes and electoral patterns. Voting turnout, for example, had jumped from 12 million in 1892 to nearly 14 million four years later. And as the years passed, analysts realized that 1896 was one of the crucial elections in American history, leading to a “critical realigning era” that would reshape American politics and government for decades.

McKinley’s majority over Bryan in the popular vote—7.1 million votes to 6.5 million—was the biggest presidential margin since Grant, but the significance of the vote lay less in its numbers than in its geographical distribution. Despite the Republican denunciations of Bryan for arousing the hatred of farmers and workers and “setting class against class,” there was far less economic than regional polarization. The geography of the election results was indeed quite remarkable. As usual the Democrats had carried the South and the Republicans had swept the northern tier, but, in between, McKinley carried every state east of the Mississippi, including the border states of Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, and Kentucky. The great electoral heartland bordered by Illinois and Wisconsin on the west and New York and Pennsylvania on the east—the pivot of most presidential contests—had swung to McKinley by an enormous margin. Even across the Mississippi, Bryan had lost Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oregon, and California. As the head of the Democratic ticket failed in state after state, he dragged down with him hundreds of state and local Democratic candidates.

Bryan had simply failed to attract two of his great potential constituencies—eastern urban labor and midwestern farmers. Not a single county in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, or Wisconsin, James Sundquist noted, showed a gain in its Democratic percentage over the combined Democratic-Populist strength of 1892. Cleveland’s unpopularity, Bryan’s inability to appeal to industrial labor, McKinley’s coalition politics, and Hanna’s massive propaganda campaign had left the grand old Democracy a shrunken remnant. Many voters had simply been scared away by Republican orators and editors. “To the image of the Democrats as the party of rum, Romanism, rebellion, and economic recession,” in Sundquist’s words, “was added another R—radicalism.”

Not only did the GOP emerge as a grand new party combining its old business, farm, veterans, and black support with widened labor backing; it was emerging also as a powerful governing instrument in Washington and in many of the state capitals. Whether tested by the quality of the GOP’s national leadership in McKinley, Hanna & co., its explicit platform speaking out forthrightly on major issues (save woman’s suffrage!), its year-round organizational structure building up from town and precinct committees, its ability to mobilize electoral support, its high capacity for raising money and commanding publicity, its congressional leadership and cohesion, the “redeveloped” Republican party was in a position, according to Paul Kleppner, to control most of the nation’s policy-making institutions after 1896.

It was easy for Bryan Democrats, silverites, and Populists to denounce the GOP as the party of plutocrats, tariff-mongers, monopolists, and gold bugs, because in part it was. But Republicanism was much more than this. The party not only reflected the interests of big capitalists; to a marked degree it disciplined those interests—in the party’s own interest, of course. The party would limit immigration even though many big employers wanted to import cheap foreign labor; the party would restrict trusts to some degree; above all, the party would maintain its appeal to farmers and workers by returning to a “free homestead policy,” restricting immigration, creating a National Board of Arbitration to mediate labor disputes. Furious at Frick and other industrialists who provoked fights with labor, Republican party leaders would not let them dominate party councils.

So the McKinley Republicans prepared to govern in 1897 in a spirit of self-confidence and high expectations. Within four months of inauguration, McKinley signed the Dingell tariff bill raising rates higher than ever but also authorizing reciprocity negotiations with other countries. A year later, Congress passed the Erdman Act providing for limited mediation of railroad labor disputes—a belated response to the Pullman strike. But there was no rush of legislation—the Republicans had no interest in passing a lot of laws. Rather, McKinley and his congressional leaders ran a tight ship, at least in domestic policy. Especially notable was McKinley’s firm but delicate touch—with assists from Hanna—in curbing the power of old-time Republican state bosses such as Thomas C. Platt of New York and Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania.

Not all the groups in McKinley’s big coalition fared well during his presidential term. Lower-income labor, striking workers, and poor farmers received little help from the White House. As usual, the most forgotten group was blacks, North and South. Despite the GOP’s “unqualified condemnation of the uncivilized and barbarous practice” of lynching in its 1896 platform, lynch law took more and more victims in the nineties. In 1896 the Supreme Court upheld segregation in railroad carriages, in Plessy v. Ferguson; two years later it sustained the poll tax and literacy tests in Williams v. Mississippi. Few were around to offer militant protest. Frederick Douglass had died in 1895, and Booker T. Washington accepted segregation. “In all things that are purely social,” Washington liked to say, “we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to our mutual progress.” Carnegie called him the most remarkable man alive, noting that Negro illiteracy had been almost cut in half in thirty years and that black land ownership had expanded.

Certainly Carnegie was satisfied with McKinleyism. “Triumphant Democracy is once more Triumphant,” he had written a Scottish friend after McKinley’s election. “All is well.” Later he would break with the President on foreign policy, but domestically McKinley stood for the things the steel magnate believed in. They both believed in liberty, but a negative liberty to be achieved against government and not through it. “The Republic may not give wealth or happiness; she has not promised these,” said Carnegie; “it is the freedom to pursue these, not their realization, which the Declaration of Independence claims….” They both believed in Horatio Alger individualism, competitiveness, getting ahead, in the self-made man rising from rags to riches. They both believed in majority rule, perhaps in part because majorities had tended to vote the “right way.”

Majority rule—that was the test. Populists, left-wing Democrats, socialists had long dreamed the dream of a coalition of the poor that would use their only political resource, votes, to win control of government and convert it into an instrument of social and economic justice. Third parties had mobilized minorities, not majorities. Bryan had utterly failed to put together a mighty coalition of the have-nots. And even if a truly popular coalition had won control of government, checks and balances against the majority within the government—the power of a money-dominated, unrepresentative Senate, for example—would have thwarted true majority rule. Few of the have-nots would have found any triumphs in Carnegie’s Triumphant Democracy. The have-nots were “ready to question whether, indeed, there was a democracy, when the courts could halt their strikes by injunctions, jail their labor leaders, declare laws taxing men of wealth unconstitutional, and smile indulgently on monopolistic trusts,” in Joseph Wall’s view. “Congress seemed eager only to protect those who were already secure, and the President looked to Wall Street, not Main Street, for support and guidance.”

Triumphant Democracy? McKinley, Carnegie, et al. seemed really to believe in a very Republican Republic. And soon people would charge that McKinley, at least, seemed to believe in a most imperial Empire.

In Havana, late in January 1898, the Maine swung slowly at anchor in the middle of the harbor, the increasingly tense crew confined on board. Armed sentries were posted on deck, ammunition piled by the guns, steam kept up. Still the men aboard waited week after week, as officials in Washington considered bringing the big battleship home.

The arrival of the Maine in Havana had been just one more step toward American involvement in the Cubans’ war for independence from Spain. That struggle had resumed in 1895, after a truce of two decades, and by 1898, more than a hundred thousand men had fallen on both sides of the conflict. Spain, with nearly 200,000 soldiers on the island, controlled Havana and the other major cities; the revolutionaries, with only a fifth as many men in the field at any one time, dominated most of the countryside. The pleas of the revolutionaries received considerable support in the United States. As meetings to support Cuba Libre mushroomed across the nation, sympathy for the rebels was compounded by indignation at the apparently heartless countermeasures of the Spanish.

Two flamboyant editors eyed the Cuban situation with avid interest: William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World. Engaged in a no-holds-barred circulation war, they largely ignored the gritty realities of the struggle, filling their columns with rumors, invective, fiction, and lurid atrocity stories designed to titillate rather than inform. By 1898, Hearst and Pulitzer were between them selling more than 1½ million copies daily, and a host of papers across the country rushed to imitate them. Popular sympathy for the Cuban revolution, which predated the Hearst-Pulitzer war, surged to a new high. Grover Cleveland had resisted these pressures, being perhaps more concerned with the threat to U.S. commercial interests and by the possibility that the rebels, many of whose leaders were black, would establish a biracial republic just ninety miles from the United States.

William McKinley had come to office facing a welter of conflicting forces over Cuba. Spain still held the island, precariously, but it was tiring of the expensive conflict. The rebels continued to press for recognition in the United States and military victory in Cuba. A large portion of the American public and the Congress—and the Republican party platform—supported Cuban independence, but had no clear plan for bringing it about. Businessmen favored any peaceful means of bringing more stability and U.S. trade to the island. A small group of expansionists, including Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and McKinley’s own Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, urged the annexation of Cuba as the first step in building an overseas U.S. empire. The yellow journalists continued to play up anything that would yield rousing headlines.

McKinley’s deftness in shepherding domestic issues through Congress was matched by his careful handling of the Cuban crisis. He deflected congressional moves to recognize the Cubans, put increasing pressure on Spain to loosen its hold on the island, and continued to interdict arms shipments to the rebels. A new Madrid government seemed to respond favorably to McKinley’s call for an end to the cruel and futile occupation policy when, in late 1897, it announced a number of reforms, including a plan for Cuban autonomy within the Spanish empire. The private messages from McKinley’s minister to Spain make clear, however, that the President viewed autonomy as a step toward gradual United States absorption of Cuba, as either a commercial dependency or an outright colony. Thus McKinley carefully avoided any move that would help the rebels in Cuba to achieve independence on their own, Philip Foner has concluded.

McKinley’s subtle intervention was hampered by the refusal of the rebels, and of many of the Spanish officers in Cuba, to accept autonomy. Late in January 1898, Havana was convulsed by riots protesting the new policy, and Secretary of the Navy John D. Long ordered the Maine to the city to protect American lives and act as a restraining influence. While the battleship kept its tense vigil in Havana harbor, Hearst’s Journal published a letter, stolen from a friend of Spanish Ambassador Dupuy de Lôme, that called into question Spain’s sincerity in granting the recent reforms—as well as containing some gratuitous insults to McKinley. Amidst great public outcry de Lôme was recalled, and the President was confronted with the knowledge that even the Madrid government doubted autonomy was feasible. Then, as pressure to recognize Cuba’s independence again mounted, the Maine blew up, killing 266 of the men on board.

“THE WARSHIP MAINE WAS SPLIT IN TWO BY AN ENEMY’S SECRET INFERNAL MACHINE,” headlined the Journal, while Assistant Secretary Roosevelt assured a friend that “the Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards”—but most of the public withheld judgment pending the findings of the official inquiry. Seventy-eight years after the sinking of the Maine, the U.S. Navy Department would publish a study, prepared by a senior officer and two experienced civilian engineers, attributing the disaster to spontaneous combustion in a coal bunker below decks, which ignited an adjacent ammunition store. But the four officers sent in 1898 to investigate for the U.S. government, pressured by press and public demand for a quick judgment, ruled that the battleship was sunk by “the explosion of a mine situated under the bottom of the ship.” Who had put the alleged mine there, the four could not say.

The press jingoes had no doubt who put the mine there. The cry for war rose over the land. McKinley had already anticipated war by gaining a congressional appropriation for $50 million. Some in Congress, however, felt that America should enter the conflict as the ally of the Cubans. In an attempt to head off such a move, McKinley assured key legislators that he was negotiating with Spain for Cuba’s independence. In fact, the Spanish did accede to most of the President’s demands. They failed, however, to give independence to the island—which McKinley did not ask for—or to transfer it to the United States, which seems to have been the President’s true aim. On April 11, just two days after Spain made further diplomatic concessions, McKinley sent his war message to Capitol Hill.

For more than a week a minority in Congress tried to force the President to recognize the Cuban rebels. Ohio’s Senator Joseph Foraker charged that otherwise “this intervention” would be converted from an act of “humanity” into an “aggressive conquest of territory.” On April 20, McKinley signed a joint resolution that did call for Cuba’s independence and authorized American intervention to help achieve it, but withheld recognition of the revolutionaries. The resolution also incorporated the compromise Teller Amendment, which disclaimed any United States intention to annex Cuba. Congress rallied behind the President only after Madrid broke relations with Washington, and by overwhelming majorities the House and Senate voted that a state of war existed with Spain. It was April 25, 1898. For the first time in fifty years the United States faced a foreign foe.

America had three assets in its war with Spain—a strong navy, a small but professional army, and a well-thought-out strategy. It was the navy that first made itself felt, striking a dramatic blow halfway around the world from Cuba. On the morning of May 1, six U.S. cruisers and gunboats under the command of Commodore George Dewey steamed into Manila Bay and confronted Spain’s larger but antiquated Asian fleet. For five hours, amidst sweltering heat and drifting clouds of gunsmoke, Dewey’s ships battered the Spaniards; by noon, every Spanish ship had been wrecked, while the American squadron was all but untouched. Dewey’s telegram announcing the victory—which took seven days to reach America from the Philippines —electrified the country.

All eyes now turned to Cuba—and to the United States Army. Although rearmed since the Indian wars, the 25,000-man Regular forces were inadequate to challenge Spain on the ground, so McKinley made the traditional call for volunteers. Some 200,000 men, including Secretary Roosevelt and William Jennings Bryan, joined the Volunteer regiments, while Congress authorized the army to enlist another 36,000 Regulars. This tenfold increase over a matter of weeks swamped the peacetime bureaucracy of the War Department. Conflicts between Washington and the states over who would pay for what, the almost complete lack of trained officers and of support personnel for the Volunteers, and the usual politicking in the state capitals all multiplied confusion. Instead of waiting for the new recruits to finish training, McKinley threw into action the Regular and national guard units that were available.

On May 30, the President instructed General William Shafter to seize the port of Santiago, where a Spanish squadron under Admiral Pascual Cervera was blockaded by the navy’s battleships. After an unseemly rush for the transports—where the Rough Riders saw their first action, against other U.S. soldiers trying to get aboard the overcrowded boats—Shafter’s command sailed for Cuba. The fleet arrived off Santiago and began to bombard the invasion beaches, much to the annoyance of the rebel force waiting to run an iron pier out for the Americans. Once the seasick invaders were ashore, Shafter began a cautious advance toward the fortified city. Ex-Confederate Joseph Wheeler, however, dashed ahead with his brigade of dismounted cavalry and collided with a Spanish delaying force. Before the Americans could work through the jungle on their flank, the blue-clad Spaniards withdrew—prompting Wheeler to slip back thirty years and shout, “We’ve got the damned Yankees on the run!”

The main rebel army under Maximo Gomez, who had expected the Americans to land near Havana, was trapped by the Spanish in the center of the island, but one division was able to join Shafter, while other detachments worked to cut off Santiago. Thus reinforced, the American general pushed forward to San Juan Hill, where Spanish General Joaquin del Rey made a stand. Del Rey himself fell in the gallant defense, as the Spaniards shot down an American observation balloon, wrecked an artillery battery, and picked off scores of the attackers. Finally a brigade of Volunteers, stiffened with a black Regular unit led by John J. Pershing, pushed the Spanish off Kettle Hill and wheeled to charge the heights of San Juan. Sweating, holding their rifles across their chests as bullets clipped the waist-high grass around them, the Americans waded up San Juan Hill. The enemy broke, and Shafter advanced to the outskirts of Santiago.

After one assault on the city failed, the Americans and Cubans settled down to besiege it. Meanwhile General Nelson Miles, captor of Geronimo and Chief Joseph, landed virtually unopposed in Puerto Rico, and the American expeditionary force in the Philippines closed on the capital city of Manila. The last dramatic moment of the war came on July 3, when Admiral Cervera sortied from Santiago harbor, catching the American fleet by surprise. Once again the Spanish ships were outclassed; Cervera watched in despair as one by one his cruisers blew up or ran aground. Captain John Philip of the Texas was also moved, reportedly exhorting his crew, “Don’t cheer, men—the poor fellows are dying.”

With the defeat of Cervera, Spain had had enough. Representatives from the two powers met in Paris, and on August 12 the Spanish agreed to evacuate the Philippines and the Caribbean, pending a final peace treaty. After 113 days, the war was over.

America’s striking success owed much to the astute strategy pursued by McKinley. Influenced in part by three years of staff discussions in the navy about the possible ways to fight Spain, the President from the first insisted on a limited war. The navy would defeat Spain’s fleet in the Caribbean and isolate her colonies, which the army would then seize. There would be no need to attack Spain itself, and thus no need for a long conflict. McKinley held to this strategy through all the tactical shifts of the war, with outstanding results. At the price of 345 battle deaths, America had gained an empire.

But did the country want that empire? The treaty with Spain, signed just before 1898 ended, transferred the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the Pacific island of Guam to the United States. The Spanish tried to convince the Americans to annex Cuba and thus assume the $400 million debt that Spain had run up on the island. But McKinley followed through with the Teller Amendment and insisted that Cuba be given its independence—under the supervision of an American army of occupation. The last imperial addition was Hawaii, taken as a stepping-stone to the Philippines. For five years, ever since a cabal of American seamen and sugar planters had deposed the native Hawaiian monarchy, the island’s government had asked to join the United States. Signing the joint resolution to take the islands, McKinley declared: “Annexation is not change; it is consummation.”

This empire-building delighted economic imperialists, who saw rosy possibilities for economic expansion abroad. Many disagreed. Andrew Carnegie, whose steel plants had armored the ships that won the war, viewed America’s new empire with distaste. Hawaii was acceptable, and for keeping Cuba independent Carnegie had “nothing but praise for the President since he took his rightful place, that of Leadership.” But the Philippines, in the eyes of the steel magnate and the New England Anti-Imperialist League that he helped finance, was a poisoned fruit: a distant, hostile, foreign province that never could be Americanized. The revolt of the Filipinos, who after years of guerrilla war against Spain found their country occupied by an American army, underscored the arguments made by the opponents of empire. Carnegie asked, “Are we to exchange Triumphant Democracy for Triumphant Despotism?” When the government turned down the industrialist’s offer of $20 million to give up the islands, he resolved to oppose the peace treaty with Spain.

In the Senate debate on the treaty, both sides laid out strong cases. Administration supporters pointed out that the treaty would bring peace with Spain, secure the Philippines against other European colonial powers, and open the way for American commercial interests in all the new territories. Moreover, both Foraker and Lodge assured the Senate that America would keep the Philippines only briefly, until the islanders were ready for self-government. The anti-imperialists, led by George Hoar of Massachusetts, denounced as un-American the taking of any foreign territory. “The downfall of the American Republic,” predicted Hoar, “will date from the administration of William McKinley.” The defection of Bryan and several other Democrats to the pro-treaty side finally tipped the scales in favor of ratification; the treaty passed with one vote to spare. Lodge wrote proudly to Roosevelt, “Aldrich and I … were down in the engine room and we do not get the flowers, but we did make the ship move.”

Having emerged victorious in Washington, McKinley could now turn his full attention to the struggle in Manila. Filipinos under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo had declared the establishment of a Philippines republic in January 1899; in February, Aguinaldo’s forces clashed with the American occupying troops, and by the end of the month there was full-scale war. General Elwell Otis’s troops broke up the Filipinos’ semi-organized units in a series of bruising encounters, so that by November, Aguinaldo had to revert to guerrilla warfare. The revolt simmered on in the Philippines and American troops still occupied Cuba as the election of 1900 drew near.

Bryan, nominated again by the Democrats, announced his intention to make imperialism the “paramount” issue—and then campaigned mainly on monopolies and silver. The Republicans countered with a litany of their successes in “filling the lunchpails” of working Americans, but the nomination of Theodore Roosevelt as McKinley’s running mate helped turn attention from economic progress back to foreign policy. Carnegie and other conservative anti-imperialists supported the President as the lesser of two evils. “McKinley stands for war and violence abroad,” declared the industrialist, “but Mr. Bryan stands for these scourges at home.” And Ignatius Donnelly, candidate of the radical Populists, viewed both with distaste: Democrats howled “about Republicans shooting negroes in the Philippines” and the Republicans denounced Democrats “for shooting negroes in the South. This may be good politics, but it is rough on the negroes.”

Imperialism and the Full Dinner Pail won in November. McKinley bested Bryan by nearly a million votes and carried the electoral college by two to one. The success could not be attributed to any one set of issues either domestic or foreign, however; probably the election was more a personal triumph for William McKinley and the Republican philosophy that the Ohioan had come to represent. To a friend McKinley reflected, “I can no longer be called the President of a party; I am now the President of the whole people.”

Of all the people save one. In September, McKinley journeyed to New York to speak at the Buffalo Exposition. On the 5th—Presidents’ Day—he addressed a crowd of 50,000 on the theme that “expositions are the timekeepers of progress.” The next day, after a trip to Niagara Falls, he stopped at the Temple of Music for a brief public reception. Waiting in line to shake the President’s hand was Leon Czolgosz, a young anarchist. Czolgosz shot McKinley twice; one bullet pierced the President’s stomach and lodged somewhere in his back. Guards knocked the assassin down as the stunned President sank slowly into a chair.

For a week McKinley lingered, and the nation hung on the confusing reports of his condition. The doctors tried in vain to locate the bullet; nobody suggested that the experimental X-ray machine, on display at the Exposition, be used. McKinley died on September 14; Vice-President Roosevelt took the oath of office the same day. In Canton, Ohio, as final rites were performed for the departed President, every factory fell silent.

PART III

Progressive Democracy?

CHAPTER 7

The Urban Progressives

IN THE VERY LAST years of the nineteenth century, at the very height of McKinley Republicanism, a bracing weather change spread through urban America—a weather change that would peak during the first two decades of the new century, transform the nation’s cultural climate, and then fade away. This profound metamorphosis, which came to be known as progressivism, was as puzzling as it was pervasive. Why did it arrive when it did—during an era of prosperity? What caused it? What composed it? What enduring effect did it have? For at least a century historians would debate the answers to these questions.

The timing of the rise of progressivism is not all that mysterious, and helps to explain the cause. During the 1890s, Western Europe was undergoing intellectual and social phases—Bismarckian “socialism,” British social liberalism and Fabianism, French radicalism—to which Americans could not be immune. The incubation of American progressivism during prosperous times was not surprising, because it is not affluence but deprivation that causes people to “hunker down” in their homes and their ideas. For Americans, the nineties had been filled with tumult—the Populist revolt, the sharp and savage recession of ’93, the searing Homestead and railroad strikes, Bryanism, Coxey’s army, war with Spain. These crises made for conflict, the catalyst of new ideas.

But even more, progressivism was a response to the rise of the industrial city and its human wants and needs—most basically, for security. Much has been made of the status anxieties of members of “the old-family, college-educated class that had deep ancestral roots in local communities and often owned family businesses, that had traditions of political leadership,” that had supplied leadership for civic improvement, and was now being pushed aside by “the agents of the new corporations, the corrupters of legislatures, the buyers of franchises, the allies of the political bosses,” in Richard Hofstadter’s words. But these threats to status paled next to the stark psychological and economic needs of masses of poor people in the big industrial cities.

These needs were manifold—needs of consumers seeking pure food and drugs at fair prices, of labor seeking higher wages and job protection, of women seeking employment without discrimination or harassment, of businessmen weary of fierce competition and of the trend toward mergers, of railroad passengers and utility customers vulnerable to the decisions of the monopolies. Businessmen made up a sizable segment of the urban progressives, in part because they shared many broad needs as consumers. Businessmen in the middle corporate ranks also experienced at first hand the demanding and arbitrary ways of some of the men at the corporate top.

Progressivism was as dynamic as the cities in which it flourished. “It appeared first on the state and local level during the 1890s, where it fused ideological, pragmatic, and political elements, most of which dated to the earliest days of the republic,” in Irwin and Debi Unger’s summary. “It became a national movement somewhere in the first years of the twentieth century, when it pulled into its orbit all manner of reformers, mavericks, opportunists, idealists, and malcontents. As time passed, its mass grew and its qualities altered in response to new groups of adherents and to new ideas, goals, and programs that emerged to meet new circumstances.”

The evolving nature of progressivism and its diversity of makeup—including some business leaders who were not progressive in attitude but saw progressivism as a means of staving off something worse, like socialism—made for a marked tendency toward incoherence of program and policy. This tendency was enhanced by the progressives’ bent for “realism,” which they viewed as experimentalism, opportunism, “immediacy.” But these “pragmatic” leanings were combined with a high moral fervor against business and political corruption, a Christian socialist abhorrence of gross materialism and inequality, a moralistic disdain for intemperance of any sort. The harsh test of progressivism in America was whether the pressing needs of masses of low-income workers in the great industrial centers of the nation would make its program more coherent, its membership more united, its leadership more daring and purposeful.

The most compelling needs in turn-of-century America were those of masses of newcomers. By 1900, the first great waves of immigrants, primarily from Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia, had reached into the American heartland, and now were yielding to another huge tide of newcomers mainly from eastern and southern Europe. Pogroms and poverty in Russia were impelling Jews by the hundreds of thousands to begin the long journey west toward the vaunted land of tolerance and freedom. The stream of Italian immigrants broadened from about 1 million in the entire nineteenth century to 2 million in the first decade of the twentieth; and while the earlier immigrants had primarily been northerners, these newcomers more often hailed from southern and rural Italy. French Canadians were still moving off the poor farms of Nova Scotia and Quebec into the textile and shoe towns of New England. Chinese immigration, totaling over 300,000 by century’s end, had slowed to a trickle in the wake of harsh exclusion acts in the promised land of liberty and equality.

Most of the immigrants headed toward where the jobs were, the cities. There they commingled with another vast migration of Americans from rural to urban areas. The desolate New England farms, with their sagging fences, broken windows, and overgrown pastures, hinted of earlier decisions to desert century-old homes for the rumored shorter hours and higher pay of factory life. Southerners, including blacks, were leaving for Northern cities; Chicago’s Negro population of about 7,000 in 1880 doubled in the next ten years.

All told, in the sixty years after 1850 the population of the United States rose roughly fourfold—from 23 million to about 92 million—while world population rose by about one-half. The population explosion in American cities was phenomenal; between 1860 and 1900, New York City grew from 1 million to 3.5 million, Philadelphia from half a million to 1.3 million, Boston from 170,000 to over half a million, Chicago from a small city to almost 1.7 million. Equally spectacular was the rise in the number of cities with more than 100,000 persons—from nine to fifty between 1860 and 1910. People talked about the ever-growing midwestern and eastern metropolises, but smaller cities of the West also underwent rapid growth, as did some in the South—Birmingham, Louisville, Memphis, the bustling cities of Texas. In sum, the American people were becoming more numerous, more diversified ethnically, more urbanized, older, and a bit more “western.”

Behind the big but impersonal figures lay countless life histories etched in fear, hope, expectation, and final reality. In the old days, many migrants to the city could bring their cows and pigs and chickens with them, but now newcomers experienced an almost total change of environment. Now they were crammed into buildings. One ward in Manhattan in 1890 had a density of 523 persons per acre, another 429. Cincinnati housed 25,000 families, numbering over 100,000 persons, in 5,600 tenements with a total of 54,000 rooms. The stench rising from open privies, garbage-strewn alleys, and stagnant water produced, someone said, a “stink enough to knock you down.” It was worse than stench, the Chicago Times sniffed, for “stench means something finite. Stink reaches the infinite and becomes sublime in the magnitude of odiousness.”

The crowding into urban America of migrants and immigrants coincided with decisions of financiers and industrialists in effect to industrialize the large American city. Most of these cities during the earlier years of the century had been primarily commercial centers serving rural hinterlands. Of the nine cities that had reached 100,000 in population by 1860, eight were ports on ocean, lake, or river. These commercial cities had taken on a special character with their mostly English-speaking merchants and clerks and bookkeepers, gathered in medium-sized populations that had a sense of coherence and community. Manufacturing establishments typically were located outside these trading centers, on power-generating streams or at transportation junctions or near the oil or coal or minerals they consumed.

The commercial centers were natural targets for industrialization. They already had sizable populations, work forces, transportation facilities, consumer markets. Of the fifteen leading cities enjoying natural trade advantages by 1910, Blake McKelvey notes, fourteen had become major industrial cities as well. “New York, the chief banker and printer, was even more busy manufacturing clothing and cigars. Chicago, which by 1870 had become the leading butcher and packer and the leading grain and lumber mart, was now taking the lead in steel fabrication. Philadelphia, which after 1905 lost top place to Lawrence in the production of woolen goods, stood second or third only to New York or Chicago in other important industries.”

In effect these commercial centers added a whole new population of rural migrants and immigrants and a brand new economy of industrial production to their existing socioeconomic bases. By combining a variety of industries, they were able to take advantage of the “specialization and division of labor” much touted by economists. These forces stimulated one another in a relationship that was both dynamic and reciprocal, producing new industrial systems that were technically specialized, occupationally diverse, and yet economically integrated. Critical to this process, however, were investors’ decisions on the location of plants—decisions influenced by the availability of cheap labor that could be trained and disciplined and deployed, and that would in turn serve as a growing market for goods produced. Capital was the catalyst, but human bodies provided the manual and brain power.

Thus urbanization meant industrialization—and the reverse. Some cities continued to specialize and became famous for their main product. Troy made shirt collars and cuffs, Waterbury brassware, Gloversville gloves, Providence silverware, Paterson silk goods, St. Louis tobacco products, Toledo glass, Springfield (Ohio) farm machinery, Youngstown iron and steel, South Omaha meat products, Tulsa oil, Houston railroad cars. But the big industrial city combined a variety of such enterprises into a dynamic whole. In the process, these cities were transformed, as were the rural populations that had come to stay. The ungainly, unplanned, and uneasy partnership of industrial elites at the top and masses of impoverished, non-English-speaking newcomers at the bottom unleashed a torrent of forces that produced the modern industrial city in its protean shape, its vitality, its ills, and its reformation.

The Shape of the City

The grandest sight in most big cities was the railroad terminal. By century’s turn, the modest old-time depot had become an imperial palace of extravagant gables, lofty towers, arched entrances, long colonnades, behind imposing Doric columns and pilasters. Cities vied with one another in terminal size and show. St. Louis boasted of the “largest depot in the world,” with its enormous train shed and Grand Hall; Chicago of its clock tower rising 247 feet; Detroit of a shaft that was half tower, half skyscraper; Boston of an arched and columned entrance fit for the arrival of Hapsburgs. You had to look sharp, though, because “terminal madness” meant repeated tearing down of old depots and building anew. There were three Grand Centrals at 42nd and Vanderbilt in New York City. Borrowing heavily from European art and experience, depot styles in the United States shifted from the Romanesque to the Renaissance to the neo-Romanesque.

The main Chicago station was so elaborate and complex, with its various levels and a waiting room sporting a mosaic floor and marble wainscoting, that architect Louis Sullivan attacked its “public-be-damned” style. But for many Americans the depot was the common man’s palace.

Into the wide-arching sheds inched the powerful new turn-of-the-century locomotives, snorting smoke, blowing off steam, and pulling dozens of cars. Down from the gleaming Pullmans stepped the magnates, the more successful traveling salesmen, the affluent professional men, and whole families with their maids and governesses and truckloads of luggage. The coaches disgorged also the plain people, carrying their valises and carpetbags. Arriving passengers paraded toward the cavernous terminals, amid flocks of porters and carters, then stepped outside into a hubbub of arriving passengers, besieging taximen, waiting trams, and drays piled high with barrels, boxes, bags of every size and shape.

It was usually a short distance from the terminal to the central business district; and here hubbub changed to bedlam. Crowds overflowed narrow sidewalks and fought with trams, hansom cabs, delivery wagons, and drays for passage space in the streets. People poured in and out of side streets packed with shoppers and lined with peddlers’ carts. Messenger boys dashed in and out of office buildings; newsboys shouted out the day’s headlines; deliverymen bent under cakes of ice, kegs of ale, piles of clothing. Overhead, telephone and tram wires were so dense as to shadow the streets. The tumult only increased at intersections, where streetcars, imprisoned on their rails, pushed aggressively ahead while drivers of smaller vehicles tried to thread their horses through to the opposite street and constables sought desperately to avert a hopeless standstill.

Huge and intimidating, piloted by imperious motormen, the trolleys were the lords of the street, and often so crowded that most riders had to stand, lurching and swaying as the cars made sharp turns over rough rails. A complaining youngster might hear from his father how the streetcars of old had been pulled by horses over even rougher rails, at a pace so slow that it was quicker to get out and walk. And that father might once have been reminded by his parents that in their earlier days they had ridden on horsecars over cobbled streets without rails, sometimes at a feverish pace as rival liverymen competed for business. And crowded? Mark Twain himself had mentioned horsecar platforms so packed you had to “hang on by your eyelashes and your toenails.” Perhaps the grandparents remembered too the piles of horse manure left in the streets—several hundred tons a day in a medium-large city, according to measurers of such phenomena.

City transport was still the most dynamic element in urban change. Inventors had dreamed up alternatives to horsepower: compressed-air cars, propulsion by ammonia gas, steam engines on street rails, an endless underground cable powered by a stationary steam engine. Only the last of these worked. Tried out on the steep hills of San Francisco, the cable was used also in Chicago, Seattle, and a score of other cities in the 1880s. Steam-powered cables were also employed for elevated transit lines along Sixth and Ninth Avenues in New York and in the Chicago Loop. But none of these changes solved the intracity transit problem: steam engines were too big, noisy, and awkward for the streets; cables moved slowly at an unvarying speed, even during rush hours, and often broke down; the “els” deafened people in their second-story flats, blocked out light, and spewed dirt and oil on the streets below.

Electrified streetcars with overhead wires changed all this. First tried out in Alabama on Montgomery’s Court Street line in 1886, electric railways came into wide use after Frank Sprague, a naval engineer who had worked for Edison, formed a company and built a successful line in Richmond. Sprague had to overcome so many technical problems, at such heavy expense, that he would not have signed the Richmond contract had he foreseen them, he said later. This remarkable inventor also designed a multiple-unit control system that enabled each trolley car to be independently powered, lighted, and braked, at the same time capable of being controlled by a master switch located in any one of them.

Soon the big rugged horses were disappearing from the city railways. Fifty cities had adopted trolley systems by 1890, another eighty-eight by 1895. Streetcars now sped along at twelve miles an hour, about twice as fast as the horses’ pace. Sprague continued to pioneer and perfect, ultimately winning the title “father of electric traction.” But Edison so dominated the popular imagination that he was often credited with inventing electric traction too, much to Sprague’s chagrin. “Popular applause, commercial propaganda and sentimental gush have helped to build up a legend largely mythical, to the effect that if Mr. Edison ever had anything to do with anything electrical, no matter how remotely,” Sprague complained, it “immediately became an Edison offspring.” Hence it was all the more ironic that in 1890 his company was absorbed by the Edison General Electric Company.

Not until the 1890s did American cities adopt the most dramatic advance in city transportation, the subway. Some years after London had pioneered with travel through the “underground,” Boston built a subway a mile long under Tremont Street, and New York in 1904 opened a longer line running from City Hall to 145th Street. Sprague’s multiple-unit control system helped make the subway possible, for it eliminated the need of a steam locomotive, whose smoke and soot would have made tunnel traveling all but unbearable. This inventor-industrialist also helped perfect the most invisible but in the long run perhaps most consequential of improvements, the electric elevator. Lifts powered by horse, steam, and hydraulic power had long existed, but only when harnessed to electric power did they come into general use. Chicago, busily building skyscrapers, pioneered in the use of “express” elevators, which made “the passenger seem to feel his stomach pass into his shoes,” a traveler wrote. Sprague, whose dependable, constant-speed motors were crucial to lifts, manufactured about six hundred of them before his business was turned over to the Otis Elevator Company.

Elevators made high-rise buildings possible even as the rising skyscrapers made elevators necessary. As the inner city grew more congested and its land more dear, one way out was the vertical. But the problem with building “up” had always been the enormously thick masonry needed to support sides and interiors. The solution, in the age of iron and steel, was first iron and then steel. Iron supports on buildings led to the first wholly cast-iron building in Manhattan at the corner of Centre and Duane. The strength, durability, and fire-resistance of cast iron brought a spate of office buildings, department stores, and warehouses built of this material, some of them surprisingly attractive and even elegant.

Within two decades, though, steel—tougher in both tension and compression—was replacing iron as the leading high-rise building material. William Le Baron Jenney erected the first steel-frame skyscraper, a ten-story insurance building in Chicago in 1885. A “Chicago School” of architects began designing skyscrapers for a host of cities. A maverick member of the school, Louis Sullivan, sensed that height was not just another dimension but a powerful means of combining form and function. “How shall we impart to this sterile pile, this crude, harsh, brutal agglomeration, this stark, staring exclamation of eternal strife,” he asked, “the graciousness of those higher forms of sensibility and culture that rest on the lower and fiercer passions?” The skyscraper, he responded, “must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.” Sullivan left notable structures in St. Louis, Buffalo, Chicago, and elsewhere.

Bursting out of its confined space, New York turned to the skyscraper as its solution if not salvation. The seventeen-story Manhattan Life Insurance Building was followed by rivals first of twenty stories, then of twenty-six, then of thirty, all by the end of the century. Then, in 1913, came the most sensational of all, the Woolworth Tower, sixty stories rising 792 feet from the street. Critics scoffed at its ornamentation and its cost—$7.5 million—but the public marveled at its majestic tower, incredible height, and 80,000 electric light bulbs. All agreed: it was the “Cathedral of Commerce.”

Of course, cities expanded outward far more than upward, as streetcar rails spearheaded the deploying of urban population away from the commercial centers. The rich, using their private carriages, had long been able to live outside the city; now the middle class and even the poor could live miles from their work, at the price of two nickels a day. In most big cities, by century’s end, a trip into the “suburbs” was a journey into monotony. Newer cities west of the Appalachians typically had been laid out on a grid pattern that led to long, straight, canyonlike streets disappearing over the horizon. “To the surveyor, the grid pattern produced a logical and orderly layout,” according to two historians; “to the eye, it produced an eternity of unbroken squares and rectangles which made one town indistinguishable from another.” Long after visiting American cities, Lord Bryce wrote that “their monotony haunts one like a nightmare.”

Uniformity resulted in part from the common practice of cutting up land into small, easily sellable lots usually about twenty-five feet wide by one hundred feet deep. These property lines ran through hill and dale, pasture and woodland, with little logic except the realtors’ interests. But the main cause of monotony in living areas was the almost universal adoption of the “balloon frame” in building residences. Early in the century most buildings had been constructed by skilled craftsmen using heavy beams and mortised and tenoned joints. The balloon frame used instead thin plates and studs, often the familiar “two-by-fours,” running the entire height of the building and held together only by spikes and nails. “A man and a boy can now attain the same results with ease, that twenty men could on an old-fashioned frame,” wrote an architectural expert in 1865. Soon the outlying city areas were dotted by thousands of balloon-frame skeletons soon to be clothed in whatever framing was handy and cheap.

The mass production of houses was part and parcel of the industrialization of the city. Such production required masses of timber, often brought long distances and processed by increasingly large and efficient woodworking machinery. Even more, mass frame housing depended on the simple nail in cheap and plentiful supply. The iron and steel industry had to provide ample metals for machines that cut and headed nails by the million. Hand-wrought nails had cost twenty-five cents a pound; by mid-century machine-made nails were selling for three cents a pound. Chicago was the ideal place to bring together masses of land, timber, nails, and carpenters, and the balloon frames came to be associated with that city; but this cheap housing was responsible for the “taming of the West” all the way to San Francisco and Los Angeles.

It was more profitable to erect houses than to provide for support services vitally needed in increasingly congested areas. Water was the vital need, for both comfort and sanitation. Toward the end of the century, the old sewerage arrangements were simply collapsing under pressure. In 1881 the mayor of Cleveland called the Cuyahoga River “an open sewer through the center of the city.” Most families depended on local wells to obtain water and private cesspools to get rid of it. “Foul-smelling” privies often stood nearby. By the late 1870s, Washington still had 56,000 private sewer vaults and cesspools, and Philadelphia 82,000. Would sewerage be better in the West, where more land seemed available and cities could start from scratch? To keep their waste from pouring into Lake Michigan, Chicagoans ingeniously reversed the flow of the Chicago River away from the lake and into the Illinois River, with the aid of six pumping stations. But the waste now fouled the water of downstream towns and still backed up into the city and into Lake Michigan during heavy rains.

Some cities planned ahead. After completing its thirty-four-mile Croton aqueduct in 1842, New York found in three decades that it needed a second big Croton aqueduct, and not long after that, a huge new source of water in the Catskills. Los Angeles had to turn to Sierra mountain water 250 miles away. Often, however, it was not foresight that brought action but disaster. Just as Philadelphia had brilliantly experimented with ingenious water gathering and distribution methods after its yellow fever epidemic of 1793, Memphis built a new sewer system only after a similar plague in 1878. In this crisis, Memphis turned to George E. Waring, Jr., who argued that typhoid and other diseases could be traced to “the exhalations of decomposing matters in dungheaps, pigsties, privy vaults, cellars, cess-pools, drains, and sewers,” and launched a campaign against filth. By 1910, over 10 million city people drank filtered water, cutting the death rate, it was estimated, by at least a fifth in New Orleans and several big eastern cities.

At least sewers were practical and useful, if expensive. What about green areas, recreation space? Few realtors trying to make a profit off land, few industrialists busy selling nails and construction machinery, had time to think much about parks, nor did workers intent on acquiring food, shelter, and clothing. Such green areas seemed the province of gentlemen-idealists like Frederick Law Olmsted, who helped conceive a magnificent plan for a central park in Manhattan, campaigned for its creation, and saw it completed in 1876 after twenty years’ effort, in a manner that preserved the easy, undulating shape of the original land and related the park to the city. Henry W. S. Cleveland, a scientific farmer and engineer, designed parks and cemeteries in both North and South. He urged city leaders to think ahead to future needs and to acquire land before real estate interests did; Minneapolis, for example, must predict what would be the “wants” of its people when they became a million strong. But visitors from abroad were distressed to see, in the working-class sections of big industrial cities, street after street, block after block, without the green space of park, playground, or even cemetery.

The ultimate unit in the “rectangular street platting, the atom of mechanical design, was the individual rectangular plot into which each block was divided,” wrote Lewis Mumford. He noted that the width of the plot was rarely greater than twenty feet; often, as in sections of Baltimore, it might be only fifteen or twelve. “As long as row houses were two rooms deep, this platting was tolerable; but as soon as the need for more dwelling space grew, the natural line of expansion was not laterally, to embrace a second costly plot, but backward, to eat up the back-yard areas and to increase thereby the sunless interior space….

“The desire to utilize every square foot of rentable space possessed the owner, even when he was building for his own use, and not for sheer pecuniary exploitation; and in its search for profits it often over-reached itself, for an overcrowded plan does not necessarily bring the maximum financial return. Cumbrous, uneconomic plans, with a maximum amount of wasteful corridor space and dark ill-ventilated rooms, characterized the two-family houses, the three deckers, the higher tenements. And the habit of letting the shape of the individual lot determine the plan and layout of the house dominated the imagination of the architect: he lost the ability to design freely in more comprehensive units, built for common living and not for individual division, individual ownership, individual sale….” This shotgun wedding of individualism and urbanization was a hallmark of the industrialization of the cities.

The Life of the City

Into the balloon frames of Chicago and St. Louis, the four-storied “three-deckers” of Boston and Lowell, the “dumbbell” shaped tenements of Manhattan and Detroit, the shanties on the outskirts of Omaha, and the boardinghouses of the western cities flowed the gigantic tide of migrants and immigrants, with their extraordinary diversity of backgrounds, religions, customs, needs, perceptions, and expectations. Whatever the architecture, the new environment was essentially the same for all—urban, congested, noisy, stinking, treeless. Yet the newcomers for a time at least transformed their immediate environment far more than they were transformed by it. Consciously or not, ethnic groups adopted strategies for coping with their environment, converting it into something familiar and manageable, for a time making it a means of alleviating physical insecurity and uncertainty, a buffer against collisions with the volatile, kaleidoscopic new world into which they had plunged.

Walk west on East Houston Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side before the turn of the century and you can see how the Jewish newcomers are absorbing the shock of moving into a crowded and ugly urban environment. Look right, beyond Hamilton Fish Park—there, in an area of twenty or more blocks behind the docks and warehouses of the East River, live tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews. On your left, reaching down to Delancey Street, stretch a dozen blocks of Galician Jews. Turn left on Chrystie Street and you pass through an area of Romanian Jews on your right and Levantine and Romanian Jews on your left. Then take another left, off Chrystie onto Canal Street, and you enter the heart of the biggest Jewish district of all—Russian Jews from Poland, Lithuania, Byelorussia, the Ukraine. Don’t try to hurry; the sidewalks and the streets are packed. This is by far the most populated square mile in the city; in some acres here are packed more people than in the same square footage in Bombay.

The East Side Jews have moored themselves to the two most enduring foundations of social stability—race and nationality. Most of them act far more like Jews with a common culture, however, than Hungarians or Russians or Romanians with separate national identities. Here on the edge of the Russian district are the Hebrew Technical School for Girls, the Home for the Aged, the Jewish Maternity Hospital, the Hebrew Sheltering House. The Forward Building on Yiddish Newspaper Row, the Isaac Elchanan Yeshiva, and the Educational Alliance flank Henry Street. A dozen congregations meet in tenements or storefronts that serve as synagogues. Over toward lower Broadway lie the temples of entertainment—the Grand Theater, the Yiddish Rialto, the Thalia Theater.

The streets burst with life, action, clamor. People throng the narrow sidewalks, push through the streets with their carts, crowd onto fire escapes, call down from open windows. Even “the architecture seemed to sweat humanity at every window and door,” the British novelist Arnold Bennett observed. In the Pig Market on Hester Street, peddlers sell fish and fruit from pushcarts, milk from big cans, cheap clothes off racks, secondhand eyeglasses and knickknacks from trays hanging on straps from the peddler’s neck. Sharp-eyed housewives with large bags check pushcart goods and prices against those in the shops that occupy the ground floor of the tenements. Things are a bit grander over on Grand Street, with its department stores, restaurants, dancing halls (for proper dancing), and even a little park.

Still, no matter how successful East Side Jews were in reestablishing old social forms and institutions in the new world of the city, few could escape psychological stress and disorganization. For some, the repeated shocks had been almost too much to bear—being left in charge of the home in Vilna or Kiev or wherever, while the breadwinner took the long journey to America; then the family’s own trip marked by fear, homesickness, illness, humiliations; the joyous reunion, followed often by shifts in the relationship of husband and wife, parents and children, parents and grandparents, as harsh new demands changed the roles of family members—especially mothers—and lowered immigrants’ sense of competence in their new situations, altered their esteem for others, sapped their self-esteem. And now again the breadwinner might seem to be deserting his family—for twelve hours a day, perhaps, as he labored in a factory, or for weeks at a time when he carried his peddler’s pack off into the wilds of Connecticut or western Pennsylvania.

For some, religion was a strengthening and stabilizing force. But, in Irving Howe’s words, “pressures of the city, the shop, the slum, all made it terribly hard to stay with the old religious ethic. The styles and rituals of traditional Judaism had been premised on a time scheme far more leisurely, a life far less harried than urban America imposed. As for the new ethic of materialist individualism, what could this mean to a garment worker who spent sixty hours a week in a sweatshop, physically present in America yet barely touched by its language, its traditions, its privileges? … Except for those who clung to faith or grappled toward ideology, the early immigrants consisted of people who were stranded—stranded socially, morally, psychologically.” These especially were the ones who withdrew into their culture, their institutions, their families, themselves, as they tried to re-create the feeling of belonging they had once enjoyed in a town or village now distant.

In many respects, the experiences of Italian immigrants paralleled those of Jews and other newcomers, especially those from southern and Eastern Europe. The heaviest waves of Italians came from western Sicily and from rural provinces south of Rome—Aguila, Reggio, Bari, and others—that were almost as separated from one another in geography, history, and even language as were some of the nations of Europe. They brought with them powerful loyalties to native town and village, high expectations aroused by the advertisements of steamship lines and by agents shilling for cheap foreign labor, and the rural folkways of the “Italian shtetl.”

Like the Jews and others, their goal in America was mainly economic betterment, but some Italians too left to find greater freedom—especially religious liberty—or to evade military service, or to break away from political oligarchies. Like other immigrants, but perhaps to an even greater extent, Italian immigrants settled into the dingiest tenements and took the most menial jobs in the stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago, the mines and steel mills of Pennsylvania, the construction gangs of Schenectady and Utica, in the “Little Italies” of Kansas City and Cleveland, in “Dago Hill” near the clay pits and brickyards of St. Louis. Even more than many other immigrants, Italians were slow to conquer the urban American language, as they converted street into “streetu,” factory “fattoria,” shop “shoppa,” store “storu.”

The most distinctive aspect of Italian immigration, however, was the manner in which the newcomers from southern Italy and Sicily coped with culture shock and economic need. This was to accept a leadership and authority system represented by the padrone. Italians arriving on the docks of American ports or in the terminals of great cities needed not sermons or patriotic speeches but help—help with officious immigration officials, help with the American language, help in finding jobs and housing. The padrone, or labor boss, was the man who met him when he arrived, took him and his family around to Little Italy, put him into some kind of flat, and knew where to find work. The padrone was essentially an agent for employers seeking low-paid labor, but in the process he often became an intermediary too; he “collected wages, wrote letters, acted as banker, supplied room and board, and handled dealings between workers and employers,” in Humbert Nelli’s description.

Because padroni recruited Italian labor not only for city jobs but for all parts of the country, Chicago as a railroad center became a stronghold for these bosses. And bosses they were, with their power to offer jobs or to withhold them, to overcharge for food, rent, and railroad tickets to construction centers, to collect fees for jobs that they then failed to produce. A United States government report in 1897 showed that prices charged by the padroni were often far greater than “those charged in Chicago markets for similar articles of food at the same quality”—almost twice as much for bread, over 50 percent extra for macaroni, two-thirds extra for tomatoes, sausages, bacon, and lard.

So Italian immigrants paid a steep price for help in acculturation at the hands of the labor bosses of Chicago. The price could be even steeper, for the padroni tied in with the criminal element that emigrated in large part from Sicily and would have a profound influence on Chicago’s—and the nation’s—urban life. But, above all, the padroni, performing their essential function of uniting labor and capital, testified to the desperate need of immigrants for help, understanding, communication, shelter, and jobs, in a nation that offered virtually no planned and comprehensive assistance or protection to the millions of newcomers flocking into its industrializing cities.

Would factory work serve as the great homogenizer? If the newcomers were bringing their cultures and subcultures with them, if they were implanting their old ways, their costumes, their pushcarts, their languages, their churches, and their family and ethnic loyalties into the heart of the industrializing city, could they carry their diverse ways of life past the factory gate? Man in all his diversity, Adam Smith had said, “is, of all sorts of luggage, the most difficult to be transported.” But the factory had its own exactions, imperatives, disciplines.

Factories had power. Factories, whether second-floor sweatshop or huge steel works, commanded that workers arrive and leave at set times—usually many hours apart—and work in prescribed conditions. The capitalist work ethic and capitalist efficiency barred loitering, absenteeism, malingering, visiting around the floor, perhaps even talking on the job. “Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist,” the Communist Manifesto had charged. “Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-looker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.” Marx and Engels had looked to the future. With the development of industry, “the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level.”

Yet immigrants and migrants found countless ways to thwart the discipline of the industrialists, the slavery of the machine. Used to their holidays in the “old country,” Poles would spend several days celebrating a wedding in a far-off mill town. Accustomed to more than eighty festivals a year, Greeks were not prepared to give up these happy occasions in the New World. The Irish celebrated some of their old patriotic and religious days, such as St. Patrick’s Day, and their new ones, like Independence Day. Nor could employers integrate holidays so that their plants would close only once, for all concerned; no one would dare synchronize Labor Day and Columbus Day. Even the nonreligious might follow the slower working-day tempo of their earlier peasant lives.

And one could seek to flee the machine. On the Lower East Side, Bernard Weinryb noted, a worker might open a candy store or grocery, or become a jobber and then a factory owner himself; the carpenter might become a builder or contractor; the peddler might become a storekeeper. A man or a woman might marry “up” and escape the factory. Others might lose themselves in radicalism or religion, or study evenings in order to take up a profession. Upward mobility often meant lateral motion as well. New York Jews were moving their stores from 14th Street to 23rd Street and then up to 34th, while some moved their families to the upper East Side. Italians, Poles, Slovaks, French Canadians often found the going harder, but they too pursued the American dream.

The Irish, after all, had long since shown that hod carriers and ditchdiggers—or at least their children or grandchildren—could rise from rags to riches. Particularly in less hierarchically structured societies, such as San Francisco during and after the gold strike, Irish immigrants like Peter Donahue and James Phelan had founded businesses and banks, prospered, and ended up among the city’s richest men. Tom Maguire built the Jenny Lind Theater, seating 2,000 persons—the biggest theater on the West Coast. There were countless success stories in other cities. To be sure, the “lace curtain Irish” were vulnerable to scornful remarks about their alleged social pretensions; a San Francisco weekly imagined the “MacShinnegan coat of arms” as a “spalpeen rampant on a field of gold.” The successful Irish, for their part, had a tendency to look down on later waves of immigrants—the Poles, the Jews, the Italians—almost as much as they despised blacks. But virtually all the nationality groups tended to decry the others, in large part because they were thrown into competition for jobs. Even co-religionists tended to divide: witness the separation of American Catholicism into Irish, French, Italian, and Polish churches that often kept their distance from one another on their local turfs.

For the few thousands who found room at the top, hundreds of thousands remained at the bottom of the social heap in the industrializing cities of America. Yet there remained a paradox. On the one hand, rarely in industrializing societies had the “objective” physical and economic nature of workers’ existence seemed more conducive to proletarianization—the forcing of masses of men and women into a homogeneous and poverty-stricken collectivity. “Big industry,” Marx and Engels asserted in The German Ideology, “destroyed as far as possible ideology, religion, morality, etc., … resolved all natural relationships into money relationships … in place of naturally grown towns created the modern, large industrial cities … created everywhere the same relations between the classes of society and thus destroyed the peculiar individuality of the various nationalities … makes labor itself, unbearable.”

On the other hand, a proletariat in the social-psychological-political sense did not develop. For the American industrializing city seemed to inspire opposite tendencies—a huge and continuous flow of labor into and out of the cities; the recruitment of workers off farms, whether European or American, where pay and hours were far worse than even the factories would offer; tensions between native-born Americans and immigrants, and conflict among immigrants from diverse national and regional backgrounds; the relatively open access for some workers to middle-class occupations and status, if not to the top. Marx did not assume that class existence automatically meant class consciousness. But Marxist theory was drawn more from the European and British experience of relatively stable working-class populations, common language, lack of mobility—in Stephan Thernstrom’s words, “some continuity of class membership in one setting so that workers come to know each other and to develop bonds of solidarity and common opposition to the ruling group above them.” The Americans did not—at least, not yet—fit the Marxist model.

Nor were the lower strata of the middle class— “the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants”—sinking into the proletariat, as the Communist Manifesto predicted. Most of the urban lower middle class, at least, changed its white-collar jobs rather than donning overalls. Many moved into the thousands of positions that were opening up in the towering new office buildings, banks, department stores, in the expanding corporate, educational, and government bureaucracies. The industrializing city required armies of technicians to staff the busy headquarters of communications and transport.

Middle-class women were finding more and more job opportunities in the industrial city, at the same time that industrialization was liberating them from some of their old household drudgery. Aluminum utensils were now taking the place of the old cast-iron pans, seasoned with beeswax and hard to clean. Refrigeration and faster shipping were bringing tomatoes into middle-class kitchens year-round, and oranges, lemons, plums, and grapes in season. Housewives were still baking bread at home, but now could more easily send out for baked goods. Still firmly entrenched as a housebound chore, however, was laundry, in part because of the intensive development and promotion of washing machines.

Some women found jobs teaching the home skills they had learned as daughters and mothers. The domestic science movement, led by Ellen Swallow Richards, gave birth to a host of training centers. Thus the Armour Institute in Chicago schooled Annie Thompson in sewing and nutrition, enabling her to clothe and feed her younger siblings after her mother’s death; later, she became a dietitian and teacher of domestic science herself. A multitude of women found teaching jobs as school systems expanded to meet the spurt in city populations.

Other women, however, wanted to move out of home and classroom. Perhaps they remembered Louisa May Alcott writing to her father: “I can’t do much with my hands, so I will make a battering-ram of my head and make a way through this rough-and-tumble world.” Sometimes a battering ram seemed necessary. When Myra Bradwell, publisher of the Chicago Legal News, sought admission to the Illinois state bar in 1869, the Illinois supreme court rejected her because she was a married woman and not an independent agent. Her appeal to the United States Supreme Court failed. “The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother,” a justice pontificated in a concurring opinion. “This is the law of the Creator.” Bradwell was finally admitted to the bar in 1890.

In cities big and small, middle-class women were joining the swelling women’s club movement. Although this movement brought cultural enlightenment and good works, perhaps even more it fostered solidarity among women otherwise isolated in separate households and attached to men competing in the business world. A dawning awareness of female identity and autonomy and a heightened sense of social effectiveness transformed some of these clubwomen’s lives. Still, the movement was by no means radical: the clubs adhered to accepted views of “woman’s sphere.” Few openly supported woman’s suffrage until after the turn of the century.

Indeed, the Federation of Women’s Clubs, launched in 1890, soon became associated in the public mind with exclusive, fashionable society, for its membership included many of the wives of the nation’s best-known business magnates—Phoebe Hearst in San Francisco, Mrs. George Pullman, Mrs. Cyrus McCormick, Mrs. Potter Palmer in Chicago. “The women were gowned to the Queen’s taste,” wrote a disconsolate delegate from Maine about the 1894 biennial convention in Philadelphia. “The president of the club was one blaze of diamonds.….”

The wealthy husbands—the Vanderbilts and Morgans and Rockefellers and the rest—continued to flourish and to prosper in the great economic boom after the turn of the century. Concentration and trustification brought them into closer collaboration, if not harmony. A powerful intercity class of business elites was intensifying in unity and purpose, communicating through the business press, Pullman car talk, rich men’s clubs, corporate board meetings, and their increasing use of the telephone. All in all, the industrial cities were potent forces in fortifying the class system.

At the base of the pyramid lived and toiled the millions of industrial workers. “Assimilate” quickly or “face a quiet but sure extermination,” the Scientific American had warned the “ruder” laborers of Europe in 1869. “Forget your past, your customs, and your ideals,” a guidebook for immigrant Jews advised in the 1890s. “Do not take a moment’s rest. Run, do, work.” A Yiddish poet struck back at the “clock in the workshop” that urged him to labor and still labor on:

The tick of the clock is the boss in his anger.

The face of the clock has the eyes of the foe.

The clock—I shudder—Dost hear how it draws me?

It calls me “Machine” and it cries to me “Sew”!

The Leaders of the City

About two in the morning of a summer’s day around the turn of the century, a Tammany district leader was awakened by the ringing of his doorbell: it was a bartender asking him to walk down to the police station and bail out a saloon-keeper who had run afoul of the law. The leader did so, got back to bed around three, only to be awakened again at six by fire engines. He followed the engines to the fire, met there with several of his district captains, took several burned-out tenants to a hotel, found them food, clothes, and temporary quarters.

After breakfast the leader repaired to the police court, where he found six of his people charged with drunkenness. He persuaded the judge to release four of them, and paid the fines of the other two. Half an hour later, at the municipal district court, he instructed one of his captains to represent a widow who was being dispossessed, and he paid the rent of a poor family also facing eviction, handing them a dollar for food. When he returned home at eleven A.M. he found three men who said they were looking for work. He found them jobs with the subway, the Consolidated Gas Company, and on the road, and he fixed things up for a fourth man who had been sacked by the Metropolitan Railway Company for neglect of duty.

The leader had only an hour for lunch before attending the funeral of an Italian constituent over by the ferry, and then rushing to the funeral of a Jewish voter. He made himself quietly conspicuous at both rites. Later he attended Hebrew confirmation ceremonies at a synagogue.

After dinner the leader presided over an hour-long meeting of his election district captains. Each reported on the political situation in his district, constituents in trouble and needing help, their attitude toward the party and its candidates. Then the leader visited a church fair, bought chances on everything, kissed the babies, jollied their mothers, and walked the fathers around the corner for a drink. Back at the clubhouse he bought tickets to a local baseball game, promised a subscription for a new church bell, and told a group of pushcart peddlers complaining about police persecution that he would go to the precinct station in the morning and see about it. Later in the evening he attended a Jewish wedding reception and dance, and got to bed by midnight.

The name of this Tammany Hall leader was George Washington Plunkitt and he would attain a special niche in American history not because his activities were unusual—on the contrary, this sort of thing was what he and scores of others did day after day—but because he was unusually candid about his activities, remarkably perceptive about the political world he lived in, and had a reporter friend, William L. Riordon, who carefully listened to him. To some, Plunkitt seemed almost a caricature, but allowing for a little blarney and a measure of exaggeration, the picture that emerged of him was true-to-life and important. Plunkitt was a leader in one of the most enduring power structures in American history.

Tammany as an organization was well over a century old by the time it reached its zenith in the 1890s. It had long since shed its old role as primarily a patriotic and philanthropic society. As political parties became more highly organized during the century, Tammany had turned into the power center of the Manhattan Democracy. Just as its sachems had championed the right to vote for the propertyless during earlier years, now the district leaders saw to it that immigrants and the rest of the poor had the practical right to vote. Tammany was unique in its longevity, not its organization. Similar “machines” existed in most of the big industrializing cities—some Republican, as in Philadelphia; some less centralized, as in Chicago; some less polyglot in membership, as in Detroit; but all with the same essential grass-roots structure and function.

That structure, in scores of cities across the nation, embraced a ward-and-precinct organization of party activists who might hold patronage or other jobs but made party business their main business. The party was organized in near-military fashion, with committeemen reporting to district captains, the captains to the district leader, and that leader to the boss or bosses of the whole organization. Typically the committeemen had deep and enduring roots in their neighborhoods. They formed a durable cadre that continued through the decades even while the top bosses came and went. Control at the top might be in the hands of one boss or a collectivity, but in either event the core of the organization was grass-roots leadership.

The formal function of the party machine was to help nominate and elect officeholders across the whole range of government, from the most local office to the President of the United States. Its informal functions included diverse activities all designed to ensure its continued influence. The burden of its business was dispensing the kind of assistance to constituents to which the Plunkitts devoted so much of their time. Not only were there turkeys at Christmas, and legal aid and help with authorities, but splendid treats—excursions up the river with bands playing, St. Patrick’s Day parades, picnics, ball, sports events. Plunkitt had his own baseball team, and a glee club for the young folks. Catering to polyglot immigrant neighborhoods, the organization usually played no ethnic favorites, at least among whites. And the aid was usually specific, concrete, practical.

“I think that there’s got to be in every ward somebody that any bloke can come to—no matter what he’s done—and get help,” Boston ward leader Martin Lomasney said to Lincoln Steffens. “Help, you understand; none of your law and justice, but help.” Perhaps the party bosses’ greatest achievement was to meet people’s basic needs of food and shelter without robbing them of their equal need for self-esteem.

But the city parties were more than welfare-dispensing machines. “As part of the developing relationship between bosses and immigrants, the political machine became an avenue of advance—and, quite possibly, of ‘Americanization’—for many citizens with foreign names,” according to Charles Glaab and A. Theodore Brown. “The machine offered more than labor jobs in public or utility construction. For the brighter and more ambitious young men, there were clerical and other white collar positions in the machine itself; such positions represented for many the first step toward middle class respectability.” The Horatio Alger ideal was not unknown in the precincts.

In the process of helping people, the bosses performed another function, even to a perverse degree—they united a fragmented governmental system and made it perform. The organizations turned the checks and balances upside down. If state constitutions, like the national, were ingeniously designed to divide local, county, and state power through separate electoral arrangements, the bosses with their grip on the nominating and electing mechanism at every level could make mayors and state legislators and county officials and governors work together. If city charters cleverly diked off executive and legislative and judicial power at the local level, the bosses often chose the aldermen, municipal judges, mayors, and—civil service laws to the contrary notwithstanding—administrative officials, and hence could make government perform.

This capacity to unite government was even more important for the organization’s key role, in the big industrial cities, in helping businessmen gain contracts, franchises, and other grants from government, to avoid regulation, to get the right streets and bridges built, to subdue and stabilize the often anarchical world around them. The corporations, wrote Robert Merton, wanted the security of the “economic czar” who controlled, regulated, and organized competition, provided that his decisions were not subject to public scrutiny and control. Often the protected activities of business merged into the underworld of gambling, prostitution, liquor, outright crime. Operating in a political shadowland, the bosses often were able to provide business, legitimate or not, with the quiet help it needed.

Arrayed against the bosses in most of the big cities were the lords of reform. The conflict between these two sets of leaders provided most of the drama and much of the importance of political activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was in many respects a conflict of ideologies—a clash between value systems, ethnic groups, class outlooks, power systems.

The reform movement in the big cities was essentially a bourgeois phenomenon, rooted in middle-class fears of urban disorder, immigrant ways, family disruption. A powerful rural myth of almost Jeffersonian dimensions persisted. Common to many of these reformers, according to Paul Boyer, “was the conviction—explicit or implicit—that the city, although obviously different from the village in its external, physical aspects, should nevertheless replicate the moral order of the village.” Still responding to the old genteel, mugwump, independent thrust in the two major parties, as indignant as ever over the excesses of party spoils and patronage, still clinging to the Nation and Harper’s Weekly and other journals of reformist tendencies, the reformers viewed the bosses as representing all they disliked in politics—corruption, manipulation, links with the underworld, and ties with monopolistic, favor-seeking businessmen.

Much earlier, a regiment of reformers had clashed with the most powerful and corrupt of bosses—and the reformers had won such a glorious battle that the victory colored their thoughts and tactics ever after. Their target and ultimate victim was William Magear Tweed, Jr. Of Scottish descent, son of a New York City chairmaker who invested in a small brush factory, Tweed by the age of twenty-one had learned bookkeeping, clerked in a mercantile office, become a member of the brush firm—and married the daughter of the principal owner. A good-natured, strapping young man of sober habits, he found his main recreation in running Americus Engine Company, Number 6, which with its emblem of a snarling red tiger became one of the best-known fire companies under the leadership of its dashing chief in his red flannel shirt and white firecoat.

New York City fire companies were intensely clannish, convivial, and political. With the loyal backing of his seventy-five fire-fighters, Tweed moved easily into Manhattan’s political world, won election as alderman, and joined the common council that came to be known as “The Forty Thieves.” It was also a school of practical politics and political moneymaking. Tireless and single-minded, Tweed broadened his influence in Tammany, occupied a variety of offices and controlled others, and made money out of every opportunity—kickbacks, city contracts, huge commissions from the Erie Railroad and other corporations, building a $12 million courthouse of which $8 million was graft. This was big business: the ultimate take of Tweed and his ring probably was measured in the upper eight figures.

It was the story of a young man’s ambition, enterprise, rise to riches—and thorough corruption. As reformism rose during the Grant years, Harper’s Weekly and the New York Times launched a long and tenacious campaign against the ring. Thomas Nast’s merciless caricatures in Harper’s converted the amiable, portly young man into a coarse, vicious-looking criminal, sinister of face and fat of belly. The cartoonists pictured him as William the Conqueror crushing the Constitution, as a crocodile, as a Roman emperor watching the Tammany tiger feasting on women’s bodies in the Colosseum—and most typically, as a bloated dictator with the face of an Irish Fagin.

“What are you going to do about it?” Tweed liked to taunt his foes. A mass meeting of outraged citizens in Cooper Union, a committee of seventy reformers, revelations from dissident members of the ring itself, and prosecution brought Tweed and his cronies down in the short space of five months. He died in jail at the age of fifty-five. It was a glorious victory for reform, but it did not last long. Reformers found that the “tentacles of the octopus” remained intact even after the head was cut off, as the Plunkitts survived in the wards and precincts. Later Tammany leaders—the Crokers and Murphys and the rest—benefited from Tweed’s downfall. They learned that they must discipline the organization, limit their greed, and share their take with their people in the old egalitarian spirit of Tammany.

Thus was set the pattern, in scores of cities, of boss control interrupted by bursts of reformism. Some of the machines were more honest and benign, some less so; the bosses were far more diverse in religion, ethnic background, civic virtue, education, appearance, and speech than the caricature of the Irish immigrant grafter would allow. But typically the organization persisted, and the reformers moved off to other interests. The perceptive Plunkitt observed this phenomenon:

“College professors and philosophers who go up in a balloon to think,” he said from his pulpit, a bootblack stand, “are always discussin’ the question: ‘Why Reform Administrations Never Succeed Themselves.’ … I can’t tell just how many of these movements I’ve seen started in New York during my forty years in politics, but I can tell you how many have lasted more than a few years—none. There have been reform committees of fifty, of sixty, of seventy, of one hundred and all sorts of numbers that started out to do up the regular political organizations. They were mornin’ glories—looked lovely in the mornin’ and withered up in a short time, while the regular machines went on flourishin’ forever, like fine old oaks.”

The reason for the fading mornin’ glories? Politics, Plunkitt explained, was a business—as much a “regular business as the grocery or dry-goods or the drug business.” He had been learning it for forty-five years, ever since he had made himself useful around the Hall at age twelve. How could businessmen turn to politics all at once and make a success of it? “It is just as if I went up to Columbia University and started to teach Greek.”

But the stakes were much deeper than merely between regular and reformer. In the industrial city, not only was politics a business; reform and bossism were so part and parcel of the corporate business world around them as to influence deeply the role of each. The more the bosses responded to business needs for franchises and other favors, the more they entered the business world—becoming in many respects brokers and businessmen themselves—and the more they tended to forfeit their old egalitarian role of giving to the poor. The commissions and bribes from business might trickle down to the needy poor, of course, thus fortifying the bosses’ claims to be modern Robin Hoods, but much of the booty stuck to their own fingers.

The businessman, Steffens concluded, was the chief source of corruption. “I found him buying boodlers in St. Louis, defending grafters in Minneapolis, originating corruption in Pittsburgh, sharing with bosses in Philadelphia, deploring reform in Chicago, and beating good government with corruption funds in New York.”

Nor could reformers escape the pervasive influence of corporate business. Many of them were businessmen themselves, and however much they might denounce the traction magnates and the like who dealt with the bosses, these reformers would not challenge the system of private property and corporate power that lay at the foundation of the industrial city. For some reformers, according to Wiebe, self-conscious businessmen alone among the progressive groups “had the inherent resources—the critical positions in the local economy, the money, and the prestige—to command some kind of response from the government. Weaker reformers, therefore, tried to attach their causes to these men’s ambitions, relying upon their need for expert advice and their general sympathy for systematization and order.” Ultimately, most reformers proved more interested in saving the lower class from liquor, gambling, and prostitutes—basic and necessary releases for those with few other means of diversion—than in reforming the socioeconomic system in which so many of the poor were trapped.

There was, indeed, a dangerously antidemocratic edge to the outlook of both regulars and reformers. That of the bosses was quite obvious: they perverted the ballot box, the cornerstone of democracy, by stuffing it, by hiring repeaters by the hundreds, voting names off gravestones, foiling the Australian ballot with the “Tasmanian dodge” (pre-marking ballots), intimidating voters, dumping ballots and whole ballot boxes into the river. Quite rightly did Joseph Choate cry out at Cooper Union: “This wholesale filching and slaughter of the suffrage is a deadly thrust at the very source and fountain of our liberties.”

But some of the reformers, in reacting against what the Times called “the dangerous classes” who cared “nothing for our liberty and civilization,” went much further in their quivering outrage and began to question the tenets of democracy itself. The curse of the city, wrote E. L. Godkin of the Nation, is the “people”—or the half of them that comprised the poor, “that huge body of ignorant and corrupt voters.”

Noting how white Southerners had deprived Southern blacks of the vote through the “grandfather clause” and other devices, an “expert” predicted that once people became convinced that “universal suffrage inevitably must result in inefficient and corrupt government, it will be abandoned.” From this vantage point it was but a step toward proposals to restrict the suffrage to the propertied class, to bar the poor immigrant, the unschooled, and the illiterate from the polls. And once that process got under way, where would it stop, as each class yearned to strengthen the morals and weaken the power of the class below?

The Reformation of the Cities

The answer of some to the plight of the poor and the blight of the city was to focus directly and intensely on what they saw as the heart of the problem—the lack of morality and character in the poor, especially the immigrant poor. This was peculiarly a strategy for preachers, lay and clerical, and many a church and forum resounded with thunderous appeals to the lower classes to shun vice and improve their ways. Some of the upright organized a Union for Concerted Moral Effort, and a leader of the National Union for Practical Progress proposed that a “new moral issue” be “presented to the people each month”—a kind of morality-of-the-month club.

The uplifters encountered a little problem, though—those to be uplifted were not in church. Most of the upright were middle-class in ideas, speech, dress, and geography; they were not speaking the same language as the immigrant poor. Recognizing this, many of the preachers made an enormous effort to bridge the gap by taking missions to the slums, turning churches into centers of social activity, sponsoring sports and theatricals. Under the creative leadership of a young native of Dublin, William S. Rainford, St. George’s Episcopal Church, on East 16th Street, set up a boys’ club, industrial training program, recreational activities, congregational singing. The Salvation Army, adapting adroitly to local conditions, helped meet needs for food and shelter and music and camaraderie so successfully that by century’s end it directed seven hundred corps, staffed by 3,000 officers, across the nation.

The moral uplifters had to face a stark fact, however: even if they reached out to the fallen, poor immigrants would accept the tangible help, politely listen to the moral exhortation that might come with it, and then stick to their old ways. This was all the more reason, other reformers contended, to try a quite different strategy—improving the environment in which the poor grew up and lived. It was a problem of nurture and culture, not innate morality or heredity. Many of the upright recognized this in setting up recreational halls and trade schools, but the most direct and dramatic effort to reshape the environment was through settlement houses. The idea was to bring middle-class reformers into the very heartland of the industrial city, establish warm contacts with the poor, and attract some of the neighborhood people into these houses, which would serve as homes, schools, and social clubs.

The most famous of the settlement houses was Chicago’s Hull-House, founded and run by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr after they had visited Toynbee Hall, London’s pioneering experiment in transforming the lives of the poor. As the settlement house movement spread to scores of other cities, Addams became its most eloquent promoter and defender. A powerful champion of environmentalism, she wanted transformed cities. “We are only beginning to understand,” she asserted, “what might be done through the festival, the street procession, the band of marching musicians, orchestral music in public squares or parks.” She mixed practicality with idealism: the “delicious sensation to be found in a swimming pool” would surely outweigh the temptation “to play craps in a foul and stuffy alley, even with the unnatural excitement which gambling offers.”

The settlement movement had its critics. Some contended that the youthful volunteers tended to take on the outlook of those among whom they lived, rather than raising them up. They were “bowled over by the first labor leader, or anarchist, or socialist they met,” said Mary Richmond of the Charity Organization Society. The settlement workers, however, were more likely to share the middle-class values of charity dispensers. The head of Boston’s South End House, himself a prohibitionist, proposed to isolate tramps, alcoholics, and paupers; and Jane Addams, it was said, never doubted that the lower-class environment of saloons, dance halls, and street life needed to be made more like a middle or upper-class neighborhood. Still, Addams emphasized—notably in her influential 1902 work Democracy and. Social Ethics—that the moral defects of the poor were the consequence, not the cause, of poverty.

Some environmentalists raised their sights far above charity and settlement houses. They would transform the entire city through creative and comprehensive planning, thus shaping a finer social and moral habitat. In part, this idea took the form of the City Beautiful movement, which in scores of industrial cities strove to replace filthy alleys, ugly billboards, overhead electrical wires, and littered vacant lots with trees, shrubbery, fountains, flower beds, even statuary and murals. This movement gained considerable impetus from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, with its transformed lakefront, majestic fountains, broad walkways, wide lawns, and clean white buildings of monumental proportions.

But beautification was not enough, other environmentalists argued: the poor could not get to a world’s fair or even to the parks in their own cities. What was needed was planning or replanning of the whole city. The city planners pointed to the transformation of Paris under Napoleon III, the exciting work in Prussian cities, the breathtaking concentric “rings” planned for fin de siècle Vienna. Could not Americans do better—at least in the nation’s capital? Washington had been planned, after all, and Pierre L’Enfant’s 1791 design for the city should now be completed. To do this Congress appointed a commission, which proposed a grand railroad station in the classical tradition, a triangle of neoclassical buildings, a memorial bridge to Arlington. A St. Louis committee rejected the monumental, centralized city in favor of clusters of neighborhood centers with comprehensive activities and programs catering specifically to the needs of the poor. The boldest plan of all, the 1909 Plan of Chicago, would expand the harbors and beaches, the parks and transportation, not only of the city but 3,000 square miles around it, from Michigan City, Indiana, to Kenosha, Wisconsin. Like its Exposition, Chicago would become a city of order, harmony, ennobling vistas, environmental delights, and hence of moral betterment.

Magnificent dreams—and almost wholly in vain. The city planners could not overcome the machinelike platting of city land into rectangular property lines and street grids; the fierce drive for profits of the real estate enterprisers and their allies in city politics; and the giant industries that ruled where people would reside, under what conditions they would work, and in effect how they would live. Most of the inspiring proposals were cut to pieces in the urban political meat grinders, or simply gathered dust on library shelves.

“Government must employ every resource in its power,” one city planner’s report asserted, and this was true in all the cities. But with its corrupted politicians, scattered authority, lack of sustained reform vigor, and state and local judges who defended private property to their last breath, government could not employ resources, for it had none. In an age that still respected private power and decried public, government was part of the problem, not its solution.

Was there, then, no hope for the industrializing cities—no hope that, with all their talent, vitality, and riches, they could be converted into communities that met the material and moral wants, the aesthetic and psychic needs of the citizens—and to do all this efficiently and within the law? The fate of most of the big cities indicated no, no such hope. Yet the experience of a number of cities hinted that, at least at intervals, they bore promise of becoming the kinds of community that the dreamers and utopians had envisaged. The realization of that promise in three cities turned on the quality of their leaders.

The most innovative and creative of these leaders, Hazen S. Pingree, ended up the least known. When this industrialist was elected mayor of Detroit in his fiftieth year, in 1889, his life had encapsulated a half-century of American history: raised on a poor Maine farm … mill hand in a Saco, Maine, cotton factory … apprentice leather-cutter in a Massachusetts shoe, factory … raw recruit in the second Battle of Bull Run … prisoner of war in vile Andersonville … escapee and again a soldier … migrant to Detroit … shoe factory hand … shoe factory partner … shoe factory magnate … member of Detroit’s economic and social elite. Angered by a corrupt city government, Republican leaders met to pick a candidate, but no one would run. Finally they turned to Pingree.

“Mayor?” he exclaimed. “Why that’s political. What in hell do I know about politics? I’m too busy making shoes.” He’d never even been in City Hall except to pay taxes, he said. But he finally gave in.

Politically, Detroit was enough to daunt any novice. As the old fur-trading town had grown from a commercial center to a big industrial city of steel foundries, machine products, and food processing, immigrants had crowded into the city and taken over the Democratic party. Republicans had run state politics for decades but could win in Detroit only when the Irish and the Germans fought each other for control of the city. The Germans, who by 1889 could boast of eight newspapers in their own language, including three dailies, were simmering over the reluctance of the Irish Democrats to slate them for office. A large Polish population felt even more ignored. Playing skillfully on these antagonisms, drinking redeye whiskey at the bar to show that he was no prohibitionist, organizing his old shoe customers and shoemakers, Pingree won the election with a margin of 2,300 votes.

For a time Pingree was just the kind of mayor the GOP business leaders wanted—a cost-cutter and a corruption-fighter. But as he fought, in turn, the city bosses, a utility overcharging for street lighting, a monopolistic street railway company, and even more as he mixed informally with people in their neighborhoods and gained a better sense of their wants and needs, he broke with the business elite and moved toward progressive and even socialistic positions. By the end of his fourth term, when he left Detroit for Lansing and the governorship, Pingree had won lower utility rates, rebuilt the sewer system, built parks and public baths, exposed corruption in the school board and expanded the school system, modernized city transit, carried out equal-tax policies, made street railways and the telephone system more competitive, set up a city-owned light plant, and started a work-relief program that had as its goal, Melvin Holli noted, “both aid to the unfortunate and a change in the climate of public opinion toward ‘paupers.’” A vocal foe of child labor, monopoly, and inequitable taxation, tolerant of Sunday drinking, opposed to required Bible readings in the schools, Pingree demonstrated over and again his commitment to both liberty and equality. He was deeply moral without being a self-righteous moralizer.

Judging by his nickname, preaching morality to other people might have been the avocation of “Golden Rule” Jones of Toledo, but he was a moralist of the Pingree stamp. As a manufacturer of oil well machinery, he posted the Golden Rule in his plant and instituted the eight-hour day, a minimum wage, vacations with full pay, Christmas bonuses; he forbade child labor, timekeepers, and piecework. As mayor of Toledo, he supported municipal ownership of utilities, free kindergartens, public playgrounds, free concerts; he made the police swap their police clubs for light canes and he disapproved arresting on suspicion and holding without charge. Jones too broke with the regular Republican organization and kept winning elections.

“Golden Rule” was an idealist, a utopian, a preacher who practiced what he preached. “In the ideal society that yet awaits us, in the co-operative commonwealth that is to be realized, in the kingdom of Heaven that is to be set up here on this earth,” he proclaimed, “there will be no patents, no railway passes, no reserved seats, no ‘free list,’ no franchises, or contracts or special privileges of any sort to enable a select few of the people to live off the toil of others.”

In Cleveland, Tom L. Johnson, inventor, steel maker, street-railroad magnate, won election as mayor four times. During his eight years in office, he transformed the municipal government, but even more he transformed the people through a continuous educational campaign. In a circus tent big enough for 4,000 persons but small enough to be moved from neighborhood to neighborhood, he discussed public affairs and invited the audience to speak up and ask questions. Johnson too fought to limit utility franchises, urged city ownership of power and water, forced the trolley car fare down to three cents, expanded recreation areas and bathhouses, and protected prostitutes and madams against the police.

“Only through municipal ownership,” Johnson said, “can the gulf which divides the community into a small dominant class on one side and the unorganized people on the other be bridged…. only by making men’s ambitions and pecuniary interests identical with the welfare of the city can civil warfare be ended.”

These three leaders—and a few others like them but with less success—achieved not merely the reform of their cities but their reformation—their restoration as places of harmony and dignity for all the people, their rebirth as moral communities, their revitalization as forces for liberty and equality and fraternity. Why these three men of wealth and status should have ended up as radicals and socialists has long been a conundrum of history. They grew up in impoverished circumstances—but many a man had done so, only to grind down the poor in his own turn at the top. Perhaps their most remarkable common quality was their capacity to learn not only from experience and human contact but from reflection and reading. Pingree read Washington Gladden, Henry Demarest Lloyd, Albert Shaw, Richard T. Ely; Jones was deeply influenced by Tolstoy, Bellamy, and Whitman; Johnson happened on a copy of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty during a train trip and it launched him on his reform career. For these men, intellectual leadership and moral leadership were inseparable.

In the final assessment of the leadership and reformation of the industrial cities, though, these men stand as exceptions, almost as curiosities. Nothing—not leadership nor morality nor beautification nor technology nor governmental reorganization—nothing stemmed for long the overpowering force of industrialization. Neither the political machines nor the welfare agencies, neither philanthropy nor radical leaders, could cope with the tide of economic and social and psychological misery that enveloped tens of millions of migrants and immigrants. Neither the organized government of politicians nor the private government of capitalists could plan ahead, raise enough money, act comprehensively and persistently enough to overcome deeply rooted urban malaise and disarray.

The failure of the cities, however, dramatized the need for national action. And the ideas incubated in the city saloons and other forums, in universities and churches, in election contests and editorial chambers, would provide much of the content and controversy of the nationwide conflicts that would herald a new age of modernity in thought and progressivism in politics.

Women: The Progressive Cadre

The brilliant political leaders who attracted national attention during the progressive era tended to obscure the remarkable array of women who emerged around the turn of the century, a group committed to an expansive view of women’s social, economic, political, and sexual rights—and to action.

Julia Lathrop, descendant of Illinois pioneers and a graduate of Vassar, accepted Governor Altgeld’s appointment in 1892 as the first woman member of the Illinois Board of Public Charities, and proceeded to visit the 102 county farms or almshouses to see the indigent, the epileptic, the insane, the delinquent children, and the rest of the unwanted, heaped together in those dreary and forlorn institutions. Florence Kelley, daughter of the famed William “Pig Iron” Kelley of Pennsylvania, graduated from Cornell, studied at the University of Zurich after being barred from pursuing law at the University of Pennsylvania because she was a woman, translated Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England. Returning home a socialist, she investigated tenement workshops as Altgeld’s chief Illinois factory inspector—the first woman to hold that post. Emma Goldman emigrated from Konigsberg, worked in a Rochester clothing plant and a New Haven corset factory, embraced anarchism after the trial of the Haymarket Square workingmen, helped her lover Alexander Berkman plan the attack upon Henry Frick, and spent a year in prison for inciting a riot. These and a host of other indomitable women would soon be followed by a new generation with many causes: Grace and Edith Abbott, Alice Hamilton, Margaret Sanger, among many others.

Dazzling among even this galaxy of leaders was the incomparable Jane Addams. Daughter of a liberal-minded politician and businessman, she was broadly educated: Rockford Seminary, a term at the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia, lengthy European travels that included prowls through the slums of East London and Naples and a visit to Toynbee Hall, a community of young Englishmen seeking to uplift the poor through benevolence and culture. Returning home, she and her Rockford classmate Ellen Gates Starr established their own settlement house amid the tenements and factories, the immigrant Irish and Germans and Russians and Italians and Polish Jews, the nine churches and 250 saloons in the 19th Ward surrounding Chicago’s South Halsted Street.

The old mansion on Halsted, with its big drawing room, high ceilings, and fancy cornices, soon was ministering to the needs of the poor it had long excluded, providing relief, food, medical care, community kitchen, an employment bureau, day nurseries. But Addams and her friends sensed that the poor wanted much more, that as their basic needs were satisfied, they increasingly craved comradeship, group activities, discussions, books, art, music, theater. Hull-House had its Women’s Club, Community Kitchen, gymnasium, day nursery, Labor Museum, and the Hull-House Players, a pioneer in the Little Theatre movement. Upper and lower class were thrown intimately together. After the Women’s Club heard a Christian Scientist urge her listeners to think of the smell of pine trees amid the setting sun rather than the stink of garbage at a nearby nauseous river, a German woman who had lived close to the stream rose to exclaim: “Vell, all I can say is if dot woman say dot river smell good den dere must be something de matter with dot woman’s nose!”

Hull-House soon became a center of intellectual controversy and excitement. Arguments raged over politics, architecture, art, religion. To its Plato Club came John Dewey to lead sessions on Greek philosophy. Governor Altgeld and the rising young attorney Clarence Darrow dropped by. Beatrice Webb, visiting the house with her husband Sidney, persuaded Jane Addams to try a cigarette for the first time; it was also the last. Hull-House was also a training institution for hosts of women who would move out into other settlement houses, into government, academe, philanthropy. Julia Lathrop worked at Hull-House, as did Alice Hamilton. Florence Kelley would never forget arriving at the house on a snowy December morning, her children around her, to be greeted by Addams holding the cook’s plump baby in her arms while keeping an eye on a lively Italian girl whose mother was working in a local sweatshop.

Addams seemed to serve in every role—as intellectual leader, project developer, fund raiser, morale booster, “community relations” manager. Her most ticklish outside relationship was with local ward boss Alderman Johnny Powers, who at election time liked to drive his bandwagon to the polling places, including the one at Hull-House, while the band played “Nearer, My God to Thee” and the boss tossed cigars to the men and nickels to the children. A smooth broker of jobs, favors, permits, ordinances, and money, Powers could not understand why Addams, whom he could not but admire, refused to work with him, even to accept his proffered favors. “Miss Addams is always O.K. with me,” Powers would complain, “but I wish just once she’d ask me and not fight me all the time.” But Addams rivaled any boss in her readiness to help the desperate. When a young woman, ostracized by her neighbors because she was bearing a child out of wedlock, went into labor unattended as no one wanted to call a doctor and risk being stuck with the bill, Addams and Lathrop hurried to the tenement to serve as midwives.

As Hull-House expanded to thirteen buildings and a staff of sixty-five, Addams seemed to expand intellectually as well, broadening her activities to encompass virtually the whole gamut of social and political reform. She was active in the National Child Labor Committee, the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, the National Playground Association, the National Consumers’ League, the American Association for Labor Legislation, the National Tuberculosis Association, and, not least, the National Women’s Trade Union League, as well as suffrage organizations and other reform efforts. Somehow she found time to write ten books and several hundred articles. She was a frequent and compelling public speaker, and although not an especially original thinker, she had, according to biographer Allen Davis, “the ability to see meaning and purpose in the confusing events of her day and to communicate that meaning to a wide audience.”

In time, Addams became almost sanctified, evoking comparisons to Joan of Arc or the Virgin Mary, a humble woman serving the lowly and sharing their poverty. In fact, Addams remained an upper-middle-class woman who enjoyed good living, especially in her travels with her close companion Ellen Gates Starr, and happily accepted the lavish entertainment offered by her wealthy friends—though she usually took the opportunity to beg them for funds.

Still, Addams was only the brightest star in that large galaxy, and it was the social enterprise and imagination of thousands of women leaders in hundreds of reform efforts that produced betterment across the nation, rivaling that of Hull-House. This leadership cadre had its roots in the intense social needs arising out of the economic malaise of the 1880s and early 1900s—especially urban conditions of unemployment, crowded tenements, low wages, high infant mortality, and increasing numbers of working women with small children. The leadership was shaped and stimulated by the sharpening ideologies of the nineties, the rising populist and progressive protest movements, the general quickening of political excitement. But the direct source of that leadership was a cadre of middle- and upper-class women who were typically college-educated, well read and traveled, and from a secular reform background.

These women were often thwarted in their career aspirations, such as law—Julia Lathrop worked for ten years in her father’s law office—or business, were often unmarried and wanted to remain so, and usually had access to wealthy benefactors, such as Julius Rosenwald in Chicago. Since professionally trained women were generally excluded from the upper ranks of university faculties, in Joan Zimmerman’s view, they naturally turned to new areas where they could use their expertise. And many of these women shared middle-class feelings of morality and guilt about their privileged status compared to that of the urban masses. Hofstadter noted that as early as 1892 Jane Addams lectured on “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” explaining how “the sheltered and well-brought-up young Americans of her generation, reared on the ideal of social justice and on Protestant moral imperatives,” had become troubled over their own sincerity and usefulness.

These forces lent a certain tone and thrust to women’s reform leadership. Settlement houses administered to a variety of human needs, not merely the economic, and they did so by seeking to satisfy them directly or “maternally,” rather than depending on the needy to conduct their own struggle for realization of their own hopes, expectations, and demands. Workers’ movements and organizations as such—especially trade unions—appealed directly to workers’ economic interests and assumed that this motive power would accelerate “labor’s demand for more.” This is not to say that women leaders opposed unions—what good progressive could do that?—or that unions were not also concerned with comradeship, education, and summer camps. Indeed, leaders like Florence Kelley and Jane Addams also invaded the political arena to work for laws protecting women and children especially. But there was, on their part, a womanly caring for all the material, social, aesthetic, and self-fulfillment needs of their “charges” that went beyond the merely economic.

These broad concerns encouraged woman leaders to act in a diversity of fields. The settlement house idea itself spread to many cities. In the early nineties Lillian Wald, of an affluent Rochester family, moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan with a determination to use her training in nursing to serve especially the needs of immigrants. With financial aid from the Schiffs and Loebs and other wealthy clans, she established the Henry Street Settlement, a large nursing facility that also offered classes in cooking and sewing, art and dancing. Appointed to the Mayor’s Pushcart Commission, Wald extended her concerns to playgrounds, parks, housing, and the regulation of sweatshops as her social sympathies compelled her to embrace ever broader reform movements. But the central effort of the ‘ Henry Street Settlement remained nursing, in its broadest dimensions, as Wald and her colleagues pressed vigorously for the extension of public nursing into schools and homes.

Another woman’s movement focused on a very specific threat to mothers and children—the saloon. Founded in 1874, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had grown rapidly during the next quarter century, reaching a membership of 300,000 by century’s end. It was the largest woman’s organization in the country, at least ten times larger than the suffrage organizations of the day, which were emerging from a political dry spell. The WCTU had not been concerned only with drunkards and their power to abuse their families and even grab the earnings of wife and children, without legal redress. Despite Carrie Nation’s notoriety as a “saloon-wrecker,” the women of the WCTU had studied and agitated on issues of labor reform, prostitution, health and hygiene, prison reform, needs of black women, drug use, international arbitration, and world peace. These broad interests were in part the product of the gifted leadership of Frances Willard, a onetime college president who moved into the temperance legions and governed with the inspired motto, “Do Everything.” With her death in 1898, the movement drifted back to its original emphasis on drinking.

Margaret Sanger, the boldest of the women’s leaders, confronted the most intimate and controversial question of all—sexuality and reproduction. A number of influences combined to convert this slight, mild-looking young woman into a dauntless crusader: a marriage at nineteen that ended in divorce; her friendship with Emma Goldman and militant radicals in the Industrial Workers of the World; her association with Malthus-oriented French syndicalists during a Paris visit in 1913. Returning to the United States the next year, she established a monthly called the Woman Rebel, advocated “birth control” (a term she coined), and aroused her foes even more by allying with anarchists, woman liberationists, and assorted radicals. After the federal government indicted her and her journal under the Comstock anti-obscenity act of 1873, she fled to England for almost a year, fearlessly returned to open the first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, and was arrested and jailed.

Sanger would not be silenced. “The basic freedom of the world is woman’s freedom,” she wrote in Woman and the New Race. “A free race cannot be born of slave mothers. A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of that bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body.”

As in the case of all strong leaders, these women divided potential followers as well as uniting them. Millions of low-income Americans, including hosts of women who desperately needed her counsels, feared and hated Margaret Sanger and all she stood for. Millions of American workers—including some women—who liked their beer and wine and the harder stuff, loathed the WCTU saloon closers. Many men—and a few women—opposed woman’s suffrage. Few objected to the settlement houses, for they seemed caring and unthreatening, but some low-income women scorned the middle-class maternalists as members of what one woman trade unionist called the “mink brigade.”

When would working women take matters into their own hands, build their own movement, choose their own leaders? At century’s end, unionization of women, after many setbacks, seemed poised for a takeoff. They were moving by the tens of thousands out of farm labor and domestic service into occupations far easier to unionize. Women employed in non-agricultural pursuits had more than doubled, from 2 million to 4.3 million, between 1880 and 1900. But hardly 3 percent of those women were unionized by century’s end. With populist and progressive winds blowing, surely women’s trade unionism would escalate during the decade ahead.

It was not to be. Women’s efforts to join men’s unions or organize their own seemed to meet all the past furies, only redoubled. Trade unions themselves seemed weighted against women. Their leaders often held their meetings in saloons, amid the stench of cigar smoke and stale beer. They resented interference by women, suggesting they should stick to home and hearth. They charged high dues. They feared low-wage competition from women workers just off the farm or out of the kitchen. It seemed to some women workers that some unionists were organized as much against them as against the bosses.

For many women the only recourse was to form their own organizations, but this required able and militant leadership—and here above all women were disadvantaged. They could not find such leadership in the American Federation of Labor under Samuel Gompers, who was as conservative toward unionizing women as he was toward organizing blacks and the unskilled. The AFL did oppose discriminatory pay for women, in order to protect all workers from cheap labor, but this policy harmed the millions of unskilled women whose only hope of a job was one with low pay. The Federation had only one female organizer in the 1890s; when she left to be married, Gompers waited until 1908 before appointing another, Annie Fitzgerald. It was not until working women organized militantly in the Lawrence textile strike of 1912 that the AFL paid much attention to them.

Women workers had only the leadership they could mobilize from their own ranks; there was no Jane Addams or Frances Willard of female trade unionism. Brilliant leaders arose from the movement, especially in the conduct of strikes, as with the textile operatives of Chicopee and the clothing makers of Chicago. Twenty thousand New York shirtwaist makers walked out, over the opposition of their male leaders. Certain unions like the hat and cap makers generated their own activists, most notably in the person of the fiery organizer Rose Schneidermann. But typically women’s leadership hardly rose above the level of “shop chairladies.”

It was in this connection that the National Women’s Trade Union League assumed special importance. Its goal was to enable women of social influence and progressive ideas to join hands with activist women in the trades. The former would supply creative ideas and leadership, the latter practical experience and information. Founded in 1903 at an AFL convention in Boston, the NWTUL became strong enough to help produce a peak organizing period for women between 1909 and 1915. Its platform called for organization of all workers into trade unions; equal pay for equal work, regardless of sex; the eight-hour day and forty-four-hour week; a “living wage”; full citizenship for women.

Effective though it was, the Women’s Trade Union League could not wholly overcome the old class barriers. For “middle class feminists outside the WTUL,” according to Robin Miller Jacoby, “class identity outweighed their rhetorical commitment to the ideal of cross-class female solidarity.” It was the society women within the NWTUL whom Schneidermann had labeled the mink brigade. Women of all classes, however, could unite in the pursuit of two goals—woman’s suffrage and social legislation—and the NWTUL plunged into both battles. Even so, suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt could not help observing, “I am a good democrat in theory, but my faith weakens when it meets bad air, dirt, horrid smells, the democratic odor diluted with perfumes of beer and uncleanliness.”

Women could also unite as consumers, under the leadership of Florence Kelley, general secretary of the National Consumers’ League. But Kelley was interested in far broader matters than consumer problems. Living at the Henry Street Settlement, she fought for the legal protection of women against long hours and unhealthful conditions; she was one of the founding members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; she organized sixty or more local Consumers’ Leagues pledged to boycott companies that employed child labor. She was so active and effective that years later a Supreme Court justice would call her “a woman who had probably the largest single share in shaping the social history of the United States during the first thirty years of the century.” By expanding the concept of consumerism to cover the social price of making goods and not merely the money price in the stores, Kelley transcended some of the old conflict between low-income women factory workers and middle-class women consumers.

Whatever the differences among women leaders, they were minuscule compared to the conflicts that cut through the ranks of working people.

After vanquishing the remnants of the militant Knights of Labor in the late 1880 s, the American Federation of Labor had come to hold a commanding place in the organization of skilled workers. By 1904, it was boasting a membership of over a million and a half. Under its founding leader, Samuel Gompers, now a burly, bespectacled gentleman usually attired in dignified clothes and carrying a cane, the Federation continued to practice business unionism—jealous guardian of the skilled crafts, protector of labor against injunctions and other hostile governmental action, critic of immigration. The AFL rejected socialism, radicalism, government welfarism, independent political action. While AFL unions often fought hard-line employers with strikes, boycotts, and other weapons, the AFL had become an essential buttress of the business system—conservative in outlook, restrictive and monopolistic in economic tactics, transactional in leadership, bargaining and competitive in its relationship with business. The Federation’s membership rose and fell with the business cycle; it joined with business and government in the National Civic Federation founded in 1900 to “unite” labor and capital; President Gompers supped with the mighty, including magnates and Presidents.

As it fought off challenge after challenge to its power, the AFL left millions of workers unorganized, politically adrift, and ready to be led. The next threat to the Federation came less from the unorganized masses of the urban East than from the embattled workers in the West. There the pugnacious Western Federation of Miners had conducted a running and often bloody war with equally pugnacious mine and railroad owners. In the bloody Coeur d’Alene area of Idaho, mine workers thwarted by antiunion bosses had dynamited a company mill, leaving two men dead; the governor promptly obtained federal troops to round up strikers by the hundreds and throw them into bull pens. The WFM was everything the AFL was not—eager to organize the unorganized, including immigrants and even blacks, and totally opposed to capitalism and capitalists. And it had a new young leader, William D. Haywood, who was everything Gompers was not.

Son of a Pony Express rider who died when he was three, Big Bill had been raised in a mining camp, put to work at fifteen as a hardrock miner, and then drifted through the West as a prospector, cowboy, surveyor, and miner again, before joining the WFM. With his huge frame, a “dead eye” lost in a childhood mishap, and a “dead hand” crushed in a mining accident, Haywood intimidated bosses and union rivals alike.

But the western miners desperately needed allies. In 1905 Haywood and other WFM leaders, along with delegates from Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance and individual socialists like Eugene Debs, gathered in Chicago to establish the Industrial Workers of the World, with the aim of uniting all workers, of all skills, races, and national origins, ready to use strikes, boycotts, and sabotage, if necessary, to realize their grand objectives of a socialist, classless, egalitarian society.

The “Wobblies” scored some organizing successes with western lumber workers and farm laborers and eastern textile workers. Haywood exercised brilliant leadership of a mass walkout against pay cuts in the Massachusetts textile town of Lawrence. As his picket lines held firm, he dramatized police brutality and won a great public-relations coup when striking parents sent their children to outlying towns to be fed. His strikers finally won in Lawrence in that year of 1912 and gave the union’s organizing drives a big boost. But the IWW’s victories—and Big Bill’s—were ephemeral. The Wobblies fought among themselves, with the AFL, with their socialist and syndicalist friends. They purged De Leon’s socialists, but they could not make a dent in the skilled ranks of the AFL. The WFM’s metalworkers could not even establish unity with the AFL’s coal miners. After a time the WFM pulled out of the IWW, leaving the Wobblies with a shrunken core.

It was a poignant state of affairs. Labor was producing its own luminaries in the progressive era—Gompers the labor “statesman” and executive, De Leon the doctrinaire syndicalist, Victor Berger the socialist politician, Eugene Debs the propagandist and election campaigner, Haywood the direct-actionist, and a host of others of almost equal talents. Yet these men could not work together for more than brief intervals. They preached unity above all else, but they could not practice it. They were not simply the victims of their own competing egos and ambitions. They were the victims too of conflicting ideologies, some imported and some homegrown, of nativist-immigrant tensions, of ethnic and racial rivalries, of an individualistic and competitive ethos that even penetrated radical labor, of capitalist opposition and divisiveness, of the sheer space and variety and regionalism of America.

And off to the side stood Emma Goldman, watching the radicals’ Virginia reel with mingled concern and contempt. She believed in activism, not organization. Following McKinley’s assassination, she was arrested, given the third degree, and then released for lack of evidence against her. Later she founded an anarchist monthly, Mother Earth, welcomed Berkman on his release after fourteen years in prison, became a friend and lover of Ben Reitman, the King of the Hobos. She scorned marriage as an institution that made wives the private property of their husbands. She scorned woman’s suffrage as tending to co-opt them into the political status quo. She scorned unions as instruments of the capitalist system. Above all, she came to oppose war. But, cut off as she was from parties and unions, she could serve only as a gadfly, albeit one with a sharp sting.

The wide split between Gompers-style and Haywood-style unionism had its counterpart in a deep political and philosophical chasm among black Americans—and the opposing black leaders were as remarkable a set of adversaries as the two unionists.

Booker T. Washington, born a slave on a Virginia plantation a few years before the Civil War, emerged out of conditions that might have made a white man either an Andrew Carnegie or a flaming radical. Washington remembered growing up in a small log cabin with earthen floor and glassless windows, eating with hands and fingers out of the family pot of cornbread and pork, going to work after Emancipation in a salt-packing factory, where he might labor seventeen hours straight. Illiterate and forbidden by his stepfather to attend school, Booker developed a fierce desire to read, prompted by his curiosity over figures on salt barrels and the gift of a Webster’s spelling book from his mother. He managed to take night lessons, then to attend day school, and finally to make the long trek to the Hampton Institute, where he served as both student and janitor. Invited to run the Tuskegee Institute, an industrial school, he set out with white patronage to convert it into a major enterprise with 1,400 pupils and thirty trades. From this base he fought his way to immense power and prestige.

The turning point for Washington came with a speech he gave in Atlanta in 1895. At a time when almost half of American blacks were illiterate, he urged schooling and more schooling. Speaking to a racially mixed audience, he in effect proposed a great transaction—that blacks acquiesce in social subordination and political inequality in exchange for economic opportunity and advancement; in time, the latter would end the former. Agitating “questions of social equality,” he said, was the “extremest folly.” His message—learn, work, earn, win respect—won a chorus of praise from Southern whites and many blacks.

Washington himself rose to great social eminence, dining (once) with the Roosevelts in the White House, receiving audiences with kings, consorting with philanthropists like Carnegie and Rockefeller. He gained political power too, as he used his Tuskegee work as a base for the “Tuskegee machine”—a personal political organization through which he placed hundreds of blacks in governmental and academic posts throughout the nation. He offered advice to Roosevelt and Taft, in exchange for which he muted criticism of their treatment of blacks. But when Taft left office, Washington’s patronage power left with him.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois seemed almost a polar opposite to Washington—born of an established mulatto family in western Massachusetts, graduate of Fisk University, student for two years at the University of Berlin, the first Negro to receive a doctoral degree from Harvard (for a notable thesis on the African slave trade). He moved on to an illustrious career as a sociologist, historian, and novelist. With success, however, Du Bois became more and more militant. He could not accept Washington’s brokerage and accommodationism. On the death of his first son, Du Bois buried his anguish in anger: “Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow.”

Du Bois came to oppose virtually everything Washington stood for. He chose militancy over cooperation, protest over patronage, black and trade-union resistance over endless deference. At a demonstration at Harpers Ferry, he and his fellow militants, in what Du Bois called some of the plainest English ever spoken by American blacks (Du Bois used the words Negro, black, and colored interchangeably, sometimes in the same sentence), demanded immediate full mankind suffrage, the end of segregation in railways and streetcars, the right “as freemen” for Negroes to walk, talk, and socialize with whites as well as blacks, and the enforcement of laws against rich as well as poor, capitalist as well as laborer, white as well as black. After two blacks were lynched and scores burned out of their homes and stores in Springfield, Illinois, forty-nine white progressives and socialists issued a “call” that gave birth to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Du Bois was the only black among its first set of top officers.

Conflict intensified between the militants and accommodationists. Washington fought the NAACP and Du Bois with bribery and espionage, and Du Bois responded with burning attacks on the Tuskegee machine. Both sides sought to control black organizations, the Niagara Movement founded by Du Bois, the NAACP, the black press, access to white philanthropy. In place of Washington’s transactional leadership—which ultimately might have served as a crucial transitional leadership—Du Bois proposed black struggle in the United States and in Asia and Africa and the “islands of the sea.”

And off to the side stood the most extraordinary leader of all, Mary Harris Jones. Above all an individualist with a dislike for doctrine, Mother Jones had one simple strategy—to travel hundreds of miles to help whatever children, women, or men needed help, whether child laborers, persecuted Wobblies, jailed union leaders, women garment workers on the picket lines. This simply dressed, grandmotherly-looking woman symbolized the capacity of women leaders, to a far greater extent than men leaders of the time, to transcend small differences and unite behind humane, progressive goals. It was grimly ironic that the cadre of leaders best equipped for the struggle to broaden democracy in America were the very ones who, with their female constituencies, were denied the stoutest democratic weapon to extend democracy, the right to vote.

CHAPTER 8

The Modernizing Mind

“I KNOW HISTORY ISN’T Thrue, Hinissy, because it ain’t what I see ivry day on Halsted Sthreet,” said Mr. Dooley, the ruminative barkeep. Historians were like doctors, he went on, either making the wrong diagnosis or making postmortem examinations. The latter type “tells ye what a counthry died iv. But I’d like to know what it lived iv.”

If life and action and excitement were what Finley Peter Dunne’s favorite bartender was wanting, he could find them in turn-of-the-century Chicago, and in the nation during what came to be known as the progressive era stretching from the mid-nineties to World War I. And if these were retrogressive times as well as progressive, of “intriguing interplay” of old and new ideas, in Lewis Gould’s words, it was also one of the most creative and innovative periods in the nation’s history.

Nothing had symbolized the past and the future better than the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. On the lakeside, a dreary stretch of plain and swamp had been transformed into a site for gleaming white buildings of shimmering domes, lofty arches, and Greek columns. The Queen of Spain sent reproductions of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria. Models of primitive ships and trains stood side by side with those of grand Pullmans and ocean liners. Alexander Graham Bell opened the New York–Chicago telephone circuit. For the 12 million visitors who entered the Court of Honor, the fair was “the first popular demonstration of the beauty of orderliness, of proper proportions, of classical lines”—a demonstration that would influence American architecture, furniture, and decoration for years to come. Even Henry Adams was impressed.

The fair, it was said, helped bring into vogue Charles Dana Gibson’s black-and-white drawings of the tall, aristocratic, smartly dressed woman and the square-jawed, clean-shaven, well-groomed young man—drawings that put the Gibson girls up in rude mining cabins and helped take mustaches off men of fashion. Women’s fashions were changing too. The turn of the century brought a “shirtwaist vogue” duly recorded by the Ladies’ Home Journal. The new fashions, however, had to accommodate another vogue—bicycling. The dangerous early “wheels,” consisting of a huge hoop topped by a saddle and connected by a curved backbone to a tiny rear wheel, had given way to two wheels of equal size, but skirts were raised and split a bit to prevent entanglement with gears and spokes

Bicycles were but one phase in the ceaseless quest for ever new forms of transportation. The Sears, Roebuck catalogue of 1900 carried sixty-seven pages of ads for buggies, harnesses, saddles, and the like, but already hansoms, victorias, sulkies, phaetons, and buggies were giving way to electric “runabouts” and gasoline-fueled cars. And in December 1903 the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot ran a headline across the front page, FLYING MACHINE SOARS 3 MILES IN TEETH OF HIGH WIND OVER SAND HILLS, with a subhead explaining NO BALLOON ATTACHED TO AID IT. The Pennsylvania Railroad launched the “fastest long-distance train in the world,” eighteen hours between New York and Chicago.

By 1900, Americans could boast that they produced more than half the world’s cotton, corn, copper, and oil; more than a third of its steel, pig iron, and silver; and perhaps a third of its coal and gold. But Americans wanted to boast of their cultural progress too, and they were proud that their own authors like Winston Churchill (the American Churchill), Hamlin Garland, and Owen Wister were replacing Englishmen like Rudyard Kipling as best-selling authors. Most music was still imported, but black Americans were developing an indigenous musical culture with their “spirituals”;

O Lord, remember the rich an’ remember the poor.

Remember the bond an’ the free.

And when you done rememberin’ all ’round,

Then, O Lord, remember me.

Almost every bright promise of the progressive era seemed to have a darker side. The huge production was sweated out of men and women working sixty hours a week at subsistence wages in factory, farm, and home; out of children crawling through tunnels thick with coal dust. Blacks were coming to feel so hopeless about the “promise of American democracy” that the National Colored Immigration and Commercial Association in 1903 petitioned President Roosevelt and Congress for $100 million to carry American Negroes to Liberia. The same schoolchildren who were merrily playing Prisoner’s Base, Follow My Leader, and King of the Rock on the school grounds were often subject to the leather strap and ruler not only for “misbehaving” but for failing to keep up with their lockstep lessons in McGuffey’s readers.

Grown-ups also played their games. The annual report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock, Secretary, offered a list of outrageous pleasures that, Comstock hinted darkly, were indulged in by the rich: indecent playing cards, roulette layouts, lottery tickets, pool scorecards, gaming tables, dream books, dice, slot machines, watches with obscene pictures, “Articles for immoral use, of Rubber, etc.” Comstock reported that he had hired a horse and sleigh and driven through rural New England tracking down “devilish books” and “villainous” men.

Women, lacking the vote, jobs, and opportunity, were even imprisoned in their dress. Wrote Kathleen Norris of the conventionally dressed woman of turn of century:

“She wore a wide-brimmed hat that caught the breezes, a high choking collar of satin or linen, and a flaring gored skirt that swept the street on all sides. Her full-sleeved shirtwaist had cuffs that were eternally getting dirty, her stock was always crushed and rumpled at the end of the day, and her skirt was a bitter trial. Its heavy ‘brush binding’ had to be replaced every few weeks, for constant contact with the pavement reduced it to dirty fringe in no time at all. In wet weather the full skirt got soaked and icy. Even in fair weather its wearer had to bunch it in great folds and devote one hand to nothing else but the carrying of it.”

The most pervasive and relentless change was still occurring in the industrializing cities, as work, work habits, and work environment responded to ceaseless innovation. Urbanization and innovation fortified each other. Hosts of inventors and experimenters of diverse talents and specialties cooperated and competed with one another on the industrial testing grounds in the big cities. The “ingenious Yankees”—now Irish and Italian and German and Jewish as well—endlessly tinkered on the job as they strove to lower costs and improve and speed production. Machines were becoming more dominant even as they became less visible—as pulleys and drive shafts gave way to covered wires and tubes, and as safety shields concealed the power apparatus.

At fin de siècle, however, more than ever before during the nineteenth century, industrial innovation was becoming dependent on advances in science and basic technology. Decades earlier Karl Marx had contended that only in particular times in human history was science enlisted in key ways in the productive processes, even as science itself was dependent on intensive development of such processes. The very late nineteenth century was such a. time. Theoretical and practical developments in electricity exemplified change most dramatically, but new ideas burst forth in a variety of industrial fields.

And what enkindling ideas they were! At century’s turn, Albert Michelson was working on the velocity of light, with the help of an “interferometer” he invented. Thomas L. Willson, a North Carolina chemist, was producing acetylene gas. Frank Austin Gooch was introducing the rotating cathode. Edward Acheson’s carborundum was tough enough to polish diamonds. Edward W. Morley determined the atomic weight of oxygen. Ohio physicist Wallace Sabine devised a reverberation equation vital to the study of acoustics. Americans were closely studying—and exploiting—pioneering work abroad: Guglielmo Marconi’s work on a wireless telegraph system; the discovery of X-rays by German chemist Wilhelm Roentgen; Lord Ernest Rutherford’s discovery of alpha and beta waves; Marie Curie’s identification of the elements polonium and radium; Max Planck’s quantum theory; Niels Bohr’s theory of atomic structure. Americans exported findings too: Michelson’s and Morley’s experiments served as a starting point for Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

Inventors were doing the most outlandish things, especially up in the air and under the sea. Simon Lake in 1894 launched Argonaut I, a small, hand-powered submersible. Three years later, he created Argonaut II, a gasoline-powered submarine with wheels for rolling along the ocean floor; and a year after that, John Holland launched his cigar-shaped submarine, powered by gasoline on top of the water and by electricity below. After Hiram Maxim failed to conquer the air with a steam-powered flying machine and after astronomer Samuel Langley built the first successful engine-propelled model airplane, bicycle makers Orville and Wilbur Wright launched the world’s first successful manned flight in a motorized airplane, at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Down on earth, after Charles and Frank Duryea had operated the nation’s first successful gasoline-powered automobile, in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1893, a host of inventors were feverishly perfecting improvements: sliding gear transmissions, steering wheels to replace the tiller, pneumatic tires, automatic lubrication.

Technology both stimulated and gained from advances in wide-ranging fields of science. Josiah Willard Gibbs at Yale and Charles Steinmetz at General Electric were working in sophisticated fields of mathematics. Geologists made key theoretical findings about glacial and other formations and practical ones about oil deposits. Astronomers were reaching farther out into the solar system, with the use of improved telescopes, photography, and a bolometer devised by Langley to detect extraterrestrial temperatures. Paleontologists—most notably Henry Fairfield Osborn at the American Museum of Natural History—were systematizing knowledge in the field through great finds of bones and fossil footprints. Anthropologists—especially Franz Boas and Clark Wissler—were taking sides between diffusionist theories stressing the geographical dispersion of Indian and other cultures, and “culture area” concepts focusing on interaction and integration within local cultures. In genetics, Thomas Hunt Morgan was doing notable work on heredity, embryology, and regeneration. Medicine abounded in advances in anesthesia, radium and X-ray therapy, prevention, surgery, and a concentrated fight against a number of diseases, especially tuberculosis.

But the weather change of the late nineteenth century far transcended even these remarkable advances. In science, there was a shift from “normal,” systematic reliance on step-by-step progress within established paradigms to imaginative leaps into the unknown, thus returning to the revolutionary pattern of great scientific breakthroughs of the past. In philosophy there was a revolt against the formal, “rational” metaphysics of the time, an exploration of new ways of understanding human motivation, of new perceptions of the relation between thought and action. These intellectual revolutions in turn stimulated new thought in law, history, political science, economics, and sociology.

The most transforming idea of the time was pragmatism, and it would become America’s single great contribution to the study of principles underlying knowledge and being. Like other changes in the American intellectual climate, the pragmatic movement seemed to arrive extrarationally, almost mysteriously—seemed to “have suddenly precipitated itself out of the air.” And no one so dominated and personified the pragmatic revolt as the author of these words, a most unrevolutionary-looking Harvard professor named William James.

The Pulse of the Machine

On a late January day in 1907, William James traveled by train from Boston to New York, took up his room at the Harvard Club on West 44th Street, and immediately plunged into the intellectual life of Gotham. He lunched, dined, and sometimes breakfasted out every day of his stay, with members of the Philosophical Club of New York and with eminent biologists, mathematicians, and literati. He capped his visit by dining with a company that included Norman Hapgood, Finley Peter Dunne, and Mark Twain. The last, he wrote to his brother Henry and his son William, “poor man, is only good for monologue, in his old age, or for dialogue at best, but he’s a dear little genius all the same.”

Once again, James was captured by the heady intellectual beat of Manhattan. He was hardly a stranger to the city, having been born in the Astor House sixty-five years before, but in later life he had never managed to stay there more than a day and a half, he said, so repelled had he been by the “clangor, disorder, and permanent earthquake conditions.” Now, however, he seemed to find an “entirely new New York, in soul as well as in body, from the old one, which looks like a village in retrospect. The courage, the heaven-scaling audacity of it all, and the lightness withal” gave him a kind of “drumming background of life that I never felt before.” On 44th Street, “in the centre of the cyclone, I caught the pulse of the machine, took up the rhythm, and … found it simply magnificent.”

James even found the subways magnificent, “powerful and beautiful, space devouring,” as he roared back and forth daily between the Harvard Club and Columbia University. There, at Teachers College, he was giving a series of lectures on pragmatism. Originally scheduled for Schermerhorn Hall, with its 250 seats, the lecture had to be moved to the chapel, where an audience of over a thousand greeted him.

James’s listeners—many of them professional or amateur philosophers themselves—hardly expected anything new from their noted guest. He had given these lectures before, most recently at the Lowell Institute in Boston. They knew him to be the grandson of a multimillionaire businessman, the son of a well-known theologian, and the brother of the eminent novelist Henry James. They knew too that James had been heavily influenced by the half-legendary Charles Peirce of Cambridge, the amazingly versatile astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and logician who in 1878 had introduced something called “pragmatism” to the American lay public in an article in Popular Science Monthly called “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” After long bouts with bad health and deep depression, James himself had forged ahead, creating at Harvard the first American laboratory in psychology and helping gain recognition for the new science. Increasingly, he had immersed himself in philosophical study and was now the most celebrated philosophizer in America.

At Teachers College that night, James neither surprised nor disappointed his audience. He delighted them with his platform style—much moving about, gesticulating, and general animation—in contrast with the stereotype of the Harvard philosophers who, like Josiah Royce, sat immobile in a chair and rolled out their dogmas in sonorous periods. But, most of all, James impressed his listeners with his pithy comments.

“Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It ‘bakes no bread,’ as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world’s perspectives.” And now a new dawn was breaking upon philosophy.

The lecturer drew a distinction between “rationalism” and “intellectualism” on one side and “sensationalism” and “empiricism” on the other. “Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection—is not averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic.”

While the audience watched, fascinated, James chalked two columns on a blackboard, separating “rationalists” from “empiricists,” but with a new and provocative heading:

THE TENDER-MINDED

THE TOUGH-MINDED

Rationalistic (going by “facts”),

Empiricist (going by “principles”),

Intellectualistic,

Sensationalistic,

Idealistic,

Materialistic,

Optimistic,

Pessimistic,

Religious,

Irreligious,

Free-willist,

Fatalistic,

Monistic,

Pluralistic,

Dogmatical

Sceptical.

Most of you, James assured his listeners, were a mixture of both tendencies, had a “hankering” for both, but also were vexedly caught between “an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough….” The lecturer left no doubt where he stood. He rejected the world of philosophical absolutes, of the “transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school,” the philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, Royce, of the absolutists who dwelt on “so high a level of abstraction that they never even try to come down.” He welcomed his listeners into the world “of concrete personal experience to which the street belongs,” multitudinous beyond imagination, “tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexed,” contradictory, confused, gothic.

In succeeding lectures, to bigger and bigger audiences, James spelled out his views with never-failing gusto and pungency: that pragmatism “unstiffened” old, absolutist theories; that new truths were “go-betweens,” “smoother-overs” of transitions from old theories to new facts; that when we say that this theory solves a problem more satisfactorily than that theory, this means more satisfactorily to ourselves; and—emphasized again and again—a theory must be tested by how it works in practice, as a practical matter; that “any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally.” And he limned the pragmatist in a few unforgettable phrases:

“He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power.” Pragmatism meant “looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”

That James’s ideas struck philosophical sparks had long been clear, and he did not need to wait long at Columbia. The New Yorkers, he wrote a friend, at the evening gatherings “compassed me about, they wagged their tongues at me”; neither side gave in. In particular, he provoked the theologians who preached the very absolutes—the Good, the Just, the Godly, the Pure, Beauty, Truth—that the tough-minded questioned. James was attacked as antireligious, though he had grown up in a religious family and had undergone a religious experience one evening alone in his dressing room when he suddenly was seized by a “horrible fear of my own existence”—an experience from which he had emerged “twice-born.” He believed in God, but it was a less-than-absolute, a finite God, a position that enabled him to accept evil along with the goodness of God, and to urge men to rely on their own minds and wills and not merely divine intervention. So James—author of The Varieties of Religious Experience—could cope with theologians and metaphysicians.

But fellow philosophers and social theorists were a different matter. From Hugo Münsterberg, a onetime junior colleague and a German philosopher educated in the idealist tradition, came a polite but sharp comment: experience was not enough; he found reality in the fulfillment of will, as “transcendental power.” “And that is really my fundamental problem: why do I care for a moral deed or a true astronomical calculation if they do not bring any advantage to me?” Münsterberg asked in good Kantian fashion. Others accused James of caricaturing absolutism, of making pragmatism itself into a catchall absolute, even of lacking in “academic dignity.” James himself disliked the term “pragmatism” and all the baggage it had accumulated—he preferred the concept “humanism,” but it was too late—and he knew that Peirce himself felt that James carried pragmatism too far. Peirce preferred his kind of pragmatism, which he labeled “pragmaticism.”

If idealists, theological and lay, were repelled by aspects of pragmatism, the doctrine had special appeal to the practical men of law. Had not the very term, indeed, with its Greek root in pragma—“practical matter”—been extended by the Romans to mean “skilled in business, and especially experienced in matters of law”? Certainly it had a strong appeal to one lawyer who happened to be a Supreme Court justice. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., hardly needed instruction from James on pragmatism; in the early 1870s, Holmes had met regularly in Cambridge with Peirce’s Metaphysical Club, which also numbered such luminaries as Chauncey Wright and John Fiske, as well as James. He and James as young men had spent long evenings “twisting the tail of the Kosmos,” and had remained in touch mainly by mail in later years.

“I heartily agree with much, but I am more sceptical than you are,” Holmes wrote James in thanking him for a copy of Pragmatism. “You would say that I am too hard or tough-minded,—I think none of the philosophers sufficiently humble.” Holmes had already responded to earlier writings of James on pragmatism. “For a good many years I have had a formula for truth which seems humbler than those you give … but I don’t know whether it is pragmatic or not. I have been in the habit of saying that all I mean by truth is what I can’t help thinking…. It seems to me that the only promising activity is to make my universe coherent and livable, not to babble about the universe…. To act affirms, for the moment at least, the worth of an end; idealizing seems to be simply the generalized and permanent affirmation of the worth of ends…. Man, like a tree in the cleft of a rock, gradually shapes his roots to his surroundings, and when the roots have grown to a certain size, can’t be displaced without cutting at his life….”

In his little masterpiece, The Common Law, Holmes—then forty years old —began with the flat announcement that the “life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” His revolt against legal formalism and absolutism led to some stunning opinions—notably to his dissent in Lochner v. New York, in which the Supreme Court struck down an act limiting New York bakery workers to a ten-hour day and a sixty-hour week. Holmes protested that the word “liberty” in the Fourteenth Amendment had been perverted. That amendment, he said, “does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.” A “constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire.”

Asked once whether he had a general philosophy to help guide him as a judge, Holmes answered: “Yes. Long ago I decided that I was not God. When a state came in here and wanted to build a slaughter house, I looked at the Constitution and if I couldn’t find anything in there that said a state couldn’t build a slaughter house I said to myself, if they want to build a slaughter house, God-dammit, let them build it.”

For all his ability to eviscerate dogma with the lance of skepticism, however, Holmes’s pragmatism left him a divided thinker and judge. A conservative himself, he delighted in puncturing conservative shibboleths; but he was too much the skeptic and ironist to enlist in any liberal or humanitarian cause, nor did he make any pretense of doing so. His rejection of both conservative and radical ideology made it difficult for him to take a consistent position on the great economic and social issues coming before the High Court; but, then, he did not believe in consistency. Even in law itself, however, his judicial opinions, Eugene Rostow said, lost their power to lead; it was “rare to find in one of his opinions the germinal idea or the creative suggestion which starts a line of decisions and guides later judges on their quest.”

Because Holmes and Louis Brandeis so often joined in dissent against their brethren’s decisions, Holmes acquired good standing with the progressives. He and Brandeis shared a pragmatic concern with the facts of the case, with the reality of social and economic circumstances. But in fundamental philosophy the two sharply diverged. “I’m afraid Brandeis has the crusading spirit,” Holmes said of his friend during the earlier Boston years. “He talks like one of those upward-and-onward fellows.” Fueled by volumes of facts, Brandeis did indeed move upward and onward as he both analyzed and embraced the idea of a liberal society based on democratic institutions and ideals of social justice. Holmes acquired fame as both a legal philosopher and technician, but without a social creed firm enough to bind his ends and means together into a creative and lasting force.

Holmes’s dualism—his stinging attacks on legal and social absolutes along with his cleansing and negative skepticism—reflected central ambivalences in the central doctrines of Peirce, James & co. The powerful emphasis in pragmatism on the inseparability of ideas from action, on the vital role of decision and choice, on ideas as plans of action, on the need to verify ideas by events, on the concept of ideas as instruments, on the mind as a crucial instrument of adaptation and survival, on ideas as changing and dynamic rather than fixed, and—always—on the knowledge that comes from immersion in experience and experiment—these notions, while by no means new, swept through the musty dogmas and received ideas of the fin de siècle like a clearing west wind. These ideas struck home in an America that was continually, feverishly experimenting, inventing, innovating.

Yet there were other tendencies in pragmatism that gravely impaired it as a tool for understanding the principles on which the nation had been founded and virtually crippled it as a means of understanding and solving the failure of Americans to make their democratic system respond to the transcending needs and aspirations of the people—in short, really to “work.” In its attack on absolutes, pragmatism failed to grasp the power, not of dogmas, but of measured principles to provide practical guidelines for political activism and governmental action. Reality, yes—but the nature of reality was one of the oldest philosophical questions, and pragmatism threw little light on it. Practicality, yes—but what really was practicality, tested by what broader criteria? Experience, yes—but how did one evaluate experience? Experimentation, yes—but how did one know how to measure the results of the experiment? To a pragmatist it might seem foolish or utopian or “impractical” to measure practical results by old canons of liberty and equality, dignity and justice—but what were these canons if not the result of hundreds of years of human experience, tested in the most bitter intellectual, political, and physical struggles, out of which the great Enlightenment values had emerged?

It was because pragmatism could not answer such burning questions as these that it faltered as both a method of thought and a guide to action. On the one hand, the overextension of this antidogmatic creed converted it into something of a dogma itself, as the Williams College philosopher James B. Pratt protested to few listeners. And because it had no transcending central doctrine that would “stiffen” it as a theory, pragmatism was easily distorted in the public mind and perverted into a simple defense of the capitalist and Social Darwinian status quo. In his enthusiasm, James told his Columbia audience that “if you follow the pragmatic method, [you] must bring out of each word its practical cash-value….” These words, torn out of their broader context, were used to flay pragmatism as a handmaiden of conservatism. This was unfair, but understandable. For the more that pragmatism emphasized practicality and realism and derogated principle and morality, the more the test of experience was short-run, tangible, quantifiable reward. And reward for whom? For the experimenter, the doer, the practitioner—and the devil take the rest. And in this sense pragmatism was a philosophy least needed in an America abounding with innovators and doers and experimenters, but short on wide moral vision, collective social organization, and long-range political action.

The Critics: Ideas vs. Interests?

The most portentous change in the intellectual climate around the turn of the century came in the way Americans viewed their own history, under the guidance of the New Historians. Perhaps it was high time. A century and a quarter had passed since Americans had fought for their independence under the banner of liberty and equality, a century since they had organized themselves under a stronger national government, almost a century since they had bound themselves together more lightly through national political parties, and almost half a century since they had reaffirmed their commitment to liberty, equality, and nationhood in the Civil War, under the leadership of a man who proclaimed on a great battlefield that their government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not perish from the earth.

How well was the nation living up to its professed principles? For the past fifty years, journalists, theologians, intellectuals of many hues had been witnessing with deepening concern and revulsion the rise of an inegalitarian society in which some Americans lived in extravagant luxury and others in utter penury, in which Southern blacks still lacked meaningful freedom, women still lacked the right to vote, Indians lacked the right to live where they wished or even to live, Orientals lacked the right to welcome their kind from overseas, labor in most sectors lacked the right to organize. They were witnessing the rise of an increasingly concentrated corporate capitalism that wielded enormous political influence in national and state legislatures and before the bar. They were witnessing a saturnalia of vulgar display, party spoils, civic corruption, sordid materialism, in which the scramble for money, status, and power seemed to taint all that it touched.

Some New Historians reacted all the more sharply to all this because of their own feeling of vulnerability. They were part of a “status revolution” in which educated, middle-class professional persons and intellectuals had found themselves caught between the nouveaux riches and the rising claims of industrial workers, poor farmers, and immigrant masses. “The newly rich, the grandiosely or corruptly rich, the masters of great corporations,” Richard Hofstadter wrote, “were bypassing the men of the Mugwump type—the old gentry, the merchants of long standing, the small manufacturers, the established professional men, the civic leaders of an earlier era.” Alienated, the professional people were shifting in their own allegiances. Thus Protestant clergy, which had presented a “massive, almost unbroken front in its defense of the status quo,” in the 1870s, and had denounced the railway strikers of 1877 as “wild beasts,” had considerably softened in its attitudes; by the 1890s, the earlier social-gospel doctrines were coming to the fore among key sectors of the clergy. The legal profession, once dominated by small-town lawyers and partnerships, was becoming increasingly bureaucratized and commercialized. American lawyers seemed to the visiting Lord Bryce much less of a distinct professional class.

The historical profession was undergoing a transformation of its own. Not only had the New Historians emerged from the broadening, somewhat beleaguered middle classes. Not only had they witnessed the tumultuous economic and social changes of late-century, vast industrialization, swelling immigration, and sharp depressions like that of the 1890s. They represented a new breed of professional historians who, in the budding graduate schools of the nation, were replacing the literary gentlemen-amateurs—the Bancrofts and Parkmans and the like—who had written the great nineteenth-century histories. Now the trained, disciplined professionals, with their newly won Ph.D.s, were taking over.

While few of the professional historians were pragmatists in a philosophical sense, most of them shared the temper of pragmatism—its revolt against formalism, absolutes, abstractions, and patriotic pieties, in favor of economics, empiricism, and “realism.” Frederick Jackson Turner, after presenting his famous paper on the significance of the frontier in American history to a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893, had continued to argue that democracy had flourished on the frontier, which provided mobility and opportunity and an economic safety valve. Orin Grant Libby, one of Turner’s students, analyzed the voting for the Constitution of 1787 on the basis of debtors and creditors. At the University of Washington, J. Allen Smith argued boldly that the Constitution of 1787, bluntly contradicting the democratic spirit embodied in the Declaration of Independence, was deliberately designed to block popular rule through its stultifying checks and balances, including judicial review.

By far the most conspicuous and controversial of the New Historians—at least by 1913, when he published his An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution—was a thirty-nine-year-old associate professor of politics at Columbia, Charles Austin Beard. Raised in a prosperous Indiana home where his father, a banker, businessman, and radical Republican, presided over vigorous family debate, young Beard had gone on to DePauw and then received an advanced education in Western industrial society. He had lived for a time in Jane Addams’s Hull-House in Chicago, where he encountered urban immigrant life in the raw; studied at Oxford, where he plunged into Fabian socialism, Labour Party politics, and the writings of John Ruskin (which were already influencing a young Indian named Gandhi); helped establish Ruskin Hall at Oxford as a school for working-men; spent two years lecturing to workers in and around Manchester, the heartland of British industrialism; and then returned home for graduate work at Columbia. There he joined a brilliant intellectual company including James Harvey Robinson in the New History and E. R. A. Seligman in economics. As he matured, his tall spare frame, bald eagle’s nose, and piercing blue eyes gave him the appearance of a benign Uncle Sam.

Beard was a noted young historian when he published his Economic Interpretation; suddenly he became notorious. To a nation still worshipping the Constitution and its framers, Beard calmly reported that the “first firm steps toward the formation of the Constitution were taken by a small and active group of men immediately interested through their personal possessions in the outcome of their labors”; that a “large propertyless mass” lacking the vote was excluded from participating in the convention through representatives; that almost all the members of the Philadelphia convention were “immediately, directly, and personally interested” in establishing the new system; and that the new constitution was ratified by one-sixth or less of the country’s adult males.

Washington, Franklin, and the rest were simply lining their own pockets? A storm broke out over the head of the young professor. In Marion, Ohio, Warren G. Harding’s Star headlined: “SCAVENGERS, HYENA-LIKE, DESECRATE THE GRAVES OF THE DEAD PATRIOTS WE REVERE.” A recently retired Republican President, William Howard Taft, demanded to know whether Beard would have preferred a Constitution drafted by “dead bodies, out-at-the-elbows demagogues, and cranks who never had any money?” Asked if he had read “Beard’s last book,” Columbia’s imperious president, Nicholas Murray Butler, exclaimed, “I hope so.”

Why this furor at the time when many of the New Historians had been making much the same point about the influence of property on American politics and government? Partly because Beard had done an enormous amount of spadework, digging into the dust-covered records in the federal Treasury Department. Partly because the book bristled with lists of the Framers’ holdings, but so starkly and dully presented that Max Lerner later would wonder if Beard had expected trouble and stripped the book of every adornment, “on the theory that a plain woman would be less suspected of being a wanton than an attractive one.” Partly because the book offered, in sum, such a simple, understandable explanation of the almost exclusively economic motives that lay behind a great historic act—the framing of the Constitution.

This simple economic interpretation, which Beard later seemed to repudiate, told perhaps more about Beard and the New Historians than about the Framers. It dramatically posed the issue of whether ideas or interests had the greater—even the fundamental and ultimate—impact on the course of history, This was an ancient question, and might have been avoided by Beard himself except that he chose to pose it near the start of his Economic Interpretation, and in particular called to his cause James Madison as an economic determinist. Triumphantly he quoted Madison’s famous dictum in the tenth Federalist that the “most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”

Was it significant that Beard, in quoting this noted paper, jumped over two cardinal passages: Madison’s tribute to liberty as “essential to political life” and his listing of ideas—a “zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning Government and many other points, as well as of speculation as of practice”—at the very head of his causes of faction? Madison in any event spoke for a large number of Framers who studied ideas, took them seriously, and acted in response to them. Often these ideas expressed—and cloaked—crass self-interest or, more typically, group and regional interest, but more often their ideas—especially their profound and measured belief in liberty—expressed their Enlightenment values, their religious and secular education, their qualities of intellect and imagination. It was because Beard, despite his protestations to the contrary, virtually dismissed these forces in leaders and in history that Holmes could in turn dismiss Beard’s “covert sneer” against the Framers and argue that “high-mindedness is not impossible in man.”

The issue of ideas versus interests was far more important, during the progressive era, than an academic argument among historians or philosophers. The issue went to the heart of the progressive response to the rising economic and political power of concentrated industrial capitalism. If popular and democratic forces were to curb economic power, they must understand the capitalists—their interests, their motives, their ideas. If the capitalists were responding merely to naked economic interest, then indeed the democratic strategy would be clear: to “turn economic determinism upside down” and gain control of industry, capital, and perhaps the capitalists themselves. This might be done through the “socialization of the means of production,” precisely what many Marxists, as confirmed economic determinists, were urging.

But if on the other hand ideas served as the crucial engines of history, a different strategy would be implied for the democratic control of economic power. That strategy must comprehend the infinite variety of noneconomic as well as economic interests, the pervasive influence of psychological forces rational and irrational, the power of ideology, the role of chance and contingency, and the daring leaps, the awful limitations, and the practical compromises of the human mind. It must understand why some persons’ ideas were pinioned to their interests, others could not even calculate their own interests, and still others far transcended them. It must comprehend an Andrew Carnegie as well as a Jay Gould, a Theodore Roosevelt as well as a J. P. Morgan.

Such intellectual comprehension, such an economic and political strategy, called for grand theory, and the New Historians did not pretend to be philosophers of history. After demonstrating so brilliantly that the Constitution was designed to thwart popular rule, Beard had no comprehensive proposals for restructuring government in order to carry out the will of a popular majority. The New Historians generally supported such reforms as the initiative, referendum, and recall, as well as popular election of United States senators, but these reforms, however desirable in themselves, would not reverse the essential Madisonian strategy of pitting rulers against one another by making them representatives of conflicting constituencies and thus making “ambition counteract ambition.” In the end the New Historians proved far more effective in demolishing old shibboleths and pieties rather than constructing new theories of history or conceiving new structures of power.

If the ablest, most progressive-minded historians failed to provide systematic theory for the control of concentrated economic power in a democratic polity, could economists fill this conceptual void? Generally not, for most established economists had no interest in radical reconstruction or change to begin with. Sympathetic interpreters of Marx’s theory of history like E. R. A. Seligman of Columbia continued to work in their particular intellectual groove, but the Marxists were still finding it difficult to apply their dynamic creed to the loose-jointed American polity and the many-chambered American mind, with its intense commitment to individual liberty and economic individualism. A small band of labor and left economists were busy challenging the received economic wisdom but erecting little to take its place.

At the turn of the century, the most defiant of the icon-smashing economists was a scholar named Thorstein Veblen. Almost peasantlike in appearance, with his round face, hair parted in the middle, heavy brows and mustache, and rough country clothes, Veblen had seemed almost reclusive until he shocked academia with a series of writings culminating in The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899 and The Theory of Business Enterprise five years later. Born on the Wisconsin frontier in 1857, Veblen had come easily by the burning scorn for pecuniary enterprise that marked most of his work. Both his grandfathers had run afoul of lawyers, government officials, and other “predators” in Norway and the United States. As a boy, Veblen had to cope with a dominant Yankee culture that regarded Norwegian immigrants as inferiors, and he grew up in a rural culture and national epoch filled with hatred and fear of merchants and lawyers and bankers, both in the country trading towns and in the nation’s power centers. Although his family prospered as the years passed, Veblen himself underwent long stretches of poverty as a graduate student and more humiliating years of underemployment before he won academic positions—though never academic tenure, even after he gained fame. Among other accomplishments, he turned the Horatio Alger myth upside down.

No one had ever read a book quite like The Theory of the Leisure Class. In heavy, polysyllabic language that gave off a whiff of academic respectability, he struck out at the most sacred of idols.

The leisure class’s addiction to sports: “Chicane, falsehood, brow-beating, hold a well-secured place in the method of procedure of any athletic contest and in games generally.”

Upper-class dress: “Much of the charm that invests the patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat, and the walking-stick … comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot when so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and immediately of any human use. Elegant dress serves its purpose of elegance not only in that it is expensive, but also because it is the insignia of leisure.”

Pets and other sacred cows: “The dog … is the filthiest of the domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits. For this he makes up in a servile, fawning attitude toward his master, and a readiness to inflict damage and discomfort on all else.” “The utility of the fast horse lies largely in his efficiency as a means of emulation; it gratifies the owner’s sense of aggression and dominance to have his own horse outstrip his neighbor’s.” Cats: well, cats were “less wasteful” than dogs and horses and might “even serve a useful end.”

Such wicked and scathing thoughts stimulated interest in Veblen’s examination that became increasingly a vivisection and produced the titles of his major works—The Instinct of Workmanship, The Higher Learning in America, The Vested Interests and the Common Man, The Engineers and the Price System, Absentee Ownership. The overarching theme of these works was the subordination in capitalistic America of industry to business, of the industrial arts to pecuniary gain, of rational use to conspicuous waste, of genuine human values to money values, of function to ownership. In his turgid and repetitive treatment of this theme Veblen dealt with a host of other subjects, ranging from the subordination of women to the nature of science, the philosophical failings of pragmatism, the most subtle psychological and anthropological aspects of American culture.

But Veblen’s writings always stopped short of presenting a system or program as an alternative to the pecuniary culture that he so despised. He had a lifelong interest in Marxism and delighted in picturing university presidents as captains of education modeled on captains of industry. Like Marx, he focused on the cultural incidence of industrialism and the machine process; like Marx, he held to an economic theory of history and a technological theory of economics; like Marx, he saw the alliance between vested interests and vested ideas. But he differed with Marxist thought in significant ways, and in any event refused to accept the glittering ideas and programs that socialists and communists were offering Americans during the progressive era.

What instead? Nothing. In later years, he proposed some kind of utopian technocracy under the leadership of rationalist engineers, but his power analysis was naive, his political program quixotic, and some of his proposals almost authoritarian. On the cardinal issues of freedom and economic planning, Lev Dobriansky concluded, Veblen’s power philosophy offered no enlightenment. Ultimately his devastating analyses would help clear the ground of much intellectual rubbish, but Veblen had few solutions for those American thinkers and actors who were struggling with the knotty problems of making economic means serve human ends.

If toward the close of the nineteenth century economists as well as historians were failing to grasp the relation of political democracy and economic power, who could master the problem? Some would have pointed to a man widely viewed as a historian—and who so viewed himself—but who was in fact far more. This was Henry Adams—social critic, political analyst, closet theologian, untitled cultural anthropologist.

It seemed that Clio herself had carefully prepared Adams for this exacting task. History was stitched into his very fiber. He could not forget that he was descended from two first families and if he happened to, he was reminded by an Irish gardener who said to him, when a child, “You’ll be thinkin’ you’ll be President too!” He had known most of the intellectual and political leaders of the middle and late years of the century. Although he remarked that Harvard had provided him no education for leadership—only for moderation, restraint, mesure—he had a continuing close-up view of the foibles, frailties, and follies of men in office. And he had devoted himself to history, producing brilliant, massive studies of the United States and of particular leaders such as Albert Gallatin, whose democratic ideas and actions he admired as much as he disliked Jefferson’s.

By turn of century, Henry Adams had long since ensconced himself in his Washington mansion, alongside a similar edifice built by his friend John Hay. There he entertained diplomats and politicians, counseled ambassadors and statesmen, and observed the rise and fall of politicos with a sardonic eye. He shared his writings with a small circle, corresponded with a few historians, even accepted the presidency of the American Historical Association. His brothers too were doing history—Charles Francis still into railroads, Brooks into such theories of history as the rhythmic oscillation of societies between barbarism and civilization.

Who better than Henry Adams—author of Democracy, analyst of the physics and psychology of power, perceptive observer of the role of women in history, morbid analyst of human nature—could solve the mysteries of the subtle interplay of political ambition and corruption, pecuniary motivation, sexual desire and jealousy, conflict of leaders, and lofty ideals? He was fascinated by political and economic power wielders without being in the least bedazzled by them—he considered himself superior to them. He was a student of the history of history, having studied his Marx and his Hegel and his Darwin. He swallowed none of the philosophical theories of history wholesale; indeed he was as critical of most of the established historians, conservative or radical, as he was of the political establishment. And he was a thoroughly modern historian, conscious of the power of the machine and the dynamics of the workshop. Surely Henry Adams could penetrate the citadels of power.

It was not to be. When Adams finally pulled together his notions of history, they emerged as a pretentious grand theory that sought to apply to the study of history the work of William Kelvin and other scientists on physical energy. Adams leaped at Kelvin’s suggestion that modern biologists were “coming once more to a firm acceptance of something beyond mere gravitational, chemical, and physical forces; and that unknown thing is a vital principle.” Adams saw “vitalism” as the social energy of history, subject to physical laws, and requiring a whole new approach to the study of social organization and evolution. It was a theory so dense and inchoate that even Adams’s friend William James said privately to a friend, “If you can understand it all you can do much better than I.”

A crucial test of the theory was its applicability to the understanding of men and events, and here it failed. Presidents, he said, illustrated the effect of unlimited power on limited minds. Theodore Roosevelt displayed such restless agitation and chronic excitement during the first year of his presidency as to make a friend tremble. Adams concluded that “power is poison” and its “effect on Presidents had been always tragic.” Adams left the matter there. A long-term observer of “trusts,” he wrote that they were unscrupulous and revolutionary, “troubling all the old conventions and values, as the screws of ocean steamers must trouble a school of herring,” tearing society to pieces and trampling it underfoot. All he could see was a contest between the trusts, with their organized “schools, training, wealth and purpose,” and the forces behind Roosevelt, their cohesion slight, their training irregular, their objects vague. Adams professed neutrality on the matter—and he offered no keys to solving the problems of either presidential or corporate power in a democracy.

How could the nation’s foremost analyst of politics end up with such a bleak and constricted theory of society? Perhaps because of his own desire for power, magnified by his sense of lacking it, both the desire and the lack sharpened by his knowledge of the Presidents and power-wielders in his own family. Himself a small, balding, sensitive man, increasingly snobbish and even anti-Semitic as he grew older, he displayed a fascination with physical power, as he haunted the great industrial exhibitions of the time, standing transfixed before the huge dynamos at work. He was equally fascinated by political power, even as he despised the men who wielded it. Adams’s impotence in his analysis of power symbolized the collective impotence of the fourth generation of Adamses, as Henry sat in his mansion staring out the window at the White House, Brooks Adams dallied with “laws” of civilization and decay, and Charles complained of New England winters and wrote Henry that “while I am not tired, I am bored.” The three brothers were living on into the twentieth century amid the ghosts of the nineteenth.

Even more, Henry Adams’s failure of analysis symbolized the intellectual tragedy of a nation unable to come to grips with the nature and implications of a powerful and expanding industrial machine challenging the pretensions of a “government by the people.” But now different persons with different questions were offering differing sets of answers—and displays of artistic expression—in the many-chambered mansion of American democracy.

Art: “All That Is Holy Is Profaned”

In Greenwich Village—in the dingy rooming houses that had once been fashionable brownstones, in the dank art studios converted from stables, in the little cafes and tearooms dotting the crooked streets—rebellions in the arts and literature, in manners and morals, broke out during the first decade of the twentieth century. This tiny area in lower Manhattan had long seemed to hold a mystic attraction for free spirits: Tom Paine had lived here, and later Edgar Allan Poe, and still later Frank Norris and Henry James and Stephen Crane. In one of their ceaseless flights uptown from the huddling masses that occupied lower Manhattan, New York’s social elites had abandoned this area, leaving their brownstones and their elegant Greek Revival houses and their shady little backyards. Now an exotic breed of artists, writers, bohemians, anarchists, and radical feminists moved in to take advantage of the low rents, while the Italian-American community looked on in wonderment.

The rebels and their causes were wondrous to onlookers. Artists were rebelling against the pastoral landscapes and sentimental domestic portraits favored by the established art institutes. Writers were repudiating the genteel tradition of The Century, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Weekly. Young intellectuals and aesthetes just out of college classrooms were turning against professors who promulgated old-fashioned morality, political conservatism, and Victorian values. Novelists were angry at established publishing houses that wanted sentimental writings lacking any sense of the grit and squalor of everyday city life. Cultural nationalists attacked the European grip on belles lettres. Behind these risings lay an intellectual revolution against bourgeois values and the corporate power of industrial capitalism.

The transcending ethic of Greenwich Village was liberation. “Everybody was freeing themselves and the world,” a Village writer recalled, “and everybody was freeing the world faster than everybody else.” Nowhere had the early ideas of Sigmund Freud been more happily, more greedily, embraced. Carl Jung even visited the Village in 1912 and lectured at the Liberal Club. Villagers endlessly discussed the meaning of their dreams, outdated morality, sexual permissiveness, and personal liberation, when they were not debating Marxism, socialism, trade unionism, bossism, pacifism, birth control, educational reform, abolition of prostitution, or Havelock Ellis’s notions of sexual liberation.

The Village was, to be sure, far more a broker of ideas than a generator of them. Its rebellions drew from myriad intellectual and artistic sources. Villagers followed the writings of the European philosophers and social critics, visited the great men abroad, talked with Europeans who made the fabled Village their first stop on arrival. Nietzsche’s assaults on Christian morality and middle-class culture, Henri Bergson’s faith in relativity and intuition, Shaw’s and Ibsen’s acid portraits of bourgeois greed and hypocrisy fueled the Villagers’ iconoclasm. James’s and John Dewey’s relativism and pragmatism gave sanction to their own skepticism and experimentation.

Everyone knew everyone else in the Village. On the street you might run into the long-arrived literary man William Dean Howells or the just-arriving Sinclair Lewis, the dancer Isadora Duncan, the ebullient young radicals John Reed and Max Eastman, the novelist Theodore Dreiser, the precocious young critic Randolph Bourne. If you stayed long enough, you saw everybody: one boardinghouse, on Washington Square South, was home at various times to Norris, Crane, O. Henry, Dreiser, Reed, Eugene O’Neill, Alan Seeger, Zona Gale. You came to know the eccentrics too, like the young man of respectable Chicago family who called himself a bastard and everyone he met a “bourgeois pig.”

The best place to meet people in the Village, if you wanted hours of uninhibited talk, was the fabled salon of Mabel Dodge Luhan. A vibrant and imposing woman, with cool, dark gray eyes and a voice “like a viola, soft, caressing, mellow,” Luhan threw herself into everything—art, politics, feminism, union struggles. In her salon you could meet Big Bill Haywood in from the labor wars, the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Lincoln Steffens, British socialists, visiting feminists. She boasted of her salon as a ferment of “Socialists, Trade-Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, Old Friends, Psychoanalysts, I.W.W.s, Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern-Artists, Clubwomen, Women’s-place-is-in-the-home Women”—and even clergymen.

Luhan and John Reed had a passionate love affair, after which he called her a “keen, cold, amorous” woman who demanded continuous change and excitement. Surely she wanted change; everyone in the Village seemed to want change, change for its own sake. Luhan wrote:

Melt, You Women!

Melt to August—grow ON and Ripen

Give Yourselves Up!

That is the only way to be Alive,

That is what you want, isn’t it?

To be alive?

Life lies in the Change,

Try it and see.

“Constant revolutionizing of production,” Marx had written sixty years earlier in the Communist Manifesto, “uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” Villagers saw themselves as rebels against the system; Marxists saw them as a zany, fleeting expression of it.

Nothing seemed more volatile in the first decade than the visual arts. Nor was there a more obvious target for rebels. A small number of powerful institutions seemed to control the public outlets of artistic expression at century’s end: the National Academy of Design and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. These custodians of “high art” insisted upon the romantic landscape, the still life, the portrait of the celebrated, and best of all, the painting that told a moral story or epitomized a historical moment. “Organized by the urban elite, dominated by ladies of high society, staffed by professionally trained personnel, housing classic works of European art donated by wealthy private collectors,” according to Alan Trachtenberg, the museums “established as a physical fact the notion that culture filtered downward from a distant past, from overseas, from the sacred founts of wealth and private power.”

Now the establishment scented rebellion. Said the director of the Metropolitan, an appointee of J. P. Morgan, “There is a state of unrest all over the world in art as in all other things. It is the same in literature, as in music, in painting and in sculpture. And I dislike unrest.” The chief source of “unrest” in American art was the movement toward a new realism. Its precursors were Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins.

“When I select a thing,” Homer once said, “I paint it exactly as it appears.” Born in 1836 in Maine, Homer was retained by Harper’s Weekly to record Civil War battlefield scenes, resulting in such graphic paintings as Rainy Day in Camp and Sharpshooter on Picket Duty. Years of painting lyrical pastoral scenes followed his war work, but when in 1883 Homer reestablished himself in his beloved Maine, he found in the violent power of the sea an enduring theme for his now-darkened temperament. Vigorous paintings in the 1880s and 1890s such as The Life Line, The Herring Net, Undertow, and The Gulf Stream depicted men and women pitted against boiling waters, at war with brooding and furious nature.

Thomas Eakins apprenticed under the genre painter Jean Léon Gérôme in Paris and analyzed the work of Goya in Spain, but perhaps more influential in the formation of his style was his study of anatomy at a medical college, fortified by his use of nude models in defiance of Philadelphia prudery. His work with Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneering photographer who with a series of cameras fixed staccato glimpses of men and animals in motion, supplemented Eakins’s knowledge of “physiology from top to toe.” Eakins’s pictures of athletes—boxers, wrestlers, rowers—rendered in fine anatomical detail, and such daring portraits as that of Dr. Gross cutting open a living body, established him as Realism’s foremost transitional figure.

By the turn of the century, the influence of Impressionism on American art was marked. Artists returned from France with reports of paintings that glowed with the reflected diffusion of light over yellows and greens and browns, and with news of painters named Monet and Pissarro and Cezanne who seemed less concerned with what they saw than with how they saw. In Greenwich Village, there emerged a group of artists who absorbed the lessons of Impressionism but united them to Eakins’s faithfulness to detail, to the social satire of Goya and Hogarth and Daumier, and, finally, to a bent for common, homely subjects and indigenous American scenes. The result was the new Realism. Inevitably these artists were dubbed the “Ashcan School” and labeled socialists or anarchists for daring to “paint drunks and slatterns, pushcarts and coal mines, bedrooms and barrooms”—to “deliberately and conscientiously paint the ugly wherever it occurs.” They were more fairly called “The Eight.”

The finest artist of the Eight was doubtless John Sloan, who could paint with equal skill the wake of a ferry, a line of tenement dwellers’ clothes drying in the bright sun, the Third Avenue elevated, or a couple of aging, sharp-eyed ladies in a coach on Fifth Avenue critically scrutinizing their passing rivals. But the most influential member was Robert Henri, for he was a brilliant teacher, if only a fair artist. Unlike Sloan, who had never left America, Henri had been rigorously schooled in France. He returned to America in the early 1890s with two convictions: that real people and real events should be the only subjects of painting and that these subjects had to be infused with the artist’s own moral or-religious point of view. Henri helped George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Rockwell Kent, and a host of other artists to see that life and art could not be separated, that the crucial thing was not the subject painted but the intention of the artist, that the idea of “art for art’s sake” was morally bankrupt.

Henri’s most important ally in storming the gates of the art establishment was the photographic genius Alfred Stieglitz. Still in his mid-thirties as the new century dawned, Stieglitz had grown up in an upper East Side brownstone full of good wines and books and presided over by an imperious German-Jewish father who had prospered as a wool merchant. Enrolled by his father in an engineering program in Germany, Stieglitz perceived photography as part of the accelerating industrialism of the early 1880s and spent the next quarter-century establishing it as an art form as valid as painting or poetry. Returning to America in 1890, he joined a camera club, quit it as too conservative, and established his own periodical, Camera Work, a term he used to include any faithful picturing of life’s deepest experiences. He had to face the hostility of painters who, he noted wryly, wished they could reproduce effects as clearly as did his “machine-made” objects. Calling themselves “Photo-Secessionists,” he and Edward Steichen established, in 1905, the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue.

Seeing no incompatibility between fine photography and fine art, Stieglitz became a leading sponsor of advanced art. The work of unknown painters and sculptors at “291” seemed sometimes to eclipse even the brilliant photographs. His was the first gallery in New York to show, and Camera Work the first magazine in America to explain, the Postimpressionist art of Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso. He was audacious enough to display Rodin’s provocative drawings of nude women, which even admirers of the Frenchman’s sculptures denounced as a “not very elevating” sight in a public gallery. He gave the first exhibit anywhere of Negro sculpture presented as art rather than as anthropological artifacts. By making available to the public art which might not otherwise have been seen, “291” and other small galleries gave artists institutional leverage against the establishment dealers, critics, art academies, and museums.

It took a group of independent artists, bursting with creativity and innovation, to bring off the most shattering public event in American art—the Armory Show of 1913. Renegades of the stature of Henri, Sloan, Bellows, Maurice Prendergast, and many others, representing diverse schools, raised money, hired the 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington and 25th, and scoured Europe and America for the best and most varied paintings, lithographs, and sculptures. Quarreling all the way—Henri even dropped out—they gathered 1,600 pictures and sculptures. The towering brick walls of the grim armory were hung with long green drapes, the huge drill floor divided into corridors and cubicles. Gossip floated about Manhattan that the organizers were planning to shock the public. And so they did, but less with the rumored erotic art than with a profusion of painting and sculpture the likes of which few of their visitors had seen.

The tens of thousands of visitors, Oliver Larkin wrote later, first encountered Barnard’s monumental Prodigal Son, passed by naturalistic portrait heads by Jo Davidson, moved on to a stunning French display of Delacroix, Daumier, Corot, Monet, Manet, and Degas, climaxing with Cézanne’s The Poor House on the Hill, Renoir’s vibrant Boating Party, and a Gauguin frieze of tawny Samoans under vines heavy with exotic fruits. Next the Fauves, the wild men: Rouault’s Parade; Derain’s jug on a windowsill, framed by stiff and bare trees behind; Matisse’s dancing nudes. And then the Cubists: the young Picasso’s Woman with a Mustard Pot and—the talk of the town— Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, an elegantly convulsive vision of an angulated, abstractive woman moving downward in a complex of geometric shapes and slashing lines.

And, not least, the “American room”; “John Sloan’s girls dried their hair on a rooftop in the sun,” Larkin wrote; Robert Henri’s gypsy was “painted with as few broad strokes as possible”; George Bellows presented “prize fighters in rapid pencil notation, and constructed in solid, lively paint the snow-covered docks along the river, the stevedores working, the tugboats sending white puffs into a crisp blue sky.”

The Establishment fought back through its reviews of the show. Cézanne was a smug ignoramus, the Century judged, Van Gogh a nutty incompetent, Picasso as cheeky as Barnum himself. Along with a nod to the show’s enterprise, Theodore Roosevelt entered some reservations: he found little to recommend in the Cubists, the Futurists, and the “Near-Impressionists.” The Cubists would interest those who liked the colored pictures in the Sunday papers—indeed, the nice Navajo rug in his bathroom he deemed a better example of “proper” Cubism; the Futurists should be called “past-ists” because their paintings resembled the “later work” of Paleolithic cave artists; and as for the Nude Descending a Staircase, it was simply a “naked man going down stairs.”

Greenwich Village critics had their own reservations about the Armory Show, or at least about the new art forms. If the Romantics had ignored the impact of industrialism on American life with their bent for landscapes, still lifes, and sentimental vignettes, the “modernists” were ignoring it by their emphasis on abstraction, Cubism, Futurism, and other evasions. The world of Cézanne and Van Gogh, Larkin wrote later, “set a premium on the pseudo artist with his facile solution and his shallow grasp: The fruitful continuity between art and the normal experience of mankind had broken down.” Why? “Henry Adams concluded it had happened when the Virgin ceased to be a power and became a picture; Tolstoy said it was when the artist forgot his fraternity with suffering men; Veblen, when art became a showy index of superfluous wealth.”

A few of the critics, apprehensive about the disjunction between art and life, were suspicious of photography’s “machine-made” objects; in this they reflected, perhaps not always knowingly, John Ruskin and William Morris, who detested machines and machinery because they served commercial greed and threatened the handicrafts of the “people.”

But Stieglitz refused to equate machines with artistic or human degradation. Stieglitz, Lewis Mumford wrote, subordinated the machine to his human direction through understanding its potentialities and capacities. “When used thus, as part of man’s organic equipment rather than as a substitute for a deficient organ, the machine becomes as integral as the original eyes or legs. Assimilating the machine in this fashion, Stieglitz was armed to reconquer the lost human provinces that had been forfeited by the one-sided triumph of the machine.” Living in New York City and summering at Lake George in the Adirondacks, Stieglitz was closely attuned to both the industrial and the natural environments around him, and this, together with his understanding of the European artistic heritage, enabled him to avoid the ephemeral and disjunctive tendencies that afflicted so many of his fellow artists.

Though he worked in a quite different medium, Frank Lloyd Wright was no less aware than Stieglitz of the need to put mechanical and industrial power to the service of human aspirations. The young architect had long objected to the industrial uglification of America. “The buildings standing around there on the Chicago prairies were all tall and all tight,” he complained. Chimneys were lean and taller still—“sooty fingers threatening the sky.” Dormers were “cunning little buildings complete in themselves,” stuck onto the main roofslopes “to let the help poke their heads out of the attic for air.” Everything was overdecorated—walls “be-corniced or fancy-bracketed,” roofs “ridged and tipped, swanked and gabled,” the exterior “mixed to puzzle-pieces with cornerboards, panel-boards, window-frames, cornerblocks, plinth-blocks, rosettes, fantails, and jiggerwork in general.” If the home was to be a machine for living, Wright contended, this machine could and should help people live according to their “organic life” as well as in a democratic fashion. In a democracy especially, man must master the machine, not the reverse—and man could do so. The machine, Wright said, is “the tool which frees human labor, lengthens and broadens the life of the simplest man,” and in doing so becomes the basis of the “Democracy upon which we insist.”

Writing: “Venerable Ideas Are Swept Away”

Fascinated by the big city—by its railroad yards, elevated trains, ferries, tenements, chimneys, skyscrapers—painters like John Sloan and George Bellows used more than their canvases to register their views. Often they turned to the radical or avant-garde magazines that were sprouting across urban America. In 1912 Sloan became art editor of The Masses, a struggling left-wing journal. Drawing with pen, charcoal, and crayon on thin paper laid over a pebbly surface, Sloan revolutionized the style and format of magazine illustration. He insisted that he was serving on the journal as an artist, not as a polemicist. Art Young, the leading Masses cartoonist, had no such inhibitions, even though he had been a fellow art student with Henri in Paris. Borrowing from the work of Hogarth and Daumier, he savagely caricatured plutocrats, imperialists, censors, and police as agents of a vicious and bloated capitalism.

The Masses had begun in 1911 as such a dull and doctrinaire sheet that it almost folded within a year. Then, in August 1912, Art Young read to the editorial board an article by an unknown young writer named Max Eastman. Impressed—and desperate—the group authorized a note to Eastman: “You are elected editor of the Masses, no pay.” The new editor, who freely admitted he knew nothing about art, brought to the journal a beguiling mixture of “scientific socialism,” applied logic, pragmatic experimentation, and Christian doctrines inherited from his parents, both of whom were Congregational ministers in upstate New York. But Eastman was no dogmatist. The pages of The Masses were soon open to a variety of radical philosophies and to a new and biting satirical tone.

The journal’s editorial board boiled with squabbles, but Eastman was good-natured about it all. “We live on scraps,” he said. “Twenty fellows can’t get together to paste up a magazine without scrapping about it.” Nevertheless, several illustrators quit the staff in 1916 after Art Young accused Sloan and other artists of wanting to “run pictures of ash cans and girls hitching up their skirts in Horatio Street—regardless of idea—and without title.” The Masses never recovered from this secession.

In that same year of 1916, it happened that a wealthy New York socialite, Mrs. A. K. Rankine, and a young utopian socialist, James Oppenheim, were being treated by the same Jungian analyst. As a means of therapy, Rankine was urged to sponsor a magazine project of Oppenheim’s. With her funding, Oppenheim began to realize his dream of “the magazine which should evoke and mobilize all our native talent, both creative and critical….” For the new journal, The Seven Arts, Oppenheim gathered around him other writers in their twenties and thirties: Waldo Frank, whose association in Paris with the circle around La Nouvelle Revue Française had fired an interest in cultural nationalism; Van Wyck Brooks, who, under the influence of Santayana and other Harvard scholars, had written The Wine of the Puritans, a seminal critique of American fiction and poetry as sentimental, escapist, and imitative of English literature; and Randolph Bourne, who had fled to Greenwich Village via Columbia from his intellectually stifling middle-class home in New Jersey.

The most arresting of this quartet was Bourne. “I shall never forget,” Oppenheim wrote, “how I had first to overcome my repugnance when I saw that child’s body, the humped back, the longish, almost medieval face, with a sewed-up mouth, and an ear gone awry. But he wore a cape, carried himself with an air, and then you listened to marvelous speech, often brilliant, holding you spellbound, and looked into blue eyes as young as a Spring dawn.” Bourne was even more arresting intellectually. Through those blue eyes he perceived Americans’ “belittling” attitudes toward women, the need for equal economic chances for women and their right to divorce and birth control, the antiquated curriculum of American education, the need to develop an American “transnationality” that respected immigrants’ old cultures instead of the “melting-pot” concept that was leaving Americans in “detached fragments.”

A cosmopolitan and iconoclastic magazine of quite different cut was The Smart Set, founded in 1900. Far more amusing than The Masses, more irreverent than The Seven Arts, the monthly had a flair for presenting serious fiction by such authors as O. Henry, Zona Gale, Edith Wharton, and Damon Runyon. But even with H. L. Mencken as literary critic and George Jean Nathan as drama critic, The Smart Set almost foundered in 1910, only to be rescued by fresh editorial talent daring enough to gather the work of D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, August Strindberg, and William Butler Yeats. After Mencken and Nathan took over the top editorship at The Smart Set in 1914, the monthly realized Mencken’s aspirations for a magazine that was “lively without being nasty…. A magazine for civilized adults in their lighter moods. A sort of frivolous sister to the Atlantic.”

It was Mencken who gave The Smart Set its distinctive style. Married to his beloved native Baltimore and to the Baltimore Sun, he kept his distance from the Greenwich Village dilettantes and bohemians, as he viewed them, by mailing material to Nathan and making only a tri-weekly trip to Manhattan, where he stayed at the Hotel Algonquin. But Mencken was as unorthodox as any Villager, working during long lunches at Luchow’s or at the Beaux Arts, offering a “Poet’s Free Lunch” of pretzels and smoked herring to visitors in his office, where his desk sported two large brass spittoons and the walls shrieked with posters of Follies girls. To Village radicals, however, he appeared a political and social Tory, and even though Mencken looked for fresh and unorthodox talent, he was cool toward some of the new poets, especially the Imagists and the experimenters in free verse.

The new poets found a warmer welcome at such New York journals as Trend and Rogue, but these havens were short-lived. Others, a more enduring monthly, provided young poets with a forum for the widest experimentation, occasionally devoting an entire issue to a movement or a theme. It was his connection with the Others crowd that brought Wallace Stevens to prominence in the New York literary world. Others published eighteen of his poems, including “Peter Quince at the Clavier” and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

But it was another journal, eight hundred miles to the west, that acted as midwife to the new era in poetry. In August 1912, after a season of fund-raising and hunts across library shelves for prospective poets, Harriet Monroe sent from Chicago a manifesto circular announcing Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. It would offer poets the chance, she wrote, “to be heard in their own place, without the limitations imposed by the popular magazine,” and its readers would be those interested in poetry as “the highest, most complete expression of truth and beauty.” Among the recipients of the circular was Ezra Pound, Idaho-born, living then in London. Monroe particularly wanted Pound’s aid because of his place at the center of “the keenest young literary group in England,” despite both his hostility toward most things American and doubts whether he would reply to the urgings of a Chicago spinster-poetess. To her surprise he did respond with a heartening letter enclosing poems for the first issue, pledges of further help, and the wish that Poetry would speed the advent of an American renaissance that would “make the Italian Renaissance look like a tempest in a teapot!” Poetry was launched.

With Pound, a tireless promoter of others as well as of himself, installed as “foreign correspondent,” early numbers of Poetry included verses from across the Atlantic by the great Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Padraic Colum, and Richard Aldington. Pound extracted contributions from his fellow expatriates, including his Imagist protégée “H.D.” (Hilda Doolittle), and Robert Frost, who was establishing himself in England. The Poetry of June 1915 featured T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” From Boston came the verses of Brahmin Imagist Amy Lowell, from New Jersey those of William Carlos Williams. Closer to home, Poetry published two of the Chicago Movement’s seminal poems, Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” and Vachel Lindsay’s “General William Booth Enters into Heaven.” Pound himself was well represented, notably by his stunning “In a Station of the Metro.” In the March 1913 number, Pound set out the principles of Imagism: “1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing,’ whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” His “Image” he defined as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.”

Many of Poetry’s offerings were mediocre, some bad, a few next to unreadable. But at a time when poetry was in an unstable state of transition, Monroe’s publication was supreme among literary journals. It maintained an unswerving seriousness of purpose; it was willing to take chances with untested poets and embryonic movements; above all, it resolutely “internationalized” American poetry, placing the work of domestic Americans in a context with the work of contemporary English and Irish poets and of American poets abroad, thus offering models and challenges to young poets groping for a voice.

In 1907 the editor of the Delineator, a woman’s magazine, commissioned Mencken to ghostwrite a series of articles on the care and feeding of babies. The exchanges between the two men, both of whom were childless and fully intended to remain so, approached high comedy as the editor, Theodore Dreiser, instructed the cigar-chewing Baltimorean that babies informed their mothers of their various needs through subtly differing cries, and Mencken manfully responded with a piece on babies’ diverse cries of habit, pain, hunger, and temper. When, a year later, Mencken visited Dreiser in New York, the latter’s first impression was of a “spoiled and petted and possibly over-financed brewer’s or wholesale grower’s son who was out on a lark.”

Doubtless Dreiser reflected on the difference between his own earlier life and that of the son of a rich Baltimore brewer. While Mencken’s background had made him provokingly cocky, Dreiser’s world could hardly have delivered more blows to his self-esteem. He was the son of German immigrants growing up in the nativist, provincial city of Terre Haute, Indiana. His parents were profoundly otherworldly, but in different ways—his father an obsessively puritanical Catholic, his mother a pagan who believed in fairies and sorcery. Misfortune racked the family. The father, once a self-confident businessman, had lost his woolen mill in a fire and was badly hurt by a falling beam while rebuilding it, after which he settled into despair and joblessness. Of thirteen children the three oldest boys died. His mother kept the conflict-ridden and poverty-stricken family together, but finally she took Theodore, then aged seven, and two of the other small children on what turned out to be a long search for a better life elsewhere. At sixteen Theodore headed off on his own for Chicago.

Catapulted into the seething Chicago cauldron of the mid-1880s, Theodore searched desperately for a job that might give him a modicum of self-esteem. He was sacked again and again for incompetence and inattention. As both his status and his sex needs rose to fever heat, as he saw men fighting for jobs in the raw industrial and commercial worlds of Chicago, Pittsburgh, and other cities, he lied, cheated, and stole in vain attempts to advance himself. It was only with the help of others—a prosperous brother who gave him money and jobs, a high school teacher who financed a year for him at Indiana University, the odd editor who was impressed by him, the large number of women, including his wife, who loved and cared for him—and by dint of his own prodigious production of hack writing—that Dreiser survived.

Later people marveled that a common hack could produce so ambitious, so moving, so “realistic” a story as Sister Carrie. It was no mystery to the few who knew his life. Many contemporary authors—especially the muckrakers—were writing of the havoc they had seen American industrial society wreak upon the vulnerable, but Dreiser had not merely seen it—he had lived it. He was the first important American writer, it was said, to come from a non-Anglo-Saxon, lower-class background. Many of his characters were not simply extensions of himself, they were himself, with all his psychological bruises, physical sufferings, degrading poverty, sexual frustrations, ferocious appetites, hopeless yearnings, fleeting successes. Later an English writer, Ford Madox Ford, praised Carrie as few American critics had done. The “difference between a supremely unreadable writer like Zola and a completely readable one like Dreiser,” he said, “is simply that if Zola had to write about a ride on a railway locomotive’s tender or a night in a brothel, Zola had to get it all out of a book. Dreiser has only to call on his undimmed memories….”

Dreiser was not merely a reporter, however; he embellished, dramatized, romanticized, philosophized, sentimentalized. But, hopelessly immersed in the turbulence of his existence, he lacked the distance necessary for a unitary vision. Rather, his fiction tended to display all his ambivalences— his irresistible sensual instincts versus the residue of his Catholic upbringing, the fatalist who saw life turning on luck and chance versus the individualist bound to determine his own fate; his compassionate feelings about humanity in general versus his selfish, mean treatment of rivals, friends, and lovers; his skepticism that often edged into cynicism versus a romanticism that often oozed into sentimentality; a Social Darwinian view of life as an industrial jungle versus his abject dependence on others for help at home and on the job.

Dreiser was frustrated to the point of acute depression by the reception of Sister Carrie, though he could have expected difficulties. Frank Norris, the reader for Doubleday, Page, had given the manuscript his warm endorsement, and Walter Page, acting head of the firm during Frank Doubleday’s absence abroad, had told Dreiser they would publish Carrie; but when Doubleday returned to New York, he read the proofs, gave them to his wife to read, and together they agreed: Carrie was evil—sin had not been punished. After a stiff legal stand by Dreiser, Doubleday reluctantly published and even promoted the book, but with wan enthusiasm. Sales lagged badly compared to the author’s wild hopes. Some of the early newspaper reviews were remarkably perceptive and fair-minded, but many of the established journals consigned it to the gutter for its sexual frankness and refusal to moralize. As an author Dreiser was in the most annoying position of all—Carrie was controversial enough to be kept off library shelves but not spectacularly controversial enough to cause a run on the bookstores.

A good part of the Carrie controversy centered on the simple question, Can he write? Of Dreiser’s prose style, one critic wrote, “Mr. Dreiser can not punctuate. He knows nothing of sentence and paragraph structure…. He flouts [details] and lumbers over them, disdainful, with an uncouth grandeur…. The art of suggestion is unknown to him.” Carrie was uneven, unsophisticated, in dire need of editing. Yet this critic and others found much to praise in Dreiser’s vitality and suggestive treatment of reality. “Even if he is not a Balzac or a Dickens or a Dostoevsky,” wrote Julian Markels, “the whole of Dreiser’s substance is frequently rich and moving and powerful.” But those prepared to find Carrie morally reprehensible were quick to seize upon Dreiser’s callow and cumbersome prose—“Evil and badly written”—as though bad writing were the handmaiden of evil intentions.

Against this controversy stands the book itself, with, as Dreiser wrote in another context, “a bitter, brutal insistence on [its] so-ness.” In many ways, Carrie is a conventional story of a young woman who, coming—as Dreiser had—from a small town to Chicago, is animated by keen yearnings for money, fine clothes, pleasure. She graduates from an affair with a natty but socially limited traveling salesman to a bigamous marriage with Hurstwood, a well-to-do saloon manager. Smitten with Carrie, Hurstwood abandons his wife and children to escape—it is more an abduction—with her to New York. From this point Carrie’s fortunes rise as Hurstwood’s decline. He loses his money, resorts to begging, and ends a suicide, while Carrie meets with mounting success on the stage. And yet, at the height of her fame, she longs for more; she is still “the old, mournful Carrie— the desireful Carrie,—unsatisfied.”

The novel is distinguished by the relentless detail of Carrie’s rise and Hurstwood’s fall, but above all by Dreiser’s steady refusal to judge his characters, nor even to hold them fully responsible for their actions. Carrie is borne by ever-ascending ideals and yearnings, the source and meaning of which she has no comprehension. Dreiser’s stance is that of an observer of a human field, in which external and impersonal pressures, accidental circumstances, indistinct impulses and desires play upon and often determine behavior and destiny and in which Christian categories of good and evil, sin and redemption, have no part. With one bold book, Dreiser knocked down and trampled those “rubber-stamp formulae,” as Mencken called them, which had extorted from authors pieties and platitudes, decorum and parsable sentences. Sister Carrie brought American fiction within the gates of American industrial society and face to face with its realities.

In 1862, nine years before Dreiser was born, George Frederick and Lucretia Jones of Gramercy Park and Newport announced the birth of their daughter Edith. The child grew up in a world that was bounded geographically by Washington Square, lower Fifth Avenue, and the approaches to Central Park, socially by a circle of Schermerhorns, Rhinelanders, and other rich, mainly “old Dutch” families. Culturally it was a world that sponsored museums and libraries but had little interest in serious art or learning. Edith came to comprehend this world, through her imagination, family travel in Europe, and her father’s library, full of Plutarch and Parkman, Dante and Milton and Pope, Scott and Irving and Thackeray.

At the age of eleven, Edith Jones produced her first literary effort, a novel. It began: “‘Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown?’ said Mrs. Tompkins. ‘If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room.’” Edith showed her work to her mother, who dismissed it. “Drawing-rooms,” she said, “are always tidy.”

By the time Dreiser was eleven, he had attended parochial and public schools, lived the meanest kind of peripatetic life with his family, gotten fired five times. By that age, Edith Jones had been schooled only by private tutors. At eighteen, Dreiser attended Indiana University for a year. Edith had hardly dreamed of going to college, knowing that it was the young men in her social set who would attend Harvard or Columbia, Oxford or Cambridge. In his twenties, Dreiser was drifting from job to job; Edith Jones was drifting from New York to Europe to Newport to Bar Harbor.

What Edith did come to learn—to see and touch and feel—was the richly upholstered and intellectually barren world of her set. First she learned about their houses: the huge brownstones, with their ballrooms that might be used one day a year; the drafty drawing rooms; the quiet libraries where the man of the house took refuge; the silk-stockinged footmen, the platoons of servants. About their cultural pursuits: the Academy of Music, where society gathered primarily to show itself; the Century Association, where young men—and men only, of course—took further refuge from their families; other clubs, where the waiting period for membership might be ten years. They traveled at home and abroad, always within the tight little cocoon of their social class.

Unblinkingly she observed the phenomenon that by the early 1880s dominated the talk of New York’s old moneyed class day after day—the insidious infiltration into established society of the philistines; of the bumptious, even vulgar, capitalists whose industrial wealth vastly surpassed the landed capital of the old families. Ultimately the old class could not stop the new, for money in that environment eventually meant power. But they could slow it down by a rigid adherence to protocol—the proper manners, clothes, decoration, watering places, decorum, taste. Old wealth shunned ostentation, loud voices, innovation. It never discussed money; it simply assumed it. “Fortified as she was in her own class,” Diana Trilling said of the struggling writer, “she knew the reality of class as no theoretical Marxist or social egalitarian can know it: not speculatively but in her bones.”

Above all, Edith Jones observed the relations between the sexes. If gentility barred women from every function save the “cultivation of the home,” as Alfred Kazin noted, the older married women were the arbiters of the protocol of established wealth. Guarding access to society’s inner sanctum and policing its behavior, however, was a role that could turn some of these women inward and away from broader social responsibilities. This was still an era when the gentlemen, after dinner, stayed together to smoke their cigars and discuss weighty matters, while the ladies moved off for decorous, gossipy talk.

Such talk did not include the subject of sex. A formidable double standard prevailed here too: men learned about sex and pursued extramarital affairs with little penalty from the matriarchs except mild tut-tutting. Women were not supposed to talk or even think sex. The result was a profound ignorance, in which Edith Jones shared. Shortly before her wedding, as her biographer tells the story, she plucked up her courage, her heart beating wildly, to ask her mother “what marriage was really like.” Her mother looked at her with icy disapproval, exclaiming, “I never heard such a ridiculous question!”

“I’m afraid, Mamma—I want to know what will happen to me,” Edith persisted.

“You’ve seen enough pictures and statues in your life,” her mother said impatiently. “Haven’t you noticed that men are … made differently from women?” “Yes,” said Edith falteringly.

“Well, then …” But her mother broke off as she observed Edith’s blank, uncomprehending expression. “Then for heaven’s sake don’t ask me any more silly questions. You can’t be as stupid as you pretend.”

After her barely consummated marriage to Teddy Wharton, a Boston socialite, Edith Jones Wharton spent another dozen years making the social rounds and storing up impressions, recollections, reflections; then she burst forth in a small flood of stories, novels, travel articles, even a book on the decoration of houses. Her most important works dealt with high society’s victims, especially women. In her 1905 novel The House of Mirth she portrayed a spirited young woman who lacks the one thing—money, or a husband who could provide it—that would secure her social status; Lily Bart gambles for success, but, lacking the necessary cards and caught between her head and her heart, she is inexorably drawn by society’s conventions into poverty, social ostracism, suicide. Fifteen years later, Wharton’s The Age of Innocence presented Ellen Olenska, who could have enjoyed status and riches if she had stayed with her unbearable husband, a Polish count; as it is, Countess Olenska flees to her relatives in New York, seeks to establish a foothold there despite her distaste for their culturally empty lives, and flees again to a lonely life in Europe after her family rejects her.

These were powerful portraits, as were other novels such as Ethan Frome and The Custom of the Country. Yet they rarely rose above the pathos of individuals caught in a social web to the level of real tragedy. Wharton herself seemed fixed in the social environment she knew so well. She seldom portrayed with much credibility the lives of the poor or lower middle class. She ignored the larger ideas that might have aroused old society, new plutocracy, or rising proletariat. Society put enormous constraints on people’s liberties, but Wharton was not about to expand on the implications of this for a nation that extolled liberty (or freedom) at every opportunity. “There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free,” says Newland Archer, Countess Olenska’s would-be lover, of his pliant mate. Wharton leaves Archer’s wife caught in a benign web of restraints to which society allowed no alternative. A superb critic of manners, the author was content with this role.

Nor did Wharton pursue a political alternative. Her gentlemen had nothing but disdain for “risking their clean linen” in the politics of Manhattan. In The Age of Innocence, Governor Theodore Roosevelt, after dining with Archer in the latter’s home, turns to his host and says, “banging his clenched fist on the table and gnashing his eye-glasses: ‘Hang the professional politician! You’re the kind of man the country wants, Archer. If the stable’s ever to be cleaned out, men like you have got to lend a hand in the cleaning.’” Glowing over the phrase “men like you,” Archer wins election as state assemblyman, serves a year, then fails of reelection—and Wharton leaves him back in obscure though useful municipal reform. Theodore Roosevelt, who became a personal friend of Wharton, went into “dirty politics” to stay. Why didn’t Archer?

Along with the lack of noblesse oblige in high society, there was contempt for the tastes of popular democracy. By turn of century, the middle and even lower-income classes were devouring books from the best-seller lists: Alice Hegan Rice, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch; John Fox, Jr., The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come; Kate Douglas Wiggin, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm; Gene Stratton Porter, Freckles; Zane Grey, The Spirit of the Border; Harold Bell Wright, The Shepherd of the Hills; Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Circular Staircase; and such robust tales as Owen Wister’s The Virginian and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf.

Edith Wharton did not need to lower her literary standards for her novels and stories to achieve impressive sales; The Age of Innocence sold 66,000 copies in its first six months and was still selling steadily two years later. She emphasized the pathos of individuals while her own class was eroding away. Both Wharton and Dreiser kept their distance from the rising philistines—she by sticking ultimately with her own class, he by entering and exploiting the crass commercial world even as he hated and derided it. “It was wonderful to discover America,” Dreiser said, “but it would have been more wonderful to lose it.” Cries Lawrence Selden in The House of Mirth, “Why do we call our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?” Readers were left with these haunting questions, but with little understanding of their implications for culture in a democratic republic and a capitalistic economy.

“All That Is Solid Melts into Air”

One night in Greenwich Village in the spring of 1913, Big Bill Haywood was telling his Village friends of the bitter strike of the silk workers in nearby Paterson. Thousands of pickets had been arrested. Two strikers had been killed by police. Whole families were starving. The IWW-run strike needed money and publicity.

Mabel Dodge Luhan spoke up. Why not move the strike right out of New Jersey and stage it in Manhattan as a pageant? Electrified, the group let its imagination soar. Artists, actors, writers would work together. John Sloan would paint a huge backdrop for the stage. The designer Robert Edward Jones would lay out a graphic program for the show. John Reed, who had written plays and songs for dramatic clubs, would draft a scenario and stage the spectacle. Big Bill was enthusiastic. He liked to tell Villagers that his workers were too busy fighting for decent wages to have time for culture. But now the strikers themselves would be the actors.

Early on a June evening, over 1,000 silk workers ferried across the Hudson and marched to the old Madison Square Garden on 26th Street. Glowing red lights spelled out “IWW” as queues stretched twenty or more blocks. On a huge stage inside, against a two-hundred-foot-long backdrop reproducing the mill’s grim facade, the Paterson workers acted out the quiet start of the working day, sudden voices crying, “STRIKE! STRIKE!,” the hands pouring out of the factory, the shooting of a striker by the police, his burial, the mournful spectacle of strikers’ children being sent off to other cities, the climactic strike meeting. Big Bill, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Carlo Tresca gave fiery speeches, as they actually had earlier at a Paterson striker’s graveside. John Reed, who had been a Harvard football cheerleader, choreographed the huge cast and directed its singing of revolutionary words set to Harvard tunes. The pageant ended with actors and spectators hymning “The Internationale” in one mighty voice.

“Who that saw the Paterson Strike Pageant in 1913 can ever forget that thrilling evening when an entire labor community dramatized its wrongs in one supreme outburst of group-emotion?” Randolph Bourne wrote. A new collective social art was coming in America, he felt. Other memories soon turned sour. A financial disaster, the pageant passed no money on to the silk workers. The strike collapsed within a month. Suffering from ulcers, Haywood left with friends for Provincetown. An exhausted Reed sailed off with Luhan to Europe.

The spectacle had merely given the strikers a moment of pageantry, Flynn concluded bitterly, and left them back on the picket line. Doubtless he was expecting too much from art—which cannot resolve social problems—while understanding too little of art’s power to sharpen people’s awareness of these problems.

CHAPTER 9

The Reformation of Economic Power

NOT SINCE THE FOUNDING decades had Americans eyed a national leader of such prodigious versatility as the man who took the oath of office that September afternoon in 1901. From childhood, Theodore Roosevelt had seemed to reach out hungrily for experience and to lose himself in action. Like Washington and Adams and Jefferson and the others, he had come to know and embrace the natural world around him as well as the political flora and fauna. If he had the attention span of a golden retriever, as some critics said, he had at least emulated the Founding Fathers in recording his experiences in correspondence, articles, and books.

In his forty-three years, Roosevelt had already lived a half-dozen lives. The product of seven generations of Manhattan Roosevelts, he had fitted in with the Boston aristocracy as well, and had even married into it. As a Harvard student of mixed abilities but wide exposure—William James was one of his teachers—he had found time on the side to write scholarly studies on the birds of Oyster Bay and of the Adirondacks. He had come to know the West—the West of the Dakota Badlands—as few easterners had been able to. He had invaded the seamy Republican clubhouses of Manhattan and had courted or quelled their denizens.

Then he soared. At the age of twenty-three he won nomination and election as New York assemblyman and took on the legislative bosses in Albany. At twenty-six he was an influential delegate at the Republican convention that nominated Blaine. At twenty-eight he ran for mayor of New York City and finished third behind an old-line Democrat and Henry George, the single-taxer. At thirty-one he took office in Washington as a Civil Service commissioner; at thirty-seven he was New York City Police Commissioner; at thirty-nine Assistant Secretary of the Navy and Rough Rider; at forty governor of New York; at forty-two Vice-President of the United States. In between he raised a family, shot buffalo and grizzlies, published writings that ranged from serious works in western and naval history to appalling potboilers.

If Roosevelt embodied much of the history of late nineteenth-century America, he also reflected its contradictions and contrarieties. Like other upper-class fathers, he was a “devoted family man” who again and again deserted his family for weeks at a time as he pursued his ambitions. He adored his first wife, who died in childbirth, but in his grief exorcised her from his memory and from history by destroying their love letters and tearing her photographs out of their frames. He talked peace but carried a gun on any plausible occasion. He loved animals but slaughtered them, and when bothered by a neighbor’s dog, he pulled out his revolver and shot it dead. He believed in liberty but of the “orderly” type. He believed in equality but only with people he respected—and never with those, including fellow legislators who were Irish, whom he termed “a stupid, sodden vicious lot, most of them being equally deficient in brains and virtue.” He was a snob of the first water who made friends with cowboys and politicians once they were able to see past the side-whiskers, the monocle, the gold-headed cane, the silk hat, the cutaway coat—all of which accoutrements he brought with him in his first appearance in the New York Assembly.

His had been a life of almost continual conflict—fighting bosses in both parties, knocking down “muckers” who accosted him in saloon or clubhouse, hunting down western desperadoes, reprimanding constables asleep at their posts, charging up San Juan Hill, endlessly tangling with fellow commissioners, governmental superiors, pacifists, and members of the “wealthy criminal class.” Life was strife. Not by nature a compassionate man, he had a contempt for “weak, spineless” men of inaction, effete intellectuals like Henry Adams and Henry James, milk-and-water reformers. This contempt stemmed in part from his own childhood weaknesses and insecurities—his small, frail body racked by asthma and other ills, his myopic eyes, his reedy voice that easily slipped into a falsetto. Through home exercises, days on end of horseback riding, and incredible feats of endurance in the Badlands he had built a bull neck and a protruding chest, over a slowly expanding waistline.

Inevitably, as an intensely competitive man, he was something of a Social Darwinist. Many industrial evils would disappear, he said, if there were more of that “capacity for steady individual self-help which is the glory of every true American.” There were higher things than the “soft and easy enjoyment of material comfort,” he told an audience. “It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness.” If the “best classes” did not reproduce themselves, he said, the “nation will of course go down; for the real question is encouraging the fit, and discouraging the unfit, to survive.” Thus he favored sterilizing the criminal and the feebleminded. He viewed the yellow and black peoples as backward and ignorant. Yet he did not embrace Social Darwinist dogma consistently, and increasingly he saw the state as protecting people, without “paternalism.”

Nor was he likely to read the turgid works of Spencer or Sumner. He devoured books in great gulps, even while riding horseback or boating down streams, and his reading reflected both his catholicity and his love of battle. If he admired Francis Parkman and James Fenimore Cooper and Frederick Jackson Turner and anyone else who wrote about the West, he positively adored epics of fighting men. Naturally he abhorred critics of America, whether Frank Norris (“preposterous”) or Henry Adams and his Democracy (“mean and foolish”), and he cherished a particular contempt for Henry James as a “very despicable creature, no matter how well equipped with all the minor virtues and graces, literary, artistic, and social.” Tolstoy he esteemed, as long as the Russian steered clear of unclean sex. Longfellow he found “simply sweet and wholesome” but Chaucer “needlessly filthy.”

Still, it was difficult for Theodore Roosevelt to leave for long the subject of himself. If, as a family member remarked, “Uncle Ted” wanted to be the groom at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral, family friends also noted that he wrote a biography of Thomas Hart Benton that seemed mainly about Roosevelt, and a biography of Oliver Cromwell that was a “fine imaginative study of Cromwell’s qualifications for the Governorship of New York.” Henry Adams lampooned him as “pure act,” but Adams and other writers were nearer the mark when they compared his career to an express locomotive, speeding to an inevitable destination.

The force of a locomotive, but to what end? Clearly, in Roosevelt’s case, the capture of power, but for what purpose? To satisfy his own ego? So many of his friends suspected; hence their reluctance to give him office and authority. Or to realize some nobler purpose? The answer was not wholly clear, even to Roosevelt.

Like many other American leaders, he lusted for power but feared it. When two journalist friends asked him, during his days as police commissioner, whether he was working to be President, he jumped to his feet, ran around his desk, and with clenched fists and bared teeth advanced on the cowering men. “Don’t you dare ask me that!” he shouted. Then he quieted down and explained: if a man in a political job was reminded that he might be President, he would “lose his nerve” and not do the great things, the hard things, that required “all the courage, ability, work that I am capable of.…”

The quality that distinguished the Founders from a man like Roosevelt was their capacity to ground their concept of power in a settled and sophisticated philosophy of majority rule and minority liberties, of democratic representation and republican checks and balances, whereas Roosevelt was at most an instant philosopher who looked on power as an all-purpose weapon for all seasons. In 1901, he held an enormous potential for either progress or regression; the tinder of popular hopes and expectations, fears and hatreds, lay around him, ready to be ignited by that spark of furious energy that burned within him.

Furious potential energy also glowed among the people. America was still a nation most sharply divided between the poor and the rich—a fact not lost on a Christian socialist poet, Edwin Markham, who for years had been haunted by a Millet painting, The Man with the Hoe, that he had seen reproduced in Scribner’s Magazine. During Christmas week 1898, he had gazed transfixed at the original painting, temporarily on exhibition in San Francisco, and returned to his home on the heights back of Oakland to write the most quoted poem of the time. Over and over his stanzas asked by whose handiwork had the Man created by Lord God been reduced to this “stolid and stunned” brother to the ox. And he closed with a warning that for some would haunt the century ahead:

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

How will the Future reckon with this Man?

How answer his brute question in that hour

When whirlwinds and rebellion shake the world?

How will it be with kingdoms and with kings—

With those who shaped him to the thing he is—

When this dumb Terror shall reply to God

After the silence of the centuries?

The Personal Uses of Power

“I was a sickly and timid boy,” Theodore Roosevelt had written to an editor friend two weeks after the Governor’s election as Vice-President. He was trying to explain a report from his friend’s son at school that young Ted had “licked all the boys in his form.” Roosevelt had to admit that he, the father, was responsible in some measure for some of Ted’s “fighting proclivities.” And he strove to explain why. His own father, the Governor wrote, had taken great and loving care of him “when I was a wretched mite suffering acutely with asthma.” But he “most wisely refused to coddle me” and made him feel “that I was always to be both decent and manly, and that if I were manly nobody would long laugh at my being decent.”

Nothing could have pleased Roosevelt more than to hear that his son, small and bespectacled as he himself had been, was a “fighter.” Yet he had to write this long defense of Ted because he was defending himself, and he was doing so because of his own feelings of ambivalence and even guilt over physical conquest. He disclaimed ambition and the pursuit of power even as he feverishly pursued them, amid a loud self-righteousness, a high-minded moralizing, and a stubborn independence gained from the Roosevelts’ social status, his Harvard education, and his background in independent Republicanism. And if any would deny that the ethic of the family and the playground could be applied to national or world politics, Roosevelt testified to the contrary.

“It is exactly the same thing with history,” he continued in this same letter. “In most countries the ‘Bourgeoisie’—the moral, respectable, commercial, middle class—is looked upon with a certain contempt which is justified by their timidity and unwarlikeness. But the minute a middle class produces men like Hawkins and Frobisher on the seas, or men such as the average Union soldier in the civil war, it acquires the hearty respect from others which it merits.”

As Roosevelt assumed the powers of the presidency, his unquenchable blaze of energy not only would illuminate his own addiction to the elixir of power; it would spotlight the more portentous question of presidential power in a representative republic, and ultimately of popular rule in a democracy. Roosevelt possessed high office by virtue of an assassin’s bullet, not of a majority vote. He held one position of power in a system of dispersed authority, in a society dominated by economic and social elites. The country waited and wondered. Would he keep McKinley’s Cabinet and policies? Would he wait for Congress to act? Would he let the Senate dictate Supreme Court appointments? Could he deal with the economic barons whose influence pervaded the whole political system?

“The deep and damnable alliance between business and politics”—this challenge to public authority, and to his personal power, had increasingly preoccupied Theodore Roosevelt since his days in the legislature. During his navy days he had poured his “disgust” over this tie into the receptive ears of William Allen White, a young Kansas editor visiting Washington: so strong “was this young Roosevelt—hard-muscled, hard-voiced even when the voice cracked in falsetto, with hard, wriggling jaw muscles, and snapping teeth,” that he swept away any doubts White had held. As governor, Roosevelt had forced through the legislature a franchise tax bill making corporations holding public franchises “pay their just share of the public burden.” The actions of a single state, however, could hardly eliminate a national problem—the tightening concentration of economic control through pools, mergers, and holding companies—the “trust” problem.

And now, as President, Roosevelt was itching to attack this problem, indeed spoiling for a fight. At the start, nonetheless, he seemed to move slowly. His first message to Congress, in December 1901, presented a program of “moderately positive action,” intended somehow to abolish abuses without abolishing combinations—a program so restrained and limited as to dishearten his more militant supporters and provoke the press, including Finley Peter Dunne, who spoke through his alter ego, Mr. Dooley, with his usual gentle but penetrating wit.

“Th’ trusts are heejous monsthers built up be th’ inlightened intherprise iv th’ men that have done so much to advance progress in our beloved counthry,” Mr. Dooley represented the new President as saying. “On wan hand I wud stamp thim undher fut; on th’ other hand not so fast.”

Roosevelt had reason to be cautious. If he confronted economic power in United States Steel, Standard Oil, and a host of other titanic corporations, he confronted only two miles away—at the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue—citadels of political power on Capitol Hill. Since the President tended to conceive of power in terms of persons rather than institutions, he saw his opposition not as Senate, House, and judiciary, but as friendly or hostile leaders holding pivotal positions. Senate influence was clear; what was less clear was its relationship to “big business.”

Some senators were big business. Leland Stanford of California had died in 1893, but others in the upper house moved as easily between the business and political worlds as the railroad magnate had. Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, born of a poor farm family, had made a fortune in business, married wealth, and long acted in the Senate with aplomb for sugar, banking, and other enterprises in which he held investments. Suave, humorous, unflappable, he was the leader of a small coterie of Old Guard senators, of equal weight, who came to be known as the Big Four. Often allied with this group were men who held close ties to big business but were above all professional politicians and proud of it. Matthew Quay had fought his way to domination of Pennsylvania politics, masterminded Benjamin Harrison’s presidential campaign in 1888, run the Republican-party, —and become his state’s high-tariff man in the Senate, while amassing one of the finest private libraries in the nation. Thomas Platt, longtime Republican boss and businessman, continued to compete with Roosevelt for party influence in the Empire State. Also remaining in the Senate was old Mark Hanna, the “man who had made McKinley.” He had disliked Roosevelt almost as much as he had loved and admired his fellow Ohioan. “Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one life between this madman and the Presidency?” he had raged when other Republican leaders balanced the ticket in 1900 and eased Teddy into vice-presidential impotence. When word had reached Hanna of McKinley’s death he had cried, “Now look— that damned cowboy is President of the United States!”

Over in the House, power relationships converged in the Speaker and the men around him, especially those in the financial committees. Thomas Reed of Maine, the most powerful Speaker in memory, had quit both the Speakership and the House in 1899 in disgust over McKinley’s expansionist foreign policies, but Joseph Cannon of Illinois, beaten in the Democratic sweep of 1890, would soon gain the office. And in its small Capitol chamber between the two houses, the Supreme Court continued to arbitrate key sectors of the nation’s economic life. These gray eminences, appointed by a string of conservative Presidents, lay in potential ambush against antibusiness policy. Regarding the Court, the new President enjoyed one consolation: to the first vacancy that arose he would appoint a man he admired, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—though only after clearing his choice with his own good friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, another baron of state and Capitol Hill politics.

“Go slow,” the congressional Old Guard was urging Roosevelt, in Hanna’s words, and the President knew what they meant. Wall Street, the conservative press, and even his brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson, were urging him to be kind to business. Even before McKinley died, a letter had reached Roosevelt in Buffalo by special messenger from Robinson: “I must frankly tell you that there is a feeling in financial circles here that in case you become President you may change matters so as to upset the confidence … of the business world.” Later, two good friends of the new President, George Perkins and Robert Bacon, had come to the White House to urge caution. But they “were arguing like attorneys for a bad case,” Roosevelt wrote Robinson. “I intend to be most conservative,” he went on, yet he would pursue his course. He not only knew the cause Perkins and Bacon represented, but the man.

That man was J. Pierpont Morgan. Even Roosevelt had to grant that the financier’s “strong and dominant” personality made him worthy of his steel. With his great flaming red nose, piercing eyes, and bristling brows, he radiated a sense of power as commanding in the business world as Roosevelt’s would be in the political. He was indeed economic power incarnate. In the same year Roosevelt became President, Morgan had led a group of financiers in buying out Carnegie and other steel makers and forming the nation’s first billion-dollar corporation, a congeries of iron and steel works, ore holdings, and shipping properties. And during Roosevelt’s first weeks in the White House, the “First Lord of American Finance” had capped fifteen years of feverish railway acquisition by organizing the Northern Securities Company, combining the stock of the Union Pacific, the Northern Pacific, and the Burlington.

Roosevelt could hardly have felt more directly challenged. Well he knew, as did the Old Guard, that his predecessors in the White House had instituted remarkably few actions against business combinations under the Sherman Act; that the most vigorous prosecution under the law had been not against a businessman but a labor leader, Eugene Debs; that a federal action against the “Sugar Trust,” which controlled 98 percent of the nation’s sugar-refining, had been repudiated by a conservative Supreme Court in a decision notable for its tortured reasoning. Roosevelt vowed that he would not be a McKinley or a Cleveland or a Harrison. To him this was a question of power—the power of the people and of the President who represented them. Not trusting even his Cabinet, in great secrecy he instructed Philander Knox, his holdover Attorney General, to move against Morgan and the whole Northern Securities crowd, alleging conspiracy in restraint of trade.

Astonished by the move, Morgan seemed later to feel more hurt than intimidated. He had known Roosevelt for years. They were both gentlemen—New York gentlemen. Had not he, Morgan, endorsed young Roosevelt when he ran for the Assembly, contributed $10,000 through Platt when he ran for governor? To be sure, the young governor had sponsored a dubious corporation tax, but since then Theodore had seemed to be settling down. He had even as Vice-President-elect given a dinner for Morgan at the Union League Club—probably, Morgan may have (rightly) suspected, to show he was really a conservative in touch with the influential classes. And now this. There was only one way to settle such a difference between gentlemen. Morgan entrained for Washington and strode into the White House. After many handshakes the conversation reportedly went as follows:

Morgan: “If we have done anything wrong, send your man”—the Attorney General— “to my man and they can fix it up.”

Roosevelt: “That can’t be done.”

Knox: “We don’t want to fix it up, we want to stop it.”

Morgan: “Are you going to attack my other interests, the Steel Trust and the others?”

Roosevelt: “Certainly not, unless we find out that in any case they have done something that we regard as wrong.”

A most illuminating conversation, the President reflected after Morgan left. “Mr. Morgan could not help regarding me as a big rival operator, who either intended to ruin all his interests or else could be induced to come to an agreement to ruin none.” While the President turned to his next target, the beef trust, the Morgan group appealed to the federal courts.

The President delivered an even sharper blow to the “arrogance” of the “big monied men” during an anthracite coal strike later in 1902. The coal operators, including the six railroad corporations that owned most of the mines, were balking at a wage increase, but even more they sought to break the power of the United Mine Workers union and its young president, John Mitchell. George F. Baer, head of a large Pennsylvania coal and iron company and the industry’s main spokesman, typified the bland arrogance of the owners when he uttered his unforgettable pronunciamento, “The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.”

As the strike continued, coal prices skyrocketed. Mayors and congressmen called for a settlement to avert a coalless winter. The specter loomed of children shivering in icy schoolrooms. At a White House conference, Mitchell said that he would accept an arbitration tribunal if the other side would, but the operators indulged in such denunciations of union anarchists and criminals that Roosevelt said later that only one man behaved like a gentleman and “that man was not I,” but Mitchell. Roosevelt was in a quandary. He would not call out federal troops, as Cleveland had done, but the operators still would not budge.

In desperation, the President let word filter into Wall Street that he was preparing to order federal seizure of the mines; and he put conciliatory feelers out to the House of Morgan through his friend Secretary of War Elihu Root. The financier and the Cabinet member worked out an arbitration proposal on Morgan’s yacht. There was a last-minute hitch when the operators refused to accept a union man for the arbitration board, but the President adroitly solved this problem by placing the Grand Chief Conductor of the Order of Railway Conductors on the board under the title “sociologist.” In the end, the arbitrators granted the workers a nine-hour day and a 10 percent pay increase—but not UMW recognition.

The President’s business foes charged that he was “playing politics” with his eye constantly cocked on the 1904 election. They were quite correct. Roosevelt indeed had been running for President since virtually the day he entered politics. In his brief half-year as Vice-President, he had begun maneuvering for the job, and he had been the most likely man to succeed McKinley if only because he would have fought the hardest. McKinley’s assassination simply speeded up the process.

Halfway through his term, with scalps from the Northern Securities case and the coal strike hanging from his belt, the President seemed to move toward the center of the GOP. He pulled back on his antitrust campaign, adopted a moderate position on the tariff and other simmering issues, placated the congressional Old Guard through word and deed, put out conciliatory feelings to Morgan and his people. He played ordinary old-fashioned presidential politics, courting blacks, labor, ethnic leaders, and other elements of the big Republican party coalition, exploiting patronage to the hilt, steering clear of state factional fights. He played his own brand of ruthless politics, as he coldly cut off Mark Hanna’s patronage base in the South, falsely denied receiving large campaign contributions from Wall Street, and even helped delay the admission of Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico because of the likelihood that they would vote Democratic in the 1904 election. When Hanna, already beaten, died from typhoid fever a few months before the convention, Roosevelt’s nomination was guaranteed. And when the Democrats, returning to their old strategy of the Northeast-South axis, chose an upright but conservative and colorless New York judge, Alton B. Parker, for President, Roosevelt’s reelection was guaranteed. He won in a sweep.

Roosevelt had camouflaged his campaign shenanigans in “boorishly self-righteous” protestations, in William Harbaugh’s words. Perhaps it was because of some sense of “power guilt,” some fear of power as an aphrodisiac, that on election night he made his fateful pronouncement, “Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination.”

But he would exercise power while he had it, especially against power in hands he considered irresponsible. Inevitably he returned to the challenge of big business. He felt, according to John Blum, “that the central issue of his time pivoted on the control of business because this control determined conduct…. He feared not the size but the policies of big business.” And of all the sectors of big business, none concerned him more than the railroads. “The question of transportation,” he stated in his annual message to Congress in December 1905, “lies at the root of all industrial success,” and the revolution in transportation during the last half-century lay at the heart of the growth of industry. What was needed was “to develop an orderly system” through “the gradually increased exercise of the right of efficient Government control.”

Now a seasoned political leader after eight years in high offices, Roosevelt followed the Machiavellian advice to combine the prudence of the fox with the might of the lion in attacking the citadels of railroad power. Within a few weeks of election he launched suits against railroads and other corporations for giving and receiving rebates. The most powerful roads— the Burlington, the Great Northern, the Chicago & Alton—were indicted. An official report, Roosevelt declared, demonstrated that the Standard Oil Company had profited “enormously” from secret rail rates. Roosevelt focused on the issue of rebates, which had been outlawed in the Elkins Act of 1903 but still remained endemic in the railroad industry.

Roosevelt also favored tariff revision, but he viewed this issue as so subordinate to curbing the railroad barons that he used tariff reform as a bogey to frighten the Republican Old Guard, then in effect withdrew his tariff card in order to gain more leverage on the railroad issue. Meantime he put steady pressure on Congress to grant the ICC authority to set maximum railroad rates. Greeted with enthusiasm by shippers, farmers, and travelers, especially in the West, rate regulation passed through the House easily but ran head-on into the Republican Old Guard in the Senate. Most of the conservative senators, not willing to defy public opinion, favored the Hepburn regulatory bill but argued for proposals to broaden the power of the judiciary to review the ICC’s rate-making and thus in effect cripple the commission’s effectiveness.

This notion of broad court review touched a most sensitive nerve in Theodore Roosevelt, for it revived a painful memory. When, in 1902, he was considering Oliver Wendell Holmes as his first and stellar appointee to the Supreme Court, the President had written Lodge that he liked Holmes’s personality, his Americanism, his record as a gallant Civil War soldier, his earlier pro-labor decisions as a Massachusetts judge. In the low and ordinary sense of “partisan” and “politician,” Roosevelt went on to Lodge, a justice should be neither. “But in the higher sense, in the proper sense, he is not in my judgment fitted for the position unless he is a party man, a constructive statesman,” who could work with “his fellow statesmen” in the other branches of government. Chief Justice Marshall had been that sort of man, Chief Justice Taney a “curse to our national life” because of his narrow view of federal power. “Now I should like to know that Judge Holmes was in entire sympathy with your views and mine….”

He would not put on the Court someone who was not “sane and sound” on such matters. Lodge had evidently reassured the President. But when the Court passed on Northern Securities in 1904 and supported the Administration’s trust-busting by a margin of one vote, Holmes had dissented. Roosevelt greeted the news with indignation: “I could carve out of a banana a judge with more backbone than that,” he was reported to have exclaimed—the same judgment he had made of McKinley on an earlier “backbone” issue.

Now, in 1906, to push the railroad rate bill through the Senate, Roosevelt had to thread his way between Aldrich’s group demanding broad review—even Lodge came out against federal rate-making—and a band of senators, headed by Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, demanding the addition to the bill of a most controversial provision for the evaluation of railroad properties. In a desperation effort, Aldrich turned over floor leadership on the bill to one of Roosevelt’s mortal enemies, Democrat Benjamin R. Tillman of South Carolina, the old populist and outspoken racist. In a virtuoso display of personal politics Roosevelt flirted with Tillman, but pulled back when Pitchfork Ben could not carry the Democratic caucus; then TR returned to a formula of ambiguous language on the issue of court review; and finally accepted a bill without provisions for physical valuation of the railroads, to La Follette’s chagrin.

The final version of the bill, however compromised, was a notable victory for the President. The Hepburn Act empowered an enlarged Interstate Commerce Commission to fix maximum railroad rates; extended the commission’s jurisdiction to include sleeping-car companies, ferries, bridges, and terminal facilities; and made its orders binding on carriers pending a court decision, thereby placing the burden of proof on the carrier. Nestled in the bill also was a provision for ICC control of interstate oil pipelines—a provision that could only have been aimed at the Standard Oil Company and its old master, John D. Rockefeller.

Foreign Policy with the TR Brand

With teeth clenched and pince-nez flashing, Roosevelt would stride round his office, dictating letters; “The Colombia people proved absolutely impossible to deal with. They are not merely corrupt. They are governmentally utterly incompetent. They wanted to blackmail us and blackmail the French company … in spite of the plainest warnings they persisted in slitting their own throats from ear to ear.”

The President often shouted out paragraphs, punctuating them with fierce gestures as though he were haranguing a crowd. But, in the next moment, he might sit on the edge of his desk, feet dangling idly, and continue in a casual or ironic tone: “I am not as sure as you are that the only virtue we need exercise is patience. I think it is well worth considering whether we had better warn those cat-rabbits that great though our patience has been, it can be exhausted.” Sometimes he intermixed cool reason and savage denunciation, causing his secretaries alternately to marvel and to quail: “At present I feel that there are two alternatives. (1) To take up Nicaragua; (2) in some shape or way to interfere when it becomes necessary so as to secure the Panama route without further dealing with the foolish and homicidal corruptionists in Bogotá. I am not inclined to have any further dealings whatever with those Bogotá people.”

Not since the days of Andrew Jackson, it seemed, had an American President so strongly put his personal mark on the nation’s foreign policy. Teddy Roosevelt brought to diplomacy a quick temper, unquenchable energy, a rigid moral code, and a vocabulary of curses that Old Hickory would have admired. Yet at the same time Roosevelt could be charming, humorous, and a patient negotiator. His intensely personal style surprised and occasionally flustered members of the staid diplomatic establishment. “We drove out to the Rock Creek,” wrote British Ambassador Sir Mortimer Durand of one interview with the President; “he then plunged down … and made me struggle through bushes and over rocks for two hours and a half, at an impossible speed, till I was so done that I could hardly stand.” Roosevelt talked nonstop, much to the relief of the winded Englishman.

In an age when diplomacy-was still a leisurely ritual practiced by gentlemanly initiates, Roosevelt was eager to charge straight toward his goals with all the force of a locomotive. His barrages of letters, disregard of proper form, public gestures of friendship and defiance, all strained tempers from Caracas to St. Petersburg—and occasionally produced results.

The goal that Roosevelt eyed most impatiently was the building of a canal to link the Atlantic and Pacific. Schemes for digging a waterway across Central America had been a fixture in U.S. diplomacy since the 1840s, when the United States acquired California and Oregon, thus becoming a two-ocean power. The need for a canal was underlined during the war with Spain, when warships from the Pacific coast had to steam 14,700 miles, all the way around South America, to join in the fighting off Cuba.

During McKinley’s Administration, Secretary of State John Hay had already begun trying to clear away obstacles to the project. The first barrier was the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, a fifty-year-old agreement that bound America not to construct a Central American canal without the consent and participation of Britain. Hay persuaded the British to grant the United States exclusive control in exchange for a pledge not to fortify the waterway. But the Senate, inflamed by anti-British rhetoric in the election campaign of 1900, rejected the proposed pact. Hay was livid. “I felt sure that no one out of a mad house could fail to see that the advantages were all on our side,” he wrote. “But I underrated the power of ignorance and spite acting upon cowardice.” The negotiations collapsed; then McKinley died and TR became President.

The scholarly Secretary of State had been an aide to Abraham Lincoln when Roosevelt was still a toddler. Of frail health and a morbid cast of mind. Hay presented a sharp contrast to the new President, but the two men became good friends and made a working team. Under Roosevelt’s prodding and Hay’s gentle suasions, the British made further concessions. By the end of 1901, the two sides concluded a second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, which this time did survive the Senate.

The next step was to choose a site for the canal. Most congressmen—including Alabama’s Senator John T. Morgan, longtime leader of the pro-canal forces—favored a route through Nicaragua. But Roosevelt, at the advice of engineers and naval officers sent to inspect the possibilities, leaned toward the Isthmus of Panama, where a French company had dug about a third of a canal before collapsing in bankruptcy. Two members of the successor of the defunct company, lobbyist William Cromwell and engineer Philippe Bunau-Varilla, joined the President in trying to bring Congress around to the Panama route. Cromwell’s sizable cash contributions to GOP war chests won him a favorable hearing from Mark Hanna and other Republican leaders, but it was Bunau-Varilla who pulled off the flashiest coup of the campaign. When a volcano erupted in the West Indies, destroying a city of 30,000 people, the Frenchman bought ninety sets of Nicaraguan postage stamps that pictured one of that country’s volcanoes and sent one to each senator with the inscription, “An official witness of the volcanic activity of Nicaragua.” In June of 1902, after a long but futile fight by Morgan, Congress authorized Roosevelt to explore the Panamanian alternative.

Bunau-Varilla’s company avidly agreed to sell its assets in Panama to the United States for $40 million. Now all Roosevelt needed to do was to persuade Colombia, which after all owned the isthmus, to let the United States begin construction. The President offered the Colombians a cash payment of $10 million and a rent of $250,000 per year in exchange for control of the canal and a zone six miles around it. The Colombian government resisted, hoping to gain more money and a firmer guarantee of its sovereignty over the canal zone. Despite warnings from the U.S. envoy in Bogotá that his terms were unacceptable, TR kept up the pressure through the fall and winter of 1902. One Colombian ambassador resigned in disgust. The next, Tomás Herrán, fearing that the “impetuous and violent” President might seize Panama by force, signed the treaty despite instructions from Bogotá.

By unanimous vote, the Colombian Senate rejected the Hay-Herrán pact on August 12, 1903. Roosevelt fulminated, sending letters and expletives flying in every direction. Evidently the Colombians hoped to wait until October of 1904, when the lease of the French company would expire and the $40 million could be paid to Colombia instead. The obvious difficulty with waiting, for Roosevelt, was the approach of the 1904 election. If he was to get the canal started before he faced the voters, the President would either have to make a much better offer to Bogotá, open an entirely new set of negotiations with Nicaragua—or hope for some change in Panama itself. The Panamanians had revolted against Colombia a number of times in the past; would they do so again when faced with the prospect of losing the canal project forever?

“Privately,” Roosevelt wrote to a friend, “… I should be delighted if Panama were an independent State, or if it made itself so at this moment; but for me to say so publicly would amount to an instigation of a revolt, and therefore I cannot say it.”

The President’s reticence about encouraging the Panamanians was not shared by other Americans, however. In Panama City, a group of U.S. Army engineers, railroad employees, and even the American consul general became involved in the incipient plan for a revolt. In New York, in Room 1162 of the Waldorf, an emissary from the would-be insurgents, Dr. Manuel Amador, met with Cromwell—who promised $100,000 to speed up the revolt—and Bunau-Varilla. It was Bunau-Varilla who sounded out Roosevelt and the State Department as to the government’s attitude toward a revolt. Apparently satisfied with their responses, and with the news that a U.S. cruiser was on its way to the isthmus, the Frenchman urged the plotters to proceed.

Amador returned to Panama with a flag, a constitution, and a battle plan—all thoughtfully provided by Bunau-Varilla—and on November 3, 1903, the Republic of Panama was proclaimed. Acting on secret orders wired from Washington the day before, the captain of the U.S.S. Nashville prevented the Colombians from landing troops to stamp out the revolt. After more American naval forces arrived, the United States formally recognized the new nation.

Bunau-Varilla had stayed in New York to act as “Envoy Extraordinary” for the revolution. The French engineer opened negotiations with Hay and quickly struck a deal: Panama would receive the $10 million and $250,000 rent originally offered to Colombia, plus an explicit American guarantee of its independence. In return, the United States was granted absolute sovereignty over an enlarged canal zone. Bunau-Varilla signed the agreement for Panama on the evening of November 18. Just hours later, Acting President Amador arrived in Washington, only to find his new nation committed to a treaty that he had never seen. Realizing that Panama was totally dependent on the protection of the U.S. fleet, Amador and his government had little choice but to accept the deal.

The agreement was not greeted by universal acclaim in the United States. The head of the American Bar Association denounced America’s role in the insurrection as a “crime”; the New York Times termed it an “act of sordid conquest.” In the Senate, John Morgan led a concerted assault on the treaty, calling it a “caesarian operation” midwived by Roosevelt. But the country at large rallied behind the President; Morgan’s forces went down to defeat, and the senator himself reluctantly voted for the treaty in the end. Better a stolen canal than no canal at all, he and others reasoned. The 1904 Republican platform, however, expressed no shame at the outcome: “The great work of connecting the Pacific and Atlantic by a canal is at last begun, and it is due to the Republican Party.” Touting Roosevelt for a presidential term in his own right, it proclaimed that “foreign policy under his administration has not only been able, vigorous, and dignified, but in the highest degree successful.”

Roosevelt’s own account of the Panama Canal’s beginnings harked back to his days in the Badlands. Colombia was a “road agent” who had tried to hold the President up, but Roosevelt had been “quick enough” and had “nerve enough to wrest his gun from him.” In his analogy the Colombians’ gun was Panama, and TR refused to heed the protests of any “hysterical sentimentalist” who wanted him to return it.

Other observers, then and since, have also seen Panama as highway robbery—but with Roosevelt as the bandit. Nor was Roosevelt’s willingness to risk conflict confined to this one affair. He convinced Britain that he would use force to settle Alaska’s disputed boundary, thus causing the British to accept the line claimed by America. He sent gunboats to Morocco to secure the release of a person who turned out not to be a U.S. citizen. In the Caribbean, the President pressured the Germans over Venezuela, took control of the Dominican Republic’s customhouses, and sent troops to occupy revolution-torn Cuba. To the Monroe Doctrine he added the so-called Roosevelt Corollary, a warning that “flagrant cases of … wrongdoing or impotence” in the Western Hemisphere would be checked by the United States acting as an “international police power.” Once again TR painted himself as fighting outlaws as well as European powers who might take over weak Latin American states unable to pay debts or protect foreign nationals.

Roosevelt quite clearly relished conflict, confrontation, even the risk of war. “No merchant,” he declared, “no banker, no railroad magnate, no inventor of improved industrial processes, can do for any nation what can be done for it by its great fighting men. No triumph of peace can equal the armed triumph over malice domestic or foreign levy.” He was much influenced by the idea of the “competition of races,” preached by Josiah Strong and others who saw America as engaged in a tremendous struggle for the dominance of the fittest among nations. In effect, Strong’s doctrine was Social Darwinism applied to international relations—and Roosevelt subscribed to it heartily.

In the hands of Strong, Roosevelt, and other expansionists, Manifest Destiny became practically indistinguishable, as a concept, from the imperialism being practiced by the nations of Europe. The contrast with the dominant ideas of a century earlier was striking. In the early days of the American republic, with France setting all Europe aflame with revolution, men like Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson could well hope that democracy was destined to spread throughout the world. Theirs was a belief in the power of ideas—particularly in the idea of liberty. Theodore Roosevelt, President in an era when Europeans were using force to subjugate much of the globe, was wedded instead to the idea of power.

If Roosevelt, in his self-proclaimed role as policeman among nations, was open to the charge of imperialism, then other actions of his require a very different explanation. One strand in Rooseveltian diplomacy was composed of force and conflict, yet an opposing strand consisted of conciliation and quiet diplomacy. Behind the scenes, the blustering Rough Rider often acted as a force for moderation.

The most dramatic display of the “other” Roosevelt came in 1905, when he moved to end the Russo-Japanese War. Fighting had broken out a year earlier, when the two powers clashed over their rival interests in Manchuria and Korea. Japan won a series of naval victories and most of the land battles, only to find her economy in critical condition as the war dragged on. The Russians, meanwhile, were bedeviled with internal turmoil, terrible incompetence in their army, and the disastrous loss of their Baltic fleet at Tsushima Straits, after its epic voyage around the world. Neither side could afford to continue the struggle, yet neither would sue for peace. In desperation over the stalemate, Japan turned to Roosevelt in April of 1905.

Initially TR had favored Japan. “You must not breathe it to anyone,” he wrote TR, Jr., after the battle of Port Arthur; “I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory.” The Japanese seemed able and intelligent, while the Russians annoyed him with their “supine carelessness” and “contemptuous effrontery.” Throughout the war, Japan’s diplomats courted Roosevelt’s further goodwill by joining him for hikes and tennis games, arranging wrestling lessons for him, and deluging him with books on the island kingdom. Roosevelt was responsive to this kind of personal approach. He tended to draw advice from his “Tennis Cabinet,” a loose group of friends and sports cronies that already included several foreign diplomats. But apparently the Japanese miscalculated the effect of their efforts. Educated by his crash course of readings—and by the string of Japanese military successes—Roosevelt began to wonder aloud whether the Japanese “did not lump Russians, English, Americans, Germans, all of us, simply as white devils inferior to themselves” and were planning to “beat us in turn.”

Aware of the big stakes involved, Roosevelt brought to the peace-making process both his vigor and his finesse. While bombarding Czar Nicholas with plans and suggestions for a peace conference, he worked on the Japanese diplomats, urging them to moderate their terms. Notes and telegrams flowed between the President and officials in London, Paris, and Berlin as Roosevelt sought for every opening to influence the belligerents. In June, convinced that at last he would receive a favorable response, he formally invited Japan and Russia to come together for direct negotiations. The two powers consented, designating the United States as the site of their conference.

At the U.S. naval base in Kittery, Maine, just across the river from Portsmouth, the two sides confronted each other. From Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt followed every nuance of the negotiations. It soon became clear that the talks would deadlock; Russia refused to concede defeat or pay an indemnity, while Japan would give up none of its military gains. “I am having my hair turned gray by dealing with the Russian and Japanese peace negotiators,” TR fumed to his son Kermit. “The Japanese ask too much, but the Russians … are so stupid and won’t tell the truth.” Again the telegraph wires to St. Petersburg burned with new arguments and proposals. First the Japanese and then the Russians were invited down to Oyster Bay for a private talk with the President. From Japan’s representative, he secured a compromise on two of the four points still at issue. Then, returning from a cruise beneath Long Island Sound in an experimental submarine, Roosevelt offered the Russians a change of wording that helped put a better face on their concessions. His skillful interventions helped to produce a treaty of peace.

Roosevelt displayed the same firm but gentle touch that made the Treaty of Portsmouth possible in other controversies between the major powers. When war threatened to break out between France and Germany over Morocco in 1905, the President again provided his good offices for settling the dispute. America’s participation in the ensuing Algeciras Conference was greeted with skepticism in Congress, but Roosevelt took considerable pride in the peaceful outcome. He also was the moving force behind the 1907 Hague Conference, which denounced the use of military force to collect foreign debts and tried to establish limits of civilized conduct in war. Watching the emergence of Roosevelt as a “diplomatist of high rank,” the London Morning Post professed to be amazed. “He has displayed … great tact, great foresight, and finesse really extraordinary. Alone … he met every situation as it arose, shaped events to suit his purpose, and showed remarkable patience, caution, and moderation.”

Roosevelt, notes biographer Elting Morison, had a “horror of anarchy, disorder, and … wanton bloodshed.” His experiences with the chaos of modern life were intensely personal: he lost a cherished wife in childbirth and a beloved younger brother to alcoholism, witnessed frontier violence, ascended to the presidency through the whim of an assassin, and watched his friend John Hay die as the Portsmouth negotiations commenced. Roosevelt courted strife because he could not seem to avoid it, yet he also was able to rise above the battle, to convert struggle into a personal and political source of power. “TR’s supporters focused on his ability to master seemingly uncontrollable forces and, in so doing, advance the cause of moral order,” according to Robert Dallek. The need to control events underlay Roosevelt’s words and beliefs as well as his actions; it was the thread that united TR the imperialist with TR the peacemaker.

Solid accomplishments were the only adequate response to life’s natural disorder. “The chief pleasure really worth having,” Roosevelt confided to a friend, “… is the doing well of some work that ought to be done.” Thus no prospect delighted him more than the actual construction of the isthmian canal. Although no President had ever before left the country while in office, Roosevelt could not keep away from Panama.

The President sailed to the Canal Zone on a battleship, purposely timing his arrival to coincide with the height of the rainy season so as to see the site at its most daunting. The weather pelted him as he rode through the streets of Panama City with Amador, wilted his white suit as he climbed aboard a huge steam shovel to do a little digging on his own, and threatened to derail his train as he inspected the locks. Everything had to be explained to him: engineers’ salaries, the crews’ kitchens, the controls of the various equipment.

“This is one of the great works of the world,” he assured the assembled diggers. “It is a greater work than you, yourselves, at the moment realize.”

On his return from Panama, Roosevelt had to take hold of a more prickly situation. The San Francisco Board of Education, under pressure to stem the flow of Japanese immigrants to California, had passed in 1906 an order that segregated all oriental students in the city’s public schools. Labeling the segregation order a “wicked absurdity,” the President tried to bring pressure to bear on the westerners, only to find himself stymied by the constraints of federalism. As Japanese indignation and Californian defiance mounted, TR turned on the charm instead. The mayor of San Francisco and seven school board members accepted his invitation to come to the White House, and in a series of meetings refereed by Hay’s successor, Elihu Root, Roosevelt and the local officials reached an understanding. San Francisco repealed the segregation order, and the President undertook to persuade the Japanese to limit their immigration to America.

The same mix of finesse and force was evident in Roosevelt’s negotiations with Japan. To fulfill his promise to the San Franciscans, Roosevelt sent another friend, Secretary of War William Howard Taft, to Tokyo. The genial Taft quickly found a face-saving formula for the Japanese: both sides would enter into a Gentlemen’s Agreement to reduce immigration to the other’s country. Roosevelt continued his efforts to assuage the Japanese and, in 1908, Root and Japan’s ambassador, Baron Kogoro Takahira, reached an agreement to maintain the status quo in the Pacific and uphold the continued independence of China. Both Taft’s and Root’s understandings were embodied in executive agreements rather than formal treaties; Roosevelt was not going to stake the fragile détente he had built in the Pacific on the uncertain outcome of a Senate ratification fight.

Yet while TR wooed Japan, he also sought to show the Tokyo government that he was not negotiating out of fear. In the summer of 1907, he conceived of a grand gesture of American might—a triumphant procession of the U.S. fleet around the world, with its first stops to include Japan. The sixteen sleek white battleships, many of them launched during his term, were other tangible proofs to TR of his success in wielding the power of the United States. In sending them to what the fleet commander thought might be a “feast, a frolic, or a fight,” Roosevelt was putting to the test the prestige of his personal leadership.

In its fourteen-month tour the fleet encountered much feasting, in Tokyo and elsewhere, some frolic—and a number of disturbing technical failures. The tremendous diplomatic success of the cruise tended to hide the fact that America could not fuel or repair a globe-circling navy, and that the ships themselves had distinct mechanical problems—ruptured boiler tubes, cracked armor plates, defective shell hoists. Nor did Roosevelt anticipate that his show of force would encourage navalists in Tokyo to speed up the expansion of the Japanese fleet, undermining the balance of power in the Orient.

Ironically, the cruise of the “Great White Fleet” pointed out the limits to Roosevelt’s reliance on the force of personality. Even as vigorous an executive as TR was unable to control all the factors at work on the disorderly world scene, or to judge correctly the consequences of all his actions. At home, too, there were forces for change at work, forces that also threatened to evade Roosevelt’s controlling hand.

Reform: Leadership and Power

At the time Roosevelt entered the White House, a new and intoxicating feeling of reform and change was pervading the nation. People were still reading George and Bellamy and Norris and the rest; an older generation could remember the exhortations of Phillips, Garrison, and Douglass, of Anthony, Stanton, and the Grimké sisters. But a different breed of reform leaders was now pushing forward and gaining public attention. The single-taxer Tom L. Johnson gained election as mayor of Cleveland, and the reform mayor of Toledo was winning reelection as “Golden Rule” Jones. A young reporter named Josiah Flynt, who had lived with tramps and pictured tramping as just another way of living, was starting a series on graft for McClure’s. The same journal was publishing Lincoln Steffens on bossism in St. Louis and Ida Tarbell on the Standard Oil Company.

Time was, Mr. Dooley opined to Mr. Hennessey, when magazines were very calming to the mind. “But now whin I pick me fav’rite magazine off th’ flure, what do I find? Ivrything has gone wrong…. All th’ pomes be th’ lady authoressesses that used to begin: ‘Oh, moon, how fair!’ now begin: ‘Oh, Ogden Armour, how awful!’ … Graft ivrywhere. ‘Graft in th’ Insurance Comp’nies,’ ‘Graft in Congress,’ …‘Graft be an Old Grafter,’ … ‘Graft in Its Relations to th’ Higher Life’….”

Others shared Mr. Dooley’s perplexity. How could reform become so popular, so fashionable, in a land that had been enjoying McKinley’s Full Dinner Pail, a nation that had easily bested an ancient European power, a society on the whole quite satisfied with itself? Time would bring some clues. People enjoying material well-being are more likely to move to higher needs and aspirations—such as the pursuit of liberty, equality, and happiness—than those desperately scrabbling for food and shelter. But to move people to higher levels of moral behavior, leadership is required, and not only was Roosevelt all too ready to provide moral leadership, but a “second cadre” consisting of hundreds of zealous young publishers, editors, and writers was now taking the lead.

The striking aspect of these two levels of leadership was the engagement between them. Roosevelt knew many of the reformers personally—he knew Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, Finley Peter Dunne, Norman Hapgood, William Allen White, Ray Stannard Baker. He read them, wrote to them, scolded them, praised them, inspired them. They read him, talked with him, corresponded with him, alternately loved him and hated him, sometimes at the same time. It was this mutually stimulating relationship that, in large part, pushed the President toward increasingly radical positions. The reformers liked his style, his gusto, his personality. “Teddy was reform in a derby,” William Allen White said, “the gayest, cockiest, most fashionable derby you ever saw.”

Perhaps even more important, however, in the rise of reform were other types of leaders—the inventors, printers, investors, and publishers who were developing new types of magazines that became the vehicles for disseminating reform ideas. The 1890s had seen the rise of the “cheap magazine,” selling for only ten cents but offering excellent illustrations with the help of improved engraving, lively and varied editorial fare, graphic descriptions of science and invention, and articles with broad popular appeal. The fine old journals—Harper’s, the Atlantic, Scribner’s, and the like—continued to flourish editorially and financially on the whole, but the ten-centers were stealing the show.

Their rise—and indeed the explosion of the whole magazine population—was as sensational as some of their feature articles. The number of periodicals in the United States rose from about 3,300 in 1885 to about 6,000 in 1905, thus almost doubling in one generation. Perhaps 7,500 magazines were actually founded in this twenty-year period, but many failed. The variety was also astonishing. “There is scarcely a province in the entire realm of science and scholarship which is now without an official organ in America,” the Philosophical Review stated as it added itself to the number. “Magazines, magazines, magazines!” exclaimed one of them. “The news-stands are already groaning under the heavy load, and there are still more coming.”

One of the earliest and most impressive of the ten-centers was McClure’s. Founded by young Samuel S. McClure and a college classmate, the journal almost collapsed when its first issue appeared during the slump of 1893 and 12,000 of the 20,000 copies were returned. But with the conviction that “if I like a thing,” then “millions will like it,” McClure found a winning editorial formula in articles about Napoleon, Lincoln, and other heroes. He also pridefully published Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, Stephen Crane, and, unknowingly, a convict named O. Henry who sent a Christmas story to McClure through an intermediary. Part genius, part madman, and part inexplicable, in Eric Goldman’s profile, McClure was less a great reformer than a superb editor, but he became more and more engulfed in the reform wave as his investigating reporters helped boost his circulation to 370,000.

And what a remarkable stable of reporters they were—not only Flynt and Steffens and Tarbell but Ray Stannard Baker, Burton J. Hendrick, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and—later—Jane Addams. And as McClure’s circulation swelled, competing journals looked for crusading journalists. The Ladies’ Home Journal published Edward Bok on patent medicine evils; Everybody’s, Thomas W. Lawson on crooked finance and Charles Edward Russell on the beef trust; Cosmopolitan, David Graham Phillips on “The Treason of the Senate.” When McClure seemed to succumb to grandiose visions of out-combining the combines against which his reporters wrote, Baker, Steffens, and Tarbell left him, enlisted White and Dunne, and bought the American Magazine for more crusading.

To many, Steffens seemed the most gifted of the lot. Reared in an affluent home, in the half-commercial, half-rural hubbub of Sacramento, educated in philosophy and ethics at Berkeley, Heidelberg, Munich, Leipzig, London, and Paris, he found newspaper jobs in New York City in the mid-1890s before joining McClure’s. There he began a long career of exposing bossism, traction magnates, municipal corruption, timber frauds, and other perversions of democracy. Published under eye-catching titles—”The Shamelessness of St. Louis,” “Pittsburgh: Hell with the Lid Lifted,” “Philadelphia: A Defeated People”—his exposés won enormous interest in high places and low. Steffens had a knack for gaining the confidence of bosses and magnates, getting them to converse with amazing candor, and printing the exchanges with apparent line-by-line accuracy. But even more, he presented his subjects, their views, and their failings with such humorous tolerance and philosophical understanding as to raise his work far above the level of mere reportage.

In the long run, however, Ida Tarbell may have had more influence on reform, if only because at the start she penetrated to the heart of economic power in the form of the Standard Oil Company and stayed with it. She had reason to dislike Rockefeller and his ilk: her father, a stalwart Republican, had been forced out of business by the oil tycoon, and her mother, reduced to peddling milk while her husband labored in the oil fields, poured out her feelings to Ida about the twin evils of whiskey and monopoly. After winning some fame for her series on Napoleon for McClure’s, she won an assignment from McClure to write a detailed study of Standard Oil and of Rockefeller, the “Napoleon among businessmen,” as the press dubbed him. On the basis of five years of intensive research in archives and corporation records, including some of Henry Demarest Lloyd’s collection of documents, Tarbell produced a series of accounts “so heavily laden with questionable business maneuvers, so bound up with bribery, fraud, coercion, double-dealing and outright violence,” in Louis Filler’s summary, “that the fact of efficiency and organization inevitably gave place to the question of whether such a concern had the right to exist.”

Few could doubt the combustibility of reform, reformer, and Roosevelt after passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. For years, Department of Agriculture reformers headed by Harvey Wiley had been pressing for federal legislation to require accurate labeling of foods and drugs. A bill had twice passed the House, but Senate approval had been held up by an alliance of conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats. Aldrich, deriding the “chemists” in the Agriculture Department, claimed that the people’s “liberty” was at stake. Then exposés of the patent medicine industry in Collier’s by Samuel Hopkins Adams and a horrifying portrait of the meat-packing industry by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle aroused middle-class public anger to its peak.

Upton Sinclair—a new face on the reform scene. A product of City College of New York and Columbia, Sinclair had been a failed novelist until he produced a novel in which a failed novelist committed suicide. He won more attention with Manassas, a Civil War novel, and then took a $500 retainer to visit Chicago’s packing industry and write a novel about it. Sick at heart after seven weeks in Packingtown, Sinclair returned to his New Jersey home and poured into The Jungle all that he had seen of workers’ misery and the industry’s nauseating conditions.

Naturally Roosevelt read The Jungle. And after a long lecture to the young author in a letter that warned of the perils of socialism and “men of hysterical temperament,” he concluded with a handwritten postscript: “But all this has nothing to do with the fact that the specific evils you point out shall, if their existence be proved, and if I have power, be eradicated.” Roosevelt’s investigations soon proved that existence, and he gained power by threatening to publicize the investigations, pressing key congressmen unmercifully, and after some strenuous give-and-take, settling for essentially the measures he wanted. The food bill made illegal the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated or falsely labeled food and drugs in interstate commerce; the Meat Inspection Act, passed the same day (June 30, 1906), provided for federal inspection of companies selling meats in interstate commerce.

Buoyed by the winds of reform, propelled by Old Guard opposition and his own reaction to it, Theodore Roosevelt during his last two years in office veered tempestuously to the left. This shift was partly rhetorical, but much of it embraced a series of most explicit proposals to Congress and the public. In December 1906, not content with passage of the Hepburn bill, he declared that all big business should be subject to federal inspection of its books, publicity of its accounts, and—to the satisfaction of La Follette—physical valuation of its railroad properties. He called again for a federal inheritance tax. He urged “compulsory investigation” of major labor disputes. After having long contended that he was an umpire and balance wheel between radicalism and conservatism, by 1907 he was, in George Mowry’s words, “trying to keep the left center together.”

Left center was far too left for the Republican party of McKinley, Aldrich, and Cannon. Roosevelt’s long struggle for conservation sharpened the divisions between “presidential” and “congressional” Republicans. Within a year of taking office he was pressing for passage of the Newlands bill, which would set aside proceeds of public-land sales in states in the South and West to pay for building and maintaining irrigation projects. This measure passed despite the noncooperation of Cannon, whose environmental views were summed up in his remark, “Not one cent for scenery.” While Congress also passed other conservation measures, Roosevelt relied more on his ample executive power, granted in previous legislation, to protect the nation’s resources by withdrawing lands from private exploitation, preventing lands from overgrazing, safeguarding forest lands, and curbing the depredations of cattle ranchers, sheepmen, mining companies, and timber cutters. When, in 1907, Congress amended an agriculture appropriations bill to ban the creation of new forest reserves in several western states, Roosevelt, rather than vainly fight the amendment, and with the help of his Chief Forester, Gifford Pinchot, in a series of “midnight” proclamations added twenty-one more forest reserves just before signing the amended bill—a foiling of Congress that gave the President immense satisfaction.

Roosevelt could not forget, however, that the main challenge to presidential and popular power came not from the congressional Old Guard or the parochial interests it represented but from big business. He knew too that corporate power did not speak with a single voice. Since Roosevelt tended to personalize that power—indeed, all power—he tended to divide his business foes into “good guys” and “bad guys,” or at least into bad guys and not-so-bad guys. What he was dealing with, in reality, was the continuing thrusts of the two capitalisms and their impact on politics.

One man personified Roosevelt’s bad capitalism—John D. Rockefeller. Not only had the oil magnate hired a substitute to serve for him during the Civil War, he was not a “gentleman” of old family wealth, eastern society, or college education. More fundamentally, Standard Oil, with its competitive methods and its power over transportation—railroads, pipelines, ships—was the biggest and most powerful combination of them all. Roosevelt knew of its reputation for “buying” senators and congressmen; during his 1904 campaign, he piously ordered the return of contributions from officials of Standard Oil. On the basis of investigations by the Bureau of Corporations, which he had persuaded Congress to establish, the President in 1905 reported that Standard Oil had wrung enormous profits from secret rail rates. By 1907, the federal government had seven suits pending against the corporation and its subsidiaries.

Even these challenges to Standard Oil hardly reflected Roosevelt’s bitter hostility to Rockefeller and the men he associated with him, such as Edward H. Harriman. Time and again during Roosevelt’s full term, his letters and conversations turned into diatribes against their “trickery,” “scoundrelism,” and sheer evil. He was convinced, moreover, that powerful corporate heads—often vulgar nouveaux riches, to boot—were plotting with their tools in press and bar and pulpit and classroom to gang up on him, discredit him, block his programs. He welcomed the news that Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis had fined Standard Oil over $29 million for violating the Elkins Act—and doubtless welcomed the ensuing fury in the business world against both the judge and himself.

But he still had to contend with the mighty Morgan, a capitalist of a different color. The banker was, of course, a gentleman with whom one could make arrangements. But he was a gentleman of power—of pervasive national influence and, with his wide international investments, of world stature. And Roosevelt needed such a banker friend in 1907. Worldwide credit expansion and price inflation amid the general prosperity of the time produced strained conditions in money markets in the United States as well as abroad. Rockefeller and other business leaders were already admonishing Roosevelt that the “political adventurer’s” attacks on capital were undermining business and risking a slump. After warning signals mounted in the summer, Roosevelt directed his Secretary of the Treasury, George Cortelyou, to work with the House of Morgan to shore up the securities market. When the Knickerbocker Trust Company closed its doors and a run threatened other banks and brokerages, the Morgan people proposed that the United States Steel Corporation be allowed to purchase controlling assets in the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company to prevent a collapse of the whole banking structure.

But there was a hitch: Would such an action violate the antitrust laws? After a hurried trip to Washington through the night, Morgan’s men judge Elbert H. Gary and Henry C. Frick called on the President and gained what they wanted—a statement by Roosevelt “that while of course I could not advise them to take the action proposed, I felt it no public duty of mine to interpose any objection.” Thus reassured, the House of Morgan did help rally the market and avert further panic—and then proceeded to add the rich Tennessee coal and iron properties to the vast holdings of Morgan’s U.S. Steel.

Roosevelt publicly congratulated “those conservative and substantial businessmen who in this crisis have acted with such wisdom and public spirit,” as compared with the bad capitalists’ “dishonest dealing and speculative enterprise.” Yet to share power on such equal terms even with the Morgans and the other “good” capitalists cost Roosevelt self-esteem, for his esteem for himself was closely allied to his feeling of possessing power to do good. More than ever, now, the issue for him was stronger federal supervision and regulation of big business and big money. In his annual message to Congress in December 1907, he called for an income as well as an inheritance tax, national regulation of interstate business, postal savings banks, and extension of the eight-hour workday to all employees of the federal government and of its contractors. Then, the next month, his sense of desperation and frustration overflowed in what Harbaugh called “one of the most bitter and radical special messages on record.”

He struck out at the “representatives of predatory wealth—of the wealth accumulated on a giant scale by all forms of iniquity, ranging from the oppression of wage workers to unfair and unwholesome methods of crushing out competition, and to defrauding the public by stock jobbing and the manipulation of securities.” Last year’s panic, he said, had been caused not by the Administration but by the “speculative folly and the flagrant dishonesty of a few men of great wealth.” He then even named the heads of the Standard Oil Company and the Santa Fe Railroad as examples of men who had fought with unlimited money and unscrupulous craft every measure for honesty in business that had been passed during his Administration.

To Roosevelt, the cure for all this was not to break big business down into small, inefficient units through trust-busting, but strong, steady, central federal control, with big business serving at best as junior partner. But there was a fateful contradiction in his views. How could a political and governmental system as deeply corrupted as the American exert effective and responsible control over the corporations whose influence reached into every sector of American life? No one had excoriated that system more sharply than Roosevelt. In this very special message, he had denounced politicians as well as editors and lawyers who were “purchased” by big business and were “but puppets who move as the strings are pulled.” How could he propose putting corporations under the control of legislators who tended to be either radical extremists or corporate pawns, under judges who, on the one hand, “truckled” to the mob or, on the other, failed to “stop the abuses of the criminal rich”? If neither legislature nor judiciary could do the job, who could?

Roosevelt’s answer to this question was of course the executive branch, the presidency, or really himself. He had been vigilant in fighting off what he viewed as excessive judicial or congressional control of policy-making bureaucrats. Yet he could hardly contend that the small, patronage-ridden, graft-tainted executive branch could handle the enormous task of corporate control. The most potentially powerful national organization that might deal with collective corporate power on at least equal terms was the Republican party, with its own roots in virtually every locality outside the South. But the GOP, with its hundreds of competing leaders in Congress, the executive, and the states, represented inchoate strength at best, and Roosevelt had done little with it other than use it to protect and enhance his personal authority.

This left the presidency as the only feasible means of corporate control, and no one had greater confidence in the integrity, wisdom, and determination of Theodore Roosevelt than Theodore Roosevelt. Yet he knew that “one-man” presidential power was anathema to most Americans. The Revolutionists of 1775–83 had revolted in large part against executive “tyranny”; the constitution makers of 1787–89 had hemmed in the chief executive with a host of checks and balances; some of the great moments of American history had seen “liberty-loving” legislators and citizens pitted against governors and Presidents. Not since Lincoln had a President exploited his constitutional and extraconstitutional authority as intensively as had Roosevelt, or made fuller use of his presidential powers of publicity—“the bully pulpit”—and the arts of bargaining, rewarding, punishing, conniving, co-opting, persuading, threatening, manipulating, cooperating, of the strategy of almost indiscriminate use of the carrot and the stick.

Lincoln had civil war as an excuse; Roosevelt had no war. But he had a temperament, and this was the problem. Increasingly, during his years in the White House, he exhibited the kind of volatility, emotionalism, anger, and overreactiveness, and indulged in the type of self-aggrandizement through personal politicking and policy-making, that had always worried prudent republicans about executive excess. At a Gridiron Club dinner in April 1906, he had suddenly and unaccountably turned on his journalistic reform friends and foes by branding them as “muckrakers,” meaning the person who “never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck-rake” and hence became “not an incitement to good” but “one of the most potent forces for evil.” At a later Gridiron Club affair, Roosevelt castigated senators to their faces on their lack of respect for the presidential office, only to be handed a senatorial lecture in return on presidential respect for the Senate; then he stalked out.

Some of his aberrations seemed more quixotic than dangerous. He campaigned for “simplified spelling” and even ordered the government printer to use “nite” and “thoro” until the House of Representatives instructed the printer otherwise. He lashed out at “nature-fakirs” who imputed human qualities to animals; it was not the sort of thing a President should do, he admitted, but “I … proved unable to contain myself.” Neither did one of the “fakirs,” who denied that Roosevelt was a naturalist: “Every time Mr. Roosevelt gets near the heart of a wild thing he invariably puts a bullet through it.”

But the most poignant and significant of Roosevelt’s aberrations was the “Brownsville affair.” A gang of black soldiers quartered near this Texas town conducted a wild midnight raid in which a white bartender was killed. The President ordered the incident investigated, but when no one in the whole black regiment would talk, he directed that the entire complement be “discharged without honor” and “forever barred from enlistment.” This punishment of 160 men—including six Medal of Honor winners— without a trial, military or civil, left a stain on the record of a man who had brooked Southern fury by having Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House, appointed or reappointed worthy blacks to federal positions over much white opposition, and in general tried to accord blacks as much recognition and status as the political situation allowed. All was forgotten during the furor over Brownsville.

To the critics of Roosevelt’s abuse of executive power, he had one compelling answer; a President did not govern for life, he had only three or four years to do his work, and then had to yield. And Roosevelt’s term was to end March 4, 1909. The President had long since selected William Howard Taft as the best candidate to succeed him, and now he stuck to that commitment despite his conviction—which he did not conceal—that he himself could have the nomination by merely lifting his finger. Taft would indeed serve as a check on Rooseveltian power, for he dropped many of Roosevelt’s people, pursued an intensive trust-busting policy in which Roosevelt had little faith, and allied himself with the conservative elements of the Republican party in Congress and country that Roosevelt had battled.

All this lay in the future. For the moment, Roosevelt could leave office knowing that he had been a vigorous and effective leader. If he had not solved the enigma of how a representative republic deals with concentrated economic power, at least he had sharply posed the issue and offered some answers. If he had not solved the questions of the role of strong leadership in a democracy, of the role of party in stabilizing and empowering leadership, of the powerful veto power left in the hands of the Congress and of the judiciary, at least he had made people think about these questions.

And possibly he had helped avert tumult and rebellion. After Mr. Dooley had told his friend Hennessey that he was reading so much about graft that he had to lock “th’ cash dhrawer” at night, Hennessey claimed to have even sniffed a revolution. Mr. Dooley hastened to reassure him:

“Th’ noise ye hear is not th’ first gun iv a rivolution. It’s on’y th’ people iv th’ United States batin’ a carpet.”

CHAPTER 10

The Cauldron of Leadership

THE RISING WINTER STORM outside seemed hardly to chill the spirits of a small group gathered in the White House on the eve of March 4, 1909. The next day William Howard Taft would be inaugurated as twenty-seventh President of the United States, and President Roosevelt had invited the President-elect and Mrs. Taft to stay overnight in the home they would occupy for at least four years. Around the table in the State Dining Room the talk ran fast and free, punctuated by Roosevelt’s high-pitched chortling and Taft’s huge booming laughter.

The two Republican leaders had much to celebrate. Their party had won all but two presidential elections since the Civil War. It had turned back the spellbinding Bryan three times. Republicans utterly dominated the legislatures of a swath of Northern states. The party had produced a series of leaders ranging from the safe and solid to the statesmanlike and even innovative. Symbolizing the power and continuity of the Grand Old Party on this very evening was the presence of Elihu Root, McKinley’s Secretary of War, Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, now with six years ahead as senator from New York.

Yet all was not well that March evening under the bright chandeliers of the dining room. Taft was apprehensive about being President; he had wanted an administrative and especially a judicial career. He admired Roosevelt’s political skill and sheer energy but had neither the desire nor the ability to become a strenuous President in the Teddy Roosevelt mold. He agreed with virtually all of Roosevelt’s policies, but not always with the rambunctious way the President had pursued them; and, like other party leaders, he had been worried by Roosevelt’s sharp turn to the left in the year or two just past. As for Roosevelt, he liked “Will,” this big hearty jovial fellow who had served him so well in the Cabinet and provided warm personal encouragement. In endorsing Taft, he had said that rarely had two public men “ever been so much at one in all the essentials of their beliefs and practices.” He expected that his chosen heir would carry on his policies. But he had doubts about Taft’s resolution and commitment.

“He’s all right,” the President said to Mark Sullivan when the reporter had stopped in earlier that day. “He means well and he’ll do his best. But he’s weak. They’ll get around him. They’ll”—the President put his shoulder against Sullivan’s and pushed— “they’ll lean against him.” But neither the new nor the retiring President expressed his misgivings to the other. In the morning, as they sat down to breakfast, a heavy snow was falling outside, and Roosevelt exclaimed to Taft that he had known there would be a blizzard when he went out, but it would be over as soon as “I can do no further harm to the Constitution.” Taft said: “It is my storm. I always knew it would be a cold day when I became President of the United States.” Within a year, friends of the two men were drawing them apart. Within two years, they would become mortal political enemies, and within three, each would have killed the other politically. Neither man had expected such a fight. Neither man wanted it. Their gunplay at the high noon of Republicanism emerged from conflicts of personality, economic interests, political institutions, and—above all—ideology.

Taft, TR, and the Two Republican Parties

Taft proposed to be a party unifier and moderate. He was well aware that the Grand Old Party embraced two sets of traditions, leaderships, loyalties, and doctrines. But even Taft, a shrewd appraiser, could not fully comprehend how wide was the gulf between the party regulars, under their conservative Old Guard leadership, and the progressives or reformers or insurgents, as they were variously called, carrying on the great mugwump tradition of part of the party. Nor could he see that this gulf was deepening when he entered the White House, even apart from any threat from Theodore Roosevelt, who was leaving for a long trip to stalk lions in Africa and potentates in Europe.

For a time, Taft followed a wavering middle course between the party regulars and progressives. He planned to continue the Square Deal policies, to ask Congress for tariff revision downward, to administer existing reform legislation, such as antitrust, more tenaciously—though less flamboyantly—than Roosevelt had. On the other hand, he kept some distance from the progressive leadership; he cramped his exercise of authority because of his deeply held views as to constitutional limitations on presidential power; and he filled his Cabinet with corporation lawyers, conspicuously replacing the Roosevelt men. And all the while, he sought to propitiate the absent Teddy and his present friends.

Taft’s middle way was doomed from the start. He was dealing not simply with two wings of the party, which could be kept in harness through long accepted ways of distributing patronage and moderating policy; he was confronting two diverging structures—leadership-followership structures. The Old Guard leadership was rooted in the regular party organizations stretching across the North, in the federal and state officials who lived off patronage, in the malapportioned and gerrymandered state legislatures that overrepresented conservative rural areas and elected standpatters to the United States Senate, in the party offices and committee chairmanships in Congress. The Old Guard regulars had consolidated their power year after year because of the huge majorities they had rolled up over Democratic candidates, and during the first years of the new century they were still at the apogee of their power.

The progressive leadership spoke for a new breed of mugwumps, entrenched in some states and districts, especially in the West, but emerging mainly from the nation’s growing professional and business elements both East and West. Most of them born and bred Republicans, they had often kept their distance from country populists, silverites, and labor groups, but many still passionately embraced the old causes of political purity and mugwump reform. By 1909, this was the party of the Square Deal, headed by Roosevelt and his reform leaders in Washington and the states.

The stiffest challenge to Taft’s middle way was posed by the progressives’ attack on Cannonism and Aldrichism. In the House, Joe Cannon, after six years in the speakership, had established an autocratic leadership that rivaled Czar Reed’s of old. A bantam rooster of a man, as coarse in manner as he was reactionary in doctrine, Cannon controlled the committee system through his power to hand out choice committee memberships. Taft disliked both Cannon and Cannonism, and might have heeded the rumblings of George Norris and other progressives who planned to strip the Speaker of his appointing powers. But the President crumbled when Cannon and Senator Nelson Aldrich warned him to his face that a defeat for Cannon would jeopardize the President’s program, especially tariff revision.

Rather, they offered him a deal: if the President stood by Cannon, the Speaker would help carry out the Republican platform. Taft agreed, to the consternation of the insurgents; soon he was out on the hustings, embracing Aldrich politically and Cannon literally. Then he had to stand by helplessly as the Speaker stripped rebel congressmen of choice committee assignments and continued to promote his own brand of Republicanism.

Later Roosevelt would attack Taft for his “bungling leadership,” which Roosevelt blamed for splitting the party. Taft was indeed inept in dealing with other politicians, especially progressive leaders. But he was no fool. He simply lacked the personal qualities necessary to carry out his strategy of “party unity.” To maintain links with both wings, to play one group against the other, to avoid alienating either side for good, called for rocklike self-confidence, unflagging energy, a firm direction, and a willingness to exploit and even expand presidential power. These strengths were not Taft’s. He lacked the steady willpower and purpose that enables strong leaders, with all their twists and turns, to move toward their goals; rather, as Secretary of Commerce and Labor Charles Nagel remarked, Taft had only the stubbornness of the uncertain man.

He was indolent, too; his personal political voltage was not high and steady enough to energize the circuits of power leading out of the White House. Doubtless, part of the problem was his sheer corpulence, though by a mighty effort he had reduced his weight from 326 to 250 pounds. He believed that the Constitution restricted presidential power, and this inhibited him from “interfering” in the bill-making process during the early crucial stages on the Hill. He was too high-minded to use some of Roosevelt’s blustering, bullying methods; and he lacked what Mowry called Roosevelt’s catlike political touch.

The more Taft succumbed to the Old Guard embrace, the more he was caught in the network of obligations and pressures surrounding the congressional party. He became more psychologically dependent on the Old Guard too. “When you and Senator Aldrich are both absent from the Senate,” the President wrote to the extreme right-wing Senator Hale of Maine in June 1910, “I yearn for the presence of an old parliamentary hand.” To Aldrich he wrote: “I long for your presence.” He was on such good terms with the Old Guard leadership that when Chauncey Depew in a jocular mood put his hand on the President’s huge stomach and asked, “What are you going to name it when it comes?” Taft shot back, “Well, if it is a boy, I’ll call it William; if it’s a girl, I’ll call it Theodora; but if it turns out to be just wind, I’ll call it Chauncey!”

Taft’s marriage of convenience with the Old Guard helped bring him some major legislative victories during his first two years in the White House. Congress passed a controversial tariff act which Taft absurdly termed the best bill ever passed by the Republican party; the Mann-Elkins Act placing telephone and telegraph companies under the Interstate Commerce Commission; a postal savings bank law; and the Mann Act prohibiting interstate transportation of women for immoral purposes. But the more Taft compromised with the regulars to pass his bills, the more he frayed the frail cords still connecting him with the progressives.

Theodore Roosevelt returned home in June 1910. He was fifty-one, restless, and jobless. He was apprehensive about Taft and the political situation, about himself and his ability to resist the siren call of ambition and power. His reception in New York—a welcome by the battleship South Carolina, a twenty-one gun salute followed by bugle calls, a reunion with his kinsfolk, including his young niece Eleanor and her husband Franklin, and a monster parade up Broadway headed by Rough Riders—boosted his self-esteem without slaking his ambition. And as he settled back into Oyster Bay life and met with old political cronies, his moral indignation began to accelerate.

Even while in Africa, runners had brought him news of Taft’s dalliance with the Old Guard. Roosevelt’s United States Forester, Gifford Pinchot, had intercepted the former President in Paris with a long bill of complaints from outraged progressives. In particular, Pinchot had filled his ears about the most sensational political issue that had boiled up during Roosevelt’s absence—Taft’s sacking of Pinchot after the forester publicly attacked Taft’s Interior Secretary, Richard A. Ballinger, for harming conservation in order to aid corporate interests. Republican regulars, including Roosevelt’s old and close friend Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, urged on him that any man who publicly attacked his superior was asking to be fired, but to Roosevelt it was a moral issue.

For a time, Roosevelt, despite his rising feeling, tried to follow a moderate and middle way. He could not forget his longtime friendship with good old Will, and he preferred not to antagonize the rank-and-file Republican regulars; yet progressive leaders were pressing him to move against the Old Guard. He tried to be a “regular with a conscience,” staying in touch with regulars like Lodge and with Taft, whom he placed in that category, while pouring out his progressive views in speeches and correspondence. But his heart was no longer in moderation or centrism. He had never had a more unpleasant summer, he told Root.

Roosevelt could no more keep to his middle course than Taft had been able to a year earlier. His indignation soared as Taft moved into closer embrace with the Old Guard. He now dismissed his successor as a man who had been a good first lieutenant but was not fit to be captain. Taft’s shift toward the right had left a leadership vacuum and progressives were now turning to Roosevelt to supply it. A “Roosevelt party” indeed stretched across the country, founded in the moralistic mugwump tradition, rooted in the nation’s social and political fabric, and fully equipped with its own ideology and platform, zealous troops, and an unemployed hero.

From the grass roots of this Roosevelt party came seductive words of praise and even more seductive calls of moral duty. In January 1911: “On the trains and in the hotels, you are the main subject under discussion”—people now “awaken to a realization of what you were trying to do for the people.” “Don’t attempt to thwart the spontaneous movement for you.” “I trust and admire you more every year”—this from editor William Allen White. “Will you lead in the formation of a new party [that will] break the solid South?” By 1912, the appeals—and invitations to speak—had risen from a trickle to a torrent. Even a former President “is not big enough” to decline a nomination which comes to him “unsought.” He should brush aside the “third term phantom—you were only elected once and you did not serve two full terms.” “It is God’s will that you be our next President.”

All that was needed now was the spark to bring this movement to life. That spark was struck from Roosevelt’s smoldering ambition. Into his letters during 1911 crept a note that betrayed his appetite for leadership and power even as he tried to contain it. “I very emphatically feel that to me personally to be nominated in 1912 would be a calamity,” he wrote in a typical letter of 1911. But then came the giveaway sentence: “Moreover I am absolutely certain that it would be criminal folly under any circumstances to nominate me unless it could be made clear as day that the nomination came not through intrigue or political work, not in the least to gratify any kind of wish or ambition on my part, but simply and solely because the bulk of the people wanted a given job done, and for their own sakes, and not for mine, wanted me to do that job.” Elihu Root astutely compared his old chief to a “thirsty sinner.”

While Roosevelt invited the call that was sure to come, opposition was looming on the left. By 1910, Robert La Follette had become the acknowledged leader of western progressives in the Senate. La Follette met the Alger image in politics: born in a two-room cabin in Wisconsin pioneer country, he had worked his way through the University of Wisconsin, served as a horseback district attorney, and was making his way through the power system of the House of Representatives as a run-of-the-mill congressman when he rebelled against the reactionary Republican establishment in Congress and back home and struck out on his own progressive course. As perhaps the most effective governor of his time, he had forced through an opposition legislature measures for an industrial commission to protect the health and safety of labor in his state, a railroad commission that slashed rates, a direct primary, and ample money and recognition for the university.

La Follette had created his personal organ, La Follette’s Weekly, in January 1909; he created his personal organization two years later when he convened a meeting of progressives in his Washington home. The cream of the progressive leadership was present: Norris of Nebraska, Senator Jonathan Bourne of Oregon, Governor Chase S. Osborn of Michigan, bathtub tycoon Charles R. Crane of Chicago, and reformer Frederic C. Howe of New York. These men and Senators Joseph L. Bristow of Kansas and Moses E. Clapp of Minnesota, and such redoubtables as Congressman Irvine L. Lenroot of Wisconsin and Gifford Pinchot of Pennsylvania, were elected to the leadership of a new organization, the National Progressive Republican League. The aim of the League was announced as the promotion of democratic government and progressive legislation, but politicos and press suspected that it was a vehicle to promote La Follette for President.

Certainly Roosevelt so suspected. He had long been personally friendly with the Wisconsin senator, but had kept a political distance from him. Now he could hardly ignore “Battling Bob,” who was the very image of progressive militancy with his eloquent speeches, quick and savage thrusts in debate, and shock of bristling hair crowning photogenic features and a sturdy frame. Roosevelt moved warily, not wanting to alienate rank-and-file progressive leaders in the West. Some of these leaders had supported La Follette on the premise that Roosevelt was unavailable; as the former President inched toward availability, La Follette suffered serious defections.

In vain the La Follette forces sought to stem the Roosevelt tide. Warning the former President that Taft delegates would carry Nebraska because of division in progressive ranks, Norris asked Roosevelt to support La Follette delegates—or at least not oppose them. If later La Follette failed of nomination, the Wisconsin’s delegates would shift toward Roosevelt. Would Roosevelt announce categorically his noncandidacy? Roosevelt would not.

The denouement came unexpectedly in early February 1912, when La Follette, himself ill and exhausted, and with his daughter facing a serious operation, gave a speech in Philadelphia to a dinner audience of publishers and politicians that included such luminaries as Alexander Graham Bell, Lincoln Steffens, and Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey. As the six hundred banqueters watched first indignant, then astonished, and finally embarrassed, La Follette, after vitriolically attacking the press, the bankers, and the interests, lost control of himself and simply ranted for over two hours. After the press caricatured La Follette as having had a mental breakdown, a number of progressive leaders found the episode a good reason—or excuse—for shifting to their true love, their “colonel.”

And by now their true love was ready. For Roosevelt, the decision to run had not been as easy as the press suspected. Certainly he wanted to beat Taft and the Old Guard. But he did not wish to do so at the risk of sending La Follette or even Bryan to the White House. And he could not forget the prospect of 1916. If he supported Taft and in the end the President lost, as Roosevelt expected he would, TR would stand well with the regulars, and, backed by his progressive followers, he could take over the GOP after some incompetent Democrat served one term. If Taft won in 1912, Roosevelt could still succeed him after the President’s second term.

Oddly, it was Taft who forced the issue, as much as Roosevelt. During 1911, he mobilized the congressional Old Guard and the rank-and-file regulars with promises, patronage, and portents. With its usual lack of skill, the Taft White House took a number of steps bound to infuriate the thin-skinned Roosevelt. A few days before Roosevelt announced, Taft wrote his brother that the former President was “surrounded by so many sycophants and neurotics who feed his vanity and influence his judgment that his usual good political sense is at fault in respect of the election.” Such provocations from Taft were not slow to reach the ears of his predecessor.

Rising differences over issues, bolstered by each man’s followers and sharpened by ambition and self-esteem, lay at the center of the escalating conflict between the two old comrades. Of all Roosevelt’s heresies, the one that Taft found most incomprehensible and unforgivable was his proposal for the people’s power to recall judicial decisions. For Taft, judicial power and independence were almost sacrosanct. He had vetoed the admission of Arizona because of a provision in its constitution authorizing the recall of judges. (The astute Arizonans removed the offending clause, gained admission to statehood in February 1912, and later restored the provision.) Roosevelt’s call, in a Columbus speech, for recall of state—but not federal—judicial decisions roused Taft to hyperbole. Such extremists, he said, were “political emotionalists or neurotics” who would cause “bubbling anarchy.” Since calling his enemies lunatics or neurotics had long been one of Roosevelt’s own specialties, he could not help being infuriated by the charge.

Each man worked from his political base. For Taft, this was the great pyramid of local and state parties, fueled by corporate money, secured by patronage, and long accustomed to the business of choosing the right delegates to state and national conventions. Early, and as quietly as they could, the Taft managers picked loyalists as delegates to the 1912 Republican convention, while Roosevelt men vainly howled in protest against the shenanigans in smoke-filled rooms. Roosevelt’s strength lay—as he was not slow to point out—in the hundreds of thousands of “plain Republicans” who had embraced the party’s progressive tradition. In this, the first election in which the direct primary was extensively used, Roosevelt after some initial setbacks rolled up 1.2 million votes against 760,000 for Taft and 350,000 for La Follette.

But delegates counted in the convention, not primary votes, and it seemed likely weeks before the conclave that Taft had it sewed up. Characteristically, Roosevelt resolved to carry his fight into the convention. By now, the two sides were excelling mainly in invective. Roosevelt men called Taft men crooks and robbers, apaches and garroters, for issuing credentials to bogus delegates risen from the “cesspools of Southern corruption,” while Taft men responded in kind, and Taft and Roosevelt labeled each other demagogue and fathead, respectively. When the Taft forces selected Elihu Root as their man for convention chairman, Roosevelt forgot the old days when he had singled out Root as the very model of an American statesman. Now he was a “representative of reaction” and had to be rejected.

Mr. Dooley forewarned that the convention would be a “combynation iv th’ Chicago fire, Saint Bartholomew’s massacres, the battle iv th’ Boyne, th’ life iv Jessie James, an’ th’ night iv th’ big wind,” but he was going anyway, because he hadn’t “missed a riot in this neighborhood for forty years.” The convention opened amid fisticuffs, charges of “liar” and “thief,” and tumult so noisy that even the shrillest speechifiers were drowned out. Amid the pandemonium, the Taft steamroller did its work, producing a 558 to 502 win for Root that meant the President’s men would control the convention. While Roosevelt men walked out or sat on their hands, the convention proceeded to nominate William Howard Taft, whose name was put forward by a small-town Ohio editor, Warren Gamaliel Harding.

Roosevelt was prepared for his defeat and for a bolt. He had already given his nomination speech the night before the convention, to a hysterical crowd of thousands that overflowed a hall and into the street, ending with a prophecy: “We stand at Armageddon,” he trumpeted, “and we battle for the Lord.”

Wilson and the Three Democratic Parties

Delegates were starting to leave their convention hall, an opera house in Trenton, late on a September afternoon in 1910, when they heard an unexpected announcement from the rostrum: Mr. Wilson, “candidate for the governorship, and the next President of the United States, has received word of his nomination; has left Princeton, and is now on his way to the Convention.” Soon a tall bespectacled man in a dark gray sack suit was making his way to the stage through cheering ranks of New Jersey Democrats. “God, look at that jaw!” a ward politician exclaimed. Not all the Democrats cheered; a group of reform Democrats sat glumly on their hands as they reflected that the bosses had beaten them once again, this time with a college professor. Most of the delegates were simply curious, never having seen Wilson before or perhaps even heard of him.

Within a few minutes the man from Princeton was transporting the crowd into a fever of enthusiasm. He electrified the reformers at the start by declaiming, “As you know, I did not seek this nomination. It has come to me absolutely unsolicited. With the consequence that I shall enter upon the duties of the office of Governor, if elected, with absolutely no pledge of any kind to prevent me from serving the people of the State with singleness of purpose.” Scenting victory in November, the regulars too kept applauding. Wilson placed himself squarely behind the progressive platform the delegates had adopted, save for the direct primary, which he did not mention. Out of the ranks of the reformers came the cry, “Thank God, at last, a leader has come!”

“Go on, go on,” delegates shouted when Wilson halted, and the orator did. Americans must reconstruct their economic order, he said, and in doing so would reconstruct their political structure. Then delegates rushed up to the platform to greet him, to lift him to their shoulders—but even the exultant speaker would not go this far. Next day the press across the country was hailing a new star in the political firmament.

It was Woodrow Wilson’s first political speech—and a moment he had been anticipating for decades. As a young man, he had devoured Houghton Mifflin’s American Statesmen series and its tales of the great orators. As a young professor at Wesleyan, he had tried to convert the debating society into a House of Commons. In his first academic writings, he had called for better parliamentary debates. He had indeed become one of the most accomplished and renowned college lecturers of his time.

And now he had held spellbound the political folk he was so eager to recruit. Still, for Wilson, oratory was a vehicle of leadership, not the heart of it. And leadership was the essence of true statesmanship. These were not pieties. By now, he had become the nation’s leading student of the complex phenomenon of leadership. Public opinion, he felt, had to be educated and persuaded by a forceful leader who, in John Blum’s summary, could perceive the inchoate desires of the community and formulate them in broad, clear, convincing arguments, and such leaders would possess poetic insights and talents. But for Wilson this was by no means a one-way process. Leaders led followers in order to mobilize and empower them. “All the renewal of a nation,” he said, “comes out of the general mass of its people.”

“The ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people,” Wilson had told a Tennessee audience twenty years before this triumphant evening in Trenton. “The forces of the public thought may be blind: he must lend them sight; they may blunder; he must set them right.” Twelve years later, he wrote a memorandum on leadership that anticipated theory about and analysis of the subject over the next sixty years. Leadership, he said, “is the practicable formulation of action, and the successful arousal and guidance of motive in social development.” Only by the action of leading minds was the organic will of a community stirred to a guiding control of affairs.

Leadership was not an end in itself. It was a means of realizing a people’s elevated values, a nation’s noblest goals. Nor was leadership a one-man show. The most effective leadership in the long run was collective—and this was one reason Wilson, in contrast to many of the educated persons he knew, believed in the indispensable role of strong parties in a democracy. He had long admired the superb debates, the orderly conflict, and the collective cabinet leadership of the two big British parties.

Who was this practitioner and theorist of leadership? some were asking after the triumph in Trenton. The man who had come to embrace an almost philosophical view of purposeful, high-minded leadership had spent his first twenty-five years in a condition of outward serenity and inner turbulence. Born in Virginia in 1856 into a religious and intellectual family, he did not learn his alphabet until he was nine or read well until he was eleven, probably as a result of a form of dyslexia. Undoubtedly this aroused considerable anxiety in his most literate and formidable father, a theologian and minister of the Presbyterian gospel, and a perfectionist as to the use of words. Sigmund Freud, with William Bullitt, theorized that Wilson’s “alienation from the world of reality” related to his religious feelings, that a passionate love of his father was at the core of his emotional life, that he probably exhibited extensive narcissism as a child, that he developed a hostility to his father which he repressed, but which broke out against father substitutes—rival leaders. Much later, Alexander and Juliette George hypothesized that power for Wilson was a means of compensation for self-esteem damaged in childhood. He could indulge his secret desire to dominate only by purifying his leadership, “by committing it to political projects which articulated the highest moral and idealistic aspirations of the people.” He had to feel virtuous.

The presidency of Princeton gave Wilson the opportunity to lead, and he seized it greedily. He promptly recruited fifty top-notch young teachers and some older and most distinguished ones. In 1905, he appointed the first Jew to the faculty and four years later the first Catholic. He instituted the preceptorial system. He immensely expanded Princeton’s physical plant. He raised an institution that was essentially at the level of excellent small colleges like Dartmouth and Williams to that of excellent universities like Harvard, Yale, and Chicago, John Cooper has noted. He did these things not alone but in close cooperation with trustees and faculty. He failed in two efforts: to convert the Princeton eating clubs into a more democratic and educationally effective system, and to locate a proposed graduate college in close proximity to undergraduates and teachers.

Wilson was later accused of inviting these two failures by being rigid and dogmatic. Yet these qualities—renamed consistency, determination, persistence, and principled leadership—helped make him a transforming leader at Princeton. And all these qualities reappeared in Wilson’s governorship of New Jersey during 1911, his first year in the post. He won the governorship by a most skillful mobilization of progressive and reform Democratic support without alienating the big-city bosses who had arranged his nomination in the first place. He then proceeded, by a careful combination of high principle and low expediency, to put through the program that he and his party had promised. During 1912, his legislative leadership faltered, in part because the Republicans had won control of the legislature, in part because Wilson was turning to the national political battle—but not because there was any discernible falling off of his ability to combine doggedness and flexibility.

The national arena—and especially the national Democracy—confronted Wilson with far severer challenges than Princeton or New Jersey. Not only was he plunging into a battle zone dominated by formidable leaders such as Roosevelt, La Follette, Bryan, and Taft; he was seeking the presidential nomination of a party that was really three parties.

The dominant wing of the Democracy was the party of Bryan and his fellow silverites and agrarians. The former “boy orator of the Platte,” now entering his fifties, was still the peerless leader of those who had fought the battle against McKinleyism in 1896 and who had nominated their man for President twice after that. He continued to appeal to the old prohibitionist and moralistic vote, to the western silverites and other insurgents, and to much of the South. Responding to the urban reformism of the decade, he was by 1910 moving toward the left, as he urged adoption of a graduated income tax, governmental ownership of the railroads, woman’s suffrage, direct primaries, the initiative, referendum, and recall. He reached out to labor with his denunciation of labor injunction abuses. But while the Nebraskan was still a formidable party leader, few expected that he could bring his personal following over to a true progressive-labor-farmer coalition.

The electoral base of the Democracy still lay in the solid South. The South—even the Southern bourbons—had stuck with Bryanism in 1896; above all, they offered loyalty, if only because they had no other place to go. The Southern Democracy had recovered with remarkable speed after the Civil War and by 1880 had crowded out the Republicans in most areas except for GOP patronage holders. Later Southern Democrats had taken a far more portentous step. Fearful of the threat to white supremacy and one-party politics that briefly loomed during the Populist years, Southern party leaders, governors, and legislatures destroyed the black political potential by systematically adopting a battery of devices to keep blacks from voting: literacy tests, poll taxes, property requirements, the “grandfather” clause. Southern elites had never been able to place their own man at the head of a presidential ticket, but they still could play a pivotal role in the choice among Northerners.

The heart of the oldest Democratic party—the “party of Jefferson and Jackson”—still beat steadily, if a bit feebly, in the new century. This was the party of presidential nominees Seymour, Tilden, and Cleveland, and a host of Northern governors, senators, and congressmen, largely faithful to sound money, lowered tariffs, and states’ rights, to economic individualism, Bill of Rights liberties, laissez-faire, and governmental economy. They made bold bids for the presidency, sometimes carrying the popular vote but less often the electoral college because of the concentration of their vote in the one-party South. The election of 1896 had left this party shattered across the North; only the pride of vindication had survived, as the Clevelandites witnessed the drubbing of the Bryanites. Cleveland himself had died in 1908, a few months before Bryan was beaten for the third time, but he had fought to the end for a conservative Democracy, with unabated attacks on silver Democrats as “confidencemen, sharpers and swindlers.”

Buffeted by these divergent party impulses, the Democracy had teetered between acquiescence in the power of the burgeoning industrial and financial elites, and challenging that power, and ended up doing neither. If the Republicans were now “firmly established as the party of rapid industrialization,” as Everett Carll Ladd concludes, the Democrats failed to take clear leadership of the loyal opposition. The Populists of 1892 could condemn both parties for drowning “the outcries of a plundered people” with a “sham battle” over the tariff. But even on the issue of protectionism—the ancient rallying ground of the Democracy—the party of Jefferson and Cleveland failed to offer a strong and united opposition. When Taft called for tariff revision in 1909, House and Senate Democrats defected from their party’s 1908 antitariff pledges and backed protection for lumber, hides, pelts, barley, and other products of rural counties. In the struggle over the Payne-Aldrich tariff, the press labeled the Democracy as leaderless in the House, utterly factionalized in the Senate.

It was this party that Woodrow Wilson confronted in 1912—a party that he quite consciously planned to win over to his support, then to use first to win the presidency, then to govern the nation. To a degree, he embodied both the strengths and weaknesses of the divided Democracy. A native Virginian who could remind Southerners about his upbringing in Georgia and South Carolina, he had never established a clear identity with that section. An antimachine reformer of the old Nation school, he had smoothly accepted the backing of some of New Jersey’s most notorious bosses in order to win the governorship, just as Cleveland and the rest had welcomed machine support in earlier days. Increasingly progressive during the muckraking decade, he had established few ties with organized labor, Bryanites, or urban reformers.

Nor was Wilson fully aware of the political forces heating up on the socialist left. Out of their fiery and fractious movements the socialists had forged a political party that was still rent with ideological and personal divisions but strong enough to arouse leftist hopes of eventual victory. For years, socialist parties had been nominating presidential candidates, receiving a scattering of votes, but the Socialist Party of the United States, founded in 1901, appeared to be better led, organized, and financed. And it had a candidate with wide appeal to labor in Eugene Debs. In 1904, the homegrown Indiana radical had won 400,000 votes for President. Four years later, he had crisscrossed the nation in his own railroad train, equipped with his portrait on the front of the boiler, a brass band, and a baggage car filled with campaign propaganda—a train soon dubbed the “Red Special.” He had won only a few thousand more votes than in 1904, but socialists vowed that 1912 would be their big election year.

And now it was 1912, and the Socialist party had never appeared so popular and promising. In eight years, the dues-paying membership had soared from 20,000 to a peak of 135,000; the national office budget was almost $100,000, and the party planned to spend another $60,000 or so on the campaign. At its May 1912 convention in Indianapolis, the party once again chose Debs as its standard-bearer, over the opposition of the moderates. Good socialists were now united behind their spellbinding candidate and behind a radical, hard-hitting party platform full of biting attacks on the two “capitalistic” parties and glowing promises to the nation’s toilers.

Governor Wilson’s moral and political leadership in New Jersey had brought him national press attention, but he needed far more than this to win the nomination of the tripartite Democracy. And he faced formidable rivals in each wing—Alabama’s Oscar Underwood, eager to prove that a true-blue Southerner could at last become President; Missouri’s Champ Clark, Speaker of the House, strict party man, and longtime Bryanite who even in his country attire and rustic ways seemed to resemble the Commoner; and a host of Northern favorite sons. Moral standing hardly helped in winning the backing of countless bosses and delegates who viewed the convention as a trading house for future patronage and other favors. Nor did morality help in dealing with Polish, Hungarian, and other groups who denounced Wilson for slurs against immigrants in his History of the American People. Wilson not only apologized to the ethnic leaders but promised to instruct his publisher to change the offending passages in the next printing. The governor writhed under the hatchet blows of William Randolph Hearst—himself an expert at political acrobatics—who labeled the “Professor” a “perfect jackrabbit of politics, perched upon his little hillock of expediency,” keenly alert to every scent or sound, “and ready to run and double in any direction.”

Expediency was the order of the day at the Democratic convention that met in Baltimore late in June 1912, with hopes whetted by Roosevelt’s defiance of the GOP a few days before. While Wilson in New Jersey announced that he would not honor any trading done in his name—the same announcement Lincoln had made fifty-two years earlier during his party’s convention in Chicago—the governor’s lieutenants in Baltimore went about the time-honored task of wheeling and dealing. It took the Peerless Leader himself to rouse the convention from pragmatics to principle. Renewing his crusade against capitalists allied with Tammany and other machines in the old Cleveland party, Bryan at a tumultuous moment in the proceedings suddenly introduced his motion:

“Resolved … As proof of our fidelity to the people, we hereby declare ourselves opposed to the nomination of any candidate for president who is the representative of or under obligation to J. Pierpont Morgan, Thomas F. Ryan, August Belmont, or any other member of the privilege-hunting and favor-seeking class.”

In the tumult that followed, as Bryan stood immobile before the howling mob, his long slab mouth resolutely closed, some delegates remembered the triumphant moment of ’96. But now the roar from the audience contained hate as well, and even Bryan’s friends wondered if he was trying to smash the party. After police restored order, Bryan went on to charge that “an effort is being made right now to sell the Democratic party into bondage to the predatory interests of this nation.” With one stroke, the Commoner had catalyzed his party.

The balloting of the delegates was almost dull compared to the oratory, as roll call followed roll call without decision. But behind the scenes, in the fabled smoke-filled rooms, a thousand dramas were enacted as the candidates’ men baited their hooks with promises of future recognition and influence, state factions traded convention votes to achieve local gains far removed from the contest in Baltimore, charges and countercharges cannonaded out of the several camps, favorite sons tried their luck and failed, all in a smoky atmosphere of hostility and paranoia. Much of the time, chance and contingency had their sway. When Clark gained a majority, Wilson suddenly lost his nerve and wired his manager, William F. McCombs, to release his delegates; McCombs stood fast. Later McCombs lost his nerve and gained Wilson’s agreement to pull out, but another Wilson man, William G. McAdoo, countermanded the order.

For four days, the convention lay in gridlock as the ballot totals, with glacial slowness, edged toward Wilson. Underwood’s men would not give Clark the necessary votes to win because the Southerners hoped that after Clark and Wilson in turn rose and fell, the South would have its chance. Bryan seemed to shift to Wilson when the New York delegation, controlled by Tammany, moved toward Clark, but he made clear he would shift back if New York shifted back; all the while delegates suspected that the Commoner was angling for his own nomination.

When the convention finally broke toward Wilson on the forty-sixth ballot, it was the immediate result of expedient trading by the Wilson men, notably with the boss-controlled Illinois delegation. But the main cause transcended the vast brokerage on and off the convention floor. Powerfully working for Wilson was his fresh image as reformist and progressive. A Democratic convention was not going to choose a reactionary or a machine candidate after a solid decade of ferment and reform. At a crucial moment, Bryan had thrown the convention into a right-left alignment. He had also thrown himself into an alignment with Woodrow Wilson, with major consequences in the days to come.

Armageddon

Not since the founding years had the nation produced such a galaxy of leaders as those who confronted one another on the hustings of America in the fall of 1912. Not since the Civil War era had the nation found leaders so passionately committed to their causes, so willing to risk the politician’s ultimate sacrifice—defeat—in fighting for their goals. Not for many years would Americans forget their glimpses of the men on the stump: Debs, his thin body coiled like a spring, the veins swelling in his forehead, as he reached out to his listeners with moving, imploring hands; Roosevelt, pulsating with energy, grimacing, gesturing, snapping his jaws open and shut, screeching out his denunciations of the two old parties; Wilson, warming to the task as he spoke, vibrant, even impassioned, but disdaining the demagogic or theatrical; Taft, seemingly calm and resolute as he looked out on the crowd from behind his thick white mustache, inwardly despairing of victory and hoping that at least he would place ahead of the man he had come to hate, Theodore Roosevelt.

Nor had Americans ever quite witnessed such a convention as founded the Progressive party and nominated Roosevelt in Chicago in August. Youthful idealists, political opportunists, social reformers, urban planners, patronage seekers, cranks, suffragists, muckrakers were among the 10,000 or more persons, including 1,200 delegates and alternates, who converted the convention hall into an evangelical camp meeting. They gave their hero a rapturous welcome as he strode to the platform to offer his “Confession of Faith.” As he stood on the platform in his old familiar style, his body rocked back and forth to the rhythm of the applause.

“Fifteen thousand people roared their welcome,” in Mowry’s words. “For fifty-two minutes, wildly waving red bandannas, they cheered him as they had never cheered anyone else.” When Roosevelt tried to stop them, they broke into song:

Thou wilt not cower in the dust,

Roosevelt, O Roosevelt!

Thy gleaming sword shall never rust,

Roosevelt, O Roosevelt!

Out of this convention rose the authentic voice of the old Republican conscience—the conscience of the abolitionists, of the crusaders against spoils, of the middle-class respectables who despised the vulgar new rich, of the urban reformers who glimpsed the heightening needs of twentieth-century urban America. Taft had been left with a party of regulars who knew how to use the power of the Republican party for their own purposes. The party conscience had bolted with Roosevelt. But now the Progressives were a party without regulars, a conscience without power. The “old Colonel” who had united the two so brilliantly now found himself commanding cavalry without foot soldiers. No wonder a reporter at the convention noted that he seemed bewildered at the wild welcome of the crowd: “They were crusaders; he was not.”

The supporting cast in the campaign that followed was almost as illustrious as the principals. After Jane Addams seconded Roosevelt’s nomination, he wrote a friend that he deeply prized her support, though there were “points where I had to drag her forward, notably as regards our battleship program, for she is a disciple of Tolstoi.” William Jennings Bryan, old grudges handsomely forgotten, threw himself into Wilson’s campaign and ranged the West trailing Roosevelt. Hiram Johnson, chosen Roosevelt’s running mate, sought to hold the progressive spotlight in his own California. La Follette came to Wilson’s support even while remaining a Republican. The aging Elihu Root, sick at heart over the Republican disruption, spoke for Taft to the degree his failing energies allowed. Norris backed Roosevelt while remaining both a Progressive and a Republican. But seven governors who had supported Roosevelt failed to join the new party because they feared losing the backing of the Republican rank-and-file in their states.

The campaign of 1912 was a confrontation of leadership; even more it was a conflict of ideas. “I have no part to play but that of a conservative,” Taft wrote a friend, and he faithfully played that part to the end. He charged the Progressives with planning “dangerous changes in our present constitutional form of representative government and our independent judiciary”—changes that would threaten individual liberty. He inveighed against the pledges of both Democrats and Progressives to direct democracy. “These gentlemen,” he said, would cure defects caused by the failure of the public to attend to its political duties by asking that same public to assume three times the burden they had failed to assume. Deserted by most of his Cabinet, who pleaded illness or sat on their hands, Taft stolidly awaited his defeat.

Debs preached a very different kind of liberty and democracy, as he summoned socialists to wrest control of government and industry from the capitalists and make “the working class the ruling class of the nation and the world.” But Debs too was plagued by division within his ranks, especially the old split between moderates who pressed immediate demands and revolutionaries who had set their hopes on ultimate goals. Debs preached unity and gained some, but even the great socialist leader could not control his irrepressible followers. Touring the Midwest he encountered the “Ohio yell”;

Ripsaw, ripsaw, ripsaw, bang!

We belong to the Gene Debs gang.

Are we Socialists? I should smile!

We’re Revolutionists all the while.

With Debs pounding away on the left and Taft still finding time to play golf, it was Wilson and Roosevelt who fully confronted each other on the most vital questions of liberty and democracy. The debate started abruptly when Wilson, during a long talk at the New York Press Club, said, “Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of government. The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. Do these gentlemen dream that in the year 1912 we have discovered a unique exception to the movement of human history?”

Roosevelt pounced on this statement when he read it in the New York Tribune the next day. Calling it the “key to Mr. Wilson’s position,” he labeled it “professorial rhetoric” without “a particle of foundation in facts,” a statement of a “laissez-faire doctrine of the English political economists” of seventy years earlier. It meant that “every law for the promotion of social and industrial justice which has been put upon the statute books ought to be repealed, and every law proposed should be abandoned.” Would Wilson propose abolishing the Interstate Commerce Commission?

A cartoon in the Boston Journal showed Professor Wilson didactically lecturing to an Uncle Sam trussed up in a straitjacket marked “Limitation on Governmental Power,” while the interests and trusts applauded the professor from the sidelines. Wilson struggled to gain the initiative. He favored governmental exercise of power to the utmost, he explained, as long as this meant government “by the power of laws, and not by the power of men.” The Democratic party, he began to emphasize, did not stand for limiting either state or national power. “There is not a Democrat that I know who is afraid to have the powers of the government exercised to the utmost.”

The candidates’ debate over liberty became part of a broader discussion of democracy. Both Wilson and Roosevelt stood on their party platforms, but the Democratic definition of democracy had been woefully weak compared to the Progressives’. Calling for “rule of the people,” the Democrats stood only on reforms already achieved—and achieved primarily by others: the overthrow of “Cannonism” and direct election of senators. The Progressives declared also for extension of the direct primary, easier amendment of the Constitution, “equal suffrage to men and women alike,” and urged on the states “the short ballot, with responsibility to the people secured by the initiative, referendum and recall.” And the Bull Moosers, boldly picking up on Roosevelt’s earlier speeches, demanded “such restriction of the power of the courts as shall leave the people the ultimate authority to determine fundamental questions of social welfare and public policy.”

Wilson did little to spell out the Democratic plank on democracy. Interrupted during a speech with a question from the floor, “What about the referendum?” he shot back, “The referendum you can take care of in Pennsylvania. It is not a national question.” Throughout the campaign, Wilson offered homilies about democracy without clarifying what he meant. An observer remarked on his “vagueness and reiteration, symbolism and incantation,” as the chief secrets of his “verbal power.” He had mastered the technique of oratory, Alexander and Juliette George noted, he “knew the value of repetition, of catch phrases, of pleasing combinations of sounds.” Five or ten thousand people would stand or sit for an hour or so in mainly rapt attention while Wilson elegantly skated over the surface of explicit ideas and specific policy.

Wilson’s ideas were much clearer on the most central issue of the campaign—economic policy. He campaigned proudly on the Democratic platform declaration that a “private monopoly is indefensible and intolerable,” on its promise to enforce vigorously the criminal as well as the civil law against trusts and trust officials, and on its support of the regulation and possible “prevention of holding companies, of interlocking directors, of stock watering, of discrimination in price, and the control by any one corporation of so large a proportion of any industry as to make it a menace to competitive conditions.” The Democrats would also restore the Sherman Antitrust Act to the full power it had had before its evisceration in the courts.

The Progressive party platform was even more positive and forthright, but still lacking in precision. It demanded “a strong National regulation of inter-State corporations.” Admitting that business concentration was to some degree necessary and inevitable, it went on: “But the existing concentration of vast wealth under a corporate system … has placed in the hands of a few men enormous, secret, irresponsible power over the daily life of the citizen—a power insufferable in a free Government….” The Progressives promised the establishment of a “strong Federal administrative commission” that would use publicity, supervision, and regulation in curbing the power of monopoly. Taft’s plank promised to continue his Sherman Act policy toward the trusts, and Debs proposed simply to nationalize them.

With such forthright party positions, the stage seemed set for a four-sided debate over monopoly; but the candidates, in the time-honored way of vote seekers, tended to blur the differences. What had seemed to be a yawning gap between Wilson and Roosevelt—the former’s emphasis on breaking down the big trusts into more efficient and responsible small units, versus the latter’s on better supervision and regulation of bigness—turned into a vague consensus as Wilson disclaimed any attack on big business as such and Roosevelt indicated he would still use the antitrust weapon.

“You recall Mr. Pierpont Morgan said ‘You can’t unscramble the eggs in an omelet,’” Roosevelt explained. He overrode the attacks of those who charged—correctly—that one of his key economic advisers and contributors, George Perkins, had deleted a strong antitrust plank from the Progressive platform, and that when the original antitrust plank was inadvertently read to the convention, Perkins got it deleted all over again, and for good. Wilson was now taking the economic advice of the brilliant Boston lawyer Louis Brandeis, who had never met or seen Wilson before the governor was nominated, but found him so promising he even fantasized that Roosevelt might throw his Progressive support to Wilson. It was almost September before Brandeis met the Democratic candidate. They talked for three hours.

“Was very favorably impressed with Wilson,” Brandeis wrote his brother Alfred. “He is strong, simple, serious, open-minded, eager to learn.” But the lawyer did not yet have a major impact on the candidate’s utterances. Wilson was eager to reassure big business that he was not against big business as such, but only irresponsible big business, while for Brandeis the central problem was bigness itself. Still, Brandeis helped Wilson sharpen his ideas and liven up his debate with Roosevelt.

As campaign fever mounted, five, ten, fifteen thousand persons flocked into the political gathering places or watched the candidates parade through town. Racked by fatigue, their voices worn down to a whisper, the candidates pleaded for quiet so that they could reach the outer fringes of the crowds. It seemed as if all America was now part of the campaign. But two large groups had to stand aside—blacks in the South, and women North and South.

Whether to involve Southern blacks had posed the harshest of moral and political dilemmas for Roosevelt. Deeply ambivalent in his attitude toward blacks, he hardly knew what to do about contested Negro delegations that had come to the Progressive party convention because they too had been inspired by the Colonel’s commitment to moral leadership and social reform. He tried to solve the problem by approving mixed delegations from border states and lily-white delegations from the South. Thus the Progressives no less than the Republicans would repudiate the legacy of Abolition and Reconstruction. Taft Republicans could sit tight: they controlled most of the anti-Democratic leadership in the South. So could Wilson, who depended on solid support from Southern segregationists. But militant women suffragists were a problem for the governor—especially when a woman named Maude Malone suddenly rose in the audience while he was speaking on monopoly at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“Mr. Wilson, you just said you were trying to destroy a monopoly, and I ask you what about woman suffrage. The men have a monopoly on that.”

“Woman suffrage, madam, is not a question that is dealt with by the national government at all, and I am here only as a representative of the national party.”

“I appeal to you as an American, Mr. Wilson.”

“I hope you will not consider it a discourtesy if I decline to answer this question on this occasion….” By now a hubbub was rising in the hall.

“Why do you decline?” Maude Malone persisted. As Wilson answered again, a large detective swooped down on Maude Malone and carried her out. Wilson protested immediately that he did not “wish that the lady should be ejected,” and he kept his composure. Maude Malone was hardly in a position to do so.

By mid-October Roosevelt’s throat was so raw that he had to cancel some appearances, but he insisted on making a major speech in Milwaukee. As he stepped out of the Gilpatrick Hotel, he waved to admirers and turned to sit down in an open car. At that moment, a man sprang from the darkness, screamed something like “No third term!” and fired a shot at the Colonel. The bullet tore through his overcoat, a metal glasses case, pages of a long speech, and sliced along four inches of his chest wall. As onlookers began to pummel his assailant, Roosevelt called out, “Don’t hurt the poor creature.” Then he insisted on proceeding to the auditorium.

Unaware of the incident, people there applauded wildly as Roosevelt strode to the platform, then sat back horrified when the chairman announced that the Colonel had been shot. Roosevelt moved up to the rostrum. “There is a bullet in my body,” he said in a low, tense tone. “But it is nothing. I’m not hurt badly.” He pulled the mangled manuscript from his pocket, lifted it over his head, and proclaimed, “It takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose!”

For over an hour he spoke, faltering at times, pushing away efforts to aid him. Finally taken to a hospital, he announced that he was willing to go down in the cause. “If one soldier who carries the flag is stricken, another will take it from his hands….” It was Roosevelt’s most glorious hour. He evoked such a wave of sympathy that pundits hitherto forecasting a Democratic landslide now hedged. Wilson announced that he would suspend talk on national issues until Roosevelt recovered. Wilson himself had tasted the perils of campaigning when a runaway freight train had smashed the observation platform of his Pullman while he slept, and later when the campaign car in which he was speeding hit a deep pothole and he smashed his head against the car roof.

Both candidates were ready for their climactic speeches. In Madison Square Garden, before a roaring crowd, Roosevelt urged his followers not to allow “the brutal selfishness of arrogance and the brutal selfishness of envy, each to run unchecked its evil course. If we do so, then some day smoldering hatred will suddenly kindle into a consuming flame.” Proposing to cast out “dead dogmas of a vanished past,” he promised to “lift the burdens from the lowly and weary, from the poor and oppressed.” He appealed to “the sons of the men who followed Lee no less than to the sons of the men who followed Grant.” It was a grand performance.

In the Garden next evening, to an equally fervent crowd, Wilson proclaimed, “We are proposing nothing for these people except what is their due as human beings.” He would go about “with the strong hand of government” to see that “nobody imposes on the weak, to see that nobody lowers the levels of American vitality by putting on the working people of this country more than flesh and blood and nerves and heart can bear.”

On election day, the voters seemed to suspend their sense of excitement and to settle back into familiar voting patterns. Wilson won 6.3 million votes, less than Bryan had totaled three times, but Bryan had faced only one opponent. Roosevelt with 4.1 million votes and Taft with 3.5 million sliced in two the Republican constituency. Because of the peculiar workings of the electoral college Wilson won 435 electoral votes, Roosevelt 88, mainly from Pennsylvania and the West Coast, and Taft 8—Utah and Vermont. Debs gained an amazing 900,000 votes, but carried no states. The total vote of Democrats, Republicans, and Progressives had hardly increased over the major-party vote of 1908. No fundamental voting shifts had occurred that would be lasting; no major party realignment had occurred. After the smoke of conflict cleared, the political battlefield appeared unchanged.

Roosevelt felt overwhelmed by his defeat. He had expected to lose, he wrote a friend, but not so badly. “We had all the money, all the newspapers and all the political machinery against us and, above all, we had the habit of thought of the immense mass of dull unimaginative men who simply vote according to the party symbol. Whether the Progressive Party itself will disappear or not, I do not know; but the Progressive movement must and will go forward even though its progress is fitful.”

To another friend he wrote, “We have fought the good fight, we have kept the faith, and we have nothing to regret.”

PART IV

Democracy on Trial

CHAPTER 11

The New Freedom

THE GARY STEEL WORKS, Gary, Indiana: A huge charging machine rumbles past a quarter mile of the new open hearths. The machine pauses by a hearth, the furnace door opens, red and white flames spew out; unperturbed, the charging machine thrusts a carload of pig and scrap metal into the maw as the furnace erupts in a new crescendo of flame and smoke. Behind the pit, a ladle slides into place and 150 tons of molten steel pour into it as the flame now billows into a whirlwind of blue and purple heat.

At the end of a narrow tunnel under Appalachian hills, coal miners slowly drill a hole in the black face with a six-foot auger and pack the hole with dynamite. Crouching in the heading, they set off the blast, then move back to shovel coal into the cars. As they drill and blast and shovel, they push the tunnel forward, shoring up the roof with short pieces of timber they call sprags. The pick mining of old is giving way to cutting machines, and the hand shoveling is yielding to loading machines that, like prehistoric monsters, reach their long thin snouts into the slack. A thousand feet above, managers are lamenting the passing of the “wonderful craftsmen” of old; today, they say, miners need no “great brains” but merely a strong back.

In the spinning room of the Amoskeag Company in Manchester, New Hampshire, long lines of men, women, and children tend more than a hundred thousand spindles. Opened in 1909, the huge spinning room, with its solid banks of milling machines stretching hundreds of yards, looks little different from the Lowell and Lawrence manufactories of six or seven decades earlier. Life in the textile factory has not changed much either—the noise, the heat, the dirty fuzz from the cotton, the long hours and days. But there are more specialized machines now: bale breakers that pick apart the compressed cotton that has been brought to Manchester by railroad; openers that break apart the tufts of cotton more thoroughly; pickers that beat out the coarser impurities in the cotton, until the cotton is ready for carding, combing, roving, spinning, weaving, burling, bleaching, and finishing.

At the big Firestone Tire and Rubber plant in Akron, workers no longer have to pull plies of fabric by hand over the iron forming-core and smooth them down with stiff fingers, layer after layer. Machines feed the fabric into a rotating core, with little wheels on each side precisely stitching the ply. Then men take over, smoothing on a chafer strip of rubberized fabric, applying sidewalls of specially strengthened rubber, laying down a cushion of rubber to bind tread and body. With the new machines, the workers’ functions are more specialized and routine now, and the direct labor cost of building a tire is cut in half.

During the progressive era, Americans underwent one of the longest and most expansive periods of prosperity in their history, interrupted only by short recessions in 1903 and 1907. Gold flowed into the capital markets from Alaska, South Africa, and the Rockies; immigrants flowed in from Europe, sometimes more than a million in a year. A steady rise in wholesale prices between 1897 and 1914 helped fuel heavy industrial growth and agricultural output. The prophets of capitalism were exultant. Yet during the same years the currents of progressive thought and action ran strong, perhaps because the fulfillment of some people’s basic needs—especially those of the burgeoning middle class—aroused “higher” needs of self-esteem, including the sense of moral self-fulfillment involved in “doing good.”

To American Marxists, applying the Master’s teachings in their own way and for their own purposes, the mighty economic and social forces rolling in America were predictable and inescapable. Evolving technology—the new inventions, mass production, industrial integration—inevitably forced wider and deeper economic combination. Corporate capitalism, crushing the workers in its industrial and financial grinders, was producing an unintended product—socialism. As the capitalists triggered imperialist wars in their global struggles for markets, as they aroused proletarian consciousness in workers in all lands, they would incubate a militant worldwide proletariat poised for revolution. At last, workers of the world would unite.

Everything depended on the crucial nexus between workers’ blighted needs and hopes and their rising revolutionary consciousness. And here something seemed to be going wrong in the New World. American capitalism had burgeoned and exploited, the proletariat had swollen and suffered—but then something had cut into the logical flow from economic misery to class consciousness to proletarian militancy. American workers seemed conscious enough of their low wages and long hours and atrocious working and living conditions, but they seemed conscious of much more—of their religious feelings, their ethnic affiliations, their roots in the old national rivalries of Europe, their special little statuses in factory and office, their faith in individualism, their hopes for improving their lot.

Something clearly had gone wrong with the socialist scenario, something had gone askew in the world of ideas. Eugene Debs had gained almost a million votes in 1912, but many more millions of workers had voted for the old party of Wilson or the new party of Roosevelt. Progressive Republicans had found a new political vehicle that would continue under TR; progressive Democrats could hope for a liberalized party under this new man from academe. Only the Old Guard Republicans under Taft seemed to follow the scenario of the left—and even Taft had busted trusts and backed the income tax.

A new leader had arisen to champion democracy and challenge corporate power. His was a fresh face on the national scene, a rather stern, composed face, bespeaking a man utterly committed to the task ahead and remarkably clear as to how to undertake it. Everything seemed to conspire to Woodrow Wilson’s advantage as his inauguration neared early in 1913. He appeared to hold a firm mandate from the electorate, after an election campaign that had posed central issues of trusts and monopoly as sharply as any party battle in memory. He led a party that after decades of Bryanite division had squarely confronted the issue of concentrated economic power in a democracy. He presided over a citizenry eager for action.

Wilson was ready. He had lived his life for this moment. He had studied and preached the vocation of leadership. “This vast and miscellaneous democracy of ours must be led,” he had said; “its giant faculties must be schooled and directed. Leadership cannot belong to the multitude; masses of men cannot be self-directed, neither can groups of communities.” He would lead. But he stuck to his old belief that great leaders must truly engage with their followers. The nation could not move forward, he said a few weeks before taking office, “by anything except concert of purpose and of judgment. You cannot whip a nation into line. You cannot drive your leaders before you.” He would concert his party, his government, his people.

The Engine of Democracy

Woodrow Wilson looked down at the 50,000 persons massed in front of the Inaugural stand. It was March 4, 1913, a cold day but sunny. Shortly before, he had descended the east Capitol steps with William Howard Taft, followed by Vice-President Thomas Marshall and members of the new Cabinet. He had taken the oath of office before Chief Justice Edward D. White, and had kissed the Bible, his lips touching the 119th Psalm: “And I will walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts…. And I will delight myself in thy commandments, which I have loved.” Turning to the crowd, he had observed a large cleared area just in front of the stand. “Let the people come forward,” he had commanded, and they did.

“There has been a change of government,” Wilson began abruptly. “It began two years ago, when the House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive majority.” The Senate also would be Democratic. “What does the change mean?

“It means much more than the mere success of a party. The success of a party means little except when the nation is using that party for a large and definite purpose. No one can mistake the purpose for which the nation now seeks to use the Democratic party. It seeks to use it to interpret a change in its own plans and point of view….

“We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through. The groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate and familiar seat….

“There has been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our thought has been ‘Let every man look out for himself, let every generation look out for itself,’ while we reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look out for themselves…. There can be no equality or opportunity, the first essential of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial and social processes which they can not alter, control, or singly cope with….

“The nation has been deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil….

“This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men’s hearts wait upon us; men’s lives hang in the balance; men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!”

There began, during the next few days, a government that would become a textbook example of presidential leadership of party and Congress. Building both on his theory of governing and his practical experience in New Jersey, Wilson appeared in person before Congress to propose measures; conferred often with party and committee leaders in the White House and on the Hill; exploited the caucus to unify the congressional party behind his program; threatened to wield the veto power against obnoxious bills; mobilized the influence of Bryan and other party leaders against wavering Democrats. The President, he had said a few weeks before his inauguration, must act and serve as “prime minister,” directing and uniting party, legislative, and executive leadership. And that was how he governed.

Wilson was not one to ignore the role of President as moral leader, however, especially when a swarm of Washington lobbyists opposing tariff revision gave him the perfect opportunity. A “brick couldn’t be thrown without hitting one of them,” he told the press at his semiweekly press conference. Then he made a public statement: “I think that the public ought to know the extraordinary exertions being made by the lobby in Washington” on the tariff bill. “Washington has seldom seen so numerous, so industrious, or so insidious a lobby. The newspapers are being filled with paid advertisements calculated to mislead the judgment of public men not only, but also the public opinion of the country itself.…” The public at large had no lobby, he added.

Above all, Wilson demonstrated a remarkable flair for executive leadership. He chose able subordinates for his Cabinet: the now-veteran Bryan for Secretary of State; William Gibbs McAdoo, a Southerner turned Northerner like Wilson, and a master of the politics of economics, for the Treasury; Josephus Daniels, editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, for Navy; Lindley M. Garrison, a New Jersey attorney, for War. “I’ve got to have men in the cabinet who have passed the acid test of honesty,” he told his confidant, Colonel House. “Men who are brave. Men who are efficient. Men who have imagination.” There was a limit to Wilson’s own courage, however. Louis Brandeis of Boston fit all those criteria, and the President wanted him at his side as Attorney General. But Brandeis had fought the railroad interests of the Northeast, which, with the help of influential Wall Streeters, the conservative Massachusetts bar, and such bluebloods as President A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard and Henry L. Higginson, warned Wilson off. House also opposed him. And when Wilson leaned instead toward picking Brandeis for Secretary of Commerce and Labor—then still one department—the united Democracy of Massachusetts, including Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald of Boston, and a number of other Irish Democrats, dissuaded the President. The rejection of Brandeis, said La Follette, “breaks all our hearts.”

It was as commander of his party that Wilson proposed to exert central leadership, and this was an imposing task. Most of the important Senate committees, and fifteen of the seventeen key House committees, were chaired by Southerners, who also in sheer numbers dominated both houses and both Democratic caucuses. It was not surprising that Wilson chose half his Cabinet from the South, and it helped that Colonel House was a Texan. During Wilson’s early presidency, he “established a degree of personal control over his party rare in American presidential history,” in John Broesamle’s estimate. He took such a firm grip of the congressional party that he organized the whole legislative package. “He personally delivered messages to both houses, employed careful timing and constant pressure, haunted the president’s room in the Capitol, working continuously with members and advisers, wielded the patronage and the influence of powerful figures like Bryan, threatened vetoes, and, when the time came and other resources had failed, appealed to the public over the heads of Congress.” The man who thirty years before had warned of disintegrated rule in Congressional Government now enjoyed the heady experience of uniting it.

Policy was the payoff. Even before he entered office, Wilson was helping to marshal the forces of the Democracy for a counterattack on the high-tariff legislation of the Grand Old Party. In his personal appearance before Congress—the first by any President since Jefferson—Wilson declared, “We must abolish everything that bears even the semblance of privilege or of any kind of artificial advantage, and put our business men and producers under the stimulation of a constant necessity to be efficient, economical, and enterprising, masters of competitive supremacy, better workers and merchants than any in the world.” Andrew Carnegie himself could not have said it better. The House enacted a moderate downward revision by a two-to-one vote early in May; the big test would come in the Senate, long the burying ground of tariff reduction. There the western sheep farming and beet sugar interests were overrepresented, and it took all Wilson’s leadership skills to persuade western Democrats in the Senate to accept his argument that sheep raisers and sugar growers could compete with foreign imports. Major tariff revision downward emerged from Congress by September—along with a hotly debated and momentous graduated federal income tax designed to compensate for anticipated revenue losses under the reduced tariff.

“Think of it—a tariff revision downwards after all—not dictated by the mfgs,” wrote Agriculture Secretary David Houston, “lower in the Senate than in the House! … A progressive income tax! I did not much think we should live to see these things.”

More challenging even than the tariff was the other key issue that dominated presidential-congressional politics during Wilson’s first year—the nation’s monetary system. Embracing the intertwined problems of currency, banking, the money supply, inflation, and the scope of corporate power over the economy, this issue had roiled the nation’s politics for almost a century and had come to a head during the later progressive years. “It is not like the tariff, about which opinion has been definitely forming long years through,” Wilson remarked in June 1913. “There are almost as many judgments as there are men. To form a single plan and a single intention about it seems at times a task so various and so elusive that it is hard to keep one’s heart from failing.” But forming a single plan and intention is precisely what Wilson accomplished.

The way had been prepared by years of debate and, more recently, by the Pujo committee’s investigation of the “money trust,” by now viewed as a “spider web of interlocking Wall Street directorates,” in Arthur Ekirch’s words. The probe predictably found an intensive concentration of control over the nation’s credit supply by J. P. Morgan & Co. and associated investment firms. Two sharp issues reemerged in the ensuing debate: whether to maintain a centralized or decentralized monetary system, and whether it should be privately or publicly controlled. Unfortunately for Wilson, these sets of issues crosscut each other, producing a ‘ parallelogram of pressure. The old inflationist wing of the Democracy was exemplified particularly by Congressman Carter Glass of Virginia, head of the House Banking Committee, who favored a decentralized and privately controlled system. Populists and progressives, including Bryan, La Follette, and Brandeis, wanted public control.

The President took the latter stand. “The control of the system of banking and of issue which our new laws are to set up,” he said in his second appearance before Congress, “must be public, not private, must be vested in the Government itself, so that the banks may be the instruments, not the masters, of business and of individual enterprise and initiative.” But how master Glass? Wilson won him over to a creative compromise through sheer patience and persuasiveness, while fending off Wall Street pressure for a central bank, European style. The compromise blossomed in the Owen-Glass Act, passed in December 1913, which combined centralization and decentralization, governmental and private control. A Federal Reserve Board in Washington, composed of public officials, had authority to raise or lower the rediscount rate, thus wielding direct control over the credit supply. Federal Reserve regions were established; in each a Federal Reserve bank, six of whose nine directors would be appointed by the Federal Reserve Board, served as depositories for the cash reserves of the national banks—which were required to join the system—and of state banks. But the regional reserve banks would remain in the ownership of private bankers, and hence in their control too—to the extent that La Follette and Representative Charles A. Lindbergh of Minnesota charged that the act legalized the “Money Trust.” The act, in Arthur Link’s view, was the greatest single piece of constructive legislation of the Wilson era.

Once again Wilson had demonstrated his uncommon ability both to lead and to follow, to stand firm and to give way. This was the hallmark of his early years in the White House, in the teeth of expectations that he would be professorially rigid and dogmatic. He made a point of treating legislators with respect, as partners in a common cause. And he learned from them. When, shortly after his inauguration, he piously told his Postmaster General and chief patronage dispenser, Albert S. Burleson, that on appointments “I am not going to advise with reactionary or standpat Senators or Representatives,” Burleson reacted like the seasoned old party pro that he was.

“Mr. President,” he exclaimed, “if you pursue this policy, it means that your administration is going to be a failure…. It doesn’t amount to a damn who is postmaster at Paducah, Kentucky. But these little offices mean a great deal to the Senators and Representatives in Congress.” He knew these congressmen and senators. “If they are turned down, they will hate you and will not vote for anything you want. It is human nature….” Wilson gave way.

The President also gave way on a far more vital question of strategy. He had not only wanted to lead the Democratic party; he had planned to transform it into a more progressive party—indeed, to reconstruct the Democracy and align it with liberal-minded independents and Republicans. Patronage for progressives in Congress was to be only one element of this strategy; he planned to reconstruct the New York and other state and local political parties by granting or withholding White House recognition. He quickly encountered the powerful defenses of political gridlock. When McAdoo and others, with Wilson’s blessing, sought to revamp the New York Democracy, its man in the Senate, James A. O’Gorman, warned that he would invoke his personal privilege as a senator to hold up appointments of anti-Tammany Democrats and independents. Wilson backed off. He discovered, though, that if he traded with the regulars, they supported him more dependably than many progressive lawmakers.

“What you told me about the old standpatters is true,” he told Burleson. “They will at least stand by the party and the administration.”

The President’s flexibility helped him immeasurably in getting his big bills through Congress. But this was short-run politics against longer-run, pragmatic politics against principled. In the long run, he might need a more progressive vehicle than the boss-ridden, disorganized, rurally oriented, fractionated Democracy; he might need liberal-minded Democrats, independents, and internationalist Republicans. In the short run, he was pushing his bills through Congress. But there would be a price to pay for pragmatism.

The Anatomy of Protest

The commanding intellectual issue in Woodrow Wilson’s first term was not the tariff or even banking and currency. It was the issue of economic monopoly in a representative democracy. For almost a century Jeffersonians, Jacksonians, farmers’ and workers’ parties, Locofocos, Grangers, Populists, and reformist Democrats and Republicans had been calling for the curbing, in various ways, of the monopolistic tendencies of big business. For half a century—ever since the Civil War—trusts had come more and more to dominate the economic landscape. In the eyes of antimonopolists, nothing seemed to stop these behemoths. The Sherman Antitrust law had been fitfully enforced and judicially eroded. At century’s turn, ten years after the act was passed, business underwent “a burst of merger activity never exceeded in importance in our history.” Left holding the economic high ground were the new giants: U.S. Steel—the first billion-dollar company—American Tobacco, International Harvester, Du Pont, American Smelting & Refining, and scores of others.

Now at last it seemed that the monsters could be tamed. Not only had business concentration been a dramatic and central issue in the 1912 campaigns; not only had all the four leading presidential candidates taken some kind of position “agin the trusts”; they had divided so contentiously over proposed solutions as to offer at least a rough guide to the voters’ minds and the new Administration’s mandate. During 1914, his second year in office, Wilson won from Congress the Federal Trade Commission Act as part of his trust regulation program. A new bipartisan commission was empowered to investigate and police corporations in order to prevent unfair business practices such as adulteration of goods, combinations for maintaining resale prices, and mislabeling. Congress also passed the Clayton Antitrust Act, which prohibited price-cutting that aimed at the destruction of competition, interlocking directorates in industrial entities capitalized at $1 million or more, and stock purchases by corporations of other corporations when these tended to lessen competition.

The passage of these acts, however, seemed less to satisfy concern over monopoly than to intensify it. This apparent paradox was due in part to widespread doubt that any legislation, federal or state, could actually master private economic power. Even more, the skepticism stemmed from the view that the problem was a much broader one than mere monopoly, that the great popular and progressive mandates of 1904 and 1912 were in jeopardy, that American democracy itself was at stake.

Fear of economic—and political—power in a few hands lay deep in the American psyche. During the progressive era, Hofstadter noted, the entire structure of business “became the object of a widespread hostility” as a result of belief that business was becoming “a closed system of authoritative action.” Wilson had touched the people’s nerve in 1912. He was engaged, he proclaimed in Denver at the height of the 1912 campaign, in a “crusade against powers that have governed us—that have limited our development—that have determined our lives—that have set us in a strait-jacket to do as they please.” Raising the stakes, he went on to call the fight a “second struggle for emancipation.”

Yet Americans seemed to be as ambivalent about the “second emancipation” as they had been about the first one. For one thing, defenders of big business were putting up powerful arguments. Consolidation, they claimed, lowered prices. “We think our American petroleum” is “very cheap,” said John D. Rockefeller smoothly. “It is our pleasure to make it so.” Big business, the argument continued, was more efficient and economical because it could buy and sell in large quantities, hire the ablest people, experiment and innovate without undue risk, use the latest labor-saving machinery. Nor was big business undemocratic, because it was controlled by shareholders with voting power. Critics of business disputed all these points, especially the last. It was already becoming clear to perceptive observers that stockholders, if they had ever really had control, were yielding it to managers, executives, and insiders.

People argued the case in terms also of their basic values, but values were not clear guides to action. Almost everyone believed in Individualism, Democracy, and of course Liberty or Freedom, but how did these terms translate into economic or governmental policy? Individualism was a case in point. It was in the name of Individualism or individual liberty that the businessmen of the late nineteenth century had fought off governmental interference and apotheosized the Horatio Alger man who rose to the top through the untrammeled exercise of ambition, competition, and talent. Then Wilson, La Follette, et al. had turned Algerism upside down by proclaiming that monopolies had blighted individual liberty, opportunity, competition.

Or consider democracy. Economic? Political? Social? In both the private and public sphere? Exercised through the majority will? Stockholders’ meetings? Party politics? Coalitions of minorities? Or through a scramble for power and pelf, open to all on an equal basis, favoring none? For most Americans, for most of their leaders, these questions were still open.

Then, the thorniest question of all: If economic concentration did indeed threaten American democracy, what should be done about it? Those who favored some kind of governmental action had divided most clearly in 1912 between Wilson’s promise to break up economic bigness and Roosevelt’s proposal to regulate it. It turned out, though, that these differences were not as polar—or as profound—as the two sides believed. In practice, policy crept out of these narrow categories and found its own crisscrossing paths. Then too, Wilson showed considerable flexibility in carrying out his programs. Thus, after having flayed Roosevelt’s proposal to regulate big business through a strong Federal Trade Commission, Wilson himself moved around to this position.

However much he might have altered course, President Wilson’s forceful leadership stimulated and catalyzed thought throughout the ranks of progressive thinkers. Out of the clash of ideas during the Roosevelt and Taft years arose an intellectual leadership that was centrally concerned over the sharpening conflict between the ideological defense of big business and the claims of democratic progressives. Four men took the lead in rethinking the role of democracy in the booming American workshop, the whole question of “industrial democracy.”

By far the most influential of these—measured both by access to power and by influence on policy—was Louis Brandeis. Unperturbed by Wilson’s failure to offer the “people’s lawyer” a major post in the face of conservative opposition, the Boston attorney continued to advise the President on major economic policy. “Brandeis and Wilson initially used Wilson’s presidency, and the potential power it gave him, to teach the nation about the ideals of Brandeis and the progressives and to enact some of them into law,” according to Philippa Strum. Brandeis successfully backed James McReynolds for Attorney General; met often with Cabinet and other Administration officials; worked with Secretary of State Bryan to influence Wilson against allowing the “money trust” too much control over the new Federal Reserve system; and, changing his own mind, helped change Wilson’s mind as to the desirability of a regulatory, rather than merely investigative, Federal Trade Commission. Though disappointed by Wilson’s conservative appointments to both the commission and the Federal Reserve Board, Brandeis remained on cordial terms with the President.

Still, Brandeis from the start took a stronger line against big business, the trusts, and especially the money trust than Wilson did. The theme that “never varied in Louis Brandeis’s thought,” according to Melvin Urofsky, was that “too great a concentration of economic power constituted a social, economic and political menace to a free society; a business could be efficient only up to a certain size beyond which bigness caused inefficiency; trusts could never stand up to smaller units in a freely and truly competitive market place; proper rules regulating competition could insure such conditions; competition is the atmosphere which a free society breathes.”

For Brandeis the paramount issue was not efficiency but democracy—industrial, political, governmental democracy. In “striving for democracy,” he told the Commission on Industrial Relations in 1915, “we are striving for the development of men.” Industrial democracy would not come by gift; it “has got to be by those who desire it.” Brandeis’s great hope was that industrial workers would want it, for they had the most to gain from it. Individual employees had no effective voice or vote, but collectively workers should exercise more control through their unions, just as stockholders should be held responsible for decisions made by their companies. Brandeis pointed to the garment industry, where an agreement had created a system of government for both employers and unions, including even “administrative officers, courts, and a legislature always ready to take up questions arising in the trade.” The smaller the business, Brandeis suggested, the more likely such industrial democracy could grow.

Second only to Brandeis in influence over presidential leadership was Herbert Croly, friend of Theodore Roosevelt. Raised by activist parents—his father the editor of the crusading New York Daily Graphic, his mother a journalist and pioneering feminist—Croly left for Harvard in 1886 imbued with his family’s Comtean positivism and dedicated to the welfare of mankind, and after intermittent years of study under James and Santayana, and as editor of the Architectural Record, he became even more dedicated to the welfare of mankind. He produced in 1909 his masterwork, The Promise of American Life, a 468-page tome as relevant and powerful as it was long and prolix. It was Roosevelt’s reading of this book, shortly after his return from Africa, that mightily strengthened the radical thrust of the former President’s progressivism and brought the two men together.

Two progressives could hardly have been more philosophically divided than Croly and Brandeis. Brandeis looked back nostalgically to Jeffersonian ideas of local democracy, individual liberty, rural culture, and small-scale economic competition. Croly called for a strong national government, under vigorous executive leadership, prepared to carry out progressive and humane policies at home and pursue nationalistic policies abroad. To him, individual liberty was important, but no less was liberty of the whole people to shape their own destiny. Only the centralized power of the people could deal with the centralized power of big business. Croly, it was said, would use Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends, though he complained that Hamilton perverted the “national idea” with his upper-class bias almost as much as Jefferson perverted the democratic idea with his extreme individualism and egalitarianism.

Croly was in fact calling for rare national leadership. He was man enough to chide his friend the Colonel for trying to make the American citizen into a “sixty-horse-power moral motor-car,” for doing little to encourage “candid and consistent thinking,” for his “sheer exuberance of moral energy,” and TR was man enough to accept the soft impeachment. The two worked together, each hardening the other’s convictions, through the 1912 campaign, and then collaborated while Roosevelt debated whether to stick with the Progressives or return to Republicanism. But as the Colonel’s 1916 election prospects dwindled, Croly turned increasingly to the Democrat in the White House who was practicing leadership, no longer merely preaching it.

When Croly began to plan a new weekly of progressive opinion in 1913, it was only natural that he would turn to his recent acquaintance Walter Weyl. A product of the Wharton School in his native Philadelphia and of the University of Halle in Germany, Weyl in 1912 published The New Democracy. “America today is in a somber, soul-questioning mood,” were Weyl’s opening words. “We are in a period of clamor, of bewilderment, of an almost tremulous unrest. We are hastily revising all our social conceptions. We are hastily testing all our political ideals.” He was happy to help with both conceptions and ideals. In the next 356 pages, he listed the nation’s gains but also its failures—“sensational inequalities of wealth, insane extravagances, strident ostentations,” along with boss-ridden cities, wretched slums, pauperism, vice, crime, insanity, dangerous factories, unemployment, premature deaths of babies, the scrapping of aged workmen, rising class conflict, hunger, “social vice,” the breakdown of government.

What would Weyl do about all these evils? First, measure them; he was an avid statistician. Second, work with consumer and labor groups, as he did in several years of involvement with the labor leader John Mitchell and his coal miners. Third, find a solution midway between Manchester liberalism and Marxist socialism. Finally, in all this be practical, “pragmatist.” Marx was wrong, Weyl contended, in teaching that progress would come through the poverty and proletarianization of the working class. Weyl proposed the doctrine of “progress through prosperity.” Reformers should use democracy—the right to vote, the initiative and referendum, the party primary—as both means and end. A sweet and easygoing man, considered almost saintly by his friends, Weyl believed in progress without pain.

Weyl was forty when tapped for the new weekly; Croly also recruited another thinker fifteen years younger than Weyl, and the most remarkable of the future editors. Like Weyl, Walter Lippmann was born of German-Jewish parents. Growing up on Manhattan’s upper East Side, he was indulged as a child and later granted independence and the money to sustain it. During his first three years at Harvard, he took one course each in history and government, three in economics, five in language, and seven in philosophy. He studied under Harvard greats—Hugo Münsterberg in psychology, George Lyman Kittredge in English, Irving Babbitt in French literature, and in philosophy, George Santayana and, above all, William James, who profoundly influenced the eager young scholar. Lippmann also learned something about political psychology and human motivation from a visiting British professor, Graham Wallas, one of the original Fabian socialists. By the time Lippmann left Harvard, he had headed the student socialist club.

By twenty-five, Lippmann had lived the average man’s lifetime: assistant to Santayana, reporter for the Boston Common, research aide to Lincoln Steffens, secretary to the socialist mayor of Schenectady, and author of two important books, A Preface to Politics and Drift and Mastery. Through luck and design, he had come to know scores of persons of political or literary note on both sides of the Atlantic—Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton in England, and at home such unlikely persons as W. E. B. Du Bois, whom he put up unsuccessfully for Manhattan’s Liberal Club. When, in October 1913, Croly invited him to lunch at the fashionable Players Club and offered him sixty dollars a week to work for the new weekly, Lippmann accepted on the spot.

“Lippmann, as you say, is an interesting mixture of maturity and innocence,” Croly happily wrote his close friend Judge Learned Hand. No matter how Lippmann turned out as a political philosopher, “he certainly has great possibilities as a political journalist.” He did not know as much as he thought he did, “but he does know a lot, and his general sense of values is excellent.” He was a bit impertinent, but it would be an impertinent journal. Croly added roguishly, “We’ll throw a few firecrackers under the skirts of the old women on the bench and in other high places.”

The weekly—it would be called the New Republic—did toss a few firecrackers, some of which exploded, but it became primarily a journal that reflected the eclectic and limber attitudes of its several editors. Lippmann’s political philosophy was changing even as he joined the weekly. Already he had given up his socialist beliefs, especially after his experience with the socialist mayor, who moderated his program to pander to the sluggish masses. His Preface to Politics was an “intellectual potpourri,” in Ronald Steel’s words, filled with Lippmann’s student collocation—James’s tribute to practical results, Henri Bergson’s creative intuition, Nietzsche’s will to power, H. G. Wells’s scientific utopianism, a chunk of Freud, and John Dewey’s master plan for social change. He attacked majority rule, the two-party system, trust-busting, electoral reform, and other products of “uptown” reformers or the mass mind. He called for national leadership, scientific management, and, in Freudian style, a new morality based on directing instead of “tabooing our impulses.” Drift and Mastery was a more intellectually focused and limited book that seemed to abandon Lippmann’s earlier emphasis on irrationality in politics, fretted over the “chaos of a new freedom,” but still contained a dash of youthful iconoclasm.

Still, it was the old story of progressives and reformers having a far better grasp of what they opposed than what they wished to substitute. The New Republic crowd, and their friends and friendly critics like Brandeis and Dewey, brilliantly dissected problems of economics, religion, politics, morals, psychology; they made many a sensible proposal for specific reforms in government, industry, education, law, crime prevention, social welfare, civic life. But they did not come to grips with the central issue that for many intellectuals lay behind all the specific issues—the threat of corporate power to American pluralistic democracy. This failure stemmed from a number of sources—the lack of adequate economic and social data, the limited tools of economic analysis, the power of reform shibboleths like “direct democracy,” the pleasures of iconoclasm as compared to the drudgery of policy analysis. But, above all, the failure lay in habits of thinking, especially in the pragmatism that dominated social thought in the progressive era. Rebelling against the windy, absolutist doctrines of left and right, such as Marxism and Social Darwinism, the progressive thinkers made a fetish of practicality, immediate results, manageable reforms. They did so at the expense of hard and creative thought about the economic and political changes that would be necessary to curb the economic behemoths and, through transforming leadership and creative popular action, bring about the reconstruction of society.

The reconstruction of American society—this was the cardinal goal of American socialists of almost all hues and tints, but they wrangled year after year as to how to define this goal and how to realize it.

Of the socialist parties still existing in 1913, however feebly, the Socialist Labor Party had taken the most consistently radical position for revolutionary action leading to the abolition of the wage system, the destruction of capitalism, and the collective ownership by the people of the means of production and distribution. Drawing its strength from Marxists—both European and homegrown—and from militants in the workingmen’s parties of the 1870s, the SLP had preached a vaguely defined revolutionary strategy, and had denounced bread-and-butter unionism even while making concessions to short-run trade union tactics. By the mid-nineties, the party had established itself especially in German-American unions and virtually controlled the Central Labor Federation of New York.

A type of leader hardly known in the United States but familiar to radicals abroad supplied powerful leadership to the SLP. He was Daniel De Leon, brilliant theoretician, doctrinaire socialist, ideological purist. His early years would hardly have seemed likely to produce such a sectarian: son of a Curaçao surgeon, De Leon studied in Germany, then in 1874 settled in New York City, where he taught Greek and Latin, edited a paper supporting independence for Cuba, won a law degree from Columbia, and became a lecturer on international law at that university, meanwhile carrying political lances for Henry George and Edward Bellamy. Winning the editorship of the SLP party organ, De Leon dominated the organization for almost a quarter-century. He fought to convert trade unionists to socialism without being converted by them, launched ferocious personal attacks on his rivals from left to right, sought to create through the SLP a revolutionary industrial union, and tried to drive the AFL out of business—all with the goal of demanding the “unconditional surrender of the capitalist system.” By 1912, after years of secessions, expulsions, and schismatic infighting, capitalism reigned triumphant and the SLP was reduced to a tiny band of militants, but De Leon had posed the question that no leader now could duck: Should industrial workers try to reform and shore up capitalism from within, or replace it with some kind of socialism?

The Socialist Party, launched in 1901, never seemed to make up its collective mind on this central question, in part because its origins were even more diverse than those of the SLP. Its early members, according to Milton Cantor, included veterans from the Populist movement, from Eugene Debs’s American Railway Union, from Christian socialism, leavened by settlement workers, millionaire socialists, scions of German Forty-eighters, “and the cultural radicals—bohemian writers and artists—who fought for birth control, women’s suffrage, and uninhibited social-sexual behavior.” The party included New York intellectuals, hard-boiled union bosses, practical-minded candidates for mayor and governor, hundreds of socialists who actually won local office.

The Socialists evolved an ingenious device for preaching both the reform of capitalism and its abolition. In the preambles, their party platforms proclaimed lofty and even revolutionary goals, such as the abolition of wage slavery or the building of a cooperative commonwealth, and then the platforms settled down to the nuts and bolts of reforming the capitalistic system: welfare measures, state and municipal reforms, protection of labor, conservation, public works for the unemployed, and the like. This device seemed to satisfy both “immediatists” and “impossibilists.” As the years passed, the party became increasingly meliorist, but the rhetoric of revolution hung evocatively over convention orators and county stump speakers.

The Socialists could boast of seasoned leadership at every party level. During the decade leading up to his 900,000-vote triumph in 1912, Eugene Debs won worldwide fame. He ran for the presidency, he told Lincoln Steffens, to raise “social consciousness.” When socialism came to the verge of success, he continued, the party would choose “an able executive and a clear-minded administrator; not—not Debs.” Debs was party candidate and spokesman, not manager. The task of running the organization fell on men like Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger, who also heavily influenced the adoption of party policies for “gas and water” socialism. In particular Berger, leader of the Milwaukee party, fought for constructive, “safe and sane” socialism—a position that helped him win congressional office.

The Industrial Workers of the World continued to roil socialist politics during these years, but its brand of socialism was even less coherent than that of the SLP or the Socialist party. The organization was rent by factions variously supporting syndicalist and even anarchist policies, straight industrial action, and vigorous political activism. In the wide-open brawls of the Wobblies, leaders fought to be “king of the rock.” In a showdown battle IWW’s pugnacious leader, Big Bill Haywood, not only vanquished De Leon but, in the noncomradely fashion of the day, helped expel him from the organization. At the core of the IWW, Aileen Kraditor concluded, “were extreme individualists who rejected not just the content of the conventional community relationships but the social bonds themselves.” Though the Wobblies proclaimed lofty socialist and syndicalist goals, Haywood and other leaders stressed the need to win labor’s immediate battles, and Big Bill sounded off against the “scum proletariat” of lawyers, preachers, authors, lecturers, and “intellectual non-producers generally,” whom he called even more dangerous than the “lumpen proletariat.”

Just after the height of its electoral success in 1912, the Socialist party and movement underwent a decline that, with occasional interruptions, continued for decades. The reason was partly organizational and “practical.” The movement was never able to build an all-encompassing organization or party; on the contrary, relations within and among socialist groups were marked by hostility, recrimination, schisms, expulsions, and searing invective. Radicals reserved their choicest epithets for socialist heretics rather than capitalist infidels. De Leon castigated an opposing faction of Debsites and others as a “vocal collection of freaks, frauds, and incompetents,” consisting not of “the raw material that a new social system is to be woven out of, but of the garbage-barrel material, the offal and refuse of society….”

Still, intolerant conviction came with the radical territory; most socialists felt more deeply about social ills than did most centrist party brokers. The organizational problem lay much deeper. As a whole, and despite the activism of such socialists as Kate Richards O’Hare, Ella Reeve Bloor, and Rose Pastor Stokes, socialist leaders were not sensitive to the needs of women. Some leaders were overtly sexist; most assumed that the abolition of capitalism automatically meant the liberation of female workers as well as male. In short, they invited women into their ranks on socialist terms, not on women’s terms. These leaders on the whole were even more culture-bound in dealing with Negro workers. At the height of segregationism it seemed impossible to confront the problem of class and race, especially in the South, where radical workers would not sit next to blacks in union halls or let them into their locals. So blacks too had to wait for the socialist tide that would raise all boats. If, as Vann Woodward said, it was “Progressivism—for Whites Only” in the post-Populist South, it was also “Socialism for Whites Only” in that region and in certain enclaves of the North.

Even with “their own people”—immigrants, ethnics, workers settled in communities—socialist leaders were often unable to penetrate the family, neighborhood, religious, linguistic, recreational, and political party worlds in which the workers actually lived most of their lives. These persons were not blank pages for radicals to write on. Among the workers’ worlds might be a trade union that ignored talk of class war and concentrated on immediate benefits. Class consciousness, Lenin was saying, could only be brought to workers from without; left to themselves, the working class would “develop only trade-union consciousness.” To transform all those workers’ “consciousnesses”—union, family, religious, and the like—would have taken a far more powerful organizational effort and psychological understanding than the socialists were able to achieve.

Ultimately, the towering problem for American socialists was more intellectual even than organizational. Their leaders failed to establish a clear and convincing case for reconstruction rather than mere reform, for some kind of revolution rather than the usual gradualism, for a central and disciplined political strategy rather than the familiar trial-and-error, one-step-at-a-time, by-guess-and-by-God tactics. Not only were the political means unclear; even more so were the goals. The socialists collectively were not agreed as to what the grand new commonwealth would be like—whether more socialist or syndicalist, how governed, how heavily egalitarian, committed to what values and to what priorities among those values. In the absence of clear guidelines, these questions of both means and ends were left to criteria of practicality—what might work today or tomorrow for narrow and specific ends. Thus inarticulate premises of common sense, pragmatism, and practicality hung over the thought and actions of socialist leaders who might never have read William James or John Dewey.

The socialists offered the workers pie in the sky, and that was all right: it was an old American custom. But just as American thinkers had so often propounded specific short-term steps on the one hand and vague long-term goals on the other, skipping over the vital linkages of interrelated ends and means, so did the radicals. They offered pie, and a future of lots of pie, but they rarely told the worker what she wanted to know—how baked, with what ingredients, how to be distributed—and whether it would really be Mom’s apple pie or a confection with a strange and alien flavor.

Markets, Morality, and the “Star of Empire”

Woodrow Wilson’s early efforts to translate into policy the ideology of the New Freedom took place against a background of turmoil and conflict on the international scene. Foreign affairs had figured little in the three-way debate of the 1912 campaign; at most it was a tangential issue, raised by Pujo Committee charges that the Taft Administration had favored bankers and investors in its diplomatic dealings. Aside from echoing these attacks on the “Money Trust,” Wilson shied away from any debate on America’s role in the world. “It would be the irony of fate,” he noted after his election, “if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.”

Wilson had very firm ideas about America’s interests abroad, however. Like most of his thinking, these ideas grew out of his deep moral commitment to justice, democracy, and Christian values. Wilson revived the Jeffersonian theme of America as a beacon star of democracy for the world, an exemplar and—with its newfound power in the twentieth century—promoter of human rights and social development. “We are chosen,” he declared in 1910, “to show the way to the nations of the world how they shall walk in the paths of liberty.” Yet this moral thrust had a practical self-interested side. Wilson’s graduate study under Frederick Jackson Turner had left him convinced that America must seek new frontiers abroad to replace the western frontier that had disappeared. One form that moral duty could take was the responsibility of empire, in the Caribbean and the Far East—for empire, notes Sidney Bell, was in Wilson’s eyes “an engine of liberty.”

That engine was to be economic as well as ideological. Wilson, as much as Taft or Roosevelt, believed that America’s foreign trade and investment should be encouraged to grow. In his official acceptance address, delivered more than a month after the Baltimore convention, Wilson declared that “our industries have expanded to such a point that they will burst their jackets if they cannot find a free outlet to the markets of the world.” On the one hand, he and the Secretary of State-designate, William Jennings Bryan, denounced the alleged machinations of investment bankers and called for a “war for emancipation from … the concentrated and organized power of money.” Yet, on the other hand, Wilson viewed the pursuit of what he called the economic “Star of Empire” as being vital to both prosperity at home and efficacy abroad.

China posed the first test of Wilson’s faith that he could reconcile these two conflicting tenets. Economics had long played a key role in shaping America’s policy toward the Celestial Kingdom. As the European powers and Japan proceeded to extract concessions and spheres of influence from the Chinese at the end of the nineteenth century, Secretary Hay had responded with a series of diplomatic notes calling for an “open door”; America’s desire, Hay asserted, was to “safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the Chinese Empire.”

The powers paid lip service to Hay’s Open Door doctrine while continuing to undermine the independence of China. When the Emperor’s government was forced to pay the Europeans—and the United States—a large indemnity after Chinese mobs attacked foreigners in the abortive Boxer Rebellion, Western bankers agreed to fund the debt in return for further concessions. Foreign control in the various spheres of influence grew; the Japanese in Manchuria, for example, collected taxes, appointed police, and supervised the population all along the railroads they operated. Meanwhile America’s share of China’s imports dwindled from 10.4 to 7.5 percent. Rather than selling vast quantities of American manufactured goods, merchants found a market for only modest amounts of U.S. lumber, tobacco, unbleached cloth, and Standard Oil kerosene.

President Taft had endeavored to reverse, with vigorous diplomacy, the decline of American commerce and influence in China. Drawing upon his own experiences in Manila and Shanghai, he wanted a Peking embassy that would employ “force and pluck” to counter the other powers and promote U.S. interests. His plan was to expand substantially American investment in China, on the theory that increased trade would follow. To Prince-Regent Chun, Taft wrote of his “intense personal interest in making the use of American capital … an instrument for the promotion of the welfare of China.” The United States would join the Europeans in their game of economic imperialism and try to beat them at it, to the alleged benefit of both America and China.

The Taft Administration launched a series of investment projects, offering funds for railroad construction, currency reform, and reorganization of Peking’s finances. Edward H. Harriman, the great magnate of western railroads, was enlisted to incorporate Manchuria into his scheme for a global network of railways and steamships. But Harriman died in the first year of Taft’s presidency. Secretary of State Philander Knox undermined several loan proposals by making unacceptable political demands on the Chinese, while other ventures were hamstrung by disputes with and among the European co-investors. Overall, American bankers were reluctant to risk their capital to promote the schemes of Taft and Knox; only persistent pressure from Washington kept “dollar diplomacy” moving at all.

The Chinese people, however, were also on the move. Reacting to increasing foreign influence, the population of the southern provinces rose in protest and toppled the Peking monarchy in 1911. Secretary Knox would neither recognize the rebel forces of Sun Yat-sen nor continue loans to Yuan Shih-kai’s self-styled republic newly organized in the capital; the entire question was left as the first foreign crisis for the Wilson Administration.

From the very beginning the incoming Democrat took a longer view of American interests in China. Political development, he concluded, was essential to economic growth; thus the United States should make its first goal the advancement of a free, democratic China. To Sun Yat-sen Wilson cabled his “strongest sympathy with every movement which looks towards giving the people … of China the liberty for which they have so long been yearning and preparing themselves.” Bryan, meanwhile, sent congratulations to Yuan—along with a copy of the works of Thomas Jefferson. When the two Chinese leaders reached a precarious compromise and formed a united government, Wilson made America the first major power to recognize the new republic.

For Wilson the “awakening of the people of China” was the “most significant … event of our generation.” The Peking embassy, Wilson and Bryan believed, should go to an ambassador who would work closely with the American missionaries and Young Men’s Christian Association activists who were penetrating the country in increasing numbers. When Henry Morgenthau asked for the appointment, Wilson demurred, replying that the post had to go to an “evangelical Christian.” The choice fell on Professor Paul Reinsch, a former editor of La Follette’s journal. To Reinsch, Wilson emphasized that education and political example should take precedence over economic involvement. Indeed, the President noted in a letter to Harvard’s Charles Eliot, American diplomacy had to be reordered across the board to put “moral and public considerations” ahead of the “material interests of individuals.”

Early on, Wilson was presented with an opportunity to put those principles into practice, when a group of American bankers applied for government permission to continue in an international loan to Yuan’s regime. Noting that the terms of the loan called for foreign control of tax collection and of expenditures, Wilson pulled the American firms out of the consortium. The United States, he declared, would take an independent course to aid China without undermining her national sovereignty.

The public greeted the rejection of the bankers’ consortium with applause. Henry George (Jr.) declared that Wilson had prevented the “prostitution of our State Department by our princes of privilege.” Outlook foresaw the triumph of progressive reform, with American guidance and trade helping to build a “New China” of “parks, and sewers, and filtered water, and war on rats and mosquitoes.” The New York World ran a cartoon entitled “Leaving the Firm,” that showed Uncle Sam turning his back on J. P. Morgan & Company. Wilson himself, however, was aware that the Taft Administration had dragooned the bankers into their Chinese loans in the first place. Now that the new President had reversed the government’s policy, freeing Morgan and his associates from an imbroglio of which they were “dead sick,” the bankers were glad to see meddling Uncle Sam take his leave.

How apply “moral considerations” much closer to home—to Mexico and other restless, poverty-racked nations of Latin America? The approach of Wall Street and Washington was mainly financial. In 1912, Americans sold more than $130 million worth of manufactured goods south of the Rio Grande and bought $250 million in foodstuffs and raw materials. Long-term investments in the region passed the $1 billion mark. In Mexico alone, Americans were estimated to own 43 percent of the invested property.

Alongside American trade, exploitation and tyranny still flourished too; could Wilson, in the spirit of the New Freedom, promote the former while combating the latter? He had little enough freedom himself, for the actions of previous Administrations narrowed his choices in dealing with the southern nations. Taft’s Latin American policy, modeled on the quasi-protectorate that TR had established over the Dominican Republic, put American experts in charge of the finances of various Caribbean republics. The system had seemed to work splendidly in Santo Domingo, where U.S. control of the customs revenues ushered in a period of political calm and economic growth. But elsewhere Taft had encountered obstacles to his paternalistic policies. The prickly Philander Knox alienated many of the Latin American diplomats who tried to work with him; Taft himself failed to get several key treaties through the Senate; and revolutionary upheavals on the scene threatened to sweep away fiscal solutions that seemed promising in Washington. Taft had characterized his policy as one of “substituting dollars for bullets,” but in Nicaragua he had to rely on both, sending in U.S. troops to prop up an unpopular government friendly to American investment.

Thus Wilson entered office bound by a series of commitments in’ Latin America: a historical commitment to the Monroe Doctrine; a strategic one to the defense of the Panama Canal, just now being completed after a decade of work; a military one to the American soldiers already stationed in Nicaragua, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Guantanamo. And finally there was a financial commitment: fully one-half of America’s investments abroad were in Latin America. Old foreign policy hands wondered how these practical considerations would interact with Wilson’s underlying moral precepts.

Wilson did not hesitate to protect American interests with vigorous action. August 1914: Nicaragua yields control of a naval base and the alternate isthmian canal route to the United States. July 1915: American Marines land in Haiti to quell bloody disorders. November 1916: the United States establishes military control over the Dominican Republic. January 1917: Wilson purchases the Danish Virgin Islands in order to secure the approaches to the Panama Canal. February 1917: more U.S. troops land in Cuba to block a revolt against the Menocal government.

Morality had its place too in a lingering crisis in American relations with Mexico. Two years of political turmoil in that country had climaxed on February 22, 1913, when President Francisco Madero was killed, allegedly by the forces of his opponent, General Victoriano Huerta. Taft’s ambassador in Mexico City advised the newly inaugurated Wilson to accept Huerta’s coup, for the general had disavowed the murder of Madero, ended the fighting that had gripped the capital, and won the support of key European envoys. The American President, however, was unmoved. To his Cabinet, Wilson exclaimed that he would not deal with “a government of butchers”; publicly he announced that “morality and not expediency” would guide American policy.

Rather than recognize Huerta, Wilson recalled the U.S. ambassador, froze Mexican government funds in the United States, and instituted a policy of “watchful waiting” toward the dictator’s regime. To the traditional tests for recognizing a foreign power, Wilson added a new formula: its government must be “constitutionally legitimate.” American friendship, he postulated in a “Declaration of Policy in Regard to Latin America,” must be predicated on “the orderly processes of just government based upon law, not upon arbitrary or irregular force.”

Wilson’s ideological approach to the Mexican crisis came under a storm of fire. The European powers regarded his new doctrine of legitimacy as an insufferable affront to accepted diplomatic practice. At home, Roosevelt and others took a different tack, charging that the President was not acting strongly enough, and calling for war with Mexico. For Wilson, the conflict soon assumed the aspect of a personal vendetta with the Mexican dictator. “There can be no certain prospect of peace in America,” he warned Congress, “until General Huerta has surrendered his usurped power.” In private Wilson also railed against his critics, charging them with base motives of gain. “I have to pause and remind myself,” he told his secretary, “that I am President of the United States and not of a small group of Americans with vested interests in Mexico.”

Wilson hoped that the United States could continue to exercise “the self-restraint of a really great nation, which realizes its own strength and scorns to misuse it.” Slowly, however, the country edged toward war. In February 1914 the President allowed arms to be shipped to the rebel Constitutionalists in Mexico. Still, Huerta seemed to be growing stronger; only military intervention, wrote Wilson’s personal envoy in Mexico City, could bring to an end the dictator’s “saturnalia of crime and oppression.” When U.S. sailors and Mexican police clashed in Tampico, Wilson went before Congress and requested authority to use force. The next day, April 21, American troops seized the port of Veracruz after overcoming stiff Mexican resistance.

The occupation of Veracruz helped bring about the downfall of Huerta and the elevation of Venustiano Carranza, chief among the Constitutionalist rebels. But Carranza was no more legitimate a ruler than Huerta; Francisco “Pancho” Villa and others kept revolt brewing in the northern provinces, while Carranza took a harshly anti-American position. Wilson was rescued from this embarrassing impasse by the diplomats of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, who offered to mediate between Washington and Mexico City. With the help of the ABC powers, Wilson was able to evacuate Veracruz in November, and a year later he grudgingly extended recognition to Carranza.

Were Wilson’s moral pronouncements merely a smokescreen for a policy of economic imperialism? Holding up Veracruz and the Caribbean interventions as examples, some observers—and some historians later— charged that Wilson “outraged the sovereignty of unwilling nations” in the interests of American business, and that his actions were indistinguishable from those of his Republican predecessors. Actually, Wilson displayed considerable restraint in dealing with Mexico. American property, and even American lives, continued to be lost in that country, yet Wilson resisted pressures to launch an all-out war. Presented with a stark choice between economic and ideological interests, Wilson used limited means and pursued democratic ends.

When he could, Wilson did try to reconcile material interests with morality, and he achieved some success. The Philippines gained limited self-government under his Administration, and the inhabitants of Puerto Rico were granted the rights of American citizenship. In the Caribbean, intervention by the United States brought democratic reforms to several states, at least on paper. Yet it is questionable whether Wilson achieved his stated goal, to “teach the South American republics to elect good men.” Certainly in China, where there were no U.S. Marines to back up his edicts, Wilson’s policy drifted toward failure as Yuan’s regime degenerated into despotism and Sun Yat-sen was forced to flee the country. The practical question, of how ideas and force should be mixed in a single consistent approach to foreign affairs, remained unresolved. At the very least for Wilson—and for all twentieth-century Presidents—Latin America was an early schooling in the complex and powerful autonomous forces operating in what would come to be known as the Third World.

Events in Mexico continued to frustrate Wilson. There Pancho Villa, the illiterate but wily peasant leader, had emerged as an even greater threat than the hostility of Carranza. Villa’s men lent a nationalist tincture to their banditry by killing Americans, blackmailing U.S. firms, and even raiding into the United States. Henry Cabot Lodge rose in the Senate to denounce Villa as a murderous peon, although to other Americans he seemed a Latin Robin Hood on horseback.

Wilson finally was forced to act when Villa shot up the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, in February 1916. The President dispatched a cavalry force under General John Pershing across the border to track down the bandit chief. Pershing’s men crisscrossed northern Mexico on horseback, in automobiles, and with airplanes; they had a few colorful gunfights with the Mexicans, but Villa and his main force eluded a showdown. The main effect of the expedition was further to poison relations with Carranza. At last, in early 1917, Wilson was forced to withdraw his men—they were needed elsewhere.

CHAPTER 12

Over There

LIÈGE, BELGIUM, AUGUST 12, 1914: From concealed bunkers cut into the hillside, machine-gun bullets spray out at the advancing German soldiers. The attackers hit the dirt, their freshly issued uniforms soiled with blood and grime. The Germans continue to crawl forward, only to be checked by a Belgian counterattack. Suddenly the attack halts; the battlefield is gripped by silence. Then the German siege guns, the largest in the world, come into play. Shrilling like speeding express trains, their shells arch over the crouched men in feldgrau and smash into the Belgian forts. The cannon, with their yard-long shells and barrels the length of a freight car, easily dwarf the two hundred men that service each of them. They are the “guns of August,” the heralds of Europe’s twentieth-century holocaust of total war.

The German emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, had inspected the guns in their Krupp factories and approved their destructive purpose. But back in his palace outside Berlin, as the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand pushed Europe toward the continental war that Wilhelm had often blustered about fighting, the Kaiser’s nerve failed. Although Austria had already attacked Serbia, and Russia was mobilizing, Wilhelm summoned his army chief of staff to the royal chambers. Tall, gloomy Helmuth von Moltke informed the agitated monarch that there was no alternative: Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, for a two-front war against Russia and France, was under way and could not be stopped. Eleven thousand trains, half a million railroad cars, and nearly 2 million men were moving with meticulous precision across Central Europe. Five German columns thrust into neutral Belgium, aiming to reach Paris and destroy the French army before Russia could act. Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg announced to the German people that their fate now rested on the “iron dice” of war.

In Paris, the leaders of the French government also met in a palace—the beautiful gilded Elysée, which seemed to embrace the diverse glories of France’s democrats, kings, and despots. Here too the political leaders found themselves at the mercy of the soldiers’ long-drafted plans. General Joseph Joffre, the stolid commander of the French army, brushed aside President Raymond Poincaré’s suggestion that a force be detached to help the Belgians. Instead, the entire army was launched against Alsace-Lorraine with the aim of wresting those two provinces back from Germany. But within days—hours in some places—the spirited French attack was bloodily repulsed. Gallic élan proved no match for German barbed wire and machine guns.

As the French army recoiled in defeat from the German frontier, Britain’s Cabinet met in the modest row house at 10 Downing Street. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey had led their country into the war over Germany’s attack on Belgium, despite the opposition of much of their own party. Now they watched in consternation as staff officers sketched out on a large-scale map how the Germans were sweeping with unexpected strength and strategic effectiveness across the Belgian plain, heading straight for France’s unguarded northern frontier and Channel ports. Britain itself seemed suddenly in danger.

Only one minister appeared undaunted by the Germans’ quick success. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, at thirty-nine was regarded as a reckless soldier, a melodramatic author, and a political jackanapes of considerable flair but little reliability. Less obvious was his passion for the fleet that he had built under the tutelage of crusty Admiral Lord John Fisher, and his cool efficiency in directing it. When the Cabinet voted for war, it found that Churchill already had the navy assembled and at battle stations, ready to block any further German surprises. In Churchill’s fleet—their answer to the Germans’ cannon—the British possessed the second-strongest piece on the European chessboard.

The most awesome piece, the 6-million-man Russian army, was commanded by the weakest player. Nicholas II, “Czar of All the Russias,” was not even master in his dreary palace on the gray Baltic seashore. Dominated by a jealous and superstitious wife; manipulated by fawning, reactionary ministers; gulled by the vicious yet mesmerizing monk Rasputin— still Nicholas himself believed the myth of his own absolute power. Honoring a pledge to come to France’s aid at the earliest possible moment, the Czar ordered the first mobilized units of his ponderous force to make an immediate attack on Germany.

As two hastily assembled armies of white-uniformed peasants advanced slowly over sandy roads into East Prussia, the limitations of czarist fiat became clear. Nicholas could not will into being the supplies of telegraph wire, shells, horses—even the black bread and tea of the men’s rations—that ran short in the very first days of the offensive. Nor could he overcome the years of neglect by a war minister who denounced machine guns and rifled cannon as “vicious innovations” and insisted that the Russian army continue its reliance on the bayonet. Most of all, there was an unfillable void of leadership. Men of ability—including the Czar’s own cousin—had been systematically barred from power as threats to the regime’s sclerotic stability. Even the cunning Rasputin was incapacitated at this crucial moment, hospitalized with a knife wound inflicted by an outraged woman. And Russia’s finest strategic mind was a thousand miles away, in exile and bitter opposition.

In neutral Switzerland, a small group of Russian émigrés watched with a wild surmise as Europe disintegrated around them. Most of these assorted literati and revolutionaries had their eyes fixed on Russia, where the czarist regime began to crumble beneath the hammer blows of 1914 and 1915. A few, however, looked farther, and among these was a balding, Tatar-eyed Marxist named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.

Ulyanov, a brilliant lawyer turned revolutionary, had for more than two decades cut a swath through Russia’s underground politics. Under the nom de révolution of Lenin he had led the Bolsheviks, the most extreme faction of the Marxist Social Democratic Party. Now exiled in Zurich, Lenin was at low ebb politically. He was cut off from Russia, bereft of all but a few diehard supporters, earning a meager living with occasional library work. Sharing an apartment with the family of a shoemaker, he and his wife Krupskaya took their meals at a dilapidated boardinghouse that Krupskaya suspected of being frequented by criminals.

Yet if Lenin was almost barren of political resources, he was powerful in intellectual ones. In his Zurich rooms, he drafted his most devastating attack on the international political-economic order, in a pamphlet entitled Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which laid the blame for the holocaust of World War I squarely on the system of industrial monopolies that had transformed Europe and America over the preceding decades. The war was caused not by faulty leadership or rising nationalism or uncontrolled militarism; rather it was “an annexationist, predatory, plunderous war” being fought “for the division of the world, for the partition and reparation of colonies, ‘spheres of influence’ of finance capital.” The strains and contradictions of monopoly capitalism had reached out to engulf the entire world, and now they were grinding to their inevitable bloody conclusion in the trenches of Europe.

Drawing on the work of J. A. Hobson, Lenin documented the growth of industrial capitalism into a global system of investment and control, especially the concentration of industrial holdings into giant monopolistic holdings throughout Europe and America. In the United States, for example, 1 percent of the firms in the country employed 30 percent of the workers, used more than 75 percent of the electric and steam power generated, and produced 43 percent of all output. These huge combines, Lenin concluded, were forced to look abroad for further growth. Thus Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, the Anglo-Dutch Shell trust, and a consortium of German banks divided up control of wells in Russia, Romania, and the East Indies, as did the House of Morgan and German shipping cartels of world steamship lines. “Today,” he summarized the world situation, “monopoly has become a fact.”

Railroads in particular seemed to fascinate Lenin. Railroad construction, he claimed, seemed a “simple, natural, democratic, cultural and civilising enterprise…. But as a matter of fact the capitalist threads, which in thousands of different intercrossings bind these enterprises with private property in the means of production in general, have converted this work of construction into an instrument for oppressing a thousand million people (in the colonies and semi-colonies), that is, more than half the population of the globe.”

As the economic struggle for division of the world continued, Lenin claimed, it increasingly took the form of violence and political domination. By the early 1900s, the world was completely divided; only a redivision was possible. Since the industrial nations, in Lenin’s analysis, were buying off their working classes with the profits squeezed from colonies, that redivision was imperative. Since each of those nations had built great military machines, the redivision would be by force. The result, he concluded, was the World War.

In 1914 events appeared to be marching to Lenin’s arguments. One by one, the nations touched by the industrial revolution were drawn into the European war: Japan, Turkey, Italy, Bulgaria, Romania, Greece. Armies clashed in eastern Africa and the Arabian deserts; fleets battled off South America; men came from Saskatoon, Pretoria, and Auckland to fight in Flanders. Only one industrial power was still uninvolved—and for it too time might run out.

Wilson and the Road to War

The outbreak of fighting in Europe came as a sudden shock to most Americans—“like lightning out of a clear sky,” one congressman wrote. Even Edward House, who from Berlin had warned Wilson in May that “an awful cataclysm” was in store, returned to the United States on July 21 confident that the situation in Europe was improving. Seven days later, Austria attacked Serbia; within another week eight countries were in the war.

In contrast to the galvanized chancelleries of Europe, the military and diplomatic establishments in Washington hardly stirred in the August heat. The State, Navy, and War departments—all housed in a massive granite and iron pile that Henry Adams had dubbed the “architectural infant asylum”—responded but feebly to the distant crisis. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, after rushing back to his office from Cape Cod on July 30, was appalled to find that “nobody seemed the least bit excited” about the war. In Theodore Roosevelt style, the young Roosevelt struggled for several days to get the American fleet mobilized and concentrated for possible action, but he sparked little response from the officers and bureaucrats around him. The War Department, meanwhile—with its bare rudiments of a general staff and a peacetime army of just 100,000 men—was even more somnolent.

Over in the State wing of the building, Secretary Bryan tried to intervene on the side of peace. Roosevelt thought him hopelessly naive. “These dear good people like W.J.B.,” FDR wrote to his wife Eleanor, “… have as much conception of what a general European war means” as his four-year-old son had of higher mathematics. But it was neither naïveté nor unpreparedness that was frustrating Bryan; rather, it was the lack of direction from across the street, at the White House.

Wilson, who had never shown a strong interest in European affairs, now seemed to turn his back on the Continent. When reporters asked whether he would tender his good offices to the warring powers, Wilson snapped that tradition, forbade America to “take part” in Europe’s quarrels. Likewise he spurned repeated suggestions from Bryan that the President offer himself as a mediator. Wilson met with the Cabinet on August 4, approved a plan to evacuate Americans stranded in Europe by the war, and agreed to an immediate declaration of neutrality accompanied by a statement urging Americans to remain “neutral in fact as well as in name, impartial in thought as well as in action.” Then he hurried back to the sickbed of his wife, whose worsening health had preoccupied him throughout the crisis. Later that night he wrote to a friend, “The more I read about the conflict across the seas, the more open it seems to me to utter condemnation. The outcome no man can even conjecture.” Two days later Mrs. Wilson died, and the President briefly seemed on the verge of collapse.

Emotion shaped Wilson’s initial response to the war: contempt toward the Europeans for allowing it to occur, outrage at the German violation of Belgium, and most of all his personal sorrow. But underlying his emotional rejection of the war was a moral vision, and as the months passed and Wilson more dispassionately studied the deadlock in Europe, that vision came to dominate his thinking. America would redeem warring Europe (just as she sought to uplift Asia and Latin America) by holding aloft the beacon of liberty and peace. By January 1915, he was calling on his countrymen to exult in their neutral stance. “Look abroad upon the troubled world. Only America at peace!

“Think of the deep-wrought destruction of economic resources, of life and of hope that is taking place in some parts of the world, and think of the reservoir of hope, the reservoir of energy, the reservoir of sustenance that there is in this great land of plenty. May we not look forward to the time when we shall be called blessed among the nations because we succored the nations of the world in their time of distress and dismay?”

For Woodrow Wilson the World War offered both horror and hope. Like Lenin, Wilson believed that a radically different world order could be built from the international system that the war was smashing to pieces. Both men, from their neutral sanctuaries, saw the holocaust engulfing Europe as the product of fundamental flaws in the old order. Beyond that, however, their agreement ended. For Lenin, Europe’s crime was capitalism; for Wilson it was selfish power politics. Lenin took his blueprint for change from Das Kapital, Wilson from the New Testament and his father’s Presbyterian sermons. And while Lenin commanded only a dispirited handful of revolutionaries, Wilson led one of the most powerful nations on earth.

Wilson’s conception of America’s potential role in the war was a positive and activist one. He sought to keep his nation neutral, Barbara Tuchman suggests, in order to “make America a larger, rather than a lesser, force in the world.” The British historian Lord Devlin concluded that Wilson was from nearly the beginning animated by the desire to use the neutral power of the United States for “restoring the peace of the world.” From that desire would flow three years of tortuous diplomacy that would end, in seeming failure, in April of 1917.

Wilson tried to take the long view. “I have tried to look at this war ten years ahead,” he told Ida Tarbell, “to be a historian at the same time I was an actor. A hundred years from now it will not be the bloody details that the world will think of in this war: it will be the causes behind it, the readjustments which it will force.” Since he saw those causes as lying in the actions of both sides, he felt qualified to act as an impartial mediator.

Several obstacles stood in the way of Wilson’s attempts to mediate the conflict and in so doing to guide the peace talks to the higher goal of fashioning a new world order. One was the propaganda efforts of the belligerents, by which they tried to draw America into the war or at least to bend her neutrality to serve their own purposes. Another was the domestic agitation, both for and against America’s entering the war, led by such figures as Theodore Roosevelt for intervention and Jane Addams for pacifism. Indeed, the controversy reached even into Wilson’s inner councils, dividing the isolationist Secretary of State Bryan from Wilson’s more belligerent advisors, Robert Lansing and Edward House.

The greatest barrier to Wilson’s goal of a negotiated peace, however, was the European powers’ imprisonment within the military juggernaut they had unleashed. Only a total victory would seem to justify the tremendous sacrifices of lives and wealth that they were making. Every new weapon—the submarine, the tank, poison gas—and every new ally tempted the side possessing it to believe that one more great push would bring complete military success.

These delusions of victory were never stronger than in the first months of the war. With German armies nearing the outskirts of Paris, and a Russian force thrusting deep into East Prussia, Wilson despaired of being able to put his principles into effect. To House he wrote that “there is nothing that we can as yet do or even attempt. What a pathetic thing to have this come.” The German advance finally was halted in the Battle of the Marne, and an entire Russian army was destroyed at Tannenberg; still it took several more months for the two sides to exhaust their first efforts. Only at the end of 1914 could the first moves toward peace be made.

Wilson’s Secretary of State was to play a key role in shaping America’s first peace initiatives. William Jennings Bryan was no longer the stentorian “Boy Orator” who had shocked and aroused the country in 1896. Four Democratic conventions, and two more runs for the presidency, lay in between. The onetime “demagogue” from the West had made his share of partisan compromises in the intervening two decades: seeking a commission in the Spanish war and then campaigning against imperialism in 1900; supporting free silver but not disavowing the conservative, Alton Parker, whom his party nominated in 1904. Bryan’s receding hair and expanding paunch seemed to confirm his evolution into a conventional, albeit progressive, politician.

But Bryan the moral visionary was in fact far from dead. Indeed, he often outstripped Wilson in applying idealistic principles to foreign policy. Bryan was the guiding force behind the negotiation of conciliation treaties between the United States and thirty other nations. He also was Wilson’s chief prop in the struggle to avoid war with Mexico. For the Secretary as much as the President, World War I represented a crowning opportunity to bring to life his most cherished visions of a new world order based upon the tenets of Christian charity and fellowship.

Like Wilson, Bryan was committed to the belief that “war could be exorcised by making moral principles as binding upon nations as upon individuals,” Paolo Coletta noted. But he conceived America’s neutral role in the war differently from Wilson. While the President searched with increasing desperation for some form of diplomatic leverage that would enable him to force the belligerents to the peace table, Bryan advocated what he called a “Real Neutrality” where America would remain even-handed, uninvolved, and thus free to influence Europe by its moral example. Wilson’s principles led eventually to the internationalist ideas embodied in the League of Nations and the United Nations; Bryan’s evolved into the isolationism of the 1930s.

In 1914, the two men were still working in harmony. At first, they had to grapple with foreign actions that threatened both American leverage and American neutrality. Early in the war, the British government took decisive steps to cut off all commerce with Germany, steps that severely infringed upon the previously accepted rights of neutrals to trade with belligerents. Through their Orders in Council, the British extended the category of contraband to include foodstuffs and most other materials and used the doctrine of the continuous voyage to limit the trade not only of Germany but also of her neutral neighbors. Additional British actions particularly aroused resentment in America: the opening of U.S. mail to Europe; the blacklisting of American firms that did business with the Central Powers; the flying of neutral flags by British ships.

Bryan drafted a series of protests against Britain’s infringements of America’s neutral rights, but he had his misgivings about the use of force. The Secretary would countenance no implied threat of retaliation against Britain, nor any American military buildup that might alarm the European powers. An arms embargo would have been perhaps the best means of forcing the Allies to change their maritime practices; yet Bryan actively opposed legislation that would have cut off arms shipments the combatants needed.

Instead he sought a humanitarian solution to the impasse over neutral trade. In February 1915, at Bryan’s urging, Wilson proposed to the belligerents a plan for reopening trade, at least in foodstuffs, to the Central Powers. Only food for Germany’s and Austria’s civilian population would be admitted through the British blockade, and the United States would undertake to monitor German compliance with those conditions. Britain and Germany were quick to see the tremendous power that control over food shipments to Europe would give Wilson; both sides rejected the offer. Thus the closest collaboration between Bryan and Wilson ended in failure.

The two men were increasingly forced apart as Germany radically changed the stakes in the debate over neutral rights. In the same month that Wilson made his offer to supervise food imports, the German navy unleashed its U-boats against shipping around the British Isles. This initial submarine campaign, undertaken with only a handful of boats, was aimed more at forcing the British to negotiate than seriously challenging their command of the seas. Still, the Germans were sinking ships and killing people—including, on March 28, 1915, an American named Leon Thrasher, who was traveling on the unarmed British liner Falaba.

The death of Thrasher divided the American government. Bryan urged that the President bar Americans from traveling on the ships of belligerents, even circumscribe U.S. trade with Europe if necessary, in order to preserve the impartial position of the United States. Lansing, on the other hand, termed the sinking of the Falaba a “wanton act… in direct violation of the principles of humanity as well as the law of nations.” He called for a strong protest against Germany’s U-boat campaign. Wilson temporized between the opinions of his two advisors, and meanwhile had warned the Germans that he would hold them to “strict accountability” for any further American deaths. The debate within the Administration continued for another five weeks, until a U-boat commander dramatically forced the issue.

On May 7, 1915, the British passenger steamer Lusitania was torpedoed and sunk off the Irish coast. Nearly 1,200 people died in the sinking, including 128 Americans. Bryan immediately suggested—and historians have subsequently confirmed—that the Lusitania was secretly carrying munitions and thus was a legitimate target of war. He used the public outcry over the sinking to reiterate his case: that Americans be warned off traveling on belligerent ships, that any apology or compensation for the incident could be postponed until the war in Europe ended, and that in the meantime an evenhanded protest to both Germany and Britain be sent. The alternative, Bryan feared, was war.

Wilson disagreed. A retreat into isolation, he told Bryan, might save lives, but in the long run it would only diminish the chances of finding a way to lasting peace. “To show this sort of yielding to threat and danger would only make matters worse.” When the German government quibbled over Wilson’s first note protesting the Lusitania incident, the President drafted a second in which he demanded that the Germans give specific guarantees not to attack unarmed ships. Unwilling to sign the note, Bryan resigned on June 7, and Lansing replaced him as Secretary of State.

Ironically, the submarine threat gradually receded after Bryan’s resignation. When, in August, two Americans died in the torpedoing of the British steamer Arabic, the Germans offered an apology and indemnity. More important, Wilson extracted from German Ambassador Johann von Bernstorff the so-called Arabic pledge that no more passenger ships would be attacked, a pledge that Berlin finally confirmed nine months—and another torpedoed passenger ship—later with the Sussex pledge. The German submarine skippers, meanwhile, turned their attention back to sinking Allied warships and freighters.

The threat of war between Germany and America really had never been serious. The phlegmatic Colonel House may briefly have lost control, warning the President that Americans “can no longer remain neutral spectators” after the Lusitania sinking, but the overwhelming majority of the public seemed opposed to an outright break with Germany. The editors of the Chicago Standard, echoing the sentiments of publicists and politicians across the country, urged its readers to view the incident with calmness and deliberation: “We must protect our citizens, but we must find some other way than war.” Thus, when Wilson spoke of America being “too proud to fight” over the submarine sinkings, too sure of its own righteousness to descend into the morass of war with Germany, he struck a responsive chord.

Some of Wilson’s critics, however, responded with anger rather than applause. Theodore Roosevelt characterized the President’s course in the submarine controversy as “supine inaction,” mere “milk and water” diplomacy. Wilson, the old Rough Rider growled, spoke for “all the hyphenated Americans … the solid flubdub and pacifist vote … every soft creature, every coward and weakling, every man who can’t look more than six inches ahead.” The Lusitania galvanized partisan opposition to the President in Congress, and guaranteed him the enmity of the small but influential band still clustered around Roosevelt. Foremost among its members was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, senior Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee.

The British were quick to capitalize on American revulsion at the submarine attacks. British spokesmen linked the Lusitania to other alleged German atrocities in France and Belgium, played up the theme of Prussian autocracy and militarism, and sought to persuade Americans that a victory by the Central Powers would endanger the safety of the United States. The Germans, however, countered with an extremely effective propaganda campaign of their own, playing in part on the sentiments of German-Americans and the anti-British feelings of Irish-Americans. The latter received a particular boost in mid-1916, when the British bloodily suppressed an uprising in Ireland and, over the formal protest of the U.S. Senate, executed several Irish leaders. In the end, scholars have concluded, the propaganda efforts of the two sides largely canceled each other out, and in the process left the American public with a better grasp of the war situation than the populations of the belligerent countries.

Wilson thus faced challenges to his policies from his political opponents, from abroad—and also from within his own party. William Jennings Bryan had not renounced his belief that the Administration’s hard line toward Germany was leading to war, nor had he stopped trying to change it. While Wilson was struggling in early 1916 to get the German government to confirm von Bernstorff’s Arabic pledge, two Bryan supporters—Thomas Gore of Oklahoma and A. Jefferson McLemore of Texas—introduced legislation in Congress to bar Americans from traveling on armed ships of the warring powers. Bryan and others hoped by this means to induce the British to disarm their commercial steamers, thus allowing German submarines to stop the ships and search them as per the old rules of cruiser warfare. Failing that, at least U.S. citizens would be kept out of the way of German torpedoes. Wilson handily defeated these Gore-McLemore resolutions, but the price in lost congressional goodwill was high.

The President further alienated the peace wing of the Democratic party when he pushed through Congress, with considerable Republican support, a “preparedness” program involving major increases in land and naval forces. Taking these defeats in good grace, Bryan continued to pledge his personal support to the President. However, the Nebraskan also kept up his public warnings against the “Jingoes” within the Administration who would “drive us into war.”

In Europe, 1916 was another year of bloody stalemate. The German attack on Verdun and Britain’s counteroffensive along the Somme both ended in defeat. In the east, the Central Powers and Russia traded staggering blows without altering the strategic balance. The British and German fleets clashed off Jutland in the North Sea, to no avail. Likewise, Italy’s armies were checked on the southern front by the Austrians.

Amid the whirl of events during late 1915 and early 1916, as Wilson was spun about in the European maelstrom, the President moved at home and abroad toward new strategies that would mark one of the transcendent acts of political leadership in American history—an act rivaling Jefferson’s assuming command of the republican movement in the 1790s and Lincoln’s decision for Emancipation during the Civil War. In all these transforming acts, the leader sensed profound human needs on the part of followers, took action, raised supporters’ hopes and expectations, and worked with followers-turned-leaders in a supreme enterprise in collective leadership.

Wilson had followed a wavering middle-of-the-road course since the New Freedom’s glory days of 1913–14. His tariff, banking, and other reforms stood proudly on the legislative books, but he appeared to compromise them by some of his appointments—notably of conservatives to the new Federal Reserve Board and Federal Trade Commission. He supported trade unionism but straddled the issue of labor’s immunity to the antitrust laws. He favored the curbing of child labor—but not a federal child labor law because he deemed it unconstitutional; he favored woman suffrage, but preferred to leave the matter to the states, and hence to the reactionary state legislatures; he had promised that Negroes too would share in the New Freedom, but tolerated increased segregation in federal employment. For a time, he welcomed controversial business leaders like Henry Ford and even J. P. Morgan to the White House.

In foreign policy, the man who had denounced Republican imperialism in 1912 put American troops into Veracruz in 1914, established a de facto United States protectorate over Haiti in 1915, and perpetuated American intervention in Nicaragua and Santo Domingo. The Administration that ruled against loans by American bankers to European belligerents in August 1914 allowed American investors to buy over $2 billion in bonds from the Allies within the next two and a half years. The President who urged Americans to remain neutral in thought as well as in deed kept in London a U.S. ambassador more rabidly anti-German than many Englishmen. As the Central and Allied powers grappled and tottered, at times Wilson seemed bound for war, at other times bound to peace.

Like most changes in grand strategy, Wilson’s did not result from a sudden revelation but from his and his party’s close watch of the shifting balance of political forces at home and military forces abroad. Like most acts of creative leadership, Wilson’s was compounded of commitment, opportunism, and chance. His shift in strategy was signaled at the end of January 1916 in a decision of calculated audacity—his nomination of Louis Brandeis as associate justice of the Supreme Court.

“I tell Louis, if he is going to retire, he is certainly doing it with a burst of fireworks,” Brandeis’s wife, Alice, wrote on reading the press reaction to his nomination. The fireworks continued to burst from that time to the day five months later when she proudly greeted her husband, returning from his law office to their Dedham home, with “Good evening, Mr. Justice Brandeis.” Progressives and conservatives waged a battle over the nomination all the more bitter for being partly under cover. Financial and industrial interests opposed the “people’s lawyer” on the public grounds of lack of judicial temperament and the like, but in fact attacked this radical—and a Jewish radical, to boot—because they did not want his economic and social views represented on the High Court.

Brandeis himself, while publicly standing mute, supplied his supporters with reams of material to rebut the opposition, wrote a partial brief defending his own “high reputation,” and personally and secretly lobbied two Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Boston Brahmins, headed by Brahmin-in-chief A. Lawrence Lowell, circulated an anti-Brandeis petition. Brandeis’s supporters, including Rabbi Stephen Wise and Henry Morgenthau, threw themselves into the battle. Brandeis’s young friend Felix Frankfurter wrote unsigned editorials for the New Republic; Walter Lippmann campaigned day after day on Capitol Hill. Following this counterattack, and a public statement by Wilson that constituted one of the most generous endorsements of an Administration nominee in presidential history, the Senate voted for confirmation, 47 to 22, with only one Democrat deserting the President and his nominee.

During the spring and summer months of 1916, Wilson shifted steadily toward a progressive stance in both politics and policy. In part, he was moving into the void left by the disintegrating Progressive party. Not only had the Democrats lost seats in the 1914 elections—predictably for the party in power—but the Bull Moosers too suffered setbacks across the country, though the indomitable Hiram Johnson won reelection as governor of California. Progressive leadership was more divided than ever, as Theodore Roosevelt edged back toward the GOP and Pinchot progressives eyed the liberalizing Democracy with rising hopes. A great Democratic party opportunity was beckoning.

Wilson realized that policy, not rhetoric, would be the acid test of his own shift toward progressivism. By early summer 1916, he was not only supporting a rural credits bill and a child labor bill but personally lobbying members of Congress. As the President moved left, progressives increasingly flocked to his standard: Jane Addams, John Dewey, Lillian Wald, Herbert Croly, Lincoln Steffens, and a host of other national and grassroots leaders of progressivism. Wilson met with another convert, Walter Lippmann, to mutual enchantment.

The President had virtually dished the Bull Moosers by the time they convened in Chicago early in June 1916, at the same time as the Republicans and only a mile away. Under pressure from Taft and other Old Guard leaders, the GOP drafted Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes as the ideal compromise candidate who might unite the fractured ranks of Republicanism. Since Taft’s preconvention stance was “anyone but Roosevelt,” and TR’s “anyone but Taft or Root,” the old rivals could at least unite behind the mildly progressive candidacy of the former New York governor—and behind their ultimate war cry, “anyone but Wilson.”

The end came for the Bull Moosers during the Republican convention. From his home in Oyster Bay, Roosevelt had been negotiating with Republican leaders, using the only leverage he had left—his threat to run again under the Bull Moose banner. But his heart was not in it; by now he was far more interested in the nation’s foreign and war policies. At the last moment, after the indignant and frustrated Progressive convention nominated Roosevelt anyway, he declined the honor—and then had the audacity to urge his old comrades to draft Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a moderate standpatter and the Colonel’s longtime confidant. Two weeks later, the Progressive party leadership disbanded the party, but progressivism would not die. Early in August, a rump of the Progressive party held a new convention in Indianapolis, repudiated Roosevelt, and endorsed Wilson.

The Democratic convention in St. Louis was a far happier affair and a far more momentous one. For at this convention the antiwar forces in the Democracy spoke up with a power and passion the party leadership could not ignore. It had been planned not as a peace convention but as a patriotic one. The President had directed that “Americanism” and “preparedness” be the keynotes, and the flag-bedecked hall was full of spread-eagle symbolism. When the keynoter, Governor Martin Glynn of New York, dutifully sounded these themes, however, the response seemed so tepid that Glynn decided to hurry through pages of his address that listed historical precedents when the United States did not go to war. But this was the red meat the crowd wanted, and as he began to recite the provocations that the nation had not converted into war, the crowd picked up the refrain, chanting again and again: “What did we do? What did we do?” and Glynn roared back: “We didn’t go to war! We didn’t go to war!”

The convention delegates—leaders in their own precincts but relegated to mere followership at these party conclaves—were exerting a leadership of their own. Other speakers responded with thunderous peace oratory. The delegates called Bryan from his seat in the press gallery—the Peerless Orator had been denied a convention seat—and Bryan thanked God that the people had a President who did not want war. Wilson, the “peace President,” was nominated by acclamation.

Sounding the peace theme, and passing a strongly progressive platform that Wilson had largely framed, the Democratic convention set the tone of the fall contest. The President, who had been preaching both peace and preparedness, both Americanism and internationalism, now moved strongly toward the stance that would make his 1916 campaign famous: “He kept us out of war.” Pamphlets by the millions and newspaper ads by the thousands amplified the keynote of peace. Hughes not only made tactical errors—most notably tying himself to the Republican Old Guard in California and unwittingly snubbing the prickly Hiram Johnson—but he failed to work out an effective strategy beyond carping at the Administration record. His potential big break came in early September after Wilson, in order to head off a nationwide rail strike, forced through Congress the Adamson Act requiring an eight-hour day on interstate railroads. Hughes quite reasonably seized on this as a campaign issue, protesting that Wilson had given in to organized labor to win its votes, but the Republican candidate may have done little more than polarize the contest, as more businessmen moved to his side and more laborites and progressives to Wilson’s.

The 1916 election would long be remembered for its poignant election night: Hughes went to bed expecting to wake up as President, and Wilson retired expecting to awaken as a lame duck. The Republican candidate had had good reason to be optimistic, for early returns showed him sweeping the Northeast, save for Ohio, and the Democratic New York World conceded victory to him. Then the West and of course the South came in heavily Democratic, with California’s thirteen votes proving decisive for Wilson in the final 277 to 254 electoral college outcome. California’s popular margin for Wilson was by 4,000 out of 928,000. Snubbing an old Bull Mooser, the pundits pontificated, could be costly.

Wilson’s photo finish portended ill for the Democratic party. A popular President, riding the tide of peace and progressivism, had barely beaten an inept campaigner hardly known in much of the nation. The barely reunited Republican party had reestablished its hammerlock on the big industrial states of the East, awakening horrendous Democratic memories of McKinley’s trouncings of Bryan. The shape of the nation’s political future was forecast far more in the GOP’s party victory than in Wilson’s personal one. And, after a decade of national debate and ferment over issues of industrial democracy, perhaps a hint of the nation’s ideological future lay in the Socialist Party vote in 1916, which dropped off almost 40 percent from its high point of four years before.

The charge leveled by Bryan and others, that the Administration was increasingly pro-Allied, had some truth to it. Certainly Walter Hines Page, the U.S. envoy in London, was so outspoken in his pro-British views that Wilson thought he needed to be brought home for “a bath in American opinion.” Robert Lansing, too, Bryan’s successor at the State Department, seemed to be working for an Allied victory. He had watered down Bryan’s protests against British abuses on the high seas while toughening the language of notes to Germany, had advised Wilson to cut off German radio traffic with America, and had drafted the legal rulings that enabled the Allied governments to obtain credit in the United States.

This last point was of special importance, for strong financial ties were growing between American industry and the Allied war effort. By April of 1917, American firms had advanced Britain and France $2.3 billion, and were doing almost $3 billion in trade each year with the Allied countries. The war was working a revolution in global economic relations, making New York the financial capital of the world in place of London. The American economy, meanwhile, was stimulated to new heights of prosperity by the Europeans’ war expenditures.

Bryan would allege, in 1917, that America finally entered the war at the behest of “Eastern financiers” determined to “make their investments in the war loans of the Allies profitable.” “We are going into war upon command” of Wall Street “gold,” Senator Norris charged. Echoed by such respected historians as Walter Millis and Charles Beard, that theory later gained wide acceptance in the 1920s and ’30s, although more recent writers have rebutted it. By the end of 1916, according to John Milton Cooper, Wilson was brandishing the money club over the Allied heads; “if Senator Norris’s ‘command of gold’ existed, the United States held it and exercised it.”

The one man who surely could influence Wilson was Edward Mandell House. The self-styled Texas “colonel” had the President’s ear and his confidence; he also was one of Wilson’s prime sources of information on European politics after his two trips to the Continent in 1914 and 1915. According to House’s diary, Wilson assured him on the eve of his second mission to Europe that “we are of the same mind and it is not necessary to go into details with you.” The President entrusted House with the task of bringing Europe’s leaders around to his ideas for a compromise peace.

If Wilson really believed that he and House thought alike—a possibility, given the pains House took to hide his true feelings from others—then the President was mistaken. While Wilson was trying to force the Germans to honor the Arabic pledge and Bryan was working for the Gore-McLemore resolutions, House composed a secret plan to bring America into the war on the side of the Allies. He proposed that, after obtaining the consent of the British, Wilson call for a peace conference, with America to join the fight against Germany if the Berlin government refused. House refined this plan in a series of secret discussions with the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, and then formalized it in the so-called House-Grey Memorandum.

That Wilson accepted the House-Grey Memorandum in early 1916 has mystified many observers since. Certainly the President had not abandoned his belief that the “worst thing that could possibly happen to the world,” as he confided to his new wife, “would be for the United States to be drawn into this contest.” Wilson made several important changes in House’s memorandum, noting that he would use every diplomatic measure available to bring Germany to the peace table and that should those fail America’s entry into the war was only “probable.” Still, Wilson was running a great risk by endorsing the plan, a risk he could justify to himself only with the possible reward of ending the fighting in Europe.

Ironically, the British refused to take up Wilson’s half-commitment to intervene on their side. Several times during the spring and summer of 1916 Wilson, through House, asked the British for their consent to his calling a peace conference, but each time he was rebuffed. It eventually became clear to House and Wilson that the British wanted to win more than they wanted peace. When no Allied victories followed, the House-Grey Memorandum was allowed to lapse.

The failure of House’s secret diplomacy, plus the sneaking suspicion that the Colonel may have been duped all along by the British, may have been the first step in the weakening of Wilson’s ties to his Texan advisor. In the past, the President had always sought to keep House close at hand; now he offered to send him to London as U.S. ambassador. Yet if the President may have been a little disillusioned with House, his disgust with the British was clear and manifest. In the fall, he informed Lord Grey “in the strongest terms” that the feeling of the American people was “as hot against Great Britain as it was at first against Germany and likely to grow hotter still against an indefinite continuation of the war.” Conventional diplomacy had failed to secure peace; so had secret machinations. Once the election of 1916 was safely won, Wilson resolved to strike out on his own, through the public and oratorical means that had served him so well in domestic politics.

Wilson’s peace offensive in the winter of 1916–17 met resistance from every side. The President originally intended to demand an immediate armistice and to repeat his offer of mediation. House, however, persuaded him to limit his statement to a call for both sides to reveal their war aims. Even this move was sabotaged by Lansing, who of his own accord told, reporters, on the day Wilson’s peace note was published, that America was on the “verge of war.” The President, furious, made Lansing retract his remarks and came close to firing him, but the damage was already done. The British, now even more hopeful of imminent American support, announced war aims that included transfers of territories and colonies which clearly were unacceptable to the Central Powers.

Berlin, however, did not publish its own demands, calling instead for peace talks at which both sides would state their case. This was the slim hope to which Wilson clung, not knowing that the Germans had already secretly resolved against peace. In the meantime Wilson laid out, in an address to the Senate, his own design for “a peace without victory.”

Victory for one side or the other, Wilson argued, would not bring true peace. It “would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.” A lasting peace would have to rest on respect for the rights of small nations, on freedom of the seas, upon the free self-determination of subject peoples such as the Poles.

“I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people…. I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances which would draw them into competitions of power, catch them in a net of intrigue and selfish rivalry….

“I am proposing government by the consent of the governed … freedom of the seas … moderation of armaments…. These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others. And they are also the principles and policies of forward-looking men and women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every enlightened community. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”

The Senate greeted Wilson’s elevating statement of ideals with thunderous applause. The President’s speech, however, changed no minds in Berlin, where the military commanders had already browbeaten Kaiser Wilhelm into unleashing Germany’s submarines for an all-out attack on Britain’s vital sea links. In Washington, Ambassador von Bernstorff, himself desperate to prevent war between the United States and Germany, fed Wilson’s hopes with positive replies to the President’s suggestions while bombarding Berlin with telegrams begging for reconsideration. At last, on January 31, von Bernstorff was forced to tell Wilson that unrestricted submarine warfare would resume the next day. Allied, American, and other neutral ships would be sunk indiscriminately. The chance for peace was lost.

The collapse of all his hopes shocked Wilson deeply. He felt, he confided to House, “as if the world had suddenly reversed itself … and he could not get his balance.” He severed relations with Germany and on February 26 asked Congress for the power to put navy gun crews on American merchant ships, hoping that these actions would force the German government to reverse itself. Instead, the toll of sinkings in the North Atlantic mounted, until Wilson finally was forced to call Congress back into session. On April 2, he went before both houses and called for a declaration of war against Germany.

How could a country fervently committed to neutrality, led by a President with a sweeping vision of the benefits to be derived from peace, choose to go to war? Part of the explanation lay in the dire and intolerable nature of the German provocations. As one historian put it: “Britain’s violations of neutral rights provoked delay and argument, but claims for damages could eventually be settled peacefully; Germany’s procedure presented a threat to important economic interests and also threatened life itself, a matter not subject to amicable arbitration.” After February 1, 1917, as the Germans continued to sink American ships and kill American citizens, the consensus for peace among American voters had rapidly unraveled.

A period of confusion might have followed, but instead the German government made a critical diplomatic blunder. The new German Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, had cabled to Mexico a proposal for a military alliance, under which the Latin republic would join in attacking America in return for Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The British had intercepted the telegram and forwarded it to the State Department, which made it public on February 28. Touching a sensitive nerve, the Zimmermann telegram crystallized national opinion. Editors castigated Germany’s actions as “sneaking and despicable.” There was a national outcry, but no stampede toward war—most Americans were still yearning for both honor and peace.

At this point, Wilson demonstrated his power to lead, as the members of the House and Senate overwhelmingly embraced his call to fight “for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German people included: for the rights of nations great and small … to choose their way of life” so that the world could be “made safe for democracy.” Individual legislators like Robert La Follette and George Norris—whom Wilson denounced as members of a “little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own”—did honestly differ with the President as to how those ideals might be translated into policy. But for one dramatic moment in American history, public emotion and private vision were fused into national action.

Others took a quite different view—notably V. I. Lenin. And he was right, to a degree; the bonds of trade and travel did help draw the United States into the war. But much more was involved. Wilson’s search for a road to peace rather than war cannot be gainsaid. As Devlin has noted, the President was prepared, just prior to Germany’s shift to unrestricted submarine warfare, to stop trading with the Allies rather than extend them formal loans and thus compromise America’s neutral stance. Even after February 1, the policy of retreat and noninvolvement advocated by Bryan was still an option.

Ultimately, Wilson’s choice of war over isolation turned on one compelling point. “This was that, if he and America with him chose the path of submission,” according to Devlin, “his ideals, his hopes, and his dreams of bringing in the new world to regenerate the old would be destroyed.” Wilson did not want war—particularly not this war. Yet every ideal that he cherished impelled him to seek a democratic world order in place of the old order that Europe’s war had razed. The President’s intimates have testified to the agony of indecision he endured in those last two months of neutrality.

In effect, Wilson called for a revolution on April 2. He summoned Americans to rally, not around the flag, but around a radical extension of the American experiment, a goal as different from Lenin’s as it was from those of supporters of the old order in both Europe and the United States. If he could mobilize Americans for war while still keeping their eyes fixed on his higher vision of peace, Wilson could yet make his ideal into reality.

Mobilizing the Workshop

The streets of Petrograd, February 23, 1917:

Thousands of Russian workers riot over food shortages. Soldiers from the city garrison join the protest and fire on police. Within days Czar Nicholas abdicates, the Duma establishes a provisional government, and councils—soviets—of soldiers and workers spring up across the country. France and Britain extend formal recognition to the Duma’s representatives, but it is on the soviets that Lenin’s Bolsheviks pin their hopes. Lenin, meanwhile, leaves Switzerland in a special train provided by the Germans, and makes his way back to Petrograd.

Allied commanders on the western front were uncertain how to regard the Russian February Revolution. A democratic government might revitalize the Russian army, bringing new pressure to bear on the Germans; on the other hand, with the monarchy gone Russia might collapse altogether or even, as Lenin vociferously advocated, withdraw from the war. Britain’s General Sir Douglas Haig and his French counterpart, Robert Nivelle, decided to wait on neither the Russians nor the newly entered Americans. Overriding the protests of Winston Churchill and the unvoiced fears of the new Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, Haig launched a full-scale assault on German positions near Passchendaele.

After a ferocious artillery bombardment, British troops lumbered across the Belgian mud toward the enemy trenches—and were stopped almost immediately. For three months, Haig kept up the attack, eventually sacrificing 300,000 men to gain just 10,000 yards of shell-blasted swamp. Of the British dead, some 56,000 sank into the muck and could never be recovered for burial.

The Nivelle offensive also ended in failure, and in its aftermath fifty divisions of the French army mutinied. Brought in as the new French commander, General Henri Pétain eventually resolved most of the soldiers’ grievances and quelled the mutiny. In the meantime, he vowed that no new offensives would be launched. “We will wait,” he promised, “for the tanks and the Americans.”

The war hit the American capital like a tidal wave—literally, a tidal wave of people. Within weeks, an estimated 40,000 soldiers, office-seekers, businessmen, clerks, scientists, and foreign dignitaries descended on Washington. Some were transients, but many more stayed to participate in the confusing welter of war work. “Life seemed suddenly to acquire a vivid scarlet lining,” wrote one old-time resident. “The one invariable rule seemed to be that every individual was found doing something he or she had never dreamed of doing before.”

Peacetime laws and the tiny federal bureaucracy could not cope with the demands of total war. General William Crozier of the Ordnance Department, charged with arming a force of 1 (eventually 3) million men, was prohibited from acquiring new offices or even hiring new clerks without specific authorization from Congress. In time, the regulations were changed, and Crozier’s command grew from less than a hundred men to 68,000 soldiers and 80,000 civilians, but it was among the “slowest mobilizations of the war.”

Wilson’s response to the confusion was to try to sweep it aside with direct presidential intervention. At his instigation, Senator Lee Overman introduced a bill in Congress authorizing the President to “make such redistribution of functions among executive agencies … and … make such regulations and issue such orders as he may deem necessary.” Despite charges from Republicans that the measure “pointed the way toward absolutism,” Congress complied with his request.

From the Overman bill and other congressional grants of power, Wilson created a series of wartime agencies to direct mobilization. The first need was for men to fill out the ranks of the proposed army in France. When only 32,000 men volunteered in the first weeks after the declaration of war, Wilson called for a draft and established the Selective Service Administration. The actual work of registering, ranking, and exempting potential recruits was delegated to local draft boards appointed by the state governors; thus the federal apparatus was kept relatively small.

During the Civil War, the draft had sparked riots and desertions, and some political leaders feared that it would again. Senator James Reed of Missouri warned Secretary of War Newton Baker, who would draw the first number of the draft, “You will have the streets of our American cities running with blood on registration day.” But no riots or large-scale protests materialized. The draft boards registered 24 million young men, of whom just over 2 million were inducted into the army.

Feeding and warming 2 million men was another unprecedented task for the government. Herbert Hoover of the Food Administration and Harry Garfield of the Fuel Administration sought to meet the army’s needs by both increasing production and limiting domestic consumption. Neither agency had any coercive powers and so had to rely on voluntary compliance with the quotas and rations that they established. Hoover launched a massive publicity campaign to promote “meatless” and “wheatless” days each week, limit sugar consumption, and encourage families to plant “victory gardens.” Domestic use of food and fuel did change marginally, but market forces worked the biggest transformations. With increased demand from both the U.S. government and the Allies, prices soared and production was boosted. For farmers and miners, patriotism went hand in hand with undreamed-of profits.

Less visible was the work of the Shipping Board. German submarines were sinking Allied shipping at a phenomenal rate—900,000 tons in April of 1917 alone—and without ships no American men or even supplies would reach Europe. The board met the need by building, buying, and renting vessels, eventually assembling a merchant marine of over 3.5 million tons. To fight the U-boat menace, the Allies organized merchant ships into convoys protected by destroyers. American shipyards ceased work on battleships and instead concentrated on convoy escorts, several hundred of which were launched by the end of the war. The convoy system proved so effective in reducing ship losses and sinking German submarines that one military historian has described it as the turning point of the war.

Riding herd over these and other wartime agencies was the War Industries Board headed by Bernard Baruch. Wilson charged the WIB with general oversight of production for both the war effort and the domestic market—an assignment both vague and demanding. Baruch was particularly adept at persuading businessmen voluntarily to join the board in reordering production and prices—thus, his biographer concludes, making the government party to a “conspiracy in restraint of trade for reasons of national security.” The war forced Wilson and Baruch to adopt policies reminiscent of the collectivist aspects of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism.

Industrialists initially were highly suspicious of Baruch and his agency. No businessman wanted government control of his firm; one vowed to “go out of business before I’ll let them come into my shop and run it.” Instead, Baruch wielded indirect power. In essence, the WIB left companies free to make whatever products they wanted, but it fixed early delivery dates—on a graduated scale of priorities—for war-related goods. Since the government oversaw rail traffic, coal production, and myriad other facets of the economy, in theory it could cut off the fuel and raw materials of any factory that failed to meet its priority deadlines. In fact, however, Baruch seldom had to invoke that threat. In general, the workshops shouldered their war burdens with alacrity.

With one dramatic exception: America’s entire mobilization effort depended on the railroads, but the giant firms controlling the transport lines proved unequal to the challenge. Massive bottlenecks developed as 1917 wore on. In eastern ports, loaded freight cars piled up because the ships they were supposed to be unloaded into could not sail, the ships could not sail because they could get no fuel, and the fuel could not get to the ships because of the jam of waiting cars. As the tie-ups spread and winter approached, half the country faced the prospect of being cut off from coal shipments.

The problem stemmed partly from Washington’s priority system, which played havoc with orderly freight schedules. Perhaps the worst bottleneck developed around the steel mills of Pittsburgh, where 85 percent of all cargoes carried priority tags. In the end, Wilson was forced to break the logjam by direct intervention. He appointed his Treasury Secretary and son-in-law, William G. McAdoo, to head the U.S. Railroad Administration, which in turn simply took over the lines. Gradually, government coordination of traffic and a new “permits” system designed to ensure the timely unloading of cargoes ended the crisis. McAdoo also was able to pool repair efforts on the tracks, add new rolling stock, and expand facilities at crucial freight terminals like Pittsburgh and Chicago.

Perhaps the main beneficiaries of federal control were the railway workers. The government allowed freight rates to increase 28 percent and passenger fares 18 percent, but railroad wages rose even higher. By executive order, McAdoo instituted equal pay for woman employees and attacked some forms of discrimination against blacks. Railroad unions won government recognition, an eight-hour day, and centralized grievance procedures. The government’s wage commission, meanwhile, recommended a pay settlement based upon “a measure of justice, consideration for the needs of the men, whether organized or unorganized, whether replaceable or not replaceable.” Labor strife on the railways subsided for the first time in years.

The intricacy of the wartime directed economy was staggering, and its accomplishments were breathtaking—especially when compared to the primitive organization of the Civil War or the brief headlong rush of 1898. Ammunition production alone required a national effort. From the cotton fields of Mississippi, cellulose for smokeless powder traveled up the Illinois Central to the great federal explosives plant in Nashville. Wood pulp crossed the Great Lakes by barge, was loaded into freight cars in Chicago, and then was carried along the Chesapeake & Ohio to another powder mill in Charleston, West Virginia: Toluol, crucial to making TNT, was extracted from the coke ovens of Pittsburgh and Birmingham and then shipped to California along the Union Pacific or the Southern Pacific. In Los Angeles, scientists “cracked” more toluol from crude oil and sent some of it to Wisconsin via the Chicago & North Western. Sulfur, for sulfuric acid, came from Texas and Louisiana along J. P. Morgan’s Southern line. Nitrates too were vital; they reached eastern ports from Chile via the Panama Canal.

Once the explosives were made they had to be bagged or packed into shells. The smokeless powder again was loaded onto trains, traveling eastward this time over the Pennsylvania or Baltimore & Ohio lines to bagging plants in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The TNT also was shipped to New Jersey, site of the main artillery shell factories. There booster charges, fuses, and adjusters were added—more components, from more parts of the country. At last the ammunition was ready for use. Trainloads fanned out to army bases and navy installations, or to Atlantic ports for shipment to France.

Over the course of their production the shells and explosives were handled by increasing numbers of female workers. The bagging of smokeless powder, for example, was done almost exclusively by women, in huge new government-run plants. The railroads saw a massive increase in the employment of women, rising from 31,000 in 1917 to 101,785 in the last month of the war. Women serviced engines, moved freight with electric lift trucks, and coupled cars, as well as working in railroad offices across the country.

Overall female employment, however, did not rise dramatically during the World War. The number of woman workers increased only 6.3 percent, not much higher than the increases of prewar years. The dramatic changes that did occur were in the nature of women’s work: females were able to secure more interesting and higher-paying jobs, some in fields once exclusively the domain of men. In previous years, women had begun moving from domestic service and piecework to jobs in offices, schools, restaurants, factories, and telephone exchanges; the war merely accelerated this trend. Some of women’s more spectacular gains—such as the Railroad Administration’s Women’s Service Section, which successfully fought sexual harassment and discrimination—disappeared after the war. The hostility of organized labor to woman workers remained largely unchanged. The shift in female employment would continue into peacetime, however.

The wartime demands that opened new job opportunities for women also helped change the lives of many Southern blacks. Over the war years more than 400,000 black men and women traveled north in search of work, most of them settling in cities along the trunk rail lines. For many, their first jobs were provided by the railroads themselves; the Pennsylvania and Erie lines, among others, actively recruited Southern blacks for such menial tasks as road work and car-cleaning. The majority of blacks, however, were able to take advantage of the war boom in employment once the railroads had taken them north. There were job openings in a variety of places and fields: the steel mills of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts war plants, the wire factories and brick yards of New Jersey.

One Connecticut city, Hartford, received 3,000 black immigrants in 1917 alone. The new climate and culture, coupled with an acute housing shortage, took its toll. “Unused to city life,” one magazine wrote of the new arrivals, “crowded into dark rooms, their clothing and utensils unsuitable, the stoves they have brought being too small to heat even the tiny rooms they have procured … shivering with the cold from which they do not know how to protect themselves, it is small wonder that illness has overtaken large numbers.” Various religious and voluntary organizations attempted to meet the housing crisis, but the more basic problem—that black workers received lower wages than whites and were forced to pay higher rents—went largely unaddressed.

The mobilization of women and the migration of blacks were great changes, but even these paled in comparison to the upheaval of sending 2 million draftees and nearly a million more soldiers, sailors, Guardsmen, and Marines to war. For this vast legion of men, 1917 was a time of tedious drilling in camps all across America; only a handful reached the fighting in France before year’s end.

In July, the first token U.S. force, a division of army regulars and a battalion of Marines, debarked in St. Nazaire. Two months later, the first volunteers arrived—men wearing spring parade uniforms, uncertain how to fire their rifles, and with just ten rounds of ammunition apiece. “To have sent us to the front at that time,” one soldier recalled, “would have been murder.” General John J. Pershing, commander of the budding American Expeditionary Force, wisely held his men back for several more months of training and then committed the first regiments to a quiet sector of the front. On November 3, the Germans tested the mettle of the newcomers: the enemy hit an American platoon in a night trench raid, killing three of the “doughboys” and capturing eleven while leaving three of their own dead behind. The Americans had neither run nor won; their first taste of the war was of bloody stalemate. One way or another, however, the deadlock in France was about to end.

“Nous Voilà, Lafayette!”

On November 6, 1917, just three days after the first clash between German and American troops in Alsace, Lenin’s Bolsheviks had seized control of the Russian capital and declared the formation of a Marxist Soviet regime. Although he had only tenuous control of a few major cities, Lenin had taken immediate steps to secure the “just and democratic” peace the Bolsheviks had promised. Lev Davidovich Trotsky, a principal Bolshevik lieutenant, met with German representatives at Brest-Litovsk and reluctantly accepted the draconic terms that they imposed. Thereafter, while Russia lapsed into civil war between Lenin’s forces and various opposing factions, the Germans had been able to transfer a million men to the western front. With them General Erich Ludendorff hoped to win the war before America could make its weight felt.

On the morning of March 21, 1918, out of a fog of smoke shells and poison gas, sixty-three German divisions attacked the British forces near St. Quentin and Arras. Hitting the Allied line at its weakest point, the Germans broke through for the first time since 1914. Forced out of their trenches, the British reeled back, losing 100,000 men and a thousand cannon in a single week. German troops reached the rail center at Amiens, threatening to cut the British off from the French and drive them into the sea.

When the British checked his first thrust at Arras and Amiens, Ludendorff launched two more attacks. The first hit the British at Ypres; the second broke through the French lines at Chemin des Dames. In this moment of crisis, with the British in retreat and German columns only fifty miles from Paris, General Pershing relented his insistence on keeping the American divisions together to fight as an independent army. The American commander dispatched two units to support the British at Amiens and sent a third to bolster the French at Château-Thierry. The U.S. 2nd Division, meanwhile, marched toward the Belleau Wood, there to meet the spearhead of the German advance on Paris.

The 2nd U.S. was a composite division, a brigade of doughboys paired with a brigade of Marines. The Americans reached Belleau Wood on June l, only to be told by French officers on the spot that they would have to retreat. “Retreat, hell,” replied Marine Captain Lloyd Williams, “we just got here!” The lone U.S. unit stopped five German divisions on the far side of the woods; then, on June 6, the Americans attacked. More than fifty percent of the American troops were killed or wounded in the frontal assault on the German positions, but the Germans were driven out of the woods and forced to retreat. The threat to Paris was over.

Ludendorff had been set back again, but he still had enough fresh troops to launch two more offensives. One drive, on Amiens, was quickly thwarted by a French counterattack. The other, however, thrust across the Marne, surrounding the 38th U.S. Infantry Regiment on three sides. Then the new Allied Supreme Commander, General Ferdinand Foch, counterpunched with a mixed force of Frenchmen, Americans, and Moroccans. Again the Germans were driven back; from then on, the strategic initiative belonged to the Allies.

The German spring offensive of 1918 may have been a blessing in disguise for the novice American troops. Pershing had originally believed that he could break the German lines with attacks by “stalking, stealthy” riflemen—the kind of tough, individualistic fighters he had commanded on the western plains, in Cuba, in Mexico. But against German artillery and machine guns, Pershing’s expert riflemen would have been slaughtered en masse, just as similar French and British assaults had failed from 1914 to 1917. Even at Belleau Wood, where the Germans had had little time to fortify their positions, that sort of impromptu attack had cost the Americans enormous casualties. In the open field, however, against German columns thinned from breaking through the Allied trenches, Pershing’s aggressive infantry tactics paid off.

The AEF also benefited from the “Iron Commander’s” emphasis on drill and discipline. “The standards of the American Army will be those of West Point,” Pershing declared in an early order. He put particular pressure on the junior officers, weeding out scores of volunteer and National Guard commanders who failed to measure up. As a result, the AEF was left with a cadre of superlative tactical leaders, young men of the caliber of Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, and George Marshall.

More than from marksmanship or discipline, the Americans drew strength from their brash self-confidence. These fresh divisions of doughboys—each twice as large as the war-worn Allied and German units—marched to battle bedecked with flowers by the dazzled French. When one frightened peasant shouted to the Marines that the war was lost, a college linguist turned leatherneck shot back, “Pas finie,” thereby giving the Marne front its name.

The Americans lost their freshness, if not their insouciance, in the fighting at Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood. Ludendorff himself was forced to acknowledge the toughness of his new foes. On the Marne, five platoons of the 38th U.S. were all but annihilated in hand-to-hand fighting with rifle butts, grenades, pistols; still the regiment held, and broke up the German attack. When the first American division had marched through Paris the previous summer, Colonel Charles Stanton had stopped to salute Lafayette’s tomb with the cry, “Nous voilà, Lafayette!”—“Lafayette, we are here!” Now the hardened survivors of Ludendorff’s attacks quipped, “We’ve paid our debt to Lafayette; who the hell do we owe now?”

As late as January 1918, Wilson had not given up his hopes for a compromise peace based on the principles of democracy and international cooperation. He instructed Colonel House to assemble a panel of experts to advise him on peace terms. In consultation with Felix Frankfurter, House brought together a team of researchers and intellectuals that included Dr. Isaiah Bowman of the American Geographical Society and Walter Lippmann. This informal body, dubbed “The Inquiry” by the newspapers, assembled memos, testimony, maps—in all, more than 2,000 documents—on questions that might be discussed at a peace conference.

More than intellectuals, events in far-off Russia affected the lives of American soldiers, scholars, and President alike in 1918. Even before they made peace with the Germans, the Bolsheviks denounced and published the czarist regime’s wartime treaties with the Allies. As Lenin intended, these secret agreements, which contemplated the division of territories of the Central Powers among Russia and its war partners, seriously embarrassed the efforts of the British and French to depict their side in the war as just and nonimperialistic.

The publication of the secret treaties reinforced Wilson’s determination to stand aloof from the British and French, as an “associated” power rather than as a formal member of their alliance. It also put pressure on him to clarify America’s own terms for peace. The American people, he wrote House, had to be reassured that they were not fighting “for any selfish aim on the part of any belligerent … least of all for divisions of territory such as have been contemplated in Asia Minor.” With preliminary reports from the Inquiry in hand, Wilson outlined the fourteen points of his tentative peace terms in an address to Congress.

Wilson took the Congress and the audience of Allied diplomats by surprise with his Fourteen Points speech. About half of the points were concrete terms for the territorial settlement of the war: evacuation of Belgium, Russia, France, and the Balkans; return of Alsace-Lorraine to France; self-determination for the peoples of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires; independence for Poland; adjustment of the borders of Italy. Six points, however, reached beyond the immediate conflict to address the problems that had troubled Europe over the past decades.

Wilson acknowledged the challenge posed by the Bolsheviks. “There is … a voice calling for these definitions of principle and of purpose which is, it seems to me, more thrilling and more compelling than any of the many moving voices with which the troubled air of the world is filled. It is the voice of the Russian people….” The President then outlined a sweeping series of reforms: open diplomacy; freedom of the seas; an end to trade barriers between nations; international arms reductions; adjustment of colonial disputes in the interests of the native populations. In the fourteenth point he declared, “A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike.”

The Fourteen Points formed the basis of what historians would later call the “liberal” peace program, the general set of ideals that progressives throughout Western Europe and America were agreed upon. The German government, however, responded with a sneer at the “demagogic artifices” of “this American busybody.” In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk the Germans demonstrated their own idea of fair peace terms, stripping Russia of 34 percent of its population, 32 percent of its farmland, half of its factories, and virtually all its coal mines. The final German answer to the Fourteen Points was Ludendorff’s spring offensive in the West.

The ferocious German attacks in France sapped some of Wilson’s idealism. He targeted the German government as the enemy; the war had to bring the “destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can … disturb the peace of the world.” Otherwise, he warned a cheering crowd in Baltimore, “Everything that America has lived for and loved and grown great to vindicate … will have fallen in utter ruin.” Wilson offered but one response to the German breakthroughs on the western front: “Force, Force to the utmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world.”

By July, more than a million American soldiers had been sent to France. In August, the Allies turned to attack all along the front. At Amiens the British broke through with four hundred tanks, the mechanical “land battleships” that Churchill had sired for the Royal Navy. The Americans too had tanks—a single brigade of borrowed French Renaults, led by a young cavalry major named Patton. With this handful of lightly armored vehicles Patton spearheaded an assault on the German salient at St. Mihiel. The Germans were already beginning to withdraw, so the Americans advanced with ease, clearing the enemy positions in just two days.

The tanks of the First World War were unromantic offspring of the industrial revolution. Slow, squat, underarmed, almost unbearably hot, they nonetheless accomplished their purpose of cutting through enemy trench lines. The same could not be said, however, of the other grand technical innovation of the war, the airplane.

Aviation was the one genuinely romantic service in this otherwise businesslike, butcherous war. René Fonck of France, Canada’s William Bishop, the von Richthofen brothers of Germany, Raoul Lufberry in the Lafayette Escadrille—these were the conflict’s truly glamorous figures, the handful of men who could literally rise above the mass carnage of the trenches and engage each other in single combat. To be sure, the march of military technology injected more and more prosaic elements into the lives of flyers: their planes began to mount more and better weapons with which to kill their fellow aviators from “the other side of the hill”; photo reconnaissance gave way to bombing missions against enemy troops and, for German zeppelin pilots, against enemy cities; ground artillery began to take its toll on the flyers, supposedly killing even the legendary Red Baron, young Manfred von Richthofen. The wartime public, however, and many of the flyers too, chose not to look beyond the knightly façade. Winston Churchill was learning to fly during the war. Theodore Roosevelt, too, might have given it a try if Wilson had not explicitly barred him from military service. Roosevelt’s son Quentin did join the army’s Aviation Section (still officially part of the Signal Corps) and died in his second week of action over the Marne.

For all the attention they received, however, the aviators had relatively little impact on the war’s course. When the Americans mounted their first independent bombing mission of the war, they could muster only eight borrowed British planes, six of which were downed and none of which bombed its assigned target. Later raids had many more planes and proportionally fewer casualties, but the results of air bombardment remained disappointing.

In the end, Pershing’s riflemen carried the brunt of the fighting for the Americans. After the relatively easy conquest of St. Mihiel, Pershing massed almost his entire force before the Argonne Forest, a tangle of fortified ridges and woods that formed the hinge of Germany’s Hindenburg Line. The Americans jumped off on September 26, quickly gained three miles, and then ran into the main line of the Germans’ defenses. Thereafter the battle degenerated into a welter of individual fights, with small units on each side lunging through the smoke-filled woods, trading grenades and machine-gun bursts, attacking and defending individual strong points. Once again the freshness and numbers of the doughboys outweighed their relative inexperience. Slowly the Germans were driven back toward the vital rail center of Sedan.

Even before that city fell, the will of the German leadership broke. Ludendorff, meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm on September 29, was forced to admit that his armies were in retreat all along the western front. Caught between a starving civilian population and a collapsing army, abandoned by the generals who had frog-marched him through the war, unnerved by Bolshevik agitators in his fleet and desperate calls for peace from his formerly docile Reichstag, Wilhelm gave up. On October 6, Wilson received a telegram, relayed from Berlin, requesting an immediate armistice.

The Germans had directed their appeal to Wilson in the hope of securing peace on the relatively generous terms of the Fourteen Points. The British, French, and Italian leaders gave their general consent to a settlement along those lines, with a few reservations designed to protect their special interests, only after House had rushed to Europe to threaten them with the prospect of a separate American peace. However, Foch and the other Allied military commanders—including Pershing—were agreed that the Germans had to be prevented from using a truce to regroup for further resistance. Foch persuaded the Allied governments that, as a precondition to negotiations, the German army had to evacuate Belgium, France, and the Rhineland, and that it must turn over to the Allies vast stores of military equipment. The generals would leave the Germans with enough arms to put down any Bolshevik-inspired uprising at home, but not enough to continue the war.

When the end finally came, it was quick. October 30: The Turks surrender to the British. November 3: Sailors of the German fleet mutiny over orders to sortie for a final suicide battle; they kill a number of their officers and refuse to leave port. On the same day, Austria accedes to terms laid down by Italy. November 7: Foch dictates his terms to the German peace commissioners. November 9: The Reichstag proclaims a republic in Germany, overthrowing the Kaiser. November 10: Wilhelm flees to the Netherlands, Ludendorff to Sweden.

On the morning of November 11, the armistice was signed at Foch’s headquarters, a converted railroad car near Compiègne. Just before noon, the guns fell silent from the English Channel to the Swiss border; it was the first moment of calm in over four years. In, the tangle of the Meuse-Argonne, corpses of German and American boys continued to rot side by side. Gas still wisped from shell craters along the Somme. Trench scars still defaced the landscape around shattered Verdun; they would still be there decades later.

There was no quiet in New York City on November 11. News of the armistice reached the city at 3 A.M. and within minutes the air-raid sirens were blaring. Ships in the harbor replied with their foghorns. Factory whistles added to the cacophony. Throughout the day, people swarmed in the streets, slapping each other on the back and echoing cheers. Impromptu parades snarled traffic. Society matrons, news vendors, shipwrights, and stenographers all rubbed elbows in the joyous throngs. There were cheers for Wilson and for the doughboys, catcalls for the Kaiser, good-natured denunciations of food rationing. Underlying the immediate relief over the war’s end was a dim realization that while America was untouched, or even stronger, because of the conflict, Europe lay on the edge of—as one paper put it—“Disaster … Exhaustion … Revolution.”

Over Here: Liberty and Democracy

War has its own trajectory and momentum. It gorges on heavy industrial goods and starves others; accelerates certain economic trends and diverts or suppresses others; levels some class barriers and creates new ones; sharpens national loyalties and stifles diversity; summons new leadership and bypasses old. In early 1917, America lay slack, loose-jointed, divided in loyalty, hazy in ideology amid the mobilized great powers. Some eighty years earlier, Tocqueville had observed that an “aristocratic nation” that did not succeed quickly in “ruining” a democratic one ran the risk of being conquered by it. He also warned that a protracted war would “endanger the freedom of a democratic country.” Would Americans conquer autocracy only to be conquered by it?

For a time after the April 1917 declaration, Americans had appeared to remain passive, as though confused or even disgruntled. Even the leadership seemed uncertain; when a senator was told that $3 billion was needed to send an army to France, he reportedly exclaimed, “Good Lord! You aren’t going to send soldiers over there, are you?” Fighting a war 3,000 miles away seemed almost incomprehensible.

Then the momentum of war took over. Americans rallied around their flag, their soldiers, their commander-in-chief. They burst into patriotic song; people who had been singing the pacifist song “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,” six months later, as Ernest May remarked, were singing George M. Cohan’s stirring “Over There.” Americans knit sweaters for soldiers overseas, volunteered their services to hospitals, the Red Cross, the YMCA, the Salvation Army. Children collected peach stones to be converted into charcoal for gas masks. Hosts of people came out of retirement for war work. Families observed meatless and even wheatless days. Fidgety boys were told, “Chew your food.”

Above all, Americans seemed ready to part with their money for the cause. War bonds, sold at immense rallies sparked by celebrities like Douglas Fairbanks, Geraldine Farrar, and Ignace Jan Paderewski, went by the hundreds of millions of dollars. Voluntary purchases of Liberty and Victory bonds, war savings certificates, and “thrift stamps” reached $23 billion, according to May, from a population with an average annual income of less than $70 billion. Americans accepted a jump in the federal personal income tax from a 1-to-7 percent to a 4-to-67 percent graduation, on all incomes over $1,000. It was a time for patriotic self-discipline.

Under Wilson’s direction a young California newspaperman, George Creel, established the most powerful propaganda agency the nation had known. His Committee on Public Information mobilized artists like Howard Chandler Christie and James Montgomery Flagg to design war posters for liberty loans and recruiting, including Flagg’s famous “I Want You for the U.S. Army.” Creel organized the nation’s orators into a 75,000-strong army, the “Four Minute Men,” who carried the Administration’s messages to millions of Americans in grange halls, lodge meetings, schools, synagogues, churches, movie theaters, and he drafted novelists such as Mary Roberts Rinehart and hosts of historians and other scholars. Creel not only mobilized the mind of America; he opened offices in world capitals to relay his war news and Wilson’s war messages to millions of Europeans and Asians, especially Chinese.

As the voices of war were piped out of Washington and amplified by the media, the attitudes of millions of Americans focused and hardened and fortified one another in an orgy of Americanism and chauvinism. Before the war, the United States had developed a “crazy quilt anti-radical pattern,” in William Preston’s words, that closed the nation to aliens if they advocated certain radical doctrines, and provided for the deportation of aliens within five years of entry if they were guilty of certain “wrong” beliefs. At this time, while the repression had not touched great numbers of persons, it had ominous potentials. “The vague terminology of deportation legislation, the removal of time limits, the withering away of due process in immigration procedure, the bureaucratic ignorance of radical ideology, and the administrative mind conditioned by its dealings with defenseless undesirables” had come to characterize Washington’s practices by 1917.

As war hysteria mounted during that year, the people and their leaders turned their jingoism and their fear against the more defenseless targets—immigrants, aliens, radicals, pacifists, German-Americans. In the rising paranoia, local epidemics were blamed on German spies contaminating the local water supply. A high Red Cross official warned that hospital bandages were being poisoned by plotters. Armed uprisings were rumored in Milwaukee and other German-American centers. Violinist Fritz Kreisler was barred from playing a concert in East Orange, New Jersey. Brown University revoked a degree given earlier to the German ambassador to the United States.

The juiciest target of all was the IWW, which had publicly and provocatively stuck to its stand against “war and capitalism” following America’s entrance. In the popular mind, the Wobblies stood for radicalism, aliens, strikes, industrial sabotage, threats to private property, and everything else that was opposed to 100 percent Americanism. Vigilantes in Arizona mining towns shipped hundreds of Wobblies and suspected sympathizers out into the desert. Western governors, reflecting logging, mining, and farm interests, petitioned the Wilson Administration to intern in remote camps Wobblies suspected of treason or of hindering “the operation of industries, or the harvesting of crops necessary to the prosecution of the war.”

Who would hold out against the war hysteria? Not the federal government, which finally opposed internment but called for increased state vigilance and state suppression of IWW propaganda. Not the religious leadership, which typically showed little Christian tolerance: a Congregational minister called the Lutheran Church in Germany “not the bride of Christ, but the paramour of Kaiserism,” and another favored hanging anyone who lifted his voice against American entrance into the war. Not judges, who often denounced Wobblies from the bench, or juries—the designated defenders of citizens against their government—who often came in with anti-Wobbly verdicts within an hour of retiring. Not the AFL leadership, which despite its own experience with antilabor bias in the courts seemed only too pleased with the persecution of the IWW.

Early in September 1917, federal agents swooped down on the Chicago IWW headquarters, seizing membership lists, leaflets, buttons, books, office equipment. The authorities seemed intent on destroying the IWW leadership. The following June, two weeks after a deliberately provocative speech by Eugene Debs in Canton, Ohio, a federal grand jury indicted him under the Espionage Act of 1917, which provided heavy penalties for persons aiding the enemy, obstructing recruiting, or causing disloyalty, and under the May 1918 sedition amendment, which banned “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” against the American form of government, the Constitution, the flag, the armed forces, or necessary war production.

In court, Debs invoked the memories of the “rebels of their day” like Tom Paine and Sam Adams, of Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison and other fighters for justice. “You are teaching your children to revere their memories,” Debs told the jury, “while all of their detractors are in oblivion.” Promptly found guilty, Debs affirmed on sentencing his “kinship with all living beings.” As the impassive judge stared down at him, he said, “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal class, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” The judge condemned those “who would strike the sword from the hand of this nation while she is engaged in defending herself against a foreign and brutal power.” His sentence: ten years in jail.

“Once lead this people into war,” President Wilson was reported to have said before American entrance into the conflict, “and they’ll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance. To fight you must be brutal and ruthless, and the spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into the very fiber of our national life.” Given this insight, why did not Wilson himself swing his presidential influence more strongly against the intolerance of 1917–19? He had been raised in the tradition of civil liberty and free speech. Liberty for him, as for millions of Americans, was the very linchpin of democracy. To a people who feared government and repression, the Bill of Rights was the essence of the Constitution. Once again from the crucible of war, however, liberty emerged as a misty symbol for most Americans and their leaders rather than a concrete guide to public and private action.

For some Americans, the worst wartime loss of liberty was their right to take the swig of their choice. By 1917, twenty-six states had prohibition laws; about half of these were “bone-dry.” Converted into a win-the-war measure by the Anti-Saloon League, a constitutional amendment banning the “manufacture, sale or transportation” of intoxicating liquors won congressional approval by the end of that year, and passed the required number of states during the following year, just in time to serve as a welcome-home present to the doughboys returning from the vineyards of France.

Not only did Prohibition constitute the kind of governmental intrusion into personal life that Americans had fought since the days of the Mayflower. It was also a federal intrusion. But many a lawmaker who had declaimed for years about states’ rights and individual liberty swallowed without a murmur an act that challenged all the ancient war cries about individualism, personal choice, family responsibility, and local option.

Amid the jingoism and intolerance and repression of the war to save democracy, some Americans fought a heroic battle at home that would produce a vital step in the democratization of American life and politics. This was the battle for woman suffrage.

Not since Civil War days had a body of Americans faced such an intimidating set of political and intellectual problems as had the suffragists during the progressive years. Not only did they confront the most impossible problem of all—how to gain the right to vote without having the vote itself as a weapon to gain it—but they had to conquer a political system loaded with booby traps, minority checks, devices of delay and devitalization, group and individual vetoes. They had to work with Southerners who were anti-Negro, with Californians who were anti-Oriental, with Northerners who were anti-immigrant, with businessmen who were antilabor.

And by now the women leaders were politically bone-tired after seventy-five years of almost ceaseless struggle. Again and again in their letters, they refer to their fatigue, the overwork that was making “physical wrecks” of women, the racking journeys by train and trolley and auto, the late-night speeches and conferences. Elizabeth Cady Stanton talked of the “wrangles, pitfalls, and triumphs” of the suffrage leaders.

“Have I not served out my sentence,” Anna H. Shaw asked in 1914, at the age of sixty-seven. “Has the cause any right to ask more of me? Why may I not go home, home, the one quiet spot in all the world, and with my books and trees and flowers and birds, rest away from all antagonisms, and fruitless misunderstandings.” But Anna Shaw would labor for another five years, then die of pneumonia while on one more speaking tour.

Despite the decades of grinding battles, some women leaders believed that victory was just a matter of time and persistence. Women continued to move into factory jobs; perhaps more importantly, they were entering professional and office positions long reserved for men, while a few more men were taking “women’s jobs” such as cooking and baking. Industrialization, along with its human evils, was generating money and leisure that freed some women to confront such evils. Women leaders were highly conscious of these trends. “Little by little, very slowly, and with most unjust and cruel opposition,” sociologist Charlotte Perkins Gilman had written in 1898, “at cost of all life holds most dear, it is being gradually established by many martyrdoms that human work is woman’s as well as man’s.”

By the turn of the century, these leaders had to confess failure in their campaign for the vote, save in a handful of states. By 1913, through this state-by-state approach, women could still vote for only seventy-four presidential electors. The problem facing women strategists was not only political but intellectual and moral: To what extent should they be concerned with the rights of blacks, immigrants, illiterates, factory workers, and Indians, rather than exclusively the right of women, to vote—never forgetting that each of those groups included women? One advantage of the state-by-state suffrage strategy was that it let legislatures decide suffrage issues on the basis of local attitudes. But the moral price was high, as lawmakers yielded to regional biases.

The cardinal issue was, of course, black voting in the South. Women abolitionists had joined with men in the searing struggle before the Civil War, and a postwar alliance of voteless women and still-deprived Negroes seemed both a moral and political necessity; at the same time, suffragists still resented the fact that Southern blacks alone were granted citizenship. During Reconstruction, Isabella Beecher Hooker, one of Susan B. Anthony’s Washington correspondents, had reported that she had gone in to see Charles Sumner and other senators with the first copy of a new suffrage pamphlet. She continued:

“I told him I heard him comment almost with tears in the Senate the day before on the case of a black man refused hotel accommodations in the middle of a stormy night—& my tears of indignation blinded my eyes & sent me out of the Senate chamber—because women had been treated thus over & over again….” Sumner asked if more Democrats might support suffrage. “When I told him that Southern democrats were really coming to think that if niggers voted it was high time their wives and mothers should—he said ‘Well that party isn’t a big thing in the south you know.’ No Sir—said I—but a disaffected republican is about as good as a democrat —isn’t he?” Sumner seemed to agree. “Well then,” she continued, “if we can get some of the democrats & the disaffected republicans to unite with some of the labor people & some of the temperance people, this might be a bigger thing than you speak of—& he didn’t even laugh or attempt a joke.”

Forty years later, suffragist leaders had not only failed to forge a full coalition of the deprived—many were also resentful of immigrants, whom Elizabeth Cady Stanton had publicly pictured as “coarse, ignorant beings” fresh from the steerage, protected by the police in their right to cast a vote, usually a vote purchased by the bosses. She resented the “ignorant native vote” of uneducated workers, even—in South Dakota—of “Indians in blankets and moccasins” who were “engaged in their ghost dances,” while “the white women were going up and down the State pleading for the rights of citizens.” Still, by the end of the progressive and reform years many women leaders were fighting both for the suffrage and for the full panoply of human rights for all Americans—especially after horrifying episodes like the 1911 Triangle fire, in which 146 women garment workers perished and which suggested that women needed safe working conditions if they were even to live to vote.

Human rights for all Americans save—as always—for the Southern black woman and man. By 1915, it was clear that women could neither pressure suffrage through the Southern-dominated committee system of Congress, nor through the Southern state legislatures, in the face of the defenders of states’ rights, Anglo-Saxon civilization, and the “Southern way of life.” The problem was growing acute, for the Republican party was increasingly falling under the leadership of antisuffragists like Henry Cabot Lodge, and the Democracy under the leadership of liberals and progressives—but always there loomed the Southern Democratic lawmakers. The national suffrage movement was losing some of its ablest Southern leaders to the antiblack claims of the region.

Suffrage leaders faced other political problems of intellectually baffling complexity. To what extent should the woman’s movement try to work through either or both major parties, or exert leverage between them, or form its own party as of old? How strongly should it link with labor and consumers and even farmers—and with their causes and demands, some of them distant from the needs of women as such? What political tactics should be used—electioneering (when only a minority of women had the vote), propaganda, personal influence, militancy, even violence? And how deal with the two male leaders who still dominated the political scene—Theodore Roosevelt, who had taken a strong position for a federal amendment in 1912 but seemed to be backsliding ever since, and Woodrow Wilson, who was a master of rhetoric about democracy and women’s rights but somehow could not bring himself to make a clear and eloquent statement for the federal—the “Susan B. Anthony”—amendment?

Slowly during 1914–16, letter by letter, speech by speech, conference by conference, setback by setback, suffragist leaders felt and thought their way through the political murk. The issue was not whether to take a new stand but whether to stick to the federal amendment route despite enticing temptations to yield unduly to “states’ rights.” The decision was to stand firm “for Susan.” Several forces converged at this point. A new cadre of leaders had arisen in the movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had died in 1902, Anthony herself four years later, and Anna Shaw, longtime head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association—a brilliant orator but a poor administrator—had been succeeded in 1915 by Carrie Chapman Catt, a woman of enormous organizational energy, political skill, and fierce determination to mount a final assault for suffrage. Moreover, a more militant woman’s organization had sprung up to challenge the NAWSA—the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, headed by Alice Paul, who as an American student had been jailed in Britain for suffrage militancy and who felt that the time had come for suffragists to be less genteel and to hold the Democratic party—the “party in power”—strictly accountable for carrying out its campaign promises. It was also becoming evident by this time that the state-by-state movement was slowing down, that many suffragists even in the South were now favoring the federal amendment, and that the power of women who already had gained the vote in some states should be mobilized for one final push for “Susan B.”

So the target now was the United States Congress—and one man, Woodrow Wilson, who would have no vote in the long amending process but could have ample influence. The suffragists had about given up on TR, who refused to use his personal influence with Lodge and the other Republican irreconcilables in Congress. But would Wilson use his presidential and personal influence with his Southern irreconcilables in House and Senate?

By no means did all women support woman suffrage; some organized against it and sought to influence Wilson. “The men should stand fast & protect us, protect ourselves as a father refuses his child something he knows that child is better without,” Mary Wilson Thompson urged in a letter to the President. “In the eyes of the world you are the Father of this great United States & you personally know that Suffrage ought not to be granted through Federal Amendment & that it never will by the States individually, that the women of this country are not fitted for the vote & that it will not come if you hold firm. Therefore I ask you to be true to your ideals of States Rights & of womanhood.”

To suffragists, the President was both attractive and exasperating. Originally antisuffrage, he “passed through successive phases in which he pleaded that he could do nothing until his party acted,” though he had led it on the most factious issues; “that he could do nothing until Congress acted and could not invade the province of a Congressional Committee,” though he had often done so; and finally, “that the issue was one solely up to the several states,” in Eleanor Flexner’s summary. Late in 1915, he journeyed to Princeton to cast a vote for woman’s suffrage in a New Jersey referendum. But this was the old state-by-state approach. When, if ever, would the President support “Susan B.” in the face of intense “states’ rights” feeling in his party?

The woman leaders supplied their own answer through a marvelous combination of skill, persistence, and luck. In January 1917, militants began picketing the White House. Standing motionless outside the gates, they held banners demanding, “MR. PRESIDENT, WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE?” and “HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY?” As the weeks passed and the slogans became more provocative, passers-by tore the banners from their hands, and police began arresting the pickets rather than the troublemakers. Thrown into a notorious workhouse nearby in Virginia, women protested their brutal treatment, went on hunger strikes, underwent forced feeding—and became martyrs.

While the militants catalyzed public sentiment, the more genteel leadership of the NAWSA exerted influence inside the White House gates. While Catt mobilized the state groups, her lobbyists pressured lawmakers on the Hill. Her ablest lieutenant by far was Helen Gardener, an affluent Washingtonian who had the good luck—if such it was—to live next to Speaker Champ Clark. Occasionally she had her cook make up Southern delicacies and hand them to the Clarks’ cook over the back fence. Mrs. Gardener was not above waiting inside her front door, with hat and coat on, until she spied Clark on his front steps; then she “chanced by.”

Helen Gardener also had access to Woodrow Wilson—a resource she used to the hilt. As a crucial House vote neared in late 1917, she played on the President’s newest and strongest motivation by urging him to support suffrage as a war measure. Soon she asked Wilson to intervene with a wavering Tennessee congressman. In January of 1918, the combined efforts of the President, the militants, the organizers, the mobilizers, and the inside operators paid off when the House of Representatives passed the Susan B. Anthony amendment by exactly the required two-thirds majority, with Champ Clark’s “yea” held in reserve in case of a deadlock.

Next the Senate—and now Helen Gardener redoubled her White House operation. Flattering Wilson with the observation that he had linked the cause of human liberty and democracy with the end of government by “male domination,” she persuaded him again and again to intervene with vacillating senators. In September 1918, on her urging and those of Administration officials including McAdoo, Wilson staked his prestige on a sudden personal appearance before the Senate. Coming before the upper chamber on only half an hour’s notice, the President gave one of his most eloquent speeches. “This is a people’s war,” he said; “democracy means that women shall play their part in affairs alongside men and upon an equal footing with them….

“We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?” And women were vital to winning the peace as well.

Eloquent words, wise words—and they did not change a single vote. After a heartbreaking loss by two votes in the Senate, the indomitable suffrage leaders returned to the battle they had fought now for three-quarters of a century—and in another year they won that battle in the Senate. It would take the movement yet another year to push the amendment through three-quarters of the states, but the two-thirds votes in House and Senate, the voting power already achieved in key states, and women’s grass-roots efforts brought victory in time for the election of 1920. Nine Southern states and Delaware refused to ratify.

The final victory was a splendid one for women and all Americans, a victory too for liberty and equality, though a victory so delayed as to lose some of its savor for the exhausted suffrage workers. It was also a flawed victory. Women had succeeded through expediency as well as conviction, making deals, forming coalitions, lobbying like any votemonger of old. All this was necessary in a veto-ridden political system. But they had failed to form firm linkages with labor or immigrants or with blacks, with Democrats or Republicans, with a third party or a party of their own. Lacking such linkages, women might be hard put to use their newly won vote to realize the humane goals that had validated their long struggle.

All this would be settled in the future. At the very least, the Nineteenth Amendment stood as a monument to the transforming leadership of five generations of women. And it was a monument as well to a President who, amid the cares and distractions of war, was willing to spend political capital on a cause that he viewed as linked to a fundamental aim of that war—the expansion of liberty and equality, and thus the enlargement of American democracy.

CHAPTER 13

The Fight for the League

THE SS GEORGE WASHINGTON pulled away from the flag-draped pier in the late morning of December 4, 1918. Warships in New York Harbor fired salutes to the little liner, once German-owned and now part of the spoils of war. Crowds were gathered at Battery Park and on Staten Island to see the ship off. As she passed the submarine net and the old Civil War ironclad that guarded the Narrows, passengers on board could make out children waving flags all along the shore. Once in the lower harbor, the George Washington was met by her escort: the battleship Pennsylvania, a dozen destroyers, plus airplanes and a navy dirigible. They all had assembled to see President Woodrow Wilson off for Europe on what all expected would be a historic mission.

The President had decided to break all precedent and personally represent the United States at the peace conference convening in Paris. Wilson was convinced, as he told reporters aboard the ship, that the Allied heads of state had already decided together to impose “a peace of loot or spoliation” upon Germany, and that only his on-the-spot intervention could redirect the conference to a program for lasting peace. Beyond that reason, however, was Wilson’s obvious, burning desire to participate in what promised to be the most important international meeting in over a century. “The plot is thickening,” he told newsmen with obvious relish. Wilson could no more have stayed away from Paris than Theodore Roosevelt could have sat out the 1912 election.

The President brought with him to Europe only a relatively small entourage: his second wife, Edith Galt Wilson; his physician, Admiral Cary Grayson; two typists; and most of the members of the Inquiry. As formal Peace Commissioners, Wilson appointed Colonel House and General Tasker Bliss (Wilson’s able liaison to the Allied Supreme War Council), who already were in Europe. The other two commissioners accompanied him—Secretary of State Lansing and Henry White, a nominal Republican and experienced diplomat long friendly with Roosevelt and Lodge.

Life aboard ship quickly settled down to routine. Most of the time the President remained isolated, talking and dining only with the members of his immediate circle. George Creel was on board, personally supervising the movie that the Committee on Public Information was making about the peace mission. Evenings Wilson and his wife joined the other passengers to enjoy the film exploits of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks before returning to affairs of state.

The President had only one extensive conference with the members of the Inquiry during the trip. He was quite frank and specific in laying out his views and goals. While the Americans had no selfish objectives to pursue at Paris, he said, the Allied leaders were bound to each other by a web of secret deals and thus “did not represent their own people.” He discussed animatedly his ideas for a league of nations. A permanent league, whose exact political structure could evolve with experience, was in his view the only guarantee of both “elasticity and security” in the wake of the World War. He foresaw this league deterring future aggressors by cutting them off from trade and communications while world public opinion was roused against them; military force would be necessary only as a last resort. In the meantime, the organization would promote international commerce and administer the colonies of the defeated Central Powers.

Wilson heartened his advisors by calling on them to guide him on the specific economic and territorial issues involved. “Tell me what’s right and I’ll fight for it,” he concluded.

His associates tried to take the measure of this American scholar-turned-politician who sought to redirect the destiny of the world with the hammer blows of his ideals. James Shotwell, a historian attached to the peace commission, was struck by the contradictions in Wilson’s appearance and actions. Close up the President had warm eyes and an engaging smile, but from the side his face appeared severe and determined. Wilson remained aloof from the other officials on the ship, yet on Sunday he unselfconsciously joined the sailors singing hymns in their mess hall. Watching Wilson watch a movie, Shotwell saw powerful emotions being held under tight control.

Escorted by Allied warships, the George Washington moved through mists as it approached the coast of France; then the skies cleared and the liner pulled into Brest harbor in mid-December 1918. The President and his party went immediately to the train that was waiting to carry them to Paris, but Shotwell took a few minutes to walk around the town. He noticed the slate-roofed stone houses, the many women dressed in black among the crowds, and the groups of American soldiers everywhere waiting for orders to sail for home. Most of all, Shotwell was struck by the wall placards that announced the coming of Wilson. One, a “red splash of color on a gray stone wall,” called upon “one and all, without distinction of party” to praise the leader who had arrived “to found a new order on the rights of peoples, and to stop forever the return of an atrocious war….”

The Mirrored Halls of Versailles

No American President had ever before met with a foreign leader while in office. Grant and Roosevelt, after they left the White House, did visit a number of heads of state during their travels, but those were social calls rather than serious diplomatic missions. Now Wilson was about to meet with the assembled premiers and foreign ministers of every European power—except defeated Germany and Bolshevik Russia—as well as leaders from nations on five continents. They had gathered to address issues of sovereignty, disarmament, and trade that spanned the globe.

The global problems were staggering. The war had left 50 million soldiers and civilians dead or maimed; blasted into ruin large stretches of France, Belgium, and Eastern Europe; sent 13 million tons of shipping to the bottom of the sea. Now starvation and typhus—which would kill another 6 million people over the next year—stalked Europe in its first winter of peace since 1914. Nor was there even peace in the east, where Poles clashed with Czechs, Bolsheviks with czarist Whites, Slavs with Italians, Turks with Greeks, and Arabs with Jews amidst the ruins of the old autocratic empires. The leaders of Europe’s three powerful democracies—Britain’s David Lloyd George, France’s Georges Clemenceau, and Italy’s Vittorio Orlando—had been united by the war but now were divided on how best to cope with its chaotic aftermath. The three were hard-pressed to make common cause with one other; how would they deal with the professor-politician-president from the west?

Clemenceau was the first to greet the American President. The French premier—still vigorous at seventy-eight, broad of chest, with short legs and a yellowish complexion that struck Lansing as the “face and figure [of] a Chinese mandarin”—had earned the nickname “Le Tigre” for his tenacious attacks on any and all political opponents. It had been Clemenceau who had published Emile Zola’s impassioned defense of Alfred Dreyfus, kept the “Affaire Dreyfus” alive year after year in the French press and Chamber of Deputies, and finally won exoneration for the wronged Jewish officer. A cold, ruthless idealist, not much liked but infinitely respected, Clemenceau had been uncompromising in prosecuting the war against the Central Powers, and now he called for peace terms that would prevent Germany from ever again being strong enough to invade France.

The first meeting between Wilson and Clemenceau went surprisingly well, mainly because both leaders strove to be conciliatory. Much to the annoyance of Colonel House, who still hoped to head the American delegation, Wilson convinced the Frenchman that the President should sit in on the peace talks as America’s chief spokesman; in return, Wilson happily agreed that Clemenceau should preside over the conference. Neither professed to see any conflict between their main aims—for Clemenceau French security, for Wilson the league—and both later took House aside to express their delight at the way things had begun.

With some days still remaining before the conference opened, Wilson’s next stop was Britain. There he met with the Royal Family, paraded through the streets of London, and joined the leaders of Britain’s Liberal party in following the returns of the elections in progress. Lloyd George, Wilson’s host, was tremendously heartened by the results as they were telegraphed in to the group gathered around the Cabinet table at 10 Downing Street. The white-maned Prime Minister—devious in his political dealings but unshakable in his commitment to his working-class constituents—was receiving a tremendous popular mandate for his party’s promise to squeeze Germany “until the pips squeak.” Any private doubts Lloyd George might have had about the wisdom of a punitive peace were not visible that night—but Wilson’s were, as he glumly sat watching the British politicians celebrate.

From England, Wilson traveled to Italy, for his most enthusiastic public greeting of all. The cheering crowds, however, could not dispel the tension in Rome. Italy’s leaders—the short, tenacious Orlando and his Foreign Minister, the “protractedly unreliable” Baron Sidney Sonnino—were determined to gain major concessions of territory as their price for Italy’s fighting on the Allied side. Wilson had already balked at some of their demands, and now the President sparred with his hosts about travel plans and access to the Italian public.

To varying degrees, therefore, the four democratic leaders—soon dubbed “the Big Four”—were divided by their aims before the talks even began. Once the conference convened, the confusions and cross-purposes were multiplied a hundredfold as each nation and group arose to plead its case. Lawrence of Arabia was on hand to speak for the Iraqis; Ho Chi Minh tried vainly to gain a hearing for Vietnamese independence; the Czechs and Poles sent representatives to argue over the coal mines of Teschen. British diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson remembered the bedlam of “the machine-gun rattle of a million typewriters, the incessant shrilling of telephones, the clatter of motor bikes … the cold voices of interpreters … and throughout the sound of footsteps hurrying” down the mirrored halls of Versailles. It reminded him, Nicolson wrote, of a “riot in a parrot house.”

Amidst the multiplicity of issues, Wilson did not take his eye off his main concern for a league of nations. Within a week of the conference’s formal opening, he arose to advocate “that a League of Nations be created to promote international cooperation, to ensure the fulfillment of accepted international obligations, and to provide safeguards against war.” Speaking from a draft resolution prepared in consultation with the British, the President declared that the “League should be created as an integral part of the general Treaty of Peace, and should be open to every civilized nation….” The conference voted unanimously to establish a committee, with Wilson as its head, to draft a constitution for the League.

Over the next two weeks, Wilson attended the general meetings of the conference and also chaired the League committee. In drawing up the covenant of the League, the President worked closely with Colonel House and Lord Robert Cecil of Britain, both ardent advocates of the proposed organization. Even more, Wilson relied on his own ability to lead debate and shape compromise. “The President excels in such work,” House recorded in his diary. “He seems to like it and his short talks in explanation of his views are admirable. I have never known any one to do such work as well.” High praise indeed from a self-styled master of quiet political manipulation—yet House’s opinion seemed warranted. Wilson made important concessions, giving up his own proposal for a statement on religious tolerance (and helping to beat down a Japanese plank on racial equality), and in turn blocked a French call for an international standing army. Overall, the nineteen-man committee took on the air of a college seminar, with several of the brighter pupils making important contributions—Cecil provided a working draft of the covenant, and Jan Smuts of South Africa devised the mandate procedure—but the terms of the discussion clearly being set by Professor Wilson.

After just ten meetings, the committee’s work was done. On February 14, Wilson addressed the general session of the conference, reading and commenting upon the finished covenant. “A living thing is born,” he concluded. “It is definitely a guarantee of peace.” H. Wickham Steel wrote in the Paris Daily Mail that Wilson’s presentation had “lifted” the affairs of the world “into new dimensions. The old dimensions of national individualism, secrecy of policies, competitive armaments, forcible annexations … were raised, if only for an instant, to a higher plane on which the organized moral consciousness of peoples, the publicity of international engagements and of government by the consent of and for the good of the governed, became prospective realities.”

The only question, wrote Steel, was “How long will the instant last?”

While Wilson framed his plan for the League, the other American delegates and experts were left largely to their own devices. With the President’s consent and some general supervision by House, the Inquiry members gradually became negotiators, in their own right, on the questions falling within their special spheres of expertise. Shotwell and the others found themselves engaged in days of exhausting but exhilarating work on issues of finance, navigation and trade, territorial adjustment, and the like.

Amidst the “whirlpool of political intrigue” slowly engulfing the delegates, the issue of Russia loomed large. None of the Western democracies had yet extended recognition to the Bolshevik regime in Moscow. Instead, France and Britain were helping to finance various of Lenin’s adversaries in the civil war engulfing the country. The Allies maintained a blockade of Russia’s ports and even landed troops to fight the Bolsheviks. While the World War was still on, the British and French had persuaded Wilson to send a small expeditionary force to northern Russia and a second force to Vladivostok on the Pacific—an intervention by the United States that was, in one scholar’s words, both “extremely reluctant and severely restrained,” though from Moscow’s standpoint, of course, a flagrantly hostile act. With public clamor to bring their troops home increasing, the Allies and Americans now sought a way out of the imbroglio in the East, a way out of the intervention of which George F. Kennan would say later, “never, surely, in the history of American diplomacy has so much been paid for so little.”

On January 22, Wilson proposed that the various warring factions in Russia meet with Allied representatives at Prinkipo, in Turkey, to attempt to hammer out their differences. The Bolsheviks hedged their reply to Wilson’s proposal, but the anti-Bolsheviks rejected it outright. Then young William Bullitt stepped into the breach. Meeting with House and with Lloyd George’s private secretary, Philip Kerr, Bullitt won approval for a fact-finding mission to Moscow. Accompanied by Lincoln Steffens and two military men, and armed with a set of general proposals suggested by Kerr and House, Bullitt left Paris on February 22.

One week earlier Wilson too had left, traveling in the opposite direction. The Congress was about to end its session, requiring him to return to Washington to sign legislation. Even more important, the League Covenant was completed, ready for presentation to the American people. Already the President was hearing in Paris echoes of opposition to the League building among politicians back home, and he sought to forestall his critics from organizing the public against his proposal. Before sailing from France, Wilson cabled the members of the Foreign Relations Committees of both houses of Congress, inviting them to meet with him at the White House to discuss the League Covenant.

Wilson clearly needed to mend his fences with the Congress—particularly with those Republicans whose votes would be necessary if the League were to gain two-thirds approval in the Senate—largely owing to his own political miscalculation. The previous October, in an effort to strengthen his hand before the Paris negotiations opened, Wilson had called upon the public to return a Democratic majority in the upcoming congressional elections. The call backfired, galvanizing Republican opposition; the GOP swept into control of the House by fifty seats, and acquired a precarious majority of two in the Senate. That slim majority elevated Wilson’s arch-opponent Henry Cabot Lodge to the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Debate on the Covenant began while Wilson was still in transit, with opponents labeling it everything from “an international quilting society” to “the most impudently un-American proposal ever submitted to the American people by an American President.” Landing in Boston on February 23, Wilson fired back at the critics, saying that in defense of this cause it was a pleasure to indulge his “fighting blood.” Three days later, however, he adopted a conciliatory tone in meeting over dinner with the congressional leaders. Those who had come to the White House determined not to be convinced by Wilson went away unmoved; Senator Frank Brandegee of Connecticut described the session as a “tea with the Mad Halter.” Another Republican, however, John Jacob Rogers of Massachusetts, carried away a much more favorable impression.

“I thought the President appeared extremely well,” Rogers wrote to Henry White in Paris. “He submitted himself to quite rigorous cross-examination for two hours, answering every question, easy or difficult, as fully as possible and with apparent candor…. There was no suggestion of a feeling of militant arrogance about him. He apparently tried to give the impression that he really was one of the circle in the East Room, who was answering rather than asking questions only because he had been so recently in Paris, and had been a factor in the preparation of the instrument under discussion.” Even Lodge admitted to Henry White that Wilson had patiently answered questions for two hours—but added, “We learned nothing.”

Where would Lodge stand on the President’s proposal? The senator’s personal antipathy toward Wilson was well known; so too, however, were his wartime statements in favor of the general idea of an international council or league. During the early stages of the Paris negotiations, Lodge hedged on the question, pleading ignorance of the President’s intentions, while touching base behind the scenes with TR and other Republican leaders inclined to distrust Wilson. Now, two days after the White House conference, he stated his position to the Senate. Lodge noted that America was being asked “to give up in part our sovereignty and independence and subject our own will to the will of other nations.” He continued: “I am not contending now that these things must not be done…. What I ask, and all I ask, is consideration, time, and thought.”

Fair words, spoken in a moderate tone—but Lodge had already made up his mind. At the suggestion of Brandegee, he now drew up a resolution urging that “the constitution of the league of nations in the form now proposed to the peace conference should not be accepted by the United States.” Securing in a single feverous day the signatures of thirty-seven senators—enough to block the passage of any treaty—Lodge rose in the Senate just before midnight on March 3 to read his “Round Robin” into the record. Next morning, the editors of the New York Sun chortled: “Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations died in the Senate tonight. Henry Cabot Lodge … read the death warrant of the League.”

Wilson’s response to the Senate Round Robin was swift. Previously he had tended to slight the efforts of ex-President Taft and other Republicans who had been stumping the country in support of an international peacekeeping body; now Wilson telegraphed Taft, asking that he appear with the President to speak in favor of the League. The Republican leader raced northward by train to New York, meeting Wilson just hours before he was scheduled to sail back to France. The two then addressed a cheering crowd of League supporters gathered at the Metropolitan Opera House. Taft spoke first, calling the League “the living evidence of the united power of Christian civilization to make this treaty a real treaty of peace.” Wilson then followed with a combative defense of his plan. To Lodge’s suggestion that the League be considered separately from the peace treaty, Wilson replied, “Gentlemen on this side will find the Covenant not only in it, but so many threads of the treaty tied to the Covenant that you cannot dissect the Covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure.”

The next two months were to be among the most difficult of Woodrow Wilson’s life. Immediately upon his return to Paris, he received a nasty jolt: during his absence the Europeans and House, for reasons of their own, had proceeded to detach the League plan from the peace treaty—just as Lodge had suggested. With Ray Stannard Baker, the President drew up a statement reiterating his commitment to making the Covenant an integral part of the treaty, a statement so strong that Baker feared it would “break up the Conference then and there.”

Over the next weeks, the differences between Wilson and the European leaders became starkly apparent. In particular, the rigid Clemenceau clashed repeatedly with the idealistic President. Relations between the two men, which had once seemed so promising, reached such a low that at one point Wilson prepared to abandon the talks and return to America. Gone were the happy days of the League-committee “seminar.” The conference now revolved around the daily meetings of the Big Four, and their increasingly acrimonious debates over military and territorial questions. During part of this time, Wilson was prostrated by an attack of influenza, the debilitating effects of which lingered through the spring and summer. He also became increasingly distant from Colonel House, whom he began to suspect of pursuing his own separate program at the conference. “I seldom or never have a chance to talk with him seriously,” House lamented, “and, for the moment, he is practically out from under my influence.”

At this critical juncture, Bullitt returned from Moscow, afire with a proposal from Lenin for a truce in the Russian Civil War and negotiations to resolve the Bolsheviks’ differences with the West. Wilson, in the thick of a fight to keep his Covenant in the treaty, could spare only brief attention for Bullitt’s report. More important, the young emissary’s two original supporters, House and Lloyd George, now backed away from the prospect of dealing directly with Lenin. The Russian offer was allowed to lapse; when Bullitt repeated it to Harold Nicolson, the Englishman “blinked politely.” Wilson, meanwhile, went ahead with a unilateral withdrawal of the American forces in northern Russia, and with the promotion of his supreme goal of the League.

In the end, Wilson preserved the Covenant by compromising on a number of issues less important to him. He accepted some of Clemenceau’s proposals for weakening Germany, agreed to British suggestions on disarmament and reparations, yielded to the Commonwealth nations on mandates, and let the Japanese retain control of Shantung. At the same time, in spite of the defiant speech he had made in New York, Wilson took steps to placate his Republican critics at home. Through Taft and some Democratic sources, Wilson learned of four basic changes that most of the signers of the Round Robin seemed to desire; in exchange for his concessions to Clemenceau and the others, Wilson was able to write three of those alterations into the Covenant. Even so, Lodge told Henry White, these were not good enough.

The final Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, did not completely satisfy anyone, and certainly not Wilson. But at least it included a strong, well-defined League of Nations. Throughout the talks the President had put so much emphasis on the League because, in part, he believed that eventually it could correct any other mistakes embodied in the peace settlement. He had succeeded in committing the European and other leaders to this great experiment in international democracy; now he had to persuade his own countrymen.

The Battle for the Treaty

On July 10, 1919, just one day after his return from France, President Wilson drove to Capitol Hill to present the completed Treaty of Versailles to the Senate. In his address Wilson reviewed the causes of America’s entry into the war, the diplomatic commitments that the Allies had made to one another before America joined them, and the compromises that he had been forced to make in Paris. The treaty was not perfect, he conceded, but it did give international sanction to American principles of individual liberty, free trade, and the peaceful resolution of disputes.

The proposed League of Nations formed the core of Wilson’s address. If the League was to fulfill its promise of bringing disarmament and peace, the President urged, then America must join it. The weaker nations trusted the good intentions of the United States, which after the Spanish-American War had honored its pledge to evacuate Cuba and begin giving self-rule to the Philippines. Leadership of the League, and thus of the world, was being offered America. “Dare we reject it and break the heart of the world?”

Wilson answered his own question with a stirring peroration: “The stage is set, the destiny disclosed. It has come about by no plan of our conceiving, but by the hand of God who has led us in this way. We cannot turn back. We can only go forward, with lifted eyes and freshened spirit, to follow the vision. It was of this that we dreamed at our birth. America shall in truth show the way. The light streams upon the path ahead, and nowhere else.”

Wilson’s eloquence reverberated through a press and public that already were bestirring themselves to debate the treaty. Thanks in part to the work of ex-President Taft and the League to Enforce Peace, public opinion in general was favorable to the idea of a League of Nations. Such diverse papers as the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Des Moines Register applauded Wilson’s League as a “broadening out of the Monroe Doctrine” to cover the entire world. Only an “international despot or an international pariah” could object to the League concept of collective security, the New York World opined. The Baltimore Sun unconsciously paraphrased James Madison’s language in Federalist 51, saying that the League of Nations would not “make nature angelic” but would be a large stride toward that goal. The Register put it more succinctly: “The alternative of the league of nations is an armed America.”

In April, the Literary Digest, in an effort to gauge public sentiment, asked newspaper editors across the country whether they favored the proposed League. Of the 1,377 editors who replied to the poll, 718 answered yes, 181 no, and 478 indicated conditional agreement. If these papers represented the views of their readers, then Democrats overwhelmingly supported the League, and even the vast majority of Republicans favored some international organization. A breakdown of the replies by region shows that the South was solidly behind the League, while conditional supporters were concentrated in the Northeast and New England. In no area did outright opponents number even 20 percent of the responses.

But while across the country League opponents may have been few and divided, in the U.S. Senate they were powerful, concentrated, and organized. While Wilson was still in Paris, Henry Cabot Lodge and his allies had agreed to launch a public campaign against the League. With funds provided by Henry Clay Frick and by the Pennsylvania industrialist Andrew Mellon, the opponents set up their own league—the League for the Preservation of American Independence—which ran advertising and sponsored meetings nationwide. William Randolph Hearst was also persuaded to throw his vast chain of newspapers into the fight against Wilson’s proposal. Meanwhile, the New York Sun declared that “greater even than the Monroe Doctrine is the Washington Doctrine,” which warned America against entangling “our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, honor or caprice.”

Lodge himself entertained hopes that the efforts of the League critics would eventually turn the public against Wilson’s plan, to the advantage of the Republicans in the next presidential election. Indeed, the senator made a conspicuous contribution to the public campaign by engaging Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell in a much-publicized debate of the League’s merits before a capacity crowd in Boston’s Symphony Hall.

The real debate, however, was to occur in the Senate. The Founding Fathers had feared both a runaway majority and an overweening chief executive, so they had fragmented power throughout the structure of American government—and Lodge never for a moment lost sight of the fact that the Constitution gave the upper chamber the ultimate power of decision to accept or reject a treaty. “The only people who have votes on the treaty are here in the Senate,” he reassured a friend. A consummate dealer in the transactions of legislative politics, Lodge relied from the first on defeating Wilson and the treaty through a legislative strategy.

Lodge’s first task was to ensure that the Republicans controlled the Senate. The election of 1918 had given the GOP a majority of two in the upper house, but Lodge had to keep in line Idaho’s William E. Borah and several old Bull Moosers who had become “irreconcilable” opponents of the treaty. While the majority of Senate Republicans agreed that some sort of league was desirable, although not necessarily the one presented by Wilson, Borah and his allies seemed willing to bolt the party rather than vote for any international organization that might infringe upon American sovereignty. Before Wilson’s return, Lodge had met with Borah and struck a deal. The irreconcilables would cooperate with the other Republicans in organizing the Senate and amending the treaty, and then would be free to vote against the pact in the final roll call. In return, Lodge would give Borah ample opportunity to promote his arguments for isolationism. Thus Borah could be sure that, even if the treaty did pass, it would be thoroughly “Republicanized.”

The Lodge-Borah arrangement worked. The Republicans took control of the Senate, elevating Lodge to the post of majority leader—and, more important, to the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee, to which Wilson now had to submit the treaty. Lodge proceeded to stack the committee with irreconcilables, and with less ideological skeptics like Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio. In particular, the new chairman denied a seat to Frank Kellogg of Minnesota, one of the foremost Senate spokesmen for the Taft wing of the party, when Kellogg refused to cooperate with Lodge’s plans.

Lodge acted in large part out of partisan considerations: if Wilson and the Democrats were allowed to take credit for creating an international organization that outlawed war, Lodge feared, they could reap a harvest of votes in the next election and undermine for years to come the tenuous Republican majority across the country. Personal factors were also at work—the two men in fact loathed each other. “I never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel toward Wilson,” Lodge had written Theodore Roosevelt long before the League fight. Even Jefferson was a better man than Wilson, the senator wrote another friend; “he could not have been worse.” Soon Lodge was calling the President “the most sinister figure that ever crossed the country’s path.” His venom arose in part from his indignation that Wilson should be regarded as the foremost intellectual in American politics—this Princeton man with his popular writings, as compared with his own classical education at Harvard. Wilson, for his part, simply viewed Lodge with cold contempt.

At the core of the hostility, however, lay genuine differences of outlook and principle. For nearly three decades, Lodge had been a leading spokesman for an aggressive, unilateralist foreign policy backed by a stronger military establishment. In the 1880s and 1890s, he had led Theodore Roosevelt and a few other young Republicans in calling for a naval buildup and the acquisition of colonies overseas. He had supported, as matters of paramount national interest, the war with Spain, the annexation of the Philippines, the building of the Panama Canal, and most of the interventions in Latin America carried out by Roosevelt and Taft. In 1919, Lodge hoped for a peace settlement that would strengthen America’s international influence vis-à-vis the European powers, and also in the Western Hemisphere. Wilson’s “idealistic” internationalism left Lodge cold, and he viewed the idea of collective security that was at the heart of Wilson’s League as a distinct threat to American freedom of action.

The President and the senator, therefore, were engaged in a battle over two conflicting foreign policy strategies. Wilson’s concept had its intellectual origins largely in his personal moral values; Lodge’s sprang mainly from traditional power considerations. The President placed his faith in the collegial good sense of an international parliament that he had taken great pains to craft; the senator proposed to rely on the nationalist economic and military policies that he had promoted for decades.

When the debate was cast in these terms, Lodge was able to rally some support in the Senate and in the country, yet seemingly not enough to block the treaty. In order to defeat Wilson, Lodge had to win and keep the backing of senators who opposed the treaty for a variety of other reasons, some of them not very admirable. Indeed, the struggle over the League of Nations aroused some of the basest prejudice and hate-mongering in American politics. James Reed of Missouri declared that “dark” peoples would outnumber whites three to one in the League assembly, while Senator Lawrence Sherman of Illinois alleged that the Catholic majority in the League would make it a tool of the Vatican. Other senators engaged in the traditional sport of twisting the lion’s tail, claiming that the British would use the League to send American boys to suppress freedom-fighters in Ireland.

With these and other legislators, Lodge acted as a traditional power broker, agreeing to tolerate or support their objections to the treaty in return for their supporting his. Slowly Lodge worked to knit the treaty opponents into a coherent group that would act together to amend or kill Wilson’s proposal. Hiram Johnson of California came over when Lodge agreed to support Johnson’s objection to Canada, Australia, and other British dominions having an independent vote in the League. At the same time, Lodge conducted delicate negotiations with Senator Porter McCumber, one of the mildest reservationists on the treaty, to find some common ground for an amendment to Article 10—Wilson’s Covenant.

The League’s opponents needed time to organize their coalition in the Senate and to convey their message to the general public. Lodge used parliamentary maneuvers to secure that time, first by tying up the Foreign Relations Committee with a two-week, word-for-word reading of the entire 268-page treaty, and then by inviting every conceivable opponent of the pact to testify at length against it. Lodge’s delaying tactics, however, did not redound exclusively to his side’s advantage. Wilson was also able to use the extra time to round up votes, for he too was pursuing a legislative strategy.

Soon after the President returned from Europe, several of his advisors suggested that he immediately tour the country to arouse further public support for the League. Other political insiders, however, most notably Herman Kohlsaat and Senator Gilbert Hitchcock, calculated that Wilson could do more good by staying in Washington to deal directly with the Senate. He heeded the advice of the latter; for six weeks he talked with senators individually and in small groups, wrote private letters to wavering Republicans, and submitted evidence—although not as much as Lodge requested—to the Foreign Relations Committee. One historian concludes that Wilson’s “approach to senators was flexible, not dogmatic and doctrinaire, not rigid and unbending.” The President answered questions and expounded on the League Covenant, but he also listened to the senators’ reservations and weighed their advice. Both Democrats and Republicans informed him that, despite the compromises that Wilson had made in Paris, the treaty would not gain the support of two-thirds of the Senate as it stood. Finding himself in a “perplexed and somewhat distressing situation,” the President nonetheless resolved to compromise once more in order to achieve his main goal of leading the United States into the League.

The key to Wilson’s strategy of conciliation lay with a small group of Republican senators, led by Kellogg, who had proposed a set of four moderate revisions to the treaty. If Wilson and Kellogg could rally a large enough coalition around those reservations, which were mainly interpretive in nature, they could beat Lodge at his own game. The contest settled into a battle of parliamentary tactics. Wilson persuaded Kellogg to submit his interpretive reservations as a separate resolution, requiring a two-thirds majority for passage, to be considered at the same time as the treaty itself. As Wilson explained the plan to his supporters, a coalition strong enough to pass Kellogg’s resolution would be strong enough to pass the treaty. By accepting Kellogg’s compromise, Wilson hoped to maneuver the Republican moderates into voting for the League.

Lodge recognized at once that Wilson’s tactics threatened his own efforts at coalition-building. The senator insisted that reservations to the treaty had to be submitted as amendments to the text itself, to be approved or rejected by a simple majority vote. Lodge could rally a potential majority behind his grab-bag of amendments, but not a two-thirds majority. The parliamentary arithmetic was plain: if Wilson won on the procedural question of what form reservations should take, the moderate Republicans would probably rally around Kellogg’s resolution as the best possible compromise and the treaty would pass substantially as Wilson wanted it.

The real climax of the legislative battle, therefore, came on August 20 when Democratic Senator Key Pittman moved that reservations to the treaty be passed in a contemporaneous resolution. Lodge met the challenge head-on, appealing to his fellow Republicans to stand together as a majority and thus retain control over consideration of the treaty. Faced with the prospect of dividing their party to the ultimate advantage of a Democratic President, most of the moderate Republicans sided with Lodge and the irreconcilables on the procedural question. Pittman was forced to delay his motion for a week while Wilson’s allies sought in vain to rally the mild reservationists back to their side. Finally, on August 27, the President conceded defeat in his tactical struggle with Lodge.

So Lodge had won—in the Senate. He had won because he had carried out one of the most brilliant feats of transactional leadership in the Senate’s history. He had controlled both his Senate majority and his committee with consummate skill. When a senator threatened to drift off the reservation, Lodge spared no pains to persuade the right man to get in touch with the right politicians who could bring the man back into the fold. Day after day he brokered and traded with both the reservationists and the anti-League extremists in his own party. He played the game like a chess master, arraying his men, calculating his tactics, exploiting time, coldly analyzing his foe’s moves, keeping his queen and his king—his committee chairmanship and his majority leadership—intact and in command.

Wilson too played a strong game in the Senate, mustering all his presidential and personal influence, using face-to-face persuasion, pulling back when need be, always holding his Senate Democrats in line. But the Senate was Lodge’s chessboard, not his. It was Lodge’s two-thirds rule for ratifying treaties, Lodge’s majority rule for amending treaties, not his.

Wilson’s strength lay in a much wider field, the national electorate. Lodge, to be sure, had not neglected this field: several hundred thousand copies of his key Senate speech were sent to his Senate friends for grassroots distribution; anti-League propaganda organs were busy; Lodge turned to Irish and other ethnic groups for support. But Wilson would transcend all this. By appealing to the nation he could transform the very ground on which the battle was being fought—and transform global politics in the process.

On the same day that he conceded Senate defeat to Lodge, the President announced his intention of appealing to the country.

On the evening of September 3, the presidential special rolled out of Washington’s Union Station. The engine drew only seven cars: quarters for the servants, reporters, Secret Service men, and the train crew that accompanied Wilson; a dining car; and, last in line, the President’s blue-painted private coach, the Mayflower. As they sat together in the lounge of the final car, Wilson’s three chosen companions for the journey—his wife Edith, his devoted secretary Joseph Tumulty, and the uneasy doctor Cary Grayson—eyed the President anxiously.

Wilson had never seemed to recover fully from his bout of influenza in Paris. For weeks he had suffered daily from mind-numbing headaches. The strain of his constant negotiations with the Senate showed in every line on his face, every irritable word and clipped gesture. Grayson, familiar with Wilson’s history of periodic physical breakdowns under stress, was vehemently opposed to the trip. But the President was determined to make his appeal to the country, to circumvent by force of eloquence and will the constitutional impasse that threatened to nullify his diplomatic craftsmanship. He believed that American leaders, like British parliamentarians, should “take their case to the people.”

When the train arrived next morning in Columbus, Ohio, the President seemed to brighten somewhat. The cheering crowds, though not as large or as reverential as those in Europe, were plainly a tonic to him. He opened his first speech of the tour with words of relief: “I have long chafed at confinement in Washington and I have wanted to report to you and other citizens of the United States.”

Public speaking as the enunciation of moral principles in clear ringing terms was Wilson’s first love, his greatest political asset. As the audiences responded to his verbal magic, some of Wilson’s frustration at the near-checkmate in the Senate began to ease away. He reached out to touch the issue closest to the hearts of his listeners. If the treaty could be passed, he declared with a beat of his hands, then “men in khaki will not have to cross the seas again!” He also reached upward, to the high ideals that were the staple of his political philosophy. “America was not founded to make money,” he told businessmen in St. Louis, “it was founded to lead the world on the way to liberty.”

The swing around the country was not destined to be a triumphant march of idealism, however. The President’s visits triggered opposition as well as applause. In Missouri, a minister countered Wilson by denouncing the League as a Wall Street plot. A Milwaukee socialist labeled the President’s plan a “capitalist scheme” to bring “more wars and more armaments.”

Lodge, meanwhile, was not idle. Although he remained firmly committed to his legislative strategy, he did dispatch several of his allies from among the irreconcilables to counter Wilson in the battle for public opinion. Hiram Johnson arrived in the Midwest shortly after Wilson left and brought an anti-League rally to its feet with charges that England hoped to use the international pact to send a hundred thousand American soldiers to fight in Constantinople. James Reed stumped New England, where doubts about the League and suspicions of Britain were most concentrated. Reed played to the hilt his assigned role of twisting the lion’s tail; “the bloody footprints of John Bull,” he exclaimed in speech after speech on the treaty, were “all over the dastardly document.” But it was back in Washington that Lodge landed the most telling blow, against both the League and against Wilson personally. The senator summoned William Bullitt, still smarting over what he regarded as Wilson’s betrayal of the peace mission to Russia, to testify about Secretary of State Lansing’s true attitude toward the treaty. Bullitt told the Foreign Relations Committee that Lansing had been less than candid in publicly stating his support for the treaty, that privately the Secretary believed the League was “entirely useless” and should “unquestionably be defeated.” When quizzed by the press, Lansing refused to deny that he had made such remarks to Bullitt.

The rising echoes of opposition that pursued Wilson denied him the release he had sought in the speaking tour. As the special moved westward, the President telescoped his schedule of speeches, canceled the days that had been set aside for rest, harangued crowds at every whistle-stop from the rear platform of his train. His headaches and nausea grew worse. Grayson feared that Wilson was trying to kill himself.

As the strain mounted, Wilson strove to answer the attacks on the treaty point by point. The people were being “deliberately misled,” he charged in Oakland, especially about the plan for collective security. In Reno and elsewhere, he laid out the rationale behind Article 10, the League Covenant that he himself had composed.

“Article 10 is the heart of the enterprise. Article 10 is the test of the honor and courage and endurance of the world. Article 10 says that every member of the League, and that means every fighting power in the world … solemnly engages to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the other members of the League. If you do that, you have absolutely stopped ambitious and aggressive war….”

The pressure on Wilson drove him again and again to an emotional prophecy: “I have it in my heart that if we do not do this great thing now, every woman ought to weep because of the child in her arms. If she has a boy at her breast, she may be sure that when he comes to manhood this terrible task will have to be done once more. Everywhere we go, the train, when it stops, is surrounded with little children, and I look at them almost with tears in my eyes, because I feel my mission is to save them. These glad youngsters with flags in their hands—I pray God that they may never have to carry that flag upon the battlefield.”

The campaigner was fighting his heart out on his own battlefield. On September 25, as the train was pulling out of Pueblo, Colorado, the first premonitory stroke hit the President, temporarily leaving his whole left side numb and practically useless. Wilson pleaded for a chance to continue the journey, to show Lodge and the others that he was not a quitter, but Grayson rallied Tumulty and Edith to dissuade him. The train sped back to Washington, where Wilson suffered an even more massive stroke on the night of October 1. For the next weeks he wavered on the edge of death. By crusading for the League, Wilson had indeed nearly thrown his own life away—yet he had not succeeded in changing a single vote in the Senate.

Wilson lay imprisoned in his White House sickroom for more than two months after his strokes. His left side was paralyzed, his speech blurred, his vision drastically reduced. Cutting the President off from visitors, Grayson and Mrs. Wilson concealed from the country the seriousness of his condition. With the help of Tumulty and the White House staff, they handled the routine business of the government until Wilson insisted he was well enough to work. He was barely able to receive Senator Hitchcock, the Democratic floor leader, for a few brief consultations as the final vote on the treaty drew near.

The debate over the treaty culminated on November 19, when the Senate finally voted on the package of fourteen amendments Lodge had assembled. Among them was the reservation Lodge himself had composed to delete Article 10, the League’s collective security pact: “The United States assumes no obligation to preserve the territorial integrity or political independence of any other country or to interfere in controversies between nations,” except when Congress, in each individual case, agreed to do so. Wilson had always opposed Lodge’s attack on Article 10. From his sickbed, just two days before the final vote, he told Hitchcock that it was “a nullification of the Treaty and utterly impossible,” the moral equivalent of South Carolina’s nullifying ordinances of the 1830s. “That cuts the heart out of the Treaty; I could not stand for those changes for a moment.” By letter Wilson instructed the Senate Democrats to vote against the treaty as amended by Lodge.

In the Senate, three factions squared off for the showdown. The Democrats and the irreconcilables voted down Lodge’s reservations by 39 to 55; then the Republican moderates joined the irreconcilables to defeat Wilson’s unamended treaty by 38 to 53. On the surface it was a straight party vote. Only four Democrats supported Lodge’s final bill, and only one Republican backed Wilson’s. In fact, however, it had taken Lodge months of adroit maneuvering to bring about this ultimate result. The Treaty of Versailles was dead, and it was Wilson’s Democrats who were forced to administer the final blow.

For decades scholars have asked why Wilson allowed the treaty to go down in defeat, why he did not just swallow hard and accept the Lodge reservations as one more necessary concession. One doctor who has done an exhaustive analysis of Wilson’s medical and emotional history maintains that the massive stroke he suffered in the fall of 1919 was the decisive factor in the situation. “It is almost certain,” writes Edwin A. Weinstein, “that had Wilson not been so afflicted, his political skills and his facility with language would have bridged the gap” between the Democrats and the Republican reservationists. Weinstein notes that Wilson’s judgment was clouded by “cerebral dysfunction” in the wake of the stroke, and that his access to information necessary for rational political calculation was being severely limited by his wife and physician. As recently as February 1919, Wilson had shown himself to be an able compromiser; the change, Weinstein concludes, must have stemmed from the President’s physical collapse.

This analysis assumes that the Republican moderates were still amenable to compromise as the final vote approached. In fact, however, Wilson had already tried to conciliate the reservationists but had lost their support by the end of August; hence the swing around the country. Moreover, Wilson did make one more stab at compromise from his sickbed. His instructions to the Senate Democrats focused on the key Lodge reservation to Article 10. One could conclude that the other reservations were negotiable as long as the attack on the League’s covenant of collective security was deleted. Lodge, however, had by November woven too tight a legislative coalition for Wilson to sunder. None of the reservationists dared to desert Lodge’s amendment lest they see their own pet changes also struck down. Thus Wilson’s famous remark to Hitchcock, that it was up to Lodge to make a move toward compromise, was reasoned political analysis rather than the petulance of a sick man.

The peculiarities of Wilson’s character were well known during his lifetime and have been subjected to endless analysis since. That Wilson’s self-esteem was damaged in his childhood, with important consequences for his adult behavior, has been commonly accepted by scholars. It still is legitimate to ask, however, whether Wilson was as much the prisoner of those psychological problems as some authors have made him out to be. Time and again in his political career, Wilson in fact was able to transcend his personal limitations. Certainly in the process of drafting and defending the Treaty of Versailles the President made repeated, skillful concessions in order to preserve the essence of his vision of a world parliament for peace. Even when paralyzed and nearly blind, he was able to lead the fight for the League from his darkened sickroom.

Wilson’s mistakes in the League fight—if mistakes they were—seemed to stem more from intellectual strategy than from mental illness. Throughout his life, Wilson held as his leadership ideal the minister, the teacher, the orator. In politics he sought to practice the arts of persuasion and inspiration, to some neglect of the structural, transactional aspects of party politics. He seemed, to both friend and foe, to care little for the gritty tasks of government beyond his own agenda for reform. Also, Wilson’s focus on inspirational leadership caused him to miss opportunities for tactical alliances—such as with the League to Enforce Peace—that could have promoted the very causes he espoused. One scholar detects in Wilson the self-styled transforming leader an “egocentricity,” a “desire for glory,” that marred his political career. Wilson could write eloquently about Cabinet government, but too often his unwillingness to share credit for accomplishments prevented him from exercising true collective leadership.

In the battle for the treaty, however, policy and not personality was the crucial factor. Wilson finally would compromise no further because the League—with a binding American commitment to it—was the irreducible core of his program. He seemed willing to accept almost anything else as long as he could preserve his plan for collective security, but that was precisely the one thing Lodge was unwilling to grant him. If the League fight is compared to the famed graduate-school controversy at Princeton, in which Wilson became locked in a bitter personal quarrel with Dean Andrew West, we then see a dramatic and ironic reversal of Wilson’s role. In the dispute at Princeton, Wilson was unwilling to accept any of the compromises West offered, whereas in the treaty fight it was Wilson who made concession after concession, only to be rebuffed by the Republicans.

Ultimately, Wilson’s League was not killed by him, by the Senate Democrats who voted as Wilson instructed them, by the irreconcilables, or even by Lodge. It was thwarted by a political system that chopped up Wilson’s idealism, diluted public sentiment for his cause, atomized his efforts for reform. Lodge, it is true, manipulated that system brilliantly, but he had only inherited it. In the struggle over the Treaty of Versailles, the American system of checks and balances worked as the Founding Fathers intended that it should. The President was unable to bring about a radical alteration in American foreign policy through a simple vote of the Senate. Wilson, however, was not about to give up trying. Already, as his tour of the country had presaged, he was looking for another political lever with which to move the nation.

1920: The Great and Solemn Rejection

Defeated in the Senate, where a two-thirds vote was required from a body he considered both unrepresentative and oligarchical, and with his direct appeal to the people cut short by illness, Woodrow Wilson looked now to one last alternative—to the presidential electoral college, where an approximate majority of the people would render the final verdict. Early in January 1920 he wrote the Democratic party leadership that he did not accept the action of the Senate as the decision of the nation. “If there is any doubt as to what the people of the country think on this vital matter, the clear and single way out is to submit it for determination at the next election to the voters of the Nation, to give the next election the form of a great and solemn referendum….”

For Wilson, “going to the country” was far more an expression of personal conviction and philosophy than a mere political tactic. His faith in representative democracy, in majority rule, in the ultimate wisdom of the people went to the very core of his being. His ultimate value—individual liberty—could be secure only in a democratic system. While still a Princeton undergraduate he had written that “representative government,” at its highest development, was that form “which best enables a free people to govern themselves.” He admired parliamentary systems—especially the British—where leaders could appeal directly to the people for decision and support. He favored not the “disintegrate ministry” of a checks-and-balances system but strong executive leadership directly linked to the people through political parties. He even proposed that the Constitution be amended so that members of Congress might join the Cabinet without surrendering their seats in House or Senate. He believed that Presidents should if necessary appeal to the voters over the heads of the legislators, as he had done in 1918, and even appeal to peoples of foreign countries over the heads of their leaders, as he had done in Europe as a world leader. By the same token, he felt that leaders who had lost the confidence of the people should resign instantly, as he had planned to do if he had lost to Hughes in 1916.

And now he would stake all on a colossal throw of the electoral dice. Doubters abounded even in his official family. How could treaty ratification be made the single issue in an election involving many questions? Lansing asked in his private diary. How could the people render a decision on several grades of League reservations, “interpretive, slightly modifying, radical, and nullifying?” The whole idea of obtaining a popular judgment by election or referendum was “absurd and utterly unworkable.”

1920 was hardly shaping up as a year for isolating and testing even a transcendent issue like the League. The end of the war seemed to bring not peace but heightened social tensions. It was a time of race riots—in Chicago, Gary, Omaha, even Washington itself; of radical and revolutionary unrest in the streets of New York and other metropolises; of a rash of labor disputes; of a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan; of food shortages and price rises; of thousands of ex-servicemen searching for jobs; of “red hunts,” by Wilson’s Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, culminating in the arrest of several thousand suspected radicals in New York on New Year’s Day, 1920. The world prospect seemed much worse. “Europe is in the throes of great changes,” wrote socialist Seymour Stedman, “class wars, nationalistic wars, revolutions, repudiation of debts, starvation, revenge, subjugation, outbursts of the oppressed, strikes, the fall of kings and cabinets; and Asia is shaking as she stretches to arise.” Everywhere recession, radicalism, repression, revolt seemed to herald a new age of the Four Horsemen.

And who would carry the League issue to the country? As Wilson looked over the field of Democratic presidential aspirants, he could see little to inspire hope. Palmer he had had to restrain, urging him, “Do not let the country see red.” The trouble was, the country already had. Then there was McAdoo, the President’s son-in-law, brilliant but not a veteran of the hustings. Out in the hinterland, one could dimly perceive the figure of James Cox, an Ohio newspaper editor, and even of William Jennings Bryan. Impossible! Who but the President himself could go to the people, could fight for vindication? They had never failed him when he was the nominee.

The idea of Woodrow Wilson as a third-term candidate seemed incredible, shocking, even to persons in Wilson’s entourage—indeed, most of all to them, for they saw him close up, while the public hardly knew of his condition. Months after his stroke, Wilson could walk only by using a cane and someone’s helping arm, and by dragging his left leg forward. Still unable to work more than a few hours a day, he looked gaunt and old, his white hair thin and wispy above the cavernous face, his voice often weak and faltering, his left arm still dangling at his side. Mrs. Wilson no longer isolated him, and he was meeting with his aides and Cabinet, but only irregularly. Visitors were still shocked by the inert, reclining figure; they remembered the man who had always leaned forward as though tensed for a footrace. But the President was slowly learning to walk again—and if he could walk, why could he not run?

In the spring of 1920, the Republicans appeared to be as united and resolute as the Democrats seemed divided and leaderless. The Grand Old Party could blame all the ills of the nation, if not of Europe, on the Wilson Democracy. It could benefit from the tides of postwar reaction and race and ethnic hostility sweeping the nation. It had a simple goal—to eradicate Wilsonism root and branch. It could boast of a galaxy of leaders—seasoned national campaigners like Taft and Hughes, Senate gladiators like Lodge and Hiram Johnson, favorite sons like Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts and reform governor Frank Lowden of Illinois, Old Guard politicos in Senate and House, even a military hero, the TR protégé and Rough Rider General Leonard Wood, who had been kept out of the fighting in France, it was said, precisely because Wilson still hated Roosevelt men.

The GOP was divided, however, between its old presidential wing and its congressional leadership entrenched in the committee system on Capitol Hill—between the moderately liberal, internationalist party headed or symbolized by Abraham Lincoln, TR, Taft, and Hughes, and the more conservative, “unilateralist” party headed by Lodge and his fellow reservationists. Each party was bottomed in its own voting constituency, entrenched in its own governmental structures, inspired by its own memories, principles, and heroes. While the Democracy also embraced two leadership structures, its congressional party had been overshadowed by Wilson’s driving presidential leadership. The presidential parties usually dominated presidential elections—but 1920 loomed as an exceptional year in which the militant, anti-League congressional Republicans might hold unprecedented influence over the Republican nomination.

Already some party leaders were counseling compromise between the Taft-Hughes leadership and the Senate Old Guard, but most of the potential nominees seemed to be lined up with one side or the other. Could a compromise candidate be found who was not a cipher? Some wondered if Senator Warren Gamaliel Harding would fill the bill. The Ohio senator had always been a party man—as a most partisan editor of the Marion Star, as an Ohio politico and officeholder, and as a conciliator who yet in 1912 had stuck with the party nominee, Taft, against the usurper back from Africa. Elected to the Senate in 1914, in Ohio’s first experience with the statewide direct primary and the direct election of senators, he had served a term distinguished mainly by his ability to win friends in all Republican factions.

But it was—it would always be—too easy to caricature Harding, as a mere glad-hander, an easygoing, fun-loving, poker-playing politician, a small-town man with a small-town mind and outlook. Although brought up in a severe and pious home—or perhaps because of it—he had a reputation as an occasional cutup, hard drinker, womanizer. He had no convictions, it was said, no set of principles, no quality of leadership. His mind, somebody would quip, was like stellar space—a huge void filled with a few wandering clichés. At least he had the becoming virtue of modesty. He did not, he wrote a friend, “possess the elements of leadership or the widespread acquaintances” essential to the “ideal leadership of our Party in 1920.”

Such was the basis of the legends that would sprout about Harding—that he did not want to be nominated for President, that he made no effort for the nomination, that he was the pawn of corporate interests seeking power, that he was a country yokel, a dumbbell, a spread-eagle orator who liked to “bloviate,” doze in his office, or relax around the poker table with his Ohio cronies.

In fact Harding had convinced himself by the summer of 1920 that he wanted to be President, that he would at least be better than the other hopefuls, and that he must work for it. While his friend Harry Daugherty made the rounds asking otherwise committed delegates to make Harding their second or third choice at the convention, he campaigned in several states. Harding was barely able to stave off an invasion by Leonard Wood in the Ohio primary, however, and he was shellacked in Indiana. By the time the first ballot was held at the broiling June convention in Chicago, Harding was far behind the front-runners, Wood, Lowden, and Johnson.

What happened in Chicago that June was simple in essence and complex in mechanics. The three front-runners deadlocked in ballot after ballot, while the steaming delegates, sometimes politicking in temperatures over 100 degrees, grew more and more weary and impatient. Late in the week, a group of senators who considered themselves the real leaders of the party gathered at the Blackstone Hotel to see if they could resolve the stalemate. It looked like a Senate cabal—Reed Smoot of Utah was there, and James Watson of Indiana, Medill McCormick of Illinois, Henry Cabot Lodge and former senators Crane and Weeks of Massachusetts. But this was no cabal, with an agreed-on strategy. All through the evening politicians drifted in and out of the smoke-filled Blackstone suite, pouring themselves drinks, sending up small trial balloons, bickering and dickering. Someone said that the room seemed like the Senate in miniature, with Lodge sitting back in his chair and biting off brief comments, while the others indulged in what one senator, stalking off, called a “footless conversation.”

The senators continued to ruffle through possible dark horses “like a deck of soiled cards,” in Francis Russell’s words, but however many times “the political cards were shuffled and dealt and discarded, somehow the Harding card always remained.” Senators who knew Harding had little respect for his intellect, his convictions, or his qualities of leadership. But he came from a pivotal and symbolically important state, he was the right age at fifty-five, he looked like a President, and above all he was a party man who would follow the Republican senators’ lead on policy, especially on the League. He seemed perfectly to fill the party slot. Still, the few stalwarts remaining in the Blackstone suite came to no final conclusion—essentially they agreed to give Harding a run for his money for a few ballots the next day, and if the Ohioan did not click with the delegates, to try some other compromise possibility.

That evening Harding was not sitting in a hotel room awaiting the call to greatness. He was roaming the Blackstone corridors, unshaven, unkempt, liquored up a bit, buttonholing any man he could meet. Gradually word leaked out to reporters—and to Harding—that he was the group’s trial horse. Next day, many of the senators in the “cabal” stuck to their earlier commitments over several ballots. But the delegates, eager to go home, knew that Harding now more than ever was “available.” Slowly they edged toward him, as Daugherty scurried around the convention floor calling in those second-chance promises, while the fading front-runners desperately tried to patch together a stop-Harding coalition. No one would run as his rival’s running mate. On the tenth ballot the man from Marion went over the top amid a burst of enthusiasm and relief.

Already a legend was sprouting—that a cabal of determined, like-minded senators had gathered at the Blackstone with the single determination to make an obscure colleague their President, and their patsy. Weeks before the convention Daugherty, in a euphoric moment, had predicted to two reporters, in New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, that “about eleven minutes after two o’clock on Friday morning of the convention, when fifteen or twenty men, bleary-eyed and perspiring profusely from the heat, are sitting around a table … at that decisive time the friends of Senator Harding can suggest him and can afford to abide by the result.” He might suggest Harding himself, Daugherty added brightly. And now the prophecy was resurrected, even though Daugherty had not attended the smoke-filled proceedings and the cabal had been far more a cloudiness than a conspiracy.

The truth was simpler and more significant—that the anti-League, conservative Republicans at the convention had wrested control from the old presidential leadership; that its leaders—primarily senators but including also national party leaders and local party bosses—had rummaged through their “soiled cards” and found their man; and that the actions of the first-cadre leaders in smoke-filled rooms had largely turned on their estimates of how hundreds of second- and third-cadre leaders on the floor of the stink-filled convention would react. Ultimately, Harding was the delegates’ choice—a party choice. And if anyone doubted the capacity of the rank-and-file delegates to work their will, they showed their power by brushing aside establishment candidates for Vice-President and nominating that law-and-order man from Massachusetts, Calvin Coolidge, as Harding’s running mate.

So, as the whole national party rallied behind Harding in its common hatred of Wilsonism, the Ohio senator sallied forth in his front-porch campaign as a party man, in the McKinley tradition. And it was as a party man that he harmonized the wings of his party, stuck to the party platform, and equated Republicanism with Americanism. The League continued to be the overriding issue. Every time Harding made a strong anti-League statement, he heard from internationalists like Herbert Hoover. When he softened his stand, Johnson and Borah descended on him like furies. Teetering back and forth, concealing his position behind clouds of platitudes, Harding skillfully held his party together until election day.

The Democrats too sought a candidate who could unite the party—and also exploit the Wilson heritage without being overburdened by it. For thirty-eight ballots McAdoo, Cox, and Palmer waged a stand-off battle at the party’s convention in San Francisco, until Palmer pulled out, Cox picked up a majority of his delegates, and the Ohio Democrat won by acclamation on the forty-fourth ballot. Refusing to desert their leader languishing in the White House, the party paid fulsome tribute to Wilson in their platform, endorsed his League, and reaffirmed Wilson’s New Freedom. But they would not renominate the President, who waited at the White House through ballot after ballot, hoping that the party might still turn to him. When word came to the President of Cox’s nomination Wilson burst into a stream of profanities and obscenities, according to his valet. The President was hardly mollified by the choice for Vice-President of young Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had something of a reputation in Washington for being independent and a bit bumptious, but the delegates liked him for his youth and vigor—especially after his spirited seconding speech for Al Smith for President, during which FDR said that the Democrats’ choice would not be made in a hotel room at two in the morning—and above all they loved him for his last name.

So Cox and Roosevelt, backed by a dispirited party, sallied forth on their quest like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and with about as much objective chance of success. Almost quixotically—at least in the minds of hardened Democratic politicos—they resolved that they would campaign for Wilson’s League. The two men visited the White House.

“Mr. President,” Cox said, “I have always admired the fight you made for the League.”

“Mr. Cox,” said Wilson, “that fight can still be won.”

After a few moments Cox went on: “Mr. President, we are going to be a million per cent with you and your Administration, and that means the League of Nations.”

“I am very grateful,” the President said in a faltering voice. “I am very grateful.”

Cox and Roosevelt lived up to their promise, campaigning vigorously throughout the nation. Cox backslid only slightly on the League, saying that he would accept a reservation to Article 10 stating that the United States would not send its armed forces into action unless authorized by Congress in each case. But it was too late for compromise. Harding swept all the states outside the South, many of the far-northern states by two-to-one and three-to-one majorities. The omen of 1916 had been realized: the Democrats had been forced back on their shrunken base. And so had the omen of 1918: the Republicans now commanded top-heavy majorities in both House and Senate.

The President’s life had settled down to a routine by the late fall of 1920. Each day he struggled to take a few steps, saw as many visitors as he could, perhaps took a drive. One of his pleasures was almost daily movies in a White House parlor. One day Ray Stannard Baker joined the President, Mrs. Wilson, and one or two others for a film on the President’s first trip to Europe.

The projector clattered and whirred, and suddenly, Baker remembered, “we were in another world; a resplendent world, full of wonderful and glorious events”—President Wilson sailing into Brest amid beflagged ships and soldiers marshaled upon the quay, “smiling upon the bridge, very erect, very tall, lifting his hat to shouting crowds.” The film ground on: Wilson driving down the Champs-Elysées, Wilson crossing the Channel escorted by warships, Wilson riding down from Buckingham Palace with the King of England, “behind noble horses flanked by outriders flying pennants”—always amid bands and flags and shouting crowds.

The film sputtered and ended. The little company sat silent in the darkness for a moment. Then Wilson was helped to his feet. He turned slowly and shuffled out of the room, without a word.

PART V

The Culture of Democracy

CHAPTER 14

The Age of Mellon

HENRY FORD’S ROUGE PLANT, a working day in the early 1920s. A massive ship loaded with iron ore steams into a turning basin off the River Rouge, swings ponderously to starboard, and slides into a slip next to Henry Ford’s concrete holding bins. Hulett unloaders rumble down the tracks alongside the slip, pause, plunge their huge arms down into the ship’s hold, scoop out ten-ton bites of ore, and swing around to dump their loads into the bins behind. Within the day, the ore is rolling on bottom-dumping railroad cars from bins to blast furnaces; within hours, molten metal moves from furnace to foundry, to be cast into engine blocks, and to the machining rooms, where the engines pass through thirty or more machine-tool operations.

In the vast assembly rooms, vehicles begin to take shape as castings, pistons, axles, springs, and thousands of other parts and pieces flow into the central assembly line. Coming in at right angles are the conveyors feeding in the parts via buckets, belts, rollers, monorails, and “scenic railways.” A seven-leafed car-spring has passed through its own assembly line—punch press, bending machine, nitrate bath, bolt insertion, painting, inspection—before joining the central procession. Roofs, wheels, windows, bumpers are clamped into place. A tall, black Model T triumphantly emerges at the end of the long line. Kindled into life by a gallon of gasoline, the car roars off in a cloud of exhaust to a railway siding and the awaiting freight train. The whole process, from ore to car, has taken perhaps a day….

The men standing at the moving assembly lines and toiling in the rolling mill, powerhouse, blast furnaces, and foundry were considered the elite of American industry, well paid, well housed, well treated by a benevolent employer. Life at the Rouge was not easy. They were part of an army—75,000 men worked at the sprawling facility by 1926—and they were treated much like soldiers. Amid an ear-splitting roar, they fought their daily battle of production standing often shoulder to shoulder, absolutely dominated by the flow of work, just as the flow of work had been carefully adjusted to them. Each man had enough space to do his work, no more. Men did not move; only materials. Each work unit, wrote an admiring observer, was “a carefully designed gear which meshes with other gears and operates in synchronism with them, the whole forming one huge, perfectly-timed, smoothly operating industrial machine of almost unbelievable efficiency.”

The whole plant seemed in motion as parts flowed from scores of tributaries into the mighty central stream. Men seemed in constant motion from the waist up as they drilled, inserted, bolted, clipped, plucked parts from small bins at their side, moved in a precise series of steps to an exact and demanding time sequence. Mass production, according to company doctrine, reduced the “necessity for thought on the part of the worker and … his movements to a minimum.” Thus workers were expected to act as efficiently and automatically as machines. Plant bosses, on the other hand, were not only allowed to move about but required to. They were given desks without chairs so that they had to work standing up, or preferably on the move. Casual conversations were frowned upon. An air of anxiety hung over the whole place as workers labored and bosses scrambled to meet the company injunction—produce, produce, produce.

The man most in motion at the Ford works was Henry Ford himself. Still lean and sinewy as he entered his sixties, almost handsome, with his black eyes and slightly curling hair, he was bored by executive meetings, hardly able to sit still for more than a few minutes. Restlessly he toured his plants and yards, his bins and his foundries, sharp to spot men engaged in idle chatter or executives stuck to their desks, praising or upbraiding with brief words and rapidly gesturing hands. Even on holidays he was restless, hurrying. Camping in the Smokies with his old friend Thomas Edison, he was surprised when the inventor felt his hip pocket. “What are you looking for?” Said Edison: “I figure you always carry a lighted bunch of firecrackers in your clothes somewhere. Slow to a walk for a while, will you? I get tired of motion pictures.”

By the early twenties, Henry Ford was already a legend, both in the popular press and in the automobile industry. The public drank in the stories—how as a young genius mechanic he had experimented with light-car Models A and B and K at a time when automobiles were big and their owners wealthy; how he had worked out audacious mass-production techniques for building hundreds of thousands of Model Ts; how he had fought off Wall Street bankers who were trying to dominate the automobile industry through patent control; how he had sent a Peace Ship to Europe in 1915 to end the war; how he had fought off his own associates and stockholders so that he could establish personal control of his company; how he had made several hundred million—or was it a billion?—dollars; and how, above all, he had suddenly announced in 1914 that every Ford worker would receive at least five dollars a day, to the delight of auto workers and the consternation of his rivals.

What impressed Americans most was Ford’s independence. In an age of monopoly and trusts, he steered clear of combination and stuck to his last—making cars and tractors. In an age that preached individualism more than it practiced it, he was the supreme individualist—a man who could tell bankers, suppliers, union bosses, rivals to go to hell. This perception was accurate. Thwarted by strikes against his glass and steel suppliers, and by miners and railroad workers, he resolved to control the source of his raw materials—of the timber that went into his car bodies, the iron mines that produced ore for wheels and axles, the glass that made car windows, the leather for interiors, the coal that fed his towering furnaces. By 1915, with his Highland plant a huge success, he had resolved on building a far bigger works at Rouge—an integrated works that would combine a multitude of auto-building processes, resting on a vertical organization of production. Raising colossal amounts of capital from his own profits, and some from bankers, Ford simply bought up enormous tracts of land, timber, iron fields, waterpower rights, limestone, and silica sand.

So that ore-bearing vessel easing into the slip belonged personally to Henry Ford, as did the cargo ship headed out to Europe and South America packed with his cars and tractors, as did canals and railroads and ports and harbors. He planned for the future, too, requiring that branch plants be set up next to waterways in case other men’s railroads should fail him. Ford wanted independence because that to him meant power—power to do as he wished. And he had few doubts about what he could do through his own talents if only rivals or incompetents did not stand in his way.

Ford would control not only raw materials but men’s lives as well—and not only their working lives but, to a degree, their home lives, too. To make sure that his five-dollars-a-day wage would not be wasted—or worse—Ford established the Sociological Department, whose main task was to encourage workers toward “thrift, honesty, sobriety, better housing, and better living generally.” At this time, the company was employing thousands of immigrants from Poland, Russia, Romania, Italy, and other less industrialized areas of Europe. Over a hundred staff members from the Sociological Department visited workers’ homes to inspect for uncleanliness, bad habits, congestion, undernourished children, drunkenness, gambling. “Employees should use plenty of soap and water in the home, and upon their children, bathing frequently,” a Ford pamphlet advised. “Notice that the most advanced people are the cleanest.”

The result was a clash of cultures—between the immigrants’ pre-industrial living and working habits and Ford’s Puritan ethic of hard work, clean living, and efficiency. Ford’s paternalism reflected a pervasive fear that the immigrants would not only waste their five dollars a day but flaunt it. A veiled warning came in a condescending verse from the Detroit poet Edgar Guest about “Giuseppe,” who goes out promenading with white collar, silk hat, cane, and Ford badge on his lapel:

He smok’ da cigar weath da beega da band,

Da “three-for-da-quart” ees da kind;

Da diamond dat flash from da back of hees hand,

Eez da beegest Giuseppe could find.…

For Giuseppe, he work at da Ford.

If the company’s “sociologists” had limited impact on the workers’ home lives, Ford had more control of their working time. Within his plants he established “Americanization” classes that taught English, table manners, cleanliness, proper attire, and even etiquette, as well as Ford shop practices. “Graduation” took the form of a pageant depicting immigrants descending from a boat down a gangway into a fifteen-foot-wide “melting pot” representing the Ford English School. But the clash of cultures could not be resolved; and, inevitably, Ford’s paternalism had its ugly side. Vexed above all by absenteeism, the company sacked almost a thousand Greek and Russian workers who as Orthodox Christians celebrated Christmas thirteen days after the regular holiday under their own Julian calendar. “If these men are to make their home in America,” a Ford official stated, “they should observe American holidays.”

Still, as historians noted, immigrants tended to cling to their ways—to the crowded tenements, the noisy sociability, the relaxed hours, even the “squalor.” After a few years, the sociological and Americanization programs were dropped. While these programs did have a certain impact on the wider social scene—the 16,000 workers who graduated from the Ford schools served as models for many local and national “Americanization” efforts directed at immigrants—Ford, in the end, found that he had less power over men than over machines.

All told, however, Henry Ford had emerged by the mid-1920s as one of the country’s supreme transforming leaders. He belonged, concluded a biographer, “to that small company of historical personalities who literally transformed the world of their time.” Not only did he make it possible for millions of Americans to own cars, not only did he develop the moving assembly line as a fundamental part of the total production process, help put the nation on wheels, and force a vast expansion of the highways his “flivvers” rode on; he also reshaped the home locations, recreation habits, social intercourse, even the language of tens of millions of working people. Thus he “altered the contours of society” as much as he “permanently changed the topography of cities and nations.”

It was not that Ford had a direct influence on politics or government. On the contrary, on almost every occasion where he moved outside his industrial orbit he failed, sometimes dramatically. Thus his Peace Ship—a 1915 cruise to Europe with Jane Addams and other pacifists—not only failed but made him something of a laughingstock. An ardent supporter of Woodrow Wilson, he moved with the President from pacifism to war mobilization, in which he had a prominent role, and then went down with Wilson and the League. He rashly accepted the Democratic nomination for United States senator from Michigan, only to be beaten by what he viewed as “Wall Street money” and by a free-spending Republican candidate who later was found guilty of violating the federal corrupt practices act. He published his own weekly, the Dearborn Independent, but this venture turned sour when Ford used it for anti-Semitic propaganda, in part because for a time he imagined a “Jewish control” of banking. His most bizarre and humiliating experience resulted from a libel suit he launched against Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s Chicago Tribune for calling him an unpatriotic “anarchist” during the war. After a long proceeding, during which Ford was put on the stand and exposed as ignorant of American history, a jury of farmers found the Tribune guilty but fined it six cents—a deliciously satisfying verdict for the Colonel.

Like many transforming leaders, Ford was a bundle of contradictions. He believed in “pragmatic,” ad hoc, day-to-day decision-making, and yet carefully and brilliantly planned one of the biggest and most complex production layouts in the world. He demanded absolute discipline from the work force, but made a special effort to employ not only unlettered immigrants but handicapped persons and ex-convicts. He led his company into historic advances but also setbacks, such as refusing to paint Model Ts anything save black, long delaying the shift from the Model T to the Model A, and holding an almost obsessive bias against hydraulic brakes. He practiced centralized and disciplined management, but preached old-fashioned smallness and, indeed, during the early twenties built a number of small factories—called Village Industries—to produce sub-assembly parts. He was almost impossible to work with or under, but he brought to industrial leadership a number of men who would become giants in the automotive industry—notably William S. Knudsen and Charles E. Sorensen. Ford, someone said, was able to assemble everything except himself.

‘‘Ford runs modern society and not the politicians who are only screens,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1924. The novelist was only partly right. Ford enormously influenced social and political attitudes through his Model Ts, his pervasive company propaganda, and his own example. His influence was worldwide; Europeans coined the term “Fordismus” for the idea of mass production, industrial efficiency, and cheap consumer goods, and even the Russians hailed him and his tractors as symbols of the kind of modern industry needed to build socialism. But the automaker found out the hard way that economic power was not directly convertible into political power. A financial loner, a political independent, an erratic innovator, Ford was far more a throwback to the days of the Carnegies and Rockefellers than a forerunner of the modern capitalist in politics. The future lay with the bankers and businessmen and brokers who would make up the transactional leadership of mid-twentieth-century America.

“The Business of America …”

During the 1920s the Republican leaders and the business leaders of the nation—often the same men—conducted a crowning experiment in America’s capitalistic brand of conservatism. Assured and determined, for ten years they had the almost unfettered opportunity to convert their individualistic rhetoric, pro-business beliefs, and corporate power into public policy and governmental action. No opponent could obstruct them as they worked in their economic and political laboratory. The conservative leaders did not, of course, view their efforts as experimental; on the contrary, they assumed that they were bringing the nation back to “normalcy”—back to old moorings, established wisdoms, and the proper conduct of affairs after the radical Wilson years. Hence the period was not a mere interregnum between the New Freedom and the New Deal, but witnessed a major venture with its own powerful impact on American history and American democracy.

An extraordinary political continuity and consistency marked that decade. Throughout, Republicans remained firmly in control. Whether the Democrats nominated a moderate liberal and internationalist in 1920, or a conservative in 1924, or an Irish-Catholic city man in 1928, the Grand Old Party racked up its nearly two-to-one popular majorities and its three-or four-to-one electoral college majorities throughout the decade. The Republicans kept control of Congress, even during the “off-year” House and Senate elections of the 1920s.

The Republicans nominated and elected three Presidents, each with a distinctive image and style. Harding in the White House continued to be very much the same man as in the Senate—a poker-playing, golf-addictive, tobacco-chewing, mistress-keeping, whiskey-drinking politico who concealed a good deal of political sophistication and grasp of policy behind an affable, glad-handing front, and a quick intelligence and lazy, undisciplined mind behind his Hollywood-presidential appearance—silvery hair, square jaw, expressive mouth, big frame, high paunch. Calvin Coolidge seemed almost his opposite—a small, spare man, as austere and hard-looking as some of his native Vermont granite, taciturn in public though garrulous enough when he wanted to be. Herbert Hoover, who had won warm admiration from Republicans and Democrats alike, and from acute observers such as Brandeis and Lippmann, for his competent and compassionate handling of wartime relief, was a remarkable administrator, both well organized and imaginative, who could launch major new ventures and write a sophisticated tract, as he did on individualism, with equal skill. All three men had small-town origins, but they had been shaped by diverse subcultures—Harding by the boom town of Marion, Coolidge by the staid political and business world of Northampton, Hoover by years as an engineer and promoter overseas and at home.

In broad political outlook, on the other hand, the three Presidents were much alike. At his first Cabinet meeting after Harding’s death in August 1923, and later to press and Congress, Coolidge stated that he would continue all his predecessor’s policies. Hoover in turn carried on most of Coolidge’s initiatives, at least until new imperatives arose. All three chief executives were under the same institutional constraints. The presidency had its own direction and dynamics, as foreign demands and bureaucratic pressures played on the White House. Even the easygoing Harding was moving toward a more modern and coherent program in the last year of his brief presidency, and Coolidge, in Robert Murray’s words, was able to be the President that Harding would have liked to have been. Undergirding all three Administrations, moreover, was the power of the Republican party. No single “boss” could tell Presidents what to do, but the collective leadership, triumphant self-confidence, and policy and patronage demands of the Grand Old Party set the course of all three Administrations.

Presidential Republican rule showed the most continuity in its top executive leadership. Secretary of State Hughes served during both the Harding and early Coolidge years, as did a number of other Cabinet officers. Coolidge as Vice-President sat in Harding’s Cabinet, Hoover as Secretary of Commerce in both Harding’s and Coolidge’s. After the long patronage drought during the Wilson years, GOP leaders in Congress and the country put intense pressure on all three Presidents for Republican appointments. But of all the forces for continuity through the 1920s, nothing could compare, in intensity and effect, with that of Andrew William Mellon.

Andrew Mellon. The star of no leader was to shine so brightly in the 1920s, nor fade so quickly into darkness thereafter. Born in 1855, Mellon had grown up in a Pittsburgh banking family drenched in affluence, education, gentility, conservatism, and Republicanism. Everything Mellon touched, as he rose in banking and industry circles, turned to money. Taking over his father’s bank at the age of twenty-seven, Andrew helped establish the Aluminum Company of America, Gulf Oil, and Union Steel, then moved on into manufacturing, shipbuilding, public utilities. He helped Marshall-McClintick become world-famous as builder of the Panama Canal locks, the Hell Gate and George Washington bridges, the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. But at heart he always remained a banker. By 1920, he was reputed to be one of America’s richest men—perhaps the richest—with a fortune of several hundred millions.

He was an austere figure amid the flamboyant politicos of the day— reticent, soft-voiced, with a long narrow head and chilly gray-blue eyes on top of a small, slight frame tightly buttoned into a dark suit. It was considered a master stroke on Harding’s part when the new President was able to persuade this diffident multimillionaire to come to Washington as Secretary of the Treasury. Coolidge, who admired wealth, was delighted to keep him on as Treasury Secretary, as was Hoover despite earlier disagreements with him in the Cabinet. He rivaled all three Presidents in his influence over economic policy.

Above all Mellon symbolized the unity between corporate power and the Grand Old Party. No chasm separated his Republicanism from his business conservatism. However much he disdained truck with ordinary politicos, touching their hands only with the tips of his fingers, organizational Republicanism was part of his life. Leaders of the Pennsylvania Cameron-Quay machine had often dropped in to see his father; later, Mellon consorted with Boies Penrose, Philander Knox, and other heads of one of the most conservative state parties in the country. Corporate control of the Republican party had long been a staple of muckraking journalists and progressive orators. They drew a picture of politicians as pawns of the corporations. But big business did not have to exert conservative influence on most Republican regulars; that influence was already in them, inculcated by heritage, family, education, occupation, class status, social environment, and party ideology.

So Harding really meant it when he said, “This is essentially a business country. We hear a vast deal about ‘big business,’ but the big business of America is nothing but the aggregate of the small businesses. That is why we need business sense in charge of American administration, and why the majority of America has for more than half a century been a Republican majority.” He denounced the “hampering restrictions and bullying methods” used against business. Coolidge not only issued his famous pronunciamento: “The business of America is business,” but, flinty Vermonter though he was, waxed euphoric: the man “who builds a factory,” he said, “builds a temple, the man who works there worships there, and to each is due not scorn and blame, but reverence and praise.” Herbert Hoover said in 1928: “Given a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years we shall soon with the help of God be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.” Every “expansion of government in business,” he said, “poisons the very roots of liberalism—that is, political equality, free speech, free assembly, free press, and equality of opportunity.”

In the election of 1928 the voters granted Hoover’s wish to continue the essential program of the previous eight years—to proceed with the Republicans’ venture in a businesslike and business-loving regime. The Grand Old Party could claim all credit for the continuing success of the grand old experiment in rugged individualism, laissez-faire, materialism, social stability, corporate influence, and business power.

Thus for a solid decade conservative belief dominated the public affairs of the nation. Not since the triumphant Republicanism of the turn of the century had a party majority so firmly established its power and leadership in Congress and the presidency, but the stakes were much higher now because of the expanded role of the federal government. Refurbishing its electoral majorities throughout the decade, the leadership of the Grand Old Party carried through its policies and programs not only in Washington but in a host of state capitals outside the South. It was government by compact majority.

It was precisely this kind of majority that the Founding Fathers had feared in drafting the new constitution in 1787. As good republicans they believed in majority rule—rule by a majority of the fraction of the people who could vote at the time, that is—but as men wanting order and stability, they proposed to curb majorities, especially majorities composed of turbulent mobs and unruly populaces. Thus James Madison recognized the old and “fundamental principle of Republican government—that the majority who rule are the safest Guardians both of public good and private rights.” But—“If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.” By dividing up powers among different sets of leaders, by making these leaders elected by and responsible to diverse and conflicting constituencies, and by staggering elections over a period of time, the Framers sought to tame the unruly beast of majority power.

The Founders recognized, nonetheless, that popular majorities ultimately would take control of the new federal government if such majorities could remain large and united enough to win a series of presidential and legislative elections. Here was where they played their trump constitutional card. By establishing presidential selection and Senate confirmation of federal judges, they tied the judiciary into the republican system; but by giving judges lifetime tenure, along with some power of judicial review, they created a judicial leadership that institutionally would be “behind the times”—that is, responding to the presidential and legislative majorities of a decade or even a generation back. This meant a virtual guarantee of continuity and stability: the judiciary would represent a kind of consensus among shifting factions, parties, and ideologies.

Somehow this logical arrangement did not seem to be working in the early twentieth century. It might have been expected that when Harding came to the White House in March of 1921, the Supreme Court in particular would strike a balance between the conservative presidencies of McKinley and Taft and the progressive presidencies of Roosevelt and Wilson. But history played one of its tricks. Taft had the pleasure of making as many Supreme Court appointments in his four years in the White House as Wilson and TR did in their combined fifteen years. This was. not wholly by chance; retiring justices had long since learned the art of waiting out Presidents.

So the Republicans returning to power in 1921 happily found like-minded brethren on the bench. Their luck continued when, two months after he took office, Harding could bestow the highest gift in a President’s hands—the chief justiceship. It was not only luck: Chief Justice White had held out until the GOP returned, repeatedly telling Taft, as the former President said later, that “he was holding the office for me and that he would give it back to a Republican administration.” It was Taft’s crowning moment, too, for this was above all else the post he craved, while serving in practically every other. There was a slight problem, since Harding had promised a place on the Court to his campaign brain-truster George Sutherland, but this was straightened out—Sutherland was told to wait for the next vacancy—and by summer 1921, William Howard Taft, as spry and genial as ever and less plump, was seated at the center of the High Court.

That Court had for some years been a center of controversy. During the heyday of progressivism, liberals and radicals complained that the reactionary bench was upholding corporate property rights and thwarting state and federal regulation of the economy. In 1908, three years after Lochner v. New York, the court in Adair v. U.S. invalidated the Erdman Act, which had outlawed the notorious “yellow-dog” contract that made union non-membership a condition of employment. The Court held that the act impaired both the employer’s and the worker’s freedom of contract, and that the commerce power of Congress did not extend to the act, for labor relations had no “real or substantial relation” with commerce. A few years later, the Court struck down a state law against yellow-dog contracts. During the progressive era, the Court upheld a couple of Oregon laws limiting hours of work, as well as other regulatory legislation. But then came Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), invalidating a child labor act that had been the direct product of efforts by Florence Kelley and other progressive activists. Congress, the Court held in a five-to-four verdict, lacked power to exclude goods from interstate commerce unless they were themselves intrinsically harmful. No matter, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in dissent, that the goods were the “product of ruined lives.”

Would the new Chief Justice—genial, moderate, kind Will Taft—make a difference? An early answer came in the second child labor case in 1922. Thwarted by Hammer v. Dagenhart, Congress had passed a new act against child labor, this time using its taxing power. Taft not only voted with the Court to invalidate; he wrote the decision. Then came Adkins v. Children’s Hospital.

Congress had passed a minimum-wage law for women in the District of Columbia, partly on the ground of a relationship between wages and the health and morals of women. The High Court was expected to sustain the act, on precedent of the Oregon cases, but the Court was now packed with more conservative justices. Writing for the Court, Justice Sutherland, who had finally been elevated late in 1922, based his decision voiding the law on the liberty-of-contract doctrine. Taft produced a moving dissent but could not sway his colleagues. Using as precedent the Lockner and Adair decisions, Sutherland held that in principle “there can be no difference between the case of selling labor and the case of selling goods.” As Max Lerner later pointed out, “by treating the labor contract like any commodity purchase-and-sale,” Sutherland had borne out the contention of Karl Marx that “under capitalism labor has become a mere commodity.” From Marx’s grave in Highgate cemetery in London might have come a thin peal of cynical laughter.

For a time under Taft’s leadership the Court followed a wavering centrist course, issuing a number of antiunion labor decisions while upholding various state regulatory laws and federal programs. Later in the 1920s, its conservatism seemed to harden. In vain left-liberals denounced the “reactionary” course of the Court. For most Americans, the High Court was still above politics and above ideology, handing down decisions from some rarefied summit, interpreting a sacred document, simply “finding” the law, not making it. In fact, the Court could hardly have been more partisan and ideological. Taft used his personal and political skills in “massing the court,” as he strove to make it appear more united than it was. Sometimes, justices would reluctantly go along with the majority in order to lessen internal conflict. Taft even held Sunday afternoon caucuses in his home, described by his friendly biographer as “extra-curricular conferences” at which “plans were made to block the liberal machinations.”

Taft and his Court occupied the best of political worlds. Benefiting from both the popular worship of the Constitution and the “cult of the robe,” the justices seemed above the battle at the same time that they in fact were deeply involved in politics. Ironically, in a system designed to thwart majorities, they held a majority that worked, that delivered. In a system that so often thwarted the wishes of masses of voters, they had the votes.

The compact majority produced. As President, Congress, and Court worked smoothly together, despite occasional sputterings, a conservative party and government churned out conservative legislation and administrative and judicial decisions. Following a rash of railroad and coal strikes in the summer of 1922, Harding allowed Harry Daugherty, now his Attorney General, to gain a sweeping restraining order from a federal judge against the rail strikers. The failed strikes left railroad labor furious with the Administration, and divided to boot, as tens of thousands of shopmen were required to sign agreements with vindictive managements, forcing them into company unions.

Toward farmers the Harding Administration took a more generous line. The Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 forbade discriminatory practices in livestock, poultry, and dairy transactions, especially the manipulation of prices, and next year the Capper-Volstead Act exempted farmers and their organizations from the reach of the antitrust laws. But what most farmers most keenly wanted was control of farm surpluses and stabilization of prices. When a 1923 credit act easing loans for crop financing proved inadequate, farm organizations rallied behind the McNary-Haugen bill, an elaborate scheme to buy the annual surplus of certain crops during times of high output and keep it off the domestic market. Defeated time and again in House or Senate, the bill finally passed Congress in 1927, only to be vetoed by Coolidge.

The Grand Old Party seemed powerful enough to resist the demands of poorer members of its grand old coalition of farmers and workers. It was equally casual toward a third and historic bastion of Republicanism—black Americans. Harding had been treading a wary course between those Republicans who wanted the GOP to recognize burgeoning black power in Northern cities, and others who sought to curb the Republican “black-and-tan” organizations in the South in order to create a “lily-white” party that could appeal to Southern whites. But Harding wanted the Negro to have the right to vote. “Let the black man vote when he is fit to vote,” he told a Birmingham audience; “prohibit the white man voting when he is unfit to vote.” And he wanted the black man to have the right to life. He proposed a federal anti-lynching law, only to see it filibustered to death by Southern Democrats in the Senate. Under Lodge’s leadership the Republican caucus decided to give up efforts to overcome the filibuster, handing black leaders the excuse blacks would hear again and again—the anti-lynching bill had to yield to “more important” business in the Senate.

That important business was a ship subsidy bill, and the Republicans throughout the decade pushed through subsidies for a variety of business interests despite their vaunted belief in laissez-faire. But the most powerful Republican thrust came in the field of taxation. This was Treasury Secretary Mellon’s domain. The financier was quite direct and emphatic in his approach to taxation. The income tax and war demands had shifted the tax burden too heavily onto the upper-income classes, he believed, impairing their capacity to risk capital for the expansion of production. Soon after his appointment, Mellon appeared before the House Ways and Means Committee to urge repeal of the excess-profits tax and reduction of the maximum surtax rate from 65 percent to 32 percent.

Harding fully backed his Secretary, though he was hardly of much help intellectually. “I can’t make a damn thing out of this tax problem,” he exploded to an aide. “I listen to one side and they seem right, and then—God!—I talk to the other side, and they seem just as right.” But Mellon did not need Presidents; he had himself. With the help of Penrose and other Old Guard members of Congress, he pushed through the first of his revenue bills by the end of 1921. Unappeased, he pressed for further reductions in personal income taxes on the rich and in inheritance taxes, gaining these in the revenue acts of 1926 and 1928 under Coolidge. Mellon backed up both Harding and Coolidge in vetoing veterans’ bonus bills, and he worked closely with Harding’s budget director, Charles Dawes, on government economy. By the time Mellon left Hoover’s Cabinet for the Court of St. James’s in early 1932, the Mellon-Harding-Coolidge-Hoover fiscal program had long been firmly in place.

Only one thing seemed to threaten continued Republican ascendancy throughout the decade—scandal. Rumors of malfeasance on the part of an “Ohio gang,” climaxed by the suicide of an old friend of Harding and Daugherty, began circulating through Washington early in 1923. The President had been suffering from high blood pressure and other ills for some time, and his concern over the reports probably hastened his death, apparently from an embolism, during a long trip back from Alaska early in August that year. For months, indeed years, following Harding’s death, Washington was titillated by revelations of fraud and bribery in the Veterans Bureau, of secret leases of Teapot Dome oil reserves to oil men in exchange for their “loans” to Harding’s Interior Secretary, Albert B. Fall. Attorney General Daugherty, who was accused of conspiracy, refused to testify, charged that “Red labor” was plotting against him, and got off with a hung jury, some three years after Coolidge had sacked him.

For all the publicity, the scandals had little effect on Republican presidential victories. In large part, this was due to Coolidge’s probity and his distance from the “Ohio gang.” Coolidge also possessed a gift that Harding lacked—luck. He had luck in small ways: the news of Harding’s death came to him while he happened to be in his rustic home town in Vermont, resulting in marvelous newspaper stories of his swearing-in by his father, a notary public, in the little parlor of the Coolidge household. If Harding had died a day later, the news would have come to Coolidge while he was stopping at the baronial New Hampshire estate of a rich Boston friend. He had luck in big ways too: the “Coolidge boom” roared all through the five and a half years of his presidency.

Coolidge boom? This was just what Andrew Mellon had planned.

Bankers and Battleships

The Republican “compact majority” was far less united over foreign policy than domestic. Businessmen could agree on tax, labor, subsidy, and similar issues, but the business community fragmented in the face of world needs and demands. Ideologically they divided into isolationists, unilateralists, and internationalists; economically they divided into importers and exporters, competing regional producing interests, investment bankers like the House of Morgan favoring financial and commercial cooperation with London, and industrialists like the Rockefellers pressing for aggressive American investment abroad. Politically they divided into factions in the GOP, in Congress, and in the presidency. The conservatism that dominated the decade’s thought seemed to falter at the water’s edge.

The result was a foreign policy of zigzag, of “fits and starts, of hesitancy and of timid advance,” in L. Ethan Ellis’s words. At times, envoys to Washington could hardly find a foreign policy. Editors sardonically suggested that the American Secret Service or even Scotland Yard be dispatched to locate it.

Harding’s Cabinet epitomized the Republican disunity. On the President’s right sat Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes, ardent spokesman for the dwindling band of GOP internationalists. Across from him was the imperious Andrew Mellon, who had bankrolled the unilateralists’ campaign against Wilson’s League. Between them was Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover, whose main goal now was to promote American exports while limiting imports. Alongside these men sat the knavish party regulars and domestic policy brokers, Albert Fall and Harry Daugherty. These regulars linked with the conservative congressional party centered in the Senate, where Lodge continued to press for a foreign policy expressive of American power, and where Borah and his fellow isolationists now opposed Lodge as tenaciously as they had fought Wilson.

Washington seemed headed for a dull and squalid unilateralism as the Republicans dropped any pretense of fulfilling Harding’s vague promise of an “association of nations” in place of the spurned League. Then came a historic zigzag.

A deadly spiral of naval shipbuilding had begun as the British, once America had opted out of the League, wished to reassert their traditional command of the seas, as the Japanese undertook their own buildup, and as American watchdogs called for escalation. But there were calls too for an end to the arms race. Borah, moving to head up the disarmament movement, proposed a simple halving of naval construction by the three maritime superpowers. Lodge earlier had buried two such resolutions, but Borah proved his match in legislative maneuver. Moreover, the Borah Resolution captured the imagination of the public, which hailed it as the “Model ‘T’” of diplomatic proposals for its simplicity and practicality. A sizable portion of the business community, concerned that the cost of the naval arms race—in an era when an estimated 93 percent of all federal expenditures went to military or veterans’ programs—would interfere with Mellon’s planned tax cuts and business subsidies, quietly rallied behind the peace movement.

In this thrust toward peace, women leaders were now playing their part. Fresh from their success in helping secure female suffrage, members of the League of Women Voters made disarmament the first issue on which to demonstrate the power of the woman’s vote. Carrie Chapman Catt roused the LWV convention in April 1921 with a hard-hitting call to action: “Everybody at this time is extremely careful about being nonpartisan. I don’t care a rap about it. I am for disarmament. I believe in taking action…. We are the appointed ones to lead in this question.” The women coordinated an alliance of church groups, unions, business and academic spokespeople in favor of arms control.

Lodge and Harding succumbed to the mounting public pressure; on July 10, Secretary of State Hughes invited the Japanese, British, and six other powers to send representatives to Washington to discuss naval armaments and political problems in the Far East. Hughes saw in the negotiations an opportunity to revive the internationalist wing of the Republican party. Throughout the summer he consulted with a group of young naval officers and administrators, led by Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and together they hammered out an audacious proposal to end the arms race.

Although Harding appointed him as one of the four American negotiators, Lodge at first put little stock in the conference. “I do not for a moment believe that either Japan or England will accept any disarmament proposals,” he confided to his diary just days before the talks opened, “but … we shall have made our position clear and will lay the responsibility where it will belong—with them.”

In mid-November 1921, the negotiators and their advisors assembled in Continental Memorial Hall for the first session of the naval talks. Only the handful of American experts who had been working with Hughes suspected that they were about to witness one of the most dramatic acts of individual leadership in the history of peace. The crowd of distinguished guests—senators and congressmen, Holmes and Brandeis from the Supreme Court, Vice-President Coolidge, British pacifist spokesman H. G. Wells—heard President Harding make a vapid introductory speech and then applauded politely as the Secretary of State took the floor.

It was the moment of a lifetime. Hughes, erect and gray-bearded at the podium, shocked the audience by calling for an immediate end to all naval construction, and went on to spell out in exquisite detail a plan for stopping the construction of capital ships for at least ten years. As the foreign negotiators sat bolt upright in disbelief, Hughes listed the ships that each power would have to cancel or scrap—seventy-eight battleships in all, totaling nearly 2 million tons. In the gallery, William Jennings Bryan, still the leader of American pacifists, sat with tears of joy in his eyes.

Hughes had instantly riveted world attention on the Washington Conference, making it difficult for any of the delegates to challenge the American proposal. Though weeks of hard negotiating still followed, the Secretary’s task was made considerably easier by the cryptologists of the Navy’s “Black Chamber,” who broke Japan’s diplomatic codes and so were able to learn the Japanese negotiating positions in advance. But it was Hughes’s benign persistence, coupled with his willingness to link the arms talks to the resolution of the political problems pending in the Far East, that finally turned the tide. The Americans’ flexibility in mixing diplomatic, territorial, and arms compromises, Hughes said later, “alone made possible the success of the Conference.”

A broad-ranging series of agreements grew out of the Washington talks. The British and Japanese accepted Hughes’s ten-year freeze and a ratio of 5:5:3 in battleships between their fleets and the U.S. Navy. Japan settled for the short end of the ratio, but in return Britain and America promised not to build or fortify any new bases in the Western Pacific. France and Italy also agreed to limit the number of their capital ships, as long as smaller vessels were exempted from the treaty. Limits were set on the tonnage and armament of all remaining warships. On the political front, Japan and Britain replaced their military alliance with a four-power nonaggression pact that included France and the United States, thus laying to rest American fears of a possible joint Anglo-Japanese attack. Lodge was able to secure Senate approval of all these agreements, although the isolationists balked at the Four-Power Treaty, which barely passed with help from Senate Democrats. The final fruit of the negotiations was a nine-power treaty in which all the nations with interests in the Far East bound themselves to uphold the independence and territorial sovereignty of China. After more than twenty years, John Hay’s Open Door proposal had finally been transformed into an international covenant.

A triumph for American ideals and interests, the Washington Conference also proved to be the swan song of the Republican internationalists. Over the rest of the decade, the leaders of the GOP proceeded to undermine or fritter away the gains that the talks had brought them. Relations between Japan and America began to improve after the conference, only to be poisoned by the xenophobic Immigration Act of 1924. Sponsored by Lodge and by California’s Hiram Johnson, the bill closed the United States to immigrants from the Orient—a mortal insult in the eyes of the Japanese. Partly as a result of rising anti-American and anti-Western sentiments in Japan, a second round of arms talks, convened in Geneva in 1927, ended in failure.

Another set of negotiations, held in London in 1930, did produce an agreement to limit all vessels, not just battleships, but only at the price of major new concessions to Japan. The London talks, moreover, foreboded a bleak future for arms control. The French and Italian delegates walked out of the conference, and the Japanese government suffered a wave of assassinations and mass protests when it ratified the new treaty.

On other fronts as well the Republicans failed to capitalize on the openings made by Hughes. After years of coaxing, the Senate in 1925 agreed to America’s joining the World Court, but only with a series of reservations that the court administrators in Geneva declined to accept. The United States also joined an international movement, led by Columbia professor James Shotwell, to “outlaw” war. The resulting Kellogg-Briand Pact, which twenty-six nations signed in 1928, had no enforcement mechanism—and just to be sure, the Senate appended a list of occasions when the United States would not be bound by it. One senator labeled it “an international kiss.”

If the Republicans stood divided in their response to internationalism, on the economics of foreign affairs they were somewhat more united. The economic thrust of American policy in the 1920s was set by Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover, who despite occasional disagreements over tactics basically concurred. The Treasury and Commerce secretaries promoted a business approach to international affairs. Drawing on their experiences in private enterprise, the two focused on “fostering the use of experts, on finding apolitical solutions, on encouraging private voluntary and cooperative action, and on enlarging but circumscribing the role of government.” They would rely on private trade, buttressed by federal data-gathering and voluntary international cooperation, to advance American interests abroad. Most of all, they would rely on Mellon’s old colleagues, the staid Republican investment bankers.

The help of the bankers was especially needed to untangle the international financial mess left by the World War and the peace settlement. The war had disrupted the old, London-based network of financial ties between Europe and the rest of the world. The Allies had been forced to borrow billions of dollars from the United States, and the various European states needed billions more to rebuild their economies when the fighting ended. When Harding entered the White House, the American government had loans out to seventeen European nations totaling more than $10 billion. The main debtors, Britain and France, made their repayment contingent on receiving reparations from Germany.

Here the Republicans reaped one of the unintended fruits of their failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. In Paris, Wilson and Lloyd George had agreed to leave unspecified the amount to be paid by Germany, as they expected that later the British and American representatives on the reparations committee would work out a fairly moderate sum. When America rejected the treaty, however, the French were left as the dominant power on the committee, and in 1921 they presented Germany with a bill for the astronomical sum of $32 billion. After the Germans refused to pay, the specter of international debts unsettled efforts to stabilize European currencies and economies.

Mellon’s banking instincts urged him toward a moderate solution to the growing debt/reparation crisis. “If we insist on too difficult terms,” we would “receive nothing,” he noted. But he was unwilling to have the American government simply write off $10 billion in supposed assets which would then have to be replaced out of the pockets of bondholders and taxpayers. His solution was to renegotiate the loans, granting the Europeans lower interest rates and longer terms of repayment. Using the leverage provided by Treasury Department oversight of private loans to foreign powers—the bankers seldom risked a loan not approved by Mellon and Hoover—the Republican banker-in-chief brought country after country to the bargaining table. Slowly the loan tangle was resolved, in the finance ministries and the banking houses. For the press and the public, however, the issue remained an acrimonious one; Coolidge’s bland and perhaps apocryphal “they hired the money, didn’t they,” rather than Mellon’s strategy of enlightened self-interest, seemed to define the American position on the debts.

Sound American business sense was also needed to help defuse the explosive question of German reparations. France’s attempt to bludgeon the Germans into paying by occupying the Ruhr in 1923 only helped wreck the German economy, unleash wild inflation that pauperized the country’s middle class, and encourage political extremists on both the left and the right. Two Americans, the Chicago banker Charles Dawes and General Electric chairman Owen Young, helped shape a solution under which Germany’s reparation payments were fixed at a reasonable yearly sum. Meanwhile private American capital flowed into Germany, helping restore prosperity to that country and indeed to much of Europe.

The cycle of private loans, reparation payments, and rescheduled war debts seemed to some a “financial merry-go-round,” as the United States collected in debt payments approximately the same amount the bankers lent to Germany. But in fact the cycle of payments seemed to be fulfilling the Republicans’ goals. With the structure of international credit restored, prosperity returned to both sides of the Atlantic. Urged on by the American banks, Britain and other European powers went back onto the gold standard. Stable prices, sound currencies, steadily growing trade—the Republican millennium appeared to be at hand as Hoover moved from the Commerce Department to the White House in 1929.

The real source of the international recovery, however, was the expansion of trade, and here the Republicans’ business sense would eventually play them false. But, for a time, Hoover’s efforts to promote American sales and investment abroad gleaned tremendous dividends. Yankee investment in Latin America tripled, and commerce with the region grew by 87 percent. Even while Congress—over Hoover’s objections—offended Japan with exclusionary immigration laws, trade with the island kingdom swelled. In revolution-torn China, where the United States government maintained a brigade of Marines from 1927 on, Model T Fords shared streets with rickshaws, and the Standard Oil refinery was one of the largest employers in Tientsin.

It was dollar diplomacy—but with a difference. Throughout the decade, the Republicans worked steadily to placate anti-American feelings triggered by previous heavy-handedness. In 1924 Coolidge withdrew the Marines from the Dominican Republic; in 1925 the occupation of Nicaragua ended, although a year later American troops returned to that country to battle the guerrilla forces of the legendary General Sandino.

The most dramatic improvement came in relations with Mexico. The Mexican government had aroused both American Catholics by its anticlerical policies and American oil companies—which controlled 70 percent of Mexico’s oil—by its nationalization of foreign oil holdings. Talk of war even bubbled up on both sides of the Rio Grande until Coolidge moved to head off the building crisis by appointing his old friend Dwight Morrow, of the House of Morgan, as envoy to Mexico City. Morrow’s tact and infectious good nature won him the friendship of Mexican officials, and he sponsored a visit to Mexico by the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh (soon to be his son-in-law) that helped turn public attitudes toward the United States around. Morrow helped negotiate a reconciliation between the government and the church in the Latin republic and he worked out a businesslike compromise on the question of oil. In the next year, Hoover put the presidential seal of approval on the tenuous new friendship with Latin America by undertaking a seven-week goodwill tour of the region just before his inauguration.

As the decade closed, the earlier rifts in the GOP seemed to have yielded to the party’s general pro-business consensus. With Hughes heading for the Supreme Court and Lodge dead, the League a political cipher, and the drama of disarmament drained by the very success of the Washington Conference, the way was at last clear for a moderate foreign economic policy. Then the GOP took another leap—backwards—as it turned in 1929 to write into law the last facet of Mellon’s economic program: a high, across-the-board protective tariff. President Hoover viewed with misgivings his party’s rally around upward tariff revision. Few men recognized better than Hoover the importance of international trade to America’s continuing prosperity, or more feared tariff retaliation by other nations.

“Break this chain” of trade, Hoover declared during the 1928 campaign, “and the whole machine is thrown out of order…. Cease exporting automobiles to South America or Europe, and automobile workers are thrown out of work in Michigan. The suffering does not stop there…. The steel mills slacken in Pennsylvania and Indiana. The mines employ fewer workers at Lake Superior. And every farmer in the United States suffers from diminished purchasing power.”

Thus Hoover had serious private doubts about the Smoot-Hawley bill that the Republicans in Congress enacted in early 1930. In public, however, the President emphasized the handful of concessions the legislative leaders had granted him. The fusillade of antitariff protests from academics and from Democrats—although many of the latter had joined in the orgy of log-rolling as Smoot-Hawley took final form—also apparently stiffened Hoover’s resolve to follow his party and accept the bill. In June 1930 the President signed the tariff into law, hailing it as the fulfillment of “the repeated demands of statesmen and industrial and agricultural leaders over the past twenty-five years.”

The ghosts of John Sherman, Mark Hanna, and Nelson Aldrich no doubt smiled down in approval.

The Voices of Protest

Smoot-Hawley towered as a party achievement, the culmination of a century of Whig and Republican economic nationalism, the climactic act of the 1920s’ “compact majority.” At the end of that decade of conservative business rule, as at the start, the party had its way, despite the misgivings of Herbert Hoover and the fears of internationalists in both parties. James Madison’s old checks and balances, designed to delay and fragment “naked majority rule,” still seemed to be suspended. By 1931, the Republicans had achieved what no liberal or progressive leadership had brought about at least since Reconstruction—ten solid years of party government. The voices of protest were shrill and scattered, minority opposition weak and divided.

If the Framers’ anti-majoritarian Constitution could not protect minority interests, what could? The American people had supplied their own answer within a dozen years of adopting the 1787 charter, by establishing a Jeffersonian party opposition to challenge the Federalist incumbents. That opposition went on to take office in 1800. The flowering of the party system had nurtured a “loyal opposition” ready to critique, challenge, and balance the party in power. As parliamentary systems grew in Europe during the nineteenth century, the idea of the militant but loyal opposition grew with them. By 1930, the labor movement in Britain, for example, and German socialists, had long since been challenging the established parties.

Emboldened by their midterm gains of 1922 and the “Ohio gang” scandals the next year, the Democrats marched into 1924 with high hopes of ousting the GOP. With a host of promising leaders, including such veterans as Oscar Underwood and former Treasury Secretary McAdoo and rising young figures like Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York, the Democracy’s prospects looked good, as they assembled in Manhattan for the quadrennial conclave. But everything fell apart in their convention hall, “Tex” Rickard’s old Madison Square Garden. Even the place was wrong—a red-brick edifice used to host circuses and six-day bike races and adorned by a ten-story tower (in which the architect Stanford White had been murdered), and located in the middle of Al Smith territory—urban, polyglot, and very “wet.” McAdoo arrived breathing fire against the city itself—“the city of privilege,” he called it, “reactionary, sinister, unscrupulous, mercenary, and sordid,” rooted in corruption and dominated by greed. At the convention, when the keynote speaker declaimed that what this country “needs is Paul Revere,” he was greeted with a round of boos because the delegates thought he said what the country needed was “real beer.” During a demonstration by the Georgia delegation, the convention band struck up with “Marching Through Georgia,” thinking it was a beloved Southern song, instead of Sherman’s victory march.

But the main trouble in the convention was the old Democratic party divisions between the congressional leadership and the presidential, between the South and the North, between the wets and the drys, between the country and the city—plus the two-thirds requirement for nomination. The convention was so divided that it failed even to censure the Ku Klux Klan. In the early-summer heat, roll call followed roll call as the Smith and McAdoo forces checked each other. Days dragged by. On the 99th ballot McAdoo led Smith by half a vote. The exhausted leadership finally worked a compromise on the 103rd ballot, by nominating for President John W. Davis, a conservative corporation lawyer in the Cleveland tradition, and for Vice-President Charles W. Bryan, brother of the Commoner, part populist and part socialist. This ticket was not balanced but, in David Burner’s term, “schizoid.”

The nation’s labor and progressive leaders had long before recognized the feebleness of the divided Democracy. Throughout the early twenties, AFL and rail labor leaders, farm-laborites, old and new Progressives, and socialists had been planning independent action for 1924. Out of these activities had grown the Conference for Progressive Political Action, which sponsored a Progressive party convention in 1924. Robert La Follette, older, wearier, was both the unifier and the hero of the CPPA. At its convention in Chicago, he won the united support of 1,200 delegates embracing labor, farmers, students, a few women, and virtually no blacks. La Follette gained the plaudits of both liberals and socialists with a demand that monopolies be “crushed.” Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, declaring that when “the Democratic party goes to Wall Street for a candidate” like Davis, he must refuse to go with it, accepted the nomination for Vice-President.

Once again La Follette found that launching a third party is one of the most difficult ventures in American politics. It was hard enough to foster unity among the fragmented elements of the left. The Socialist party fell in line, formally endorsing La Follette, while the Communists and other radical parties castigated the La Follette Progressives as even more reactionary than the two major parties. But the strategic problem lay deeper. The La Follette leadership hoped that the Progressive thrust in 1924 would break through existing party alignments and clear the way for a true split by 1928 between a right and a left party. In the meantime, though, La Follette did not want to jeopardize the reelection of Borah, Norris, and other Progressives. Many socialists, on the other hand, wanted a third party that would push for its own Senate and state candidates, even against liberal Democrats and Republicans, if need be, in order to build a labor-left party that could some day take over the whole sprawling governmental system. La Follette insisted on running solo. As it turned out, the Idaho Progressive party endorsed Borah, who later backed Coolidge; Norris ran as a Republican but renounced Coolidge.

The Republicans held probably the dullest convention in the nation’s history. Hiram Johnson, who opposed the Administration’s tax reduction program and many of its foreign policies, might have enlivened the proceedings, but he lost out early against Coolidge’s party organization and patronage. In any event, the GOP leadership wanted a bland convention and a quiet campaign. It publicized slogans such as “Keep Cool with Coolidge” and “Coolidge or Chaos.” The myth of cautious Cal, of silent Cal, was building. Middle-class Americans liked him for his nutshell philosophy, “Work and save.” They liked him for his honesty and simplicity, for his willingness to put on Indian headdresses out west, all the while looking as though he had been weaned on a pickle, as Alice Roosevelt Longworth would claim she had not said.

Americans liked him in 1924, giving him a huge vote of endorsement, 15.7 million votes to Davis’s 8.4 million and La Follette’s 4.8 million. La Follette carried only his own Wisconsin, though he ran second to Coolidge in half the mountain and all three Pacific states. The GOP carried the congressional elections, and Borah and Norris retained their seats and returned to Washington to carry on the fight within the party. Progressivism seemed to be stalled as a national movement. The 1912 progressives had split with the Taft party and met defeat at the hands of a united Democracy. The 1924 progressives had failed to unite with the Democrats, and both parties had been shellacked by a united GOP.

It was clear to the Democratic party leaders—including young Franklin Roosevelt, now slowly regaining some mobility after a crippling polio attack—that the Democracy must move more firmly to the still-burgeoning urban and immigrant masses and toward industrial labor. Their candidate for 1928 was at hand. Al Smith had emerged from the sidewalks of New York, educated at no college other than the Fulton Fish Market, politically savvy, able above all to learn from experience. Elected to the state legislature, he gained a seat on the Banking Committee after having entered a bank only once—to serve a jury notice—and on the Forest Committee, though he had never been in a forest. He learned much from Tammany and from rebelling against Tammany; he learned from the Triangle fire that women were cheap, property sacred. Democratic hopes for Al Smith and his party soared when Silent Cal, vacationing in the Black Hills in August 1927, summoned the press and handed each reporter a little slip: “I do not choose to run for President in 1928.”

Most Americans knew little about Al Smith except for one big fact: he was a Catholic. Survivors of the McAdoo-Smith convention duel of 1924 knew that a Smith nomination in 1928 would set off a religious war. Could a rational debate on the issue forestall irrational confrontation? In April 1927, the Atlantic Monthly published an “open letter” from Charles C. Marshall to Smith questioning whether a Catholic’s dual allegiance to his Church and Constitution should bar him from the presidency. The Atlantic printed Smith’s reply in the next issue:

“Taking your letter as a whole and reducing it to commonplace English, you imply that there is a conflict between religious loyalty to the Catholic faith and patriotic loyalty to the United States.” No such thing could be true. “I have taken an oath of office in this State nineteen times. Each time I swore to defend and maintain the Constitution of the United States.” He had never known any conflict between his official duties and his religious belief. And, rebutting Marshall, Smith contended that no such conflict could exist in education, religious tolerance, appointments, foreign policy.

“I summarize my creed as an American Catholic. I believe in the worship of God according to the faith and practice of the Roman Catholic Pope and I recognize no power in the institutions of my Church to interfere with the operations of the Constitution of the United States or the enforcement of the law of the land. I believe in absolute freedom of conscience for all men and in equality of all churches, all sects, and all beliefs before the law as a matter of right and not as a matter of favor. I believe in the absolute separation of Church and State….”

In vain. Americans were not yet ready for a rational debate over church and state. As the Democratic nominee, Smith ran into a hurricane of religious bigotry, misunderstanding, sectional chauvinism. It was a religious war and much more—a culmination of the cultural war between big city and small town, immigrants and nativists, wets and drys, North and South, East and West, Irish and English, on a battlefield of ignorance and intolerance. Smith, moreover, refused to pretend that he was not what he was, in Oscar Handlin’s words— “a Catholic, a grandson of Irish immigrants, a poor boy off the sidewalks of New York.” Against the advice of the media experts of the day he went right on wearing his brown derby and big cigar, saying “horspital” over the “raddio,” attacking Prohibition, refusing to restrict immigration: “I have lived among these people all my life” and “I can’t shut the door in their faces.”

Al Smith received the news of his defeat sitting in the Seventy-first Regimental Armory, an unlighted cigar clamped in his teeth. He had won 87 electoral votes against Hoover’s 444, 15 million popular votes against Hoover’s 21.4 million. “Well,” he later said, “I guess the time has not yet come when a man can say his beads in the White House.”

Once again the Democrats had failed to build an electoral coalition that could even come close to beating the GOP. Once again the loyal opposition had failed to come up with a credible alternative. Excuses there were aplenty, but perhaps even the Democrats did not comprehend the full power of the Republicans’ “compact majority.” Corporate business had more than an efficient party working for it; it had an ideology rooted in the modern American experience, grounded in fundamental American beliefs and attitudes, fortified by “scientific ideas” such as Social Darwinism, operationalized through an experienced political leadership, and above all expressive of the nation’s industrial and financial power. The only strategy for a party and electoral opposition was to shape an ideology, a party, and a leadership so sharply different from the “ins” as to pose a constant challenge and thereby offer some hope of winning in the future. The Democrats failed to do this; even Smith, with his ties to big business and his innate social conservatism, offered no clear-cut alternative. Election studies later revealed that the 1928 presidential contest was far more a reflection of the politics of the 1920s than a forerunner of the political alignments to come.

If Democrats, progressives, liberals, laborites, and their allies could not overcome the “compact majority” of corporate and Republican power and leadership, at least the minority had the right to exist, speak up, challenge the ins, and seek to oust them at the polls. What about opposition from more radical elements? The Founding Fathers had sought to protect the rights of small minorities as well as large, of tiny sects, rebellious movements, individual dissenters. They had bequeathed this protection in the checks and balances and in the Bill of Rights, and they and their successors had institutionalized that protection by allowing dissenters recourse to the judges, who were expected to be aloof, protected by lifetime tenure from the gusts of intolerance and passion that swept the populace.

Toward “seditionists,” draft obstructionists, and the like, a conservative Supreme Court took a hard line during wartime. In the Schenck case Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke for the entire Court in upholding Charles T. Schenck’s conviction for mailing impassioned anti-draft letters to draftees. “The most stringent protection of free speech,” Holmes wrote, “would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” But Holmes set a stern test for future restrictions on First Amendment liberties. “The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight….”

Eugene Debs fared no better than Schenck, however, under this wartime test. Holmes spoke for the Court in sustaining Debs’s conviction for obstructing the recruiting service in the socialist leader’s now famous Canton speech. Privately Holmes seemed defensive about his position. Referring to a “lot of jaw about free speech,” he wrote his friend Sir Frederick Pollock about “people who pitched into the Court for sending Debs to prison.” He hoped that Wilson would pardon him “and some other poor devils with whom I have more sympathy.” He went on: “The greatest bores in the world are the come-outers who are cocksure of a dozen nostrums. The dogmatism of a little education is hopeless.”

Jacob Abrams, a Russian emigrant, was sentenced under the Espionage Act to twenty years’ imprisonment for throwing down from a loft in the garment district some leaflets urging workers to produce no arms for American intervention in Russia at a time when Americans were not at war with Russians. The Court held that the necessary result of this incitement was to hamper the war with Germany. Holmes and Brandeis dissented. Abrams’s action was only indirect, Holmes argued; there was no clear and present danger in the publication of such a “silly leaflet.” Holmes concluded with words that would become etched in American constitutional history:

“But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market…. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment….” What about free speech when the.nation was not at war? The “red scare” of 1919, coming on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and a rash of communist uprisings elsewhere in Europe, left a scar on the popular mind that lasted well into the twenties and later. Extremism had fed on extremism; alarming labor actions like the Boston police strike, the furious factional quarrels among communists and between communists and socialists, and the bombings, had been matched by the reckless arrests and imprisonments, mass deportations, and demands by such as Billy Sunday that “wild-eyed Socialists and I.W.W.’s” be stood up before firing squads.

Amid the whipped-up fear and hysteria, each side stereotyped the other and lost any capacity to discriminate. Fanatics placed or mailed bombs that mainly hurt the poor and vulnerable—one mail bomb blew off the hands of a Southern senator’s maid—while missing their targets; Tennessee’s Senator Kenneth McKellar wanted to send American radicals to penal colonies in the middle of the Pacific, and South Carolina’s James F. Byrnes asked federal help to thwart an alleged plot of communists to foment a black uprising in the South. The New York State Assembly denied their seats to five socialists who obviously had chosen the democratic electoral process over “red rebellion.”

In the postwar hysteria Benjamin Gitlow, a left-wing socialist, had been arrested and convicted under New York’s Criminal Anarchy Act of 1902 for writing pamphlets that urged proletarian “struggle.” The Court upheld his conviction, Holmes and Brandeis dissenting. Holmes and Brandeis agreed with the majority on one crucial point—that the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment was part of the “liberty” of the Fourteenth Amendment and thus guaranteed against state infringement. The dissenters, moreover, saw no clear and present danger in Gitlow’s pamphlet. Incitement? Holmes asked in response to the Court’s depiction of the pamphlet. “Every idea is an incitement.” He added: “If in the long run the beliefs expressed in proletarian dictatorship are destined to be accepted by the dominant forces in the community, the only meaning of free speech is that they should be given their chance and have their way.” And in the Schwimmer case, upholding the right of a pacifist to become naturalized as a United States citizen, he reminded the Court that the most vital principle of the Constitution was that of free thought, including freedom for the thought “we hate.”

Still, this was only the loyal opposition speaking. The compact majority on the Court, under Taft’s unifying leadership, turned out decision after decision against dissent—or at least against dissenters. To some it seemed odd that a Court so clearly representing conservative thought in the country, so clearly committed to laissez-faire and against governmental regulation, should crumble so easily when government attacked individual liberty to dissent. The High Bench seemed far more devoted to property rights than to civil liberties. This view was bottomed on a major and very articular premise—that in America’s hierarchy of liberties, economic liberty stood at the top. Faith in Algerism was still running strong in the 1920s.

However thwarted by their minority status, the dissenters found other ways to influence political opinion and action. Holmes and Brandeis and their numerous political friends such as the La Follettes, former law clerks, intellectual correspondents, and faithful acolytes constituted a powerhouse of ideas, criticisms, ruminations, explorations, and proposals. Brandeis and Holmes struck sparks off each other; Brandeis wrote Felix Frankfurter of Harvard Law School almost every day, passing on political and judicial gossip, asking for legal and other information, and often suggesting ideas, proposals, and comments for Frankfurter in turn to pass on to the New Republic or—later—the New York World. Through Frankfurter also, Brandeis made his private political views known to a wider circle. The justice paid his young associate several thousand dollars a year to help him work for causes they both favored.

Holmes and Brandeis were tourist attractions on the High Court, in the little Capitol room in which the Court still met—the former with his swath of white hair, mustachios, and imperial presence; the latter with his “piercing blue eyes,” abundant gray hair, and creased cheeks, looking, according to one of his clerks, “like a combination of Hebrew prophet and Abraham Lincoln.” But even between the two of them there was a division in the intellectual powerhouse. Holmes did not share Brandeis’s almost undiscriminating opposition to “bigness.” Holmes’s approach to free speech was based on claims of utility rather than of morality, in Philippa Strum’s words, while “Brandeis saw free speech as an end as well as a means,” and believed in it as an absolute truth, along with his insistence upon experimentation. Agreed in practice on most legal questions, the two men differed on key issues of principle and philosophy.

Nor did left-liberal thinkers outside the Court achieve much intellectual unity. Philosophers, historians, and economists seemed more interested in perfecting their crafts than in trying to match the brilliant innovations of the progressive era or, in the European fashion, to frame comprehensive doctrines that could undergird political programs. Vernon Parrington worked on the third volume of his architectonic Main Currents in American Thought, which he would never complete. Thorstein Veblen, a founding member of the New School for Social Research in New York, had fled from the “higher learning in America” that he had derided in 1918 only to see some of his work popularized and cheapened. Neither man would outlive the decade. Charles and Mary Beard published a best-selling history of the United States. Walter Lippmann, writing first for the New Republic and then for the New York World, had moved by the late 1920s so far toward the lively political center that after the World was sold off to Scripps-Howard, he was offered jobs by William Randolph Hearst, Roy Howard, the New York Times, and the Republican New York Herald-Tribune; Lippmann chose the Trib.

Certainly no creed arose in the 1920s to challenge Sumner’s Social Darwinism or Herbert Hoover’s Individualism; no radical movement or party arose that could mobilize popular support in the fashion that the Republican party did. While the weakness of the left was partly political—the socialists, for example, were unable truly to engage with the “masses”—the failure was primarily intellectual. Few demanded of Hoover how far he would go if he really believed that everyone should be given the chance to develop “the best with which he has been endowed in heart and mind.” If life chances were to be equalized, if everyone, in Hoover’s words, was to be given an equal place at the starting line, where would that starting line be established? Who would provide the “life chances”; only one’s parents or employers, or also schools, literacy projects, vocational programs, health and welfare agencies—in short, government?

“Equality of opportunity” was becoming the catchword of corporate conservatism—its formula for combining liberty and equality. But how much genuine equality was implied in this slogan, and what kind, and when? How much liberty; not only of property but of speech, ideas, dissent?

CHAPTER 15

The Commercialized Culture

MORE THAN ANY OTHER decade since the Civil War, the 1920s quickly settled into the American memory as a distinctive era in the nation’s history. Perhaps the reason was simply that the years seemed clearly bracketed by the coming of Harding and the economic crisis under Hoover. Or perhaps it was because the decade was studded by events that took on enormous symbolic importance even though they appeared later as of little historical significance. Unlike the first dozen years of the century, which would be remembered as the age of muckraking, TR, and the Square Deal, or of the second decade—the New Freedom, Wilson, the war—the 1920s seemed to have had no shape, no hero in the presidency, no long-run impact.

Yet the twenties would become the most unforgettable of decades, the most sentimentalized and scorned, evoked and rejected. America could never quite get the era out of its hair. It began to apply labels to the decade even before it was over.

It was, first and last, the Dollar Decade. Real national income soared during the period; real earnings of workers—at a time of relative price stability—rose sharply; millionaires multiplied. From its cornucopia the huge American workshop showered goods onto eager buyers. Industrial production almost doubled between the recession year of 1921 and the boom year of 1929. Spending skyrocketed—on cars, telephones, cigarette lighters, oil furnaces, fresh fruit and vegetables from distant parts. The smell of money hung in the air. A big electric sign blinked out the message over New York’s Columbus Circle: YOU SHOULD HAVE $10,000 AT THE AGE OF 30; $25,000 AT THE AGE OF 40; $50,000 AT 50.

It was the Age of Ballyhoo, with enormous promotion of prizefights, football contests, parlor games, movie stars—the age of fads, crimes, trials, Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, Mah-Jongg and crossword puzzles, Red Grange and Bobby Jones, the marriage of Gloria Swanson to a marquis and the funeral of Rudolph Valentino, which was promoted as heavily as an opening night. The winds of publicity blew capriciously: the slow and closely followed death of one man, Floyd Collins, in a Kentucky cave-in won a three-column headline from the New York Times, while the deaths of fifty-three miners in a North Carolina cave-in a month later attracted only routine notice. Thousands craned their necks as Shipwreck Kelly sat on a Baltimore flagpole for twenty-three days and seven hours; while the morbid watched, marathon dancers shuffled night and day, day and night, in an agony of fatigue.

It was the Jazz Age. This new music was fast, loud, feverish, exciting. A verb entered the popular vocabulary—to “jazz” or “jazz up.” The new music was all the more delicious because the establishment opposed it: jazz would drive out opera, claimed the Italian composer Mascagni; it was insane, boring, brainless, said others. It was the day of the saxophone; Mark Sullivan said a skillful player “could achieve titillating arpeggios, glissandos, every sort of musical coruscation; he could toot and he could tootle, he could blare and blast, could bleat and blat, he could chatter, he could coo.” Proclaimed Paul Whiteman: “I sincerely believe that jazz is the folk-music of the machine age.”

It was the Roaring Twenties, by which people meant flaming youth, illegal liquor, dancing the Charleston, singing the blues, joyriding in the family Wills Saint Claire, partying through the night. They also meant factories working round the clock, the booming stock market, the passion for size and speed. Above all they meant sex—petting parties, the twosome with a flask in the rumble seat, people dancing as if glued together, cheek to cheek, body to body. Women smoking, women with rouge, women abandoning corsets, women getting “blotto”—these were the big issues.

“The low-cut gowns, the rolled hose and short skirts are born of the Devil and his angels,” warned the president of the University of Florida, “and are carrying the present and future generations to chaos and destruction.”

For some, it was the worst of decades. Millions of people remained in poverty and squalor amid the boom. Countless middle-class innocents were swindled out of their life’s savings by con artists like the fabled Charles Ponzi of Boston. Tens of thousands of blacks who had migrated north found that settling in and becoming “neighbors” did little to mitigate intolerance and discrimination. Blacks were still mobbed, shot, beaten, and stabbed in riots or individual encounters. Reorganized and reinvigorated, the Ku Klux Klan under Wizards and Goblins and Kleagles sold memberships at ten dollars a head, recruiting, according to one estimate, over 4 million persons by the mid-twenties. Long after the 1920 expulsion of five socialist members of the New York State Assembly on the grounds of “disloyalty,” the anti-red and anti-radical hysteria continued to flare. Middle-class Catholics and Jews suffered more subtle kinds of discrimination, often as a result of WASP “gentlemen’s agreements.”

For some, it was the best of decades. Millions of Americans realized their dream of owning an automobile and a home. Big industry cut the hours of work, giving its employees more time with their families and for recreation. A construction boom provided laborers with jobs building highways, bridges, and skyscrapers. The consumption of entertainment—sports, films, plays, games, trials—reached new highs.

Amid this boom in money and stocks and things, one epic adventure transcended the intolerance and the self-seeking. On the evening of May 19, 1927, a twenty-five-year-old stunt flyer named Charles A. Lindbergh took off from Long Island into drizzling skies and headed out over the Atlantic. For thirty-three hours the nation held its breath. Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris unloosed a flood of relief, joy, and ballyhoo. He was young and lean and tousle-haired and modest. President Coolidge sent a cruiser to fetch him back, commissioned him a colonel, presented him with the Congressional Medal of Honor. New York dumped 1,800 tons of torn-up paper on his triumphal procession. Streets and schools were named for him. Nor did the adulation cease. Hero-worshippers packed the roads around his New Jersey farm on weekends; laundries kept his shirts for souvenirs; medals, tributes, dollars were showered on him.

Why? For years men had been flying the Atlantic, in both directions; Lindbergh’s distinction was only to be the first to do it alone. The explanation was simple, wrote Frederick Lewis Allen as the decade came to an end. “A disillusioned nation fed on cheap heroics and scandal and crime was revolting against the low estimate of human nature which it had allowed itself to entertain.” The flyer seemed to be a modern Galahad. He “did not accept the moving-picture offers that came his way, he did not sell testimonials, did not boast, did not get himself involved in scandal, conducted himself with unerring taste—and was handsome and brave withal. The machinery of ballyhoo was ready and waiting to lift him up where every eye could see him.”

The flight was a triumph of individual daring and enterprise; it was also the “climax of the co-operative effort of an elaborately interlocked technology,” noted John W. Ward. In pinning the Distinguished Flying Cross on Lindbergh, President Coolidge expressed his delight that the flyer, who liked to use the term “we,” gave equal credit to his plane—for which, Coolidge asserted, “more than 100 separate companies furnished materials, parts or service in its construction.”

This “silent partner,” declared the President, “represented American genius and industry.”

THE WORKSHOP OF EDUCATION

Soon Lindbergh’s portrait was adorning thousands of school classrooms, side by side with Washington and Lincoln, Edison and Ford. It was a tribute to Lindy’s enterprise and heroism that he was admitted to the pantheon of portraiture, for even small changes such as this were not made lightly in the nation’s schools. The elementary school was one of the most immobile institutions in America.

Exploring the work of the seventh grade in Muncie, Indiana, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd noted that reading, writing, arithmetic, language, spelling, drawing, music, and geography, which had comprised the essential curriculum of that grade in 1890, still did so thirty-four years later, though civic training, history and civics, and manual arts for boys and home economics for girls had been added.

Nor had the life of the school changed much in those thirty-four years. “The school, like the factory, is a thoroughly regimented world,” reported the Lynds. “Immovable seats in orderly rows fix the sphere of activity of each child. For all, from the timid six-year-old entering for the first time to the most assured high school senior, the general routine is much the same. Bells divide the day into periods. For the six-year-olds the periods are short (fifteen to twenty-five minutes) and varied….” They were free to move about except during “recitation,” but as they grew older “the taboo upon physical activity becomes stricter, until by the third or fourth year practically all movement is forbidden except marching from one set of seats to another” and brief exercise.

The teachers of Muncie children also provided continuity. They were predominantly women brought up in Indiana; in Middletown, as in the nation, the percentage of male teachers had dropped by more than half in two generations. All were high school graduates, but less than half had attended college or even “normal school.” They shared little in Muncie community life, much less any broader one. Middletown, the Lynds discovered, paid the people to whom it entrusted its children about what it paid retail clerks, and otherwise rather ignored them.

The nation’s high schools gave promise in the 1920s of turbulence and change, if only as a result of skyrocketing numbers of youths entering secondary school. Enrollments in the four public high school years doubled during the 1920s, from 2.2 million in 1920 to 4.4 million ten years later. Immense high school buildings were overflowing within a few years of construction. The buildings themselves “reflected the ideology of mid-1920s prosperity and power,” Edward Krug has observed. “Massive and overwhelming on the outside, coldly ostentatious on the inside, they fit well the impersonal dignity of institutions that daily processed several thousand students with efficiency and dispatch.” Behind the school explosion lay major social trends: rising middle-class and business stress on education as the key to success, lessened child labor in industry since 1910, and, to some degree, tougher school attendance laws. Still, for every student enrolled in high schools in 1920, two teenagers were not.

Out of these teeming numbers in school rose the image of flaming youth. Not only in college but in high school the “Wild Young People” proceeded to shock their elders—even more so by charging that the “older generation,” as one of the self-proclaimed wild ones said, “had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us.” The elders—especially the educators—hunted for scapegoats: drink, lurid magazines and novels, the sensationalist press, films like The Mad Whirl, Sinners in Silk, Mad Hour, Unguarded Women, A Perfect Flapper. An Illinois high school teacher blamed jazz for loose speech, morals, and dress; Wisconsin county superintendents condemned it by formal vote. Conservative students at the University of Minnesota, blaming improper dancing, passed out cards to offenders: “We do not dance cheek to cheek, shimmy, or dance other extreme dances. You must not.”

It was a picture of wild abandon, untrammeled sex, unabashed self-indulgence. It led to even wilder expectations. “Institutions everywhere are in flux,” wrote Miriam Van Waters. “In morals the old is not dead and the new is not strong enough to stand,” as “youth dances into the streets, eager and untaught….” In fact the picture was wildly exaggerated. Behind the hullabaloo, conservative attitudes in secondary education in the 1920s hardly changed. The schools of the 1920s were many times more effective as bulwarks of the existing order than as challengers to it.

“As a public agency,” wrote an educator early in the decade, “the schools of this democracy have in every age reflected the current political and social philosophy, the dominant social theory and aim of the day…. That aim today is social efficiency through mass conservation. Consequently, layman and educator alike are no longer defining education in terms of personal accomplishment or political rights, but in terms of social necessity, social efficiency, social conservation, social adjustment.” In practice this meant playing up patriotism and the flag, assimilating and homogenizing immigrants and other students who were “different,” teaching them not only English but “American” English, emphasizing vocational education as preparation for practical work, trimming down the classics, both ancient and later, in favor of courses that could lead directly into the world of business, discouraging dissent in thought, speech, or action.

Business exerted influence not by a heavy hand from the top circles of corporate capitalism—education was too decentralized and locally controlled for that—but through a widely shared perception that schools should teach youth how to get ahead in the practical world. The Indiana and Muncie educational leaders, the Lynds noted, stressed that history should teach reverence for law and for private property, that other social studies should emphasize respect for “fundamental institutions of society: private property, guaranteed privileges, contracts, personal liberty, right to establish private enterprises.” A solid education, said Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, would teach Americans to lose their fear of stocks, Wall Street, banks, and large corporations, so that even women would find that “the symbols of the ticker tape are not Sanskrit after all.”

Few worried that education for “social efficiency” or for “life adjustment” could be profoundly hostile to the intellect—hostile to the free play of the mind, exploration of new ideas, vigorous controversy over fundamentals, learning for its own sake. There were few protests against anti-intellectualism, even within the teaching community. Elmer Ellis of the University of Missouri argued for “making modern life comprehensible to the individual so that he can act intelligently in relation to it,” but far more typical was the New York committee of principals and teachers who complained that certain textbooks were written from the point of view “of a critical historian” rather than from the point of view of teachers.

Nor was there a genuine youth revolt in the twenties, or even a youth movement. Although countercultural philosophy was available in the works of Randolph Bourne and. others, most young people, as usual, reflected the conventional attitudes of their parents. “The image that teases the historical imagination,” according to Paula Fass, “is of a rebellious youth, iconoclastic, irreverent, frivolous, lost to social responsibility, and even more lost to traditional values and beliefs.” It was in fact “a portrait carefully constructed by contemporaries in the twenties—in the creative literature, popular journals, and volumes of social analysis by educators, judges, and poets.”

College youth had an even more distorted reputation than high school students. After all, college was where flaming youth really congregated, with its raccoon coats, hip-pocket flasks, fraternity parties, rumble-seat petting, ear-splitting jazz. But here too the noisy, gaudy façade cloaked the reality of apathy, a dash of cynicism, a touch of revolt, and a structure of conservative Republicanism.

Like the high school students, the college generation in the twenties seemed lively and rebellious in large part because of sheer numbers. The number of men students receiving bachelor’s degrees during the decade doubled; the number of women graduates, after rising steadily since 1890, tripled in the same decade. But in general, the students seemed to bring their home lives and attitudes with them. They joined fraternities and sororities dominated by the same middle-class virtues they had learned at their parents’ knees. “We are all more or less self-centered residents of Main Street,” said a Trinity College editor. Fraternities, with their boosterism and their absorption in athletics and socializing, were easy way-stations to postgraduate membership in the Kiwanis and Rotary Club. College youth read the Saturday Evening Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Cosmopolitan, just as their parents did; they also read Sinclair Lewis, and perhaps even glimpsed their futures in Babbitt.

“George F.” Babbitt Jr. “is going to college,” said an Ohio State University editor, “and he is even more secure in college than in the world of business, if we are to believe our eyes and ears and the college papers.”

Politically, college students outside the South were heavily Republican. A large, moderately representative poll of students in 120 institutions in October 1924 gave Coolidge 30,000 “votes” to fewer than 14,000 for Davis and 7,500 for La Follette. Women were no less conservative than men. Coolidge, who as Vice-President had called eastern women’s colleges hotbeds of radicalism and Bolshevism, “carried” Wellesley by 76 percent of the vote, Smith by 73, Vassar and Bryn Mawr each by 54. La Follette made a decent showing only at Barnard.

College students in the twenties, on the other hand, were by no means lacking in a measure of idealism, or at least old-fashioned liberalism. On issues that did not clearly affect their future pocketbooks they could take advanced positions. They were often tolerant of dissent, intolerant of intolerance as embodied in the Ku Klux Klan, protective of civil liberties and academic freedom. But they saw little linkage between such issues and party politics. “The only subjects that are getting any attention from the ‘political minded,’” observed an editor at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1926, “are Prohibition, Birth Control and the Bible Issue, none of which are in the least related to politics or political wisdom.” The simmering issue of racial justice was largely ignored, except when a campus incident produced a quick but fleeting expression of concern.

On the fringes of campus life, small groups of students spoke up for socialism or liberalism or black rights or academic liberty or—especially in the immediate post-World War I years—pacifism and internationalism and disarmament. Here and there a student editor or group might speak up against United States policy in Latin America or the efforts of an American Legion post to get a normal-school teacher fired for radical views. But college students formed no general political movement, headed toward no confrontation with their teachers or their elders. There was, it is true, one issue on which concerned students were relatively consistent—the supreme issue in America of individual liberty. Thus, when the New York State legislature proposed to purge socialist and communist teachers from the schools, an editor of the Cornell Sun demanded: “Has the panic caused by Bolshevism and socialism so befuddled the college graduate [in the legislature] that he can urge the investigation of the beliefs of every member of the Cornell faculty, and the discharge of every man whose views do not coincide with his own? Since when, may we ask, has any group of citizens been granted the power of determining what a man may think in order that he may secure a livelihood?” But such occasional challenges as these, in the 1920s, merely reinforced the views of those who chose to believe that the colleges were hotbeds of subversion as well as sex.

Most college youth of the 1920s had shared educational experiences outside the classroom. They were graduates of American Protestantism, the products of Sunday school and church pews, of YMCAs and YWCAs, during the years when the Protestant Establishment had been at the height of its numbers, momentum, and apparent influence. Protestantism encompassed diverse tendencies—this was part of its strength—both theological conservatism and the powerful Social Gospel movement, both old-fashioned fundamentalist orthodoxy and liberal reformism. It was learning to live with a Roman Catholic community that was developing the “largest private educational system in the world.”

Having developed historically in intimate embrace with capitalist ideals and institutions, dynamic Protestantism might have seemed poised at the start of the twenties for another great period of expansion. Yet by 1921, notes Winthrop Hudson, “much of the contagious enthusiasm exhibited by the churches in the prewar years had begun to be dissipated. By 1925 the usual indices of institutional strength—church attendance, Sunday school enrollment, missionary giving—showed a downward trend that was to continue for at least a decade.” Perhaps nothing better indicated Protestantism’s loss of verve and idealism during the twenties than the fact that 2,700 students applied for foreign missionary service in 1920, 252 eight years later.

Most serious of all for the Protestant churches in the 1920s, according to Sydney Ahlstrom, “was a pervasive thinning out of evangelical substance, a tendency to identify religion with the business-oriented values of the American way of life.” Much of the leadership of the church, instead of countering the conservatism, commercialism, and complacency of the decade, succumbed to these tendencies.

The most glaring sign of the churches’ surrender to the commercial spirit was the effort to “merchandise” religion. In part, this was due to the need to compete with films and radio, with the automobile that made whole families mobile on weekends, with burgeoning entertainments and recreation; in part it was due to the role of businessmen in promoting and financing churches; most of all, probably, it was due to the prevailing commercial ethos of the twenties. Ministers “are salesmen with a wonderfully fine ‘line’ to sell their congregations,” a Methodist paper editorialized. “Selling Religion—that is the only business of the Church,” advised the clerk of the Presbyterian General Assembly. Promoters and preachers concocted teasing slogans and sermon topics: “Worship Increases Your Efficiency” or “Business Success and Religion Go Together.”

By far the most successful promoter of Protestantism was Bruce Barton, onetime muckraker and radical, later a sensationally successful Manhattan advertising executive and publicist for the Republican party. In 1925, he published The Man Nobody Knows, a portrait of Jesus Christ as master salesman, vigorous executive, and creator of the best twelve-member management team of all time. Critics charged that Barton ignored Christ’s divinity and even remade Jesus in the author’s own image, but the work headed the nonfiction best-seller lists for many months. Barton was in fact a sophisticated and thoughtful conservative, and The Man Nobody Knows was by no means a crass defense of capitalism; rather, in Otis Pease’s words, its “principal thrust was to urge business-minded Americans, concerned with success, to model their lives on a man who, Barton insisted, exemplified humaneness, sociability, service to others, the leadership to inspire ordinary people to rise above themselves, a capacity to love everyone as persons….” But these finer points tended to become lost in the decade’s ballyhoo.

There was little protest against conservatism and commercialism in the churches, except on the part of a few liberals and radicals in the theological schools and the religious press. No strong movement appeared on the religious left. Opposition, on the contrary, rose on the “rural right” from the old fundamentalist, revivalist sectors of Protestantism. The new fundamentalist militancy in the 1920s took two distinct forms, according to Ahlstrom: an effort to stop public schools and colleges from teaching scientific theories thought to be contrary to traditional interpretations of the Bible, and an effort to halt liberal theology and critical scholarship within the churches. Protestant unity soon was shattered by bitter fundamentalist-modernist disputes.

Fundamentalism in the twenties embraced some ministers of great congregations in the North, not merely the rural South and West, but the movement came to be characterized—and caricatured—by some of its more spectacular leaders. Billy Sunday, a former professional baseball player, had become a super-evangelist who could attract a million-and-a-half attendance in a ten-week campaign. He also denounced “hireling” ministers who forgot Jesus Christ in their effort to please their liberal parishioners. While Sunday had reached the peak of his influence before the war, both his revival rhetoric and his rescuing of the fallen at two dollars a soul cast their spell over the evangelists of the 1920s. The most unforgettable of these was Aimee Semple McPherson, proprietor of the Angelus Temple in Los Angeles. Presented in her $1.5 million temple, attired in virginal white, McPherson made a continuous wedding service of entertainment, commerce, and evangelism. “There is no way to understand how a jejune and arid pulpit has become a dynamic of literally National proportions,” said a rival Los Angeles minister, “but to hear and see the woman.” And that was just what Aimee Semple McPherson wanted.

What the modernist-fundamentalist conflict needed in the 1920s was a drama with a morality theme, and this was provided by the trial of John Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925, for teaching evolution in defiance of the laws of the state. Over one hundred newspaper journalists telegraphing 2 million words of newspaper reportage brought an audience of tens of millions into the morality play. Eagerly they followed the principals and the scenario: young Scopes, struggling through his first year of high school teaching; Clarence Darrow, the famed attorney for the defense; William Jennings Bryan, who had helped draft an anti-evolution resolution passed by the Florida legislature; and then the tragicomic encounter between Darrow and Bryan, as the attorney led the old Commoner into detailing an absurdly literal interpretation of the Bible. Day after day, in killing heat, the ordeal continued, with Scopes found guilty—and Bryan found dead a few days later.

Not reported was one arresting aspect of the “monkey trial”; the whole issue had arisen in Dayton because a group of local businessmen wanted to stage an event that would spark the town’s economic development. Even the most spectacular ideological confrontation of the 1920s had not escaped the commercial taint.

The Press as Entertainment

The one hundred or more newspeople who reported the Scopes trial were not a high number for the coverage of courtroom dramas in the 1920s. The Hall-Mills murder trial—the bodies of a minister and his church’s choir leader had been found together under a New Jersey crab-apple tree—attracted twice as many reporters. The New York Times printed 528,000 words on the trial and 435 pictures; the New York American, 347,000 words and 2,691 pictures; the Daily News, 223,000 words and 2,962 pictures. For the Times, half a million words on the trial was almost literally all the news fit to print.

Doubtless the press felt it deserved such self-indulgence, for it had ballyhooed the case into sensationalism in the first place. Indeed, after a grand jury had refused to indict, a tabloid had gotten the case reopened on the basis of flimsy evidence, and then reaped circulation benefits by its avid coverage of the subsequent trial. The press corps at the later murder trial of a corset salesman included Mary Roberts Rinehart and Billy Sunday, and D. W. Griffith and Peggy Joyce did special interpretations. It received more play than the sinking of the Titanic; the press assigned 120 reporters to this case, “more than represented all the American newspapers and news agencies in the Far East,” Silas Bent observed.

Sensationalism was nothing new in the American press, but the 1920s was indeed the age of ballyhoo. The reason was in part economic. For half a century the newspapers had undergone rising costs and circulation wars. The indispensable Linotype machine now cost $18,000. Newsprint had soared from 2 1/4 cents to 6 cents a pound during the war. Printers’ and pressmen’s wages had doubled since 1910, to $50 a week during the twenties. But newspapers were still selling for the smallest coin of the realm. Until recently, Walter Lippmann wrote in Public Opinion, the public had accustomed itself “to paying two and even three cents on weekdays, and on Sundays, for an illustrated encyclopedia and vaudeville entertainment attached, we have screwed ourselves up to paying a nickel or even a dime.”

More than ever this cost-price gap was being filled by advertising, which by the 1920s was generating two-thirds of the newspaper revenue and, in metropolitan newspapers, appropriating three columns for every two of reading matter. The cost of advertising in English language newspapers tripled between 1915 and 1929, amounting to $860 million in the latter year. Earlier, Ivory Soap had boasted, “It Floats”; now Maxwell was urging installment buyers of autos to “Pay As You Ride”; the railroads were exhorting travelers to “See America First”; Listerine was warring on halitosis and Life Buoy Soap on “B.O.”

In the frenzied search for advertising and hence for circulation, the newspapers offered entertainment and diversion—scandal, crime, fashion notes, puzzles, society gossip, recipes, beauty hints, astrology, chess, whist, bridge, gardening, palmistry, advice to the lovelorn. “The newspaper offers a mart wherein the commodity factory may shriek its wares, and exploit its own workers, who spend more and more of their surplus on newly-created wants,” Silas Bent wrote during mid-decade. “The newspaper offers to the literate but uneducated workers an escape, an entertainment, a thrill, an opiate.”

Nothing combined all these qualities more graphically than the comics, which had originated earlier as day-to-day gags but came into their own as continuity strips at the start of the twenties. Millions followed the lives and times of Andy Gump, Toots and Casper, Skeezix, Winnie Winkle, Barney Google, Tillie the Toiler, Moon Mullins, and Blondie. Accident-prone, crisis-ridden, vociferous, funny, they let their eager public identify itself with their family squabbles and personal foibles. “If historians of the next century were to rely upon the comic strip,” Stephen Becker has observed, “they would conclude that we were a peaceful lot of ruminant burghers from 1920 to 1929, with only flashes of inspired insanity, and that our social conflicts and national crises were settled by family conferences at the dinner table.”

No ideological pattern emerged from the zany characters and their doings. Cartoonist Harold Gray’s conservatism, individualism, and philosophy that “only the good have rights” expressed itself in Little Orphan Annie’s millionaire protector Daddy Warbucks, but most of the comic characters of the 1920s are notable only for their human vanities and failings. The comics represented commercialism more than conservatism. Publishers knew that the comic strips were by far the most read of all their features, and their artists were among the best paid of all who worked for newspapers.

More than ever before, the big papers were big business, sharing the powers and vicissitudes of big business. Newspaper proprietors, it was said, had to be “reelected” every day, as customers casually chose among a dozen competing papers at a newsstand. One response to “destructive competition” was consolidation. Strong newspapers swallowed up weak ones; morning and evening papers combined, thus keeping a single plant running twenty-four hours; papers merged to keep or gain the precious Associated Press franchise. Consolidation intensified during the war years and continued into the twenties.

The monarch of mergers in the 1920s was surely Frank A. Munsey. A Horatio Alger figure who had started out at thirteen as a clerk, he rose to fame and riches by buying, selling, merging, or discontinuing a large number of newspapers. After buying the New York Press and merging it with the Sun, a penny paper, he poured $2 million in it by 1920 without much effect on circulation. He then bought the Herald, a venerable paper that with the Sun had set high standards in American journalism. After neither turned a profit, Munsey eyed the Tribune, another excellent and unprofitable organ. When the Reid family refused to sell this living legacy of their late father, Munsey abruptly sold them the Herald. The result was the Herald Tribune.

Munsey did not sentimentalize over the seven New York dailies or the eleven magazines that he merged, sold, killed off, or renamed. “The same law of economics applies in the newspaper business that operates in all other important business to-day,” he said. “Small units in any line are no longer competitive factors.” The mergers that made newspapers scarcer made Munsey richer, to the tune of $20 million.

At the start of the twenties, Upton Sinclair threw down his gauntlet before the working press. “The Brass Check is found in your pay-envelope every week—you who write and print and distribute our newspapers and magazines. The Brass Check is the price of your shame—you who take the fair body of truth and sell it in the market place, who betray the virgin hopes of mankind into the loathsome brothel of Big Business.”

Strong words, but Walter Lippmann granted that Sinclair spoke for a large body of Americans. How answer such a charge? Lippmann could hardly defend the accuracy of the press, for he and a colleague were just completing a test of the New York Times’s coverage of the Russian Revolution and concluding that the “news about Russia is a case of seeing not what was” but rather what reporters and editors “wished to see.” But Lippmann would not blame the big publishers as big businessmen. The problem lay elsewhere—in the fact that news and truth were by no means the same thing. The press could report only palpable events, “like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision.” It could not report underlying, tangled, “social truth.” That could be done only through a system of intelligence, a machinery of knowledge.

Others traced the failure to economics and technology. “The industrialization of the news gathering process,” according to a recent study, “had inevitably required further and further division of labor. From a colonial institution in which one man wrote, edited and printed the entire newspaper, the press had developed into a complex operation in which the facts in any one story were transmitted from one person to another in an expanding chain. An overseas story might go from reporter to rewrite man to editor of the originating paper in the United States and thence through wire or syndicate editors to hundreds of other papers for handling by still other rewrite men and editors. The process provided limitless possibilities for honing and focusing news, but it also made possible a good deal of misunderstanding and re-interpretation.”

Perhaps the critical change had taken place in the nature of public opinion itself. Trying to collect news from a chaos of sights and sounds, reporters lacked a shaping framework in which to conduct their work. In earlier days, at least in their political reporting, they had operated in a party environment and worked for partisan newspapers. Public opinion was largely party opinion. Parties were already declining in the 1920s under the impact of the anti-party reforms of earlier in the century, however, and the number of party-affiliated newspapers had dropped dramatically—from 801 Republican and 732 Democratic dailies in 1899 to 505 Republican and 434 Democratic dailies by 1929. More party independence did not free the press from political or economic controls, but simply made reporters dependent on other influences and moorings.

To some degree, publicity agents filled the party gap—a clear sign, Lippmann noted, that “the facts of modern life do hot spontaneously take a shape in which they can be known. They must be given a shape by somebody.” Also interpreting events were syndicated political columnists, who came into their own during the twenties. Arthur Brisbane’s column “Today” was syndicated by Hearst’s Washington Times. Mark Sullivan, Walter Winchell, and Will Rogers appeared in scores of papers; Heywood Broun’s “It Seems to Me” appeared in the New York Tribune and then in the New York World until he clashed with his employers and moved to the New York Telegram. And when the World disappeared into the World-Telegram in 1931, the dispossessed Walter Lippmann moved to the Herald Tribune, where for years he would help “shape the news.”

Henry Luce, recently of Yale, had his own ideas as to how to sculpture the news. With his friend Britton Hadden, he founded Time in 1923, with a prospectus claiming that Americans were on the whole poorly informed. Luce and Hadden proposed to offer a blend of fact and opinion, on the premise that anyone who thought he was objective was deceiving himself. Luce urged newspapers to drop their separate editorial page and feature “intelligent criticism, representation and evaluation” of leaders. Time itself had no editorial page; critics held that all its pages were editorial. Luce believed in free enterprise, free speech, hard competition, and the “American Way.” Even more conservative, at least on economic issues, was the Reader’s Digest, which began in 1922 as a pocket-sized monthly composed of articles condensed from other publications. Both these journals ended the decade with sizable circulations; in 1930, Time Inc. spawned Fortune, a monthly for affluent businessmen.

To such publications there was, however, no counterpart on the left, no substantial adversary press. The Yiddish-language Daily Forward had a decent circulation, but most socialist and communist journals struggled through the gay twenties. The trade union press consisted mainly of provincial, craft-oriented papers. At the start of World War I, the United States could boast of more than 1,200 foreign-language newspapers, 500 of them printed in German; New York alone had ten German-language newspapers. But many German-language presses were stopped during the war, never to run again. Socialist papers such as the Milwaukee Leader and the New York Call were denied the use of the mails; the Leader’s editor, Victor Berger, was barred from his seat in Congress; the editors of Philadelphia’s Tageblatt went to jail for criticizing the war effort.

The native Indian newspapers, which under the leadership of the Cherokee Advocate had thrived during the previous century, entered a dark age. The Advocate’s Cherokee-language type was handed over to the Smithsonian, and its press sold as junk. Other journals such as the American Indian Magazine printed work by leading Indian writers but lasted only a few years. A number of black newspapers, on the other hand, flourished during the twenties; even the radical Chicago Defender had a circulation of 93,000, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Crisis, the organ of the NAACP, enjoyed a marked influence. Northern black papers were said to have helped inspire the continuing Negro migration to Northern cities.

Nonetheless, all these minority or dissenting papers combined—and, in contrast to mainstream papers, they did not seek to combine—could in no way be considered to constitute a strong adversary or opposition press.

The major challenge to the established press lay outside the press, in an innocuous little box that was showing up in more and more American parlors. This was the radio, the “Furniture That Talks,” as comedian Fred Allen dubbed it.

“I have in mind,” twenty-five-year-old David Sarnoff had written in 1916, “a plan of development which would make radio a ‘household utility’ in the same sense as the piano or phonograph…. The receiver can be designed in the form of a simple ‘Radio Music Box’ and arranged for several different wave lengths.” Five years later, after becoming general manager of the new Radio Corporation of America, Sarnoff persuaded RCA to enter radio broadcasting. Five years after that, he helped launch the National Broadcasting Company.

Everything turned on that box in the parlor. By 1922 sales of radio sets and parts had reached $60 million; within two more years sales were almost six times that figure. Stations quickly proliferated—28 were licensed in 1921; by July 1922 this number had swelled to 430. A whole new industry was getting under way. Radio magazines appeared with broadcasting schedules. Technology, programming, professionalism all improved. At first the stations tended to feature European classical music. Then they discovered the swinging music of New Orleans, called jazz or “race music.” Because the saxophone was considered an immoral instrument, this kind of music was not to be found on the airwaves until the mid-1920s—and by then the listener could hear little else.

Radio had a particular impact on the nation’s farmers, a million of whom were receiving programs from five hundred stations. Some large firms like the Gurney Seed and Nursery Company in South Dakota bought not only time but whole stations. Soon the little boxes were offering religion, politics, Fibber Magee and Molly on Chicago’s WMAQ, and Henry Ford’s old-time square-dance music on Detroit’s WBZ. It was estimated that 25 million people heard Calvin Coolidge’s Inaugural Address in 1925.

The Bill of Rights forbade regulation of the press, but what about radio, which used the nation’s airwaves? The federal government, through activist Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, began to regulate radio by assigning wavelengths. Some small stations refused to stick to their allotted place, wandering instead through the radio spectrum in search of clear air. When Hoover sealed the chronically offending station of Aimee Semple McPherson, she replied with a tart telegram: “PLEASE ORDER YOUR MINIONS OF SATAN TO LEAVE MY STATION ALONE. YOU CANNOT EXPECT THE ALMIGHTY TO ABIDE BY YOUR WAVE LENGTH NONSENSE.”

Minor controversy broke out as to whether radio should be federally regulated at all, but only regulation of wavelengths could prevent chaos, and radio recognized no state boundaries. Virtually no one even raised the question of whether government should own the airwaves or control the contents of radio broadcasts, even though during the 1920s Britain under a Conservative government established the nationalized British Broadcasting Corporation. So radio was turned over to private enterprise, which inevitably competed to offer entertainment.

Entertainment as Spectatorship

The movies had a history something like that of radio. In each “a crude toy became an industry; fierce patent struggles erupted; public acceptance skyrocketed; business combinations won domination; anonymous idols exploded into fame.” There was a difference in degree of spectatorship between radio and film, however, that amounted to a difference in kind. People could interact face-to-face with stump speakers; they could heckle, applaud, boo, and hiss, and speakers could respond to these cues. Audiences could interact with actors in the “legitimate theater,” registering their feelings and even eliciting subtle responses from the stage. Radio listeners could talk among themselves, or at least turn to another wave band. But moviegoers sat in relative isolation; they could not communicate with the silent actors on the silver screen; they could not easily talk among themselves or quit the theater. Spectatorship was complete.

The earliest movies had typically been either ludicrous farces or stiffly filmed stage plays. Then films increasingly became rich in spectacle, allegory, and melodrama. The blazing power of huge battle was combined with close attention to detail in both these and domestic scenes. D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, with its pioneering film technique, was a landmark of art and of finance. Some viewers were furious over the film’s portrayal of idyllic life on an antebellum Southern plantation, villainous abolitionists, and the evils of miscegenation—and also because many of the blacks in the huge cast were played by white actors. But Griffith’s film went on making money, at the then-unheard-of price of two dollars a seat, with the producer proclaiming his audience to be the leisured elite, not the impecunious who had filled the nickelodeons.

As people demanded to see more feature films like Griffith’s, as big-name stars, better scripts, lavish sets and costumes became more expensive, the scattered film enterprises were transformed into a major industry. By 1920, studios were vast businesses, embracing real estate, production plants, towering sets, well-paid screen writers, film stock, animals, carpenters, electricians, cameras, laboratories, promoters and advertisers, and performers. As in all businesses, distribution was another huge expense, involving everything from posters and theaters to usherettes and popcorn sellers. It was also a key to domination of the whole industry.

This key was in the hands of entrepreneurial producers like Adolph Zukor. Under Zukor’s leadership, Paramount Pictures abandoned the old method of renting films to many theaters simultaneously and substituted a method of classifying picture houses. The first exclusive showing at a prestigious theater would cost more than later runs. Following lavish promotion of a new film, Zukor insisted that a theater owner who wanted it would have to take his studio’s entire year’s output. After experimenting with three kinds of pictures—artsy, star-studded, and cheap-and-quick— Zukor discovered that the films with stars were the most popular. With actors like Mary Pickford and William S. Hart, he was in a commanding position.

Prestigious films with celebrated actors and actresses required fitting movie theaters. Fifty years earlier, the cathedrals of American business had been magnificent railroad stations; now they were “movie palaces,” the legendary master of which was Samuel L. Rothafel, known to the public as “Roxy.” In the mid-twenties he built in New York City his dream show-place, modestly called the Roxy. “Three hundred plasterers were gathered to work their rococo magic on every available inch,” according to a breathless report. “The Roxy also utilized Renaissance details of gold filigree and vivid red. The rotunda was supported by twelve marble columns, and rose five stories above a magnificent oval rug which weighed over two tons, measured fifty-eight feet by forty-one feet, and cost $15,000. Amber glass windows, crystal chandeliers, and enormous urns decorated the immense 6,214-seat auditorium.” Roxy and other impresarios built strings of rococo palaces across the nation, and Roxy reached his own pinnacle with the Radio City Music Hall. Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Irving Berlin, and William Randolph Hearst were among the celebrities attending the opening night.

Titanic battles were fought to control theaters, films, and stars. Theater owners, cut off from control by impresarios like Zukor, banded together to take over film production, contracting with stars like Chaplin. Zukor responded by building some six hundred first-run theaters for Paramount, including some of the rococo cathedrals. Film artists too sought to control their own product. Griffith, Chaplin, Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks formed United Artists in 1919 to distribute their films. Each of them had a separate production unit, thus insuring their independence. United Artists survived, despite the power of the goliaths, and became a model for independent producers in later decades.

But the true czars were the producers who owned or controlled movie theaters, and America had never seen a group of entrepreneurs quite like the first generation of czars. Typically Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, with little formal education, they plunged into the American business maelstrom, sometimes running amusement parks where they converted their arcades into nickelodeons. As the movie business prospered, these producers typically built a few more theaters until they owned a chain. One of the most famous was Louis B. Mayer, who as a child had emigrated from Minsk with his Russian family in the late 1880s. He bought his first nickelodeon with his last fifty dollars, then moved up the ladder to fame and fortune. Volatile, ruthless, melodramatic, Mayer was innovative in seeking an appealing story, rather than depending on the popularity of stars.

Temperamental producers often battled with their temperamental stars. “Remember it was I who first had the vision!” Zukor said to Chaplin. “Who swept out your dirty nickelodeon? Who put in your plush seats? It was I who built your great theaters, who raised prices and made it possible for you to get large grosses for your pictures.”

As in other industries, the Hollywood studios could always fall back on mergers. Marcus Loew’s ailing Metro studio, Sam Goldwyn’s heavily indebted Goldwyn Company, and Louis Mayer’s thriving studio combined in 1924 in a lasting merger. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer billed itself “The Home of the Stars,” proving it with such big names as Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish, and Lon Chaney. Much of MGM’s success was due to a shy, talented young businessman from Brooklyn, Irving Thalberg, whose instinct for film, for the right scene, gave him the reputation of defining the quintessential “MGM film.”

But what Americans saw was not the industry but the stars, and during the twenties they were flocking to watch the mishaps of Charlie Chaplin, the acrobatics of Buster Keaton, the antics of Harold Lloyd, the licit sex appeal of Clara Bow, the brooding, heavy-lidded eyes of Theda Bara, the dark passion of Rudolph Valentino. A host of movie magazines told in intimate detail, issue after issue, of the working lives and good times and tragedies of such stars, of their romances, marriages, divorces, of their clothes, hairdos, cars. A nation of spectators watched a handful of stars.

The censors also were watching. Hollywood had taken on the flavor of sin after comedian “Fatty” Arbuckle’s involvement in the death of a starlet, the mysterious murder of director William Desmond Taylor, and Cecil B. De Mille’s Male and Female—the film version of James M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton—which had allowed a fleeting glimpse of Gloria Swanson’s breasts. Several states had passed censorship laws by 1920. More ominously, the United States Supreme Court had held that prior censorship of motion pictures was within the constitutional authority of the states. The guarantee of free opinion and speech, the Court ruled, need not encompass the profit-making business of exhibiting films.

With their usual resourcefulness, the Hollywood moguls hit upon a winning formula in the face of these threats—films that were paeans to the resistance of temptation, yet showed in lurid detail the temptations resisted. But the industry’s main defense was to form a new trade organization, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association. Chosen as first president was a man of impeccable moral and political credentials, Will H. Hays, former Postmaster General under Harding, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Presbyterian elder from Pennsylvania. Functioning as a glorified press agent, Hays managed, through speeches, articles, and committee sessions, both to placate the guardians of morality and to celebrate the role of film in American life. Although movies still depicted nudity and debauchery, with Hays at the helm the studios were able to persuade the upright that the films were purer than ever—chiefly by rewarding virtue at the end of the film.

This myth—Hollywood as virtuous—was only one of the illusions manufactured by the magical image-makers of the film industry. By the end of the decade, Hollywood had become a worldwide symbol of the lights and shadows cast on the silver screen, avidly followed by a nation of voyeurs.

Entertainment as spectatorship reached its apogee in the 1920s with the confluence of two great forces—nationwide media and professional athletics. Newspapers had been paying more and more attention to big-league baseball; a New York editor commented that “no single classification of news … sells more papers than sports,” Film and the set-piece sports event seemed made for each other, as evidenced in the Pathé and other newsreels that preceded the feature film in theaters; the feature itself might deal with a sports hero. And the graphic broadcasts of Grantland Rice, Graham McNamee, and others sometimes made the play sound better over the radio than it looked on the field.

Few aspects of American life were changing so fast as sports participation and spectatorship. During much of the nineteenth century American sports had been palpably class-oriented. The social elites, city and country, had gone in heavily for individual and often expensive recreation: riding, yachting, rowing, billiards, and later, tennis, polo, golf. The urban rich grouped together in country clubs and athletic clubs that set them apart from the sports-minded masses. The New York Athletic Club was founded in 1866, the Westchester Polo Club in the late seventies, the Amateur Athletic Union in 1888, the Intercollegiate Athletic Association in 1905. As usual, the elites had their internal squabbles. The New York Athletic Club was rent by conflict between the Old Guard, who believed in sports for sport’s sake, and an element that was suspected of using the club as a stepping-stone to high social status. Some of the old sports gaffers resigned when they lost this battle.

Middle-class men and women had shared in some upper-class sports activities, but to a limited degree. Genteel women were not expected to be physically active or participate in games; they often shunned dancing or even card-playing. The working classes, in factory and field, had more than enough exercise on the job, but they might hunt or fish, or repair to a secluded livery stable to watch a cockfight, goat fight, or “ratting”—wagering on how long it would take a dog to kill a pit full of rats. But late in the century “urbanization, technological innovations, rising per capita incomes, and the new social and cultural milieu combined in complex ways to trigger a sports revolution and a new era of American sport, ‘The Age of the Players,’” according to Benjamin Rader. The players “took the initiative in organizing, managing, and financing” the sports of the upper and middle classes. And these sports were still player-centered.

Many were still excluded from this tight circle, but the “outsiders” found points of entry or, more often, developed their own sports events. Caledonian Scots put on contests in footracing, tug-of-war, hurdling, pole-vaulting, throwing the hammer, and other games brought over from the old country. The Turner Societies held gymnastics competitions modeled after festivals in Frankfurt and other German cities. As usual, blacks encountered the worst exclusion. Marshall W. “Major” Taylor, acclaimed as the “Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World,” encountered rivals who together sought to knock him off his cycle, box him in, or attack him.

The 1920s brought, in Rader’s terms, the “age of the spectator”—the heyday of the modern sports hero, celebrated teams, big-time promoters, athletic specialization, expert coaching; in short, the triumph of mass spectator sports. This did not mean the end of participatory sport, of course. For a time, indeed, it seemed possible that hosts of new players might match the number of spectators. Over a million persons were playing tennis by the end of the decade, and 2 million had taken up golf. But the most popular sports were organized for the watchers rather than the players. Never before had sports in America offered such an array of spectacles, or been so lucrative for their promoters.

The age of the football hero began. The game in a single decade was transformed from a college pastime to a national fascination. In the first thirteen minutes of one game against Michigan, “Red” Grange scored four touchdowns for Illinois in four carries. One hundred thousand persons gathered from throughout the nation to watch Grange play his last game for Illinois in 1925. Thereafter, as a professional, he earned as much as $35,000 a game, netting himself a million dollars and enabling him to retire while still in his twenties. What Grange was to playing, Knute Rockne was to coaching. Piloting Notre Dame to football greatness, he promoted the forward pass, which broke up the old static defense formations, boosted scores, and brought new excitement to the game.

Tennis had its own hero, in the versatile stroking machine known as Big Bill Tilden. After years of tirelessly practicing the mechanics of each shot and return, he won the singles championship at Wimbledon as an unknown, and for the next six years he dominated the game. Golf too had its brilliant technician in Bobby Jones. Dubbed “Robot, the Mechanical Man of Golf,” Jones first mastered his own self-destructive temper and then perfected the loveliest swing in the game. On the links, thousands of fans pursued him, chanting “Bobby! Bobby!” between strokes.

But the hero of heroes, in part because he played in the game of games, was George Herman Ruth, Jr. He had risen to fame and fortune out of adversity: given up by his parents at the age of nine as incorrigible, raised in a Catholic reform school, he moonlighted as a bartender and bouncer in his father’s saloon during his first season on the diamond. Benefiting from the abolition of the “spitball” and the development of a more resilient baseball, he hit fifty-four home runs in 1920—twice the previous record—and batted a smashing .376 for the season. The Ruth legend was born. Guided by his personal manager Christy Walsh—“the first modern athletic business agent”—the Babe lent his name to newspaper articles, clothing, sports products, even automobiles.

There was plenty of money to go around. In Ruth’s first year with the Yankees, attendance at their games doubled, topping the 1 million mark. Through the twenties, a team could expect to take in around $10 million a year in gate receipts and concessions, of which nearly 20 percent was profit. The owners were able to build huge ballparks in the hearts of the major cities. Yankee Stadium, the “House That Ruth Built,” cost nearly $2.5 million and seated more than 60,000 spectators. City bosses and businessmen rushed to invest in this newest and most lucrative of urban franchises. It was better even than the stock market. Ruth himself picked up the rags-to-riches theme. “The great thing about this country,” he said, “is the wonderful fact that it doesn’t matter which side of the tracks you were born on, or whether you’re homeless or homely or friendless. The chance is still there….”

But for crack baseball players born on the wrong side of the color line, the chance was not there, not in the big leagues. Baseball, indeed, had an inflated reputation as the poor man’s sport. Immigrants tended to ignore the game, blacks had to play in their own league, and high ticket prices kept many poor people outside the stadium.

The fans adored Babe Ruth despite his roguish qualities—or perhaps because of them. But about the other great sports hero from the working classes, Jack Dempsey, they remained divided. The press branded him—falsely—as a draft dodger and wife-beater; churchmen denounced him as the symbol of the American relapse into “paganism.” Dempsey was in fact neither a rogue nor a villain. A shy, uneducated man, the son of poor Colorado pioneers, he had made a meager living from impromptu fights in Rocky Mountain saloons and mining camps. Seeing the potential in the sinewy young boxer, the gambler-turned-promoter “Tex” Rickard arranged for Dempsey to fight Jess Willard, the world heavyweight champion. After the aggressive, snarling Dempsey beat his bigger foe bloody in three rounds, Rickard unleashed a blizzard of publicity for the new champion, “Jack the Giant Killer.”Rickard promoted not only Dempsey but boxing. He made prizefighting respectable, taking it out of smoke-filled rooms and staging it before upper- and middle-class audiences in big, scrubbed-up auditoriums. Purses of fifty and one hundred thousand dollars added piquancy for both spectator and contestant. Dempsey became such a celebrity that he made half-a-million annually from vaudeville and movie appearances without accepting a single fight in three years. But the fans—and the promoters—wanted him back in the ring. The obvious contender was Harry Wills of New Orleans. But he was black. Earlier, lynchings and race riots had followed in the wake of Jack Johnson’s winning of the heavyweight crown, and Rickard was not willing to run this risk again.

So Dempsey fought Gene Tunney and made sports history—twice. Tunney was a different kind of boxer from most of the fighters Dempsey had met. For years he had studied and practiced his craft, mastering combinations of blows and footwork that he was certain could overcome Dempsey’s savage power. In a result that astonished everyone else, Tunney absorbed and evaded the champion’s blows, slowly wore him down, and won on points.

Tunney might have walked out of a Scott Fitzgerald novel. A onetime clerk and Marine, he aspired to an educational and social status that might have seemed beyond the reach of his Irish working class and took a most unusual route to attain it. In a Scott Fitzgerald story there would have been a rematch, and there was. With movie cameras whirring above Chicago’s Soldier Field, Graham McNamee narrating for the radio fans, and 100,000 spectators in their seats, once again Dempsey threw himself into every punch, once again Tunney danced and jabbed. Knocked flat by a powerful punch, Tunney waited out a delayed count to nine, outpointed Dempsey in each of the remaining rounds, and won by unanimous decision of the judges. Tunney retired rich afterwards, married an heiress, and lived happily ever after.

“I have no alibis to offer,” Dempsey said. “I lost to a good man, an American—a man who speaks the English language.”

There had always been a seamy side to sports in America. Rough-and-tumble fighting on the frontier often ended in kneeing, biting, hair-pulling, eye-gouging, or even “balloching,” or emasculation. Horse racing attracted gamblers, touts, tricksters, and prostitutes. Slaveowners were reported to have pitted their best fighting slaves against those from nearby plantations. A ratting or a cockfight in a livery stable might end with a boxing match between two women naked above the waist.

In 1919 the World Series itself was fixed, when seven White Sox players accepted $5,000 to $10,000 to let Cincinnati win. To cleanse baseball’s public image the owners hired the theatrical Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as baseball czar. Landis cut a highly visible swath through organized baseball, fining or firing players, barring them from the game, vowing an open war on gambling. Landis played too, his critics said—to his audience.

Corruption in sports helped establish the twenties in the popular mind as the time of the great crime wave. In fact, there was no such crime wave, aside from the millions of Americans who drank illegal liquor. Public perception of crime turned largely on the mobsters who moved in on the illicit liquor traffic and the “speakeasies.” The decade also introduced a new figure into American culture, the big-time gangster hero. As the press sensationalized the sordid exploits of Al Capone and his ilk, and Edward G. Robinson immortalized the mobster in Little Caesar, crime became another spectator sport.

Some of the spectators were not amused. President Hoover and Secretary Mellon were said to have conferred repeatedly on federal efforts to prosecute Capone. The Justice Department’s Prohibition Bureau set up a special unit to get him. Tax sleuths also investigated him. Under pressure the Chicago gangster slipped, was convicted of tax evasion, was sentenced to ten years, and later died of syphilis. But that was long after this antihero hero, bullet-headed and weasel-eyed, with his florid suits and string of grisly murders, had captured the imagination of the country.

The Workshop and the Demos

If more and more Americans were becoming spectators in a commercialized society, what did they see? Crammed with political and economic pieties from birth, steeped in Social Darwinist ideology, conditioned by a conservative and sensationalist press, lulled by religious orthodoxy, opiated by heavily promoted sports and other entertainments, what could they see? Some observers contended that the people were conditioned to see nothing except the glories of capitalism—that Jack Dempsey, for example, by being made a hero helped to perpetuate conservative values, such as white superiority, or the mythology of a simple boy’s rise from nowhere to fame and riches. Others, following more a confusion theory than a conspiracy theory, held that the effect of mass spectatorship was to divert workers’ attention away from social and political matters to recreation and entertainment. Diversion was easy, for the intellectual challenge was harsh.

The prime intellectual issue still facing the American people in the 1920s was the compatibility of a rapidly centralizing system of corporate capitalism with an old-fashioned, divided constitutional system—a republic that institutionalized civil liberties, a broad electorate, checks and balances, and minority vetoes. The key political question was which system could better satisfy people’s wants and needs, expectations and demands.

The bemused and distracted American people hardly recognized the problem, however, much less the solution. Even if they had focused their attention they might not have seen that they had a choice between the two systems. Many felt that they had done well under capitalism, or hoped to do well in the future, or had concluded that if they had not done well it was their fault and not the system’s. In many aspects the economic system remained harsh and inhuman, but compared to the old days, when the industrial titans could let the public be damned, an army of publicists and promoters were decking out “free enterprise” in the rosiest of colors. Even more, the system was changing a bit, as some of the bigger firms began to provide free legal services, group insurance, profit-sharing, medical clinics, or other forms of welfare capitalism; Owen D. Young of General Electric shocked his Harvard Business School audience by calling for “great business organizations” that would actually belong to the workers “who are giving their lives and their efforts to them.”

It was also evident by the 1920s that business could not mobilize the kind of naked economic power that the tycoons had wielded almost casually a half century before. Business—industrial, financial, commercial business—was too divided within itself, too localized and regionalized and specialized, to present a common front, except in final defense of property. The translation of economic into political power was not all that easy, moreover, especially in a system of dispersed authority between nation and states, between executives and legislatures and judiciaries, among public and private agencies. The growing body of regulatory legislation—federal laws passed during the days of TR and Wilson, and state measures sponsored by La Follette and other progressive governors—established rough constraints on the economic and political power of business.

What business had been supremely successful at doing was to maintain an ideology of free enterprise that made opposition to capitalism appear wrongheaded at best and subversive at worst. Thus the issue returned full circle to the question of whether the people as a whole could see through the propaganda, the stereotypes, the prejudices surrounding corporate power and privilege, so as to achieve a realistic grasp of affairs. The answer of leading pundits of the day was: no, they could not.

H. L. Mencken had no doubts on the matter. The Sage of Baltimore had long dismissed the typical American as “homo boobiens.” Public opinion? It gushed out from mob fears, was “piped to central factories,” there “flavoured and coloured, and put into cans.” The average man? He did not want to be free, only to be safe in a well-managed penitentiary. Democracy? A fraud perpetrated by the upper class, full of delusion, sentimentality, envy, bamboozlement.

Walter Lippmann’s view of democracy was more considered but almost as pessimistic. In Public Opinion, written at the start of the decade, he had used the parable of Plato’s cave to contend that average people mistook the pseudo-environment they saw for reality. The world had become too complex and remote for the mass public to understand. By the mid-twenties Lippmann was taking an even bleaker view of the situation. In The Phantom Public, he asserted that the “ideal of the omnicompetent, sovereign citizen” was a “false ideal,” and that none of the educational, ethical, populist, or socialist remedies for the situation could possibly work. Mencken welcomed Lippmann to the ranks of those who viewed the masses as ignorant and unteachable.

Lippmann made one vital concession to the ideal of self-government. He granted that the mass public did have the capacity to make decisions between clearly visible leaders, issues, parties. The public could not creatively make complex policy, but to “support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly, this, in spite of all that has been said about tweedledum and tweedledee, is the essence of popular government.” Lippmann betrayed his own growing conservatism when he added that the difference between the Ins and the Outs should not be profound; otherwise “the defeated minority would be constantly on the verge of rebellion.” Surely in the 1920s the problem was not too much conflict between parties, leaderships, and programs but too much blandness and consensus.

Still, Lippmann posed the issue: Were the deprived people of the 1920s—nonunion workers, jobless women, blacks North and South, middle-class people unprepared for the competitive scramble, among others—capable of perceiving and defending their own interests against the compact majority of the Republicans? Were they able to see through the fog of stereotypes, self-promotion, and self-satisfaction surrounding the corporate elites?

The answer depended first of all on the extent to which the opposition was organized and militant. This could hardly have been said of the Democratic party during the twenties. Irresolute, divided, underorganized, the Democracy did little to mobilize the masses; it seemed content to hold lengthy national conventions, sometimes help and sometimes oppose the GOP in Congress, and serve as an arena for bitter primary contests among Democratic aspirants. Nor did organized labor, the other great potential countervailing force against business power, assume the task of militant opposition. On the contrary, total union membership dwindled from almost 5 million in 1921 to less than 3.5 million in 1929; AFL rolls fell by a million during that period; even John L. Lewis’s mine workers shrank from 400,000 dues-paying members to about a fifth of that. Under William Green’s benign leadership, the AFL was far more interested in business unionism than in militant opposition or even vigorous industrial unionism. Women and Northern blacks had the right to vote but continued to be politically underorganized.

Though united by common concerns and vibrant memories, women also remained divided over priorities and tactics. “Hard core feminists” stressed above all women’s rights, while “social feminists” made social reform their first priority. Women active in the National Woman’s Party favored independent political action, while female Democratic and Republican activists worked through their respective parties. Tension developed between the Women’s Joint Congressional Committee, essentially a lobbying vehicle, and the League of Women Voters, more oriented toward its grass-roots organizations. Women who had opposed their own suffrage continued to fight the movement and its legislative goals. Still, the women’s groups—through arduous lobbying and grass-roots efforts, and despite charges of “communism” and “socialism” from women’s groups as well as men’s—were able in 1921 to push through a lethargic Congress the Sheppard-Towner maternity and infancy bill, designed to aid the states in attacking the alarming level of maternal and infant mortality in the United States. It was in part a measure of the weakness of women’s political organization, however, that the act was allowed to expire by the end of the decade.

The main hope for the Outs in the 1920s lay in the realm of ideas, and here the picture was far more mixed. The political opposition in America, no matter how defined, had sharply limited common ideology, core of ideas, or psychological basis of unity. If the literary and political world had no equivalent to England’s Bloomsbury circle, with its fecund and eclectic concepts and conceits, American workers also had nothing to compare with Britain’s Workers Educational Association, with its grass-roots teaching of trade unionists by some of the finest university minds. The American left could find little basis for unity; not only did socialists, communists, and La Follette progressives attack one another doctrinally, but factions within each of these groupings fought among themselves with the kind of bitterness reserved for renegades. Writers on the left seemed to war on one another with even greater fury than did the radical politicos.

The most biting attacks on American culture came less from socialists or social scientists than from novelists. After his years at Yale, in Greenwich Village and as a reporter and free-lance writer for popular magazines, Sinclair Lewis touched an American nerve with Main Street in 1920, and stung that nerve with Babbitt two years later. In these novels, Lewis satirized in merciless detail the flat, sluggish, and supremely dull lives of the conventional middle-class people he had known while growing up in Sauk Centre, Minnesota. His characters’ voices were often his own—for example, that of Carol Kennicott in Main Street, reflecting on the contrast between the portrait of small-town life in popular fiction—friendly, honest people, etc.—and reality: a “savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking-chairs prickly with inane decorations, listening to mechanical music, saying mechanical things about the excellence of Ford automobiles, and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.”

In his speech accepting the Nobel Prize—an award he coveted even at the earlier time when he had declined a Pulitzer—Lewis excoriated the American literary establishment and especially the “writers for the popular magazines who in a hearty and edifying chorus chant that the America of a hundred and twenty million population is still as simple, as pastoral as it was when it had but forty million; that in an industrial plant with ten thousand employees, the relationship between the worker and the manager is still as neighborly and uncomplex as in a factory of 1840, with five employees; that the relationships between father and son, between husband and wife, are precisely the same in an apartment in a thirty-story palace today, with three motor cars awaiting the family below and five books on the library shelves and a divorce imminent in the family next week, as were those relationships in a rose-veiled five-room cottage in 1880….”

Back home, as Mark Schorer said, dudgeon was high after this address. Lewis had never feared to state—often to overstate—his case, and he would not stop now, at the pinnacle of success. Nor had the establishment feared to take him on. In Elmer Gantry, Time said, Lewis had made “another large roundup of grunting, whining, roaring, mewing, driveling, snouting creatures,” whom he could “beat, goad, tweak, tail-twist, eye-jab, belly-thwack, spatter with sty-filth and consign to perdition.” But the most telling attack on Lewis came from Walter Lippmann, who was so upset by Harcourt Brace’s ballyhoo for Elmer Gantry that he broke off his relationship with the publisher. In Men of Destiny, Lippmann wrote off Lewis as puerile, shallow, overrated, propagandistic, and a greater bigot than the characters in his novels. The big question, Lippmann concluded, was whether Lewis would reach maturity or remain arrested in adolescent rebellion.

Lippmann’s attack on Lewis typified the hostility among literary men during the twenties. Though Lewis made generous references to Dreiser and other fellow authors in his Nobel and other addresses, he attacked them in personal talk and correspondence. Solidarity was almost wholly lacking within the American literary firmament. The writers were isolated and, in part because they were isolated, they were vulnerable to the very forces they caricatured in their writings—the censors, the puritans, the bluestockings. And, typically, fiction writers scorned politics except for occasional causes.

John Dos Passos brilliantly limned persons in their economic struggles and class positions, and in his middle years he took a militant role in left-wing causes, but he did little to explore the implications of his graphic writings for class struggle or political action. There was little on politics in his first great success, Manhattan Transfer. “The book,” Granville Hicks wrote, “is directed against a way of life, not a political or economic system—against greed and conformity and pretentiousness.” It was said later that Dos Passos had omitted only the external class struggle and that within his characters the class struggle was waged constantly, but this inclusion still left his characters with crises of individual morality rather than the catharsis of collective communication and political action.

Dos Passos’s views flowed far more from Whitman and Veblen than from Marx, as he admitted. Whitman’s faith in the capacities of individual man and Veblen’s faith in the value of workmanship seemed to stay with Dos Passos throughout his life. Yet, as with Jefferson’s individualism, this faith could co-exist with a variety of diverse social attitudes and political strategies. Dos Passos was the first major American writer, according to Jack Diggins, “to develop a purposely fragmented narrative style in order to convey the frantic tone and mechanical temper of modern technological society.” He hated establishments, left and right, and establishment leaders like Woodrow Wilson. In The 42nd Parallel, the first volume of his trilogy U.S.A., he began to develop his master portrait of Americans caught in the rhythms, machinery, organizations, and structures of the Machine Age. But there seemed no way out, whether through individualism or communism—both of which Dos Passos simultaneously embraced.

Many other novelists in the twenties were sensitive to class differences and social prejudice but silent about possible political implications. Like Edith Wharton earlier, F. Scott Fitzgerald had a love-hate attitude toward the world of the rich and established. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” he wrote in his story “The Rich Boy” in 1926. “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different….”

The rich for Fitzgerald were nevertheless careless and even brutal, as well as vacuous and vulgar: Daisy’s voice “full of money,” Gatsby reverently displaying his fancy imported shirts, the “diamond as big as the Ritz,” Gatsby’s weekend entertainments full of champagne and yacht trips and Rolls-Royces, the eight servants and “extra gardener” required on Mondays to clean up his estate after the ravages of the night before. Still, this was nothing to campaign against. Life was largely a personal affair. The question of politics hardly existed for even the class-conscious writers; as Fitzgerald himself said, it was “characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all.” A character in The Beautiful and Damned tried to imagine himself in Congress “rooting around in the litter of that incredible pigsty,” associating with mediocre men spouting puerile ideas and copybook ambitions in “the lustreless and unromantic heaven of a government by the people….”

Government by the people. At the very least, this meant a government by majority rule that respected personal liberties, due process, the rights of unpopular minorities and individuals. In August 1927, at the height of the Gay Twenties, there occurred an event that shook people’s faith in American justice. This was the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian aliens, draft-registration evaders, and admitted anarchists, who had been convicted of murder after a trial that violated fundamental tenets of procedural and substantive justice. Challenged by the liberal and labor press (though not at first by the communists), out-argued by Felix Frankfurter, who presented the case against the government in the Atlantic, deplored even by Walter Lippmann in the World, the government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with the backing of a governor’s advisory committee headed by President Lowell of Harvard, moved inexorably to the final solution. Before and after the execution, bombs exploded in foreign capitals, demonstrators marched on the American embassy, workers rioted. Dos Passos, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and other writers were jailed for demonstrating in Boston.

So the American conservative establishment, even at its most manifestly callous, appeared as complacent in ideology and as effective in action as it was secure against attacks from the left. Dos Passos wrote:

“they are stronger they are rich they hire and fire the politicians the newspapereditors the old judges the small men with reputations the collegepresidents the wardheelers (listen…. America will not forget her betrayers)….

all right we are two nations”

CHAPTER l6

The Vacant Workshop

LATE IN THE 1920S, as the Soviets’ first Five-Year Plan was getting under way, Russian fourteen-year-olds were given a school text called New Russia’s Primer. While the little volume focused on the glories of the plan, its author, a young Soviet engineer named M. Ilin, had America very much on his mind. “America has many large factories, many more than we have,” he wrote. There factories turned out four automobiles a minute; there a million tractors worked in the fields.

“The Americans are proud of their machines, of their factories. But how do these factories work? According to some general plan, do you suppose? No, they work without a general plan.” And, with clever illustrations, the author offered the parable of Mr. Fox, the capitalist.

“Mr. Fox acquires money—one million dollars. But money must not remain idle.” Mr. Fox consulted newspapers, friends, agents. “At last a business is found. Hats! That is what one should make. Hats sell; men get rich.” Mr. Fox promptly builds a hat factory.

“The same idea occurs at the same time to Mr. Box, and Mr. Crox, and Mr. Nox. And they all begin to build hat factories simultaneously.” Soon shops are bursting with hats. But the factories continue to work at full speed.

“And here something happens that neither Mr. Fox, nor Mr. Box, nor Mr. Nox, nor Mr. Crox anticipated. The public stops buying hats.” Fox et al. cut prices, slash wages, close their factories. Thousands of workers are idle, new machines grow rusty, factory buildings are sold. Then a year or two passes, the hats wear out, people return to the shops, hat prices go up.

“And now, not Mr. Fox, but a certain Mr. Doodle, thinks of a profitable business”—hats, of course. “The same idea also enters the heads of other wise and business-like people—Mr. Boodle, Mr. Foodle, and Mr. Noodle. And the old story begins over again.

“The experience with hats is repeated with shoes, with sugar, with pig iron, with coal, with kerosene. Factories are blown up like soap bubbles and burst. One would think people had lost their minds.”

This picture of American capitalism, drawn at the height of Soviet euphoria over planning and before sinister aspects of Soviet leadership became evident, was not wholly a caricature of the American economy in the 1920s. The Florida land boom was not all that different from Comrade Ilin’s hat story. In the early twenties the scrublands and everglades of the “Friendly State” lay open for draining and development, thanks to better roads and railroads, a benevolent climate, and the testimonials of William Jennings Bryan, who made his home there, the Ringling circus brothers, Roger W. Babson, the stock market forecaster, and a host of promoters, speculators, and developers. Inflamed by get-rich-quick stories pouring out of Florida, thousands of the gullible bought “prime beachfront property” in towns with such beguiling names as Boca Raton, Coral Gables, Hollywood-by-the-Sea. Never mind that they bought options from a blueprint and did not trouble to look at their land, which might be part of a pestiferous swamp or at the bottom of a lake.

The speculative fever and the enticing stories fed on each other. There were tales—some even true—about the poor woman who had bought a piece of land near Miami in 1896 for $25 and sold it in 1925 for $150,000, about the New York lawyer who turned down $240,000 for a strip along Palm Beach, finally accepted $800,000 in 1923, only to see the strip broken into building lots and sold for a total of $1.5 million, with the value rising later by another $2 million or so at the height of the boom.

Then, in a single day, the bubble burst. A hurricane ripped through southern Florida, smashing buildings, killing several hundred persons, shredding the illusions of the survivors. Even without the storm, the land boom would soon have collapsed. It had been a pyramid game, with each speculator buying not property but a promise, a piece of paper, with which to entice another buyer. Nine buyers out of ten, it was estimated, purchased their options with only one purpose—to resell.

Some of the get-rich-quick schemes were bogus from the start. Charles Ponzi of Boston, a, convicted felon, gulled people into giving him more than $15 million on the claim that he could make vast profits through deft manipulation of foreign exchange rates. In fact, he used the money of later investors to pay off the earlier ones—a classic pyramid scheme. Ponzi seems to have deluded even himself. When he was finally arrested for mail fraud, it was discovered that he had stolen very little for himself; most of the millions he netted had quite unintentionally trickled through his fingers to the investors in his “business.”

Speculative fever spread across the nation in the late twenties and peaked in the “Great Bull Market.” The myth developed that farmers and window washers and maids entered the market in droves, but they did this more as spectators than participants. The number of actual players was probably less than 1 percent of a population of 120 million; as in the past, speculation remained almost exclusively the preserve of the financial elite. But there was an ominous change in who among the elite were playing. Relatively few industrialists and businessmen had participated in past booms, but now much of the money pouring into the stock market came from the capital reserves of manufacturing corporations. With returns from stock speculation exceeding 12 percent through 1928 and early 1929, how could a corporation head resist such alluring profits? When General Motors bought out the plants of the seven Fisher brothers, the automotive pioneers transferred their fortune to Wall Street and became full-time speculators. This industrial money might otherwise have gone into dividends, wage hikes, or capital improvement.

Indeed, the economic leadership of the country seemed to sponsor a market surge that in earlier days would have been discouraged by the likes of Andrew Mellon. Even the former high priests of fiscal conservatism, the directors of the House of Morgan, formed their own investment trust as stock prices skyrocketed. Columnist Arthur Brisbane, himself heavily involved in speculation, wrote glowing accounts of stock prospects for the Hearst chain. President Coolidge opined that Wall Street was “absolutely sound” and that stocks remained “cheap at current prices.” The Democrats chose the market operator John J. Raskob as their National Committee chairman.

The bull market pounded through 1928 and thundered into 1929. Trading on the New York Stock Exchange rose from 3.8 million shares a day to more than 6.6 million during 1928. Brokers’ loans—a measure of the activity of persons buying stock “on margin,” putting up only part of the purchase price—grew from around a billion dollars in the early 1920s to $5.7 billion in 1928, even as interest rates on them doubled. Few found it worth remarking that brokers’ loans had reached a total larger than the amount of actual currency circulating in the country. Herbert Hoover, who had entered the White House with vague intentions of trying to curb the boom, quietly abandoned his effort in the face of opposition from banking and business leaders.

In the summer of 1929, the speculative fever turned into a frenzy. Every market indicator shot up to unprecedented heights. Time and again the ticker in the New York Exchange fell an hour or more behind. Then, at the beginning of September, the upward surge suddenly halted. It was mysterious; there seemed to be no reason. For more than a month prices hovered shakily, as speculators debated whether to cut and run, or to wait in the hope that the boom would pick up again. Slowly, in the Wall Street psychology that had replaced economics and politics, the market edged downward as one investor after another sold out.

Life in the Depression

The stock market debacle of fall 1929 came not in one dramatic crash but in a series of sickening collapses and cruelly delusive rallies. The stock market broke early in September, recovered strongly, then weakened erratically over the next weeks. This period of uncertainty ended with sudden panic on Thursday, October 24—”Black Thursday.” Almost 13 million shares passed over the Wall Street counter that day, often at fractions of their previous prices. The forces building up the market earlier in the decade now went into reverse, destroying stock values at a geometric rate. The need to meet margin calls forced more and more speculators to sell at a loss, which fed the rising panic.

At noon of that day, word spread that Charles E. Mitchell, Thomas W. Lamont, and several other banking czars were meeting at the 23 Wall Street offices of J. P. Morgan and Company. This was immensely reassuring, for the elder Morgan, who had died in 1913, was reputed to have averted the panic of 1907. His son was in Europe, but Lamont was Morgan’s senior partner. There “has been a little distress selling on the Stock Exchange,” Lamont told reporters, “due to a technical condition of the market.” Prices already were firming. Then Richard Whitney—not present at the Lamont meeting—strode confidently onto the Exchange floor and moved conspicuously from post to post, buying shares. Brokers breathed easier. A sharp recovery followed.

Would the big bankers’ dam hold? Prices steadied during Friday and the short Saturday session, but plunged again on Monday. Once again the bankers met, but now their mood had changed. In the face of the panic to sell, the bankers now wished to protect themselves. No optimistic statements came out of the meeting; no Whitney appeared jauntily on the Exchange floor. There was an ominous silence.

On Tuesday, October 29, the hurricane struck. It was, John Kenneth Galbraith would write, “the most devastating day in the history of the New York stock market, and it may have been the most devastating day in the history of markets. It combined all of the bad features of all of the bad days before.” Under a four-column headline next day, the New York Times summed up the crisis in its lead story: “From every point of view, in the extent of losses sustained, in total turnover, in the number of speculators wiped out, the day was the most disastrous in Wall Street’s history. Hysteria swept the country….”

“The fundamental business of the country, that is production and distribution of commodities, is on a sound and prosperous basis,” said President Hoover during these October days. His statement was intended mainly to reassure investors, but Hoover’s emphasis on production reflected his own economic philosophy. As a “practitioner of industrial rationalization” and a prophet of enlightened industrialism, he had seen the strength of the nation in its vast and efficient manufacturing capacity, and its economic weakness in unbridled speculation. Now he was presiding over an economy in which reckless investors—stock purchasers and sellers—appeared to be dragging industry into the chasm with them.

But industry was still the fundamental strength of the nation; Hoover and the economic leadership assumed that the financial panic would pass, after a healthful cleansing, and then the economy would right itself. This is what had always happened in the past. But, to the bewilderment of Administration and business leaders, this was dramatically not happening in 1930. On the contrary, the first half of that year brought a massive drop in consumer spending that in turn closed shops and factories. The Gross National Product, the measure of all goods produced in the country, fell from $103.1 billion in 1929 to $90.4 billion in 1930, $75.8 billion in 1931, and $58 billion in 1932. Unemployment in the same years rose from 1.55 million in 1929 to 4.34 in 1930, 8.02 in 1931, 12.06 million in 1932. National income, $81 billion in 1929, shrank to $68 to $53 to $41 billion in 1932. The three years 1930–32, according to Dixon Wecter, “took a toll of eighty-five thousand business failures with liabilities of four and a half billion dollars and the suspension of five thousand banks. Nine million savings accounts were wiped out….”

The nation’s great industrial centers—the sinews and pride of American capitalism—were especially hard hit. By 1932, a million were jobless in New York City, 660,000 in Chicago; in Cleveland, 50 percent of the working force lacked work, in Akron 60 percent, in Toledo 80 percent. It was estimated that, during the three years after the crash, an average of 100,000 workers were laid off every week. The huge steel furnaces were banked down; the automobile industry by 1932 was operating at one-fifth of its 1929 capacity.

Farmers were hit even harder. Agriculture had been ailing long before the crash, as prices of farm products declined steadily through the decade while maintaining a precarious parity with the fall of other price levels in the economy. But not for years had farmers faced such a cataclysm as 1930. Within a year the price of December wheat at Chicago plummeted from $1.35 to 76 cents a bushel, of July wheat from $1.37 to 61 cents. Millions of farmers plunged deeper into debt, many of them into bankruptcy. And as usual in depressions, it was the weakest, poorest people on America’s farmlands—tenant farmers, migratory workers, blacks, women—who were most vulnerable.

President Hoover had been neither uncaring nor inactive in the days following the crash. He summoned to meetings the leaders of the “solid” part of the economy—top industrialists, railway and utility managers, farm spokesmen, union heads. To halt the deflationary spiral, he asked the industry leaders to agree not to cut wages or payrolls. His guests responded with optimistic statements, pep talks, and promises. Henry Ford, acting with his usual well-publicized boldness, left with Hoover a pledge to hike auto workers’ pay to seven dollars a day. In the hope of expanding the supply of credit enough to offset the contraction, the President took steps toward tax reduction, increased spending on public works, and a Federal Reserve cut in the discount rate.

Hoover also tackled the psychological aspect of the problem. So earnestly did he believe in the importance of confidence, according to David Burner, that he “attended a World Series game in Philadelphia simply to make an example of his own serenity.” And he made a point of using the term “depression” because he feared people would be frightened by such blunt words as “panic” or “crisis.”

When the stock market recovered in the winter of 1930, it appeared that Hoover’s policies might be working. “I am convinced we have passed the worst and with continued effort we shall rapidly recover,” said the President. Then the market slide resumed, week after week, month after month. Skepticism rose. Hoover’s tax reductions, it was noted, grossly favored the rich. The industrialists forgot the promises they had made in Washington when they returned to their bleak factory towns. Congress resisted measures that might unbalance the federal budget.

Increasingly, people saw an economic crisis and called it that. And they were less and less concerned about Hoover’s serenity, which appeared intact, than about his wisdom and compassion.

In later years, memories of the Great Depression would take their shape from photographs of long breadlines, people selling apples, men living in shacks called Hoovervilles, emaciated women and children, the jobless clustering by the hundreds in front of factory gates. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the depression at the time was its invisibility. Walking through an American city, Frederick L. Allen wrote, you “might notice that a great many shops were untenanted, with dusty plate-glass windows and signs indicating that they were ready to lease; that few factory chimneys were smoking; that the streets were not so crowded with trucks as in earlier years, that there was no uproar of riveters to assail the ears, that beggars and panhandlers were on the sidewalks in unprecedented numbers (in the Park Avenue district of New York a man might be asked for money four or five times in a ten-block walk). Traveling by railroad, you might notice that the trains were shorter, the Pullman cars fewer—and that fewer freight trains were on the line. Traveling overnight, you might find only two or three other passengers in your sleeping car.” Otherwise things might seem to be going on much as usual.

Nor were people as militant and activist as later generations might have expected. The desperate men lined up quietly in the soup lines. People were evicted from their homes or farms and resignedly went off somewhere. The unemployed demonstrated, but only infrequently. Some workers struck, but no more than before; the number of strikes remained about the same during the depression, and union membership even declined. Workers gathered before factory gates not to take over the plant, or to burn it down, but in hope of a job. The dominant emotion was not anger or hostility but resignation or fear. Instead of rising up, people hunkered down. People in Cincinnati wore buttons: “I won’t talk depression.” During the depression, billboards appeared reading, “Wasn’t the Depression Terrible?”

This social passivity rested on the profoundest of psychological forces that swept pervasively through the population—loss of security and lack of self-esteem. A wiped-out bank account did not send people out onto the streets or even to the bank; it was too devastating. Losing a job, seeking a job, being denied a job—these meant constant blows to self-esteem. “Anonymous” wrote for Outlook magazine about how “I Lost My Job.” In the spring of 1929, he had left a $65-a-week staff job with a New York newspaper to become a public relations man for a big eastern railroad at three times that pay. A year later the public relations department was wiped out in a merger.

What Anonymous then endured would come to be familiar to millions of families: dispossession from his apartment for failure to pay the rent—moving with his wife and baby into the home of her family, to the latter’s intense annoyance—getting ample free advice from the family to sell brushes or silk stockings—studying the Help Wanted columns and starting the dolorous rounds of nonemployment—borrowing on insurance policies—earning a few dollars by selling Christmas cards, mainly to kind friends—losing his final cash reserve in the closing of the Bank of the United States—earning $30 on jury duty—watching his job application blank torn up by a clerk when he had the temerity to inquire about the job—contemplating suicide but lacking the courage—having to move his father from a home into a “poorhouse”—appealing for help to relatives he hardly knew on his mother’s side of the family—receiving $10 from them—taking a furnished room with wife and baby—left with $12 at the time of writing his article.

Some took the drastic way out that Anonymous flirted with. Reports of bankrupted millionaires jumping out of skyscraper windows after the crash became part of the legend of the Great Crash. The suicide rate was relatively low in late 1929, but it did rise during the next three years. But it was not brokers but unemployed workers who were more likely to contemplate or threaten suicide, like the former Youngstown steel operative who, begging for a job in 1932, said, “If you can’t do something for me, I’m going to kill myself.”

As usual, women were highly vulnerable to economic threat, whether as wives or workers or both. Marriage, divorce, and birth rates all fell sharply in the early 1930s. It was often too expensive to get a divorce or to have children. There was evidently a decline in sexual relations owing to fear of pregnancy, psychological demoralization following loss of a job, and women fatigued by having to work both outside and inside the home. Married women were tempting targets for legislators and organizations. Of 1,500 school systems contacted in 1930–31, over three-quarters would not hire married women and almost two-thirds dismissed women teachers if they were married. Although the unemployment rate for women was 4.7 percent in 1930 compared to 7.1 percent for men, this was partly because many women held low-income jobs for which men could not or would not compete.

And as usual, blacks were most vulnerable of all. They had little seniority and only a weak, semiskilled status at best. Working mainly in service and unskilled industries, they were the classic “last hired, first fired.”When skilled white workers lost their jobs, they often slid into the dirtier, more demeaning jobs, displacing blacks. A social worker in Atlanta noted that white men “have taken over such positions as elevator operators, tradesmen, teamsters, expressmen, bill posting, city sanitary wagon drivers … stewards, cooks, waiters and bell boys in hotels, hospital attendants, mechanics at filling stations, delivery boys from drug stores” and even chauffeurs and maids. Sometimes whites forced blacks out of jobs through intimidation, sometimes through force. In the southwestern division of the Illinois Central, black firemen were lured from their cabs with flares and then shot down.

The desperate jobless, blighted women, intimidated blacks—these and millions of other fearful, poverty-stricken Americans might have formed a mighty army of the wretched, a coalition of the deprived. But misery did not seem to like company. The depression exacerbated tensions among the wretched of the earth as blacks and whites fought for jobs, women lost jobs because their husbands had them, and jobless workers competed to be first in line at the employment office.

In his textbook for Soviet schoolchildren M. Ilin had described how, in a country “boasting millions of machines, storerooms are bursting with goods; corn is burned in place of coal; milk is poured into the river.” Ilin had quoted stories from the 1920–21 recession. Already, as he wrote, he was hearing reports of a new depression, new spilling of milk.

“What does this mean?” he asked. “Who profits by it?

“It is profitable to the Foxes and the Boxes. Mr. Fox burns a few trainloads of grain in order to raise the price of corn. Mr. Box gives orders to spill tens of thousands of bottles of milk into the river in order that milk may not be sold too cheaply. And in the mean time school physicians in New York report that one out of every four children in the city is undernourished.” The fact that farmers, not capitalists, were destroying grain and milk might not have daunted Mr. Ilin; these were kulaks, and kulaks too were capitalists.

The Crisis of Ideas

Americans entered the decade of the thirties with their economy half paralyzed, their family and individual lives impoverished, their hopes and expectations blighted. With the poet Carl Sandburg they might ask, “Where to? What next?” Their only hope lay in thinking their way out of the crisis, and acting on the basis of that thought. But this was an intellectual capacity that leaders of established wisdom found utterly lacking in the people as a whole. The Enlightenment idea, Lippmann had written in Public Opinion ten years before, that assumed humankind had direct experience and understanding of the complex world around it, was false for a mass society. People were governed by stereotypes, prejudice, propaganda. A few years later, in The Phantom Public, Lippmann had taken an even stronger position. “The public will arrive in the middle of the third act and will leave before the last curtain, having stayed just long enough perhaps to decide who is the hero and who the villain of the piece.”

The best hope, Lippmann believed, lay with the experts, armed with the latest inside information—experts who could rise above narrowness and bias. Who in times of crisis could better assume that role than the experienced insiders who had actually run American industry and finance, who could now tell what was wrong and put the economy back on track? Innovators and enterprisers, they would not be mired in the failed ideas of the past.

Surely the big industrialists in particular would be a fount of fresh wisdom during the crisis—and their potent propaganda and political arm, the National Association of Manufacturers, providentially happened to be in annual session assembled when Wall Street was experiencing one of its first panics in the fall of 1929. Confronting this “financial” crisis caused by upstart speculators, the NAM stuck to its ancient wisdom about economics and politics. The test would come as the depression deepened and it became clear that the nation was caught in a general industrial and business crisis and not merely a Wall Street dip.

But the citadel of NAM conservatism remained unpenetrated. A few weeks after the market crash, the NAM president, John E. Edgerton, congratulated Hoover on his conference of business leaders and assured the President that “complete confidence will very soon be restored, if, as you advised, everybody goes to work and quits talking about the securities of our economic future, and, if there are no attempts made among the people to capitalize for personal or group advantage a situation which lends itself so readily to publicity.” Evidently the NAM shared Lippmann’s doubts about the competence of the people, though perhaps for different reasons.

A year later, in the face of sharply mounting unemployment, Edgerton was holding his ideological fort. The most important cause of poverty, he said, lay in the failings of the unemployed themselves. Poverty “results not alone from involuntary unemployment, but more often from voluntary unemployment, thriftlessness, sin in various forms, disease, and other misfortunes.” Fred W. Sargent, railroad president and director of the Chamber of Commerce, gave his answer: “We should go back to the policies that have thus far made us great; to stop petitions for public improvement far beyond our means to afford; to realize that we cannot solve our problems of governmental finance by easy expedients, and to admit that nothing can take the place of collective thrift, self-denial and intelligent citizen participation in government.”

Citizen participation in government? Were the leaders of industry urging the mass public to go into politics to protect its own interests? Only if it was intelligent participation—that is, not harmful to property and social stability. Noting that “there are already formulated and in process a variety of legislative proposals on public unemployment insurance, old age pensions, and similar measures for the consideration of the Legislatures which are to meet in 1931,” Edgerton warned that all such proposals were intended “in the name of expediency and social progress to shift individual responsibility to the already overburdened shoulders of government and industry and thereby take us a long step further towards the Socialistic goal, the abolition of private property.”

Was there no role, then, for government in the crisis? Yes, there was a role—to fight crime. This was government’s greatest responsibility; there was no need, Edgerton said, “for it to become more concerned with or to look for other tasks.” Indeed, a sincere and successful attack on crime would promptly end the depression itself! “Driving crime from its appalling entrenchments in this land of boasted civilization” would itself “mean food to the hungry, clothes for the naked, jobs for the unemployed, peace in industry, and security to all.”

At this point—when industry leaders were proposing to solve the great depression through crime-fighting—this leadership was clearly losing touch with economic reality. But the NAM did not speak for all or even most of industry—there were enlightened business leaders, and the most powerful and convinced of these was sitting in the White House—the “Great Engineer,” former Secretary of Commerce, now President, Herbert Hoover.

Hoover saw his presidency as an exercise in moderate, rational government. “Our program,” he said later, “was one of deliberate purpose to do everything possible to uphold general confidence which lies at the root of maintained initiative and enterprise; to check monetary, security, and commodity panics in our exchanges; … to accelerate construction work so as to absorb as many employees as possible from industries hit by decreased demand; to hold up the level of wages by voluntary agreement and thus maintain the living standards of the vast majority who remain in employment; to avoid accelerating the depression by the hardship and disarrangement of strikes and lockouts; and by upholding consuming power of the wage earners to in turn support agriculture.”

To the extent that he could deal with problems in an orderly, temperate manner, Hoover was reasonably successful with some of these policies. His troubles arose whenever the compelling needs of the time required him to move toward, or away from, ideas on which he was inflexible. Thus he had an overpowering faith in voluntary cooperation, local initiative, efforts by the Red Cross and charities, and if necessary governmental action by the states and localities—a faith he simply would not give up many months after it was clear that voluntarism of these sorts could not possibly break the grip of the depression. He maintained a zealous opposition to direct federal relief to the poor and the jobless because, he said, it would rob them of their character and initiative, and he stuck to this position long after no alternative to the “dole,” as Hoover preferred to call it, seemed feasible.

If Hoover had shared Andrew Mellon’s conservative ideology, he might have stuck to orthodox finance, rigorous economy, and pro-business policies until the economy, purged of its waste and inefficiency, could return to rigorous capitalistic rules and norms. That was Mellon’s strategy; the Treasury Secretary, Hoover would remember, “had only one formula: ‘Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate …. purge the rottenness out of the system.’” But Hoover was too much the moderate, the liberal Republican, the critic of big finance to do this, and hence he was unable to embrace the kind of forthright alternative that a stronger leader might have followed in similar circumstances.

Hoover, as an engineer, had very definite views on specific policies. He had strong moral beliefs about such things as wastefulness, indolence, governmental paternalism. But he possessed no general philosophy—no moral code—that linked broad principles to operating strategies, and these in turn to social and economic programs and specific policies. Hence he often seemed lost, even bewildered, desperate over the failure of his policies to turn the tide, yet too frozen in his pieties to be able to execute a major shift in strategy. Hence, too, he kept searching for the origins or causes of the depression—a search economists would be conducting for another half century at least—and changing his mind as to whether the main source was irresponsible financial policies at home, or faulty economic actions in Europe, or big business, or some failure in the American people.

Nothing tested Herbert Hoover’s policy consistency and economic principle more sharply than the tariff issue, and here he simply failed. Having pledged in the 1928 campaign that he would aid farmers by seeking higher duties on agricultural imports, he called a special session of Congress a few weeks after his Inaugural for the “selective” revision of the tariff. He might have predicted that he could not control a Congress that opened the Pandora’s box of tariff revision, and, sure enough, he lost his legislative leadership as senators and representatives went in for an orgy of tariff-raising. The resulting Smoot-Hawley bill was the highest tariff rise in history.

Would the President sign it? He had long preached economic internationalism. He was angered by some of the high schedules in the measure. Internationalist business and political leaders in both parties urged him to veto it. More than 1,000 economists denounced the bill. Hoover signed it because he liked some of its provisions, because it was politically expedient, because other nations were adopting nationalistic policies. In doing so, Herbert Hoover aligned himself with the Republican Old Guard more clearly and controversially than by any other act of his Administration.

As he reached his midterm, the President did begin to change some of his positions. In particular, he concluded that a greater federal recovery effort was necessary. In December 1930 he asked Congress for an additional $100 to $150 million for public works. In January 1932 he obtained from Congress a bill to establish the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, empowered to provide emergency financing to banks, railroads, life insurance companies, and other institutions, to the maximum extent of $2 billion. But Hoover’s position on the tariff, along with his opposition to direct federal relief to persons, sharpened the popular image of a rigid, doctrinaire President.

Hoover and the Republican leadership had a powerful political and moral argument for sticking to their convictions—they had won a mandate in 1928, they were carrying out that mandate, and they needed four years to make it work. They could boast, moreover, that they had won a renewed vote of confidence in the 1930 midterm election, gaining over 54 percent of the popular major-party vote for House seats—down only 3.3 percent from that of 1928—and retaining control of the Senate, if only by a paper-thin majority. It was not, after all, the job of the party in power to attack its own program. Let the opposition do that.

But where was the opposition? The most striking political fact of the depression era was not the failure of the Republican government—the GOP was simply going down in the face of the economic storm, its doctrinal pennant still waving bravely—but the feebleness, the cowardice, indeed the near-invisibility of the opposition.

Labor was the main case in point. The days of the militant Knights of Labor and IWW appeared to be over. The dominant national organization of trade unionists, the American Federation of Labor, entered the depression clinging strongly to its old doctrine of “voluntarism”—the concept of organized labor as a private enterprise to be promoted through bread-and-butter unionism, limited government, and opportunistic political tactics of “aiding labor’s friends and opposing labor’s enemies.” With the depression, though, “massive unemployment, declining wage rates, falling membership, and hopeless strikes demonstrated that history had outsped Gompers,” in Irving Bernstein’s summary. How long could the AFL stick to Gompersism? The answer came in a series of annual AFL conventions as the delegates discussed the issue of unemployment insurance, which was becoming the litmus test for voluntarism.

Gompers had denounced unemployment insurance as “socialism.” To craft unions with their own insurance programs, the proposal did seem like unfair competition from government. Voluntarism won overwhelmingly at the 1930 AFL convention. Opponents of unemployment insurance called it a “dole.” Should workers’ liberty be sacrificed, demanded one delegate, to afford workers a little “unemployment relief under government supervision and control”? The next year, in the face of rising joblessness, the convention again debated the issue. More individual unions were sending delegates to the national convention endorsing unemployment insurance, but voluntarism still won the voice vote. The time had not yet arrived for it, said AFL president William Green. Finally, in the 1932 session—a few weeks after the presidential election—the AFL came out for insurance, both state and federal.

Over toward the left, the Socialist Party made its first gains in almost a decade, doubling its membership in just three years, raising money on a national scale, and organizing a speaker’s bureau to spread the message of radical reform. Still, the movement remained puny; there were scarcely more than 16,000 members in 1932. Moreover, the party had changed drastically since the days of Eugene Debs, loosening its ties with labor and becoming largely an organization of college-educated, middle-class reformers. The old leadership of the Socialists faced repeated challenges from the new recruits, who tended to be younger, more radical, and impatient with a doctrinaire approach to reform. Socialist successes in electing a few local officials, and Norman Thomas’s impressive showing in his two New York mayoralty races, stemmed more from the individual reputations of the candidates than from any ground swell of support for socialism in itself.

The most impatient reformers abandoned socialism altogether. Joining the Socialist Party, John Dos Passos said, “would have just about the same effect on anybody as drinking a bottle of near-beer.” The moment of the Communist Party would seem to have come. Yet the American communists failed altogether to engage—either intellectually or politically—with the crisis gripping the United States. Instead, William Z. Foster and his followers set their party line by the dictates of factional fights in Moscow, paying more attention to purging their ranks of “Trotskyites” and “Bukharinites” than to organizing the unemployed millions in the United States. Although Dos Passos urged the Communist Party to “Marxianize the American tradition” or else “Americanize Marx,” no home-grown Lenin arose with a program equivalent to the “Peace, Land, and Bread” of the Russian Revolution. The American workers were interested in immediate solutions, not in eventual revolutions, and here the communists, like the socialists, failed them.

In a two-party democracy, the burden of opposing the “ins” lies ultimately on the main opposition party. Shut out from the White House for more than a decade, the Democratic party in the early 1930s seemed to have an unparalleled opportunity to put the depression squarely on the backs of the Republicans. But thoughtful Americans expected more from the Democracy than blind opposition, and here the Democrats ran into trouble. They were too fundamentally divided to offer a coherent and credible opposition to the GOP.

The hand of the past rested heavily on the Democratic party. Al Smith, the 1928 candidate, appeared to be moving to the right as Franklin D. Roosevelt, his dynamic successor in the governor’s chair in Albany, came up with liberal, or at least fresh, ideas and policies. John W. Davis, the Democrats’ 1924 candidate, attacked Hoover in 1931 for “following the road to socialism at a rate never before equaled in time of peace.” Even James Cox, the Wilsonian 1920 candidate, demanded a balanced budget and a sales tax, in a speech at the Democracy’s Jackson and Jefferson Day dinners of 1932. These were the Northern Democrats; much of the Southern leadership of the Democratic party lay to the right of the Republicans on economic policy and far to the right of it on racial issues.

In Congress the Democracy claimed some conspicuous liberals, such as Senators Robert Wagner of New York, Thomas Walsh of Montana, and Burton Wheeler of Montana, but the party as a whole, in Otis Graham’s summary, “had no ideological center. Every four years its national nominating convention briefly encompassed diverse elements—Jeffersonian states’ righters, liberal intellectuals and planners, urban bosses, Wilsonian idealists, midwestern soft money men, conservative labor leaders, Wall Street bankers. Party structure was appropriate to this doctrinal babel of tongues.” The party had an impoverished headquarters in New York, shared its “fund-raising duties and its powerlessness” with the Senate and House campaign committees, and tried to preside over forty-eight state parties, countless city and county organizations, and a few thousand party “leaders” going their separate ways.

Could a party like this put up an effective opposition? A battle over taxes left the issue in doubt. Desperately seeking a balanced budget in a time of shrinking revenue, Hoover proposed a sales tax as part of the 1932 revenue legislation. It was a classic issue on which the Democrats could pose as the “party of the people,” except that most of the Democratic leadership in Congress, as well as Smith, Cox, Davis, Raskob, and Bernard Baruch, backed the bill. Opposition fell into the hands of Fiorello La Guardia, a fiery maverick Republican from Manhattan, and rank-and-file Democratic leaders. Castigating the bill as “grinding the face of the poor,” La Guardia and his Democratic allies aroused a House coalition that defeated the measure. But the fractured Democracy had denied itself a party victory.

If the party could not oppose, could it govern? Could it indeed even choose a winning candidate for the presidency? The two-thirds requirement for nomination encouraged candidates to appeal to factions and ideas across the whole spectrum of the party from left to right. In January 1932, Roosevelt threw his hat into the ring; a few days later, Al Smith announced his availability. Several favorite sons eyed the race, hoping for a deadlock between the current and former New York governors. For a time it seemed they might have their wish. With the help of the astute James A. Farley, New York Democratic party chairman, and the prestige of his own record-breaking majority in winning reelection two years before, Roosevelt had become the Democratic front-runner. But he met a series of setbacks in the spring of 1932 when Smith won a big bloc of Tammany-ites, every delegate from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and a sizable chunk of the California delegation. Smith had become the candidate of the Democratic right. After FDR charged Hoover with neglecting the “little fellow” in favor of big business, Smith declared that he would “take my coat off’ and enter the ring against any candidate for the presidency who persisted “in any demagogic appeal to the masses of the working people.” At the same time, some liberal Democrats attacked FDR for embracing conservative policies.

Battered from left and right, Roosevelt straddled as many issues as he could, and this in turn strengthened attacks on him as a cynical opportunist. No one pursued this line more assiduously than Walter Lippmann, who prided himself on being a connoisseur of leadership. Charging Roosevelt with failure to offer true national leadership, Lippmann remarked, as the campaign year opened, that the “art of carrying water on both shoulders is highly developed in American politics, and Mr. Roosevelt has learned it.” Roosevelt, he concluded, “is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.” Lippmann much preferred former Secretary of War Newton D. Baker to Roosevelt, but Baker too—and with Lippmann’s help—had softened his old fervor for the League of Nations in order to disarm his isolationist foes.

If FDR was really just a political broker, as others besides Lippmann believed, brokerage paid off handsomely at the Democratic national convention in Chicago late in June. Apparently stalled after leading on the first three ballots, the Roosevelt forces strove desperately to keep their delegates in line while they sought the additional votes needed to reach the magical two-thirds. Joseph P. Kennedy reached William Randolph Hearst and warned him that Baker, whom Hearst detested, would gain the nomination if FDR went down. Hearst was the key to shifting the California delegation. When California was reached on the fourth roll call, William G. McAdoo stepped to the podium and announced: “California came here to nominate a President of the United States; she did not come to deadlock the Convention or to engage in another devastating contest like that of 1924.” Thus the ghosts of the past hovered over the Democratic conclave as delegation after delegation broke toward Roosevelt and gave him the nomination with enthusiasm—but not with unanimity, for the embittered Smith refused to release his delegates. Then the Democrats, still divided, prepared to attack the Republican redoubt.

“Once I Built a Railroad, Made It Run”

The imperious locomotives still thundered through town. If the express slowed down a bit coming round the bend, you could stand at the depot and look into brightly lit interiors as the Broadway Limited or the Twentieth Century Limited flashed by—actually see people reclining in their palatial diners, luxurious club cars, ornate drawing rooms, A century earlier Ralph Waldo Emerson had seen in the rails a magician’s rod with the power “to evoke the sleeping energies of land and water.” Railroads had become the nation’s first big industry, a sinew of war, a spearhead of urban change, a transformer of the environment. Through it all, Americans had never forsaken their romance with the rails, even when gouging and monopolistic railroads had forsaken them.

Now the railroads seemed forsaken. American Locomotive had been selling six hundred of its great steam engines a year during the 1920s; in 1932 it sold one. Between 1929 and 1932, rail employees had dropped from 1.7 million to less than 1 million, freight tons carried from 1.419 billion to 679 million, dividends from $500 million to one-fifth of that. You could stand for hours at the depot and not see a train come through.

1932 was the worst year yet by far. The gross national product fell from $103.1 billion in 1929 to $58 billion in 1932. Automobile production dropped from 411,000 cars a month in the same period to 89,000; oil production sagged from a billion barrels to less than 800 million; contracts for new residential buildings shrank 86 percent; farm income fell from $6.2 billion to $2 billion. U.S. Steel was operating at 19 percent capacity. Retail sales declined, but the number of retail stores increased—a measure of inflated hopes and frustrated expectations.

There was no human misery index as accurate as the economic. Psychologically, middle-class people probably were hit hardest. They made up a good part of the 273,000 families evicted during 1932. Some fought back as best they could. They opened small businesses at home—beauty parlors, laundries, grocery stores, ice cream booths, antique shops often filled with items from forced sales of farms. People resharpened safety razors, bought day-old bread, rolled their own cigarettes, renewed the shoulder straps of bras, perused chapters in cookbooks called New Dishes from Leftovers. The wife of a middle-aged broker, living with her husband in a posh New Jersey residential hotel, was within a few months of the crash working in the hotel laundry.

Workers in heavy industry were especially hard up, except where they had some union protection. Wages of unorganized laborers fell far more rapidly than union workers’ pay during 1931–32 and by 1933 a wage differential of 30 percent separated the two groups. A Kentucky miner wrote that “we have been eating wild greens” such as violet tops, wild onions, and “forget-me-not wild lettuce.” Strikes and demonstrations were rarely very effective when so many men were competing for jobs. In the late winter of 1932, several thousand Detroit workers, under militant leaders, marched toward the employment office of Henry Ford’s Rouge works, crown of the Ford industrial empire. Pushing past the Dearborn police, the marchers, waving placards and banners, encountered contingents of Detroit security forces. The nature of the wild melee that followed was never clear, but the upshot was twenty-four demonstrators killed or wounded, a good number of police injured by bricks, stones, and clubs.

A large new class had come into being—a class of the unemployed, the reliefers, the transients, the homeless, the vagabonds, the hoboes. Many of the jobless, according to Caroline Bird, “simply could not bear going home and headed for a freight train instead.” They followed rumors of jobs, often false ones. “Once footloose, it did not much matter where they went. Hope of warm weather, word of a friend, memory of relatives perhaps never actually known, was excuse for a jaunt across the continent.” Many headed home after a spell of wandering. Home, Robert Frost had written, was “the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” It was estimated that only 10 percent of the transients were “professional bums.”

How could local communities cope with armies of transients? Many could not. Queried by a Senate subcommittee, some mayors reported that they variously pushed the transients on, “[got] them out of town as soon as possible,” “flatly refused to help,” helped “a little.” Others responded: “one good meal and more if they work” … “bunked in barracks—fed at jail” … “merchants taking care of ”… “work them in the wood yard” … “let them sleep in flop houses; give a bowl of soup in the morning and order them out of town.” Tucson posted a sign on its outskirts: “Warning to Transients. Relief funds for local residents only. Transients, do not apply.”

Three score and nine years earlier, Abraham Lincoln had asked whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to equality could long endure. He had consecrated the nation to a continuing experiment in freedom and justice. Was the experiment over? In a new crisis, when the leadership in neither party appeared to have achieved the Emancipator’s courage and resolution, many were answering, “Yes!”

In September 1932, fifty-three intellectuals and artists published an open letter that denounced the two major parties as hopelessly corrupt, repudiated the socialists as do-nothings, and announced their support for the Communist Party. The manifesto proclaimed the fatal contradictions of capitalism, the futility of socialist “reformism,” the menace of fascism. It rejected “the disorder, the lunacy spawned by grabbers, advertisers, speculators, salesmen, the much-adulated, immensely stupid and irresponsible ‘business men.’” It urged writers, artists, scientists, teachers, engineers, and “all honest professional workers” to support the “frankly revolutionary Communist Party” and its candidates.

One of the signatories of this letter was the literary critic Edmund Wilson, and his political odyssey epitomized the leftward movement of the intelligentsia. Like many of his comrades, he was no ivory-tower intellectual but had observed poverty firsthand in West Virginia, in Harlan County, Kentucky, and in California. The depression had convinced him of “the incurable swinishness and inertia of human nature which automatically leads to class war.” He expected Roosevelt to be “largely controlled by the profit-squeezing class,” just as Hoover was, and he saw the socialists as identifying themselves with the owning classes. While he had misgivings about the Communists’ insistence on ideological discipline, he concluded that they alone were working impressively “to educate and organize our wage-earning classes for the defeat of the capitalist system.”

And the capitalists themselves? By mid-1932, they were alternating between a foolish optimism and deep frustration and bewilderment. “If you can’t think yourself into a job, work yourself into one,” advised the financial seer Roger Babson. “Insist on working even without pay.” “We cannot squander ourselves into prosperity,” declaimed Herbert Hoover. Said Henry Ford of young vagabonds: “Why, it’s the best education in the world for those boys, that traveling around! They get more experience in a few months than they would in years at school.”

Behind such zany views, however, lay a hardening class attitude. A deputy to General Douglas MacArthur in May 1932 proposed to ship “leading malefactors,” including “important public officials,” to a sparsely inhabited Hawaiian island where they could “stew in their own filth.” Two months later, MacArthur led four troops of cavalry, four companies of infantry, a mounted machine-gun squadron, and six tanks down Pennsylvania Avenue past big crowds. His troops crossed the Anacostia Bridge and attacked thousands of the “Bonus Army” veterans, their wives and children, with tear gas and bayonets, burning their encampment and killing two veterans, fatally injuring a baby, and partially blinding an eight-year-old boy. The bonus marchers, nearly two-thirds of whom had served in Europe during World War I and one-fifth of whom had been disabled, were described by an Assistant Secretary of War as “a polyglot mob of tramps and hoodlums, with a generous sprinkling of Communist agitators.”

Many Americans recoiled with shame. Reporter Thomas L. Stokes wondered if this might be the end of the country as he knew it. “The United States Army turned on to American citizens—just fellows like myself, down on their luck, dispirited, hopeless. My mood was one of despair.” But the American public did not know the worst. MacArthur had disobeyed Hoover’s order to “use all humanity” in dispersing the veterans, yet the President did not discipline his general or even protest. The following day the White House announced to the press that “the President was pleased.”

If an experiment was ending in late 1932, it was not the grand American experiment of the Framers, of Jefferson and Lincoln. It was an experiment in rule by industrialists and financiers. They had by no means been all-powerful. In case after case—as in the example of Henry Ford’s political activities—they had found it impossible to convert economic power into social control. But American business held two strong cards. It could accomplish through the Republican party, and the broad coalition it represented, what it could not effect through economic means alone. And it had long been represented by a “compact majority” that united the separated institutions of government behind pro-business measures.

If the compact majority had held power, it had also to assume responsibility. But assumption of responsibility was impossible unless there was a “compact opposition” to put the failures of leadership directly on the shoulders of the Hoover Administration. As the campaign of 1932 got under way, no such compact opposition was evident. No one could quite place Franklin Roosevelt. Sometimes he almost talked socialism, sometimes he promised to balance the budget. The nation waited.

The transients waited, killing time, moving ever on, hunkering down at night in “hobo jungles,” reduced to the primal wants of food and shelter. In the silence of the railroad tracks they rarely burst into song; they had little to sing about. But a plaintive ditty began to catch on:

Once I built a railroad, made it run,—

Made it race against time.

Once I built a railroad, now it’s done—

Brother can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee, we looked swell

Full of that Yankee Doodle-de-dum.

Half a million boots went sloggin’ thru Hell,

I was the kid with the drum.

Say don’t you remember, they called me Al—

It was Al all the time

Say, don’t you remember, I’m your Pal!

Buddy, can you spare a dime?

Notes

1. THE WAR OF LIBERATION

p. 3 [Lincoln’s trip to Gettysburg]: Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (Harcourt, Brace, 1939), vol. 2, pp. 462–63; George M. Hart, Director of the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, supplied technical and historical information on the type of train Lincoln rode to Gettysburg; see also Edwin P. Alexander, Down at the Depot (Clarkson N. Potter, 1970), pp. 58-59; William E. Barton, Lincoln at Gettysburg (Peter Smith, 1950), pp. 58–59. The wood most probably used to fire the engine was hardwood, and in the Gettysburg region that implies walnut or cherry, the smoke of which would be blue. See also Philip Kunhardt, A New Birth of Freedom (Little, Brown, 1983), pp. 68 ff.

3–4 [Washington, November 18, 1863]: New York Times, November 19, 1863, pp. 1–4; Howard K. Beale, ed..Diary of Gideon Welles (W. W. Norton, 1960), vol. 1, pp. 479–80; Sandburg, vol. 2, p. 461.

4-5 [Ceremonies at Gettysburg]: Barton, pp. 72–79; Clark E. Carr, Lincoln at Gettysburg (A. C. McClurg, 1906), pp. 36-–56; Sandburg, vol. 2, pp. 465–68; Massachusetts Historical Society, Edward Everett at Gettysburg (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1963); David C. Mearns, “Unknown at This Address,” in Allan Nevins, ed., Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address (University of Illinois Press, 1964).

5 [Text of Everett’s oration]: Barton, pp. 211–54.

5–6 [Text of Gettysburg Address]: Newspaper version, in Roy P. Basler, ed.,The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Rutgers University Press, 1953), vol. 7, pp. 19–21. [Lincoln’s delivery of Address]: Barton, pp. 80–81; Carr, pp. 56–57, 70.

Manning the Front

6 [Bull Run survivors in Washington]: Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington (Harper & Bros., 1941), pp. 102–6; Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (Alfred A. Knopf, 1952),pp. 271–73.

6–7 [Lincoln’s strategic plan]: “Memoranda of Policy Suggested by Bull Run Defeat,” July 23, 27, 1861, in Basler, op. cit.,vol. 4, pp.457–58, quoted at p. 457.

7 [Southern military advantages]: James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 184–86.

[“Highways of invasion” into the South]: ibid, p. 186.

[Lincoln on his Indian War service]: Thomas, pp. 33–34.

[Confederate defensive strategy]: Address to the Confederate Congress, April 29, 1861, in Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers and Speeches (J.J. Little and Ives, 1923), vol. 5, p. 84.

8 [Lincoln on outcome of Fredericksburg]: quoted in McPherson, p. 306.

[Vallandigham]: Thomas, pp. 379–80.

[Desertion in the Army of the Potomac]: Bruce Catton, Glory Road: The Bloody Route from Fredericksburg to Gettysburg (Doubleday, 1952), pp. 111–12, 116.

[Lincoln finds a general]: T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), pp. 271–99; see also Kenneth P. Williams, Lincoln Finds a General, 5 vols. (Macmillan, 1949–59).

9 [Lincoln on Grant]: quoted in Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South (Little,Brown, 1960), p.371.

[Confederate general on Grant]: General Richard Ewell, quoted in Robert Leckie, The Wars of America (Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 412–13.

9 [Union officer on Grant]: Catton, Grant Moves South, p. 420.

9–10 [Vicksburg campaign]. Samuel Carter III, The Final Fortress: The Campaign for Vicksburg, 1862–1863 (St. Martin’s Press, 1980), passim; Catton, Grant Moves South, pp. 405–70; Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative (Random House, 1963), vol. 2, pp. 323–427, 606–14; Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (Century, 1888), vol. 3, pp. 462–570.

9 [Grant on the need for a decisive victory]: quoted in Carter, p. 109.

10 [Sherman’s jubilation]: quoted in Catton, Grant Moves South, p. 448.

[Lincoln’s reaction to Chancellorsville]: quoted in Catton, Glory Road, p. 230.

10–11 [Generalship of Robert E. Lee]: Thomas L. Connelly, The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), pp. 4–8; Foote, vol. 1, pp. 128–31.

11 [Confederate strategic planning and Lee’s plan]: McPherson, p. 324; Foote, vol. 2, pp. 424–33.

[Lee’s army the true objective]: Lincoln to Hooker, telegram, June 10, 1863, in Basler, vol.6, p. 257.

[Battle of Gettysburg]: Catton, Glory Road, pp. 289–344; see also Sandburg, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 340–47.

12 [Lincoln’s whaling metaphor]: quoted in Sandburg, vol. 2, p. 21.

[The discouragement of Lincoln]: ibid., vol. 2, p. 351; Beale, op. cit.,vol. 1, p. 371.

[Battle of Chattanooga]: Foote, vol. 2, pp. 685–94, 708–68; see also Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command (Little, Brown, 1968), pp. 30–93.

[The ebbing of Confederate hopes]: Davis to General E. K. Smith, letter, July 14, 1863, in Rowland, vol. 5, p. 554.

[Despair of Confederate veterans]: quoted in McPherson, p. 333.

[Mary Chesnut]: C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 519, 502, 501, 523.

Forging the Sword

13 [Meeting of Lincoln and Grant]: Catton, Grant Takes Command, op. cit., pp. 124–27, Lincoln quoted at p. 125.

[Southerners evaluate Grant]: quoted in Woodward, op. cit., p. 520.

14 [The draft]: Eugene C. Murdock, One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971), pp. 6–8, 24–25; see also, Albert B. Moore,Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (Macmillan, 1924).

[Rich man’s war]: quoted in Murdock, p. 6.

[New York draft riots]: Albon P. Man, Jr., “Labor Competition and N.Y. Draft Riots, 1863,”Journal of Negro History, vol. 36, no. 4 (October 1951); see also, Henry Steele Commager, ed., The Blue and the Gray (Bobbs-Merrill, 1950), vol. 2, pp. 714–19.

[Disappointment of Northern draft]: Allan Nevins, The War for the Union (Scribner’s, 1960–71), vol. 2, pp. 464–66, quoted at p. 464; see also, Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (Doubleday, 1954), pp. 23–31; Peter Levine, “Draft Evasion in the North During the Civil War,”Journal of American History, vol. 67, no. 4 (March 1981), pp. 816–34.

14–15 [Draft as stimulus to volunteering]: Nevins, vol. 2, p. 465.

15 [Southern opposition to draft]: T. Harry Williams, The History of American Wars: From 1745to 1918 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), p. 224; Moore, pp. 229–304.

[Numbers mobilized, North and South]: Williams, p. 225; Thomas L. Livermore, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America, 1861–1865 (Houghton, Mifflin, 1901).

[Sudden mobilization and demand for war supplies]: A. Howard Meneely, The War Department, 1861: A Study in Mobilization and Administration (Columbia University Press, 1928), passim: see also, Fred Albert Shannon, Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 2 vols. (Arthur H. Clark, 1928); Frederick Phisterer, Statistical Record of the Armies of the United States (Scribner’s, 1883).

[Records of quartermaster]: Nevins, vol. 2, p. 473.

[Lincoln on the national resources]: Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1864, in Basler, op. cit., vol. 8, p. 151.

[Improved production of shoes]: Frank A. Taylor, “Lyman Reed Blake,” in Allen Johnson, ed., Dictionary of American Biography (Scribner’s, 1929), vol. 2, pp. 344–45; Nevins, vol. 2, pp. 492–94.

15–16 [Southern industrial weaknesses]: Williams, p. 228.

16 [Centralized Confederate war effort]: Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 206–14.

[Rifles of the Civil War]: Nevins, vol. 1, pp. 342–50.

[The effect of canister or grape shot]: term employed by McPherson, op. cit., p. 192.

[Erie Canal traffic]: Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History (Harper & Bros., 1961), p. 516.

[Horses for the Army of the Potomac]: Nevins, vol. 2, p. 475.

16–17 [Prosperity of Northern railroads]: ibid., pp. 501–3, 505, Tribune quoted at p. 501; see also, Thomas Weber, The Northern Railroads in the Civil War, 1861–186; (King’s Crown Press, 1952), pp. 15, 43–93.

[Spanning the Potomac Creek]: George Edgar Turner, Victory Rode the Rails (Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), pp. 149–53, Turner quoted at p. 152, Lincoln at p. 153.

17–18 [Emerson’s plight]: Emerson to William Emerson, January 21, 1862, in Ralph L. Rusk, ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Columbia University Press, 1939). vol. 5, pp. 263–64.

18 [Financing the war]: Sidney Ratner, American Taxation: Its History as a Social Force in Democracy (W.W. Norton, 1942), pp. 67–110; Nevins, vol. 2, pp. 212–14; Robert P. Sharkey,”Commercial Banking,” in David T. Gilchrist and W. David Lewis, eds..Economic Change in the Civil War Era (Eleutherian Mills—Hagley Foundation, 1965); Morris, pp. 239–40, 530.

[Jungle of laissez-faire]: Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America (Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 675.

[Party and intra-party divisions on finance]: Robert P. Sharkey, “Money, Class and Party: An Economic Study of Civil War and Reconstruction,”Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science (Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), pp. 279–84.

19 [Women’s labor]: McPherson, p. 376; see also, Cindy Aron, “‘To Barter Their Souls forGold’: Female Clerks in Federal Government Offices, 1862–1890,”Journal of American History, vol. 67, no. 4 (March 1981), pp. 835–53.

[Women’s wages]: Sharkey, “Money, Class and Party,” p. 181; and see Emerson David Fite, Social and Industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War (Frederick Ungar, 1963), p. 184.

[Labor union response to war]: quoted in T. V. Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor: 1859 to 1889 (Excelsior, 1890), p. 35.

[Myth of economic impact of Civil War]: Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (Macmillan, 1927–42), vol. 2, pp. 53, 54.

20 [War and financiers]: Sharkey, “Money, Class and Party,” p. 295.

[Economic impact of war]: Gilchrist and Lewis; Ralph Andreano, ed., The Economic Impact of the American Civil War (Schenkman, 1967).

The Society of the Battlefield

21 [Soldiers’ low spirits]: John N. Moulton to his homefolk, February 1, 1863, quoted in Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank (Bobbs-Merrill, 1951), p. 279. [Moulton’s tiredness]: Moulton to his homefolk, March 16, 19, 1863, quoted in ibid., p.280.

[Enthusiasm and disappointment]: Levi Ross to his father, February 3, 1863, quoted in ibid.

[Soldiers sick of battle]: M. N. Collins to C. H. Bell, December 22, 1862, quoted in ibid., p. 279.

[Soldiers’ fear]:John N. Moulton to his homefolk, February 1, 1863,quoted in ibid., p. 279.

[“Fantom of hope”]: M. P. Larry to his sister, December 23, 1862, quoted in ibid., p. 280.

[Incompetent leadership]: Edward L. Edes to “Charlotte,” December 28, 1862, quoted in ibid., p. 279.

21–22 [Soldiers on slaves and emancipation]: ibid., p. 281.

22 [Participation of blacks]: Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Russell & Russell, 1968), quoted at p. 199; Dudley Taylor Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (W. W. Norton, 1966); Ira Berlin, ed., Freedom, A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867: The Black Military Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1982).

[“Heartily sick of war”]: Edward L. Edes to “Charlotte,” December 28, 1862, quoted in Wiley, p. 279.

22 [Desire for compromise]: Levi Ross to his father, February 3, 1863, quoted in ibid., p. 280.

[Peace and soldiers’ defeatism]: Crittenden to his wife, February 20, 1863, quoted in Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb (Bobbs-Merrill, 1943), p. 131.

[Confederacy “done whiped”]: John R. Hopper to his brother, September 9, 1863, quoted in ibid.

[Going home]: William R. Stillwell to his wife, August 13, 1863, quoted in ibid.

22–3 [Methods of encouraging reenlistment]: ibid., pp. 132–33.

23 [Daily routine]: John Beatty, Memoirs of a Volunteer (W. W. Norton, 1946), p. 40.

[Soldiers’ rations and supplements]: Nevins,The War for the Union, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 479; and see Commager, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 293; Wiley, Reb, pp. 90–107.

23–4 [Improvisation and the influence of army life]: Wiley, Yank, chs. 2, 12; Catton, Stillness at Appomattox, op. cit., pp. 219–25, 241–43; F. H. Mason, The Forty-Second Ohio Infantry (Cobb, Andrews, 1876), pp. 78–79.

24 [Organization and the war]: Nevins, vol. 1, p. v, and vol. 3, chs. 7–8; Jacob D. Cox, Military Reminiscences of the Civil War (Scribner’s, 1900), vol. 1, pp. 169–79.

24–5 [The field of battle]: Leander Stillwell, The Story of a Common Soldier, 1861–1865 (Franklin Hudson, 1920), p. 44; and see Commager, vol. 2, p. 603; Wiley, Yank, ch. 3.

25 [Fondness for war]: quoted in Nevins, vol. 2, p. 347 footnote.

[“Nobody sees a battle”]: quoted in Wiley, Yank, p. 77.

[Loading muskets]: McPherson, op. cit., p. 196.

[Disposition of dead after battle]: quoted in T. Harry Williams, History of American Wars, op. cit., p. 257.

26 [Medical treatment for wounded]: McPherson, p. 384.

[Sanitary conditions and disease]: ibid., p. 383; Wiley, Yank, p. 125.

26–7 [Sanitary Commission]: Nevins, vol. 1, pp. 283–85, 416, and vol. 3, pp. 317–19; George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War (Harper & Row, 1965), ch. 7; United States Sanitary Commission Documents, 2 vols. (1866).

27 [Patent Office into hospital]: Eliza Woolsey Howland, “The Top of the Patent Office Became a Hospital,” in Sylvia G. L. Dannett, ed., Noble Women of the North (ThomasYoseloff, 1959), pp. 81–83, quoted on soldier at p. 83.

[Prison conditions]: William B. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons (Frederick Ungar, 1930); and see Commager, vol. 2, pp. 685–707.

28 [“Battle Hymn”in Libby Prison]: Laura E. Richards and Maud Howe Elliot, Julia Ward Howe (Houghton Mifflin, 1915), vol. 1, pp. 188–89.

“Let Us Die to Make Men Free”

28–9 [The threat to Washington and the Shenandoah Valley campaign]: Catton, Stillness at Appomattox, op. cit., pp. 255–75, 279–88, 295–317; McPherson, op. cit., p. 429.

29 [Atlanta campaign]: Samuel Carter III, The Siege of Atlanta, 1864 (St. Martin’s Press, 1973); B. H. Liddell Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American (Dodd, Mead, 1930), pp. 231–307.

[“Atlanta is ours”]: quoted in Carter, p. 318.

[The view from Richmond]: see Morris, op. cit., p. 290.

30 [“Loathsome wounds”]: Woodward, op. cit., p. 641.

[“I am First Texas”]: quoted in ibid., p. 637.

[Wounded soldiers in Washington, D.C.]: Leech, op. cit., pp. 325–26.

[Louisa May Alcott in Washington, DC.]: ibid., pp. 222–24.

[“Getting worse, worse, worse”]: letter of April 5, 1864, in Whitman, The Correspondence, Edwin Haviland Miller, ed. (New York University Press, 1961–69), vol. 1, p. 208.

[Lincoln on cooperation with successor]: quoted in Stephen B. Oates, With Malice Toward None (Harper & Row, 1977), p. 395.

31 [Lincoln as politician]: David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered (Vintage Books, 1961), pp.57–81, 103–27; Don C. Seitz, Lincoln: The Politician (Coward-McCann, 1931).

[1862 cabinet crisis]: Burlon J. Hendrick, Lincoln’s War Cabinet (Little, Brown, 1946), Book 5, ch. 1; James MacGregor Burns, The Vineyard of Liberty (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 626–27, Lincoln on “pumpkins” quoted at p. 627.

31 [Pressure for Seward’s resignation]: James W. White to William Butler, January 12, 1863, Chicago Historical Society.

[Lincoln’s advice to general]: Lincoln to J. M. Schofield, May 27, 1863, Lincoln Collection, Chicago Historical Society.

31–2 [Lincoln and foreign policy]: Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974); Martin Duberman, Charles Francis Adams, 1807–1886 (Stanford University Press, 1960), chs. 21–22; Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People (F. S. Crofts, 1941), ch. 22; Philip Van Doren Stern, When the Guns Roared (Doubleday & Co., 1965), ch. 38; Norman Graebner, “Northern Diplomacy and European Neutrality,” in Armin Rappaport, ed..Essays in American Diplomacy (Macmillan, 1967), pp. 106–20.

32 [Absence of loyalty to Lincoln]: quoted in Donald, p. 62.

[Republican critics on Lincoln]: ibid.

[Advisability of second term questioned]: ibid, p. 63.

[Adams on Davis and Lincoln]: Charles Francis Adams to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., April 8, 1963, R. H. Dana Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

[Republican radicals and Lincoln] T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals (University of Wisconsin Press, 1941), esp. ch. 12; Donald, ch. 6; Hans L. Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968); Mark E. Neely.Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (McGraw-Hill, 1982), pp. 251–54 (“Radical Republicans”).

[Lincoln’s use of patronage]: Harry J. Carman and Reinhard H. Luthin, Lincoln and the Patronage (Columbia University Press, 1943), ch. 10.

33 [1864 conventions and campaign]: Harold M. Hyman, “Election of 1864,” in Arthur M.Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968 (Chelsea House,1971), vol. 2, pp. 1155–78; Oates, pp. 387–99.

[“A view to an ultimate convention”]: Democratic platform reprinted in Schlesinger, vol. 2, pp. 1179–80, quoted at p. 1179.

[Richmond Examiner on McClellan’s platform]: quoted in Nevins, The War for the Union, op. cit., vol. 4, p. 101.

[Copperheads in 1864]: Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War (Viking Press, 1942), ch. 8.

[Election results, 1864]: Schlesinger, vol. 2, p. 1244.

[Lincoln’s movement to the left]: McPherson, p. 477.

34 [Peace initiatives]: Basler, op. cit., vol. 7, pp. 517–18.

[Lincoln’s leadership]: see Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (Simon and Schuster, 1953).

[Sherman’s march through Georgia]: McPherson, p. 460; and see Liddell Hart, pp. 331–35.

35 [Lee on his army]: quoted in Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee (Scribner’s, 1934–36),vol. 4, p. 84.

[Surrender at Appomattox]: ibid., vol. 4, pp. 117–48.

[Union colonel on Lee]: Stephen Minot Weld, War Diary and Letters (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1979), p. 396.

[News of Lee’s surrender reaches Washington]: Oates, p. 422.

[Welles on jubilation in Washington]: Bcale, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 278.

36 [The legend of Lincoln begins]: adapted in part from Max Lerner, Ideas for the Ice Age (Viking Press, 1941), pp. 396–97.

[Experiment of the Confederacy]: E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America: 1861–1865 (Louisiana State University Press, 1950); Clement Eaton, A History of the Southern Confederacy (Macmillan, 1954); Hudson Strode, Jefferson Davis (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955–64), vols. 1 and 2; Frank Lawrence Owsley, State Rights in the Confederacy (University of Chicago Press, 1925).

[The end of an experiment]: William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (Alfred A. Knopf, 1948); Harold M. Hyman, Lincoln’s Reconstruction: Neither Failure of Vision Nor Vision of Failure (Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum, 1980).

37 [Lincoln’s peroration]: Basler, vol. 8, p. 333.

[Lincoln’s funeral trip]: Sandburg, op. cit., vol. 4, ch. 76.

[“When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d”]: Walt Whitman, The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman (Putnam’s, 1920), vol. 2, pp. 94, 96.

2. THE RECONSTRUCTION OF SLAVERY

38 [Euphoria at the bush spring]: Laura S. Haviland, A Woman’s Life-Work (Arno Press, 1969), pp. 414–15.

38–9 The leading source on reactions and perceptions of slaves and former slaves, drawn largely from oral interviews and histories made many years after the event, is George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Greenwood Press, 1972), 19 vols. See also Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979); John W. Blassingame, Slave Testimony (Louisiana State University Press, 1977); Norman R. Yetman, ed..Voices from Slavery (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970); Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered (University of North Carolina Press, 1979).

[Myrta Lockett Avary on her father’s talk to his slaves ]: Myrta Lockett Avary, Dixie After the War (Doubleday, Page, 1906), pp. 183–85; see also, James Roark, Masters Without Slaves (W. W. Norton, 1977), esp. part 3.

[Blacks’ song in Bexar County]: quoted in Litwack, p. 217.

Bound for Freedom

41–2 [Political situation and attitudes following Civil War]: Michael Les Benedict, A Compromise of Principle (W. W. Norton, 1974), chs. 5–6; David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (Alfred A. Knopf, 1970); Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), ch. 3; Fawn M. Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens, Scourge of the South (W. W. Norton, 1959), chs. 18, 19.

43 [Mantell on Republican leadership]: Martin E. Mantell, Johnson, Grant, and the Politics of Reconstruction (Columbia University Press, 1973), p. 5.

[Andrew Johnson]: Lately Thomas, The First President Johnson (William Morrow, 1968); Howard K. Beale, The Critical Year: A Study of Andrew Johnson (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1930); Eric L. McKitrick, ed., Andrew Johnson (Hill and Wang, 1969).

[“Fine feathers and gewgaws”]: quoted in Margaret Shaw Royall, AndrewJohnson—Presidential Scapegoat (Exposition Press, 1958), p. 51.

43–4 [Wade-Johnson mutual assurances]: Brodie, p. 223; David Donald, The Politics of Reconstruction, 1863–1867 (Louisiana State University Press, 1965), p. 19.

[Historians’ shifting views of Reconstruction]: Harold M. Hyman, ed., The Radical Republicans and Reconstruction, 1861–1870 (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), introduction, pp. xvii–lxviii; see also Mark W. Summers, Railroads, Reconstruction, and the Gospel of Prosperity (Princeton University Press, 1984).

45 [Keller on new nationalized and centralized system]: Morton Keller, Affairs of State (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. vii–viii, 4, 17ff.

46 [“The only safety of the nation”]: quoted in Beale, p. 27.

[Amnesty and other measures, late spring 1865]: Stampp, pp. 62–64.

[Sumner’s confidence in Johnson]: quoted in Donald, Sumner, p. 222 (italics in original).

47 [Johnson’s break with radicals, other Reconstruction developments]: Stampp, ch. 3 and passim; Hyman; Mantell, chs. 1–5; Howard P. Nash, Jr., Andrew Johnson: Congress and Reconstruction (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972); LaWanda Cox and John H. Cox, Politics, Principle, and Prejudice (Free Press, 1963).

[Schurz’s lour of the South]: Stampp, pp. 73–80, quoted at p. 78.

47–8 [Sumner’s exchange with Johnson]: quoted in Donald, Sumner, p. 238; see Eric McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 142–52.

49 [Proposed terms of Fourteenth Amendment]: quoted in Stampp, p. 136.

[Sumner’s oration on “The Equal Rights of All”]: Congressional Globe: The Debates and Proceedings of the First Session of the Thirty-ninth Congress (F. &J. Rives, 1866), February 6, 1866, p. 687.

[Clara Barton’s testimony]: quoted in Brodie, p. 244.

[“Irresponsible central directory”]: quoted in Stampp, p. 112.

[National Union Convention]: Benedict, pp. 191–96.

51 [Warning to Johnson against “swing around the circle”]: quoted in Thomas, p. 484.

[Johnson’s campaign]: ibid., pp. 485–99, quoted at pp. 489, 491.

[Election results, 1866]: Brodie, p. 288; Stampp, pp. 117–19.

A Revolutionary Experiment

52 [Reconstruction Congress as querulous, distracted, etc.]: Timothy Otis Howe, quoted in Benedict, op. cit.,p. 239.

[Stevens on the floor]: Brodie, op. cit.,pp. 309–10.

[Marx on Johnson]: quoted in Keller, op. cit., p. 63.

53 [Chronology of Radical Reconstruction]: Stampp, op. cit, pp. 144–48.

[Reconstruction Act Of March 2, 1867]: ibid.,pp. 144–45.

[Ex parte Milligan]: 4 Wallace 2 (1866), quoted at p. 124.

54 [Stevens on Milligan]: quoted in W. R. Brock, An American Crisis: Congress and Reconstruction (St. Martin’s Press, 1963), p. 186.

[Brock on Milligan]: ibid.

[Measure limiting Supreme Court jurisdiction]: Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History (Little, Brown, 1932), vol. 2, pp. 456–64.

[Court rulings against Southern states seeking to enjoin executive enforcement of the Reconstruction Acts]: State of Georgia v. Stanton, 6 Wallace 50 (1867); State of Mississippi v. Johnson, 4 Wallace 475 (1867); and see Warren, vol. 2, pp. 465, 472–84, 487–88.

[Chase’s warning against “collision”]: quoted in Keller, p. 76.

55 [Impeachment of Andrew Johnson]: Michael Les Benedict, The Impeachment and Trial of AndrewJohnson (W. W. Norton, 1973); Hans L. Trefousse, Impeachment of a President (Universityof Tennessee Press, 1975); James E. Sefton, Andrew Johnson and the Uses of Constitutional Power (Little, Brown, 1980); Raoul Berger. Impeachment: The Constitutional Problems (Harvard University Press, 1973).

[Letter to Garfield on constitutional implications of impeachment]: Burke A. Hinsdale to Garfield, September 30, 1867, in Mary L. Hinsdale, ed., Garfield-Hinsdale Correspondence: Correspondence between James Abram Garfield and Burke Aaron Hinsdale (University of Michigan Press, 1949), pp. 107–8.

[Johnson’s opposition to black suffrage in the South]: see esp. George F. Milton, “The Tennessee Epilogue,” excerpted from Milton, The Age of Hate (Coward-McCann, 1930), reprinted in McKitrick, ed., Andrew Johnson, op. cit., pp. 193–218; Benedict, Compromise of Principle,ch. 5.

56 [Johnson on being compelled to stand on his rights]: quoted in Stampp, p. 149.

[Johnson in the impeachment experience]: Thomas, op. cit., pp. 541–607; Albert Castel, The Presidency of Andrew Johnson (Regents Press of Kansas, 1979) and sources cited therein; McKitrick, Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction, op. cit., pp. 486–509.

[Grant, Johnson, and the Tenure of Office Act]: William S. McFeely, Grant (W. W. Norton, 1981), pp. 262–73.

56–7 [Surratt episode]: Thomas, pp. 349–52, 538–40.

57 [Foreknowledge of balloting on Johnson’s removal]: Trefousse, p. 169; see also, Ralph J.Roske, “The Seven Martyrs?,” American Historical Review, vol. 64, no. 2 (January 1959), pp. 323–30.

57-8 [Trumbull on possible implications of impeachment]: quoted in Stampp, p. 153; Stampp’s comment on same, ibid.

58 [Johnson’s burial]: Milton in McKitrick, pp. 216–17.

[Election of 1868]: Mantell, op. cit., chs. 6–9; William B. Hesseltinc, Ulysses S. Grant—Politician (Frederick Ungar, 1935), chs. 5–6; John Hope Franklin, “Election of 1868,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 2, pp. 1247–1300.

[Grant on the summer of 1868]: quoted in Mantell, p. 129.

59 [1868 Republican platform]: reprinted in Schlesinger, vol. 2, pp. 1270–71, quoted at p.1270.

[1868 election results]: Mantell, pp. 143–49; Schlesinger, vol. 2, p. 1300.

“I’se Free. Ain’t Wuf Nuffin”

60 [Sumner upon his reelection]: quoted in Donald, Sumner, op. cit., p. 348.

[Implications of election results of 1867]: Benedict, Compromise of Principle, op. cit., pp. 272–75;James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality (Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 378, 382,412.

60 [American Freedman editorial]: quoted in McPherson, p. 399.

[Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment]: William Gillette, The Right to Vote (Johns Hopkins Press, 1965).

60–1 [Henry Wilson on Republican struggle to give equal rights]: quoted in Benedict, p. 326, which is also the source of the statement of the other Republican senator (Samuel C. Pomeroy).

61 [Benedict on the political fortunes of the Republican party]: ibid., p. 327.

[Iowa editor on Phillips]: Keokuk Gate City, quoted in McPherson, p. 368.

[New York Times and World on the radicals]: ibid.

61–2 [American Anti-Slavery Society on Fifteenth Amendment]: ibid., p. 427.

62 [Child on Fifteenth Amendment]: ibid., p. 428.

[Southern politics in Reconstruction]: Stampp, op. cit.,ch. 6, quoted on black leaders at p. 167.

[Reaction of planters to new prestige and power of freedmen]: Litwack, op. cit., pp. 553–54.

62–3 [Bryce on corruption in the South]: James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (Macmillan, 1924), vol. 2, pp. 498–99.

63 [Results of black-and-white rule in South]: Stampp, p. 172.

[South Carolina constitution]: ibid., pp. 172–73.

[McPherson on education of black schoolchildren]: McPherson, p. 394.

63–4 [Education and black children]: ibid., pp. 386–407; W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (Russell & Russell, 1935), ch. 15; Luther P.Jackson, “The Educational Efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau and Freedmen’s Aid Societies in South Carolina,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 8, no. 1 (January 1923), pp. 1–40;James M. Smallwood, Timeof Hope, Time of Despair: Black Texans During Reconstruction (Kennikat Press, 1981), ch. 4; Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 92–118.

64 [Comments of Louisiana legislator and Southern white woman on schooling for blacks]: quoted in Litwack, pp. 485, 486.

[Paducah Herald on ruining blacks as laborers]: quoted in McPherson, p. 395.

[Mayor of Enterprise on teacher’s arrest]: quoted in Litwack, p. 487.

[“Forty acres and a mule”]: McPherson, pp. 407–16; Smallwood, ch. 3; Eric Foner, “Reconstruction and the Crisis of Free Labor,” in Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 97–127; Foner, “Thaddeus Stevens, Confiscation and Reconstruction,” in Foner, pp. 128–49; Escott, op. cit., pp. 150–51.

[South Carolina black, black preacher, Virginia black on land]: quoted in Litwack, pp. 392, 402, 403, respectively.

65 [Black leaders’emphasis on liberal, middle-class values]: ibid., pp. 520–22; Harold M. Hyman, ed., New Frontiers of the American Reconstruction (University of Illinois Press, 1966), pp.73–74, 79; Eugene Genovese, In Red and Black: Marxist Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History (Pantheon Books, 1971), esp. pp. 139–42; Howard M. Shapiro, “Land Reform During Reconstruction: A Case Study in the Sociology of History,” Williams College, 1981.

65–6 [Means of keeping blacks from voting]: William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (Louisiana State University Press, 1979), chs. 2, 12.

66 [Gibson County, Tennessee]: ibid., p. 29.

[The Klan and federal action]: see Allan W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (Harper & Row, 1971), passim.

[Dwindling of voting prosecutions and convictions]: Gillette, Retreat, pp. 42–45.

67 [Hayes and the South]: Gillette, Retreat, ch. 14; C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction (Little, Brown, 1951).

[White Georgian on “negro’s first want”]: quoted in Litwack, p. 448. This statement is a paraphrase made by a New York Times correspondent (see New York Times, January 7, 1866, p. 3) who does not name the quoted Georgian.

[One-sided black-planter bargains]: ibid., p. 409.

68 [Phillips on the need for a social revolution]: quoted in McPherson, pp. 370, 373.

[Henry Wilson on freedom]: quoted in Stampp, p. 88.

[Congressman Hoar on suffrage without education]: Gillette, Retreat, p. 215.

[Phillips on how to make “the negro safe”]: quoted in Benedict, p. 258.

69 [Stampp on radicals’ lack of knowledge of “sociology of freedom”]: Stampp, p. 129.

[Gillette on the kind of leadership needed]: Gillette, Retreat, p. 184.

69–70 [The Nation on governing well]: quoted in Alan Pendleton Grimes, The Political Liberalism of the New York Nation (University of North Carolina Press, 1953), p. 10; see also Edwin Lawrence Godkin, Problems of Modern Democracy, Morton Keller, ed. (Harvard University Press, 1966), passim.

70 [Sumner on human rights as constitutional]: quoted in Grimes, p. 6.

[Sea Islands land distribution]: Litwack, pp. 400–407; Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Bobbs-Merrill, 1964).

[Black woman and Alabama freedman on freedom]: quoted in Litwack, pp. 226, 328, respectively.

3. THE FORCES OF PRODUCTION

73 [John Adams on studying politics]: James Truslow Adams, The Adams Family (Little, Brown, 1930), p. 67.

[Charles Francis Adams, Jr.]: Diary of Charles Francis Adams, Jr., Massachusetts Historical Society; Charles Francis Adams, An Autobiography (Houghton Mifflin, 1916); Edward Chase Kirkland, Charles Francis Adams, Jr.: The Patrician at Bay (Harvard University Press, 1965).

[Adams following the locomotive engine]: Diary, August 21, 1887.

74 [American patents]: see U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), Part 2, pp. 957–59 (Series W 96–106).

[Observer on machinery, 1844]: Thomas A. Devyr, in the Working Man’s Advocate, March 30, 1844, cited in John R. Commons and Associates, History of Labour in the United States (Macmillan, 1918–35), vol. 1, p. 491.

75 [Charles Francis Adams on his “blue” day]: Diary, February 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 1883.

[Marx on the forces of production]: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Parts I and III, R. Pascal, ed. (International Publishers, 1947), pp. 16, 28, 29.

[Marx and Engels on revolutionizing the instruments of production]: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Parly,” in David Fernbach, ed., Karl Marx: Political Writings (Random House, 1973–74), vol. 1, pp. 67–98, quoted at p. 70.

[Americans’ knowledge of Marx and Marxism]: Howard H. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement (University of South Carolina Press, 1953), p. 4; David Herreshoff, American Disciples of Marx (Wayne State University Press, 1967).

[Marx on Lincoln]: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States (International Publishers, 1937), p. 281.

76 [Marx’s American journalism]: Henry M. Christman, ed., The American Journalism of Marx & Engels (New American Library, 1966).

[Life of Marx]: Christman, p. xii; and see Maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale, Marx Without Myth (Harper & Row, 1975); Werner Blumenberg, Karl Marx, Douglas Scott, trans. (New Left Books, 1972).

[The “wretchedness of existence”]: see Blumenberg, p. 109.

[Marx on “feverish and youthful” America]: Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Fernbach, vol. 2, p. 155.

[America as “outside history”]: see Herreshoff, p. 13.

[Marx on “wonders” of bourgeois production]: quoted in ibid., p. 20.

Innovators: The Ingenious Yankees

[Hoosac Tunnel]: Gary S. Brierly, “Construction of the Hoosac Tunnel 1855 to 1876,” Journal of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers Section, American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. 63, no. 3 (October 1976); Carl R. Byron, A Pinprick of Light (Stephen Greene Press, 1974); J. L. Harrison, The Great Bore (Advance Job Print Works, 1891); William B. Browne, “Tunnel Days in the Tunnel City” (unpublished manuscript, Williamsiana Collection, Williams College).

77–8 [Progress in coal and iron mining]: John W. Oliver, History of American Technology (Ronald Press, 1956), pp. 315–17.

79 [Automatic turret lathe]: Nathan Rosenberg, Perspectives on Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 21.

[Late-nineteenth-century innovators]: W. Paul Strassmann, Risk and Technological Innovation: American Manufacturing Methods during the Nineteenth Century (Cornell University Press, 1959). pp. 130–33, 142–45

[American iron and steel industry]: ibid., ch. 2; Oliver, ch. 22; Peter Temin, Iron and Steel in Nineteenth Century America (M.I.T. Press, 1964), ch. 8.

[Bessemer converters]: Temin, ch. 6; Oliver, p. 318; see also James M. Swank, History of the Manufacture of Iron in All Ages, and Particularly in the United States from Colonial Times to 1891 (American Iron and Steel Association, 1892), chs. 45, 46.

80 [Bridges]: D. B. Steinman, The Builders of the Bridge (Harcourt, Brace, 1945); David Plowen, Bridges: The Spans of North America (Viking Press, 1974).

[Eads and the St. Louis bridge]: Joseph Gies and Frances Gies, The Ingenious Yankees (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), ch. 22.

81 [Twine binder]: Oliver, pp. 366–67; William T. Hutchinson, Cyrus Hall McCormick: Harvest, 1856–1884 (D. Appleton-Century, 1935), vol. 2, ch. 13.

[Chronology of progress after the Civil War]: adapted from Lawrence Urdang, ed., The Time-Tables of American History (Simon and Schuster, 1981), pp. 223–47.

82 [Sawyer on technological development]: quoted in Strassmann, p. 184.

[American investment in education]: Nathan Rosenberg, Technology and American Economic Growth (M. E. Sharpe, 1972), p. 35.

[Marx on competition and technological progress]: Karl Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Writings (International Publishers, 1968), p. 90.

[Jefferson on practicality]: Jefferson to Cooper, July 10, 1812, in H. A. Washington, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson (Townsend, MacCoun, 1884), vol. 6, p. 73.

83 [Practical man on “our greatest thinkers”]: John Milton Mackie, From Cape Cod to Dixie and the Tropics (Putnam, 1864), pp. 200–201, as quoted in Rosenberg, Technology and Growth, p. 33

[Tocqueville on limits to American mind]: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Henry Reeve, trans., 4th ed. (Sever and Francis, 1864), pp. 40, 48, 53.

[Experiments in electricity]: Strassmann, pp. 159–60; Malcolm MacLaren, The Rise of the Electrical Industry during the Nineteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1943); Harold Passer, The Electrical Manufacturers, 1875–1900 (Harvard University Press, 1953).

[Joseph Henry]: J. G. Crowther, Famous American Men of Science (W. W. Norton, 1937), ch. 2.

[Davenport]: Carl W. Mitman, “Thomas Davenport,” in Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds.. Dictionary of American Biography (Scribner’s, 1930), vol. 5, pp. 87–88.

[Alexander Graham Bell]: Herbert N. Casson, The History of the Telephone (A. C. McClurg, 1910); Robert V. Bruce, Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Little, Brown, 1973); Gies and Gies, ch. 24; Oliver, ch. 30.

84 [“Mr. Watson—come here”]: quoted in Bruce, p. 181.

[Edison]: Crowther, ch. 4; Matthew Josephson, Edison (McGraw-Hill, 1959); Oliver, ch. 24.

85 [Edison’s search for a filament]: quoted in Oliver, p. 349.

Investors: Eastern Dollars and Western Risks

[Adams’s boredom and frustration]: Adams, Jr., Diary, op. cit., January 21, 22, February 16, March 4, 1869; see also Kirkland, op. cit., p. 127.

86 [Adams’s visit to Stock Exchange]: Diary, April 14, 1869.

[New Year’s greeting]: quoted in Edward Chase Kirkland, Men, Cities and Transportation: A Study in New England History, 1820–1900 (Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 92.

[Michigan copper]: William B. Gates, Jr., Michigan Copper and Boston Dollars (Harvard University Press, 1951); Angus Murdock, Boom Copper (Macmillan, 1943).

[“Trial-and-error fumbling”]: Gates, p. 30.

[Lodes at Calumet and Hecla]: Russell B. Adams, Jr., The Boston Money Tree (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1977), pp. 160–67, Agassiz quoted at p. 163; Gates, pp. 43–45, 57.

87 [Dividends from Calumet and Hecla]: Adams, Boston Money Tree, p. 166.

[The “general entrepreneur”]: Thomas C. Cochran, Railroad Leaders 1845–1890: The Business Mind in Action (Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 9–12; see also Adams, Boston Money Tree, pp. 136–46.

[Chapin]: Cochran, pp. 19–20, 288–89.

[Higginson]: Adams, Boston Money Tree, pp. 183–88 and passim.

[Nathan and Thomas Gold Appleton]: Frederic C. Jaher, “Businessman and Gentleman: Nathan and Thomas Gold Appleton—An Exploration in Intergenerational History,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 2nd ser., vol. 4, no. 1 (Fall 1966), pp. 7–39.

[Capital tied up in family trusts]: ibid., p. 34.

88 [Growth of New York City as capital market]: William J. Schultz and M. R. Caine, Financial Development of the United States (Prentice-Hall, 1937), pp. 192, 239, 249.

[Lowell on the Lowells]: quoted in Cleveland Amory, Proper Bostonians (E. P. Dutton, 1947), p. 44.

[Barker]: Fritz Redlich, The Molding of American Banking: Men and Ideas (Johnson, 1968), Part 2, pp. 60–61; see also Richard Sylla, “American Banking and Growth in the Nineteenth Century: A Partial View of the Terrain,” Explorations in Economic History, vol. 9, no. 2 (Winter 1971–72), pp. 197–227.

[Girard]: Redlich, Part 2, pp. 61–63.

[Jay Cooke]: Ellis P. Oberholtzer, “Jay Cooke,” in Johnson and Malone, Dictionary of American Biography, op. cit., vol. 4, pp. 383–84; Stuart Bruchey, “Jay Cooke,” in John A. Garraty, ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography (Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 217–18.

89 [Redlich on Cooke]: Redlich, Part 2, p. 356.

[Post-Civil War banking]: ibid., p. 74 ff.

(J. P. Morgan]: George Wheeler, Pierpont Morgan & Friends: The Anatomy of a Myth (Prentice-Hall, 1973).

[Morton, Bliss and Co.]: George Bliss Papers, Miscellaneous correspondence (Letterpress), 1876–79, New-York Historical Society.

90 [Bliss on “our position with the new administration”]: Bliss to Grenfell, March 6, 1877, in ibid.

[Communist Manifesto on entrepreneurs]: Marx and Engels, “Manifesto,” in Fernbach, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 72.

[Schumpeter on the entrepreneurial function]: Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 3rd ed. (Harper & Bros., 1947), p. 132 (emphasis added).

90–1 [Veblen on failure to innovate]: Thorslein Veblen, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (B. W. Heubsch, 1923), pp. 80–103; see also J. D. Bernal, Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953).

91 [Investment and innovation in late nineteenth-century capitalism]: see Strassmann, op. cit.; Rosenberg, Technology and Growth, op. cit.; Rosenberg, Perspectives, op. cit.

[Daniel Drew]: Allan Nevins, “Daniel Drew,” in Johnson and Malone, Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 5, pp. 450–51; Charles Francis Adams, Jr., “A Chapter of Erie,” in Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and Henry Adams, Chapters of Erie and Other Essays (James R. Osgood, 1871), pp. 1–99, quoted at p. 5.

92 [“Commodore” Vanderbilt]: Wheaton J. Lane, Commodore Vanderbilt: An Epic of the Steam Age (Alfred A. Knopf, 1942).

[Harlem Railroad corner]: Nevins in Johnson and Malone, p. 450.

[Jay Gould]: Julius Grodinsky, Jay Gould: His Business Career, 1867–1892 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957); Richard O’Connor, Gould’s Millions (Doubleday, 1962).

[James Fisk]: Robert H. Fuller, Jubilee Jim: The Life of Colonel James Fisk, Jr. (Macmillan, 1928).

[“Instincts of fourteen”]: Henry Adams, “The New York Gold Conspiracy,” in Adams, Jr., and Adams, p. 104.

93 [Adams on Fisk and Gould]: Kirkland, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., pp. 41, 62.

[Adams and bribery]: ibid., p. 110; Adams, Jr., Autobiography, op. cit., pp. 191–96; see also Paul Goodman, “Ethics and Enterprise: The Values of a Boston Elite, 1800–1860,” American Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 3 (Fall 1966), pp. 437–51.

Entrepreneurs: The Californians

93 [Lake Donner]: Alonzo Delano (“The Old Block”), The Central Pacific Railroad, or ’49 and ’69 (White and Bauer, 1868), p. 18; Collection Bancroft Library, University of California.

94[Winter of 1866–67]: Sacramento Union, December 28, 1866; Testimony of James Strobridge before the Pacific Railway Commission (Government Printing Office, 1887), vol. 5, p. 3150; Statement of L. M. Clement, civil engineer, Pacific Railway Commission, vol. 5, p. 2577; Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy (University of California Press, 1971), p. 64.

[Conditions]: Chinese-American Workers, Past and Present: An Anthology of Getting Together Magazine (Getting Together, 1970), pp. 6–7; Wesley Griswold, A Work of Giants (McGraw-Hill, 1962). p. 120.

[Twenty-seven-inch record]: James McCague, Moguls and Iron Men (Harper & Row, 1964), p. 159.

[Reluctance to use Chinese laborers]: Testimony of James Strobridge, Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, 2nd Session, 44th Congress, 1876–77 (Government Printing Office, 1877), Report No. 689, p. 723; McCague, pp. 103–4.

[Chinese hired as potential strikebreakers]: Saxton, p. 62; McCague, pp. 103–4.

[Early agitationfor railroad]: Robert S. Cotterhill, “Early Agitation for a Pacific Railroad, 1845–1850,” in Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 5, no. 4 (March 1919), pp. 396–414, esp. p. 397.

95 [Federal approval]: Norman E. Tutorow, Leland Stanford: Man of Many Careers (Pacific Coast Publishers, 1971), pp. 70, 72.

[Big Four]: ibid., pp. 70–75.

[Judah]: Collection of pamphlets on Theodore Judah, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

[Stanford at GHQ]: Leland Stanford Correspondence, vol. 3, October 21, 1868, Stanford University Archives.

[Crocker in the field]: Charles Crocker, “Facts … regarding … identification with the Central Pacific Railroad,” dictated to H. H. Bancroft, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, pp. 49–52.

[Chinese strike]: Alta California, July 1, 3, 1867; Testimony of Charles Crocker, Report of the Joint Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, p. 669.

96 [Railroad rivalry]: John Debo Galloway, The First Transcontinental Railroad (Simmons-Boardman, 1950), p. 88; “The Last Spike,” pamphlet (not dated), Bancroft Library,University of California, Berkeley; Testimony of Leland Stanford, Pacific Railway Commission, vol. 5, p. 2523; Strobridge Testimony, Pacific Railway Commission, vol. 5, pp.2580–81; General Grenville M. Dodge (chief engineer of the Union Pacific Railway),”How We Built the Union Pacific Railway,” in Henry Steele Commager and AllanNevins, eds., The Heritage of America (Little, Brown, 1939), pp. 835–37.

[Last spike]: Dodge, in Commager and Nevins, p. 837; Tutorow, pp. 90, 91, 98. [“You brag of the East”]: “What the Engines Said,” in Bret Harte, Poems (Fields, Osgood, 1871), pp. 38–39.

[Emerson trip]: James Bradley Thayer, A Western Journey with Mr. Emerson (Little, Brown, 1884; reprinted by Kennikat Press, 1971), pp. 39–43. quoted at p. 42.

97 [Sights of gold mining]: Thayer, pp. 113–14; Albert D. Richardson, Beyond the Mississippi: From the Great River to the Great Ocean (American Publishing, 1867), pp. 391–92.

[Urchins panning gold]: Charles Nordhoff, California: A Book for Travellers and Settlers (Harper & Bros., 1872), pp. 98–99.

[Windmills]: Thayer, p. 119.

[John Muir]: ibid, pp. 88–109.

[Traveling south through Central Valley, past land of Spanish and Indians]: Nordhoff, pp. 119–24, 150–57, 238–45, quoted at pp. 123, 157, 152, 242 respectively.

[Los Angeles market produce]: Nordhoff, p. 136.

[Railroad in Los Angeles]: Glenn S. Dumke, The Boom of the Eighties in Southern California (Huntington Library, 1944), pp. 19–21.

99 [Shipping]: Iris Higbie Wilson, William Wolfskill (Arthur H. Clarke, 1965), pp. 176–77; Andrew F. Rolle,California: A History, 2nd ed. (Thomas Crowell, 1969), pp. 359–60.

[Phineas Banning]: Banning Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Dumke, pp. 19–20.

100 [“Stanford’s Palace”]: Tutorow, pp. 206–7.

[Lucy Jones]: Diary of Lucy S.Jones, 1874–75, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

[Chinatown]: San Francisco Alta (1870), quoted in William N. Camp, Port of Gold (Country Life Press, 1947), p. 264; Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California (The History Co., 1890), vol. 7, pp. 336, 340, 691–92, footnote 37.

[Absentee landlords]: Nordhoff, p. 91.

100–1 [Anti-Chinese agitation and legislation]: Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer, The Anti-Chinese Movement in California (University of Illinois Press, 1973), p. 52; Ira B. Cross, A History of the Labor Movement in California (University of California Press, 1935), pp. 74–87.

101 [Democratic planks]: Sandmeyer, p. 46.

[Anti-Chinese sentiment within labor movement]: Frederick L. Ryan, Industrial Relations in the San Francisco Building Trades (University of Oklahoma Press, 1936), p. 15; Lucile Eaves, A History of California Labor Legislation (University of California Press, 1910), pp. 6, 105, quoted in Sandmeyer, p. 40; Cross, pp. 74–75.

[Mass meetings, Workingmen’s Party]: Sandmeyer, pp. 47, 66.

[Invalidity of constitutional provisions]: ibid., p. 74.

[San Francisco’s cultural life]: Rolle. p. 450; Lucy Jones Diary, Bancroft Library, Franklin Walker, San Francisco’s Literary Frontier (Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), pp. 8, 116, 127, 316, 352; Lawrence Ferlinghetti and NancyJ. Peters, Literary San Francisco (City Lights Books and Harper & Row, 1980), pp. ix–xi, 29–32, 42–44, 64–66, 75–84.

Industrialists: Carnegie, Rockefeller, and the Two Capitalisms

102 [Carnegie]: Joseph Frazier Wall, Andrew Carnegie (Oxford University Press, 1970), passim, Irishman quoted at p. 151.

[“I can get nae mair work”]: quoted in Harold C. Livesay, Andrew Carnegie and the Rise of Big Business (Little, Brown, 1975), p. 11.

[Carnegie making the trains run]: Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (Houghton Mifflin, 1920), pp. 70–72.

[Carnegie burning wrecked freight cars]: Wall, p. 151.

104 [Carnegie on lime and coke]: quoted in ibid., p. 342.

[Wall on Carnegie and cost-cutting]: Joseph F. Wall, “Andrew Carnegie,” in Garraty, op. cit., p. 176.

[“We were boys together”]: J. Edgar Thomson, quoted in Livesay, p. 162.

[Growth and economies]: ibid., pp. 155–56.

[“Beyond this never earn”]: quoted in Wall, Carnegie, pp. 224–25.

[“Gospel of Wealth”]: ibid., pp. 805–15.

[The “other” Carnegie in England]: ibid., ch. 14; see also Carnegie, chs. 22–25.

105 [John D. Rockefeller and his family]: David Freeman Hawke, John D. (Harper & Row, 1980), ch. 1.

105–6 [Rockefeller’s youthful enterprises]: ibid., p. 12.

[Rockefeller on competition and combination]: a composite of paragraphs of conversations of John D. Rockefeller with William O. Inglis, quoted in ibid., pp. 153–55.

107 [Philanthropy of Carnegie and Rockefeller]: Burton J. Hendrick, “Andrew Carnegie,” in Johnson, Dictionary of American Biography, op. cit., vol. 3, p. 505; Wall, Carnegie, ch. 22; AllanNevins, John D. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise (Scribner’s, 1941), vol. 2, chs. 48, 49, and p. 712.

[Marxist definition of need]: Agnes Heller, The Theory of Need in Marx (St. Martin’s Press, 1974), passim.

[Production in the late nineteenth century]: Edwin Frickey, Production in the United States: 1860–1914 (Harvard University Press, 1947), especially pp. 7–15 (Table 1); John A. Garraty, The New Commonwealth, 1877–1890 (Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 82–85.

107 [Manufactured goods index]: Garraty, New Commonwealth, p. 80; see also David A. Wells, Recent Economic Changes (D. Appleton, 1899).

108 [Innovation in 1886–95]: Urdang, op. at., pp. 244–58.

109 [Scientific man versus inventor]: Edison in Brooklyn Citizen, November 4. 1888, quoted in Roberc Conot, A Streak of Luck (Seaview Books, 1979), p. 460.

[“My business is thinking”]: ibid., p. 456.

[Edison as a transitional figure]: Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Houghton Mifflin, 1950), p. 127.

Philadelphia 1876: The Proud Exhibitors

[Philadelphia Centennial Exposition]: Gies and Gies, op. cit., pp. 3–9; Oliver, op. cit., pp. 300–302; Marshall Davidson, Life in America (Houghton Mifflin, 1974). vol. 1, pp. 538–41; J. S. Ingram, The Centennial Exposition (Hubbard Bros., 1876).

110 [“Sober black iron monsters”]: Gies and Gies, p. 7.

[Bell at the Centennial]: ibid., pp. 327–28; Bruce, op. cit., p. 197.

[“Centennial Hymn”]: The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Houghton Mifflin, 1895), p. 234, stanza 1.

4. THE STRUCTURE OF CLASSES

111 [Chicago stockyards]: W.Joseph Grand, The Illustrated History of the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, Ill. (Thomas Knapp, 1896); “The Meat Industry of America,” Scientific American, vol. 100, no. 4 (January 23, 1909), pp. 84–86 and no. 5 (January 30, 1909), pp. 99–102; Rudolf A. Clemen, The American Livestock and Meat Industry (Ronald Press, 1923); Lewis Corey, Meat and Man (Viking Press, 1950).

[Everything used but the squeal]: quoted in Bessie L. Pierce, A History of Chicago (Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), vol. 3, p. 123.

[Uses of the cow]: Finley Peter Dunne, quoted in ibid., vol. 3, p. 124.

112 [Alienation in capitalist production]: Karl Marx, Capital, Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, trans. (Charles H. Kerr, 1915), p. 708.

[Capital as dead labor]: ibid., p. 257.

[Labor robbed of its value]: ibid., pp. 202–3.

[Gutman on London]: Herbert G. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), p. 40.

Upper Classes: The New Rich and the Old

113 [The Chicago rich]: Wayne Andrews, Battle for Chicago (Harcourt, Brace, 1946); Harper Leech and John Charles Carroll, Armour and His Times (Appleton-Century, 1938); Pierce, op. cit., vols. 2 and 3; Dixon Wecter,The Saga of American Society (Scribner’s, 1937), pp.143–48.

[Armour’s routine]: Andrews, pp. 86–87, quoted at p. 87.

[Armour on making money]: quoted in ibid., p. 87.

[Ethics according to David Harum]: Edward N. Wescott, David Harum (D. Appleton, 1899), p. viii.

114 [Elites generally]: see Frederic Cople Jaher, ed., The Rich, The Well Born, and the Powerful (University of Illinois Press, 1973); Frederic Cople Jaher, “Nineteenth Century Elites in Boston and New York,”Journal of Social History, vol. 6, no. 1 (Fall 1972), pp. 32–77;Maury Klein and Harvey Kantor, Prisoners of Progress (Macmillan, 1976), esp. ch. 7;Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes (C. H. Kerr, 1909).

[Palmer House]: Andrews, pp. 75–78, quoted at p. 76.

[McCormick’s fresco]: ibid., p. 112.

[Boston elites]: Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (E. P. Dutton, 1947); Lucius Beebe, Boston and the Boston Legend (Appleton-Century, 1935).

[Chicagoans and Mr. Smith]: Amory, p. 11.

115 [Intermarriage in Boston high society]: ibid., p. 20.

[Mrs. Jack Gardner]: ibid., ch. 6; Beebe, ch. 17.

[Beacon Hill lady on being “already here”]: quoted in Amory, p. 23.

115 [Jaher on Brahmin power]: Jaher, “Nineteenth Century,” p. 60.

116 [Philadelphia elites]: E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (Collier-Macmillan, 1966); Nathaniel Burt, The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (Little, Brown, 1963).

[“Different, aloof and apart”]: Baltzell, p. 188.

[Pepper on Walnut Street]: quoted in ibid., p. 185.

117 [New York elites]: John A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (Doubleday, 1953); Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York (Random House, 1951); Mrs. John King van Rensselaer. The Social Ladder (Henry Holt, 1924).

[McAllister on standards]: quoted in Klein and Kantor, p. 221.

[The “Four Hundred”]: ibid., pp. 225–26; Morris, ch. 12;Ward McAllister, Society As I Have Found It (Cassell, 1890).

118 [American society managed by women]: quoted in Klein and Kantor, p. 231; see also Wecter, ch. 8.

[Ambitious hostesses]: Klein and Kantor, p. 226.

[The Vanderbilts]: Wayne Andrews, The Vanderbilt Legend (Harcourt, Brace, 1941).

[Vanderbilt, Astor hostilities]: ibid., pp. 254–55; Harvey O’Connor, The Astors (Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), pp. 195–98.

[Vanderbilt Hyde Park mansion]: Charles W. Snell, Vanderbilt Mansion (National Park Service Historical Series No. 32, 1960).

119 [New Haven class structure]: Robert E. Dahl, Who Governs?: Democracy and Power in anAmerican City (Yale University Press, 1961), Books 1, 2.

[Springfield]: Michael Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840–1880 (Harvard University Press, 1972). [Patriarchal chauvinism]: see O’Connor, pp. 193, 194.

The Middle Classes: A Woman’s Work

[Details of home life]: Helen Smith Jordan, Love Lies Bleeding: The Life in Letters of Mary Abigail Abell (1979). at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe; Mary E. Howard, “The Changing Household, 1865–1900,” paper presented to Radcliffe Women’s Archives Workshop, 1952–53, Schlesinger Library; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown (Harcourt, Brace, 1929), ch. 12, p. 167 footnote 17; Philip C. Dolce, ed..Suburbia: The American Dream and Dilemma (Anchor Books, 1976), pp. 5–7; Earl Lifshey, The Housewares Story (National Housewares Manufacturers Association, 1973), pp. 124, 126; Richard Sennett, “Middle-Class Families and Urban Violence: The Experience of a Chicago Community in the Nineteenth Century,” in Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett, eds., Nineteenth Century Cities (Yale University Press, 1969); Doreen Yarwood, Costume of the Western World (St. Martin’s Press, 1980).

119–20 [Laundry tasks]: Diary of Annie Thompson (unpublished manuscript in private collection, Chicago), quoted at p. 117; Howard, passim.

120 [Housecleaning]: Claudia L. Bushman, A Good Man’s Poor Wife (University Press of New England, 1981), pp. 112–13.

[“Hattie’s ‘opera cape’”]: Harriet Hanson Robinson, quoted in ibid., p. 113.

[Journals read by women]: Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Harvard University Press, 1930–68), vol. 3, ch. 4; vol. 4, ch. 21 and supplement; collection. New York Historical Society.

121 [Domestic help]: U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office, Statistics of the Population of the United States of the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880) (Government Printing Office, 1883), p. 729; Theresa M. McBride, The Domestic Revolution (Holmes & Meier, 1976), pp. 18–19; David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (Oxford University Press, 1978);Jordan; Bushman, pp. 109–12; Lillian Pettingill, Toilers of the Home (Doubleday, 1903); Harriet Prescott Spofford, The Servant Girl Question (1881; reprinted by Arno Press, 1977); Faye E. Dudden, Serving Women (Wesleyan University Press, 1983).

[Housewives’complaints]: Harriet Hanson Robinson, quoted in Bushman, pp. 109, 110, 109 respectively; see also Katzman, pp. 16–17.

[Domestic science, domestic feminism]: Catharine E. Beechcr and Harriet Beechcr Stowe, The American Woman’s Home: or Principles of Domestic Science (J. B. Ford, 1869; reprinted, 1874, as The Housekeeper’s Manual); Edith Hoshino Altbach, Women in America (D. C. Heath, 1974), pp. 8. 33; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (Yale University Press, 1973),pp.96–97, 158–67, and passim; Mary P. Ryan, “The Power of Women’s Networks: A Case Study of Moral Reform in Antebellum America,” Feminist Studies, vol. 5, no. 1 (Spring 1979), pp. 66–85; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good (Anchor Press, 1978), ch. 5.

121 [Training of daughters]: Edna Ormsby. Journal (Schlesinger Library), February 12, 1895, p. 73; ibid., February 20, 1896, p. 84; Bushman, p. 112; Jordan, passim; Thompson, passim.

121–22 [Sexuality]: Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 23–25; Ronald G. Waters, Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America (Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 65–78; see also Stephen Kern, Anatomy & Destiny: A Cultural History of the Human Body (Bobbs-Merrill, 1975), ch. 9; G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth Century America (Harper & Row, 1976).

122 [“The full force of sexual desire”]: William Sanger, The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes and Effects Throughout the World (Harper & Bros., 1858), pp. 488–89, in Waters, p. 67.

[Fashion]: Yarwood, pp. 52, 54.

[Corsets]: AndrewSinclair, The Better Half: The Emancipation of the American Woman (Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 103–5, Stanton quoted at p. 105.

[English visitor on corseted American women]: Ada S. Ballin, The Science of Dress in Theory and Practise (Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1885), p. 160, in Kern, p. 13.

[Beecher on cares of marriage]: Catharine Beecher, “On Female Health in America,” from Letters to the People on Health and Happiness (Harper & Bros., 1855), in Nancy F. Cott, ed., Roots of Bitterness (E. P. Dutton, 1972), p. 263.

[“Like a man a-mowing”]: Anonymous wife, quoted in Gordon, p. 105. [“Unaccommodating and capricious”]: ibid., p. 125.

[Women’s network]: Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth Century America,” in Linda K. Kerber and Jane De Hart Mathews, eds., Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 156–79.

123 [Contraception and control of family size]: Gordon, chs. 5–6; Daniel Scott Smith, “Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America,” in Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck, A Heritage of Her Own (Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 222–45.

[Comstock law]: reprinted in Kerber and Mathews, p. 438; and see Gordon, pp. 24, 167.

[Abortion ]: James C. Mohr, “Abortion in America,” in Kerber and Mathews, pp. 179–89.

[Stanton on Whitman and women]: Harriet Stanton Blatch and Theodore Stanton, eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Arno Press, 1969), vol. 2, p. 210 (diary entry, September 6, 1883).

[Burton on love]: Harriet Burton Laidlaw, Diary, Harriet B. Laidlaw Papers, Schlesinger Library.

[Survey of women’s attitudes toward sex]: Dr. Clelia Duel Mosher, “Hygiene and Physiology of Women” (Mosher Papers, Stanford University), vol. 10, in Carl N. Degler, “What Ought to Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” American Historical Review, vol. 79, no. 5 (December 1974), pp. 1467–90, quoted at p. 1487.

[Gilman ‘s illness ]: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Harper Colophon Books, 1975), p. 92.

[Women’s depression]: Ehrenreich and English, pp. 1–4; and ch. 4, esp. p. 95.

124 [Alice James on the “receptive attitude”]: Alice James to William James, January3–7, 1886(?), in Ruth Bernard Yeazell, The Death and Letters of Alice James (University of California Press, 1981), p. 107.

[Beecher on “decay of female health”]: Beecher, “On Female Health in America,” in Cott, pp. 263–70, quoted at p. 263.

[Woman as “chief ornament”]: Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (Modern Library, 1934), p. 180.

[Gilman on wife’s role]: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Are Women Human Beings?,” Harper’s Weekly, May 25, 1912, p. 11, in Aileen S. Kraditor, ed., Up from the Pedestal (Quadrangle, 1975), pp. 325–31; see also Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (Small, Maynard, 1898).

124 [Doctors and women]: Ehrenreich and English, pp. 35–88, also ch. 4.

[Henry Ward Beecher]: Clifford E. Clark, Jr., Henry Ward Beecher: Spokesman for a Middle-Class America (University of Illinois Press, 1978);William G. McLoughlin, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America, 1840–1870 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1970).

125 [Victoria Woodhull]: Emanie Sachs, “The Terrible Siren” (Harper & Bros., 1928); Johanna Johnscon, Mrs. Satan (Putnam’s, 1967).

[Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly]: Mott, vol. 3, pp. 443–53; extensive (though incomplete) collection of the Weekly in New-York Historical Society.

125–6 [Woodhull on freeing women from sexual slavery]: Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, October 1, 1870, p. 11.

126 [Woodhull’s appearance in Steinway Hall]: Sachs, pp. 135–36; see also the Weekly, January 2, 1875, p. 2.

[Woodhull’s exposé of the Beecher-Tilton relationship]: Weekly, November 2, 1872, pp. 9–13; see also Robert Shaplen, Free Love and Heavenly Sinners (Alfred A. Knopf, 1954).

127 [Beecher as spokesman for the middle class]: Clark, prologue.

The Farmer’s Lot

[Department of Agriculture study of farm wife’s work]: cited in John Mack Faragher, “The Midwestern Farming Family, 1850,”in Kerber and Mathews, op. cit., pp. 114–29, quoted at p. 123.

[Farm women’s routine]: John Ise, Sod and Stubble: The Story of a Kansas Homestead (University of Nebraska Press, 1967), ch. 3.

128 [E.B.’s complaint and rejoinders]: from The Household, 1878–79, 1883, in Norton Juster, So Sweet to Labor: Rural Women in America, 1865–1895; (Viking Press, 1979), pp. 145–51, quoted at pp. 145, 146, 149.

[Migration into the Plains states]: Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), p. 38; see also Page Smith, Daughters of the Promised Land (Little, Brown, 1970), esp. ch. 15.

[Creating new counties and communities]: John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (University of Minnesota Press, 1931), p. 18.

[Homestead Act]: ibid., pp. 9–10.

129 [Sod houses and living conditions]: Ise, passim; Hicks, p. 30.

[Farmers’ financial plight]: Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 114; Hicks, pp. 89–90; Norman Pollack, ed., The Populist Mind (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 34; Ise, p. 17.

130 [Farmers, middlemen, and trusts]: Shannon, pp. 174, 179, 192–93; Hicks, p. 61.

[Downgrading “number one” wheat]: Lewis Walker, Jr., “Abuses in the Grain Trade of theNorthwest,” in Annals of the American Academy of Politicul and Social Science, vol. 18 (November 1901), pp. 488–90, quoted at p. 490.

[The small farmer’s high costs of transportation]: Hicks, pp. 61–65.

[Migration back to the East]: ibid., p. 84; Shannon, p. 146.

130–1 [Susan Orcutt’s appeal]: quoted in Pollack, p. 36 (June 29, 1894).

131 [Condition of Southern farmers, post-Civil War]: Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 1977). p. 151.

[The cotton mania]: Charles H. Otken, The Ills of the South (Putnam’s, 1894), ch. 7, quoted in Hicks, p. 49.

[Conditions in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi]: C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Louisiana State University Press, 1951), p. 177.

[Political leaders on farmers’ conditions]: quoted in ibid., pp. 187–88.

132 [“Working on halves”]: Ransom and Sutch, pp. 89–90.

[“Slavery under a new name”]: Robert Preston Brooks, “The Agrarian Revolution in Georgia, 1865–1912,” in Georgia Studies: Selected Writings of Robert Preston Brooks (University of Georgia Press, 1952), p. 101.

[Ned Cobb on his labor as a boy]: quoted in Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), p. 15.

132–3 [Washington on living conditions of sharecroppers]: Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (Corner House, 1971; originally published 1900, 1901), pp. 112–16.

134 [Ownership of land by black farmers]: Woodward, p. 205; Arnold H. Taylor, Travail and Triumph: Black Life and Culture in the South Since the Civil War (Greenwood Press, 1976), p. 72.

[Pride of ex-slaves in owning land]: George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Greenwood Press, 1972), vol. 6, p. 192, quoted in Taylor, p. 69.

[Conditions of white sharecroppers]: Shannon, p. 99.

134–5 [Farm family’s income]: ibid., quoted at p. 115.

[Woodward on the crop lien system]: Woodward, p. 180.

[Otken on credit system]: quoted in Ransom and Sutch, p. 164.

135–6 [Merchant-debtor relationship]: Goodwyn, p. 31; see also Thomas D. Clark, “The Furnishing and Supply System in Southern Agriculture Since 1865,”Journal of Southern History, vol. 12, no. 1 (February 1946), pp. 24–44.

136 [“No cotton, no credit”]: Goodwyn, p. 31.

[Matt Brown]: Clark, “Furnishing and Supply System,” pp. 41–42.

Working Classes: The Conditions of Existence

137 [Transformation of Lynn]: John T. Cumbler, Working-Class Community in Industrial America (Greenwood Press, 1979), quoted at p. 17.

[Inside view of a tenement]: Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (Scribner’s, 1890), p. 43.

[Death rate of children]: ibid., p. 36.

138 [Death of a baby]: ibid., pp. 43–44.

[Divisions between ethnic groups]: ibid., pp. 24–25.

[Sweatshops]: John Dewitt Warner, “The ‘Sweating System’ in New York City,” Harper’s Weekly, vol. 39, no. 1990 (February 9, 1895), p. 135, as cited in Milton Meltzer, Bread—and Roses: The Struggle of American Labor, 1865–1915 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 41.

139 [Testimony of Fannie Harris]: quoted in Robert W. Smuts, Women and Work in America (Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 43–44; on child labor, see also Jacob A. Riis, The Children of the Poor (Scribner’s, 1902).

[Richardson]: Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day: The True Story of a New York Working Girl as Told by Herself (Century, 1905), as cited in Smuts, pp. 70–72, Richardson quoted on owner at p. 72.

[“A few hard chairs”]: Rose Cohen, quoted in Katzman, p. 12.

[Domestics’ grievances]: Helen Campbell, Prisoners of Poverty (Little, Brown, 1900), pp. 222–31, excerpted in Cott, pp. 322–26, quoted at pp. 323, 324.

[Domestic work]: Smuts, pp. 79–80, quoted at p. 80.

140 [Wage data]: Clarence D. Long, Wages and Earnings in the United States, 1860–1890 (Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 61–68, 109–10.

[Incomes of the wealthy]: Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American Biography (Scribner’s, 1929), vol. 1, p. 348 (“Philip Danforth Armour”), and vol. 3, pp. 500, 503 (“Andrew Carnegie”); Jules Abels, The Rockefeller Billions (Macmillan, 1965), p. 179.

[Life in a steel works]: Charles Rumford Walker, Steel: The Diary of a Furnace Worker (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922), p. 16; John A. Fitch, The Steel Workers (Russell Sage Foundation, 1911), Part 1.

[Accidents in a steel mill]: Fitch, p. 64.

141 [“I live in the mills”]: quoted in ibid., p. 201.

[Home life in a mill town]: ibid., p. 203.

[Homes of steel workers]: Stefan Lorant, Pittsburgh (Author’s Edition, Inc., 1980), p. 212.

[Steel wages]: Fitch, ch. 12; see also Paul Underwood Kellogg, ed., Wage-Earning Pittsburgh (Survey Associates, 1914), ch. 3.

[Social evils of the urban environment]: Riis, The Other Half, p. 3.

142 [The Pullman experiment]: Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880–1930 (Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 41; and see also Meltzer, pp. 148–52.

Social Class and Social Outcast

142 [Aristotle on the class system as universal]: Aristotle, Politics, Benjamin Jowett, tr. (Modern Library, 1943), quoted at pp. 190, 191,192.

[Postwar disparity in income]: Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History (Academic Press, 1980), quoted at p. 75; see also J. R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History (University of California Press, 1978), p. 208.

143 [Myth of “rags to riches” in Pittsburgh]: John N. Ingham, The Iron Barons: A Social Analysisof an American Urban Elite, 1874–1965; (Greenwood Press, 1978), quoted at p. 5; see also, Gutman, op. cit.,ch. 4.

[Social and cultural forces in the industrial working class, and their political implications]: see Melvin Rader, Marx’s Interpretation of History (Oxford University Press, 1979); John M. Maguire, Marx’s Theory of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1978); Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (University of Texas Press, 1979); Gutman, passim.

[Gutman on transformations of working class]: Gutman, p. 15.

144 [Eastern Europeans at Carnegie]: David Brody, Steel Workers in America: The Nonunion Era (Harvard University Press, 1960), ch. 5, esp. p. 96.

[“Nothing job, nothing job”]: “Song of an Italian Workman,” Rochester (N.Y.) Post-Express, n.d., reprinted in Gutman, p. 31.

145 [Caste and class and race in the United States]: Anthony de Reuck and Julie Knight, Caste and Race: Comparative Approaches (J. & A. Churchill, 1967); Celia S. Heller, ed., Structured Social Inequality (Macmillan, 1969); Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds.,Class, Status, and Power (Free Press, 1953).

[Dimensions of caste]: Max Weber, “Class, Status, Party,” reprinted in Bendix and Lipset, pp. 63–75.

[Jewish upper class in Manhattan]: Stephen Birmingham, “Our Crowd”; The Great Jewish Families of New York (Harper & Row, 1967), passim; John Higham, Send These to Me (Atheneum, 1975), esp. ch. 8; John Higham, “Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age: A Reinterpretation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 43, no. 4 (March 1957), pp. 559–78; see also Judith Rita Kramer and Seymour Leventman, Children of the Gilded Ghetto (Anchor Books, 1969).

[Jewish aristocracy]: Birmingham, p. ix.

146 [Hierarchy within the Jewish community]: ibid., pp. 154–55; and see also Nathan Glazer.American Judaism (University of Chicago Press, 1957).

[Jews and the Statue of Liberty]: Birmingham, p. 128.

[Ghetto to ghetto]: Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), chs. 1–3, quoted at p. 67.

[East Side living and working conditions]: Howe, ch. 3, quoted at p. 88; and see Riis, The Other Half, op. cit., chs. 10, 11.

147 [“Jewtown”]: Riis, The Other Half, p. 104.

[Jews indifferent to abuse]: ibid., p. 42.

[Nineteenth century immigration]: Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History (Harper & Bros., 1961), pp. 471–72.

148 [Blacks in Washington]: James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington (University of Illinois Press, 1980).

[A “vile place”]: quoted in ibid, pp. 26–27.

[Color line in Manhattan]: Riis, The Other Half p. 150.

[Ethnic cleanliness]: ibid.

[“Once a colored house”]: quoted in ibid., p. 151.

[Welshman on Southern blacks]: John R. Williams to William Thomas, letter of November 10, 1895, in Mortimer S. Adler, ed., The Negro in American History: A Taste of Freedom, 1854–1927 (Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corporation, 1969), pp. 137–41, quoted at pp. 139, 140.

149 [Black cowhands]: Kenneth W. Porter, “Negro Labor in the Western Cattle Industry,1866–1900,” in Milton Cantor, ed., Black Labor in America (Negro Universities Press,1969), pp. 24–52.

[Vardaman on official Southern racism]: quoted in E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States (Macmillan, 1949), p. 157; and see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford University Press, 1974).

149 [Kansas Exodus]: Charles H. Wesley, Negro Labor in the United States, 1850–1925 (Russell& Russell, 1967), pp. 213–15.

149–50 [Cheyennes vs. the Union Pacific]: Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), pp. 185–86.

150 [Ten Bears against settling]: quoted in ibid., pp. 187–88.

[The Sioux]: Ruth Underhill.Red Man’s America (University of Chicago Press, 1953), ch. 8; see also George Bird Grinnell, When Buffalo Ran (University of Oklahoma Press, 1966); Royal Hassrick, The Sioux: Life and Customs of a Warrior Society (University of Oklahoma Press, 1972); and Warren K. Moorehead, The American Indian in the United States: Period 1850–1914 (Andover Press, 1914).

[Sioux Ghost Dance]: Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., The Indian Heritage of America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 121; Underhill, p. 159.

[Sioux preparation for the hunt]: Grinnell, p. 19.

[The hunt]: Underhill, p. 156.

[The agriculturalists of the Southwest]: E. E. Dale, The Indians of the Southwest (University of Oklahoma Press, 1949); Josephy, ch. 16; Underhill, ch. 9; Clark Wissler, Indians of the United States (Doubleday, 1966), ch. 22.

151 [Hopi snake dance]: Wissler, p. 220.

[The pueblo]: ibid., p. 225.

[The Navajos and Apaches]: Underhill, ch. 10.

[Kwakiutl competitiveness and cannibalism ]: Phillip Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast (Chandler, 1965), ch. 8; Josephy, p. 77; Wissler, p. 119.

5. THE POWER OF IDEAS

152 [Times on liberty]: New York Times, October 29, 1886, p. 1.

152–3 [Creation and dedication of the Statue of Liberty]: Marvin Trachtenberg, The Statue of Liberty (Penguin Books, 1976); Rodman Gilder, The Battery (Houghton Mifflin, 1936), pp. 219–20.

153 [Cleveland’s acceptance of the Statue]: quoted in New York Times, October 29, 1886, p. 2.

[Liberty]: Christian Bay, The Structure of Freedom (Stanford University Press, 1958); Sidney Hook, The Paradoxes of Freedom (University of California Press, 1964); Louis Hartz, TheLiberal Tradition in America (Harcourt, Brace, 1955).

[Webster on Liberty and Union]: Register of Debates (Gales and Seaton, 1830), vol. 6, 21st Congress, 1st session, January 27, 1830, p. 80.

[Adams on liberty and properly]: from John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of the Governments of the United States, quoted in Francis W. Coker, Democracy, Liberty, and Property (Macmillan, 1942), p. 125.

[Emerson’s liberty]: see James MacGregor Burns, The Vineyard of Liberty (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 483, 491.

154 [Marx on bourgeois liberty]: Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed..The Marx-Engels Reader (W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 40.

Dinner at Delmonico’s

155 [Liberty and laissez-faire]: R. L. Meek, The Economics of Physiocracy (Harvard UniversityPress, 1963).

[Malthus]: T. R. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, 2nd ed. (W. Pickering, 1836).

[Ricardo]: David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 3rd ed. (John Murray, 1821).

[Wayland]: The Elements of Political Economy (Gould, Kendall and Lincoln, 1837).

156 [Individualism, late nineteenth-century America]: Irvin G. Wyllie, Self-Made Man in America (Rutgers University Press, 1954); Kenneth S. Lynn, Dream of Success: The Modern American Imagination (Little, Brown, 1955); Theodore P. Greene, America’s Heroes (Oxford University Press, 1970); Moses Rischin, ed., The American Gospel of Success (Quadrangle, 1965); Richard M. Huber, The American Idea of Success (McGraw-Hill, 1971).

[The “Great Train Robbery”]: Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955). p. 221.

[Conservatism in nineteenth-century America]: Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865–1901 (University of Michigan Press, 1956), passim, from whom Atkinson (p. 52), J. S. Mill (p. 9), the theologian, Roswell D. Hitchcock (p. 121), and Burgess (p. 94), respectively, are quoted; see also Rossiter, esp. chs. 3 and 4; Vernon Louis Parrington, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America (Harcourt, Brace and World. 1958), vol. 3 of Main Currents in American Thought.

157 [Darwin vs. the creationists]: Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought, 2nd ed. (Ronald Press, 1956), ch. 14.

[The “Vogue of Spencer”]: Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (Beacon Press, 1955), ch. 2; Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography (Houghton Mifflin, 1920), esp. pp. 333–39; John Fiske, Edward Livingston Youmans (D. Appleton, 1894), esp. pp. 502–51.

[Spencer on true liberty]: Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (D. Appleton, 1865), quoted in Fine, p. 33.

[Spencerism and its influence]: Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, 2 vols. (D. Appleton, 1904), for recent analyses of Social Darwinism see Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Temple University Press, 1979); Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction Between Biological and Social Theory (Humanities Press, 1980); Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (W. W. Norton, 1962); Jack Jones, “Social Darwinism Reconsidered,” Political Psychology (Spring–Summer 1981–82), pp. 239–66.

158 [Hofstadter on Spencer]: Hofstadter, p. 32.

[American sales of Spencer’s books]: ibid., p. 34.

[James on Spencer]: Fine, p. 41.

[Professors agreeing on free competition]: J. F. Normano, The Spirit of American Economics (John Day, 1943), p. 61, quoted in Fine, pp. 11–12; see also Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (Viking Press, 1946–59). vol. 2; Anna Haddow, Political Science in American Colleges and Universities, 1636–1900 (D. Appleton-Century, 1939), Part 4.

[Sumner]: Hofstadter, ch. 3; Stow Persons, ed., Social Darwinism: Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner (Prentice-Hall, 1963); Bruce Curtis, William Graham Sumner (Twayne, 1981).

[Sumner on “strong” and “weak”]: quoted in Hofstadter, p. 57.

[Sumner on the natural selection of millionaires]: ibid., p. 58.

159 [Student exchange with Sumner]: William Lyon Phelps, “When Yale Was Given to Sumnerology” (review of Harris E. Starr, William Graham Sumner), Literary Digest International Book Review, vol. 3, no. 10 (September 1925), pp. 661–63, quoted at p. 661.

[Clergymen on success and property]: quoted in Fine, pp. 118–19.

[Edwin Lawrence Godkin on government intervention and corruption]: quoted in Parrington, vol. 3, p. 162.

160 [Horatio Alger, Jr.]: John Tebbel, From Rags to Riches (Macmillan, 1963); Ralph D. Gardner, Horatio Alger, or the American Hero Era (Wayside Press, 1964); Herbert R. Mayes, Alger (Macy-Masius, 1928).

[Huber on Alger’s heroes]: Huber, p. 46.

[Greene on Munsey]: Greene, quoted at p. 99.

[“Riches power”]: quoted in ibid., p. 99.

[White on Munsey]: ibid., p. 102.

[McGuffey Reader on trying]: quoted in Rischin, p. 45.

161 [Carnegie on Spencer]: quoted in Joseph F. Wall, Andrew Carnegie (Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 381.

[Dinner at Delmonico’s]: Spencer, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 478; New York Times, November 10, 1882, p. 5; Carnegie, pp. 335–37; Wall, pp. 387–89; Lately Thomas, Delmonico’s (Houghton Mifflin, 1967); Ethel F. Fisk, ed., The Letters of John Fiske (Macmillan, 1940), p. 478.

162 [Wall on other speakers]: Wall, p. 388.

[Beecher’s qualified endorsement of evolution]: quoted in New York Times, November 10, 1882, p. 5

The Bitch-Goddess Success

[Dinner at Delmonico’s for Henry George]: New York Times, October 22, 1882, p. 9; Perry Belmont, An American Democrat (Columbia University Press, 1940), pp. 296–97.

[Henry George]: Henry George, Jr., The Life of Henry George (Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1960); Charles Albro Barker, Henry George (Oxford University Press, 1955).

163 [Henry George on man’s right to the free gifts of nature]: quoted in George, Jr., p. 223.

[Bellamy]: Sylvia E. Bowman, The Year 2000: A Critical Biography of Edward Bellamy (Bookman Associates, 1958), esp. pp. 107–52.

[Bellamy on his purpose in writing Looking Backward]: Edward Bellamy, “How I Wrote Looking Backward,” Ladies’ Home Journal, vol. 2, no. 5 (April 1894), quoted in A. E. Morgan, Edward Bellamy (Columbia University Press, 1944), pp. 229–30.

[Looking Backward]: Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (Houghton Mifflin, 1888).

[The metaphor of the coach]: ibid., pp. 10–12.

164–5 [Dialogue between Julian West and Edith]: Edward Bellamy, Equality (D. Appleton, 1897), pp. 4–13.

166 [Lloyd]: Chester McArthur Destler, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Empire of Reform (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963).

[Destler on Lloyd]: ibid., p. 301.

166–7 [George on Looking Backward]: quoted in Barker, p. 540.

167 [Lloyd on George]: quoted in Destler, p. 136.

[Bellamy, nationalizing and “Nationalism”]: Bowman, pp. 122–38, 308–14.

[Bellamy-George exchange]: quoted in Morgan, pp. 392–93.

[Bellamy on the word socialist]: quoted in John A. Garraty, The New Commonwealth, 1877–1890 (Harper & Row, 1968), p. 319; see also, Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 252.

[“Prince of muddleheads”]: quoted in Garraty, p. 319.

[Marx on George as theorist]: quoted in Barker, p. 356.

[Lloyd on Marx’s determinism]: quoted in Destler, pp. 180, 508.

[Gladden]: see Washington Gladden, Applied Christianity: Moral Aspects of Social Questions (Houghton Mifflin, 1886), esp. pp. 103 ff; Washington Gladden, Tools and the Man (Houghton Mifflin, 1893).

[Morris on Looking Backward]: quoted in Parrington, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 311–12.

167–8 [Post-Civil War New England culture]: Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer, 1865–1915 (E. P. Dutton, 1940]: Parrington, vol. 3, passim; see also F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1941). [Parrington on nostalgia for Federalism]: Parrington, vol. 3, p. 50.

[Adams on Boston]: Henry Adams, The Life of George Cabot Lodge (Houghton Mifflin, 1911), quoted in Brooks, p. 199 footnote.

[Twain on his Boston audience]: quoted in ibid., p. 8.

[Brooks on exhaustion of old reformers]: ibid., p. 120.

169 [Henry Adams]: Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams, 3 vols. (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1948–64); Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Houghton Mifflin, 1918).

[Adams trying to drive away students]: quoted in Brooks, p. 254 footnote.

[Mrs. Lightfoot Lee and power]: Henry Adams, Democracy (Farrar, Straus and Young, n.d), p. 10.

[Henry James]: Leon Edel, Henry James (J. B. Lippincolt, 1953–72), vol. 1; Maxwell Geismar, Henry James and the Jacobites (Houghton Mifflin, 1963).

170 [James’s alleged lampooning of Peabody]: Edel, vol. 3, pp. 142–43.

[Parrington on James’s concern only with nuances]: Parrington, vol. 3, p. 241.

[James as “pragmatizing”]: quoted in Brooks, p. 228.

[James’s (not necessarily intended) “figure in the carpet”]: Geismar, pp. 137–39.

[“Best and brightest”]: quoted in Brooks, p. 188.

[Howells]: Kenneth S. Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971).

[Twain]: Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (Simon and Schuster, 1966); Roger B. Salomon, Twain and the Image of History (Yale University Press, 1961); Philip S. Foner, Mark Twain: Social Critic (International Publishers, 1958).

171 [Huck on the Mississippi]: Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (American Publishing, 1903), p. 161.

[Huck’s escapism]: Albert E. Stone, Jr., The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain’s Imagination (Yale University Press, 1961), esp. ch. 5.

[Huck on Aunt Sally’s effort to “sivilize” him]: Twain, p. 375.

[“I’d got to decide, forever”]: ibid., p. 279. On Huck’s decision, see also Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 337–38.

[“NOTICE” to the reader]:Twain, p. iii.

[Norris]: Ernest Marchand, Frank Norris (Octagon Books, 1981); William B. Dillingham, Frank Norris: Instinct and Art (University of Nebraska Press, 1969).

[McTeague]: Frank Norris, McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (Doubleday, Doran, 1928).

172 [The Octopus]: Frank Norris, The Octopus: The Epic of the Wheat: A Story of California (P. F. Collier, 1901), quoted at p. 473.

[Huck on the steamboat smashing through the raft]: Twain, p. 133.

“Toiling Millions Now Are Waking”

173 [De Leon on the Declaration of Independence]: quoted in David Herreshoff, American Disciples of Marx (Wayne State University Press, 1967), pp. 167–68.

[Marx on wages labor as a probational state]: quoted in Stuart Bruce Kaufman, Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the American Federation of Labor, 1848–1896 (Greenwood Press, 1973), p. 28.

[Early development of American socialism]: Howard H. Quint, The Forging of American Socialism (University of South Carolina Press, 1953), esp. ch. 1; Herreshoff, chs. 3–4.

174 [Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly]: most issues in New-York Historical Society; Communist Manifesto in issue of December 30, 1871; see also, Herreshoff, pp. 83–84, 86.

175 [National Labor Union]: Gerald N. Grob, Workers and Utopia (Northwestern University Press, 1961), ch. 2.

[Socialists on letting “wage slavery” go on]: Kaufman, p. 85.

[Union membership, 1878]: see Philip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States (International Publishers, 1947–65), vol. 1, pp. 439–40.

[Labor troubles of 1870s]: Philip S. Foner, The Great Labor Uprising of 1877 (Monad Press, 1977); Garraty, op. cit., ch. 4; Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (South End Press, 1972), ch. 1; Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), ch. 6.

[Molly Maguires]: Louis Adamic, Dynamite (Viking Press, 1934), ch. 2.

176 [Adams on railroad strikes]: Edward Chase Kirkland, Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 1965), pp. 54–55.

[National trade unions]: Norman J. Ware, The Labor Movement in the United States, 1860–1895 (D. Appleton, 1929); Lloyd Ulman, The Rise of the National Trade Union (Harvard University Press, 1955); John Philip Hall, “The Knights of St. Crispin in Massachusetts, 1869–1878,” Journal of Economic History, vol. 18, no. 2 (June 1958), pp. 161–75.

[Knights of Labor and the strikes of 1884 and 1886]: Brecher, ch. 2; Grob, chs. 3. 4; Gerald N. Grob, “The Knights of Labor and the Trade Unions, 1878–1886,” Journal of Economic History, vol. 18, no. 2 (June 1958), pp. 176–92; Foner, History of the Labor Movement, vol. 1, ch. 21, pp. 504–12 and vol. 2, chs. 3–5; James MacGregor Burns, “Labor’s Drive to Majority Status,” unpub. dissertation, Williams College, 1939.

[Garraty on Powderly]: Garraty, p. 162.

[Powderly on the word “class “]: quoted in Harold C. Livesay, Samuel Gompers and Organized Labor in America (Little, Brown, 1978), p. 77.

[“Toiling millions now are waking”]: quoted in Adamic, p. 62.

177 [Haymarket Massacre]: Henry David, The History of the Haymarket Affair (Farrar & Rinehart,1936); Adamic, ch. 6; Philip S. Foner, The Autobiography of the Haymarket Martyrs (Humanities Press, 1969).

[Anarchist circular]: reprinted in Adamic, p. 70.

[“Then we’ll all go home”]: quoted in ibid., p. 73.

178 [David on the Haymarket “martyrs”]: David, p. 534.

[The American Federation of Labor]: Livesay, Kaufman; Foner, History of the Labor Movement, vol. 2, chs. 9, 12; Grob, Workers and Utopia, chs. 8, 9; John Laslett, “Reflections on the Failure of Socialism in the American Federation of Labor,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 50, no. 4 (March 1964), pp. 634–51.

178 [Strasser’s dialogue with the senator]: quoted in Garraty, p. 170.

[Gompers’s early life and apprenticeship]: Samuel Gompers, Seventy Years of Life and Labor (E. P. Dutton, 1925). vol. 1, book 1; Livesay, chs. 1–3.

[“Study your union card, Sam”]: Karl Laurrell, quoted in Gompers, vol. 1, p. 75. [Gompers on improving material conditions]: quoted in Kaufman, p. 174.

180 [“The only desirable legislation for the workers”]: Twentieth Century Fund, Labor and theGovernment (McGraw-Hill, 1935), pp. 14–15.

[Gompers and Social Darwinism]: Gompers, vol. 2, ch. 26; George B. Cotkin, “The Spencerian and Comtian Nexus in Gompers’ Labor Philosophy: The Impact of Non-Marxian Evolutionary Thought,” Labor History, vol. 20, no. 4 (Fall 1979). pp. 510–23.

The Alliance: A Democracy of Leaders

[“Largest democratic mass movement”]: Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment (Oxford University Press, 1978), p. vii.

181 [Crop lien system]: Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 26–31.

[“Laboring men of America”]: W. Scott Morgan, History of the Wheel and Alliance and the Impending Revolution (W. Scott Morgan, 1889), p. 24, quoted in Martha A. Warner, Kansas Populism: A Sociological Analysis (M.A. thesis, University of Kansas, 1956), p. 94.

182 [Founding and structure of Farmers’ Alliance]: Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, pp. 33–40; Topeka Advocate, July 22, 1891; John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (University of Nebraska Press, 1961), pp. 128–29; Homer Clevenger, “The Teaching Techniques of the Farmers’ Alliance,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 11, no. 4 (November 1945), pp. 504–18.

[Lamb]: Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, pp. 40–41;Roscoe C. Martin, The People’s Party in Texas: A Study in Third Party Politics (reprint; University of Texas Press, 1970), pp. 44–45.

[Great Southwest Strike and the Alliance]: Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, pp. 54–65.

[Growth of Alliance membership]: ibid., pp. 65, 73.

[Cleburne convention and demands]: ibid, pp. 77–83, demands quoted at p. 79; Hicks, pp. 105–6.

183 [Macune]: Hicks, pp. 106–9; Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, pp. 83–86; Annie L. Diggs, “The Farmers’ Alliance and Some of Its Leaders,” The Arena, no. 29 (April 1892), pp.598–600; C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Louisiana StateUniversity Press, 1951), p. 190.

[“Freedom from the tyranny of organized capital”]: quoted in Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, p. 90.

[Waco, 1887]: ibid., pp. 89–91; Hicks, pp. 107—9.

[Farmers like “ripe fruit”]: William L. Garvin and S. O. Daws, History of the National Farmers’ Alliance and Cooperative Union of America (J. N. Rogers, 1887), pp. 49–50, quoted in Hicks, p. 110.

184 [Georgia Alliance and the “jute trust”]: C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (Macmillan, 1938), pp. 136, 141–42; Alex M. Arnett, The Populist Movement in Georgia (Columbia University Press, 1922; reprinted by AMS Press, 1967), p. 100; see also Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism (Oxford University Press, 1983).

[Kansas Alliance and the “twine trust”]: Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, pp. 94–107; W. F. Rightmire, “The Alliance Movement in Kansas,” Kansas State Historical Society Collections, vol. 9 (1906), pp. 3–4; W. P. Harrington, “The Populist Party in Kansas,” Kansas State Historical Society Collections, vol. 16 (1925), pp. 405–6; American Nonconformist (Winfield, Kansas), April 4, 11, 1889.

[Sectionalism of postwar Democratic and Republican parties]: Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, pp. 4–10.

[Kansas People’s Party]: Topeka Advocate, June 18, 1890; Rightmire, p. 5; Harrington, pp. 410–11; Hicks, pp. 155–56.

185 [Simpson]: Paul Dean Harper, The Speechmaking of Jerry Simpson (M.A. thesis, Kansas State College of Pittsburg, 1967), pp. 30–44; O. Gene Clanton, Kansas Populism (UniversityPress of Kansas, 1969), pp. 82–87.

185 [Simpson on debate with Hallowell]: quoted in Clanton, p. 86.

[Diggs on Alliance women]: Annie L. Diggs, “The Women in the Alliance Movement,” The Arena, no. 32 (July 1892). pp. 163–64.

[Diggs]: Ross E. Paulson, “Annie LePorte Diggs,” in Edward T.James, ed., Notable American Women, 1607–1950 (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 481–82; Walter T. K. Nugent, The Tolerant Populists: Kansas Populism and Nativism (University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 135.

[Lease]: Diggs, “Women in the Alliance Movement,” pp. 165–67; Clanton, pp. 73–78; American Nonconformist, September 25, 1890.

[“Pinning sheets of notes”]: Clanton, p. 74.

186 [“A golden voice”]: William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen White (Macmillan, 1946), p. 218.

[Diggs on Lease’s voice]: Diggs, “Women in the Alliance Movement,” p. 166.

[“Less corn and more Hell!”]: quoted in Elizabeth Barr, “The Populist Uprising,” in William E. Connelley, History of Kansas: State and People (American Historical Society, 1928), vol. 2, p. 1166.

[Kansas Populists in the elections of 1890 and 1892]: Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, pp. 200–201; 317–18; Nugent, pp. 91–93, 123–24.

[“First People’s party government on earth”]: Clanton, p. 129.

[“Incendiary Haymarket inaugural”]: quoted in ibid., p. 131.

[Kansas tug-of-war]: ibid., pp. 131–36; Barr in Connelley, pp. 1184–98.

187 [Goodwyn on the People’s Party]: Goodwyn, Populist Moment, pp. 126–27.

[Woodward on complexities of race]: Woodward, Watson, p. 220.

[Populism and American blacks]: Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, ch. 10; Norman Pollack, ed., The Populist Mind (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), part 4, ch. 2.

[Watson]: Woodward, Watson, passim.

188 [“I did not lead the Alliance”]: quoted in ibid., p. 140.

[Watson’s 1890 campaign for Congress]: ibid., pp. 146–50, 156–61; Arnett, pp. 113–14.

[“Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace”]: quoted in Arnett, p. 114.

[Watson in Congress]: Woodward, Watson, ch. 12.

[Watson on economic basis for black-white division]: Watson, “The Negro Question in the South,” The Arena, no. 35 (October 1892), pp. 540–50, in Pollack, pp. 361–74, quoted at p. 371.

[Watson’s 1892 electoral defeat]: Woodward, Watson, pp. 227–43; Arnett, pp. 143–55.

[Texas Alliance Exchange]: Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, pp. 125–42.

189 [Sublreasury as instrument of political revolt]: ibid., p. 243.

[Founding of People’s Party of Texas]: ibid., pp. 285–91; Martin, pp. 36–41.

[Donnelly’s St. Louis address]: quoted in Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, p. 265.

[Omaha convention]: ibid., pp. 270–72; George B. Tindall, “The People’s Party,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties (Chelsea House, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 1714–16.

[People’s Party platform, 1892]: Pollack, pp. 60–66, quoted at pp. 63, 64.

[Populist campaign and election results]: Tindall in Schlesinger, vol. 2, pp. 1716–18; Theodore Saloutos, Farmer Movements in the South, 1865–1933 (University of California Press, 1960), pp. 133–35.

[“A regular walking omelet”]: quoted in Barr in Connelley, p. 1183.

6. THE BROKERS OF POLITICS

192 [“Government… for the benefit of Senators”]: Henry Adams, Democracy (Farrar, Straus and Young, n.d.), pp. 22–23.

[Emerson and Burroughs on Whitman’s eyes]: quoted in Mark Van Doren, “Walt Whitman,” in Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 20 (Scribner’s, 1936), p. 146.

[Parrington on Whitman]: Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (Harcourt, Brace, 1927), vol. 3, p. 69.

[ Whitman’s familiarity with Mill and Tocqueville]: see Roger Asselineau, The Evolution of Walt Whitman (Harvard University Press, 1960–62), vol. 2, pp. 331–32.

[Whitman on “our great experiment”]: quoted in Parrington, vol. 3, p. 72.

192–3 [“I chant … the common bulk”]: quoted in Asselineau, vol. 2, p. 154.

193 [“Divine average”]: see “Starting from Paumanok,” in Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Doubleday, Doran, 1929), p. 17.

[Whitman on Whitman, “a kosmos”]: “Song of Myself,” in ibid., pp. 43–44. [Whitman in the Brooklyn Eagle]: Whitman, The Gathering of the Forces, Cleveland Rodgers and John Black, eds., 2 vols. (Putnam’s, 1920).

[Whitman on equality, including female]: “Preface to 1855 Edition,” in Leaves of Grass, p. 491. See also F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1946), ch. 13.

[“Pride, competition, segregation”]: Democratic Vistas (1871) in Whitman, Prose Works, 1892, Floyd Stovall, ed. (New York University Press, 1963–64), vol. 2, pp. 361–426, quoted at p. 422.

[“The People!”]: ibid., p. 376. [“Pervading flippancy and vulgarity”]: ibid., p. 372.

[Whitman on need for natural leaders]: see Asselineau, vol. 2, pp. 154–55.

194 [Marx on class flux in the United States]: “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,”in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 444.

[Mr Gore and Mrs. Lee on democracy in America]: Adams, pp. 53, 54.

The Ohioans: Leaders as Brokers

94–5 [Republican convention, 1868]: quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties (Chelsea House, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 1337, 1340.

195 [Journalist on Ohio “conspiracy”]: Rollin Hartt, “The Ohioans,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 84 (1899), p. 690.

[Pre-Civil War Ohio politics]: Stephen E. Maizlish, The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844–1856 (Kent State University Press, 1983).

[Hartt on Ohio]: “The Ohioans,” p. 682.

196 [“A neighborly place”]: Walter Havighurst, Ohio: A Bicentennial History (W. W. Norton, 1976), p. 138.

[Ohio boxing the compass]: Hartt, p. 684.

[Ohio cities]: Havighurst, p. 121.

[Growth of city populations]: John Sherman, Recollections of Forty Years (Werner, 1895), vol. 1, p. 71.

[City culture and industry]: Havighurst, pp. 109–18, 150; William Rose, Cleveland: The Making of a City (World, 1950); Writers’ Program, Cincinnati (Wiesen-Hart Press, 1943; reprinted by Somerset Publishers, 1973).

197 [Impact of railroads]: Hartt, p. 680; Sherman, vol. 1, p. 70.

[“Smoke means business”]: Hartt, p. 681.

[Cities and blacks]: David Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line (University of Illinois Press, 1976); W. A. Joiner, A Half Century of Freedom of the Negro in Ohio (1915; reprinted by Books for Libraries Press, 1977).

[Basis of old Ohio civilization]: Havighurst, p. 115.

[Young Ohio leaders]: Felice A. Bonadio, North of Reconstruction: Ohio Politics, 1865–1870 (New York University Press, 1970), pp. 24–27.

198 [Faith of the new leaders]: ibid., p. 30.

[Array of Ohio leadership]: see William Dean Howells, Stories of Ohio (American Book, 1897), chs. 24–25.

[Ohio’s “treacherous”politics]: Bonadio, p. 22. On Ohio leadership and politics generally, see collections in Ohio Historical Society, especially the Charles Kurtz Papers and the William Henry Smith Papers.

[“Every man for himself]: Cox to Aaron Perry, January 25, 1867, quoted in Bonadio, p. 73.

[Garfield]: Margaret Leech and Harry J. Brown, The Garfield Orbit (Harper & Row, 1978); Allan Peskin, Garfield (Kent State University Press, 1978); Theodore Clarke Smith, The Life and Letters of James Abram Garfield (Yale University Press, 1925), vol. 1; James D. Norris and Arthur H. Shaffer, eds., Politics and Patronage in the Gilded Age: The Correspondence of James A. Garfield and Charles E. Henry (State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1970).

199 [Sherman]: Theodore E. Burton, John Sherman (Houghton Mifflin, 1906); Sherman, Recollections.

200 [Hayes]: Harry Barnard, Rutherford B. Hayes and His America (Bobbs-Merrill. 1954); H.J. Eckenrode, Rutherford B. Hayes: Statesman of Reunion (Dodd, Mead, 1930).

[“Not too much hard work”]: quoted in Barnard, p. 242.

[Hayes on reform of appointments]: diary entry of March 28, 1875, in Charles R. Williams, ed., Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1922–26), vol. 3, p. 269.

[“Grantism”]: William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (W. W. Norton, 1981), chs. 24–25; Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, 9th ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 379, 383.

[Waite]: PeterC. Magrath, Morrison R. Waite: The Triumph of Character (Macmillan, 1963).

201 [Hayes on push and shove]: quoted in Bonadio, p. 27.

[The election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877]: C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction (Little, Brown, 1951); Keith Ian Polakoff, The Politics of Inertia (Louisiana State University Press, 1973]: Allan Peskin, “Was There a Compromise of 1877?” Journal of American History, vol. 60, no. 1 (June 1973), pp. 63–75; C. Vann Woodward, “Yes, There Was a Compromise of 1877,” ibid., pp. 215–23.

Politics: The Dance of the Ropewalkers

203 [Huntington’s direct action]: Woodward, Reunion and Reaction, op. cit., pp. 235–36.

[Josephson on the talkers and the actors]: Matthew Josephson, The Politicos (Harcourt, Brace, 1938). p. vii.

[Constriction of the Fourteenth Amendment]: U.S. v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876), quoted at pp. 545–55; Civil rights cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).

[Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment]: Howard Jay Graham, “The Early Antislavery Backgrounds of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Wisconsin Law Review (May 1950), pp. 479–661; Jacobus ten Broek, The Antislavery Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment (University of California Press, 1951); Raoul Berger, Government by Judiciary (Harvard University Press, 1977); Joseph B. James, The Framing of the Fourteenth Amendment (University of Illinois Press, 1956).

204 [Conkling’s interpretation of Fourteenth Amendment]: Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction: 1865–1877 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1975). pp. 137–38.

[Women and the Fourteenth Amendment]: Ellen C. Du Bois, Feminism and Suffrage (Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 58–62, 65; Bettina Aptheker, Woman’s Legacy (University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), ch. 2.

[Anthony’s vote and arrest]: Alma Lutz, Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian (Beacon Press, 1959), pp. 198–213, quoted at p. 201.

[Virginia Minor case]: Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162 (1875).

[Hopes for a new North-South party of property]: Woodward, ch. 2.

[Raleigh Observer on reviving the Whig Party]: April 4, 1877, quoted in ibid., p. 39.

205 [Continuing strength of the Democratic party]: Jerome Mushkat, The Reconstruction of the NewYork Democracy (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981).

[Nature of party cleavages]: James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System (Brookings Institution, 1973), quoted at pp. 93–94.

206 [Factional stability]: PolakofF, op. cit., p. 321.

[Republican party subdivisions]: David Donald, The Politics of Reconstruction (Louisiana State University Press, 1965), p. 76.

[Continuing Ohio Republican leadership]: Joseph B. Foraker Papers, Library of Congress, Container 1.

[George A. Myers]: George A. Myers Papers, Ohio Historical Society; John A. Garraty, ed., The Barber and the Historian: The Correspondence of George A. Myers and James Ford Rhodes, 1910–1923 (Ohio Historical Society, 1956); Felix James, “The Civic and Political Career of George A. Myers,”Journal of Negro History, vol. 58, no. 2 (April 1973), pp. 166–78.

207 [The Liberal Republicans]: John G. Sproat, “The Best Men” (Oxford University Press, 1968), quoted at p. 81.

208 [Greenback party]:Paul Kleppner, “The Greenback and Prohibition Parties,” in Schlesinger, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 1549–1697; Sundquist, pp. 98–101, and state studies cited therein; Irwin Unger, The Greenback Era (Princeton University Press, 1964).

[Third parties]: Murray S. Stedman, Jr., and Susan W. Stedman, Discontent at the Polls (Columbia University Press, 1950); Steven J. Rosenstone, Roy L. Behr, Edward H. Lazarus, Third Parties in America (Princeton University Press, 1984), ch. 3.

208 [Woman suffragist movement, post-Civil War]: Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle (Harvard University Press, 1975). esp. ch. 10; Edith Hoshino Altbach, Women in America (D. C. Heath, 1974); Aptheker, ch. 2.

[Stanton on blacks and foreigners]: quoted in Flexner, p. 147.

208–9 [Douglass on blacks’ and women’s rights]: ibid.

209 [Patrons of Husbandry]: Solon Justus Buck, The Granger Movement, 1870–1880 (Harvard University Press, 1913); D. Sven Nordin, Rich Harvest: A History of the Grange, 1867–1900 (University Press of Mississippi, 1974).

210 [Party continuity]: party histories cited above; also Horatio Seymour Papers, New York Historical Society.

[Presidential election of 1884]: Mark D. Hirsch, “Election of 1884,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 197:), vol. 2, pp. 1561–1611; Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland (Dodd, Mead, 1932), ch. 11.

[Campaign taunts]: quoted in Nevins, p. 177.

211 [Pastor on “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion”]: quoted in Hirsch in Schlesinger, Elections, vol.2, p. 1578.

[“Royal Feast”]: October 30, 1884, reprinted in ibid., pp. 1604–5.

The Poverty of Policy

[Washington in the 1880s]: Frank C. Carpenter, Carp’s Washington (McGraw-Hill, 1960), quoted at pp. 8–9; see also Charles Hurd, Washington Cavalcade (E. P. Dutton, 1948), pp. 127–43; Constance M. Green, Washington: Capital City 1879–1950 (Princeton University Press, 1963), chs. 2–6; David L. Lewis, District of Columbia (W. W. Norton, 1976), passim.

[“City of rest and peace”]: S. Reynolds Hole, quoted in Green, p. 77.

[Grigsby on comfort in Post Office]: ibid.

212 [Pennsylvania Railroad vs. Pennsylvania Avenue]: ibid., pp. 52–53; Hurd, p. 127.

[Tariff controversy]: Tom E. Terrill, The Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 1874–1901 (Greenwood Press, 1973); Morton Keller, Affairs of State (Belknap Press, 1977), esp. ch. 12; John A. Garraty, The New Commonwealth (Harper & Row, 1968), passim.

[Newspapers and tariffs]: Terrill, p. 35.

213 [Terrill on tariff politics]: ibid., p. 10.

[Cleveland on tariff reduction]: “President’s Annual Message,” December 6, 1887, Congressional Record, 50th Congress, 1st session (Government Printing Office, 1888), vol. 19, part 1, pp. 9–11, quoted at p. 11.

[Currency legislation]: Margaret G. Myers, A Financial History of the United States (Columbia University Press, 1970), ch. 9; Don C. Barrett, The Greenbacks and Resumption of Specie Payments, 1862–1879 (Harvard University Press, 1931); Clarence A. Stern, Golden Republicanism (Edwards Bros., 1970); Frank W. Taussig, The Silver Situation in the United States (Putnam’s, 1893); Allen Weinstein, Prelude to Populism: Origins of the Silver Issue, 1867–1878 (Yale University Press, 1970).

[Diffusion of interests on silver issue]: Robert P. Sharkey, “Money, Class, and Party: An Economic Study of Civil War and Reconstruction,” The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science (Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), series 77, no. 2, pp. 286, 301; Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (Hill and Wang, 1967), pp. 13, 21, 300; Stanley Coben, “Northeastern Business and Radical Reconstruction: A Re-examination,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (June 1959), pp. 67–90.

214 [Government of maneuver and drift]: Wiebe, pp. 35, 43.

[Railroad policy]: Thomas C. Cochran, Railroad Leaders, 1845–1890 (Harvard University Press, 1953), ch. 14; Keller, pp. 422–30; see also Gabriel Kolko, Railroads and Regulation 1877–1916 (Princeton University Press, 1965), chs. 1–3; Robert W. Harbeson, “Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916: Conspiracy or Public Interest?,” Journal of Economic History, vol. 27, no. 2 (June 1967), pp. 230–42; Albro Martin, “The Troubled Subject of Railroad Regulation in the Gilded Age—A Reappraisal,” Journal of American History, vol. 61, no. 2 (September 1974), pp. 339–71.

215 [Failure of slate and federal supervision]: Keller, p. 430.

215 [The Big Four]: Leland Stanford Correspondence, Stanford University Archives; Collis P. Huntington Papers, Bancroft Library; Huntington-Mark Hopkins Correspondence, Stanford Archives; Norman E. Tutorow, Leland Stanford: Man of Many Careers (Pacific Coast Publishers, 1971), esp. pp. 70–75.

[Stanford on “question of might”]: quoted in Stuart Daggett, “Leland Stanford,” in Dumas Malone. ed., Dictionary of American Biography (Scribner’s, 1935), vol. 17, p. 504.

[“Battle” for the mountain passes]: Stewart H. Holbrook, The Age of the Moguls (Doubleday, 1953), p. 123.

215–16 [Huntington’s comments and instructions]: NewYork Sun, December 29 and 30, 1883, from letters dated January 17, 1876; November 9, 1877; February 28, 1878 (the letters were from court records of a suit against Huntington).

216 [Lord Bryce on combination]: James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, rev. ed. (Macmillan, 1921), vol. 2, pp. 591–92.

[Background and passage of Sherman Antitrust Act]: Hans B. Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy (Johns Hopkins Press, 1955); Keller, pp. 436–37.

[Antitrust Act]: quoted in Thorelli, p. 610.

217 [Attacking the surplus]: James R. Tanner, quoted in Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History (Harper & Bros., 1961), p. 261.

[Indian policy]: Loring B. Priest, Uncle Sam’s Stepchildren (Rutgers University Press, 1942); Henry E. Fritz, The Movement for Indian Assimilation, 1860–1890 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963); Grant Foreman, The Last Trek of the Indians (University of Chicago Press, 1946), part 2; Katherine C. Turner, Red Men Calling on the Great White Father (University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), chs. 9–12; Richard H. Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, Robert M. Utley, ed. (Yale University Press, 1964); Sean D. Cashman, America in the Gilded Age (New York University Press, 1984), ch. 8.

[Church officials and Indians]: Priest, esp. ch. 3.

[Congressional debate on Indians]: Wiebe, p. 11.

218 [Indian wars]: Robert M. Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866–1890 (Macmillan, 1973); Robert Leckie, The Wars of America (Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 534–38.

[Sitting Bull]: Utley, Frontier Regulars, p. 236.

219 [“A match for any man”]: General George Crook, quoted in ibid., p. 72.

[Life of frontier regulars]: ibid., ch. 6, self-description quoted at p. 80.

219–20 [U.S. foreign policy, 1865–1877]: Bailey, Diplomatic History, op. cit., chs. 24–26; McFeely, op. cit., ch. 21.

220 [New interest inforeign affairs]: Robert Beisner, From the Old Diplomacy to the New, 1865–1900 (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975); Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Cornell University Press, 1963); Milton Plesur, America’s Outward Thrust: Approaches to Foreign Affairs, 1865–1890 (Northern Illinois University Press, 1971).

[Grant’s world tour]: McFeely, ch. 26.

221 [Americans abroad]: Plesur, passim: Foster Rhea Dulles, Americans Abroad (University of Michigan Press, 1964), chs. 8–10.

[James on tourists]: quoted in Dulles, p. 111.

222 [Economic expansion and foreign affairs]: Plesur, pp. 28ff.

[“Th’ hand that rules th’ wurruld”]: quoted in ibid., p. 31.

[Foreign service a “humbug and a sham”]: quoted in Leckie, p. 539.

[Developments in naval policy]: Walter R. Herrick, Jr., The American Naval Revolution (Louisiana State University Press, 1966); Ronald Spector, Admiral of the New Empire: The Life and Career of George Dewey (Louisiana State University Press, 1974), pp. 21–32; see also Hyman G. Rickover, How the Battleship Maine Was Destroyed (Department of the Navy, 1976), pp. 1–3, 18–21.

223 [Arthur on need to rebuild navy]: quoted in Herrick, p. 25.

Showdown 1896

[Carnegie on Triumphant Democracy]: quoted in Keller, op. cit., p. 440.

224 [Condition of labor, 1892]: John R. Commons et al., History of Labour in the United States (Macmillan, 1918–35), vol. 2, part 6, ch. 13; Walter A. Wyckoff, The Workers, An Experiment in Reality The West (Scribner’s, 1899), passim.

224 [Fears of class warfare]: H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877–1896 (Syracuse University Press, 1969), p. 441 and note.

[Populists and blacks]: Robert Saunders, “Southern Populists and the Negro, 1893–1895.” Journal of Negro History, vol. 54, no. 3 (July 1969), pp. 240–61.

[Fraud in Watson elections]: C. Vann Woodward, Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel (Macmillan, 1938), pp. 270–77.

[Homestead strike]: Joseph F. Wall, Andrew Carnegie (Oxford University Press, 1970), ch 16; see also Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography (Houghton Mifflin. 1948), ch. 17.

[Frick]: George Harvey, Henry Clay Frick: The Man (Scribner’s, 1928), passim; Wall, pp. 478–536.

225 [Carnegie’s and Frick’s attitudes toward unions]: Wall, p. 544.

[Berkman’s attack upon Frick]: Harvey, pp. 136–40.

[Press revilement of Carnegie following Homestead]: Wall, pp. 571–73.

[St. Louis Post-Dispatch contrasting Fnck and Camegie]: quoted in ibid., p. 573.

225–6 [Frick’s intransigence]: Harvey, ch. 11, quoted at p. 151; Wall, pp. 566–69.

226 [Carnegie on Cleveland’s victory]: Carnegie to Frick, November 9, 1892, quoted in Harvey, p. 157.

[Cleveland’s rejection of “paternalism”]: Inaugural Address, March 4, 1893, reprinted in Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), quoted at p. 165.

[Depression of the nineties]: Charles Hoffman, The Depression of the Nineties: An Economic History (Greenwood Publishing, 1970), esp. ch. 2 and appendix to ch. 2; Morris, Encyclopedia of American History, op. cit., p. 539; see also Rendig Fels, American Business Cycles, 1865–1897 (University of North Carolina Press, 1959), chs. 10–12.

[Cleveland’s response to the crisis]: Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (Dodd, Mead, 1932), chs. 29, 31; Morgan, pp. 451–65, 473–76.

[Living petition]: Resolution of Oak Valley Alliance, Nebraska, May 5, 1894, quoted in Norman Pollack, The Populist Response to Industrial America (W. W. Norton, 1966), p. 50.

[“Petition in boots “]: Donald L. McMurry, “Jacob Sechler Coxey,” in John A. Garraty, ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography (Harper & Row, 1974), p. 235.

[Coxey and Coxey’s army]: Norman Pollack, ed., The Populist Mind (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 342–47; George P. Tindall.ed., A Populist Reader (Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 160–65; Elizabeth Barr, “ The Populist Uprising,” in William E. Connelley, History of Kansas: State and People (American Historical Society, 1928), vol. 2, pp. 1199–1200; Pollack, Populist Response, pp. 48–52; McMurry in Garraty, pp. 234–35.

227 [The Pullman Palace Car Company in 1894]: Thomas G. Manning, The Chicago Strike of 1894 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), p. 1.

[Flowers and lawn in the model town]: Pullman pamphlet, quoted in Milton Mellzer, Bread—and Roses: The Struggle of American Labor, 1865–1915 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 148.

[Pullman paternalism]: Almont Lindsey, “Paternalism and the Pullman Strike,” American Historical Review, vol. 44, no. 2 (January 1939), pp. 272–89.

[“We are born in a Pullman house”]: quoted in Meltzer, p. 151.

[Strike]: Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning (Oxford University Press, 1967), chs. 12–15; Manning, passim; Meltzer, ch. 14; Christopher Lamb, “Eugene Debs, the A.R.U., and the Failure of Radical Labor” (typescript, Williams College, 1981); Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (Viking Press, 1934), ch. 11.

[Railroad boycott]: Meltzer, pp. 153–54.

227–8 [Effect on congressional elections in the nineties of economic and social pressures]: Samuel T. McSeveney, The Politics of Depression: Political Behavior in the Northeast, 1893–1896 (Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. vii–ix.

[Reed on the unknown Democratic dead]: quoted in Paul W. Glad, McKinley, Bryan, and the People (Lippincott, 1964), p. 91.

228 [Cleveland, federal finances and the syndicate]: Nevins, pp. 652–66.

[“I hate the ground that man walks on”]: Senator John T. Morgan, quoted in ibid., p. 568.

[Democratic factionalism]: Glad, pp. 91–94, 113–22; Morris, p. 264.

[Internal populist crisis over silver]: John D. Hicks, The Populist Revolt (University of Nebraska Press, 1961), pp. 316–19; Pollack, Populist Response, pp. 109–10; Topeka Advocate, May 8, 1895.

228 [Watson on free silver]: C. Vann Woodward, The Origins of the the New South, 1877–1913 (Louisiana Slate University Press, 1951), p. 282.

229 [Pre-presidential McKinley]: see Margaret Leech, In the Days of McKinley (Harper & Bros., 1959), chs. 1–3.

[Governor McKinley’s debt]: H. Wayne Morgan, William McKinley and His America (Syracuse University Press, 1963), pp. 169–76.

[Morgan on McKinley]: Morgan, Hayes to McKinley, pp. 492–93.

[Bryan]: Louis W. Koenig, Bryan (Putnam’s, 1971); Paolo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan: Political Evangelist, 1860–1908 (University of Nebraska Press, 1964).

229–30 [McKinley and Bryan compared]: Glad, ch. 1 and pp. 32–36, quoted at p. 15.

230 [La Follette on Bryan’s appearance]: quoted in Morgan, Hayes to McKinley, p. 496.

[The convention and the speech]: Koenig, ch. 13; Coletta, ch. 8.

230–1 [Text of Bryan’s “Cross of Gold”]: William Jennings Bryan, The First Battle: A Story of the Campaign (W. B. Conkey, 1896), pp. 199–206, reprinted in Schlesinger, Parties, op. cit, vol. 2, pp. 1080–85, quoted at pp. 1080, 1081, 1085.

231 [Lloyd on Populist dilemma]: quoted in Woodward, Watson, p. 303.

[1896 Populist convention]: Robert F. Durden, The Climax of Populism: The Election of 1896 (University of Kentucky Press, 1965), pp. 23–44; Woodward, Watson, pp. 302–31.

[The fall campaign]: Keller, pp. 582–84; Glad, ch. 8; Gilbert Fite, “Election of 1896,” in Schlesinger, Elections, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 1787–1825.

232 [Bryan’s concession and challenge]: quoted in Morgan, Hayes to McKinley, p. 521.

[Watson on death of Populist party]: Woodward, Watson, p. 330.

Triumphant Republicanism

[Significance of 1896 election]: Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System, op. cit., esp. ch. 7; Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (W. W. Norton, 1970), esp. ch. 4’,Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, Partisan Realignment (Sage Publications, 1980); V. O. Key, Jr., “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics, vol. 17, no. 1 (February 1955), pp. 3–18; Allan J. Lichtman, “Critical Election Theory and the Reality of American Presidential Politics, 1916–1940,” American Historical Review, vol. 81. no. 2 (April 1976), pp. 317–51. esp. pp. 320–23, 339–44; Fite in Schlesinger, Elections, op. cit.,vol. 2, pp. 1787–1825.

232–3 [County results in the Midwest]: Sundquist, p. 151.

233 [Sundquist on “another R”]: ibid., p. 150.

[Kleppner on the redeveloped Republican party]: Paul Kleppner, “From Ethnoreligious Conflict to ‘Social Harmony’: Coalitional and Party Transformations in the 1890s,” in Seymour Martin Lipset, ed., Emerging Coalitions in American Politics (Institute for Contemporary Studies, 1978), pp. 41–59. quoted at p. 42.

[Farm support for McKinley, 1896]: Gilbert C. Fite, “Republican Strategy and the Farm Vote in the Presidential Campaign of 1896,” American Historical Review, vol. 65, no. 4 (July 1960), pp. 787–806.

[Labor support for McKinley]: Morgan, McKinley and His America, op. cit.: see also Irving Bernstein, ed., “Samuel Gompers and Free Silver, 1896,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 29, no. 3 (December 1942), pp. 394–400.

234 [The McKinley administration]: Morgan; Leonard D. White, The Republican Era: 1869–1901 (Macmillan, 1958); Keller, op. cit., esp. ch. 16.

[1896 Republican platform on lynching]: quoted in Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 2, p. 1834.

[Plessy v.Ferguson]: 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

[Williams v. Miss.]: 170 U.S. 213 (1898).

[Washington on segregation]: Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery (1901), in Louis R. Harlan andJohn W. Blassingame, eds., The Booker T. Washington Papers (University of Illinois Press, 1972–82), vol. 1, pp. 209–385, quoted at p. 342.

[Carnegie on Washington and blacks]: quoted in Wall, op. cit.,pp. 972–74.

[Carnegie on “Triumphant Democracy”]: ibid., p. 469.

[Carnegie on freedom]: ibid.,p. 396. 234–5 [Carnegie’s economic and social views]: AndrewCarnegie, Triumphant Democracy (Scribner’s, 1893); Carnegie, Autobiography, op. cit.: Robert Green McCloskey, American Conservatism in the Age of Enterprise (Harvard University Press, 1951), esp. ch. 6.

235 [Wall on the have-nots]: Wall, p. 459.

[The Maine in Havana]: Rickover, op. cit., ch. 4.

[Spanish-Cuban-American war]: Bailey, Diplomatic History, op. cit., ch. 31; Philip S. Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, 1895–1902 (Monthly Review Press, 1972), vol. 1, passim; Ernest R. May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power (Harper & Row, 1961), parts 4–5; Morgan, chs. 15–17.

[The Hearst-Pulitzer war]: W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst (Scribner’s, 1961), part 3; Leckie, op. cit., pp. 544–45.

236 [McKinley and Cuba]: Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (Regents Press of Kansas, 1980); Foner, vol. 1, chs. 11–12.

237 (Journal on the Maine disaster]: February 17, 1898, quoted in Swanberg, p. 136.

[Roosevelt on Spanish “treachery”]: Roosevelt to Benjamin Diblee, February 16, 1898, in Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard University Press, 1951–54), vol. 1, p. 775.

[1976 Navy Department study]: Rickover, passim.

[1898 court of inquiry report on the Maine]: quoted in ibid., p. 70.

[Foraker on “aggressive conquest of territory”]: Congressional Record, 2nd Session (Government Printing Office, 1898), vol. 31, part 4, p. 3780 (April 13, 1898).

238 [American military effort]: Graham Cosmas, An Army for Empire (University of Missouri Press, 1971); David F. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (Macmillan, 1981); Foner, vol. 2, ch. 15; Leckie, pp. 546–63; Spector, op. cit., chs. 2–3.

239 [“Damned Yankees on the run”]: quoted in Leckie, p. 556.

[“The poor fellows are dying”]: ibid, p. 562.

[McKinley’s strategy]: see Trask, passim.

239–40 [Diplomatic resolution of the war]: H. Wayne Morgan, ed., Making Peace with Spain: The Diary of Whitelaw Reid, September–December, 1898 (University of Texas Press, 1965); Morgan, McKinley and His America, pp. 400–414.

240 [Annexation as “consummation”]: quoted in Bailey, p. 435.

[Debate over imperialism]: Morgan, McKinley and His America, pp. 415–23 and ch. 19; Daniel B. Schirmer, Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War (Schenkman, 1972); Richard E. Welch, Jr., Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War, 1899–1902 (University of North Carolina Press, 1979); see also Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” Journal of American History, vol. 66, no. 4 (March 1980), pp. 810–31. [Carnegie on McKinley’s leadership]: quoted in Wall, p. 693.

[“Triumphant Despotism”]: ibid., p. 694.

[Hoar on the “downfall” of the republic]: quoted in Schirmer, p. 109.

[Lodge on passage of the treaty]: ibid., p. 122.

241 [Philippine insurrection]: John M. Gates, Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1898–1902 (Greenwood Press, 1973); Bonifacio S. Salamanca, The Filipino Reaction to American Rule, 1901–1913 (Shoe String Press, 1968), chs. 1–3.

[Election of 1900]: Coletta, op. cit., ch. 12; Koenig, op. cit., chs. 18–19; Morgan, McKinley and His America, ch. 21; Walter LaFeber, “Election of 1900,” in Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 3, pp. 1877–1962.

[Imperialism as “paramount” issue]: quoted in LaFeber in Schlesinger, vol. 3, p. 1878.

[Carnegie’s support of McKinley]: Wall, p. 710.

[Donnelly on “shooting negroes”]: quoted in LaFeber in Schlesinger, vol. 3, p. 1883.

[“President of the whole people”]: quoted in Morgan, McKinley and His America, p. 508.

[“Timekeepers of progress”]: ibid., p. 517.

[Assassination of McKinley]: A. Wesley Johns, The Man Who Shot McKinley (A. S. Barnes, 1970); see also James W. Clarke, American Assassins: The Darker Side of American Politics (Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 39–62.

7. THE URBAN PROGRESSIVES

245 [Origins of progressivism]: Irwin Unger and Debi Unger, The Vulnerable Years: The United States, 1896–1917 (New York University Press, 1978), ch. 4; Richard L. McCormick, “The Discovery That Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” American Historical Review, vol. 86, no. 2 (April 1981), pp. 247–74; Arthur A. Ekirch,Jr., Progressivism in America (New Viewpoints, 1974); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), chs. 4, 5; John D. Buenker, “The Progressive Era: A Search for a Synthesis,” Mid-America, vol. 51, no. 3 (July 1969), pp. 175–93; David P. Thelen, “Social Tensions and the Origins of Progressivism,” Journal of American History, vol. 56, no. 2 (September 1969), pp. 323–41; Peter G. Filene, “An Obituary for ‘The Progressive Movement,’” American Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 1 (Spring 1970), pp. 20–34; Robert H. Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Harvard University Press, 1962); Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (University of Chicago Press, 1957).

245 [Hofstadter on class anxieties]: Hofstadter, p. 137.

246 [Ungers on development of progressivism]: Unger and Unger, pp. 101–2.

[Immigration, migration, and population increases]: Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History (Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 647–62.

246–47 [Urban crowding]: Joel Arthur Tarr, “From City to Suburb: The ‘Moral’ Influence of Transportation Technology,” in Alexander B. Callow, Jr., ed., American Urban History, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 205–6; John A. Garraty, The New Commonwealth (Harper & Row, 1968), pp. 188–93.

247 [Chicago stink and stench]: quoted in Garraty, p. 193.

248 [Industrialization of large American cities]: Maury Klein and Harvey A. Kantor, Prisoners of Progress: American Industrial Cities, 1850–1920 (Macmillan, 1976); Blake McKelvey, The Urbanization of America (Rutgers University Press, 1963); Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Urban Wilderness (Harper & Row, 1972), ch. 4; Allan R. Pred, The Spatial Dynamics of U.S. Urban-Industrial Growth, 1800–1914: Interpretive and Theoretical Essays (MIT Press, 1966).

[McKelvey on shift from commercial to industrial cities]: McKelvey, p. 48.

248–49 [Aspects of the industrializing city]: Stephan Thernstrom, “Reflections on the New Urban History,” Daedalus, vol. 100, no. 2 (Spring 1971), pp. 359–75.

The Shape of the City

249 [Railroad terminals]: Carroll L. V. Meeks, The Railroad Station: An Architectural History (Yale University Press, 1956).

[Louis Sullivan on the Chicago station]: quoted in ibid., p. 108.

[Central business district]: Martyn J. Bowden, “Growth of the Central Districts in Large Cities,” in Leo F. Schnore, ed., The New Urban History (Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 75–109.

250 [City transport]: Charles N. Glaab and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America (Macmillan, 1967), pp. 147–52; Klein and Kantor, op. cit., pp. 146–51; McKelvey, op.cit.,ch. 5.

[Mark Twain on hanging on by eyelashes]: quoted in Glaab and Brown, p. 149.

[Estimate of manure left on streets]: Joel A. Tarr, “Urban Pollution—Many Long Years Ago,” American Heritage, vol. 22, no. 6 (October 1971), pp. 65–106.

[Sprague on the “Edison legend”]: F.J. Sprague to S. H. Libby, October 10, 1931, in Roger Burlingame, Engines of Democracy (Scribner’s, 1940), p. 198.

251 [Elevators]: Glaab and Brown, pp. 144–45; Burlingame, pp. 88–89.

[Traveler on sensations of an express ride]: Julian Ralph, quoted in Glaab and Brown, p. 145.

[Cast-iron and steel buildings]: Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (Harvard University Press, 1954), pp. 193–98.

252 [Sullivan on the power of height]: quoted in Klein and Kantor, p. 158.

[Woolworth Tower]: ibid., pp. 159–60.

[Appearance of the grid pattern]: ibid., p. 127.

[Bryce on monotony]: quoted in ibid.

253 [The balloon frame]: Giedion, pp. 345–53, G. E. Woodward quoted at p. 347.

[Sewerage and water]: Klein and Kantor, pp. 165–68; Glaab and Brown, pp. 164–66.

[Cleveland’s open sewer]: quoted in Garraty, op. cit., p. 192.

254 [Waring on filth as cause of disease]: quoted in Glaab and Brown, p. 165.

[Urban parks]: Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design (MIT Press, 1982).

[Mumford on rectangular street platting]: Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (Harcourt, Brace, 1938), quoted at p. 189.

The Life of the City

255 [Social topography of the Lower East Side]: Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Harvard University Press, 1962), pp. 76–94; see also Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), ch. 2; and, more generally, John Higham, Send These to Me: Jews and Other Immigrants in Urban America (Atheneum, 1975).

256 [Bennett on the architecture “sweating humanity “]: Arnold Bennett, Those United States (Martin Secker, 1912), p. 239.

[Cultural and psychological shocks of migration]: Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted, 2nd ed. (Little, Brown, 1973), esp. chs. 9, 10.

257 [Howe on role of religion]: Howe, p. 70.

[Italian immigrants]: Robert F. Foerster, The Italian Emigration of Our Times (Harvard University Press, 1919); Andrew F. Rolle, The Immigrant Upraised (University of Oklahoma Press, 1968); Oscar Handlin, ed., Immigration as a Factor in American History (Prentice-Hall, 1959), pp. 29–31, 77–84, 133–35.

[Italian immigrants in Chicago]: Humbert S. Nelli, Italians in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Oxford University Press, 1970).

[Italian immigrants adapting to the urban language ]: Joseph Lopreato, Italian Americans (Random House, 1970), p. 57.

258 [Nelli on the role of the padrone]: Nelli, p. 63.

[Prices charged by padroni]: Carroll Wright, “Ninth Special Report of the Italians in Chicago,” United States Department of Labor Bulletin, no. 13 (November 1897), p. 727.

[Pressures on Chicago community life]: Richard Sennett, “Middle-Class Families and Urban Violence: The Experience of a Chicago Community in the Nineteenth Century,” in Stephan Thernstrom and Richard Sennett, eds., Nineteenth-Century Cities (Yale University Press, 1969), pp. 386–420.

[Smith on transporting of man]: Herbert G. Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815–1919,” American Historical Review, vol. 78, no. 3 (June 1973. pp. 531–87. quoted at p. 547.

259 [Communist Manifesto on factories as industrial armies]: in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (W. W. Norton, 1972), quoted at pp. 341, 342.

[Immigrants celebrating old-time holidays]: Gutman, pp. 547–48.

[Jews moving upward]: Bernard D. Weinryb, “Jewish Immigration and Accommodation to America,” in Marshall Sklare, ed., The Jews: Social Patterns of an American Group (Free Press, 1958), pp. 4–22.

[Irish-American upward mobility]: William V. Shannon, The American Irish (Macmillan, 1966), chs.6, 9; Carl Wittke, The Irish in America (Louisiana State University Press, 1956); Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1865 (Harvard University Press, 1941).

260 [MacShinnegan coat of arms]: The Argonaut, quoted in Shannon, p. 88.

[Marx and Engels on the impact of industrialization and the industrial city]: The German Ideology, in Tucker, quoted at pp. 149–50; I have made minor changes in punctuation.

[Marx and class consciousness]: Norman Birnbaum, “Afterword,” in Thernstrom and Sennett, pp. 421–30.

260–61 [Thernstrom on continuity of class membership in one setting]: Stephan Thernstrom, “Urbanization, Migration, and Social Mobility in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” in Callow, op. cit., p. 405.

261 [Communist Manifesto on proletarianization]: in Tucker, pp. 341–42.

[Changes in the home]: Elizabeth M. Bacon, “The Growth of Household Conveniences in the U.S. from 1865 to 1900,” Ph.D. dissertation, Radcliffe College, 1942.

[Domestic science movement]: Barbara J. Harris, Beyond Her Sphere: Women and the Professions in American History (Greenwood Press, 1978), p. 135; Diary of Annie Thompson, private collection; Catharine Esther Beecher, The American Woman’s Home; or, Principles of Domestic Science (J. B. Ford, 1869).

[Alcott on making a battering-ram of her head]: quoted in Marjorie Worthington, Miss Alcott of Concord (Doubleday, 1958), p. 83.

[Bradwell]: Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130 (1873), quoted at 141; Harris, pp. 110–12.

262 [The club movement]: Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (Holmes & Meier, 1980).

[Maine delegate on fashionable clubwomen]: quoted in ibid., pp. 95–96.

262 [Scientific American on assimilation or extermination]: June 9, 1869, quoted in Gutman, p. 584.

[“Forget your past”]: quoted in ibid., p. 582.

(The “clock in the workshop”]: reprinted in ibid., p. 547. I have added the word “to” to the last line.

The Leaders of the City

263 [Boss Plunkitt’s day]: William L. Riordon, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall (E. P. Dutton, 1963), pp. 91–93.

[Tammany Hall]: Gustavus Myers, The History of Tammany Hall (Boni & Liveright, 1917); M. R. Werner, Tammany Hall (Doubleday, Doran, 1928); John W. Pratt, “Boss Tweed’s Public Welfare Program,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly, vol. 45, no. 4 (October 1961), pp. 396–411.

264 [ Tammany structure and function ]: Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Free Press, 1957), pp. 71–82; Eric L. McKitrick, “The Study of Corruption,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 4 (December 1957), pp. 502–14; Seymour J. Mandelbaum, Boss Tweed’s New York (John Wiley, 1965).

[Other city “machines”]: Harold F. Gosnell, Machine Politics: Chicago Model (University of Chicago Press, 1968); Zane L. Miller, Boss Cox’s Cincinnati (Oxford University Press, 1968); George M. Reynolds, Machine Politics in New Orleans, 1897–1926 (Columbia University Press, 1936); Walter Bean, Boss Ruef’s San Francisco (University of California Press, 1952).

265 (Lomasney on getting help]: quoted in Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography (Chautauqua Press, 1931), p. 618.

[Glaab and Brown on machine as “avenue of advance”]: Glaab and Brown, op. cit., p. 225.

[Merton on corporations and the “economic czar”]: Robert K. Merton, “Latent Functions of the Machine,” in Callow, op. cit., pp. 220–29, quoted at p. 223.

266 [Boyer on cities replicating the moral order of the village]: Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Harvard University Press, 1978), p. viii.

[Reformers]: Geoffrey Blodgett, “Reform Thought and the Genteel Tradition,” in H. Wayne Morgan, ed., The Gilded Age, 2nd ed. (Syracuse University Press, 1970), pp. 55–76; John G. Sproat, “The Best Men “: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (Oxford University Press, 1968); Geoffrey Blodgett, The Gentle Reformers: Massachusetts Democrats in the Cleveland Era (Harvard University Press, 1966).

[Boss Tweed]: Alexander B. Callow, Jr., The Tweed Ring (Oxford University Press, 1966); Merton in Callow, American Urban History; Mandelbaum.

267 [“What are you going to do about it?”]: quoted in Callow, The Tweed Ring, p. 9.

[Plunkitt on reform movements as “mornin’glories”]: Riordon, p. 17.

267–68 [Plunkitt on politics as a business]: ibid., p. 19.

268 [Steffens on businessmen and corruption]: quoted in Klein and Kantor, op. cit., p. 357.

[Wiebe on reformers’ dependence on business]: Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (Hill and Wang, 1967), p. 174.

269 [Choate on the danger to liberty]: quoted in Callow, The Tweed Ring, p. 265.

[Doubts of some reformers about universal suffrage]: ibid., ch. 17; Melvin G. Holli, Reform in Detroit (Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 171–78.

[Times on the “dangerous classes”]: New York Times, July 16, 1871, p. 4.

[E. L. Godkin on ignorant and corrupt voters]: quoted in Callow, The Tweed Ring, p. 267.

[“Expert’s” prediction of abandonment of universal suffrage ]: Frank Goodnow, quoted in Holli, p. 174.

The Reformation of the Cities

[Union for Concerted Moral Effort and National Union for Practical Progress]: Boyer, op. cit., p. 163.

270 [Hull House]: Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (Macmillan, 1910).

[Jane Addams on transforming cities]: quoted in Boyer, pp. 222–23; see also, Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (Macmillan, 1909); Addams, A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (Macmillan, 1912).

270 [Mary Richmond on settlement house workers]: quoted in Boyer, p. 156.

271 [City Beautiful movement]: Jon A. Peterson, “The City Beautiful Movement: Forgotten Origins and Lost Meanings,” Journal of Urban History, vol. 2 (August 1976), pp. 415–34; Klein and Kantor, op. cit, pp. 423–30.

[City planning]: John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1965); Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., “The Town-Planning Movement in America,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 51 (January 1914), pp. 172–81; Boyer, ch. 18; Mumford, op. cit., passim.

272 [Pingree and Detroit]: Holli, op. cit., passim.

[“I’m too busy making shoes”]: quoted in ibid., p. 17.

273 [Pingree’s achievements]: ibid.,pp. 157–58, quoted at p. 158.

[“Golden Rule”Jones]: Jack Tager, The Intellectual as Urban Reformer (Case Western Reserve University Press, 1968), ch. 4; Samuel M.Jones, The New Right: A Plea for Fair Play Through a More Just Social Order (Eastern Book Concern, 1899); Brand Whitlock, Forty Years of It (D. Appleton, 1914); Samuel M.Jones, “The New Patriotism: A Golden Rule Government for Cities,” Municipal Affairs Magazine (September 1899), pp. 455–61, in Charles N. Glaab, ed., The American City: A Documentary History (Dorsey Press, 1963), pp. 406–13.

[Jones on “the ideal society”]: Jones, The New Right, p. 66.

[Johnson]: Tom Loftin Johnson, My Story (B. W. Huebsch, 1911).

274 [Johnson on municipal ownership]: quoted in Glaab and Brown, op. cit., p. 215.

Women: The Progressive Cadre

275 [Lathrop]: Jane Addams, My Friend Julia Lathrop (Macmillan, 1935); Ray Ginger, “The Women at Hull-House,” in Linda K. Kerber and Jane De Hart Mathews, Women’s America (Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 265–66.

[Kelley]: Josephine Goldmark, Impatient Crusader (University of Illinois Press, 1953); Ginger, pp. 263–64.

[Goldman]: Richard Drinnon, Rebel in Paradise (University of Chicago Press, 1961).

[Addams]: Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, op. cit.; Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (Oxford University Press, 1973); Anne Firor Scott, “Jane Addams,” in Edward T. James, ed., Notable American Women, 1607–1950 (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 16–22.

276 [German’s response to Christian Scientist]: quoted in Ginger, p. 269.

[Addams’s only cigarette]: Ginger, p. 271.

[Kelley’s arrival at Hull-House with children]: Davis, pp. 76–77.

[Addams and Powers]: quoted in Ginger, p. 270; Davis, pp. 121–25.

277 [Addams and Lathrop as midwives]: Davis, pp. 81–82.

[Addams’s activities in organizations]: Lauren Ribardo, “Jane Addams: A Guiding Woman in a Man-Made World,” typescript, Williams College, November 1983, pp. 11, 14.

[Davis on Addams]: Allen F. Davis, “Jane Addams,” in John A. Garraty, Encyclopedia of American Biography (Harper & Row, 1974), p. 18.

[Addams’s reputation]: see Davis, American Heroine, ch. 11.

[Women and reform efforts]: see Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform (Oxford University Press, 1967).

278 [Zimmerman on professionally trained women]: Joan G. Zimmerman, “Women as Interpretersof Social Scientific Knowledge: A Professional Approach to Progressive Reform, 1880–1925,” paper presented at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, October1981, to the Chesapeake Area Group of Women Historians.

[Hofstadter on Addams]: Hofstadter, op. cit., p. 208.

[Political action for laws protecting women and children]: see Davis, Spearhead, ch. 7.

[Wald]: Robert L. Duffus, Lillian Wald (Macmillan, 1938); Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman,” in Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own (Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 412–44; Lillian D. Wald, The House on Henry Street (Henry Holt, 1915).

279 [WCTU]: Ruth B. Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty 1873–1900 (Temple University Press, 1981); Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Wesleyan University Press, 1981), chs. 4–5.

279 [“Do Everything”]: see Epstein, pp. 120–21.

[Sanger]: David Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (Yale University Press, 1970); James Reed, “Margaret Sanger,” in Notable American Women,vol. 4, pp. 623–27.

[Sanger on “the basic freedom”]: Sanger, Woman and the New Race (Brentano’s, 1920), p. 94.

280 [ Women in nonagricultural pursuits]: see Janet M. Hooks, “Women’s Occupations Through Seven Decades,” Women’s Bureau Bulletin, no. 218, U.S. Department of Labor (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1947), esp. Appendix, Table IIa.

[Women and unions]: Alice Kessler-Harris, “Where Are the Organized Women Workers?,” in Cott and Pleck, pp. 343–66; Kessler-Harris, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 151–64. See also Susan Levine, “Labor’s True Woman: Domesticity and Equal Rights in the Knights of Labor,”Journal of American History, vol. 70, no. 2 (September 1983), pp. 323–39.

281 [WTUL]: Kessler-Harris, Out to Work, pp. 164–71, 203–10; Robin Miller Jacoby, “The Women’s Trade Union League and American Feminism,” Feminist Studies, vol. 3 (Fall 1975), pp. 126–38, quoted at p. 128; Nancy S. Dye, “Creating a Feminist Alliance: Sisterhood and Class Conflict in the New York Women’s Trade Union League,” Feminist Studies, vol. 2, no. 2/3 (1975), pp. 24–38.

[“I am a good democrat in theory”]: quoted in Jacoby, p. 132.

[Justice on Kelley]: Felix Frankfurter, “Foreword,” in Goldmark, p. v.

282 [AFL under Gompers]: Harold C. Livesay, Samuel Gompers and Organized Labor in America (Little, Brown, 1978); Bernard Mandel, Samuel Gompers: A Biography (Antioch Press, 1963); Lewis Reed, The Labor Philosophy of Samuel Gompers (Columbia University Press, 1930).

[Haywood]: Joseph R. Conlin, Big Bill Haywood and the Radical Union Movement (Syracuse University Press, 1969); Peter Carlson, Roughneck (W. W. Norton, 1983); Eric Sears Stein, “Reform and Revolutionary Leadership: A Study of Samuel Gompers and William Haywood,” typescript, Williams College, December 1983.

283 [IWW]: Paul Frederick Brissenden, The IWW: A Study of American Syndicalism (Columbia University, Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, 1920); Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All: A History of the Industrial Workers of the World (Quadrangle, 1969).

[IWW on labor unity among races]: Brissenden, pp. 84, 208; see also, Milton Meltzer, Bread—and Roses (Alfred A. Knopf, 1967).

[Debs]: Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (University of Illinois Press, 1982); Bruce Rogers, comp., Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches (The Appeal to Reason, 1908).

[Goldman]: Drinnon; Emma Goldman, Living My Life, 2 vols. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1931); Terry M. Perlin, ed., Contemporary Anarchism (Rutgers University Press, 1979); Alan Ritter, Anarchism: A Theoretical Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 1980); William Reed Sawyers, “Emma Goldman: Anarchist as Leader,” typescript, Williams College, November 1983.

284 [Washington]: Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader (Oxford University Press, 1972); Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee (Oxford University Press, 1983); Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901) in Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers (University of Illinois Press, 1972–82), vol. 1, pp. 209–385; Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro (Collier Books, 1969); E. Davidson Washington, ed., Selected Speeches of Booker T. Washington (Doubleday, Doran, 1932.

[Washington on “questions of social equality”]: “The Standard Printed Version of the Atlanta Exposition Address,” September 18, 1895, in Washington Papers, vol. 3, p. 586.

285 [Du Bois]: Francis L. Broderick, W. E. B. Du Bois (Stanford University Press, 1959); Rayford W. Logan, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois: A Profile (Hill and Wang, 1971); W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Black Folk Then and Now (Octagon Books, 1973); see also William Toll, The Resurgence of Race (Temple University Press, 1979).

[Du Bois on his son]: quoted in Eric Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny (Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), p. 178.

[Du Bois’s interchangeable use of terms “Negro,” “black,” “colored”]: Logan, Du Bois, p. xiii.

285 [Mary Harris Jones]: Autobiography of Mother Jones (Charles H. Kerr, 1925).

286 [Women’s networks]: Cook, in Cod and Pleck, passim.

8. THE MODERNIZING MIND

287 [Mr. Dooley on history]: quoted in Mark Sullivan, Our Times (Scribner’s, 1926–35), vol. 1, p. 243 footnote.

[Gould on “intriguing interplay”]: Lewis L. Gould, ed., The Progressive Era (Syracuse University Press, 1974), p. 9.

[1893 Chicago Fair]: Sullivan, vol. 1, pp. 188–93, Ernest I. Lewis quoted at p. 192 footnote.

[Even Henry Adams]: Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Houghton Mifflin, 1927), pp. 339–43; and see also Adams to Elizabeth Cameron, October 8, 1893, in Worthington Chauncey Ford, ed., Letters of Henry Adams (Houghton Mifflin, 1930–38), vol. 2, p. 33, footnote 1.

[Gibson girls, shirtwaists, and bicycles]: Sullivan, vol. 1, pp. 193–96, 13–14, 240–43, respectively.

288 [American production, 1900]: ibid., p. 33.

[Negro spiritual]: quoted in ibid., p. 38 footnote.

[Black petition for passage to Liberia]: ibid., pp. 591–92.

[Comstock report on improper pleasures]: 37th Annual Report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, January 1911, in Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Reel 98, Library of Congress.

289 [Kathleen Morris on women’s dress]: quoted in Sullivan, vol. 1, p. 390.

[Dominance of the “invisible” machine]: Oscar Handlin, “Science and Technology in Popular Culture,” in Gerald Holton, ed., Science and Culture (Houghton Mifflin, 1965), esp. p. 194.

[Marx on technology and the productive processes]: Nathan Rosenberg, “Karl Marx on the Economic Role of Science,” in Rosenberg, Perspectives on Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 126–38.

[Michelson]: BernardJaffe, Men of Science in America (Simon and Schuster, 1949), ch. 15.

[Willson]: Robert Multhauf, “Industrial Chemistry in the Nineteenth Century,” in Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Purcell, Jr., eds., Technology in Western Civilization (Oxford University Press, 1967), vol. 1, pp. 468–89, esp. p. 478.

[Gooch]: Ralph G. Van Name, “Frank Austin Gooch,” in National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, vol. 15, 3rd memoir (1934), pp. 105–35.

290 [Acheson]: Edward G. Acheson, A Pathfinder (Press Scrap Book, 1910).

[Morley]: Howard R. Williams, Edward Williams Morley (Chemical Education Publications, 1957).

[Sabine]: Daniel J. Kevles, “Wallace Clement Ware Sabine,” in Charles C. Gillespie, ed., Dictionary of Scientific Biography (Scribner’s, 1970–80), vol. 12, p. 54.

[Submersible]: Allen Hoar, The Submarine Torpedo Boat (Van Nostrand, 1916).

[Flying machines]: Tom D. Crouch, A Dream of Wings: Americans and the Airplane, 1875–1905 (W. W. Norton, 1981).

[Langley]: Jaffe, ch. 14.

[Charles and Frank Duryea]: G. N. Georgano, ed., Encyclopedia of American Automobiles (E. P. Dutton, 1971), pp. 67–68 (“Duryea”).

[Gibbs and Steinmetz]: Jaffe, ch. 13; J. W. Hammond, Charles Proteus Steinmetz (Century, 1924).

[Osborn]: Edwin H. Colbert, Men and Dinosaurs: The Search in Field and Laboratory (E. P. Dutton, 1968), pp. 147 ff.

[Boas and Wissler]: Melville J. Herskovits, Franz Boas: The Science of Man in the Making (reissue; Augustus M. Kelley, 1973).

[Morgan]: Garland E. Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan: The Man and His Science (Princeton University Press, 1978).

291 [Pattern of development in science]: Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1970).

[James on pragmatism’s “precipitation”]: William James, Pragmatism, and Four Essays from The Meaning of Truth (Meridian Books, 1950), p. 13.

The Pulse of the Machine

291–92 [William James in New York and at Columbia]: James to Henry James and William James, Jr., February 14, 1907, in Elizabeth Hardwick, ed., The Selected Letters of William James (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. 1960), pp. 227–29; Gay Wilson Allen, William James (Viking Press, 1967), pp. 457–58.

291 [James on Twain]: letter, February 14, 1907, in Hardwick, pp. 228–29.

292 [James on New York]: ibid., pp. 228, 229.

[James’s earlier life, and relationship with Peirce]: Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vols. 1 and 2 (Little, Brown, 1935), esp. chs. 32, 75, 76.

[Peirce]: Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur Burks, eds., The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 8 vols. (Harvard University Press, 1931–58); Philip P. Weiner and Frederic H. Young, eds., Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce (Harvard University Press, 1952).

293–93 [James’s lectures on pragmatism]: reprinted “as delivered,” according to the author, in James, Pragmatism, op cit.

293 [James on the “tender-minded” and the “tough-minded”]: ibid., p. 22. Other quotations from the lectures: ibid, pp. 19, 21, 23, 24, 27, 49, 45, 47, respectively.

[Reception of pragmatism]: see Perry, vol. 2, ch. 78; James on the evening discussions quoted in Hardwick, p. 229.

294 [James’s sudden “fear of my own existence”]: quoted in Edward C. Moore, American Pragmatism: Peirce, James, and Dewey (Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 115.

[Reaction of philosophers and others to James’s Pragmatism]: H. Münsterberg to James, July 1, 1906, in Perry, vol. 2, pp. 471–72; C. S. Peirce to James, March 7, 1904, in ibid., p. 430; see also p. 465.

[Pragmatism as humanism]: F. C. S. Schiller, Studies in Humanism (Macmillan, 1907); see corr. between James and Schiller, in Perry, passim

[Derivation of “pragmatism”]: Philip P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas (Scribner’s, 1973), vol. 3. p. 554.

295 [Holmes to James on Pragmatism]: Perry, vol. 2, p. 462. Earlier comments on James’s articles on pragmatism: Holmes to James, March 24, 1907, ibid., pp. 459–61; Holmes to James, April 1, 1907, ibid., pp. 461–62.

[Holmes on the “life of the law”]: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (Little, Brown, 1881), p. 1. See also Note, “Holmes, Peirce and Legal Pragmatism,” Yale Law Journal, vol. 84, no. 5 (April 1975), pp. 1123–40.

[Lochner v. New York]: 198 U.S. 45 (1905), quoted at 75; see also Max Lerner, ed., The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes (Little, Brown, 1943), pp. 143–50.

[Holmes on letting slaughterhouses be built]: quoted in Eric F. Goldman. Rendezvous with Destiny (Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), p. 136.

296 [Rostow on Holmes’s opinions]: Eugene V. Rostow, “The Realist Tradition in AmericanLaw,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Morton White, eds., Paths of American Thought (Houghton Mifflin, 1970), p. 205.

[Holmes on Brandeis as a crusader]: quoted in Perry, vol. 1, p. 518.

[Aspects of pragmatism]: Morton White, Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (Beacon Press, 1947); Charles Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy (George Braziller, 1970); Morton White, Pragmatism and the American Mind (Oxford University Press, 1973); Gail Kennedy, ed., Pragmatism and American Culture (D. C. Heath, 1950); AndrewJ. Reck, Introduction to William James (Indiana University Press, 1967), esp. chs. 5–6.

297 [Pratt on James’s pragmatism]: James Bissett Pratt, What Is Pragmatism? (Macmillan, 1909).

[James on bringing out the cash value of each word]: Pragmatism, p. 46.

The Critics: Ideas vs. Interests?

298 [Hofstadter on the newly rich]: Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955). p. 137.

[Protestant ministry’s “massive”front]: Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (Harper & Bros., 1949), p. 91.

[Shift of Protestant clergy and of legal profession]: Hofstadter, ch. 4.

299 [Turner on the frontier]: Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (Henry Holt, 1920); see also Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier and Section: Selected Essays, Ray A. Billington, ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1961); Wilbur R.Jacobs, ed., Frederick Jackson Turner’s Legacy (Huntington Library, 1965).

[Other progressive historians]: Orin Grant Libby, “The Geographical Distribution of the Vote of the Thirteen States of the Federal Constitution, 1787–1788,” in Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, Economics, Political Science and History Series, vol. 1, no. 1 (1934); J. Allen Smith, The Spirit of American Government (Macmillan, 1907).

[Beard’s economic interpretation]: An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (Macmillan, 1913).

[Beard’s early years]: Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), ch. 5; Goldman, op. cit., pp. 149–51.

300 [Beard’s conclusions]: Economic Interpretation, pp. 324–25.

[Response to Beard’s Interpretation]: quoted in Goldman, pp. 153–54.

[Lerner on Beard’s Interpretation]: Max Lerner, Ideas Are Weapons (Viking Press, 1939), p. 154.

301 [Madison on ideas and interests]: The Federalist, Jacob E. Cooke, ed. (Wesleyan UniversityPress, 1961), no. 10, quoted at pp. 57–59.

[Holmes on Beard’s Interpretation]: quoted in Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians, pp. 212–13.

On Charles A. Beard and his Interpretation in general, see John Patrick Diggins, “Power and Authority in American History: The Case of Charles A. Beard and His Critics,” American Historical Review, vol. 86, no. 4 (October 1981), pp. 701–30.

302 [Beard as a theorist]: Harold J. Laski, “Charles Beard: An English View,” in Howard K.Beale, ed., Charles A. Beard: An Appraisal (University of Kentucky Press, 1954), pp. 9–24.

302–3 [Veblen’s personality and background]: Joseph Dorfman, Thorstein Veblen and His America (Viking Press, 1934]: David Riesman, Thorstein Veblen (Scribner’s, 1953); Max Lerner, ed..The Portable Veblen (Viking Press, 1948), “Introduction” by Lerner.

303 [Veblen chrestomathy]: Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Modern Library,1934), pp. 274. 170–71, 141, 143, 140, respectively.

[Veblen’s basic philosophy]: Bernard Rosenberg, The Values of Veblen (Public Affairs Press, 1956); Stanley Matthew Daugert, The Philosophy of Veblen (King’s Crown Press, 1950).

[Veblen on the subordination of women]:John P.Diggins, The Bard of Savagery (Seabury Press, 1978). ch. 8.

[Veblen and Marx]: Diggins, Bard of Savagery, part 2; Veblen, “The Socialist Economics of Karl Marx and His Followers,” in Veblen, Veblen on Marx, Race, Science and Economics (Capricorn Books, 1969), pp. 409–56; J. A. Hobson, Veblen (Chapman and Hall, 1936).

304 [Dobriansky on Veblen]: Lev E. Dobriansky, Veblenism: A New Critique (Public Affairs Press,1957). esp. ch. 9.

[Veblen’s failure to offer comprehensive social alternative]: Arthur K. Davis, “Sociological Elements in Veblen’s Economic Theory,” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 53, no. 2 (June 1945). pp. 132–49.

[Irish gardener to Adams]: Education of Henry Adams, op. cit., p. 16.

[Adams in Washington]: Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer (E. P. Dutton, 1940), ch. 17.

305 [Henry Adams, life and ideas]: Henry Brooks Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society; Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams: The Major Phase (Harvard University Press, 1964);R. P. Blackmur, Henry Adams (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980); David R. Contosta, Henry Adams and the American Experiment (Little, Brown, 1980); John J. Conder, A Formula of His Own (University of Chicago Press, 1970); William Dusinberre, Henry Adams: The Myth of Failure (University Press of Virginia, 1980).

[Kelvin on modern biologists]: quoted in Samuels, p. 476.

[James on not understanding Adams’s theory]: ibid., p. 485.

[Adams on power, Roosevelt, and trusts]: Education of Henry Adams, pp. 418, 500.

306 [Brooks Adams’s views]: Brooks Adams, “Introductory Note,” in Henry Adams, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (Macmillan, 1920), pp. v–xiii; Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decay (Swan Sonnenschein, 1895).

[Charles Francis Adams on being bored]: Charles Francis Adams, Jr., to Henry Adams, January 15, 1908, Henry Brooks Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, see also, Ford, Letters of Henry Adams, op. cit.,vol. 2, pp. 487–88 (Henry Adams to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., January 17, 1908).

Art: “All That Is Holy Is Profaned”

306 [Greenwich Village, early 1900s]: Arthur Frank Wertheim, The New York Little Renaissance (New York University Press, 1976); John A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (Doubleday, 1953), Group Six; Frederick J. Hoffman, The Twenties (Viking Press, 1955), ch. 1.

307 [“Everybody was freeing themselves”]: Floyd Dell, quoted in Goldman, op. cit., p. 224.

[Washington Square boardinghouse ofthe great]: Gilbert Tauber and Samuel Kaplan, The New York City Handbook (Doubleday, 1966), p. 467.

[A bastard and the “bourgeois pigs”]: quoted in Goldman, p. 225.

308 [Luhan’s voice]: Maurice Sterne, quoted in Wertheim, p. 91.

[The Luhan salon]: Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, vol. 3 of Intimate Memoirs (Harcourt, Brace, 1933–36), p. 83.

[Reed on Luhan]: quoted in Wertheim, p. 91.

[“Melt, You Women!”]: ibid.

[Marx on the bourgeois epoch]: quoted in Justin Kaplan, review ofMarshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (Simon and Schuster, 1982), Harvard Magazine (March–April 1982), pp. 8–9.

[The American art establishment, late nineteenth century]: Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (Hill and Wang, 1982), esp. ch. 5, quoted at pp. 144–45; Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform (Basic Books, 1982), pp. 102–3.

309 [“And I dislike unrest”]: Sir Purdon Clarke, quoted in Herbert J. Seligmann, “291: A Vision Through Photography,” in Waldo Frank et al., America & Alfred Stieglitz (Aperture, 1975), p. 60.

[New currents in art, late nineteenth century]: Oliver W. Larkin, Art and Life in America (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), book 4; Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., Carol Troyen, and Trevor J. Fairbrother, A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting, 1760–1910 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1983), chs. 8–9; Trachtenberg, passim.

[Homer]: Gordon Hendricks, The Life and Work of Winslow Homer (Harry N. Abrams, 1979); Lloyd Goodrich, Winslow Homer (Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art-Macmillan, 1945).

[“Exactly as it appears”]: quoted in James T. Flexner, That Wilder Image (Little, Brown, 1962), pp. 345–46.

[Eakins]: Gordon Hendricks, The Life and Times of Thomas Eakins (Grossman, 1974); Sylvan Schendler, Eakins (Little, Brown, 1967).

[“Physiology from top to toe”]: quoted in Larkin, p. 277.

310 [“Drunks and slatterns”]: Outlook, quoted in ibid., p. 336.

[“Paint the ugly”]: ibid.

[The Eight]: Bernard B. Perlman, The Immortal Eight (Exposition Press, 1962); Ira Glauckens, William Glauckens and the Ashcan Group (Crown, 1957); Wertheim, pp. 131–36.

[Henri]: William Innes Homer, Robert Henri and His Circle (Cornell University Press, 1969); Perlman, pp. 39–64 and passim.

[Henri’s convictions about painting]: Crunden, p. 104.

[Stieglitz]: Dorothy Norman, Albert Stieglitz: An American Seer (Random House, 1960); Sue Davidson Lowe, Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983); Sara Greenough and Juan Hamilton, eds., Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings (Callaway Editions, 1983); Waldo Frank et al.

311 [“Not very elevating”]: W. B. McCormick, quoted in Norman, p. 72.

[Armory Show]: Larkin, ch. 28. I have drawn heavily from Larkin in describing the exhibits, especially the “American room,” quoted from Larkin at p. 363.

[Century review of Armory Show]: ibid., p. 364.

312 [Roosevelt on the Armory Show]: quoted in Crunden, p. 114.

[Loss of continuity between art and experience]: Larkin, p. 348.

[Mumford on Stieglitz assimilating the machine]: Mumford, “The Metropolitan Milieu,” in Waldo Frank et al., p. 32.

313 [Wright on the uglification of America]: quoted in Crunden, pp. 158–59.

[Wright on the machine and Democracy]: ibid., p. 157.

Writing: “Venerable Ideas Are Swept Away”

[Sloan and The Masses]: Wertheim, op. cit., pp. 37–44; Bruce St. John, ed., John Sloan’s New York Scene, from the Diaries, Notes and Correspondence, 1906–1913 (Harper & Row, 1965); Crunden, op. cit., pp. 111–12.

[Art Young]: Young, Art Young: His Life and Times, John N. Beffel, ed. (Sheridan House, 1939), esp. ch. 26.

[Eastman]: Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), ch. 1 and passim; William O’Neill, The Last Romantic (Oxford University Press, 1978), esp. ch. 2; Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Living (Harper & Bros., 1948), esp. parts 6 and 7; Wertheim, pp. 34–35.

[Eastman’s appointment]: Young, p. 275.

314 [“We live on scraps”]: quoted in Wertheim, p. 43.

[Secession at The Masses]: ibid., pp. 43–44, Young quoted at p. 43.

[The Seven Arts]: ibid., pp. 173–83, Oppenheim quoted at p. 174; James Oppenheim, “The Story of the Seven Arts,” The American Mercury, vol. 20, no. 78 (June 1930), pp. 156–64.

[Bourne]: Louis Filler, Randolph Bourne (American Council on Public Affairs, 1943); Max Lerner, “Randolph Bourne and Two Generations,” Twice a Year, vols. 5–6 (double number: Fall–Winter 1940 and Spring–Summer 1941), pp. 54–78.

[Oppenheim on Bourne]: “The Story of the Seven Arts,” p. 163.

[Mencken and The Smart Set]: Wertheim, ch. 12; C. L. Bode, Mencken (Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), esp. ch. 5. The six-volume “series” of Prejudices (Alfred A. Knopf, 1919–27) offers a selection, with some revisions, of Mencken’s contributions to The Smart Set.

315 [Mencken’s ambition for The Smart Set]: quoted in Wertheim, p. 197.

[“Poet’s Free Lunch”]: ibid., p. 196; Bode, p. 71.

[Mencken and the new poets]: Mencken, “The New Poetry Movement,” in Mencken, Prejudices: First Series (Alfred A. Knopf, 1919), pp. 83–96.

[Others]: Wertheim, pp. 102–8.

[Poetry]: Harriet Monroe, A Poet’s Life (Macmillan, 1938), esp. chs. 24–27; Dale Kramer, Chicago Renaissance: The Literary Life in the Midwest, 1900–1930 (Appleton-Century, 1966), ch. 15; “Bastien von Helmholtz” (Ezra Pound), “Review: Poetry: A Magazine of Verse,” The Egoist (reprinted by Kraus Reprint), vol. 1, no. 11 (June 1, 1914), p. 215.

[Monroe circular]: quoted in Monroe, p. 251.

[“Keenest young literary group”]: ibid., p. 259.

316 [Pound’s letter to Monroe]: August 18, 1912, in D. D. Paige, ed., The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941 (Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 9–10, quoted at p. 10.

[Principles of Imagism]: “F. S. Flint” (Ezra Pound), “Imagisme,” Poetry, vol. 1, no. 6 (March 1913), p. 199.

[“Image” defined]: Pound, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” ibid., p. 200.

[Dreiser and Mencken]: W. A. Swanberg, Dreiser (Scribner’s, 1965), pp. 124–27, Dreiser quoted at p. 126; Bode, pp. 103–5.

317 [Dreiser’s family]: Swanberg, ch. 1.

[Dreiser’s years before Carrie]: ibid., pp. 23–81.

[Dreiser as first important American writer from a non-Anglo-Saxon, lower-class background]: John Lydenberg, “Theodore Dreiser: Ishmael in the Jungle,” in Lydenberg, ed., Dreiser: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 24.

318 [Ford on Dreiser]: Ford, “Theodore Dreiser,” The American Mercury, vol. 40, no. 160 (April 1937). p. 495.

[Doubleday and Carrie]: Swanberg, pp. 85–90.

[Early reviews of Carrie]: ibid., pp. 91–92; Donald Pizer, ed., Critical Essays on Theodore Dreiser (G. K. Hall, 1981), pp. 157–68.

[“Mr. Dreiser can not punctuate”]: Harriet Merton Lyon, “Theodore Dreiser’s ‘Sister Carrie’” (1907), in Pizer, p. 163.

319 [Markels on Dreiser]: Markel, “Dreiser and the Plotting of Inarticulate Experience,” in Pizer, p. 186.

[“Bitter, brutal insistence”]: Dreiser, The ‘Genius’ (Horace Liveright, 1923), p. 231.

[“Old, mournful Carrie”]: Dreiser, Sister Carrie (“The Pennsylvania Edition”; University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), p. 487.

[“Rubber-stamp formulae”]: Mencken, “The Dreiser Bugaboo,” The Seven Arts (reprinted by AMS), vol. 2 (August 1917). p. 517.

[Young Edith Jones]: Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (D. Appleton-Century, 1934), chs. 1–4; R. W. B. Lewis, Edith Wharton (Harper & Row, 1975), chs. 2–3.

[Father’s library]: Backward Glance, pp. 64–72.

[First literary effort]: ibid., p. 73.

[Trilling on Wharton]: Diana Trilling, “The House of Mirth Revisited,” in Irving Howe, ed., Edith Wharton: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 105.

[Kazin on function of genteel women]: Kazin, On Native Grounds (Doublcday, 1956), p. 55.

321 [“What marriage was really like”]: quoted in Lewis, p. 53.

322 [Archer on emancipating his wife]: Wharton, The Age of Innocence (Modern Library, 1920), p. 196.

[Roosevelt on cleaning out the stable]: Age of Innocence, pp. 348–49.

[Best-sellers, 1901–1908]: Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History (Harper & Row, 1976), p. 858.

[Sales of Age of Innocence]: Lewis, p. 429.

[Dreiser on discovering America]: quoted in Kazin, p. 68.

323 [Generous illusions and mean truths]: Wharton, The House of Mirth (Berkley Books, 1981), p. 71.

“All That Is Solid Melts into Air”

[Paterson strike and pageant]: John Reed, “War in Paterson,” in William L. O’Neill, ed., Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911–1917 (Quadrangle, 1966), pp. 143–47; William D. Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book (International Publishers, 1929), pp. 261–64; Joyce L. Kornbluh, Rebel Voices: An I.W.W. Anthology (University of Michigan Press, 1964), ch. 7; Wertheim, op. cit., pp. 51–57.

[Bourne on pageant]: Randolph Bourne, “Pageantry and Social Art,” in Bourne, The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911–1918, Olaf Hansen, ed. (Urizen Books, 1977), p. 519.

324 [Flynn’s judgment of pageant]: Flynn, “The Truth about the Paterson Strike,” address given January 13, 1914, reprinted in Kornbluh, pp. 215–25, esp. pp. 221–22.

9. THE REFORMATION OF ECONOMIC POWER

325 [Roosevelt’s pre-presidential career]: Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979); David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (Simon and Schuster, 1981); Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard University Press, 1951–54), vol. 1.

326 [Roosevelt’s personality and views]: John Morton Blum, The Republican Roosevelt (Harvard University Press, 1967); Edward Wagenknecht, The Seven Worlds of Theodore Roosevelt (Longmans, Green, 1958); John M. Blum, “Theodore Roosevelt: The Years of Decision,” appendix 9, in Morison, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 1484–94; Morris; McCullough.

[Roosevelt’s killing of neighbor’s dog]: Morris, p. 98.

[Roosevelt on Irish fellow legislators]: Theodore Roosevelt, “Diary of Five Months in the New York Legislature,” in Morison, Letters, vol. 2, appendix 1, pp. 1469–73, quoted at p. 1470.

[“Wealthy criminal class”]: quoted in Wagenknecht, p. 217.

[Roosevelt and Social Darwinism]: William Henry Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), pp. 62, 92, 99, 140.

[Roosevelt on self-help and struggle]: quoted in Morris, pp. 348, 571.

[Roosevelt on the “best classes” and on sterilizing the criminal and the feebleminded]: quoted in Wagenknecht, p. 86.

327 [Roosevelt’s reading]: Blum in Morison, vol. 1, pp. 1488–91.

[Roosevelt on social critics]: quoted in ibid., p. 1491.

327 [Roosevelt’s qualified admiration of Tolstoy]: Harbaugh, p. 460.

[Roosevelt on Longfellow]: Roosevelt to Arlo Bates, September 29, 1897, in Morison, Letters, vol. 1, p. 695.

[Roosevelt on Chaucer]: Roosevelt to Cecil Arthur Spring Rice, May 3, 1892, in ibid., vol. 1, p. 277.

[Roosevelt in his biographies of Benton and Cromwell]: Morris, pp. 332–35, 705.

[Adams on Roosevelt]: Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Houghton Mifflin, 1974). p. 417.

[Roosevelt’s anger over query as to his presidential ambition]: Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (Harcourt, Brace, 1931), pp. 258–60, Roosevelt quoted at pp. 259, 260.

328 [“The Man with the Hoe”]: quoted in Mark Sullivan, Our Times (Scribner’s, 1926–35), vol. 2,p. 239.

The Personal Uses of Power

[“I was a sickly and timid boy”]: Roosevelt to Edward Sanford Martin, November 26, 1900, in Morison, Letters, op. cit., vol. 2, pp. 1442–45, quoted at pp. 1442, 1443.

329 [Roosevelt on history]: ibid., p. 1444.

[“Deep and damnable alliance”]: quoted in William Allen White, The Autobiography of William Allen White (Macmillan, 1946), pp. 297–98.

[White on Roosevelt]: ibid., p. 298.

[Franchise tax bill]: Morris, op. cit., p. 698.

330 [Program of “moderately positive action”]: Harbaugh, op.cit., pp. 155–57, quoted at p. 155.

[Mr. Dooley on Roosevelt’s antitrust policy]: quoted in Elmer Ellis, Mr. Dooley’s America: A Life of Finley Peter Dunne (Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), p. 170.

[Aldrich and Quay]: Nathaniel W. Stephenson, Nelson W. Aldrich (Scribner’s, 1930); James A. Kehl, Boss Rule in the Gilded Age: Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981).

[Hanna on Roosevelt as “madman” and as “cowboy”]: quoted in Henry F. Pringle, Theodore Roosevelt: A Biography (Harcourt, Brace, 1931), p. 223; and in H. H. Kohlsaat, From McKinley to Harding (Scribner’s, 1923), p. 101.

331 [Reed’s retirement]: Samuel W. McCall, The Life ofThomas Brackett Reed (Houghton Mifflin,1914), ch. 20.

[“Go slow”]: quoted in Harbaugh, p. 155.

[Robinson’s warning to Roosevelt about business confidence]: quoted in ibid., pp. 153–54.

[Roosevelt’s reply]: Roosevelt to Douglas Robinson, October 4, 1901, in Morison, Letters, vol. 3, pp. 159–60.

[Morgan]: Frederick Lewis Allen, The Great Pierpont Morgan (Harper & Bros., 1949); Herbert L. Satterlee, J. Pierpont Morgan (Macmillan, 1939).

332 [Early prosecutions under the Sherman Antitrust Act]: Hans B. Thorelli, The Federal Antitrust Policy (Johns Hopkins Press, 1955), esp. chs. 7 and 8.

[Roosevelt on corporate control as question of presidential and popular power]: Thorelli, pp. 423–24; Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography, as quoted in Harbaugh, p. 149.

[Morgan-Roosevelt relationship]: Roosevelt to William Thomas O’Neil, November 12, 1882, in Morison, Letters, vol. 1, p. 58, footnote 2; Roosevelt to Elihu Root, December 5, 1900, in ibid., vol. 2, p. 1450; Allen, ch. 11; Satterlee, passim.

[Morgan-Knox-Roosevelt dialogue and Roosevelt’s subsequent reflections]: quoted in Joseph B. Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time (Scribner’s, 1920), vol. 1, pp. 184–85.

333 [Coalstrike, 1902]: Robert J. Cornell, The Anthracite Coal Strike of 1902 (Catholic Universityof America Press, 1957); Robert H. Wiebe, “The Anthracite Strike of 1902: A Record of Confusion,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 48, no. 2 (September 1961), pp.229–51; Harbaugh, ch. 10.

[Baer on the rights of laboring men]: quoted in Harbaugh, p. 173.

[Roosevelt on behavior at White House conference]: quoted in Pringle, p. 272.

[Campaign of 1904 ]: William E. Harbaugh, “Election of 1904,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 3, pp. 1965–2046.

334 [Roosevelt and the admission of three new states]: George E. Mowry, The Era of TheodoreRoosevelt (Harper & Bros., 1958), p. 126.

334 [Harbaugh on campaign shenanigans]: Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, p. 217.

[Roosevelt on no third term]: quoted in ibid., p. 232.

[Blum on “central issue”]: Blum, The Republican Roosevelt, op. cit., p. 86.

[Roosevelt on transportation]: Congressional Record, 59th Congress, 1st Session (vol. 40, part 1), December 5, 1905, pp. 91–105, quoted at p. 93.

335 [Rail reform legislation]: Blum, Republican Roosevelt, ch. 6.

[Roosevelt to Lodge on Holmes]: reprinted in William M. Goldsmith, ed..The Growth of Presidential Power (Chelsea House, 1974), vol. 2, pp. 1160–62; see also John Garraty, “Holmes’ Appointment to the Supreme Court,” New England Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 3 (March 1949), pp. 291–303; Max Lerner. ed., The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes (Little, Brown, 1943), pp. xxxi–xxxvi, 217–31.

[Roosevelt on Holmes’s lack of “backbone”]: quoted in Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, p. 162.

Foreign Policy with the TR Brand

336 [Correspondence, Roosevelt-style]: Morison, Letters, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 651, 625, 599, respectively. See also Wagenknecht, op. cit., p. 9.

337 [Interview with Roosevelt]: Diary of Sir Mortimer Durand, quoted in Eugene P. Trani, The Treaty of Portsmouth: An Adventure in American Diplomacy (University of Kentucky Press, 1969), pp. 15–16.

[Panama Canal diplomacy]: Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, 9th ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1974), ch. 33; Lawrence O. Ealy, Yanqui Politics and the Isthmian Canal (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), chs. 4–6; Walter LaFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective (Oxford University Press, 1978), ch. 2; David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas (Simon and Schuster, 1977), chs. 10–14.

[Hay on “ignorance and spite”]: quoted in Bailey, p. 488.

338 [Volcanic inscription]: ibid., p. 489.

[Herrán’s fear of Roosevelt]: quoted in McCullough, p. 332.

339 [Roosevelt on Panamanian independence]: Roosevelt to Albert Shaw, October 10, 1903, in Morison, Letters, vol. 3, p. 628.

[Denunciations of U.S. role in Panama insurrection ]: quoted in McCullough, p. 381, and Ealy, p. 61. See also Bailey, p. 495.

340 [Republican platform on canal success]: quoted in Ealy, p. 65.

[Roosevelt on Colombian canal banditry]: quoted in G. Wallace Chessman, Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Power (Little, Brown, 1969), pp. 99–100.

[Roosevelt Corollary]: quoted in Bailey, p. 505. See also Cecil V. Crabb, Jr., The Doctrines of American Foreign Policy (Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 38–40.

[Roosevelt on the superiority of fighting men]: quoted in Wagenknecht, p. 248.

[Competition of races ]: see Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), pp. 6–7.

341 [Roosevelt’s preference for Japan]: letter of February 10, 1904, in Morison, Letters, vol. 4, p. 724.

[Roosevelt’s annoyance with the Russians]: ibid.; and Roosevelt to Cecil A. Spring Rice, December 27, 1904, ibid, vol. 4, p. 1085.

342 [Roosevelt on Japanese contempt for “white devils”]: ibid., pp. 1085–86.

[Portsmouth negotiations]: Trani, passim, and sources cited therein.

[Roosevelt’sfrustration with Portsmouth negotiators]: Roosevelt to Kermit Roosevelt, August 25, 1905, in Morison, Letters, vol. 4, pp. 1316–17.

342–43 [Morning Post on Roosevelt as diplomatist]: quoted in Trani, p. 61.

[Roosevelt’s fear of disorder]: Morison, Letters, vol. 5, p. xvi.

[Roosevelt’s mastery of “uncontrollable forces”]: Dallek, p. 51.

[Roosevelt on work]: Roosevelt to Frederic René Coudert, July 3, 1901, in Morison, Letters, vol. 5, p. xv.

[Roosevelt at the Canal]: McCullough, pp. 492–502.

[Roosevelt on “one of the great works of the world”]: quoted in Ealy, p. 66.

[California school segregation]: Bailey, pp. 521–23, Roosevelt quoted at p. 522.

344 [Tour of the “Great White Fleet”]: Robert A. Hart, The Great White Fleet (Little, Brown, 1965), fleet commander (Adm. Robley D. Evans) quoted at p. 45; see also Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, op. cit., pp. 300–301; Howard K. Beale, Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power (Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), pp. 328–32.

Reform: Leadership and Power

345 [The new breed of reformers]: Louis Filler, Crusaders for American Liberalism (Harcourt, Brace, 1939), esp. chs. 5–7.

[Mr. Dooley on reform magazines]: Finley Peter Dunne, “National Housecleaning,” in Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley: Now and Forever, Louis Filler, ed. (Academic Reprints, 1954), pp. 244–45.

[Roosevelt’s personal relationships with reformers]: Morison, Letters, op. cit., passim.

346 [White on Roosevelt as “reform in a derby”]: quoted in Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny (Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), p. 165.

[Rise of the “ten-cent magazine”]: Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Harvard University Press, 1957), vol. 4, chs. 1, 4.

[Profusion of magazines]: ibid., vol. 4, p. 11.

[Comment of Philosophical Review]: quoted in ibid., vol. 4, p. 10.

[“Magazines, magazines, magazines.’“]: National Magazine, November 1897, quoted in ibid., p. 11.

[Rise of McClure’s]: Harold S. Wilson, McClure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers (Princeton University Press, 1970); Mott, vol. 4, pp. 589–607.

[McClure’s philosophy]: quoted in Mott, vol. 4, p. 594.

[Goldman on McClure]: Goldman, p. 172.

347 [Steffens]: Steffens, Autobiography, op. cit.; Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens (Simon andSchuster, 1974).

[Tarbell and Standard Oil]: Filler, Crusaders, ch. 9.

347–48 [Filler on Tarbell’s Standard Oil series]: ibid., p. 104.

348 [Aldrich on food and drug regulation]: quoted in Sullivan, Our Times, op. cit., vol. 2, p. 532.

[Sinclair]: Upton Sinclair, The Autobiography of Upton Sinclair (Harcourt, Brace, 1962).

[Roosevelt to Sinclair on the perils of socialism]: March 15, 1906, in Morison, Letters, vol. 5, pp. 178–80, quoted at pp. 178, 180.

[Food and drug legislation]: Harbaugh, Power and Responsibility, op. cit., pp. 255–60.

349 [Roosevelt’s proposals of December 1906]: Annual Message of the President to the Congress,in Congressional Record, 59th Congress, 2nd Session (vol. 41, pt. 1), December 4, 1906, pp. 22–36, quoted at p. 26.

[Roosevelt trying to keep the left center together]: Mowry, op. cit., p. 211.

[Conservation]: William D. Lewis, The Life of Theodore Roosevelt (John C. Winston, 1919), ch. 19.

[Cannon on “scenery”]: quoted in Harbaugh, p. 321.

350 [Roosevelt’s refusal of 1904 Standard Oil contribution]: Harbaugh, pp. 228–29.

[Roosevelt and corporate heads]: see, e.g., Roosevelt to Charles Joseph Bonaparte, January 2, 1908, in Morison, Letters, vol. 6, pp. 883–90, and ibid., vol. 5, pp. 755, 797, 845, 856, 859.

[Panic of 1907 and the merger]: Harbaugh, pp. 311–16.

[Roosevelt’s assurance to Gary and Frick]: Roosevelt to Charles Joseph Bonaparte, November 4, 1907, in Morison, Letters, vol. 5, pp. 830–31.

351 [Roosevelt’s congratulations to “conservative and substantial businessmen”]: Roosevelt to George Bruce Cortelyou, October 25, 1907, in ibid., vol. 5, pp. 822–23.

[Annual Message, 1907]: in Congressional Record, 60th Congress, 1st Session (vol. 42, pt. 1), December 3, 1907, pp. 68–84.

[Roosevelt’s special message of January 1008]: Message of the President to the Congress, in Congressional Record, 60th Congress, 1st Session (vol. 42, pt. 2), January 31, 1908, pp. 1347–53, quoted at pp. 1349, 1353, 1350, 1351, respectively; Harbaugh, p. 343; see also Mowry, p. 220.

352 [Roosevelt’s denunciation of “muckrakers”]: quoted in Mowry, p. 206.

[Roosevelt’s confrontation with senators at the Gridiron Club]: ibid., p. 213.

352–53 [Roosevelt on not being able to restrain himself]: Roosevelt to John Burroughs, March 12, 1907, in Morison, Letters, vol. 5, p. 617.

353 [The “fakir” on Roosevelt as “naturalist”]: Rev. William J. Long, quoted in Harbaugh, p. 309.

[Brownsville ]: John D. Weaver, The Brownsville Raid (W. W. Norton, 1970); Ann J. Lane, The Brownsville Affair: National Crisis and Black Reaction (Kennikat Press, 1971)

[Roosevelt’s altitude toward blacks]: Roosevelt to Owen Wister, April 27, 1906, in Morison, Letters, vol. 5, pp. 221–30; Wagenknecht, op. cit., pp. 230–36; see also Seth M. Scheiner, “President Theodore Roosevelt and the Negro, 1901–1908,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 47, no. 3 (July 1962), pp. 169–82; Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Louisiana State University Press, 1980), ch. 5.

354 [Mr. Dooley on American people “batin’ a carpet”]: Dunne, “National Housecleaning,” in Dunne, pp. 246, 248.

10. THE CAULDRON OF LEADERSHIP

355 [Eve of March 4, 1909, at the White House]: William Manners, TR and Will (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), ch. 1; Philip Jessup, Elihu Root (Dodd, Mead, 1938), vol. 2, pp. 137–38.

[Roosevelt and Taft “at one”]: Roosevelt to George Otto Trevelyan, June 19, 1908, in Elting E. Morison, ed., The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard University Press, 1951–54), vol. 6, p. 1085.

355–56 [Roosevelt to Sullivan on Taft]: quoted in Mark Sullivan, Our Times (Scribner’s, 1926–35), vol. 4, pp. 331–32.

356 [Taft on “my storm”]: quoted in Paolo Coletta, The Presidency of William Howard Taft (University Press of Kansas, 1973), p. 47.

Taft, TR, and the Two Republican Parties

[Taft as party man]: Donald F. Anderson, William Howard Taft (Cornell University Press, 1973). pp. 99–104, 162–67.

[Taft and the two Republican parties]: James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Prentice-Hall, 1963), ch. 5; I have borrowed occasional sentences and paragraphs in this section from this earlier work; I have also used the sources cited therein (pp. 354–55)

357 [Party developments during progressive era ]: James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System, rev. ed. (Brookings Institution, 1983), ch. 8; Paul T. David, Party Strength in the United States, 1872–1970 (University Press of Virginia, 1972); David Burner, “The Democratic Party, 1910–1932,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of U.S. Political Parties (Chelsea House, 1973), vol. 3, pp. 1811–1936; William H. Harbaugh, “The Republican Party,1893–1932,” in ibid., pp. 2069–255.

[The struggle over Cannonism]: Blair Bolles, Tyrant from Illinois (W. W. Norton, 1951), chs. 13–15; Alfred Lief, Democracy’s Norris (Stackpole, 1939), ch. 4; Randall B. Ripley, Majority Party Leadership in Congress (Little, Brown, 1969), pp. 136–44.

[Roosevelt on Taft’s “bungling leadership”]: Coletta, op. cit., pp. 106–7; see in general, Morison, Letters, op. cit., vol. 7, passim.

358 [Taft’s stubbornness]: quoted in Henry Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (Farrar & Rinehart, 1939), vol. 2, p. 762.

[Taft’s indolence and corpulence]: Judith Icke Anderson, William Howard Taft (W. W. Norton, 1981), ch. 1.

[Mowry on TR’s “catlike touch”]: George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt (Harper & Row, 1958), p. 245.

[Taft’s “love letters” to Hale and Aldrich]: quoted in Pringle, vol. 1, p. 415.

[Taft-Depew exchange]: quoted in Judith Anderson, p. 28.

[Taft’s early legislative victories]: see Coletta, chs. 3, 6.

[Roosevelt’s return home, June 1910]: Joseph L. Gardner, Departing Glory (Scribner’s, 1973), ch. 9.

[Lodge on Pinchot]: Lodge to Roosevelt, January 15, 1910, in Selections from the Correspondence of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Cabot Lodge (Scribner’s, 1925), vol. 2, p. 358.

[Roosevelt to Root on unpleasant summer]: letter of October 21, 1910, in Morison, Letters, vol. 7, p. 148.

[Roosevelt’s indignation against Taft]: George E. Mowry, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement (University of Wisconsin Press, 1947), pp. 137–42; see also Morison, Letters, vol. 7, pp. 93–156.

359 [Roosevelt’s dismissal of Taft as good first lieutenant]: see, for example, Roosevelt to Henry Cabot Lodge, April 11, 1910, in Morison, Letters, vol. 7, p. 69.

[Grass-roots calls on Roosevelt to run for the presidency]: reels 96–97, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress (January 1911); reel 122, ibid. (January 1912).

[Roosevelt’s “noncandidacy” but possible availability in 1911]: Morison, Letters, vol. 7, passim; Roosevelt to Benjamin Barr Lindsey, December 5, 1911, in ibid., pp. 450, 451.

360 [Root on Roosevelt as a “thirsty sinner”]: Root to Roosevelt, February 12, 1912, in ibid.,vol. 7, p. 504, footnote 1.

[La Follette and his progressives]: David P. Thelen, Robert M. La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit (Little, Brown, 1976); Kenneth W. Hechler, Insurgency (Columbia University Press, 1940); Belle Case La Follette and Fola La Follette, Robert M. La Follette (Macmillan, 1953), vol. 1; Robert M. La Follette, La Follette’s Autobiography (Robert M. La Follette Co., 1913).

[Norris to Roosevelt on Roosevelt’s noncandidacy]: Norris to Roosevelt, January 5, 1912, reel 122, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress.

[La Follette’s Philadelphia speech ]: La Follette’s version of the text is in the appendix of his Autobiography, pp. 762–97.

362 [Taft’s forcing of the issue with Roosevelt, 1911]: Norman M. Wilensky, Conservatives in the Progressive Era, University of Florida Monographs, Social Sciences, no. 25 (Winter 1965), esp. ch. 2.

[Taft on Roosevelt as surrounded by sycophants]: Taft to Horace Taft, February 15, 1912, quoted in Donald Anderson, p. 182.

[Taft on judicial recall as causing anarchy]: quoted in Mowry, Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement, p. 216.

[1912 Republican primaries]: Gardner, pp. 228–35, primary results given at p. 235 (figures have been rounded off).

363 [Demagogue and fathead]: quoted in Mowry, Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement, p. 234.

[Roosevelt on Root as “representative of reaction”]: quoted in Sullivan, op. cit., vol. 4, p. 498.

[Mr. Dooley on the forthcoming Republican convention]: quoted in Mowry, Roosevelt and theProgressive Movement, pp. 243–44.

[1912 Republican convention]: Gardner, ch. 12; Burner in Schlesinger, vol. 3, pp. 2090–91.

[“We stand at Armageddon”]: quoted in Sullivan, vol. 4, p. 509.

Wilson and the Three Democratic Parties

[Wilson at New Jersey Democratic convention, 1910]: Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton University Press, 1947), pp. 166–68; John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest (Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 164–66.

364 [Wilson’s address to New Jersey convention]: quoted in Link, p. 167.

[ Wilson on influencing public opinion]: John Morton Blum, Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality (Little, Brown, 1956), p. 21.

[“All the renewal of a nation”]: quoted in Cooper, p. 128.

364–65 [Wilson on leadership]: Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton University Press, 1966–83), vol. 6, pp. 646–71 (“Leaders of Men” address dated June 17, 1890); vol. 12, p. 365 (“A Memorandum on Leadership,” May 5, 1902); T. H. Vail Motter, ed., Woodrow Wilson, Leaders of Men (Princeton University Press, 1952), esp. pp. 41–42.

365 [Wilson’s childhood and youth]: Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George, WoodrowWilson and Colonel House (John Day, 1956), chs. 1–2; Sigmund Freud and William C.Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson (Houghton Mifflin, 1967); Robert C. Tucker, “The Georges’ Wilson Reexamined: An Essay on Psychobiography,” American Political Science Review, vol. 71, no. 2 (June 1977), pp. 606–18.

[Georges on Wilson’s leadership]: George and George, p. 320.

[Wilson’s transformation of Princeton]: Cooper, p. 101; Henry W. Bragdon, Woodrow Wilson: The Academic Years (Harvard University Press, 1967), part 3.

366 [Governor Wilson]: Link, Road to the White House, chs. 7–9.

[Bryan’s shift to the left]: David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 7; Paul W. Glad, The Trumpet Soundeth: William Jennings Bryan and His Democracy, 1896–1912 (University of Nebraska Press, 1960), esp. ch. 5.

367 [Democratic party divisions]: Ralph M. Goldman, Search for Consensus: The Story of the Democratic Party (Temple University Press, 1979); Wilfred E. Binkley, American Political Parties:Their Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1947); Herbert Agar, The Price of Union (Houghton Mifflin, 1950), chs. 27–33; Sundquist, op. cit., chs. 6, 7.

[Cleveland on silver Democrats]: Cleveland to Charles S. Fairchild, April 2, 1897, Grover Cleveland Papers, New-York Historical Society.

[Response of Democratic party to industrialization]: Everett Carll Ladd, American Political Parties: Social Change and Political Response (W. W. Norton, 1970), ch. 4.

[Ladd on the Republicans]: ibid., p. 150.

[Populist “outcries”]: quoted in ibid., p. 152.

368 [Socialist party, early twentieth century]: Nathan Fine, Labor and Farmer Parties in the United States, 1828–1928 (Rand School of Social Science, 1928), esp. ch. 8; David A. Shannon,The Socialist Party of America (Macmillan, 1955), ch. 3; Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912 (Columbia University Press, 1952), chs. 6–11, 16.

[Debs and associates]: Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (University of Illinois Press, 1982), chs. 7, 8; Sally M. Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910–1920 (Greenwood Press, 1973), chs. 2–3.

[Socialist party membership and budget]: Kipnis, pp. 364–65.

[Socialist platform, 1912]: reprinted in Schlesinger, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 2486–90.

369 [Wilson’s troubles with his History]: Link, Road to the White House, pp. 381–87.

[Hearst on Wilson]: quoted in ibid., pp. 382–83.

[Democratic convention, 1912]: ibid., ch. 13.

[Bryan’s resolution and subsequent charge]: quoted in ibid., pp. 442–43.

Armageddon

371 [Roosevelt’s reception at Progressive party convention]: Mowry, Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement, op. cit., p. 264.

[“Authentic voice” of Progressive convention]: Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy, op. cit., p. 117.

[“They were crusaders; he was not”]: New York Times, August 7, 1912, p. 2.

372 [Roosevelt on having to “drag forward” Addams]: Roosevelt to Arthur H. Lee, November 5, 1912, in Morison, Letters, op. cit., vol. 7, p. 633.

[Campaign of 1912]: George E. Mowry, “Election of 1912,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 1971), pp. 2135–66; Gardner, op. cit., ch. 13; Link, Road to the White House, op. cit., ch. 14.

[Taft on his role as a conservative]: quoted in Mowry in Schlesinger, vol. 3, p. 2158.

[Taft’s attacks on “dangerous changes” and direct democracy]: “Acceptance Speech,” August 2, 1912, in ibid., pp. 2204–19, quoted at pp. 2204, 2208.

[Debs on making the working class the ruling class]: quoted in Salvatore, op. cit., p. 263.

[The “Ohio yell”]: ibid., p. 264.

373 [Woodrow Wilson on liberty “never coming from the government”]: John Wells Davidson, ed., A Crossroads of Freedom (Wilson’s 1912 campaign speeches) (Yale University Press, 1956), p. 130.

[Roosevelt’s response]: ibid., pp. 123, 130; Mowry in Schlesinger, vol. 3, p. 2160.

[Journal cartoon]: reprinted in Davidson, p. 123.

[Wilson’s shift to acceptance of government]: ibid, p. 264.

[Democratic party platform plank on democracy]: Schlesinger, vol. 3, pp. 2169, 2177.

374 [Progressive party planks on democracy]: ibid., pp. 2186–87.

[Wilson on the referendum]: Davidson, p. 487.

[Observer on the secrets of Wilson’s “verbal power”]: William Bayard Hale, quoted in George and George, op. cit., p. 108.

[Georges on Wilson’s mastery of oratorical techniques]: ibid.

[Democratic party plank on antitrust policy]: Schlesinger, vol. 3, p. 2168.

[Progressive party plank on antitrust policy]: ibid., p. 2190.

375 [Roosevelt quoting Morgan on not unscrambling an omelet]: quoted in Cooper, op. cit.,p. 196.

[Deletion of antitrust plank]: Mowry, pp. 269–71.

[Brandeis establishing connection with Wilson]: Philippa Strum, Brandeis (Harvard University Press, 1984), read in manuscript; Melvin I. Urofsky, “Wilson, Brandeis, and the Trust Issue, 1912–1914,” Mid-America, vol. 49, no. 1 (January 1967), pp. 3–28.

375 [Brandeis’s evaluation of Wilson after first meeting]: Brandeis to Alfred Brandeis, August 29, 1912, in Melvin I. Urofsky and David W. Levy, eds., Letters of Louis D. Brandeis (State University of New York Press, 1971–78), vol. 2, p. 661.

[Roosevelt’s ambivalence on race]: Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Louisiana State University Press, 1980), esp. chs. 1, 5.

376 [Maude Malone’s confrontation with Wilson]: quoted in Davidson, p. 472.

[The wounding of Roosevelt]: Frank K. Kelly, The Fight for the White House (Thomas Y. Crowell, 1961), ch. 11, assailant quoted at p. 244, Roosevelt at pp. 245, 246, 247.

377 [The candidates’ climactic speeches]: quoted in Cooper, p. 202, and Link, Wilson Papers, op.cit., vol. 25, pp. 493–501, at 497.

[Election results]: Cooper, pp. 204–5; Schlesinger, vol. 3, p. 2242 (state-by-state touts); Sundquist, op. cit., p. 165.

[Roosevelt’s postelection comment]: Roosevelt to Arthur Hamilton Lee, November 5, 1912, in Morison, Letters, vol. 7, p. 633; Roosevelt to James R. Garfield, November 8, 1912, in ibid., p. 637.

11. THE NEW FREEDOM

381 [Gary steel-making]: Stewart H. Holbrook, Iron Brew: A Century of American Ore and Steel (Macmillan, 1939), pp. 298–304.

[Coal mining in Appalachia]: Carter Goodrich, The Miner’s Freedom: A Study of the Working Life in a Changing Industry (Marshall Jones, 1925), pp. 19–27, quoted at p. 22.

[Amoskeag]: Tamara K. Hareven and Randolph Langenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory City (Pantheon, 1978), pp. 34–38, 41–49 (interview with Mary Cunion, weaver), 196–200 (interview with Yvonne Dionne).

382 [Mechanization in tire manufacture]: Alfred Lief, The Firestone Story (McGraw-Hill, 1951), pp. 65–66.

[American socialism during the progressive era]: Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912 (Columbia University Press, 1952).

383 [Taft’s trust-busting and tax backing]: Donald F. Anderson, William Howard Taft: A Conservative Conception of the Presidency (Cornell University Press, 1968), pp. 78–82, 108–10, 230.

[Wilson on leadership]: quoted in Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., Progressivism in America (NewViewpoints, 1974), p. 224; see also Woodrow Wilson, “The Study of Administration,”Political Science Quarterly, vol. 2 (June 1887), pp. 197–222.

[Wilson on need of concert of purpose]: “Remarks in Trenton to the New Jersey Electors,” January 13, 1913, in Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton University Press, 1966–83), vol. 27, pp. 40–44, quoted at p. 41.

The Engine of Democracy

[Woodrow Wilson’s inaugural]: Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The New Freedom (Princeton UniversityPress, 1956), pp. 57–60; John Morton Blum, Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality (Little, Brown, 1956), p. 65.

384 [Wilson’s Inaugural Address]: “An Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1913, in Link, Papers, op. cit., vol. 27, pp. 148–52.

385 [Wilson’s Administration in early years as textbook model of presidential leadership]: Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (Harper & Bros., 1954), ch. 2; John J. Broesamle, “The Democrats,” in Lewis L. Gould, ed., The Progressive Era (Syracuse University Press, 1974), pp. 101–3; John Milton Cooper, Jr., The Warrior and the Priest (Harvard University Press, 1983), ch. 15.

[Wilson on President as “prime minister”]: Wilson to Alexander Mitchell Palmer, February 5, 1913, in Link, Papers, vol. 27, pp. 99–100.

[Wilson’s denunciations of tariff lobbyists]: quoted in Link, The New Freedom, p. 187.

[Wilson on “acid test”for cabinet ministers]: quoted in ibid., p. 11.

386 [La Follette on rejection of Brandeis]: La Follette to Josephine La Follette Siebecker, March16, 1913, in Belle Case La Follette and Fola La Follette, Robert M. La Follette (Macmillan,1953), vol. 1, p. 462.

386 [Broesamle on Wilson’s personal control of his party]: Broesamle in Gould, quoted al pp.102–3.

[Tariff reform]: Link, The New Freedom, ch. 6.

[Wilson on stimulating business to be more efficient]: “An Address on Tariff Reform to a Joint Session of Congress,” April 8, 1913, in Link, Papers, vol. 27, pp. 269–72, quoted at p. 271.

[Houston on downward revision]: David F. Houston to W. H. Page, September 12, 1913, quoted in Link, The New Freedom, p. 194.

387 [Banking and currency reform]: ibid., ch. 7.

[Wilson on the variety of judgments on banking]: quoted in Cooper, p. 233.

[Ekirch on money trust viewed as a spider web]: Ekirch, op. cit., p. 226.

[Wilson’s message to Congress on currency legislation]: “An Address on Banking and Currency Reform to a Joint Session of Congress,” June 23, 1913, in Link, Papers, vol. 27, pp. 570–73, quoted at pp. 572–73.

388 [Lindbergh and La Follette on Federal Reserve Act]: quoted in Link, The New Freedom, p. 239; see also La Follette and La Follette, vol. 1, pp. 486–87.

[Link on Federal Reserve Act]: Link, The New Freedom, p. 238.

[Burleson’s advice to Wilson on patronage]: quoted in ibid., pp. 158–59 (from an interview of Burleson by R. S. Baker, March 17–19, 1927).

[O’Gorman’s thwarting of Wilson]: ibid., pp. 165–67.

[Wilson to Burleson on “old standpatters”]: quoted in Cooper, p. 231.

389 [Wilson’s short-run and long-run strategies]: Cooper, pp. 231–32; Broesamle in Gould, pp.104–5; James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp.131–33; Blum, passim.

The Anatomy of Protest

[Tendencies toward economic concentration]: John M. Blair, Economic Concentration: Structure, Behavior and Public Policy (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), esp. ch. 11; G. Warren Nutter and Henry Adler Einhorn, Enterprise Monopoly in the United States: 1899–1958 (Columbia University Press, 1969), esp. chs. 2, 3; Ralph L. Nelson, Merger Movements in American Industry, 1895–1956 (Princeton University Press, 1959); Edward S. Herman, Corporate Control, Corporate Power (Cambridge University Press, 1981).

[“A burst of merger activity”]: Nelson, p. 34.

[Antitrust legislation]: Link, The New Freedom, op. cit., ch. 13.

390 [Hofstadter on the closed system]: Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955), p. 227.

[Wilson on the “powers that have governed us”]: quoted in Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton University Press, 1947), p. 514.

[Rockefeller on petroleum prices]: testimony before the Committee on Manufactures, House Report, no. 3112, 50th Congress, 1st Session (1888), p. 389.

[Big business’s arguments in favor of consolidation]: Edward C. Kirkland, Industry Comes of Age (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), pp. 310–14.

391 [Brandeis’s economic views]: Philippa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Harvard University Press, 1984), passim.

[Strum on Brandeis and Wilson]: ibid., p. 221.

392 [Brandeis’s opposition to economic concentration]: Melvin I. Urofsky, “Wilson, Brandeis and the Trust Issue, 1912–1914,” Mid-America, vol. 49, no. 1 (January 1967), p. 22.

[Brandeis on industrial democracy]: Louis D. Brandeis, testimony before the Commission on Industrial Relations, New York, N.Y., January 23, 1915, Senate Doc. 415, 64th Congress, 1st Session, pp. 7657–81, quoted at pp. 7662, 7659, 7660, 7665, respectively.

[Croly]: Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 1961), ch. 1 and passim; Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (Macmillan, 1910).

392–93 [Croly’s views on Hamilton and Jefferson]: Croly, ch. 2.

393 [Croly on Roosevelt’s moral urgings]: ibid., p. 174.

[Weyl]: Forcey, ch. 2; Walter E. Weyl, The New Democracy (Macmillan, 1912).

[Weyl on America’s problems]: Weyl, pp. 1–2.

393–94 [Weyl on being pragmatic and working for progress through prosperity]: ibid., chs. 12–13, pp. 268–70, quoted at p. 191.

394 [Lippmann]:Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Little, Brown, 1980); Benjamin F. Wright, Five Public Philosophies of Walter Lippmann (University of Texas Press, 1973). Marquis Childs and James Reston.eds., Walter Lippmann and His Times (Harcourt,Brace, 1959); Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (Mitchell Kennerly, 1913); Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery (Mitchell Kennerly, 1914).

[Croly to Hand on Lippmann]: quoted in Steel, p. 60.

395 [Steel on Preface to Politics]: ibid., p. 47.

[“Tabooing our impulses”]: Preface to Politics, p. 49.

[“Chaos of a new freedom”]: see Drift and Mastery, introduction.

[Failures of liberal and progressive economic thought]: R. Jeffrey Lustig, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890–1920 (University of California Press, 1982).

396 [The socialist movement and parties during the Wilson era]: James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (Monthly Review Press, 1967), esp. ch. 2; Kipnis, op. cit.; Aileen S. Kraditor, The Radical Persuasion, 1890–1917 (Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Leon Fink, review of Kraditor, The Radical Persuasion, in The Nation, vol. 236, no.4 (June 18, 1983), pp. 770–73.

[De Leon]: Don K. McKee, “Daniel De Leon: A Reappraisal,” Labor History, vol. 1, no. 3 (Fall 1960), pp. 264–97; Kipnis, pp. 12–19.

[“Unconditional surrender of the capitalist system”]: quoted in Kipnis, p. 16.

396–97 [Socialist Party makeup and evolution]: Milton Cantor, The Divided Left (Hill and Wang, 1978), pp. 23–24, quoted at p. 24; see also David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America (Macmillan, 1955), esp. chs. 1–3; Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (University of Illinois Press, 1982); Morris Hillquit, History of Socialism in the United States, 5th ed. (Russell & Russell, 1965), chs. 4–5; Sally M. Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of Constructive Socialism, 1910–1920 (Greenwood, 1973), esp. ch. 1.

397 [Debs on running for president to raise social consciousness]: quoted in Weinstein, p. 11.

[Kraditor on individualism at core of IWW]: Kraditor, p. 284.

[Haywood on the “scum proletariat”]: quoted in Weinstein, p. 15, footnote.

398 [De Leon on the Debsites]: quoted in Kraditor, p. 290.

[Women, blacks, and socialism]: ibid., ch. 6; Kipnis, pp. 260–65.

[Woodward’s “Progressivism—For Whites Only”]: see C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Louisiana State University Press, 1951), ch. 14.

[Lenin on trade-union consciousness]: V. I. Lenin, “What Is to Be Done?,” first published in Stuttgart, 1902, reprinted in Lenin, Collected Works (Foreign Language Publishing House, 1960–70), vol. 5, pp. 347–529, quoted at p. 375.

Sources on the organizational and especially the intellectual problems of socialism are extremely diverse and scattered; see the model bibliography, Donald Drew Egbert and Stow Persons, eds., T. D. Seymour Bassett, bibliographer, Socialism and American Life, vol. 2 (Bibliography: Descriptive and Critical) (Princeton University Press, 1952).

Markets, Morality, and the “Star of Empire”

[Wilson on “irony of fate”]: quoted in Arthur S. Link, Wilson the Diplomatist (Johns Hopkins Press, 1957), p. 5.

400 [“We are chosen”]: quoted in Arthur S. Link, “Woodrow Wilson: Hinge of the 20th Century,” in Woodrow Wilson: A Commemorative Celebration (The Wilson Center, 1982), p. 21.

[“An engine of liberty”]: Sidney Bell, Righteous Conquest: Woodrow Wilson and the Evolution of the New Diplomacy (Kennikat Press, 1972), p. 22.

[Wilson on industries bursting their jackets]: quoted in Jerry Israel, Progressivism and the Open Door: America and China, 1905–1921 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971), p. 104.

[Wilson on war against money power]: ibid.,p. 107.

[“Star of Empire”]: quoted in Bell, p. 22.

[China policy of Taft and Wilson]: Roy W. Curry, Woodrow Wilson and Far Eastern Policy: 1913–1921 (Bookman Associates, 1957); Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs (Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), ch. 3; Roberta A. Dayer, Bankers and Diplomats in China, 1917–1925: The Anglo-American Relationship (Frank Cass, 1981), ch. 1; Israel, passim; Walter V. Scholes and Marie V. Scholes, The Foreign Policies of the Taft Administration (University of Missouri Press, 1970); Harold M. Vinacke, “Woodrow Wilson’s Far Eastern Policy,” in Edward H. Buehrig, ed., Wilson’s Foreign Policy in Perspective (Indiana University Press, 1957). pp. 61–104.

400 [Hay’s Open Door notes]: Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, 9th ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp 480–83, quoted at p. 482.

400–01 [Decline of U.S. trade with China]: Scholes and Scholes, p. 112; Paul A. Varg, “The Myth of the China Market, 1890–1914,” American Historical Review, vol. 73, no. 3 (February 1968), pp. 742–758, esp. p. 755.

401 [Taft on “force and pluck”]: quoted in Scholes and Scholes, p. 21.

[Taft on U.S. capital in China]: quoted in Paolo E. Coletta, The Presidency of William Howard Taft (University of Kansas Press, 1973), p. 194.

[Wilson on Chinese movement toward liberty]: quoted in Curry, p. 16.

402 [Wilson on awakening of China]: ibid., p. 23.

[Need for “evangelical Christian” in Peking]: ibid., p. 38.

[Wilson to Eliot on reordering U.S. diplomacy]: letter of September 17, 1913, quoted in ibid., p. 35.

[Wilson’s withdrawal of American support for consortium]: ibid., pp. 21–24.

[George on consortium rejection]: quoted in Israel, p. 109.

[Outlook on reform in China]: September 1, 1915, quoted in ibid, p. 118.

[“Leaving the Firm”]: Curry, p. 25.

[Bankers sick of Chinese investments]: Charles Addis, quoted in Scholes and Scholes, p. 239.

402–03 [Trade and investment in Latin America]: Bell, pp. 46–47; Coletta, p. 175.

403 [Latin American policy]: Bell, chs. 3–5; Samuel Flagg Bemis, “Woodrow Wilson and Latin America,” in Buehrig, pp. 105–40; Sidney Lens, The Forging of the American Empire (ThomasY. Crowell, 1971), chs. 11–13; Scholes and Scholes, part 1; see also Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (W. W. Norton, 1983), ch. 1.

[Taft on “substituting dollars for bullets”]: quoted in Coletta, p. 185.

[Wilson and Mexico]: Mark T. Gilderhus, Diplomacy and Revolution: U.S.-Mexican Relations under Wilson and Carranza (University of Arizona Press, 1977); P. Edward Haley, Revolution and Intervention: The Diplomacy of Taft and Wilson with Mexico, 1910–1917 (MIT Press, 1970); Linda B. Hall, Alvaro Obregon: Power and Revolution in Mexico, 1911–1920 (Texas A&M University Press, 1981); Robert E. Quirk, An Affair of Honor: Woodrow Wilson and the Occupation of Veracruz (University of Kentucky Press, 1962); Douglas W. Richmond, Venustiano Carranza’s Nationalist Struggle, 1893–1920 (University of Nebraska Press, 1983), chs. 3–4.

404 [ Wilson on “a government of butchers”]: quoted in Gilderhus, p. 5.

[“Morality and not expediency”]: quoted in Bailey, p. 556.

[Policy of “watchful waiting”]: quoted in Josephus Daniels, The Life of Woodrow Wilson, 1856–1924 (Will H. Johnston, 1924), p. 179.

[Wilson’s Latin American declaration]: quoted in Bemis, p. 120.

[Opposition to Wilson’s Mexican policy]: Bailey, p. 557.

[Wilson’s call for Huerta’s surrender]: quoted in Daniels, p. 179.

[Wilson on the “vested interests”]: quoted in Bailey, p. 557.

[Wilson on self-restraint]: quoted in Haley, p. 100.

[Huerta’s “saturnalia”]: John Lind, quoted in ibid., p. 129.

405 [“Outraged the sovereignty of unwilling nations”]: Lens, p. 196; see also Scott Nearing and Joseph Freeman, Dollar Diplomacy (B. W. Huebsch and the Viking Press, 1926).

[Wilson on teaching democracy to South America]: Wilson to Sir William Tyrrell, November 13, 1913, quoted in Bailey, p. 555.

[Wilson and Villa]: Clarence C. Clendenen, The United States and Pancho Villa (Cornell University Press, 1961); Martin Luis Guzman, The Eagle and the Serpent, Harriet de Onis, tr. (Doubleday, 1965); Martin Blumenson, ed., The Patton Papers, 1885–1940 (Houghton Mifflin, 1972), vol. 1, part 5.

12. OVER THERE

407 [August 1914 ]: William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp (Little, Brown, 1964), pp. 280–89; George M. Thomson, The Twelve Days: 24 July to 4 August 1914 (Hutchinson, 1964); Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (Macmillan, 1962).

407 [“Iron dice” of war]: quoted in Tuchman, p. 74.

408 [Russian war minister on modern weapons]: General Vladimir Sukhomlinov, quoted in ibid., p. 61.

409 [Lenin in Zurich]: Nadezhda K. Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin (International Publishers, 1932), vol. 2, pp. 175–97; Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks (Collier Books, 1965), pp. 305–313.

[Lenin on World War I]: Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (International Publishers, 1939), p. 9.

[Industrial concentration in America]: ibid., pp. 16–17.

410 [Corporate domination abroad]: ibid., pp. 70–73.

[Lenin on monopoly]: ibid., p. 20.

[Lenin on railroads]: ibid., p. 10.

Wilson and the Road to War

[Congressman on the outbreak of war]: R. N. Page, quoted in Arthur S. Link, Wilson: The Struggle for Neutrality, 1914–1915 (Princeton University Press, 1960), p. 7.

[House’s warning from Europe]: letter of May 29, 1914, quoted in ibid., p. 2; see also Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882–1928 (Putnam’s, 1971), p. 367.

411 [“Architectural infant asylum”]: quoted in Constance M. Green, Washington: Capital City, 1879–1950 (Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 140; see also Frank G. Carpenter, Carp’s Washington (McGraw-Hill, 1960), p. 125.

[FDR on apathy toward war]: FDR to Eleanor Roosevelt, August 2, 1914, quoted in Davis, p. 369.

[FDR on Bryan]: ibid., p. 385.

[Wilson on keeping out of Europe’s quarrels]: quoted in Link, p. 3.

[Bryan’s peace efforts]: Paolo E. Coletta, William Jennings Bryan (University of Nebraska Press, 1964–69), vol. 2, pp. 249–52.

[Neutrality proclamation]: quoted in Tuchman, op. cit., p. 337.

[Wilson’s condemnation of the war]: Wilson to C. R. Crane, August 4, 1914, quoted in Link, p. 50.

411 [“Only America at peace!”]: New York Times, January 9, 1915, quoted in ibid., p. 55.

[Tuchman on American neutrality]: The Guns of August, p. 337.

[Devlin on Wilson and the war]: Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality (Oxford University Press, 1975), p. vii.

[Wilson to Tarbell on historian’s view of the war]: quoted in Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace (Harlan Davidson, 1979), p. 2.

[Wilson’s early mediation attempts]: Link, Struggle for Neutrality, ch. 7.

413 [Wilson’s despair of a negotiated peace]: Wilson to House, August 24, 1914, quoted in ibid., p. 50.

[Bryan and World War I]: Paolo E. Coletta, “A Question of Alternatives: Wilson, Bryan, Lansing, and America’s Intervention in World War I,” Nebraska History, vol. 63, no. 1 (1982), pp. 33–57; see also Coletta, Bryan, vol. 2, chs. 9–12; Louis W. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan (Putnam’s, 1971), ch. 26.

413–14 [Coletta on Bryan’s principles]: Coletta, “A Question of Alternatives,” p. 33.

414 [Bryan’s “Real Neutrality”]: Coletta, Bryan, vol. 2, p. 313.

415 [Lansing on the Falaba incident]: quoted in ibid., p. 303.

[“Strict accountability”]: quoted in Link, Struggle for Neutrality, p. 323.

[Wilson on Bryan’s Lusitania proposals]: Wilson to Bryan, May 14, 1915, in Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, The Lansing Papers, 1914–1920 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939), vol. 1, p. 406.

415–16 [Bernstorff promise]: Link, Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 582–87.

416 [House on the Lusitania]: quoted in ibid., p. 375.

[Chicago Standard]: May 13, 1915, quoted in ibid.

[“Too proud to fight”]: quoted in ibid., p. 382.

[Roosevelt on Wilson’s diplomacy]: Joseph Gardner, Departing Glory: Theodore Roosevelt as ex-President (Scribner’s, 1973), p. 339; Roosevelt to A. H. Lee, June 17, 1915, in Elting E. Morison.ed.,The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard University Press, 1951–54), vol. 8, p. 937; Link, Struggle for Neutrality, p. 383.

416 [Wartime propaganda]: see Link, Struggle for Neutrality, pp. 35–43, and sources cited therein.

417 [Bryan and the Gore-McLemore bills]: see Devlin, pp. 438, 445–46, Bryan quoted at p. 446.

[The war in 1916]: Harvey A. DeWeerd, President Wilson Fights His War (Macmillan, 1968), ch. 6.

418 [Wilson’s nomination of Brandeis]: Alpheus T. Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life (Viking Press, 1946), chs. 30–31; Philippa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Harvard University Press, 1984), ch. 15.

[Alice Brandeis on the expected fireworks]: letter to Alfred Brandeis, January 31, 1916, quoted in Mason, p. 466.

419 [Brandeis’s early involvement in his own defense]: Brandeis to Norman Hapgood, February1, 1916, in Melvin I. Urofsky, ed., Letters of Louis D. Brandeis (State University of NewYork Press, 1971–78), vol. 4, pp. 27–29 and passim.

[Lippmann’s and Frankfurter’s involvement]: Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 101–2.

[Wilson’s further endorsement of Brandeis]: Wilson to Senator Charles Allen Culberson, May 5, 1916, in Arthur S. Link, ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson (Princeton University Press, 1966–83), vol. 36, pp. 609–11.

[Wilson’s shift toward progressivism on domestic policy]: Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era (Harper & Bros., 1954), pp. 224–30; Wilson to Newton D. Baker, September 16, 1916, in Link, Wilson Papers, vol. 38, p. 178; vol. 38, passim; vol. 37, pp. 427–28.

[Republican and Progressive conventions]: Arthur S. Link and William M. Leary, Jr., “Election of 1916,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 1971). vol. 3, pp. 2248–52; George E. Mowry, Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement (Hill and Wang, 1960), ch. 14.

[Roosevelt’s views of the nomination]: Morison, Letters, vol. 8, pp. 1058–74 (esp. Roosevelt’s messages to Progressive party “conferees” and leadership, June 10–22, 1916).

420 [Democraticparly convention]: Link and Leary in Schlesinger, vol. 3, pp. 2252–55.

[Glynn’s keynote address]: Arthur S. Link, Wilson: Campaigns for Progressivism and Peace, 1916–1917 (Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 43–45, quoted at p. 44.

[Wilson’s campaign]: Link and Leary in Schlesinger, pp. 2258–68; Link, Wilson Papers, vol. 38, pp. 165–633. On 1916 campaign in general, see S. D. Lovell, The Presidential Election of 1916 (Southern Illinois University Press, 1980).

[Passing a strongly progressive platform]: Schlesinger, vol. 3, pp. 2271–81.

421 [Hughes’s campaign ]: Betty Glad, Charles Evans Hughes and the Illusions of Innocence (University of Illinois Press, 1966), ch. 5; Dexter Perkins, Charles Evans Hughes and American Democratic Statesmanship (Little, Brown, 1956), ch. 3.

[Election results, 1916]: Schlesinger, vol. 3, p. 2345.

[Wilson on Page]: quoted in Devlin, p. 317.

[Lansing’s attitude]: see Daniel M. Smith, Robert Lansing and American Neutrality, 1914–1917 (DaCapo Press, 1972).

422 [American loans and trade during the war]: Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History, rev. ed. (Harper & Bros., 1961), p. 303.

[Bryan on Eastern financiers and the war]: William J. Bryan to Charles W. Bryan, March 26, 1917, quoted in Coletta, “A Question of Alternatives,” p. 51.

[Norris on Wall Street gold]: John M. Cooper, Jr., “The Command of Gold Reversed: American Loans to Britain, 1915–1917,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 45 (1976), pp. 209–30, quoted at p. 209.

[Revisionists on economic origins of U.S. intervention]: Charles A. Beard, The Devil Theory of War (Vanguard Press, 1936); Walter Millis, Road to War: America, 1914–1917 (Houghton Mifflin, 1935).

[Cooper on “command of gold”]: Cooper, p. 230.

[Colonel House and the war]: Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George, Woodrow’Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (Dover, 1964), chs. 9–10; Devlin, chs. 9, 12–14.

422 [Wilson’s confidence in House]: quoted in Edwin A. Weinsiein, Woodrow Wilson: A Medical and Psychological Biography (Princelon University Press, 1981), p. 269.

422–23 [Wilson on intervention as the worst thing]: ibid., p. 288.

423 [Wilson’s qualification of House-Grey Memorandum]: Arthur S. Link, Wilson: Confusion and Crises, 1915–1916 (Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 138 and footnote 103.

[Wilson’s protest to Britain]: quoted in Link, Progressivism and Peace, p. 196.

[Lansing’s sabotage]: ibid., pp. 221–24, quoted at p. 222.

424 [“Peace without victory”speech]: ibid., pp. 265–68.

[Resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare]: ibid., p. 290.

[“The world had suddenly reversed itself’]: House Diary, February 1, 1917, quoted in ibid., p. 294.

425 [Contrast between British and German neutrality violations]: Coletta, “A Question of Alternatives,” p. 37.

[Response to Zimmermann telegram]: Link, Progressivism and Peace, p. 357.

[Wilson’s statement of war aims]: quoted in ibid., p. 425.

[“Little group of willful men”]: ibid., p. 367.

425–26 [Devlin on Wilson’s motives]: Devlin, p. 678.

Mobilizing the Workshop

426 [Fears of Churchill and Lloyd George in 1917]: William Manchester, The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill (Little, Brown, 1983), p. 616.

[Allied offensives of 1917]: DeWeerd, op. cit., pp. 179–92.

427 [Pétain on waiting for the Americans]: quoted in ibid., p. 184.

[Washington at war]: Green, op. cit., pp. 236–40; Helen Nicolay, Our Capital on the Potomac (Century, 1924), quoted at pp. 512–13.

[Mobilization of the Ordnance Department]: DeWeerd, pp. 220–23; Crozier is quoted on slowness at p. 221.

[Overman bill]: Congressional Record, 65th Congress, 2nd Session (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1918), vol. 56, part 4, p. 3815 (March 21, 1918).

[Republican charges of absolutism]: New York Times, February 18, 1918, quoted in George and George, op. cit., p. 180.

[Wartime agencies]: Daniel R. Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, 1917–1919 (University of Nebraska Press, 1966); Benedict Crowell and Robert F. Wilson, The Giant Hand (Yale University Press, 1921); DeWeerd, ch. 10; Francis W. O’Brien, ed., The Hoover-Wilson Wartime Correspondence (Iowa State University Press, 1974); Jordan A. Schwarz, The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in Washington, 1917–1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 1981), ch. 2; Mark Sullivan, Our Times (Scribner’s, 1926–35), vol. 5, chs. 15–21; T. Harry Williams, The History of American Wars (Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), pp. 382–98.

428 [Reed warns of draft riots]: quoted in Sullivan, vol. 5, p. 296.

[Hoover’s publicity campaign]: DeWeerd, pp. 243–44.

[Convoys as turning point of war]: ibid., p. 170.

428–29 [“Restraint of trade for reasons of national security”]: Schwarz, pp. 51–52.

429 [Manufacturer’s vow to “go out of business “]: quoted in Crowell and Wilson, p. 46.

[American railroads in World War I]:Keith L. Bryant, Jr., History of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway (Macmillan, 1974), ch. 9; George H. Burgess and Miles C. Kennedy,Centennial History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company (reprint; Arno Press, 1976), pp.560–72; Richard C. Overton, Burlington Route (Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), ch. 16. See also Oliver Jensen, Railroads in America (American Heritage, 1981), pp. 284 and 289 for price and profit figures.

[Federal direction of railroads]: Aaron A. Godfrey, Government Operation of the Railroads, 1918–1920 (San Felipe Press, 1974); Walker D. Hines (Director-General of Railroads, 1919–20), War History of American Railroads (Yale University Press, 1928); I. Leo Sharfman, The American Railroad Problem (Century, 1921); John F. Stover, American Railroads (University of Chicago Press, 1961), ch. 7.

[Federal wage recommendations]: Report of the Lane Commission, quoted in Godfrey, p. 110.

430 [Production of explosives]: Benedict Crowell and Robert F. Wilson, The Armies of Industry (Yale University Press, 1921), ch. 8. See also Stover, pp. 160–61, for a map of the principal rail lines.

430 [Women and war work]: Crowell and Wilson, Armies of Industry, pp. 168–70; Maurine W. Greenwald, Women, War, and Work (Greenwood Press, 1980), passim; Selig Perlman and Philip Taft, History of Labor in the United States, 1896–1932; Labor Movements (Macmillan, 1935), section 3.

431 [Black labor and migration]: Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker (Atheneum, 1969), esp. part 4; Emmett J. Scott, Negro.Migration During the War (reprint; Arno Press, 1969), passim.

[Living conditions of blacks in the North]: The Survey, February 17, 1917, quoted in Scott, p. 140.

[American military experiences in 1917]:DeWeerd, pp. 184–85, 193; Robert Leckie, The Wars of America (Harper & Row, 1968), vol. 2, pp. 111–17; Laurence Stallings, The Doughboys (Harper & Row, 1963), ch. 2.

432 [Soldier on unprepared American troops]: Private Leo Bailey, quoted in Stallings, p. 25.

“Nous Voilà, Lafayette!”

[Lenin’s call for peace]: quoted in Leckie, op. cit., p. 108.

[German 1918 offensive]: DeWeerd, op. cit., part 4; Basil H. Liddell Hart, History of the First World War (Cassell, 1970), ch. 8; Leckie, pp. 120–27; Manchester, Last Lion, op. cit., pp. 628–42; Stallings, op. cit., chs. 3–7.

433 [“Retreat, hell”]: quoted in Robert B. Asprey, At Belleau Wood (Putnam’s, 1965), pp.127–28.

[Pershing’s infantry tactics]: see DeWeerd, pp. 215–16, and sources cited therein.

[West Point discipline for AEF: quoted in ibid., p. 213.

434 [“Pas finie”]: Manchester, Last Lion, p. 641.

[“Nous voilà”]: quoted in Stallings, p. 15.

[Debt to Lafayette]: ibid., p. 16.

[The Inquiry]: Ray Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters (Doubleday, Doran, 1927–39), vol. 7, pp. 254, 275, 352; Arthur Walworth, America’s Moment: 1918 (W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 76–78. See also Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry (Yale University Press, 1963), passim.

[ Wilson on selfish war aims]: telegram of December 1, 1917, quoted in Baker, vol. 7, p. 387.

435 [“Fourteen Points” address]: “An Address to a Joint Session of Congress,” January 8,1918, in Link, Wilson Papers, op. cit., vol. 45, pp. 534–39, quoted at pp. 535, 538; see alsoWalworth, pp. 275–83 (Appendix A).

[The “liberal”peace program]: Link, Revolution, War, and Peace, op. cit., ch. 4.

[German reply to Wilson]: New York Times, January 11, 12, 1918, quoted in Baker, vol. 7, p. 456, footnote 2.

[Treaty of Brest-Litovsk]: see Leckie, p. 120.

[Wilson on arbitrary power]: quoted in Sullivan, op. cit., vol. 5, p. 449.

[Baltimore address]: April 6, 1918, Baker, vol. 8, p. 76.

[“Force to the utmost”]: ibid.

[American tanks at St. Mihiel]: Martin Blumenson, ed., The Patton Papers, 1885–1940 (Houghton Mifflin, 1972), ch. 29, Patton quoted at p. 594.

[Aircraft in World War I]:Liddell Hart, pp. 457–64; Stallings, ch. 14; Williams, op. cit., pp. 389–92.

435–37 [The last months of the war]: DeWeerd, chs. 17–18; Baker, vol. 8, chs. 4–5.

438 [Armistice celebration in New York]: Sullivan, vol. 5, pp. 521–27, newspaper (Brooklyn Eagle, November 12, 1918) quoted at p. 527.

Over Here: Liberty and Democracy

[Tocqueville on aristocracies and democracies facing war]: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Philip Bradley, ed. (Vintage Books, 1954), vol. 1, pp. 235–38.

[Senator on sending an army to France]: Thomas S. Martin, quoted in Ernest R. May, War, Boom and Bust (Time, Inc., 1964), p. 10.

438 [The momentum of war]: ibid., pp. 10–14.

[Creel’s propaganda organization]: George Creel, How We Advertised America (Harper & Bros., 1920); Harold D. Lasswell, Propaganda Techniques in the World War (Alfred A. Knopf, 1927); James R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words That Won the War (reprint; Russell & Russell, 1968).

[Chauvinism, war hysteria, war opposition]: William Preston, Jr., Aliens and Dissenters (Harvard University Press, 1963), quoted at pp. 85, 87; see also Sullivan, op. cit., vol. 5, pp. 467–77; H. C. Peterson and Gilbert C. Fite, Opponents of War, 1917–1918 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1957); Joan M.Jensen, The Price of Vigilance (Rand McNally, 1968).

440 [Western governors’ petition for interning of Wobblies]: quoted in Preston, p. 124.

[Minister on the Lutheran Church in Germany]: quoted in Sullivan, vol. 5, p. 467.

440–41 [Debs’s arrest and trial]: Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs (University of Illinois Press, 1982), pp. 294–96, Debs quoted at p. 295, Judge D. C. Westenhaver quoted at p. 296; Peterson and Fite, ch. 22; see also James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (Monthly Review Press, 1967), ch. 3.

[Wilson on wartime intolerance]: Conversation with Frank I. Cobb, in John L. Heaton, Cobb of “The World” (E. P. Dutton, 1924), quoted in Link, Progressivism and Peace, op. cit., p. 399. For a discussion of the date of this conversation, see Link, p. 399, footnote 33.

[Prohibition ]: Joseph L. Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement (University of Illinois Press, 1963); Peter H. Odegard, Pressure Politics (Columbia University Press, 1928); James H. Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, 1900–1920 (Harvard University Press, 1963); Richard Hofstadter,The Age of Reform (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955). pp. 287–91.

442 [Suffragist leaders as “physical wrecks”]: Carrie Chapman Catt to “My dear precious friend,” October 8, 1912, Woman’s Rights Collection, The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College.

[Stanton on “wrangles”]: Stanton to Ida Harper, September 30, 1902, Harper Manuscripts, Box 4, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

[Shaw on serving out her “sentence”]: Shaw to “Dear Friend,” June 10, 1914, Woman’s Rights Collection, Schlesinger Library.

[Gilman on human work as woman’s work]: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (Small, Maynard, 1898; reprinted by Harper & Row, 1968), p. 53.

443 [Progress on woman’s suffrage by 1913]: Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle (Harvard University Press, 1975), ch. 19.

[Suffragists and the other dispossessed]: Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (Columbia University Press, 1965), chs. 6, 7.

[Isabella Beecher Hooker’s report on her meeting with senators]: I.B.H. to Susan B. Anthony, January 21, 1871, pp. 1, 10, Stone-Day Foundation, Hartford.

[Stanton on immigrants and the “ignorant native vote”]: quoted in Kraditor, pp. 129, 133.

[“Indians in blankets and moccasins”]: Anna Howard Shaw, quoted in ibid., p. 219.

444 [Triangle fire]: Flexner, pp. 251–52.

[Congressional Union]: ibid., pp. 274–79; Mari Jo Buhle and Paul Buhle, eds..The Concise History of Woman Suffrage (University of Illinois Press, 1978), pp. 417–29.

[Suffragists and Theodore Roosevelt]: correspondence of Ida Husted Harper and Theodore Roosevelt, September 16–December 30, 1918, Huntington Library.

445 [Thompson to Wilson, in opposition to woman’s suffrage]: Link, Wilson Papers, op. cit., vol. 37, pp. 502–4 (July 30, 1916).

[Flexner on Wilson’s shift toward federal amendment]: Flexner, p. 288.

446 [Militants at White House gates, January 1917]: ibid., pp. 292–93.

[Helen Gardener’s personal influence]: correspondence of Helen Hamilton Gardener, esp. folders 71–73, Woman’s Rights Collection, Schlesinger Library; Maud Wood Park, “Supplementary Notes about Helen Gardener” (n.d.), Schlesinger Library. See also Harriet B. Laidlaw Papers, esp. corr. 1917 folder, Schlesinger Library; Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association Papers, esp. boxes 1 and 2, which contain extensive correspondence between Minnesota suffrage leaders and national and other state leaders. See also Adelaide Washburn, “Helen Hamilton Gardener,” in Edward T. James, ed., Notable American Women, 1607–1950 (Belknap Press, 1971), vol. 2, pp. 11–13.

446 [Wilson’s address to the Senate on woman’s suffrage]: quoted in Flexner, p. 322.

447 [Woman’s suffrage movement and third parties]: see, for example, Susan B. Anthony to Mrs. Colby, July 6, 1894, Huntington Library.

13. THE FIGHT FOR THE LEAGUE

448 [Voyage of the George Washington]: Rear Admiral Cary Grayson, Woodrow Wilson: An Intimate Memoir (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), ch. 8; James T. Shotwell, At the Paris Peace Conference (Macmillan, 1937), pp. 67–84; Arthur Walworth, America’s Moment: 1918 (W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 129–36.

[Wilson on his reasons for attending the conference]: Grayson, pp. 59–61. quoted at pp. 60, 59 respectively.

[Wilson’s discussion with the Inquiry]: Shotwell, pp. 75–78, quoted at pp. 76, 77, and 78 respectively.

449 [Shotwell’s observations on Wilson]: ibid., pp. 70–71, 73.

449–50 [Poster in Brest]: ibid., pp. 83–84.

The Mirrored Halls of Versailles

450 [Europe, winter 1918–19]: Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking 1918–1919 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1967); Charles L. Mee, Jr., The End of Order: Versailles 1919 (E. P.Dutton, 1980); Francis W. O’Brien, ed., Two Peacemakers in Paris: The Hoover-Wilson Post-Armistice Letters, 1918–1920 (Texas A&M University Press, 1978); Walworth, op. cit.

[Lansing on Clemenceau]: quoted in Mee, p. 17.

450–51 [Wilson-Clemenceau meetings]: Walworth, pp. 144–46; see also Charles Seymour, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House (Houghton Mifflin, 1928), vol. 4, pp. 251–54.

451 [Wilson in Britain and Italy]: Mee, pp. 29–38.

[“Until the pips squeak”]: quoted in ibid., p. 34.

[Lloyd George’s doubts about a punitive peace]: see Shotwell, op. cit., p. 22.

[Baron Sonnino]: Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 1919 (Houghton Mifflin, 1933), p. 169.

[“Riot in a parrot house”]: ibid., pp. 152–53.

452 [Wilson and the League resolution]: quoted in Seymour, pp. 290–91.

[House on Wilson’s negotiating skill]: entry of February 7, 1919, in ibid., p. 312.

[Wilson on the covenant]: quoted in Jonathan Daniels, The Time Between the Wars (Doubleday, 1966), p. 17.

[Steel on Wilson’s presentation]: Paris Daily Mail, February 15, 1919, quoted in Seymour, pp. 318–19.

453 [Experts as negotiators]: Shotwell, pp. 153–98.

[“Whirlpool of political intrigue”]: Eleanor Lansing Dulles, Chances of a Lifetime (Prentice-Hall, 1980), p. 66.

[Historian on American intervention in Russia]: John W. Long, “American Intervention in Russia: The North Russian Expedition, 1918–19,” Diplomatic History, vol. 6, no. 1 (1982), pp. 45–67, quoted at p. 47; see also George F. Kennan, The Decision to Intervene (Princeton University Press, 1958), quoted at p. 471.

[Russia and Bullitt]: Beatrice Farnsworth, William C. Bullitt and the Soviet Union (Indiana University Press, 1967), ch. 2; Mayer, ch. 14; Walworth, ch. 12.

[Wilson’s return to America]: Denna F. Fleming, The United States and the League of Nations, 1918–1920 (Putnam’s, 1932), ch. 5; Alexander L. George and Juliette L. George, Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (Dover Publications, 1964), pp. 232–39

454 [“International quilting society”]: New York Sun, January 27, 1919, quoted in Fleming, p.118.

[League as “impudently un-American”]: Harvey’s Weekly, February 22, 1919, quoted in ibid, p. 117.

[Wilson’s “fighting blood”]: ibid., p. 126.

[“Tea with the Mad Hatter”]: ibid., p. 134. For Wilson’s invitation to the meeting, see Joseph Tumulty to Lodge, February 15, 1919, Henry Cabot Lodge Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, 1919 Boxes (hereafter cited as Lodge Papers).

[Rogers on conference with Wilson]: Rogers to Henry White, March 3, 1919, quoted in Allan Nevins, Henry White, Thirty Years of American Diplomacy (Harper & Bros., 1930), pp. 392–93.

454 [Lodge comment]: Lodge to Henry White, April 8, 1919. Henry White Papers, Box 53, in the Lodge Papers.

[Lodge and the League]: see Henry Cabot Lodge, The Senate and the League of Nations (Scribner’s, 1925); John A. Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 1953). esp. pp. 349–56.

455 [Lodge on consideration, time, and thought]: quoted in Garraty, p. 352.

[Senate Round Robin], ibid., p. 354.

[Sun on demise of the League]: March 4, 1919, quoted in Fleming, p. 159.

[Wilson and Republican League supporters]: see Ruhl J. Bartlett, The League to Enforce Peace (University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

[Taft on the League]: quoted in Fleming, p. 160.

[Wilson on ties between the Covenant and the treaty]: quoted in George and George, p. 239.

[Baker’s fears about Wilson’s statement]: Ray Stannard Baker, American Chronicle (Scribner’s, 1945), p. 392.

456 [Wilson’s illness]: Edwin A. Weinstein, Woodrow Wilson: A Medical and Psychological Biography (Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 336–43.

[Break between Wilson and House]: ibid., pp. 334–35, 347–48; see also George and George, ch. 13.

[House on distance from Wilson]: quoted in George and George, p. 266.

[Lenin’s peace offer]: Farnsworth, pp. 40–54.

[Nicolson’s response to Bullitt]: ibid., p. 54.

[Unilateral American withdrawal from Russia]: Long, pp. 65–67.

[Wilson’s compromises]: Fleming, pp. 179–87; Mee, part 4.

[Lodge’s reaction]: Lodge to Henry White, April 30, 1919, Henry White Papers, Box 53, Lodge Papers.

The Battle for the Treaty

457 [Wilson’s address to the Senate]: Fleming, op. cit., pp. 235–37; Arthur S. Link, WoodrowWilson: Revolution, War, and Peace (Harlan Davidson, 1979), p. 107.

[Efforts of the League to Enforce Peace]: Bartlett, op. cit., ch. 5; Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (Farrar & Rinehart, 1939), vol. 2, ch. 49.

[Newspapers on the Monroe Doctrine and the League]: James D. Startt, “Early Press Reaction to Wilson’s League Proposal,” Journalism Quarterly, vol. 39 (Summer 1962), pp. 301–8, quoted at pp. 302, 304; John A. Aman, “Views of Three Iowa Newspapers on the League of Nations; 1919–1920,” Iowa Journal of History and Politics, vol. 39 (July 1941), pp. 227–85, quoted at p. 256.

[New York and Baltimore papers on the League]: quoted in Startt, pp. 303, 304.

458 [Register on “an armed America”]: quoted in Aman, p. 251.

[Literary Digest poll]: Fleming, pp. 218–20; Startt, pp. 307–8.

[Public campaign against the League]: Fleming, pp. 208–11.

[Sun on the “Washington Doctrine”]: quoted in Aman, p. 229.

[Lodge on the only votes being in the Senate]: quoted in Garraty, op. cit., p. 370.

459 [Agreement between Borah and Lodge]: ibid, pp. 362–63; see also Ralph Stone, The Irreconcilables: The Fight Against the League of Nations (University of Kentucky Press, 1970), pp.90–93; see also Lodge to Frank B. Kellogg, May 28, 1919; Kellogg to Lodge, May 31,1919, Lodge Papers, Box 51.

[Lodge’s partisan motives for opposing Wilson]: William C. Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy (University of California Press, 1980), ch. 8; see also Garraty, ch. 20; George and George, op. cit., pp. 269–70.

[Lodgeon Wilson]: Lodge to Theodore Roosevelt (n.d., but evidently 1916 or early 1917); Lodge to Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, August 18, 1919; Lodge to Andrew A. West, August 22, 1919, all in Lodge Papers, Boxes 86, 49, 51, respectively.

460 [Hate-mongering against the League]: see Thomas A. Bailey, The Man in the Street: The Impact of American Public Opinion on Foreign Policy (Macmillan, 1948), pp. 110, 210.

461 [Wilson’s legislative strategy]: Kurt Wimer, “Woodrow Wilson Tries Conciliation: An Effort That Failed,” The Historian, vol. 25, no. 4 (August 1963), pp. 419–38.

461 [Wilson’s flexibility]: ibid., p. 419; see in general Woodrow Wilson Papers, Reels 157–58 (1919), Library of Congress.

[Wilson perplexed by opposition to the treaty]: Wilson to Thomas Lamont, August 1,8, 1919. quoted in Wimer, p. 425.

462 [Pittman motion]: ibid., pp. 432–33.

463 [Wilson’s tour of the country]: Grayson, op. cit., ch. 14; Gene Smith, When the CheeringStopped: The Last Years of Woodrow Wilson (William Morrow, 1964), ch. 5.

[“I have long chafed at confinement”]: quoted in Smith, p. 62.

[Soldiers never having to cross the seas again]: ibid.

[“America was not founded to make money “]: ibid., p. 64.

464 [Opposition of clergyman and socialist (Victor Berger) to the treaty]: ibid., p. 66.

[Attacks by Johnson and Reed]: ibid., pp. 69–70.

[Bullitt’s testimony against the League]: Farnsworth, op. cit., pp. 58–63, quoted at p. 62; see also Lodge to Henry White, October 2, 1919, Henry White Papers, Lodge Papers.

[Wilson on public being misled]: quoted in Link, p. 114.

464–65 [Defense of Article 10]: ibid., p. 115.

[Wilson’s prophecy]: ibid., p. 118.

[Failure of the tour]: see James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 140.

[Wilson’s illness]: Weinstein, op. cit., ch. 21; Smith, chs. 6–7.

[Lodge reservation to Article 10]: quoted in Link, p. 123.

465–66 [Wilson on Lodge’s reservation]: quoted in Grayson, pp. 102–3.

466 [Final vote on the League]: see tables in W. Stull Holt, “Playing Politics with the League,”in Ralph A. Stone, ed., Wilson and the League of Nations (Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1967), pp. 27–35.

[Doctor on stroke as decisive factor in League defeat]: Weinstein, pp. 362–63.

467 [Wilson’s psychological makeup]: see Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study (Houghton Mifflin, 1967); George and George; Jerrold M. Post, “Woodrow Wilson Re-examined: The Mind-Body Controversy Redux andOther Disputations,” Political Psychology, vol. 4, no. 2 (June 1983), pp. 289–306, plus following comments by Weinstein, the Georges, and Michael Marmor; Robert C.Tucker, “The Georges’ Wilson Reexamined: An Essay on Psychobiography,” American Political Science Review, vol. 71, no. 2 (June 1977), pp. 606–18.

[Wilson’s neglect of party politics]: see Burns, Deadlock of Democracy, pp. 142–47.

[Wilson’s desire for glory]: Tucker, p. 617.

[Graduate school controversy]: George and George, esp. ch. 2.

1920: The Great and Solemn Rejection

468 [Wilson’s call for a referendum]: Richard L. Merritt, “Woodrow Wilson and the ‘Great and Solemn Referendum,’ 1920,” Review of Politics, vol. 27, no. 1 (January 1965), pp. 78–104, quoted at p. 97.

[Wilson’s views on relationship of leaders to citizens in a democracy]: Woodrow Wilson, “Cabinet Government in the United States,” International Review (August 1879), pp. 146–63; Wilson, Congressional Government (Houghton Mifflin, 1885); Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (Columbia University Press, 1908); A.J. Wann, “The Development of Woodrow Wilson’s Theory of the Presidency: Continuity and Change,” in Earl Latham, ed..The Philosophy and Policies of Woodrow Wilson (University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 46–66.

[Wilson on “representative government”]: “Cabinet Government in the United States,” p. 147.

[“Disintegrate ministry”]: Congressional Government, p. 102.

469 [Lansing on absurdity of referendum call]: quoted in Merrill, pp. 99–100.

[America in 1920]: Robert K. Murray, The Harding Era (University of Minnesota Press, 1969), ch. 3.

[Stedman on Europe in chaos]: Seymour Stedman, “Nine Steps to a New Age,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 3, p. 2434.

[Wilson’s warning to Palmer]: quoted in Smith, op. cit., p. 155.

469 [Wilson in 1920]: ibid., chs. 9–10.

470 [Republican party leadership, 1920]: Wesley M. Bagby, The Road to Normalcy (Johns Hopkins Press, 1962), ch. 1.

[The four-party system in 1920]: Burns, Deadlock of Democracy, op. cit., chs. 6–7.

471 [Editor and Senator Harding]: Murray, pp. 5–18; Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove (McGraw-Hill, 1968).

[Harding on his own inadequacies as leader]: Russell, pp. 313–15, Harding quoted at p. 313.

472 [The “smoke-filled room”]: ibid., ch. 15; Murray, ch. 1; Bagby, ch. 3; William Allen White, Masks in a Pageant (Macmillan, 1928), ch. 36.

[“Footless conversation”]: Sen. James Wadsworth, quoted in Russell, p. 380.

[Russell on convention leaders and dark horses]: ibid., p. 381.

[Dougherty’s prediction]: quoted in ibid., pp. 341–42.

473 [Harding campaign]: ibid., pp. 397–416; Bagby, ch. 5.

[Democratic convention]: Donald R. McCoy, “Election of 1920,” in Schlesinger, vol. 3, pp. 2361–66; Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal (Little, Brown, 1954), ch. 4.

474 [Cox-Wilson exchange]: quoted in Freidel, p. 74.

[Cox campaign]: Bagby, ch. 5; James M. Cox, Journey Through My Years (Simon and Schuster, 1946), chs. 21–24.

[Presidential election results, 1920]: Schlesinger, vol. 3, p. 2456.

475 [Wilson viewing the film]: Baker, American Chronicle, op. cit., pp. 481–82.

14. THE AGE OF MELLON

479 [Ford works]: Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge, 1915–1933 (Scribner’s, 1957), ch. 11, John Van Deventer quoted on efficiency of work units at p. 288.

480 [Thought and motion in mass production]: Henry Ford, My Life and Work (Garden City Publishing, 1922), p. 80. On Ford’s views see also, Henry Ford, My Philosophy of Industry (Coward-McCann, 1929); Ralph H. Graves, The Triumph of an Idea (Doubleday, Doran, 1934).

[Edison to Ford on slowing down]: quoted in William C. Richards, The Last Billionaire (Scribner’s, 1948), p. 378.

[The Ford legend]: Nevins and Hill, pp. 607–13.

481 [Five dollars a day]: Keith Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford (Rinehart, 1948), ch. 4.

[Creating Rouge]: Nevins and Hill, ch. 8.

[Sites of branch plants]: ibid., p. 256.

[Ford’s Sociological Department]: Stephen Meyer, “Adapting the Immigrant to the Line: Americanization in the Ford Factory, 1914–1921,”Journal of Social History, vol. 14, no. 1 (Fall 1980), pp. 67–82, quoted at pp. 70, 71; Allan Nevins, Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company (Scribner’s, 1954), pp. 551–63, Edgar Guest verse quoted at p. 552; Stephen Meyer, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (State University of New York Press, 1981), esp. ch. 6.

482 [Ford official on observance of “American” holidays]: quoted in Meyer, “Adapting the Immigrant,” p. 74.

[Ford as transforming leader]: William Greenleaf, “Henry Ford,” in John A. Garraty, ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography (Harper & Row, 1974), p. 369.

483 [Ford in politics]: Nevins and Hill, pp. 114–22.

[Ford’s anti-Semitism]: Leo P. Ribuffo, “Henry Ford and The International Jew,” American Jewish History, vol. 69, no. 3 (March 1980), pp. 437–77; Upton Sinclair, The Flivver King (Upton Sinclair, 1937), pp. 118–28.

[Tribune suit]: Nevins and Hill, pp. 129–42.

[Ford’s personality]: Ann Jardim, The First Henry Ford (MIT Press, 1970); Samuel S. Marquis, Henry Ford: An Interpretation (Little, Brown, 1923).

[Ford and decentralization]: John Robert Mullin, “Henry Ford and Field and Factory,” Journal of the American Planning Association, vol. 48 (Autumn 1982), pp. 419–31; Nevins and Hill, pp. 227–30.

483 [Ford’s associates]: Charles E. Sorensen, My Forty Years with Ford (W. W. Norton, 1956); Nevins and Hill, pp. 11–17, 167–70, 269–78.

[Fitzgerald on Ford]: quoted in Greenleaf, p. 370.

“The Business of America …”

484 [The 1920s in retrospect]: Henry F. May, “Shifting Perspectives on the 1920’s,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 43, no. 3 (December 1956), pp. 405–27; Burl Noggle, “The Twenties: A New Historiographical Frontier,”Journal of American History, vol. 53, no. 2 (September 1966), pp. 299–314. For general accounts, see William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–32 (University of Chicago Press, 1958); David A. Shannon, Between the Wars, 1919–1941 (Houghton Mifflin, 1965); George Soule, Prosperity Decade (Rinehart, 1947); Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order (St. Martin’s Press, 1979).

485 [Coolidge’s pledge to adhere to Harding policies]: Robert K. Murray, The Politics of Normalcy (W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 131.

[Murray on Coolidge able to be the President Harding wanted to be]: ibid, p. 143.

[Harding Administration]: Robert K. Murray, The Harding Era (University of Minnesota Press, 1969); Leuchtenburg, ch. 5; Soule; Eugene P. Trani and David L. Wilson, The Presidency of Warren G. Harding (Regents Press of Kansas, 1977). [Mellon]: Andrew W. Mellon, Taxation: The People’s Business (Macmillan, 1924); Allan Nevins, “Andrew William Mellon,” in Robert L. Schuyler, ed., Dictionary of American Biography,vol. 22, supplement 2 (Scribner’s, 1958), pp. 446–52; Harvey O’Connor, Mellon’s Millions (John Day, 1933).

486 [Harding on America as a business country]: quoted in James Warren Prothro, Dollar Decade (Louisiana State University Press, 1954), p. 223.

487 [Coolidge on factories as temples]: ibid., p. 224.

[Hoover on banishing poverty]: ibid, p. 225.

[Madison on majority rule]: Gaillard Hunt, ed., The Writings of James Madison (Putnam’s, 1900–10), vol. 2, p. 366; Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Federalist (Wesleyan University Press, 1961), p. 351 (Federalist No. 51).

488 [Post-World War 1 Supreme Court]: Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History (Little, Brown, 1924), vol. 3; Alpheus Thomas Mason, The Supreme Court from Taft toWarren (W. W. Norton, 1964), ch. 2; William F. Swindler, Court and Constitution in the 20thCentury: The Old Legality (Bobbs-Merrill, 1969).

[Chief Justice White “holding” the chief justiceship for Taft]: quoted in Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft (Farrar & Rinehart, 1939), vol. 2, p. 955.

[Adair case]: Adair v. U.S., 208 U.S. 161 (1908), quoted at 178.

488–89 [State yellow-dog contract case]: Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1 (1915).

489 [Child labor case]: Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918), quoted at 281; Holmes dissent reprinted in Max Lerner, ed., The Mind and Faith of Justice Holmes (Little, Brown,1943), pp. 168–71, quoted at p. 171.

[Second child labor case]: Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company, 259 U.S. 20 (1922).

[Adkins case]: Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923), quoted at 558.

[Lerner on Sutherland’s treatment of labor as a commodity]: Lerner, p. 173.

490 [Taft “massing the court”]: Mason, pp. 57–58.

[Taft’s Sunday afternoon “caucus”]: Pringle, vol. 2, pp. 1043–44.

[Rail and coal strikes of 1922]: Murray, Politics of Normalcy, pp. 80–81.

[Farmers and the Harding Administration]: ibid., pp. 50–52, 61–64.

[Harding and black rights]: Murray, The Harding Era, pp. 397–403, Birmingham address quoted at p. 399; Richard Sherman, “The Harding Administration and the Negro: An Opportunity Lost,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 49, no. 3 (July 1964), pp. 151–68.

491 [Tax reductions]: Murray, Politics of Normalcy, pp. 53–55, 57–58, Harding quoted on complexities of “this tax problem” at pp. 54–55.

[Harding scandals]: Burl Noggle, Teapot Dome: Oil and Politics in the 1920s (Louisiana State University Press, 1962). Leonard Bates, Origins of the Teapot Dome (University of Illinois Press, 1963).

492 [Coolidge’s luck as to day he heard of Harding’s death]: William Allen White, A Puritan in Babylon (Macmillan, 1938), p. 243.

Bankers and Battleships

[Republican foreign policy in the 1920s]: L. Ethan Ellis, Republican Foreign Policy, 1921–1933 (Rutgers University Press, 1968); Betty Glad, Charles Evans Hughes and the Illusions of Innocence (University of Illinois Press, 1966), part 3; Murray, The Harding Era, op. cit., ch. 11; Joan Hoff Wilson, American Business & Foreign Policy, 1920–1933 (University Press of Kentucky, 1971).

[Ellis on zigzag foreign policy]: Republican Foreign Policy, p. 34.

[Confusion as to American intentions]: Benjamin D. Rhodes, “British Diplomacy and the Silent Oracle of Vermont, 1923–1929,” Vermont History, vol. 50, no. 2 (1982), pp. 69–79.

[Editors on the mystery of Republican foreign policy]: Thomas A. Bailey, The Man in the Street: The Impact of American Public Opinion on Foreign Policy (Macmillan, 1948), p. 238.

[Harding’s Cabinet]: see James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy (Prentice-Hall. 1963), p. 149.

493 [Borah Resolution as “Model ‘T’”]: John C. Vinson, The Parchment Peace (University of Georgia Press, 1955), p. 52.

[Business attitude towards arms control]: Wilson, ch. 2. See also Vinson, p. 46, for cost figures on military spending.

[Catt on taking action]: Gaddis Smith, “The First Freeze,” New York Times Magazine, April 24, 1983, pp. 110–11, 114, quoted at p. 111.

[Lodge on probable failure of naval talks]: quoted in John A. Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge (Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), p. 404.

[Washington Naval Conference]: Thomas H. Buckley, The United States and the Washington Conference, 1921–1922 (University of Tennessee Press, 1970); Glad, chs. 17–18; Smith; Vinson. (The conference met in Continental Hall, not Constitution Hall—see Buckley, p. 69.)

494 [Hughes’s speech and reaction to it]:Buckley, ch. 5.

[Black Chamber breaks Japanese codes]: James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace (Houghton Mifflin, 1982), pp. 9–10.

[Hughes on linking political and arms negotiations]: quoted in Glad, p. 280.

495 [Immigration Act of 1924 ]: Ellis, pp. 14–19.

[Arms talks in Geneva and London]: ibid., ch. 5.

[The Senate and the World Court]: Thomas A. Bailey, A Diplomatic History of the American People, 9th ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 629–31.

495–96 [Kellogg-Briand Pact]: L. Ethan Ellis, Frank B. Kellogg and American Foreign Relations, 1925–1929 (Rutgers University Press, 1961), ch. 7.

496 [Kellogg-Briand as an “international kiss”]: James Reed, quoted in Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1980), p. 254.

[Republican economic policy abroad]: Melvyn P. Leffler, “Herbert Hoover, the ‘New Era,’and American Foreign Policy,” in Ellis W. Hawley, ed., Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce: Studies in New Era Thought and Practice (University of Iowa Press, 1981), pp.148–79, quoted at p. 150.

[Reparations and war debts]: Soule, op. cit., ch. 12; Wilson, chs. 4–5. See also table in Bailey, Diplomatic History, p. 657; Joseph Young Case and Everett Needham Case, Owen D. Young and American Enterprise (David R. Godine, 1982).

496–97 [Mellon on rescheduling debts]: quoted in Wilson, p. 126.

497 [Coolidge on war debts]: Howard H. Quint and Robert H. Ferrell, The Talkative President (University of Massachusetts Press, 1964), p. 176.

[Financial “merry-go-round”]: Bailey, Diplomatic History, p. 664.

[U.S. trade and investment in Latin America]: Wilson, pp. 169, 199–200.

498 [American presence in China]: Robert M. Leventhal, “China Marine,” Marine Corps Gazette,vol. 56, no. 11 (1972), pp. 36–44.

[Relations with Latin America]: Ellis, Republican Foreign Policy, chs. 7–8.

[Morrow in Mexico]: ibid., pp. 245, 252.

499 [Smoot-Hawley tariff]: Ray Lyman Wilbur, The Hoover Policies (Scribner’s, 1937), pp. 181–92; Wilson, pp. 93–98; see also Elmer E. Schattschneider, Politics, Pressures and the Tariff (Prentice-Hall, 1935).

[Hoover on international trade]: quoted in Leffler, p. 152.

[Hoover on Smoot-Hawley]: quoted in Wilson, p. 98.

The Voices of Protest

[Republican party “compact majority”]: Randall B. Ripley, Majority Party Leadership in Congress (Little, Brown, 1969), ch. 4.

[Rise of the “loyal opposition party]: James MacGregorBurns, The Vineyard of Liberty (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), chs. 4–5.

499–500 [Political developments during the 1920s]: Jonathan Daniels, The Time Between the Wars (Doubleday, 1966), esp. chs. 6–13; Karl Schriftgiesser, This Was Normalcy (Little, Brown, 1948).

500 [1924 Democratic convention]: David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), pp. 114–28, McAdoo quoted at p. 114; keynote speaker, Sen. Pat Harrison, quoted at p. 116.

[Burner on 1924 Democratic ticket as “schizoid”]: ibid., p. 125.

[Progressive party, 1924 ]: Kenneth Campbell MacKay, The Progressive Movement of 1924 (Columbia University Press, 1947); Belle Case La Follette and Fola La Follette, Robert M. La Follette (Macmillan, 1953), vol. 2, chs. 69–71.

501 [Wheeler on Democratic party]: Burton Wheeler and Paul F. Healey, Yankee from the West (Doubleday, 1962), p. 249.

[Left-wing parties and the Progressives]: James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912–1925 (Monthly Review Press, 1967), chs. 7–8; David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America (Macmillan, 1955), ch. 7.

[1924 election]: David Burner, “Election of 1924,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 3, pp. 2459–2581; J. Leonard Bates, “The Teapot Dome Scandal and the Election of 1924,” American Historical Review, vol. 60, no. 2 (January 1955), pp. 303–22; Svend Petersen, A Statistical History of the American Presidential Elections (Frederick Ungar, 1963), pp. 86–88.

[1924 election results]: Schlesinger, vol. 3, p. 2581.

502 [Roosevelt, Smith, and the future of the Democratic party]: Burner, Politics of Provincialism, ch.5; Alfred Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe (Alfred A. Knopf, 1962); Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal (Little, Brown, 1954), pp. 201–2; Ruth C. Silva, Rum, Religion and Votes: 1928 Re-examined (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962).

[Al Smith]: Oscar Handlin, Al Smith and His America (Little, Brown, 1958); Leuchtenburg, op. cit, pp. 230–32.

[1928 election]: Handlin, ch. 6; Leuchtenburg, ch. 12; Lawrence H. Fuchs, “Election of 1928,” in Schlesinger, vol. 3, pp. 2585–2704 (the Marshall-Smith exchange from the Atlantic is reprinted in this volume, pp. 2649–60); Silva; Earland J. Carlson, “Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Post-Mortem of 1928 Election,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, vol. 8, no. 3 (August 1964), pp. 298–308; see also Allan J. Lichtman, Prejudice and the Old Politics: The Presidential Election of 1928 (University of North Carolina Press, 1979).

503 [Al Smith’s refusal to be other than Al Smith]: Handlin, p. 130.

[Smith’s refusal to “shut the door” in immigrants’ faces]: quoted in Steel, op. cit., p. 248.

[Election results, 1028]: Schlesinger, vol. 3, p. 2704.

[Smith on his loss]: quoted in Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (Viking Press, 1946), p. 46.

[1928 election as refection of politics in the 1920s]: Allan J. Lichtman, “Critical Election Theory and the Reality of American Presidential Politics, 1916–40,” American Historical Review, vol. 81, no. 2 (April 1976), pp. 317–48.

504 [Civil liberties cases, wartime and postwar]: Zechariah Chaffee, Jr., Free Speech in the United States (Harvard University Press, 1941). chs. 2–4.

[Oliver Wendell Holmes’s opinions and dissents]: Lerner, op. cit., part 2. See generally, Paul L. Murphy, The Meaning of Freedom of Speech (Greenwood Press, 1972), esp. chs. 3–10.

504 [Holmes’s opinion in Schenck]: Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), quoted at 52; Lerner, pp. 294–97, quoted at pp. 296–97.

[Holmes to Pollock on Debs case]: letters of April 5 and 27, 1919, in Mark DeWolfe Howe, ed., Holmes-Pollock Letters (Harvard University Press, 1941), vol. 2, pp. 7, 11.

[Holmes’s opinion in Debs case]: Debs v. United States, 249 U.S. 211 (1919); Lerner, pp. 300–4.

[Abrams]: Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919), quoted at 628, 630; Lerner, pp. 307–13, quoted at pp. 310, 312.

505 [Red scare of 1919–20]: Robert K. Murray, Red Scare, 1919–1920 (University of Minnesota Press, 1955); Stanley Coben, “A Study in Nativism: The American Red Scare of 1919–1920,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 1 (March 1964), pp. 52–75; Paul L. Murphy,”Normalcy, Intolerance, and American Character,” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 40 (Summer 1964), pp. 445–59; Leuchtenburg, ch. 4.

[Demands of Sunday, McKellar, and Byrnes for action against radicals]: Leuchtenburg, p. 66.

[Gitlow]: Gitlow v. New York, 268 U.S. 652 (1925), quoted at 673; Lerner, pp. 324–25.

506 [Schwimmer]: United States v. Schwimmer, 279 U.S. 644 (1928), quoted at 655; Lerner, pp.326–28, quoted at p. 328.

[Holmes and his correspondents]: Mark DeWolfe Howe, ed., Halmes-Laski Letters (Harvard University Press, 1953), vol. 2; Howe, Holmes-Pollock Letters.

[Brandeis-Frankfurter relationship]: Bruce Allen Murphy, The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection (Oxford University Press, 1982), esp. ch. 3; Melvin I. Urofsky and David W. Levy, eds., Letters of Louis Brandeis (State University of New York Press, 1971–78), vols. 2–5, passim; Philippa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Harvard University Press, 1984), passim.

[Law clerk on Brandeis’s appearance]: H. Thomas Austern, quoted in Strum, p. 358.

[Differences between Holmes and Brandeis]: Strum, p. 317; see also Alpheus Thomas Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life (Viking Press, 1946), pp. 572–81.

507 [Hoover on individualism]: Herbert Hoover, American Individualism (Doubleday, Page, 1922), p. 13; see also David Burner, Herbert Hoover (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 139–42.

15. THE COMMERCIALIZED CULTURE

508 [Doubled industrial production]: George J. Stigler, Trends in Output and Employment (National Bureau of Economic Research, 1947), p. 57 (Table A).

[Consumer spending]: Robert S. Lynd and Alice C. Hanson, “The People as Consumers,” in The President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States (McGraw-Hill, 1933), pp. 857–911. Cf. Richard Wightman Fox, “Epitaph for Middletown: Robert S. Lynd and the Analysis of Consumer Culture,” in Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (Pantheon Books, 1983), pp. 101–41.

[YOU SHOULD HAVE $IO,OOO]: William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 9.

[The Age of Ballyhoo]: Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s (Perennial Library, 1964), pp. 68, 158–62, 186.

509 [Jazz]: Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (Oxford UniversityPress, 1968); Marshall W. Stearns, The Story of Jazz (Oxford University Press, 1956);Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Greenwood Press, 1981), ch. 8.

[Mascagni on jazz]: quoted in Mark Sullivan, Our Times (Scribner’s, 1926–35), vol. 6, p. 481.

[“The day of the saxophone”]: ibid., pp. 483–84.

[Whiteman on jazz]: quoted in ibid., p. 480.

[University president on twenties dress as Devil’s work]: quoted in Allen, p. 76.

[Ponzi’s swindles]: “Mr. Ponzi and His ‘Ponzied Finance,’” Literary Digest, vol. 66,, no. 8 (August 21, 1920), pp. 44–50.

[Blacks in the twenties ]: Louise V. Kennedy, The Negro Peasant Turns Cityward: Effects of Recent Migrations to Northern Cities (Columbia University Press, 1930); T. J. Woofter, Jr., “The Status of Racial and Ethnic Groups,” in Recent Social Trends, pp. 553–601; Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (Albert & Charles Boni, 1925), esp. part 2.

509 [The Klan in the twenties]: Arnold S. Rice, The Ku Klux Klan in American Politics (Public Affairs Press, 1962), esp. ch. 2; David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965 (Doubleday, 1965); Hiram W. Evans, “The Klan’s Fight for Americanism,” North American Review, vol. 233 (March 1926), pp. 33–63.

[Anti-red, anti-radical hysteria]: Zechariah Chaffee, Jr., Free Speech in the United States (Harvard University Press, 1941), pp. 269–354.

510 [Lindbergh]: Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis (Scribner’s, 1953); Kenneth S. Davis, The Hero: Charles Lindbergh and the American Dream (Doubleday, 1959)

[Allen on Lindbergh]: Allen, p. 183.

[Ward on Lindbergh’s flight]: John W. Ward, “The Meaning of Lindbergh’s Flight,” American Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 1958), pp. 3–16, quoted at p. 14.

[Coolidge on “this silent partner”]: quoted in ibid., p. 14.

The Workshop of Education

511 [Elementary school curriculum]: Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd, Middletown: A Study in American Culture (Harcourt, Brace, 1929), p. 189. See also, Edward A. Krug, The Shaping of the American High School, 1920–1941 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), pp. 55–59.

[Lynds on the regimented classroom]: Lynd and Lynd, p. 188.

[Declining percentage of male teachers]: ibid., p. 206, footnote 1; see also, Ernest C. Moore, Fifty Years of American Education: 1867–1917(Ginn, 1918), pp. 60–61

[Education and social status of teachers]: Lynd and Lynd, ch. 15; Krug, pp. 147–54.

[High school enrollment, 1920s]: U.S. Office of Education, “Biennial Survey of Education, 1930–1932,” Bulletin, 1933, no. 2 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1934), pp. 46–47, in Robert H. Bremner, ed., Children and Youth in America: A Documentary Survey (Harvard University Press, 1970–71), vol. 2, parts 7 and 8, p. 1101.

511–12 [Krug on high school buildings]: Krug, pp. 42–43.

512 [Two of every three teenagers not enrolled]: ibid., p. 7.

[Wild one on the “older generation”]: John F. Carter, Jr., “These Wild Young People,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 126, no. 3 (September 1920), pp. 301–4, quoted at p. 302.

[Search for scapegoats]: Krug, pp. 21–24, University of Minnesota strictures against improper dancing quoted at p. 23; Paula S. Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920’s (Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 18–25; Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (Basic Books, 1977), pp. 258–61; Jerome Leon Rodnitzky, “David Kinley: A Paternal President in the RoaringTwenties,”Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, vol. 66, no. 1 (Spring 1977), pp. 5–19, esp. pp. 15–16.

[Van Waters on institutions in flux]: quoted in Kett, p. 259.

[Educator on the “aim of today”]: Charles A. Prosser, quoted in Krug, p. 4.

[“Americanization” in American schools]: Bremner, vol. 2, parts 7 and 8, pp. 1324–36.

513 [The emphases of history and social studies in Muncie]: Lynd and Lynd, pp. 196–201, quoted at p. 199.

[Mellon on a solid education]: quoted in Krug, p. 19.

[Ellis’s plea to make “modern life comprehensible”]: ibid., p. 82.

[New York educators on textbooks’ point of view]: ibid; see also, E. E. Brossard, ed., Wisconsin Statutes, I, 432 (1921), in Bremner, vol. 2, parts 7 and 8, pp. 1330–31.

[Fass on the “teasing image”]: Fass, pp. 6, 7.

[College students, 1920s]: ibid., passim:Kett, pp. 261–64; Joan C. Zimmerman, “College Culture in the Midwest, 1890–1930” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1978), pp. 252–56.

514 [Rise in college attendance, 1920s]: Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), part 2, p. 386 (Series H 751–765).

[Trinity College editor on “self-centered residents of Main Street”]: quoted in Fass, p. 365.

[Fraternities, 1920s]: ibid, pp. 141–67, 235–36; Lawrence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (University of Chicago Press, 1965), pp. 292–94.

[Student reading, 1920s]: Fass, p. 365.

[“George F…. is going to college”]: quoted in ibid.

[Studen tpoll, 1924]: ibid., pp. 343–45.

[UCLA editor on the “political minded”]: quoted in ibid, p. 355.

515 [Cornell editor on “the panic”]: ibid., p. 349.

[“Largest private educational system”]: Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America (Scribner’s, 1965), p. 396.

[Hudson on decline of Protestantism in 1920s]: ibid., quoted at p. 357; Robert T. Handy, “The American Religious Depression, 1925–1935,” Church History, vol. 29, no. 1 (March 1960), pp. 3–16.

[Applications for foreign missionary service]: Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (Yale University Press, 1972), p. 899.

516 [Ahlstrom on the “thinning out of evangelical substance”]: ibid

[“Merchandising” of religion]: Hudson, pp. 375–76, Zion’s Herald on minister as salesman and Lewis S. Mudge on “the only business of the Church,” quoted at p. 375; slogans and sermon topics, quoted at pp. 375–76. See also Ahlstrom, pp. 904–5.

[Barton]: Leo P. Ribuffo, “Jesus Christ as Business Statesman: Bruce Barton and the Selling of Corporate Capitalism,” American Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 2 (Summer 1981), pp. 206–31; Otis Pease, “Bruce Barton,” in John A. Garraty, ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography (Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 62–63.

[Pease on The Man Nobody Knows]: Pease, p. 62.

[Fundamentalist militancy of twenties]: Ahlstrom, p. 909. See also, W. B. Riley, “The Faith of the Fundamentalists,” Current History, vol. 26, no. 3 (June 1927), pp. 434–40, reprinted in Loren Baritz, ed., The Culture of the Twenties (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), pp. 191–201.

517 [Sunday]: William G. McLoughlin, Jr., Billy Sunday Was His Real Name (University of Chicago Press, 1955); McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism: Charles Grandison Finney to Billy Graham (Ronald Press, 1959), ch. 8.

[“Hireling” ministers]: quoted in McLoughlin, Modern Revivalism, p. 410.

[$2 a soul]: McLoughlin, Billy Sunday, ch. 3, esp. p. 116.

[McPherson ]: Lately Thomas, Storming Heaven: The Lives and Turmoils of Minnie Kennedy and Aimee Semple McPherson (William Morrow, 1970); Sheldon Bissell, “Vaudeville at the Angelus Temple,” The Outlook, vol. 149 (May 23, 1928), pp. 126–27, 158, reprinted in Baritz, pp. 201–9; Carrie McWilliams, “Aimee Semple McPherson: ‘Sunlight in My Soul,’” in Isabel Leighton, ed., The Aspirin Age (Simon and Schuster, 1949), ch. 3.

[Rival minister on McPherson]: Bissell, p. 209.

[Scopes trial]: Ray Ginger, Six Days or Forever? Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes (Beacon Press, 1958); James W. Wesolowski, “Before Canon 35: WGN Broadcasts the Monkey Trial,”Journalism History, vol. 2, no. 3 (1975), pp. 76–79, 86.

[Bryan’s death]: Ginger, p. 192.

[Scopes as commercial venture]: see R. M. Cornelius, “Their Stage Drew All the World: A New Look at the Scopes Evolution Trial,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 2 (1981), pp. 129–43.

The Press as Entertainment

518 [Press coverage of murder trials]: Silas Bent, Ballyhoo: The Voice of the Press (Boni & Liveright, 1927).pp. 192—95, quoted at p. 194.

[Rising costs of newspaper production]: Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism (Macmillan, 1941), p. 674; Robert A. Rutland, The Newsmongers: Journalism in the Life of the Nation, 1690–1072 (Dial Press, 1973), pp. 254–55.

[Lippmann on the price of newspapers]: Lippmann, Public Opinion (Harcourt, Brace, 1922), p. 321.

[Proportion of ads in metropolitan papers]: Bent, p. 214.

[Tripled cost of advertising]: Mott, p. 712.

518–19 [Ad slogans]: ibid., pp. 505, 712,713.

[Newspaper features]: Bent, pp. 227–30.

[Bent on newspaper offerings]: ibid, pp. 197–98.

[Comic strips] Stephen Becker, Comic Art in America (Simon and Schuster, 1959), ch. 3, quoted at p. 54; Emest Brennecke, “The Real Mission of the Funny Paper,” The Century, vol. 107, no. 5 (March 1924), pp. 665–75.

[“Only the good have rights”]: Becker, pp. 64–67, quoted at p. 66.

[Newspaper consolidation]: Mott, ch. 37; Bent, ch. 10.

520 [Munsey]: Mott, pp. 637–40; George Britt, Forty Years—Forty Millions: The Career of Frank A. Munsey (Farrar & Rinchart, 1935).

[Munsey on the “law of economics”]: quoted in Bent, p. 260.

[Sinclair on the “Brass Check”]: Sinclair, The Brass Check (Upton Sinclair, 1920), p. 436.

[Lippmann on the Times’s coverage of the Russian Revolution]: Lippmann and Charles Mertz, “A Test of the News,” The New Republic, vol. 33, no. 296 (August 4, 1920), supplement, pp. 1–41, quoted at p. 3.

[Lippmann on the press as the “beam of a searchlight”]: Public Opinion, pp. 364–65, quoted at p. 364.

[Industrialhation of news-gathering]: Cathy Covert, “A View of the Press in the Twenties,” Journalism History, vol. 2, no. 3 (1975). pp. 66–67, 92–96, quoted at pp. 92–93.

521 [Decline of partisan papers]: Alfred M. Lee, The Daily Newspaper in America (Macmillan, 1937), p. 182. See also, Silas Bent, “Partisanship in the Press,” The New Republic, vol. 56, no. 720 (September 19, 1928), pp. 116–18.

[Publicity agents]: Michael Schnudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (Basic Books, 1978), pp. 134–41.

[Lippmann on shaping “the facts of modern life”]: Public Opinion, p. 345.

[Rise of syndicated columnists]: Schnudson. pp. 150–51; Mott, pp. 689–94.

[Founding of Time]: W. A. Swanbcrg, Luce and His Empire (Scribner’s, 1972), pp. 52–56. The prospectus is reprinted at pp. 53–54 See also, Schnudson, p. 149.

[Luce’s proposals for newspaper reform]: quoted in Swanberg, p. 143.

522 [Reader’s Digest]: Mott, pp. 732–33; John Bainbridge, “Little Magazine,” The New Yorker, vol. 21, part 4 (“Profiles” series, November 17–Decembcr 15, 1945).

[Foreign-language papers before World War I]:Rutland, p. 291.

[Measures against Leader, Call, and Tageblatt]: ibid., p. 297; Chaffee, op. cit., pp. 86–92, 247–69, 298–305.

[Indian publications]: James E. Murphy and Sharon M. Murphy, Let My People Know: American Indian Journalism, 1828–1978 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), esp. ch. 3.

[Black papers]: Frederick G. Detweiler, The Negro Press in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 1922), ch. 3; Richard Bardolph, The Negro Vanguard (Rinchart, 1959), pp. 142–46; Roi Ottley,The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott (Henry Regnery, 1955).

[“Furniture That Talks”]: quoted in Reynold M. Wik, “The Radio in Rural America During the 1920s,” Agricultural History, vol. 55, no. 4 (October 1981), p. 340.

[Sarnoff]: Eric Barnouw, A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1966–70), vol. 1, pp. 75–81, Sarnoff’s “plan of development” quoted at p. 78; Eugene Lyons, David Sarnoff (Harper & Row, 1966).

523 [Sales of radio sets and parts]: Barnouw, vol. 1, p. 125.

[Proliferation of stations]: ibid., p. 91.

[Content of musical programming]: ibid., pp. 126–31.

[Radio and farmers]: Wik, pp. 344, 345, 348, 349, and passim.

[Regulation of radio]: Barnouw, vol. 1, pp. 94–96, 100–101, 121–22, 178–79, 211–19; Wik, pp. 341–42.

[McPherson’s telegram]: quoted in Barnouw, vol. 1, p. 180.

Entertainment as Spectatorship

524 [“A crude toy became an industry”]: Barnouw, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 225.

[Birth of a Nation]: Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Social History of American Movies (Random House, 1975), pp. 57–61; Fred Silva, ed., Focus on The Birth of a Nation (Prentice-Hall, 1971); Robert M. Henderson, D. W. Griffith: His Life and Work (Oxford University Press, 1972), ch. 9. 54–5

524–525 [Studios, Zukor, and block booking]: Sklar, ch. 9; Lawrence Kardish, Reel Plastic Magic: A History of Films and Filmmaking in America (Little, Brown, 1972); Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art: A Panoramic History of the Movies (New American Library, 1957), pp. 107–10.

525 [The Roxy]: Lucinda Smith, “Introduction: Before the Final Curtain,” in Ave Pildas, Movie Palaces (Clarkson N. Potter, 1980), p. 14; sec also, Lloyd Morris, Not So Long Ago (Random House, 1949), pp. 187–90.

[United Artists]: Gerald Mast, A Short History of the Movies (Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), p. 121.

525 [First generation of movie czars]: Mast, p. 119; Lary I. May and Elaine Tyler May, “Why Jewish Movie Moguls: An Exploration in American Culture,” American Jewish History, vol. 72, no. 1 (September 1982), pp. 6–25.

526 [Mayer]: Bosley Crowther, Hollywood Rajah: The Life and Times of Louis B. Mayer (Henry Holt, 1960).

[Zukor to Chaplin]: quoted in May and May, p. 21.

[“The Home of the Stars”]: Crowther, pp. 92–100; Knight, p. 109.

[Thalberg]: Crowther, pp. 85–92, 102–4; Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By … (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), pp. 424–27.

[Film magazines]: see Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (Harcourt, Brace, 1922), p. 225.

[Hollywood scandals and censorship]: Sklar, pp. 77–82, 122–32; Raymond Moley, The Hays Office (Bobbs-Merrill, 1945), ch. 1; Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, 236 U.S. 230 (1915); Mutual Film Corporation v. Hodges, Governor of the State of Kansas, 236 U.S. 248 (1915).

[Hollywood response to censorship threats]: Sklar, pp. 82, 91–95; Moley, ch. 4 and pp. 240–41 (Appendix D); Knight, pp. 112–16.

527 [Hays]: Moley, ch. 2; Sklar, pp. 83–85.

[Editor on sports selling papers]: W. P. Beazell, quoted in Wayne M. Towers, “World Series Coverage in New York City in the 1920s,” Journalism Monographs, no. 73 (August 1981).

[Sports and the elites, nineteenth century]: Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Spectators (Prentice-Hall, 1983), ch. 3.

[Founding of sports clubs and unions]: ibid., pp. 47, 54.

[Conflict at the New York Athletic Club]: ibid, p. 50.

528 [Women and sports]: ibid., pp. 164–69.

[Sports among the working classes]: ibid., pp. 30–35.

[Rader on the “sports revolution”]: ibid., pp. 46, 47.

[“Outsiders” and sports]: ibid., ch. 5, esp. pp. 90, 91–93, 96.

[The “age of the spectator”]: ibid., pp. 172–73.

[Grange]: Geoffrey Perrett, America in the Twenties (Simon and Schuster, 1982), p. 212; Allison Danzig, The History of American Football (Prentice-Hall, 1956), pp. 259–61; W. C. Heinz, “The Ghost of the Gridiron,” in Herbert Warren Wind, ed., The Realm of Sport (Simon and Schuster, 1966), pp. 315–23.

[Rockne]: Perrett, p. 212; Rader, pp. 212–13; “‘Rock’ Is of the Ages,” New Republic, vol. 66, no. 854 (April 15, 1931), pp. 220–22.

529 [Tilden]: Frank Deford, Big Bill Tilden (Simon and Schuster, 1976); Allison Danzig, “Tilden, Autocrat of the Courts,” in Wind, pp. 601–5; William T. Tilden, The Art of LawnTennis (Methuen, 1920).

[Jones]: Perrett, pp. 220–23, quoted at p. 221.

[Ruth]: Rader, pp. 177–82; Robert W. Creamer, Babe (Simon and Schuster, 1974); Babe Ruth and Bob Considine, The Babe Ruth Story (Scholastic Books, 1969); Red Smith, “Babe Ruth: One of a Kind,” in Smith, The Red Smith Reader, Dave Anderson, ed. (Random House, 1982), pp. 160–65.

[Technical changes in baseball]: Towers, p. 2; Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Golden Age (Oxford University Press, 1971), ch. 3.

[Ruth’s 1920 season]: Creamer, ch. 19; Perrett, p. 209.

[Walsh]: Rader, pp. 181–92, quoted at p. 181; Creamer, pp. 271–74.

[Yankee attendance with Ruth]: Perrett, p. 209; see also, “What Is Babe Ruth Worth to the Yankees?,” Literary Digest, vol. 104, no. 13 (March 29, 1930), pp. 38–42.

[Gate receipts and concessions, 1920s]: Steven A. Riess, Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era (Greenwood Press, 1980), p. 76.

[Yankee Stadium]: ibid., pp. 105–10; Creamer, pp. 276, 277–78.

[Ruth on “the chance”]: Ruth and Considine, p. 9.

[Baseball and the “poor man”]: Riess, pp. 30–38; Rader, pp. 128–29.

530 [Dempsey]: Rader, pp. 186–93; Randy Roberts, Jack Dempsey: The Manassa Mauler (Louisiana State University Press, 1979).

[Dempsey and “paganism”]: Dr. John Straton, quoted in Roberts, p. 127.

[Dempsey vs. Wiliard]: Roberts, pp. 50–66.

[Rickard]: Rader, pp. 186–93; Jack Kofoed, “The Master of Ballyhoo,” North American Review, vol. 227, no. 3 (March 1929), pp. 282–86.

530 [Dempsey’s non-boxing income]: Roberts, ch. 10, esp. p. 202.

[Rickard’s denial of a fight to Wills]: ibid., pp. 141–48, 213–19.

[Tunney]: ibid., pp. 219–23; “Corbett to Tunney on ‘How to Win the Mob,’” Literary Digest, vol. 96, no. 2 (January 14, 1928), pp. 54–60; S. G. S. McNeil, “The Real Gene Tunney,” North American Review, vol. 226, no. 5 (November 1928), pp. 282–86.

[Dempsey-Tunney bouts]: Roberts, chs. 11 and 12; Gene Tunney. “My Fights with Jack Dempsey,” in Wind, pp. 212–18.

531 [“/ have no alibis to offer”]: Randy Roberts, “Jack Dempsey: An American Hero in the1920’s,” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 8, no. 2 (Fall 1974). p. 422.

[Fights on the frontier and the plantations and in the livery stables]: Radcr, pp. 33, 35–36.

[World Series scandal and Landis]: Seymour, chs. 15–17 and ch. 19.

[Twenties crime wave as mythical]: Perrett, pp. 397–401; Edwin H. Sutherland and C. E. Gehlke, “Crime and Punishment,” in Recent Social Trends, op. cit., pp. 1123–39, 1165.

[The gangster-hero]: see L. Glen Seretan, “The ‘New’ Working Class and Social Banditry in Depression America,” Mid-America, vol. 63, no. 2 (April–July 1981), pp. 107–17.

[Capone]: Allen, Only Yesterday, op. cit.. pp. 216–20; Perrett, pp. 393–97; John Kobler, Capone (Putnam’s, 1971).

The Workshop and the Demos

532 [Dempsey as symbol]: Roberts, “Jack Dempsey: An American Hero in the 1920’s,” op. cit, pp. 411–26.

[Mass spectatorship as diversion]: see Joel H. Spring, “Mass Culture and School Sports,” History of Education Quarterly, vol. 14 (Winter 1974), pp. 483–99, esp. pp. 492–93.

[Welfare capitalism]: Leo Wolman and Gustav Peck, “Labor Groups in the Social Structure,” in Recent Social Trends, op. cit., pp. 843–47; Robert H. Zieger, “Herbert Hoover, the Wage-Earner, and the ‘New Economic System,’ 1919–1929,” Business Historical Review, vol. 51 (Summer 1977), pp. 161–89; David Brody, “The Rise and Decline of Welfare Capitalism,” in John Braeman et al., eds., Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America: The 1920’s (Ohio State University Press, 1968), pp. 147–78.

[Young on employee ownership]: quoted in Josephine Young Case and Everett Ncedham Case, Owen D. Young and American Enterprise (David R. Godine, 1982), p. 374.

533 [“Homo boobiens”]: Mencken, Notes on Democracy (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), p. 45. See also, Mencken, “On Being an American,” in Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series (Alfred A. Knopf, 1922), pp. 9–64.

[Mencken on public opinion]: Notes on Democracy, p. 192.

[Mencken on the average man]: ibid., p. 148.

[Mencken on democracy]: ibid., p. 4 and passim.

[Plato’s cave in Lippmann]: Lippmann, Public Opinion, op. cit., esp. ch. 1.

[Lippmann on the “false ideal”]: Lippmann, The Phantom Public (Harcourt, Brace, 1925), pp. 38–39, quoted at p. 39.

[Mencken’s welcome to Lippmann]: Mencken, “Katzenjammer” (review of The Phantom Public), American Mercury, vol. 7, no. 25 (January 1926), pp. 125–26.

[Lippmann on public support of Ins and Outs]: Phantom Public, pp. 126, 127.

534 [Democratic party, 1920s]: David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968); James Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System (Brookings Institution, 1973), ch. 9.

[Union membership, 1920s]: Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, op. cit., part 1, p. 177 (Series D 940–945); Morton S. Baratz, The Union and the Coal Industry (Yale University Press, 1955), p. 61.

[AFL in the twenties]: James O. Morris, Conflict Within the AFL: A Study of Craft versus Industrial Unionism, 1901–1938 (Cornell University Press, 1958), chs. 1–5; Philip Taft, The A.F. of L from the Death of Gompers to the Merger (Harper & Bros., 1959).

[Women’s politics in the 1920s]:). Stanley Lemons, The Woman Citizen (University of Illinois Press, 1973).

535 [Leftist writers in the twenties]:Daniel Aaron: Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), chs. 4–7.

[Lewis]: Mark Schorer, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (McGraw-Hill, 1961).

535 [Kennicott on fiction and reality of small-town life]: Lewis, Main Street (Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), p. 265.

[Lewis’s Nobel Prize address]: reprinted in Lewis, The Man from Main Street: Selected Essays and Other Writings, 1904–1950, Harry E. Maule and Melville H. Cane, eds. (Random House, 1953), pp. 3–17. quoted at pp. 6–7.

[Reaction to Nobel address]: Schorer, pp. 552–53.

536 [Time review of Gantry]: “Bible Boar,” Time, vol. 9, no. 11 (March 14, 1927), pp. 38–40, quoted at p. 38.

[Lippmann breach with Harcourt, Brace]: Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1980), p. 260.

[Lippmann’s judgment of Lewis]: Lippmann, Men of Destiny (Macmillan, 1927), ch. 7.

[Lewis-Dreiser feud]: Schorer, pp. 561–64.

[Hicks on Manhattan Transfer]: Hicks, “The Politics of John Dos Passos,” Antioch Review, vol. 10, no. 1 (March 1950), pp. 85–98, quoted at p. 89.

[Class and individual struggle in Dos Passos]: Lionel Trilling, “The America of John Dos Passos,” in Trilling, Speaking of Literature and Society, Diana Trilling, ed. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 108.

[Influence of Whitman and Veblen]: Harry Levin, “Revisiting Dos Passos’ U.S.A.,” Massachusetts Review, vol. 20 (Autumn 1979), p. 404.

[Dos Passos’s style and the modern temper]: Jack Diggins, “John Roderigo Dos Passos,” in Garraty, op. cit., p. 287. See also, Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (Doubleday, 1956), pp. 267ff.

537 [Fitzgerald]: Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise (Houghton Mifflin, 1965); see alsoWilliam Wasserstrom, The Ironies of Progress: Henry Adams and the American Dream (Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), ch. 8.

[Fitzgerald’s ambivalences towards the rich]: Henry Dan Piper, F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965), pp. 175–77.

[“Let me tellyou about the very rich”]: “The Rich Boy,” in The Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald (The Bodley Head, 1959–63), vol. 3, pp. 355–96, quoted at pp. 355–56.

[Daisy’s voice “full of money”]: The Great Gatsby (Scribner’s, 1925), p. 144. [Eight servants and an “extra gardener”]: ibid., p. 47.

[Fitzgerald on the Jazz Age]: Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” in Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, Edmund Wilson, ed. (New Directions, 1945), pp. 13–22, quoted at p. 14.

[“Thai incredible pigsty”]: Anthony Patch in The Beautiful and the Damned, in Bodley Head Scott Fitzgerald, vol. 4, quoted at p. 56.

[Sacco and Vanzetti]: Herbert B. Ehrmann, The Case That Will Not Die: Commonwealth vs. Sacco and Vanzetti (Little, Brown, 1969); David Felix, Protest: Sacco-Vanzetti and the Intellectuals (Indiana University Press, 1965).

538 [Frankfurter in the Atlantic]:”The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 139 (March 1927), pp. 409–32. Frankfurter’s The Case of Sacco and Vanzetti (Little, Brown, 1927) is an expanded version of the Atlantic piece.

[Lippmann on Sacco-Vanzetti]: New York World, August 8, 12, 19, 24, 1927; Steel, pp. 227–34.

[“they are stronger… all right we are two nations”]: Dos Passos, The Big Money (Harcourt, Brace, 1933), pp. 461–62.

16. THE VACANT WORKSHOP

539 [Soviet primer]: M. Ilin, New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the Five-Year Plan, George S. Counts and Nucia P. Lodge, translators (Houghton Mifflin, 1931), pp. 5–9.

540 [Florida land boom]: A. M. Sakolski, The Great American Land Bubble (Harper & Bros., 1932; reprinted by Johnson, 1966), ch. 16; Frederick Lewis Allen, Only yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen Twenties (Harper & Bros., 1931), ch. 11; John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash: 1929 (Houghton Mifflin, 1954), pp. 8–12; Bruce Bliven, “Where Ev’ry Prospect Pleases,” New Republic, vol. 38, no. 486 (March 26, 1924), pp. 116–18.

[Ponzi]: Geoffrey Perrett, America in the Twenties (Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 356–57; “Mr. Ponzi and His ‘Ponzied Finance,’” Literary Digest, vol. 66, no. 8 (August 21, 1920), pp. 44–50.

[Number of players in the market]: Galbraith, pp. 82–83; Allen, pp. 314–16.

541 [Fishers’ move to Wall Street]: Galbraith, p. 19.

[Morgan investment trust]: ibid., pp. 55–56.

[Brisbane]: ibid., pp. 123–24; Perrett, p. 365.

[Coolidge on Wall Street]: quoted in Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929–1941(Macmillan, 1952), p. 16.

[Raskob]: Allen, pp. 302–3.

[Rise in shares traded, 1928]: Galbraith. pp. 20, 22.

[Rise in loans and interest rates]: ibid., pp. 24–27, esp. pp. 26–27.

[President Hoover and the boom]: Hoover, pp. 16–19; David Burner, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), pp. 246–47; Harris G. Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression (Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 102–3.

[September halt]: Galbraith, pp. 87–92.

Life in the Depression

For causes of the Crash and the Depression, see Galbraith, op. cit.; Robert Sobel, Panic on Wall Street: A History of America’s Financial Disasters (Macmillan, 1968), ch. 11; Milton Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, The Great Contraction: 1929–1933 (Princeton University Press, 1965); Peter Temin, Did Monetary Forces Cause the Great Depression? (W. W. Norton, 1976); Elmus Wicker, “A Reconsideration of the Causes of the Banking Panic of 1930,” Journal of Economic History, vol. 40, no. 3 (September 1980), pp. 571–83; Ferdinand Pecora, Wall Street Under Oath (Simon and Schuster, 1939).

542 [Trading volume, Black Thursday]: Galbraith, p. 104.

[Meeting at Morgan]: ibid., p. 106; Sobel, pp. 376–77.

[“A little distress selling”]: quoted in Galbraith, pp. 106–7.

[Whitney on the floor]: ibid., pp. 107–8.

[The crumbling dam]: ibid., pp. 110–16.

[Galbraith on “the most devastating day”]: ibid., p. 116.

[Times on “the most disastrous” day]: New York Times, October 30, 1929, p. 1.

543 [Hoover on “a sound and prosperous basis”]: quoted in Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression (Times Books, 1984), p. 66.

[“Practitioner of industrial rationalization”]: David Burner, “Herbert Clark Hoover,” in John Garraty, Encyclopedia of American Biography (Harper & Row, 1974), p. 535.

[Hoover’s economic views]: McElvaine, pp. 56–62, 65–69; J. Joseph Huthmachcr and Warren I. Susman, eds., Herbert Hoover and the Crisis of American Capitalism (Schenkman, 1973); Peri E. Arnold, “The ‘Great Engineer’ as Administrator: Herbert Hoover and Modern Bureaucracy,” Review of Politics, vol. 42, no. 3 (July 1980), pp. 329–48.

[GNP drop]: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), part 2, p. 224 (Series F 1–5).

[Unemployment rise]: ibid., part 1, p. 126 (Series D 1–10).

[National income drop]: Dixon Wecter, The Age of the Great Depression: 1929–1941 (Macmillan, 1948), p. 17.

[Wecter on business failures, bank suspensions, and lost savings accounts]: ibid.

[Unemployment in the cities]: William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity, 1914–1932 (University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 247.

[Weekly layoffs]: ibid.

[Automobile industry turndown]: ibid., p. 248.

[Chicago wheat prices]: Allen, Only Yesterday, op. cit., p. 343.

544 [Effect of crash upon the vulnerable]: see Bernard Sternsher, ed., Hitting Home: The GreatDepression in Town and Country (Quadrangle, 1970); Mauritz A. Hallgren, Seeds of Revolt (Alfred A. Knopf, 1933); Clarence Enzler, Some Social Aspects of the Depression, 1930–1935 (Catholic University of America Press, 1939), ch. 3; Lorenzo J. Greene, “Economic Conditions Among Negroes in the South,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 64 (1979), pp.265–73; Lawrence Gordon, “A Brief Look at Blacks in Depression Mississippi, 1929–1934: An Eyewitness Account,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 64 (1979), pp. 377–90.

[Hoover’s actions, early days following the Crash]: Galbraith, pp. 142–46; Hoover, Memoirs, op. cit., ch. 6; Warren, op. cit., ch. 9.

[Ford’s pledge]: McElvaine, p. 73.

544 [Burner on Hoover at the World Series]: Burner, Hoover: A Public Life, op. cit., p. 248.

[Hoover’s use of “depression”]: ibid.

[Hoover on passing the worst]: quoted in Hoover, p. 58.

[Skepticism and resistance to Hoover]: see Warren, pp. 120–21.

[Allen on visible effects of Depression]: Frederick Lewis Allen, Since Yesterday: The Nineteen-Thirties in America (Harper & Bros., 1940), pp. 59–60, quoted at p. 59.

545 [Decline in strikes and union membership]: Historical Statistics, part 1, pp. 177 (Series D 940–945) and 179 (Series D 970–985); seealso Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933 (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 335, 341–42.

[Buttons and billboards]: quoted in Sternsher, p. 28.

[Anonymous on how he lost his job]: “I Lost My Job,” Outlook, vol. 160, no. 6 (March 1932), pp. 180–81, 184–85.

546 [Suicides in the depression]: Galbraith, pp. 133–37; Enzler, pp. 74–78; “The Depression and Suicide,” Literary Digest, vol. 114, no. 2 (July 9, 1932), p. 7; Caroline Bird, The Invisible Scar (David McKay, 1966), pp. 8–9.

[“If you can’t do something for me”]: quoted in Robert S. McElvaine, Down and Out in the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p. 18.

[Women in the depression]: Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Twayne Publishers, 1982); Winifred Wandersee, Women’s Work and Family Values (Harvard University Press, 1981); Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Random House, 1969); Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (Harcourt, Brace, 1937), pp. 54–64, 179–86.

[Marriage, divorce, birth rates, early thirties]: Ware, pp. 6–8; Bird, pp. 283–91; Lynd and Lynd, pp. 144–79.

[Married women in the teaching profession]: Ware, p. 28.

[Unemployment among women, 1930]: ibid., p. 36.

[Blacks and jobs in the depression]: Raymond Wolters, Negroes and the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery (Greenwood Press, 1970), esp. pp. 90–94, 113–24; Erwin D. Hoffman, “The Genesis of the Modern Movement for Equal Rights in South Carolina, 1930–1939,” in Bernard Sternsher, ed., The Negro in Depression and War: Prelude to Revolution, 1930–1945 (Quadrangle, 1969), pp. 193–223; John Williams, “Struggle of the Thirties in the South,” in ibid., pp. 166–80; Robert Weaver, “Negro Labor Since 1929,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 35, no. 1 (January 1950), pp. 20–38, esp. pp. 20–23.

[Social worker on white displacement of blacks]: Forrester B. Washington, quoted in Wolters, p. 113.

[Black firemen of the Illinois Central]: ibid., p. 116.

547 [Ilin]: New Russia’s Primer, op. cit., pp. 11–12.

The Crisis of Ideas

[“Where to? What next?”]: “The People, Yes,” in Carl Sandburg, Complete Poems (Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 437–617, quoted at p. 617.

[Lippmann on the arrival and departure of the public]: Lippmann, The Phantom Public (Harcourt, Brace, 1925), p. 65.

548 [NAM and pre-crash crisis]: James W. Prothro, Dollar Decade: Business Ideas in the 1920s (Louisiana State University Press, 1954). pp. 212–13.

[Edgerton’s assurance to Hoover]: quoted in ibid., p. 218.

[Edgerton on the causes of poverty]: ibid., p. 213.

[Sargent’s prescription for a return to prosperity]: ibid., p. 217.

[Edgerton on “Socialistic” legislative proposals]: ibid., pp. 217–18.

549 [Edgerton on crime]: ibid., p. 219.

[Hoover and his “program “]: quoted in Warren, op. cit., p. 295.

[Hoover and voluntarism]: see Burner, Hoover, op. cit., pp. 259–69; Hoover, Memoirs, op. cit., pp. 53–56, 174–75.

550 [Hoover on Mellon’s proposed purge]: Memoirs, p. 30.

[Hoover and the tariff]: Warren, pp. 84–92; Burner, pp. 297–99; Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency, 1920–1933 (Macmillan, 1952), ch. 41.

551 [Public works and the RFC]: Warren, pp. 142–47, 194; James S. Olson, Herbert Hoover and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (Iowa State University Press, 1972).

[Voluntarism and unemployment insurance in the AFL]: Bernstein, op. cit., pp. 91, 345–55.

[Bernstein on the inadequacies of Gompersism]: ibid., p. 345.

[Gompers on unemployment insurance]: quoted in ibid., p. 347.

552 [AFL convention debates over unemployment insurance]: see Reports of Proceedings of the 50th (1930), 51st (1931), and 52nd (1932) Annual Conventions of the American Federation of Labor, 3 vols. (Law Reporter Printing, 1930–32); Bernstein, pp. 347–54.

[Delegate on workers’ liberty and unemployment relief]: Victor Olander, quoted in Report of Proceedings (1930), p. 311.

[Green on insurance, 1931]: Report of Proceedings (1931), p. 397.

[1932 vote for insurance]: Report of Proceedings (1932), pp. 39–44, 325–60.

[Socialist Party, early Depression]: David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America (Macmillan, 1955), ch. 9; Michael Harrington, “The Socialist Party,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of U.S. Political Parties (Chelsea House, 1973). vol. 3, pp. 2426–28.

[Socialist Party membership, 1932]: Harrington, p. 2427.

[Dos Passos on Socialist Party]: quoted in Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), p. 192.

[Communist Party, early Depression]: Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919–1957) (Beacon Press, 1957). ch. 5.

[Dos Passos’s advice to the Communist Party]: quoted in Aaron, p. 192.

553 [Democratic party, early 1930s]: David Burner, The Politics of Provincialism: The DemocraticParty in Transition, 1918–1932 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), pp. 244–45.

[Smith’s movement to the right]: Burner, Politics of Provincialism, p. 245; McElvaine, Great Depression, op. cit., pp. 123–24.

[Davis on Hoover’s “socialism”]: Burner, Politics of Provincialism, p. 245.

[Cox’s demand for balanced budget and sales tax]: ibid.

[Graham on Democratic party]: Otis L. Graham, Jr., “The Democratic Party, 1932–1945,” in Schlesinger, vol. 3, pp. 1939–64, quoted at p. 1940.

[Democrats and the sales tax]: Burner, Hoover, pp. 280–82.

[La Guardia on sales tax bill]: quoted in ibid, p. 281.

554 [1932 campaign for Democratic nomination]: Burner, Politics of Provincialism, pp. 246–50; McElvaine, pp. 123–28; James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, Brace, 1956), pp. 123–34.

[FDR’s attack upon Hoover and Smith’s retort]: New York Times, April 8, 1932, p. 1; Richard O’Connor, The First Hurrah: A Biography of Alfred E. Smith (Putnam’s, 1970), p. 251.

[Lippmann on FDR]: Lippmann, “Governor Roosevelt’s Candidacy,” New York Herald Tribune, January 8, 1932, reprinted in Lippmann, Interpretations: 1931–1932, Allan Nevins, ed. (Macmillan, 1932), pp. 260, 262.

[Democratic convention, 1932]: O’Connor, pp. 255–63; Frank Freidel, Franklin Roosevelt: The Triumph (Little, Brown, 1956), ch. 20; Michael Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (W. W. Norton, 1980), pp. 69–73.

555 [McAdoo’s announcement]: quoted in Burns, p. 137.

“Once I Built a Railroad, Made It Run”

[Emerson on the rails]: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Young American,” in Emerson, Nature: Addresses and Lectures (Houghton, Mifflin, 1903; reprinted by AMS Press, 1979), pp. 363–95, quoted at p. 364.

[American Locomotive sales]: William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream (Little, Brown, 1974). p. 34.

[Decline in rail employees]: Thor Hultgren, American Transportation in Prosperity and Depression (National Bureau of Economic Research, 1948), p. 179 (Table 54).

[Decline in freight tonnage]: ibid., p. 355 (Table 141).

[Decline in dividends]: ibid., p. 336 (Chart 124).

[Decline in GNP]: Historical Statistics of the United States, op. cit., part 2, p. 224 (Series F 1–5).

[Decline in auto production]: Hultgren, p. 350 (Table 136).

[Decline in oil production]: ibid, p. 353 (Table 140).

[Decline in residential building contracts]: Warren, op. cit., p. 236.

555 [Decline in farm income]: McElvainc, Down and Out, op. cit., p. 27.

[Decline in steel production]: Manchester, p. 34.

[Decline in retail sales]: see Lynd and Lynd, op. cit., p. 529 (Table 1).

556 [Families evicted, 1932]: Manchester, p. 33.

[Businesses at home]: Lynd and Lynd, p. 20.

[Middle-class economies]: Bird, op. cit., pp. 273–81.

[Union and nonunion wage decline]: Bernstein, op. cit., p. 320.

[Diet of Kentucky miner]: quoted in “In the Driftway,” The Nation, vol. 134, no. 3492 (June 8, 1932), p. 651.

[Rouge demonstration]: Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Decline and Rebirth, 1933–1962 (Scribner’s, 1962), pp. 32–34; Keith Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford (Rinehart, 1948), ch. 18.

[Bird on transients]: Bird, p. 67.

[“They have to take you in”]: Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man,” in Frost, Selected Poems (Henry Holt, 1923), pp. 13–20, quoted at p. 18.

[“Professional bums” among transients]: statement of Elliot Chapman, Hearings of a Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Manufactures, Relief for Unemployed Transients, 72nd Congress, 2nd Session, January 13–25, 1933 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1933), p. 112.

[Mayors on treatment of transients]: “Digest” of mayors’ responses, in ibid., quoted at pp. 192, 201, 190, 188, 189, 191, 194, 198, respectively.

557 [“Transients, do not apply”]: testimony of Professor A. W. McMillen, in ibid., p. 45.

[Open letter, September 1932]: Aaron, op. cit., pp. 196–98, quoted at p. 197.

[Wilson’s firsthand observations]: see Wilson, The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (Scribner’s, 1932); Wilson, The American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties (Doubleday, 1938); Wilson, The Thirties, Leon Edel, ed. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), pp. 208–14, quoted at pp. 208, 212.

[“Insist on working even without pay”]: quoted in Bird, p. 76.

[“We cannot squander ourselves into prosperity”]: quoted in Hoover, Memoirs: The Great Depression, op. cit., p. 134.

[Ford on vagabonds]: quoted in Manchester, p. 22.

558 [MacArthur deputy’s proposal]: Brig. Gen. George Van Horn Moseley, quoted in Burner, Hoover, op. cit., p. 307.

[Bonus Army]: ibid., pp.309–12; Roger Daniels, The Bonus March (Greenwood Publishing, 1971); Bernstein, ch. 13; Hoover, Memoirs: The Great Depression, pp. 225–32.

[“A polyglot mob”]: F. Trubee Davison, quoted in Warren, p. 235.

[Stokes on Bonus March]: quoted in Bernstein, p. 454.

[“Use all humanity”]: quoted in Daniels, p. 165.

[“The President was pleased”]: quoted in Bernstein, p. 454.

559 [“Brother, Can You Spare a Dimef”]: lyrics by E. Y. Harburg, music by Jay Gorney, in 100 Best Songs of the 20’s and 30’s (Harmony Books, 1973), pp. 271–74. The song was sung and popularized by Rudy Vallee.

Index

A  |  B  |  C  |  D  |  E

F  |  G  |  H  |  I  |  J

K  |  L  |  M  |  N  |  O

P  |  Q  |  R  |  S  |  T

U  |  V  |  W  |  Y  |  Z

abolitionists, and 15th Amendment, 61–2

Abrams, Jacob, 504–5

Acheson, Edward, 290

Adams, Charles Francis, 32, 73, 207

Adams, Charles Francis, Jr., 73, 75, 85–6, 115

and railroads, 73, 93, 176

Adams, Henry, vii, 92, 168, 169, 304–6, 326

Democracy, 169, 192, 194

Adams, John, 73, 153

Adams, Samuel Hopkins, 348

Adamson Act (1916), 421

Addams, Jane, 123, 371–2

as pacifist, 412, 483

and Progressive party, 419

and settlement-house movement, 270–1, 275–7, 278

advertising; 518–19

AFL, see American Federation of Labor

Agassiz, Louis, 81, 86–7

Age of Innocence, The (Wharton), 321, 322 agrarian revolt, 180–91

agriculture:

in California, 99

and Civil War, 20–1

in Depression, 543

machinery and tools for, 81, 129

see also farmers

Ahlstrom, Sydney, 516

airplanes, 288, 290

in World War I, 436

Alaska, 220, 340

Alcott, Louisa May, 30, 261

Aldrich, Nelson, 330, 335, 336, 357

Algeciras Conference (1905), 342

Alger, Horatio, Jr., 159–60

Algerism (rags-to-riches myth), 143, 144–5, 159–60

Carnegie and, 102, 161; and McKinley, 234

Dempsey and, 532

and economic concentration, 390

Frick and, 224

Irish immigrants and, 259–60

La Follette and, 360

and political machines (urban), 265

aliens, deportation and repression of, 439–40

Allen, Frederick Lewis, 510, 544–5

Altgeld, John P., 227, 276

Amador, Manuel, 339

Amalgamated Iron, Steel and Tin Workers, 224–6

Amendments to U.S. Constitution:

1st, 504, 505

13th, 37, 48, 60

14th, 49, 50, 53, 60, 203–4, 505

15th, 60–2, 204

18th (Prohibition), 441

19th (“Susan B. Anthony”), 444–7

Bill of Rights, 504, 523

American Federation of Labor (AFL), 178–80, 282

and Depression, 551–2

membership of (1920s), 534

and Pullman boycott (1894), 227

and SLP, 396

and women, 280

American Railway Union (ARU), 227

American Woman Suffrage Association, 209

Amiens (France), battles for, 432, 433, 436

ammunition production (World War I), 430

Amory, Cleveland, 115

Ampère, André Marie, 83

Andrews, Stephen P., 125

Anthony, Susan B., 125, 204, 209

antitrust movement, 182, 216

Brandeis and, 391–2

of Roosevelt (T.), 332–3, 349–52

of Wilson, 389–91

Appleton, Thomas Gold, 87

Appomattox, Va., 35

Arabic pledge (World War I), 415, 417, 422

arbitration of labor disputes, 233–4; see also strikes

Aristotle, 142

armed forces, American:

in World War I, 417, 431–2, 433–4, 435–7;

mobilization of, 427–30;

return of, to society, 469

see also Confederate Army; Navy; Union Army; veterans

Armory Show (1913), 311–12

Armour, Philip D., 113–14

income of, 140

arms talks (20th century), 493–5

Arthur, Chester Alan, 223

arts, visual, 308–13

“Ash Can School” of painting, 310

Asquith, Herbert, 409

Asselineau, Roger, 193

assembly line, 479–80, 482

Astor, Caroline Schermerhorn, 117–18

Atkinson, Edward, 156

Atlanta, Ga., 29

automation, 479–80, 482; see also industry: machinery for

automobiles, 288, 290

manufacture of, 479–80

Babbitt (Lewis), 514, 535

Baer, George F., 333

Baker, Newton D., 554

Baker, Ray Stannard, 455, 474

Baltzell, E. Digby, 116

Bancroft, George, 101

banks and banking:

and Alliance Exchanges, 189

and China, 402

in Civil War period, 18

crises/failures of: 1873, 75; 1893, 226

and farmers, 129

federal control of (20th century), 387

private, 88–90

and World War I fiscal aftermath, 496, 497

see also “money trust”

Banning, Phineas, 99

Barker, Jacob, 88

Bartholdi, Frédéric Auguste, 152, 153–4

Barton, Bruce, 516

Barton, Clara, 50

Baruch, Bernard, 428–9

baseball, 529–30, 531

battles, of Civil War:

Bull Run, 6, 7

Chancellorsville, 10

Chattanooga, 12

Chickamauga, 12

Fredericksburg, 8

Gettysburg, 5, 11–12

Missionary Ridge, 12

pattern of, for soldiers, 24–5

Vicksburg, 9–10, 12

of the Wilderness, 14

battles, of Spanish-American War:

Manila Bay, 238

San Juan Hill, 239

battles, of World War I:

Amiens, 432, 433, 436

Argonne Forest, 437

Belleau Wood, 433, 434

Château-Thierry, 433, 434

Marne, 413, 436

St. Mihiel, 436–7

battleships, 223

number limited (1921), 493–5

Beard, Charles Austin, 19, 422, 507

Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, An, 299–301

Beard, Mary, 507

Becker, Stephen, 519

Beecher, Catharine, 121, 122, 124

Beecher, Harriet, see Stowe, Harriet Beecher

Beecher, Henry Ward, 124–7, 161, 162

“beef trust,” 332

Bell, Alexander Graham, 83–4, 110, 287

Bell, Sidney, 400

Bellamy, Edward, 164–5

Equality, 164–6

and George (H.) and Lloyd, compared, 167–8

Looking Backward, 164, 166–7, 189

Belleau Wood (France), battle of, 433, 434

Bellows, Henry W., 26

Belmont, August, Jr., 228

Belmont, Perry, 162

Benedict, Michael Les, 61

Bennett, Arnold, 256

Bent, Silas, 518, 519

Berger, Victor, 283, 397, 522

Berkman, Alexander, 225, 275, 283

Bernstein, Irving, 551

Bernstorff, Johann von, 415, 424

Bessemer converter, 79–80

Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 407

bicycling, 287–8

Biddle, Nicholas, 88

Big Four (capitalists), 95, 99–100

and railroad regulation, 215–16

Big Four (democratic leaders), 451

Billings, Josh, 185

Bill of Rights, 504, 523

Bird, Caroline, 556

Birmingham, Stephen, 145, 146

birth control, 123, 279

Birth of a Nation (Griffith), 524

black Americans:

abuse of, 50; lynching, 149, 234, 285

attitudes of, toward freedom from slavery, 38–41

in cities, 147–8, 247

civil and political rights of: “Black Codes,” 47; Democratic party and, 367; Grant and, 66; Johnson and, 46; national commitment to, 60; Republicans and, 48–9, 52, 206

in Civil War, 22

as cowhands, 149

in Depression, 546

education of, 63–4, 68, 133–4

as farmers (in South), 131–4; and

populists, 188

labor unions and, 176, 179

and land distribution, 64–5, 70

leadership of, 284–5

and Liberia, 288

migration of: to northern cities, 136–7, 149, 197, 247, 431; westward, 149

music of, 288, 509

as officeholders, in South, 62

in Ohio, 197

and political parties (participation): populists, 188, 189, 224; Progressives, 375; Republicans, 206, 490–1; Socialists, 398

Roosevelt (T.) and, 375

in South: and election (presidential) of 1876, 202; as farmers, 131–4; and land distribution, 64–5, 70; life of, during Reconstruction, 67–71; as officeholders, 62; and People’s Party, 188, 189

in sports, 528, 529, 530

suffrage of: black leaders and, 65; in District of Columbia, 53; election of 1868 and, 59; 15th Amendment and, 60–2; Johnson and, 46, 55; Northerners and, 59, 60; Reconstruction Act and, 53; Republicans and, 48, 55, 59; thwarting of, 65–6

Wilson and, 418

see also freed people; slavery; slaves

“Black Codes,” 47

“Black Thursday” (Oct. 1929), 542

Blaine, James G., 52, 210–11, 221

Blair, Frank P., Jr., 59

Blake, Lyman Reed, 15

Bland, Richard (“Silver Dick”), 228, 231

Bland-Allison Act (1878), 213

Bliss, George, 89–90

Bliss, Gen. Tasker, 448

Bloor, Ella Reeve, 398

Blum, John, 334

Boas, Franz, 290

Bohr, Niels, 290

Bonadio, Felice, 198

bonus marchers (1932), 558

boom-and-bust economy:

post-Civil War, 74–5

1880s, 192

Booth, Edwin, 101

Booth, John Wilkes, 36

Borah, E. William, 459, 493, 501

bosses, party, 263–7, 268

Boston:

cultural investments in, 87, 115–16

intellectual tradition of, 167–70

investors from, 85–8

old wealth in, 114–16

subway in, 251

Boston & Albany Railroad, 86

Bourne, Randolph, 314, 323, 513

Bowen, Francis, 155

Bowman, Isaiah, 434

Boyer, Paul, 266

Bradley, Joseph, 201, 204

Bradwell. Myra, 261–2

Bragg, Gen. Braxton, 12

Brandegee, Frank, 454

Brandeis, Louis:

and Holmes, 296, 504, 505, 506

as Supreme Court justice, 419, 504, 505, 506

and Wilson, 375, 385–6, 391–2; Supreme Court nomination, 418–19

bridges, 18, 80–1, 110

Brisbane, Arthur, 521, 541

Britain, see Great Britain

Brock, William R., 54

Broesamle, John, 386

Brooks, Van Wyck, 168, 314

Broun, Heywood, 521

Brown, A. Theodore, 265

Brown, J. R., 79

Browning, Orville H., 42

“Brownsville affair,” 353

Bryan, Charles W., 500

Bryan, William Jennings:

and Democratic party, 366, 369

and disarmament, 494

and League of Nations, 469

in presidential elections: 1896, 229–33, 235; 1900, 241; 1908, 367

and Scopes trial, 517

as Secretary of State, 385, 400, 401, 415; and World War I, 411, 413–15, 417, 422

in Spanish-American War, 238

and Wilson, 370, 372, 414–15, 417, 420

Bryant, William Cullen, 207

Bryce, Lord James, 63, 216, 252, 298

buildings, 114, 251–2

homes of the wealthy, 114, 118–19, 141

railroad terminals, 249

see also housing

Bullitt, William, 365, 453, 456, 464

Bull Moosers, see Progressive Party

Bull Run (Va.), battles of, 6, 7

Bunau-Varilla, Philippe, 338, 339

Burbank, Luther, 81

Burgess, John W., 156

Burleson, Albert S., 388

Burner, David, 500, 544

Burroughs, John, 192

Burroughs, William S., 108

Burton, Harriet, 123

business:

Brandeis and, 375

combinations, 106–7, 390, 481; see also antitrust movement; monopoly

and education, 513

failures of (in stock-market crash), 543

government and: laissez-faire policy, 91, 154–6, 159; 1920s, 484–92, 503, 532–3; in World War I, 428–9

1920s, 484–92

optimism of (mid-19th century), 73–4

and peace movement (1920s), 493

Republican party and, 484, 486–7, 491, 499, 503, 558

Roosevelt (T.) and, 329–30, 331–4, 349–52

Wilson and, 375, 389–91

see also banks and banking; industry Butler, Gen. Ben, 32, 57

Butler, Nicholas Murray, 300

Byrnes, James F., 505

cable cars, 250

California:

Chinese immigrants in, 100–1

Japanese immigrants in, 343–4

19th century, 97–9, 101–2

railroad regulation by, 215–16

see also San Francisco

Calumet and Hecla (C & H), 86–7

campaigns, political, see elections and campaigns, congressional; elections and campaigns, presidential; elections and campaigns, state

canal, across Central America, 222, 337–40, 343

Cannon, Joseph, 331, 349, 357

Cantor, Milton, 396

Capital (Marx), 75, 112

capitalism:

creativity of, 90

Russian school textbook on, 539–40, 547

Capone, Al, 531

Capper-Volstead Act (1922), 490

Carlyle, Thomas, 193

Carnegie, Andrew, 102–5

early life of, 102–3

fortune of, 104

Homestead (Pa.) steel works of, 224–6

on imperialism (American), 240

income of, 140

literary friendships of, 105

and McKinley, 234–5, 241

newspapers (British) of, 105

philanthropy of, 107

and rags-to-riches myth, 102, 161

and Spencer, 161, 162

Triumphant Democracy, 223–4, 235

and unionism, 225

“carpetbaggers,” 62, 63

cars, 288, 290, 479–80

caste system, American, 145–51, 192; see also classes (social) and class system

Catt, Carrie Chapman, 445, 446, 493

Cecil, Lord Robert, 452

Central America, 222, 337–40, 343; see also Mexico; Nicaragua; Panama Central Pacific Railway, 93–6

Chancellorsville (Va.), battle of, 10

Chandler, Zachariah, 42

Chapin, Chester W., 87

Chaplin, Charlie, 525, 526

Chase, Salmon Portland, 4, 18, 31, 32, 89

as Chief Justice, 54, 198

Château-Thierry (France), battle of, 433, 434

Chattanooga (Tenn.), battle of, 12

checks and balances:

and black suffrage, 69

and “compact majority,” 499, 503

and impeachment, 55

Radical Republicans and, 51, 54

Roosevelt (T.) and, 352

and Treaty of Versailles ratification, 468

Chesnut, Mary, 12, 30

Cheyenne Indians, 149–50

Chicago:

black population of, 136, 247

housing in, 253

Hull-House, 270, 275–6

industrialization of, 248

Italian immigrants and padroni in, 258

plan to re-design, 271

Pullman’s model city near, 141–2, 227

stockyards in, 111

upper classes in, 113–14, 119

World’s Columbian Exposition (1893) at, 271, 287

Chickamauga (Ga.), battle of, 12

Child, Lydia Maria, 62, 217

children:

in labor force: and school attendance, 512; Supreme Court and, 489; wages of, 140; Wilson and, 418, 419

urban conditions of, 137–9

China, and U.S., 400–2, 405, 495

trade relations, 498

Chinese immigrants: ca. 1900, 247

as railroad builders, 94; strike for pay increase, 95–6

in San Francisco, 100–1

Choate, Joseph, 269

Christie, Howard Chandler, 439

churches, Protestant, 515–17

and Smith’s presidential candidacy, 502–3

Churchill, Winston, 288

Churchill, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer, 408

Cigarmakers International Union, 174, 178

cities:

beautification of, 271

buildings and architecture in, 251–2

conditions in, 255–62; for blacks, 147–8; for immigrants, 247; progressives and, 245–6; reform efforts and, 266–75; upward mobility, 259; for working class, 136–41

elites of, 113–19

industrialization of, 247–9; implacability of, 271–2, 274, 289; specialized, 248

leadership in, 263–9, 272–4

migration to, from rural areas, 136–7, 149, 197, 247, 431

of Ohio, 196–7

parks and recreational areas in, 254

party bosses in, 263–5

population growth of, 247

reformers and, 266–75

transport in, 250–1

turn of the century, 249–55

water supply for, 253–4

City Beautiful movement, 271

Civil Rights Act (1866), 49

Civil Rights Act (1875), 66, 203

Civil War, 6–36 passim

battles, see battles, of Civil War

cost of, 17–18

economic conditions and development

in, 15–16, 17–18, 19–20

end of, 34–6

naval aspects of, 9, 29, 34

soldiers’ life in, 21–8; camp life, 23–4; food, 23; prisoners, 27–8; wounded, 25

strategy, military and economic:

Northern, 6–7, 12; Southern, 7, 11 transport in, 16–17

war supplies and production in, 15–16

Claflin, Victoria, see Woodhull, Victoria Claflin

Clark, Champ (James Beauchamp), 369, 446

classes (social) and class system, 111–51

Aristotle on, 142

and democracy, 192

disparity among, 140, 142–3

farmers, 127–36

fortified by industrial cities, 262

middle, 142–3; women of, 119–27

relations among, 141; in Bellamy’s Equality, 165–6

in sports, 527–8

upper, 113–19

war between, feared, 224

working, see workers

Clayton Antitrust Act, 389

Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, 337

“Cleburne demands,” 190

Clemenceau, Georges, 450–1, 456

Clemens, Samuel Langhome, see Twain, Mark

Cleveland, Ohio, 196, 197, 273–4

Cleveland, Grover:

death of (1908), 367

economic conservatism of, 206

as President: economic policy, 226, 228; election of (1892), 210–11; foreign policy of, 221; and tariff reduction, 213, 226

Cleveland, Henry W. S., 254

coal industry, 78, 333, 490

Cochran, Thomas C, 87

Coletta, Paolo, 414

college students (1920s), 513–15

Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), 271, 287

combinations, industrial, 106–7, 390, 481

see also antitrust movement; monopoly

Committee on Public Information, 439

“Commonweal Army of Christ,” 226

Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 75, 90, 174, 259, 308

Communist Party, 501, 552, 557

communitarianism, 167, 173

“compact” majority, see majority, compact

competition:

American faith in, 216, 217

Brandeis on, 392

vs. combination (Rockefeller on), 106–7

industrialists and, 162

Marx on, 82

see also antitrust movement; monopoly

Comstock, Anthony, 126, 288–9

“Comstock” law (1873), 123

concentration of power:

economic: Brandeis on, 392; as challenge to democracy, 389–95, 532–8; Croly on, 393; Progressive Party on, 374; Roosevelt (T.) and, 331–3, 349–52; Wilson and, 389–91

political: Founding Fathers and, 487–8, 499; Republican (20th century), 487–91, 499, 503, 558; in Supreme Court, 506

Confederate Army, 14–15, 22–23, 29

surrender of, 35, 36

Confederate Congress, 14, 18

Confederate States of America:

amnesty and oaths for, 46, 65, 70

cost of war to, 17

defeat and dissolution of, 34–6

economic conditions in, 15–16, 17–18

foreign recognition of, 31–2

military strategy of, 7, 11

morale of, 12, 22–3, 29

war production in, 16

Conference for Progressive Political Action (CPPA), 500

Congressional Government (Wilson), 386

Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, 445

Conkling, Roscoe, 204

conscription, military:

in Civil War, 14–15, 23

in World War 1, 427–8

Constitution (U.S.), 44, 299–301

see also Amendments to U.S. Constitution

consumers and consumerism, 281

Conwell, Russell, 159

Cooke, Jay, 88–9, 198

Coolidge, Calvin:

character and personality of, 485, 492

and Lindbergh, 510

nominated as Vice-President, 473

as President: accession, 492; and business, 487; economic policy of, 491

Cooper, John Milton, 422

Cooper, Peter, 208

Cooper, Thomas, 82

cooperatives, agricultural, 183, 188–9

“Copperheads,” 8, 33

copper mining, 86–7

corruption, 265, 266–7, 268

in sports, 531

Cortelyou, George, 350

cotton, 131, 133, 134–5

courts, military, 49, 54

cowhands, 148–9

Cox, Jacob, 198

Cox, James, 469, 473–4, 553

Coxey, Jacob, 226

Crédit Mobilier scandal, 93

Creel, George, 439, 448–9

crime (1920s), 531, 549

Crocker, Charles, 95–6

Croly, Herbert, 392–3, 419

Cromwell, William, 338, 339

crop lien system, 135–6, 181, 189

Crozier, Gen. William, 427

Cuba, 219, 220, 403

war of independence, 235–40

Cubism, 311, 312

Cumbler, John, 137

Curie, Marie, 290

currency:

Civil War period, 18

1870s, 213–14

1890s, 228

populists and (subtreasury plan), 187, 188, 189

Custer, George Armstrong, 218–19

Czolgosz, Leon, 241

Dallek, Robert, 343

Dana, Charles A., 169

Dana, Richard Henry, 32

Daniels, Josephus, 385

Darrow, Clarence, 276, 517

Darwin, Charles, 157

Darwinism, Social:

businessmen and, 162

Gompers and, 180

popularity of, 159

pragmatism and, 297

Republican party and, 503

Roosevelt (T.) and, 326, 340–1

Spencerism, 157–8

and workers, 173

Daugherty, Harry, 471, 472–3, 490, 491–2, 493

Davenport, Thomas, 83

David, Henry, 178

Davis, Allen, 277

Davis, David, 175, 201

Davis, Jefferson, 29

Adams (C. F.) on, vs. Lincoln, 32

on Confederacy, 12, 36

Johnson and, 52

military strategy of, 7

Davis, John W., 500, 553

Dawes, Charles, 491, 497

Dawes Act (1887), 217

Debs, Eugene, 227, 283, 332, 397

as presidential candidate: 1904, 368; 1912, 368, 370–1, 372, 374, 377, 383

tried for sedition, 440–1; Supreme Court on, 504

Declaration of Independence, 173

De Leon, Daniel, 173, 283, 396, 397

Delmonico’s (restaurant), 90, 161–2, 211

del Ray, Joaquin, 239

democracy:

Adams (H.) on, 192

Brandeis on, 392

and economic concentration, 391, 392

industrial, 392, 421

Weyl on, 394

Whitman (W.) on, 192

Wilson vs. Roosevelt on, 373–4

Democracy (Adams), 169, 192, 194

Democracy, the, see Democratic party Democratic party:

conservatism (economic) of, 206

conventions of: 1864, 33; 1896, 229–31; 1912, 369–70; 1916, 420; 1920, 473–4; 1924, 499–500; 1932, 554–5

differences and divisions within: 19th century, 206–7; 20th century, 366–8, 500; in Depression, 553–4

Republican rivalry, 205–6, 227–8, 233

in South: dominance of, 67, 366–7; andHayes election (1876), 201–2; 1920s, 553; and populists, 187–8

weakness of, as “loyal opposition,” 503, 534, 553–4

see also elections and campaigns

Dempsey, Jack, 530, 531, 532

Depcw, Chauncey, 358

depressions:

post-Civil War, 74–5

1893, 226

“Great,” 543–7, 555–7; measures in response to, 547–55

deserters (in Civil War), 8, 15, 29

Destler, Chester, 166

Detroit, Mich., 272–3

Devlin, Lord, 412, 425, 426

Dewey, Comm. George, 238

Diggins, Jack, 536

Diggs, Annie, 185

Dingell tariff bill (1897), 234

diplomatic corps, strengthening of, 222

disarmament, 493–5

distribution of wealth, 140, 142–3, 192

Dix, Dorothea, 27

Dobriansky, Lev, 304

domestic science, 121, 261

domestic servants, 121, 139–40

Dominican Republic, 403, 498

Donahue, Peter, 259–60

Donald, David, 32, 206

Donnelly, Ignatius, 167, 189, 241

Dooley, Mr., 222, 287, 330, 345, 354, 363

Doolittle. James R., 51

Dos Passos, John, 536–7, 538, 552

Douglass, Frederick, 208, 234

draft, military:

in Civil War: Confederate, 14–15, 23; Union, 14-15

in World War I, 427–8

Dreiser, Theodore, 316–19, 322–3

Drew, Daniel, 91–2

Dreyfus Affair, 450

drugs, labeling of, 348

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 285, 522

Dunne, Finley Peter (Mr. Dooley), 222, 287, 330, 345, 354, 363

Durant, Thomas C, 96

Duryea, Charles and Frank, 290

Eads, Capt. James, 80–1, 103

Eakins, Thomas, 309

Early, Gen. Jubal A., 28

Eastman, George, 81

Eastman, Max, 313–14

Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, An (Beard), 299–301

economic power, concentrated:

Brandeis on, 392

as challenge to democracy, 389–95, 532–8

Croly on, 393

Progressive party on, 374

Roosevelt (T.) and, 331–3, 349–52

Wilson and, 389–91

economic situation and conditions:

1850s, 20, 73, 74

Civil War period, 15–16, 17–18, 19–20

late 1860s, 73–5

1893, 226

in World War I, 428–31

1920s, 540–1; see also depressions: “Great”

Edgerton, John E., 548–9

Edison, Thomas Alva, 82, 84–5, 108–9, 198, 251

education:

for blacks, 63–4, 68, 133–4

business and, 513

1920s, 511–15

and technological innovation, 82

eight-hour workday:

campaign for, 176, 177, 178

for railroad workers, 421, 429

Ekirch, Roger, 387

elections and campaigns, congressional:

1866, 49, 51

1868, 59

1874, 67

1878, 208

1888–94, 227–8

1890, 186

1918, 454

1924, 501

1930, 551

elections and campaigns, presidential:

1864, 303

1868, 58–9, 194–5

1872, 207

1876, 67, 200, 201–2

1884, 210–11, 224

1892, 190, 225–6

1896, 229–33, 367

1900, 241

1904, 338–4, 368

1908, 367, 368

1912, 359–63, 370–7

1916, 419–21

1920, 470–4

1924, 499–501

1928, 487, 502–3

1932, 554–5, 558

elections and campaigns, state:

1890, 186

1892, 190

electricity, 82, 83, 289

alternating current standardized, 108

Elements of Political Economy (Wayland), 155

elevated transit lines (“els”), 250

elevator, electric, 108, 251

elite classes, 113–19

Ellis, L. Ethan, 492

Elmer Gantry (Lewis), 536

Emancipation Proclamation (1863), 8, 21–2, 34

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 17–18

on individual liberty, 153

on the West, 96–7

Emery, Sarah, 185

employment, see children: in labor force; unemployment; women: in labor force

Enforcement Act (1870), 66

Engels, Friedrich, 75–6

Communist Manifesto, 75, 90, 174, 259, 308

German Ideology, The, 75, 260

and IWW, 174

England, see Great Britain

Equality (Bellamy), 164–6

Erdman Act (1898), 234, 488–9

Erie Railroad, 91–3

Espionage Act (1917), 440

ethnic/racial caste system, 145–51; see also classes (social) and class system

Evarts, William M., 57, 161

Everett, Edward, 4, 5

family size, 122–3

Faraday, Michael, 83

Far East, 221, 495

see also China; Japan; Korea; Philippines

Farley, James A., 554

farmers, 127–36

in Depression, 543–4

Harding Administration and, 490

indebtedness of, 129, 130, 543

political organizations of, 180–91, 209

radio and, 523

southern; 131–6; black, 131–4; white, 134–6

western, 129–31, 181

wives of, 127–8

see also agriculture

Farmers’ Alliance, 182–4; see also National Farmers’ Alliance and Cooperative Union

farm machinery, 81, 129

farm prices, stabilization of, 490

Farragut, Adm. David, 34, 51

fashions, for women, 287, 289

Fass, Paula, 513

Federal Reserve system, 387–8, 391, 418

Federal Trade Commission, 391, 418

Federal Trade Commission Act (1914), 389

Federation of Women’s Clubs, 262

Field, Marshall, 114

Field, Stephen J., 204

Filler, Louis, 347–8

films, 524–7

Fish, Hamilton, 220

Fisk, James, 92, 93

Fiske.John, 161, 162, 295

Fitzgerald, Annie, 280

Fitzgerald, Francis Scott, 483, 537

Fitzgerald, John “Honey Fitz,” 385

five-day workweek, 144

Flagg, James Montgomery, 439

Flexner, Eleanor, 445

Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley, 323, 324

Flynt, Josiah, 345

Foch, Gen. Ferdinand, 433, 437

Foner, Philip, 236

food:

labeling of, 348

shortages of, after World War I, 469

in World War 1, 414, 428

football, 528–9

Foraker, Joseph B., 206, 237

Forbes, John Murray, 87

Ford, Ford Madox, 318

Ford, Henry, 418, 480–4, 544

character and personality of, 483

control by, 480–2

on vagabonds, 557

and Wilson, 483

and workers, 481–2

foreign affairs:

corporations and, 222

late 19th century, 219–22

in Lincoln Administration, 31–2

in McKinley Administration, 236–41

1920s, 492–6; economic aspects, 496–9

in Roosevelt (T.) Administration, 336–45

in Wilson Administration, 399–406, 418

see also League of Nations; World War I; and specific countries

Foster, William Z., 552

Founding Fathers, see Framers of Constitution

Fourier, Charles, 173

Fourteenth Amendment, 49, 50, 53, 60, 303–4, 505

Framers of Constitution, 204, 301

and protection of minority rights, 487–8, 499, 503, 504

France:

and Germany (after World War I), 450, 456, 496, 497

and World War I, 407–8, 427–8

Frank, Waldo, 314

Frankfurter, Felix, 419, 434, 506, 537–8

Franklin, Benjamin, 154

Fredericksburg (Va.), battle of, 8, 25

Freedmen’s Bureau, 49

freedom, see liberty

freed people:

abuse of, 50

attitudes of, 38–41

education of, 63–4

and land distribution, 64–5

life of, in South, 67–71

political and civil rights of, 46, 47, 48–9, 52; see also black Americans: suffrage of

free love, 126

Frémont, Gen. John C, 32

Freud, Sigmund, 124, 307

on Wilson, 365

Frick, Henry Clay, 78, 103, 275, 350

and Homestead (Pa.) violence, 224–6

home of (“Clayton”), 141

and League of Nations, 458

Frost, Robert, 556

furnishing merchants, 135–6, 181

Galbraith, John Kenneth, 542

Gardener, Helen, 446

Gardner, Isabella Stewart (Mrs. Jack), 115

Garfield, James A., 52, 198–9

Garland, Hamlin, 288

Garraty, John, 107, 176

Garrison, Lindley M., 385

Gary, Elbert H., 350

Gates, William B., 86

General Managers Association, 227

George, Alexander and Juliette, 365, 374

George, Henry, 101, 162–3

and Bellamy and Lloyd, compared, 167–8

Progress and Poverty, 163

George, Henry, Jr., 402

German Ideology, The (Marx and Engels), 75, 260

Germany, in World War I, 407, 423–4, 432–4

reparations, 496–7

U.S and, 424–6, 433–4, 435

Geronimo (Apache leader), 218, 219

Gettysburg (Pa.), battle of, 5, 11–12

Gettysburg Address (Lincoln), 3–6, 557

Gibbs, Josiah Willard, 81, 290

Gibson, Charles Dana, 287

Gies, Joseph and Frances, 110

Gillette, William, 69

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 123, 124, 442

Girard, Stephen, 88

Gitlow, Benjamin, 505

Glaab, Charles, 265

Glad, Paul, 229

Gladden, Washington, 167

Glass, Carter, 387

Glynn, Martin, 420

Godkin, Edwin Lawrence, 70, 159, 207, 269

Goldman, Emma, 275, 283–4

Goldman, Eric, 346

gold mining, 97

gold rush, 218, 259

golf, 529

Gompers, Samuel, 179–80, 280, 282

and Pullman boycott (1894), 227

on unemployment insurance, 551

Gooch, Frank Austin, 289

Goodwyn, Lawrence, 180, 187

Gore, Thomas, 417

Gould, Jay, 177, 182, 211, 214

and “Erie War,” 92, 93

Gould, Lewis, 287

government:

influence of, on daily lives, 19

laissez-faire policy of (economic), 91, 154–6, 159; and labor unions, 180; Spencer on, 157–8

role of, in Depression, 548–9; direct relief by, 549, 551

government, urban, 265

Graham, Otis, 553

“Grangers,” 209

Grant, Ulysses Simpson:

and black rights, 66

in Civil War, 8–10, 13–14

and Johnson, 51, 56

and Lee, 13–14, 28–9, 35

and Lincoln, 13

as President: election of, 58–9; foreign policy of, 220; nomination of, 194–5

and Reconstruction, 58–9

world tour by, 220

Gray, Harold, 519

Great Britain:

and Civil War (U.S.), 31–2, 220

and Washington Conference (1921), 493–5

and World War I, 408

Great Southwest Strike (1886), 182

“Great White Fleet,” 34

Greeley, Horace, 207, 210

Green, William, 534, 552

green areas, urban, 254

Greenback (or Greenback Labor) party, 208

Greene, Theodore, 160

Greenleaf, Halbert, 81

Greenwich Village, New York City, 306–8

Grey, Sir Edward, 409, 422

Griffith, D. W., 518, 524, 525

Grimké, Sarah and Angelina, 204

Guam, 240

Guest, Edgar, 482

Gutman, Herbert, 111, 143

Hague Conference (1907), 342

Haig, Gen. Sir Douglas, 426

Haiti, 403, 418

Hall, Asaph, 81

Hall-Mills murder trial, 518

Hallowell, Col. James, 185

Hamilton, Alice, 275, 276

Hammond, Bray, 18

Hammond, William A., 27

Hancock, Winfield, 210

Handlin, Oscar, 503

Hanna, Mark, 198, 229, 231–2, 234

and Roosevelt (T.), 330, 334

Harbaugh, William, 334

Harding, Warren Gamaliel, 363, 459

on America as “business country,” 486

character and personality of, 471, 484

death of, 491–2

as President, 484–5; and blacks, 490–1; economic policy of, 491; and farmers, 490; foreign policy of, 492–5; nomination of, 471–3; and Supreme Court, 488

Harriman, Edward H., 350, 401

Harrison, Benjamin, 216, 217, 226

harrow, 81

Harte, Bret, 96, 101

Hartt, Rollin, 195, 197

Haupt, Herman, 17

Havighurst, Walter, 196

Hawaii, 221, 240, 400

Hay, John, 170, 198, 337–8

Hayes, Rutherford B., 198, 199–200

election of, 67, 201–2

Haymarket Massacre (1886), 177

Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, 338

Hays, Will H., 527

Haywood, William D. (“Big Bill”), 282–3, 323–4, 397–8

Hearn, Lafcadio, 221

Hearst, William Randolph, 235–6, 369, 507

against League of Nations, 458

and Roosevelt’s nomination (1932), 554–5

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 76

Henri, Robert, 310, 311

Henry, Joseph, 83

Henry, O. (William Sidney Porter), 346

Hepburn Act (1906), 335–6

heroes, athletic, 528–30

Hicks, Granville, 536

Higginson, Henry Lee, 87, 385

high-rise buildings, 251–2

high schools, 511–12

Hillquit, Morris, 397

Hitchcock, Gilbert, 461

Hoar, George, 68, 240

hobos and vagabonds, 556–7, 558–9

Hobson, John Atkinson, 409

Hofstadter, Richard, 158, 245, 298, 390

Holli, Melvin, 273

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 168

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 295–6

as Supreme Court justice, 489, 504–5; appointment as, 331, 335

Homer, Winslow, 309

Homestead Act (1862), 19, 37, 128

Homestead (Pa.) steel works, 224–6

Hood, Gen. John Bell, 29, 35

Hooker, Isabella Beecher, 443

Hooker, Gen. Joseph, 10, 11

Hoover, Herbert, 485

and business, 487

in Food Administration, 428

as President, 485; and Depression, 549–51; economic policy of, 496, 498–9; election of (1928), 487; foreign policy of, 496, 497–8; and stock market crash, 541, 543, 544

Hopkins, Mark (of Big Four), 95

Hopkins, Mark (Williams College president), 159

House, Col. Edward Mandell, 386

and Wilson, 386, 423, 456

and World War I, 410, 413, 416; diplomatic activities of, 422–3, 448

House-Grey Memorandum (World War I), 422–3

housekeeping manuals, 121

House of Mirth (Wharton), 321, 323

House of Morgan, see Morgan (J. P.) & Co.

housing:

construction methods for, 253

mass-produced, 253

Pullman’s model city, 142

Riis on, 141

urban, 255–6: tenements, 137–8, 141

of the wealthy, 114, 118–19, 141

Houston, David, 386–7

Howe, Irving, 146, 257

Howe, Julia Ward, 169, 209

“Battle Hymn of the Republic,” 28

Howells, William Dean, 118, 170

Howland, Eliza, 27

Huber, Richard, 160

Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 170–1, 172

Hudson, Winthrop, 515

Huerta, Gen. Victoriano, 404

Hughes, Charles Evans, 419–20, 492, 493–4, 495

as Supreme Court justice, 498

Hull-House, Chicago, 270, 275–6

Huntington, Collis P., 95, 203, 215–16

Imagism, 316

immigrants, 246–9

arrival rate of, 147

in Civil War period, 19

competition and suspicion among, 260

as domestic servants, 121

Ford and, 481–2

holidays and festivals of, 259

labor unions and, 101, 176, 179, 283

as steel workers, 141, 144

as stockyard workers, 111

suffragists and, 443

urban life of, 138, 146–7, 247, 256–8

see also aliens, deportation and repression of; Chinese immigrants; Irish immigrants; Italian immigrants; Japanese immigrants; Jews in New York; workers

Immigration Act (1924), 495

impeachment (of Pres. Johnson), 54–8

imperialism, American, 239–41, 341

incandescent lamp, 84–5

income:

disparities in, 140, 142–3, 192

wages: in Civil War period, 19; in Depression, 556; in manufacturing (1860s–1890s), 140; Ricardo’s “iron law” of, 155; of women, 19, 140, 429, 431, 489; of wealthy, 140

income tax:

1861, 18

Knights of Labor on, 176

1920s, 491

under Wilson, 387

during World War I, 439

Indians, 149–51, 217–19

Cheyennes, 149–50

civil rights of, 49, 443

newspapers of, 522

Sioux, 150

stereotyping of, 151

individualism:

economic, 154–9, 162, 207, 390

as “liberty,” 153

see also Algerism

industrialism:

protest against, 172–3; socialist, 173–5

urban, 247–9; implacability of, 271–2, 274, 289; specialized, 248

Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, “Wobblies”), 283, 397–8

and silk workers’ strike, 323

suppression of (in World War I), 440

industry:

in Civil War period, 15–16, 19

machinery for, 74, 77–85, 108, 289, 290–1, 381–2; for automobile manufacture, 479–80; for shoe manufacture, 15

in Ohio, 196–7

workers in, see workers

in World War I, 428–9

see also production; and specific industries

inflation, in Civil War period, 20

Ingham, John, 143

Innocents Abroad, The (Twain), 221

“Inquiry, The” (on peace terms, World

War I), 434, 448–9, 453

intellectual leadership:

in Boston, 169–70

with moral leadership, 274

and Reconstruction, failure of, 69–70

International Workingmen’s Association, 174

Interstate Commerce Act (1887), 214, 216

Interstate Commerce Commission, 214–15, 335, 336, 358

inventors and inventions, see agriculture: machinery and tools for; industry: machinery for; technology: innovation in

investors:

from Boston, 85–8

and innovation, 90–1

personal bankers, 88–90

Irish immigrants, 259–60

as railroad workers, 94, 96, 97

iron industry, 74, 78, 79–80

Italian immigrants, 257–8

IWW, see Industrial Workers of the World

Jackson, Helen Hunt, 217

Jackson, Gen. Thomas Jonathan (“Stonewall’), 10

Jacoby, Robin Miller, 281

Jaher, Frederic C, 87, 115

James, Alice, 123–4

James, Henry, 169–70, 221, 306

Bostonians, The, 170

Roosevelt (T.) and, 326, 327

James, William, 158, 170, 291–4, 394

Japan:

and U.S., 344, 495; on Russo-Japanese War, 341–2; trade relations, 497–8

and Washington Conference (1921), 493–5

Japanese immigrants:

and Immigration Act (1924), 495

segregation of, in California, 343–4

jazz, 509, 523

Jefferson, Thomas, 82, 156

Jenney, William Le Baron, 252

Jews in New York, 255–7

immigrant/poor, on Lower East Side, 146–7, 256–7

national origins of, 255

religious life of, 256–7

upward mobility of, 259

wealthy, 145–6

Jim Crow system, 149

jobs, see children: in labor force; unemployment; women: in labor force

Johnson, Andrew:

death of, 58

early life of, 43

impeachment of, 54–8

later career of, 58

nomination of, as Vice-President, 32

as President, 43–8, 50–8

and Reconstruction, 45, 50–1, 55

and Republican party, 43–4, 45, 52–3, 55

and Southern leaders, 46–7, 52

Johnson, Hiram, 372, 419, 460, 495, 501

Johnson, Tom L., 273–4, 345

Johnston, Gen. Joseph, 9–10, 29

Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 48, 49, 50

Jones, Capt. “Bill,” 103

Jones, Bobby, 529

Jones, Edith, see Wharton, Edith

Jones, Lucy S., 100, 101, 102

Jones, Mary Harris (“Mother”), 285–6

Jones, Samuel Milton (“Golden Rule”), 273, 274, 345

Joseph (Nez Percé chief), 218, 219

Josephson, Matthew, 203

journalism and journalists:

broadcast (radio), 522–3

and Cuban revolution, 235–6, 237

magazines: avant-garde, 313–16; laissez-faire theme in, 159: movie, 526; and reform, 345, 346–7; of success stories, 160; women’s, 120

newspapers, 518–20; black, 522; foreign-language, 522; Indian, 522; mergers and consolidation of, 519–20

1920s, 518–23

Juárez, Benito, 219–20

Judah, Theodore, 95

Julian, George W., 42–3

Jungle, The (Sinclair), 348

Kansas, 128, 149

People’s Party in, 184–7

Kazin, Alfred, 320

Kearney, Denis, 101

Keller, Morton, 45, 215

Kelley, Florence, 275, 276, 278, 281, 489

Kelley, William D., 43

Kellogg, Frank, 459, 461

Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), 495–6

Kelvin, William, 305

Kennan, George F., 453

Kennedy, Joseph P., 554–5

Kimball, W. W., 114

Kleppner, Paul, 233

Knights of Labor, 176–8, 551–2

Knox, Philander, 332, 401, 403

Knudsen, William S., 483

Kohlsaat, Herman, 461

Korea, 221

Kraditor, Aileen, 397

Kreisler, Fritz, 440

Krug, Edward, 511–12

Ku Klux Klan, 66, 203, 206, 469, 500, 509, 514

labor, see children: in labor force; women: in labor force; workers

labor disputes, 233–4, 469 see also strikes

labor unions, 175, 282–4

and blacks, 176, 179

in Civil War period, 19

and Depression, 551–2

and immigrants, 101, 176, 179, 283

and industrial democracy, 392

Marxists on, 173, 175

membership decline in (1920s), 534

and socialists, 396

Wilson and, 418

and women, 176, 179, 280, 431

and “yellow-dog” contracts, 488–9

see also Amalgamated Iron, Steel and Tin Workers; American Federation of Labor; American Railway Union; Cigarmakers’ International Union; Industrial Workers of the World; International Workingmen’s Association; National Labor Union; Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance; strikes; United Mine Workers; Western Federation of Miners

Ladd, Everett Carll, 367

La Follette, Robert, 230, 335–6

and elections: 1912, 360–1, 372; 1924, 500–1

and World War I, 425

La Guardia, Fiorello, 553

laissez-faire economics, 91, 154–6, 159

and labor unions, 180

Spencer on, 157–8

Lake, Simon, 290

Lamb, William, 182, 189

lamp, incandescent, 84–5

land, nationalizing of, 163, 167

land distribution:

in South, 64–5, 70

for western settlers, 129

Langley, Samuel, 290

Lansing, Robert, 413, 415, 421, 448, 469

Larkin, Oliver, 311, 312

lathe, automatic, 79

Lathrop, Julia, 275, 276, 277

Latin America:

U.S. investment in, 497

U.S. policy on, 221–2; under Hoover, 498; (T.) Roosevelt’s, 340 (see also Panama Canal); Wilson’s, 402–6

Lawrence. Mass., 283

Lazarus, Emma, 146, 152, 154

leadership, see intellectual leadership; moral leadership; Wilson, Woodrow: on leadership

League of Nations:

American ratification process for, 453–5 457–75; opposition to, 453, 454–5, 458–68 passim; popular referendum on (proposed), 468–9; public opinion on, 457–8, 462–3, 464; Senate and, 454–5, 458–63, 465–6; support for, 455, 457; Wilson and, 453–75

committee draws up Covenant for, 452, 453

Cox and Roosevelt (F. D.) campaign for, 474

Wilson’s plan for, 414, 449, 452, 457

Lease, Mary, 185–6

Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 192, 193

Lee, Gen. Robert E., 10–12, 35

and Grant, 13–14, 28–9, 35

surrender of, 35

Legal Tender Act (1862), 18

legislative branch, primacy of (in Reconstruction period), 51

L’Enfant, Pierre, 271

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, 409–10, 412, 425, 456

ideology of, 409–10; and Wilson’s, compared, 412

Lerner, Max, 300, 489

Lewelling, Lorenzo, 186

Lewis, Sinclair, 514, 535–6

Liberal Republican party, 207

Liberia, 288

liberty:

Brandeis and Croly on, 392–3

Carnegie and McKinley on, 234

as central American value, 153

college students on, 515

Declaration of Independence promises, 173

as economic individualism, 154–6

Farmers’ Alliance and, 190

Whitman on, 192

Wilson on, 373, 441

lighting, incandescent, 84–5

Lincoln, Abraham:

death and funeral train of, 36–7

and election of 1864, 30–3

foreign policy of, 31–2

Gettysburg Address, 3–6, 557

leadership qualities of, 31–2, 33–4

political strategy of, 31, 33

and Republican party leaders, 32, 43

war planning and strategy of, 6–7, 12

Lincoln, Daniel Waldo, 88

Lindbergh, Charles A., 388

Lindbergh, Charles A., Jr., 498, 510, 511

Link, Arthur, 388

Lippmann, Waller, 394–5, 507, 521, 533–4, 538

and Brandeis, 419

Drift and Mastery, 394, 395

on “Inquiry, The,” 434

and Lewis (S.), 536

Phantom Public, The, 533, 547

Preface to Politics, A, 394, 395

on the press, 518, 520

Public Opinion, 518, 533, 547

and Roosevelt (F. D.), 554

and Wilson, 419

Little Big Horn, battle of (1876), 218–19

Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 166, 167–8, 231

Lloyd George, David, 450, 451, 456

lobbies, political, 385

Locke, John, 155

Lodge, Henry Cabot:

as antisuffragist, 444

on Cuba, 236

and disarmament, 493–4, 495

and League of Nations, 454–5, 458–66 passim, 468

and Roosevelt (T.), 331, 359, 416; and World War I, 416

on Villa (P.), 406

and Wilson, 454, 459–60

Long, Clarence, 140

Looking Backward (Bellamy), 164, 166–7, 189

Lorant, Stefan, 141

Los Angeles, 99

Lowell, A. Lawrence, 88, 385, 419, 458

Luce, Henry, 521–2

Ludendorff, Gen. Erich, 432–7 passim

Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 308, 323

Lusitania (steamship), 415, 416

lynching, 149, 234, 285

legislation against, 491

Lynd, Robert and Helen, 511, 513

Lynn, Mass., 137

MacArthur, Gen. Douglas, 558

machines:

as heart of industrialism, 172

internal combustion engine, 110

for tunnel-making, 77–8

for urban life, 250–1

workers and, 143, 259

Wright (F. L.) on, 313

see also agriculture: machinery and tools for; industry: machinery for; technology

machine tools, 78–9

Macune, Charles, 183, 189

Madison, James, 300–1, 487, 499

magazines:

avant-garde, 313–16

laissez-faire theme in, 159

movie, 526

and reform, 345, 346–7

of success stories, 160

women’s, 120

Maguire, Tom, 260

Mahan, Capt. Alfred Thayer, 223

maids, 121, 139–40

Maine (battleship), 235, 236–7

Main Street (Lewis), 535

majority, “compact,” 487–91, 499, 503, 558

in Supreme Court, 506

majority rule, 234–5, 537

Malthus, Thomas, 155

Manifest Destiny:

under Roosevelt (T.), 341

Seward and, 220

Wilson and, 406

Manila Bay, battle of (1898), 238

Mann Act, 358

Mann-Elkins Act, 358

Mantell, Martin, 43

Man with the Hoe, The, 328

Marconi, Guglielmo, 290

Markels, Julian, 318–19

Markham, Edwin, 328

marriage (middle class), 122

Marshall, Charles C, 502

Martineau, Harriet, 155

Marx, Karl, 75–6

Capital, 75, 112

Communist Manifesto, 75, 90, 174, 259, 308

and George, Lloyd, and Bellamy, 167

German Ideology, The, 75, 260

and IWW, 174

on Johnson (A.), 52

and Veblen, compared, 303–4

Wage Labour and Capital, 82

Marxist theory:

class system, 194

industrial labor, 112, 259, 489; and class solidarity, 143, 173; proletarianization of, 260–1, 382–3; and trade unionism, 173

other socialist ideas, 174

production, 75–6

property, private, 154

technology, 76, 82, 289, 382

see also socialism

Masses, The (periodical), 313–14

mass production:

of automobiles, 179–80

Ford develops, 480, 484

of houses, 253

Maxim, Hiram, 81, 290

May, Ernest, 439

Mayer, Louis B., 526

McAdoo, William Gibbs, 385, 388, 429, 469, 473, 500, 555

McAllister, Ward, 117

McClellan, Gen. George B., 33, 205

McClure’s (periodical), 345, 346–7

McCombs, William F., 370

McCormick, Cyrus Hall, 81, 114, 222

McCormick, Fanny, 185

McCormick, Col. Robert R., 483

McCumber, Porter, 460

McKellar, Kenneth, 505

McKelvey, Blake, 248

McKinley, William, 198

death of, 241–2

as President, 234–5; election of, 231–3; foreign policy of, 236–41; nomination of, 229–30; reelection of (1900), 241

McLallin, Stephen, 185

McLemore, A. Jefferson, 417

McNary-Haugen bill (1927), 490

McPherson, Aimee Semple, 517

McPherson, James, 7, 25, 33, 63

McReynolds, James, 391

McTeague (Norris), 171–2

Meade, Gen. George Gordon, 11

Meat Inspection Act (1906), 348

Mellon, Andrew William, 458, 485–6

and Depression, 550

on education, 513

as Secretary of State, 486, 491, 493, 496–7

Mencken, Henry Louis, 315, 316–17, 533

Menlo Park (N.J.) “scientific factory,” 108–9

mergers, 216–17

of film studios, 526

of newspapers, 519–20

see also combinations, industrial

Merton, Robert, 265

Mexico:

French invasion of (1861), 219–20

U.S. and, 403–6, 498

Michelson, Albert, 289

Michigan Central Railroad, 87

middle class, 142–3

women in, 119–27

Midway Island, 220

migration:

northward, from country to city (by blacks), 136–7, 149, 197, 247, 431

westward, 128–9, 219; by blacks, 149

Miles, Gen. Nelson, 239

military courts, 49, 54

military personnel, see armed forces, American

milk, pasteurized, 108

Mill, John Stewart, 156, 158

On Liberty, 192

milling machines, 78–9, 381

Millis, Walter, 422

mining, 78, 86–7

Minor, Virginia, 204

Missionary Ridge (Tenn.), battle of, 12

Mississippi River, 80–1

Mitchell, John, 333, 393

Mitchell, Maria, 81

“Molly Maguires,” 175, 176

Moltke, Helmuth von, 407

monetary system:

currency issues: Civil War period, 18; 1870s, 213–14; 1890s, 228; populists and (subtreasury plan), 187, 188, 189

Wilson and, 387–8

“money trust,” 387, 388, 391, 392

monopoly:

debated in 1912 campaign, 374–5, 383

Lenin on, 409–10

Lloyd on, 166

resistance to, see antitrust movement

Wilson and, 389–91

see also combinations, industrial

Monroe, Harriet, 315–16

Monroe Doctrine, 340, 424

moral leadership, 41–2, 274

see also reform movement

Morgan, H. Wayne, 229

Morgan, John T., 338, 340

Morgan, J. Pierpont, 89, 222, 228

and Roosevelt (T.), 331–2, 350

Wilson and, 418

Morgan, Thomas Hunt, 290

Morgan (J. P.) & Co.:

and “Black Thursday,” 542

Lenin on, 410

Roosevelt (T.) and, 350–1

speculation by, 541

Wilson and, 387

Morgenthau, Henry, 402, 419

Morison, Elting, 343

Morley, Edward W., 290

Morris, William, 167

Morrow, Dwight, 498

Morton, Levi P., 89

motion pictures, 524–7

Mowry, George, 349, 371

“Mugwumps,” 211

20th century, 357, 359

Muir, John, 97

Mumford, Lewis, 254, 312

Munsey, Frank A., 160, 520

Münsterberg, Hugo, 294

museums, 308–9

Muybridge, Eadweard, 309

Myers, George A., 206

NAACP, 285

Nagel, Charles, 358

Nast, Thomas, 267

Nathan, George Jean, 315

Nation, Carrie, 279

Nation, The (periodical), 69–70

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 285

National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), 548–9

National Bank Act (1863), 18

National Board of Arbitration, 233

National Broadcasting Company, 523

National Civic Federation, 282

National Colored Immigration and Commercial Association, 288

National Consumers League, 281

National Farmers’ Alliance and Cooperative Union, 183–4

in Midwest, 184–7 passim

in South, 187–90 passim

National Labor Reform party, 175

National Labor Union (NLU), 175

National Progressive Republican League, 361

National Reform Press Association, 189

National Union Convention (1866), 50

National Woman’s Party, 534

National Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), 61, 209, 445, 446

National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL), 281

Native Americans, see Indians

natural selection, 157

economic interpretation of, 158–9

see also Darwinism, Social

Navy, U.S., 222–3

in Spanish-American War, 238, 239

Washington Conference (1921) and, 493–5

world tour by (1907–08), 344

and World War I, 411

NAWSA, 61, 209, 445, 446

Nevins, Allan, 14, 15, 25, 92

New Democracy, The (Weyl), 393

New England, 167–70

see also Boston

New Historians, 297–302

Newman, Samuel Phillips, 155

New Republic (periodical), 394–5

newspapers, 518–20

of minority groups, 522

New York City:

blacks in, 148

buildings in, 251, 252

Central Park, 254

as financial capital, 88, 117, 248

fire companies in, 266

Greenwich Village, 306–8

intellectual life of, 291–2, 306–8

Jews in, 145–7, 255–7

Tammany Hall organization in, 263–4, 266–7

upper classes in, 117–19

working-class conditions in, 137–40

Nicaragua, 403, 418, 498

Nicholas II, Czar, 408

Nicolson, Sir Harold, 451, 456

nitroglycerine, 77

Nivelle, Robert, 426

Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, 176–8, 551–2

Norris, Frank, 171–2, 306

Norris, George, 372, 422, 425, 501

Norris, Kathleen, 289

Northern Securities Company, 331–2, 335

O’Gorman, James A., 388–9

O’Hare, Kate Richards, 398

Ohio, 195–6

blacks in, 197

cities of, 196–7

industries of, 196–7

political “dynasty” from, 195–200

Olmsted, Frederick Law, 26, 254

Oppenheim, James, 314

Orient, 221, 495

see also China; Japan: Korea; Philippines

Orlando, Vittorio, 450, 451

Osbom, Henry Fairfield, 290

Osier, William, 108

Others (periodical), 315

Otis. Gen. Elwell, 241

Otis Elevator Company, 108, 251

Otken, Charles, 135

Overman, Lee, 427

Owen, Robert, 173

Owen-Class Act (1913), 387

Packers and Stockyards Act (1921), 490

padroni, 257–8

Palace Car Company, boycott of, 227

Palmer, A. Mitchell, 469, 473

Panama, 338, 339, 339–40, 343

Panama Canal, 222, 337–40, 343

Pan-Americanism, 221

panics, economic, 74–5, 542

see also banks and banking: crises/failures of

Parker, Alton B., 334, 413

parks and green areas, urban, 254

Partington, Vernon, 168, 192, 507

party bosses, 263–7

and reformers, 266, 267, 268

party system, 205–6, 499

see also third parties, political; and specific political parties

patents, 74, 91

Paterson Strike Pageant (1913), 323–4

Patrons of Husbandry (“Grangers”), 209

Patton, Gen. George, 433, 436

Paul, Alice, 445

Peabody, Elizabeth, 168

Peace Democrats (“Copperheads”), 8, 33

peace movement (1920s), 493–6

Peace Ship (sent by Ford, 1915), 480, 483

Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, 109, 110

Peffer, William, 186

Peirce, Charles, 292, 294

Pemberton, Gen. John, 9–10

Pennsylvania Railroad, 103, 104

People’s Party (populists), 184–91, 224

and election of 1896, 231–2

in Georgia, 187–8

internal crisis of (1890s), 228

of Kansas, 184–7

in South, 187–90

in Texas, 189

women in, 185–6

Pepper, George Wharton, 116

Perkins, George, 331, 375

Perry, Arthur Latham, 155

Pershing, Gen. John Joseph, 239, 406, 432, 433, 436–7

Pétain, Gen. Henri, 427

Petersburg (Va.), siege of, 14, 29

Phelan, James, 260

Phelps, William Lyon, 159

Philadelphia, 88, 116, 248

Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition (1876), 109–10

philanthropy, 107

Philip, Capt. John, 239

Philippines, 239–41, 405

Phillips, Wendell, 61–2, 68–9, 70, 168, 217

Pinchot, Gifford, 349, 359, 361

Pingree, Hazen S., 272–3

pioneers (western settlers), 128–9

Pittman, Key, 462

Pittsburgh, Pa., 140–1

Plains states:

farming in, 129–31

Indian “wars” in, 218–19

migration to, 128–9, 219; by blacks, 149

Piatt, Thomas C., 234, 330

Plunkitt, George Washington, 263–4, 267–8

Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 315–16

Poincaré, Raymond, 407–8

Polakoff, Keith, 206

poll tax, 65, 234

Ponzi, Charles, 509, 540

poor:

morality and character of, 269–71

and rich: economic disparity between, 140, 142–3, 192; relations between, 141, 165–6

see also immigrants; workers

Popular Science Monthly, 292

population of U.S. (1850–1910), 247

populists, 184–91, 224

and election of 1896, 231–2

in Georgia, 187–8

internal crisis of (1890s), 228

of Kansas, 184–7

in South, 187–90

in Texas, 189

women among, 185–6

Porter, Adm. David, 9

Pound, Ezra, 315–16

Powderley, Terence V., 176–7

Powers, Johnny, 276

pragmatism (as philosophy), 291–7

President of U.S.:

power of: Roosevelt (T.) and, 352–4; Taft and, 356, 358; Wilson and, 364–5, 385–6

religion of, 502–3

Republicans as (20th century), 484–5

see also individual presidents

press:

and Cuban revolution, 235–6, 237

magazines: avant-garde, 313–16; laissez-faire theme in, 159; movie, 526; and reform, 345, 346–7; of success stories, 160; women’s, 120

newspapers, 518–20; of minority groups, 522

1920s, 518–23

Preston, William, 439

production:

expansion of: late 19th century, 107–8; 1920s, 508

investors and, 90–1

Marx on, 75–6

regional inequality of, 107–8

and technology, 74, 76

Progress and Poverty (George), 163

Progressive party:

dissolution of, 419–20

and elections: 1912, 371, 373, 374, 377; 1924, 500–1

progressivism, 245–6, 287, 501–2

Prohibition, 441–2, 531

Prohibition party, 208

proletarianization of workers, 260–1, 382–3

Promise of American Life, The (Croly), 392

propaganda efforts (World War I), 412, 416–17, 426–7, 439

property, right of, 153

Marx on, 154

Republicans emphasize, 206

Supreme Court and, 488, 506

Protestantism, 515–17

and Smith’s presidential candidacy, 502–3

Puerto Rico, 405

Pulitzer, Joseph, 152, 235–6

Pullman, George M., 114, 227

model town of, 142, 227

Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), 348

Quay, Matthew, 234

Quesnay, Francois, 154

Rader, Benjamin, 528

radio, 522–3

rags-to-riches myth (Algerism), 143, 144-5, 159–60

Carnegie and, 102, 161; and McKinley, 234

Dempsey and, 532

and economic concentration, 390

Frick and, 224

Irish immigrants and, 259–60

La Follette and, 360

and political machines (urban), 265

railroads:

Boston investors and, 87

in Civil War, 16–17

combinations in, 331–2

“Erie War,” 92–3

and farmers, 130

in fiction, 172

Lenin on, 410

1930s, 555

in Ohio, 196, 197

regulation of, 73, 214–15, 334–5, 336

Roosevelt (T.) and, 331–2, 334–5

strikes against, 95–6, 175–6, 182

transcontinental, 93–6

westward movement promoted by, 128–9

in World War I, 429

see also Central Pacific; Erie; Michigan Central; Pennsylvania; Southern Pacific; trains; Union Pacific

railroad terminals, urban, 249

Rainford, William S., 269

ranching vs. farming, in California, 98–9

Rankine, Mrs. A. K., 314

Raskob, John J., 541

Rasputin, 408, 409

Raymond, Henry J., 34

Reader’s Digest (periodical), 522

Reagan, John H., 214

Reconstruction:

Congress and, 48–50, 53–4

end of, 67

evaluation of, 68–70

failure of (blame for), 45–6

Grant and, 58–9

Johnson and, 45, 50–1, 55

Lincoln vs. other Republicans on, 32, 33

Republican leadership and, 44–5

revenge vs. reform in, 46–7

Reconstruction Act, 53–4

Reconstruction Finance Corporation, 551

“red hunts,” 469 Redlich, Fritz, 89

“red scare,” 178, 505 Reed, James, 428, 460, 464

Reed, John, 307, 308, 323, 324

Reed, Thomas B., 227–8, 331

reform movement, 266–75

leadership of, 345–8

and party bosses, 266, 267, 268

women in, 270, 275–8

Reid, Whitelaw, 198

Reinsch, Paul, 402

Reitman, Ben, 283

religion and religious life:

and election of 1928, 502–3

Jewish, 256–7

Protestant, 515–17

Republican party:

and black civil and political rights, 48–9, 52, 55, 59, 206

blacks in, 206, 490–1

and business, 484, 486–7, 491, 499, 503, 558

control of Congress by: in Civil War

period, 36–7; post-World War I, 474, 484, 487, 501; in Reconstruction period, 44, 48, 51, 59, 60

conventions of: 1864, 32–3; 1868, 58, 194–5; 1912, 363–3; 1920, 471–3; 1924, 501

Democrats, rivalry with, 205–6, 227–8; 1896, 233

differences and divisions within: 1865–66, 48–9; 1870s, 1880s, 206; ca. 1909, 356–8; 1920s, 470, 492

dominance of: 1896 on, 233; 20th century, 474, 484–5, 487–92, 503

and farmers, 490

and populists, 186–7

Radical wing of, 41–4, 51–2, 59–60; and Johnson, 52–3, 54–8; and Reconstruction, 44–5, 48–9, 53–4

see also elections and campaigns

residences, see housing

Ricardo, David, 155

rich, see wealthy

Richards, Ellen Swallow, 261

Richmond, Mary, 270

Richthofen, Baron Manfred von (the “Red Baron”), 436

Rickard, “Tex,” 530

Riis, Jacob, 137–8, 141, 142, 143, 147, 148, 149

Rinehart, Mary Roberts, 439, 518

Riordon, William L., 264

riots:

anti-Chinese, 101

against draft (Civil War), 14

racial, 50

see also strikes

“Roaring Twenties,” 509

Rockefeller, John D., 105–7, 198

defends big business, 390

early life of, 105–6

income of, 140

and Lloyd (H. D.), 166

philanthropy of, 107

Roosevelt (T.) and, 349–50

Tarbell on, 347

Rockne, Knute, 528–9

Roebling, John A., 80, 110

Rogers, John Jacob, 454

Rogers, Will, 149, 521

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano:

as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 411

as Democratic party leader (1920s), 502, 553

and election of 1932, 554–5

nominated as Vice-President, 474

Roosevelt, Theodore, 325–54

and blacks, 375

career of, 325

character and personality of, 325–8, 352–3

early life of, 325–8

and election of 1912, 359–60, 361–3, 371–7 passim

and power, 327–8, 329, 330, 341, 351, 360

as President, 329–54; antitrust campaign of, 332–3, 349–52; assumes office (1901), 242; and domestic powers and issues, 329–36, 348–51; and election of 1904, 333–4; and environmental issues, 349; executive power and control by, 329, 352–4; foreign policy of, 336–45; increasing liberalism of, 348–9; and reform movement, 345–6; and Supreme Court, 331, 335

and Progressive party, 371, 373, 377, 419, 420

and Spanish-American War, 236, 338

and Taft (W. H.), 353, 355–6, 358–9, 362–3, 371

third term contemplated by, 359–60, 361–3

as Vice-President, 241, 325

and Wilson, 372–3

and World War I, 412, 416

Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr., 494

Root, Elihu, 333, 344, 355, 360, 363, 372

Rosenwald, Julius, 278

Ross, John, 3

Rossiter, Clinton, 156

Rostow, Eugene, 296

Rothafel, Samuel L., 525

Rouge works (Ford Motor Co.), Mich., 479–80, 556

Rough Riders, 238

Russell, Francis, 472

Russell, Lillian, 101

Russia:

American expeditionary force in, 453

Bolshevik regime: publishes secret treaties, 434; recognition of (international), 453, 456

civil war in, 432

and World War I, 408–9

Russian Revolution (1917), 426

Russo-Japanese War, 341–2

Ruth, George Herman (“Babe”), 529–30

Rutherford, Lord Ernest, 290

Sabine, Wallace, 290

Sacco, Nicola, 537–8

Sacramento, Calif., 97

St. Mihiel (France), battle for, 436–7

saloons, opposition to, 279

Salvation Army, 270

Samoa, 221

Sandburg, Carl, 547

San Francisco, 99–102, 250

Chinese in, 100–1

Irish in, 99, 259–60

Sanger, Margaret, 123, 275, 179–80

Sanitary Commission (U.S.), 26–7

San Juan Hill, battle of (1898), 239

Sargent, Fred W., 548

Sargent, James, 81

Sargent, John Singer, 115

Sarnoff, David, 522–3

Sawyer, John E., 82

Say, Jean Baptiste, 155

“scalawags,” 62, 63

Schenk, Charles T., 504

Schenk, Robert, 200

Schlieffen Plan (World War I), 407

Schneidermann, Rose, 281

schools, see education

Schorer, Mark, 535

Schumpeter, Joseph, 90

Schurz, Carl, 47, 161, 162, 207

Schwab, Charles M., 103

scientific innovation, see technology: innovation in

Scopes trial (1925), 517

Scott, Thomas, 215

seapower, 222–3

Sedgwick, Susan and Theodore, 86

seismograph, 108

Selective Service Administration, 427–8

self-made man, see rags-to-riches myth

Seligman, E. R. A., 302

Sellers, William, 79

separation of powers, 51, 54

and impeachment, 55

see also checks and balances

servants, domestic, 121, 139–40

settlement-house movement, 270, 275–6, 278, 280

settlers, in Plains states, 128–9, 219

Seven Arts, The (periodical), 314

sewage treatment and disposal, 108, 253

Sewall, Arthur, 231

Seward, William Henry, 4, 31, 51

and Alaska purchase, 220

sewing machine, 108, 120

sexuality:

liberation in: in Greenwich Village, 307; in 1920s, 509

of women, 121–4;

Woodhull on, 125–6

Seymour, Horatio, 59, 205, 210

Shafter, Gen. William, 238–9

Shakers, 167

Shannon, Fred, 134–5

sharecroppers, 131–3

Shaw, Anna H., 442, 444–5

Sheppard-Towner Act (1921), 534

Sheridan, Gen. Philip, 29, 35

Sherman, John, 52, 198, 199

Sherman, Lawrence, 460

Sherman, Gen. William Tecumseh, 9, 29, 34–5, 70

Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), 216–17, 332, 374, 389

Sherman Silver Purchase Act (1890), 213

repeal of, 226, 228

Shipping Board (World War 1), 428

ships, naval, 222–3

“Great White Fleet” world tour (1907–08), 344

limitation of numbers of (1921), 493–5

see also battleships; submarines

Shotwell, James, 449–50, 453, 495

Shufeldt, Comm. Robert, 221

silverites, against gold standard, 213, 230–1

Simpson, “Sockless” Jerry, 185, 188, 224, 228

Sinclair, Upton, 348, 520

Sioux Indians, 150

Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 317–19

skyscrapers, 251–2

slaveholders, and freeing of slaves, 39–40 slavery: outlawed by 13th Amendment (1865), 37, 48;

wage slavery, 132

see also Emancipation Proclamation

slaves, arming of (proposed, in Civil War), 29

Sloan, John, 310, 311, 313, 314

Smart Set, The (periodical), 314–15

Smith, Adam, 154–5, 258

Smith, Alfred Emanuel (“Al”), 500, 553

in elections: 1928, 502–3; 1932, 554

Smith, J. Allen, 299

Smoot-Hawley Act (1930), 499, 550

Smuts, Robert, 139

Social Darwinism:

businessmen and, 162

Gompers and, 180

popularity of, 159

pragmatism and, 297

Republican party and, 503

Roosevelt (T.) and, 326, 340–1

Spencerism, 157–8

and workers, 173

socialism, 173–4

divisions within, 398, 399

political parties of, 396–9

suppression of, 509–10

see also Marxist theory

Socialist-Labor Party (SLP), 174, 396

Socialist Party, 396–7

and Depression, 552

1912, 368

1916, 421

1924, 501

Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance, 283

Sorensen, Charles E, 483

Sorge, Friedrich, 174

South, the:

black education in, 63–4

Democratic party in: dominance of, 67, 366–7; and Hayes election (1876), 201–2; 1920s, 553; and populists, 187–8

farmers in, 131–6

land distribution in, 64–5

and Reconstruction, 46–8, 53

state governments in, 62–3

see also black Americans: in South; Confederate States of America

Southern Pacific Railroad, 97, 99

Spain:

and Cuba, 219, 220, 235–40

war with (1898), 238–40

Spanish landowners, in California, 98–9

“speakeasies,” 531

speculation, financial, 540–1

Spencer, Herbert, 157–8, 161–2, 207

sports, 527–31

corruption in, 531

Sprague, Frank, 250–1

Sproat, John, 207

Stampp, Kenneth, 47, 58, 62, 63, 69

standardization, social:

of suburbs, 252–3

of workers, 258–9, 480

standardization, technological:

of alternating current, 108

of gauges, 79

metric system, 81

of nuts, bolts, screws, 79

Standard Oil Company (Ohio), 106–7, 33

foreign sales by, 222

Lenin on, 410

as monopoly, 166

Roosevelt (T.) and, 349–50

Tarbell on, 347–8

Stanford, Leland, 95–6, 100, 215, 216, 330

Stanley, Henry M., 221

Stanton, Edwin M., 3, 35, 53, 56

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 122, 123, 208, 442, 443, 444

Slarr, Ellen Gates, 270, 275, 277

states’ rights, and Reconstruction, 48, 49, 51, 53

Statue of Liberty, 117, 146, 152–4

dedication of, 152–3

Stedman, Seymour, 469

Steel, H. Wickham, 452

Steel, Ronald, 395

steel industry:

Carnegie and, 103–4

innovations in, 79–80, 381

working conditions in, 140–1

Steffens, Lincoln, 265, 268, 345, 347, 419, 453

Steichcn, Edward, 310

Steinmetz, Charles, 290

Stevens, Thaddeus, 42, 52, 54, 57

Stieglitz, Alfred, 310–11, 312

stock market, 540–3

crash of (Oct. 1929), 542–3

Stokes, Rose Pastor, 398

Stokes, Thomas L., 558

Stone, Lucy, 209

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 125, 126, 217

Strasser, Adolph, 174, 178–9, 180

streetcars, electrified, 250–1

strikes:

in Civil War period, 19

by coal miners, 333, 490

in Depression, 545, 556

Great Southwest (1886), 182

Haymarket Massacre (1886), 177

at Homestead steel works (1892), 224–6

Pullman (1894), 227

of railroad workers, 95–6, 175–6, 490

of silk workers (1913), 323–4

by women, 280–1

Strong, Josiah, 340–1

Strum, Philippa, 391, 506

submarines, 290

German, in World War I, 415, 416, 424, 428

subtreasury plan for credit and currency, 187, 188, 189

suburbs, 252–3

subways, 251

suffrage:

of blacks: black leaders and, 65; in District of Columbia, 53; election of 1868 and, 59; 15th Amendment and, 60–2; Johnson and, 46, 55; Northerners and, 59, 60; Reconstruction Act and, 53; Republicans and, 48, 55, 59: thwarting of, 65–6

restriction of, by class (proposed), 269

of women, 442–7; and black suffrage, 204, 208–9; and 15th Amendment, 61; and 19th Amendment, 444–7; People’s Party and, 190; political priorities and tactics on, 209, 444; Roosevelt (T.) and, 444, 445; state-by-state movement, 445; support for, among women, 262, 280, 445, 534; Wilson and, 376, 418, 444, 445, 446–7; Woodhull and, 125

suicide (in Depression), 546

Sullivan, Louis, 252

Sullivan, Mark, 509, 521

Sumner, Charles, 41–2, 52, 60, 203, 220

and 14th Amendment, 49–50

and Hooker (I.), 443

and Johnson, 44, 46, 47–8

and Reconstruction, 46, 70

Sumner, William Graham, 158–9, 207

Sunday, Billy, 505, 517, 518

Sundquist. James, 205, 233

Sun Yat-sen, 401

Supreme Court:

Abrams case, 504–5

appointment of justices to: Chase (S. P.), 54; by Harding, 488; by Roosevelt (T.), 331, 335; by Taft, 488; Waite (M. R.), 200; by Wilson, 418–19

under Chase’s leadership, 54

and Civil Rights Act (1875), 49, 66, 203

controversy about (20th century), 488–9

Debs case, 504

and 1st Amendment, 504

and 14th Amendment, 203–4

Gitlow case, 505

and Interstate Commerce Commission, 215

and motion-picture industry, 526

1920s, 488–90, 504–6

Schenk case, 504

and segregation (racial), 234

under Taft’s leadership, 489–90

Surratt, Mary E., 56–7

Sutherland, George, 488, 489

sweater’s shop, 138–9

Swift, Gustavus, 114

Taft, Alphonso B., 198

Taft, William Howard, 198, 206, 300, 344

character and personality of, 357

as Chief Justice, 488, 489–90

and election of 1912: campaign, 371–7 passim; defeat of, 377; nomination of, 362–3; and Republican party, 356, 371

and League of Nations, 455

as President, 353, 355–8; foreign policy of, 401, 403; and Republican party, 356–8, 371

and Roosevelt (T.), 353, 355–6, 358–9, 362–3, 371

Tammany Hall political organization, 263–4, 266–7

Tarbell, Ida, 345, 347–8

tariff:

Cleveland and, 213, 226

contending interests and, 212

Hoover and, 498–9, 550, 551

investors protected by, 91

McKinley and, 234

Roosevelt (T.) and, 335

Smoot-Hawley Act, 499, 550

Taft and, 356, 358, 367–8

Wilson and, 385, 386–7

taxes and taxation:

in Depression, 544

income: 1861, 18; Knights of Labor on, 176; 1920s, 491; under Wilson, 387; during World War I, 439

Republicans and (20th century), 491

Taylor, Frederick W., 79

teachers:

of black children, 63, 64

influential, at colleges, 155

in middle America, 511

Teapot Dome scandal, 492

technology:

automation, 479–80, 482

innovation in: education and, 82; late 19th century, 77–85, 108; pragmatism of, 82; 20th century, 289, 290–1

Marx on, 76, 82, 289, 382

military, 436

and production, 74, 76

science and, 289–91

standardization in: of alternating current, 108; of gauges, 79; metric system, 81; of nuts, bolts, screws, 79

and workers, 143, 259

see also machines

telephone, 83–4

Teller Amendment (1898), 237, 240

tenant farmers, 130–3

tenement life, 137–8, 141

tennis, 529

Tenure of Office Act (1866), 53, 54, 56, 57

Terrill, Tom, 213

textiles, manufacture of:

in Civil War era, 15

late 19th century, 107

machinery for, 74, 381

Thalberg, Irving, 526

Thayer, William Makepeace, 160

theaters, movie, 525

Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen), 302–3

Thernstrom, Stephan, 260–1

third parties, political, 207–9, 235, 501

Thomas, Gen. George, 34–5

Thomas, Norman, 552

Thompson, Annie, 261

Thompson, Mary Wilson, 445

Thrasher, Leon, 415

Tilden, Bill, 529

Tilden, Samuel J., 67, 201, 202, 205, 210

Tillman, Benjamin R., 131, 336

Time magazine, 521–2

tires, rubber, 108

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 83, 192, 438

Trachtenburg, Alan, 309

Tracy, Benjamin, 223

trade unions, see labor unions

trains, 249, 556

see also railroads

transients (in Depression), 556–7, 558–9

transportation:

in Civil War, 16–17

railroads supplant canals, 108

turn-of-the-century, 288

urban, 250–1

see also airplane; automobile; bicycling; railroads; trains; trolleys

travel, foreign, 220–1

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 435

Treaty of Portsmouth, 342

Treaty of Versailles, 456–7

American ratification of, 457–68

and German reparations, 496

Triangle fire (1911), 444, 502

Trilling, Diana, 320

trolleys, 250–1

Trotsky, Lev Davidovich, 432

Trumbull, Lyman, 42, 57

trusts:

Adams (H.) on, 305

“beef,” 332

Brandeis and, 392

“money,” 387, 388, 391, 392

resistance to, see antitrust movement

Roosevelt (T.) and, 332–3, 349–52

Wilson and, 389–91

Tuchman, Barbara, 412

tunnel, in Hoosac Mountains, Mass., 76–8

Tunney, Gene, 530

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 299, 400

Turner, George Edgar, 17

Tuskegee Institute (Ala.), 284

Twain, Mark, 168, 170–1, 250, 291

Huckleberry Finn, 170–1, 172

Innocents Abroad, The, 221

Tweed, William Magaer, Jr. (“Boss”), 266–7

twine binder, 81

Underwood, Oscar, 369

underworld, 265, 266

unemployment:

1893, 226

in Depression, 543, 545–7, 556; of blacks, 546

unemployment insurance, 551–2

Unger, Irwin and Debi, 246

Union, the (in Civil War), 17–18

Union Army, 8

casualties of, 14

“Colored” regiments in, 22

conscripts and “volunteers” in, 14–15

desertions from, 8

morale of, 8, 22

supplies for, 15

Union for Concerted Moral Effort, 269

Union Pacific Railway, 4, 93, 96

unions, see labor unions

United Artists, 525

United Mine Workers, 333

United Nations, 414

United States Steel Corporation, 350–1, 389

upper classes, 113–19

upward mobility, social, 259–60

urban living conditions, 255–62

for blacks, 147–8

for immigrants, 146–7, 247, 256–8

progressives and, 245–6

reform efforts and, 266–75

upward mobility, 259

for working class, 136–41

see also cities

Urofsky, Melvin, 392

utilities, 273, 274

utopianism, 173

vagabonds, 556–7, 558–9

Vallandigham, Clement, 8, 33

Van Buren, Martin, 210

Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 92–3, 127

Vanderbilt, Frederick W., 118–19

Vanderbilt, Mrs. William K., 118

Van Syckel, Samuel, 81

Van Waters, Miriam, 512

Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 537–8

Vardaman,James, 149

Veblen, Thorstein, 90–1, 302–4, 507

and Dos Passos, 536

and Marx, compared, 303–4

Theory of the Leisure Class, The, 302–3

Versailles peace negotiations (1919), 450–3, 455–7

and League of Nations, 452, 455–7

preparations for, 434, 437, 448–9

Treaty of Peace, 452, 456

veterans, as bonus marchers (1932), 558

Vickrey, Fanny, 185

Vicksburg, Va., battle of, 9–10, 12

Victoria League, 125

Villa, Francisco “Pancho,” 405–6

violence:

against blacks owning farms, 134

and black suffrage, 66

in labor strikes, 175–6, 177, 225–6, 227, 556

see also lynching; riots

Virgin Islands, 403

visual arts, 308–13

voting rights, see suffrage

Wade, Benjamin F., 42, 44, 56

Wade-Davis Bill, 32

wages:

in Civil War period, 19

in Depression, 556

in manufacturing (1860s–1890s), 140

Ricardo’s “iron law” of, 155

of women, 19, 140, 429, 431, 489

Waite, Morrison R., 200, 203, 204

Wald, Lillian, 278, 419

Wall, Joseph, 162, 235

Wall Street, see stock market

Ward, John W., 510

War Industries Board, 428–9

Waring, George E., 254

Washington, D.C.:

blacks in, 148; suffrage of, 53

in Civil War, 28

as nation’s capital, 211–12

planning and completion of, 271

Washington, Booker T., 132–3, 234, 284

Washington Conference (1921), 493–5

Waterman, Lewis E., 82

water supply, urban, 253–4

Watson, Thomas A., 84

Watson, Tom, 131, 187–8, 224, 228, 231, 232

Wayland, Francis, 155

wealth:

distribution of, 140, 142–3, 192

government and, 217

justified by Social Darwinism, 158–9

Wealth Against Commonwealth (Lloyd), 166

Wealth of Nations (Smith), 154–5, 258

wealthy, the, 113–19, 262

athletic activities of, 527

Bryan and, 369

Fitzgerald (F. S.) on, 537

among Jews in New York, 145–6

pleasures of, alleged, 288–9

Roosevelt (T.) and, 331–2, 349–51

weapons:

in Civil War, 16

reduction and control of, 493–5

Weaver, Gen. James B., 190, 208

Webster, Daniel, 153

Wecter, Dixon, 534

Weinryb, Bernard, 259

Weinstein, Edwin A., 466

Western Federation of Miners, 282–3

Western Reserve, Ohio, 196

western U.S., landscape of, 96–7

see also California

Westinghouse, George, 81

westward expansion, 128–9

Weyl, Walter, 393–4

Wharton, Edith, 319–23

Wheeler, Burton K., 501, 553

Wheeler, Gen. Joseph, 238–9

White, Edward Douglass, 488

White, Henry, 448

White, William Allen, 160, 186, 329, 346, 360

“whitecapping,” 134

Whitehead, Arthur, 223

Whiteman, Paul, 509

Whitman, Walt, 30, 37, 123

on democracy, 192–3

Democratic Vistas, 193

and Dos Passos, 536

Leaves of Grass, 192, 193

Whittier, John Greenleaf, 110

Wiebe, Robert, 214, 218, 268

Wiener, Norbert, 109

Wiley, Bell, 23

Wiley, Harvey, 348

Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 407, 437

Wilkes, Capt. Charles, 31

Willard, Frances, 279

Williams, T. Harry, 15

Willson, Thomas L., 289

Wilson, Edith Galt, 448, 463, 465, 470

Wilson, Edmund, 557

Wilson, Henry, 60, 68

Wilson, Woodrow:

and blacks, 418

character and personality of, 366, 449, 467

Congressional Government, 386

and Democratic party, 368–70, 386, 388

early life of, 365

and elections: 1912, 371–7 passim; 1916, 420–1; 1920, 469, 473–4

first political speech of, 363–4

as governor of New Jersey, 366

health of, 456, 463–6 passim, 469–70

on leadership, 364–5, 383

and Lenin’s ideology, compared, 412

and power, 365

as President, 383–475; and Clemenceau, 450–1; economic policy of, 374, 385–91; election of, 377, 421; flexibility of, 388–9, 391, 456; foreign policy of, 399–406, 418; Fourteen Points speech, 435, 437; and House (E. M.), 386, 423, 456; inauguration of, 383–4; leadership qualities of, 385–6, 391, 417, 425; and League of Nations, 414, 449, 452, 453–75; and Lodge (H. C), 454, 459–60; nomination of, 369–70, 420; as orator, 363–4, 383–4, 463; at Paris peace talks, 451–3, 455–7; progressivism of, 419; and Supreme Court, 418–19; travels to Paris (1918), 448–51; and World War I, 411–13, 418, 422–6, 427, 434–5

as Princeton president, 365–6

and Roosevelt (T.), 372–3

and third-term possibility, 469, 473

and wife’s death, 411

Wise, Stephen, 419

Wissler, Clark, 290

Wister, Owen, 288

“Wobblies,” see Industrial Workers of the World

women:

in Civil War, 26–7

college education of, 514

in Depression, 546

in farm families, 127–8

health of, 123–4

in labor force: labor unions and, 176, 179, 280, 431; leadership of, 280–1; in manufacturing, 19, 422; strikes by, 280–1; wages of, 19, 140, 429, 431, 489; in World War I, 429, 430–1, 442

leaders among (turn-of-century), 275–81

middle class, 119–27, 261–2; housework of, 261

and peace movement, 493

in politics and political parties: 1920s, 534; People’s Party, 185–6; socialists, 398; for suffragist cause, 442, 444

in professions, 261–2, 442

as reform leaders, 270, 275–8

sexuality of, 121–4, 15–6

suffrage of, 442–7; and black suffrage, 204, 208–9; and 15th Amendment, 61; and 19th Amendment, 444–7; People’s Party and, 190; political priorities and tactics on, 209, 444; Roosevelt (T.) and, 444, 445; state-by-state movement, 445; support for, among women, 262, 280, 445, 534; Wilson and, 376, 418, 444, 445, 446–7; Woodhull and, 125

wealthy, 115, 117–18, 262

and women’s clubs, 262

Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 279

women’s club movement, 262

Wood, Leonard, 471 Woodhull, Victoria Claflin, 124–7

Woodward, C. Vann, 131, 135, 187, 398

workers:

in Chicago stockyards, 111

cultural diversity among, 143–4

and industrial democracy, 392, 421

Marx on, 112, 259, 489; on class solidarity, 143, 173; proletarianization, 260–1, 382–3; and trade unionism, 173

political organizing of, 209

Social Darwinism and, 173

and socialism, 173–4, 398–9

sports for, 528

standardization and efficiency of, 258–9, 480

wages of, see wages

women as: labor unions and, 176, 179, 280, 431; leadership of, 280–1; in manufacturing, 19, 422; strikes by, 280–1; wages of, 19, 140, 429, 431, 489; in World War I, 429, 430–1, 442

see also immigrants

Workingmen’s Party, 101

workweek and workday, length of:

eight-hour day, 176, 177, 178, 421, 429

five-day week, 144

nine-hour day, 333

World Court, 495

World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), 271, 287

World War I, 407–47

aftermath of, 450; reparations, 496–7

American attitudes toward, 410–11, 416, 425, 438–41; domestic agitation on, 412–13

Arabic pledge on ships’ neutrality, 415, 417, 422

armistice for, 437–8

aviation and aviators in, 436

economic causes of, 409–10, 422

House-Grey Memorandum on, 422–3

military aspects of, 407, 410, 417, 431–4, 435–7; battles, see battles, of World War I

peace negotiations on (Paris, 1919), 450–3, 455–7; and League of Nations, 452, 455–7; preparations for, 434, 437, 448–9; Treaty of Peace, 452, 456

propaganda efforts in, 412, 416–17, 426–7, 439

U.S. and: financial aspects, 418, 421–2, 425–6, 439; military involvement and mobilization, 417, 425, 427–30, 431–2; neutrality, 411, 412, 414, 416, 426; public opinion, 410–16, 425, 438–41

Wilson and, 411–13, 418, 422–6, 427, 434–5

Wounded Knee Creek, massacre at, 219

Wright, Frank Lloyd, 312–13

Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 290

writing and writers, American, 288, 313–23

best-selling books, 322

“yellow-dog” contracts, 488, 489

Yosemite valley, 97

Young, Art, 313–14

Young, Brigham, 95

Young, Owen D., 497, 532

youth (1920s), 512–15

Zimmerman, Joan, 278

Zimmermann, Arthur, 425

Zukor, Adolph, 524–5, 526

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IN CARRYING THIS STUDY of “The American Experiment” on from the Civil War years to the crises of the early 1930s, I have continued to emphasize the role of purposeful leadership in the processes of historical causation. But now my central concern is with economic as well as intellectual and political leadership. The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were indeed an era of great financial and industrial tycoons—Morgan, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, and many others. I have tried to indicate some of the influence these leaders had on American thought, society, and politics.

As in the first volume, however, I do not conceive leadership as a function merely of the more celebrated persons, but as the product of numberless purposes and actions of leaders of the second and third cadres in many social and political arenas. Even in situations where the top economic leadership—the great industrialists and financiers—appears capable of wielding enormous economic and political power, the “subordinate” leaders in my view have a critical influence on the course of events. Their role also helps to explain why economic power cannot be simply or mechanically converted into political power; for these “lesser” leaders, reflecting as they do the endless social and ideological diversity of the American people, will often tend to lie outside, or even block or divert, the vertical flow of power from the top—and the more numerous and varied such leaders, the greater this tendency. I plan to return to the central problem of the role of concentrated economic power in a democratic republic in the third volume of this trilogy.

Once again I have sought to illuminate the role of second- and third-cadre leaders by sinking “historical drill-holes” in specific sectors and situations, through research in a number of archives and libraries. For their unfailing helpfulness I thank the archivists and librarians at the Baker Library at Harvard Business School, the Buffalo Historical Society, California Historical Society, Columbia University Library, Ford Motor Company, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Huntington Library, Kansas State Historical Society, Library of Congress, Louisiana State University Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, Minnesota State Archives, New-York Historical Society, New York Public Library, Ohio Historical Society, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, Stanford University Library and Archives, Stowe-Day Library (Hartford), Williams College Library, and various other, more specialized archives and libraries.

This volume, like The Vineyard of Liberty, has been very much a collaborative venture, in which I have had the privilege of working with great and varied talents. Once again I have pitilessly enlisted assistance from my family. My wife and fellow author, Joan Simpson Burns, helped me understand literary and other cultural forces in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries by sharing with me her ideas on and extensive knowledge of these subjects. I made full use of the versatility of Deborah Edwards Burns, a journalist who helped me with research on women’s history and related social history, and who conceived and executed the illustrative endpapers. Trienah Meyers Kuykendall critiqued the whole manuscript, making particular use of her legal background, and I tested my ideas against those of Peter Meyers, a young political theorist. I was especially fortunate to have the creative assistance of Stewart Burns, author of a doctoral dissertation, “The Populist Movement and the Cooperative Commonwealth: The Politics of Non-Reformist Reform” (1984), who generously helped me in placing the role of the Farmers Alliance in a broad historical and theoretical framework, shared with me his data, and collaborated with me in the drafting of the sections on the Alliance, Populism, and related intellectual and political developments.

Because of the emphasis on economic and social history as well as intellectual and political history in this volume, I am especially grateful for help and collaboration from social historians working in these areas. Joan G. Zimmerman gave me indispensable assistance in the fields of Progressive politics, social legislation, and women’s education, as did Ellen M. James and Dee Ann Montgomery in women’s history, Eric Scheye in intellectual and ethnic history, Fran Burke in the political leadership of women, Anne Margolis in intellectual history, and Philippa Strum, author of a preeminent study of Louis Brandeis, in legal history and politics. Others who provided valued help in specific areas were Eunice Burns, Laurie Burns Gray, Rodger Davis, Lee Farbman, Michael Koessel, and Jay Leibold. Michael Beschloss, Lisl Cade, and Maurice Greenbaum also contributed in important ways. Milton Djuric provided extensive and invaluable editorial assistance at every stage of the book’s preparation.

The most important contribution to the volume was made by my good friend, close associate, and former student, Jeffrey P. Trout. Not only did he collaborate with me in planning, researching, and drafting in areas in which he is especially knowledgeable—military, diplomatic, and political history; he also worked closely with me in conceptualizing the whole volume, in organizing the flow of chapters, and in bibliographical research and criticism. His sense of history, enthusiastic participation, and crisis-management have improved every part of the volume.

As with the first volume, I solicited critical reviews of the manuscript from scholars far more expert than I, and I was fortunate in receiving stringent and constructive criticism from David Burner, John Milton Cooper, Jr., Eric Foner, James M. McPherson, Jerome Mushkat, Irwin Unger, and my longtime friend and colleague at Williams, Robert C. L. Scott. At our neighboring North Adams State College, historians W. Anthony Gengarelly, Clark Billings, Richard Taskin, and David Oppenheimer generously shared their specialized knowledge with me. My friends in the Faculty Secretarial Office at Williams literally made possible the production of this work. At Alfred A. Knopf, my editor, Ashbel Green, Betty Anderson, Peter Hayes, Anne Eberle, and Melvin Rosenthal played indispensable roles.

Any errors or deficiencies are solely my responsibility—and I would appreciate being informed of them, at Williams College, Williamstown, Mass. 01267. I wish to thank those who sent in corrections for the first volume. They were: (p. 116) Benjamin Franklin lay mortally ill at this time rather than “lay dying,” as he did not die until a year later; (180) it was not Lewis but Clark who had probably met Daniel Boone; (501) Whittier was a Quaker, not a Unitarian (though he did have Unitarian sympathies); (518) Lovejoy was the son of a Congregational minister, not a Presbyterian one, he was a student at Princeton Theological Seminary but did not graduate from it, and he might better be described as an “extremist” than as a “fanatic.” These changes have been made in the paperback edition (1983).

As with the first volume, I have borrowed occasional phrases or sentences from my own earlier works in cases where I felt my prose was—or should be made—imperishable.

J.M.B.

The Crosswinds of Freedom

The American Experiment, Volume III

James MacGregor Burns

TO WRITERS FOR THE THIRD CENTURY

Deborah Burns

Stewart Burns

Milton Djuric

Peter Meyers

Trienah Meyers

Wendy Severinghaus

Jeffrey P. Trout

Contents

PART I • What Kind of Freedom?

CHAPTER 1 The Crisis of Leadership

THE DIVIDED LEGACY

THE “HUNDRED DAYS” OF ACTION

“DISCIPLINE AND DIRECTION UNDER LEADERSHIP”?

CHAPTER 2 The Arc of Conflict

CLASS WAR IN AMERICA

“LENIN OR CHRIST” OR A PATH BETWEEN?

THE POLITICS OF TUMULT

APPEAL TO THE PEOPLE

CHAPTER 3 The Crisis of Majority Rule

COURT-PACKING: THE SWITCH IN TIME

CONGRESS-PURGING: THE BROKEN SPELL

DEADLOCK AT THE CENTER

THE FISSION OF IDEAS

THE PEOPLE’S ART

PART II • Strategies of Freedom

CHAPTER 4 Freedom Under Siege

THE ZIGZAG ROAD TO WAR

THE WAR OF TWO WORLDS

THE PRODUCTION OF WAR

THE RAINBOW COALITION EMBATTLED

CHAPTER 5 Cold War: The Fearful Giants

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

THE LONG TELEGRAM

THE SPIRAL OF FEAR

THE PRICE OF SUSPICION

CHAPTER 6 The Imperium of Freedom

THE TECHNOLOGY OF FREEDOM

THE LANGUAGE OF FREEDOM

DILEMMAS OF FREEDOM

CHAPTER 7 The Free and the Unfree

THE BOSTON IRISH

THE SOUTHERN POOR

THE INVISIBLE LATINS

THE REVOLUTIONARY ASIANS

PART III • Liberation Struggles

CHAPTER 8 Striding Toward Freedom

ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS

MARCHING TO WAR

WE SHALL OVERCOME

CHAPTER 9 The World Turned Upside Down

PEOPLE OF THIS GENERATION

ROLLING THUNDER

INTO THE QUICKSAND

SONGS OF THE SIXTIES

CHAPTER 10 Liberty, Equality, Sisterhood

BREAKING THROUGH THE SILKEN CURTAIN

THE LIBERATION OF WOMEN

THE PERSONAL IS POLITICAL

PART IV • The Crosswinds of Freedom

CHAPTER 11 Prime Time: Peking and Moscow

FINDING CHINA

PEACE WITHOUT PEACE

FOREIGN POLICY: THE FALTERING EXPERIMENTS

CHAPTER 12 Vice and Virtue

WATERGATE: A MORALITY TALE

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

CARTER: THE ARC OF MORALITY

GUN AND BIBLE

CHAPTER 13 The Culture of the Workshop

THE DICING GAME OF SCIENCE

THE RICH AND THE POOR

CROSSWAYS, LAND AND SKY

PART V • The Rebirth of Freedom?

CHAPTER 14 The Kaleidoscope of Thought

HABITS OF INDIVIDUALISM

KINESIS: THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIANS

SUPERSPECTATORSHIP

THE NEW YORKERS

THE CONSERVATIVE MALL

CHAPTER 15 The Decline of Leadership

REPUBLICANS: WAITING FOR MR. RIGHT

THE STRUCTURE OF DISARRAY

REALIGNMENT? WAITING FOR LEFTY

A REBIRTH OF LEADERSHIP?

MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE: A PERSONAL EPILOGUE

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct-action campaign that was “well-timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation.

For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity.… We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee.…

We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

April 16, 1963

PART I

What Kind of Freedom?

CHAPTER 1

The Crisis of Leadership

SLOWLY GAINING SPEED, THE glistening Ford Trimotor bumped across the grassy Albany airfield and nosed up into lowering clouds. It was July 2, 1932. The day before, the Democrats, meeting in Chicago, had nominated Franklin D. Roosevelt for President of the United States. Roosevelt and his family had received the news in their Hyde Park mansion after long hours in front of the radio listening to the bombastic speeches charged with hatred for Hoover Republicans and all their works. At the moment of greatest suspense the Roosevelt forces had gone over the top.

As the plane turned west Roosevelt had a chance to glimpse the Hudson, the river of American politics. With his twinkling pince-nez, his cockily uptilted cigarette holder, his double-breasted suit stretched across his big torso, his cheery, mobile features, he radiated exuberant self-confidence and a beguiling self-esteem as he leafed through a pile of congratulatory telegrams. He had long planned this little stroke of innovative leadership— to accept the nomination in person instead of awaiting a pompous notification weeks later. He was the first presidential candidate to fly; perhaps it was a tonic to this vigorous man, crippled since 1921 by polio, to demonstrate his mobility at the climactic hour. In any event, he could have fun with the press.

“I may go out by submarine to escape being followed by you men,” he had twitted the reporters. Or he might ride out on a bicycle built for five. “Papa could sit in front and steer and my four sons could sit behind.”

Part of his family was flying with him—his wife, Eleanor, and sons Elliott and John—along with counselor Samuel Rosenman, secretaries “Missy” LeHand and Grace Tully, and two state troopers as bodyguards. The rest of the family and Louis Howe, his longtime political confidant and aide, awaited the plane in Chicago. Eleanor Roosevelt, pressed by reporters, was staying in the background. “One person in politics is sufficient for one family,” she had said the night before, while instructing the butler to bring frankfurters for the gathering. “I’ll do as I’ve always done, accompany my husband on his trips and help in any way I can.”

The plane pounded on, following the route of the old Erie Canal—the thin artery that had pumped people and goods into Buffalo and points west, and farm produce back to the East. Now an economic blight lay across the land. For a time Roosevelt watched the deceptively lush fields unfold below; then he turned to Rosenman. They had work to do—trimming and polishing the acceptance speech. Over the radio came reports of the restive delegates in Chicago. Some were starting home. The disgruntled men of Tammany, sore over Al Smith’s defeat, were planning to be gone before Roosevelt arrived. Convention managers were trying to enliven the delegates with songs and celebrities. On the plane Roosevelt and Rosenman huddled over the speech. It had to galvanize the weary delegates, the whole weary nation.

As buffeting winds pushed the plane far behind schedule, the two men lopped more and more paragraphs off the draft. Roosevelt had no time for the crowds that gathered at the refueling stops in Buffalo and Cleveland. While John was quietly sick in the rear of the plane, his father passed pages of his draft to Elliott and Eleanor, chain-smoked, joked with his family, and slept. When the plane touched down hours later in Chicago, Roosevelt boasted, “I was a good sailor,” as he greeted his oldest child, Anna, and sons James and Franklin.

The airport scene was chaotic. Crowds pressed in around the candidate, knocking off his hat and leaving his glasses askew. Campaign manager James Farley pushed through to Roosevelt. “Jim, old pal—put it right there—great work!” Louis Howe was his usual dour self. Climbing into the candidate’s car with him, Howe dismissed the Roosevelt and Rosenman draft, which had been telephoned to him the night before. Rosenman, forewarned of Howe’s attitude, made his way through the throng to the candidate’s car, only to hear Howe saying, as he thrust his own draft into Roosevelt’s hand, “I tell you it’s all right, Franklin. It’s much better than the speech you’ve got now—and you can read it while you’re driving down to the convention hall, and get familiar with it.”

“But, Louis,” Rosenman heard his boss say, “you know I can’t deliver a speech that I’ve never done any work on myself, and that I’ve never even read.…” When Howe persisted, Roosevelt agreed to look it over. As his car moved through big crowds to the stadium, he lifted his hat and shouted “hellos” left and right, pausing to glance at Howe’s prose. Finding Howe’s opening paragraphs not radically different from his own draft, he put them on top of it.

Waiting at the Chicago Stadium, amid ankle-deep litter and half-eaten hot dogs, amid posters of FDR and discarded placards of his bested foes, amid the smoke and stink of a people’s conclave, were the delegates in all their variety and contrariety—Louisiana populists and Brooklyn pols, California radicals and Mississippi racists, Pittsburgh laborites and Philadelphia lawyers, Boston businessmen and Texas oilmen. The crowd stirred, then erupted in pandemonium, as Roosevelt, resplendent in a blue suit with a red rose, made his way stiffly across the platform on a son’s arm, steadied himself at the podium. He looked up at the roaring crowd.

He plunged at once into his theme—leadership, the bankrupt conservative leadership of the Republican party, the ascendant liberal leadership of the “Democracy.” After a tribute to the “great indomitable, unquenchable, progressive soul of our Commander-in-Chief, Woodrow Wilson,” he declared that he accepted the 1932 party platform “100 per cent.”

“As we enter this new battle, let us keep always present with us some of the ideals of the Party: The fact that the Democratic Party by tradition and by the continuing logic of history, past and present, is the bearer of liberalism and of progress, and at the same time of safety to our institutions.” The failure of the Republican leadership—he would not attack the Republican party but only the leadership, “day in and day out,” he promised— might bring about “unreasoning radicalism.”

Roosevelt was speaking in his full, resonant voice. “To meet by reaction that danger of radicalism is to invite disaster. Reaction is no barrier to the radical. It is a challenge, a provocation. The way to meet that danger is to offer a workable program of reconstruction, and the party to offer it is the party with clean hands.

“This, and this only, is a proper protection against blind reaction on the one hand and an improvised, hit-or-miss, irresponsible opportunism on the other.”

The candidate then challenged members of both parties: “Here and now I invite those nominal Republicans who find that their conscience cannot be squared with the groping and the failure of their party leaders to join hands with us; here and now, in equal measure, I warn those nominal Democrats who squint at the future with their faces turned toward the past, and who feel no responsibility to the demands of the new time, that they are out of step with their Party.” The people wanted a genuine choice, not a choice between two reactionary doctrines. “Ours must be a party of liberal thought, of planned action, of enlightened international outlook, and of the greatest good to the greatest number of our citizens.”

Roosevelt then made a series of positive—and prophetic—promises to the Democracy’s constituencies: protection for the consumer, self-financing public works for the jobless, safeguarding land and timberland for the farmer, repeal of the Prohibition amendment for the thirsty, jobs for labor, a pared-down government for businessmen. But Roosevelt repeatedly sounded a higher note, especially as he concluded.

“On the farms, in the large metropolitan areas, in the smaller cities and in the villages, millions of our citizens cherish the hope that their old standards of living and of thought have not gone forever. Those millions cannot and shall not hope in vain.

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people. Let us all here assembled constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage.

“This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”

The Divided Legacy

“He had come in an airplane, symbol of the new age, touching the imagination of the people,” wrote a reporter. But his roots lay in a horse-and-buggy era that had transmuted relentlessly into the railroad epoch, and then into the age of the automobile. Both in his heritage and in his growth he could say with Walt Whitman that he embraced multitudes.

He was born January 30, 1882, in a mansion high on a bluff overlooking the Hudson. Breast-fed for a year by his mother, Sara, he grew up in a home of enveloping security and tranquility. An only child, he lived among doting parents and nurses, affectionate governesses and tutors, in a house that was warm and spacious though by no means palatial. Outside lay the grounds peopled by gardeners, coachmen, stable boys, farmhands. North and south along the river towered the mansions of the truly wealthy. It was the world of Currier & Ives come to life—sleighing on country rides past farmhouses wreathed in snow, stopping with his father in barnyards filled with horses and dogs, swimming and fishing in the majestic river, digging out of snowstorms—most memorably the great blizzard of 1888.

Occasionally the long mournful whistle of a train passing below carried into the home, but it brought no hint of the hates and fears simmering in the nation’s urban and industrial world in the 1880s—no hint of the wants and needs of immigrants pouring by the hundreds of thousands into the city a hundred miles to the south, of the desperate strikes that swept the nation’s railroads, of the bone-deep misery of countless southern and western farmers and their wives, of the massacre of workers in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. The Roosevelts traveled by rail but never left their protected environment of family carriages, private railroad cars, of ships where there were always, as Sara said, “people one knows.” Places they visited teemed with cousins and aunts and friends of their own social class. Nor did young Franklin leave this social cocoon when he departed for Groton, one of the most exclusive schools in the nation, and later for Harvard’s “Gold Coast.”

It was hardly a life to ignite political ambition or a passionate lust for power, if these result from early material or psychological blows to self-esteem, as Harold D. Lasswell and others have contended. It was easy to understand how Roosevelt’s future friends and rivals strove to overcome a sense of insecurity and inferiority in childhood: Winston Churchill, virtually ignored by his socially ambitious mother and by a father slowly going insane from syphilis, cabined and bullied in the cruel and rigid world of Victorian boarding schools; Benito Mussolini, son of a half-socialist, half-anarchist father, a mean-spirited and fiery-tempered youth, expelled from school at the age of ten for stabbing and wounding another boy; Adolf Hitler, orphaned in his teens and cast out into vagrancy; Josef Dzhugashvili, later Stalin, living in the leaky adobe hut of a peasant cobbler in Georgia, a land seared by ancient hatreds.

Yet more subtle and significant psychological forces were molding young Franklin’s personality. The Roosevelt and Delano families had been established long enough on the banks of the Hudson to despise the vulgar parvenus who were pushing to power and riches in the boom times of the nineteenth century. But the Roosevelts themselves were parvenus compared with the Schuylers and Van Rensselaers who had been living along the river for a century or more. Sara Roosevelt’s father had made his fortune by selling Turkish and Indian opium to Chinese addicts. The comfortably well-off Roosevelts could not ignore the far wealthier families around them; for the rest of his life FDR would show an almost obsessive interest in the homes and trappings of the ostentatious “nouveaux riches,” such as the Vanderbilts’ baronial mansion a few miles to the north.

Nor could young Franklin escape direct confrontations with the social elite. At Groton he was barred from the inner social and athletic circles; at Harvard he was not tapped by Porcellian, the most exclusive club. He was seared by these rejections far more than he admitted in his breezy, dutiful letters to his parents. Many, including Eleanor Roosevelt, later wondered whether Franklin’s rejection by young patricians, most of whom would go into brokerages and banking, led him to “desert his class” and to identify with life’s outcasts. Being a Porcellian rejectee hardly catapulted Franklin into the proletariat; yet these class and psychic privations had a part in shaping his later views.

Far more important were the times he lived in—the heyday of turn-of-the-century progressivism, a muckraking press, and Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal. And always there was the role model, in the other major branch of the Roosevelt family, of “Uncle Ted” himself—the New York City police commissioner, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, seemingly single-handed conqueror of San Juan Hill, and, during Franklin’s Harvard years, President of the United States. Even more, there was the President’s niece Eleanor Roosevelt.

Much has been made of Eleanor Roosevelt’s bleak childhood—of her unloving mother who died when she was eight; of her handsome, dashing, adored father who showered endearments on her but deserted her again and again and then for good, dying of drink when she was ten; of her life as an orphan, neglected by her grandmother, tyrannized by her governess, and frightened by her alcoholic uncles. By her early teens she was a timid, sensitive, awkward child, with a wistful shadowed face and a tall figure usually attired in a shapeless, overly short dress. But this was not the Eleanor Roosevelt whom Franklin courted and married. By her late teens she had become far more at ease and poised in her family relationships, and with her warm and sympathetic manner, her expressive face and soft yet alert eyes, and above all her lively intelligence and quick compassion she had won a host of friends of both sexes. Her metamorphosis was largely the product of caring teachers—especially of the extraordinary Marie Souvestre, headmistress of the school Eleanor attended in England, a sophisticated, sharing, and demanding daughter of the French Enlightenment who drew Eleanor to good literature, foreign cultures and languages, and social radicalism.

The two young Roosevelts who ardently plighted their troth in March 1905 felt very much in rapport, but there were deep potential divisions between them—and within each of them. In her early years Eleanor had developed a compassion for fellow sufferers—for all sufferers—that she was never to lose. She was haunted for months by the tormented face of a ragged man who had tried to snatch a purse from a woman sitting near her. Roosevelt in those years was still moved far more by a patrician concern for people, in the abstract, by noblesse oblige—or by what his mother preferred to call “honneur oblige.” Eleanor showed her concern day after day by teaching children at her settlement house. When Franklin once accompanied her to a tenement where one of her charges lay ill, he came out exclaiming, “My God, I didn’t know people lived like that!”

Franklin’s ambition seemed to soar with the taste of office rather than in advance of it. Unexpectedly a run for the state senate opened up for him; once nominated, he plunged into the struggle with enormous dash and energy, and won. He entered the state senate as a vaguely progressive anti-Tammanyite; in office he led a fight against Tammany and moved so far to the left as to become virtually a “farm-labor” legislator. A Wilsonian in 1912, he gained the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy without much effort—but once in the job he became the most vigorous and committed navy man since Teddy Roosevelt himself had held the job. Action—and skill in action—spurred further ambition.

While Eleanor had her own values, commitments, and purposes, she was so self-effacing as to seem to lack ambition. Life closed in around her after her marriage. She had not only a mother-in-law who refused to let her son go but a husband who saw a clear demarcation between his public career and her family role. “I listened to all his plans with a great deal of interest,” she said later. “It never occurred to me that I had any part to play.” Having six babies in ten years—one died at seven months—narrowed and deepened her personal life. Her public role became a pale reflection of her husband’s—entertaining legislators in Albany, doing the rounds of government wives in Washington, helping with Red Cross and other war activities. Her husband was not always supportive. When to Washington’s amusement she blundered into telling The New York Times that in her wartime food-saving effort she had found that “making ten servants help me do my saving has not only been possible, but highly profitable,” he wrote her cuttingly, “All I can say is that your latest newspaper campaign is a corker and I am proud to be the husband of the Originator, Discoverer and Inventor of the New Household Economy for Millionaires!”

Most devastating of all to Eleanor’s self-esteem was her husband’s wartime romance with Lucy Mercer. “Franklin’s love of another woman brought her to almost total despair,” according to Joseph P. Lash, but “she emerged from the ordeal a different woman.” She said years later, “I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time. I really grew up that year.” She insisted that he break off with Lucy—or with her. A chastened husband, aware that a divorce would be politically devastating, and probably also under motherly pressure, chose the former. He knew too that his wife could be a great political asset, especially since women at last had won the right to vote in national elections.

Invited to join his campaign train when he ran for Vice President in 1920, Eleanor Roosevelt got her fill of the most grueling kind of electioneering. The Democratic debacle sent Roosevelt back to private life and gave his wife some hope of liberation from politics. This was not to be. Struck down by polio, Roosevelt endured intense physical and psychological pain with outward stoicism—he was rarely heard to complain—while Eleanor sought to keep the family on an even keel, served as her husband’s political stand-in, and tried desperately to maintain her own composure as the mother of five children ranging from five to fifteen years old.

Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt emerged from their ordeal tempered and matured, but not fundamentally changed in their political attitudes. Having twice been defeated—in 1920 and earlier, in 1914, when he had made a try for the U.S. Senate—Roosevelt would proceed slowly, regaining his political base as he sought to regain his ability to walk. He would continue to pursue political office—making necessary compromises to achieve it but proceeding boldly on policy once in power. Eleanor would continue to pursue political goals—peace, help to the poor, women’s rights, clean government—by working in the organizations necessary to achieve them. She became increasingly active in the Women’s Trade Union League, founded in 1903 by Jane Addams, in peace efforts, and in the tedious job of trying to rebuild the New York State Democratic party. Everyday politics still did not excite her; Franklin was the politician, she said later, and she the agitator. So she acted within the boundaries set by her husband, who saw competitive politics as essentially men’s business even while he sought laws that would aid women.

These two legacies divided the couple, now both in their forties, as they moved back into public life during the twenties—as Roosevelt accepted his party’s draft for governor in 1928, as he campaigned vigorously and won a narrow victory while Eleanor intensified her party and campaign work, as he sought to carry out his liberal promises often against recalcitrant Republican legislators, as he won a landslide reelection for governor in 1930. The closer he came to the presidential nomination fight, the more he seemed to compromise, from Eleanor’s standpoint—on the League of Nations, on Prohibition, on Tammany, on states’ rights. But Roosevelt had a far better sense of the electoral complexities. On the League issue in particular he was the target of front-page fulminations by publisher William Randolph Hearst, who, Roosevelt knew, could influence delegates to the 1932 Democratic convention as well as newspaper readers. He caved in to Hearst. Eleanor conspired with her husband’s staff members and friends to stiffen his resolve. When an angry Wilsonian came in to berate him for a “shabby” statement on the League, he expressed regret and then asked his visitor if she would help make peace between Eleanor and him. “She hasn’t spoken to me for three days!”

One hard political fact confronted Roosevelt—the disheveled, fragmented state of the Democratic party, whose convention a candidate could carry only by winning two-thirds of the delegate vote. The party wielded little political muscle as a national organization; during the mid-twenties the Democrats had not even had a national headquarters but rather lived off the largesse of millionaires like John J. Raskob and Bernard Baruch. Nationally the party was composed of ideological and regional shards, each of which seemed to be represented in the candidates who entered the nomination fight after Roosevelt took the lead—Al Smith for the urban Democracy; House Speaker John Garner for the Southwest; demagogic Governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray of Oklahoma for the rural West; Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland for the old Jeffersonian, states’ rights Democrats; Newton D. Baker for the Wilson internationalists; and a string of favorite sons.

Such a panoply of rivals both fortified and weakened Roosevelt—they fragmented his opposition but also threatened to slice off chunks of his own nationwide support. But he had many assets, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., summarized them: “a familiar name, a charming personality, demonstrated political popularity, an impressive executive record in Albany, a dramatic personal victory over illness, a wide and well-cultivated acquaintance across the country.” With the devoted and expert help of Eleanor Roosevelt, Louis Howe, Jim Farley, Sam Rosenman, and a host of others, Roosevelt’s bandwagon carried him to victory through a string of primaries, aside from a win by the ever-popular Smith in Massachusetts and by Garner in California. The Roosevelt forces arrived at the Chicago convention with a handsome majority of the delegates but tantalizingly short—by about 200 votes—of the necessary two-thirds.

Feverishly the governor’s foes tried to head him off, clasping hands across ancient fissures in the party. The Roosevelt campaign effort almost blew up in Chicago when a group of FDR enthusiasts launched an attack against the two-thirds rule, thus giving the opposition a moral issue about “changing the rules of the game” and jeopardizing the support of Southerners who had long used the rule to protect racial and regional power. Roosevelt, who had originally planned to challenge the rule but had now lost control of the timing, retreated as gracefully as possible.

So he would have to attain the magic two-thirds, and he did, through the disarray of his opponents, the unflagging efforts of Farley and other FDR men on the convention floor and in the smoke-filled rooms, and—at a critical moment after the third ballot—the consummation of the candidate’s patient courting of Texas’s Garner and California senator William G. McAdoo and his genuflection before Hearst. Fearing that Baker might win if Roosevelt did not, the Californians and the Texans pooled their poker hands. The big card was the vice-presidential nomination for Garner. Once he agreed—reluctantly, because he had no great wish to quit the Speakership—the deal was made. To McAdoo was given the exquisite satisfaction of settling the convention score of 1924, when he had been denied the nomination by Al Smith.

“California came here to nominate a President of the United States,” he shouted in the teeth of the howling and booing delegates. “She did not come to deadlock the Convention or to engage in another devastating contest like that of 1924.” More hisses and groans. “California casts 44 votes for Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Then bedlam.

“Good old McAdoo,” Roosevelt exclaimed by his radio at Hyde Park. While Eleanor went to the kitchen to cook bacon and eggs, he began planning for the next morning’s rendezvous with the waiting plane.

Out of the pandemonium in the Chicago Stadium a young novelist, John Dos Passos, walked down West Madison Street. Gradually the din of speeches faded from his ears. No one in the seedy crowd about him seemed to know of the “historic” event that had just taken place. He stepped down a flight of stairs into the darkness of the roadway under Michigan Avenue.

“This world too has its leisure class,” he noted. “They lie in rows along the ledges above the roadway, huddled in grimed newspapers, gray sag-faced men in worn-out clothes, discards … men who have lost the power to want. Try to tell one of them that the gre-eat Franklin D. Roosevelt, Governor of the gre-eat state of New York, has been nominated by the gre-eat Democratic party as its candidate for President, and you’ll get what the galleries at the convention gave Mr. McAdoo when they discovered that he had the votes of Texas and California in his pocket and was about to shovel them into the Roosevelt bandwagon, a prolonged and enthusiastic Boooo. Hoover or Roosevelt, it’ll be the same cops.”

The Democrats had their man. But who was he? Perhaps those who had sized him up best were the convention delegates and their leaders. Roosevelt was attractive, ambitious, electable, a reliable deal-maker; he was “available.” But the press and the pundits were looking for a higher quality—leadership. In this they had found Roosevelt lacking. The New Republic had viewed him as utterly without the kind of “great intellectual force or supreme moral stamina” that underlay strong leadership. He hedged on everything, complained the Washington Post. Wishy-washy, said Henry Mencken. “Too easy to please”—not the dangerous enemy of anything, Walter Lippmann had said earlier in the year. “In boldness of political leadership,” he was “certainly no Cleveland or Wilson,” said The Outlook.

This criticism galled Roosevelt, but he could only respond privately. “Can’t you see,” he wrote to a Wilsonian outraged over his desertion of the League, “that loyalty to the ideals of Woodrow Wilson is just as strong in my heart as it is in yours—but have you ever stopped to consider that there is a difference between ideals and the methods of attaining them? Ideals do not change, but methods do change with every generation and world circumstance.

“Here is the difference between me and some of my fainthearted friends: I am looking for the best modern vehicle to reach the goal of an ideal while they insist on a vehicle which was brand new and in good running order twelve years ago. Think this over! And for heaven’s sake have a little faith.” But his friends felt that he was being fainthearted. They knew, moreover, that on some issues he was consistent and committed—on big questions, such as the need for an activist government and a liberal Democratic party, and on specific issues, such as the vital role of electric power in his state and nation. He was not even consistent in his inconsistency.

Those who examined Roosevelt’s inner circle for a clue to his fundamental and enduring beliefs were no less puzzled. By campaign time Roosevelt had collected around himself a group of “brain trusters” as diverse as they were talented. There were Columbia University political scientist Raymond Moley, a onetime city reformer who had since become most concerned about the “anarchy of concentrated economic power”; Adolf Berle, a child prodigy at Harvard who had continued to be so prodigious in law and economics that H. G. Wells once said of him that his worldview “seemed to contain all I had ever learnt and thought, but better arranged and closer to reality”; Rexford Tugwell, a Columbia economist who was both a romantic and a planner, an intellectual experimenter and a governmental centralizer. These men, united in their concern over the chaos, inefficiency, and cruelty of capitalist breakdown, were divided over monetary and other economic issues.

Also close to Roosevelt was another penetrating mind but of quite different cast—Felix Frankfurter of the Harvard Law School, an irrepressible pursuer of legal justice and good conversation, who abhorred Utopian ideas for social reconstruction and called for economic decentralization and fair play through regulation of banking and securities. He was carrying the flag of his mentor, Justice Louis D. Brandeis, which was also the flag of many progressive—and powerful—Democrats and Republicans in Congress. Of quite different orientation were a number of self-styled “Jeffersonians” who preached states’ rights, limited government, and above all economy and budget-balancing, and who with the help of Louis Howe could gain access to Roosevelt at critical moments. Others operated on the fringe: Cordell Hull, a courtly Tennessean and veteran politico whose suspicion of big business took the form mainly of a near-obsession against high tariffs; General Hugh Johnson, a colorful old army man even at the age of fifty, a Bernard Baruch protégé who believed both in budget-balancing and in central governmental direction of the economy; various monetary theorists; and Eleanor Roosevelt.

The candidate made no effort to impose intellectual unity on the core group—he had none to impose. But he did establish a clear line between “politics” and “policies.” Farley, after being installed by Roosevelt in place of Raskob as Democratic national chairman, said to Moley, “I’m interested in getting him the votes—nothing else. Issues aren’t my business. They’re yours and his. You keep out of mine, and I’ll keep out of yours.” Roosevelt reposed such confidence in these diverse brains—they never made up a monolithic “trust”—that he left speech- and issue-planning under Moley’s direction while he took off with three of his sons in a forty-foot yawl for a sail along the New England coast.

Roosevelt had several acute questions of campaign strategy to ponder as he sailed contentedly under sunny July skies, occasionally stopping at sleepy ports for political confabs. One was how to appeal to progressive Republicans. The inheritors of the cause of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert La Follette were still active in the GOP—and still frustrated. Rejecting Hoover, they had other alternatives besides Roosevelt: form a new progressive party, support Norman Thomas’s Socialist party, or sit the election out. Some progressives, especially in the East, doubted Roosevelt’s character and convictions. Why support a tweedledum Democrat? One progressive of impeccable credentials—George W. Norris of Nebraska— announced for Roosevelt early and staunchly, however, largely because of Roosevelt’s consistent support of public electric power. Some progressives followed. A national progressive league for Roosevelt and Garner was formed under Norris. Hiram Johnson endorsed the Democratic candidate, as did Robert La Follette,Jr., despite his doubts about Roosevelt’s commitment to social justice. Other progressives held back.

An easier question was whether Roosevelt should actively campaign at all. Some urged that he conduct a front-porch campaign, as presidential candidates had done in olden times. They felt that a campaign tour was unnecessary, that he might not be up to it physically. Garner, visiting Roosevelt at Hyde Park, advised that all the boss had to do was to stay alive until election day. Farley, passing on the mixed views of party leaders, favored an active campaign. Roosevelt took little urging. His Dutch was up, he told Farley. Soon he, Farley, and Howe were planning an election drive that became even more ambitious once the candidate got underway.

The toughest question of campaign strategy was whether the candidate should offer a coherent, challenging set of ideas or tailor his views to expedient campaign needs. Not only did Tugwell and other advisers want their boss to speak out; they wanted him to present a program, comprehensive, consistent, with focus and priorities. He was “weak on relations, on the conjunctural, the joining together of forces and processes, especially in the national economy,” as Tugwell saw it. Roosevelt’s scattered approach to policy gave force to acid comments by left-wing commentators, Tugwell felt; he himself had boiled over in Chicago when he picked up a newspaper with a column by Heywood Broun calling Roosevelt “the corkscrew candidate of a convoluting convention.”

Roosevelt continued to be disappointed and even hurt by the liberal intellectual critics. The intellectuals never allowed a politician the least leeway, he said to Tugwell; they were positively fearful of being caught in an approving mood. But what he was trying to do, Roosevelt continued, was to get elected, not simply arouse agitation and argument. Let Hoover be the ideologue—and be cramped by this. The Democrats, by staying more “flexible,” could become the majority party. Leadership with such support might continue to win elections, perhaps for a generation.

By following a wobbly line somewhere between the middle and somewhat left of middle Roosevelt made himself a difficult target for Hoover, but he also invited attacks from both right and left. The financier and industrialist Owen D. Young, after visiting Roosevelt at Hyde Park in midsummer, had the feeling that the governor “was avoiding real issues” with him and perhaps had met with him only for campaign cosmetics. A few days later Roosevelt reaped a whirlwind on the left. Sitting at lunch with Eleanor Roosevelt, Tugwell, and others, he took a call from Huey Long, whose angry voice carried to the others at the table. As Tugwell remembered the conversation, Long was furious because Roosevelt had seen that “stuffed shirt Owen Young” while the Kingfish sat down in Louisiana and never heard from anybody.

“God damn it, Frank, who d’you think got you nominated?”

“Well,” said Roosevelt, “you had a lot to do with it.”

“You sure as hell are forgettin’ about it as fast as you can.” Long complained that there was a “regular parade” of people like Young seeing the governor.

“Oh, I see a lot of people you don’t read about. The newspaper boys only write up the ones their editors like.”

If Roosevelt didn’t stop listening to people like that, Long said, Roosevelt wouldn’t carry the South. “You got to turn me loose.”

“What d’you mean, turn you loose?” Roosevelt said. “You are loose.”

“That Farley,” said Long, “that’s what I mean, and that Louis.” They wouldn’t give him any money. He wanted to work with Roosevelt directly. Was the governor coming South?

“No, I don’t need to; your country there is safe enough.”

“Don’t fool yourself—it ain’t safe at all. You’ve got to give these folks what they want. They want fat-back and greens.…” Long went on and on, shouting expletives and demands. When he finally hung up, Roosevelt sat ruminating for a few moments about how Long was leading people to the promised land. “You know,” he said, “that’s the second most dangerous man in America.” Pressed as to who was the most dangerous man, he said, “Douglas MacArthur.”

Ready to move left or right, or hover in the center, Roosevelt began his speaking campaign in Columbus, Ohio, late in August with a denunciation of Hoover’s “Alice-in-Wonderland” economics, then presented his own proposals for federal regulation of security exchanges, banks, and holding companies. In Sea Girt, New Jersey, before a monster throng mobilized by Boss Frank Hague of Jersey City, he called for repeal of Prohibition, as had the Democratic platform, but coupled this with a sermon in favor of temperance. In mid-September, in Topeka, he came out for the “planned use of the land,” lower taxes for farmers, federal credit for refinancing farm mortgages, and the barest shadow of a voluntary domestic allotment plan to manage farm surpluses, at the same time pulling back from the old McNary-Haugen formula that he had indiscreetly endorsed in a book. In Salt Lake City he took a quite different tack with a call for an integrated federal transportation effort, including federal regulation and aid for the floundering railroad industry.

Sharp disputes broke out among Roosevelt’s advisers over these speeches, with the result often a compromise. Thus the Topeka speech, shaped by perhaps twenty-five minds, produced what Roosevelt wanted: “a speech so broad in implications,” according to Frank Freidel, “that it would encompass all the aspirations of Western farmers no matter what their prejudices, and at the same time so vague in its endorsement of domestic allotment that it would not frighten conservative Easterners.”

In the midst of this weaving and fencing Roosevelt gave a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco that electrified progressives. It was powerful in its parts: an invitation to “consider with me in the large, some of the relationships of Government and economic life that go deeply into our daily lives, our happiness, our future and our security”; a long review of the rise of the centralized state and the struggle of the individual to assert his rights; of the rise of the machine age and of the “financial Titans” who had “pushed the railroads to the Pacific” ruthlessly and wastefully but had built the railroads; of the decline of equality of opportunity under capitalism; of the need for an “economic declaration of rights” to meet deeply human needs. The speech was studded with acute insights, memorable phrases, and evocative ideas, well suited to his California audience and especially to the venerable progressive Hiram Johnson.

But this notable address did not hang together. It began with the proposition that “America is new” and had “the great potentialities of youth” but pages later concluded that “our industrial plant is built” and probably overbuilt, “our last frontier has long since been reached,” that the safety valve of the western frontier was gone, that “we are not able to invite the immigration from Europe to share our endless plenty.” Hence the task was not expansion but the “soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand,” of “adjusting production to consumption,” of “distributing wealth and products more equitably.” The speech had been written by Berle and was delivered by the candidate with minimal change; Tugwell claimed Roosevelt never even saw it until he opened it on the lectern, and Moley disagreed with key parts of it.

The candidate’s final string of speeches continued in this vein, rich in good ideas and specific proposals but often unconnected and even inconsistent. When he was presented with a speech draft endorsed by Hull calling for a general lowering of tariffs, and with another that called for gradual, bilateral “old-fashioned Yankee horse-trades,” he left Moley speechless by instructing him to “weave the two together.” Following a series of addresses calling for social justice, for action on unemployment and social welfare, he accused Hoover late in the campaign of reckless and extravagant spending, of burdening the people with taxes, of inflating the bureaucracy, of drastically unbalancing the budget. Herbert Hoover a spendthrift! Roosevelt made a flat promise to “reduce the cost of current Federal Government operations by 25 percent.” By now critics were charging once again that no profound difference in policy separated the Democratic candidate from the Republican President.

Herbert Hoover saw profound differences. At first he had not taken his opponent’s candidacy too seriously, telling his Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, that Roosevelt would be the easiest man to beat. But as the summer progressed and Roosevelt danced all around him on issues, Hoover’s composure gave way; visitors found him shifting between dark pessimism and blazing anger at foes and deserters. In mid-September he told Stimson that while “he was gaining in the East he would lose everything west of the Alleghenies and would lose the election.” Anger, indignation, pride, passion brought him out on the hustings in the fall. Painstakingly writing his own speeches, delivering them in a flat, hard monotone—Mencken said he could recite the Twenty-third Psalm and make it sound like a search warrant—Hoover tried to get a fix on this “chameleon on the Scotch plaid.” As he drove down city streets he encountered boos and catcalls, signs reading “In Hoover we trusted; now we are busted”; the cold hostility of rows of onlookers.

There might have been a tragically ennobling aspect to the campaign, as the ideologue of the besieged order grimly defended his castle against the would-be usurper. But the campaign flattened out, despite frantic warnings by Hoover against fascist and socialist tendencies in the other camp, and demagogic attacks by Roosevelt on the “present Republican leadership” as the “Horsemen of Destruction, Delay, Deceit, Despair.” If Hoover could not get a grip on Roosevelt, neither could Socialist Norman Thomas or the candidates of other minor parties. It was not 1896 or 1904 or 1912. In the gravest economic crisis they had ever known, the American people seemed bewildered and benumbed, lethargic amid the tempests of the politicians.

Polls—and especially the results of Maine’s early state election—robbed the outcome of much suspense. Assembled on election night in Democratic party headquarters on the first floor of the Biltmore, Roosevelt’s family and friends received favorable early returns and then reports of a near-sweep. Only Pennsylvania and five smaller states stayed with the President. Roosevelt won 22.8 million votes, Hoover 15.8 million, Norman Thomas 885,000, Communist William Z. Foster 103,000.

Louis Howe uncorked a bottle of sherry he had put away twenty years before in Albany. After receiving a gracious concession telegram from Hoover, the President-elect left for his Sixty-fifth Street house, to be met by his mother, who said, “I never thought particularly about my son being President, but if he’s going to be President, I hope he’ll be a good one!” Eleanor Roosevelt seemed in a less celebratory mood. She was happy for her husband, she told people, while to a close woman friend she confided that she had not wished to be First Lady. “If I wanted to be selfish, I could wish Franklin had not been elected.” She had watched Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt and learned what it meant to be the wife of a President, and she did not like the prospect. It meant the end of her personal life.

She would have to work out her own salvation. She could not know yet that this might have to wait out the salvation of a nation.

The “Hundred Days” of Action

Four long months stretched ahead before the President-elect could take office, for the Constitution of 1787 had been drafted in a world of travel by carriage, sail, and horseback, not train, auto, and plane. During those four months lame-duck members of Congress would meet, debate and denounce, answer to no one, and go home.

Could human misery wail for constitutional processes? During the autumn the economy had fallen off even further—a result, Hoover convinced himself, of business fears of what the Democrats would do. As winter approached, business activity dropped to between a quarter and a third of “normalcy” and one worker out of five—perhaps one out of four—was jobless. The employed were hardly better off. Women lining slippers—one every forty-five seconds—in Manhattan sweatshops earned barely over one dollar for a nine-hour day. Girls sewing aprons for 2½ cents per apron could make 20 cents a day. “There is not a garbage-dump in Chicago which is not diligently haunted by the hungry,” Edmund Wilson reported.

“Last summer in the hot weather when the smell was sickening and the flies were thick, there were a hundred people a day coming to one of the dumps, falling on the heap of refuse as soon as the truck had pulled out and digging in it with sticks and hands. They would devour all the pulp that was left on the old slices of watermelon and canteloupe till the rinds were as thin as paper; and they would take away and wash and cook discarded onions, turnips, potatoes, cabbage or carrots. Meat is a more difficult matter, but they salvage a good deal of that too. The best is the butcher’s meat which has been frozen and hasn’t spoiled. In the case of the other meat, there are usually bad parts that have to be cut out or they scald it and sprinkle it with soda to kill the rotten taste and the smell.”

Poverty and despair lay deep over the farmlands as well. Farmers were burning corn in their stoves in places where coal cost four dollars a ton and corn sold for a third of that. Desperate men were brandishing hangman’s nooses and shotguns to keep deputy sheriffs from foreclosing their mortgages and selling their acreage. Farmers bid in a neighbor’s foreclosed farm for a dime, amid threats to serious bidders, and then turned the land back to the neighbor. But local action, they knew, was not enough. Farm leaders in Nebraska talked about marching tens of thousands of protesters to the state capitol and tearing it down if they were denied relief. Farm leaders in Washington warned of revolution in the countryside.

Who would take leadership during the interregnum? Not Congress. Weighted down by 158 members who had been given their walking papers in November, divided in party control, surly toward the President, unsure of the President-elect, the legislators fribbled and dawdled, squabbling over beer, deadlocking over relief, putting off action on farm mortgages and bank deposit legislation.

Not big business. Questioned by the Senate Finance Committee, noted businessmen admitted virtual intellectual bankruptcy. He had no solution, said one New York banker, “and I do not believe anybody else has.” Myron C. Taylor of U.S. Steel and others saw only one possibility— retrenchment. Pleas to balance the budget sounded like a mindless litany in the hearing room. The business leadership of the nation had fallen from its highest level of influence, judged Walter Lippmann, to its lowest.

Nor would Roosevelt take leadership before he took office. He was still learning and listening while he cleaned up his gubernatorial affairs in New York. Stopping off in Washington on trips to Warm Springs and back, he talked at length with congressional leaders, and found the Democrats as factionalized as ever. He tried to hold off pressure from the left. He received and listened attentively to a left-wing delegation planning a hunger march in Washington, but avoided taking a stand. “When I talk to him he says ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’” grumbled Huey Long. “But Joe Robinson”— Senate Majority Leader and the Kingfish’s bête noire—“goes to see him the next day and again he says ‘Fine! Fine! Fine!’ Maybe he says ‘Fine!’ to everybody.” Roosevelt did—to almost everybody—and visitors left with the feeling he agreed with them when he had meant simply that he understood them.

The one man with the constitutional authority and responsibility to lead was politically impotent as a lame duck. Herbert Hoover, however, was by no means eager to surrender leadership. When Britain asked the President for suspension of World War I debt payments to the United States and for a review of the whole debt situation, Hoover invited Roosevelt to discuss the matter with him. The President-elect was wary. He was no expert on the foreign debt question; he knew that Democratic congressional leaders were opposed to forsaking money that Europe “had hired,” in Calvin Coolidge’s words; and he wanted to maintain his own freedom of action. There followed a long and stately minuet of suspicious co-leaders, with little action.

The nation tried to size up its next President. “Your distant relative is an X in the equation,” editor William Allen White wrote to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. “He may develop his stubbornness into courage, his amiability into wisdom, his sense of superiority into statesmanship. Responsibility is a winepress that brings forth strange juices out of men.” Wrote Lippmann earlier: “His good-will no one questions. He has proved that he has the gift of political sagacity. If only he will sail by the stars and not where the winds of opinion will take him, he will bring the ship into port.”

The nation seemed to hunger for leadership—but what kind of leadership? Europe provided some models. In Germany, on January 30—Roosevelt’s fifty-first birthday—a befuddled President von Hindenburg designated as Chancellor Adolf Hitler, who promptly dissolved the Reichstag, called an election, locked up opposition leaders, and terrorized the voters with an ersatz panic. Mussolini’s Italy was shipping arms to Austrian fascists. In the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin was still mercilessly crushing his party opponents.

“The situation is critical, Franklin,” Lippmann told the President-elect during a visit to Warm Springs. He reminded Roosevelt that Hitler had come to power over a paralyzed executive and deadlocked parliament. His host as usual was vague about specific plans. Two weeks later Lippmann wrote in his column that Congress should give the new President a free hand by refraining from debate and amendment for a year. Just at this time the nation was reminded of the explosive forces lying under the surface when Joseph Zangara, an unemployed bricklayer, took a shot at Roosevelt in Miami, missed him, and mortally wounded the mayor of Chicago, who was riding in an open car with the President-elect. “I do not hate Mr. Roosevelt personally,” Zangara said, “I hate all Presidents … and I hate all officials and everybody who is rich.”

About this time a very rich man, Henry Ford, was refusing the pleas of White House emissaries to help bail out two Michigan banks in which the automaker had millions of dollars of deposits. Let the crash come, Ford said. Soon the governor of Michigan proclaimed a bank holiday—and a ripple of fear spread through the nation. Once again Hoover sought to involve Roosevelt in an economic decision, urging him to assure the country that there would be no “tampering or inflation of the currency,” that the budget would be balanced and government credit maintained. Roosevelt would not repudiate the “new deal” that he was slowly shaping. In a last desperate try, Hoover in two late-night phone calls on the eve of Inaugural Day asked Roosevelt whether he would endorse a White House executive order controlling bank withdrawals. The President-elect would not—the President must act on his own. As the White House clock struck midnight, Hoover said, “We are at the end of our string.”

The government was paralyzed as the nation’s financial structure seemed close to toppling. Ashen-faced bankers, sitting late in their offices totaling withdrawals, wondered whether their banks would pull through. On March 3 over $100 million in gold was withdrawn from the Treasury. Governor Herbert Lehman declared a banking holiday in New York. Illinois followed. As the Hoovers’ bags were being packed in the White House, the fear that had been sweeping through the nation turned into panic.

A poem by Robert Sherwood appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature:

Plodding feet

Tramp—tramp

The Grand Old Army’s

Breaking Camp.

Blare of bugles

Din—din

The New Deal is moving in.…

But where’s the army of the unemployed?

One would think they’d be overjoyed

To join this pageant of renown—

These festive rites.…

Washington, D.C., March 4, 1933. Perched on the icy branches of the gaunt trees overlooking the Capitol’s east front, they waited for the ceremony to which they had no tickets: an old man in ancient, patched-up green tweeds; a pretty young redhead in a skimpy coat; an older woman in rags, her face lined with worry and pain; a college boy whose father was jobless. They watched the crowd below as rumors drifted through that Roosevelt had been shot, that the whole area was covered by army machine guns. The older woman prayed on her tree limb: “No more trouble, please, God. No more trouble.”

They watched as dignitaries straggled down the Capitol steps: Herbert Hoover, morose and stony-faced; Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, his white beard fluttering a bit in the cold wind; Vice President Garner, shivering without an overcoat; finally Franklin D. Roosevelt, moving down the steps with agonizing slowness on the arm of his son James. They watched as the new President took the oath of office, his hand lying on the 300-year-old Roosevelt family Bible, open at Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians: “though I have faith …and have not charity, I am nothing.” And they watched as, still unsmiling, he gripped the rostrum firmly and looked out at the crowd.

“I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels.” The cold wind riffled the pages of his text.

“This great nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.” The President’s words rang out across the plaza. “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

The great crowd stood in almost dead silence. Chin outthrust, face grave, Roosevelt went on: “In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”

The crowd began to respond as it caught the cadence of the phrases: “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization.…

“This Nation asks for action, and action now. Our greatest primary task is to put people to work.” The throng stirred to these words. The President gave the core of what would become the first New Deal programs. He touched on foreign policy only vaguely and briefly.

“In the field of world policy I would dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor—the neighbor who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others.…”

He hoped that the Constitution, with its normal balance of presidential and congressional power, would be adequate to the crisis. But if Congress did not respond to his proposals or act on its own, and if the national emergency continued, “I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” The American people wanted direct, vigorous action.

“They have asked for discipline and direction under leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes.…”

As Roosevelt ended, he was still grim; but his face lighted up when the crowd seemed to come to life. The old man in the tree had broken into tears. “It was very, very solemn, and a little terrifying,” Eleanor Roosevelt said later to reporters in the White House. “The crowds were so tremendous, and you felt that they would do anything—if only someone would tell them what to do.”

Someone would. The new President had no sooner reviewed the inaugural parade and hosted a White House reception for a thousand guests than he swore in his cabinet en masse upstairs in the Oval Room. Washington had come alive with rumor and hope. Even while couples waltzed gaily at the inaugural balls, haggard men conferred hour after hour in the huge marble buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue. Republican holdovers and Democrats newly arrived in Washington sat side by side, telephoning anxious bankers, drawing up emergency orders, all the while feeling the financial pulse of the nation and world.

With the nation’s finances paralyzed the new President gathered his lieutenants together for rapid action, but at his first cabinet meeting the day after the inaugural the group hardly looked like a team. After long and careful clearances with congressional and other leaders, Roosevelt had pieced together a kind of ministry of all the talents—or at least of all tastes and tendencies. Around him sat four old Wilson Jeffersonians, most notably Cordell Hull; two midwestern progressives and nominal Republicans, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes; and three New Yorkers, Jim Farley, the party and campaign expert, Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet member ever appointed, and a real Republican, the new Treasury Secretary, William Woodin. Conspicuous by their absence was the party old guard; Roosevelt had not asked any of the three living Democratic presidential nominees to serve—not even his old running mate, James Cox—or any key member of the Wilson Administration save Carter Glass, who had declined the Treasury.

Later in the day Roosevelt conferred with a set of congressional leaders equally diverse in party and ideology. In a diary that he kept for two days and then gave up, Roosevelt gave the best account of the early meetings: “Conferences with Senator Glass, Hiram Johnson, Joe Robinson and Congressmen Steagall and Byrnes and Minority Leader Snell.” All approved the President’s calling a special session of Congress. “Secretary Woodin reported bankers’ representatives much at sea as to what to do. Concluded that forty-eight different methods of handling banking situation impossible. Attorney General Cummings reported favorably on power to act under 1917 law, giving the President power to license, regulate, etc., export, hoarding, earmarking of gold or currency. Based on this opinion and on emergency decided on Proclamation declaring banking holiday.” Then supper with Franklin Jr. and John before they returned to school, a talk with several reporters, a five-minute radio address for the American Legion, a late visit from Hull, and “Bed.”

The next morning this leader, so ready for action, had an unnerving experience. Wheeled over by his valet to his office in the West Wing, he was left there alone in a big empty room. “There was nothing to be seen and nothing to be heard,” as Tugwell was later to relate Roosevelt’s account. “And for a few dreadful moments he hadn’t a thought. He knew that the stimulus of human contact would break the spell; but where was everybody?” He felt physically helpless, paralyzed—but much worse, he wondered whether the national paralysis had struck to the center. “There must be buttons to push, but he couldn’t see them. He pulled out a drawer or two; they had been cleaned out.”

So he sat back in his chair and simply shouted. That shout brought his aides running. And with that shout there began what would go down in history as the “Hundred Days.”

March 5—The President declared that an “extraordinary occasion” required Congress to convene on March 9.

March 6—The President proclaimed a bank holiday. This was an act of psychological leadership. The banks already were closed, by their own action or that of the states. Roosevelt played his role of crisis leader with such skill that his action in keeping the banks closed struck people with bracing effect. The far more daunting problem was reopening the banks in a way that would help them stay open, and here, in Frank Freidel’s judgment, he had no clear idea. He relied on his own brain trusters, but even more on bankers and holdovers from the Hoover Administration— men who were cautious and conservative. The money-changers, chortled the left-wing press, were back in the temple.

March 10—The President asked Congress for authority to make “drastic economies” in government. “Too often in recent history,” he said, “liberal governments have been wrecked on rocks of loose fiscal policy.” National recovery depended on frugality. The address was straight out of the Chamber of Commerce—and Roosevelt’s Pittsburgh campaign promises. Caught by surprise, lobbyists for veterans’ groups wired their state and local bodies that benefits were in danger. The Democratic leadership in the House put down a revolt among the rank and file.

March 13—Beer! The President urged on Congress the legalization of the manufacture and sale of beer and light wines—the first step toward the repeal of the Volstead Act.

March 16—The President asked for a “new means to rescue agriculture”—an Agricultural Adjustment Act to hike farmers’ buying power, slacken the pressure of farm mortgages, and raise the value of farm loans made by banks. It was none too soon. Angry farmers took matters into their own hands even as the bill was debated. Mobs of Iowans stopped eviction sales, manhandled bank agents and special deputies, fought with National Guard troops. In one town a “foreclosing judge” was dragged from his bench by masked men, mauled, half-strangled by a hangman’s noose, forced to his knees, told to pray. When he entreated, “Oh Lord, I pray thee, do justice to all men,” but still would not promise to drop the foreclosure proceeding, he was left half naked, smeared with dirt and grease.

March 21—The President proposed a bill close to his own heart—a Civilian Conservation Corps that would put tens of thousands of jobless young men to work in the nation’s woodlands to protect the forests, fight floods and soil erosion—and in the process regenerate themselves and their skills. Like all big projects, he had told reporters earlier, “It is in a sense experimental, therefore we do not want to launch it on too big a scale until we know how practical it is.” Congress legislated the plan before the end of the month. In the same message the President asked for a big program of federal emergency relief to feed and clothe millions of destitute Americans; Congress gave him this bill within two months.

March 29—The President urged on Congress the federal supervision of investment securities, because of the “obligation upon us to insist that every issue of new securities to be sold in interstate commerce shall be accompanied by full publicity and information.” To the old doctrine of caveat emptor, he said, must be added the further doctrine: “Let the seller also beware.” Roosevelt had no completed bill to offer—only the services of advisers who were already battling among themselves over the bill and were soon negotiating a tangle of policy concepts and specifics with members of Congress and their staffs. There was strong support on the Hill, however, especially on the part of Sam Rayburn of Texas and other old Wilsonians, and Congress passed in May a bill levying heavy penalties for failing to file full and honest information with the government.

April 5—By executive order the President prohibited “the hoarding of gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates” and directed all holders of gold to turn it over to a bank, in order to strengthen the nation’s financial structure and “to give the Government that element of freedom of action” necessary as the “very basis of its monetary goal and objective.”

April 10—The President “suggested” to Congress a project as close to his heart as the CCC, and for the same reason—it would nurture both people and the environment. This was for a Tennessee Valley Authority charged with the duty of planning for the “proper use, conservation and development of the natural resources of the Tennessee River drainage basin and its adjoining territory.” In his broad vision the President saw the enterprise as transcending mere power development and encompassing flood control, soil conservation, reforestation, retirement of marginal lands, industrial distribution and diversification—“national planning for a complete river watershed.” No one more eagerly welcomed this bill on Capitol Hill than George Norris, who with liberal allies in both parties had for more than a decade fought efforts to sell the government-built Muscle Shoals dam and power plant, which would now become part of a vast program of public development, ownership, and control.

During the interregnum the President-elect had led Norris and other congressional leaders on a tour of the valley. Pulling up at the dam at Muscle Shoals, Roosevelt watched the surging waters pour through the spillway—and go to waste. He had publicly promised that now these waters would be harnessed. He called Norris up from the car behind him. “This ought to be a happy day for you, George.” It was, said Norris; “I can see my dreams coming true.” He added half aloud as he walked back to his car: “Thank God for a President who can dream dreams!” With Norris looking on exultantly, Roosevelt signed the TVA bill in mid-May.

April 13—As foreclosures rose to a thousand a day, the President asked for legislation to protect home ownership as a guarantee of economic and social stability. The government would refinance mortgages of small owners, some of whom had lost their homes as far back as 1930. Congress passed this measure with enthusiasm.

May 4—The President urged emergency railroad legislation that would establish a coordinator of transportation to help or compel carriers to avoid duplication of service and waste and encourage financial reorganizations. Both houses passed bills within a month of Roosevelt’s request.

May 17—The President sent a double recommendation to Congress— “for the machinery necessary for a great cooperative movement throughout all industry” for reemployment, a shorter working week, decent wages, and the prevention of “unfair competition and disastrous overproduction”; and for granting the President “full power to start a large program of direct employment” at a cost of about $3.3 billion. The resulting National Industrial Recovery Act was a legacy of World War I mobilization and the 1920s trade association movement, and the immediate product of brainstorming and horse-trading among an unusually large number of advisers and politicians in the legislature and the executive. Offering enticements to labor as well as capital, the bill was assailed from both right and left on Capitol Hill and barely survived the Senate gantlet. “History probably will record the National Industrial Recovery Act,” said Roosevelt when he signed it on June 16, “as the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress.”

So with that signing ended the Hundred Days—a policy explosion without precedent in American history—but of what enduring effect none could foresee.

“Discipline and Direction Under Leadership”?

At the center of the action sat Franklin Roosevelt, presiding, instructing, wheedling, persuading, enticing, pressuring, negotiating, manipulating, conceding, horse-trading, placating, mediating—leading and following, leading and misleading. People marveled how the President, his cigarette holder deployed more jauntily than ever, appeared to bounce and skip through the day, despite his inability to walk, as he punctuated solemn conferences with jests, long and somewhat imaginary stories, and great booming laughter. While still in bed in the morning, his large torso looming over legs that hardly ribbed the sheets, he spouted ideas, questions, instructions to his aides. Wheeled over to the west wing, he swung into his office chair for long hours of visitors, letters, telephone calls, emergency sessions.

Calvin Coolidge had allegedly disposed of visitors by a simple formula: “Don’t talk back to ’em.” Roosevelt used talk as a tool of influence, outtalking his advisers, outtalking department heads, even outtalking visiting senators.

The President soon proved himself an artist in government—in his fine sense of timing, his adroit application of pressure, his face-to-face persuasiveness, his craft in playing not only foes but friends off against one another. Like a creative artist, Frances Perkins said, he would begin his picture “without a clear idea of what he intends to paint or how it shall be laid out upon the canvas, and then, as he paints, his plan evolves out of the material he is painting.” He could think and feel his way into political situations with imagination, intuition, insight.

These traits dominated his policy thinking as well as his political calculating—and with less success. People close to Roosevelt were dismayed by his casual and disorderly intellectual habits. To Adolf Berle his judgments of people and ideas were “primarily instinctive and not rational,” his learning came not from books but from people. He read not books but newspapers, perhaps half a dozen before breakfast—devoured them “like a combine eating up grain,” a friend noted. He was not so much a creator of ideas as a broker of them. He did not assemble his ideas into a comprehensive and ordered program, with priorities and interconnections. Just as he lived each day for itself, as he liked to tell friends, so he appeared to flirt with each idea as it came along.

Everything seemed to conspire to fortify these intellectual habits of the new President—his eclectic education and reading, the ideologically divided party he led, the factionalized Congress he confronted, above all the advisers he had chosen and who had chosen him. His chief brain truster during 1933 was Ray Moley. Prickly and hard-driving, the former Columbia professor—now Assistant Secretary of State—shared some of his boss’s political shrewdness and opportunism, intuitive judgment, and keenness in evaluating friend and foe. But Roosevelt also talked at length with Berle about banking, railroad, and monetary problems, and Berle’s ideas for raising business to a higher level of efficiency and responsibility; with Tugwell about conservation, agriculture, and industrial discipline, and Tugwell’s notions of democratic planning of the economy.

These brain trusters had their differences, but they seemed three of a kind compared with Roosevelt’s other advisers, formal and informal: his old-time Hudson Valley friend and neighbor Henry Morgenthau, humanitarian by heritage and sensibility but cautiously conservative in economic policy; budget director Lewis Douglas, absolutely dedicated to governmental penny-pinching and fiscal orthodoxy; Treasury Under Secretary Dean Acheson, close to Douglas in his economics; Jesse Jones, Texas business mogul who now ran the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Another broad influence on Roosevelt was the lively correspondence and visitation with Felix Frankfurter, who discreetly spoke for Justice Brandeis’s bias against economic and governmental giantism even as the Harvard Law School professor helped people Washington agencies with young activists who would make their own diverse marks in coming months.

Most remarkable of all was that one-woman brain trust, Eleanor Roosevelt—and all the more influential for not being viewed in that role. Through quick visits to her husband while he was still breakfasting in bed, little chits and memos, thick reports infiltrated into the executive offices, the visitors she invited to the White House, and her own influence on public opinion and Washington attitudes, she soon became a penetrating voice for the humanitarian liberal-left. Through a wide correspondence— she received 300,000 pieces of mail the first year—her press conferences and newspaper columns, her speeches and magazine articles, her widely advertised (and criticized) trips to CCC camps and coal mines, she began to build up a potentially powerful constituency of her own. Historian Mary Beard wrote admiringly of her ability to give “inspiration to the married, solace to the lovelorn, assistance to the homemaker, menus to the cook, and help to the educator, direction to the employer, caution to the warrior, and deeper awareness of its primordial force to the ‘weaker sex.’” The First Lady also served as a model for other women in Washington government. Her close friend Frances Perkins, with her labor and urban concerns and constituencies, had special access to both Roosevelts, and women like Molly Dewson of the Democratic National Committee learned that they could be, all at the same time, competent, caring, and controversial.

Such was the flux and flow of advice to the President that no one really knew which advisers were influential or why or when. Who was having the President’s ear at the moment provoked jealousies worthy of the royal courts of old. The President’s mind seemed awesomely accessible—to the kitchen cabinet, to department heads like Ickes and Perkins, to experts coming through Washington. The President would be seen talking animatedly with men regarded by the orthodox—though not necessarily by history—as quacks.

Roosevelt was following no set course, left, right, or center. He was leading by guess and by God. He not only admitted to playing by ear but boasted of it. He was a football quarterback, he told reporters, calling a new play after he saw how the last one turned out. Snap judgments had to be made. But Washington wondered what lay back of the snap judgments—some ideology or philosophy?

Neither of these, but rather a loose collection of values—Roosevelt’s warm humanitarianism, his belief that the needy must be helped, that government must step in when private institutions could not do the job, and that now—in 1933—this meant the federal government. The President also had a fine grasp of political and governmental nuts and bolts. But between the two levels of grand philosophy and policy specifics he would be experimental, eclectic, nonprogrammatic, nondoctrinaire. He would be a broker of ideas as well as of interests and individuals.

As a master broker Roosevelt presided over a grand concert of interests. Labor, farmers, businessmen, investors, unemployed youth, some of the poor—all got a slice of the first New Deal, at least on paper. FDR assumed the role of bipartisan leader, “president of all the people,” virtually the national father. He happily cited a Nebraska congressman’s definition of the New Deal as an effort “to cement our society, rich and poor, manual worker and brain worker, into a voluntary brotherhood of freemen, standing together, striving together, for the common good of all.” Government, he told a convention of bankers, was “essentially the outward expression of the unity and the leadership of all groups.” All this seemed a long cry from the “discipline and direction under leadership” he had promised in his inaugural address.

Congress, though more responsive to regional and special interests, quickened to the energy that radiated from the President. Even some Republicans fell over themselves to express support for the Democratic Roosevelt. In many respects the Chief Executive was Chief Legislator. Congress was by no means supine. Conservative Democratic senators like Carter Glass and Harry F. Byrd of Virginia usually opposed the President’s bills. Congress as a whole, however, was more positive than even Roosevelt toward the New Deal. Many congressmen wanted more inflation than Roosevelt, ampler spending for people’s needs, greater generosity to veterans and farmers, bigger public works, tougher policies toward Wall Street. The President skillfully brokered with the congressional left. For the conservative Democrats in the Senate he had growing hostility. Byrd opposed the AAA, FDR told Tugwell, because, as an apple grower, “he’s afraid you’ll force him to pay more than ten cents an hour for his apple pickers.”

As master broker Roosevelt for a time could stay above the political and ideological battles raging around him. In the distribution of good things— whether government money or patronage jobs or social policy or his smile of approval—he could act as transactional leader within the existing system. He might give TVA to the left and economy to the right, but as a compromising broker rather than ideological leader he would not move decisively left or right. Social justice, he said, “ought not to consist of robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

It all seemed to work beautifully for a time. Employment, prices, income all soared in the weeks after the Hundred Days. The industrial production index nearly doubled from March to July. Unemployment fell off from around 15 million at the time of Roosevelt’s inaugural to about 11 million in October, a drop in the jobless rate from about 30 to about 22 percent.

Roosevelt’s popularity floated high on this first gust of recovery. “If he burned down the capitol,” said Will Rogers, “we would cheer and say, ‘well, we at least got a fire started anyhow.’”

He won praise from Bertie McCormick’s Republican Chicago Tribune and William Randolph Hearst’s New York American. Daily, White House mailmen hauled in sacks of mail, most of it laudatory, some of it fulsome. An adviser found the President happily leafing through a sheaf of this mail. He was sorting letters he had received from British subjects addressing him as “Your Majesty” or “Lord Roosevelt” or in other monarchical terms. Why? He wanted to send them to King George V for his “amusement.” History has not recorded that His Majesty was amused.

Psychology overwhelmed economics. In sad reality at least 10 million Americans remained jobless in 1933, and industrial production was still far below that of the prosperity years and even the first year of the depression. In October 3 million families—at least 12 million people—still depended on unemployment relief of about $23 a month, which covered food but left little or nothing for rent and utilities. But people felt better—and this was largely Roosevelt’s doing. He exuded cheerfulness. He raised hopes and expectations. Above all, he acted; for several months he simply dominated the front pages of the nation’s newspapers with his speeches, bill-signings, trips, executive orders, pronunciamentos.

His fireside chats carried his buoyant presence directly into home and hearth. “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking,” he said at the start of his first fireside chat in mid-March. “I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.” And he proceeded to do just that, in simple, human terms. Read later in cold print, the chats seemed a bit limp and pedestrian. Read by Roosevelt over the radio, they sounded warm, intimate, homely. Watching him deliver a fireside chat, Frances Perkins sensed that he could actually see the families listening at the other end. “His face would smile and light up as though he were actually sitting on the front porch or in the parlor with them.” The President took care not to overuse this device, giving only four chats the first year, at two- or three-month intervals.

Nor did he overstrain the press conference as a way of reaching people. He held these twice a week, to the joy of the White House press corps, but the sessions were often more frustrating than rewarding to the reporters. Roosevelt was a master at withholding information. He spent much of the half hour jovially fencing and parrying with the reporters, or offering them tidbits, or lecturing them. Crowding around the President’s gadget-covered desk, the correspondents pressed him hard, with mixed results. Roosevelt wanted to control the flow of information, to create his own sensations, to set his own timing. He was not the first or the last President to do all this; he was simply more effective than most.

Nothing epitomized the New Deal in action better than the National Recovery Act and Administration—epitomized Roosevelt’s Concert of Interests, his role of broker, the psychological impact of the Hundred Days, the fundamental problems of the “broker state” at work. As boss of NRA, Roosevelt chose General Hugh Johnson, who was a mass of contradictions himself—outwardly a tough old cavalryman with a leathery face, squint eyes, and a rough bark of a voice, inwardly an amalgam of public commitment, touchy ego, maudlin sentimentality, business savvy, and as clamorous and picturesque as a sideshow barker. The general’s first job was to persuade employers to draw up codes of fair competition, a task he attacked like a cavalry charge. Once approved by the President and given the force of law, the codes were designed to discourage wasteful, junglelike competition by setting more orderly pricing and marketing policies, and to benefit workers by establishing higher wages, shorter hours, better working conditions, and the end of child labor. As part of the deal, antitrust policies would be softened so that businessmen could cooperate in setting up the codes. Code signers could affix the “Blue Eagle” label to products and shopwindows.

With Johnson as bugler, the NRA galvanized the American people like a national call to arms. Suddenly the Blue Eagle was everywhere—on magazine covers, in the movies, on girls in chorus lines. (But not on Ford cars; Henry Ford perversely refused to sign the automobile code, then lived up to it anyway.) Rushing from city to city in an army plane, dishing out Boy Scout-style enthusiasm, biting criticism, and wisecracks at every stop, Johnson pressured and coaxed businessmen to endorse the codes, then gathered them in Washington for the signing and orating. As the very personification of recovery, the general staged a monster Blue Eagle parade on New York’s Fifth Avenue. For hours he reviewed the parade of a quarter million persons, with another million and a half cheering from the sidewalks. Not since 1917 had Americans savored such a throbbing sense of marching unity.

As the months passed, though, the questions became more and more urgent: Unity for what? Marching to where? Under pressure for quick results, Johnson dealt with the business and labor leaders closest at hand, those who were most vocal, best organized, most skillful in dealing with bureaucrats and politicians. Inevitably he delegated crucial pricing and production decisions to the dominant interests, which often turned out to be the biggest corporations. The NRA was becoming a breeder of monopoly, charged Senator Gerald Nye. Who would speak for unorganized consumers? A Consumers’ Advisory Board was set up but without adequate political muscle; its members, Tugwell said, were “spearheads without shafts.”

Union labor, being organized, fared better under NRA. Section 7(a) of the act boldly proclaimed that employees “shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing, and shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers” in choosing their representatives. No one seeking or holding a job “shall be required as a condition of employment to join any company union or to refrain from joining, organizing, or assisting a labor organization of his own choosing.” Union leaders greeted this as labor’s Magna Carta—comparable to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, said John L. Lewis—and the message was clear: Organize, “THE PRESIDENT WANTS YOU TO JOIN A UNION,” placards read. “Forget about injunctions, yellow dog contracts, black lists and the fear of dismissal.” But there were complications. President William Green and the American Federation of Labor old guard wanted to organize workers into separate craft unions, even in huge auto plants, while Lewis and the rising young militants around him wanted to organize all the workers in a plant or company or industry into big, solid industrial unions.

Employers bridled at 7(a). Many set up company unions—or “employee representation plans”—which came to be run by company stooges. Labor responded with a rash of strikes during the summer of 1933; by September nearly 300,000 workers had walked out. The “concert of interests” seemed to be emitting discordant noises. “N.R.A. means National Run Around,” read a sign hoisted on a picket line. The President set up special boards, trimmed NRA’s power, eased Johnson out, and put in more domesticated chiefs, but to little avail; during 1934 the NRA eagle fluttered through heavy weather.

In the end the significance of the National Recovery Administration was not its impact on economic recovery, which was mixed, but its curbing of child labor, sweatshops, and unfair trade practices, its big boost to unionization and its modest protection to consumers. Why then was the NRA finally dismissed as a failure, even privately by Roosevelt himself? Largely because it failed in its highly touted supreme aim of bringing capital, labor, and other interests into a happy concert under the “Broker State,” and by artificially raising prices and restricting production, it only marginally helped produce recovery.

If the Concert of Interests did not work, what would? Public works, the companion piece to the NRA, was launched with little of the drama of the Blue Eagle, under the leadership of one of the most committed and stouthearted New Dealers, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Touchy and cantankerous, suspicious of friend and foe—and especially of government contractors—“Honest Harold” did not hesitate to use government snoopers to check on suspect PWA employees and their financial connections. Ickes was in no great hurry; his big projects needed careful planning and budgeting as well as laborious scrutiny by the secretary himself When the public works program finally got underway it built gas and electric power plants, jails and hospitals, sewage and water systems, bridges, docks, and tunnels—and aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers, army and navy airplanes. But the $9 billion that PWA ultimately spent were not central to recovery during Roosevelt’s first two years.

Much quicker to get underway was the federal relief program under a lanky young ex-director of private welfare programs named Harry Hopkins, who acted almost as fast as he talked. Appointed Federal Emergency Relief Administrator with a grant of half a billion dollars, Hopkins began authorizing millions of dollars in relief even while he was wailing in a hallway to be moved into his office. Since he could give money only to the state and local public relief agencies, which in turn administered relief programs, he could do little more than monitor the levels of compassion and competence with which programs were carried out. Behind his cynical, wisecracking façade Hopkins was deeply concerned with guarding the dignity, pride, and self-esteem of people on relief. Hence he was eager that the unemployed be given jobs and not merely handouts, but job programs cost more money. Late in 1933 Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt to launch a massive crash program to employ 4 million. In its brief existence, the Civil Works Administration undertook the building or rebuilding of vast numbers of roads, parks, schools, playgrounds, swimming pools, and other “light,” short-term projects, in contrast to the PWA’s “heavy” jobs.

It was this massive spending on work relief, supplemented by that of the PWA, the TVA, the CCC, the AAA, and other programs, that in 1933 and 1934 provided the central thrust of the early New Deal. It was not really planned that way; Roosevelt was responding not to grand ideology or to grand economics but to sheer human needs that he recognized and that Eleanor Roosevelt, Hopkins, Perkins, and the others brought to him. This was part of Roosevelt’s political strength in the face of the bewildering problems of 1933 and 1934: the ability to follow ad hoc, expedient policies; to mediate between liberals and moderates, ideologues and politicians, spenders and economizers; to move so quickly and deftly from policy to policy, posture to posture, as to keep his adversaries guessing and off balance; and hence to avoid being cornered by left or right—all the while helping millions of people in need.

Was this oscillating middle way also the President’s weakness? Instead of standing above the contending groups in society his administration often became part of the struggle, even sundered by it. By trying to do so many different—even competing—things, he did few that were adequate to the desperate needs. In trying to be both budget-balancer and provider, he satisfied neither the economizers nor those who believed that only a truly massive spending program would produce a massive recovery. By flirting with groups and movements stretched across the political spectrum he lost an opportunity to mobilize and lead forces arrayed from a “little left of center” to the far left. Perhaps the basic problem was one of intellectual grasp. “Roosevelt had a cogent overall interpretation of presidential leadership,” in James Sargent’s judgment, but the “disorder and ambiguity of his thought and expression” intruded when he “attempted to transfer his general thinking to specific proposals and actions.” Thus, in December 1933 the President told a press conference that “somewhere” between Douglas’s efforts to economize and “those who want to spend ten billion additional on public works, we will get somewhere.…”

In foreign policy, where Presidents usually have a freer hand, Roosevelt was equally vigorous, versatile, volatile—and opportunistic. At heart still an old Wilsonian, he had made enough concessions to Hearst and other nationalists to leave himself in an ambivalent position from the start of his administration. In choosing Cordell Hull for Secretary of State he was recognizing a man who had made no secret of his hope to crown his lifework for expanded trade and economic cooperation among nations. But in his domestic policies, with the backing of Moley, Tugwell, and others, the President was seeking a moderate rise in farm and industrial prices, which he did not want washed out by an inundation of cheap goods from abroad. Moreover, he had inherited a dubious bequest from Hoover: to take part in an International Monetary and Economic Conference set for London in the early summer, which might conflict with his early decision to go off the gold standard and his plan to free his monetary policy— especially his moderate “reflation” efforts—from entanglement with the international gold standard.

Roosevelt’s approach to the London Conference reflected his crossed purposes and mixed counsel in foreign affairs. Despite his skepticism about the London gathering, he threw himself into the posture of world leader by receiving foreign representatives, including British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, at the White House in April. Rosy pieties at these meetings raised hopes for the conference. Then the President sent to London a delegation headed by Hull but including also such protectionists as Senator Key Pittman of Nevada; the President had even tried to enlist the Senate’s supreme isolationist, Hiram Johnson, who shrewdly declined. In London the American delegation wandered in a fog of confusion which was only intensified by Roosevelt’s belated dispatch of Moley as “liaison” and ultimately, apparently, as possible fall guy. Suddenly there arrived a sharp message from Roosevelt in effect scolding the delegates for trifling with efforts for an artificial and temporary monetary stability and for ignoring fundamental ills. Confounded, the conference limped on for a few weeks and then quit, amid sharp recriminations and general hopelessness.

Roosevelt’s torpedoing of the conference did not usher in wholly nationalist policies, however; he preferred to keep dual strategies in play. In the fall he set up a committee of low-tariff men to prepare a bill for the 1934 session of Congress. On their recommendation Roosevelt asked Congress for presidential authority to make commercial agreements with foreign nations under which rates could be revised 50 percent either way. The passage of this bill was a triumph for Hull’s internationalism.

But what about Roosevelt’s? In the fall of 1933 he was still pursuing the nationalist economic policies for which his London Conference “bombshell message” had freed him. One of these policies was to shore up domestic prices by buying gold—a device that had been sold the President by a monetary theorist. So for some weeks there occurred a most extraordinary episode in presidential history—the President of the United States meeting every morning with his new Acting Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, to set the price of gold. Since edging prices upward rather than any precise figure was the aim, Roosevelt could rather arbitrarily set the figure within a certain range. Once when he proposed to Morgenthau an increase to twenty-one cents, he twitted the solemn secretary by explaining, “It’s a lucky number, because it’s three times seven.”

Also in the fall, however, Roosevelt brought off what in history might rank as potentially the most significantly internationalist act of all—recognition of the Soviet Union. This action followed lengthy haggling over terms, Washington holding out hopes for expanded trade and Moscow making vague promises to stop abetting revolutionary activity in the United States and to protect the right of free religious worship of Americans in Russia. Eleanor Roosevelt liked to tell of visiting a schoolroom where the Soviet Union had been blacked out—actually “whited out”—on a map of the world, leaving only a void. Roosevelt now had begun to fill that void.

To some inside the Roosevelt administration the New Deal by summer 1934 appeared in disarray, if not chaos. “Public works” was almost at a full stop, Berle observed, and NRA rapidly disintegrating. “We have an administration in very bad shape indeed.” Key officials, especially on the right, were quitting the administration. Lewis Douglas left in August and Acheson was preparing to leave. Some projects failed or badly faltered: the gold purchase venture; an effort by Ickes to impose some order in the chaotic oil industry; an effort by the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation to provide food for the needy and to stabilize the commodity markets. The last two of these fell afoul of industry pressures and fragmentation. The President’s abrupt cancellation of private carriers’ airmail contracts on the grounds of collusion and the assumption by the Air Corps of the flying of the mails led to a series of plane crashes and pilot deaths in the February 1934 storms—a much-publicized disaster that might have brought down a less popular President.

The public as a whole had quite a different view of the administration. It saw a President who was doing his damnedest, quick to confront specific problems, brilliant at explaining his deeds and hopes, always positive, exuberant, seemingly on top of things. The public saw a leader.

For that public the ultimate test was economic recovery, and the flush of prosperity felt strong by fall 1934, compared to the miseries of March 1933. Could “bucks” be converted to ballots? A third of the senators and all the representatives were up for reelection. Roosevelt’s tactic was to stand above the party battle, in line with his bipartisan posture of “leader of all the people.” But he helped friendly candidates indirectly, and he posed the campaign issue by asking in a fireside chat, “Are you better off than you were last year? Are your debts less burdensome? Is your bank account more secure? Are your working conditions better? Is your faith in your own individual future more firmly grounded?”

The result was a resounding verdict for the President and his New Deal. Typically Presidents lost ground in midterm congressional elections, but in 1934 Democratic strength rose from 313 to 322 in the House and— incredibly—from 59 to 69 in the Senate. A clutch of highly conservative Republican senators was sacked. “Some of our friends think the majority top-heavy,” Garner wrote the President, “but if properly handled, the House and Senate will be all right and I am sure you can arrange that.”

Next month a late vote came in from Britain. “The courage, the power and the scale” of Roosevelt’s effort, wrote Winston Churchill, “must enlist the ardent sympathy of every country, and his success could not fail to lift the whole world forward into the sunlight of an easier and more genial age.” The British Conservative was seeking to place Roosevelt in the broadest sweep of history.

“Roosevelt is an explorer who has embarked on a voyage as uncertain as that of Columbus, and upon a quest which might conceivably be as important as the discovery of the New World.”

CHAPTER 2

The Arc of Conflict

THE WINTER OF 1934 was the hardest time of all, the young factory worker said. At one point the family ate only potatoes and dog meat. “We sold everything we could except the piano. Mama wouldn’t let that go.… All of us had taken our music lessons on it—especially my sister, the one who died when I was little. I guess that was the real reason Mama wouldn’t let it go.”

In Macon County, Georgia, the NRA meant to many blacks “Negro Removal Act” or “Negro Rarely Allowed,” and to some whites “Negro Relief Act” or “No Roosevelt Again.”

In a country town outside Boston a decorous bridge party ended up in merriment and highjinks, with the ladies scissoring off their partners’ long neckties just below the knot. “I hope that wasn’t your best tie, Charles,” the hostess joked. Charles was an MIT graduate now ekeing out a living from a chicken farm. “My dear,” he said with a tight smile, “it was my only one.”

“Close to me four children moved up and down the row with nimble fingers” picking currants, a jobless writer related. “The parents scolded or cajoled as the hot day wore on and the kids whined or sulked under the monotonous work. Their ages ranged from six to twelve or thirteen.” Two younger girls tended a baby on a blanket under a tree. “For one day’s work of nearly ten hours the father collected for himself, his wife, and four children $2.44.”

From Florida a Du Pont in-law and vice president indignantly wrote a friend: “A cook on my houseboat at Fort Myers quit because the government was paying him a dollar an hour as a painter.”

An Indiana housewife wrote to the local newspaper about living on $1.50 a week. “Those in charge of relief have never known actual hunger and want.… Just what does our government expect us to do when our rent is due? When we need a doctor? …It is always the people with full stomachs who tell us poor people to keep happy.”

J. P. Morgan’s family often warned visitors not to mention Roosevelt’s name to the old man—it might raise his blood pressure to dangerous heights. It was not safe to mention any Roosevelt. When someone had let fall the name of Theodore Roosevelt, Morgan had burst out, “God damn all Roosevelts!”

In Garden City, Kansas, the skies blackened as whirlwinds of black dust beat on the farmhouses. “The doors and windows were all shut tightly, yet those tiny particles seemed to seep through the very walls. It got into cupboards and clothes closets; our faces were as dirty as if we had rolled in the dirt; our hair was gray and stiff and we ground dirt between our teeth.”

A community sing in a migratory labor camp in California hymned an old sharecropper’s lament:

Eleven Cent cotton and forty cent meat

How in the world can a poor man eat?

Flour up high, cotton down low,

How in the world can you raise the dough?

Clothes worn out, shoes run down,

Old slouch hat with a hole in the crown.…

These were the voices of some Americans not during the Hoover depression but a year or two after Roosevelt’s Hundred Days. Overall, the statistics looked good. New private and public construction put in place rose from $2.9 billion in 1933 to $3.7 billion in 1934 and $4.2 billion in 1935. Average weekly earnings of production workers went up from $16.65 in 1933 to $18.20 the next year and $19.91 the year after that. Unemployment fell in these same years from 12.8 million to 11.3 to 10.6. But these improvements looked almost pathetic compared with the 1929 figures—only 1.5 million jobless that year, weekly paychecks of almost $25 for factory workers, nearly $11billion in construction. As usual, women did worse than men and improved their lot more slowly. Roosevelt’s central goal and promise—recovery—had been only fractionally accomplished.

Yet the smell and feel of a strong recovery lasted for at least a year after the Hundred Days. Roosevelt’s exuberance, experimentation, concern— above all, the sheer range and variety of his activism—symbolized a nation on the march, looking forward. And there had been so much change and progress in so many areas: NRA had begun to bring some order and equity to what had been pure jungle conflict; depositors’ savings were safe; millions of the poor were receiving relief jobs or at least relief; magnificent projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority had been launched; the government was policing—or at least monitoring—Wall Street; farm income had been boosted and stabilized; new conservation programs were underway; the sight of the dispossessed family huddling outside its ancestral home while the slick-talking auctioneer sold it off was far less common across the great agricultural regions of the nation.

Yet millions of people were still in dire want—all the more so because promises from Washington and state capitals had sharpened their hopes and appetites. The President was now caught up in one of the most dynamic and compelling transformational situations that a free people can experience. Not only did the basic wants exist in harrowing abundance; they had been acknowledged and legitimated by the New Dealers to the point that now they had become publicly recognized needs. As political leaders made more promises, offered more assurances, aroused more hope, these needs were converted into popular expectations that were addressed back to the leaders—any leaders. And as leaders sought followers, as politicians competed for votes, popular expectations changed into feelings of entitlement and in turn into demands by followers on leaders. Who then would become the true leaders?

Class War in America

“In the summer of 1933, a nice old gentleman wearing a silk hat fell off the end of a pier. He was unable to swim. A friend ran down the pier, dived overboard and pulled him out: but the silk hat floated off with the tide. After the old gentleman had been revived, he was effusive in his thanks. He praised his friend for saving his life. Today, three years later, the old gentleman is berating his friend because the silk hat was lost.”

Roosevelt was a bit disingenuous in telling this story. Having watched the counterattack of leaders of finance on both Cousin Ted’s and Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism, he could hardly have been astonished that capitalists would turn against the New Deal. Still, he was genuinely perplexed as to why the right-wing counterattack came so quickly, and in such angry and often ugly form. As the master conductor of the concert of interests, had he not responded to business needs—in his stern call for economy, his refusal to support left-wing proposals such as the socialization of banking, his early insistence on self-liquidating public works, his initial coolness even to federal guarantee of bank deposits, his defiance of the American Legion on veterans’ pensions? Had he not received praise from such diverse conservatives as Henry L. Stimson, Walter Lippmann, and Hamilton Fish, such conservative newspapers as The Wall Street Journal and the Hearst chain? Had not the NRA and other measures tried to be evenhanded between capital and labor?

Many on the right were not placated by these measures, and their fury rose in the months after the Hundred Days. In his speeches and posture, if not always in his policies, Roosevelt was challenging some of the fundamental values of the old American right—its definition of liberty as freedom from governmental regulation and control, its belief in individualism in contrast to the “collectivist” NRA and AAA, its attachment to laissez faire and limited government in contrast to the leviathan that Roosevelt seemed to be erecting, its championship of thrift in public spending, its reverence for the Constitution and the checks and balances designed to frustrate popular majorities seeking to control the presidency and Congress. Some of the more venerable spokesmen for American conservatism in the 1930s had sat in Yale and other classrooms when Spencerian Social Darwinism—above all, the belief that progress emerges out of competition and the struggle for survival—had been relayed by the likes of William Graham Sumner and other eminent teachers.

It was inevitable that these powerful men would come into conflict with the President unless he hewed to a conservative line—and Roosevelt the improviser and experimenter would hew to no ideology during the early New Deal. Rumblings on the right began to be heard by late 1933. An organized counterattack on the New Deal was developing strongly by mid-1934, at a time when protest on the left—aside from socialists and communists who had been against the Administration from the start as a matter of course—was still mixed and unfocused. And leadership of the right was taken initially not by conservative Republicans or big businessmen but by Democrats.

The most notable of these Democrats was the party’s hero of the 1920s, Al Smith, who had now become the unhappiest warrior of them all. His desertion of the “collectivist” New Deal signaled a poignant effort of the old business leadership of the Bourbon Democracy, now aided by disaffected urbanites, to hold the Democratic party to its earlier “Jeffersonian” ways. John J. Raskob, a close friend of Smith’s, had retired from active directorship of General Motors in 1928 to head up both the Democratic-National Committee and the Smith campaign. After Smith’s defeat Raskob and Jouett Shouse, a Kansas newspaper editor and politico, ran the party. Roosevelt’s vanquishing of Smith at the 1932 Democratic convention left both Raskob and Shouse in political eclipse. By early 1934 a Du Pont vice president was corresponding with Raskob about Roosevelt’s seeking to set labor against capital, buying votes from the poor, attacking corporate wealth, and other transgressions. Why not, Raskob asked the Du Pont man, set up an organization to combat the idea that businessmen were crooks and similar iniquitous notions?

From these seeds there rapidly grew a unique organization, the American Liberty League. Top men in General Motors, Du Pont, and other corporations took the lead with Raskob and Shouse in setting it up, sometimes meeting with Smith in his office at the Empire State Building. Most of the participants by now were Republicans, but the group secured as members of its board of directors not only Smith but the 1924 Democratic presidential nominee, John W. Davis. Heavily financed by Du Pont and other big corporations, the League by the end of summer 1934 was ready to go into action as the anti-New Deal voice of business.

Shouse first paid a courtesy call on the President in mid-August to assure him of the League’s “absolutely non-partisan character.” Roosevelt could not have been more agreeable. After hearing out Shouse’s list of objectives—chiefly the protection of enterprise and of property—the President said airily, “I can subscribe to that one hundred per cent.” He might use League people to help him prepare the next federal budget, he volunteered, and he even called in his press secretary in Shouse’s presence and instructed him to announce the President’s endorsement of the League when it went public.

As usual, Roosevelt bided his time. Late in August he told reporters amiably that Shouse had stopped by and had pulled out of his pocket a couple of “Commandments”—the need to protect property and to safeguard profits. What about other commandments? he had asked Shouse. The League said nothing about teaching respect for the rights of individuals against those who would exploit them, or the duty of government to find jobs for all those who wished to work. The President quoted a gentleman “with a rather ribald sense of humor” as saying that the League believed in two things—love God and then forget your neighbor.

Had Shouse asked him to join? a reporter asked. “I don’t think he did,” Roosevelt said with a grin. “Must have been an oversight.”

With this press-conference baiting of the League, the war was on between Roosevelt and the right. Conservative pamphlets had the New Deal putting the nation on the brink of chaos, destroying states’ rights, plunging the country into bankruptcy, leading the people into socialism, dictatorship, and tyranny. The New Deal was communist or fascist, or perhaps both. Roosevelt must have been puzzled by a question that has eluded historians for at least half a century: why such emotional intensity? Surely not because of economic deprivation; business was enjoying a moderate boom under the early New Deal. Surely not wholly because of loss of power; Roosevelt had given business leaders a voice and some influence in policy-making, albeit only as a junior partner.

Perhaps the most likely explanation is a psychological one. The vehemence of the right-wing counterattack can be seen as deriving chiefly from acute feelings of insecurity and lowered status in the business community. Roosevelt had robbed capitalists of something even more important than some of their money and their power. He had threatened their self-esteem. The men who had been the economic lords of creation now inhabited a world where political leaders were masters of headlines and recipients of deference, even adulation. Men who had claimed for themselves Righteousness and Civic Virtue, even during the Hoover depression years, now found themselves whipping boys for vote-cadging politicians—or even in the dock. Roosevelt, said a French observer, had exploded one of the most popular of American myths—he had dissociated the concept of wealth from the concept of virtue.

And Roosevelt’s own psychology? His pride and self-esteem were also at stake. He was sensitive to criticism from the right, especially from people of his own class. He wrote a Harvard classmate, a Boston banker, that he had heard of some remarks the classmate had made, and “because of what I felt to be a very old and real friendship these remarks hurt.” He wrote another friend bitterly about the “dinner-party conversations in some of the best houses in Newport.” Doubtless he felt demeaned and deserted by the same types of people who had stood apart from him in his school and college years. It was often charged, Richard Hofstadter noted, that Roosevelt was betraying his class, “but if by his class one means the whole policy-making, power-wielding stratum, it would be just as true to say that his class betrayed him.” And the President was still acting and sounding far more like a Groton gentleman than were many of his erstwhile schoolmates.

As psychology overrode economics on both sides, the business community’s intensifying feelings of guilt, apprehension, and lowered self-esteem fueled a mounting hatred for Roosevelt that began to assume pathological dimensions. He was called, privately or publicly, the Pied Piper of Hyde Park, the High Priest of Repudiation, Franklin “Deficit” Roosevelt, a Little Napoleon, Roosevelt the Tyrant, a Svengali, and of course a communist. One card that was smirkingly passed around had the caption “Can you answer the $64 Question?”:

WHAT MAN SAID TO “THAT” WOMAN?

“You kiss the negroes

I’ll kiss the Jews,

We’ll stay in the White House,

As long as we choose.”

Another card read:

THE PRESIDENT’S WIFE

IS SUING FOR DIVORCE BECAUSE

SHE IS NOT GETTING WHAT HE IS GIVING

THE OTHER PEOPLE

There developed a curious obsession with Roosevelt’s physical disability; “that cripple in the White House” was also rumored to have cancer or syphilis. But the main charge was of insanity—like fervent ideologues everywhere, his foes felt that their chief enemy could not merely be wrong; he must be crazy.

On the farthest reaches of the right—a world away from responsible conservatism—lay the political scavengers of anti-Semitism, and “Rosenfeld” became a prime target. His “Jew Deal” was run by Frankfurter, Brandeis, Baruch, Morgenthau, Cohen, and other “legal kikes.” A host of groups sprang up—white shirts, silver shirts, blue shirts—to purvey this line through speeches and pamphlets with such titles as There Is a Jewish World Plot, The Jewish New Deal, Aryan Americanism, and—inevitably—the fake Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the final proof of the international Jewish plot to take over the world. All these groups—as well as the white-sheeted Ku Klux Klan—were united by hate and fear of liberalism, socialism, and communism and by the passionate belief that the New Deal embodied these heresies.

With the Liberty League as its political action committee, American capitalism by late 1934 had declared war on the New Deal. Even more, it had declared a kind of class war on militant unions and all the hostile elements it perceived on the underside of American life. In the charges and the whispers against Roosevelt, in the hatred of the upper class for the President as a “traitor to his class,” capitalists largely initiated the very class war they imputed to Roosevelt and the left.

But where was the class enemy? The forces of labor, liberalism, and the left in 1933 and 1934 resembled more a guerrilla army living off the land than the solid ranks of the proletarian masses. For a half-century or more, labor and other groups—most dramatically the Knights of Labor in the 1880s—had made sporadic efforts to unite workers, skilled and unskilled, in a broad and durable radical movement. All had failed. A national organization mainly of craft unions, the American Federation of Labor, had come to dominate the labor field under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, apostle of business unionism. During the “business decade” of the 1920s the AFL had declined in membership and influence. During the “Hoover depression” the Federation had declined even further. No other national labor or left-wing organization yet challenged it. No political party had arisen to unite workers and farmers politically since Robert La Follette’s short-lived Progressive party of 1924.

A rash of strikes had broken out across the nation with the first flush of prosperity in 1933. As union organizers exploited NRA’s Section 7(a) and the slightly tighter labor market, workers flocked into the big AFL organizations—into Lewis’s United Mine Workers, into Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers, into David Dubinsky’s International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, into the United Textile Workers of America, and to a lesser degree into the hundreds of craft unions of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, and other skilled workers. And with more organization—and with more employers’ counterattacks against organization—came more waves of walkouts during 1934. Some strikes failed in their objectives, some succeeded—but one in particular served to arouse the fears of upper and middle classes alike. This was the San Francisco general strike of late spring 1934.

In no other city were the workers historically more militant, the employers more anti-union, and the newspaper owners—Hearst, the Knowlands—more reactionary than in the city by the Golden Gate. Few workers had sharper grievances than the longshoremen over the way the shipping companies ran the daily shape-up. Men gathered in bleak hiring halls along the Embarcadero at six in the morning, hoping to catch the eye of the dispatcher for a day’s work. This functionary could choose one man because he was a good worker, or was a cousin, or would slip him a five-spot, and send another man back into the street because he was “unreliable.” Longshoremen despised this “slave mart,” for even if chosen they remained slaves—slaves to the hook that inexorably plunged into the cargo hold and “must never hang,” that is, must never dangle idly for even a few moments.

Enflamed by this issue, the San Francisco conflict followed the classic path of escalation in the spring of 1934. The International Longshoremen’s Association demanded union recognition under the NRA; the shipping companies rejected the demand; the longshoremen struck on the Embarcadero; the companies hired strikebreakers, boarding them luxuriously on vessels; strikers hunted down scabs, kicking in their teeth or breaking their legs over a curb. Then the battle widened as the Teamsters and other unions struck in support of the longshoremen, the bosses unified their ranks through their Industrial Association of industrial, banking, railroad, and shipping interests, and more radical union leaders gained influence. Foremost of these was an intense, wiry immigrant from Australia named Harry Bridges, whose determination to win justice for labor and cynicism about ways and means had both been strengthened in the years he had spent as sailor and longshoreman.

Violence erupted when the employers sent trucks full of strikebreakers through picket lines; strikers let fly with bricks and spikes, police responded with billy sticks, tear gas, and bullets. San Francisco became a sprawling, shifting battlefield as thousands more strikers and sympathizers converged on the scene. Two men died on “Bloody Thursday”; scores, perhaps hundreds, were hurt. Now a general strike was imminent, as more and more unions fell into line.

The threat of a general strike—the nation had experienced perhaps two in its entire history—touched off widespread hysteria. The press warned of revolution and the Red Menace; rumors circulated about an imminent communist invasion of the Bay area; vigilantes smashed union offices; the mayor swore in several hundred deputy policemen; the governor called out the National Guard; Bridges and his men hung tough. Would the nation’s armed forces also be necessary? Officials turned to the Commander-in-Chief. But Roosevelt was not at his White House GHQ. He was in fact cruising Pacific waters on the USS Houston. “Everybody demanded that I sail into San Francisco Bay,” the President said later, “all flags flying and guns double shotted, and end the strike. They went completely off the handle.”

One person who had not gone off the handle was Frances Perkins. Controlling in Washington much of the communications with the President, the Secretary of Labor and her aides played down the gravity of the crisis in messages to the cruiser. She then helped arrange for a series of arbitration efforts that produced settlements by the fall. In the give-and-take of the new agreements one item stood out: the ILA alone now had the power to name the dispatcher. Despite his communist connections and rhetoric, Harry Bridges emerged as a hero of waterfront labor. But Frances Perkins, resolute and discerning under the most intense pressures, was the true heroine of deescalation.

Class war had been raging in Minneapolis in the same weeks that violence swept San Francisco. The broad pattern was much the same: employers traditionally dead set against unionization and especially the union shop; workers suffering from unemployment and low wages in the city’s great railroad, timber, iron ore, farm, and transportation industries, now battered by depression; probably the nation’s most militant workers’ leadership, headed by Ray Dunne. He had five brothers, all brought up as Roman Catholics, all unionists, several of them leftists of various hues. The escalation too followed the familiar pattern: organization of workers—in this case truck drivers—under the spur of 7(a); categorical rejection by employers of the closed shop because they could never bargain away the “workers’ liberties”; elaborate preparations on both sides for a showdown; an incident; bloody skirmishes between police with clubs and pickets with baseball bats; a truce; new tension; then “Bloody Friday”—July 20, 1934— as police with shotguns killed two strikers and left scores of others with wounds in their backsides.

Both sides had sought this showdown, but it settled nothing. As tension mounted again Governor Floyd Olson, onetime Wobbly and longtime farm-labor progressive, called in the National Guard and with fine impartiality raided first the union headquarters and then the anti-union Citizens Alliance. Both sides turned to Roosevelt, but he would not intervene— publicly. Privately he put pressure on the employers through Jesse Jones, who used as leverage the RFC’s power to give or withhold credit to Minneapolis’s beleaguered banks and businesses. Attacked on their weakest flank, the employers finally agreed to representation elections for the workers and to other concessions. The agreement left the Dunne brothers with a notable victory and also in the same kind of theoretical quandary that confronted Harry Bridges at the end: How could the State—which in the Marxist view of capitalism must of necessity reflect the interests of the ruling classes—have come ultimately to the aid of the workers? And in this case through that embodiment of Texas wealth, enterprise, and individualism, Jesse Jones?

Where union organization was weak, however, business control of the State was far more naked. Such was the case with textile workers, especially in the South. Embittered over cruelly low wages and long hours, and over the body-racking stretch-out that tied machine tenders to heavier workloads, cotton workers struck in nine states from Maine to Georgia. Over 350,000 workers walked off the job or stayed home. “The 1934 general strike in the textile industry,” according to Robert R. R. Brooks, “was unquestionably the greatest single industrial conflict in the history of American organized labor”—and it struck concomitant fear among employers. In mill towns across the South they fought back through sheriffs deputies, the National Guard, espionage, and terrorism, and the strikers suffered hundreds of casualties. In North Carolina, Roosevelt’s old boss Josephus Daniels wrote him that in almost every instance “the troops might as well have been under the direction of the mill owners.”

In the North, Rhode Island governor Theodore Green called in troops, in part because he saw the strike as virtually a communist revolt. Workers were shot down in Saylesville and Warren. The governor, nearly beside himself, called on the President to prevent communists and outlaws from “destroying cities” and marching on the statehouse. After checking with the FBI, the President took no such action. But on the other hand he gave the textile workers little help, and the big strike collapsed. Labor failed also in other big industries: steel, automobiles, tires.

Workers were facing once again a hard truth—unorganized, they were almost impotent economically and politically. This reality also confronted poorer Americans who lived on the land. Farmers who owned their own spreads in the Midwest and Northeast acted through the big farm associations like the Grange and the American Farm Bureau Federation. But sharecroppers in the South and farm workers in the West and elsewhere lacked organizational muscle. And they were suffering.

“Sharecropping, once the backbone of the South’s agricultural empire, is rapidly giving way to an even more vicious system of labor extraction,” Erskine Caldwell wrote in the mid-thirties. “The new style is driving the sharecropper away from the fertile land, away from schools for his children, away from contact with civilization. The sharecropper of yesterday is the wage worker of today, the man who peddles his brawn and muscle for twenty-five and thirty cents a day, and who is lucky if he works one day a week during the winter months, and still luckier if he can collect it in cash instead of in corn meal or old clothes.”

The AAA had aroused the hopes and expectations of sharecroppers too, but little of Washington’s money trickled down to them. Some whites and blacks, working together, formed the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union under local and outside—mainly Socialist party—leadership, only to be met with threats from farm owners, vigilantes with whips and loaded shotguns, sheriffs with arrest orders. An Arkansas preacher told a New York Times reporter: “It would have been better to have a few no-account, shiftless people killed at the start than to have all this fuss raised up.” The federal government was attacked for stirring up “niggers” to think that they would be given forty acres. To some observers blacks were still in a condition of slavery—but so were many whites.

Even more wretched than the sharecroppers were the itinerant farm workers, who had no land or place to call their own and existed in a succession of shanties and hovels, many of them lacking running water, sanitation, or even window screens. Many of these farm workers were former sharecroppers who had made their way north or west to join Arkies from Arkansas and Okies from dust-ridden Oklahoma in a vast army of wanderers. They had been infected by New Deal hopes and promises, as had their brothers and sisters in the East. In the summer of 1933 tobacco workers in the Connecticut Valley rose in indignation over their meager wages, as did cranberry pickers in the bogs of Cape Cod and citrus fruit pickers in Florida. Next year onion diggers in southern Appalachia, farm and cannery workers in New Jersey, pecan shellers in the San Antonio area, and hosts of other farm workers struck over wages and other issues. This wave of protest culminated in the spacious farmlands of California’s Imperial Valley.

The lettuce and fruit-and-vegetable workers of California not only ran the bloody gamut that had now become endemic—terrorism, vigilantes, false arrests, kidnappings, clubs, shotguns, invocation of the red menace, calling in of the troops. In California the whole union effort was savaged— organization meetings, peaceful travel by organizers, union headquarters themselves. Employer intransigence played directly into the hands of the militant union leaders, many of whom were communists. The strikes in the Imperial Valley, in Irving Bernstein’s judgment, were less a labor dispute than a “proto-Fascist offensive” by the growers and shippers and business-dominated local officials. When the southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, seeing a direct challenge to the constitutional rights of American citizens, conducted a “Good Will” tour of the valley, the group was surrounded by an angry mob in Brawley and sent back to Los Angeles.

America in 1934 was rife with upper-class hostility toward the poor. Was there to be class war? The vast majority of Americans in 1934, even those in deepest want, would have answered no. Most would have understood neither the question nor the very notion of class war. They thought in terms of their immediate boss or foreman, the bank that held their mortgage, the men who had hired them to dig potatoes or pick fruit, the minister they listened to on Sunday, their union leader if they had one. Most did not see themselves as belonging to a class. They simply knew where they stood in the distribution of food, shelter, and clothing.

Two sets of Americans, however, did understand the idea of class war, and in varying degrees expected it. American capitalists, speaking through the Liberty League, increasingly warned of the Red Menace at home and abroad, of agitators, Moscow-trained or homegrown, subverting republican institutions, of a climactic attack of a proletariat of some kind against individual liberty and free enterprise. In general, though, capitalist action was more telling than capitalist oratory. In their refusal to recognize unions of the workers’ own choosing, their resistance to labor demands, their ready use of scabs, stool pigeons, police, sheriff’s deputies, and ultimately the National Guard, employers—whether great industrialists in Detroit and Pittsburgh or little operators of apple orchards—tended to foment the very class feeling, if not the class consciousness, that they deplored.

If some capitalists practiced class conflict without preaching it, some anticapitalists preached the class struggle without practicing it. Forced to pitch their appeals to an enormous range of groups and situations—from Manhattan garment workers to Pittsburgh steelworkers to southern tenant farmers to Texas pecan pickers to California longshoremen—communists and other left radicals adapted their tactics to local possibilities. Even so, they were still banking on the doctrine that in the long run the bleak and needful conditions of existence for millions of workers and farmers would draw them inexorably into class attitudes and class politics.

But how long the long run? Even by their own doctrine, the prologue to class war in America was not being written during the early New Deal. That doctrine assumed not only the objective conditions for lower-class solidarity but a sharpening consciousness of deprivation and need. Such consciousness could not develop spontaneously but required a heightened sense of conflict with social and economic elites. Such a sense of class conflict required in turn, as Lenin had practiced and preached, the kind of transcending and transforming leadership that could lift people out of their parochial day-to-day concerns to a vision of a better future in a new society. Radicals needed to persuade the working class that it had only two alternatives—staying with the “capitalistic-liberal-bourgeois-neofascist coalition presently running America,” as the jargon had it, or joining a radical movement or party dedicated to overthrowing the system and all its evils. There was no choice in between.

American socialists, fundamentally pluralist, rejected this harsh class division. But some citizens endorsed it. During the early New Deal an eighteen-year-old youth on relief wrote a poem called “Prayer of Bitter Men”:

We are the men who ride the swaying freights,

We are the men whom Life has beaten down,

Leaving for Death nought but the final pain

Of degradation. Men who stand in line

An hour for a bowl of watered soup,

Grudgingly given, savagely received.

We are the Ishmaels, outcasts of the earth,

Who shrink before the sordidness of Life

And cringe before the filthiness of Death.

Will there not come a great, a glittering Man,

A radiant leader with a heavier sword

To crush to earth the enemies who crush

Those who seek food and freedom on the roads?

We care not if Thy flag be white or red,

Come, ruthless Savior, messenger of God,

Lenin or Christ, we follow Thy bright sword.

“Lenin or Christ”—or a Path Between?

Heightening the class consciousness of the masses, sharpening their sense of conflict with the capitalist elites, providing militant cadres to lead these great efforts—all this lay at the very heart of the Communist strategy in the United States. Under the eyes of Lenin himself, the Communist International in 1920 had proclaimed its aim “to fight by all available means, including armed struggle, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie.” In 1928, four years after Lenin’s death, the Sixth World Congress had called on communists everywhere to smash capitalism, if necessary by force. As always, Communist leaders in the United States danced to the international party tune.

On the eve of the 1930s the Communist party in the United States listed around ten thousand members, many of them in the needle and building trades or jobless, with relatively few in basic industries like steel. The membership included only a scattering of blacks, farmers, and working women. The communist movement was broader than the party. Communist foreign-language newspapers had a readership of perhaps 200,000, though the circulation of the English-language Daily Worker was only a small fraction of this number. Through trade union, “Women’s Work,” Negro, and other apparatuses party members penetrated many other organizations. The movement had hosts of sympathizers, including a sprinkling of the very rich.

The great depression should have been a boon to American communism. At last the mightiest industrial nation of them all appeared to be succumbing to the historical inevitability of boom and bust, working-class misery, and proletarian revolution. Party membership, indeed, almost doubled by the end of 1932. But then it shrank by more than three thousand during the next six months. What was wrong? Despite its much touted and feared internal discipline, the American Communist party was so rent with factionalism that Stalin himself dressed down its leaders in Moscow. Even more, the great mass of American workers, stirred though they might be by specific Communist charges and promises, were cool toward left-wing ideologies in general, communist dogma in particular, and an American Communist party that—as they correctly perceived—was always under the overt or covert control of the Kremlin. But these had long been obstacles for the Communists. How now to sharpen class consciousness under the continuing depression? The answer in the early New Deal years appeared to be to redouble the Communists’ tactic of the “united front from below”—the strategy of co-opting other organizations not by deals with their leaders (the “united front from above”) but by forging links with rank-and-file memberships and involving them in the communist movement. By the beginning of 1935 Communist leader Earl Browder—as aggressive in combat as he was bourgeois in appearance—could claim a mass following of over half a million, though signed-up members numbered around 30,000.

The Communists wooed peace lovers and anti-Nazis with the American League Against War and Fascism, young people with the American Youth Congress, artists and authors with the American Writers’ Congress. But the main target was the working class—factory hands, farm laborers, semiskilled and some skilled workers. Here the vaunted leadership skills of the Communists failed them. In the late 1920s, the party had tried to set up separate “red unions” to draw workers from established ones, but these failed miserably. They were quietly liquidated during 1934 and early 1935, while the leadership lamely called for organizing separately and at the same time infiltrating the merely “reformist” unions, working, for instance, “among the A.F. of L. workers wherever they are organized.” This stratagem failed too, for penetrating and dominating the Federation was like invading and capturing a guerrilla army in a swampland; Communists did eventually manage to establish footholds in key industrial unions.

Determined never to be outflanked on the left, the American Communists could not ignore a competing force on their immediate right—the Socialist party. American socialists could look back to their days of glory— to the vibrant leadership of Eugene Debs, to the stunning election results of 1912, when hundreds of socialists were elected to state legislatures and city councils, to the 885,000 votes Norman Thomas won twenty years later. They could boast of able and experienced leadership, especially that of Thomas himself, the benign visionary and eloquent Presbyterian, product of both Princeton and East Harlem slums. “His humane and appealing version of Socialism,” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., noted, won “many disciples in the churches and on the campuses: where Debs had Americanized Socialism for the working class, Thomas Americanized it for the middle class.”

But the socialists, like the communists and most other radical movements, were divided, and at a time when a united effort was most needed. Seasoned but defanged older leaders jousted with young “Militants” whose clenched-fist salutes and socialist-left views appeared to some old-timers as smacking of communism. Young, college-educated socialists with middle-class backgrounds wanted to move more vigorously toward more radical goals than did the old guard, with its working-class and immigrant origins. Militants also fought with Militants. Socialist comrades battled over hard questions: how closely should they work with the labor movement, itself divided; should the party preach revolution or evolution, class war or class harmony; should socialists fight the New Deal or invade and reform it; how, specifically, could a radical, egalitarian socialist movement work with a conservative, craft-union-dominated AFL? Thomas, himself more sympathetic to the radical Militant wing, tried to hold the movement together.

As reaction and fascism mobilized in Europe against a divided left, Thomas also tried to make peace with the Communists, but too many hatreds, ancient and current, stood in the way. Early in 1934 New York Socialists and unionists called a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden to protest the murderous suppression of Austrian Social Democrats by the clerical-fascist Dollfuss regime. Determined to take over the meeting from the “social fascists,” hundreds of communists broke into the Garden, drowned out David Dubinsky and other speakers, and tried to take over the podium. The meeting broke up in a melee of fistfights, bottle-throwing, and knifings. He was now convinced, Thomas wrote his fellow civil libertarian and friend Roger Baldwin, “that a united front with Communists is impossible.” But both sides went back to speaking to each other. They had to. In the Archey Road, Finley Peter Dunne’s philosophizing barkeep Mr. Dooley had observed, “when a man and a woman found they simply couldn’t go on living together, they went on livin’ together.” The two movements were bound to each other, if only out of shared political frustration and a common capitalist enemy.

Both groups had failed to provide leadership to the great mass of industrial and farm workers. A new, far more dynamic leadership was already emerging out of the industrial grass roots of the nation. This leadership, bursting through the old confining structures of craft fiefdom and business unionism, moved American labor into the new era of corporate capitalism and shaped the labor movement for decades to come. It was leadership committed to a simple but bold idea—industrial unionism.

The American Federation of Labor embraced industrial unions, such as the Mine Workers, as well as craft unions, but its dominant ideas and institutions were still vintage Gompers—limited political action; ad hoc, day-to-day tactics; fear even of benevolent government; the granting of exclusive territories to the big national unions that comprised the AFL; organization of workers on the basis of occupations and skills rather than whole industries, such as auto or steel. Suddenly, in late 1933 and in 1934, the Federation had a bonanza on its hands—hundreds of thousands of less skilled workers, historically the hardest to awaken but now, in the heady climate of the New Deal, eager to join unions in their plants or industries. How to exploit this bonanza, which the Federation had not earned but which had sprung out of partial recovery, Roosevelt’s inspirational leadership, NRA’s Section 7(a), and heightened hopes and expectations?

The Federation’s answer was to dump the unorganized into “federal unions”—big catchall bodies, weak and short-lived—until these workers could be parceled out to existing unions and their locals. But now, amid the organizing fever of 1934, something was different. Taking on a life of their own, the federal unions generated their own leaders, who began insisting that the AFL authorize them to form broad-based industrial unions. Youthful, defiant, impatient, as Irving Bernstein has described them, those leaders knew that only workers united industry by industry, plant by plant, could prevail against unified corporate elites. They were supported, rather surprisingly, by such publications as Fortune and the Literary Digest, such notables as Walter Lippmann and General Johnson.

But the decision would be made within the AFL, and the Federation was sorely divided. On one side of the issue sat the chiefs of the AFL’s great national craft unions, men like John Frey of the Metal Trades, obsessively protective of his machinists’ craft enclaves; William “Big Bill” Hutcheson, the big, burly, rough-spoken head of the Carpenters; Dan Tobin, the smooth, seasoned boss of the Teamsters. Hutcheson, an active Republican who had supported Hoover in 1932, and Tobin, an ally of Roosevelt’s, personified the vaunted “nonpartisanship” of the Federation. In the dead center of the contestants sat William Green, cautious, deliberate, his rounded face and form seemingly smoothed out by years of conciliation and compromise.

On the left, preaching industrial unionism, were such leaders as George L. Berry, the veteran head of the pressmen, and two men who had emerged out of the tumultuous immigrant world of New York City, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. No one doubted who was their chieftain—John L. Lewis. With his huge miner’s torso, his shaggy eyebrows beneath a shock of hair, his face fixed in an almost perpetual scowl, his deep rumbling voice, he was a formidable figure both to mine owners and to his AFL rivals.

And so the argument raged at numberless council and committee meetings between the November 1934 and October 1935 conventions of the Federation. The craft unionists evoked ancient dogma about labor unity and settled arrangements, raised the bogey of “dual unionism,” and deprecated mass-production workers as fair-weather members who would join the new union for higher wages and then pull out. Lewis & Co. urged that above all the Federation must take in the millions clamoring at its gates and organize them in mighty locals that could challenge General Motors and Ford and U.S. Steel. Neither side was monolithic; Green tried conciliation, and men like Dubinsky sought to restrain Lewis from moving too far ahead of his small group. In this fluid situation there was only one constant: the old guard had the votes.

One short hard punch dramatized the final rupture. Hour after hour delegates to the 1935 AFL convention in Atlantic City had debated a minority report in favor of industrial unionism. Finally Lewis took the floor. “The labor movement,” he said, “is organized upon a principle that the strong shall help the weak.” Hence it was morally wrong for craft unions that stood on their own feet “like mighty oaks” not to help weak unions exposed to “the lightning and the gale.” If they rejected the minority report, “high wassail” would prevail at the banquet tables of the mighty. The convention voted it down. Two days later Lewis, trying to revive the issue, ran into Hutcheson’s parliamentary objection. “Small potatoes,” Lewis shouted, and Hutcheson responded in kind. As Lewis moved back to his seat he and Hutcheson had another exchange. Hearing the word “bastard,” Lewis sent Hutcheson to the floor with that one punch. He then straightened his collar and tie, relit his cigar, and sauntered casually to the podium.

“You shouldn’t have done that, John,” said President Green. “He called me a foul name,” said Lewis. “Oh,” said Green, “I didn’t know that.”

Three weeks later Lewis, Hillman, Dubinsky, and others set up a Committee for Industrial Organization, with Lewis as chairman. Despite the group’s promises to work within the Federation, labor was now headed toward civil war, as the craft unionists look an increasingly adamant stand, and pressure from aroused grass-roots leaders pushed Lewis & Co. toward a separate organization. Desperately Green tried to mediate. Not only had he risen through an industrial union, the Miners, but he had written eloquently in favor of industrial unionism as concentrating the strength of skilled and unskilled. Lewis played on this past in a letter to Green:

“Why not return to your father’s house? You will be welcome. If you care to dissociate yourself from your present position, the Committee for Industrial Organization will be happy to make you its Chairman in my stead.” “I am in my father’s house,” Green replied. “It is my firm purpose to remain there.” In more than thirty years in the labor movement, he added pointedly, “I have never aligned myself with any … dual movement.”

Consciously or not, American communists, socialists, and trade unionists were acting in the spirit of the great working-class movements that had emerged during the industrial revolution. Millions of Americans, however, had grown up in another, more middle-class tradition that rivaled working-class ideology in its intellectual and moral power and its social impact. This was the social-reform movement within the three great Western religions, stemming from the emphasis on collective morality, philanthropy, and responsibility in Judaism; from reformism, abolitionism, and the missionary spirit—including missions to the urban poor—in the Protestant churches; from the heightened Roman Catholic concern with social justice.

This last was not least. As the miseries of the factory system became more acute and widespread during the nineteenth century, Catholics had turned back to the teachings of Thomas Aquinas of six hundred years before—especially his definition of a just order that balances social duties with individual rights—and to other thinkers and actors in the Thomist tradition. These ideas came to a dramatic focus in 1891with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum, or On the Condition of the Working Class. While broadly concerned with maintaining an ordered and equitable society under the tutelage of the Church, Leo’s call for social action to relieve poverty was a trumpet blast for hundreds of young priests who every day, in their parishes, confronted the human wreckage left behind by the march of industry.

In the industrial city of Toronto at the end of the century existed an order, the Basilian Fathers, that was deeply stirred by the Catholic movement for social justice. To a school run by this order there came a twelve-year-old boy escorted by his parents, a seamstress and a church sexton. The boy’s mother, it was said, on giving birth had murmured a prayer: “A girl—for the—convent,” or if a boy, “please, God—a priest.” Brought up by these pious parents, the boy did become a priest, after starring at school as scholar and athlete. Before his proud mother in the front pew he celebrated his first mass in the summer of 1916. His name was Charles E. Coughlin.

There seemed nothing remarkable about this young priest as he went about his parish duties during the next few years—except for two things. One was his persuasive, almost enticing voice, warm, resonant, portentous. The other was his willingness to use that newfangled device, the radio. He had hardly settled into his final parish in Royal Oak, twelve miles north of downtown Detroit, when he began building a new church, using up-to-date fund-raising devices, and arranging with a local radio station to offer sermons over the air in order to attract new parishioners. Soon that voice— adorned with a bit of an Irish brogue and charged with such “manly, heart-warming, confidential intimacy, such emotional and ingratiating charm,” in Wallace Stegner’s words, as to be one of the “great speaking voices of the twentieth century”—was attracting listeners by the thousands, then by the tens of thousands, and finally by the millions.

Success did not soon spoil Charles Coughlin—or at least cause him to forget who he was and where he was. He was a priest under the authority of a bishop to whom he gave unceasing and proper obeisance, receiving in turn the protection—against politicians, the public, even others in the hierarchy—that only a bishop could provide. And he was a priest in the Detroit area, a social wilderness even before the depression and an economic wasteland after it struck. Sickened by the poverty and desperation all around him—Detroit had the highest jobless rate of any major city by April 1930—the young priest struck directly at the foundation of the problem: unbridled capitalism. It was not worth saving, he charged; “in fact it is a detriment to civilization.” Often he coupled these attacks with denunciations of communism, socialism, divorce, birth control, Prohibition.

Plenty of people were attacking capitalism by this time; Coughlin stood out for his audacity. He named names: Herbert Hoover, the Rothschilds, the Dillon-Reads, the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”—Morgan, Mellon, Mills, and Meyer. He lambasted such Catholic heroes as Al Smith for “selling out” to Morgan and other capitalists, such Catholic dignitaries as William Cardinal O’Connell for his notorious “silence on social justice.” By 1934 Coughlin was simply a phenomenon, with a steady weekly audience of at least ten million, scores of assistants to handle the million letters that might come in after a major speech, and a magnificent new church of his own next to a 150-foot stone tower in which he had his office.

One man the young priest revered, aside from his bishop—Franklin D. Roosevelt. He had had some contact with the New York governor before and during the 1932 campaign, and had even worked quietly for him at the convention; he could not openly endorse Roosevelt but made up for this with ferocious attacks on Hoover. After the Hundred Days, however, his adulation became public, and almost total. It was “Roosevelt or Ruin.” The New Deal was “Christ’s Deal.” Coughlin wrote fulsome letters to the President, praising FDR as magnificent, fearless, a natural-born artist with the radio. He adjured his followers to support the President, to love him. Even more, he began to insinuate himself into the extended White House. He referred to the President as the “boss”; called staff members by their first names; offered free advice. On their part, friends of the Administration such as Joseph Kennedy and Frank Murphy held Coughlin’s hand to keep him on board.

As Roosevelt’s popularity waxed, so did Coughlin’s. His mail, his audience, his unsolicited donations from listeners rose to new highs. Earlier Coughlin had demonstrated his power when CBS, the radio network over which he spoke, asked him to water down his fiery speeches. CBS retreated after Coughlin indignantly appealed to his listeners. When CBS later refused to renew his contract, the “Radio Priest” simply organized his own network. Thereafter he could overcome complaints from local radio stations by threatening to take his orations—and his audiences—elsewhere. And his audiences were broadening as he reached out beyond the desperately needful people of industrial Michigan to members of the lower-middle and middle-middle classes—to persons who had gained and were clinging to some bourgeois respectability, to skilled craft workers, even to farmers.

By 1934 Coughlin appeared unassailable, for his power lay in his own personal constituency—his audience. For him the power was the medium that linked him to his followers. But his followers had power over him too. His listeners were leading him even while he was leading them. As Coughlin lauded Roosevelt and denounced the “plutocrats,” he aroused his listeners’ hopes and hatreds to fever pitch. Soon the priest began to have policy differences with the President; Coughlin’s central concern was with money and its control, which he wanted shifted from the bankers to the government, while Roosevelt had broader legislative concerns. But the widening gap was both political and psychological; Coughlin was now on a separate trajectory from the President’s, and his deep-seated ideological differences with FDR were bound to mount under electoral pressures.

Late in 1934 Coughlin announced his plan to form a new association, the National Union for Social Justice, as “an articulate, organized lobby of the people.” Thus he would mobilize his audience for action. There would be card files, membership lists, local meetings. But no one doubted the nature of the symbol and the instrument of the new organization. It was the microphone.

The microphone gave another commanding figure a strong grip on the imagination of the American people during the early 1930s. Huey Long was one of the first politicians to use radio, as far back as the mid-1920s, but the power of his visual impact—his rumpled hair, loosened collar, and violent gestures—did not carry through the medium, and his sharp, insistent voice contrasted with Coughlin’s smooth and sonorous delivery. As he reached for a national audience in the early 1930s, however, Long learned to moderate his voice and switch easily back and forth between “Luziana corn pone” for home audiences and a clear and resonant style for the networks. By 1935 his political speeches over NBC were reaching huge audiences, exceeded only by those of Coughlin and Roosevelt.

What Long said, as much as how he said it, was arresting. Although his policy positions shifted somewhat over the years, his central, unvarying pitch was that Roosevelt, Morgan, and the rest had seized control of the nation’s riches. The only solution was his Share Our Wealth plan. He offered “facts and figures.” Two percent of the people owned 60 percent of the wealth, he contended. It was as though all Americans had been invited to a great barbecue. “God called: ‘Come to my feast.’” But the big capitalists “stepped up and took enough for 120,000,000 people and left only enough for 5,000,000 for all the other 125,000,000 to eat. And so many millions must go hungry and without these good things God gave us unless we call on them to put some of it back.”

How put it back? Long proposed that the government confiscate all inheritances of more than $1 million, take in income tax any and all money a person made over $1 million in a year, and heavily tax existing wealth. Then would come the sharing. The government would guarantee every needy family a minimum income of $2000-$3000 a year. Even better, each such family would be granted a basic “household estate” of $5000, “enough for a home, an automobile, a radio,” and other goods. Government would also support stepped-up aid to farmers, pensions for the aged, education for the young, public works, shorter working hours. Long left many of the details vague and the complexities unaddressed, but he promised to call in “some great minds” to help him.

Such proposals created an uproar in the press, even in the New Deal atmosphere. All this was demagogic pandering at its worst, cried conservative editors. Long himself, as H. L. Mencken had perceived earlier, was “simply a backwoods demagogue of the oldest and most familiar model— impudent, blackguardly, and infinitely prehensile.” It was easy for economists to punch holes in his economic program; at the very least, the available money, no matter how drastically squeezed out of the rich, would not have met the human needs he dramatized. Still, however simplistic the plan, it was not “an attempt to divert attention away from real problems; it did not focus resentment on irrelevant scapegoats or phony villains,” Alan Brinkley concluded. “It pointed, instead, to an issue of genuine importance; for the concentration of wealth was, even if not in precisely the form Long described it, a fundamental dilemma of the American economy.” It was also a fundamental moral dilemma of American democracy.

Long expected the uproar, he welcomed it, he thrived on it. He was a child of conflict, born in a state almost schizoid in its division between the Catholic, French Cajun, and mercantile cultures of southern Louisiana and the Protestant, lumber, oil, small-farm cultures upstate, born in the northern poor-white region that had been seared by populist and other challenges to the old white power structure. As a child he had embodied conflict, fighting—though not physically if he could help it—with his brothers and playmates, infuriating his teachers and other elders with his impudent questions, later harshly attacking anyone who stood in the way of his political ambition. His pugnacity and tireless campaigning paid off early. In 1918, at the age of twenty-five, he was elected the youngest member ever of the state’s Railroad Commission. He then spent ten years stumping up and down the state, and in 1928 won the governorship.

He looked the part of the fighter as he castigated his enemies, his rubbery features tightening in righteous wrath, hair streaming down on his face, arms pumping, voice driving and piercing. His tactics as governor provoked his foes to fight back through investigations, the courts, an impeachment effort, appeals to Washington, but with little success. Long’s power stemmed more and more from practical action. Out of his contempt for the old guard, the wide exposure to suffering people he had gained as a door-to-door salesman, and the snubs he was handed by the socially privileged of his adopted city of Shreveport came a lifelong concern for the poor that as governor he converted into tangible results. In a state crying for expanded public services, he and his allies immensely enlarged the Louisiana highway system, built bridges, improved public health services, provided schoolchildren with free textbooks, upgraded the school system in general and Louisiana State University very much in particular.

A “bad Huey” appeared to struggle with a “good Huey”—his ruthless power-seeking versus his concern for people, his challenge to the establishment that included an unconstitutional effort to tax advertising in large newspapers, his attack on privilege that left out solid measures such as child-labor laws, minimum-wage laws, old-age insurance. Still, by the early 1930s the “Kingfish,” as he now liked to be called, had clamped so firm a grip on Louisiana politics that he could agitate on the national stage as a United States senator. This brought him into political collusion and then collision with Roosevelt.

The collusion was strictly practical. When the Roosevelt forces at the 1932 Democratic convention supported the seating of Long’s delegation, the senator worked to keep Louisiana and other southern delegates in line for the New York governor. The two men had never liked each other. Long considered Roosevelt a political dilettante; after Montana senator Burton Wheeler, along with George Norris, had helped bring him around to the governor, Long told Wheeler, “I didn’t like your son of a bitch,” but would support him. Roosevelt, for his part, viewed the Louisiana senator as one more strident voice that could be kept in harmony by judicious combinations of evasion, flattery, and deals. But behind practicalities and personalities lay an ideological conflict that Roosevelt had not yet fully grasped. Long was determined to carry his populist and egalitarian ideas into the national arena, while the President was still engaged in brokerage. Meanwhile, the Kingfish would maintain his grip on his Louisiana base, using his own judicious combination of force, fraud, and favors.

The collision was not long in coming. The Hundred Days electrified the country but turned off Huey Long. He opposed the Economy Act, anti-inflation efforts, the Administration’s rejection of the veterans’ bonus payment, and above all the NRA. On a visit to Roosevelt, the Kingfish played the boor, keeping his straw hat on, or whipping it off to tap the President on the knee or elbow; but he could not puncture FDR’s genial façade. “What the hell is the use of coming down to see this fellow,” he muttered on leaving the White House, “I can’t win any decision over him.” About ready to break away from Long, the Administration cut off patronage and reopened a suspended probe of Louisiana shenanigans. Long compared Hoover to a hoot owl and Roosevelt to a scrootch owl.

“A hoot owl bangs into the roost and knocks the hen clean off, and catches her while she’s falling. But a scrootch owl slips into the roost and scrootches up to the hen and talks softly to her. And the hen just falls in love with him, and the first thing you know, there ain’t no hen. ”

Long would evade the scrootch owl. Early in 1934 he announced over a radio network his plan for a new national organization, the Share Our Wealth Society, with the slogan “Every Man a King.” It would fight for the egalitarian principles the Kingfish had long since proclaimed: heavy taxes on big fortunes and incomes, guaranteed family income, and the rest. Long was now adding a plan for local Share Our Wealth clubs that would blanket the nation. Popular reaction was quick, strong, and sustained. Tens of thousands of letters and applications poured into Long’s offices during the succeeding months—so many that Long had to set up a work force that spilled out of his Senate office into extra rooms and even into the corridors. By the end of 1934 his Share Our Wealth movement boasted of having three million members—though observers then and later differed over the extent to which this was a solid following or a “glorified mailing list.”

By this time Long had established a communications kingdom of his own, embracing his monthly newspaper, American Progress; his autobiography, Every Man a King; a huge mailing and “membership” list; and frequent recourse to the NBC radio network. This last was crucial. Ad-libbing freely, using his voice skillfully, attacking his foes unstintingly, quoting the Bible promiscuously, he built up by 1935 one of NBC’s biggest audiences.

It was clear that the 1936 election campaign would be dominated by three masters of the radio. The age of electronic political communication was already underway.

The Politics of Tumult

On the face of it, Roosevelt seemed to be riding high politically as he entered his midterm in January 1935. He and his party had won a convincing victory in the congressional elections two months before. Many of his New Deal programs were solidly in place. The great mass of people still loved him, many to the point of veneration.

The President, in fact, was headed into a time of troubles, and he may have known this, at least intuitively. While European affairs were relatively quiet for the moment, Hitler had consolidated his power and seemed more threatening and truculent than ever. Not to be outdone, Mussolini was threatening war in Ethiopia over territory on the border of Italian Somaliland. The murder of King Alexander of Yugoslavia by a Croatian terrorist in Marseilles had left people with revived memories of the assassination in Sarajevo twenty years earlier, and its dire consequences. In January the President, a supporter of the World Court, was handed a sharp reminder about the limits of his own power over foreign relations when the Senate vote for membership in the World Court failed of the required two-thirds.

But Roosevelt’s main troubles lay at home. Politically he was little daunted by the resurgence of business opposition on the right, because the Liberty League and the rest gave him choice campaign targets. Far more threatening was the mobilization of popular forces behind Long, Coughlin, and the other voices of protest; and probably Roosevelt sensed that the expectations he had aroused in his first two years were rising to new heights and would now sweep back onto the Administration. It is doubtful, though, that the President yet felt intimidated by this prospect; he was an old hand, after all, at operating in the political center against both right and left.

Rather, his main problem during these cold winter weeks was intellectual. This leader who had showed himself such a master of experimentation, improvisation, and tactical maneuver now had to face hard strategic alternatives that embraced policy and program as well as politics. He had still made no final choice between conciliating or at least mollifying business and seriously reforming it, between ordering and rationalizing business in the spirit of the NRA and atomizing or regulating it in the spirit of Louis Brandeis, between balancing the budget and spending heavily to meet acute human needs. Go left or stay in the center? To move right was not an option for the New Deal.

Nor could the President fall back on concerted advice from his staff. Raymond Moley, frustrated by FDR’s improvisations, was drifting back to private life; Tugwell saw the New Deal as incomplete; Berle feared that the Administration was disintegrating. Louis Howe, who had kept his boss close to the great constituencies of need that made up the foundation of the Democratic party, lay dying of emphysema during the early months of 1935; he slipped away in mid-April. Even before Howe’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt felt that her husband was seeing a narrower range of advisers. Molly Dewson, on the firing line at Democratic party headquarters, was concerned about the President’s faltering leadership. To worriers the First Lady gave the President’s response: “Please say to everyone who tells you that the President is not giving leadership” that he was working closely with Congress, “but this is a democracy after all, and if he once started insisting on having his own way immediately, we should shortly find ourselves with a dictatorship.…

“The ups and downs in people’s feelings, particularly on the liberal side, are an old, old story. The liberals always get discouraged when they do not see the measures they are interested in go through immediately.…

“Franklin says for Heaven’s sake, all you Democratic leaders calm down and feel sure of ultimate success. It will do a lot in satisfying other people.”

Western and southern farmers were especially impatient with FDR by 1935. For two years agricultural politics, policy, and administration had epitomized the character of the first New Deal: improvised, experimental, controversial but neither radical nor conservative, basically humane. The Agricultural Adjustment Act had been hammered out during early 1933 amid heavy pressures from farm interests and desperate farmers. These pressures had continued to affect its administration, and the fearsome drought of 1934 had intensified the desperation. Supporters of diverse policies—higher farm prices and inflation in general, the old McNary-Haugen scheme for stimulating farm sales abroad and stabilizing farm prices at home, refinancing of farm debts, raising farm prices by cutting down production—continued to fight for their particular road to agricultural salvation.

Roosevelt’s farm effort embraced elements of these and other policies, but the heart of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration program lay in the Domestic Allotment plan. This meant “plowing every third row under” and slaughtering little pigs (so they would not become big hogs and inflate supply). Nothing could have been more shocking to a world with a half-billion or more hungry people, to a nation that measured progress by productivity, to millions of Americans long undernourished, and to the farmers themselves. In Georgia, a cotton planter carefully marked off twenty-five acres to be plowed up and told several tenants that someday soon he would tell them to go to it. A field investigator overheard the tenants’ murmured conversation.

“You know,” said one, “I ain’t never pulled up no cotton stalks befo’, and somehow I don’t like the idea.”

“I been feelin’ sorter funeral-like all afternoon,” said another. But a third had a happier thought.

“Let’s swap work that day; you plow up mine, and I’ll plow up yours.”

Henry Wallace and his Agriculture Department appeared to face almost insuperable problems. They had to cope with a hundred or so zealots in the farm bloc in Congress who watched their every move. In the Senate they confronted some of the most powerful and prestigious lawmakers, many of them prima donnas. From the old, northern-based Grange on the right to the National Farmers’ Holiday Association on the left they were lobbied by some of the most potent farm and commodity groups in the nation, including the well-entrenched American Farm Bureau Federation and the militant Tenant Farmers’ Union. Processors, railroad and other transportation interests, farm equipment makers, rural banks, and others stood guard over their turfs. These groups were as quick to unite against a minor perceived threat as they were slow to unite behind a program for farmers as a whole.

Bolstered by Roosevelt’s backing and popularity, funds from processing taxes, and inspirited leadership by talented federal administrators, the AAA promulgated its rules, set up its field staffs, issued its millions of checks, and pumped money into the nation’s fiscal bloodstream. Yet the AAA paid a price. To get quick results it often had to make peace with legislators, state officials, county farm agents, with the whole panoply of state and regional interests and institutions. Some states had wanted the AAA to be administered through their own departments of agriculture. In Georgia—the President’s “adopted state”—the right-wing populist governor, Eugene Talmadge, followed policies almost opposite to those of the New Deal.

Like an old wooden plow worn and splintered by rocky soil, the Agriculture Department, and especially the AAA, was itself cleft by the economic and political ground it worked in. Offices and bureaus dependent on client groups jousted with one another. Old department hands fought with young New Deal activists. Interests inside and outside the department competed for funds. Centralizers debated with Brandeisian decentralizers. Quick-action enthusiasts pleaded with due-process literalists. A major result of these internal conflicts was that the AAA did reasonably well the work that everyone wanted—getting money into the hands of “constituents”—but did not have the grass-roots clout to bring about fundamental change.

One of these conflicts seemed relatively unimportant in itself but triggered a major crisis in the department. Virtually all the New Dealers in Agriculture were intent on getting AAA money into the hands of tenant farmers and sharecroppers as well as planters and landlords. But some feared “unnecessarily” provoking local resistance, especially of dominant white groups in the South. The question of whether the 1934-35 cotton contract required the landlord to keep the same tenants or the same number of tenants brought matters to a head. Militant New Dealers feared that the latter interpretation would enable landlords to “hire and fire” tenants at will within their set number. When the AAA’s general counsel, Jerome Frank, interpreted the contract to require the retention of tenants, AAA chief Chester Davis sacked him and several of his associates.

This much-publicized “purge” of February 1935 exposed Roosevelt’s plight at midterm. His farm laws, improvisations, and experiments had opened a hornet’s nest of controversial policies, programs, and personalities that were failing to bring a genuine new deal to hundreds of thousands of tenants, sharecroppers, and farm laborers. Along with the financial and psychological relief he had given millions of people, he had aroused consciousness of the need for change without bringing about fundamental or enduring transformation. Hence he confronted farm groups and constituencies more aroused and hopeful than ever. Poor farmers, however, still lacked the catalytic leadership that could jolt them into effective political action; the question by 1935 was whether they would turn to Franklin Roosevelt or some other leadership between “Lenin and Christ.”

The power of leadership at this point was being demonstrated by a most unlikely man and a most unlikely group of dispossessed—the elderly poor and insecure. Dr. Francis Townsend hardly looked the part of the charismatic leader—he was old and ailing and plain and bespectacled, resembling a bit the farmer in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic”; he had a monotonous speaking voice, he had little money left over from his medical practice, and now he was jobless. The people he mobilized appeared to be about the least combustible in the nation: elderly, largely nonpolitical, living on farms or in small towns or cities, heavily Protestant, retired on small incomes if any. Hardly materials for a political explosion, certainly, and yet Townsend and his elderly followers became a political phenomenon during Roosevelt’s first term. The Townsend cause enrolled at least two million people in some seven thousand clubs across the nation. Reporters groped to understand the movement, but they had only to look at its causes.

Dr. Townsend was addressing a dire need—not only the financial poverty of so many of the elderly but their social and psychological predicament. Part of the human price of industrialization and urbanization, many of these men and women had lost their homes and their savings, or barely held on to them; they had left their children back on the old farm, or lost their jobs through a swift-changing technology. They had become isolated, in Talcott Parsons’s view, from “kinship, occupational, and community ties” and hence were ripe for political agitation. They needed help, and Dr. Townsend had a plan, a most wonderful plan: give everyone over sixty federal pensions of $200 a month, with the delectable requirement that the money be spent within the month and thereby bolster the whole economy. A federal sales tax would pay for the scheme. It seemed like the economic equivalent of perpetual motion.

Then there was the doctor himself, who proved to be a master of hype. He liked to tell how he had looked out of his bathroom window one day in Long Beach, California, to see three haggard old women rummaging through garbage cans, how he had burst out into a string of epithets that he wanted God Himself to hear, how he said he would shout “until the whole country hears,” and invented the movement on the spot. In fact, it was no sudden revelation. Townsend himself had come to the end of a long road—born in a log cabin in northern Illinois, he had led something of a Horatio Alger life without the Algerian reward. After picking up jobs as ranch hand, farm laborer, mine-mucker, and teacher in the West, he worked his way through medical college and then endured a hard life as a country doctor in South Dakota. Later, as a medical officer treating the Long Beach indigent during the depression, he had ample reason and time to ponder the plight of the elderly and to concoct his plan.

Not especially religious himself, Townsend invested his venture with a powerful evangelical appeal. He proclaimed that his movement would have as mighty an impact as Christianity. At their club meetings Townsendites sang hymns (including a “new” one, “Onward, Townsend soldiers / Marching as to war”), idolized the doctor as a Christ-like, God-given leader, and discussed how best to budget and spend the anticipated $200. Townsend and his top organizers installed ministers as key regional and state directors. Yet he kept the movement centralized, and he adroitly made it seem safe and respectable, as well as transformative, by such devices as labeling his proposed sales tax a “transaction tax.”

By January 1935 the Townsend movement towered on the political horizon. The Townsend leadership was not above inflating the number of its clubs and members, and a credulous press often exaggerated the Townsendites’ strength; Time overstated the number of clubs by at least fivefold. Stanley High, a minister and friend of the Administration, wrote in to the White House that the more he saw of the movement, the more its power impressed him. “It is doing for a certain class of people what—a few years ago—was done by the prohibition movement: giving them a sublimation outlet.” And had not the drys actually altered the Constitution of the United States?

In what had long ago been part of the “old Northwest”—Wisconsin, Minnesota, and neighboring areas—other storm clouds were rising, where the hopes and expectations of progressives in all their colorations, independent, liberal, radical, socialistic, had glowed anew with the coming of the New Deal. In Wisconsin, “Fighting Bob” La Follette’s dissimilar sons—the cool, thoughtful “young Senator Bob” and the often tempestuous and passionate “Governor Phil”—were united in carrying on their father’s radical mission. They had also carried on the progressive tradition of political independence when, in 1934, they trounced both major parties at the Wisconsin polls. Roosevelt at a press conference had opportunistically expressed a preference for Bob La Follette over possible Democratic candidates for senator. What now would be the relationship between the rejuvenated Progressive party of Wisconsin and the New Deal? There was talk of party realignment—but of which party, in what direction? Much would turn on the future direction of FDR’s currently faltering New Deal.

The La Follettes worked closely with Minnesota governor Floyd Olson, an even more radical leader. While Phil talked vaguely of a cooperative, nonsocialistic society, Olson on the hustings denounced liberalism, fascism, capitalism, communism with equal gusto. What was he for? As governor he had called for public power, insurance for the jobless, a state income tax, and of course mortgage relief. For the nation he preached the gospel of “collective ownership of the means of production and distribution,” though he was no Marxist. If his proposals were somewhat fuzzy, the political power he wielded as head of his militant, well-organized Farmer-Labor party was clear and commanding. Olson too talked about a third party for 1936, headed perhaps by Bob La Follette. What about 1940? he was asked. Said Olson: “Maybe by then I won’t be radical enough.”

It was from the Far West, however, and especially California, that Roosevelt and the nation learned how tumultuous, arousing, colorful, and nutty the politics of protest could be. No one could remember a political leader like Upton Sinclair, winner of the Golden State’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in 1934. A talkative, ebullient man then in his mid-fifties, Upton Sinclair had never stopped writing, protesting, and politicking since the kindling days of The Jungle and The Brass Check, his famous muckraking works. Indignant over the idle land, factories, and people he saw all about him in the early thirties, he concocted a plan that, he proclaimed categorically, would end poverty in California. And it was called just that: End Poverty in California. Under his plan the state would acquire farmland and factories, turn them over to the jobless to grow food and make their own clothes and furniture and shoes, and issue scrip that could be used for the exchange of produce and goods. Always the Utopian, Sinclair dreamed of the establishment ultimately of networks of workers’ and farmers’ villages. It would be the Cooperative Commonwealth.

The killing of Upton Sinclair’s dream was testament to the novelist’s long avowal of unpopular causes, the ingenuity of California’s power elites, and the Machiavellianism of Franklin Roosevelt.

Like other communitarian plans that had been advanced in America for over a century, EPIC was no real threat to corporate property or profit; nevertheless, the business interests of California—backed up by Republican party leaders, Hollywood moguls and movie stars, and a new type of hatchet job by professional public relations experts—portrayed the one-time muckraker as an atheistic, anarchist communist and a believer in free love, telepathy, and vegetarianism to boot. Fake photographs and newsreels showed California being invaded by bums and tramps seeking an end to their own poverty at the expense of the state’s taxpayers. All this worked in the mercurial, personality-dominated political environment of the Golden State.

Sinclair had fairly beaten the old Wilsonian politico George Creel in the Democratic primary, but the usual White House endorsement of a Democratic candidate was not forthcoming. He appealed to Roosevelt and had no answer. He appealed to Eleanor Roosevelt, who ordinarily supported the EPIC type of local initiative. Instructed by her husband to “(1) Say nothing and (2) Do nothing,” she wrote Sinclair a guarded reply. But FDR was not content to do nothing. He allowed Administration operatives to make a deal with the conservative Republican candidate, Frank Merriam, under which Merriam would proclaim, if he won, that his victory could not have happened without Democratic support and hence was no repudiation of the New Deal. And that was how the Democratic candidate was ditched, to the benefit of a Republican candidate who had come out for “Roosevelt’s policies,” the Townsend plan, and funny-money schemes.

Upton Sinclair the writer had the last word. Having authored I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty before his campaign, he now produced I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked, in which he told all. Soon he would be writing his Lanny Budd novels, which apotheosize FDR, the man who had deserted him.

In the half-century since the fateful year of 1935, historians of the New Deal have puzzled over Roosevelt’s alleged “turn to the left.” Did he indeed turn to the left—and what was the “left” to which he turned? Was it from the centrist, bipartisan essence of the “First” New Deal to the radical, populist thrust of the “Second”? Was it from government as regulator and atomizer of concentrated economic power to government as planner and coordinator of it? Was it from government as broker and unifier of major interests to government as a vehicle for more social justice and equality? Was the “Second” New Deal, in short, fundamentally more radical than the “First”? And if it was, why did FDR shift, and at the time that he did—the summer of 1935? Was it a result mainly of external forces, political and economic, working on him, or of intellectual and psychological influences working within him, or of some baffling combination of the two?

Surely a shift to the left seemed logical politically. The Democratic gains in the 1934 midterm elections had confirmed the popularity of FDR and his program. The 1934 ferment in farm and factory, the increasingly strident and persuasive voices of Long, Coughlin, and the others, the pressures from New Deal Democrats and liberal Republicans in Congress—all these appeared to set the stage for a White House call for action as the new year opened and a new Congress got underway. But that was not how the President behaved. He was obviously cool to a measure that would have seemed ideal for both policy and political reasons—New York Senator Robert Wagner’s bill to guarantee labor’s right to organize. His January State of the Union message, moderate in tone and policy recommendation, was hardly a foretaste of the stormy days to come, calling as it did for a “genuine period of good feeling, sustained by a sense of purposeful progress.”

One piece in the puzzle is clear. The President’s dismay over the defeat of the World Court and his intellectual uncertainty did not quickly pass, in contrast to earlier periods when he had been briefly down in the dumps. Activists who saw the President during the spring of 1935 remarked on his passivity and touchiness, almost as though he were suffering from a physical ailment. “I must say that the President seemed to me to be distinctly dispirited,” Ickes noted in his diary late in February. “… He looked tired and he seemed to lack fighting vigor or the buoyancy that has always characterized him.” Ickes doubted that he could put through even his moderate program.

Was Roosevelt at last stopped, immobilized? Instead of preparing to make a mighty strategic choice between programs, between left and center, between ideologies and strategies, at this point he was picking his way, step by step, amid great pressures, moving a bit right or left as he faced specific problems. This was Roosevelt the fox, not the lion. Balancing and brokering from day to day, he was both capable of dealing with events and vulnerable to them. And then, in the spring of 1935, there occurred a series of acts that altered the political climate. These were actions, not of Roosevelt himself or his friends, but of his adversaries.

At the end of April the United States Chamber of Commerce held its annual conference in Washington. Gone and apparently forgotten were the days when the Chamber, speaking for a cowering business community, had endorsed much of the New Deal and even given the President a rising ovation. Now the nation’s business leaders—especially small businessmen who felt distanced from Washington—were ready to counterattack the New Deal. A delegate accused the Administration of trying to “Sovietize the country.” The Chamber voted its opposition to much of the New Deal already in place. Thomas J. Watson privately apologized to the President for such unrestrained criticism, and Winthrop Aldrich of the Chase National Bank, Walter Gifford of American Telephone and Telegraph, Myron Taylor of U.S. Steel, and a few other “industrial statesmen” who were now less anti-New Deal than most smaller entrepreneurs paid a placatory visit to the White House, but the President had heard the message from the wards and precincts of conservatism.

Most of FDR’s business foes could only protest, but there were other conservatives—conservatives with teeth. These were five men who made up a majority on the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. Aside from one Wilson appointment, they were the legatees of Republican Presidents who had chosen safe and dependable men from the world where business, the bar, and politics converged. The minority of four were also legatees of one Democratic and several Republican Presidents—Chief Justice Hughes, appointed by Hoover; Brandeis (Wilson); Harlan F. Stone (Coolidge); and Benjamin N. Cardozo (Hoover).

No President can be sure that his judicial appointees fully share his political philosophy or will continue to share it. There was no compact old guard majority on the Court arrayed against a solid minority expressing the views of Wilsonian democracy and liberal Republicanism. Majorities and minorities recombined fluidly as individual cases were heard. But the ideology of the 1920s—indeed, of the nineteenth century—hung closely enough over the Court as to produce a virtual massacre of New Deal measures between January 1935 and the spring of 1936. Stricken down successively were the “hot oil” provisions of the NRA Act, the Railroad Pension Act, the NRA itself, the farm mortgage law, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Guffey Bituminous Coal Act, and the Municipal Bankruptcy Act.

One act that escaped the judicial guillotine caused Roosevelt as much worry as several that died under it. In January 1935 the High Court began hearing arguments on the power of the government to impair the obligation of contracts, public and private, a power Congress had claimed during the Hundred Days in nullifying the gold clauses in such contracts. A decision affirming the sanctity of contracts would put in jeopardy the power of Congress to control monetary policy and would bring dire practical consequences. The public debt would immediately jump by $10 billion, while the total debt—which FDR was still vainly hoping to reduce—would soar to almost $70 billion. Bondholders, demanding full gold value for their bonds of $1.69 for every dollar, would reap a bonanza.

Apprehensively, Roosevelt, Morgenthau, and their aides waited in the White House for the Court’s verdict to come over the ticker. Then the good news: by a 5-4 vote the justices upheld the government. Undoubtedly the President’s relief was deeply tinged with bitterness. For one thing, Chief Justice Hughes, in a tortured ruling for the Court, held that government bonds, in contrast to private obligations, were contractual obligations that Congress had unconstitutionally violated, but that the plaintiff had suffered only nominal damage and could not sue in the Court of Claims. More than ever the President must have reflected about the ungrateful capitalist and the lost top hat. His gold policy had been designed to stabilize the financial markets, to shore up capitalism—was this the response of the business community? Justice James C. McReynolds from the bench had accused the government of confiscation, repudiation, destroying the Constitution; and in court, during a twenty-minute extemporaneous harangue, he said, “This is Nero at his worst.”

If any case had been designed to stir Roosevelt’s deepest feelings against a certain type of capitalist—bondholders, coupon-clippers, the idle rich—it was the Gold Clause cases. Even in the eminence of the presidency he could recall the kind of men who, as youths, had excluded him from the inner circles of Groton and Harvard, the men who later had fought both his presidential heroes, TR and Wilson. Certainly as a power broker he could now see the judicial handwriting on the Supreme Court façade. “I shudder at the closeness of five to four decisions in these important matters,” he wrote. Hence he was not surprised by the Supreme Court decision against the NRA on May 27, though he could hardly have expected the unanimous thumbs-down. But once again his class had betrayed him— was not the NRA, even with its dire problems, his best effort to harmonize and stabilize industry and business, to find a middle way between collectivism and unbridled competition?

The right-wing counterattack on the New Deal—through the Supreme Court, small business spokesmen, and a thousand lesser channels—served as a catalytic factor in the forces now pushing the President out of his drift and indecision. By now the President was feeling heavy pressure from the left as well. In mid-May, a week after the Court invalidated the Railroad Pension Act and appeared to question whether old-age pensions lay within the scope of federal commerce power in the Constitution, a group of liberal senators met with Roosevelt for a long talk. La Follette, Johnson, Norris, Wheeler, and Costigan, all of whom had been members of the National Progressive League for Roosevelt in 1932, were there, along with cabinet members Ickes and Wallace, and Felix Frankfurter, who had organized the meeting.

La Follette in particular was brutally frank: The President must reassert leadership. It was well that business spokesmen had attacked him, for now business had put its cards on the table. The best answer to Long and Coughlin was to press ahead on the legislative program. In the light of opposition within the Democratic party, La Follette reminded the President that Theodore Roosevelt had not hesitated to take open issue with members of his own party. FDR might have to do the same thing. Frankfurter brought a warning from Brandeis that it was the “eleventh hour.” The President seemed to be in a fighting mood when the group left.

He was still in a fighting mood at the end of May after the Court’s voiding of the NRA. To his press conference he delivered a one-and-a-half-hour monologue on the substance of the decision. First he quoted a series of poignant letters from small businessmen—a cigar maker, store owner, printer, “drug-store people”—asking in effect, the President said, “please save us.” Smiling, speaking calmly and simply, pausing only to stab out a cigarette and fix a new one in his long ivory holder, Roosevelt dwelt on how the Framers had written the interstate commerce clause into the Constitution back in the “horse-and-buggy” age, how impossible it had become for forty-eight states to deal with nationwide economic needs, and how “we have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce.” Thus did the President of the United States put in his dissenting opinion to a holding of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Where next for the nation, asked the President—toward federal or toward state power over national economic and social problems? “Don’t call it right or left; that is just first-year high-school language, just about. It is not right or left—it is a question for national decision.”

What “national decision” for Roosevelt? Whatever his dislike of the cloudy terms, he was now tilted toward the cloudy liberal-labor-left. But would he go with the Moley-Tugwell-Berle strategy of coordinated national planning and control or with the strategy of decentralized administration, small institutions, and local initiatives urged by Frankfurter, Ben Cohen, and Tommy Corcoran?

The first gun in this struggle had already been fired. On what the New Dealers were already calling “Black Monday”—the day the High Court killed the NRA—Corcoran had started to leave the chamber after the session when a page tapped him on the shoulder and asked him to come to the robing room. There Corcoran found Brandeis holding his arms up to be derobed, looking “for a moment like a black-winged angel of destruction.” The justice spoke sharply to his young friend:

“This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the President that we’re not going to let this government centralize everything. It’s come to an end. As for your young men, you call them together and tell them to get out of Washington—tell them to go home, back to the states. That is where they must do their work.” Corcoran duly got word to the President—but “Tommy the Cork,” as FDR called him, and many of his young colleagues never left Washington.

A message from Brandeis, direct or indirect, was never taken lightly in the Roosevelt While House. For years the justice had been bombarding the Administration with advice, sometimes directly to Roosevelt, usually indirectly through Frankfurter or other mutual friends. The Administration viewed the justice not merely as an adviser, or even as a justice, but as “Isaiah,” a prophet of profound wisdom. He and Frankfurter, moreover, had served virtually as a New Deal scouting and recruiting agency, peopling not only the White House but the whole Administration with talented activists. Always implicit but unspoken in Brandeis’s counsel was the fact that the justice not only could give advice—he could enforce it from the high bench. Now that threat had been made explicit.

By now Roosevelt was asserting leadership, and clearly toward the left, but he still faced a choice, among others, between the “Brandeisian” left and the “Tugwellian” left. Even though his friends and advisers, most of whom were hostile to bigness, redoubled their efforts after NRA’s invalidation, the President still hankered for the kind of “collectivist” control over business that had been embodied in the NRA. But any White House insiders who expected a grand strategic decision from their boss did not know their man. He was not wont to choose between lofty philosophical principles. Rather he would exploit immediate opportunities by modernizing old ideas, applying the results of his own experiments, choosing eclectically among disparate policies, and responding to the pressures of interest groups, especially the rising power of industrial labor. He would find decision in day-to-day action, by throwing himself into new legislative battles.

Late in May began the “Second Hundred Days.” Reverting to his old role of Chief Legislator, the President bluntly told congressional chieftains that certain bills must be passed. Congress, which had been dawdling, was suddenly spurred into action, with the progressives in each chamber now riding high. Laboring in the heat, without air conditioning, Congress responded to the presidential spur.

July 5, 1935—Having given the green light earlier to Senator Robert Wagner, the President signs Wagner’s National Labor Relations Act—the augmented legacy of NRA’s Section 7(a)—and declares that the high goal of the act is a better relationship between labor and management by “assuring the employees the right of collective bargaining” and providing “an orderly procedure for determining who is entitled to represent the employees.” A five-person independent quasi-judicial body will administer the act.

August 14—FDR signs the Social Security Act. “Today a hope of many years’ standing is in large part fulfilled,” he says. After the “startling industrial changes” that in the past century have threatened the security of person and family, “this social security measure gives at least some protection to thirty million of our citizens who will reap direct benefits through unemployment compensation, through old-age pensions and through increased services for the protection of children and the prevention of ill health.”

August 24—The President signs the Banking Act of 1935, which centers control of the money market in the Federal Reserve. This was largely the brainchild of Marriner Eccles at the Federal Reserve Board. The President had predicted to Eccles that “it will be a knock-down and drag-out fight to get it through,” and he was right. Not only leading bankers but old Senator Glass, father of the Federal Reserve System in Wilson days, fought tenaciously against “political control” and won some modifying changes. After the President, at the signing, handed one of the pens to Glass, someone whispered, “He should have given him an eraser instead.”

August 26—Roosevelt signs the Public Utility Holding Company Act. This measure, designed to curb the power of gigantic utility holding companies over their operating subsidiaries, had been urged by the President in January; when he renewed pressure for the bill, the utilities fought back with an intensive propaganda and lobbying campaign. They feared especially FDR’s demand for a “death sentence,” as it came to be called, for utility holding companies that could not show they served a sound economic purpose. Senator Wheeler and Congressman Sam Rayburn had carried the fight in Congress, and Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky pushed through the final compromise version. This allowed a holding company to control more than one public utility system if potential additional systems could otherwise not survive economically. The utility chieftains—especially an unusually articulate spokesman named Wendell Willkie—remained utterly hostile to the measure.

August 31—The President signs the Revenue Act of 1935. In mid-May he had shocked the business community with a message to Congress contending that “great accumulations of wealth cannot be justified on the basis of personal and family security” and calling for taxes on “inherited economic power.” Congress, after a sharp struggle in the country and on the Hill, enacted a measure increasing rates for estate and gift taxes, boosted the surtax rates for large incomes, imposed a graduated rate on corporation income, and placed a special tax on corporations’ undistributed earnings.

These bills—the Big Five—were the essence of the Second Hundred Days. But the momentum of that year initiated or invigorated many other elements of the New Deal: rural electrification, youth programs, protection of natural resources, farm credit, above all the WPA and other spending programs for the needy—covering almost the whole of Roosevelt’s concerns and amounting in effect to the Second New Deal. Probably the most important of these programs—certainly the most important in its direct impact on people’s lives—was Harry Hopkins’s Works Progress Administration, designed to replace the faltering federal-state-local direct relief efforts with a big national works program for jobless employables. Even while Congress passed the Second Hundred Days laws, Hopkins was gearing up his agency to spend the $5 billion appropriated for the first year. Within that year WPA rolls numbered almost 3.5 million people. Hopkins’s was the most visible and controversial New Deal program; gangs of WPA workers repairing roads or bridges were often jeered at by passersby still lucky enough to have jobs and cars.

Studying Roosevelt’s 1935 measures and actions, observers were still uncertain whether the President was at last opting for the Brandeis-Frankfurter anti-bigness stance. Was he moving strongly in a progressive, even radical direction toward economic equality and social justice?

The Brandeis school feared bigness both in business and in government—but to what extent was a strong and unified federal government needed to curb private concentrated power? Could decentralized governmental power compel diffused economic power? It seemed unlikely. Yet the progressive senators were hardly in a mood to substitute big public bureaucracies for big private ones, except for such huge programs as AAA and Social Security that clearly demanded massive government. The holding company bill, administered by a relatively small regulatory agency like the SEC, was a model for the decentralizers.

A big federal program or bureau, on the other hand, did not necessarily mean monolithic and centralized power. The NRA had provided for code-making by private interests as well as by Hugh Johnson’s diktats. The AAA provided for farmers’ referendums. The Tennessee Valley Authority embraced extensive local decision making as well as regional. The 1935 “wealth tax” was in part an assault on big business. The decentralizers’ rhetoric rarely took into account such subtleties or ambivalences. Senator Wheeler, according to Ronald Mulder, believed that a proper use of governmental power could decentralize both the economy and the government. “Excessive centralization in whatever form it may exist negated American ideals,” Wheeler said. The Brandeis school may have won some symbolic victories in the Second Hundred Days, but the balance between bigness and smallness, between central and local control, did not fundamentally change.

Equality? The fierce reaction of Liberty Leaguers and other conservatives—including judges—to the “radicalism” and “Bolshevism” of the Second New Deal left FDR with a more liberal image than ever. To a considerable degree this was deserved. But the measures of the Second Hundred Days did not constitute a major shift toward economic equality and social justice. Because the President had an insurance model in mind for Social Security, this vital program was financed by payroll taxes that were as regressive as sales taxes. The payroll tax, according to Mark Leff, reaped as much each month in federal revenue as the controversial income tax increase under the 1935 wealth tax did in a whole year. In short, the Social Security Act sought social security, not income redistribution— though in the long run the first was hardly possible without the latter. Many of the other key 1935 bills, as well as lesser ones, had been watered down by congressional and business opposition.

The acid test for Roosevelt’s liberalism—and that of all Presidents—was tax policy. Here again the President was left with a sharpened progressive image, and deservedly so, for his original bill had strong redistributionist elements. Yet these were much weakened in the legislative labyrinth. On close analysis, indeed, the Second New Deal appeared a creature less of ideological or policy consistency than of legislative and electoral necessity. Roosevelt had made no philosophically based or motivated grand strategic deployment to the left. He was more like the commander of a guerrilla army whose scattered columns, fighting blindly in the mountains through dense ravines and thickets, suddenly converge, half by plan and half by coincidence, and debouch into the plain below.

And if the Politician-in-Chief should ever forget the centrality of politics, there were those who would remind him. In particular there was one boisterous, pudgy-faced senator who by early 1935 was in open revolt against the White House. Huey Long attacked the Social Security bill for the payroll tax, the stinginess of its pensions for the aged, and other inadequacies. But the Kingfish’s great moment came when FDR’s tax message was read to the Senate. As the President’s specific proposals were spelled out, Huey pranced around the chamber grinning broadly, rolling his eyes in mock amazement, pointing to himself, and letting it be known that the President was stealing his thunder.

A few days later, the Kingfish was at it again. He was glad that the President had joined him at last, he proclaimed. He had some questions for FDR, he said, and if the President answered them satisfactorily, he—the Kingfish—would retire from politics, his work done. Delightedly he quoted Will Rogers’s comment:

“I would sure liked to have seen Huey’s face when he was woke up in the middle of the night by the President, who said, ‘Lay over, Huey, I want to get in bed with you.’”

Appeal to the People

“We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed. The very nature of the problem that we faced made it necessary to drive some people from power and strictly to regulate others.” The “unscrupulous money-changers” stood indicted in the court of public opinion. They had admitted their failure and abdicated. “Abdicated! Yes, in 1933, but now with the passing of danger they forget their damaging admissions and withdraw their abdication.”

It was the evening of January 3, 1936. From the rostrum of the House of Representatives, Franklin D. Roosevelt looked out at the crowded and boisterous chamber. This was his annual message on the state of the union, and it had started out as a state paper, as he described the growing world crisis. In October, Mussolini’s forces had invaded Ethiopia, and two months later France and Britain had agreed to the conquest of Haile Selassie’s hapless country. “Nations seeking expansion, seeking the rectification of injustices springing from former wars, or seeking outlets for trade, for population or even for their own peaceful contributions to the progress of civilization, fail to demonstrate that patience necessary to attain reasonable and legitimate objectives by peaceful negotiation or by an appeal to the finer instincts of world justice.” But the President hurried on to what was obviously a campaign speech. Indeed, he had insisted on departing from precedent and speaking in the evening in order to reach millions of radio listeners in their homes.

“The rulers of the exchanges of mankind’s goods” now “seek the restoration of their selfish power. They offer to lead us back round the same old corner into the same old dreary street.” Lowering his voice confidentially, rocking back and forth behind the rostrum, FDR was drawing blood. Cheers and rebel yells burst from the Democrats, while the little band of Republicans looked on in bitter silence.

“They steal the livery of great national constitutional ideals to serve discredited special interests.” They would “gang up” against the people’s liberties. They would extend to government the principles many of them had instilled into their own affairs: “autocracy toward labor, toward stockholders, toward consumers, toward public sentiment.” Any doubt that this was the campaign kickoff for 1936 evaporated when the President concluded by anticipating “a balance of the national budget” and seeing no need for new taxes.

But where were the battle lines? Like the Napoleonic general of the armies who surveys the terrain, sizes up the enemy, mobilizes and measures his own troops, and makes sense of it all, the President by attacking early sought to control the theater of combat. As he reconnoitered the political terrain, however, with his sharp eye for divisions on both sides he could see little but factionalism and confusion. The ideological left was divided as usual between communists and socialists, and both these movements were deeply cleft between moderate and militant elements. Father Coughlin was reorganizing his National Union for Social Justice while keeping some distance from rival organizations. The AFL and the new CIO were still busy at fratricide. Dr. Townsend had become increasingly hostile to FDR and was considering a third-party effort. As for the President’s own party, Al Smith and the rest of the old guard were attacking the President at every opportunity and were now aided and abetted by young ideologues of fiscal orthodoxy such as Dean Acheson and Lewis Douglas and by a host of conservative Southerners.

One figure no longer dominated the politics of protest. Two months after his waggish response to FDR’s tax bill on the Senate floor, Huey Long had conducted a final one-man filibuster in the upper chamber and returned home. He was flirting with the notion of seeking to deny Roosevelt a second term by uniting the followers of Townsend, Coughlin, Sinclair, and others against him, thus electing a Republican, who would make such a mess of things that a true believer in sharing the wealth—and who else but the Kingfish himself?—would win the presidency in 1940. And the results of a poll commissioned in spring 1935 by the Democratic National Committee indicated that this was no idle threat. As a third-party candidate, Long might receive three to four million votes, enough, James Farley feared, to give him “the balance of power in the 1936 election.”

Early in September in the Louisiana state capitol, after sauntering around the House chamber telling jokes and barking out orders, Long had swept into one of the marble corridors, followed by his bodyguards. A slight bespectacled man stepped out from behind a pillar, brushed through the guards, and shot one bullet into Huey Long’s stomach. The guards then shot down the assailant and poured bullets into his prone body. He was a young and brilliant Baton Rouge physician who hated Long and his dictatorship and was ready to die in an act of tyrannicide.

After a bungled operation the Kingfish died a day and a half later, murmuring, it was said, “God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.” Quickly a Long lieutenant, Gerald L. K. Smith, stepped forth to convert the third-party movement into his personal political base. Driven out of Louisiana politics by the inheritors of Long’s organization, Smith by early 1936 was seeking to build a nationwide coalition against the President.

Roosevelt was now building his own electoral coalition—far broader than the Democratic party. Indeed, there already existed a coalition of groups that New Deal laws and money had aided. The President had called the roll in his address to Congress—farmers reaping higher prices, homeowners enjoying lower interest rates, workers now able to join in unions of their own choosing, the aged cherishing the prospect of pensions, young people in the CCC, the jobless, investors now protected against speculators. Roosevelt already was instructing Farley and his own political aides to establish campaign organizations that would make direct appeals to such groups.

To the President’s critics this was special-interest politics of the most sordid type. Perhaps they were unduly concerned. The critical presidential reelection campaigns in American history had turned not merely on group allegiances but on presidential qualities that far transcended narrow interest—qualities of trust, commitment, leadership, vision—as well as on widely felt popular benefit and improvement. Although Roosevelt’s popularity as measured by polls had dropped, he still ranked high in public esteem. And he appeared to be fulfilling the supreme promise he had made in 1932—recovery. Unemployment was down by more than one-third from its height of at least 13 million and national income had increased almost two-thirds from the $40 billion level of 1933.

Yet the half-filled glass was also half empty. There were still over 9 million jobless in early 1936. Reemployment during the first term was a result less of careful planning than of direct spending to meet human needs, especially following the big work-relief and public works programs of 1935. Huge sections of the population, moreover, were beyond even the long reach of the New Deal. Millions of poor people on the land—tenants, sharecroppers, farm laborers, migrant workers—had hardly felt the impact of New Deal agricultural programs. Nor had millions of southern blacks, imprisoned in local racist cultures and discriminatory state economic and political structures, and the last to reap benefits from the New Deal because reactionary lawmakers in Washington stood guard over white privilege back home.

Nor had millions of women. Although the New Deal brought unprecedented numbers of women into the government bureaucracy, working women continued to face oppressive job and wage discrimination, and, in a tight labor market, they had little leverage and few options. Married women in particular suffered from the popular notion that unemployment could be reduced by simply denying them jobs. And women were practically excluded from the heavy construction projects at the core of the relief efforts of the PWA and other agencies.

The plight of poor farmers, blacks, and women, however, hardly seemed to preoccupy Roosevelt’s conservative opposition. The President’s heightened militancy quickly aroused an oratorical counteroffensive. Triumphantly the Liberty League presented Al Smith in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel to a great throng that numbered Du Ponts, disaffected Democrats such as Raskob and Davis, and two thousand others. Decked out in white tie and tails, Al had never been more sulphurous. “It’s all right with me if they want to disguise themselves as Norman Thomas, or Karl Marx, or Lenin, or any of the rest of that bunch,” he shouted, “but what I won’t stand for is allowing them to march under the banner of Jefferson, Jackson, or Cleveland.” There could be only one capital, he warned, Washington or Moscow—“the clear, pure, fresh air of free America, or the foul breath of Communistic Russia.” He warned further that come election day he might take a walk—and he did so.

If the key issue against the New Deal was to be its alleged secret Red sympathies, the leader of the opposition must be William Randolph Hearst. In the happy days of 1932, the publisher had helped tilt the nomination toward FDR. Now his papers addressed the President as “you and your fellow Communists” and ran little ditties like:

A Red New Deal with a Soviet Seal

Endorsed by a Moscow hand,

The strange result of an alien cult

In a liberty-loving land.

Almost comical was Hearst’s détente with Smith, whom he had once excoriated. But for Roosevelt the message was clear: with the great bulk of the press against him, he must rely all the more on radio.

FDR’s most menacing foes were still the conservatives with teeth—the conservative majority on the Supreme Court and the federal judges across the land who were tying up Administration programs with injunctions, occasionally adorned with anti-New Deal stump speeches from the bench. When in early 1936 the High Court had struck down the Agricultural Adjustment Act by a 6-3 vote—on the ground that the processing tax was not a genuine tax but a vehicle for regulating agriculture—Stone, dissenting, had called the decision a tortured construction of the Constitution and warned that the judiciary was “not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have the capacity to govern.” His brethren little heeded his admonition, as the beheading of other New Deal measures followed. Then came the most lethal decision of all, a voiding of a New York measure setting a minimum wage for women. The High Court was now thwarting state power as well as national.

“There is grim irony,” Stone wrote in his dissent, “in speaking of the freedom of contract of those who, because of their economic necessities, give their service for less than is needful to keep body and soul together.” As for Roosevelt, he was no longer offering dissenting opinions. Indeed, he was curiously mute. Like the Tar Baby, he “ain’t sayin’ nothin’.”

By late spring both parties were mobilizing for battle. From the start Generalissimo Roosevelt directed operations from his own command post, bypassing Farley as needed. He dealt directly with Lewis and other labor leaders. He mollified businessmen by giving a long White House luncheon for business friends of Commerce Secretary Daniel C. Roper. He set up a new “nonpartisan” organization, with the imposing title of the Good Neighbor League, to appeal to religious, black, civic, and related groups across the nation. Above all he sought to attract support from women. With his backing Eleanor Roosevelt, Frances Perkins, and Molly Dewson organized election cadres of women across the nation. Once again the First Lady demonstrated her capacity to shift almost overnight from her posture of gracious serenity to that of a hardheaded machine politician—who nonetheless viewed campaigns as essentially vehicles for educating the public.

But Roosevelt would hold the spotlight. “There’s one issue in this campaign,” he told Moley in one of their last meetings, according to the former brain truster. “It’s myself, and people must be either for me or against me.”

In June the Republicans, torn between their heart and their head— between their feeling for their old stalwart, Herbert Hoover, and their practical need for a new face—chose Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas to head their ticket and Colonel Frank Knox, publisher of the Chicago Daily News, as his running mate. Both men were proud old Bull Moosers. Hoover, who had been castigating the New Deal in speeches around the country for years, hoped forlornly that one big speech at the convention might win him the nomination. A smashing speech it was, but the GOP rank and file knew that a ticket headed by Hoover would buy a journey to defeat. In Landon they found a decent, moderate man, with just the qualities of common sense, homely competence, and rocklike “soundness” that the party hoped to contrast with the nutty theorist in the White House, and yet with a progressive past and reputation. His square, guileless face, rimless glasses, and slightly graying hair made the Kansas governor look like a million other middle-aged, middle-class Americans.

The Democratic convention later in June was a one-man show—even though the man was not present until the end. FDR supervised the writing of an exuberantly New Deal platform, planned the schedule, and hand-picked the members of crucial delegations, such as California’s. He also forced through the convention a vital change—substitution of a simple majority for the Democracy’s historic two-thirds requirement for presidential nominations, a rule that had tied up countless conclaves and almost dished Roosevelt’s hopes in 1932. The President had astutely asked Bennett Champ Clark, son of a victim of the requirement in 1912, to move the adoption of majority rule.

The convention came fully to life only when the President arrived at Philadelphia’s Franklin Field stadium to accept the nomination. Before a wildly enthusiastic throng of 100,000, he accused the opposition of seeking to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. “Today,” he said, “we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place.” Then the climactic sentences:

“Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.…

“I accept the commission you have tendered me. I join—” A roar burst across the stadium and drowned out the final words: “with you. I am enlisted for the duration of the war.”

By midsummer both parties confronted a third force that suddenly seemed to be threatening. Both Coughlin and Townsend had been mustering their troops for action. They hated and feared Roosevelt, held the Republican old guard in utter contempt, and viewed each other with suspicion. The Kingfish was gone, but now two new leaders emerged. Gerald Smith proved to be not only a rousing tub-thumper but a coalition-builder. Befriending Townsend, he brought the doctor into contact with Coughlin and won the priest’s support for an alliance. Since all three men were prima donnas, a compromise candidate was needed. Congressman William Lemke of North Dakota, a longtime agrarian radical whose seamed, leathery face and rustic clothes belied his years at Georgetown University and Yale Law School, would serve. Soon he was denouncing the President as the “bewildered Kerensky of a provisional government” and Landon as “the dying shadow of a past civilization.” His hastily organized Union party boasted that it could command 25 million votes or more and at the least throw the election to Landon, thus paving the way to Huey Long’s great goal for 1940.

It was clear also by midsummer that Roosevelt had little to fear from the parties of the old left, even as balance-of-power forces. The age-old failure of the broad American labor-liberal-left to unite seemed almost caricatured in the Socialists’ internal divisions. At their convention in May they had renominated Norman Thomas but split over another issue; a large number of old-liners walked out and formed the Social Democratic Federation, leaving the Socialist party with a strong leftward tilt. Caught in the middle, Thomas saw some of his supporters move further to the left while others—including Hillman and Dubinsky—joined the New Deal camp.

American Communists also had their frustrations. Moscow’s switch to a new popular front, antifascist strategy had left anti-New Deal zealots in an embarrassing position: after lambasting Roosevelt and his New Deal, now they must support him. Yet despite their deep distrust of the President, they much preferred him to Landon, whom they labeled a forerunner of fascism. While the Socialists shifted sharply to the left, Harvey Klehr noted, the Communists passed them headed to the right. Meantime the comrades unveiled their patriotic slogan “COMMUNISM IS TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICANISM.”

The Republican campaigners were the first off the mark, and a good start it was, as Americans seemed to take to this outspoken Midwesterner with his sensible ideas and moderate positions. Buoyed by ample press support and good crowds, he attacked the New Deal at some of its weaker points and argued that he could meet the people’s needs more effectively and cheaply. As the weeks passed, however, he ran into more and more difficulties—his own fatigue, his repetitiousness, growing boredom and lack of response in the crowds. Moreover, he had no target, as FDR was lying low.

Landon’s nemesis was Herbert Hoover. Frozen out of the Landon campaign circle, thirsting for vindication, hating Roosevelt, the former President concluded that the candidate lacked fire and that he would provide it. Hoover’s attacks on the New Deal were so virulent as to be self-defeating, but in the process he and other hard-liners drew Landon into their vortex. Soon the Kansan was leveling extreme charges against his adversary. Pressured from the Republican right and the center, Landon never found a solid, consistent theme. By October his campaign was slowly and inexorably sinking, buoyed only by falsely optimistic polls in the Literary Digest.

The campaign of the Union party proved an exercise in self-destruction, performed before an indifferent press and public. Landon’s troubles with Hoover were as nothing compared to Lemke’s with Coughlin. Virtually ignoring his party’s candidate, the radio priest concentrated his fire on Roosevelt as “anti-God,” anti-American, pro-Red. The New Deal was “a broken down Colossus,” he shouted, “its left leg standing on ancient Capitalism and its right mired in the red mud of Communism.” He carried his red-baiting of the Administration to such a point, with ominous undertones of anti-Semitism, that his bishop, his cardinal, and even the Vatican rebuked him. Undeterred, Coughlin boasted that he would throw Roosevelt out of his office just “as I was instrumental in removing Herbert Hoover,” and cried, “If I don’t deliver 9,000,000 votes for William Lemke, I’m through with radio forever.” Smith and even Townsend also became vituperative, but they were cool to each other, and to Lemke. With too many leaders and too little money and organization, the Union party was in tatters by the middle of the fall.

By then Roosevelt was just starting his formal campaign. Always a master of timing, he stood aside until his foes had exhausted themselves and their audiences. His crowds seemed to get bigger and more enthusiastic as theirs dwindled during the autumn days. Spoken with power and passion but without stridency, his radio addresses were unusually effective, reaching widely across the electorate. He knew, too, when to leave well enough alone: he let friendly Catholic hierarchs answer Coughlin; he ignored pinpricks; when some of his campaign leaders almost panicked in the wake of a telling last-minute Republican attack on Social Security taxes and “name tags,” the President kept his nerve. His final campaign trips through the Northeast could fairly be described as triumphal processions.

He brought his campaign to a stunning climax in Madison Square Garden before a crowd of enthusiasts who seemed to thirst for political blood:

“For nearly four years now you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. And I can assure you that we will keep our sleeves rolled up.

“We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

“They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. And we know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

“I should like to have it said of my first Administration”—Roosevelt’s voice was rising—“that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match.

“I should like to have it said—” A thunderclap of cheers and applause burst from the crowd.

“Wait a moment! I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.” The crowd let out a great guttural roar.

“Of course we will continue to seek to improve working conditions for the workers of America.… Of course we will continue to work for cheaper electricity.… Of course we will continue our efforts in behalf of the farmers of America … for young men and women … for the crippled, for the blind, for the mothers.…

“For these things, too, and for a multitude of things like them, we have only just begun to fight. ”

CHAPTER 3

The Crisis of Majority Rule

FOR MORE THAN ONE hundred years, ever since Jeffersonian times, presidential candidates of humane and liberal tendencies had been seeking to muster popular majorities strong and stout enough to sustain their work. Their success had been mixed at best. Lincoln and Wilson won office, but only with a minority of the popular vote against divided opposition. Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt won popular majorities only to encounter opposition inside the governmental or party system. Somehow conservative Republican leadership had been able to achieve “compact majorities,” especially in the late nineteenth century and in the 1920s. Somehow liberal Democrats and progressive Republicans had been unable to create durable majority coalitions.

Suddenly, on Wednesday morning, November 4, 1936, the political landscape seemed altered and the old hope renewed. It was not merely a Roosevelt victory, the press proclaimed, but a tidal wave, an earthquake, a landslide, “the blizzard of ’36.” The President carried every state save Maine and Vermont, swept the electoral college by 523 to 8, won the popular vote by 27,748,000 to 16,680,000. Lemke’s 892,000 votes amounted to less than 2 percent of the total. The outcome was historic: Roosevelt had won the largest presidential vote up to that time, the largest presidential plurality, the largest proportion of electoral voles since 1820; he had helped win the largest House majority since 1855, the largest Senate majority since 1869. The new House would have 331 Democrats and 89 Republicans, with 13 members of other parties; the Senate, 76 Democrats, 16 Republicans, and 4 “others.” The Democratic hurricane swept through state legislatures and county courthouses across the nation. And the Democrats for the first time made deep inroads into the black vote.

So Franklin Roosevelt had his majority, a magnificent majority in electoral breadth and legislative depth. What would he do with it? Few doubted that he would have to face up to the one lingering majority of conservatives—that on the Supreme Court. Later on, some would propagate the myth that the President, intoxicated with his success, suddenly and recklessly pounced on the High Court. In fact, the battle was long in the making, for it reflected a conflict built deep into the heart of the constitutional system, popular attitudes, and the ambitions of leaders.

The Framers of the Constitution had been deeply ambivalent toward the idea and practice of majority rule. Believers in republican government, they had to accept the ultimate power of the people as expressed in electoral and legislative majorities. But as devout believers too in minority rights, they wished to curb the power of popular majorities, composed perhaps of debt-ridden farmers, to invade property rights. For them Shays’s rebellion early in 1787 had been the great warning bell in the night. At Philadelphia the founders shaped a constitution that would thwart sudden and passionate expressions of the popular will. A majority would need to win the House of Representatives, the presidency, and the Senate before it could work its will—and its will might be cooled off in the process as surely as cold milk could chill hot tea. And if all this failed, there would be the courts, which would exercise some major, though not wholly defined, restraints on legislative and executive policy.

Not all the founding fathers favored such curbs on popular rule. Thomas Jefferson, who was absent from the Philadelphia convention but always present in the Framers’ thoughts, not only backed legislative majority rule but talked grandly about popular rule and the right of the people to revolt every generation or so. To be sure, Jefferson, as a libertarian and democrat, set as a “sacred principle that if the will of the Majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable”—it must not violate the minority’s “equal rights.” But he had confidence that a majority of free Americans would never trample on the liberties of fellow Americans as guaranteed in bills of rights.

While FDR spurned grandiose constitutional theory, he had a good working knowledge of the Framers’ checks and balances as vehicles for frustrating popular impulses and thwarting social change. He had learned even more from historical narratives, as a politician delving into the past in order to defend his positions of the present. But most of all he learned from people—from Jefferson and Jackson and their difficulties with the Federalist-Whig court of John Marshall, from Lincoln, from the judicial erosion of black rights during Reconstruction, and above all from Cousin Ted’s blasts against reactionary judges.

Roosevelt had long recognized that the High Court was no chaste and lofty sanctum protected by vestal virgins of the law against political contamination, but rather an institution drenched in politics at least since the days of Marshall. Even more, he tended to look at the Court in personal rather than institutional terms. To him Hughes was not an Olympian jurist but a former politico, presidential candidate, and stalwart Republican. McReynolds was not a fine Wilsonian philosopher but a fanatical reactionary; Roosevelt would not have been surprised to learn of a letter from McReynolds to his brother in which he described the President as lacking “brains to understand what he is doing,” as “bad through and through,” and controlled by the radicals around him. Even Brandeis—the “Isaiah” whom FDR admired—had labored indefatigably for Roosevelt’s own goals and had advised New Deal officials closely, though usually indirectly, on policy measures—and then had turned suddenly against the Administration in demolishing the NRA. “Where was Ben Cardozo?” Roosevelt said on hearing of the 9-0 verdict against the NRA. “And what about old Isaiah?”

Hence it was not surprising that the President, forced by polarizing political pressures to rise above interest-group brokerage and bolstered by his big 1936 majority vote, now would confront minority power entrenched in the Supreme Court of the United States.

Court-Packing: The Switch in Time

The New Deal and the Old Court had almost collided in February 1935 in the Gold Clause cases. If the Court had decided against the Administration, Roosevelt had planned to defy the Court because to “stand idly by” and permit the decision to take effect would “imperil the economic and political security of this nation.” The decision if enforced, he intended to proclaim, would result in unconscionable profits to investors, bankruptcy for railroads and corporations, default by state and local governments, intensified mortgage foreclosures, a hike in the national debt—in short, would plunge the nation into an economic crisis.

After the narrow 5-4 decision in his favor, a relieved President wrote jauntily to Joseph P. Kennedy, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission: “How fortunate it is that his Exchanges will never know how close they came to being closed up by a stroke of the pen of one J.P.K.’” FDR seemed a bit crestfallen, however, that he had not been able to deliver the “marvelous radio address” he planned. It was the justices who gave the speeches. Hughes scolded the President in the majority opinion, while the archreactionary McReynolds in his extemporaneous dissent lamented that “Shame and humiliation are upon us now.”

But the gold cases had been only a respite, as the Court returned to its massacre of 1935. After “Black Monday”—the NRA along with two other anti-Administration decisions—the President began seriously and systematically to consider what could be done about the Court. During the next two years he devoted, on a reasonable estimate, several hundred hours of thought and reading and discussion to the problem. He would have had to do this even if he had preferred not to, for the press was agitating the issue and members of Congress were proposing scores of measures to curb the Court. Labor had been stung by the voiding in Carter of the Guffey Coal Act, which provided for a wages-and-hours code and collective bargaining for mineworkers, and it was now fearful of a similar fate for the Wagner and Social Security acts; its spokesmen attacked the Court for putting property rights above human rights and called for some kind of remedy. And after every anti-Administration decision the White House received a spate of letters from the general public.

“President Andrew Jackson, our greatest Democrat, defied the Supreme Court,” a Mississippi editor wired FDR. “Hope you will do the same.” From Los Angeles came a complaint about “that body of nine old has-beens, half-deaf, half-blind, full-of-palsy men.” To see that they were behind the times, “all you have to do is to look at Charles Hughes’ whiskers.” Demanded a Chicago businessman, “Are you aware that the people at large are getting damned tired of the United States Supreme Court, and that, if left to a popular vote, it would be kicked out?”

The President was aware; more than once he told intimates that there would be “marching” farmers and workers throughout the land if the Court tried to throw out the New Deal. When the Administration quietly lofted trial balloons intimating court reform, the public appeared unperturbed. But what to do? Roosevelt and Attorney General Homer S. Cummings examined a variety of proposals and found virtually insuperable objections to all of them.

A constitutional amendment? Almost anything could be done on paper through formal change of the Constitution. One day at lunch with his ambassador to Italy, Breckinridge Long, the President talked rather freely about possibilities. Long noted in his diary: “The amendments are not yet in specific or concrete form but might be broached under three headings: first, to define Inter-State Commerce with authority to Congress to legislate on the subject; second, to define certain phases of Inter-State Commerce; and third, taking a page from Lloyd George, to give authority to the Congress to pass over the veto of the Supreme Court legislation which the Court held unconstitutional.” The President was recalling the historic effort of a British Prime Minister (in fact Asquith, not Lloyd George) to overcome opposition in the House of Lords by threatening to create several hundred peers.

The President considered various permutations and combinations of these and other options but two problems dominated the discussions. The Supreme Court itself would interpret to its own advantage a constitutional amendment, unless it was drastic and explicit, but such an amendment probably would not pass. And could any amendment pass? The President often mentioned the power of a few state legislatures, heavily influenced by corporation money—$15 to $20 million, he estimated—to block an amendment. At best this route would take years.

Congressional action? There were precedents for the national legislature’s increasing or reducing the size of the Court, limiting the scope of the Court’s review power, determining judicial structure and processes, setting terms for retirement. Senator Norris asked Congress now to have the courage to pass legislation requiring a unanimous decision by the High Court to strike down an act of Congress. Others urged that Congress simply enlarge the Court by another two or three members, but Cummings in particular feared there would be considerable prejudice against “packing the Court,” as he described it. Compulsory retirement at seventy? This might appear to be a personal attack on the older justices, including Brandeis, and could easily be voided by the Court as an unconstitutional intrusion into its own domain.

Do nothing? Let nature take its course? Older justices—especially Willis Van Devanter—had stuck it out through Roosevelt’s first term; surely they would quit or die if FDR won reelection. The President, however, was not at all sure that the Supreme Court would follow the election returns, especially since he felt that certain conservatives on the Court were personally hostile to him. He could imagine old Van Devanter gleefully putting off his retirement month after month just to spite the President. He could not leave the crucial matter of timing in the opposition’s hands.

And so the pondering and analyzing went on during most of 1935 and 1936, amid great secrecy. Like Brer Fox watching Brer Rabbit become entangled with the Tar Baby, he lay low—and the Court did become more involved in a potential constitutional crisis with its devastating 1936 invalidations of the AAA and other measures. But the President would not even make the Court an explicit campaign issue. The Democratic platform offered only a vague plan on the matter, and Roosevelt said nothing explicitly about it in his campaign speeches. Implicitly he raised the issue every time he proclaimed that his New Deal would go forward if he received the mandate of the people.

That mandate came in full force on November 3, 1936, and now the President had to act quickly on the momentum of his victory, before the Court could strike down more New Deal laws. Day after day he pored over alternatives with Cummings, who used a secret White House entrance to evade the press. The amendment route was rejected, as the President and the Attorney General leaned toward two separate proposals—appointment of new justices and compulsory retirement at seventy. But each of these seemed weak and unattractive in itself.

A suggestion came in from the famed constitutionalist at Princeton, Edward S. Corwin, the most influential of several academic specialists with whom Cummings had been consulting. Why not combine the two approaches with an act of Congress authorizing the President, “whenever a majority of the Justices” are “seventy or more years old, to nominate enough new justices of less than that age to make a majority”?

About this time Cummings struck a bonanza in the departmental archives—a recommendation from an earlier Attorney General that when any federal judge (except Supreme Court members) “fails to avail himself of the privilege of retiring now granted by law” (at age seventy, after having served ten years, upon full pay), the President could with the consent of the Senate appoint another judge. That Attorney General had been none other than James McReynolds, who had served in the Wilson Administration. With glee Cummings and Roosevelt pounced on this find. Why not apply it to the Supreme Court? Linking the notion of retirement to that of new appointments especially attracted the President, with his relish for tactical combinations.

It was with this recommendation in mind that the President stood before Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes on January 20, 1937, to take for the second time the inaugural oath of office. When Hughes read the oath with slow and rising emphasis as he came to the words “promise to support the Constitution,” the President wanted, he would recall, to cry out, “Yes, but it’s the Constitution as I understand it, flexible enough to meet any new problem of democracy.” Then FDR turned to address the inaugural crowd. It was not a sunny picture he painted but a picture of tasks still undone, promises unfulfilled, human needs unmet:

“I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.…

“I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children … millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory.…

“I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

“It is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out.”

All this demanded political leadership, he concluded; and he promised to supply it.

On February 5, 1937, Roosevelt revealed his Court plan to an extraordinary joint session of cabinet members and congressional leaders. They heard him with mixed emotions, some like Ickes with delight, others like Garner with doubts, still others with the deepest misgivings. Under the President’s plan, for every Supreme Court justice who failed to quit the bench within six months after reaching seventy, the President would be empowered to appoint a new justice, up to a total of six. The President did not solicit much comment; quickly he wheeled off to meet a waiting group of newspapermen.

Bursts of laughter swept the press conference as the President went over his plan. Roosevelt presided like an impresario, occasionally throwing his head back and joining in the laughter. He was savoring his triumph. His plan, he expected, would bring quick resignations, protect his big measures of the Second Hundred Days—and dish the conservative opposition on and off the Court. He would extract the conservatives’ teeth. Demanding absolute secrecy until the message was released, he took special pleasure from the surprise he had achieved.

Surprise—and shock. Riding back to the Capitol, the congressional leaders sat in stunned silence. Suddenly Hatton Sumners of Texas, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, turned to the others. “Boys,” he said, “here’s where I cash in.” At the Capitol legislators stood about in little knots, variously elated and indignant after reading the message. In the Supreme Court the attorney at bar paused a moment, sensing a sudden change in mood, after a page slipped through the draperies behind the dais and handed a message to each justice. Hughes shifted restlessly in his chair. Van Devanter looked grim; others sat with their judicial mien unruffled.

The proposal set off a fire storm in the press. “This is the beginning of pure personal government,” wrote columnist Dorothy Thompson. “Do you want it? Do you like it?” Her home paper, the New York Herald Tribune, compared Roosevelt to Louis XIV—“L’état, c’est moi. ” If the plan passed, Henry Mencken predicted, “the court will become as ductile as a gob of chewing gum, changing shape from day to day and even from hour to hour as this or that wizard edges his way to the President’s ear.” Herbert Hoover took to the air: if a troop of “President’s judges” could be sent into the halls of justice to capture political power, he said, that “is not judicial process. That is force.” The nation faced a grave crisis, opined the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of New York. “These proposals would be a death blow to our constitutional democracy.”

But it was on the Hill—most immediately in the Senate—that the issue would be decided. “What a grand fight it is going to be!” Roosevelt had written a friend. Instead of a straight fight between Democrats and Republicans or between liberals and conservatives, however, the battle degenerated into guerrilla warfare. Progressives like Burt Wheeler and Hiram Johnson opposed the bill, as did important Democrats like Joseph O’Mahoney of Wyoming, Tom Connally of Texas, Bennett Clark of Missouri. La Follette and some other progressives spoke up strongly for the measure. A host of conservative or moderate Democrats from both North and South opposed the bill, as did the small band of Republicans, but the latter decided to step back and let the Democrats split over the measure. Among some southern lawmakers a deep racial fear stirred; seeing sinister motives in the Court plan, Josiah W. Bailey of North Carolina said the President was determined “to get the Negro vote and I do not have to tell you what this means.”

As the factional lines firmed up, about a third of the Senate was flatly opposed to the bill, another third favored it, leaving the rest with the crucial votes. Even some of the President’s supporters, however, had serious misgivings. Democratic loyalist chieftains like Majority Leader Joe Robinson were angered by the President’s secrecy in preparing the bill, by his refusal to work with his congressional leaders. They were also put off by FDR’s disingenuousness in presenting the Court plan not in the name of liberalism and constitutional reform but on the ground that the justices were behind in their work, and thus as a measure to produce greater efficiency and expedition in the courts.

Within a few weeks Roosevelt recognized this error. Abruptly shifting tactics, he decided to wage his campaign squarely on the basic issue of bringing the Court in line with the people. At a Democratic victory dinner early in March he seemed to be in the best of humor, but his voice was stern and commanding. He had given warning during the campaign, he observed, that “we had only just begun to fight. Did some people really believe we did not mean it? Well—I meant it, and you meant it.” Once again he spoke of “one-third of this Nation” as “ill-nourished, ill-clad, ill-housed.”

The President’s switch came too late. Already another master politician was organizing his own opposition and preparing the means of puncturing the President’s weakest argument.

That master politician was Charles Evans Hughes. Incensed by the “Court-packing” measure, eager in particular to rebut the President’s charge of inefficiency, the Chief Justice chafed under the Court’s historic self-denial of an overt political role. Roosevelt’s charge relating to the internal operations of the Court gave him just the opportunity he needed to intervene in the struggle. But how to be politically effective without appearing to be political? Brandeis, also indignant over the Court proposal, at this point suggested to Wheeler that the Montana senator ask Hughes to rebut the charge of inefficiency. Hughes not only was willing to do so but wished to make a personal appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, until Brandeis dissuaded him on the grounds that a letter would be enough.

It was. Hughes’s clear and convincing rebuttal of the inefficiency charge marked a turning point in the Court battle. Ironically the Chief Justice, that devotee of protocol, neglected to clear his letter with most of the justices, leaving a good deal of ill feeling on the part of Stone in particular. But no matter; Hughes’s colleagues were not likely to complain publicly and never did. After all, the Chief was warding off presidential invasion of their turf.

Far more momentous developments were now underway in the Court. Early in April, Roosevelt had still been optimistic about the Court bill’s prospects. Warned of the opposition’s determination both on the Hill and in the High Court, the President replied, “We’ll smoke ’em out. If delay helps them, we must press for an early vote.” But support was draining away, and then on April 12 came Hughes’s coup. In a packed, tense courtroom the Chief Justice read the long-anticipated holding of the Court on the Wagner Act. It was a vote to sustain the measure. In the 5-4 decision, Justice Owen J. Roberts was the swing man, voting with the pro-Wagner majority. He had heralded his shift earlier by reversing his vote of 1936 against state minimum-wage laws.

Why was Roberts switching? Frankfurter believed he knew why. “And now,” he wrote “Dear Frank,” the President, “with the shift by Roberts, even a blind man ought to see that the Court is in politics, and understand how the Constitution is ‘judicially’ construed. It is a deep object lesson—a lurid demonstration—of the relation of men to the ‘meaning’ of the Constitution.” Roberts’s behavior, the Harvard law professor added, had come on top of the Hughes letter. “That was a characteristic Hughes performance”—part and parcel of his “pretended withdrawal from considerations of policy,” even while he was shaping them. Later Frankfurter regretted that he had imputed political considerations to Roberts, but careful analysis has made clear that Roberts began switching shortly after Roosevelt received his mandate the previous November.

Hughes also appeared to be shifting away from some of his anti-New Deal positions, but like most politician-judges he had been flexible enough in those positions to make the jump plausible. In any event, his new stance was more important politically than judicially. He had consolidated a majority of the Court behind him; he had taken the heart out of the President’s argument about the Court’s inefficiency; he had upheld a measure dear to labor, whose interest in reform seemed to slacken after the Wagner law was upheld. And he had done all this without undue sacrifice of the Court’s dignity. The politician-judge had bested the politician-President.

Roosevelt was all bravado. “I have been chortling all morning,” he told reporters after the Court switch. “I have been having a perfectly grand time.” He compared the Herald Tribune’s enthusiastic hailing of the Wagner Act decision with its approval two years before of a famous “brief” by Liberty League lawyers “invalidating” that act.

“Well, I have been having more fun,” he went on, amid guffaws from reporters. “And I haven’t read the Washington Post, and I haven’t got the Chicago Tribune yet. Or the Boston Herald.…”

Still, the President must have sensed the change in the situation. He might have declared victory and quit the battle, but his personal prestige was now so involved that he carried on the fight. Prospects dipped even further when Van Devanter announced his intention to resign. More bad luck as well as a personal loss followed when Robinson, who had been carrying the burden of the exhausting Court fight, fell dead in his hotel room, a copy of the Congressional Record in his hand. When Robinson’s heart was ruptured, ruptured as well were the bonds of fellow senators’ personal loyalty to him—bonds on which the Majority Leader, who hoped to lake Van Devanter’s place, had depended to win the Court fight and thus renew FDR’s obligation to him. A week later Vice President Garner came in to see the President.

“How did you find the court situation, Jack?” FDR asked.

“Do you want it with the bark on or off, Cap’n?”

“The rough way,” Roosevelt said.

“All right. You are beat. You haven’t got the votes.”

Almost lost in the final smoke of battle was Roosevelt’s victory on the Wagner Act. The High Court’s switch could not have upheld a more vital New Deal measure. Like its predecessor, Section 7(a) of the NRA, the Wagner Act had helped stimulate workers’ self-organization in the nation’s industrial heartland, and had hence brought about a major redistribution of power. To be sure, the impact of the measure on unionization was limited by employers’ legal and physical obstruction, but the opposition of the bosses made it all the more central and valuable to the workers. On the floor of the Senate, Robert Wagner denounced the “organized and calculated and cold-blooded sit-down” against the law, which had come “not from the common people, but from a few great vested interests.” Make men free, “and they will be able to negotiate without fighting.”

Men and women were already making themselves free. During 1936 and early 1937 tens of thousands of workers took matters into their own hands in the big auto, steel, rubber, and other mass-production industries of the nation. While Lewis and other CIO leaders were busy separating themselves from the AFL and deciding on a grand strategy for organizing big industry, rank-and-file leaders were using a most marvelous weapon—the sit-down. Employed during the mid-thirties by coal miners throughout Europe and by textile workers in India, the sit-down was a ready instrument of spontaneous, militant action. In the United States during 1937, 400,000 workers conducted almost 400 sit-down strikes in more than a dozen industries, and in the process transformed—for a time at least—the industrial world they lived in.

It was a simple but daring device. Workers merely sat down amid their assembly lines—perhaps on the auto cushions they were supposed to install. If it was a “quickie” sit-down, workers would resume work after a few minutes, having sent their message to management. If it lasted days or weeks, workers’ friends and family sent in food and blankets. No need to set up picket lines; no need to worry about scabs. Management would hesitate to drive the strikers out for fear of bloodshed and damage to machinery. And sitting down in their own workplaces gave people an intoxicating sense of power. Some of them sang:

When they tie the can to a union man,

Sit down! Sit down!

When they give him the sack they’ll take him back,

Sit down! Sit down!

When the speed-up comes, just twiddle your thumbs,

Sit down! Sit down!

When the boss won’t talk don’t take a walk,

Sit down! Sit down!

But the very potency of the weapon brought risks. It required shop-floor leadership of rare coolness, steadfastness, and judgment as well as militancy. A long sit-down required a measure of community support, and it demanded solidarity among and between Irish and Polish and Italians, whites out of Appalachia, blacks from the South. Above all, the sit-down was a direct and flagrant attack on the property rights of owners, a challenge to conventional middle-class attitudes, and a temptation to police, prosecutors, and judges who could use anti-trespass and other laws against it.

Originally John Lewis & Co. had planned to concentrate first on Big Steel, on the theory that “as steel goes, so goes” unionization and much else. During early 1936, however, “quickie” shutdowns swept through the huge tire plants of Akron, and major sit-downs swept through the automobile industry during the following year. Encouraged by FDR’s big win over the GOP, and under some guidance from Lewis, workers concentrated on Fisher and other plants that supplied bodies and parts to General Motors plants.

Sometimes strikes broke out over an incident, as when an active unionist was fired for jumping over a conveyor line in his hurry to get to a toilet three hundred yards away. But there was a broader logic in auto workers taking the lead, and against GM. Auto workers were already famous for their youthfulness and bravado. Their shop-floor militancy easily shifted into tumultuous, old-fashioned syndicalism, tending toward confrontation and violence. The structure of work in the auto industry encouraged militance: skilled workers such as welders and metal polishers who stuck together in small groups, partly to protect their jobs; a dense system of shop stewards who stayed close to their men; and considerable direct dealing between stewards and foremen.

So General Motors was the target—and some target! By 1937 GM was the world’s biggest manufacturing corporation in number of employees, sales, and profits. It was not “big but colossal,” Fortune enthused, “the hugest technological organism of our technological age,” the “world’s most complicated and most profitable manufacturing enterprise.” Its Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac-La Salle divisions, along with its Yellow taxi and related operations, claimed 45 percent of the American market. Considered by some the best-managed corporation in the country, under the leadership of Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., William Knudsen, and big Du Pont stockholders, GM had achieved a fine balance between centralized policy-making and decentralized operations. GM was tough on its executives, its suppliers, and its union employees. All this contrasted with the auto workers: undisciplined, factionalized, poorly coordinated, infested with spies for GM. It was David versus Goliath, and of course David had to win.

“The most critical labor conflict of the nineteen thirties,” as Walter Galenson called it, erupted in Flint as 1937 dawned, and swept through Toledo, Detroit, and other cities. Flint set the pace. Organized in squads of fifteen under a captain, the sit-ins there carried on strike duties, conducted health and safety inspections, played cards and checkers, attended classes in labor history, did KP, ate meals brought in from outside, and settled down at night among their products, sometimes in cushy Fisher bodies. General Motors seemed muscle-bound. A friendly judge in Flint who ordered the strikers out of a Fisher plant was exposed as all too friendly—he owned several thousand shares of GM stock. When GM cut off food and heat, strikers drove off encroaching police with a barrage of pop bottles and brickbats.

This violence projected Governor Frank Murphy into the struggle. Murphy was a far cry from the compliant Republican politicos who so often had aided big corporations in their labor struggles. Proud of his Irish heritage, devout in his Roman Catholicism, gentle in manner, he was also a stalwart civil libertarian, a committed liberal Democrat, and so ambitious as to talk of becoming the first Catholic President of the United States. Murphy called out the National Guard, not to attack the strikers but to curb violence on both sides. He also tried to mediate the dispute; when this failed, negotiations shifted to Washington, where the newly reinaugurated President and Frances Perkins pressured Sloan and Lewis for settlement. Tension mounted as the auto workers occupied another huge GM plant, a judge unencumbered by GM stock issued a new injunction, and Murphy warned Lewis that the authorities would have to carry out the court order.

While the strikers sweated it out, Lewis loudly stuck to his demand for exclusive representation of his auto workers, Sloan refused for a time even to meet with the CIO leader, Murphy kept his troops at the ready but refused to send them in, and he and Lewis had a dramatic face-off in Michigan. Throughout, Roosevelt and Perkins sought to bring the two sides together and head off a violent showdown. At last, one cold fact prevailed: the strikers had cut GM’s auto production to a driblet. Quite suddenly, GM capitulated, granting recognition to the auto workers as bargaining agent for “those employees of the Corporation who are members of the Union,” and pledging not to bargain with any other union for six months. Soon strikers were leaving the plants singing “Solidarity Forever.” They knew that they had won the battle. Soon Chrysler—but not Ford—followed GM.

As GM goes, so goes steel—at least Big Steel. Eager to crack U.S. Steel, inheritor of Carnegie’s policy of low wages and Frick’s anti-unionism, Lewis had established the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, CIO, under his longtime protégé and lieutenant Philip Murray. A warm and compassionate man who, as Murray Kempton wrote, touched “the love and not the fears of men,” Murray had a steely determination easily aroused to anger when his fundamental faith in unionism and industrial democracy was challenged. Working closely with ethnic and black leaders, claiming Roosevelt’s blessing with the message “The President Wants You to Join the Union” (he didn’t know whether they were referring to him or to President Lewis, FDR told reporters archly), Murray exploited above all the presence of a multitude of company unions throughout U.S. Steel. He would turn these “kept unions” on their heads by co-opting rebels in restless company unions and converting them into rank-and-file leaders under his own direction.

By January 1937 the SWOC claimed over 100,000 members, U.S. Steel was witnessing sit-down strikes spreading through other mass-production industries, and its chief, Myron Taylor, was reassessing his company’s whole labor strategy. His chance encounter with Lewis in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel led to a series of secret negotiations in the capital and an agreement that startled the nation. In what has been called the most important single document in the history of the American labor movement, the corporation agreed to bargain with SWOC (though only for the workers it represented), gave a 10 percent wage boost across the board, and granted the forty-hour week with time and a half for overtime. A million Carnegie and Frick workers, someone observed, might have stirred in their early graves.

Little Steel was a far different story. Led by the redoubtable Tom Girdler of Republic Steel, the heads of the smaller, independent companies not only were fiercely determined to resist unionization but had a strategy of resistance—the “Mohawk Valley formula.” Brand the union leaders as extremists, the formula prescribed. Mobilize the community by threatening to shut down the plant. Build up an anti-union armed force of police, vigilantes, and special deputies. Set up a puppet association of “loyal” employees to stage a conspicuous back-to-work movement. Have a citizens’ committee demand reopening of the plant. Resume operations to any extent possible, announce that the plant is in full operation, and denounce the remaining dissidents as thwarters of the sacred right to work.

Given such a strategy of resistance, and given a militant union flushed with victories over Big Steel, clashes and riots were inevitable. They culminated in South Chicago on Memorial Day 1937, when marchers seeking to mass-picket Republic Steel confronted police marshaled two blocks from the gate. Someone threw a tree limb at the police, a cop fired his revolver into the air, some in the crowd threw rocks—and then the police fired point-blank into the massed men, women, and children, killing ten and wounding at least eighty. Three policemen were hospitalized. By the summer of 1937 Bethlehem, Republic, and other Little Steel companies were still holding out against the SWOC. The Mohawk Valley formula was working.

Congress-Purging: The Broken Spell

Behind the great waves of unionization in auto and steel were not only pent-up demands and militant leaders but a vast expansion of production in the mid-thirties. As in the past, mass industrialization buoyed mass organization, as though capitalism and unionism American style required each other. As sales of passenger cars almost doubled from 1933 and 1934 to 1936 and 1937, the number of auto production workers rose by about a half from 1933 to 1937. Iron and steel output doubled in the same period, employment there also rising by about a half. But what rose in the great waves would drop in the troughs. In midsummer 1937 tremors of recession began spreading through the economy. The stock market slid and then a jarring series of sell orders tumbled prices to new lows.

Suddenly it seemed like 1929 all over again. People talked of “Black Tuesday”—October 19, 1937—when prices cascaded, in Henry Morgenthau’s words, “amid an hysteria resembling a mob in a theater fire.” And for a time the Roosevelt Administration reacted much in the manner of the Hoover government eight years before. The crash looked to Berle “like 1903—a rich man’s panic.” Her statisticians expected an early business upturn, Secretary Perkins reported. The President, suspecting that big business was trying to drive the market down to hurt the Administration, was cautiously hopeful. He did not yet realize that it was his own sharp cutback in federal spending that, far more than any business action, had precipitated the slump. A flurry of White House meetings resulted in little action. Then began a series of sickening drops that continued through the fall and winter as the “Roosevelt recession” deepened, with unemployment, which had been cut from 12.8 million in 1933 to 7.7 million in 1937, rising to 10.4 million in 1938.

“Everything will work out all right if we just sit tight and keep quiet,” the President had told his cabinet three weeks before Black Tuesday. He asked Commerce Secretary Roper to stop “giving out so many Hooverish statements.” But sitting tight worked no better for FDR than it had for Hoover. His cabinet members brought him more bad news. “We are headed right into another depression,” Morgenthau told him. “The question is, Mr. President—what are we going to do about it?”

The President did not know what to do about it. Berle found him “ill, tired and obviously confused.” Morgenthau found him worried about fascism abroad and the possibility that it would come to America in the form of big businessmen organizing to put their own man into the White House. And at a cabinet meeting early in November, FDR betrayed his irritation and anxiety.

“Of course, I am glad to hear from the various members of the Cabinet their sad story of how bad business conditions are,” Roosevelt began cuttingly, as Morgenthau recalled in his diary. “Last night when I went to bed, alongside of my bed was the darnedest letter you ever saw from Henry.” The President’s anger was rising.

“I am sick and tired of being told by the Cabinet, by Henry and by everybody else for the last two weeks what’s the matter with the country and nobody suggests what I should do.”

Morgenthau spoke up. “You can do something about public utilities. You can do something about the railroads. You could do something about housing. Above all, you must do something to reassure business.”

“You want me to turn on the old record.”

What business wanted to know, the secretary said, was “Are we headed toward state Socialism or are we going to continue on a capitalistic basis?”

“I have told them that again and again.”

“All right, Mr. President, tell them for the fifteenth time. That’s what they want to know.”

Wallace, for his part, thought the President should do something about labor, while Farley urged him to tell the country that he was going to reduce the cost of government.

“All right, Jim; I will turn on the old record.”

More desperately than ever the President reached out for advice, but the advice he received was still sharply conflicting. Morgenthau used the slump to urge the President almost daily to retrench even further and balance the budget. But while he and Farley wanted to conciliate business, Ickes, Perkins, and sometimes Wallace sought an expansion of New Deal social programs. Staff people were even more divided. Many in the Treasury backed Morgenthau, but throughout the Administration economists of Keynesian persuasion were pointing to the recession as evidence that the Administration had spent too little, not too much. The most powerful advocates of spending were Marriner Eccles at the Federal Reserve and Harry Hopkins, but Hopkins was ill during the critical days. A brilliant assortment of economists and lawyers scattered through the government—Herman Oliphant in Treasury, Mordecai Ezekiel in Agriculture, Lauchlin Currie under Eccles, Leon Henderson under Hopkins—fought their daily battles with memos and mimeograph machines.

The opposition was busy too. Early in December the National Association of Manufacturers, meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York, adopted resolutions that to New Dealers indicated big business had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Manufacturing was “shackled by restrictive legislation, burdened with excessive taxes, continually in doubt as to the nature and permanency of government policies, crippled by labor difficulties and handicapped by inability to secure funds from investors.” When factories prospered, America prospered. The recommendations were no fresher than the plaints: Reduce taxes on business. Stop laws that reduced incentive to invest funds. Repeal laws that incited labor controversies. Produce more wealth rather than redistribute it. Above all, bolster “business confidence.”

It was a dismal December, with Roosevelt still beset and uncertain, little clusters of New Dealers meeting secretly for feverish discussion, and the recession worsening. Differences over solutions remained acute in both cabinet and staffs. The old conflict between central planners and trustbusters broke out again. Keynesians pressed for much larger spending, but they were divided over proposals for modest pump priming, heavy compensatory spending, and an attack on “secular stagnation” that would call for massive controls, planning, and long-run spending. Morgenthau stuck to his budget-balancing pitch like a man obsessed. Some advisers wanted a comprehensive approach; others would concentrate on rejuvenating specific industries, such as railroads and housing.

Amidst it all the President fretted and pondered. Never had people seen him reach out so far for advice and counsel. During early 1938 businessmen streamed into the White House on the President’s invitation to press their ideas on him. The Administration sponsored in Washington a conference of small businessmen that became so turbulent that police had to be called. The Business Advisory Council, through its spokesman, Averell Harriman, asked the President to provide leadership around which they could rally. A hundred thousand Detroiters turned out for a relief demonstration; three thousand youth delegates convened in Washington to demand a “youth act” that would provide part-time jobs.

“There is in Chicago,” Grace Abbott wrote Molly Dewson at the Democratic National Committee, “and in a very large part of the country, more suffering than there was in 1933 when the President came into office. It is a common sight to see children salvaging food from garbage cans.”

Bitterly Roosevelt attacked his critics who came up with no constructive proposals of their own. At a press conference with editors of trade papers he complained of people whose advice was in the form of “Yes, but—.” “They will say, ‘Oh, yes, we are in favor of flood control, but we do not like this way of doing it.’ Or, ‘We do not like this party doing it, or this President doing it.’” They were all for this or that but not if it cost money.

It was a set of conditions, not a theoretical breakthrough, that finally moved the President out of his faineancy. In March the stock market’s halting decline suddenly turned into a panicky drop; unemployment and relief rolls were still growing. The economic decline since September had become the sharpest the nation had ever known. And a critical set of congressional elections would be coming in November. On a train trip back from Georgia in the spring Roosevelt looked out the window at the nondescript men and women who—five years after his inauguration—were still waiting for him along the track to wave and smile. He turned to an aide. “They understand what we’re trying to do.” He knew that now he must act for them.

Once FDR decided, there was no looking back. In mid-April 1938 he asked Congress for a three-billion-dollar spending bill. Over a billion dollars would go to the WPA; smaller sums would go to the CCC, the National Youth Administration, and the Farm Security Administration. He did not forsake the Brandeisians; a bit later he agreed with congressional leaders on a full-scale investigation of concentrated economic power through what would become the Temporary National Economic Committee. An anguished Morgenthau threatened to resign when he saw his last chance at budget-balancing go glimmering. His boss was tough, warning him that he would go down through history as having quit under fire. Morgenthau stayed, reflecting that the ties that bound him and the President together transcended even this issue.

In his message to Congress the President stressed that the situation called for an act of collective will by the nation’s leadership, under the “discipline of democracy.” In his fireside chat he repeated this point. “Our capacity is limited only by our ability to work together. What is needed is the will.” Obviously the President had summoned that will, after being almost immobilized by the shock of the steep and sudden slump. Once again he might mobilize the will of the people. But could he summon the political leadership and followership of the nation?

The answer lay in a tangle of leadership elements—the President’s own morale and determination, the attitudes of key members of Congress who were both his followers and yet leaders in their own right—and in the nation’s voters, who would exert their own leadership in the elections of 1938 and 1940. The answer lay also in the linkages between President and people—most notably in the organized interests of the nation and in the political parties. And by the summer of 1938 all these elements lay in a state of discord and disarray.

Angered by opposition in Congress, embittered by the savage attacks of business leaders, frustrated by the intractability of the economic situation, Roosevelt was more determined than ever to protect the New Deal from conservative counterattacks and if possible to extend it. While he was as willing as ever to horse-trade with Congress, he was now taking the most militant and radical stance of his entire public career; more than ever before, he would use the stratagems of the fox but only to augment the power of the lion. Repeatedly during 1937 and early 1938 he tried to rally his forces in Congress and country.

Roosevelt’s inept handling of the Court bill, and above all his defeat on the issue, had made him seem vulnerable within a few months of his great mandate of 1936. While many members of Congress had sympathized with FDR’s objectives, in the light of the reactionary Supreme Court decisions of 1935 and 1936, they had been appalled by his methods. Above all, in this sixth year of the New Deal, and after sixteen months of the Court fight and other grueling conflicts, they were tired of “must bills,” tired of crises, tired of being called “rubber-stamp yes-men,” tired of bustling, pushing young zealots from the White House. Their attitudes could be summed up in the anguished phone call of one congressman to the White House in April 1938: “For God’s sake, don’t send us any more controversial legislation!” An index to the congressional mind of 1937-38 was the fate of the President’s bill to reorganize the executive branch.

On the face of it, no measure could have seemed less controversial than the reorganization bill. For years Presidents from both parties, with the help of business and other management experts, had been trying to make the executive establishment more responsible, accountable, effective, and efficient, mainly through strengthening the President’s executive controls. But FDR was unlucky—or maladroit—enough to bring in the reorganization bill about the same time as the Court proposal. Tainted by this association, the bill languished in 1937.

Next year the storm broke out in full fury. In this time of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, opponents dubbed the proposal the “dictator bill.” Still, White House forces were holding their own when an unlucky adjournment over the weekend enabled Father Coughlin, Frank Gannett’s National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, Hearst’s newspapers, and even President Green of the AFL to mobilize opposition against the bill. A blizzard of telegrams—300,000 by some counts—hit Congress on Monday morning. Congressmen ran for cover.

The President issued an extraordinary statement:

“I have no inclination to be a dictator.

“I have none of the qualifications which would make me a successful dictator.

“I have too much historical background and too much knowledge of existing dictatorships to make me desire any form of dictatorship for a democracy like the United States of America.”

Rarely had Roosevelt been forced so much on the defensive. And it was not enough. Despite his willingness also to accept some weakening changes in the measure, the House recommitted the bill by a 204-196 vote. Six Progressives, two Farmer-Laborites, and 108 Democrats voted against the Administration.

The journey of wages-and-hours legislation through legislative obstacles was, like the course of the reorganization bill, a clear reflection of the congressional mind. By the mid-thirties the United States was far behind other industrialized nations in wages-and-hours standards. NRA codes, during their brief existence, had sought to set decent wages for a shorter workweek. The wages-and-hours bill the Administration had brought into Congress in 1937 after the death of the NRA was ground to pieces between the labor-liberal bloc and the southern bloc. The main obstacle was the House Rules Committee, in which two conservative southern Democrats held the balance of power, Howard W. Smith of Virginia and Edward E. Cox of Georgia. When the bill was held over to the 1938 session, once again the Rules Committee balked. A discharge petition was necessary to pry the bill out of Smith’s and Cox’s hands.

Afraid that too few representatives would sign the petition, the Administration resorted to a typical Rooseveltian stratagem. Senator Claude Pepper, a staunch FDR supporter, was involved in a slam-bang race for renomination in Florida. The White House had reason to believe that he would win big. Since Pepper was an open and stalwart backer of the wage-hour bill, White House tacticians—and especially the Tactician-in-Chief—calculated that if the Florida congressman could be induced to speak vigorously for it, his win would be interpreted as a southern endorsement of the bill. As an inducement to Pepper, the White House turned a $10,000 fund over to his campaign. The stratagem worked. After Pepper’s decisive victory so many representatives crowded around to sign the petition in the well of the House that proceedings were delayed. Liberated from Rules, the bill passed the House by a heavy vote. Senators threatened to filibuster it to death, but after further compromises the bill finally became law in June.

“That’s that,” said Roosevelt as he signed the measure. It was a sigh of relief over the outcome, of disappointment over the weakening compromises—and perhaps of dismay over the hurdles in the legislative process. Part of the problem lay with the President himself, for the White House had failed to establish close relationships with rank-and-file Democrats in the lower chamber. When Pittsburgh Democratic boss David Lawrence wanted to bring in three new Democratic congressmen to meet the President early in 1937, FDR put him off, finally allotted three minutes, and then postponed even that appointment. “There is a group of aggressive progressive Democrats who have stuck by you through thick and thin,” Representative Kent Keller wrote the President the next year, “… and I do not believe that you have ever called in a single one of this group” to consult about policy.

As Washington returned more and more to “politics as usual” in 1937 and 1938 after the glory days of the early New Deal, organized interest groups appeared to play a more dominant role. For some bills, indeed, the imprimatur of pressure-group leaders was now as important as the sponsorship of the White House. Low-paid workers had had insufficient political strength to smooth passage of the wage-hour bill, while the leadership of the AFL retained much of its old hostility toward minimum-wage laws. The reorganization bill had had tough going because there was only thin, generalized public support for a streamlined executive branch. For spending programs, however, Congress gave many millions more to FDR than he had requested in his message of April 1938. Farm programs were continued without undue political controversy or delay. Earlier programs had helped create a huge constituency of the needy expecting and demanding such programs.

Organized and organizing workers and farmers had helped build the New Deal, which in its turn had invigorated the labor and farm movements and organizations. Thereupon the groups ran ahead of the New Deal, pressing for recognition and rewards that the Roosevelt Administration would not or could not grant. John L. Lewis’s Committee for Industrial Organization, more hostile than ever to the AFL, was one of the most militant of these groups. Once dependent on Roosevelt’s political and psychological patronage, and on legislation such as the Wagner Act, the CIO was becoming more independent of the Administration and willing to put pressure on it. And Lewis, angry over “broken promises,” was infuriated by FDR’s statement during the sit-down strikes: “A plague on both your houses.”

With his pug face wearing its customary scowl, the CIO leader wanted a payoff for his help to FDR in 1936. It was not forthcoming, as Roosevelt played his own brand of group politics. But Lewis could play his too. The transformation of the original CIO into the Congress of Industrial Organizations late in 1938, with Lewis as president and Murray and Hillman as vice presidents, signified not only a wider separation from the AFL but the determination of the CIO to follow its own economic and political course—with or without Roosevelt’s patronage.

Crucial in the mix of leadership factors was FDR’s own popularity. The President in 1938 was losing public favor, as measured by polls, not only among upper-income voters but even more among middle- and lower-income groups. In fact, the decline was not as steep as it seemed, and even at the lowest point of his popularity in 1938 he commanded the support of a bare majority of the people. But in the flush days of the early New Deal he had given the impression of much greater popularity. Public attitudes were also highly ambivalent. The vast majority—even of executives and professional people—approved of him personally, or at least “liked his personality,” as the Fortune pollsters phrased it. Newspaper reports squared with the poll results. Support was much lower for his “methods,” his advisers and associates, and some of his policies. Opinion, as the polls registered it, was significantly, but not sharply, skewed by income; of five major economic groups—blacks, poor, lower-middle, upper-middle, and high-income—all but the first two opposed the President’s methods. Running through the opposition was a streak of fear of FDR’s power and his use of it.

A determined and even vengeful President, a New Deal still not fully dealt, a Congress moving toward all-out resistance to the Administration, group interests fired with both hope and disillusion, congressional elections nearing in the fall of 1938—the tangle of leadership elements had become a gridlock of political forces. How unlock it? At some point in the spring of 1938 the President came to a drastic decision—it was high time for a party showdown, time for a purge of anti-New Deal Democrats in Congress. That Roosevelt could come to this decision was the true measure of both the intensity of his feeling and the urgency of his situation. He did not enjoy personal confrontations. He would rather manipulate his adversaries, or maneuver around them, than attack head-on.

That Roosevelt would seek a solution within the Democratic party was another measure of his concern. If the Democracy appeared to be a part of the problem rather than a solution to it, the President had to share the blame for this. For some years he had variously used, not used, and abused the Democracy as it served his electoral interests—by taking little leadership in developing grass-roots organizations, by flirting with laborite third parties in New York and a few other states and with the La Follette Progressives in Wisconsin, by building up and exploiting his personal leadership and personalismo rather than shaping and utilizing collective party leadership. In suddenly assuming active generalship of the party, moreover, the President was invading political turf far better defended than he may have realized.

Doubtless he had observed the experience of the GOP. In many ways— and often unnoticed by the national press—the Conservatives who dominated the Republican party had been trying “soft purges” of GOP liberals, just as New Dealers had been considering ways and means of overcoming conservatives in the Democracy. Right-wing Democrats and Republicans had toyed with the idea of coalition, just as New Deal Democrats and liberal Republicans had done. FDR’s purge effort was not new—but it was bigger, more intensive, more dramatic.

It was more visible and open, because the President wanted it that way. Firing the opening salvo in a fireside chat in June 1938, he lashed out at “Copperheads”—reviving the term for pro-peace Democrats of the Civil War—who in the great fight for liberalism wanted “peace at any price,” and he defined the issue in 1938 as between liberals who saw that new conditions called for new remedies and conservatives who believed that individual initiative and private philanthropy would solve the nation’s problems. As President of the United States, he said disingenuously, he was not himself taking part in primaries or asking people to vote Democratic. But—

“As the head of the Democratic party … charged with the responsibility of the definitely liberal declaration of principles set forth in the 1936 Democratic platform,” he had every right to speak out in clear instances when liberal and conservative Democrats were opposing each other.

The drive for party realignment, James Patterson noted later, was at last underway. But the President was not mainly thinking in grand strategic terms. That was not his interest at the moment. He simply wanted to rid Congress of men who were obstructing the New Deal. And he would invade southern and other states and meet his foes on their own political ground.

The conflict that followed in the Democratic party had all the intensity of fratricidal strife, along with a few touches of comic opera. A host of Democratic politicians had to calculate whether to stick with the President or break with him or somehow hide, whether to work with Republicans in an ad hoc coalition or rely on their own party, how to take some credit for the more popular elements of the New Deal without being labeled yes-men for the White House.

Roosevelt too had to calculate just how he would grant recognition or withhold it and what kinds of blessings he would bestow. The President was put to the test in Kentucky, where he was strongly backing his loyal Senate Majority Leader, Alben Barkley, over the ebullient governor of the state, A. B. “Happy” Chandler. Greeting the presidential train, Happy deftly slid into the presidential limousine to take his bows too, while Barkley smoldered and Roosevelt maintained his usual sang-froid. As the “purge train” continued on its way, the President gave his apostolic benediction to good friends like Congressmen Lyndon Johnson and Maury Maverick in Texas, delicately criticized Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina for allegedly saying that a family could live on fifty cents a day, and later, in Maryland, stumped for two days against the urbane Senator Millard Tydings.

The hardest confrontation for Roosevelt came in Georgia, his “adopted state,” where the venerable Senator Walter George was fighting off a challenge from Lawrence Camp, a young attorney hand-picked by the Administration. While George sat impassively on the platform a few feet away, the President addressed a throng of 50,000 persons at Barnesville:

“Let me make it clear,” he said, that the senator “is, and I hope always will be, my personal friend. He is beyond question, beyond any possible question, a gentleman and a scholar.” But a candidate had to answer two questions, FDR went on. “First, has the record of the candidate shown, while differing perhaps in details, a constant active fighting attitude in favor of the broad objectives of the party and of the Government as they are constituted today; and secondly, does the candidate really, in his heart, deep down in his heart, believe in those objectives?” George, he asserted, could not answer yes.

“Mr. President,” said the senator when Roosevelt finished, “I want you to know that I accept the challenge.”

“Let’s always be friends,” Roosevelt replied smilingly.

The purge had provoked the nation’s press. Editors and columnists condemned Roosevelt’s “meddling” in “local” elections. Cartoonists pictured him as a donkey rider, a pants kicker, a big-game hunter. A White House cabal was sounding the death knell of representative government, former brain truster Raymond Moley wrote in Newsweek. Liberals criticized the President for conducting the purge in an improvised, unplanned way. Feeling was most intense within the Democracy. Some party leaders evaded the issue: Farley was in Alaska part of the time, and Garner, increasingly turned off by the New Deal, would not meet the President in Texas. Southern conservatives were the most bitter; to them the purge was an assault on the southern way of life as well as on their own power in the party. The southern people, said Senator Glass, “may wake up too late to find that the negrophiles who are running the Democratic Party now will soon precipitate another Reconstruction period for us.”

With their votes southern whites gave their verdict: the South would remain unreconstructed. George, Smith, and Tydings, FDR’s chief targets, all won decisively. Maverick and other FDR supporters—though not Lyndon Johnson—lost in Texas. While Barkley beat Chandler in Kentucky, several anti-New Dealers or semi-New Dealers won in northern states. FDR had one small but pleasing consolation prize. His friends in New York had used both American Labor party support and Democratic bosses to replace John O’Connor, FDR’s foe on the Rules Committee, with James H. Fay, a war veteran with impeccable Irish antecedents. Still, the purge had been a “bust,” as Farley had predicted. Said the President glumly, “It takes a long, long time to bring the past up to the present.”

But the nadir of FDR’s fortunes was yet to come. In the fall congressional elections the Republicans almost doubled their strength in the House and added eight senators to their small band in the upper chamber. While the liberal bloc in the House was halved, the Republicans lost not a single seat. Some promising Republicans with fresh appeal won in statewide elections as well: Leverett Saltonstall in Massachusetts, Robert A. Taft in Ohio, John Bricker in Ohio, Harold Stassen in Minnesota, while the young Tom Dewey almost overcame the redoubtable Herbert Lehman for governor of New York. A trio of progressive governors failed of reelection: Frank Murphy in Michigan, Philip La Follette in Wisconsin, Elmer Benson in Minnesota.

The President sought to play down the results. In the time-honored way of Presidents explaining midterm election setbacks, he contended that the trouble lay in local scandals and squabbles, labor strikes, poor candidates. And after all, his party still held big majorities in the House and Senate. But one fact could not be blinked: Franklin D. Roosevelt had suffered his first major electoral defeat in eighteen years.

FDR would willingly defy conservatives but not constituents. If it was a mark of his courage that he would press his fight for liberalism following his Court-packing and other legislative defeats and the “Roosevelt recession,” it was a mark of his caution that he took a much more moderate posture after the congressional and state election returns of 1938. He told the new Congress in January 1939 that “having passed the period of internal conflict in the launching of our program of social reform,” he and they must now “preserve our reforms.” Not that he would surrender the New Deal ship. He warned the Democracy, in a Jackson Day dinner speech, against being the “Democratic Tweedledum” to a “Republican Tweedledee.” And he made a spate of major appointments guaranteed to raise conservative hackles: Hopkins to follow Roper as Secretary of Commerce, the now unemployed Frank Murphy to take Cummings’s place as Attorney General, Frankfurter to replace Cardozo in Holmes’s old seat on the Supreme Court, William O. Douglas to succeed Brandeis on the high bench.

But if Roosevelt would not retreat, he would not advance. He reverted once again to his old economic orthodoxy, refusing to equalize old-age benefits between rich and poor states by raising the federal contribution to Social Security. “Not one nickel more,” he said. “Not one solitary nickel. Once you get off the 50-50 matching basis the sky’s the limit.” He refused to support Wagner’s proposed national health program embracing medical insurance and funds for child and maternity care, public health services, and hospital construction. He complained to Morgenthau, according to the secretary, that he was “sick and tired of having a lot of long-haired people around here who want a billion dollars for schools, a billion dollars for public health.”

The President now seemed almost rueful about his public image. “You undergraduates who see me for the first time,” he told a delighted student audience at Chapel Hill, “have read … that I am, at the very least, an ogre—a consorter with Communists, a destroyer of the rich, a breaker of our ancient traditions.” They had heard, he went on amid laughter, that he had invented the economic royalist, was about to plunge the nation into both war and bankruptcy, and “breakfasted every morning on a dish of ‘grilled millionaire.’

“Actually I am an exceedingly mild mannered person—a practitioner of peace, both domestic and foreign, a believer in the capitalistic system, and for my breakfast a devotee of scrambled eggs.”

Even if the President had wished to expand the New Deal, Congress would have stopped him. The election results had bolstered southern committee chairmen as the power elite on Capitol Hill. They not only held the balance of power between Republicans and New Deal Democrats but used the ancient weapons of congressional attack on presidential leadership. The House Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by Texan Martin Dies, renewed its jabs at Ickes, Hopkins, Perkins, and other officials for their “softness on communists.” Another committee under Howard W. Smith exposed reds and irregularities in the National Labor Relations Board. A conservative coalition of southern Democrats attacked the President’s crucial appointing power, both by enforcing “senatorial courtesy” against top appointments and by restricting the political activities of lower-echelon federal employees. Even more, Congress slashed funds for some New Deal agencies, and especially for administrative functions that in the long run might critically influence the impact of programs—planning, research, economic analysis, information, staffing.

The New Deal lived on, however, in substance and style—and no one personified it more arrestingly than Eleanor Roosevelt. It was in these waning days of the domestic New Deal that she moved to the fore as a leader extraordinarily sensitive to needs her husband’s program had not fully met. It was not surprising that she would work for women’s rights, or concern herself with dire problems of housing, health, and poverty in field and factory, or devote an enormous amount of time to the plight of the nation’s young people, several million of whom lacked jobs.

But the First Lady advanced as well into the nation’s most sensitive political and social battlefield—the needs and rights of black Americans. She established close working relationships with black leaders like Mary McLeod Bethune and Walter White while her husband remained cautious. She strongly supported an antilynching bill, in contrast to her husband, who deplored the horrifying lynchings in the South but dared not recommend legislation for fear of alienating southern congressional leaders who could kill or mutilate his other measures.

Eleanor Roosevelt not only had to cope with her husband’s caution, with aides close to Roosevelt who fretted over the pressure that black leaders put on their boss, with attacks on her in Congress, but had to walk a delicate line between respect for her husband’s political situation and her own right to speak and act for herself. Even more, she had to cope with herself—with her own class and cultural origins, with the influence on her of a great-aunt who had had slaves as personal servants, and with her own tendency to use words like “darky” and “pickaninny.” She learned as she led, and led as she learned.

Her symbolic role came to a magnificent climax in the spring of 1939 when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to permit Marian Anderson to sing in Constitution Hall. The First Lady promptly resigned her membership in the DAR and set about, with the enthusiastic help of Ickes and the permission of the President, to help make arrangements for the contralto to sing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Seventy-five thousand people mustered at the base of the memorial and along the Mall, a setting that Ickes called “unique, majestic, and impressive.” Marian Anderson began her performance with “America,” a paean to liberty. She ended it with “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” an ode to justice and a reminder of inequality.

Deadlock at the Center

Why did you lose? The Nation had asked the three progressive governors who failed of reelection in 1938, and the answers were revealing. They saw their defeats as part of a national reaction against the New Deal. People believed that government somehow “had muffed the ball,” said La Follette, that it “had tried to do the right thing, but that in spite of all our relief spending, pump-priming, and social legislation we were back where we started from—in the midst of depression.” Benson of Minnesota and Murphy of Michigan also saw the Roosevelt recession—though they did not call it that—as the underlying problem, especially in the farm areas of their states. La Follette quoted an agricultural economist on the big Republican gains among farmers: “I guess you can’t beat the price of cheese.”

Some New Dealers decided by the late thirties that the Administration had not only mismanaged the economy but mismanaged the New Deal itself. FDR’s lieutenants came in for a full share of blame. The peppery, cantankerous Ickes caused endless friction as he fought with all comers— Johnson, Morgenthau, Perkins, Hopkins, and especially Wallace. Other rivalries heating up in the Administration were fair game for Washington reporters. The President frowned on these conflicts, but his administrative methods seemed to encourage them; he even appeared to enjoy pitting bureaucrat against bureaucrat. He delegated power so loosely that agency chiefs found themselves entangled in crisscrossed lines of authority. That New Deal programs were uncoordinated and improvised also made for friction. And the President was often an enigmatic boss.

“You are a wonderful person but you are one of the most difficult men to work with that I have ever known,” Ickes blurted out to FDR one day, according to his diary.

“Because I get too hard at times?” Roosevelt asked.

“No, you never get too hard but you won’t talk frankly even with people who are loyal to you and of whose loyalty you are fully convinced. You keep your cards close up against your belly.”

Some have found method in FDR’s administrative madness. His technique of fuzzy delegation, according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “often provided a testing of initiative, competence and imagination which produced far better results than by playing sale by the book.” By flouting the administrative rule of “making a mesh of things,” even at the risk of making a mess of them, the President avoided hardened arteries of structure and control. And as usual he was willing to take on the burden of salving the aches and lacerations that resulted from the administrative infighting.

Yet Roosevelt himself had serious qualms about this way of running things. Since his years in the Navy Department he had maintained a strong interest in executive leadership, planning, and management. He set up an Executive Council of cabinet officers in 1933 and later a National Emergency Council of wider membership; these dwindled into mere clearinghouses of information. By 1936 the President was so troubled by the organizational confusion and policy disorder of the New Deal that he was surprised the Republicans did not make it a crucial issue in the campaign. Realizing that “the President needs help,” he established the Committee on Administrative Management, which developed many of the proposals that made up his ill-fated reorganization proposal of 1937. One of the committee’s few recommendations that survived the legislative gantlet was its proposal that the President be given six assistants with “a passion for anonymity.”

If the President wanted better management, why did he tolerate and even encourage tangled lines of organization, duplication of effort, and administrative cross-purposes in the executive branch? Partly because he had no choice. He utterly lacked the personnel, machinery, and power for centralized supervision and management. For six years the President’s staff consisted of a press aide, an executive assistant, a bevy of devoted secretaries, one or two speech writers, a legal counsel, and a handful of advisers from outside the White House. To hold the scattered strings of administrative control in his own hands, to get his instructions carried out, to keep subordinates from ganging up on him, even to find out what was going on in the lower echelons, he had his lieutenants come to him, be dependent on him, confide in him, let him pass out rewards and penalties. Hence the Chief Executive became also Chief Disorganizer and Chief Manipulator.

Even more, the disarray of presidential management and planning was part of the peculiar American system of checks and balances in the structure of the federal government and indeed in the whole federal-state-local pyramid of government. There was nothing FDR could do about this; the Framers of the Constitution had bequeathed it all, and the essential structure had not altered in a century and a half. Roosevelt had to work with all the blockages, slowdowns, veto traps, and compromises built into a system deliberately fashioned to thwart rapid governmental response to popular majorities and to thwart consistent and continuous follow-through on policy and program.

The crucial test for Roosevelt was his capacity to wring from the system as much of a New Deal program as was possible, and he met this test magnificently. Day after day, he patiently, cunningly, even cynically, pulled strings, played on men’s ambitions, exploited their vanities, applied soothing syrup—inspired them, manipulated them, raised them up, put them off, and eased them away when they were no longer useful to him.

He did all this so well, indeed, that he may never have recognized how much the system eroded the substance and impact of his New Deal programs. Even more, he never truly confronted the system that in the end would defeat him. All his personal politicking, coaxing, and manipulating could not pack the Supreme Court or purge Congress or reorganize the executive branch, but he was successful enough in his daily maneuvering and dealing to achieve at least half-victories on many policies. Indeed, these partial victories may have helped the President to misconceive the constitutional system of delay and deadlock that he faced. In calling for Court reform he had described President, Congress, and judiciary as three workhorses proceeding in harness, and he had rebuked the Supreme Court for not doing its part on the team. But the Framers had not set up the federal government to be a team—quite the opposite.

The problem was that the President faced more than groups of legislators and judges and bureaucrats who happened to differ with him. He confronted men and women who were leaders of institutions that had different constitutional foundations, traditions, career patterns, political constituencies, and ideological or policy outlooks than the President’s. Hence to attack individuals in these institutions was not only to trigger opposition from their friends and followers but to activate the full powers of the institutions themselves. To challenge a congressional committee chairman like Senator George meant taking on the seniority system and all that went with it. To seek to add members to the Supreme Court was to challenge the whole judicial system. To curb the independence of an agency like the Army Corps of Engineers or the Federal Reserve Board was to activate a host of client interests backing such agencies. Inevitably New Deal programs were morselized in the ensuing clashes.

In olden times a President in this predicament might have used his leadership of the governmental and party team to put through party programs over opposition in Congress, state governments, and even the judiciary. This choice was not open to FDR by the late 1930s, for he had not been a strong party leader and his party was not unified philosophically or organizationally. The Democratic party by the mid-nineteenth century had lost much of its egalitarian spirit of Jeffersonian days and had become an alliance of northern commercial and southern agrarian interests and a vehicle of compromise over slavery. For a century, beginning with Martin Van Buren and continuing through FDR, the party had honored a largely unspoken bargain: Northerners would be granted the presidential nomination, Southerners would maintain balance-of-power control in Congress. And this bargain embraced an even less spoken one: northern Democrats would not threaten white hegemony in the South in a quest for black votes. Woodrow Wilson, of southern background, had scrupulously lived up to this bargain, as had FDR less scrupulously in expressing sympathy for the plight of blacks but shunning civil rights legislation.

The Democracy was weakened and compromised in other ways as well. The adoption of the primary system and the other middle-class, “good government,” and antiparty reforms in the early years of this century had robbed the party leadership of its most potent tool—control over nominations. Many city and other local elections had become nonpartisan, at least in form, and party patronage had been curbed. Since 1933 Jim Farley had provided skillful leadership in Washington, but the party as an organization was withering at the grass roots. It had become too spindly in most rural and small-town areas, too muscle-bound in many urban, “boss-ridden” precincts, and too conservative and conventional in general to recruit the millions of workers, youths, elderly persons, women, and others who were now turning to their own organizations. The Democracy, which had originally gathered strength as a mass movement under “radical” leadership, had lost its power to mobilize the masses.

Nor was FDR the man to recruit and mobilize the tired and tattered battalions left in the party. Few Presidents had ignored or bypassed their party organizations more than he had. During the emergency year of 1933 he had played down his role of party leader even to the extent of shunning Jefferson Day celebrations. We are thinking, he said piously the next year, “about Government, and not merely about party.” That same year he backed Bob La Follette and other Progressive candidates over Democratic party nominees but cold-shouldered the “left-wing” Upton Sinclair, the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in California. In 1936 he leaned heavily on Farley and the national Democracy but bypassed the party in setting up a separate election group of laborites and the “nonpartisan” Good Neighbor League. Both these groups worked for Roosevelt in particular but not for Democratic party candidates in general.

Then, in 1938, the “nonpartisan” leader who had brought the Democratic party great victories but also neglected and bypassed it, suddenly, with lizardlike rapidity, dubbed himself “head of the Democratic party,” held himself responsible for carrying out the party program, and began purging the party of its unfaithful. Roosevelt watchers were bewildered: what strategy was FDR following now? During his first year or two, during the emergency days, it had been a strategy of bipartisanship, as Roosevelt tried to unite both parties behind the NRA and other programs. Then he had switched to a conventional party strategy of uniting the Democracy by devoting much time and political capital to mediating between northern liberals and southern conservatives, at the risk of alienating labor, urban, and left-wing leaders. This approach helped him win his nationwide victory in 1936, but then, with his Court-packing and other ventures he had moved left in search of a different political base. The difference between an electoral victory for Roosevelt and his party in 1936 and a collective victory for his liberal program became clear as his personal coalition collapsed in 1937 and 1938 in the face of counterattacks by southern conservatives and desertions by some northern progressives and laborites.

The Grand Strategist appeared to be more a Grand Experimenter. But Roosevelt had the fine quality of learning from his victories and defeats. He had learned from the purge something about the outer limits of his power to reshape the Democratic party in the South. His defeats at the hands of George et al. and his inability even to gain a toehold in such bastions as Senator Glass’s Virginia had suggested that a quick and improvised personal campaign was not enough; only a carefully planned, comprehensive, and long-run effort had any chance of overcoming such redoubts. At the same time his success in ousting O’Connor in Manhattan indicated that there might be more possibilities in the North than the President had realized.

What were those possibilities? The most arresting had for some years been a dream of a number of Democrats—including at times of Roosevelt himself. This was to convert the Democratic party into the clearly liberal-left party of the nation. “We’ll have eight years in Washington,” Tugwell remembered his boss saying to some liberal friends in 1932. “By that time there may not be a Democratic party, but there will be a Progressive one.” Wallace and Ickes and other Administration leaders tended to agree. But just what did FDR intend? To make a dramatic appeal to third-party leaders and members to join the Democratic party? Or to desert his own party, set up a new progressive party as Theodore Roosevelt had done in 1912, and lead liberal Democrats into it? Or simply to try to oust southern conservatives from the Democracy and hope that progressives would join a clearly liberalized Democratic party?

The purge had proved that the last option would not transform the Democracy; even after FDR’s honest effort to purge southern conservatives, progressives did not flock to the Democratic party banner, perhaps because the effort had failed. The option of a new party was out. Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, the President was not a party-breaker. Besides, FDR was in office, while Cousin Theodore had been out of it and wanting back in. What about seeking to liberalize the Democratic party? To a considerable extent the President had already done this, in party program and policy. But it was notable that such Democratic leaders as Al Smith had not deserted the party—they had merely deserted Roosevelt. Nor were southern Democrats quitting. Even after FDR showed them the door and tried to push them through it, they refused to leave their father’s mansion— partly because it was their father’s mansion.

So eight years after making that electrifying statement to Tugwell, Roosevelt was no nearer to creating a cleanly progressive party. The reason may have been clear to him as a practical matter if not in theory. He was not dealing with a two-party system in which liberal and conservative crossovers would be easy—conservative Democrats hungering to switch over to a right-wing GOP, or liberal Republicans panting to join the Democracy. He was coping with a four-party system in which right-wing Democrats enjoyed their power in Congress and were wary of joining a Republican party that contained hosts of liberals, while liberal Republicans enjoyed their considerable power over presidential nominations and were not eager to join a party of southern Negro-oppressors and northern city bosses.

The four-party system, then, stretched across a spectrum in which Roosevelt Democrats stood on the moderate left, Hughes and Landon Republicans were near the center, George and Tydings and Byrd Democrats stood to the right of center, and congressional Republican leaders held well to the right of them. These four parties were not merely party wings or collections of like-minded voters. They were built into government. Presidential Democrats held the office, with a boost from the electoral college, which favored Democratic contenders from the big urban states. The presidential Republican party tended to dominate presidential nominating conventions. Over on the conservative side of the spectrum the two congressional parties were happy to stay in their places, partly because each had a virtual stranglehold on certain party policies and partly because, sitting cheek by jowl ideologically, they had their own conservative coalition.

Reshaping the Democracy into a liberal party that could compete with a reshaped conservative Republican party was a forbidding prospect for FDR, in short, because the parties had already been realigned into a durable four-party system. Hence it was not surprising that FDR gave up this particular battle, at least for the time being. He had good reasons to do so. His own political stock was low after the purge struggle; he faced the likelihood of losing more and more influence as he neared the end of his second and presumably last term; heightening tension abroad was beginning to affect domestic politics and might bring its own realignment of political forces. It is doubtful that the President conceptualized the problem systematically; but certainly he had a feeling in his gut that he had tried to liberalize American politics and failed.

So he would return to the “politics of personalismo”—the politics of personal leadership, of putting together ad hoc coalitions in Congress and the country as opportunity dictated, of gaining short-run advances on a few fronts instead of making a policy or program breakthrough on a big front. Once again he would become Tactician-in-Chief, the transactional leader of the Broker State. But there was a price to pay for Roosevelt and his Administration: continued administrative cross-purposes, policy disarray, short-run planning, and political expediency, counterbalanced to some degree by advantages of flexibility and adaptability in the face of increasingly visible signs of new troubles abroad.

The price for much of the nation was more severe. In mobilizing his great majority of 1936,Roosevelt had raised hopes that he was realizing an ambition that had mesmerized the American left for more than a century—that a mighty coalition of liberal reformers, egalitarian leftists, women and black liberationists, urban radicals, socialist reconstructionists, and their allies could build and maintain a solid majority left of center, win political power, and enact into law their version of the ideology of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In their time—especially in the 1920s—conservative Republicans had exploited their own “compact majority”; surely the 1930s would be the time of a united liberal-labor-left.

It was not to be. The reasons were manifold: deep divisions within the popular majority; the powerful resistances of the political system to broad popular control, as the Framers had intended; Roosevelt’s proclivity for short-run, “practical,” ad hoc ventures and measures; the necessarily experimental and tentative nature of much of the New Deal. But perhaps the profoundest obstacle to a united and effective left majority was far less visible and yet all the more powerful, gripping the minds of leaders and followers alike. This was the set of “inarticulate major premises” informing the action and inaction of American liberalism and the American left during the days of the New Deal.

The Fission of Ideas

The idea that still gripped the American mind in the 1930s, as it had in the previous century and the century before that, was liberty—the “most precious trait,” John Dewey called it, the “very seal of individuality.” But the idea of liberty—or freedom—was still more a source of ambivalence than of coherence in the American consciousness. Just as the idea had been used both to defend and to attack first slavery and then capitalist power in the nineteenth century, so it was used both to defend and to attack the New Deal in the twentieth. “Negative” liberty as the precious right of Americans to be protected against interference by government and other outside intruders, “positive” liberty as the right to use government for the protection and expansion of individual rights—this crucial distinction now defined the struggle over the meaning of freedom.

The idea of freedom crowned the great Enlightenment and revolutionary trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity, and these words could well have been inscribed on the banner of 1930s liberalism in America and of the New Deal. But to lengthen the arc along which New Deal liberal ideas were arrayed was merely to broaden the ambiguity. No one saw the incoherence of liberalism more keenly than its leading explicator in America, John Dewey. The nineteenth-century liberals who had been the dedicated and effective foes of absolutism, he wrote in 1935, had themselves become intellectual absolutists. Their doctrine had become frozen. “Since the ends of liberalism are liberty and the opportunity of individuals to secure full realization of their potentialities,” and since “organized social planning” alone could secure these objectives, he urged, liberalism must for the sake of its ends reverse its means.

Had the famous “pragmatist” given up his faith in hardheaded experimentation, in testing ideas by their concrete results, only to embrace a new doctrine? Not fundamentally. But this former denizen of Hull-House, who had shared Jane Addams’s concern over how the other nine-tenths lived and had named a daughter for her, now saw the relation of knowing and acting in a more urgent context. Ideas and theory, he wrote in The Journal of Philosophy in 1935, must be “taken as methods of action tested and continuously revised by the consequences they produce in actual social conditions.” That was the old Dewey. But the “experimental method is not just messing around nor doing a little of this and a little of that in the hope that things will improve.” This was the Dewey who feared that the New Deal was doing exactly that. Just as the experimental method in science had to be controlled by “comprehensive ideas, projected in possibilities to be realized by action,” so that method in society had to be directed by a “coherent body of ideas.” This was the newest Dewey.

A coherent body of ideas, however, was precisely what the New Deal lacked after six years and more in office. The reasons go far to explain the intellectual incongruities of the New Deal.

The heritage of progressive thought was fragmented. The heritage lived on in old Bull Moosers and old Wilsonians who were still divided over whether trusts should be destroyed or controlled, pitted the New Freedom as represented by Brandeis against the kind of national power and responsibility urged by Herbert Croly, weighed the competing virtues of legal opportunity versus equal social and economic opportunity, and debated the extent to which government should aid women and blacks and poor farmers as well as more organized groups. The national government—how big and powerful it should be, how it should be used—was still the hard question that cut through the ranks of old progressives. Interviewing a sample of elderly survivors, historian Otis Graham found them deeply divided over the New Deal, with perhaps a 60-40 split against it. Among women progressives, Ida Tarbell opposed the New Deal, while Lillian Wald and Mary Wooley, president of Mount Holyoke, “followed their progressivism straight into the arms of the New Deal.”

Durable continuities did of course link the old progressivism to the New Deal: a concern for large numbers of poor Americans, opposition to concentrated economic power, some commitment to equal opportunity to achieve social justice. These views left a heavy mark on much of the New Deal’s economic legislation—especially on securities and other regulation and on the NRA and the AAA. “There is much evidence of a direct reform bloodline,” Graham concluded. “Yet to anyone conversant with much progressive thought at the more popular levels—a good example would be Winston Churchill’s novels Coniston (1906) and Mister Crewe’s Career (1908), which faithfully represent the progressive ethos—or to anyone unable to dismiss the progressive credentials of F.D.R.-haters like James R. Garfield, Bainbridge Colby, or James A. Reed, or the slightly less angry William Allen White, the case for progressive-New Deal similarity bogs down in crippling qualifications.”

If the thin bloodline from progressivism to the New Deal left the latter with even less intellectual coherence than the former, New Deal thought did not undergo the dialectical competition with opposing sets of doctrines that might have given it force and focus. Certainly the Socialists offered little intellectual opposition, though Norman Thomas eloquently and passionately continued to pose moral issues about capitalism in general and southern peonage in particular. Defections on the left and right appeared to leave the party weaker but no less factionalized and its doctrine in some disarray.

American socialism still suffered from its historic handicap: by “swallowing up both peasantry and proletariat into the ‘petit-bourgeois’ scheme,” as Louis Hartz wrote later, the nation “prevented socialism from challenging its Liberal Reform in any effective way.” The Socialists were still unable to gain a national hearing for the questions they rightfully wished to pose for Roosevelt: If socialist ventures like TVA worked, why would not more socialism? If the New Deal had carried out the 1932 Socialist platform, as some charged, why did it do so “only on a stretcher”? Was the New Deal really state capitalism and a prelude to fascism?

American communists were even less equipped to serve the classic left opposition role of forcing the governing elite to harden its intellectual defenses and unify its doctrine, for the communists were no longer in opposition, at least publicly. It was still the era of the Popular Front, and the Communist party in the United States had prospered, by 1938 almost tripling its 1934 enrollment of 26,000. This expansion brought into the party a greater diversity of members and attitudes, and Moscow doubtless tolerated more day-to-day, freewheeling discussion of doctrine and tactics. But ultimate control of both strategy and ideology remained in the hands of the Comintern. Neither rank-and-file talkfests nor Stalin’s party line had an appreciable influence on New Deal thought during this period of softened antagonism.

So it fell quite logically to the conservative opposition, not the left competition, to establish a dialectical relationship with Roosevelt doctrine. The American right wing, however, appeared to be in as much intellectual disarray as the competing isms. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conservatism—the old “Toryism” that prized authority, hierarchy, order, continuity, stability, and the bonds of moral obligation to class and country, and feared egalitarianism, liberty in the form of license, crass commercialism, and excessive individualism—had only partially given way to new doctrinal trends on the right. But the newer conservatism had also divided into a variety of doctrines as it encountered the pluralism of American life. Even aside from the far-right groups bordering on neofascism, Clinton Rossiter identified “ultra-conservatives” such as Hearst editors, author Freda Utley, and columnist Westbrook Pegler; “middle-of-the-road conservatives” like the still vocal Herbert Hoover; and “liberal conservatives” like Walter Lippmann. Each group had its centers of thought and action: the old conservatives, in different guises, in both southern agrarian and northern Roman Catholic circles; the “bourgeois” conservatives in small-business, small-town cultures; and the moderates in the larger corporate and publishing hierarchies. Out of this congeries of conservative groupings and doctrines it was still impossible for either conservative leaders or their liberal adversaries to discern a consistent, comprehensive philosophy that would keep New Dealers on their intellectual toes.

The incoherence of doctrine was exacerbated by the ambiguity of concept that dominated everyday discourse in press, pulpit, and pub. Liberty? Not only the old dichotomy between “freedom from” and “freedom to” muddied discussion but more explicit and operational questions: Whose liberty? Liberty to do what or be free from what? What kind of liberty—Bill of Rights liberties or more recent freedoms, economic, social, psychological, sexual? Freedom under what conditions—depression, affluence, war? Equality? Of opportunity or of condition? What kind of opportunity—economic, educational, medical-access, athletic, artistic? And to start when— at the fetal stage, at birth, in preschool years, during what stage of school and in what kind of school? If equality of condition—financial, sexual, legal, political? Individualism? Independence from the government, separateness from the mass, a large sphere of privacy, removal of all improper and artificial restraints? Or individuality—self-development and self-realization? The crisis in American culture, Dewey said, could be solved by the recovery of a “composed, effective and creative individuality,” or by a new individualism through democratic socialism—a fine sentiment that also reflected the ambiguity of concepts.

Political ideas during the late 1930s took almost kaleidoscopic patterns, but to consider only what Americans thought would be to consider only one dimension. Equally important was how they thought, and how the channels or structures of thought impinged on decision-making. How people thought concerned the relation among ideas and between ideas and action, the impact of ideas on policy-making, and always the linkage between thought and power.

John Dewey had strong views about how people thought and should think, views made more urgent by the dramatic need in the 1930s for fresh ideas. He preached the need for “freed intelligence,” meaning by intelligence the “conversion of past experience into knowledge and projection of that knowledge in ideas and purposes that anticipate what may come to be in the future and that indicate how to realize what is desired.” This rather common-sense notion, however, did not appear to impress the left. In a Nation article titled “The Pathos of Liberalism,” Reinhold Niebuhr, a forty-three-year-old theologian at Union Theological Seminary, argued that freed intelligence alone was no safe instrument of social change. This simply betrayed a basic weakness in the liberal approach to politics, said Niebuhr. Dewey’s concept failed to take into account “the perennial and inevitable character of the subordination of reason to interest in the social struggle”; the idea of “freed intelligence” presumed a degree of rational freedom from particular interests and perspectives that was, in Niebuhr’s view, “incompatible with the very constitution of human nature.” For Niebuhr, all life was an expression of power.

It was a curious indictment of Dewey, who so closely linked his ideas of intelligence and thoughtful experimentation to specific and effective action. But Niebuhr’s emphasis on power was also a scarcely veiled attack on the kind of pragmatism with which Dewey was identified. This was not the kind of philosophic pragmatism, or even “pragmatic idealism,” in Bernard Bailyn’s term, that had its roots in the ideas of Peirce and James. It was not the brand of pragmatism that emphasized the interrelationship between clearly defined ends and specific means—emphasized the need of shaping ends to practical necessities and means to high purposes. It was a far narrower pragmatism that elevated eclectic experimentation, expediency, political opportunism, self-justifying technique, and automatic compromise to the level of the principled if not the virtuous.

If compelling and explicit ideas were necessary to the effective use of power in the American democracy, pragmatism of this sort could not do the job. Lacking were the intermediate ends and operational means that linked higher purposes—the broadening of liberty, the expansion of equality of opportunity—to the day-to-day actions of government that affected people’s relief checks, WPA jobs, savings, taxes, recreation, roads, parks, homes. In the United States, Tocqueville had observed, “ideas are all either extremely minute and clear or extremely general and vague; what lies between is a void.” A century later the “Tocquevillian void” still bifurcated ideas. It was not that the New Deal had no ideology but that its ideology in its central linkages was so soft and shapeless, such a rickety edifice of related and unrelated ends and means. Through the Tocquevillian void philosophy and power could not hear each other. And the less effective and efficient these programs were, the more the necessary expansion of the New Deal became compromised and politically precarious.

This central problem for the New Dealers was immensely enhanced by the nature of the political system in which they operated. Political opinions and pressures were channeled to Washington through thousands of avenues and agencies. Several hundred members of Congress kept close to their towns and precincts. Local unions, chambers of commerce, bar associations, medical societies, organized relief recipients, and other interest and protest groups had lines of influence running into Capitol Hill, the White House, and bureaucracies. Pressures on Washington were also generated in state and local governments.

If the United States had possessed a strong, essentially two-party system like the British, with the majority party responsible for governing and the minority party for opposing, effective opinion would have been channeled into some coherence. A multi-party system, with peasants, proletariat, and bourgeoisie broadly represented in agrarian, left, and center-right parties, again would have provided some channeling. But the Democratic and Republican parties embraced such wide, variegated, and overlapping groups as to render neither party clearly reflective of an ideological grouping or strongly supportive of government or opposition.

In the absence of broadly organized, programmatic, membership-rooted parties, channels of public opinion and political influence tended to center in political offices and their incumbents, from village fence viewer to President. Personal factions, interlocking with interest and other groups, clustered around these offices like bees around their hives. The fairly rigid structure of American governmental offices, mostly ordained by the Constitution or by state charters, gave a large measure of stability and continuity to the pattern of influence, as reflected in the four-party system.

The implications of this four-party structure for Roosevelt’s governance and doctrine were formidable. He was clearly the leader of the presidential Democratic party, just as men like George and Byrd and Howard Smith and (increasingly) John Garner led the congressional Democrats, Alf Landon briefly in 1936 led the presidential Republicans, and a group of little-known ranking members of key House and Senate committees led the congressional Republicans. Since his party less and less commanded a majority in Congress during the late 1930s, the President had to broker and bargain with the leadership of the three other parties. Thus his position was not wholly unlike that of a French premier of his day, constantly seeking to build coalitions under the Third Republic.

The consequences for Roosevelt politically were mixed. On the one hand, he was enormously constrained by coalition politics that constantly eroded comprehensive programs and their funding, by institutional rigidities such as the seniority system in Congress, by the absence of a powerful majority party that could sustain him in Congress and country. On the other hand, the very fragmentation of the system, the inchoate nature of opposing doctrines and leadership groups, gave him, as a master of political footwork, marvelous opportunities to push his controversial policies through the formidable but scattered opposition. But there were always limits as to how far he could carry the “policy ball,” always the question of whether it might be plucked out of his hands, as in the Court fight.

Within a quarter century of the congressional counterattack on the Roosevelt program, some historians were judging the New Deal as harshly as critics on the left had done during the 1930s. Roosevelt’s New Deal, said Jacob Cohen, had developed no new philosophy of reform, “relying on a patched up merger of Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Wilson’s New Freedom.” The New Deal marked the last act of the old order, not the first act of the new. The New Deal, Barton Bernstein concluded, could have achieved more—“in redistributing income, in reshaping power relations, in restructuring the economy, and in extending meaningful representation and participation in the polity.” Even many of Roosevelt’s more humane reforms, Bernstein wrote, had been “generally faltering and shallow, of more value to the middle classes, of less value to organized workers,” and even less to “marginal men.” “The story of many New Deal agencies was a sad story,” Paul Conkin concluded, “the ever recurring story of what might have been.”

Revisionists pointed to the critical transition days of early March 1933 as a time when Roosevelt, dealing with terrified bankers pleading for federal action, could have socialized or nationalized the banks. Still others held that, at the very least, the President and Congress could have created a national central banking system that would have given Washington comprehensive control of the banks without “expropriating” them. Such a move would have accorded with century-old attitudes in the Democratic party and would not have alarmed moderates. The conventional view had been that Roosevelt, providing strong leadership, coolly steered crisis banking policy between shoals left and right. This too was challenged by revisionist historians who demonstrated that the President during those critical days delegated banking policy to a group of conservative holdovers from the Hoover White House who, with almost equally conservative Roosevelt men, were intent on preserving the existing banking system, not fundamentally changing it.

These revisionist historians, of whatever color, were defying members of their own historical establishment who contended that even to discuss questions of “what might have been” or of “what did not happen in history” was to be ahistorical and hence unprofessional. Nevertheless the revisionists were quite right to submit at least preliminary judgments. Historians of all varieties constantly make judgments, in the topics they choose, in the facts that they select and the facts that they ignore, in allotting praise and blame, even when they do not explicitly analyze alternatives. The issue is not whether historians discuss what might have been but how well, by what criteria, they discuss it.

The most valid and crucial criterion of what leaders have done or not done is their success or failure in meeting their own standards—that is, fulfilling their own goals, realizing their own values—not necessarily the standards or goals or values of the historian writing in a later era with different values. Historians may apply their own standards, but this is a very different enterprise. Some historians have criticized FDR for failing to “socialize” not merely the banking system but the whole economy. But Roosevelt was no socialist, almost all his advisers were not socialists, his party never adopted a socialist program, and the electorate, judging from the Socialist party’s lack of popular appeal, had little yearning for socialism. That the New Deal included one or two socialist experiments such as TVA—and indeed brought that one off with great éclat—is no proof that the New Dealers or the American people had broader socialist aims.

Even less did the New Deal aspire under the influence of Brandeis and his circle to a systematic decentralization of economic power, on the ideological ground that “smallness is beautiful.” Nor did it wish to “restructure” the economy in any other systematic way—it wished only to subsidize it, stimulate it, make it more productive of jobs and higher wages. Neither did it propose to reshape power relations in any fundamental sense. It sought simply to bring labor, the unemployed, youths, and to a degree blacks into a wider and fairer balance of power.

Even judged by its own values and goals, however, the record of the New Deal was mixed. Roosevelt’s supreme immediate aim, defined by personal and party promises, was recovery; he achieved partial recovery by the mid-thirties, lost ground in the “Roosevelt Recession,” and regained partial recovery after passage of his big spending bill of 1938. He wanted to make government more humane and caring, and he achieved this for millions of the poor, by placing a floor under them, but other millions were no better off, no more secure than before. Though his tax and other proposals were intended substantially to redistribute income, they succeeded merely to a moderate degree. He wanted to make government more responsive to citizens previously underrepresented, and particularly the millions of the poor, and he helped his party rid itself of the two-thirds rule, but he had little success in either liberalizing the Court or softening the grip of conservative committee chairmen on legislation.

Why such mixed results, by his own standards, on the part of a President who combined compassion and political skill to an extraordinary degree, had the aid of scores of the most talented men and women, enjoyed enormous support in Congress and among the people for at least four years, and had the depression crisis to give his Administration force and momentum?

Was it a personal failure? Roosevelt, it is said, simply did not have the gut commitment to his values and goals that would have enabled him to fight his way through to complete victory. But the President’s struggles day in and day out, his ceaseless efforts to patch together ad hoc coalitions to put his measures through, his willingness to brook the opposition of the most formidable adversaries, his fervent and repeated appeals to the people, his tireless maneuvering and manipulating and horse-trading, his feverish experimenting in search of solutions, belie this notion.

Was it an institutional failure? The New Dealers, it is said, were trying to put twentieth-century programs and policies through an eighteenth-century governmental system; inexorably the delays and the checks and the vetoes made impossible integrated and comprehensive and massive programs of recovery and reform. Rather the system either fostered slowdown and compromise or invited highly personal presidential intervention that could mass political influence at a particular point for a brief time and put something through but not launch and sustain a big and comprehensive effort. That this was a major obstacle to New Deal success, as proposed in earlier pages of this volume, has been widely accepted by political scientists and political practitioners, most notably by the Politician-in-Chief himself, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Or was it primarily an intellectual failure? The President’s reliance on his political machinery had at length failed him, Adolf Berle noted late in 1937, and he predicted that unless FDR was ready to be not a political organizer but an intellectual leader, he would be fighting a rearguard action for the next three years. Such an intellectual failure could have stemmed from the incoherence of public opinion, the disarray of the “public philosophy,” the New Dealers’ meager or faulty theorizing. Neither of the first two of these factors—neither the fragmented and ephemeral reflection of popular attitudes nor the divided and amorphous carryover of powerful ideas from the past—provided the New Dealers with adequate sets of guides and limits to governmental action. The New Deal would have to fashion an ideology of its own, and such an ideology must consist of more than Roosevelt’s magnificent enunciations of broad ends, more than the New Dealers’ versatile and eclectic employment of “practical” political and governmental means. It would need to include the political strategies and operational codes necessary to link ends and means. Such linkages doubtless would have to include ideas for long-term party and governmental reorganizations and modernizations far more sweeping than Roosevelt’s limited and mainly abortive efforts at governmental reform.

Was there any way out for Roosevelt? Was there any idea or combination of ideas that could have generated a strategy adequate to meet New Deal goals of economic recovery and political modernization, consistent with the President’s basic values, satisfying public opinion, carrying on at least part of the progressive political heritage, and avoiding the institutional veto traps and slowdowns? There was—the twin idea of massive spending and other fiscal strategies combined with national and regional planning.

To some of the young New Deal economists, heavy deficit spending appeared to be the ideal solution to continued economic stagnation. On the whole, Congress liked to spend, especially on public works back home. The Court would not threaten the federal government’s spending power; Justice Stone at a social affair whispered into Frances Perkins’s ear, “My dear, the taxing power is sufficient for everything you want and need.” The publication of John Maynard Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in 1936 equipped the economists with the necessary technical theory and data. Above all, spending offered the President a middle way between doctrinaire economizing and doctrinaire socialism.

Roosevelt would never have read a book as dense as The General Theory, but he had something much better—Keynes himself. During the early months of the New Deal the Cambridge economist wrote Roosevelt and his advisers long and warm letters about economic policy. But in May 1934, when the President and the economist met in the White House, both were disappointed by their exchange. “He left a whole rigamarole of figures,” Roosevelt wrote Perkins. “He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.” The President was no economist, Keynes remarked to friends.

Why did not the President seize on such an enticing solution, especially during the “Roosevelt Recession”? In part because his advisers were divided, as were friendly members of Congress; some were more intent on raising taxes, controlling prices, or undertaking short-run “pump priming” until business could man the pumps. But the main reason was intellectual. Roosevelt was unable as a thinker to seize the opportunity that Keynesian economics gave him. At heart he was as addicted to balancing the budget—someday—as he was to squirreling away bits of string and hanging on to old suits. Keynes called for such massive spending, such dramatic budget-unbalancing, as to stagger even Roosevelt’s imagination. It was a middle way, to be sure, but it called for such radical and unorthodox pursuit of this middle way as to give it the flavor of extremism.

A Keynesian solution, moreover, called for an unprecedented degree of planning, not only in the fiscal areas of spending, taxing, investment, price policy, and the like, but in physical planning of public works, housing, transportation, urban rehabilitation, and much else. It seemed to be an auspicious time for comprehensive planning, which was increasingly the vogue in business, education, and even religion.

Roosevelt was a planner, but more of the nuts-and-bolts variety. During his second term he established the National Resources Planning Board and other planning entities, but these units, partly because of hostility in Congress, lacked political muscle and adequate funds. The failure of the President’s reorganization bill had left the executive branch as Balkanized as ever, hardly the vehicle for unifying the Administration and its programs. The Soviets with their five-year plans gave the whole business a slightly sinister cast, and pundits such as Walter Lippmann attacked the proposal as bureaucratic, collectivist, and authoritarian. The outcome was unfortunate. Favoring regional as well as national planning, the President wanted to extend comprehensive programs like the TVA to other valleys, including the Missouri. These proposals died in the legislative labyrinth.

“We are at one of those uncommon junctures of human affairs,” Keynes had said in the 1930s, “when we can be saved by the solution of intellectual problems and in no other way.” Fiscal strategy and comprehensive planning were largely intellectual problems, embracing the whole realm of thought from minute plans to supreme values.

To what extent, then, had Roosevelt realized his own value of equality as he neared the end of his second term? Fifty years later, historians were still in disagreement. A Soviet historian came to the New Deal’s defense. “There is no reason why radical historians,” wrote Nikolai Sivachev, a Soviet specialist on the New Deal, “should not admit that Roosevelt’s services to the monopolies does not exclude the possibility of the New Deal’s bringing about a significant change in the structure of American capitalism, that the New Deal reforms bear the stamp of the struggle of the working class and of all democratic Americans for social progress.” Facing the structured inequality in American society, Roosevelt did not become a transforming leader, but the image of a compassionate, beleaguered President fighting to tame capitalism and to deal out a new hand, even if from an old deck of cards, would be fixed in the national memory for decades to come.

On the other great value—liberty—Roosevelt’s reputation would rest more securely. Despite all the charges that big government would crush Bill of Rights liberties, these continued intact. Indeed, Roosevelt was now beginning to articulate his belief that political and religious liberties were symbiotic with social and economic freedom. Even more, he was symbolizing and inspiring self-expression and creativity among artists and writers across the nation. If, as Alfred Kazin wrote at the time, the New Deal was “weakest in philosophy,” the President was also, in H. G. Wells’s words, “a ganglion for reception, expression, transmission, combination, and realization”—and hence a leader who helped bring about at the grass roots an explosion of artistic creativity in his time.

The People’s Art

The floor of the House of Representatives, June 15, 1938. Amid howls of laughter, members of the House are watching the antics of Congressman Dewey Short, Republican from the Missouri Ozarks. Florid of face, squat of figure, the onetime preacher has joined the debate over a bill to set up a permanent federal agency to aid the arts. He will resign from the House, the “Sage of the Ozarks” declaims, if he can help run the division dealing with the dance. He burlesques a tap dance in the aisle, amid more merriment, then rises to his toes to mimic ballet dancers. Art should not be subsidized, he says, for the only good art comes from suffering artists. Nobody can “feel comfortable or enjoy listening to the strains of Mendelssohn with the seat of his pants out.” More hilarity. The Snopeses of Capitol Hill then help kill the measure, 195-35.

This forensic lynching bee against the arts measure was part of the massive counterattack launched by the Republican-southern Democratic coalition against the New Deal from 1937 to 1939. The cultural projects of the Roosevelt Administration were especially enticing targets. The right-wing coalition used two old congressional weapons—investigation and financial veto. Witnesses before the House Committee on Un-American Activities testified that art and theater and writers’ projects were infested with communists, that the leadership was communist or communist-influenced, that in New York City the Workers’ Alliance, a relief recipients’ union, ran the theater project and the Communist party ran the union. The editor of the conservative National Republic, in his testimony, denounced art “smeared upon the walls” by reds on relief. The headlines were gratifying to the right wing, despite occasional embarrassments, such as when the name of one Christopher Marlowe surfaced during testimony and a committeeman demanded to know, “Is he a Communist?” A year later a southern Democratic and Republican coalition controlling a House appropriations subcommittee crippled the arts, writers’, and music projects and in effect killed the federal theater program.

The assault on New Deal cultural programs marked the beginning of the end of one of the most humane, imaginative, generous, and daring efforts of the federal government to meet the dire needs and enlarge the opportunities of the nation’s artists. For a man who had no great personal interest in the arts, Roosevelt had devoted an extraordinary amount of time to developing, nurturing, financing, and protecting the cultural programs, which in turn required an enormous amount of placating and conciliating the strong-minded persons involved. He did this in part because of his heritage of patrician patronage of the arts, but far more because he knew that the nation’s artists were among the most vulnerable in a depression.

Eleanor Roosevelt supported the cultural programs at key junctures, put “federal” art in the White House, and spoke up against censorship of art, telling a group of museum directors in December 1933 that it was “unbelievable that a great nation” could fail to use “its creative talents to the fullest.” Aiding and abetting the effort were tough-minded administrators—Ickes, Morgenthau, Hopkins, and many less known—who early on glimpsed the need for a qualitative as well as a quantitative liberalism. But the true heroes of the effort were the unsung or less sung leaders of the national and local programs, along with the artists, actors, musicians, and writers who, working for a pittance, responded by producing a cornucopia of cultural productions, notable always for quantity but often too for quality.

The New Deal art program had got off to an early start because the federal government owned thousands of post offices and other buildings whose walls were temptingly empty. Roosevelt had been in office hardly two months when muralist George Biddle, one of the Philadelphia Biddies and a Groton and Harvard schoolmate of Roosevelt, wrote FDR about the grand achievements of muralists of the Mexican revolution. Young American artists were eager to capture the “Roosevelt-guided social revolution” on the public walls of the nation. The President directed him to the Treasury, central custodian of federal buildings. With tentative support from such leading muralists as Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Laning, Reginald Marsh, and Henry Varnum Poor, Biddle plunged into the field of federal subsidy of the arts, amid fears that it was a briar patch.

A briar patch it was—not only of bureaucratic rivalries, but of ancient conflict between traditionalists and the avant-garde, between artists of competing schools. Biddle and his colleagues were soon dealing with problems that had always bedeviled subsidized art, whether sponsored by state, church, or private patrons. Any relationship between free-spirited artists and institutions dealing with art involved an “awkward embrace” that the honeyed words of politicians and bureaucrats could not ease. To what degree should established artists be favored over the mainly needy ones? To what extent should the “feds” yield to local control or even institutionalize it? How much artistic freedom should be allowed for projects subsidized by the taxpayers? To what degree should artists be supervised—for example, the time they were putting into their work? Who should decide what art should be not only subsidized but chosen for exhibit? What are the criteria for excellence in art?

These problems rolled in on the public works art directors in the form not merely of in-basket paper but of raging conflicts in the field. In San Francisco, newspaper editors were given a “pre-vue” of new murals in the Coit Tower created under the public works art program, only to discover a miner in one panel reading a well-known local communist weekly, in another panel a hammer and sickle and a call that the “Workers of the World Unite,” and—worst blow of all—renditions of many left-wing front pages but no representation of the establishment San Francisco Chronicle. During the ensuing flap the city park commission locked the big doors to the tower, the local Artists’ and Writers’ Union picketed the closed edifice, and the lower opened again after several months, with only one “subversive” item—a Soviet emblem—missing.

In Washington, the artist Rockwell Kent had his own little joke. Illustrating the expansion of the postal service in a mural for the capital’s Post Office Building, he portrayed Alaskan Eskimos dispatching a letter in one panel and black Puerto Rican women receiving it in a second. All very patriotic—except that on close scrutiny the message was found to be a call for freedom for both dependencies. After much amusement over Kent’s joke, the Treasury paid the artist off and blanked out the message. When Paul Cadmus portrayed sailors frolicking with “curvaceous damsels of obviously insecure reputation” in his “The Fleet’s In,” an admiral denounced it, the Navy asked that it be withdrawn from a forthcoming exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery, and it was.

These and other imbroglios hardly dampened cultural productivity. During the first few months of the public works program artists turned out well over 10,000 pieces of art and craft—over 3,000 oils, almost 3,000 watercolors, numerous prints, etchings, woodcuts, poster panels, and a lesser number of carvings, decorative maps, pottery, tapestries, mosaics. But even these figures were dwarfed by the productivity of artists working under the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration, which behind the strong leadership of Harry Hopkins and the Project’s chief, Holger Cahill, got underway with heavy funding in 1935. The Art Project was designedly a relief effort, part of the overall WPA cultural program embracing artists, writers, musicians, actors, and others. But by enabling artists to do their own work, even at $20 or $30 a week, it produced an explosion of “people’s art” without parallel in American history. If the output of the public works projects could be numbered by the thousands, that of the FAP could be by the tens or hundreds of thousands—over 100,000 easel works (oil, watercolor, tempera, pastel), 17,000 pieces of sculpture, an estimated 240,000 copies of over 10,000 original designs in varied print media.

Enormous quantity—but quality? The level of work under the FAP was so varied as to defy generalization. Such artists, later to be famous, as Willem de Kooning, Anton Refregier, Chaim Gross, and Peter Hurd would credit the program with helping them in their careers. But the aim was to include as many artists as possible, good or bad, and to bring the people’s art to the people, in regional and local centers across the nation. The FAP not only promoted art exhibits and gallery tours on a vast scale but stressed art as a learning experience for the masses by sponsoring educational programs under hundreds of teachers in settlement houses, hospitals, clubs, parks, and even—especially for children—zoos. A disciple of John Dewey, Cahill believed that art was a matter less of the rare masterpiece than of vitalizing “democracy in the arts” through community participation.

The more the FAP reached out to the wider public, however, the more controversial and hence political it became. The conflicts that had plagued the public works program bedeviled the FAP even more. Cutbacks in the program in response to Roosevelt’s post-election economizing produced anger and resentment in art centers. New York artists, the most militant in the nation, marched in December 1936 to WPA headquarters on East Sixty-ninth Street, occupied the offices of New York City FAP chief Audrey McMahon, and stayed on despite threats of being blacklisted. The artists locked arms to confront the police, who dragged them out amid the thud of nightsticks, shrieks of pain, and the wounding of a dozen artists and policemen. As total WPA rolls were cut by one million from the preelection high of two and a half million, artists and other recipients could have bitterly recalled the words of FDR’s Madison Square Garden speech: “For all these things”—including useful work for the needy unemployed— “we have only just begun to fight.” Both FDR’s retrenchment and the protest of the artists helped trigger the congressional counterattack of 1937 and 1938.

One reason the art program aroused such controversy was its sheer visibility on the public walls and in the new and old art centers of the nation. Even more visible—and vulnerable—was the Federal Theatre Project. The FTP shared many of the ecstasies and the burdens of the other cultural programs—wide outreach to needy theater people, enormous output, some brilliant productions, support from the Roosevelts, especially Eleanor, along with parsimony in funding, bureaucratic tangles, censorship, red-baiting, and cutbacks. But the Federal Theatre, like the figure over a Broadway marquee, was always larger than life—in its leadership, its daring, its visibility, and its downfall.

Its head was the most striking of all the persons who ran WPA cultural projects, Hallie Flanagan. Creator of an experimental theater first at Grinnell College and then at Vassar, she had participated at Harvard in George Pierce Baker’s noted theatrical laboratory, the 47 Workshop, and studied European and Russian theater abroad before establishing her own reputation for experiment. Broadway impresarios were still underestimating the daring and determination of this small, mild-mannered woman when Hopkins recruited her, but he did not. Soon she was making the hard decisions: dealing with the tough stage unions, giving preference in hiring to skilled professionals, choosing the most controversial plays for production and at the same time dreaming of creating a great and enduring national theater out of the relief project. She collected a remarkable staff and set of associates: Eddie Dowling, national director of vaudeville; Elmer Rice, head of the New York City project, and his assistant Philip Barber; Charles Coburn, director for New England; Jasper Deeter, director for Pennsylvania.

“We live in a changing world,” Flanagan told her associates when they first met at her headquarters in the old McLean mansion on Dupont Circle; “man is whispering through space, soaring to the stars, flinging miles of steel and glass into the air. Shall the theatre continue to huddle in the confines of a painted box set? The movies, in their kaleidoscopic speed and juxtaposition of external objects and internal emotions, are seeking to find visible and audible expression for the tempo and psychology of our time. The stage too must experiment—with ideas, with psychological relationship of men and women, with speech and rhythm forms, with dance and movement, with color and light—or it must and should become a museum product.” The theater, she added, must not ignore problems of wealth and poverty, peace and war, the role of government—or the changing social order would ignore the theater.

Flanagan followed up this rhetoric with arresting productions. In spring 1936 the Federal Theatre put on the New York premiere of Murder in the Cathedral, T. S. Eliot’s verse drama about Thomas à Becket. The play, which had been turned down by the Theatre Guild, left audience members, including Eleanor Roosevelt, deeply moved. An especially innovative production was Macbeth, set in a castle in Haiti during Napoleonic times, produced by John Houseman, directed by Orson Welles, and staged in Harlem with black actors. On opening night the Negro Elks’ eighty-piece brass band marched past the Lafayette Theatre in their scarlet-and-gold uniforms, while thousands lined up for tickets. The show got enthusiastic reviews from Burns Mantle of the New York Daily News and other critics. Everyone knew, a black woman watching the show for the fifth time told a London reporter, that “this Mr. Shakespeare had always intended his plays to be acted by Negroes.”

But by far the boldest venture of the Theatre Project was the “Living Newspaper.” Conceived by Flanagan and sponsored by the Newspaper Guild, the Living Newspaper Unit operated like a city room with editors and reporters. “Great ingenuity was displayed,” Edmond Gagey observed, “in devising new technical methods or devices—employment of a loudspeaker for the voice of the Living Newspaper or of an old tenement house; frequent use of scrim, projection, and moving pictures; action on different levels of ramps with imaginative use of spotlight and blackout; playing of scenes in silhouette; clever stage business and properties to illustrate abstract points.”

No issue, no matter how thorny, seemed to daunt Flanagan & Co. The White House in effect killed the first Living Newspaper, Ethiopia, on the ground that it involved the impersonation of foreign leaders, Haile Selassie and Mussolini. Despite frantic appeals by Flanagan through Eleanor Roosevelt and the angry resignation of Elmer Rice, the show reached the boards only for the press. But other productions were equally provocative. Triple-A Plowed Under dramatized the farm problem in a series of sharp vignettes: mortgages foreclosed, farms auctioned off, crops dumped, all amid ravaging drought. Attacks on the greed of middlemen and words of Earl Browder interspersed with those of Jefferson and Al Smith did not win favor from the right—especially when it was not Browder who was booed. Injunction Granted, originally designed as a balanced picture of labor’s treatment in the courts, turned out on opening night to be a strong dose of militant unionism. Even Flanagan was upset by its leftward tilt, but the play went on, with a few modifications. Power, an attack on the utilities and a call for public ownership, was a piece of calculated propaganda; the Living Newspaper staff, Brooks Atkinson wrote, had “come out impartially against the electric light and power industry, and for the TVA.” Perhaps the most powerful of the plays, One-Third of a Nation, was the most brilliant, the most professional, and the best received by the critics. With its set showing a four-story tenement full of rickety stairs, beat-up furniture, dirt and disarray, One-Third of a Nation was a pointed reminder of New Deal promises made and still unfulfilled. It Can’t Happen Here, a dramatization of Sinclair Lewis’s novel showing how fascism could, was seen by hundreds of thousands in New York and a score of other cities.

The FTP offered much more than these electrifying productions. It embraced regional efforts, most notably in Chicago and Los Angeles, and a host of state amateur theater groups—eighteen in North Carolina alone. At its height it involved not only great actors and directors but a peak work force of about ten thousand stagehands and electricians and cue girls as well as actors and playwrights. Flanagan recognized that modern dance could express vital ideas and encouraged Helen Tamiris to develop an independent dance unit that had a brief but stormy and creative life until it was merged again with the Theatre Project.

But the FTP never shed its image of being centered in New York City, radical, and iconoclastic. Hence it was all the more vulnerable to the budget-cutters in Washington, and to both the red-baiters in Congress and the communists themselves who attacked it from the left. The FTP was the first of the cultural programs to be killed on Capitol Hill. Said the chastened but indomitable Flanagan, “The theatre, when it’s good, is always dangerous.”

It was acutely ironic that the theater and other New Deal cultural programs should have been shut down because of their “radicalism,” for they were at the heart of the revival of cultural nationalism in the 1930s. That decade, in Charles Alexander’s look back four decades later, brought a “remarkable celebration in American thought and culture of the goodness and glory of the nation and its people.” This was true “as much in architecture, where modernists linked adaptable, utilitarian design to the task of social reconstruction, as it was in music, where composers were often willing to exploit native folk and popular resources, or in the literary or visual arts, where the social and artistic values of realism prevailed.” Coming home from European or spiritual exile, intellectuals and artists not only rediscovered the American present; “as the decade progressed they more and more explored the national past, seeking enduring values, precedents for action, even meaningful legends with which to fashion the most elaborate version thus far of a usable past.”

Throughout the decade public arts programs existed side by side with private ventures. The public was not always clear as to what was “socialistic” and what was “commercial.” Thus it was the FTP that put on the musical drama The Cradle Will Rock, but it was the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union that produced the equally pro-union and anti-capitalist Pins and Needles. The federal art programs covered public buildings with murals and paintings, but independent and established artists like Reginald Marsh, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood were painting on their own. Rather than crushing private or commercial ventures, the federal cultural programs appeared to stimulate them. On occasion, feds fought one another. WPA officials in Washington, fearful about the approaching Federal Theatre production of The Cradle Will Rock during the bitter struggle between labor and Little Steel, put off the presentation at the last moment. After vain protests and appeals, author Marc Blitzstein and director Orson Welles led the opening-night audience from the Maxine Elliott Theatre twenty blocks to the old Venice Theatre, where actors and stagehands improvised a performance that would be talked about— and reenacted—decades later.

The Federal Writers’ Project was a prime example of the easy coexistence of public and private cultural enterprise. When the FWP came under the usual attack on Capitol Hill, forty-four publishers wrote a joint letter to the investigating subcommittee asserting that the work of the writers was a “genuine, valuable and objective contribution to the understanding of American life” and not a vehicle of propaganda. While the publishers unduly played down the left bias in enclaves of the project, prestigious houses such as Random House and Houghton Mifflin had enough confidence in the FWP to undertake cooperative publishing with it. Certainly the FWP needed every friend it could mobilize, as it suffered along with the other cultural projects from the usual congressional barrages about reds, waste, administrative incompetence.

The Federal Writers’ Project shared much else with its sister programs in the arts—a gifted leadership, though often erratic in the case of the writers’ program, the unswerving support of Eleanor Roosevelt and the cautious backing of her husband, the inadequacy of funds in view of the need, and the image of being a New York project despite the existence of strong state programs, fourteen of which were headed by women. It could boast of the usual huge output: around 6,500 writers in four years produced several hundred publications on a wide diversity of subjects, with the help of thousands of volunteer consultants, most of them college teachers, who helped prepare FWP manuscripts. And the quality of the output, as in the other projects, varied wildly. It was at worst pure hack stuff and at best enduring work, such as the two thousand slave narratives based on interviews with former slaves and collated in seventeen volumes.

The showcase of the Writers’ Project was its American Guide Series. Rising almost spontaneously from under the noses of the WPA planners, the idea was to employ writers, editors, historians, researchers, art critics, archaeologists, map draftsmen, geologists, and other professionals to prepare local, state, and regional “Baedekers.” But some hoped that these would be more than Baedekers—that they would dig into the roots of American history and culture and hence would become, as Alfred Kazin later put it, part of an “extraordinary national self-scrutiny.”

The series was most impressive for its sheer size and range—as though it wished to manifest the size and range of the nation it covered. By 1942 the collection consisted of 276 volumes and 701 pamphlets; even so, the FWP had still not published any of the regional guides originally planned.

Once again the quality was grossly uneven, but at its best the series presented known and unknown writers at their most creative and imaginative. For the Massachusetts guide Conrad Aiken anonymously described the “wonderful ghostliness” of old Deerfield as “the perfect and beautiful statement of the tragic and creative moment when one civilization is destroyed by another.” He also paid tribute to the “profound individualism” of which Massachusetts had been such a prodigal and brilliant source— only to provoke the wrath of leftists who argued that the good in America had stemmed from popular, collective action. The guide calmly published both views, “each in effect arguing against the other.”

Not all the difficulties of the Massachusetts guide were settled so easily. The day after the first copy off the Houghton Mifflin press was presented to the governor, the Boston Traveler headlined “Sacco Vanzetti Permeate New WPA Guide.” It seemed that the guide described the Boston Tea Party in nine lines and the Sacco-Vanzetti case in forty-one. Other “revelations”—and headlines—followed about the guide’s handling of the Boston police strike, the great 1912 strike of textile workers, child labor, and other skeletons in the Bay Stale closet. The governor denounced the book, declared that the writers should go back to where they came from if they didn’t like America, and collaborated with the state librarian in an effort to strike from the guide references to organized labor, welfare legislation, and Labor Day. In Washington, Harry Hopkins laughed off the affair, and in Boston the guide sold like hotcakes.

Other state guides came under literary attack for poor style or for history that was only guidebook-deep. But their critics missed the essential point of the guides and of the whole Writers’ Project—to mobilize hundreds of writers who in turn could dig into the heart and mind, the very bone and sinew, of the nation. They wrote mainly about people—famous and infamous, heroic and villainous, remembered and forgotten. “It is doubtful,” wrote Robert Cantwell in The New Republic, “if there has ever been assembled anywhere such a portrait, so laboriously and carefully documented, of such a fanciful, impulsive, childlike, absent-minded, capricious and ingenious people.”

So the guides abounded in people, presented often in exquisite and loving detail, like the jobless man whose opening words to the FWP interviewer were: “I admit it, I’m a hog. In other words human. I enjoy women and a pair of doughnuts like anybody else. Say tomorrow I wake up I’m covered in communism, say I can go and get what I want by asking—I want six wives. You maybe want twenty-four suits…” Or like John D. Rockefeller golfing in Florida, wearing a straw hat tied with a shawl-like handkerchief under his chin as he bicycled “from stroke to stroke, followed by two valets, one with milk and crackers, the other with a blanket to be spread on the ground when he wishes to rest.”

And so it was possible for Alfred Kazin to write that the enormous and remarkable body of writing of the Depression era, for all its shapelessness, offered the fullest expression of the national consciousness. It was the “story of a vast new literature in itself, some of it fanatical or callow, some of it not writing at all, much of it laboriously solid and curious and humble, whose subject was the American scene and whose drive was always the need, born of the depression and the international crisis, to chart America and to possess it.” And because much of this literature dealt with the 1930s, inevitably much of it dealt with economic hope and despair.

“Jus’ let me get out to California,” says Grandpa Joad. “Gonna get me a whole big bunch of grapes off a bush, or whatever, an’ I’m gonna squash ’em on my face an’ let ’em run offen my chin.” Getting to California—the Joads have been thinking of this for months. The real Joads were the half-million refugees created when the great dust storms swept through the Plains and border states, reducing almost 100 million acres to dust. For a time the uprooted became wanderers, traveling like sleepwalkers, but most were headed west in rattletrap cars and trucks, in a grim reenactment of the American dream. Headed west to California, the last paradise, where the land was rich and jobs were for the asking. But their hopes were blighted—as Ma Joad had expected, the promises had been “too nice, kinda.”

John Steinbeck had made this trek too. In 1939 he published the novel that documented the Okie experience, The Grapes of Wrath. In California his family, the Joads, encounter the people in paradise: farm owners who offer jobs to migrants at starvation wages—take it or leave—and sheriffs who move them like cattle from miserable camp to worse camp and Californians who hiss “Okie” at them no matter what state they hail from. The Joads’ meager savings evaporate; they find no place to rest; they are abused, tricked, exploited. The family falls apart—the grandparents die, a son-in-law deserts, a baby is stillborn, a son avenges a preacher by attacking a strikebreaker. In the end a tremendous rain descends, like a second Flood, and this ironic rain, whose absence had denied the Joads life in Oklahoma, now forces them to take cowering refuge in a barn. They must leave behind their truck, their belongings. They have nothing left.

Steinbeck’s book set off a fire storm of controversy and made the thirty-seven-year-old novelist famous. Inevitably attacked as a Communist propagandist, Steinbeck in fact had made one of the principal themes of an earlier novel, In Dubious Battle, the darker side of Communist activists— their fanaticism, their subordination of the strikers’ needs to the party’s political goals, their provocativeness, and hence the “dubiousness” of the battle. Far from advocating communism, The Grapes of Wrath offered no coherent program whatever but rather a mystic union of Emerson’s transcendentalism, Whitman’s mass democracy, and Jefferson’s agrarian populism. It beckoned readers back to the time when men and the land were one, when greed yielded to selflessness, “for the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we.’” A federal migrant camp offers a glimpse of Utopia, where the life-principles are cooperation and sharing, and where the Joads have a few weeks to learn to “feel like people again.”

But Steinbeck speaks best through his characters. Ma Joad, indomitable defender of the family unit against all comers: “Use’ ta be the fambly was fust. It ain’t so now. It’s anybody. Worse off we get, the more we got to do.” Jim Casy, a preacher who accompanies the Joads to California and has given up conventional Christianity for the faith that “all men got one big soul ever’-body’s a part of.” Young Tom Joad, who lakes on Casy’s burden when the preacher is murdered for leading a migrant workers’ strike, assaults the murderer, and must flee. But, he tells his mother, “I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.… An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”

Woody Guthrie was there too, a real-life Okie who rode the freights through the South and Southwest during the dust bowl years, playing and singing to anyone who would listen. Growing up in a disintegrating home, in his teens he was an “alley rat” living among old cowboys and onetime outlaws and plain down-and-outers, listening to their yarns about the glory days of the West. When the dust storms hit in the spring of 1935, Woody was still only a twenty-three-year-old soda jerk in Pampa, Texas, but then he began to travel. “This dusty old dust is a-getting my home / and I’ve got to be drifting along.…”

On the road, thrown among the dust-blown, Guthrie’s alley-rat “I” was transmuted into an impassioned “we.” He “had never considered himself part of any group before,” according to Joe Klein. “But here he was, an Okie, and these were his people.” And as more and more he saw what was happening to them, his music took on a new bite. “I never did make up many songs about the cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky, but at first it was funny songs of what all’s wrong, and how it turned out good or bad. Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in that country was thinking.” Guthrie gathered a repertoire of old tunes—ballads, hymns, country blues—from hoboes and migrants and fitted his own lyrics to them. “The way I figure, there are two kinds of singing and two kinds of songs,” he said. “Living songs and dying songs.” He would sing both. Drawing from the Wobblies’ old Little Red Songbook, his lyrics became more pointed in pathos and politics:

We got out to the West Coast broke,

So dad gum hungry I thought I’d croak,

And I bummed up a spud or two,

And my wife fixed up a ’tater stew.

We poured the kids full of it.

Mighty thin stew, though: you could read a magazine right through it.

Always have figured that if it had been just a little bit thinner some of these here politicians could have seen through it.

Two thousand miles to the east, the trouble with Studs Lonigan is that he cannot speak his true feelings, deep and powerful feelings of revolt against Chicago’s drab Irish middle class, with its petty aspirations and empty values and spiritual poverty. Studs is crushed between a latent conscience desperate to emerge, which enables him to grasp vaguely that something is wrong with his world, and his lack of knowledge, either of himself or of society, that would make his rebellion effective. Robbed of any model for revolt, Studs falls back on the hackneyed American rebel of dime novels and juvenile fantasies, on the model of the tough guy as boxer, outlaw, hoodlum, soldier, or teen gang leader. Shadowboxing before a mirror, cursing his sister, drinking himself into a stupor, strutting among his adolescent admirers, Lonigan must constantly affirm to himself that he is indeed “real stuff.” But by adopting the pose and vocabulary of the tough guy, he can neither fully tolerate nor articulate genuine emotions and impulses.

In the park with Lucy, the fifteen-year-old Studs has a feeling “that seemed to flow through him like nice warm water,” but he feels “goofy and fruity about having it, and felt that he hadn’t better let anyone know he had thoughts like that. … If some of the kids knew what he was doing and thinking, they’d laugh their ears off.” How can he express his feeling to Lucy? “He couldn’t even say a damn thing about how it all made him want to feel strong and good, and made him want to do things and be big and brave for her.” So when he parts from her in frustration he feels “more and more of a hell of a Goddam goof.” After this moment of feeble perception the shutters close once again, and Studs spends the rest of his life caught between growing apprehension of early death and pathetic nostalgia for lost chances. He dies in 1931 at the age of thirty, of heart failure.

The man who created Studs Lonigan, James T. Farrell, himself was raised in an Irish middle-class home in Studs’s Chicago neighborhood. The author believed that only his critical instinct and his intellectual curiosity had saved him from Studs’s fate. He was lucky enough to have had good teachers, who encouraged him in his writing and wide reading, strengthened his self-confidence, and opened the shutters wide for the literary and intellectual worlds that lay beyond. Studs never had such teachers, such leaders, who could have responded to his wants and needs, protected and bolstered his self-esteem, taught him some skills, and encouraged him to self-fulfillment. In leaving Studs as a youth of suppressed conscience unable to rise to moral consciousness and hence unequipped to move on to political or some other collective action, Farrell personified the masses of Americans imprisoned in enclaves of self-doubt, self-hate, and self-destruction.

The fictional Studs Lonigan of Chicago would never have met the fictional Bigger Thomas of Chicago, except perhaps during the real-life race riot of 1919, which began when a black youth at a segregated beach stepped into “white waters” and ended with the deaths of twenty-two blacks and fourteen whites. Studs and his gang were there. “The streets were like avenues of the dead. They only caught a ten-year-old Negro boy. They took his clothes off, and burned them. They burned his tail with lighted matches, made him step on lighted matches, urinated on him, sent him off running naked with a couple of slaps in the face.” Bigger Thomas might have been there, momentarily freed from his cage. He lives with his mother, brother, and sister in a squalid one-room apartment in Chicago’s black belt. Unlike the Joads, the Thomases do not even begin as a prideful family; they taunt and nag and torment one another. Bigger is locked in a cage of unemployment, ignorance, petty criminality, fearful hatred of whites and even blacks. He knows that the moment he becomes fully conscious of what his life means, he will kill himself or someone else. In the apartment he encounters a rat, also trapped, and explodes. “Bigger took a shoe and pounded the rat’s head, crushing it, cursing hysterically: ‘You sonofabitch!’”

Later Bigger does kill two persons—a young white woman without meaning to, his girlfriend Bessie meaning to. His criminality liberates him: “He had murdered and had created a new life for himself. It was something that was all his own, and it was the first time in his life he had had anything that others could not take from him.” Filled with elation, he is transformed from a victim of his environment into an existential actor: “Never had he had the chance to live out the consequences of his actions; never had his will been so free as in this night and day of fear and murder and flight.” When Boris Max, his communist lawyer, a kindly white whom Bigger trusts, offers the judge an impassioned plea that Bigger’s crimes are the result of circumstances, that “we must deal here with a dislocation of life involving millions of people,” Bigger resists this view of him. Max’s argument robs him of his freedom, his individuality. And so when Bigger, in his cell—his final cage—hours away from execution and longing more than ever to talk with Max, insists passionately upon his responsibility, Max’s eyes fill with terror as he gropes for his hat “like a blind man,” uncomprehending that for Bigger:

“What I killed for, I am! … What I killed for must’ve been good! … I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.”

The creator of Native Son’s Bigger Thomas, Richard Wright, had grown up in the South and then in Chicago, “ringed by walls,” as he later put it. “Tension would set in at the mere mention of whites,” he remembered. “It was as though I was continuously reacting to the threat of some natural force whose hostile behavior could not be predicted,” as though he had been the “victim of a thousand lynchings.” But, unlike Studs and Bigger, he found a way out—reading. Resorting to a ruse to borrow books from a whites-only library, he began with Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces. It startled him. “What was this?” he wondered. “Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words.” Then perhaps he too could use words as weapons. But he could not wholly break out of his own cage. By the late 1930s, Daniel Aaron speculated, Wright was leading a double intellectual life: the black Marxist who sought to bring “scattered but kindred peoples into a whole” and the private man, the novelist who idealized the isolated, existential individual.

Many of the authors and artists of the 1930s were trying to bring scattered but kindred peoples together, striving to release them from their separate cages and to raise them to an individual and collective consciousness they had never known, hoping to complete the task of psychological and political mobilization that the New Dealers had started but not finished. It was altogether fitting that one of their most articulate creations was a man who never said a word, never even appeared in a book or on a stage. By 1935 the Group, an experiment in collective theater, had scored some striking successes by importing the Stanislavsky method, which taught actors to inhabit their characters, and by insisting that “the blood and bones of a living stage must be the blood and bones of the actuality around us.” In January 1935, amid many doubts, the Group put on Waiting for Lefty by a rather untried playwright, Clifford Odets.

A somewhat simplistic play, like all agitprop, about a taxi strike, Waiting for Lefty dramatized a drivers’ meeting, with the entire theater serving as a union hall and the audience as union members. As the tension and oratory mounted, the first-night audience took on the call for “STRIKE!” with such fervor that the actors stood frozen on the stage, gaping at the cheering, stamping mass. “STRIKE! STRIKE!” But strike for what? Against what? The audience did not seem to know or care. Liberated, it felt unencumbered by the need to act or even choose. How had Odets achieved this magic that night after night brought suburban matrons and Wall Street tycoons to stamp their feet and shake their fists?

In part by never producing Lefty. For Lefty was dead.

PART II

Strategies of Freedom

CHAPTER 4

Freedom Under Siege

IN APRIL 1939 THE “winds of war” were swiftly enveloping Europe. With decisive help from Hitler and Mussolini, General Francisco Franco had just clamped his grip on all of Spain. The Nazis had completed their occupation of Czechoslovakia and were now turning to the conquest of Poland. Mussolini had sent troops into helpless little Albania as a springboard against Yugoslavia and Greece. Franklin D. Roosevelt, like the other leaders of Western democracies, had stood by impotent while the aggressors moved from attack to attack. But if Roosevelt could not act, he could at least talk. On April 14, 1939, he sent an appeal personally to Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of the German Reich. A similar message went to Premier Benito Mussolini.

“You realize, I am sure,” the President began, “that throughout the world hundreds of millions of human beings are living today in constant fear of a new war or even a series of wars.” Three nations in Europe, one in Africa, and vast territory of another in the Far East—he did not identify these nations—had had their independence crushed or had been occupied. Then Roosevelt came to the point.

“You have repeatedly asserted that you and the German people have no desire for war. If this is true there need be no war.…” Could Roosevelt, as “a friendly intermediary,” have a frank statement as to the Führer’s intentions—a statement that he could pass on to other nations?

“Are you willing to give assurance that your armed forces will not attack or invade the territory or possessions of the following independent nations: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and Ireland, France, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Russia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Iraq, the Arabias, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Iran.” If the President received such assurance, which would have to cover the next ten years at least, the United States “would be prepared to take part in discussions looking toward the most practical manner of opening up avenues of international trade to the end that every Nation of the earth may be enabled to buy and sell on equal terms in the world market as well as to possess assurance of obtaining the materials and products of peaceful economic life.”

In Hitler’s Chancellery and Mussolini’s Palazzo Venezia, men stared at this message with amusement and incredulity. Hermann Göring said that Roosevelt must be “suffering from an incipient mental disease,” and Mussolini thought the message a result of the illness that had crippled him. At first disdaining to respond to so “contemptible a creature” as the “present President of the United States,” Hitler then saw a superb opportunity to dish this hypocritical moralist of the West. First he demanded—and received—from the nations Roosevelt listed assurances that they did not feel threatened by Germany. When little Latvia sent an obscure reply, the German minister in Riga was instructed to inform Latvia that unless a clear negative was received, its leaders would be considered accomplices of Roosevelt; Latvia quickly complied. Next Hitler summoned his puppet Reichstag to meet in the Kroll Opera House for a direct response to Roosevelt. Sitting through the two-hour harangue, CBS correspondent William Shirer judged it probably the most brilliant he had heard Hitler give, for “sheer eloquence, craftiness, irony, sarcasm and hypocrisy.”

While Göring in the President’s chair grimaced and snickered, Hitler ticked off the “threatened” nations one by one and announced their negative responses. Ireland had more to fear from English aggression than German. The deputies roared when the Führer assured Roosevelt that he did not plan an attack on the United States either. He castigated the President for talking about conferences when the United States had not joined “the greatest conference of all time,” the League of Nations. Roosevelt, he said, had spoken of the general fear of war, but Germany had had nothing to do with the “fourteen wars” that had been waged since 1919, or with the twenty-six “violent interventions” since that year, of which the United States had committed six. Germany respected the Monroe Doctrine and did not interfere in Central or South America; why should the United States meddle in Europe? Roosevelt talked about disarmament—but Germany had for all time learned her lesson since appearing unarmed at the Versailles conference table and being “subjected to even greater degradations than can ever have been inflicted on the chieftains of Sioux tribes.” Mocking laughter swept through the old opera house as the Führer scored his points.

Then Hitler came to his peroration:

“Mr. Roosevelt! I fully understand that the vastness of your nation and the immense wealth of your country allow you to feel responsible for the history of the whole world and for the history of all nations. I, sir, am placed in a much more modest and smaller sphere.…” He had sought only to serve the German people.

“I have conquered chaos in Germany, re-established order and enormously increased production in all branches of our national economy.” Boasting of finding useful work for “the whole of 7,000,000 unemployed,” doubtless as a contrast with Roosevelt’s partial success at recovery, he went on: “Not only have I reunited the German people politically, but I have also re-armed them” and destroyed “sheet by sheet” the Versailles treaty containing the “vilest oppression” in history. “I have brought back to the Reich provinces stolen from us in 1919; I have led back to their native country millions of Germans who were torn away from us and were in misery; I have re-established the historic unity of German living space and, Mr. Roosevelt, I have endeavored to attain all this without spilling blood.…

“You, Mr. Roosevelt, have a much easier task in comparison. You became President of the United States in 1933 when I became Chancellor of the Reich.” Roosevelt headed “one of the largest and wealthiest States in the world.” His own world, the Führer concluded, was much smaller but “more precious than anything else,” for it comprised his own people.

This masterpiece of defense and demagoguery, which the Nazis arranged to be fully publicized in the United States and elsewhere, was greeted by Roosevelt’s enemies at home as a deserved put-down for his naïve and provocative meddling. “Hitler had all the better of the argument,” said the isolationist Senator Hiram Johnson. “Roosevelt put his chin out and got a resounding whack.” While neither the President nor Hull had been optimistic about the outcome, in his first widely publicized encounter with Hitler, Roosevelt had come off a clear second best.

But Hitler’s speech was far more than a collection of debater’s points, far more than a tissue of lies about Hitler’s pacific policies; ominously—by two omissions—it presaged the future. The first was Hitler’s crafty skimming over Poland in his list of nations he was not threatening. The other was the absence of his usual diatribe against Russia. Like most observers, Roosevelt was hardly aware of the omission. Within four months, on the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact, he would understand. He would also understand that, as the leader of a constitutional democracy, he was challenged not by Hitler alone but by Stalin as well—by two dictators who could move with speed, decision, and power, unrestrained by the peoples they led.

Once upon a time Hitler had been more friendly. “I have sympathy with President Roosevelt,” the Führer had said in mid-1933, “because he marches straight to his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.” Hitler was describing the FDR of the Hundred Days; he could hardly have been more wrong about the real Roosevelt, who rather than marching straight to his goals, almost invariably skirmished, sidestepped, retreated, feinted, parried, danced and pirouetted as he picked his way through the minefields toward his goal of security and survival.

The Zigzag Road to War

In heritage and upbringing Franklin Roosevelt was internationalist to the bone. Some of his forebears had been world travelers who traded and invested in Asian and South American enterprises. First taken to Europe at the age of three, during the 1890s he stayed almost every year in France, England, and Germany for a few months. During these years, European governesses at Hyde Park tutored him in French and German, which he would retain workably if not fluently for the rest of his life. Weekly the Illustrated London News brought news and pictures of the top-hatted statesmen in London and the other capitals, of the glamorous social doings in the cosmopolitan worlds of spas and fox hunts and society balls.

The years at Groton and Harvard broadened young Roosevelt’s world-view. He debated international issues—naval expansion, or the Boer War, or Hawaiian or Philippine self-rule—with his fellows; he gloried in the Cuban exploits of Cousin Ted, who brought his robust activism to Groton, where he spoke to the boys; he fully supported the Square Deal President’s foreign policy, whether pacific or belligerent. Lodged in the Wilson Administration in the spring of 1913, less than a year and a half before war broke out in Europe, he was at times more the Wilsonian internationalist than Wilson himself. Later in the 1920s the onetime big-navy man, still an internationalist, not only supported the five-power Washington Treaty for naval reduction but berated Coolidge for wishing to rebuild the Navy on “an enormous scale.”

During the late 1920s, however, FDR’s internationalism waned—in part a political response to the defeat he and Cox had suffered in 1920 on the League of Nations issue, partly an acquiescence in the decade’s reaction against the idealism and utopianism of Wilsonian days, but altogether a reflection of FDR’s rising presidential ambitions. His switch on the League issue was only the most evident example of his general shift to a more nationalist position.

Still, the electorate had long been accustomed to candidates’ opportunism as they faced the ordeal of running for President. The test of Roosevelt’s basic beliefs would come when he exercised the considerable powers of the presidency. The Hundred Days proved his drive and sense of direction in domestic policy. Could he lead in foreign policy making too? His recognition of the Soviet Union demonstrated some boldness, at least, and his intervention in the London economic conference was at least a decisive act, whatever its nationalist impact.

But the mid-1930s were a tough time for any kind of internationalist leadership as Americans retreated to their psychological storm cellars in the face of trouble abroad. Since public-opinion polling was still in its infancy, and other indicators were partial and impressionistic, we do not have wholly reliable guides to opinion during the mid-1930s, but one poll result in February 1937 was so emphatic as not to be doubted. Asked if another war like World War I came in Europe, “should America take part again?” 95 percent of the sample answered “No!” The next month the same percentage favored “doing everything possible to keep us out of foreign wars,” as against doing “everything possible to prevent war between foreign countries, even if it means threatening to fight countries which start wars.”

Behind this emphatic affirmation of isolationism lay a fluid, negative, uninformed public opinion that provided an unstable foundation for a consistent and coherent foreign policy. In this broth lay hard lumps of isolationist feeling, composed largely of millions of Americans in the more rural, insular areas of the nation and other millions of Americans of German, Irish, and Italian descent hostile to Britain, and still more millions of persons who were prisoners of ancient fears and shibboleths—that wily foreign diplomats always played Uncle Sam for a sucker, that the nation had never lost a war or won a peace conference, that salvation lay in keeping free of permanent alliances, just as George Washington had urged.

Besides needing to gauge the currents of public opinion and public ignorance, the President had to assess political forces in other lands. The thrust of the Nazi ideology, the balance of power in the French Chamber of Deputies, the foreign policy attitudes of British labor, the paranoia and lethal struggles within the Kremlin, the fortunes of Chinese warlords, nationalistic strivings in southern Asia, were all elements in the equation of world power. Reading long letters from his ambassadors, lunching with foreign envoys, quizzing his unofficial agents who had just seen Göring or Mussolini or a Chinese or Japanese diplomat, leafing through thick State Department studies, Roosevelt had to make judgments from day to day on mighty imponderables imperfectly understood. No wonder that he moved warily on the darkling terrain of foreign policy.

“In the present European situation I feel very much as if I were groping for a door in a blank wall,” he wrote a friend early in 1934. “The situation may get better and enable us to give some leadership.”

Leadership? That was precisely what FDR’s critics, both interventionists and isolationists, felt he was not providing during the years when action by an American President might make the difference. Others were providing their own kind of leadership—the isolationist bloc in the Senate headed by men like William Borah and Burton Wheeler; out in the country, the increasingly rabid “America Firsters” glued to the radio for the sermons of Father Coughlin, who could be depended on to berate the red devils, foreign and domestic; pacifists led by such prestigious figures as Norman Thomas; belligerently isolationist press lords such as Hearst and McCormick. But the President had to deal with problems of ways and means they could hardly imagine or did not care to. In Washington he confronted a Congress deeply divided over the mechanics of neutrality but leaning sharply toward isolationism; a Democratic party leadership internationalist by heritage but fragmented in region and ethnicity; and even a divided set of advisers ranging from the internationalists in the State Department like Hull, William Phillips, and Sumner Welles to moderate unilateralists like Moley and Ickes, and an economic nationalist, George N. Peek, a “foreign trade adviser” until the implacable Hull forced him out.

The President’s responsibility transcended all these partial views and interests. Somehow he had to speak for the American people as a whole, to take a “reasonable” and representative stance in foreign relations however erratic or mystifying at times, to avoid the “veto traps” set for him on the Hill and even in his own Administration, and above all to win national—presidential and congressional—elections. And he had to do all this amid intellectual confusion. He and his adversaries at home had a common goal—national security. But whether this goal could be achieved through collective efforts with allies abroad or by the unilateral efforts of a Fortress America was a biting issue.

Each side was fragmented in turn by internal quarrels. Even the terms of discourse were clouded; some “isolationists” did not wish at all to isolate the nation from certain parts of the world, notably the Far East; some “internationalists” had little interest in certain parts of the world, notably the Far East. As to Latin America, almost all sides backed the Monroe Doctrine in some form. Isolationists were selectively unilateralist, wary of international commitments. “They did not oppose all American activity abroad,” according to Wayne S. Cole, “but they wanted to leave Americans free to determine for themselves when, where, how, and whether the United States should involve itself abroad. They did not want to be bound by prior commitments in alliances or international organizations.”

If in heritage Roosevelt was an internationalist, at heart he was an interventionist, as instinctively activist in redressing problems abroad as in helping people at home. Moreover, he was worried about the weaknesses of democratic leadership, as in the French parliamentary system; addressing the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, he asserted roundly that “the blame for the danger to world peace lies not in the world population but in the political leaders of that population.” Yet his own leadership during these critical months responded far more to the isolationist pressures in the electorate than to his activist, worldly instincts. Whatever his deeper feelings—and these were obscure to biographers even decades later—he strengthened the isolationist cause by virtually joining it. Any President during this period, given the confused state of public opinion and political combat, would have had to pick his way cautiously through the foreign policy maze of the mid-thirties. But Roosevelt appeared to mirror the general confusion and division rather than to transcend it.

The Senate investigation of the munitions industry, an egregious case in point, was one of the best planned, most spectacular, most effective antiwar efforts during the thirties. In the white marble caucus room of the Senate Office Building, flanking the stern young chairman, Gerald P. Nye, Republican populist from North Dakota, sat other stalwarts of American isolationism, including Republican Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan and Democrat Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri. The mission of the committee was beyond reproach: to expose the evil machinations of arms makers in fomenting strife and to “take the profits out of war.” The villains in the drama were delectably evil: Du Ponts, Morgan partners, and other bloodsucking “merchants of death” who day after day confessed their sins. The heroine was an ethereal figure called Peace. Crowded into the big room was the chorus, muttering with indignation as the sordid story unfolded. Intensively covered and dramatized by the press, the committee dominated headlines for months.

Roosevelt was no innocent bystander. He had publicly urged the Senate to appoint such a committee; he gave the committee full access to executive papers that disclosed the skulduggery of bankers and diplomats; he endorsed Nye’s drastic proposals to curb arms makers’ profits. Hull was deeply disturbed by the Administration’s cooperativeness with the committee. The President—and the Secretary of Slate too, he admitted to himself—were marking time, unwilling to stand against the isolationist wave until it abated. Indeed, Hull himself had offered to supply information to the investigators.

The President’s volatile stand on neutrality legislation was an even more significant sign of his—and his nation’s—uncertainty over the effective response to international aggression. Probably at no other time in his presidency did FDR confront such a tangle of perplexities, both moral and operational, as in the struggle over neutrality.

The key issue was not neutrality in itself—almost all Americans favored it, or said they did—but how much discretion the President should have in cutting off arms and other supplies to nations at war. Paradoxically the Supreme Court was recognizing at this time, in the Curliss-Wright case, the “very delicate, plenary and exclusive power” of the President “as the sole organ of the Federal government in the field of international relations.” So it was not formal authority that the Chief of State lacked, but a leadership strategy to cope with his adversaries at home and abroad. He had had great luck with the mandatory 1935 act that required him to ban arms both to Italy and to Ethiopia, thus potentially hurting Italy, with its need for modern arms, far more than Ethiopia. For months thereafter his foreign policy consisted essentially of juggling as he faced the isolationist opposition in the Senate with its special weapon of the filibuster, his own advisers with their varied counsels, the often irresolute democracies, the all too resolute pacifist and isolationist groups at home, unpredictable “enemy” nations abroad, and the shifting fortunes of diplomacy and war. So uncertain was the President over fundamental strategy that during an early phase of congressional debate over neutrality measures he changed his mind on important issues, according to Robert Dallek’s analysis, no less than four times within a short period. And his luck ran out in Spain, where the mandatory law—and the vociferous feelings of many Catholic leaders—made it impossible for him to help the beleaguered Republican armies, increasingly dominated by communists, against Franco’s attacks.

No other American could have juggled more skillfully than did Roosevelt, but juggling was not enough. Some urged him to apply the magic touch of the first and second Hundred Days, but the President had run out of magic, especially following the domestic political setbacks early in his second term. Since no one abroad appeared able to supply effective leadership, he told reporters in midsummer 1937, people were looking for someone outside Europe “to come forward with a hat and a rabbit in it.” Well, the President went on, “I haven’t got a hat and I haven’t got a rabbit in it.”

Others called on the President to educate the public on the gravity of the situation abroad and the measures necessary to deal with it. But the best way to educate is to exert strong leadership in speech and action on foreign policy—something Roosevelt had found virtually impossible during his first term, and prospects for leadership appeared little improved in the first year of his second term. Early in October 1937, in a major speech in Chicago, he proclaimed that the “peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality,” and he called for a quarantine of lawbreaking nations similar to quarantine against the spread of disease. Although the President was vague about the kind of quarantine, the need for collective action, and other specifics, his speech set off an uproar. The AFL resolved against involvement in foreign wars. Isolationist congressmen threatened FDR with impeachment. And few in the Democratic party or even in his Administration backed up the President, except for ardent interventionists.

“It’s a terrible thing,” he said later to Sam Rosenman, “to look over your shoulder when you are trying to lead—and to find no one there.” The President quickly pulled back—too quickly, according to some critics, for he appeared to have harbored undue expectations about the public response, then to have been disappointed by the mixed reaction, and then to have overreacted to that reaction.

And so Roosevelt marched forward two paces, retreated one, and sidestepped, meantime indulging in moral rhetoric and vague threats that unduly raised his followers’ expectations while markedly inflaming his isolationist opposition. It was not Roosevelt but Hitler who “marched straight to his objective” over political opposition at home and his divided adversaries in Europe. The Führer’s power, even within Germany, was by no means absolute; he too had to overcome foot-dragging and resistance in the state bureaucracy, in the Army, and in the party; sometimes he too had to pause or even retreat. But he found that audacious and aggressive acts abroad expanded his power base, while reducing his foes to sputtering indignation and rhetorical protest.

March 7, 1936—Hitler thrust his troops into the Rhineland, against the advice of some of his generals. France hesitated, Britain equivocated, the League declared Germany guilty of breaching the Versailles treaty. No one acted. Though deeply disturbed, Roosevelt did nothing and said nothing. Later Hitler admitted that if the French had marched into the Rhineland, he and his troops would have had to withdraw “with our tails between our legs.”

November 6, 1937—Hitler with Mussolini and the Japanese leaders proclaimed the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Anti-Comintern Pact. The Japanese smashed deeper into China. The democracies remained united in rhetoric, divided over action.

March 12, 1938—German troops and tanks swept across the Austrian border to be greeted by cheering crowds. Roosevelt was privately concerned, publicly silent.

September 12, 1938—Before a frenzied crowd at Nuremberg, Hitler demanded “justice” for Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia. Roosevelt appealed to all parties for peace, avoided replying to a plea from President Eduard Beneš of Czechoslovakia that he urge Britain and France not to desert Prague, and declined to permit Chamberlain to broadcast a message directly to the American people. Mobilizing his troops and threatening war, bullying his adversaries through diplomatic notes and face to face, Hitler pressured Chamberlain, the French, and even the Czechs into granting him the Sudeten districts and the fortifications that lay within them. Suddenly the old city of Munich, site of the decisive conference, became a symbol of appeasement. While the President could not say with Winston Churchill, “We have sustained a total, unmitigated defeat,” he was now profoundly pessimistic about the chances for peace in Europe.

The Ides of March 1939—Skillfully wielding diplomacy, threat, and subversion, Hitler seized the rump of Bohemia and put Moravia under Nazi “protection.” Hungary, snatching at the bone tossed by the Führer, gobbled up Ruthenia. “Never in my life,” FDR wrote a friend, “have I seen things moving in the world with more cross currents or with greater velocity.” In early April, Mussolini invaded Albania, and a week later the President sent the appeal to which the Führer replied so mockingly before the jeering Reichstag deputies.

The President now redoubled his efforts to obtain repeal of the arms embargo from the Senate. Repeal was the best way to deter Hitler, he argued, and to safeguard national security in the event of war. The Senate isolationists were more stubborn than ever. Roosevelt tried to encourage Chairman Pittman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to push repeal through by agreeing to boost the price for domestic silver; having been properly bribed, Pittman still could not deliver a solid majority from his committee. At a meeting in the President’s study in mid-July 1939, Senate leaders sat, drinks in hand, while FDR pressed his case. Finally Borah spoke up.

“There’s not going to be any war this year,” he said. “All this hysteria is manufactured and artificial.”

“I wish the Senator would come down to my office and read the cables,” Hull said. Borah waved him quiet.

“I have sources of information in Europe that I regard as more reliable than those of the State Department.” Hull almost burst into tears; Roosevelt was silent; then Vice President Garner polled the senators on repeal. Then he turned to the President. “Well, Captain,” he said, “we may as well face the facts. You haven’t got the votes; and that’s all there is to it.”

Roosevelt could not be so unruffled. He warned House leaders that Germany and Italy had at least a fifty-fifty chance of winning a war, after which they would threaten Latin America. Soon, he predicted, we would find ourselves surrounded by hostile states in this hemisphere. Further, the Japanese, who “always like to play with the big boys,” would probably go into a hard-and-fast alliance with the Germans and Italians. If the United States resisted this threat, the three Axis states would be tempted “to try another quick war with us.”

The President was not so prescient, however, about the likely effect on Hitler of a repeal of the arms embargo. To the Führer this would have been but a pinprick among the momentous events in the making in Europe. Stalin, after having been excluded from the Western decision to sacrifice Czechoslovakia, suspected that Munich was a Western plot to divert Hitler to the east. He could play that game too; he might divert Hitler to the west and let the fascists and capitalists fight it out. Cautious feelers between Moscow and Berlin about enlarging trade led to political discussions, then to the decision that the fierce ideological war between the two countries could be suspended for the sake of Realpolitik. Stalin dropped Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, the apostle of collective security with the West, in favor of Vyacheslav Molotov, a hard-liner.

Years later, at Yalta, Stalin would tell Churchill that decisive action by the Allies would have headed off Moscow’s turn to Berlin. But the Allies did not act; they diddled, fearful of the price that Stalin might exact for collaboration. Then came the last two scenes of the prewar drama:

August 23, 1939—In the Kremlin, Molotov and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop sealed the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact. During the evening festivities that followed, Stalin drank to Hitler’s health, saying, “I know how much the German nation loves its Führer.” The new era in German-Russian relations was repeatedly and royally toasted. On hearing the catastrophic news Roosevelt sent Hitler a last despairing plea for peace. Hitler replied with action, not words.

September 1, 1939—Germany fell on Poland from the west; Russia invaded from the east over two weeks later. Britain and France indicated that they would live up to their treaty obligations to Poland.

September 3, 1939—Britain and France declared war on Germany. In New York, amid crushed communist and left-wing illusions about the Popular Front, the English poet W. H. Auden wrote:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-Second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

In London, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy cried out, his voice choking: “It’s the end of the world … the end of everything.”

For Franklin Roosevelt, the coming of war in Europe was not the end of everything but the opening of new opportunities. At last Americans had to stop speculating about the possibility of war in Europe and start facing the reality of it. Congress did so by decisively repealing the arms embargo and authorizing “cash and carry” exports to warring powers—but only after the Administration conducted a massive propaganda effort on and off the Hill, and with the provision that American merchant ships must not enter combat zones. The noninterventionists, dreading the prospect of Americans being hornswoggled into a second world war, conducted their own campaign. Spearheaded by Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, and Borah & Co., a national radio campaign clogged congressional offices with a deluge of mail—a million letters, telegrams, and postcards, it was estimated. Roosevelt once again promised that he would be guided by “one single hard-headed thought—keeping America out of this war.”

By the time Congress passed the measure, at the end of October 1939, German and Soviet troops had overrun Poland and divided the spoils of war. There followed a curious and dispiriting period for the President. It was so quiet on the western front that people began to talk about the “Phony War.” One front was not quiet. Late in the fall Stalin’s troops and planes attacked Finland to bolster the northern defenses of the Soviet Union. Angry at “this dreadful rape of Finland,” the President could find no way to help Helsinki, in part because he feared taking action that would push the Soviets closer to Berlin and farther from London and Paris. After a heroic three-month resistance Finland yielded territory and made other concessions.

Most irksome of all was Washington’s relationship with London itself. For some years Roosevelt and Chamberlain had had an icy contempt for each other—the Prime Minister viewing FDR as something of a dilettante overly given to personal diplomacy and overly fearful of his own electorate, Roosevelt seeing the British leader as rigid toward his American friends and conciliatory to his Nazi enemies. That each government had long suspected the other was seeking to advance its economic interests at the expense of its ally incidentally provided ammunition in each country to leftists who contended that both bourgeois governments were far more interested in protecting capitalism than in thwarting fascism.

For London “cash and carry” turned out to be a considerable disappointment; by taking American ships off the seas it helped the German blockade. To tighten their blockade of Germany the British searched American ships and violated American “neutrality zones,” arousing folk memories of historic encounters with Britain on the high seas. The President told his friend Winston Churchill, who had become First Lord of the Admiralty at war’s outbreak, “I would not be frank unless I told you that there has been much public criticism here.”

By early spring of 1940 the President was caught in a strategic stalemate abroad and a political bind at home. He had based his policy of “all aid short of war” so conspicuously on the supreme goal of keeping the nation out of war that any move on his part to help the allies beyond “cash and carry” brought down the wrath of isolationists. At home he faced a presidential election amid rising pressure from Administration Democrats— and from within himself—to be a candidate. But he could defy with no more impunity the tradition barring a third term than he could defy the almost hysterical popular fear of being sucked into another European war. “The country as a whole does not yet have any deep sense of world crisis,” he had written at the start of the year. Only a great crisis could resolve his strategic and political impasse. It came on April 9, 1940.

At dawn German infantry struck across the naked Danish border. Soon Hitler’s troops were disgorging from destroyers, barges, and troopships along the Norwegian coast. “Today we can have no illusions,” Roosevelt warned a few days later in a Pan American Day address. Nor, it soon developed, could there be any illusions about Britain’s capacity even to protect neighboring countries on the North Sea. The Nazis had laid their plans with thoroughness and imagination; the British response was improvised, ill planned, and inadequate. Amid bitter criticism Chamberlain prepared to resign; Churchill would shortly lake his place. Then, on May 10, Hitler struck again.

At dawn a sheet of German fire and steel swept across the Dutch and Belgian frontiers. As siren-screaming dive bombers roared down through the spring air and parachutists seized airfields, 120 divisions of German assault troops poised for battle. And somewhere behind this stupendous power was the demoniac genius Hitler, proclaiming that the battle would “decide the destiny of the German people for a thousand years.” A half-million Allied troops moved up behind the Belgian troops. Then, advancing with shocking speed, German tanks and motorized troops cut around the Allied flanks in great encircling sweeps and converted Belgium into a vast trap for the defenders. Within five days German tanks burst through the ill-defended Ardennes hills and began their lightning dash across northern France.

“The scene has darkened swiftly,” Churchill cabled Roosevelt on May 15. “The small countries are simply smashed up, one by one, like matchwood.” He knew that Mussolini would hurry in to share the loot. “We expect to be attacked here ourselves.” The next few days brought news of disaster after disaster. Pouring through the Ardennes gap, German armor curved west toward the Channel, pinning masses of French and British troops against the sea. Soon Roosevelt was receiving desperate appeals for military aid from British and French leaders to prevent what Churchill called a “Nazified Europe.” As France neared collapse, Premier Paul Reynaud in a last, desperate appeal asked Roosevelt to intervene with force, or at least the threat of force. Otherwise France would “go under like a drowning man.”

Never in his whole political career did Roosevelt face a harsher test of his leadership under crisis conditions than in those spring days of 1940. He took the British and French warnings with the utmost seriousness, including the threat that the French fleet probably, and the British fleet possibly, would fall into Hitler’s hands if the two allies went under. But at home he still faced a Congress more skittish than ever about sending modern arms from America’s arsenal across the Atlantic; when David I. Walsh, chairman of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, discovered that twenty new motor torpedo boats were to be sent to Britain, the Massachusetts senator went into a towering rage and threatened to force legislation prohibiting the sale of anything. To be sure, public opinion surged toward support of the democracies after Britain evacuated its troops from Dunkirk, but it was still afflicted by the fateful reservation—all aid short of war. About two-thirds of those polled favored aid, but nearly two-thirds considered it more important for America to stay out of war than to aid Britain at the risk of war. And the isolationists were still in full cry, though there were some defections in the ranks after the fall of France.

All this—and a presidential election campaign ahead. Somehow during these feverish days the President had time and energy to follow the fights over state delegations to the Democratic convention, to enjoy victories scored by Roosevelt slates in Texas, California, and elsewhere, to watch the spirited preconvention Republican race among Senators Robert Taft and Arthur Vandenberg, young Tom Dewey, and a political newcomer, utility tycoon Wendell Willkie. The anti-third-term bugaboo was still the unmeasurable factor in FDR’s own candidacy. He was so closemouthed about his plans that correspondents and cartoonists pictured him as the Sphinx.

But at the very least FDR would take no step that committed him to run—or not run—for President. His success on this score was marked. Even more, he took certain measures that would help him if he did decide to run. One was to assume a bipartisan stance. Another, a piece of pure Machiavellianism, was to enlarge the field of candidates and thereby diffuse the potential opposition within the Democracy. Unlike a dictator, who clings to his leadership position by excluding and perhaps killing rivals, the President welcomed them and even put a large bee in their bonnet, when none might have existed, by playing up their presidential qualifications. Hull, Hopkins, and others far less known received the “treatment.” Experienced enough to know they were receiving it, these men nevertheless could not leave the White House without hopes a tiny bit enhanced.

During the “hundred days” from mid-June to mid-October—one of the epochal turning points of world history—Americans were engulfed in a turbulent flow of events:

June 10—Italy declared war on France. “The hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor,” declared the President in a Charlottesville speech.

June 17—The French government, now headed by Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, asked Germany for armistice terms.

June 20—FDR consternated the GOP by appointing two Republicans to his cabinet—the former Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson as the new Secretary of War and Chicago publisher Frank Knox as Navy Secretary.

June 28—The Republicans convened in Philadelphia to choose a candidate for President. In a four-way race, Vandenberg was far behind at the starting gate, Dewey began strongly and then faded, Willkie started weakly and gained steadily in the next five ballots, and he and Taft made it a two-man race before Willkie, amid wild enthusiasm and chanting galleries, swept to a majority.

July 3—The British destroyed or immobilized major units of the French fleet anchored at Oran, Algeria.

July 7—Pressed as to his plans by Farley on the eve of the Democratic convention, Roosevelt said that he did not want to run but, “Jim, if nominated and elected, I could not in these times refuse to take the inaugural oath, even if I knew I would be dead within thirty days.” Next day, Farley left for the convention determined that FDR would not receive an unopposed draft.

July 16—Barkley read to the Democrats assembled in Chicago a message from FDR asserting that he had absolutely no desire to run again for President and that delegates were free to vote for whomever they wished. During the stunned silence that followed, a single thunderous voice burst out of the loudspeakers, braying “WE. WANT ROOSEVELT!” As a potbellied little man in the basement pressed his lips to the microphone and repeated his call, delegates and spectators took up the cry. “ROOSEVELT, ROOSEVELT, ROOSEVELT.” The results of the first and only ballot the next day: Farley 72, Garner 61, Tydings 9, Hull 5, FDR 946. Roosevelt’s choice of the progressive Henry Wallace for Vice President so upset the party leadership that Eleanor Roosevelt and others were recruited to placate the delegates.

August 8—German bombers opened a massive offensive against the British industrial heartland. During the sixteen-week Battle of Britain the defenders destroyed 1,700 German aircraft, while the Royal Air Force lost 915 fighters.

September 5—As the Battle of Britain roared toward a climax and after weeks of negotiation, Roosevelt and Churchill concluded the “destroyer deal.” Informed by Churchill in midsummer that “the whole fate of the war” might be decided by the dispatch of fifty or sixty old destroyers and that “in the long history of the world, this is a thing to do now,” Roosevelt had held off for fear of congressional reaction. It was only after the pro-British, Manhattan-based Century Group and others urged an exchange of destroyers for British concession of key possessions in the Western Hemisphere, and on the understanding that Willkie would not oppose the deal, that the President agreed to the swap by executive order. His “horse trade,” under which the United States received ninety-nine-year leases on naval and air bases from Newfoundland to British Guiana, was well received by Congress and public.

October 12—Chastened by British resistance in his hopes for a cross-Channel invasion of England, Hitler finally called off the project. His thoughts turned east.

October 16—Following congressional passage of the Selective Service Act in mid-September, Roosevelt took symbolic as well as actual leadership of the muster, speaking movingly to the nation about its significance and presiding magisterially at the first drawing from the goldfish bowl.

The President had worried about pressing for the draft in the middle of a reelection campaign. After taking a moderately interventionist line early in his campaign, to the approbation of eastern internationalists like Walter Lippmann, Henry Luce, and Dorothy Thompson, Willkie suddenly switched toward isolationism when he found his early strength dwindling. His new position lost him Lippmann’s and Thompson’s backing but brought him into “a temporary alliance with people for whom he had contempt,” according to a biographer, “including such isolationist stalwarts” as Hamilton Fish, Lindbergh, and McCormick. It also helped win him an endorsement from John L. Lewis, who had turned bitterly against FDR. Willkie’s new line appeared to boost him in the presidential polls.

While Ickes and other activists agonized, the President stuck to the appearance of nonpartisanship until late in October. Then he attacked. Few commanders have sized up the terrain more shrewdly, rallied their restless battalions more boldly, and struck at the enemy’s weak points more tellingly than did FDR during the two-week blitz that he unleashed on October 23. From his declaration that night to a roaring crowd in Philadelphia that “I am an old campaigner and I love a good fight,” to his attack not on Willkie but on the congressional Republicans symbolized by “Ma-a-a-rtin, Ba-a-a-rton, and Fish,” to his rash promise in Boston to the “mothers and fathers of America” that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars,” he stayed on the offensive.

With Lewis, antiwar socialists, and the communists attacking the Administration in a strange partnership, the President noted that there was something “very ominous in this combination that has been forming within the Republican Party between the extreme reactionary and the extreme radical elements of this country.” On election night the President was so worried by the apparent closeness of the contest that he untypically took the early returns alone. But his victory was decisive: 449 electoral votes to 82 for Willkie, and a popular-vote margin of five million. FDR won every city, save one, with a population over 400,000. Labor had stuck with him—including Lewis’s mine workers. Willkie picked up five million more votes than Landon had four years before.

“I’m happy I’ve won, but sorry Wendell lost,” Roosevelt told his son James. The two men quickly buried their campaign hatchets. When Willkie visited the White House after the election, the two men were overheard swapping campaign anecdotes amid great bursts of laughter.

The War of Two Worlds

In front of a bristling artillery piece at the Rheinmetall-Borsig Works of Berlin, Adolf Hitler poured out his wrath on the capitalists of the world, their kept press and political parties. The stakes, he told the assembled workers, were far greater than the fate of one nation. “Two worlds are in conflict, two philosophies of life … Gold versus labor.” One of these worlds would crack up.

Three weeks later, in a fireside chat on the eve of 1941, Roosevelt accepted the gage of battle. Citing Hitler’s remark about “two opposing worlds,” the President said, “In other words, the Axis not only admits but proclaims that there can be no ultimate peace between their philosophy of government and our philosophy of government.” The “Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.”

Wearing his pince-nez and his usual bow tie, the President was sitting in front of a plain desk covered with microphones labeled NBC, CBS, MBS. Around him in the little room crowded a small and mixed company: his mother, Sara, Cordell Hull and other cabinet members, and Clark Gable and his wife, Carole Lombard.

The American appeasers, the President went on, “tell you that the Axis powers are going to win anyway; that all this bloodshed in the world could be saved; that the United States might just as well throw its influence into the scale of a dictated peace, and get the best out of it that we can.

“They call it a ‘negotiated peace.’ Nonsense! Is it a negotiated peace if a gang of outlaws surrounds your community and on threat of extermination makes you pay tribute to save your own skins?” After these bellicose words the President once again renewed his pledge to keep out of war.

“Thinking in terms of today and tomorrow, I make the direct statement to the American people that there is far less chance of the United Slates getting into war, if we do all we can now to support the nations defending themselves against attack by the Axis than if we acquiesce in their defeat, submit tamely to an Axis victory, and wait our turn to be the object of attack in another war later on.” Admittedly, he said, there was risk in any course. But his “sole purpose” was to keep war away from the United States. His listeners could “nail any talk about sending armies to Europe as deliberate untruth.” America, he proclaimed in the grand climax of his talk, “must be the great arsenal of democracy.”

Roosevelt’s talk, by far his most militant response to Hitler’s challenge, sent a thrill of hope across the anti-Nazi world—to Londoners who on that very night were reeling from a stupendous firebombing by the Nazis, to Frenchmen and Dutchmen crouching by their radios, to impatient interventionists at home listening to Roosevelt’s strong, resonant voice by their own firesides. His speech aroused isolationists to a new pitch. More than ever they were convinced that Roosevelt was now plotting to bring the nation into a shooting war.

They did not know their man. It was not Roosevelt’s style or strategy to fashion a grand political and military strategy that in turn would produce a clear-cut decision. Rather, he kept his eye constantly cocked on public opinion, especially as reflected in Congress. It was never clear when he crossed the momentous threshold from viewing “all aid short of war” as a way of keeping out of war to seeing it as a way of winning an inevitable war. More likely he approached the threshold warily, evaded it, skirted around it, and then found himself past it, without having ever decisively stepped over it. Intellectually, he had no secret plan to involve the United States in the war; strategically, he was not a plotter.

But the isolationists in a fundamental sense were more justified in their suspicions than perhaps even they wholly recognized. For the crucial question in these epochal days was not what Roosevelt was secretly thinking. It was what he was publicly doing, whether or not even he realized the full implications of all he was doing. And what he was doing was inextricably linked with its impact on public opinion and Congress and cabinet at home, on the arousal of expectations in London and fears in Berlin and Tokyo, on the forging of a closer alliance between Germany and Japan. And what Roosevelt and Churchill did, how Hitler reacted to it, how Congress and public responded, unleashed further events that ineluctably brought the United States into the war. Thus it can be said in retrospect that the several months beginning with Roosevelt’s reelection in early November—another “hundred days,” as it turned out—marked the start of the country’s intervention in World War II. It was, not in mind but in effect, the Administration’s declaration of war.

That declaration began with the American voters’ decision, by a clear-cut majority, to endorse the more strongly interventionist of the two major-party candidates. Hitler could read election returns. Now he began to take seriously the likelihood of American entrance into the war, even while he underestimated the American military-industrial potential. As a global strategist he saw the interrelationships of national power. If the Russian threat against Germany were removed, he told his generals, “we could wage war on Britain indefinitely. If Russia collapsed, Japan would be greatly relieved; this in turn would mean increased danger to the U.S.A.”

By tying down the United States in the Pacific, the Japanese would draw the Americans away from Europe, making Britain more vulnerable.

Churchill too could read election returns—and his own shipping losses. Early in December he wrote Roosevelt that those losses had been over 400,000 tons in the five weeks ending November 3. “The enemy commands the ports all around the northern and western coasts of France. He is increasingly basing his submarines, flying-boats, and combat planes on these ports.” In his letter—“one of the most important I ever wrote”—he laid out his urgent requests: American aid in keeping the supply routes open to Britain, which would help ensure continued British resistance and would not, Churchill said, provoke Hitler into fighting the United States; Roosevelt’s “good offices” to induce Eire to cooperate on such matters; and above all dollars to help Britain pay for massive supplies of planes, ships, tanks, and other arms.

“I believe you will agree,” Churchill concluded, “that it would be wrong in principle and mutually disadvantageous in effect if at the height of this struggle Great Britain were to be divested of all saleable assets, so that after the victory was won with our blood, civilization saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone.”

Carrying Churchill’s letter, a seaplane splashed down next to the cruiser Tuscaloosa off Antigua, where the President was vacationing in the bright Caribbean sun. He read the letter with a poker face and seemed unmoved, but Hopkins sensed during the next few days “that he was refueling, the way he so often does when he seems to be resting and carefree.… Then, one evening, he suddenly came out with it—the whole program.” The whole program was Lend-Lease—the simple but drastic idea that the United States could send Britain munitions without charge and be repaid, not in dollars, but in kind, after the war was over. The President could not doubt Britain’s financial urgency; word came from Washington that London evidently had less than $2 billion available to pay for $5 billion in orders.

Back home, in press conferences, speeches, his eve-of-1941 fireside chat, and in his inaugural address, the President used the momentum of his election victory to press for massively increased aid to Britain. He wanted to “get rid of the silly, foolish old dollar sign,” he told reporters, and offered an example. “Suppose my neighbor’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire.” Afterward he would ask for no money from his neighbor—only to have his garden hose back. Few challenged Roosevelt’s analogy, save for Senator Robert A. Taft, who said that lending war equipment was like lending chewing gum—you wouldn’t want it back.

Isolationists pounced on the bill as soon as it was introduced into Congress in mid-January. The great debate got off to an acrimonious start when Wheeler called the bill “the New Deal’s triple A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American boy.” Telling the press they could quote him, Roosevelt labeled this remark “the most untruthful, as the most dastardly, unpatriotic thing that has ever been said.” Wheeler, Hamilton Fish, and others pictured the bill as an act of war. It was a bill for the “destruction of the American Republic,” thundered the Chicago Tribune; a bill designed to scuttle American democracy, cried Father Coughlin. Lindbergh urged in congressional hearings that America should concentrate on building up her air power and retire behind continental defenses; he predicted German victory in Europe but denied he favored it. Claiming he was barred from testifying, the blatantly anti-Semitic Gerald L. K. Smith threatened to bring in a petition with two million signatures against the bill. Almost drowned out in the furor were the words of thoughtful critics of the bill such as the historian Charles A. Beard, who warned that the measure would engage the government “officially in the conflicts of Europe and Asia.”

The passage early in March 1941of Lend-Lease by overwhelming majorities—60-31in the Senate and 317-71in the House—had just the effect that interventionists wanted and isolationists feared: deeper entanglement of the United States in the war. The stakes were higher now: Roosevelt’s in having supplies reach England, Churchill’s in receiving them, Hitler’s in halting them. All the stakes were raised after the Führer’s unstoppable armies invaded Yugoslavia and Greece in April. As the spring days lengthened, the Nazi threat to North Atlantic shipping grew sharply; as did pressure on Roosevelt from Stimson, Knox, and other interventionists to convoy ships through the submarine-infested waters. But Roosevelt feared that convoying would move him too far ahead of public opinion. He would only patrol—but his naval and air patrols, he confided to his war cabinet, would notify British convoys of the whereabouts of Nazi raiders.

Slowly—all too slowly for his impatient advisers—the President involved his navy and his nation in the Battle of the Atlantic. He did everything save convert his “undeclared naval war” into a declared one: he took over the defense of Greenland from Denmark; authorized British ships to be repaired in American shipyards and British pilots to be trained on American airfields; transferred ten Coast Guard cutters to the Royal Navy; sent his patrol ships farther north and east; proclaimed an “unlimited national emergency.” His destroyers became ever bolder in tracking U-boats and reporting their locations. Roosevelt half feared, half hoped for some incident in the brumous mists of the North Atlantic. But it had to be a major incident that would unite the country, not a minor incident that might merely inflame the debate at home. When the American freighter Robin Moor was sunk in the South Atlantic by a U-boat in June, the President found it an inadequate excuse to start convoying.

By late spring 1941 Roosevelt was impaled on the horns of his own strategic dilemma. He had so insisted that aid was a means of avoiding rather than preparing for war that he cloaked his aggressive Atlantic patrolling in secrecy. Hitler could ignore small provocations; Roosevelt dared not try a large one, such as armed convoying, which would divide Congress and the electorate. So he had become hostage to Hitler’s strategy; as long as the Führer refrained from responding to an action of FDR’s as casus belli, the President was imprisoned in his policy of aid short of war.

Only another momentous event now could free the President from his dilemma. Germany’s massive invasion of Russia in June 1941 transformed the global struggle but it only served to worsen FDR’s predicament. For Hitler, now that he was fighting on two fronts, was all the more intent on keeping the United States out of the European war, and hence all the more intent on edging Japan toward a more belligerent posture in the Pacific. More than ever on the global chessboard, Roosevelt seemed to be a pawn edging ahead one or two steps, or a knight moving obliquely—and certainly not a queen radiating power across the board or a king offered as the supreme prize of battle.

If the President felt constrained in the Atlantic, he felt positively frustrated in the Pacific. On becoming President he had inherited an enmity between his own country and Japan that he had found no opportunity to overcome. In the fall of 1931, a year and half before he entered the White House, Japanese officers of the Kwantung Army had used a manufactured incident to attack and then take over Manchuria, which Tokyo thereupon recognized as Manchukuo. Soon Hoover’s Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, had promulgated the “Stimson Doctrine,” which held that the United States would not acknowledge agreements impairing the sovereignty of the Republic of China. Later Japan denounced the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, quit the League of Nations, promulgated the “new order” as a substitute for the “antiquated” Open Door policy, and stepped up its aggressive activities in North China. Stimson, now FDR’s Secretary of War, pressed the President to take a firmer stand in the Pacific. Whenever the Administration appeared to be making concessions to Japan at the expense of China, moreover, protests and lamentations arrived from the beleaguered President Chiang Kai-shek in Chungking.

It was no simple matter, the President was discovering, to be aggressive in the Atlantic and pacific in the Pacific. Around the globe the fronts were linked in numberless ways: Tokyo would benefit from the success of Hitler’s drive east into Russia; Hitler hoped for Japanese action against Russia; Britain’s interests in Asia were imperiled; Vichy’s authority over Indochina was vulnerable; the Dutch had a presence in the East Indies; and these all were further linked with the interests of secondary powers. The President had to calculate how these fears and ambitions were cantilevered by the complex and ever-shifting strains and thrusts of military power and strategy. One blow could upset the swaying, quivering mobile of global balances, but what kind of blow and with what effect?

And always the President had to act amid the murk of secret plans and obscure rivalries. “The Japs are having a real drag-down and knock-out fight among themselves,” he wrote Ickes early in July 1941, “and have been for the past week—trying to decide which way they are going to jump—attack Russia, attack the South Seas (thus throwing in their lot definitely with Germany) or whether they will sit on the fence and be more friendly with us. No one knows what the decision will be.” The Japanese leaders had no less difficulty divining the Administration’s intentions. Through myopic eyes the inscrutable Orient and the incomprehensible Occident viewed each other.

Events were no less cloudy in the Atlantic. The five months of diplomatic activity, military planning, and incidents from the early summer of 1941 to the end of November were among the most critical and complex in the history of American foreign relations. Not only were the events themselves significant, but how they were perceived or misperceived by the other side closely affected the course of events.

In mid-August, Roosevelt and Churchill met secretly at Argentia Bay off Newfoundland. It was less a time of close military planning than an opportunity for the two leaders to size each other up face to face, discuss postwar problems and opportunities, and issue an eloquent Wilsonian Atlantic-Charter of war aims. To Hitler it was a meeting of warmongers plotting the “final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”—a phrase in the sixth article of the Charter.

Only three weeks after the Argentia rendezvous, the American destroyer Greer encountered a U-boat southeast of Iceland, tracked it for several hours, all the while reporting its location to a nearby British bomber, and later became itself engaged in an indecisive battle of depth charges and torpedoes with the German submarine, which assumed its adversary was British. Six weeks later the American destroyer Kearny sped four hundred miles to the aid of a stricken convoy, joined in depth-bombing the attacking wolf pack, and was hit by a torpedo that killed eleven American seamen and put the Kearny out of action.

Roosevelt grossly exaggerated the provocativeness of the German actions and minimized that of the American in his public reaction to the incidents. Following the Kearny episode he said in a major address, “Very simply and very bluntly—we are pledged to pull our own oar in the destruction of Hitlerism.” Berlin boiled with indignation. For once the master falsifier had been outfalsified. From Hitler’s headquarters on the Russian front came a statement that “the United States has attacked Germany.” But Hitler would not yet escalate incidents into war.

Things were somewhat quieter—but potentially even more explosive— on the opposite side of the globe.

Each of the big powers in the Pacific played from poker hands that changed month to month as the shifting circumstances of war dealt out the cards. The problem was not so much lack of communication as too much of it. As factions tussled for influence in each capital—diplomats against soldiers, politicians against bureaucrats, old diplomatic hands against new—the official and unofficial channels were a source as much of confusion as of clarity. Amid the day-to-day chatter and bustle the leaders lost perspective on the towering conditions and events, hopes and expectations, that were holding the Pacific theater in their grip.

The most crucial of these forces was the increasing determination of the Japanese to hold and extend their presence in China. This was a matter not simply of global strategy but of national pride and ideology. The Japanese could not forget the American exclusion of Orientals and other racist discriminations; they could not ignore America’s use of the Monroe Doctrine to buttress its political and economic power in Latin America; they could not ignore Washington’s imperial and colonial ventures in the Pacific. The jingoists of Tokyo were demanding that Japan pursue its old nationalist and imperialist ambitions. Japan was heavily dependent on external sources, including the United States, for economic and military materials, and Washington was withholding high-octane gasoline and scrap iron; warriors and diplomats in Tokyo were therefore determined to extend their grip to Indochina and to the economic lifelines in the South Seas.

Half a world away Churchill had a clear set of priorities, or at least hopes. His greatest hope was that the United States would declare war on Germany, but he saw this as unrealistic in view of Hitler’s spurning the gage of battle in the Atlantic. The next great hope in his global wish list was for a war between Japan and the United States, which Britain would join “within the hour,” but Washington would take the lead in protecting both American and British interests in the Pacific. His mortal fear was that events would leave Britain facing Japan alone and thus locked into the kind of two-front war that all the contestants sought to avert. Hence the Prime Minister devoted much time in 1941to helping stiffen Washington’s posture toward Tokyo.

And Roosevelt? He too had his priorities, but his wish list was the shortest and simplest of them all. He hoped above all not to be involved in a shooting war in the Pacific when the real enemy was Adolf Hitler. He too feared a two-front war. He recognized, of course, that understandings between the two Axis countries would sooner or later turn a war against Japan into a war with Germany, but much depended on what was sooner and what was later. Hence Roosevelt’s essential stratagem, through all the diplomatic windings and twistings of fall 1941, was to play for time—to drag out negotiations, to be conciliatory at one point and tough at another, all the while coping with pressures from London and Chungking to be more resolute. And he needed time for rearmament.

But time, more than Roosevelt realized, was an even greater imperative for the Japanese; they were as insistent on speed as Roosevelt on delay. Tokyo diplomats and militarists alike recognized that the only chance for Japan in a total war was a smashing victory over its adversaries, the establishment of a huge and impregnable defense bastion, and the rapid military and economic consolidation of conquests in China and to the south. Otherwise the immense economic and military power of the United States and Britain would prevail in two or three years. For some months during 1941 the military leaders of Japan allowed the diplomats to pursue their negotiations in case Japan could achieve its goals through parleys rather than war. Early in September they set a deadline—if there was no agreement by mid-October, Japan would prepare itself for battle against the United States, Britain, and Holland. This was the most momentous decision in the tortuous road to war in the East.

For there was no agreement. The more the Japanese and American leaders understood each other, the more they understood how much they disagreed. Tokyo was bent on expansion to the west and south, Washington on stopping it. Both sides were the victims of miscalculation, false hopes, unreal expectations—Tokyo that it could win a lasting victory through a quick stroke, Washington that the Japanese would strike south toward the possessions of beleaguered Britain, France, and Holland, possibly toward the Philippines, but certainly not at Oahu. That island, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall had assured Roosevelt in May 1941,was “the strongest fortress in the world.”

In the White House during the evening of December 6, a young naval aide carried up to the President’s study a locked pouch containing communications from Tokyo to the Japanese embassy in Washington. For over a year these messages had been decoded by American cryptanalysts. The President was seated at his desk; Hopkins paced slowly back and forth. Both men carefully read through the messages. The young aide later recalled their reactions:

“This means war,” Roosevelt said.

Since war would undoubtedly come at the convenience of the Japanese, Hopkins observed, it was too bad that the United States could not strike the first blow and prevent a surprise.

“No, we can’t do that,” the President said. “We are a democracy and a peaceful people.” Then he added, raising his voice a bit, “But we have a good record.”

That same evening Japanese carriers northwest of Oahu were turning to starboard and speeding south with relentless accuracy, amid mounting seas, toward Pearl Harbor.

Thundering down over the green fields of Oahu, the attacking aviators could hardly believe how calm and orderly everything seemed—Pearl Harbor and Honolulu bathed in the bright morning sunlight, the orderly rows of barracks and aircraft, the while highway wriggling through the hills, and the great battlewagons anchored two by two along the mooring quays. Their commander, Fuchida Milsuo, remembered the mightiest fleets he had seen assembled in German and French harbors, but, he said later, he had never seen warships anchored so closely together. In the next 140 minutes 181 Japanese fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo planes ranged up and down Oahu almost at will, leaving four battleships sunk or sinking, four others mauled, 150 aircraft destroyed, barracks and airfields ravaged, more than 2,300 soldiers and sailors killed. The Japanese lost around thirty planes before turning back to their carriers.

It was a brilliant stroke, planned with imagination and painstaking care, executed with audacity, and backed up with a superbly equipped and trained naval force. The Japanese had some luck—their flattops had been undetected—but they had bad luck too, for of the carriers they expected to find at Pearl that day, one was being repaired in Puget Sound and two were off on sea missions. The Japanese gained, however, from the poor military intelligence and the lazy security and communications arrangements of the American command. Above all, they benefited from the Americans’ faulty ideas—especially the idea that the “Japs” would never— never—attack the powerful fortress on Oahu. Despite later accusations, Washington did not “plan it that way”; the Japanese did that. Not a conspiracy theory but a complacency theory explains the surprise at Pearl Harbor—pervasive complacency in Washington and at every other level over Hawaii’s state of readiness, over Tokyo’s alleged military weakness, and over the degree of American knowledge of Japanese intentions and capabilities.

In Washington, Navy Secretary Knox exclaimed “My God!” when the flash came in: AIR RAID ON PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NO DRILL. “This can’t be true! This must mean the Philippines.” Knox telephoned the President, who was sitting at his desk talking with Hopkins. There must be some mistake, Hopkins said. Roosevelt disagreed; it was just the kind of unexpected thing, he said, that the Japanese would do. Soon the horrifying details were coming in.

In Tokyo hundreds of loudspeakers blared out the news in the streets. Some older people moved off to the Palace gates to pray for victory. The Emperor toned down an imperial rescript, adding his personal regret that the Empire was at war. In a radio address Prime Minister Tojo warned of a long war for the future of Japan and East Asia. There followed a recorded martial song:

Across the sea, corpses in the water;

Across the mountain, corpses in the field.

I shall die only for the Emperor,

I shall never look back.

At Chequers, Winston Churchill had a moment of pure joy. So he had won after all. Yes, after Dunkirk, the fall of France, the fear of invasion, the U-boat struggle in the Atlantic, after seventeen months of Britain’s lonely fight—the war was won. England would live; the Commonwealth and the Empire would live. The war would last long, but all the rest would be merely the proper application of overwhelming force. People had said that the Americans were soft, he reflected—divided, talkative, affluent, fearful of shedding blood. But he knew better—he had studied the Civil War, fought out to the last desperate inch.

In Berlin, just returned from the Russian front, where the Red Army was vigorously counterattacking, Adolf Hitler had little hesitation in fulfilling his obligation to his Pacific ally, even though Tokyo had not given him advance word of Pearl Harbor. He and Ribbentrop had orally promised Japan that Germany would fight the United States if Japan did. But this promise was not the main reason for Hitler’s decision. The Führer felt that the Americans had already declared war on him by attacking his ships—a feeling confirmed when Roosevelt in a fireside chat two days after Pearl Harbor declared flatly that “Germany and Italy, regardless of any formal declaration of war, consider themselves at war with the United States at this moment just as much as they consider themselves at war with Britain or Russia.” Both Hitler and Roosevelt recognized the inevitably wide involvement of nations locked in a global war. Even so, there was a manic quality to Hitler’s decision to war on the United States. Audacity and bravado had worked for him in the past; they would work again. He loathed Roosevelt personally with almost hysterical intensity. This manic quality explains in part the only real mystery in Hitler’s behavior after Pearl Harbor—his failure to press Japan harder to attack Russia, as a quid pro quo. Perhaps, though, Hitler recognized reality here. The Japanese would never take on the colossus to the north as long as they were so engaged in operations to the south.

And engaged they were in the weeks after Pearl Harbor. Some hours after Pearl Harbor—long enough to be fully alerted—Douglas MacArthur’s air and naval forces were devastated in the Philippines. If confusion was the story of Pearl, befuddlement and indecision marked MacArthur and his commanders on Luzon. So dense was the fog of battle that a half century later historians were still trying to pierce it. Washington had contributed to complacency by sending out a handful of heavy bombers as a deterrent to Tokyo; these and most of MacArthur’s other aircraft were smashed on the field. Once again the Japanese bombers and fighters left virtually unscathed.

After immobilizing American bases on Luzon and crippling British sea power in the Pacific by sinking the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, the Japanese carried out their audacious and carefully planned strategy of expanding their island empire through Malaya, Burma, the Dutch East Indies, and the western Pacific islands. To the amazement of the Allied defenders, within an incredibly few weeks after Pearl Harbor the empire threatened Midway and Hawaii to the east, Australia to the south, and even India to the west.

The bombs and torpedoes that shattered the towering battlewagons at Pearl Harbor and MacArthur’s forces on Luzon on Sunday, December 7, 1941, had shattered also some of the towering illusions of the day: that the Japanese would back down if American and British deterrence was powerful enough; that the enemy would not really fight because he was under-trained and ill equipped and even—in the case of Japanese aviators—too nearsighted to fly planes; that if the Japanese did go to war, they would attack British or Dutch possessions and not American; or if they did have the nerve to take on the United States they would attack the Philippines and perhaps Guam but never Pearl Harbor. Shattered also was Roosevelt’s notion that he could pursue undisturbed his strategy of aggressiveness in the Atlantic and caution in the Pacific. Now he faced the two-front war that he had tried so hard to avoid; and for months he would have to fight on the wrong—the far western—front.

Britain’s enemies boxed the compass: Nazi sea power to the west and north and east, German land power to the south in France, Italian naval forces in the Mediterranean, the Japanese by land and by sea in Asia and the Pacific. Both Germany and Japan now confronted adversaries on several fronts. Only Russia now faced just one foe—but one was enough. The million or more German troops grinding their way eastward into the Russian heartland comprised at this time land power without parallel in history.

Both the Allies and the Axis were forced to conduct coordinated strategies, since concentration on one front inevitably robbed others. Hence each coalition strove for unity. But each nation had also separate interests, hardly papered over by the much-publicized conferences and consultations. Some American leaders, with eyes to public opinion as reflected in Congress, were tempted to turn westward against the Japanese, especially after the loss of Luzon and the agonizing siege of Corregidor. British leaders, scourged by memories of the bloodbaths of World War I, feared launching a premature invasion of France that could lead to another stalemate. The Russians had one central interest outside their borders—a massive Anglo-American cross-Channel attack to lighten the awful German pressure on the Soviet Union. And each nation had some separate leverage. The Americans could shift their forces between the two oceans, the British could build up attacking power along the whole periphery, the Russians could warn of impending collapse or even loft hardly veiled threats of another deal with Hitler.

These global coalitions and conflicts weighed heavily on Roosevelt and Churchill when the Prime Minister late in December arrived at the White House for a long Christmas visit. Churchill had the delicate double objective of concentrating the Anglo-American effort in Europe rather than the Pacific, yet avoiding a commitment of the European effort to a cross-Channel attack. Soon he presented his case to Roosevelt and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for an Allied invasion of northwestern Africa, designed to hook up with British troops renewing their drive west along the North African coast into Tunisia.

The Prime Minister promptly ran head-on into the sturdy opposition of General Marshall. The quintessential professional soldier, the Chief of Staff had been raised in the American military tradition, symbolized by Ulysses S. Grant, of massing central and coordinated forces for assaults straight into the enemy heartland. Marshall feared not only dispersion of effort in Africa but even more that success in the Mediterranean, with all its enticing openings for future moves, would pull men and munitions away from the central effort in Western Europe. With Roosevelt not committed in either direction, except to the primacy of Europe in general, the African issue was left unresolved. This made the outcome more dependent on events—that is, on the actions of lesser leaders.

The top leaders found it easier to agree, with their allies, on the ends for which the vast conflict would be fought. In jointly composing a “Declaration of United Nations” Roosevelt and Churchill could accord on almost all items except freedom for India. Far stickier, in view of the need to gain the adherence of the atheistic Russian leaders, was the President’s insistence on “religious freedom” as a goal. Only after Roosevelt had convinced envoy Maxim Litvinov, plucked out of obscurity by Stalin as a gesture to his allies, that religious freedom included the right to have no religion at all, and only after Litvinov won the permission of a dubious Number One in Moscow, could a proud President and Prime Minister issue the declaration. Signed by twenty-six nations—an array much like the group that both Roosevelt and Hitler had appealed to in 1939—the central provision made it the purpose of the Allies “to defend life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands.”

Victory seemed far away in the following weeks of early 1942, however, as the Japanese extended their grip on the western and southwestern Pacific and the Nazis continued to hammer Russia. For months the Allies knew nothing save defeat. But before the end of 1942 they had fought three crucial battles that if lost would have meant a very different war and a far longer struggle.

The first of these critical battles was a series of engagements in the southwestern Pacific that continued through most of 1942.

While still consolidating their hold on the Philippines and routing a fleet of American, British, and Dutch warships in the Java Sea, the Japanese began a 2,000-mile advance through eastern New Guinea and further southeast through the Solomon Islands. Early in May a large Japanese fleet, covered by three carriers, sped west through the Coral Sea to seize Port Moresby, a key Australian base on the narrow eastern neck of New Guinea. Alerted to Japanese plans by cryptanalytic intercepts, an American fleet, protected by the carriers Yorktown and Lexington, moved to the attack. In the first sea battle in history fought only by carrier planes, the American fleet under the command of Rear Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher sank one Japanese carrier and damaged other warships, while losing the Lexington. This indecisive engagement was enough to stem Tokyo’s southern advance.

A thousand miles to the east the Japanese land advance had come to a halt at Guadalcanal, an island at the southeastern end of the Solomons. Now the Americans turned to counterattack. The Navy surprised the lightly defended island with an amphibious landing early in August, only to be surprised in turn by a Japanese night attack that devastated the blundering American support fleet in one of the most mortifying defeats the American Navy had ever suffered. For a time virtually cut off from base, the Marines on Guadalcanal captured an almost completed airfield— promptly renamed Henderson Field—and held off fierce Japanese counterattacks. On the seas around Guadalcanal, violent naval and air battles erupted as both sides sought to control access to the island. For the Marines Guadalcanal became a “green hell,” a hot and stinking island full of thorn-studded vines, mosquitoes, malaria, dysentery, “loathsome crawling things,” and rain and humidity that turned food and supplies into mold and rot. But in this hell Americans proved that on the ground as well as on the sea and in the air, they could fight on equal terms and win against a brave and tenacious foe.

The second of these decisive battles, Midway, was a reverse replay of Pearl Harbor. The American carriers absent from Pearl Harbor that day now had their chance to redress the naval balance in the Pacific; the Japanese now had their chance to smash the flattops that had eluded them. If the Americans wanted revenge, so did the Japanese, and for a very special reason. In mid-April, American bombers had suddenly appeared out of nowhere over Tokyo. These were Colonel James Doolittle’s army bombers that almost unbelievably had been flown off the carrier Hornet by B-25 pilots who had never even practiced this feat. The bombing had little physical but an enormous psychological effect on the Japanese, and especially on the high command, which now resolved on a hazardous sea attack on Midway thousands of miles to the east, an attack that would both avenge this insult and thwart a repeat performance.

Midway also reversed Pearl Harbor in giving the Americans the advantage of surprise and luck. As Tokyo’s plans developed and a great force of carriers and battleships sortied east toward Midway late in May, cryptologists and radio traffic analysts in naval intelligence had tracked enemy plans and movements. Feinting to the north in a failed effort to draw away Admiral Chester Nimitz’s fleet units, Admiral Yamamoto’s main force of carriers headed straight east. The Americans were ready for them. Wave after wave of torpedo planes and high-flying bombers descended on the attacking warships, only to be devastated by skilled Japanese gunners and Zero pilots. One torpedo squadron lost ten of its fourteen planes and another was totally destroyed—without either squadron scoring a hit. Then American dive bombers arrived by a stroke of luck just as the flight decks of Yamamoto’s carriers were cluttered with planes preparing for the next attack. In a few minutes three Japanese carriers were infernos of fire and explosions. Dive bombers sank a fourth carrier later in the day. The Yorktown was set afire in a counterstroke and was finished off the next day by a Japanese submarine. Yamamoto ordered a retirement. The Japanese had now lost the initiative in the mid-Pacific.

The third turn-of-the-tide battle was already on the planning tables. While war during spring 1942 raged in the Pacific, Washington and London had continued to struggle over their “Hitler first” strategy—when and where to strike in Europe. As Allied fortunes of war sank around the world, with Japanese victories in the Pacific, Red Army reverses on the long Russian front, the capture of Tobruk in Libya by German general Erwin Rommel, and staggering shipping losses in the Atlantic, Roosevelt felt the pressure of public opinion for more aggressive prosecution of the war, but centered in the Pacific, which was already serving as the biggest suction pump of all. Setbacks along the immense Japanese periphery from the Aleutians to Burma drew men and munitions to the Pacific theater. With no front opened in Europe to match those in the Pacific, Roosevelt and his chiefs of staff sought desperately to bring their power to bear across the Atlantic.

But where? The British still resisted an early cross-Channel attack. The Russians still pressed for an assault in force. Roosevelt still sought major action somewhere. Stimson and Marshall still fought “dispersion.” General Dwight Eisenhower, who was assuming an ever larger role as a war planner, spoke his superiors’ views as well when he noted that a cross-Channel attack would be “one hell of a job” but was better than “sitting on our fannies giving out stuff in driblets all over the world.” Back and forth swayed the battle over strategy between American and British planners; some joked that it was the biggest fight going. But soon it was summer of 1942, too late to take advantage of good invasion weather in the Channel. The major assault on the Continent was put off to 1943, as much by delay and default as by decision, in favor of an attack in North Africa for the fall of 1942.

However modest the North African plan appeared compared to a massive continental assault, it was bizarre and daring enough in itself. The United States’ attack would be launched initially not against its mortal enemy, Germany, but against its oldest ally, France—albeit a France run by Nazi hirelings in Vichy. Its success might turn more on political than on military factors. It was long opposed by the very generals and admirals who would have to carry it out. And no wonder—the plan called for moving tens of thousands of troops across thousands of miles of Atlantic waters infested by U-boats, landing them on difficult North African beaches, deploying them to cope with French forces under Vichy command, to link up with British and other Allied troops pushing west and catch Rommel’s forces in a vise, and to do all this with untried sailors and soldiers. There was always the fear too that Hitler’s friend Franco might close the Straits of Gibraltar and thus cut the invasion lifeline or even allow the Führer to thrust his own divisions through Spain and into Africa.

Mirabile dictu, the military plan worked. In the early hours of November 8, 1942, troops scrambled ashore at a dozen target points along the shoulder of northwestern Africa from south of Casablanca to east of Algiers. Luck was with them: the Atlantic surf was unusually calm; the U-boats had been successfully feinted off; French troops put up only scattered resistance. There lay ahead a long struggle, during which American troops were bloodied, before Allied forces could corner the Germans in Tunisia. But the unseasoned American soldiers and sailors in North Africa, as in the Pacific, showed that they could meet the enemy, take their losses, persist, and ultimately win through.

Oddly, Roosevelt’s luck rose with the military landings, which had to be somewhat improvised, and fell with the political operation, on which he and Churchill had lavished much effort and thought. The initial attack appeared to outrage alike the Vichy French, the non-Vichy French, and the anti-Vichy French. When an “arrangement” was finally struck with the local Vichyites then in apparent command, Roosevelt was roundly berated for the sordid deal with the French admiral Jean Darlan. But the President said he would “walk with the Devil” until he had crossed the bridge. And he could proclaim high ideals. Disembarking troops were issued a letter from their Commander-in-Chief: “Upon the outcome depends the freedom of your lives: the freedom of the lives of those you love.” BBC London broadcast his words in French to the French: “My friends … I salute again and reiterate my faith in Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.”

The Production of War

The war would be won, Churchill had exulted after hearing the news of Pearl Harbor—all the rest would be merely the “proper application of overwhelming force.” He was right. Once the Allies had won the initiative in the desperate battles of 1942, especially at Midway and Stalingrad, they never relinquished it for long, despite many defeats and setbacks. In every major engagement on the western front there was always more, much delayed at times, sometimes inferior in quality, but always more—more men, and from the overflowing war plants more munitions, more supplies, more planes and tanks and landing craft. Although for a time every theater felt starved, the Allies could plan their major attacks months in advance, achieve enormous buildups, and feed in mountains of backup supplies as the troops moved forward.

The troops themselves were in many ways production workers. Usually they did not advance in splendid array as in a pageant, or fight with bayonets and pistols in Hollywood fashion. Typically soldiers wormed ahead on their bellies as they encountered strong points, manhandled their light weapons into place, poured in fire and explosives, and moved on; or if the enemy defenses held, they called up reinforcements, asked for bigger tools such as tanks, waited, summoned artillery, heavy mortars, planes, unleashed a holocaust of metal and fire, waited.… The press glorified “tough, elite troops” serving as the “cutting edge of war.” More likely at the end of the long supply lines was a thin, almost invisible line of men with grimy hands and hairy faces, in shapeless work clothes, cursing and bitching as they fed the machines of war.

There was always more, mainly because Americans by 1943 were creating the biggest war-production boom in history. It was slow to take off while the idea of business as usual persisted. Many businessmen, enjoying their best profits since 1929, were slow to convert; many workers were quick to strike; and Washington’s efforts to mobilize and coordinate were often weak and inept. FDR’s much-publicized goals for 1942 of 60,000 planes and 45,000 tanks were not met. For months after Pearl Harbor, the automobile industry continued to produce passenger cars. But the military defeats of early 1942 helped produce a sense of crisis that brought all the producers together in a stupendous united effort. Typewriter factories turned out machine guns, toaster plants made gun mounts, pot and pan makers assembled and loaded flares. In Minnesota a tombstone manufacturer put his grinders to work facing the edges of steel plates for welding.

Americans were doing what they had always done best—making things—and the results were as astounding as Carnegie’s and Ford’s feats of old. Airplane output jumped from 2,100 in 1939 to 48,000 in 1942 and 96,000 in 1944. From mid-1940 to mid-1945 Americans made more than 100,000 tanks, 370,000 artillery pieces, 87,000 warships, almost 2.5 million trucks, nearly 5 million tons of aircraft bombs, about 44 billion rounds of small-arms ammunition. In 1943 steelworkers produced 12 tons for every American soldier. Production of locomotives quintupled, of aluminum quadrupled, of industrial chemicals tripled. The United States alone furnished in 1944 60 percent of the Allied combat munitions, which helped to guarantee a three-to-one edge in arms over the Axis.

Once again, as in the days of the Yankee entrepreneurs, technology paced production. America’s production superiority still rested on its unrivaled stock of special-purpose machine tools. The precision of these tools promised that when all the parts were brought together, as in the case of the 2 million parts needed to make one of Ford’s B-24 bombers, they would fit exquisitely. Specific technological advances, such as welding rather than riveting, radically hastened production, especially of ships. A heavy dependence on subcontracting brought a few small firms back into some of the prominence they had enjoyed during America’s industrial growth—along with the multitude of tinkerers they sheltered.

But enormous production did no good, as shipbuilders kept reminding Americans, unless it got to the fronts. Frightful shipping losses and enormously heightened global demands required a production miracle. Such it appeared to be. Americans produced over 53 million tons of shipping during the war. Improved methods of prefabrication and precision assembly cut the average time for constructing a 10,500-ton Liberty ship from 200 days in 1941 to 40 in 1942.

At Yard Two, Richmond Shipyards, California, in November 1942, long-necked cranes towered above crews swarming over the shipways, lifting and gently setting down 100-ton prefabricated sections of Hull 440. Work continued through the night. By the end of Day One the hull was shaped, three bulkheads and the entire engine assembly installed, and 18,000 feet of welding complete. On Day Two the rest of the bulkheads, the sheer strakes, fantail, freshwater tanks, and midship deckhouses were in place. The upper deck was finished. On Day Three the six-story “whirly” cranes lifted all of the superstructure—deckhouses, masts, windlass—onto the ship and the big rudder and antiaircraft guns were added. Day Four was devoted to finishing up welding and riveting and electrical wiring. By the end of that day Hull 440 was complete, outfitted with life belts, coat hangers, and signs in the toilets reading “Water Unfit for Drinking.” Then Hull 440, now named Robert E. Peary, its flags flying and coat of gray paint scarcely dry, proudly slid down the ways—and stayed afloat.

Shipbuilders, like sailors and soldiers, enjoyed telling their own Paul Bunyan stories. One yarn was about the woman who, according to the singer Gracie Fields, was invited to christen a new ship. She was brought to an empty launching way and handed a bottle of champagne.

“But where is the ship?” the bewildered guest asked.

“You just start swinging the bottle, lady,” a worker replied. “We’ll have the ship there.”

For some Americans it was the best of times, for some the worst, and for some it was both. On the face of things, never had so many Americans had it so good. At last jobs were abundant; full employment was achieved just a decade after the New Deal got underway. The labor force grew 36 percent during the war years, while the average workweek lengthened from 37.7 hours to 46.6. Wages soared. Average hourly pay in manufacturing rose from 73 cents in 1941to $1.02 in 1945; average weekly wages almost doubled.

The rising tide of prosperity lifted all income groups, but some rose much more than others. Most notably, the poorer persons did best relatively. From 1941to 1945 family incomes of the lowest fifth grew 68 percent and of the second-lowest fifth 59 percent, while family incomes of the top fifth rose 20 percent. At last Americans were seeing the poorest of their fellow citizens lifted out of the bleakest poverty—a goal sought futilely by progressives, socialists, New Dealers, and some capitalists, a goal rarely achieved by liberal democracies or by self-proclaimed egalitarian revolutionary or totalitarian regimes. But by a bitter irony it was a goal now achieved almost incidentally as part of a very different but transcending goal—winning a war.

For a time Americans—especially the poor—spent as they had never spent before. Consumer spending as a whole rose from $66 billion in 1939 to $104 billion in 1944. As durable goods like washing machines and refrigerators became more scarce, however, spending shifted from goods that might have provided poor people with an improved quality of life to more transient satisfactions. Racetrack attendance rose by two million a year, while the amount bet skyrocketed. Movie theaters were often open around the clock to accommodate three shifts, and nightclubs boomed. So did jewelry and cosmetics—except those with ingredients that were needed for munitions. To a degree, however, rising incomes lifted all consumer spending, save for scarce or rationed items. Book sales rose 20 percent a year as cheap paperbacks came into their own. Pocket Books, whose sales had been in the hundreds of thousands before the war, sold 40 million copies in 1943. Comic books, catering to servicemen as well as children, became a billion-dollar business. Tourism, however, stagnated because of gasoline rationing, though Miami had some success with its advertisements that weary war workers could “Rest Faster Here.”

If in a material way some of the poor had never had it so good, more fundamentally they hardly escaped their poverty of health, speech, education, and aspiration, or their vulnerability. Many of them had to move from rural areas in order to find the big-paying jobs. They were part of one of the biggest migrations in American history, as some 15 million of the civilian population left their home counties and poured into Detroit-Willow Run, Mobile County, Los Angeles, San Diego, by the hundreds of thousands. They were the new Okies—Okies with jobs but little else. Schools were sometimes so crowded that countless children did not attend at all. Inadequate child care and lack of extended families among migrants left young children to their own devices while their mothers worked the graveyard shift. A Los Angeles social worker counted forty-five babies locked in cars in a single parking lot near war plants. Housing was so scarce in Bath, Maine, that fifty families stuck out an intensely cold winter in trailers banked with snow. In Beaumont, Texas, people were nauseated by the stench of an out-of-control garbage dump near the shipyards.

Whatever their income group, the best-organized did best. From the very start of the defense effort businessmen moved into Washington to run the industrial mobilization agencies. Shortly after Pearl Harbor the President created the War Production Board under Donald Nelson, who would be the “final authority” on production issues. Nelson, formerly chief purchasing agent for Sears, Roebuck, was an unpretentious, agreeable man who preferred persuasion over wielding the big stick but lacked FDR’s sense of timing and relish for control. “On this job … we must have down here men who understand and can deal with industry’s intricate structure and operation,” Nelson said. Naturally such men had to come chiefly from industry itself. Businessmen were moving up in the New Deal Administration, Business Week exulted, “replacing New Dealers as they go.”

Many executives in government, including three-fourths of those in WPB, were dollar-a-year men who continued to draw their corporate salaries, an arrangement that angered Harry S Truman, chairman of the Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate the Defense Program. Unimpressed by Nelson’s contention that dollar-a-year men could not afford to give up their corporation salaries for lower federal pay, Truman wrote: “The committee does not like to have procurement matters entrusted to men who have given such hostages to fortune.” But even Truman conceded that if necessary the executives should be hired. “We want to win the war.”

For business, voluntary cooperation was patriotic, and also good for both its image and its profits. Industry received lush incentives to maximize production. Contracts were made on a cost-plus basis; the government undertook to pay all costs plus a fixed fee, or guaranteed profit, and thereby freed the contractor of risk. “Of course it contributes to waste,” said the president of Bell Aviation. “For maximum economy, go flat price. If you want maximum output, you have to go fixed fee.” The government also subsidized or made low-interest loans for expanding production facilities—which would be made available to companies at fire-sale prices when the war ended. Not surprisingly, net corporate profits rose from $6.4 billion in 1940 to $10.8 billion in 1944. In five years corporate assets almost doubled to nearly $100 billion. Said Secretary of War Stimson: in a capitalistic society at war, “you have to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work.”

Big business certainly. For many small enterprises, the war years brought anxiety and disappointment. The Administration lacked a firm policy on using small business, which in turn had few friends among military procurement officers; these tended to favor large corporations with whom they had established contacts. The Truman Committee took up the cause of small business and two agencies were created: the Small War Plants Division within WPB and the separate Small War Plants Corporation. Nevertheless small firms received only a tiny percentage of army contracts, and half a million small enterprises went out of business from 1941 to 1943. At the top of the pyramid two-thirds of all wartime contracts went to a hundred firms, with ten corporations receiving almost one-third of the business.

Organized workers also made out relatively well. Union membership, fueled by the huge job expansion, rose from under nine million in 1940 to almost fifteen in 1945. The AFL claimed seven million members, the CIO six million. Five weeks after Pearl Harbor the President established the National War Labor Board, composed of four public members, four from industry, and four representatives of labor. Much stronger than its predecessor agency, the Defense Mediation Board, the NWLB could take over a labor dispute on its own authority and impose settlement rather than merely recommend it. The board boldly took on the problem of closed shop versus open. Under a statesmanlike formula, “maintenance of voluntarily established membership,” workers were given a fifteen-day grace period during which they could quit their union and still keep their jobs. After that they had to pay union dues for the life of the contract.

The Labor Board epitomized the three-way partnership among government, industry, and labor that was supposed to preside over economic mobilization. Labor had demanded an equal partnership—after all, it provided the sinews of production—but soon felt relegated to a junior status. In return for a no-strike pledge that some national union leaders made after Pearl Harbor, labor expected more than token representation in the industry-dominated mobilization agencies. But labor “advisory committees” were appointed and ignored. When Walter Reuther, an astute young vice president of the auto workers, early on proposed an ambitious plan to convert the auto industry’s excess capacity to the production of 500 aircraft a day under the supervision of a government-industry-labor board, the idea was dismissed as “socialism.”

CIO president Philip Murray had joined in the no-strike pledge, but later he began to lose control of the rank and file, who he said were showing an “attitude of rebellion.” Grass-roots leaders, unfettered by “partnership” promises, responded to the grievances of men and women working perhaps eleven hours a day, living in shacks and trailers, driving or busing for hours to and from work. Wages for some had risen 15 percent under a 1942 “Little Steel” formula, but this was barely enough to compensate for inflation, and prices continued to rise during 1942 and 1943—another 8 percent, the government admitted, another 28 percent, labor claimed. As in the past, the tight labor market put extra leverage in the hands of union organizers and strike provokers. The result was 3,700 work stoppages in 1943, even more in 1944. Ford alone experienced 773 wildcat strikes between 1941 and 1945.

The most conspicuous nonpartner was John L. Lewis, more militant and truculent than ever. True to his 1940 pledge, Lewis had resigned as CIO president after FDR’s reelection. As head still of the United Mine Workers he kept his base in the pits, but in the early war years he was an isolated figure nationally. The miners too, after early wage boosts, suffered with frozen wage rates and rising prices. “When the mine workers’ children cry for food,” Lewis thundered, “they cannot be satisfied with a ‘Little Steel Formula.’” Pledged to support the war effort, Lewis was reluctant to strike, but his oratory inspired militant rank-and-file miners who moved ahead of him. In January 1943 they staged unauthorized walkouts, with the demand that Lewis immediately negotiate a $2-a-day pay boost. Emboldened by the miners’ demands even as he put them back to work, Lewis negotiated fruitlessly with the mine owners for six weeks, boycotted the NWLB when it took over the case, and resisted both presidential appeals and presidential threats, including one to draft men up to the age of sixty-five (Lewis was sixty-three).

“Speaking for the soldiers, John Lewis,” trumpeted the service journal Stars and Stripes, “damn your coal black soul.” Earl Browder, at this point militarized as well as communized, denounced Lewis’s “insurrection against the war.” The conflict drifted on into the fall, the miners remaining adamant and Lewis maintaining a public image of inflexibility while in fact making compromise after compromise. FDR joked that he would gladly resign his presidency if only Lewis would commit suicide. The agreement finally signed in November 1943 brought the miners $2 more a week rather than $2 a day, but Lewis had demonstrated that he and his union were willing to arouse the public’s wrath if necessary to make the Little Steel formula bend a bit.

The least organized Americans, of course, were women and blacks. The increase in income for these groups, as for the poor in general, was in contrast to their actual well-being. Although firms were reluctant to hire women until the pool of male workers was depleted, by 1943 women made up a big part of the work force in such war industries as steel (18.5 percent), aircraft (39), communications equipment (51), small-arms ammunition (47), and rubber products (38). Women operated drill presses, milling machines, cranes, turret lathes. They burred and painted and doped, riveted and welded and loaded. They drove buses and taxis, served as police officers and football coaches. Ford put a team of manicurists to work filing precision instruments. By August 1944 over 18 million women had jobs, nearly twice as many as in early 1941.

But even in wartime, when “equal pay for equal work” was proclaimed, women in manufacturing earned $34.50 weekly in 1944, while men made $57.50. Many unions admitted women, if only because they feared that employers would otherwise use them to undercut union wage scales, but some unions, including the Teamsters, admitted women only “for the duration,” as though they were industrially dispensable when the war ended. That was the myth of Rosie the Riveter. Though Rosie had been happy as a housewife, she went to work for patriotic reasons. She enjoyed her war work but would eagerly return to housework after the duration, when men would return to reclaim their jobs.

Like white women, black men had to wait for jobs until the manpower shortage became acute, and that wait could be “mighty slow.” As of September 1941 more than half the jobs created by federal defense contracts were as a matter of company policy closed to blacks, but by 1944 Negro workers made up 7.5 percent of employment in war production. The wage differential between whites and blacks closed somewhat—from worse than a ratio of one to two in 1940 to that of $2,000 to $2,600 in 1944. Sometimes unions were more discriminatory than employers. Blacks had their own “unions” in the NAACP, its membership expanding explosively with the enrollment of black servicemen, and in the newly founded Congress of Racial Equality, which used sit-ins in its strategy of nonviolent direct action. In the human pressure cookers of the big industrial centers, race riots exploded in Detroit and Los Angeles in June 1943, both touched off by white servicemen stationed nearby.

And to be both black and female? In September 1942 only fifty black women worked in war plants, and even two years later only 13.4 percent of employed Negro women worked in manufacturing of any sort. More than half provided domestic and personal services. In a St. Louis electric company 64 percent of the employees were white women, 24 percent black men, and 12 percent white men, but the company hired not a single black woman despite a government order to do so. Black women were typically the sweepers, janitors, and material handlers; one in a Baltimore arsenal lifted fifty-five-pound boxes of TNT all day long for $18 a week.

And so the production of war drew on the vast industrial energies of Americans, lifting some out of money poverty but not out of social poverty, reflecting both the power of the organized and the vulnerability of the unorganized but leaving class relationships essentially unchanged. Except in one respect—there was a new instant underclass created by anti-Japanese racism on the West Coast, popular fears of a “Jap invasion,” army overzealousness, and timid politicians in Washington and Sacramento. This consisted of almost the entire West Coast population of 120,000 Japanese-Americans now living behind barbed wire in concentration camps.

They had been routed out of their homes some weeks after Pearl Harbor, tagged like checked parcels, and dispatched to assembly centers— hastily converted racetracks, fairgrounds, stockyards—where they might be housed in stables, searched at will, and ringed by guards and searchlights. After a few months they were loaded onto trains and shipped, with blinds drawn, to camps in the deserts of Arizona and California, the barren flatlands of Utah, the swampy lowlands of Arkansas—ten camps in all. Families lived in cramped tar-paper barracks, ate in mess halls, used communal showers and toilets. They cleared sagebrush, dug irrigation canals, produced vegetables and poultry. They were the new money-poor, earning $8 to $16 a month.

“When I first entered our room, I became sick to my stomach,” Stanley Shimabukuro wrote from the Santa Anita assembly camp. “There were seven beds in the room and no furnishings nor any partitions to separate the males and the females of the family.” The food was terrible. “I feel so sorry for granduncle and grandauntie.” Two weeks later he found a ray of hope. His parents, he wrote, were showing signs of a new faith in “what I’d like to call a Brotherhood of Mankind” as against the persecution of yellow men by whites. In another camp a child asked, “When can we go back to America?”

No protesting voice of consequence was raised as Americans watched their friends and neighbors lose their most precious possession, liberty. Few wondered why Japanese were penned up but not Germans or Italians. No party of consequence opposed the “relocation,” as it was called. The normal checks and balances of politics were suspended, as were the normal checks and balances of the Constitution. Congress later ratified the act and the Supreme Court much later validated it. The relocation deeply disturbed Morgenthau and Ickes, but the cabinet registered no opposition. Walter Lippmann, so zealous of individual liberties back in New Deal days, urged strong measures on the ground that the Pacific Coast was officially a combat zone. Senator Taft challenged the legislation, but his objection was to the wording and form of the bill, not to the relocation itself. Attorney General Francis Biddle at first strongly opposed evacuation, then washed his hands of the matter.

“Politics is out,” Roosevelt told reporters in March 1942. In assuming nonpartisanship the Commander-in-Chief had suspended some of the traditional political processes. There was now no loyal opposition to confront the White House and propose major alternatives—only individual critics shooting from all directions. But politics in democratic America could never be adjourned, war or no war. The only question was what form politics would assume.

It would take an electoral form in any event, since the 1942 congressional and state elections lay ahead. Well aware of Woodrow Wilson’s setback in 1918, the President adopted a hands-off policy. “When a country is at war,” he told reporters, “we want Congressmen, regardless of party—get that—to back up the Government of the United States.” But the Politician-in-Chief could no more abstain from politicking than a toper from a drink. He tried without success to produce a strong Democratic challenger to Thomas Dewey’s gubernatorial quest in New York. He was no more successful in seeking to unite Democrats and liberal Republicans against his old Dutchess County neighbor and antagonist Hamilton Fish. He publicly endorsed the independent reelection campaign of Senator George Norris, sending him a note—“If this be treason, let every citizen of Nebraska hear about it”—but failed in his effort to keep a Democrat out of the race.

With a low turnout on election day, Republicans gained a surprising 44 seats in the House and 9 in the Senate. Wilson had called for a Democratic Congress in 1918, a commentator noted, and had lost seats in both House and Senate; FDR had not called for anything and had lost twice as many. Republican gubernatorial candidates Dewey in New York, Earl Warren in California, Harold Stassen in Minnesota, John Bricker in Ohio, all won. The independent Norris lost. When Congress convened in 1943, southern and border-state Democrats held 120 of the 222Democratic seats in the House and 29 of 57 in the Senate. With conservative Republicans they could form a majority. The anti-Roosevelt conservative coalition was alive and well again.

The new Congress set about gutting whatever was vulnerable in the remaining New Deal. The legislators in 1942 had already refused to allocate funds for the firstborn of the New Deal agencies, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and even ardent New Dealers had to grant with FDR that the WPA now deserved an “honorable discharge.” But the same could not so easily be said of the National Resources Planning Board, the Farm Security Administration, or the Rural Electrification Administration, which Congress axed, gutted, or starved in 1943. In that year Congress rejected the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill to expand Social Security coverage, even though Roosevelt had gone out of his way to take any New Deal label off it. And the Smith-Connally bill, giving the government wide powers to end work stoppages, was passed over his veto. John L. Lewis had got his comeuppance.

Having now doffed the garb of “Dr. New Deal,” as he put it, and donned that of “Dr. Win-the-War,” Roosevelt could accept the counterattack on New Deal measures with some equanimity. But the attack on his domestic war program was something else. On the critical issue of financing the war, he believed he could not afford to surrender. Congress in 1942 had passed tax legislation that raised $7 billion in additional revenue, boosted corporation taxes and the excess-profits tax, and brought millions of Americans onto the tax rolls for the first time. By mid-1943, however, the government was spending nearly $7 billion a month on the war, the national debt had risen since 1939 from $40.4 billion to $136.7 billion, and consumers would be left with more than $40 billion that available goods and services could not soak up. A flood of debt and inflation threatened the war economy.

To dam this flood Treasury Secretary Morgenthau in October 1943 called for $10.5 billion in new revenue, over half to come from personal income taxes and the rest from corporate, excise, and gift and estate taxes.

The House Ways and Means Committee threw out the Administration proposals and drafted a bill of its own that would raise just $2 billion in new taxes. This bill the full House and Senate passed after their conferees had merrily ratified the tax concessions the two chambers had granted business. It was “really a vicious piece of legislation,” Rosenman said, riddled with special-interest provisions.

His boss agreed. In a biting veto message FDR called the congressional measure “a tax relief bill providing relief not for the needy but for the greedy.” He would not be content with this “small piece of crust.” Now it was Majority Leader Barkley’s turn to become indignant. He had advised the President against a veto, he brooded; now here was this sarcastic message. In high dudgeon Barkley stood before the Senate to denounce the President’s “relief for the greedy” crack as a “calculated and deliberate assault upon the legislative integrity of every Member of Congress.” The stage was now set for a political charade. Barkley indicated he would resign as Majority Leader. FDR wrote him a placatory letter hoping that he wouldn’t, and that the Senate Democrats would reelect him if he did. Barkley resigned anyway, the Senate Democrats met and reelected him—all amid exploding flashbulbs and torrents of excited newspaper talk.

The flap was over in a few days, with Barkley back in his post as the Administration workhorse. But a residue of bitterness remained. And a fiscal crisis in the making, for Congress by heavy majorities passed its tax bill, the first time in history a revenue bill had become law over a presidential veto. For all practical purposes, Roosevelt now felt, the nation had a Republican Congress.

The penning up of over 100,000 fellow Americans, the wartime restrictions on almost everyone’s individual liberty, the continued subordination of women and blacks, the contrast between the material well-being of tens of millions of Americans and the deep and ceaseless sorrow of those who had lost fathers, brothers, and sons (and the first few mothers, sisters, and daughters), the impoverished lives of even high-flying, big-spending war workers—all this should have sharpened questions about the fundamental meaning of the war. Yes, avenging Pearl Harbor—yes, beating Hitler—yes, winning, winning—but beyond that, what? Four months after Pearl Harbor half the respondents in a survey admitted that they had “no clear idea of what the war was all about.” A year after Pearl Harbor fully one-third still had no “clear idea.” The vast majority had no notion—or only the foggiest—of the Atlantic Charter or of the freedoms the nation was defending.

Still, the concentration on winning the war, under the leadership of Dr. Win-the-War, had a profound psychological impact on people. They felt included, involved, integrated with their fellow citizens. Even in remote areas people could tend Victory gardens, take part in civil defense, collect rubber or scrap metal or paper, turn in cans of fat, serve on rationing boards. Six hundred thousand people manned observation posts against enemy planes that never came. One such sentinel at the gates was a Connecticut woman of eighty-six years, three-quarters blind but with 20/20 hearing and sense of duty. For many this feeling of participating and sharing helped make up for the shabbiness of their wartime living and the emptiness of their war lives. At least for a time—the longer the war continued, Richard Polenberg concluded, the more people turned to “private and personal concerns.”

Even participation and sharing were not enough—what was the war for? During World War I, George Creel’s Committee on Public Information, with its wide powers of propaganda and censorship, had aroused such intense opposition that Roosevelt shied away from any similar agency. He created first the Office of Facts and Figures, under poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, and later the Office of War Information, which absorbed OFF and was directed by Elmer Davis, a journalist much respected for his terse and factual radio reporting. Charged with both putting out information and facilitating understanding of the war, Davis soon encountered the traditional opposition of the military to full dissemination of war news.

More surprising was OWI’s internal division over how to explain the meaning of the war. The “writers” followed MacLeish’s belief that Americans should begin at once to try to grasp what they were fighting for and hence that OWI should dramatize issues in a way that would “excite and encourage discussion.” The “advertisers” contended that OWI should “state the truth in terms that will be understood by all levels of intelligence.” The advertisers gained such ascendancy within OWI that many writers resigned in the spring of 1943, one of them leaving behind a mock poster displaying a Coke bottle wrapped in an American flag with the legend: “Step right up and get your four delicious freedoms.”

Such government-sponsored shows as This Is War! explained the fighting to “all levels of intelligence” by trivializing it. Broadcast into 20 million homes, This Is War! began with “Music: ominous”—“What we say tonight has to do with blood and with love and with anger, and also with a big job in the making. Laughter can wait. Soft music can have the evening off.… There’s a war on.” OWI encouraged radio stations to broadcast one-minute plugs of the war. At least there was some down-to-earth humor. On Jack Benny’s “Victory Parade” his partner, Mary Livingston, told of her uncle who had shed twenty-three pounds by eating nothing but soup. “Nothing but soup?” exclaimed Benny, the straight man. “S-a-a-y, he must a had a lot of will-power!” Then Livingston’s punch line: “No, my Aunt gave his teeth to the Rubber-drive.”

Hollywood was quick to get into uniform. Producers met the demands of the OWI advertisers and the public by playing up martial themes, casting servicemen as romantic leads, and replacing gangsters as public enemies with Nips and Huns. The Japanese, usually played by Chinese-Americans or Korean-Americans—except for Peter Lorre, a German who could also do Nazis—were portrayed as treacherous, sly, cruel, and prone to saying things like “The Rising Sun never sets, so her spies never sleep.” The GIs were average Joes, modest, stoic, loyal to the sweet girl they’d left behind. They explained the war in simple terms: “It doesn’t matter where a man dies, so long as he dies for freedom.” At its peak Hollywood was packing war themes into a third of its films, from God Is My Co-Pilot to We’ve Never Been Licked to Four Jills in a Jeep. But filmmakers lost interest in war themes about the same time audiences did. In July 1943, Variety headlined: “STUDIOS SHELVE WAR STORIES AS THEY SHOW 40% BOX OFFICE DECLINE.”

Tin Pan Alley chimed in with “We’ll Knock the Japs Right Into the Laps of the Nazis,” “You’re a Sap, Mister Jap,” “To Be Specific, It’s Our Pacific,” “Over Here,” “Stalin Wasn’t Stallin’.” None of these measured up to World War I’s “Over There.” The most popular tune of the war— dolefully sung by men on sunny atolls and by their wives and sweethearts back home—was Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” crooned by Bing Crosby.

Even more pervasive than the sentimentalizing and trivializing of the war was its commercialization. “Fertilizer can win the war.” Prune juice was good for “America behind the guns.” A maker of bedroom furniture advertised that “America’s greatest fortress is the American home.” Mineral water helped “keep America fit in war time.” A manufacturer of air conditioning claimed that a Japanese ship was torpedoed because part of a periscope had been produced in an air-conditioned factory. The makers of Coca-Cola, seeking to keep their sugar allotment, persuaded the government to make Coke an essential war product. A bomber pilot coming across an ad headed “Who’s Afraid of the Big Focke-Wulf?” scrawled across it “I am” and mailed it to the manufacturer.

But few soldiers objected to the commercialization, especially when the ads spoke of home. If the GIs had an ideology, that was it. They wanted to win the war so they could go home. Meanwhile they made ersatz homes of their bivouacs. “The American soldier is a born housewife,” Ernie Pyle wrote from the front. “They wish to hell they were someplace else,” Bill Mauldin wrote. “They wish to hell the mud was dry and they wish to hell their coffee was hot. They want to go home. But they stay in their wet holes and fight, and then climb out and crawl through minefields and fight some more.” They fought to go home.

“What would you say you were fighting for?” John Hersey asked a group of Marines on Guadalcanal. “Today, here in this valley, what are you fighting for?” The men fell silent, they looked distracted. Finally one of them spoke: “Jesus, what I’d give for a piece of blueberry pie.” Soldiers talked less about returning to democracy, historian John Blum observed, than about creature comforts and affluence after the war. They talked about hot baths, flush toilets, a nice little roadster, a mother’s cooking, a blonde on each arm, a bottle of Scotch, a cabin on five acres, running their own filling station, fresh eggs.

Some would never come home. A new war photograph repelled soldiers and civilians alike. It showed a gray sea lapping at three men, armed, helmeted, booted, swelling into their fatigues, face down, sinking into the sand, dead. Was it an epigraph to the Japanese martial song about “across the sea, corpses in the water” when an American soldier-poet wrote of

… the slow, incessant waves

curving and falling,

the white foam lifting the white sand drifting

over your face, your outflung hand … you have come a long way, a world away, to sleep …

The Rainbow Coalition Embattled

For Roosevelt and Churchill 1943 was a year of conferring and planning, as they presided over an almost nonstop series of traveling strategy meetings. The President met with Churchill at Casablanca in January 1943, as well as with the feuding French generals Henri Giraud and Charles de Gaulle; with British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in Washington in March; with Churchill and the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington in May. Late in August he met with the Prime Minister and their military and diplomatic staffs in Quebec, and these meetings continued in Washington the next month. Then these sessions broadened into a series of global climaxes: Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek, and military staffs in Cairo in late November; Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in Teheran at the end of November; Roosevelt and Churchill in Cairo in early December.

It was in these conferences that crucial war and postwar strategy was hammered out. It was also where a fundamental rigidity in Big Three relationships became more and more evident.

For Roosevelt, getting there was half the fun. When he left the White House on an early January 1943 evening with Hopkins and a small party, boarded the presidential train at a secret siding near the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and started a slow train trip to Miami, he was gay, relaxed, and full of anticipation. He was soon to see Churchill, a new continent, combat troops. He would travel by plane for the first lime since his flight to the Democratic convention eleven years before. He would be the first President to fly, the first to leave the United States during wartime, and the first since Lincoln to visit an active theater of war. After taxiing out of Miami harbor on a Pan American Clipper the President missed nothing as he flew over the Citadel in Haiti, scanned the jungles of Dutch Guiana, glimpsed the Amazon, then slept during the long overnight trip to British Gambia, where he drove through the old slaving port of Bathurst and was appalled by the ragged, glum-looking natives and reports of disease and high mortality rates. Thence he flew over the snowcapped Atlas Mountains and into Casablanca.

The President encountered few surprises at Casablanca. Churchill and his big staff, having laid their conference plans with exquisite care, were as resistant as ever to an early cross-Channel attack in force. Like an old roué viewing a beach beauty, Churchill could not resist casting a lascivious eye on the eastern Mediterranean, with all its delicious curves and tempting cleavages. In the plenitude of deep harbors and wide landing beaches he saw ways to strengthen his lifelines to and from the Dominions and colonies, keep Hitler off balance, and find entrances to Southern and Eastern Europe that might offset the potential expansion of Soviet power. And FDR’s military advisers, intent on winning the present war, were just as adamant as ever against drawing troops and weapons into the eastern Mediterranean suction pump, even while their own enormous pump in the Pacific sucked vast amounts of supplies away from Europe and General Henry “Hap” Arnold’s bombers consumed enormous resources in Britain for their ever-intensifying assaults on the Continent.

Roosevelt was still in the middle. Long eager to launch a major offensive, he wanted to thrust across the Channel but also at the underbelly if possible. The British approach had always had some appeal for him, since it kept major options open, allowed for quick and perhaps easy victories, kept American troops active and moving, might knock Italy out of the war, and provided Stalin with at least the semblance of a second front. By the close of the long and often heated Casablanca talks the Anglo-Americans were broadly agreed on priorities for 1943: overcome the U-boat menace in the Atlantic; send all possible aid to Russia but not at prohibitive cost; center Mediterranean operations on the capture of Sicily; carry on the bomber offensive and the buildup for the cross-Channel invasion; counterattack Japan and support China.

What about the real second front—when and where and how big? The specter at Casablanca was Josef Stalin, who had been invited but declined because of his war burdens. He wanted one thing and one thing only out of Casablanca—absolute and foolproof assurance that the invasion of France would be launched in early 1943, as promised. And this was precisely the assurance he did not receive in the weeks following the conference. On the contrary, after the Wehrmacht poured tens of thousands of troops through Italy into Africa, broke through the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, and look many Americans prisoner, Churchill warned Stalin that these reverses would delay clearing the Axis out of Africa. Confirmed in his suspicion of the fecklessness or worse of the whole Mediterranean effort, Stalin responded in cold anger:

“At the height of fighting against the Hitler troops, in February and March, the Anglo-Saxon offensive in North Africa, far from having been stepped up, has been called off.” Meantime Germany had moved thirty-six divisions—six armored—to the eastern front. “I must give a most emphatic warning, in the interest of our common cause, of the grave danger with which further delay in opening a second front in France is fraught.”

“Grave danger.” What did Stalin mean? That the Soviet front might collapse? That Stalin might go it alone, militarily and diplomatically? That he might even make a deal with Hitler? The last seemed out of the question, but so had the Nazi-Soviet pact appeared before August 1939. Stalin nursed the gravest suspicions about his allies. For him the delay in the second front was not merely a question of strategy; hundreds of thousands of Russians would perish as a result. Were his “allies” hoping that Russians and Germans would exhaust themselves in mortal combat, leaving the Anglo-Americans supreme on the Continent? Was that why they had been so deceitful about the second front? The dictator’s suspicions were dark. Were they trying to help Russia just enough to keep the Soviets in the war, but not so much as to help them win it?

It was evident by mid-1943 that Roosevelt and Churchill must meet with Stalin before the delay in opening a second front brought the anti-Nazi coalition to collapse. But no conference could take place until the Allies could agree on the cross-Channel attack. In meeting after meeting the military leaders thrashed out their differences, postponing the second front until sometime in 1944. The successful invasion of Sicily in midsummer and Mussolini’s resignation helped Roosevelt at the Quebec talks to gain British agreement to an invasion of northwestern France in May 1944, even while Churchill and indeed Roosevelt still cast lingering glances at the eastern Mediterranean. In September, Stalin agreed to a Big Three meeting, provided it was near Soviet borders, in Iran. Soon the President was happily preparing for another long trip, during which he would meet not only Stalin for the first time but Chiang Kai-shek.

This time the Commander-in-Chief and his Joint Chiefs crossed the Atlantic on a battleship, the Iowa, 58,000 tons, almost a fifth of a mile long, 210,000 horsepower, 157 guns including nine sixteen-inchers. After a calm trip—aside from an errant torpedo from an escorting destroyer that almost hit the dreadnought—the Iowa put into Oran, on the old Barbary Coast. With Eisenhower, the President toured the recent battle area and flew along the Nile into Cairo. There he met Madame Chiang, who had charmed the President in a tête-à-tête in Washington, and the Generalissimo. The President beheld a small man in a neat khaki uniform, with a serene unwrinkled face below a clean-shaven pate. Roosevelt had to summon up all his tact in the meetings that followed, for MacArthur’s and Nimitz’s successes in the Pacific were rendering a China strategy obsolete. Chiang and the Madame left with rosy promises about China’s postwar role but only vague pledges of an amphibious operation in the Bay of Bengal.

Then on to Teheran—and Stalin. Once again the President watched eagerly as his plane flew over storied Sinai and Jerusalem, the Dead Sea, the green valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and into Teheran. Soon he met Stalin, a short compact man dressed in a tightly buttoned, mustard-colored uniform with large gold epaulets. “Seems very confident, very sure of himself, moves slowly—altogether quite impressive, I’d say,” the President observed later.

At his first formal meeting with the President and Prime Minister, Stalin disdained oratory and came straight to the point—his point. The Nazis could be smashed only by a direct assault through France, not by an attack through Italy or the Balkans. Roosevelt restated his commitment to an early cross-Channel attack, but he also appeared to be flirting with the Balkans as well. Churchill too made the cross-Channel pledge, but he similarly dallied with Allied possibilities in Italy and points east. Once again it seemed that little had changed, with Stalin demanding an early second front, Churchill resisting it, and Roosevelt, as Churchill would later complain, drifting to and fro. But at least the three men could thrash things out face to face.

And so the hard, blunt talk went on for three days, Stalin doodling, smoking a pipe, scratching words on gridded pieces of paper; Churchill glowering behind his glasses, gesticulating with his cigar, lofting into flights of oratory; Roosevelt fitting cigarette after cigarette into his long holder, listening, calculating, interposing, placating. At some point on the third day the balance swung slowly but inexorably against Churchill and an attack at the periphery. Cross-Channel, combined with a landing in southern France, was confirmed for May 1944. Churchill, celebrating the start of his seventieth year that day, gave in with good grace, partly because the Combined Chiefs of Staff had agreed on attack plans, partly because Stalin had privately warned him face to face about the impact in Moscow of further delay.

That evening, at Roosevelt’s birthday party for Churchill, the President properly saluted George VI, the Prime Minister toasted Roosevelt as the defender of democracy and Stalin as Stalin the Great, the Marshal saluted the Russian people and American production—especially of 10,000 planes a month. In a last word, at two in the morning, the President spoke of the coalition as a rainbow of “many varying colors,” blending into “one glorious whole.” At Teheran, “the varying ideals of our nations” could “come together in a harmonious whole.”

A brilliant ceremony had symbolized the hard-won agreement at Teheran. Between rows of towering British and Soviet soldiers Churchill presented Stalin with the Sword of Stalingrad, forged by British craftsmen and given by King George to the “steel-hearted citizens of Stalingrad.” Stalin kissed the gleaming blade, then showed the weapon to Roosevelt, who drew the long blade from the scabbard and held it aloft. The soldiers and civilians of Stalingrad had stood off the Nazis, then counterattacked and encircled them. Now it was time for the Allies to marshal their forces for the attack across the Channel.

By June 1944 the coastal areas of southern England were one vast staging area. Rows of new Mustang fighters perched wing to wing on small airfields behind the coast. Along pleasant English lanes stood ungainly amphibious vehicles, stacks of bombs, tires, wheels, reels of cable. Landing ships built on Lake Michigan and floated down the Mississippi were packed beam to beam in the ports. Long ugly LSTs (landing ships with tanks) constructed in California, their front ends gaping wide, were ready to disgorge tanks, trucks, bulldozers. Far inland lay the reserve production of war, for use in France: hundreds of new locomotives, thousands of freight and tanker cars, tens of thousands of trucks. Nothing could stop this massed power—except bad weather. Eisenhower postponed the attack once in the face of high winds and heavy clouds; two days later, with the forecast still dubious, he said calmly, “O.K., let’s go.”

Roosevelt and his commanders waited in suspense as the mightiest amphibious assault the world had ever known moved across the Channel, toward Normandy; paratroopers floated down in the dark over the pastures of the Cotentin Peninsula; warships poured shells and rockets into beach targets; bombers and fighters filled the dawn skies. Yet rarely has a great battle been decided so much in advance as the invasion of France--decided not so much by tactics as by strategy. The long delay in mounting the second front had made possible this stupendous buildup, had forced the Russians to engage the bulk of Nazi land forces, had enabled the Allies to mount a whole separate invasion of southern France. The invaders had almost total command of the sea and the air; the vaunted Luftwaffe had been reduced to fewer than 120 fighters in the defense area, and only two Allied destroyers and a number of smaller vessels were lost in the attack.

The invaders had outfoxed the defenders as well as outgunned them. The Allies’ remarkable decoder, Ultra, provided Eisenhower with virtually the enemy’s whole order of battle. The German radar that survived shelling was foiled by devices simulating a different landing. The Führer was so certain that the first landings were a feint that he delayed the dispatch of two Panzer divisions. General Rommel, commanding the defenders, was not even at the front; he had left the day before the invasion to visit Hitler at Berchtesgaden. But it was sheer Allied power that made the overwhelming difference: a million and a half Americans, another million British and Canadians, tens of thousands of Norwegians, Danes, Frenchmen, Belgians, Czechs, Poles, and others; 900 warships, including twenty-six battleships and heavy cruisers, 163 air bases directly supporting the offensive—and 124,000 hospital beds ready for the wounded.

Not that everything on D-Day went according to plan. Off Utah beach landing craft were swamped in the heavy seas, while other craft were swept by a strong current past their assigned beaches. Strong enemy defenses, surviving heavy bombardment, poured a withering fire on the invaders. For hours masses of men and equipment jammed the beaches. Radios and other equipment failed to function. But the Allies’ superior power allowed for this sort of thing; some spearheads would be blunted, but others would break through. By nightfall on D-Day, although none of the Allied landings had reached the designated target lines, almost continuous thickets of ships were disgorging war power along miles and miles of coast. That evening an enormously relieved President led his fellow Americans in prayer for “our sons, pride of our Nation,” and for the people at home who must wait out their long travail and the inevitable sorrow.

During the next few weeks, while the Allies deepened their bridgehead, bested the Germans in stiff fighting, and joined with troops moving up from almost unopposed landings in southern France, American commanders in the Pacific continued to give Eisenhower and his lieutenants some lessons in the tactics of combined sea, air, and land power. To be sure, the imperatives of war differed there. Strategy in Europe called for mass, focus, unity of purpose, singleness of command—under Eisenhower. Strategy in the Pacific was prone to dispersion, opportunism, competing arms and commands—under an admiral and two generals. In the great arc stretching ten thousand miles from the Aleutians south and west and then north into Southeast Asia, Nimitz continued to command the northern and central Pacific, MacArthur the southwestern Pacific, and Joseph W. Stilwell the China-Burma-India theater.

At times hostility within the Allied camp almost rivaled the feeling against the enemy. Stilwell was furious at Chiang, whom he privately called “Peanut,” for his unwillingness to come to grips with the enemy and the widespread corruption in his government and army. MacArthur was still incensed by the Navy’s plans for a straight thrust through the central Pacific. Such a direct attack, he instructed the joint Chiefs, would degenerate into a spate of separate seaborne attacks against powerful island defenses that could fend off carrier-based planes, and—he did not add— would leave him underemployed. Attacks from his theater, on the other hand, would be launched from bases closest to the targets and could choose the most lightly defended enemy positions for destruction.

Evidently MacArthur did not realize that not only he but Nimitz too was perfecting the fine art of island-hopping. In November 1943 Nimitz’s naval, air, and ground forces began their long campaign west across the Pacific by capturing Tarawa and Makin in the Gilbert Islands. Three months later they seized Kwajalein and Eniwetok in the Marshalls. Four months after that they assaulted Saipan and then Guam in the Marianas. Challenged on their own territory, a big Japanese naval force—nine carriers, eighteen battleships and cruisers, 430 carrier-based aircraft—struck from the west with orders to annihilate the invaders. But it was the Americans who did the annihilating, in what became known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.” In two days the Japanese lost three flattops, including their flagship, and 400 aircraft, and a month later the Tojo government fell.

MacArthur was not to be outdone, by either the Japanese or the American Navy. During early 1944 his sea, air, and land forces occupied the Admiralty Islands and landed in Dutch New Guinea. In October, MacArthur redeemed his promise—“I shall return”—when his forces invaded Leyte in the central Philippines. Again the Japanese fleet sortied out to battle, this time losing four carriers and eleven battleships and cruisers. By the end of 1944 Japanese sea power had been virtually destroyed, as the Allies closed in on their home islands from east and south.

During the rise and fall of the fortunes of war Roosevelt could not ignore the requirements of political leadership both at home and abroad. He had two primary tasks: to persuade Americans of the need for and importance of coalition with Russia, and to counter Hitler’s global ideological appeal.

The first task proved surprisingly easy, largely because American press and public opinion had swung strongly on their own initiative to the cause of the beleaguered Soviets. Popular support for treating Russia “as a full partner” rose sharply after Pearl Harbor. Time, which had featured “Man of the Year” Stalin as a bad guy in January 1940, presented him as a good guy on its front cover three years later. The Chicago Tribune was now calling communists not Satanic but merely “cockeyed.” Stalin was “killing the men who would kill Americans,” opined the New York Herald Tribune. Wendell Willkie and other eminent personalities led the demand for a second front. Quentin Reynolds defended Stalin’s purges as having eliminated Russia’s fifth column.

It seemed to take an old communist to resist the new appeal. “‘Don’t say a word against Stalin or he won’t accept our tanks!’” Max Eastman wrote in Reader’s Digest, “seems to be the attitude of some of those who are now giving away the national treasure so avidly.”

Roosevelt was more concerned with that master propagandist, Hitler. As a longtime promoter of the idea of freedom the President could hardly ignore the fact that the Führer was increasingly exploiting that very same symbol in his appeals to friend and foe. Having once narrowly defined freedom as essentially Lebensraum for good Germans, now Hitler was shifting its meaning to freedom for the masses to enjoy national and personal security and the good things of life. Freedom in America and Britain he derided as license for the plutocrats within democracies to exploit the people. A Nazi school for propagandists taught that Americans preached liberty and equality but had surrendered to lobbyists and the kept press. Roosevelt in turn repeatedly assailed Hitler’s freedom as license for the Nazis to dominate and enslave the human race.

But what about freedom in America? The President tried to make the term relevant to real human problems and social conditions. “The essence of our struggle today is that man shall be free,” he had said a month after Pearl Harbor. “There can be no real freedom for the common man without enlightened social policies.” His Four Freedoms included freedom from want. He spelled out for Congress an economic bill of rights in January 1941; three years later he presented this “second Bill of Rights” in sharper detail: the right to good jobs and to adequate food and clothing and recreation; the right of every family to a decent home and adequate medical care; the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age and sickness and accident and unemployment; the right to a good education.

“For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.”

These words, in January 1944, could have applied as well to FDR’s electoral security, for they presented in essence his domestic program. Once again he would have to run for reelection. But this time, unlike 1940, he was not about to play political games; in July he simply notified the Democratic party that he was available. His handling of vice-presidential ambitions in 1944, however, was much like his crafty management of presidential rivals four years earlier. Vice President Henry Wallace was willing to go on, but he was unpopular with party professionals and conservatives. FDR gave Wallace a personal letter of support but on various other occasions threw enticements in the paths of James F. Byrnes, Hull, Barkley, Rayburn, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and several others. In the end he let the party leaders make the choice—Senator Harry Truman of Missouri, a stalwart New Dealer who had also demonstrated his independence, especially in his leadership of the war investigation committee.

It was the Republicans who seemed at first to face a donnybrook among a host of strong potential candidacies—until they began to fall like tenpins. Willkie was drubbed so badly in the Wisconsin primary, winning not a single delegate, that he immediately dropped out. MacArthur, who had privately expressed interest, issued a Sherman-like statement when one of his more ardent conservative boosters ineptly released a letter from the general hinting darkly of “the sinister drama of our present chaos and confusion” and of a New Deal “monarchy.” Taft deferred to his fellow Ohioan, Governor John Bricker. “And then there was one”—Tom Dewey of New York, a young veteran in Republican politics who now drove straight down the open road to the GOP nomination. Eternally plagued by his image—the only man who could strut sitting down, the groom on the wedding cake, the Boy Orator of the Platitude—Dewey had shown his drive and professional skill in winning the New York governorship, a political prize monopolized for two decades by the Democrats.

Dewey’s main problem, it soon developed, was a paucity of issues. He could deplore Roosevelt’s handling of the war, but the summer of 1944 was a season of triumphs in Europe and the Pacific. He could condemn the Roosevelt Administration’s economic policies, but the war economy was prospering. He could denounce Roosevelt’s postwar plans, but only at the risk of antagonizing large sections of the nation’s leadership who were calling for bipartisan support for a bipartisan foreign policy. It was most infuriating of all that his adversary piously adhered to his role of Commander-in-Chief and refused to campaign—or when he campaigned, did so in the form of war inspection trips. Like half a dozen challengers before him, Dewey was finding FDR an elusive and tantalizing foe.

While Dewey sought some opening, others went for the jugular. A whispering campaign about Roosevelt’s health had him dying of everything from cancer to syphilis—if he was not dead already. Rumors were floated that he had left his terrier Fala behind in the Aleutians and had sent a destroyer to retrieve it. A story was told that when Truman’s name had come up for the vice presidency FDR had said, “Clear it with Sidney.” Now Roosevelt was “clearing everything” with Hillman, and labor’s Political Action Committee was scheming to bring out a huge working-class vote. Billboards read: “SIDNEY HILLMAN AND BROWDER’S COMMUNISTS HAVE REGISTERED. HAVE YOU?”

Now Roosevelt saw his opening and struck. At a Teamsters union dinner in Washington late in September he spoke mournfully, with a mock-serious expression, about the opposition:

“These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks—on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but”—a pause, and then quickly—“Fala does resent them.” The room burst into cheers and laughter.

Infuriated by Roosevelt’s ridicule, and with his own campaign still faltering, Dewey told an Oklahoma audience that he would have to depart from the high road in order to “keep the record straight.” The issue of communism that he had earlier left to others he now took up with a prosecutor’s fury. FDR, he said, was indeed “indispensable”—indispensable “to Sidney Hillman and the Political Action Committee, he’s indispensable to Earl Browder, the ex-convict and pardoned leader of the Communist Party.” The whole Democratic party, he charged, had been taken over by Browder and Hillman. Allowed to look at the draft of one of her husband’s speeches, Mrs. Dewey said sharply, “Bricker could have written it.” In this speech Dewey charged that Roosevelt had pardoned Browder in time to organize support for his campaign.

This challenge Roosevelt could not dismiss with jokes. It came at a time when American opinion toward Russia appeared to be cooling. It was one thing for Americans to have sympathized with a beleaguered Soviet Union and to have asked, “If Russia falls, who next?” It was quite different to be asking when the Red Army was marching west, “If Russia wins, what next?” Once again the old-time foes of Soviet communism were becoming more vocal—the Hearst papers, the conservative leadership of the AFL, Roman Catholic bishops. Thoughtful commentators including Walter Lippmann and Reinhold Niebuhr were apprehensive—though Lippmann was so repelled by Dewey’s late-campaign tactics as to decide to vote, glumly, for FDR.

The President dealt with the health rumors, which immensely annoyed him, by taking long campaign trips in an open car, sometimes in a pouring rain. He answered charges of the Administration’s military incompetence by pointing to the glorious victories of Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Nimitz. He dealt with the charge of communist influence largely by evading it. “I can’t talk about my opponent the way I would like to sometimes,” he said at the end of the campaign, “because I try to think that I am a Christian.” Later that day, in Boston, he rebutted the charge.

Polls predicted such a close result that Roosevelt’s victory by 432 electoral votes to Dewey’s 99 came as a surprise. Even so, the race had been something of a close-run thing. Roosevelt’s popular-vote margin of 3.6 million was the smallest since 1916—and this at the very height of the nation’s military successes, at the peak of war prosperity, and after a poor Republican campaign. Perhaps the figures reflected a deep current—war-weariness, and a trend toward “privatization.” It had been a bitter, unedifying contest at a time when a world-transforming conflict was reaching its climax and posing momentous postwar questions. Said the President, going to bed after Dewey’s concession, “I still think he is a son of a bitch.”

Three months after his reelection, and two weeks after his fourth-term inauguration at the south portico of the White House, Franklin Roosevelt in his plane Sacred Cow touched down on the icy runway of the Soviet airport of Saki in the Crimea. Joined by Prime Minister Churchill, the President rode slowly in his jeep before a guard of honor, while the Prime Minister plodded alongside. The Soviet soldiers stood frozen to attention, their commander holding his sword in front of him like a great icicle. Shortly Roosevelt was speeding in a limousine, with his daughter Anna at his side, to Yalta, ninety miles away. He scanned everything with lively interest—the endless lines of guards, some of them young women with tommy guns; the gutted buildings and burned-out tanks; and later the snow-covered mountains through which the caravan threaded its way to the coast of the Black Sea. Soon the President was installed in Livadia Palace, a fifty-room summer place of the czars overlooking gardens filled with cypress, cedar, and yew.

Yalta. Neither Roosevelt nor Churchill could have expected that this would become the most famous—the most notorious—of wartime conferences, for the crucial decisions had been made at Casablanca and Quebec and Teheran and a host of other meetings, and Yalta essentially confirmed as well as updated and applied some of the earlier plans. Churchill would have been astonished at Yalta’s later reputation as a sellout to the Russians by naïve Anglo-Americans; he had never held illusions about the Soviets. Roosevelt would have been perplexed—or perhaps amused—by reports of the “sick man at Yalta”; he found the energy to get through an enormous amount of business and indeed to conduct a whole separate set of negotiations with Stalin, chiefly over the Far East.

The three men met as victors. By February 1945 the conquest of Germany was clearly in sight. Red Army troops had invested Budapest, captured Warsaw, and overrun East Prussia, and were within forty miles of Berlin. On the western front the Allies had been delayed for weeks by a surprise German counterattack in the Ardennes forest leading to the bloody Battle of the Bulge, but Eisenhower’s forces had retaken the lost ground and were beginning an offensive that would carry them across the Rhine. In the Philippines, MacArthur’s troops were closing in on Manila; in the Pacific, Nimitz’s amphibious forces were laying plans for assaults on Okinawa and Iwo Jima, stepping-stones to the home islands. Assembled with the three leaders at Yalta were some of the men who had planned the political and military offensives: Marshall, Admiral William Leahy, Hopkins, and the ambassador to the Soviet Union, W. Averell Harriman; Molotov, his deputy Andrei Vishinsky, and the ambassador to the United Slates, Andrei Gromyko; Eden and a big retinue of seasoned Britons.

The Yalta Conference dealt with a wide range of issues, including postwar arrangements for regions like the Baltic and the Balkans and for the division of Germany. But for Roosevelt three issues were preeminent—and in each case he held weak cards.

The knottiest of these was Poland. The Big Three had long agreed that the war-racked nation would be picked up like a carpetbag and set down a few hundred kilometers to the west, satisfying Russia’s appetite for real estate, penalizing Germany’s, and taming Warsaw’s. But who would run postwar Poland? For some time Moscow had been dealing with the “Lublin Poles,” a coalition dominated by Polish communists, while London and Washington dealt with the “London Poles,” the Polish government-in-exile in the British capital. Roosevelt was under no illusions about Soviet plans for Poland. As the conference met, the Red Army was completing Poland’s liberation—or rather, its occupation. The question was how much representation for noncommunist Polish elements could be extracted from a Kremlin that viewed liberals and conservatives as bourgeois exploiters if not fascists, and was absolutely determined both to create a buffer state against future invasions from the west and to consolidate Soviet control of Eastern Europe.

Roosevelt, reminding Stalin of the “six or seven million” Polish-Americans who opposed recognizing the Lublin group because it represented only a small portion of the Polish people, urged a government of national unity. Churchill backed the President. But Stalin was adamant. “During the last thirty years our German enemy” had passed through Poland twice, he said. And he admonished Churchill for proposing that a Polish government be established at Yalta, when no Poles were present. “I am called a dictator and not a democrat,” he said, “but I have enough democratic feeling to refuse to create a Polish government without the Poles being consulted.” During the next three days Roosevelt and Churchill, step by step, drew formal concessions from the Russians for a more inclusive government, free and unfettered elections, and participation by the London Poles. But it was probable that Washington and London would have little actual influence over the holding and policing of elections.

The President was nearing the end of his leverage with Stalin. And a cardinal reason for that was Roosevelt’s supreme military goal at Yalta— the participation of Russia in the war against Japan. The President and his military chiefs had long agreed that Soviet action on the Asiatic mainland was imperative to avoid unacceptable American losses. Nor was there any question that Russia would intervene; this had long been agreed upon, and it was to Moscow’s interest anyway. The question was when and how and with what power the Red Army would intervene. Would it hold back while the Allied forces assaulted the bulk of the Japanese troops in the home islands and on the mainland—and then move in for the spoils? Or would the Russians take their share of the burden from the start?

Was history playing a grotesque trick? For three long years Stalin had urged—demanded—pleaded for a second front in France and the Anglo-Americans had taken their time about it, or so it seemed to the Kremlin, finally crossing the Channel when it suited their own interests. Now it was Roosevelt who was asking for a second front and Stalin who could take his time. Stalin made the most of his bargaining position by gaining confirmation of a host of political concessions: return of southern Sakhalin to Russia; cession of the Kurile Islands to the Soviet Union; preservation of the Moscow-controlled regime in Outer Mongolia; internationalization of the port of Dairen; recognition of Moscow’s “pre-eminent interests” in Manchuria. On some issues the President asked for postponement so he could consult the absent Chiang. In return Stalin promised in writing that he would enter the war against Japan two or three months after the surrender of Germany.

For any misgivings Roosevelt had about certain compromises at Yalta he had a great consolation—but one that also served to narrow his leverage. This was agreement on the shape of the United Nations, his third supreme goal at Yalta. Here the President was acting not only out of his own hopes and convictions but for a large body of liberal and internationalist feeling in the United States expressed by such diverse notables as Henry Wallace and Wendell Willkie (before the latter’s death in the fall of 1944). There was no question that a UN would be established; the question was its power and structure. Roosevelt found Churchill cooperative though skeptical, Stalin grudgingly responsive but insistent on the principle of great-power unanimity. Stalin and Molotov were still pushing their outlandish idea that the Soviet Union should have sixteen votes in the proposed assembly, one for each of its sixteen component republics. When Molotov suddenly cut down the request to two extra votes, and the British—doubtless with an eye on their own dominions—appeared to go along with this compromise, Roosevelt felt he had to agree.

Some in Roosevelt’s delegation thought he had compromised too much, but the President believed that an effective United Nations organization could rectify the failings of Yalta and earlier conferences. He was so eager for its establishment that he risked being a hostage to its success. “Mr. President,” Leahy said at one point, “this is so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without even technically breaking it.”

“I know, Bill—I know it. But it’s the best I can do.” The two men were discussing the Polish settlement, but the exchange could have related to any of the major Yalta compromises. Holding only weak hands in the great poker game of Yalta, Roosevelt believed he had won the foundations of future peace. It was with hope and even exultation that he and his party left Yalta for the long journey home.

Above all, he left with confidence that, whatever the problems ahead, he could resolve them through his personal intervention—whether it was dealing with Stalin over Poland, or with Chiang over Far Eastern settlements, or even with Churchill or de Gaulle over imperialism in India or colonialism in Indochina. But Roosevelt did not know, for neither his doctor nor anyone else had ever told him, that his heart had been failing for several years. On his return from Yalta people in the White House— especially the correspondents—noted more than ever before how gray and scrawny he appeared, even vacant of face with his jaw drooping and mouth falling open—but then how he would suddenly come to life, tell a joke, his laughter booming out above theirs. He appeared to compartmentalize his health and malaise as he did the rest of his life, alternating intervals of intense activity like Yalta with long periods of rest away from Washington.

He looked forward to his trip to San Francisco for the founding meeting of the United Nations in April, and to a voyage to England later in the spring with the First Lady. What a grand reception he would receive from the British! But first he would report to Congress, and then he would journey to Warm Springs at the end of March for an old soldier’s R&R— rest and recreation.

CHAPTER 5

Cold War: The Fearful Giants

AFTER BUFFETING HEAVY SEAS off the Chesapeake capes, the cruiser Quincy glided into Newport News on February 27, 1945, bringing the Commander-in-Chief back from Yalta. Two days later Roosevelt was wheeled into the well of the House of Representatives and seated in a red plush chair in front of a small table. Apologizing for speaking while sitting—“it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs”—he reported optimistically on Yalta but warned that whether it was entirely fruitful or not lay in the hands of “you here in the halls of the American Congress.”

Those looking down from the packed galleries—Eleanor Roosevelt, visiting royalty and dignitaries—watched the President with concern. It was uncharacteristic of him to refer to his disability. Slightly stooped over the table, he spoke in a flat tone, slurring his words and stumbling a bit over his text. The resonant voice of old had lost its timbre; it was the voice of an invalid. Friend and foe noted his gaunt face and trembling hand. Yet his flagging voice rose to a note of desperate urgency at the climax of his address.

“Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed—we failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world to survive, again.” Yalta “ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.” He called once again for a universal organization of peace-loving nations.

Almost the whole of his fourth term apparently lay before the President—plenty of time to organize the new United Nations, finish off Hitler, throw the full weight of Allied power against Japan, and strengthen his working partnership with Stalin. In fact only eight short weeks remained to Roosevelt, and in half that time relations with Moscow turned sour.

Again Poland was the main engine of conflict, just as it had been in 1939 and before. Within the loose framework of the Yalta agreement, Stalin was absolutely determined to install reliable communists as rulers of Poland. He was already operating on a bald sphere-of-interest basis: the Anglo-Americans were to have a free hand in Greece and points west, and the Russians in Poland and the Balkans. Churchill cabled Roosevelt: “Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom?” He might have to reveal in Parliament, Churchill added, a British-American “divergence” unless the Allies confronted the “utter breakdown of what was settled at Yalta.”

The crisis in the “Rainbow Coalition” became even more acute when Stalin suspected that Anglo-American talks with the defeated Germans in Italy were the first step toward a negotiated separate peace—a violation of the Big Three pledge to require an unconditional surrender to all three Allies jointly. Angry messages flew back and forth between Moscow and the Western capitals. Stalin, once again facing the old bogey of German troops being released in the West to fight in the East, accused the West of not merely a “misunderstanding but something worse.” Roosevelt cabled Stalin that he bitterly resented Stalin’s “informers” for their “vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.” The President perhaps was even more upset when he learned that not Molotov but only Ambassador Gromyko would head the Soviet delegation to the San Francisco UN organizing conference. If this reflected Stalin’s downgrading of the UN, it was a serious blow to Roosevelt’s high hopes for postwar unity.

Still, Roosevelt’s spirits seemed to brighten by April, when events reached one of the great climacterics of history. The whole German defense structure was crumbling west of the Rhine. The Red Army was across the Oder and grinding its way westward against last-ditch resistance. After a bloody struggle, a huge amphibious task force that in February had launched a massive invasion of Iwo Jima was mopping up the tiny island. On April 1 Nimitz’s men invaded Okinawa and made rapid progress during the first days ashore, while the invasion fleet stood guard offshore and beat off hundreds of suicide attacks by Japanese aircraft.

Relations with Stalin seemed to ease a bit in early April. On the afternoon of April 11 the President dictated the draft of a speech for Jefferson Day: “… Today we are faced with the preeminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships—the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world at peace.…

“The work, my friends, is peace. More than an end of this war—an end to the beginnings of all wars. Yes, an end, forever, to this impractical, unrealistic settlement of the differences between governments by the mass killing of peoples.…

“The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today. Let us move forward with strong and active faith.”

The Death and Life of Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin Roosevelt died April 12, 1945, at his second home in Warm Springs, Georgia, among greening trees and flowering dogwood and wild violets. He died in the company of women he held dear—his secretary Grace Tully, his cousins Margaret Suckley and Laura Delano, and his friend Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. Eleanor Roosevelt, notified at the White House, arrived in time to accompany her husband’s body on the funeral train that next day rolled slowly north through Georgia and the Carolinas into Virginia. Glimpsing the weeping faces and solemn crowds at the little depots and crossroads, she remembered:

A lonesome train on a lonesome track,

Seven coaches painted black.…

A slow train, a quiet train,

Carrying Lincoln home again.…

Following the obsequies in Washington, the funeral train once again headed north, now pulling seventeen cars filled with officials and politicians. The train passed through New Jersey and Manhattan and up the east bank of the Hudson. At Garrison, across from West Point, men removed their hats just as men had done when Lincoln’s funeral car passed eighty years ago that spring. At the little siding at Hyde Park cannon sounded twenty-one times as the coffin was moved from the train to a horse-drawn caisson. Behind the bier another horse, hooded and with stirrups reversed, led the little procession as it toiled up the steep slope to the rose garden on the bluff above. There stood Eleanor Roosevelt, Anna, and one son who could be freed from war duty, along with President Harry Truman and his cabinet, and a phalanx of six hundred West Point cadets.

The aged rector prayed as servicemen lowered the body into the grave. Cadets fired three volleys. A bugler played taps. The soldier was home.

The death of any President leaves Americans in shock and grief. The passing of Roosevelt left them also empty and disoriented. Millions of Americans in their teens and twenties had never really known another President. For them Roosevelt was the presidency. And for many he would continue to be. More than any President since Jefferson, FDR dominated his times; more than any President since Lincoln, his ideals and policies would influence the presidencies to come.

The man people most vividly remembered in their mourning was the FDR who had electrified the nation on entering the White House hardly more than a dozen years before. That Roosevelt had touched their hearts and minds and bodies with a reassuring immediacy; the enduring effects of FDR’s leadership in peace and war remained to be tested. The New Deal laws and programs had virtually transformed major aspects of American life—economic security, agriculture, labor relations, banking, welfare, conservation, and much else. FDR had bequeathed the powers and structure of the modern presidency, its penetrating impact on people’s lives, an expanded and rejuvenated federal government. He had mobilized millions of new voters and partially realigned the balance of parties. And as William Leuchtenburg later made clear, he would cast his shadow over future presidencies by setting the agenda of policy, establishing the standards for measuring presidential leadership, leaving a federal government filled with his people and his ideas.

Roosevelt’s greatest service to mankind, Isaiah Berlin wrote from a British perspective, was proving it possible “to be politically effective and yet benevolent and human”; that “the promotion of social justice and individual liberty” did not necessarily mean the end of effective government; that “individual liberty—a loose texture of society”—could be reconciled with “the indispensable minimum of organizing and authority.”

It was harder to assess the man than the presidency. “Great men have two lives,” Adolf Berle said in a tribute to his old boss, “one which occurs while they work on this earth; a second which begins at the day of their death and continues as long as their ideas and conceptions remain powerful.” But the more Roosevelt’s “second life”—his heritage of ideas and decisions, examples and innovations—was examined, the more fragmented it appeared to be. For not only did Roosevelt conduct multiple and sometimes clashing policies at any one time, he shifted from plan to plan, from program to program, with such nonchalance as to leave his friends perplexed and his adversaries aiming at a moving target.

He started off as a crisis manager who simultaneously economized in order to balance the budget, pushed through a socialistic venture in the Tennessee Valley, tightened and expanded the regulation of banking and agriculture, and sought to concert the interests of workers and industrialists under the NRA. Soon he gave up on economizing, began to spend lavishly on emergency relief projects and later on the WPA, built and restored bridges, dams, roads, and other public services while diverting funds to construct aircraft carriers, went in for major relief expenditures as he approached the 1936 election, reverted to economizing after it, then turned back to heavier spending in the recession years of 1938 and 1939. Meantime FDR experimented with such imaginative ventures as the Civilian Conservation Corps, the National Youth Administration, rural electrification, soil conservation, housing subsidies.

He held mixed views about private and public centralization. The New Deal monopoly policies, economist Ellis Hawley concluded, were a study in “economic confusion,” as Washington shifted from government-sponsored cartelization under the NRA, marketing agreements, and coal policy to trustbusting rhetoric and antimonopoly measures such as the Wheeler-Rayburn utility holding company act. New Deal economic planning, according to Hawley, came in a “disjointed, almost haphazard manner, in response to specific pressures, problems, and needs, and without benefit of any preconceived plan or integrating theory.” Herbert Stein summarized the first four years as “fiscal drift.” That term and the next left an ambiguous heritage to later administrations.

Juggling economic policies from day to day amid his own Tocquevillian void, Roosevelt did not always exhibit grace under pressure. During the economic crisis in spring 1938 he had angry meetings with Morgenthau, whom the President evidently felt he could safely rebuke as an old friend and neighbor. The Treasury Secretary for his part grumbled in his extensive diary about Roosevelt’s “helterskelter” planning and his lost sense of proportion. A year later, with unemployment still ranging up toward 10 million, the President and the Secretary were still wrangling, Morgenthau was still talking about resignation, Eleanor Roosevelt was still talking him out of it. When Morgenthau asked for an appointment to present a statement on taxation—two hours, he thought, would be needed—his boss asked him instead to leave it so that he could “read it a little bit at a time at my bedside.”

Seeking some intellectual order in the disarray of Roosevelt’s economic programs, historians identified a first and second New Deal, but there were in fact several New Deals as the President groped for the key to full recovery. Historians discerned a third New Deal late in Roosevelt’s second term that emanated from his effort to find institutional solutions to faltering economic strategies. Thwarted in his efforts to build an executive-legislative-judicial team, he sought to improve presidential planning by creating the National Resources Planning Board under a Delano uncle, establishing more presidential control over “independent” regulatory commissions, enlarging the White House policy staff, proposing the “Seven TVA’s bill” that would establish regional planning authorities in the Missouri and other great riverbeds. Most of these efforts failed in the face of bureaucratic inertia and congressional fears of “fascist type” concentration of power that would destroy state and local authority.

It would remain for World War II to supply Washington with the authority, the planning and enforcement tools, and the purposefulness that earlier New Deal efforts had lacked. Massive doses of “war Keynesianism” and military manpower drafts finally enabled the “fourth New Deal” to realize its supreme aim of ending unemployment. In the mushrooming of federal agencies and personnel, the huge military planning agencies, the centralization of authority, the subordination of courts and Congress, the New Deal found the firm linkage of ends and means that had eluded it during Roosevelt’s first two terms. The irony of war prosperity was inescapable.

The domestic New Deal ended up as a lavish policy feast, which later Presidents and Congresses could use as precedents and learning experiences, especially in the realms of economic reform and social welfare. The New Deal recruited a brilliant corps of innovators, planners, and dreamers who invigorated later administrations, Republican as well as Democratic, for decades. The tragedy of the domestic New Deal was that it failed to fashion an effective economic strategy and stick with it. Conceivably a rigorous and sustained budget-balancing effort from the start would have encouraged, as in past economic cycles, a sharp recovery of investor confidence, but Roosevelt for reasons both humanitarian and political soon rejected this harsh policy. Conceivably the NRA could have been reorganized after its voiding by the High Court and converted into a comprehensive venture in industrial rationalization and economic planning, but the President gave up on it. He favored somewhat redistributionist tax policies, but not to the extent where they might have served as a decisive step toward a more egalitarian society. He played with antimonopoly policies, regionalization, encouragement of local initiatives without ever surrendering his strong reliance on national action. Above all he failed to carry through the one strategy that was politically the most feasible and economically the soundest for a depressed economy—broad fiscal planning encompassing monetary, investment, pricing, interest rate, public works, and welfare policies, a strategy based not on occasional “pump priming” but on the heavy and continuous deficit spending that later fueled the war economy.

If the New Deal domestic heritage was mixed at best, the image of the head New Dealer remained clear and vibrant in the people’s memory—that of a cheerful, buoyant, warmhearted man absolutely committed to his goals of economic recovery and social justice, a very political man who could strike deals and manipulate men and win elections, an orator who could touch people’s hearts as they sat by a fireside, a man who always seemed in motion despite the polio-wasted legs of which, at least in public, he never complained and never explained. He had his bad days when he was negative and critical and even spiteful but he always bounced back, causing Morgenthau or Ickes or some other complainer to put his resignation statement back into his pocket and hearken anew to his boss’s uncertain trumpet.

A dozen years later Holmes’s perception could be both affirmed and extended—a first-class temperament and second-class intellect, yes, but also, throughout the presidential years, superb intelligence and rarely failing insight.

As a war leader too, Roosevelt was a deeply divided man—divided between the Soldier of the Faith, the principled leader, the man of ideals, crusading for a spacious and coherent vision, and the man of Realpolitik, Machiavelli’s Prince, the leader intent on narrow, manageable, short-run goals, careful always to protect and husband his power in a world of shifting moods and capricious fortune. This dualism not only cleft Roosevelt but divided his advisers within themselves and from one another. And it reflected central dichotomies within the American people, who vacillated between the evangelical moods of idealism, sentimentalism, and utopianism and traditions of national self-protection, prudence, and power politics.

Roosevelt demonstrated his purposeful, principled, steady, and coherent leadership most strikingly as Commander-in-Chief and war propagandist. He brilliantly articulated the ideals of freedom for which the nation fought and he provided ample and steadfast support to the men and women who were fighting for those ideals. For a leader who had intervened almost promiscuously in the decisions of his domestic agencies he was remarkably self-restrained in dealing with his generals and admirals. Even when he might have exploited some incident for his own political gain—as in the case of General George Patton’s slapping two soldiers in Sicily—he was silent. For a highly political man, he left selection of his generals to the top command; even Stimson acknowledged his “scrupulous abstention from personal and political pressure.” He overturned few sentences after courts-martial.

As an old navy man the Commander-in-Chief offered numerous suggestions and queries to the armed services, but he largely left them alone. Only when it came to political matters did he exert close authority. He insisted on the principle of unconditional surrender, arousing misgivings among some in the Pentagon even though it flowed directly out of the American military tradition. Roosevelt recognized the political significance of the doctrine, which had been fully vetted in the State Department, for maintaining unity among the Rainbow Coalition, discouraging divisive surrender offers by the enemy, and setting things straight for postwar peacekeeping efforts. Robert Dallek concluded that Roosevelt was the “principal architect” of the basic strategic decisions that brought the early defeat of the Axis.

Roosevelt the Prince, the global politician, the Machiavellian leader, lived uneasily with Roosevelt the Soldier of the Faith. FDR dealt not only with Churchill behind Stalin’s back but with Stalin behind Churchill’s. He misled the American people on his aggressive posture in the Atlantic. He failed to communicate to Polish leaders—or to the American people—the full gravity of Soviet intransigence about their western borders. He did not share atomic secrets with his Russian ally. Remembering talks with Roosevelt during wartime, de Gaulle was to write of FDR’s “light touches,” made “so skillfully that it was difficult to contradict this artist, this seducer, in any categorical way.” In numberless other political decisions—or in military decisions involving politics—Roosevelt manipulated, dissimulated, horse-traded, always on the grounds that this was the prudent or practical or realistic way to act.

He appeared to combine the most striking qualities of his two great presidential mentors—the martial vigor of Theodore Roosevelt and the idealism of Woodrow Wilson. But just as both those qualities were evident in both those men, FDR appeared to embrace principle and Realpolitik almost indiscriminately. Part of his strength lay in this; it was hard to know what Roosevelt one was dealing with. William James had spoken of the “once-born,” those who easily fitted into the ideology of their time, and of those “divided selves” who went through a second birth, seizing on a second ideology. Raised in a stable and secure home, comfortable in his self-identity despite some injuries to his self-esteem, Roosevelt in many respects was the classic once-born leader. But he shifted so widely in his priorities of political leadership during his long career that he appeared at least thrice-born—not only as Dr. New Deal and Dr. Win-the-War but ultimately as Dr. Win-the-Peace.

Both Roosevelt’s idealism and his Realpolitik were effective; the problem lay in the linkage between the two. He often failed to work out the intermediary ends and means necessary to accomplish his purposes. Thus he could proclaim unconditional surrender but practice some kind of deal with Darlan and later the Italians. The more he preached his lofty ends and practiced his limited means, the more he widened the gap between popular expectations and actual possibilities. Not only did this derangement of ends and means lead to crushed hopes and disillusion at home; it would help sow the seeds of cold war later. The Kremlin contrasted Roosevelt’s coalition rhetoric with his Britain-first strategy and falsely suspected a bourgeois conspiracy to destroy Soviet communism. Indians and Chinese contrasted his anticolonial words with his military concessions to colonial powers, and falsely inferred that he was an imperialist at heart and a hypocrite to boot.

Like most of the more effective Presidents, Roosevelt made his White House years a magnificent learning experience for himself and those around him. Like the great teaching Presidents in the early years of the republic—notably Washington, Jefferson, Jackson—he educated the American people in the uses of government to achieve great national purposes. Like the other world leaders of his time, he aroused people’s hopes, converted them into expectations and entitlements, and then responded to the demands that his followers—now become leaders—put on him. Like the stronger Presidents of the past century—notably Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson—he moved broadly to the left of the political spectrum in which he operated. But if his commitment to liberty and equality—to freedom—was realized most fully and paradoxically in the war years, he ended up in this posture as the result not of a steady evolution but rather of a series of jumps from role to role, as in the case of Dr. New Deal shifting suddenly to Dr. Win-the-War.

This capacity to compartmentalize his presidency and even his personality over time, and at any one time, gave him political advantages. It also helped explain the greatest moral failure of his presidency—a failure even greater and far more disastrous than his authorization of relocation camps for Japanese-Americans. This was his inaction in the face of the Holocaust. For years Roosevelt, like other Western leaders, had denounced Nazi persecution of the Jews. During the months after Pearl Harbor, reports began to reach the White House that something unspeakably more horrible was taking place—the “final solution of the Jewish question”: calculated, mechanized, bureaucratized murder on a colossal scale. Reports came too of people by the hundreds and thousands buried or burned alive, of infants swung by the heels and dashed against walls, of boxcars groaning with their loads of sick, freezing, starving, suffocating, dying “passengers.”

The totality of this holocaust was matched by the near-totality of failure on the part of everything that was supposed to stand guard against barbarism—press, church, public opinion, government itself. Newspapers became so inured to the reports, or found them so “beyond belief,” that an authentic account of the murder of tens of thousands of Jews might be put on an inside page next to marriage announcements. Leaders of the Christian churches within the United States and outside were almost silent. The public, misled by atrocity stories about the Germans during World War I, wondered if it was being bamboozled again. State Department officials, irresponsibly slow to react to anguished pleas and demands for help, appeared to reflect the moral lethargy and the endemic anti-Semitism among the public and Congress.

The President was not wholly passive. Persuaded by Morgenthau and others that Hull’s people were hopelessly inadequate to the situation, he established the War Refugee Board under his direct supervision. He authorized hostage deals and other specific operations that saved a number of Jews. He periodically denounced the slaughter in the strongest terms. But between his word and his deed lay a void. Urged to disrupt the shipment of human cargo by bombing the rail lines to the extermination factory of Auschwitz in Poland, he reverted to his role of Dr. Win-the-War, contending that all resources must be directed to the military destruction of Nazism and that such diversions would postpone that day. Yet even as that day approached, even as American bombers overflew the rail lines, overflew Auschwitz itself, European Jewry fell as steadily to its destruction as sand through an hourglass, until only three million, then only two million, then only one million, and finally only a handful of Jews remained alive, and these physically and psychologically devastated. On this ultimate crime against humanity the President never displayed—never sought to display—the consistent and compelling moral leadership that would break through bureaucratic callousness, legislative resistance, popular ignorance and apathy.

So Franklin Roosevelt left a highly divided legacy to a people themselves classically devoted on the one hand to lofty global ideals and on the other to narrow isolationist self-protection, with weak linkage between. But he left also a living legacy—living on in the unquenchable memories of his own leadership, living on also in the persons to whom he immediately passed on the legacy. One was his Vice President, a practical politician. The other was his wife, an impractical politician. They would become both allies and antagonists, politically and symbolically, in the nation’s postwar leadership. Isaiah Berlin spoke of Eleanor Roosevelt’s “greatness of character and goodness of heart.” She possessed much more than this, including some of the militance and tenacity of her Uncle Theodore—but character and goodness of heart would not be the least of the qualities she would bring to the struggle for peace.

The Long Telegram

So swiftly did the cold war envelop the Rainbow Coalition during 1945 that for decades historians would search for the sources of this early and acrimonious falling-out between Moscow and Washington. Two comrades-in-arms, who had come together from opposite sides of the globe to beat down the most murderous and monstrous threat the modern world had known, appeared suddenly to turn on each other in a new war of words and weapons. The turnabout seemed to defy conventional explanation. These two great nations had no common land borders to fight over, no heritage of ancient rivalries, no dire economic conflict, no clashing territorial ambitions. For a century before 1917 their main contact had been a mutually satisfactory real estate deal over Alaska.

American visitors to the Soviet Union noted how the two countries appeared to resemble each other: huge continental nations with comparable populations, both boasting revolutions to celebrate and world-famous leaders—Lincoln and Wilson, Lenin and Trotsky—to glorify or denigrate. Visitors from the American Midwest felt at home when they observed the immense, gently undulating plains, the seasons suddenly changing from the deep snow of winter to the bottomless mud of spring to blinding summer light and drought, the “deep, mournful, yet mellifluous and muted bellowing” of the huge steam locomotives as they rumbled across the flat plain. Russians, when you got to know them, seemed a lot like Americans—friendly, talkative, boastful, fascinated by new cars, machines, household gadgets.

Most of these appearances were deceptive. Russian history, society, psychology, culture were profoundly different from the American. The flat plains that for Americans were havens of peace and isolation—at least since the dispersion of the Indians—were for Russians avenues of attack from neighboring countries. The vast majority of Soviet citizens were peasants—religious, fatalistic, isolated in their remote and scattered villages, tending to suspicion toward outsiders. The Russian temperament, far more than the American, appeared to be at odds with itself—a popular craving for authority, leadership, and collective controls clashing with a tendency to be “independent to the point of anarchy,” in Edward Crankshaw’s words, “and expansive to the point of incoherence.” Although both peoples apotheosized common values in their sacred documents—freedom, justice, equality, human rights—American children in their families and schools and churches had been taught to abhor communism, Soviet children to abhor capitalism and the fascism it allegedly spawned. Each side not only hated the other’s ideology but feared it. The “reds” were seeking to arouse the world proletariat against the democratic—the American—way of life; the American warmongers sought to encircle and crush the Russian Revolution—had they not tried to stifle it in its cradle in 1919?

A quarter century after the Russian Revolution, each nation grotesquely misperceived the other’s “plot” for “world domination.” United States propagandists and press quoted Marxist predictions of inevitable war, not bothering to point out that Lenin had preached the inevitability of war among the capitalistic nations rather than between communism and capitalism. Soviet propagandists seized on the more extreme statements of American leaders—notably that of a then obscure American senator named Harry S Truman, who had said during the frightful summer days of 1941, as the Nazis were rolling across the Russian plains, “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible,” though he added that he did not want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.

Many on each side misperceived the other side’s wish for world communism or world capitalism to become the global way of life as an elaborately blueprinted plot for world conquest. These fears persisted throughout World War II, certainly among Americans and probably among Soviet citizens as they were continually reminded of the West’s “perfidious” failure to mount the cross-Channel invasion. Even during the euphoria of wartime collaboration, polls showed that many Americans were not counting on the Russians to “cooperate” after the war.

Was any reality perceivable through the mists of ideology? Patterns of behavior were discernible to those who looked for them, but the patterns were mixed. The Bolsheviks had waged ideological warfare against the West ever since winning power, but the trumpet calls were rarely more than bombast. In Finland and Poland and elsewhere, Moscow had shown a ferocious determination to exert control over border countries, but its aim seemed far more to prevent these nations from serving as stepping-stones for invading armies than to make them bases for Red Army moves against Western Europe or Japan. The Kremlin subsidized Communist parties around the world, but invariably subordinated those parties’ interests to its own state interests when they collided. And the West had some knowledge of Stalin’s massive party purges, in which thousands of old comrades perished, and of his “de-kulakization” and forced collectivization campaigns, in which millions of peasants were executed or sent to Siberian labor camps or died of starvation—but these were “internal matters.”

For its part, the West had waged an abortive hot war and then a long cold war against the Soviet Union. The United States had a monopoly on nuclear arms for years following World War II, while the Soviets were still militarily depleted and economically devastated, but Washington did not use the ultimate weapon. State and Defense Department officials adopted a series of carefully considered position papers, culminating in 1950 with NSC-68, which pictured the Soviet Union as “animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own,” and as seeking to “impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world,” but Washington did not back up this dire assessment with military action. Above all, the Americans and British had followed their own national interests in the timing of the second front, as postwar revelations of Lord Beaverbrook and others made clear, and had left Moscow feeling deceived and millions of Russians without the sons, fathers, and brothers who had taken the brunt of the Nazi onslaught, but the Kremlin realists could not have doubted that, had the situation been reversed, they would have done exactly the same.

The cold war, in short, had started early and had never ended, not even during the war. The conflict was far too deeply rooted to be quickly or easily eliminated, but it could be managed or overridden by strong and purposeful leadership. That was the kind of leadership Roosevelt and Churchill had supplied throughout most of the shooting war, in collaboration with Stalin. During both 1942, the year of shocking defeats, and the planning year of 1943 the two Western leaders and their staffs had hammered out the shape of final victory in tandem with the Russians. After five years of doubt and agony men had mastered events, at least for the moment. Now with Hitler gone as a unifying force, could Harry Truman and his Administration offer the same kind of leadership after the war? The issue was not long in doubt.

Harry Truman would never forget his meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt after he was suddenly summoned from the Capitol to her study on April 12, 1945. “Harry,” she had said quietly, “the President is dead.” Speechless for a moment, he had asked her if there was anything he could do.

“Is there anything we can do for you?” she had replied. “For you are the one in trouble now.” The widowed First Lady knew well the toll exacted by the presidency. Within a few months the new President was lamenting that being Chief Executive was like “riding a tiger,” as he desperately sought to keep on top of events before they got on top of him.

Rarely had a new President appeared so poorly prepared for the job. The Missourian had never visited Europe since shipping back from his World War I service as an artilleryman in France. A decent, hardworking New Deal senator, Truman had been chosen as FDR’s running mate largely because, of all the hopefuls, he would “hurt the President least.” Roosevelt barely knew him, and made little effort to see him or keep him informed—even about the A-bomb—during the months after their November victory. The last of the Vice President’s few messages to the President concerned a patronage matter. Politically Truman traded on his plain manners, blunt speech, and I’m-from-Missouri skepticism toward Senate windbags and Washington pundits. Behind the heavy spectacles and homespun features, however, lay a tangle of incongruities—a jaunty self-confidence along with feelings of inadequacy; a calm and sometimes stubborn resoluteness along with sudden flaring rages when he was crossed; a rustic morality that still accommodated itself easily to the unsavory Pendergast machine. He was a high school graduate moving in a world of college-educated men, but he took pride in his wide reading in American history.

Along with these ambivalences the new President inherited FDR’s divided legacy of principled, idealistic leadership and short-run Realpolitik manipulation. The organizational meeting of the United Nations, opening two weeks after Truman took the oath of office, symbolized both the high ideals and the political pragmatics of the new President and of the nations’ representatives who assembled there. In a brief, simple address piped in by direct wire, Truman urged the delegates to “rise above personal interests” and “provide the machinery, which will make future peace, not only possible, but certain.” But Poland’s seat at the conference lay empty, for Washington and Moscow were still at odds over the composition of the new Warsaw leadership. Also roiling the San Francisco assembly was Stalin’s insistence that one power could not only veto a move to use force but veto even discussion of the question. Happily, Harry Hopkins, in his last major mission to Moscow—he would be dead of hemochromatosis in nine months—persuaded Stalin to withdraw Moscow’s position on the veto. But even Hopkins could make little progress on Poland.

Overwhelmed by events, irked by the old Roosevelt hands in his cabinet who he felt shared little of FDR’s greatness, immersed in paperwork as he tried feverishly to brief himself on the hard decisions facing him, Commander-in-Chief Harry Truman at least had the satisfaction of presiding over the last battles of the European war, as Allied spearheads stabbed into Germany from east and west. Late in April, American and Soviet soldiers met and clasped hands at Torgau, on the Elbe, while British forces were taking Bremen. Within a few days all ended for the Axis in a leaders’ Götterdämmerung, as Mussolini and his mistress were shot to death by Italian partisans in a town on Lake Como, Dr. and Frau Goebbels killed their six young children and themselves, and Hitler and his bride of thirty-six hours committed suicide in their bunker as the Russians closed in. The German command—what was left of it—unconditionally surrendered on May 7, 1945.

Japan now fought on alone. American forces completed the conquest of Okinawa late in June, in what historians optimistically called the “last battle,” but losses on this Ryukyu island were so staggering—over 11,000 GIs, marines, and sailors dead, over 33,000 wounded—combined with those earlier on Iwo Jima, as to boost Allied estimates of the human cost of invading the home islands. From the Potsdam Conference in Berlin late in July, the Big Three issued an unconditional surrender ultimatum to Tokyo.

This conference was a most remarkable affair. It was the first and only wartime summit meeting attended by Truman, and the last for Winston Churchill, who during the proceedings was replaced by Labour’s Clement Attlee as Prime Minister. At times the conferees appeared more like future adversaries than victorious allies, as the Anglo-Americans tussled with the Russians over the future of Germany, reparations, and—more and more bitterly—Poland. Asserting that Poland must never again be able to “open the gates to Germany,” Stalin was adamant that the “London Poles” have no more than token representation in the communist-dominated government. Most remarkable of all was the virtually unmentioned fact hanging over the conference, the fact of American development of the atomic bomb—fleetingly mentioned by the Americans because they thought they had kept the secret from the Russians, unmentioned by Stalin because he knew the “secret” but did not want Truman to know that he knew it.

Of all the legacies Truman received from Roosevelt, the A-bomb was at once the most constricting and most liberating, the most Utopian and most deadly. Truman was “restricted politically, psychologically, and institutionally from critically reassessing” Roosevelt’s legacy of the bomb, in Barton Bernstein’s judgment. The bomb that had been developed as a military weapon in response to fears that the Germans would have it first was now—after a successful test in the Alamogordo desert of New Mexico—ready for use against Orientals.

Months before Stimson informed Truman of the “most terrible weapon ever known in human history,” however, the Secretary of War had been contemplating its future political uses as well. The atomic bomb would give the United States “a royal straight flush and we mustn’t be a fool about the way we play it.” This kind of talk pleased the poker-playing President. The “cards” were in American hands, Truman claimed, and he meant “to play them as American cards.” On the other hand, some scientists and Administration officials hoped the bomb might be a weapon for world peace or at the very least might gain the “liberalization of Soviet society” as a precondition for postwar cooperation. But would Stalin join in the poker game or even higher pursuits? Truman was disappointed at the Potsdam Conference when he mentioned the mighty weapon in vague terms to Stalin and the dictator showed only casual interest.

Typically, American planners were thinking more in short-run military terms than in geopolitical. All available forces were now concentrated in the western Pacific. American bombers, stepping up their attacks from ever nearer bases, incinerated hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in Tokyo and other cities. While Japanese diplomats felt out Soviet officials on a deal with Russia, the Anglo-Americans approached their momentous decision about using the atomic weapon, with Moscow unconsulted. The American leaders were divided, some arguing that the dreadful weapon was not needed at all, others that a demonstration would be enough, still others that the time-honored American strategy of heavy direct military assault would work again. Whatever his private doubts, Truman took the line that it was a purely military decision, that he did not want to disrupt the enormously costly atomic effort underway, and that a “one-two” punch would knock Japan out of the war, averting hundreds of thousands of American casualties and possibly millions of Japanese. As no one could authoritatively predict how strongly the Japanese would fight on their own soil, the simple, short-range, “practical” strategy of using all available weapons overcame any concerns about long-range consequences.

The Japanese climax surpassed even the German. So powerful was the will to resist that even after two bombs obliterated much of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Soviet troops smashed into Manchuria, Japanese civilian and military leaders argued for days whether to capitulate. Assured that the throne would be protected even under the terms of unconditional surrender, the civilian leaders won out after narrowly averting a palace revolt by officers determined to fight to the finish. On September 2, 1945, MacArthur presided over the Japanese capitulation in Tokyo harbor on the steel decks of the battleship Missouri.

Long before the hot war ended against Japan, the cold war between the Soviets and the Anglo-Americans was becoming more and more frigid. If the main reason for unleashing the atomic holocaust on Japan was short-run military, the Americans were not unhappy that they could demonstrate the A-bomb to the Russians. The Russians, however, appeared not to be intimidated by the awesome new weapon—partly because they had not been surprised by it. At Potsdam, just after Truman had told Stalin vaguely about the big bomb, Stalin had passed the “news” on to Molotov. “Let them,” his Foreign Minister had said, adding, “We’ll have to … speed things up.” Did he mean speed up work on their own bomb—or prepare for war against Japan?

In the atmosphere of rising hostility, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, launched even earlier than the Yalta agreement had called for, won few plaudits in Washington. The Russians simply wanted to be in on the kill—and the booty. Still, some American officials were hopeful and even conciliatory. On his trip home from Potsdam, Truman had told the officers of the Augusta that “Stalin was an SOB but of course he thinks I’m one, too.” Stalin was like Boss Pendergast, Truman told a friend later, a man who would size up a question quickly and stand by his agreements. He even mused that Stalin “had a politburo on his hands like the 8oth Congress.”

Even more hopeful and conciliatory, for a time, was Truman’s Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes. An old Senate hand, briefly a Supreme Court justice and then wartime economic czar, “Jimmie” believed that friendliness, old-time horse-trading, lengthy talk, and perhaps a spot of bourbon could thaw out any adversary, even a communist. When Japan surrendered, Byrnes looked forward to the first meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers that had been set up to carry forward Allied collaboration. That conference, in London shortly after V-J Day, Byrnes found frustrating and a bit baffling. Preach though he might about the need for “free elections” and representative government in Poland and the Balkans, he could make no dent in the adamantine resolve of Moscow to control its spheres of interest.

As for the bomb, at a cocktail party, Molotov suddenly raised his glass and said, “Here’s to the atom bomb—we’ve got it!” At this point another Russian took Molotov by the shoulder and led him from the room. Byrnes stood there perplexed. Was Molotov bluffing? Had he had one glass too many of vodka? Was the whole thing staged? Or—God forbid—did the Russians “have it”?

“I’m dreaming of a white Christmas,” the soldiers had sung on barren atolls and in sweltering jungles, and by the end of 1945, millions of men and women had returned from the wars to their white and green Christmases at home. The joyous family reunions were hardly marred by thoughts of war; the world was at peace. Few could have believed that the next five years could be as crucial and traumatic, if less lethal, a period in world history as the previous five, that those years indeed would end in another hot war.

Nor could the men in Washington so imagine. By the end of 1945 the leaders who had inherited FDR’s dual legacy were themselves even more ambivalent about the best posture toward Russia. Some saw Moscow pursuing traditional “stale” interests—protecting her borders, establishing control in her own spheres of interest, pursuing old-fashioned bargaining and balance-of-power politics. Others saw “imperial Bolshevism” embarked on global conquest. This ambivalence both fostered and reflected a dualism among the American people, who were divided between a conciliatory and a get-tough policy toward Moscow. Most Americans favored holding on to the “secret” of the bomb, according to polls in late 1945, but most would also turn the United Nations into “a kind of world government” with the power to restrict the use of the atomic weapon.

Few Americans considered that the Kremlin also might be divided, in part because they perceived Soviet rule as far more monolithic than any Western regime. Yet Stalin too had to heed hard-liners like Andrei Zhdanov, who preached ideological war and revolution to communists abroad, yet also give ear to the many officials and diplomats who had worked with the Anglo-Americans during the war and favored collaboration. Number One blew hot and cold; he certainly had his own reservations about using communist centers abroad, “leaving them in the lurch whenever they slipped out of his grasp,” the Yugoslav leader Milovan Djilas noted; but he was not slow to meddle abroad when he saw a Soviet advantage. The Russians talked tough but hardly seemed to be preparing for a war—they labeled 1946 the “Year of Cement.” And somewhere in the background lay the Russian people, taught to hate and fear the imperialists but holding wartime memories of Anglo-American collaboration against the Hitlerites—and broken promises about an early second front.

After Stalin spoke in the Bolshoi Theater early in February 1946 on the eve of a Soviet “election,” American perplexity about the Russians mounted. Despite praise of the Big Three’s “anti-Fascist coalition” during the war, and a heavy emphasis on Soviet reconstruction through another Five-Year Plan, the speech was ambiguous enough in its foreign policy implications to arouse a new debate in Washington. Was Stalin talking conciliation, isolationism, or remilitarization? Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas privately said it was a “Declaration of World War III.” The State Department queried its most seasoned Russian expert in Moscow, George Kennan, who responded with an 8,000-word telegram.

Clattering in through State’s tickers, the “long telegram,” as it came to be called, had a quick and lasting impact. Kennan described Soviet official policy as based on the premises that Russia lived amid antagonistic capitalistic encirclement, that capitalist nations inevitably generated wars among themselves, that to escape from their inner conflicts capitalist nations intervened against socialist governments. Hence Moscow’s official policy was to strengthen the Soviet state by any means possible, advance Soviet power abroad wherever feasible, weaken Western ties to colonial peoples, take part in the United Nations only in order to protect and advance its own interests. Russia’s unofficial or “subterranean” policies were even more baleful: to “undermine general and strategic potential of major Western powers” by a host of subversive measures, to destroy individual governments that might stand in the Soviet path (even Switzerland), to do “everything possible” to “set major Western powers against each other.”

“In summary,” Kennan telegraphed, “we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our state be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure.”

Kennan’s telegram brought the thrill of vindication to Washington hardliners and, coming from a diplomat in the field, impressed waverers. The ideas were not all that novel; it was Kennan’s dramatic and apocalyptic presentation of them that galvanized Washington officialdom. Above all, it was Kennan’s imputing of vast skill and incredible efficiency to a regime that had so often seemed incompetent. Not only did the Kremlin have “complete power of disposition over energies of one of the world’s greatest peoples and resources of the world’s richest national territory,” cabled Kennan breathlessly, but it had “an elaborate and far-flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history.”

If this secret telegram sharpened Administration fears of Soviet power, the most famous Anglo-American in the world helped harden attitudes toward the Russians among a far wider public. Winston Churchill, introduced by President Truman, told a Missouri college audience that from “Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” Communists and fifth columnists constituted a “growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.” Wanting not war but only the fruits of war, the Russians admired nothing so much as strength. Hence Americans and British must form a permanent military alliance, centered on their combined military forces and atomic monopoly.

The speech caused such a storm that American officials, including the President, discreetly but distinctly distanced themselves from the former Prime Minister. But these subtleties eluded the men in the Kremlin. Denouncing the Anglo-American in a Pravda interview for plotting against the Soviet Union’s right to exist, Stalin called Churchill a Hitlerite racial theorist, stoked memories of the 1918 intervention in Russia, and castigated his wartime ally for his “call to war with the Soviet Union.”

For almost a year after Kennan’s cable and Churchill’s speech the spiral of hostility slowly mounted. The Kremlin tightened its grip on Poland and the Balkans, save for Yugoslavia, while the Americans extended their guard over Greece and Turkey. Meetings of Foreign Ministers erupted in quarrels over “free elections” in Stalin’s buffer states, the disposition of Germany, and reparations. Zhdanov demanded a crackdown on the “putrid and baneful” influence of bourgeois culture in the Soviet Union, and the American public, still divided and uncertain, became more and more drawn into the spiral. But the spiraling slowed at times. The Foreign Ministers finally agreed on a host of postwar treaty settlements; the Administration urged control of atomic energy through an international agency, though one dominated by Washington; Stalin withdrew his troops from Iran after a sharp confrontation in which Washington tried out, within the framework of the United Nations, its strategy of “get tougher”; Truman, despite deepening suspicion and fear of the Soviet Union, did not yet openly support Churchill’s hard line.

Then, late in 1946, the spiral of confrontation began to quicken. A number of forces converged. As Moscow appeared to become more intransigent, perceptions and misperceptions of Soviet behavior narrowed and hardened among Truman lieutenants who had to deal daily with the Russians. Navy Secretary James Forrestal, former head of the investment firm of Dillon, Read, not only worried about the dangers of communism but inundated his colleagues with hundreds of copies of anti-Soviet reports and warnings—most notably, Kennan’s long telegram. Slowly Forrestal’s worry was becoming an obsession. Dean Acheson, after finding his natural niche in the State Department, took increasing leadership there even as he held decreasing hopes of dealing with the Russians.

Kennan’s telegram became more and more influential—especially after it was offered to the public in a Foreign Affairs article by “X”—even as Kennan worried more and more about overreaction to it. A clear omen was seen in the fate of Secretary of State Byrnes, whose efforts at conciliation with the Soviets had fared less well than his give-and-take with senators. After Truman became increasingly critical of Byrnes’s soft approach to Moscow, the secretary took a harder line, but by now he and his boss were drifting apart.

Increasingly the President, so lacking in broad executive experience or in FDR’s ability to manipulate and stay on top of his advisers, was becoming a prisoner of his staff. An even more important cause of the President’s hardening, however, was clearly political. In the congressional elections of November 1946 the Republicans ran a skillful negative campaign. Their slogan “Had enough?” promiscuously fused grievances over inflation, strikes, price controls, meat shortages—and fears of communism at home and abroad. The Republicans swept the Senate and House for the first time in sixteen years. The Chicago Tribune called it “the greatest victory for the Republic since Appomattox.” Harry Truman had lost his first election as President.

Now controlled by Republicans, the House Un-American Activities Committee early in 1947 planned a dramatic effort to “expose and ferret out the communists and communist sympathizers in the federal government.” The election had brought into Congress the “Class of ’46,” which included such anticommunist militants as Richard Nixon of California, William Jenner of Indiana, and Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Truman, responding to the political currents, tried to play their game and beat them to the punch. Proclaiming that the presence in (he government service of “any” disloyal or subversive person constituted a “threat to our democratic processes,” he created a Federal Employee Loyalty Program that, operating through scores of loyalty boards at lower levels, was empowered to sack employees for “membership in, affiliation with, or sympathetic association with any foreign or domestic organization” that might be designated by the Attorney General as “totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive.” The Attorney General’s “little list” was compiled without giving a hearing to named organizations or specifying the nature of the threat they posed.

Worse was to come. Employees under investigation were granted a hearing and the right to appeal, but the burden of proof was on them. They had in effect to prove their loyalty. They need not know the accusations; the specification of charges, according to Truman’s executive order, was “to be as complete as security provisions make possible.” Nor could they hope to confront their accusers, for in almost all cases the FBI, intent upon protecting its informants, withheld the sources of derogatory information. Loyalty boards quizzed employees as to their views of coexistence, peace, civil liberties, and other horrendous things advocated by the Communist party. Said a top loyalty boss, “The man who fears that his thinking will be curbed by a check of loyalty may be thinking things that tend to be disloyal to his country.”

To those who cried out that the program threatened the most basic and old-fashioned American value—individual liberty—the Administration retorted that communism threatened liberty even more. Moreover, it contended, the Democrats must clean house or the Republicans in their zeal would burn the whole house down. If the White House thought that its loyalty boards could outshine the real “red hunters,” however, it had underestimated the congressional lust to investigate. In the fall of 1947 HUAC opened a star-spangled extravaganza on communism in Hollywood. The dapper character actor Adolphe Menjou testified that anyone “attending any meeting at which Paul Robeson appears, and applauds, can be considered a Communist.” Gary Cooper, whose appearance evoked sighs from the audience, said of communism, “From what I hear, I don’t like it because it isn’t on the level.” Friendly witnesses had a glorious time trading in rumor and speculation.

The mood changed when the Hollywood Ten—a group of screenwriters, producers, and directors—contended that HUAC had no right to ask them about Communist party membership. Much shouting and gaveling-down ensued, all before an avid press. The Ten, who had expected their appeal to the First Amendment to be upheld in the courts, were fined and jailed for contempt and blacklisted by the studios. A purge by terrified Hollywood and radio executives followed. Some 350 Hollywood actors, writers, and directors and perhaps 1,500 television and radio employees lost their jobs in the next few years. Some ex-communists, on the other hand, came before the committee to expiate their sins—to name names, denounce former comrades, provide delectable details of disloyal activities. Some admitted their own sins but refused to name others; some named names reluctantly; some named them eagerly; and a few took up ex-communism as a livelihood, testifying at trials, writing books, touring the lecture circuit, acting as “expert consultants.”

Most of the government people targeted by HUAC were small game until, one day in 1948, a pudgy, rumpled, troubled man appeared before HUAC, a man who had consorted with tramps and prostitutes as well as communists, a self-confessed thief and perjurer. His name was Whittaker Chambers. He had come to name several government officials. One name leapt out, a Harvard Law School graduate, protégé of Felix Frankfurter, clerk for Justice Holmes, rising young State Department hand, adviser at Yalta, presider at the UN organizing meeting, now head of the Carnegie Endowment. His name was Alger Hiss.

Two days after Chambers named Hiss as a communist, Hiss testified that he was not. So persuasive was Hiss, so boyish of face and earnest and attractive of demeanor, that he received congratulations from spectators and even handshakes from HUAC members. One Republican committeeman moaned, “We’ve been had! We’re ruined.” But another member thought differently. Richard Nixon kept the case alive, arranged a Hiss-Chambers confrontation, pursued loopholes and inconsistencies in Hiss’s testimony. When the young New Dealer sued Chambers for libel, Chambers produced the “pumpkin papers”—microfilms of classified State Department material he had hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his farm— as evidence that Hiss had been not only a Communist party member in the 1930s but a spy for the Soviet Union. Four days later, Hiss was indicted for perjury.

As the Republicans continued to exploit the communism issue, President Truman tried to defuse this atomic bomb of domestic politics. The menace of communism was not foreign agents, he told a Chicago audience, but the areas of American society in which the promise of democracy remained unfulfilled. He dismissed one HUAC hearing as a “red herring.” But Truman could not bottle up the genie of suspicion he had helped release. The spiral of fear intensified among Americans as the spiral of hostility intensified between Washington and Moscow.

A sudden sharp crisis early in 1947 spun the Administration toward a sphere-of-interest commitment in the eastern Mediterranean that almost equaled the Soviet Union’s in Eastern Europe. Warned by the British that they could no longer shore up Athens with economic and military aid, informed by advisers that the crisis-laden Greek government was near the breaking point, Truman responded largely to the communist threat. Moscow expected Greece to fall into its hands soon like a “ripe plum,” said an Administration adviser. Then “the whole Near East and part of North Africa” was “certain to pass under Soviet influence.” The domino theory was gaining adherents. In fact, although communists in neighboring Balkan countries were stirring up what trouble they could in the ancient “cradle of democracy,” Stalin himself was observing his sphere-of-interest deal with Churchill. If the domino was falling, it was falling of its own weight.

In mid-March, Truman asked Congress for $400 million for Greek and Turkish aid. “It must be the policy of the United States,” he told a joint session of Congress, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” This urgent call to economic and military arms, soon named the Truman Doctrine, was followed three months later by a momentous proposal to shore up the European economy, still stricken by the effects of total war. General Marshall, now Secretary of State, from the steps of Memorial Church in Harvard Yard portrayed to “you gentlemen” of the graduating class—and to T. S. Eliot, another honorary degree recipient that day—a Europe near “breakdown,” requiring “substantial additional help.” Marshall announced that the United States would do everything possible to “assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” American policy, he said, was directed “not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” Such an effort could not be piecemeal, however—all nations must join, pool their needs, and present Washington with a single combined request.

At once the new plan—the Marshall Plan—was swept into the spiral of East-West hostility. It quickly became evident that Congress, now dominated by Senator Taft and other economizers and budget balancers, would respond far more enthusiastically to an “anticommunist” measure than to a welfare program for Europeans. But the more the plan was sold as anticommunist, the more Russian suspicions of it were inflamed. Invited to take part, Moscow at first seemed tempted, sending a delegation to Paris for consultations with other Europeans, then coldly declined, rightly suspecting that many of the inviters hoped that this particular guest would not sup at the table. Over the following weeks, while Congress debated the plan and the billions of dollars requested, Stalin immensely helped its passage by establishing the Cominform—the “Communist Information Bureau”—to replace the old Comintern, and by clamping harsh controls on Czechoslovakia just as debate over Marshall Plan funding came to a head. Then it was Washington’s turn to react, as Truman called for a renewed draft, worked out collective security arrangements with Western Europe, and declared his intention to set up an independent West German state.

The cold war appeared on the verge of turning red hot, as the spiral of fear and hatred reached its apogee. In part the hatred was the logical manifestation of Great Power conflict over ideology and interest. But even more it was a reflex of perceptions. Washington underestimated Moscow’s absolute determination to control its bordering states and grossly exaggerated Soviet designs outside its sphere. Moscow exaggerated Truman’s disposition to use atomic weapons and underestimated his genuine concern over the European economy and his absolute determination to unify Western Europe, including the West Germans, behind an anticommunist strategy. And behind the misperception lay age-old psychological tendencies, among which Ralph K. White included diabolical enemy images and moral self-images, overconfidence and worst-case thinking.

The growing anticommunist militancy that buoyed the Administration ran into political volleys from all directions—from Taft unilateralists, old-fashioned isolationists, pro-Soviet radicals, and a handful of pundits and publicists who viewed themselves as “realistic” as the most hard-nosed Truman hand. Among the latter stood Walter Lippmann, who differed so sharply with George Kennan that he devoted fourteen successive columns to refuting the “X” article—and to lambasting the Truman Doctrine, which Kennan’s long telegram had helped inspire. The Truman strategy was too grandiose, Lippmann contended, too indiscriminately global, too unrealistic in view of the nation’s limited resources, and based on false premises— especially the perception of Moscow as pursuing ideological and messianic goals rather than traditional sphere-of-interest and balance-of-power statecraft.

The Truman Administration could dismiss hostile pundits as not having the votes, unilateralists as mere go-it-aloners, isolationists as head-in-the-sand ostriches. But as 1947 gave way to the election year of 1948, the political leaders in Washington could not dismiss one man who was neither isolationist nor unilateralist and might have some critical votes. This was Henry Wallace, behind whom loomed at times the evocative figure of Eleanor Roosevelt. While Truman had switched back and forth between Roosevelt’s dual foreign policy tracks of Wilsonian idealism and conventional power politics, Wallace stayed squarely on the former path. He was still serving as Secretary of Commerce, the post FDR had chosen for him after easing him out of the vice-presidency. During 1946, as Truman’s advisers and Soviet provocations drew the President into an ever stronger cold war posture, Wallace’s friends—old-line pacifists, anti-anticommunists, liberals and radicals of all stripes, scientists heartsick over Hiroshima—fortified Wallace’s own determination to break with the White House.

The messy rupture began with a Madison Square Garden speech before the National Citizens Political Action Committee. Hissed whenever he said anything derogatory about Russia, Wallace called for a “real peace treaty” between the United States and the Soviets, amid such provocative remarks as “We should recognize that we have no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America, Western Europe and the United States.” Wallace added—correctly—that the President had gone over the speech, and had said it represented Administration policy.

A Washington tempest followed. Byrnes threatened to resign. Vandenberg said that the Republicans could “only cooperate with one Secretary of State at a time.” Truman explained lamely that there had been a misunderstanding—he had only approved Wallace’s right to give the speech, not its contents. In a long face-to-face meeting Wallace told Truman that the people feared that American policy was leading to war, adding pointedly, “You, yourself, as Harry Truman really believed in my speech.” But Harry Truman the President made clear that he must keep unity in his cabinet and present a united front abroad. The President revealed his true feelings the next day in a memorandum about Wallace:

“He is a pacifist one hundred per cent. He wants us to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo. I do not understand a ‘dreamer’ like that.… The Reds, phonies and the ‘parlor pinks’ seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger.

“I am afraid,” he added, “that they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin.” These remarks were a measure of Truman’s tendency to strike out at his adversaries in crude personal terms and of the completeness of his break with the anti-cold war forces.

Eleanor Roosevelt followed the rupture with rising concern. She had worked with Wallace during the New Deal and respected his idealism and commitment; she had counseled Truman on how to get along with both Churchill and Stalin. In the United Nations she was experiencing firsthand Soviet suspicion and stubbornness. As Truman and Wallace spun away from each other, she was left isolated in the void between them. She believed Wallace was unwise to make speeches in Europe criticizing Administration policy; she was disturbed by the go-it-alone aspects of the Truman Doctrine and by the President’s failure to offer relief and rehabilitation in cooperation with the UN. While lauding Wallace’s commitment to world understanding, she also approved of the Marshall Plan and admired its author. As the Wallace forces moved toward establishing a third party, however, Eleanor Roosevelt knew where she would stand. She had always believed in working within the Democratic party.

Political leaders on all sides had long expected 1948 to be a “showdown year.” At long last the Republicans could battle someone other than Franklin Roosevelt. The Democrats could no longer depend on the electoral magician in the White House. The Wallace movement, soon to be converted into the Progressive party, expected at least to hold a critical balance of power. Within each party too, rival leaderships hoped to establish their factional dominance. Conservative Republicans headed by Senator Taft planned to wrest their party away from men of the Willkie, Stimson, and Dewey stamp. The presidential Republicans, headed by aggressive young activists like Harold Stassen, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Dewey himself, labored to deny party leadership to the isolationists and to set the GOP on a steady course of moderation in domestic policy and of internationalism abroad. On the Democratic side, hawks and doves, as they would come to be called, fought for the soul of the Democracy, as did states’ righters against the Truman forces backing the social welfare and reformist programs of his Fair Deal.

In the center of the Democratic battlefield stood Harry Truman. Not for decades—certainly not since William Howard Taft had been beset by La Follette Progressives and Teddy Roosevelt Square Dealers in 1912—had a President seemed so isolated and deserted as Truman when he announced his candidacy early in March 1948. The Henry Wallace Progressives threatened to carve deeply into the “peace vote.” A number of labor leaders, personally furious with Truman after he had cold-shouldered them during a rash of postwar strikes, threatened to sit the election out. Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal, anticommunist group founded by Eleanor Roosevelt and a host of academics, politicos, and assorted old New Dealers, was sticking with the Democracy, but some of its leaders were working to draft the popular General Eisenhower as the Democratic standard-bearer. The Republicans appeared likely to renominate Dewey, who had his own lines into labor, liberal, and black enclaves.

Through it all Truman appeared his usual feisty self. He not only aroused antagonism—he seemed to solicit it. In the face of conservative opposition to his Fair Deal economic measures he inflamed southern Democrats even further with his sweeping civil rights message of February 1948. Based on the recommendations of a special presidential commission chaired by Charles E. Wilson, head of General Electric, the message called for a permanent federal commission on civil rights, a permanent fair employment practices commission, the outlawing of segregation in schools and transportation and other public facilities, and a federal antilynching law. Truman’s central strategy, however, was to stand on his Fair Deal extension of the New Deal—housing, welfare, labor and consumer protection, farm subsidies.

Soon Truman was besieged on three fronts. The GOP duly nominated Dewey on a moderately liberal and internationalist platform, a band of solid Southerners bolted the Democratic convention and later nominated Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for President on the States’ Rights or “Dixiecrat” ticket, and a Progressive convention nominated Wallace. Truman’s whole instinct was to fight back, like the French general who cried, “My left flank is in ruins, my right flank is retreating, my center is caving in. Good! I shall attack.” By midsummer the voters were being treated to a four-cornered race reminiscent of 1912, as Truman crisscrossed the country in an exhausting “whistlestop” campaign by train, Wallace made his rustic, low-key appearances before hyperbolic crowds, Thurmond sought enough electoral votes to throw the presidential race into the House of Representatives, and Dewey tried to appear presidential in order to become presidential.

For a time, fortune scarcely favored the bold. At the Democratic convention Young Turks headed by Hubert Humphrey, the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of Minneapolis, had pushed through a strengthened civil rights plank that threatened to alienate even more of the southern Democracy. Zigzagging across the country, the Truman campaign repeatedly ran out of money, requiring frenzied appeals to fat cats, usually to oil barons with ready cash. Toward the end of the campaign the election forecasts, including roundups by The New York Times and other periodicals, had Truman so far behind Dewey as to arouse despair in the President’s entourage. Shown a poll of “fifty political experts,” all of whom predicted a big Dewey win, Truman blinked, grinned, and said, “Oh, well, those damn fellows; they’re always wrong anyway. Forget it, boys, and let’s get on with the job.”

In the end, fortune did favor the bold. The Dixiecrat bolt backfired, as most southern Democrats stuck with Truman while northern blacks credited his timely civil rights position. Two or three million Republicans stayed home out of overconfidence, or so Dewey later complained. Wallace’s strength steadily ebbed as liberals and laborites feared to waste their ballots on a third-party ticket. They also suspected extensive communist influence over the campaign, and rightly so. Warned of this influence, Wallace was unwilling even to investigate, for fear that he would be guilty of the very red-baiting that he had warned Americans against. He felt far more pressed from the right. Bold enough to stay overnight in the homes of southern blacks, he would remember his campaign through the South as “one long succession of tomatoes and eggs.” The author of The Century of the Common Man later remarked that the “common man can be very, very barbarous.”

Dewey, seeking to soften memories of his blatant linking of the Democrats with communism in 1944, took the high road, lost his fighting edge, and embraced bipartisanship in foreign policy to the degree that he could not exploit Truman’s chief vulnerabilities. The President skillfully employed FDR’s tactic of attacking the congressional rather than the presidential Republicans. He called Congress into special session, challenged the Republicans to pass the legislation demanded in their party platform, and hung the congressional failure to do so around Dewey’s neck.

Truman’s close but decisive victory was so unexpected as to be sensational. It quickly became the pride of historians prone to demonstrate the power of individual leadership against historical forces. People saw “a brave man,” in Richard Kirkendall’s words, “fighting almost alone against great odds,” and bringing off the greatest upset in American history. But Truman finally won by not fighting alone. With the help of Stalin’s aggressive blockade of land traffic between Berlin and West Germany, he played on the anticommunism latent in millions of Americans. He received Eleanor Roosevelt’s benediction and exploited the momentum and mythology of the Roosevelt heritage. He depended heavily on the Democratic party, which produced a set of congressional victories as significant as the presidential. He remobilized the economic voting groups of farmers, workers, and urban consumers bequeathed by Roosevelt.

The gutsy little man from Missouri had ridden these forces, even guided them, rather than being overwhelmed by them. Americans, recovering from their election-night shock, took this underdog—this winning underdog—to their bosom.

The Spiral of Fear

For the political leadership of the nation 1948 had indeed been a showdown. For Dewey, whose popular vote fell short of his 1944 total, it would be the end of the presidential road. Thurmond’s States’ Rights party, winning 1,169,000 popular votes and 38 electoral votes, fell far short of its electoral hopes in the South. The Wallace Progressives, garnering even fewer popular votes than the Dixiecrats and no electoral votes, learned once again the bias of American traditions and elections against third parties. Congressional Republican leaders, set up as a perfect target by the Democrats, lost their House and Senate majorities. And renowned political prophets suffered the derision of the winners and the wrath of the losers who castigated them for their sloppy polling techniques.

For the longer run, however, the 1948 election was less dramatic. In the lexicon of political scientists, it was a “maintaining election,” reflecting persisting party loyalties and stable group attachments. The excitement of a four-cornered battle had not brought out a big vote. In many respects the 1948 election was a fifth presidential victory for FDR and the New Deal. For most Americans, voting Democratic had become a habit.

Yet in a far more momentous way 1948 was a different kind of maintaining election—an election that sustained the Truman Administration in its Fair Deal posture but above all in its anticommunism. It seemed likely that Truman’s loyalty program and his increasingly hard line toward Moscow had blunted Republican charges of “soft on communism” and helped turn Dewey against the weapon he had used in 1944. Even more, the election ratified the sphere-of-interest strategy on which the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and other Administration foreign policies were grounded. The Administration’s unofficial protectorate over Greece and Turkey, its insistence on holding West Berlin through a resourceful air-supply program—along with its reluctance to interfere in the Soviet sphere—suggested that the war-torn world of the early 1940s was settling down into some kind of Great Power stability based on mutual containment.

Maintaining that stability, however, would call for the most exacting statecraft on all sides; it would call for clear perceptions of nations’ interests, dependable estimates of the military potential and intentions of rival powers, sophisticated political intelligence about the interplay of national interests within and among rival blocs, realistic estimates of strategic possibilities and impossibilities, skillful national leadership and tenacious diplomacy. The historic balances of power of past centuries had depended on the statecraft of military and political leaders possessing such Bismarckian qualities. But the sphere-of-interest, balance-of-power way of stabilizing international relationships—especially difficult for democracies to manage—was always hostage to one powerful force: change. Alterations in the actual military and economic power of rival and friendly nations, combined with misperceptions of popular attitudes and the intentions of leaders, all in a context of fear and hostility, could—and often did—bring the trembling mobiles of the balance of power crashing down.

The years 1948 and 1949 bristled with events full of potential for arousing fear and hostility, misperceptions and miscalculations, among the Great Powers. The mysterious, awesome might of the atomic weapon was proving a source more of fear than of security among nations. Evidence of atomic espionage by Soviet spies struck fear in American hearts that the Russians would steal the “secret” of the bomb. The Soviets, knowing that Washington would never permit international controls that would give Moscow that secret, worked feverishly on their own bomb. Despite scientists’ advice that Moscow would not be slow to develop an atomic weapon, many Administration officials confidently assumed that they would continue to hold this trump card. Then in September 1949 came the dread news: winds blowing high over North America were carrying radiation from a Soviet atomic test. A few months later Truman announced that the United States would begin to develop the hydrogen bomb—potentially many times more destructive than the A-bomb.

Germany was another crisis point. The standoff following the Soviet blockade and the Western airlift left heightened fears and hostility on each side, in turn drawing the divided Germans into the East-West spheres of interest. This balance-of-power tendency might have stabilized the situation, save that a divided Berlin remained a tempting and vulnerable island in eastern Germany. Officials on each side, moreover, now feared that the adversary would seek to draw all of Germany into its own embrace. Step by fearful step, the two camps lost the opportunity, limited in any event, to shape a unified and disarmed Germany.

But the most profound change—perhaps the most significant transformation of the mid-twentieth century—was threatening the balance of power on the other side of the globe. The civil war in China had accelerated, despite patient efforts by General Marshall to mediate the conflict. By the end of 1947 Mao Tse-tung’s communist armies had won control of Manchuria and by the end of 1948 most of northern China; during 1949 it became clear that soon they would drive Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces off the Chinese mainland. Chiang’s withdrawal to Taiwan created one more outpost—a counterpart to Berlin—that could be protected against invasion only by Western power. And it left fear and anger among Americans who cherished their country’s historic involvement and sympathy with China—most recently with Chiang and Madame Chiang’s Republican China, which they imagined could be guided toward Western-style democracy.

It was not in Germany or China, however, or in some atomic confrontation, but in the little-known land of the Koreans that statecraft failed and the balance of power began a wild oscillation.

Although this remote land, protruding into the Sea of Japan out of the great haunch of Manchuria, had for centuries been a jousting ground for rival powers, it had been viewed during the postwar years of tension as one of the less likely theaters of hot war. Divided along an “administrative dividing line”—the 38th parallel—after World War II, Korea fell into the hands of militant communists in the north headed by Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang and militant anticommunists in the south headed by Syngman Rhee in Seoul. The two regimes, each hoping to take over the whole country, glared covetously at each other’s lands across the parallel.

In January 1950, Dean Acheson, Marshall’s successor as Secretary of State, described to Washington journalists an American defense perimeter that ran from the Aleutians to the Ryukyus to the Philippines but excluded Korea, though the secretary added that if such other areas were invaded the people attacked must resist with the help if necessary “of the entire civilized world under the charter of the United Nations.” American occupation troops pulled out of South Korea, leaving light weapons and ammunition but no aircraft, tanks, or heavy naval craft. Washington’s idea was that Rhee would be able to defend but not attack. Moscow, Peking, and Pyongyang looked on with interest.

The war that erupted after North Korean troops drove through the parallel on June 25, 1950, was in part an old-fashioned campaign of movement and maneuver. Within two days President Truman, without waiting for Congress to act, ordered United States air and naval forces to Korea and authorized the dispatch of a regimental combat team within a week. The North Koreans quickly captured Seoul and drove south down the peninsula, seizing Pohang on the southeastern coast by early September and cornering their foe at the foot of the peninsula. On September 15, American forces under General MacArthur struck back with a brilliantly conceived and executed landing at Inchon, on the coast west of Seoul. Within eleven days the counterattackers had captured Seoul, and by late October they had taken Pyongyang, a hundred miles to the north. Intoxicated by his success at Inchon, by hopes of a glorious triumph over communism, and by visions of his return home to a hero’s welcome, MacArthur drove his troops still further north, toward the Manchurian border.

The world looked on aghast—World War II was not yet five years over in the Pacific and Americans were once again fighting Asians. How could this “most unnecessary of wars” have started?

The misperceptions that dominated the Korean War rivaled the blunders that had led to hostilities in earlier centuries when both intelligence and communication among nations were still primitive. Its origins were parochial. Kim feared that Rhee would wipe out communists in the south and then turn north; Rhee feared that Pyongyang would seek to “unify” the country by mobilizing those same southern communists. According to Khrushchev’s later account, Kim, during a trip to Moscow, sought Stalin’s permission to strike south and topple Rhee. Somewhat reluctantly Stalin assented, doubtless calculating on a large gain at small risk. Even so, Stalin ordered all Soviet advisers out of North Korea so that Moscow would not be compromised in the venture. He also had Kim clear the decision with Mao, or perhaps did so himself when Mao visited Moscow. Both the Russian and the Chinese dictator expected that the Americans would not intervene, at least not in time to stop Kim’s conquest of the south. But Truman, under attack himself for “losing China,” was not going to “lose” more real estate. The fall of South Korea would gravely menace Japan.

The Americans and South Koreans counterattacked far more quickly and effectively than the communist leaders had expected. But now it was the Americans’ turn for miscalculation.

Truman, assuming wrongly that Moscow had instigated the invasion and that Korea was the first step in the communist march to world conquest, had hopes of rolling back communist power and unifying Korea. Now, with the North Korean forces reeling backwards, he could win a relatively cheap victory. But it would not be cheap. After MacArthur’s forces neared the Yalu River and launched a general assault to win the war, the Chinese counterattacked in heavy force. Soon it was MacArthur’s army, divided and immobilized in the mountain passes, suffering bitterly in the winter snow and ice, bleeding heavily from close Chinese pursuit, that stumbled back to positions on the other side of the 38th parallel. There the two sides sparred with each other for years, suffering further heavy casualties, until an armistice was signed in July 1953, a few months after the death of Stalin.

Both sides had failed to assess correctly the other’s strategic capability. Both sides were militarily unprepared for the battle they would undertake. Each had underestimated the other’s willingness to fight and then had exaggerated the other’s fighting as part of a long-planned strategy of global conquest. Each assumed that the “other” Korea was the enemy’s puppet. Originally Korea had not been part of either side’s master plan, but the outbreak of the Korean War, resulting from miscalculations and misperceptions, made Korea part of a crisis plan.

Then, too, the Korean War had a dire and unexpected impact on the relationship of Moscow and Peking. It was, Adam Ulam concluded, one of the biggest blunders of postwar Soviet foreign policy. “On the surface it appeared as a master stroke to make Peking the lightning rod for America’s wrath and frustration while the Soviet Union remained a sympathetic bystander. In fact, those two years when the Chinese had to assume the burden of the fighting marked their psychological emancipation and speeded up the process of equalization between the two states” that had begun with negotiations between Mao and Stalin in Moscow. The increasing tension between Peking and Moscow heartened Western leaders, but it was a further destabilizing factor in the quivering balance of power around the globe.

Perhaps the Korean War’s major effect in the United States was on the mass public’s fears and hostility. Anticommunists now cried out that their warnings had been justified, that the North Korean attack proved Russia to be bent on world conquest, that the Chinese attack across the Yalu confirmed that Peking was bent on Asian conquest. It was in this context that anticommunist feeling was reaching a new pitch among Americans.

After his election “in his own right,” President Truman carried on his anticommunist campaign, holding that his “responsible” efforts might moderate or head off the “irresponsible” red hunters. In July 1948 his Justice Department won the indictment of twelve Communist party leaders, including Eugene Dennis and Gus Hall, for violating the 1940 Smith Act, which made it a crime “to teach and advocate the overthrow of the United States government by force and violence.” The trial dragged on through most of 1949. The prosecution based its case largely on the testimony of ex-communists and on readings from “Marxist-Leninist” classics, with former Daily Worker managing editor Louis Budenz explaining that however innocent the language of the classics might appear, it had an altogether different and sinister meaning to trained communists. The twelve sought but failed to put “the Government… on trial.” The judge’s charge to the jury that there was “sufficient danger of a substantial evil” eliminated the “clear and present” test of the First Amendment from the jury’s deliberations. Conviction duly followed.

Administration actions of this sort, however, appeared not to quench popular fears of the reds at home and abroad but to stoke them. Those fears flamed higher after the Chinese intervention across the Yalu and Harry Truman’s sacking of MacArthur for publicly advocating, against Administration policy, that the war be carried to communist China. Korea was now closely linked with “Red China.” A militant “China Lobby,” embracing such notables as Clare Boothe Luce, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and James Farley, and such publications as the Hearst newspapers and the Luce magazines, kept up a drumfire: Who lost China? Senator Taft charged that “the proper kind of sincere aid to the Nationalist Government a few years ago could have stopped communism in China,” but a “pro-Communist group in the State Department” had promoted “at every opportunity the Communist cause in China.”

At the center of the China Lobby’s target stood Dean Acheson. This sternest of cold warriors was described in the Senate as having “whined” and “whimpered” as he “slobbered over the shoes of his Muscovite masters.” Acheson was vulnerable. Though lacking a political base of his own, he made no attempt to modify his bristling Groton-Yale-Eastern Establishment demeanor. Acheson showed his class manners and his moral code when he told reporters that he would never “turn my back” on Alger Hiss, but this only goaded his foes to a new fury.

“I look at that fellow, I watch his smart-aleck manner and his British clothes and that New Dealism,” cried Senator Hugh Butler of Nebraska, “and I want to shout, Get out, Get out. You stand for everything that has been wrong with the United Stales for years.”

During the late forties the war on “reds in America” had lacked a single dominant leader—or perhaps it had suffered from too many leaders vying for headlines and photographs. Then there emerged a figure that only a movement of the fearful and the paranoid could have brought to the fore. Decades later it was difficult for historians to fathom just why an obscure junior senator from Wisconsin named Joseph R. McCarthy suddenly became the notorious spokesman and symbol of American anticommunism at home. “Tail-gunner Joe,” as he was somewhat derisively called, had won some note in 1946 by shooting down a famous senator and heir to a great Wisconsin dynasty, Robert M. La Follette, Jr. In Washington he soon won a small reputation for abusing Senate procedures, harassing witnesses, and using “the multiple untruth,” as Richard Rovere later termed it. He employed these tactics indiscriminately against advocates of public housing, communists, fellow senators.

McCarthy had been casting about for some exploitable cause when the GOP sent him out on a routine barnstorming trip in February 1950. At Wheeling, West Virginia, he offered to an audience of Republican women the usual grab bag of parings from newspaper columns, Senate testimony, and anticommunist talks—this time a two-week-old Nixon speech, which he plagiarized. After the tired old cracks at traitors and fellow travelers and striped-pants diplomats in the State Department, McCarthy tried his version of the Big Lie. “While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as active members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring,” he said, “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”

This was pretty stale talk, and the Wheeling speech itself received little press attention. But as McCarthy continued his tour and spewed out charges and numbers, he gathered more and more headlines. It was still not clear why. His Wheeling “list” had come from a 1946 letter—which he did not “hold in his hand”—to Congress from Secretary Byrnes. The letter reported on a preliminary screening, made no mention of Communist party membership, contained no names; and McCarthy had no idea how many of them were still in State. But something about this man increasingly riveted press attention—his sullen, jowly, dark-shaven features, his menacing voice, the recklessness with which he offered specific figures instead of hazy accusations.

Indeed, he had the audacity to renew his charges on the Senate floor. Fishing papers out of his briefcase, he embarked on an eight-hour, case-by-case analysis of what were now “81 loyalty risks.” His speech was a masterpiece of distortion of a two-year-old House of Representatives report drawn from unsifted State Department files that were in turn based, in many cases, on rumor and hearsay. McCarthy promoted a suspect in the House report from an “active fellow traveler” to an “active Communist,” converted a man “inclined towards Communism” into simply a “Communist,” transformed a “friend of someone believed to be a Communist” into a “close pal of a known Communist.” Even Senator Taft called it a “perfectly reckless performance.”

Questioned by a Senate investigating committee under the chairmanship of Maryland Democrat Millard Tydings, McCarthy twisted and parried and obfuscated. Pressed for names, he threw out those of culprits with abandon and sometimes, it seemed, at random. After a four-month investigation the committee concluded that McCarthy had perpetrated a “fraud and a hoax” on the Senate.

But for many Republicans the Wisconsin senator was now changing from an embarrassment to an artillery piece in a wider war. Any Republican could use this freewheeling red hunter against the Democrats without taking responsibility for him. And conservative, isolationist Republicans could use him against moderate, internationalist ones. Soon Taft, despite private doubts, was encouraging McCarthy to “keep talking and if one case doesn’t work out, he should proceed with another one.” Moderate Republicans were prepared neither to embrace McCarthy nor to join his Democratic foes. Rather they sought a middle ground that proved to be unstable. After seven moderates, headed by Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, issued a “Declaration of Conscience” that scored both Truman and the exploiters of fear, five of the seven backed away as they felt the political heat.

That heat was rising as the elections of 1950 and 1952 neared. McCarthy received hundreds of invitations to speak for his party’s candidates, more than all other senators combined. He appeared in fifteen states, most notably in Illinois, where he backed Everett Dirksen, and in Maryland, where he opposed Tydings. In the 1950 elections Democrats kept control of both houses, but the result was seen as a stunning triumph for McCarthy, who brandished the scalps of at least five anti-McCarthy senators, including Tydings. Later election analysis deflated McCarthy’s role, but it was the perception that counted. To oppose the Wisconsin senator, it appeared, was to commit political suicide. A reporter noted in 1951: “The ghost of Senator Tydings hangs over the Senate.”

His 1950 crusade elevated McCarthy to the high priesthood of Republican right-wing extremism. McCarthyism, said the rising young conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., “is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.” The trick of McCarthy’s success was becoming clear too. He appeared to have an almost instinctive skill for manipulating the press during an age of fear. He dexterously handled the wire services, which supplied most of the country’s newspapers and radio stations with national news. He knew how to make headlines and catch deadlines; he knew that wild charges were played big while denials were buried among the want ads; he knew that the wilder the charge, the bigger the headline.

Covering McCarthy was a “shattering experience,” remembered George Reedy of the United Press. “We had to take what McCarthy said at face value. Joe couldn’t find a Communist in Red Square—he didn’t know Karl Marx from Groucho—but he was a United States Senator.” He was also both a reflector and an exploiter of the age of fear.

It was in this atmosphere of hostility and fear that Americans entered the election year of 1952. Already the sides were lining up but more so within the parties than between them. Senator Taft, cherishing his growing image of “Mr. Republican,” had already made clear his aim to win the nomination that twice had eluded him. Harry Truman, beset by the triple charges of “K1-C2” (Korea, corruption, and Communism), was not expected to run again—unless some Dixiecrat or populist Democrat threatened to make off with the nomination. McCarthy continued to play his own game. And to the consternation of Taft Republicans, the hated “Eastern Establishment,” after losing twice with Dewey, was preparing to foist another “New Deal Republican” onto the Grand Old Party.

That Establishment was busy recruiting its man. Dwight Eisenhower’s wartime reputation and popularity, projected through his soldierly bearing and infectious smile, made him the favorite of both Democrats and Republicans for their presidential candidate. A stint as president of Columbia University, glamorized by the New York press, followed by his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, had kept the general in the center of the public eye. By late 1951 Dewey, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, and a dozen other northeastern senators and governors were forming an Eisenhower organization and dispatching missionaries to NATO headquarters in Paris to draft their man.

Their man was proving curiously undraftable. Appealing to his ambition was useless. He had pretty well hit his peak in history, he liked to tell visitors, when he accepted the German surrender in 1945. “Now why should I want to get into a completely foreign field and try to top that?” The old soldier, now in his sixty-second year, also had the typical distaste of the American military man for the seamy side of politics. But he also had a sense of duty, even of indispensability, and it was on these vulnerabilities that the recruiters played while the “isolationist” Taft threatened to win the nomination, the Korean War festered, and China appeared more and more “lost.” Ike wanted the expression of duty to take tangible form, however—nomination and even election by acclamation. As Taft proceeded to line up delegates early in 1952, it became clear that the convention would not draft the general. Playing on his combative instincts, the missionaries won his grudging agreement to come home and fight for his nomination.

By late spring, when he returned home, Ike was ready for a fight, but not for the one that awaited him. Somewhat familiar with the ideological warfare between the old guard and young moderates within the GOP, he still had not realized the intensity of that conflict. It was not merely isolationists versus internationalists, or eastern and western “coastal” Republicans against midwestern Republicanism. The GOP was virtually two parties, each with its own ideology, traditions, and policies, its own leadership, electoral following, institutional foundations in federal and state governments. These two parties, one entrenched in Congress and state legislatures, the other in the federal and state executive branches, ordinarily kept their distance, but they could not escape collision in the campaign for delegates to the GOP national convention.

The Taft and Eisenhower forces came into sharpest conflict in Texas, where anti-Truman Democrats, anti-Taft Republicans, and just plain “I Like Ike” voters sought to wrest convention votes away from the old-guard regulars. Fierce battles erupted in precinct caucuses when the regulars, many of them accustomed to holding these meetings in their front parlors, found “one-day Republicans” crowding in to vote for Ike. Some precinct bosses ousted the intruders, who then held rump caucuses out on the lawn; other “hosts” were shoved out of their own homes and had to hold their own rump meetings outside. The upshot, after the Taft-controlled state convention met, was a ferocious fight over two competing delegate slates to the national convention.

This kind of fight over delegates’ credentials was nothing new; indeed, Taft could remember a similar battle between his father and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Whether a party should represent the old dependables who stuck with it in good times and bad, for power or profit or principle, or the independents and volunteers and irregulars who “raided” the party either from opportunism or from idealism was one of the oldest political questions, in both theory and practice. What was new was the skill of the public relations men around Eisenhower in elevating the matter to a transcending moral issue. Soon his forces were embarked not on a messy old credentials dispute but on a crusade for moral purity, THOU SHALT NOT STEAL, proclaimed Dewey, Lodge & Co. Ike forces waved signs: ROB WITH BOB and GRAFT WITH TAFT. Eisenhower joined with his followers in denouncing the “Texas steal.” Taft offered to compromise, but how could the Ike crusaders compromise on a moral issue?

It was one of the more spurious “moral” issues in American history, but it was nonetheless effective. The Eisenhower forces won the credentials fight at the national convention in Chicago and then, with their strength augmented, held full command. There was hell to pay. Thrusting a limp, quivering finger toward the New York delegation, Taft stalwart Everett Dirksen, senator from Illinois, from the convention podium charged Dewey with taking “us down the path to defeat.” He cried, “Don’t take us down that road again!” Conservatives and moderates blasted one another on the convention floor. But Ike had the votes. Despite a prompt and friendly visit from the nominee, Taft left Chicago a deeply embittered man. His presidential road, like Dewey’s in 1948, had come to an end. But he could not understand why. He had taken the traditional path toward the White House. He was “Mr. Republican.” He asked a reporter, “Why do they hate me so?”

Could the two Republican parties remarry, at least for the campaign? It was a matter for negotiation. After demanding assurances from the nominee that he would exclude Dewey as Secretary of State from an Eisenhower cabinet and give the Taft forces equal representation, Taft was more conciliatory at a breakfast meeting on New York’s Morningside Heights. Eisenhower, after barely looking at it, approved a statement making “liberty against creeping socialization” the central campaign issue, promising to “battle communism throughout the world and in the United States,” and playing down the foreign policy differences between the two men.

Democrats would have viewed Ike’s “surrender at Morningside Heights” with pleasure, except that they were plagued by their own divisions. Truman still planned not to run, but only if he could bequeath the office to an acceptable—i.e., pro-Administration—nominee. This ruled out an engaging young senator from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver, whose chairmanship of a committee investigating crime in politics had supplied Republicans with ammunition against White House “cronies.” Southern Democrats, still angry over the President’s civil rights program, were planning once again to break out of the party tent in one direction or another. Truman’s eye lingered on Adlai E. Stevenson, whose high-toned, good-humored governorship of Illinois was drawing national attention. But Stevenson was a curious political animal—he liked being governor and had little hankering for the White House. Offered the nomination by Truman, he declined. Pressed to run by hosts of Democrats ranging from Chicago bosses to Manhattan intellectuals, he repeatedly stated that he was not a candidate. To be sure, he did not issue a “Sherman,” and some expert decoders of the Delphic utterances of politicians made much of his having said, not that he “would not” accept the nomination, but that he “could not.” Others believed he had closed the door.

The vast majority of the delegates hardly knew Stevenson when this slight, balding, vibrant man welcomed them to Chicago in words of polished elegance and wit that many present would never forget. Here on the prairies of Illinois, he said, “we can see a long way in all directions.” Here were no barriers to ideas and aspirations, no shackles on the mind or spirit, no iron conformity. Here the only Democratic governors chosen in a century had been John Peter Altgeld, a Protestant, Edward F. Dunne, a Catholic, and Henry Horner, a Jew. And “that, my friends, is the American story, written by the Democratic Party, here on the prairies of Illinois.”

The delegates sat hushed, spellbound, as Stevenson turned to the Republicans. For almost a week “pompous phrases marched over this landscape in search of an idea, and the only idea they found was that the two great decades of progress in peace, victory in war, and bold leadership in this anxious hour were the misbegotten spawn of socialism, bungling, corruption,” and the rest. “They captured, tied and dragged that ragged idea in here and furiously beat it to death.…” After all the denunciations of Washington he was surprised that his mail was delivered on time. “But we Democrats were not the only victims here. First they slaughtered each other, and then they went after us.” This speech brought howls of laughter and wild applause, and helped produce Stevenson’s nomination a few days later—one of the few genuine presidential drafts in American history.

With both nominees chosen, the election outcome turned on each candidate’s capacity to unite and mobilize his party. Eisenhower’s was the more formidable task. Placating Taft and the congressional Republicans was one thing; bringing around McCarthy and the McCarthyites was something else. Holding his nose, the general made the necessary concessions. In Indiana he shared a platform with Senator William Jenner, who had called Eisenhower’s revered boss George Marshall a “front man for traitors” and a “living lie.” In Wisconsin, under pressure from midwestern politicians and from McCarthy himself, he deleted from his speech a tribute to Marshall’s “profoundest patriotism” in “the service of America.”

But the harshest test of Eisenhower’s effort to follow the high road while exploiting the low came with the revelation that running mate Richard Nixon, whom he had named in an effort to appease both Taft and the McCarthyites, possessed a “secret fund” fattened by businessmen. Although there was nothing illegal about the fund and the money had been used for legitimate campaign expenses, Nixon’s charges of Democratic corruption exposed him to fierce counterattack. First the general allowed him to twist in the wind while Republican politicians and editors—most of them from the Eastern Establishment—urged the vice-presidential candidate to quit the ticket. Then he waited until Nixon delivered a maudlin television talk about his wife and his daughters and his dog, Checkers. Only after several hundred thousand or more telegrams and letters deluged the Republican party with expressions of support did he embrace Nixon as “my boy.” The “boy” would never forgive Eisenhower for making him undergo this ordeal.

With biting humor Stevenson dug at these open sores in the GOP, quipping after the Eisenhower-Taft summit conference that Taft had lost the nomination but won the nominee, that the general was worried about Stevenson’s funny bone but he was worried about the general’s backbone. He liked poking fun at the war between the “two Republican” parties. But the Democratic candidate had his own two parties to deal with. With some Southerners ready to bolt again, the Democrats had adopted a platform exquisitely ambiguous on the key issue of federal fair employment legislation. They had chosen as Stevenson’s running mate Senator John Sparkman of Alabama, whose record on civil rights was such that fifty black delegates had walked out of the convention. Stevenson was caught in the middle of this issue, while Eisenhower, inheriting much of Taft’s symbolic and personal support in the South, took a conservative position on civil rights but a strong stand for ownership of the oil tidelands by the states. With the prestigious Senator Richard Russell applying steady pressure from the right, and black and white civil rights liberals from the left, Stevenson hoped that he could at least sweep the South in time-honored Democratic style.

But the South was no longer for the Democratic taking. Eisenhower proved to be the great unifier, just as his recruiters had hoped, and campaigned extensively in the South. Then, when he made the electrifying statement that he would “go to Korea”—after Stevenson had considered and rejected the idea as inappropriate for himself—election-watchers knew that the fight was over. The general swept the northern industrial states and carried Virginia, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee—but not the states of the “solid South” that had bolted the Democracy in 1948. Election analysis demonstrated that his winning margin was far more a tribute to his personal popularity than a victory for the GOP. Almost half the poor did not vote, but among the poor who did turn out, most voted for Ike.

“Someone asked me, as I came in, down on the street, how I felt,” Stevenson told his weeping followers on election night. He was reminded of a story about Lincoln after an unsuccessful election. “He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.”

The Price of Suspicion

The Senate Caucus Room, April 22, 1954. Bathed in brilliant television lights, senators, counsel, witnesses, bodyguards huddle around a small, coffin-shaped table, surrounded in turn by several score reporters. Men who are famous—and others who will be—are there: Joe McCarthy, smiling and frowning and giggling, his face heavier and stubblier than ever, the center of exploding flashbulbs; his aide, a smooth-faced young attorney named Roy Cohn; Joseph Welch, a little-known, old-fashioned-looking Boston attorney; Robert Kennedy, the twenty-nine-year-old minority counsel. Jammed into the room are four hundred spectators, including such Washington celebrities as Alice Roosevelt Longworth and “hostess with the mostest” Perle Mesta.

For weeks the eyes of the nation would be focused on this Senate cockpit. The formal issues seemed almost trivial, considering all the fuss: Did McCarthy and others put improper pressure on the Army in order to win preferential treatment for Private David Schine, Cohn’s good friend; did Army officials use improper methods to deflect earlier McCarthy probes? The stakes in fact were much bigger. “They ranged from the integrity of the Armed Forces to the moral responsibilities of federal workers,” in David Oshinsky’s words, “from the separation of powers to the future of Senator McCarthy,” pitting President against Congress, Republican against Republican, senator against senator.

The subcommittee chairman rapped an ashtray, the television lights brightened, the subcommittee’s special counsel opened his mouth to speak, then:

“A point of order, Mr. Chairman. May I raise a point of order?”

Once again McCarthy was moving audaciously, outrageously, stealing the scene from all the others, putting himself at the center of the affair— and there he would remain day after day, exposing himself to millions of avid television watchers for 187 televised hours.

“Point of order, Mr. Chairman, point of order.” The phrase engraved itself on the memory of a nation.

Fifteen months after Dwight Eisenhower had taken the oath of office the shadow of Joseph McCarthy lay across his Administration. At the moment the Wisconsin senator’s target was the Army. It appeared, though, that he was attacking not only the usual suspects—Communists, fellow travelers, intellectuals, Democrats—but the very foundations of the republic: the armed forces, the Senate, the White House, even the churches. Earlier his man J. B. Matthews had charged in The American Mercury that the “largest single group supporting the Communist apparatus in the United States is composed of Protestant clergymen.”

It was not as though the President had ignored the matter; it had been a source of attention, irritation, anger. But he had tried to defuse McCarthy rather than confront him. Ike’s 1952 running mate, after all, had savaged Stevenson as an appeaser who “got his Ph.D. from Dean Acheson’s College of Cowardly Communist Containment.” In his Checkers speech, Nixon had attributed his slush-fund woes to those who had opposed him “in the dark days of the Hiss case.” Later Nixon had charged that Stevenson “has not only testified for Alger Hiss, but he has never made a forthright statement deploring the damage that Hiss and others like him did to America because of the politics and comfort they received from the Truman Administration and its predecessors.” To McCarthy these were weasel words. He had shown Nixon the real stuff, castigating Stevenson as the candidate of the Daily Worker and supporter of “the suicidal Kremlin-shaped policies of this nation.”

The President raged at McCarthy privately but would not openly take him on. “I just will not—I refuse—to get into the gutter with that guy,” he said to intimates. Moreover, he did not want to jeopardize his right-wing support in the Senate. A Republican White House, he hoped, would reassure and tame the Wisconsin “trouble-maker.”

Such hopes were dashed within a month of Eisenhower’s inaugural on January 20, 1953. Using as his vehicle the previously sleepy Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, stacking it with loyal Republicans and dominating it as chairman, McCarthy went off on a rampage against the State Department, charging sabotage in State’s Voice of America program, discovering communism in the Overseas Libraries Division, taking up cudgels against Eisenhower’s friend Charles Bohlen, FDR’s translator at Yalta. When the new President proposed Bohlen for ambassador to the Soviet Union—a cold war nomination, considering Bohlen’s record— McCarthy was infuriated. Bohlen was “at Roosevelt’s left hand at Teheran and Yalta,” he said. Dirksen orated: “I reject Yalta, so I reject Yalta men.” After the “Yalta man” was confirmed Taft told the President, “No more Bohlens.”

It was a severe burden on Eisenhower and the nation he now led that this legacy of the past rested so heavily on his Administration. Not since Herbert Hoover, at least, had a new President been better prepared to be Chief of State and chief foreign policy-maker. He had helped shape some of the nation’s key policies abroad, such as its military and economic linkages with Western Europe. He had been trained from his West Point days to be a leader—to take charge, to plan ahead, to unite diverse men in common effort, to be consistent and persistent, to be “fair but firm.” More and more distanced from Truman and the Democracy during the 1952 campaign, he was eager to launch new initiatives toward world peace and national security.

He had a typical piece of “Ike luck” when Joseph Stalin died only six weeks after he took office. Stalin had appeared increasingly paranoid during his last years; now he was succeeded by a collective leadership that seemed more moderate. Eisenhower’s own collective leadership was bolstered by Republican majorities in House and Senate. Taft’s election as Majority Leader in the upper chamber gave promise of a continuing collaboration between the President and the legislative leader who had fought him for the nomination and then fought for him in the election campaign.

To throw off the burdens of the recent past—the spiral of fear, the freezing of attitudes, the rigidification of policy—Eisenhower needed a Secretary of State who could devise and carry out fresh initiatives. His selection of John Foster Dulles seemed irreproachable, indeed almost inevitable. Grandson of a Republican Secretary of State under Harrison and nephew of a Democratic Secretary of State under Wilson, member himself of the American delegation to the Versailles peace conference of 1919, Dulles embodied the American foreign policy tradition. He was the one eastern internationalist whom Taft had approved for the job. To be sure, many found Dulles a windbag, a bore, and a prig. But the President could overlook such qualities in a man who seemed able to unite the two Republican parties and to make a fresh start in foreign policy.

The fresh start was slow in coming. Dulles seemed to maintain the worst of the Truman-Acheson cold war posture rather than shifting it. Like Acheson, he “approached relations with the Soviet Union as a zero-sum game,” according to Gaddis Smith. “A gain in power for the United States was good. A gain for the Soviet Union was bad. An outcome of any issue that was advantageous to both sides was hard to imagine.” The President could—and occasionally did—rein in his secretary. But Dulles was everlastingly at it, day after day, in speech after speech, junket after junket.

His rhetoric far surpassed his chiefs. Eisenhower in his inaugural address warned that because “forces of good and evil are massed and armed and opposed as rarely before in history,” it was all the more urgent to seek peace, especially since “science seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to erase human life from this planet.” Dulles in this same month of January 1953 declaimed that Soviet communism viewed people as “nothing more than somewhat superior animals,” and that as long as communism held such conceptions, there could not be “any permanent reconciliation.” He saw an “irreconcilable conflict.” In the following months Dulles did more than negotiate with the hard-liners in Congress and in the country—he often represented them in Administration councils. Time and again he threatened to lay a blighting hand on the President’s hopes and initiatives.

Thus Dulles’s calls for liberation of Moscow’s satellites and for “massive retaliation,” which evoked countervailing fear and hostility in the Kremlin, went far beyond the President’s vague calls for freedom for the captive peoples. At a time when Eisenhower was seeking to lower tension between the two sides in Korea and stabilize the front, Dulles was siding with Rhee’s demands for reunification (under him) after a massive new “preemptive” strike to the north. At a time when Eisenhower was seeking to strengthen Western European unity and even help shape a “United States of Europe,” his Secretary of State was threatening that the United States might go it alone. At a time when his chief was denouncing “book burning” in a speech at Dartmouth College (though he backed off a bit later), Dulles was still pressing for the clearing out of suspect volumes in overseas libraries. At a time when the President sought some stabilization of relations between Peking and Chiang’s new government on Taiwan, Dulles favored “unleashing” the Nationalists for some kind of offensive on the mainland.

It was not that Dulles vetoed or openly sabotaged the President’s plans and policies—in general, Eisenhower stayed on top of his Administration. Rather the Secretary of State frustrated that part of Eisenhower that wished to mobilize the forces for peace in the world and amplified that part of Ike that was a cold warrior. It was the old story of the “pragmatist” feeling his way, exploring opportunities, trying out initiatives, all the time that his true believer of a Secretary of State was scaring the adversaries— and even more the allies—half to death.

The tumultuous Middle East offered Eisenhower ample opportunity for “pragmatic” action. When Iran’s Prime Minister, Muhammad Mossadegh, appeared soft on communism—he had accepted financial support from Moscow and political support from the Communist party in Iran—Eisenhower authorized a CIA-financed coup that drove Mossadegh out of office in 1953 and put Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlevi on his path to the throne. While the Administration was eager to help United States oil interests, Eisenhower’s central motive was the “Soviet threat”; Eden reported to Churchill after a talk with the President that he “seemed obsessed by the fear of a Communist Iran.” When the pro-Western government of Lebanon appeared likely to collapse in 1958 amid Christian and Moslem rioting, Eisenhower sent Marines into the country. In both cases the President had responded to what he perceived as a Soviet threat expressed directly or through “puppets”; in both cases he and his advisers miscalculated, for the real threat was militant Middle Eastern nationalism.

Still, Eisenhower’s main accomplishment in his early years as President was what he did not do. After visiting along the Korean front lines, viewing the misery of the soldiers and sizing up the formidability of the mountainous terrain, he did not order an attack to the north. When the Chinese communists began to bombard the islands of Quemoy and Matsu off their coast late in the summer of 1954, the President rejected the advice of Air Force and Navy chiefs that the United States, together with Chiang, carry out bombing raids—including atomic bombing—on the mainland. Repeatedly, when the French were facing defeats in Indochina at the hands of the communist-led Vietminh, he resisted urgings of Vice President Nixon, of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and—off and on—of his Secretary of State to intervene with conventional and even atomic arms. “Five times in one year,” observed his biographer Stephen Ambrose, “the experts advised the President to launch an atomic strike against China. Five times he said no.”

Eisenhower’s ability to say no to new departures in domestic policy as well as to adventurism abroad, his endless search for compromise and consensus, his acceptance of Establishment values led contemporary observers to describe his Administration derisively as the “bland leading the bland.” By the 1980s historians were treating him more favorably, as fresh data revealed what political scientist Fred I. Greenstein termed his “hidden hand” legislative and political tactics, his effort to give a New Look—more atomic firepower, expanded Air Force, less cost for conventional arms—to his foreign policy, his concept of leadership as raising followers above their individualistic, short-term goals to embrace long-run moral goals. His main failing—lack of strong, consistent policy direction stemming from inability to link broad ends to explicit and specific means—reflected central ambiguities in this man of war who was also a man of peace.

Above all, in his presidency, a man of peace. For Eisenhower had to live with the horror of atomic war as few others did. On a June evening in 1955, as he was leaving the Oval Office, an aide hurried toward him to blurt out the fearful words—the enemy had attacked the United States—fifty-three of the biggest cities had been devastated—vast numbers were fleeing— there were uncounted dead—fallout had spread over the country. Casualty estimates were stupefying—up to 60 or even 100 million.

It was a mock exercise, of course—part of Operation Alert, an effort to simulate a real atomic attack. The President had instructed that he not be told in advance when the exercise would be mounted. If he “survived,” he and his cabinet would be evacuated to a secret site in the Carolina mountains.

To build peace, time for Dwight Eisenhower ran short. Twelve weeks before he took office a hydrogen device as large as a two-story house, weighing some sixty-five tons, and almost a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, had obliterated a Pacific island a mile wide. Twelve weeks after taking office the President told a meeting of the American Society of Newspaper Editors that in exchange for certain Soviet concessions, including agreement on a “free and united Germany” and the “full independence of the East European nations,” he was ready to sign an arms limitation agreement and to accept international control of atomic energy under a “practical system of inspection under the United Nations.” He warned of a life of perpetual fear, of enormous financial costs. Struck even as he spoke by an intestinal attack that brought sweat, chills, and dizziness, he clung to the rostrum and went on:

“This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” The cost of one heavy bomber equaled that of two fully equipped hospitals. A single fighter plane cost a half-million bushels of wheat. “This is not a way of life at all”—“it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”

Late in August 1953 Moscow announced that it had tested an H-bomb. Before the United Nations in December the President proposed that the United States and the Soviet Union contribute part of their nuclear stockpiles to an international atomic energy agency. To this “Atoms for Peace” proposal the 3,500 delegates responded with a prolonged ovation, but the Russians, fearing it would enable the Americans to get ahead of them, answered with long stalling tactics. On March 1, 1954, the United States exploded a nuclear device on Namu Island in the Bikini atoll. The stupendous fireball lighted the skies for a hundred miles around; the wave of radiation sickened Marshallese on the islands and Japanese on an unlucky fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon. By now the H-bomb was becoming central to Western strategy; Britain and France would have the bomb before the decade was over.

The oratory continued while the atomic arsenals expanded. At a Geneva summit in the summer of 1955 the Soviets urged that the manufacture and use of atomic weapons be prohibited and that the armed forces of China, Russia, and the United States be limited to a million and a half men each. Eisenhower proposed that each nation give the other a “complete blueprint” of its military establishments and that each permit the other free photographic reconnaissance over its lands. The Russians rejected this “Open Skies” proposal as a bald espionage plot. A year later Adlai Stevenson, once again nominated by the Democrats, suggested suspension of nuclear tests; a year after that, in August 1957, the reelected President asked for a two-year suspension.

Eisenhower’s initiatives were not working, nor were Moscow’s. Fear continued to dominate diplomacy. And so did politics: Nixon had called Stevenson’s proposal for a halt to nuclear tests “not only naïve but dangerous to our national security.”

But the President could still display his greatest skill—not going to war. During the early 1950s both the Soviets and the Western powers became increasingly involved in the Middle East, largely because each side feared penetration of the area by the other. In part to neutralize a Soviet arms sale to Egypt, Dulles—at a time when the President was still recovering from a serious heart attack—first offered to help Egypt finance the building of the Aswan Dam, President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s top economic priority, and then withdrew the offer. Both steps were taken in light of American strategic needs rather than the Egyptian people’s needs. After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain, France, and Israel, each for its own reasons, plotted—the term is not too strong—to retake the Suez. The Israelis drove into the Sinai while British and French forces attacked Egypt. A fully recovered and furious Eisenhower threw every ounce of his influence for a solid week into bringing the invasion to a halt. The President not only did not go to war—he stopped a war.

During this time came another and sterner test of Dulles declamation versus Eisenhower deescalation. Although “liberation of captive peoples” had been quietly dropped as an operational practicality during Eisenhower’s first year in office, Administration propagandists kept alive hopes and expectations at home and abroad. In October 1956, after Poland was swept by rioting, a new leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, warned Moscow defiantly that the Polish people would defend themselves against any effort to push them “off the road of democratization.” Inspired by the Poles, Hungarians took to the streets against their Soviet-dominated government. Massive Soviet intervention followed against Hungarian “freedom fighters” hurling homemade Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks. Eisenhower’s main concern was to give Moscow no reason to think that the United Slates would support the freedom fighters; he feared that Moscow might even start a third world war to maintain its hold on Eastern Europe.

“Liberation was a sham,” wrote Stephen Ambrose. “Eisenhower had always known it. The Hungarians had yet to learn it.”

Many on the Republican right shared such bitterness. Not least of these was Joe McCarthy, but in 1956 the Wisconsin senator could no longer threaten the President. The Army hearings had turned into a disaster for McCarthy, who revealed himself to the public as an inquisitorial bully. Near the end, after McCarthy had gratuitously pounced on a young, vulnerable lawyer, Welch said that he had not dreamed the senator could be so reckless and cruel “as to do an injury to that lad.” When McCarthy, glowering and storming, resumed the attack, Welch told him to stop. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” The audience burst into applause. McCarthy was bewildered. Grim, sweating, he kept asking, “What did I do? What did I do?” Six months later the Senate formally “condemned” him for abusive conduct toward his fellow senators. In three years he was dead of alcoholism.

McCarthy left human wreckage behind him—men humiliated and browbeaten, their reputations tarnished. Among the diminished was Dwight Eisenhower. He had dealt with McCarthy in his own way, by indirection, by persuading others to attack him, by pronouncements that conspicuously failed to mention the senator by name, by blowing off steam to intimates, by various other “hidden hand” manipulations. He had damaged his foe, but he had never struck at his jugular. “Eisenhower’s only significant contribution to McCarthy’s downfall,” according to a sympathetic biographer, “was the purely negative act of denying him access to executive records and personnel. Eisenhower’s cautious, hesitant approach—or nonapproach—to the McCarthy issue did the President’s reputation no good, and much harm.”

McCarthy also left a legacy of unreasoning fear. Part of that legacy materialized weeks after the Army hearings ended, when Congress passed the Communist Control Act, in effect outlawing the Communist party, which was already moribund. The vote was overwhelming in each house. The author of the bill was Hubert H. Humphrey, Minnesota Democrat.

It was the communists in Russia, not in America, who posed the true challenge, and the challenge was not purely military. In October 1957 the Soviets launched Sputnik—“traveling companion”—the world’s first man-made satellite. Sputnik II followed, carrying a dog and instruments. The feat was a “distinct surprise,” Eisenhower admitted. The popular reaction at home astonished him even more. Americans were chagrined, astounded. The Russians were supposed to be far behind on such matters, to be backward in general. Americans indulged in an orgy of self-examination and scapegoating. Seizing on education as the source of the trouble, the authorities instituted crash programs in science and languages.

American scientists were already racing to loft their own Sputnik. After vast publicity a Vanguard rocket lifted off before television cameras. It rose for two seconds, attained an altitude of four feet, caught fire, crumpled down, and blew up. The world jeered. It was a hard time for Eisenhower. A committee headed by H. Rowan Gaither, Jr., had just given him a secret and frightening report that American military defenses were inadequate against the Russians, that Moscow had a huge nuclear arsenal, that its intercontinental ballistic missile would soon be operational, that the Soviet GNP was growing faster than the American, and more. The Gaither committee of experts was so frightened that three members urged an immediate preventive war. For the first time in its history, Eisenhower told Dulles, the United States was “scared.”

Still, the President would not overreact. He knew—though he could not say so without compromising the source of his information—that the United States had great strategic superiority. But for how long? The Soviet challenge stirred him to one last effort, in the closing years of his Administration, toward détente with Moscow. And he now found himself dealing with a man in the Kremlin with whom it seemed possible to try such a venture. This was Nikita Khrushchev, who had emerged as the Soviet leader during the post-Stalin years.

Western leaders found Khrushchev almost a welcome relief from the grim gray men who had succeeded Stalin—and a striking contrast to the silent, implacable, paranoid Stalin. Short, broad, bald, no matter how well dressed he looked to Americans like an unmade bed. His earthiness, suspiciousness, rough speech revealed the “worker and peasant” origins of which he was proud; his shrewdness in Kremlin infighting, sense of timing, grasp of when to speak out with biting candor and when to be silent and patient reflected his long immersion in party affairs and foreign policy. At a showdown Plenum of the Central Committee, Khrushchev and his cohorts chastised Foreign Minister Molotov to his face for Stalinist, even “imperialist,” interference in Tito’s Yugoslavia, patronizing and arrogant intrusion into Polish affairs, blundering in approaches to Mao Tse-tung. There had probably never been another communist gathering, according to David Dallin, “at which so much unvarnished truth was spoken about Soviet behavior abroad.” But the outcome had been carefully prepared: a solid vote against Molotov, followed by his “admission” of errors and his inevitable downfall.

Six months later, in February 1956, Khrushchev astounded the Twentieth Party Congress with a blistering attack on Stalinism—on its old assumptions that capitalist wars and violent revolutions were inevitable, that “peaceful coexistence” among nations with differing social systems was impossible. Amid perhaps uneasy cheers from the delegates, he castigated Stalin for his personality cult and dictatorial ways, for underestimating the American resolve to defend Korea, for his “lack of faith in the Chinese comrades,” for his “shameful role” in Yugoslavia, and—jumping back more than fifteen years—for relying on his pact with Hitler and not preparing for the Nazi attack. While Khrushchev and his allies made clear that the United Slates was still the great adversary, the speech signaled major departures in Soviet policy: a shift from bipolar confrontation to more conventional rules of multilateral diplomacy and pluralistic accommodation; an acceptance of existing territorial arrangements in Europe; political rapprochement toward uncommitted neutrals and toward nationalist, even bourgeois, regimes; widening of the “socialist camp” to embrace independent communist states like China. And it was now clear that Khrushchev was cock of the walk.

Accepting an invitation from Eisenhower, the Soviet dictator in September 1959 treated the United States with a visit. Khrushchev made the most of his twelve days, visiting the Eisenhowers in Washington and Camp David, appearing at the United Nations, seeing the sights in Hollywood and the Iowa heartland and industrial plants, all the while wisecracking, praising, arguing, criticizing, and complaining. His loudest complaint was that he and his party had not been allowed to visit Disneyland.

“Why not?” the dictator had asked as he reported to a Hollywood luncheon. “Is it by any chance because you now have rocket-launching pads there?” It was for his own safety, he had been told. “What is it? Has cholera or plague broken out there that I might catch?” His audience guffawed. “Or has Disneyland been seized by bandits who might destroy me?”

Khrushchev’s visit survived such contretemps, however, and culminated in what came to be known as the “Spirit of Camp David.” Though Khrushchev disappointed the President by appearing not at all impressed by the abundant American homes, highways, and cars that the President had arranged for him to see by helicopter—too crowded, expensive, and wasteful, the dictator said—he pleased his host by appearing more conciliatory about Berlin and agreeing tentatively to a summit meeting in Paris in August i960.

A summit in Paris in the last year of his administration—the President now looked forward to this as the culmination of his efforts for peace. Could he will the means to this great end? As a man of peace he devoutly wished for détente with the Russians; as an old soldier he had to know what the Russians were up to, both as a military precaution and also as a means of keeping hard-liners and Pentagon spendthrifts at bay by assuring them that the Russians were not ready to go to war.

A remarkable new intelligence machine was serving this purpose—the U-2, capable of flying so high above the Soviet Union as to escape missile fire, but low enough to photograph military installations and preparations. It was this plane that assured Eisenhower of the Soviets’ relative strategic weakness. Faced both by eager CIA demands for frequent flights and by warnings as to the potential Soviet reaction, the President monitored and limited the U-2 missions over Soviet territory. As the summit conference neared he cut the flights more sharply to avoid provoking Moscow. Finally he allowed one last foray by May 1. For fourteen days Russia was covered by clouds. On May 1 the weather cleared, and Francis Gary Powers took off from his U-2 base in Turkey for Bodö, Norway.

He never made it. The President was informed next day that the plane was missing and must be down inside Russia. Since the craft was equipped for self-destruct of both plane and pilot, Powers was surely dead. Eisenhower did nothing, on the assumption that Moscow would do nothing, at least publicly, in order not to jeopardize the summit. Eisenhower approved a statement that a weather plane had been lost. Next day the Kremlin published a photograph of a wrecked plane, calling it the spy plane—but it was not a U-2. Why? Khrushchev was luring the White House into a trap. The longer Eisenhower stuck to his story about a “weather plane,” the more discredited he would be when the truth came out.

Then Khrushchev sprang his trap. He had “parts of the plane” and also “the pilot, who is quite alive and kicking.” Hardly able to believe the news, the President now faced a terrible dilemma. He could admit that the Administration had lied but argue that Soviet secrecy had made overflights necessary. This might wreck the summit. Or he could say that the fliked thought had been unauthorized. But as an old army man he could not confess that his outfit was out of his control; as President he could not legitimize charges that he had lost command of his Administration. Soon the Administration was caught in such a tangle of falsehoods, with the Kremlin joyfully exploiting every misstatement, as to leave Washington embarrassed, angry, and fearful of the implications for the summit.

“This was a sad and perplexed capital tonight,” James Reston reported in The New York Times, “caught in a swirl of charges of clumsy administration, bad judgment and bad faith.” The President was so upset that he talked briefly of resigning. He could hardly doubt the price to be paid: Khrushchev would not sit down at the summit with a President whose spy had invaded the Russian homeland—and on May Day, the worldwide communist holiday.

In retrospect, the incident was a microcosm of the ills—the fears, suspicions, misperceptions, and miscalculations—that had afflicted Soviet-American relationships for years. Just as the Kremlin had underestimated Washington’s reaction to the invasion of South Korea, so Moscow underrated American fears of Soviet aggression—fears that in turn led to provocative spying. And typically men in the Kremlin viewed the whole affair not as a series of blunders but as a plot by the Pentagon or the CIA—perhaps by the President himself—to produce an incident that would abort the summit. The Americans repeated all their old errors: putting undue faith in intelligence technology, keeping “secret” the U-2 flights long after Moscow and other capitals—indeed, all but the American people—knew of them; allowing intelligence agencies too much influence over policy; evoking the worst of Soviet fears about intrusion onto their turf. Eisenhower and Khrushchev each underestimated the vulnerability of the other to hard-liners; hence each brought out the worst in the other.

It was one of the saddest moments in postwar history, for each of the leaders, in his better half, genuinely wished for détente. Eisenhower came off the worse. He went on to Paris, but the “summit was over before it started, all the hopes for détente and disarmament gone with it,” in Ambrose’s bleak words. He had only a few months left to see his Vice President, Nixon, defeated, a brash young Democrat elected, and no further progress toward détente. At least he could advise the nation. In his Farewell Address he pointed to the “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” and warned Americans that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” The price of such acquisition could be the loss of freedom.

His great solace was that he had “kept the peace.” People, he said later, asked how it had happened. “By God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that!” But he told a friend not long before his death in March 1969 that he had longed to bring world peace but “I was able only to contribute to a stalemate.” Could anyone else have done better? Ike had the wry satisfaction of living through two Democratic presidencies for which the U-2 affair was a dress rehearsal—a minor flap compared to the real crises and stalemates of Cuba and Vietnam.

CHAPTER 6

The Imperium of Freedom

TOWARD THE END of the 1950s the Soviet Union had about 3.6 million persons under arms, the United States about 2.5 million. Each nation maintained stupendous nuclear arsenals capable of devastating the other. With its more than 500 long-range B-52S, almost 1,800 medium-range bombers, twenty-three aircraft carriers, and three Polaris submarines, the United States was far ahead in the capability for continental attack or massive retaliation, while Soviet troops, tanks, land-based aircraft, and medium-range ballistic missiles confronted the European allies. British and other friendly forces bolstered the power of the West. Amid a remarkable variety of nuclear weapons—from recoilless riflelike Davy Crocketts for close-up infantry support to eight-inch howitzers to ballistic missiles— the Strategic Air Command wielded the most usable military might, for its “bombers could burst through the pervious screen that protected our opponent.”

The nation’s relative economic power was even more marked than its military. National economic productivity had grown strongly during the 1950s, as had the gross national product. Americans produced almost half the world’s generation of electricity and large shares of its steel, copper, and coal. The nation’s exports and imports dwarfed those of all other countries. In 1955 a congressional report had shown the United States leading the Soviet Union in virtually every dimension of economic power. “For the United States,” economic historian David F. Noble summed it up, “the postwar decades were an expansive time, fertile ground for technological achievement and enchantment.” Assured by their leaders—in this era before Sputnik—of their unrivaled military, economic, and industrial might, “infused with the pride, confidence, and triumphant optimism of victory, relatively unscarred by the actual horrors of war, and with the ruins of failed empires at their feet, Americans embarked upon their own ambiguous fling at empire.”

An empire? Americans hardly thought in such grandiose terms. Yet their influence reached to the Caribbean, to Alaska and Hawaii, both of which became states in 1959, to old and to newly reconquered bases in the Pacific, to their military protectorate Taiwan. Military, economic, diplomatic ties intertwined American power with Latin American nations through the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance of 1947, with European and Middle Eastern nations through the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949, with Australia, New Zealand, Pakistan, Thailand, and other nations through the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty of 1954, with Japan and South Korea through mutual defense treaties. Dulles spent much of his time rushing from capital to capital repairing and refurbishing these ties. On the vast chessboard of Atlantic and Pacific power few doubted which nation held queen, castles, and knights.

European allies viewed American military and technological prowess with awe and fear. The Yanks’ advanced aircraft, their H-bombs and capacity to deliver them, their magnificent flattops, along with their fancy big automobiles, refrigerators, computers, and other gadgetry, were the talk of European capitals. But foreigners feared that Americans with their awesome military power were like children playing with dangerous toys. European pundits wrote scorchingly of American pretensions of leading the “free world,” of American soldiers and other visitors who scattered their dollars, Cokes, slang words, and bastard children across the Continent. French intellectuals attacked the new barbarism, while nourishing the consoling thought that Europe could serve, in Max Lerner’s words, “the role of a cultural Greece to the American Rome—a Greece which, while conquered, takes the conqueror captive.” Still, in the aftermath of the Marshall Plan most people in countries benefiting by the Plan admired America’s “free elections” and other democratic institutions, saw the “real issue” as “communism and dictatorship versus democracy and freedom,” and had faith in the Plan itself as aiding European economic recovery.

The Kremlin responded to Western militancy with its own provocations and interventions, threats and bluster, combined with occasional essays at détente. Behind its actions lay deep fears—of an increasingly independent and hostile China, a turbulent and unpredictable Middle East, unrest in its satellites that might lead to outbreaks of Titoism, a resurgent Germany. Above all Moscow feared renewal of the old threat of Western—now “capitalist”—encirclement. The view from Moscow was of American power stretching from the Aleutians through Korea and Japan to the Philippines, from Southeast Asia to Turkey and Greece up through Europe to Scandinavia. Acutely aware of his strategic nuclear inferiority, Khrushchev resorted even to bluff to conceal it—most notably when he flew the same squadron of his Bison bombers in circles around a reviewing stand at a 1955 Aviation Day ceremony.

Yet even uneasier and more mistrustful than the Russians in the late 1950s were most Americans. If a leader as levelheaded as Eisenhower could have been “obsessed” by fear of a communist Iran on the borders of the Soviet Union, it was hardly strange that many Americans, saturated from school days by talk of Soviet power and Bolshevik evil, should match fear with fear, anger with anger. Thus Khrushchev’s paper-fort deception with his Bisons triggered in Washington a sharp “bomber gap” scare that in turn produced a quick boost in B-52 bomber-building. Visiting the United States, Europeans who viewed themselves as occupying the nuclear front lines were amused to find Americans huddling—intellectually if not physically—in bomb shelters. Americans during the 1950s found themselves feared in their image around the globe but fearful themselves of the future.

Not that most Americans worried about their survival as a nation. Having appointed themselves guardians of liberty, however, they feared for the survival of freedom in the Western world. As in the past, they were far more effective in saluting freedom than in defining it. But definition was crucial. FDR’s Four Freedoms—of speech and religion, from fear and want—were only a starting point. What kind of freedom—individual, civil, economic, religious, ethnic? Freedom for whom—minorities, blacks, women, artists, intellectuals, censors of textbooks, extremists, pornographers, noncitizens? Freedom when—after World War II, after the cold war? Freedom from whom? The reds abroad? The “commies” at home? The “feds”? Corporation chiefs? Foremen? Deans? Religious zealots? Group and community pressures? It would become clear in the 1950s and 1960s that threats to these freedoms emanated from far more complex and numerous sources than the Politburos of Moscow and Peking.

The Technology of Freedom

The most striking aspect of freedom in America in the 1950s was its grounding in the nation’s technological might and economic abundance. During the half century past, Americans had proved their capacity to outproduce their rivals in automobiles, domestic appliances, and a host of other manufactures; during the 1940s they had astonished the world with their feats in building ships and weapons. By the early 1950s Americans could—and did—boast that their per capita income of approximately $1,500 was roughly double that of the British and the Swedes, more than four times that of the Russians. With 7 percent of the world population, the United States had over 40 percent of the world’s income.

Would freedom flower in America during the fifties amid such plenty? The prospects were highly mixed. Historically freedom had flourished not where life was nasty, brutish, and short but in expanding economies that fostered equality of opportunity, more sharing, vertical and horizontal mobility. Still horrified by revelations about Nazi mass slaughter, shocked by new revelations about the monstrous “crimes of the Stalin era,” many Americans valued their own liberties all the more. Yet the 1950s, at the height of cold war anxieties, turned out to be a decade of intolerance of other Americans’ ideas. Individualism in the economic marketplace was not matched by individual liberty in the political and intellectual marketplace.

Advocates of the free market were happy with their economic freedoms during the Age of Eisenhower, however, and even more with their economic successes. “We have entered a period of accelerating bigness in all aspects of American life,” proclaimed Eric Johnston confidently in 1957. “We have big business, big labor, big farming and big government.” The former head of the United States Chamber of Commerce even mused whether this was the start of an age of “socialized capitalism.” Certainly American business, if not “socializing,” was consolidating, bureaucratizing, innovating, and proliferating at home and overseas. Over 4,000 mergers and acquisitions of manufacturing and mining concerns occurred during the 1950s—a dramatic number though almost 3,000 fewer than in the 1920s. Large firms took over smaller ones less to run risks than to minimize them; despite Joseph Schumpeter’s warning of the “perennial gale of creative destruction,” the survival rate of large firms during the decade was almost 100 percent. Elaborate systems of recruitment, personnel, information, and leadership training expanded in the big corporations, with the help of complex office machines and business school graduates.

The power of the American economy, however, lay far less in bigness and organization than in technological and scientific advances stemming from a century of experimentation and invention and later propelled by the imperative demands of two world wars and the cold war. And just as nineteenth-century army ordnance needs had promoted such important innovations as interchangeable parts, so world war needs fueled such varied practical achievements as penicillin, jet propulsion, and radar. Massive federal spending for invention and development carried on through the cold war years; by the late 1950s Washington was financing nearly 60 percent of the nation’s total research and development budget. In one major respect, however, twentieth-century technology was more than simply a wider and more varied activity than that of the nineteenth. In Nathan Rosenberg’s words, “an increasing proportion of technological changes” were now “dependent upon prior advances in systematized knowledge.” Innovators were more dependent than in Edison’s day on scientific disciplines such as physics and chemistry.

Some of the postwar advances in specific fields were spectacular. In October 1947, Captain Charles E. Yeager burst through the invisible barrier that had seemed to fix a limit to the speed of flight by flying the experimental rocket-powered X-1 faster than the speed of sound. In September 1948, an air force Sabre set a world speed record for jet fighters at 670 miles an hour; five years after that a Super Sabre became the first jet to cross the sound barrier, hitting 755, and in 1957 a Voodoo jet topped 1,200. The nuclear submarine Nautilus was reported to have used 8.3 pounds of uranium fuel to travel 60,000 miles. After the inglorious “Kaputnik” of the first Vanguard, the American space program made steady progress. And by 1960 the X-15 rocket plane was flying almost twice as fast as the Voodoo.

More down-to-earth, but crucial to a wider technology, were advances in the sector in which Yankee tinkerers had pioneered a century earlier with their milling and grinding machines. This was the machine tool industry. Severely depressed after its World War II expansion—300,000 machine tools were dumped onto the market after the war—the industry burgeoned during the cold war. Aircraft manufacture, a voracious consumer of machine tools, also became increasingly interlinked with the electronics industry, which was now producing its own miracles. Though eventually developing its own huge domestic market, for years electronics reflected wartime need for miniaturization of electrical circuits in proximity fuses for bombs, gunfire control mechanisms, radar and sonar. As late as the mid-1960s the federal government was still providing two-thirds of the “R&D” costs of the electrical equipment industry, which included such giants as General Electric and American Telephone and Telegraph.

Earthiest of all—and perhaps most important of all for its worldwide implications—was innovation in farming. Improved harvesters and other machines, combined with better fertilizers and sprays and new plant strains, produced higher output per acre, a vast increase in production, and a steep decrease in the total work hours in the United States devoted to agriculture. By 1960 8 percent of the labor force was occupied with farming, compared with 63 percent a century before. Hybrid corn, a systematic crossing of selected inbred lines, resulted in an increase in the average yield of corn per acre from 23 bushels in 1933 to 62 bushels in the mid-1960s. Thus hybrid corn research paid off handsomely, returning, it was estimated, seven times its cost by the mid-1950s. The lion’s share of the boost in farm yield came from—and profited—huge family farms, commercial farms, and other components of “agribusiness” that controlled the production and marketing of key foods and fibers through vertical integration, while millions of small farmers and migrant farm workers clung to a precarious livelihood.

Out of the “Enormous Laboratory,” as Max Lerner called it, poured not only new machines and gadgets but the makings of wholly new or immensely enlarged industries—television, antibiotics, electronics, jet aircraft, rocketry. But the actual laboratories that produced this cornucopia of hardware were also the scenes of quiet encounters in one of the oldest intellectual conflicts in America—between the ideal of pure science and the practices of applied science.

Many Americans still venerated the ideal of committed, disinterested science, of free, undirected research, of idle speculation and inspired hunch, of lack of pressure for immediate “practical” results, of a clear separation from the cash nexus—all the more because they could claim only one American in the past century who was comparable to such luminaries of European science as Darwin, Mendel, and Faraday. This was Josiah Willard Gibbs, the Yale mathematician whose work in thermodynamics, vector analysis, and statistical mechanics had belatedly won him an international reputation and whose laws of chemical energetics had enormous impact on processes as varied as the refining of oil, the synthesizing of rubber, and the separation of metals from their ores.

Of scientific eminences the postwar United States had its share—Isador Isaac Rabi and J. Robert Oppenheimer in physics, Hermann Joseph Muller in genetics, George Gaylord Simpson in evolutionary biology, Harlow Shapley in astrophysics, and scores of others. Yet most of these scientists largely depended on the theoretical work of Europeans. Most notably, it was the transformation of theoretical physics undertaken by Einstein, Heisenberg, and others in Germany that had laid the groundwork for atomic fission. Now, as the United States basked in its world economic supremacy, had the time and occasion come for Americans to make great theoretical contributions to pure science?

A century before, Karl Marx had warned that science could not for long be autonomous, that it was a social activity, that the nature of the demand for science was even more important than the quality of its supply. In America, science had to pay the piper. Giant corporations were eager to put vast sums of money into research, but of a special kind, really research and development. While the firms varied in their toleration of free research, sooner or later they expected a payoff in new inventions, patents, profits. The R&D departments emphasized team research, committee decisions, pooled facilities, narrowly focused investigation. There was little encouragement of idle curiosity, messing around, just looking out the window. “The underlying principle, rarely formulated precisely but ever present,” a study concluded, “has been that originality can be organized; that, provided more people can be equipped with technical knowledge and brought together in larger groups, more new ideas must emerge; that mass production will produce originality just as it can produce sausages.” Military needs created even heavier demands for scientific group-think and the organization man.

Politicians and scientists alike attacked the restrictions on Soviet science, but Americans could hardly be complacent. Aside from confronting seductive commercial and military demands on R&D, scientists had to contend with a popular double impulse to worship them and to fear them—the worship leading to unduly high popular expectations followed by disappointments, the fear leading to suspicion of their unorthodoxy and associations, as witness the classification of Robert Oppenheimer as a “security risk.” Pleased by statements such as that of Harvard’s president, James Conant—subsidies should go to persons, not projects—some scientists sought to protect their freedom of inquiry and communication by remaining in the universities. But scholars in the groves of academe were not free from political and press attacks, outside pressures for directed research, the temptations to undertake team projects and group authorship, the enticements of big corporate and military money.

Perhaps the major obstacle to “free science,” however, was the empirical tradition in American scientific thought. The heroes of American popular science were the Thomas Edisons who disdained formal abstract knowledge or theorizing and preferred to tinker “by guess and by God” in their labs. It was this feet-on-the-ground compulsion that had channeled American genius into technology and engineering. If the nation were now to make as well a truly substantial contribution to scientific progress, greater freedom to reflect and to brood, freer play for the creative imagination, were crucial.

Possibly some of the applied scientists, ensconced in their big laboratories and snug in their teams, recalled the lot of Professor Gibbs. He had worked at Yale almost alone and undisturbed. He had no team. He had few close friends and few students. He had no wife or children. He had no pay from Yale for a decade or so, until Johns Hopkins in 1880 offered him a professorship with salary, at $3,000 a year. Only then did Yale put him on its payroll, at $2,000, “with prospects of an early increase.”

One controversial application of “science” related to the men and women who in turn related to machines. Initially called “scientific management,” it was first popularized by Frederick W. Taylor. After brilliant inventions of automatic grinding, forging, and tool-feeding mechanisms, Taylor had moved on at the turn of the century to time-and-motion studies designed to fit workers more closely to the imperatives of the machines and thereby increase industrial efficiency. The production process was functionalized and standardized by dividing it into measurable and controllable units of time and motion. Under Taylor’s leadership the idea was picked up by a host of large corporations, including American Locomotive, Brighton Mills, Yale and Towne Lock. Machines, however, proved more easily manageable than men. Most workers preferred to follow their own motivations, rhythms, craft routines, group standards. A strike of molders in 1911 at the huge Watertown arsenal near Boston led to a government investigation and later a ban on Taylorism in government arsenals. A young assistant secretary, Franklin D. Roosevelt, imposed the ban in navy yards.

Turning away from Taylorism as a system of managerial dictation— Taylor himself declared each worker must become “one of a train of gearwheels”—some “industrial scientists” tried to civilize the production process by “human engineering” or “human relations.” Psychologists and other social scientists were enlisted in this cause. Often benign in intent while manipulative in technique, “humanizing” turned out to be an effort to motivate workers through their own psychological processes rather than through managerial controls. Advocates of the method said that it promoted better communication, involved workers in at least minor decisions, enhanced “group feeling” and a sense of teamwork, fostered “leadership” as opposed to “control.” During and after World War II, the idea of human relations in industry flourished.

Still the workers resisted. When Henry Ford II said that solving “the problem of human relations” would immensely speed up “progress toward lower costs,” men and women on the line could wonder whether their welfare or lower costs and higher profits were the goal. Union heads spoke sarcastically of foremen receiving training in the art of convincing workers “that they really are deeply beloved by the boss,” of employers “trooping to the special classes at Harvard” to learn that while the bosses were in business for a fast buck, workers reported to the plant each morning “for love, affection, and small friendly attentions.”

A thirty-seven-year-old worker, interviewed at home, described what real life was like “on the line.” His job was to spot-weld the front cowling onto an automobile underbody.

“I take a jig off the bench, put it in place and weld the parts together.” The jig was all made up in advance. “Takes me one minute and fifty-two seconds for each job. I walk along the line as it moves. Then I snap the jig off, walk back down the line, throw it on the bench, grab another just in time to start on the next car.”

He did this eight hours a day, with a breather in the morning and afternoon and a half-hour for lunch. “Sometimes the line breaks down. When it does we all yell ‘Whoopee!’”

He hated his work. “I like a job where you feel like you’re accomplishing something and doing it right.” But everything was laid out for him. “The big thing is that steady push of the conveyor—a gigantic machine which I can’t control.” He had ideas for improvements but no one asked him. “You go by the bible.”

Why not quit? “I’ll tell you honest. I’m scared to leave.” He was getting good pay, was on the pension plan, the lighting and ventilation were good, he could use the plant hospital. “Sorta trapped—you get what I mean?”

So how did he cope? By sharing the “misery” with his partner. “We gripe about the job 90 percent of the time.” By walking out with the others when something intolerable happened—like when a guy was “bounced” because he was slow on the line. By snapping at his family when he got home, his wife added. The people who ran the plant, the worker said finally, were “pretty good guys themselves.” But “you’re just a number to them. They number the stock and they number you.” He was just so much horsepower. “You’re just a cog in the wheel.”

His wife often wished he’d get another job. “He comes home at night, plops down in a chair and just sits.…”

If workers were not happy with their machines, applied scientists could invent a new machine that had less need of workers. This was automation. Mushrooming during the 1950s, the automatic equipment industry reached annual sales of over $6 billion by the end of the decade. World War II needs had hastened the development of electrical servomechanisms that operated on the principle of input-output flow and feedback in a continuously self-correcting control loop. Stimulated by such advances, the industry took off after the war and was soon integrating digital computers, sophisticated programming techniques, and vast data and memory banks into elaborate remote-control systems, including the automation of whole factories. By 1951 a Ford engine plant was feeding castings, already produced in an automated foundry, into precision broachers that machined the top and bottom of a cylinder block in thirteen seconds. Exclaimed an observer, “It just goes ‘whoosh’ and it is done.”

“Automation is a magical key of creation,” proclaimed the National Association of Manufacturers. “Guided by electronics, powered by atomic energy, geared to the smooth, effortless workings of automation, the magic carpet of our free economy heads for distant and undreamed of horizons.” Others were less euphoric but argued that automation would shrink the number of boring and degrading repetitive tasks, raise educable workers to higher levels of skill and pay, lessen worker fatigue, depression, and unrest.

Still others were not at all enchanted by the “whoosh.” Union leaders stood en garde. The problem was not whether unions were for or against automation, said James B. Carey, president of the International Union of Electrical Workers. “The problem is whether or not the American people and our free society will be subjected to vast dislocations during the coming ten to twenty years, when the automatic operation of many industrial and clerical processes will be introduced.” Fortune had published a photograph of the “old production line”—a vast room full of workers individually tending their machines—followed by drawings of the proposed “automatic factory.” Not a worker was to be seen in the drawings—not even the ornery old “parts inspector.” A photoelectric scanning device would do his job.

At a congressional hearing late in 1955 President Walter Reuther of the Automobile Workers roundly denounced the NAM’s portrayal of automation as part of industrialization’s “Second American Revolution.” Had the NAM forgotten the misery that accompanied the first? Reuther asked. Displaced workers would not give up family ties, local roots, and neighborhood belongingness to go off to new jobs, even if they could find them and were young enough to take them. “Will automation mean the creation of whole new communities in some areas, while others are turned into ghost towns? How can we increase the market for goods and services sufficiently, and quickly enough, to match greatly accelerated increases in productivity?” Industry replied that displaced workers could find better jobs under automation, indeed that automation would create a bigger pie and “everybody’s slice will be larger.”

While the argument waxed, so did automation. Ford helped lead the way, with its partially automated cylinder-block line and automated production of crankshafts and small parts. As the number of workers “on the line” increased and the number doing more skilled “bench work” on parts and subassemblies dropped, auto worker militancy fell. It had been the more skilled workers, such as metal trimmers and torch welders, with their comradeship and critical production role, who had sparked the great strikes and demonstrations. “Automated” workers appeared to be psychologically atomized.

It was this wider impact of automation and of the tendencies that accompanied it—toward bigness, bureaucratization, even bondage—that concerned a wide array of social observers. Deep concern over such tendencies was almost as old as the trends themselves. From the rampaging machine wreckers at the dawn of the industrial revolution to the latest walkout in protest against automation, human beings had feared the machine as a threat to their status, income, security, and pride. Marx had seen that productive forces rising from technological-social change both reinforced the social order and undermined it. A century before Ford’s automation William Morris fought to preserve handicrafts against the ravaging advance of the machine.

The Englishman Samuel Butler wrote in his 1872 anti-utopian novel, Erewhon, that man is supposed to be the master and the machine the servant, but “the servant glides by imperceptible approaches into the master,” and now man is overly dependent on his “servant,” and his very soul is becoming a machine-made thing. Man is in bondage; he can only “hope that the machines will use us kindly.”

By the 1950s there was less concern over the economic and industrial effects of automation and other technological developments than over the psychological and social. Sociologists feared that the obsessive focus on production, combined with the fragmentation of workers’ lives into numbing pressure on the job and emptiness outside it, in the long run would impair both efficiency and the health of the whole culture. Daniel Bell noted Freud’s observation that work was the chief means of binding an individual to reality. “What will happen, then, when not only the worker but work itself is displaced by the machine?” Many social scientists were influenced by the work of Lewis Mumford, who in Technics and Civilization and other writings had graphically pictured the machine as part of a system of power, superfluous production as “purposeless materialism,” and technology as increasingly the master of man. Two technologies existed side by side, Mumford wrote in the wake of the 1950s, “one authoritarian, the other democratic, the first system-centered, immensely powerful, but inherently unstable, the other man-centered, relatively weak, but resourceful and durable.” It was time for human interventions in behalf of human alternatives.

The human use of human beings—this was the particular concern of Norbert Wiener, who published a book with this title at the start of the 1950s. A professor of mathematics at MIT and author of Cybernetics, which examined the dynamic role and implications of feedback in purposeful machines and animals, Wiener shared with a wide public his fears that “thinking machines” would render the human brain obsolete, especially in an era of mammoth war technology.

But what precisely was the impact of the machine, especially automation—and what could be done about it? During the 1950s the social scientists’ diagnosis was twofold: alienation and anomie. Definitions of these phenomena varied widely, and hence diagnosis and prescriptions did as well. Alienation—from work, from family and community, from self? The standard answer was: all of the above. Specialization, compartmentalization, and routine left workers with little sense of accomplishment, fulfillment, or creativity on the job, and this emptiness carried over into life outside the workplace. But was the essential problem—both on the job and off it—the kind of powerlessness that Marx had analyzed, or the kind of “meaninglessness” that Karl Mannheim had seen as robbing persons of the capacity to make decisions, or the kind of normlessness that Emile Durkheim long since had analyzed in studies of anomie, or the sense of isolation and self-estrangement that was becoming the focus of social psychologists in the 1950s? Great disputes arose about these questions, with the social analysts themselves divided by discipline, specialization, and ideology.

The diagnosis of anomie aroused the sharpest concern, for it applied to a person’s whole life. Defined broadly as the collapse of social norms that regulate social attitudes, expectations, and behavior, a condition of anomie could have a variety of effects: a normlessness marked by the feeling that “anything goes”; a hunger for direction and authority that might lead to a turning toward autocratic leaders; a craving for reassurance from peers and superiors; a proclivity to manipulate others in a culture lacking standards of more benign human interaction; even a tendency to rely on what Robert K. Merton called mysticism—“the workings of Fortune, Chance, Luck.” But anomie remained a somewhat amorphous concept, overly extended, as Melvin Seeman complained, to a variety of social conditions and psychic states such as personal disorganization and cultural breakdown.

Inescapably the cardinal question arose—by what standard, what principle, what central value was the impact of technology being measured? Social observers were remarkably agreed: the test was freedom in all its dimensions and in all its equivalents such as liberty, liberation, individuality. Virtually every idea and program was advanced and defended by reference to this overriding value. “In the present situation of material and intellectual culture,” wrote Herbert Marcuse, a philosopher of the émigré Frankfurt school, “the problem of values is, in the last analysis, identical with the problem of freedom.” That one idea covered all that is “good, right and admirable” in the world. “Freedom—and this is the profound result of Kant’s analysis—is the only ‘fact’ that ‘is’ only in its creation; it cannot be verified except by being exercised.”

Marcuse had his own very definite idea, however, as to what freedom was or should be. Freedom was liberation from an increasingly impersonal, bureaucratic, oppressive technology, from the long and oppressive hours of work that drained people of their humanity, from the restrictions on human spontaneity, creativity, erotic fulfillment, and sensuous joy—restrictions of a Freudian as well as Calvinistic origin. The pursuit of happiness was the quest for freedom; indeed, freedom was happiness, in the fullest dimensions of both these noble concepts.

But other acolytes of Freedom saw different dimensions. They were not only like blind men feeling different parts of the elephant; each was loudly touting his part of the elephant as the whole elephant. For over two centuries Americans had debated and squabbled and even warred over the definition of freedom. During the 1950s the quarrel turned into a cacophony.

The Language of Freedom

“We are children of freedom,” Dean Acheson had proclaimed. All agreed, though not all knew what he meant. During the 1950s American leaders proclaimed freedom throughout the world and for all the world. Conflict and confusion over the principles and practices of freedom did not deter the ideologues of freedom from prescribing it for all. Even before Pearl Harbor, Henry Luce, editor-in-chief of Time and Life and Fortune, had urged the British to follow “America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprises, America …as the Good Samaritan, really believing that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Justice and Freedom.” Though Luce had some second thoughts, at the end of the 1950s he struck the same note: “The founding purpose of the United States was to make men free, and to enable them to be free and to preach the gospel of freedom to themselves and to all men.”

Not only pundits but philosophers sounded this theme. Sidney Hook spoke for many of his fellow intellectuals when he urged on them the duty to publicize the “elementary truth” that what divided the world was “the issue of political freedom versus despotism.” Politicians long before had climbed aboard the Freedom bandwagon with alacrity. If Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms appeared a bit tattered and weather-beaten by now, many Americans remembered that his so-called “Economic Bill of Rights” had spelled out those freedoms in a most specific way, that Truman had sought to implement them, and that even Eisenhower was paying more than lip service to them.

To celebrate Freedom was to celebrate America, and vice versa. When Luce proclaimed in 1941 the belief—shared, he said, by “most men living”—that “the 20th Century must be to a significant degree an American Century,” he laid out the peculiarly American ideals and institutions that must be shared with others—“our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills.” The reaction was not wholly favorable. Reinhold Niebuhr found an “egotistic corruption” in the very title, a critic dubbed Luce the Cecil Rhodes of journalism, and Henry Wallace countered Luce with a proclamation of the century of the common man. Was this the new American imperialism? Luce later talked less about the American Century but still pushed the doctrine.

Embarrassments occasionally marred this glowing portrait of Freedom versus Autocracy. Leading American intellectuals became furious over “party liners’ control” of a 1949 Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Sidney Hook himself had been denied the rostrum to offer a paper disputing the Marxist doctrine of “class truth.” In reply such European and American luminaries as André Malraux, John Dos Passos, Ignazio Silone, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Koestler, and Hook met in Berlin in June 1950 to inaugurate the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Supporting messages arrived from Eleanor Roosevelt and Niebuhr. After properly flaying totalitarian thought control, a number of participants proclaimed that the West must take its stand on communism—it was “either-or.” Condemning those who preferred “neither-nor,” the Congress set up a nucleus of internationally known writers who would have no truck with “neutrality” in the struggle for freedom. It would later develop that the activities of the Congress in the 1950s and 1960s were subsidized in part by the CIA, which disbursed funds through fake foundations.

Still, the American intellectuals did not need Washington gold to stiffen their resolve. Their views sprang from the very core of their belief in individual liberty and human rights. And they gained immeasurably both in their self-confidence and in their influence from their conviction that while the other side was ideological, their own position was not. They contended that after the passions of the New Deal era, the struggle with Hitlerism, and the polemics of the cold war, Americans were spurning ideology as the “opium of the intellectuals,” in Raymond Aron’s words, or coming to the “end of ideology,” in Daniel Bell’s. “Looking back from the standpoint of a newly-achieved moderation,” wrote sociologist Edward Shils, “Western intellectuals view the ideological politics of Asia and Africa, and particularly nationalism and tribalism, as a sort of measles which afflicts a people in its childhood, but to which adults are practically immune.”

Picturing ideology as a form of childhood measles was a curious indulgence on the part of intellectuals who themselves were acting as ideologists by any neutral definition of the term. If an ideology consists of a comprehensive set of goals or values, reflecting the mobilized attitudes of a large section of the public, expressed through institutions such as the press and the state, and legitimized by appropriate political, economic, and other establishments, then postwar Americans indeed possessed an ideology that was brilliantly expressed by its pundits and philosophers. It was an ideology of hazy, undefined ends and richly differentiated means—moderate and incremental policy-making machinery, a politics of bargaining and accommodation, a polity rich in voluntary associations and pluralistic groupings, all leading to a mixed economy and a stable, balanced, consensual society.

Ultimately this kind of society reflected a political ideology of consensus and compromise. Men of ideas such as Hook, Bell, Schlesinger, and Daniel Boorstin often differed on specific issues and reforms, but they struck historian Richard Pells as tending “to elevate existing American customs and institutions to a set of normative ideals.” If they were more interested in analyzing society than in reforming it, however, their “retreat from ideology” did allow them to focus on current economic and political realities, Pells granted. “At the same time, their high regard for pragmatism and stability, together with their dread of fanaticism and upheaval, were reasonable and humane reactions to the catastrophic experiences of the twentieth century.”

It was not that the social critics had wholly deserted their old vocation of judging their own culture. Even though their ideas had reflected the ideals of the European Enlightenment—but without passion, as Shils suggested—those ideas continued to arouse disputes within the still compelling trinity of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Amid the relative affluence of the 1950s critics now appeared less troubled by the lack of real equality of opportunity for the less privileged, far more concerned about the meaning of freedom for the middle classes and the threat to that freedom from solidarity of a smothering suburban kind. Most of the critics deplored the vast disparities in income and welfare among Americans—who could not?—but many of them now focused on psychological and cultural trends within the middle class rather than economic and social deprivations within the working class and the poor. Even the anxiety over automation amounted to a worry over psychological deprivation rather than over bread-and-butter issues of take-home pay.

And looking out over the social and physical landscape surrounding the cities, critics felt they had plenty to worry about. Huge eight-lane highways were grinding their way through the working-class sectors into the greener areas beyond, bringing in their wake concrete cloverleafs, shopping malls, towering apartment houses, and—much further out—suburban ranch houses complete with swimming pools, manicured greens, picture windows, and outdoor barbecue pits. These were the baronies of the new middle classes, “from the managerial employees and the ‘idea men’ in the talent professions at the top,” Max Lerner wrote, “to the file clerks and sales girls at the bottom: a formless cluster of groups, torn from the land and from productive property, with nothing to sell except their skills, their personality, their eagerness to be secure, their subservience and silence.”

The new middle classes, bursting with achievers and achievers-to-be, with postwar “baby-boomers,” with creative skills, with ladders of upward mobility, were the source of enormous energy and talent in the America of the 1950s, and a source too of social and political equilibrium. But critics, even aside from the intellectual disdain for picture windows and barbecue pits, worried about more than dreary suburbs and empty lives. They fretted over psyches. A central fear carried over from earlier work by Erich Fromm, a German philosopher and psychoanalyst who had emigrated to the United States after Hitler’s seizure of power. In 1941 Fromm published Escape from Freedom, which held that, upon the lifting of feudal ties and hierarchy, Protestantism had produced fearful and alienated persons, that industrialization had forced on such persons competitive, insecure lives that left them fearful of economic crises, loss of jobs, and imperialistic wars, and that the outcome was a tendency to submit to authoritarian leaders who offered them feelings of involvement, security, and power. This was the road to fascism. While Fromm feared these tendencies in all strata, he and his followers saw the middle classes—especially the lower middle classes—as most vulnerable to the appeal of fascism.

Other social critics eschewed such apocalyptic visions but they had major concerns of their own. In 1950 David Riesman, a University of Chicago social theorist still in his thirties, gained almost instant attention with The Lonely Crowd, a study of the “other-directed” personality that had replaced the “inner-directed” product of the Protestant ethic, which earlier had superseded the “tradition-directed” member of a hierarchical society held in the family embrace of clan, caste, and castle. In the affluent, leisure-minded postwar era, Riesman’s other-directed man, anti-individualistic, group-centered, and conformist, put social solidarity and harmony over his own individuality and was ready to market his personality rather than his skill or creativity. The Lonely Crowd was studded with memorable phrases and insights: the oversteered child—from Bringing Up Children to Bringing Up Father—from craft skill to manipulative skill—from the bank account to the expense account—heavy harmony and lonely success— the automat versus the glad hand—captains of industry and captains of consumption.

In this book and in Individualism Reconsidered, a collection of essays, Riesman explored the implications of the new conformity for freedom. The pressure of the group on most individuals was so profound, he contended, that they doubted both their ability and their right to stand on their own. How then to protect the freedom of the individual, especially for the solitary man? Only by an appeal to resources within the person, to a heightened self-consciousness, an awareness of potentials and inadequacies, the will to exercise a freedom to make choices in a realm somewhere between anarchy and conformity. Ultimately Riesman sought to find a balance between individuality and comradeship.

Another social critic, William H. Whyte, Jr., wrote even more urgently about the influence of the scientific managers, the recruitment bias toward team players and mediocrity, the corporate demand for togetherness, adjustment, compromise, and conformity. A Princeton graduate and longtime Fortune editor, Whyte followed the spoor of his Organization Men in multiversities and suburbia and their flowering in the hierarchies of corporation boards, law factories, hospitals, banks, the military, education, and organized religion. The old-fashioned boss wanted only a man’s sweat, he wrote, the modern boss his soul. “Group-think,” company loyalty, committee decision-making were the order of the day.

Whyte’s central concern was over the personal freedoms of individuals, their liberation from the group, the office, the organization. His solution, like Riesman’s, was to appeal to the individual to be an individual, to broaden freedom within the group or organization. Nonconformists, however, must recognize the genuine needs of the organization even as they explored crevices, escape mechanisms, room at the bottom. Was this enough? Even Whyte seemed unsure.

Hailed as the latest in social criticism, the work of both Riesman and Whyte had old-fashioned assumptions and goals. Their appeal to the individual to win liberation from group, community, and office was hardly more than a sophisticated modernization of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century search for liberty from church and state. Such Bill of Rights liberties were fundamental but were they enough? What was freedom for? Released from their social or other bonds, how could human beings define and achieve more positive freedoms—even those as simple and fundamental as FDR’s Four Freedoms? Riesman and Whyte and their colleagues grappled with this kind of question too, but at best they could foresee some kind of murky balance between autonomy and togetherness. Hence they appeared to leave humankind in an existential predicament.

Herbert Marcuse did not share such intellectual inhibitions. Borrowing heavily from Hegel as well as Marx, he explored the interiors of freedom and proposed a dialectical consciousness able to perceive an alternative to any given reality and to use reason to judge between true and false needs. To think dialectically was freedom itself, the vital creative act. Marcuse wanted theory geared to human needs; he wanted the productive system to serve the needs of the entire society; he wanted people to test all the possibilities of erotic and intellectual fulfillment; he wanted them to convert their bodies into instruments of pleasure. But the means of reaching this Utopia he left fuzzy.

And so the acolytes of Freedom argued and agonized over its meaning in a modern age. If intellectual progress seemed slow—if the very terms were misty, if the content of Freedom was so comprehensive as to seem all-inclusive, if the priorities among types of freedom lacked precision, if the ways of expanding freedom ranged from the overly utilitarian to the foolishly Utopian—if all this was true, at least the theorists and practitioners of Freedom were bumping up against its wider and deeper dimensions, organizational, industrial, psychological, cultural, and sexual.

At the very heart of the American idea of freedom were still the noble “First Freedoms” of thought and speech, press and religion. And of these freedoms none was more vigorously pressed and expressed in the fifties than the right of newspapers and other media to offer information and opinion without interference by public authority or hostile group. Even as the press proclaimed and practiced freedom, however, the media faced threats to their liberties far less from outside foes than from internal tendencies toward consolidation and conformity.

Automation continued to transform the production of newspapers as it did other industries. Mergenthaler’s Blue Streak Comet bypassed the venerable Linotype keyboard by using teletype tape for matrix assembly. Harris-Intertype’s Monarch speeded up slug-casting by tape that performed over ten operations per second. Old-time newshawks, weaned on their Linotype, looked on in amazement as tape-triggered brass matrices streamed into the assembly, “making a clinking rhythm like that of a poker player at Las Vegas riffling silver dollars,” Editor & Publisher reported, “and quicker than you could say ‘aces back-to-back,’ column-width slugs lined up at the rate of fourteen per minute.” Technology continued apace. By the late 1950s Interstate’s Fotosetter, arraying characters by photography on acetate film for the printing plate, was offering a variety of type sizes. Even the larger dailies were now using the wire services’ teletypesetters that transmitted tape ready for the composing machines.

Enormously expensive, the new machines called for heavy investments that in turn encouraged newspaper consolidations. William Randolph Hearst’s death at the start of the decade and the succession of his five sons as heads of Hearst Consolidated Publications were a reminder that consolidation was one of the oldest habits in the newspaper game, even under the aegis of flamboyant tycoons like the erratic crusader and art collector of San Simeon. By 1960 hundreds of newspapers were organized in “groups,” a term the trade preferred to “chains.” The new Hearst—but far more reserved in manner and provocativeness—was Samuel I. New-house, who controlled the Portland Oregonian, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and over a dozen other major papers and magazines. Newhouse astutely combined mergers and cost-cutting techniques. The extent to which consolidation led to conformity—or on the other hand provided papers with the financial capacity not to conform—remained a simmering issue in the newspaper world.

What was not in dispute, however, was that newspapers had become big business—and were assuming the views that went with it. The great majority of newspapers—and an even larger proportion of total newspaper circulation—had been Republican for so long that people took the one-party press almost for granted; some analysts concluded that many readers simply discounted the conservative bias of editors and columnists. More insidious and hence more influential was the press’s tendency toward conformity. By using a term like red, Marxist, socialist, or reactionary, Max Lerner wrote, the newspapers “cast it outside the pale of discussion. By a black magic they place a taboo on it.” Equally insidiously, many newspapers played it safe, featuring comics, crossword puzzles, and games and dramatizing sensations of crime and sex at the same time that their editorial pages were monuments of insipidity.

In the decade of the growing cold war the most marked effect of press conformity was to rally around the cold war. A Protestant magazine article charged that the press and radio “first lay down a terrific barrage against the Red Menace. Headlines without a shred of substance shriek of atom bombs, or plots to overthrow our government, of espionage, of high treason, and of other blood-curdling crimes.” This was the prelude to labeling all opposition as “red.” A longtime press-watcher, Curtis MacDougall of Northwestern University’s journalism school, noted that when an Associated Press correspondent found no war fever in Moscow, his dispatch was buried in inside pages; if he had reported the opposite, it would have been headlined. Polls indicated that the percentage of Americans who viewed a third world war as inevitable rose steadily from 32 percent in late 1945 to 73 percent in early 1948. Many Americans, influenced both by official and press hysteria and demagoguery at home and by events abroad, obviously did see a red menace.

Later it seemed apparent that most journalists were not biased in their reporting but rather, emerging as they did from the same class and cultural environment, shared cold war assumptions that dominated their perception of events. These assumptions made it more tempting for journalists not only to report happenings but to take part in them. The austere Walter Lippmann had a notable role in conceiving and shaping as well as reporting and analyzing the Marshall Plan. Some reporters complained of being “used” by government, others boasted of it, but in fact officials and reporters were each using the other, for their own purposes. This intertwining of government and press became so close during the 1950s that Douglass Cater, a journalist himself, described the press as the fourth branch of government, full of journalistic brokers and middlemen, compartmentalized much like the government itself, trading information with publicity-seeking politicians, and exerting an influence on government that astonished visitors from abroad—especially British journalists, who generally maintained a certain deference toward the cabinet government in London.

It was not an era for journalistic innovation. Would-be enterprisers in publishing could hardly forget the sad story of the newspaper PM, which had risen in the early forties and then fallen despite the brilliant editorship of Ralph Ingersoll, heavy advances by Marshall Field III and other investors, and reporting by a stable of top-flight writers. FDR himself had welcomed the new paper, in part because its refusal to take advertising, Roosevelt wrote Ingersoll, “appeals to me as a new and promising formula for freedom of the press.” Strident, opinionated, ranging in its collective views from left liberal to liberal left, PM had to abandon its policy of not running advertising and then was itself abandoned by Field. The Chicago publisher had other problems. He had started the Chicago Sun in 1941, purchased the Chicago Times six years later, combined the two—and found that McCormick’s Tribune had a lock on newsstands, the best comics, and Associated Press membership.

A brilliant innovation of the 1920s, however, was more prosperous—and more controversial—than ever thirty years later. Time magazine’s circulation soared during the 1950s from 1.65 million to 2.54 million at decade’s end. Life, launched by Time Inc. in 1936, with its circulation base up to 5.6 million by the mid-fifties, belonged to the elite family of mass-circulation magazines: Reader’s Digest (10.4 million), which had begun to take advertising; The Saturday Evening Post (4.8 million); Look (4.1 million biweekly); Collier’s (3.8 million biweekly); Woman’s Home Companion (4.1 million monthly). It was estimated that advertisers had put well over a billion dollars into Life during its first twenty years. By 1960 the total assets of Time Inc., which now included several magazines and a variety of other enterprises, had risen to $230 million, almost a tenfold increase in twenty years.

Preacher and sermonizer, innovator and enterpriser, moralizer and manipulator, Henry Luce ran his empire with a sometimes imperious, sometimes gentle hand. He delegated considerable authority to his subordinates, but the compelling suggestions, pithy comments, and measured exhortations that streamed from his office, along with his custom of directly editing each magazine for a week or two while the managing editor stood aside, brought his forceful presence into every editorial department. Luce made no secret of his own political views—he was for God, country, the OOP, free enterprise, and Yale, not necessarily in that order. All the editorial convictions of Time Inc., Luce wrote his editors in a paper titled “The Practice of Freedom,” could be summarized in one word, Freedom, by which Luce meant the Bill of Rights, representative government, and competitive free enterprise.

Luce played high politics in the Republican party, throwing his own and sometimes his magazines’ weight behind favored candidates such as Wendell Willkie. But like many an American President, he saw far less power looking out of his office than others saw looking in. Many of his best writers and editors were New or Fair Dealers. Most could easily find jobs elsewhere. And to the “top performers,” as John Kobler wrote, “Luce developed a strong, deep, possessive attachment.” He would brook considerable independence before he would let go a man like Theodore White, who came to differ with him sharply over China policy, but in the end, of course, it was never Luce who went. Life itself seemed indestructible until it was challenged by a medium that was bringing pictures—up-to-the-minute moving pictures—into the nation’s living rooms.

Television was only beginning to come into its own by 1950, but one thing was already clear—the new medium would be a commercial proposition. Just as a small group of teachers, parents, and others had tried to salvage radio for educational purposes and failed, so in the 1950s a comparable group strove to hold a number of channels for higher intellectual levels and standards of taste. Indeed, in that decade television achieved a kind of “Golden Age” as artists and intellectuals experimented with innovative forms of entertainment, featured Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now on CBS and NBC’s Today Show, and premiered Laurence Olivier’s feature film Richard III before it hit the movie-house circuit.

But even the most optimistic innovators in television could not ignore the millions of “little black boxes” that by the mid-fifties sat in most American homes—radio sets that were also chambers of horrors to the critics. The listener could turn the knob from station to station and hear the same programming—endless popular music dispensed by jabbering disc jockeys and punctuated by a profusion of commercials along with a few news snippets. By 1960, with over 500 commercial television stations, TV appeared to be headed in the same direction that radio had taken. The reformers could not overcome the combined power of advertisers and broadcasters, who resisted invasion of their immensely profitable turf by invoking both the spirit of free enterprise and the sanctity of free speech.

A pervasive complacency, a burgeoning middle class, suburban togetherness, automated workers, widespread anomie and escapism, media pitched to the lowest common denominator, trivialization of thought—all these in different ways helped produce a politics of blandness, conformity, and consensus during the 1950s. To be sure, President Eisenhower had begun his Administration in 1953 with constructive purposes, buttressed by Republican majorities in House and Senate. On the domestic front he had created a new department, Health, Education, and Welfare, established the Air Force Academy, replaced mandatory farm price supports with flexible supports based on “modernized parity,” won a housing act that somewhat expanded public housing and eased the burden of home mortgages, and signed legislation establishing a thirteen-year construction program for a 41,000-mile interstate system of highways. On foreign policy he sought to carry on a bipartisan approach, working with leaders of the Democratic minority like Senator Walter George of Georgia, just as Truman had collaborated with Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg.

Bipartisanship in foreign policy, however, was largely a façade behind which the two parties fought each other and—even more—factions within the parties fought one another. Democrats were as usual splintered into almost as many fragments as there were Democratic leaders, but they broadly fell into a Truman-Acheson-Harriman camp calling for hard-line policies toward the Soviets, and a circle that included Eleanor Roosevelt, Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver, and Connecticut governor Chester Bowles, supporting various forms of détente, with Adlai Stevenson seeking to bridge the gap. The Republicans had their own sharp differences— especially between backers of such ideas as massive retaliation and Dulles’s brinkmanship and old-time isolationists like Taft and his followers.

Bipartisanship was a skimpy blanket hauled out at every point of military crisis or foreign policy quandary so that it could cloak differences and present a national posture of harmony and unity. “Politics must stop at the water’s edge,” the politicians and pundits would cry out. This was nothing new. In 1948 bipartisanship had been used to thwart the posing of fundamental alternatives to cold war assumptions. Writing a quarter century later, Robert A. Divine found it “a tragedy that the containment policy did not receive the careful analysis and debate it merited. Wallace’s attack on Truman’s policy suffered from emotional charges and flabby rhetoric, but beneath the shrill oratory there were important objections to the ‘get tough with Russia’ policy that deserved thoughtful consideration rather than contemptuous dismissal as Communist propaganda.” It was estimated that less than 1 percent of the nation’s newspapers supported Wallace’s views in 1948, and many gave him short shrift even in their news columns. Neither Dewey in 1948 nor Eisenhower in 1952 challenged the cold war assumptions of the Truman Administration. The argument was over means, not ends, over cold war tactics, not strategy.

Cold war assumptions continued to grip the American mind during the fifties. A soothing bipartisanship discouraged clear, focused debate and shrouded fundamental choices in a cocoon of bland harmony. The most visible impact of consensus was on the election of 1956. Along with Eisenhower’s personal popularity and the rally-’round-the-President impact of the Budapest revolt against Moscow and the Suez crisis, that consensus helped produce Stevenson’s staggering 1956 loss to Eisenhower. The President carried both the electoral college and the popular vote by an even bigger margin than in 1952. His challenger won only Missouri and six southern states. Shifting back and forth between bipartisan agreement and opposition on details but always following cold war assumptions, Stevenson simply could not come to grips with the amiable figure in the Oval Office. The Democratic party—especially the Democratic leaders in Congress—had not built up a credible, consistent, comprehensive foreign policy program resting on premises different from cold war encirclement and containment of Russia.

Part of the trouble was that Americans, unlike the British, had no loyal but militant opposition with an institutional base. The Democratic party as such was too fragmented to provide a coherent alternative program to a strategy of containment, which after all it had bequeathed to the Eisenhower Republicans in 1952. Following the 1956 debacle the Democrats sought to remedy this situation by establishing the Democratic Advisory Committee (later Council). In joining it Stevenson called for “strong, searching, and constructive opposition.” The DAC’s advisory committees on policy included perhaps the most remarkable collection of political and policy brains of the era: William Benton, Bowles, Senators Kefauver and Herbert Lehman, political scientist Hans Morgenthau, Michigan governor G. Mennen Williams on foreign policy; economists John Kenneth Galbraith, Marriner Eccles, Walter Heller, Leon Keyserling, Isador Lubin, and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., on domestic policy; labor leaders James B. Carey, Sidney Hillman, David J. McDonald, Walter Reuther on industrial policy. The DAC issued brilliant position papers but in doing so revealed anew the policy splits within the Democracy—especially the deep divisions between the presidential Democrats and the congressional Democrats. The Democratic leaders of the House and Senate casually boycotted the Council.

The most conspicuous victim of cold war consensus was the twice-defeated Stevenson. A man of such sparkling wit and elegant charm that he made even the most sophisticated “madly for Adlai,” a scintillating speaker who eschewed bombast and banality, a politician with a high sense of responsibility and probity, he was unable to break out of the intellectual cocoon of containment and put forward a comprehensive alternative strategy. Instead he called for specific changes—an end to the draft and a ban on H-bomb testing—but both of these lay in the field of military expertise where the voters preferred to trust the general in the White House. Stevenson’s campaign faults—endless reworking of speeches, immoderate moderation, excessive cautiousness—were not simply personal failings. They were the flaws of a candidate whose party, fellow leaders, and personal philosophy left him in a consensual void in which he desperately cast about for some winning stance and failed to find it.

Could the Democrats have found another leader who could have united the party behind a strategy of détente? It was unlikely, given the divisions in the party. But there was one leader who transcended the divisions, who maintained good personal relations with Truman, Harriman, Stevenson, and the congressional leaders even as she campaigned for peace. This was Eleanor Roosevelt. During these years she threw herself into the war against war and poverty, the campaign for civil rights and social welfare. She proved herself once again a consummate politician, as in the 1956 campaign when her appearance for Stevenson at the Democratic convention proved crucial in stemming a last-minute push by Harry Truman for Harriman. Though she was seventy years old by the mid-1950s, it was not really her age that prevented her from becoming the acknowledged leader of the Democratic party, perhaps even its candidate. The explanation was simpler. She was a woman.

Still, the political failures of the 1950s had much deeper sources than the Democrats’ incapacity to offer a united front behind an alternative foreign policy. They lay in the cold war consensus that in turn stemmed from the spiral of fear and hate that continued to dominate Soviet-American relations. This spiral thwarted the steady, day-to-day diplomacy, the thoughtful and imaginative planning, the flexible but purposeful policies necessary to deal with Khrushchev. In the absence of such determined statecraft, problems festered, tempers rose, crises broke out, Americans rallied behind the President, Congress delegated him gobs of power. Brinkmanship was the inevitable result of drift and indecision. It was not Eisenhower’s fault that the crises of Hungary and Suez erupted at the height of the 1956 campaign. It was simply his luck.

Dilemmas of Freedom

If the Democrats would not challenge cold war assumptions, who would? Not the media as a whole in the climate of the fifties, nor the churches, nor the educators. In Western society the task of political criticism and social dissent, if all other leaders or groups failed, lay with the intelligentsia. Freed of close dependency on institutions, the intellectual, in Richard Hofstadter’s words, “examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines,” rather than seeking to manipulate or accommodate. During the 1950s American foreign policy was the target of the most searching criticism by four men—a journalist, a diplomat, a professor, and a theologian— who in the view of some were reminiscent of the great thinkers of the eighteenth-century constitutional founding era in the breadth and depth of their intellectual power.

If Walter Lippmann, George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, and Reinhold Niebuhr could even be compared with the men of 1787, it was in part because they, like the Framers, had lived and reflected in a time of almost ceaseless ferment and conflict. Reaching adulthood early in the century, they had witnessed all its traumas—World War I and its aftermath, the great depression, the rise of Nazism, World War II, the slave-labor camps and death factories, the incinerated cities and the atom bomb and hydrogen bomb, the cold war. They had known evil in much the way that J. Robert Oppenheimer could say to President Truman: “In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

Lippmann, oldest of the four, was still in his early sixties when Eisenhower first ran for office. Although he backed the general over Stevenson in 1952, the noted columnist was as unsparing of Republican foreign policy as he had been of Democratic. Just as he had attacked Truman’s NATO policy as the work of “zealous cold warriors” who sought to bribe and bully nations into an anti-Soviet alliance, now he questioned the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, incidentally noting that it included only one Southeast Asian nation. Just as he had confronted Acheson in a blazing argument over the Truman Doctrine and later called for his resignation, now he lectured Dulles face to face—and was lectured back.

Lippmann could consistently criticize Democrats and Republicans because he consistently thought in terms of fixed assumptions: that foreign policy must act always for a carefully defined national interest, that world peace depended on a balancing of national interests, that great nations must wield their power circumspectly amid a network of secondary as well as primary powers, that prudent diplomacy called for professional foreign-policy-makers insulated against the wilder passions and selfish interests of the masses, that apocalyptic visions and abstract “solutions” must be rejected in favor of “practical” arrangements such as old-fashioned spheres of interest and regional neutralization. These ideas were broad and flexible enough to allow for a variety of applications and even contradictions; his support for a global equilibrium of power with the Soviets, for example, appeared to clash with his calls for withdrawals from Berlin and from Taiwan and Southeast Asia.

The traumas of the age of Korea and McCarthyism had indeed left Lippmann so pessimistic about the paralysis and indecision of democracies that his faith in popular rule fell even lower than it had been in the years when he was writing Public Opinion and The Phantom Public. The people, he argued in what he hoped would be his culminating masterwork, The Public Philosophy, had “acquired power they are incapable of exercising, and the governments they elect have lost powers which they must recover if they are to govern.” He called for the restoration of “government strong enough to govern, strong enough to resist the encroachment of the assemblies and of mass opinions, and strong enough to guarantee private liberty against the pressure of the masses.” Jumping on this sentence, Archibald MacLeish, former Librarian of Congress, now a Harvard professor, and always a poet, accused Lippmann of narrowing freedom to fit within the rational, ordered society in which the columnist appeared to believe. He accused Lippmann flatly of being opposed to real freedom and democracy. Lippmann indignantly responded that he did believe in freedom—his kind of freedom.

While Lippmann was seeking a “public philosophy” as the intellectual foundation for the kind of polity and policies he favored, George Kennan was coping with the aftermath of the “X” article that Lippmann had attacked so tellingly. Kennan’s harsh portrait of Soviet power and motivation became so rigid a dogma in Administration councils as to leave the diplomat penitent and fearful. He continued to write and speak against the “legalistic-moralistic” approach to world affairs—and especially its application to Russia—that he felt had crippled Roosevelt’s dealing with wartime problems and possibilities. Kennan continued to preach “realism,” but under Acheson’s State Department leadership it was increasingly evident that once you founded your foreign policy strategy on “realism,” you were on treacherous ground. It could lead to endless ambiguities and self-contradictions, as it did even with Kennan. And tougher and more “realistic” realists could make a dogma out of what Kennan, at least, had seen as a policy of prudence. By 1950 Kennan was so disturbed by the Administration’s cold war extremism as to greet with relief an invitation from Oppenheimer, now head of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, to continue his historical studies there.

In the quiet of the Institute, Kennan hoped to think through his own premises and experiences. He had maintained his friendship with Lippmann despite their differences over containment and over specific policies, and those very differences between two men who prided themselves on their “realism” illustrated the pitfalls of the concept. When it came to military alliances, German policy, disengagement in Europe, summitry, and indeed the whole strategy toward Russia especially after Stalin, what was realistic? Who admitted to being unrealistic? The concept had no intrinsic meaning. The problem was especially acute for Kennan because behind the cool façade of the diplomat and the detachment of the historian lay a deeply humane, sensitive, and indeed moral person who had seen the errors of “realists” in power, viewed diplomacy as the vocation of skilled men of the highest probity and responsibility, and insisted that a nation must seek to live up to its own moral standards even while rejecting the will-o’-the-wisp of global utopianism. And the more Kennan pondered in the groves of academe, the more he questioned the whole philosophy of cold war containment.

What seemed to be lacking in both Kennan and Lippmann was an overriding philosophy of international relations and a coherent strategic concept that could stand the test of repeated shocks like Korea and Berlin, Hungary and Suez, as well as the endless currents of change. And no one seemed readier to supply this need than Hans J. Morgenthau, a professor of international relations at the University of Chicago. A veritable child of conflict, Morgenthau had grown up in a Bavarian city seared by race hatred even in the early 1920s; when, as a young Gymnasium student at the top of his class, he was chosen to give the annual Founder’s Day address, the deposed duke of the region sat in the front row during the speech holding his nose in an obviously anti-Semitic gesture. Morgenthau left Germany as the Nazis moved toward power and later settled in Madrid to teach diplomacy, only to be overwhelmed by the Spanish Civil War; he made his way to Paris during the Popular Front days and then to Brooklyn College, only to be vilified there by young ideologues who were put off by the émigré’s sober and scholarly approach to some of the passionate questions of the day.

Later, at Chicago, Morgenthau produced a series of volumes—Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, Politics Among Nations, In Defense of the National Interest—that marked him as a formidable strategist of international politics. Morgenthau began with the premise that power politics, “rooted in the lust for power which is common to all men,” was inseparable from all social life. There was no escape from it: “whenever we act with reference to our fellowmen, we must sin and we must still sin when we refuse to act.” Power was the central, almost the exclusive, foundation of national interest and criterion of foreign policy. Such power, essentially military, must of course be prudently managed, but managed also quickly and decisively, which required strong executive leadership. The executive branch, however, took little initiative in foreign policy, Morgenthau lamented to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1959, because it feared Congress, and Congress feared public opinion. Yet public opinion, he went on in much the same vein as Lippmann, should be not the cause but the result of “dynamic executive and congressional leadership.” Public-opinion polls measured the impact of past leadership, not the potential of the new. They must not be the yardstick of foreign policy.

“The history of America,” Morgenthau instructed Senators J. William Fulbright, Mike Mansfield, and Wayne Morse among others, “is the story of the enthusiastic responses of the American people to dynamic leadership on behalf of foreign policies which can be shown to have a positive bearing upon the national interest.”

Critics were not slow to challenge Morgenthau’s realism. If the national interest was the foundation of foreign policy, they said, the power underlying it must be clear and measurable, which meant military power—but even this power had often been miscalculated by both its wielders and its targets. The professor himself, the critics added unkindly, had miscalculated the national interest—for example, in his expectation that the Soviets would risk or even start a ground war in Europe once they acquired nuclear power. There were, moreover, other tangible and intangible bases of power—economic, psychological, ideological—that had to be included in assessing the might of nations. Yet if these were included, the “national interest” became such a tangle of multiple, shifting, and dynamic forces as to defy measurement and analysis. Hence to be for the national interest or for realism was no more clarifying than to be for wisdom or common sense or statecraft. Who wasn’t?

Realism, in short, was a necessary but inadequate component of a strategy of international relations. It was a preoccupation with means—the marshaling of power—in a series of world crises that called for a sense of proportion and perspective, a wider comprehension of ends, a philosophy of world politics, even a theology of the human condition. If this was the call, it appeared to have been answered in the 1950s by a theologian-philosopher-politician who had for twenty years been leaving church pulpits and college campuses dazzled by his stabbing oratory and pungent sermonizing. This was Reinhold Niebuhr.

Schooled at Elmhurst College in Illinois and at Yale Divinity School, he had held an evangelical pulpit in Detroit until 1928, when he joined the Union Theological Seminary in New York, much to the dismay of the established theologians there who deplored his lack of a doctorate, his bumptious midwestern manner, and his outspoken radicalism. His years in Detroit had left Niebuhr filled with fierce indignation over the industrial and human wasteland he had witnessed outside his own middle-class parish.

Detroit made Niebuhr a socialist; then for the next thirty years he followed a zigzag route through a series of doctrines and causes as he tried to come to grips with the depression, the New Deal, and the cold war. What kept him from intellectual faddism was his philosophical ambivalence—his tendency to embrace different doctrines at the same time in a kind of continuous internal dialectic; even while proclaiming a thesis he nurtured the seeds of its antithesis. Thus in Detroit he proclaimed the Social Gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch even while he exhibited, in his passion for new ideas and his instinct for irony and political practicality, many of the intellectual traits of the pragmatism of James and Dewey. His Detroit experience and the onset of the depression now moved him toward Marxist ideas, but it was Niebuhr’s own brand of Marxism, shot through with concern over the havoc of capitalism, fear of rising fascism, an ornery repugnance for communist dogma and messianism, and a hatred for Soviet bureaucracy and oppression. During the late 1930s, after holding the New Deal in some distaste for its opportunism and its “whirligig” of reform, he deserted Norman Thomas and the socialists to vote for Roosevelt. This shift too was marked by ambivalence: Niebuhr, who turned to FDR in part because of the President’s resistance to Nazism, had earlier attacked him for expanding the Navy.

By the 1940s Niebuhr could best be described as a liberal realist who was faithful to his earlier Social Gospel compassion in seeking to push the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations further to the left, in the process taking active leadership in Americans for Democratic Action and other liberal groups. At the same time he took a militant stand against Soviet expansionism and left-wing dogmatics. The old tensions and ambivalences remained. During the war he had hoped that “the companionship in a common purpose” with Russia would persuade the Soviets “to disavow political forms and fanaticisms which outrage standards of freedom established in the Western world.” This was the kind of “liberal illusion” that Niebuhr at other times denounced. He inveighed against American pride and self-righteousness but he also educated a rising generation of politicians in “realistic,” hard-nosed politics—in the notion, according to Richard W. Fox, that “moral men had to play hardball.”

By the 1950s Niebuhr had reached the height of his fame. “He was the father of us all,” George Kennan said of him. The ADA in a formal resolution named him its “spiritual father.” The theologian’s words excited so many agnostics, backsliders, and heretics that someone proposed a new group, “atheists for Niebuhr.” How to account for this extraordinary influence? The answer lay less in Niebuhr’s own ideological “whirligig” over the years than in the power of his theology of human nature. Whatever his current credal passion, it was informed by his biblical awareness of original sin, but sin now armed by technology with new destructive power, his rejection of Jeffersonian “illusions” for a Dostoevskian recognition of human evil, his sensitivity to human alienation, anxiety, and the “dizziness of freedom,” his constant reminders of pride, aggressiveness, sinfulness. Always sin—sin as the “narcosis of the soul.”

Audiences would never forget the sight of this man behind pulpit or rostrum, his bald pate gleaming as he pitched his hawklike face forward, his words tumbling out as his whole body seemed to weave and thrust, while his listeners tried frantically to scribble down his dazzling epigrams and polemical outbursts. His written words also had a stunning impact; for Harvey Cox his first reading of Moral Man and Immoral Society, gulped down in one sitting, was an intense revelation that made him “an instant Niebuhrian.” But when the sermons and books were digested, the question remained whether Niebuhr had done much more than clothe liberal realism in a powerful theological frame without resolving the ultimate in his paradoxes—the tension between liberal compassion, hopes and dreams, and hardheaded realism. Was Niebuhr simply one more example of the great Tocquevillian failure in American intellectuals—the failure to connect practical expedient politics informed by human possibility and limitation to lofty but explicit goals that might challenge the best in humankind?

No more than Morgenthau or the others did Niebuhr take on the toughest intellectual task of all: to explore the dimensions of liberty, the structure of freedom, the ambivalences of equality—and the tension among these values—and to link these with the strengths and weaknesses of American institutions, politics, and leadership. What was desperately needed in postwar America was analysis of the intervening linkages between ends and means, but this would have called for an analysis of political parties and electoral processes and public opinion and governmental structures—analysis hardly conducive to evangelical sermonizing and radical rhetoric. It was this failure that—granted the empirical richness and political wisdom of Lippmann and Kennan, Morgenthau and Niebuhr—set them a rung below the intellectual leadership of the 1780s. The Framers had crafted a constitution that superbly fixed their goals of individual liberty to concrete governmental institutions and electoral processes—so superbly that leadership in the 1950s still had to operate through their centuries-old system in seeking to reach twentieth-century goals.

Nor did these four political analysts—in even sharper contrast with the Framers in their time—hold much sway over foreign, even European, opinion. Kennan, a visiting professor at Oxford in 1957-58, lectured for the BBC on “Russia, the Atom and the West.” The stoutly anticommunist newspaper Le Figaro ran Lippmann columns. Lippmann indeed had a fan in General de Gaulle, who found Le Crépuscule des démocraties—the French edition of The Public Philosophy—full of “rare perceptions,” mainly because the two men shared strong doubts about the equation of democracy with parliamentarism and the “usurpation of popular sovereignty by professional politicians,” in de Gaulle’s words. But in general the ideas of the four were hardly exportable, conditioned as those ideas were by America’s geopolitical worldview.

Other things American, however, were most exportable. Europeans found their continent awash in American advertising and consumer goods. Turn the corner near Beethoven Strasse in Amsterdam or push your way through Piccadilly Circus or parade down the Champs-Elysées and you could hardly escape the ads for Kent cigarettes or Coca-Cola or Ford cars. Or escape the products themselves in the shops—Maxwell House coffee and Sea & Ski suntan lotion and Heinz tomato ketchup and Revlon lipstick. American cars seemed to be conquering European streets and mores, crowding highways, requiring car parks, changing suburban and recreation patterns.

Americans were exporting their corporations along with their goods. In the late fifties some two hundred American companies a year were settling in Belgium, Holland, and Prance, and about the same number in Britain. These enterprises employed tens of thousands of Americans and Europeans. Businessmen and politicians denounced the invaders for paying higher wages and salaries and for “disruption of orderly marketing.” American loans, or American management practices, or American competition would make Britain—or France or Italy or Belgium—the “49th State.” The Yankee traders, moreover, were taking back European art and other treasures. A London antique shop featured in its window a bristling sign: “Americans are not served.”

Other Europeans fought back in ways known to old cultures. Despite much advertising, some American products simply could not make a go of it: Campbell soups had trouble competing in the home of famous potages; the British did not take to motherly Betty Crocker and her cake mixes; General Mills tried to market Cheerios but Londoners stuck with their cornflakes and their kippers. Europeans attacked American economic and cultural “imperialism”: the Marshall Plan as a “dollar noose,” American loans as the work of a “shabby moneylender,” American managers as crass and unknowing, American GIs as “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” For some Americans the height of indignity was a report by a Russian, the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, after a trip to the States that Americans suffered from “spiritual standardization”—“the same houses, the same furniture, the same crockery.”

No place on the globe, critics complained, escaped “Coca-colonization.” Arthur Koestler noted: “The motorbus which carries the traveller at 5 A.M. from Bangkok airport to the center of the capital of Thailand has a loudspeaker through which American crooners purr at him, and makes him wonder whether his journey was really necessary. The Arabian desert is ploughed by Cadillacs, and the exhibition of Eskimo handicrafts at the airport of Anchorage, Alaska, bears the same hallmark of the Late Woolworth Period as the idols of Krishna, made of plastic, which are worshipped in Indian homes.”

How could the “other” America be presented abroad—the good America, the America of books and music, of the Bill of Rights and representative government, especially at a time when the Kremlin was reputed to be spending half a billion dollars a year on propaganda? This was the job of the United States Information Agency, the successor to a series of agencies going back to the wartime propaganda units. By the end of the decade the USIA was running a wide range of information and cultural activities— books, films, lectures, radio programs, exhibits, student and teaching exchanges—through 200 posts in over 80 countries. No agency was more vulnerable politically both at home and abroad; while young European radicals were assaulting overseas libraries from the outside, McCarthy’s men were doing so from the inside. Some overseas librarians hid books by Tom Paine and other radicals; a few timid souls actually burned books— only about a dozen, but enough to touch burning memories of the Nazis. “For the free world outside the U.S.,” wrote a Canadian journalist, “McCarthyism is not just a spectacle. It is a tragedy.”

McCarthy’s assault on the Bill of Rights symbolized the USIA’s broader problem. Which America, what kind of America, should it seek to present abroad—America in all its variety, its freedoms and oppressions, its high culture and its barbarism, its noble principles and its often egregious practices? “France was a land, England was a people,” Scott Fitzgerald had written, “but America, having still about it that quality of an idea, was harder to utter.” America was liberty, individual rights, Freedom—these were the foundation stones. But then there was that spectacle of the long-tolerated McCarthy.…

By the 1950s private philanthropic foundations were deeply involved in international affairs, especially in the Third World. The Ford Foundation devoted over $50 million—about a third of its total spending—to international programs from 1951 through 1954.While much of this effort abroad was for practical economic development programs, it also had a strong ideological cast. For years Ford helped finance the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which Ford officials defined as an effort “to combat tyranny and to advance freedom in Europe and Asia.” The tyranny was Marxism, Soviet style, and the freedom was the Bill of Rights, American style, but the implications of extending civil liberties to poverty-stricken peoples rather than helping them achieve social and economic freedoms were left largely unexplored.

The men and women who had the most influence, however unwittingly, on European perceptions of the United States were American writers and artists. The late 1940s and the 1950s brought an Indian summer of the sparkling literary era that had stretched from World War I through the 1930s. Still shining or at least flickering in the afterglow of that era were the giants of the 1920s. Sinclair Lewis died at the start of the fifties but only after publishing a final volume of social criticism, Kingsblood Royal, an attack on racial prejudice. Although the best work of Robert Frost was behind him, he was still the most widely read serious poet in America. Ernest Hemingway published Across the River and into the Trees in 1950 and The Old Man and the Sea two years later, followed by the award of a Pulitzer Prize and, in 1954, the Nobel Prize in literature. William Faulkner, who had won the Nobel five years earlier, published Requiem for a Nun in 1951 and A Fable in 1954, and he completed his trilogy about the Snopes clan with The Town and The Mansion during the late fifties. Soon after the end of the decade, the pens of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Frost would be stayed for good.

Crowding onto the literary scene were younger writers who brought a springtime of creativity even while the Indian summer waned. Between 1947 and 1955 playwright Arthur Miller gave to the stage All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge. Ralph Ellison wrote a single stunning novel, The Invisible Man; J. D. Salinger published The Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey; Saul Bellow contributed The Adventures of Augie March and Henderson the Rain King; playwright Tennessee Williams, after his brilliant The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, wrote The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. These five men were in their late thirties or early forties; even younger was Norman Mailer, who had brought out The Naked and the Dead, a war novel, at the age of twenty-five and wrote two significant works, Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, in the 1950s.

Of all the tests of great literature, two are most clearly measurable— longevity and universality. The permanence of the notable work of the Indian summer could not be tested for another century, but the universality of the older generation of writers had striking demonstration during the 1950s.

France had been the supreme testing ground abroad for American writers, in part because French critics viewed themselves as the ultimate tribunal of international letters. The literati of Paris had been peculiarly generous to American novelists, some of whom they had known during the novelists’ self-imposed exiles in France in the twenties. Lewis’s Babbitt had sold 80,000 copies in France within a few months of publication; at least thirteen of his other works were translated into French by the end of the thirties. During that decade, the “greatest literary development in France,” in the judgment of Jean-Paul Sartre, was the discovery of Faulkner, Dos Passos, Caldwell, and one or two other writers; at once, he added, “for thousands of young intellectuals, the American novel took its place, together with jazz and the movies, among the best of the importations from the United States.” Even André Gide, the grand old man of French letters, said that “no contemporary literature” excited his interest more than that of young America.

And of these “young” Americans, no one excited the French more than Hemingway. His subjects fascinated them—bloody prizefighters, hired killers, disemboweled matadors, crippled soldiers, hunters of wild animals, deep-sea fishermen, as André Maurois summed them up. They liked his style even more—the simplicity of word and deed, the flat unemotional perceptions, the code of courage and personal honor, the clean, hard writing style, the celebration of nada—nothingness. It was a style that was said to have influenced Camus. By 1952 For Whom the Bell Tolls had sold over 160,000 copies in a French-language edition.

In the long run, the reputation of Faulkner in France surpassed even Hemingway’s. The literati liked the sense of tragic pessimism in the Mississippian, his metaphysical approach to time, his “magical, fantastic, and tragic” universe, as one reviewer wrote, inhabited by “a strange music, an unforgettable rhythm of incantation.” If Hemingway influenced Camus, Faulkner, according to Sartre, inspired Simone de Beauvoir’s technique of substituting a more subtle order of time for the usual chronology. Some French critics viewed Faulkner as America’s best—even the world’s best— novelist, much to the discomfiture of Hemingway, who at least had the consolation of vastly outselling Faulkner in France. Americans were wrong to treat Faulkner as a regionalist, Paris critics asserted; he was rather a “universal writer” in the fullest sense.

It was not only Faulkner and Hemingway that France celebrated, and it was not only France that celebrated American writers. Across the Continent there appeared a hunger for Steinbeck, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, and others, and for Westerns and detective stories as well. A German writer told many years later of how he had cadged books from American GIs during the occupation and built his literary education on crates of Armed Services Editions, “courtesy of the American taxpayer.”

Why this transatlantic appeal of American writers? Italian novelist Cesare Pavese, who translated earlier American classics as well as Faulkner and Hemingway, said he had found “a thoughtful and barbaric America, happy and quarrelsome, dissolute and fruitful, heavy with all the world’s past, but also young and innocent.” Was this all there was to it—Europeans in one of their recurring “discoveries” of a simple, innocent, youthful America, refreshing to jaded continental sensibilities? Were either the established or the rising American writers of the 1950s telling them anything about the heart and mind and soul of America? What ultimately did this big, bustling country stand for?

Hemingway did not answer this question—he had no intention to. He dwelt on men’s—it was almost always men’s—individual fear and bravery, desire and frustration, struggle and death. Like Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls, he had no political beliefs except a furious antifascism and an all-embracing individualism. “You believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Robert is told by “himself,” but himself wants these good things for individuals, not nations. Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea superbly portrayed a man’s struggle against a personal adversary and a fated defeat by an inexorable environment, but had nothing to say about collective effort and frustration.

With his closeness to the land, his love of community and region, his feeling for the “presentness of the past,” his old-fashioned sense of religious morality, William Faulkner appeared far more likely than Hemingway to plumb the mind and heart of the country. He was very much in the American literary tradition—indeed, two traditions, as Hyatt Waggoner suggested: the romantic symbolism of Hawthorne and Melville, the naturalism of Howells, Twain, and Dreiser. The people of Yoknapatawpha County—their greed and cunning, their moral and physical vulgarity, and the struggles of some to break the chains of fate and rise to some kind of human stature—were lifted in his charged prose to the level of universality and tragedy that the French critics so praised. But Faulkner, like Hemingway, was far more concerned with private values and personal afflictions than with public substantive values like political and economic freedom. When he did call for individual rights and liberty in his books and public addresses, they were largely his kind of rights and liberty—a sphere of private space, artistic independence that no government could be allowed to invade. The broader picture of “what the country stood for” that emerged from his writings was murky, even muddled.

A marvelous line from Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom, noted by Malcolm Cowley, summed up the eloquence and the despair of modern human existence: “moving from a terror in which you cannot believe, toward a safety in which you have no faith.” This was the folly and impotence of America but by no means its essence.

Robert Frost even more than Faulkner defined freedom in his sayings and writings as personal liberty against the state, whether New Deal bureaucracy or the compulsory public school. And his freedom too, on closer inspection, turned out to be the crucial but self-serving independence of the man of letters. “We prate of freedom,” he said. “All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material—the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.” And he wrote:

Keep off each other and keep each other off.

You see the beauty of my proposal is

It needn’t wait on general revolution.

I bid you to a one-man revolution—

The only revolution that is coming.

Many of Frost’s finest poems celebrated the independent, self-reliant, skeptical country man, who could say with the poet, “The freedom I’d like to give is the freedom I’d like to have.” But this was a negative freedom largely irrelevant to the human needs of millions of industrialized, urbanized, automated Americans. There was one thing Frost could not do, Granville Hicks had written earlier. He “cannot give us the sense of belonging in the industrial, scientific, Freudian world in which we find ourselves.” The poet never did, never wanted to.

What writer, then, did manage to present the essence of the American experiment in the realm of ideas and values? Surely not Norman Mailer, who in the 1950s was still preoccupied with self-promotion, self-definition, self-resolution, with orgasm as true love, ideology as illusion, the hipster as the “wise primitive.” Surely not Tennessee Williams, who epitomized the decade’s concern with personal trauma and private values, or J. D. Salinger’s adolescents in constant rebellion against the “phony bastards” around them, or Saul Bellow’s characters—unforgettable but largely preoccupied with their own psyches.

The writer who came closest to dramatizing the great public issues and values was a playwright. Manhattan-born Arthur Miller, the son of a garment manufacturer afflicted by the depression, rebelled against commercial values and middle-class hypocrisy much as his fellow writers did. But he used his characters to dramatize social as well as personal needs and failures. The “right dramatic form,” he wrote in 1956, “is the everlastingly sought balance between order and the need of our souls for freedom; the relatedness between our vaguest longings, our inner questions, and private lives and the life of the generality of men which is our society and our world.” His great plays—notably Death of a Salesman and The Crucible—were in part direct responses to the threat to people’s hopes and dreams from a business civilization that degraded them and the threat to personal liberty from McCarthyism. Predictably Miller was attacked from the right; more significantly, he was criticized from the left for not being radical enough, for not being clear whether it was Willy Loman who was at fault or the society that produced him, for not tying his plays more explicitly to current issues.

Miller easily survived his critics. But even though his plays were produced in Europe, he had only a limited impact abroad. The ambiguities in his dramas—the ambivalences in Miller reflecting those in the larger culture—were enough to blur his powerful portrait of America’s yearnings toward both liberty and order, freedom and security, individualism and solidarity. The portrait was not clear to all Americans either. Miller himself wryly mentioned the man who came out of a performance of Death of a Salesman exclaiming, “I always said that New England territory was no damned good.”

If American writers were unsure of what their nation stood for, it was not surprising that Europeans were equally puzzled. European intellectuals had long labeled the country’s commitment to freedom as either self-indulgence bordering on anarchy or a boorish egalitarianism bending toward class leveling. “I am held to be a master of irony,” George Bernard Shaw had gibed. “But not even I would have had the idea of erecting a Statue of Liberty in New York.” On the other hand, Europeans had to and did admire the American commitment to some notion of freedom in two wars and the cold war. If Europeans, with their long exposure to Americans, were left uncertain, what could be expected of the Soviets, with their very different, very ideological conception of freedom?

A remarkable meeting in San Francisco in September 1959 between Nikita Khrushchev and nine American labor leaders headed by Walter Reuther helped answer this question. For two hours the two sides went at it, Khrushchev reddening, pounding the table, shouting out his arguments, the union men roaring back in a cacophony of indignant voices. More and more the argument narrowed down to the question of freedom—for workers in East Germany, for Hungarian “freedom fighters,” for West Germans, for Americans. Khrushchev was soon on his feet. Suddenly, according to the official record, he gave a burlesque demonstration of the dance he had witnessed during the Hollywood rehearsal of the forthcoming film Can-Can. He turned his back to the table, bent downward, flipped his coat up, and gave an imitation of the cancan.

“This is a dance in which girls pull up their skirts,” the Premier fulminated. “This is what you call freedom—freedom for the girls to show their backsides. To us it is pornography. The culture of people who want pornography. It’s capitalism that makes the girls that way.”

The meeting sputtered toward its end.

“We are interested in how best to advance the interest of workers under freedom,” Reuther said.

“You have your point of view; we have ours,” Khrushchev replied. “They are irreconcilable.”

CHAPTER 7

The Free and the Unfree

ONLY A TINY PORTION OF the people of the world had ever taken part in the global controversy over the nature of freedom. Yet, whether this lofty idea was defined in its core as individual civil and political liberty or as the broadest social and economic opportunity and equality, whether—in FDR’s terms—freedom was not only of speech and worship but also from want and fear, the meaning of freedom had enormous potential implications for the billions of people who were as remote from the controversy as if they lived on another planet.

The vast majority of these persons lived in peasant huts or city shanties. They subsisted on 2,000 calories a day or even less, barely enough to supply the energy needed for bodily survival. In the cities they lived perforce on a day-to-day, even hour-to hour economy, as they scrounged for enough money or food to carry them through the day. In the country they lived seasonally, planting their single crops on postage-stamp plots, but were often at the mercy of landlords, moneylenders, drought, and flood. In time of dire need they might resort to begging, pilfering, to sending their children out to beg or toil. At best they might live four or five or six to a shack, often in curtained-off tiers of straw mats.

The most eloquent world leader could not reach these people. They had no magazines, newspapers, or books—and could not read them if they had, for the great majority were illiterate. They might possess a radio, if they had electricity and if the national regime wanted a direct line to them; more likely they could attend a community radio or perhaps a film. Many blocks away, or across the valley somewhere, there might be a school—perhaps a two-room hutch for the hundreds of children in the area. Few attended— there were better uses for them. In southern India twelve-year-old untouchables bobbed up and down in lime pits stamping hides with their bare feet; elsewhere in Asia children might be sent out in time of famine to pick the undigested oats from horse droppings.

Around the globe, wherever the sun was hottest typically the poverty was direst. Its burning rays brought light and energy but also drought and flood to southern Asia, to tropical and Saharan Africa, to Brazil and her neighbors to the west. The overhead sun traced the global hunger belt. In the late 1950s “developed” countries outside the communist bloc had less than one-fifth of the world’s population but over three-fifths of the world’s gross national product. The communist bloc including Asia claimed a third of the global population and a fifth of the GNP. That left the rest of the world—a billion and a third people—with the rest of the GNP, less than 15 percent. More starkly, about half the world’s population of almost three billion had a GNP per head of $100 or less by the end of the fifties.

There was nothing new about this abject poverty; much of humankind had always been in dire want. It was the sheer number of people now inhabiting the earth, and therefore the sheer scope of privation, that was new. World population had climbed from less than 1.2 billion in 1850 to around 1.6 billion in 1900 and then surged to 2.4 billion by 1950. There was virtually no chance of slowing down the population increase in the next half century because it was propelled by almost inexorable forces: the nineteenth- and twentieth-century revolutions in personal and public hygiene, medicine, agriculture, industrial productivity. On the contrary, experts in demography fully anticipated a further population spurt during the late twentieth century.

It was not simply a matter of numbers, however, but of the revolution in attitudes created by people having longer life spans, working more productively, living and toiling in denser clusters. These attitudes were focused and steeled by two powerful intertwined tendencies. One was the heating up of fierce nationalist feelings and rivalries that swept Asia and Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A sense of common fate “united peoples divided by older social barriers of ethnicity, class, rank, culture, religion,” in Peter Worsley’s words. “People drew together, and were forced together.” They united against their colonial masters; what they united for was not so clear. The other development was world war, accompanied by multitudinous smaller wars. Economically stimulated by the colonial powers’ ravenous exploitation of their natural resources, Third World peoples were also psychologically charged when the British and Americans appeared vulnerable to Third World nationalism. And vulnerable as well to other races: at Singapore, Pearl Harbor, and elsewhere, Oriental power—at least for a few electrifying months—seemed able to take the measure of the white master.

“O masters, lords and rulers in all lands, / How will the Future reckon with this Man?” poet Edwin Markham had asked at the turn of the century after gazing at a reproduction of Millet’s The Man with the Hoe. How answer his brute question “when whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world”? When would the “dumb Terror” cry out? For the most part he did not. The man with the hoe stayed chained to his plot, his cottage, his village, his tribe, imprisoned in a structure of poverty embracing every aspect of his existence: his poor nourishment, ill health, ignorance, illiteracy, lack of motivation, opportunity, hope. Studies of Indian villages portrayed communities whose hierarchy of castes and classes appeared utterly impervious to external influence or internal disruption.

Others revolted. They rose against their colonial masters or the local colonial surrogates or their own national or tribal despots. Some rebels, following the paths of the great liberal European leaders they had studied in their school textbooks, chose the course of party competition, voteseeking, parliamentary maneuver, cabinet leadership. Others turned to Marxist doctrines and Leninist tactics, focusing hatred against colonists, landlords, plantation owners, moneylenders, storekeepers—against all “capitalists.” The result had been a variety of communist and socialist regimes, some of them collaborating with the master models in Moscow and later Peking, others following their own nationalist versions of Marxism.

The path that rising peoples followed was not chosen by the collective voice or vote of the people acting en masse. Nor on the other hand did one leader or a tiny set of leaders at the top make the decision. It came of shifting combinations of national leaders, grass-roots activists, and followers, varying from nation to nation, region to region. But at least one broad pattern could be discerned in this complex process. While “arousing the masses,” leaders inspired subleaders who tended to challenge and overtake the original leaders and then remove or even execute them. Thus revolutions devoured their own children. As leaders responded to wants and turned them into socially legitimated needs, people were not content for long; after food in their bellies and security in their homes they wanted higher things—self-esteem and self-fulfillment. Seeking votes, politicians offered people hope and found the collective hope they aroused turning into expectations that soon became entitlements that soon became demands. And once the followers put demands on their leaders and the leaders followed the followers, the followers were the true leaders.

Other poverty-stricken people found a quite different way out—migration. For some this meant moving from the countryside into the burgeoning cities—or into the shacks that clustered in the city but were not part of it. For others, whether early immigrants such as the Irish or later ones like the Chinese, it meant voyages of several thousand miles across the high seas to new lives and new leaders, new freedoms and new frustrations.

It so happened that during the 1960s, when demands for economic and social as well as political and constitutional freedoms were echoing throughout the Third World, Americans came under the leadership of two Presidents who—more than any of their predecessors for at least a century—had lived among migrant peoples who had come to the United States seeking liberty of thought and expression and equality of opportunity. John Kennedy had grown up among the descendants of the Irish who had fled from British oppression, and in his city constituencies he had seen people imprisoned in urban poverty that matched the rural deprivations of the old country. As a young schoolteacher, Lyndon Johnson had entered the lives of children descended from some of the several million Mexicans who had remained in the Southwest following the Mexican-American war or who had later crossed the border to find jobs. Could not these two Presidents take the lead in teaching the American people—and themselves—how to understand the cries for freedom rising from the Third World, and how to respond to them?

The Boston Irish

In the late 1840s the trickle of Irish immigrants into Boston had suddenly turned into a flood. In less than a decade over 120,000 Hibernians crossed over the gangplank and, full of wild hopes and apprehensions, descended into the tumult of the dock. The central cause of this sudden spurt could hardly have appeared more remote to the Brahmin world of Beacon Hill—yet it would profoundly alter that world. It was a fungus in Irish fields that left potato stalks slimy and stinking and the spuds underground small and mushy. The blight devastated Ireland’s single main crop. More than half a million Irish people died of starvation and related illnesses in the famine, it was estimated, while hundreds of thousands of others in fury and desperation sought escape to England, Canada, and America.

It was not the first time that the Irish had wondered if God’s curse lay on their country. For centuries they had known oppression from the alien regime across the Irish Sea. Repeated rebellions had brought bloody reprisals and massacres. The Irish “always went forth to battle and they always fell,” a poet lamented. The English government had planted thousands of Presbyterian Scots in northern Ireland—a move that would divide the country for at least four centuries. Irish Catholics were denied the right to vote, to serve on juries, to teach school, to enter a university, to marry a Protestant, to own much land, to join the bar, to work for the government. Slowly, grudgingly, London made concessions, but it was all too late. By the early nineteenth century the Irish had turned inward, to their land, their family, their superstitions, their villages, their grievances, and above all their religion.

It was a colonized people who made their way across the Atlantic, only to meet—in Boston, at least—new colonial masters. Here again were Protestant overlords who dominated intellectual and cultural life, occupied the economic and political power centers, controlled the major press organs, dominated the election process. Most of the Irish exchanged their hovels in County Kerry for tenements off filthy alleys, their farm labor for pick-and-shovel jobs on roads or canals, or drudgery in Protestant kitchens or factories. But they did not exchange their church, their one dependable institution. The Irish in Boston continued to hunker down together, to cling to their songs and wakes and taverns, their sly ways of frustrating their oppressors.

But something was different in America. It was a nation that appeared to prize its constitutional processes and Bill of Rights, a people that affirmed—even if they often failed to practice—the supreme principles of liberty and equality. And it was a land of bursting economic opportunity, however uneven. In many respects Boston, compared with the bustling cities to the south and west, was already experiencing an economic decline, but the city was a job cornucopia compared to the old country.

The Boston Irish found three ladders out of privation. Sports was the handiest—literally handy for a man quick with his fists. Hero to Boston Irishmen was John L. Sullivan, who discovered his prowess at the age of nineteen by knocking his foe into the orchestra pit with his first blow. Sullivan took on all comers, promising $25 to anyone who could knock him out. In 1882 he vanquished the national heavyweight champion, Paddy Ryan; seven years later he fought Jack Kilrain for seventy-five rounds with bare knuckles; three years after that he lost the championship to Gentleman Jim Corbett and with it a purse of $45,000. So prestigious were Irish boxers that some aspiring pugilists without a drop of Irish blood took Hibernian names.

For more ambitious Boston Irish, the main ladder was political. In the United States, Irishmen’s votes counted just as much as any others, sometimes more if counted by the right people. By the 1870s the Boston Irish were electing city aldermen and state legislators, then mayors and congressmen. Outdoing the Protestants in dispensing patronage, soon they were making their friends and supporters policemen, inspectors, firemen, and the like. With their ready tongues, their quick wit, their concern for families living in their ward or precinct if not for people en masse, their flair for building personal followings, their vaunted “human touch,” and with their numbers, the Irish soon captured Boston, except for brief periods of reform protest. Newcomers from other countries had many of these qualities too, but the Irish (or many of them) enjoyed one inestimable advantage—they were the only “new” immigrants to arrive speaking English.

Belatedly it was the economic ladder that carried some Boston Irish to the top. Much has been made of the job discrimination the Irish faced—the signs reading “None need apply but Americans,” the white-collar promotions reserved for Protestants, the shunting off of talented young Irishmen into domestic and service jobs. Less has been made of the handicaps that many of the Irish brought to job-seeking and advancement: illiteracy, inability to speak English well, lack of vocational skills and of a feel for the rhythms of the city. Despite all this, sizable numbers of the Boston Irish went into business and finance and thrived. This was partly because they had entrepreneurial skills that could not be denied, partly because the better-assimilated second and third generations suffered fewer handicaps and found a variety of channels in a nationally expanding economy, partly because the most stiff-necked State Street banker would deal even with Irishmen as long as he could make a dollar.

The social environment was changing too. The “No Irish” notices came down, the Boston Transcript finally stopped running “Protestant only” job ads, and more and more non-Catholics voted for Catholics running for office—but of course not yet for the presidency. The changing image of the Irish was reflected in Puck, a journal of “mirth and fun” published in New York but widely circulated in Boston. In the 1880s Puck caricatured Bridget in the kitchen and Paddy in his shanty swarming with pigs, chickens, and children. “In front of these leaking, tumbledown shacks sits the Hibernian male, clay pipe sticking from a large, baboon-like mouth in an underslung jaw,” in John Appel’s description of the caricature. Paddy was “eternally hostile to Great Britain; prepared to send his and Bridget’s hard-earned dollars to support lazy relatives or harebrained, landlord-murdering, dynamite-happy compatriots in the Emerald Isle or the United States.” Later the cartoonists featured the second generation of financially successful contractors and their upward-striving wives, and still later Puck’s savage thrusts at the Irish and other immigrants died away, as did the journal itself.

Still, the transition into politics, business, and the professions was never easy. Economically the Irish could follow the path of Social Darwinism or of a Horatio Alger hero, but still be excluded from the Protestant old-boy network of corporate decision-makers. Educationally they could send their children to Protestant schools, knowing that their sons might be accepted on the football field or baseball diamond but not in a fraternity or in a dormitory clique. Socially they could meet members of their own class at Boston events, but not enter the Somerset Club. Politically they operated under the umbrella of the Democratic party, but the Democracy served them as a patronage machine rather than as a political and programmatic movement. Ideologically they shared the welfare liberalism of progressive-minded Protestants, but they recoiled from their social liberalism, feminist (and, earlier, abolitionist) leanings, intellectual eclecticism and tolerance, and Bill of Rights absolutism, which clashed with Catholic moral and social conservatism.

The Irish could be, in short, wholly “American” in their behavior— ambitious, cosmopolitan, active in the party of their choice, contributors to charity, hostile to radical causes and groups, paying obeisance to the higher American values, sharing in the nation’s love of heroes in the political and sports arenas. But “structurally” they were not integrated into the American system. They stood a bit apart, somewhat quizzical, sardonic, critical of many of the modernist and secular trends in American life.

Probably no family in Boston embodied the Irish Catholic heritage and ambivalences more fatefully, or seized on the new land’s opportunities more eagerly, than the Kennedys. The generations followed the classic sequence. During the famine Patrick Kennedy, a County Wexford tenant farmer, walked—so it is said—from his cottage to the packet ship that took him to Boston. There he worked as a barrel maker, married Bridget Murphy, fathered four children, and died of the cholera in his early thirties. His son Patrick Joseph attended a parochial and then a public school, worked as a dockhand, saved his money, bought a tavern in Haymarket Square, and then branched out into both politics and finance, building his own Democratic party organization and helping to establish an East Boston bank. He won the hand of Mary Hickey, at the time a bit above his station. Their firstborn, Joseph Patrick, attended parochial school through the lower grades, then Boston Latin, then Harvard. In 1914, when he was in his mid-twenties, he married Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald. Rose was the bright and beauteous daughter of Boston mayor John (“Honey Fitz”) Fitzgerald, who had been born in a tenement near the Old North Church of parents from County Wexford.

The Kennedy-Fitzgerald clans, packed with Murphys and Hickeys and Connellys as well, were claimed by an admiring Bostonian to be “Irish as Paddy’s pig.” Yet the second generation of that clan—PJ’s and Honey Fitz’s generation—had begun to veer from the shanty Irish stereotype. With his jokes about the auld sod, all too frequent warbling of “Sweet Adeline,” fondness for jigs and wakes, Honey Fitz was the very caricature of the merry little Irishman, but he penetrated Protestant society through his athletic feats at Boston Latin and after, and he even enrolled in Harvard Medical School, dropping out after his father’s early death. Not only did PJ see his son into Harvard but this “typical Irish boss” ended up an affluent banker and liquor wholesaler living in a fine colonial mansion.

Honey Fitz and PJ moved toward success without apparent trauma, in part because they accepted the rules of the social game—equal, but separate. This was precisely what Joe Kennedy would not accept. He must be not separate but included, not equal but at the top. And this he never fully achieved. With strong initial boosts from his father and father-in-law he went on to a highly remunerative career in Boston banking, in films, liquor, stock speculation, and real estate. But riches never brought him acceptance from men whom he often despised anyway. While Groucho Marx remarked that he would not join the kind of club that would let him in, Kennedy would join it—but the club would not let him in. Still, despite his own womanizing, he could take enormous solace in his loyal wife and rapidly growing family of nine children—especially in his firstborn and namesake, Joe Jr. And he could send his four sons to Harvard.

John Kennedy grew up half Irish, half Harvard, conventionally Catholic in religious matters, secular and skeptical in intellectual. He dealt with such dualities by compartmentalizing his life and perhaps even his thoughts. He dutifully followed his mother’s admonitions about attending mass, but he ignored theology and spurned religiosity. He was properly pious and decorous when occasion demanded it, but at Choate school he headed a “mucker’s club” that rebelled against the headmaster and his rules. He became a bread-and-butter Democrat who shunned the orthodox liberalism of Americans for Democratic Action and the American Civil Liberties Union. His detachment from traditional American Catholicism, wrote his friend Arthur Schlesinger, was part of his detachment from middle-class parochialism, the business ethos, ritualistic liberalism.

Rather early in his life there began to develop a public John Kennedy and a private Jack. The fierce competitor in football, sailing, swimming, and roughhousing concealed the youth who was racked and often immobilized by a series of illnesses. The son of Boston actually grew up mainly in New York, Cape Cod, and Palm Beach. The image of the clean-cut all-American youth was shrouded in obsessive womanizing that started remarkably early in his life and lasted until the end of it. He wrote grandly of courage and leadership in politics but usually practiced caution and shrewdness. He took the orthodox anticommunist posture in public while in private he more and more favored flexibility toward the Soviet Union. He demonstrated independence in his behavior and his career choices, even while he was closely dependent at critical junctures on his father’s money, connections, and advice.

He was not even committed to a political career until his brother Joe was killed piloting a bomber over the English Channel in 1944. A constituency opened up too, when James Michael Curley, who represented everything the Kennedys now detested in Boston politics—pugnacious demagoguery, silver-tongued blarney, flamboyant appeals to the shanty Irish, corruption—relinquished his 11th Congressional District seat in 1946 to run for mayor. Since the 11th was as heavily Democratic as it was Catholic, the big fight would come in the party primary. Almost a dozen hopefuls, including one woman, jumped into the race.

Soon this old working-class district was treated to the spectacle of a gaunt, hollow-eyed twenty-nine-year-old, still yellow from South Pacific Atabrine, handshaking his way through Maverick Square, the Italian North End, tenements, and factories. The young Kennedy did not take to this glad-handing easily; shy and slow with the sweet talk, he developed his own style of direct, informal, pithy speech. More decisive in such a free-for-all, however, was father Joe’s quiet mobilization of media attention, subway and billboard advertising, and tens of thousands of reprints of a Reader’s Digest abridgment of an account by John Hersey of Kennedy’s steady leadership after the loss of his PT boat in the South Pacific. The primary outcome—a clear lead by Kennedy over his nearest rival—was sobering as well as gratifying: after all the months of hoopla and beating of the bushes by all the candidates, fewer than a third of the registered voters bothered to vote.

His congressional race taught the ambitious young politician a lesson in American politics that was wholly congenial to a Kennedy—it was all against all in a big game of King of the Rock. You gather your friends and family around you, raise money, organize a personal following, ignore the party organization except when you can exploit it, keep flailing about in one big donnybrook—and the devil take the hindmost. Anything goes, almost; when the Kennedy people feared that one Joseph Russo might win a plurality (and hence victory) with just the Italian vote, they dug up another Joseph Russo to split his vote.

In the House of Representatives, Kennedy did not find that political lesson any less useful. Party leadership and organization were weak; the House Democrats were fragmented into a host of shifting factions; despite advice from his elders that in the House you must “go along to get along,” you really did best by endlessly wheeling and dealing in a system of free political enterprise.

But life in the House, partly for these reasons, was boring as well; he “felt like a worm there,” Kennedy later complained. Soon he was setting his sights on statewide office, whether senator or governor he did not much care; either could be a stepping-stone to still higher office. It became clear that in 1952 the congressman could have a clear shot—that is, without major opposition in a primary—at Henry Cabot Lodge for Lodge’s seat in the Senate. It was a sobering prospect. Grandson of Woodrow Wilson’s nemesis, Lodge had inherited much of the old senator’s Irish and isolationist support. After roundly defeating Jim Curley for the Senate seat in 1936 he had resigned for combat service, then returned and beaten the “unbeatable” incumbent, David I. Walsh. Having won new prestige from having helped draft Eisenhower for the Republican presidential nomination, Lodge was now the unbeatable one.

The contest that followed was one of the most significant of the postwar years—not because of the contestants, notable though they were; not because of the money spent, which was probably no greater than in many other Senate races; but because Kennedy’s campaign epitomized a “new politics,” involving massive use of the media, variety of focus on candidate image and personalismo, extraordinary exploitation of family money and friends, and attacks on the foe from both the right flank and the left with little regard to program or ideology.

In the fall of 1952 tens of thousands of Massachusetts women, responding to personalized invitations, turned out to meet mother and son, share some refreshment, and enjoy a political gathering with hardly a hint of sordid politics in the air. While John Kennedy’s father financed these affairs, his mother and sisters made them a spectacular success. No other candidates were invited, of course. Jack was running solo. He ran his campaign out of his own city and town headquarters and kept his distance from Democrats competing for other offices who might be a drag on his own campaign; many a party hand working for the whole ticket looked forlornly out of a second-floor cubbyhole to see the glittering Kennedy storefront headquarters across the way. Only Kennedy literature was available there.

How to attack Lodge, who held the strategic middle ground as the “centrist,” moderate Republican candidate? Kennedy, with a crucial assist from his father, enfiladed that centrism from opposite sides of the political spectrum. He targeted conservative Republicans still angry over Eisenhower’s “theft” of the Republican nomination. Joe Kennedy served as the contact with anti-Eisenhower publishers; his exquisitely well-timed promise of a half-million-dollar loan to the publisher of the noisily right-wing Boston Post greased the way for the publisher’s abrupt switch from Lodge to Kennedy. Over on the liberal side of the spectrum Jack Kennedy played up bread-and-butter issues, his promise to do MORE for Massachusetts, his past and future helpfulness to labor, consumers, and other clients of the Democracy. On Joe McCarthy—a friend of his father’s—and on McCarthyism the candidate remained absolutely mum.

Courage and caution paid off. Kennedy beat Lodge by a margin of 70,000 in a total vote of over 2.6 million. In January 1953 he took his seat in the upper chamber. The new president of the Senate was Richard M. Nixon. The new Minority Leader of the Senate Democrats was Lyndon B. Johnson.

The Southern Poor

When the “famine Irish” shipped into American ports during the late 1840s they found themselves among the descendants of great waves of earlier immigrants—of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonials, of Huguenot French and a diversity of Germans, and of large numbers of Protestant Scotch-Irish, many of whom had settled in Pennsylvania and Virginia and then fanned out to the borderlands. Like the Irish Catholics, many of these migrants had come in search of free religion and speech, free education and enterprise, freedom from class distinction and compulsory military service. The famine Irish encountered one other type of “immigrant,” however—black men and women who had been kidnapped or traded out of Africa and smuggled into southern ports. A few blacks had made their way to northern cities, where they often fought with the Irish over the economic scraps, but most ended up on the cotton and tobacco and rice plantations of the South.

At the dawn of the twentieth century large numbers of the northern Irish, but only a small fraction of rural blacks, had won economic and political freedoms. Emancipated slaves had emerged from the Civil War and Reconstruction with somewhat broadened constitutional rights and liberties, only to have their advances virtually nullified later in the century by Jim Crow laws that robbed them of their newly won right to vote and systematically separated them from whites in schools, workplaces, and public facilities. By the 1950s southern rural blacks, ravaged further by the great depression, by pervasive segregation and discrimination, and by the mechanical cotton picker and other technological changes, comprised the poorest of the poor. Macon County, Alabama, an 82 percent black cotton-growing land that included Tuskegee, illustrated the situation at its worst. Of several hundred tenant dwellings surveyed in the 1930s, more than half had open privies, almost that proportion had no sewage disposal whatever, eighty-one had no water on the place.

There was a cruel poverty of aspiration as well. Whether the nation enjoyed prosperity or depression, conditions for the southern poor hardly improved over the years. FDR called the South “the nation’s No. 1 economic problem” and channeled funds into the area, but the structure of poverty remained unchanged. By 1960 seven out of ten of the nation’s black families earning under $3,000 a year lived in the South, as compared to four out of ten white families. Clearly a multitude of whites also suffered poverty in the South, but like the Boston Irish they could take educational, entrepreneurial, and employment paths to personal freedom. Southern blacks could not—and far worse, their children could not. An 1896 Supreme Court decision that most blacks had not even heard of, Plessy v. Ferguson, had set the precedent for “separate but equal” schools that had remained separate but grossly unequal. Black schoolchildren were still systematically shunted out of the mainstream of opportunity.

Southern blacks were immobilized in their own caste, in their own class structure. At the bottom of the pyramid were blacks still effectively or even literally in peonage. Growing out of wage agreements following emancipation, serving as a crude path from bondage to “freedom,” enforced by the whip and the chain gang, peonage had served as a means of labor control through keeping blacks constantly in debt. Nonpayment left blacks in the toils of the law and hence, in many cases, of the boss man. Isolated cases of peonage were still being reported in the 1950s. Two Alabama farmers were imprisoned in 1954 for paying blacks’ jail fines by working them in the fields; one of the blacks who was bailed out had later been beaten to death when he tried to flee.

A step above peonage were the sharecroppers, tenant farmers, wandering job-seekers, a kind of rural proletariat locked into its own mores, illiteracy, and low motivation. A black middle class embraced farm owners, artisans, steady workers, elementary and perhaps high school graduates, churchgoers. At the top were a few hundred thousand established business people, lawyers and ministers and teachers and other professionals, even plantation owners. They had “made it” through sheer pluck and a bit of luck.

But no black, high or low, peon or professional, could escape shattering blows to self-esteem. Carl Rowan, a Tennessee-born black journalist, returned to the South in 1951 to report on race relations there. Soon his stories in the Minneapolis Morning Tribune and later his book South of Freedom were pricking the conscience of the nation. They were old stories to southern blacks: the little white girl pointing to the well-dressed Rowan and crying, “Momma, Momma, look at the pretty nigger!”—the black Charleston schools operating on double shifts—“colored” waiting to board a bus until all the whites had entered—one black doctor in Georgia for over 7,500 blacks—Harvey’s Bar B-Q Stand in Rowan’s hometown, owned by a black and segregated—the man whose grandson was lynched a few days before the actual culprit was found—blacks who could go anywhere as long as they wore a white coat and black bow tie—blacks who could go anywhere if they were or pretended to be African diplomats, and not Americans—and everywhere (including Washington, D.C.) segregated hotels, restaurants, waiting rooms, schools, laundries, and movie theaters.

How escape caste and class? Some blacks conducted desperate little rebellions of their own, almost invariably to be crushed. Some quietly hunkered down in their own protective storm cellars of home or community. Some acculturated, imitating white ways, but color was still the impassable barrier to “uppity niggers.” Many fled to the North or other parts of the South. During the 1950s the Southeast registered a net loss of almost 1.5 million blacks. Between 1940 and 1960 the percentage of the nation’s blacks living in the Southeast fell from 61 to 45, with the black farm population dropping by about two-thirds.

Blacks were tempted north in much the same ways European immigrants had been tempted west, by glowing reports of jobs, schools, “freedom,” but often they found that they had merely exchanged their rural ghettos for urban ones. Migratory workers, black and white, followed the crops north, moving as the crops ripened—citrus fruit and tomatoes and potatoes in Florida, corn and snap beans in the Carolinas, berries and fruits in Virginia and Maryland, then the table vegetables of New Jersey and New York and, late in the fall, the potatoes of Maine. Encountering working and living conditions like those of the California Okies, many East Coast migrants returned home bitterly disillusioned about freedom north of “south of freedom.”

Even more remarkable was the migration of southern blacks within the South. Hundreds of thousands living in rural areas moved into southern cities; hundreds of thousands living in the “core” or “solid” South moved to the “rim” states, especially Florida, Louisiana, and Virginia. Some never made it, returning home or ending up as migratory labor within the South. But for countless blacks the move from country to city, from heartland to “rim,” brought better jobs, schools, and living conditions. A few even won white-collar positions, though most black women became household or service workers, and the number of them employed in private households increased during the 1950s.

On the surface, early in the 1950s the economic and political system of the Deep South seemed little changed. Underneath, a vast social transformation was underway, including the emergence of young black activists and a dramatic rise in the number of black children, more of whom now were getting some schooling. But whether blacks would break out of their social and psychological bonds depended on a liberating leadership that still lacked power at either the national or the community level.

Many rural whites in the South were poverty-stricken too, in their lack of good education, housing, nutrition, medical care, but they did not share these conditions with the blacks; the two races were often more sharply segregated in low-income areas than in middle-class. Entrenched white poverty extended to Appalachia, which included northern sections of Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee as well as all of West Virginia and parts of five more northern states. Southern Appalachia in particular presented the familiar pathology of poverty—“low income, high unemployment, lack of urbanization, low educational achievement, and a low level of living,” as one report summarized it. Typically poor Appalachian whites lacked even the “niggers” to look down on, but in coal-mining towns where the companies had recruited blacks from the South, the races lived, prayed, and schooled separately. A white coal miner related that after he had worked agreeably with a “colored boy” for some weeks and then quit merely to take a better job, his former boss looked him up and told him, “Jackson, if you will come back to work for me I’ll fire every damn Nigger on the job.”

It was a land of magnificent mountain ranges and wretched little “hollers,” of abundant natural resources and human deprivation, of fierce family feuds and touching personal loyalties. In eastern Kentucky lay Harlan County, “bloody Harlan,” ravaged in the 1930s by strikes, lockouts, and the killing of striking coal miners and scabs. But beginning in Appalachia, reaching across most of Tennessee, and extending into adjacent states stretched a vast experiment in the taming of nature and the betterment of human lives. This was the Tennessee Valley Authority. One of the New Deal’s most daring and enlightened ventures, the TVA by 1960 had grown into a huge complex of thirty dams mainly on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, flood-control projects, electric power generating plants, river-traffic expansion, fertilizer production, forestry protection and technology, malaria control, recreational development. The Authority’s significance lay in the way these activities interlinked and impinged upon people’s lives and enterprises. In an area of the country dominated by the caprices of nature and the limited vision of leaders, here was a project that connected commerce with flood prevention, promotion of traffic with water control, river-taming with cheap electricity, parks with regional development, altogether a supreme effort at rational planning. In a benign transformation of the people’s environment—at least until the advent of nuclear power—a new inland world was created, of lakes gleaming like diamond pendants along the once turbulent Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, of sailing and fishing, swimming and camping, hiking and animal watching.

Far to the west, past the Mississippi River and Louisiana and eastern Texas, lay that part of the South that appeared the least southern of all. The hill country of central Texas sat in the south-center of the plains that stretched down the middle of Texas west of the Balcones Escarpment. The hill country, west of Austin and northwest of San Antonio, was grassy, giving way to brush, thin-soiled, dry, windy, and subject to drought—a poor land barely supporting poor people. To the hill country settlers had come throughout the last century, to raise cattle and cotton. By the end of the century the hill country was in a long decline, as cattle ate away the grass that shielded the soil even as cotton drained the soil itself. Here Lyndon B. Johnson was born in the summer of 1908; this land shaped him as a Southerner and politician.

Within a few years Lyndon was showing qualities that would mark him for the rest of his life; he was bossy, competitive, restless, and ornery. For a time he and his father, Sam Ealy, and mother, Rebekah Baines, and four siblings lived in a warm family circle. He adored his mother and admired his father, a Democratic state representative of populist principles. And Lyndon heard much about his idealistic grandfather who had been an unsuccessful populist candidate for the Texas legislature. But by the time Lyndon was in his teens, gangling, big-eared, thin-faced, he was rebelling against Sam, who had fallen on hard times in a down cycle of the boom-and-bust economy of central Texas. Now the family lived in relative poverty and—Lyndon suspected—was the butt of ridicule for having lived high on the hog and fallen so low.

The solution for young Johnson was escape. He fled to the company of older men and women in the neighborhood; journeyed south and worked eleven hours a day in a huge cotton gin, boiling hot and thick with lint and dust; made his way west to California, where he clerked in a cousin’s law office; returned home and worked with a road gang; and finally went off to college, to Southwest Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos. Some of LBJ’s enduring traits were shaped at San Marcos, as he played up to the college president and faculty, bossed the younger students, manipulated school elections, organized the underrepresented students against an elite group of star athletes—a strange mixture of bootlicker and bully, in the eyes of critical schoolmates. He took a year off to make some money by teaching in the “Mexican school” in Cotulla, a town of crumbling shanties situated on a desolate plain fifty miles from the Rio Grande.

Almost everywhere young Johnson went he saw poverty—at home in his own family, among the cotton gin workers, at college, where some of the students were poorer than he. He found abject poverty in Cotulla, where there was no school lunch hour because the pupils had no lunch, and no playground except a debris-littered vacant lot. Undaunted, LBJ threw himself into the job, inspiring and disciplining the students, motivating the teachers, galvanizing much of the town. Promoted to principal at the very start, he demonstrated an insatiable need for respect and deference, but he exhibited as well a big heart. Discovering that the school janitor could not speak English, he spent hours before and after class time tutoring him—he also insisted that the school be spanking clean.

Graduated from San Marcos in 1930, Johnson carried his competitiveness and his compassion, his raw ambition and his populist instincts, into a series of jobs—public-speaking teacher in Houston, Texas state director of the National Youth Administration, aide to a Texas congressman, candidate for Congress. If LBJ’s political character was foreshadowed in college, his political career was portended in his first campaign for the House. When the incumbent representative died in 1937 and the governor called a special “sudden death” election (that is, no runoff ), Johnson heard that the widow of the deceased was thinking of running. To head her off he announced at once—before the body was cold, as some Texans saw it— and she stayed out. There followed a wild melee as LBJ, twenty-eight years old and one of the most obscure of the contenders, scoured the district for votes, scrounged the countryside for money, and wrapped himself around with FDR’s coattails. His gargantuan energy, along with one of the biggest war chests Texas had seen for a House race, brought him a convincing win over eight rivals.

In Washington and Texas politics the young congressman showed a flair for combining political savvy, feverish energy, and corporation money. When the Roosevelt White House suddenly needed funds in 1940 to help beleaguered Democratic candidates for Congress, Johnson raised tens of thousands of dollars. Increasingly, as he planned to run for the first Senate seat available, he was drawn toward the world of the Texas rich—into the “endless chains of inter- and intra-city, family and club, formal and informal relationships which characterize the Texas monied establishment,” in Neal Peirce’s words. This world had several dimensions.

Jesse Jones, banker, publisher of the Houston Chronicle, financial backer of the Democratic party, FDR’s head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and Secretary of Commerce, typified the old dominion of agriculture and lumber and banking and real estate. Intertwined with this business dominion was the “old” establishment of oil based on the huge fields of southern Texas—notably Spindletop—and controlled by such big eastern corporations as Standard Oil, Gulf, and Sun. The drilling of the sensational five-billion-barrel East Texas fields in the early 1930s—the “poor man’s pool”—had enriched hundreds of wildcatters who promptly became the nouveaux riches—the très très riches—of Texas. Bitter quarrels often erupted within and among these groups but in crucial ways they stood together: they were Texans, proud and independent; they were almost casual gamblers, whether in oil or in stocks, on crops or on cards; they stood united against both “Wall Street capitalism” and western egalitarian populism; and no business group in the country had a better grasp of the politics of economics and the economics of politics.

The young congressman had an uncanny ability to draw political money from older businessmen, in part because he knew how to defer to them, flatter them, listen to them. And he needed big money when a Senate seat opened up in 1941—again because the incumbent had died. Embarking on a huge statewide campaign requiring a big and costly personal organization, once again running on FDR’s coattails, he raised tens of thousands of dollars from both Texas contractors and Washington New Dealers— only to be ignominiously defeated by Governor “Pappy” (“Pass the Biscuits”) O’Daniel and his hillbilly band that included two of Pappy’s sons, fiddler Patty Boy and banjo-playing Mickey Wickey. When a second Senate seat opened in 1948, Johnson waged another campaign of furious energy and big campaign contributions, but with a difference. This time he distanced himself from the memory of FDR and even from Truman; and this time he won—but with a margin of fewer than 100 votes out of 900,000 cast, leaving him with an imperishable nickname in Texas, “Landslide Lyndon.”

The Senate that Lyndon Johnson entered in January 1949 was already peopled by famous men—the reserved and formidable Richard Russell of Georgia, FDR’s 1938 purge target Walter George, the racist Mississippian James Eastland, the liberal Republican Wayne Morse of Oregon, the Senate president and United States Vice President, Alben Barkley. Johnson’s own “Class of 1948” glittered with younger talent: Estes Kefauver, Huey’s son Russell Long, civil rights leader Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, the dean of the liberal Democrats, Paul Douglas of Illinois. But three years later, as Doris Kearns noted, it was none of the above who was elected Democratic party whip, but rather the little-known newcomer from Texas. Two years later, Johnson was chosen Minority Leader, and two years after that, when the Democrats regained control of the upper chamber, he became the Senate Majority Leader.

How could this “youngster” rise so fast in what looked like a gerontocracy? In part because he deferred to the gerontocrats—men like Russell who stood guard over Senate rules and customs. Once again LBJ showed his capacity to adjust to his environment—and then dominate it. From his old roles of Texas populist and flag waver for FDR and the New Deal he shifted easily into the transactional leadership of a parliamentary coalition broker. The Senate and he seemed made for each other, as he quickly mastered its procedures, nosed out its corridors and cloakrooms of power, calculated the influence of parties, blocs, and individual senators.

The Senate mastered him as well. It softened the sharp edges of his personality, dampened down the fire of his populist ideology, and forced him to operate within its own channels. As Democratic leader, Johnson was perched at the center of a four-way clustering of Senate power. On his farther left were the liberal Democrats, mainly from the North and led by such senators as Humphrey and Douglas. To his immediate left sat the moderate Republicans headed by politicos close to the Eisenhower White House and by East and West Coast Republicans. Just to the right sat a cluster of conservative Democrats, mainly Southerners like Russell and Eastland, entrenched in powerful committees such as Finance and Judiciary. And to the farther right were the congressional Republicans, headed by Everett Dirksen of Illinois and largely responsive to the conservative business interests of the nation’s hinterland. LBJ’s talents lay in keeping his distance from each of these groups even while he traded with all of them.

His talents were put to the test by the harshest challenge the Senate had faced since the 1937 Court fight or even the League of Nations struggle. Johnson’s wheeling and dealing, his coalition making and unmaking, his geeing and hawing, worked reasonably well as long as he was trading with the White House and among the Senate parties over bread-and-butter legislation. He brokered between Eisenhower’s modest proposals for housing, farm, defense, and education and programs opposed or supported by congressional factions. There were limits: Republicans would not retreat on the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act, which LBJ had defended; Democrats fought off major erosion of New Deal and Fair Deal legislation. But these were mainly “quantitative” measures on which the Majority Leader could skillfully cut deals involving the size of appropriations and the extent of regulations.

The storm that gathered during the 1950s was not over such quantifiable matters, however, but over a transcending moral and ideological issue. This was freedom for southern and other Negroes. For many decades major civil rights legislation had been the great “undoable” for the United States Senate. The old, southern-dominated Democracy had lived off racism politically. FDR hated discrimination, whether in the South or the North, but feared to throw an explosive issue into Congress that would shatter his North-South Democratic coalition; as World War II approached he set up a Fair Employment Practices Committee under pressure from militant blacks, but he only weakly defended it against its enemies. Year after year, Truman’s broad civil rights proposals to Congress were killed in committee or on the floor. “Negroes could protest, presidents could recommend, party platforms could endorse, the House of Representatives could act,” James Sundquist noted, “but no civil rights bill could become law without a change in the Senate rule requiring a two-thirds majority to end debate.” And the filibuster rule itself could be protected by a filibuster. In the House the Rules Committee, controlling the traffic flow of bills, was almost equally lethal, and in both chambers southern committee gerontocrats shielded by the seniority rule stood in phalanxes against civil rights spear carriers.

A grim interplay of personality, politics, and place, the civil rights battle by the mid-1950s was so convoluted as both to demand and to defy untangling. The two cardinal issues were black voting rights in the South and desegregation of schools and other public facilities. With notable exceptions northern presidential Democrats favored both a voting rights bill and school desegregation; presidential “waterside” Republicans, including the Eisenhower Administration, supported vote legislation but backed a school bill only to the degree that they feared that northern Democratic appeals to black voters might swing the next election; congressional Democrats would accept a weak voting bill but indignantly opposed a school bill; and congressional Republicans put either or both issues at the bottom of their priority lists. With racial tension mounting in the South, the government of the United States seemed mired in deadlock over civil rights.

Suddenly the third horse in the American troika came galloping to the rescue when the Supreme Court—supposedly the “nonpolitical” branch— in the Brown case on May 17, 1954, held racially segregated public schools in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision burst on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers like a bombshell, but Court-watchers were not so surprised. Roosevelt appointees, including Hugo Black, William O. Douglas, and Felix Frankfurter, still held a majority on the High Court; gifted black and white attorneys for the NAACP and other civil rights organizations had been pressing the courts for redress; and the Supreme Court in 1950 had struck down state laws failing to satisfy blacks’ Fourteenth Amendment rights in higher or professional education. Still, the Brown decision was breathtaking—in its extension of these rights to hundreds of thousands of children in elementary schools and in its frank reversal of the pro-segregation Plessy decision of 1896 and its endorsement by all nine justices, headed by Eisenhower appointee Earl Warren.

But even the Supreme Court, acting decisively in the policy void left by anti-civil rights congressional leadership and presidential nonleadership, could not shake the Senate bastion. How would the justices’ decision be enforced, especially since the Warren Court had left open the implementation formula? Against the gathering civil rights forces North and South the southern Democratic senators fought to defend the right to filibuster— which for them was a fight for the “southern way of life.” Johnson, eternally balancing interests, institutions, and ideologies, struggled to find some common ground. “I knew that if I failed to produce on this one,” he said later, “my leadership would be broken into a hundred pieces.”

The upshot was the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which emerged from the legislative obstacle race as a weak voting rights bill, stripped of its provisions enforcing school desegregation. Liberal Democrats found some consolation in the hope that once southern blacks gained the right to vote with the help of the new measure, they could use their newfound power to gain more goals. Others, including many blacks, contended that Negroes could win freedom and equality only by pressing ahead on all fronts—desegregation, fair employment, housing, welfare, as well as voting—in a manner that allowed these changes to be mutually reinforcing. This strategic issue was never put to the test because the voting measure of 1957 produced very little voting. Two years later fewer than two hundred blacks were registered to vote in Alabama’s Dallas County, only a total of five blacks in three other Alabama counties. For countless blacks and others, “liberal democracy,” American style, did not appear to be working even for the most elementary of rights, the right to vote.

Nor did “liberal democracy” now have the luxury of time. Even as Eisenhower signed the 1957 bill in mid-September, tension was rising over the barring of blacks from Little Rock high schools by order of the governor. In two weeks the President reluctantly sent a thousand federal paratroopers to the Arkansas capital to force integration against the will of the state government and the mob. The blacks there were making school integration, not voting rights, the issue. As the mobilized civil rights forces pursued direct action and as massive resistance and noting by whites broke out elsewhere in the lower South, it was more and more evident that Congress must once again face the issues of voting rights and schools.

A long guerrilla battle broke out in the Capitol contrapuntally to the struggle in the South. Once again the filibuster rule stood firm in the Senate; indeed, this kind of obstruction reached a new high when a moderate civil rights bill ran into a filibuster in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was found to have no cloture rule. With Eisenhower offering little support because, he said, he had “very little faith in the ability of statutory law to change the human heart, or to eliminate prejudice,” the 1957 voting rights bill was somewhat strengthened in 1960 but enforcement of school desegregation was killed.

Johnson was still the Negotiator-in-Chief, bargaining with the White House and helping build coalitions for or against specific sections of the civil rights bill. But now the political environment was changing as the 1960 presidential election neared. And Lyndon Johnson, determined to seek the presidency, confronted a rival who as a senator was no great shakes but was vigorously building a national constituency. This was John F. Kennedy.

The two men had more in common than either might wish to admit. Each had had a nurturing mother and a demanding father who had fired up his ambition and helped satisfy it. Each had represented a poverty-stricken congressional district that he had won after furious battles with a bevy of fellow Democrats. Both had been bored in the House of Representatives. Each was highly ambitious, politically cautious, rhetorically bold. Both had had serious health problems. Navy veterans, they were part of the postwar generation of tough-minded, “pragmatic” politicians. But the differences between them were more profound. JFK had observed poverty; LBJ had lived in it. Kennedy could depend on his father to supply political money; Johnson had to turn to businessmen outside his family. The Massachusetts senator had an inbred cosmopolitan style that the Majority Leader disdained and envied. The biggest contrast, though, lay in their constituencies—Johnson’s in the Senate, in the congressional parties he traded with, and in the South; Kennedy’s in the larger, urban, ethnic states that held the big, balance-of-power chunks of the electoral college.

On civil rights Kennedy had hardly shown a profile in courage. He had favored sending the 1957 measure to that graveyard of civil rights legislation, the Judiciary Committee, to the outrage of black leaders and northern liberals, and to the delight of southern senators including Eastland, who promptly stated his support for Kennedy for President. Later he lined up with the liberals in voting for the desegregation part of a 1960 bill, although—or perhaps because—it had little chance of passing. His civil rights stand, as his loyal aide Theodore Sorensen later lamented, was still “shaped primarily by political expediency instead of basic human principles.”

The shape of “political expediency” had changed by 1960. While Johnson as an established national leader thought he could campaign for the presidency from the Senate, Kennedy knew that he must convert his magazine-cover fame into grass-roots voting support in the key presidential primaries, every one of which posed critical challenges for him. He had to placate ADA liberals turned off by his compromises on McCarthy and civil rights, veteran party leaders like Harry Truman who flatly opposed him, southern conservatives against him for both religious and ideological reasons, Stevenson loyalists who wanted their man to have the opportunity to run against someone besides Ike.

The Kennedy people believed they could deal with such traditional political pressures, but three other “issues” bristled: the candidate’s religion, his youth, and his father. The Kennedy office made intensive studies of the “Catholic element” in voting, put out analyses suggesting the advantages of a Catholic running for office, and were immensely relieved when Protestant West Virginia, stimulated by heavy campaign spending, gave Kennedy a clear win over Humphrey in its primary. Kennedy rebutted the youth issue with talk about a “new generation of leadership.” His father and his father’s money he handled with humor. To a 1958 Gridiron Club dinner, he read a telegram from his “generous daddy”: “Dear Jack—Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary—I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” The remorseless correspondents replied with a song at the next year’s Gridiron to the tune of “All of Me”:

All of us

Why not take all of us

Fabulous

You can’t live without us

My son Jack

Heads the procession

Groomed for succession.…

Brilliantly supported by a small campaign group headed by the versatile Sorensen, amply financed by his father, intensively covered by television that projected his image to millions of new tube watchers, and assisted by Kennedy enthusiasts who traveled hundreds of miles to “help Jack,” Kennedy picked his way adroitly through the political minefields and lined up enough Democratic convention delegates weeks in advance to bring him victory on the first ballot in Los Angeles.

Trounced on the convention floor, Johnson now had to contemplate the humiliation of being passed over for running mate. He wanted to be Vice President, both to position himself as JFK’s successor someday and because he believed that he could convert any job—even Throttlebottom’s— into a power base. Kennedy’s first-ballot victory was followed by a wild day in which the candidate and his brother Robert lost control of the process of picking a running mate—a process that LBJ would have handled with brutal skill. The struggle over the vice-presidential choice was so complex and murky that historians were still differing in their accounts decades later, but this much seemed clear: in the maneuvering before the convention, Kennedy had long and seriously considered LBJ, but the names of Humphrey, Missouri Senator Stuart Symington, Governors G. Mennen Williams of Michigan and Orville Freeman of Minnesota, and others had also been put forward; in a typical politicians’ confrontation, the nominee halfheartedly offered his beaten rival the nomination and LBJ halfheartedly declined, in part because “Mr. Sam” Rayburn opposed acceptance; labor and liberal leaders implored the Kennedy people to reject Johnson; hours of confusion passed as pro- and anti-Johnson people pressured Kennedy, and LBJ’s friends pressured him to run and not to run; Bobby offered to try to persuade LBJ not to accept and Jack wished him good luck; Bobby’s missions ran into an increasingly indignant Johnson and retinue; and JFK suddenly put an end to the whole business by telling Johnson he not only wanted him but would fight for him. That was what Johnson, burning with indignation at “that little shit-ass” Bobby, wanted to hear.

One vice-presidential nomination was far from enough, however, to assuage the various wounds left by the Los Angeles convention. Even before it ended, the party seemed to crack: Russell had quit the convention early because he feared the “evil threat” to “our Southland” of the pro-civil rights party platform, while Eleanor Roosevelt quietly departed out of disappointment that her close friend and ally Adlai Stevenson had neither made much effort for the nomination nor been accorded the support she felt was due him. Harry Truman hadn’t put in an appearance; nine days before the convention opened, he had blasted Kennedy at a televised press conference and condemned the convention as a “prearranged affair.” Protestant spokesmen were hostile; some leading Catholics feared that a Kennedy campaign would simply exacerbate ancient hostilities.

Of all the specific fence-mending he had to do, the most crucial to Kennedy was a reconciliation with Eleanor Roosevelt, the conscience of the party and the channel to alienated Stevensonians and ADA liberals who could have critical influence in California and New York. So skillfully did Kennedy handle a showdown meeting with the former First Lady in Hyde Park—like Napoleon and Alexander’s meeting on their “raft at Tilsit,” he called it—that she warmed to him and soon became one of his most enthusiastic campaigners.

Some of his fences mended, Kennedy plunged into his campaign. Awaiting him was Richard M. Nixon, who had won Ike’s glum support, easily fought off an inept challenge by Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, and been nominated by acclamation.

The battle that followed left glowing images on the nation’s memory: Nixon’s lightning trips to all fifty states, including Hawaii and Alaska, as he had rashly promised—Kennedy’s audacious mission to Texas, where he assured a gathering of the Houston Ministerial Association, chaired by Norman Vincent Peale, that he believed in “an America where the separation of church and stale is absolute”—the first of four televised debates, with Nixon holding his own on substance but losing on the television screen—Kennedy’s compassionate and astute telephone call to Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., after her husband was jailed in Georgia—and the huge crowds, swollen by the debates, and fronted by long lines of “jumpers” bobbing up and down in waves as the candidates passed. Then the long tense election evening, as Kennedy took an early lead, only to watch it slowly erode and leave him with the narrowest of victories.

The Invisible Latins

“To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required—not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.” John F. Kennedy looked out at the sea of faces in the Capitol Plaza reflecting the cold January sun. “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” The new President’s voice was strong and confident.

“To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge— to convert our good words into good deeds—in a new alliance for progress—to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty. But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the prey of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.”

So finely honed were the bracing inaugural words, so masterfully delivered, so euphorically received, that many missed the deep ambivalences and dichotomies interwoven throughout:

Man “holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” Americans still had their old “revolutionary beliefs.” But: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights … to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”

Let every nation know that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Kennedy decried the cost of arms, the “steady spread of the deadly atom” and urged that “both sides begin anew the quest for peace.” But: “We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.”

“Let us never fear to negotiate.” But: “Let us never negotiate out of fear.”

“Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle … against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.” But: “In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.”

The whole inaugural address, like many before and since, was a “celebration of freedom,” in Kennedy’s words—of liberty, the ranks of the free, of revolutionary rights, of a free society, of free men and free governments, of the freedom of humankind. But far more than the other addresses, Kennedy’s reflected the nation’s uncertainty and confusion over the meaning of freedom.

Did Kennedy’s ambivalences reflect, in his own character and ideology, polarities that had originated in his earlier divided self? Or were they merely the familiar hedging of the American politician? Probably both, but the sheer breadth of his inaugural dichotomies suggested more that they were deep-seated. In the end, however, the new President’s words would be tested in action. Within two months of his inaugural Kennedy spoke to the Latin American diplomatic corps in the East Room of the White House in the language of hope:

“I have called on all people of the hemisphere to join in a new Alliance for Progress—Alianza para Progreso—a vast cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools—techo, trabajo y terra, salud y escuela.” He laid out a program for economic development through national planning, regional marketing, commodity stabilization, hemispheric cooperation in education and research. “Let us once again transform the American continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts—a tribute to the power of the creative energies of free men and women—an example to all the world that liberty and progress walk hand in hand.”

Enchanted by this eloquent, dynamic young President, inspired by both his rhetoric and his recommendations, the diplomats in the East Room that day burst into applause. “We have not heard such words since Franklin Roosevelt,” the Venezuelan ambassador remarked to Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger. But mixed with the new hope of the Latin Americans was their collective memory of their earlier relationship with the “colossus of the North.”

It was only a half century since imperial American interventions in Central America and the Caribbean, hardly more than thirty years since Calvin Coolidge had sent troops into Nicaragua to help check the insurrectionist leader Augusto Sandino. To be sure, President Hoover and Secretary of State Stimson had talked a less interventionist line in the early 1930s, and FDR and Hull’s Good Neighbor policy, with its emphasis on the lowering of trade barriers and nonintervention, had come as a powerful breath of fresh air to Latin Americans. Even under FDR, however, Washington remained deeply involved in the internal affairs of nations such as Cuba, and the Good Neighbor idea itself had been more a fine helping of rhetoric about freedom and the equal rights of all the American nations than a vehicle of economic or social reform. The main continuities of Washington’s interventionist policy toward Latin America over the decades had been unpredictability and volatility. For most Americans, Latin America was the great “invisible” land that burst onto the national consciousness only when some crisis—a revolution, a natural catastrophe, a phenomenon like Juan and Evita Perón of Argentina—for a brief time seized the headlines.

The diplomats facing Kennedy in the East Room represented a region with some of the most entrenched poverty on the globe. The Latin American per capita income was not only low—$325 a year—but seemed static. Over two-thirds of the Latins lived in dire want. This figure both reflected and concealed the enormous disparity of income: 2 percent of the people owned three-quarters of all arable land and about one-half of all personal wealth. Twenty-four million Mexicans, out of a population of 35 million, lived in homes without electric lights; 30 million urban Latins lacked city-controlled drinking water; the average Peruvian subsisted on 1,900 calories a day, enough for bare survival.

But even these figures hardly told the story. While the Latins had scored some notable economic achievements, their poor lived in a Gordian knot of poverty, the thongs of which pulled ever tighter in its crushing embrace. Against limited resources the population was expanding faster than any other in the world. Only half of children under eighteen—only a quarter in rural areas—attended school. Half of the whole Latin population was illiterate. Life expectancy ranged from 33 years in Haiti to 39 in Brazil to 57 in Argentina—as against 67 years in the United States. Investigating the human condition behind such figures, an anthropologist found a “culture of poverty” in the very heart of great cities like San Juan and Mexico City—a poverty of “segregation and discrimination, fear, suspicion or apathy” thwarting involvement of the poor in the wider society; a poverty that drained hope, expectation, motivation, morale, opportunity; a “family” poverty comprised of the “absence of childhood” as a long, protected stage in the life cycle, “early initiation into sex, free unions of consensual marriage,” frequent abandonment of wives and children, “a trend toward female- or mother-centered families,” individual feelings of helplessness, dependence, and inferiority. These were the truly mute, invisible Latins; these were the unfree.

The bewildering diversity of Latin American peoples, nationalisms, cultures, and subcultures had produced a variety of American diplomatic and military responses over the decades. After the earlier times of hostility and intervention Washington’s relations with Mexico had come to a happy plateau. Two fine ambassadors, Coolidge’s and Hoover’s Dwight Morrow and FDR’s Josephus Daniels, helped to defuse and finally settle through skillful diplomacy and political compromise the long-simmering issue of Mexican expropriation of the oil properties of United States companies. Mexico, under its own able leadership, appeared to help teach Americans how to live with avowed revolutionaries next door.

The rest of Latin America made up a patchwork of old-style caudillo regimes, such as Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo’s in the Dominican Republic, François Duvalier’s in Haiti, and Somoza’s in Nicaragua; of conservative, more or less democratic regimes, as in Ecuador, Chile, Panama, and Peru; of newly established liberal regimes, as in Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela; and of revolutionary regimes in Bolivia and most notably Cuba. The “postrevolutionary” regimes of Mexico and Uruguay had demonstrated that Latin American nations could pass through upheavals and achieve “politically durable and relatively prosperous regimes” without undue guidance from the “motherland” of American nations born in revolution—the United States of America. Latin Americans had long been familiar with Washington orators who declaimed about glorious revolutions in history and in theory—United States style, of course—and attacked contemporary revolutions in process.

If the United States had given birth to the very model of the successful “democratic” revolution, Cuba was the father of revolutionary failure. The slave revolts that began in the sixteenth century and rose to horrifying proportions in the nineteenth, the revolt of vegueros—planters—against the tobacco monopolists early in the eighteenth century, and the ten-year war against Spanish rule ending in 1878, were put down with slaughter and torture. The rebellion against Spain, during which the Spanish commander ordered that any doctor, schoolteacher, or lawyer captured with the rebels should be instantly shot, took 200,000 lives and left a land seared with hatred. Cubans finally won their independence at the end of the century only to fall under the writ of the North Americans who had helped them gain it.

From the days of Theodore Roosevelt, who wanted to teach the “cheating, mañana lot” to behave properly, Cuba stood as a classic example of United States intervention in Latin America. Washington tolerated and supported corrupt and brutal dictators in Havana as long as American economic and security interests—especially its huge base at Guantánamo—were protected. By the 1950s “American companies controlled 40 percent of the island’s sugar lands, 80 percent of its public utilities, 90 percent of the mines and cattle ranches, and, in combination with Shell, substantially all the oil business.” Although part of the rationale for heavy Yankee investment—equal to one-third of Cuba’s gross national product— was that it would raise the people’s living standards, hundreds of thousands of cane-cutters, tobacco-field laborers, and other peasants lived in the usual poverty. The Cuban labor forces also included 100,000 or more sugar-mill workers, who formed the core of the island nation’s labor movements, as well as several hundred thousand jobless people, some of whom found seasonal work in the fields for a few meager months.

For a time after Fidel Castro and a small army of guerrillas, following initial blundering attacks, through sheer tenacity and fanatical determination drove the malodorous Batista regime out of power, Washington and Havana maintained a semblance of harmony; Castro even visited the United States and conducted virtually a sidewalk campaign tour. Relations hardened when Castro seized American-owned oil refineries and other properties and Congress cut the quota on Cuban sugar. By the time he left office a hesitant Eisenhower, prodded by Vice President Nixon, was organizing a CIA-backed invasion of Cuba by exiles. This stratagem had worked in Guatemala six years before—why not in Cuba?

John Kennedy had once called Fidel Castro “part of the legacy of Bolívar,” part of that “earlier revolution which won its war against Spain but left largely untouched the indigenous feudal order.” By the fall of 1960, however, Castro had turned to the Kremlin for support and Kennedy was locked in a bitter campaign struggle with Nixon, who had proposed to the annual American Legion convention that the “cancer” of Castroism be eliminated through a “quarantine.” The Democratic nominee was not to be outdone. Nixon, who for security reasons could not reveal the “Cuba project,” was enraged when he read a New York Times headline: “Kennedy Asks Aid for Cuban Rebels to Defeat Castro, Urges Support of Exiles and ‘Fighters for Freedom.’” The Vice President used his fourth television debate with Kennedy to call his foe’s proposals “the most dangerously irresponsible recommendations,” all the while knowing that it was more than a White House recommendation—it was White House policy.

It was against this background of escalating, vote-huckstering anti-Castroism that the new President inaugurated his bold Alliance for Progress. He was now imprisoned by his own campaign rhetoric and promises, by the invasion plans already underway, by CIA support for those plans. Faced with a situation calling either for direct military action, as against Mexico in olden times, or for self-restraint and diplomacy, the new President was politically and intellectually able to do neither. Rather he clung to the “middle way” of an invasion by refugees shielded by a deployment of United States air and sea power that must—on this Kennedy insisted— remain invisible. The success of the venture depended finally on the hope, founded on the Guatemalan experience, that once the rebels had landed, support for Castro among the Cuban military and population would collapse. Kennedy’s staff shared a tendency toward group-think that discouraged dissent from this notion.

The invasion that got underway in mid-April 1961 became a world-class example of military misadventure. Almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong: bad communications, faulty intelligence, unexpected reefs, poor coordination of arms, inadequate numbers and equipment. The real failure, however, was not operational but psychological and political. Even if the invaders had landed in force and moved inland, they would have failed. For the effect of the invasion on the Cuban people was just the opposite of Washington’s hopes. Mobilized not merely by the fast-moving, well-prepared Castro but by fierce nationalistic instincts, the “invisible” Cubans emerged to support the dictator’s smashing counterattacks.

Humiliated by failure, heartsore over the hundreds of rebels killed or taken prisoner, Kennedy rose to one of his finest hours in taking personal responsibility for the fiasco. “There’s an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,” he told the press. “I am the responsible officer of the government.” Privately, he was furious at the CIA, the military, and above all himself. “All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts,” he said to Sorensen. “How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?”

Vienna, June 1961. After dazzling Charles de Gaulle and the crowds in Paris with the young President’s vitality and humor and the First Lady’s dark beauty and Oleg Cassini gowns, the presidential couple flew on to Vienna for a much-heralded summit conference. Greeting them warmly, Khrushchev insisted that he wanted to “shake her hand first.” But once the talks began, the mood turned cold and heavy and not even a glittering dinner in the Schönbrunn Palace could dispel it.…

Kennedy’s thrust against Castroism had plunged Latin Americans more deeply into the global cold war. Once upon a time Washington had been able to isolate Latin politics from European rivalries, coldly informing London and Paris and Berlin that the North Americans would deal with their neighbors to the south under the Monroe Doctrine, which was conveniently adapted to Washington’s needs of all seasons. But during the cold war Latin America became part of the great trembling mobile of global politics, and the Bay of Pigs fiasco sent a tremor through the quivering balances.

The Bay of Pigs intersected with another Kremlin sortie over Berlin. Kennedy had hoped that Berlin could be left in its impasse while he dealt with Castro but Khrushchev was not so obliging. In Vienna he presented Kennedy with a demand that if the two Germanys could not agree on a means of reunification in six months, then each should sign a separate peace treaty with the World War II victors. At this point, as a new European crisis loomed, both Moscow and Washington were caught in the spiral of fear. While boasting about his big missile force Khrushchev knew that he was far behind the Americans. Despite his campaign charges of a huge “missile gap,” Kennedy now knew that the United States was far ahead on missiles but he feared that the Soviets were rapidly filling the gap.

The summer tension of 1961 rose to a fever pitch as the Kremlin stuck to its “deadline diplomacy” and Americans glimpsed the possibility of nuclear war. Kennedy and his Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, somberly discussed the nation’s capacity to absorb a Soviet nuclear attack and then launch a devastating strike against the Russians. At the height of the war fever the President gave the most frightening speech Americans had heard from the White House since Pearl Harbor. Seated at a desk surrounded by the panoply of his office, speaking with a cold militancy, he called for a big expansion in armed manpower, a boost in nonnuclear arms, and an emergency civil defense program. A kind of midsummer madness swept the nation as Americans rushed to build bomb shelters and to debate whether it was morally justified to slam the shelter door shut against desperate intruders—or even shoot them down.

“I don’t know when I’ve been happier,” Harry Truman wrote the President, “than when I listened to your great speech.” But Eleanor Roosevelt worried in a newspaper column that civilian defense measures would induce a war psychosis, and later she urged on him a demilitarized Central Europe and a tenacious give-and-take for arms reduction regardless of whatever charges of “appeasement” it might bring. Khrushchev suddenly transformed the whole Berlin issue by allowing the East Germans to stem the flow of desperate refugees to the West. Soon Berlin was split by the Wall.

The spiral of fear mounted in late 1961 and early 1962 as Moscow and Washington spurred the arms race. Then the Kremlin came to a decision that would startle the world, for it amounted to nuclear adventurism. This was to emplace missiles in friendly Cuba. At first it was hard for the Administration to believe that Moscow was deploying missiles capable of bearing nuclear warheads on a vulnerable island some 6,000 miles from Russia. But Khrushchev had his reasons. In the wake of the Bay of Pigs, Cuba offered him a delicious opportunity to protect a friend—and a position of strength in the Caribbean—against further “imperialist” onslaughts. The Chairman, moreover, had to negotiate with his own hardliners, especially in the military. But the Kremlin acted also out of fear bordering on paranoia. If Russia was far behind on intercontinental missiles and could not catch up for years, what better way to close this real missile gap than by deploying Soviet medium-range or intermediate-range ballistic missiles only a few hundred miles from cities and military installations in the southern United States?

The operation must be secret, of course, until the Russians had emplaced enough missiles to scare off or defeat an early United States response. But the sharp photographic eyes of the high-flying U-2S quickly spotted launching sites under construction in Cuba for MRBMs and IRBMs. This time, instead of rushing to action, the President convened a loose assembly of cabinet members, security advisers, and others under the informal leadership of his brother Robert, the Attorney General. Day after day as new intelligence flowed in, members of this “ExCom” analyzed and debated alternative courses of action. While some shifted ground and no firm lines developed, the group split roughly between “hawks” like Dean Acheson and most of the military participants and “doves” such as Stevenson, George Ball, Sorensen, and Robert Kennedy himself. The President occasionally took part, but he listened far more than he talked. More than anyone else, he had to calculate the political element, for Republicans in Congress would leap on another Bay of Pigs, another “surrender.” And the Commander-in-Chief alone would make the final decision. At an off-the-record session with several hundred newspaper editors during the crisis, he quoted the bullfighter’s lament:

Bullfight critics ranked in rows

Crowd the enormous Plaza full;

But only one is there who knows—

And he’s the man who fights the bull.

As the ExCom debated, Soviet freighters capable of bearing missiles were headed toward Cuba, nearing the quarantine line Kennedy had drawn around the island. Time was running out. Some in the group wanted an air strike on Cuba, even an invasion, but a very different resolution was taking shape. Messages were running between Moscow and Washington through formal and informal channels, and each side was taking care to leave fallback positions and “escape hatches” open to the other. It became clear that Khrushchev would agree to pull out his missiles if Kennedy made a hard promise not to invade Cuba and a soft—that is, orally communicated—promise later to pull American missiles out of Turkey. To be sure, the Administration had planned to remove those outdated Jupiter missiles anyway, but this mattered not to Khrushchev. He had a deal he could present to his own hard-liners. The freighters slowed, paused, and turned back.

The nation had waited, poised breathlessly on the brink, while the quiet debate and diplomacy had gone ahead. Now, after days of fear and even terror, people around the globe breathed a huge sigh of relief. The President met a storm of applause that was like balm to the wounds still aching from the Bay of Pigs. It had been a “close-run thing” that depended on an unusual degree of flexibility in both the Kremlin and the White House. Both leaders had had the desire and the authority to face down their hawks. The President learned from the crisis, Robert Kennedy said later, not to “humiliate” Khrushchev “or push him over the brink.” It later became known, indeed, that Kennedy was prepared to offer Moscow an outright exchange of Turkish and Cuban missile withdrawal if Khrushchev had remained adamant.

In the post-crisis euphoria, however, hard facts were ignored. There had been some intelligence lapses as well as triumphs. Early diplomatic opportunities had not been exploited. At one or two points the war hawks, American and Russian, had almost carried the day. Khrushchev’s standing in the Politburo was undermined by his combination of adventurism and withdrawal. In any event, it was clear that his retreat from Cuba resulted far less from diplomatic statesmanship than from his recognition that the Russians were immensely outgunned in intercontinental nuclear arms. This would not long be the case. For the relentless arms race carried on.

The Revolutionary Asians

“To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free,” John Kennedy had proclaimed in his inaugural address, “we pledge our word that one form of colonial control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom—and to remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.” A few words later he called for that “peaceful revolution of hope” which would help “free men and free governments” cast off the chains of poverty.

Within a few months of inauguration, Kennedy was plunged into both an intellectual and a military struggle over the meaning and application of those evocative terms, Freedom and Revolution. In Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev had no doubts about these ideas and their relationship. If Khrushchev sensed in Vienna that the young President had never seriously read “Lenin or any of the Soviet theoretical writers,” which doubtless was the case, Khrushchev could not have known that Kennedy had read few of the Western theorists either. “Kennedy wanted to maintain the status quo in the world,” the Soviet First Secretary would recall, including the “inviolability of borders plus the enforced preservation of a country’s internal social and political system. ” More than ever Khrushchev saw his own opportunity to appeal to the potentially revolutionary masses of the world.

Fidel Castro was quick to advance his own Marxist-Leninist concept of revolution. Washington’s baleful hostility to him after the missile crisis— its continued efforts to bring down his regime, to sabotage electric power plants and other targets, and even to assassinate him—combined with his own increasing ideological militancy, helped to push the Cuban revolutionaries deeper into their embrace with the Soviet Union. But Castro continued to have his differences with the Kremlin, and not least of these was his rejection of sacrosanct Marxist-Leninist doctrine that revolution must grow out of the urban proletariat; Cuba had a paucity of urban proletarians. Régis Debray, a young Frenchman teaching in Havana, wrote, with the help of Castro and others, Revolution in the Revolution?, which turned upside down traditional Leninist dogma that revolutionary mass consciousness aroused by militant party leadership must precede revolutionary action. Military action must come first to produce that consciousness, argued Debray. And Castro’s close friend Ché Guevara prepared to crusade through Africa and Latin America preaching the need for revolutionary guerrilla action. Still, while communism looked monolithic to many in Washington, doctrinal disputes and personal rivalries sharply divided communist parties and leaders the world over.

More than ever Kennedy staked his Latin American hopes on the Alliance for Progress. Conceived in large part as a response to Castroism, guided by meetings of Latin representatives, buttressed by investment money from the developed countries, the Alliance was Kennedy’s kind of revolution. Two years after the euphoric White House kickoff, however, the Alliance was making slow progress in overcoming poverty in Latin America. The effort in Washington suffered in part from the usual bureaucratic delays, competing interests, and inadequate funding, in part from lack of political leadership strong enough to prevent diversion of effort away from the imperatives of the antipoverty struggle and toward the demands of the nation’s corporations and military. But the transcending problem was that Washington was attempting to work through existing Latin governmental structures and political processes, and with capitalist enterprises and assumptions, such as the protection of private property, that were inadequate to the aims of the Alliance.

The Bay of Pigs had been, for this vigorous young President, a bitter lesson in the confines and cunning of history—in the momentum of events, the tangle of conflicting forces, the power of bureaucracies, the volatility of mass opinion. In the end he had settled for the middle way between no invasion and an all-out one—and the middle way had turned out to be perhaps the worst way of all. In the missile crisis he had finally settled on a mid-course between an air strike on Soviet installations and Stevenson’s proposal for yielding Guantánamo as well as Turkish and Italian missile bases in return for missile withdrawal from Cuba. This time the middle course had worked, but largely because the Soviets did not wish to gamble further on war when they still lagged behind the United States in nuclear arms.

From Western traders and missionaries Asian leaders had been hearing for almost two centuries about the republic that had rebelled against its English masters. Even in the 1780s American revolutionary scenes were portrayed on Chinese porcelain and wallpaper. Japanese in Nagasaki heard that “a military official named Washington, and a civil official named Franklin,” had stood up in an assembly and cried, “We must not lose this heaven-given opportunity” to sever relations with the English forever. After the revolution, rulers and subjects lived alike, Nagasaki heard, with similar homes and food; even when officials were clothed with authority and the masses regarded them “with respectful fear,” it was only for a fixed term of years.

Later, despite America’s imperial ventures, the Chinese still seemed to have a special regard for the white people almost halfway across the world. Sun Yat-sen, “father of the Chinese Republic,” noted how Westerners had extolled liberty and had even said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” though he added that “liberty develops as the power of the people develops.” Chiang Kai-shek studied the implications of the French and American revolutions for Chinese nationalism and anticolonialism. The young, poverty-stricken Mao Tse-tung, after reading about the American struggles for independence in a borrowed book, remarked to a friend about the “eight long, bitter years” of the fighting under Washington. During World War II, Mao praised FDR and Henry Wallace as worthy heirs of Jefferson and Lincoln. But the American war of independence was never really his kind of uprising. A revolution was not a dinner party or painting a picture or doing embroidery, he wrote sternly, but “an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Southern and southeastern Asians as well as Chinese could hardly ignore the lustrous example of a developing young nation that had thrown off the shackles of its own mother country. But Americans could ignore them; in a 1942 poll 60 percent of Americans could not locate either China or India on a map. This was after Pearl Harbor, an event that swiveled American eyes westward and would forever alter United States relations with Asian peoples.

Roosevelt and Churchill’s Atlantic Charter of August 1941 had apparently proclaimed the self-determination of all peoples, but Churchill told Parliament that the Charter applied only to those under the Nazi yoke. FDR was in a quandary. Mohandas Gandhi, leading the nationalist forces in India, repeatedly appealed to the President for support, while the Prime Minister remained adamantly opposed to granting India its independence until after the war. As the Japanese advanced through Burma toward India following Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had pressed Churchill for a compromise acceptable to Gandhi and Nehru, and Vice President Wallace spoke publicly of America’s duty to oppose imperialism in all forms. Encouraged by Washington’s stand, Gandhi and Nehru were all the more disappointed and angry when FDR repeatedly backed off from a showdown with Churchill.

“Dear Friend,” Gandhi wrote Roosevelt on July 1, 1942. He told of his and his country’s many connections with the United States, of how he had profited from the writings of Thoreau and Emerson, how he cherished his personal friendships in Britain. Then the thrust to the heart: “I venture to think that the Allied declaration that the Allies are fighting to make the world safe for freedom of the individual and for democracy sounds hollow, so long as India and, for that matter, Africa are exploited by Great Britain, and America has the Negro problem in her own home.” Chiang Kai-shek too urged the President to help “restore to India her complete freedom.”

Despite pressure from Eleanor Roosevelt and Administration officials, the President put first his military partnership with Churchill, and the imprisonment of Gandhi, Nehru, and other nationalist leaders in August 1942 ended hopes for a compromise. Roosevelt blew hot and cold over India throughout the war. Only a few weeks before his death he complained to an adviser that Churchill failed to understand that 1.1 billion “brown people” resented rule by a “handful of whites”—and “1,100,000,000 potential enemies are dangerous.”

The struggles of the billion “brown people” gripped the conscience of American leaders following the war. Indian leaders—most notably Nehru himself—asked why a “revolutionary country” like the United States gave so little help to Indians in their struggle for freedom. The United States, in the eyes of many Asians, was tainted by its merely passive opposition to the efforts of the colonial powers to hang on to their possessions in Asia—especially in India and Indochina.

Onto this uneasy scene in southern Asia in 1952 came the sturdy figure of Eleanor Roosevelt, fresh from her work on the United Nations Human Rights Commission. She had her own special recollections of the Indian struggle—not only of FDR’s deference to Churchill but of a curious telegram of condolence from Gandhi on her husband’s death that included “congratulations” that the President had been “spared humiliating spectacle of being party to peace which threatens to be prelude to war bloodier still if possible.” Eleanor Roosevelt’s journey to the old colonized nations of the Middle East and southern Asia became a kind of triumphal procession. In India she suffered endless entertainments, paid homage to Gandhi at the spot where he had been assassinated, visited famous caves, worked an old spinning wheel in the spirit of the Mahatma, dealt amiably with aroused students, met with as many women and women’s groups as possible, and was upset only when she was denied a ride on an elephant.

By the 1960s Americans had come to know much more about this Asian 1.1 billion—now approaching 2 billion—especially about India, which had a population greater than Latin America and Africa combined. They knew something of the intractable poverty that held village people imprisoned generation after generation, the staggering health problems, the literacy rate that ranged from 15 to 35 percent across the continent, the tens of thousands living their lives out on the streets of Calcutta and Bombay. What the American people did not know fully was the potential for protest and violence among the hundreds of millions whom the colonial powers had made dangerous. Gauging this potential was a task for leadership. As a senator John Kennedy had won attention for his anticolonial speeches. As a congressman he had toured Indochina and India, even interviewing a rather distant Nehru. Now, as President, he viewed India as the “key area” of Asia:

The new Administration, recognizing that India’s first need was stepped-up economic aid, quickly won from Congress a massive increase in funds for Indian development. Even half a billion dollars, spread over a period of years, amounted to only pitifully few dimes for every Indian and could have no more than a marginal influence on the vast subcontinent’s economy. More important were the psychology and politics of the new approach to India. Perceiving that no government is touchier than one that has just achieved independence, the Kennedy White House put far less emphasis on policies that had antagonized New Delhi in the past, such as “buy American” requirements encased in foreign aid provisions. It was now accepted that tax money exacted from Americans, including capitalists, would flow into India’s “public sector”—i.e., socialist enterprises. American politicians who abhorred planning had to accept the Indian determination to fit foreign aid into a series of five-year plans. And Kennedy adroitly recognized India’s need for self-esteem when he sent to New Delhi John Kenneth Galbraith, perhaps the ablest—certainly the drollest—of a string of prestigious envoys assigned to the Indian capital.

Still, Indian policy under Kennedy continued to be heavily influenced by the cold war strategy that under both Truman and Eisenhower had tilted economic aid toward Western Europe, as a counterweight to Soviet power, and hence given aid to developing countries a low priority. While Moscow had its doubts about the Indian brand of socialism, the Kremlin had been only too happy during the 1950s to exploit Washington’s heavy-handedness toward New Delhi. The Kennedy Administration indeed inherited a set of Indian attitudes that would have given any cold warrior pause. Public-opinion polls in India during the late 1950s, even accepting a fairly large margin of error, indicated that Russia enjoyed more prestige and popularity than the United States.

How could this be? It seemed incredible to American pundits and politicians that the Soviet Union, which they viewed as a boorish, aggressive nation, could have made such inroads among the Indian masses. Certainly the reason in part lay in Soviet anticolonialism and its acceptance of India’s revolution. The situation changed abruptly in the fall of 1962, however, when Chinese and Indian troops fought obscure battles over disputed frontier areas. When Khrushchev informed New Delhi that Moscow would not intercede in behalf of India, Nehru turned to Kennedy for assistance. Putting aside his long irritation over New Delhi’s nonalignment policies and its preachings against the cold war, Kennedy responded quickly, graciously, and—within several constraints—practically, with light armaments.

Close working relationships between Nehru and Galbraith, and Galbraith’s successor, Chester Bowles, took some of the kinks out of the grim interplay of ideology and strategy. And a different kind of sojourner in India leavened the two nations’ relationship. During a visit to Washington late in 1961 Nehru had appeared cool and aloof even during informal talks in the White House, perhaps because of disappointment over Kennedy’s first year of militant foreign policy-making. The President later told Schlesinger that it was the “worst head-of-state visit” he had had. But the one time Nehru appeared his old self, the President noted, was in animated talk with Jacqueline Kennedy. When the Indian Prime Minister invited the First Lady to India, she and the President had accepted with alacrity.

The trip was a total success. The Prime Minister was most gracious, the First Lady most captivating—and she went on to Pakistan to maintain Washington’s evenhandedness toward the rival nations. Her journey to southern Asia was the capsheaf of one of the notable foreign policy successes of the Kennedy Administration—winning the friendship of the Indian people and most of its leaders. And Jacqueline Kennedy got to ride an elephant.

John Kennedy could get along with Nehru and other Indian leaders, for they spoke the same language. This was true literally—Nehru and others spoke the King’s English better than most Americans. It was true intellectually too, for the President could talk Indian revolutionary language. He could understand something of the nature and needs of India’s revolution—really a struggle for independence against the English not wholly unlike the American experience almost two centuries earlier, save for the nonviolent tactics of the insurrection and the bloody civil strife that erupted between Moslem and Hindu in the wake of partition. In Southeast Asia, however, the Kennedy White House had to deal with revolutionary ideas and leaders of a very different sort.

For centuries Southeast Asia had been the tinderbox of Asia. After countless wars, civil and uncivil, and bloodily suppressed uprisings, this land of great mountain ranges and long valleys, of thin upland soil and lush deltas, of ancient hatreds and polyglot cultures, had come in the main under harsh colonial rule. By the 1930s and 1940s intellectuals, peasants, and workers were listening to Marxist revolutionary voices as well as to revolutionaries American style. Perhaps more than others in Asia, Indo-chinese peoples took heart from the Japanese blows against white prestige, even as they suffered under Japanese occupation. Freedom—early liberation from Tokyo’s iron hand, final liberation from colonial rule—was the rallying cry for Burmese, Siamese, Indonesians, the peoples of Indochina. But what kind of freedom? A rising leader in Indochina, Ho Chi Minh, later asserted his agreement with the American Declaration of Independence and its evocation of equality as well as liberty, by opening his own declaration of independence with the words of Jefferson.

Probably no Western leader had a more abiding concern for the future of Indochina than Franklin Roosevelt: Impelled in part by Wilsonian idealism and even more by a bitter scorn for French colonial oppression and cruelties, especially in Vietnam, FDR made clear to his wartime partners— Churchill, Stalin, and Chiang—that he would veto any return of French troops to Indochina after the war. The danger of setting off Churchill’s explosive temper, however, was so contrary to Roosevelt’s feline approach that he preferred to put his case to Anthony Eden, who liked to describe back in London FDR’s “cheerful recklessness” about such matters. Feckless Roosevelt was not; but he subordinated long-run political planning to immediate military needs, just as he subordinated Asian strategy to European. Roosevelt until his death stuck to his principled opposition to French reoccupation but his month-to-month dealings with allies on the matter were ambiguous enough to enable Truman to accept the French return to Indochina without appearing to challenge his predecessor’s anti-colonialism.

From his House and Senate vantage points John Kennedy watched while the Truman While House and the Acheson State Department pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into the French effort allegedly to defend the principles of freedom in Indochina; while the Eisenhower White House in 1954 stood twice at the edge of war in northern Vietnam as Dulles, Nixon, and military leaders urged American air strikes to rescue the beleaguered French troops in Dien Bien Phu; while the Geneva Accords of the same year, which the United States did not sign but had pledged halfheartedly to support, provided for armistices in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia and partitioned Vietnam at the 17th parallel until a nationwide election could be held in 1956 under the supervision of an international commission; while Washington backed the Ngo Dinh Diem regime in the south despite its increasing corruption and incompetence; while Diem put off promised reforms and, with quiet American acquiescence, the unification election, lost support in the country, and tried to cope with communist National Liberation Front insurgents—known pejoratively as Vietcong—in the south.

And now John Kennedy as President confronted this tangle of complexities. He was convinced that he could certainly do better in Indochina than had the dispirited Eisenhower Administration, but the new President’s problem lay not only in the quagmire that was forming in Vietnam, or in the readiness of American war hawks and McCarthyites to pounce on any sign of Administration willingness to “lose Indochina” as the Truman Administration had “lost China.” Part of the problem lay in Kennedy’s head—in the major articulate premises he brought into the White House, in the deep division within him over fundamental strategy, in his “pragmatic solutions” of taking small, “practical” steps in order to avoid or postpone a decisive intellectual and strategic commitment.

On Capitol Hill, Kennedy had echoed the conventional wisdom: that the United States must help thwart “the onrushing tide of Communism from engulfing all Asia,” that Vietnam was a “proving ground for democracy in Asia” and a test of “American responsibility and determination,” that—the domino theory—“our security may be lost piece by piece, country by country.” And he dared not run the risk—at least before the election of 1964—of appearing soft on the Indochina issue. Still resonating to the Bay of Pigs failure and feeling vulnerable on a compromise settlement in Laos he had agreed to, he told Galbraith, “There are limits to the number of defeats I can defend in one twelve-month period.”

On the other hand, Kennedy was a seasoned and sophisticated politician who loved to prick banalities and challenge shibboleths. Believing more in the “confusion theory” of history than the “conspiracy theory,” he did not conjure up terrifying images of the Soviet Politburo sitting at the center of a web of world power and masterminding grand strategies for the military conquest of the West; indeed, tension between Moscow and Peking in these very years was refuting the theory of monistic communist power. As for the threat from Republican and other war hawks, he knew that at times presidential politicians must take risks in order to pursue responsible policies. And after all, who had won fame for a book called Profiles in Courage?

Kennedy’s response to his own intellectual dilemma was reflected in the diversity of advisers he consulted. On Vietnam policy, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary McNamara, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, Walt W. Rostow, and most of the military leaders were generally hawkish, at least initially; George Ball of the State Department, Chester Bowles, Averell Harriman, and Galbraith were decidedly dovish. Some of Kennedy’s advisers shared his view that the United States must recognize and even aid the revolutionary forces that were rising out of the peasant villages of Asia; others shared his view that the Indochinese revolutions were not good revolutions of the American or even the French variety, but malevolent revolutions of Marxist inspiration and Leninist strategy.

The result was a tendency on Kennedy’s part to take the middle ground between strategies and advisers on the day-to-day problems that inexorably surfaced. Thus between those who argued for a heavy military commitment in Vietnam and those for a minimal one, he initially sent to Vietnam 400 soldiers from the Special Forces and 100 additional military advisers; and at the same time authorized secret warfare against North Vietnam by South Vietnamese trained and directed by the CIA and the Special Forces. He evaded a negotiated settlement but also spoke of the danger of escalation. He devoutly wished to win the allegiance of the peasants of Indochina but his Special Forces used tactics of defoliation, flesh-burning napalm, and forced penning of farmers in “strategic hamlets” that gained countless recruits for the communist adversary. He wanted Diem toppled but feared to take overt steps; his signal to Vietnamese generals that the United States would not “thwart a change of government” spurred a coup, but he was sickened by Diem’s brutal assassination. Each of the middle-of-the-road steps in fact pulled the Administration deeper into the Vietnam morass— but without the debate and decision, both comprehensive and focused, that at the least might have prepared the American people for the perils ahead.

As he entered his third summer in the White House, John Kennedy’s progress in defining the dimensions and prospects of popular aspirations for freedom in the Third World was lagging far behind the benign rhetoric of 1960 and 1961. He and most of his advisers had assumed that peoples like the Cubans and the Vietnamese aspired at least as strongly to Western-style liberal constitutional procedures and Bill of Rights protections as they did to national independence and to revolutionary concepts of social and political equality. Chester Bowles, a key drafter of Roosevelt’s “Economic Bill of Rights” during the war and ambassador to India under Truman, had as Under Secretary of Stale in the Kennedy Administration a firsthand view of the White House “realists” who had made error after error in dealing with Third World nations. Exiled back to New Delhi in 1963 as a fuzzy-minded idealist, Bowles went off with the dismal conclusion that the Kennedy Administration had fallen far short of his hopes. He had found “almost no intellectual leadership that has seriously challenged the conventional wisdom or ventured beyond the limited and now inadequate concepts of the New Deal.”

Even sterner challenges to Kennedy’s and Johnson’s intellectual leadership lay ahead, at the hands of some of their fellow Americans.

PART III

Liberation Struggles

CHAPTER 8

Striding Toward Freedom

DURING THE KINDLING TIMES of the 196os hitherto little-known persons— blacks, women, college students, southern preachers—took moral and political leadership of the nation in boldly claiming their civil rights. For a few brief shining years, neighborhood people challenged authority, aroused the consciousness of followers as to their true needs, and spurred the conscience of their fellow Americans. Day after day, for weeks at a time, the national media—especially television and the picture magazines— brought into tens of millions of homes images of helmeted troops with upraised clubs, snarling police dogs lunging at protesters, black persons kneeling in prayer for their persecutors as well as for themselves. The black protesters—and the student and women activists who would follow—for a decade would stir the conscience of the nation.

This assumption of leadership by the poor and the persecuted stood in sharp contrast to the nation’s policy making during previous decades. Franklin Roosevelt had come into office with little mandate from the people for programs except to “do something, anything” about the depression. New Deal policies were responses far less to local or regional initiatives than to proposals of Washington politicians and intellectuals who in turn drew from a bank of ideas built by liberal and left leaders of the progressive and Wilson eras. Truman’s initiatives such as the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan were responses to urgent appeals from abroad and to war experience, in an atmosphere of rising cold war hostility, and they led and shaped, rather than followed, public opinion. The Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision in 1954 was a result more of the justices’ collective conscience and practical wisdom than of nascent popular pressure; indeed, that decision in Brown would doubtless have failed of passage if it had been offered to the American electorate in the form of a national referendum.

A renowned political economist, Joseph Schumpeter, wrote in the early 1940s that the people do not rule in democracies. The democratic method, he said, was “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.” People did not autonomously take initiatives, organize themselves, and direct policy. This was a provoking contradiction to the great American faith in Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Schumpeter’s observation was in fact only a half-truth. Historians could point to countless examples of spontaneous leadership by community or group activists in labor conflicts, populist upheavals, revolutionary situations. On a national scale Gandhi was showing, even as Schumpeter wrote, that a leader’s deep involvement with his followers could give them, in Erik Erikson’s words, a sense of participation that would raise them to power.

But that was India. Had Americans become so manipulated from above, so enervated politically—had the national and state and even city governments become so distant and the presidency so powerful and all-encompassing—that people in their neighborhoods and communities could no longer take their futures into their own hands? Had the vaunted old frontier spirit, the populist rebelliousness, the famous community “get up and go” disappeared from American life? If collective action was necessary, how broad—reaching out to which groups and movements and regions and parties and national leaderships—must that collective action be? Or would heroic individual action be enough to get results?

The protesters of the 1960s responded with actions as well as words.

Onward, Christian Soldiers

Dusk had fallen on December 1, 1955, when Rosa Parks, a tailor’s assistant, finished her long day’s work in a large department store in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama and the first capital of the Confederacy. While heading for the bus stop across Court Square, which had once been a center of slave auctions, she observed the dangling Christmas lights and a bright banner reading “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men.” After paying her bus fare she settled down in a row between the “whites only” section and the rear seats, according to the custom that blacks could sit in the middle section if the back was filled.

When a white man boarded the bus, the driver ordered Rosa Parks and three other black passengers to the rear so that the man could sit. The three other blacks stood up; Parks did not budge. Then the threats, the summoning of the police, the arrest, the quick conviction, incarceration. Through it all Rosa Parks felt little fear. She had had enough.

“The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed,” she said later. “I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” Besides, her feet hurt.

The time had come … Rosa Parks’s was a heroic act of defiance, an individual act of leadership. But it was not wholly spontaneous, nor did she act alone. Long active in the civil rights effort, she had taken part in an integration workshop in Tennessee at the Highlander Folk School, an important training center for southern community activists and labor organizers. There Parks “found out for the first time in my adult life that this could be a unified society.” There she had gained strength “to persevere in my work for freedom.” Later she had served for years as a leader in the Montgomery and Alabama NAACP. Her bus arrest was by no means her first brush with authority; indeed, a decade earlier this same driver had ejected her for refusing to enter through the back door.

Rosa Parks’s support group quickly mobilized. E. D. Nixon, long a militant leader of the local NAACP and the regional Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, rushed to the jail to bail her out. Nixon had been waiting for just such a test case to challenge the constitutionality of the bus segregation law. Three Montgomery women had been arrested for similar “crimes” in the past year, but the city, in order to avoid just such a challenge, had not pursued the charge. With Rosa Parks the city blundered, and from Nixon’s point of view, she was the ideal victim—no one commanded more respect in the black community.

Word of Rosa Parks’s arrest sped through black Montgomery. The Women’s Political Council, a civil rights group of black professional women, had been talking for months about a bus boycott. This was the time. Soon members were handing out leaflets and conferring with Nixon, who agreed to lead the effort. When he arrived home that evening he took a sheet of paper and drew a rough sketch of the city, measuring distances with a slide rule. He found that people could walk to work from anywhere in Montgomery if they wanted to. He said to his wife, “We can beat this thing.”

Nixon realized, though, that the boycott could not succeed without the united support of the black ministers, the most influential black leaders in Montgomery as elsewhere. He called them one by one, starting with Ralph Abernathy, the passionate young pastor of the Baptist church Parks attended, a man with an earthy sense of humor and a “gift of laughing people into positive action.” Abernathy was enthusiastic. Third on the list was twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr., minister of the Dexter Street Baptist Church, hardly more than a stone’s throw from the gleaming white state office buildings surrounding the Capitol.

King had grown up in Atlanta, Georgia, a hundred fifty miles to the northeast, the son of a prosperous minister of one of the largest Baptist congregations in the nation. “Daddy” King had long been indignant over segregation; he had led efforts against discrimination as early as the 1930s, including a voting rights march to city hall. Though he ruled his home “like a fierce Old Testament patriarch” and often whipped his kids, Martin Jr. called him “a real father to me.” Martin, the second child and first son, showed extraordinary gifts. He seemed to excel at everything—school-work, sports (especially wrestling), dancing, debate, oratory. From age six he soloed hymns at church services and conventions, and by his early teens his voice had matured into a rich, deep baritone that awed his listeners in song or speech.

Pricked by the thorns of segregation but steadied by his mother’s counsel to believe he was “somebody,” young King resolved to improve the lives of black people. At first he rebelled against Daddy King’s demand that he follow in his ministerial footsteps, but he changed his mind and served as assistant pastor in his father’s church. Later he graduated from Atlanta’s Morehouse College, attended Crozer Seminary in Pennsylvania, and earned his doctorate at Boston University. During these years King read Niebuhr, whose paradoxes fascinated him; Marx, whose materialism alienated him; and especially Walter Rauschenbusch, whose belief in a Christian commonwealth on earth, loving, spiritual, sharing, stirred his imagination. The young theologian searched for ways in which these ideas and those of the great Western philosophers, from Plato and Aristotle to Mill and Locke, could be converted to effective methods of social change. Hired to take over the Montgomery church, he moved there with his wife, Coretta Scott King, a gifted singer who had given up a musical career to marry him.

In the eyes of Montgomery blacks, King was no zealot. His church was a respectable one, with a largely middle-class congregation, and though he had gained a reputation for being a social activist, he had just turned down a chance to head the local NAACP. But King’s brothers and sisters throughout Montgomery were already leading the way. Nixon had set up a meeting of black ministers and community leaders at King’s church. Women’s Political Council activists and ministers then spread word of the bus boycott to Montgomery’s 50,000 blacks over the weekend, especially at church services. Monday morning thousands were driven to work in black cabs with specially cut rates, or rode mules or horses, or walked. Barely a dozen blacks rode buses. The Montgomery Improvement Association was formed to coordinate efforts, but it was left to a mass meeting to decide whether the boycott would continue. And King, who had, to his surprise and despite his reluctance, been drafted to head the MIA, would address it.

So fast were events moving that King had only twenty minutes to prepare what he believed would be the most decisive speech of his life—one that must not only fire up his audience but blend militance with moderation. Almost paralyzed by feelings of anxiety and inadequacy, he prayed; he had time only to sketch a mental outline and tore off to the church. He found it overflowing. As the meeting opened the powerful refrains of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” swelled through the church and outside, where three or four thousand people stood patiently in the cold night listening to the meeting through loudspeakers. After prayers and scripture readings, King walked to the pulpit.

He gazed out at the audience, at the people crowded onto the floor and the balcony, at the television cameras. Speaking without notes, he told, simply but passionately, the story of Rosa Parks and others who had been mistreated on the buses. He exhorted the boycotters to use persuasion, not coercion, and ended: “If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’ This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.” His electrifying words brought waves of applause, which rose again when Rosa Parks was presented. Abernathy read the boycott demands, to more wild cheering. This was, King wrote later, the first great meeting of the freedom movement.

The city responded by forbidding black taxis to lower their fares. Undaunted, the boycott organizers set up an efficient car-pool system modeled on a similar Baton Rouge action two years before. A small army of ministers, businesspeople, teachers, laborers, and others, driving cars and dusty pickups and shiny new church-owned station wagons, collected passengers at forty-eight dispatch stations to carry them to work. Hymns wafted out of car windows as the “rolling churches” crisscrossed the city with what arch-segregationists at a White Citizens’ Council meeting glumly admitted was “military precision.” Some blacks preferred to walk. Mother Pollard vowed to King that she would walk until it was over.

“But aren’t your feet tired?” King asked her.

“Yes,” she said, “my feet is tired, but my soul is rested.”

As mass meetings were rotated among churches, ministers took turns giving rousing talks to maintain militance. But it was a carefully controlled militance. King had been fascinated by nonviolent doctrines ever since reading Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience at Morehouse and then studying Gandhi’s Autobiography at Crozer, but it was all intellectual until Rosa Parks made it come alive for him. Tutored also by the pacific reflections of Rauschenbusch and the advice in person of Bayard Rustin and others, King now got a quick education in the practice of satyagraha, or truth force. With his fellow ministers King toured the church meetings, turning them into schools of “Christianity in action,” nonviolent resistance, and direct-action techniques.

Victory came, slow and hard. City officials, fighting every inch of the way, sought to divide the boycott leaders from one another, concocted a bogus settlement, and prosecuted King and hundreds of others. Moments arose during the year-long boycott when black commitment to tactical nonviolence was sorely tested by bombings of homes and churches. But the boycott was still going strong when on a climactic day in November 1956 the city won an injunction to shut down the car pools, the boycott’s circulatory system, while the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a prior ruling of the federal court in Montgomery that the city and state bus laws were unconstitutional.

Four days before Christmas 8,000 souls voted to end the boycott, the largest and longest protest by black people in the nation’s history to that date. Soon the desegregated buses were moving smoothly despite sporadic acts of violence. Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged from the ordeal the most prominent black leader since Booker T. Washington, a man of quite different ideological cast. The freedom movement appeared to have taken off.

But where to? How far? In what way? The Montgomery boycott did not trigger a wave of protest actions throughout the South. In that same year of 1955, when Rosa Parks would not budge, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago black visiting relatives in Mississippi, was dragged from their home for having “whistled” at a white woman. He was beaten, his testicles cut off, and his body dumped into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton-gin fan chained around his neck. North and South, people recoiled with horror, but the atrocity had little more impact; the confessed killers were of course acquitted. In 1957 Eisenhower’s dispatch of paratroopers to Little Rock produced sensational headlines, but it was followed by resolutions in state legislatures pitting state sovereignty against federal court decisions, and by school absenteeism and occasional rioting—and precious little school integration in most southern states.

Black leaders were neither daunted nor dumbfounded by the frustration of the civil rights movement. But now northern observers were at last seeing more clearly what blacks were up against—a system of discrimination and segregation entrenched in an array of mutually reinforcing ideological, social, political, and legal barriers.

There still was, of course—there always had been—the “Other South”: the South of racial tolerance and Christian brotherhood. Noted newspapermen embodied this heritage: Harry S. Ashmore of the Arkansas Gazette, Hodding Carter of the Delta Democrat-Times in Mississippi, Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Constitution, Buford Boone of the Tuscaloosa News. Harry Golden, publisher of the Carolina Israelite, won chuckles even from his enemies when he described himself as a member of three minorities—“I’m a Jew, a Yankee, and a radical”—and when he proposed the Golden Vertical Negro Plan, which would integrate the races in the schools by providing desks without seats, in the same way that blacks and whites shopped standing up side by side in city drugstores and supermarkets. But these were lonely voices. The notion of black inferiority was built into the minds of most of even the better-educated Southerners. Writing on the Other South of the nineteenth century, Carl Degler noted that with the coming of the twentieth “the great period of Southern dissent on a widespread and organized basis came to an end.” When Buford Boone attacked white violence in a talk to whites in western Alabama in 1957, from the audience came shouts of “Kill him!” and “Hang him!”

The white dogma of Negro inferiority took form in the southern mind as a mishmash of stereotypes and shibboleths: “Mongrelization”—white men must protect the purity of blue-eyed, golden-haired southern girls— Negro blood had destroyed Rome—the “curse of Ham” in Genesis defined the black race—blacks were superior only in sports and entertainment— the “good colored” were quiet and law-abiding—Negroes preferred their own segregated schools. Some of these shibboleths combined with anti-Semitism; thus activist Negroes were mere pawns of the Jews. And as the fear of communism swept the country during the 1950s, southern demagogues linked civil rights leaders to Moscow.

White children in the South picked up these stereotypes in their homes or churches or in play with other kids. Some of their most insidious notions were reinforced by grammar and high school texts. These abounded with tales of the happy relationships between masters and slaves, of slaves who after Emancipation remained with their masters because they knew who their friends were. Slavery, the children read, was the earliest form of Social Security. The Klan was a law-enforcement agency. There were the inevitable portraits of blacks as happy dancers and singers, with their “bright rows of white teeth,” of the lazy black, the carefree childlike black. But in these schoolbooks recent-day blacks and their history remained misty and shrouded. Typically there was no mention of Brown, of black leaders, or of the civil rights struggle.

An array of southern organizations reflected and relayed these ideas. The most active and conspicuous, with a large membership of “respectable” whites, were the Citizens’ Councils that erupted across the South in the wake of Brown. First membership cardholder and Confederacy-wide head of the Association of Citizens’ Councils of America was Robert “Tut” Patterson, a onetime football player for Ole Miss. Patterson drafted a long-range platform for the Councils’ official newspaper, advocating the “recognition of racial differences as fact,” the migration of blacks and whites seeking integration to states sanctioning it, laws ensuring the “future racial integrity” of black and white communities, “strict enforcement of state voter qualification laws,” separate public schools for the black and white races. Other groups ranged from prestigious organizations for the protection of states’ rights and grass-roots independence to disreputable “white brotherhoods” and the like, and the abominable Klan.

These groups were part and parcel of a political system that built ideas, interests, institutions, and leaders into a fortress of racism and inequality. A tragic paradox lay across the South. Ordinarily southern state governments were politically so unrepresentative, and organizationally so slack, that progressive action to meet human needs—even if only white needs— was weak and faltering. Governors’ powers were limited; legislatures were dominated by reactionary rural cliques; the one-party system of Democrats inflated the politics of personality and demagoguery and thwarted a rationally competitive politics of intelligent policy choices.

By the end of the 1940s the most astute analyst of southern politics, the Texan v. O. Key, Jr., could conclude that politics was the South’s greatest problem. “The South’s heritage from crises of the past,” Key wrote, “its problems of adjustment of racial relations on a scale unparalleled in any western nation, its poverty associated with an agrarian economy which in places is almost feudal in character, the long habituation of many of its people to nonparticipation in political life”—all these put the South’s political system under an enormous burden. Those who loved the South, he concluded, “are left with the cold, hard fact that the South as a whole has developed no system or practice of political organization and leadership” able to carry that burden.

Once Brown and other events challenged southern racism, however, southern leaders sprang into united action to obstruct progress and protect while privilege, drowsy legislatures churned out legislation, governors rushed to the school doors, registrars redoubled their vigilance against black invasion of the polls. White Citizens’ Councils, “employing the powerful weapons of economic reprisal, political pressure, psychological and emotional terror, and social ostracism,” coordinated the efforts of hitherto slack state officials. Within four years of Brown, state legislatures passed 196 segregation laws—measures for placement or assignment of pupils, grants for private education, repeal of compulsory school attendance, even provisions for the possible abolition of public schools. The country, said Harry Ashmore, had not seen such a mass of restrictive legislation since the days of the Know-Nothings.

Such was the suddenly restocked and rearmed fortress that civil rights leaders confronted in the late 1950s. Their weapons seemed puny, measured by ordinary criteria of political warfare. Southern blacks typically could not vote, could not run for office, lacked extra cash for politics, often could not even protest. But they had their own secret weapon of enormous potential power—their sense of outrage welling up from years of oppression, their moral fervor rising out of their belief in America’s promise of liberty and equality for all. And they had their political and moral arm— their churches.

Through every twist and turn of the southern civil rights movement during the late 1950s and 1960s, the black church—Baptist churches mainly, but also Methodist—would be its driving force and institutional base, at once spiritual, moral, cultural, political, organizational. Nat Turner was only one of the Baptist preachers who had led slave revolts, and black churches North and South played vital roles in the abolitionist movement. After Reconstruction, however, the combative spirit of many southern churches leaked away as they accommodated to Jim Crow; many black ministers gained influence and prestige as brokers between white elites and black folk. Still, as E. Franklin Frazier wrote, with the “elimination of Negroes from the political life of the American community,” the Negro church became the only arena in which blacks could “assert themselves” and in which the “thirst for power could be satisfied.”

The old marks of the resistance to slavery were still evident as the black church grew stronger: charismatic leaders insulated from white society; a large, tightly organized congregation; a communications network; an independent financial base; relatively safe meeting places for planning tactics and generating commitment; and most critically, the “common church culture,” grounded in a rich heritage of empowering prayers and spirituals that could be directly channeled to political goals. Ever since slavery the male preacher had been the accepted community leader, closely attuned to the needs and aspirations of his black followers. Oratorical mesmerists like King had ready opportunity to reshape the cultural content of black religion into a weapon of protest by reinterpreting biblical stories or portraying Moses and Jesus as revolutionaries. The dynamic relationship between the charismatic clergy and the common church culture fashioned a mighty engine of grass-roots social power.

Who would direct this power? This question was largely settled in 1957, when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took form, in Aldon Morris’s words, “to unite community leaders by bringing them directly into leadership positions while simultaneously organizing the black masses.” Indeed, the mass base of the church was “built into” the SCLC structure. The SCLC nurtured extraordinary second-cadre leaders, both in its Atlanta headquarters and in the affiliates—Fred Shuttlesworth, Hosea Williams, James Revel, Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy. The focus of authority and the center of attention was young King, who showed a “rare talent for attracting and using the skills and ideas of brilliant aides and administrators”—he was compared to FDR on this score—and provided a degree of tough organizational power.

SCLC moved into the political vacuum after the Montgomery boycott, but as it solidified itself organizationally and financially, it floundered in charting a strategy for the budding movement. It mounted a southern-wide voter registration campaign but with little success. The momentum of the freedom movement slowed to a crawl.

Angry and frustrated, black activists passionately debated new tactics and strategies. With SCLC divided over ways and means, other black organizations challenged the movement leadership. In 1942 James Farmer and others had founded the Congress of Racial Equality, which had pioneered the use of nonviolent direct action to integrate Chicago restaurants. Five years later CORE had joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation in a freedom ride through the upper South. But by 1960 CORE too was frustrated and uncertain. Then a handful of college students and a lone black woman took leadership.

Late Monday afternoon on February 1, 1960, four well-dressed young men, first-year students at the mainly black North Carolina A & T College in Greensboro, bought some school supplies at Woolworth’s, then sat down and ordered coffee and doughnuts. “I’m sorry,” the waitress said, “we don’t serve you here.” “Why not?” the students asked. The waitress called the manager, who tried to reason with them, while a cop paced back and forth swinging his club but uncertain what to do. The students held their seats until the store, now crowded with onlookers, closed for the day. The move had been carefully planned as a team effort. Though they were much influenced by Gandhi, a protester said later, what had precipitated the action was the “courage each of us instilled within each other.” Growing numbers of students joined them at the lunch counter every day that week; soon virtually all of the area’s college students, as well as students from Greensboro’s black high school and hundreds of others, were sitting in, picketing, or boycotting segregated eating places.

By wire service and student grapevine, news of the sudden protest flashed across North Carolina and the rest of the nation. It was “like a fever.” The next week students staged lunch-counter sit-ins in Winston-Salem, Durham, and other communities. By February’s end protests had erupted in over thirty cities in seven states and by April had swept through the entire South. Again and again young men and women stayed resolute and nonviolent when ketchup and other food were flung at them, lighted cigarettes were jabbed into them, white toughs set on them with little police interference. As the actions grew larger and better organized and moved deeper into the South, white violence increased along with black arrests. Would this movement peter out? Black leaders again debated strategy.

One woman had her own answer. When black activist Ella Baker first heard about the sit-ins she called her contacts at southern colleges. “What are you all going to do?” she asked in her deep resonant voice. “It is time to move.” Then in her mid-fifties, Baker had acquired a grass-roots wisdom in her three decades of organizing. She remembered hearing, as a young child in a small North Carolina town, her ninety-year-old grandmother tell stories about slave revolts. The grandmother, flogged for refusing to marry the man chosen by the owner, had instead married a rebellious slave preacher. Valedictorian of her class at Raleigh’s Shaw University, Baker moved to Harlem just before the depression. During the 1930s she traveled the country setting up black consumer co-ops, then began a long association with the NAACP, organizing chapters through the South. She had an extraordinary ability to give people, especially young people, a deeper understanding of social change.

But Ella Baker was a woman, and even though she had become executive director of SCLC, she had never felt accepted by King and his lieutenants. They did not take seriously her bold ideas for improving SCLC and its voting rights campaign. Growing more and more critical of its centralized, charismatic leadership, she resigned in the summer of 1960.

Baker saw that the new student movement would not last without a structure to coordinate local groups. Borrowing funds from SCLC, she organized a southern-wide conference of student activists from over fifty colleges and high schools at Shaw University during Easter weekend. King spoke to two hundred fervent activists, but Baker fought an effort by SCLC to capture the students as its youth wing. Like most of the students, she believed they needed an autonomous organization “with the right to direct their own affairs and even make their own mistakes”; and she hoped they would be more militant in their nonviolence than SCLC. The young activists thoroughly agreed. After setting up a loosely structured Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, with delegates from every southern state, they committed themselves to nonviolence as the “foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our belief, and the manner of our action.”

And so SNCC—“Snick,” as people called it—was born. Inspired by Ella Baker, SNCC came to embody a brand of leadership that would clash with the leadership model of SCLC. Students tended to agree with her view that the centrality of one or a few charismatic leaders able to attract big crowds, big media, and big money was dangerous, for the charismatic leader got to the point of believing “that he is the movement.” They liked her idea of “group-centered leadership”—the idea that the movement needed people willing and able to develop leadership among other people and not operate as leaders above the crowd. They believed with her that black people in the South would have to rely on themselves and not on outside leaders. Above all, they agreed that SNCC must, in its organization and methods, prefigure the values of the redemptive society they sought to build, and that since they all shared both a hostility to authority and the risk of death, “we are all leaders.” This seeming anti-leadership ethos was actually an affirmation of an alternative kind of leadership—decentralized, participatory, comradely.

But still the fortress of racism stood. By the end of 1960 hundreds of eating places had been opened to all, while tens of thousands of lunch counters, schools, terminals, drinking fountains, toilets, buses, lodging places remained barred to blacks. Increasingly, leaders in SCLC if not SNCC evaluated the advantages and dangers of turning to the federal government for help.

Turning to the white man’s government out of desperation was nothing new for southern blacks. In the 1860s the government fought a war first for the Union and then, increasingly, to abolish slavery, but war and reconstruction ended with blacks merely in a new form of servitude. The national Republican party, with its Lincoln tradition, and later the New Deal, with its social welfare concerns, handed out various favors to blacks, but it was the coming of a war fought for democracy and freedom and against Nazi racism that brought blacks such tangible benefits as jobs and welfare programs. Later, neither Truman Democrats nor Eisenhower Republicans appeared willing or able to deliver on their parties’ commitments to the men and women “freed” almost a century earlier.

By the 1960s “turning to the feds” raised in sharpest form the central political and even philosophical question facing blacks: to what extent should they rely on the white majority in the nation as a whole to respond to black needs and aspirations? Should they risk once again being forgotten, sold out, double-crossed? To the contention that Theodore Roosevelt’s Square Deal, FDR’s New Deal, and Truman’s Fair Deal gave economic help or at least a measure of social and psychic support to blacks, came the response that that help was at best incidental to helping needy whites and at worst “mere crumbs.” But the argument remained that action by blacks alone, though vitally necessary, was tragically inadequate, given the power of the southern white fortress. No one made this point with such overwhelming intellectual authority, philosophical imagination, and analytical skill as a Swedish scholar who had so immersed himself in the American racial dilemma as to become a citizen in thought if not in law. His name was Gunnar Myrdal.

In his 1,000-page study, An American Dilemma, sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation and published in 1942, Myrdal drew a portrait of black-white relationships in America in all their rich and evil complexity and explored the paradoxes that made up the dilemma: the continuing power of the American ideals of liberty and equality even as they existed side by side with gross racism and injustice and structures of inequality; the tragedy as well as the opportunity of the white majority—mostly “good people,” wanting to be “rational and just,” pleading to their consciences that they meant well even when things went wrong. Equally arresting—and even more relevant in 1962, when Myrdal brought out a twentieth anniversary edition—was his argument, powerfully supported by both historical data and sociological theory, that blacks must use all possible weapons in their effort to conquer the fortress of racism, and that these weapons most decidedly should include the moral passion, the credal ideals, the institutional machinery, and the collective leadership available among the American people as a whole. The civil rights movement must, in short, fight not only in the streets and at the lunch counters but in Washington and the state capitols.

For southern black leaders, turning to Washington looked more promising as the long Eisenhower Administration ground to an end in January 1961. They had been pleased by John Kennedy’s call to Coretta King after her husband’s jailing, by the nominee’s acceptance of the strong party platform shaped by liberal Democrats, by the campaigner’s fine promises about civil rights. But they were disappointed by JFK’s selection of Johnson as running mate, and even more by his early presidential actions and inactions. As a student of revolution, King was appalled by the Bay of Pigs. It reflected, he thought, a failure by Kennedy and the nation to “understand the meaning of the revolution taking place in the world,” which resulted in the loss of any “real moral voice to speak to the conscience of humanity.” When King met with the President for the first time in the White House, in spring 1961, his moralizing tone put JFK off—moral sentiment generally tended to make Kennedy uncomfortable—but King, for his part, was even more put off by the President’s plan to delay legislative action on civil rights.

For the acid test of Kennedy’s leadership, as black leaders saw it, was his willingness to push, lever, bargain—move in some way, any way—a strong civil rights bill through Congress. But for Kennedy, southern power in Congress was a racist command post. With their chairmanships of key congressional committees, their mastery of the fine art of parliamentary delay, their formidable weapon-in-reserve of the Senate filibuster, the Southerners held a barricade not only against civil rights measures but against his whole legislative program. He argued, as Presidents had before him, that his economic and social measures—minimum-wage boosts, housing and education programs, and the like—would benefit blacks even more than whites. The President, moreover, had an alternative strategy. He insisted to King that the people he had put in charge of civil rights policy— notably his brother Robert as Attorney General—and the executive actions he could take in certain spheres against discrimination enabled him to strengthen civil rights with simple strokes of the pen. And blacks had long heard this kind of talk too.

If this first White House meeting between Kennedy and King brought something of a standoff, it also reflected in both of them the kinds of moral dilemmas Myrdal had described. King, an old negotiator himself, could hardly ignore the President’s need to conciliate Congress. Even “Daddy” King had been a compromiser in his own way; the son could remember his father’s saying, after the call to Coretta, that he was switching from Nixon to Kennedy despite JFK’s Catholicism: “But I’ll take a Catholic or the Devil himself if he’ll wipe the tears from my daughter-in-law’s eyes.” And Kennedy had to respect King’s position. The President was caught at this point, Arthur Schlesinger wrote later, in a “terrible ambivalence about civil rights.” He was certain that his executive strategy was the only possible one, but he recognized the injustice of the delay—and liberal Republicans were only too happy to remind him of this publicly. Still, with the southern fortress intact, he was determined to hold off on sending a major civil rights program to the Hill.

So once more blacks were being told: “Wait.”

Marching as to War

Some would not wait. Early in May 1961 thirteen activists, about half of them white, boarded two buses in Washington, D.C., and headed south. As the Supreme Court had just outlawed segregated bus terminals, James Farmer and other CORE leaders now hoped that “putting the movement on wheels,” and refusing to bail out of jail, would rivet the nation’s attention and force Washington to carry out the law. The thirteen bus riders planned to traverse every Deep South state and end in New Orleans. They eluded violence until Rock Hill, South Carolina, where seminary student and SNCC organizer John Lewis, along with a white former navy commander now turned pacifist, Albert Bigelow, were set upon by white toughs as they entered the waiting rooms.

The doughty thirteen bused on through Georgia and across the border into Alabama. There, in Anniston, a roaring mob with iron bars attacked one of the Greyhound buses, smashed windows and slashed tires, and forced it to a stop outside of town. A fire bomb was thrown into the bus, which erupted in a blazing inferno. Gasping and choking, the protesters barely escaped before the bus exploded. When the second bus pulled into Anniston an hour later, whites charged in, beat up the freedom riders, and made blacks sit apart from whites as the bus drove on to Birmingham.

There a bigger mob awaited the riders. “As we entered the white waiting room and approached the lunch counter,” veteran CORE activist Jim Peck related, he and a black youth “were grabbed bodily and pushed toward the alleyway.” The whites attacked with fists and pipes. When Peck regained consciousness, blood was flowing down his face. “I tried to stop the flow with a handkerchief but it soon became soaked.” “Everybody who got off the bus was clubbed, kicked or beaten,” wrote an FBI informant in the Klan. “When people looked up, I couldn’t see their faces for blood.” He observed several FBI men making movies of the beatings. No Klansman was arrested.

Across the South, blacks were watching transfixed. From Nashville SNCC students made their way toward Birmingham despite fears of death that they did not hide from one another. Arrested at the Birmingham bus terminal, held for a day in “protective custody” and then “deported” a hundred miles to the Tennessee border, they made their way back, only to be bloodied by the mob.

The Kennedy brothers followed these happenings with dismay. Violence was a dire threat to their strategy of compromise and delay. Preparing at this juncture for his meeting with Khrushchev, the President said abruptly to an aide about the riders, “Tell them to call it off! Stop them!” Said the aide, “I don’t think anybody’s going to stop them right now.” He was right.

Birmingham was more than a bloodletting; it posed a crisis of strategy for both the Kennedy Administration and the civil rights movement. In Washington the Attorney General, coping with the crisis on an hour-to-hour basis, urged Alabama governor John Patterson to give the riders safe passage across the state, helped arrange bus transportation to Montgomery for the beleaguered activists, conferred with black leaders, and after repeated rebuffs from Patterson and others, dispatched five hundred marshals under Byron White’s command to the Alabama capital. The Kennedy effort to avoid bloodshed was clearly not working. But neither was Martin Luther King’s, as he watched civil rights activists encounter the kind of violence he abhorred. Still, when a mass meeting was quickly called at Ralph Abernathy’s church in Montgomery, King flew in to speak in support of the freedom riders.

Even a Baptist church was no sanctuary. As King conferred in the church basement with Farmer, Abernathy, and others, a mob gathered outside. King and Robert Kennedy talked by phone: King wanted the Attorney General to protect the church and the riders; Kennedy urged King to stop the freedom rides to allow a cooling-off period. When King relayed this message to the group, Farmer said, “Please tell the Attorney General that we have been cooling off for 350 years.” Upstairs at the mass meeting people emboldened themselves with spirited singing while rocks smashed through the stained-glass windows, showering people in the pews with glass. The mob appeared about to break down the doors when U.S. marshals dispersed them with tear gas.

Early next morning, after nightlong negotiations among Robert Kennedy, the local National Guard general, and black leaders, the beleaguered churchgoers were driven home in army trucks. A few days later two busloads of freedom riders, escorted by National Guardsmen and highway patrolmen, drove to Jackson, Mississippi. People in Jackson gaped as National Guardsmen led the protesters into the bus station and local police first opened doors for them, then arrested them. The riders served almost two months in grim state pens, where defiant singing of freedom songs helped pull them through. During the summer hundreds of SNCC activists descended on the Jackson bus station and promptly joined their brothers and sisters in jail. They later agreed that prison had served as their training ground, steeling their commitment to a necessary but unpredictable struggle.

Even as the mob’s stones smashed through the windows of Abernathy’s church in Montgomery, conflict of a different sort had divided some of the black leaders conferring in the church basement. King was acting less as a leader than as a mediator who dealt on the phone with Robert Kennedy and other authorities. Farmer and Abernathy and an embattled student leader, Diane Nash, put steady pressure on King against compromise or cooling off. Later, when the young riders left for Jackson and King refused to accompany them because he was on probation, a young protester said, “We’re all on probation. That doesn’t stop us. We’re in a war.” But King had to deal with the Kennedys. The night that Abernathy and the other freedom riders arrived in Jackson and were promptly arrested, King telephoned the Attorney General. Kennedy wanted to get the protesters out of jail; King said they would stay in.

“It’s a matter of conscience and morality,” the young pastor told the young Attorney General over the phone. “They must use their lives and their bodies to right a wrong.”

“Their staying in jail,” Kennedy replied, would not have “the slightest effect” on him.

“Perhaps it would help if students came down here by the hundreds,” King said, “by the hundreds of thousands.”

Kennedy bristled. “Do as you wish,” he said, “but don’t make statements that sound like a threat. That’s not the way to deal with us.”

There was an awkward pause. Then King tried again.

“It’s difficult to understand the position of oppressed people. Ours is a way out—creative, moral and nonviolent. It is not tied to black supremacy or Communism but to the plight of the oppressed. It can save the soul of America. You must understand that we’ve made no gains without pressure and I hope that pressure will always be moral, legal and peaceful.”

“But the problem won’t be settled in Jackson, Mississippi,” Kennedy said, “but by strong federal action.”

He was hopeful, King said, “but I am different than my father. I feel the need of being free now!”

If the people in jail didn’t want to stay, Kennedy said, “we can get them out.”

“They’ll stay.”

The dispute among black leaders about strategy carried over into the next great phase of the movement, in Albany, the hub of rural southwestern Georgia. Once again taking the lead, SNCC organizers moved into the city in the fall of 1961, forged a coalition of local college students and older residents, and launched waves of nonviolent protests to integrate the bus station and other public places. Soon hundreds of blacks were languishing in jail, sometimes dozens in cells designed for six. When the campaign sagged, local leaders—over the objections of some SNCC leaders who wished to keep this a local people’s movement—implored King to “just speak for us one night.” King had not planned to become involved in Albany, but he went; once there he had not planned to stay, but his arrival and speeches incited a huge and emotional response, a march downtown headed by King, and his arrest along with that of many others. Both his incarceration and his subsequent bail-out sparked fervent demonstrations.

Spiritually the “Albany Movement” was a triumph, as an unprecedented expression of black cultural power. It was the “singing movement,” as protesters of all ages poured out their souls in freedom songs melded with old slave spirituals. Singing was the language of protest—especially for the illiterate—the vital tool to build solidarity, sustain morale, instill courage, and deepen commitment. “We Shall Overcome,” led by an Albany State student activist, Bernice Reagon, became the movement’s anthem, sung at the end of every big meeting—all standing, crossing arms and holding hands, gently swaying back and forth, singing so powerfully that, SNCC’s Charles Sherrod remembered, “nobody knew what kept the top of the church on its four walls.”

If the final test for blacks was political impact, however, Albany was a disaster. The city’s astute police chief, Laurie Pritchett, systematically and “nonviolently” herded protesters into city and nearby county jails, determined to avoid incidents that could cause an explosion of national outrage. King, in and out of jail, was caught between compromisers in the movement, who accepted poor deals with the city, and militants, who deemed King too conciliatory, too passive, but also too interfering in their local efforts. At one point, enraged by the kicking of a pregnant woman while she was taking food to protesters in a jail thirty-five miles from the city, Albany blacks went on a rampage, flinging bottles and stones at the Albany police. King, grieving over this violation of nonviolence, canceled a scheduled march and, in the spirit of Gandhi, declared a day of penance. But “Pritchett’s jails,” wrote historian Carl Brauer, “had proven to be stronger than the endurance of Albany’s black people.”

It was becoming dramatically clear that progress in civil rights depended less on the first-cadre white political leadership in Washington, important though that was, than on the second-cadre black leadership in Atlanta and Montgomery, and even more on the third-cadre leadership of students, older black women, and white protesters from the North. Then, in the fall of 1962, a single black student showed that one man could make a crucial difference.

Inspired by JFK’s inaugural address, James Meredith the next day had applied for admission to the whites-only University of Mississippi at Oxford. “Nobody handpicked me,” he said later; he felt a “Divine Responsibility” to break white supremacy, starting with Ole Miss. He would not evade the issue through a “sneak registration” in Jackson. Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi was equally adamant. He himself would go to jail, he said at one point, before he would let “that boy,” backed by the “Communist” NAACP, get into Ole Miss. After Barnett’s endless stalling in the face of a federal circuit court’s order to the university to admit, Justice Hugo Black handed down an enforcing order from the Supreme Court, while Barnett roared defiance and white hatred mounted in Oxford.

The episodes that followed burned into the nation’s memory: the President dispatching federal marshals to the Oxford area—rednecks and Citizens’ Council militants advancing into the area by the truckload—the President’s telephone appeal to Barnett to carry out the court orders—the governor’s public defiance even while he privately discussed deals with the Kennedys—the President federalizing the Mississippi National Guard— the marshals moving onto the campus, five hundred strong—the gathering crowd becoming increasingly hostile, while Meredith waited in a dormitory—the mob surging into the line of marshals behind a barrage of rocks and bottles and, soon, bullets, while the marshals tried to protect themselves by firing canisters of tear gas—the beleaguered marshals’ request that the Army be sent and then the agonizingly slow arrival of the troops— the two bystanders killed, the scores of marshals wounded, the hundreds of rioters taken into custody—finally, the registration of the indomitable Meredith at daybreak, on a campus reeking of smoke and hatred.

During the ten days leading to this night of violence, Robert Kennedy had been in repeated telephone contact with Barnett. Each had done his share of feinting, bluffing, dealing. They agreed on a “sneak registration” (which Barnett shortly repudiated); Kennedy for a time pulled back a federal convoy, to avert violence and save the governor from political “embarrassment.” He had also instructed the marshals in their remarkable self-restraint. The Kennedys operated amid intense pressures, ranging from Third World reactions to those of southern Democrats on the Hill, while Barnett had more leeway. Both sides wished above all to avoid violence; both got it. The Oxford crisis shocked the Kennedys. With all the good communications and give-and-take, how could it end in bloodshed? “We lacked,” an aide said, “a sense of Southern history”—a sense of the power of rooted ideology and historic extremism. At Oxford, Arthur Schlesinger wrote later, the Kennedys began to understand “how profoundly the republic had been trapped by its history.” The Kennedys were trapped too by their own history, above all by the notion that the give-and-take of brokerage politics would work amid the polarized politics of reaction and revolution. Hence it was not surprising that, when Robert Kennedy and his associates conducted a review of their handling of the situation, they appeared mainly concerned about their operational failures, as though they could outmaneuver history through tactical methods rather than through a transformation of their own moral attitudes and political strategy.

Black leaders had even more reason than the White House to reassess the lessons of Ole Miss and the earlier struggles. For them registering one man at the university was only a start; they viewed the Kennedy’s efforts as, at worst, manipulation of blacks as pawns, mere tokenism at best. Even moderates like King felt depressed after Oxford. The Kennedy Administration was better on civil rights than its predecessors, he granted, but it was helping to constrict a movement that should be “breaking out into the open plains of progress.” A “sweeping revolutionary force,” he said, was being “pressed into a narrow tunnel.”

But even if only a tunnel, a tunnel to where? Black leaders disagreed not only over means—nonviolent direct action appealing to the liberal conscience against more conventional pressure on the federal government— but also over goals. Should across-the-board civil rights policies be the top priority, or was it better to concentrate on voting rights as the crucial first step to all other rights? A conflict simmered inside SNCC between advocates of more civil disobedience against desegregation and those who held that racism would not be overcome until blacks had political power, which meant vote power. The direct-actionists suspected that the voting registration strategy was merely a White House device to enlarge the black constituency for the next election.

King and the SCLC leadership, after a two-day strategy review, decided to put desegregation first. Direct action in department stores and lunch counters, they calculated, could bring concrete results and at the same time focus intensified pressure on the White House. For their next target they chose Birmingham.

Birmingham. For blacks, this city, the industrial center of the South, was the American Johannesburg, the most segregated metropolis in the country, the self-styled “magic city” that was really the “tragic city.” The white power structure consisted of three mutually reinforcing elements: the business and industrial elites who ran the Birmingham economy; the political elites who maintained the racial status quo, ranging from Governor George C. Wallace in Montgomery to the “magic city’s” Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor; and the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups that abounded in the city and its outskirts. To challenge this structure SCLC had in Birmingham one of its strongest affiliates, headed by one of its most militant leaders, Fred Shuttlesworth. SCLC’s strategy was to throw its resources into mass demonstrations and store boycotts, with the hope of splitting the business elite from the political leaders. SCLC saw the campaign as a drama, progressing act by act until it reached the crisis, followed by the denouement when white power would be forced to yield.

By March 1963, SCLC people were moving into the streets. After a few skirmishes Connor won a state court injunction barring King and his companions from leading more protests. He would violate the order, King asserted at a spirited mass meeting, even though the movement had run out of funds and he was needed to raise bail money. On Good Friday the jeans-clad King and Abernathy and fifty others marched downtown in a glare of publicity. When the two walked up to the burly Connor and knelt in prayer, police grabbed them by the back of their shirts, threw them into paddy wagons, then seized the others. King was held incommunicado in a dark cell with no mattress or blanket until, at Coretta King’s request, John Kennedy interceded and conditions improved.

Soon the prisoner was busy scribbling on scraps of paper and in the margins of a newspaper. He was responding to a letter in that newspaper by white Alabama clergy condemning his tactics and timing. In biting sentences King laid down his creed: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.… We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. … I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.… If our white brothers dismiss as ‘rabble-rousers’ and ‘outside agitators’ those of us who employ nonviolent direct action and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies—a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.” This became the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the most cogent and moving justification of civil disobedience since Thoreau’s essay.

Marching to Birmingham’s city hall, wave after wave of men and women were mauled by police dogs, hurled against walls and pavements by fire hoses that shot out water with cannonlike force, jammed into jails that soon were overflowing. But when King and Abernathy were released, the crusade began to flag. As a last resort to revive media attention, black leaders dispatched battalions of children—some as young as six—who marched with songs and shouts of “We want freedom,” endured dogs and fire hoses, and rode off in school buses to jail cheering and singing. With the passing days the police became rougher, as young blacks on the sidelines hurled the usual street missiles.

Black activists fought the battle of the media along with the battle in the streets. They had long experienced not only the conservative bias of many southern newspapers but also the tendency of the southern media to play down or even ignore demonstrations taking place in front of their own offices. “We don’t want to fan the flames,” an editor explained. But the activists needed to break through middle-class white apathy. Thus it was all the more crucial to arouse the national media, which reached not only a mass audience but to some degree brought the news of southern conflict into southern homes.

Just as SCLC leaders hoped, Bull Connor’s police dogs and fire hoses galvanized the nation’s conscience, including the leaders’ in Washington. Fearing a violent uprising, the White House sent in mediators. This interposition, combined with efforts of local white moderates to negotiate a compromise, touched off a raging dispute among the black leadership. When King agreed to a temporary halt in the protests, Shuttlesworth, who had been hospitalized with a severe fire-hose injury, rounded on the pastor. He shouted that President Kennedy “doesn’t live down here, and I live down here.… Tell him King can’t call it off.”

King pleaded for unity. “I’ll be damned if you’ll have it like this,” Shuttlesworth cried. “You’re mister big, but you’re going to be mister S-H-I-T.” Then he walked out.

Yet both the blacks’ militance and their moderation were working. The business leaders, threatened by the paralyzing boycott and damning publicity, agreed to desegregation demands, though city officials remained intransigent. The vaunted white power structure was not so shatterproof after all. Still, the blacks’ victory was a mixed one, with continuing divisions among their leadership, recriminations from George Wallace and others of the white old guard, a Ku Klux Klan rally in a local park, the bombing of the home of King’s brother, and more rioting. Bull Connor had clearly lost, however, as the electrifying drama of Birmingham, conveyed by extraordinary television coverage, projected his snarling, biting police dogs to the nation and the world.

Birmingham projected into the White House. The President told a group of civil rights liberals that a newspaper picture that morning of a police dog attacking a black woman had made him “sick.” John Kennedy was going through his own crisis of conscience during the spring of 1963. At the start of the year he had decided once again not to seek major civil rights legislation, for the usual reasons—it would not pass, it would alienate southern Democratic leaders, it would hurt the rest of his program. He had begun to move from this position by the end of February, when he submitted proposals to strengthen desegregation programs and to buttress voting rights, and told Congress flatly that racial discrimination was not only economically costly: “Above all, it is wrong.” Black leaders were disappointed by the slimness of the program, however, and even more by the President’s failure to push even these proposals. He himself believed the Administration was “sincere,” King said, but he floated what he called the “cynical view” that it wanted the votes of both sides and was “paralyzed by the conflicting needs of each.” The Administration did indeed seemed paralyzed on civil rights legislation.

But events—and those who made them—were in the saddle. The SCLC’s “street leaders” and their jailings by Bull Connor brought tempers North and South to a fever heat. In New York, Robert Kennedy met with a group of blacks gathered by the novelist James Baldwin, including the singers Lena Home and Harry Belafonte, the brilliant social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, and Jerome Smith, a freedom rider who held a CORE record for beatings and jailings. Smith drew Kennedy’s attention at the start by saying he was “nauseated” at being in the same room with him, that he was not sure how long he would stay nonviolent, that he would “Never! Never! Never!” fight for his country. The artists joined in with their own castigations. The Attorney General vainly tried to turn the subject to Clark’s facts and figures, but “none of us wanted to hear figures and percentages and all that stuff’ in the light of Birmingham, Lena Home said.

“It was all emotion, hysteria—they stood up and orated—they cursed— some of them wept and left the room,” Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger despairingly. In three hours of confrontation neither side believed it had communicated with the other. And yet the blacks in their outrage had. Kennedy “resented the experience,” Schlesinger wrote later, “but it pierced him all the same. His tormentors made no sense; but in a way they made all sense.”

The tormentors of the centrists, the activists on both sides, were still in the saddle. Armed with a federal district court ruling, young blacks planned to renew their effort to register at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Alabama governor Wallace, having sworn at his inaugural that he would “draw the line in the dust” and stand and fight for “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” and having resolved that he would never again be “out-nigguhed” following an earlier electoral defeat, prepared to defy the feds publicly while dealing with them privately. John and Robert Kennedy, still haunted by Meredith and Oxford, were ready to let Wallace have his day in the sun if he would then let the blacks register. So after further posturing and fire-breathing, Wallace positioned himself for the best television shots at the registration building door and read his proclamation denouncing the feds, while Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach confronted him. Then both retired; the blacks proceeded to their dormitories and later quietly registered. No one blocked the door.

The day was June 11, 1963. That evening, after anxious hours, the President addressed the nation on radio and television. The nation faced a moral crisis, he said.

“The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the Nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed.…

“The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.…

“We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes … ?”

Eight days later the President asked Congress for measures to ban the segregation of public facilities, give the Attorney General authority to initiate proceedings against the segregation of schools, expand educational and training programs, grant a permanent statutory basis for his Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. While Kennedy renewed the voting rights recommendations he had urged in February, the heart of the June 1963 proposals lay in their antisegregation provisions. Still divided themselves over whether desegregation or voting rights was the better strategy, black leaders were disappointed that the President did not ask for more—but grimly determined that he would at least get what he asked.

As the engines of delay and deadlock were wheeled into action on the Hill, the Council on United Civil Rights Leadership, a coalition of the “Big Six”—the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young of the Urban League, Martin Luther King, James Farmer of CORE, SNCC executive secretary James Forman (rotating with SNCC’s chair, John Lewis), and Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women—debated how to put pressure on Congress. At an earlier leadership meeting, it was recalled, the revered labor leader A. Philip Randolph had proposed that the Big Six organize a massive march on Washington; after all, Randolph’s mere threat to invade the capital back in 1941 had pushed FDR into banning discrimination in war industries. The leaders seized on a “march for jobs and freedom” that would unify all factions of the movement.

They conferred with the President, who was cool to the idea, fearing that it would give members of Congress an easy way out by charging intimidation. It was, he suggested, ill-timed.

“It may seem ill-timed,” King said. “Frankly, I have never engaged in any direct action movement which did not seem ill-timed.” The leaders resolved to go ahead.

August 28, 1963, the Mall, Washington, D.C. A quarter of a million people, black and white together, gathered in the summer heat at the Washington Monument and then surged forth to the Lincoln Memorial. They had come on buses and trains, many from the Deep South. Large contingents represented white religious faiths and, despite lack of backing by the AFL-CIO, many labor unions. Haunting freedom songs—“We Shall Overcome” sung by Joan Baez, “Oh, Freedom!” by Odetta—blended with speeches by the civil rights leadership. SNCC’s John Lewis pierced the uplifting mood by denouncing the inadequacy of conventional liberalism and Kennedy’s legislative program to complete “the unfinished revolution of 1776.”

Around midafternoon Martin Luther King stood beneath the brooding face of Abraham Lincoln. Inspired by the sea of upturned black and white faces, he left his carefully crafted text and in rippling cadences and rich colors, he painted his vibrant dream of racial justice. Repeatedly invoking his phrase, “I have a dream,” \ responding to the people in rhythm with him, he implored that freedom ring from the hilltops of New Hampshire, the mountains of New York and Pennsylvania, and even more, from Georgia’s Stone Mountain. “Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. From every mountain top, let freedom ring.

“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and from every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!’”

A euphoric group of blacks, save for Coretta King, who to her distress was left to repair to her hotel room, met with the President following the rally. Having first opposed the march and then cooperated with it—to the point, some militants charged, of cooptation—Kennedy now shared in the moment of relief and triumph. He was “bubbling over with the success of the event,” Wilkins recalled. But out on the Mall some blacks remained skeptical and even cynical. Listening to King, young activist Anne Moody had told herself that back in Mississippi they had never had time to sleep, much less dream. An angry black man had shouted: “Fuck that dream, Martin. Now, goddamit, NOW!”

It was a luminous moment in a season of death and despair. The very evening of Kennedy’s June television address, NAACP leader Medgar Evers had been shot down as he returned to his home in Mississippi; later the President consoled the Evers family in the White House. By the end of the summer nearly 14,000 persons had been arrested in seventy-five cities in the South alone. Two weeks after the March, on a Sunday morning, a dynamite bomb exploded in Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a center of the spring crusade, killing four black girls as they were donning their choir robes.

During some of the tense days of school and university integration a few Americans North and South had dreamt their own special dream—that the President of the United States would walk hand in hand with two small black children toward a schoolhouse door, or that John F. Kennedy rather than a subordinate federal official would stand up to a southern governor at a university registration place. Even if the Secret Service had approved this risky act, JFK would never have favored such a melodramatic gesture. But in the increasingly polarized atmosphere of fall 1963 he was willing to venture into politically hostile land. This was Texas, some of whose cities harbored not only extreme racists but fanatical rightists, anti-Castro Cubans, Puerto Rican nationalists, black militants, violent leftists. Dallas, a center of Texas politics and finance, was also a center of hatred. There Lyndon B. Johnson himself had been beset by a hostile crowd during the 1960 campaign; there Adlai Stevenson had been spat upon earlier this very fall. Stevenson had been shown handbills screaming WANTED FOR TREASON under a photograph of Kennedy.

The President would journey to Texas not to confront Southerners over civil rights but to seek common ground. So in San Antonio he would visit the new Aero-Space Medical Health Center and greet crowds of Mexican-Americans. In Houston he would talk to Latin American citizens about the Alliance for Progress. In Fort Worth he would discuss his defense program, which not coincidentally had brought huge contracts to General Dynamics and other corporations located in Texas. In Dallas at the Trade Mart he intended to describe the Administration’s pro-business policies to Texas business leaders. In all these places he would seek to recognize his congressional and other supporters, placate rival factions in the Texas Democracy, raise money for his own reelection campaign. Told by a southern friend that he was about to enter a hornet’s nest, Kennedy said drily, “Well, that’ll add interest.”

And so San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, in lovely weather before exuberant crowds. Then Dallas, the cavalcade, the open presidential limousine, the sharp turn left where the Texas School Book Depository overlooked Dealey Plaza, the unerring bullets …

The searing, the exalting events of the twentieth century had left millions of Americans with memories of just where they had been, what they had been doing, when they heard the news—of Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris, of Roosevelt’s bank holiday, of Pearl Harbor, of Hiroshima or the war’s end. But nothing so riveted the memory as the horrifying news from Dallas. (This author was teaching a class in American government in a basement room of the First Congregational Church of Williamstown, Massachusetts, when a student came to the door with an early report of Kennedy’s wounding; the class continued in a half-daze, then broke up in shocked incredulity when someone burst in with the wrenching second report.) The earlier unforgettable events had been understandable, they had made some sense. Kennedy’s death seemed inexplicable, senseless. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said to an interviewer: “You know the French author Camus—he said the world was absurd. A Christian couldn’t think that, but the utter senselessness, the meaninglessness … We all of us know down here that politics is a tough game. And I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.… Mary McGrory said to me that we’ll never laugh again. And I said, ‘Heavens. We’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.’” Searching for meaning, people looked for a conspiracy, villains, motives.

Investigations, official findings on the assassination, did not satisfy most Americans, nor did the passage of time put the event into a comfortable perspective. But John Kennedy, a fatalist who had lost a brother and a sister in aircraft tragedies, might have seen Dallas only as the ultimate proof of his favorite adage: “Life is unfair.” So was death.

John Kennedy had planned on almost three thousand days in office; he was given a third of that. Lincoln and McKinley had enjoyed at least full first terms and the satisfaction of reelections. It was the brutal cutting off of a young leader of a young administration that appalled people. After earlier mishaps, he had been coming into the fullness not only of his presidential power but of personal fulfillment. He had told a friend some months before his presidential campaign that while some people had their liberalism “made” by their late twenties, “I didn’t. I was caught in cross currents and eddies. It was only later that I got into the stream of things.”

Still caught in these crosscurrents, the President for a year or two seemed to be four persons: a rhetorical radical delivering the ringing speeches Theodore Sorensen and others prepared for him; the policy liberal carefully husbanding his power and weighing the balance of interests and attitudes; the fiscal conservative, always intent, like FDR, on balancing the budget and, like FDR, always failing; and the institutional conservative who accepted the constraints around him and planned on vitalizing the torpid governmental system by jolts of New Frontier electricity. These four Kennedys could not coexist for long and they did not; toward the end the eloquent leader was moving the policy liberal toward stronger positions and toward Keynesian economics, although not toward any assault on the institutional chains and checks.

Watching Kennedy during his early presidential months, pundits and politicians noted his calculating approach to politics and policy, his personal self-control and self-containment. Civil rights posed the great test of these qualities. For two years he and his brother Robert had analyzed the mounting struggle in the South by the same standards as they had conventional and quantifiable problems like taxation or Social Security. Just as the policies and priorities could be weighed and balanced off against one another, so the prescriptions could be measured out in droplets—for southern blacks, voter education and registration programs, case-by-case litigation, step-by-step policy making.

The passion in the black movement, in contrast, was beyond calculation. By Kennedy’s third year in office that passion could not be contained. When Birmingham and other flash points threatened to burst into flames, King warned the Administration that it was at a “historic crossroad” and now it must face “its moral commitment and with it, its political fortunes.” Kennedy the rhetorical radical must come across. Within a few weeks Kennedy recognized the “moral crisis” that could not be met by repression or tokenism. Still, the leadership had come from the bottom, from Rosa Parks and all her counterparts across the South who had acted while others preached. They created the events that in turn moved the Administration. The White House had mainly reacted.

These leaders had given Kennedy, indeed the whole nation, a lesson in freedom. For Kennedy freedom had meant Bill of Rights liberties, constitutional procedures, liberal tolerance. For blacks freedom meant also self-expression, self-respect, dignity, status, power. They had their own language of freedom—they talked about freedom rides, freedom songs, freedom schools, the freedom movement. They were following Ella Baker’s cardinal principle: “You must let the oppressed themselves define their own freedom.” In the end it was not his Irish-American heritage but civil rights principles backed up by black pressure that moved John Kennedy toward an expanded concept of freedom.

An eager lover of life and fun and paradox, a man of rationality and restraint and realism, he had only an amused contempt for the theatrical gesture, the sentimental idealist, the quixotic hero. This made the cause of his death—the smashing, blinding bullets arching out of nowhere—all the more incomprehensible, all the more unbearable to those who had known and loved him.

We Shall Overcome

Lyndon B. Johnson lost no time in taking the oath of office, grasping firmly the reins of power, and making passage of the civil rights bill his top legislative priority. “We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights,” he told Congress in a brief address five days after the assassination. “We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.” This was the kind of talk black leaders wanted to hear—and had not expected to hear from the Johnson they had known.

But it was Congress that passed the laws, and Congress on civil rights continued to provide a masterly example of American government in inaction. The civil rights bill was still in the hands of the House Rules Committee, chaired by Judge Howard W. Smith, the venerable Virginian who had led the counterattack against FDR’s New Deal in the late 1930s. At a critical moment during the combat over the 1957 civil rights bill he had delayed consideration by discovering that he must return home to inspect a barn that had burned, upon which Speaker Rayburn quipped that although he knew Howard Smith would do anything to block a civil rights bill, “I never knew he would resort to arson.” Finally opening proceedings before the Rules Committee in January 1964, he proved that he had not exhausted his parliamentary bag of tricks when he scheduled day after day of hearings on what he called this “nefarious bill.” At last voted out of the Rules Committee, the measure had then to run the House gantlet of days of debate on complex provisions and amendments. Smith threw male members of the House into confusion by moving to add the word “sex” to the list of forbidden discriminations—race, creed, color, and national origin. Designed more to kill the bill than to promote equal rights for women, his amendment prevailed after vigorous lobbying by the National Women’s Party.

By early 1964, however, parliamentary maneuvers alone could not stop a measure whose time had come. When the bill passed the House 290-130, the four-party split was once again evident as 86 Democrats from the states of the old Confederacy voted against the bill and 138 Republicans supported it, while “aye” votes by 11 representatives from the “outer rim” states of the South indicated some erosion in southern congressional opposition to civil rights. Republican support for the measure reflected both the historic allegiance of presidential Republicans to the party of Lincoln and their hopes and fears about the forthcoming presidential election; it was also a response after his death to John Kennedy’s assiduous courting of Republican votes for his civil rights bill.

And then the Senate. The four-party split on civil rights broadly prevailed in the upper chamber too, but backers of the measure faced there the single most venerable and formidable weapon of delay in the congressional arsenal—the filibuster. Southern senators, proclaiming that they were prepared for “a battle to the last ditch—to the death,” made clear that they would filibuster the bill at every possible point in the tortuous Senate process. Civil rights Democrats under the leadership of majority whip Hubert H. Humphrey and civil rights Republicans led by Thomas H. Kuchel of California teamed up to try to muster the two-thirds vote necessary to invoke cloture and end debate. Civil rights advocates were apprehensive. Their adversaries included such skilled obstructionists as Richard Russell, John Stennis, and Strom Thurmond; Thurmond had established the filibuster record in the Senate with an uninterrupted twenty-four-hour speech against the 1957 civil rights bill.

Feeling in the nation mounted as the Southerners conducted their talkathons. A Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms, Inc., headed by the arch-reactionary publisher of the Manchester Union Leader in New Hampshire, William Loeb, Jr., but largely financed by Mississippians, charged that the bill was a “billion dollar blackjack.” A formidable leadership network united the civil rights coalition—the President of the United States, congressional leaders, labor spokesmen, a “leadership conference” busily lobbying on behalf of the fourscore organizations it embraced. Crucial to the effort were the organizing and lobbying efforts of religious bodies. “We have seen cardinals, bishops, elders, stated clerks, common preachers, priests, and rabbis come to Washington to press for passage of the bill,” Senator Russell complained. “They have sought to make its passage a great moral issue.”

Week after week the Senate debate droned on—through eighty-two working days, 6,300 pages of the Congressional Record, ten million words. Throughout Johnson stood steadfast for the bill, rejecting major changes, prodding and advising Humphrey, twisting people’s arms, wheeling and dealing. Pivotal in the Senate was one man, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, long a leader of the congressional Republicans on the Hill. The President drew Humphrey aside at a White House breakfast for legislative leaders.

“The bill can’t pass unless you get Ev Dirksen,” LBJ said. “You and I are going to get Ev. It’s going to take time. We’re going to get him. You make up your mind now that you’ve got to spend time with Ev Dirksen. You’ve got to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time. Don’t let these bomb throwers, now, talk you out of seeing Dirksen. You get in there to see Dirksen. You drink with Dirksen! You talk with Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen!”

Humphrey did—and so did Johnson. Having measured the man during their years together in the Senate, the President, said a White House aide, “never let him alone for thirty minutes.” Dirksen was heavily cross-pressured by attitudes among his Illinois constituents, including a mounting number of blacks, by his friendships with both Kennedy and Johnson, by public-opinion polls favorable to civil rights, by his conservative Republican cronies and his Democratic allies in the South who warned him that backing the measure would “kill off” Republican hopes for victory in November, and above all, perhaps, by his own moral concern over the struggle. In the end he not only switched; he became a Senate crusader for civil rights.

Finally, with the civil rights lobbyists working day and night while the filibusterers did likewise, a cloture petition was filed. Dirksen’s led the names on the petition. Soon the Senate voted cloture 71-29—the first time it ever did so on a civil rights bill. Passage of the bill followed. Only one Democrat outside the South—Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia—and only four non-southern Republicans voted against. One of them was Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on July 2 in the East Room of the White House, where John F. Kennedy had lain in state seven months earlier. The new law, LBJ told the nation, was designed neither to punish nor to divide, but “to promote a more abiding commitment to freedom.” Later he handed out seventy-two pens to the backers of the act clustered around him. The leaders were happy and self-satisfied. The battle had been a long and hard one. One hundred years before, Yankee troops were smashing through the South with victories that marked the turning point of the Civil War. A century was a long time, but the system finally had produced.

Yet the power of the President, of the Justice Department, of congressional majorities, of the Supreme Court, had not been enough. It was the civil rights street people who had pushed and prodded that system into action. Whether or not they received pens that night, they had been the real leaders.

The civil rights measure that Lyndon Johnson signed in July 1964 outlawed discrimination in public accommodations, authorized the Attorney General to initiate suits to desegregate public facilities including schools, barred discrimination in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It gave a little more protection to voting rights— mainly by banning denial of registration because of trivial errors in filling out forms—but it largely bypassed the issue of the denial to blacks of the right to register and vote. Many still believed that blacks must secure their rights by gaining voting power in the political system—power that they could use to fight all the ills that beset them, power they could exercise through city councils and state governments as well as in Washington, power that could be brought to bear on the sheriffs, school boards, state troopers, mayors, city police, who were so often the bane of their lives. And what could be more appropriate in a democracy—more citizenlike, more unthreatening—than to seek the right to vote?

Two years before LBJ signed the 1964 act, a tired but strong-willed woman with a warm smile and great shining eyes had walked into a meeting at her church in Ruleville, a Mississippi Delta town not far from where Emmett Till had been bludgeoned to death. “Until then I’d never heard of no mass meeting and I didn’t know that a Negro could register and vote,” Fannie Lou Hamer recalled. James Forman and other SNCC activists ran the meeting. “When they asked for those to raise their hands who’d go down to the courthouse the next day, I raised mine. Had it up high as I could get it. I guess if I’d had any sense I’d a-been a little scared, but what was the point of being scared. The only thing they could do to me was kill me and it seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time ever since I could remember.”

Forty-four years old, Hamer was the youngest of twenty children of sharecropper parents. She had picked cotton all her life, for the past eighteen years with her husband on a nearby plantation. She had always known poverty and injustice; when her parents were getting a little ahead a white farmer had poisoned their mules. For a long time she had wanted to help her kind. “Just listenin’ at ’em, I could just see myself votin’ people outa office that I know was wrong and didn’t do nothin’ to help the poor.”

With seventeen others Hamer rode on a bus chartered by SNCC to the county seat of Indianola, birthplace of the White Citizens’ Councils, where the registrar “brought a big old book out there, and he gave me the sixteenth section of the Constitution of Mississippi, and that was dealing with de facto laws, and I didn’t know nothin’ about no de facto laws.” She “flunked out” along with the others. Driving home, they were all arrested because the bus was “too yellow.” The plantation owner kicked Hamer off the land, and the house where she stayed in town was shot up by vigilantes. It was one hell of a winter. “Pap couldn’t get a job nowhere ’cause everybody knew he was my husband.” But they made it through. Soon Hamer joined SNCC as an organizer.

SNCC had been struggling since 1961 to register black voters in the closed society of Mississippi. Although blacks made up almost half the population, local intimidation, along with the state literacy test and poll tax, held them down to 5 percent of the registered voters. The old debate in the southern black movement between those who advocated civil disobedience in resistance to segregation and those who argued that blacks must first pursue political power now intensified. At an August 1961 SNCC conference at Highlander, Ella Baker had mediated the issue with a proposal to have two wings in SNCC, one for direct action and one for voter registration. As it turned out, no action was riskier, more militant, even potentially more revolutionary than organizing blacks to vote in Mississippi, whose reputation for terrorism had made it the most dreaded state on SNCC’s target list and virtually off limits to SCLC.

Mississippi more than lived up to its reputation. When Bob Moses, the driving force behind the SNCC voting campaign, had moved to the small southern Mississippi city of McComb in July 1961 to set up the first of a string of registration “schools,” he and his cohorts were routinely arrested and beaten—more than once in a place called Liberty. Herbert Lee, a local farmer and father of nine, was gunned down by a state legislator who was never prosecuted; after a protest march Moses and others were jailed for two months. Routed for the moment, they left McComb, recruited people from the grass roots, and fanned out into several other counties in the flat Delta country. Risk and repression became a way of life. Diane Nash, now married to James Bevel and pregnant, was jailed after teaching nonviolence to young people; refusing bail, she declared that “since my child will be a black child, born in Mississippi, whether I am in jail or not he will be born in prison.”

Fannie Lou Hamer was in the thick of the struggle. She and others were locked up for trying to use a whites-only café. The next moments burned into her memory: the shrieks from blows in other cells—the cop yelling at her, “You, bitch, you, we gon’ make you wish you was dead”—the two black prisoners forced to beat her with a long blackjack—screaming into the mattress so the sound would not come out—the injuries that never left her. It was while she was in jail that Medgar Evers was killed. But the black leaders persisted in Mississippi, turning increasingly to electoral tactics as 1964 approached. Black and white activists canvassed the state, persuading over 80,000 black people to cast symbolic “freedom ballots” in churches, in stores, and on the street.

Early in 1964, SNCC began a campaign to sign up voters for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which sought to challenge the lily-white Democrats for accreditation as the Mississippi delegation at the Democratic national convention to be held in Atlantic City in August. Black leaders launched a large project to import hundreds of white college students to help in a climactic registration campaign. Three activists—two white and one black—were arrested for speeding, turned over to the Klan, beaten, mutilated, and shot to death (for which crimes seven whites were later convicted in a federal court). Still the students flocked in by the hundreds, living with black families in ramshackle “freedom houses,” teaching the three R’s and black history and the meaning of democracy in “freedom schools,” escorting to the courthouse blacks who dared try to register. After modest gains the registration crusade waned as plans focused on gaining seats at the Democratic national convention. Party conclaves in each county, some threatened by hostile whites, chose delegates to the five congressional district conventions, which in turn sent delegates to the state convention in Jackson.

Some of the delegates came to Jackson straight out of tar-paper shacks, wearing borrowed suits, with no memory of political involvement, but catching on, participant Sally Belfrage reported, “with some extraordinary inner sense to how the process worked, down to its smallest nuance and finagle.” The eight hundred grass-roots representatives, mostly black and poor and including many women, chose sixty-eight delegates to journey to Atlantic City. At last blacks could challenge white power inside one of its power centers. Or could they?

The Boardwalk, Atlantic City, late August 1964. Balloons and bunting adorned the façades of the convention hotels; the very ocean air smelled like “popcorn and seaweed”; the severe features of LBJ frowned from countless posters. Across the water a huge billboard, proclaiming “In Your Heart You Know He’s Right,” reminded Democrats that Barry Goldwater, the champion of the Republican right wing, had been nominated by the GOP six weeks before. Crowding the boardwalk in their Sunday best were hundreds of southern blacks, who had journeyed with the MFDP delegates to the resort town. Delegates and their backers had two tasks: to lobby vigorously for the seating of their “freedom delegation” in place of the official “lily-whites” and to sustain an around-the-clock vigil on the boardwalk.

Fannie Lou Hamer stole the show by picturing graphically before television cameras her gripping tale of being beaten in jail, that “woesome time for us when we was arrested in Winona.” All they had wanted to do, she said, was “to register, to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

With the President watching with a hawk’s eye from Washington, his aides, instructed to gain any kind of compromise that would avert an uproar on TV, had planned to offer the MFDP no votes but the privilege of the floor, along with a new rule that would open Democratic parties in the South to blacks in the future. So electrifying was the testimony of Hamer and others, expertly stage-managed by the redoubtable civil rights lawyer Joseph Rauh, that this compromise collapsed in the face of the public response and Freedom Party militance.

The Johnson people now offered the MFDP a slightly better deal—two at-large votes as well as the promised nondiscrimination rule for the future. A formidable array of civil rights notables—King, Bayard Rustin, Wilkins, Humphrey, Rauh, and even Walter Reuther, who flew to Atlantic City at the behest of the White House—were willing to go along with this, but despite intense pressure an overwhelming majority of the MFDP delegates dug in their heels. Two token seats, handpicked by the whites? “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats!” Hamer proclaimed. And what good was a nondiscrimination rule without a guarantee of black voting rights? So that deal too collapsed. MFDP delegates in protest occupied the empty seats of the lily-white delegation, which had walked out in their own protest against Johnson’s brokerage.

In the evening the boardwalk vigil broke into song amid cries of “Freedom Now!” But it was not freedom now; this battle was lost. The little army that had tried to inject moral passion and commitment into pragmatic electoral politics returned to its southern battlefield, dejected, disillusioned, but by no means defeatist. Its troops had learned once again that to deal on equal terms with the “big boys” they had to wield power on their own. But power meant votes—and they were still seeking to put their hands on the ballots that were their passports to freedom and democracy.

When Lyndon Johnson trounced Barry Goldwater in November 1964, taking 43.1 million popular votes to Goldwater’s 27.2 million and all but 52 of the 538 electoral votes, the reasons were manifold: the nation’s post-assassination tribute to John Kennedy, LBJ’s vigorous coalition building, rising prosperity, the Arizonan’s inept handling of moderates in his own party, the President’s reassurances about nuclear war. Black votes for LBJ in the “Solid South” were not a reason. Despite their hard struggles, most blacks could not vote for the President even if they wished to do so. Only 23 percent of Alabama’s blacks were registered to vote in 1964, only 6.7 percent of Mississippi’s. Against a certified Southerner, or at least Southwesterner, Goldwater carried the bell of southern states from South Carolina through Louisiana. The Democracy, even with a Texan heading the ticket, was still losing its old white bulwark in the Solid South without gaining a new electoral base there. But after the big November win the complacent leadership of the Democratic party lost little sleep over the problem.

So once again it fell to the most physically vulnerable, the most politically impotent people in the United States to act in this moral crisis of American freedom. In January 1965, SCLC launched a crucial voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, a city with one of the most egregious registration barriers. Fresh from the pinnacle of world acclaim for winning the Nobel Peace Prize, King led a march toward the county courthouse in Selma, where after kneeling in prayer he and Abernathy and hundreds of others were jailed. Within a week over three thousand more had been arrested. In the nearby town of Marion, after state troopers set upon black people during a peaceful march, young Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot down as he tried to protect his mother and grandfather, both badly beaten. When Jackson died a few days later, SCLC’s James Bevel and local black leaders resolved to march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery, though Governor Wallace had banned such action and King was in Atlanta.

On a Sunday early in March six hundred people strode out of Brown Chapel, crossed over the Alabama River, and ran straight into a solid phalanx of helmeted and gas-masked state troopers, who with little warning lunged at them with clubs and whips, cracking heads and lobbing tear-gas grenades. Troopers and the sheriff’s posse pursued them back to the church, using whips and cattle prods, hurling one youth through a stained-glass window that depicted Jesus. When King, who was keeping in close touch with federal authorities, told the Selma marchers to “put on their walking shoes” and this time personally led them across the bridge to face the troopers—only to turn the long column around abruptly and lead them back into town, as if by prearrangement—SNCC leaders denounced him for the apparent deal. But King was still trying to draw the line between militance and violence.

By now protests sounded across the country, as pictures of mounted horsemen flailing and clubbing fleeing blacks in the initial fracas appeared on television screens and front pages, and SCLC flashed telegrams to hundreds of northern clergy urging them to join King in two days to pick up the march. President Johnson was aroused to the finest words and most important domestic action of his presidency. Calling for a strong voting bill with provisions for federal registrars and the banning of literacy tests, he told a joint session of Congress, his big frame hunched over the podium, that at times history and fate met in a single moment in a single place “to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.” So it had been at Lexington and Concord and at Appomattox, and so “it was last week in Selma.” Congress applauded and began the long process of passing the measure.

The Selma activists would not wait or let up. A few hundred marchers once again set off for Montgomery, now guarded by ten times as many troops deployed by the President. For five days these “mudcaked pilgrims” trekked through the heat and drenching rain, through dense swamps, past half-collapsed shacks, rickety Baptist churches, a dilapidated black school at a place called Trickem. Along the way, or encamped at night, they sang.

We shall overcome,

We shall overcome,

We shall overcome some day.

Oh, deep in my heart

I do believe,

We shall walk in peace some day.

Or the more militant:

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,

With the cross of Jesus going on before!

Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;

Forward into battle see His banners go!

At the end, after the marchers surged into Montgomery while Wallace peered out from his office, Martin Luther King stood near the bronze star marking the site where Confederate President Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated.

“How long?” he asked. “Not long,” he answered, repeating the litany again and again as more voices joined the stirring rhythm.

“How long?” he concluded. “Not long, because mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored …

“His truth is marching on!”

Euphoria could never last very long in the struggle for civil rights. One of King’s rapt listeners that day was Viola Liuzzo, a white volunteer from Detroit who was helping to ferry the marchers back to Selma. She was shot to death by four Klansmen—one of them an FBI informer—as she was driving on a desolate highway in the swamps of Lowndes County. When LBJ was finally able to sign a strong voting rights bill early in August 1965, he could proudly declaim, “They came in darkness and they came in chains. And today we strike away the last major shackles of those fierce and ancient bonds.” But shackles remained. And even as the President spoke, the civil rights movement was changing, dividing, turning more to the black ghettos in the North.

SNCC was beset by growing pains as well as battle fatigue. An influx of white organizers after “Freedom Summer” intensified black-white friction. Conflict mounted between the more group-oriented leaders, represented by Ella Baker and Bob Moses, who were trying to carry on the original SNCC spirit and lifestyle, and the “hard-liners,” led by James Forman and Cleveland Sellers, who wanted a more disciplined, centralized, and politically effective organization. And a very different kind of leadership was arising outside of SNCC, in the cities of the North.

The black leaders in the South were waging their struggles for a constituency that was eroding. During the 1960s the South lost nearly one-eighth of its black population. In another of America’s massive migrations, almost a million and a half blacks “left the South for the already overcrowded ghettos and marginal neighborhoods of the urban North” between 1960 and 1970. By 1960 blacks numbered over half of Washington’s population, over a quarter of the people of Philadelphia, Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis, almost a quarter of Chicago and Houston. The ghetto populations of Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan were around 95 percent black. It cost “roughly a thousand dollars” in lost wages to be black, it was estimated; the economic cost to the nation of discrimination was over ten billion a year.

It took a child of the ghetto to translate these figures into human terms. In a stunning portrait of the Harlem he had known for forty years—the Harlem where his family had “moved from house to house, and from neighborhood to neighborhood, within the walls of the ghetto,” in a desperate effort to flee its creeping blight—Kenneth Clark etched the sociology and pathology of the black poor. Dark Ghetto was his “anguished cry” about the life and plight of these urban prisoners. Clark captured the physical ugliness of Harlem, the dead-end jobs, dilapidated housing, street kids killed by cars in their only playground, broken families, absent fathers, insensitive social workers, rampant venereal disease, drug addicts vomiting in the Tombs, the gang leaders and dope peddlers. He captured the bitter, angry talk of the streets too: “The flag here in America is for white men” who will “lynch you” and “fry you”—“The only thing you can do is to kill us”—“I’m not a man, none of us are men!”—“Why in the hell— now this is more or less a colored neighborhood—why do they have so many white cops?”—“So we’re out on the sidewalk, right on the sidewalk; we might feel like dancing, or one might want to play something on his horn. Right away here comes a cop.”

There was nothing new in all this; what was new was the sheer number and size of the ghettos by the 1960s, along with hardening intractability of the conditions. Bad nourishment, education, motivation, housing, poor speech habits, combined with few hopes, low expectations, no jobs—all these fortified one another and produced the prison that millions of blacks could not escape.

Also new was the rise of black leaders attuned to the pathology and politics of the city. One of these was Malcolm X. Son of a Baptist minister who had organized for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, Malcolm Little had worked as a shoeshine boy and in a dining car, then made his way as a hustler, drug dealer, and pimp. Jailed for robbery, he wrote to Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, or Black Muslims. On his release he converted to the sect and took the name Malcolm X.

A tall, thin, copper-colored man, charming and witty offstage but polemical in the podium or pulpit, he soon won followers with his blistering attacks on the Kennedys, on King, on integration and intermarriage, on the white people as devils. He broke with Muhammad in March 1964 and in a hurricane of activity set up his own Muslim group, founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and made two long journeys to the Middle East and Africa, during which he converted to orthodox Islam and communed with African revolutionary leaders.

He shaped a grand strategy—to ground the struggle of Afro-Americans firmly in the global majority of people of color, to gain moral and material help from Third World countries, to raise the “civil rights struggle” to the level of “human rights”—and as a beginning to put American racism on trial before the United Nations. Less and less was Malcolm a separatist as the years passed, or even a pure and simple black nationalist. Nor was he a Marxist, though he identified with African-style socialism. While he castigated civil rights leaders like King for their caution and compromise, he wanted to cooperate with the freedom movement. But he disdained the “masochism” of nonviolence and justified not only armed self-defense but “tit for tat” revenge against the Klan and other white terrorists. Ultimately he believed that freedom would come “either by ballots or by bullets,” but he also called for freedom “by any means necessary.”

While equally radical, Stokely Carmichael was of a different cut from Malcolm. He had made his way out of the New York ghetto to the select Bronx High School of Science and then to Howard University, from which he moved into the Mississippi freedom struggle. Concluding that blacks could not rely on white allies and must create their own power base independent of the Democratic party, Carmichael mobilized local citizens, notably ministers and older women, to form the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. Its symbol was a black panther, which when pressured “moves back until it is cornered,” explained a local leader, “then it comes out fighting for life or death.” In May 1966, Carmichael was elected chair of SNCC, while the former freedom rider Ruby Doris Smith Robinson replaced Forman as executive secretary, at a pivotal meeting that decided that white SNCC members should henceforth organize only white communities.

One month later, James Meredith was wounded by a shotgun blast while on a one-man “march against fear” from Memphis to Jackson. Black leaders gathered in Memphis to discuss taking up Meredith’s fallen banner. Carmichael, supported by armed members of the paramilitary Deacons for Defense, demanded that the march be confined to blacks, that the Deacons be authorized to provide armed protection for marchers, and that the trek be used to “highlight the need for independent, black political units.” The NAACP’s Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young of the Urban League angrily packed their bags and returned to New York. King, Carmichael, and Floyd McKissick, representing CORE, hammered out a compromise. But as the Meredith march wound slowly through the Delta bitter disagreements persisted.

Carmichael was arrested in Greenwood and greeted upon his release by a huge night rally. “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested,” he shouted, “and I ain’t going to jail no more.” The crowd cheered him on. “The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over. We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we gonna start saying now is Black Power!” Calls for “Black Power!” rose again and again from the crowd. The cry, which starkly encapsulated SNCC’s new political vision, electrified black youth even as it ignited a storm of criticism from older leaders and liberal allies. On the march the nightly rallies turned into contests over which chant—“Black Power” or “Freedom Now”—could drown out the other.

King had met with Carmichael and other SNCC leaders to try to break the deepening impasse. King said he understood the new slogan’s magnetic appeal to young blacks who, after he and others had lifted their expectations, now felt betrayed because their elders had not delivered. But the slogan would be self-defeating, he insisted; while the concept of black power was sound, the image it conjured up would alarm the media. Every other ethnic group had created its own power base, Carmichael replied— why not black people?

“That is just the point,” King answered. “No one has ever heard the Jews publicly chant a slogan of Jewish power, but they have power.” The same was true of the Irish and Italians. “Neither group has used a slogan of Irish or Italian power, but they have worked hard to achieve it. This is exactly what we must do.” They must build racial pride and through a program, not merely a slogan, “refute the notion that black is evil and ugly.”

“Martin, I deliberately decided to raise this issue on the march in order to give it a national forum,” Carmichael admitted, “and force you to take a stand for Black Power.”

King laughed, “I have been used before. One more time won’t hurt.”

Neither side swayed the other, but out of respect for their veteran leader, the SNCC and CORE chiefs agreed to defer using either slogan until the expedition was over. Later King disavowed the “Black Power” slogan, but he never repudiated Carmichael or SNCC; he still hoped for a united black movement.

This was not to be. Pressures were building up, now in the North, that would drive black leadership further apart. The assassination of Malcolm X in February 1965 led to fears of a “holy war” between his followers and those loyal to Elijah Muhammad. SNCC was already shifting its center of gravity to the North. Brilliantly focusing the pent-up anger of urban blacks, Carmichael became the leading popularizer of Black Power and an international media star. The ambiguity, complexity, and poetry of Black Power gave it mystique: its democratic aspirations for black self-determination; its critique of integration as a one-way street; its irresistible insistence, in the spirit of Malcolm X, on racial pride and the beauty of blackness; and for some, inspired by Algerian psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon, the glorification of violence as a psychic need and an end in itself.

King was moving left too, but not this fast. He remained the apostle of nonviolence, but he was edging closer to SNCC’s belief in long-term community organizing, toward grass-roots, class-based interracial alliances of the poor. Always a philosopher of social change, he was thinking more of a “reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.” The old-line black organizations were moving too, but more slowly. At its 1966 convention the NAACP sharply questioned “Black Power” as a slogan just after the CORE convention had endorsed it. Blacks were losing one of their mightiest weapons—unity.

It was the old story of younger, more radical leaders pushing to the fore on the billows of revolution as the tidal wave of change surged toward distant shores. But this tidal wave was about to be transformed by forces boiling up from the back yards and front stoops of city blacks—and from age-old but resharpened conflicts at the opposite ends of the globe.

CHAPTER 9

The World Turned Upside Down

IN THE “100 DAYS OF 1965,” stretching from June to late October of that year, Congress passed and the President signed the Medicare bill, long heatedly fought by the American Medical Association; the epochal Voting Rights bill; Omnibus Housing, which mandated stepped-up rent supplements to low-income families; a measure to create a new Department of Housing and Urban Development; another measure to establish the National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities; a major broadening of the immigration laws; the Water Quality bill, requiring states to set and enforce water quality standards for all interstate waters within their borders; and the Clean Air Act of 1965, which supplemented and strengthened the Clean Air Act of 1963, targeting now automobile exhaust, following three years of controversy touched off by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Earlier in the year the first large-scale program of aid to elementary and secondary schools had been enacted, and fueled with a grant of $1.3 billion.

In the midst of this flood of legislation stood Lyndon Johnson, still using the techniques of personal persuasion he had honed in the Senate, techniques now backed up by a formidable array of White House resources. With a shrewd eye for the strengths and vulnerabilities, appetites and sensitivities of his targets, the President spent hundreds of hours on the telephone or face to face, bullying and pleading, bidding and dealing, placating and mediating, all in the currency, now hard and now soft, of presidential-congressional exchange. If the Kennedys had gloried in using the arts of “blarney, bludgeon, and boodle,” LBJ inflated all these, Texas style.

It was by no means a one-man show. Working closely with the White House in the Senate were Hubert Humphrey, still ebullient even as Vice President, and Mike Mansfield, the dour Majority Leader. In the House, where John McCormack was Speaker and the well-liked Carl Albert of Oklahoma was Majority Leader, a band of liberal Democrats, headed by the astute and resolute Missourian Richard Boiling, helped marshal the huge Democratic majority that Johnson had helped bring into the lower chamber in the 1964 election.

These were the creative months of the Great Society that Johnson sought to build. The currents of history converged in a fashion that the labor-liberal-left forces in America had rarely known: the program that John F. Kennedy had advanced with his glowing rhetoric; the homage the nation wished to pay to the martyred young President; Barry Goldwater’s conservative campaign, which catalyzed and united a new Democratic party coalition; the Congress and its committees liberalized; and a new President determined to show that a Texan and a Southerner could fight for a progressive program, that a politician stigmatized for his wheeling and dealing on Capitol Hill could become a great President in the tradition of FDR.

These should have been the memorable, the glory times of the Great Society, when programs were introduced that would transform the lives of countless Americans for decades to come—but glory times they were not. For the attention of Americans was increasingly distracted by events nine thousand miles away, and LBJ seemed as crippled in dealing with this growing crisis as he had been creative in leading his domestic program through Congress.

For Johnson was now swaying under the full burden of the divided legacy of Kennedy’s foreign policy—the pacific legacy of the Peace Corps, the resolution of the missile crisis, the test ban treaty, the hard legacy of confrontation in Europe and escalation in Vietnam. The Peace Corps, established by Kennedy within six weeks of his inauguration, had become a special link with his successor. It was a reminder to LBJ of the hopes and ideals of his days in the National Youth Administration; he liked its chief, Sargent Shriver, whom he made head of his Job Corps; and the work of the volunteers—helping people grow better crops and dig better wells and build better habitations—was the kind of thing that appealed to the new President’s belief in benign progress, in gritty, hands-on social change without trauma. Attacked on the right as “global do-goodism” and on the left for being merely a disguised form of American cultural imperialism and indeed as an opiate to calm the potentially revolutionary masses, the Peace Corps, with its thousands of volunteers in developing countries around the world, was nevertheless an exquisitely appropriate living memorial to John Kennedy.

But Kennedy had left another living heritage—thousands of American troops in Vietnam. The onetime “military advisers” had escalated to a force of some 16,000 personnel by the time of JFK’s death. They were now conducting “combat support” missions and they were now dying in action—77 had in 1963. Lyndon Johnson inherited Kennedy’s war—and the divisions within the Administration over its conduct. He would continue the creeping escalation.

People of This Generation

At the start the peace movement appeared innocuous, even quixotic. It was indeed hard to find a start. Ever since Hiroshima, of course, antiwar activists had been protesting the bomb. Radical pacifists, many of them Quakers, had agitated especially against civil defense drills, but the scourge of McCarthyism had thinned their ranks. Scientists, including some who had worked on the bomb, became so alarmed about the dangers of radioactive fallout that they sought to educate their colleagues and the public; some even hoped to “bridge the gap between East and West” and unite the world scientific community as a step toward peace. Made credible by such technical expertise, the issue of atmospheric testing galvanized a movement to stop nuclear tests, just when the orbiting of Sputnik heightened America’s fear of Soviet technological progress.

At the cutting edge of the peace movement in the mid-fifties was the Committee for Nonviolent Action, which sponsored a number of daring and imaginative projects. In 1958, Earle and Barbara Reynolds and their family, piloting the good ship Phoenix built in Hiroshima, penetrated the vast Pacific area that the Atomic Energy Commission had blocked off for H-bomb tests that summer. Arrested and detained at the navy base on Kwajalein atoll, Barbara Reynolds and her son witnessed in the night a dirty orange light, like a “gigantic flash bulb,” illuminating the dark clouds.

Later that year, after CNVA protested the construction of a missile base near Cheyenne, Wyoming, five men and women were imprisoned for blocking trucks. The next year, when the militants launched Omaha Action, a campaign of community education and civil disobedience to halt the building of missile silos, one of those arrested for climbing over a fence was A. J. Music, the seventy-four-year-old ringleader and chair of CNVA, longtime radical pacifist, labor leader, strike organizer, incorrigible civil disobedient. After CNVA settled in New London, Connecticut, where missile-firing Polaris submarines were built, peace guerrillas paddled out to board the subs or block their launching. They were repulsed.

Tired of being yelled at to “tell it to the Russians,” a group of Americans and Europeans walked through the Iron Curtain into East Germany and Poland, made their way to Moscow’s Red Square, held a vigil, and passed out leaflets urging disarmament. “I went to jail because I refused to serve in the U.S. Army,” Bradford Lyttle told a crowd in Minsk. “I have protested against American rockets aimed at your cities and families. There are Soviet rockets aimed at my city and my family. Are you demonstrating against that?”

CNVA carried on two more years of peace walks, test site invasions, campus rallies, marches. Women Strike for Peace organized a simultaneous protest by 50,000 women in a few dozen cities. To complement the direct action of CNVA with more conventional political activity, peace activists and “nuclear pacifists”—among them Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling and noted journalist Norman Cousins—had in 1957 formed the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. SANE quickly grew into a major national organization and, like CNVA, broadened its goal to general disarmament. But it underwent a purge of alleged communist members and many radical pacifists resigned in protest.

Then, when Washington and Moscow in August 1963 agreed on a limited test ban treaty, some activists for a time assumed that the government was serious about negotiating a halt to the arms race, that a thaw in the cold war might even be at hand. After all the bold and quixotic actions— was it in part because of them?—a little chunk of peace had been won but the peace movement seemed defused. New allies were soon to arrive, however, from ranks of young Americans who saw themselves as among the most powerless people in America.

Sixty members of a little-known student group, Students for a Democratic Society, convened in June 1962 at the United Auto Workers’ FDR Camp on the southern shore of Lake Huron, forty miles north of Detroit. This was not the usual student beer bust—these men and women were deadly serious. Under a different name SDS had served for decades as the student wing of the democratic-socialist League for Industrial Democracy, but since 1960 it had been asserting more independence, symbolized by its change of name. SDS field secretary Tom Hayden, a journalism student at the University of Michigan and editor of the campus paper, had worked with SNCC on voter registration in Georgia and had suffered the usual beatings and jailings. Hayden and SDS president Al Haber hoped that radical students could link up with the black student activists. But much as they admired SNCC’s spirit and political style, their aims were broader.

The conferees broke off into small study groups to revise the rough draft of a manifesto mainly written by Hayden, who had been analyzing the ideas of myriad thinkers. The students then focused on what they called the “bones,” essential matters worth an hour’s debate, as against “widgets,” of medium importance, and “gizmos,” worth only ten minutes. The pieces were then sewn back together into a patchwork quilt that emerged as a stinging moral critique of American society and a compelling vision of a regenerated democracy.

“We are people of this generation,” the Port Huron Statement began, “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” They did not spare their teachers—“their curriculums change more slowly than the living events of the world; their skills and silence are purchased by investors in the arms race; passion is called unscholastic.” Indeed, they spared virtually nothing and no one—the brokers of politics, militarism, the economic system, the universities, passive students.

The manifesto proclaimed in fresh and forceful prose a radicalism that exalted aspirations for personal empowerment, wholeness, and authenticity; transformed what might seem personal needs and troubles into legitimate political concerns; and brought to light the hidden linkages in the web of issues that plagued the nation and the world. From the heart of the message issued its call for a new kind of democracy:

“We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity. As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life, that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation.” Politics should bring people out of isolation into community. All major institutions—political, economic, cultural, educational—had to be fully democratized. Thus the students, historian Wini Breines noted, “sought to create both a community within the movement and structural transformation in the larger society.” They were eager to serve as transforming leaders who would rise above the shabby brokerage of institutional life. But even the most ardent, as they left Port Huron after five days of nonstop debate, could hardly know that they had helped set the stage for the surge of grass-roots democratic activity and New Left militance in the 1960s.

It was not by historical accident that the SDS appeared at this time. Its members and the New Left in general were catalyzed by the southern freedom movement and in particular by SNCC, some of whose values and organizing style SDS imitated and refined, as well as by the ban-the-bomb movement and efforts to restore civil liberties in the wake of McCarthyism. At a deeper level, the New Left was a direct response to the cool conformist culture of the 1950s with its ethic of acquisitiveness, its model of the unquestioning “organization man,” its “Catch-22” insanities that seemed to apply more to the cold war than to World War II. Caught in the yawning chasms between American ideals of self-fulfillment and the felt experience of bureaucratic manipulation and personal emptiness, between the possibilities for freedom and creativity offered by technology and the harsh realities of spiritual poverty, middle-class youth was “growing up absurd,” the title of Paul Goodman’s book. Our abundant society, Goodman wrote, “has no Honor. It has no Community.”

Unable to make sense of their world, angered by what they saw as almost universal hypocrisy, many young people acted out their semi-conscious critique of the “system” through deviant behavior of one kind or another: as rebels without causes, as followers of the Beat subculture of nonconformity, as spiritual dropouts. Beat figures like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were role models for many of the rebels, and the existentialisms of Sartre and Camus their chosen philosophy.

If the passionate and sardonic Goodman was the chief interpreter of youthful cultural alienation, the equally committed and iconoclastic C. Wright Mills, a Texas-bred Columbia University sociologist, was centrally involved in translating it into overt political expression and commitment. Criticized for imputing too much power to the interlocking “power elite” of corporate, military, and political leaders, and for other nonconforming social science, Mills feared that in both superpowers “we now witness the rise of the cheerful robot, the technological idiot, the crackpot realist,” all of them embodying the common ethos of “rationality without reason.” His solution was less programmatic than a matter of transforming consciousness: to make reason into an instrument for restless and rebellious social criticism, for penetrating society’s invisible controlling assumptions and interlocking power systems; to convince intellectuals, especially the young intelligentsia, of their moral responsibility to tackle the real problems of the era; and to lead the academy, and then all of society, out of conformity and apathy and into informed engagement. His words and spirit had shone through every page of the Port Huron Statement, adopted three months after his death from a heart attack at forty-five.

High noon, Berkeley, October 1, 1964. Two deans and the campus police chief advanced on a young man sitting at a table in Sproul Hall Plaza at the University of California’s 27,000-student campus across the bay from San Francisco. The table displayed literature on the Congress of Racial Equality and a collection jar, violating a campus ban on advocacy and fund-raising. When CORE organizer Jack Weinberg refused to take down the table the security people put him under arrest, but a large crowd gathered around him shouting, “Take all of us!” A police car arrived, the cops hustled Weinberg into it, only to find a sea of students surging around them and then sitting down. Mario Savio, a philosophy major just in from the Mississippi Freedom Summer, jumped on top of the police car—a perfect soapbox—and after politely removing his shoes demanded Weinberg’s release and an end to the ban on free speech.

For thirty-two hours the students held the police car hostage—with Weinberg still in it—while student reinforcements lined up to revel in the delights of free speech. Bettina Aptheker, who as a teenager had marched against the bomb and Jim Crow and had picketed her local Woolworth’s in Brooklyn in support of the southern sit-ins, “got inspired,” as she said later. After fending off nervousness she climbed up to face the television lights and cameras that pierced the darkness. “There was this tremendous glare of light” and “roar from the crowd” that seemed to come out of nowhere. She remembered one of her favorite quotations from black leader Frederick Douglass and yelled at the crowd, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” The next evening Savio announced an armistice with university administrators. The students freed the police car and later paid for its badly dented roof. A brief calm settled over the campus.

Unexpected though it was, the police-car sit-in was a spark struck off from long-growing friction between students and authorities, and a spark that ignited afresh the fires of campus rebellion. A “free speech” movement had been kindling at least since May 1960, when Berkeley students had tried to attend hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco; repeatedly refused admission, they staged a sit-in, only to be washed out of the rotunda and down the steps of city hall by fire hoses. Dozens were arrested. Savio and others involved in the police-car sit-in had been suspended by the university after earlier protests. Then, when the university abruptly extended its ban on political activity to a small strip of pavement that had been a haven for political talk and recruiting, activists lashed back that October noon. They were being treated like southern blacks, they protested—their own civil rights were being violated. The university authorities were thrown off guard by the readiness and vehemence of their young adversaries.

In the heady days after the armistice an unusually broad coalition of student groups, ranging from Goldwaterites and Young Republicans to socialists and Maoists, formed the Free Speech Movement. Because of lingering McCarthyism and relentless red-baiting, “we had to convince people that we were small ‘d’ democrats in addition to whatever else we were,” Savio said later. “We were hung up about democracy.” They sought to make FSM a model of participatory democracy. Students chose representatives to a large executive committee, which in turn elected delegates to a small steering committee that carried out the larger body’s policies and tactics from day to day. The steering committee tried to act by the Quaker method of consensus and the FSM ethic of openness. Aptheker, Savio, and others spent many long nights churning out leaflets with detailed accounts of the day’s happenings; these were printed by dawn and handed out, 20,000 daily, by 8 A.M. The FSM, however, lacked a key dimension of democracy—there were few women in leadership positions.

The university itself served as one of FSM’s best organizers. When the movement seemed to be losing steam, Berkeley’s chancellor rejuvenated it by bringing new charges against Savio and another leader. Aroused once again, a thousand students took over Sproul Hall, administration headquarters. After a night electrified by Joan Baez’s singing “We Shall Overcome,” and nourished by peanut butter sandwiches, Charlie Chaplin films, and “Free University” classes, the students were beset by hundreds of police who rooted them out floor by floor. Eight hundred were arrested, the biggest campus civil disobedience in the country’s history.

In response, graduate students organized a strike so widely supported that it shut down the university. Scores of professors emerged from their studies to back the movement. In a remarkable faculty decision the Academic Senate voted overwhelmingly to back the FSM demands. After the vote, Aptheker recalled, “we students parted ranks, forming an aisle through which the faculty seemed to formally march in a new kind of academic procession.” It was only then, ten weeks after the police-car sit-in, that the regents rescinded the ban on campus free speech.

The Berkeley rebellion, scrupulously nonviolent, the first major white student movement since the 1930s and the first to employ mass direct action on campus, involved much more than traditional political freedoms. Many students felt alienated by the intellectual assembly line of a huge, impersonal “multiversity” harnessed to the needs of large corporations and the Pentagon. Berkeley political theorists Sheldon Wolin and John Schaar observed that the students were “ill-housed, and ill-clad, and ill-nourished not in the material sense, but in the intellectual and spiritual senses.” Students contended that they were being bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated by faceless bureaucrats; they were fighting to gain more control over their lives. They saw the university’s intellectual repression as of a piece with its contribution to basic social ills, from automation to the nuclear arms race, and they hoped that by forcing the institution to live up to its original scholarly ideals, they could take a big step toward reshaping the entire society.

Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, did not feel like a faceless bureaucrat, pawn of the power elite, or a master of power. He felt more like a punching bag. “The university president in the United States,” he wrote in 1963, “is expected to be a friend of the students, a colleague of the faculty, a good fellow with the alumni, a sound administrator with the trustees, a good speaker with the public, an astute bargainer with the foundations and the federal agencies, a politician with the state legislature, a friend of industry, labor, and agriculture, a persuasive diplomat with donors, a champion of education generally, a supporter of the professions (particularly law and medicine), a spokesman to the press, a scholar in his own right, a public servant at the state and national levels, a devotee of opera and football equally, a decent human being, a good husband and father, an active member of a church.” Kerr played most of these roles with skill and versatility.

Yet there was something gravely lacking in all this, and the students sensed it. In trying to deal with what historian Frederick Rudolph called the “delicate balance of interests,” in searching ever for consensus, in settling for day-to-day “practical steps” of management and persuasion, Kerr and a host of other university heads evaded the crucial tasks of clarifying educational goals, setting priorities, being controversial, leading rather than mediating and bargaining. Students saw themselves as the least of a president’s concerns. They were now making the multiversity a political battleground.

While a few of the FSM leaders like Savio had been tutored in civil rights protest in Mississippi, most of the campus dissidents were so immersed in their own battles against the multiversity that for a time they paid little attention to struggles hundreds of miles away in the South or nine thousand miles away in Southeast Asia. The Port Huron Statement had referred to the “Southern struggle against racial bigotry” and Vietnam, American imperialism, and the bomb only as items in a much wider set of problems. Southern black leaders were also so preoccupied with endless crisis and confrontation that they had little time either for the “rich rebels” in northern universities or for peasants far across the Pacific. As the civil rights struggle moved North during the 1960s, widening the arc of black concerns, and as the war in Vietnam escalated, blacks and students were drawn together in the vortex of a new conflict. But the civil rights battle in the North still remained to be fought out.

In mid-August 1965, just a few days after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, the Watts section of Los Angeles burst into violence. It seemed a curious location for a “race riot”—not a place of dark and towering tenements, but a ghetto, in the Los Angeles style, of bungalows and ranch houses, intermixed with trash-filled alleys, boarded-up stores, bars and pool halls, drunks and drug peddlers. It was 98 percent black. Starting with a routine arrest of a black youth suspected of drunken driving, the violence whirled out through the streets on the wings of rumor. Day after day, in torrid heat, blacks looted and torched stores, pelted cops and passing cars, randomly attacked whites, hurled Molotov cocktails, ambushed firemen and policemen.

Once again neighborhood people—in this case street people—were taking the lead, but this was a leadership of nihilism. In their fury blacks set scores of major fires, tried to burn a local community hospital, and torched the shops of other blacks despite signs on storefronts pleading ownership by a “Black Brother” or “Soul Brother.” The rioters were “burning their city now, as the insane sometimes mutilate themselves,” wrote a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, himself black.

Martin Luther King flew to Los Angeles and walked the debris-strewn streets of Watts among smoldering ruins of shops and houses, imploring the locals to turn away from violence, which had brought ten thousand National Guard troops into the area. King provoked argument, skepticism, even heckling. Some youngsters told him, “We won.”

“How can you say you won,” King demanded, “when thirty-four Negroes are dead, your community is destroyed, and whites are using the riots as an excuse for inaction?”

“We won,” a jobless young man responded, “because we made the whole world pay attention to us.”

Increasingly blacks were turning to the ideas King had fought—to separation from whites rather than integration, to street riots rather than nonviolence, to the religion of the Nation of Islam rather than Christianity. Elijah Muhammad, suspected by some of having instigated the murder of Malcolm X, continued to lead the Nation, with its Muslim schools, businesses, and publications, including Muhammad Speaks, the Muslim weekly newspaper. In 1962 the paper had printed Muhammad’s “Muslim Program,” in which he had trumpeted that since blacks could not get along with whites “in peace and equality, after giving them 400 years of our sweat and blood and receiving in return some of the worst treatment human beings have ever experienced, we believe our contributions to this land and the suffering forced upon us by white America, justifies our demand for complete separation in a state or territory of our own.” He demanded separate schools and a ban on “intermarriage or race mixing.”

Such an ideology called for political separatism as well. This was the strategy of Black Power. Born in the anger of the Meredith march through Mississippi, this potent idea was carried North by Stokely Carmichael and other militants and debated at a National Conference on Black Power attended by a thousand delegates in Newark in midsummer 1967. In the spirit of Malcolm X’s black nationalist program, the aim now was to organize a separate black “third force,” which was either to gain control of one or both major parties or to strike out on its own. The most extreme expression of political separatism was the Black Panther party, founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby George Seale a year and a half after Malcolm’s death. His party, Panther chairman Seale said, “realizes that the white power structure’s real power is its military force.” So blacks had to organize themselves “and put a shotgun in every black man’s home.”

The force of black desperation and anger was now both vitalizing and fragmenting the black leadership. The once liberal-left NAACP now stood on the right of an array of black groups. King’s SCLC was shifting a bit to the left, and SNCC even more so, as it dropped much of its white membership. Also on the left stood CORE, but it still sought to work through the machinery of the two big parties. On the far left, separated from the rest -by their cult of violence, stood the Panthers. “The thrust of Black Power into national politics sounded the death knell of civil-rights alliances,” according to historian Thomas L. Blair. “It brought the black masses into what Frederick Douglass called the ‘awful roar of struggle.’ It revealed basic differences over ideology, methods, tactics, and strategy” among black groups as well as conflicts over power and status within the Democratic-liberal-labor-left civil rights coalition.

Yet at the heart of the new black politics was a powerful political consciousness rooted in an old and expanding black culture. More blacks were turning, for reasons ideological and spiritual, to their origins in Africa, to their way stations in the Caribbean. They looked up to their own heroes and celebrities, to their own artists, writers, musicians, dancers, their own actors on and off Broadway and in the ghetto, their own black history and myths. They read such journals as Black Theatre, Black Scholar, Black Poetry, Black Enterprise. Negro Digest changed its name to Black World, as blacks drove the very word “Negro,” and all it connoted, out of their vocabulary and their conscious lives. There was black dress, food, slang, jazz, hairstyles, and black jive and rapping, and above all black soul, which encompassed all of these things and more. Black religion embraced Christianity, Islam, and varieties thereof, including fundamentalism, evangelicalism, Catholicism, belief in the Kawaida value system or in a Christian black nationalism that proclaimed Jesus as the Black Messiah. Many of these beliefs were in flux; black Roman Catholics, for example, tripled in number over the three postwar decades.

Thus Black Power had its own rich culture, history, literature, religion, style, values. But it lacked a coherent political strategy, and the issue of strategy more and more arrayed black against black. Even while he led the Meredith march through the Mississippi heat, King could hear young blacks behind him bitterly criticizing nonviolence. “If one of these damn white Mississippi crackers touches me,” he heard a young voice say, “I’m gonna knock the hell out of him.” They should sing, someone said, “We Shall Overrun,” not “Overcome.”

The issue of strategy came to a head in a new and bitter battlefield: Chicago. After his successes in the South, King decided to make the “City of the Big Shoulders” his first major northern target, not only to force Mayor Richard Daley to end racism in hiring and housing but to prove that nonviolence could work in northern ghettos. To show his commitment he settled in a shabby, urine-stenched tenement in one of Chicago’s worst slums. During the long planning and mobilizing process Black Power militants booed King on the streets. Though hurt and angry, he reflected that he and the other leaders had preached freedom and promised freedom but had been “unable to deliver on our promises.” Few could question King’s militance in Chicago. After affixing a set of demands to the metal door of City Hall, in Martin Luther style except for the adhesive tape, King readied his forces for nonviolent sit-ins, camp-ins, boycotts.

It was too late. The street people moved first. In the 100-degree heat youths turned on water hydrants and reveled in the cold jets, but when they were accosted by the police, violence erupted, turning that night and the next day into open war between hundreds of police and thousands of blacks. In vain King and his associates toured the war-swept area preaching nonviolence. By the time several thousand National Guardsmen started patrolling the area, two persons had been killed, 56 injured, almost 300 jailed. King grimly proceeded with his demonstrations. Day after day blacks marched through white areas of Chicago. They were met with epithets, Confederate flags, rocks, bottles, bricks.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” King said. In all the demonstrations down South he had “never seen—even in Mississippi and Alabama—mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago.” Somewhat intimidated, and under heavy pressure from Chicago’s Catholic hierarchy, Daley met with King and other black leaders to patch together an agreement on housing, mainly consisting of promises. Some blacks praised King for forcing the mayor to the bargaining table. Others called it a sellout.

So the black leaders continued to divide and argue over political ways and means. In all the diversity of attitudes and style, however, there could be discerned a remarkable agreement over the highest values and ultimate ends. Just as blacks from left to right apotheosized liberty and equality, so did both black nationalists and Muslims. Elijah Muhammad’s 1962 manifesto proclaimed at the very start, “We want freedom,” as did the Black Panther party program six years later. Blacks invariably backed egalitarian ideas as well. Inevitably interpretations of such values differed. Thus the Muslims declared they wanted “full and complete freedom” and spelled this out, while the Panthers defined their freedom as “power to determine the destiny of our black community.” Whether this kind of agreement on overarching values, camouflaging disagreement over specific policies and tactics, could serve as a basis of political unity remained as dubious in the black community as it always had in the white.

A storm was rising in the mid-sixties, however, that would bring blacks into stronger harmony. As LBJ’s escalation in Indochina proceeded apace, blacks were drawn more and more into the Vietnam resistance, out of motives ranging from compassion for people of color in Indochina to distaste for “whitey’s war” fought so disproportionately by black men. As King became increasingly outspoken against the war, the White House distanced itself from him and the black movement. This hurt, because time and again King still needed Administration help. But he could not resist this higher call. “We must combine the fervor of the civil rights movement with the peace movement,” he said in February 1967, in his first talk entirely devoted to Vietnam. “We must demonstrate, teach and preach, until the very foundations of our nation are shaken. ”

Rolling Thunder

He had known from the start, Lyndon Johnson told Doris Kearns the year after he left the White House, that he would be crucified either way he moved.

“If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams to provide education and medical care to the browns and the blacks and the lame and the poor. But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.”

LBJ elaborated. “Oh, I could see it coming all right. History provided too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers.” The Spanish-American War had drowned the populist spirit—World War I, Wilson’s New Freedom—World War II, the New Deal. It could happen again. The conservatives always loved a war. “Oh, they’d use it to say they were against my programs, not because they were against the poor—why, they were as generous and charitable as the best of Americans—but because the war had to come first. First, we had to beat those Godless Communists and then we could worry about the homeless Americans. And the generals. Oh, they’d love the war, too.” That was why he had been so suspicious of the military.

“Yet everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I’d be giving a big fat reward for aggression. And I knew that if we let Communist aggression succeed in taking over South Vietnam, there would follow in this country an endless national debate—a mean and destructive debate—that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy.” Truman and Acheson had lost their effectiveness when the communists took over in China. The “loss” of China helped cause the rise of McCarthy. But compared to what might have happened in Vietnam, all that was “chickenshit.”

The former President had lost none of his bombast, sarcasm, Texas high coloring, his capacity to oversimplify history. But wholly authentic in this discourse was the self-portrait of a leader who had been deeply divided about his choices as he had perceived them. As usual, he had dealt with his options by personalizing them. He remembered just what he had felt and whom he had feared in those years: Bobby Kennedy would be out front telling everyone that Lyndon Johnson had betrayed John Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam. LBJ would be called a coward, an unmanly man, a man without a spine. He had nightmares, he said, about people running toward him shouting “Coward! Traitor! Weakling!” But he feared World War III even more.

Always the image of Roosevelt loomed before him as exemplar and guide—FDR, who had led the nation so skillfully against Hitlerism despite the doubters and the defeatists. World War II had shown that the defense of little nations like Czechoslovakia was necessary to the security of big nations; that the democracies must unite in the face of aggression; that nations must live up to their promises and commitments. LBJ knew of Hans Morgenthau’s warning against treating Vietnam in European terms—but had not Roosevelt’s and Truman’s way of standing up to aggression worked against Japan? Against North Korea?

So Johnson had reasoned. It seemed historically fitting, in retrospect, that he had dealt with his first Vietnam “crisis” much as Roosevelt had exploited Nazi “aggression” in the North Atlantic. Just as FDR had converted provocative acts on both sides into a simple act of Nazi hostility, just as he had grossly oversimplified murky actions in the misty waters south of Greenland, so Johnson seized on equally minor, two-sided, and confused encounters between an American destroyer and North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 to step up the war. After ordering reprisal air strikes against North Vietnam, LBJ asked congressional approval for a resolution—drafted in the White House several months before the Tonkin Gulf incident—that would empower the President as Commander-in-Chief to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against forces of the United States. After brief hearings at which the Administration failed to provide Congress with vital information about the Gulf of Tonkin encounters, disingenuously suggesting that the attack on the destroyer had been unprovoked, the House gave Johnson his mandate by a vote of 414-0, the Senate by 88-2. Only the outspoken former Republican Wayne Morse of Oregon and Democrat Ernest Gruening of Alaska voted against the White House.

The escalation continued. National Liberation Front forces attacked a U.S. base at Pleiku in February 1965, killing eight Americans. Johnson ordered air strikes and sent in the first official American troops—no longer “advisers.” The sequence became tedious: land battles, more troops mobilized on both sides, lulls in the struggle marked by calls for negotiation, more battles.

Later, when Johnson talked to Kearns and others about his nightmares, about awaking and prowling the White House and visiting the situation room to scrutinize the latest battle reports, some said that the President had become unhinged. But if this was the case, the whole White House had been a little mad, for the President had acted not alone but on the advice of such presumably sober and experienced advisers as Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, and many others who were largely holdovers from the JFK White House. Some said that LBJ had become a fanatical anticommunist in the face of Hanoi’s resistance. But the President was no fanatic. He often spoke loudly while wielding a relatively small stick, limiting attacks in both intensity and duration, holding back the military all-outers, spending hours selecting bombing targets that would not provoke Chinese or Soviet retaliation. He constantly pleaded that he was seeking not to crush communism in Russia or China or North Vietnam—merely to preserve South Vietnam as a bastion of present, or future, freedom. Indeed he staked his most eager hopes on his numerous economic aid and social reform programs in Vietnam—a kind of Indochinese Great Society. He would bring to the Vietnamese democracy American style, honest elections, Bill of Rights liberties. Like his predecessor, he failed to see that the Vietnamese wanted freedom as they defined it—and the first freedom was liberation from imperial or neocolonial control.

His motivation was far less psychological or ideological than political and conceptual. The Gulf of Tonkin brush occurred hardly two weeks after the nomination of Barry Goldwater, and the Republicans were already making clear that they would campaign against the party that had lost Poland and China and was now about to lose Indochina. Even after his November triumph, Johnson feared that other rivals lay in wait for him, not only in the GOP but in both the hawk and dove wings of the Democratic party. Yet the conceptual factor was perhaps more influential, certainly more insidious. Every small escalation seemed so sensible, so practical, so moderate. Each little step was based on careful analysis, ample intelligence, elaborate quantification. Like good pragmatists, like eminently reasonable men, the leaders experimented with a variety of strategies and tactics. When none worked—and none ever did—they tried something else.

Moreover, they were not wholly distracted by Southeast Asia—not at first anyway. They were guarding Atlantic ramparts against communism as well. Early in 1963, Kennedy had dispatched Vice President Johnson to the Dominican Republic for the inauguration of Juan Bosch, a litterateur and leftist, noncommunist politician, as President. Photographs depicted LBJ and Bosch in a warm Latin abrazo. After the generals overthrew Bosch six months later, civilian and army supporters of the deposed President struck back in April 1965. Johnson promptly dispatched the Marines, ostensibly to save lives but mainly because of some scattered indications that communists were among the pro-Bosch forces. Within three weeks 22,000 American troops were patrolling the small nation—the first major overt military intervention in a Latin nation in forty years. The Administration never produced convincing evidence of significant communist involvement, but once again Washington was captive to the phantom threat of unified global communism. God forbid that there be another Cuba in the Caribbean!

The Americans used the latest, most sophisticated intelligence technology in Indochina, but their analysis of political information was faulty. Otherwise they might have grasped that the communists too lacked global unity; that the communist world too was torn by geopolitical differences, national rivalries, factional quarrels, leadership rivalries; that Hanoi faced many of the same types of problems with friends and foes that Washington did—faithless allies, coalition weaknesses, great powers ultimately devoted to their own national interests and perhaps willing in a pinch to “lose” Vietnam or some other small communist ally.

As usual, big powers had plenty of advice for small allies. Mao Tse-tung urged the Vietnamese communists to follow the strategy of protracted conflict he had developed and tested against the Japanese and the Chinese Nationalists. Lin Piao wrote an important article humbly analyzing mistakes made during the Chinese Revolution but obviously reproaching Hanoi for being intent on escalating and not knowing when to pull back. The Vietnamese hardly took this advice with fraternal grace. They had long memories of Chinese aggression over the centuries, of Chinese arrogance toward lesser peoples, of the Chinese “sellout” of their Vietnamese comrades at Geneva in 1954, when Vietnam was partitioned at the 17th parallel. Did Peking wish to keep Vietnam divided and impotent so that the Chinese could dominate Indochina?

Nor did the Hanoi regime have any more comradely love for the Russians. Moscow too had been a party to the Geneva Accords; at a critical moment Molotov, surrounded by Mendès-France, Chou En-lai, and Eden, had hammered down with the finality of a blacksmith’s blows the agreement that provided for partition. Hanoi rightly suspected that the Russians saw Vietnam as a pawn in great power rivalry, were far more concerned about their relationship with China, and above all feared that escalation in Southeast Asia would lead to World War III. Hanoi no doubt suspected all this—what it did not fully grasp was the extent to which Lyndon Johnson too feared that escalation might trigger a nuclear war.

What Hanoi did know by 1965 was that Hanoi must go it alone. The North Vietnamese could extract help from Moscow and Peking by expertly playing one off against the other, but the extent of military and logistical aid finally turned on shifting great power relationships as well as Hanoi’s needs. The North Vietnamese people had to survive under merciless American bombing while Hanoi mounted its own land infiltration and attacks to the south. During 1966 the Pentagon’s Rolling Thunder saturated North Vietnamese military centers, supply depots, and infiltration tracks with 136,000 tons of bombs. Mammoth B-52S, each carrying almost thirty tons of explosives, left the countryside scarred and towns and villages destroyed. McNamara privately admitted that North Vietnamese civilian casualties were running up to one thousand a month.

Rolling Thunder was ill named, for it implied an Administration steadfastness that did not exist. The Joint Chiefs were urging a stepped-up, unrestricted air war; others contended that bombing could not succeed against a government and people like the North Vietnamese. Here too Johnson took the “practical” middle path, adopting a stop-and-go escalation. This not only hardened popular anger and resistance in North Vietnam without shocking it into defeatism but enabled Hanoi, with its small and widely dispersed factories, to establish alternative transportation routes and place workers underground. Tens of thousands of men, women, and children worked and even lived in an estimated 30,000 miles of tunnels.

Under the holocaust of bombs Hanoi was still able to dispatch troops and supplies to the south. Even the official United States estimates acknowledged that perhaps 90,000 men infiltrated south in 1967, almost three times the number that had done so two years earlier. As usual the airmen boasted of bombing with surgical precision and as usual they exaggerated—it was hard to identify the infiltration routes and even harder to hit them. North Vietnamese engineers and laborers quickly filled in craters and improvised pontoon bridges, while drivers camouflaged their trucks with palm fronds and traveled at night, their headlights turned off, by following white markers along the roads. Americans marveled at the “ant labor” that could put back into operation in several days a key pass leading to the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

In the south the Americans massed military technology on the ground as awesome as the B-52S in the air. In what their general, William Westmoreland, called the “most sophisticated war in history,” they tried to apply the latest weapons to old-fashioned guerrilla warfare. “To locate an ever elusive enemy,” in George Herring’s summary, “the military used small, portable radar units and ‘people sniffers’ which picked up the odor of human urine. IBM 1430 computers were programmed to predict likely times and places of enemy attacks. Herbicides were used on a wide scale and with devastating ecological consequences to deprive the Vietcong of natural cover. C-123 ‘RANCHHAND’ crews, with the sardonic motto ‘Only You Can Prevent Forests,’ sprayed more than 100 million pounds of chemicals such as Agent Orange over millions of acres of forests, destroying an estimated one-half of South Vietnam’s timberlands and leaving human costs yet to be determined. C-47 transports were converted into awesome gunships (called ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’) that could fire 18,000 rounds a minute.”

But it was still the human factor that made the difference. “I have no army, I have no finances, I have no education system,” Ho Chi Minh had said. “I have only my hatred”—a hatred, Frances FitzGerald wrote later, that was the “key to the vast, secret torrents of energy that lay buried within the Vietnamese people.” But it was more than hatred. It was the determination of a rigorously propagandized and disciplined people led by ideologues. It was pride in their defeat of the French and now their standing up against the Americans. It was hope in their future of national independence—a hope that had stirred Americans two centuries before. It was faith in their kind of freedom.

Washington, D.C., Holy Saturday, April 17, 1965.A warm cloudless day in the nation’s capital, one of those dreamlike spring days that made the city of cherry blossoms appear like a fairy-tale picture book of democracy. While military officials in the big government buildings toiled during the weekend over escalation plans for Vietnam, tens of thousands of war protesters were flocking into town on buses and trains and on foot. After picketing the White House the petitioners moved on to the Washington Monument, where they heard peace songs by Joan Baez and Judy Collins and speeches by Bob Moses, Staughton Lynd, I. F. Stone, and Senator Gruening. Paul Potter, head of SDS, which had organized the march, closed it with a passionate and prophetic call to his listeners to build a broad social movement that “will, if necessary, respond to the Administration war effort with massive civil disobedience all over the country,” and beyond that, to try to change the whole “system” that had produced the war.

One by one Lyndon Johnson was also losing the support of men who had backed him. Martin Luther King, wondering when America would learn to understand the nationalistic spirit awakened within the colored people of the world, including the Vietnamese, broke with the Administration during the summer of 1965 on the issue. Walter Lippmann, discovering that the President had been planning to escalate the war even while telling the columnist that the war “had to be won on the non-military side,” and feeling the Administration’s cool breath to boot, never set foot in Johnson’s White House after the spring of 1965. Other notables also broke with the White House and the response was the same—excommunication.

But it was the protesters in the streets—especially the young—who were still leading the way. In the wake of the April march, SDS campus chapters, coffers, and protests burgeoned, with excited coverage by the media. Others had not waited for SDS to lead the swelling movement. In an earlier striking display of the 1960s phenomenon of leadership welling up from below, University of Michigan students and faculty in March had organized an all-night teach-in that drew thousands—an idea quickly copied at scores of other campuses, where antiwar professors debated State Department “truth teams” before large audiences. In late July 1965, just after LBJ announced a doubling of draft calls, CNVA troops marched on the New York induction center, carrying signs reading: “The President has declared war—we haven’t.” On the twentieth anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki an “Assembly of Unrepresented People” gathered in Washington for workshops and direct action that would connect black voting rights with Vietnam, creating a “peace and freedom” movement; a few hundred were arrested as they tried to invade the Capitol nonviolently with a “Declaration for Peace.” The Assembly gave birth to the first national antiwar coalition, the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, composed of thirty-three organizations.

It was across the country that the thunder rolled. In Oakland, protesters sat down in front of army trains carrying soldiers bound for Vietnam. An eighty-two-year-old woman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, followed the example of Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns and set herself afire on a Detroit street. In New York, pacifist David Miller lighted a flame to his draft card before cameras at the induction center, the first public defiance of a new law which had made draft card destruction punishable by five years in prison. In the fall of 1965 the National Coordinating Committee sponsored international days of protest, with thousands taking to the streets in cities across the country and as far-flung as Tokyo. A thirty-two-year-old Quaker from Baltimore also sat down—within view of McNamara’s window at the Pentagon—poured kerosene over his body, and died in a small inferno. A young Catholic Worker activist immolated himself in front of the United Nations, after having witnessed a draft-card burning during which hecklers yelled, “Burn yourselves, not your cards!”

As protests erupted across the country, attracting ever-greater numbers of people and intense television coverage, antiwar activists hotly debated age-old questions of strategy and organization: Should they maintain their bias against centralization or recognize the frequent need for leadership? Should they concentrate on the single issue of the Vietnam War or reach out to the varied concerns of other groups, especially blacks and students? Should they admit, or at least work with, communists, or steer clear of them as dangerous allies? The last issue was especially complex not only because liberal groups like the ADA and old-line labor unions in general opposed inclusion of “Stalinists” but because the communists were as usual divided into orthodox CPers, Maoists, Trotskyites, young communists, and other factions, who fought among themselves.

Cutting across these questions and groups was a conflict that pervaded the whole antiwar movement, a conflict, partly of generations, of classes, of tactics, a conflict of the Old Left, of the industrial trade unions, the nonrevolutionary socialists, the League for Industrial Democracy, of ADA “liberal reformism,” of political writers like Max Lerner and John P. Roche and novelists like Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison, arrayed against the New Left, with its own dogmas, against SDS and other militant organizations, against numerous academic Marxists, writer Norman Mailer and poet Robert Lowell, The Nation and the New York Review of Books, radical chic, “resistance and reconstruction.” Intellectuals pitched ferociously into the fray— some critics said because of guilt over their having legitimated confrontation by the young. Susan Sontag described America as a “criminal, sinister country—swollen with priggishness, numbed by affluence, bemused by the monstrous conceit that it has the mandate to dispose of the destiny of the world, of life itself, in terms of its own interests and jargon.”

“These alienated intellectuals,” exclaimed John Roche, now an LBJ aide, to Jimmy Breslin. “Mainly the New York artsy-crafty set. They’re in the Partisan Review and the New York Review and publications like that. The West Side jackal bins, I call them. They intend to launch a revolution from Riverside Drive.” He named names—Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Mailer …

Anti-Vietnam protest reached a new peak in April 1967, when at least a quarter million people gathered at the sprawling Sheep Meadow in Central Park and marched to the United Nations to hear King, Spock, Carmichael, and other notables speak passionately against the war. Though dizzied by the size of the New York rally, SDS leaders and some of their older associates were becoming convinced that protest was not enough—they must move on to resistance. Once again the rank-and-file activists took the lead: a three-day takeover of the University of Chicago administration building—Harvard SDS activists surrounding McNamara’s car and heatedly interrogating him—“We Won’t Go” statements and signings of students on dozens of campuses—an intense but nonviolent effort to obstruct Dow Chemical recruiting at the University of Wisconsin, triggering a ferocious assault by riot-clad police—and in late October 1967, a march on the very center of the “military-industrial complex,” the Pentagon, that huge, squat, World War II rampart across the Potomac from Washington.

The battle of the Pentagon was carefully planned as a rally for beginners, a “be-in” for hippies, an act of militant civil disobedience for the already committed, and as a “creative synthesis” of “Gandhi and guerrilla.” First an array of “witches, warlocks, holymen, seers, prophets, mystics, saints, sorcerers, shamans, troubadours, minstrels, bards, roadmen, and madmen,” led by the Diggers, a West Coast group of artists-organizers and “anarchists of the deed,” and by a rock band called the Fugs, invoked every bit of their magic to levitate the Pentagon and exorcise its demonic spirits. Unaccountably the Pentagon did not levitate. After an SDS vanguard and others broke through a cordon of MPs and National Guardsmen and seized high ground in the plaza before the building, several thousand more protesters pressed their way up against solid rows of rigid young soldiers carrying bayoneted M-14s. Through bullhorns and face to face the protesters conducted a teach-in to win over the troops.

“Join us!” they shouted, and then more gently, “You are our brothers.” They pleaded with the soldiers, sang to them, placed flowers in their upraised gun barrels. The rigid lines hardly wavered, nor did their confronters. As night fell and cold set in, protesters built campfires from posters and debris and shared their marijuana joints. When someone yelled “Burn a draft card! Keep warm!” hundreds of little flames flickered in the darkness—the ultimate “burn-in.” When the television cameras were gone, a flying wedge of troops broke them up with clubs and rifle butts. The next day the remaining protesters, singing “This Land Is Your Land,” quietly offered themselves for jail.

By this time, late 1967, the number of American troops in Vietnam was approaching a half million. Facing resistance in Vietnam and at home as strong as ever, Johnson struggled with his own ambivalence. He burned under the protesters’ caricature of him as a wild Texan aching to fire his six-shooters come high noon. Even in the White House he could hear the protesters, out on Pennsylvania Avenue, chanting, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” More and more the war heightened the war within himself. He hated to escalate, while step by step he escalated. Close associates—George Ball, Bill Moyers, and more recently McNamara—had broken away from him largely because of Vietnam. To the Chiefs of Staff, especially anxious for even fewer restrictions on bombing, he grumbled, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, that’s all you know.” He would not provoke Peking or Moscow. “I’m not going to spit in China’s face,” he said. On the other hand, “We can’t hunker down like a jackass in a hailstorm.” LBJ was no longer exhibiting the kind of Rooseveltian leadership that he prized.

It was now Hanoi, not Washington, that was preparing for a major escalation. Even more than Johnson, the communist leaders recognized an intensifying deadlock in the south. They detected worrisome signs. The party cadres seemed to be losing some of their revolutionary zeal after years of war. They were ignoring the doctrine “from the masses, to the masses,” losing touch with the villages, appearing even “passive and pessimistic.” It was time for bold revolutionary action, for the shock of violence. Hanoi carefully planned devastating attacks at over a hundred cities and towns, aimed at reinvigorating the military cadres, carrying the war for the first time from the countryside into urban areas, arousing the revolutionary potential among the South Vietnamese masses, and throwing both the Americans and the Saigon regime off balance. The attack would be launched at the start of Tet, the lunar new year holiday that by long custom had been observed with a cease-fire.

The Tet offensive burst out in South Vietnam like an eruption of electrical storms. From the tip of the delta to the northern border the communists struck at five of the six major cities and most of the provincial capitals. Their most publicized feat was an invasion of the fortresslike United States embassy in Saigon, their most dramatic victory the temporary capture of Hué. No quarter was shown: the attackers executed hundreds of soldiers and civilians in Hué; the chief of South Vietnam’s national police shot a bound captive out of hand on the streets of Saigon in full view of cameramen. Taken by surprise, American and South Vietnamese forces rallied strongly enough to recapture all the lost centers, usually after savage combat.

Blood-soaked bodies lying on the embassy lawn—the corpses of American dead piled on a personnel carrier—a Saigon official murdering a frightened and helpless captive—these pictures shocked the American public all the more after a series of optimistic statements by the commanding general in Vietnam, William Westmoreland. A serious military setback to Hanoi was converted by the press coverage into proof that the Administration had been lying about progress in Vietnam. Even the avuncular Walter Cronkite, who had flown to Vietnam for a firsthand look at Tet, was said to have demanded, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war! “ “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate,” the CBS newscaster told his huge audience in a special report when he returned to New York.

In vain LBJ insisted that once “the American people know the facts,” the communists would not “achieve a psychological victory.” This was what they had achieved. The public after a decade of Vietnam had had enough “facts.” It wanted the truth.

And the truth was that the United States could win this war only at a price it would not pay. The Administration even now did not fully recognize this; intense debates broke out in the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon in response to the generals’ request for another 206,000 men—which would have required mobilization of the reserves—to launch a post-Tet counterattack. Even the Pentagon was at war with itself. Civilian advisers to McNamara’s successor, the noted Washington lawyer Clark Clifford, warned that further escalation would send shock waves through the nation. But the military pressed for more. Clifford, who himself had turned against the war, convened for Johnson’s benefit a meeting of the so-called Wise Men, pillars of the national security establishment like Dean Acheson, John McCloy, McGeorge Bundy, Cyrus Vance.

It was a moment of truth for men brought up in a world when, time and again, American power had made the crucial difference in Europe, in the Pacific, in Korea. Now they told LBJ, like the gentlemen they were but in blunt language, that the war policy was bankrupt, the cost, political and financial, was too high. The key point, Vance said later, was that division in the country “was growing with such acuteness” as to threaten to “tear the United States apart.” Said LBJ: “The establishment bastards have bailed out.”

Politics was already dividing the nation—this was election year 1968. Vietnam dominated the scene as the presidential primaries got underway. “The President is confronted with the resistance, open or passive, of the whole military generation, their teachers, their friends, their families,” Walter Lippmann wrote. Public approval of Johnson’s handling of the war dropped to an all-time low of 26 percent after Tet—hard reading for a President who followed polls as closely as his blood pressure. Sensing LBJ’s weakness, Senator Eugene McCarthy entered the New Hampshire primary. A product, along with Humphrey and a dozen other national leaders, of Minnesota’s potent Democratic-Farmer-Labor school of doctrinal politics, McCarthy was committed to ending the Vietnam war. When he gained a remarkable 42 percent of the New Hampshire Democratic vote, he lost to the President but captured the nation’s headlines. For LBJ it was a political Tet—he had mobilized the most electoral power but lost the psychological battle.

No leader was more confounded by the New Hampshire surprise than Robert Kennedy, Senator from New York since 1964. Tet had shocked him into making his most passionate speech against the war; it had also made McCarthy formidable. Yet a Gallup poll showed that 70 percent of the American people wanted to continue the bombing. All save Johnson assumed that LBJ would run again; no major party in the twentieth century had repudiated its man in the White House. Now, after New Hampshire, McCarthy might have LBJ on the run. For weeks Kennedy and his old political friends had agonized over the New York senator’s running. They divided over it too: Ted Kennedy and Ted Sorensen opposed the idea, while others saw no alternative. Robert Kennedy, as competitive as ever, could not allow this rival to preempt the Vietnam issue or indeed the whole anti-Johnson movement. In mid-March, Kennedy announced for the presidency in the caucus room of the old Senate office building, where John Kennedy had thrown his hat into the ring eight years earlier.

During this month the White House had been undergoing its own agonizing over Vietnam. On March 31, Johnson took to the airwaves to announce a unilateral halt of all United States air and naval bombardment of most of the populated areas of the north. He called on Hanoi to join in negotiations. Then, as his listeners stared speechless at their television screens, the President said at the end of his talk, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.” He had had enough, he told Doris Kearns later. He was being stampeded from all directions—“rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters.” Then the thing he had feared most—Bobby Kennedy back in the fray, embodying the Kennedy heritage.

April was the cruelest month. Martin Luther King’s dream came to an end, for him, on the balcony of the black-owned Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where he had been championing a strike by garbagemen. One shot from a sniper’s rifle flew across the motel’s courtyard, cut King’s spinal column, and crumpled him to the floor. Within hours blacks in cities and towns across the nation exploded in wrath and frustration against this ultimate racial crime. Over 2,000 fires were set, over 2,000 people arrested, over 20,000 injured. The nation’s capital suffered the worst devastation, with ten deaths and over 700 fires. A white man was dragged from his car and stabbed to death. William Manchester noted the bitter irony: the death of the greatest prophet of nonviolence touched oil the worst outburst of arson, looting, and crime in the nation’s history.

Clearly the war issue had catalyzed black revolt and student unrest, not superseded them. The three issues collided and coalesced at Columbia University in the same tempestuous month of April. A few hundred student activists, after demonstrating against the university’s ties with a Pentagon think tank for war research, left the campus and descended into the hilly Harlem park—a buffer zone between the old university and the teeming ghetto below—where Columbia was building a gymnasium with a bottom level that would offer a “separate-but-equal” facility for Harlem. After tearing down a fence and denouncing “Gym Crow,” the students headed back to the campus, occupied the main undergraduate building, and “imprisoned” an acting dean. When black students who had joined the takeover asked the whites to leave so that the blacks could “go all the way,” the white activists surged toward the administration building, Low Library, heaved a board through a window, and made themselves at home in the suite of President Grayson Kirk.

For several days the strike gathered momentum, as the blacks renamed their captive building Malcolm X Hall, the whites experimented with techniques of participatory democracy and communal living, and three more buildings were occupied. An arm’s-length alliance between black and white students kept the forces of law at bay while the administration negotiated with the occupiers through the faculty. The stickler was amnesty. Several tense days of deadlock followed—then a thousand cops smashed through the barricades and arrested 700, leaving 150 injured. A new strike ended classes for the year. In the end the gym was abandoned, so the children of Harlem lost; students never won amnesty; Kirk retired from the university.

“Oh, God. When is this violence going to stop?” Robert Kennedy had cried out when he was told that King had been shot. His cry could as well have resounded in Europe, as 1968 became the “year of the barricades,” with eruptions of protest and reprisal in a long arc from art colleges in Britain to huge labor walkouts and street violence in France to university turbulence in Madrid to students marching in Belgrade and chanting “Free art, free theater” in Warsaw. By late June Kennedy was campaigning in the style his brother Jack had made famous. But people were sensing in him a compassion and desperate concern beyond anything Kennedys had before exhibited on the hustings. His blue eyes, Jack Newfield had noticed earlier, “were now sad rather than cold, haunted rather than hostile.” He spoke for the poor, the underclass that establishment and students alike had bypassed. The poor “are hidden in our society,” he would say. “No one sees them any more.” But he did.

Liberals backing McCarthy were furious with him as a Johnny-come-lately and as a Kennedy. McCarthy himself, waging a campaign of issues, warned against presidential power and the Kennedy type of “personalization of the presidency” at the expense of the kind of leadership that “must exist in every man and every woman.” Such adversaries Kennedy could at least see and even respect. Out there somewhere were the haters and the killers. Early in June, on a Tuesday evening in Los Angeles, after hearing the California primary returns that gave him a clear win over McCarthy and a realistic chance for the presidency, and after giving a brief talk for the poor and against violence, he left the hotel ballroom by a “safer” route through the kitchen for his own appointment in Samarra.

In a very real sense, David Broder wrote later, the Democratic party never recovered in 1968 from the shock of Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Certainly the suspense was gone, for Hubert Humphrey, inheriting the established labor-liberal leadership in the Democracy, was bound to win the convention endorsement in Mayor Daley’s Chicago. Others did keenly look forward to the convention—most notably the Youth International Party or “Yippies,” which aimed at shaping the youth culture into a revolutionary fighting force, using sensational media events instead of grass-roots organizing. They would nominate for President a live pig named “Pigasus.” While the Yippies helped turn the convention into the theater of the absurd, with others they made it a theater of conflict. Bathed in the eerie glare of TV lights, protesters and police fought it out in the heart of the city. In the convention hall Senator Abraham Ribicoff, in a dramatic nominating speech for Senator George McGovern, told Mayor Daley and the other delegates, “With George McGovern, we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago,” turning the mayor purple with rage.

When Richard Nixon completed the first leg of his comeback from the bitter defeats of the 1960 presidential election and the 1962 California gubernatorial race by easily winning the Republican nomination over New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, the stage seemed set for a climactic and even historic collision between warring philosophies, programs, and politicians. No one provoked Democrats as readily as Nixon, who intended to keep the focus on Democratic failures rather than Republican proposals. President Johnson’s anointment of Humphrey, however grudging, put the burden of defending the Democratic party record on the Vice President, however much he might want to strike out on his own. George Wallace’s entrance into the race challenged both parties but especially the Administration’s civil rights record. Eager to meet this challenge, black leaders stepped up their voter registration efforts. In a year already filled with tumult and bloodshed some observers anticipated a “real Donnybrook.”

The campaign did indeed get underway amid suspense and excitement, as Humphrey sought to reach out to the peace forces without antagonizing the still powerful and still proud President in the White House, as Nixon tried to go on the attack without reviving memories of the red-baiting “Tricky Dick” of the 1940s and 1950s, and as Wallace made a direct populist pitch to segregationists, fundamentalists, and blue-collar labor in their own vernacular. Wallace enlivened matters by choosing as his running mate on the American Independent ticket retired general Curtis E. LeMay, former chief of the Strategic Air Command, who presented a caricature of the bomb-wielding militarist and appeared, in Marshall Frady’s words, as “politically graceful as an irate buffalo on a waxed waltz floor.”

These political pyrotechnics were deceptive. The campaign became largely a battle of personalities rather than policies, mainly because Humphrey and Nixon hewed so closely to a centrist, consensual position on the issue of Vietnam that most voters saw little difference in their positions—and those voters who did see a distinction did not agree on which candidate was more hawk or more dove. Nixon was a “master of ambiguity” on Vietnam, a scholarly study concluded, and Humphrey “alternated between protestations of loyalty to current policy, and hints that he really disagreed with it.” Wallace, charging that there was not a “dime’s worth of difference” between the Tweedledum and Tweedledee candidates, appealed directly to the “forgotten Americans” and their sense of political alienation, powerlessness, estrangement from government, loss of freedom— and to their chauvinism, racism, and hatred of war resisters in the colleges.

“I’m going to ask my Attorney General,” he said in his standard speech, “to seek an indictment against every professor in this country who calls for a communist victory”—voice rising—“and see if I can’t put them under a good jail somewhere.” Loud cheers. “I’m sick and tired of seeing these few college students raise money, blood, and clothes for the communists and fly the Vietcong flag; they ought to be dragged by the hair of their heads and stuck under a good jail also.”

In the end the election contest settled into the electoral pattern of the preceding two decades. After assiduously courting the southern vote, Wallace carried five states of the old Solid South and Nixon five of the southern “rim states”; Humphrey won only Texas. Since southern states had been voting Republican or independent for President off and on for several decades, this was a predictable outcome in light of the Democrats’ civil rights posture. Winning 9.9 million votes nationally against Nixon’s 31.8 million and Humphrey’s 31.3 million, Wallace ran the strongest race against major-party candidates since La Follette in 1924. Humphrey, holding the labor vote against Wallace, carried the old Democratic party bastions of the industrial Northeast.

In splitting their vote almost evenly between Nixon and Humphrey, voters gave little guidance to leaders on Vietnam, for the major-party candidates had given little guidance to them. Well could reporter David Broder sum up the central paradox of the 1968 election: “a year of almost unprecedented violence and turmoil, a year of wild political oscillations and extremes, produced a terribly conventional result.” But the election had one decisive outcome. Richard M. Nixon was the next President of the United States.

Into the Quicksand

On January 19, 1969, the day before the inauguration of Richard Nixon as President, ten thousand “militant—but for the most part genial” demonstrators, led by four active-duty GIs, marched on the Capitol in opposition to the continuing war. The next day, armed only with banners, chanting protesters organized by the National Mobilization Committee conducted a peaceful incursion into the inaugural ceremony and the parade to the White House. But as the presidential motorcade crawled down Pennsylvania Avenue, a shower of projectiles—sticks, stones, bottles, smoke bombs—landed on the limousines of the new regime. The Mobe publicly condemned this violent action by an SDS faction—the first such disruption of an inaugural.

The world did not pay much attention. Its eyes were on the new President, who had come back from the defeats of 1960 and 1962 to inch his way up to the top of the greasy pole. It was the new Nixon, certified so by publicists and politicians. The old President-watcher Walter Lippmann, in choosing him over Humphrey, had discerned a “new Nixon, a maturer and mellower man who is no longer clawing his way to the top.” Theodore White would say, in his best-seller on the 1968 election, that the “Nixon of 1968 was so different from the Nixon of 1960 that the whole personality required re-exploration.” A happy Nixon on election night had promised to “bridge the generation gap” and “bring the American people together.” His inaugural address was conciliatory too.

But was there indeed a new Nixon? The first test was bound to be Vietnam. Nixon had promised—and the country expected—more decisive action to end the war in Indochina without dishonor. But how? On what terms? Leaders of both parties had long broadly agreed on the strategy of “Vietnamization”—of phasing out American troops while South Vietnam took control of its own military defense. Johnson’s strategy had been gradual escalation, extensive though selective bombing, and promises to Saigon of support for the South Vietnam regime along with assurances to Hanoi that he would not challenge its legitimacy in the north. Nixon too favored help to Saigon along with a phased pullout, but twenty years later, after studying the available records and the myriad memoirs, historians were not clear whether Nixon and his adviser Henry Kissinger planned on keeping South Vietnam viable no matter what—the old policy—or on pulling out of South Vietnam no matter what. And that would be a crucial distinction.

“We will not make the same old mistakes,” Kissinger said in 1969. “We will make our own.” But the American people would not tolerate many more mistakes in Vietnam.

From the start Vietnam brought out Nixon’s basic dualism. He would step up negotiation with Hanoi and speed up withdrawal of American troops. Maintaining continuity with previous Presidents, he would “seek the opportunity,” as he said in an address to the nation in mid-May 1969, “for the South Vietnamese people to determine their own political future without outside interference.” If the war had to go on, it was “a war for peace.” If that phrase reminded some less of Woodrow Wilson than of George Orwell (“War Is Peace”), the new President still was eager to end the bloodletting in Vietnam. “I’m not going to end up like LBJ,” he said, “holed up in the White House, afraid to show my face on the street. I’m going to stop that war. Fast.”

But his other means of stopping the war—“fast”—was to enhance it. He could not forget his days in the White House under Eisenhower when Ike had won a favorable settlement in Korea, as Nixon saw it, by threatening China with massive escalation, even the use of nuclear weapons. Surely a jolting threat would succeed against another obdurate enemy in Asia.

“I call it the Madman Theory, Bob,” Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman reported his boss’s telling him during the 1968 campaign. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”

Certainly Ho was not begging for peace at the moment. Late in February his forces launched a new offensive that inflicted heavy losses on American troops, now approaching their peak level of 543,400. Within a few weeks the President expanded the bombing in Laos, sending in B-52S for the first time, and began a secret air war in Cambodia; for over a year the bombing orders were burned after each sortie. By intensifying the war outside Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger were showing Hanoi and Moscow that they would break the restraints LBJ had imposed. Sensing that the war would not soon end, the antiwar and black movements during Nixon’s first hundred days escalated in size and militance as dramatically as the secret enlargement of the war. More and more students were taking part in protests, which often brought a rash of strikes and building takeovers, amid considerable property destruction and violence.

And now a strange thing happened to the Nixon White House. It fell into the same Vietnam pattern as had the previous Administration it had so condemned—the same heavy military actions interspersed with clandestine negotiations, the same expansion and contraction of the war as the prospects of a settlement waxed and waned, the same effort to strengthen the South Vietnamese forces, the same caution about unduly provoking Moscow or Peking.

The White House did not understand that the Vietnam War, despite all the escalation, refused to fit the pattern of Western wars—authoritative decisions by the political and military leaders at the top, the marshaling of disciplined armies on the field, the mobilization of patriotic support at home. To an extraordinary degree the course of events in Vietnam turned on the motivation, morale, and self-discipline of third cadres, whether regulars or guerrillas, in the field, and on the protesting activists in the streets and neighborhoods of America. The outcome of all wars of historic importance is determined to a degree by the skill and resoluteness of foot soldiers on the political battlefield as well as the military. The crucial role of these factors in Vietnam was enormously enhanced by the fact that not two opposing armies but five had thrown their weight into the shifting balance of forces: Hanoi’s regulars in the south, the NLF, Saigon’s troops, American GIs, and the army of protesters back home. These military and political cadres formed a grid of countervailing forces that dominated Nixon’s White House even more than Johnson’s.

Of the staying power of the communists there could be little doubt, after almost a decade of their battling the American invader following their earlier rout of the French. Despite extensive indoctrination by Hanoi in its version of Marxism, the regulars and the guerrillas were motivated far more by sheer hate—of all invaders, Chinese, Japanese, French, or American, of imperialists and exploiters who had controlled their country, cruel landlords, greedy police, and village officials who acted as puppets of the alien rulers—and by hope of freedom as they defined it. “Only by revolutionary violence can the masses defeat aggressive imperialism and its lackeys and overthrow the reactionary administration to take power,” their leader General Vo Nguyen Giap had written in 1964. Violent revolution was their means of achieving power; whether this means of achieving freedom might ultimately corrode that noble end was a question postponed. At times recruitment and morale sank, especially among the guerrillas, but their ideology of hate and hope and their refusal, unlike their enemy, to be distracted by the “illusion of peace” always brought them back to one transcending goal, victory.

With Nixon’s critical decision to push “Vietnamization” of the war in order to assure American families that their fathers, sons, and brothers, husbands and boyfriends, would soon be returning, the staying power of Saigon’s troops became of central importance to the White House during 1969. Most Americans in Saigon, forgetting that their own politicians had pioneered in the arts of bribery and boodle, had little but contempt for the corrupt, divided Saigon government with its brief king-of-the-rock regimes. They often lost patience with the South Vietnamese troops they sought to instruct in the techniques of mechanized war. Still, the fifth government after Diem was stabilized under Nguyen Van Thieu, and after intensive efforts by Saigon and Washington to beef up and modernize the South Vietnamese armed forces, these numbered about a million strong by the end of 1969, with ample weapons and supplies at their disposal. Everything then depended on the working out by Saigon and Washington of long-range plans for an orderly and successful execution of Vietnamization, but the necessary control and consistency were lacking in both capitals. Given the weaknesses at the top, the South Vietnamese troops showed more staying power than might have been expected.

So did the American troops in Vietnam, but their situation was quite different. Fighting nine thousand miles from home, holding only the vaguest notions of what they were fighting for or against, facing day after day appalling mud, heat, dust, downpours, and an elusive enemy who attacked with grenades, mines, ambushes, night infiltrations, and other guerrilla tactics, the GIs held up relatively well until Nixon’s troop pullback policy left the remaining Vietnam force even less aware of the purpose of the war and even more eager to get out fast. As morale and discipline fell, a whole drug culture developed. Ugly racial hatreds surfaced. “Fragging”—men killing their own officers—rose to unprecedented heights. Americans at home were shocked to learn, eighteen months after it happened, that in March 1968 GIs had gunned down at least 450 helpless South Vietnamese civilians—children, women, old men—at My Lai. The great number of GIs dug in and held on, but by 1969 they were a declining part of the grid of countervailing forces.

The most dynamic force in this grid was busy mobilizing, recruiting, and deploying not in Indochina but in the United States, as antiwar protesters stepped up their demonstrations across the country. Far more ominous for the Administration, protest was now flaring in and around the armed services. More and more soldiers were going AWOL to avoid being sentenced to Vietnam; a few found temporary sanctuary in churches and movement dwellings. Service people were now joining peace marches as “GI coffeehouses” in Vietnam, elsewhere abroad, and back home helped to galvanize discontent at military bases. Draft resistance and evasion were widening. During the Vietnam era it was estimated that more than half a million men were draft offenders; of these over 200,000 were actually accused of draft offenses, 25,000 were indicted, almost 9,000 were convicted, and 4,000 were sentenced to prison, serving an average of eighteen months. Nearly half of the half million draft offenders had failed even to register for the draft; of these only a few were prosecuted. Some 40,000 presumed draft offenders and military deserters fled to Canada and other countries.

Protest took spectacular forms, as activists vied for headlines. In July 1969, five women, calling themselves Women Against Daddy Warbucks, darted into Manhattan draft board offices, stole dozens of draft files, and tore the “1” and the “A” from typewriters to exorcise the l-A denoting draft eligibles. Two days later they surfaced at Rockefeller Center to toss the confettied draft records into the teeth of the multinational corporations concentrated there. This climaxed a dozen nonviolent raids on draft boards and on Dow Chemical that had started two years earlier when Jesuit priest Philip Berrigan and two others poured their own blood (mixed with duck blood) on draft files in Baltimore as their way of combining Gandhi and guerrilla, thus pushing nonviolent direct action to its outer limit. Some months later the Catonsville Nine—Berrigan, his brother Daniel, also a Jesuit priest, and seven other radical Catholics—made a bonfire of draft files with homemade “napalm,” declaring, “We believe some property has no right to exist.” These activists, carefully avoiding harm to persons, calmly accepted the consequences, often jail.

In a relentless spiral, militant protest edged toward outright armed struggle, as New Left activists lost patience with nonviolence. Many SDSers felt frustrated with their failure to build a more radical movement, except at a few places like Stanford. With the infiltration of SDS by the Progressive Labor party, a self-styled Marxist-Leninist-Maoist cadre, SDS meetings became scenes of ideological forensics. Bitter quarrels and shouting matches erupted over the correct line—“vanguarditis,” Carl Oglesby called it—in recruiting and organizing. To counter the growing appeal of PL’s organizational vigor and anti-imperialist political dogma, the National Office won adoption of a proposal to forge a “Revolutionary Youth Movement” of the working class. Marxism became, wrote Jim Miller, “a weapon in an internal power struggle.”

This sectarian extremism culminated at the SDS convention in Chicago in June 1969. The National Office contingent handed delegates a long-winded RYM treatise entitled “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows”—a line from Bob Dylan—and setting forth what Kirkpatrick Sale described as “a peculiar mix of New Left attitudes clothed in Old Left arguments, the instincts of the sixties ground through a mill of the thirties, the liberating heritage of SDS dressed up in leaden boots from the past.” The assembly soon degenerated into mindless name-calling and slogan-shouting, enlivened by a few fistfights in the back. RYM leader Bernardine Dohrn, a brilliant young attorney who had worked with the National Lawyers Guild, led a walkout of a majority opposed to PL. When she returned later to the rump session with her forces and declared that all PL members were expelled from SDS, the RYM faction, several hundred strong, marched out into the Chicago night. Over the summer RYM in turn split into two parts, one of which became “Weatherman,” pledged to urban guerrilla warfare in support of Third World revolution.

And so SDS died as a national entity. The “organized New Left disintegrated into warring factions over precisely the question of how to transcend the limits of student radicalism,” Richard Flacks, a leader of SDS in the early days, concluded. “The era of campus confrontation and student revolutionism has ended not because it failed, but because it reached the limit of its possibilities.”

Divided as they were, the protesters could hardly grasp their growing impact on the White House. Nixon was still groping for some kind of middle way even while the student-led demonstrations single-mindedly focused on ending the war, and even while Hanoi’s spokesmen made clear their absolute determination to win it. The White House was caught in a vise largely of its own making. It was trying to fend off protest at home, conduct air and ground attacks against North Vietnam, and “Vietnamize” the war even while the Saigon regime feared the departure of the Americans. In early summer 1969 the President decided to “go for broke” to end the war, according to his memoirs, “either by negotiated agreement or by an increased use of force.”

It must have been the first time in history that a war leader adjusted his war-and-peace scenario to the academic calendar. “Once the summer was over,” Nixon remembered, and the colleges as well as Congress returned from vacation in September, “a massive new antiwar tide would sweep the country during the fall and winter.” He decided to set November 1, 1969— the first anniversary of a bombing hall that LBJ had desperately gambled on during the final days of the 1968 election—as the deadline for an ultimatum to North Vietnam. He instructed Kissinger to draw up an operation—“Duck Hook” it was called—to force Hanoi to its knees. Soon the national security aide and his staff were working up such alternatives as massive carpet bombing of Hanoi and other cities, mining Haiphong harbor and inland waterways, bombing dikes on the Red River delta, even using tactical nuclear weapons to cut off supply routes from Russia and China. But Nixon had been right about the protesters. Four blocks from the White House another team of planners was hard at work organizing a huge Moratorium, a day of nationwide protest against the war.

The peace forces got there first. On October 15, another thunderous wave of protest rolled across the nation. Students, workers, homemakers, politicians, executives broke from their routines to join marches, rallies, vigils, teach-ins, doorbell ringings, and readings of the rolls of war dead. Few campuses were untouched. At Whittier College, Nixon’s alma mater in California’s Orange County, the college president’s wife lit a “flame of life” to burn until the war ended. Women in Los Alamos, New Mexico, birthplace of the atomic bomb, blocked a bridge leading to war plants. At the county courthouse in Lexington, Kentucky, a large crowd listened quietly to the names of the state’s war dead; a woman walked up to the microphone and uttered a single name. “This is my son,” she said. “He was killed last week.”

Caught between Hanoi’s steadfast pursuit of victory and the protesters’ demand for peace, Nixon suddenly switched from his intended ultimatum to a speech in defense of Vietnamization. Delaying his address for two days so that it would not adversely affect a Republican candidate in a New Jersey state election, the President contended that a quick pullout from Vietnam would produce a bloodbath and a loss of confidence in American leadership at home and abroad. Vietnamization would mean peace with honor. He had seen in San Francisco, he said, demonstrators with signs reading: “Lose in Vietnam, bring the boys home.” Well, he would not allow a “vocal minority” to prevail over “the great silent majority.” It was Nixon at his most ambidextrous:

“Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”

The protesters would have none of it. They saw Vietnamization as Nixon’s “invisibility” stratagem to turn over the ground war to Saigon while he further expanded the air war, which was less accessible to the media. By reducing troops, draft calls, costs, and caskets returning from combat, he would make a pretense of winding down the war while in fact it would become more destructive than ever. In November the Moratorium and the Mobe’s successor coalition, the New Mobe, in uneasy alliance, led the most ambitious demonstration yet, blanketing the nation but concentrated in Washington. In long, dark robes tens of thousands of protesters walked silently in a “March Against Death” from Arlington National Cemetery to Capitol Hill. Each wearing a cardboard placard with the name of an American soldier killed or a Vietnamese village destroyed, they shouted out the names as they passed the White House. The next day eleven coffins bearing the placards headed a vast procession from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Over half a million people gathered there in the cold, setting a new turnout record.

By January 1970, the end of his first year in the White House, Nixon’s Vietnam policy was still wavering between attack and withdrawal. Given time—much time—he might have stayed atop his swaying tightrope indefinitely. But the dynamics of war were not so easily balanced abroad and brokered at home. In March 1970, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s Chief of State, who had been walking his own tightrope in dealing with Hanoi, Peking, Washington, and Saigon and with ambitious subordinates in his capital at Phnom Penh, was deposed while on a trip to Europe. Whether or not Washington had any hand in the overthrow—and Kissinger hotly denied it—the new President, Lon Nol, was friendly to the Americans.

The coup upset a delicate balance. Hanoi’s forces had been taking advantage of long-established “sanctuaries” in Cambodia that protected their vital supply lines to the south, and Washington had been blasting these strong points. South Vietnamese certainly, and Americans probably, had been infiltrating across the South Vietnam border into Cambodia, for various reasons and with various covers. All parties concealed—or at least denied—their involvement. Now facing an unfriendly government in Phnom Penh, Hanoi’s forces in the sanctuary areas attacked farther west into Cambodia in order to avoid entrapment by U.S. and Saigon forces and strengthen their hand for future operations.

Whether this episode remained merely one more of the age-old shifts of power in the murky politics of Indochina depended on how the rival capitals responded. Commander-in-Chief Nixon was already poised for action. Hanoi’s “aggression” struck at all his vulnerabilities—his feeling that he had been playing the good guy in not escalating the war, his awareness that the fall election campaigns would be starting soon and the Administration had little to boast about, his fear of “losing” Cambodia, and above all his concern that Hanoi was strengthening its capacity to disrupt Vietnamization. Bypassing his Secretaries of State and Defense, who had expressed qualms about the idea, but with the solid support of Kissinger and some of the military, the President late in April resolved on a joint “incursion” by Americans and South Vietnamese against Hanoi’s sanctuaries.

“If, when the chips are down,” he said in announcing the invasion, “the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.” Like so many of Washington’s much-touted operations in Vietnam, the Cambodia incursion gained mixed results at best. GIs and South Vietnamese forces captured large stocks of supplies and cleared a few square miles of jungle, but once again the elusive North Vietnamese troops and their headquarters personnel escaped the net.

Back home the reaction of the antiwar forces was not mixed. Furious students protested on several hundred campuses, some of which were closed for months. Student outrage boiled over following press reports that Nixon during a visit to the Pentagon had said of other protesters, “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses.” At some universities students attacked or sacked ROTC buildings. After a weekend of turmoil at Kent State University in Ohio, during which the ROTC building was gutted, edgy National Guardsmen, ordered to disperse even peaceful assemblies, suddenly turned and fired on a crowd of demonstrating students. They killed two women and two men, two of them bystanders. Less noticed by a stunned nation was the even more arbitrary killing of two black students by police at Jackson State College in Mississippi. The Vietnam bloodbath had overflowed into the groves of academe.

Militarily, Cambodia left the war little changed. Washington pulled its troops back by the end of June; Hanoi, its timetable somewhat disrupted by the operation, restocked its supply depots and reestablished its sanctuaries. There followed a year of fight-talk-fight on both sides. Hanoi could not mount a decisive attack, nor could the Americans. Protests continued, fueled by a rising number of Vietnam veterans, some of whom at Christmastime 1971 occupied the Statue of Liberty as a war protest and hung the American flag upside down from Liberty’s crown. The Administration appeared physically as well as politically under siege, as demonstrators ringed the White House.

In his cell in the grim, fortresslike Latuna prison near El Paso, Texas, where he was doing two years for draft resistance, Randy Kehler opened his New York Times on a Sunday in mid-June 1971. Splashed across the front page was the first installment of the Pentagon’s own secret history of the Vietnam War, ordered by Defense Secretary McNamara in 1967 to uncover what had gone wrong. The forty-seven volumes of memos, cables, reports, and analysis documenting a pattern of governmental deception and confusion might never have seen the light of day without Kehler. For a few weeks publication of the Pentagon Papers in the Times and the Washington Post once again fired up the debate over Vietnam.

The man who leaked the secret history was forty-year-old Daniel Ellsberg. For years he had seemed the model young careerist on the rise. After a stint as a Marine infantry commander, he had spent years as a national security bureaucrat, a specialist in crisis decision making and nuclear command and control, a Pentagon functionary involved intimately in the early escalation of the Vietnam War, a “pacification” officer in South Vietnam, and an author of the Pentagon history. He returned from Vietnam opposed to the war effort—at first not because it was wrong or immoral but because of its dishonesty, corruption, and futility. For two years he crusaded in the corridors of power, lobbying high officials like McNamara and Walt Rostow and advising presidential candidates in 1968, especially Robert Kennedy. Nothing seemed to work.

Gradually Ellsberg fell in with people who had been remote from his world—a nonviolent activist from India who said that “for me, the concept of enemy doesn’t exist”; war resisters who defied the popular image of them as “guilt-ridden, fanatic extremists”; a Quaker activist, about to be locked up for refusing induction; and Kehler, who said he looked forward to joining David Harris and other friends in jail and had no remorse or fear, because he knew, he told a war resisters’ conference, that “lots of people around the world like you will carry on.” Later Ellsberg thought: these were “our best, our very best, and we’re sending them to prison, more important, we’re in a world where they feel they just had to go to prison.”

It was Kehler who provided the spark. Now Ellsberg knew that he would have to join the war resisters even if it meant jail. With the help of his children he xeroxed his top-secret volumes of the Pentagon report, and after fruitless efforts to involve prominent Senate doves, he turned the history over to The New York Times. When the Pentagon Papers appeared a month later the Justice Department won injunctions against further publication in the Times and the Post, a “prior restraint” on press freedom that was overturned by the Supreme Court.

With his mind on reelection in 1972, Nixon saw the Pentagon Papers flap as an opportunity to create another Alger Hiss, who had served his earlier ambitions so well. By painting Ellsberg as the symbol of the extreme left, the Administration could tar with the same brush both the New Left and antiwar Democrats. As a political functionary named Charles Colson reported to the White House, moreover, the Pentagon Papers were “a tailor-made issue for causing deep and lasting divisions within the Democratic-ranks.” The Democratic party hardly needed GOP help on divisiveness. Already carrying their heritage of disunity, they were busy seeking to recruit blacks, students, war resisters, and women, all of whom had plenty of divisions of their own.

Songs of the Sixties

When they’d finally all arrived they were, they sang, half a million strong—probably an exaggeration by a hundred thousand or so, but the Woodstock festival appeared so grandiose, in scope of music, attendance, media coverage, and social significance, that hyperbole seemed the only way to communicate its bigness. Attendance reached twice the anticipated 50,000 per day before dusk the first evening—and the organizers were forced to declare the concert free to all who had made the trek that August 1969 weekend to Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York. A participant called it “three days of mud, drugs, and music.” And how it rained, defiantly, on the greatest assemblage of rock ’n’ roll and folk talent of the decade: Richie Havens; Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Joe Cocker; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Santana; the Jefferson Airplane; Sly and the Family Stone; Jimi Hendrix; and the Who.

For three days music blasted from the amplifiers scattered around the eighty acres of natural bowl. But the music was secondary. Though Woodstock came “as a logical consequence of all the be-ins, love-ins, pop festivals, and tribal convocations that preceded it,” wrote Bruce Cook, it was more than all of these, giving “to an entire generation not so much a sense of who they are, but (much more important) who they would like to be.… The first Eucharistic Congress of a new rock religion.” And Life wrote: “Woodstock was less a music festival than a total experience, a phenomenon, a happening, high adventure, a near disaster and, in a small way, a struggle for survival.”

The roots of rock ’n’ roll—so named by a white Cleveland disc jockey who wanted to avoid the racial stigma carried by rhythm and blues—lie embedded in the early years of blues and country music. Before the 1950s whites had recorded “white music” while blacks recorded “black,” and though their listeners crossed color lines, musically and thematically country and rhythm and blues remained equal but separate.

In the mid-1950s, when white groups began recording black songs, rhythm and blues gained hold and rock took off. “To make R &B acceptable,” wrote composer and performer Frank Zappa, “the big shots of the record industry hired a bunch of little men with cigars and green visors, to synthesize and imitate the work of the Negroes. The visor men cranked out phony white rock.” But whatever the commercially imposed limitations of the music, it was an infusion of energy into popular culture. Rock ’n’ roll fans drove the new songs to the top of the charts. Opposition from the black artists whose works were being pilfered, from a Congress responding to industry pressure, and from the AM radio stations who recognized the exploitation for what it was, were all insufficient to halt the infestation of “phony white rock.”

The music called “black” had faced all the usual objections from the conventional, but rock ’n’ roll encountered a new and unique brand of opposition. Many adults found rock loud, often incomprehensible, and intolerably sexual. “If we cannot stem the tide of rock ’n’ roll,” warned a Columbia University professor, “with its waves of rhythmic narcosis and of future waves of vicarious craze, we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of pandemic funeral dances.” Boston Catholic leaders demanded the banning of rock. The San Antonio city council banished it from municipal swimming pool jukeboxes because it “attracted undesirable elements given to practicing their spastic gyrations in abbreviated bathing suits.” Parents shuddered at such insinuating lyrics as “I need it / When the moon is bright / I need it / When you hold me tight / I need it / In the middle of the night” and their blood curdled when Little Richard yowled, “Wop-bop-a-loo-bop / A-wop-bam-boom!”

But that was part of the idea—the more adults deplored rock, the more it meant to the young. Rock burst in on a generation that, Nik Cohn noted, felt it had no music of its own, no clothes or clubs, no tribal identity. “Everything had to be shared with adults.” The music began to generate its own social significance, at first vaguely and immaturely, but nevertheless giving a “divided people a sense that they may have something in common.”

“The culturally alienated went in for cool jazz, and folk music was the vehicle for the politically active minority,” wrote Jeff Greenfield. Folk had its origins in depression-era, vagabond protest music, but it was only infrequently available on commercial releases, and usually heard by the already converted until the voices and vibrancy of Joan Baez; the Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul and Mary; Phil Ochs; Pete Seeger; and, above all, Bob Dylan introduced a larger, if still selective, audience to the true music of protest and disaffection.

Dylan was “discovered” in a Greenwich Village club in 1961, where, upon entering, he had been asked for proof of age. His roots were middle-class, middle-American, but his voice was coarse, his music was of the road, his style was that of “the hungry, restless, freedom-loving friend and comrade of the oppressed.” He rambled into New York from Minnesota with dreams of emulating Woody Guthrie—“the greatest holiest godliest one in the world.” After his “discovery” he made his first album, playing alone with a harmonica and an acoustic guitar. The record cost Columbia Records just $402 to produce.

Dylan was not the popularizer of his greatest hit, “Blowing in the Wind.” He performed the song on tour and the mimeographed magazine Broadside published the lyrics, but not until the popular folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary heard and recorded it did it sell a million copies.

How many roads must a man walk down

before you call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove sail

before she sleeps in the sand?

How many times must the cannonballs fly

before they’re forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind,

the answer is blowing in the wind.

That recording single-handedly “established topical song as the most important development of the folk revival,” and Dylan as its premier artist.

Though he was never to dominate the music industry as the Beatles would, Dylan earned a commitment from his fans perhaps even deeper than the loyalty the Beatles enjoyed. Yet his followers’ expectations of him as the “musical great white hope of the Left” proved a burden. When, on the last night of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan stepped onto the stage carrying an electric guitar and launched into a rocking version of “Maggie’s Farm,” the audience for a moment sat in stunned silence, then heckled him off the stage with shrill cries of “Play folk music! … Sell out! … This is a folk festival!”

If Dylan’s folk fans felt betrayed by his electrification, he saw it as evolution and synthesis. Village Voice critic Jack Newfield commented, “If Whitman were alive today, he too would be playing an electric guitar.” Dylan had succeeded in bringing the feeling of folk—modern, protest folk—to the masses of rock. Proof of his success came in one month of 1965, when no fewer than forty-eight Dylan originals were recorded and released to a rapturous public.

They were four scruffy lads from the run-down port city of Liverpool playing seedy clubs in Britain and Germany until a shrewd manager repackaged them as waggish, cuddly moptops. The Beatles’ first success was sudden and phenomenal. In the annus mirabilis of 1963, their music became “one of the most persistent noises heard over England since the air-raid sirens were dismantled.” They sold more than two and a half million records that year, performed for royalty on the same bill with Maurice Chevalier and Marlene Dietrich, and needed squads of bobbies to protect them from screeching, scratching, fainting Beatlemaniacs.

The Beatles commenced their personal conquest of the United States when, on February 7, 1964, ten thousand teenagers gave them a hysterical welcome at Kennedy Airport in New York. Airport officials were incredulous—they had seen nothing like it, “not even for kings and queens!” 73 million people watched the Beatles perform on Ed Sullivan’s television show. They played at Carnegie Hall in New York, and one fifteen-year-old fan from New Hampshire who was there with 6,000 others described the essential Beatlemaniacal delusion: “You really do believe they can see you, just you alone, when they’re up on the stage. That’s why you scream, so they’ll notice you. I always felt John could see me. It was like a dream. Just me and John together and no one else.”

With such albums as Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles, and Abbey Road, the Beatles revolutionized rock and opened it to new possibilities. They spearheaded a British invasion that, as Ellen Willis noted, proved “that the mainstream of mass culture could produce folk music—that is, antiestablishment music.” Most antiestablishment and jolting to American sensibilities were Mick Jagger’s Rolling Stones, with their “twentieth century working-class songs.” As Jerry Hopkins put it, the “Beatles asked teenaged American females for their hands; the Stones asked for their pants.” Their music harked back to rock’s gritty, jarring, erotic origins in the blues, and in appearance the Stones cultivated ugliness and overt sexuality. They exuded contempt—and earned millions.

Groups inspired by the Beatles, such as the Beach Boys, and duos, such as Simon and Garfunkel, carried a sound even President Reagan would, years later, admit appreciating. But still newer sounds—more moody, less accessible, more personal—emerged from San Francisco bands, and they shifted the center of avant-garde rock from Britain to California.

Late in 1965 two benefit concerts were held in San Francisco, the first featuring the music of the Jefferson Airplane, with Allen Ginsberg leading three thousand in the chanting of mantras, and the second in the Fillmore Auditorium with the Grateful Dead. On the heels of these successes and at the urging of author Ken Kesey, came the seminal San Francisco “Trips Festival,” “a three-day mixed-media attempt to recreate an LSD experience without the LSD.” The Festival marked the beginning of the Haighl-Ashbury era with its psychedelia, mind-bending drugs, sandalwood, body painting, tribal Love-Ins and Human Be-ins.

San Francisco also produced Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company, and Country Joe and the Fish (originally called Country Mao and the Fish, after a saying of the Chairman’s, “Every fish in the sea is a potential convert”). The Dead challenged their audiences to fly on LSD, Joplin seduced hers, and Country Joe sang “ 1-2-3 What are we fightin’ for / Don’t ask me—I don’t give a damn / Next stop is Vietnam / And it’s 5-6-7 / Open up the pearly gates / Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why / Whoopee! / We’re all gonna die.”

Country Joe sang his “Fixin’ to Die Rag” at Woodstock, but that “first Eucharistic Congress” illustrated the tensions between the rock and counterculture and the New Left and antiwar movement. “Rock and Roll, Rock culture, hip, pop, and youth culture,” wrote radical Tom Smucker, “all spring out of middle-class reality, and spring out of capitalism, and all spring out of affluence.” While rock took overtly political forms and served up songs of social significance, typically it described freedom as the road to individual happiness, to personal self-fulfillment—a road that often had the contours of hedonism. Asked what was her “philosophy of life,” Janis Joplin replied, “Getting stoned, staying happy, and having a good time.” The point of drug use, wrote Todd Gitlin, was “to open a new space, an inner space, so that we could space out, live for the sheer exultant point of living.” Though the counterculture assumed that its hedonism was intrinsically anticapitalist, it reflected the established culture’s materialism, with, as William L. O’Neill noted, motorcycles, stereos, and electric guitars taking the place of big cars and ranch houses. Entrepreneurs trafficked in countercultural commodities, pushing strobe lights, Nehru jackets, surplus army clothes, incense, beads and bangles, posters, drugs, and, of course, records. By 1968 records were selling at a rate of nearly a billion dollars a year, and Forbes was counseling “Dad” not to dismiss rock as noise: “Try to dig it … it’s the sound of money.”

The counterculture’s political vision was of a Utopia from which politics was excluded, a pastoral Arcadia whose currency was amour. “All you need is love,” sang the Beatles. “Love is all you need.” The Jefferson Airplane urged, “Hey people now / Smile on your brother / Let me see you get together / Love one another right now.” SUPERZAP THEM ALL WITH THE LOVE, exhorted a sign in a Los Angeles commune. The counterculture was out to save America with a “cultural and spiritual revolution which the young themselves will lead,” but its approach to political action was antipolitical: the young were not to engage the established society but to disengage themselves from it, to drop out, to do their own thing. Social change was to be the outcome of individual self-realization. “We want the world and we want it now!” Jim Morrison snarled, but his vehicle of revolution was what he called “sexual politics.” At a Doors concert, he said, “The sex starts with me, then moves out to include the charmed circle of musicians on stage,” and then the audience. The audience went home, interacted “with the rest of reality, then I get it all back by interacting with that reality, so the whole sex thing works out to be one big ball of fire.” “The idea of leadership is a false god,” said Beatle John Lennon. “Following is not what it’s all about, but leaving messages of ‘This is what’s happening to us. Hey, what’s happening to you?’” The Vietnam war was over, he sang, when you wanted it to be.

This was a sea, Andrew Kopkind noted, in which political radicals found it difficult to swim. Though much of the New Left was “hippyized”— borrowing clothes, long hair, language, sexual and drug practices from the rock culture—that culture, in radical eyes, had evolved too little from its origins as an immature teen rebellion against “adults.” Gitlin, an SDS leader, worried that love should feel ashamed “when it was founded on privilege.”

Tom Smucker of the Movement for a Democratic Society wondered whether it was politically correct even to participate at Woodstock. When he heard that Abbie Hoffman had wrested from the weekend’s promoters space for a “Movement City,” he decided to go as a “test to see if the Movement could relate to something hip.” But how best to approach the hippies? Various suggestions were made, including: “Point out to people that what they were doing isn’t real. Bread and Circuses, Co-optation, The Plastic Straitjacket, that it was happening under Capitalism and therefore phony.” The MDS set up its booth in Movement City with a small printing press and heaps of literature. But in the City they were far from the center of action—where the “plain old campers” were—and soon they themselves abandoned the booth. “Leaflets blowing through a field, a printing press in the rain that was never used” were the “symbol of all our political activity.” Radicals failed to understand, he concluded, that Woodstock was not a political event but “another Rock and Roll adventure,” another example of “how you survive in affluent middle-class adolescence, and beyond. You take the good things, which are lying here or there, and turn them into something you can dig or turn yourself into someone who can dig them. You ignore the rest.

“We didn’t build the city, that’s for sure.”

Perhaps better even than Woodstock, an earlier incident at a Berkeley student strike illustrated the decade’s troubled connection between music and politics. To the audience an organizer shouted, “Let’s sing ‘Solidarity Forever.’” But no one seemed to know the words of that epic anthem of working-class revolt and there was an uncomfortable silence, until someone in the back started harmonizing the words of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” These innocuous if familiar lyrics were immediately and enthusiastically taken up by the thousands assembled.

CHAPTER 10

Liberty, Equality, Sisterhood

EARLY IN NOVEMBER 1962, as the glowing colors along the Hudson were turning to autumn sere, Eleanor Roosevelt died in her cottage in the hills above the river. Until the final weeks of pain and confinement she had carried on her private responsibilities, keeping in touch with her five offspring and myriad grandchildren and in-laws and ex-laws, serving hot dogs to youngsters from a school for troubled children, trudging through shops for the right presents at Christmastime, helping a black poet find a publisher, faithfully attending church, where she paid pew rent and put two dollars into the plate on Sunday mornings. Occasionally she faced small moral dilemmas. Offered $35,000 to do a margarine commercial, she struggled with her conscience overnight and in the morning decided she would do it. “For that amount of money,” she said, “I can save 6,000 lives”—through CARE packages.

She labored under her more public responsibilities as well, lecturing at Brandeis, pressuring John Kennedy about more appointments for women, publicizing the lot of migratory workers, writing her column—now taken by about forty newspapers after all the controversies. She remained as conventional about personal behavior as she was progressive about social responsibility; thus she was visibly annoyed when a granddaughter failed to return from a party by midnight. Her energy and prestige remained so high in her late seventies that Kennedy recruited her to chair his Commission on the Status of Women; from this position she peppered him and others in authority with letters of warm encouragement or gentle reproach on women’s issues and much else.

The long trajectory of Eleanor Roosevelt’s public life had spanned six decades of women’s evolving needs and interests. Opposed in her early years even to woman suffrage, she had expanded her own consciousness as she moved through the world of women’s clubs, the League of Women Voters, reform groups seeking to protect working women, the Democratic party anterooms to which women were relegated, barred from the chambers of power. By the 1960s she had seen it all: the pervasive discrimination against women in education and employment, the crucial role they could play in grass-roots politics, their inability often to perpetuate and institutionalize their gains, their need to establish a base in the political parties—especially her party, of course—rather than wasting their energies on third-party forays. Originally opposed to the Equal Rights Amendment for fear it would jeopardize hard-won legal protection for women, she was open-minded enough later to reverse her position. And she learned that a President’s widow could be voted America’s “Most Admired Woman” sixteen years after her husband’s death and still crave the warmth of intimate human love.

Always a social reformer rather than a militant feminist, she died on the eve of a profound transformation in the consciousness, behavior, and status of American women. The people she had worked with—Frances Perkins, Molly Dewson, the much-admired black leader Mary McLeod Bethune—had been primarily concerned with women’s pay, living conditions, education for jobs, relegation to the lowest rung of the opportunity ladder. This deep-biting economic inequality was thoroughly documented in the report of the commission transmitted to President Kennedy on the first anniversary of Eleanor Roosevelt’s death and two weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. Most of the economic problems facing women were centuries old; in the 1960s progress was still coming by inches. While blacks and students and antiwar protesters were seizing the headlines, women on the whole appeared inactive except to the degree they were involved in black and antiwar movements led largely by men.

Women lacked the kind of event—economic collapse, Pearl Harbor, Vietnam—that was needed to electrify the people and jolt the government out of its semi-paralysis. Their crisis was still an invisible one—a crisis of frustration and desperation. It was a “problem that has no name.”

Diary of four hours in the life of Marion Hudson, wife of Henry, mother of two, maker of a home of seven rooms, university student, part-time employee.

5.30 Henry wakes up to go to work. “Trucking” by Marvin Gay can be heard all over the house at full volume. I’m awake. 5.35 Henry turns down the radio just a little. 5.40 Bathroom light is on. Kitchen light is on. Hallway light is on.

(Why can’t he turn off these lights when he’s finished in a particular room!) 6.00 Monique and Tracey are awake. (Who isn’t after the troops have just been called out—meaning Henry.)

6.05 Gave Monique a bottle and changed her diaper.

6.06 Told Tracey he could not have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at this ghastly hour. (Didn’t say ghastly.)

6.15 Henry is off to the post office.

6.16 Get up to cut off the lights.

6.17 Settle down for some sleep.

6.30 Tracey is up—walking around in the house—scares me half to death.

6.31 Tracey starts pounding me on my back to wake up. He didn’t make it to the bathroom. His pajamas are wet.

6.32 I tell Tracey I am going to beat him half to death if he doesn’t change those pajamas.

6.33 Tracey gets in my bed.

6.40 We both finally doze off.

6.41 Tracey is awake again. He wants some Bosco.

6.42 I threaten him with a severe beating.

7.00 Thoroughly exhausted from scolding Tracey, I get up and make him some delicious Bosco. (Actually I feel like dumping the whole glass on top of him.) 7.05 It’s no use. I can’t get back to sleep. Tell Tracey to go upstairs and play with his trucks. Nothing else to do but daydream and think of what I have to do and wear.

7.25 Tracey wants a piece of pie.

7.30 I get up and turn on Tracey’s TV so he can watch Little Rascals.

8.00 Monique wants to get out of her crib. I let her yell till 8:30.

8.30 I’m up and ready. The wheels begin to move into motion.

8.45 Wash Monique and Tracey. Get them dressed. Fuss with Tracey about what shoes he is going to wear. He wants to wear his cowboy boots instead of the black ones. 9.00 Feed them breakfast. Eggs, Spam and toast. Turn on Sesame Street. Tracey doesn’t want his eggs. More confrontation.

9.05 Pack the kids tote bag to take over to Grandma’s. Tell Tracey he cannot take his new trucks. “Yes, I have to go to school today.” Clean off kitchen table and stove after Henry and myself.

9.10 Get dressed. Make up Tracey’s and Monique’s beds. Go into my room and make up the bed.

9.20 Pack my schoolbooks and coat. Gather Monique’s and Tracey’s coats and hats.

9.25 Start towards door. Run to freezer—take something out for dinner.

9.30 Monique just messed in her pants. Back to the bedroom. Change her. Put her coat back on. Meanwhile Tracey is hollering—he wants to go.

9.40 Get in car—head for Grandma’s.…

Breaking Through the Silken Curtain

During the “conformist fifties” Betty Friedan, a young Smith College alumna, had been writing and editing articles with titles like “Millionaire’s Wife” and “I Was Afraid to Have a Baby” for popular magazines like Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle. She had also been reading works by the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who contended that educated women reached their highest self-realization not through husband and children but through themselves, through their recognition of their own needs and capacities, through “self-actualization.” She had been reading surveys by Dr. Alfred Kinsey which indicated that as American women advanced in education and jobs, as they made “progress to equal participation in the rights, education, work, and decisions of American society,” they enjoyed higher degrees of sexual fulfillment. In 1963 Friedan achieved her own self-actualization with a book, The Feminine Mystique, that struck thousands of American women like a thunderclap.

With unflinching certitude Friedan’s book traced the web of myths and illusions that bound middle-class women to the one-dimensional role of housewife and mother—and the social forces that created and bolstered them. After World War II, she contended, educators, social scientists, the mass media, corporate advertising, and Freudian theories of female sexuality treated as “scientific religion” had together instilled in talented women the belief that their only sources of fulfillment were sex, home, and family. The well-educated and affluent suburban housewives she interviewed lived lives of quiet desperation, feeling inadequate, anxious, and depressed in existences ruled by the feminine mystique. The core of the modern woman’s problem, she concluded, was not sex but identity. Just as the Victorian culture barred women from gratifying their sexual needs, “our culture does not permit women to accept or gratify their basic need to grow and fulfill their potentialities as human beings.”

Though Friedan demonstrated that “the problem that has no name” was social and structural, not personal, her remedy was the reverse: that women exercise individual will and choice, that they find their identity by making their own life plans for meaningful work outside the home. She tacitly assumed that, at least for white middle-class women, institutions did not have to change substantially. Friedan ended her book with no call to collective action, no appeal to politics. But politics would not leave her alone.

Her start as a political activist was triggered by that act “conceived out of wedlock”—Chairman Howard Smith’s failed effort to kill the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by adding “sex” to the title outlawing discrimination in employment. The word “sex” stayed and the measure was enacted, but the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, evidently considering its addition a fluke and lacking effective enforcement powers, took little or no action on thousands of complaints filed by women. At a June 1966 conference in Washington of state commissions on the status of women— bodies spawned by Kennedy’s original commission that were now a “seething underground of women”—activist women urged passage of a resolution that the EEOC carry out the ban against sexual discrimination in employment. Stunned when the proposal could not even reach the floor—at a conference entitled “Targets for Action”—the activists turned to Friedan, who was attending the conclave to get material for her next book. She had already been urged by women in the underground—especially in the press, government, and unions—to start a movement modeled on the blacks’ successful effort.

Now the moment had arrived. During the final plenary session two dozen women from government, state commissions, and unions hastily gathered to lay plans. Friedan would later wonder whether the cabinet members and other high officials “who talked down to us at lunch knew that those two front tables, so rudely, agitatedly whispering to one another and passing around notes written on paper napkins, were under their very noses organizing NOW, the National Organization for Women, the first and major structure of the modern women’s movement.”

When it was formally established in October 1966, NOW had about three hundred charter members, a few of whom were men. The delegates elected Friedan president. Despite the leadership role of Aileen Hernandez, a black and a disaffected EEOC commissioner, who later would succeed Friedan as president, NOW activists were mainly white middle-class professionals in their mid-twenties to mid-forties.

“We, men and women,” NOW’s statement of purpose began, “… believe that the time has come for a new movement toward true equality for all women in America, and toward a fully equal partnership of the sexes, as part of the worldwide revolution of human rights now taking place within and beyond our national borders.” NOW would “break through the silken curtain of prejudice and discrimination against women in government, industry, the professions, the churches, the political parties, the judiciary, the labor unions, in education, science, medicine, law, religion and every other field of importance in American society.” NOW would “not accept the traditional assumption that a woman has to choose between marriage and motherhood, on the one hand, and serious participation in industry or the professions on the other.” The document set forth a formidable agenda of reform.

NOW began as a hierarchically structured body that made up for its lack of a mass base by expert use of the media. Her celebrity status, organizational skill, and boundless energy put Friedan in a central leadership role; she served as president until 1970. From the start, Friedan recounted, NOW members were reluctant “to hand over their individual autonomy and decision-making power to any body of leaders.” They hoped that the local and individual participation built into the structure would encourage leadership among women at the grass roots. But a balance between hierarchy and autonomy was hard to attain. Even while they encouraged local initiative, national leaders usually ran the show and took the limelight, leading to conflicts between local chapters and the central body that were typically expressed in terms of feminist ideals. Elitist leadership, local activists said, was a value of the male world. The higher circles saw themselves as pressure-group activists, not mere servants of the locals’ needs.

Inevitably. NOW sharpened a set of issues that had divided women for generations, between such reformers as members of the League of Women Voters who believed in pressing women’s issues one by one through lobbying and other interest-group tactics, and “transformers” in the old National Women’s Party who campaigned for the total equality of women through militant political action. This conflict had erupted during the Kennedy Administration in a dispute between women leaders centered in the Women’s Bureau and the President’s Commission on the Status of Women under Eleanor Roosevelt, on the one hand, and feminists from the Women’s Party now allied with movement activists, on the other. The former favored “specific bills for specific ills,” which would be upheld by the courts under the Fourteenth Amendment, while the latter sought such fundamental changes as the Equal Rights Amendment to give broad constitutional support to equality. Both sides talked grandly of liberty and equality but defined these values differently: the reformers fought for the removal of injustices especially in the workplace, while feminists in the Women’s Party tradition “placed special emphasis on personal freedom and accomplishment,” on liberating the whole woman.

Early on, when NOW drew up a Bill of Rights for Women, labor delegates threatened to pull out because their unions opposed ERA, fearing it might nullify laws protecting working women. Then a group of members walked out in protest against NOW’s support of reproductive freedom and repeal of abortion laws—probably the first time that “control of one’s body” had been formally articulated as a woman’s right. The dissidents formed the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL), which concentrated on fighting discrimination in education and employment and later joined hands with NOW on these issues and ERA.

Such differences hardly slowed NOW’s momentum. Dividing up into myriad task forces on such issues as discrimination in employment and education, NOW activists showed their mettle in changing government policy, though the battle for enforcement often took years. NOW helped win from the Johnson White House an executive order barring sexual discrimination in federal contracts, including those with academic institutions. As the self-appointed watchdog of the EEOC, NOW successfully filed suit against the agency’s upholding of sex-segregated want ads— “Help Wanted: Male” and “Help Wanted: Female.” Activists dumped piles of newspapers at EEOC offices and followed with a national day of picketing. NOW ranged through the business world too, gaining a historic settlement with AT&T, which even the EEOC had singled out as the largest oppressor of women workers, and compelling the airlines to end the involuntary retirement of flight attendants when they married or turned thirty-two.

NOW was especially effective on Capitol Hill. Its representatives lobbied hard for the 1972 act that strengthened the EEOC’s enforcement powers and expanded its jurisdiction. Its greatest success followed, as it spearheaded congressional passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972— the prize winner of the bumper crop of women’s rights legislation pushed through the 92nd Congress. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, prohibiting credit discrimination on the basis of sex or marital status, was the fruit of intensive lobbying efforts by a coalition of women’s groups, including NOW, WEAL, and the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC). Leaders in these efforts were Friedan, New York congresswomen Bella Abzug and Shirley Chisholm, and Gloria Steinem, a founding editor of the new mass-circulation feminist magazine, Ms.

Working with black women was a quite different proposition. Probably the most oppressed large group in America, black women had the unique experience of being stigmatized both for their sex and for their color. During the 1940s, they made more gains in occupational status, education, and income than in the previous three decades. While still far behind in absolute terms, they surpassed not only white women but black men in relative gains. But though black women might earn more than before in better jobs, they still found the doors of real opportunity sealed shut against them. Their economic improvement quickened hopes and expectations that their cultural and political environment crushed. No wonder that, according to a Louis Harris poll for Virginia Slims, 62 percent of black women in 1972 favored efforts to strengthen women’s status in society, compared with only 45 percent of white women. The different situations of black and white women caused many black women leaders to keep their distance from such white-dominated organizations as NOW and even to refer to the “white” women’s liberation movement.

The more NOW expanded, the more it came to embrace women of differing interests and loyalties, such as trade unionists, blacks, professionals, housewives. A dramatic display of unity was needed, and a fine occasion was at hand—the fiftieth anniversary of the winning of female suffrage. Sensing that something grander than the usual demonstration was in order, Friedan conceived of a “Women’s Strike for Equality” as a way to channel the energy of the burgeoning movement toward concrete political goals; it would show women, the media, the government “how powerful we were.” When she proposed the idea during her farewell speech as head of NOW in March 1970, some delegates cheered, but others groaned, wondering how ridiculous they might appear if most American women did not strike. Hernandez and other leaders feared squandering resources on a crazy plan that was likely to fail.

Undaunted, Friedan and hundreds of NOW activists pulled out all the stops to bring together a wide national coalition of women’s groups, including many younger and more militant participants, working out differences along the way. As a down payment toward equality the strike called for abortion on demand, twenty-four-hour child-care services, and equal opportunity in jobs and schooling. To enable women to participate in the strike privately in their homes and offices if they did not want to take to the streets, planners presented the strike as an opportunity “to do your own thing.”

Locking arms with Judge Dorothy Kenyon, an eighty-two-year-old suffrage veteran, and with a young radical in blue jeans, Friedan on August 26, 1970, led a huge march of women—and some men—down Fifth Avenue. Defying police orders to stay on the sidewalks, they spilled into the street, holding banners high and calling out, “Come join us, sisters,” to women waving from curbs and office windows. Women marched for equality in every other large city that day and in many smaller ones. It was the first nationwide mobilization of women for women since the direct action by suffragists, and the first time the movement was covered seriously by the media. Suddenly famous, NOW found its membership swelling. Most of the new recruits were homemakers and clerical workers rather than professional women.

“This is not a bedroom war,” Friedan proclaimed that evening at a rally next to the New York Public Library, where she had written her pathbreaking book. “This is a political movement.”

Friedan was not speaking for all women, not even all embattled women. Marion Hudson’s was a bedroom war—a kitchen war—a war over children. Whether she realized it or not, Marion Hudson was a guerrilla in her own home, embattled with husband and children, mired in her “rat race” of an existence. She shared this kind of life with millions of other housewives— mothers—workers. Some liked it. Others accepted it because it was the way things were supposed to be—they read in Life about the “Busy Wife’s Achievements” as “home manager, mother, hostess, and useful civic worker.” Still others felt, as one “homemaker” told Friedan, that “by noon I’m ready for a padded cell.”

During the sixties countless wives began rebelling against the “Busy Wife’s” life, in part because the flammable writings of Friedan and others were coming into their homes via radio, television, and the popular press. Exposed to feminist arguments during the day, “trapped housewives” were now intellectually armed to confront their husbands at six. “By the time my husband walked in the door all hell would break loose,” a woman said. “He was responsible for all the evils of the world and especially responsible for keeping me trapped.”

Freed of the trap, what then? Some women became active in NOW or other women’s political organizations. Some struck out for careers of their own, despite the impediments and difficulties. Some returned to college or university. Some did all these things. But numerous women—especially younger women, many of them veterans of the black freedom movement or the New Left—were not content with the means and ends of NOW. Political action, progress in education, even successful careers often appeared to them like tokenism. And because they insisted on going to what they called the “heart of the problem,” they helped create a fundamental dualism in the women’s movement between what came to be called the younger and older branches.

The heart of the problem, as the younger branch saw it, was the subjugation of women in personal relationships with men and in their domestic roles. What they scornfully called “careerism” was no solution, for it did not challenge the domestic division of labor and was open to only a minority. They demanded not equality of sex roles—which they likened to the Jim Crow doctrine of “separate but equal”—but their elimination. Theirs was a search for identity, self-expression, self-fulfillment.

They were emerging from the womb of conflict. Just as the nineteenth-century women’s rights movement had grown out of the participation of black and white women in the crusade to abolish slavery—and the awareness of their second-class status in that movement—so the younger branch of the new feminist movement originated in the southern freedom struggle of the 1960s. That women passionately engaged in social activism would precipitate a revolt centering on ostensibly personal matters appeared ironic only to those who could not see that to these women the personal was the political, that women’s inequality in the public world was on a continuum with inequality in private life.

That conservatives and “male chauvinists” would seek to put them down, protesting women expected. That their fellow rebels and radicals treated them almost as badly as the establishment did make them indignant. At a SNCC retreat late in 1964, Casey Hayden, an activist in both SDS and SNCC, and Mary King drafted a position paper protesting that assumptions of male superiority were “as widespread and deep rooted and every much as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro.” Why was it, they asked, that competent and experienced women in SNCC were almost automatically relegated to the “female” kinds of jobs—typing, desk work, filing, cooking, and the like— and rarely elevated to the “executive” kind? Stokely Carmichael’s rebuttal to Hayden and King: “The only position for women in SNCC is prone.” Though it might have been made in jest, the remark “generated feminist echoes throughout the country.”

A year later, after little progress, Hayden and King took a tougher stance at an SDS “rethinking conference.” SDS women were now beginning to organize and meet separately and to exclude men. They reacted eagerly to Hayden and King’s strictures on the peace and freedom movements’ own “sex-caste system.” Three activists protested that they were “still the movement secretaries and the shit-workers,” preparing the mailings and serving the food. Even more, they were “the free movement ‘chicks’—free to screw any man who demanded it, or if we chose not to—free to be called hung-up, middle class and up-tight.”

As women continued to be barred from decision-making, their anger and determination deepened. At the June 1967 SDS convention in Ann Arbor, the “Women’s Liberation Workshop” offered a bold resolution not open to debate, declaring that women were “in a colonial relationship to men” and had to fight for their independence. The resolution demanded that “our brothers recognize that they must deal with their own problems of male chauvinism in their personal, social, and political relationships,” and it insisted on full participation, especially in leadership roles. The resolution passed, despite a “constant hubbub” of catcalls and invective— the first time the New Left took a public stand against sexism.

THE LIBERATION OF WOMEN

Having begun to win a battle they had never wanted to fight, younger-branch activists were ready to organize on their own. The spark that ignited independent action was struck off in Chicago in September 1967 at the National Conference for a New Politics, an abortive effort to forge a militant alliance of blacks and whites. When in a condescending manner the NCNP leadership blocked Shulamith Firestone and other women from reading a radical resolution drafted by the women’s caucus, on the ground that women’s oppression was insignificant compared with racism, they had had enough. Firestone, Jo Freeman, and others formed the first autonomous women’s liberation group in Chicago. Later that fall Firestone and Pamela Allen started New York Radical Women, which shortly organized a counter-demonstration to a Washington antiwar protest led by a coalition of mainstream women’s peace groups. With a torchlight parade at Arlington Cemetery symbolizing “The Burial of Traditional Womanhood,” Radical Women argued that “we cannot hope to move toward a better world or even a more democratic society at home until we begin to solve our own problems.” Women left for home fired up to form their own collectives.

Why did these younger-branch feminist leaders not join NOW, which had formed in response to women’s plight in the home as well as on the job? The activist women on all sides shared common values of liberty, equality, and sisterhood but they had major differences. NOW was relatively centralized in organization, hierarchical in power arrangements, focused on political organization and action, oriented toward Washington and state capitals. The women now springing into action were concerned less with policy goals than with self-consciousness, self-realization, self-identity; they wanted to reach the Marion Hudsons. Opposed to formal leadership, structure, and elitism, they urged networking and decentralization down to the smallest local gatherings. NOW abounded with stars; the new groups were hostile to celebrities and skeptical of “expert authority.” NOW included men and worked with them. Many of the younger branch not only were critical of men for all the usual reasons but viewed them as the class enemy.

Such considerations prompted Firestone and Ellen Willis in early 1969 to establish Redstockings, which proclaimed that relationships between men and women were a conflict-ridden class relationship and could be resolved only by collective political action. About the same time radical dissidents in the New York NOW chapter tried to change the chapter bylaws to abolish hierarchy. When the chapter majority voted down a proposal by its flamboyant president, Ti-Grace Atkinson, either to abolish offices or to spread them around, she resigned in protest, telling the press that the division lay between “those who want women to have the opportunity to be oppressors, too, and those who want to destroy oppression itself.”

Atkinson and other NOW insurgents joined former members of Radical Women to form a new group called the Feminists, whose founding principle was equal participation. To prevent the quick and the vocal from dominating meetings they set up an ingenious Lot and Disc system: all tasks were assigned by lot, and all members were given the same number of discs, one of which had to be spent for each utterance. Legend in the women’s movement has it that at the first meeting the members used up their discs in fifteen minutes, and at the next meeting they hoarded them and said little. In other ways too the Feminists were different. They ruled that no more than one-third of their members could be living with men. They discouraged “star making” by choosing their media spokespersons by lot. Despite—or because of—this gallant effort to structure participatory democracy, and perhaps also because of its moral absolutism, the organization withered and died.

Radical feminist groups were now sprouting at an astounding rate, and were depleting New Left ranks, as word spread through networks. Starting them up had never been so easy or exciting, an organizer recalled. Binding together the radical feminists was a shared view of their plight as women. Leading off from French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s insight that the world treats man as subject, woman as object, as Other, radical feminists were coming to see themselves as constituting an oppressed class, even a caste. The male-female division was the “primary class system” underlying all other class distinctions. Proclaimed the Redstockings Manifesto:

“Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) are extensions of male supremacy: men dominate women, a few men dominate the rest. All power structures throughout history have been male-dominated and male-oriented.”

While male and female are biological, Kate Milieu contended, gender, masculine or feminine, is cultural and thus learned; anatomy is not destiny. Women—and men—would be truly liberated when they could free themselves from “the tyranny of sexual-social category and conformity to sexual stereotype,” as well as from racial caste and economic class. The goal of expunging oppressive sex roles was the touchstone of radical feminism. Many agreed that this required the abolition of marriage and the traditional family, but some went further to demand an end to heterosexuality. In her book The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone called for a full-fledged feminist revolution, made possible by technological advances, enabling women to seize control of reproduction and make childbearing and child-raising the responsibility of society rather than solely of individual women.

The heart of liberation was the consciousness-raising group. For radical feminists the CR group was at once a recruitment device, a process for shaping politics and ideology, and a microcosm of an egalitarian community that prefigured a feminist society. The participants, usually a group of from six to twenty, met in a safe, nurturing atmosphere to share their most intimate feelings and questions. Some groups followed a four-stage process: opening up, sharing, analyzing, abstracting—the last meaning to fit a resultant understanding “into an overview of our potential as human beings and the reality of our society, i.e., of developing an ideology.” Some groups concentrated on sharing experiences: what it was like for a woman to sit passively in a car while a man walked around it to open the door—to fake an orgasm to protect both her own pride and her partner’s—to try to maintain a dignified silence in the street when men hooted or stared at her—to wait on a husband who would not lift a hand in the kitchen.

Mainly these “rap groups” shared questions. Why should a woman spend so much time and money to “go unnatural” in order to attract a man? Should women be willing to sacrifice more than men do for the sake of marriage or companionship? How could they persuade the men they lived with to share housekeeping chores? In the warmth and intimacy of the rap sessions they talked about loving men and other women and the meaning of mutuality, about sexual violence in the bedroom and rape in marriage.

Raising consciousness was a first step to political action. Late in 1968 about two hundred women descended on the Atlantic City boardwalk to protest the Miss America Pageant as “patently degrading to women,” according to a key organizer, “in propagating the Mindless Sex Object Image.” The pageant had always been a lily-white, racist contest with never a black finalist; the winner toured Vietnam, “entertaining the troops as a Murder mascot”; the whole million-dollar affair was a “commercial shill-game” to sell the sponsors’ products. Where else, the protesters demanded, could one find such a perfect combination of false American values—racism, militarism, capitalism, all packaged in the “‘ideal’ symbol,” a woman? The feminists picketed and performed guerrilla theater, auctioned off a dummy Miss America, crowned a live sheep as their winner, and tossed dishcloths, steno pads, women’s magazines, girdles, bras, high heels, and “other instruments of torture to women” into a Freedom Trash Can.

As liberation groups and activities proliferated, a radicalization occurred typical of social movements, to the point of self-parody. On Halloween 1968 a coven from WITCH, the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, surfaced on Wall Street “to pit their ancient magic against the evil powers of the Financial District—the center of the Imperialistic Phallic Society.” After plastering WITCH stickers onto the George Washington statue, the masked, wand-wielding witches danced around the big banks, chanting curses, and invaded the Stock Exchange to hex men of finance. The money changers stood in awe but unhexed. Soon the witches’ covens and their offspring broadened out, casting their spells at bridal fairs, AT&T, the United Fruit Company, a marriage license bureau. Among the most imaginative was the nonviolent storming of a Boston radio station by women angered over an announcement that “chicks” were wanted as typists; the station manager was handed an offering of eight baby chicks.

Stunts and self-parody were tempting for their appeal to the media, which “discovered” feminism in the “grand press blitz” of 1970. Though often portrayed mockingly or trivialized as a fad, radical feminism found its coverage soar in major newspapers and magazines as well as on TV. And the feminists used Big Media’s devouring appetite to score points against it. Organizers of the first Miss America protest made a decision that became movement policy—to speak only to female reporters. They were not “so naive as to think that women journalists would automatically give us more sympathetic coverage,” Robin Morgan explained, but they wanted to make “a political statement consistent with our beliefs.”

If the media influenced the women’s movement to be bolder and more theatrical, the movement affected the media as well. Refusing to talk to male reporters helped generate more meaningful assignments for female journalists, freeing them from the “ghetto” of the woman’s page. At Newsweek, after months of agitation and a complaint to the EEOC, female employees reached an accord with management to accelerate the hiring and promotion of women. Some radicals engaged in militant direct action, notably an eleven-hour sit-in at the Ladies’ Home Journal to try to liberate it. They won the right to produce a special supplement on feminism. Employees seized and barricaded the avant-garde Grove Press to protest discrimination, the firing of women for organizing a union, and the publishing of erotica they felt degraded women—and were charged with resisting arrest when they demanded female cops.

More venturesome still for activists was to put out their own publications. The first feminist newspaper, off our backs, published in Washington, was followed by an effusion of journals and magazines—over one hundred by 1971. Notable were Women: A Journal of Liberation, Quest, Signs, and the glossy popular magazine Ms., which reached a circulation of half a million. Closely linked to the alternative periodicals were feminist collectives that churned out everything from literary and political anthologies to nonsexist, nonracist children’s books.

The younger branch became a great teaching movement. To learn more about what de Beauvoir called the “second sex,” and to instruct young women in how to reclaim their past, feminist scholars initiated women’s studies courses and programs on hundreds of campuses. Radical feminists who felt demeaned or mistreated by the male medical establishment, particularly with respect to birth control and pregnancy, organized self-help classes to enable women to know and care for their bodies and to conduct self-examinations. A group of Boston women taught a course on women’s health that resulted in a collectively written handbook, Our Bodies, Ourselves. First printed by the New England Free Press in 1973, it became the most widely read of all feminist publications, translated into eleven languages and growing thicker with each edition—the bible of the women’s health movement. Alternative clinics for women sprang up, specializing in pregnancy and abortion, along with a resurgence of natural childbirth, home birth, and midwifery.

The determination to control their own bodies helped empower especially the younger branch during the 1970s. Abortion, often self-induced, had been a common though risky practice for centuries; it did not become generally illegal in the United States until the medical elite campaigned against it after the Civil War. During the 1960s coalitions of professional men and women in some states gained modification of anti-abortion laws that permitted abortion by a physician under certain conditions but still left the decision to the doctor, usually male. Then the rising feminist movement turned the debate upside down, proclaiming that abortion was a woman’s basic right, that the decision was hers alone, and that abortion laws must be repealed, not reformed.

“When we talk about women’s rights,” said one activist, “we can get all the rights in the world—the right to vote, the right to go to school—and none of them means a doggone thing if we don’t own the flesh we stand in, if we can’t control what happens to us, if the whole course of our lives can be changed by somebody else that can get us pregnant by accident, or by deceit, or by force.”

Although initially even some feminists did not consider it a feminist issue, NOW leaders and others formed in 1969 the National Abortion Rights Action League, which along with other “pro-choice” groups mobilized for legislative and judicial changes. Radical feminists, who demanded not only abortion on demand but an end to coerced sterilization of poor, largely nonwhite women, joined with moderates to organize abortion teach-ins and testify at legislative hearings; characteristically, NOW activists gave legal testimony while radicals talked graphically about their own abortions and sometimes disrupted the formal proceeding with speech-making and guerrilla theater.

These pressures, combined with other developments—the passage of liberalization laws in some states during the 1960s, rising concern for pregnant women’s physical and psychological safety, and concern over population growth symbolized by the co-chairing of Planned Parenthood-World Population by ex-Presidents Truman and Eisenhower in 1965— helped produce the biggest pro-abortion rights victory of all from the all-male Supreme Court of the United States. In 1973, following extensive litigation, the Court in Roe v. Wade ruled that restrictions on abortion during the first trimester violated the constitutional right to privacy; abortion could be regulated in the second trimester only for the protection of a woman’s well-being, and must be permitted even in the final three months if her health and survival should be at stake. Though Roe did not grant women an unconditional right to abortion, it came close enough since most abortions took place in the first trimester.

But even as feminists rejoiced, a passionate movement erupted against abortion, with Roe as the hate object. Led by conservative women, fundamentalist preachers, Catholic clergy, and leaders of the New Right, the “right-to-lifers” succeeded in persuading national, state, and local governments to whittle down the practical promise of Roe—in particular, to bar public funding of abortions, which mainly affected poor women. Anti-abortion women activists organized their own demonstrations and street protests. This fierce counterattack made abortion the social issue of the 1970s. The struggle was less about the right of the fetus, the sociologist Kristin Luker concluded, than about the role of women and “the place and meaning of motherhood.” Many women, especially those deeply religious and of low-income backgrounds, perceived the feminist vision of self-empowerment as a serious threat.

A woman’s control of her body encountered its most shocking and horrifying violation in the assault called rape. Wrote Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson: “Rape is all the hatred, contempt, and oppression of women in this society concentrated in one act.” Feminist thinkers like Susan Griffin and Susan Brownmiller developed broad analyses of rape that placed it on a continuum of male aggression and power rather than seeing it as a deviation or the result of uncontrolled “passion.” Brown-miller examined the “masculine ideology of rape” that made it the ultimate expression of male domination and possession of women.

With reported rapes having doubled in half a decade, in part because women were gaining the boldness to report them, feminists undertook to educate the public and aid the victims. Early in 1971,the New York Radical Feminists organized the first rape “speak-outs,” in which survivors talked openly about their ordeals, in the process “making rape a speakable crime, not a matter of shame.” Soon women across the country were setting up hundreds of rape crisis centers offering emergency support services, especially phone “hot lines” womanned around the clock to counsel sisters in need. Feminists in NOW and other groups set up local and national task forces to lobby for such reforms as prohibiting court testimony about a victim’s sexual history, for laws against marital rape, and for the creation of a national center for the prevention and control of rape.

As usual the younger branch took the lead in organizing creative direct action, from women’s “anti-rape squads” that patrolled streets and pursued suspects to candlelit “take back the night” marches, born in Italy and Germany, that protested all violence against women. The growing public enlightenment about rape encouraged more and more women to break their silence about violence in the home, resulting in the formation of crisis centers and shelters for battered wives and children. Later in the decade many radicals zeroed in on purveyors of pornography, accusing them of dehumanizing women and promoting a cultural temper of hostility toward them. This led to vigorous debate within the women’s movement pitting the evils of pornography against the evils of censorship and what could seem like a conservative moralist attack on sexual liberty.

During these days of intensive consciousness-raising, debate, and confrontation, two groups were watching and participating in the progress of the movement but not without reservations, at one in their mutual isolation but not always agreeing. These were lesbians and black women.

“What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age, acts in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society … cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with herself.” So began a bold manifesto—“The Woman Identified Woman”—struck off by the Radicalesbians.

The issue of lesbianism in the women’s movement steamed up as a vital, much-publicized controversy in both branches. Though a minority, lesbians from the start had made vital contributions to NOW as well as to radical groups—“carried the women’s movement on their backs,” said Millett—but by and large they had kept their sexual identity hidden. A police raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village in June 1969 and the violent resistance by gay men led to an upwelling of “gay pride” and helped to inspire male homosexuals and lesbians to conquer their fears and “come out.” Lesbians, demanding the elimination of heterosexual dominance and homosexual stigmas, moved far beyond older groups like Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society, which had focused on civil rights and personal adjustment.

Lesbians felt doubly oppressed on the basis of their sexuality, “doubly outcast.” They also believed that they met the feminist movement’s own criteria for defining the liberated woman—“economic independence, sexual self-determination, that is, control over their own bodies and lifestyles.” Thus it was fair and fitting that they be at the forefront of feminism, its “natural leaders.” But many “straight” feminists in both branches feared the “lavender menace,” as Betty Friedan called it, on the ground that their enemies would pounce on this Achilles’ heel, equating feminism with lesbianism.

The issue was fought out in meeting after meeting over several years. At the second Congress to Unite Women in 1970 the lights suddenly went out on the first night; when they came back on moments later, women in lavender T-shirts paraded in front, claimed the microphone, and denounced the feminist movement for its heterosexism. Pro-lesbian resolutions passed at workshops over the weekend. The tide seemed to be turning when the president of New York NOW, to Friedan’s consternation, encouraged the wearing of lavender armbands on a Manhattan march. The 1971 national NOW convention unequivocally resolved in support of lesbians’ right to define their own sexuality and lifestyle and acknowledged “the oppression of lesbians as a legitimate concern of feminism.”

By now lesbian activism had a momentum of its own. Some lesbian leaders had higher aspirations than for mere acceptance. They wanted the movement to adopt “lesbian-feminism” as its political creed, defined by their journal The Furies as a “critique of the institution and ideology of heterosexuality as a primary cornerstone of male supremacy.” They called for complete separation from men and even from heterosexual feminists who were not “woman-identified.” Feminists on the other side charged them with “vanguardism” and dogmatic moralism. Still, most feminists continued to work together across the sexual divide. The great promise of lesbian-feminism—its compelling vision of an autonomous women’s culture flowering in many hues—lived on in such profound contributions to sisterhood as the poetry of Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, or the women’s music of Meg Christian, Margie Adam, Kris Williamson, Holly Near. “Free spaces”—coffeehouses, music festivals, cultural happenings—proliferated, places where self-defining women could explore their commonalities as well as their differences.

This was not the world of black women, most of whom were poor or jobless or underemployed. Black feminist leaders were determined to make feminism a movement for all women and to establish themselves as a visible presence in its midst. With an equal stake in women’s liberation and black freedom, they were central figures at the confluence of the two movements. Both to forge links between the movements and to “organize around those things which affect us most,” black feminists formed their own groups, the most prominent being the National Black Feminist Organization, founded in 1973 by a diverse assemblage.

“We were married. We were on welfare. We were lesbians. We were students. We were hungry. We were well fed. We were single. We were old. We were young. Most of us were feminists. We were beautiful black women.” So the NBFO members identified themselves. The statement of purpose proclaimed that the “distorted male-dominated media image of the Women’s Liberation Movement has clouded the vital and revolutionary importance of this movement to Third World women.”

On a smaller scale were groups like the Combahee River Collective in Boston, named after an 1863 guerrilla action in South Carolina, led by Harriet Tubman, that freed hundreds of slaves; they were “committed to working on those struggles in which race, sex and class are simultaneous factors in oppression,” struggles against forced sterilization, rape, and domestic violence and for abortion and child care. Such concerns, they argued, united all women.

Other women of color, especially Latinas, overcame cultural barriers and divided loyalties to take part in the feminist movement. Chicana and Puerto Rican women formed autonomous organizations such as the Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional in the Southwest, the Mexican-American Women’s Association, and the National Conference of Puerto Rican Women. Chicana activists were the backbone of the United Farm Workers’ strikes and boycotts.

The trend in the feminist movement toward harnessing its breadth and diversity through coalition building culminated at the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston. Established and financed by legislation pushed by Bella Abzug, who chaired the International Women’s Year Commission that coordinated it, the conference met to propose measures to achieve full equality, which had been discussed earlier in public meetings involving over 100,000 women. The Houston delegates ranged from progressive church women, trade unionists, and community activists across a wide spectrum to the hard core of conservative “antis,” sporting yellow “Majority” ribbons and seeking in vain to block resolutions in support of ERA and abortion rights. With middle-class whites underrepresented, it may have been one of the most all-embracing political conventions in American history.

It did not lack in theater. At the start of the proceedings, a multiracial team of relay runners carried into the convention center a flaming torch from Seneca Falls, New York, site of the first women’s convention in 1848. During heated debate over a National Plan of Action a woman rose in the rear of the hall and said dramatically, “My name is Susan B. Anthony”; at the end of her remarks the grandniece of the revered leader joined others in chanting, “Failure Is Impossible!”—the elder Anthony’s final public words. The climax of the gathering was the near-unanimous passage of a minority women’s resolution, drafted by a joint caucus of blacks, Latinas, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans, that called for recognition and alleviation of their “double discrimination.” Among many conservatives who stood up to vote for it were two white Mississippians, a man and a woman who reached across the seated disapproving members of their delegation to grasp each other’s hand. The coliseum swayed with “We Shall Overcome.”

Aside from such peak moments, the movement as it matured came to feel less like a nurturing family, a “room of its own,” and more like what it really was—a massive and complex coalition of women with much in common but many differences. Women of color who were vitally attuned to the “simultaneity of oppressions” felt the strongest need for linking issues and took the lead in building bridges of interdependence. The progress that had been made toward sisterhood did not blind feminist delegates to the big obstacles to unity that remained—above all, the many women they had not yet reached, represented by the “antis” at Houston. “Change means growth, and growth can be painful,” said the black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde. Her remark summed up the intellectual and political struggles of the whole decade.

The Personal Is Political

How did “the movement” get started? How fully did it reach its goals? Years later veterans of the women’s movement, like old campaigners re-fighting the battles of yore, were still debating how a movement that appeared to have lost most of its fire and focus after winning the vote in 1920 suddenly flamed up into a force that transformed the ideas and behavior of both women and men, at least in the upper and middle classes. Historians were already examining the origins of the movement, its linkages with the black and student revolts, its durability, the “real change” it produced in terms of its own aspirations, and the historians were discarding almost as many explanations as they found useful.

The movement emerged from volcanic economic and social changes in the years following World War II, according to one theory. The percentage of women in the total civilian work force rose from 28 in 1947 to 37 in 1968, bringing a huge increase of women who were exposed to both the temptations and the frustrations of the job mart and who shared with one another financial and occupational concerns. At the same time women’s relative deprivation mounted as their share of “both quantitative and qualitative occupational rewards,” in Jo Freeman’s analysis, dwindled. This seeming paradox produced a volatile mixture—aroused hopes and crushed expectations.

Other explanations were that World War II had served as the catalyst of increased employment among women, producing a change in self-image as well as expectations that were rudely shattered after the war, as men took back the better jobs; and/or that social and class forces involved in urbanization and suburbanization, and the relatively greater deprivation of middle-class women, fostered a desire for reform; and/or that psychologically, the more women operated in the male sphere, the more they had to assert their identity as female. Having earlier possessed a self-identity, a fixed societal position, or at least a nurturing leadership role in the family, many women now operated in a twilight zone between low-paid jobs and family responsibilities. Wanting a life outside the home, yet feeling guilty about their husbands’ unmet needs, they were driven by guilt and emptiness to smother their children with care, to treat them as though they “were hot-house plants psychologically.” This “Rage of Women,” as a Look article called it, was that identity crisis dramatized by Friedan as “the problem that has no name.”

To be trapped between domestic demands and the need for “something more” was an old story for many American women, but powerful intellectual and ideological forces were sweeping the West during the 1960s. These were years of turbulence in Europe as well as the United States. Simone de Beauvoir, the novelist Doris Lessing, and others across the Atlantic had challenged the dominant image of woman’s subordinate position. In the United States the black and student revolts lifted the banners of liberty and equality even as they fought with others and among themselves about the meaning and application of these values.

In proclaiming liberty, equality, and sisterhood, women too broke up into rival ideological camps. Feminists of the NOW camp typically held that women were equal to men but had been kept subordinate to them, that the goal was integration on an equal basis, through political action. Women’s liberationists of the younger branch protested that they were treated as sex objects or as mere property, that they must act through psychological or social “woman power.” Liberal feminists defined liberty as the absence of legal constraints on women and equality as equal opportunity to attain their goals. Marxist feminists saw themselves as victims of the capitalist system, liberty as protection against the coercion of economic necessity, and equality as the equal satisfaction of material needs. All this was aside from “sexual conservatives” who saw men and women as inherently unequal in abilities and held that unequals should be treated unequally.

Sisterhood was powerful enough to keep these differing values from tearing the women’s movement apart. Indeed, conflicts over goals doubtless sharpened the impact of consciousness-raising. Borrowing from blacks’ examples of standing up in meetings and testifying about their treatment by “the Man,” borrowing even from Mao’s way of criticism of oneself and others, “Speak pain to recall pain,” consciousness-raising intensified as women in small groups spoke to one another about any and all of their “personal problems,” including husbands, housework, making office coffee, shopping, curtailed ambitions, child care, male bosses, sexual relationships. The heart of these meetings was the probing by women of themselves and others about problems as they defined them.

The genius of these meetings lay in a leadership that was as potent as it was inconspicuous. It was a leadership of women by women, as experiences were exchanged, feelings evoked, attitudes articulated. Women exchanged leadership positions as the “rapping” moved from problem to problem. The effect was much in accord with the teachings of psychologists like Maslow whom Friedan and others had read—the raising of persons to higher levels of self-awareness, self-identity, self-protection, self-expression, and ultimately to creative self-fulfillment. The rap groups discussed the writings of leading thinkers in the women’s movement too, and as they did so it became more and more evident that their personal problems were in many respects political problems, involving millions of women, widespread customs and attitudes, laws and judicial findings, governmental institutions and power.

At first cool to these “bitch sessions” as providing young women with a crutch that would divert them from political action, NOW came to see them as means of enlarging the mass base of the organization and at the same time meeting women’s needs. NOW expanded from 14 chapters in 1967 to around 700 seven years later, while membership rose from 1,000 to perhaps 40,000. Yet NOW did not appear to grow proportionately in electoral strength, despite its emphasis on practical political action. Part of the problem was that its organizational structure failed to keep pace with the growth in membership.

But the main problem was the anti-leadership and anti-organization ideology and ethic in the women’s movement. These tendencies existed in NOW to some degree but were offset by vigorous leadership at the top. The movement’s younger branch was determined, on the other hand, as both the means and the end of social change, to replace the “masculine” principle of hierarchy with the ideology and practice of collective sisterhood. Less ambivalent than the New Left or NOW, radical feminists rejected hierarchical leadership altogether. This was partly a reaction to the seeming hypocrisy of movement groups that kicked hierarchy out the front door only to sneak it in through the back. But it was the result even more of the feminist notion that power meant “possession of the self rather than manipulation of other people—hence women had to shun leadership of and by others in order to cultivate the strength to lead their own lives.

“Because so many of our struggles necessarily had to be carried on in isolation, in one-to-one relationships with men,” an activist of the younger branch observed later, “it was imperative for women, as individuals, to gain the confidence to act autonomously, to lead oneself. So the moral distaste for leadership by others became an intensely practical tactic, completely appropriate to the tasks to be performed.”

The absence of recognized leadership, however, did not prevent the rise of leaders who were more skillful verbally and in other ways. Describing what she called the “tyranny of structurelessness,” Freeman—known in the movement by her nom de guerre, Joreen—noted that every group had a structure and that covert structures generated covert elites. Lack of formal structure thus became a way of masking power, which then became “capricious.” Groups could not hold de facto leaders accountable; indeed, the covert elite’s existence could hardly be conceded. The unhappy consequence was difficulty in charting a clear direction for individual groups and the whole movement, leading in turn to diminished effectiveness. Sharing these concerns as the “euphoric period of consciousness-raising” ebbed, a number of activists began to put a higher priority first on lobbying and other pressure-group tactics and later on party and electoral action to uproot sexism.

This shift fostered more emphasis on political leadership, while “structurelessness” tended ironically to exacerbate the celebrity syndrome. One of radical feminism’s loudest grievances was the male “star system” of the New Left, but the women had their own celebrities. And when the movement shunned the idea of official leaders or spokespersons, the media appointed their own whether or not they were truly representative. Not only did the grass-roots collectives, then, have little control over feminist stars, but resentments festered and eventually erupted in open denunciations of the stars as “elitist”—which pushed them even further away, sometimes to the movement’s outer edges. Celebrity Kate Millett, whose Sexual Politics was a best-seller, said that she was made to feel a traitor to the whole movement.

“All the while,” Milieu wrote, “the movement is sending double signals: you absolutely must preach at our panel, star at our conference—implying, fink if you don’t… and at the same time laying down a wonderfully uptight line about elitism.” Millett had been anointed as a star by Time magazine, which put her on its cover in August 1970. When a few months later she publicly declared her bisexuality at a feminist conference, Time dethroned her, ruling that she had lost her credibility as the movement’s “high priestess.”

If the personal was the political, to what degree must the women’s movement turn to political action? And what kind of political action? Women’s differences on these questions deepened. Some women adamantly opposed a party and electoral strategy because it meant entering a male-dominated world and seeking to influence male-made and male-controlled institutions. They argued for individual and group face-to-face persuasion and confrontation in universities, corporations, law offices, hospitals, government agencies—and in the streets. The great potential of the women’s movement, they contended, was not primarily in its electoral power but rather in its moral power—its capacity to appeal to the conscience of the American people on issues of simple decency, justice, equality. And that appeal had to be dramatic, passionate, militant, uncompromising, as black leaders had demonstrated in the previous decade.

Beware of a party and electoral strategy for two further reasons, these women argued. To be effective in parties and elections required endless compromises on moral principles as issues and policies were bargained out amid many contending groups. And even if women helped win elections, they would have to try to carry out their policies in a fragmented governmental system that required still further bargaining and sacrifice of principle. In the end women would become just one more pressure group and lobbying organization, their moral appeal muted.

This view tended to dominate thinking among the younger branch. While women were not neatly divided on the basis of competing strategies, most feminists in the older branch came to believe that party participation and electioneering were vitally necessary.

The older-branch leaders were confident they commanded the intellectual and political organization and strength necessary for a major electoral and lobbying effort. The National Women’s Political Caucus under Abzug and Chisholm, now claiming hundreds of participating state and local units, laid groundwork. With NOW and other allies, it threw its weight into the internal struggles of groups with which the women’s movement intended to work in electoral politics.

Organized labor was a prime target. Across the nation working women had been fighting a long battle to persuade male-dominated trade unions to pay more attention to their grievances about sexism and job discrimination and the paucity of women among the top leadership. With crucial help from NOW, women trade unionists convinced the AFL-CIO finally to abandon its opposition to ERA. Women also launched their own unions. Probably the greatest gains were made by groups like “9 to 5,” which began to organize women office workers in Boston in 1973.

Professional women organized too, especially in academia, through autonomous caucuses and associations. Notable for their militance, caucuses within scholarly organizations like the American Political Science Association raised hell at annual conventions on a host of problems plaguing women scholars. Nowhere did feminists mount a more daring assault on tradition than in churches and synagogues, as women fought for the ordination of female clergy, the degendering of sacred texts and even of God, and the creation of a nonpatriarchal feminist theology. The National Coalition of American Nuns protested domination by priests “no matter what their hierarchical status.”

Still, the acid test of institutional power, in the American governmental system, was electing a President and winning majorities in Congress. The older branch was far better prepared for the 1972 elections than it had been for 1968—in part because of the rules adopted after the 1968 Democratic convention for broader representation of women in the party’s governing councils. These rules changes and a concentrated drive by NWPC paid off: women made up 40 percent of the delegates attending the 1972 convention compared with 13 percent four years earlier.

Thoroughly coached by the NWPC in the complex and often bizarre and ferocious processes of delegate selection, platform drafting, and credentials battles, women at the 1972 convention in Miami had a major role in convention decisions—above all in the nomination of George McGovern. Women had the heady experience of taking part in the inner strategy councils, helping to choose the running mate, and seeing one of their number, Jean Westwood, selected as the new chairperson of the Democratic National Committee. For their part, blacks doubled their percentage of delegates at the convention over 1968.

Sharing in the exercise of power, Democratic women encountered its disappointments as well. One of these was McGovern’s sacrifice of a number of women delegates, whose seating he had promised to support, to the exigencies of convention politics. Representatives Shirley Chisholm and Abzug and other women’s rights leaders complained that they were deserted on key platform planks, especially abortion rights. Women had a minor role in McGovern’s choice of Senator Thomas Eagleton as his running mate, but virtually none in the selection of Sargent Shriver as Eagleton’s replacement following a press flap over revelations that Eagleton years before had been hospitalized a few times for psychiatric disorders.

A more surprising and severe failure for the women’s movement lay ahead. ERA had passed both houses of Congress early in 1972 with such heavy majorities, and with such enthusiastic support from Nixon as well as the Democratic candidates, that women expected the proposed constitutional amendment to gain swift passage through the required thirty-eight state legislatures. Within a year, thirty states had ratified ERA. But then its progress began to stall, under the pressure of a powerful “STOP ERA” coalition directed by a resourceful right-wing leader, Phyllis Schlafly, and composed of diverse antifeminist, radical right-wing, and business groups and of an unlikely alliance of Protestant fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, and Catholics. State legislatures started to repeal their ratifications of the amendment, as STOP ERA played upon the fears of millions of American women and men who felt threatened by the women’s movement or who believed that it had gone far enough. ERA, its opponents charged, would lead to the drafting of women and the denial to mothers of the custody of their children, to single-sex toilets and homosexual marriages. They linked the amendment to “forced busing, forced mixing, forced housing,” as one ERA foe wrote to her senator. “Now forced women! No thank you!”

Its political setbacks were doubly unfortunate for the women’s movement, for they tended to obscure the astonishing transformation in everyday attitudes and behavior that both the older and the younger branch had helped bring about. At least within the middle- and upper-income classes, sexual stereotyping of women in businesses, college faculties, hospitals, on athletic fields and military installations had markedly lessened. Equally notable were changes in speech, dress, deportment, parenting, housekeeping. Gentlemen who had grown up in an earlier school had to learn to refrain from opening doors for women and offering to carry their packages and walking between them and the curb, from referring to young women as “girls” or older women as “ladies”—even from standing up when a woman approached their restaurant table.

In this sense the personal was not so much the political as the psychological, the attitudinal, and the behavioral. Few of these changes had been caused or even affected by laws, nor were they sustained by them. The changes had emerged from women’s aching needs for recognition, identity, self-assertion, self-fulfillment. They were enforced by no cops or prosecuting attorneys but by a kind of instinctive conspiracy among women to shame or cast down or freeze out the incautious or insensitive husband, teacher, store clerk, coach, bureaucrat. They had sprung not from a few protest meetings or public defiances but rather from thousands and thousands of tiny confrontations, inside and outside the home, as women looked up from their reading or returned from their rap session to conduct their own face-to-face insurrections.

At last women were bringing to bear on their own lives the values that men had been preaching for decades, for centuries. In this respect their activism was ideological, reflecting the values of liberty, equality, and sisterhood. But to define these values and their linkages, to array them in a hierarchy of priorities, to make the crucial connection between these values and the everyday lives and aspirations of women—and to envision the political strategies and organizations necessary to operationalize these values—this was a task of intellectual leadership. It was the availability of such leadership to the women’s movement at every level that made the most critical difference in the complex forces leading to the transformation of women’s lives.

For many women it was difficult to move from “personal” politics into the public arena. Women who were most experienced in movement politics and organization often had the most difficulty in the transition, because party and electoral politics had their own organizational imperatives, sacred turfs, lines of influence, points of access, rules, and taboos. Women’s organizations had not been built as electoral machines; they were not easily convertible. Some women, on the other hand, feared that feminists would be too successful in invading big political institutions—they feared the kind of co-optation that would blunt their organizations’ image and thrust, compromise their specific goals, and yet not have any lasting reform impact on the broader political system.

Election year 1972. For many leaders in the older branch of women activists and in the black and peace movements who had staked their political futures on working within the two-party system, 1972 beckoned as a test of this strategy. For many in the younger branch, and for many of their “aging the system” counterparts in the other movements, 1972 loomed as one more series of concessions and “sellouts” by left-liberal forces to a major party and its candidate, who would abandon the left if they won and blame the left if they lost. For historians then and later, 1972 was the culmination of one of the most turbulent decades in American history, from the nationwide mobilization of black protesters early in the 1960s to the fiery protests of student, anti-Vietnam, and women’s forces later in the decade; from the first involvement of “advisers” in Indochina to the massive intervention of the late 1960s; from the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 to the killing of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy five years later to the near-murder and political disabling of George Wallace in May 1972 after his impressive showings in several northern Democratic primaries.

If the 1972 presidential election outcome was a fair test of the strategy of older-branch leaders committed to the Democratic party, they failed. Nixon and his Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew, after a generally negative campaign interspersed with calls for “Peace with Honor,” swept the nation, aside from Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. The Republicans won the largest popular vote margin in history, 47.2 to 29.2 million. And at last, with Wallace out of the game, Nixon carried the whole of the Solid South, which even Ike had failed to do. Older-branch leaders took solace in the high participation rate of women—especially blue-collar women, liberal and young women—in the campaign and their increased voting turnout, and in the continuing Democratic majorities in Congress despite the Nixon sweep. But it was small comfort after such high hopes.

If 1972 was a litmus test for women’s political leadership and activism, it was even more so for the two other great movements of the 1960s. Blacks had developed such strength politically in numbers and organization by 1972 as to protect most of their gains; they could chalk 1972 defeats off as temporary setbacks. The anti-Vietnam activists suffered the worst defeat. The campaign was fought out largely on terms that they had set— Vietnam, arms reduction, the draft—and Nixon would have appeared to have won a mandate against them had he not pirouetted around both or all sides of the peace issue during the campaign.

So 1972 was a setback, but there would be other elections. To some women in both branches a more important long-run question was the quality of the established leadership and of the next generation of leaders, male or female. The 1960s—the fateful decade—had produced a burst of political talent: John Kennedy, who by 1963 was positioning himself to provide strong détente and civil rights leadership; Lyndon Johnson, who brought thirty years of New Deal, Fair Deal, and New Frontier promises to culmination; Martin Luther King, who taught blacks and whites how to be both militant and nonviolent; Robert Kennedy, probably the only leader of his generation who had the potential to have firmly united the black, peace, and women’s movements with the Democratic party. Three of these leaders were killed; the other was politically disabled. Who would—who could—take their place?

With McGovern and Shriver decisively defeated and Humphrey and Muskie vanquished four years earlier, no potential successor was visible among the Democratic party leaders of either gender. Both the party and its allied movements, however, were rich in second-cadre leaders in Washington, the state capitals, and the myriad movement headquarters. Many of these men and women were talented speakers, negotiators, legislators, administrators, spokespersons for their causes. Was there a Martin Luther King among them? The more one studied King’s life, the more one was impressed not simply by his obvious political skills but even more by his intellectual qualities. His life was a reminder that transforming leadership is a product of formal learning molded and burnished by combat and controversy. In theological school King had steeped himself in the writings of Gandhi and social theorist and activist Walter Rauschenbusch, of Niebuhr and R. H. Tawney, of Marx and Hegel. Hence he was able then and later to define and sort out his values, shape ways and means to achieve those values, and devise day-to-day political strategies and street tactics necessary to achieve the changes he sought. And he was a focus of conflict—in the black movement and organizations, with other black leaders such as Malcolm X, with white critics ranging from J. Edgar Hoover to benign but hostile editors and fellow ministers.

Much of the force of the 1960s movements lay in their intellectual strengths—in the kind of prolonged debate and analysis that went into the Port Huron Statement, the remarkable teaching of women by women that backed up their philosophy and strategy, the street seminars and walking debates of King and his co-leaders. For many, movement life had been a special form of higher education. But street skills and intellectual leadership were not enough. Also indispensable for effectiveness in American politics was individual and organizational persistence, sheer staying power—both as an expression of confidence and determination and as a warning to political friend and foe that you will be around for a long time and must be reckoned with. A century earlier the business leaders of the North, by moving into the top councils of the Republican party, and by staying with the GOP through thick and thin, had dominated the federal government for decades. In the 1930s the liberal-labor-left forces of the nation, by moving into the top councils of the Democratic party, and by staying with the Democracy through depression and war and cold war, through election triumphs and defeats, had put their stamp on federal and state policy-making. The insurrectionists of the 1960s left an array of groups and organizations devotedly carrying on their causes. But they neither maintained their influence in the Democratic party nor created a party of their own—they had not achieved staying power.

Paradoxically, even as the strength of the left was waning after its relative high point early in 1972, conservative movements were rising that within a decade would accomplish essentially what the left had not—would find their unifying and transforming leader, who in turn would seize control of a major political party after initial setbacks, would lead that party to victory, and then would firmly seize the reins of office and power.

All this lay in the future. At the moment—election night, November 7, 1972—Richard Nixon, strangely morose and withdrawn after his big win, contemplated four more years in the White House.

PART IV

The Crosswinds of Freedom

CHAPTER 11

Prime Time: Peking and Moscow

FOUR YEARS AFTER HE became President, a quarter century after he entered politics, Richard Nixon the private man remained a figure of mystery in the public mind. Some of the most gifted interpreters of American politics and politicians could not seem to get a handle on him. Of all the Presidents since 1789, Kenneth S. Davis wrote in the Encyclopedia of American Biography following the first term, Nixon was “probably the most baffling to contemporaries who sought truly to know and understand him as mind, character, personality, and to relate this knowledge to major acts of his public career.” Most American Presidents have had complex personas; save for a few war heroes, less complicated men are unable to “embrace multitudes” and win their embrace. But Nixon was not merely complex, he was opaque; not merely ambivalent as a policy maker but pulverized as a personality.

He was a preacher of harmony who viewed his critics with a cold implacable hatred, a mildly pacifist Quaker who had favored dropping atomic bombs—only three small ones, to be sure—to rescue the French at Dien Bien Phu, a mediator between moderate and conservative factions of the Republican party who seemed equally at home in either wing, a fierce nationalist and practitioner of Realpolitik who held the idealistic, internationalist Wilson in veneration, a man of seething resentments and black Irish hatreds who liked to appear with Billy Graham in politico-spiritual assemblies dripping with cheerfulness and piety, an advocate of “guts” and determination who swore that he was not a quitter but who finally quit, a man who evaded personal confrontations but relished crises. Many political leaders are torn between conventional and “rational” alternatives, between left and right alternatives, or between principled and practical strategies of leadership. Nixon was so eviscerated by multiple lines of tension and cleavage as to leave him a shredded man.

“Let’s see—What’ll I wear today?,” Herblock, the Washington Post’s political cartoonist, had Vice President Nixon saying upon rising and facing a choice of apparel labeled “Dead-End Gang,” “All-American Boy,” “Look, Folks, I’m a Statesman,” and “Political Pitchman.”

Challenged by this complexity, students of personality sought to uncover the sources of Nixon’s political character. James David Barber, analyzing types of presidential character, labeled Nixon “active-negative” —ambitious, power-seeking, devious, aggressive, hyperactive—as against “active-positive” (FDR, Truman, JFK), “passive-positive” (Taft, Harding), or “passive-negative” (Coolidge, possibly Ike). There was much interest in Nixon’s early years: life with an often angry, financially insecure father, the death of two brothers, a beloved mother’s prolonged absences. Psycho-historian Bruce Mazlish noted his fears of being unloved, of being considered weak or timid. At the deepest level, Mazlish wrote, Nixon was a political actor whose role-taking substituted for “an insecurely held self.” Psychiatrists diagnosed him—from afar—as orally and/or anally fixated, as a “compulsive obsessive,” as driven by the need for power. An astute biographer, Garry Wills, emphasized more the impression Nixon gave of being adrift, of lacking a sense of place, of coming across as “the least ‘authentic’ man alive.”

The President’s domestic policy-making during his first term was no help to the search for the “real Nixon.” Right-wing Republicans and conservative southern Democrats had for decades listened to Nixon sound the tocsin against federal regulation and spending, and were hoping that his Administration would roll back four decades of liberal Democratic and moderate Republican reform; they were quickly disillusioned. Myriad programs were extended—environmental protection, occupational safety and health, urban mass transit, farm price supports—and even expanded. The Clean Air Act of 1970, establishing comprehensive air pollution programs that sharply curbed carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions in 1975 cars, appeared to be precisely the kind of legislation Nixon had long denounced for stifling free enterprise. On other matters, such as some of his judicial nominations, a series of crime and drug control acts, and his (unsustained) veto of a major water pollution control bill, he gave some satisfaction to the right. On still other issues such as civil rights—and especially women’s rights—the Administration’s record was mixed.

Eventually the President’s domestic program dissolved into a jumble of disparate policies. Halfway through his term, in his January 1971 State of the Union address, he suddenly asked Congress for a “New American Revolution,” which, after the hyperbole was extracted, still looked somewhat radical: welfare reform, health insurance reform, major governmental reorganization, revenue sharing, “full prosperity in peacetime.” Such proposals cloaked for a time the reality that Nixon was essentially bored by domestic policy-making—especially environmental—compared with foreign policy.

Without a firm hand from above, disputes broke out between liberal and conservative advisers—notably between Assistant for Urban Affairs Daniel Patrick Moynihan and economic specialist Arthur F. Burns. Burns, the former chief of Eisenhower’s economic advisers, was perturbed by Nixon’s quick policy decisions—it had taken only two minutes, he said, to persuade the President to go ahead with revenue sharing. During a long series of intra-Administration battles over welfare reform, Burns complained to friends that when he told presidential aide John Ehrlichman that Moynihan’s guaranteed income plan was not in accord with the President’s philosophy, Ehrlichman had asked, laughingly, “Don’t you realize that the president doesn’t have a philosophy?”

In foreign policy it was going to be different. After the disarray of LBJ’s final years in office, the new Administration would propound a strategy of foreign and military policy-making—a strategy of Administration teamwork, careful setting of priorities, linkage among foreign policy initiatives—aimed at continuity, coordination, consistency. “If our policy is to embody a coherent vision of the world and a rational conception of America’s interests,” according to this plan, “our specific actions must be the products of rational and deliberate choice,” as compared with the “series of piecemeal tactical decisions forced by the pressures of events” of the past.

The team that Nixon assembled for this “new strategy for peace” hardly appeared equal to this awesome task. His Secretary of State, William P. Rogers, was a respected lawyer who had had only a marginal relationship to foreign policy-making. A loyal friend of Nixon’s from the early years, he had served as Attorney General under Eisenhower. Rogers and Nixon had drifted apart during their years in New York in the 1960s—in part, Rogers’s friends believed, because of the former Attorney General’s success as a big-league lawyer and on the Manhattan social circuit. The new President chose him as a skillful negotiator, not as a strategist or shaper of foreign policy; Nixon hoped to be his own Secretary of State. For Secretary of Defense he turned to Melvin Laird, a longtime congressman out of the Wisconsin heartland, an expert on military appropriations, and a shrewd middleman among Washington’s power brokers. Neither secretary was well prepared to master his huge bureaucracy packed with talented specialists protecting their turfs and slowed by endless processes of clearance, consultation, and collective judgment.

Nor were they equipped to deal with the White House—with Nixon’s consuming concern with foreign relations, his penchant for secrecy, his contempt for the “permanent” bureaucrats held over from previous Administrations. Even less could they cope with the youngish, rather innocuous-looking academic whom their boss had chosen as his Assistant for National Security Affairs. If they knew of Henry Kissinger, it was as a refugee from Germany who had served in army intelligence in Europe during the war, risen quickly through his wits in the academic community, gained access to the defense and foreign policy establishments while teaching at Harvard, acted as a foreign policy adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, developed close connections with leaders in both parties and all factions, and maneuvered himself into positions that made him a readily available candidate for national security aide to Nixon—or perhaps to Humphrey or even to Robert Kennedy if either had been elected.

Looking out on the Washington jungle through his heavy, old-fashioned spectacles, Kissinger thoroughly agreed with his new boss’s plans for more consistent, coordinated, rational foreign policy-making. He too believed in teamwork, but there had to be a captain and a quarterback. Kissinger was ready to take charge of the team, not only to defend the United States against its foreign foes but to accomplish the even more difficult task of defending the President’s and his own powers against domestic enemies— radical agitators, carping congressmen, overly inquisitive journalists, stubborn feds in State and Defense, White House rivals, the President’s inner inner circle, the President himself.

Finding China

Few American leaders of national standing had rivaled Richard Nixon in denouncing communism in general and the Chinese communists in particular. He had climbed the first rung of the political ladder by stigmatizing his congressional opponent, the rather idealistic New Deal Democrat Jerry Voorhis, as communist-supported. He had clawed his way up the second rung, in a 1950 contest filled with red-baiting on both sides, by tarring his rival for the Senate, Helen Gahagan Douglas, as a consistent follower of “the Communist Party line.” He made enormous political capital out of the Alger Hiss case. He became a favorite of the China Lobby that guarded the Taiwan ramparts in Washington and again and again during the 1950s castigated Truman and Acheson and other Democrats for “losing China.” He warned of a monolithic, global communist conspiracy.

“Now, what do the Chinese Communists want?” he demanded during his election battle with John Kennedy in i960. “They don’t want just Quemoy and Matsu. They don’t want just Formosa. They want the world.”

Later in the sixties Nixon seemed to be changing his line on “Red China.” In a 1967 essay for a foreign affairs journal, he wrote that, “taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors.” The essay was ambivalent enough to suggest a new Nixon, China sector. But on closer reading one found the old Nixon labeling China as the “epicenter of world revolution,” referring to the “poison from the Thoughts of Mao,” decrying Peking’s “imperial ambitions” in Asia, and making clear that it was China that must change. And his approach, he carefully added, did “not mean, as many would simplistically have it, rushing to grant recognition to Peking, to admit it to the United Nations and to ply it with offers of trade—all of which would serve to confirm its rulers in their present course.” The article was ambivalent enough to support wrath against Peking or rapprochement with it.

Yet he had a curiosity about China. He kept turning toward it, like a soldier of fortune to an old battle zone. He even tried to visit mainland China in 1965, when he was a private citizen, but LBJ’s State Department denied him permission. Even before the end of his first presidential year, however, Nixon began an exchange of signals with the Chinese leadership. Each side had good reason for seeking rapprochement. Indeed Nixon had several: to play Moscow off against Peking, to take some striking initiative in a period when his foreign policy seemed moribund, to weaken Chinese ties to Hanoi, to draw this vast nation with its exploding population more into the world community, and above all to win reelection in 1972 by end-running the Democrats on the peace issue.

Peking had one towering reason for rapprochement with the American superpower: Russia. After veering apart earlier on ideological and geopolitical issues the two communist powers now were at each other’s throats. A series of clashes broke out between Soviet and Chinese border guards during the spring of 1969 along the Amur River and on the Kazakhstan-Sinkiang border 3,000 miles to the west. Moscow was shifting into eastern Siberia a dozen infantry divisions, late-model Soviet aircraft, and even, it was rumored, nuclear-equipped missiles. In 1968 Moscow had demonstrated its own border phobia by its invasion of Czechoslovakia. Would China be next? There were reports that the Soviets were readying an attack. Peking desperately needed a nuclear ally, and there was only one available: the capitalist barbarians across the Pacific. It was time for triangular diplomacy.

In his increasingly mixed feelings toward China, Nixon was continuing an old American tradition of “a curious ambivalence in our China policy,” as the historian John K. Fairbank called it, a gap between attitude and reality. For a century and a half Americans had gone to Cathay in a state of high-mindedness, intent on bringing proper religion, education, trade, and freedom to the Orientals. The reality they found was of an old culture fixed in its ways, stratified in its classes, oblivious of its innumerable poor, established in its religion. It was hard to exert much influence, benign or not, on this ancient people. So the Americans tended to talk of moral uplift but to act opportunistically. Thus they deplored the hold of opium on the masses while Yankee traders bought the drug in Turkey and sold it in Canton. For decades hardly more than junior partners to the British, they inveighed against imperialism and colonialism but accepted extraterritoriality and most-favored-nation treatment. Missionaries preached the Gospel—“When we step in here we bridge over in a second twelve hundred years of history,” a booster of Protestant Christianity told the young army officer Joseph Stilwell in 1911—without much effect on the natives. When the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, Washington replied with Stimson’s righteous but ineffectual nonrecognition doctrine; during World War II the United States sent aid—including Stilwell—to China but kept eastern Asia at the bottom of its military priority list; and after the war provided aid to Chiang Kai-shek insufficient to dam the revolutionary forces of Mao, even if Chiang had used it effectively.

Ultimately the contradictory attitudes among Americans and Chinese produced conflicting memories. “The American memory,” wrote Dennis Bloodworth, “was one to inspire a daydream of fond reminiscence—of selfless Protestant missionaries striving to save the heathen soul of nineteenth-century China; of a morally upright Washington that had stood aside when greedy European colonialists plundered the Celestial Empire, endowing it instead with the Open Door policy; of a generous administration that had lavished military aid and moral counsel on the Chinese during the war against Japan; and of a culture that had given them the precious message of democracy and the American way of life.” The Chinese memory, observed Bloodworth, “had been scarred by all the love bites.”

It was these crosswinds of history, memories, and attitudes, East and West, through which Richard Nixon would have to find his way. “When the moment comes to jump—leapfrog over the position immediately ahead,” was Nixon’s style as described by his speech writer William Safire. The President’s leaping was more like the knight’s on a chessboard—forward and to the side, after a cautious assessment of the new position. To influence Hanoi and counter Moscow he would use Peking. To reach Peking he would use Henry Kissinger.

The national security aide hardly appeared a promising player on the Chinese chessboard. An admirer of the nineteenth-century diplomats Castlereagh and Metternich and a student of the post-Napoleonic “conference system” of powerful and independent Foreign Ministers managing an intricate balance of power, Kissinger had as little knowledge as his chief of Asian politics. Twenty years of distance from the Chinese leadership, he now discovered, had left Washington ignorant even of how to approach Peking. Its eastern Asia expertise decimated by the red hunts following the fall of China to the communists, the State Department had by now regained a pool of China hands. But here another difficulty arose. The President suspected the State Department of invariably leaking, so he viewed absolute secrecy as essential, while Professor Kissinger was contemptuous of the academic orientation of the experts at State. The department, for its part, was institutionally dubious about the “loose cannon” personal diplomacy of Presidents. Above all, Nixon did not wish to share with Secretary Rogers the glory of being the modern Marco Polo who had rediscovered China. He even wanted to omit any initial trip to China by an emissary because it would “take the glow off his own journey”—or so Kissinger supposed.

The approach to Peking, Kissinger wrote later, began like “an intricate minuet between us and the Chinese so delicately arranged that both sides could always maintain that they were not in contact, so stylized that neither side needed to bear the onus of an initiative.” This was a Metternichian view; the rapprochement might rather be likened to one of those arranged marriages in the East, requiring much clandestine family negotiation through obscure channels and myriad brokers, carefully timed overtures and withdrawals, conjuring up of rival swains as a way of applying genteel pressure, and the final production of the blushing bride and her dowry.

Once the elaborately contrived invitation to Kissinger from Peking was received, Nixon and Kissinger plotted to keep this initial trip a secret not only from enemies like Russia but from rivals like the State Department. An elaborate cover was contrived for Kissinger, under which he would ostensibly tour Asian capitals but in fact would fly unobserved into China from friendly Pakistan. When the President finally broke the news to the Secretary of State—after Kissinger was well on his way—Nixon deceived Rogers, telling him that Kissinger’s trip was in response to a last-minute invitation received while his aide was in Pakistan.

All this maneuvering hardly diminished Kissinger’s excitement as he and three NSC colleagues flew from Islamabad to Peking early in July 1971. As Kissinger’s plane crossed the snowcapped Himalayas, “thrusting toward the heavens in the roseate glow of a rising sun,” and then flew for hours over arid deserts dotted by oases, he reflected that he was about to begin an extraordinary adventure that would make time stand still while he penetrated the mysteries of this almost unknown nation of 800 million people. Nor was he disappointed by the kaleidoscope of events: meeting the welcoming party in their Mao uniforms at a military airport on the outskirts of Peking—driving through wide, clean streets with little traffic save bicycles—settling down in guesthouses connected by tiny bridges around the former imperial fishing lake—driving to the Forbidden City, whose huge grounds had been closed off to the public—touring its superbly proportioned halls and gardens, stone carvings, and bronze lions— holding sessions in the Great Hall of the People, which struck Kissinger as a cross between Mussolini neoclassicism and communist baroque.

Most of all, Kissinger was impressed by the chief negotiator for the Chinese, Premier Chou En-lai. More than any leader save Mao, Chou incarnated the revolution. The product of a middle-class family in Kiangsu province, Chou in his twenties had studied in France and Germany. A veteran of the Long March, Premier of the People’s Republic for over twenty years, he was a political survivor of the civil war, the war with Japan, the cold war, the Korean War, the Cultural Revolution, and the break with Moscow. Yet it was no embittered or fanatical zealot whom Kissinger faced but an urbane, knowledgeable statesman who appeared equally accomplished in history, philosophy, geopolitics, and humorous repartee.

The presidential aide found Chou a formidable adversary. And an informed one. Chou threw him off stride by quoting from a recent Nixon speech of which Kissinger knew nothing. Chou forcefully laid out Peking’s position: that Taiwan was part of China; that China supported the North Vietnamese; that not only Russia and the United States but India and Japan were overly aggressive toward China; that China had no wish to be a superpower. Kissinger, compelled by the secrecy factor to work quickly and charged above all with producing an invitation to the President from Peking, made no serious effort to extract concessions from Chou or to offer any. He left Peking with the assurance of an invitation to Nixon. Three days later Chou flew to Hanoi to reassure the North Vietnamese that an American pullout from South Vietnam was China’s main objective.

A euphoric Nixon preempted the networks to tell the world of Kissinger’s just completed trip and his own forthcoming one. He reassured Russia that his search for “a new relationship with the People’s Republic of China” was not directed against any other nation, and Taiwan that it would not “be at the expense of our old friends”—deceiving neither nation.

The White House began feverish preparations for the presidential visit. Kissinger was dispatched again to China to plan specific arrangements. Dismayed by the amount of publicity that the security aide was reaping from the China initiative, Nixon and Haldeman were determined that the presidential trip be bathed in television coverage. Network people received ample travel accommodations, at the expense of newspaper reporters. Long tormented far more by the print press than by the electronic, Nixon found the trip to China, Kissinger noted, “a great opportunity to get even.” The Chinese fell in with the spirit of full television coverage, doubtless with more interest in its ratings in Moscow than in how it played in Washington.

His trip to China surpassed even Nixon’s hopes. Air Force One arrived in Peking at 11:30 A.M. on February 21, 1972, which happened to be excellent television time—10:30 P.M.—in Washington and New York. Television cameras followed him as he and Mrs. Nixon descended the ramp and he extended his hand ostentatiously to the waiting Chou En-lai, while a Chinese band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The handshake was symbolic—many years earlier, at the Geneva Conference on Indochina, John Foster Dulles, in one of his more boorish moments, had refused to shake hands with Chou. This injury, which the Chinese had never forgotten, Nixon now rectified. But he insisted on doing so alone; on the plane a burly aide blocked the aisle so that neither Kissinger nor anyone else could interrupt Nixon’s solo performance before the cameras.

The drive into Peking was less successful from a public relations standpoint, since the Chinese masses appeared merely to be going about their business, unaware of the barbarians in their midst. But marvelous photograph opportunities opened up in the days following, as the presidential party toured the Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs, the Summer Palace, watched table tennis and gymnastics in the Sports Palace, attended a revolutionary ballet, and made the obligatory tour of the Great Wall, where Nixon proclaimed to the waiting press, “This is a great wall.”

The President was elated early in the meetings when Chou sent word that Mao Tse-tung would see him. Taking Kissinger with him but not Rogers, who was excluded from the most important meetings, the President and his aide were driven to the Imperial City and ushered into a modest house. There they found Mao sitting in a medium-sized, book-lined study. Though ailing and infirm, the Chairman could not have been more affable. He joked to Nixon that “our common old friend,” Chiang, did not approve of this meeting. To the President’s suggestion that his writings had “changed the world,” Mao replied modestly that he had been able to change only “a few places in the vicinity of Peking.” He implied that he preferred to deal with predictable conservatives rather than wobbling liberals, and even added smilingly that “I voted for you during your last election.” He skirted policy issues, preferring to discuss questions of “philosophy” and leaving specifics to his Premier. But it was clear that he looked on the Russians, not the Americans, as the real adversary.

Nixon was as willing to delegate the hard, hour-to-hour bargaining to Kissinger as Mao was to turn it over to Chou. The negotiators did not face momentous strategic decisions. The harsh facts of Soviet intimidation, Chinese and American commitments in Indochina, Chinese-American conflict over Taiwan, had already determined strategy. The problem rather was to reduce a complex balance of power to a formula that could be presented as a joint statement by Peking and Washington without unduly straining the alliances of either with third parties. The Americans were playing a three-dimensional game that required skill and patience. If they leaned too far toward Moscow, China might try to repair its old friendship with the Soviet Union; if too far toward Peking, the Russians might even try, Kissinger feared, a “preemptive attack on China.” Vietnam and Taiwan had to fit into this broader framework.

The Shanghai Communiqué, issued at the end of the trip, spoke of the belief in freedom the two nations shared—the Americans in “individual freedom,” the Chinese in “freedom and liberation.” But then, using a formula worked out in earlier meetings, the communiqué listed the differences between the two countries. Taiwan was still the main issue. The Chinese reiterated that the island was wholly their internal affair. The Americans adroitly acknowledged and agreed “that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.” Hoping for a peaceful settlement of the question by the Chinese themselves, the United States “affirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal of all U.S. forces and military installations from Taiwan. In the meantime, it will progressively reduce its forces and military installations on Taiwan as the tension in the area diminishes.”

The presidential party flew back to Washington and a hero’s welcome. Senators and congressmen from both parties, headed by Vice President Agnew, greeted Nixon at Andrews Air Force base and voiced strong support the next day at a conference. The Republican right did not seem unduly disturbed. Governor Ronald Reagan of California joked that the China initiative had been a wonderful television “pilot” and should be made into a series. A few newspapers wondered whether the future of Taiwan had been bartered away in exchange for a presidential visit, a dramatic initiative, and breaking the taboo of noncommunication between East and West. But in general the press was not critical. Indeed, when a reporter in Shanghai pressed Kissinger about the American commitment to Taiwan, Kissinger had said that he would “appreciate it” if the press would stop asking about it “in these circumstances,” and the reporters desisted.

The voyagers were not modest about their success, or about its historic importance. It had been “the week that changed the world,” as the President put it in a farewell banquet toast in China. Nixon’s mere announcement of his forthcoming trip to Peking had “transformed the structure of international politics” overnight, Kissinger maintained years later. Certainly they had much to brag about. They had penetrated and demystified the inscrutable Orient, put Moscow on the defensive, and expanded trade and “people-to-people exchanges.” They displayed extraordinary skill and patience not only in negotiating with their erstwhile enemies in Peking but in fending off their adversaries in State and Defense, in Congress, in the old China Lobby. Moreover, they had been blessed with that priceless gift for diplomats negotiating on a confused and darkling plain—luck. China’s leadership had been undergoing a massive internal convulsion that still had not ended when Kissinger first arrived. Washington’s political intelligence on China was so poor that the voyagers knew little of the intensity of the conflict between the anti-Soviet, moderate faction represented by Chou and the hard-line “anti-imperialists” led by Lin Piao and supported by the military. This left them in blissful ignorance of a conflict whose merest spasm could have upset all their plans.

Still, the test of their success lay in Moscow as well as in Peking. They were above all playing triangular diplomacy. Soon after returning the summiteers redoubled planning for another historic meeting.

At the end of March 1972, only four weeks after the return of the exuberant voyagers from China, three divisions of North Vietnamese infantry, backed by two hundred tanks and new recoilless artillery, smashed south across the Demilitarized Zone. There ensued one of the most bizarre series of events in the Vietnam War. While General Creighton Abrams’s forces to the south had long anticipated such an attack, they took days to discern just what was happening. Although the United States had long been pulling out its troops by the thousands, Hanoi converted the attack into a major offensive after the breakthrough. Although strategic air and sea power could have little immediate impact on a land offensive, Nixon resumed intensive bombing of Haiphong and Hanoi—the first since 1968—and mined Haiphong harbor and other North Vietnamese ports. Although the White House at this point was desperately eager for a Moscow summit, mainly in order to persuade Moscow to persuade Hanoi to accept a settlement, American aircraft sought to interdict Soviet ships bringing military supplies to Hanoi, which risked provoking a major incident. Although such an event did occur when American bombs hit four Soviet merchant ships in Haiphong harbor, the Kremlin merely protested and continued with plans to welcome the Americans in Moscow.

All these incongruities could be explained by one circumstance—the desire of two nuclear superpowers to parley within the triangle of great-power rivalry, giving only secondary consideration to tertiary powers. But the incongruities challenged the popular shibboleth that Moscow or Peking headed up a massive, global, coordinated communist movement. For neither government had decisive influence over a North Vietnamese leadership that gloried in its own autonomy.

Washington’s rapprochement with Moscow took much the same form as the opening to Peking. Once again the President dispatched Kissinger to “advance” the trip. Once again he sidetracked his Secretary of State—this time by repairing to Camp David, ostensibly with Kissinger, and then informing Rogers that his security aide had flown to Moscow on receiving a sudden invitation from Brezhnev. And once again the President blew hot and cold about the prospective summit. He was eager to be the first President since FDR to visit the U.S.S.R., the very first to go to Moscow—a trip that Ike had missed after the U-2 debacle. But he feared a debacle of his own making, if Moscow saw the parley as a means of strengthening its hand in Vietnam and weakening the American, or if on the other hand the Kremlin suddenly called off the whole summit. For Moscow was becoming huffy. When Kissinger invited Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, with whom he had a close working relationship, to view Chinese-made films of Kissinger’s Peking visits, this interlude of triangular diplomacy with a vengeance ended in a sharp exchange between the two over the American buildup in Southeast Asia.

But the Kremlin did not call off the summit, nor did the White House. The Soviet Union wanted to throw its weight against Chinese influence, to hold tight its corner of the triangle, to persuade Washington to put its full effort behind West German ratification of postwar treaties with Russia and Poland, to discuss arms control, to make deals for grain and other Soviet needs. Nixon’s aims were simpler but no less compelling: to persuade Moscow to press Hanoi for an acceptable settlement; to emerge from a second summit as the supreme peacemaker; above all to dish the Democrats on the peace issue and win big in November.

Late in May 1972, Air Force One, bearing the President and Mrs. Nixon and the usual big presidential party, soared off into the skies over Washington, this time heading east. The mood, in Kissinger’s memory, was optimistic, even jubilant, unspoiled by undue humility. “This has to be one of the great diplomatic coups of all times!” the President recalled Kissinger saying. “Three weeks ago everyone predicted it would be called off, and today we’re on our way.”

President Nikolai Podgorny, Premier Aleksei Kosygin, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and a conspicuously small crowd greeted the Americans at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. As party boss, Brezhnev was not required to be there and chose not to be. The presidential motorcade raced to the Kremlin through emptied streets. Soon the Nixons were installed in opulent quarters inside the Kremlin’s Grand Palace, and shortly after that the President was closeted with Brezhnev.

He faced a large, active man with heavy swept-back hair over bushy eyebrows and powerful features. Brezhnev’s rapidly alternating friendliness and pugnacity reminded the President of Irish labor bosses back home, or even Chicago’s Mayor Daley. Wasting little time on formalities, the General Secretary launched into vigorous complaints about Vietnam. This over, he became almost convivial as he proposed a close personal relationship between them and spoke of the memory of Franklin Roosevelt cherished by the Soviet people, and he warmed up even more when Nixon said that in his experience disputes among subordinates were usually overcome by agreement among the top leaders.

“If we leave all the decisions to the bureaucrats,” Nixon ventured, “we will never achieve any progress.” Brezhnev laughed heartily at this common complaint of leaders. Kissinger was not present at this initial meeting.

“They would simply bury us in paper!” the General Secretary said, slapping his hand on the table.

The parley that followed underwent the zigs and zags, the starts and stops, that had always characterized Soviet-American negotiations. The crucial business was nuclear arms negotiations. Kissinger conducted the hard bargaining. He and the President had kept control of the American side by excluding from a direct role in the summit talks not only Rogers but the SALT experts in Helsinki, who had been negotiating on arms for many months. Hour after hour, jotting down on yellow pads endless combinations and permutations of arms calculations, Kissinger hammered out compromises with his Kremlin counterparts, under the watchful eye of the President. And this was the greatest incongruity: here inside the Kremlin, the historic citadel of Russian authority, ringed by military might in and around the capital, in a nation bristling with nuclear arms, this magically transported White House, with its President and aides, secretaries and secretaries to secretaries, communications and transportation experts, security men and chauffeurs, was closeted with the Soviet power elite commanding those nuclear arms from a cluster of ancient buildings around them.

Communication was easy with the help of a gifted Soviet interpreter, but the language was arcane: throw weights and first strikes, hard targets and soft, silos and delivery vehicles, ABMs (antiballistic missiles), ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles), and MIRVs (multiple independent reentry vehicles). These bland and bureaucratic terms, as Bernard Weisberger noted, “hid the appalling realities of the subject and made seemingly rational discussion possible.” The two nuclear powers had continued to operate on the premise that their goal was not to win a nuclear exchange but to forestall one by making clear that if one side launched a first strike, the other would, with its surviving weapons, inflict an unbearable counter-strike. Thus neither side could hope for victory. But each side had to guard against the possibility that reckless leaders in the other camp might nevertheless be tempted to take out its weapons or to encase theirs in hardened silos and other devices, or to turn science fiction into reality by developing technology that could destroy or turn away incoming missiles. Thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons had been piled up in each nation to guard against the unthinkable—a situation in which one’s own side had no nuclear weapons left and the other had at least one.

The key outcome of the Moscow summit was a strategic arms limitation treaty limiting the deployment of antiballistic missile systems to two for each country—one to protect the capital and one to protect an ICBM complex—and an “Interim Agreement” freezing for the next five years the number of ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles each side could possess. There were collateral agreements and understandings: a grain deal for the Soviets, who were facing a potentially catastrophic crop failure, implicit promises by Moscow that it would not intervene in Vietnam against the United States, and a set of “Basic Principles” piously promising that each nation would try to avoid military confrontations, would respect the norm of equality, would not seek unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, all this in the spirit of “reciprocity, mutual accommodation and mutual benefit.”

In its detail, it was a small step. The Interim Agreement called for no reduction in offensive weapons systems, but simply established a cap on the number of missile launchers each country could build until a permanent agreement could be negotiated. No constraint was placed on the number of independently targeted warheads that could be placed on each missile. But symbolically it was a big step. After years of frustration the nuclear powers had proved that they could negotiate limits on offensive weaponry. “A First Step,” The New York Times headlined, “but a Major Stride.” Once again the presidential party returned to a hero’s welcome, with SALT treaty ratification assured—the ABM agreement was soon ratified by an 88-2 vote—and the President’s reelection prospects further enhanced. Soon the White House promotion team was dramatizing his personal triumph in Moscow.

Peace Without Peace

On the evening of November 7, 1972, Richard M. Nixon stood at the pinnacle of world prestige and domestic power. Even the scattered first returns showed that he was winning a sweeping victory over George McGovern. With Eisenhower, he was only the second Republican in the century to win two presidential elections. Both his mixed batch of liberal-conservative domestic policies and his bomb-and-pull-out Vietnam tactics appeared to be handsomely vindicated in the election returns. He was concluding a year of achievement—the summits in Peking and Moscow, the SALT agreement, the apparent winding down of American involvement in Indochina. Only a week or so earlier Henry Kissinger had told the press, “We believe that peace is at hand.”

But the President did not appear triumphant, or even happy, that night. He had a spell of melancholy, perhaps foreboding. Was it due to some revelations about campaign excesses that had come to light, and the possibility of far more serious disclosures? Or his failure to carry in a Republican Congress? Or the empty feeling that this would be his last campaign, that the conflict and crisis on which he thrived appeared to be over? Or merely the pain of having the cap on a top front tooth snap off while he was listening to the early returns? The next morning, looking cold and remote, he strode into a specially summoned meeting of the White House staff, thanked them perfunctorily, and turned the meeting over to Haldeman, who without ado ordered all staff members to submit their resignations immediately.

The most likely explanation for Nixon’s malaise was Vietnam. Following North Vietnam’s massive “Eastertide” attack across the DMZ in March and Washington’s retaliatory bombing and blockade, Hanoi had continued its heavy offensive for weeks. The President had sporadically taken personal command of the air war, chafing when the weather was poor. “Let’s get that weather cleared up,” he exclaimed to Haldeman and John Mitchell one afternoon in April. “The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time.” It wasn’t just the weather. “The Air Force isn’t worth a—I mean, they won’t fly.” In May the bombing reached its highest level of the war; the next month American planes dropped over 100,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam. Even so the war was grinding down to a stalemate again. Thieu remained in power; the South Vietnamese Army was still largely intact; Hanoi had lost 100,000 men in the attack, perhaps four times Saigon’s losses. On the other hand, tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops were now ensconced in defensive positions well below the DMZ.

It was this last fact that now produced the single most crucial development in the latter stages of the Vietnam War—a development so carefully concealed from the American public, so muffled in diplomatic bargaining, so obscured in double-talk, that its full nature and import would not be clear for years. This was the signaling by Nixon and Kissinger to Hanoi through Moscow and other channels that the American troop withdrawal would continue even though Hanoi’s troops stayed in place in South Vietnam, that Washington would not exact a troop withdrawal from Hanoi to match its own steady pullout of the ground forces that for years had been the principal support of the Saigon regime. This signal was wrapped in a shroud of self-protective premises and claims: that the South Vietnamese Army was now fortified enough by American arms and training to hold its own, that the North Vietnamese forces would wither away in the south as a result of their isolation from their bases across the DMZ, that the Americans could always return with heavy bombing and even with troops if Hanoi conducted further attacks.

The most remarkable aspect of Washington’s yielding to Hanoi was that Nixon and Kissinger did not deceive themselves—they knew exactly what they were doing. They were at the very least taking an enormous gamble with the future of South Vietnam as an independent nation, at the worst laying the groundwork for a peace bound to collapse—a peace without honor. For few American leaders had warned more often than Nixon that communism was innately aggressive, that Hanoi was insatiably expansionist, that the communist enemy could be stopped only by counterforce, that to yield militarily to communists was to encourage them, not to desist, but to grab more. Kissinger could hardly have been unaware of the teachings of Vietnam’s foremost military strategist, Vo Nguyen Giap—that revolutionary forces must know how to be patient but also when to strike. Indeed, Giap had called only a few months earlier for heavy attacks by combined regular and guerrilla forces.

One man who understood the situation with crystal clarity was President Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon. When Nixon sent Kissinger’s deputy Alexander Haig to Saigon early in October to urge the South Vietnam regime to go along with negotiations with Hanoi, Thieu had argued, protested, stormed, and finally broken into tears. The President’s reaction to Haig’s report of this episode, as reflected in Nixon’s memoirs years later, revealed once again the disingenuous cynicism of his attitude toward what the South Vietnamese later would call Nixon’s sellout.

“I sympathized with Thieu’s position,” the President wrote. “Almost the entire North Vietnamese Army—an estimated 120,000 troops that had poured across the DMZ during the spring invasion—were still in South Vietnam, and he was naturally skeptical of any plan that would lead to an American withdrawal without requiring a corresponding North Vietnamese withdrawal. I shared his view that the Communists’ motives were entirely cynical. I knew, as he did, that they would observe the agreement only so long and so far as South Vietnam’s strength and America’s readiness to retaliate forced them to do so. But I felt that if we could negotiate an agreement on our terms, those conditions could be met.” He sent Thieu a personal reassurance that he would agree to nothing without talking “personally with you well beforehand.” Thieu did not want talk— he wanted a guarantee that his ally would not keep withdrawing its troops while his enemy’s troops stayed in place.

Throughout the late summer and early fall of 972, as the President became increasingly involved in campaign chores, Kissinger had been meeting secretly in Paris in a desperate effort to work out an agreement with Hanoi’s negotiator, the redoubtable Le Duc Tho. Although eager to stop the bombing and to get on with their war with the Saigon regime now that their troops were in place, the North Vietnamese were in no great hurry; their intent now was to win the war with as few losses as possible. Kissinger, however, was under heavy time pressures: he wanted to demonstrate progress in the negotiations to help his chief ward off McGovern’s expected peace offensive, to soften public demands that the remaining American troops continue to be pulled out on schedule, and above all to reach an agreement with both Hanoi and Saigon before Congress convened in January and began to slash appropriations for the war in Vietnam. The negotiators spent hundreds of hours on the fine-print questions involving a cease-fire, the return by Hanoi of American prisoners of war, the timing of the withdrawal of the remaining American forces—by August 1972 the last United States ground combat troops had been withdrawn— following the cease-fire, and some kind of tripartite commission that would supervise elections and otherwise help implement the agreement.

There was an Alice-in-Wonderland quality to these discussions: most of the key provisions of the draft agreement, aside from the return of POWs, would be made irrelevant by the transcending legitimation of Hanoi’s presence in force south of the DMZ. And elaborate plans for electoral commissions and the like were preposterous given the deadly hatred that was bound to remain between North and South Vietnamese and the repeated failures of communists and noncommunists in other lands to agree on electoral arrangements, or even on what an election meant.

In mid-October, as the election campaign back home pounded to the finish, Kissinger wrapped up the final details of an elaborate agreement with Le Duc Tho. Tired but euphoric, he flew back to Washington with what he viewed as “the finest compromise available.” He basked in the thought that McGovern had just put forward a peace program that “asked much less of Hanoi than Hanoi had already conceded to us.” When he and Haig reported to Nixon in the President’s “hideaway” suite across from the White House in the old-time State Department building, Nixon was so pleased that he ordered steak and wine to celebrate the breakthrough.

The last crucial step lay ahead—pressing Saigon into a settlement without risk of “sellout” accusations before election day. Reviewing the terms as he flew to Saigon, Kissinger felt optimistic. The proposed cease-fire in place would leave Thieu’s government in control of 90 percent of the population, Kissinger calculated, and the other provisions were beneficial. To be sure, he had not gained Hanoi’s agreement to withdraw its forces from the south, but he comforted himself with the thought that if a clause forbidding infiltration was honored, attrition would ease the threat to Saigon.

Arriving in Saigon in this mood on October 19, Kissinger confidently explained the details of the agreement to Thieu and his entourage. He was unprepared for Thieu’s response—total skepticism about the agreement, total consternation at the prospect of being deserted by his American ally. Kissinger argued, promised, threatened. All in vain. After five days of fruitless exchanges he urged Nixon to bypass Saigon and sign with Hanoi. This the President would not do. With election day just ahead, he did not want to rouse Republican hawks or in any way jeopardize his expected victory; moreover, he had misgivings about “losing” South Vietnam. While furious with Thieu’s intransigence, he decided that the only hope now was for Kissinger to renegotiate better terms with Le Duc Tho.

Returning to Paris two weeks after the November election, Kissinger found himself in a vise between North Vietnam scenting victory and South Vietnam fighting for its existence. Hanoi, after making “maximum” concessions in October, was hardly disposed to reopen the agreement in any event and was given little incentive to do so. Kissinger’s secret discussions with Le Duc Tho made little progress, as Tho responded to new American demands in kind, by heightening his own demands, retracting concessions, stalling. The White House, meanwhile, pursued carrot-and-stick tactics with Saigon, sending more military hardware to South Vietnam—in the process making the little country the fourth-largest air power in the world—and assuring Thieu that if Hanoi violated the agreement the United States would immediately retaliate, while threatening to make peace without him if he refused to go along. At the same time only a stick was waved at Hanoi—another massive dose of bombing—if it did not make further concessions.

It was not an edifying moment in the White House. Kissinger, pursuing the negotiations in the now frigid atmosphere of Paris, found Nixon mercurial in mood and tactics, alternately bellicose and conciliatory, often withdrawn and sullen, fundamentally ambivalent in his posture toward the rival camps. Kissinger suspected that he was still fair game for White House rivals gunning for his seat—or at least maneuvering to oust him from it. Nixon for his part was concerned about Kissinger’s emotional state—he was, Nixon noted in his diary in mid-December, “up and down”—under the pressures besetting him, especially after his aide hinted at resigning.

By early December, with the Paris talks deadlocked and Saigon still adamant, Nixon was moving toward a massive “retaliation” strike against North Vietnam. On December 13, the negotiations broke off and Kissinger returned to Washington disillusioned, exhausted, and angry. Gritting his teeth and clenching his fists, as Nixon later remembered, he called Hanoi’s negotiators “just a bunch of shits. Tawdry, filthy shits.” They made the Russians look good, he went on, “compared to the way the Russians make the Chinese look good” when it came to decent negotiating. It was time, Kissinger said, to resume bombing.

Ready for his last roll of the dice, the President ordered bombing in the north as well as the south and the reseeding of mines in Haiphong harbor. Still dubious about the zeal of the Air Force, he told the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an admiral, “I don’t want any more of this crap about the fact that we couldn’t hit this target or that one. This is your chance to use military power effectively to win the war, and if you don’t, I’ll consider you responsible.”

While Americans were celebrating the long Christmas holiday at home, American bombers ranged over the populous corridor between Hanoi and Haiphong, dropping more than 36,000 tons of bombs in the most intensive attack of the war. While Americans paid tribute to the Prince of Peace, B-52S killed at least 1,600 civilians.

At home the press exploded in indignation. Caught unprepared as a result of the White House penchant for secrecy, filled with hope after Kissinger’s comment two months before that peace was at hand, repeatedly assured that Nixon was winding down American involvement, the public saw the horrendous scenario being enacted again. Nixon was denounced as a madman “waging war by tantrum.” Republican senator George Aiken spoke of this “sorry Christmas present” for the American people. Newspapers blazoned headlines: “Terror from the Skies,” “New Madness in Vietnam,” “Beyond All Reason,” “The Rain of Death Continues.” Pope Paul VI told a Vatican audience that the bombing of “blessed” Vietnam was causing him daily grief.

The bombing ended when Hanoi agreed to return to the bargaining table, but the agreement Kissinger and Tho patched together in Paris differed little from the October draft. The bombing had not obtained the concessions that Nixon and Kissinger needed to gain Saigon’s consent to an agreement. Nor had this fierce Christmastide demonstration of Washington’s willingness to “retaliate” persuaded Thieu. But now Nixon simply imposed the agreement on him, with yet another promise that if Saigon went along, the United States would “respond with full force” to North Vietnamese violations. After stalling for a few days Thieu admitted that at last he had no choice, saying resignedly, “I have done all that I can for my country.” On January 27, 1973, the agreement was signed in Paris by the United States and the two rivals—and also by the Vietcong’s Provisional Revolutionary Government, which occupied “leopard spots” in the south.

President Nixon had hoped that the nation would be at peace in Southeast Asia when he began his second term, on January 20. But Thieu’s stalling tactics allowed him to talk only about the settlement soon to come. Still, he could take satisfaction in the triumphs of his foreign policy and look to the future. “We have the chance today,” he told the inaugural crowd, “to do more than ever before in our history to make life better in America—to ensure better education, better health, better housing, better transportation, a cleaner environment—to restore respect for law, to make our communities more livable—and to ensure the God-given right of every American to full and equal opportunity.”

Even in this hour of triumph he could not ignore the pinpricks. He had heard that some members of Eugene Ormandy’s orchestra had asked to be excused from performing in the inaugural concert at the Kennedy Center and had to be ordered to come, but he was pleased that Ormandy had wanted him to appear on the platform “just to show those left-wing sons of bitches.” He noted in his diary, “What a man he is.” Then, on his ride to the Capitol, demonstrators yelled “f-u-c-k” in the distance, and on the way back the dissidents threw eggs at his cavalcade. The inaugural balls went off well but they were so huge and packed he wondered whether his would be the last of such affairs. Still he felt that he and his wife, Pat, had mixed well with the crowds, which was important because, he wrote in his diary, he needed to demonstrate his “affability.” The White House staff just hadn’t been able to get this across. “On the other hand, you can’t overplay it.”

With Vietnam evidently settled, he looked forward to more successes overseas. Planning was already underway for the next summit—a visit by Brezhnev to the United States. The President eagerly anticipated showing America to the Soviet leader—showing not only the White House and the monuments in Washington but, even more, southern California with its splendid freeways and homes. Once again Kissinger journeyed to Moscow to plan what would become known as Summit II. His “advancing” went well, aside from an ominous moment alone with Brezhnev in the General Secretary’s hunting stand ninety miles northeast of Moscow, when Brezhnev suddenly started in on China. His brother had worked there, he said, and had found the Chinese treacherous and arrogant. Now China was building a nuclear arsenal—something would have to be done. To this rather crude gambit Kissinger was noncommittal. The next day Ambassador Dobrynin took Kissinger aside to confirm that Brezhnev had been wholly serious in his comments on China.

In style, Brezhnev’s June visit surpassed Nixon’s fondest hopes. The party boss was all exuberance and joviality in Washington and at Camp David as he worked the crowd on ceremonial occasions and enthusiastically accepted Nixon’s gift of a Lincoln Continental donated by the Ford Motor Company. After a trip across the country with the President in Air Force One he appeared to be gratifyingly impressed, during a short helicopter ride to San Clemente, by the streams of cars on the roads below and the number of private houses. Some of the beachfront houses were owned by wealthy people, Nixon explained, but most of the others belonged to people who worked in factories and offices. Insisting on staying at San Clemente rather than on a nearby Marine base, the burly Russian agreeably settled in amidst the very feminine decor of Tricia Nixon’s bedroom.

In substance Summit II could not match the pathbreaking achievements of the Moscow summit thirteen months earlier. The key product—mostly symbolic but a measure of some détente progress over the past year or two—was a joint “Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War.” The agreement provided that the two powers would “act in such a manner as to prevent the development of situations capable of causing a dangerous exacerbation of their relations, as to avoid military confrontations, and as to exclude the outbreak of nuclear war between them and between either of the Parties and other countries”; that each would “refrain from the threat or use of force against the other Party, against the allies of the other Party and against other countries”; that if relations between them and other countries/or among other countries, appeared to involve the risk of nuclear war, the two parties would “immediately enter into urgent consultations with each other and make every effort to avert this risk.”

It was a noble declaration—but how seriously made? Nixon suspected that Brezhnev wanted it out of fear that Washington might soon conclude a military agreement with China. Kissinger described it at the time as a “landmark” step toward the prevention of nuclear war, but his memoirs present it as a “bland set of principles that had been systematically stripped of all implications harmful to our interests.” From their long agitation for its drafting and their public celebration of it, the Soviets appeared to take the declaration far more seriously. Both sides knew, however, that the success of the agreement depended on a “real life” test, which would depend in turn on each side’s ability to see the agreement as a constraint upon its own options and not merely the other side’s. And a test of all this came with alarming swiftness in that cockpit of violence, the Middle East.

A curious episode in San Clemente had foreshadowed it. After a convivial dinner filled with warm toasts and Brezhnev bear hugs, the Soviet leader retired early because of jet lag. The President was in his pajamas later in the evening when a Secret Service agent knocked on the door. It was a message from Kissinger: the Russians wanted to talk, immediately— Kissinger did not know why. Shortly Nixon and Kissinger were confronting Brezhnev, Gromyko, and Dobrynin in a stiff and emotional exchange over a Soviet proposal that the two nations agree then and there on a Middle East settlement calling for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders in return for an end to the state of belligerency. These were the standard Arab terms. Nixon replied coolly that he could not prejudice Israel’s rights. Brezhnev warned in effect that if the two sides could not agree on this, war would break out again in the Middle East.

This summit confrontation occurred, Kissinger was to complain later, only a day after the signing of the agreement on the prevention of nuclear war. But he should not have been surprised by Brezhnev’s thrust, however untimely, for the subject had come up in Kissinger’s advance meeting in the Soviet Union, and indeed the Middle East had been a source of Soviet-American tension since the Six-Day War in 1967. That war, during which the U.S. Sixth Fleet had been put on alert and two aircraft carriers moved east from Crete, had left the Israelis victoriously occupying Syria’s Golan Heights, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, and Jordan’s territory adjoining Israel west of the Jordan River. Ever since, Moscow and Washington had been pouring arms into the seething region, while the Arab nations sought some means of regaining the lands they had lost.

Early in October 1973, less than four months after Summit II, Egyptian and Syrian troops drove into the Sinai and the Golan Heights while Israel’s guard was down during Yom Kippur. In the course of two weeks of fierce combat, as Israeli forces were pushed back but then gained the offensive, Moscow and Washington alternated in urging a cease-fire in place, depending on whose ally held the upper hand. Finally achieved, it collapsed when Israel, taking advantage of some earlier veiled encouragement by Kissinger and of a real or alleged violation of the truce by Egypt, completed its isolation of the Egyptian Third Army on the east side of the Suez Canal. Both Moscow and Cairo importuned Washington to force Israel to stop its advance. Brezhnev proposed a joint Soviet-American effort to restore the cease-fire, adding that failing joint action, Moscow would “be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally.” The word “unilaterally” leaped out of the message. This Washington would not tolerate.

There followed what Elizabeth Drew later called “Strangelove Day.” Kissinger did not inform Nixon of Brezhnev’s message, but rather convened an enlarged National Security Council meeting, which decided to issue a general military alert. The Strategic Air Command and other nuclear forces were alerted, along with field commands in Europe. Carriers moved toward the eastern Mediterranean. The next day the alert was claxoned on morning television news shows and blared in newspaper headlines. A message to Brezhnev warned that Washington would “in no event” accept unilateral action. A crisis reminiscent of the Cuban missile confrontation seemed in the making until the White House took one simple step that deflated the situation—it persuaded Israel to accept a cease-fire.

Washington was intent on diminishing Moscow’s influence in the Middle East. Even a joint Russian-American peace effort, the White House feared, would advance Soviet interests there. According to Raymond Garthoff's careful analysis of the crisis, Kissinger also sought to demonstrate an American capacity to face down Moscow. The “Soviets subsided,” Kissinger wrote later, “as soon as we showed our teeth.” Four months after the lofty declarations of Summit II and after aggressive gestures by both Moscow and Washington, the Bear and the Eagle were once again following the law of the jungle.

By 1973 summitry was taking on a life of its own. Just as Summit II had little effect on the Middle East crisis, so the summits in general appeared to proceed on their own lofty plane, with only glancing impact on the Realpolitik of international rivalry. Thus Summit I had taken place notwithstanding North Vietnam’s onslaught through the DMZ and the massive American bombing, and despite Hanoi’s indignation at its perfidious ally. Day after day at the summits men solemnly discussed arms reduction deals without exerting any significant influence in the end on the ability of each nation to obliterate the other many times over. The Russians tried at the summits to turn the Americans against the Chinese without avail, for the Americans were having their own summits with the Chinese. Suspecting that mighty decisions were afoot, NATO and other allies were restive over summitry “plots,” but they had little to fear. Washington would not forsake its crucial Western alliances for any deals at the summit. Indeed, the White House planned some kind of “Year of Europe” in 1973, but this initiative collapsed.

Though summitry went on—a third Soviet-American meeting was planned for June 1974 in Moscow—it was approaching a dead end. In part this was a result of a resurgence of hawks among both Democrats and Republicans who, sensing the President’s vulnerabilities and incensed by what they saw as dangerous concessions at the summits, launched counterattacks against the whole strategy of détente. By Summit III press and public feeling appeared to be turning against summitry for several reasons: the dashed expectations following earlier meetings, especially Summit II; rising American resentment over Soviet mistreatment of Jews; Moscow’s “meddling” in the Middle East, climaxed by its aid to Israel’s foes. The Soviets had their own set of grievances, particularly the failure of Congress to grant them equal tariff treatment or to make large credits available. Doubts about détente were growing in the Kremlin. Inevitably Nixon’s last summit in 1974, just before his fall (discussed in the next chapter) produced only limited agreements.

Gerald R. Ford, appointed to the vice-presidency by Nixon after Spiro Agnew’s resignation and ascending to the presidency after Nixon’s own resignation, made a valiant effort to restore the spirit of détente at his first summit, in Vladivostok in late November 1974. With the aging Brezhnev he reached agreement limiting each superpower to 2,400 strategic weapon systems, which could comprise a combination of heavy bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and air-launched ballistic missiles. Eight months later Ford and leaders of the Soviet Union and thirty-three other nations signed in Helsinki a pathbreaking set of agreements designed to protect human rights and permit freer travel by each nation’s citizens. But relations with Moscow were cooling as anti-Soviet feeling intensified at home, exacerbated by the Kremlin’s expulsions of dissidents, most notably of the writer Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. Ford’s Secretary of Defense, James R. Schlesinger, became such an open critic of détente that the President fired him, leaving Schlesinger more pestiferous than ever outside the tent.

The harrowing collapse of South Vietnam in the spring of 1975 transcended all these events. Hanoi’s drive to victory unrolled slowly but implacably against a foe that was gradually disintegrating under an appalling burden of political corruption, economic chaos, and military incompetence and demoralization. For two years the North Vietnamese built up their troop strength and logistical support in the south, including even an oil pipeline from the north. Then they struck with overwhelming speed and power. American radio and television brought the denouement home: the triumphant march of Hanoi’s forces toward Saigon—the spreading panic in the capital—scores of American helicopters like great vultures rising and descending over the city—thousands of Vietnamese surging to the takeoff points, crying out to be saved—a marine clubbing them as they sought frantically to board the helicopters—the men and women and children left behind, now frantically seeking escape routes to the ocean and soon to risk their lives in small boats on the high seas.

One American would long be haunted by his own special memory—of an aged farmer who somehow made his way onto an evacuation plane still pulling his bullock on a rope. Soon after takeoff the terrified animal, rampaging on the aircraft, forced his way through a half-open exit, dragging his master with him. Moments later the American saw the farmer still holding the rope tied to his bullock as they both floated in space, then plunged to the red earth below.

Foreign Policy: The Faltering Experiments

While the Vietnam War was heading toward its Götterdämmerung, Americans were readying to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the era when their revolutionary ancestors conducted the long struggle for freedom from Britain. The fireworks, the patriotic speeches, the costumed parades, were a buoyant reminder of the Declaration that had freed the colonies to shape their own destiny as an independent nation. The lofty brigantines, frigates, and other men-of-war, stretching along the Hudson River with their ballooning sails and bright pennants, commemorated the beginning of an era when the small country with limited arms but consummate diplomacy held off the British and French and Spanish and secured a new republic.

In the two centuries since those days Americans had in effect conducted a series of experiments in foreign and military policy. In the endless bouleversement of international affairs the young nation almost went to war against its old French ally, fought a second war against Britain that ended ingloriously, ousted or exterminated Indians, conducted a risky invasion into Mexico’s heartland, and then settled down to a long peace interrupted only by its own civil holocaust in the early 1860s. A period of internal expansion and warfare against Native Americans was punctuated by chauvinistic outbursts against Cubans and Canadians and Mexicans following some real or contrived incident. During the last third of the nineteenth century Americans established their Pacific dominion—Alaska, Hawaii, the Philippines, numerous islets—and intervened in Latin America during the 1890s to protect their commercial and political interests. It was said that the British built their empire in a fit of absentmindedness; this was almost as true of the Yankees.

During these years Washington alternated between spasms of expansionist activity and longer periods of absorption in domestic problems; then the first years of the twentieth century inexorably drew the nation into global demands and crises. Theodore Roosevelt, sword in one hand and dove in the other, could no more resist international challenges and enticements than he could domestic. Woodrow Wilson moved from “too proud to fight” to making the world “safe for Democracy” almost in a twinkling of the eye. Three Republican Presidents in the 1920s experimented with repudiation of the League of Nations, deep reductions in arms, intervention in Central America, and tariff boosting.

If American foreign policy making had appeared kaleidoscopic during the first third of the twentieth century, after 1932 it flashed across the public scene like images from a stepped-up movie projector. In a period of eight years FDR moved from policies of economic nationalism to semi-isolationism, to neutrality, to aid to the democracies, to all aid short of war, to military intervention in the North Atlantic. Eager at first to reduce American commitments abroad, Harry Truman was drawn into the intensifying cold war, into crises in Berlin, Greece, the Middle East, and Korea, ultimately almost into a war with China. Hoping to bring some order and stability to foreign relations, Eisenhower ran into a dangerous conflict over the Suez Canal, a desperate revolt in Hungary, crises in the Formosa Strait and Berlin, and a loss of credibility in the U-2 incident. Caught between clashing personal instincts toward détente and deterrence, and pulled politically between hawks and doves among Democrats and among the voters, Kennedy first stood by containment in Berlin and Cuba and then moved toward détente. Pledged to pursue peace in his 1964 contest with the bellicose Goldwater, LBJ sank steadily into the Vietnam quicksand even as he strove desperately for an “honorable” way out. Famous and infamous as a communist-fighter, Nixon opened relations with the communist power that a generation earlier had sent American troops reeling back toward the 38th parallel.

That Washington’s foreign policy making was unstable, unpredictable, and volatile had long been a source of perplexity to allies and of suspicion to adversaries. British envoys would report back to London that they had enjoyed their stay in the American capital but could not find the government. Sophisticated Britons in Washington learned to maintain close contacts with Congress, the opposition party, and the media as they sought to divine the next actions of Presidents and Secretaries of State. Soviet Foreign Ministers and ambassadors were not so tolerant. Trying to make sense of the Washington kaleidoscope, they saw not merely inconstancy but duplicity and worse. If, as Andrei Gromyko complained, “a new leadership arrives and crosses out all that has been achieved before,” the reason must be, in the eyes of Pravda, the machinations of militaristic and capitalistic-forces within the “ruling circles of the United States.”

Pravda was succumbing to paranoia. In fact, the direct source of the instability of American foreign policy lay far more in complexity and clutter than in conspiracy—in popular attitudes, party fragmentation, and governmental separation of powers. Students of public opinion had long noted that attitudes toward foreign policy among Americans lacked factual substance and intellectual depth, were not anchored to a “set of explicit value and means calculations,” and took the form of shifting moods. Instead of a two-party system arraying popular attitudes behind a governing party and an opposition, the country had had a four-party politics that reflected and perpetuated the diversity and volatility of opinion, leading to “nonpartisan” policies responsive to everybody and nobody. The constitutional provision requiring two-thirds of the Senate to approve treaties, the congressional distribution of foreign policy making among a host of Senate and House committees, the wide breaches between White House and Capitol Hill were neither confusion nor conspiracy but rather applications of the checks and balances planned with exquisite artistry by the framers of the Constitution.

Even so, was a foreign policy of spasm and swerve inevitable? Did “underlying circumstances” doom the United States forever to short-run, ad hoc, volatile policy making in international affairs? Were tiny faltering steps, confusing and contradictory policies, vacillating half measures inevitable? A young Harvard scholar thought not. The past decade and a half, he wrote as Eisenhower’s presidency came to an end, had been a period of stagnation and decline. “Fifteen years more of a deterioration of our position in the world such as we have experienced since World War II would find us reduced to Fortress America in a world in which we had become largely irrelevant.” Americans must now choose between drift and decision.

The solution, Henry Kissinger had contended, lay not in altering institutions but in summoning to leadership men who could replace routine with purpose, substitute individual creativity for group mediocrity, elevate purpose and principle over “pragmatism” and opportunism, risk new departures at the expense of rote and routine. Above all, the German-born political scientist inveighed against sensible, expedient policies. “In a revolutionary period, it is precisely the ‘practical’ man who is most apt to become a prisoner of events. For what seems most natural to him is most in need of being overcome.” The standing operating procedure would clash with the needs of creativity.

As if by a flying carpet, this scholar had been transported to a global decision center that could make innovative leadership possible, and eventually to a success and celebrity of which he could hardly have dreamed. “Only in America,” as Americans liked to say—but it was by competence and conniving, not a feat of legerdemain, that the critic rose from political science to political power. All had begun well as Kissinger and Nixon rejected the old policies of alternating between acquiescence and confrontation, between compromise and containment, and proclaimed a new era of coherent, purposeful foreign policy making based on balancing interests with power.

Disillusionment came slowly for both. The President found that he had appointed as security aide a brilliant conceptualizer and articulate advocate who, however, appeared to seek the Washington spotlight as though it were the aide and not the President who would have to stand responsible for foreign policy at the next election. Kissinger found that he was working under—and to a degree taking lessons from—an expert manipulator who disliked the process of face-to-face, give-and-take negotiating, who often appeared psychologically insecure to the point of literally kicking out in his anger and then withdrawing to privacy and solitude, who employed secrecy and deception almost as a matter of course, who rejected “teamwork” in favor of a decision-making process that again and again excluded the participation of the Secretary of State and even of White House aides.

Both men were wily tacticians, resourceful crisis managers, brilliant opportunists. Both believed that leaders should lead—should press for decision and action despite foot-dragging bureaucrats and recalcitrant legislators, play enemies and even allies off against one another without apology, use almost any means to reach what they considered to be elevated goals. They were twentieth-century Machiavellians who maneuvered, manipulated, and mystified their adversaries and often their allies. In the end, however, whatever the various successes and failures of their foreign policy, Kissinger fell far short of the working principles he had set forth in his Harvard study.

Perhaps the most important of these principles was to be expected of a scholarly rationalist who had immersed himself in the leisurely and well-considered diplomacy of the nineteenth-century aristocrats. This was the idea of basing foreign policy tactics on a philosophy of international politics that could serve as a guide to the flood of day-to-day decision making. But often missing in his strategy in practice was the crucial linkage between the overall goal and the everyday means—a framework consisting of explicit concepts, clear choices among priorities, interrelated guidelines—without which statecraft puffs up into rhetoric or crumbles into bits of eclectic, unrelated twitches, jerks, and spasms. This was most evident in White House Soviet policy, which proclaimed lofty principles of cooperation and dealt also with prosaic problems such as grain, but failed to fashion the linkage between these that would make for long-run, stable, reasonably predictable dealings with Moscow, her enemies, and her allies, notably North Vietnam.

Another bête noire of Kissinger the scholar was the tendency of American foreign policy makers to seek out a “middle way,” bipartisan agreement, popular consensus. This tendency, he warned, made for weak policy by committees, the fragmentation of consensus into a series of ad hoc decisions, the conversion of substantive issues into administrative or even technical ones, and ultimate resolution of a problem by morselization and “coordination” rather than through clear decision and action. But such was the fate of the Kissinger operation.

Such, in particular, was the fate of the policy toward Vietnam. Essentially, Nixon and Kissinger followed a middle way between an all-out military confrontation with Hanoi and a full-scale and early withdrawal from South Vietnam. Within the broad, bipartisan middle way there were violent fluctuations of policy as Nixon stepped up heavy bombing at the same time he was methodically pulling out ground forces.

Were there alternative strategies in Vietnam? At least three. One was to plan and undertake, with the full knowledge of the Saigon regime, a carefully planned, orderly withdrawal of all American power in South Vietnam, with full rearguard protection from GIs and aircraft, in a manner that would enable escapees to find safety in other lands and at least avoid the terrible later ordeals of the “boat people.” Or Washington might have stepped up the bombing of North Vietnam so massively as to compel Hanoi to pull its troops north of the DMZ—an alternative that, however irrational, fitted Nixon’s willingness to pose as a “madman” who could scare his foes into compromise. There was also the “Korea” or “heartland” alternative—establishing and maintaining a shrunken South Vietnam in the Saigon and delta regions, backed up by ready American sea, air, and ground power over a long period.

During Kissinger’s rule the NSC offices in the White House were a place less of calm consideration of alternative strategies than of continual tension, sudden crises, flaring anger, confrontations, shouting matches, group resignations. Doubtless this state of affairs was due in part to Kissinger himself, with his endless manipulations and bullying ways. But it was due also to erratic presidential direction, because, as Kissinger later reflected, “there was no true Nixon.” Several qualities fought for supremacy in the same man: he was “idealistic, thoughtful, generous,” along with “vindictive, petty, emotional,” “reflective, philosophical, stoical,” along with “impetuous, impulsive, and erratic.” Adlai Stevenson quipped during the 1960 campaign that no man since Lon Chancy had shown so many faces to the American public. Whether or not the President foiled his enemies, certainly he perplexed his associates. Anyone entering the Oval Office or Nixon’s hideaway study might find a master of calm analysis or a prisoner of deep insecurities and dark passions.

The Nixon-Kissinger While House was an extreme version of the problems of other presidencies—the paper-thin bipartisanship, the absence of clear guidelines linking broad but explicit goals to everyday policy making, the atmosphere of recurrent tension and desperate crisis management. These problems stemmed from the fundamental and persistent failing in American foreign policy making—the lack of steadfast, coherent, “follow-through” decision and action—in short, of a strategy of international relations. A quarter century after Kissinger published his critique of ad hoc, volatile, zigzag foreign policy making, another young scholar could have made the same biting criticism of him, only with more urgency.

This failure encompassed a number of tendencies: the revival of a presidency imperial in scope and power and heavily personal in image and operation; the refusal of Presidents, especially in crisis times, to include in the decision process America’s allies, congressional leaders, or even key cabinet officials; presidential exploitation of popular protest over an issue or incident, raising public expectations that whip back on the White House; and the traditional gulfs between Congress and the President, and between the houses of Congress, that produce the stalemates and slowdowns that in turn trigger spasms of action.

Many of these tendencies were not new. For decades Presidents had bypassed the Senate treaty-ratification hurdle by making executive agreements on crucial matters with nations around the globe. At least since the Civil War, Presidents had been using their war powers to the hilt and extending their inherent or emergency powers to almost every conceivable domestic crisis as well. Indeed, the kind of congressional-presidential friction that tempted Presidents to go it alone had begun almost as soon as the two branches of government were established in lower Manhattan in the spring of 1789. As for secret presidential adventurism, the researches of Abraham Sofaer have supported his surmise that, in Arthur Schlesinger’s summary, “early presidents deliberately selected venturesome agents, deliberately kept their missions secret, deliberately gave them vague instructions, deliberately failed either to approve or to disapprove their constitutionally questionable plans and deliberately denied Congress and the public the information to determine whether aggressive acts were authorized.” White House agents operating secretly in Iran in the 1980s were nothing new.

What was novel and portentous was the convergence of these tendencies, immensely magnified by the media. Kennedy’s domination of press and electronic news during the missile crisis, Johnson’s obsessive monitoring of the media, Nixon’s access to television during both his foreign and his domestic struggles, demonstrated White House power to exploit television; but the media were willing accomplices. Presidents found it much easier to command the airwaves for direct appeal to the people than to consult congressional or even Administration leaders to shape a collective decision that might have future public support and staying power.

The power of the media to present foreign policy in quick, intense, staccato images put enormous emphasis on the appearance of national power as well as its reality. Once upon a time Winston Churchill had built his reputation partly on his ability to proclaim defeat. After Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt told the American people that the Japanese attack had “caused severe damage to American naval and military forces” and that it would not only be a long war but a hard war. Later, General Stilwell, despite PR hopes to cover up defeat in Burma, refreshingly said, “I claim we got a hell of a beating.” After the missile crisis, on the other hand, Kennedy said that while Soviet missiles in Cuba would not have significantly changed the military balance of power, it would have appeared to change the political balance of power and “appearances contributed to reality.” Johnson had deep psychological fears of appearing “soft.” Nixon, commanding stupendous nuclear power, feared that the United States might appear “like a pitiful, helpless giant.” The perception of power, John Lewis Gaddis concluded, “had become as important as power itself.” The actuality of a nation’s military power had a certain continuity and measurability, while the appearance of power could change overnight, thus intensifying the uncertainty, unpredictability, and volatility of Washington’s role abroad.

In earlier days the United States had conducted successful experiments in foreign policy—or at least had occasionally persisted with a foreign policy strategy long enough to test whether it would be successful or not. Lend-Lease during World War II and its transmutation into the Marshall Plan after the war loomed as a strikingly effective, comprehensive, and long-run collective effort with other nations. More typically since 1932 Washington had tried short, staccato essays at economic isolation, political unilateralism, aid to allies, full partnership with allies including Russia, deterrence, containment, détente, triangular diplomacy with Russia and China, human rights.

Something important, however, was missing from this list. The transcending experiment Americans had not tried was a sustained, committed political-economic-ideological strategy of comprehensive détente as a road to world peace.

CHAPTER 12

Vice and Virtue

VIETNAM HAD LEFT DEEP and tormenting scars across the body politic. It was not like the century’s earlier wars that had ended with most Americans feeling victorious and the wars’ original opponents at least acquiescent. After World War II those who had rallied against Nazism knew they had helped put down a monstrous and dangerous tyranny. After Korea, those who had supported the final settlement were satisfied to have restored the regional balance of power first upset by North Koreans attacking south and then by Americans attacking too far north.

After Vietnam, all felt defeated—the hawks who had pressed for a “victory,” the doves who had wanted out, the veterans who returned to a sullen, ungrateful republic, the allies who had been enlisted in a hopeless cause, the Saigon leaders who felt deceived and betrayed, the anticommunist South Vietnamese who faced an anguished choice of fleeing to parts unknown or living under communist rule. Vietnam had displayed the ultimate strategic failure and moral bankruptcy of the “middle way,” of “bipartisan” foreign policy making, day-to-day, step-by-step escalation and de-escalation. An undeclared war for ill-defined goals had ended with Americans frustrated, embittered, and divided.

“It was the guerrilla war to end all guerrilla wars until it somehow became simply a war to be ended,” wrote Max Frankel in The New York Times a few days after Nixon announced the cease-fire of January 1973. “It was the proxy war to contain international Communism until it somehow became the central embarrassment to an era of Communist-capitalist détente. It was devised by a generation that wanted no more Munichs, meaning betrayals by appeasement, and it spawned a generation that wants no more salvations by intervention, no more Vietnams.” Few could have guessed that the war would come to an even more tragic end two and a half years later, or that already it had helped to trigger the chain of events that would bring about the collapse of the Nixon presidency long before hostilities ended.

On Sunday morning, September 8, 1974—thirty days after he took office—President Ford granted a “full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon” for all federal offenses “he has committed or may have committed” or had helped commit as President. At once a fire storm of outraged telephone calls and telegrams broke upon the White House. Press and television editorialists thundered. But no one could do anything; the presidential power to pardon Presidents—or anyone else—was absolute and irreversible. Appearing on national television with the pardon in front of him, Ford stated that the former President would be excessively penalized in undergoing a protracted trial, “our people would again be polarized in their opinions,” and the “credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad.” He then signed the document in full view of the cameras.

Some Americans believed that nothing would prove the credibility of free institutions more dramatically, or set a better example for dictatorships abroad, than the willingness to put a President on trial. Many simply suspected a Ford-Nixon deal. It was rumored that aides in the Ford White House knew of a call from Nixon to the new President: if Ford refused to grant him a full pardon, Nixon would announce publicly that Ford had promised the pardon in exchange for the presidency. Ford boldly appeared before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Justice to declare, “There was no deal, period”; but the investigative reporting of Seymour M. Hersh suggested that Ford did have an outright arrangement with the man who had made him Vice President and then President. Another possibility was that such carefully protected multi-channel negotiations were conducted between the two through intermediaries that the parleys aroused hopes that melded into expectations that led to understandings that emerged as clear promises of a pardon, all conducted with the winks and nods, whispers and silences, gestures and mumbles that constitute the language of brokering politicians. Or perhaps Ford acted, as he claimed, in behalf of what he considered “the greatest good of all the people of the United States whose servant I am.”

In a very different fashion, nevertheless, Nixon went on trial anyway. Ford’s demonstration of presidential power and the debate over its cause and justice, the trials of high Watergate figures in the following months, the voluminous memoirs of Watergate heroes and villains in the following years, and Nixon’s disbarment from practicing law in New York State had the more important effect of putting not merely Nixon but his whole Administration on trial, and even more, of exposing the most extraordinary and pervasive abuse of power in high places. There emerged a frightening portrait of an Administration conducting a political war of attempted extermination against its political enemies at home even while it was waging a military struggle in Southeast Asia. Viewing street demonstrators and student protesters not as legitimate political opponents but as threats to national security and subverters of the national interest, the White House developed a siege mentality.

This was not the first time an Administration had hunkered down into a psychology of besiegement; the previous Administration had exhibited similar signs and strains. But ultimately there was a difference between Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Until the end LBJ’s instinct had been to move out to people, to consult Republicans like Dirksen, to include critics like George Ball. It was better, he liked to tell intimates, to have such people “inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” And in the end Johnson was willing to quit voluntarily. Nixon’s instinct was for exclusion—to suspect anybody and everybody, ignore them, fire them, exile them. And in the end he in effect was forced out of office.

But before that end the Nixon White House had abused power with awesome ingenuity. They had set up an extensive “enemies list” that ranged from political opponents like Jane Fonda, Shirley Chisholm, and Edmund Muskie to the heads of eastern universities and foundations, along with media figures, actors, even athletes, and included a mistake or two—non-enemy Professor Hans Morgenthau made the list because he was confused with enemy Robert Morgenthau, U.S. Attorney in New York City. They conducted a private investigation of Senator Edward Kennedy’s 1969 automobile accident at Chappaquiddick in which a woman drowned. They tapped their foes and one another with wild abandon. They tried to subvert the IRS, the CIA, the FBI for political purposes. Though the so-called Huston Plan, which outlined a sinister program of surveillance of American citizens and proposed the use of “surreptitious entry”— burglary—for intelligence-gathering, was blocked by a nervous J. Edgar Hoover, it revealed the illegal lengths to which the Administration was willing to go in its war against political enemies. Parts of the plan were later implemented, and it was the inspiration of the “Plumbers” unit that burglarized the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s California psychiatrist and of the team that broke into the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington’s Watergate complex.

Not only the political war plans but the planners told much about the Nixon White House. Some of the inmates were of the order of Charles Colson, who liked to call himself a “flag-waving, kick-’em-in-the-nuts, anti-press, anti-liberal Nixon fanatic” and “the chief ass-kicker around the White House.” Others were younger men like White House counsel John Dean, attractive, clean-cut, affable, flexible—ever so flexible. And willing—ever so willing. When Nixon asserted to Dean on September 15, 1972, that the White House had not used the FBI or the Justice Department against its enemies, but that “things are going to change now. And they are either going to do it right or go,” Dean exclaimed, “What an exciting prospect!”

The more that Watergate unfolded in the trials and memoirs of participants, in the brilliant reporting of Washington Post correspondents and of Hersh and J. Anthony Lukas and others, the more it appeared to be a morality tale, complete with villains and saints, winners and sinners, and a Greek chorus of Washington boosters and critics.

Watergate: A Morality Tale

The Polo Lounge, the Beverly Hills Hotel, Los Angeles, June 17, 1972. Jeb Stuart Magruder, deputy director of the Committee to Reelect the President— called CRP by its friends, CREEP by its foes—was breakfasting with aides when the phone call came from Washington. It was G. Gordon Liddy, insisting that Magruder drive ten miles to a “secure phone.” “I haven’t got time,” Magruder replied impatiently. “What’s so important?” Liddy said, “Our security chief was arrested in the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate last night.” Magruder: “What?”

Magruder knew what. If the men who had tried to plant listening devices in the Democratic National Committee could, through CRP security chief James McCord, be linked to Liddy, counsel to CRP, they could be linked to himself, to his boss, CRP director John Mitchell, and therefore to his boss, the President of the United States. Magruder and his assistants hurried to Mitchell’s suite in the hotel. They had only one thought at this point, Magruder remembered later: How could they get McCord out of jail? Some way must be found. “After all, we were the government; until very recently John Mitchell had been Attorney General of the United States.” The break-in was not just hard-nosed politics; it was a crime that could destroy them all. With White House power behind them, it seemed inconceivable that they could not fix the problem. The decision for a cover-up was immediate and automatic; no one suggested anything else.

For Jeb Stuart Magruder, like many others caught in the Watergate web, this was a moment of truth, a point of passage. Magruder was no hard-boiled, cynical politico who had fought his way up from the precincts. A Staten Island high school and Williams College graduate, he had worked for IBM and other big corporations, run two small cosmetics companies in Chicago, managed southern California for Nixon in 1968 and accepted with alacrity a White House post as deputy director of communications the next year. Considered the perfect PR man, he was to go through much of the same anguish, the same passage from arrogance to humiliation, in the following nightmarish months of exposure as others in the White House, but he later related his experience more reflectively and revealingly than his colleagues.

During the “siege” days of 1970, Magruder recalled, the White House existed in “a state of permanent crisis.” Now, after the Watergate break-in, the spacious mansion turned into a Hobbesian world of all against all, a Shakespearean stage of suspicious, frightened men shaken from their pinnacle and clawing for survival. To cover up the burglary White House chiefs and operatives destroyed their own documents, pried open and emptied the safes of others, pressured the CIA to pressure the FBI to limit its investigation. They arranged hush money for the burglars, though, as John Dean noted, “no one wanted to handle this dirty work. Everyone avoided the problem like leprosy.” The White House “thought Mitchell should ‘take care’ of the payments because he had approved the Liddy plan” to burglarize the DNC, while the former Attorney General blamed the White House for sending him Liddy and pressing him for intelligence. Finally a “fund-raiser” was found in the President’s personal attorney, Herbert Kalmbach, who over the next two months gathered $220,000 in $100 bills—soon to be known as CREEP calling cards. Now the frightened men in the White House began to jettison not only records but themselves and one another. Kalmbach quit while under FBI investigation.

In October 1972, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, after months of patient sleuthing and with the guidance of a well-informed source—“Deep Throat”—whose identity only Woodward knew, tied the Watergate break-in to “a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage conducted on behalf of President Nixon’s re-election and directed by” White House and CRP officials. During the January 1973 trial of the burglars, Judge John J. Sirica, dissatisfied with the efforts of Attorney General Richard Kleindienst’s prosecutors, questioned defense witnesses from the bench. Late in March, McCord, whom “the government” had failed to spring and who feared a severe sentence if he refused to cooperate, charged that others besides the burglars had been involved and that perjury had been committed at the trial. The President was following every move.

The Oval Office, February 28, 1973. John Dean was once again reporting to the President. The two discussed ways to obstruct the select committee the Senate had established under Democrat Sam Ervin of North Carolina and Dean assured Nixon that despite the setbacks, the cover-up was still viable:

DEAN: We have come a long road on this thing now. I had thought it was an impossible task to hold together until after the election until things started falling out, but we have made it this far and I am convinced we are going to make it the whole road and put this thing in the funny pages of the history books rather than anything serious because actually—

NIXON: It will be somewhat serious but the main thing, of course, is also the isolation of the President.

DEAN: Absolutely! Totally true!

But by March 13, the scenario Dean presented to the President was less optimistic:

DEAN: There is a certain domino situation here. If some things start going, a lot of other things are going to start going, and there can be a lot of problems if everything starts falling. So there are dangers, Mr. President.… There is a reason for not everyone going up and testifying.

And on March 21, against Nixon’s enthusiasm for continued hush-money payments—“You could get a million dollars. You could get it in cash. I know where it could be gotten”—Dean warned:

DEAN: I think that there is no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’ve got. We have a cancer within, close to the Presidency, that is growing. It is growing daily. It’s compounded, growing geometrically now, because it compounds itself.… Basically, it is because (1) we are being blackmailed; (2) People are going to start perjuring themselves very quickly that have not had to perjure themselves to protect other people in the line. And there is no assurance—

NIXON: That that won’t bust?

DEAN: That that won’t bust.

Dean by this time was wondering who “would have to fall on his sword for the President.” Himself? “Yes, I thought. Then, no. There had to be another way.” But if he refused to fall, he might be pushed. Dean’s other way was to beat his co-conspirators in the White House to the federal prosecutors and the Ervin committee and cut a deal.

Senate caucus room, hearings before the Watergate Committee, testimony of John Dean, June 25-29, 1973. Ponderously, inexorably, the two rival branches of the federal government were wheeling up their artillery against the abuse of presidential power. The judicial branch had demonstrated its power in Judge Sirica’s court; there was talk of impeachment in the House, though it had yet to initiate such proceedings; the Senate select committee hearings had opened on May 17.

The counter-tactic Dean, and fellow Nixon aides John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, in consultation with the President, had devised the White House taking “a public posture of full cooperation,” as Dean recalled, while privately trying to “restrain the investigation and make it as difficult as possible to get information and witnesses.” But with White House and CRP officials—Magruder and Dean himself among them—now jumping ship, the dark and criminal underside of the Nixon White House was being exposed to the Ervin committee and the full glare of television lights. On June 25, Dean began his testimony:

DEAN: To one who was in the White House and became somewhat familiar with its interworkings, the Watergate matter was an inevitable outgrowth of a climate of excessive concern over the political impact of demonstrators, excessive concern over leaks, an insatiable appetite for political intelligence, all coupled with a do-it-yourself White House staff, regardless of the law.

Dean’s reading of his 245-page opening statement took up the entire first day of his testimony. The next day, Georgia Democrat Herman Talmadge questioned him:

TALMADGE: Mr. Dean, you realize, of course, that you have made very strong charges against the President of the United States that involves him in criminal offenses, do you not?

DEAN: Yes sir, I do.

But Dean kept his finger coolly pointed at the President. Later that day, Joseph Montoya, Democrat of New Mexico, questioned him:

MONTOYA: Now, on April 17, 1973, the President said this: “I condemn any attempts to cover up in this case, no matter who is involved.” Do you believe he was telling the truth on that date?

DEAN: No, Sir.

MONTOYA: Will you state why?

DEAN: Well, because by that time, he knew the full implications of the case and Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Ehrlichman were certainly still on the staff and there was considerable resistance to their departure from the staff.

And on July 28, Tennessee Republican Howard Baker asked Dean the question he asked almost every witness—the question of the summer:

BAKER: What did the President know and when did he know it, about the cover-up?

DEAN: I would have to start back from personal knowledge, and that would be when I had a meeting on Sept. 15 [1972] when we discussed what was very clear to me in terms of cover-up. We discussed in terms of delaying lawsuits, compliments to me on my efforts to that point. Discussed timing and trials, because we didn’t want them to occur before the election.

As the White House launched a massive counterattack—it was the word, it argued, of a self-acknowledged leader of the cover-up fighting and bargaining to save his skin against that of the President of the United States— John Dean’s credibility became a chief topic of discussion. During the former counsel’s testimony, a man just outside the caucus room assembled an impromptu jury of twelve fellow spectators to pass judgment on Dean’s veracity and, implicitly, on Nixon’s guilt. The vote was unanimous in Dean’s favor. Two other spectators called out, “Make it fourteen.”

Day after day that summer, the Ervin committee elicited the damning testimony: that the “enemies list” was designed for the harassment of its targets through the IRS and other means; that an attempt was made to forge State Department cables in order to implicate President Kennedy in the assassination of Vietnamese President Diem; that Nixon had tape-recorded his conversations in the White House and his hideaway office in the Executive Office Building; that Ehrlichman deemed the burglary of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist as within the constitutional powers of the President.

More charges and revelations emerged from the committee and other investigations: that the President had taken fraudulent income-tax deductions; that he had used sizable government funds to improve his estates in Key Biscayne, Florida, and at San Clemente, California; that the financier and manufacturer Howard Hughes had made large secret donations of cash, supposedly for campaign purposes but apparently spent on private expenses by Nixon, his family, and his friends. The plea-bargained resignation in October 1973 of Spiro Agnew—charged with federal income-tax evasion for payoffs from construction company executives he had accepted while governor of Maryland and even as vice president—added to the portrait of a pervasive corruption surpassing even Grant’s and Harding’s Administrations.

Inch by inch Nixon fell back, fighting all the way, making public explanations that were soon proven false or declared “inoperative” by the White House itself, throwing his closest associates out of his careening sleigh as the wolves relentlessly closed in. Shortly before the Ervin committee began its hearings he shoved Haldeman and Ehrlichman out of the White House with garlands of praise and replaced Kleindienst as Attorney General with Elliot L. Richardson, who chose his old Harvard law professor, Archibald Cox, as special prosecutor. The struggle now was over presidential tapes that were believed relevant to the investigation. When Nixon balked at releasing the tapes either to Cox or to the Ervin committee, both subpoenaed him for this crucial evidence. Ordered by Judge Sirica to turn the tapes over to the court, the President proposed a compromise arrangement so egregiously self-protective that Cox turned it down.

Then the “Saturday Night Massacre”—Nixon commanded Richardson and then Deputy Attorney General William D. Ruckelshaus to sack Cox for defying a presidential order to give up his pursuit of the tapes through the courts. Both refused—Richardson resigned, Ruckelshaus was dismissed. Solicitor General Robert H. Bork, of the Yale law faculty, was hurriedly driven to the White House and designated Acting Attorney General, and promptly fired Cox. The outburst of public outrage once again drove Nixon back on the defensive. He agreed to hand the tapes over to Sirica, then reversed his “abolition” of the special prosecutor’s office and chose for Cox’s replacement a man whom Nixon expected to be more pliable, a conservative Texas Democrat, corporate lawyer, and reputed law-and-order man named Leon Jaworski. Nixon aroused more public suspicion when he handed over to Sirica a crucial tape with an eighteen-minute gap, which the court’s panel of experts found had been caused by repeated, probably deliberate erasures.

Leon Jaworski did indeed turn out to be a law-and-order man. When the President, citing the doctrine of executive privilege, refused to turn over to him additional tapes involving conversations with his aides, Jaworski argued first before Judge Sirica, who upheld him, and then, when Nixon took the case to the Court of Appeals, went to the Supreme Court for “immediate settlement.” On July 24, 1974, the Court rendered its decision in United States of America v. Richard Nixon, President of the United States. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, after reading a brief tribute to his recently deceased predecessor, Earl Warren, summarized the Court’s unanimous finding. The President’s claim to executive privilege, the opinion held, “to withhold evidence that is demonstrably relevant in a criminal trial would cut deeply into the guarantee of due process of law and gravely impair the basic function of the courts.” The privilege could not “prevail over the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of justice.” When the news reached Nixon at San Clemente, according to Anthony Lukas, “the President exploded, cursing the man he had named chief justice,” and reserving a few choice expletives for Harry A. Blackmun and Lewis F. Powell, Jr., his other appointees. At first Nixon seriously considered challenging the Court, but he feared adding to the likely impeachment charges, and the Court’s unanimity made it impossible to claim that the decision was insufficiently definitive. In all the months of slow Chinese torture that Nixon suffered, it was probably the news from the High Bench that gave him the most sudden, piercing pain.

The Judiciary Committee, Room 2141, Rayburn House Office Building, 7:45 p.m., July 24, 1974. Over a hundred reporters looked on and about 40 million Americans watched on television as Chairman Peter Rodino rapped his gavel on the table. Solemnly he reminded the members of their responsibilities. “Make no mistake about it. This is a turning point, whatever we decide. Our judgment is not concerned with an individual but with a system of constitutional government. It has been the history and the good fortune of the United States, ever since the Founding Fathers, that each generation of citizens and their officials have been, within tolerable limits, faithful custodians of the Constitution and the rule of law.” But the minds of his fellow committee members were very much on one individual—the President of the United States. There had been doubts that this unwieldy committee of thirty-eight members, many of them highly partisan, and polarized between “Democratic Firebrands” and “Republican Diehards,” could handle the tough, risky task of impeachment.

Impeachment! During much of 1973 few even in the media had dared mention the word; it smacked of the impeachment and trial 105 years earlier of Andrew Johnson, an episode ill regarded in most recent histories. For months the committee and its big staff had been sorting through White House tapes and other records that the President, dragging his feet at every stage, had turned over to the committee or the courts. Day by day the specter of impeachment became more real. The Republican minority on the committee were an especially anguished lot. Many were personally as well as politically loyal to Nixon, who had done them many favors, including trips into their districts to give their campaigns the White House blessing. This was the case with Hamilton Fish, Jr., who to boot was the fourth consecutive Hamilton Fish to serve as a Republican member of Congress. His father, famed as a target of FDR’s jibes at “Martin, Barton, and Fish,” was still active, at eighty-five, in backing Nixon and demanding whether there could be “fair and impartial justice among the left-winged Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee who received large campaign contributions from organized labor.”

But the younger Fish was slowly moving toward impeachment after the Saturday Night Massacre, which had socked him “right in the gut,” and after reading tape transcripts. Some Republicans were outraged by the unending stream of revelations; others held out for “our President,” while Rodino sought to “mass” the committee in order to stave off accusations of blind partisanship. The committee rose to the occasion, with some noble utterances during its deliberations.

Barbara Jordan, Texas Democrat, woman, black: “Earlier today we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States. ‘We, the people … ’ It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787 I was not included in that, ‘We, the people.’ I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision I have finally been included in ‘We, the people.’ Today, I am an inquisitor. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”

M. Caldwell Butler, Virginia Republican: “For years we Republicans have campaigned against corruption and misconduct.… But Watergate is our shame. Those things have happened in our house and it is our responsibility to do what we can to clear it up.” He announced that he was inclining toward impeachment. “But there will be no joy in it for me.”

On July 27, 1974, the committee voted 27-11 to recommend impeachment on the ground that the President had “engaged personally and through his subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct the investigation” of the Watergate burglary. Two days later the committee voted, 28-10, an article charging that Nixon’s conduct had violated the constitutional rights of citizens and impaired the proper administration of justice. The votes reflected a precarious coalition of committee Democrats and Republicans; the majority of Republicans still stood by their President.

But on August 5, Richard Nixon, in obedience to the Supreme Court decision, released the transcripts of three conversations which showed beyond any doubt that six days after the Watergate break-in—on June 23, 1972—he was at the center of the conspiracy to cover up that crime, obstructing justice by plotting to block the FBI investigation. “I was sick. I was shocked,” a middle-level White House official told a journalist. “He had lied to me, to all of us. I think my first thought, before that sank in, was of those Republicans on the Judiciary Committee … those men who had risked their careers to defend him.”

Now one of those men—Charles Wiggins—said, “I have reached the painful conclusion that the President of the United States should resign.” If he did not, “I am prepared to conclude that the magnificent career of public service of Richard Nixon must be terminated involuntarily.”

The White House, August 7-9, 1974. In the final days the two Nixons—the shrewd, confident calculator and the narcissist hovering between dreams of omnipotence and feelings of insecurity—emerged in the Watergate crucible. Even now he was a cold head counter, yet he appeared to be swinging erratically between holding out to the bitter end and throwing it all up. Senators Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott and House Minority Leader John J. Rhodes arrived at the White House on August 7 to brief the President on the situation in Congress. After some small talk:

SCOTT: We’ve asked Barry to be our spokesman.

NIXON: GO ahead, Barry.

GOLDWATER: Mr. President, this isn’t pleasant, but you want to know the situation and it isn’t good.

NIXON: Pretty bad, huh? … How many would you say would be with me—a half dozen?

GOLDWATER: More than that, maybe sixteen to eighteen.… We’ve discussed the thing a lot and just about all of the guys have spoken up and there aren’t many who would support you if it comes to that.

I took kind of a nose count today, and I couldn’t find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from older Southerners. Some are very worried about what’s been going on, and are undecided, and I’m one of them.

NIXON: John, I know how you feel, what you’ve said, I respect it, but what’s your estimate?

RHODES: About the same, Mr. President.

NIXON: Well, that’s about the way I thought it was. I’ve got a very difficult decision to make, but I want you to know I’m going to make it for the best interests of the country.… I’m not interested in pensions. I’m not interested in pardons or amnesty. I’m going to make this decision for the best interests of the country.

SCOTT: Mr. President, we are all very saddened, but we have to tell you the facts. NIXON: Never mind. There’ll be no tears. I haven’t cried since Eisenhower died. My family has been fine. I’m going to be all right.… Do I have any other options?

There were no options. After a bit more small talk his visitors left. The next night the President addressed the nation on television. He was calm, restrained. “As we look to the future, the first essential is to begin healing the wounds of this Nation, to put the bitterness and divisions of the recent past behind us and to rediscover those shared ideals that lie at the heart of our strength and unity as a great and as a free people.” There was no admission of guilt, no word about the lies he had told or the laws he had broken or the trust he had violated; he would say only that “some of my judgments were wrong”—but he announced his resignation, effective the next day, August 9, at noon.

In the last hours the President vacillated between mourning and brief bouts of euphoria, between weeping and laughter. In his departing speech to cabinet and staff on the morning of August 9, he talked about the White House—“this house has a great heart”—and about his father, “a streetcar motorman first”—and about his mother—“my mother was a saint.” Then an admonition from this man whose great hatreds had contributed to his fall: “… always remember, others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”

Finally the scene, etched on the memory of America, of Nixon and his wife and daughters, their eyes brimming, walking out to the waiting helicopter. There in the door he turned to the crowd, and waved, a contorted smile on his face. From Andrews Air Force Base he and Mrs. Nixon flew west on the Spirit of ’76 to their home in San Clemente. Somewhere over central Missouri the presidency of Richard Nixon came to its end.

What did the President know? When did he know it? And when would the American people know what and when the President knew? These continued to be the critical questions facing Americans during most of the months of Watergate. The stunning answer came on August 5, 1974, when Nixon released the three damning tapes of June 23, 1972. At last the “smoking gun” lay before the people.

Knowing what had happened evoked the more compelling and intractable questions: Why? How could it have happened? Was Watergate due to one man, Richard Nixon, and his flaws of character? If so, why had he been joined in criminal and immoral acts by another thirty or forty men, not all of whom were close to him? Was Watergate, then, a product of the political institutions in which these men operated—of the “imperial presidency,” a hostile and biased media, the whole political and constitutional system? But what had shaped these institutions—psychological forces within the political elite, a corruption of the American national character, economic and social tendencies inherent in an individualistic, dog-eat-dog culture?

Nixon’s apologists defended him as a victim rather than a villain—as the legatee of dishonorable precedents set by previous Presidents, as the butt of a vindictive press, as simply acquiescing, in son-in-law David Eisenhower’s words, “in the non-prosecution of aides who covered up a little operation into the opposition’s political headquarters,” a long-established practice “that no one took that seriously.” John Kenneth Galbraith had predicted at the time of Nixon’s resignation that someone would also advance the argument that “there’s a little bit of Richard Nixon in all of us.” Galbraith added, “I say the hell there is!”

A more persuasive explanation of Watergate put the whole episode in a political and institutional context. The “swelling of the presidency,” wrote presidential scholar Thomas E. Cronin, had produced around the President a coterie of dozens of assistants, hundreds of presidential advisers, and “thousands of members of an institutional amalgam called the Executive Office of the President.” This presidential establishment had become a “powerful inner sanctum of government, isolated from traditional, constitutional checks and balances.” George E. Reedy, former press secretary to LBJ, saw beneath the President “a mass of intrigue, posturing, strutting, cringing, and pious ‘commitment’ to irrelevant windbaggery”—a “perfect setting for the conspiracy of mediocrity.” John Dean remembered the “blind ambition” that had infected him and others in the White House.

Jeb Magruder wrote that the President’s mounting insecurities and passions over Vietnam and the antiwar protests led to Watergate, for Presidents set the tone of their Administrations. But, Magruder continued, it was not enough to blame the atmosphere Nixon created. “No one forced me or the others to break the law,” he said. “We could have objected to what was happening or resigned in protest. Instead, we convinced ourselves that wrong was right, and plunged ahead.”

It was the sting of the media that drove Nixon to dangerous and desperate retaliatory tactics, some of his supporters contended. In fact, each side—all sides—exaggerated the extent to which the media supported their adversaries and, even more, the actual influence wielded by the media. The Watergate “battle of public opinion” was more like a vast guerrilla war in which a variety of political and media generals and colonels fought for advantage in the murk. Nixon repeatedly used television to reach the viewers over the heads of the press, but his credibility was suspect. Investigative reporters burrowed away, looking for fame as well as facts. Polls were used to influence public opinion as well as to test it. A polling organization friendly to the White House asked its sample: “Which action do you yourself feel is the more morally reprehensible— which is worse—the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick or the bugging of the Democratic National Committee?”

The nature of the public-opinion battle, moreover, changed during the two-year struggle. People tended to react to the early revelations as Democrats and Republicans, or as Nixon admirers and haters. The press, too, tended to divide along lines of party or presidential preference in 1972, when about seven of every ten newspapers endorsed Nixon and about one out of every twenty McGovern. At first the pro-Nixon newspapers tended to play down or ignore the Watergate burglary; then they faltered and shifted in the face of the avalanche of evidence of wrongdoing. All in all, two close students of Watergate public opinion concluded, grass-roots political attitudes had less an active than a reactive role in Watergate; they were not so much a powerful, cohesive force pressing for a certain action as simply a melting away of Nixon’s old constituency, especially after the smoking-gun revelation, and he was left without his “base.”

In the end it was not in the “tribunal” of public opinion that the issue was settled but in the more formal tribunals of the American political and constitutional system. If Nixon hoped he could save himself eventually as he had done with his “Checkers” appeal in 1952, he was underestimating the legislative branch. A Congress that for months had been stupefied and almost immobilized by shocking revelations roused itself to concerted action, voting in committee to impeach. Even so, the system might well not have worked except for investigative reporters who refused to quit, a remarkable series of blunders by Nixon, stretching from his original taping of the White House to his failure to destroy the tapes, and other “chance” or aberrant developments. In some respects the constitutional system thwarted rather than impeded action. The separation of powers and checks and balances, political scientist Larry Berman concluded, had not stopped “the espionage, the plumbers, the dirty tricks, the cover-up, the secret bombing of Cambodia, all the culmination of presidential imperialism.” It was the capacity of key persons—journalists, legislators, judges, even men in the White House circle—to rise in the face of doubt and suspicion and to defy the royal court itself that made all the difference by 1974.

Ultimately, Watergate became a test of moral leadership—a test that the White House dramatically failed to meet. There was no sense of embarrassment or shame, Magruder said later, “as we planned the cover-up. If anything, there was a certain self-righteousness to our deliberations. We had persuaded ourselves that what we had done, although technically illegal, was not wrong or even unusual.” Their foes were making a mountain out of a molehill. “We were not covering up a burglary, we were safeguarding world peace.” Besides, hadn’t previous presidencies—especially the JFK White House—prepared the way for “hardball politics”? Kennedy men had stolen the election of 1960 from their boss, some in the White House still believed. They recalled the old story that members of Kennedy’s White House loved to tell about the JFK staff man who was complaining of the misdeeds of the “rascals” in the enemy camp. When another staff man remarked mildly that there were rascals in their own camp as well, the first man said, “Ah, but they are our rascals!”

It fell to men like Archibald Cox and Elliot Richardson to exercise moral leadership in the crucible, but a desperate President could always find a complaisant man to carry out his orders. It was hard to accept the truth that the President was a liar, Elizabeth Drew reflected as she read through the smoking-gun tapes. It seemed impossible that a President was “capable of looking at us in utter sincerity from the other side of the television camera and telling us multiple, explicit, barefaced lies.” She felt torn between the “idea that people must be able to have some confidence in their leaders and the idea that in this day of image manipulation a certain skepticism may serve them well.” Here was a fundamental question about moral leadership in the American democracy. Perhaps a New Yorker cartoon of the time hinted at the nature of the problem, if not the answer. It showed one man telling another man in a bar: “Look, Nixon’s no dope; if the people really wanted moral leadership, he’d give them moral leadership.”

Crime and Punishment

After Judge Sirica sentenced Jeb Magruder to a term of ten months to four years in prison, the former White House aide had ample time to analyze “why Watergate.” He blamed excessive power in the White House, Nixon’s “instinct to overreact in political combat,” and the lawbreaking by White House staff “out of a combination of ambition, loyalty, and partisan passion.” Analyzing his own wrongdoing, he ascribed it in some degree to the failure of his college professors to teach morality. Thus at Williams, political scientist Frederick L. Schuman had advocated a “tough power-politics approach to international diplomacy,” chaplain William Sloane Coffin was too rigid and confrontational a moralist, and James MacGregor Burns, while ideological, did not teach enough morality in his politics courses. He reflected with some bitterness that Coffin had defended draft-card burning and other illegal activities, in turn provoking illegality in the White House, even though “two wrongs do not make a right.”

Other Watergate wrongdoers also could reflect on the fortunes of political war. More than a score went to jail. Convicted of conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice, Haldeman served eighteen months in prison; later he became vice president of a real estate development firm in Los Angeles. Ehrlichman, convicted of the same three crimes, emerged from eighteen months in jail fifty-seven, bearded, affable, and ready to embark on a career of writing about his Washington days. John Mitchell, convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and lying under oath, served nineteen months before being paroled, only to go through more years of ill health, disbarment, and separation from his wife, Martha, who later died of cancer. Charles Colson and Jeb Magruder, after serving seven months, turned successfully to Christian ministerial activities. G. Gordon Liddy, convicted both of the break-in and of conspiring to raid the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, served the longest Watergate prison sentence—fifty-two months—because he refused to talk, even under subpoena; he later became a celebrity lecturer and security consultant. A dozen other Watergaters served brief sentences, then turned to business, law, writing, and lecturing. All the key Watergate participants save Mitchell wrote works of fiction or fact about the episode; many of these were best-sellers.

And the chief co-conspirator? Ten years after the break-in, Richard Nixon had published his own best-selling memoir, moved from California to Manhattan to the New Jersey hinterland, continued to receive federal pensions and free office space and clerical help like all former Presidents, and earned over $3 million from his writings. He was lionized at home and abroad, defended his actions in television interviews, wrote on foreign policy and foreign leaders, advised President Reagan, and was attacked by Haldeman and others for further distorting the record. Nixon told a CBS interviewer that he “never” thought about Watergate. “I’m not going to spend my time just looking back and wringing my hands about something I can’t do anything about.”

Nixon’s slow and careful reentry into public life only intensified the anger of those who believed he had deserved a conviction rather than a pardon. Here was the old-boy network in spades, now deciding the leadership of the nation. Here was the pinnacle of pardons, the Everest of exculpation, something for the book. It was the same old story—the big guys take care of themselves while the little guys get it in the neck.

Nixon’s white-collar crimes happened to coincide with a dramatic rise in public consciousness of lawbreaking by persons in corporations, government, and other organizations. The FBI in the 1970s found that the frequency of such crimes as bribery, kickbacks, payoffs, and embezzlement was growing at an alarming rate. The costs of white-collar crime in goods and services, the Bureau estimated, eventually caused about a 15 percent markup for consumers. The FBI was now assigning over a fifth of its agents to the investigation of such crimes.

The moral ambiguity of the Nixon pardon was matched by confusion over the very nature of white-collar crime. Some Americans believed that, however heinous Nixon’s misdeeds were, the pardon was justified because no other punishment could compare with the humiliation and mortification an American President must endure in quitting office in the face of looming impeachment. And so with white-collar people. A bank teller, an insurance clerk, a postal employee, a politician living in a tight-knit community and known to everyone, some Americans believed, faced far more embarrassment on conviction than thieves working some distance from their communities.

Many investigators of white-collar crime had little patience with such popular distinctions. In a social economy undergoing rapid organizational and technological changes during the 1960s and 1970s, they faced trying problems in even defining, measuring, and understanding white-collar crime before tackling the questions of deterrence and punishment. Two seasoned investigators virtually threw up their hands over the task of definition, finally settling for “an intuitively satisfying understanding” encompassing a broad range of offenses. A widely accepted working definition was “illegal acts committed by nonphysical means and by concealment or guile, to obtain money” and other personal or business advantages. Even so, differences over definition were so wide that estimates of the incidence of white-collar crime also varied widely. If the FBI was finding an alarming growth, was this because the Bureau was broadening its definition of white-collar crime, or because its expanded white-collar unit was uncovering more offenses, or because there really was an increase in white-collar crime?

Even more daunting was the assignment of responsibility, which in turn involved the imposing of penalties for crimes committed. Since the vast majority of these misdeeds occurred in organizations, who should be held responsible—the leaders, the subleaders, the rank and file, the whole organization? The President, all or part of the presidential staff, the whole presidency, indeed the whole executive branch? A corporation’s top executives, its middle managers, the local managers perhaps “just following orders,” the whole corporation, the capitalist system?

Responsibility might, on the other hand, be so widely diffused in a corporation that individual liability would be impossible to determine, or it might be hidden in its interstices. Or it might be both expedited by electronic technology and cloaked within it. With business operations increasingly computerized and computers serving as “vaults” for corporate assets, computer-related crime—difficult to detect when perpetrated skillfully, with higher per-incident losses than other white-collar crimes—became a “universal and uniform threat.”

Most of the problems centered in large corporations. This was not new; two hundred years ago the Lord Chancellor of England had asked, “Did you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned, and no body to be kicked?” and he was rumored to have added in a stage whisper, “By God, it ought to have both.” Corporations also posed some of the most dramatic issues of responsibility. Thus in the 1970s the Ford Motor Company built Pintos with the metal fuel tank located behind the rear axle. Although a safety device would have cost only eleven dollars per car, Ford did not remedy the situation, despite a rash of rear-end collisions causing fiery deaths and injuries. After three young women were burned to death, an Indiana jury in 1980 acquitted Ford of reckless homicide charges. The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, the first American firm to supply steel-belted radial tires in large quantities to automakers, acknowledged a large number of accidents associated with the tires. In 1978, pressed by the “feds,” Firestone agreed to recall over seven million radial tires. Although many asbestos manufacturers knew of the danger of asbestosis and pneumoconiosis among their workers, few companies moved to rectify the situation.

Given the murky distribution of power in large corporations, to whom should punishment be meted out for misdeeds? And how large should the penalties be? Judges and juries faced dilemmas. If they levied moderate fines on executives—who in any event were usually protected against such liability so long as they had acted in “good faith”—these costs could be absorbed by the corporation and community in various ways and hence could not serve as much of a deterrent. If the court whacked the corporation with a huge fine, perhaps in the millions, the burden might fall on the innocent—the great majority of stockholders, the white-collar employees who might be denied a pay raise, and even the workers who might lose jobs if the fine was large enough to force the firm to scale down its operations or even submit to bankruptcy. An individual misdeed thus might be converted into a community crisis.

Most Americans were far more concerned about “street crime” than about white-collar crime, except when the latter had a physical impact, such as corporations leaving former employees gasping for breath on a hospital bed or customers incinerated in gasoline explosions. The estimated number of all offenses—street and white-collar—known to police almost quadrupled between 1960 and 1983, from 3.4 million to 12.1 million. Even when adjusted for a population increase from 179.3 million in 1960 to 234 million in 1983, the rise was still startling—from 1,887 per 100,000 persons to 5,159. Violent crimes such as murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault quadrupled, while property crimes such as burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft tripled. Thus there was a marked increase in crimes of an especially ugly and devastating nature.

An alarmed public watched the rising crime rate—and experienced it. In the early 1980s Americans, regardless of race, sex, education, income, size of city, or party membership, responded “more” to the Gallup poll question “Is there more crime in this area than there was a year ago, or less?” People felt less safe at home at night, more fearful of walking alone at night within a mile of their homes, widely concerned that their property might be vandalized, their home burglarized, that they might be robbed in the street and injured in the process.

The polling returns showed some anomalies. The fear was disproportionate to the actual numbers of victims. In 1982 fewer than one half of 1 percent of the national sample had been injured by a burglar at home, but nearly a third allowed that they worried at least a “good amount” about its happening. At the same time, 51 percent of the sample answered “too much” to the question “Do you think television news gives too much attention to stories about crime, not enough attention, or what?” while 29 percent answered “about right” and 18 percent “not enough.”

The intensity of the national debate over the “cause and cure of crime” rose even faster than the crime rate. The centerpiece of the debate was the issue of poverty and crime. Since some supporters of LBJ’s “War on Poverty” had touted it as a fundamental solution to the problem of crime arising from material poverty, it was easy for critics of that war, including anti-Great Society Republicans and the ideological right as well as skeptical scholars, to point out that crime had risen along with affluence. “Liberals first denied that crime was rising,” James Q. Wilson wrote. “Then, when the facts became undeniable, they blamed it on social programs that, through lack of funds and will, had not yet produced enough gains and on police departments that, out of prejudice or ignorance, were brutal and unresponsive. It was not made clear, of course, just why more affluence would reduce crime when some affluence had seemingly increased it, or why criminals would be more fearful of gentle cops than of tough ones.”

Others preferred to probe the “root causes” of crime. As a result of the “baby boom” following World War II, it was noted, the segment of the population from fifteen to twenty-four years old grew by over a million persons a year during the 1960s. This was said to be a highly crime-prone group that may have caused roughly half of the crime rise. Still others found the source of crime, especially white-collar crime, in the structure of economic and political power within American corporate capitalism. Still others contended that a growing underclass of the poor and alienated had been left in the slums; that the superabundance of expensive consumer goods for the middle classes, including costly cameras, color televisions, and the like, had boosted both the opportunity and the temptation of crime; that drugs in the 1960s and thereafter, like alcohol in the 1920s, had created an addictive subculture dependent on crime; that the root of the problem was not poverty in the measurable monetary sense but a culture of ignorance, apathy, degradation, mental and physical illness, low motivation, and damaged self-esteem that had little connection with rising affluence. Most likely the “root cause” lay in the reinforcing interaction of all or most of these factors.

There was little debate over the impact of rising crime on the criminal justice system. The number of criminal cases filed in all federal district courts rose from 28,000 in 1960 to almost 36,000 in 1983, in federal appeals courts from 623 to 4,790. Criminal trials completed soared from 3,500 to over 6,600 between the same years. These criminal cases in the federal courts had to compete for personnel and funds with an almost fivefold jump in federal civil filings, and all these with an explosion of criminal and civil cases in state and local courts. This enormously stepped-up caseload fell on a system of criminal justice with often ancient features—sheriffs and police, bailiffs and bail vendors, parole and probation officers, arraignments, charges, hearings, trials, postponements, continuances, depositions, grand and petit juries, sentences, appeals, revocations, clemency and pardons—a system that had hardly changed in essential form from the days of Dickens’s Bleak House. It was as if a great mass of cars, buses, and trucks had suddenly overwhelmed an ancient network of roads, ferries, canals, horse trails, and tollhouses.

Months and years of delay was only the first of a series of stinging indictments brought against the whole criminal justice system. Plea bargaining had become so extensive, it was charged, that the court proceeding had often become but a charade in which pleas were recorded before a judge, satisfying the demands of justice while mocking them. Drawn disproportionately from the lower-middle and middle classes, juries often were not competent to rule on street crime. The failings of the system, wrote a Harvard law professor and former prosecutor, were not “isolable, incidental features of a generally sound process” but characteristic and intrinsic features. The “revolution in criminal procedure” that people liked to talk about, he said, was more a matter of just spinning wheels.

As Americans neared the bicentennial of the establishment of the federal judiciary in 1789, the intellectual disarray of the national deliberation over the state of the criminal justice system overshadowed the institutional disorder of the system itself. Lacking were close analyses of the relationship of immediate expedient means, short-run ends, and ultimate goals of criminal justice; careful ordering of policy priorities linked to fundamental values such as liberty and equality; a consideration, both imaginative and empirical, of the wider psychological, legal, and political ramifications of the social pathology of the culture of poverty; a capacity intellectually to transcend expediency and everyday coping in dealing with problems rising under the criminal justice system. Perhaps the most poignant, if not most serious, reflection of this intellectual disarray was a hardly concealed retreat from theory in favor of specific policies aimed at particular problems. Policy analysis probed not the root cause of a problem but what policy measures and tools might produce “at reasonable cost a desired alteration”—typically a reduction in specified forms of crime. There was one great advantage to “incapacitation” (incarceration) as a crime control strategy, James Wilson wrote—“it does not require us to make any assumptions about human nature.”

In the wake of Watergate, the mushrooming of street crime, and horrendous insults by corporations and by government to people’s health and their natural environment, there still was no grand debate over American values and the principles and workings of the criminal justice system. Gone were the days when French and American revolutionists had fought to protect the legal rights of individuals, regardless of social rank or class, against the establishment thinkers seeking to defend the ancient prerogatives of state and church. Gone even were the times, fifty years back, when “legal realists,” often of New Deal persuasion, had jousted with sacrosanct legal principles that, embodied in judicial findings, could be applied “dispassionately” to current problems. Aside from a few intellectual ventures—notably the critical legal studies movement at Harvard and a handful of other law schools—the debate of the 1980s took the typically American form Tocqueville had noted a century and a half before: grandiose rhetoric about vague but compelling principles like “equal justice under law” and numerous small devices for tinkering with the system, with no firm analytical linkage between values, ordered priorities, and specific measures.

The clouds of rhetoric obscuring the ideological battle did not, however, fully cloak the trench warfare over specific principles and policies. In general, conservatives favored deterrence theories and practices, notably incarceration; in general, liberals supported reformation ideas and measures, notably rehabilitation. These conflicting principles affected choices made and policies pursued across the vast range of the criminal justice system—availability of public defenders, sentencing, parole and probation, indeed the whole gamut of Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment liberties. In the absence of intellectual clarity, however, these issues were typically settled on the basis of the short run, the expedient, the “practical,” of the “facts” of each case rather than an overarching intellectual framework. Thus, plea bargaining was used by prosecutors and defense attorneys alike as a means to obtain quick, acceptable settlements. Rarely did the question arise as to the greater stakes involved. “If the punishment imposed is usually a ‘normal price’ for the crime and the defendant’s benefit from his bargain is less than he hoped,” Lloyd Weinreb observed, “nevertheless he is institutionally encouraged to believe that he is trading some of his freedom in order not to be deprived of more.” And the easy trading of freedom—freedom from confinement—hardly accorded with this supreme American value.

By and large during the 1970s the hardheaded men, the practical people, the “tough-minded” pragmatists were in charge of the American criminal justice system. They were not stick-in-the-muds—they called for many a reform to energize the system: more police, more judges, more and bigger jails, capital punishment, “fiat-time sentencing,” severer sentences, various reorganizations of the court and penal systems. Their ultimate recourse in practicality was something no one loved in principle—the jail. For incarceration evaded all the tough intellectual issues and put the lawbreaker in a controlled situation.

But the inmates had their practicality too. “The warden might control his subordinates,” a student of criminal justice noted, “but together they did not completely control the prison. An inmate subculture with a clearly defined power structure and differentiated roles exercised considerable power of its own. A trade-off between staff and inmates developed: the inmates accepted the general routine of prison life (‘did time’), and in return the staff overlooked systematic violations of prison rules (contraband money, bootleg alcohol and drugs, pervasive homosexuality, including gang rapes, and random violence). Prison violence was frighteningly routine.” On their own turf, someone gibed, the inmates were conducting their own form of plea bargaining.

Practical, hardheaded men were in charge at upstate New York’s huge Attica prison in 1971: a warden who had worked his way up from the rank of prison guard and won a reputation as a disciplinarian; a seasoned corrections commissioner who would negotiate with inmates up to a point; a worldly governor, Nelson Rockefeller, who preferred to leave “local” crises in the hands of experienced professionals at the scene. Violence had swept New York prisons in recent months and these men knew that Attica, overcrowded with 2,200 inmates, was seething with unrest; they seemed less aware of subtler forces, such as the reaction of Attica’s militant blacks to the killing of their hero, George Jackson, during an alleged breakout effort at San Quentin prison in California. A sudden fracas at Attica opened the floodgates of hatred between the inmates, most of them black, and the all-white guard unit. Hundreds of inmates, sweeping through cellblocks, beat up some of the guards, seized forty hostages, set fire to the chapel and the school. Shortly they formed a governing body and issued a set of demands.

During four taut and anguished days the inmates and the local authorities negotiated, while Rockefeller stuck to his Albany office and a group of observers, including the journalist Tom Wicker and the civil rights attorney William Kunstler, served as go-betweens. They could not break the deadlock. Suddenly, after inmates replied “Negative - negative!” to what amounted to an ultimatum from the authorities, state police and prison guards armed with rifles and shotguns moved in behind clouds of tear gas. Nine minutes later forty-three persons, including ten hostages, lay dead or dying. Cornered, cowed, stripped naked, surviving inmates were crowded back through tunnels to their cells.

A few months later, in a poetry workshop for Attica inmates, Clarence Phillips wrote:

What makes a man free?

Brass keys, a new court

Decision, a paper signed

By the old jail keeper? …

What makes a man free?

Unchained mind-power and

Control of self— Freedom now!

Freedom now! Freedom now!

Carter: The Arc of Morality

The man who succeeded Gerald Ford on January 20, 1977, had swept onto the American political scene like a gust of fresh air during the presidential primaries of the previous winter. A proud “outsider,” an ex-governor from Georgia, Jimmy Carter had bested nationally known Democratic pros like Henry M. Jackson, Sargent Shriver, and Morris Udall in the preconvention battles. Then he had narrowly defeated President Ford— the first time a White House incumbent had been beaten since Hoover in 1932—with an assist from the Watergate albatross hanging over the GOP.

By inauguration day Carter had acquired a lustrous media image. After years of mendacity and mediocrity in government, now appeared this man of religious conviction and high ethical standards. After years of drift and deadlock in government, a leader of proved competence—competence at running a business and a state, a submarine and a tractor, and those tough primary campaigns, a demanding, clearheaded man—seemed to have stepped forward. Even his appearance—his bluff, open face creased by a wide smile, his hair style that looked both stylish and rustic, his quick, buoyant ways—set him off from the gray, sedate men in high office.

To be sure, there was an air of mystery behind the sunny façade. For a man with relatively brief political experience he showed an astonishing flair for capturing nationwide media attention. As an upward striver who, in the judgment of political scientist Betty Glad, had “proved to be a good, but not extraordinary, governor,” he seemed to be aiming a bit prematurely for the top job. A proud and self-confessed “idealist” speaking out in round biblical terms, he said also that he was an “idealist without illusions”—which, as in the case of John Kennedy, appeared to leave him plenty of leeway. He had a knack of seeming both above politics and very canny in political maneuver and combat. He appeared religious but not pious, compassionate but not sentimental, moral but not moralistic.

If some in the media were put off by his southern Baptist ways—his joyful hymn singing and hand holding in church, his appeals for more love and compassion, his southern accent that seemed to grow thicker the nearer he was to home—many Americans were happy that he was from the Deep South, the first President to have roots in that region for over a century. Surely he would bring fresh regional and cultural perspectives to bear on big government in Washington. People looked to him to transcend the racial conflicts that had wounded blacks, the South, and the nation. And “Solid Southerners” were pleased that at last there was a President who spoke without an accent.

And now, on inaugural day, he demonstrated afresh his human touch and media appeal when he bounded out of his limousine on the way to the White House and walked down Pennsylvania Avenue hand in hand with the new First Lady and daughter Amy. In office he promptly pardoned Vietnam draft violators—a happy contrast with Ford’s full pardon of Richard Nixon. When Carter fulfilled a campaign promise to keep close to the people by conducting a presidential “town meeting” in a small Massachusetts community, he brought the government home from its Washington remoteness, and incidentally offered a harvest of photo opportunities.

Carter’s deepest concern was for human rights. This commitment had quickened in his own recent immersion in the struggle for civil rights in the South. He had been slow to enlist in that struggle, he freely admitted, but by the end of his governorship, “I had gained the trust and political support of some of the great civil rights leaders in my region of the country. To me, the political and social transformation of the Southland was a powerful demonstration of how moral principles should and could be applied effectively to the legal structure of our society.” He well knew the view that Presidents had to choose between Wilsonian idealism and Niebuhrian realism, or between morality and power, but he rejected the dichotomy. “The demonstration of American idealism” was a practical and realistic “foundation for the exertion of American power and influence.”

Carter was publicly pledged to the campaign for human rights. “Ours was the first nation to dedicate itself clearly to basic moral and philosophical principles,” he had said in accepting his nomination for President. In his inaugural address he proclaimed that people around the world “are craving, and now demanding, their place in the sun—not just for the benefit of their own physical condition, but for basic human rights.” His Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, and his national security aide, Zbigniew Brzezinski—both members of the eastern foreign policy establishment— stood with him in his dedication to a “principled yet pragmatic defense of basic human rights,” as Vance summarized it.

How apply this noble principle? The President could draw from a broad array of human rights—the heritage of civil and political liberties, such as freedom of thought, religion, speech, and press, forged over the centuries; the right to participate in government, a right much broadened in the Western world during the nineteenth century; personal protection rights against arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, inhuman treatment or punishment, degradation or torture, denial of a proper trial; or a battery of newfound freedoms, such as rights to food, shelter, health care, education. Many of these rights were embodied in the United Nations charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that in 1948 virtually all nations had approved at least in broad terms, and in the Helsinki agreements.

A week after Carter’s inauguration the State Department warned Moscow that any effort to silence the noted physicist and dissident Andrei D. Sakharov would be a violation of “accepted international standards in the field of human rights.” Dobrynin promptly telephoned Secretary Vance to protest interference in Soviet internal affairs. Undeterred, the Administration appeared to launch a campaign, expressing concern over the arrests of dissidents Aleksandr Ginzburg, Anatoly Shcharansky, and Yury Orlov, receiving a dissident in exile at the White House, planning substantial boosts in funding for Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty and in broadcasts to Russia by the Voice of America. In mid-March 1977 the President, in an address to the United Nations General Assembly, once again stated his intention to press for human rights globally.

At the same time Carter was determined to pursue SALT II negotiations, despite warnings that the two efforts would collide. Vance, who had been urging quiet diplomacy as opposed to public pressure on human rights, journeyed to Moscow in late March hoping at least to pick up on negotiations as Ford and Kissinger had left them in Vladivostok, and if possible to move ahead with a much more ambitious and comprehensive plan of the President’s. The Soviets, who had responded to the campaign for the dissidents with more arrests, were in no mood to bargain. After cataloguing alleged human rights violations in the United States and attacking the new SALT proposals as harmful to Soviet security, Brezhnev sent Vance home empty-handed.

Nothing more clearly reflected the fundamental ambiguity and the later shift in the Carter foreign relations approach than its rapidly evolving human rights policy. What began as Vance’s ambivalent “principled yet pragmatic” posture became increasingly an attack on specific human rights violations that the Kremlin on its side chose to interpret as an onslaught against Soviet society. The American “‘defense of freedom,’” said Pravda, was part of the “very same designs to undermine the socialist system that our people have been compelled to counter in one or another form ever since 1917.” When Carter contended that he was upholding an aspiration rather than attacking any nation, the Russians tended to suspect Brzezinski’s motives rather than the President’s moralisms. The human rights files in the Carter presidential library make clear what happened: the President’s early Utopian tributes to human rights encouraged Soviet, Polish, and other dissidents and their American supporters to put more pressure on the Administration, especially through sympathizers like the national security aide. At the same time that Moscow was condemning American human rights violations at home, black leaders were complaining to the White House that the Administration was retreating on its promises to minorities.

Nearer home Carter applied his foreign policy of “reason and morality” with considerable success during his first year in the White House. He and his wife had a long-standing interest in Latin America, had traveled there, and knew some Spanish. He saw in Latin America, according to Gaddis Smith, a “special opportunity to apply the philosophy of repentance and reform—admitting past mistakes, making the region a showcase for the human-rights policy.” Of past mistakes there had been plenty—years of intervention, occupation, and domination. FDR’s Good Neighbor policy had brought little surcease. The CIA-managed coup in Guatemala in 1954, John Kennedy’s abortive invasion of Cuba, LBJ’s intervention in the Dominican Republic, the efforts of the Nixon Administration and the CIA to undermine the duly elected leftist President of Chile, Salvador Allende, and their contribution to his eventual overthrow and death—all these and more still rankled in the memories of Latin American leaders, liberal and radical alike.

No act of Yankee imperialism was more bitterly recalled than the imposition on the Republic of Panama in 1903 by the United States and its Panamanian “puppets” of a treaty defining a strip of land ten miles wide connecting the two oceans while cutting Panama in two and giving the northern colossus near-sovereignty in perpetuity over the canal and the surrounding area. Following a bloody fracas between Panamanians and troops of the United States in 1964, negotiations had been dragging along under Johnson, Nixon, and Ford pointing toward the renegotiation of the 1903 treaty. Carter decided to move quickly. He was well aware of the virulent opposition to a settlement by nationalists in both countries. “We bought it, we paid for it, it’s ours and we’re going to keep it,” had been one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite punch lines in the 1976 presidential primaries. Backed up by Defense Secretary Harold Brown’s view that the canal could best be kept in operation by “a cooperative effort with a friendly Panama” rather than by an “American garrison amid hostile surroundings,” Carter and Vance negotiated with Panama two treaties, one repealing the 1903 treaty and providing for mixed Panamanian-United States operation of the canal until December 31, 1999, the second agreement defining the rights of the United States to defend the canal following Panama’s assumption of control on that date.

The White House then threw itself into the battle for Senate ratification, using the time-honored tools of exhortation, bargaining, and arm twisting. The opposition counterattacked with its traditional devices of delay and diversion. Only a mighty effort to mobilize every scrap of his influence enabled the President in the spring of 1978 to win acceptance of the treaties, and then by only the thinnest of margins and at considerable loss of political capital. So virulent was the opposition that, as Carter glumly noted in his memoirs, a number of senators “plus one President” were defeated for reelection in part because of their support of the treaties.

As usual the Middle East confronted Washington with the most intractable problems of all. How defend Israel’s security without antagonizing the Arab states? How persuade the Israelis to be more conciliatory toward the Arabs? How find a humane solution to the plight of the Palestinians, whether inhabitants of the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank or holders of a precarious Israeli citizenship? How strengthen friendly Arab states militarily enough to steel their resistance to Soviet power but not embolden them also to threaten Israel? Carter approached these problems not only with the traditional top-priority commitment of Washington to Israel based on domestic political and national security considerations, but also with a deep moral concern. He believed “that the Jews who had survived the Holocaust deserved their own nation,” and that this homeland for the Jews was “compatible with the teachings of the Bible, hence ordained by God.”

For sixteen months Carter and Vance conducted an intensive, often desperate search for peace in the Middle East. It was their good fortune that Egypt was ruled by the remarkably farsighted President Anwar el-Sadat, with whom Carter established cordial personal relations, and that Israel came to be headed by a tough negotiator, Menachem Begin, who had enough standing with Israeli hard-liners to risk agreement with the Egyptians. In his own efforts in Washington and in the Middle East, Carter proved himself a resourceful and indefatigable mediator. Often his hopes flagged, particularly after Israeli troops invaded Lebanon in March 1978 in retaliation for a terrorist assault that cost the lives of thirty-five Israelis, all but two of them civilians. To maintain credibility with the Arabs he supported a UN condemnation of the invasion and demand that Israel withdraw its forces. The reaction of American Jews was so sharp, Carter wrote later, that “we had to postpone two major Democratic fund-raising banquets in New York and Los Angeles because so many party members had cancelled their reservations to attend.”

Caught between implacable forces, Carter resolved in July 1978 that it “would be best, win or lose, to go all out” to obtain a peace agreement. He persuaded Sadat and Begin to attend together a September meeting at Camp David. For thirteen days the President and his aides conducted with the two leaders a kind of footpath diplomacy between the cabins. The upshot was Sadat and Begin’s agreement to two sets of guidelines: a framework for an Egyptian-Israeli peace providing that the Sinai would be turned over to Egypt by stages while protecting certain Israeli interests there; and a separate framework for “Peace in the Middle East,” providing for a five-year period during which a self-governing authority under Egypt, Israel, and, it was hoped, Jordan, would replace the existing Israeli military government in the West Bank and Gaza, while the three nations negotiated the final status of the territories.

At perhaps the high point of his presidency Carter declared to a joint session of Congress, with Begin and Sadat present: “Today we are privileged to see the chance for one of the sometimes rare, bright moments in human history.” But nothing important ever came easy for Jimmy Carter. When Begin and Sadat were unable to agree on final peace arrangements before the planned deadline of mid-December 1978, the President decided as “an act of desperation” to fly to Cairo and Jerusalem for personal diplomacy. Once again he demonstrated his flair for mediation, gaining agreement from both sides on the remaining thorny issues, with the aid of inducements and guarantees from the United States. Amid much pomp and circumstance, Sadat and Begin signed the final agreement on the White House lawn late in March 1979.

Wrote Carter in his diary, “I resolved to do everything possible to get out of the negotiating business!”

Over all these efforts abroad there fell—at least in American eyes—the shadow of the Kremlin. No matter how much the White House denounced violations of human rights outside the Kremlin’s orbit the issue always came back to Soviet repression of dissidents. A major disturbance could not erupt in a newly emerging African nation without suspicion in the White House that Moscow plotters were afoot. The Administration began its peacekeeping effort in the Middle East in cooperation with the Soviet Union, only to turn away from it out of fear that Moscow was interested less in peace than in extending its own influence in the region. The more Washington pursued its rapprochement with Peking, the more it encountered hostility in Moscow. The Administration suspected that the Russians were bolstering their military strength in Cuba. Even the Panama settlement, which seemed far outside the Soviet sphere of influence, was almost fatally jeopardized by those Americans who feared that the strategically vital canal would under Panamanian control prove vulnerable to Soviet political or military threat.

The view from Moscow was clouded by its perception of an ever more threatening America. Washington was seeking to exclude Soviet influence in the Middle East—a strategic area in Russia’s own back yard. The Americans were trying not only to make friends with the Chinese but to arm them against the Soviet Union, and thereby encircle it. Washington was trying to block the Soviet Union, as the mother communist nation, from exercising its right and duty to help both stabilize and strengthen “national liberation” movements in the fledgling nations. Above all was the matter of arms—the Soviet Union was on the verge of achieving some kind of nuclear parity with the United States, at which point the Carter Administration undertook a big new arms program that could result only in a spiraling arms race.

Both sets of perceptions were misconceptions. Washington was more interested in restoring triangular diplomacy with China than in exacerbating the Sino-Soviet rupture. The Russians were more interested in stability in the Middle East than in military advantage. Each side saw itself as defensive, peace-loving, cooperative, the other as offensive, aggressive, destructive. Looking at Moscow, Washington remembered the brutal invasion of Hungary in 1956, the shipping of missiles to Cuba in 1962, the suppression of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Looking at Washington, Moscow recalled the attack north of the 38th parallel into North Korea in 1950, the occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1965, the bombing of North Vietnam and invasion of Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mutual suspicion and hostility of the two superpowers touched every part of the globe—even the smallest and weakest nations. The tiny Yemens were a prime example. South Yemen, with its major naval facilities at Aden, the former British port, accepted aid from Moscow and gave it access to the port. North Yemen, fearful of the Yemenis to the south, wanted American military aid. When the Soviets began to give heavy aid to Ethiopia in support of its dispute with Somalia, Brzezinski saw a new Soviet threat to the Middle East. The canny North Yemenis, seeing their chance to pay off the southerners and gain more aid from Washington, sent alarmist reports of a looming invasion from the south. Alert to this mortal peril, Washington sent American arms and advisers to North Yemen and dispatched the carrier Constellation to the Arabian Sea “to demonstrate our concern for the security of the Arabian Peninsula.” In the end several Arab states mediated the scrap between the Yemenis—and North Yemen made an arms deal with the Russians twice the size of the American deal. The fight between the Yemenis, scholars later concluded, had not been plotted by Moscow. “The United States,” according to historian Gaddis Smith, “was responding, not to a reality, but to imaginary possibilities based on the assumption of a sinister Soviet grand design.”

Nor was Washington plotting in most of these situations. It was a classic case of confusion rather than conspiracy. At the center of the confusion was the President himself. He continued to be convinced, during his first year in office, that he could crusade against human rights violations in Russia and at the same time effectively pursue détente with Moscow. During his second year he was still talking détente and SALT II but emphasizing also the need to strengthen United States forces in Europe to meet the “excessive Soviet buildup” there. By mid-1978, Carter’s ambivalence was so serious that Vance formally requested a review of relations with the Soviets, noting “two differing views” of the relationship. The emphasis, Vance said, had been on balancing cooperation against competition; was the emphasis now merely on competition? When Carter at Annapolis in June reaffirmed détente but now spoke a language of confrontation, the press complained about “two different speeches,” the “ambiguous message,” and general “bafflement.” Moscow, however, viewed the speech solely as a challenge.

Carter was now enveloped in a widening division, especially between Vance and Brzezinski. The Secretary of State, who had built his reputation largely on high-level negotiations during the 1960s, spurned ideology in favor of détente through persistent—and if necessary severe—diplomacy. The national security adviser, son of a prewar Polish diplomat, had taken a hard line toward Moscow since the 1950s. In 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, from his Columbia University post he had telegraphed the Kennedy White House a warning against “any further delay in bombing missile sites.” Under Carter the two men repeatedly disagreed over policy toward the Soviet Union—most notably the extent to which the “China card” should be played against Moscow. And they insistently denied the disagreement—until it came time for their memoirs. Vance remembered the national security adviser as afflicted with “visceral anti-Sovietism.” Brzezinski evaluated the Secretary of State “as a member of both the legal profession and the once-dominant Wasp elite,” operating according to “values and rules” that were of “declining relevance” to both American and global politics.

The President saw the two men as balancing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, but instead of moving steadily between them, he followed a zigzag path. His aim was still a summit meeting with the Russians for a climactic effort to achieve a second SALT agreement. During 1978, however, playing the “China card” in a manner tantamount to playing with fire, he allowed Brzezinski to journey to China, where the security adviser urged the not unwilling Chinese to step up their diplomatic and political moves against Moscow. The morbidly distrustful Russians suspected that the Yankees might sell “defensive weapons” to the Chinese.

The summit was further delayed while Carter amid intense publicity received and entertained Deng Xiaoping at the White House at the end of January 1979, only a few weeks after Washington broke formal diplomatic-relations with Taiwan and established full relations with China. Carter and Deng got along famously, signing agreements for scientific and technological cooperation. The Chinese leader even confided to the President his tentative plans to make a punitive strike into Vietnam because of Hanoi’s hostility to Peking. Carter tried weakly to discourage this, but the Chinese attacked within three weeks of Deng’s visit to Washington.

On the eve of flying off in June 1979 for the summit the President announced his decision to develop the MX missile. By the time he and Brezhnev met in Vienna, much of the will in both camps for comprehensive peacemaking had slackened. Brezhnev, old and ailing, seemed to have lost his energy and grasp of issues. The two men signed a package of agreements, elaborately and cautiously negotiated over a period of many months, providing for limitations in land-based missiles, submarine-based MIRVed missiles, bombers equipped with multiple missiles, and other arms. SALT II was still a respectable step forward—if the step could be taken. Following the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan shortly after New Year’s 1980, however, the President asked the Senate to defer action. This delay, and Reagan’s condemnation of the treaty during the 1980 campaign, killed SALT II’s chances—the most profound disappointment of his presidency, Carter said later.

Historians will long debate the causes of the malaise that afflicted Jimmy Carter’s presidency about the time he began the last third of his term. Was it largely a personal failure of leadership on the part of Carter and his inner circle at a crucial point in his Administration? Or was the loss of momentum and direction during 1979 more the result of factors that plague every President—intractable foreign and domestic problems, a divided party, a fragmented Congress, a hostile press, limited political resources? Or was it a matter of sheer bad luck—a series of unpredictable events that overwhelmed the Administration?

In his disarmingly frank way, Carter himself admitted a failure of personal leadership. In midsummer of 1979, he removed his government to Camp David and summoned over a hundred Americans—political, business, labor, academic, and religious leaders—for long consultations, and then emerged to declare in an eagerly anticipated television speech that the nation was caught in a crisis of confidence, a condition of paralysis and stagnation, to which his detached, managerial style of leadership had contributed and at the center of which was the energy crisis, whose solution could “rekindle our sense of unity, our confidence in the future.” At a specially convened cabinet meeting two days after the speech, he stated, according to a participant, “My government is not leading the country. The people have lost confidence in me, in the Congress, in themselves, and in this nation.” A week before his 1980 election defeat he graded himself on CBS’s 60 Minutes, giving his presidency a B or a C plus on foreign policy, C on overall domestic policy, A on energy, C on the economy, and “maybe a B” on leadership. For a President, B and C are failing grades.

Carter’s shifts toward the middle ground in domestic policy and confrontation in Soviet relations, along with his loss of popularity at home, had opened up a leadership vacuum that was bound to attract a liberal-left Democrat of the stripe of Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, or indeed the 1976-style Jimmy Carter. Would Edward Kennedy run? Since his brother Robert’s assassination, Democratic party leaders and rank-and-file enthusiasts had been trying to recruit him, but the young senator had proved to be a master at saying no. Now, thoroughly disappointed by Carter, he decided to take on the toughest of political assignments, unseating a President of one’s own party. At first Kennedy appeared unable to define his alternative program coherently, and when he took a fling at the dethroned Shah of Iran and the “umpteen billions of dollars that he’s stolen from Iran,” the media treated this as a campaign gaffe to be derided rather than a policy issue to be debated.

Carter’s early handling of the seizure in November 1979 of the American embassy in Teheran and sixty-three American hostages produced the usual rally-’round-the-President surge in public opinion. Kennedy failed to gain momentum after running far behind the President in the Iowa caucuses. Later the senator picked up strong support in urban areas when he spoke firmly for détente abroad and anti-inflation controls at home, but he never headed his adversary. Some of the President’s men argued that Kennedy’s run hurt Carter in the fall contest with Ronald Reagan, but Democrats showed their usual capacity for reuniting before the final battle. In retrospect it appeared that Carter had defeated himself, largely by appearing to have faltered as a strong leader, a sitting duck for Reagan’s charges of inadequacy and indecision.

Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s aide and confidant, wrote after the 1980 defeat that he had “found many forces at play today that make the art of governing very difficult”—an “active and aggressive press,” the fragmentation of political power, congressional resistance, special-interest groups, and the like. Conditions, in effect, made governing impossible. Leading students of the Carter presidency instead fixed the blame on the President himself. “Carter lacked any sense of political strategy,” wrote political scientist Erwin C. Hargrove, “and thereby the majority of citizens came to believe that he was not in control of the events which most concerned them.” If Carter was bedeviled by weak party support, congressional factionalism, bureaucratic power groups—and by the “iron triangles” interlocking these resistance forces—the question arises: to what degree did he seek to curb or even master these by leading and refashioning his divided party, for example, or by improving his poor congressional liaison office? He devoted little time to rebuilding either the party or the liaison office.

The “bad luck” theory of Carter’s decline holds that he was simply engulfed by forces over which he had no control—the energy crisis, soaring gasoline prices, steep inflation, high interest rates, Kennedy’s challenge, and above all the continuing hostage crisis and the brutal Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. As great leaders have demonstrated, however, setbacks can be—or can be made to be—spurs to action.

Perhaps Carter’s greatest failure stemmed from his moralism in foreign policy combined with his flair for media showmanship. His reaction to the hostage seizure in Iran and to the Afghanistan intervention was not to put the crises in perspective and restrain public opinion but to dramatize the issues and further inflame the public. This politically expedient course, reflecting also Carter’s moral judgment, brought the heady feeling in the short run of being the true spokesman and leader of the people, but it had severe longer-run effects. In helping to arouse the public, and then responding to that aroused public, Carter raised hopes and expectations inordinately. But Iran held on to the hostages and the Russians remained in Afghanistan. Nothing is more dangerous for a leader than a widening gap between expectations and realization.

This gap paralleled and exacerbated another one—between Carter’s idealistic, uplifting foreign policy pronouncements and day-to-day specific-policies. Preachments were not converted into explicit guidelines. A strategic approach was lacking. When initiatives had to be taken and tough choices made, the Administration lacked a hierarchy of priorities that could fill the gap between its global activism and the routine application of foreign policies. Carter alternated between born-again moralizing and engineering specifics. In this respect he shared one of the oldest intellectual weaknesses of American liberal activism.

Gun and Bible

At the 1978 Harvard commencement a gaunt and towering figure out of the Russian past denounced not the evils of Soviet communism, as many in the audience had expected, but the American culture in which he had taken refuge. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn delivered a powerful attack on the ideas and symbols most Americans held sacred—liberty, liberal democracy, even the pursuit of happiness. “Destructive and irresponsible freedom,” he said, had produced an “abyss of human decadence”—violence, crime, pornography, “TV stupor,” and “intolerable music.” Solzhenitsyn had long been sounding the tocsin against freedom Western style. Civil liberty, he had said almost a decade before, had left the West “crawling on hands and knees,” its will paralyzed, after it had supped “more than its fill of every kind of freedom.” Indeed, to regard freedom “as the object of our existence” was nonsense.

If the Harvard audience responded to most of Solzhenitsyn’s stinging attack with a measure of composure, it was perhaps in part because the university was by tradition a forum of protest. Graduate student Meldon E. Levine, delivering the English Oration in 1969, at the height of the student protest, in that same Harvard Yard, had challenged his audience of alumni, faculty, and parents to live up to their own standards of equality and justice, courage and trust. The students were “affirming the values which you have instilled in us,” he said, “AND WE HAVE TAKEN YOU SERIOUSLY.” And almost two centuries before, President Samuel Langdon of Harvard had lamented, “Have we not, especially in our Seaports, gone much too far into the pride and luxuries of life?” Was it not a fact that “profaneness, intemperance, unchastity, the love of pleasure, fraud, avarice, and other vices, are increasing among us from year to year?”

For more than three centuries, indeed, Americans had worried about other Americans’ loss of virtue. Over the years, the definition of virtue— and of vice—had taken many forms. During the twenty years or so following President Langdon’s protest of 1775 the most widely accepted idea of virtue was the subordination of private interests to the public good, demonstrated by direct, day-to-day participation in civic affairs. What were these private interests to be suppressed? Certainly the blasphemy and drinking and carnality and pleasure seeking that Langdon complained of, but even more the commercial avarice and frenzied moneymaking that promoted those vices and ultimately corrupted the republic. Vice and virtue were locked in a never-ending struggle for the soul of America.

The framers of the Constitution had enjoyed few illusions as to how that struggle might turn out, for their political and military battles in the 1770s and 1780s and their study of political philosophy had left them pessimistic about the nature of man, in contrast to its potential under the right circumstances. They had limited faith in the capacity of their fellow Americans to exhibit the classical virtues of self-discipline, courage, fortitude, and disinterested public service, even less faith in the power of Calvinism’s austere morality to control appetites and passions, and only a faint hope that a benevolent tendency within human nature to sociability and community, as articulated by the Scottish philosophers, would prevail under the raw conditions of American life. Unwilling to pin their hopes on human virtue, they had fashioned rules and institutions—most notably the Constitution—that at the very least would channel and tame the forces of passion and cushion the play of individual and group interest.

Two centuries later, Americans were more divided than ever as to the cause and cure of vice and the nature and nurture of virtue. Ostensibly these matters were left to the deliberations and preachments of churchmen, but they too were divided in numberless ways, even within their own denominations. Families, schools, the military, the workplace, the tavern added to the variety of ethical codes. And beyond all this, American men and women professed moralities that they did not follow in practice. In the mid-1950s Max Lerner found that the moral code prescribed that “a man must be temperate in drink, prudent in avoiding games of chance, continent in sex, and governed by the values of religion and honor.” A woman must be chaste and modest. But this formal code had been replaced by “an operative code which says that men and women may drink heavily provided they can ‘carry’ their liquor and not become alcoholics; that they may gamble provided they pay their gambling debts, don’t cheat, or let their families starve; that a girl may have premarital sexual relations provided she is discreet enough not to get talked about or smart enough to marry her man in the end; that husband or wife may carry flirtations even into extramarital adventures, provided it is done furtively and does not jeopardize the family; or (if they are serious love affairs) provided that they end in a divorce and a remarriage.”

Even as the moral code was cloaking “real sex” during the 1950s, unsentimental biologists were ripping aside the shields between sexual pretension and practice. In 1953, Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female a few years after their similar study of the human male. In a huge sample of respondents, over 90 percent of the males and over 60 percent of the females had, by their own account, practiced masturbation; about half the men and over a quarter of the women reported having had some homosexual experience; 8 percent of the males and about half that percentage of females admitted some experience with bestiality. Tens of millions of Americans, in short, were sexually “perverse,” according to the moral code. The Kinsey studies recorded the assertion of 71 percent of the men and 50 percent of the women that they had practiced premarital intercourse in their teens; indicated that adultery and illegitimacy were far more common and widespread than commonly supposed; reported that many boys of low-income families claimed to have had intercourse with scores and even hundreds of different girls. So tens of millions of Americans were “immoral” by the standards of the received morality.

If the practitioners of “vice” found considerable solace in the Kinsey survey, the shock of the findings further fragmented moral attitudes in a society that was already “half Babylonian and half Puritan,” in Lerner’s phrase, further divided a religiosity that had both a “soft,” tolerant side and a “hard,” condemnatory side, in John P. Diggins’s. Now that their worst suspicions had been vindicated as to how people behaved sexually no matter how innocently they talked, media moralists and religious fundamentalists renewed their campaign against permissive laws and standards. Civil libertarians, in turn, sprang to the defense of books, films, plays, television programs, and, above all, magazines such as Playboy and later Penthouse and the raunchier Hustler that depicted and exploited sexual behavior and sexual fantasies.

Both sides—all sides—appealed to the symbol of Freedom. Sexual liberationists spoke up for the freedom to defy the majority and indulge in deviant forms of sexual behavior in their pursuit of happiness. Moralists pressed for censorship of sexually explicit expression, but they had to deal with libertarians in their midst who opposed the heavy hand of the censor and contended that family, school, and church should do the work of combating sexual “misbehavior” and its depiction.

The conflict over erotica and its expression cut deep into the bone and tissue of American society. Feminists, united so passionately over so many burning issues, were divided over censorship of pornography. Some argued that the depiction of violent porn should be shorn of its First Amendment protection. Sexual degradation of women, rape, harassment, battering, sadism—the mere depiction of such misbehavior influenced men’s behavior. Others contended that “evil thoughts” did not necessarily lead to evil action, that the problem was the depiction not of sexual violence but of sexual violence, that damage to women could just as well be caused by violence without sex.

The “experts,” as usual, differed among themselves. A 1970 commission found no evidence that “exposure to explicit sexual materials” played a “significant role” in causing delinquent or criminal behavior among youth or adults, while a 1986 Reagan Administration commission found ample evidence of a causal link between violent pornography and aggressive behavior toward women.

Some feminists, conceding that thought did not always lead to action, turned to antidiscrimination laws as the vehicle for curbing the depiction of sexual violence. Antipornography feminists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon proposed an ordinance granting any woman a cause of action if she had been coerced into a pornographic performance and granting all women the right to bring suit against traffickers in pornography for assault or other harm alleged to be caused by pornography. Others, organized in the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT), protested that the Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinance was vague in its definition of pornography, and it was largely on this and on First Amendment grounds that a federal judge invalidated an enactment of the ordinance in Indianapolis, a decision which the Supreme Court later affirmed. FACT, according to philosophy professor Rosemarie Tong, contended that the antipornography feminists had left the core question begging: “What kinds of sexually explicit acts place a woman in an inferior status? An image of rape? An image of anal intercourse? An image of the traditional heterosexual act in which a man’s body presses down on and into a woman’s?” What worried FACT most, according to Tong, was the refusal of the ordinance “to recognize the degree to which what we see is determined by what we are either told to see or want to see.” The issue was not only content but intent and context.

Once again a policy issue had ended up—even among friends—as a sharp difference over fundamental values. Feminist antipornographers demanded to be free of masculine domination, “compulsory heterosexuality,” depictions of the degradation of women; they asserted that sexual equality between men and women was integral to equal rights and legal and political equality. The feminist sexual liberationists demanded their own kind of freedom and warned, in Tong’s words, that an antiporn campaign “could usher in another era of sexual suppression” and “give the moralists, the right-wingers, the conservatives a golden opportunity to limit once again human sexual exploration.” Again American values were proving inadequate as guidelines to policy.

It has long been accepted in international affairs that nation-states are not required to observe the same standards of behavior—of mutual respect, reciprocity, understanding, honor—expected of the relationships of individuals in ordered societies. “If we had done for ourselves what we did for the state,” Cavour said, “what scoundrels we would be.” Niebuhr distinguished sharply between “moral man” and “immoral society.” Kenneth Thompson observed that morality within the nation “can be manageable, convincing and attainable,” while “the international interest is more remote, vague and ill-defined.”

Religious leaders, however, have not been so willing to let nation-states evade the demands of morality and mutuality. In colonial times Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, and Shakers spread widely their teachings about peace and nonviolence. During the next century Congregationalists, Unitarians, and leaders in other Protestant denominations set up numerous “nonresistance” societies, culminating in the formation of the League of Universal Brotherhood in 1847. This organization, which after a few years boasted a membership in the tens of thousands, carried on its condemnation of all war in mass publications and at international peace congresses. In the early twentieth century the Catholic Church, preoccupied with efforts to establish itself in sometimes alien or nativist communities, had only the barest involvement in the American peace movement. While some Catholic groups embraced a tradition of social dissent and constituencies of the poor, “a patriotic inclination to celebrate American society; a fear of criticism arising from marginal social status and the general Catholic respect for authority,” in Mel Piehl’s words, dampened Catholic radical social efforts.

American Catholics, numbering fifty million by the 1980s, were broadening their participation in American politics, higher education, business—and peace movements. No longer did they need to prove their patriotism by uncritically embracing an aggressive foreign and military policy. While Protestant, Jewish, and other religious leaders also stepped up their peace efforts, American Catholic bishops effected an amazingly rapid transition from support of the U.S. effort in Vietnam in 1966 to condemnation in 1971 on the grounds of its “destruction of human life and moral values.”

The swing of the bishops toward a strong peace stance was expedited by an earlier shift in the Vatican. Even in the face of aggressive cold war behavior by its mortal enemy, Soviet communism, the papacy called increasingly for steps to control the nuclear genies. In his historic 1963 encyclical, Pacem in Terris, John XXIII, recognizing the “immense suffering” that the use of modern arms would inflict on humanity, declared it “contrary to reason to hold that war is now a suitable way to restore rights which have been violated.” Pressure was exerted within the American church by peace-minded groups, most notably the United States section of the international Catholic organization Pax Christi. After a faltering start, Pax Christi became well organized during the late 1970s and by 1983 had chapters in all fifty states and a powerful corps of leaders, as exemplified by Bishops Thomas J. Gumbleton of Detroit and Carroll T. Dozier of Memphis. Operating outside the institutional church but stirring Catholic consciences “from the left” were individual militants such as former nun Elizabeth McAlister and priests such as the Berrigan brothers.

In the spring of 1983, while the Reagan Administration carried on a foreign relations rhetoric that vacillated between the aggressive and the bellicose, the Catholic bishops issued their “Pastoral Letter” entitled “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response.” The statement was at once traditional and radical, Patricia Hunt-Perry has noted—“traditional in the sense that the bishops grounded their pronouncements solidly in Catholic dogma, Biblical text, and the teachings of Catholic saints such as Augustine and Aquinas,” but radical in its application of traditional doctrines to the urgency of a “whole human race” facing, in the bishops’ words, a “moment of supreme crisis in its advance toward maturity.”

“We are the first generation since Genesis with the power to virtually destroy God’s creation,” the bishops warned. “We cannot remain silent in the face of such danger.” The letter assigned to Americans the “grave human, moral and political responsibilities” to see that a “conscious choice” was made to save humanity. “We must shape the climate of opinion which will make it possible for our country to express profound sorrow over the atomic bombing in 1945.” The willingness to initiate nuclear war “entails a distinct, weighty moral responsibility; it involves transgressing a fragile barrier—political, psychological and moral.” Striking major military or economic targets “could well involve such massive civilian casualties” as to be “morally disproportionate, even though not intentionally indiscriminate.”

In general, the bishops underplayed legal, technical, and policy arguments in order to speak all the more powerfully with their collective moral voice. Indeed, the final draft eliminated earlier references in the main body of the text to such specific issues as the MX missile. But the bishops did propose that the “growing interdependence of the nations and peoples of the world, coupled with the extragovernmental presence of multinational corporations, requires new structures of cooperation.” They boldly confronted one of the toughest questions—that of the “just war”—and reviewed the conditions necessary to it: just cause, declaration of war by a competent authority, comparative justice, right intention, last resort, probability of success, and proportionality between destruction inflicted and the aims to be achieved. And they expressed special concern about the impact of the arms race—“one of the greatest curses on the human race”— on the poor.

In the debate that followed, it was clear at least that the pastoral letter had raised the moral tone and urgency of the nuclear issue. George Kennan called it “the most profound and searching inquiry yet conducted by a responsible collective body into the relations of nuclear weaponry, and indeed of modern war in general, to moral philosophy, to politics and to the conscience of the nation state.”

A decline in courage was the most striking feature in the West, Solzhenitsyn had said at Harvard, especially “among the ruling and intellectual elites.” America’s refusal to win the Vietnam War, he added amid un-Harvard-like hisses, was the ultimate evidence of the loss of willpower in the West. Solzhenitsyn could hardly have been pleased by the position of the Catholic bishops—all the more because they were religious leaders who should have stood militantly united against Soviet communism. But Solzhenitsyn could hardly have found the American kaleidoscope of ideas, groups, parties, and leaders anything but baffling. The head of the European Economic Community, Jacques Delors, made a more penetrating observation of American world policy as Reagan neared the end of his first term. He saw an “increasingly aggressive and ideological” Administration carrying “a bible in one hand and a revolver in the other.” In truth, though, Delors could have said this of most presidential Administrations since World War II.

Washington’s human rights policy exposed the division and confusion about foreign policy in the American mind. In December 1948 the United Nations General Assembly had adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights “as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.” This elevated document laid out three sets of fundamental rights. First, proclaiming that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” it set forth the historic intellectual and political freedoms—“the right to life, liberty and the security of person” and the “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion.” Then a set of procedural guarantees including provisions that “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” or “be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.”

Finally, a set of basic economic and social rights: “to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment,” the right to equal pay for equal work, “the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family,” the right to free education, at least in the lower grades.

How could such a diversity of nations, with the varieties of subcultures, live up to such a wide range of specific rights which were, in turn, obligations placed on their own governments? In part merely by ignoring or evading them. In part by defining or interpreting them to suit their own political needs. And in part by establishing radically differing sets of priorities among these three major sets of basic rights in the instrument.

For Americans, individual civil and political rights emerged out of a long and precious tradition—Magna Carta, the English Petition of Right and Bill of Rights of the seventeenth century, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791, the American Bill of Rights ratified in the same year. These in essence were protections for the rights of individual citizens against the state. But it is “not enough to think in terms of two-level relationships,” Vernon Van Dyke contended, “with the individual at one level and the state at another; nor is it enough if the nation is added. Considering the heterogeneity of humankind and of the population of virtually every existing state, it is also necessary to think of ethnic communities and certain other kinds of groups.” Trade unions, public or semi-public corporations, cultural entities, semi-autonomous regional groups might claim rights against both the state and the individual.

The most serious potential clash among the doctrines of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights lay between the first and the third major set of rights—political freedoms such as those of thought and religion, opinion and expression, of movement within and among nations, as against social and economic freedoms such as rights to employment, decent pay, education, health, food, housing. Third World countries inescapably stressed the socioeconomic rights in the Universal Declaration over the individualist. “You know, professor,” a junior minister of an African nation said to a Zimbabwean academic, “we wish imperialists could understand that the sick and hungry have no use for freedom of movement or of speech. Maybe of worship! Hunger dulls hearing and stills the tongue. Poverty and lack of roads, trains, or buses negate freedom of movement.”

Russians and Americans differed even more sharply over individualistic political rights versus collective socioeconomic freedoms. When Washington accused Moscow of violating personal political rights in its treatment of dissidents, the Kremlin gleefully retaliated by accusing Washington of violating the social and economic rights of the poor in general and blacks in particular. The Carter Administration sought to deflect such ripostes by emphasizing that human rights encompassed economic and social rights as well as political and civil liberties. “We recognize that people have economic as well as political rights,” Secretary of State Vance said in 1978.

Still the debate continued, and rose to new heights during the Reagan Administration as conservative ideologues found official rostrums from which to belabor Soviet repression, while Soviet propagandists found ample material for exploitation in stories in American journals and newspapers about the poor and the homeless.

At the dawn of the last decade of the second millennium A.D., as Westerners prepared to celebrate the bicentennials of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the American Bill of Rights, human rights as a code of international and internal behavior—especially as embodied in the UN declaration of 1948—were in practical and philosophical disarray. Rival states used the Universal Declaration to wage forensic wars with one another over the fundamental meaning of freedom. It had proved impossible for national leaders to agree on priorities and linkages among competing rights, most notably between economic-social and civil-political.

And yet the world Declaration of Rights still stood as a guide to right conduct and a symbol of global aspiration. In both domestic and international politics it was invoked, on occasion, with good effect. As cast into international instruments, human rights law, David Forsythe concluded, “is an important factor in the mobilization of concerned individuals and groups who desire more freedom, or more socio-economic justice, or both. This mobilization has occurred everywhere, even in totalitarian and authoritarian societies.” And the conflict over the meaning and application of international human rights invited the tribute of hypocrisy. “The clearest evidence of the stability of our values over time,” writes Michael Walzer, “is the unchanging character of the lies soldiers and statesmen tell. They lie in order to justify themselves, and so they describe for us the lineaments of justice. Wherever we find hypocrisy, we also find moral knowledge.” Thus the idea of freedom and justice and human rights binds the virtuous and the less virtuous together, in hypocrisy and in hope.

CHAPTER 13

The Culture of the Workshop

OUT OF THE PRODIGIOUS experimental workshops of America—the “enormous laboratories,” the solitary one-person think tanks, the suspense-ridden observatories, the bustling engineering departments— erupted a fecundity of ideas, discoveries, and inventions during the 1960s and 1970s. Measured by Nobel Prizes, United States scientists still dominated the life sciences and physics and, to a lesser degree, chemistry. In physiology or medicine, Americans during these two decades won Nobels for discoveries about hearing, cholesterol metabolism, hormonal treatment of prostate cancer, color perception, enzymes and the growth and functioning of cells, the relation between cancer-causing viruses and genes, the origin and spread of infectious diseases, the action of hormones, the effect of restriction enzymes on genes, the CAT-scan X-ray procedure, cell immunology. In physiology and medicine, Americans, sometimes in partnership with British and continental scientists, won Nobels for seven years straight starting in 1974.

In physics, during these two decades Americans were awarded Nobel Prizes for work on the complex structure of protons and nucleons, the symmetry principle governing the interaction of nuclear particles, masers, quantum electrodynamics, the nuclear reactions involved in the production of energy in stars, superconductivity, the subatomic J/psi particle, solid-state electronics, background cosmic radiation supporting the “big bang” theory, the symmetry of subatomic particles. In chemistry, Americans won Nobel Prizes for work on the chemical reactions in photosynthesis, the synthesis of organic structures, the theory of chemical bonds holding atoms together in molecules, the reciprocal processes in interactions such as those of voltage and temperature in heat transfer, the molecular analyses of proteins and enzymes, macromolecules, the methods of diagramming the structure and function of DNA.

The Nobel committee does not grant prizes in astronomy or astrophysics, but scientists in the nation’s observatories hardly needed kudos from Stockholm for incentives. Knowledge of outer space expanded immensely as more and more powerful radio telescopes were built. In 1960, quasars (“quasi-stellar radio sources”) were detected at Palomar Observatory in southern California. Within a few years, astronomers were discovering that the fastest and most distant of these faint blue celestial bodies, quasar 3C-9, was speeding away from the Milky Way at almost the speed of light. In 1975, University of California observers found a new galaxy at least ten times larger than the Milky Way and around eight billion light-years away from Earth. “Black holes” were probed, including a possible one at the center of the Milky Way. During the 1960s and 1970s, the space program was bringing breathtaking information about the planets and other nearby precincts. But nothing stirred earthlings’ imaginations as much as the radio waves coming in from galaxies quadrillions of miles away.

The dependence of astronomy on radio telescopes and space programs indicated the vital role of technology in scientific work. In atomic research, the 1930 cyclotron that accelerated particles to energies of a few million volts for smashing atoms was followed thirty years later by larger atom smashers at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and by Stanford University’s two-mile, 20-billion-volt linear accelerator. Oceanography required large vessels with highly specialized equipment. The development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs had taken huge facilities and vast sums of money. The dependence of science on technology was not new in America—only its magnitude. Even while Josiah Gibbs had been working solo with meager facilities at Yale, Thomas Edison had been establishing an elaborately equipped industrial research laboratory. While Edison had enjoyed calling it his “invention factory,” the German economist Werner Sombart glimpsed the new world ahead when he noted that, in the United States, Edison had made a “business” of invention. The increasing dependence of scientific research on big technology raised a number of political and intellectual problems, such as the controls implied in both corporate and governmental subsidies, excessive influence on scientific research of market forces, and discouragement of “free” scientific inquiry.

Volumes—indeed, libraries of volumes—were written about scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs of Nobel-class stature. Was there a pattern in these developments? The growth and impact of semiconductor electronics illustrated, perhaps more dramatically than most inventions, the nature of the origin and application of scientific ideas in the twentieth century. The intellectual roots of the electronics industry went back to earlier scientific geniuses, in this case Faraday and Maxwell; the next steps were the product of fundamental, multidisciplinary academic research, which both contributed to and was greatly stimulated by the two world wars, especially the second; further development as usual turned on 90 percent perspiration, 10 percent inspiration, on the part of a large number of persons. Soon semiconductor research, like that producing other great innovations, moved far beyond the capacities of the kind of Yankee tinkerer that had pioneered American technology in earlier decades. There was no way, Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald wrote, in which semiconductor devices could be “tinkered with at home; no way by which a skilled craftsman could improve their performance. The mode of operation of these devices is so complex and intricate, the scale so small, the interactions so subtle, that all old-fashioned inventiveness proved of no avail.”

The semiconductor breakthroughs fell upon American industry in the form of computers capable of storing and processing fantastic quantities of data and of large-scale automation, on American consumers in glittering arrays of electronic calculators, digital watches, portable tape recorders, heart pacemakers, hearing aids. An estimated 190 million integrated circuits were installed in 1980-model American cars to monitor engine efficiency and produce the increasingly elaborate dashboard displays. Entering the inner world of miniaturization was as extraordinary as exploring the universe of space. Americans developed microchips the size of a postage stamp with half a million or so transistors and associated circuitry mounted on each. These chips liberated millions of Americans from old-time chores like “figurin’” with pencil and paper; they also made bugging devices more efficient and easily concealed. Americans were moving so fast through the electronics age that the enlargement and diminution of personal freedom could hardly be calculated.

The Dicing Game of Science

Just as the rise of American capitalism had made heroes of captains of industry like Carnegie and Ford, and two world wars had created paladins like Pershing and Eisenhower, so the outpouring from the prodigious laboratories of the 1950s and 1960s produced heroes of science. Jonas E. Salk of the University of Pittsburgh Medical School, using three strains of inactivated polio, developed a vaccine that was injected into almost two million schoolchildren, with gratifying results. The frightening rise of polio cases from three or four thousand a year in the late 1930s to around 60,000 by 1952 was reversed to its levels of the 1930s. This benign curve was completed by Albert Sabin, whose widely used oral vaccine brought polio cases reported in the United States down to twenty-one in 1971. Linus Pauling, after receiving the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his research into the forces holding proteins and molecules together, became the first man to win a second unshared Nobel, the peace prize of 1962, for his leadership in the campaign against nuclear testing. James Watson achieved fame not only for his role in the discovery of the structure of DNA— suddenly “we knew that a new world had been opened”—but for writing about it in a book, The Double Helix, that revealed the amazing mixture of boldness and caution, planning and chance, cooperation and rank competitiveness, intensive analysis and experimental derring-do that defined the world of the top scientists.

Yet none of these scientific celebrities could compare—in scientific eminence, intellectual genius, influence on scientific thought, and impact on public attitudes toward scientists—with another American, Albert Einstein. Having fled from Nazism to the United States in 1932 and become an American citizen in 1940, the German-born scientist was proudly accepted by his adopted fellow countrymen as one of their own.

By the time of Einstein’s death in 1955, aspiring young scientists knew much about his life, a kind of Horatio Alger saga, European style—how he grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in heavily Catholic Munich, learned to speak so late that his parents feared he was subnormal, received mediocre schooling, moved to Milan with his family when his father’s business failed (for the second time), then struck out on his own for Zurich in order to attend the highly regarded Swiss Federal Polytechnic School. Frustrated young scientists drew solace from reading about young Einstein’s ups and downs: a cheeky scholar who was rebuffed by his teachers, an iconoclast who rebutted conventional scientific wisdom, he spent years in hand-to-mouth employment until he got a low-level job in the Swiss Patent Office. While there he conducted intensive study on his own time and often on the government’s.

Suddenly, from the mind of this twenty-six-year-old bureaucrat, who had neither classroom nor laboratory, neither students nor apparatus, came in 1905 a series of sensational papers. Two of these—“On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid According to the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Induction” and “On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light”—exemplified not only Einstein’s scientific versatility but his genius in both methodology and conceptualization. The third paper, presenting the special theory of relativity—on the mass-energy equivalence, E = mc^2—produced the most fundamental change in popular scientific thought about space and time in the three centuries since Newton.

The young scientist who had been denied decent teaching posts only a few years before now won a series of professorships at Zurich, at Prague, and at the newly established Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics at the prestigious University of Berlin. Deeply absorbed in new concepts of relativity, Einstein in 1916 published his general theory, which challenged conventional Newtonian views of gravity. When a British solar eclipse expedition in 1919 confirmed, through photographs, the prediction that the general theory had made of the extent of starlight’s gravitational deflection at the edge of the sun, the forty-year-old scientist in Berlin “awoke to find himself famous.” The Times of London, in a leading article, opined that nearly all that had “been accepted as the axiomatic basis of physical thought” must now be swept away.

Einstein’s rise to world fame coincided in 1918-19 with the collapse of the German monarchy in defeat, starvation, and revolution. The solitary scientist who had shunned politics had joined an antiwar political party that was banned in 1916, signed a petition asking the heads of state about to meet in Versailles to “make a peace that does not conceal a future war,” and later worked for world intellectual cooperation under the League of Nations and enlisted in the Zionist cause. Though lampooned as a “guileless child” for supporting pacifism and internationalism, he was politically astute enough to sense the menace of Nazism and make his escape from Germany just before Hitler took power.

At the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Einstein continued his search for a unified field theory, running into formidable mathematical and conceptual problems. But he did not shun political affairs in his adopted country. And in August 1939, as Europe was about to be engulfed in war once again, Einstein signed the famous letter, prepared by fellow refugee-scientist Leo Szilard, warning Roosevelt that research performed in “the course of the last four months” had made it appear possible in the near future “to set up nuclear chain reactions in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated,” and that this could lead to the construction of bombs so powerful that a single one could destroy a port and the city around it.

Later, Einstein would minimize his role in pressing for action on the atomic bomb. His participation had consisted of one act, he said—“I signed the letter to President Roosevelt.” Perhaps he wanted to forget that he had done much more. In March 1940, he had sent a warning to FDR that the Germans were moving ahead on uranium research. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, he helped solve a theoretical problem relating to gaseous diffusion, and offered to help on anything else within his power. Early in the spring of 1945, as the war neared its end, he revealed his general knowledge of progress on the bomb when he confided to a reporter that if nuclear energies could be used, it would not be houses or blocks that would be destroyed in a few seconds—“it will be entire cities.” And he even helped Szilard get an appointment with FDR, through the good offices of Eleanor Roosevelt, when Szilard planned to advise the President on the proper posture toward Russia should the United States make progress in developing the hydrogen bomb. The appointment was postponed until Roosevelt returned to the White House from a vacation in Warm Springs—which he never did.

During the cold war, some pundits accused Einstein of political gullibility. Others felt that he had been effective as a lifelong thinker about war and peace, freedom and oppression. A pacifist, he allowed two exceptions—the war against Nazism and the security of Israel against predatory neighbors. He was a Zionist and friend of Israel who in 1952 sensibly rejected Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s offer of the presidency of the new nation. He was a believer in civil liberties and academic freedom who as readily and publicly supported a pacifist Heidelberg professor under nationalist attack in the interwar years as he did a Brooklyn teacher haled in 1953 before a congressional committee investigating “un-Americans.” What should intellectuals do against this evil? Einstein demanded publicly.

“Frankly, I can see only the revolutionary way of non-cooperation in the sense of Gandhi’s. Every intellectual who is called before one of the committees ought to refuse to testify, i.e., he must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in short, for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of his country.” Predictably, sundry newspapers attacked him for this, the New York Times tut-tutting him for using one evil to attack another. Einstein was disappointed by the pallid support from academics. If people were willing to testify, he said, “the intellectuals of this country deserve nothing better than the slavery which is intended for them.” Einstein spoke feelingly; for years he and his secretary were under investigation by the FBI, suspected of “pro-Communist” activities.

Throughout his life Einstein’s highest political commitment was the search for international understanding and world peace. As chauvinism rose to new heights during World War I, he had signed a “Manifesto to Europeans” urging all those whom Goethe had called “good Europeans” to join forces for lasting unity. Forty years later, he served as a leader in the world government movement and as chairman of the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists to appeal for control of nuclear arms. In April 1955, during the last week of his life, he agreed with Bertrand Russell on a manifesto that proposed a global conference of scientists to assess the peril of war. This later led to the Pugwash conferences attended by scientists from Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and other countries.

The scientist Einstein’s supreme commitment was to a unity and coherence that transcended even global politics—the grand unification of physical theory. His work on the general theory of relativity had struck another eminent German scientist, Max Born, as “the greatest feat of human thinking about nature, the most amazing combination of philosophical penetration, physical intuition, and mathematical skill”—even more, a “great work of art.” Both before and after he emigrated to the United States, Einstein labored over his unified field theory, which he viewed as the capstone of the inspired work of Maxwell, Faraday, and others. His general relativity theory, he explained to the press, reduced to one formula all laws governing space, time, and gravitation. The purpose of his continuing work was “to further this simplification, and particularly to reduce to one formula the explanation of the field of gravity and of the field of electro-magnetism.”

He died without achieving this supreme goal. The immense mathematical and conceptual stages still eluded him. But he died expecting that the goal would be achieved. Everything in him, as a supreme embodiment of the Western Enlightenment, cried out that there must be some ultimate harmony in the physical as well as in the moral and intellectual universe. He was convinced, he liked to say, that God would not leave things to blind chance—that the “Old One” did not “throw dice” with the world. When Einstein died, many physicists doubted the possibility of a unified theory. Thirty years later, however, his faith was being vindicated. Scientists were more hopeful than ever that, following a somewhat different path to the same goal, they were on the verge of discovering the “Grand Unified Theory.” Einstein would have liked the acronym they applied to it—GUT.

Three decades after Einstein’s death it seemed a hundredfold more likely that science would be unified than would the cultural and political thought of the world, or even of the West. In 1959 the English scientist and novelist C. P. Snow asserted in a Cambridge University lecture that Western society had become seriously fragmented, lacking even the pretense of a common culture. In particular, scientists and “literary intellectuals” had lost even the capacity to communicate with one another on the plane of serious common concerns. Soon Snow was set upon by those who insisted that there was really only one culture—the bourgeois capitalist one—or three or twenty or fifty ones, and by those who held that “culture” itself had become an ambiguous, problematic, and therefore, in Snow’s sense, meaningless term. But the press and public responded to his ideas with an intensity and excitement that indicated, as Snow later noted, a deep underlying concern with intellectual and cultural fragmentation.

A few years after Snow’s lecture Hans Morgenthau, in his Science: Servant or Master?, described an even deeper and more pervasive problem than Snow’s. He found a conflict within the mind of man rather than between science and the mind of man—a “contrast between the achievements and promises of science and their acceptance by humanity, on the one hand,” and a “malaise” that had become a “universal phenomenon encompassing humanity.” This malaise stemmed from the irrelevance of institutional scholarship to the concerns of society, of people, and especially of the young who were in the process during these years, the early 1970s, of rebelling against that scholarship and its theft from them of their individual autonomy. In effect Morgenthau took Tocqueville’s old insight into the intellectual gulf in America—the gap between cloudy, high-blown rhetoric and day-to-day “pragmatic” expediency—and broadened it into even more dire and far-reaching disjunctions: actions directed by utilitarian objectives rather than by effective theory, ideas measured by technological relevance and applicability rather than by a transcending grand theory, and theory governed more by “smart truth”—what is knowable—than by what is worth knowing, as measured by transcending moral principles derived from authentic human needs.

As a political theorist, Morgenthau emphasized the applicability of these gloomy findings to the physical danger resulting from scientific progress and the inability of politics to master that danger. “When science fails to protect man from the forces of nature,” he wrote, “its failure can be justified by the ineluctable limits of human powers confronting those forces. But war and misery are not the result of the blind forces of nature. They are the result of purposeful human action which, in its march toward the mastery of nature, has turned against man, his freedom, and his life. This shocking paradox of man’s ability to master nature and his helplessness to control the results of that mastery, his supremacy over what is inanimate and alien and his impotence in the face of man, is at the root of the contemporary revolt against science, society, and politics-as-usual.”

Morgenthau was writing in the wake of almost three decades of memorable collisions between science and politics. Most of the scientists who had developed the A-bomb had wanted to avert or postpone its use, or at least have it dropped into an uninhabited area, but to no avail. They had chafed under military restrictions at Los Alamos and other scientific installations. They had heard with disbelief that army occupation forces in Japan had destroyed with welding torches and explosives five cyclotrons that the Japanese, lacking uranium, had developed chiefly for biological and medical research. Hundreds of scientists had mobilized to fight off the May-Johnson bill, which they feared would put atomic energy excessively under the control of the government in general and the military in particular, with dire implications for freedom of scientific research and experimentation. Even though a less threatening act passed, by the early 1950s many scientists outside the old leadership corps represented by Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant saw the national program for the physical sciences, in the words of science historian Daniel J. Kevles, as “dominated outside of atomic energy by the military, its dispensations concentrated geographically in the major universities, its primary energies devoted to the chief challenges of national defense and fundamental physics.” This focus might be necessary for scientific progress—was it enough?

Many scientists had plunged into politics after the war, intent not only on controlling the atom but on banishing force as a means of settling disputes among nations. Although it might have appeared at first, wrote historian Alice Kimball Smith, that “the evangelical zeal with which scientists embarked on public education and lobbying was entirely out of character with the rationalist temper of their calling, yet their moral earnestness often had deep roots in backgrounds of Judaism or evangelical Protestantism.” Scientists translated their moral concern into the practical tasks of speaking, testifying, raising money, and organizing the Federation of American Scientists. Even so, they were hardly prepared for the vagaries of transactional interest-group politics. Like other pressure groups, scientists wanted government support without government regulation; government wanted scientific progress at bargain rates.

In the end it was evident that “something between seduction and rape repeatedly occurred,” science editor Daniel Greenberg concluded, but it was not always clear which side was the aggressor and which the victim. Depending on the times, scientists were now villains, now heroes. Sometimes they could be both. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the research project at Los Alamos, became an American hero as the “father of the A-bomb.” He became controversial after fighting for international control of atomic energy, wobbling on the May-Johnson bill, opposing and then accepting development of the hydrogen bomb, and disregarding official security regulations. Edward Teller, “father of the H-bomb,” suspected him of being a communist. The Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, at the height of the McCarthy furor, stripped him of his security clearance. Less than a decade later, on December 2, 1963, with Teller and others in the audience, President Johnson presented Oppenheimer with the AEC’s prestigious Fermi Award that Kennedy had decided to grant him. Oppenheimer in his subdued response reminded his listeners that Jefferson had spoken of the “brotherly” spirit uniting the votaries of science. “We have not, I know,” Oppenheimer went on, “always given evidence of that brotherly spirit of science.” This was a gentle reminder of what Greenberg described as the political fragmentation of American science.

Those who knew of Einstein’s life during the opening years of the century marveled at the contrast between his daily occupations at the Swiss Patent Office and his scientific work outside it. As a “technical expert, third class, provisional, lowest salary,” he spent the day examining models of household appliances and farm implements, cameras and typewriters, and various engineering devices that came in from the inventive Swiss. During his glorious “eight hours of idleness plus a whole Sunday,” as he described it to a friend, he worked on abstract and advanced theoretical concepts that would revolutionize scientific thought. It is very possible, however, that the kinds of gadgets and gimmicks he examined during the day had even more influence on Western life during the century ahead than his most creative scientific theorizing.

This influence was evident not only in the immense number of mechanical devices that flooded first the Western world and then most of the globe during the twentieth century but also in the technological systems that braided societies—transportation, communications, information, medical, military. What the public tended to see and use as an array of convenient and time-saving devices were but the day-to-day manifestations of semi-autonomous entities that cut across whole cultures. Thus, something that started out as the horseless carriage, Michael Maccoby noted, became highway networks, plus a petroleum industry, plus rubber plantations, plus auto workers’ unions. In earlier times factories financed by capitalists had made goods; in the most recent era laboratories with public and private money manufactured whole technological systems, such as Morton Thiokol’s production of the space shuttle’s booster rockets. At the start of the 1980s Bell Laboratories in its eighteen locations had an annual budget of over $1 billion and 20,000 employees, of whom 2,500 held doctorates.

During the 1980s the earlier furors over mechanization, scientific management, and automation were giving way to debate over the consequences of the information revolution. In fact, the “revolution” was a culmination of a long process stretching back to the early industrial revolution, even to Gutenberg, and embracing hundreds of developments from the invention of simple pencil erasers to the telegraph, the typewriter, the punch-card tabulating machine, word processors, computers, and the other bewildering electronic devices adorning banks, offices, factories, and, increasingly, homes. The new machines were so impressive in their capacities and versatile in their uses that once again the warning bells sounded: technology was threatening to replace human mind and feeling, information processing was no substitute for ideas, the finest computer could not capture the poetry and joy and nuances of life, the rising generation of students might even be “seriously hampered in its capacity to think through the social and ethical questions that confront us” if educators were swept into the computer cult.” Even defenders of the computer granted, in J. David Bolter’s words, that it would foster “a general redefinition of certain basic relationships: the relationship of science to technology, of knowledge to technical power, and, in the broadest sense, of mankind to the world of nature.”

Others raised the same question about technology that Morgenthau had about science: servant or master? Granted that machines could not master anything except at the command of the human beings running them, whose interests did the new technology serve? Presumably the owners and managers of the technology. Possibly the great mass of technical people operating the machines, who tended, David F. Noble wrote, to “internalize and even consciously adopt the outlook of their patrons, an outlook translated into professional habit through such mechanisms as education, funding, reward-structures, and peer pressure.” Labor? Some argued that the skilled monitoring and constant adjustments required by the new cybernetic systems were making factory jobs more interesting and remunerative for skilled labor; others noted that, for the mass of workers, making or running information systems would continue to be boring and alienating. Women? Their relationship to technology had differed sharply from men’s all along, in Ruth S. Cowan’s view—as evidenced even in the writing of the history of technology.

“Women menstruate, parturate, and lactate; men do not,” Cowan wrote. Technologies relating to these processes had long been developed: pessaries, sanitary napkins, tampons, intrauterine devices, childbirth anesthesia, artificial nipples, bottle sterilizers, pasteurized and condensed milks. Where, Cowan asked, were the histories of these female technologies? They had yet to be written. Even more, she wrote, women had been culturally discouraged from playing a major role in general technological change. They had experienced technology and science as consumers, not producers. Hence it was not surprising that an upsurge of “antitechnology” attitudes among women during the 1970s was correlated closely with the upsurge in women’s political consciousness, or that women might carry an unspoken hostility to science and technology into the political arena.

Technology as a whole had long been deeply enmeshed with politics and government, though often in complex, mysterious, and unseen ways. The design of bridges—as against the awarding of contracts for the building of bridges—would have seemed a virtually nonpolitical act, at least until the days of Robert Moses, the builder of New York highways, parks, and bridges. Moses, his biographer Robert Caro reported, built the bridges over Long Island parkways with very low clearances in order to discourage buses that would allow hordes of New York’s poor—especially blacks—to invade his beloved Jones Beach. The clearances admitted middle-class people with private cars. This politically shrewd, if morally reprehensible, decision was taken without undue publicity and fuss. Many of Moses’s “monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality,” according to Langdon Winner, “a way of engineering relationships among people that, after a time, become just another part of the landscape.”

By the late 1980s the information revolution was still shrouding the play of technological politics. With their emphasis on interaction, the processes of linkage, feedback, equilibrium, cybernetics, and information systems put a premium on harmony and stability, whereas politics thrived on conflict. The massive information and other technological systems fit their operators into the internal consensus and equilibrium of the systems, thus presenting unified ranks to the often hostile outside world. But internal conflicts broke out—between employers and employees, among doctors and administrators and nurses, railroads and bus companies and air carriers, army, marine, and naval officers. And the systems were not wholly benign; some posed threats to the whole society, as in the case of arms building, environmental pollution, traffic in illegal drugs, nuclear power plants.

These conflicts and threats were catapulted into the political process, as technologists transformed themselves into pressure groups competing with rival interests. Compromises were arranged, regulations imposed or withdrawn or changed, judgments made and unmade by government. Scientists manifested a growing concern as to whether the American political process could resolve not only routine, day-to-day interest-group conflicts but the far more complex task of helping science and technology fortify, rather than threaten, core American values. If, as an MIT professor of electrical engineering feared, the American culture had “a weak value system,” would it therefore be “disastrously vulnerable to technology”? If, as other scientists contended, they needed a wide measure of freedom in the early development of technologies, at what point should government step in to constrain their freedom to extend technology into such dangerous areas as genetic experimentation? If, as an MIT political scientist observed, whatever claims might be made for liberty, justice, or equality could be quickly neutralized by the answer, “‘Fine, but that’s no way to run a railroad’ (or steel mill, or airline, or communications system, and so on),” did such counterclaims of practical necessity eclipse the need for “moral and political reasoning”?

Faced with such bewildering intellectual and moral dilemmas, scientists, like other Americans, turned to education as the chief hope—perhaps the only one. The launching of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957 had shocked Americans out of their complacent assumption of being in the scientific lead. High schools across the country intensified their science and language teaching. The National Science Foundation’s budget for curriculum development jumped from half a million dollars in 1957 to ten times that two years later. Programs were expanded in “STS”—science, technology, and society—with emphasis on ideas, technology, and social institutions and on ethical values in science. Federally funded teaching materials were widely distributed as alternatives to commercial textbooks.

But these were “quickie” programs and twenty-five years later assessments of the state of science education and literacy were still bleak. “By even the most elementary standards, instruction in the sciences in most schools for most Americans is minimal,” Stephen Graubard wrote. “Science is avoided—evaded—by the preponderant number of American schoolchildren. That evasion is permitted to continue in the universities.” Commercially produced texts still dominated the high school classrooms. An NSF report revealed that the number of American students enrolled for graduate study in chemistry, physics, and mathematics had remained almost stationary between 1979 and 1985, while the number of foreign nationals in these programs rose by half or more.

More and more people were using modern technology, observed the chancellor of the State University of New York, while understanding it less. “Instead, we are content to be served by cadres of technicians and specialists and, thereby, to cede to them an inordinate, even ominous amount of control over our lives.” He wondered whether the great mass of people, including many college graduates, were in danger of becoming what had been called “techno-peasants”—“modern-day serfs, nominally free but disenfranchised by ignorance—and fear—of prevailing technologies.”

The great mass of Americans were in far greater danger of becoming “econo-peasants.” Popular ignorance of economics surpassed that of science and technology. During the years when millions of Americans were becoming intimately familiar with their individual microeconomics—maintaining checking accounts, applying for mortgages, playing the market, itemizing tax returns, using desk calculators, buying foreign currency, monitoring their payroll deductions, taking out credit cards—their understanding of the macroeconomics that dominated their collective economy remained low. Even more paradoxical was the disarray in the economic theory and practice of the nation’s intellectual and political leadership in the face of the refractory problems of the post-Vietnam years.

The Rich and the Poor

Camp David, Friday, August 13, 1971. The limousines pulled in during the afternoon, disgorging presidential advisers. Although this summit meeting on top of the low Catoctin Mountain had been announced as a conference on defense spending, only civilians were present. Whisked away to their quarters, where they were offered food, drink, and a variety of recreations, they found themselves totally cut off from communication with the world below. The President wanted no leaks as he prepared to announce what he would describe as the “most comprehensive new economic policy” since Roosevelt’s New Deal.

A participant remembered the weekend more for its atmosphere than for its decision-making. The mountaintop retreat seemed to isolate the group from the realities of economic life. “They acquired the attitudes of a group of script-writers preparing a TV special to be broadcast on Sunday evening,” economic adviser Herbert Stein recalled. “The announcement—the performance—was everything.” It was not viewed, he noted wryly, as part of the regular process of government. After the TV special, regular programming would be resumed. The President and Haldeman concentrated on the mechanics of the television speech. At first Nixon balked at speaking Sunday night because he feared preempting Bonanza, an immensely popular program, but he was advised that he had to speak before the markets opened Monday. Manfully he bumped Bonanza.

Nixon had inherited a booming but dangerously heated-up economy when he entered the White House two and a half years before. John Kennedy had proposed a tax cut, only to see it languish on Capitol Hill. Johnson drove it through Congress hardly three months after he took office. The biggest tax cut in American history, adopted even though the budget was running heavily into red ink, this reduction in both personal and corporate income-tax rates, along with the rising outlay for both welfare and war, helped fuel a huge expansion in both employment and the gross national product by the mid-sixties. Soon the economy showed signs of overheating, but LBJ, reluctant to change a winning game and eager to push his urban welfare programs in the face of rioting in Watts and elsewhere, fended off his economic advisers’ urgings that he now ask for a tax increase. Finally, in 1967, as inflation threatened, Johnson during the height of the Vietnam effort urged a tax boost on Congress. In a classic example of institutional friction and delay, Congress failed to enact the revenue increase for another year and a half. That came too late to cool the broiling economy.

It came too late for the new President as well. Inflation was running at about 5 percent a year when Nixon took office. In accord with sound Republican doctrine, the new Administration must throttle down the social spending and the budget deficits for which they had castigated Humphrey and his fellow Democrats in the 1968 election campaign. But Nixon was wary. He still felt the scars of his defeat by Kennedy in 1960, when he had been beaten in part by the Eisenhower recession, or so he believed. Herbert Stein had encountered Nixon’s ambivalence when he first met the President-elect on the day his appointment as economic adviser was announced. When his new boss asked Stein what he thought would be the nation’s main economic problem, Stein answered with the conventional wisdom: inflation. To his surprise Nixon showed equal concern about unemployment.

For over two years Nixon, teetering between his two fears, tried to fine-tune the economy with a mix of monetary and budgetary policies, along with exhortation from the White House. It was hard going every inch of the way. Fine-tuning would have been difficult even for a united government. The President had to share economic policy-making with the very independent Federal Reserve Board under its imperious chairman and with the Democratic-controlled Congress. By spring 1970 both prices and unemployment were rising sharply—a remarkable combination. The federal deficit was soaring, interest rates climbed, and then the stock market took its steepest plunge since depression days. In June 1970 came the collapse of the Penn Central Railroad, called by Leonard Silk the greatest business failure in history. For some Americans that failure sounded the tocsin for the slow death of passenger railroading, one of the ineradicable and glorious memories of countless older Americans.

By 1971 the nation was beset by economic storms from abroad as well. The great edifice of Western monetary cooperation, founded during Lend-Lease days, dedicated at Bretton Woods, expanded during the era of the Marshall Plan, and buttressed by hundreds of international postwar agreements, appeared in peril. For years that edifice had stood on the firm base of the dependable, all-powerful dollar, which in turn had been stabilized by a fixed gold price. American financial dominance had been under growing threat for years as the nation spent billions abroad for foreign goods and military operations, until the mountain of foreign-held dollars had become far larger than the value of the United States gold stock. What if foreign treasury ministers began to line up at the Washington “gold window” of the financial edifice and tried to draw out more of the bullion than was now available? Britain’s request, in early August 1971, for $3 billion in gold was merely the triggering device for powerful economic forces that had been building up for years, including a strong German mark and rising Japanese competition.

Now Nixon had to act, but he faced a painful dilemma. The American economy had become linked firmly with the Western and Japanese economies. He would have to move on both the domestic and the global front, in particular because ending convertibility of paper into gold and allowing the dollar to depreciate would stimulate price rises at home as the dollar price of imports mounted. Hence it would be necessary to establish mandatory price and wage controls. But if there was any man who had, year in and year out, vociferously denounced controls, it was Richard Nixon. His aversion was based in part on conventional Republican doctrine but even more on his brief working experience with price controls in the Office of Price Administration during World War II. This proved, said some, that a little experience was a dangerous thing.

But on the evening of August 15, 1971, at the culmination of the secret Camp David meeting, the President bit both bullets—indeed, several bullets. He imposed a ninety-day freeze on prices, wages, and rents, suspended the convertibility of dollars into gold, and placed a 10 percent surcharge on imports. He asked Congress to repeal the 7 percent excise tax on cars, to speed up personal income-tax exemptions, to put off welfare reform for a year, to postpone revenue-sharing programs with the states for three months, to pass a 10 percent “job development credit”—a tax credit to business for investment in new plants and equipment—that would drop to 5 percent after one year.

The President had acted. The country seemed thrilled, as it so often had been by forthright leadership after a period of doubt and disarray. Wall Street appeared to be elated, as the Dow Jones rose 32.9 points on the Monday after the presidential speech—the biggest one-day jump to that point. Three months later the President instituted Phase II, a comprehensive and mandatory system of controls. The Fed, now under the chairmanship of Arthur Burns, helpfully expanded the money supply. Then, in a series of steps and phases, the controls were gradually loosened, until June when, with food prices climbing and the Administration bleeding from Watergate, Nixon reimposed the freeze. But this time the freeze proved “a total disaster,” as livestock was destroyed or kept from market and food was hoarded. Again the controls were slowly lifted and, by April 1974, eliminated.

Though economically the program had mixed results, politically Nixon’s “New Economic Policy,” as he called it, was a splendid success. Just as his trip to China and détente with Russia took the wind out of McGovern’s peace strategy of 1972, so the President’s dexterous juggling of economic policy from crisis to crisis deflated the Democrats’ domestic challenge. True-blue conservatives were dismayed by the President’s opportunistic interventionism. The tide was not running toward freedom, Stein concluded morosely. Thoughtful conservatives were further dismayed when Nixon tapes publicized by the Watergate inquiry shone a spotlight on Nixon as Economist-in-Chief. Late in June 1972, Haldeman had asked his boss whether he had gotten the report that London had decided to float the pound.

NIXON: That’s devaluation?

HALDEMAN: Yeah.…

NIXON: I don’t care about it. Nothing we can do about it.

Haldeman tried to arouse the President’s interest by mentioning a staffer’s report that the British action showed the wisdom of the President’s policy. The President would not be tempted.

NIXON: Good. I think he’s right. It’s too complicated for me to get into.

Then Haldeman noted that Burns expected a 5 to 8 percent devaluation of the pound against the dollar.

NIXON (impatiently): Yeah. O.K. Fine.

HALDEMAN: Burns is concerned about speculation about the lira.

NIXON: I don’t give a shit about the lira.

Undiscouraged, Haldeman mentioned a good reaction in the House of Representatives.

NIXON: There ain’t a vote in it.…

Thus ended the morning’s economic policy making.

From the resigned President, Gerald Ford inherited a festering case of what had come to be called stagflation. He faced a perplexing combination of high inflation and rising unemployment, complicated by a slowdown in economic output, a big trade deficit, and a falling stock market. Ford reacted to these conditions like the stalwart Republican he had always been, but with a public relations twist. He adopted a Madison Avenue-style slogan—Whip Inflation Now! or WIN!—and jawboned General Motors into trimming a planned price increase from almost 10 percent to 8.6. He cut government spending, sought to balance the budget, and with Congress reduced personal and corporate taxes. Harried by the Democratic-controlled Congress, outflanked on the right by Reagan Republicans, bedeviled by the aggressive efforts of the Arab-dominated Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to boost oil prices, Ford resorted to ad hoc, step-by-step economic policies.

He had no national constituency of his own. He could not forget that he was the first and only President chosen by one man, elevated to the vice presidency after Agnew quit under fire, elevated to the presidency after Nixon quit under fire. He chose Nelson Rockefeller as his Vice President in the hope that the former New York governor would bring support from the once-mighty presidential Republicans, but that old party was now a ghost party and Rockefeller a hate object to the resurgent Republican Right. Inundated by advice, Ford pressed his fight against the twin horsemen of inflation and unemployment, shifting back and forth without routing either. Hardly a year after entering the White House he had to launch his struggle to hold his office. Democrats attacked his tax program as regressive, his welfare programs as inadequate, his economics as thwarting growth, his military spending as excessive. And millions of Americans thought of him chiefly as the man who had pardoned Richard Nixon.

Compromised by their own failures to find a solution to the stagflation problem, congressional Democrats were vulnerable to many of the same attacks they launched against the President. Their best hope, and Ford’s worst fear, was the emergence of a presidential candidate untainted by past Democratic failures. Such an outsider was Jimmy Carter. The new President pictured himself, however, much more the orderly policy maker than the passionate, “charismatic” leader. He based his “exact procedure” to some degree on his scientific and engineering background, he told Neal Peirce shortly after winding up his remarkable primary victories in 1976. He liked first to study the historical background of a problem, then “to bring together advice or ideas from as wide or divergent points of view as possible, to assimilate them personally or with a small staff,” bringing in others if necessary to discuss the matter in depth. “Then I make a general decision about what should be done involving time schedules, necessity for legislation, executive acts, publicity to be focused on the issue. Then I like to assign task forces to work on different aspects of the problem,” and he would remain personally involved in the whole process.

This was the operational code of a commanding, “take charge” leader, a blueprint for action—but one that Carter appeared to ignore in much of his economic policy making. The White House sent out mixed signals as to what it wanted. Advance preparation was inadequate, follow-through sporadic, lines of communication and delegation scrambled. The normal friction between the executive and legislative branches was exacerbated by exceptionally poor staff work in the White House’s congressional liaison office. Above all a clear sense of priorities was lacking.

Gradually, almost imperceptibly for a while, the Carter Administration drifted to the right in economic policy. This appeared to be the result of no grand strategic reconsideration but rather, after the first year or so, of mishaps and collisions that drained the White House of a sense of resolution and consistency, even while the old populist rhetoric remained much the same. Thus the President continued to attack the oil industry and other special interests, Betty Glad noted, even while he moved toward their positions on policy. He talked about the nation’s health crises, but made funding of a national health insurance plan contingent on the state of the economy and the federal budget. In his first year in office he emphasized tax reduction and raising the minimum wage; in the next three years he showed much more concern about inflation and pressed for some restriction on wage increases.

Most of this was in response to immediate, specific problems and crises. But once again “practicality” and “pragmatism” failed. By December 1980, the annual rate of inflation was at 13 percent, the prime rate had risen to 21.5 percent, and unemployment stood at 7.4 percent. Stagflation was back with a vengeance.

One by one Carter’s liberal, urban constituencies began to back away from the Administration. Speaker Tip O’Neill, repeatedly bypassed and “blindsided” by the White House, proclaimed that he had not become Speaker “to dismantle programs I’ve fought for all my life.” Hearing of proposed Social Security cuts, House Majority Whip John Brademas, a workhorse for Democratic party programs, warned that the White House would “run into a buzzsaw” if it tried to eliminate major benefits. As Carter began his third year Senator Edward Kennedy complained that the Administration’s budget asked “the poor, the black, the sick, the young, the cities and the unemployed to bear a disproportionate share of the billions of dollars of reductions.” Urban, black, labor, consumer, and other leaders turned more and more against the Administration during 1979 and helped project Kennedy that fall into his failed effort to wrest the 1980 nomination from the President.

White House watchers had been quick to jump on sudden and erratic shifts of policy. Nixon “clings to what is familiar until the last moment,” Hugh Sidey of Time had noted. “Then, when the evidence overwhelms him or something happens in his gut, he decides to act, and nothing stands very long in his way. He abandons his philosophy, his promises, his speeches, his friends, his counselors. He marches out of one life into a new world without any apologies or glancing back.” Scholars as well as journalists maintained a drumbeat of critical comments on Carter’s gaps between principle and policy. Few of these critics paused to ask whether the White House during the 1970s was receiving steady and adequate intellectual nourishment from the pundits and the professors.

The answer would have been no. In the absence of that kind of nourishment, Presidents attempted a series of “practical” experiments in economic policy, many of them vague reflections of half-understood conventional economic theories.

If the Republicans had been willing to live up to their campaign oratory their path would have been well marked after they recaptured the presidency in 1968. They needed only to slash spending, balance the budget, turn key federal functions over to private enterprise, cut back heavily on regulation—in short, “get government off our backs.” Philosophically, this path had been well marked not only by Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner in the previous century but by countless laissez-faire enthusiasts in the twentieth. The most notable of these following World War II was Friedrich August von Hayek, born in Vienna in 1899, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics and at the University of Chicago.

In 1944 Hayek had published The Road to Serfdom, which for a book on economics won wide attention and sales, especially in the United States. The book seemed to have special appeal in embattled Western nations whose peoples were tiring of wartime rationing, price controls, travel restrictions, endless regulations. Its message was simple: extensive governmental intervention into the economy, whether through welfare programs or nationalization or economic planning, would lead to totalitarianism, which would crush all freedoms. The next three decades proved this analysis dead wrong. All the major Western democracies had indulged intensively in peacetime intervention, with mixed economic results but with few infringements on fundamental individual rights such as freedom of speech, religion, press, assembly. On the contrary, some contended, promoting economic and social security through public programs more often protected and enlarged individual freedom.

Doctrinaire laissez-faire had become so discredited as public policy during the depression years that neither Nixon nor Ford—nor Eisenhower earlier—offered more than oratory and a few crusts of policy to the free-marketeers. This enabled the laissez-faire theorists to keep their doctrine intact by arguing that it had never really been tried.

During the depressed 1930s Keynesianism had succeeded laissez-faire as the dominant intellectual influence in Western economics. FDR had followed Keynesian policies without understanding the theory behind them, and to the extent he put federal money into public works and other spending projects he lifted the nation out of stagnation. It took World War II, however, to show what “war Keynesianism” could do to bring about a full recovery. Despite predictions of a catastrophic postwar depression, continued federal spending on welfare and war sustained a strong economy through the 1950s and 1960s. Truman and even Eisenhower were “closet Keynesians,” and Kennedy by 1962 was willing to embrace the doctrine publicly. Johnson carried Keynesian spending to its practical political limit and with great success until the disastrous delay in the tax boost and other mishaps disrupted his experiment in financing both guns and butter.

It fell to Richard Nixon not only to admit but to assert proudly, “Now I am a Keynesian.” While this pronouncement hardly struck Western ears with the impact of Kennedy’s “I am a Berliner,” it was testament to Nixon’s occasional willingness to think and act boldly as well as his desire to be seen as a modern man not mired in nineteenth-century economic orthodoxy. It also fell to Nixon to embrace the still controversial doctrine at the very time when it was becoming less relevant to the specific economic problems facing the nation. The longer-run risks of Keynesianism had not escaped its more thoughtful advocates. Alvin Hansen, Keynes’s leading American disciple, in calling for a bold program of public investment in 1938, had warned against overemphasis on such a program, failure to achieve “a balance in the cost-price-income structure,” and choking off private investment. The hard-nosed Keynesians advising Kennedy and Johnson—Paul Samuelson, Walter Heller, Kermit Gordon, James Tobin, Arthur Okun, and others—knew that depression-style Keynesianism was not enough.

They knew, that is, Keynesianism’s great flaw—its inability to deal with the raging inflations that swept Western economies during the 1970s. By the early 1980s, as the Keynesian economist Robert Lekachman granted, it was clear that the doctrine “underestimated both the inflationary potential of full employment and the impact on public expectations of continuous inflation without serious interruption for so long a period. Keynes exaggerated the competitiveness of the private sector and, in some moods, the efficacy of fiscal and monetary remedies.” Non-Keynesians attacked other Keynesian assumptions—that the economy had a built-in tendency to operate with output below its potential while unemployment remained high, that enough jobs could be provided through fiscal actions of government to expand demand, that governments could estimate accurately how much spending and deficit creation would be enough to achieve employment goals.

As the Keynesians fell into some disrepute during the inflationary seventies, a new doctrine galloped to the rescue from Stage Right. It was in fact an old idea—the dominant economic doctrine of the 1920s—dressed up in mod fashion for the post-Keynesian era. This was monetarism. Associated in the United States mainly with the noted University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, monetarism preached that regulating the supply and, if possible, the velocity of money was the way to stabilize the economy and especially to control inflation. It was a beguiling doctrine, largely because it depended mainly on a single lever of economic control, and also because the government, through the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department, had far swifter and more decisive influence over the volume of money than over any other component of the economy. During the 1970s the monetarists, said Alan S. Blinder, “swept through the universities, conquered Wall Street, infiltrated the Congress, and eventually gained the upper hand at the Federal Reserve.”

Since Keynesians were viewed as liberals ideologically, and monetarists as conservatives, Carter’s choice of Paul Volcker as head of the Federal Reserve Board in 1979 was seen as a decisive presidential shift to the right. Volcker promptly made clear that the Board would pursue monetarist policies. There followed a classic example of Herbert Spencer’s case of the murder of a beautiful theory by a brutal gang of facts. The money supply and especially money velocity fell quickly, interest rates mounted, and a short, sharp recession followed. Within three years the Fed had to abandon its monetarist experiment. The economy quickly improved, but it was far too late to save the Carter presidency.

The University of Chicago economists, popularly called the Chicago School despite their numerous internal differences, were countervailed at Harvard by a one-man school that displayed equal intellectual vigor and versatility. This school was called John Kenneth Galbraith. Canadian by birth, he had emerged from an Ontario farming community rent by social and political discord and managed to study and teach during the 1930s at a series of intellectually disputatious universities, including Berkeley, Harvard, and Cambridge. During World War II he helped run the Price Division of the Office of Price Administration, served as an editor on Henry Luce’s Fortune, and directed the United States Strategic Bombing Survey. After writing a scholarly book on the theory of price control, which to his considerable indignation went almost unread, he resolved never again to “place myself at the mercy of the technical economists who had the enormous power to ignore what I had written.” He struck out for a broader readership, and he reached it in 1952 with his American Capitalism.

Equipped with a gadfly’s wit, a plenitude of self-esteem, and a six-foot-eight frame, Galbraith sometimes looked like a towering farmer beating off a swarm of bees. And stinging bees there were aplenty, as critics reacted to the economist’s pokes at the pieties of the day. When his lucid work on American capitalism, recognizing its modernity and productivity, argued that consolidation was a healthy force in an economy held in balance by the “countervailing power” of corporations, unions, and other forces, he was assailed from the left for ignoring the plight of the consumer and minimizing the need for vigorous antitrust enforcement. When in The Affluent Society (1958) Galbraith urged that the nation’s enormous productive forces be shifted toward education, housing, mass transit, and other sectors that responded to people’s true needs rather than artificially contrived ones, he heard from the right about his improper imposition of his own values on consumer choices and from the left about his call for a national sales tax. When in The New Industrial State (1967) he described the technicians who ran the top 500 corporations as the nation’s de facto economic planners—and planning as much for their own status and self-esteem as for profit—he was variously assailed for overestimating the technological efficiency of the big corporation, for equating corporate or sectoral industrial planning with overall national economic planning, and again for minimizing the need for antitrust enforcement.

As the years passed and the dust settled a bit, critics had to acknowledge that, whatever the balance of Galbraith’s economic truths and errors, he had brilliantly succeeded in his original determination to reach outside the profession for popular attention and, in gaining it, to force economists publicly to question conventional wisdom. Galbraith, for his part, showed a willingness, unusual for academics, to admit error and correct it. Thus in the second edition of The New Industrial State he conceded that a critic had properly taxed him with a failure to make clear the great difference between planning that is within the framework of and responsive to the market and planning that “replaces the market.” His theory of countervailing power came to be seen as partly a reflection of the “equilibrium bias” that dominated social science thinking in the postwar years. If some of the topics he dealt with appeared to some far removed from the everyday concerns of working-class and poor people, few could doubt the abiding concern with social reform and human betterment that lay behind the merciless dissections and the mordant wit.

Into the midst of the skirmishes among rival “bourgeois” economists, intellectual cannonballs were lofted from the far left. Marxist and neo-Marxist thought in America continued to be vigorous and contentious during the heyday of the monetarists and their counterattackers. Economists of such standing in the profession as Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and Samuel Bowles, and publications like the Review of Radical Political Economy and Sweezy’s Monthly Review, compelled American social scientists— though rarely American political leaders—to confront radical economic and political alternatives.

Marxism in the late twentieth century still to an extraordinary degree lived off the power and creativity of the master’s teachings of over a century before. There was the same emphasis on the mode of production as the driving rod of economic and social change, on the class system as the foundation of political power, on the contradictions implicit in the process of capitalist accumulation, on the inevitable conflict between a compact ruling class of capitalists and a working class divided and repressed but steadily gaining in proletarian consciousness, on the coming “doom” or “twilight” or “fall” of capitalism. Criticism of Marxism had a fixed quality too: its exaggeration of the causal role of economic forces; its simplistic view of class that ignored the rich findings of sociologists and political scientists about the nuances and subtleties of class attitudes and relationships; its overemphasis on the potential solidarity of the working class; its underestimation of the resilience and resourcefulness of the capitalist “rulers.”

The intellectual burden of the past that weighed most heavily on the Marxists was the haziness about alternative economic and political strategies. Just as Marx himself had been brilliant and prophetic in his analysis of capitalism but vague—perhaps deliberately so—about the process of revolutionary change that would finish it off, so the American Marxists of the 1970s and 1980s failed to match their penetrating critiques of modern capitalism with explicit analyses of possible political strategies and social transformations. To be sure, Marxists had scored one intellectual breakthrough. After decades of being mesmerized by the temptations of “nationalizing” industries and services and big administrative entities with undiscriminating zeal, they had learned the lesson that Adolf Berle had taught capitalists a half century before—technical ownership did not necessarily mean actual control. In nation after nation indiscriminate nationalization had not only failed economically but, alienating the voters, had hurt socialist regimes politically.

The failure of nationalization as a cure-all, however, left Marxists and other socialists without a weapon of change they had long depended on. Instead they were offering cloudy proposals for “democratic planning.” In fact, central economic planning was perhaps the most theoretically neglected and politically underestimated doctrine available to American liberals and radicals. But the Marxists gave little intellectual aid. This was partly because they were still intoxicated by dreams of some kind of public “ownership” rather than analytically challenged by the gritty but vital processes of effective public control. Even more, it was because they faced a dilemma. On the one hand, they saw the need for central planning and coordination of monetary, budgetary, resource, environmental, and other controls. On the other hand, they feared Stalinist tendencies toward despotic and rigid centralization—tendencies they truly hated. Instead they called for “democratic” planning, which often meant worker participation in management decisions, grass-roots control of economic decision making, delegation of policy making to state, community, and even neighborhood entities. How to find the proper mix of central economic direction and local, rank-and-file democracy evaded the theoretical grasp of the Marxists, as well as of conservative, libertarian, and liberal thinkers.

Still, that grasp was firm compared to the left’s intellectual grip on the question of how to achieve power. The radicals had no revolutionary plan, no street tactics, no political party strategy relevant to the peculiar American conditions of hazy ideologies, amorphous political parties, and fragmented government. Noting the leftist view that monopoly capitalism faced a continuing and intensifying state of economic crisis, Benjamin Ward wrote that “clearly there is an important immediate goal: building a movement capable of acting should a crisis opportunity emerge in the near future.” But the American left had not even begun to build the kind of political movement that had reshaped politics in European democracies. More than a century after Marx, more than half a century after Lenin, it lacked an intellectual leadership that could be compared to the master political economist in London, or a political leadership comparable to the brilliant strategist of Zurich and Petrograd. This would have been of some satisfaction to the American establishments, had they been aware of it.

While these debates among economists dragged on, so did acute poverty in the United States. If the economic controversy was conducted over the heads of the poor, the poor continued to go about their ways regardless of the economists, the sociologists, and the policy-makers. Some kind of war was being conducted on behalf of the poor, but like peasants and townspeople hearing the confusing roar of battle over a distant darkling plain, many of the poor could hardly understand the marches and countermarches of the warriors against poverty.

It was not even clear when that war had been declared—perhaps when Kennedy witnessed firsthand the poverty of West Virginia during his presidential primary campaign there, or perhaps when he praised the Social Security Act later that year for undertaking a “war on poverty,” or perhaps when he repeatedly referred to poverty in his inaugural address and said, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.” The ambivalence of those inaugural words was reflected in Kennedy’s Administration. He and his brother Robert initiated numerous policies and projects for youth employment and remedial education, aid to depressed areas, accelerated public works, manpower development and training, and extension of aid to families with dependent children. But many of the programs were weakened by Congress, severely underfunded, and represented no significant redistribution of income from the rich to the poor.

Even meager programs carrying the Kennedy imprimatur, moreover, ran into vehement opposition. In the summer of 1961the city manager of Newburgh in the Hudson Valley ordered drastic restrictions in welfare policy, including the withholding of benefits to unwed mothers if they had another illegitimate child. “It is not moral,” he said, “to appropriate public funds to finance crime, illegitimacy, disease, and other social evils.” Ever since the Leopold-Loeb case, he added, “criminal lawyers and all the mushy rabble of do-gooders and bleeding hearts … have marched under the Freudian flag toward the omnipotent state of Karl Marx.”

Lyndon Johnson declared his war against poverty within a few weeks of taking office. In a few more weeks the Administration was pressing through Congress the Economic Opportunity Act, a program for a coordinated attack on the many causes of poverty—joblessness, illiteracy, poor education, meager public services. Congress authorized almost a billion dollars for an Office of Economic Opportunity, which would conduct separate programs—Job Corps, work-training, work-study, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, Volunteers in Service to America. OEO head Sargent Shriver charged into the poverty battle with energy and enthusiasm rivaling Harry Hopkins’s in New Deal days. But, oversold and underfunded, the program soon ran into opposition from radical leaders like community organizer Saul Alinsky who expected too much and from conservatives like Barry Goldwater who feared too much. As controversy arose about both the poverty programs and the Vietnam War, LBJ’s war against poverty flagged.

Like the Thirty Years’ War of the early seventeenth century, the wars against poverty began amid great huzzahs, picked up momentum, faltered, started up all over again—and took decades. Just as some LBJ warriors against poverty concluded that JFK’s efforts had been inadequate, so Richard Nixon resolved that he would do something about the “welfare mess” once and for all. Amid much fanfare he proposed a Family Assistance Plan to guarantee all families with children a minimum of $500 per adult and $300 per child every year. FAP would build a work incentive into the program by allowing a poor family to keep the first $60 per month of earned income without any reduction in government aid. The plan would help meet the needs especially of children under eighteen and of the poor in the South, where welfare payments were lower than in the West and North. A year later, urging its passage, Nixon called FAP the “most important piece of domestic legislation of the past 35 years, one of the dozen or half dozen such bills in the Nation’s history.”

The chief planner of Nixon’s FAP was a one-man brain trust, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. A former director of the Joint Center of Urban Studies at MIT and Harvard, Moynihan had helped draft early poverty legislation under Kennedy and Johnson. He had been acutely disillusioned by the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act provision that antipoverty programs be carried out with the “maximum feasible participation” locally of the poor. The result, in his eyes, had been neighborhood conflict, racial turmoil, editorial denunciation, and a stigma attached to the whole poverty effort. Now, under Nixon, he threw himself into the battle for FAP, with the plea that this new initiative—a shift from a services strategy to an income strategy—would “almost surely define the beginning of a new era in American social policy.” Soon Moynihan underwent another disillusion. After a long struggle among congressional factions, FAP was defeated by attrition, shriveled into just another disbursement to special categories of the poor. The great initiative was over before it was initiated.

Why still another failure? Blame would fall on the Vietnam War, Watergate, institutional clogs, inadequate leadership. The main reason for the lost war, it would become clear, was not only political but also intellectual—a failure of definition and concept, historical perspective, social analysis.

The poor were variously defined as the low-income, the unemployed, the “have-nots,” the powerless, the proletariat, or even the Lumpenproletariat, described by Marx and Engels as the “social scum,” that “passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society,” far more likely to be a “bribed tool of reactionary intrigue” than to be truly proletarian. What, conceptually, was poverty—economic, social, political, material, motivational, attitudinal, or some or all of these? Where were the poor—diffused throughout the populace or fragmented in separate enclaves or occupying some discernible cultural shape of their own?

The historical record was largely ignored, even though Anglo-Americans had had six centuries of experience in dealing with such questions, going back to the English Poor Laws. “We find that throughout this period, in both England and later in the United States,” Chaim Waxman wrote, “poverty has been considered a negative condition, that the poor have been perceived as ‘not quite human,’ and that social welfare legislation has been primarily concerned with the maintenance of public order (the order of the non-poor), rather than with the condition and care of the poor on their own account.” While the New Dealers put the lives of the jobless ahead of public order, relief was to go only to the unemployables. “Work must be found for able-bodied but destitute workers,” Roosevelt declared, for to “dole out relief was to “administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” By the 1960s, the years of LBJ’s war on poverty, the planners of that war spent little time analyzing the successes and failures of New Deal welfare and unemployment programs, perhaps because the Roosevelt record was so mixed. The poverty war planners had to shape their programs so hurriedly that they hardly had time to answer the question that would not disappear: who are the poor?

Were the poor, however defined, merely the people clustering around the bottom of the economic or social or prestige or self-esteem ladder, people not fundamentally different from the rest of us but suppressed by the system, cruelly stigmatized by the “haves,” casually beggared by the throw of the social dice—perhaps loaded dice? Or did the poor—the persistingly poor—form a whole separate culture with its own traditions, customs, outlook, motivation, goals, social or antisocial behaviors? “Let me tell you about the very rich,” said Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator. “They are different from you and me.” Could the same be said of the very poor? The answer to this question had critically important analytical, political, and policy implications.

To a number of American sociologists and anthropologists the poor in large American cities appeared to be locked in mutually reinforcing conditions of poor nourishment, inadequate housing, mental and physical illness, low motivation and self-esteem, limited education and skills, crime and delinquency. As a staff memorandum of the Council of Economic Advisers put it in 1963, “cultural and environmental obstacles to motivation” among the poor led to “poor health, and inadequate education, and low mobility, limiting earning potential,” which in turn led to poverty, which led to poor motivation, and so on, around and around the vicious circle. Oscar Lewis’s portrait of an autonomous, poverty-ridden enclave in the heart of Mexico City was one of the most graphic studies of the subculture of poverty. That subculture was not always wholly malign. It could be a world of instant gratification and delayed deprivation—social prestige built on defiance of cops and teachers, gang warfare, drug and alcohol abuse, intensive and promiscuous sex leading to high birth rates, illegitimacy, and disrupted families. “Irrational” or “immoral” behavior such as abusing teachers or fighting in the streets might be quite realistic and adaptive given the subculture’s way of life and divergent value system.

For other analysts, called “situationists” or “structuralists,” this was a picture of hopelessness and a counsel of despair. They described the poor as sharing the dominant hopes and values of the larger society but failing to realize them through the existing structure of opportunity. In this view, the poor turned to “deviant” or “delinquent” behavior precisely because they lacked any other means of attaining the material and psychic satisfaction propagated by the ruling culture. If money was a supreme aim, stealing might be a sensible tactic. If sex was glorified in film and glossy print, one might indulge in it without much thought of consequences nine months away.

If this analysis was correct, the solution according to situationists lay with the larger society, with the environment of the poor. Society must widen opportunity and thus give the poor a strong helping hand. To deal with juvenile delinquency, develop “new opportunities for the disadvantaged youth,” read a staff memorandum to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in early November 1963. If poor children were doing badly in schools, improve the schools. If poor people felt uninvolved and powerless, set up a community action program for participatory democracy.

Inevitably, the divergent analyses had different policy implications. To integrate the poor into the wider culture would call for a social transformation of the poor themselves, according to the “culturalists.” No, said the situationists, the overall society must be reformed to make room for all. In practice the two sides overlapped in their policy choices, but their theoretical divergence more often produced political and policy divergence as well. It also produced a great deal of intellectual confusion. Of one program Moynihan wrote, “… it was not social science competence that was missing in the conception and management of this program; it was intellect.” The essential fact was, he wrote with emphasis, that the “government did not know what it was doing. It had a theory. Or, rather, a set of theories. Nothing more.”

This central theoretical issue—between culturalist “transformation” and structuralist “opportunity broadening”—was never resolved. Rather, the politicians spun out disparate policies and programs, some of which helped alleviate destitution but which together did not conquer poverty. The intellectual failure was all the more poignant, for it became clear after the war on poverty was fought and lost that poverty was so entrenched and intractable that both strategies were necessary. That is, the effort at regeneration must be made deep within the culture of poverty even while society as a whole broadened its opportunity structure. An effort of this magnitude, however, seemed to be beyond the intellectual as well as the institutional resources of the nation.

This made a “spearhead” strategy all the more tempting. Throughout the decades following the great depression many intellectuals as well as politicians had embraced the notion that some single solution could break through the poverty gridlock or that some special political effort by the poor themselves could hoist them out of poverty by their own bootstraps. Economic strategies such as Keynesianism and New Deal programs such as Social Security and minimum-wage legislation were expected to help the poor, and did to some degree, but they failed to break open the structure of poverty. Political action by the poor themselves brought some relief but invariably petered out.

During New Deal days the Workers’ Alliance of America, with a membership estimated as high as 600,000, had appeared by 1936 to be building a strong, militant, national coalition of poor people. Members agitated, demonstrated, protested, and lobbied, but with only marginal impact on the relief and welfare policies of FDR and Harry Hopkins. After a few years the Alliance faded away amid division and frustration. In the late 1960s welfare rights groups began to band together in the National Welfare Rights Organization, which, in contrast to the mainly white Workers’ Alliance, was composed largely of blacks, especially black women. Under the gifted leadership of Dr. George A. Wiley, a professor of chemistry turned civil rights activist, NWRO members staged hundreds of demonstrations, marches, and other protests against welfare restrictions. But the members divided over tactical questions, they failed to build a mass organization, and NWRO died in early 1973, a few months before Wiley’s death by drowning in Chesapeake Bay. The slum organizer Saul Alinsky led blacks in Rochester and Chicago to some notable victories over rents and housing but concentrated on local efforts rather than forging a national coalition of the poor. An ambitious series of federally sponsored community action programs faltered.

It became obvious that the very condition and structure of poverty thwarted the poor in efforts toward political mobilization and activism. The poor were poor politically as well as financially, educationally, motivationally. Kenneth B. Clark looked back on the lessons of the failed community action program and reflected that “those of us who were involved in setting up the prototype of these programs” were “somewhat naive and sentimental. We did not take into account the effect of poverty and deprivation on the human personality. We did not calculate that for the poor the chief consequence of the culture of poverty is a kind of human stagnation, acceptance, defeat, which made meaningful involvement of the poor more verbal than real.”

A quarter century after Lyndon Johnson launched his war against poverty, Clark’s lessons seemed more pertinent than ever. To a small but significant degree, blacks—the best tests of progress—had closed the gap with whites in the percentage of high school graduates and of enrollees in college. They had held their own or caught up a bit in median family income. But the black unemployment rate had doubled. The National Urban League reported that 25 percent of black households were affected by crime; the rates of drug use, crime, and violent deaths were considerably higher among blacks than whites; and 40 percent of black children lived in homes without fathers. Thus the culture of poverty continued, and in a form that would blight lives well into the twenty-first century.

Only transforming leadership of the rarest quality—the kind that Martin Luther King, Jr., had displayed a decade before—could have combined in the late seventies the egalitarian ideals, the intellectual grasp, the educational effort, the setting of priorities, the organizational dynamics, the grass-roots mobilization, and the electoral strategy necessary to topple the structure of poverty and give the poor their share of American abundance. Such leadership was lacking in the politically and intellectually disordered wake of Vietnam and Watergate. There was no Martin Luther King for the poor.

Crossways, Land and Sky

During the 1970s, when the United Slates still loomed as the economic overlord of the Western world, European intellectuals asked barbed questions as to why this capitalist nation so steeped in affluence could not take care of its own poor. Washington had plenty of advice and even dollars for developing nations afflicted by rural and urban poverty—why could it not deal with deprivation in the Bronx and Watts and Appalachian hollows? If American leaders—even Nixon—were now posing as Keynesians, why did they not apply modernized or post-Keynesian strategies to their own economic policy making? Some pointed to the case of Sweden, which had long served as an example to Americans as an effective “middle way.” By the mid-1970s Sweden was outperforming the United States in real growth per capita, employment levels, and, to some degree, even the inflation rate. To be sure, Sweden’s was a more homogeneous society and a more “manageable” economy than the American, but in many respects it was even more vulnerable to outside forces.

If European critics liberally criticized American economics, however, for the most part they had unabashed admiration for American science and technology. Americans had landed on the moon, dominated the Nobel sweepstakes, flooded the world with electronic marvels and household gadgets. Above all, Europeans admired the ubiquitous American automobile, which changed its decor and contours as often as did Paris fashions. To be sure, they laughed at reports—true, as it turned out—that a California minister sermonized to ranks of cars in his drive-in church, and that a Detroit funeral home enabled mourners to drive up to a window and remain in their cars while they enjoyed a thirty-second viewing of the deceased. But even the more sophisticated critics could not escape the spell of the gleaming new American automobile. Behind the Iron Curtain too, it was a common experience for Americans returning to their parked cars to find them encircled by gaping admirers.

It was indeed the era of triumph for the American auto. Everything appeared to be coming together for the industry during the Johnson and early Nixon years. While the chart of annual new car sales in the 1960s and early 1970s was uneven, the overall trend was exuberantly upward, topping 10 million, of which only a small fraction were imports. The average price of a new car as a percentage of United States median family income had fallen steadily since the fifties. The Big Three—or at least the Big Two, GM and Ford—were thriving.

Over half a century earlier the erratic financial genius William Crapo Durant had combined Buick, Cadillac, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Chevrolet into the mighty General Motors Corporation, which, with the crucial help of Du Pont money, came to dominate the automobile market. Under Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., the ablest automobile industrialist of them all, General Motors modernized its financial systems and pioneered installment loans to customers, annual model changes, and a radical decentralization of operations. Sloan even applied class analysis to his products: Chevrolet, he said, was “for the hoi polloi, Pontiac for the poor but proud, Oldsmobile for the comfortable but discreet, Buick for the striving, and Cadillac for the rich.” By the 1970s its buy-outs, immense capital resources, and long-range planning were paying off for GM, which steadily outpaced in sales the other domestic automakers combined.

But Ford had also prospered in the sixties and early seventies, enjoying well over 2 million new car sales a year. The company had finally shaken off the archaic hold of its founder after his grandson, Henry Ford II, took over company leadership in 1945. Young Ford quickly sacked the despised aide of the founder, Harry Bennett, made peace with the United Automobile Workers, failed dramatically with the Edsel but then triumphed with the Falcon and the Mustang. He showed a special talent for bringing into the company or promoting such high-powered executives as Ernest R. Breech, Robert S. McNamara, and Lee Iacocca.

Union labor in the auto industry shared the prosperous times. Outstripping even the steelworkers in hourly pay during the late sixties and early seventies, auto labor used its union power to gain abundant wage settlements. For years the UAW picked off GM’s weaker competitors one by one to win generous agreements that the rest of the auto manufacturers were then bound to accept. When in 1970 the UAW leadership decided it was time to tackle GM first, the result was one of the most expensive strikes in American history, but once again the union won a good settlement. The auto workers conducted this strike without their widely admired leader, Walter Reuther, who was killed in a plane crash a few weeks before negotiations got underway. Two decades earlier Reuther and his brother Victor had been seriously wounded on separate occasions by shotgun blasts into their homes—a grievous portent of the assassinations of American leaders in later years.

The control that the auto industry in collaboration with union labor exercised over technology, capital investment, plant locations, wages, prices, consumer preferences made it a prime example of the kind of industrial planning Galbraith described in The New Industrial State. Ever since Henry the First had begun to flood the country with Model T’s, automobiles had been steadily transforming American life and geography. Before World War II the automobile began to channel Americans into suburban areas that had earlier been beyond the reach of commuter trains and had converted “autocamping” into a growing roadside industry of restaurants and motels. The massive road building commissioned by the Eisenhower Administration’s Interstate Highway Act of 1956 further stimulated automobile use, which in turn stimulated more road building. The spiraling of auto production and demand not only enlarged the auto network of garages, filling stations, and highway motels and restaurants but also knit together a wider array of the “Road Gang,” as Helen Leavitt called it—trucking companies, the Teamsters union, automobile dealers, turnpike builders, oil importers and producers, state politicians, lobbies, legislators, highway officials.

Thus the automakers sat in the middle of a carefully spun and balanced web of group interests. But this web, in turn, lay in the middle of a pulsating and swiftly changing environment that was as chaotic as the industrial web was “rational.” One-hundred-foot-wide highways speared through urban ghettos and lush farmland. Suburbia expanded faster than ever, housing subdivisions proliferated, shopping malls mushroomed, industries moved out into the hinterland. “Mini-cities” and “urban villages” sprang up. Pollution spread in rural valleys that had never known smog or factory smells. National and state parks were overwhelmed. At the same time that driving one-and-a-half-ton steel projectiles at sixty or seventy miles an hour on crowded highways became “another inalienable American right,” in James Flink’s words, unintended slaughter on superhighways became a daily American tragedy.

Inevitably little outside the web was planned. Few observers in 1956, save for those of prophetic insight like Lewis Mumford, had thought of the wider impact of spending almost $30 billion on a 41,000-mile road-building program that would devour 2 million acres of land. In particular few had analyzed its impact on people—people living in bypassed towns and cities, people seeking privacy and peace of mind away from the roar of traffic and the pollution of air, above all people—many of them black and Hispanic and poor—whose neighborhoods and communities had been sliced apart and pulverized by the relentless expressways.

“White roads through black bedrooms,” some said, had been a prime factor in the unrest that triggered the Detroit rioting of 1967, leaving 40 dead, 2,000 injured, 5,000 homeless. The fury of the violence was a stunning surprise. Indeed, the social evils of the expansion of the auto industry and its Road Gang had been as uncalculated as the economic expansion had been analyzed, quantified, and projected. Uncalculated too was the extent to which the auto, by gulping down oil from abroad, helped transform America’s relationship with a far-off region of the world.

In the Yom Kippur War of October 1973, Egypt suffered its third defeat at the hands of Israel since 1948. The aroused Arab world retaliated with an oil embargo against nations friendly to Israel. After abortive earlier efforts at cooperation, Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing nations had at last formed the OPEC cartel, and now began to wield their united economic power. By March 1974, when seven Arab nations—all but Libya and Syria—lifted the embargo, the price of oil had soared from $3 to $12 a barrel.

Although Arab leaders had long threatened to use their potent economic weapon, the political leadership in Washington appeared to be unready to cope with the crisis. So did American car owners. As gasoline prices doubled and pumps ran out, people waited for hours, tempers fraying. Fights broke out as drivers tried to jump the line. The fear of running dry was greater than the experience of actually doing so; in the first quarter of 1974 gas consumption in the United States dropped only 7 percent, but Americans, long used to gasoline gushing readily and cheaply out of hoses, panicked at the very thought of being unable to jump into their cars and roar off at any time to any place for any reason.

A search for scapegoats followed, with the automakers among the first targets. Henry Ford II, whose motto in awkward personal circumstances was: “Never explain, never complain,” had already been grumbling that the auto industry and the “so-called highway lobby” were being blamed for causing “a host of environmental problems—including, to name just a few, air, noise, and visual pollution, urban traffic congestion, unplanned suburban sprawl, the decay of central cities, the decline of public transportation and the segregation of minorities in urban ghettos.” In the aftermath of the oil crunch, criticism escalated on all these counts. Cars were too big and were gas guzzlers. Annual style changes were simply a crafty device to raise sales through planned obsolescence. The automobile industry, once world-famous for its experimentation and innovation, had become complacent and routinized, as in its failure to shift from rear-wheel to front-wheel drive. Its concern for its customers’ safety was nil. And now critics like Ralph Nader, who had briefly jolted automakers out of their complacency with Unsafe at Any Speed, his 1965 exposé of the “designed-in dangers” of American cars, were finding a larger and angrily receptive audience.

The capacity of the automobile industry to respond to this, the worst crisis in consumer relations it had ever faced, became a test of individual leadership in the three dominant car companies. There was no united front, despite charges from the left that the automakers formed a tight conspiracy against humankind. It was sink or swim for each company.

After World War II no large corporation had a bigger and perhaps more deserved reputation for its top leadership than General Motors. Sloan’s “industrial statesmanship” was a model for such strong GM executives as William Knudsen, who became FDR’s head of war production during World War II, and Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson, later Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense. Sloan’s decentralization of operations, which left major decisions in the hands of production chiefs, and his willingness to innovate had attracted innumerable bright young men to the company.

By the 1960s the rising new generation at General Motors was finding its vaunted industrial leadership to be a thing of the past. Control of the company had passed into the hands of finance officers who had had little experience in production. They played a safe game, with annual profits as their guide and god. Behind the façade of teamwork, top executives carved out private dukedoms that did silent battle with one another. Typically the finance officers were hostile to innovation, creativity, and unorthodoxy. Men had to conform in attitude, advice, and even attire—an executive wearing a brown suit one day instead of the prescribed blue or gray was sent home to change. The result, in the eyes of Young Turks who were later to write with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, was repeated failure to innovate, to experiment boldly.

GM executives often gave speeches about the free market, private enterprise, and individual initiative, even while their dominant role in the auto industry vitiated these ideas. They denounced government for its swollen bureaucracy, waste, heavy-handed controls, even while their own organization displayed these same tendencies. Indeed, the famous Fourteenth Floor of GM’s Detroit headquarters building exhibited many characteristics of the White House—crisis decision-making, jockeying for advancement, ad hoc coping, favoritism. Occasionally the Fourteenth Floor even acted like the Kremlin: on one famous occasion in the presence of a large assembly of executives, GM finance officers who had climbed the greasy pole castigated the old-line “production men” who had, they said, left the company in a shambles. It seemed a bit like new masters in the Politburo attacking past leaders to whom they had once truckled.

Restless young executives at GM often pointed to Ford as more innovative and creative, but inside GM’s chief rival, Young Turks were having their own problems. The hostility of the engineering and production men at the industrial grass roots toward the bosses in the executive suites was even greater at Ford than at GM. When Ford went public with a huge stock offering in late 1955, amid huge excitement in the investment houses, the company appeared to turn its back on Henry the First’s adamant opposition to control by Wall Street or “the bankers.” The shift also heightened the power of the auto companies’ financial officers over the production people, for now the New York men of finance could hold the Detroit men in line. Sharply budgeted and restricted, Young Turks noted that Henry the Second had inherited his grandfather’s distaste for innovation. Just as the first Ford had stuck to the Model T too long, giving Chevrolet an edge it never lost, so the heir cast a dim eye on many a proposal from the engineering and production people, especially after the Edsel fiasco. Advised to diversify, he liked to say flatly, “My grandfather made cars and I make cars.” Urged in the mid-1970s to build the Fiesta with a Honda engine and transmission in it, he said, “No Jap engine is going under the hood of a car with my name on it.”

Few Ford executives felt more frustrated by Ford executives in general and by Henry II in particular than an up-and-coming young protégé of McNamara’s named Lee Iacocca. After a meteoric rise through the ranks, Iacocca became president of Ford at the end of the euphoric sixties, which alas was the start of the dismal seventies. A tempestuous, outspoken, egotistical man, he soon came into conflict with Chairman Ford and with the finance people over change and innovation. Face-to-face confrontations followed, especially when Iacocca pressed for a strong small-car program. One of the two had to go, and it was not Ford.

For years Chrysler had been running third among the Big Three; by the late 1970s this had become a very poor third. Its sales, employment, net earnings, and common stock were all sharply down. Iacocca, freed from Ford in 1978, was summoned to the rescue. During the long months that followed, he and his crisis team put together an extraordinary combination of UAW support, the influence of Michigan black leaders in Washington, the willingness of suppliers to accept delayed payments, the cooperation of bankers and other creditors in staving off bankruptcy and putting pressure on Congress to help. Washington, moving with all deliberate slowness, at last agreed to guarantee $1.2 billion in loans, enough to keep in production the fuel-efficient, front-wheel-drive “K” car on which Iacocca had set his hopes. By mid-1982 Chrysler was beginning to show a profit again, and Iacocca was a national hero.

It had indeed been a heroic rescue operation, but some had misgivings. Tens of thousands of laid-off Chrysler workers were left unemployed, as were other thousands among its suppliers. Elinor Bachrach, who had served on the staff of Senator William Proxmire, an opponent of the bailout, said five years later that it had been “oversold.” The company was saved but had the “guy on the assembly line” been substantially helped? Proxmire himself called “absolute nonsense” the claim that the bailout program had saved more jobs or factories than a Chapter Eleven reorganization. Others pointed to jobs salvaged, community stability reestablished, welfare cases avoided and hence public money saved, three-way competition extended among the Big Three. In perspective the bailout seemed to have worked for a wide array of interests except for the non-reemployed.

The rescue had once again presented American executives at their most resourceful in an emergency. A host of practical steps saved the day. At the same time it presented major institutions at their worst—a once formidable corporation in collapse, the government moving with glacial slowness, the failure of business and political leadership to anticipate crucial problems or to make institutional changes in advance. It seemed doubtful in retrospect that much had been learned, or at least changed. Amid much talk about the need for employee or union representation on the Chrysler board, the head of the auto workers’ union was grudgingly admitted. This amounted to little more than a token compared with the kind of workers’ participation represented by the Swedish model. Nor had this immense failure in anticipation and prevention brought about institutional changes that could help to avert recurrences of major sectoral economic breakdowns and crises. There was no agency for long-range planning that could avoid major bailouts such as those of Chrysler, Lockheed, and indeed New York City.

There remained the supreme irony—the industry that had most opposed “governmental paternalism,” that had shunned government and even defied it, had seen its third most important component turn to the feds in Washington. And as the Japanese challenge intensified, the entire industry—automakers, auto unions, the whole once powerful Road Gang—had to beg Washington to adopt tariffs, quotas, and other protections against Tokyo. The Koreans, Taiwanese, and other up-and-coming industrial nations also invaded the big, tempting, high-priced American market. It was not like the old days, when Henry Ford and Al Sloan could talk with Presidents almost as equals. Automakers and workers were just another claimant. Failed economic leadership now had to depend on political leadership.

The Soviet embassy, Washington, Friday, October 4, 1937.The old mansion on Massachusetts Avenue had a festive air as Russians and Americans danced, sang, and laughed together. No one was enjoying the party more than William Pickering, head of the American satellite program—until the science writer of The New York Times burst into the room and accosted him. What was this “spootnik” that the Russians had launched into orbit? Pickering looked at him in amazement, and then, with his equally startled American colleagues, he gamely toasted the Russians. Then they rushed off to begin a crude calculation of Sputnik’s orbit. American space scientists and administrators would later remember that night, wrote Clayton R. Koppes, “much as other people could recall how they felt when they heard of the deaths of presidents or the bombing of Pearl Harbor.”

Indeed, Berkeley physicist Edward Teller somberly told a television audience that the United States had lost “a battle more important and greater than Pearl Harbor.” Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson picked up the cry, adding that “we do not have as much time as we did” after that attack. With scientists and politicians feeding the hysteria of Americans unable to absorb “the realization that Buck Rogers might prove to be a Russian peasant,” President Eisenhower was prompted to reassure the nation that only its pride, not its security, had been damaged.

The surprised reactions—especially among the experts—were unwarranted. For two years the Soviets had been signaling their intentions and progress in a series of statements and press reports, and four months before Sputnik, they had announced their readiness to loft a satellite—and even advertised the frequency on which it would transmit. Some American scientists, moreover, had been urging competitiveness. In 1954 the German émigré physicist Wernher von Braun, requesting $100,000 for “a man-made satellite,” which “no matter how humble (five pounds) would be a scientific achievement of tremendous impact,” said that “it would be a blow to U. S. prestige if we did not do it first. “ In August 1955 the United States announced that in the eighteen-month International Geophysical Year it would put into space a series of “small, unmanned, earth-circling satellites.”

But before Sputnik, speed was not the Eisenhower Administration’s main consideration. The President and his advisers were concerned that the satellite work not detract from weapons research and that the nascent space program be divorced as far as possible from the military. Thus in deciding the interservice competition over whose rocket would launch the first American satellite, the Administration in fall 1955 rejected the Army’s Project Orbiter, though it had the better booster and promised the earliest launch date. The Navy’s proposal, with its stronger scientific, nonmilitary character, was accepted. The choice would prove fateful: Orbiter’s launch date had been August 1957, Vanguard’s was to be December. Sputnik left earth on October 4, 1957.

The inevitable next leg of the space race was the launching of a human being into space, and this mission was entrusted to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, an independent civilian agency established in 1958. The first goal of NASA’s Mercury program was to “shoot a man from a cannon,” and the vehicle to take him up and down was a haphazardly assembled combination of an ICBM-Redstone booster and a capsule with a cramped cabin. The original seven Mercury astronauts, all of them hard-boiled test pilots, were signed to a munificent exclusive contract with Life magazine and aggressively promoted as “lovable freckled heroes,” men who were “cheerfully facing torture, danger and perhaps death for their country.” Alan B. Shepard, Jr., was chosen to man the first Mercury flight—a brief suborbital mission. But before he could be launched—a mere three weeks before—the Americans once again were trumped, as the Soviets announced that Vostok I had carried cosmonaut Major Yuri A. Gagarin into orbit around the earth.

At 9:34 A.M. on May 5, 1961, as 45 million watched on television, the spacecraft Freedom 7, with Shepard strapped in atop the huge rocket, lifted off its pad at Cape Canaveral to “go roaring upward through blue sky toward black space”—but only toward, not into, space. He splashed down in the Atlantic fifteen minutes later, his flight an anticlimax after Gagarin. In July, Liberty Bell 7 took Gus Grissom up and down on a longer but still suborbital ride.

For Americans, playing eternal catch-up—and not even catching up— was not the right stuff. Three weeks after Grissom, cosmonaut Gherman Titov made 17.5 orbits of the earth, on a flight lasting more than twenty-five hours. The pressure on NASA to fling a man into orbit was immense. The man whom NASA chose to fling first, a forty-year-old Korean War veteran, John Glenn, had been disappointed when Shepard was given the initial launch. But after Vostok I, Glenn realized that Shepard’s was no longer the mission. It mattered now to be the first American to orbit and, with his test pilot’s cocksureness and his ambition, Glenn was ready.

Hopes rose for a December 1961 launch date, but technical procedures and run-throughs of the mission pushed the date into 1962. January 23 was finally announced to the press, but before the reporters had a chance to assemble at the now familiar dateline of Cape Canaveral, the launch was again shifted—to the twenty-seventh. Twenty minutes prior to launch, after Glenn had been in the capsule for five hours, the mission was again postponed, because of bad weather. The largely untried new Atlas rocket was purged of propellants and stored. On January 30 it was refueled, but ground support noticed a leak in a kerosene tank. Another delay; this time, until February 13. Twenty-four recovery ships and sixty aircraft manned by 18,000 personnel were recalled. More bad weather on the thirteenth, though. The forecast for Tuesday, February 20, was good, and on Monday night the ground crew began its 610-minute countdown.

Glenn was awakened at 2:20 A.M. Tuesday morning for a breakfast of steak and eggs. After a 135-minute delay while part of the booster guidance system was replaced and the dawn skies cleared, Glenn stepped into Friendship 7 at 6:03. A broken bolt on the hatch and a stuck fuel valve caused further delays. One hundred million people at their television sets shared some of Glenn’s tension. At T minus six and a half minutes the Bermuda tracking station experienced a power failure—further delay for repairs. Finally, at 9:47, the Atlas, with a huge tail of fire, lifted off the pad, and mission announcer John A. Powers spoke the words Americans had waited so long to hear: “Glenn reports all spacecraft systems go! Mercury Control is go!” After three orbits in just under five hours, Glenn splashed down in the Atlantic near Bermuda.

The earthbound gave Glenn a tumultuous welcome. His footprints on the deck of the recovery ship were marked with white paint. Schools and highways were renamed in his honor. Four million screaming, shoving New Yorkers jammed Broadway for a ticker-tape parade. Glenn addressed a joint session of Congress—“I still get a real hard-to-define feeling when the flag goes by”—and met with a fascinated admirer at the White House.

Ten months before Glenn’s flight—and six weeks after Gagarin’s—John Kennedy had taken the first step of a journey whose end he would not see: “Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth. … I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” The United States, he declared, had never before “made the national decisions or marshalled the national resources required for such leadership.”

Congress enthusiastically acceded to the President’s request. With a goal so distant in time and in place, Kennedy had dramatically lifted the Soviet-American space rivalry to a different plane: over the longer run, American economic and technological superiority would provide a crucial advantage, if indeed the Soviets dared to compete at all. And if some in the scientific community believed that $20 billion would be better spent on unmanned flights, they for the most part kept silent, knowing that $20 billion would not be forthcoming without the goal of a manned moon landing.

Before the decade was out—on July 20, 1969—a fragile lunar module hovered above the moon’s rocky surface. Four hundred thousand workers, two hundred colleges and universities, many thousands of corporations had joined forces to produce this moment. As the world watched transfixed, the lander, Eagle, first separated from its command ship, Columbia. While Michael Collins waited in Columbia, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin looped into their own orbit around the moon’s surface. Twelve minutes before landing Houston transferred control to Eagle: “You are go. Take it all at four minutes. Roger, you are go—you are to continue powered descent.”

At 33,500 feet crisis threatened—the navigational computer was overloading near its limit. If it exceeded that limit the mission would have to be aborted. Armstrong searched the surface for a suitable landing spot, and found only rough ground which would destroy the module. As Armstrong took navigational control from the computer, Aldrin read vital figures from the control panel. The attitude control handle in Armstrong’s right hand tilted the spacecraft in any direction; the thrust control handle in his left moved the craft horizontally. The computer maintained control over rate of descent.

Fuel was low, but still Armstrong rejected site after site. Finally he found his spot. A few tense moments as the craft eased down. Then he spoke: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

As the exploratory Mercury and Gemini had pioneered Apollo’s way to the moon, so too did Apollo cut a path for the space-laboratory Skylab missions in 1973 and 1974 and the joint American-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz of 1975. Pioneer and Mariner probes surveyed Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Between 1957 and 1984, nearly 14,000 objects had been launched into space and some 5,000 of them remained in earthly orbit, including telecommunications satellites of the Department of Defense, the National Weather Service, AT&T, and RCA.

On Sunday morning, April 12, 1981, four IBM computers, with a fifth as backup, kicked into gear and took over launch control. Majestically, a giant new rocket rose slowly from its platform, a truly space-age spacecraft strapped to its back. The crew could feel the swing of the vehicle and the surge of power as the booster rockets fired. The ground shook with the thrust of space shuttle Columbia’s main engines, running at 104 percent of their rated power. The craft accelerated as it left the earth; its engine ran more efficiently at higher altitudes, and the burning of fuel lightened the vehicle. At launch plus eleven seconds the crowd three miles below saw Columbia roll over in the sky onto its back and felt and heard the roar. After eight minutes the main engines had burned out, and Columbia achieved orbit.

After two days the engines were again turned on to slow the craft and it began its descent out of orbit. Four hundred thousand feet above the earth Columbia still traveled twenty-five times the speed of sound. Nothing this big had ever been brought back to earth, much less landed on an airstrip. Computers again assumed control to perform split-second navigational functions. Its speed down to four times the speed of sound, Columbia crossed California’s northern coast and started its descent into the Mojave Desert. Across the state Columbia’s sonic booms drew people’s attention skyward. At Edwards Air Force Base, hundreds of thousands of persons watched as the world’s first reusable manned spaceship, under its pilot’s control, glided in and gracefully touched down at 225 miles per hour.

Over the next five years, the American shuttle fleet flew twenty-three more missions, and NASA set an ambitious schedule of fifteen flights in 1986 alone. But as early as the second shuttle flight, technicians had noticed that the O-rings—enormous circles of rubber that helped to seal segments of the booster rocket together—had charred. Routine reports were filed, but the problem recurred on flight after flight. Both the shuttle research facility at Marshall Space Flight Center and contractor Morton Thiokol’s people decided they would develop a plan to fix the O-ring seal problem themselves rather than review it with NASA management—but personnel changes and wrangling with Congress delayed action. By the end of 1985 ten flights had experienced seal failures. Rather than break the flight schedule, waivers were signed that allowed the flights to continue despite the threats to safety.

Preparations for Challenger mission 51-L began on a cold Monday in January 1986. Project manager Allan J. MacDonald warned his superiors that low temperatures affected the O-rings and Thiokol engineers recommended against the launch unless the temperature of the O-rings was at least fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit. But on Tuesday, January 28, at 3:10 A.M., the launch crew began pumping liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the giant external tank of Challenger. Reports of surface temperatures were not part of the routine, so the twenty-five degrees of the left booster and the eight degrees of the right were not communicated to the launch room. The flight had already been postponed several times. Children across the country were glued to televisions for this flight of Christa McAuliffe, the first “teacher in space,” part of NASA’s program to loft ordinary citizens. The countdown continued and Challenger was launched. Tremendous pressure from the expanding gases inside the rocket booster strained against the flawed rings. Falling ice, steam, and distance obscured the puff of ominous black smoke as Challenger rose.

Still seconds into the ascent, Challenger was saved by milliseconds when the melted joint created a temporary seal. At T plus 60 seconds, as the main engines throttled up to 104 percent, rookie astronaut Mike Smith yelled, “Feel that mother go.” But the rocket’s vibrations had broken the temporary seal: the O-ring had failed. At T plus 73, NASA officials witnessed the explosion on their television monitors. Nine miles above the Atlantic, Mike Smith could see the flames outside his window. “Uh, Oh!” he said as the cabin broke from the rocket. It plunged 65,000 feet to the sea in two minutes and forty-five seconds. All seven astronauts died, from asphyxiation or fire or impact, as they smashed into eighty feet of water at 207 miles an hour.

Time and time again it had taken disasters, whether natural or man-made, to force Americans to do the kind of thinking that, had it been done in advance, might have averted or mitigated them. The deaths of seven astronauts focused the American mind. “More than the Challenger exploded in the blue sky over the Atlantic Ocean,” wrote New York Times science correspondent John Noble Wilford. Thirty billion dollars and fourteen years after the huge shuttle effort began, “we are left full of doubts not only about the shuttles and NASA’s fabled competence, but about the very fundamentals of our national space policy.” At first the media concentrated on the O-rings—so simple to present graphically and ominously— and other shuttle apparatus. Gradually, as the debate widened and deepened, it was apparent that, as Joseph Trento wrote, “the destruction of Challenger is not a story of technological failure—it is a story of political failure,” a function of policy decisions that emerged from political compromises that in turn reflected conceptual muddle.

The failure to anticipate and plan against disasters had often had its roots in complacency—over the unsinkability of the Titanic, the safety of hydrogen-filled dirigibles, the permanence of 1920s prosperity, the American inability to lose a war. So with the space program, and the complacency had some justification. John Kennedy had made a solid commitment to put a man on the moon—a commitment no later President could repudiate. It was his way of dramatizing his active leadership in comparison with that of Eisenhower, who, according to a Washington story, had said that unlike Queen Isabella’s patronage of Christopher Columbus, he would not “hock his jewels” to send anyone to the moon. Kennedy had been attacked for grandstanding, playing politics, fighting the cold war in space. But Kennedy had his reasons: national defense, strengthening the aerospace industry, national morale. Above all for him it was a matter of national prestige—Yuri Gagarin’s earth orbit was a challenge. His Vice President agreed; to be “second in space,” advised LBJ, was to be “second in everything.”

On this issue, as on others, Kennedy shifted later. Two months before he died he proposed before the United Nations that Russians and Americans make the moon flight together. “Let us do the big things together.”

The spectacular feat of Apollo had captured the world’s headlines and imagination. The moon landing became a symbol of the American will, unassailable proof of superior American technology. But Apollo’s end left NASA “with a vehicle rather than a mission.” What next? The boldest spirits wanted to combine a Mars landing with an earth-orbiting space station and a reusable shuttle, but the political environment was changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Vietnam, together with the easing of cold war tensions, made a national commitment to an adventure in space on the scale of Apollo impossible. And Apollo’s very success—Apollo 11and five subsequent moon landings—had made the public blasé even about men on the moon. The object now, in John M. Logsdon’s words, “was to make access to orbit routine and relatively inexpensive, and that these objectives could be achieved within a budget substantially less than required for Apollo.” But NASA, with the shuttle program it formally adopted in 1972, made a grandiose mockery of these realistic and coherent objectives. The shuttle design incorporated the “highest possible level of technology,” when simpler, cheaper technology would have served the purpose as well, or better. Because the price of the shuttle was so high, the space station which it had originally been intended to service was indefinitely postponed. And in order to promote the shuttle as the only American launch vehicle, NASA reduced or deferred research and development of alternatives, thus eliminating the possibility of a balanced space program or of a fallback in the event of a shuttle failure or disaster. As Wilford wrote, “NASA mortgaged nearly everything—science, space exploration, the development of new technologies—to build the space shuttle on what was a shoestring budget, as big Government projects go.”

As Congress grew more interested in the shuttle program, NASA, hungry for more funding, responded by creating still other justifications for the shuttle’s existence. Like any bureaucracy, NASA had to justify its own existence, and it was also heavily cross-pressured by its contractors, for whom the agency had been in the 1960s a bottomless feedbag. NASA countered these pressures in part by encouraging the commercial use of space and space technology—the contractors would be kept busy and business would share the costs. Thus telecommunications companies developed their own satellites and NASA launched them, and the later Apollo flights and the shuttle missions conducted experiments in space manufacture. In 1984, the Reagan Administration stepped up commercial development of space. But by the time of the Challenger disaster, the profitability of space manufacture was still unproven. Nor had the shuttle met the expectation that it would lower the cost of space transportation: instead of a projected $260 per pound of payload, the actual price was over $4,000 per pound—and that would rise to $6,800 when shuttle flights resumed.

The Reagan Administration also accelerated the militarization of the space program. Eisenhower had set a policy followed by the next three Presidents: top priority to the open, civilian applications of the program, not to military uses. When Moscow was reported to have resumed anti-satellite tests in 1976, President Ford instructed the Defense Department to make development of space weaponry a high priority. When the Soviets in 1981 and again in 1983 offered at the United Nations serious treaty proposals for space arms control, the Reagan White House ignored them and continued to pour money—by the late 1980s billions of dollars a year—into a “Strategic Defense Initiative” whose purpose was to “counter the awesome Soviet missile threat” by developing directed-energy weapons that, shot from satellites or from earth to orbiting reflectors, would intercept Soviet missiles in flight. Scientists urged in vain that such funds be spent instead on a more realistic, multifaceted, balanced, and steady program of space research.

What, then, was space to be used for? For disinterested scientific exploration? Commercial exploitation? As a new platform for the cold war? The American space effort was a complex interweaving of scientific, military, geopolitical, and commercial influences, resulting in complex policy making and shrouded accountability and responsibility. “Because it is difficult in the pluralistic U.S. policy-making process to reach consensus on policy goals, debates about means to achieve those goals often are used as surrogates,” Logsdon wrote after Challenger. “Substituting choices of means for choices of ends produces effective public policy only when agreement on means implies a decision on goals.”

Americans followed Soviet space exploits with mortification. The Russian tortoise had got off to an early start, then the American hare had bounded far ahead with the moon landing, but by the late 1980s the hare seemed caught in a brier patch and the tortoise far ahead. A major reason was that the Soviets matched their means, their technology, to their goal of the gradual “evolution of man into space.” They had, said John Glenn, now a United States senator, “a very steady, thoughtful, well-laid-out program.” They used rather crude but low-cost and dependable rockets— “Big Dumb Boosters,” the Americans called them—and had 90 successful launches in 91 tries in 1986, while the United States had only six successes in only nine attempts. Their cosmonauts held every endurance record in space. NASA and the Defense Department had long since rejected proposals for an American Big Dumb Booster. Lacking clear ends, stable planning, and consistent follow-through, the Americans made space decisions on the basis of what would “advance the technology,” filling the policy vacuum with expensive high-tech razzle-dazzle.

By the end of the 1980s the most poignant symbol of intellectual failure in space was an object significantly not in space but rather grounded, swaddled, and isolated in an eight-story “clean room” in California. This was the Hubble Space Telescope. Lofted into the pure atmosphere far from earth’s surface, the Hubble was programmed to peer almost to the edge of the universe. Its blindfold allegorized the clouded vision of key leaders of the space program.

The songwriter Neil Young in 1979:

Out of the blue and into the black

You pay for this but they give you that

And once you’re gone, you can’t come back

When you’re out of the blue and into the black.

PART V

The Rebirth of Freedom?

CHAPTER 14

The Kaleidoscope of Thought

IN JULY 1979, THIRTY months after he entered the White House, Jimmy Carter faced a crisis of confidence. It was in part a lack of confidence in him, as people waited in gas lines, worried about energy supplies, and were squeezed by inflation rising toward an annual rate of more than 13 percent. It was even more the President’s loss of confidence in himself, his leadership, his government. He suddenly postponed what was to have been his fifth speech on the energy crisis and repaired to Camp David to consult and to think.

For ten days, while the nation waited in curiosity and suspense, Carter talked with over 130 persons from virtually every major segment of society. He solicited and received blunt advice, he later reported. A southern governor told him he was not leading the nation, “just managing the government.” Other admonitions: The nation was confronted with a moral and a spiritual crisis. The real issue was not energy but freedom. Some of his cabinet members were not loyal, he was told. “You don’t see the people enough anymore.” But most of the pleas were for stronger leadership. “Mr. President, we’re in trouble. Talk to us about blood and sweat and tears.” … “If you lead, Mr. President, we will follow.” … “Be bold, Mr. President. We may make mistakes, but we are ready to experiment.”

Carter came down from Catoctin Mountain in an apocalyptic mood. The crisis of confidence, he told the nation in an intensely hyped television address, was a crisis that “strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.” People were losing faith “not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”

The symptoms of the crisis, Carter went on, were all around. “For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.”

What to do? Americans had turned to the federal government and found it isolated from the “mainstream of our Nation’s life.” People were looking for “honest answers” and “clear leadership” and not finding them. Rather they found in Washington “a system of government that seems incapable of action. … a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests.… every extreme position defended to the last vote.” The nation, he warned solemnly, was at a turning point, one path leading to “fragmentation and self-interest,” the other toward common purpose, toward the restoration of “true freedom for our Nation and ourselves.”

The reaction of press and people was as extraordinary as the speech. At first it was sharply positive, both in editorial columns and in the polls. Then the President, to show that he meant business, brusquely sacked several high officials whose loyalty and effectiveness he questioned. To the public, the disarray that Carter had dramatized in his address was suddenly evident in his own Administration. An aide to one of the fired officials was reminded of the story of the king who told his minister that he had been looking out of the window and perceived that his country was in trouble. “But sire,” replied the minister, “that’s not a window—it’s a mirror.” A ground swell of criticism enveloped what was now dubbed the “malaise speech” although Carter had not used the word. Confidence in the President sank further a month later when the President accepted the resignation of his old friend Andrew Young as ambassador to the United Nations after it was revealed that Young had violated an official ban against meetings with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization and then lied to the State Department about what he had done.

In the spirit of Winston Churchill, Carter had given one of the most candid, realistic speeches an American President had ever made. But he was no Winston Churchill. His speech was a political failure because, in contrast to Churchill’s defiance, he had followed up only with the popgun of reshuffling Administration posts. It was an intellectual failure, for Carter spoke rhetorically rather than analytically about the problems, failed to define the “true freedom” and other values he celebrated, and refused to spell out specifically what he would propose to do about “paralysis and stagnation and drift.” The disarray indeed appeared to be in Carter’s government—and in his mind.

In essence the speech was a kind of cri de coeur—a heartfelt appeal for national unity, for seizing “control again of our common destiny”—but just how these rousing political war cries, however sincerely uttered, could be translated into policy and action was left unclear. The address did not hang together. While its first half was filled with grim generalities—the President warning against fragmentation, excessive individualism, against a “growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions”—the second half detailed an energy program. The preacher and the engineer did not connect. Was it curious, or inevitable, that one of the most thoroughly thought-out and skillfully crafted presidential messages of recent times should reflect the central weakness of the American intellect—the Tocquevillian void between the lofty plane of abstraction and the immediate “pragmatic” action?

The ultimate paradox was the self-admitted failure of Carter and other leaders during a decade devoted to celebrating the great men of the 1770s. Reminded of the achievements of the likes of Washington and Franklin— and even more, of their conviction, their absolute dedication to their causes, their willingness literally to lay down their lives for independence, for liberty, for the Revolution—the Americans of the 1970s could be pardoned for comparing them with the LBJ of Vietnam, the Nixon of Watergate, the honest but faltering Carter, the hundreds of politicians who served as nothing more than brokers eternally calculating their self-interest in executive chambers and legislative halls.

Many Americans, however, did not need to reach back two centuries to realize the current state of “paralysis and stagnation and drift.” They had grown up in the era of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, of Stimson, Hughes, Willkie, and Eisenhower, of Truman and Marshall and Acheson, of administrators with the gritty idealism of Harold Ickes, David Lilienthal, Frances Perkins. Younger Americans remembered the two Kennedys and Martin Luther King, who had given up their lives, and the astronauts who had risked theirs.

In other fields too Americans glumly contrasted the current crop with the old. Who in music in the 1970s and 1980s could compare with Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson of the 1930s and 1940s? What pundit could stand with Walter Lippmann for the sheer range and depth of his grasp of issues both philosophical and practical? Who in literature with Faulkner or Frost or Hemingway? Who with John Dewey in philosophy, Reinhold Niebuhr in theology, Hannah Arendt and Harold Lasswell in social analysis, V. O. Key in political science? Where were the newspaper publishers and editors who could rank with Henry Luce or Ralph Ingersoll for creativity and innovation? Where was the equivalent of Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture, of Martha Graham in dance, of Dave Brubeck in jazz, of Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz in photography, of Alfred A. Knopf and Harry Scherman in book publishing and distribution, of Edward R. Murrow and William Shirer in radio, of Robert Hutchins in higher education, of Paul Robeson in music and drama?

Habits of Individualism

The mounting popular concern during the 1980s over the innumerable ills afflicting the republic—widespread crime, pervasive corruption, illiteracy, school dropouts and other signs of failures in education, drug and alcohol dependency, AIDS, a rash of teenage suicides—led to those time-honored resorts of perplexed Americans: legislative investigations, citizens’ study groups, “blue ribbon” commissions at the national, slate, and municipal levels. These investigators made numerous suggestions, most of them useful and some of them even carried out, but the more that reforms were put into effect, the more it became evident that the roots of the cultural disarray lay deeper in the body social and politic than simple, isolated remedies could reach.

Hence investigators looked closely at attitudes and behaviors shaped within the family and absorbed by children literally at their mothers’ and fathers’ knees. The 50 million “married couple families,” as the Census Bureau identified them—about half of them “with own children under 18”—were so numerous and diverse as to make generalizations about them so general as to be commonplace and to conceal the enormous variety of learning and socialization experiences these families—especially the children—were undergoing. To many investigators it seemed more fruitful to explore the impact on attitudes of the two preeminent institutions outside the family that influenced Americans from a very early age— the church and the school.

The number of members claimed by American religious bodies in the 1980s was staggering—over 140 million, in 344,000 churches, synagogues, and other congregations, served by over 300,000 clergy of all denominations. The enrollment in Sunday schools or their equivalent numbered almost 30 million. As striking was the enormous diversity of religion in America. The National Council of Churches listed over eighty separate nationwide religious bodies claiming memberships of at least 50,000— among them the United Methodist Church with 9 million adherents, the Southern Baptist Convention (14 million), the Presbyterian Church (3.1 million), the Roman Catholic Church (52 million), and the Churches of Christ (1.6 million). Across the nation a half dozen or so Protestant “splinter” churches each numbered several million members. Memberships in non-Christian faiths were sizable; Jews, for example, were estimated to be 5.8 million strong.

Church and temple involvement by members was another matter. The percentage of Americans attending a weekly religious service wavered between 30 and 33 percent during the 1940s, rose to almost 50 percent during the late 1950s, and then leveled off to about 40 percent during the 1970s. The question of church influence over members was still another matter, and a most complex one. Asked over the years, “At the present time, do you think religion as a whole is increasing its influence on American life or losing its influence?” a cross section of Americans who answered “losing” rose to a high point of 75 percent in 1970 and then leveled off, at least for a time, to around 50 percent in the late 1970s. The ratio of church membership to population also stabilized, at around 60 percent. These overall figures concealed a degree of flux among denominations. Between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s several of the “mainline” Protestant churches lost over four million members, prompting painful self-examination on the part of church leaders.

Despite the shifting allegiances and the shallow affiliations of many, the potential influence of church and temple remained substantial. How much of that potential was realized? Of preeminent concern to investigators during the years after Vietnam and Watergate was the extent to which religious leaders not only inculcated specific everyday values of honesty, courtesy, tolerance, and the like, but, even more, offered their congregations some transcending vision of the good life and the good society and a sense of moral coherence, such as a grasp of the interrelated values of liberty, equality, and justice. Religious teachers and learners alike displayed the dichotomy Tocqueville had noticed between the flowery abstractions appealing to all and the specific belief meeting individual needs, with little connection between the two.

Many Americans, Robert Bellah and his associates noted, had lost a “language genuinely able to mediate among self, society, the natural world, and ultimate reality.” They often fell back on abstractions when discussing the most important matters. “They stress ‘communication’ as essential to relationships without adequately considering what is to be communicated. They talk about ‘relationships’ but cannot point to the personal virtues and cultural norms that give relationships meaning and value.” The fragmentation of American religion into an endless diversity of sects and organizations exacerbated these tendencies.

Many years earlier, Henry Thoreau, on hearing that after a tremendous effort Maine and Texas had been connected by the magnetic telegraph, had asked, What in the world did Maine and Texas have to say to each other? What did ministers and their flocks have to say to one another in the 1980s? Religious leaders and followers, Catholics and Moslems and Jews, the profusion of Protestant leaders and sects—could they communicate, whether in agreement or not, only in empty banalities and stereotypes? If so, would they drift further apart, falling back on their own internal languages, parochial ideas, and individual interests?

Like religion, American education was massive in scope and endlessly fragmented in structure. By the early 1990s, according to mid-1980s projections, 50 million students would be enrolled in all public schools, elementary, secondary, and college, and another 9 million in private schools at those levels. Not included in these estimates were the 10 or 20 million persons who would attend a variety of alternative, special education, vocational, and other schools. Such figures raised again the old paradox of American education. Public schools were the nation’s biggest collective enterprise and at the same time its biggest experiment in socialism. For a century or so, American mothers and fathers, all the while denouncing nationalization of industry in other countries, had been putting their beloved children into the hands of government bureaucrats employed in government-controlled enterprises located on government-owned land, at the children’s most impressionable and vulnerable ages.

The people’s confidence in the state-run public school system had been magnificently vindicated. Mass public education had elevated the minds and skills of tens of millions of youngsters, and helped to equalize their opportunities. At the same time, this socialism, as a potential source of indoctrination in “collectivist” ideas, had been a toothless tiger. Ample criticism there had always been—of the teachers, the textbooks, the curriculum, the principals, the coaches. At the same time the teachers in general were too cautious, the classes too pedantic, the reading too tame, and above all the schools too regionalized and localized in their leadership and direction for the public school system nationally to become controversial. Private schools, moreover, afforded parents an alternative—or an escape; thus the enrollment in private secondary schools almost doubled in the decade following the Supreme Court’s antisegregation decisions in Brown and other cases, as whites sought to evade integrated public schools.

What was happening inside the 85,000 public schools? In the wake of huge rises in spending for public schools during the post-Sputnik years, study after study supported one high school senior’s answer: “Dullsville.” The “recitation syndrome” continued, according to a Harvard Educational Review report based on data from over 1,000 elementary and secondary classrooms. Classes, typically ranging from 30 to 35 pupils, were dominated by teacher talk, which took up over four-fifths of the time. Little used were such teaching and learning devices as give-and-take discussion, demonstration, the encouragement of informed questioning and student decision making. There was a kind of “hidden” curriculum based on authority, linear thinking, intellectual apathy, “hands-off learning.” The investigators quoted Alvin Toffler: education is “not just something that happens in the head. It involves our muscles, our senses, our hormonal defenses, our total biochemistry.” In American classrooms, the study concluded, rote was king.

American schools adapted to the political and community environment, Richard M. Merelman concluded, by reducing the intellectual quality of the training. This meant deemphasizing the academic competence of their teachers; setting achievement levels low enough to ensure that most students “passed”; blurring the differences between facts and values in politics; emphasizing the ritual of class participation over its quality.

Dullsville did not lack variety of course choice. Some listings of courses offered hundreds of selections and resembled university catalogues. After studying the formal curriculum, with its array of offerings from Calligraphy to Beginning French to Income Properties Management, along with the “extracurriculum” of clubs and sports, and noting the psychological and social “services curriculum” offered by some schools, three education experts wrote a book titled The Shopping Mall High School.

The 3,300 institutions of higher education—the 2,000 four-year and the 1,300 two-year colleges and universities, the 800,000 or more full-time and part-time teachers, the 12 million full-time or part-time students—did not escape the same accusations of intellectual disarray, moral purposelessness, lack of clear priorities, variety beyond healthy diversity. If the typical big high school could be compared to a shopping mall, big universities were a mall, with their long and glittering array of specialized courses, adult programs, artistic and dramatic productions, stores, banks, eateries, big-time athletic contests, and other public and private enterprises. The missing ingredient, observed economist and former Grinnell president Howard R. Bowen, was a set of values. After decades of vigorous growth, wrote Ernest Boyer and Fred Hechinger, American higher education was confused over its goals, lacking in self-confidence, uncertain about the future.

Why? Higher education was adrift, Boyer and Hechinger said, because the nation was in some respects adrift. Universities were no longer enlisted in the fight against economic depression, the all-out effort to win a global war, the race with the Russians to the moon. Others believed that the purposelessness and disarray lay much more within higher education itself—in the enormous amount of intellectual and curricular specialization, in the privatization of young scholars obsessed with gaining advancement through publishing rather than teaching, in the conflicts among values as well as the confusion in values. Political theorist Michael Walzer noted a fateful tendency of the “American liberal approach to moral” life in education either to relegate values to private life and thus cut them off from public discourse and education or to reduce values to quantifiable cost-benefit analysis and thus evade the harsh task of making moral choices.

Those who attacked religion and education for lacking clear values as guidelines and intellectual and moral coherence were not always willing or able to offer coherent critiques. It was often not clear what kinds of values they were urging—whether “modal” values, modes of conduct such as honesty, fairness, civility, courage, fidelity, honor; or those substantive, palpable goals, “core” values, such as liberty, justice, equality, community; or instrumental values, such as democratic procedures, which had some intrinsic worth but were also means of achieving broader, substantive ends. Thus in debates over civil rights there might be confusion as to whether the issue was a core value like equality, an instrumental value such as free speech or majority rule in achieving equality, or a modal value such as the orderly, fair-minded, honest, civil, and responsible conduct of the debates.

Even more critical than these ambiguities was the particular set of core values held by critics of excessive educational diversity and religious heterodoxy, many of whom supported, indeed would have given their lives for, a core value that buttressed that diversity and heterodoxy—individual freedom. “Freedom,” wrote Robert Bellah and colleagues in Habits of the Heart, “is perhaps the most resonant, deeply held American value. In some ways, it defines the good in both personal and political life. Yet freedom turns out to mean being left alone by others, not having other people’s values, ideas, or styles of life forced upon one, being free of arbitrary authority in work, family, and political life. What it is that one might do with that freedom is much more difficult for Americans to define.” This, it appeared, included American intellectuals, but fortunately this did not keep them from trying. Typically they proceeded by making the case against individualism, as they found it in Reagan-era America.

That case was eloquent and powerful, if not novel. Individualism eroded or snapped the human links between persons and their families, religious leaders and groups, teachers and fellow students, neighbors and fellow workers. “The decline of church, state, and class as centers of culture in America,” Richard Merelman wrote in 1983, “has created unusually extreme individualism among Americans,” leaving “the individual alone and adrift in an often alien social and political universe.” They were concerned, Bellah and his associates wrote two years later, that the individualism described by Tocqueville with a mixture of admiration and anxiety “may have grown cancerous—that it may be destroying those social integuments that Tocqueville saw as moderating its more destructive potentialities, that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.” Bellah and his colleagues were especially alarmed by the stimulus that religious sects gave to individualism, which in turn created an intellectual environment in which sects flourished.

These and other social critics of individualism granted that their case was not new—that a generation earlier Fromm and Riesman, Whyte and Marcuse, and thinkers for many centuries before them had grappled with this phenomenon. But they claimed a special urgency in the age of Reagan. Much was being made in the press of the “yuppies”—the young, upwardly mobile professionals flooding into law offices, investment firms, and corporate executive suites who were reputed to be scrambling all over one another in a mad rush for personal success, which often meant merely higher salaries rather than work that was either intellectually rewarding or socially useful. But individualism in modern-day America included much more than self-promotion, the Bellah study found—it also embraced self-protection, as in the case of Sheila Larson, a young nurse who was interviewed. “Sheilaism”—that was her term and her faith, said Sheila. “I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.”

In explaining Sheilaism—“It’s just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself”—Sheila personified another trend that had caught the critical intellectual eye. This was a narcissism that took the form, Christopher Lasch had written in 1978, not of self-love or egomania but of psyches so frail as to need propping up by those in touch with them. Or narcissists might need to manipulate their appearances and feelings, often expressed as the “management of personal impressions” in a way that brought success “in political and business organizations where performance now counts for less than ‘visibility,’ ‘momentum,’ and a winning record.” Thus the narcissist had become a kind of hollow man in a culture of image makers, promoters, advertisers, and passive consumers.

As the age of Reagan approached its end, much of this criticism appeared to be penetrating and sophisticated. But it failed to offer significant alternatives to the institutions under attack or to clarify alternative sets of values. These failures were marked in the discourse over individualism.

One could never know, listening to this discourse, that individualism was one of the most analyzed and debated as well as one of the most humane and spacious concepts in political and intellectual history. It had embraced the lofty principle of the dignity of man as an end in itself, as a core value; of the innate and supreme worth of the human being; and closely related values such as privacy, establishing a sphere of independence around the individual into which no unwelcome force could intrude; such as autonomy or self-direction; the right of individuals to act in response to their authentic wants and needs; such as self-development leading to the highest possible self-fulfillment of individuals, especially those with unique qualities of creativity; such as political individualism, serving as a basis for the principle of one man-one vote and an array of individual civil liberties of speech, press, and religion. And in contrast to other spacious and seminal doctrines, these tenets of individualism have existed with one another in mutual reinforcement rather than negation.

The doctrine of individualism in its various forms had engaged the intellects of a host of the greatest thinkers of the West: Luther’s and Calvin’s claims on and for the individual conscience; Thomas Hobbes’s effort to abstract the individual mind even from the power of the state; Kant’s principle that the will of every rational being underlay universal law; Bentham’s dictum that each individual is to count for one and only one; Tocqueville’s concept of individualism as the natural product of democracy; Durkheim’s critical studies in the psychological and political anomie and isolation of individuals. Spongy and inflatable, the doctrine took on the intellectual and social shape of the nations in which it flourished: in France responding to the needs of socialists and revolutionaries; in Germany assuming a romantic and later a nationalist coloration; in England serving as a foundation for the emphasis on individual liberty in the writings of a series of thinkers, most notably John Stuart Mill.

And in the United States? Rarely has a spacious doctrine shriveled into a rationale for class interests as dramatically as “rugged individualism” was reduced to satisfy the promotional needs of big business in the late nineteenth century. Atomistic individualism echoed through the next century in the writings of Ayn Rand and the hyperbole of some of Ronald Reagan’s speech writers; it also took on a softer edge in the oratory of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and even William Jennings Bryan, and in some thoughtful writing by Herbert Hoover. Late in the century, still largely held captive by the forces of the extreme and moderate right, the concept remained stripped of its more humane and generous dimensions.

The conversion in the United States of one of the most human and noble of Western Enlightenment doctrines into hardly more than a slogan for naked class interest and selfish privatization, combined with the atomization of religious organization and the fragmentation and trivialization of teaching and learning, lay at the heart of the intellectual disarray in the 1970s and 1980s. But that disarray was part of wider phenomena.

“In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God,” Jimmy Carter had said in his July 1979 “malaise speech,” “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” Increasingly, however, the longing for meaning was superficially satisfied by the huge institutions whose images and messages flashed before the eyes and pounded the ears of Americans hour after hour, day after day. These were the film, television, entertainment, and professional sports industries. How these institutions shaped American social and political thought was centrally determined by the nature of their birth, growth, structure, and strategies of influence.

Kinesis: The Southern Californians

Legends sprouted about Hollywood even as the film colony was taking root. Filmmakers from the East had come here early in the century, it was said, to make better movies amid the perfect mix of air and wind and water. In fact, economics had largely shaped the rise of Hollywood from the start, as it did ever after. Some of the earliest moviemakers were fugitives from process servers dispatched by the eastern patent trust that sought to control film technology. Most were Jews, mainly from Eastern Europe, who had settled in New York and other eastern cities, had begun their rise from rags to riches in the rag business itself—clothes, gloves, furs, shoes—and then bought into penny arcades, nickelodeons, theater chains.

Above all, these men were entrepreneurs. To them California, with its cheap land and labor, its predictably good weather, and its marvelous varieties of scenery nearby that would save transportation costs, was essentially a good investment. But they were enterprisers with flamboyance, even chutzpa. When the Czar was incarcerated by the Bolsheviks, Lewis J. Selznick had wired him that while the Czar’s police had mistreated him as a boy, he had no hard feelings and was prepared to offer the fallen monarch a good job in the film industry.

Hollywood itself was, increasingly, a myth. The stars and directors soon spread out from the fabled movie kingdom to Bel Air and Beverly Hills; the studios moved still farther out. Forming a great crescent around Los Angeles, from Santa Barbara through the Ojai Valley to San Bernardino, Riverside, and Palm Springs, and rejoining the Pacific at San Diego, this southeastern slope of southern California did provide film directors with desert and ocean, snow-clad mountains and city scenes, along with authentic-looking country for movies shot in the “Wild West.” Economically southern California fit the movie industry like a glove, Carey McWilliams noted. Here was one industry that needed virtually no raw materials and had an enormous payroll. What could be more desirable, McWilliams asked, “than a monopolistic non-seasonal industry with 50,000,000 customers, an industry without soot or grime, without blast furnaces or dynamos, an industry whose production shows peaks but few valleys?”

Socially too the industry and the region nourished each other. Ceaseless migrations from south, west, and east had brought in thousands of potential actors, extras, and craftspeople—Mexicans and Spanish, Japanese and Chinese, drawling Texans, pious Iowans, drought-stricken Oklahomans. After the Russian Revolution, émigré White Russian aristocrats and their families and retinues had formed a colony in Hollywood. By the 1930s automobiles were a way of life in southern California, providing filmmakers with ample material and locations for wild chases, crashes, motels, eateries, general mayhem. Best of all, southern California loved the movie industry. At first the Los Angeles elite had snubbed the scruffy crowd of directors and actors who invaded Hollywood, but the 1915 success of D. W. Griffith’s Civil War epic, Birth of a Nation, pointed the industry toward its later image of patriotism and even respectability.

The film industry blossomed in the southern California culture. In the 1920s and early 1930s Los Angeles was still an open-shop town, following years of fierce labor-industry strife that had culminated in the bombing of the anti-union Los Angeles Times and the disruption of the labor movement. For their labor-intensive industry the filmmakers found ample cheap manpower. There developed a symbiotic relationship between the volatile, rapidly expanding film industry and the city around it, with its rootless middle class, disorganized working class, and mainly nouveaux riches upper class. If southern Californians were heterogeneous in background, diverse in their immigrant cultures, fragmented in their social attitudes, Hollywood reflected its milieu in the themelessness and eclecticism of its productions. Films lacked intellectual and even ideological coherence except for the insipid icons of romance and violence. South Sea natives who had watched American movies, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker noted, divided them into two types, “kiss-kiss” and “bang-bang.”

Accustomed to more structured societies, visitors from abroad wrote of Hollywood flora and fauna with glee and malice. Los Angeles was the newest and strangest of all the American cities, J. B. Priestley observed, a “gaily-colored higgledy-piggledy of unending boulevards, vacant lots, oil derricks, cardboard bungalows, retired farmers, fortune-tellers, real estate dealers, film stars, false prophets, affluent pimps, women in pajamas turning on victrolas, radio men lunching on aspirin and Alka-Seltzer, Middle-Western grandmothers, Chinese grandfathers, Mexican uncles and Filipino cousins.” It reminded the British author T. H. White of Elizabethan London.

It was above all the profusion of creeds, sects, and cults that gave the area its special flavor. The Krotona, Theosophy, and New Thought movements had their day. Swamis, yogis, faith healers, mind readers, spiritualists, graphologists practiced their arts. During the 1920s Aimee Semple McPherson, a resourceful showwoman, drew thousands to her Angelus Temple with her Foursquare Gospel of conversion, healing, resurrection, and redemption. After she apparently drowned in the Pacific surf and was melodramatically mourned, Aimee accomplished her own second coming by making a triumphal entrance into Los Angeles before ecstatic thousands. Press revelations that she had been trysting in a Carmel “love cottage” shook her idolaters only briefly: Aimee was like that. During the 1930s the Mighty I Am cult celebrated wealth, power, and sublimated sex. Mankind United simply promised Utopia—a sixteen-hour workweek, ample pensions, and “automated” homes.

Southern California labor was as divided and turbulent as the various cults and “ham ’n’ eggs” causes. The Wagner Act helped union organizers pull in large numbers of new members, but it also left the AFL and CIO in California hostile and competitive. A large “self-help” cooperative movement, with especially aggressive leadership in Los Angeles County, operated separately from the trade unions. As usual the communists stood aside from the “bourgeois” organizations; much of the New Deal and even Upton Sinclair’s EPIC were “social fascism.” Some remarkable women leaders helped mobilize the California left. Dorothy Healey, brought up in a socialist colony and a member of the Young Communist League at the age of fourteen, was organizing cannery workers two years later. Miranda Smith, a black militant, and Luisa Moreno, a Guatemalan, aroused working-class self-consciousness. Unionists, blacks, students, Latinos, women activists, communists, rank-and-file Democrats, coalesced in 1938 long enough to put a progressive Democrat, Culbert L. Olson, into the governorship—the first of his party to occupy the office in forty years—but the coalition was not strong enough to keep Olson in office in 1942, when he yielded the governorship to Republican Earl Warren.

One thread connected these causes, whether left or right—a flamboyant individualism that led the seekers to shop for their favorite cults and causes, quitting one for another in an endless Virginia reel. But this individualism rarely took the form of personal fulfillment and efficacy, for the faithful readily yielded their individualism to group arousals and pressures. Politically the region reflected these tendencies. California’s political parties had virtually disintegrated early in the century and nothing had sprung up to take their place. Voters crossed and recrossed electoral lines, supporting their favorite in the primary of one party and casually voting for someone of quite different political view in the general election. A nominally Democratic electorate often chose Republicans for President and governor. Upton Sinclair’s EPIC, Dr. Townsend’s pension scheme, Robert Noble’s $25-Every-Monday campaign, which was soon subverted and corrupted—these and countless lesser causes roiled California politics during the 1930s.

In this political environment Richard Nixon spent his teens. Doubtless he was far more directly influenced by his family than by the rapidly changing southern California culture. His parents and siblings believed in old-fashioned Horatio Alger industriousness and individualism, not the values of Hollywood’s later plush years—the mother hardworking and moralistic, the father tightfisted, fearful of debt, ever cautious after a lifetime of drifting from job to job. Nixon did some acting, not in Hollywood but at Whittier College. He was interested enough in a business career to take a plunge in a frozen orange juice venture, which ended disastrously. He perfectly summarized, Garry Wills concluded, an older America made up of sacrifice and self-reliance. As a twelve-year-old he had told his mother that he wanted to be “an old-fashioned kind of lawyer—a lawyer who can’t be bought.”

The film industry reached its apogee during the thirties and the war years. Inside huge, walled studio lots, beneath towering sets, tens of thousands of employees worked in the projection rooms, machine shops, dressmaking rooms, scenery-making docks, planing mills, executive offices. Anyone who went to the pictures or read movie magazines knew of the Big Five: M-G-M, Warner Bros., Paramount, RKO, 20th Century-Fox; Columbia, Universal, and United Artists were the “little three.” At the top were the producers, the directors, and the stars. Louis B. Mayer for a time was the highest-salaried business executive in the country. In 1941 motion-picture theaters outnumbered banks. Attendance reached an all-time high during the last year of the war.

Stung by rising criticism of their films’ vulgarity and superficiality, especially during the New Deal years, the moguls boasted of the intellectual and artistic talent they had imported—notably authors F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Bertolt Brecht, the composer Arnold Schoenberg, the conductor Leopold Stokowski. Few writers, however, boasted about working in Hollywood, except perhaps about the money they made. They saw their work reprocessed by directors, producers, other writers, and even the actors. Sometimes they saw no results at all; during a one-year contract, Faulkner worked on nine projects, only two of which were produced. Screenwriting, he complained, allowed for little individual creativity. William Saroyan stayed for a short time and left in disgust. Fitzgerald, nearing the end of his life, appeared to pose some of his own fantasies and self-delusions in his uncompleted novel, The Last Tycoon. West exacted a writer’s revenge with his novel The Day of the Locust, a kaleidoscopic view of Hollywood that struck his friend Budd Schulberg as a “puke-green phantasmagoria of life in the lower depths of the house of horrors.” Schulberg himself, no migrant but the son of a major producer, wrought his own revenge with What Makes Sammy Run?—a savage portrait of a producer clawing his way to the top.

If producers and writers often failed to engage with each other, so did actors and writers. Driving the newly introduced Clark Gable and William Faulkner through Palm Springs on a hunting expedition, Howard Hawks overheard Gable ask Faulkner who he thought were good writers. “Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and myself,” Faulkner answered. “Oh, do you write, Mr. Faulkner?” Gable asked. “Yeah,” Faulkner said. “What do you do, Mr. Gable?” That was not a put-down, Hawks thought—he doubted that Gable had ever read a book or Faulkner had ever seen a movie.

Like other industries, moviemaking remained vulnerable to new technologies. The advent of sound in the 1920s had brought major changes, especially for the acting corps. The rise of television after World War II seemed for a time to spell the doom of Hollywood. Annual movie-house admissions, at 4.5 billion in the mid-1940s, stabilized at about one billion two decades later. The Hollywood producers fought television by joining it. In 1956 the Screen Actors Guild found that about 35 percent of the earnings of its members came from television programs and 25 percent from motion pictures. The industry also turned to the production of 16-millimeter home movies, educational programs, color films.

To a Hollywood nearing the height of its influence had come Ronald Reagan in 1937, and it was a declining motion-picture industry that he was to leave two decades later for television and General Electric. He brought with him a finely honed radio voice, a degree from Eureka College, and years of experience as a resourceful sportscaster. He also brought a body of ideas and notions drawn from a childhood in conservative, small-town Illinois, from an Irish-Catholic father whose long career as a salesman had been disintegrating amid alcoholism, from a mother who had musical and theatrical interests along with an abiding devotion to the Disciples of Christ, and from a deep immersion in the life of this middle-class, moralistic, temperance-preaching church. Young Reagan imbibed the dogmas of a small-town rugged individualism, tempered by an admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had inspired optimism during the depression days and helped people like his father. He held no deeply felt political beliefs; he was malleable.

In Hollywood, Reagan entered a world of illusion. At its zenith of prosperity and of power over social attitudes Hollywood was coming under increasing attack for its superficial plots, bland “message,” insipid preachments of God, country, and home. Hortense Powdermaker called it the “dream factory,” others the world of make-believe, the city of deceptions. Hollywood was escapism, Powdermaker wrote, escapism not into the broadening of experience and the world of the imagination, but into “saccharine sentimentality” and the stylized exaggeration of existing stereotypes, shibboleths, and fears. On the one hand, the Production Code Administration systematically cleared scripts of words like lousy, punk, nuts, jerk, and damn—except for Gable in Gone With the Wind—threw out all suggestions of sexual intimacy outside of marriage, lovemaking in bed, “open-mouthed or lustful kissing,” prostitution, scenes of a wet baby, even doll-wetting, or of the sex organs of animals, of toilets, of the sign LADIES. Yet Hollywood continued to put out pictures with the most torrid love scenes and amoral behavior—as long as sinners were punished or redeemed by the end of the last reel. Hollywood films frowned on adultery and divorce, even while the movie magazines dealt in salacious detail with the marital goings-on of the stars, not always inaccurately.

Reagan was a performer in the dream factory. The very image of the chaste male, he had become the protégé of the Hearst columnist Louella Parsons, long feared as the maker and breaker of stars and their marriages. In her column Parsons gushed that Jane Wyman, brown eyes sparkling and voice bubbling with happiness, had told her, “Have I got a scoop for you! Ronnie and I are engaged!” The two were married at Forest Lawn, in the Wee Kirk o’ th’ Heather. It was the second marriage for Wyman. When Reagan and Wyman were divorced, Parsons seemed personally affronted. The couple had always stood for “so much that is right in Hollywood.” She was “fighting hard” to bring them to their senses.

Make-believe of far greater import characterized Reagan’s involvement in a number of organizations—the Screen Actors Guild, Americans for Democratic Action, the Music Corporation of America—despite his distrust of organized social action as against individual initiative. He voluntarily offered the FBI—the government—the names of SAG members suspected of following the Communist party line. Some SAG members were convinced that in granting a blanket waiver in 1952 to one of Hollywood’s biggest talent agencies, MCA, that would allow it to produce television shows while continuing to represent actors—thus giving MCA an unprecedented advantage over its competitors—SAG president and MCA client Reagan had sold them out to MCA.

But if Reagan had made a deal with MCA, the agency had much the better part of it. While MCA by 1961 was producing 40 percent of all prime-time television, Reagan’s own film career faltered badly. After a brief stint in a Las Vegas nightclub, he joined General Electric in 1954 as a promoter of the company and of conservatism, an easy step for a man in transition between marriages and careers. At first a liberal dubious about liberalism, later a Democrat who urged Eisenhower to run as a Democrat, still later a Democrat who supported Republican Ike, Reagan shifted steadily rightward across the political spectrum. Not only was he confirmed in his new conservatism by the GE world in which he now moved, but, in Lou Cannon’s judgment, with his growing wealth he resented more and more the bite of a steeply graduated income tax. His second wife, Nancy Davis, and her conservative stepfather helped nudge him toward the right. When General Electric later let him go, evidently in part because he was too conservative and controversial as a spokesman for a corporation with huge government contracts, Reagan was ideologically primed to move into the political right wing—and he was available.

Hollywood continued to cope with technology. During the 1960s the major studios began to rent to television networks films made within the preceding five years and to create their own TV-film fare—not only the made-for-TV movie but the miniseries and novel-for-television. Pay television came along when Time Inc.’s Home Box Office offered cable TV viewers movies without commercials. A few years later Sony moved in with the Betamax home videocassette recorder, followed by the VHS. Despite the complaints of Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association, that the VCR was a parasitical instrument, Hollywood recouped by grossing over $1.5 billion in 1985 from selling videocassettes mainly as rental copies—which was more than it grossed from the box office. The industry also stepped up its production of blockbuster films that won huge audiences.

Whether or not the film industry was stabilizing, southern Californians appeared to have emerged from their long bewitchment by Hollywood and to have entered a period of mature growth with the creation of a larger and broader industrial base as well as a steady increase in population. Planning exuberantly for their entrance into the third millennium, southern Californians could boast of having the largest concentration of high technology in the world, the largest port in the United States, one of the leading international financial centers, and superb access to the burgeoning Pacific rim economies. The Los Angeles Times, once the very exemplar of stodgy, conservative journalism, had become one of the best and most aggressive newspapers in the country, and the region’s universities were achieving ever greater prestige. Illusions and make-believe were declining as the region faced the economic and human costs of development.

As self-delusion slowly died, however, the region’s most salient characteristic once more came to the fore—its social and political and intellectual fragmentation. Los Angeles and many of the other cities were still racially splintered. The megalopolis sprawled ever outward, engorging mountain and desert. Angelenos still insisted on their separate houses on tiny plots. Public transportation remained primitive. Few great writers comparable to Fitzgerald and West were either coming to the area or springing up from its asphalt and desert.

Above all, southern Californians continued their love affair with their cars and the freeways that slashed through city and country, linking some citizens and diking off others. By the late 1980s the road system had reached the saturation point. Congestion had spread out from central Los Angeles freeways to virtually the whole region. With five million more population expected within the next quarter century in the southern California basin, from Ventura down the coast to San Juan Capistrano and inland as far as Riverside, it was projected that even after planned freeway expansion half of all driving time would be spent stuck in traffic jams, while average rush-hour speeds for all streets and freeways would fall from 37 miles per hour to 19. Meanwhile motorists would be wasting millions of hours a year sitting on freeways.

Wasting? Drivers were not daunted. Highway police reported that motorists passed their time eating, isometric exercising, brushing and flossing teeth, singing, shaving, smooching, changing clothes, screaming to relieve tension. Said one driver to a reporter, “I think basically the car is like a movable home. You’re in a private world and you can do and say and think anything you want when you’re alone in that car.” Not long after these benign reports there was an outburst of random shooting on the freeways. Making love inside the automobile, shooting up the other highwaymen outside, as in an old Hollywood film—perhaps the South Sea natives had understood something when they reduced things to “kiss-kiss” and “bang-bang.”

SUPERSPECTATORSHIP

Even the most jaded habitués of Las Vegas looked up from their gaming tables on hearing this news. The long-anticipated title match between “Marvelous Marvin” Hagler and “Sugar Ray” Leonard would be held on April 6, 1987, in their own remote Nevada town. And it evidently would be the battle of the century, for more than 1,100 reporters from all over the world would be trekking to Vegas. Soon torrents of media publicity turned the boxing match into “Superfight.” Hagler, the self-made brawler—coarse, mean, and hungry—would be pitted against Leonard, an Olympic gold medal winner, a media darling, a strategist surrounded by trainers, publicists, and groupies. And it must be Superfight because of the money involved—an anticipated purse of $25 million, the largest yet.

Only a spoilsport or two mentioned that both men were past their prime, that even at their best they were second-raters compared to such greats of the past as Jack Dempsey, Gene Tunney, Joe Louis. For boxing aficionados who remembered the epic contests in the smoky haze of Madison Square Garden, with its tens of thousands of frenzied onlookers, there was something quite depressing about this Vegas bout. Superfight would have a live audience of only a few thousand persons, those who could afford the plane fare to Vegas as well as fight tickets, many of which were reserved for celebrities or scalped far above their face value. A sports event hyped for days and weeks on national and local television was unavailable to the stations that had been ecstatically playing it up. Nor could it be seen on cable television or pay TV. The fight could be viewed only in select establishments, on closed-circuit television for sums ranging from $25 to $100. In the end the fight itself was far less of a spectacle than the media coverage of it.

Superfight was indeed a supreme achievement not of the boxing world but of the media world. It was a classic merging of television, advertisers, big money, and headline celebrities. It achieved its supreme goal—almost everyone in the country was talking about it. The fight replaced the weather as a topic of conversation, but like the lovely morning that everyone remarked on at the checkout counter or the gas station, it was here today and gone tomorrow.

Something that almost everyone in America talked about, even for half a minute, was not to be belittled in a nation so lacking in more serious topics of common concern. Countless Americans watched football who had never felt a jolting tackle, followed basketball who had never sunk a three-pointer, viewed hockey who had never shot a puck into a well-guarded cage, gazed at baseball who had never lofted a homer in the neighborhood sandlot. Perhaps that was why they spent hours in front of the tube watching—because they could never do it. And perhaps also because, having watched a game, they knew that they could enjoy instant empathy with the bus driver, the paper boy, the garage mechanic, the library assistant. “Sportswatching,” Janet Podell wrote, “may well be Americans’ truest expression of democratic feeling: far more people watch sports than vote in national elections.”

A powerful combination of technology and personalism sustained this mass interest. Network television embraced all regions of the country, satellites girdled the globe. VCRs, now in millions of homes, enabled viewers to tape programs and watch them at any hour of the day or night. Cable challenged the preeminence of the three networks. Round-the-clock news and sports programs attracted more and more viewers, especially at times of national crises or scandals. Satellite programming and the promise of optic-fiber communications undermined traditional rationales for federal regulation, posing even greater future threats to the electronic status quo.

Yet the technology was heavily moralized, sensationalized, even fantasized, especially in athletics. Sport was elementary and moral, the bad guys against the good. The conflict was clear-cut and clearly resolvable. Sport was combat, man-to-man, gladiatorial: when Dave Winfield’s six-foot-six-inch frame sped gracefully to meet an arching shot off George Brett’s agile bat, there was nothing on the field except the beauty of one man’s skill against another’s. Sport was simple: it was “wholly intelligible to the lowest common denominators in society.” Above all, sport was fantasy in a harsh, cynical world. It fed, said Richard Lipsky, “depoliticization by creating a world of meaning, a Utopian refuge, within the larger technical life-world.” And there was always escape into the future: “Wait till next year!” Fantasy allowed oddities too. Fans would journey to an airport to greet a conquering home team made up of numerous blacks—but would not want to live on the same block with them. Blacks were video gladiators, welcomed on the screen, not in the neighborhood.

Big sport and spectatorship required big money. In 1873, Cornell president Andrew D. White, responding to a request of his football team to travel to Michigan for a game, had proclaimed, “I will not permit thirty men to travel 400 miles merely to agitate a bag of wind.” Nor would he pay thirty train fares. A century later, in January 1988, over a hundred million people watched professional football’s annual championship; a minute of advertising time during that contest cost $1.3 million. This amounted to more than $30 million for the game, but even so was dwarfed by the sums television and cable contracts fetched for season telecast rights. In 1982, the National Football League received a five-year $2 billion contract from the three networks. Baseball’s 1983 deal with the networks netted more than a billion over six years, and rights sales to local broadcast and cable stations brought in still more. And the 1984 Olympics, which cost $525 million to produce, was hyped as pumping $3.3 billion into southern California’s economy.

Many sports fans questioned the commercialization and industrialization of their games. Large salaries contributed to cleavage between fans and the players with whom they identified; it was easier to picture oneself in a DiMaggio’s shoes when his life off the playing field was not all that unlike one’s own. But when star players made $2 million annually, identification was strained and resentment crept into some fans’ hearts. When Boston Celtics fans were asked whether Larry Bird, the team’s star forward, was worth the $2 million he was paid at the height of his career, the vast majority replied no. Yet the same majority, unwilling to lose him to another team, did not begrudge his demand or the owner’s willingness to meet it.

Television long since had become one of the nation’s biggest industries, taking a huge slice of the $50 billion that American businesses spent on advertising in 1986. Few TV viewers understood the impact of advertising on their programming. “The economics of television, and thus of political communication,” wrote W. Russell Neuman, “is based not on the providing of programs to audiences but rather on the selling of audiences to advertisers.” While producers also had to attract audiences, some complained that spontaneity was lost somewhere along the line. As a new concept was reached, tested, premarketed, polled, and analyzed before release, intuition and innovation and risk appeared to be giving way to spreadsheet analyses inside boardroom and film studio alike.

The press was not only subject to big business pressures; it was big business. Newspaper publishing had become more a business and less a journalistic calling. The Wall Street Journal, its circulation at 1,910,000, was not only the preeminent business newspaper; it was a major business in its own right. USA Today, initially designed as a working-class alternative, adopted a TV format of encapsulated news and “factoids,” and was sold in vending machines that looked like television sets. USA Today hoped also to capture the market of young, upwardly mobile business and professional people who wanted to enjoy their news, like their food and entertainment, while on the go.

As businesses, the newspapers tended toward concentration. In 1986 ten financial and business corporations controlled the three major television and radio networks and 34 affiliated stations, 201 cable TV systems, 62 radio stations, 20 record companies, 59 magazines including Time and Newsweek, 58 newspapers including The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times, 41 book publishers, and sundry motion-picture companies. And banks accounted for 75 percent of the major stockholders of the three networks. “The American press,” wrote journalist David Broder, “is a private business performing a vital public function under a specially protected constitutional status, exempt from regulation by government, immunized against many of the forms of pressure and persuasion to which other institutions are subject in our system of checks and balances.” To whom, readers or stockholders, was the press corps ultimately accountable? Presumably to the readers who made everything possible. But newspaper after newspaper—some of them respected and “responsible”—had seen their customers slip away to worship electronic gods.

Its huge reach and alleged cannibalistic tendencies made television the cardinal concern to those worried about balance among the media. In 1974, 46 percent of those interviewed in national polls reported television as their favorite pastime. “Television expanded its audience at the expense of reading, which dropped from 21% to 14%, of movies, from 19% to 9%, and of radio, from 9% to 5%,”wrote Morris Janowitz on the basis of annual reports by the Roper Organization. “Even dancing suffered; from 9% to 5%. Only playing cards held its own.” Americans as a whole were watching television an average of about three hours a day by 1974; the college-educated and the affluent were watching almost as much, about two hours and a half. White-collar and blue-collar workers could not escape the intrusions of television even on the job; increasingly headquarters executives were transmitting via satellite sales information, company news, and pep talks to captive groups of employees.

Politicians eagerly seized on the changing media technology. Ready-to-print stories were transmitted by computer directly to news organs back home, and, in at least one case, messages were beamed directly to constituents with personal computers. Some congressmen produced and distributed their own cable television productions, for complete broadcast or for excerpt by news organizations. Diana Winthrop, vice president of the Washington-based midwestern radio news service GAP Communications, said of the trend, “It is irresponsible and unethical for members of Congress to present canned radio and television programs as news—and just as irresponsible for the industry to accept them.”

When the networks offered original coverage they tended to concentrate more on the horse race and superficial aspects of political campaigns than on substance. Commenting on the 1976 campaign, Malcolm MacDougall observed: “I saw President Ford bump his head leaving an airplane.… I saw Carter playing softball in Plains, Georgia. I saw Carter kissing Amy, I saw Carter hugging Lillian. …I saw Ford misstate the problems of Eastern Europe—and a week of people commenting about his misstatement. I saw Ford bump his head again.… But in all the hours of high anxiety that I spent watching the network news, never did I hear what the candidates had to say about the campaign issues. That was not news.” It was simpler to report who was leading in the New Hampshire polls than to analyze a twenty-page position paper, and more interesting too.

Was television simply the fall guy? Some media experts doubted the existence of massive video influence. They noted first of all that analysis of media influence in general was now much more sophisticated than in earlier days, when some investigators tended to equate stimulus with response. Most Americans, no matter how poorly educated, were not clean slates on which the communicators could imprint their messages. The formation of opinion was an exceedingly complex process, with “shapers” shaping themselves in anticipation of the attitudes and reactions of their targets, raising the question of just who was influencing whom. Moreover, people had grown wary of advertisers, candidates, promoters. Then too, research in the 1940s had emphasized the role of local opinion leaders— ministers, bartenders, party precinct leaders, friends with “inside information”—as brokers between the mass media and the local citizenry, while in the television age, mediation of this sort had lost its significance. Nor did it appear that TV, incapable of reducing viewers to obedient zombies, was able to make them cynics. Though a major study suggested that reliance on television news helped to foster political cynicism and distrust, television “believability” remained relatively high—especially for individual network “anchors” like Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, and Dan Rather—and it could be argued that it was not the way news was reported but the news itself that produced cynicism in viewers.

And if television did have an all-pervasive influence, what political effect did it have? It was often contended that the advertisers, network owners and bosses who were also propertied capitalists, and the affluent, college-educated, upper-middle-class managers who controlled programming had produced a strong right-wing bias in television. On the other hand, the right charged that television as well as major newspapers such as The New York Times and the Washington Post slanted the news to the left. The working reporters were in fact relatively more liberal Democratic than the public as a whole.

The prime corrective to massive media influence, however, was the enormous number and variety of newspapers and journals in a nation that still liked to read. Around the beginning of the 1970s celebrated magazines folded—The Saturday Evening Post after almost a century and a half of continuous publication, Look with its circulation of seven million, the world-famous Life. But during the sixties and seventies other journals appeared with powerful appeals to more specialized audiences. Among these were Psychology Today, Ms., New York. “Underground” journals— notably the Berkeley Barb, the L.A. Free Press, modeled on New York’s successful Village Voice, and Rat, published by a group of women—along with such famous environmental publications as The Whole Earth Catalog, did not always attain longevity but they added zest and variety to the political and social debate of the day.

All told, the media of the late 1980s were ominously bifurcated. Reaching across the nation were the huge television establishments, newspaper chains, record and cassette producers, mass-appeal comic strips. In search of the widest common denominator, no matter how synthetic, the mass media concentrated on celebrities, sports, entertainment, disasters, scandals, and the like. Appealing to the specialized interests, on the other hand, were thousands of periodicals. A kind of vacuum lay between the extremely general and the extremely particular. This vacuum had once been filled in part by hundreds of regional or local newspapers with strong editorial views, such as William Allen White’s Emporia Gazette or the New York Herald Tribune, by farm and labor publications, by outspokenly partisan organs. Many of these had declined into routine publications on whose editorial pages one could find the same canned opinions as one traveled from city to city. Radio, once so promising, had become a national media tragedy, with its incessant pop music, commercials, and occasional insipid commentary.

Both nationalized and pluralized, both commercialized and trivialized, the huge communications and entertainment industries were no longer under exclusive East and West Coast control. Within a few square miles of New York City, however, were clustered the editorial offices of magazines big and small, the three networks, most of the important book publishing houses, the big art galleries, the make-or-break legitimate theaters. New York was also still the center of “serious” painting, writing, performing. How creative could these arts remain amid the pressures and temptations of mass communication, electronic commercialization, marketplace competition? Would they too become part of an ever more rapidly shifting kaleidoscope?

The New Yorkers

During the 1970s writers and critics expressed a growing concern over the decline of American literature. Their worry was nothing new—every generation since the nation’s founding had denigrated its current writers as compared with the “greats” of the past. But the 1970s concerns were more than generational. Critics pointed to many a morbid symptom, found many a cause, prescribed many a cure, but it was obvious to all that from the 1960s and 1970s had emerged few novelists who could compare, in universality of appeal over time and space, not only with the likes of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Frost but with black writers like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. Faulkner’s lengthening reputation overshadowed the rising generation of southern writers, even those with the talents of a Eudora Welty or Walker Percy.

Why the alleged decline? A common explanation was the cumulative impact of the cold war and of Vietnam on American culture, especially its chilling influence on dissent. “In the past ten years,” E. L. Doctorow told the graduating Sarah Lawrence class of 1983, “there has been a terrible loss of moral energy in art, in politics, in social expectations.” Americans and Russians, he said, had set up an unholy alliance, each aping the other’s response, creating a logic of Us or Them. “We are in thrall to our own Bomb.”

Others pointed to the impact of the mass media. Saul Bellow complained of “publicity intellectuals,” onetime students of literature, the social sciences, art, or drama who had left college and plunged directly into media jobs. There they had surrendered to the mass public’s demand for sensation, exploiting culture for its commercial return, in effect enriching themselves rather than their culture. “The million-dollar advances and earnings,” wrote Alfred Kazin, “the money-mindedness that leaves its grease stain on every discussion of a ‘popular’ book (and of a markedly unpopular one)—these, along with the widespread contempt for politics, the breakdown of intellectual authority that gives every sexual and ethnic faction the brief authority of anger, are not just symptoms of some profound cultural malaise—they are the malaise.” Kazin pointed to the book supermarkets that gave earnest young readers no chance to discover the unexpected, the supplements that accepted “cultural comment” only if written in “snappy prose,” the English departments featuring the triumph of deconstruction over some “helpless poem.”

Other critics aimed at a variety of targets. Richard Kostelanetz decried the many blocks that barred the entrance of young writers, women, and other outsiders into the literary world—not only the publishers’ subservience to the mass media but the bias toward established authors and the “big book,” the commercial tie-ins with films, the quick shredding or dumping of books that did not take off, the decline of the creative relationship among editor, publisher, and author, growing oligopoly as conglomerates took over ancient publishing houses, the enhanced power of financial managers, the crucial influence of reviews and full-page advertisements in The New York Times Book Review. John W. Aldridge contended that the two currents traditionally feeding the American novel—the impulse toward “beatific transcendence” and “a hardy and altogether disenchanted pragmatism” that checked this impulse—had become disjoined, leaving the novel in a self-destructive process of demythifying itself.

As usual various literary establishments came under fire—the publishing, the academic, the old Wasp, the southern. But now a new establishment had risen that for some was the juiciest target of all—the Jewish. The “New York intellectuals,” as they came to be called, were typically the sons of immigrants from the ghettos of Eastern Europe who had settled in new ghettos in Manhattan and Brooklyn and Newark. With much scrimping and saving their fathers had put them through Columbia or City College or some other city university, only to see their prodigal sons reject parents and synagogue and plunge into radical politics during depression days. They fought together and against one another in Stalinist or Trotskyist causes, were swept into World War II, gained more education perhaps on the GI Bill, then began their climb to success through teaching and writing. To their careers they brought “gutter-worldliness” and “harsh and abrasive skepticism,” in Irving Howe’s words.

To their careers they also brought an instinct for power—or at least a fascination with it—nurtured in their endless ideological and literary struggles. As Marxists of various hues they had railed against upper-class rule, the power elite, the literary and journalistic and academic establishments.

Some saw all human interactions as power relationships—Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead presented in 1948 a portrait of military power simplistic and exaggerated to the point of caricature. Treating power as a commodity rather than as a relationship, a physical rather than as a psychological phenomenon, these power-fixated writers rarely grasped the crucial fact that power appeared far more formidable to outsiders looking into power centers than to the wielders of power looking out.

Hence the rising New York intellectuals hardly dreamed that someday they too would be looked on as an establishment, a power elite. But that is just what happened. By the mid-1970s Kostelanetz and others were denouncing the Jewish “commercial establishment,” accusing it of controlling literary careers and access points, of publishing only established and approved authors, of indulging in patronage, mutual back-scratching and the like. Kostelanetz wrote of the power and wealth, the avarice and corruption, of the “New York literary mob.”

As in a novel, literature, fame, publishing, protest, and power, and the men and women who personified them, came together to do battle at a writers’ gathering in the literary capital of the nation.

The Reading Room, the New York Public Library, January 12, 1986. Literary celebrities from home and abroad, delegates to the 48th Congress of International PEN, waited impatiently to file through airport-type security. Some were left outside and seething as all seats were filled. Inside the hall tempers were even shorter. Norman Mailer, president of American PEN, without consulting his board of directors, had invited Secretary of State George Shultz to address the gathering. Sixty-odd writers had already written Shultz that it was “inappropriate” for him to open the Congress because “your Administration supports governments that silence, imprison, even torture their citizens for their beliefs.” It verged on the scandalous, E. L. Doctorow had written in The New York Times, that Mailer and his cronies had put themselves “at the feet of the most ideologically right-wing Administration this country has seen.” An angry Mailer apologized to Shultz for the bad manners of the “catatonic left.” Shultz then surprised the delegates with an illuminating speech.

“Freedom—that is what we are all talking about,” the Secretary of State told the crowd, “and is why we are here. And the writer is at the heart of freedom. And there is no more striking image of freedom than the solitary writer—the individual of imagination, creativity and courage, imposing through language the perceptions and prescriptions that can illuminate and perhaps change the world.” He acknowledged the tension between the writer and the state. “The state aims to provide social order; and the writer aims to create an imaginative order of his own.” Shultz attacked the idea that “creativity forged in the crucible of totalitarianism is greater than that in politically free but culturally commercialized societies.” He concluded: “Ronald Reagan and I are with you all the way.”

This remark drew groans and catcalls; the following day Günter Grass pounced on him. He did not “feel comfortable traveling from Europe to New York,” said the German novelist, “and the first thing I get is a lecture about freedom and literature” from the Secretary of State. He had seldom met politicians who were able to listen, Grass said. “Even if you say, ‘You are right,’ they say, ‘No, you don’t understand.’ Always they understand better and better.” Mailer took for granted the animosity toward Americans. “In the eyes of foreigners, we’re righteous, we’re hypocritical. We’re immensely wealthy, and from a European and third-world point of view, we’re filled with hideous contradictions.” In an interview after the conference, Mailer appeared philosophical about the disputes that had racked the proceedings. “How can you have a literary conference without friendships and feuds being formed out of it?” But his equanimity had been sorely tested by an onslaught from indignant women delegates.

Betty Friedan, Grace Paley, and other feminists had protested the scarcity of women on the panels. Paley from the floor: “Out of 120 panelists, only 16 are women.” Mailer from the chair: “Who’s counting?” Novelist Erica Jong: “Why do you look at us and not see?” Mailer: “Erica Jong is the last woman in the world who can plead invisibility.” Poet Cynthia Macdonald asked, “Won’t we ever do the things to make this boring subject obsolete?” The session ended in a shouting match as women delegates staged a walkout.

Almost concealed in all the brawling was the serious theme of the conference, formally announced as “The Writer’s Imagination and the Imagination of the State.” For a time delegates struggled with this murky topic. “Our contemporary life is marked by the failure of the ruling ideologies, the bankruptcy of all the earthly delights promised or ordained by the state,” Giinter Grass opined. “By now we know full well how exhausted state Communism is in its self-imprisonment, even though its power persists; and capitalism struggles from crisis to crisis in a correspondingly ritualized manner.” Said Israeli novelist Amos Oz, “Our title has about it a ring of romantic anarchism. Indeed, a touch of Manichaeistic kitsch.” He rejected the image of “a saintly lot of writers marching fearlessly to combat” beastly bureaucracies.

As the Congress turned into a “fully clawed political organism,” in Cynthia Ozick’s report of it, and meeting rooms bristled with manifestos and accusations, the real issue surfaced. It was the millennia-old dilemma of the power of the state versus the freedom of the individual writer. After Saul Bellow spoke eloquently of the American dream of democracy, the irrepressible Grass challenged the American novelist to hear the echo of his words in the South Bronx. He was not ignoring pockets of poverty, Bellow responded, “I was simply saying the philosophers of freedom of the 17th and 18th centuries provided a structure which created a society by and large free.” An overflow audience at a session titled “Censorship in the U.S.A.” was informed that school and library authorities in forty-six of the fifty states had recently tried to censor such works as The Catcher in the Rye and Anne Frank’s Diary.

It soon became evident that the American writers knew much more about their individual liberty than they did about the politics and power of the state. John Updike benignly described his relationship to the state in terms of the vast friendly postal service culminating in his blue mailbox—“I send manuscripts away; I sometimes get praise and money in return,” while some of his listeners reflected that their mailboxes more often contained rejection slips than checks. American speakers attacked the state as a monolithic evil, even though many of them had benefited for years from largess in the form of grants, travel money, and Fulbrights, and many also had long and successfully been urging the federal government to exercise its power to end poverty, strengthen civil rights, bolster public education, broaden the Bill of Rights. It was curious: writers who had described social and even political relationships in all their subtlety and variety, who had produced intricate, sensitive tapestries of all manner of human relationships—convoluted alliances, enmities, love affairs, rivalries, jealousies, generosities—could find for the state only the metaphor of the sledgehammer.

It remained for foreign writers, many of whom had in fact suffered at the hands of the sledgehammer state, to remind the Americans of those subtleties and complexities. A PEN committee on writers in prison told the delegates that over 400 of their peers were “detained” or missing in foreign lands. But, as Amos Oz contended, there were degrees of evil and it was the writer’s particular task to make the distinctions. Present at the meeting were representatives from Nicaragua and other countries confronting the painful question that had faced Lincoln during the Civil War— to what extent could certain liberties or rights like habeas corpus be sacrificed for the sake of the victory that would protect all the Bill of Rights freedoms and indeed bring liberty to southern slaves? These delegates defended retreats and compromises on such liberties for the sake of national survival in the good old American pragmatic spirit, and for the sake of freedom as they defined it.

American writers appeared more distressed than authoritative about such complexities. More often the delegates retreated to the high moral ground, but as a refuge from hard thought rather than a place for deep analysis. Many years earlier Henry James had complained, in The American Scene, of the “thinness” of American life. Bellow in 1963 had sensed continually in modern literature not “the absence of a desire to be moral, but rather a pointless, overwhelming, vague, objectless moral fervor.” At the PEN Congress the moral imagination as well as the understanding of many of the American writers appeared thin, vague.

Over the whole proceedings, for the foreigners at least, hovered the ghosts of the American “greats.” Said a Swedish novelist, “You don’t have any truly great writers.” Said a German, “The strongest impact still is Faulkner.” Said Amos Oz, “It’s been a long time since I’ve read an American novel that evoked gutsy passion in me.” Said South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, “There was a time when one sensed through Hemingway and Mailer the American manhood. Then, such authors as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison explored the black experience, and Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow gave a clear sense of growing up Jewish in America. But now, except for maybe William Styron, nothing like that is being attempted.” When she drove past mobile homes in upstate New York, said South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, she wondered, “Who are these people?” She did not meet them in American fiction. To many of the writers from abroad, American novels of the past twenty years appeared to be filled with the personal, the trivial, with “tiny fictions” untouched by history and environment.

While the power and gore of the “literary mob” were most visible in Manhattan and in the big publishers concentrated there, fine university presses and small publishers were dispersed throughout the country. The nation’s profusion of writers created their works wherever, at home or abroad, they could find a desktop for their lined yellow pads, their typewriters, or—increasingly—their word processors. Actors, on the other hand, wanted to be near Broadway or off-Broadway, although Hollywood drew its share for movies and later television. The creative people most concentrated in New York were the artists, who needed access to the city’s art galleries, dealers and patrons, museums, while they lived in lofts and cold-water flats. It was in New York that there had emerged after three centuries, in John Russell’s words, “an independent, self-generating and specifically American art.” The formats and materials used by the “First New York School” were not new. What the artists now did with them was.

During the nineteenth century, American painters had found it necessary to study in Europe and to paint like Europeans if they were to sell in their own country. Even so, wealthy American collectors tended to buy European art. During the first part of the twentieth century, Europe was still Mecca but there and in the United States Modernism was emerging in such forms as Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Orphism, Cubism, as well as Futurism, Surrealism, and Constructivism. Spilling into America, these forms converged after World War II as Abstract Expressionism, and with this style American art came into its own.

Formidable artists gathered in New York: Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and many others. What a profusion of styles they created—the tension lines and stresses in a Pollock, the spatial relationships of a Mark Rothko, the touch and feel of fleshed-out cloth in a Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg’s “Giant Toothpaste Tube” that resembled a reclining woman, the serried rows of Coca-Cola bottles in a shocking Andy Warhol, for whom preformed subject matter was a condition of his art, the sensitive Helen Frankenthaler’s freehand drawing with paint that, John Russell wrote, “was allowed to stain its way into the canvas rather than to sit, like a skin, on top of it,” Roy Lichtenstein’s dramatic “Drowning Girl” in comic-strip style complete with cartoon balloon—“I don’t care! I’d rather sink—than call Brad for help!”

Serious art during the latter half of the century revealed three aspects that characterized other sets of American ideas and attitudes. It was ephemeral. It was commercial. It was eclectic. “New, Newer, Newest,” wrote critic John Simon as technology combined with the rise of a literate and art-conscious public to speed the flow of new art styles. The different, the outrageous could not be produced fast enough. A style might grow to maturity and decline in a single decade while the market went on to the next fad. Something called Kinetic Art referred back to Futurism and forward to Op Art. Pop Art connected with comic books but had roots in Dadaism and the work of Marcel Duchamp earlier in the century. Minimalism now emerged as a rejection of Abstract Expressionism and was taken up by some of its practitioners. Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings epitomized what was “perhaps the most difficult, embattled and controversial art ever made.”

Gallery visitors gaped, politicians scoffed, buyers coughed up. A phrase, the Tyranny of the New, became current. This tyranny was aided not only by the press but by the rapid emergence of new techniques and electronic devices such as video and television that gobbled up material as fast as it could be produced and ravaged the past to satisfy its voracious appetite. High Culture and Mass Culture, once considered mutually exclusive, merged so as to become almost indistinguishable. What had been called High Culture was increasingly being supplanted by an expert culture, according to sociologist Herbert Gans, “dominated by cultural professionals: creators, critics, and especially academics.”

A handful of Manhattan critics were alleged to hold immense influence over public reaction to new or newly disinterred paintings. Artists, gallery owners, collectors, and museum curators waited in trepidation for their reviews. But of course the arbiters quarreled with one another. Time art critic Robert Hughes derided New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer for being obsessed with left-wing conspiracy. “Let the New Museum put on a show called ‘Art and Ideology’—stuffed with works so banal or impenetrable that their appeal as propaganda is close to zero—and he goes into his war dance about cultural Stalinism.”

Hughes criticized Kramer for so deeply loathing kitsch as to blame it on camp subversion rather than on the “free-market capitalism he admires.” That free market was booming in art by the 1970s. Buyers for large banks and corporations bid up the prices. Heavily promoted by the titillated media, art was becoming big business. “The change from the small, rather compact ‘art world’ of the 1940s to the explosive, hustling scene of today,” wrote a former gallery owner, “is surely one of the most radical changes in the history of the art market.” Russell called “radically wrong” a world in which “works of art which are part of our universal inheritance can be hidden in vaults until the bankers’ consortium which owns them can make a sufficient return on its investment.” Yesterday’s canvases began to sell like old masters. In 1983, at an auction at Christie’s, Two Women by Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning sold for $1.2 million, the largest sum paid to that date for a work by a living American. Surely this was market capitalism at its finest.

At the opposite end of the economic spectrum, thousands of artists, neglected by critics and well-heeled connoisseurs in the excitement over “big names,” survived by moonlighting in academia or in odd, routine, often distasteful jobs. Still, many artists admitted they “never had it so good.” Support from federal and state agencies and private foundations was at unprecedented levels. Small galleries proliferated. Colleges and universities built art museums and competed for prestigious shows. Rich or poor, artists were drawn increasingly into the wider political arena. Women and minority groups—especially blacks—organized to become a more visible part of the art world. The New York Art Strike of 1970, organized by the artist Robert Morris, who, protesting the Vietnam War, had canceled his own solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum, produced a series of demonstrations. To enable all artists, rich and poor, to share in the profits when their work was resold, Edward Kennedy introduced remedial legislation in the Senate.

By the mid-1960s, a kind of free-for-all had erupted as artists abandoned the idea, which had survived and even thrived under the rubric of Modernism, that the work of art—the painting in its frame, the sculpture on its pedestal, the oil on canvas, the carved stone or cast metal—deserved special and unique status as an object. For their materials, artists found and transformed—or did not transform—natural and man-made objects and even their own bodies. The traditional materials of art were turned against themselves with an irony of form or subversive allusions to the icons of art history and popular culture.

“Art today,” wrote Susan Sontag, “is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility.” Many of these attacks on tradition, going under a panoply of labels (Performance Art, Process Art, Conceptual Art, Earthworks, Pop Art, and more), could be traced to the work of Marcel Duchamp. His “ready-mades,” as he called them—exemplified by a urinal he bought from a plumbing supply warehouse and exhibited unmodified but signed— raised by means of the object itself a question about its status as art. Duchamp’s influence persisted in the latter part of the century in work by the likes of Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Vito Acconci, and many other artists, including Alice Aycock and Dennis Oppenheim, who produced mechanical works that in an electronic age seemed in some ways nostalgic.

Much of this art was an attempt to jettison the object and to bring a pure idea of idea to the foreground. But the work of art as object remained. The 1980s saw a Neo-Expressionism played off against a new Minimalism. Art in general had become a kind of “tolerated pluralism.” It could include philosophy, postindustrial technologies and information processes, linguistics, mathematics, social criticism, life risking, jokes and other kinds of “narratives.” Anything went—including outright appropriation of the works of other artists. On this open field, art had ample room for play, for humor and irony, for serendipity and nostalgia, and the spectacle of movements scrambling pell-mell for their fifteen minutes in the sun was itself amusing. But critic Arthur Danto noted, “When anything is allowed,” the point of “doing whatever one chooses to do is lost.”

No longer neatly framed by those old adversaries, High Culture and Mass Culture, art as well as literature appeared to be changing, if not vanishing, in clouds of self-referentiality, of circular and abstruse discussions of the nature of art. The situation was mirrored in such fashionable intellectual movements as Structuralism, which attempted to do without the author in deciphering the text or object. Structuralism’s child, Deconstruction, was even more radical, for here the text disappeared and only readers remained. In this scenario, the construction of relations with a text (object) was taken to be bound by self-reference. Though the progression from Structuralism to Deconstruction was not linear and practitioners disagreed heatedly among themselves, a string of high priests emerged, from Claude Lévi-Strauss to Jacques Derrida.

A third artistic-critical movement, and in some respects a product of the other two, was Postmodernism, which appeared most vividly at first in architecture and architectural writing. With its references to various pasts, Postmodernism appeared nostalgic, ironic, and playful all at the same time. In its self-consciousness it reflected the mood of America, which seemed in some sense not to be entirely serious, yet anxious and equally various.

Other arts in America also provided a mixed picture. Broadway pulled out of its sharp artistic and financial decline of the early 1970s and off-Broadway continued to play a vital role, but much of the excitement in the American theater a decade and a half later was generated by British imports and by revivals of O’Neill and Miller. The technology of music making and distribution was changing so rapidly as to make prediction impossible; even a college jazz ensemble could assemble onstage not only musicians and their instruments but a Model 2000 Pitch Reader, a Digital Delay, a TX-7 Yamaha Synthesizer, two television sets, a video recorder, and a Yamaha SPX-Bass-effects Generator. Conceivably the seventies and eighties might best be remembered for the creativity, iconoclasm, and originality of the nation’s cartoonists and comic-strip creators, especially in their willingness to take on errant Presidents, from Herblock’s formidable assaults on Nixon to Garry Trudeau’s graphic explorations of Ronald Reagan’s brain.

The Conservative Mall

In December 1980, a few weeks after Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency, the American Enterprise Institute—at the time the paramount conservative think tank—staged a week-long victory celebration. The leading stars of the right speechified; politicians who had before kept their distance were there working the crowd; and a politician who had not kept his distance, Ronald Reagan, his face wreathed in smiles over his black tie, paraded in while the band played “Hail to the Chief.” The President-elect quickly made it clear that he would not forget his conservative friends. “I just want you to know,” he told the delirious crowd, “that we’ll be looking closely at your observations and proposals.” Even better, key AEI staff people were already headed for the White House. “This kind of working relationship with AEI is one the next administration wants to maintain during the next four years.”

A century earlier a gathering of conservatives had met with equal cheer to honor another hero of the right, Herbert Spencer. If the conservative celebrities of 1980 hardly rivaled in eminence those present at Delmonico’s in 1882—not only Spencer but Carl Schurz, Andrew Carnegie, William Graham Sumner, Henry Ward Beecher—the 1980 gathering at least hosted a President-elect, while it doubtless would not even have occurred to the men of 1882 to expect Chester A. Arthur for dinner. Presidents had not been very relevant to the men at Delmonico’s, whereas the new President in 1980 was of enormous importance to the crowd at the celebration. During the few weeks before his inauguration they would have time not only to celebrate but to cerebrate, to machinate—and to hope.

Fifty years of frustration going back to Hoover’s repudiation made the conservative victory taste all the sweeter in these transitional days. In 1952 the American right, backing Robert “Mr. Republican” Taft, had lost to a nonpartisan general who governed as a moderate broker between congressional Democrats and Republicans. In 1960 they had lost with a promising young California conservative who had cornered Alger Hiss. Four years later they had lost with the stoutest heart of all, Barry Goldwater, against a Democrat who exploited JFK’s memory and brandished promises of peace. In 1968 they had won with Nixon, who soon established price controls in Washington and, along with Rockefeller’s man Kissinger, toasted the Chinese reds in Peking before he lost the whole shooting match at Watergate. Jerry Ford had been just another namby-pamby moderate Republican in the White House who had used his presidential perquisites to beat out Reagan for the 1976 GOP nomination and then had managed to lose to Carter.

But losing had not been the worst of it, at least for conservatives accustomed to putting principles before pragmatics. Almost unbearable had been the complacency and effrontery of liberalism during the long period of its intellectual and political rule. The left, they noted, simply wrote off much of the right as neurotic, paranoid, or at least extremist, operating far outside the rational consensus. Viewing the right also as politically impotent, liberals proclaimed the death of conservatism after its every defeat. Following Goldwater’s rejection, William F. Buckley, Jr., complained that liberals were holding “that the electorate had once and for all spoken on the subject, and that therefore the only realistic thing a conservative could do was to fold up his tent, and hitch-hike along with history.”

Behind the complaints lay the fear that perhaps the liberal complacency was justified, perhaps liberalism did command a central fortress from which it could not be dislodged, perhaps the liberal establishment was as truly established as any state or church of old. That establishment, charged the conservative author M. Stanton Evans, “is in control. It is guiding the lives and destinies of the American people. It wields enormous, immeasurable power” by controlling popular opinion. Most mortifying of all to literate conservatives, liberals of various stripes wrote the books about conservatism that won the most respectability. Cornell political scientist Clinton Rossiter, taking a “hard look” at American conservatism, taxed it with being impotent in the realm of ideas. Harvard scholar Louis Hartz appeared to reduce conservatism to Whiggery and reaction. Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter pictured the radical right as rootless, dispossessed, paranoid, and not really conservative. Unkindest cut of all, a former editor of conservative journals, Alan Crawford, published in 1980 an exposé of the New Right as a movement, in the words of Peter Viereck, of a “lawless, rabble-rousing populism of the revolutionary Right,” that threatened the authentic conservative heritage of Edmund Burke and John Adams. But now, in the same year that Crawford published his book, the ecstatic crowd was celebrating its presidential victory, and some of the celebrants were the very “extremists” that liberals and moderate conservatives had attacked.

There would be many explanations of the rise of the conservative movement from the political slough of the Goldwater and Nixon years to its triumph in the 1980s: the exhaustion of liberal ideas, energy, and agenda; the reaction to the leftist “excesses” of the 1960s; the failures of Democratic Administrations; the revived cold war in the wake of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and turmoil in southern Africa and Central America. But the main reason for that rise was rather remarkable in an age when change was so often attributed to the uncontrollable collision of events or the blind turnings of history. The conservative triumph stemmed to a marked degree from a considered and collective effort of rightists of various schools to build their intellectual case and to use invigorated and broadened conservative ideas as vehicles to political power. They would build not the mythical “city upon a hill” but a formidable citadel of ideas as a foundation of the conservative effort. This strategy was based on the idea that powerful ideas themselves were the most steady and dependable propellants of political action. “Ideas Are Weapons,” said the liberal Max Lerner. “Ideas Have Consequences,” wrote the conservative Richard Weaver.

But ideas as weapons must be armed and armored. Unless conservatives realized “that massive public education must precede any hope of a Presidential victory,” wrote Buckley, “they will never have a President they can call their own.” Journals were established or refurbished: the National Review, The Public Interest, Commentary, to join the long-established Wall Street Journal and Reader’s Digest as purveyors of right-wing views. Think tanks were founded for incubating ideas, and foundations for incubating think tanks. Serious journals like The Public Interest were all the more influential for being moderate in tone and scholarly in format, with tables, charts, and footnotes. These publications drew from a remarkable array of old and new conservatives: Hayek, Friedman, L. Brent Bozell, Ralph de Toledano, George F. Gilder, James J. Kilpatrick, Clarence Manion, Frank S. Meyer, Max Rafferty, Phyllis Schlafly, William E. Simon, and others less famous but influential in diverse ways.

The avalanche of books and articles tumbling out of conservative foundations, research institutions, publishing houses, and corporate public information offices attested to the intellectual breadth of conservatism; it also dramatized its divisions. The more conservatism prospered as a creed and cause, the more the various right-wing factions advanced their competing doctrines. Their schools of thought had not changed much during the postwar years. Traditionalist conservatives, still proudly resonating to the writings of the Burkeans, preached the virtues of order, reverence, stability, moderation, gradual change, to be achieved through a harmonious balancing of the demands of hierarchy, community, privilege, and noblesse oblige. Libertarian conservatives demanded optimal individual freedom of choice in cultural, sexual, and social matters, protected especially against governmental intrusion. Free-market conservatives called for an open, competitive economy, which to them meant reductions in government, in regulation, in union power, and a drastic cutback on the environmental, affirmative-action, and other controls loaded on private enterprise from the FDR through the Carter years.

Populist conservatives, in rising numbers especially in southern and western “Sunbelt” regions, echoed the demands of the free-marketers but focused their attacks especially on the “new elites,” nonelected and self-promoted—network news producers, liberal journalists, radical professors, federal bureaucrats, education administrators, left-wing writers, literary critics, and others of related breeds entrenched especially in northeastern and West Coast cities. The evangelical and fundamentalist right, embracing such groupings as the Moral Majority and Christian Voices, overlapped the libertarians in its view of freedom and individualism as pro-market and anti-government. But the central commitment of the “new Christian right” was to family, religion, community, and old-fashioned morality, and its chief targets were moral relativism, sexual permissiveness, abortion, ERA, prohibitions on school prayer, the secular curriculum in public schools. The capacity of the Christian right to build networks, operate through local congregations, and mobilize its strength in the Republican party had been a decisive element in Reagan’s 1980 victory.

These conservative groupings intertwined, overlapped, and conflicted. They formed an unstable equilibrium, much like right-wing parliamentary coalitions. Liberationists wanted free-marketers to oppose government interference in private life as vehemently as intrusion into free enterprise; populists found some of the eastern sophisticates tending toward an elitist “conservative chic”; traditionalists deplored some of the destabilizing, disruptive tendencies implied in the other conservative philosophies. Nevertheless, conservatism as a whole displayed considerable coherence. Despite much writing about “new” conservatives and “neoconservatism,” the doctrinal branches of the right remained much the same over these decades. Indeed, the general terms—liberal and conservative, the right and the left—came into wider use and clearer usage during this period than in the New Deal era. When reporters referred to a “conservative” senator or “House liberals” the general public understood what they meant.

Still, the traditional differences among the doctrinal conservative groups persisted, and the left, accustomed to ferocious battles among its own warring factions, wondered whether the conservative movement could enjoy unity during its prosperity. For a time at least, the conservatives put up a relatively solid front. Journals such as Buckley’s National Review and Irving Kristol’s The Public Interest showed an ecumenical flair for bringing under their tents a wide variety of right-wing ideas. In particular, Buckley, who had been the scourge of liberal academics with his biting wit and carefully planned polemics, established intellectual and personal links with virtually every brand of conservative thinker; Buckley once boasted that he had had only a single resignation from the National Review, that of Max Eastman—and, considering the erratic career and mercurial iconoclasm of this former Marxist turned Reader’s Digest feature writer, Buckley could readily be forgiven that exception.

A key force for conservative unity was Ronald Reagan, who emphasized the common beliefs on the right; and in any event he was not one for fine theory spinning or jesuitical hairsplitting. He displayed a winning ability to talk order and stability to the traditionalists, individual liberty to the libertarians, anti-regulation to the free-marketers, and anti-elitism to the populists. In unifying the disparate strands of conservatism, Sidney Blumenthal concluded, Reaganism “animated the intellectuals’ theories with a resonant symbolism—images of idyllic small-town life, enterprising entrepreneurs whose success derived from moral character, and failure induced only by federal bureaucrats.” The candidate also benefited from his skill in using anecdotage, reminiscence, misreminiscence, and jokes to glide over burdensome or hostile facts.

The most powerful source of conservative unity, however, was anti-communism. With their hostility to unregulated enterprise, to rugged individualism, to the FBI and other watchdogs against the “red network” in Washington, the communists were the perfect unifiers. Above all, anticommunism was a stimulus and attraction to the countless former communists who had deserted the “naked god” and flocked to the journals and think tanks of the right. That anticommunism would remain an enduring and dependable basis of unity appeared rather questionable, since it might depend more on communist developments abroad than on the efforts of conservative thinkers and politicians at home.

Liberals were in no mood to celebrate as they came to the end of their worst decade, the 1970s. During the final forlorn weeks of the Carter Administration, as they watched conservatives move into the new presidency, into a newly Republican Senate, and into the cultural and economic decision-making centers of Washington, liberals could reflect once again that nothing fails like success. Looking back over the liberal and Democratic dominance of the past five decades, they asked what had gone wrong—what had really gone wrong? The record seemed so positive. Three Republican Presidents had left virtually intact the New Deal and the Fair Deal, the New Frontier and the Great Society, almost none of their major laws repealed or key programs canceled. Who could deny that poverty had been reduced, the elderly and the young protected, the farmer subsidized, civil rights broadened, educational opportunity vastly expanded, environmental problems confronted, with considerable prosperity for all but the very poor and without confiscatory taxation or runaway federal deficits?

Three decades earlier Lionel Trilling had written that “liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition” in the United States, adding that “it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.” Now, at the start of the 1980s, everything seemed turned upside down. By the hundreds conservatives were pouring out of right-wing journals and research institutions, out of universities and corporations—liberals had not realized how large the army of the right had become. And how youthful they seemed, how self-confident, how brash, as they prepared to transform the nation. Some liberal memories reached back to the New Deal and the Kennedy years, when young people, equally brash and confident, had taken over State and Treasury, Interior and Justice, and the other federal strong points.

Already the left was challenging itself, on the eve of the touted “Reagan Revolution,” to come up with fresh ideas, new proposals. But liberals were still mesmerized by their decades of success and power. Of course, they granted, there had been egregious failures, shortcomings, inadequacies, sheer blunders, follies, and idiocies. But these had been the exceptions, departures from the norm, not failings inherent in liberal programs. Obviously liberals should govern better, innovate more carefully, administer more efficiently. But cancel or drastically alter the great liberal program of the past fifty years? Never!

The deeper problem was not simply that liberals were wed to the programs they had put through—it was that they were still living off the intellectual capital of the first fifty years of the century. That capital had been ample enough in the 1950s, and even still in the early 1970s, to influence the thinking of Republican Administrations, putting Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, and their men on the defensive even while they presided over the White House. Now everything was different. The triumphant Reaganites evinced not the slightest interest in their ideas, except as artifacts to be swept away in the conservative revolution. Liberal thinkers, out of power or access to power, out of sight as their speaking invitations dwindled, would have plenty of leisure for rethinking liberalism.

How well would they use this time? Not to arrive at some “consensus”; it was already apparent at the start of the eighties that liberalism would remain divided within itself and from the much smaller authentic American left, itself far more fractured. There was much talk of neoliberalism, the New Left, postliberalism, and so on, but once again the prefixes did not help analysis. The divisions among liberals remained much the same, only enhanced: New Deal or New Frontier “welfare” liberals who stuck with their ideas and programs and wanted only to improve, extend, and perhaps enlarge them; other liberals who, impressed or depressed by the conservative resurgence, proposed to preserve the essence of the Great Society and its predecessors but in a modified, more “fiscally responsible” form, even if this meant more federal taxation attuned to lower spending; still others who turned toward what Robert B. Reich later would call a “New Public Philosophy,” which faced up to emerging industrial and technological problems and opportunities, especially on a global level, without forsaking fundamental liberal values. ‘;

Fundamental values? These were precisely what liberals were more and more abandoning, according to activists further to the left. Especially one value—equality. Liberals in general, it was charged, had so fully joined the broad American consensus behind individual rights, civil liberty, individualism, individuality, that the great competing and balancing claims of equality—at least of equality of opportunity—were being ignored. Even committed egalitarians had to grant that inequality had been far more deeply rooted than they had perceived and that the road to social justice was strewn with bogs and pitfalls. As he neared seventy, Kenneth Clark, the longtime student and preacher of racial integration and equality, confessed that he had “seriously underestimated the depth and complexity of Northern racism.” Clark conceded that some major federal welfare programs might have worsened the lot of blacks by encouraging a trend toward one-parent families and helping maintain the “pathology” of ghetto life.

“But that’s not God-ordained,” Clark said. “I’m convinced that social engineering is no more difficult than space engineering. If a program to get us to the moon didn’t work, the engineers would try another program.” Why not with social engineering as well? He was bewildered, Clark said despondently, that so many liberals—old friends and students—had given up trying and had even deserted the liberal cause.

To staunch socialists further left on the spectrum, liberal weakness was no surprise. Liberal failure of commitment was one reason they were socialists. On the eve of the Reagan presidency, however, few leftists were optimistic about the future of socialism. Its leaders still showed little interest in shaking off the failed intellectual and political habits of the past. The leadership had usually had a Marxist as well as a religious orientation—a source of disunity in itself. Historically, the larger the appeal of the socialist movement, the more variegated its membership had been—militant Wobblies from the old Industrial Workers of the World, prairie populists, Wisconsin progressives, Yiddish-speaking New Yorkers, western copper miners, urban intellectuals. The socialists of the 1980s could no longer claim leaders of the quality of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas, who had managed to transcend major divisions.

Politically socialism had long been notorious for its electoral purism and ideological sectarianism. Socialist leaders had stood aside from the New Deal, even though it brought “the greatest wave of social reform that this country had seen for many decades,” in Irving Howe’s view. A half century later many socialist leaders and intellectuals were still standing aside from even the most liberal of liberal initiatives and programs. Typically socialist and other left-wing movements were composed of hundreds, even thousands of local organizations focused on specific goals of their own as they responded to local needs and interests.

When the defeat in 1980 set socialists, liberals, and Democratic party strategists to considering new possibilities of a Democratic, left-wing coalition, the most perplexing problem for socialists was still the old one— whether to vote for the lesser evil between the two major parties, and thus run the risk of throwing away their vote, or to seek to build a strong third party, and thus run the risk of doing the same thing.

If a measure of rethinking about coalition strategies was taking place, the left was ignoring almost completely the question of governmental strategy when and if a liberal-labor-left party coalition took office. It had long been obvious that the fragmentation of power resulting from federalism and the checks and balances would gravely hobble a left-wing government. It was remarkable that in 1987, when politicians and professors devoted much attention to analyzing the Constitution during its bicentennial, liberal and left-wing thinkers gave so little attention to a constitutional system filled with veto traps and devices for delaying and devitalizing progressive measures and programs. How much could the left expect from a radical or socialist leadership in Washington, considering how Wilson with his Treaty of Versailles, Roosevelt in his second term, and Kennedy in his one and only term had been thwarted by political forces acting through the marvelous contrivances devised by the Framers and elaborated by their successors to balk comprehensive and forthright government action? At least, as the Reagan era dawned, leftist thinkers could settle back and plan to enjoy the spectacle of a conservative Administration being divided and frustrated by conservative constitutional arrangements largely of conservative origin.

CHAPTER 15

The Decline of Leadership

FOR AMERICANS 1987 WAS to be a special year of remembrance and perhaps of renewal. In a winter of deep cold and heavy snows New Englanders commemorated the guerrilla struggles of the Shays rebels during the same kind of harsh weather two hundred years earlier. Late in May 1987 scholarly conferences in Philadelphia marked the bicentennial of the arrival of delegates to the Constitutional Convention and the leadership of James Madison and his fellow Virginians in offering a bold new plan for a stronger national government. In September, on the bicentenary anniversary of the convention’s close, Philadelphia burst into pomp and pageantry as hundreds of thousands celebrated with floats and balloons and fireworks.

The festivities barely concealed an undercurrent of concern and disillusion. The bicentennial year began amid revelations of gross failures in the Reagan White House, of an Administration out of control as a few men conducted their own “rogue” foreign policy with the government of Iran and with the Contra opposition to Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. Reagan’s erratic leadership, both foreign and domestic, compared poorly with that of his fellow conservative Margaret Thatcher, who won her third general election, and that of the worldly Soviet party boss, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had launched a bold effort to modernize the Soviet economy and democratize the political system.

At home Congress and the President gave a classic demonstration of the workings of the checks and balances by failing to agree on or enforce measures sharply to reduce the annual deficit and eventually tackle a national debt nearing $3 trillion. The nation continued to struggle with economic ills whose solution appeared beyond human wit—regional decline, inner-city blight, lack of affordable housing, large sectors of entrenched poverty. Abroad Americans faced brutal competition from Japan and other exporting nations. The United States had now become a dependent nation. Financially, wrote Felix Rohatyn, “we are being colonized.”

The floundering leadership of 1987 stood in stark contrast to the bold, purposeful work of the Framers of the Constitution two centuries earlier. Even those who wondered whether the Constitution was good for another two centuries—or even two decades—freely granted that the Founding Fathers had displayed a collective intellectual leadership without peer in the Western world. Above all they had displayed during their four months in Philadelphia the capacity to stand back from the existing national government—the Articles of Confederation—and summon the institutional imagination and political audacity to fashion a whole new structure of government. Two hundred years later proposals to make even small structural changes in the constitutional system evoked emotional opposition from some members of the public and the academy—and almost complete indifference from officeholders who were struggling unsuccessfully to make the present system work.

The Framers had shown remarkable flexibility and responsiveness to the public as well, especially when it became clear that delegates to the state ratifying conventions in 1787 and 1788 would approve the new charter only if the Constitution makers guaranteed that consideration of a Bill of Rights would be one of the first duties of the new Congress. That Bill of Rights, drafted by James Madison in the summer of 1789, endorsed by Congress that fall, and ratified by the states between 1789 and 1791, became the crownpiece of the Constitution. Its enactment also meant that celebration-weary Americans would have to gird themselves for another series of bicentennial commemorations from 1989 through 1991.

New Yorkers who liked celebrations were in luck. Manhattan was where Madison had drafted the noble statement and where Congress had been sitting when it passed the proposed amendments. Indeed, New Yorkers had already held their celebration of the Bill of Rights in 1986, when they had seized on the centennial of the erection of the Statue of Liberty to stage a great weekend festivity, amid a swarm of old sailing ships in New York Harbor and a spectacular display of fireworks in the evening.

The celebration revealed a deep hunger on the part of people to return to the past, to touch and savor it. Liberty Weekend, designed to stress the great statue’s welcome to immigrants, turned into a preview also of the Bill of Rights commemoration, as orators, pundits, and plain people explored the deeper meanings of freedom as the central value in American life and history. The celebrations took on a poignant aspect as speakers conjured up memories of the illustrious leaders of the past such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, devotees of liberty like Tom Paine and Patrick Henry. Two hundred years later, was there a single leader who could be compared with these men? What had happened to that fierce devotion to liberty? Could Congress formulate, would the states ratify, would the people approve a 1989 Bill of Rights as bold and sweeping as that drawn up two centuries earlier?

That weekend, while President Reagan and other dignitaries paid homage to the restored and relighted Miss Liberty, a score of panelists— women’s leaders, trade unionists, educators, the mayor of the city—met in a hotel on Broadway to debate the next hundred years of freedom. The future of individual liberty seemed safe in the hands of panelists who had passed in front of garish, X-rated movie houses to enter the hotel but rejected censorship of pornography, who were concerned that their children could buy rock records with sexually explicit lyrics but favored identifying the contents rather than banning them. After New York’s Mayor Edward Koch complained that women had complained when his minions had placed signs in bars warning pregnant women against drinking, NOW president Eleanor Smeal asked not that the signs be taken down but rather that other signs be posted warning men against drinking and thus endangering babies while driving home.

When the question shifted from the protection of individual liberty against government to that of the advancement of freedom through government—that is, from “freedom of speech and religion” to “freedom from fear and want”—the conferees became far more divided. Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz and head of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, sharply posed the issue of social and collective freedom when he called on America to open its doors to anyone who wanted to enter, for economic as well as political reasons. We are all free only to the extent others are free, he said. The discussion turned to equality as inseparably linked with liberty. Could the American constitutional system not only protect liberty but broaden social freedom and deal with the nation’s enduring inequalities?

Some of the conferees answered that the system worked, or at least could be made to work. However fragmented and stalemated, it could at least fend off arbitrary governmental intervention, and at the same time could be used as a positive means for expanding economic and social freedoms. Other conferees were doubtful. The system was too slow, too ponderous, too exposed to control by economic and social elites. Still others believed, though, that great leadership of the quality of Jefferson and Lincoln and EDR might make the system work. If anyone at the conference thought morosely about the state of the current leadership in both parties, no one wanted to mention the matter on a pleasant Fourth of July weekend of happy celebration.

Republicans: Waiting for Mr. Right

Few at the Liberty Weekend conference would have offered as a model leader the man who a few miles away was hailing the renovated Miss Liberty in a speech filled with his usual pieties and banalities. Even though Ronald Reagan had twice won both the governorship of California and the presidency of the United States, many in the press and academia still viewed him as merely a rigid ideologue whose hard-core conservatism was cushioned by a relaxed, easygoing manner and prettified by disarming, even self-deprecating, jokes and anecdotes. It was easy to compare his mind, as Harding’s had been compared, to stellar space—a huge void filled with a few wandering clichés. Or to picture, as Garry Trudeau had in his comic strip, an intrepid explorer pushing through the tangled filaments of the President’s brain in an effort to discover how—or whether—it worked.

Even after his six years in the White House spotlight, many President watchers were still misjudging Ronald Reagan. They did not see the committed political activist and strategist behind the façade. They saw the Reagan who appeared on the screen, an “aw shucks” old boy, with bobbing head, face turning and smiling, shoulders rising and falling—a showcase of ingratiating body language. They heard that long-honed voice over the radio every Saturday, easily rising and receding, alternating between mellowness and intensity, hovering at times “barely above a whisper,” Roger Rosenblatt wrote, “so as to win you over by intimacy, if not by substance.” They chuckled at the perfectly timed joke or anecdote or observation. Many of his stories turned out to be untrue even during his presidential years, when at least his speech writers should have been more careful, and his misstatements and tall tales were numerous enough to be collected and published in book form.

But few appeared to care when Reagan was found out, contradicted, refuted. “There he goes again,” the public seemed to smile indulgently. It took a long time for President watchers to understand that Reagan was not a man of details, specifics, particulars. Theodore White had called him a man more of ideas than of intellect, but he proved to be a man less of ideas than of stances, shibboleths, stereotypes. He was a strategist rather than a tactician, a hedgehog who knew one big thing, in Herodotus’ famous phrase, rather than a fox who knew many little things. What Reagan had known in the 1960s was that he must and could rid the Republican party of its liberal elements, marry the GOP to the burgeoning conservative causes and movements, fight off the far-right extremists, reunite Republicans around a clearly conservative doctrine, mobilize disaffected Democrats and blue-collar workers behind a Reagan candidacy, denounce the Russians—and win.

In retrospect this strategy would seem obvious and even easy, but it had not so appeared at the time. The dominant image in the minds of Republican party politicians in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the crushing Goldwater defeat of 1964. Never mind the excuses—that no one could have overcome the Kennedy remembrance that year or outbid LBJ as peace leader. The practical pols knew their history—a moderate Eisenhower had won in 1952 and 1956, Nixon with his conservative, red-baiting image had lost in 1960, a “new Nixon,” bleached and smoothened, had won in 1968, and any solid right-wing candidate, no matter how attractive personally, would yield centrist voters and hence presidential elections to the Democrats. It was this Goldwater syndrome that Reagan had to overcome if he was to put himself at the head of the GOP and take it to victory.

In the mid-1970s, however, many conservatives were by no means convinced that the Republican party could be their ticket to power. To them the GOP seemed irretrievably in the hands of Gerald Ford and his Vice President-select, the hated Nelson Rockefeller. Ford had been in the White House for hardly half a year when the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom jointly sponsored a conference at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel to consider forming an independent party to challenge both the GOP and the Democracy. Enraptured by the vision of a new conservative party that would unite rural Southerners and northern blue-collar workers, they urged Reagan to lead the effort. He gave his answer in a banquet speech before a packed ballroom. After winning cheers for a denunciation of the Ford policies, he dampened the fire-eaters by demanding, “Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party…?”—a committedly conservative GOP.

Reagan would wait—but the movement conservatives would not let him wait. In mid-June 1975, only four months after the Mayflower conference, a group of conservative leaders, including mail-order entrepreneur Richard Viguerie, columnist Kevin Phillips, Colorado brewer Joseph Coors, several supporters of George Wallace, and a cross section of conservative organization leaders, confronted Reagan at a private dinner. Phillips led the attack, asserting that the GOP was falling apart just as the Whigs had divided and collapsed in the 1850s, that it was time for a new conservative party that could overcome both Democrats and Republicans in a three-party battle, that Reagan must make a direct bid for the Wallace backers and hence must break whatever ties he had with Republican liberals and even Republican moderates. A free-for-all followed. Some in the group told Reagan harshly that he lacked “fire in his belly” and was dawdling while Ford picked up conservative support for the approaching 1976 campaign. Viguerie, arguing that the GOP had become “unmarketable,” urged the governor to unite conservatives and independents in a New Majority. Then Reagan told them his decision—he would fight Ford for the Republican nomination; as the Republican nominee he would unite conservatives, independents, and conservative Democrats in a broad coalition; and if necessary he would propose that the Republican party change its name. In effect he would transform the GOP or, failing that, abandon it. Half persuaded, and lacking any alternative candidate of national standing (Wallace was still disabled by his gunshot wounding in 1972), the conservatives could only assent. Reagan soon demonstrated that he did have fire in his belly by taking Ford on in the 1976 presidential primaries despite pressure from many GOP leaders to wait his turn. He proved his commitment when he returned to the fray in 1980 as an unrepentant conservative and Republican, and then after winning both the nomination and the election, made clear that he would govern as a conservative, and as head of a conservative Administration.

The media for the most part interpreted the outcome of the 1980 presidential election as a repudiation of Carter rather than a victory for Reagan. Soaring prices, astronomical interest rates, the President’s apparent scolding of the American people in his “malaise” speech, his long agonizing months of being held hostage to the hostage situation in Iran—all these and much else were cited as proof. This view of the election outcome, however, revealed the bias of some liberals, who refused to believe that any authentic, outspoken conservative could win the presidency of the United States—the Goldwater syndrome at work. In fact, Reagan won the election by persuasive appeals to the right-wing vote and to disaffected independents, full exploitation of the remarkable direct-mail and fund-raising apparatus of the Republican national party, and his skillful coalition building between GOP regulars and movement conservatives, as reflected in the choice of George Bush for running mate.

Then, to the astonishment of many, especially of Democrats who had become accustomed to their winning candidates reneging on promises of peace and reform within a year or two of coming into office, Reagan began to govern just as he had promised—as a conservative. He promptly appointed a conservative cabinet headed by Alexander Haig as Secretary of State, and ordered a freeze of federal hiring of civilian employees. Then, after recovering from a near-fatal assassination attempt, he repudiated Carter’s human rights approach, crushed striking air controllers and their union, called the Russians names, and engaged in a variety of symbolic acts that left no doubt that he was a conservative who meant it.

Reagan had shrewdly recognized—or perhaps had simply sensed intuitively—that he should move ahead strongly in domestic economic policy even at the expense of dramatic initiatives abroad. Tax policy offered the best opportunity to redeem his campaign promises and publicize his departure from “discredited” New Deal policies of Carter and his Democratic predecessors. Working closely with congressional leaders, Vice President Bush, and the Republican Senate, the Administration pushed its legislative program of cutting personal income taxes across the board over thirty-three months; reducing the maximum tax on all income from 70 to 50 percent; indexing tax rates to soften the impact of graduated income taxes on rises in personal income; reducing the maximum tax on capital gains from 28 to 20 percent; liberalizing deductions for contributions to individual retirement accounts; lowering estate and gift taxes; providing business with tax breaks. The tax reductions were tied closely to a package of budget cuts that slashed toward the heart of the New Deal, Fair Deal, and Great Society domestic programs—education, health, housing, urban aid, food stamp programs, the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and even federal subsidies for school meals—but never never never defense spending.

The Reagan Revolution was underway. The head revolutionary spurred his troops on television, in speeches to joint sessions of Congress, in huddles with key senators and representatives, in trips out into the country. Revolutionary fervor needed a doctrine, and this took the form of the supply-side theory that lowering taxes would produce prosperity by giving producers more capital for production and giving consumers more money for consumption. Savings, investment, and growth would be stimulated, the budget ultimately balanced through growth in the tax base. For all-out supply-siders, these were at the heart of a much wider program, described later by Reagan’s budget chief, David Stockman, as a “whole catalogue of policy changes, ranging from natural gas deregulation, to abolition of the minimum wage, to repeal of milk marketing orders, to elimination of federal certificates of ‘need’ for truckers, hospitals, airlines, and anyone else desiring to commit an act of economic production. It even encompassed reform of the World Bank, and countless more.” All of this was designed to overcome the stagflation of the late 1970s.

Since the House of Representatives had remained in Democratic hands in the 1980 election, it was imperative that the President bring around a large segment of the opposition. In a House vote on his crucial budget bill within four months of his inauguration, sixty-three Democrats—over a quarter of the Democracy’s House membership—broke ranks to support the Administration. Many of these were from the South and West—an exciting hint of the possibilities of a future party realignment. No President since Roosevelt, Time opined six months after Reagan’s inauguration, had “done so much of such magnitude so quickly to change the economic direction of the nation.”

The euphoria was not for long. During late 1981 and 1982 the economy plunged into recession. Once again the media headlined stories of bank failures, farm closures, bankruptcies, desperate family and individual crises. The jobless rate rose to over 10 percent, the highest since the great depression of the 1930s. The hard facts threw the White House economists and their colleagues outside into disarray. The supply-siders defended themselves with the classic explanation of dogmatists who fail—their program had not been tried hard enough, or long enough, or this or that vital ingredient was missing. Stockman was now mainly concerned that future Reagan budgets would be more and more out of balance in a recession situation. Republican party leaders feared that the GOP would be tagged with another “Hoover depression.”

And Reagan? The President had now fallen into a severe political and intellectual bind. He had not been able to balance the budget—politically he dared not cut Social Security and other major safety-net spendings, viscerally he not only opposed cuts in his planned military buildup but also wanted a huge boost in defense spending. And in the end he still confronted Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill’s power base in the House. Doctrinally he remained absolutely rigid in the face of his failure. Time and again emergency budget meetings in the Oval Office were trivialized as the President retreated into anecdotage about timeserving bureaucrats or wasteful projects. Stockman noted that when Pete Domenici, a Republican senator friendly to the White House, confronted Reagan with the need to raise taxes, the President jotted down notes during the presentation but only in order to rebut it.

“Damn it, Pete,” he said, “I’m just not going to accept this. This is just more of the same kind of talk we’ve heard for forty years.”

It became clear during that first year that Reagan the campaign and electoral strategist was a different man from Reagan the head of government. The grand coalition builder, who had spoken from the stump in pieties and platitudes that united people, now proved himself unable to think in terms of the hard policies and priorities that linked the overall values to day-to-day governmental choices and operations. Stockman complained of Reagan’s habit of castigating spending in the abstract while he shrank from the “real bullets” he would have to face politically if he took on the welfare state’s gigantic entitlement programs. Few in the White House pressed their chief to make fundamental strategic choices; rather they echoed his dogmatics or lobbied for some pet solution of their own. As Ralph Nader noted in a preface to a study of “Reagan’s ruling class,” the people around the President showed a remarkable sameness of “attitudes, ideologies, and even styles of thinking and explaining.” Not for Reagan was FDR’s penchant for peopling his Administration with challenging intellectual eclectics.

But one grand asset Reagan retained—political luck. The recession came early enough for some Reaganites to blame it on the lingering effects of Carter policies, early enough too for the White House to wait it out and hope for recovery by election time. The very spending that Reagan condemned in principle while authorizing in practice, combined with such anti-inflationary developments as an oil price decline over which the White House had little control, brought a strong recovery. Although large pockets of poverty and unemployment persisted, the recovery remained vigorous enough to project Reagan toward his massive reelection triumph of 1984. It was hard enough for Walter Mondale, leading a divided, irresolute party, to take on an incumbent whose personal popularity remained high, who had managed to maintain his electoral coalition despite sporadic complaints from both movement conservatives like Viguerie and liberal and moderate Republicans in the Senate. But former Vice President Mondale, forced to share some of the blame for failed Carter economic policies, also faced a Republican Santa Claus who continued to disperse federal money to thousands of vested interests and welfare projects even while preaching economy and thrift and budget balancing. He faced a chameleon who alternated between attacking government and exploiting his government. It was no contest from the start.

Reagan’s big reelection set the stage for a major piece of unfinished domestic business, tax reform. For some time the Administration had been tracking proposals by Republican congressman Jack Kemp, an early booster of supply-side economics, for further cuts in personal rates, and by two Democrats, Senator Bill Bradley and Congressman Richard Gephardt, for lower rates combined with a slash in deductions. The President virtually stole the issue from the Democrats during the 1984 campaign and made it his own. A few months later, in his State of the Union address to Congress, he made tax reform the central domestic initiative of his second term. “Let us move together with an historic reform of tax simplification for fairness and growth,” he proclaimed, promising to seek a top rate of no more than 35 percent. Evidently having taken to heart the lessons of his first-term setbacks, Reagan showed a good deal of flexibility in bargaining with congressional leaders and factions over the specifics of his tax proposal.

Again and again the Administration measure seemed to die on Capitol Hill, only to be resurrected by a President absolutely committed to tax reform and ever ready to make political forays out into the country to channel public pressure toward Congress. White House leadership was crucial; while three-quarters of Americans in a poll favored a simplified tax system and almost three-fifths considered the existing system unfair, they listed the tax system fifth in importance among economic problems, behind the deficit, unemployment, interest rates, and inflation. The Administration had to fight off lobbyists who put heavy pressure on legislators. The bill curtailed consumer interest deductions, and she had a Chrysler plant in her district, a congresswoman said. She thought she should vote no, but “I couldn’t do it.”

Reaganites were proud that they had overcome “Lame-Duck-Itis,” as they felicitously called it. Historically, however, the problem of the presidential lame duck was less the second term than the second two years in each term, following the congressional midterm elections.

It was clear even as Reagan took command of tax policy that he must share leadership with committee chieftains and party lieutenants in Congress, which retained its constitutional authority over revenue measures. In foreign policy, on the other hand, the Chief Executive had held the dominant role both under the Constitution and by custom. If many conservatives had been sorely disappointed by Reagan’s compromises over taxation and domestic policies, hawkish right-wingers had been entranced by his fulminations against communism. Rhetorically, at least, he had entered the White House as the most bellicose peacetime President since Theodore Roosevelt. While TR had tended to strike out in all directions, however, Reagan had eyed the reds with the steely hostility of a frontiersman targeting a band of Indians.

Reagan’s anticommunist rhetoric had long been unbridled. He wrote in a 1968 volume: “We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars.” Junior-partner communists were just as bad: the North Vietnamese, of course controlled by Moscow, were “hard-core, hard-nosed, vicious Communists” who were going to “fudge, cheat and steal every chance they get.” Americans should have stayed in both Korea and Vietnam, gone all out, and won. Reagan liked to talk about Lenin’s “plan” to “take Eastern Europe,” organize the “hordes of Asia,” about Lenin’s “prediction” that eventually the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, would “fall into our outstretched hand like overripe fruit.” For some hawks it was as rousing as a Hollywood scenario. Would Ronald Reagan ride to the rescue?

Many Americans were apprehensive when this fire-breather entered the White House, but experienced President watchers professed not to be worried. The reins of power, they said reassuringly, would tame the rider. It was one thing to rant outside the While House, something else to handle the perplexing everyday questions that took on all the grayish hues between black and white. Wait until he had to consult with heads of state, foreign envoys, wait until he had to read cables bristling with the endless complexities of real-life international politics. After all, hadn’t Teddy Roosevelt in the White House become a conciliator, mediating the Russo-Japanese War and even winning the Nobel Peace Prize?

For a time the new President did indeed moderate his oratory. He preached peace sermons, called the nuclear threat “a terrible beast” before the West German Bundestag, told the British Parliament that nuclear weapons threatened, “if not the extinction of mankind, then surely the end of civilization as we know it.” Hedrick Smith of The New York Times and other journalists wondered whether he was deserting his sharply ideological, anti-détente rhetoric for a more moderate, centrist foreign policy. Soon, however, the President returned to his rhetorical battles, like an old soldier pulling his saber down from over the fireplace. In a March 1983 speech to Christian evangelists in Florida, he labeled the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” called totalitarian states the focus of wickedness in the modern world, and warned that America’s struggle with communist Russia was a struggle between right and wrong. “Adopting a perspective very similar to John Foster Dulles in the fifties,” Betty Glad wrote, “Reagan has not changed,” even though technological and political change had undermined the old assumptions of a Pax Americana.

Was it perplexing that this genial, charming, worldly septuagenarian could label as diabolical the creed of a large portion of humankind, that he sounded like the Ayatollah Khomeini when the Iranian revolutionary castigated the United States as “the great Satan”? Not if one kept in mind the old actor’s love for white hat--black hat scenarios, his authentic fears that the communists might stamp out the kind of individualism he had absorbed in Dixon, Illinois, or—in the view of some biographers—his displacement of earlier insecurities and embarrassments, such as his father’s alcoholism, onto the treacherous world outside.

But the main reason for Reagan’s bellicose rhetoric may have been much simpler. He did not really mean it—mean it in the sense of converting ideology into action against powerful opponents. In divorcing his foreign policy from his rhetoric he was carrying to the extreme the tendency of recent American leaders to enunciate vague and lofty values without reducing them to operating principles, policy choices, clear priorities. Reagan’s 1988 summit with Gorbachev typified the President’s bent for high rhetoric—now friendly, now hostile to the Kremlin—that had little relation to the skimpy policy results of the meeting.

It took anticommunist hawks a long time to recognize Reagan’s separation of rhetoric and reality, in part because he gave them occasional swigs from the heady old ideological bottle, in part because Carter had moved so far toward an aggressive anti-Moscow posture after 1979 that his successor could offer no sharp break in policy even had he wished to. By the end of his first term, however, the anticommunist true believers were expressing keen disillusionment. Why did a President who attacked the “evil empire” lift the grain embargo that was destabilizing the Soviet economy? When the Polish authorities declared martial law and cracked down on the Solidarity movement, why did not Washington bring the crisis to a boil by declaring Poland in default for failure to pay interest on its debts to Western banks? Why not step up support for “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan and Angola? Why not do more for the Nicaraguan Contras despite the Boland Amendment? Why perpetuate the Democrats’ abandonment of Taiwan, even if Peking was a counterweight to Moscow? In the Persian Gulf, why put America’s commercial concerns about oil so far ahead of anti-Soviet militance? In Europe, why not try harder to stop the Western subsidy of an oil pipeline that would help the Soviet export economy? Could George Will’s quip be true—that the Administration loved commerce more than it loathed communism?

Still, Reagan largely held the support of far-rightists even as they grumbled. His huge reelection sweep was a tribute to his continued coalition-building skills. To be sure, some in the extreme right sat on their hands, but they had no other place to go: the ballot offered no Strom Thurmond, no George Wallace, for whom they could vote in indignation. And certainly Reagan was better than Carter, better even than Nixon. The hardest test of loyalty came after the Iran-Contra revelation late in 1986. While many conservative Republican politicians recoiled in dismay, it was the movement conservatives who rallied to their leader’s support.

The Iran-Contra hearings dramatized the price of stances not converted into operating policies. Bizarre initiatives, fouled-up communication, cowboy-style forays, even a little private enterprise for profit, were the colorful parts of the story. But behind it all was a lack of clear guidelines from the White House, even more a lack of knowledge in the Oval Office. The whole affair was a caricature of the incoherence and inconsistency that characterized the Reagan Administration in foreign policy. After eighteen months Alexander Haig had quit as Secretary of State in part because he could not deal with the protective cordon around Reagan, in larger part because he felt unable to “restore unity and coherence” to foreign policy. These qualities continued to elude the Reagan White House—and all the more as it moved into lame-duck status.

The Structure of Disarray

“The true Reagan Revolution never had a chance,” wrote David Stockman as he reviewed his White House years. “It defied all of the overwhelming forces, interests, and impulses of American democracy. Our Madisonian government of checks and balances, three branches, two legislative houses, and infinitely splintered power is conservative, not radical. It hugs powerfully to the history behind it. It shuffles into the future one step at a time. It cannot leap into revolutions without falling flat on its face.”

Stockman had come belatedly to a revelation that had struck many of his fellow practitioners years before. During the Carter presidency, several score former senators, cabinet officers, governors, mayors, women activists, as well as scholars, journalists, and lawyers, had begun meeting from month to month only a few blocks from the White House to assess the health of the American political system. The frustrations and deadlocks that most of these politicians and administrators encountered in merely trying to make the government work rivaled Stockman’s more ideological disappointments. Early in 1987, even before the full import of the Iran-Contra scandals was known, this group made public its bleak diagnosis of the present condition and future prospects of the American political system.

As befitted its name—Committee on the Constitutional System—the group concentrated on structural and institutional disorders. In the bicentennial year of 1987 it found serious strains and tensions in the nation’s governing processes. The committee pointed to the huge, “unsustainable deficits” that defied the good intentions of legislators and President. It pointed to foreign and national security programs, where focus and consistency were frustrated “by an institutional contest of wills between Presidents and shifting, cross-party coalitions within the Congress.” It pointed to presidential-Senate conflict over treaty-making. Over forty pacts submitted to the Senate for ratification since World War II either had been rejected or had never even come to a vote. Among those not voted on were SALT II, treaties on underground nuclear tests, several human rights conventions, and a variety of trade, tax, and environmental pacts. Just as the President’s threat of veto often chilled measures in Congress, so the Senate’s threat of inaction or negative action could freeze the ratification process.

Other monitors found the disarray outside the constitutional system even more serious than the delay and deadlock within it. They pointed to the falling-off of voter turnout at almost all levels of government, reflecting widespread apathy toward matters political and pervasive distrust of government, which was also indicated in poll after poll. They deplored the dominance of media and personality politics, the power of interest-group politics coupled with the decline of parties, the huge and ever-rising costs of running for office, the endless campaigns that maximized problems of campaign finance while boring the public. Critics noted the hypertrophy of some organs of government in the midst of the weakness and disarray— the rise of the “imperial presidency” and of the equally imperial judiciary.

The 1987 monitors willy-nilly had joined one of the country’s oldest vocations—criticizing the system. The Framers’ failure in 1787 to add a Bill of Rights had left hundreds of state and local leaders suspicious of the new constitution. The most striking turnabout on the Constitution was conducted by some of the leading Framers when they had to run the government they had planned. After all their denunciations of “party spirit” and their careful engineering of a system of checks and balances designed to thwart popular majorities, Hamilton and Madison and their allies in the 1790s fashioned and captained party factions in Congress and the Administration that unified government to a degree.

During the early 1800s abolitionists attacked the Constitution for countenancing slavery and women leaders condemned it for failing to grant their sex voting and other rights. Southerners flailed it for encouraging centralizing tendencies in the national government, tendencies legitimated by the decisions of Chief Justice John Marshall and his nationalist brethren in cases striking down state interferences with national economic power. The victory of the North in the Civil War and the passage of the Reconstruction amendments consolidated national—and for several decades Republican—predominance in the constitutional system. Early in the new century, as progressives and radicals assessed the suffering and wastage caused by a virtually unregulated system of private enterprise, the Constitution came under attack as a conservative and elitist frame of government still designed to thwart the aspirations of the masses of people.

Progressives during the Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson eras managed to democratize the Constitution. Under the Seventeenth Amendment all United States senators would be directly elected by the voters rather than by state legislatures. Many states adopted the initiative, referendum, and recall. Under their own indomitable leadership, women won the right to vote in national elections. Political parties were “purified” and “democratized” by the adoption of reform measures substituting party primaries for nominating conventions, establishing nonpartisan elections in many cities and even states, and eliminating straight-ticket voting that had encouraged less informed voters to ballot for the whole party slate with one check mark. Progressive-era democratization turned out to be a largely middle-class effort whose main result was not purifying politics but curbing the impact of party leadership and party policy on government. Since political parties were often the only “lobby” or “interest group” that low-income workers, immigrants, blacks, domestics, the jobless, the very young, and the very old possessed, the decline of party meant a major alteration in the foundations of government power.

For a century and a half the constitutional frame of the government remained intact, like some grand old pyramid towering serenely over the desert storms. It was a tribute to the wisdom of the builders of 1787 that their edifice, despite wear here and erosion there, carried on its main role of institutionalizing the checks and balances among President, two houses of Congress, and the judiciary. In a century when a number of upper houses were abolished or defanged in other Western democracies, the American Senate retained its panoply of powers. The absolute veto of House and Senate on each other remained, as did the qualified vetoes of President and Congress on each other. A Rip Van Winkle returning to Washington a century after the Capitol was built and proceeding from the White House along Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill, would have found the same several branches, separated from one another, everything quite in place, just as the Framers had wanted.

Within this structure, however, powers shifted, processes changed, with the ebb and flow of political combat. The presidency had assumed far more massive power than the Framers could have dreamed—and yet had lost control of large sections of the executive branch when regulatory commissions, the Federal Reserve Board, bureaus supported in Congress and the country by special interests, were cut off from supervision by even the most vigilant of Presidents. Even within the Executive Office itself, the President’s control was not absolute, as the Iran-Contra revelations disclosed. The Senate held a veto on the rest of the government but still was subject to internal veto by a few determined filibusterers. The House of Representatives, once a relatively disciplined body under Speakers called “czars,” was fragmented by party factions, committee and subcommittee chairpersons, activist staffs, and interest groups and their lobbyists.

Save in war, the Framers’ fundamental strategy of government was not harshly tested until the depression years, when the public demanded that the government act. So effective was FDR’s masterful combination of moral leadership, indefatigable horse trading, and delicate manipulation that the failure of the New Dealers to end unemployment and rural and urban poverty was not fully recognized. It was only after World War II, when analysts compared the limited economic success of the New Deal with the massive wartime improvement in employment, wages, public housing, nutrition, that scholars and practitioners proposed changes to strengthen the institutional linkages between President and Congress: simultaneous election of President and all legislators; a joint executive and legislative cabinet to set policy; a broadening of the impeachment power; Senate ratification of treaties by majority rather than two-thirds vote.

Two hundred years earlier the Founding Fathers had not only framed proposals far more bold and sweeping than these; they had written them into a constitution and then prevailed on suspicious but open-minded grass-roots leaders to adopt them. Politicians, scholars, and journalists largely ignored the proposals of the mid-twentieth century “re-framers” or greeted them with hostility and ridicule.

But some critics responded to would-be reformers with analysis rather than anger, challenging the reformers’ basic assumption that constitutional checks and balances impeded good government. “There are two fundamental arguments for a constitutional system of separate institutions sharing powers: It helps preserve liberty and it slows the pace of political change,” wrote political scientist James Q. Wilson. “Those arguments are as valid today as they were in 1787.” The interplay of conflicting leaders might bring slower, more incremental progress, but it would be safer and sounder.

Was there a better way—some means of shaping a more unified, effective, and responsible government that would not open the Pandora’s box of constitutional alteration? A group of political scientists, meeting in the late 1940s, had urged in effect that Americans return to the party system that the “party framers”—not only Madison and Hamilton but Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren, and later the great Republican party leaders—had shaped in the century after the founding. Their report, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” proposed some significant institutional changes: stronger national party organization in the form of a top governing council of fifty party and electoral leaders; a biennial national convention; a more representative national committee and more cohesive and disciplined House and Senate parties based on a combination of stronger leadership and democratic decision making by caucuses.

These party proposals met much the same response as had schemes for constitutional modernization: hostility, derision, inattention, along with some scholarly analysis. While the report had some impact on the thinking of journalists, it largely lay neglected both by politicians and by academics. Proposals for party change during the 1960s and 1970s took an entirely different direction: proportional representation of women, young people, and minorities in the selection of Democratic party convention delegates and other devices to “democratize” the Democracy, in the spirit of party reform.

Was it possible to have both strong parties and democratic parties? A number of state Democratic parties, such as those in Iowa, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, combined participatory, caucus-based local structures with good organization and leadership at the state level. Nationally the Republicans liberalized a bit some internal party processes and urged state parties to bring in more women, minority persons, the old and the young, and “heritage groups.” The GOP also modernized its fund-raising and promotional activities, which helped bring the Republicans their stunning presidential victories of 1980 and 1984.

For some years “constitution modernizers” and “party renewers” pursued their separate paths. Each group in its own way sought to outwit the Framers—to pull together the government branches that the Constitution put asunder. The modernizers would do so by modifying the constitutional checks and balances, the renewers by building party ties that would bind President and Congress, House and Senate, despite the checks and balances. Party renewers contended that constitutional modernization, desirable though it might be, would never occur because the American people would oppose any major tampering with the sacred document. Constitution modernizers replied that strong enough party bridges could never be built over the wide constitutional chasms that separated legislators and executives.

During the 1980s the two groups bridged their own chasm to a considerable degree. Constitution modernizers recognized that they could not outwit the Framers unless they used the Framers’ own strategy. If the essence of the checks and balances was to seat President, senators, and representatives in separate and rival constituencies, then the antidote was to build a nationwide two-party constituency so that the leaders of the winning party could govern with the support of their partisans across the nation. If conflict among branches of the government could be transformed into conflict between a government party and a “loyal opposition” party, the former could expect to have considerable control over policy, at least until the next presidential election.

Party renewers, for their part, came increasingly to recognize that the two major parties had become so infirm that they could never revive on their own, even to the level of strength they had enjoyed in the nineteenth century. Present-day parties needed artificial stimulation—and if institutional checks and balances had tended to fragment the parties, then knitting the government together organizationally or structurally might in turn unify the parties.

After many a summit conference, constitution and party renewers agreed on a “minimal” program: granting representatives four-year terms concurrent with the presidential, thus abolishing the “unrepresentative” midterm election; granting senators eight-year concurrent terms so that President, representatives, and senators would take office together and thus provide the basis for teamwork; permitting members of Congress to sit in the cabinet without giving up their congressional seats; replacing the two-thirds treaty requirement in the Senate with a simple majority-rule requirement in both chambers; broadening the impeachment power so that Presidents could be removed not only for malfeasance but also for losing the confidence of both parties in Congress and in the nation; strengthening national parties, especially in their opposition role; and, perhaps most important of all, establishing the foundations of party leadership unity at the grass roots by allowing voters to choose between party slates for federal offices and “vote the party ticket.”

The American people as a whole were supremely uninterested in these proposals. Most leaders, having risen to office under the existing system, were reluctant to junk it. Bold thinking about radical institutional reform was as rare in the 1980s as it had been rife in the 1780s. Two hundred years later it was still hard to outthink or outperform the Framers.

As the last barrage of star bombs lighted up the Philadelphia skies in September 1987, Americans concluded months of unbridled constitution worship during that bicentennial year. It was clear that they honored the Founding Fathers in every regard—with one exception. They were in no mood to emulate the Framers’ willingness to stand back from the existing constitution in 1787—the Articles of Confederation—and not only criticize but alter and in the end abolish it. During the flush times of the late 1980s Americans would only celebrate the Constitution, not criticize or even cerebrate about it.

The reason was not only Constitution worship. Americans had an instinctive feeling, buttressed by years of surviving crises, that in a pinch their ultimate safeguard lay not in constitutions and parties but in the President. It was to the White House that they had turned for reassurance, inspiration, consolation, explanation, drama. FDR’s forthright actions during the Hundred Days of 1933, his later responses to the Allies’ need for war aid, Truman’s quick action after war broke out in Korea, Kennedy’s mobilization of the whole executive branch to force Big Steel to roll back a price increase—these and countless other incidents fed the image of the President as western sheriff riding to the rescue.

Why go through the painful effort of changing the system when the law-and-order men were so easily available? But did the lawmen truly stand for law and order? Watergate, of course, revealed the opposite, but the cast of characters seemed so bizarre that defenders of the presidency could dismiss it as an aberration. Washington insiders knew of myriad other White House misadventures and cover-ups, but it remained for the Iran-Contra revelations to dramatize the extent to which the President—and hence the people—had lost control of the presidency.

The popular idea of presidential abuse of power was of a Nixon or Johnson seeking to seize control, but their reasons for power grabs may have lain more in presidential frustration than in presidential feistiness. In many cases, the White House acted because the system as a whole seemed paralyzed in the face of crisis, whether depression, Nazi aggression, civil rights violations, the “communist menace,” or hostage seizures. Under such pressure the White House could become a “rogue presidency”—an unsaddled beast, unable to control itself, on the rampage through the wilderness of the American political system. Iran-Contra and all the other excesses and usurpations demonstrated that this beast might be too hard to tame, too dangerous to ride.

Hence Americans had come to rely on the judiciary both to tame the presidency and to take leadership on its own. With neither the Congress nor the President able or willing to act on civil rights, the Supreme Court had moved into the vacuum, most notably with its epochal Brown decision of 1954. Since that time—and even after LBJ and his Democratic Congress put through the great civil rights measures of 1964 and 1965—the Court had continued to make policy in the most sensitive areas: First Amendment liberties, women’s rights, the environment, affirmative action, criminal procedure, privacy.

The resurgence of the “imperial judiciary,” of “government by judiciary,” of the Supreme Court as super-legislature, intensified a debate that had proceeded off and on ever since John Marshall’s assertion of judicial power in 1803. During Marshall’s leadership of the Court, champions of states’ rights denounced its nationalizing thrust and its government by judiciary. They complained less of judicial power, and antislavery leaders complained more, with the arrival of the Taney Court and the enunciation of Dred Scott in 1857, in which the Court for the first time vetoed a major substantive act of Congress. The course of the debate over the next century demonstrated that in judicial politics as much as legislative and electoral, much depended on whose ox was gored.

The quickest flip-flop occurred during the 1930s and 1940s. As the High Court dismantled part of the New Deal in 1935 and 1936, New Dealers denounced the “nine old men” and their power, while conservatives toasted “judicial independence.” Within a decade or two the right was denouncing the “Roosevelt Court” and its reach, while liberals exulted in the Court’s upholding of New Deal and Fair Deal measures and their implementation—and welcomed especially its intrusion into desegregation and other civil rights areas. The stakes in this legal, political, and ideological battle became much higher as the judiciary moved into wider and wider policy fields and as claimants turned to the courts for relief because they could not win action from the legislative and executive branches.

It was clear that conservatives would have to wait for another shift of the party pendulum before they could hope for a switch in Supreme Court philosophy. Eisenhower had not been much help with his appointment of Earl Warren as chief justice—a choice the President later called his biggest mistake—but Ike after all was a moderate Republican in rightists’ eyes, and hence prone to errors of this sort. With Nixon’s election in 1968 and reelection in 1972, conservatives could hope for a return to judicial sanity after the excesses of Warren and his brethren. And Nixon came through with the appointments of two dependably conservative jurists in William H. Rehnquist and, above all, Warren E. Burger, whom he named chief justice in 1969 after Warren’s resignation. At last the Court would be following the election returns.

But it was not all that simple. For one thing, the Burger Court harbored several holdovers from previous Administrations, including the leader of the liberal faction, William L. Brennan—another Eisenhower appointee— and Thurgood Marshall. No judge worthy of presidential appointment and Senate confirmation, moreover, was likely to tread a narrow ideological line, whatever his background. Once faced with concrete cases, the justices were constrained by constitutional heritage, judicial precedent, decisions of lower courts coming up on appeal, the exchanges in their own semi-weekly conferences, the attitudes of their clerks fresh out of law school, and above all by the complexity and intractability of cases before them. Nixon’s two other appointees showed the influence of office: Lewis F. Powell proved a consummate centrist, becoming in the later years of the Burger Court a crucial and unpredictable swing vote in close decisions, and Harry A. Blackmun often joined the liberals, casting the deciding vote—and writing the opinion—in Roe v. Wade.

So the Burger Court brought no judicial counterrevolution. Rather it followed a meandering middle way as it mediated among issues. Thus on school desegregation the High Court in 1973 held that the Denver school board had practiced a policy of segregation in choosing sites for school buildings and in its pupil transfer plans, but the Court reflected widespread public opposition to busing when in 1974 it rejected a broad plan to integrate the overwhelmingly black school systems of metropolitan Detroit with fifty-three overwhelmingly white suburban school districts, and in 1976 vetoed a federal district court’s plan for Pasadena that barred any school from having a majority of black students. In a 1978 case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Burger Court struck down a medical school quota system that allotted a fixed number of admissions for minority applicants. Applying the Fourteenth Amendment in this first great test of “reverse discrimination,” the Court held that Allan Bakke, a white applicant whose test scores were superior to those of some of the minority applicants accepted by the medical school, had been denied his right to equal protection. But while disapproving the school’s “explicit racial classification” and its fixed quotas, the Court acknowledged that the State had “a legitimate and substantial interest” in ameliorating or eliminating “the disabling effects of identified discrimination.” In the thorny field of discrimination against women the Court generally was protective of women’s rights in specific cases but refused to adopt a rigorous test that would deem gender classification, like racial classification, as inherently suspect, unless it served an overriding State interest.

Expected to offer a consistently law-and-order interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, the High Court cautiously picked its way between upholding and vetoing state law-enforcement procedures. The Court, perhaps recognizing that for millions of American commuters their car as well as their home was now their castle, threaded an especially narrow course on searches of vehicles. “While the justices gave state police broad latitude to conduct auto searches,” students of the Court wrote, “they prohibited warrantless interrogation of motorists to check driver’s licenses and registrations without probable cause suggesting possible criminal activity. If the Burger Court permitted police to search the passenger compartment of a car stopped for a traffic violation and to seize evidence subsequently used to prosecute for violation of narcotics laws, it also prohibited the search of a vehicle’s luggage compartment.” Between the back seat and the luggage compartment lay a narrow line indeed.

In other areas the Burger Court also took a mixed position. On protection against self-incrimination, it continued the Warren Court’s Miranda doctrine but refused to broaden it. Its ruling in Roe v. Wade was a victory for women’s rights, but the Court afterward sustained denials of public funding for abortions. It protected or even enlarged free speech in some cases but narrowed it in others, as in cases of pornography or of leafleting or picketing in privately owned shopping malls.

Rejecting such eclecticism, the Republican right greeted with new hope Burger’s decision to quit the Court in 1985 to head the nation’s official bicentennial commission, and with even greater hope Reagan’s elevation of Rehnquist to Burger’s seat and his choice of two associate justices with impeccable conservative credentials. A minor consequence of conservative satisfaction was that the broad issue of the Court’s power to invalidate laws on a variety of grounds—one of the most important and potentially explosive issues of American democracy—was hardly touched upon during the cerebrations of the 1987 bicentennial. Instead, oceans of ink and flights of oratory were devoted to a lesser though equally fascinating question, original intent.

This question was propelled into the forensic arena when Reagan’s Attorney General, Edwin Meese III, calling for a “Jurisprudence of Original Intention,” intimated that his chief would pick only judges whose applications of the Constitution would reflect the intentions of the Framers. Law school professors, historians, political scientists, and Supreme Court justices pounced on this dubious notion, proved conclusively that it was wrong historically—and then wondered whether they had won a glorious intellectual victory on a side issue. The scenario was repeated when Reagan proposed Robert H. Bork for the High Court—the Senate foes won the debate over original intent, handily vetoed Bork, but were left with a Pyrrhic victory after the President found an almost equally conservative substitute.

The central issue of judicial power was also one of intellectual leadership. In their meandering course, the Burger Court, and for a time at least the Rehnquist Court, appeared deceptively eclectic, moderate, practical. But that course concealed a lack of jurisprudential and philosophical coherence in the very heart and brain of the federal judiciary. At best the Reagan Court was marking time; at worst it was losing time, failing to develop clear and consistent operational standards related to the nation’s values, storing up trouble for the future, its incoherence rivaling what the Iran-Contra hearings revealed in the presidency, and with perhaps equally grave consequences.

In the late 1980s the structure of government remained intact, the balances in the old clock still operating, the springs and levers still in place. A Republican President and a Democratic Congress nicely checked each other; House and Senate held an absolute veto power over each other; the Supreme Court had an all but final veto over the two political branches. Inside these separated institutions lay political and intellectual conflicts that contained the seeds of enormous change and potential crisis.

Realignment?: Waiting for Lefty

For a century and a half the two main parties had proceeded down the political mainstream, rolling along with the inevitability of the Mississippi. But just as storm and flood had periodically roiled the placid waters of that river of American history, so political movements and ideological tempests had disrupted the steady flow of two-party politics. And American politicians, like the people living along the riverbank, knew that the flood would come again—but they did not know when.

Social protests and political movements had risen and fallen with some regularity over time. Before the Civil War abolitionism had challenged both Democrats and Whigs and the easy accommodations they had made with slavery. In the 1890s aroused agrarians had moved into the Democratic party, even wresting the presidential nomination from the centrist Clevelandites. In the 1930s several streams of protest had coalesced as desperate farmers, urban reformers, western progressives had taken a dominant role in the Democracy. In the 1970s and 1980s conservatives of varied stripes had merged with Republican party regulars to put Ronald Reagan into office and keep him there.

These movements might appear to have erupted with the suddenness of a spring freshet and then subsided as quickly. Each protest, in fact, had sources deep within the politics and morality of its period. Outrage over slavery had aroused the consciences of men and women in both the Democratic and Whig parties, triggered third-party forays such as that of the Liberty party, cut deep divisions not only between parties and between major interests but within them, and convulsed the entire political system by the 1860s. The lightninglike capture of the Democratic party by the Bryanites in 1896 was the product of years of intense agrarian unrest, western greenback and silver movements, organizational efforts by the Farmers’ Alliance leaders and rank and file, years of populist agitation, the devastatingly low farm prices and other hard times of the nineties. Fighting Bob La Follette’s Progressive party of 1924 and Al Smith’s presidential candidacy of 1928, followed by the farm movements of the great depression, helped pave the way for Roosevelt’s presidency and for the New Deal expansion of both the political appeal and the social philosophy of the Democracy. And on the American right both economic and evangelical leaders had fought a long battle, first winning and then losing with Gold-water in 1964, flirting with George Wallace and other elements North and South hostile to civil rights, and losing once again with Reagan in the GOP nomination fight of 1976, before achieving their breakthrough in the 1980s.

Thus movement politics had collided and combined with party politics throughout American history. Like their counterparts in other countries, American social protest movements were unruly, untidy, and unpredictable in effect, but they displayed continuities and similarities in their very dynamics. The pattern was clear, even dramatic: these movements emerged out of economic stress and social tension and erupted in conflict, often violent. After a time they dominated political debate, overshadowed more traditional issues, cut across existing lines of party cleavage, polarized groups and parties. The immediate test of success was whether the movement could force one major party or both of them to embrace its cause. The test of long-run success was whether the movement left the whole party system altered and, even more, left the political landscape transformed.

The great transformations that had occurred, in the antecedents of such critical elections as those of 1860 and 1896, and the series from 1928 to 1936, have been studied in great detail by exceptionally able historians and political scientists. The main interest was usually in the rise and fall of parties, since their fate in elections could be so easily measured. But party change contained a paradox—despite all the turmoil the nation had undergone, the Democratic party had existed ever since the 1830s and the Republican party since the 1850s. These staid old parties had entered and left office like Box and Cox but had continued to move down the political mainstream, capsizing and sinking third parties in the process.

Hence on closer inspection, the critical question was not so much party realignment as party reconstitution. The most significant case of this kind of change in the twentieth century was the shift of the Democratic party under Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson. Behind FDR’s leadership the Democracy became much more of an urban, trade union, ethnic, and poor people’s party, but—partly because of Roosevelt’s need of support from internationalists of all stripes during the war years—it retained its old and solid base in the white South. Truman’s bold civil rights stance, Kennedy’s Catholicism and growing commitment to civil rights, and LBJ’s comprehensive civil rights program accelerated the reconstitution of the party. Blacks forsook their ancient allegiance to the Republican party of Lincoln and flocked to the Democracy; white southern Democrats forsook the party of Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson to move first toward third-party ventures and then toward their old partisan adversaries, the Republicans.

For Southerners, switching parties was not easy. Their leaders in particular were “in a bind with the national Democratic party,” as Republican Representative Trent Lott of Mississippi noted. “If they subscribe to the national Democrat party’s principles, platform, they are clearly going to alienate the overwhelming majority of the white people in Mississippi.” If they stayed with the national party’s base, “they wind up with blacks and labor and your more liberal, social-oriented” Democrats. “Put those groups together and they are a minority in Mississippi.” So Republican party leaders were ready at the front gate to welcome the Southerners. The Goldwater-Reagan party, having ousted the liberal Rockefeller wing, was prepared to usher southern ex-Democratic leaders into the inner councils of the purified GOP. Congressional converts like South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond were soon making Republican party policy, and convert John Connally of Texas even ran for the Republican presidential nomination.

The test of this reconstitution lay in the political grass roots of the South, and here the shift was dramatic. The percentage of white Southerners identifying themselves as Republicans rose eight points between 1979 and 1984 and then jumped an astonishing ten points further the following year, a movement which public-opinion analyst Everett Carll Ladd saw as “an almost unprecedentedly rapid shift in underlying party loyalties across a large and diverse social group.”

By the late 1980s the Republican party had reconstituted itself as the clearly conservative party of the nation. Ronald Reagan presided as a conservative; all the Republican presidential aspirants of 1988 endorsed his Administration and bore, in one way or another, the Reagan stamp. Reagan Republicans had conducted “half a realignment,” in popular terms. They posed a challenge that the Democratic party leadership was failing to meet as the 1988 election approached.

That challenge was as much philosophical and ideological as political and electoral. The GOP’s rightward tack appeared to leave a huge unoccupied space in the middle of the political spectrum. To all the Democratic presidential aspirants save Jesse Jackson this space was an enticement. How logical it appeared for Democrats to shift some of their appeal to the center while holding their traditional support on the left, and forge a moderate-centrist-liberal coalition much like the winning North-South alliance the national Democracy had maintained for decades before that strategy crumbled in the face of the black revolt. But in a battle against conservative Republicans, they could not talk centrism without being accused of the sin of “me-tooism.” And me-tooism was hardly the answer to the Democratic dilemma. “If American voters are in a conservative mood,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, “they will surely choose the real thing and not a Democratic imitation.”

So what the Democrats talked was not conservatism or even centrism but pragmatism. The American Enterprise Institute political analyst William Schneider, after sitting in on a 1986 board meeting of a candidate’s think tank—it happened to be Gary Hart’s—noted that certain words kept coming up: parameter, interactive, consensus, instrumental, modernize, transition, dialogue, strategic, agenda, investment, decentralize, empowering, initiative, and entrepreneur. But the word of the day, he noted, was pragmatic. “Be pragmatic in all things,” the group seemed to be saying. “Be not ideological.” The Democrats’ selection of Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis as their presidential nominee in 1988, and his choice in turn of Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate, met this test.

What did they mean by pragmatism? Whether the candidates used the term or not, it was clear they meant what was practical, realistic, sensible— what worked. But what was the test of workability? By what values was workability measured? Into this forbidding “ideological” land the candidates were reluctant to venture.

What politicians mean by workability is usually what promotes their immediate candidacies, rather than an ultimate cause or creed. Thus was pragmatism degraded into the most self-serving kind of doctrine, a pragmatism that would not have recognized its intellectual ancestry. Indeed, presidential candidates in the 1980s, especially the Democrats, were embracing their brand of pragmatism so enthusiastically as to make it into a doctrine, even an ideology—anathema to Charles Peirce and John Dewey.

To a degree, pragmatism was a convenient way to avoid labeling. Did it conceal an agenda? “Pragmatic,” Schneider noted, had become “this season’s Democratic code word of choice for market-oriented, rather than government-oriented, solutions.” For most of the Democratic candidates, it seemed, pragmatism meant some form of market capitalism. Then how much of an ideological gap separated them from Reaganism? The leaders of the Democratic liberal-left answered “too little” and proposed a clearly contrasting alternative.

That alternative was a movement strategy as against a strategy of mainstream and marketplace. It was in key respects an old-fashioned idea: if social protest movements had been vital to the renewal and redirection of political parties in the past, and if the needs and aspirations of large sectors of American society remained unmet, then the Democrats must make their mightiest effort to reach out to movement leaders and rank and file. These, in some combination, were its natural and traditional constituency— women, peace groups, blacks, union labor, small farmers, ethnics, youth, the poor, and the jobless.

However familiar a political alliance this was for the Democrats, the question in the late 1980s was whether the partners—party regulars and movement activists—were ready for one another. The Democratic party leadership hardly appeared ready for bold initiatives. That leadership, indeed, had cut its structural ties with movement activists when, earlier in the 1980s, the Democrats’ regular midterm policy conference had been discontinued. That midterm conference, a grand assembly of both Democratic party regulars and delegates representing women and minority groups, had been noisy, expensive, untidy, unpredictable, sometimes a bit embarrassing. But it had also linked the party establishment to creative and dynamic electoral groups; by abandoning it, the leadership cut off some of its own intellectual and political lifeblood. The presidential aspirants, focusing on their own campaigns, could not be expected to restore the connection. Several of them in fact were founders of the Democratic Leadership Council, a centrist group that made no secret of its intention to rescue the Democracy from control by “extremists” and “ideologues”— the very groups that had lost their footing at the midterm conference. Michael Dukakis, in choosing Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate and shunning liberal-left stands on tough issues like taxes, presented the moderate face of the Democratic party to the nation. In Massachusetts, however, he had won elections in part because of his skill at uniting party regulars with movement activists.

Nationwide the activists for their part had decidedly mixed desires and capacities to marry or remarry the Democratic party. The movements themselves were divided organizationally. Peace activists were morselized into tens of thousands of local groups individually or cooperatively conducting local rallies, demonstrations, and protest action. Women’s groups had the same types of divisions along with a particular inhibiting factor— many women’s organizations, especially the large and influential League of Women Voters, were nonpartisan and hence barred from forming organizational links with the Democrats. Blacks were overwhelmingly Democratic in their voting but proudly separate in most political endeavors. Some activists in all these movements shunned party politics as a matter of principle, on the ground that Democratic party leaders had betrayed, sold out, neglected, forgotten, or otherwise mistreated them over the years. Other movement leaders spurned any kind of conventional politics at all, preferring to put their energies into street activism.

Then there were the “young,” tens of millions of them. It was calculated that by the late 1980s those born from 1946 onward, in the baby boom, would comprise around 60 percent of the electorate. But this was a demographic “cohort,” not a voting bloc. Some had become the yuppies who were distinguished mainly by having no distinctive political attitudes beyond a vague and ineffectual anti-establishmentarianism. Historian Robert McElvaine, however, detected among the immense number of baby-boomers a group that was not upwardly mobile, affluent, or typically professional. “During the 1950s and ’60s, the average American’s inflation-adjusted income increased by 100 per cent between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five,” McElvaine noted. “For those who were twenty-five in 1973, however, their real income had risen by only 16 per cent when they reached thirty-five in 1983.” Because many of these young people had lived the hard-pressed lives about which New Jersey rocker Bruce Springsteen sang, McElvaine called them the “Springsteen Coalition.”

Inspired by childhood memories of King and Kennedy, disillusioned by Watergate and Vietnam and much that followed, these young persons retained both a sense of grievance and a streak of idealism that might surface in their voting in the 1990s. But would they vote? Or would they contribute more than their share to the steadily declining voter turnout of the late twentieth century? The same question could be asked of the protest movements that made up the Democratic party’s natural constituency. Movements that had supplied zest and fresh blood to party politics now appeared passive, dispirited. They were part of the impasse of the system, not solvents of it.

If movements as well as parties were fixed in the immobility of American politics, was it likely that Americans might experience incremental, brokerage politics under transactional leadership for years to come? Or was it possible that they would enter another period of social protest, movement politics, and major party transformation and bring on a critical realignment? The answer would turn on the quality of leadership and the character of its followership.

Neither the movement nor the party leadership of the nation gave much promise in the late 1980s of moving Americans out of their political immobility. Leaders were scarce whose capacities could compare with those of the great leaders of the past—with Dr. Townsend’s skill in mobilizing the elderly in the 1930s, with the kindling power of John L. Lewis or the labor statesmanship of Walter Reuther, with the intellectual and political audacity of the early leaders of the women’s movement, or with the galvanizing power and charisma of King and his fellow protesters. As for the Democratic party, virtually all the candidates for President—even Jesse Jackson—exhibited great skill at working within the system. Few of these “pragmatists” hinted at a potential for transcending the system, mastering it, transforming it if necessary. To be sure, any one of the candidates might display great leadership capacities upon attaining office, as Franklin Roosevelt had done. But FDR had not had to go through the modern presidential recruitment process that tested candidates more for their ability to campaign than for their capacity to govern.

Was there no alternative, then, to politics as usual? One possible development that could “break the system wide open” was an economic catastrophe of the magnitude of the great depression, or at least of a severe recession following a stock market plunge like that of “Black Monday” in October 1987. Some liberals and Democrats were predicting such an event, some even forecast a likely time of onset, but the prospect that the nation had to wait for a catastrophe in order to take actions that might have prevented it seemed as wretched as the notion that the world would have to go through a nuclear crisis before it would take the necessary steps to forestall nuclear war.

Some kind of desperate crisis might be necessary, however, for liberal-left Democrats to employ the most ambitious and radical means of opening up the system, a mobilization of the tens of millions of Americans not participating in electoral politics. By the time of the 1984 election the number of voters, even in the presidential race, where the participation rate was much higher than for lower offices, had fallen spectacularly—to roughly half the potential electorate. Americans, who like to view their country as something of a model of democracy, had the poorest voter-turnout record of all the industrial democracies. Aside from the occasional laments of editorial writers, however, Americans did not appear unduly disturbed by this travesty of democracy.

Democrats on the left had special reasons to be concerned, for the poor, the jobless, and the ethnics were disproportionately absent from the polling place. These no-shows represented a huge array of constituencies that the Democrats were failing to tap. A strenuous effort by a national voter registration group helped persuade some states to relax the registration barriers that had kept some people from voting and to allow the use of government offices as registration places, but even in those states turnout remained low. The root difficulty was that many low-income, less educated nonvoters did not see the point of voting—for them electoral participation in America was a middle-class game which they did not care to join.

It would take rare leadership to overcome their ignorance and alienation, to attract them to the polls, to enable them to vote their deepest, most authentic, and abiding needs. Aside from Jesse Jackson, who demonstrated a remarkable talent for mobilizing low-income blacks and whites in his 1988 presidential primary campaign, this kind of leadership was missing, at least on the left, in the America of the late 1980s. Such leadership could not be manufactured—it emerged out of a people’s heritage, values, aspirations, and took its color and energy from conflict. Great leadership historically had never been possible except in conditions of ideological battle. Such conflict was not in sight in a nation whose liberal leaders, or aspirants to leadership, appeared wholly content with a politics of moderation, centrism, and consensus.

A Rebirth of Leadership?

As the 1988 presidential nominating races got underway more than a year before the first primary, it appeared unlikely that one election could break open the party and the constitutional gridlock that gripped the American political system. From the very start the presidential candidates were entangled in one of the worst leadership recruitment systems in the Western world. The presidential primary not only pitted them against fellow party leaders in endless and acrimonious combat; it forced them to mobilize personal followings that after the combat might persist as dispersive and even destructive forces within the parties and within their Administration. It was not surprising that the governor of a large state, such as New York’s Mario Cuomo, would reject this process whereas fifty-six years earlier Franklin D. Roosevelt had found it possible to perform as governor and to campaign for the presidency in the much less demanding nominating procedure of 1932. How defensible was a selection process that choked off the recruitment of some of the best and busiest leaders?

In other Western democracies the parties served not only as recruiting agencies for leaders but as training grounds for leadership. Party mentors identified, coached, and promoted promising young men and women—sometimes in actual party schools. By and large, the more doctrinal the party, the more effective its recruitment and training programs. It was only when the GOP became a more ideological party that it “engaged in an extensive program of political education for legislative candidates and their managers,” John F. Bibby reported. But this effort was exceptional; in this century American parties have been too flaccid, underfinanced, and fragmented to serve as schools of leadership. Other sectors of American society, among them corporations, the military, and government agencies, taught forms of leadership, but these were specialized programs that served the purposes of the organization rather than the broader needs of the general public.

Typically, Americans were trained to be effective politicians—good brokers, manipulators, money raisers, vote winners. Since the very nature of the governmental system, with its rival branches and complex dispersion of power, put a premium on transactional leadership, American politics offered endless play to lawyers and other negotiators and mediators. The system would long ago have collapsed without their capacity to grease the machinery at the connecting points. But what if the machinery was failing anyway? Appeals for creative, transforming leadership were frequent in the 1980s but vain. Such leadership could not be summoned like spirits from the vasty deep.

When political leaders fail, Americans often turn to the next most available saviors or scapegoats—the educators. The era from Vietnam and Watergate to Iran-Contra generated even more than the usual calls for reforming or revolutionizing the nation’s secondary schools and, even more, its colleges and universities. Most of the proposals, dusted off for the latest crisis, embodied the special ideological, professional, or career interests of the reformers—more cross-disciplinary studies, more emphasis on reading the classic writings of the great philosophers from Plato on, strengthening the liberal arts curriculum, and the like. There was much emphasis in the 1980s on teaching and the taught, but significantly less on the teachers. Few of the reformers appeared to comprehend that teachers were the people’s first and most influential set of leaders, as role models, opinion shapers, inspirers, disciplinarians, embodiments of ongoing middle-class, ethnic, and political traditions.

If the public had recognized the central importance of teachers, perhaps proposed reforms would have focused more on these human beings. Or perhaps not, because “reforming” the human beings would have appeared far more difficult and dangerous than manipulating processes or techniques. Still, the quality of the teachers—their competence, breadth of knowledge, intellectual vigor, commitment to the classroom, and professionalism—was far more important than their specific mode of teaching, set of readings, or place in the curriculum.

This centrality of the teacher made all the more crucial and ominous a finding during the “educational crisis” of the 1980s that received little attention at the time compared with the headlines dwelling on superficialities. From a random sample of 2,500 Phi Beta Kappa members and of almost 2,000 Rhodes scholars, Howard R. Bowen and Jack H. Schuster concluded in 1985 that fewer and fewer of the nation’s most intellectually promising young people were entering or planning careers in higher education. This finding had the direst implications for the quality of the best kind of teaching as leadership for the half century ahead; and, as the analysis concluded, it was also significant that “the academy, it seems, grows less and less attractive as a house of intellect, as a nurturing and stimulating environment for the gifted and creative.”

This finding was widely ignored, perhaps because by implication it called for the most prodigious effort to draw the truly best and brightest of the nation’s youth into teaching. The Bowen-Schuster report noted, as had so many earlier findings, that the “quality of working conditions for faculty also has deteriorated markedly over the past decade and a half; less clerical support, overcrowded facilities, outmoded instrumentation, tighter library budgets, and poorly prepared students.” No improvement was expected for another decade or so. To overcome these deficiencies in public higher education would call for the kind of clear goals, dependable funding, long-range planning, firm commitment, steady policy making, and persistent follow-through that were so uncommon in American government.

What should good teachers teach? Not what to think but how to think— that is, how to think across a wide span of disciplines, values, institutions, and policies in a highly pluralistic, fragmented culture. Educators based their claim to priority ultimately on the proposition that the products of liberal arts or humanities programs, as exemplified by Rhodes scholars and Phi Betas, had shown such intellectual grasp of a variety of subjects as to equip them as political leaders to deal with the diverse and continually shifting problems they would face as leaders.

But could any group—even an educational elite—cope with the combination of political fragmentation and intellectual disarray that threatened the American future?

The intellectual disorder had manifested itself during the past half century in the loose collection of hazy ideas that passed as the American idea-system; in the flowery platitudes of candidates, whether about communism or the family or the deficit or poverty; in the once famous New York School of art that fractured into several New York schools and later into an endless succession of styles; in the hopes for a unified social science declining in the face of ever-multiplying subdisciplines and specializations; in the disintegration of the humanities into a “heap or jumble” that reminded Allan Bloom of the old Paris flea market.

A century and a half ago Tocqueville had observed that science could be divided into three parts: the most abstract and theoretical principles; general truths derived from pure theory but leading “by a straight and short road to practical results”; and methods of application and execution. On the practical matters, he noted, “Americans always display a clear, free, original, and inventive power of mind,” but few concerned themselves with the theoretical and abstract. On the other hand, Tocqueville said, American orators and writers were given to speaking in the most inflated, grandiloquent style about vast topics.

The American’s “ideas,” Tocqueville summed up, were either extremely minute and clear or extremely general and vague: “what lies between is a void.” The idea of freedom was his best example. It is the best example today of the “Tocquevillian void.”

Of all the central ideas in the American experiment the concept of freedom had been the most glorious, compelling, and persistent—and also the most contrarily defined, trivialized, and debased. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was essentially a paean to liberty, a term that has been long used as an equivalent to freedom. Eleven years later the Constitution would secure “the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” and in 1791 the French Constitution, responding to the same Enlightenment values, incorporated a Declaration of Rights asserting that “men are born and live free and equal as regards their rights.” Within seventy-five years “freedom” had become so evocative, and yet so hazy, as to be invoked by Union soldiers “shouting the battle cry of freedom” against slavery, by Confederate troops “shouting the battle cry of freedom” against Yankee oppression, and by a black regiment singing, “We are going out of slavery; we’re bound for freedom’s light.” During the past century speakers and writers across the entire political spectrum, from American communists to the extreme right, have invoked the term. It was rare to hear a major speech by Reagan, or by the Democratic aspirants of 1988, that did not appeal to freedom or liberty or their equivalents. It was even rarer to hear them spell out what they meant, except in more banalities, shibboleths, and stereotypes.

Did it matter that Tocqueville’s void still loomed toward the end of the twentieth century—that orators continued to “bloviate” and millions of men and women went about their minute, day-to-day decision-making with no linkage between the two? There would be no practical will to action, the philosopher Charles Frankel wrote, unless value judgments were made—and made explicit. If there was to be conversion of social theory into social action on a scale large enough to shape the whole society, a social philosophy that explored “the basic choices available” and offered “an ordered scheme of preferences for dealing with them” was indispensable.

Any one of our animating ideas was complex enough—had to be complex to be so attractive to so many different minds. Liberty was the prime example. A word that appears on our coins, on the marble walls of public monuments like the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials, in virtually every stanza of the great national anthems, had to resonate appealingly through many classes, regions, and occupations. But what did it mean, as a guide to action? Only negative liberty—freedom from arbitrary regulation by public or private power wielders? Or also positive liberty—the freedom to take purposeful steps, often in social and economic areas, to realize one’s goals? Both freedoms could be left at first to the private sphere, but as society became more complex and interrelated, the two liberties increasingly impinged on each other and on the public realm. This happened most dramatically with slavery, and led to one of Lincoln’s wisest reflections. “The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty,” he declared in 1864, “and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men.…”

Events expanded the concept of liberty, and further complicated it. Franklin Roosevelt not only took the lead in defending the Western democratic definition of freedom against Adolf Hitler’s perversion of it, but in proclaiming the Four Freedoms he nicely balanced the negative liberties of speech and religion from arbitrary public and private action against the positive liberties of national military security and personal economic security. Later, contending that “necessitous men are not free men,” he said, “We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.” The President then listed a set of positive economic rights that would constitute the agenda for liberal Democratic Administrations and candidacies in the years ahead.

The struggle over negative liberty—personal protection against authority—attracted some of the most impressive intellectual leadership in the history of the nation. The philosophical heritage of individual liberty, the Jeffersonian and Lincolnian defenses of this supreme value, the fervent conservative vindication of property rights, the vigilance of the American Civil Liberties Union and like-minded groups, the presence on the High Court of justices with the commitment of Louis Brandeis, Harlan Stone, Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, William Douglas, Earl Warren, the zeal for civil liberties on the part of appellate judges such as Learned Hand of New York—all of these had variously combined to establish the federal judiciary as, on the whole, the prime definer as well as protector of civil liberties. The enunciation by the High Court during the 1940s of the “preferred position” doctrine, holding that First Amendment freedoms deserved the highest priority in the hierarchy of constitutional protections and presuming to be unconstitutional any law that on its face limited such freedoms, further insulated individual liberty against arbitrary interference.

Still, civil libertarians could not be complacent as the Bill of Rights bicentennial neared. The judiciary’s record since the founding had been uneven. And when, in 1987, the Chief Justice of the United States, along with the latest Reagan appointee, joined in a minority vote to sustain the constitutionality of a Louisiana statute requiring the teaching in public schools of the creationist theory of human origin, civil libertarians had to assess the implications for the future of appointments by a series of conservative Presidents.

“All men are created equal.” If the Court had helped fill Tocqueville’s void in the area of civil liberty, the same could not be said about the record of the nation’s intellectual and political leadership in meeting the flat commitment that Americans of 1776 had made to the principle of equality except for slaves and women. This failure was understandable in part because the realization of economic and social equality was intellectually an even more daunting venture than the protection of individual liberty. But even the most essential preliminary questions had not been answered: What kind of equality was the issue—political, social, economic, gender, racial, or other? Guaranteed by what private or public agency, if any? Equality for whom—blacks as well as whites? Equality when? This last question was of crucial importance to low-income Americans long assured that their opportunity would come if only they waited long enough. It had taken almost a century for the nation to take the primitive step of making child labor illegal.

The intellectual confusion over equality was sharply reflected in the ancient debate between equality of condition and equality of opportunity. It was in part a false debate, for very few Americans wanted absolute or even sweeping equality of condition. But even the sides of the debate were mixed up. In part because Herbert Hoover and other enlightened conservatives had contended that inequality of condition was acceptable as long as all the “runners” had the same place at the starting line, many on the left spurned that kind of equality as brutal capitalist competitiveness.

But in fact equality of opportunity was a most radical doctrine. If the nation actually wanted persons to achieve positions for which their basic potentials of intelligence and character fitted them, then government must be more than a referee at the starting line; it must intervene at every point where existing structures of inequality barred people from realizing those potentials. If the nation wanted to open the way for people to realize their “life chance,” then government or some other agency must act early in their lives to help them obtain the motivation, self-assurance, literacy, good health, decent clothes, speech habits, education, job opportunity, self-esteem that would enable them really to compete.

Neither in action nor in analysis did the government fill this Tocquevillian void. Perhaps the political leadership did not wish to, for granting true equality of opportunity would call for innovative social analysis as well as bold and comprehensive governmental action—would call indeed for a program for children’s rights rivaling earlier programs for the poor, women, and minorities. Some presidential candidates in 1988 were cautiously discussing such policies as much-expanded child care and paid leaves for parents of newborns, but no Marshall Plan for children was in sight.

The vital need for a set of findings firmly seated in clear and compelling moral principles and linked in turn to explicit policy choices was met, almost miraculously it seemed, in 1984 by the 120-page first draft of the Roman Catholic bishops’ “Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teachings and the U.S. Economy.” The letter was unsparing of American leadership. The level of inequality in income and wealth in the nation was morally unacceptable. “The fulfillment of the basic needs of the poor is of the highest priority. Personal decisions, social policies and power relationships must all be evaluated by their effects on those who lack the minimum necessities of nutrition, housing, education and health care.” Again and again the bishops assailed selfishness, consumerism, privilege, avarice, and other ugly characteristics of American society. Speaking from their hearts trained in compassion and their heads trained in moral reasoning, from their pastoral closeness to the needs of people and their experience with government programs, the bishops magnificently filled the gap between high moral principle and explicit economic policy.

If an air of old-fashioned morality hung over the bishops’ letter, some of the solutions too sounded old-fashioned to some critics. In calling for help to the needy abroad the bishops appeared to ignore findings that a great deal of American aid, instead of helping the poor in Third World countries, had come under the control of powerful and rich elites who portioned it out among themselves. Thus the American poor to some degree were subsidizing the foreign rich. And when the bishops proposed empowering the poor, at home and abroad, critics noted that it was precisely in power, among other things, that the poor were poor; they might not know how to gain and exert power effectively any more than they were able to gain and spend money. In many other respects too, solving poverty was extraordinarily difficult. But the bishops would hardly have denied this.

In any event, few were listening, or at least acting. Three years later the richest 1 percent of American families were approaching the peak share of the nation’s wealth of 36 percent attained in 1929. For the poorest 20 percent of American families, annual incomes in real dollars were one-third less than in 1972. Almost half of the new jobs created during the decade paid less than a poverty income. The stock market, however, was booming, and millions of middle-class Americans were engaged, like their government in Washington, in a spending spree.

As it turned out, the two-hundredth birthday of the Constitution in 1987 was an occasion much more for celebration than cerebration. Serious debate about the Constitution was minimal, except for one unplanned episode. Reagan’s nomination of Robert Bork for the High Court provided a classic demonstration of the type of presidential-congressional struggle so carefully planned by the Framers, and provided also a Senate forum for debate over major constitutional issues such as “original intent.” But those who hoped that 1988—the opening, year of the Constitution’s third century—might prove an occasion not only for testing Reagan conservatism at the polls but also for debate over sharply posed constitutional issues were to be disappointed on both counts. Major governmental restructuring occurred that year not in Washington but in the Soviet Union.

The electoral politics of 1988 turned out to be a disgrace to an “advanced democracy.” After spending hundreds of days on the campaign road and millions of dollars before a single vote was cast, two coveys of candidates, Democratic and Republican, underwent a series of primary elections so rife with opportunism, so repetitious, and finally so anticlimactic as to bore the electorate before the main campaign even started. Two conventions full of fervid oratory but void of dramatic roll-call votes merely ratified the results of the primaries. The campaign that followed was the most scurrilous in recent American history, the most intellectually degrading since the campaign of bias against Al Smith in 1928.

A principal reason for George Bush’s victory, studies indicated, was general satisfaction on the part of most voters with what the Democrats called the “credit-card economy.” Most respondents in a nationwide poll during the early fall of 1988 said that they viewed themselves as better off than they had been eight years earlier, and most expected to be still better off four years hence. Few heeded warnings of future economic disarray or collapse as the trade and federal budget deficits continued to soar. Basic also to the Bush victory was a large and solid conservative constituency; 42 percent of the respondents in an August CBS News/New York Times poll held that the Reagan Administration’s approach had not been conservative enough. Perhaps decisive in the outcome, however, was the GOP’s expert manipulation of media, money, and symbols, and of the Republican candidate himself.

Long before election day, large numbers of voters were protesting the low level of the campaign. Many resolved on principle not to vote for president. An unprecedented number of newspapers refused to endorse either candidate. Voter registration campaigns floundered; after all the pronunciamentos about the biggest registration drive yet, the percentage of eligible Americans who were registered to vote by election time had dropped over two percentage points from four years before. And on election day the voter turnout—the ultimate test—fell to 50 percent, the lowest rate since the Coolidge-Davis race in 1924.

The Bush Republicans had proved that Reaganism could win without Reagan. They had failed, however, to convert presidential Republican votes into congressional or gubernatorial majorities; indeed, the Democrats gained small increases in their Senate, House, and statehouse ranks. One test for President Bush—a former chairman of the Republican National Committee—was whether he would now prove able to further modernize the GOP even while he sought to draw more Reagan Democrats into the party. Still, the Republicans had shaped a conservative, Sunbelt-based electoral strategy that worked in 1988.

And the response of the defeated? Many Democratic party leaders still failed to comprehend that for over a decade the Reagan Republican party had been conducting ideological warfare against the Democracy as the party of liberalism; that the Republicans had won this war in election after election; that the Democratic party lacked bold, creative, and innovative ideas, instead beating a timid retreat into calculation, centrism, and consensus. The Democracy would face huge tasks: to democratize and invigorate both its internal organization and the governmental system itself; to approach women, blacks, labor, peace activists, environmentalists and others less as vote pools to be tapped and more as partners in continuing social experimentation and change; to draw to the polls tens of millions who are, demographically, potential voters for the liberal-labor-left—if given inspired leadership of Rooseveltian quality.

Intellectually this would demand of the Democrats a clearheaded array of values and a grasp of priorities and relationships among values, thus filling the “Tocquevillian void” with a structure of well-formed ideas, experiments, and policies. “If you go back and read William James on pragmatism,” scientist Michael Maccoby once remarked to some colleagues, “what he said was that truth would be discovered neither by the tough-minded people who live by numbers nor the tender-minded who live by ideology, but rather by people who make their ideals explicit, are willing to test them out and experiment with them constantly in the real world. That was really the essence of the American experiment.” But what truth had the American experiment established? “Politics in the United States,” wrote historian Alan Brinkley, “always has been afflicted with a certain conceptual barrenness. Efforts to create meaningful ‘values,’ to find a useful ‘moral core’ for our public life have competed constantly and often unsuccessfully against the belief in liberty, the commitment to personal rights unconstrained by any larger conception of a common purpose.”

The volatility of the American character by the 1970s, Maccoby said, “makes the role of leadership absolutely crucial,” measured by both clarity of values and the experimental attitude. Yet transformative political and intellectual leadership had been conspicuously absent in the seventies and eighties, especially on the left. Was there still a place in the American scheme for the leader who could transcend the medley of special interests, carry through great projects, and provide creative and transforming leadership to the nation? Much would depend on the propulsive force by which leadership would be projected into office. Backed by a broad and militant mandate, such leadership would have a chance. Whether such a mandate would develop in the 1990s was not clear. Believers in the pendulum theory of politics now expected a great shift toward the left, but history has been known to play tricks on people with patterns. Leadership was not in automatic supply.

Americans had no need for a hero, a spellbinder, a messiah. They needed committed men and women who could mobilize, and respond to, tens of thousands of rank-and-file leaders who in turn could activate hundreds of thousands of persons in the neighborhoods and precincts, thus creating a movement. This movement would both guide the top leaders and sustain them, just as hundreds, then thousands of black militants had rallied behind King and pressed him toward ever bolder action. Americans needed political leaders who, like Roosevelt on the left and Reagan on the right, could merge movement leadership with party and electoral organization, in order to win and hold governmental power.

Such leadership, such followership, can be founded only on intellectual and moral commitment to values and principles, to ideology in the true sense of the word. In the United States it can be founded only on the values of liberty and equality, of freedom, that Americans have been extolling for two centuries or more. Most conservatives will define freedom as individualism and libertarianism, most liberals and radicals as the Four Freedoms, as sharing and solidarity. That is a rational basis for conflict. During the next political cycle, in the wake of Reagan conservatism, it would enable a leader on the left to have a special rendezvous with destiny—as President to confront the oldest continuing challenge in America: the broadening of real equality of opportunity combined with the expansion of individual liberty.

Bob Dylan had sung in 1963:

The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast

The slow one now will later be fast

As the present now will later be past

The order is rapidly fadin’

And the first one now will later be last

For the times they are a-changin’

Memories of the Future: A Personal Epilogue

THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR OF my study I can see a field of goldenrod and purple aster glowing softly in the sun of early fall, then coming to an abrupt end a quarter mile away against a dark-green line of austere, impenetrable oaks and maples. Above the trees looms the great bulk of Mount Greylock, landmark for the northern Berkshires. To the east of Greylock there is a saddle in the Hoosac Range over which Shays’s rebels fled to a brief Berkshire refuge after they were cannonaded and routed in an attack on the Springfield arsenal over two centuries ago. Famous and infamous men and women have traveled through the valley beneath me—perhaps from distant Boston over the old Mohawk Trail or from the Hudson River lowlands to the west where the Dutch settled more than three centuries ago.

Henry David Thoreau first spied Greylock in 1844 when he tramped across the Hoosac Range, picking raspberries by the wayside. In the valley he packed rice and sugar into his knapsack and, with thunder rumbling at his heels, he trudged up through the open fields that then mantled Greylock. Then the wayfarer picked a path through trees that had a “scraggy and infernal look, as if contending with frost goblins.” He reached the summit by dusk. In the soft green valley below, he remembered, he found “such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise.”

From the summit Thoreau could see fifteen miles south to the town of Pittsfield. There, hardly a decade later, another young author looking north could view Greylock at its widest girth. Breaking through the clouds from the low mountains clustering around it, Greylock gave to Herman Melville the impression of a double-humped whale surfacing through ocean water. Melville’s mind was on whales—he was writing Moby-Dick. “I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country,” he wrote. “My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.”

Melville lived on a farm he named Arrowhead after he had plowed up Indian relics. During these years, the early and middle 1850s, Melville became good friends with another young writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who lived a few miles to the south in Lenox. The two often discussed their writing problems in Melville’s hayloft, between country romps with another local literary man, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Hawthorne was still working on The House of the Seven Gables in his cottage called Tanglewood when Melville wrote the final pages of Moby-Dick.

It was another half century before the area could boast of another writer of wide renown, Edith Wharton, and some decades after that of a poet of even greater fame, Robert Frost. Looking north from my front porch, I can see the first rises of Vermont’s Green Mountains enfolding Bennington, where Frost lies buried in a churchyard among the kind of woods and hills he loved. At the foot of the Green Mountains lies Williams College, where I have taught for almost fifty years and still serve and where we still sing an anthem that begins:

O, proudly rise the monarchs of our mountain land,

In their kingly forest robes to the sky.…

And concludes:

… The glory and the honor of our mountain land,

And the dwelling of the gallant and the free.

Glory, honor, gallantry—I have drawn a rather benign portrait of the Berkshires, of their natural beauty and early literary creativity. But this is also a region scarred by violence and long peopled by men going to war and—not all of them—returning. For centuries these green valleys were passages for Indian braves marauding their way into other tribal domains. To the east I can see the site of Fort Massachusetts, built in 1745 as the northwest outpost in a line of forts and stockades running back to the Connecticut River. Down the valley in front, close to the college, lies the site of Fort West Hoosac, built ten years later as defense against invading French and Indians. In 1756, during an intense attack on this fort, which the defenders repulsed, three Williamstown soldiers ventured out to search for some cows that had strayed. The men were cornered by Indians, killed, and scalped. Thus the first Williamstown casualties occurred within a few hundred yards of the slain men’s homes, much as at Lexington Green less than twenty years later a Minuteman crawled across the road from the killing and died on his front stoop under his wife’s eyes.

Since that day Williamstown and other Berkshire men have gone off to war in an ever-widening arc of conflict. In 1777, the third year of the Revolution, over 150 Williamstown militiamen, armed with muskets, fowling pieces, scythes, and hatchets, marched fifteen miles to Bennington to join General Stark’s forces in their rout of Tories, Hessians, and Indians under General Burgoyne at the Battle of Bennington. In 1812 a few Williamstown men journeyed 200 miles or so to fight along the Canadian border. In the Civil War they entrained in large numbers to the killing grounds several hundred miles away; in the Spanish-American War they traveled a thousand miles to Florida, where some were stricken by typhoid fever and malaria; in 1917 and 1918 they sailed three thousand miles to France; in the early 1940s some flew six thoµsand miles across the Pacific to places like Okinawa and IwoJima; in the late 1960s they fought almost literally at the opposite end of the globe, in Vietnam. And—though one would certainly prefer otherwise—someday local men and women may fight tens or hundreds of thousands of miles away, in space wars.

Neither in war nor in peace has Williamstown or the rest of Berkshire County given famous generals or Presidents to the nation, though a few were schooled here. But the Berkshires have supplied hundreds of the type of second-level leaders that are most crucial to a nation’s survival and progress. In 1766 Benjamin Simonds built the first tavern in Williamstown; later he took the lead in laying out the first church site, sired the first white child born in the town, and as colonel of the all-Berkshire regiment led it to Bennington. During his final years he helped clear the land and make the brick for the “Free School,” shortly renamed Williams College. Or consider the twenty-two Berkshiremen who were elected in the winter of 1787 as delegates to the Massachusetts convention to ratify the new Constitution, and who took part in an historic debate that led to the addition of the Bill of Rights to the new charter.

During the next century the county contributed hundreds of educators, lawyers, ministers, businessmen, inventors who took leadership positions throughout the country. One of these was William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, born in Great Barrington in 1868. Harvard Ph.D., militant foe of Booker T. Washington’s palliative tactics, author of profound studies of African and American blacks, leader of pan-African unity efforts, in 1961 he joined the Communist party, renounced his United States citizenship, and moved to Ghana, where he died two years later. There his home is a shrine. His Great Barrington birthplace at last report was a weed-choked lot with a crude wooden plaque.

Berkshire County is steeped in history, benign or not. But so is every county in the United States. I grew up in a town north of Boston, in an expanse of farm and woodland where my nearest playmates were two miles away. Yet I could walk through woods behind my house for an hour, pass by a few homes including my girlfriend’s, and come onto Lexington Green, where the first Revolutionary blood was shed in April 1775. One can hardly visit any part of the United States without being struck by the richness of the local history. It simply remains to be discovered, in attics, people’s memories, yellowing newspapers, artifacts, local libraries. One is struck even more by the ubiquity of group conflict in the United States—between Indians and settlers, Yanks and Rebs, blacks and whites, farmers and sheriffs, workers and bosses, outlaws and inlaws. If one could put on a map of the United States tiny X’s denoting pitched battles, little else would show.

In October 1988, at the height of the presidential campaign, I was reminded of an earlier October—in 1932, when, amid the darkening red leaves on the mountainsides, Democratic nominee Franklin D. Roosevelt drove into Williamstown on the road along which the Berkshire troops had once marched to Bennington. His limousine passed Ben Simonds’s old tavern and then slid through the college precincts, slackening its pace so that all could see the cheery, hat-waving governor, but it did not stop. Perhaps he had heard something about Williams students’ political leanings. When the car did halt just beyond the college bounds, a frustrated throng caught up, crying, “Speech! Speech!” But FDR appeared far more interested in conversing with the politicos who crowded around his car. When an arm-waving party chieftain called for “three cheers for the next President of the United States,” hearty shouts for Hoover and a few yells for Norman Thomas rose in the autumn air. Unperturbed, FDR and his party moved on.

Later Roosevelt would set a standard for the presidency, in both its creative and its dangerous aspects. What has been less appreciated is the standard set by the “second-cadre” men and women around him, in the White House, his cabinet, his brain trust, his New Deal agencies. Frances Perkins and Harold Ickes and Thomas Corcoran and later George Marshall and Leon Henderson and always of course Eleanor Roosevelt have been celebrated enough—in part because many of FDR’s top people like Ickes and David Lilienthal were masterly diary-keepers—but the special greatness of these leaders lay in their capacity to draw a third cadre of leadership into the corridors of power.

It was the intellectual quality of the men and women of all three cadres that made the crucial difference. Jurists like Felix Frankfurter and Hugo Black, politicians like Corcoran and Robert La Follette, Jr., legislators like Representatives Thomas Eliot, Mike Monroney, and Albert Gore, or personages of the stature of Perkins or Eleanor Roosevelt herself were more interested in ideas than in political promotion or maneuver. No wonder, then, the comment of John Maynard Keynes in the mid-1930s that of “all the experiments to evolve a new order, it is the experiment of young America which most attracts my own deepest sympathy,” or Adlai Stevenson’s observation in the mid-1950s that the “next frontier is the quality, the moral, intellectual and aesthetic standards of the free way of life.”

Interviewing leaders like these, examining their lives, following the ebb and flow of their careers arouses a profound curiosity about the nature of intellectual and political leadership. Watching John Kennedy climb the greasy pole and reach the top while so young was a fascinating case study in human ambition, political skill, and audacity. As I came to know Kennedy during the 1950s, I found I was observing a politician who as a student of history and of major American politicians had had ample opportunity on Capitol Hill coolly to measure leaders at home and abroad. He had limned his own political heroes in Profiles in Courage, a portrayal of senators who had fought for their convictions at risk—often at fatal risk— to their political careers. Kennedy’s own career, however, suggested that he would not risk election defeat in pursuit of some Utopian principle.

Early in 1960 I published a study of Kennedy in which I expressed some doubt that he would show more than a profile in caution as candidate for President. The issue was intellectual and moral commitment as well as political. Though the book was generally positive toward the candidate, it did not meet the exacting standards of the Kennedy family and entourage. Jacqueline Kennedy in particular was disturbed by my portrait, which she felt made too much of the influence of his parents, his older brother Joe, and indeed his whole social background.

“You are like him in many ways,” she wrote beguilingly. “You know the hard parts and the pitfalls. Can’t you see that he is exceptional?

“Or is he to be just another sociological case history? Irish-Catholic, newly rich, Harvard-educated etc. — Does every man conform totally to his background? Surely there are some who contribute something of their own.…” She was most upset by my failure to emphasize more her husband’s learning experiences. What other candidate, she asked, had in his twenties talked to Chamberlain, Baldwin, Churchill, Laski, had in his thirties known de Lattre, Nehru, Ben-Gurion, had been to Russia in Stalin’s day, had had friends in the French and English parliaments? “Jack was part of all that and it influenced him enormously.” She went on: “I think you underestimate him. Anyone sees he has the intelligence—magnetism and drive it takes to succeed in politics. I see, every succeeding week I am married to him, that he has what may be the single most important quality for a leader—an imperturbable self confidence and sureness of his powers.”

Jacqueline Kennedy’s letter was more than a wife’s brief for a husband— it was a reminder to biographers that their subjects can rise far above, or, by implication, fall far below, the psychological and sociological forces that have shaped them. And if John Kennedy turned to sundry Western leaders as role models, he in turn became a model for thousands of young would-be leaders. So had Eleanor Roosevelt for countless women, and so would Robert Kennedy later for young rebels, and Martin Luther King, Jr., for blacks.

The leadership gap that afflicts us today could be rather simply explained: our leaders were shot down. Yet a nation with strong second and third cadres can survive the loss of top leaders. While some of JFK’s best men left Lyndon Johnson’s administration during its first year, enough remained—and enough new talent came in with LBJ—to devise and launch the sweeping domestic programs of the Great Society. So there must be a more fundamental explanation for the decline of leadership, especially among liberal Democrats.

Does our foreign policy experience give us a clue? The leadership group that had waged the battle against isolationism in the late 1930s fell victim to the cold war mentality following World War II—with considerable assistance from Stalin—and two decades later younger men and women were even more victimized by the cold war. For they were stigmatized whatever side they took on Vietnam. As the Democratic party establishment collapsed in 1968, those who stuck with the Vietnam War went down with it, while those who broke with the war became isolated in the McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and McGovern secessions. Men and women on both sides later became university presidents or deans, foundation heads, distinguished attorneys, writers, and teachers. But what many of them in the 1970s were not doing was what they should have been doing when their turn came in the rise and fall of leadership generations—running the government. It is their exile, along with the withering away of the Stimson-Eisenhower-Rockefeller presidential Republican party, which helped produce the critical leadership gap of the last two decades.

And yet, the sources of our leadership failures lie deeper than electoral prudence or political assassinations, cold war attitudes, or foreign policy disasters. They lie in habits of thought long shaped in a land that has allowed ample leeway for social and political as well as economic and industrial innovation, on the part of people who like tinkering and patching up and proceeding “by guess and by God.” Looking back over two hundred years, the chronicler sees the American Experiment as a series of planned or unplanned experiments—ventures in a written Constitution, a Bill of Rights, checks and balances, federalism, Jacksonian democracy; in isolationism, expansion, empire building, Wilsonian internationalism, cold war interventionism, bountiful foreign aid; in slavery, civil war butchery, emancipation, serfdom, southern white rule; in massive migration and immigration, industrial innovation and giantism, Social Darwinism, New Deal regulation, Keynesian spending, war economics, laissez-faire; in nuclear attack; in race hatred and segregation, exploitation of women and children, Prohibition, repeal, depression, joblessness, drugs, poverty; in public education, social movements, populism, desegregation, literary and artistic creativity, youth rebellion, scientific discovery, space exploration.

But the grand experiment that transcended all the others was the effort to expand both individual liberty and real equality of opportunity for all—the supreme promise of the Declaration of Independence, the campaign pledge of the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians and their successors, the subject of Tocqueville’s most penetrating observations, the core of the epic struggle of the 1860s, the essence of the twentieth-century philosophical battles over the dynamic tension and interplay between liberty and equality. This experiment was called Freedom, combining as it did liberty and equality. And this doctrine of freedom was forged and promoted by liberals of all creeds, liberals in both parties and third parties, Republican liberals like Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, Wendell Willkie and Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits and Clifford Case, Democratic liberals like Wilson and Al Smith and FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt and Barbara Jordan, Truman and LBJ, Senators Lehman and Wagner, Fulbright and Kefauver, and three leaders by the name of Kennedy.

The political and intellectual vehicle for the ideology of freedom was called liberalism. So pervasive was this doctrine in American history, so comprehensive its reach in American politics, that liberalism and liberals seemed unassailable. During the 1980s, however, Reaganites converted this mild and venerable word into a hate object. Where in the old days conservatives had attacked communism and socialism, now they were moving toward the heart of their target. At the same time, liberalism was ripe for a fall. Like some old mansion top-heavy with junk-filled attics and sagging excrescences but weak in its foundations, liberalism collapsed of overextension—its overemphasis on individualism and pluralism, its flabby appeal across the wide center of the political and intellectual spectrum that resulted in a lack of core values.

All these tendencies reflected habits of thought that foster experimentation but at the same time lead to an excessive reliance on expediency, short-run planning, opportunism, and ultimately to the erosion of the supreme values—liberty and equality—by which the experiments themselves must be tested.

I completed the writing of this volume during the bicentennial celebrations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Doubtless my dismay over the quality of late-twentieth-century leadership in both parties, and especially in the Democracy, has been deepened by the inevitable contrast with the thinkers and politicians of the late eighteenth century. Historians have long studied the personal qualities of the Framers that led to that explosion of talent in Philadelphia in 1787. Some of their findings are summarized in a capsule explanation of mine I like to quote: they were well bred, well fed, well read, well led, and well wed. But the thousand or so delegates to the state ratifying conventions often lacked some or all of these advantages: many came from poor, low-status families, they had little or no formal schooling, they were cut off from the main leadership networks, and their brides rarely brought them the several thousand acres of land that could provide leisure for deep thought. How then explain the intellectual capacity of the second-cadre leadership that came to the fore in the ratification debates?

The answer, I think, lies in the transcending, even overwhelming moral and intellectual commitment that these early Americans made first to independence from Britain, then to a new constitutional order, and finally to the Bill of Rights, all within the twenty years between the early 1770s and the early 1790s. All these commitments were crucial, and each vivified the others. The leaders, national and local, had staked their hopes and their lives on a carefully thought-out balance of liberty and order. In a time of tumultuous conflict they had fought their colonial governors in America, their imperial masters in London, and then one another, for what they considered the highest purpose. And because every major step they took was informed by a powerful but incalculable moral passion as well as a calculation of grand political strategy, they spoke from the heart as well as the head.

It is this combination of moral and intellectual commitment that I find so lacking in our current politics. All political leaders in democracies are brokers, finaglers, manipulators; the question is whether they rise above this when fundamental issues reach crucial turning points. FDR transcended his foxlike maneuvering when he moved to the left in 1935 and 1936, when he tried to deal with a deadlocked political system during his second term, as he came to confront the menace of Nazism, when he sought to leave a legacy of world peace and security in postwar plans for the United Nations and in settlements with the Russians. John Kennedy made the kind of commitment of the heart as well as head that the presidency called for in his third and last year in office, setting a standard for his successors. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, struck one as merely opportunistic to the last, operational, pragmatic in the worst sense—he earned the appellation “Tricky Dick.” Conservative Republicans had to wait for Reagan to make a firm, strategic commitment to rightist doctrine— a commitment hopelessly snarled in Reagan’s White House.

Aside from Reagan and Jesse Jackson, presidential candidates in the 1980s seemed all of a piece—cool, calculating, prudent, carefully choosing and exploiting issues on the basis of public opinion polls and media attention. They were leading with their heads, not their hearts. A year or so after JFK became President I saw in him four Kennedys—the rhetorical radical, the policy liberal, the fiscal moderate, the institutional conservative—and I expected that the four tendencies could not live together indefinitely. Presidential candidates today seem equally fragmented—able rhetoricians, fine policy analysts, fiscally cautious, sublimely indifferent to the fact that their larger hopes and programs cannot be achieved through our splintered and often deadlocked governmental machinery. The candidates forswear ideology, not recognizing that they themselves possess ideologies of flabby liberalism or cloudy conservatism.

Moral passion informing intellectual power harnessed securely to explicit, overriding ends or values—this must be the essence of twenty-first-century leadership.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. …”These words of Yeats have been quoted by every generation since he wrote them in 1920, but never more than today. In the late twentieth century many Americans sense an intellectual, cultural, and political fragmentation and trivialization that pervades our public and private lives. And there has been the usual overreaction, the breast-beating about the ignorance and distorted values of the American people followed by a feverish search for scapegoats. The two leading culprits are the mass media and education. Since there is a reluctance to challenge the independence of the media, given its protected position under the Bill of Rights, the easy, all-purpose target has been the educator, whether the kindergarten teacher, the college dean, or the graduate school professor.

Once again, in the most recent “crisis of education,” all the old moth-eaten solutions have been trotted out. The most popular one is that we must read the Great Books. As a former teacher of some of the “Greats,” as one who believes that they should be at the heart of every liberal arts or humanistic curriculum, as one who knows that the great philosophers offer profound explorations of human nature, moral values, and political power, I balk at this cheap overselling of the classics. They are introductions to thought, not substitutes for it. They raise the enduring questions that confound humankind—they do not offer solutions necessarily relevant to our current plight.

Like Jefferson and Madison and Lincoln, like the many lesser “greats” who flowered in this country from around the second to the sixth decade of this century, we must think our way through our problems. This means drawing our values from the teachings of the past, arraying them in priorities based on human needs, and above all—and by far the most daunting intellectual and analytical enterprise—working out the instrumental ends and the intermediate means that enable us to apply our supreme values effectively and explicitly to everyday decisions and actions. This intellectual strategy calls for a structure of government—in essence for a team of leaders with the power to govern, an opposition party leadership with the power to oppose, full protection of procedural and substantive liberties by all branches and especially the judiciary—in short, majority rule, minority rights, and a constitutional system that fosters both.

“… The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” Yeats continued. It is above all the lack of moral conviction and of intellectual creativity that lies behind our present predicament, and this in turn stems largely from the decline of cutting conflict and controversy in our politics. As long as press and politicians prate about consensus and bipartisanship and centrism, both our ideas and our politics will be sterile and stalemated.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer.…” So Yeats began his famous poem. The Berkshire hills and dales broaden out to the Taconic Range and the Green Mountains and the Alleghenies, and finally to the Appalachians and the Rockies and the great valleys in between. The mountainsides turn during the fall from dark green to brilliant red to brown and then to a blackness against the first snows. I reflect on a phenomenon that I will never fully understand—how the lushness and softness of the summer is incomprehensible as one stands in an icy field, how the rocklike soil and all-enveloping cold of winter are incomprehensible as one sits amid the gentle grass and last wildflowers of autumn.

But, I reflect, at least there is the certainty of it even as we cannot quite grasp it. And I find some consolation in the thought that coping with both the killing frosts of winter and the droughts, floods, and bugs of summer provided Americans—whether Yankee tinkerers or eminent philosophers—with the kind of stimulus, the kind of contrasting challenges that spurred their inventiveness and creativity.

I think finally of the explorers—those who made their way across the Atlantic, who penetrated the Appalachian slopes and then, under men like Lewis and Clark, pushed their way across prairie and desert and mountain chain. And I think finally of the space explorers of today, human and robotic, and of a planned space platform that will be named Freedom, and of probes called Pioneer flying past Saturn and Pluto even as these words were written and are now being read.

My hills, like the stars, endure. And in college convocations to come, I will join in singing some words that express my most fundamental commitment—singing them with a fervor that still surprises me:

My country, ’tis of thee,

Sweet land of liberty,

Of thee I sing;

Land where my fathers died,

Land of the Pilgrims’ pride,

From ev’ry mountain side

Let freedom ring.

Notes

1. The Crisis of Leadership

p. 3 [Flight to Chicago]: Ed Plaut Papers (RG 31-HH), Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.; New York Times, July 3, 1932, pp. 1, 9; Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1932, pp. 1-5; Time, vol. 20, no. 1 (July 11, 1932), p. 10; Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (Harper, 1952), pp. 67-77; Nathan Miller, FDR: An Intimate History (Doubleday, 1983), pp. 277-81; Gilbert Grosvenor, “Flying,” National Geographic, vol. 53, no. 5 (May 1933), p.586.

[“I may go out by submarine”]: quoted in Time, vol. 20, no. 1 (July 11, 1932), p. 10,

[“One person in politics”]: quoted in New York Times, July 2, 1932, p. 4.

4 [“A good sailor”]: quoted in Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Triumph (Little, Brown, 1956), p. 313.

[“Put it right there”]: quoted in New York Times, July 3, 1932, p. 9.

[“It ’s all right, Franklin”]: quoted in Rosenman, p. 76; see also Alfred B. Rollins, Jr., Roosevelt and Howe (Knopf, 1962), pp. 346-47; Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New York Years, 1928-1933 (Random House, 1985), pp. 333-34.

4-5 [At Chicago Stadium]: New York Times, July 3, 1932, p. 9; Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1932, pp. 1-3.

5 [Acceptance address]: The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 1, pp. 647-59, quoted at pp. 648, 649, 659.

[Roosevelt in 1932-33]: Adolf Berle Papers, esp. containers 15-17, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library; Raymond Moley Papers, Roosevelt Library; Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, Roosevelt Library; Moley Papers, esp. boxes 1, 8, 63, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University, Stanford, Calif.

The Divided Legacy

6 [“In an airplane”]: Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1932, p. 1.

[FDR’s early years]: Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet (Harper, 1985); Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The Beckoning of Destiny, 1882-1928 (Putnam, 1971), books 1, 2; Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Apprenticeship (Little, Brown, 1952); Miller; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order (Houghton Mifflin, 1957), ch. 29; James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, Brace, 1956), chs. 1-2; I have used occasional phrases or passages from this earlier work in my treatment of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the present volume.

[“People one knows”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 5.

7 [Sources of political ambition]: Harold D. Lasswell, Power and Personality (Norton, 1948); Joseph A. Schlesinger, Ambition and Politics: Political Careers in the United States (Rand McNally, 1966); Abraham H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality (Harper, 1954); Stanley Renshon, Psychological Needs and Political Behavior (Free Press, 1974); Gordon Black, “A Theory of Political Ambition: Career Choices and the Role of Structural Incentives,” American Political Science Review, vol. 66, no. 1 (March 1972), pp. 144-59.

[FDR and the “nouveaux riches”]: see Freidel, Apprenticeship, pp. 12-14; William D. Hassett, Off the Record with F.D.R., 1942-1945 (Rutgers University Press, 1958), pp. 13-15, 88-89, 124-25.

7-8 [FDR’s maturation during Progressive era]: see Davis, Beckoning, chs. 8-12; Daniel R. Fusfeld, The Economic Thought of Franklin D Roosevelt and the Economic Origins of the New Deal (Columbia University Press, 1956), ch. 3.

8 [Eleanor Roosevelt’s early years]: Eleanor Roosevelt, This Is My Story (Harper, 1937), chs. 1-4; Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (Norton, 1971), book 1; Burns, Eton, pp. 26-27,

[“Honneur oblige”]: letter of Sara Roosevelt to Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, October 14, 1917, in F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. *(Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1947-50), vol. 2, pp. 274-75, quoted at p. 274.

[“Lived like that!”]: quoted in Lash, p. 135.

[FDR’s rising ambition]: see Joseph Schlesinger, esp. pp. 8-10.

[FDR as “farm-labor” legislator]: Freidel, Apprenticeship, ch. 7; Burns, Lion, pp. 41-46.

9 [“Listened to all his plans”]: Eleanor Roosevelt, p. 166.

[“Making ten servants”]: quoted in New York Times, July 17, 1917, p. 3,

[“Proud to be the husband”]: letter, July 18, 1917, in Personal Letters, vol. 2, p. 349.

[Lucy Mercer]: Lash, pp. 220-27, quoted at p. 220.

[“I faced myself”]: quoted in ibid., p. 220.

[Polio]: Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Ordeal (Little, Brown, 1954), ch. 6; Lash, chs. 26-27; Davis, Beckoning, chs. 21-22.

10 [Eleanor’s issues in the 1920s]: see Lash, chs. 25, 27-28, 30; Elisabeth Israels Perry, “Training for Public Life: ER and Women’s Political Networks in the 1920s,” in Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, eds., Without Precedent (Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 28-45; Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media: A Public Quest for Self-Fulfillment (University of Illinois Press, 1987), chs. 1-2 passim.

[Franklin the politician, Eleanor the agitator]: Lash, p. 348.

[Governor Roosevelt]: Davis, New York Years, chs. 1-6, 8, passim; Bernard Bellush, Franklin D. Roosevelt as Governor of New York (Columbia University Press, 1955); Freidel, Ordeal, chs. 15-16; Freidel, Triumph.

[Hearst and the League]: Freidel, Triumph, pp. 250-54.

[“Hasn’t spoken to me!’”]: quoted in Lash, p. 347.

11 [Schlesinger on FDR’s assets]: Crisis, p. 279.

[Democratic primaries, 1932]: Freidel, Triumph, chs. 17-19; Burns, Lion, pp. 123-34; James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots (Harcourt, 1938), pp. 58-112.

[Democratic convention, 1932]: Freidel, Triumph, ch. 20; Burns, Lion, pp. 134-38; Farley, pp. 112-54.

[“California came here”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 137.

12 [“Good old McAdoo”]: ibid.

[“The same cops”]: Dos Passos, “Out of the Red with Roosevelt,” New Republic, vol. 71, no. 919 (July 13, 1932), pp. 230-32, quoted at p. 232.

[1932 campaign]: Freidel, Triumph, chs. 22-24; Davis, New York Years, ch. 11; Burns, Lion, pp. 140-45; Farley, pp. 155-91; Roy V. Peel and Thomas C. Donnelly, The 1932 Campaign: An Analysis (Farrar & Rinehart, 1935); Herbert Hoover, Memoirs: The Great Depression, 1929-1941 (Macmillan, 1952), chs. 19-31; Rexford C. Tugwell, The Brains Trust (Viking, 1968); Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt (Doubleday, 1957), ch. 12; Tugwell, In Search of Roosevelt (Harvard University Press, 1972), ch. 6; Schlesinger, Crisis, ch. 33.

[Press on FDR]: see Literary Digest, vol. 114, no. 2 (July 9, 1932), pp. 2-3; Oswald Garrison Villard, “An Open Letter to Governor Roosevelt,” Nation, vol. 134, no. 3488 (May 11, 1932), pp. 532-33.

[New Republic on FDR]: “Is Roosevelt a Hero?,” New Republic, vol. 66, no. 852 (April 1, 1931), pp. 165-66, quoted at p. 166.

[Post on FDR]: Freidel, Triumph, p. 328.

[Mencken on FDR]: “Where are we at?,” Baltimore Evening Sun, July 5, 1932, reprinted in Mencken, A Carnival of Buncombe, Malcolm Moos, ed. (Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), pp. 256-60, esp. p. 259.

[Lippmann on FDR]: “Governor Roosevelt’s Candidacy,” New York Herald Tribune, January 8, 1932, reprinted in Lippmann, Interpretations, 1931-1932, Allan Nevins, ed. (Macmillan, 1932), pp. 259-63, quoted at p. 261.

[Outlook on FDR]: Outlook, vol. 160, no. 7 (April 1932), p. 208.

12 [“Can’t you see”]: letter to Robert Woolley, February 25, 1932, quoted in Freidel, Triumph, p. 253n.

13 [Brain trust]: Raymond Moley, After Seven Years (Harper, 1939); Tugwell, Brains Trust; Beatrice Bishop Berle and Travis Beal Jacobs, eds., Navigating the Rapids, 1918-1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle (Harcourt, 1973), esp. part 2; Fusfeld, ch. 15; Davis, New York Years, ch. 9; Bernard Sternsher, Rexford G. Tugwell and the New Deal (Rutgers University Press, 1964), part 2; Elliot A. Rosen, “Roosevelt and the Brains Trust: An Historiographical Overview,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 87, no. 4 (December 1972), pp. 53-57.

[“Anarchy of concentrated economic power”]: Moley, p. 24.

[Wells on Berle]: quoted in Schlesinger, Crisis, p. 400.

14 [“Issues aren’t my business”]: quoted in Moley, p. 36,

[Progressive Republicans]: Alfred Lief, Democracy’s Norris (Stackpole, 1939), ch. 16; Richard Lowitt, George W. Norris: The Persistence of a Progressive, 1913-1933 (University of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 549-59; Ronald L. Feinman, “The Progressive Republican Senate Bloc and the Presidential Election of 1932,” Mid-America, vol. 59, no. 2 (April-July 1977), pp. 73-91; Harold L. Ickes, Autobiography of a Curmudgeon (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943), pp. 253, 260-65.

[Garner on staying alive]: Bascom N. Timmons, Gamer of Texas (Harper, 1948), p. 168.

[Farley on active campaign]: Farley, pp. 163-64.

[Brain trust’s desire for program]: see Tugwell, Brains Trust, pp. 421-24, ch. 39; Tugwell, In Search, ch. 5.

[Tugwell on FDR]: In Search, p. 128,

15 [Broun on FDR]: quoted in Tugwell, Brains Trust, p. 283.

[FDR on intellectuals and flexibility]: see ibid., pp. 286-87, 409-11, 422-24, 441-47, 467-70, 488-96.

[Young on FDR]: quoted in Josephine Young and Everett Needham Case, Owen D. Young and American Enterprise (David R. Godine, 1982), p. 601.

[FDR-Long telephone exchange]: quoted in Tugwell, Brain Trust, pp. 430-33, I have condensed, slightly rearranged, and supplied quotation marks for Tugwell’s dialogue, part of a wider luncheon-table discussion that remained so vivid a recollection, wrote Tugwell, “that I am willing to stand on its accuracy” (p. 434n.).

16 [Most dangerous man]: ibid., p. 434,

[FDR’s speaking campaign]: Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 1, ch. 24, part 2; see also Fusfeld, ch. 16.

[“Alice-in-Wonderland” economics]: August 20, 1932, in Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 669-84, esp. pp. 674-75.

[“Planned use of the land”]: September 14, 1932, in ibid., vol. 1, pp. 693-711, quoted at p. 699.

[Freidel on Topeka address]: Triumph, p. 347.

[Commonwealth Club address]: September 23, 1932, in Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 742-56, quoted at pp. 743, 747, 752, 743, 750, 751-52, respectively.

17 [Tugwell and Moley on Commonwealth Club address]: Tugwell, Democratic Roosevelt, p. 246; Freidel, Triumph, p. 353n.; see also Tugwell, In Search, ch. 7.

[“Yankee horse-trades”]: Moley, p. 48, [“Weave the two together”]: quoted in ibid.

[“Reduce the cost”]: address at Pittsburgh, Pa., October 19, 1932, in Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 795-811, quoted at p. 808.

[Hoover on FDR as easiest man to beat]: entry of June 27, 1932, Henry L. Stimson Diary, quoted in Schlesinger, Crisis, pp. 430-31.

[Hoover’s September prediction]: entry of September 19, 1932, Stimson Diary, quoted in Freidel, Triumph, p. 365.

[Hoover’s composition of own addresses]: see Harris G. Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression (Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 256; Hoover, Memoirs, p. 234.

[Mencken on Hoover’s oratorical style]: “The Hoover Bust,” Baltimore Evening Sun, October 10, 1932, reprinted in Mencken, Carnival, pp. 260-65, esp. pp. 262.

[“Chameleon on the Scotch plaid”]: address in Indianapolis, Ind., October 28, 1932, in Public Papers of Herbert Hoover (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974-77), vol. 4, pp. 609-32, quoted at p. 619.

17 [“In Hoover we trusted”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Crisis, p. 432.

18 [“Horsemen of Destruction”]: address at Baltimore, Md., October 25, 1932, in Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 831-42, quoted at p. 832.

[Election night]: Farley, pp. 185-89.

[Election results]: Svend Petersen, A Statistical History of the American Presidential Elections (Frederick Ungar, 1963), p. 91.

[“I never thought particularly”]: quoted in Time, vol. 20, no. 20 (November 14, 1932), p. 26.

[Eleanor Roosevelt’s reaction to election]: quoted in Lorena Hickok, Reluctant First Lady (Dodd, Mead, 1962), p. 92; see also Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember (Harper, l949), pp. 74-75.

The “Hundred Days” of Action

[Hoover on business fears]: Hoover, Memoirs, p. 269.

18-19 [Economic conditions, fall-winter, 1932-33]: Time, vol. 21, no. 11 (March 13, 1933), p. 14; Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 319-21; Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Launching the New Deal (Little, Brown, 1973), pp. 11-12.

19 [Wilson on garbage dump]: Wilson, “Hull-House in 1932: III,” New Republic, vol. 73, no. 948 (February 1, 1933), pp. 317-22, quoted at p. 320.

[Farm stirrings]: John L. Shover, Cornbelt Rebellion: The Farmers’ Holiday Association (University of Illinois Press, 1965), chs. 4-5; Schlesinger, Crisis, pp. 459-61; Literary Digest, vol. 115, no. 3 (January 21, 1933), pp. 32-33, and vol. 115, no. 5 (February 4, 1933), p. 10; Freidel, Launching, pp. 12, 83-85.

[Congressional inaction]: Burns, Lion, p. 146; E. P. Herring, “Second Session of the Seventy-Second Congress,” American Political Science Review, vol. 27, no. 3 (June 1933), pp. 404-22; Laurin L. Henry, Presidential Transitions (Brookings Institution, i960), ch. 23.

[Banker on absence of solutions]: Jackson Reynolds, quoted in Schlesinger, Crisis, p. 458.

[Taylor on retrenchment]: ibid. [Lippmann on business leadership]: ibid., p. 459.

20 [Hunger-march delegation]: Time, vol. 20, no. 22 (November 28, 1932), p. 12, [“Fine! Fine! Fine! ”]: quoted in T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (Knopf, 1970), p. 619. [FDR-Hoover interregnum minuet]: Herbert Feis, 1933: Characters in Crisis (Little, Brown, 1966), chs. 3-10; Frank Freidel, “The Interregnum Struggle Between Hoover and Roosevelt,” in Martin L. Fausold and George T. Mazuzan, eds., The Hoover Presidency: A Reappraisal (State University of New York Press, 1974), pp. 134-49; Davis, New York Years, chs. 42-13 passim; Tugwell, In Search, ch. 9; Henry, ch. 22; Hoover Public Papers, vol. 4, pp. 1013-88.

[White on FDR]: quoted in Freidel, Launching, p. 16.

[Lippmann on FDR]: ibid., p. 17.

[“Situation is critical”]: quoted in Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Little, Brown, 1980), p. 300.

21 [Lippmann on a free hand for FDR]: ibid.

[“I hate all Presidents”]: quoted in New York Times, February 16, 1933, p. 2; see also Freidel, Launching, pp. 169-74; Davis, New York Years, pp. 427-37.

[Ford and Michigan banks]: Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Decline and Rebirth, 1933-1962 (Scribner, 1962), pp. 11-15.

[Bank crisis]: Henry, pp. 343-55, Hoover quoted at p. 346; Freidel, Launching, ch. 11; Susan E. Kennedy, The Banking Crisis of 1933 (University Press of Kentucky, 1973).

[Hoover’s two late calls to FDR]: see Kennedy, pp. 148-49; Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933-1937 (Random House, 1986), p. 25.

[“End of our string”]: quoted in Freidel, Launching, p. 193.

[“Plodding feet”]: Robert E. Sherwood, “Inaugural Parade,” in Saturday Review of Literature, vol. 9, no. 33 (March 4, 1933), pp. 461-62.

22 [March 4, 1933]: “The Talk of the Town,” New Yorker, vol. 59 (March 7, 1983), pp. 37-38, lady in rags quoted at p. 37; Anne O’Hare McCormick, “The Nation Renews Its Faith,” New York Times Magazine, March 19, 1933, pp. 1-2, 19; New York Times, March 5, 1933, pp. 1-3; Edmund Wilson, “Inaugural Parade,” New Republic, vol. 74, no. 955 (March 22, 1933), pp. 154-56.

22-3 [Inaugural address]: Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 11-16; on the drafting of the inaugural address, see Raymond Moley, The First New Deal (Harcourt, 1966), ch. 7.

[“Very, very solemn”]: quoted in New York Times, March 5, 1933, p. 7.

[FDR’s cabinet]: see Freidel, Launching, ch. 9.

[FDR’s diary]: Personal Letters, vol. 3, pp. 333-35.

[“Nothing to be seen”]: Tugwell, Democratic Roosevelt, pp. 270-71.

[Bank holiday]: Burns, Lion, p. 166; Freidel, Launching, pp. 214-36; Kennedy, ch. 7.

[Freidel on FDR and banking crisis]: Launching, p. 218.

25 [Left-wing press on money changers]: see ibid., p. 219; see also “Morgan’s Friends Must Go,” Nation, vol. 136, no. 3544 (June 7, 1933), pp. 628-29.

[Economy bill]: Freidel, Launching, ch. 14; Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 49-51, quoted at p. 50.

[Beer!]: William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D Roosevelt and the New Deal (Harper, 1963), pp. 46-47.

[AAA]: Arthur M. Schlesinger. Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin, 1958), chs. 4-5; Rexford G. Tugwell, Roosevelt’s Revolution: The First Year—A Personal Perspective (Macmillan, 1977), chs. 9, 11; Sternsher, chs. 14-16; John L. Shover, “Populism in the Nineteen-Thirties; The Battle for the AAA,” Agricultural History, vol. 39, no. 1 (January 1965), pp. 17-24; Gilbert C. Fite, “Farm Opinion and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, 1933,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol.48, no. 4 (March 1962), pp. 656-73; Irvin May, Jr., “Marvin Jones: Agrarian and Politician,” Agricultural History, vol. 51, no. 2 (April 1977), pp. 421-40; Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, quoted at p. 74.

[“Foreclosing judge”]: Schlesinger, Coming, pp. 43-43, Judge Charles C. Bradley quoted at p. 43.

[CCC]: ibid., pp. 335-41; John A. Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1931-1942: A New Deal Case Study (Duke University Press, 1967), ch. 1 and passim: press conference, March 15, 1933, in Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 67-72, quoted at p. 67.

25-6 [Securities supervision]: Ralph F. de Bedts, The New Deal’s SEC: The Formative Years (Columbia University Press, 1964), ch. 2; Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 93-94, quoted at p. 93.

26 [Executive order on gold hoarding]: see Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 111-16, quoted at pp. 111, 115.

[TVA]: Paul K. Conkin, “Intellectual and Political Roots,” in Conkin and Erwin C. Hargrove, eds., TVA: Fifty Years of Grass-Roots Bureaucracy (University of Illinois Press, 1983), pp. 1-32; Gordon R. Clapp, “The Meaning of TVA,” in Roscoe Martin, ed., TVA: The First Twenty Years (University of Alabama Press/University of Tennessee Press, 1956), pp. 1-15, esp. p. 3; Joseph C. Swidler, “Legal Foundations,” in ibid., pp. 16-34, esp. pp. 24-25; Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 19; Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 122-23, quoted at p. 122.

[Norris-FDR exchange]: quoted in Lief, p. 406; see also Lowitt, pp. 567-69. [Mortgage act]: Schlesinger, Coming, pp. 297-98.

26-7 [Railroad legislation]: Freidel, Launching, pp. 410-16.

27 [NIRA] Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 6; Hugh S. Johnson, The Blue Eagle from Egg to Earth (Doubleday, Doran, 1935), chs. 17-18; Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton University Press, 1966), part 1; Kim McQuaid, “Corporate Liberalism in the American Business Community, 1920-1940,” Business History Review, vol. 52, no. 3 (Autumn 1978), pp. 342-68, esp. pp. 354-56; James MacGregor Burns, “Congress and the Formation of Economic Policies” (doctoral dissertation; Harvard University, 1947), ch. 1; A. Cash Koeniger, “Carter Glass and the National Recovery Administration,” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 74, no. 3 (Summer 1975), pp. 349-64, esp. pp. 351-53; Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 202-4, quoted at p. 202.

[FDR on NIRA at signing]: Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 246-47, quoted at p. 246.

“Discipline and Direction Under Leadership”?

[FDR at work]: Burns, Lion, pp. 264-65; Freidel, Launching, pp. 274-88; see also Milton Katz, “From Hoover to Roosevelt,” in Katie Loucheim, The Making of the New Deal: The Insiders Speak (Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 120-29, esp. pp. 121-22; Davis, New Deal Years, ch. 6.

28 [Perkins on FDR]: Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (Viking, 1946), p. 163.

[Berle on FDR]: Berle and Jacobs, p. 72.

[“Combine eating up grain”]: quoted in Bernard Asbell, The F.D.R. Memoirs (Doubleday, 1973), p. 84.

[Brain trust]: see sources cited in ch. 1, first section, supra.

[Frankfurter and FDR]: see Max Freedman, annot., Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1928-1945 (Little, Brown, 1967), esp. chs. 2-4; Bruce A. Murphy, The Brandeis/ Frankfurter Connection (Oxford University Press, 1982), ch. 4.

29 [Eleanor Roosevelt as First Lady]: Lash, ch. 35; Eleanor Roosevelt, This I Remember, chs. 7-9; see also Burns, Lion, p. 173.

[Beard on Eleanor]: quoted in Lash, p. 373.

[Dewson on both Roosevelts]: Molly Dewson Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library.

[FDR’s accessibility]: see Freidel, Launching, pp. 74-79; Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 32.

[FDR as quarterback]: Burns, Lion, p. 171.

30 [FDR as broker]: see Otis L. Graham, Jr., Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon (Oxford University Press, 1976), ch. 1; Graham, “The Broker State,” Wilson Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 5 (Winter 1984), pp. 86-97.

[“To cement our society”]: address at Green Bay, Wise, August 9, 1934, in Roosevelt Public Papers, vol. 3, pp. 370-75, quoted at p. 375; see also Moley, Seven Years, p. 290. The Nebraska congressman was Edward Burke.

[“The outward expression”]: October 24, 1934, in Public Papers, vol. 3, pp. 435-40, quoted at p. 436.

[Congress and the early New Deal]: James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (University of Kentucky Press, 1967), ch. 1, FDR quoted on Byrd at pp. 29-30; Burns, Lion, pp. 174-75; Shover, “Populism in the Nineteen-Thirties”; Koeniger; Barbara Sinclair, “Party Realignment and the Transformation of the Political Agenda: House of Representatives, 1925-1938,” American Political Science Review, vol. 71, no. 3 (September 1977), pp. 940-53.

[“Robbing Peter to pay Paul”]: Green Bay address, in Public Papers, vol. 3, p. 374.

30-1 [Economic conditions, spring-summer 1933]: Irving Bernstein, A Caring Society: The New Deal Confronts the Great Depression (Houghton Mifflin, 1985), pp. 92-93, also pp. 35-36.

31 [“Burned down the capitol”]: quoted in Robert Bendiner, Just Around the Corner (Harper, 1967), p. 35.

[Praise from Tribune and American]: see ibid., p. 36.

[Lord Roosevelt and King George]: James E. Sargent, Roosevelt and the Hundred Days: Struggle for the Early New Deal (Garland Publishing, 1981), p. 214; Personal Letters, vol. 3, pp. 369-71; Freidel, Launching, pp. 278-79.

[Families on relief]: Bernstein, Caring Society, pp. 32, 34.

[“ I want to talk”]: March 12, 1933, in Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 61-65, quoted at p. 61.

[Perkins on FDR’s radio delivery]: Perkins, p. 72.

[FDR’s press conferences]: see Graham J. White, FDR and the Press (University of Chicago Press, 1979), ch. 1; see also Public Papers, vols. 2 and 3 passim.

[Hugh Johnson and the Blue Eagle in action]: Johnson, chs. 19-28; Matthew Josephson, “The General,” New Yorker, vol. 10 (August 18-September 1, 1934); Leverett S. Lyon et al., The National Recovery Administration: An Analysis and Appraisal (Brookings Institution, 1935), part 2; Donald R. Richberg, The Rainbow (Doubleday, Doran, 1936), chs. 10-11; Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 7; New York Times, September 14, 1933, pp. 1-3.

[Ford and NRA Code]: Nevins and Hill, pp. 15-27.

[Nye on NRA]: Schlesinger, Coming, p. 131.

[Tugwell on Consumers’ Advisory Board]: quoted in ibid., p. 130.

[Section 7(a)]: Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), chs. 1-3, text of 7(a) quoted at p. 34; Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 9; Twentieth Century Fund, Labor and the Government (McGraw-Hill, 1935).

33 [Lewis on 7(a)]: Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis (Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977), p. 184.

[“PRESIDENT WANTS YOU”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 216.

[“Forget about injunctions”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Coming, p. 139.

[“National Run Around”]: Burns, Lion, p. 193.

[Failure and significance of NRA]: Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, “State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal,” Political Science Qarterly, vol. 97, no. 2 (Summer 1982), pp. 255-78; Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 10; Hawley, chs. 6-7; Berle and Jacobs, p. 102; McQuaid, pp. 355-56; Johnson, chs. 29-30; Bernard Bellush, The Failure of the NRA (Norton, 1975), esp. chs. 7-8,

[FDR’s private judgment on NRA]: see Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America 1929-1941 (Times Books, 1984), p. 162.

34 [PWA]: Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 17; Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes (Simon and Schuster, 1953-54), vol. 1, passim.

[FERA and CWA]: Bernstein, Caring Society, pp. 25-42; George McJimsey, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (Harvard University Press, 1987), ch. 4; Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 16; Burns, Lion, p. 196; Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (Harper, 1948), ch. 3; William M. Bremer, “Along the ‘American Way’: The New Deal’s Work Relief Programs for the Unemployed,” Journal of American History, vol. 62, no. 3 (December 1975), pp. 636-52; Paul E. Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Louisiana State University Press, 1978), chs. 3-4; Davis, New Deal Years, pp. 305-14.

35 [Sargent on FDR]: Sargent, pp. 21-22.

[“Get somewhere”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 197.

[London Conference]: Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 39-58; Feis, chs. 12-20; Burns, Lion, pp. 177-78; Schlesinger, Coming, chs. 12-13; James R. Moore, “Sources of New Deal Economic Policy: The International Dimension,” Journal of American History, vol. 61, no. 3 (December 1974), pp. 728-44; Freidel, Launching, chs. 27-28; Betty Glad, Key Pittman: The Tragedy of a Senate Insider (Columbia University Press, 1986), ch. 17; Davis, New Deal Years, ch. 5.

36 [Tariff bill]: Schlesinger, Coming, pp. 253-55.

[Gold purchases]: ibid., ch. 14; Elmus Wicker, “Roosevelt’s 1933 Monetary Experiment,” Journal of American History, vol. 57, no. 4 (March 1971), pp. 864-79; John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Crisis, 1928-1938 (Houghton Mifflin, 1959), pp. 6l-75.

[“A lucky number”]: quoted in Blum, p. 70.

[Recognition of the Soviet Union]: Dallek, pp. 78-81; Robert P. Browder, The Origins of Soviet-American Diplomacy (Princeton University Press, 1953), esp. chs. 4-6; George F. Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1961), pp. 297-300; Loy W. Henderson, A Question of Trust: The Origins of U.S.-Soviet Diplomatic Relations, George W. Baer, ed. (Hoover Institution Press, 1986).

36-7 [“Whited out” map]: Lash, p. 589.

37 [Berle on public works and NRA]: Berle and Jacobs, p. 102.

[Ickes and the oil industry]: Linda J. Lear, “Harold L. Ickes and the Oil Crisis of the First Hundred Days,” Mid-America, vol. 63, no. 1 (January 1981), pp. 3-13; Ickes Diary, vol. 1, pp. 10-16, 36-47 passim.

[FSRC]: C. Roger Lambert, “Want and Plenty: The Federal Surplus Relief Corporation and the AAA,” Agricultural History, vol. 46, no. 3 (July 1972), pp. 390-400; Irvin May, Jr., “Cotton and Cattle: The FSRC and Emergency Work Relief,” ibid., pp. 401-13.

[Air mail]: Schlesinger, Coming, pp. 448-55; Thomas T. Spencer, “The Air Mail Controversy of 1934,” Mid-America, vol. 62, no. 3 (October 1980), pp. 161-72.

[1934 election]: Schlesinger, Coming, pp. 503-7; Burns, Lion, pp. 198-203.

[“Are you better off?”]: June 28, 1934, in Public Papers, vol. 3, pp. 312-18, quoted at p. 314.

[Garner on congressional majority]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 202.

37-8 [Churchill on FDR]: Churchill, “While theWorld Watches,” Collier’s, December 29, 1934, as quoted in Schlesinger, Coming, p. 23.

2. The Arc of Conflict

39 [“We sold everything we could”]: Jimmy Douglas, quoted in Federal Writers’ Project, These Are Our Lives (University of North Carolina Press, 1939; reprinted by Arno Press, 1969), p. 241.

[NRA in Macon County]: Arthur F. Raper, Preface to Peasantry: A Tale of Two Black Belt Counties (University of North Carolina Press, 1936), p. 237.

[“Your best tie”]: Personal reminiscence of the author.

[Writer on currant pickers]: John Macnamara, “Berry Picker,” Nation, vol. 139, no. 3610 (September 12, 1934), pp. 302-4, quoted at p. 303.

[Du Pont vice president on cook]: Robert Carpenter, quoted in Gerard Colby Zilg, Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 289.

[Indiana housewife on relief]: quoted in Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middle-town in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts (Harcourt, 1937), pp. 111-12.

40 [“God damn all Roosevelts.”]: quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin, 1958), p. 567.

[Garden City dust storm]: quoted in Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 17.

[“Eleven Cent cotton”]: quoted in Ann M. Campbell, “Reports from Weedpatch, California: The Records of the Farm Security Administration,” Agricultural History, vol. 48, no. 3 (July 1974), p. 402.

[Economic conditions, 1929-35]: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), part 1, p. 135 (Series D 85-86) (unemployment); part 1, p. 170 (Series D 802-10) (weekly earnings); part 2, p. 610 (Series N 1-29) (construction).

Class War in America

41 [“A nice old gentleman”]: address delivered at Syracuse, N.Y., September 29, 1936, in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 5, pp. 383-90, quoted at p. 385.

[FDR’s conservatism in early New Deal]: see Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Launching of the New Deal (Little, Brown, 1973), chs. 12-14 passim.

42 [Values of American right]: see Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (Knopf, 1955), esp. ch. 4.

[Al Smith and the New Deal]: Richard O’Connor, The First Hurrah: A Biography of Alfred E. Smith (Putnam, 1970), chs. 18-19; Oscar Handlin, Al Smith and His America (Little, Brown, 1958), ch. 8.

42-3 [Founding of Liberty League]: George Wolfskill, The Revolt of the Conservatives: A History of the American Liberty League, 1934-1940 (Greenwood Press, 1962), pp. 23-25, 56-67; Frederick Rudolph, “The American Liberty League, 1934-1940,” American Historical Review, vol. 56, no. 1 (October 1950), pp. 19-33; Zilg, pp. 283-98; Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (Harper, 1970), pp. 200-2.

43 [Shouse-FDR meeting]: Wolfskill, pp. 27-28, quoted at p. 27.

[FDR on “Commandments”]: press conference 137, August 24, 1934, as quoted in James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, 1956), pp. 206-8, and Schlesinger, Coming, p. 487.

[Conservative attack on New Deal]: George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson, All but the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933-39 (Macmillan, 1969), pp. 161-62; collection of American Liberty League pamphlets at Sawyer Library, Williams College.

43-4 [FDR’s threat to capitalists’ self-esteem]: see Burns, Lion, p. 240; Daniel Aaron, “Conservatism, Old and New,” American Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer 1954), pp. 99-110; Louis Hartz, “The Whig Tradition in America and Europe,” American Political Science Review, vol. 46, no. 4 (December 1952), pp. 989-1002; Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind (Henry Regnery, 1955); Rossiter, ch. 11; Robert A. Nisbet, “Conservatism and Sociology,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 58, no. 2 (September 1952), pp. 167-75; Richard W. Leopold, Elihu Root and the Conservative Tradition (Little, Brown, 1954); Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Harcourt, 1955); Peter Viereck, Conservatism Revisited (Scribner, 1949).

44 [French observer on wealth and virtue]: Burns, Lion, p. 240.

[FDR on classmate’s remarks]: quoted in ibid., p. 205.

[FDR on “dinner-party conversations”]: ibid., pp. 205-6.

[Hofstadter on betrayal]: Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (Knopf, 1948), p. 330; see also Wolfskill and Hudson, ch. 6.

[Names for FDR]: Wolfskill and Hudson, pp. 16-17.

[“The $64 question”]: ibid., p. 25.

45 [“THE PRESIDENT’S WIFE IS SUING”]: ibid.

[Obsession with FDR’s disability]: ibid., pp. 12-15.

[FDR’s “insanity”]: ibid., pp. 5-11.

[Anti-Semitism]: ibid., pp. 65-78.

45-6 [AFL in 1920s and depression]: Irving Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920-1933 (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), pp. 83-108; see also Eugene T. Sweeney, “The A.F.L.’s Good Citizen, 1920-1940,” Labor History, vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring 1972), pp. 200-16.

46 [Union growth under 7(a)]: Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941 (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), chs. 2-3.

[San Francisco labor conflict]: ibid., pp. 252-98; Felix Riesenberg. Jr., Golden Gate (Knopf, 1940), ch. 23; Charles P. Larrowe, “The Great Maritime Strike of ’34,” Labor History, vol. 11, no. 4 (Fall 1970), pp. 403-51, and vol. 12, no. 1 (Winter 1971), pp. 3-37.

[Shape-up]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 254-56.

47 [FDR on strike]: quoted in ibid., p. 289.

[Perkins’s role in settlement]: ibid, pp. 288-90; George Martin, Madam Secretary (Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 313-22; Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (Viking, 1946), pp. 312-15.

[Minneapolis strike]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 229-52; George H. Mayer, The Political Career of Floyd B. Olson (University of Minnesota Press, 1950), ch. 10.

48 [Textile strike]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 298-315.

[Brooks on textile strike]: quoted in ibid., p. 309.

[Daniels on troops]: quoted in Schlesinger, Coming, p. 394.

49 [“Destroying cities”]: quoted in Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 313.

[Sharecroppers’ plight]: Erskine Caldwell, Tenant Farmer (Phoenix Press, 1935), quoted at p. 4; Raper.

[Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union]: H. L. Mitchell, Mean Things Happening in This Land (Allanheld, Osmun, 1979), esp. chs. 4-10; Lowell Dyson, “Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and Depression Politics,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 88, no. 2 (June 1973), pp. 230-52; Bernard K. Johnpoll, Pacifist’s Progress: Norman Thomas and the Decline of American Socialism (Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 146-52; Donald H. Grubbs, Cry from the Cotton: The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union and the New Deal (University of North Carolina Press, 1971); Jess Gilbert and Steve Brown, “Alternative Land Reform Proposals in the 1930s: The Nashville Agrarians and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union,” Agricultural History, vol. 55, no. 4 (October 1981), pp. 351-69.

[Preacher on “this fuss”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Coming, p. 377.

[Itinerant farm workers]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 150-70; see also Walter J. Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Greenwood Press, 1973), esp. ch. 8.

50 [Bernstein on Imperial Valley dispute]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 160.

[ACLU tour]: ibid., pp. 166-67.

51 [“Prayer of Bitter Men”]: quoted in Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley, eds., One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression (University of Illinois Press, 1981), p. 365.

“Lenin or Christ”—or a Path Between?

52 [“Fight by all available means”]: “Statutes of the Communist International Adopted at the Second Comintern Congress,” August 4, 1920, in Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919-1943, Documents (Oxford University Press, 1956), vol. 1, quoted at p. 163.

[Sixth World Congress on smashing capitalism]: see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 189.

[Communist party, eve of 1930s]: Harvey Klehr, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade (Basic Books, 1984), ch. 1, esp. p. 5.

[Depression as potential boon to Communists]: see Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919-1957) (Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 188-97.

[Communist party membership, 1932-33]: Klehr, pp. 91-92.

53 [“United front from below”]: ibid., pp. 13, 97-104; Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 197-98.

[Browder]: Klehr, pp. 21-23; John McCarten, “Party Linesman,” New Yorker, vol. 14 (September 24, 1938), pp. 20-24, and (October 1, 1938), pp. 22-27; James Gilbert Ryan, “The Making of a Native Marxist: The Early Career of Earl Browder,” Review of Politics, vol. 39, no. 3 (July 1977), pp. 332-62.

[Browder’s claims as to size of following]: Schlesinger, Upheaval, p. 198, [Signed-up members]: Klehr, p. 365.

[League Against War and Fascism]: ibid., pp. 107-12; Howe and Coser, pp. 348-55.

[Youth Congress]: Klehr, pp. 319-23; Earl Browder, “The American Communist Party in the Thirties,” in Rita James Simon, ed., As We Saw the Thirties (University of Illinois Press, 1967), pp. 227-29.

[Writers and Communist party]: see Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (Harcourt, 1961), part 2 passim.

[Demise of “red unions”]: Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict that Shaped American Unions (Princeton University Press, 1977), ch. 3, esp. pp. 74-75; Jack Statchel quoted on working among AFL workers at p. 74; Klehr, chs. 7, 13; Howe and Coser, ch. 6.

[Thomas]: Johnpoll; W. A. Swanberg, Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist (Scribner, 1976).

[Schlesinger on Thomas]: Upheaval, p. 177.

53-4 [Divisions among Socialists]: Johnpoll, ch. 4; Swanberg, esp. ch. 9; John H. M. Laslett and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds., Failure of a Dream?: Essays in the History of American Socialism (Doubleday, 1974).

54 [Attempts at Socialist-Communist union]: Johnpoll, pp. 111-16, 140-43; Howe and Coser, pp. 325-27; Klehr, pp. 99-112; Norman Thomas, “The Thirties as a Socialist Recalls Them,” in Simon, pp. 114-17.

[Madison Square Garden meeting]: New York Times, February 17, 1934, pp. 1, 3; Klehr, pp. 113-16.

[Thomas on impossibility of united front]: quoted in Johnpoll, p. 115; see also Peggy Lamson, Roger Baldwin: Founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (Houghton Mifflin, 1976), esp. ch. 14.

[In the Archey Road]: Finley Peter Dunne, “Proposed: A Federal Divorce Law,” in Dunne, Mr. Dooley on the Choice of Law, Edward J. Bander, comp. (Michie Co., 1963), pp. 87-95, quoted at p. 87.

[AFL as federation of craft and industrial workers]: Christopher L. Tomlins, “AFL Unions in the 1930s: Their Performance in Historical Perspective,” Journal of American History, vol. 65, no. 4 (March 1979), pp. 1021-42; see also Edwin Young, “The Split in the Labor Movement,” in Milton Derber and Edwin Young, eds., Labor and the New Deal (University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), pp. 47-50.

55 [Federal labor unions]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 355-60.

[Bernstein on federal union leaders]: ibid., p. 373; see, generally, Walter Licht and Hal Seth Barron, “Labor’s Men: A Collective Biography of Union Officialdom During the New Deal Years,” Labor History, vol. 19, no. 2 (Fall 1978), pp. 532-45.

[Supporters of federal union leaders]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 363.

[Divisions among AFL leaders]: see ibid., pp. 360-66 and ch. 8 passim; Maxwell C. Raddock, Portrait of an American Labor leader: William L. Hutcheson (American Institute of Social Science, 1955), ch. 14; Robert D. Leiter, The Teamsters Union (Bookman Associates, 1957), ch. 2; David Dubinsky and A. H. Raskin, David Dubinsky: A Life with Labor (Simon and Schuster, 1977), ch. 9; Matthew Josephson, Sidney Hillman: Statesman of American Labor (Doubleday, 1952), ch. 17.

55 [Lewis]: Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis (Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977).

55-6 [Debate among craft and industrial unionists, 1934-35]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 368-86; Young in Derber and Young, pp. 52-55.

56 [1935 AFL convention]: American Federation of Labor, Report of Proceedings of the Fifty fifth Annual Convention (1935), esp. pp. 521-75, 614-65, 725-29; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 386-98.

[Lewis on strong and weak unions]: quoted in Proceedings, pp. 541, 542. [Lewis’s punch]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 397; Proceedings, p. 727.

[Lewis-Green exchange]: quoted in Schlesinger, Coming, p. 413.

[Formation of CIO]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 397-431; Dubofsky and Van Tine, ch. 11; see also David Brody, “Labor and the Great Depression: The Interpretive Prospects,” Labor History, vol. 13, no. 2 (Spring 1972), pp. 231-44.

56-7 [Lewis-Green exchange of letters]: quoted in Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 403-4; on Green’s writings in favor of industrial unionism, see ibid., pp. 399-400.

57 [Social justice in Catholic Church]: see John F. Cronin, Social Principles and Economic Life (Bruce Publishing, 1959); Aaron I. Abell, American Catholicism and Social Action: A Search for Social Justice, 1865-1950 (Hanover House, 1960); Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, Olive Wyon, trans. (Allen & Unwin, 1950), vol. 1.

[Coughlin]: David H. Bennett, Demagogues in the Depression (Rutgers University Press, 1969), part 1; Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (Knopf, 1982), chs. 4-6 and passim: Sheldon Marcus, Father Coughlin: The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower (Little, Brown, 1973); Charles J. Tull, Father Coughlin and the New Deal (Syracuse University Press, 1965).

[“Please, God—a priest”]: quoted in Brinkley, p. 84.

58 [Stegner on Coughlin’s voice]: Stegner, “The Radio Priest and His Flock,” in Isabel Leighton, ed., The Aspirin Age, 1919-1941 (Simon and Schuster, 1949), p. 234.

[Detroit in the depression]: B. J. Widick, Detroit: City of Race and Class Violence (Quadrangle, 1972), ch. 3.

[“A detriment”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 18-19.

[“Four Horsemen”]: ibid., p. 18.

[Coughlin on Smith]: see Marcus, p. 64.

[Coughlin on O’Connell]: quoted in Bennett, p. 59.

[Coughlin in 1934]: Brinkley, pp. 119-20; Marcus, pp. 54-56, 61-62.

[Coughlin in 1932 campaign]: Brinkley, pp. 107-8; Marcus, pp. 44-48.

[“Roosevelt or Ruin”]: quoted in Brinkley, p. 108.

[“Christ’s Deal”]: ibid.

[Coughlin’s letters to FDR]: see Bennett, p. 38; Brinkley, p. 109.

[Coughlin and White House]: Tull, ch. 2; Brinkley, pp. 108-10.

59 [Coughlin and CBS]: Brinkley, pp. 99-101.

[Coughlin’s audience]: ibid., pp. 196-207.

[Coughlin-FDR divergence]: Tull, pp. 52-58; Marcus, pp. 58-70; Brinkley, pp. 124-27, 178-79, 244-46.

[National Union for Social Justice]: Marcus, ch. 5; Tull, ch. 3.

[“Organized lobby”]: quoted in Brinkley, pp. 133-34.

[Long]: T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (Knopf, 1969); Harnett T. Kane, Louisiana

Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship, 1928-1940 (Morrow, 1941); Huey Pierce Long, Every Man a King (National Book Co., 1933); Brinkley, chs. 1-3 and passim: Huey P. Long Papers, General Correspondence, Louisiana State University

Library; Glen Jeansonne, “The Apotheosis of Huey P. Long: A Critique of Huey Long”

(typescript, n.d.); Lipset and Raab, pp. 189-99.

[Long’s use of radio]: Williams, pp. 203, 629-30.

60 [Long’s “facts and figures”]: Brinkley, p. 72.

[“Come to my feast”]: quoted in ibid., pp. 71-72.

60 [Share Our Wealth plan]: ibid., pp. 72-73, quoted at p. 72; Kane, pp. 121-24; see also Arnold Shankman, “The Five-Day Plan and the Depression,” The Historian, vol. 43, no. 3 (May 1981), pp. 393-409; see also Sender Garlin, The Real Huey P. Long (Workers Library Publishers, 1935), a Communist party attack on Long.

[“Some great minds”]: quoted in Brinkley, p. 73.

[Mencken on Long]: ibid.

[Brinkley on Long’s plan]: ibid., p. 74.

61 [Long’s Louisiana]: V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (Knopf, 1949), ch. 8; Allan P. Sindler, Huey Long’s Louisiana: State Politics, 1920-1952 (Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), esp. ch. 1.

[Long’s hold on Louisiana politics]: Brinkley, pp. 22-35, 67-70; Williams, pp. 712-36; see also Kane, pp. 102-15; Hodding Carter, “Huey Long: American Dictator,” American Mercury, vol. 48, no. 304 (April 1949), pp. 435-47.

[Long at 1932 convention]: Williams, pp. 571-82; Long, chs. 32-33.

62 [Long on FDR]: quoted in Brinkley, p. 46; see also Williams, p. 6.

[Long’s opposition to Hundred Days]: Williams, pp. 627-36; see also Michael J. Cassity, “Huey Long: Barometer of Reform in the New Deal,” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 2 (Spring 1973), pp. 255-69.

[Long at White House]: James A. Farley, Behind the Ballots (Harcourt, 1938), pp. 240-42, Long quoted at p. 242.

[Administration action against Long]: Williams, pp. 636-38, 689-92, 793-98, 812-13; Brinkley, pp. 79-81; Farley, Ballots, pp. 251-52.

[Hoot owl and scrootch owl]: quoted in Kane, p. 101.

[Share Our Wealth Society]: Williams, pp. 692-98, 700-2; Long Papers, General Correspondence, 1934-35.

[Share Our Wealth membership]: Williams, p. 700; see also Raymond Gram Swing, “The Menace of Huey Long: III,” Nation, vol. 140, no. 3629 (January 23, 1935), pp. 98-100.

[Long’s communications kingdom]: Brinkley, pp. 62, 70-71, 169; Williams, pp. 641-47; collection of radio speeches, Long Papers.

The Politics of Tumult

63 [Condition of FDR’s staff, midterm]: Beatrice Bishop Berle and Travis Beal Jacobs, eds., Navigating the Rapids, 1918-1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle (Harcourt, 1973), p. 102; Berle Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.; Schlesinger, Upheaval, p. 212; Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes (Simon and Schuster, 1953-54), vol 1., p. 303; Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (Norton, 1971), pp. 435-36.

[“A democracy after all”]: quoted in Lash, p. 437; see also Molly Dewson Papers, Roosevelt Library.

[Agriculture in first New Deal]: Raper, pp. 243-53; Georgia tenants’ conversation quoted at p. 245; Theodore Saloutos and John D. Hicks, Agricultural Discontent in the Middle West, 1900-1939 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), ch. 17; Theodore Saloutos, The American Farmer and the New Deal (Iowa State University Press, 1982), chs. 3-7; Bernard Sternsher, Rexford Tugwell and the New Deal (Rutgers University Press, 1964), chs. 15-22; C. Roger Lambert, “Want and Plenty: The Federal Surplus Relief Corporation and the AAA,” Agricultural History, vol. 46, no. 3 (July 1972), pp. 390-400; Irvin May, Jr., “Cotton and Cattle: The FSRC and Emergency Work Relief,” ibid., pp. 401-13.

[Agricultural lobbying groups]: Saloutos and Hicks, chs. 8-9; John L. Shover, Cornbelt Rebellion: The Farmers’ Holiday Association (University of Illinois Press, 1965), chs. 9-11; Wesley McCune, The Farm Bloc (Doubleday, Doran, 1943); Orville Merton Kile, The Farm Bureau Through Three Decades (Waverly Press, 1948), esp. chs. 16-17; John A. Crampton, The National Farmers’ Union: Ideology of a Pressure Group (University of Nebraska Press, 1965); James L. Guth, “The National Cooperative Council and Farm Relief, 1929-1942,” Agricultural History, vol. 51, no. 2 (April 1977), pp. 441-58; Robert L. Tontz, “Memberships of General Farmers’ Organizations, United States, 1874-1960,” ibid., vol. 38, no. 3 (July 1964), pp. 143-60; Lee J. Alston and Joseph P. Ferrie, “Resisting the Welfare State: Southern Opposition to the Farm Security Administration,” Research in Economic History (JAI Press, 1985), Suppl. 4, pp. 83-120.

65 [Talmadge’s agricultural policies]: see Raper, pp. 225-28.

66 [1935 AAA “purge”]: Sternsher, ch. 16; Saloutos, American Farmer, ch. 8; Richard Lowitt, “Henry A. Wallace and the 1935 Purge in the Department of Agriculture,” Agricultural History, vol. 53, no. 3 (July 1979), pp. 607-21.

[Townsend and Townsend Movement]: Bennett, chs. 10-12; Abraham Holtzman, The Townsend Movement: A Political Study (Bookman Associates, 1963), chs. 2-3; The Committee on Old Age Security of the Twentieth Century Fund, The Townsend Crusade (Twentieth Century Fund, 1936); Schlesinger, Upheaval, ch. 3.

67 [Parsons on the elderly]: quoted in Holtzman, p. 20.

[“Until the whole country hears”]: quoted in Brinkley, pp. 222-23.

[“Onward, Townsend soldiers”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Upheaval, p. 34.

68 [Time inflation of Townsend clubs]: vol. 25, no. 2 (January 14, 1935), p. 14. [High on Townsend movement]: quoted in Schlesinger, Upheaval, p. 34.

[La Follette brothers]: Donald Young, ed., Adventure in Politics: The Memoirs of Philip La Follette (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), esp. ch. 17; Edward N. Doan, The La Follettes and the Wisconsin Idea (Rinehart, 1947); Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 104-8; John E. Miller, “Philip La Follette: Rhetoric and Reality,” Historian, vol. 45, no. 2 (February 1983), pp. 65-83.

[FDR’s endorsement of Bob La Follette]: Burns, Lion, p. 201.

[Olson]: Mayer; Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 98-104.

[Olson on 1940]: quoted in Schlesinger, Upheaval, p. 104.

69 [EPIC and anti-EPIC campaigns]: Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked (Upton Sinclair, 1935); “The Epic of Upton Sinclair,” Nation, vol. 139, no. 3617 (October 31, 1934), pp. 495-96; Royce D. Delmatier et al., The Rumble of California Politics, 1848-1970 (Wiley, 1970), pp. 266-67, 272-80; Luther Whiteman and Samuel L. Lewis, “EPIC, or Politics for Use,” in Dennis Hale and Jonathan Eisen, eds., The California Dream (Collier Books, 1968), pp. 63-71.

[White House and Sinclair’s campaign]: Sinclair, Candidate, chs. 15-17, 36; Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 115-17, 119-21; Lash, pp. 386-87.

[“ (I) Say nothing”]: quoted in Lash, p. 387.

70 [Sinclair’s books on campaign]: Sinclair, Candidate; Sinclair, I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty (Upton Sinclair, 1933); for Lanny Budd, see Sinclair’s eleven-volume “World’s End” series (Viking, 1940-53).

[Historians’ and FDR’s “turn to the left”]: see Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America 1929-1941 (Times Books, 1984), pp. 261-63; Otis Graham, Jr., “Historians and the New Deal, 1944-1960,” Social Studies, vol. 54 (April 1963), pp. 133-40; Sternsher, ch. 11; Barton J. Bernstein, “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform,” in Bernstein and Allen J. Matusow, eds., Twentieth-Century America: Recent Interpretations (Harcourt, 1972), pp. 242-64.

[FDR’s coolness to Wagner bill]: see Joseph J. Huthmacher, Senator Robert B. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (Atheneum, 1968), pp. 166-69, 189-90, 197-98.

[1935 State of the Union address]: January 4, 1935, in Public Papers, vol. 4, pp. 15-25, quoted at p. 25.

70-1 [“Distinctly dispirited”]: Ickes Diary, vol. 1, p. 306.

71 [Chamber of Commerce conference]: New York Times, May 1, 1935, pp. 1-2, Silas Strawn quoted at p. 1; New York Times, May 3, 1935, pp. 1, 4; Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 270-72.

72 [Supreme Court invalidation of New Deal legislation]: Panama Refining Co. v. Ryan, 293 U.S. 388 (1935) (hot oil provisions of NRA); Railroad Retirement Board v. Alton Railroad Co., 295 U.S. 330 (1935); Schechter v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935) (NRA); Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. Radford, 295 U.S. 555 (1935) (farm mortgage law); United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936) (AAA); Carter v. Carter Coal Co., 298 U.S. 238 (1936) (Bituminous Coal Act); Ashton v. Cameron County Water Improvement District No. 1, 298 U.S. 513 (1936) (Municipal Bankruptcy Act).

[Gold Clause cases]: Perry v. United States, 294 U.S. 330 (1935); United States v. Bankers Trust Co., 294 U.S. 240 (1935); Norman v. Baltimore & Ohio R.R. Co., 294 U.S. 240 (1935); Nortz v. United States, 294 U.S. 317 (1935); McReynolds quoted in Newsweek, vol. 5, no. 8 (February 23, 1935), p. 7; John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Crisis, 1928-1938 (Houghton Mifflin, 1959), pp. 130-31. 72-3 [“Shudder at the closeness”]: letter to Angus D. MacLean, February 21, 1935, quoted in Schlesinger, Upheaval, p. 260.

73 [FDR’s meeting with liberal senators]: Max Freedman, annot., Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1928-1945 (Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 269-72; Ickes Diary, vol. 1, pp. 363-64.

[“Eleventh hour”]: quoted in Ickes Diary, vol. 1, p. 363.

[FDR’s press conference after NRA invalidation]: May 31, 1935, in Public Papers, vol. 4, pp. 201-22, quoted at pp. 201, 202, 209, 221.

74 [“Black-winged angel”]: Schlesinger, Upheaval, p. 280.

[“This is the end”]: quoted in Philippa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 352.

[Brandeis and Frankfurter in FDR Administration]: ibid., pp. 380-87; Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 219-25; Bruce A. Murphy, The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection (Oxford University Press, 1982), chs. 4-5; Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton University Press, 1966), part 3; Rexford G. Tugwell, “Roosevelt and Frankfurter: An Essay Review,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 85, no. 1 (March 1970), pp. 99-114; Freedman, passim.

75 [FDR’s continued desire for “collectivist” control]: see Otis L. Graham, Jr., Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon (Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 32.

[FDR’s imperative]: Murphy, p. 159; see also FDR memorandum to legislative leaders, June 4, 1935, in F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947-50), vol. 3, p. 481; and memorandum for legislative conference of August 18, 1935, in ibid., pp. 502-3.

[Congressional progressives riding high]: see Ronald A. Mulder, “The Progressive Insurgents in the United States Senate, 1935-1936: Was There a Second New Deal?,” Mid-America, vol. 57, no. 2 (April 1975), pp. 106-25; Freedman, pp. 269-72.

[NLRA]: Bernstein, Turbulent Years, ch. 7; Cletus E. Daniel, The ACLU and the Wagner Act (ILR/Cornell, 1980); R. W. Fleming, “The Significance of the Wagner Act,” in Derber and Young, pp. 121-55; Huthmacher,pp. 189-98; Public Papers, vol.4, quoted at p. 294.

[Social Security]: Roy Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security, 1900-1935 (Harvard University Press, 1968); Schlesinger, Coming, ch. 18; Martin, Madam Secretary, ch. 26; Perkins, ch. 23; Public Papers, vol. 4, quoted at p. 324.

[Banking Act]: Hawley, pp. 309-15; Marriner S. Eccles, Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal Recollections, Sidney Hyman, cd. (Knopf, 1951), part 4, chs. 1-4, [“Knock-down and drag-out fight”]: quoted in Eccles, p. 175.

[“An eraser instead”]: ibid., p. 229.

76 [Public Utility Holding Company Act]: Ralph F. de Bedts, The New Deal’s SEC: The Formative Years (Columbia University Press, 1964), ch. 5; Hawley, pp. 329-37; see also William O. Douglas Papers, esp. container 2, Library of Congress.

[Revenue Act]: Hawley, pp. 344-50; Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 325-34; James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (University of Kentucky Press, 1967), pp. 59-69; Message to the Congress on Tax Revision, June 19, 1935, in Public Papers, vol. 4, pp. 270-76, quoted at p. 272.

[WPA]: George McJimsey, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (Harvard University Press, 1987), chs. 5-8; Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933-1937 (Random House, 1986), pp. 463-71, 567-71, 621-23.

77 [Progressive senators and bureaucracies]: Mulder, p. 124 and passim. [Holding company bill as model]: see Murphy, p. 165.

[Mulder on Wheeler]: Mulder, p. 124.

[“Excessive centralization”]: quoted in ibid.

[Regresiveness of Social Security insurance model]: McElvaine, pp. 256-57; Mark H. Leff, “Taxing the ‘Forgotten Man’: The Politics of Social Security Finance in the New Deal,” Journal of American History, vol. 70, no. 2 (September 1983), pp. 359-81.

[Leff on payroll tax]: Leff, p. 379.

[Social security and income redistribution]: Lubove, ch. 8; James Leiby, A History of Social Welfare and Social Work in the United States (Columbia University Press, 1978), ch. 13.

78 [Long’s opposition to Social Security bill]: Williams, Long, pp. 835-36.

[Long’s reaction to tax message]: ibid., pp. 836-37; Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 327-28.

[“Lay over, Huey”]: quoted in Williams, p. 836.

Appeal to the People

[1936 State of the Union address]: January 3, 1936, in Public Papers, vol. 5, pp. 8-18, quoted at pp. 13-14, 10, 14, 17, respectively; New York Times, January 4, 1936, pp. 1, 8.

79 [Condition of ideological left, early 1936]: see Johnpoll, pp. 167-70; Brinkley, pp. 190-92; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 404-9; Holtzman, p. 171.

[Democrats against FDR]: Schlesinger, Upheaval, ch. 28; Patterson, pp. 250-57.

80 [Long’s plans for 1936 and 1940]: Williams, Long, pp. 843-47; Kane, pp. 124-25.

[Long in 1931 poll]: Farley, Ballots, pp. 249-50, quoted at p. 250; Brinkley, pp. 207-8.

[Long’s assassination]: Williams, pp. 859-76; see also Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (Harcourt, 1946), pp. 418-25.

[Smith and Long’s legacy]: see Bennett, ch. 9; see also Glen Jeansonne, Gerald L. K. Smith, Minister of Hate (Yale University Press, 1988).

[FDR’s roll call]: Annual Message, in Public Papers, vol. 5, pp. 15-16.

[FDR’s instructions to Farley and political aides]: see James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story (McGraw-Hill, 1948), p. 59; Lester G. Seligman and Elmer K. Cornwell, Jr., eds., New Deal Mosaic: Roosevelt Confers with His National Emergency Council, 1933-1936 (University of Oregon Books, 1965), pp. 481-501 (meeting of December 17, 1935).

81 [FDR in polls and public esteem]: see the results of a January 1936 Fortune poll, as given in Hadley Cantril and Mildred Strunk, eds., Public Opinion, 1931-1946 (Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 754-55 (Item 1).

[Economic conditions, 1936]: Historical Statistics, part 1, p. 126 (Series D 1-10) and p. 235 (Series F 163-85).

[Poor people on the land and the New Deal]: Mitchell, chs. 7-8; Raper, part 5; Saloutos, American Farmer, ch. 7; Paul E. Mertz, New Deal Policy and Southern Rural Poverty (Louisiana State University Press, 1978).

[Southern blacks and the New Deal]: Raymond Wolters, Negroes and the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery (Greenwood Publishing, 1970), part 1; Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks (Oxford University Press, 1978), esp. ch. 2.

[Women and the New Deal]: Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Twayne, 1982), esp. ch. 2; Ware, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (Harvard University Press, 1981); Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From World War I to the Present (Free Press, 1980), chs. 14-17; Bernstein, Caring Society, pp. 290-92.

[“What I won’t stand for”]: O’Connor, pp. 282-84, quoted at p. 283; William E. Leuchtenburg, “Election of 1936,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968 (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 3, p. 2826.

82 [Hearst’s opposition to FDR]: see John K. Winkler, William Randolph Hearst: A New Appraisal (Hastings House, 1955), pp. 259-68.

[“You and your fellow Communists”]: quoted in Graham J. White, FDR and the Press (University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 95.

[“A Red New Deal”]: quoted in Wolfskill and Hudson, p. 193.

[AAA decision]: United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936), Stone’s dissent quoted at 87; Alpheus T. Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (Viking, 1956), pp. 405-18.

[Minimum-wage law decision]: Morehead v. New York, 298 U.S. 587 (1936), Stone’s dissent quoted at 632; Mason, pp. 421-26.

[Roosevelt’s coalition building]: Schlesinger, Upheaval, ch. 32; Lash, pp. 439-42; Farley, Ballots, pp. 301-2; Dubofsky and Van Tine, pp. 248-52; FDR memorandum to Farley, July 6, 1935, in Personal Letters, vol. 3, p. 492; Eleanor Roosevelt memorandum to FDR and others, July 16, 1936, in ibid., pp. 598-600; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 449-50.

83 [“One issue”]: quoted in Raymond Moley, After Seven Years (Harper, 1939), p. 342.

[Landon’s nomination]: Donald R. McCoy, Landon of Kansas (University of Nebraska Press, 1966), chs. 9-10; Leuchtenburg, pp. 2812-16.

83 [Hoover’s hopes for nomination]: Gary Dean Best, Herbert Hoover: The Postpresidential Years, 1933-1964 (Hoover Institution Press, 1983), vol. 1, pp. 39-65; McCoy, p. 255.

[Landon]: McCoy; Burns, Lion, p. 270.

[1936 Democratic convention]: Farley, Ballots, pp. 306-8; Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 579-85.

[Democratic platform]: reprinted in Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 3, pp. 2851-56; see also Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (Harper, 1952), pp. 101-3.

[FDR’s acceptance address]: June 27, 1936, in Public Papers, vol. 5, pp. 230-36, quoted at pp. 234, 235, 236.

84 [Coughlin-Townsend-Smith coalition]: Bennett, Prologue and ch. 14.

[Lemke]: ibid., part 2; Edward C. Blackorby, Prairie Rebel: The Public Life of William Lemke (University of Nebraska Press, 1963).

[Lemke on FDR and Landon]: quoted in Wolfskill and Hudson, p. 252.

[Union party boast]: see Bennett, p. 191.

[Socialist convention and fractures]: Swanberg, ch. 10; see, generally, Laslett and Lipsett, ch. 8.

84-5 [Communist popular front strategy]: Klehr, chs. 9-10; Howe and Coser, pp. 327-32; Kenneth Waltzer, “The Party and the Polling Place: American Communism and an American Labor Party in the 1930s,” Radical History Review, no. 23 (Spring 1980), pp. 104-29; Max Gordon, “The Communist Party of the Nineteen-Thirties and the New Left,” Socialist Revolution, vol. 6, no. 1 (January-March 1976), pp. 11-48; James Weinstein, “Response to Gordon,” ibid., pp. 48-59; Gordon, “Reply,” ibid., pp. 59-65.

85 [Klehr on Socialist and Communist shifts]: Klehr, p. 194.

[“TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICANISM”]: Howe and Coser, p. 333. [Landon’s campaign]: McCoy, chs. 11-13; Schlesinger, Upheaval, ch. 33 and pp. 635-38; Leuchtenburg, pp. 2816-21;Oswald Garrison Villard, “Issues and Men,” Nation, vol. 123, no. 10 (September 5, 1936), pp. 266-67.

[Hoover in 1936 campaign]: Best, vol. 1, pp. 65-73; Herbert Hoover, Addresses upon the American Road, 1933-1938 (Scribner, 1938), pp. 159-227; McCoy, pp. 279-81, 309.

[Literary Digest polls]: see Literary Digest, vol. 122,no. 18 (October 31, 1936), pp. 4-5, and no. 20 (November 14, 1936), pp. 7-8.

[Union party campaign]: Blackorby, pp. 222-31; Bennett, part 6; Tull, ch. 5.

[“Anti-God”]: quoted in Bennett, p. 230.

[“Broken down Colossus”]: ibid.

[Church hierarchy rebuke of Coughlin]: ibid., pp. 254-57; see also George Q. Flynn, American Catholics & the Roosevelt Presidency, 1932-1936 (Universitv of Kentucky Press, 1968), ch. 9.

[“As I was instrumental”]: quoted in Bennett, p. 228.

[“If I don’t deliver”]: quoted in Tull, p. 141.

[Coolness among Union party leaders]: see Bennett, ch. 19; Schlesinger, Upheaval, pp. 626-28.

86 [FDR’s campaign]: Farley, Ballots, pp. 308-27; Rosenman, pp. 107-39; Schlesinger, Upheaval, ch. 32 and pp. 630-35.

[Madison Square Garden address]: October 31, 1936, in Public Papers, vol. 5, pp. 566-73, quoted at pp. 568-69, 571-72, as modified by comparison with a recording of the address; New York Times, November 1, 1936, pp. 1, 36.

3. The Crisis of Majority Rule

87 [Press on FDR’s victory]: see James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, 1956), p. 284.

[Presidential election results, 1936]: Robert A. Diamond, ed., Congressional (Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections (Congressional Quarterly, 1975), pp. 251, 290; see also Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 642.

[Congressional results]: Congressional Quarterly, Guide to U.S. Elections, 2nd ed. (Congressional Quarterly, 1985), p. 1116.

88 [Framers and majority rule]: see Edwin Mims, Jr., The Majority of the People (Modern Age Books, 1941), esp. ch. 2; Henry Steele Commager, Majority Rule and Minority Rights (Oxford University Press, 1958); James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-Party Politics in America (Prentice-Hall, 1963), ch. 1; Burns, The Vineyard of Liberty (Knopf, 1982), chs. 1-2.

[Jefferson on majority rule]: inaugural address, March 4, 1801, in Paul Leicester Ford, ed., The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (Putnam, 1892-99), vol. 8, pp. 1-6, quoted at p. 2.

[McReynolds on FDR]: Paul A. Freund, “Charles Evans Hughes as Chief Justice,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 81, no. 1 (Autumn 1967), pp. 4-43, quoted at p. 12; see also William O. Douglas, The Court Years, 1939-1975 (Random House, 1980), p. 13.

[“Where was Ben Cardozo?”]: quoted in Eugene C. Gerhart, America’s Advocate: Robert H. Jackson (Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 99.

Court-Packing: The Switch in Time

[FDR on possible defiance of Court]: William E. Leuchtenburg, “The Origins of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘Court-Packing’ Plan,” in Philip B. Kurland, ed., The Supreme Court Review (University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 347-400, quoted at p. 353; see also John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Crisis, 1928-1938 (Houghton Mifflin, 1959), pp. 125-31.

[“How fortunate it is”]: letter of February 19, 1935, in F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947-50), vol. 3, p. 455.

[“Shame and humiliation”]: quoted in Leuchtenburg, “Origins,” p. 355.

[Search for solution to Court problem]: ibid., passim; see also Harold L. Ickes, The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes (Simon and Schuster, 1953-54), vol. 1, pp. 494-96 and passim.

90 [Labor’s attack on Court]: James C. Duram, “The Labor Union Journals and the Constitutional Issues of the New Deal: The Case for Court Restriction,” Labor History, vol. 15, no. 2 (Spring 1974), pp. 216-30.

[Letters to FDR from public]: quoted in Leuchtenburg, “Origins,” pp. 368, 366, respectively.

[FDR on “marching” farmers and workers]: ibid., p. 365.

[Long’s diary on possible amendments]: ibid., p. 361.

[FDR on Prime Minister’s threat]: Ickes Diary, vol. 1, pp. 467-68, 494-95.

90-1 [FDR on difficulties of passing an amendment]: letter to Charles C. Burlingham, February 23, 1937, in Personal Letters, vol. 3, pp. 661-62; letter to Felix Frankfurter, February 9, 1937, in Max Freedman, annot., Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1929-1945 (Little, Brown, 1967), pp. 381-82.

91 [Morris on need for unanimous decision]: Leuchtenburg, “Origins,” p. 374. [Cummings on “packing the Court”]: ibid., p. 390.

[Option of doing nothing]: ibid., p. 382; Rodney Morrison, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court: An Example of the Use of Probability Theory in Political History,” History and Theory, vol. 16, no. 2 (1977), pp. 137-46.

[Court in 1936 election]: Leuchtenburg, “Origins,” pp. 379-80.

[Democratic platform on Court]: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968 (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 3, pp. 2854-55; see also Leuchtenburg, “Origins,” pp. 378-79.

[FDR’s post-election planning]: Leuchtenburg, “Origins,” parts 5 and 6.

92 [Corwin’s proposal]: quoted in ibid., p. 389.

[McReynolds’s recommendations on retirement]: ibid., p. 391.

[“Constitution as I understand it”]: quoted in Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (Harper, 1952), p. 144.

[1937 inaugural address]: January 20, 1937, in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 6, pp. 1-6, quoted at pp. 4-5; see also Rosenman, Working, pp. 142-44.

93 [FDR’s meeting with cabinet and congressional leaders]: Joseph Alsop and Turner Catledge, The 168 Days (Doubleday, Doran, 1938), pp. 64-66; Ickes Diary, vol. 2, pp. 64-66.

[Text of Court plan message]: in Public Papers, vol. 6, pp. 51-59.

[FDR at press conference]: press conference 342, February 5, 1937, in Public Papers, vol. 6, pp. 35-50.

[“I cash in”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 294.

93 [Reaction to plan at Court]: ibid., pp. 294-95.

[Thompson on plan]: quoted in James T. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal (University of Kentucky Press, 1967), p. 87.

[Herald Tribune on plan]: editorial of February 6, 1937, quoted in Alfred Haines Cope and Fred Krinsky, eds., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court (D. C. Heath, 1969), p. 28; see also ibid., pp. 29-34; “Speak Frankly, Mr. President!,” Business Week, no. 392 (March 6, 1937), p. 68.

[Mencken on plan]: quoted in Patterson, p. 87.

[Hoover on plan]: Hoover, Memoirs: The Great Depression, 1929-1941 (Macmillan, 1952), p. 373.

[New York bishop on plan]: William T. Manning, quoted in Newsweek, vol. 9, no. 8 (February 20, 1937), p. 17.

[“A grand fight!”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 298.

94 [Congressional divisions over plan]: Patterson, pp. 88-117.

[Bailey on plan and “Negro vote”]: quoted in ibid., pp. 98-99; see also Ickes Diary, vol. 2, p. 115.

[“I meant it”]: address of March 4, 1937, in Public Papers, vol. 6, pp. 113-21, quoted at pp. 114, 121.

95 [Hughes’s letter]: David J. Danelski and Joseph S. Tulchin, eds., The Autobiographical Notes of Charles Evans Hughes (Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 304-7 and p. 306, n. 50; Alpheus T. Mason, Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law (Viking, 1956), pp. 450-53; Bruce A. Murphy, The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection (Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 179-82; Freedman, p. 396; Philippa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 388.

[“Smoke ’em out”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 303.

[Wagner Act decisions]: NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 (1937); NLRB v. Freuhauf Trailer Co., 301 U.S. 49 (1937); NLRB v. Friedman-Harry Marks Clothing Co., 301 U.S. 58 (1937); see also Robert L. Stern, “The Commerce Clause and the National Economy, 1933-1946,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 59, nos. 5 and 6 (May and July, 1946), pp. 645-93, 883-947.

[State minimum-wage decision]: West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 391 (1937).

[Frankfurter on Roberts switch and Hughes’s letter]: letter of March 30, 1937, in Freedman, p. 392; see also ibid., pp. 392-95; Felix Frankfurter, “Justice Roberts and the ‘Switch in Time,’” in Allen F. Westin, ed., An Autobiography of the Supreme Court (Macmillan, 1963), pp. 241-48.

[Roberts’s switch and 1936 election]: John W. Chambers, “The Big Switch: Justice Roberts and the Minimum-Wage Cases,” Labor History, vol. 10, no. 1 (Winter 1969), pp. 44-73; Michael E. Parrish, “The Hughes Court, the Great Depression, and the Historians,” Historian, vol. 40, no. 2 (February 1978), pp. 286-308; see also Frank V. Cantwell, “Public Opinion and the Legislative Process,” American Political Science Review, vol. 40, no. 5 (October 1946), pp. 924-35; Charles L. Black, Jr., The People and the Court: Judicial Review in a Democracy (Macmillan, 1960), esp. ch. 3. [Hughes’s new stance]: Danelski and Tulchin, pp. 311-13; Freund; Mason, pp. 455-60; Parrish.

96 [Labor and Court reform after Wagner decisions]: Duram, pp. 232-34.

[“Chortling all morning”]: press conference of April 13, 1937, in Public Papers, vol. 6, pp. 53-56, quoted at pp. 153, 154.

[Court plan after switch]: William E. Leuchtenburg, “FDR’s Court-Packing Plan: A Second Life, a Second Death,” Duke Law Journal, vol. 1985, nos. 3 and 4 (June-September 1985), pp. 673-89; Ickes Diary, vol. 2, pp. 162-64; Jordan A. Schwarz, The Speculator: Bernard M. Baruch in Washington, 1917-1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 1981), p. 319.

[Garner-FDR exchange]: quoted in Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas (Harper, 1948), p. 223.

[“Organized and calculated”]: quoted in J. Joseph Huthmacher, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (Atheneum, 1968), p. 233.

97 [Number of sit-downs, 1937]: Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941(Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 500.

[Sit-downs in practice]: ibid., pp. 499-501; Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis (Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977), pp. 258-59; Sidney Fine, Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1937 (University of Michigan Press, 1969), pp. 121-32 and ch. 6.

97 [“Sit down! Sit down. ”]: quoted in Bernstein, p. 501.

97-8 [Lewis’s plans for Big Steel]: Bert Cochran, Labor and Communism: The Conflict That Shaped American Unions (Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 103-5; J. Raymond Walsh, C.I.O.: Industrial Unionism in Action (Norton, 1937), p. 112.

98 [Unionist’s dash for toilet]: Bernstein, p. 523.

[Structure of auto work]: see Nelson Lichtenstein, “Auto Worker Militancy and the Structure of Factory Life, 1937-1955, ” Journal of American History, vol. 67, no. 2 (September 1980), pp. 335-53, esp. pp. 336-40; see also Herbert Harris, “Working in the Detroit Auto Plants,” in Don Congdon, ed., The Thirties: A Time to Remember (Simon and Schuster, 1962), pp. 477-86; Fine, pp. 54-63.

[GM in 1937]: Fine, ch. 2; Dubofsky and Van Tine, p. 256; Bernstein, pp. 509-19.

[Fortune on GM]: “General Motors,” Fortune, vol. 18, no. 6 (December 1938), quoted at p. 41.

[“Most critical labor conflict”]: quoted in Bernstein, p. 525.

[GM strike]: ibid., pp. 519-30; Fine, chs. 5-9.

99 [Murphy and GM strike]: Fine, pp. 148-55 and passim: Bernstein, pp. 530-51; J. Woodford Howard, Mr. Justice Murphy: A Political Biography (Princeton University Press, 1968), pp. 123-44.

[FDR and Perkins in GM strike]: George Martin, Madam Secretary: Frances Perkins (Houghton Mifflin, 1976), pp. 400-4; Fine, ch. 10; Dubofsky and Van Tine, pp.

255-70; Bernstein, pp. 534-51; Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (Viking, 1946), pp. 320-24.

[GM’s capitulation]: quoted in Howard, p. 140; Fine, pp. 298-312; see also General Motors Labor Policies and Procedures (General Motors Corporation, 1937).

[Chrysler and Ford after GM capitulation]: Bernstein, pp. 551-54, 569-71; Howard, pp. 150-56.

[Murray and Big Steel]: Bernstein, pp. 441-57; see also Morris Llewellyn Cooke and Philip Murray, Organized Labor and Production (Harper, 1940); Daniel Nelson, “The Company Union Movement, 1900-1937: A Reexamination,” Business History Review, vol. 56, no. 3 (Autumn 1982), pp. 335-57.

[Kempton on Murray]: Bernstein, p. 443.

100 [FDR on “The President Wants”]: ibid., p. 454.

[SWOC membership, January 1937]: ibid., p. 465.

[Taylor’s reassessment]: ibid., pp. 466-70.

[Taylor-Lewis negotiations]: ibid., pp. 470-73; Dubofsky and Van Tine, pp. 273-77. [Single most important document]: Robert R. R. Brooks, As Steel Goes, … (Yale University Press, 1959), p. 108.

[Little Steel and unionization]: Bernstein, pp. 473-98; Dubofsky and Van Tine, pp. 312-5.

[Chicago Memorial Day incident]: Donald G. Sofchalk, “The Chicago Memorial Day Incident: An Episode of Mass Action,” Labor History, vol. 6, no. 1 (Winter 1965), pp. 3-43.

Congress-Purging: The Broken Spell

101 [Auto industry improvement, 1933-37]: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), part 2, p. 716 (Series Q 148-62); Bernstein, p. 503.

[Iron and steel industry improvement, 1933-37]: Historical Statistics, part 2, p. 693 (Series P 231-300); Bernstein, p. 448.

[1937 recession and the search for a solution]: Blum, Morgenthau Diaries, ch. 9; Herbert Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America (University of Chicago Press, 1969), chs. 6-7; Byrd L. Jones, “Lauchlin Currie and the causes of the 1937 recession,” History of Political Economy, vol. 12, no. 3 (1980), pp. 303-15; Ickes Diary, vol. 2; Donald Winch, Economics and Policy: A Historical Study (Walker and Co., 1969), ch. 11; Robert Lekachman, The Age of Keynes (Random House, 1966), ch. 5; Burns, Lion, ch. 16; Kenneth D. Roose, The Economics of Recession and Revival (Yale University Press, 1954); Marriner S. Eccles, Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal Recollections, Sidney Hyman, ed. (Knopf, 1951), pp. 287-323; Beatrice Bishop Berle and Travis Beal Jacobs, eds., Navigating the Rapids, 1918-1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle (Harcourt, 1973), pp. 141-77; James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story (McGraw-Hill, 1948), ch. 11.

101 [“Mob in a theater fire”]: quoted in Blum, p. 386.

[“Rich man’s panic”]: Berle and Jacobs, p. 142.

[Perkins on upturn]: see Ickes Diary, vol. 2, p. 212.

[FDR’s suspicions and hopes]: ibid., p. 241.

[Unemployment]: Historical Statistics, part 1, p. 126 (Series D 1-10).

[“Sit tight”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 320.

[“Hooverish statements”]: quoted in Ickes Diary, vol. 2, p. 224.

[“We are headed”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 320.

[“ Ill, tired”]: Berle and Jacobs, p. 148.

[FDR’s fears of fascism]: Blum, p. 393.

102 [Cabinet discussion]: quoted in ibid., pp. 391-92; see also Ickes Diary, vol. 2, pp. 240-43.

102-3 [NAM platform]: quoted in New York Times, December 9, 1937, p. 23.

103 [Small businessmen. Business Advisory Council, Detroit demonstration, youth delegates]: Burns, Lion, p. 326.

[Abbott on Chicago conditions]: letter of February 3, 1938, Dewson Papers, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.

[FDR on carping critics]: press conference with editors of trade papers, April 8, 1938, in Public Papers, vol. 7, quoted at p. 194.

104 [Recession in March 1938]: see Burns, Lion, p. 327; Roose, ch. 3.

[“They understand”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 328.

[Temporary National Economic Committee]: see Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 404-15; Wilson P. Miscamble, “Thurman Arnold Goes to Washington: A Look at Antitrust Policy in the Later New Deal,” Business History Review, vol. 56, no. 1 (Spring 1982), pp. 1-15.

[Morgenthau’s threat to resign]: Blum, pp. 423-25.

[“Discipline of democracy”]: message of April 14, 1938, in Public Papers, vol. 7, pp. 221-33, quoted at p. 231.

[“What is needed”]: fireside chat of April 14, 1938, in ibid., pp. 236-48, quoted at p. 246.

105 [“For God’s sake”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 339.

[Reorganization bill]: Richard Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government: The Controversy over Executive Reorganization, 1936-1939 (Harvard University Press, 1966); Polenberg, “The Decline of the New Deal,” in John Braeman et al., eds., The New Deal: The National Level (Ohio State University Press, 1975), pp. 250-51.

[“Dictator bill”]: see Polenberg, Reorganizing, pp. 148-49.

[Weekend telegram blitz]: Patterson, Congressional Conservatism, pp. 222-23.

[“I have no inclination”]: in Public Papers, vol. 7, pp. 179-81, quoted at p. 179.

106 [House recommittal of bill]: Patterson, p. 226.

[Passage of wages-and-hours legislation]: Burns, Lion, pp. 342-44; Patterson, pp. 179-82, 242-46.

[“That’s that”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 343.

107 [FDR’s putting off of Lawrence]: ibid., p. 349.

[“Aggressive progressive Democrats”]: quoted in ibid.

[Rise of special-interest groups]: see Otis L. Graham, Jr., “The Broker State,” Wilson Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 5 (Winter 1984), pp. 86-97.

[Lewis and FDR]: Burns, Lion, pp. 350-51; Dubofsky and Van Tine, pp. 323-34; see also Mike Davis, “The Barren Marriage of American Labour and the Democratic Party,” New Left Review, no. 124 (November-December 1980), pp. 43-84.

[“Plague on both your houses”]: quoted in Bernstein, p. 496.

[FDR in polls, 1938]: “Fortune Quarterly Survey: XII,” Fortune, vol. 18, no. 1 (July 1938, p. 37; Burns, Lion, pp. 338-39.

[Attempts at conservative coalition]: Patterson, pp. 251-70.

109 [FDR’s June 1938 fireside chat]: in Public Papers, vol. 7, pp. 391-400, quoted at pp. 395, 399.

[Patterson on drive for realignment]: Patterson, p. 277.

[FDR’s purge travels]: J. B. Shannon, “Presidential Politics in the South, 1938,” Journal of Politics, vol. 1, no. 2 (May 1939), pp. 146-70 and no. 3 (August 1939), pp. 278-300; Barkley Papers, University of Kentucky; Burns, Lion, pp. 361-64.

110 [FDR’s attack on George]: in Public Papers, vol. 7, pp. 463-71, quoted at pp. 469-71; and Burns, Lion, pp. 362-63.

[Press reaction to purge]: see George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson, All but the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933-39 (Macmillan, 1969), pp. 289-90; Burns, Lion, p. 362.

[Moley on White House cabal]: Moley, “Perspective,” Newsweek, vol. 11, no. 24 (June 13, 1938), p. 40.

[Liberal criticism of purge]: see T.R.B., “Washington Notes,” New Republic, vol. 96, no. 1243 (September 28, 1938), p. 212.

[Farley’s and Garner’s evasion]: Farley’s Story, p. 141; Timmons, pp. 234-37.

[Southern Democrats’ response to purge]: Patterson, pp. 283-85, Glass quoted at p. 285; Shannon.

111 [Purge results]: Shannon, p. 299 (Table 2) and passim; Charles M. Price and Joseph Boskin, “The Roosevelt ‘Purge’: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Politics, vol. 28, no. 3 (August 1966), pp. 660-70; Stuart L. Weiss, “Maury Maverick and the Liberal Bloc,” Journal of American History, vol. 57, no. 4 (March 1971), pp. 880-95, esp. p. 891-95.

[A “bust”]: Farley, p. 144.

[“A long, long time”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 364.

[Republican successes in 1938]: Patterson, pp. 288-90; Milton Plesur, “The Republican Congressional Comeback of 1938,” Review of Politics, vol. 24, no. 4 (October 1962), pp. 525-62, esp. pp. 544-46; Donald R. McCoy, “George S. McGill and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938,” Historian, vol. 45, no. 2 (February 1983), pp. 186-205.

[Reasons for 1938 setbacks]: see Plesur, pp. 544-54; Farley, pp. 149-50; Shannon, pp. 295-98; Philip F. La Follette, Elmer A. Benson, and Frank Murphy, “Why We Lost,” Nation, vol. 147, no. 23 (December 3, 1938), pp. 586-90; Patterson, pp. 286-87.

[“Having passed the period”]: in Public Papers, vol. 8, pp. 1-12, quoted at p. 7.

112 [Jackson Day dinner speech]: January 7, 1939, in ibid., pp. 60-68, quoted at p. 63.

[1939 appointments]: Burns, Lion, p. 368; see also Patterson, pp. 298-99.

[“Not one nickel more”]: quoted in Polenberg, “Decline,” p. 261.

[FDR’s refusal to support national health program]: Huthmacher, pp. 263-67.

[“Sick and tired”]: quoted in John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Urgency, 1938-1941 (Houghton Mifflin, 1965), pp. 41-42.

[“You undergraduates”]: address of December 5, 1938, in Public Papers, vol. 7, pp. 613-21, quoted at p. 615.

[Congressional balance of power, 1939]: see Patterson, pp. 289-90, 322-24.

[House Un-American Activities Committee]: Walter Goodman, The Committee (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968), pp. 52-58; Ickes Diary, vol. 2, pp. 506-7, 528-29, 546-50, 573-74.

[Smith investigation of NLRB]: Earl Latham, The Communist Controversy in Washington: From the New Deal to McCarthy (Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 131-37; Bernstein, Turbulent Years, pp. 663-70.

[Attack on FDR’s appointing power]: see A. Cash Koeniger, “The New Deal and the States: Roosevelt versus the Byrd Organization in Virginia,” Journal of American History, vol. 68, no. 4 (March 1982), pp. 876-96.

113 [Restriction of political activities of federal employees]: see “Federal Workers in Politics,” New Republic, vol. 100, no. 1289 (August 16, 1939), pp. 33-34.

[Reductions in New Deal funds]: Burns, Lion, p. 370; see also Patterson, ch. 9, [Eleanor Roosevelt and blacks]: Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 59-65, 132; Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (Norton, 1971), p. 522; Joanna Schneider Zangrando and Robert L. Zangrando, “ER and Black Rights,” in Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, eds., Without Precedent: The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt (Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 88-107; Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln (Princeton University Press, 1983), esp. ch. 6.

113 [Marian Anderson and the DAR]: Ickes Diary, vol. 2, pp. 612-16; Sitkoff, pp. 326-27; Lash, pp. 525-28.

[“Unique, majestic”]: Ickes Diary, vol. 2, p. 615.

Deadlock at the Center

114 [Why did you lose?]: La Follette, Benson, and Murphy, “Why We Lost,” La Follette, quoted at p. 586.

[“Price of cheese”]: quoted in ibid., p. 586.

[FDR as administrator]: see Raymond Moley, 27 Masters of Politics (Funk & Wagnalls, 1949), p. 45; Herbert A. Simon et al., Public Administration (Knopf, 1950), p. 168; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Curmudgeon’s Confessions,” New Republic, vol. 129, no. 19 (December 7, 1953), pp. 14-15; Burns, Lion, pp. 371-75.

[“A wonderful person but”]: quoted in Ickes Diary, vol. 2, p. 659.

[Schlesinger on FDR’s fuzzy delegation]: “Curmudgeon’s Confessions,” p. 15.

115 [Executive Council and National Emergency Council]: Otis L. Graham, Jr., “The Planning Ideal and American Reality: The 1930s,” in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds., The Hofstadter Aegis: A Memorial (Knopf, 1974), p. 271; Lester G. Seligman and Elmer E. Cornwell, Jr., eds., New Deal Mosaic: Roosevelt Confers with His National Emergency Council, 1933-1936 (University of Oregon Books, 1965).

[“The President needs help”]: President’s Committee on Administrative Management, Administrative Management in the Government of the United States, in Senate Documents: Miscellaneous, 75th Congress, 1st Session (U.S. Government Priming Office, 1937), Document 8, quoted at p. 19.

[Committee on Administrative Management]: Graham, pp. 271-72; Polenberg, Reorganizing, ch. 1.

[“A passion for anonymity”]: President’s Committee, p. 19.

115-16 [Effect of FDR’s administrative techniques on New Deal]: see John Braeman, “The New Deal and the ‘Broker State’: A Review of the Recent Scholarly Literature,” Business History Review, vol. 46, no. 4 (Winter 1972), pp. 409-29, esp. pp. 426-27.

[FDR’s description of three branches]: fireside chat of March 9, 1937, in Public Papers, vol. 6, pp. 123-24.

116-17 [FDR and Democratic party]: see Burns, Lion, pp. 375-80; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Houghton Mifflin, 1958), pp. 503-5; Otis L. Graham, Jr., “The Democratic Party, 1932-1945,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of U.S. Political Parties (Chelsea House, 1973), vol. 3, pp. 1939-64.

117 [FDR’s attack on George and seniority system]: see Willmoore Kendall, The Conservative Affirmation (Henry Regnery, 1963), ch. 2.

[“Not merely about party”]: quoted in Burns, Deadlock, p. 157; see also William E. Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan (Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 245-46.

[“Head of the Democratic party”]: fireside chat of June 24, 1938, in Public Papers, vol. 7, pp. 391-400, quoted at p. 399.

118 [FDR and Virginia]: Koeniger, “The New Deal and the States.”

[“Eight years in Washington”]: quoted in Rexford G. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt (Doubleday, 1957), p. 412.

120 [FDR as transactional leader]: see Braeman; Graham, “Broker State”; Burns, Lion, pp. 197-202.

The Fission of Ideas

120-1 [Dewey on liberty]: Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (Putnam, 1935), p. 24.

[Dewey on nineteenth-century liberals]: see ibid., ch. 1 and passim.

[Dewey on means and ends of liberalism]: ibid., pp. 51, 54.

[Dewey and Hull-House]: George Dykhuizen, The Life and Mind of John Dewey (Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), pp. 104-6.

121 [Dewey on the experimental method]: Dewey, “The Future of Liberalism,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 32, no. 9 (April 25, 1935), pp. 225-30, quoted at p. 228.

[“Comprehensive ideas”]: Liberalism and Social Action, p. 43.

[“Coherent body of ideas”]: “Future of Liberalism,” p. 228.

122 [Old progressives in New Deal]: Otis L. Graham, Jr., An Encore for Reform: The Old Progressives and the New Deal (Oxford University Press, 1967); see also Alan Brinkley, “A Prelude,” Wilson Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 2 (Spring 1982), pp. 51-61; John Morton Blum, The Progressive Presidents: Roosevelt, Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson (Norton, 1980), ch. 3.

[Graham’s survey]: Encore, pp. 166-69. Quoted at p. 169.

[“Direct reform bloodline”]: ibid., pp. 8-9.

[Failure of socialism]: see sources cited in ch. 2, second section, supra.

122-3 [Hartz on socialism’s handicap]: Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (Harcourt, 955), p. 228.

[Communist party in 1930s]: see sources cited in ch. 2, second section, supra; and Theodore Draper, “The Popular Front Revisited,” New York Review of Books, vol. 32, no. 9 (May 30, 1985), pp. 44-50. [Communist party membership, 1938]: Draper, p. 45.

[Conservatism in New Deal era]: see sources cited in ch. 2, first section, supra. [Rossiter’s identification of conservative groups]: Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (Knopf, 1955), pp. 173-86; see also A. James Reichley, Conservatives in an Age of Change (Brookings Institution, 1981), ch. 1.

124 [Individualism]: see David Riesman, Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays (Free Press, 1954), esp. part 2.

[Dewey on “individuality”]: quoted in Arthur A. Ekirch, Ideologies and Utopias: The Impact of the New Deal on American Thought (Quadrangle, 1969), p. 127. [“Freed intelligence”]: Liberalism and Social Action, p. 50.

124-5 [Niebuhr on “freed intelligence”]: Niebuhr, “The Pathos of Liberalism” (review of Liberalism and Social Action), Nation, vol. 141, no. 3662 (September 11, 1935), pp. 303-4, quoted at p. 303.

125 [“Pragmatic idealism”]: Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 232.

[“A void”]: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Knopf, 1945), vol. 2, p. 77.

[Softness and shapelessness of New Deal ideology]: see Jacob Cohen, “Schlesinger and the New Deal,” Dissent, vol. 8, no. 4 (Autumn 1961), pp. 461-72, esp. pp. 466-68; Barton J. Bernstein, “The New Deal: The Conservative Achievements of Liberal Reform,” in Bernstein and Allen J. Matusow, eds., Twentieth-Century America: Recent Interpretations (Harcourt, 1972), pp. 242-64.

126 [The four parties]: Burns, Deadlock, esp. chs. 8-9, 126-7.

[Cohen on New Deal]: Cohen, p. 465.

127 [Bernstein on New Deal]: Introduction to Bernstein in Bernstein and Matusow, p. 243, and Bernstein in ibid., pp. 259-60.

[Conkin on New Deal]: Paul Conkin, The New Deal, 2d ed. (Harlan Davidson, 1975), p. 71; see also Jerold S. Auerbach, “New Deal, Old Deal, or Raw Deal: Some Thoughts on New Left Historiography,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 35, no. 1 (February 1969), pp. 18-30.

[Revisionists and bank crisis]: see Kenneth S. Davis, FDR: The New Deal Years, 1933-1937 (Random House, 1986), pp. 49-53 and sources cited therein; Conkin, pp. 65-66, 75-76; Auerbach.

[New Deal income redistribution]: see Historical Statistics, part 1, p. 301 (Series G 319-36) and p. 302 (Series G 319-36 and G 337-52).

[Berle on FDR]: Berle and Jacobs, p. 149; see also Berle Papers, Personal Correspondence 1936-38, esp. container 25, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.

[Stone on taxing power]: quoted in Perkins, p. 286.

[FDR on Keynes and vice versa]: FDR quoted in ibid., p. 225; Keynes’s reaction in ibid., p. 226.

130-1 [Planning in New Deal]: see Graham, “Planning Ideal and American Reality,” passim; Otis L. Graham, Jr., Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon (Oxford University Press, 1976), ch.1; Barry D. Karl, Charles G. Merriam and the Study of Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1974), chs. 12-13; Byrd Jones, “A Plan for Planning in the New Deal,” Social Science Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 3 (December 1969), pp. 525-34.

131 [Lippmann on planning]: Lippmann, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society (Little, Brown, 1937), passim.

[FDR’s hopes for further TVA-like programs]: James MacGregor Burns, “Congress and the Formation of Economic Policies” (doctoral dissertation; Harvard University, 1947), ch. 6.

[“One of those uncommon junctures”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 335.

[Sivachev on New Deal achievement]: Sivachev, “The Rise of Statism in 1930s America: A Soviet View of the Social and Political Effects of the New Deal,” Labor History, vol. 24, no. 4 (Fall 1983), pp. 500-25, quoted at p. 504; see also Bradford A. Lee, “The New Deal Reconsidered,” Wilson (Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 2 (Spring 1982), pp. 62-76; Cohen, pp. 471-72; William E. Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” in John Braeman et al., eds., Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century America (Ohio State University Press, 1964), pp. 81-143; Rush Welter, Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America (Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 310-17.

[Liberty and the New Deal]: see Jerold S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New Deal (Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), pp. 208-18, and sources cited therein.

[“Weakest in philosophy”]: Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942), p. 492.

[Wells on FDR]: quoted in ibid., p. 493.

The People’s Art

132 [Short's House performance]: quoted in Congressional Record, 75th Congress, 3rd Session, vol. 83, part 8, p. 9497 (June 15, 1938); see also Richard D. McKinzie, The New Deal for Artists (Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 154-55.

[Attack upon cultural programs]: McKinzie, ch. 9; Jerre Mangione, The Dream and the Deal: The Federal Writers’ Project, 1935-1943 (Little, Brown, 1972), chs. 1, 8; Jane De Hart Mathews, The Federal Theatre, 1935-1939: Plays, Relief and Politics (Princeton University Press, 1967), chs. 5-6.

[“Smeared upon the walls”]: testimony of Walter Steele, Hearings Before a Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 75th Congress, 3rd Session (1938), vol. 1, p. 554.

[“Is he a Communist?”]: Representative Joe Starnes of Alabama, quoted in testimony of Hallie Flanagan, ibid., vol. 4, p. 2857.

133 [Eleanor Roosevelt’s support of arts programs]: quoted in McKinzie, p. 10; see also Lash, pp. 467-68.

[Biddle’s initiative]: McKinzie, pp. 5-10, McKinzie quoted on “social revolution” at p. 5; George Biddle, An American Artist’s Story (Little, Brown, 1939), pp. 263-80; William F. McDonald, Federal Relief Administration and the Arts (Ohio State University Press, 1969), pp. 357-61.

[“Awkward embrace”]: Joan Simpson Burns, The Awkward Embrace: The Creative Artist and the Institution in America (Knopf, 1975); see also McKinzie, chs. 3-5.

134 [San Francisco murals controversy]: McKinzie, pp. 24-26.

[Kent’s Eskimos and Puerto Ricans]: ibid., pp. 63-64.

[“The Fleet’s In”]: ibid., pp. 29-30, quoted at p. 29.

[Artistic production under public works program]: ibid., p. 27.

[TAP]: ibid., ch. 5; McDonald, chs. 18-19; Francis V. O’Connor, ed., Art for the Millions (New York Graphic Society, 1973); O’Connor, ed., The New Deal Art Projects: An Anthology of Memoirs (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972); New York Public Library, FDR and the Arts: The WPA Arts Projects (exhibition brochure, 1983); Marianne Doezma, American Realism and the Industrial Age (Cleveland Museum of Art/Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 108-14; Selden Rodman, Ben Shahn: Portrait of the Artist as an American (Harper, 1951), ch. 3; Garnett McCoy, “Poverty, Politics and Artists, 1930-1945,” Art in America, vol. 53, no. 4 (August-September, 1965), pp. 88-107; Art in Public Buildings, vol. 1: Mural Designs, 1934-1936 (Art in Federal Buildings, Inc., 1936). [Output under FAP]: McKinzie, p. 105.

135 [Bringing people’s art to the people]: Jane De Hart Mathews, “Arts and the People: The New Deal Quest for a Cultural Democracy,” Journal of American History, vol. 62, no. 2 (September 1975), pp. 316-39; McDonald, pp. 463-79; McKinzie, ch. 8.

[Cahill on art]: quoted in Mathews, “Arts and the People,” p. 323.

[New York artists’ protest]: McKinzie, p. 96.

[Reduction of WPA rolls]: ibid., p. 97. 135-6 [Flanagan and formation of FTP]: Hallie Flanagan, Arena (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940), pp. 3-47; Mathews, Federal Theatre, chs. 1-2; McDonald, pp. 496-533; Willson Whitman, Bread and Circuses: A Study of the Federal Theatre (Oxford University Press, 1937), chs. 2-3; Jay Williams, Stage Left (Scribner, 1974), pp. 221-22.

136 [“A changing world”]: quoted in Mathews, Federal Theatre, pp. 42-43.

[Murder in the Cathedral]: ibid., pp. 74-75; Whitman, pp. 39-40; Williams, p. 223. [Macbeth]: Mathews, Federal Theatre, pp. 75-76, woman quoted on Shakespeare at p. 104; Richard France, The Theatre of Orson Welles (Bucknell University Press, 1977), ch. 2; John Houseman, Run-Through (Simon and Schuster, 1972), pp. 185-205.

137 [Cagey on Living Newspapers]: Edmond M. Cagey, Revolution in American Drama (Columbia University Press, 1947), pp. 165-66; see also Williams, pp. 224-25; Flanagan, pp. 64-65, 70-73.

[Ethiopia]: Williams, pp. 225-26; Mathews, Federal Theatre, pp. 62-68.

[Triple-A Plowed Under]: Mathews, Federal Theatre, pp. 70-74; Williams, pp. 88-92.

[Injunction Granted]: Flanagan, pp. 72-73; Mathews, Federal Theatre, pp. 109-13; Whitman, pp. 85-86; John O’Connor and Lorraine Brown, Free, Adult, Uncensored: The Living History of the Federal Theatre Project (New Republic Books, 1978), pp. 76-87; Granville Vernon, review of Injunction Granted, Commonweal, vol. 24, no. 17 (August 21, 1936), p. 407.

[Power]: Mathews, Federal Theatre, pp. 113-15, Atkinson quoted at p. 114; Whitman, pp. 87-88.

[One-Third of a Nation]: Mathews, Federal Theatre, pp. 169-77; O’Connor and Brown, pp. 160-73; Brooks Atkinson, review of One-Third of a Nation, in Bernard Beckerman and Howard Siegman, eds., On Stage: Selected Theater Reviews from The New York Times, 1920-1970 (Arno Press, 1973), p. 196.

[It Can’t Happen Here]: O’Connor and Brown, pp. 58-67; Williams, pp. 228-29.

[Regional FTP]: Flanagan, passim; McDonald, ch. 22; Mathews, Federal Theatre, ch. 4; Whitman, pp. 73-78.

138 [FTP’s dance unit]: O’Connor and Brown, pp. 212-23; Williams, p. 231. [“Always dangerous”]: quoted in Whitman, p. 172.

[Alexander on 1930s]: Charles C. Alexander, Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth-Century America (Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 191.

138-9 [Cradle Will Rock controversy]: Mathews, Federal Theatre, pp. 122-25; France, ch. 5; Houseman, pp. 245-49, 253-79.

139 [FWP]: Mangione; McDonald, chs. 26-28.

[Publishers’ letter on FWP]: quoted in Mangione, p. 15.

[Women as FWP state heads]: ibid., p. 88.

[FWP writers and output]: Ray A. Billington, “Government and the Arts: The W.P.A. Experience,” American Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 4 (Winter 1961), p. 468; Mangione, pp. 8-9.

[Slave narratives]: Mangione, pp. 263-65; and see George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Greenwood Press, 1972-79), 19 vols., and supplements, series 1 and 2, 22 vols.; Benjamin A. Bodkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 1945); Savannah Unit, Georgia Writers’ Program, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (University of Georgia Press; reprinted by Greenwood Press, 1973).

[American Guide Series]: Mangione, pp. 46-49.

[Kazin on American Guides]: Kazin, p. 486.

[Size of Guide Series]: Mangione, p. 352.

140 [Aiken on Deerfield]: Federal Writers’ Project, Massachusetts: A Guide to Its Places and People (Houghton Mifflin, 1937), p. 223.

[Individualism vs. collectivism controversy in Massachusetts]: Billington, p. 475; Massachusetts Guide, pp. 89-109, “profound individualism” quoted at p. 90.

140 [Controversy over Massachusetts guide]: Mangione, pp. 216-20, Traveler quoted at p. 217; Billington, pp. 477-78.

[Critics on guide]: Mangione, pp. 351-66; Robert Cantwell, “America and the Writers’ Project,” New Republic, vol. 98, no. 1273 (April 29, 1939), pp. 323-25; Lewis Mumford, “Writers’ Project,” New Republic, vol. 92, no. 1194 (October 20, 1937), pp. 306-7; Robert Bendiner, “When Culture Came to Main Street,” Saturday Review, vol. 50 (April 1, 1967), pp. 19-2); Daniel M. Fox, “The Achievement of the Federal Writers’ Project,” American Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1961), pp. 3-19.

[Cantwell on guides]: Cantwell, p. 323. [“I’m a hog”]: quoted in Mangione, p. 273. 140-1 [Rockefeller at play]: ibid., p. 362.

141 [“A vast new literature”]: Kazin, pp. 485-86.

[“Jus’ let me get out to California”]: John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (Viking, 1939), p. 112.

[Dust bowl refugees]: Donald Worster, Dust Howl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (Oxford University Press, 1979); Walter J. Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Greenwood Press, 1973); Thomas W. Pew, Jr., “Route 66: Ghost Road of the Okies,” American Heritage, vol. 28, no. 5 (August 1977), pp. 24-33; see also Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939).

[“Too nice, kinda”]: Grapes of Wrath, p. 122.

[Grapes controversy]: see Peter Lisca, “The Grapes of Wrath, ” in Robert M. Davis, ed., Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1972), pp. 75-101, esp. pp. 78-82; Martin S. Shockley, “The Reception of The Grapes of Wrath in Oklahoma,” in E. W. Tedlock, Jr., and C. V. Wicker, eds., Steinbeck and His Critics (University of New Mexico Press, 1957), pp. 231-40.

142 [“Quality of owning”]: Grapes of Wrath, p. 206.

[“Feel like people again”]: ibid., p. 420.

[“Use’ ta be the fambly”]: ibid., p. 606.

[“One big soul”]: ibid., p. 33.

[“I’ll be ever’where”]: ibid., p. 572.

[Guthrie’s growing-up]: Joe Klein, Woody Guthrie: A Life (Knopf, 1980), chs. 1-2; Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory (E. P. Dutton, 1943); Frederick Turner, “Just What in the Hell Has Gone Wrong Here Anyhow?: Woody Guthrie and the American Dream,” American Heritage, vol. 28, no. 6 (October 1977), pp. 34-43.

[Twenty-three-year-old soda jerk]: see Klein, p. 71.

[“This dusty old dust”]: “So Long It’s Been Good to Know Yuh,” in Harold Leventhal and Marjorie Guthrie, eds., The Woody Guthrie Songbook (Grosset & Dunlap, 1976), p. 210.

[Klein on Guthrie]: Klein, p. 79.

142-3 [Guthrie on his songs]: Bound for Glory, p. 232.

143 [“Living songs and dying songs”]: quoted in Guthrie Songbook, p. 30.

[“We got out to the West Coast broke”]: “Talking Dust Bowl,” in ibid., p. 220.

[“Real stuff”]: James T. Farrell, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan in Farrell, Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy (Modern Library, 1938), p. 107.

[Studs in the park with Lucy]: Young Lonigan in ibid., pp. 110, 111, 113, 114, 115.

144 [Farrell]: Farrell, “My Beginnings as a Writer,” in Farrell, Reflections at Fifty and Other Essays (Vanguard, 1954), pp. 156-63; Farrell, “How Studs Lonigan Was Written,” in Farrell, The League of Frightened Philistines and Other Papers (Vanguard, 1945), pp. 82-89; Edgar M. Branch, James T. Farrell (University of Minnesota Press, 1963); Ann Douglas, “Studs Lonigan and the Failure of History in Mass Society: A Study in Claustrophobia,” American Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 4 (Winter 1977), pp. 487-505; Alan M. Wald, James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years (New York University Press, 1978); Kazin, pp. 380-85; Farrell, A Note on Literary Criticism (Vanguard, 1936).

[1919 Chicago race riot]: Finis Farr, Chicago: A Personal History of America’s Most American City (Arlington House, 1973), pp. 337-38; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (University of Chicago Press, 1922), ch. 1 and passim.

[“Avenues of the dead”]: Young Manhood, p. 74.

[“Bigger took a shoe”]: Richard Wright, Native Son (Harper, 1979), p. 10.

[“He had murdered”]: ibid., p. 101.

[“Never had he had the chance”]: ibid., p. 225.

[“We must deal here”]: ibid., p. 357.

[“Like a blind man”]: ibid., p. 392. [“What I killed for, I am!”]: ibid., pp. 391-92.

[Wright]: Wright, Black Boy (Harper, 1945); Wright, in Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (Harper Colophon, 1963), pp. 115-62; Constance Webb, Richard Wright (Putnam, 1968); David Ray and Robert M. Farnsworth, eds., Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives (University of Michigan Press, 1973); Keneth Kinnamon, The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study in Literature and Society (University of Illinois Press, 1972).

[“Ringed by walls”]: Black Boy, p. 220. [“Tension would set in”]: ibid., p. 65.

[“What was this?”]: ibid., p. 218.

[Wright’s double intellectual life]: Aaron, “Richard Wright and the Communist Party,” in Ray and Farnsworth, p. 44.

[“Scattered but kindred peoples”]: Wright in Crossman, p. 118.

[The Group]: Foster Hirsch, A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actors Studio (Norton, 1984), chs. 4-5; Williams, chs. 4, 10, 12, and passim; Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Story of the Group Theatre and the Thirties (Knopf, 1945).

145-6 [“Blood and bones”]: quoted in Williams, p. 63.

146 [Odets]: Gerald Weales, Clifford Odets, Playwright (Pegasus, 1971); Robert Shuman, Clifford Odets (Twayne, 1962); Harold Cantor, Clifford Odets, Playwright-Poet (Scarecrow Press, 1978).

[Waiting for Lefty]: in Odets, Six Plays (Random House, 1939); see also Weales, ch. 3; Hirsch, pp. 79-82; Williams, pp. 144-46.

4. Freedom Under Siege

[FDR’s message to Hitler]: in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 8, pp. 201-5, quoted at pp. 201, 202, 203, 204; see also Cordell Hull, Memoirs (Macmillan, 1948), vol. 1, p. 620.

[Göring and Mussolini on FDR]: William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 470.

[“Contemptible a creature”]: quoted in Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 186.

[Pressure on Latvia]: Shirer, pp. 470-71.

[Hitler’s response]: April 28, 1939, in Louis L. Snyder, Hitler’s Third Reich: A Documentary History (Nelson-Hall, 1981), pp. 311-26, quoted at pp. 317, 313, 318, 324-25, 326, respectively; Shirer, pp. 471-75, quoted on Hitler’s speech at p. 471; see also Shirer, The Nightmare Years (Little, Brown, 1984), pp. 397-404.

151 [“Hitler had all the better”]: quoted in Dallek, p. 187; see also C. A. MacDonald, The United States, Britain and Appeasement, 1936-1939 (St. Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 153.

[“Sympathy with President Roosevelt”]: quoted in James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (Harcourt, 1956), p. 184.

The Zigzag Road to War

152 [FDR’s pre-presidential foreign policy background]: see Dallek, Prologue; Geoffrey C. Ward, Before the Trumpet (Harper, 1985).

[FDR’s criticism of Coolidge]: quoted in Dallek, p. 17.

153 [Isolationism]: Wayne S. Cole, Roosevelt and the Isolationists, 1932-45 (University of Nebraska Press, 1983), p.9 and passim; Dallek; Wayne S. Cole, Charles A. Lindbergh and the Battle Against American Intervention in World War II (Harcourt, 1974); Cole, America First: The Battle Against Intervention, 1940-1941 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1953); Manfred Jonas, Isolationism in America, 1935-1941 (Cornell University Press, 1966); Sheldon Marcus, Father Coughlin: The Tumultuous Life of the Priest of the Little Flower (Little, Brown, 1973), chs. 7-8 passim; Michele Flynn Stenehjem, An American First: John T. Flynn and the America First Committee (Arlington House, 1976).

153 [Opinion polls, 1937]: Harvey Cantril and Mildred Strunk, eds., Public Opinion, 1935-1946 (Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 966 (item 2), 967 (item 20); see also Jerome S. Bruner, Mandate from the People (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944), pp. 18-20.

[Elements in equation of world power]: see Burns, Lion, p. 248.

54 [“Groping for a door”]: quoted in ibid.

[FDR’s prewar foreign policy leadership]: ibid., pp. 262-63; James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (Harcourt, 1970), pp. 65-66, 119-20; Gloria J. Barron, Leadership in Crisis: FDR and the Path to Intervention (Kennikat Press, 1973); Mark M. Lowenthal, “Roosevelt and the Coming of War: The Search for United States Policy, 1937-1942,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 16 (1981), pp. 413-40; Bruce M. Russett, No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry into World War II (Harper, 1972); Robert A. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Johns Hopkins Press, 1969), chs. 1-2; Divine, The Reluctant Belligerent: American Entry into World War II (Wiley, 1965); Richard W. Steele, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Foreign Policy Critics,” Political Science (Quarterly, vol. 94, no. 1 (Spring 1979), pp. 15-32; Steele, “The Great Debate: Roosevelt, the Media, and the Coming of the War, 1940-1941,”Journal of American History, vol. 71, no. 1 (June 1984), pp. 69-92; Warren F. Kimball, ed., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the World Crisis, 1937-1945 (D. C. Heath, 1973), part 1; Charles C. Tansill, Back Door to War (Henry Regnery, 1952); Arnold A. Offner, American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933-1938 (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969).

[Divisions within isolationist camp]: Cole, Roosevelt, pp. 6-7, quoted at p. 7.

155 [“The blame for the danger”]: December 28, 1933, in Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 544-49, quoted at p. 546.

[Nye committee]: Wayne S. Cole, Senator Gerald P. Nye and American Foreign Relations (University of Minnesota Press, 1962), esp. chs. 5-6; Cole, Roosevelt, ch, 11; John E. Wiltz, In Search of Peace: The Senate Munitions Inquiry, 1934-1936 (Louisiana State University Press, 1963); Burns, Lion, pp. 253-54.

[Hull on Administration marking time]: Cole, Roosevelt, p. 147.

156 [Curtiss-Wright]: U.S. v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304 (1936), quoted at 320; Erik M. Erikson, The Supreme Court and the New Deal (Rosemead Review Press, 1940), pp. 197-200; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Houghton Mifflin, 1973), pp. 100-4.

[Neutrality legislation and FDR’s foreign policy]: see Dallek, ch. 5; Cole, Roosevelt, chs. 12, 15; Richard P. Traina, American Diplomacy and the Spanish Civil War (Indiana University Press, 1968); Robert A. Divine, The Illusion of Neutrality (University of Chicago Press, 1962); Burns, Lion, pp. 255-59; Divine, Roosevelt, pp. 10-14.

[“A hat and a rabbit”]: quoted in Dallek, p. 144.

157 [FDR’s 1937 Chicago address]: October 5, 1937, in Public Papers, vol. 6, pp. 406-11, quoted at p. 408; see also Dorothy Borg, “Notes on Roosevelt’s ‘Quarantine’ Speech,” in Robert A. Divine, ed., Causes and Consequences of World War II (Quadrangle, 1969), pp. 47-70.

[Response to Chicago address and FDR’s response]: Burns, Lion, pp. 318-19; Cole, Roosevelt, pp. 246-48; Dorothy Borg, The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933-1938 (Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 382-98, 538-39; Divine, Reluctant Belligerent, p. 45.

[“A terrible thing”]: quoted in Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (Harper, 1952), p. 167.

[Hitler’s domestic power]: see Edward N. Peterson, The Limits of Hitler’s Power (Princeton University Press, 1969); Shirer, Rise and Fall.

[Rhineland]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 290-96, Hitler quoted at p. 293; James T. Emmerson, The Rhineland Crisis, 7 March 1936: A Study in Multilateral Diplomacy (Maurice Temple Smith, 1977); William L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 [Simon and Schuster, 1969), ch. 16.

158 [Sudeten crisis]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, ch. 12, Churchill quoted at p. 423; Telford Taylor, Munich: The Price of Peace (Doubleday, 1979); Burns, Lion, pp. 384-88; Shirer, Collapse, chs. 19-21 ; Larry W. Fuchser, Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement: A Study in the Politics of History (Norton, 1982), chs. 6-7; Offner, pp. 245-71; Joseph Alsop and Robert Kintner, American White Paper: The Story of American Diplomacy and the Second World War (Simon and Schuster, 1940), ch. 2; MacDonald, chs. 6-7.

158 [Czech dismemberment]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 428-30, 437-54.

[“Never in my life”]: letter to Gertrude Ely, March 25, 1939, in F.D.R.: His Personal Letters, 1928-1945, Elliott Roosevelt, ed. (Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1950), vol. 2, p. 872.

[Efforts toward arms embargo repeal]: see David L. Porter, The Seventy-sixth Congress and World War II, 1939-1940 (University of Missouri Press, 1979), ch. 3; Betty Glad, Key Pittman: The Tragedy of a Senate Insider (Columbia University Press, 1986), ch. 22.

[Pittman]: Fred L. Israel, Nevada’s Key Pittman (University of Nebraska Press, 1963), pp. 166-67; see also Glad, pp. 217-19 and chs. 20-24; Wayne S. Cole, “Senator Pittman and American Neutrality Policies, 1933-1940,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 46, no. 4 (March 1960), pp. 644-62.

[FDR meeting with Senate leaders]: quoted in Burns, Lion, pp. 392-93.

159 [FDR on prospective Axis aggression]: memorandum by Carlton Savage, May 19, 1939, quoted in William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Challenge to Isolation, 1937-1940 (Harper, 1952), pp. 138-39.

[Stalin to Churchill on Soviet turn to Germany]: Lord Beaverbrook Papers, Cabinet Papers, House of Lords.

[Nazi-Soviet Pact]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, ch. 15, Stalin quoted at p. 540; Shirer, Collapse, chs. 22, 24; Vojtech Mastny, Russia’s Road to the Cold War: Diplomacy, Warfare, and the Politics of Communism, 1941-1945 (Columbia University Press, 1979), pp. 23-35; David J. Dallin, Soviet Russia’s Foreign Policy, 1939-1942, Leon Dennen, trans. (Yale University Press, 1942), chs. 2-3; Raymond J. Strong and James S. Beddie, eds., Nazi-Soviet Relations, 1939-1941: Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Office (U.S. Department of State, 1948), chs. 1-3.

[Start of World War II]: Nicholas Bethell, The War Hitler Won: The Fall of Poland, September 1939 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972); Shirer, Rise and Fall. chs. 16-17; Shirer, Collapse, chs. 25-26.

160 [“I sit in one of the dives”]: “September 1, 1939,” in The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, Edward Mendelson, ed. (Random House, 1977), pp. 245-47, quoted at p. 245.

[“The end of the world”]: quoted in Michael R. Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (Norton, 1980), p. 190.

[Arms embargo repeal and “cash and carry”]: Porter, ch. 4; Divine, Illusion, chs. 8-9; Cole, Roosevelt, pp. 320-30; Burns, Lion, pp. 395-97; Langer and Gleason, pp. 218-35.

[Noninterventionist mail campaign]: Dallek, p. 200.

[“One single hard-headed thought”]: message to Congress, September 2 1, 1939, in Public Papers, vol. 8, pp. 512-22, quoted at p. 521.

[“Dreadful rape”]: FDR to Lincoln MacVeagh, letter of December 1, 1939, in Personal Letters, vol. 2, p. 961.

161 [Anglo-American relations]: see MacDonald, passim; Warren K. Kimball, The Most Unsordid Act: Lend-Lease, 1939-1941(Johns Hopkins Press, 1969); Kimball, “Lend-Lease and the Open Door: The Temptation of British Opulence, 1937-1942,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 86, no. 2 (June 1971), pp. 232-59; Fuchser, pp. 97-99.

[“Much public criticism”]: letter of February 1, 1940, in Francis L. Loewenheim et al., eds., Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (Saturday Review Press/ E. P. Dutton, 1975), p. 93.

[“The country as a whole”]: quoted in Dallek, p. 211.

[German invasion of Denmark and Norway]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, ch. 20; J. L. Moulton, The Norwegian Campaign of 1940: A Study of Warfare in Three Dimensions (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1960); Richard Petrow, The Bitter Years (Morrow, 1974), chs. 1-7.

[“Can have no illusions”]: April 15, 1940, in Public Papers, vol. 9, p. 161.

162 [German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, France]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, ch. 21; Shirer, Collapse, chs. 28-29; John Williams, The Ides of May: The Defeat of France, May-June 1940 (Knopf, 1968).

[“Decide the destiny”]: quoted in Burns, Lion, p. 419.

162 [“Scene has darkened swiftly”]: in Loewenheim, pp. 94-95, quoted at p. 94. [“Nazified Europe”]: ibid., p. 94.

[Reynaud’s appeal to FDR]: quoted in Dallek, p. 230; see also Eleanor M. Gates, End of the Affair: The Collapse of the Anglo-French Alliance, 1939-40 (University of California Press, 1981), Appendix D. [Walsh threat]: Burns, Lion, pp. 421-22.

[Opinion polls on aid]: poll of May 23, 1940, in Cantril and Strunk, p. 973 (item 67).

163 [Isolationist defections]: Justus D. Doenecke, “Non-interventionism of the Left: The Keep America Out of the War Congress, 1938-41,”Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 12, no. 2 (1977), pp. 221-36, esp. pp. 231-32.

[FDR as Sphinx]: see Burns, Lion, p. 410.

[FDR’s maneuverings to preserve options]: ibid., pp. 408-15; James A. Farley, Jim Farley’s Story (McGraw-Hill, 1948), chs. 20-24; Bascom N. Timmons, Garner of Texas (Harper, 1948), chs. 15-16; Herbert S. Parmet and Marie B. Hecht, Never Again: A President Runs for a Third Term (Macmillan, 1968), chs. 1, 2.

163-4 [Republican convention]: Robert E. Burke, “The Election of 1940,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968 (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 4, pp. 2928-31; Steve Neal, Dark Horse: A Biography of Wendell Willkie (Doubleday, 1984), ch. 10; Parmet and Hecht, ch. 6; James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: Robert A. Taft (Houghton Mifflin, 1972), chs. 14-15.

164 [“Could not in these times refuse”]: quoted in Farley, p. 251.

[Democratic convention]: Burns, Lion, pp. 426-30; Burke, pp. 2933-36; Farley, chs. 25-29; Parmet and Hecht, ch. 8.

[“Destroyer deal”]: Philip Goodhart, Fifty Ships That Saved the World (Doubleday, 1965); Mark L. Chadwin, The Hawks of World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 1968), ch. 4; Dallek, pp. 243-48; Kimball, Unsordid Act, pp. 67-71; Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 384-86; Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 376-407; Thomas A. Bailey and Paul B. Ryan, Hitler vs. Roosevelt: The Undeclared Naval War (Free Press, 1979), ch. 7.

[“Whole fate of the war”]: letter of July 31, 1940, in Loewenheim, pp. 107-108, quoted at p. 107.

[Hitler’s thwarted invasion of Britain]: see Shirer, Rise and Fall, ch. 22.

165 [Selective Service]: J. Garry Clifford and Samuel R. Spencer, Jr., The First Peacetime Draft (University Press of Kansas, 1986); Porter, chs. 6-7; Dallek, pp. 248-50; Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 473-75.

[Willkie campaign]: Neal, ch. 12; Burke, pp. 2937-43; Parmet and Hecht, chs. 9-12; Muriel Rukeyser, One Life (Simon and Schuster, 1957), ch. 4; Donald Bruce Johnson, The Republican Party and Wendell Willkie (University of Illinois Press, 1960), ch. 4; Cole, Roosevelt, p. 396.

[“A temporary alliance”]: Neal, pp. 158-59, quoted at p. 159.

[FDR’s campaign]: Burns, Lion, pp. 442-51; Burke, pp. 2943-45; Parmet and Hechl, chs. 9-12.

[“An old campaigner”]: in Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 485-95, quoted at p. 488,.

[“Ma-a-a-rtin”]: see ibid., pp. 506, 523; Rosenman, Working, pp. 240-41.

[“Mothers and fathers of America”]: October 30, 1940, in Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 514-24, quoted at p. 517.

[“Very ominous”]: campaign address at Brooklyn, N.Y., November 1, 1940, in ibid., vol. 9, pp. 530-39, quoted at p. 531; see also Burns, Lion, p. 449.

[Election results]: Schlesinger, vol. 4, p. 3006; Burns, Lion, pp. 454-55.

[“Happy I’ve won but”]: quoted in James Roosevelt and Bill Libby, My Parents: A Differing View (Playboy Press, 1976), p. 164.

[FDR-Willkie meeting]: see James Roosevelt and Sidney Shalett, Affectionately, F.D.R.: A Son’s Story of a Lonely Man (Harcourt, 1959), p. 325; Grace Tully, F.D.R., My Boss (Scribner, 1949), p. 58.

The War of Two Worlds

166 [Hitler’s address at Rheinmetall-Borsig]: New York Times, December 11, 1940, pp. 1, 4-5, quoted at p. 4.

166 [FDR’s reply]: fireside chat of December 29, 1940, in Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 633-44, quoted at pp. 634, 639, 640, 643; Burns, Soldier, pp. 27-28.

[Hitler on global strategy]: quoted in Shirer, Rise and Fall, p. 821; see also Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, Richard and Clara Winston, trans. (Vintage, 1975), p. 643.

[Churchill’s letter to FDR]: December 8, 1940, in Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour (Houghton Mifflin, 1949), pp. 558-67, quoted at pp. 561, 564, 566.

[“One of the most important”]: ibid., p. 558.

[FDR’s conception of Lend-Lease]: quoted in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (Harper, 1950), p. 224.

[Lend-Lease]: Kimball, Unsordid Act; John Morton Blum, From the Morgenthau Diaries: Years of Urgency, 1938-1941 (Houghton Mifflin, 1965), ch. 6; William L. Langer and S. Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940-1941 (Harper, 1953), chs. 8-9; Dallek, pp. 255-60; Cole, Roosevelt, ch. 28; Burns, Soldier, pp. 43-49; Kimball, “Lend-Lease and the Open Door”; William A. Klingaman, 1941 (Harper, 1988), ch. 3.

[Britain’s financial straits]: Dallek, p. 255.

[FDR’s garden-hose analogy]: press conference 702, December 17, 1940, in Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 604-15, quoted at p. 607; see also Kimball, Unsordid Act, p. 77.

169 [Taft on Lend-Lease]: Patterson, Mr. Republican, pp. 242-44.

[Wheeler on Lend-Lease and FDR’s reply]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 44; and press conference 710, January 14, 1941, in Public Papers, vol. 9, pp. 710-12, quoted at pp. 711-12.

[Tribune on Lend-Lease]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 45.

[Coughlin on Lend-Lease]: see Charles J. Tull, Father Coughlin and the New Deal (Syracuse University Press, 1965), p. 228.

[Lindbergh’s testimony]: Cole, Roosevelt, pp. 416-17; Kimball, Unsordid Act, p. 190.

[Smith’s threat]: Kimball, Unsordid Act, pp. 162-63; see also Gerald L. K. Smith, Besieged Patriot (Christian Nationalist Crusade, 1978).

[Beard on Lend-Lease]: Kimball, Roosevelt and the World Crisis, p. 10.

[Pressure on FDR to convoy ships]: Dallek, pp. 260-62; Burns, Soldier, pp. 80-92.

[FDR’s “undeclared naval war”]: Bailey and Ryan; Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 878-83; H. L. Trefousse, Germany and American Neutrality, 1939-1941 (Bookman Associates, 1951).

170 [German invasion of the Soviet Union]: G. Deborin, The Second World War (Progress Publishers, Moscow, n.d.), chs. 7-8.

[U.S.-Japanese relations in 1930s]: John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945 (Random House, 1970), chs. 1-2; Armin Rappaport, Henry L. Stimson and Japan, 1931-1933 (University of Chicago Press, 1963); Dorothy Borg and Shumpei Okamoto, eds., Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931-1941 (Columbia University Press, 1973); Howard Jaslon, “Cordell Hull, His ‘Associates,’ and Relations with Japan, 1933-1936,” Mid-America, vol. 56, no. 3 (July 1974), pp. 160-74; Frederick C. Adams, “The Road to Pearl Harbor: A Reexamination of American Far Eastern Policy, July 1937-December 1938,” Journal of American History, vol. 63, no. 1 (June 1971), pp. 73-92.

171 [Atlantic-Pacific links]: see Burns, Soldier, p. 106.

[“Knock-outfight”]: letter of July 1, 1941, in Personal Letters, vol. 2, pp. 1173-74, quoted at p. 1174.

[FDR-Churchill summit]: Theodore A. Wilson, The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941 (Houghton Mifflin, 1969); Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War, ch. 21.

[“Final destruction of the Nazi tyranny”]: quoted in Wilson, p. 206.

171-2 [Greer and Kearny incidents]: Bailey and Ryan, chs. 12-14; Langer and Gleason, Undeclared War, pp. 742-60.

172 [“Very simply and very bluntly”]: Navy and Total Defense Day Address, October 27, 1941, in Public Papers, vol. 10, pp. 438-44, quoted at p. 441.

[“United States has attacked”]: quoted in Bailey and Ryan, p. 202.

[Approach of war in the Pacific]: Dallek, ch. 11 passim; Toland, Rising Sun, chs. 4-5; Burns, Soldier, ch.4; Shirer, Rise and Fall, ch. 25; Herbert Feis, The Road to Pearl Harbor: The Coming of the War Between the United States and Japan (Princeton University Press, 1950); Kimball, Roosevelt and the World Crisis, pp. 90-103; Winston S. Churchill, The Grand Alliance (Houghton Mifflin, 1950), ch. 11; Christopher Thorne, The Issue of War: States, Societies, and the Far Eastern Conflict of 1941-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1985), part 1; Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1978), ch. 2; Jonathan G. Utley, Going to War with Japan, 1937-1941 (University of Tennessee Press, 1985); Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War (Harvard University Press, 1981), ch. 1; Iriye, Across the Pacific: An Inner History of American-East Asian Relations (Harcourt, 1967), ch. 8; Kimilada Miwa, “Japanese Images of War with the United States,” in Akira Iriye, ed., Mutual Images: Essays in American-Japanese Relations (Harvard University Press, 1975), ch.6.

[ U.S. gasoline and scrap iron embargo]: see Burns, Soldier, pp. 21, 107, 109-10.

[“Within the hour”]: note from Churchill to Eden, December 2, 1941, in Churchill, Grand Alliance, pp. 600-1, quoted at p. 601.

[“Strongest fortress”]: quoted in Gordon W. Prange, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (McGraw-Hill, 1981), p. 122.

[“This means war”]: ibid., p. 475.

[Pearl Harbor]: ibid., chs. 61-67; Ronald H. Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (Free Press, 1985), pp. 1-7; Toland, Rising Sun, pp. 211-20; Klingaman, ch. 27.

[Mitsuo on concentration of U.S. ships]: Spector, p. 4.

175 [Controversy as to foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor attack]: see Spector, pp. 95-100; Prange, At Dawn, esp. ch. 81 and Appendix (“Revisionists Revisited”), pp. 839-50; Prange et al., Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (McGraw-Hill, 1986); John Toland, Infamy: Pearl Harbor and Its Aftermath (Doubleday, 1982); Charles A. Beard, President Roosevelt and the Coming War, 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (Yale University Press, 1948); Robert A. Theobald, The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The. Washington Contribution to the Japanese Attack (Devin-Adair, 1954); Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford University Press, 1962); Telford Taylor, “Day of Infamy, Decades of Doubt,” New York Times Magazine, April 29, 1984, pp. 107, 113, 120.

[Washington reaction to attack]: Toland, Rising Sun, pp. 216, 223-24, Knox quoted at p. 223.

[Tokyo reaction to attack]: ibid., pp. 227-28, song quoted at p. 228.

[Churchill’s reaction to attack]: Churchill, Grand Alliance, pp. 604-8.

175-6 [Hitler’s reaction to attack]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 875-76, 883-902; Fest, pp. 655-56.

176 [FDR on Germany and Italy at war with U.S.]: Public Papers, vol. 10, pp. 522-30, quoted at p. 530.

[Hitler’s declaration of war upon U.S.]: Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 897-900; Burns, Soldier, pp. 67-68, 173-74; Bailey and Ryan, ch. 17; John Toland, Adolf Hitler (Doubleday, 1976), pp. 692-97; Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New American Library, 1978), pp. 489-99; James V. Compton, The Swastika and the Eagle: Hitler, the United States, and the Origins of World War II (Houghton Mifflin, 1967), chs. 1-2, 15; Gerhard L. Weinberg, “Hitler’s Image of the United States,” American Historical Review, vol. 69, no. 4 (July 1964), pp. 1006-21.

[Japanese attack at Philippines]: William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964 (Little, Brown, 1978), ch. 5; Toland, Rising Sun, pp. 232-35; Spector, pp. 106-8; Louis Morton, The Fall of the Philippines (U.S. Department of the Army, 1953); Daniel F. Harrington, “A Careless Hope: American Air Power and Japan, 1941,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 48 (1979), pp. 217-38.

177 [FDR-Churchill conference]: Robert Beitzell, The Uneasy Alliance: America, Britain, and Russia, 1941-1943 (Knopf, 1972), ch. 1; Richard W. Steele, The First Offensive: Roosevelt, Marshall and the Making of American Strategy (Indiana University Press, 1973), ch. 3; W. G. F. Jackson, “Overlord”: Normandy 1944 (Davis-Poynter, 1978), pp. 41-53; Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Ordeal of Hope, 1939-1942 (Viking, 1966), ch. 12; Churchill, Grand Alliance, chs. 14-15; see also Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy (Macmillan, 1973), ch. 7.

[Religious freedom in Declaration]: Sherwood, pp. 448-49.

[“To defend life, liberty”]: quoted in Churchill, Grand Alliance, p. 684.

179 [Battle of the Coral Sea]: Spector, pp. 158-63; Ronald Lewin, The American Magic: Codes, Ciphers and the Defeat of Japan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982), pp. 90-96.

179 [Guadalcanal]: Spector, chs. 9-10 passim; Toland, Rising Sun, part 4; Samuel B. Griffith II, The Battle for Guadalcanal (Lippincott, 1963); John Hersey, Into the Valley: A Skirmish of the Marines (Knopf, 1944); S. E. Morison, The Struggle for Guadalcanal (Little, Brown, 1949).

[“Green hell”]: Toland, Rising Sun, ch. 15.

[“Loathsome crawling things”]: Weigley, p. 276.

[Doolittle’s feat]: Spector, pp. 153-55; Toland, Rising Sun, pp. 304-10; Quentin Reynolds, The Amazing Mr. Doolittle (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953), chs. 8-9. [Midway]: Spector, pp. 166-78; Toland, Rising Sun, pp. 325-42; Gordon Prange, Miracle at Midway (McGraw-Hill, 1982); Lewin, pp. 96-111; Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya, Midway, the Battle That Doomed Japan: The Japanese Navy’s Story (U.S. Naval Institute, 1955).

180 [Public pressure for shift to Pacific first]: Steele, pp. 81-92; Manchester, pp. 307-12; Burns, Soldier, pp. 210-11.

[Debate over European strategy]: see Jackson, chs. 3-4; Steele, chs. 4-8; John Grigg, 1943: The Victory That Never Was (Hill and Wang, 1980), part 1 passim; Herbert Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin: The War They Waged and the Peace They Sought (Princeton University Press, 1957), chs. 5-10; Joseph L. Strange, “The British Rejection of Operation SLEDGEHAMMER, An Alternative Motive,” Military Affairs, vol. 46, no. 1 (February 1982), pp. 6-14; Pogue, chs. 12, 14-15; Beitzell, chs. 2-3. For a Soviet view of the strategic background, see Genrikh Trofimenko, The U.S. Military Doctrine (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1986), pp. 1-56.

[Eisenhower on cross-Channel attack]: quoted in Steele, p. 79.

181 [North Africa]: Arthur Layton Funk, The Politics of TORCH: The Allied Landings and the Algiers Putsch (University Press of Kansas, 1974); William L. Linger, Our Vichy Gamble (Knopf, 1947); Stephen E. Ambrose, The Supreme Commander: The War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Doubleday, 1970), book 1, chs. 7-10; Burns, Soldier, ch. 9; Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 919-25; Pogue, ch. 18,

[“Walk with the Devil”]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 297.

[“The freedom of your lives”]: ibid., p. 292.

[“I salute again”]: November 7, 1942, in Public Papers, vol. 11, pp. 451-52, quoted at p. 451.

The Production of War

182 [“Proper application of overwhelming force”]: Churchill, Grand Alliance, p. 607.

[Soldiers as production workers]: Burns, Soldier, p. 470; William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 (Little, Brown, 1974), pp. 267-68, 280-83; Bill Mauldin, Up Front (Henry Holt, 1944), pp. 143-44 and passim.

[Press on soldiers]: Burns, Soldier, p. 470; John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture During World War II (Harcourt, 1976), pp. 53-64.

[Slow conversion to war production]: see Richard Polenberg, War and Society: The United States, 1941-1945 (Lippincott, 1972), pp. 10-11; see generally David Brinkley, Washington Goes to War (Knopf, 1988), esp. chs. 3-5.

[FDR’s production goals for 1942]: address on the State of the Union, January 6, 1942, in Public Papers, vol. 11, p. 37.

[Sample conversions]: Manchester, Glory and Dream, p. 293; John R. Graf, A Survey of the American Economy, 1940-1946 (North River Press, 1946), p. 33.

183 [American military output]: A. Russell Buchanan, The United States and World War II (Harper, 1964), vol. 1, p. 140; Manchester, Glory and Dream, p. 296; Alan S. Milward, War, Economy and Society, 1939-1945 (University of California Press, 1977), pp. 69 (Table 15), 70.

[Technology as pacing production]: Milward, pp. 188-91; Graf, p. 41; Allan Nevins and Frank K. Hill, Ford: Decline and Rebirth, 1933-1962 (Scribner, 1962), p. 191.

[Wartime shipping tonnage]: Donald M. Nelson, Arsenal of Democracy: The Story of American War Production (Harcourt, 1946), p. 243.

[Rate of ship production]: Manchester, Glory and Dream, p. 295.

[Hull 440]: Bernard Taper, “Life with Kaiser,” Nation, vol. 155, no. 24 (December 12, 1942), pp. 644-46; Russell Bookhout, “We Build Ships,” Atlantic, vol. 171, no. 4 (April 1943), pp. 37-42; Richard R. Lingemann, Don’t You Know There’s a War On?: The American Home Front, 1941-1945 (Putnam, 1970), pp. 130-31; A. A. Hochling, Home Front, U.S.A. (Crowell, 1966), pp. 51-52; Augusta Clawson, “Shipyard Diary of a Woman Welder,” Radical America, vol. 9, nos. 4-5 (July-August 1975), pp. 134-38.

184 [“But where is the ship?”]: quoted in Bookhout, p. 38.

[Laborforce, workweek, wage increases]: Buchanan, vol. 1, p. 138; Joel Seidman, American Labor from Defense to Reconversion (University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 270.

[Income redistribution]: Geoffrey Perrett, Days of Sadness, Years of Triumph (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973), p. 354.

[Consumer spending]: Combined Production and Resources Board, The Impact of the War on Civilian Consumption in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1945), p. 17 (Table 11).

[Spending on nondurables]: ibid., pp. 3, 23-25; Lingemann, pp. 241-42, 281, 295, 319; Perrett, pp. 239, 381-82.

185 [“Rest Faster Here”]: quoted in Lingemann, p. 241.

[Migration in wartime]: Francis E. Merrill, Social Problems on the Homefront: A Study of War-time Influences (Harper, 1948), pp. 15, 61 (Table 4).

[Migrant children]: Agnes E. Meyer, Journey through Chaos (Harcourt, 1943), pp. 152, 204-5, and passim; see also Merrill, ch. 3.

[Migrant housing]: Blair Bolles, “The Great Defense Migration,” Harper’s, vol. 183 (October 1941), p. 463; see also Meyer, p. 100; William H. Jordy, “Fiasco at Willow Run,” Nation, vol. 156, no. 19 (May 8, 1943), pp. 655-58; Polenberg, pp. 140-42; Lingemann, pp. 82-84, 107-10.

[Beaumont dump]: Meyer, pp. 174-75.

[Nelson and the WPB]: Nelson; Eliot Janeway, The Struggle for Survival: A Chronicle of Economic Mobilization in World War II (Yale University Press, 1951), esp. ch. 11; Bruce Catton, The War Lords of Washington (Harcourt, 1948); Calvin L. Christman, “Donald Nelson and the Army: Personality as a Factor in Civil-Military Relations during World War II,” Military Affairs, vol. 27, no. 3 (October 1973), pp. 81-83.

[“Final authority”]: see Perrett, p. 256. [“We must have down here”]: quoted in Catton, p. 117.

[“Replacing New Dealers”]: quoted in Polenberg, pp. 90-91.

[Dollar-a-year men]: ibid., p. 91.

185-6 [Truman on dollar-a-year men]: quoted in Catton, pp. 119, 118, respectively; see also Donald H. Riddle, The Truman Committee: A Study in Congressional Responsibility (Rutgers University Press, 1964), pp. 41-43, 65-66, 71-73.

186 [Industry incentives]: Lingemann, p. 111; Blum, p. 122.

[“Of course it contributes to waste”]: quoted in Meyer, p. 5.

[Corporate profits and assets]: Polenberg, p. 13; Perrett, p. 403.

[“You have to let business make money”]: quoted in Blum, p. 122.

[Small business in the war]: Jim F. Heath, “American War Mobilization and the Use of Small Manufacturers, 1939-1943,” Business History Review, vol. 46, no. 3 (August 1972), pp. 295-319; Polenberg, pp. 218-19; Lingemann, p. 65; Riddle, pp. 63-64; Blum, pp. 124-31.

[Union membership]: Lingemann, p. 161; Craf, pp. 181-82.

[NWLB]: Seidman, pp. 81-86, 272-74; Burns, Soldier, p. 192; Public Papers, vol. 11, pp. 42-48.

[Maintenance of membership]: see Seidman, ch. 6.

187 [Labor’s junior status in war]: see Paul A. C. Koistinen, “Mobilizing the World War II Economy: Labor and the Industrial-Military Alliance,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 42 (1973), pp. 443-78.

[Reuther’s plan]: Jean Gould and Lorena Hickok, Walter Reuther: Labor’s Rugged Individualist (Dodd, Mead, 1972), pp. 188-95, William Knudsen on “socialism” quoted at p. 193; Irving Howe and B. J. Widick, The UAW and Walter Reuther (Random House, 1949), pp. 108-10; Janeway, pp. 220-25.

[Murray on rank and file]: quoted in Koistinen, p. 468.

[Labor conditions]: Meyer, passim; Ed Jennings, “Wildcat! The Wartime Strike Wave in Auto,” Radical America, vol. 9, nos. 4-5 (July-August 1975), pp. 77-105. [“Little Steel” and inflation]: Seidman, ch. 7; Koistinen, p. 468.

187 [Work stoppages]: Seidman, p. 135 (Table); Jennings, p. 89.

[Lewis in early war years]: Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren VanTine, John L. Lewis (Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977), ch. 17.

[“When the mine workers’ children cry”]: quoted in ibid., p. 419.

[Mine workers’ conflict]: ibid., ch. 18; Seidman, pp. 136-40; Burns, Soldier, pp. 335-37.

188 [“Damn your coal black soul”]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 337. [“Insurrection against the war”]: quoted in Seidman, p. 144.

[FDR on resignation and suicide]: see Dubofsky and Van Tine, p. 424.

[Women as percentage of war work force]: International Labour Office, The War and Women’s Employment: The Experience of the United Kingdom and the United States (International Labour Office, 1946), pp. 172-74.

[Sample women’s jobs]: ibid., p. 195; Lingemann, p. 152; Meyer, p. 46; Studs Terkel, “The Good War”: An Oral History of World War Two (Pantheon, 1984), p. 10. [Numbers of women employed, 1944]: ILO, p. 166; Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Twayne, 1982), pp. 77-78.

[Women’s wages, 1944]: ILO, pp. 199-200, 207.

[Women workers and unions]: ibid., pp. 237-47; Hartmann, pp. 64-69; Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations, and the Status of Women During World War II (Greenwood Press, 1981), pp. 55-60.

[Rosie the Riveter]: see Paddy Quick, “Rosie the Riveter: Myths and Realities,” Radical America, vol. 9, nos. 4-5 (July-August 1975), pp. 115-31, esp. pp. 115-16; Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II (University of Massachusetts Press, 1984); Sherna B. Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change (Twayne Publishers, 1987). [Defense contractors’ hiring policies]: see Lingemann, p. 162.

[Blacks as percentage of war workers, 1944]: ibid.

188-9 [Black-white wage differential]: ibid., pp. 164-65.

189 [NAACP and CORE in the war]: Warren D. St. James, The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People: A Case Study in Pressure Groups (Exposition Press, 1958), pp. 52, 54 (Table 1); August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 (Oxford University Press, 1973), ch. 1; Richard M. Dalfiurne, “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” in Bernard Sternsher, ed., The Negro in Depression and War: Prelude to Revolution, 1930-1945 (Quadrangle, 1969), pp. 298-316; Lee Finkle, “The Conservative Aims of Militant Rhetoric: Black Protest during World War II,” Journal of American History, vol. 60, no. 3 (December 1973), pp. 692-713; Blum, pp. 182-99.

[Race riots, 1943]: Alfred M. Lee and Norman D. Humphrey, Race Riot (Detroit, 1943) (Octagon Books, 1968); Carey McWilliams, North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States (Lippincott, 1949), chs. 12-13.

[Employment of black women]: ILO, pp. 184-85; Karen T. Anderson, “Last Hired, First Fired: Black Women Workers during World War II,” Journal of American History, vol. 69, no. 1 (June 1982), pp. 82-97.

[St. Louis electric company]: Anderson, “Last Hired,” p. 84.

[Black women’s jobs]: Hartmann, p. 87; Anderson, Wartime Women, p. 39.

[Japanese internment]: Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis, The Great Betrayal: The Evacuation of Japanese-Americans during World War II (Macmillan, 1969); Bill Hosokawa, Nisei: The Quiet Americans (Morrow, 1969), part 2 passim: Carey McWilliams, Prejudice: Japanese-Americans, Symbol of Racial Intolerance (Little, Brown, 1945); Charles Kikuchi, The Kikuchi Diary: Chronicle from an American Concentration Camp, John Modell, ed. (University of Illinois Press, 1973); Yoshiko Uchida, Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family (University of Washington Press, 1982); Terkel, pp. 28-35; Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy (Morrow, 1976); Thomas James, Exile Within: The Schooling of Japanese-Americans, 1942-1945 (Harvard University Press, 1987).

[“When I first entered our room”]: Letters of Stanley Shimabukuro, Joseph Goodman Collection, box 1, folder 1, California Historical Society, San Francisco. 190 [“When can we go back to America?”]: quoted in Girdner and Loftis, p. 148.

[Political leaders and commentators and relocation]: Morton Grodzins, Americans Betrayed: Politics and the Japanese Evacuation (University of Chicago Press, 1949), pp. 254-73, and passim: Girdner and Loftis; Weglyn, p. 72; Burns, Soldier, p. 216; Graham White and John Maze, Harold Ickes of the New Deal (Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 224-25; Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 394-95; Korematsu v. U.S., 323 U.S. 214 (1944); Francis Biddle, in Brief Authority (Doubleday, 1962), ch. 13; Ted Morgan, FDR (Simon and Schuster, 985), pp. 275-76.

190 [“Politics is out”]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 273.

[“When a country is at war”]: press conference 803, February 6, 1942, in Public Papers, vol. 11, p. 80.

[FDR’s involvements in 1942 campaign]: Robert E. Ficken, “Political Leadership in Wartime: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Election of 1942,” Mid-America, vol. 57, no. 1 (January 1975), pp. 20-37; Burns, Soldier, pp. 273-80; Farley, ch. 35.

191 [“If this be treason”]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 279.

[Election results, 1942]: ibid., pp. 280-81; Polenberg, pp. 187-92.

[Commentator on 1918 and 1942]: Burns, Soldier, p. 281.

[Congressional makeup, 1943]: Polenberg, pp. 192-93.

[Congressional action against New Deal agencies]: ibid., pp. 79-86; Blum, pp. 234-40.

[Wagner-Murray-Dingell]: Polenberg, pp. 86-87.

[Smith-Connally]: Seidman, pp. 188-91.

[“Dr. New Deal” and “Dr. Win-the-War”]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 423.

[1942 tax legislation]: Randolph E. Paul, Taxation in the United States (Little, Brown, 1954), pp. 294-326.

[1943 government spending, national debt, consumer savings]: Burns, Soldier, pp. 362-63, 433-34; Craf, p. 122 (Table 15); Paul, pp. 349-51.

191-2 [Morgenthau’s 1943 tax proposal and Congress’s substitute]: Paul, pp. 353-70; Blum, p. 243.

192 [“Vicious piece of legislation”]: quoted in Polenberg, p. 198.

[“Tax relief bill”]: February 22, 1944, in Public Papers, vol. 13, pp. 80-83, quoted at pp. 80, 82; see also Paul, pp. 371-72.

[“Calculated and deliberate assault”]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, pp. 435-36.

[Barkley’s “resignation”]: ibid., pp. 435-37; Paul, pp. 373-75; Public Papers, vol. 13, pp. 85-86.

[FDR on “Republican” Congress]: see Polenberg, p. 199.

[Opinion polls on war’s purpose, 1942]: Cantril and Strunk, pp. 1077-78 (item 41), 1083 (items 5-6, 8); see also Richard W. Steele, “American Popular Opinion and the War Against Germany: The Issue of Negotiated Peace, 1942,” Journal of American History, vol. 65, no. 3 (December 1978), pp. 704-23.

193 [Civilian participation in war effort]: see Perrett, ch. 19, p. 394; Lingemann, ch. 2, pp. 251-52; Manchester, Glory and Dream, p. 303; Burns, Soldier, pp. 158-59; Anna W. M. Wolf and Irma S. Black, “What Happened to Younger People,” in Jack Goodman, ed., While You Were Gone: A Report on Wartime Life in the United States (Simon and Schuster, 1946), p. 75.

[Eighty-six-year-old Connecticut sentinel]: Interview with Ann Hoskins, in Roy Hoopes, Americans Remember the Home Front: An Oral Narrative (Hawthorn Books, 1977), pp. 281-82.

[“Private and personal concerns”]: Polenberg, p. 137.

[OWI]: Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942-1945 (Yale University Press, 1978), chs. 1-2; Catton, pp. 186-95; Blum, pp. 21-45.

[OWI and the military]: Winkler, pp. 44-51.

[OWI split between “writers” and “advertisers”]: Blum, pp. 36-39; Polenberg, pp. 52-53.

[“Encourage discussion”]: MacLeish, quoted in Blum, p. 33.

[“All levels of intelligence”]: quoted in Polenberg, p. 53.

[“Step right up”]: quoted in Blum, p. 39.

[This Is War!]: quoted in Sherman H. Dyer, Radio in Wartime (Greenberg Publisher, 1942), p. 245.

193-4 [Benny-Livingston routine]: quoted in Winkler, p. 61.

194 [Hollywood goes to war]: Bernard F. Dick, The Star-Spangled Screen: The American World War II Film (University Press of Kentucky, 1985); Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, “What to Show the World: The Office of War Information and Hollywood, 1942-1945,” Journal of American History, vol. 64, no. 1 (June 1977), pp. 87-105; David Culbert, “‘Why We Fight’: Social Engineering for a Democratic Society at War,” in K. R. M. Short, Film & Radio Propaganda in World War II (University of Tennessee Press, 1983), pp. 173-91; Bosley Crowther, “The Movies,” in Goodman, pp. 511-32; Lingemann, pp. 168-210.

194 [“Her spies never sleep”]: Peter Lorre, quoted in Lingemann, p. 195.

[“He dies for freedom”]: Robert Taylor, quoted in ibid., p. 200.

[“STUDIOS SHELVE WAR STORIES”]: ibid., p. 206.

[Tin Pan Alley’s efforts]: ibid., pp. 210-23; Perrett, pp. 241-43.

[War advertisements]: Raymond Rubicam, “Advertising,” in Goodman, pp. 433-34; Life, March 30, 1942, p. 90; Life, March 23, 1942, p. 111; Life, March 16, 1942, p. 60; see also Lingemann, pp. 291-97.

[Coke as essential war product]: Blum, pp. 107-8.

[“Who’s Afraid”]: Rubicam, p. 432.

[The GI ideology]: Samuel Stouffer et al., The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life (Princeton University Press, 1949), vol. 1, chs. 5, 8, 9, and vol. 2, chs. 2, 3, and passim; Mauldin; Blum, pp. 64-70; Burns, Soldier, pp. 470-72; Mina Curtiss, ed., Letters Home (Little, Brown, 1944); Manchester, Glory and Dream, pp. 282-83; Ralph G. Martin, The GI War, 1941-1945 (Little, Brown, 1967), p. 55 and passim.

[“Born housewife”]: quoted in Blum, p. 65.

195 [“Wish to hell they were someplace else”]: Mauldin, p. 16.

[“Blueberry pie”]: quoted in Blum, p. 66.

[Soldiers’ talk of creature comforts]: ibid., p. 67.

[Warphoto]: Arthur B. Tourtellot, ed., Life’s Picture History of World War II (Simon and Schuster, 1950), p. 207.

[“…the slow, incessant waves”]: Sergeant Charles E. Butler, “Lullaby,” quoted in Martin, p. 240.

The Rainbow Coalition Embattled

[FDR’s trip to Casablanca]: Burns, Soldier, pp. 316-17.

[Casablanca Conference]: Grigg, pp. 59-79; Dallek, pp. 368-72; Feis, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, ch. 11; Winston S. Churchill, The Hinge of Fate (Houghton Mifflin, 1950), pp. 674-95; Burns,Soldier, pp. 317-24; Raymond G. O’Connor, Diplomacy for Victory: FDR and Unconditional Surrender (Norton, 1971); Forrest C. Pogue, George C. Marshall: Organizer of Victory, 1941-1945 (Viking, 1973), ch. 2.

197 [Stalin’s response to Churchill’s warning]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 327. [Possibility of Nazi-Soviet deal]: see Mastny, pp. 73-85.

[Stalin’s suspicions]: see Burns, Soldier, p. 373; Mastny, chs. 2-4 passim; Jackson, ch. 2; Feis, chs. 7-8, 15 passim; Churchill, Hinge, pp. 740-61 passim; Keith Sainsbury, The Turning Point (Oxford University Press, 1985), ch. 2; see also Mark A. Stoler, “The ‘Second Front’ and American Fears of Soviet Expansion, 1941-1943,” Military Affairs, vol. 39, no. 3 (October 1975), pp. 136-41.

198 [Quebec Conference]: Dallek, pp. 408-21; Feis, ch. 16; Pogue, ch. 13; Winston S. Churchill, Closing the Ring (Houghton Mifflin, 1951), pp. 80-97; Jackson, pp. 101-8; Burns, Soldier, pp. 390-94.

[FDR’s trip to Cairo]: Keith Eubank, Summit at Teheran (Morrow, 1985), ch. 6; Burns, Soldier, pp. 402-3,

[Cairo Conference]: Eubank, ch. 7; Churchill, Closing, pp. 325-41; Sainsbury, ch. 7; Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 (Macmillan, 1970), ch. 16; Burns, Soldier, pp. 403-5.

[FDR on Stalin]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 407.

[Teheran Conference]: ibid., pp. 406-14; Dallek, pp. 430-40; Eubank; Feis, chs. 25-28 passim; F. P. King, The Sew Internationalism: Allied Policy and the European Peace, 1939-1945 (Archon Books, 1973); Sainsbury, ch. 8; Beitzell, part 5; W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946 (Random House, 1975), ch. 12; Mastny, pp. 122-33; Churchill, Closing, pp. 342-407.

[Churchill on FDR’s drifting]: Sainsbury, p. 231.

199 [Birthday toasts and FDR on the rainbow coalition]: Burns, Soldier, p. 411. [Sword of Stalingrad]: ibid., p. 410.

[General strategic, background, European war]: see Weigley, American Way, ch. 14.

199 [Preparations for D-Day]: Burns, Soldier, pp. 473-74; Ambrose, Supreme Commander, book 2, part 1; Russell F. Weigley, Eisenhower’s Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944-1945; (Indiana University Press, 1981), part1; Jackson, ch. 6; Pogue, ch. 19 passim.

200 [“O.K., let’s go”]: quoted in Ambrose, Supreme Commander, p. 417, and see footnote.

[Normandy invasion]: ibid., book 2, part 2; Weigley, Lieutenants, ch. 5; Max Hastings, Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy (Simon and Schuster, 1984); Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 1036-42; Jackson, ch. 8; Burns, Soldier, pp. 475-77.

[Intelligence and deception at Normandy]: see Ralph Bennett, Ultra in the West: The Normandy Campaign, 1944-45; (Hutchinson, 1979), esp. chs. 1-3; Weigley, Lieutenants, pp. 53-55; Jackson, ch. 7; Stephen E. Ambrose, Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment (Doubleday, 1981), chs. 6-7. [FDR’s prayer]: June 6, 1944, in Public Papers, vol. 13, pp. 152-53, quoted at p. 152.

201 [General strategic background, Pacific war]: see Weigley, American Way, ch. 13.

[Stilwell-Chiang relations]: Tuchman, ch. 12 and part 2 passim.

[MacArthur’s opposition to direct Pacific thrust]: see Weigley, American Way, pp. 283-84; Spector, pp. 255-56, 276-80. 201-2 [Pacific campaign]: Toland, Rising Sun, parts 5-6 passim: Spector, chs. 12-14, 19-20; Thorne, Allies of a Kind, parts 4-5 passim; Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1947-62), vols. 7-8, 12-13; Philip A. Crowl and Edmund G. Love, Seizure of the Gilberts and Marshalls (U.S. Department of the Army, 1955); Philip A. Crowl, Campaign in the Marianas (U.S. Department of the Army, 1960); M. Hamlin Cannon, Leyte: The Return to the Philippines (U.S. Department of the Army, 1954); Robert R. Smith, Triumph in the Philippines (U.S. Department of the Army, 1963); Manchester, American Caesar, pp. 339-55, 363-73, and ch. 7.

202 [Popular support for Russia after Pearl Harbor]: Ralph B. Levering, American Opinion and the Russian Alliance, 1939-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 1976), p. 61 (Figure 2); see also Melvin Small, “How We Learned to Love the Russians: American Media and the Soviet Union During World War II,” Historian, vol. 36, no. 3 (May 1974), pp. 455-78.

[Time’s revised view of Stalin]: Time, vol. 35, no. 1 (January 1, 1940), pp. 14-17; and Time, vol. 41, no. 1 (January 4, 1943), pp. 21-24.

[Tribune on communists]: quoted in Levering, p. 76.

[Herald Tribune on Stalin]: ibid., p. 89.

[Reynolds’s defense of Soviet purge]: Reynolds, … Only the Stars Are Neutral (Random House, 1942).

[“‘Don’t say a word against Stalin’”]: Eastman, “We Must Face the Facts About Russia,” Reader’s Digest, vol. 43, no. 255 (July 1943), pp. 1-14, quoted at p. 3.

[Hitler’s exploitation of freedom as symbol]: Burns, Soldier, pp. 386-87; see also James MacGregor Burns, “The Roosevelt-Hitler Battle of Symbols,” Antioch Review, vol. 2, no. 3 (Fall 1942), pp. 407-21; transcripts of translated Nazi broadcasts at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, N.Y.; Z. A. B. Zeman, Nazi Propaganda (Oxford University Press, 1964); Alexander L. George, Propaganda Analysis (Row, Peterson, 1959); Paul M. A. Linebarger, Psychological Warfare (Infantry Journal Press, 1948); Ralph K. White, “Hitler, Roosevelt, and the Nature of War Propaganda,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 44, no. 2 (April 1949), pp. 157-74; Ernest K. Bramsted, Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda (Michigan State University Press.

[“Essence of our struggle”]: address to the Delegates of the International Labour Organization, November 6, 1941, in Public Papers, vol. 10, pp. 474-80, quoted at p. 476.

203 [Economic bill of rights]: see Annual Message to the Congress, January 6, 1941, in ibid., vol. 9, pp. 663-72, esp. pp. 670-71.

[“Second bill of rights”]: Message on the State of the Union, January 11, 1944, in ibid., vol. 13, pp. 32-42, quoted at p. 41, as modified by comparison with tapes of the speech.

[FDR’s vice-presidential manipulations]: Burns, Soldier, pp. 503-7; Blum, V Was for Victory, pp. 288-92; John Morton Blum, ed., The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace (Houghton Mifflin, 1973), pp. 360-72; Leon Friedman, “Election of 1944,” in Schlesinger, vol. 4, pp. 3023-28; James F. Byrnes, All in One Lifetime (Harper, 1958), ch. 13.

203 [GOP road to nomination]: Richard N. Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 385-405; Manchester, American Caesar, pp. 355-63; Neal, chs. 17-18; Friedman, pp. 3017-23; Patterson, Mr. Republican, pp. 268-72.

[“Sinister drama”]: quoted in Friedman, p. 3019.

204 [Risk to Dewey of denouncing FDR’s postwar plans]: see Richard E. Darilek, A Loyal Opposition in Time of War: The Republican Party and the Politics of Foreign Policy from Pearl Harbor to Yalta (Greenwood Press, 1976), ch. 7.

[GOP rumor campaign]: Perrett, pp. 292-93.

[Hillman-Browder billboards]: Manchester, Glory and Dream, p. 330; see also Smith, pp. 409-10.

[FDR’s Teamster address]: September 23, 1944, in Public Papers, vol. 13, pp. 284-92, quoted at p. 290, as modified by comparison with tapes of the speech. [“Keep the record straight”]: quoted in Smith, p. 422.

[Dewey on FDR’s “indispensability”]: ibid., p. 424.

[Dewey on Democratic party takeover by Hillman-Browder]: Friedman, p. 3033. [“Bricker could have written it”]: Smith, pp. 433-34, quoted at p. 433.

204-5 [Resurgent antagonism to Russia]: see Levering, ch. 6 and pp. 169-84.

205 [Lippmann’s reluctant vote for FDR]: see Steel, pp. 412-14.

[“I can’t talk about my opponent”]: campaign remarks at Bridgeport, Conn., November 4, 1944, in Public Papers, vol. 13, pp. 389-91, quoted at p. 391.

[Election results, 1944]: Schlesinger, vol. 4, p. 3096; Smith, pp. 435-36.

[Trend toward “privatization”]: see Polenberg, p. 137.

[“Son of a bitch”]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 530.

[FDR’s arrival at Yalta]: ibid., p. 564.

206 [Yalta Conference]: Diane Shaver Clemens, Yalta (Oxford University Press, 1970); King, ch. 10 and passim; Dallek, pp. 506-20; Harriman and Abel, ch. 17; James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (Harper, 1947), ch. 2; Burns, Soldier, pp. 564-80; Mastny, ch. 7; Winston S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Houghton Mifflin, 1953), book 2, chs. 1-4; Feis, chs. 51-57; Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929-1969 (Norton, 1973), ch. 11; Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America During World War II (Atheneum, 1967); Athan G. Theoharis, The Yalta Myths: An Issue in U.S. Politics, 1945-1955 (University of Missouri Press, 1970); Russell D. Buhite, Decisions at Yalta: An Appraisal of Summit Diplomacy (Scholarly Resources, 1986); Deborin, ch. 17.

[Battle of the Bulge]: John Toland, Battle: The Story of the Bulge (Random House, 1959); John S. D. Eisenhower, The Bitter Woods (Putnam, 1969); Shirer, Rise and Fall, pp. 1089-96; Weigley, Lieutenants, chs. 25-29.

[FDR on Polish-Americans]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 569.

[Stalin on Poland]: quoted in Harriman and Abel, p. 407.

[“Pre-eminent interests”]: quoted in ibid., p. 399.

[Leahy-FDR exchange]: quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 572.

208-9 [FDR’s health]: ibid., pp. 448-51, 573-74, 594-95, and sources cited therein.

5. Cold War: The Fearful Giants

210 [FDR’s address on Yalta]: in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 13, pp. 570-86, quoted at pp. 570, 586; see also James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (Harcourt, 1970), pp. 581-82.

210-11 [Deterioration of Allied relations]: Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 521-27; Winston S. Churchill, Triumph and Tragedy (Houghton Mifflin, 1953), book 2, chs. 6-8; W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946 (Random House, 1975), ch. 18; Francis L. Loewenheim et al., eds., Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence (Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton, 1975), pp. 660-709; Robert Lovett Diary and Daily Log Sheet, July 1, 1947-Jan. 27, 1949, New-York Historical Society, New York, N.Y.

211 [Stalin-FDR exchange over surrender talks]: quoted in Dallek, pp. 526-27; see also Allen Dulles, The Secret Surrender (Harper, 1966).

[Jefferson Day draft]: in Public Papers, vol. 13, pp. 613-16, quoted at pp. 615, 616.

The Death and Life of Franklin D. Roosevelt

212 [FDR’s death and return to Hyde Park]: Burns, Soldier, Epilogue; Bernard Asbell, When FDR Died (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961); Turnley Walker, Roosevelt and the Warm Springs Story (A. A. Wyn, 1953), ch. 7.

[“A lonesome train”]: Millard Lampell, “The Lonesome Train,” quoted in Burns, Soldier, p. 604.

212-13 [FDR’s lasting influence]: see William E. Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR (Cornell University Press, 1983), Preface and ch. 1.

213 [Berlin on FDR]: Isaiah Berlin, Personal Impressions, Henry Hardy, ed. (Viking, 1981), p.3.

[“Great men have two lives”]: quoted in Leuchtenburg, pp. viii-ix.

214 [Hawley on New Deal policies]: Ellis Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 15, 270.

[“Fiscal drift”]: Stein, The Fiscal Revolution in America (University of Chicago Press, 1969), ch. 4.

[“Helterskelter” planning]: entry of April 11, 1938, in Morgenthau Presidential Diaries, book 1, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.

[“Read it a little bit”]: entry of April 25, 1939, in ibid.

[Third New Deal]: Barry D. Karl, The Uneasy State (University of Chicago Press, 1983), esp. chs. 7-8.

216 [Dualism in FDR as war leader]: see Burns, Soldier, pp. 607-9; Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Houghton Mifflin, 1977), ch. 2; Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (Simon and Schuster, 1970).

[FDR’s articulation of freedom]: see Burns, “Battle of Symbols.”

[FDR and the military]: Burns, Soldier, pp. 490-96, Stimson quoted at p. 493; see also Kent Roberts Greenfield, American Strategy in World War II: A Reconsideration (Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), ch. 3; William Emerson, “Franklin Roosevelt as Commander-in-Chief in World War II,” Military Affairs, vol. 22 (1958), pp. 181-207.

216-17 [FDR’s insistence upon unconditional surrender]: Raymond G. O’Connor, Diplomacy for Victory: FDR and Unconditional Surrender (Norton, 1971), esp. ch. 3; Russell F. Weigley, The American Way of War (Macmillan, 1973), pp. 281, 325; Gaddis Smith, American Diplomacy During the Second World War, 1941-1945 (Wiley, 1967), ch. 3; Anne Armstrong, Unconditional Surrender: The Impact of the Casablanca Policy upon World War II (Rutgers University Press, 1961).

217 [Dallek on FDR as “principal architect”]: Dallek, p. 532.

[FDR’s refusal to share atomic secrets with Soviets]: see ibid., pp. 416-18, 470-72, 534; Barton J. Bernstein, “Roosevelt, Truman, and the Atomic Bomb: A Reinterpretation,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 1 (Spring 1975), pp. 24-32.

[De Gaulle on FDR]: De Gaulle, War Memoirs: Unity, 1942-1944 (Simon and Schuster, 1959), p. 270.

[“Once-born” and “divided selves”]: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Longmans, Green, 1935), p. 199, as cited and interpreted in Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther (Norton, 1962), pp. 41, 117.

218 [FDR and the Holocaust]: David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (Pantheon, 1984); Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945 (Rutgers University Press, 1970); Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981); Richard Breitman and Allan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945 (Indiana University Press, 1987); Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy (Collins, 1986); Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933-1945 (Free Press, 1986); Michael R. Marcus, The Holocaust in History (University Press of New England, 1987), ch. 8.

218 [“Final solution”]: Hermann Goring to Reinhard Heydrich, July 31, 1941, quoted in Gilbert, Holocaust, p. 176.

219 [Berlin on Eleanor Roosevelt]: Personal impressions, p. 31.

The Long Telegram

220 [Origins of the cold war]: D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins, 1917-1960, 2 vols. (Doubleday, 1961), esp. vol. 1, ch. 11, and vol. 2, ch. 24; Charles S. Maier, “Revisionism and the Interpretation of Cold War Origins,” Perspectives in American History, vol. 4 (1970), pp. 313-47; John Lewis Caddis, The Long Peace (Oxford University Press, 1987), esp. chs. 1-3, 8; Caddis, “The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History, vol. 7, no. 3 (Summer 1983), pp. 171-90; Thomas G. Paterson, On Every Front: The Making of the Cold War (Norton, 1979); Alexander Werth, Russia: The Post-War Years (Taplinger, 1971), ch. 3; Barton J. Bernstein, “American Foreign Policy and the Origins of the Cold War,” in Bernstein and Allen J. Malusow, eds., Twentieth-Century America: Recent Interpretations, 2nd ed. (Harcourt, 1972), pp. 344-94; Lloyd C. Gardiner, Architects of Illusion: Men and Ideas in American Foreign Policy, 1941-1949 (Quadrangle, 1970), ch. 11; Gardiner, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.. and Hans J. Morgenthau, The Origins of the Cold War (Ginn and Co., 1970); Thomas T. Hammond, ed., Witnesses to the Origins of the Cold War (University of Washington Press, 1982); Eduard Mark, “American Policy toward Eastern Europe and the Origins of the Cold War,” Journal of American History, vol. 68, no. 2 (September 1981), pp. 313-36; Robert J. Maddox, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 1973); Vojtech Mastny, Russia’s Road to the Cold War, 1941-1945 (Columbia University Press, 1979); Thomas G. Paterson, Soviet-American Confrontation: Postwar Reconstruction and the Origins of the Cold War (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Lovett Diary and Log Sheet, 1947-1949; Hugh Thomas, Armed Truce: The Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-46 (Atheneum, 1987), esp. pp. 541-50; Frederick L. Schuman, The Cold War: Retrospect and Prospect (Louisiana State University Press, 1962); John P. Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peaces 1941-1960 (Norton, 1988), ch. 2 passim.

[“Deep, mournful”]: quoted in Edward Crankshaw, Russia and the Russians (Viking, 1948), p. 21.

[Crankshaw on Russian temperament]: ibid., p. 23.

221 [Truman on German-Russian fight]: quoted in New York Times, June 24, 1941, p. 7. Copy of newspaper page now displayed in Museum of the Red Army, Moscow.

[Polk on Soviet postwar cooperation]: Gary J. Buckley, “American Public Opinion and the Origins of the Cold War: A Speculative Reassessment,” Mid-America, vol. 60, no. 1 (January 1978), pp. 35-42, esp. pp. 37-38 (Table 1).

222 [NSC-68]: Yergin, pp. 401-4, quoted at p. 401; Gaddis, Long Peace, pp. 114-15; Richard A. Melanson, “The Foundations of Eisenhower’s Foreign Policy: Continuity, Community, and Consensus,” in Melanson and David Mayers, eds., Reevaluating Eisenhower: American Foreign Policy in the 1950s (University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 31-64, esp. pp. 36-40.

[“The President is dead”]: quoted in Harry S. Truman, Memoirs: Year of Decisions (Doubleday, 1955), p. 5.

[“Riding a tiger”]: Truman, Memoirs: Years of Trial and Hope (Doubleday, 1956), p. 1.

222-3 [Truman’s background and character]: Alfred Steinberg, The Man from Missouri (Putnam, 1962); Cabell Phillips, The Truman Presidency (Macmillan, 1966); Robert L. Miller, Truman: The Rise to Power (McGraw-Hill, 1986); Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Modern American Presidency (Little, Brown, 1983); Bert Cochran, Harry Truman and the Crisis Presidency (Funk & Wagnalls, 1973); Deborah Welch Larson, Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton University Press, 1985), ch. 3; John Lewis Caddis, “Harry S. Truman and the Origins of Containment,” in Frank J. Merli and Theodore A. Wilson, eds., Makers of American Diplomacy: From Benjamin Franklin to Henry Kissinger (Scribner, 1974), pp. 493-522; Paterson, On Every Front, ch. 5; Arnold A. Offnner, “The Truman Myth Revealed: From Parochial Nationalist to Cold Warrior,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Reno, Nev., March 1988.

223 [FDR’s divided legacy]: see Gardner, Architects, pp. 307-8; see also Warren F. Kimball, ed., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the World Crisis, 1937-1945 (D. C. Heath, 1973), part 2; Thomas, ch. 10.

[UN organizational meeting]: Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America During World War II (Atheneum, 1967), ch. 11.

[Truman’s address to UN]: April 25, 1945, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1961-66), vol. 1, pp. 20-23, quoted at pp. 20, 21.

[Hopkins in Moscow]: Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (Harper, 1948), ch. 35; Herbert Feis, Between War and Peace: The Potsdam Conference (Princeton University Press, 1960), chs. 15-18.

[End of European war]: John Toland, The Last 100 Days (Random House, 1965); Cornelius Ryan, The Last Battle (Simon and Schuster, 1966); William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (Simon and Schuster, 1960), chs. 30-31.

[Truman and FDR’s cabinet]: see Truman to Jonathan Daniels (unsent), February 26, 1950, in Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (Harper, 1980), p. 174.

224 [Okinawa]: Roy E. Appleman, James M. Burns, Russell A. Gugeler, and John Stevens, Okinawa: The Last Battle (U.S. Department of the Army, 1948); John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945, (Random House, 1970), ch. 30.

[Potsdam]: Feis, part 4; Robert J. Donovan, Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945-1948 (Norton, 1977), chs. 8-9; Mastny, pp. 292-304; Truman, Decisions, chs. 21-25; Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929-1969 (Norton, 1973), ch. 13; Charles L. Mee*, Jr., Meeting at Potsdam (M. Evans & Co., 1975); Churchill, Triumph, book 2, chs. 19-20.

[“Open the gates”]: quoted in Thomas, p. 252.

[Debate over political role of atomic bomb and its use against Japan]: Toland, Rising Sun, chs. 31-32; Truman, Decisions, pp. 4, 14-20; Donovan, chs. 5, 7, 10; Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (Harper, 1948), chs. 22-23; Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War, 1945-1950 (Knopf, 1980), ch. 1 and passim; Gardiner, Architects, ch. 7; Fleming, vol. 1, pp. 296-308; Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (Knopf, 1975), esp. part 3; Herbert Feis, Japan Subdued: The Atomic Bomb and the End of the War in the Pacific (Princeton University Press, 1961), parts 1, 4, and passim; Barton J. Bernstein, “Roosevelt, Truman, and the Atomic Bomb, 1941-1945: A Reinterpretation,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 1 (Spring 1975), pp. 23-69; Maddox, ch. 3; Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam (Simon and Schuster, 1965); Yergin, pp. 1 15-16, 120-22, and 433-34 n. 19; Stephen Harper, Miracle of Deliverance: The Case for the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985).

[Bernstein on atomic bomb legacy]: “Roosevelt, Truman,” p. 24.

[“Most terrible weapon”]: quoted in Stimson and Bundy, p. 635.

[“Royal straight flush”]: quoted in Herken, p. 17.

224-5 [“American cards”]: ibid.

225 [Truman-Stalin exchange on bomb at Potsdam]: Mastny, pp. 297-98; Bohlen, p. 237; Donovan, p. 93; Churchill, Triumph, pp. 669-70; see also Feis, Potsdam, ch. 23; Yergin, p. 121.

[U.S. bombing of Japanese cities]: Ronald Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (Free Press, 1985), pp. 487-93, 503-6; Toland, Rising Sun, pp. 670-77; Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (Oxford University Press, 1985), chs. 6-7; Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II (University of Chicago Press, 1948-58), vol. 5, chs. 17-18, 20-21.

[Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and surrender]: Toland, Rising Sun, chs. 33-37; Craven and Cate, vol. 5, pp. 703-35; John Hersey, Hiroshima (Knopf, 1946); Robert J. C. Butow, Japan’s Decision to Surrender (Stanford University Press, 1954); Barton J. Bernstein, “The Perils and Politics of Surrender: Ending the War with Japan and Avoiding the Third Atomic Bomb,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 46 (1977), pp.1-27; Pacific War Research Society, Japan’s Longest Day (Kodansha International, 1980); Committee for the Compilation of Materials on Damage Caused by the Atomic Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The Physical, Medical, and Social Effects of the Atomic Bombings, Eisei Ishikawa and David L. Swain, trans. (Basic Books, 1981).

226 [“Let them”]: quoted in Yergin, p. 121; see also Mastny, p. 298.

[Truman on Stalin]: quoted in Yergin, p. 119.

[Byrnes at London Foreign Ministers’ conference]: Robert L. Messer, The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War (University of North Carolina Press, 1982), ch. 7; Herken, ch. 3; Yergin, pp. 122-32; James F. Byrnes, Speaking Frankly (Harper, 1947), ch. 5.

[“Here’s to the atom bomb”]: quoted in Yergin, p. 123.

227 [American ambivalence over Soviet intentions]: see Lynn E. Davis, The Cold War Begins: Soviet-American Conflict over Eastern Europe (Princeton University Press, 1974), ch. 11; Herken, ch. 2; John Lewis Caddis, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History (Wiley, 1978), ch. 7 passim; Caddis, Long Peace, ch. 2; Robert Daltek, The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs (Knopf, 1983), ch. 6; William Zimmerman, “Rethinking Soviet Foreign Policy: Changing American Perspectives,” International Journal, vol. 25 (Summer 1980), pp. 548-62; see also William Welch, American Images of Soviet Foreign Policy: An Inquiry into Recent Appraisals from the Academic Community (Yale University Press, 1970); Thomas, book 2; Melvyn F. Leffler, “The American Conception of the National Security State and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945-1948,” American Historical Review, vol. 89, no. 2 (April 1984), pp. 346-81.

[Poll on bomb secret and UN]: Dallek, p. 161; see also Paterson, On Every Front, pp. 113-29; Yergin, pp. 171-72.

[Soviet cold war policy, sources and conflicts]: Werth, chs. 11, 14, and passim; Crankshaw, ch.5 and passim; Frederick C. Barghoorn, The Soviet Image of the United States (Harcourt, 1950); Thomas, book 1; Joseph L. Nogee and Robert H. Donaldson, Soviet Foreign Policy Since World War II (Pergamon Press, 1981), chs. 2-3; Marshall D. Shulman, Stalin’s Foreign Policy Reappraised (Harvard University Press, 1963); Anatol Rapoport, The Big Two: Soviet-American Perceptions of Foreign Policy (Pegasus, 1971), pp. 120-26; Paterson, On Every Front, ch. 7; William Taubman, Stalin’s American Policy: From Entente to Detente to Cold War (Norton, 1982), esp. chs. 5-7; Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: The History of Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917-1967 (Praeger, 1968), pp. 408-55; Robert V. Daniels, Russia: The Roots of Confrontation (Harvard University Press, 1985), chs. 8-9; Genrikh Trofimenko, The U.S. Military Doctrine (Progress Publishers, Moscow, n.d.), esp. chs. 1-2.

[“Leaving them in the lurch”]: quoted in Daniels, p. 220.

[“Year of Cement”]: Yergin, p. 166.

[Stalin’s Bolshoi Theater address]: February 9, 1946, in Walter LaFeber, ed., The Dynamics of World Power, A Documentary History of United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1973: Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (Chelsea House, 1973), pp. 191-99; see also Werth, ch. 5; Yergin, pp. 166-67, 177.

[Douglas on Stalin’s speech]: quoted in Walter Millis, ed., The Forrestal Diaries (Viking, 1950), p. 134.

[Kennan’s “long telegram”]: “Telegraphic Message from Moscow to the State Department on Soviet Policies,” February 22, 1946, in LaFeber, pp. 200-10, quoted at pp. 207, 208; see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford University Press, 1982), chs. 2-3; Rapoport, pp. 106-12; Yergin, pp. 168-71; Thomas G. Paterson, “The Search for Meaning: George F. Kennan and American Foreign Policy,” in Merli and Wilson, pp. 568-76; John Lewis Gaddis, “Containment: A Reassessment,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 55, no. 4 (July 1977), pp. 873-87; George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950 (Atlantic Monthly/ Little, Brown, 1967), ch. it; Thomas, ch. 22.

228 [“Complete power of disposition”]: “Telegraphic Message” in LaFeber, quoted at p. 208.

[“An iron curtain”]: March 5, 1946, in ibid, pp. 210-17, quoted at pp. 214, 215; see also Terry H. Anderson, The United States, Great Britain, and the Cold War, 1944-1947 (University of Missouri Press, 1981), pp. 110-16; Fleming, vol. 1, pp. 348-57; Thomas, ch. 23.

229 [“Call to war”]: March 13, 1946, in LaFeber, pp. 217-21, quoted at p. 218; see also Werth, pp. 110-14.

[“Putrid and baneful”]: quoted in Daniels, p. 227.

[Forrestal’s anti-Sovietism]: see Gardner, Architects, ch. 10; Millis, passim. [Kennan’s “X” article and his concern about his influence]: “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 25, no. 4 (July 1947), pp. 566-82; Kennan, Memoirs, pp. 294-95, ch. 15; see also Gaddis, Russia, pp. 187-88.

229-30 [Byrnes and Truman]: Messer, chs. 8-9; Truman, Decisions, pp. 545-52.

230 [1946 Congressional elections]: Donovan, ch. 24.

[“Greatest victory”]: quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1911-1962 (Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 141.

[HUAC’s plans for 1947]: quoted in Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946-1948 (Knopf, 1972), p. 132.

[“Class of ’46”]: see David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (Free Press, 1983), p. 53; Ambrose, Nixon, p. 141.

[Loyalty program]: Athan Theoharis, Seeds of Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism (Quadrangle, 1971), pp. 103-6, quoted at p. 105; Alan D. Harper, The Politics of Loyalty: The White House and the Communist Issue, 1946-1952 (Greenwood Publishing, 1969), ch. 3; Truman, Trial and Hope, ch. 19; Donovan, ch. 31; Athan Theoharis, “The Escalation of the Loyalty Program,” in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration (Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 242-68; Roger S. Abbott, “The Federal Loyalty Program,” in Edward E. Palmer, ed., The Communist Problem in America (Crowell, 1951), pp. 385-97; see, generally, Stanley I. Kutler, The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (Hill and Wang, 1982); Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers (Donald I. Fine, 1988); Diggins, Proud Decades, ch. 5 passim.

[“Membership in, affiliation with”]: quoted in Abbott, p. 390.

[Attorney General’s list]: Freeland, pp. 208-16; Palmer, Appendix.

[Loyalty board proceedings]: Harper, pp. 47-53, executive order quoted at p. 39; David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower (Simon and Schuster, 1978), pp. 269-92.

[“The man who fears”]: Seth W. Richardson, quoted in Richard M. Fried, Men Against McCarthy (Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 24.

231 [HUAC in Hollywood, 1947]: Walter Goodman, The Committee: The Extraordinary Career of House Committee on Un-American Activities (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), pp. 207-25; Victor Navasky, Naming Names (Viking, 1980); Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960 (Anchor Press/ Doubleday, 1980), esp. chs. 8, 10; Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Harper, 1985), pp. 301-10; Gordon Kahn, Hollywood on Trial: The Story of the 10 Who Were Indicted (Boni & Gaer, 1948).

[Menjou on communists]: quoted in Roger Burlingame, The Sixth Column (Lippincott, 1962), p. 127.

[Cooper on communism]: quoted in Goodman, p. 209.

[Hollywood and radio purge]: Pells, p. 310; see also John Cogley, Report on Blacklisting, 2 vols. (Fund for the Republic, 1956).

[Ex-communists]: see Navasky; Herbert L. Packer, Ex-Communist Witnesses: Four Studies in Fact Finding (Stanford University Press, 1962).

[Hiss case]: Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case (Knopf, 1978); Alistair Cooke, Generation on Trial: U.S.A. v. Alger Hiss (Knopf, 1950); Ambrose, Nixon, ch. 10; Packer, ch. 2; Goodman, ch. 8 passim; Leslie A. Fiedler, “Hiss, Chambers, and the Age of Innocence,” in Fiedler, The Collected Essays of Leslie Fiedler (Stein & Day, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 3-24.

232 [“We’ve been had!”]: quoted in Weinstein, p. 15.

[Truman on the menace of communism]: Freeland, pp. 335-36.

[“Red herring”]: Weinstein, p. 15.

[Greek crisis and Administration response]: Freeland, ch. 2; Theoharis, Seeds, ch. 3; John Lewis Gaddis, “Was the Truman Doctrine a Real Turning Point?,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 52, no. 2 (January 1974), pp. 386-402; Yergin, pp. 279-83; Truman, Trial and Hope, ch. 8; Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (February 21-June 5, 1947) (Viking, 1955); Michael Leigh, Mobilizing Consent: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy, 1937-1947 (Greenwood Press, 1976), ch. 5; Fleming, vol. 1, pp. 438-61, 465-76.

232 [“Ripe plum”]: Mark Ethridge, quoted in Yergin, pp. 279-80.

[Truman’s address to Congress]: “The Truman Doctrine,” March 12, 1947, in LaFeber, pp. 309-13, quoted at p. 312.

233 [Marshall’s Harvard address]: “Proposal of the Marshall Plan,” June 5, 1947, in ibid., pp. 320-22, quoted at pp. 320, 321.

[Marshall Plan]: John Gimbel, The Origins of the Marshall Plan (Stanford University Press, 1976); Jones; Charles L. Mee, Jr., The Marshall Plan: The Launching of the Pax Americana (Simon and Schuster, 1984); Freeland, ch. 4; Werth, pp. 257-81; LaFeber, pp. 322-29; Thomas G. Paterson, “The Quest for Peace and Prosperity: International Trade, Communism, and the Marshall Plan,” in Bernstein, Politics and Policies, pp. 78-112; Michael J. Hogan, “Paths to Plenty; Marshall Planners and the Debate over European Integration, 1947-1948,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 53 (1984), pp. 337-66.

[Cominform]: see Werth, ch. 14.

234 [White on psychological tendencies in cold war]: see Ralph K. White, Fearful Warriors (Free Press, 1984), ch. 10; see also Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 1976); Vamik D. Volkan, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies (Jason Aronson Inc., 1988).

[Lippmann on “X” article]: Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (Harper, 1947); see also Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 443-46; Barton J. Bernstein, “Walter Lippmann and the Early Cold War,” in Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Cold War Critics: Alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years (Quadrangle, 1971), pp. 18-53.

[Wallace’s Madison Square Garden address]: September 12, 1946, in LaFeber, pp. 255-60, quoted at p. 258; Richard J. Walton, Henry Wallace, Harry Truman, and the Cold War (Viking, 1976), pp. 100-8; Norman D. Markowitz, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Century: Henry A. Wallace and American Liberalism, 1941-1948 (Free Press, 1973), pp. 178-82; Alonzo L. Hamby, “Henry A. Wallace, the Liberals, and Soviet-American Relations,” Review of Politics, vol. 30, no. 2 (April 1968), pp. 153-69,

235 [Truman’s approval of Wallace’s speech]: see Walton, pp. 98-99; John Morton Blum, ed., The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946 (Houghton Mifflin, 1973), pp. 612-13; Truman, Decisions, p. 557.

[Washington reaction to Wallace’s address]: Walton, pp. 108-12, Vandenberg quoted at p. 111; Blum, p. 613 n. 1, and pp. 613-32; Truman, Decisions, pp. 557-60; Byrnes, pp. 239-43; Donovan, ch. 23.

[“You, yourself”]: Blum, p. 618.

[“Pacifist one hundred per cent”]: quoted in Walton, pp. 113-14.

[Eleanor Roosevelt and postwar world]: see Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone (Norton, 1972), chs. 1-6 passim; Tamara K. Hareven, Eleanor Roosevelt: An American Conscience (Quadrangle, 1968), chs. 10-12.

235-6 [Truman’s political position, early 1948]: see Richard S. Kirkendall, “Election of 1948,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968 (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 4, pp. 3100-4.

236 [ADA]: Clifton Brock, Americans for Democratic Action: Its Role in National Politics (Public Affairs Press, 1962); Mary S. McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947-1954 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), pp. 5-10 and passim; Alonzo L. Hamby, “The Liberals, Truman, and FDR as Symbol and Myth,” Journal of American History, vol. 56, no. 4 (March 1970), pp. 859-67; Norman Markowitz, “From the Popular Front to Cold War Liberalism,” in Robert Griffith and Athan Theoharis, eds., The Specter: Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism (New Viewpoints, 1974), pp. 90-115.

[Truman’s civil rights message]: February 2, 1948, in Truman Public Papers, vol. 4, pp. 121-26; see also Donald R. McCoy and Richard T. Ruetten, Quest and Response: Minority Rights and the Truman Administration (University Press of Kansas, 1973), ch. 6; Donovan, ch. 35; William C. Berman, The Politics of Civil Rights in the Truman Administration (Ohio State University Press, 1973), ch. 2 and pp. 79-85; Barton J. Bernstein, “The Ambiguous Legacy: The Truman Administration and Civil Rights,” in Bernstein, Politics and Policies, pp. 269-314.

236 [Dewey’s nomination]: Richard N. Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (Simon and Schuster, 1982), ch. 14; Kirkendall, pp. 3113-16; James T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: Robert A. Taft (Houghton Mifflin, 1972), chs. 26-27.

236-7 [Dixiecrat revolt]: Leonard Dinnerstein, “The Progressive and States’ Rights Parties of 1948,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties (Chelsea House, 1973), vol. 4, pp. 3314-19, 3324-28; V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (Knopf, 1949), pp. 329-44; Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950’s (Louisiana State University Press, 1969), pp. 28-37; McCoy and Ruetten, ch. 7; Truman, Trial and Hope, pp. 179-87.

237 [Progressive convention]: Curtis D. MacDougall, Gideon’s Army (Marzani & Munsell, 1965), vol. 2, chs. 22-25; Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, ‘The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1919-1957) (Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 469-77; David A. Shannon, The Decline of American Communism: A History of the Communist Party Since 194** (Harper, 959), pp. 164-75.

[Democratic civil rights plank]: see Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 4, p. 3154; see also Kirkendall, pp. 3117-18; Truman, Trial and Hope, pp. 181-83.

[1948 campaign]: Donovan, chs. 41-43; Smith, ch. 15; Kirkendall, pp. 3123-45; Dinnerstein, pp. 3321-27; MacDougall, vol. 3; Walton, chs. 5-9 passim: Berman, ch. 3 passim: Markowitz, Rise and Fall, ch. 8; Truman, Trial and Hope, ch. 15; Susan M. Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress (University of Missouri Press, 1971), ch. 8; Robert A. Divine, “The Cold War and the Election of 1948,” Journal of American History, vol. 59, no. 1 (June 1972), pp. 90-110; Harvard Silkoff, “Harry Truman and the Election of 1948: The Coming of Age of Civil Rights in American Politics,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 37, no. 4 (November 1971), pp. 597-616; Allen Yarnell, Democrats and Progressives: The 1948 Presidential Election as a Test of Postwar Liberalism (University of California Press, 1974); Irwin Ross, The Loneliest Campaign: The Truman Victory of 1948 (New American Library, 1968); Oral History of Henry Wallace, Columbia University, pp. 21-72.

[Truman’s reaction to poll of fifty experts]: quoted in Phillips, pp. 243-44. [Dewey on overconfidence]: Donovan, p. 437.

[“Very barbarous”]: Wallace Oral History, p. 72.

238 [Election results]: Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 4, p. 3211.

[“A brave man”]: Kirkendall, p. 3099.

The Spiral of Fear

[Polling in 1948]: Angus Campbell and Robert L. Kahn, The People Elect a President (Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, 1952); Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 4, pp. 3192-97; Frederick Mosteller et al., The Pre-election Polls of 1948: Report to the Committee on Analysis of Pre-election Polls and Forecasts (Social Science Research Council, 1949); Bernard R. Berelson et al., Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (University of Chicago Press, 1954).

[1948 as “maintaining election”]: see Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (Norton, 1970); James Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Brookings Institution, 1973), chs. 11-12; Kirkendall, p. 3144.

239-40 [Soviet atomic bomb]: “Announcement by President Truman,” September 23, 1949, in LaFeber, pp. 406-7; see also Herken, chs. 14-15; Yergin, ch. 5 passim: Robert J. Donovan, Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S Truman, 1949-1953 (Norton, 1982), ch. 9; “Reactions of 150,000,000,” Newsweek, vol. 34, no. 14 (October 3, 1949), pp. 25-26.

240 [Germany in the cold war]: Bruce Kuklick, American Policy and the Division of Germany: The Clash with Russia over Reparations (Cornell University Press, 1972); W. Phillips Davison, The Berlin Blockade: A Study in Cold War Politics (Princeton University Press, 1958); Lucius D. Clay, Decision in Germany (Doubleday, 1950), chs. 19-20 and passim; Avi Shlaim, The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948-1949: A Study in Crisis Decision-Making (University of California Press, 1983); Yergin, ch. 14.

240 [Chinese revolution and the U.S.]: U.S. Department of State, United States Relations with China (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949); Tang Tsou, America’s Failure in China, 1941-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 1963); H. Bradford Westerfield, Foreign Policy and Party Politics: Pearl Harbor to Korea (Yale University Press, 1955), chs. 12, 16; Lewis M. Purifoy, Harry Truman’s China Policy: McCarthyism and the Diplomacy of Hysteria, 1947-1951 (New Viewpoints, 1976); Donovan, Tumultuous Years, chs. 6-7; John K. Fairbank, The United States and China, 4th ed. (Harvard University Press, 1983); Russell D. Buhite, Soviet-American Relations in Asia, 1945-1954 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1981), chs. 1-3; Kenneth S. Chern, Dilemma in China: America’s Policy Debate, 1945 (Archon Books, 1980); Okabe Tatsumi, “The Cold War and China,” in Yonosuke Nagai and Akira Iriye, eds., The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (Columbia University Press/University of Tokyo Press, 1977), pp. 224-51.

[Korean War]: Joseph C. Goulden, Korea: The Untold Story of the War (Times Books, 1982); David Rees, Korea: The Limited War (St. Martin’s Press, 1964); Ronald J. Caridi, The Korean War and American Politics: The Republican Party as a Case Study (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); Bevin Alexander, Korea: The First War We Lost (Hippocrene, 1986); Donovan, Tumultuous Years, ch. 8 and parts 3-4 passim; Truman, Trial and Hope, chs. 22-28 passim: David J. Dallin, Soviet Foreign Policy After Stalin (Lippincott, 1961), pp. 60-69; Glenn D. Paige, The Korean Decision (Free Press, 1968); Buhite, ch. 5; Allen Guttmann, ed., Korea: Cold War and Limited War, 2nd ed. (D. C. Heath, 1972); Charles M. Dobbs, The Unwanted Symbol: American Foreign Policy, the Cold War, and Korea, 1945-1950 (Kent State University Press, 1981); Allen S. Whiting, China Crosses the Yalu (Macmillan, i960); Strobe Talbott, ed. and trans., Khrushchev Remembers (Little, Brown, 1970-74), vol. 1, ch. 11; Dean Acheson, The Korean War (Norton, 1971); Gaddis, Strategies, ch. 4; John Lewis Gaddis, “Korea in American Politics, Strategy, and Diplomacy, 1945-50,” in Nagai and Iriye, pp. 277-98; Robert M. Slusser, “Soviet Far Eastern Policy, 1945-50: Stalin’s Goals in Korea,” in ibid., pp. 123-46; Robert R. Simmons, The Strained Alliance: Peking, Pyongyang, Moscow and the Politics of the Korean War (Free Press, 1975); James I. Matray, “Truman’s Plan for Victory: National Self-Determination and the Thirty-eighth Parallel Decision in Korea,” Journal of American History, vol. 66, no. 2 (September 1979), pp. 314-33; Daniels, pp. 239-41; Taubman, pp. 201-2, 211-22; Shulman, chs. 6-7; William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964 (Little, Brown, 1978), chs. 9-10.

[“Administrative dividing line”]: Acheson, quoted in Manchester, p. 539.

240-1 [Acheson on U.S. defense perimeter]: quoted in Goulden, p. 30; see also Dobbs, pp. 180-81; Gaddis, Long Peace, ch. 4.

[Ulam on Soviet blunder in Korea]: Adam B. Ulam, “Washington, Moscow, and the Korean War,” in Guttmann, pp. 258-85, quoted at p. 277.

[Smith Act]: quoted in Howe and Coser, p. 418.

[Smith Act trial of communist leaders]: ibid., pp. 481-82; Shannon, pp. 198-200; Packer, pp. 11-13.

[“Government … on trial”]: William Z. Foster, quoted in Shannon, p. 198.

[“Sufficient danger”]: Judge Harold R. Medina, quoted in ibid., p. 200.

[China-Korea links]: see Purifoy, chs. 8-9.

[China Lobby]: Ross Y. Koen, The China Lobby in American Politics (Octagon Books, 1974), esp. ch. 2; Stanley D. Bachrack, The Committee of One Million: “China Lobby” Politics, 1953-1971 (Columbia University Press, 1976), esp. part 1.

[Taft on communism in China]: quoted in Fried, p. 4; and E. J. Kahn, Jr., The China Hands: America’s Foreign Service Officers and What Befell Them (Viking, 1975), p. 2.

[Acheson as target]: see Westerfield, pp. 327-29.

[“Whined” and “whimpered” and “slobbered”]: quoted in William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1912-1972 (Little, Brown, 1974), p. 492.

244 [Acheson and Hiss]: Weinstein, pp. 505-6, Acheson quoted at p. 505.

[Butler on Acheson]: quoted in Eric F. Goldman, The Crucial Decade: America, 1945-1955 (Knopf, 1956), p. 125.

[McCarthy]: Richard H. Rovere, Senator Joe McCarthy (Harcourt, 1959); Oshinsky; Fried; Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy (Stein & Day, 1982); Edwin R. Bayley, Joe McCarthy and the Press (University of Wisconsin Press, 1981); Daniel Bell, ed., The New American Right (Criterion Books, 1955); Earl Latham, ed., The Meaning of McCarthyism, 2nd ed. (D. C. Heath, 1973); Michael P. Rogin, The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (MIT Press, 1967); Robert Griffith, The Politics of Fear: McCarthy and the Senate (University Press of Kentucky, 1970); Donald F. Crosby, God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950-1957 (University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Joseph R. McCarthy, McCarthyism: The Fight for America (Devin-Adair, 1952; reprinted by Arno Press, 1977).

244 [“Multiple untruth”]: see Rovere, pp. 109-10.

[Wheeling]: Reeves, pp. 222-33, McCarthy quoted at p. 224; Oshinsky, pp. 107-12; Bayley, ch. 1.

245 [McCarthy’s Senate performance]: Reeves, pp. 236-42, quoted at p. 239; and Oshinsky, pp. 112-14, quoted at p. 112.

[“Perfectly reckless”]: quoted in Patterson, Mr. Republican, p. 446.

[Tydings committee]: Reeves, pp. 249-314, conclusion quoted at p. 304; Rovere, pp. 145-59.

[“Keep talking”]: quoted in Patterson, p. 446.

[“Declaration of Conscience”]: Oshinsky, pp. 163-65; Fried, p. 83.

[McCarthy in 1950 campaign]: Reeves, ch. 14, reporter quoted at p. 346; Fried, ch. 4.

246 [Buckley on McCarthyism]: quoted in Rovere, p. 22.

[McCarthy and the press]: Bayley, esp. ch. 3, Reedy quoted at p. 68; see also James A. Wechsler, The Age of Suspicion (Random House, 1953); Oshinsky, ch. 12.

[Courting of Eisenhower]: Herbert S. Parmet, Eisenhower and the American Crusades (Macmillan, 1972), chs. 9-10; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952 (Simon and Schuster, 1983), ch. 25; Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (Doubleday, 1963), ch. 1.

247 [“Completely foreign field”]: quoted in Barton J. Bernstein, “Election of 1952,” in Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 4, p. 3225.

[GOP nomination battle]: Ambrose, Soldier, ch. 26; Eisenhower, ch. 2; Patterson, part 6; Parmet, chs. 12-14; Bernstein, “Election,” pp. 3224-34.

[GOP as two parties]: see James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-Party Politics in America (Prentice-Hall, 1963), esp. ch. 8.

248 [“Path to defeat”]: quoted in Bernstein, “Election,” p. 3230.

[“Why do they hate me so?”]: quoted in Patterson, p. 547.

[Morningside Heights statement]: quoted in Parmet, p. 130; see also ibid., pp. 128-30; Patterson, pp. 572-78; Eisenhower, p. 64.

[“Surrender at Morningside Heights”]: quoted in Bernstein, “Election,” p. 3242.

249 [Courtship of Stevenson]: Kenneth S. Davis, A Prophet in His Own Country: The Triumphs and Defeats of Adlai E. Stevenson (Doubleday, 1957), ch. 24; John Bartlow Martin, Adlai Stevenson of Illinois (Doubleday, 1976), pp. 513-78; Walter Johnson, How We Drafted Adlai Stevenson (Knopf, 1955); Truman, Trial and Hope, pp. 491-96.

[“Could not, ” not “would not”]: quoted in Davis, p. 394.

[Stevenson’s convention welcome] July 21, 1952, in Walter Johnson, ed., The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson (Little, Brown, 1972-79), vol. 4, pp. 11-14, quoted at p. 12; author’s personal observations, July 21, 1952, Chicago.

[Democratic, convention]: Davis, pp. 397-409; Martin, pp. 578-604; Bernstein, “Election,” pp. 3236-40; Johnson, Papers, vol. 4, ch. 1.

[Eisenhower in Indiana]: Parmet, pp. 127-28, Jenner quoted on Marshall at p. 127; Ambrose, Soldier, pp. 552-53.

249-50 [Eisenhower in Wisconsin]: Reeves, pp. 436-40, praise of Marshall quoted at p. 437; Ambrose, Soldier, pp. 563-67.

250 [Nixon’s second crisis]: Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (Doubleday, 1962), ch. 2; Parmet, pp. 134-41; Fawn M. Brodie, Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (Norton, 1981), ch. 19; Smith, Dewey, pp. 599-603; Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (Houghton Mifflin, 1970), pp. 91-114; Eisenhower, pp. 65-69.

[“My boy”]: quoted in Nixon, p. 123,

[Stevenson on Taft winning nominee]: Johnson, Papers, vol. 4, p. 90.

[Stevenson on Eisenhower’s backbone]: Ambrose, Soldier, p. 567.

[“Two Republican” parties]: see Johnson, Papers, vol. 4, pp. 66-68.

[Civil rights and the South in 1952 campaign]: Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 4, pp. 3280-81; Bernstein, “Election,” pp. 3247, 3251-52; Eisenhower, pp. 55, 69-71; Donald S. Strong, “The Presidential Election in the South, 1952,” Journal of Politics, vol. 17, no. 1 (August 1955), pp. 343-89; Johnson, Papers, vol. 4, pp. 47-48, 54-60, 89, 151-53, 157; Robert F. Burk, The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights (University of Tennessee Press, 1984), ch. 1 passim.

[“Go to Korea”]: Parmet, pp. 142-43, Eisenhower quoted at p. 143.

[1952 election results]: Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 4, p. 3337; see also Bernstein, “Election,” pp. 3264-65; Strong.

[Stevenson on his loss]: Johnson, Papers, vol. 4, p. 188.

The Price of Suspicion

[Army-McCarthy hearings]: U.S. Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Special Subcommittee on Investigations, Charges and Countercharges Involving: Secretary of the Army Robert T. Stevens …, 83rd Congress, 2nd Session (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954); Oshinsky, chs. 27-31; Reeves, chs. 21-22; Michael W. Straight, Trial by Television (Beacon Press, 1954); Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Lender (Basic Books, 1982), pp. 198-212. [Oshinsky on hearings]: Oshinsky, p. 416.

252 [“Largest single group”]: quoted in ibid., p. 319.

[“Got his Ph.D. ”]: quoted in Brodie, p. 290.

[“The dark days of the Hiss case”]: quoted in ibid., p. 284.

[Nixon on Stevenson and Hiss]: quoted in Johnson, Papers, vol. 4, p. 392. [McCarthy on Stevenson]: quoted in Reeves, p. 445.

[“Get into the gutter”]: quoted in Oshinsky, p. 260.

[“Trouble-maker”]: see entry of April 1, 1953, in Robert H. Ferrell, ed., The Eisenhower Diaries (Norton, 1981), pp. 233-34.

[McCarthy’s depredations, early Eisenhower Administration]: see Reeves, ch. 18; Parmet, ch. 26; see also Griffith, Politics of Fear, ch. 6.

[McCarthy and Dirksen on Bohlen]: quoted in Parmet, p. 246; see also Athan G. Theoharis, The Yalta Myths: An Issue in U.S. Politics, 1945-1955 (University of Missouri Press, 1970), ch. 9 and passim. 853.

[“ No More Bohlens”]: quoted in Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President (Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 60.

[Stalin’s death and the succession]: Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty letters to a Friend, Priscilla Johnson McMillan, trans. (Harper, 1967), pp. 5-14; Khrushchev Remembers, vol. 1, pp. 306-41; Dallin, pp. 117-34; Daniels, pp. 246-50; Eisenhower, Mandate, pp. 43-45.

[Dulles]: Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1973); Ronald W. Pruessen, John Foster Dulles: The Road to Power (Free Press, 1982); John R. Beal, John Foster Dulles, 1888-1959 (Harper, 1959); Herbert S. Parmet, “Power and Reality: John Foster Dulles and Political Diplomacy,” in Merli and Wilson, pp. 589-619; Ambrose, President, pp. 20-22; Gaddis, Strategies, pp. 136-45; Khrushchev Remembers, vol. 2, pp. 362-64.

253-4 [Smith on Dulles]: Gaddis Smith, “The Shadow of John Foster Dulles” (review of Hoopes), Foreign Affairs, vol. 52, no. 2 (January 1974), pp. 403-8, quoted at p. 406.

254 [Eisenhower’s inaugural address]: January 20, 1953, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight. D. Eisenhower (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1958-61), vol. 1, pp. 1-8, quoted at pp. 1, 2.

[Dulles on communism]: January 15, 1953, in LaFeber, pp. 464-68, quoted at p. 466.

[Dulles’s hard line vs. Eisenhower’s soft]: see Seyom Brown, The Faces of Power: Constancy and Change in United States Foreign Policy from Truman to Reagan (Columbia University Press, 1983), chs. 7-8; Robert A. Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 19-23 and passim: Ambrose, President, passim: Hoopes, passim; Charles C. Alexander, Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Era, 1952-1961 (Indiana University Press, 1975), pp. 64-66; Gaddis, Strategies, ch. 5 passim; Richard M. Saunders, “Military Force in the Foreign Policy of the Eisenhower Administration,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 100, no. 1 (Spring 1985), pp. 97-116.

[“United States of Europe”]: see Ambrose, President, pp. 49-50, 120. [Eisenhower, Dulles and “book burning”]: see ibid., pp. 81-83; Reeves, pp. 477-96 passim.

255 [Iran]: Ambrose, President, pp. 109-12; Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran (McGraw-Hill, 1979); Sepehr Zabih, The Mossadegh Era: Roots of the Iranian Revolution (Lake View Press, 1982); Dallin, pp. 203-17; Anthony Eden, Full Circle (Houghton Mifflin, 1960), ch. 9; Stephen E. Ambrose, Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Defense Establishment (Doubleday, 1981), chs. 14-15.

[Eden on Eisenhower’s “obsession”]: quoted in Eden, p. 235.

[Lebanon]: Ambrose, President, pp. 462-75 passim; Fahim I. Qubain, Crisis in Lebanon (Middle East Institute, 1961); Leila M. T. Meo, Lebanon, Improbable Nation: A Study in Political Development (Indiana University Press, 1965); Hoopes, ch. 27.

[“Five times he said no”]: Ambrose, President, p. 229; see also Gaddis, Long Peace, ch. 6.

[“Bland leading the bland”]: quoted in Melanson in Melanson and Mayers, p. 47.

[Eisenhower revisionism]: see Murray Kempton, “The Underestimation of Dwight D. Eisenhower,” Esquire, vol. 68, no. 3 (September 1967), pp. 108-9, 156; Vincent P. De Santis, “Eisenhower Revisionism,” Review of Politics, vol. 38, no. 2 (April 1976), pp. 190-207; Richard H. Rovere, “Eisenhower Revisited—A Political Genius? A Brilliant Man?,” in Bernstein and Matusow, pp. 436-54; Greenstein; Ambrose, President, chs. 1, 27; Mary S. McAuliffe, “Eisenhower, The President,” Journal of American History, vol. 68, no. 3 (December 1981), pp. 625-32; Divine, Eisenhower, pp. 6-7; Wills, pp. 115-38; Melanson and Mayers, passim.

[New Look]: Ambrose, President, pp. 171-73, 224-26; Melanson in Melanson and Mayers, pp. 49-54; Gaddis, Long Peace, pp. 123-24, 140-45; Ambrose, Ike’s Spies, pp. 275-76.

256 [Operation Alert]: Ambrose, President, pp. 256-57; Peter Lyon, Eisenhower: Portrait of the Hero (Little, Brown, 1974), p. 655.

[Eisenhower’s address to editor]: “The Chance for Peace,” April 16, 1953, in Eisenhower Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 179-88, quoted at pp. 185, 186, 182, respectively; see also Ambrose, President, pp. 94-96.

[“Atoms for peace”]: December 8, 1953, in Eisenhower Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 813-22; Ambrose, President, pp. 147-51. 256-7 [Bikini atoll test]: Robert A. Divine, Blowing in the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954-1960 (Oxford University Press, 1978), ch. 1.

257 [Geneva summit]: Ambrose, President, ch. 11; Hoopes, ch. 18; Dallin, pp. 279-83; Eisenhower, Mandate, ch. 21; Khrushchev Remembers, vol. 1, ch. 13.

[“Complete blueprint”]: “Statement on Disarmament,” July 21, 1955, in Eisenhower Public Papers, vol. 3, pp. 713-16, quoted at p. 715.

[Stevenson’s proposal of test suspension]: Divine, Blowing on the Wind, pp. 86-87, Nixon quoted at p. 87.

[Dulles and Aswan]: Hoopes, chs. 20-21.

[Suez]: Hoopes, chs. 22-24; Ambrose, President, chs. 14-15 passim; Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Waging Peace, 1956-1961 (Doubleday, 1965), ch. 3 passim; Herman Finer, Dulles Over Suez: The Theory and Practice of His Diplomacy (Quadrangle, 1964); Eden, book 3.

258 [Gomulka’s warning]: quoted in Ambrose, President, p. 354; see also Dallin, pp. 358-64; Konrad Syrop, Spring in October: The Story of the Polish Revolution, 1956 (Praeger, 1957).

[Hungary]: Paul E. Zinner, Revolution in Hungary (Columbia University Press, 1962); Melvin J. Lasky, ed., The Hungarian Revolution: A White Book (Praeger, 1957); Ambrose, President, ch. 15.

[“Liberation was a sham”]: Ambrose, President, p. 355.

[Welch-McCarthy clash]: Oshinsky, ch. 31, quoted at pp. 462, 463, 464.

[McCarthy’s “condemnation”]: Reeves, ch. 23; Rovere, pp. 222-31.

[Eisenhower’s hidden hand against McCarthy]: see Greenstein, ch. 5; see also Sherman Adams, Firsthand Report: The Story of the Eisenhower Administration (Harper, 1961), ch. 8; Oshinsky, pp. 258-60, 387-88, and ch. 23.

[“Purely negative act”]: Ambrose, President, p. 620.

[Communist Control Act]: see McAuliffe, Crisis on the Left, ch. 9.

259 [Sputnik]: Walter A. McDougall, … The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (Basic Books, 1985), pp. 131-34, chs. 6-7; James R. Killian, Jr., Sputnik, Scientists, and Eisenhower (MIT Press, 1977), Introduction and chs. 1-2; Dallin, pp. 453-54;  Eisenhower, Waging, ch. 8 passim; Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), pp. 69-74.

259 [“Distinct surprise”]: quoted in Brown, p. 114.

[Vanguard failure]: McDougall, p. 154; Constance M. Green and Milton Lomask, Vanguard: A History (NASA, 1970), pp. 204-12.

[Gaither report]: Ambrose, President, pp. 433-35; Morton H. Halperin, “The Gaither Committee and the Policy Process,” World Politics, vol. 13, no. 3 (April 1961), pp. 360-84; Samuel P. Huntington, The Common Defense: Strategic Programs in National Politics (Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 106-13; Brown, ch. 10; Eisenhower, Waging, pp. 219-23.

[Eisenhower on U.S. as “scared”]: quoted in Ambrose, President, p. 451. [Eisenhower’s knowledge of U.S. strategic superiority]: Ambrose, Ike’s Spies, pp. 275-78; Robert A. Strong, “Eisenhower and Arms Control,” in Melanson and Mayers, pp. 255-56.

[Khrushchev]: Dallin, pp. 218-19; Khrushchev Remembers, vols. 1, 2; Edward Crankshaw, Khrushchev (Viking, 1966); Roy A. Medvedev and Zhores A. Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power, Andrew R. Durkin, trans. (Columbia University Press, 1976).

260 [Khrushchev’s attack upon Molotov]: Dallin, pp. 227-35, Dallin quoted at p. 230.

[Khrushchev’s Twentieth Party Congress address]: Khrushchev, “The Crimes of the Stalin Era,” text reprinted in The New Leader, sect. 2, July 16, 1956, S7-S65; see also Dallin, pp. 322-27.

[Khrushchev in America]: Khrushchev in America (Crosscurrents Press, 1960); “Great Encounter, Part Two,” Newsweek, vol. 54, no. 13 (September 28, 1959), pp. 33-46; Ambrose, President, pp. 541-44; Eisenhower, Waging, pp. 405-14, 432-49; Khrushchev Remembers, vol. 2, ch. 16.

[Khrushchev on his being denied Disneyland]: quoted in Khrushchev in America, pp. 112-13.

[U-2]: David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The U-2 Affair (Random House, 1962); Michael R. Beschloss, Mayday: Eisenhower, Khrushchev and the U-2 Affair (Harper, 1986); Ambrose, President, pp. 571-77; Eisenhower, Waging, pp. 543-52; M. S. Venkataramani, “The U-2 Crisis: An Inquiry into Its Antecedents,” in Venkataramani, Undercurrents in American Foreign Relations: Four Studies (Asia Publishing House, 1965), pp. 157-208; Carl A. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership, 1957-1964 (Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), ch. 6.

261 [Khrushchev on having “parts of the plane” and the pilot]: quoted in Ambrose, President, p. 574.

262 [Reston on Washington]: New York Times, May 9, 1960, p. 1.

[Paris summit]: Beschloss, ch. 11; Wise and Ross, ch. 10; Ambrose, President, pp. 577-79; Eisenhower, Waging, pp. 553-59; Khrushchev Remembers, vol. 2, ch. 18; Jack M. Schick, The Berlin Crisis, 1958-1962 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), pp. 111-33; Harold Macmillan, Pointing the Way, 1959-1961 (Macmillan, 1972), ch. 7. [Ambrose on summit]: Ambrose, President, p. 579.

[Eisenhower’s Farewell Address]: January 17, 1961, in Eisenhower Public Papers, vol. 8, pp. 1035-40, quoted at p. 1038.

262-3 [“Kept the peace” … “didn’t just happen”]: quoted in Beschloss, p. 388.

263 [“Stalemate”]: ibid.

6. The Imperium of Freedom

264 [Soviet and American military power]: John M. Collins, U.S.-Soviet Military Balance: Concepts and Capabilities, 1960-1980 (McGraw-Hill, 1980), pp. 25-38, Collins quoted on “bombers could burst through” at p. 36; Genrikh Trofimenko, The U.S. Military Doctrine (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1986).

[American economic power]: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), part 2, p. 948 (Series W 1-11) and part 1, p. 224 (Series F 1-5); Gertrude Deutsch, ed., The Economic Almanac 1962 (National Industrial Conference Board, 1962), pp. 498, 500; U.S. Library of Congress, Legislative Reference Service, Trends in Economic Growth: A Comparison of the Western Powers and the Soviet Bloc (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), pp. 1-5 and passim.

[“Expansive time”]: David F. Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (Knopf, 1984), p. 3; see also, generally, David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (University of Chicago Press, 1954).

[American treaty commitments]: see Roland A. Paul, American Military Commitments Abroad (Rutgers University Press, 1973), pp. 14-15.

[European attacks on America]: see Andre Visson, As Others See Us (Doubleday, 1948); Wolfgang Wagner, “The Europeans’ Image of America,’’ in Karl Kaiser and Hans-Peter Schwarz, eds., America and Western Europe: Problems and Prospects (Lexington Books, 1978), pp. 19-32; Richard Mayne, Postwar: The Dawn of Today’s Europe (Schocken Books, 1983), pp. 111-17; Sidney Alexander, “The European Image of America,” American Scholar, vol. 21, no. 1 (Winter 1951-52), pp. 49-55.

[Lerner on Europe and America]: Max Lerner, America as a Civilization (Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 930.

[European admiration and support of America]: Henry Lee Munson, European Beliefs Regarding the United States (Common Council for American Unity, 1949), pp. 16, 22, 49, and passim.

[Soviet responses and fears]: see J. M. Mackintosh, Strategy and Tactics of Soviet Foreign Policy (Oxford University Press, 1963); Joseph L. Nogee and Robert H. Donaldson, Soviet Foreign Policy Since World War II (Pergamon Press, 1981), chs. 2, 4; William Zimmerman, Soviet Perspectives on International Relations, 1956-1967 (Princeton University Press, 1969); Charles Gati, “The Stalinist Legacy in Soviet Foreign Policy,” in Stephen F. Cohen et al., eds., The Soviet Union Since Stalin (Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 279-301;David J. Dallin, Soviet Foreign Policy After Stalin (Lippincott, 1961). [Aviation Day and the “bomber gap”]: see Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence (Harper, 1963), pp. 149, 162-63; Nogee and Donaldson, p. 109; Arnold L. Horelick and Myron Rush, Strategic Power and Soviet Foreign Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 17-18, 27-30, 66; Lincoln P. Bloomfield et al., Khrushchev and the Arms Race: Soviet Interests in Arms Control and Disarmament, 1954-1964 (MIT Press, 1966), ch. 2 passim.

The Technology of Freedom

266 [Per capita and national income]: Potter, pp. 81-84.

267 [American intolerance in 1950s]: see Charles C. Alexander, Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Era, 1952-1961 (Indiana University Press, 1975), pp. 121-22.

[“Entered a period”]: quoted in James Gilbert, Another Chance: Postwar America, 1945-1968 (Temple University Press, 1981), p. 186.

[Mergers and acquisitions, 1950s]: Harold G. Vatter, The U.S. Economy in the 1950s: An Economic History (Norton, 1963), pp. 205-6, Schumpeter quoted at p. 206; survival rate of large firms given at ibid.; see also John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 2nd ed. (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), ch. 8; Robert Sobel, The Age of Giant Corporations: A Microeconomic History of American Business, 1914-19**0 (Greenwood Press, 1972), ch. 8; Willard F. Mueller, “Concentration in Manufacturing,” in Edwin Mansfield, ed., Monopoly Power and Economic Performance: Problems of the Modern Economy (Norton, 1978), pp. 69-73.

[World War II and technological advances]: Noble, ch. 1 passim, pp. 334-35; Ralph Sanders, “Three-Dimensional Warfare: World War II,” in Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., eds., Technology in Western Civilization: Technology in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 561-78.

[Federal share of research and development, late 1950s]: W. David Lewis, “Industrial Research and Development,” in Kranzberg and Pursell, p. 632; see also Donald J. Mrozek, “The Truman Administration and the Enlistment of the Aviation Industry in Postwar Defense,” Business History Review, vol. 48, no. 1 (Spring 1974), pp. 73-94.

267-8 [Rosenberg on technological change and systematized knowledge]: Rosenberg, Technology and American Economic Growth (Harper, 1972), p. 117.

268 [Air speed records]: Gene Gurney, A Chronology of World Aviation (Franklin Watts, 1965), pp. 139, 144, 171, 192, 207; Roger E. Bilstein, Flight in America, 1900-1983: From the Wrights to the Astronauts (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 183; Patrick Harper, ed., The Timetable of Technology (Hearst Books, 1982), p. 154; Thomas M. Smith, “The Development of Aviation,” in Kranzberg and Pursell, pp. 158-59; Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), esp. ch. 3.

268 [Nautilus]: Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Nuclear Navy, 1946-1962 (University of Chicago Press, 1974), esp. chs. 6-7.

[Machine tool industry growth, postwar]: Noble, pp. 8-9.

[Federal share of R&D, electrical equipment industry, mid-1960s]: ibid., p. 8. [Technological advances in agriculture]: Gilbert C. File, American Farmers: The New Minority (Indiana University Press, 1981), pp. 110-15; Wayne D. Rasmussen, “Scientific Agriculture,” in Kranzberg and Pursell, pp. 337-53; Reynold M. Wik, “Mechanization of the American Farm,” in ibid., pp. 353-68; Rosenberg, Technology and Growth, pp. 127-46; Zvi Griliches, “Research Costs and Social Returns: Hybrid Corn and Related Innovations,” in Nathan Rosenberg, ed., The Economics of Technological Change (Penguin, 1971), pp. 182-202; Griliches, “Hybrid Corn and the Economics of Innovation,” in ibid.,pp. 211-28.

[Decline of farm labor force]: Rosenberg, Technology and Growth, p. 130; see also Fite, p. 115.

[Increase of per-acre com yield]: Rasmussen, p. 343.

[Return on hybrid corn research]: Griliches, “Research Costs,” p. 183.

268-9 [Agribusiness]: Fite, ch. 7 and pp. 194-97.

269 [“Enormous Laboratory”]: Lerner, p. 216.

[Gibbs]: Lynde Phelps Wheeler, Josiah Willard Gibbs: The History of a Great Mind (Yale University Press, 1951); Muriel Rukeyser, Willard Gibbs (Doubleday, Doran, 1942); J. G. Crowther, Famous American Men of Science (Norton, 1937), pp. 227-98. [Marx on science as social activity]: Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, trans. (Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1906-9), vol. 1, esp. ch. 15; see also Nathan Rosenberg, “Karl Marx on the economic role of science,” in Rosenberg, Perspectives on Technology (Cambridge University Press, 1976), ch. 7; M. M. Bober, Karl Marx’s Interpretation of History, 2nd. ed. (Harvard University Press, 1968), esp. chs. 1, 8, and pp. 363-76.

[Corporate R&D and American science]: George H. Daniels, Science in American Society: A Social History (Knopf, 1971), esp. ch. 14; Sobel, ch. 9; John Jewkes, David Sawers, and Richard Stillerman, The Sources of Invention (Macmillan, 1958), esp. chs. 2, 6-7; Jack Raymond, Power at the Pentagon (Harper, 1964), chs. 8-9; William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (Simon and Schuster, 1956), part 5; Jacob Schmookler, “Technological Progress and the Modern Corporation,” in Edward S. Mason, ed., The Corporation in Modern Society (Harvard University Press, 1960), ch. 8; Jay M. Gould, The Technical Elite (Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), ch. 7; David C. Mowery, “Firm Structure, Government Policy, and the Organization of Industrial Research: Great Britain and the United States, 1900-1950,” Business History Review, vol. 58, no. 4 (Winter 1984), pp. 504-31.

270 [“Underlying principle”]: Jewkes el al., p. 238.

[Oppenheimer’s classification as security risk]: United States Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board, April 12-May 6, 1914 (United States Government Printing Office, 1954); Philip M. Stern, The Oppenheimer Case: Security on Trial (Harper, 1969).

[Conant on subsidies]: Lerner, p. 218.

[Gibbs on Yale payroll]: see Wheeler, pp. 57-59, 90-93, quoted at p. 91.

271 [Taylor and scientific management]: Frederick W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Managment (Harper, 1929); Taylor, Shop Management (Harper, 1911); Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (University of Wisconsin Press, 1980); Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1964); David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (Knopf, 1977), pp. 264-77.

[Watertown strike]: Noble, America by Design, p. 272; Nelson, pp. 164-66; see also U.S. Ordnance Department, Report of the Chief of Ordnance to the Secretary of War: 1913 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1913), pp. 12-15 and Appendix 1.

[“Train of gear wheels”]: quoted in Daniels, p. 309.

271 [“Human engineering”]: Loren Baritz, The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry (1960; reprinted by Greenwood Press, 1974), chs. 8-10 and sources cited therein.

[“Problem of human relations”]: quoted in Baritz, p. 190.

[Union heads on “human relations” approach]: ibid., p. 183.

271-2 [Spot welder on his job]: “J.D.,” quoted in Robert H. Guest, “The Rationalization of Management,” in Kranzberg and Pursell, pp. 56-59.

272 [Automation]: John Diebold, Automation: Its Impact on Business and Labor (National Planning Association, May 1959); James R. Bright, “The Development of Automation,” in Kranzberg and Pursell, pp. 635-55; Noble, Forces, ch. 4 and passim; Ben B. Seligman, Most Notorious Victory: Man in an Age of Automation (Free Press, 1966); Simon Marcson, ed., Automation, Alienation and Anomie (Harper, 1970), esp. parts 2-3.

[Automatic equipment sales, late 1950s]: Diebold, p. 22.

[Automation at Ford]: ibid., pp. 9-10, observer on “whoosh” quoted at p. 9; Bright, pp. 651-53; Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Decline and Rebirth, 1933-1962 (Scribner, 1962), pp. 354-57, 364-66. [“Magical key of creation”]: quoted in Diebold, p. 2.

273 [Carey on automation]: ibid., p. 35.

[Fortune’s “automatic factory”]: “The Automatic Factory” and E. W. Leaver and J. J. Brown, “Machines without Men,” Fortune, vol. 34, no. 5 (November 1946), pp. 160-65, 192-204.

[Reuther on automation]: Reuther, “The Impact of Automation,” in Reuther, Selected Papers, Henry M. Christman, ed. (Macmillan, 1961), pp. 67-100, quoted at p. 76.

[“Everybody’s slice”]: Diebold, p. 43,

[Automation and auto worker militancy]: see Nelson Lichtenstein, “Auto Worker Militancy and the Structure of Factory Life, 1937-1955,” Journal of American History, vol. 67, no. 2 (September 1980), pp. 335-53; William A. Faunce, “Automation in the Automobile Industry: Some Consequences for In-Plant Social Structure,” in Marcson, pp. 169-81.

274 [Butler on man and machine]: Butler, Frewhon, or Over the Range (A. C. Fifield, 1917), pp. 246, 268.

[Bell on work and the machine]: Bell, Work and Its Discontents (Beacon Press, 1956), p. 56.

[Mumford on machine as part of system of power]: see Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Harcourt, 1934), pp. 41-45, 273, 324, and passim.

[Mumford on two technologies]: Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” Technology and Culture, vol. 5, no. 1 (Winter 1964), pp. 1-8, quoted at p. 2. [Wiener]: Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Houghton Mifflin, 1950); Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Wiley, 1948).

275 [Alienation and anomie]: see Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, George Simpson, trans. (1933; Free Press, 1960); Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1955), ch. 5 and passim; Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, Edward Shils, trans. (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1940); Wilbert E. Moore, Industrial Relations and the Social Order (Macmillan, 1951), esp. chs. 9-10; Robert Blauner, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry (University of Chicago Press, 1964), esp. chs. 2, 5; Seligman, Notorious Victory; William A. Faunce, “Automation and the Division of Labor,” in Marcson, pp. 79-96; Faunce, “Industrialization and Alienation,” in ibid., pp. 400-16; Melvin Seeman, “On the Meaning of Alienation,” in ibid., pp. 381-94.

[“Fortune, Chance, Luck”]: Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure: Toward the Godification of Theory and Research (Free Press, 1949), p. 138.

[Seeman on anomie]: Seeman, pp. 388-89.

275-6 [Marcuse on values and labor]: quoted in Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (University of California Press, 1984), p. 140; see also ibid., esp. chs. 6, 10; Marcuse, “Aggressiveness in Advanced Industrial Society,” in Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, Jeremy J. Shapiro, trans. (Beacon Press, 1968), pp. 248-68; Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Beacon Press, 1955); H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought,1930-1965   (Harper, 1975), pp. 70-88.

The Language of Freedom

276 [“Children of freedom”]: quoted in Adam B. Ulam, The Rivals: America and Russia Since World War II (Viking, 1971), p. 157.

[“Dynamic center”], quoted in John P. Mallan, “Luce’s Hot-and-Cold War,” New Republic, vol. 129, no. 9 (September 28, 1953), p. 12.

[“Founding purpose”]: Luce, “National Purpose and Cold War,” in John K. Jessup, ed., The Ideas of Henry Luce (Atheneum, 1969), pp. 131-33, quoted at pp. 131-32. [“Elementary truth”]: quoted in Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 19)40s and 1950s (Harper, 1985), pp. 124-25.

277 [“An American Century”]: Luce, “The American Century,” in Jessup, pp. 105-20, quoted at p. 117.

[“Egotistic corruption”]: quoted in ibid., p. 16.

[Luce as Cecil Rhodes of journalism]: ibid., p. 15.

[Century of the common man]: Wallace, “The Price of Free World Victory,” in John M. Blum, The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946 (Houghton Mifflin, 1973), pp. 635-40, esp. p. 638.

[1949 Conference for World Peace]: Pells, pp. 123-24; Irving Howe, “The Culture Conference,” Partisan Review, vol. 16, no. 5 (May 1949), pp. 505-11; Joseph P. Lash, “Weekend at the Waldorf,” New Republic, vol. 120, no. 16 (April 18, 1949), pp. 10-14.

[Congress for Cultural Freedom]: Sidney Hook, “The Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom,” Partisan Review, vol. 17, no. 7 (September-October 1950), pp. 715-22; Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World (Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 259-73; Christopher Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” in Barton J. Bernstein, ed., Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (Pantheon, 1968), pp. 322-59; Mary S. McAullife, Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947-1954 (University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), pp. 115-29; New York Times, April 27, 1966, p. 28; Pells, pp. 128-30.

[“Opium of the intellectuals”]: Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals, Terence Kilmartin, trans. (Norton, 1962).

[“End of ideology”]: Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties, rev. ed. (Free Press, 1962); see also Edward Shils, “Ideology and Civility: On the Politics of the Individual,” Sewanee Review, vol. 66, no. 3 (July-September 1958), pp. 450-80; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Liberalism in America: A Note for Europeans,” in Schlesinger, The Politics of Hope (Houghton Mifflin, 1963), ch. 6; James Nuechterlein, “Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and the Discontents of Postwar Liberalism,” Review of Politics, vol. 39, no. 1 (January 1977), pp. 3-40; Stephen J. Whitfield, “The 1950’s: The Era of No Hard Feelings,” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 74, no. 3 (Summer 1975), pp. 289-307, esp. pp. 297-98; Bernard Sternsher, “Liberalism in the Fifties: The Travail of Redefinition,” Antioch Review, vol. 2a, no. 3 (Fall 1962), pp. 315-31; McAuliffe; Pells, esp. ch. 3; John P. Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in War and in Peace, 1941-1960 (Norton, 1988), ch. 7 passim. 277-8 [Shils on intellectuals]: Shils, p. 456.

278 [Pells on intellectuals]: Pells, p. 181.

[Shils on social critics and Enlightenment ideals]: Shils, p. 455.

279 [Lerner on the new middle classes]: Lerner, p. 490.

[Fromm] Fromm, Escape from Freedom (Rinehart, 1941); Fromm, Sane Society; Fromm, The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology (Harper, 1968); Fromm, May Man Prevail?: An Enquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy (Anchor, 1961); see also John H. Schaar, Escape from Authority: The Perspectives of Erich Fromm (Basic Books, 1961), esp. chs. 3-4.

279-80 [Riesman]: Riesman, with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Yale University Press, 1950); Riesman, Individualism Reconsidered and Other Essays (Free Press, 1954); see also Seymour Martin Lipset and Leo Lowenthal, eds., Culture and Social Character: The Work of David Riesman Reviewed (Free Press, 1954).

[Whyte]: Whyte, Organization Man; see also Robert Lekachman, “Organization Men: The Erosion of Individuality,” Commentary, vol. 23, no. 3 (March 1957), pp. 270-76.

281 [Marcuse]: Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Beacon Press, 1964); Marcuse, Eros and Civilization; Marcuse, “Aggressiveness”; Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (Columbia University Press, 1958); see also Kellner; Jerzy J. Wiatr, “Herbert Marcuse: Philosopher of a Lost Radicalism,” Science & Society, vol. 34 (1970), pp. 319-30.

[Technological advances in newspaper production]: Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690-1960 (Macmillan, 1962), pp. 807-9, Editor & Publisher quoted at pp. 807-8.

282 [Press consolidation]: ibid., pp. 813-17.

[“Outside the pale”]: I.erner, p. 762.

[Press and cold war]: James Aronson, The Press and the Cold War (Beacon Press, 1970); Bernard C. Cohen, The Press and Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 36-39 and passim; Douglass Cater, The Fourth Branch of Government (Houghton Mifflin, 1959); see also Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (Basic Books, 1978), ch. 5; Potter, esp. ch. 8.

282-3 [Protestant on press]: quoted in Aronson, p. 36.

283 [MacDougall on press]: ibid., p. 37.

[Polls on inevitability of war, 1945, 1948]: ibid.

[Lippmann and Marshall Plan]: see Joseph M. Jones, The Fifteen Weeks (February 21-June 5, 1917) (Viking, 1955), pp. 226-32.

[Cater on press as fourth branch]: see Cater, pp. 2-3, 7-8, 67-74, and passim.

[PM]: Roy Hoopes, Ralph Ingersoll (Atheneum, 1985), chs. 9-14; Stephen Becker, Marshall Field III (Simon and Schuster, 1964), ch. 6 and pp. 398-402; Mott, pp. 771-75; Carey McWilliams, “The Continuing Tradition of Reform Journalism,” in John M. Harrison and Harry H. Stein, eds., Muckraking: Past, Present and Future (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973), p. 124; Louis Kronenberger, No Whippings, No Gold Watches: TheSaga of a Writer and His Jobs (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1970), ch. 5.

[FDR on PM]: quoted in Becker, p. 209.

284 [Time circulation growth, 1950s]: Dan Golenpaul Associates, Information Please Almanac 1952 (Macmillan, 1951), p. 143; Dan Golenpaul Associates, Information Please Almanac 1962 (Simon and Schuster, 1961), p. 310.

[Mass-circulation magazines’ circulations]: Dan Golenpaul Associates, Information Please Almanac 1957 (Macmillan, 1956), p. 318.

[Life advertising revenues]: Robert T. Elson, The World of Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1941-1960 (Atheneum, 1973), p. 404.

[Assets of Time Inc.]: ibid., p. 459,.

[Luce’s management of his enterprises]: Elson, Time Inc.: 1941-1960; Elson, Time Inc.; The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 1923-1941 (Atheneum, 1968); T. S. Matthews, Name and Address (Simon and Schuster, 1960), pp. 215-74; Hoopes, chs. 5-8 passim; Kronenberger, ch. 4; Joan Simpson Burns, The Awkward Embrace: The Creative Artist and the Institution in America (Knopf, 1975), pp. 142-50; David Cort, “Once Upon a Time Inc.: Mr. Luce’s Fact Machine,” Nation, vol. 182, no. 7 (February 18, 1956), pp. 134-37; John Kobler, Luce: His Time, Life, and Fortune (Doubleday, 1968).

[Luce on editorial convictions]: Elson, Time Inc.: 1941-1960, pp. 74-75.

[Luce in politics]: see ibid., chs. 7, 20, 23, and passim; Mallan, pp. 12-15; W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (Scribner, 1972), pp. 176-79, 219-22, 268-73,and passim.

[Kobler on Luce and “top performers”]: quoted in Joan Burns, Awkward Embrace, p. 142. [Luce and White]: see Theodore H. White, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure (Harper, 1978), pp. 126-30, 205-13, 246-49.

284-5 [Development of commercial television]: Erik Barnouw, A History of Broadcasting in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1966-70), vol. 2, pp. 293-95 and passim, and vol. 3, chs. 1-2; James L. Baughman, “Television in the ‘Golden Age’: An Entrepreneurial Experiment,” Historian, vol. 47, no. 2 (February, 1985), pp. 175-95; Leo Bogart, The Age of Television: A Study of Viewing Habits and the Impact of Television on American Life (Frederick Ungar, 1956); James L. Baughman, “The National Purpose and the Newest Medium: Liberal Critics of Television, 1958-1960,” Mid-America, vol. 64, no. 2 (April-July 1982), pp. 41-55; William Y. Elliott, ed., Television’s Impact on American Culture (Michigan State University Press, 1956).

285 [Radio in the 1950s]: J. Fred MacDonald, Don’t Touch That Dial (Nelson-Hall, 1979), pp. 85-90; Arnold Passman, The Deejays (Macmillan, 1971).

285-6 [Democratic and Republican parties, 1950s]: Gary W. Reichard, “Divisions and Dissent: Democrats and Foreign Policy, 1952-1956,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 93, no. 1 (Spring 1978), pp. 51-72; Reichard, The Reaffirmation of Republicanism: Eisenhower and the Eighty-third Congress (University of Tennessee Press, 1975); Herbert S. Parmet, The Democrats: The Years After FDR (Macmillan, 1976), part 2; Samuel Lubell, Revolt of the Moderates (Harper, 1956); Norman A. Graebner, The New Isolationism: A Study in Politics and Foreign Policy Since 1950 (Ronald Press, 1956); Ralph M. Goldman, Search for Consensus: The Story of the Democratic Party (Temple University Press, 1979), pp. 196-207; James MacGregor Burns, The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-Party Politics in America (Prentice-Hall, 1963), part 3; James L. Sundquist, Politics and Policy: The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (Brookings Institution, 1968), part 2, esp. ch. 9.

286 [Divine on containment in 1948 campaign]: Divine, “The Cold War and the Election of 1948,” Journal of American History, vol. 59, no. 1 (June 1972), pp. 90-110, quoted at p. 110.

[Newspaper support of Wallace, 1948]: see Aronson, p. 47.

[Election results, 1956]: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968 (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 4, p. 3445.

287 [Democratic Advisory Committee]: Parmet, pp. 151-61; John Bartlow Martin, Adlai Stevenson and the World (Doubleday, 1977), pp. 395-402; Sundquist, pp. 405-15; Goldman, pp. 202-4; Burns, Deadlock, pp. 254-55.

[“Strong, searching”]: quoted in Martin, p. 395.

[1956 campaign]: Malcolm Moos, “Election of 1956,” in Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 4, pp. 3341-54; Martin, ch. 2; Reichard, “Divisions,” pp. 65-69; Walter Johnson, ed., The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson: Toward a New America, 1955-1957 (Little, Brown, 1976); Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Waging Peace, 1956-1961 (Doubleday, 1965), ch. 1; Kenneth S. Davis, A Prophet in His Own Country: The Triumph and Defeats of Adlai E. Stevenson (Doubleday, 1957), chs. 28-29; Robert A. Divine, Foreign Policy and U.S. Presidential Elections, 1952-1960 (New Viewpoints, 1974), chs. 3-4.

287-8 [Eleanor Roosevelt, mid-1950s]: Eleanor Roosevelt, On My Own (Harper, 1958), chs. 10-22; Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone (Norton, 1972), chs. 11-13; Tamara K. Hareven, Eleanor Roosevelt: An American Conscience (Quadrangle, 1968), pp. 210-14.

Dilemmas of Freedom

288 [Hofstadter on the intellectual]: quoted in James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (Harper, 1978), p. 141.

289 [“Physicists have known sin”]: quoted in Whitfield, p. 292.

[Lippmann in the postwar world]: Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (Harper, 1947); Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1955); Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1980), chs. 32-41 passim: Anwar Hussain Syed, Walter Lippmann’s Philosophy of International Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), pp. 340-44 and passim; Barton J. Bernstein, “Walter Lippmann and the Early Cold War,” in Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Cold War Critics: Alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years (Quadrangle, 1971), pp. 18-53; Kenneth W. Thompson, Political Realism and the Crisis of World Politics: An American Approach to Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 38-50.

[Lippmann on popular rule]: The Public Philosophy, pp. 14, 61.

289-90 [MacLeish on Lippmann and Lippmann’s reply]: MacLeish, “The Alternative,” Yale Review, vol. 44, no. 4 (June 1955), pp. 481-96, esp. p. 487; Lippmann, “A Rejoinder,” ibid., pp. 497-500.

290 [Kennan’s continued opposition to “legalistic-moralistic” approach]: see Kennan, “Morality and Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 64, no. 2 (Winter 1985-86), pp. 205-18; Kennan, Memoirs, 2 vols. (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1967-72); Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (University of Chicago Press, 1951); Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy (Norton, 1966); Kennan, Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920, 8 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1956-58); Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (Little, Brown, 1961).

290 [Pitfall of “realism”]: see Christopher Lasch, “‘Realism’ as a Critique of American Diplomacy,” in Lasch, The World of Nations: Reflections on American History, Politics & Culture (Knopf, 1973), pp. 205-15; Robert C. Good, “The National Interest and Political Realism: Niebuhr’s ‘Debate’ with Morgenthau and Kennan,” Journal of Politics, vol. 22, no. 4 (November 1960), pp. 597-619; Thompson, Political Realism, pp. 50-61; Dean Acheson, “The Illusion of Disengagement,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 36, no. 3 (April 1958), pp. 371-82; John W. Coffey, “George Kennan and the Ambiguities of Realism,” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 2 (Spring 1974), pp. 184-98.

291 [Morgenthau]: Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1946); Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (Knopf, 1948); Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy (Knopf, 1951); Morgenthau, The Impasse of American Foreign Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1962); George Eckstein, “Hans Morgenthau: A Personal Memoir,” Social Research, vol. 48, no. 4 (Winter 1981), pp. 641-52; ibid., vol. 48, no. 4 (Winter 1981), passim; Robert W. Tucker, “Professor Morgenthau’s Theory of Political ‘Realism,’ “American Political Science Review, vol. 46, no. 1 (March 1952), pp. 214-24; Stanley Hoffmann, “Realism and Its Discontents,” Atlantic, vol. 256, no. 5 (November 1985), pp. 131-36; Kenneth W. Thompson, “Moral Reasoning in American Thought on War and Peace,” Review of Politics, vol. 39, no. 3 (July 1977), pp. 386-99, esp. pp. 391-94; see also Thompson, Morality and Foreign Policy (Louisiana State University Press, 1980).

[“Lust for power”]: Morgenthau, Scientific Man, p. 9.

[“We must sin”]: ibid., p. 201; see also Kenneth W. Thompson, Moralism and Morality in Politics and Diplomacy (University Press of America, 1985), pp. 93-107.

[Morgenthau on public opinion]: Morgenthau, “What Is Wrong with Our Foreign Policy,” in Impasse, pp. 68-94, quoted at p. 74.

292 [Niebuhr]: Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Scribner, 1932); Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (Scribner, 1952); Niebuhr, Christian Realism and Political Problems (Scribner, 1953); Niebuhr, The Structure of Nations and Empires (Scribner, 1959); Richard W. Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr (Pantheon, 1985); Fox, “Reinhold Niebuhr and the Emergence of the Liberal Realist Faith, 1930-1945,” Review of Politics, vol. 38, no. 2 (April 1976), pp. 244-65; Donald B. Meyer, The Protestant Search for Political Realism, 1919-1941 (University of California Press, 1960), esp. chs. 13-14; Charles Frankel, The Case for Modern Man (Harper, 1955), ch. 6; Good; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Role in American Political Thought and Life,” in Schlesinger, Politics of Hope, pp. 97-125; Morton White, “Of Moral Predicaments” (review of Niebuhr, Irony), New Republic, vol. 126, no. 18 (May 5, l952), pp. 8-9.

293 [“Companionship in a common purpose”]: quoted in Fox, “Niebuhr and Emergence,” p. 260.

[“Play hardball”]: quoted in William E. Leuchtenburg, “Preacher of Paradox” (review of Fox, Niebuhr), Atlantic, vol. 257, no. 1 (January 1986), p. 94.

[“Father of us all”]: quoted in Fox, “Niebuhr and Emergence,” p. 245.

[“Spiritual father”]: ibid.

[“Atheists for Niebuhr”]: Thompson, “Moral Reasoning,” p. 387.

[“Dizziness of freedom”]: quoted in Frankel, p. 88.

[“Narcosis of the soul”]: ibid., p. 89.

[“Instant Niebuhrian”]: Harvey Cox, “In the Pulpit and on the Barricades” (review of Fox, Niebuhr), New York Times Book Review, January 5, 1986, pp. 1, 24-25, quoted at p. 24.

294 [“Russia, the Atom and the West”]: Kennan, Russia, the Atom and the West (Harper, 1958); see also Kennan, Memoirs, vol. 2, ch. 10.

[De Gaulle on Lippmann]: quoted in Steel, p. 495.

[American products in Europe]: see Edward A. McCreary, The Americanization of Europe: The Impact of Americans and American Business on the Uncommon Market (Doubleday, 1964), pp. 13-15, 89-90.

295 [American corporations in Europe]: see ibid., ch. 4; Mayne, pp. 112-17. [“49th State”]: British shipowner, quoted in Visson, p. 68.

[“Americans are not served”]: ibid.

[American product failures in Europe]: McCreary, p. 91; see also ibid., pp. 128-35; Mayne, pp. 114-15.

[European view of America’s “imperialism, ” “dollarnoose, ” and “shabby money-lending”]: Visson, pp. 13, 75, 115, and passim; Bruce Hutchinson, Canada’s Lonely Neighbor (Longmans, Green, 1954), p. 11 and passim; “Why Is US Prestige Declining?,” New Republic, vol. 131, no. 8 (August 23, 1954), p. 8; Jean Rikhoff Hills, “The British Press on ‘The Yanks,’” ibid., pp. 9-12; Franz M. Joseph, ed., As Others See Us: The United States through Foreign Eyes (Princeton University Press, 1959).

[“Spiritual standardization”]: quoted in Visson, p. 161.

[“Coco-colonization”]: Mayne, p. 115.

[Koestler on American ubiquity]: quoted in Wilson P. Dizard, The Strategy of Truth: The Story of the U.S. Information Service (Public Affairs Press, 1961), p. 10.

296 [USIA]: Dizard; Thomas C. Sorenson, The Word War: The Story of American Propaganda (Harper, 1968); Thomas C. Reeves, The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy (Stein & Day, 1982), pp. 476-91 passim; Robert E. Elder, The Information Machine: The United States Information Agency and American Foreign Policy (Syracuse University Press, 1968).

[“McCarthyism … is a tragedy”]: Hutchinson, p. 26,

[“France was a land”]: quoted in Dizard, p. 20.

[Ford Foundation international programs]: Dwight Macdonald, The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions (Reynal & Co., 1956), p. 60 and passim; Edward H. Berman, The Influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations on American Foreign Policy: The Ideology of Philanthropy (State University of New York Press, 1983).

[Ford support of Congress for Cultural Freedom]: Berman, pp. 143-45, “combat tyranny” quoted at p. 144.

297 [Lewis in France]: Thelma M. Smith and Ward L. Miner, Transatlantic Migrations: The Contemporary American Novel in France (Duke University Press, 1955), p. 17.

[“Greatest lileary development”]: quoted in ibid., pp. 20-21; see also Henri Peyre, “American Literature Through French Eyes,” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 23, no. 3 (Summer 1947), pp. 421-38.

298 [Gide on American literature]: Smith and Miner, p. 21.

[French appreciation of Hemingway]: see ibid., ch. 8 and passim; Roger Asselineau, “French Reactions to Hemingway’s Works Between the Two World Wars,” in Asselineau, ed., The Literary Reputation of Hemingway in Europe (New York University Press, 1965), pp. 39-72; Peyre, p. 435.

[Maurois on Hemingway’s subjects]: Maurois, “Ernest Hemingway,” in Carlos Baker, ed., Hemingway and His Critics: An International Anthology (Hill and Wang, 1961), p. 38.

[Sales of French-language Bell Tolls]: Smith and Miner, p. 30.

[French appreciation of Faulkner]: see ibid., ch. 9.

[“Magical, fantastic”]: quoted in ibid., pp. 129-30.

[Sartre on Faulkner and de Beauvoir]: ibid., pp. 62-63.

[Faulkner as “universal writer”]: see ibid., p. 141.

[German on cadging American books]: Hans Magnus Enzenberger, “Mann, Kafka and the Katzenjammer Kids,” New York Times Book Review, November 11, 1985, pp. 1, 37-39, quoted at p. 37.

[“Thoughtful and barbaric”]: quoted in Mayne, p. 109.

299 [Hemingway’s politics]: see Scott Donaldson, By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway (Viking, 1977), ch. 5; John Killinger, Hemingway and the Dead Gods: A Study in Existentialism (University of Kentucky Press, 1960), esp. ch. 5; Carlos Baker, Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 197-202, ch. 10 and passim; Ray B. West, Jr., “Ernest Hemingway: The Failure of Sensibility,” Sewanee Review, vol. 53 (1945), pp. 120-35; Lionel Trilling, “Hemingway and His Critics,” in Baker, Hemingway and His Critics, pp. 61-70.

[“You believe in Life”]: Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (Scribner, 1940), p. 305. [“Presentness of the past”]: Hyatt H. Waggoner, “William Harrison Faulkner,” in John A. Garraty, ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography (Harper, 1974), pp. 343-45, quoted at p. 344.

299 [Faulkner in two American traditions]: ibid., p. 344.

[Faulkner and public and private values]: Faulkner, “Speech of Acceptance upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature,” in The Faulkner Reader (Random House, 1954), pp. 3-4; Hyatt H. Waggoner, William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World (University of Kentucky Press, 1959), esp. chs. 11-12; R. W. B. Lewis, “William Faulkner: The Hero in the New World,” in Robert Penn Warren, ed., Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays (Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 204-18; Edmund Wilson, “William Faulkner’s Reply to the Civil-Rights Program,” in ibid., pp. 219-25; Vincent F. Hopper, “Faulkner’s Paradise Lost,” Virginia Quarterly Review, vol. 23, no. 3 (Summer 1947), pp. 405-20; see also Joseph Blotner, Faulkner, 2 vols. (Random House, 1974).

[“Moving from a tenor”]: quoted in Hopper, p. 420.

300 [“We prate of freedom”]: quoted in George W. Nitchie, Human Values in the Poetry of Robert Frost: A Study of a Poet’s Convictions (Duke University Press, 1960), pp. 88-89.

[“Keep off each other”]: “Build Soil—A Political Pastoral,” in Robert Frost, Complete Poems (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), pp. 421-30, quoted at p. 429.

[“Freedom I’d like to give”]: quoted in Lawrance R. Thompson, Fire and Ice: The Art and Thought of Robert Frost (Henry Holt, 1942), p. 216; see also ibid., pp. 177-232 passim; Nitchie; Malcolm Cowley, “Frost: A Dissenting Opinion” and “The Case Against Mr. Frost: II,” New Republic, vol. 111, no. 11 (September 11, 1944), pp. 312-13, and no. 12 (September 18, 1944), pp. 345-47; William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (Oxford University Press, 1984).

[Hicks on Frost]: Hicks, “The World of Robert Frost,” New Republic, vol. 65, no. 835 (December 3, 1930), pp. 77-78, quoted at p. 78.

[“Wise primitive”]: Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” in Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (Putnam, 1959), pp. 337-58, quoted at p. 343.

[Miller]: Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (Grove Press, 1987); Leonard Moss, Arthur Miller (Twayne, 1967); Robert A. Martin, ed., The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller (Viking, 1978); Benjamin Nelson, Arthur Miller: Portrait of a Playwright (David McKay, 1970); Richard Corrigan, ed., Arthur Miller (Prentice-Hall, 1969). [“Right dramatic form”]: Miller, “The Family in Modern Drama,” in Martin, pp. 69-85, quoted at p. 85.

301 [“I always said”]: Miller, “Introduction to the Collected Plays,” in ibid., pp. 113-70, quoted at p. 141; see also Richard T. Brucher, “Willy Loman and The Soul of a New Machine: Technology and the Common Man,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 17, no. 3 (December 1983), pp. 325-36.

[Europeans on America’s commitment to freedom]: see Wagner in Kaiser and Schwarz, pp. 19-32, esp. pp. 24-25; see also Jean-Paul Sartre, “Individualism and Conformism in the United States,” in Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, Annette Michelson, trans. (Criterion Books, 1955), pp. 97-106.

[Shaw on Americans]: quoted in Wagner, p. 25.

[Khrushchev’s meeting with American labor leaders]: “Free Labor Meets Khrushchev,” in Reuther, Papers, pp. 299-315, quoted at pp. 312, 313; Khrushchev in America (Crosscurrents Press, 1960), pp. 124-40; see also Herbert Mitgang, Freedom to See: The Khrushchev Broadcast and Its Meaning for America (Fund for the Republic, April 1958); Alexander Rapoport, “The Russian Broadcasts of the Voice of America,” Russian Review, vol. 16, no. 3 (July 1957), pp. 3-14; Alexander Anikst, “American Books and Soviet Readers,” New World Review, vol. 4, no. 3 (March 1956), pp. 18-20; Melville J. Ruggles, “American Books in Soviet Publishing,” Slavic Review, vol. 20 (1961), pp. 419-35.

7. The Free and the Unfree

303 [Lives of the poor]: see Robert L. Heilbroner, The Great Ascent: The Struggle for Economic Development in Our Time (Harper, 1963), chs. 2-3; see also Aidan W. Southall and Peter C. W. Gutkind, Townsmen in the Making: Kampala and Its Suburbs (East African Institute of Social Research, 1957).

[Untouchable children in lime pits]: Margaret Bourke-White, Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India (Simon and Schuster, 1949), ch. 14.

304 [Division of world GNP]: P. N. Rothenstein-Rodan, “International Aid for Underdeveloped Countries,” Review of Economics and Statistics, vol. 43, no. 2 (May 1961), p. 118 (Table l-A).

304 [GNP per capita]: ibid., p. 118 (Table 1-B); see also ibid., p. 126 (Table 2-C); Paul G. Hoffman, World Without Want (Harper, 1962), pp. 38-39 (Table 1).

[Population growth and its causes]; J. O. Hertzler, The Crisis in World Population (University of Nebraska Press, 1956), pp. 20-21 (Table 1), p. 22 (Figure 1), p. 23 (Table 2).

[Nationalism, war, and decolonization]: Peter Worsley, The Third World, 2nd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1970), chs. 2-3; T. O. Lloyd, The British Empire, 1558-1981 (Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 276-92, 312-20; Milton Osborne, Region of Revolt: Focus on Southeast Asia (Penguin, 1970), ch. 5; Tony Smith, “Introduction,” in Tony Smith, ed., The End of the European Empire: Decolonization After World War II (D. C. Heath, 1975), pp. vii-xxiii; Rudolf von Albertini, “The Impact of the Two World Wars on the Decline of Colonialism,” in ibid., pp. 3-19; William R. Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1978). [Worsley on sense of common fate]: Worsley, p. 84.

[“O masters, lords”]: “The Man with the Hoe,” in Markham, The Man with the Hoe and Other Poems (Doubleday, Page, 1913), pp. 15-18, quoted at pp. 17, 18.

305 [Imperviousness of Indian villages]: see Kusum Nair, Blossoms in the Dust: The Human Element in Indian Development (Gerald Duckworth, 1961).

[Forms of nationalist revolt and postcolonial government]: see Worsley, chs. 3-5.

The Boston Irish

306 [Numbers of Irish immigrants into Boston, late 1840s-1850s]: Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 1790-1865: A Study in Acculturation (Harvard University Press, 1941), p. 229 (Table 5).

[Irish famine]: Thomas Gallagher, Paddy’s Lament, Ireland 1846-1847: Prelude to Hatred (Harcourt, 1982), ch. 1 and passim; Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845-9 (Hamish Hamilton, 1962); R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams, eds., The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845-52 (Browne and Nolan, 1956).

[Famine deaths and emigration]: see William P. MacArthur, “Medical History of the Famine,” in Edwards and Williams, pp. 308-12; William V. Shannon, The American Irish (Macmillan, 1966), p. 1; Oliver MacDonagh, “Irish Emigration to the United States of America and the British Colonies during the Famine,” in Edwards and Williams, pp. 317-88, esp. p. 388 (Appendix 1).

[Ireland under British rule]: J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603-1923 (Knopf, 1966); T. W. Freeman, Pre-Famine Ireland: A Study in Historical Geography (Manchester University Press, 1957); Thomas A. Emmet, Ireland Under English Rule, or A Plea for the Plaintiff, 2 vols. (Knickerbocker Press, 1903); Lawrence J. McCaffrey, The Irish Question, 1800-1922 (University of Kentucky Press, 1968); Edward M. Levine, The Irish and Irish Politicians: A Study of Cultural and Social Alienation (University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), ch. 2; Kevin B. Nowlan, “The Political Background,” in Edwards and Williams, ch. 3; Shannon, ch. 1.

[“Always went forth”]: quoted in Shannon, p. 9.

307 [Irish in Boston]: Handlin; Levine, ch. 3; Donald B. Cole, Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845-1921 (University of North Carolina Press, 1963), esp. ch. 3; Shannon, ch. 11, also ch. 2; see also Gallagher, ch. 23; Woodham-Smith, ch. 12.

[Irish in sports]: Carl Wittke, The Irish in America (Louisiana State University Press, 1956), ch. 24; Shannon, pp. 95-102.

[Irish in politics]: Levine, esp. chs. 4-5; Arthur Mann, Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1954), ch. 2; Handlin, ch. 5; Shannon, chs. 4-5; Edgar Lin, Beyond Pluralism: Ethnic Politics in America (Scott, Foresman, 1970), ch. 8; see also Wittke, ch. 10; Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (MIT Press, 1963), pp. 217-87.

308 [Irish economic progress]: Stephan Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in an American Metropolis, 1880-1970 (Harvard University Press, 1973), esp. pp. 130-44, 160-75; Handlin, esp. ch. 3; Cole, chs. 3-4, 7, and passim; Wittke, chs. 3-5, 7, 21; Marjorie R. Fallows, Insh Americans: Identity and Assimilation (Prentice-Hall, 1979), chs. 4-5; H. M. Gitelman, “The Waltham System and the Coming of the Irish,” Labor History, vol. 8, no. 3 (Fall 1967), pp. 227-53; Stephen Birmingham, Real Lace: America’s Irish Rich (Harper, 1973); Shannon, ch. 6.

308 [“None need apply”]: quoted in Handlin, p. 67.

[Irish in Puck]: John J. Appel, “From Shanties to Lace Curtain: The Irish Image in Puck, 1876-1910,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 13 (1971), pp. 365-75, quoted at p. 367; see also Shannon, ch. 9.

[Continued social exclusion of Irish]: see Helen Howe, The Gentle Americans, 1864-1960: Biography of a Breed (Harper, 1965), pp. 97-99; Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (E. P. Dutton, 1947), esp. ch. 15; Birmingham; Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, Times to Remember (Doubleday, 1974), pp. 49-52; Richard J. Whalen, The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy (New American Library, 1964), pp. 24-27, 34, 59, 401-2, 417-18; David E. Koskoff, Joseph P. Kennedy: A Life and Times (Prentice-Hall, 1974),pp. 18-19, 378-80.

309 [Limits of Insh liberalism]: see Levine, chs. 4-6; Mann, ch. 2; Glazer and Moynihan, pp. 229-34, 264-74; Liu, ch. 8; Fallows, ch. 8.

[Two Patrick Kennedys]: Tim Pal Coogan, “Sure, and It’s County Kennedy Now,” New York Times Magazine, June 23, 1963, pp. 7-9, 32-36; Koskoff, chs. 1-2; Whalen, ch. 1 ; see also the genealogical tables in James MacGregor Burns, Edward Kennedy and the Camelot Legacy (Norton, 1976), pp. 344-46.

[Honey Fitz]: Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (Simon and Schuster, 1987), book 1 ; John Henry Cutler, “Honey Fitz”: Three Steps to the White House (Bobbs-Merrill, 1962); Kennedy, chs. 2-5; Francis Russell, The Great Interlude: Neglected Events and Persons from the First World War to the Depression (McGraw-Hill, 1964), pp. 162-90.

310 [Joe Kennedy]: Whalen; Koskoff; Goodwin, book 2 passim; Michael R. Beschloss, Kennedy and Roosevelt: The Uneasy Alliance (Norton, 1980); Birmingham, ch. 16; Matthew Josephson, The Money Lords: The Great Finance Capitalists, 1925-1950 (Weybright and Talley, 1972), pp. 176-87.

[John Kennedy and Catholicism]: see Garry Wills, The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1982), p. 61; Lawrence H. Fuchs, John F. Kennedy and American Catholicism (Meredith Press, 1967); James MacGregor Burns, John Kennedy: A Political Profile (Harcourt, 1960), ch. 13; Donald F. Crosby, God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950-1957 (University of North Carolina Press, 1978), p.35; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Houghton Mifflin, 1965), pp. 107-8; see also Goodwin, p. 635.

[Kennedy and liberalism]: see Schlesinger, pp. 9-19; Burns, Profile, pp. 73-81, 132-36, 264-68; Crosby, pp. 106-7; Herbert S. Parmet, Jack: The Struggles of John F. Kennedy (Dial Press, 1980), pp. 175-82, 188-89, 461-62,and ch. 26; David Burner and Thomas R. West, The Torch Is Passed: The Kennedy Brothers and American Liberalism (Atheneum, 1984), ch. 3 passim.

[Schlesinger on Kennedy’s detachment]: Schlesinger, p. 108; see also Goodwin, pp. 752-55.

[Kennedy’s womanizing]: see Joan Blair and Clay Blair, Jr., The Search For JFK (Berkley, 1976), passim; Wills, chs. 1-2.

311 [Curley]: Joseph F. Dineen, The Purple Shamrock: The Hon. James Michael Curley of Boston (Norton, 1949); James Michael Curley, I’d Do It Again (Prentice-Hall, 1957); Russell, pp. 191-212; Shannon, ch. 12.

[Kennedy’s first congressional campaign]: Parmet, ch. 10; Whalen, ch. 22; Blair and Blair, part 4; Goodwin, pp. 705-21; Koskoff, pp. 405-9; Burns, Profile, ch. 4; Kennedy, pp. 306-20.

[The two Joseph Russos]: Koskoff, p. 407; Cutler, p. 308; independent anonymous source.

[Kennedy in the House]: Blair and Blair, chs. 41-43; Parmet, chs. 11-12; Burns, Profile, ch. 5; Goodwin, ch. 40.

312 [“Felt like a worm there”]: Interview with Senator John F. Kennedy, 1959.

[Kennedy’s Senate campaign]: Parmet, ch. 13; Burns, Profile, ch. 6; Goodwin, pp. 755-68; Kennedy, pp. 320-27; Crosby, pp. 108-11; Whalen, ch. 23; Koskoff, pp. 413-17.

312 [Kennedy’s distance from other Democrats]: see Parmet, p. 254.

[Joe Kennedy and the Post]: Koskoff, pp. 415-16; Whalen, pp. 429-31; Parmet, pp. 242-43.

313 [Kennedy and McCarthyism]: Burns, Profile, ch. 8; Crosby, pp. 108-13, 205-16; Parmet, pp. 243-52, 300-11.

The Southern Poor

[Macon County, 1930s]: Charles S. Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation (University of Chicago Press, 1934; reprinted 1979), p. 100.

314 [FDR on the South]: message to the Conference on Economic Conditions of the South, July 4, 1938, in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 7, pp. 421-22, quoted at p. 421.

[Proportion of American poor black families in South]: Alan Batchelder, “Poverty: The Special Case of the Negro,” in Louis A. Ferman, Joyce L. Kornbluh, and Alan Haber, eds., Poverty in America (University of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 114.

[Plessy v. Ferguson?: 163 U.S. 537 (1896).

[Black poverty and class structure in South]: see John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 3rd ed. (Doubleday Anchor, 1957), ch. 5 and passim; Morton Rubin, Plantation County (University of North Carolina Press, 1951), pp. 123-32 and passim, Nathan Hare, “Recent Trends in the Occupational Mobility of Negroes, 1930-1960: An Intracohort Analysis,” Social Forces, vol. 44, no. 2 (December 1965), pp. 166-73; Batchelder in Ferman et al., pp. 112-19; Tom Kahn, “The Economics of Equality,” in ibid., pp. 153-72; Vivian W. Henderson, The Economic Status of Negroes: In the Nation and in the South (Southern Regional Council, 1963); Charles S. Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South (1941; Schocken Books, 1907); Johnson, Shadow; Robert Coles, Children of Crisis (Little, Brown, 1967-78), vol. 2, chs. 4, 7; V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (Knopf, 1949), esp. part 5; Truman M. Pierce et al., White and Negro Schools in the South: An Analysis of Biracial Education (Prentice-Hall, 1955); see also Neil R. Peirce, The Deep South States of America (Norton, 1974); Jack Bass and Walter DeVries, The Transformation of Southern Politics: Social Change and Political Consequence Since 1945 (Basic Books, 1976).

[Peonage]: Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 (University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 188 and passim.

[Rowan in the South]: Rowan, South of Freedom (Knopf, 1952).

[“Momma, momma”]: ibid., p. 40.

315 [Black migration from Southeast, 1950s]: Selz C. Mayo and C. Horace Hamilton, “The Rural Negro Population of the South in Transition,” Phylon, vol. 24, no. 2 (July 1963), p. 165.

[Decline in proportion of American blacks in Southeast, 1940-60]: ibid., p. 161.

[Decline in black farm population]: ibid. (Table 1).

[Migrant workers]: Dale Wright, They Harvest Despair: The Migrant Farm Worker (Beacon Press, 1965); Truman Moore, The Slaves We Rent (Random House, 1965); Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States (Macmillan, 962), pp. 48-56; Coles, vol. 2, chs. 3, 8.

[Black migration within South and economic opportunities]: Mayo and Hamilton, pp. 162, 166-71.

[Black women as household or service laborers]: ibid., p. 168 (Table 5).

316 [Appalachia]: Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1963), esp. parts 5-7; William J. Page, Jr., and Earl E. Huyck, “Appalachia: Realities of Deprivation,” in Ben B. Seligman, ed., Poverty as a Public Issue (Free Press, 1965), pp. 152-76; Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg, Our Appalachia (Hill and Wang, 1977); Roul Tunley, “The Strange Case of West Virginia,” Saturday Evening Post, vol. 232, no. 32 (February 6, 1960), pp. 19-21, 64-66; William H. Turner, “Blacks in Appalachian America: Reflections on Biracial Education and Unionism,” Phylon, vol. 44, no. 3 (1983), pp. 198-208.

[“Low income, high unemployment”]: Page and Huyck, p. 153.

[“Fire every damn Nigger”]: Interview with Milburn (Big Bud) Jackson, in Shackelford and Weinberg, pp. 300-3, quoted at p. 302.

316 [Harlan County]: see John W. Hevener, Which Side Are You On?: The Harlan County Coal Miners, 1931-39 (University of Illinois Press, 1978); G. C. Jones, Growing Up Hard in Harlan County (University Press of Kentucky, 1985).

[TVA]: David E. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March (Harper, 1953); Frank E. Smith, Land Between the Lakes (University Press of Kentucky, 1971); Gordon R. Clapp, The TVA: An Approach to the Development of a Region (University of Chicago Press, 1955); Caudill, pp. 318-24.

317 [Texas]: Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power (Knopf, 1982), esp. ch. 1; T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (Macmillan, 1968); George N. Green, The Establishment in Texas Politics: The Primitive Years, 1938-1957 (Greenwood Press, 1979); Neil R. Peirce, The Megastates of America (Norton, 1972), pp. 495-563; Key, ch. 12.

317-18 [Johnson, birth to Senate]: Caro; Alfred Steinberg, Sam Houston’s Boy (Macmillan, 1968), chs. 1-27; Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (Harper, 1976), chs. 1-3; Ronnie Dugger, The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson, The Drive For Power, from the Frontier to the Master of the Senate (Norton, 1982), parts 1-10; Merle Miller, Lyndon: An Oral Biography (Putnam, 1980), ch. 1; Sam Houston Johnson, My Brother Lyndon (Cowles Book Co., 1970), chs. 2-4; Seth S. McKay, W. Lee O’Daniel and Texas Politics, 1938-1942 (Texas Tech Press, 1944), ch. 6; Monroe Billington, “Lyndon B. Johnson and the Blacks: The Early Years,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 42, no. 1 (January 1977), pp. 26-42; T. Harry Williams, “Huey, Lyndon, and Southern Radicalism,” Journal of American History, vol. 40, no. 2 (September 1973), pp. 267-93.

318 [“Endless chains”]: Megastates, p. 509.

[Jones]: Bascom N. Timmons, Jesse H. Jones: The Man and the Statesman (Henry Holt, 1956); Jesse H. Jones and Edward Angly, Fifty Billion Dollars: My Thirteen Years with the HFC (Macmillan, 1951).

319 [Texas oilmen]: Carl Coke Rister, Oil! Titan of the Southwest (University of Oklahoma Press, 1949); Richard O’Connor, The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur (Little, Brown, 1971); Ed Kilman and Theon Wright, Hugh Roy Cullen: A Story of American Opportunity (Prentice-Hall, 1954); Harry Hurt III, Texas Rich: The Hunt Dynasty from the Early Oil Days through the Silver Crash (Norton, 1981); John Bainbridge, The Super-Americans (Doubleday, 1961).

[Johnson’s 1948 Senate campaign]: Steinberg, chs. 28-29, “Landslide Lyndon” quoted at p. 276; Dugger, chs. 52-58.

[Johnson in the Senate]: Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power (New American Library, 1966), chs. 3-10; William S. White, The Professional: Lyndon B. Johnson (Houghton Mifflin, 1964), chs. 10-11; Kearns, Johnson, chs. 4-5 and pp. 379-84; Steinberg, Johnson, chs. 30-54; Miller, ch. 2; Alfred Steinberg, Sam Rayburn (Hawthorn Books, 1975), ch. 26; Dugger, part 12; William S. White, Citadel: The Story of The U.S. Senate (Houghton Mifflin, 1968), pp. 88-89, 101-5, 201-2, 209-10, and passim.

[Kearns on Johnson’s election as party whip]: Kearns, Johnson, p. 102.

321 [FDR and civil rights]: Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue (Oxford University Press, 1978); Raymond Wollers, Negroes and the Great Depression: The Problem of Economic Recovery (Greenwood Publishing, 1970); John B. Kirby, “The Roosevelt Administration and Blacks: An Ambivalent Legacy,” in Barton J. Bernstein and Allen J. Matusow, eds., Twentieth-Century America: Recent Interpretations, 2nd ed. (Harcourt, 1972), pp. 265-88.

[Truman and civil rights]: Donald R. McCoy and Richard T. Ruetten, Quest and Response: Minority Rights and the Truman Administration (University Press of Kansas, 1973), chs. 9, 13, and passim; Barton J. Bernstein, “The Ambiguous Legacy: The Truman Administration and Civil Rights,” in Bernstein, ed., Politics and Policies of the Truman Administration (Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 269-314.

[Sundquist on the filibuster]: Sundquist, Politics and Policy: The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (Brookings Institution, 1968), p. 222.

[Brown]: 347 U.S. 483 (1954); see also Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (Knopf, 1976); Daniel M. Berman, It Is So Ordered: The Supreme Court Rules on School Desegregation (Norton, 1966); Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950’s (Louisiana State University Press, 1969), chs. 4-5; Robert F. Burk, The Eisenhower Administration and Black Civil Rights (University of Tennessee Press, 1984), ch. 7.

322 [1950 Court decisions]: Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950); McLaunn v. Oklahoma State Regents, 339 U.S. 637 (1950).

[“If 1 failed to produce”]: quoted in Kearns, Johnson, pp. 147-48; see also Billington.

[Civil Rights Act of 1957]: Burk, ch. 10; Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969 (Columbia University Press, 1976), chs. 6-7; Sundquist, pp. 222-38; J. W. Anderson, Eisenhower, Brownell and the Congress: The Tangled Origins of the Civil Rights Bill of 1956-1957 (Inter-University Case Program/University of Alabama Press, 1964); Kearns, Johnson, pp. 146-52; Evans and Novak, ch. 7; Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Waging Peace, 1956-1961 (Doubleday, 1965), pp. 154-62; Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey (Norton, 1984), pp. 179-80. [Black registration, 1919, in Alabama]: Sundquist, pp. 244-45; see also Burk, ch. 11; Lawson, pp. 203-20; Foster Rhea Dulles, The Civil Rights Commission: 1957-1961 (Michigan State University Press, 1968).

[Little Rock]: Eisenhower, pp. 162-76; Burk, ch. 9; Tony Freyer, The Little Rock Crisis: A Constitutional Interpretation (Greenwood Press, 1984); Sherman Adams, Firsthand Report: The Story of the Eisenhower Administration (Harper, 1961), ch. 16; Bartley, ch. 14 and passim: see also John Bartlow Martin, The Deep South Says “Never” (Ballantine, 1957); James J. Kilpatrick, The Southern Case for School Segregation (Crowell-Collier Press, 1962).

323 [Struggle over strengthening the act]: see Lawson, pp. 222-49; Sundquist, pp. 238-50; Daniel M. Berman, A Bill Becomes a Law: Congress Enacts Civil Rights Legislation, 2nd ed. (Macmillan, 1966); see also Burk, ch. 11.

[“Very little faith”]: quoted in Sundquist, p. 243.

[Kennedy and civil rights]: Carl M. Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction (Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 11-29; Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (Harper, 1965), pp. 470-72; Burns, Profile, pp. 200-6; Parmet, Jack, pp. 408-14.

324 [“Shaped primarily”]: quoted in Parmel, Jack, p. 409.

[Campaign for Democratic nomination]: ibid., chs. 24-27, 29; Theodore C. Sorensen, “Election of 1960,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968 (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 4, pp. 3450-54, 3456-61; Sorensen, Kennedy, chs. 4-5; Schlesinger, Thousand Days, chs. 1-2; Solberg, ch. 20; Evans and Novak, chs. 11-13; Whalen, pp. 443-56; Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (Atheneum, 1961), chs. 2, 4-6; Wall Anderson, Campaigns: Cases in Political Conflict (Goodyear Publishing, 1970), ch. 10.

[“DearJack”]: quoted in Parmet, Jack, p. 439.

[“All of us”]: ibid., p. 508.

325 [Johnson’s selection as running mate]: Schlesinger, Thousand Days, pp. 39-57; Herbert S. Parmet, JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Dial Press, 1983), pp. 21-30; Sorensen, Kennedy, pp. 162-66; Burner and West, pp. 85-88; Miller, pp. 254-60.

[“Little shit-ass”]: quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), p. 210. [“Evil threat”]: quoted in Parmet, JFK, p. 34.

[Truman and Roosevelt defections]: Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone (Norton, 1972), pp. 292-97; Marie B. Hecht, Beyond the Presidency: The Residues of Power (Macmillan, 1976), pp. 144-45; New York Times, July 3, 1960, pp. 1, 18-19; Truman quoted on “prearranged affair” at p. 1.

325-6 [Kennedy-Roosevelt reconciliation]: Lash, pp. 297-99, Kennedy quoted at p. 297; Parmet, JFK, pp. 35-36.

326 [Nixon’s nomination]: Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962 (Simon and Schuster, 1987), ch. 24; Sorensen, “Election,” pp. 3454-56, 3461-69; White, chs. 3, 7.

[1960 campaign]: Sorensen, “Election,” pp. 3461-69; Sorensen, Kennedy, chs. 7-8; Ambrose, Nixon, chs. 25-26; Schlesinger, Thousand Days, ch. 3; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 211-21; Parmet, JFK, ch. 2; Burk, ch. 12; Eisenhower, ch. 25; White, part 2; Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (Doubleday, 1962), pp. 293-426; Fawn M. Brodie, Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (Norton, 1981), pp. 410-34; Evans and Novak, ch. 14; Brauer, ch. 2; Robert A. Divine, Foreign Policy and U.S. Presidential Elections, 1952-1960 (New Viewpoints, 1974), pp. 183-287; Eric F. Goldman, “The 1947 Kennedy-Nixon ‘Tube City’ Debate,” Saturday Review, vol. 4, no. 2 (October 16, 1976), pp. 12-13.

326 [Kennedy on separation of church and state]: quoted in Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 190; see also Fuchs, pp. 179-82.

[1960 election results]: Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 4, p. 3562; see also Bernard Cosman, “Presidential Republicanism in the South, 1960,” Journal of Politics, vol. 24, no. 2 (May 1962), pp. 303-22.

The Invisible Latins

[Kennedy’s inaugural address]: January 20, 1961, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962-64), vol. 1, pp. 1-3.

328 [Kennedy on Alliance for Progress]: March 13, 1961, in ibid., vol. 1, pp. 170-75, quoted at pp. 172, 175.

[“Heard such words”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 205. [Coolidge’s intervention in Nicaragua]: L. Ethan Ellis, Republican Foreign Policy, 1921-1933 (Rutgers University Press, 1968), pp. 252-61; Harold N. Denny, Dollars for Bullets: The Story of American Rule in Nicaragua (1929; reprinted by Greenwood Press, 1980); Gregorio Selser, Sandino (Monthly Review Press, 1981); William Kamman, A Search for Stability: United States Diplomacy Toward Nicaragua, 1925-1933 (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968).

[Hoover and Stimson in Latin America]: Bryce Wood, The Making of the Good Neighbor Policy (Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 123-28, 131-35; Donald M. Dozer, Are We Good Neighbors?: Three Decades of Inter-American Relations, 1930-1960 (University of Florida Press, 1959), pp. 9-16; Ellis, ch. 8.

[FDR and the Good Neighbor]: Wood; Dozer, chs. 1-4; Irwin F. Gellman, Roosevelt and Batista: Good Neighbor Diplomacy in Cuba, 1933-1945 (University of New Mexico Press, 1973.)

[Latin America in the American consciousness]: see D. H. Radier, El Gringo: The Yankee Image in Latin America (Chilton Co., 1962), p. 3 and passim.

329 [Figures of Latin poverty]: Samuel Shapiro, Invisible Latin America (Beacon Press, 1963), p. 3 and chs. 1-7 passim; see also Tad Szulc, The Winds of Revolution: Latin America Today—and Tomorrow (Praeger, 1963), ch. 2; Robert J. Alexander, Today’s Latin America (Anchor Books, 1962), pp. 57-83; Nathan L. Whetten, Guatemala: The Land and the People (Yale University Press, 1961), parts 2-3.

[“Culture of poverty”]: Oscar Lewis, “The Culture of Poverty,” in Arthur I. Blaustein and Roger R. Woock, eds., Man Against Poverty: World War III (Vintage, 1968), pp. 260-74, esp. pp. 264-68; see also Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (Basic Books, 1959); Lewis, The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (Random House, 1961); Lewis, La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty—San Juan and New York (Random House, 1966).

[Mexican oil dispute]: see Wood, chs. 8-9; Robert F. Smith, The United States and Revolutionary Nationalism in Mexico, 1916-1932 (University of Chicago Press, 1972); Harlow S. Person, Mexican Oil: Symbol of Recent Trends in International Relations (Harper, 1942); Ellis, pp. 229-52.

329-30 [Forms of government in Latin America]: Shapiro, pp. 18-24, quoted at p. 23.

330 [Cuban revolt against Spain]: Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (Harper, 1971), book 3; David F. Trask, The War with Spain, 1898 (Macmillan, 1981); Philip S. Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism, 1891-1902, 2 vols. (Monthly Review Press, 1972).

[U.S. intervention in Cuba]: Thomas, books 4-8, 10 passim; Henry Wriston, “A Historical Perspective,” in John Plank, ed., Cuba and the United States: Long-Range Perspectives (Brookings Institution, 1967), pp. 1-30; Robert F. Smith, The United States and Cuba: Business and Diplomacy, 1917-1960 (Bookman Associates, 1960), esp. chs. 10-11; Wood, chs. 2-3; Gellman; William Appleman Williams, “The Influence of the United States on the Development of Modern Cuba,” in Robert F. Smith, ed., Background to Revolution: The Development of Modern Cuba (Knopf, 1966), pp. 187-94.

330 [“Cheating, mañana lot”]: quoted in Wriston, p. 13.

[Figures of U.S. companies’ control of Cuban economy]: Shapiro, p. 75.

[U.S. investment as one-third Cuban GNP]: ibid.

330-1 [Cuban sugar-mill workers and the jobless]: see Thomas, p. 1109.

331 [Castro’s revolution]: ibid., book 8 passim; Robert F. Smith, “Castro’s Revolution: Domestic Sources and Consequences,” in Plank, pp. 45-68; Herbert L. Matthews, The Cuban Story (George Braziller, 1961); Warren Miller, 90 Miles from Home: The Face of Cuba Today (Little, Brown, 1961); Tad Szulc, Fidel (Morrow, 1986), parts 1-3.

[U.S.-Cuban relations after revolution]: Thomas, chs. 98-102 passim; Richard E. Welch, Jr., Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959-1961 (University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Philip W. Bonsai, Cube, Castro, and the United States (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971); see also F. Parkinson, Latin America, the Cold War, & the World Powers, 1945-1973 (Sage Publications, 1974), ch. 5.

[Plans for CIA-backed invasion]: Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story (Jonathan Cape, 1979), chs. 1-2 passim; Brodie, ch. 27; Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President (Simon and Schuster, 1984), pp. 504-7, 556-57, 582-84, 608-10.

[The “Guatemala model”]: see Lucien S. Vandenbroucke, “Anatomy of a Failure: The Decision to Land at the Bay of Pigs,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 99, no. 3 (Fall 1984), pp. 471-91, esp. pp. 474-75; Richard H. Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention (University of Texas Press, 1982), esp. pp. 188-97; Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs (Norton, 1987), esp. ch. 1.

[Kennedy on Castro]: Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace, Allan Nevins, ed. (Harper, 1960), pp. 132, 133.

[Nixon on eliminating “cancer”]: Nixon, pp. 352-53.

[“Kennedy Asks Aid”]: New York Times, October 21, 1960, p. 1; see also Nixon, pp. 353-54.

[Nixon on Kennedy’s proposal]: New York Times, October 22, 1960, p. 8; see also Nixon, pp. 354-57.

[JFK’s “middle way”]: see Wyden, pp. 92, 99-101, 149-52, and chs. 3-4 passim; see also Schlesinger, Thousand Days, ch. 10 passim; Sorensen, Kennedy, pp. 294-98. [Advisers’group-think]: Vandenbroucke; Wyden, pp. 314-16.

332 [Bay of Pigs invasion] Wyden, chs. 5-7; Haynes B. Johnson, The Bay of Pigs: Brigade 2506 (Norton, 1964); Higgins, esp. ch. 8; Thomas, ch. 06; Parmet, JFK, ch. 7; Parkinson, ch. 6; Schlesinger, Thousand Days, ch. 11; John Bartlow Martin, Adlai Stevenson and the World (Doubleday, 1977), pp. 622-36; Beatrice Bishop Berle and Travis Beal Jacobs, eds., Navigating the Rapids, 1918-1971: From the Papers of Adolf A. Berle (Harcourt, 1973), pp. 740-43; Wills, Kennedy Imprisonment, chs. 18-19; Szulc, Fidel, pp. 532-61.

[“An old saying”]: quoted in Wyden, p. 305.

[“All my life”]: quoted in Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 309.

[Paris and Vienna summits, Berlin crisis and war fears, summer 1961]: Schlesinger, Thousand Days, chs. 14-15; Parmel, JFK pp. 183-202; Jack M. Schick, The Berlin Crisis, 1958-1962 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), chs. 5-6; Jean E. Smith, The Defense of Berlin (Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), chs. 11-12 passim; Robert M. Slusser, The Berlin Crisis of 1961 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Ralph G. Martin, Hero for Our Time: An Intimate Story of the Kennedy Years (Macmillan, 1983), ch. 18; Charles de Gaulle, Memoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor, Terence Kilmartin, trans. (Simon and Schuster, 1971), pp. 254-60; Strobe Talbott, ed. and trans., Khrushchev Remembers (Little, Brown, 1970-74), vol. 2, pp. 487-509; Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions: The Presidential Politics of John F. Kennedy (David McKay, 1976), pp. 64-82; Alexander L. George and Richard Smoke, Deterrence in American Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (Columbia University Press, 1977), ch. 14; Montague Kern et al., The Kennedy Crises: The Press, the Presidency, and Foreign Policy (University of North Carolina Press, 1983), part 3; “Gun Thy Neighbor?,” Time, vol. 78, no. 7 (August 18, 1961), p. 58; “The Sheltered Life,” Time, vol. 78, no. 16 (October 20, 1961), pp. 21-25.

[“Shake her hand first”]: quoted in Parmet, JFK, p. 187.

[“Missile gap”]: see George and Smoke, pp. 449-59; Arnold L. Horelick and Myron Rush, Strategic Tower and Soviet Foreign Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1966), chs. 8-9 passim; Roy E. Licklider, “The Missile Gap Controversy,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 85, no. 4 (December 1970), pp. 600-15; see also Ambrose, Eisenhower, pp. 312-14, 561-63.

[Kennedy-McNamara discussions]: Parmet, JFK, p. 196.

[Kennedy’s address]: July 25, 1961, in Kennedy Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 533-50; Parmet, JFK, p. 197.

[Truman on address]: quoted in Parmet, JFK, p. 198.

[Roosevelt on civilian defense and negotiations]: ibid.; Lash, p. 319.

[Berlin Wall]: Schick, pp. 172-73; Smith, Defense, ch. 13; George and Smoke, pp. 437-42; Schlesinger, Thousand Days, pp. 394-97.

[Cuban missile crisis]: David Detzer, The Brink: The Missile Crisis, 1962 (Crowell, 1979); Elie Abel, The Missile Crisis (Lippincott, 1966); Abram Chayes, The Cuban Missile Crisis (Oxford University Press, 1974); Herbert S. Dinnerstein, The Making of a Missile Crisis: October 1962 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Robert F. Kennedy, Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Norton, 1969); Parmet, JFK, ch. 12; Martin, Stevenson, pp. 719-48; Sorensen, Kennedy, ch. 24; Thomas, chs. 107-10; Khrushchev Remembers, vol. 1, ch. 20, and vol. 2, pp. 509-14; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, ch. 22; Szulc, Fidel, pp. 562-92; Parkinson, ch. 8; Jerome H. Kahan and Anne K. Long, “The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Study of Its Strategic Context,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 87, no. 4 (December 1973), pp. 564-90; Roberta Wohlstetter, “Cuba and Pearl Harbor: Hindsight and Foresight,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 43, no. 4 (July 1965), pp. 691-707; George and Smoke, ch. 15; Andrés Suárez, Cuba: Castroism and Communism, 1959-1966, Joel Carmichael and Ernest Halperin, trans. (MIT Press, 1967), ch. 7; Carl A. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957-1964 (Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), ch. 8; Kern et al., part 4; Wills, chs. 21-22; Miroff, pp. 82-100; Raymond L. Garthoff, Reflections on the Cuban Missile Crisis (Brookings Institution, 1987); J. Anthony Lukas, “Class Reunion: Kennedy’s Men Relive the Cuban Missile Crisis,” New York Times Magazine, August 30, 1987, pp. 22-27, 51, 58-61, esp. pp. 58, 61.

[“Bullfight critics”]: quoted in Parmet, JFK, p. 286.

[Robert Kennedy on lessons learned]: Thirteen Days, pp. 124, 126.

The Revolutionary Asians

[“To those new states”]: Kennedy Public Papers, vol. 1, p. 1.

[“Lenin or any of the Soviet”]: Charles Bohlen, quoted in Parmet, JFK, p. 191.

335-6 [Khrushchev on Kennedy]: Khrushchev Remembers, vol. 2, p. 495.

336 [U.S. and Cuba after missile crisis]: see Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, ch. 23; Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, The Fish Is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro (Harper, 1981); K. S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, Arnold Pomerans, ed. (Hill and Wang, 1970), pp. 270-87.

[Debray]: Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?: Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America, Bobbye Ortiz, trans. (Monthly Review Press, 1967); see also Hartmut Ramm, The Marxism of Regis Debray: Between Lenin and Guevara (Regents Press of Kansas, 1978), esp. ch. 4; Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, eds., Regis Debray and the Latin American Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 1968).

[Guevara]: Daniel James, Ché Guevara (Stein & Day, 1969); Luis J. Gonzalez and Gustavo A. Sanchez Salazar, The Great Rebel: Che Guevara in Bolivia, Helen R. Lane, trans. (Grove Press, 1969); Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “La Guerra de Guerrillas,” in Franklin M. Osanka, ed.. Modern Guerrilla Warfare (Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), pp. 336-75; see also Parkinson, pp. 215-18; Karol, ch. 4.

[Alliance for Progress]: see Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onís, The Alliance That Lost Its Way: A Critical Report on the Alliance for Progress (Quadrangle, 1970); Department of Economic Affairs, Pan American Union, The Alliance for Progress and Latin-American Development Prospects: A Five-Year Review, 1961-1965 (Johns Hopkins Press, 1967); Szulc, Winds of Revolution, ch. 6; Rader, ch. 9; Miroff, pp. 110-42; Schlesinger, Thousand Days, ch. 8; Abraham F. Lowenthal, “‘Liberal,’ ‘Radical,’ and ‘Bureaucratic’ Perspectives on U.S. Latin American Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Retrospect,” in Julio Cotler and Richard R. Fagen, eds., Latin America and the United States: The Changing Political Realities (Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 212-35; Heraclio Bonilla, “Commentary on Lowenthal,” in ibid., pp. 236-37.

337 [Stevenson’s missile crisis proposal]: see Martin, Stevenson and the World, pp. 723-24.

[American Revolution in Asia]: Richard B. Morris, The Emerging Nations and the American Revolution (Harper, 1970), pp. 199-205, Nagasaki report quoted at p. 200, Sun Yat-sen at p. 202, Mao at pp. 204, 205.

337-8 [1942 poll on locations of China and India]: Gary R. Hess, America Encounters India, 1941-1947 (Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), p. 2.

338 [Churchill on limited application of Atlantic Charter]: ibid., pp. 28-29.

[FDR and India during World War II]: ibid.; Christopher Thome, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1978), chs. 8, 14, 21, 28; see also, generally, Louis.

[“Dear Friend”]: quoted in Hess, pp. 68-69.

[“Restore to India”]: cable of July 25, 1942, quoted in ibid., p. 76.

[“1,100,000,000 potential enemies”]: quoted in ibid., p. 155.

[Postwar Indian criticism of U.S.]: see ibid., pp. 163-72 passim.

339 [Gandhi’s “congratulatory” telegram]: quoted in ibid., p. 155.

[Roosevelt’s voyage to India]: Eleanor Roosevelt, India and the Awakening East (Harper, 1953); Lash, pp. 195-205.

[Indian conditions]: see Nair; Bourke-White; Ronald Segal, The Anguish of India (Stein & Day, 1965); Chester Bowles, Ambassador’s Report (Harper, 1954); Amlam Dalta, “India,” in Adamantios A. Pepelasis et al., Economic Development: Analysis and Case Studies (Harper, 1961), ch. 13; Donald K. Faris, To Plow with Hope (Harper, 1958), esp. part 1.

[Senator Kennedy’s anticolonial speeches]: see Schlesinger, Thousand Days, pp. 507-8; Parmet, Jack, pp. 399-408; Burns, Profile, pp. 193-200.

[Representative Kennedy’s tour of Asia]: Parmet, Jack, pp. 226-28; Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 522; see also W. W. Rostow, The Diffusion of Power: An Essay in Recent History (Macmillan, 1972), p. 106.

[“Key area”]: Schlesinger, Thousand Days, p. 522.

[Foreign aid to India]: P. J. Eldridge, The Politics of Foreign Aid in India (Schocken, 1970), passim; see also Segal, ch. 4; Rostow, ch. 20.

340 [India and the Soviet Union]: see Eldridge, ch. 4 and passim; Bowles, chs. 15-16; Arthur Stein, India and the Soviet Union: The Nehru Era (University of Chicago Press, 1969); Robert H. Donaldson, Soviet Policy towards India: Ideology and Strategy (Harvard University Press, 1974), chs. 3-5; see also Robert Trumbull, As I See India (William Sloane Associates, 1956), ch. 17.

[Indian polls on U.S. and Soviet prestige]: see Eldridge, pp. 98-111 passim. [Chinese-Indian border conflict]: Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (Pantheon, 1970); John Kenneth Galbraith, Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years (Houghton Mifflin, 1969), chs. 19-22.

[Nehru in the U.S., 1961]: Schlesinger, Thousand Days, pp. 523-26; Kennedy quoted at p. 526; Galbraith, pp. 245-51; India Information Services, The Prime Minister Comes to America (Information Service of India, n.d.).

[Jackie Kennedy in India and Pakistan]: Galbraith, pp. 305-33 passim; Schlesinger, Thousand Days, pp. 530-31; Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 383.

341 [Budding revolution in Southeast Asia]: see Osborne, esp. chs. 3-4; Erich H. Jacoby, Agrarian Unrest in Southeast Asia (Columbia University Press, 1949); Frank N. Trager, ed., Marxism in Southeast Asia: A Study of Four Countries (Stanford University Press, 1959); Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff, The Left Wing in Southeast Asia (William Sloane Associates, 1950).

[Ho and the American Declaration of Independence]: see Marvin E. Gettleman et al., eds., Vietnam and America: A Documentary History (Grove Press, 1985), pp. 39-42; Morris, p. 220; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam (Viking, 1983), pp. 135-36; see also Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh, Peter Wiles, trans. (Random House. 1968), ch. 14; David V. J. Bell and Allen E. Goodman, “Vietnam and the American Revolution,” Yale Review, vol. 61, no. l (October 1971), pp. 26-34.

341 [Roosevelt and Indochina]: Gary R. Hess, “Franklin Roosevelt and Indochina,” Journal of American History, vol. 59, no. 2 (September 1972), pp. 353-68; Walter LaFeber, “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Indochina, 1942-45,” American Historical Review, vol. 80, no. 5 (December 1975), pp. 1277-95; Thorne, chs. 7, 13, 20, 27.

[“Cheerful fecklessness”]: quoted in Hess, “Roosevelt and Indochina,” p. 356.

342 [U.S. and Indochina, Truman and Eisenhower Administrations]: George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (Knopf, 1986), chs. 1-4; Karnow, chs. 4-6; Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1973), chs. 15-16; Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Brookings Institution, 1979), pp. 36-68; K. M. Kail, What Washington Said: Administration Rhetoric and the Vietnam War, 1949-1969 (Harper, 1973), passim; Ronald H. Spector, Advice and Support: The Early Years of the United States Army in Vietnam, 1941-1960 (Free Press, 1985), parts 2-3; Jeanette P. Nichols, “United States Aid to South and Southeast Asia, 1950-1960,” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 32, no. 2 (1963), pp. 171-84.

[President Kennedy and Indochina]: Kahin, chs. 5-6; Karnow, chs. 7-8; Gelb and Betts, ch. 3; Schlesingcr, Thousand Days, chs. 13, 20; Kail, passim; David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (Random House, 1972), chs. 1-16; William J. Rust, Kennedy in Vietnam (Scribner, 1985); Richard J. Walton, Cold War and Counterrevolution: The Foreign Policy of John F. Kennedy (Viking, 1972), ch. 10; Kern et al., parts 2, 5; Maxwell D. Taylor, Swords and Plowshares (Norton, 1972), chs. 17-18, 23; Ralph L. Stavins, “Kennedy’s Private War,” New York Review of Books, vol. 17, no. 1 (July 22, 1971), pp. 20-32; Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation (Doubleday, 1967), part 9.

343 [“There are limits”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 705. [Kennedy on danger of escalation]: see Kahin, p. 138.

[Kennedy and Diem coup]: Rust, chs. 6-10; Kahin, ch. 6; Schlesinger, Thousand Days, pp. 981-98; Karnow, ch. 8.

[“Thwart a change”]: quoted in Karnow, p. 295.

344 [Kennedy Administration assumptions about Third World aspirations]: see Robert A. Pakenham, Liberal America and the Third World (Princeton University Press, 1973), esp. pp. 59-85 and chs. 3-4.

[Bowles on Kennedy Administration]: Bowles, Promises to Keep: My Years in Public Life, 1941-1969 (Harper, 1971), pp. 435-36, quoted at p. 435; see also Bowles, “Reminiscences,” Oval History Project, Columbia University (1963), pp. 841, 846.

8. Striding Toward Freedom

[“That institutional arrangement”]: Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (Harper, 1942), p. 269.

[Erikson on Gandhi and his followers]: see Erik H. Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (Norton, 1969), p. 408; see also Richard H. Solomon, Mao’s Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (University of California Press, 1971).

Onward, Christian Soldiers

[Martin Luther King, Jr., other leaders, and the civil rights struggle]: Primary correspondence (1955-68), esp. box 1, King Library and Archives, Martin Luther King, Jr., Center, Atlanta.

[Parks]: Howell Raines, My Soul Is Rested: Movement Days in the Deep South Remembered (Putnam, 1977), pp. 40-42, 44; David L. Lewis, King (Praeger, 1970), pp. 47-48; George R. Metcalf, Black Profiles (McGraw-Hill, 1968), pp. 255-64.

[“Time had just come”]: Parks radio interview with Sidney Roger, 1956 (Pacifica Radio Archive, Los Angeles); Raines, p. 44.

349 [Highlander]: Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (Free Press, 1984), pp. 139-57; Frank Adams and Myles Horton, Unearthing Seeds of Fire: The Idea of Highlander (John F. Blair, 1975).

[“A unified society”]: quoted in Adams and Horton, p. 122.

349 [Montgomery boycott]: Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (Harper, 1958); Lewis, ch. 3; Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper, 1982), pp. 64-107; Morris, pp. 40-63; Raines, book 1, ch. 1.

[“Beat this thing”]: Raines, p. 44.

[“Gift of laughing people”]: King, Stride, p. 74.

[King]: David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Morrow, 1986); Oates; Lewis; Hanes Walton, Jr., The Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Greenwood Publishing, 1971); August Meier, “The Conservative Militant,” in C. Eric Lincoln, ed., Martin Luther King, Jr. (Hill and Wang, 1970), pp. 144-56; Sidney M. Willhelm, “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Black Experience in America,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 10, no. 1 (September 1979), pp. 3-19.

350 [“Old Testament patriarch”]: Oates, p. 8.

[“Real father”]: quoted in ibid., p. 12.

[King’s studies]: see ibid., pp. 17-41; David J. Garrow, “The Intellectual Development of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Influences and Commentaries,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, vol. 40 (January 1986), pp. 5-20; John J. Ansbro, Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Making of a Mind (Orbis Books, 1982).

351 [King’s address at mass meeting]: King, Stride, pp. 61-63, quoted at p. 63; see also Oates, pp. 69-72.

[“Military precision”]: quoted in King, Stride, p. 77.

[“My feet is tired”]: quoted in Oates, pp. 76-77.

351-2 [King and nonviolence]: ibid., pp. 23, 30-33, 77-79; Lewis, ch. 4 passim; Ansbro, esp. chs. 4, 7; Walton, esp. ch. 4; Warren E. Steinkraus, “Martin Luther King’s Personalism and Nonviolence,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 34, no. 1 (January-March 1973, pp. 97-111.

[Till]: Oates, p. 62.

[White southern ideology]: see W. F. Cash, The Mind of the South (Knopf, 1941); I. A. Newby, Jim Crow’s Defense: Anti-Negro Thought in America, 1900-1930 (Louisiana State University Press, 1965); Lawrence J. Friedman, “The Search for Docility: Racial Thought in the White South, 1861-1917,” Phylon, vol. 31, no. 3 (Fall 1970), pp. 313-23; Neil R McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 1954-1964 (University of Illinois Press, 1971), part 3 passim; James G. Cook, The Segregationists (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1962); Julia K. Blackwelder, “Southern White Fundamentalists and the Civil Rights Movement,” Phylon, vol. 40, no. 4 (Winter 1979), pp. 334-41; David C. Colby, “White Violence and the Civil Rights Movement,” in Laurence W. Moreland et al., eds., Blacks in Southern Politics (Praegcr, 1987), pp. 31-48; Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901; reprinted by Arno Press, 1969); James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (Harcourt, 1964); John Hope Franklin and Isidore Starr, eds., The Negro in Twentieth Century America (Vintage, 1967), pp. 34-38; Reese Cleghorn, “The Segs,” in Harold Hayes, ed., Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties (McCall Publishing, 1969), pp. 651-68; Bertram W. Doyle, The Etiquette of Race Relations in the South: A Study in Social Control (1937 reprinted by Kennikat Press, 1968).

[“Other South”]: Carl N. Degler, The Other South: Southern Dissenters in the Nineteenth Century (Harper, 1974); William Peters, The Southern Temper (Doubleday, 1959), esp. chs. 7, 10.

[“I’m a Jew”]: quoted in Peters, p. 126.

[Golden’s plan]: ibid., pp. 125-26.

[“Great period of Southern dissent”]: Degler, p. 371.

[“Kill Him!”] Peters, p. 117.

[Racist stereotypes]: see Cook, Segregationists, pp. 15, 17, 18, 51, 59, 213, 223, and passim.

[Racism, anti-Semitism, anticommunism]: see McMillen, ch. 10; Cook, Segregationists, chs. 4, 7, and pp. 293-303.

[Blacks in southern textbooks]: Melton McLaurin, “Images of Negroes in Deep South Public School State History Texts,” Phylon, vol. 32, no. 3 (Fall 1971), pp. 237-46, “bright rows” quoted at p. 239; see also Franklin and Starr, pp. 45-52.

354 [Citizens’ Commis]: McMillen; Cook, Segregationists, ch. 2; Samuel DuBois Cook, “Political Movements and Organizations,” in Avery Leiserson, ed., The American South in The ***’s (Praeger, 1964), pp. 130-53, esp. pp. 133-44; see also David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The First Century of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865-1965 (Doubleday,1965), esp. chs. 46-48; Wyn Craig Wade, The Fiery Cross: The Ku Klux Klan in America (Simon and Schuster, 1987), chs. 10-12.

354 [Councils’ platform]: quoted in Cook, Segregationists, p. 51.

[Southern politics]: V. O. Key, Jr., Southern Politics in State and Nation (Knopf, 1949); Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s (Louisiana State University Press, 1969); Bartley and Hugh D. Graham, Southern Politics and the Second Reconstruction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), esp. ch. 3; Cook, “Political Movements”; Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics (Harcourt, 1966); Earl Black, “Southern Governors and Political Change: Campaign Stances on Racial Segregation and Economic Development, 1950-1969,” Journal of Polities, vol. 33 (1971), pp. 708-19; McMillen, esp. ch. 14; Cash, passim; Cook, Segregationists, esp. ch. 8; Silver, chs. 1-3; Robert Sherrill, Gothic Politics in the Deep South: Stars of the New Confederacy (Grossman, 1968).

[Key on southern politics]: Key, p. 4.

355 [“Employing the powerful weapons”]: Cook, “Political Movements,” p. 136.

[Ashmore on restrictive legislation]: ibid., p. 133.

[Black churches]: Morris, pp. 4-12; Benjamin E. Mays and Joseph W. Nicholson, The Negro’s Church (1933; reprinted by Negro Universities Press, 1969), ch. 17 and passim; Charles V. Hamilton, The Black Preacher in America (Morrow, 1972); James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Seabury Press, 1969), ch. 4; William H. Pipes, Say Amen, Brother!: Old-Time Negro Preaching, A Study in American Frustration (1951; reprinted by Negro Universities Press, 1970).

[Frazier on Negro church]: quoted in Morris, p. 60.

[“Common church culture”]: ibid., p. 11.

356 [Formation of SCLC and its strategic foundering]: Garrow, Bearing, ch. 2; Oates, pp. 122-24, 129-30, 144-46, 156-58; Morris, chs. 4-5; Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1980 (Hill and Wang, 1981), pp. 64-66; Louis E. Lomax, The Negro Revolt (Harper, 1962), pp. 92-96.

[“Unite community leaders”]: Morris, p. 46. [“Rare talent”]: Lerone Bennett, quoted in ibid., p. 94.

[CORE]: August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942-1968 (Oxford University Press, 1973), part 1; Morris, pp. 128-38. [Lunch-counter sit-ins]: Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Beacon Press, 1964), ch. 2; Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Harvard University Press, 1981), ch. 1; Morris, ch. 9; Raines, book 1, ch. 2 passim; Meier and Rudwick, ch. 4; Miles Wolff, Lunch at the 5 & 10: The Greensboro Sit-ins (Stein & Day, 1970); William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (Oxford University Press, 1980), ch. 3.

[“I’m sorry”]: quoted in Raines, p. 76.

357 [“Instilled within each other”]: Franklin McCain, quoted in ibid., p. 75. [“Like a fever”]: quoted in Carson, p. 12.

[“Time to move”]: quoted in Morris, p. 201.

[Baker]: Morris, pp. 102-4; Zinn, pp. 32-33; Ellen Cantarow and Susan Gushee O’Malley, “Ella Baker: Organizing for Civil Rights,” in Cantarow et al., Moving the Mountain: Women Working for Social Change (Feminist Press/McGraw-Hill, 1980), pp. 52-93; Mary King, Freedom Song (Morrow, 1987), pp. 42-43.

[Baker and SCLC]: see Morris, pp. 103-4, 112-15, Cantarow and O’Malley, p. 84; Garrow, Bearing, pp. 120-21, 131, 141.

358 [Formation of SNCC]: Morris, pp. 215-21; Carson, ch. 2; James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Macmillan, 1972), ch. 29; Raines, book 1, ch. 2 passim, and book 1, ch. 5; Zinn, pp. 33-36; Oates, pp. 154-55.

[“Direct their own affairs”]: Baker interview with Clayborne Carson, New York, May 5, 1972.

[“Foundation of our purpose”]: SNCC founding statement, in Judith C. Albert and Stewart E. Albert, eds., The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (Praeger, 1984), quoted at p. 113.

[“He is the movement”]: Ella Baker, “Developing Community Leadership,” in Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America (Pantheon, 1972), quoted at p. 351. [“We are all leaders”]: quoted in Morris, p. 231.

[An American Dilemma]: Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (“Twentieth Anniversary Edition”: Harper, 1962), quoted at p. 1023.

[King on Bay of Pigs]: quoted in Oates, p. 173.

[King-Kennedy meeting]: ibid., p. 172; see also Harris Wofford, Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980), pp. 128-29.

[The Kennedy White House and the civil rights movement]: Burke Marshall Papers, esp. boxes 17-19, John F. Kennedy Library.

[“Or the Devil himself”]: quoted in Carl M. Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction (Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 48.

[‘“Terrible ambivalence”’]: Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 930; see also Brauer, ch. 3; James L. Sundquist, Politics and Policy: The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (Brookings Institution, 1968), pp. 256-59; John Hart, “Kennedy, Congress and Civil Rights,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 13, no. 1 (April 1979), pp. 165-78; Steven F. Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969 (Columbia University Press, 1976), ch. 9; Wofford, ch. 5; Bruce Miroff, Pragmatic Illusions: The Presidential Politics of John F. Kennedy (David McKay, 1976), ch. 6 passim; Victor S. Navasky, Kennedy Justice (Atheneum, 1971), pp. 96-99.

Marching as to War

361 [1961 Freedom Rides]: Zinn, ch. 3; Carson, ch. 3; Raines, book 1, ch. 3; Morris, pp. 231-36; James Peck, Freedom Ride (Simon and Schuster, 1962), chs. 8-9; Forman, ch. 18; Brauer, pp. 98-111; James Farmer,  Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement (Arbor House, 1985), chs. 17-18; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), pp. 294-300; Wofford, pp. 151-58; Meier and Rudwick, ch. 5; Oates, pp. 174-78.

[“Movement on wheels”]: Raines, p. 110.

[“As we entered”]: Peck, p. 128.

[FBI informant on beatings]: Gary Thomas Rowe, Jr., quoted in Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 295.

[“Stop them”]: quoted in Wofford, p. 153.

[“Have been cooling off”]: quoted in Farmer, p. 206.

[“All on probation”]: ibid., p. 207.

[King-Kennedy exchange]: quoted in Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 299-300.

364 [Albany]: Carson, ch. 5; Garrow, Bearing, ch. 4; Morris, pp. 239-50; Oates, pp. 188- 201; Brauer, pp. 168-79; Zinn, ch. 7; Forman, ch. 33.

[“Just speak for us”]: William G. Anderson, quoted in Oates, p. 189.

[Sherrod on the singing]: quoted in Forman, p. 247; see also Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Songs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1955-1965: A Study in Culture History” (doctoral dissertation; Howard University, 1975), chs. 2, 3, 5; Reagon, “In Our Hands: Thoughts on Black Music,” Sing Out!, vol. 24, no. 6 (January-February 1976), pp. l ff.

[Brauer on “Pritchett’s jails”]: Brauer, p. 177.

365 [Meredith]: Metcalf, pp. 219-54; Brauer, ch. 7; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 317- 27; Navasky, ch. 4 passim.

[“Nobody handpicked me”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 317. [Barrett on “that boy”]: ibid., p. 319.

366 [“Sense of Southern history”]: Edwin Guthman, quoted in ibid., p. 325; see also Brauer, p. 204.

[“Republic had been trapped”]: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 326.

[“Breaking out”]: quoted in ibid., p. 327.

[Black disagreements over goals and strategy]: see Carson, ch. 3 passim: Garrow, Bearing, pp. 216-30 passim; Forman, ch. 31; Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait (Harper, 1964), chs. 2, 8 passim; Lomax, ch. 12.

367 [The “magic city”]; see King, Why We Can’t Wait, pp. 37-43; Morris, pp. 257-58; Silver, passim.

[Birmingham campaign]: King, Why We Can’t Wait; Garrow, Bearing, pp. 231-64; Oates, pp. 209-43; Morris, pp. 250-74; Raines, book 1, ch. 1, part1; Forman, ch. 40. 367-8 [“Letter from Birmingham Jail”]: in King, Why We Can’t Wait, ch. 5, quoted at pp. 82, 83, 87, 91; see also Wesley T. Mott, “The Rhetoric of Martin Luther King. Jr : Letter from Birmingham Jail”, Phylon, vol. 36, no. 4 (Winter 1975), pp. 411-21.

368 [The movement and the media]: see Garrow, Bearing, pp. 247-50; Catherine A. Barnes, Journey from Jim Crow: The Desegregation of Southern Transit (Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 203; Mary King, esp. ch. 6.

[“Fan the fames”]: quoted in I.ois L. Duke, “Cultural Redefinition of News: Racial Issues in South Carolina, 1954-1984” (doctoral dissertation; University of South Carolina, 1979), p. 175.

[“Doesn’t live down here”]: quoted in Garrow, Bearing, p. 257.

369 [Kennedy on photo of dog attack]: quoted in Brauer, p. 238.

[“Above all, it is wrong”]: Special Message to the Congress on Civil Rights, February 28, 1963, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. John F. Kennedy (U.S. Government Printing Of?ìce, 1962-64), vol. 3, pp. 221-30, quoted at p. 222; see also Brauer, pp. 211-29; Theodore C. Sorensen, Kennedy (Harper, 1965), pp. 493-96; Oates, p. 214.

[King on Kennedy proposals]: quoted in Brauer, p. 228.

[Robert Kennedy’s meeting with blacks]: Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 330-35, Smith quoted at p. 332, Horne at p. 333, Kennedy at p. 334, Schlesinger at p. 335; Brauer, pp. 242-45.

370 [Tuscaloosa confrontation]: Brauer, pp. 252-59; Marshall Frady, Wallace (New American Library, 1975), pp148-70; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 337-42; see also Robert J. Norrell, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (Knopf, 1985), chs. 9-10.

[“Draw the line”]: quoted in Jody Carlson, George C. Wallace and the Politics of Powerlessness (Transaction Books, 1981), p. 24.

[“Segregation now!”]: quoted in Frady, p. 142.

[“Out-nigguhed”]: quoted in Carlson, p. 22.

[“Negro baby born”]: in Kennedy Public Papers, vol. 3, pp. 468-71, quoted at pp. 468, 469.

370-1 [Kennedy’s proposals and their reception]: June 19, 1963, in ibid., vol. 3, pp. 483-94; Sorensen, pp. 496-504; Oates, pp. 243-45; Sundquist, pp. 259-65; Brauer, pp. 245-52, 259-64, and ch10 passim: see also Steven F. Lawson, “‘I Got It from The New York Times’: Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedy Civil Rights Program,” Journal of Negro History, vol. 67, no. 2 (Summer 1982), pp. 159-72.

371 [March on Washington]: New York Times, August 29, 1963, pp. 1, 16-21; Oates, pp. 246-47, 256-64; Garrow, Bearing, pp. 265-86 passim; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 349-52; Carson, ch. 7; Brauer, pp. 272-73, 290-93; Forman, ch. 43.

[“May seem ill-timed”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 350. [Lewis’s speech at March]: Carson, pp. 91-95, quoted at p. 95.

371-2 [King’s speech at March]: Oates, pp. 261-62, quoted at p. 262.

372 [Post-March meeting with Kennedy]: Garrow, Bearing, p. 285.

[Wilkins on Kennedy]: quoted in Oates, p. 262.

[Moody]: Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (Dial, 1968), p. 275.

[“Fuck that dream”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, p. 351.

[Evers shooting and Kennedy]: New York Times, June 13, 1963, pp. 1, 12-13; ibid., June 21, 1963, p. 14; Metcalf, pp. 195-218; Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, pp. 344-45.

[Arrests in South]: see Theodore H. While, The Making of the President: 1964 (Atheneum, 1965), p. 171.

[Birmingham church bombing]: New York Times, September 16, 1963, pp. 1, 26; Oates, pp. 267-69.

372-3 [Dallas 1963]: William Manchester, The Death of a President (Harper, 1967), pp. 34-51 passim; Herbert S. Parmet, JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (Dial, 1983), pp. 340, 344-45.

373 [WANTED FOR TREASON]: quoted in Parmet, p. 340.

[Kennedy in Texas]: ibid., pp. 341-46; Manchester, book 1 passim.

373 [“That’ll add interest”]: quoted in Parmet, p. 341.

[“You know the French author”]: Moynihan papers, Nixon Administration Papers, Subject File II, excerpt from interview, December 5, 1963, uncatalogued folder.

[“Caught in cross currents”]: quoted in James MacGregor Burns, John Kennedy: A Political Profile (Harcourt, 1960), p. 155.

[“Historic crossroad”]: Mark Stern, “Black Interest Group Pressure on the Executive: John F. Kennedy as Politician,” paper prepared for delivery at the 1987 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, King quoted at p. 51. [Baker’s principle]: quoted in Mary King, p. 456 (italics added).

We Shall Overcome

[The Johnson White House and the civil rights struggle]: Burke Marshall Papers, esp. boxes 17-19, John F. Kennedy Library.

[“Talked long enough”]: in The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965-70), vol. 1, part 1, pp. 8-10, quoted at p. 9. On the ambivalence of LBJ over civil rights legislation when Vice President in 1963, as contrasted with his presidential leadership, see telephone conversation between LBJ and Theodore Sorensen, Edison Dictaphone recording, June 3, 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson Library.

376 [“Resort to arson”]: quoted in Charles Whalen and Barbara Whalen, The Longest Debate: A Legislative History of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Seven Locks Press, 1985), p. 90.

[“Nefarious bill”]: ibid., p. 91.

[Smith and “sex” amendment]: ibid., pp. 115-17; Carl M. Brauer, “Women Activists, Southern Conservatives, and the Prohibition of Sex Discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 49, no. 1 (February 1983), pp. 37-56.

[House passage of civil rights bill]: Whalen and Whalen, p. 121; Sundquist, p. 266 and p. 266 n. 144; see also Joe R. Feagin, “Civil Rights Voting by Southern Congressmen,” Journal of Politics, vol. 34, no. 2 (May 1972), pp. 484-99.

[Senate filibuster]: Whalen and Whalen, chs. 5-7; Sundquist, pp. 267-69.

[“To the last ditch”]: Russell, quoted in Whalen and Whalen, p. 142.

[Thurmond’s filibuster record]: ibid., p. 143.

377 [“Billion dollar blackjack”]: ibid., p. 145.

[Russell on lobbyists]: quoted in Sundquist, p. 268.

[Length of Senate debate]: see ibid., p. 267 n. 146.

[“Bill can’t pass”]: quoted in Whalen and Whalen, p. 148.

[Aide on LBJ and Dirksen]: quoted in Sundquist, p. 268.

377-8 [Senate approval of cloture and bill]: ibid., pp. 269-70; Whalen and Whalen, pp. 199-200; see also Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power (New American Library, 1966), pp. 76-80.

[“More abiding commitment”]: in Johnson Public Papers, vol. 1, part 2, pp. 842-44, quoted at p. 843.

[Provisions of civil rights bill]: see Whalen and Whalen, pp. 239-42 (Appendix).

378-9 [Hamer on Ruleville meeting]: Hamer, To Raise Our Bridges (KIPCO, 1967), p. 12.

379 [Hamer]: Hamer; Raines, pp. 249-55; Zinn, pp. 93-96; Susan Kling, “Fannie Lou Hamer: Baptism by Fire,” in Pam McAllister, ed., Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence (New Society, 1982), pp. 106-11; Mary King, pp. 140-44.

[“Just listenin’ at ’em”]: quoted in Raines, p. 249.

[Hamer on literacy test]: ibid., p. 250. [“Too yellow”]: Hamer, p. 12.

[Reprisals against Hamer]: ibid., p. 13; Zinn, p. 94; Raines, pp. 250-51.

[Mississippi voter registration drive]: Carson, chs. 4, 8, 9; Zinn, chs. 4-6; Forman, chs. 30, 34, 36, 38, 48; Sally Belfrage, Freedom Summer (Viking, 1965); Mary A. Rothschild, A Case of Black and White: Northern Volunteers and the Southern Freedom Summers, 1964-1965 (Greenwood Press, 1982); Meier and Rudwick, CORE, ch. 9; Emily Stoper, “The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: Rise and Fall of a Redemptive Organization,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (September 1977), pp. 13-34; Bob Moses, “Mississippi: 1961-1962,” Liberation, vol. 14, no. 9 (January 1970), pp. 7-17; Cantarow and O’Malley, pp. 86-88; Seth Cagin and Philip Dray, We Are Not Afraid (Macmillan, 1988).

379 [Baker’s mediation at Highlander]: Carson, pp. 41-42.

380 [“Born in prison”]: quoted in Zinn, p. 80.

[Hamer on jail beatings]: Raines, pp. 253-54, quoted at p. 253; Hamer, p. 14.

[Casting of “freedom ballots”]: Zinn, pp. 98-101; Carson, pp. 97-98; Forman, pp. 354-56.

[MFDP]: Carson, pp. 108-9, 117; ‘‘Belfrage, ch. 12; Hanes Walton, Jr., Black Political Parties (Free Press, 1972), pp. 80-95.

381 [“Extraordinary inner sense”]: Belfrage, p. 201.

[MFDP at Democratic convention]: Forman, pp. 384-97; Carson, pp. 123-28; Mary King, pp. 343-52; Belfrage, pp. 236-46; Walton, pp. 95-103; White, pp. 277-82; Silkoff, pp. 179-85; Evans and Novak, pp. 451-56.

[“Popcorn and seaweed”]: Belfrage, p. 240.

[“Woesome time”]: quoted in Raines, p. 252.

[“I question America”]: “The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer,” Pacifica radio program (Pacifica Radio Archive, Los Angeles).

381-2 [“Come all this way”]: quoted in Forman, p. 395.

382 [1964 election]: White, passim; John Bartlow Martin, “Election of 1964,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of American Presidential Elections, 1789-1968 (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 4, pp. 3565-94; ibid., p. 3702; Eric Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf, 1969), chs. 8-10; Evans and Novak, chs. 20-21; Robert D. Novak, The Agony of the G.O.P., 1964 (Macmillan, 1965); John H. Kessel, The Goldwater Coalition: Republican Strategies in 1964 (Bobbs-Merrill, 1968); Richard H. Rovere, The Goldwater Caper (Harcourt, 1965); Samuel A. Kirkpatrick, “Issue Orientation and Voter Choice in 1964,” Social Science Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 1 (June 1968), pp. 87-102.

[Southern black voting, 1964]: James C. Harvey, Black Civil Rights During the Johnson Administration (University and College Press of Mississippi, 1973), p. 27 (Table 1).

[Selma and Voting Rights Act]: David J. Garrow, Protest at Selma: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Voting Rights Act of 1961 (Yale University Press, 1978); Charles E. Fager, Selma 1965: The March That Changed the South (Scribner, 1974); Garrow, Bearing, ch. 7; Sundquist, pp. 271-75; Raines, book 1, ch. 4, part 2; Wofford, ch. 6; Lawson, pp. 307-22; Carson, pp. 157-62; Mary King, pp. 216-28; Oates, pp. 325-65 passim, 369-72.

383 [“Put on their walking shoes”]: quoted in Garrow, Bearing, p. 403.

[“Turning point”]: “The American Promise,” March 15, 1965, in Johnson Public Papers, vol. 2, part 1, pp. 281-87, quoted at p. 281.

[“Mudcaked pilgrims”]: Fager, p. 158.

384 [“How long?”]: quoted in ibid., p. 162.

[Murder of Viola Luizzo]: ibid., pp. 163-64; Garrow, Protest, pp. 117-18; Wade, pp. 347-54.

[“They came in darkness”]: August 6, 1965, in Johnson Public Papers, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 840-43, quoted at p. 840.

[Conflict within SNCC]: Carson, part 2 passim; Forman, chs. 62-63; Mary King, chs. 12-13 passim.

385 [Black migration, 1960-70]: Thomas L. Blair, Retreat from the Ghetto: The End of a Dream? (Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 228; see also John D. Reid, “Black Urbanization of the South,” Phylon, vol. 35, no. 3 (Fall 1974), pp. 259-67; Hollis R. Lynch, ed., The Black Urban Condition: A Documentary History, 1866-1971 (Crowell, 1973), pp. 439-40 (Appendix D).

[Black proportion of urban populations by 1960]: Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (Harper, 1965), pp. 24 (Tables 2 and 2A), p. 25 (Table 3). [Cost of being black and of discrimination]: Paul M. Siegel, “On the Cost of Being a Negro,” in John F. Kain, ed., Race and Poverty: The Economics of Discrimination (Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 60-67, quoted at p. 67; and Council of Economic Advisers, “The Economic Cost of Discrimination” (1965), in ibid., pp. 58-59.

[Clark’s Harlem]: Clark, quoted on his family’s movements at p. xv; see also U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, A Time to Listen … A Time to Act: Voices from the Ghettoes of the Nation’s Cities (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967); Paul Jacobs, Prelude to Riot: A View of Urban America from the Bottom (Random House, 1967); Daniel R. Fusfeld and Timothy Bates, The Political Economy of the Urban Ghetto (Southern Illinois University Press, 1984); Robert Coles, “Like It Is in the Alley,” in David R. Goldfield and James B. Lane, eds., The Enduring Ghetto (Lippincott, 1973), pp. 104-15; James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue Uptown,” in ibid., pp. 116-24.

385 [“Anguished Cry”]: Clark, p. xx.

[Street talk]: quoted in ibid., pp. 6, 16, 1, 4, respectively.

385-6 [Malcolm X and the Black Muslims]: Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Grove Press, 1965); George Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks (Grove Press, 1965); Eugene V. Wolfenstein, The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution (University of California Press, 1981); Louis E. Lomax, When the Word Is Given … (Greenwood Press, 1963); Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X (Harper, 1973); C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America, rev. ed. (Beacon Press, 1973); Blair, ch. 2; Oates, pp. 251-53; Hank Flick, “Malcolm X: The Destroyer and Creator of Myths,”Journal of Black Studies, vol. 12, no. 2 (December 1981), pp. 166-81; Peter Schrag, “The New Black Myths,” Harper’s, vol. 238, no. 1428 (May 1969), pp. 37-42; Lawrence L. Tyler, “The Protestant Ethic Among the Black Muslims,” Phylon, vol. 27, no. 1 (Spring 1966), pp. 5-14; Raymond Rodgers and Jimmie N. Rodgers, “The Evolution of the Attitude of Malcolm X toward Whites,” ibid., vol. 44, no. 1 (Spring 1983), pp. 108-15; Peter Goldman, “Malcolm X,” in John A. Garraty, ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography (Harper, 1974), pp. 723-24; Clifton E. Marsh, From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Transition from Separatism to Islam, 1930-1980 (Scarecrow Press, 1984); Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Black Man in America (Muhammad Mosque of Islam No. 2, 1965).

386 [From “civil rights” to “human rights”]: “The Ballot or the Bullet,” April 3, 1964, in Malcolm X Speaks, pp. 23-44, quoted at p. 34.

[“By ballots or by bullets”]: “With Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer,” December 20, 1964, in Malcolm X Speaks, p. 111;see also “Ballot or Bullet” in ibid.

[“By any means necessary”]: see Wollenstein, pp. 8-9, 324-25; Goldman in Garraty, p. 724.

[Carmichael]: Carson, pp. 162-63; Donald J. McCormack, “Stokely Carmichael and Pan-Africanism: Back to Black Power,,” Journal of Politics, vol. 35, no. 2 (May 1973), pp. 386-409; “Stokely Carmichael,” in Charles Moritz, ed., Current Biography Yearbook 1970 (H. W. Wilson Co., 1971), pp. 66-69.

[Lowndes County Freedom Organization]: Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (Vintage, 1967), ch. 5; Carson, pp. 162-66; Walton, ch. 4; “Lowndes County Freedom Organization Voting Pamphlet,” in Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, The New Radicals (Random House, 1966), pp. 143-44.

[“Comes out fighting”]: John Hulett, quoted in Carson, p. 166.

[SNCC May 1966 meeting]: ibid., pp. 191-206; Forman, ch. 54.

[Meredith march]: Garrow, Bearing, pp. 473-89; Oates, pp. 395-405; Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Harper, 1967), pp. 23-32; Carson, pp. 207-11; Paul Good, “The Meredith March,” New South, vol. 21, no. 3 (Summer 1966), pp. 2-16; Steven F. Lawson, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965-1982 (Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 49-63.

[“Highlight the need”]: quoted in Lawson, In Pursuit, p. 52.

[“Ain’t going to jail no more”]: quoted in Oates, p. 400.

[King-Carmichael exchange]: Where Do We Go, pp. 30-32, quoted at pp. 30-31.

[Assassination of Malcolm X]: Alex Haley, “Epilogue,” in Malcolm X and Haley, pp. 422-52; Marsh, p. 89.

[Black Power and divisions within movement]: Carson, chs. 14-15; Forman, chs. 47, 55; Blair, ch. 3; Carmichael and Hamilton, esp. ch. 2; Garrow, Bearing, ch. 9 passim; Walton, pp. 114-28; King, Where Do We Go, ch. 2 and passim; Meier and Rudwick, CORE, ch. 12 and Epilogue; Rhoda L. Blumberg, Civil Rights: The 1960s Freedom Struggle (Twayne, 1984), ch. 8; Julius Lester, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! (Dial, 1968); Charles V. Hamilton, “An Advocate of Black Power Defines It,” in August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, eds., Black Protest in the Sixties (Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 154-68; Ansbro, pp. 211-24; Bruce Miroff, “Presidential Leverage over Social Movements: The Johnson White House and Civil Rights,” Journal of Politics, vol. 43, no. 1 (February 1981), pp. 2-23; Joel D. Aberbach and Jack L. Walker, “The Meanings of Black Power: A Comparison of White and Black Interpretations of a Political Slogan,” American Political Science Review, vol. 64, no. 2 (June 1970), pp. 367-88; Irwin Klibaner, “The Travail of Southern Radicals: The Southern Conference Educational Fund, 1946-1976,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 49, no. 2 (May 1983), pp. 195-201; Chafe, ch. 7; Bayard Rustin, “‘Black Power’ and Coalition Politics,” Commentary, vol. 42, no. 3 (September 1966), pp. 35-40; David Danzig, “In Defense of Black Power, ” ibid., pp. 41-46.

388 [King’s shift leftward]: see Oates, pp. 365-68, 418-26, 431-43; Lewis, ch. 10 passim; see also Ansbro, ch. 7; King, Where Do We Go.

[“Reconstruction of the entire society”]: quoted in Oates, p. 442.

[CORE approval and NAACP rejection of Black Power]: Meier and Rudwick, CORE, p. 414; New York Times, July 5, 1966, pp. 1, 22; ibid., July 6, 1966, pp. 1, 14; ibid., July 10, 1966, p. 53.

9. The World Turned Upside Down

389 [Medicare]: Theodore R. Marmor, The Politics of Medicare (Aldine, 1973), esp. ch. 4; Eric F. Goldman, The Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson (Knopf, 1969), pp. 284-96; Lyndon B. Johnson, The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency, 1963-1969 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. 212-20.

[Omnibus Housing bill and creation of HUD]: John Nicholson et al., eds., Housing a Nation (Congressional Quarterly Service, 1966), pp. 60-86; Robert Taggart III, Low-Income Housing: A Critique of Federal Aid (Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), ch. 5; John B. Willmann, The Department of Housing and Urban Development (Praeger, 1967), ch. 2. [National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities]: Stephen Miller, Excellence and Equity: The National Endowment for the Humanities (University Press of Kentucky, 1984), ch. 1; Michael M. Mooney, The Ministry of Culture (Wyndham Books, 1980), pp. 46-49.

[Water Quality bill and 1965 Clean Air Act]: Clarence Davies III, The Politics of Pollution (Pegasus, 1970), pp. 38-44, 49-54; Charles O. Jones, Clean Air: The Policies and Politics of Pollution Control (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), pp. 62-66; Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1962); Frank Graham, Jr., Since Silent Spring (Houghton Mifflin, 1970), esp. part 1.

[School aid program]: Hugh Davis Graham, The Uncertain Triumph: Federal Education Policy in the Kennedy and Johnson Years (University of North Carolina Press, 1984), ch. 3 passim; Vaughn D. Bornet, The Presidency of Lyndon B Johnson (University Press of Kansas, 1983), pp. 222-24; Goldman, pp. 296-308; Johnson, pp. 206-12; New York Times, April 12, 1965, pp. 1, 22.

390 [Great Society and LBJ’s presidential style generally]: see Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (Harper, 1976), chs. 7-8; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, Lyndon B. Johnson, The Exercise of Power (New American Library, 1966), chs. 17, 19, 22; Bornet, chs. 1-2, 10; Harry McPherson, A Political Education (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1972), pp. 248-333 passim; Goldman, esp. chs. 2, 4-5, 12, and pp. 164-67; Jack Valenti, A Very Human President (Norton, 1975); Hugh Sidey, A Very Personal Presidency: Lyndon Johnson in the White House (Atheneum, 1968); Frank Cormier, LBJ: The Way He Was (Doubleday, 1977); David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (Random House, 1972), esp. ch. 20.

[Peace Corps]: Gerald T. Rice, The Bold Experiment: JFK’s Peace Corps (University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); Robert G. Carey, The Peace Corps (Praeger, 1970); David Hapgood and Meridan Bennett, Agents of Change: A Close Look at the Peace Corps (Little, Brown, 1968); Marshall Windmiller, The Peace Corps and Pax Americana (Public Affairs Press, 1970).

[U.S. personnel in Vietnam at Kennedy’s death]: Johnson, p. 42.

390-1 [American deaths in Vietnam, 1963 ]: George McT. Kahin and John W. Lewis, The United States in Vietnam (Dial, 1967), p. 188 (Table 4).

People of This Generation

391 [Scientists and the bomb]: Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Pantheon, 1985), part 3; Morton Grodzins and Eugene Rabinowitch, eds., The Atomic Age: Scientists in World and National Affairs (Basic Books, 1963); Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Movement in America, 1945-47 (University of Chicago Press, 1965); Joseph Rotblat, Scientists, the Arms Race and Disarmament (Taylor & Francis, 1982); Linus Pauling, No More War! (Dodd, Mead, 1958); Lawrence S. Winner, Rebels Against War: The American Peace Movement, 1933-1983 (Temple University Press, 1984), pp. 143-50, 165-69, 175-78, 188-90, 199-201.

[“Bridge the gap”]: Wittner, p. 251.

[CNVA]: ibid., pp. 246-50, 252-53, 261-62; see also Thomas B. Morgan, “Doom and Passion Along Rt. 45,” in Harold Hayes, ed., Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties (McCall Publishing, 1970), pp. 548-60.

[Voyage of the Phoenix]: Earle Reynolds, Forbidden Voyage (David McKay, 1961); Albert Bigelow, The Voyage of the Golden Rule: An Experiment with Truth (Doubleday, 1959); Wittner, pp. 247-50; Barbara Deming, Revolution & Equilibrium (Grossman, 1971), pp. 124-35.

[“Gigantic flash bulb”]: Reynolds, p. 61.

[Omaha Action]: Wittner, p. 262; Wilmer J. Young, “Visible Witness,” in A. Paul Hare and Herbert H. Blumberg, eds., Nonviolent Direct Action, American Cases: Social-Psychological Analyses (Corpus Books, 1968), pp. 158-70.

[New London action]: Deming, pp. 23-37; Wittner, pp. 261-62.

[March to Moscow]: Deming, pp. 51-72, Lytlle quoted at p. 69; Jules Rabin, “How We Went,” in Lillian Schlissel, ed., Conscience in America: A Documentary History of Commentions Objection in America, 1757-1967 (E. P. Dutton, 1968), pp. 376-83.

392 [Women Strike for Peace]: New York Times, November 2, 1961, p. 5; Wittner, p. 277; Amy Swerdlow, “Ladies’ Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace Versus HUAC,” Feminist Studies, vol. 8, no. 3 (Fall 1982), pp. 493-520; Walter Goodman, The Committee (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), pp. 437-42.

[SANE]: Wittner, pp. 242-46, 251-52, 257-61, 280; Robert A. Divine, Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954-1960 (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 165-69; Deming, pp. 38-50.

[1963 limited test ban]: Harold K. Jacobson and Eric Stein, Diplomats, Scientists, and Politicians: The United States and the Nuclear Test Ban Negotiations (University of Michigan Press, 1966); Glenn T. Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and the Test Ban (University of California Press, 1981); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Houghton Mifflin, 1965), ch. 17 and pp. 893-915 passim: Wittner, pp. 279-81; see also Divine.

[SDS origins and Port Huron conference]: James Miller, “Democracy is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Simon and Schuster, 1987), chs. 1-6; Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (Random House, 1973), chs. 2-4 and pp. 673-93; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, 1987), ch. 5.

[“Bones,” “widgets,” and “gizmos”]: quoted in Sale, p. 49.

393 [Port Huron Statement]: in Paul Jacobs and Saul Landau, The New Radicals (Random House, 1966), pp. 150-62, quoted at pp. 150, 152-53, 155; see also Miller, chs. 5, 8; Wini Breines, The Great Refusal: Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-68 (Praeger, 1982), esp. ch. 4; G. David Garson, “The Ideology of the New Student Left,” in Julian Foster and Durward Long, eds., Protest! Student Activism in America (Morrow, 1970), pp. 184-201; David Westby and Richard Braungart, “Activists and the History of the Future,” in ibid., pp. 158-83; Irwin Unger, The Movement: A History of the New American Left, 1959-1972 (Dodd, Mead, 1974), pp. 52-56.

[Breines on SDS goals]: Breines, p. 57.

[Freedom struggle and New Left]: see Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (Knopf, 1979); Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the Sixties (Harvard University Press, 1981 ), pp. 53-55 and ch. 12 passim; Mitchell Cohen and Dennis Hale, eds., The New Student Left (Beacon Press, 1966), pp. 50-109; see also Mario Savio, “An End to History,” in Hal Draper, Berkeley: The New Student Revolt (Grove Press, 1965), pp. 179-82.

394 [“No Honor”]: Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System (Random House, 1960), p. 12; see also Richard Flacks, “Who Protests: The Social Bases of the Student Movement,” in Foster and Long, pp. 134-57; Steven Warnecke, “American Student Politics,” Yale Review, vol. 60, no. 2 (December 1970), pp. 185- 98; Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society (Harcourt, 1965); Keniston, Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth (Harcourt, 1968); Paul Cowan, The Making of an Un-American: A Dialogue with Experience (Viking, 1970); Unger, pp. 25-42.

[The Beats]: Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 45-54; Lawrence Lipton, The Holy Barbarians (Julian Messner, 1959), part 4 and passim; Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation (Scribner, 1971); Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher, eds., The Village Voice Reader (Doubleday, 1962); Jack Newfield, A Prophetic Minority (New American Library, 1966), ch. 2.

[“Rise of the cheerful robot”]: Mills, “The Politics of Responsibility,” in Carl Oglesby, ed., The New Left Reader (Grove Press, 1969), pp. 23-31, quoted at p. 26; see also Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review, no. 5 (September-October 1960), pp. 18-23; Miller, ch. 4; Ronald Berman, America in the Sixties: An Intellectual History (Free Press, 1968), pp. 110-18.

[Free Speech Movement]: Draper; Editors of California Monthly, “Chronology of Events: Three Months of Crisis,” in Seymour Martin Lipset and Sheldon S. Wolin, eds., The Berkeley Student Revolt: Facts and Interpretations (Anchor/Doubleday, 1965), pp. 99-199; Lipset and Wolin passim; Sale, pp. 162-69; Daily Californian (University of California, Berkeley), October 1, 1984; Breines, pp. 23-31, 46-47; Berman, pp. 156-64; Bettina Aptheker talk at University of California, Berkeley, October 2, 1984.

395 [“Take all of us!”]: Draper, p. 39.

[Aptheker’s speech]: Stewart Burns interview with Aptheker, February 18, 1986.

[Berkeley students at HVAC hearings, 1960]: Goodman, The Committee, pp. 429-34; Unger, pp. 45-47; see also Max Heirich and Sam Kaplan, “Yesterday’s Discord,” in Lipset and Wolin, pp. 10-35.

[“Had to convince people”]: Savio talk at University of California, Berkeley, October 2, 1984.

396 [“We students parted ranks”]: Aptheker talk at University of California, Berkeley, October 2, 1984.

[The multiversity]: see Lipset and Wolin, part 2; Wolin and John H. Schaar, “The Abuses of the Multiversity,” in ibid., pp. 350-63; Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Harvard University Press, 1963); Berman, pp. 145-56; Michael W. Miles, The Radical Probe: The Logic of Student Rebellion (Atheneum, 1971), ch. 3; Immanuel Wallerstein and Paul Starr, eds., The University Crisis Reader (Random House, 1971), vol. 1, ch. 2-3, 7.

[“Ill-housed”]: Wolin and Schaar, p. 360.

397 [Kerr on university president]: Kerr, “Selections from The Uses of the University, “ in Lipset and Wolin, pp. 38-60, quoted at p. 38; see also Kerr, “Reply to Wolin and Schaar,” in ibid., pp. 364-66; Kerr, “Presidential Discontent,” in David C. Nichols, ed., Perspectives on Campus Tensions (American Council on Education, 1970), pp. 137-62.

[“Delicate balance”]: Rudolph, The American College and University: A History (Knopf, 1962), p. 423.

[“Southern struggle”]: in Jacobs and Landau, p. 150.

[Watts]: Jerry Cohen, Burn, Baby, Burn!: The Los Angeles Riot, August 1965 (E. P. Dutton, 1966); Robert E. Conot, Rivers of Blood, Years of Darkness (Bantam, 1967); Paul Jacobs, Prelude to Riot: A View of Urban America from the Bottom (Random House, 1966); William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream (Little, Brown, 1974), pp. 1062-65; Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper, 1982), pp. 377-78.

398 [“Burning their city”]: Robert Richardson, quoted in Manchester, p. 1064. [“How can you say you won … ?”]: quoted in Oates, p. 377.

[Muhammad on need for “complete separation”]: in John H. Bracey, Jr., et al., eds., Black Nationalism in America (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), pp. 404-7, quoted at pp. 404, 405; see also C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Beacon Press, 1961 ), pp. 84-97 and passim.

399 [National Conference on Black Power]: New York Times, July 21, 1967, pp. 1, 34; ibid., July 22, 1967, pp. 1, 10-11; ibid., July 24, 1967, pp. 1, 16; Thomas L. Blair, Retreat to the Ghetto: The End of a Dream? (Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 202.

[Black Panther party]: Gene Marine, The Black Panthers (New American Library, 1969); Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (Harcourt, 1973); Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (McGraw-Hill, 1968); Bobby Seale, A Lonely Rage (Times Books, 1978); Blair, pp. 86-103 passim; Don A. Schanche, The Panther Paradox: A Liberal’s Dilemma (David McKay, 1970); Paul Chevigny, Cops and Rebels. A Study of Provocation (Pantheon, 1972); James Korman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Macmillan, 1972), ch. 64.

[Seale on arming blacks]: quoted in Blair, p. 92.

[Fragmentation of movement groups along political spectrum]: see Blair, pp. 81-83; Carson, pp. 144-45, l89, 191.

[“Thrust of Black Power”]: Blair, p. 82.

[Black culture]: see ibid., ch. 5 passim; Lee Rainwater, ed., Soul (Transaction Books, 1970); Al Galloway, “An Introduction to Soul,” in Hayes, pp. 708-12; Ulf Hannerz, “The Significance of Soul,” in August Meier, ed., The Transformation of Activism (Aldine, 1970), pp. 155-78; Adrian Dove, “Soul Story,” in August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, eds., Black Protest in the Sixties (Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 243-51. Peter Schrag, “The New Black Myths,” Harper’s, vol. 238, no. 1428 (May 1969), pp. 37-42.

[Black theology]: see Charles V. Hamilton, The Black Preacher in America (Morrow, 1972), esp. ch. 5; James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966-1979 (Orbis Books, 979); James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (Seabury Press, 1969); Blair, pp. 128-33.

[Growth in number of black Roman Catholics]: Blair, p. 133.

400 [“Gonna knock the hell”]: quoted in Oates, p. 397.

[“We Shall Overrun”]: ibid.

[King in Chicago]: David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian leadership Conference (Morrow, 1986), chs. 8-9 passim; Oates, pp. 365-69, 387-95, 405-19; David L. Lewis, King (Praeger, 1970), ch. 11; Bill Gleason, Daley of Chicago (Simon and Schuster, 1970), chs. 4-5; see also CORE (Chicago Chapter), 1956-64, boxes 1 and 2, Chicago Historical Society.

[“Unable to deliver”]: quoted in Oates, p. 406; see also August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, “Negro Protest and Urban Unrest,” Social Science Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3 (December 1968), pp. 438-43.

[“Never seen anything like it”]: quoted in Oates, p. 413.

401 [“We want freedom”]: in Bracey et al., p. 404.

[“Full and complete freedom”]: ibid.

[“Power to determine”]: in ibid., pp. 526-29, quoted at p. 526.

[Black opposition to Vietnam]: Henry E. Darby and Margaret N. Rowley, “King on Vietnam and Beyond,” Phylon, vol. 47, no. 1 (March 1986), pp. 43-50; Garrow, esp. ch. 10 passim; Oates, pp. 373-76, 431-44; Lewis, pp. 307-12, 355-71 passim; Carson, pp. 183-89; Korman, pp. 444-47; Michael Ferber and Staughton Lynd, The Resistance (Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 29-33; Adam Fairclough, “Martin Luther King. Jr., and the War in Vietnam,” Phylon, vol. 45, no. 1 (1984), pp. 19-39.

[“We must combine”]: quoted in Oates, p. 431.

Rolling Thunder

[“If I left the woman”]: quoted in Keams, pp. 251-53; see also F. M. Kail, What Washington Said: Administration Rhetoric and the. Vietnam War, 1949-1969 (Harper, 1973), pp. 97-103 and passim; Goldman. chs.14-15, 18 and passim; Philip Geyelin, Lyndon B. Johnson and the World (Praeger, 1966), chs. 1, 5-6; Halberstam, esp. ch. 20; James Deakin, “The Dark Side of L.B.J.,” in Hayes, pp. 506-22; Joseph Kraft, Profiles in Power: A Washington Insight (New American Library, 1966), ch. 2.

402 [Morgenthau’s warning]: see McPherson, pp. 389-90; see also Hans J. Morgenthau, “We Are Deluding Ourselves in Viet-Nam,” in Marcus G. Raskin and Bernard B. Fall, eds., The Viet-Nam Reader (Random House, 1965), pp. 37-45.

403 [Tonkin]: George G. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 2nd. ed. (Temple University Press, 1986), pp. 118-23; George McT. Kahin, Intervention: How America Became Involved in Vietnam (Knopf, 1986), pp. 219-26; Joseph G. Goulden, Truth Is the First Casualty: The Gulf of Tonkin Affair—Illusion and Reality (Rand McNally, 1969); Kathleen J. Turner, Lyndon Johnson’s Dual War: Vietnam and the Press (University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 81-85; Anthony Austin, The President’s War (Lippincott, 1971); Sandy Vogelgesang, The Long Dark Night of the Soul: The American Intellectual Left and the Vietnam War (Harper, 1974), pp. 53-55; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam (Viking, 1983), pp. 365-76.

[Pleiku]: Herring, pp. 128-29; Halberstam, pp. 520-26; Karnow, pp. 411-15.

[Johnson’s men]: Halberstam; Kraft; Richard J. Barnet, “The Men Who Made the War,” in Ralph Stavins et al., Washington Plans an Aggressive War (Random House, 1971), pp. 199-252; Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy (Doubleday, 1967), ch. 4; Henry L. Trewhitt, McNamara: His Ordeal in the Pentagon (Harper, 1971); Warren I. Cohen, Dean Rusk (Cooper Square Publishers, 1980); John B. Henry II and William Espinosa, “The Tragedy of Dean Rusk,” Foreign Policy, no. 8 (Fall 1972), pp. 166-89.

404 [Dominican intervention]: Theodore Draper, The Dominican Revolt: A Case Study in American Policy (Commentary, 1968); Abraham F. Lowenthal, The Dominican Intervention (Harvard University Press, 1972); Evans and Novak, ch. 23; Turner, pp. 135-37; Geyelin, ch. 10.

405 [Mao’s advice]: see Karnow, p. 329.

[Lin Piao’s article]: see John J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Westview Press, 1981), p. 245; Karnow, p. 453.

[Vietnam, China, Soviet Union]: Duiker, passim: Donald S. Zagoria, Vietnam Triangle: Moscow, Peking, Hanoi (Pegasus, 1967); Daniel S. Papp, Vietnam: The View from Moscow, Peking, Washington (McFarland & Co., 1981); Jon M. Van Dyke, North Vietnam’s Strategy for Survival (Pacific Books, 1972), pp. 217-28; King C. Chen, Vietnam and China, 1938-1954 (Princeton University Press, 1969); Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh, Peter Wiles, trans. (Random House, 1968), ch. 13; Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1972), ch. 2 passim: Adam B. Ulam, The Rivals: America and Russia Since World War II (Viking, 1971), ch. 11 passim; Victor G. Funnell, “Vietnam and the Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1965-1976” and “Documents: Vietnam and the Sino-Soviet Conflict,” Studies in Comparative Communism, vol. 11, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Summer, 1978), pp. 142-99.

[Rolling Thunder]: Herring, pp. 129-30, 146-47, 149-50; see also Kahin, chs. 10-11; James C. Thompson, Rolling Thunder: Understanding Policy and Program Failure (University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Turner, pp. 114-18.

[McNamara on civilian casualties]: Herring, p. 147.

405-6 [Divisions within Administration]: see Herring, pp. 137-43; Larry Berman, Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam (Norton, 1982); Halberstam, Best and Brightest, chs. 24-26 passim; Henry F. Graff, The Tuesday Cabinet: Deliberation and Decision on War and Peace under Lyndon B. Johnson (Prentice-Hall, 1970), ch. 1; George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern (Norton, 1982), pp. 380-403; Geyelin, pp. 213-35, 291-302; Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Belts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Brookings Institution, 1979), pp. 116-43 passim; Harvey A. DeWeerd, “Strategic Decision-Making in Vietnam, 1965-1968,” Yale Review, vol.67, no. 4 (June 1978), pp. 481-92.

406 [North Vietnam’s defense and mobilization against U.S. bombing and escalation]: see Herring, pp. 147-49, “ant labor” quoted at p. 148; Karnow, pp. 454-59; see also Van Dyke, passim; Duiker, pp. 240-46; Wilfred G. Burchett, Vietnam North (International Publishers, 1966).

[“Most sophisticated war”]: quoted in Herring, p. 151.

[“To locate an ever elusive enemy”]: ibid.; see also William A. Buckingham, Jr., Operation Ranch Hand: The Air Force and Herbicides in Southeast Asia: 1961-1971 (Office of Air Force History, 1982); William Heseltine, “The Automated Air War,” New Republic, vol. 165, no. 16 (October 16, 1971), pp. 15-17; Paul F. Cecil, Herbicidal Warfare: The RANCH HAND Project in Vietnam (Praeger, 1986).

406 [“I have no army”]: quoted in FitzGerald, p. 169; see also ibid., esp. ch. 4; Duiker; Douglas Pike, Viet Cong: The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (MIT Press, 1966); Van Dyke; Paul Berman, Revolutionary Organization: Institution-Building Within the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (Lexington Books, 1974); Vo Nguyen Giap, People’s War, People’s Army (Praeger, 1962); Susan Sheehan, “The Enemy,” New Yorker, vol. 42, no. 29 (September 10, 1966), pp. 62-100; George A. Carver, Jr., “The Faceless Viet Cong,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 44, no. 3 (April 1966), pp. 347-72; David Hunt, “Villagers at War; The National Liberation Front in My Tho Province, 1965-1967,” Radical America, vol. 8, nos. 1-2 (January-April 1974), pp. 3-181; Cincinnatus, Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and Decay of the United States Army During the Vietnam Era (Norton, 1981), Appendix D.

[“Key to the vast, secret torrents”]: FitzGerald, p. 169.

407 [Washington protest, April 1965]: New York Times, April 18, 1965, pp. 1, 3; Sale, ch. 11; Miller, pp. 226-34; Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left (University of California Press, 1980), pp. 46-60; Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 177-87; Nancy Zaroulis and Gerald Sullivan, Who Spoke Up?: American Protest Against the War in Vietnam, 1963-1975 (Doubleday, 1984), pp. 38-42.

[Potter’s speech]: quoted in Sale, p. 189.

[King’s break with Johnson]: Oates, pp. 373-76.

[Lippmann’s break with Johnson]: Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 571-72, quoted at p. 572. [Teach-ins]: Louis Menashe and Ronald Radoshe, eds., Teach-ins, U.S.A. (Praeger, 1967); Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 37-38, 43; Vogelgesang, pp. 70-74.

[March on New York induction center]: Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 51, 53-54, sign quoted at p. 51; New York Times, July 30, 1965, p. 2; Ferber and Lynd, pp. 21-22; on the draft and resistance, see also Michael Useem, Conscription, Protest, and Social Conflict: The Life and Death of a Resistance Movement (Wiley, 1973); Alice Lynd, ed., We Won’t Go: Personal Accounts of War Objectors (Beacon Press, 1968); Wallerstein and Starr, vol. 1, ch. 6; Handbook for Conscientious Objectors, Arlo Tatum, ed., 8th ed. (Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, 1966); Jessica Mitford, The Trial of Dr. Spock (Knopf, 1969); Lawrence M. Baskir and William A. Strauss, Chance and Circumstance: The Draft, the War, and the Vietnam Generation (Knopf, 1978); Ferber and Lynd.

408 [“Assembly of Unrepresented People”]: New York Times, August 9, 1965, p. 4; ibid., August 10, 1965, p. 3; Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 51-53.

[Antiwar self-immolations]: see Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 1-5, “Burn yourselves” quoted at p. 4.

[Miller’s burning of draft card]: ibid., pp. 56-57; Ferber and Lynd, pp. 22-27.

[Fall 1965 international days of protest]: New York Times, October 16, 1965, pp. 1-2; ibid., October 17, 1965, pp. 1, 42-44; Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 56-57. [Strategic and organizational debate within the movement]: see Sale, chs. 12-16 passim; Miller, pp. 234-59; Breines, ch. 5; Gitlin, Whole World, esp. ch. 4; Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 188-92, 225-30.

408-9 [Old Left and New]: Milton Cantor, The Divided Left: American Radicalism, 1900-1971 (Hill and Wang, 1978), ch. 10 passim; Mills, “Letter to the New Left”; Ronald Berman, America in the Sixties, chs. 5-6 passim; Breines, pp. 13-17; James Weinstein, “The Left, Old and New,” Socialist Revolution, vol. 2, no. 4 (July-August 1972), pp. 7-60; Newfield, ch. 8; David Caute, The Year of the Barricades: A Journey Through 1968 (Harper, 1988), pp. 33-38, 40-43; see also Bogdan Denitch, “The New Left and the New Working Class,” in J. David Colfax and Jack L. Roach, eds., Radical Sociology (Basic Books, 1971), pp. 341-52.

409 [“Criminal, sinister country”]: quoted in Vogelgesang, p. 73.

[“Alienated intellectuals”]: ibid., p. 91.

[April 1961 New York demonstration]: New York Times, April 16, 1967, pp. 1-3; Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 110-14; Ferber and Lynd, ch. 5; Lynd, We Won’t Go, pp. 220-25; Paul Goodman, “We Won’t Go,” New York Review of Books, vol. 8, no. 9 (May 18, 1967), pp. 17-20.

[From protest to resistance]: Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 86, 94-96, 104-7; Gitlin, Sixties, ch. 10 passim; Durward Long, “Wisconsin: Changing Styles of Administrative Response,” in Foster and Long, pp. 246-70; see also Sale, part 3; Ferber and Lynd, ch. 4 and passim; Wallerstein and Starr, vol. 2, ch. 6.

409 [Pentagon march]: New York Times, October 21, 1967, pp. 1, 8; ibid., October 22, 1967, pp. 1, 58-59; ibid., October 23, 1967, pp. 1, 32-33; Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History (New American Library, 1968); Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 135-42; David Dellinger, “Gandhi and Guerrilla—The Protest at the Pentagon,” in Dellinger, Revolutionary Nonviolence (Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), pp. 285-92; Vogelgesang, pp. 130-33; “The Pentagon Demonstration,” in Hare and Blumberg, pp. 241-70; Sale, pp. 383-86; Ferber and Lynd, pp. 135-40.

[“Creative synthesis”]: Dellinger, “Gandhi and Guerrilla,” p. 287.

[“Witches, warlocks”]: quoted in Sale, p. 384.

[“Anarchists of the deed”]: Gitlin, Sixties, p. 223.

410 [“Join us”]: quoted in David Dellinger, More Power Than We Know: The People’s Movement Toward Democracy (Anchor Books, 1975), p. 126.

[“Burn a draft card ”]: quoted in Zaroulis and Sullivan, p. 139.

[U.S. troops in Vietnam, 1967]: see Karnow, p. 512.

[Divisions within Administration and LBJ]: Reams, ch. 11; Karnow, ch. 13 passim; Turner, ch. 7 passim; Johnson, pp. 366-78; Townsend Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention (David McKay, 1969), chs. 3-6; Gelb and Betts, pp. 156-70; Graff, ch. 3; Herring, pp. 175-83; DeWeerd.

[“Bomb, bomb, bomb”]: quoted in Herring, p. 178.

[“Spit in China’s face”]: quoted in Karnow, p. 504.

[“Can’t hunker down”]: quoted in Herring, p. 179.

[Ebbing of revolutionary zeal]: quoted in Duiker, p. 262.

410-11 [Preparations for Tet]: Don Oberdorfer, Tet! (Doubleday, 1971), ch. 2; Duiker, pp. 263-65; Herring, pp. 187-88.

411 [Tet and its effects upon American opinion]: Oberdorfer; Karnow, pp. 523-44; FitzGerald, ch. 15; Herring, pp. 186-92, 200-3; Turner, pp. 217-23; Duiker, pp. 265-71, 273-76; Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 298-301; Robert Pisor, The End of the Line: The Siege of Khe Sanh (Norton, 1982); Peter Braestrup, Big Story, 2 vols. (Westview Press, 1977); John B. Henry II, “February, 1968,” Foreign Policy, no. 4 (Fall 1974), pp. 3-33; Herbert Y. Schandler, The Unmaking of a President: Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam (Princeton University Press, 1977), ch. 4; see also Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy (Presidio Press, 1982), ch. 1.

[“What the hell is going on?”]: quoted in Herring, p. 191; see also Oberdorfer, pp. 246-50.

[“It seems now more certain”]: quoted in Oberdorfer, p. 251.

[“American people know the facts”]: quoted in Turner, pp. 221-22.

[Debate over post-Tet strategy]: Herring, pp. 192-206 passim; Oberdorfer, pp. 257-77 and ch. 8; Hoopes, chs. 8-10; Karnow, pp. 549-57; Johnson, pp. 383-415 passim, DeWeerd; Schandler, chs. 5-13 passim.

412 [Conclusion of the Wise Men]: Oberdorfer, pp. 308-15; Hoopes, pp. 214-18; Ball, pp. 407-9; Schandler, ch. 14; Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men (Simon and Schuster, 1986), ch. 23.

[“Growing with such acuteness”]: quoted in Hoopes, p. 216.

[“Establishment bastards”]: quoted in Herring, p. 206.

[“President is confronted”]: Lippmann, “This Draft Is Difficult to justify,” Washington Post, March 24, 1968, p. B3. [LBJ in polls, post-Tet]: Herring, pp. 201-2.

[McCarthy campaign and New Hampshire primary]: David S. Broder, “Election of 1968,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections (Chelsea House, 1971), vol. 4, pp. 3716-18; Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1968 (Atheneum, 1969), ch. 3 passim; Lewis Chester et al., An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (Viking, 1969), ch. 3; Vogelgesang, pp. 142-46; Sidney Hyman, Youth in Politics: Expectations and Realities (Basic Books, 1972), pp. 97-133; David Halberstam, “McCarthy and the Divided Left,” Harper’s, vol. 236, no. 1414 (March 1968), pp. 32-44; Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 294-97.

[Kennedy’s dilemma and entry into race]: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Robert Kennedy and His Times (Houghton Mifflin, 1978), chs. 37-38; David Halbersham, The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy (Random House, 1968), ch. 1; Broder, pp. 3718-19; Kearns, pp. 338-39; Chester et al., pp. 105-26.

412 [Poll on public support for bombing]: John Mueller, War, Presidents and Public Opinion (Wiley, 1973), p. 72 (Table 4, 3).

413 [LBJ’s withdrawal]: in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1965-70), vol. 5, part 1, pp. 469-76, quoted at p. 476; see also “The President’s News Conference of March 31, 1968,” in ibid., pp. 476-82; Johnson, ch. 18; Turner, pp. 233-48; Herring, pp. 207-9; Kearns, ch. 12 passim; Schlesinger, Kennedy, pp. 868-69; McPherson, pp. 430-35; Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), pp. 642-47; Schandler, ch. 15; Gitlin, Sixties, p. 304.

[“Rioting blacks, demonstrating students”]: quoted in Kearns, p. 343.

[King’s assassination and rioting]: Manchester, pp. 1128-29; Oates, pp. 483-98; Lewis, pp. 383-92; Newsweek, vol. 71, no. 16 (April 15, 1968), pp. 31-34; ibid., vol. 71, no. 17 (April 22, 1968), pp. 24-26; Schlesinger, Kennedy, pp. 874-75; Garry Wills, “Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case, ”] in Hayes, pp. 731-50.

[Columbia rising]: Jerry L. Avorn et al., Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis (Atheneum, 1969); Fact-Finding Commission on Columbia Disturbances, Crisis at Columbia (Vintage, 1968); Joanne Grant, Confrontation on Campus: The Columbia Pattern for the New Protest (Signet, 1969); Daniel Bell, “Columbia and the New Left,” in Bell and Irving Kristol, eds„ Confrontation: The Student Rebellion and the Universities (Basic Books, 1969), pp. 67-107; Michael A. Baker et al., Police on Campus: The Mass Police Action at Columbia University, Spring, 1968 (New York Civil Liberties Union, 1969).

[“Go all the way”]: Avorn et al., p. 61.

414 [“Violence going to stop?”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Kennedy, p. 874.

[“Year of the barricades”]: Caute, “free art, free theatre,” quoted at p. 71.

[Kennedy campaign]: Schlesinger, Kennedy, chs. 39-41; Halberstam, Odyssey, chs. 2, 4-6; White, pp. 166-79; Chester et al., pp. 127-79 passim and 297-349 passim; Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey (Norton, 1984), chs. 28-30.

[“Sad rather than cold”]: quoted in Schlesinger, Kennedy, p. 756.

[The poor “are hidden”]: quoted in Halberstam, Odyssey, p. 9.

[Liberal McCarthyites’ anger at Kennedy]: see Schlesinger, Kennedy, pp. 859-61, 896-99.

[“Personalization of the presidency”]: quoted in ibid., p. 893.

[Kennedy’s assassination]: Chester et al., pp. 349-62; Schlesinger, Kennedy, pp. 907-16; see also Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 310-11; Miller, pp. 287-88, 292-94.

[Broder on shock of assassination]: Broder, p. 3725.

[Chicago convention]: ibid., pp. 3731-39; White, ch. 9; Chester et al., ch. 10; Daniel Walker, Rights in Conflict (E. P. Dutton, 1968); Donald Myrus, ed., Law of Disorder: The Chicago Convention and Its Aftermath (Donald Myrus and Burton Joseph, 1968); David Farber, Chicago ’68 (University of Chicago Press, 1988); Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 175-201; Gitlin, Sixties, ch. 14; Miller, pp. 295-306; Sale, pp. 472-77; Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (World Publishing, 1968), part 2; Caute, chs. 15-16; Solberg, ch. 31; Dellinger, Revolutionary Nonviolence, part 5.

415 [Ribicoff on “Gestapo tactics”]: quoted in Broder, p. 3739.

[Nixon’s nomination]: ibid., pp. 3709-15, 3725-31; White, chs. 2, 5, 8; Chester et al., chs. 5, 9; Richard Nixon, Memoirs (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), pp. 297-316; Mailer, Miami, part 1.

[Presidential campaign, fall 1968]: Broder, pp. 3739-50; White, part 3; Chester el al., chs. 11-12; Marshall Frady, “The American Independent Party,” in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of U.S. Political Parties (Chelsea House, 1973), vol. 4, pp. 3429-44; Jody Carlson, George C. Wallace and the Politics of Powerlessness (Transaction Books, 1981), chs. 1-2, 7-9; Solberg, chs. 32-34; Nixon, pp. 316-35; George Christian, The President Steps Down (Macmillan, 1970); Philip E. Converse et al., “Continuity and Change in American Politics; Parties and Issues in the 1968 Election,” American Political Science Review, vol. 63, no. 4 (December 1969), pp. 1083-1105; Benjamin I. Page and Richard A. Brody, “Policy Voting and the Electoral Process: The Vietnam War Issue,” ibid., vol. 66, no. 3 (September 1972), pp. 979-95. [“Irate buffalo”]: Fady, p. 3441.

416 [“Master of ambiguity”]: Page and Brody, p. 987.

[“Alternated between protestations”]: ibid., p. 989.

[“Dime’s worth of difference”]: quoted in Carlson, p. 131.

[“Ask my Attorney General”]: quoted in Page and Brody, p. 992.

[Election results]: Schlesinger, Elections, vol. 4, p. 3865; and Broder, pp. 3707, 3750-52; see also Page and Brody; Richard W. Boyd, “Popular Control of Public Policy: A Normal Vote Analysis of the 1968 Election,” American Political Science Review, vol. 66, no. 2 (June 1972), pp. 429-49.

[Broder on 1968 election]: Broder, p. 3705.

Into the Quicksand

[Inaugural protest]: New York Times, January 20, 1969, “militant—but for the most part genial,” quoted at p. 21; ibid., January 21, 1969, p. 24; see also Gitlin, Whole World, p. 214.

417 [Lippmann on “new Nixon”]: quoted in Steel, p. 589; see also Jonathan Schell, The Time of Illusion (Knopf, 1976), p. 20.

[White on Nixon]: White, Making 1968, p. 143.

[Nixon’s election night promises]: quoted in Schell, p. 17.

[Nixon’s Vietnam strategy]: Richard M. Nixon, “Asia After Viet Nam,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 46, no. 1 (October 1967), pp. 111-25; Henry A. Kissinger, “The Viet Nam Negotiations,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 47, no. 2 (January 1969), pp. 211-34; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 347-51; Tad Szulc, The Illusion of Peace: Foreign Policy in the Nixon Years (Viking, 1978), pp. 23-31; Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (Summit, 1983), ch. 4; Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (Harper, 1977), pp. 149-54; Herring, pp. 221-26; Gelb and Belts, pp. 348-50, 354-58.

[“We will not make”]: quoted in Herring, p. 221.

[“Seek the opportunity”]: Address to the Nation on Vietnam, May 14, 1969, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971-75), vol. 1, pp. 369-75, quoted at p. 371.

418 [“War for peace”]: quoted in Herring, p. 223.

[“Not going to end up”]: quoted in H. R. Haldeman and Joseph DiMona, The Ends of Power (Times Books, 1978), p. 81. [“Madman Theory, Bob”]: ibid., p. 83.

[Peak level of American Troops]: see Richard Dean Burns and Milton Leitenberg, The Wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, 1941-1982: A Bibliographic Guide (ABC-Clio Information Services, 1984), p. 144 (Table 4).

[Secret Cambodian bombing]: see William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (Simon and Schuster, 1979), ch. 1; Hersh, ch. 5; Szulc, pp. 36-39, 52-61; Karnow, pp. 589-92; Schell, pp. 32-38; U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, Impeachment of Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States: Report, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), pp. 217-19; Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Little, Brown, 1979), pp. 239-54.

419 [“Only by revolutionary violence”]: Giap, “The South Vietnamese People Will Win,” in Russell Stetler, ed., The Military Art of People’s War: Selected Writings of General Vo Nguyen Giap (Monthly Review Press, 1970), pp. 185-225, quoted at p. 213.

[Nixon’s “Vietnamization”]: FitzGerald, pp. 404-14; Gelb and Betts, pp. 349-50; Herring, pp. 229-32; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 271-77.

[American attitudes toward the South Vietnamese]: see FitzGerald, chs. 10-14, 16-17 passim.

420 [Numbers of South Vietnamese troops, late 1969]: Herring, p. 231.

[Demoralization and decay among American troops]: David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt: The American Military Today (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975), chs. 1-2; Richard Boyle, The Flower of the Dragon: ‘The Breakdown of the U.S. Army in Vietnam (Ramparts Press, 1972); Herring, pp. 243-44; John Helmer, Bringing the War Home: The American Soldier in Vietnam and After (Free Press, 1974); Baskir and Strauss, ch. 4; Cincinnatus; Edward Shils, “A Profile of the Military Deserter,” Armed Forces and Society, vol. 3, no. 3 (May 1977) pp. 427-31; Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (Harper, 1972), pp. 181-85 and passim; Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., “The Collapse of the Armed Forces,” in Marvin E. Gettleman et al., eds., Vietnam and America: A Documented History (Grove Press, 1985), pp. 322-31.

420 [My Lai]: Seymour M. Hersh, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (Random House, 1970); U.S. Department of the Army, The My Lai Massacre and Its Cover-up (Free Press, 1976); Seymour Hersh, Cover-up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4 (Random House, 1972); Boyle, pp. 127-43.

[Service people against the war]: Cortright, part 1 passim: Matthew Rinaldi, “The Olive-Drab Rebels: Military Organizing During the Vietnam Era,” Radical America, vol. 8, no. 3 (May-June 1974), pp. 17-52.

[Draft offenders]: Baskir and Strauss, pp. 5 (Figure 1) and 69 (Figure 4); see also ibid., ch. 3; G. David Curry. Sunshine Patriots: Punishment and the Vietnam Offender (University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); Willard Gaylin, In the Service of Their Country: War Resisters in Prison (Viking, 1970).

[Exiles]: Baskir and Strauss, p. 169 (Figure 7) and ch. 5; Renee G. Kasinsky, Refugees from Militarism: Draft-Age Americans in Canada (Transaction Books, 1976).

421 [Women Against Daddy Warbucks]: New York Times, July 3, 1969, pp. 1, 5; ibid., July 4,1969, pp. 1-2; Ferber and Lynd, pp. 202, 210-11;Women Against Daddy Warbucks, “Our Statement,” in Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful (Vintage, 1970), p. 530.

[Baltimore draft office action]: New York Times, October 28, 1967, p. 5; Zaroulis and Sullivan, p. 230; Ferber and Lynd, pp. 201-2.

[Catonsville Nine]: New York Times, May 18, 1968, p. 36; Ferber and Lynd, ch. 14 passim; Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 229-37 passim; see also William Van Elten Casey and Philip Nobile, eds., The Berrigans (Praeger, 1971); Jack Nelson and Ronald J. Ostrow, The FBI and the Berrigans: The Making of a Conspiracy (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1972). [“Some property has no right”]: quoted in New York Times, May 18, 1968, p. 36.

[SDS internal quarrels]: Sale, chs. 22-23; Freines, ch. 6; Gitlin, Whole World, ch. 6; Gitlin, Sixties, pp. 377-91; Miller, pp. 284-85, 311-13.

[“Vanguarditis”]: Carl Oglesby, “Notes on a Decade Ready for the Dustbin,” Liberation, August-September 1969, p. 6. [“A weapon”]: Miller, p. 285.

[SDS Chicago convention]: Sale, pp. 557-79; Karin Ashley et al., “You Don’t Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows,” in Harold Jacobs, ed., Weatherman (Ramparts Press, 1970), pp. 51-90; Andrew Kopkind, “The Real SDS Stands Up,” in ibid., pp. 15-28; Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 251-55.

[“A peculiar mix”]: Sale, p. 562.

422 [Flacks on disintegration of the New Left]: Flacks, Youth and Social Change (Markham, 1971), p. 101.

[“Go for broke”]: Nixon, Memoirs, p. 393.

[“Once the summer was over”]: ibid.

[Administration deadline threats and plans for major offensive] : see Hersh, Price, ch. 10 passim; Szulc, pp. 149-56; Morris, pp. 163-68; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 393-96, 405-7 passim; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 284-86, 303-4.

[Moratorium day]: New York Times, October 16, 1969, pp. 1, 18-22; Time, vol. 94, no. 17 (October 24, 1969), pp. 16-20; Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 264-73; Schell, pp. 52-55; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 400-3.

423 [“Flame of life”]: quoted in New York Times, October 16, 1969, p. 19.

[“This is my son”]: quoted in Newsweek, vol. 74, no. 17 (October 27, 1969), p. 32.

[Nixon’s address]: November 3, 1969, in Nixon Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 901-9, quoted at pp. 908, 909; see also Schell, pp. 62-66; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 407-11. [November 1969 demonstrations]: New York Times, November 14, 1969, pp. 1, 20-21; ibid., November 15, 1969, pp. 1, 26-27; ibid., November 16, 1969, pp. 1, 60-61; Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 276-300 passim; Time, vol. 94, no. 21, (November 21, 1969), pp. 23-26.

424 [Lon Nol coup]: see Shawcross, ch. 8; Hersh, Price, ch. 15; Kissinger, White House Years, pp.457-65; Norodom Sihanouk and Wilfred Burchett, My War with the CIA (Pantheon, 1973).

[North Vietnamese Cambodian “sanctuaries”]: Shawcross, ch. 1 passim, pp. 64-72; Duiker, pp. 283-84; see also Roger M. Smith, Cambodia’s Foreign Policy (Cornell University Press, 1965).

424 [Invasion of Cambodia]: Shawcross, ch. 9, pp. 150-51, 171-75; Herring, pp. 234-37;Karnow, pp. 606-10; Szulc, pp. 244-49, 252-75, 279-84; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 448-51; Duiker, pp. 285-88; Hugh Sidey, “Anybody See Patton?” in Lloyd C. Gardner, The Great Nixon Turnaround (New Viewpoints, 1973), pp. 183-86; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 467-75, 483-509, 517-20; Hersh, Price, ch. 16.

[“If, when the chips are down”]: April 30, 1970, in Nixon Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 405-10, quoted at p. 409; see also Shawcross, pp. 146-49; Schell, pp. 89-95.

424-5 [Protests against invasion]: New York Times, May 2, 1970, pp. 1, 9; ibid., May 5, 1970, pp. l, 17-18; Time, vol. 95, no. 19 (May 11, 1970), pp. 19-25; ibid., vol. 95, no. 20 (May 18, 1970), pp. 6-15; Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 318-31; Sale, pp. 635-42; Shawcross, pp. 152-53; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 509-17; U.S. President’s Commission on Campus Unrest, Report (Arno Press, 1970), pp. 233-465; James A. Michener, Kent State: What Happened and Why (Random House, 1971); I. F. Stone, The Killings at Kent State: How Murder Went Unpunished (New York Review, 1971); Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 456-59.

425 [“You see these bums”]; quoted in New York Times, May 2, 1970, p. 1; see also Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 453-56.

[Veterans’ occupation of Statue of Liberty]: New York Times, December 27, 1971, pp. 1, 21; ibid., December 29, 1971, p. 32; see also John Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The New Soldier, David Thorne and George Butler, eds. (Macmillan, 1971); Zaroulis and Sullivan, pp. 354-58; Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The Winter Soldier Investigation (Beacon Press, 1972).

[Pentagon Papers publication]: New York Times, June 13, 1971, pp. 1, 35-40; The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, 4 vols., and index vol. (Senator Gravel, ed.: Beacon Press, 1971-72); Neil Sheehan et al., The Pentagon Papers: As Published by the New York Times (Bantam, 1971); George McT. Kahin, “The Pentagon Papers: A Critical Evaluation,” American Political Science Review, vol. 69, no. 2 (June 1975), pp. 675-84; H. Bradford Westerfield, “What Use Are Three Versions of the Pentagon Papers?,” ibid., pp. 685-96; Stewart Burns interview with Randy Kehler, August 1976; Peter Schrag, Test of Loyalty: Daniel Ellsberg and the Rituals of Secret Government (Simon and Schuster, 1974), pp. 35-37, 45-65, 80-100; Hersh, Price, pp. 325-32; Schell, pp. 151-54; David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (Knopf, 1979), ch. 22 passim; Harrison E. Salisbury, Without Fear or Favor: The New York Times and Its Times (Times Books, 1980).

[Ellsberg]: Stewart Burns interviews with Daniel Ellsberg, October 29, 1976, December 16, 1977, October 5, 1978; Ellsberg talk in Santa Rita county jail, Pleasanton, Calif., June 26, 1983; Robert Ellsberg, “On Daniel Ellsberg; Remembering the Pentagon Papers,” 1976 Peace Calendar (War Resisters League); Daniel Ellsberg, Papers on the War (Simon and Schuster, 1972); Schrag, pp. 24-54 passim.

426 [“Concept of enemy doesn’t exist”]: Janaki Tschannerl, quoted in Daniel Ellsberg talk at Isla Vista, Calif., May 13, 1975.

[“Guilt-ridden, fanatic extremists”]: “An Interview with Daniel Ellsberg,” WIN, November 1, 1972, quoted at p. 7.

[“Lots of people around the world”]: transcribed in Liberation & Revolution: Gandhi’s Challenge, Report of the Thirteenth Triennial Conference of the War Resisters’ International (War Resisters’ International, 1969), p. 107.

[“Our best, our very best”]: Anthony Lukas, “After the Pentagon Papers: A Month in the Life of Daniel Ellsberg,” New York Times Magazine, December 12, 1971, pp. 29, 95, 98-106, quoted at p. 106.

[Supreme Court decision on Pentagon Papers]: New York Times Co. v. U.S., 403 U.S. 713 (1970); see also Schrag, pp. 92-100.

[Nixon’s war on Ellsberg]: Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (Viking, 1976), ch. 4 passim; Hersh, Price, ch. 28; Schrag, pp. 100-24 and passim; Schell, pp. 161-68; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 511-15; Jim Hougan, Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA (Random House, 1984), ch. 3; Nixon Impeachment: Report, pp. 36, 157-70. [“Tailor-made issue”]: quoted in Nixon Impeachment: Report, p. 158.

Songs of the Sixties

426 [Woodstock]: Cook, Beat Generation, pp. 230-39, quoted at p. 230; Robert S. Spitz, Barefoot in Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969 (Viking, 1979), pp. 389-486; Andrew Kopkind, “Woodstock Nation,” in Jonathan Eisen, ed., The Age of Rock: Sights and Sounds of the American Cultural Revolution (Random House, 1969-70), vol. 2, pp. 312-18.

[Life on Woodstock]: “The Big Woodstock Rock Trip,” Life, vol. 67, no. 9 (August 29, 1969), pp. 14B-23, quoted at p. 14B.

[Roots of rock ’n’ roll]: Ed Ward, “The Fifties and Before,” in Ward, Geoffrey Stokes, Ken Tucker, Rock of Ages (Rolling Stone Press (Prentice-Hall, 1986), pp. 17-248; Carl Belz, The Story of Rock (Oxford University Press, 1969), chs. 2-3; Howard Junker, “The Fifties,” in Eisen, vol. 2, pp. 98-104; Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll (Outerbridge and Dienstfrey, 1970), ch. 1; Nik Cohn, Rock from the Beginning (Stein & Day, 1969), chs. 1, 4.

[Black originals and white covers]: Arnold Shaw, The Rockin’ ’50s (Hawthorn, 1974), ch. 14; on racism in music, see Steve Chappie and Reebee Garofalo, Rock ’n ’ Roll Is Here to Pay: The History and Politics of the Music industry (Nelson-Hall, 1977), ch. 7.

[“Little men with cigars”]: quoted in Jerry Hopkins, The Rock Story (Signet, 1970), p. 24; on the rock industry, see Michael Lydon, “Rock for Sale,” in Eisen, vol. 2, pp. 51-62; Chappie and Garofalo, ch. 2 and passim.

427-8 [“Stem the tide”]: A. M. Meerio, quoted in Hopkins, p. 31.

428 [Boston Catholic leaders and San Antonio city council]: ibid.

[“I need it”]: “Honey Love,” quoted in ibid., p. 18, words and music by Clyde McPhatter and J. Gerald, copyright 1954, Progressive Music Publishing Co., Inc. [“Wop-bop-a-loo-bop”]: “Tutti Frutti,” recorded by Little Richard, words and music by Richard Penniman, D. LaBostrie, and Joe Lubin, Venice Music, Inc., Specialty Records.

[“Shared with adults”]: Cohn, p. 15.

[“Something in common”]: Janet Podell, ed., Rock Music in America (H. W. Wilson Co., 1987), p. 5.

[“Culturally alienated”]: Jeff Greenfield, “They Changed Rock, Which Changed Culture, Which Changed Us,” New York Times Magazine, February 16, 1975, pp. 12-13, 37-46, quoted at p. 38.

[Folk music]: R. Serge Denisoff, Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left (University of Illinois Press, 1971); Denisoff and Richard A. Peterson, eds., The Sounds of Social Change: Studies in Popular Culture (Rand McNally College Publishing Co., 1972), passim; Wayne Hampton, Guerrilla Minstrels: John Lennon, Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, and Bob Dylan (University of Tennessee Press, 1986).

[Dylan]: Wilfrid Howard Mellers, A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan (Oxford University Press, 1985); Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (Morrow, 1986); Lawrence Goldman, “Bobby Dylan—Folk-Rock Hero,” in Eisen, vol. 1, pp. 208-13; Ellen Willis, “The Sound of Bob Dylan,” Commentary, vol. 44, no. 5 (November 1967), pp. 71-78; Hampton, ch. 6; Cohn, ch. 17.

[“Hungry, restless”]: Goldman, p. 211. [“Greatest holiest”]: quoted in Hampton, pp. 152-53.

[“Blowing in the Wind”]: quoted in Willis, p. 73, initially recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, words and music by Bob Dylan, copyright 1962, M. Witmark and Sons, Warner Brothers Records.

429 [“Established topical song”]: ibid., p. 73.

[“Musical great white hope”]: Denisoff, Great Day Coming, p. 181.

[Dylan at Newport, 1965]: Shelton, pp. 301-4, “Play folk music!” quoted at p. 302; Hampton, pp. 176-78; Paul Wolfe, Dylan’s Sellout of the Left,” in Denisoff and Peterson, pp. 147-150.

[“If Whitman were alive”]: quoted in Willis, p. 77.

[Release of forty-eight Dylan originals]: Hopkins, p. 83.

[The Beatles]: Hunter Davies, The Beatles, rev. ed. (McGraw-Hill, 1978); Wilfrid Howard, Twilight of the Gods: The Music of the Beatles (Schirmer Books, 1973); Geoffrey Stokes, The Beatles (Times Books, 1980); Jon Wiener, Come Together: John Lennon in His Time (Random House, 1984); Hopkins, ch. 15; Ned Rorem, “The Music of the Beatles,” New York Review of Books, vol. 10, no. 1 (January 18, 1968), pp. 23-27.

429 [“Most persistent noises”]: Newsweek, quoted in Hopkins, p. 70.

430 [“Not even for kings and queens! ”]: ibid.

[“You really do believe”]: quoted in Davies, p. 198.

[“Mainstream of mass culture”]: Willis, p. 76.

[“Twentieth century working-class songs”]: Hopkins, p. 79; on the Rolling Stones, see David Dallon, The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years (Knopf, 1981); Stanley Booth, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (Vintage, 1985); Hopkins, pp. 79-80.

[“Asked for their pants”]: Hopkins, p. 79.

[Reagan’s pop music appreciation]: see Fred Bruning, “The Reagans and the Beach Boys,” Maclean’s, vol. 96, no. 18 (May 2, 1983), p. 13.

[San Francisco rock]: Hopkins, ch. 7; Belz, pp. 197-208; Cohn, ch. 12; Lar Tusb, “West Coast Then … and Now,” in Eisen, vol. 2, pp. 251-56.

[“LSD experience without the LSD”]: Hopkins, p. 92.

[“1-2-3 What are we fightin’ for”]: “I Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” quoted in ibid., pp. 97-98, recorded by Joe McDonald, words and lyrics by Joe McDonald, copyright 1965, Alkatraz Music Co.

431 [Counterculture and New Left]: Gitlin, Sixties, esp. ch. 8; Hampton, chs. 1-3, 6-7; Denisoff and Peterson, ch. 3; William L. O’Neill, Coming Apart (Quadrangle Books, 1971),esp. ch. 8.

[“Rock and Roll, Rock culture”]: Smucker, “The Politics of Rock: Movement vs. Groovement,” in Eisen, vol. 2, pp. 83-91, quoted at p. 88.

[“Getting stoned”]: quoted in O’Neill, p. 244.

[“Open a new space”]: Gitlin, Sixties, p. 202.

[O’Neill on countercultural materialism]: O’Neill, p. 264.

[Record sales, 1968]: Hopkins, p. 121.

[“Try to dig it”]; quoted in ibid., p. 123.

[“Hey people now”]: quoted in Gitlin, Sixties, p. 204.

[SUPERZAP THEM]: quoted in Time, vol. 90, no. 1 (July 7, 1967), p. 20.

[“Cultural and spiritual revolution”]: Robert A. Rosenstone, “‘The Times They Are A-Changin’: The Music of Protest,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 382 (March 1969), p. 142.

[“We want the world”]: quoted in Hopkins, p. 100.

[“Sex starts with me”]: quoted in O’Neill, p. 243.

432 [“Idea of leadership”]: quoted in Hampton, p. 20.

[Kopkind on countercultural sea]: Kopkind, “Woodstock Nation,” p. 318. [“Founded on privilege”]: Gitlin, Sixties, p. 212.

[Smucker at Woodstock]: Smucker, quoted at pp. 85, 87, 88, 89, 90; see also Kopkind; Jon Wiener, “Woodstock Revisited,” in Eisen, vol. 2, pp. 170-72. [“Sing ‘Solidarity Forever’”]: quoted in Denisoff, Great Day Coming, p. 193.

10. Liberty, Equality, Sisterhood

433 [Eleanor Roosevelt’s last years]: Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor: The Years Alone (Norton, 1972), ch. 15; Tamara K. Hareven, Eleanor Roosevelt: An American Conscience (1968; reprinted by Da Capo Press, 1975), ch. 13; Maurine H. Beasley, Eleanor Roosevelt and the Media: A Public Quest for Self-Fulfillment (University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 182-85.

[“Save 6,000 lives”]: quoted in Lash, p. 304.

[Roosevelt and women’s issues]: see Elisabeth Israels Perry, “Training for Public Life: ER and Women’s Political Networks in the 1920s,” in Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, eds., Without Precedent: The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt (Indiana University Press, 1984), pp. 28-45; Susan Ware, “ER and Democratic Politics: Women in the Postsuffrage Era,” in ibid., pp. 46-60; Lois Scharf, “ER and Feminism,” in ibid., pp. 226-53; Hareven, pp. 24-32, 63-68, 135-36, 233-34, 27, and passim.

434 [“Most Admired Woman”]: Lash, p. 302.

[President’s commission report]: U.S. President’s Commission on the Status of Women, Report: American Women (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1963); see also Margaret Mead and Frances Bagley Kaplan, eds., American Women: The Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and Other Publications of the Commission (Scribner, 1965); Scharf, pp. 247-49; Cynthia E. Harrison, “A ‘New Frontier’ for Women: The Public Policy of the Kennedy Administration,” Journal of American History, vol. 67, no. 3 (December 1980), pp. 630-46; Judith Hole and Ellen Levine, Rebirth of Feminism (Quadrangle, 1971), pp. 18-24.

434 [“Problem that has no name”]: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (Norton, 1963), p. 543-46.

434-6 [Marion Hudson’s diary]: “Diary of a Student-Mother-Housewife-Worker,” in Rosalyn Baxandall et al., eds., America’s Working Women (Vintage, 1976), pp. 336-40, quoted at pp. 336-38.

Breaking Through the Silken Curtain.

436 [Friedan’s writings for popular magazines]: see Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (Knopf, 1979), p. 3.

[Maslow]: Maslow, “Dominance, Personality, and Social Behavior in Women,” Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 10, no. 1 (February 1939), pp. 3-39; Maslow, Motivation and Personality (Harper, 1954); Friedan, Feminine Mystique, pp. 316-26.

[Kinsey]: Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (W. B. Saunders, 1953); Friedan, Feminine Mystique, esp. ch. 11 and pp. 327-29.

[“Progress to equal participation”]: Friedan, Feminine Mystique, p. 329.

[“Scientific religion”]: ibid., p. 125.

[“Our culture does not permit”]: ibid., p. 77.

437 [“Conceived out of wedlock”]: Donald A. Robinson, “Two Movements in Pursuit of Equal Opportunity,” Signs, vol. 4, no. 3 (Spring 1979), pp. 413-33, quoted at p. 423; see also Carl M. Brauer, “Women Activists, Southern Conservatives, and the Prohibition of Sex Discrimination in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” Journal of Southern History, vol. 49, no. 1 (February 1983), pp. 37-56; Martha Griffiths, “Women and Legislation,” in Mary Lou Thompson, ed., Voices of the New Feminism (Beacon Press, 1970), pp. 112-14.

[Weak enforcement of antidiscrimination law]: Robinson, pp. 420-26 passim; Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its Relation to the Policy Process (David McKay, 1975), pp. 178-83; Jane De Hart Mathews, “The New Feminism and the Dynamics of Social Change,” in Linda K. Kerber and Mathews, eds., Women’s America: Refocusing the Past (Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 408; Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement (Random House, 1976), pp. 78-80; Joan Abramson, Old Boys, New Women: The Politics of Sex Discrimination (Praeger, 1979), ch. 5; Pauli Murray and Mary Eastwood, “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII,” in Anne Koedt et al., eds., Radical Feminism (Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1973), pp. 165-77.

[June 1966 conference and formation of NOW]: Hole and Levine, pp. 81-86; Friedan, It Changed My Life, pp. 75-86.

[“Seething underground”]: Betty Friedan, “Up From the Kitchen Floor,” New York Times Magazine, March 4, 1973, pp. 8-9, 28-35, 37 quoted at p. 28.

[“Talked down to us”]: Friedan, It Changed My Life, p. 83.

[Organization and structure of NOW]: Maren Lockwood Carden, The New Feminist Movement (Russell Sage, 1974), chs. 8-9 passim: Freeman, ch. 3; Friedan, It Changed My Life, pp. 95-96; Joyce Gelb and Marian Lief Palley, Women and Public Policies (Princeton University Press, 1982), chs. 2-3 passim.

[“We, men and women”]: “NOW Statement of Purpose,” in Friedan, It Changed My Life, pp. 87-91, quoted at pp. 87, 88, 90.

438 [“To hand over”]: ibid., p. 95.

[Conflict among women leaders during Kennedy Administration]: Cynthia E. Harrison, On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women’s Issues, 1945-1968 (page proofs: University of California Press, 1988), parts 2-3 passim; see also Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Survival in the Doldrums: The American Women’s Rights Movement, 1945 to the 1960s (Oxford University Press, 1987).

438 [“Specific bills”]: Esther Peterson, quoted in Harrison, On Account of Sex, p. 116.

[“Special emphasis”]: William H. Chafe, The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Ec nomic, and Political Roles, 1920-1970 (Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 127.

438-9 [Policy differences within NOW]: Freeman, pp. 80-83; Hole and Levine, pp. 87-92, 95; Friedan, It Changed My Life, pp. 104-6.

439 [WEAL]: Freeman, pp. 81, 152-54; Gayle Graham Yates, What Women Want: The Ideas of the Movement (Harvard University Press, 1975), pp. 46-48; Hole and Levine, pp. 95-98; Karen O’Connor, Women’s Organizations’ Use of the Courts (Lexington Books, 1980), pp. 96-98 (Table 5-1), 105-8; Gelb and Palley, chs. 2-3 passim.

[Executive order on federal contracts]: Freeman, pp. 75-76, 191-96; Friedan, “The First Year: President’s Report to NOW,” in It Changed My Life, pp. 97-99; see also Abramson, ch. 4; Bernice Sandler, “A Little Help from Our Government: WEAL and Contract Compliance,” in Alice S. Rossi and Ann Calderwood, eds., Academic Women on the Move (Russell Sage, 1973), pp. 439-62. [NOW suit on want ads]: Hole and Levine, pp. 40-44, 86-87; Freeman, pp. 76-79; Friedan, It Changed My Life, pp. 94-95; see also O’Connor, pp. 96-98 (Table 5-1), 103-5.

[NOW, AT&T and flight attendants]: Feeman, pp. 76-77, 188-90; Friedan, It Changed My Life, pp. 92-95.

[Women’s Legislation, 92nd Congress]: Freeman, pp. 184, 202-5, 209-29; see also Gelb and Palley; Anne E. Costan, “Representing Women: From Social Movement to Interest Group,” Western Political Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 1 (March 1981), pp. 100-13; George P. Sape and Thomas J. Hart, “Title VII Reconsidered: The Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972,” George Washington Law Review, vol. 40 (July 1972), pp. 824-89.

[ECOA]: Gelb and Palley, ch. 4.

[NWPC]: Freeman, pp. 160-62; Gelb and Palley, pp. 26-31 passim; Yates, pp. 48-50; Friedan, It Changed My Life, pp. 165-83.

[Black women’s employment gains]: Allen L. Sorkin, “Education, Occupation, and Income of Nonwhite Women,” Journal of Negro Education, vol. 41 (1972), pp. 343-51; Lynn Y. Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820-1980 (University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 89, 96.

440 [“Virginia Slims” poll]: Freeman, p. 38.

[Black women and white women’s organizations]: see Carden, pp. 28-30; Freeman, pp. 37-42; Cellestine Ware, Woman Power: The Movement for Women’s Liberation (Tower Publications, 1970), ch. 2.

[Women’s Strike for Equality]: New York Times, August 27, 1970, pp. 1, 30; Freeman, pp. 84-85; Hole and Levine, pp. 92-93; Friedan, It Changed My Life, pp. 137-54.

[“How powerful”]: Friedan, It Changed My Life, p. 141.

[“Your own thing”]: see Freeman, p. 84.

441 [“Not a bedroom war”]: “Strike Day: August 26, 1970,” in Friedan, It Changed My Life, pp. 152-54, quoted at p. 153.

[Women in the 1950s]: Friedan, Feminine Mystique; Evans, pp. 3-15 passim; Chafe, American Woman, ch. 9; Maxine L. Margolis, Mothers and Such: Views of American Women and Why They Changed (University of California Press, 1984), pp. 166-76, 218-25; Sheila M. Rothman, Woman’s Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present (Basic Books, 1978), pp. 224-31; Wiener, pp. 89-96 passim; Helena Znaniecki Lopata, Occupation: Housewife (Oxford University Press, 1971); Susan M. Hartmann, The Home Front and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Twayne, 1982); Judy Syfers, “Why I Want a Wife,” in Koedt et al., pp. 60-62; Alan L. Sorkin, “On the Occupational Status of Women, 1870-1970,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, vol. 32, no. 3 (July 1973), pp. 235-43; Nancy Walker, “Humor and Gender Roles: The ‘Funny’ Feminism of the Post-World War II Suburbs,” American Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 1 (Spring 1985), pp. 98-113; Joann Vanek, “Time Spent in Housework,” in Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth H. Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 499-506.

[“Busy Wife’s Achievements”]: Life, vol. 41, no. 26 (December 24, 1956), p. 41.

441 [“ Ready for a padded cell”]: quoted in Friedan, Feminine Mystique, p. 28. [“All hell would break”]: Jan Schakowsky, quoted in Evans, pp. 227-28.

[Civil rights movement, New Left, and women’s movement]: Evans; Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (Harper, 1962), Appendix 5 (“A Parallel to the Negro Problem”); Mathews, “New Feminism,” pp. 410-12; Hole and Levine, pp. 109-14; Carden, pp. 26, 59-63; Mary King, Freedom Song (Morrow, 1987), esp. ch. 12; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (Bantam, 1987), ch. 16; Shirley N. Weber, “Black Power in the 1960s: A Study of Its Impact on Women’s Liberation,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 11, no. 4 (June 1981), pp. 483-97; Gail Paradise Kelly, “Women’s Liberation and the Cultural Revolution,” Radical America, vol. 4, no. 2 (February 1970), pp. 19-25; Marlene Dixon, “On Women’s Liberation,” ibid., pp. 26-34; Myra Marx Ferree and Beth B. Hess, Controversy and Coalition: The New Feminist Movement (Twayne, 1985), pp. 31-35, 45-48, 59-62; Barbara Burris et al., “The Fourth World Manifesto,” in Koedt et al., pp. 322-57; Marge Piercy, “The Grand Coolie Damn,” in Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful (Random House, 1970), pp. 421-38; Roxanne Dunbar, “Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution,” in ibid., pp. 477-92; Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” in Betty Roszak and Theodore Roszak, eds., Masculine/Feminine: Readings in Sexual Mythology and the Liberation of Women (Harper Colophon, 1969), pp. 241-50; Mary Aickin Rothschild, “White Women Volunteers in the Freedom Summers: Their Life and Work in a Movement for Social Change,” Feminist Studies, vol. 5, no. 3 (Fall 1979), pp. 466-95.

442 [“Widespread and deep rooted”]: “Women in the Movement,” November 1964, reprinted in Evans, pp. 233-35, quoted at p. 234; see also Mary King, pp. 443-55 passim.

[“Only position for women”]: Evans, p. 87.

[“Generated feminist echoes”]: ibid., p. 88; see also Mary King, pp. 451-52. [Women at SDS “rethinking conference”]: Evans, pp. 156-69 passim.

[“Sex-taste system”]: Casey Hayden and Mary King, “Sex and Caste,” November 18, 1965, reprinted in ibid,, pp. 235-38, quoted at p. 237.

[“Shit-workers” and “free movement ‘chicks’”]: Sue Munaker, Evelyn Goldfield, and Naomi Weisstein, quoted in Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (Random House, 1973), p. 526. [“Liberation Workshop”]: Evans, pp. 187-92.

[“Colonial relationship”): “Liberation of Women,” reprinted in ibid., pp. 240-42, quoted at pp. 240, 241.

443 [“Constant hubbub”]: quoted in ibid., p. 192.

The Liberation of Women

[Women at NCNP]: Evans, pp. 195-99; Freeman, pp. 59-60; Hole and Levine, pp. 112-14.

[Formation of first women’s liberation groups]: Evans, pp. 199-211; Freeman, pp. 56-62; Hole and Levine, pp. 114-22 passim: Carden, pp. 63-65.

[Washington counter-demonstration]: Hole and Levine, pp. 117-19, Kathie Amatniek quoted at p. 118; Carden, p. 61; New York Times, January 16, 1968, p. 3.

444 [Redstockings]: “Redstockings Manifesto,” in Morgan, Sisterhood, pp. 533-36; Yates, pp. 94-95, 100-1; Hole and Levine, pp. 136-42.

[Atkinson’s break with NOW]: Atkinson, “Resignation from N.O.W.,” in Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (Links Books, 1974), pp. 9-11, quoted at p. 10; Freeman, pp. 81-82; Hole and Levine, p. 90.

[The Feminists]: “The Feminists: A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles,” in Koedt et al., pp. 368-78; The Feminists, “Women: Do You Know the Facts About Marriage?,” in Morgan, Sisterhood, pp. 536-37; Hole and Levine, pp. 142-47; Atkinson.

[Ease of starting women’s groups]: see Evans, p. 211.

[Radical feminist ideology]: see Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, H. M. Parshley, trans. (Knopf, 1952); Koedt et al., part 3; Marlene Dixon, “The Rise of Women’s Liberation,” in Roszak and Roszak, pp. 186-201; Hole and Levine, chs. 3-4; Yates, ch. 3 passim: Carden, ch. 4; Mathews, pp. 413-15.

[“Primary class system”]: Barbara Mehrhof, quoted in Yates, p. 93.

444 [Redstockings Manifesto on male supremacy]: Morgan, Sisterhood, quoted at p. 534.

444-5 [Millett]: Millett, Sexual Politics (Doubleday, 1970), quoted at p. 363; see also Yates, pp. 79-84.

445 [Firestone]: Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (Morrow, 1970); see also Yates, pp. 84-87.

[Consciousness-raising]: Pamela Allen, Tree Space: A Perspective on the Small Group in Women’s Liberation (Times Change Press, 1970); Claudia Dreitus, Women’s Fate: Raps from a Feminist Consciousness-Raising Group (Bantam, 1973); Vivian Gornick, “Consciousness,” in Gornick, Essays in Feminism (Harper, 1978), pp. 47-68; Carol Williams Payne, “Consciousness Raising: A Dead End?,” in Koedt et al., pp. 282-84; Ronnie Lichtman, “Consciousness Raising—1970,” in Gerda Lerner, ed., The Female Experience (Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), pp. 456-58; Freeman, pp. 116-19; Yates, pp. 103-6; Carden, pp. 33-37; Mathews, pp. 412-13.

[“Overview of our potential”]: Allen, pp. 6-7.

[Miss America protest]: Robin Morgan, “Women Disrupt the Miss America Pageant,” in Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (Vintage, 1978), pp. 62-67, quoted on “Mindless Sex Object Image,” “Murder mascot,” “commercial shill-game,” and “‘ideal’ symbol,” at p. 64; New York Times, September 8, 1968, p. 81; “No More Miss America!,” in Morgan, Sisterhood, pp. 521-24.

446 [“Instruments of torture”]: quoted in Ann Popkin, “The Personal Is Political; The Women’s Liberation Movement,” in Dick Cluster, ed., They Should Have Served That Cup of Coffee: Seven Radicals Remember the 60s (South End Press, 1979), p. 190.

[WITCH]: Morgan, Going Too Far, pp. 71-81; Hole and Levine, pp. 126-30; Morgan, Sisterhood, pp. 538-53, 556; “The WITCH Manifesto,” in Roszak and Roszak, pp. 259-61.

[“Pit their ancient magic”]: Robin Morgan, “WITCH Hexes Wall Street,” in Morgan, Going Too Far, pp. 75-77, quoted at p. 175.

[Feminists and the media]: Ferree and Hess, pp. 74-78; Hole and Levine, pp. 247-70; Freeman, pp. 111-14, 148-50; see also Matilda Butler and William Paisley, Women and the Mass Media: Sourcebook for Research and Action (Human Sciences Press, 1980).

[“Grandpress blitz”]: Freeman, p. 148.

[“A political statement”]: Morgan, “Miss America Pageant,” p. 63.

[“Ghetto” of women’s page]: ibid., p. 63.

[Newsweek accord]: New York Times, August 27, 1970, p. 30; Hole and Levine, pp. 258-60.

447 [Ladies’ Home Journal sit-in]: Hole and Levine, pp. 255-58; Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1970; Newsweek, vol. 75, no. 13 (March 30, 1970), p. 61; ibid., vol. 76, no. 5 (August 3, 1970), p. 44.

[Feminist publications]: see Hole and Levine, pp. 270-76; Carden, pp. 65, 69-70, 144-45, 211-17; Freeman, pp. 110-11; Ferree and Hess, pp. 72-74.

[Women’s studies]: Florence Howe and Carol Ahlum, “Women’s Studies and Social Change,” in Rossi and Calderwood, pp. 393-423; Gloria Bowles and Renate Duelli Klein, eds., Theories of Women’s Studies (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983); Ellen Carol DuBois et al., Feminist Scholarship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe (University of Illinois Press, 1985); Freeman, pp. 166-69; Hole and Levine, pp. 326-28; Kathleen O’Connor Blumhagen and Walter D. Johnson, eds., Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Collection (Greenwood Press, 1978).

[Women’s health movement]: Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves (Simon and Schuster, 1973); Ellen Frankfort, Vaginal Politics (Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1972); Gena Corea, The Hidden Malpractice: How American Medicine Treats Women as Patients and Professionals (Morrow, 1977); Margolis, pp. 247-51; Hole and Levine, pp. 358-62; Ferree and Hess, pp. 96-98; Dorothy Rosenthal Mandelbaum, “Women in Medicine,” Signs, vol. 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1978), pp. 136-45; see also Miriam Galper and Carolyn Kott Washburne, “A Woman’s Self-Help Program in Action,” Social Policy, vol. 6, no. 5 (March-April 1976), pp. 46-52.

[Abortion]: Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and Reproductive Freedom (Longman, 1984); Beverly Wildung Harrison, Our Right to Choose: Toward a New Ethic of Abortion (Beacon Press, 1983); Kristin Luker, Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood (University of California Press, 1984), esp. chs. 3, 5, 7-9; Hole and Levine, ch. 7; Yates, pp. 110-12; Lucinda Cisler, “Abortion Law Repeal (sort of): A Warning to Women,” in Koedt et al., pp. 151-64; see also Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (Grossman, 1976).

447-8 [“Talk about women’s rights”]: quoted in Luker, p. 97.

448 [Roe v. Wade]: 410 U.S. 113 (1973); see also Luker, pp. 125-27; Janet Benshoof, “The Legacy of Roe v. Wade,” in Jay L. Garfield and Patricia Hennessey, eds., Abortion: Moral and Legal Perspectives (University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), pp. 35-44; Hyman Rodman et al., The Abortion Question (Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 183-90; James C. Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800-1900 (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 250-57.

[Abortion backlash]: Luker, chs. 6-9 passim; Andrew H. Merton, Enemies of Choice: The Right-to-Life Movement and Its Threat to Abortion (Beacon Press, 1981); Petchesky, chs. 7-8; Benshoof; Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women (Coward-McCann, 1983), ch. 3 passim; Kerree and Hess, pp. 130-39.

[Luker on backlash’s meaning]: Luker, pp. 193-94, quoted at p. 193.

449 [Rape]: Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (Simon and Schuster, 1975); Andra Medea and Kathleen Thompson, Against Rape (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974); Susan Griffin, “Rape: The All-American Crime,” Ramparts, vol. 10, no. 3 (September 1971), pp. 26-35; Griffin, Rape: The Power of Consciousness (Harper, 1979); New York Radical Feminists, Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women, Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson, eds. (New American Library, 1974); Diane E. H. Russell, The Politics of Rape: The Victim’s Perspective (Stein & Day, 1984); Rosemarie Tong, Women, Sex, and the Law (Rowman & Allenheld, 1984), ch. 4; Margolis, pp. 252-59.

[“All the hatred”]: Medea and Thompson, p. 11.

[“Masculine ideology”]: see Brownmiller, pp. 12, 14, 396.

[Feminist mobilization against rape]: Jane Benson, “Take Back the Night” (unpublished manuscript, 1983); Our Bodies, Ourselves, ch. 8; New York Radical Feminists; Susan Pascalé et al., “Self-Defense for Women,” in Morgan, Sisterhood, pp. 469-77; Medea and Thompson, pp. 125-30, 144-51; Carol V. Horos, Rape (Dell/Banbury, 1981). [“Speakable crime”]: Brownmiller, p. 396.

[Pornography]: Laura Lederer, ed., Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography (Morrow, 1980); Ferree and Hess, pp. 105-7; The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (Bantam, 1970); Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature (Harper, 1981); Alan Soble, Pornography: Marxism, Feminism, and the Future of Sexuality (Yale University Press, 1986); Ray C. Rist, ed., The Pornography Controversy: Changing Standards in American Life (Transaction Books, 1975); Long, ch. 1; Brownmiller, pp. 392-96.

450 [Lesbianism]: Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism (Stein & Day, 1972); Abbott and Love, “Is Women’s Liberation a Lesbian Plot?,” in Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, eds., Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (Basic Books, 1971 ), pp. 436-51; Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (Simon and Schuster, 1973); Estelle B. Freedman et al., eds., The Lesbian Issue: Essays from SIGNS (University of Chicago Press, 1985); Free man, pp. 134-42; Anne Koedt, “Lesbianism and Feminism,” in Koedt el al., pp. 246-58; Radicalesbians, “The Woman Identified Woman,” in ibid., pp. 240-45; Yates, pp. 108-10.

[“What is a lesbian?”]: Radicalesbians, p. 240.

[“Carried the women’s movement”]: quoted in Abbott and Love, Sappho, p. 146. [Police raid on gay bar]: see ibid., pp. 159-60.

[“Doubly outcast”]: Abbott and Love, “Lesbian Plot,” p. 443.

[“Economic independence”]: Abbott and Love, Sappho, p. 136.

[“Lavender menace”]: quoted in ibid., p. 110.

[Congress to Unite Women, 1970]: ibid., pp. 113-16.

[New York NOW president and lavender armbands]: ibid., pp. 121-22; see also Friedan, It Changed My Life, pp. 158-59.

450-1 [1971 NOW resolution on lesbians]: quoted in Freeman, p. 99; see also Abbott and Love, Sappho, pp. 125-34.

451 [“Primary cornerstone of male supremacy”]: Nancy Myron and Charlotte Bunch, eds., Lesbianism and the Women’s Movement (Diana Press, 1975), p. 10.

[“Vanguardism”]: Freeman, p. 138; see also Koedt, “Lesbianism and Feminism.” [Black feminism]: Frances M. Beal, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in Morgan, Sisterhood, pp. 340-53; Firestone, ch. 5; Phyllis Marynick Palmer, “White Women/Black Women: The Dualism of Female Identity and Experience in the United States,” Feminist Studies, vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring 1983), pp. 151-70; Pauli Murray, “The Liberation of Black Women,” in Thompson, pp. 87-102; Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (Random House, 1981); Cellestine Ware, “Black Feminism,” in Koedt et al., pp. 81-84; Kay Lindsey, “The Black Woman as Woman,” in Toni Cade, ed., The Black Woman (New American Library, 1970), pp. 85-89; Toni Cade, “On the Issue of Roles,” in ibid., pp. 101-10; Gloria I. Joseph and Jill Lewis, Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives (Anchor Press, 1981 ); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984); Ware, Woman Power, ch. 2; Bell Hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (South End Press, 1981). [“Organize around those things”]: “Black Feminism: A New Mandate,” Ms., vol. 2, no. 11 (May 1974), pp. 97-100, quoted at p. 97.

[National Black Feminist Organization]: ibid.; Freeman, pp. 156-57; Joseph and Lewis, pp. 33-34.

[“We were married”]: “Black Feminism: A New Mandate,” p. 98.

[“Male-dominated media image”]: “Statement of Purpose,” ibid., p. 99.

[“Committed to working”]: Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (Persephone Press, 1981), pp. 210-18, quoted at p. 217.

452 [Latina feminism]: “Women of ‘La Raza’ Unite!,” in Angela G. Dorenkamp et al., eds., Images of Women in American Popular Culture (Harcourt, 1985), pp. 430-32; Mirta Vidal, Chicanas Speak Out: Women—New Voice of La Raza (Pathfinder Press, 1971); Sylvia Alicia Gonzales, “The Chicana Perspective: A Design for Self-Awareness,” in Arnulfo D. Trejo, ed., The Chicanos: As We See Ourselves (University of Arizona Press, 1979), pp. 81-99; Morgan, Sisterhood, pp. 376-84; Gilberto López y Rivas, The Chicanos: Life and Struggles of the Mexican Minority in the United States, López y Rivas and Elizabeth Martínez, eds. and trans. (Monthly Review Press, 1973), pp. 168-74.

[National Women’s Conference]: Lindsy Van Gelder, “Four Days That Changed the World,” Ms., vol. 6, no. 9 (March 1978), pp. 52-57, 86-93; U.S. National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, The Spirit of Houston: The First National Women’s Conference (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978); Alice S. Rossi, Feminists in Politics: A Panel Analysis of the First National Women’s Conference (Academic Press, 1982).

[“My name is Susan B. Anthony”]: quoted in Van Gelder, p. 90.

[Minority resolution]: Spirit of Houston, pp. 155-60.

[“Simultaneity of oppressions”]: Barbara Smith, “Introduction,” in Smith, ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), p. xxxiii; see also Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Coalition Politics: Turning the Century,” in ibid., pp. 356-68.

453 [“Change means growth”]: Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Lorde, pp. 114-23, quoted at p. 123.

The Personal Is Political

[Analysis of women’s movement]: see Freeman, pp. 1-70 and ch. 7 passim, and sources cited therein; see also Ferree and Hess, pp. 1-27 and ch. 8.

[Rise in percentage of women in workforce, 1947-68]: Freeman, p. 30; see also Chafe, esp. pp. 218-25, 234-37.

[Freeman on occupational rewards]: Freeman, p. 31.

454 [“Hot-house plants”]: Alice S. Rossi, quoted in ibid., p. 27.

[“Rage of Women”]: ibid., p. 27, n. 40.

[Varieties of feminist ideology]: see Alison Jaggar, “Political Philosophies of Women’s Liberation,” in Mary Vetterling-Braggin et al., eds., Feminism and Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield, 1977), pp. 5-21; see also Jaggar and Paula Rothenberg Struhl, eds., Feminist Frameworks: Alternative Theoretical Accounts of the Relations Between Women and Men (McGraw-Hill, 1978); Ferree and Hess, pp. 41-43; Yates.

454 [Black and Maoist origins of consciousness-raising]: see Yates, p. 103.

[Growth and organizational difficulties of NOW]: Freeman, pp. 86-97; Carden, ch. 9 passim.

[Anti-leadership ethic and its difficulties]: see Joreen, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” in Koedt et al., pp. 285-99; Carden, ch. 7 and pp. 128-32; Freeman, pp. 119-29, 142-46; Hole and Levine, pp. 157-61; Galper and Washburne.

[“Possession of the self”]: Vivian Gornick, “Feminist Writers,” in Gornick, Essays, pp. 164-70, quoted at p. 169.

[“So many of our struggles”]: Leah Fritz, Dreamers and Dealers: An Intimate Appraisal of the Women’s Movement (Beacon Press, 1980), pp. 16-17.

[“Tyranny of structurelessness”]: Joreen, “Tyranny.”

456 [“Euphoric period”]: “Editorial: Notes from the Third Year,” December 1971, in Koedt et al., p. 300.

[Feminist “stars”]: see Cardin, pp. 89-90; Freeman, pp. 120-21; Joreen, pp. 292-93; Claudia Dreifus, “The Selling of a Feminist,” in Koedt et al., pp. 358-61; see also Todd Gitlin, The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left (University of California Press, 1980), ch. 5.

[“Sending double signals”]: Millett, Flying (Knopf, 1974), p. 92.

[Millett’s career in Time]: see Time, vol. 96, no. 9 (August 31, 1970); and “Women’s Lib: A Second Look,” Time, vol. 96, no. 24 (December 14, 1970), p. 50; see also Abbott and Love, Sappho, pp. 119-25; Millett, Flying.

457 [Feminists and labor and professional organizations]: Hole and Levine, pp. 98-107, 338-55, 362-71; Philip S. Koner, Women and the American Labor Movement: From World War I to the Present (Free Press, 1979-80), vol. 2, chs. 24-27; Kay Klotzburger, “Political Action by Academic Women,” in Rossi and Calderwood, pp. 359-91; Anne M. Briscoe, “Phenomenon of the Seventies: The Women’s Caucuses,” Signs, vol. 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1978), pp. 152-58.

457-8 [Feminists and religion]: Mary Daly, The Church and the Second Sex (Harper, 1968); Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Beacon Press, 1973); Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church & State (1893; reprinted by Persephone Press, 1980): Yates, pp. 65-73, 140-41; Hole and Levine, ch. 11 passim.

458 [“Their hierarchical status”]: quoted in Freeman, p. 163.

[Women and the 1972 Democratic convention]: Byron E. Shafer, Quiet Revolution: The Struggle for the Democratic Party and the Shaping of Post-Reform Politics (Russell Sage, 1983), chs. 6-7, 17 passim: Denis G. Sullivan et al., Explorations in Convention Decision Making: The Democratic Party in the 1970s (W. H. Freeman, 1976); Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1972 (Atheneum, 1973), chs. 3, 7; Wilma E. McGrath and John W. Soule, “Rocking the Cradle or Rocking the Boat: Women at the 1972 Democratic National Convention,” Social Science Quarterly, vol. 55, no.1 (June 1974), pp. 141-50; see also Kristi Andersen, “Working Women and Political Participation, 1952-1972,” American Journal of Political Science, vol. 19, no. 3 (August 1975), pp. 439-53.

[Black delegates at 1968 and 1972 Democratic conventions]: Steven F. Lawson, In Pursuit of Power: Southern Blacks and Electoral Politics, 1965-1982 (Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 195-96.

[Feminist disappointments at convention]: see Shirley Chisholm, The Good Fight (Harper, 1973), pp. 128-31.

[ERA] Janet K. Boles, The Politics of the Equal Rights Amendment: Conflict and the Decision Process (Longman, 1979); Boles, “Building Support for the Equal Rights Amendment,” in James David Barber and Barbara Kellerman, eds., Women Leaders in American Politics (Prentice-Hall, 1986), pp. 37-41:Hole and Levine, pp. 54-77; Ferree and Hess, pp. 125-30; Equal Rights Amendment Project of the California Commission on the Status of Women, ed., Impact ERA: Limitations and Possibilities (Les Femmes Publishing, 1976); Yates, pp. 52-58; Mathews, “New Feminism,” pp. 416-19; Sylvia Ann Hewlett. A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America (Morrow, 1986), ch. 9; Foner, vol. 2, pp. 482-87; Lisa Cronin Wohl, “White Gloves and Combat Boots: The Fight for ERA,” Civil Liberties Review, vol. 1, no. 4 (Fall 1974), pp. 77-86; Wohl, “Phyllis Schlafly: ‘The Sweetheart of the Silent Majority.’” Ms., vol. 2, no. 9 (March 1974), pp. 54-57, 85-89; Sarah Slavin, ed., “The Equal Rights Amendment: The Politics and Processes of Ratification of the 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Women & Politics, vol. 2, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Summer 1982); see also Donald G. Mathews and Jane De Hart Mathews, “Gender and the U.S. Constitution,” paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Washington, D.C., December 28, 1987.

[“Now forced women!”]: quoted in Mathews, “New Feminism,” p. 418; see also Rebecca E. Klatch, Women of the New Right (Temple University Press, 1987). [Achievements of women’s movement]: Mathews, “New Feminism,” pp. 419-21; Ferree and Hess, chs. 7-8; Hole and Levine, pp. 397-400; Margolis, esp. Epilogue; Carden, pp. 158-71 ; O’Connor; Gelb and Palley, esp. ch. 8; Judith M. Bardwick, In Transition: How Feminism, Sexual Liberation, and the Search for Self-Fulfillment Have Altered Our Lives (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979); Hewlett.

[1972 campaign]: White, chs. 8-13; Ripon Society and Clifford W. Brown, Jr., Jaws of Victory (Little, Brown, 1974), part 1 passim; Edward W. Knappman et al., eds., Campaign 72: Press Opinion from New Hampshire to November (Facts on File, 1973), part 3; Irwin Unger, The Movement: A History of the American New Left, 1952-1972 (Dodd, Mead, 1975), pp. 199-202.

[1972 election results]: White, pp. 342-43, 372-73 (Appendix A).

460-1 [Women in 1972 election]: Andersen, “Working Women.”

461 [King’s studies]: see David J. Garrow, “The Intellectual Development of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Influences and Commentaries,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, vol. 40 (January 1986), pp. 5-20.

[Evaluations of sixties movements]: see Charles Perrow, “The Sixties Observed,” in Mayer N. Zald and John D. McCarthy, eds., The Dynamics of Social Movements: Resource Mobilization, Social Control, and Tactics (Winthrop Publishers, 1979), pp. 192-211; Roberta Ash, Social Movements in America (Markham, 1972), ch. 9; Mathews, “New Feminism,” pp. 398-412; Donald Von Eschen et al., “The Disintegration of the Negro Non-violent Movement,” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 6 (1969), pp. 215-34; Anthony Oberschall, “The Decline of the 1960s Social Movements,” in Louis Kries-burg, ed., Research in Social Movements, Conflict and Change (JAI Press, 1978), pp. 257-89; Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (Free Press, 1984), chs. 1, 11, and passim; Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Harvard University Press, 1981), ch. 18 and passim; Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (Pantheon, 1977), ch. 4; Chafe, part 3 passim; Jo Freeman, “Women and Public Policy: An Overview,” in Ellen Boneparth, ed., Women, Power and Policy (Pergamon, 1982), pp. 47-67; Wini Breines, The Great Refusal: Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968 (Praeger, 1982); Gitlin, Whole World; Gitlin, Sixties, ch. 19; Arthur Schweitzer, The Age of Charisma (Nelson-Hall, 1984), pp. 210-21; August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, “Negro Protest and Urban Unrest,” Social Science Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 3 (December 1968), pp. 438-43.

11. Prime Time: Peking and Moscow

465 [Davis on Nixon]: Davis, “Richard Milhous Nixon,” in John A. Garraty, ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography (Harper, 1974), pp. 811-15, quoted at p. 812; on Nixon and his character, see also Stephen E. Ambrose, Nixon: The Education of a Politician, 1913-1962 (Simon and Schuster, 1987), esp. chs. 1-7; Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (Houghton Mifflin, 1970); Fawn M. Brodie, Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (Norton, 1981 ); Eli S. Chesen, President Nixon’s Psychiatric Profile (Peter H. Wyden, 1973); David Abrahamsen, Nixon vs. Nixon: An Emotional Tragedy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977); Bruce Mazlish, In Search of Nixon: A Psychohistorical Inquiry (Basic Books, 1972); Lloyd Etheredge, “Hardball Politics: A Model,” Political Psychology, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1979), pp. 3-26; Mauricio Mazon, “Young Richard Nixon: A Study in Political Precocity,” Historian, vol. 41, no. 1 (November 1978), pp. 21-40.

[“What’ll I wear today?”]: Washington Post, February 15, 1956, p. 14.

466 [Barber on Nixon]: James D. Barber, The Presidential Character: Predicting Performance in the White House (Prentice-Hall, 1972), part 5.

466 [Mazlish on Nixon]: Mazlish, p. 74. [Wills on Nixon]: Wills, p. 406.

[Nixon’s domestic policy]: Herbert Stein, Presidential Economics: The Making of Economic Policy from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (Simon and Schuster, 1984), ch. 5; A. James Reichley, Conservatives in an Age of Change: The Nixon and Ford Administrations (Brookings Institution, 1981), pp. 68-78, chs. 7-11; Theodore H. White, Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon (Atheneum, 1975), p. 139; Rowland Evans, Jr., and Robert D. Novak, Nixon in the White House: The Frustration of Power (Random House, 1971), chs. 6-8.

[1971 State of the Union]: January 22, 1971, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971-75), vol. 3, pp. 50-58, quoted at p. 52.

467 [Burns on Nixon’s quick decsion]: Reichley, p. 138.

[Dispute over welfare reform]: ibid., pp. 130-43, Ehrlichman quoted at p. 139. [“A coherent vision”]: First Annual Report to Congress on United States Foreign Policy for the 1970’s, February 18, 1970, in Nixon Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 116-90, quoted at p. 124.

467-8 [Nixon’s foreign policy advisers and apparatus]: Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (Summit, 1983), chs. 1-3; Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Little, Brown, 1979), ch. 2 passim: Reichley, pp. 64-68; Marvin Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (Little, Brown, 1974), ch. 5; Roger Morris, Uncertain Greatness: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (Harper, 1977), pp. 78-93.

Finding China

468 [Nixon as anticommunist]: Brodie, chs. 13-17; Mazlish, pp. 81-87; Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises (Doubleday, 1962), sect. 1 and passim; Nixon, Memoirs (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), pp. 343-44; Earl Mazo, Richard Nixon: A Political and Personal Portrait (Harper, 1959).

[“What do the Chinese Communists want?”]: quoted in Kalb and Kalb, p. 218. 468-9 [Nixon’s changing line on China]: Nixon, “Asia After Viet Nam,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 46, no. 1 (October 1967), pp. 111-23, quoted at pp. 121,123, 121, respectively.

469 [Nixon’s attempt to visit mainland China]: William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside View of the Pre-Watergate White House (Doubleday, 1975), p. 366.

[Start of rapprochement between the U.S. and China]: Warren I. Cohen, America’s Response to China: An Interpretative History of Sino-American Relations (Wiley, 1971), pp. 239-42; John King Fairbank, The United States and China, 4th ed. (Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 457-58; Hersh, ch. 26, pp. 363-71; Kissinger, White House Years, chs. 6, 18; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 545-52; Seymour Topping, Journey Between Two Chinas (Harper, 1972), ch. 27; Kwan Ha Yim, ed., China and the U.S.: 1964-72 (Facts on File, 1975), pp. 215-23; John W. Carver, China’s Decision for Rapprochement with the United States, 1968-1971 (Westview Press, 1982); Michael Schaller, The United States and China in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 163-71; Frank van der Linden, Nixon’s Quest for Peace (Robert B. Luce, 1972), pp. 139-43; Michael I. Handel, The Diplomacy of Surprise: Hitler, Nixon, Sadat (Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1981), ch. 4.

[“Curious ambivalence”]: Fairbank, United States and China, p. 314.

469-70 [U.S.-China historical background]: ibid., chs. 12-13 and passim; Fairbank, China: The People’s Middle Kingdom and the U.S.A. (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), esp. chs. 8, 10; Akira Iriye, “The United States in Chinese Foreign Policy,” in William J. Barnds, ed., China and America: The Search for a New Relationship (New York University Press, 1977), pp. 13-37; Michael H. Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (Columbia University Press, 1983); Michael Oksenberg and Robert B. Oxnam, eds., Dragon and Eagle: United States-Chinese Relations (Basic Books, 1973); A.T. Steele, The American People and China (McGraw-Hill, 1966).

470 [“When we step in here”]: quoted in Barbara W. Tuchman, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45 (Macmillan, 1971), p. 39.

[“The American memory”]: Bloodworth, The Messiah and the Mandarins: Mao Tsetung and the Ironies of Power (Atheneum, 1982), p. 266; see also Oksenberg and Oxnam, part 2.

471 [“When the moment comes”]: quoted in Handel, p. 176.

471 [Washington’s ignorance mapproaching China]: see Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 164, 167, 685-88.

[“Take the glow off”]: Kissinger, White House Years, p. 711.

[“An intricate minuet”]: ibid., p. 187; see also Hersh, p. 351.

[Plans for Kissinger’s trip]: Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 718-40; Hersh, pp. 372-73.

[Kissinger’s trip to Peking]: Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 738-55; Schaller, pp. 170-72; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 553-54; Hersh, ch.27.

[“Toward the heavens”]: Kissinger, White House Years, p. 742.

472 [Chou]: Dick Wilson, Zhou Enlai (Viking, 1984).

[Chou’s trip to Hanoi]: Hersh, p. 375.

[Nixon’s announcement]: July 15, 1971, in Nixon Public Papers, vol. 3, pp. 819-20, quoted at p. 820.

[Preparations for Nixon trip]: Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 774-84, 1049-53; Schaller, pp. 173-74; Hersh, pp. 489-93; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 554-59.

473 [“Great opportunity”]: Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1050.

[Nixon’s arrival]: Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 559-60; Schaller, p. 174; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1053-56; see also Townsend Hoopes, The Devil and John Foster Dulles (Atlantic Monthly/ Little, Brown, 1973), p. 222.

[Nixon in China]: Kissinger, White House Years, ch. 24; Hersh, ch. 35; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 560-80; Newsweek, vol. 79, no. 10 (March 6, 1972), pp. 14-29.

[“A great wall”]: exchange with reporters at the Great Wall of China, February 24, 1972, in Nixon Public Papers, vol. 4, pp. 370-72, quoted at p. 370.

[Nixon-Mao exchange]: quoted in Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 561-62.

474 [Shanghai Communiqué]: reprinted in Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1490-92, n. 3, quoted at pp. 1491, 1492; see also ibid., pp. 1085-86; Gene T. Hsiao, “The Legal Status of Taiwan in the Normalization of Sino-American Relations,” in Hsiao and Michael Witunski, eds., Sino-American Normalization and Its Policy Implications (Praeger, 1983), ch. 2, esp. pp. 41-57.

[Reactions to China initiative]: Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1091-94, Reagan quoted at p. 1093.

474-5 [Kissinger’s request to the press]: Hersh, pp. 499-500, quoted at p. 500.

475 [“Week that changed the world”]: quoted in Nixon, Memoirs, p. 580. [“Transformed the structure”]: Kissinger, White House Years, p. 163.

[Chinese internal conflict]: Garver, ch. 4; Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Brookings Institution, 1985), pp. 235-36.

475-6 [North Vietnamese offensive and preparations for Moscow summit]: Kissinger, White House Years, chs. 25-27; George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975 (Wiley, 1979), pp. 239-42; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 586-608; Stanley Karnow, Vietnam (Viking, 1983), pp. 639-47; Hersh, ch. 36; Georgi A. Arbatov and Willem Oltmans, eds., The Soviet Viewpoint (Dodd, Mead, 1981), pp. 61-64.

476 [Kissinger-Dobrymn exchange]: Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1117,

[Moscow summit]: ibid., ch. 28; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 609-21; Safire, pp. 440-59; Garthoff, ch. 9; Hersh, ch. 37.

476-7 [Kissinger on mood aboard Air Force One]: Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1202.

[“One of the great diplomatic coups”]: quoted in Nixon, Memoirs, p. 609.

[“If we leave all the decisions”]: quoted in ibid., p. 610.

[“Hid the appalling realities”]: Weisberger, Cold War, Cold Peace: The United States and Russia Since 1941 (American Heritage Publishing, 1984), p. 268.

[“Reciprocity, mutual accommodations”]: quoted in Garthoff, p. 290.

478-9 [“A First Step”]: quoted in Hersh, p. 530.

479 [SALT ratification vote]: New York Tunes, August 4, 1972, pp. 1-2.

Peace Without Peace

[“Peace is at hand”]: quoted in Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1399; see also Nikolai V. Sivachev and Nikolai N. Yakovlev, Russia and the United States, Olga Adler Titelbaum, trans. (University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 252-55.

479 [Nixon’s post-election melancholy]: Nixon, Memoirs, p. 717.

[Demand for staff resignations]: Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1406-7. [“Eastertide’’ offensive and U.S. retaliation]: Hersh, pp. 503-8, Nixon quoted on the weather and the Air Force at p. 506; Karnow, pp. 639-43; Herring, pp. 240-43.

480 [Giap’s strategy]: see William J. Duiker, The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (Westview Press, 1981), pp. 227, 292.

[Haig’s trip to Saigon]: Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1338-39; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 689-91; Arnold R. Isaacs, Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 35.

481 [“I sympathized”]: Nixon, Memoirs, p. 690.

[“Personally with you”]: quoted in ibid., p. 690.

[Kissinger’s negotiations in Paris]: Allan E. Goodman, The Lost Peace: America’s Search for a Negotiated Settlement of the Vietnam War (Hoover Institution Press, 1978), pp. 125-52; Kissinger, White House Years, chs. 31-33; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 687-701; Hersh, ch. 38: Herring, pp. 244-46.

482 [“Finest compromise”]: Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1358.

[Kissinger’s report to Nixon]: ibid., pp. 1360-62; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 691-93. [Kissinger’s trip to Saigon]: Herring, p. 245; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1367-91; Hersh, pp. 593-603.

[Nixon’s misgivings about agreement]: see Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 701-7; Hersh, ch. 39 passim.

482-3 [Post-election negotiations]: Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1410-46; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 717-33; Goodman, pp. 152-60; Hersh, pp. 610-23.

483 [“Up and down”]: quoted in Nixon, Memoirs, p. 735.

[“Bunch of shits”]: ibid., p. 733.

[Renewed bombing]: Goodman, pp. 160-61; Hersh, pp. 616-28; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1444-57; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 733-41.

[“This is your chance”]: quoted in Nixon, Memoirs, p. 734.

484 [“War by tantrum”]: James Reston, quoted in ibid., p. 738.

[“Sorry Christmas present”]: quoted in Herring, p. 249.

[Newspaper headlines]: quoted in Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1453.

[Pope on “blessed” Vietnam]: quoted in Karnow, p. 653.

[Resumption of negotiations]: Herring, pp. 249-50; Goodman, pp. 162-64; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1457-70; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 741-51 passim: Hersh, pp. 631-35; see also Gareth Porter, A Peace Denied: The United States, Vietnam, and the Paris Agreement (Indiana University Press, 1975), ch. 5; Maynard Parker, “Vietnam: The War That Won’t End,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 53, no. 2 (January 1975), pp. 352-74.

[“Respond with full force”]: letter of Nixon to Thieu, January 5, 1973, in Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold L. Schechter, The. Palace File (Harper, 1986), pp. 143-44, quoted at p. 144.

[“All that I can”]: quoted in Herring, p. 250.

[“The chance today”]: in Nixon Public Papers, vol. 5, pp. 12-15, quoted at pp. 13-14.

[“Just to show”]: quoted in Nixon, Memoirs, p. 752.

485 [“On the other hand”]: ibid., p. 753.

[Preliminaries to Summit II]: Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Little, Brown, 1982), pp. 228-86; Garthoff, pp. 319-30.

[Summit II]: Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 286-301; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 876-87; Garthoff, pp. 330-44.

[“Act in such a manner”]: quoted in Garthoff, p. 334; see also ibid., pp. 334-44; Kissinger, Year of Upheaval, pp. 274-86.

486 [Nixon’s suspicions of Brezhnev’s motives]: Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 880-81. [“Landmark” step]: quoted in Gartoff, p. 335.

[“Bland set of principles”]: Kissinger, While House Years, p. 1152.

[Summit conflict over Middle East]: Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 297-99; Nixon, Memoirs, pp. 884-86; Garthoff, pp. 364-65.

487 [Middle East crisis]: Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, chs. 11-12; Garthoff, ch. 12; Alan Dowty, Middle East Crisis: U.S. Decision-Making in 1958, 1970, and 1973 (University of California Press, 1984), part 3; John G. Stoessinger, Henry Kissinger: The Anguish of Power (Norton, 1976), pp. 175-95.

[“Appropriate steps unilaterally”]: quoted in Garthoff, p. 377.

487 [“Strangelove Day”]: ibid., p. 378. [“In no event”]: ibid., p. 380.

[Garthoff on Kissinger’s motives]: ibid., p. 384.

[“Soviets subsided”]: Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, p. 980.

488 [NATO and détente]: see ibid., chs. 5, 16 passim; Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1273-75.

[Doubts concerning detente]: Garthoff, ch. 12 passim; Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, ch. 22 passim.

[Vladivostok summit]: Gerald R. Ford, A Time To Heal (Harper, 1979), pp. 213-19; Garthoff, pp. 443-50; Thomas W. Wolfe, The SALT Experience (Ballinger, 1979), ch. 9. 488-9 [Helsinki agreements]: Garthoff, pp. 473-79; Ford, pp. 298-306 passim.

489 [Schlesinger firing]: Ford, pp. 320-24; Reichley, pp. 348-51; Garthoff, pp. 441-42.

[Fall of South Vietnam]: Isaacs, ch. 13; Karnow, pp. 659-70; Herring, pp. 252-63; Alan Dawson, 55 Days: The Fall of South Vietnam (Prentice-Hall, 1977); see also Frances FitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (Atlantic Monthly/Little, Brown, 1972), esp. ch. 17.

[Farmer and bullock]: story related to author.

Foreign Policy: The Faltering Experiments

491 [“A new leadership”]: press conference of A. A. Gromyko, Pravda, April 1, 1977, as quoted in Garthoff, p. 809.

[“Ruling circles”]: “On the Present Policy of the U.S. Government,” Pravda, June 17, 1978, as quoted in ibid., p. 604.

[“Explicit value, and means calculations”]: Gabriel A. Almond, The American People and Foreign Policy (Harcourt, 1950), pp. 66-85, quoted at p. 69; see also Frank L. Klingberg, “The Historical Alternation of Moods in American Foreign Policy,” World Politics, vol. 4, no. 4 (January 1952), pp. 239-73.

492 [“Fortress America”]: Henry A. Kissinger, The Necessity for Choice: Prospects of American Foreign Policy (Harper, 1961), p. 1.

[“In a revolutionary period”]: ibid., pp. 355-56.

493 [Kissinger on “middle way”]: ibid., ch. 8.

493-4 [Alternative strategies]: James MacGregor Burns, “A Way Out in Vietnam,” Harper’s, vol. 233, no. 1394 (August 1966), pp. 34-35; see also Anthony Eden, “Toward Peace in Indochina, Twelve Steps to a Long-range Settlement,” ibid., pp. 36-43; see, generally, Joseph W. and Stewart Alsop Papers, General Correspondence, esp. containers 69-77, Library of Congress.

494 [“No true Nixon”]: Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 73-74.

[Stevenson on Adlai]: John Bartlow Martin, Adlai Stevenson and the World (Doubleday, 1977), p. 547.

495 [“Early presidents deliberately selected”]: Schlesinger, The Cycles of American History (Houghton Mifflin, 1986), pp. 296-97; see also Abraham D. Sofaer, War, Foreign Affairs and Constitutional Power: The Origins (Ballinger, 1976).

[Media and foreign policy]: see Montague Kern, Patricia W. Levering, and Ralph B. Levering, The Kennedy Crises: The Press, the Presidency, and Foreign Policy (University of North Carolina Press, 1983); David L. Paletz and Robert M. Entman, Media Power Politics (Free Press, 1981), ch. 13.

[“Caused severe damage”]: in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 10, pp. 514-16, quoted at p. 514.

[“Hell of a beating”]: quoted in Tuchman, p. 300.

496 [“Appearances contributed to reality”]: John Kennedy, quoted in Robert Dallek, The American Style of Foreign Policy (Knopf, 1983), p. 230.

[Johnson’s fear of appearing “soft”]: see Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream (Harper, 1976), pp. 258-59, 269.

[“Pitiful, helpless giant”]: Address to the Nation on the Situation in Southeast Asia, April 30, 1970, in Nixon Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 405-10, quoted at p. 409. [Caddis on the perception of power]: John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 277; see also James Chace and Caleb Carr, America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars (Summit, 1988).

12. Vice and Virtue

497 [“Guerrilla war to end”]: Max Frankei, “A Divided Nation Lost Its Way,” New York Times, January 28, 1973, sect. 4, p. 2.

[“Full, free, and absolute”]: Proclamation 4311, Granting Pardon to Richard Nixon, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Gerald R. Ford (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975-79), vol. 1, pp. 103-4, quoted at p. 104; see also Gerald R. Ford, A Time to Heal (Harper, 1979), pp. 157-71, 196-99; Robert Sam Anson, Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon (Simon and Schuster, 1984), chs. 3-4.

[“Our people would again”]: in Ford Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 101-3, quoted at p. 102.

[Suspicions of Ford-Nixon deal]: Hersh, “The Pardon,” Atlantic, vol. 252, no. 2 (August 1983), pp. 55-78; J. Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (Viking, 1976), p. 545.

[Nixon’s alleged call to Ford]: Hersh, p. 76.

[“No deal, period”]: October 17, 1974, in Ford Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 338-71, quoted at p. 363; see also Ford, Time to Heal, pp. 196-99.

[“The greatest good”]: in Ford Public Papers, vol. 1, p. 102.

499 [Enemies list]: Lukas, pp. 12-13.

[Huston Plan]: memoranda reprinted in Steve Weissman, ed., Big Brother and the Holding Company (Ramparts Press, 1974), pp. 321-32; Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance (Knopf, 1980), pp. 261-68; Lukas, pp. 32-37; Steve Weissman, “Tom Huston’s Plan,” in Weissman, pp. 45-60; Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (Free Press, 1987), pp. 448-58.

[“Flag-waving”]: quoted in Lukas, p. 11.

500 [“Going to change now”]: Gerald Gold, ed., The White House Transcripts (Bantam, 1974), p. 63.

Watergate: A Morality Tale

[At the Beverly Hills Hotel]: Jeb Stuart Magruder, An American Life: One Man’s Road to Watergate (Atheneum, 1974), pp. 211-15; see also Lukas, ch. 7.

[Magruder-Liddy exchange]: quoted in Magruder, p. 211.

[“We were the government”]: ibid., p. 214.

[Magruder]: ibid., chs. 1-8; Lukas, pp. 7-8.

501 [“State of permanent crisis”]: Magruder, p. 72.

[Cover-up]: Lukas, chs. 8-9; Magruder, chs. 11-12; John W. Dean III, Blind Ambition (Simon and Schuster, 1976), chs. 4-6; Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms & the CIA (Knopf, 1979), pp. 258-67.

[“This dirty work”]: Dean, p. 123.

[Kalmbach’s fund-raising]: ibid., pp. 123-24, 139-40; Lukas, pp. 250-55.

[Post investigations]: Bernstein and Woodward, All the President’s Men (Simon and Schuster, 1974), quoted at p. 142; see also Barry Sussman, The Great Cover-Up: Nixon and the Scandal of Watergate (Crowell, 1974), part 4.

[McCord’s admission]: Lukas, pp. 302-6; John J. Sirica, To Set the Record Straight (Norton, 1979) ch5.

502 [“Come a long road”]: White House Transcripts, p. 91.

[“Certain domino situation”]: ibid., p. 119.

[“Get a million dollars”]: ibid., pp. 146-47.

[“No doubt about the seriousness”]: ibid., p. 134.

[“Fall on his sword”]: Dean, pp. 194, 195.

503 [Ervin committee]: Sam J. Ervin, Jr., The Whole Truth: The Watergate Conspiracy (Random House, 1980); Sam Dash, Chief Counsel (Random House, 1976); Dean, ch. 10; Magruder, pp. 304-7; Gerald Gold, ed., The Watergate Hearings: Break-in and Cover-Up (Viking, 1973); Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang, The Battle for Public Opinion: The President, the Press, and the Polls During Watergate (Columbia University Press, 1983), ch. 5; Mary McCarthy, The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits (Harcourt, 1974).

503 [“Public posture”]: quoted in Lukas, p. 278.

[Dean’s testimony]: Watergate Hearings, pp. 266-363, quoted at pp. 266, 302, 307-8, 353-54.

504 [“Make it fourteen”]: quoted in McCarthy, p. 37.

[Other charges against Nixon]: see Lukas, ch. 10; Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, The Final Days (Simon and Schuster, 1976), pp. 23-24.

504-5 [Agnew]: Richard M. Cohen and Jules Witcover, A Heartbeat Away: The Investigation and Resignation of Spiro T. Agnew (Viking, 1974); Lukas, ch. 12.

505 [Struggle over tapes]: Sirica, chs. 7-14; Lukas, chs. 11, 13-14 passim; Leon Jaworski, The Right and the Power (Reader’s Digest Press/Gulf Publishing, 1976); James Doyle, Not Above the Law (Morrow, 1977); Richard Ben-Veniste and George Frampton, Jr., Stonewall (Simon and Schuster, 1977).

[“Immediate settlement”]: quoted in Lukas, p. 495.

[U.S. v. Nixon]: 4 8 U.S. 683 (1974), quoted at pp. 71 2, 713; see also Leon Friedman, ed., United States v. Nixon: The President before the Supreme Court (Chelsea House, 1974).

506 [“‘The President exploded’”]: Lukas, p. 518; see also John Osborne, “Judgment Days,” New Republic, vol. 171, nos. 6 & 7 (August 10 & 17, 1974), pp. 9-11.

[Judiciary Committee]: Lukas, ch. 15, pp. 522-35; Frank Mankiewicz, U.S. v. Richard Nixon: The Final Crisis (Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1975), pp. 183-237; Lang and Lang, ch. 7; Jimmy Breslin, How the Good Guys Finally Won (Viking, 1975).

[“Make no mistake”]: quoted in Lukas, p. 522.

[Committee polarization]: ibid., pp. 496-97.

507 [“Fair and impartial”]: quoted in ibid., p. 508.

[“Right in the gut”]: ibid., p. 509.

[“Earlier today we heard”]: ibid., pp. 530-31.

[“For years we Republicans”]: ibid., p. 531.

[Committee votes on impeachment]: articles of impeachment reprinted in Mankiewicz, pp. 257-63, quoted at p. 257; roll calls given in ibid., pp. 259, 261-62.

508 [June 21, 1972, tapes]: Time, vol. 104, no. 8 (August 19, 1974), pp. 18-19. [“He had lied to me”]: quoted in Lukas, p. 549.

[“The painful conclusion”]: quoted in Woodward and Bernstein, Final Days, p. 379.

[Final days]: ibid., pp. 403-56; Time, vol. 104, no. 8 (August 19, 1974), pp. 13B-22; Lukas, pp. 558-69; Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Little, Brown, 1982), pp. 1198-1214; see also Fawn M. Brodie, Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (Norton, 1981), chs. 1, 34.

[“We’ve asked Barry”]: Woodward and Bernstein, Final Days, pp. 413-17, quoted at pp. 415-16.

509 [“As we look to the future”]: in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971-75), vol. 6, pp. 626-29, quoted at pp. 627, 628.

[“Has a great heart”]: in ibid., pp. 630-32, quoted at pp. 630, 631, 632.

510 [Mind of Watergate]: see Brodie, chs. 1, 34, and passim: Leo Rangell, The Mind of Watergate: An Exploration of the Compromise of Integrity (Norton, 1980); Douglas Muzzio, Watergate Games: Strategies, Choices, Outcomes (New York University Press, 1982); and sources cited for the introduction of ch. 11 supra.

[“Covered up a little operation”]: quoted in Brodie, pp. 18-19.

[“A little bit of Richard Nixon”]: ibid., p. 18.

[“Swelling of the presidency”]: Cronin, “The Swelling of the Presidency,” in Paul J. Halpern, ed., Why Watergate? (Palisades Publishers, 1975), pp. 92-102, quoted at pp. 92, 93, 94.

[“Mass of intrigue”]: George E. Reedy, The Twilight of the Presidency (New American Library, 1970), p. xiv.

[“No one forced me”]: Magruder, p. 317.

510-11 [Watergate, public opinion, the press]: Lang and Lang; David L. Paletz and Robert M. Entman, Media Power Politics (Free Press, 1981), pp. 158-66; Mankiewicz, pp. 81-141; John C. Spear, Presidents and the Press: The Nixon Legacy (MIT Press, 1984), ch. 7.

511 [“More morally reprehensible”]: quoted in “Watergate Trails Kopechne Death in a National Poll,” New York Times, August 4, 1973, p. 10.

[Newspaper endorsements, 1972 campaign]: Lang and Lang, p. 28.

511 [Berman on “presidential imperialism”]: Berman, The New American Presidency (Little, Brown, 1986), p. 292; see also Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Houghton Mifflin, 1973), ch. 8 and passim; Samuel Hendel, “Separation of Powers Revisited in Light of Watergate,’” Western Political Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 4 (December 1974), pp. 575-88.

512 [“A certain self-righteousness”]: Magruder, pp. 229-30.

[“Capable of looking at us”]: Elizabeth Drew, Washington Journal: The Events of 1973-1974 (Random House, 1975), p. 392; see also Robert G. Meadow, “Information and Maturation in Children’s Evaluation of Government Leadership During Watergate,” Western Political Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 4 (December 1982), pp. 539-53.

[“Look, Nixon’s no dope”]: quoted in Brodie, p. 18.

Crime and Punishment

[“Instinct to overreact”]: Magruder, p. 317.

512-13 [Magruder on his teachers]: ibid., pp. 22, 25-26, 27-30, 306-7, 309, quoted on Schuman at p. 22, on “two wrongs” at p. 306; author’s personal correspondence with Magruder.

513 [Fates of Watergate participants]: Donald P. Doane, “How Time Has Treated the Watergate Crew,” U.S. News & World Report, vol. 92, no. 23 (June 14, 1982), pp. 51-53; see also John W. Dean III, Lost Honor (Stanford Press, 1982), Epilogue.

[Nixon after resignation]: Anson; Doane, p. 51; Newsweek, vol. 107, no. 20 (May 19, 1986), pp. 26-34; ibid., vol. 106, no. 18 (October 28, 1985), p. 45; see also Rangell, ch. 5-6.

[“Not going to spend my time”]: quoted in Anson, p. 264.

514 [Rise in white-collar crime]: W. H. Webster, “Examination of FBI Theory and Methodology Regarding White-Collar Crime Investigation and Prevention,” American Criminal Law Review; vol. 17, no. 3 (Winter 1980), pp. 275-86.

[Difficulties in defining white-collar crime]: see Gilbert Geis, ed., White-Collar Criminal: The Offender in Business and the Professions (Atherton, 1968), esp. parts 1, 6. [“Intuitively satisfying”]: Gilbert Geis and Ezra Stotland, eds., White-Collar Crime: Theory and Research (Sage Publications, 1980), quoted at p. 11.

[“Illegal acts committed”]: Donn B. Parker, “Computer-Related White-Collar Crime,” in ibid., pp. 199-220, quoted at p. 199.

514-15 [Corporate crime]: John C. Coffee, Jr., “‘No Soul to Damn: No Body to Kick’: An Unscandalized Inquiry into the Problem of Corporate Punishment,” Michigan Law Review, vol. 79 (January 1981), pp. 386-459; W. Allen Spurgeon and Terence P. Pagan, “Criminal Liability for Life-Endangering Corporate Conduct,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 72, no. 2 (1981), pp. 400-33; Geis, part 2; Geis and Stotland, esp. chs. 3-7; Harold C. Barnett, “Corporate Capitalism, Corporate Crime,” Crime & Delinquency, vol. 27, no. 1 (January 1981), pp. 4-23.

515 [Computer-related crime]: Parker, quoted at p. 219; see also M. E. Baldigo, “Computer Abuse—Past Is Prologue,” Internal Auditor, vol. 37, no. 2 (April 1980), pp. 90-95.

[“Did you ever expect ”]: Edward, First Baron Thurlow, quoted in Coffee, p. 386 and 386 n. 1.

[Pinto trial]: Spurgeon and Fagan, pp. 417-18, 426; New York Times, March 14, 1980, pp. 1, D12.

[Firestone recall]: Spurgeon and Fagan, pp. 403 n. 11, 416 n. 76.

516 [Concern with street over white-collar crime]: Laura Shill Schrager and James F. Short, Jr., “How Serious a Crime? Perceptions of Organizational and Common Crimes,” in Geis and Stotland, pp. 14-31.

[Rise in offenses, 1960-83]: Edmund F. McGarrell and Timothy J. Flanagan, eds., Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics—1984 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985), p. 380 (Table 3. 81).

[Polls on crime]: ibid., pp. 170-79 (Tables 2.3-2.9); see also John E. Conklin, The Impact of Crime (Macmillan, 1975), ch. 2.

[“Liberals first denied”]: Wilson, Thinking About Crime, rev. ed. (Vintage, 1985), p. 14.

517 [Baby boom and crime rise]: Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American Criminal Justice (Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 205, 228.

517 [Capitalist structures and crime]: Barnett; see also Jeffrey H. Reiman and Sue Headlee, “Marxism and Criminal Justice Policy,” Crime & Delinquency, vol. 27, no. 1 (January 1981), pp. 24-47.

[Criminal cases filed and criminal trials completed in federal courts]: Richard A. Posner, The Federal Courts: Crisis and Reform (Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 61 (Table 3.1), 64 (Table 3.2), 68 (Table 3. 3); see also Sourcebook 1984, sects. 4-5.

[Federal civil filings]: Posner, pp. 61 (Table 3.1), 64 (Table 3.2).

518 [“Isolable, incidental features”]: Lloyd L. Weinreb, Denial of Justice: Criminal Process in the United States (Free Press, 1977), p. ix.

[“Revolution in criminal procedure”]: ibid., p. viii.

[Criminal justice analyses]: see Wilson, ch. 3, quoted on “reasonable cost” at p. 49, [“Assumptions about human nature”]: ibid., p. 145.

519 [Critical legal studies]: Roberto M. Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement (Harvard University Press, 1986); Unger, Law in Modern Society: Toward a Criticism of Social Theory (Free Press, 1976); Mark Kelman, A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (Harvard University Press, 1987).

[Weinreb on plea bargaining]: Weinreb, p. 86; see also Milton Heumann, Plea Bargaining (University of Chicago Press, 1978).

[“Might control his subordinates”]: Walker, p. 216.

520 [Attica]: Tom Wicker, A Time to Die (Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1975); Herman Badillo and Milton Haynes, A Bill of No Rights: Attica and the American Prison System (Outerbridge & Lazard, 1972); New York State Special Commission on Attica, Attica (Praeger, 1972).

[“Negative-negative!”]: quoted in Wicker, p. 276.

[“What makes a man free?”]: Phillips, “What Makes a Man Free?,” in Celes Tisdale, ed.,

Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica (Broadside Press, 1974), p. 38.

Carter: The Arc of Morality

521 [Carter]: Betty Glad, Jimmy Carter: In Search of the Great White House (Norton, 1980); James Wooten, Dasher (Summit, 1978); Jimmy Carter, A Government as Good as Its People (Simon and Schuster, 1977); William Lee Miller, Yankee from Georgia: The Emergence of Jimmy Carter (Times Books, 1978); James MacGregor Burns, The Power to Lead: The Crisis of the American Presidency (Simon and Schuster, 1984), ch. 1, from which I have borrowed or paraphrased.

[“Not extraordinary governor”]: Glad, p. 187.

[“Idealist without illusions”]: quoted in Burns, Power to Lead, p. 25.

522 [Inaugural walk]: Glad, p. 409. [Massachusetts town meeting]: ibid., p. 411.

[Carter and human rights]: Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith (Bantam, 1982), pp. 141-51; Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977-1981 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983), pp. 122-29; Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Brookings Institution, 1985), chs. 17-18 passim; Seyom Brown, The Faces of Power (Columbia University Press, 1983), chs. 27-28; Gaddis Smith, Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years (Hill and Wang, 1986), pp. 49-55; Subject File, Human Rights, boxes HU-1 through HU-18, Jimmy Carter Library.

[“Gained the trust”]: Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 141-42, quoted at p. 142.

[“Demonstration of American idealism”]: ibid., p. 143.

[“‘The first nation”]: quoted in ibid., p. 144.

[“Craving, and now demanding”]: January 20, 1977, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977-82), vol. 1, part 1, pp. 1-4, quoted at pp. 2-3.

[“Principled yet pragmatic”]: Cyrus R. Vance, Hard Choices: Critical Years in America’s Foreign Policy (Simon and Schuster, 1983), p. 44.

523 [“Accepted international standards”]: quoted in Garthoff, p. 569.

[Administration attention to Soviet human rights violations]: Smith, pp. 67-68; Garthoff, pp. 568-74; see also Brzezinski, pp. 155-56.

[Vance’s trip to Moscow]: Vance, pp. 53-56; Garthoff, p. 573.

[“Defense of freedom”]: quoted in Garthott, p. 610.

[Carter and Latin America]: Smith, pp. 109-10, quoted at p. 110.

[Canal negotiations]: Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 152-85; Smith, pp. 110-15; Vance, ch. 8; Brzezinski, pp. 134-39; J. Michael Hogan, The Panama Canal in Domestic Politics: Domestic Advocacy and the Evolution of Policy (Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), pp. 83-131.

[“We bought it”]: quoted in Smith, p. 1 12.

[“Cooperative effort”]: quoted in Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 155.

525 [“Plus one President”]: ibid., p. 184.

[“Jews who had survived”]: ibid., p. 274; see also Carter, The Blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle East (Houghton Mifflin, 1985), esp. pp. 31-36.

[Carter and search for Middle East peace]: Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 273-429; Vance, chs. 9-1 1; Smith, pp. 157-68; Brown, ch. 29; Brzezinski, pp. 83-122, 234-88; William B. Quandt, Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics (Brookings Institution, 1986); Eric Silver, Begin: The Haunted Prophet (Random House, 1984), chs. 19-20,.

[“Had to postpone”]: quoted in Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 313.

[“To go all out”]: quoted in ibid., p. 316.

526 [“We are privileged”]: September 18, 1978, in Carter Public Papers, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 1533-37, quoted at p. 1537.

[“Act of desperation”]: Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 416.

[“Out of the negotiating business”]: quoted in ibid., p. 426.

527 [The Yemens]: Garthoff, pp. 653-60; Smith, pp. 172-74; Robin Bidwell, The Two Yemens (Longman/Westview Press, 1983), pp. 262-337.

[“Demonstrate our concern”]: quoted in Smith, p. 174.

528 [Smith on American response]: ibid.

[“Excessive Soviet buildup”]: address at Wake Forest University, March 17, 1978, in Carter Public Papers, vol. 2, part 1, pp. 529-35, quoted at p. 533; see also Garthoff; pp. 503-95.

[Vance’s request for review]: Brzezinski, pp. 319-20; Vance quoted on “differing views” at p. 319; Vance, pp. 99-102; Garthoff, pp. 600-1.

[Annapolis speech]: in Carter Public Papers, vol. 2, part 1, pp. 1052-57.

[Press reaction]: Garthoff, p. 603. [Soviet view]: ibid., pp. 604-5.

[“Any further delay”]: quoted in David Detzer, The Brink: Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (Crowell, 1979), p. 234.

[“Visceral anti-Sovietism”]: Vance, p. 394.

[Brzezinski on Vance]: Brzezinski, p. 43.

528-9 [Brzezinski’s trip to China]: ibid., pp. 202-19; Smith, pp. 88-89; Garthoff, pp. 701-10.

529 [Deng in U.S. ]: Garthoff, pp. 718-26; Brzezinski, pp. 405-11; Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 202-11; Smith, pp. 92-94; Time, vol. 113, no. 7 (February 12, 1979), pp. 10-16.

[Vienna summit]: Garthoff, pp. 728-40; Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 239-61; Brzezinski, pp. 340-44; Smith, pp. 208-11.

[Afghanistan and SALT]: Garthoff, chs. 26-27 passim; Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 264-65; Brown, ch. 32; Vance, ch. 18; Smith, ch. 9; Glad, pp. 460-62.

[Most profound disappointment]: Carter, Keeping Faith, p. 265.

529-30 [Camp David consultations]: Carter, Keeping Faith, pp. 114-20; Newsweek, vol. 94, no. 4 (July 23, 1979), pp. 20-26; Glad, pp. 444-47.

530 [“Rekindle our sense”]: July 15, 1979, in Carter Public Papers, vol. 3, part 2, pp. 1235-41, quoted at p. 1240.

[“Not leading the country”]: quoted in Joseph A. Califano, “Getting Fired by Jimmy Carter,” Washington Post, May 24, 1981, pp. C1, C5, quoted at p. C5.

[Carter on 60 Minutes]: “Carter: Toll of a Clockwork Presidency,” Washington Post, October 27, 1980, pp. A1, A4, quoted at p. A4.

[Kennedy campaign]: Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, Blue Smoke and Mirrors (Viking, 1981), chs. 3-4, 7, 9; Glad, ch. 24 passim; Burns, Power to Lead, pp. 80-89.

[“Umpteen billions”]: quoted in Burns, Power to Lead, p. 84.

[Hostage seizure]: Smith, ch. 8; Brown, ch. 30; Vance, chs. 17, 19; Glad, pp. 458-60.

531 [“Many forces at play”]: “Hamilton Jordan: Looking back,” Washington Post, December 2, 1980, p. A19; see also Hamilton Jordan, Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency (Putnam, 1982), pp. 378-81.

531 [“Any sense of political strategy”]: Hargrove, review of Glad, Jimmy Carter; in American Political Science Review, vol. 75, no. 2 (June 1981), pp. 493-95, quoted at p. 494.

[Gulf between pronouncements and policies]: Samuel P. Huntington, “Renewed Hostility,” in Joseph S. Nye, Jr., ed., The Making of America’s Soviet Policy (Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 265-89, esp. p. 275; Burns, Power to Lead, pp. 29-30; John Steuart and Steve Lietman, “Carter’s Unkept ’76 Promises—A Time Bomb?,” New York Times, September 7, 1980, sect. 4, p. 19.

Gun and Bible

532 [“Destructive and irresponsible freedom”]: Solzhenitsyn, A World Split Apart, Irina I. Alberti, trans. (Harper, 1978), pp. 21, 37.

[“On hands and knees”]: quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Houghton Mifflin, 1986), p. 113.

[“Object of our existence”]: ibid.

[“Affirming the values”]: quoted in Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 2.

[“Have we not”]: quoted in Schlesinger, p. 111.

[Approaches to vice and virtue]: John Patrick Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics (Basic Books, 1984); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1975), esp. chs. 14-15; John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Value sin America, 1776-1900 (Grossman, 1976); John Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy, Varnum L. Collins, ed. (Princeton University Press, 1912); Garry Wills, Explaining America: The Federalist (Doubleday, 1981), esp. ch. 22; James MacGregor Burns, The Vineyard of Liberty (Knopf, 1982), pp. 58-63.

533 [Lerner on 1950s mores]; Lerner, America as a Civilization (Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 673.

533-4 [Sexual studies]: Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (W. B. Saunders, 1948), pp. 499, 550-51, 623, 670; Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (W. B. Saunders, 1953), pp. 142, 286, 453, 505; Charles H. Whiteley and Winifred M. Whiteley, Sex & Morals (Basic Books, 1967); Michael G. Schofield, The Sexual Behaviour of Young People (Little, Brown, 1965); Lerner, pp. 679-87.

534 [“Half Babylonian”]: Lerner, p. 686.

[“Soft” and “hard”]: Diggins, p. 335.

[Campaign against sexual permissiveness]: Robert B. Fowler, A New Engagement: Evangelical Political Thought. 1966-1976 (William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1982), ch. 10; Louis A. Zurcher, Jr., and R. George Kirkpatrick, Citizens for Decency: Antipornography Crusades as Status Defense (University of Texas Press, 1976); Robert C. Liebman and Robert Wuthnow, eds., The New Christian Right (Aldine, 1983), esp. chs. 7-8, 10.

534-5 [Commissions on pornography]: U.S. Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, Report (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970), quoted at p. 27; Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, Final Report (Department of Justice, 1986).

535 [Dworkin-MacKinnon ordinance]: Rosemarie Tong, “Women, Pornography and the Law,” Williams Alumni Review, vol. 79, no. 1 (Fall 1986), pp. 3-11; Indianapolis Star, November 20, 1984, pp. 1, 6; Freedom to Read Foundation News, vol. 13, no. 1 (1986); Hudnut v. American Booksellers Association, Supreme Court affirming lower court’s judgment, February 24, 1986 (no. 85-1090); interview with John Swan; see also Catharine A. MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Harvard University Press, 1987).

[Tong on FACT]: Tong, p. 8.

[“Usher in another era”]: ibid., p. 9.

536 [“What scoundrels we would be”]: quoted in Kenneth Thompson, Moralism and Morality in Politics and Diplomacy (University Press of America, 1985), p. 8.

[“Moral man” and “immoral society”]: Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Scribner, 1941).

[“Can be manageable”]: Thompson, p. 55.

536 [Peace and nonviolence in early America]: Peter Brock, Pacifism in the United States from the Colonial Era to the First World War (Princeton University Press, 1968).

[“Patriotic inclination”]: Piehl, Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origin of Catholic Radicalism in America (Temple University Press, 1982), p. 54; see also Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (Yale University Press, 1972), pp. 330-42, 527-68.

[Catholic Church and peace movement]: Eric O. Hanson, The Catholic Church in World Politics (Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 281-322; George Weigel, Tranquillitas Ordinis (Oxford University Press, 1987); Jim Castelli, The Bishops and the Bomb: Waging Peace in a Nuclear Age (Doubleday, 1983); James E. Dougherty, The Bishops and Nuclear Weapons (Archon Books, 1984); William A. Au, The Cross, the Flag, and the Bomb: American Catholics Debate War and Peace, 1960-1983 (Greenwood Press, 1985); Never Again War! (Office of Public Information, United Nations, 1965); Patricia Hunt-Perry, “Peace, Politics and Theology: The Institutional Catholic Church Enters the Peace Movement in the United States,” presented at the annual meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford University, 1983.

[Catholic switch on Vietnam]: quoted in Hunt-Perry, p. 36.

[“Contrary to reason”]: reprinted in Never Again War!, pp. 81-126, quoted at p. 112.

537 [“The Challenge of Peace”]: reprinted in Origins, vol. 13, 110, 1 (May 19, 1983), pp. 1-32, quoted at pp. 1, 30, 2, 27, 15, 18, 25, respectively.

[“Traditional in the sense”]: Hunt-Perry, p. 21.

[Issue of “just war”]; see “Challenge of Peace,” pp. 9-12; Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (Basic Books, 1977); Terry Nardin, Law, Morality, and the Relations of States (Princeton University Press, 1983), esp. ch. 11; Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (University of Chicago Press, 1977), esp. chs. 1, 3.

538 [“Most profound and searching”]: Kennan, “The Bishops’ Letter,” New York Times, May 1, 1983, sect. 4, p. 21 ; see also Kennan, The Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the Nuclear Age (Pantheon, 1982).

[“Ruling and intellectual elites”]: Solzhenitsyn, World Split Apart, p. 11.

[“Increasingly aggressive”]: quoted in Schlesinger, p. 57.

[Universal Declaration of Human Rights]: reprinted in Never Again War!, pp. 127-34.

539 [“Not enough to think”]: Van Dyke, “The Individual, the State, and Ethnic Communities in Political Theory,” in Donald P. Kommers and Gilburt D. Loescher, eds., Human Rights and American Foreign Policy (University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), pp. 36-62, quoted at p. 36.

[“You know, professor”]: Eddison J. M. Zvobgo, “A Third World View,” in ibid., pp. 90-106, junior professor quoted at p. 97.

[Vance on economic and political rights]: quoted in David P. Forsythe, Human Rights and World Politics (University of Nebraska Press, 1983), p. 95.

540 [“Factor in the mobilization”]: ibid., p. 87.

[“Evidence of the stability”]: Walzer, p. 19.

13. The Culture of the Workshop

541 [“Enormous laboratories”]: Max Lerner, America as a Civilization (Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 209.

[American Nobel Prize recipients]: Bernard Schlessinger and June H. Schlessinger, eds., The Who’s Who of Nobel Prize Winners (Oryx Press, 1986).

541-2 [Advances in astronomy]: Martin Harwit, Cosmic Discovery: The Search, Scope, and Heritage of Astronomy (Basic Books, 1981); Patrick Moore, The Story of Astronomy (MacDonald and Jane’s, 1978); Otto Struve and Velta Zebergs, Astronomy of the 20th Century (Macmillan, 1962).

542 [Advances in atomic research]: Alex Keller, The Infancy of Atomic Physics: Hercules in His Cradle (Clarendon Press, 1983); Physics Through the 1990s: Nuclear Physics (National Academy Press, 1986).

[“Invention factory”]: Matthew Josephson. “Thomas Alva Edison,” in John A. Garraty, ed., Encyclopedia of American Biography (Harper. 1974), pp. 321-23, Edison quoted at p. 322.

[“Business” of invention]: quoted in ibid., p. 322.

542-3 [Development, applications, and implications of semiconductors]: Ernest Braun and Stuart Macdonald, Revolution in Miniature, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1982), quoted at p. 6; T. R. Reid, The Chip (Simon and Schuster, 1984).

543 [Integrated circuits in autos]: Braun and Macdonald, p. 202.

The Dicing Game of Science

[Salk and Sabin]: John R. Paul, A History of Poliomyelitis (Yale University Press, 1971), chs. 39, 41, and p. 439 (Figs. 58-59); Richard B. Morris et al., eds., Encyclopedia of American History, 6th ed. (Harper, 1982), p. 814.

544 [Discovery of DNA]: James Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (Atheneum, 1968); Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology (Simon and Schuster, 1979), esp. part 1.

[“New world”]: quoted in Judson, p. 581.

[Einstein]: Ronald W. Clark, Einstein (World Publishing, 1971); Jamie Sayen, Einstein in America: The Scientist’s Conscience in the Age of Hitler and Hiroshima (Crown, 1985); Abraham Pais, “Subtle is the Lord … ”: The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (Clarendon Press, 1982); Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden, eds., Einstein on Peace (Schocken, 1968).

[Einstein’s pathbreaking papers]: “On the Motion of Small Particles,” reprinted in Einstein, Investigations on the Theory of the Brownian Movement, A. D. Cowper, trans. (London, 1926); “On a Heuristic Viewpoint,” in Annalen der Physik, ser. 4, vol. 17, pp. 132-48; “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (special theory), in H. A. Lorentz et al., The Principle of Relativity, W. Perrett and G. B. Jeffery, trans. (Dover, 1952), pp. 35-65; “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity,” in ibid., pp. 109-64; see also (Mark, chs. 4-5, 8-10 passim: Pais, parts 3-4 passim: Max Born, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Henry L. Brose, trans. (Methuen, 1924); Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, Robert B. Lawson, trans. (Crown, 1961 ); Gerald Tauber, ed., Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity (Crown, 1979), esp. part 2.

545 [“Awoke to find himself famous”]: Clark, p. 237; see also ibid., pp. 227-33; Pais, pp. 303-12; Tauber, part 3.

[“Axiomatic basis”]: “The Fabric of the Universe,” London Times, November 7, 1919, p. 3.

[“Peace that does not conceal”]: quoted in Clark, p. 219.

[Einstein and League of Nations]: Clark, ch. 13 passim: Nathan and Norden, ch. 3.

[Einstein and Zionism, interwar]: Clark, ch. 14 passim.

[“Guileless child”]: quoted in Clark, p. 145.

[Einstein and the Nazis]: Clark, chs. 15-17 passim: Nathan and Norden, chs. 6-7.

[Einstein’s letter to FDR]: Clark, pp. 550-58, quoted at p. 556.

[“I signed the letter”]: quoted in ibid., p. 554.

[Einstein and the making of the atomic bomb]: ibid., ch. 20 passim: Sayen, pp. 117-23, 147-48, 171; Nathan and Norden, ch. 9; see also Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon and Schuster, 1986).

[“Entire cities”]: quoted in Clark, p. 582.

546 [Szilard appointment]: ibid., pp. 581-83.

[Einstein’s refusal of Israeli presidency]: Clark, pp. 617-19; Nathan and Norden, pp. 571-74.

[Defense of Heidelberg professor]: Clark, p. 597.

[“Revolutionary way of non-cooperation”]: New York Times, June 12, 1953, pp. 1, 9, quoted at p. 9; see also Clark, pp. 597-99; Sayen, pp. 267-79; Nathan and Norden, ch. 16.

[Times criticism of Einstein]: New York Times, June 13, 1953, p. 14.

[“Intellectuals of this country”]: ibid., June 12, 1953, p. 9.

[“Manifesto to Europeans”]: Clark, pp. 180-82; Nathan and Norden, pp. 3-8.

[Einstein and world government movement]: Clark, pp. 587-91; Nathan and Norden, esp. ch. 13.

[Russell manifesto]: Clark, pp. 624-27; Nathan and Norden, ch. 18.

546-7 [Einstein’s search for grand unified theory]: Clark, pp. 405-9, 612-14; Pais, esp. ch. 17; see also Barry Parker, Einstein’s Dream: The Search For a Unified Theory of the Universe (Plenum Press, 1986); Tauber, part 7.

547 [Born on general relativity]: quoted in Clark, p. 200.

[“Further this simplification”]: ibid., p. 407.

[“Old One” did not “throw dice”]: ibid., p. 340.

[Snow on intellectual fragmentation]: Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1959); Snow, The Two Cultures and a Second Look (Cambridge University Press, 1964), esp. pp. 53-100.

548 [“Achievements and promises”]: Morgenthau, Science: Servant or Master? (New American Library, 1972), p. 4; see also Farrington Daniels and Thomas M. Smith, eds., The Challenge of Our Times: Contemporary Trends in Science and Human Affairs as Seen by Twenty Professors at the University of Wisconsin (Burgess Publishing, 1953); George H. Daniels, Science in American Society (Knopf, 1971); Gerald James Holton, The Advancement of Science, and Its Burdens: The Jefferson Lectures and Other Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

[“When science fails”]: Morgenthau, pp. 46-47.

[Collisions between science and politics]: Daniel S. Greenberg, The Politics of Pure Science (New American Library, 1967); Vannevar Bush, Pieces of the Action (Morrow, 1970); C. P. Snow, Science and Government (Harvard University Press, 1961); Jerome B. Wiesner, Where Science and Politics Meet (McGraw-Hill, 1965); Rae Goodell, The Visible Scientists (Little, Brown, 1977); Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, Science and Society (Penguin, 1969). [Army destruction of Japanese cyclotrons]: Greenberg, p. 118.

549 [“Dominated outside of atomic energy”]: Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Knopf, 1978), p. 365.

[“Evangelical zeal”]: Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists* Movement in America, 1945-47 (University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 529.

[“Seduction and rape”]: Greenberg, p. 125.

[Oppenheimer]: Kevles, pp. 380-82, 391, Oppenheimer quoted at p. 391; U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, in the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1954); Philip M. Stern and Harold P. Green, The Oppenheimer Case: Security on Trial (Harper, 1969).

550 [Einstein as patent clerk]: Clark, pp. 45-51, “eight hours of idleness” quoted at p. 51; Pais, pp. 46-47.

[Maccoby on growth of technological systems]: “Some Issues of Technology: A Symposium,” Daedalus, vol. 109, no. 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 3-24, esp. p. 15.

[Bell Laboratories]: N. Bruce Hannay and Robert E. McGinn, “The Anatomy of Modern Technology,” ibid., p. 40; see also Braun and Macdonald, ch. 4 passim: Jeremy Bernstein, Three Degrees Above Zero: Bell Labs in the Information Age (Scribner, 1984).

[Information revolution]: see James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1986).

551 [“Seriously hampered”]: James Fallows, “Terminal Paranoia” (review of Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (Pantheon, 1986), New Republic, vol. 195, nos. 2-3 (July 14-21, 1986), pp. 30-32, Roszak quoted at p. 30.

[“A general redefinition”]: Bolter, Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (University of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 9.

[“Internalize and even consciously adopt”]: Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (Knopf, 1984), p. 43; see also ibid., passim: Larry Hirschhorn, Beyond Mechanization: Work and Technology in a Postindustrial Age (MIT Press, 1984), ch. 7 and passim.

[Ignored history of women’s technologies]: Cowan, “From Virginia Dare to Virginia Slims: Women and Technology in American Life,” Technology and Culture (University of Chicago Press), vol. 20, no. 1 (January 1979), pp. 51-63, quoted at p. 51. [Antitechnology attitudes among women in the 1970s]: ibid.,pp. 61-63.

552 [Moses’s parkway bridges]: Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts have Politics?,” Daedalus, vol. 109, no. 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 121-36, esp. pp. 123-24; Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Knopf, 1974), pp. 318-19, 546, 951-58.

[“A weak value system”]: Joseph Weizenbaum, quoted in “Some Issues of Technology,” p. 3; see also ibid., p. 14, [“No way to run a railroad”]: Winner, p. 133.

[Post-Sputnik rush]: Philip W. Jackson, “The Reform of Science Education: A Cautionary Tale,” Daedalus, vol. 112, no. 2 (Spring 1983), pp. 143-66, esp. pp. 147-48. [Graubard on science education]: Graubard, “Nothing to Fear, Much to Do,” ibid., pp. 231-48, quoted at p. 233.

[Commercial textbooks]: Jackson, p. 150.

[Graduate enrollment]: Theodore P. Perros, “U.S. Heads Down the Road to Scientific Dotage,” New York Times, December 8, 1986, p. A26.

[“Content to be served”]: Kenneth Prewitt, “Scientific Illiteracy and Democratic Theory,” Daedalus, vol. 112, no. 2 (Spring 1983), pp. 49-64, Clifton R. Wharton quoted at p. 53; see also Manfred Stanley, The Technological Conscience: Survival and Dignity in an Age of Expertise (Free Press, 1978).

The Rich and the Poor

554 [Camp David conference]: Herbert Stein, Presidential Economics: The Making of Economic Policy from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond (Simon and Schuster, 1984), pp. 176-80; Leonard Silk, Economics in the Real World (Simon and Schuster, 1984), pp. 37-41; Richard Nixon, Memoirs (Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), pp. 518-20. [“Comprehensive new economic policy”]: Address to the Nation Outlining a New Economic Policy; “The Challenge of Peace,” August 15, 1971, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971-75), vol. 3, pp. 886-90, quoted at p. 890.

[Stein on Camp David conference]: Stein, pp. 176-77.

[Johnson’s economic policies]: ibid., ch. 4; Hobart Rowen, The Free Enterprisers: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Business Establishment (Putnam, 1964), chs. 3, 13; James L. Sundquist, Politics and Policy: The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson Years (Brookings Institution, 1968), chs. 2-4, 11 passim.

555 [Stein on Nixon’s ambivalence]: see Stein, p. 135.

[Nixon’s economic policies]: A. James Reichley, Conservatives in an Age of Change: The Nixon and Ford Administrations (Brookings Institution, 1981), chs. 3-5, 7-8, 10-11 passim; Leonard Silk, Nixonomics: How the Dismal Science of Free Enterprise Became the Black Art of Controls (Praeger, 1972); Stein, ch. 5; Rowland Evans, Jr., and Robert D. Novak, Nixon in the White House (Random House, 1971), ch. 7.

[Penn Central collapse]: Silk, Economics, p. 36; Robert Sobel, The Fallen Colossus (Weybright and Talley, 1977); Stephen Salsbury, No Way to Run a Railroad (McGraw-Hill, 1982).

555-6 [Economic storms from abroad and Nixon’s reaction]: Silk, Nixonomics, chs. 9-12; Silk, Economics, ch. 4 passim; Stein, pp. 163-68.

556 [“New Economic Policy” and reactions]: Nixon Public Papers, vol. 3, pp. 886-90, quoted at p. 886; see also Silk, Nixonomics, chs. 6-7; Stein, pp. 179-87; Time, vol. 98, no. 9 (August 30, 1971), pp. 4-18; New York Times, August 16, 1971, pp. 1, 14-15; ibid., August 17, 1971, p. 1.

[“Total disaster”]: Stein, p. 186.

557 [Stein on Nixon’s economic policies]: ibid., p. 207.

[“That’s devaluation?”]: quoted in Silk, Economics, pp. 45-46.

557-8 [Ford’s economic policies]: Reichley, chs. 14-15, 17-18 passim; Stein, pp. 209-16; Silk, Economics, ch. 6; John Osborne, White House Watch: The Ford Years (New Republic Books, 1977), pp. 67-76, 204-9, 229-35.

[Carter on his “exact procedure”]: quoted in Laurence E. Lynn, Jr., and David DeF. Whitman, The President as Policymaker: Jimmy Carter and Welfare Reform (Temple University Press, 1981), p. 262.

[Carter’s drift to the right in economic policies]: Betty Glad, Jimmy Carter: In Search of the Great White House (Norton, 1980), pp. 426-27; Stein, pp. 216-33; Silk, Nixonomics, chs. 10-11; William Greider, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country (Simon and Schuster, 1988), part 1 passim.

559 [Economy in December 1980]: Time. vol. 117, no. 3 (January 19, 1981), pp. 62, 63.

[Democratic congressional opposition to Carter]: quoted in Glad, p. 427.

[“Clings to what”]: quoted in Time, vol. 98, no. 9 (August 30, 1971), p. 5.

[Hayek]: Friedrich August von Hayek, Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1944); see also Silk, Economics, ch. 8.

[New Deal Keynesian economics] : Alvin Harvey Hansen, Full Recovery or Stagnation ? (Norton, 1938); Stein, ch. 2.

[Truman, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ as Keynesians]: see Stein, chs. 3, 4.

[“Now I am a Keynesian”]: quoted in ibid,, p. 135.

[Hansen on Keynesiamsm]: Hansen, pp. 327-28.

[Lekachman on Keynesianism]: Lekachman, “A Keynes for All Seasons,” New Republic, vol. 188, no. 24 (June 20, 1983), pp. 21-25, quoted at p. 24.

561-2 [Attacks on Keynesian assumptions]: Stein, pp. 46-53; see also Henry Hazlitt, The Critics of Keynesian Economics (Van Nostrand, 1960).

562 [Monetarism]: Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960 (Princeton University Press, 1963); Milton Friedman, The Optimum Quantity of Money and Other Essays (Aldine, 1969); Lester C. Thurow, Dangerous Currents: The State of Economics (Random House, 1983), ch. 3 passim: William Breit and Roger L. Ransom, The Academic Scribblers: American Economists in Collision (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), chs. 13-14.

[“Swept through the universities”]: Alan S. Blinder, “Keynesians Regain Some Courage,” New York Times, February 12, 1984, sect. 3, p. 3.

[Volcker as Fed head]: Greider, passim; Stein, pp. 229-32; John T. Woolley, Monetary Politics: The Federal Reserve and the Politics of Monetary Policy (Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 103-5; Donald F. Keitl, Leadership at the Fed (Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 175-78, 183-84, 191-92; Ralph C. Bryant, Controlling Money: The Federal Reserve and Its Critics (Brookings Institution, 1983).

[Galbraith]: John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times (Houghton Mifflin, 1981); Charles H. Hession, John Kenneth Galbraith & His Critics (New American Library, 1972).

563 [“Place myself at the mercy”]: quoted in Hession, p. 25.

[American Capitalism]: Galbraith, American Capitalism: The Concept of Countervailing Power (Houghton Mifflin, 1952); see also Hession, chs. 2-3.

[Affluent Society]: Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Houghton Mifflin, 1958); see also Hession, chs. 4-5; David T. Bazelon, The Paper Economy (Vintage, 1965).

[New Industrial State]: Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Houghton Mifflin, 1967); Hession, ch. 6; Irving Kristol, “Professor Galbraith’s ‘New Industrial State,’” Fortune, vol. 76, no. 1 (July 1967), pp. 90-91, 194-95; Robert L. Heilbroner, “Capitalism Without Tears,” New York Review of Books, vol. 8, no. 12 (June 29, 1967), pp. 16-19.

[Two types of planning]: Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 2nd ed. (Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. xx.

564 [American Marxism and the economic dilemma]: Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (Monthly Review Press, 1966); Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (Monthly Review Press, 1957); Sweezy, Post-Revolutionary Society (Monthly Review Press, 1980); Benjamin Ward, The Ideal Worlds of Economies (Basic Books, 1979), book 2.

565 [“Important immediate goal”]: Ward, p. 305.

566 [Kennedy on Social Security Act]: quoted in James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty, 1900-1980 (Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 126.

[“If a free society”]: January 20, 1961, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962-64), vol. 1, pp. 1-3, quoted at p. 1.

[Kennedys war on poverty]: Patterson, ch. 8 passim: Sundquist, Politics and Policy, chs. 2-4, 11 passim; Daniel Knapp and Kenneth Polk, Scouting the War on Poverty: Social Reform Politics in the Kennedy Administration (Heath Lexington Books, 1971).

[“It is not moral”]: Joseph Mitchell, quoted in Patterson, pp. 107-8.

[Johnson’s war on poverty]: Sar A. Levitan, The Great Society’s Poor Law: A New Approach to Poverty (Johns Hopkins Press, 1969); Patterson, chs. 8-10 passim; Sundquist, Politics and Policy, chs. 2-4, 11 passim; James L. Sundquist, ed., On Fighting Poverty: Perspectives from Experience (Basic Books, 1969); see also William J. Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1987).

567 [Nixon’s war on poverty]: Vincent J. Burke and Vee Burke, Nixon’s Good Deed: Welfare Reform (Columbia University Press, 1974); Patterson, chs. 11-12 passim; Reichley, ch. 7; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Politics of Guaranteed Income: The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan (Random House, 1973); Moynihan Papers, Nixon Ad ministration Files, Subject File II, boxes 1, 6, 7, 10, Library of Congress.

[“Most important piece”]: August 28, 1970, in Nixon Public Papers, vol. 2, pp. 690-91, quoted at p. 690.

[Moynihan]: Douglas Schoen, Pat: A Biography of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (Harper, 1979); Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: Community Action in the War on Poverty (Free Press, 1969).

[“Maximum feasible participation”]: quoted in Moynihan, Misunderstanding, p. xvi.

[“Almost surely define”]: text of Moynihan address in Moynihan Papers, n.d., quoted at p. 10.

[Defining poverty]: Chaim I. Waxman, The Stigma of Poverty: A Critique of Poverty Theories and Policies, and ed. (Pergamon, 1983), esp. chs. 1-2; Patterson, chs. 6-7; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, ed., On Understanding Poverty: Perspectives from the Social Sciences (Basic Books, 1969); Charles A. Valentine, Culture and Poverty: Critique and Counter-Proposals (University of Chicago Press, 1968); Burton A. Weisbrod, ed., The Economics of Poverty: An American Paradox (Prentice-Hall, 1965); Moynihan, Misunderstanding, ch. 8 and passim.

[“Social scum”]: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Samuel Moore, trans. (International Publishers, 1948), p. 20.

568 [Waxman on poverty]: Waxman, p. 75.

[“Work must be found”]: annual message to the Congress, January 4, 1935, in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 4, pp. 15-25, quoted at pp. 20, 19, respectively.

[“The very rich”]: Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy,” in Arthur Mizener, ed., The Fitzgerald Reader (Scribner, 1963), pp. 239-75, quoted at p. 239.

[“Cultural and environmental obstacles”]: quoted in Moynihan, Misunderstanding, p. 79.

569 [Poverty in Mexico City]: Oscar Lewis, Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (Random House, 1961).

[“New opportunities for disadvantaged youth”]: quoted in Moynihan, Misunderstanding, p. 71.

[“Not social science competence”]: ibid., pp. 109, 170.

570 [Workers’ Alliance]: Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (Pantheon, 1977), pp. 72-76, 85-92.

[NWRO]: ibid, ch. 5.

[Alinsky]: Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals (Random House, 1971); Robert Bailey, Jr., Radicals in Urban Politics: The Alinsky Approach (University of Chicago Press, 1974); Patrick Anderson, “Making Trouble Is Alinsky’s Business,” in Harold L. Sheppard, ed., Poverty and Wealth in America (Quadrangle, 1970), pp. 247-62.

[Community action]: Moynihan, Misunderstanding, passim; Sundquist, Fighting Poverty, chs. 4-5; Patterson, pp. 138-41, 145-52; Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (Pantheon, 1971), ch. 10; Gary Delgado, Organizing the Movement: The Roots and Growth of ACORN (Temple University Press, 1986).

571 [“Somewhat naive and sentimental”]: quoted in Waxman, p. 107.

[Black progress and setbacks]: Richard Bernstein, “King’s Dream,” New York Times, January 17, 1988, sect. 4, p. 1.

Crossways, Land and Sky

[Sweden as “middle way”]: Marquis Childs, Sweden, The Middle Way, rev. ed. (Yale University Press, 1947); Philip Arestis, “Post Keynesian Economic Policies: The Case of Sweden,” Journal of Economic Issues, vol. 20, no. 3 (September 1986), pp. 709-23, esp. p. 719.

572 [Drive-in church]: “The Automobile Age,” Wilson Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 5 (Winter 1986), pp. 64-79, esp. pp. 77.

[Auto industry in 1960s and early 1970s]: Lawrence J. White, The Automobile Industry since 1945 (Harvard University Press, 1971).

[Annual new car sales]: David L. Lewis, “The Industry,” Wilson Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 5 (Winter 1986), pp. 47-63, esp. p. 60.

[New car price as percentage of family income]: ibid.

[Formation and rise of General Motors]: Ed Cray, Chrome Colossus: General Motors and Its Times (McGraw-Hill, 1980), chs. 1-10; Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., Adventures of a White-Collar Man (Doubleday, 1970); Bernard A. Weisberger, The Dream Maker: William C. Durant, Founder of General Motors (Little, Brown, 1979).

[“Pontiac for the poor”]: quoted in Lewis, pp. 51-52.

572-3 [Fall and rise of Ford]: Allan Nevins and Frank Ernest Hill, Ford: Decline and Rebirth, 1945-1963 (Scribner, 1963); David Halberstam, The Reckoning (Morrow, 1986), ch. 5, parts 4, 6 passim: Charles E. Sorenson and Samuel T. Williamson, My Forty Years with Ford (Norton, 1956), esp. ch. 20; Lee Iacocca and William Novak, Iacocca (Bantam, 1984), chs. 3-8; Robert Lacey, Ford: The Men and the Machine (Little, Brown, 1986), chs. 15-29 passim.

573 [Auto labor]: Victor G. Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW (Houghton Mifflin, 1976); William Serrin, The Company and the Union (Knopf, 1973), esp. ch. 4.

[1970 strike]: Serrin.

[Assassination attempts on Reuthers]: Reuther, pp. 276-91 passim.

[Effects of the automobile on American life]: James J. Flink, The Car Culture (MIT Press, 1975); Helen Leavitt, Superhighway, Superhoax (Ballantine, 1970); John C. Esposito, Vanishing Air: The Ralph Nader Study Group Report on Pollution (Grossman, 1970); Richard O. Davies, The Age of Asphalt: The Automobile, the Freeway, and the Condition of Metropolitan America (Lippincott, 1975); Warren J. Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910-1945 (MIT Press, 1979); “Automobile Age.”

[Interstate Highway Act]: Flink, pp. 190, 213-15; Leavitt, pp. 26-50.

[“Road Gang”]: see Leavitt, pp. 111-55, esp. p. 152.

574 [“Another inalienable American right”]: Flink, p. 219.

[“White roads through black bedrooms”]: quoted in “Automobile Age,” p. 76.

[The rise of OPEC and the oil oasis]: Dankwart A. Rustow, Oil and Turmoil: America Faces OPEC and the Middle East (Norton, 1982), esp. chs. 3-5; Flink, pp. 226-31; Halberstam, ch. 27; Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Little, Brown, 1982), chs. 19-20; Raymond Vernon, ed., The Oil Crisis (Norton, 1976).

575 [“Never explain, never complain”]: quoted in Halberstam, p. 202.

[“A host of environmental problems”]: quoted in Emma Rothschild, Paradise Lost: The Decline of the Auto-Industrial Age (Random House, 1973), p. 18.

[Nader]: Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile (Grossman, 1965); see also Halberstam, ch. 30.

575-6 [GM’s leadership failure in 1960s]: Cray, esp. Introduction and pp. 430-31; J. Patrick Wright, On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors: John Z. De Lorean’s Look Inside the Automotive Giant (Wright Enterprises, 1979).

576 [GM executive’s brown suit]: Wright, p. 33.

[Conflicts between engineering and accounting at Ford]: Halberstam, chs. 11-13, 20-21 passim.

[“My grandfather made cars”]: quoted in Halberstam, p. 479.

577 [“No Jap engine”]: ibid, p. 535.

[Ford and Iacocca]: ibid., pp. 470-80, chs. 32-33; Iacocca, chs. 9-12; Lacey, chs. 35-36 passim.

[Chrysler crisis]: Robert B. Reich and John D. Donahue, New Deals: The Chrysler Revival and the American System (Times Books, 1985); Iacocca, chs. 14-24.

[Bachrach on Chrysler bailout]: Reich and Donahue, p. 265.

[“Absolute nonsense”]: ibid.

578 [Swedish model for long-range development]: Arestis.

[Challenge to American auto from abroad]: Halberstam, chs. 49-54 passim; Cray, ch. 19; Reich and Donahue, chs. 6-7; Tetsuo Sakiya, Honda Motor: The Men, the Management, the Machines (Kodansha International, 1982), ch. 1; Douglas H. Ginsburg and William J. Abernathy, eds., Government, Technology, and the Future of the Automobile (McGraw-Hill, 1980), ch. 5; Iacocca, ch. 27.

578 [At the Soviet embassy]: Clayton R. Koppes, JPL and the American Space Program: A History of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 82-83, quoted at p.83.

[“Battle more important”]: quoted in ibid., p. 84.

579 [“Do not have as much time”]: ibid.

[“Buck Rogers might prove”]: Erlend A. Kennan and Edmund H. Harvey, Jr., Mission to the Moon: A Critical examination of NASA and the Space Program (Morrow, 1969), p. 58.

[Eisenhower’s assurance]: in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1958-61), vol. 5, pp. 789-99.

[Soviet signals]: Kennan and Harvey, p. 62.

[“No matter how humble”]: quoted in Walter A. McDougall,… The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (Basic Books, 1985), p. 119.

[1955 U.S. satellite announcement]: quoted in Loyd S. Swenson, Jr., James M. Grimwood, and Charles C. Alexander, This New Ocean: A History of Project Mercury (NASA, 1960), p. 28.

[Satellite decision]: McDougall, pp. 112-24; Constance McLaughlin Green and Milton Lomask, Vanguard (NASA, 1970), ch. 3; Hugo Young, Bryan Silcock, and Peter Dunn, Journey to Tranquility (Doubleday, 1970), pp. 41-45; Koppes, pp. 79-80. [Origins of NASA]: McDougall, ch. 7; Swenson et al., ch. 4; Koppes, pp. 94-102; Young et al., pp. 62-66.

[Project Mercury]: Swenson et al., passim; Young et al., pp. 158-60.

[“Shoot a man”]: McDougall, p. 243.

[Mercury astronauts]: Swenson et al., pp. 159-65, chs. 7-8; Young et al., ch. 8; Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979); M. Scott Carpenter et al., We Seven (Simon and Schuster, 1962). [“Lovable freckled heroes”]: Young et al., p. 140.

580 [Vostok]: ibid., pp. 83-85; Swenson et al., pp. 332-35.

[Freedom 7]: Swenson et al., pp. 341-65, quoted at p. 342; Time, vol. 77, no. 20 (May 12, 1961), pp. 52-58.

[Liberty Bell 7]: Swenson et al., pp. 365-77; Wolfe, pp. 277-96.

[Titov’s flight]: Swenson et al., pp. 377-79.

580-1 [Glenn’s flight and return]: ibid., ch. 8; Wolfe, ch. 12; Time, vol. 79, no. 9 (March 2, 1962), pp. 11-18; ibid., vol. 79, no. 10 (March 9, 1962), pp. 22-23.

581 [“All spacecraft systems go!”]: quoted in Swenson et al., p. 426.

[“Real hard-to-define feeling”]: quoted in Time, vol. 79, no. 10 (March 9, 1962), p. 22.

[“Now it is the time”]: Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, May 25, 1961, in Kennedy Public Papers, vol. 1, pp. 396-406, quoted at pp. 403, 404, 403, respectively.

[Congressional reaction to Kennedy challenge]: Young et al., p. 92; McDougall, pp. 361-62, 373-76, 392-97; New York Times, May 26, 1961, pp. 1, 13.

[July 20, 1969]: Young et al., ch. 13; Time, vol. 94, no. 4 (July 25, 1969), pp. 10-19; Charles R. Pellegrino and Joshua Slott, Chariots for Apollo: The Making of the Lunar Module (Atheneum, 1985), chs. 43-52.

[“You are go”]: quoted in Young et al., p. 269.

582 [The Eagle has landed”]: ibid., p. 272.

[Objects in space]: J. E. S. Fawcett, Outer Space: New Challenges to Law and Policy (Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 116.

[Space shuttle Columbia’s launch]: Joseph J. Trent, Prescription for Disaster (Crown, 1987), pp. 187-93; Time, vol. 117, no. 17 (April 27, 1981), pp. 16-23.

583 [Early hints of O-ring problems]: Trento, pp. 205, 259-61, 276, 281.

[Challenger mission 51-L]: ibid., pp. 249-50, 280-92; Newsweek, vol. 107, no. 6 (February 10, 1986), pp. 26-42.

[“Feel that mother go”]: quoted in Trenlo, p. 290.

[“Uh, Oh!”]: ibid.

584 [“More than the Challenger exploded”]: Wilford, “After the Challenger: America’s Future in Space,” New York Times Magazine, March 16, 1986, pp. 38-39, 93, 102-6, quoted at p. 38.

584 [“Story of political failure”]: Trento, Acknowledgments; see also U.S. Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, Report to the President, 5 vols. (1986).

[“Hock his jewels”: quoted in Young et al., p. 72.

[Reasons for Kennedy’s moon decision]: McDougall, ch. 15; Young et al., ch. 5; Kennan and Harvey, pp. 74-83; John M. Logsdon, The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest (MIT Press, 1970).

[“Second in everything”]: quoted in McDougall, p. 320.

[“Do the big things together”]: ibid., pp. 394-95, quoted at p. 395.

[“Vehicle rather than a mission”]: Trento, p. 105.

584-5 [Post-Apollo planning and shuttle decision]: McDougall, pp. 420-23; Trento, pp. 88-94, ch. 5; John M. Logsdon, “The Shuttle Program: A Policy Failure?,” Science, vol. 232 (May 30, 1980), pp. 1099-1105; Gregg Easterbrook, “Big Dumb Rockets,” Newsweek, vol. 110, no. 7 (August 17, 1987), pp. 50-54; see also Logsdon, Decision, ch. 6.

585 [“Make access to orbit routine”]: John M. Logsdon, “After Challenger Does the U.S. Have a Future in Space?,” American Politics, vol. 1, no. 7 (August 1986), pp. 6-9, quoted at p. 7.

[“Highest possible level”]: quoted in Easterbrook, p. 52.

[“Mortgaged nearly everything”]: John Noble Wilford, “At NASA, All That’s Up Is the Shuttle Columbia,” New York Times, November 1, 1981, sect. 4, p. 9.

[Space commercialization]: Pamela E. Mack, “Government and Enterprise: Commercialization and Privatization in the U.S. Space Program,” paper prepared for delivery at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Washington, DC, December 1987; Nathan C. Goldman, Space Commerce: Free Enterprise on the High Frontier (Ballinger, 1985); David Osborne, “Business in Space,” Atlantic, vol. 255, no. 5 (May 1985), pp. 45-58.

[Projected and actual costs of payload per pound]: Easterbrook, pp. 54-55.

[Space militarization]: Paul B. Stares, The Militarization of Space: U.S. Policy, 1945-1984 (Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 178-79, 225-35, and passim; Stares, Space and National Security (Brookings Institution, 1987); Zbigniew Brzezinski et al., eds., Promise or Peril: The Strategic Defense Initiative (Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1986); Daedalus, vol. 114, nos.2-3 (Spring-Summer 1985); Jonathan B. Stein, From H-Bomb to Star Wars: The Politics of Strategic Decision Making (Lexington Books, 1984), chs. 8-9.

586 [“Awesome Soviet missile threat”]: Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security, March 23, 1983, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982- ), vol. 3, part 1, pp. 437-43, quoted at p. 442.

[Logsdon on ends and means]: Logsdon, “Space Shuttle Program,” p. 1105. [Soviet space progress]: Larry Martz, “America Grounded,” Newsweek, vol. 110, no. 7 (August 17, 1987), pp. 37, 40-41, Nicholas Johnson quoted on “evolution of man into space” at p. 37, Glenn quoted at p. 37; Easterbrook, pp. 46, 60; see also William H. Schauer, The Politics of Space: A Comparison of the Soviet and American Space Programs (Holmes & Meier, 1976); Roald Sagdeev, “Soviet Space Science,” Physics Today, vol. 41, no. 5 (May 1988), pp. 30-38; Louis J. Lanzerotti and Jeffrey D. Rosendhal, “Policy Challenges Facing the US Space Research Program,” ibid., pp. 78-83.

[“Advance the technology”]: quoted in Easterbrook, p. 52.

586-7 [Hubble telescope]: Newsweek, vol. 110, no. 7 (August 17, 1987), pp. 52-53.

587 [“Out of the blue”]: Young, “Hey Hey, My My,” quoted in McDougall, p. 450, Copyright 1979, Silver Fiddle Music.

14. The Kaleidoscope of Thought

591 [Carter’s retreat]: Newsweek, vol. 94, no. 3 (July 16, 1979), pp. 19-21; ibid., vol. 24, no. 4 (July 23, 1979), pp. 21-26; Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith (Bantam, 1982), pp. 114-20; Godfrey Hodgson, All Things to All Men: The False Promise of the Modern American Presidency (Simon and Schuster, 1980), pp. 162-63 and passim; Betty Glad, Jimmy Carter: In Search of the Great White House (Norton, 1980), pp. 444-46.

591 [Advice to Carter]: Energy and National Goals, July 15, 1979, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Jimmy Carter (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977-82), vol. 3, part 2, pp. 1235-41, quoted at p. 1236.

[Carter’s address]: ibid.; see also Jeffrey K. Tulis, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 3, 136, 141.

592 [Carter’s firings and public response]. Newsweek, vol. 94, no. 5 (July 30, 1979), pp. 22-28, anecdote of the king told at p. 27.

Habits of Individualism

594 [Census family statistics]: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1987 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1986), p. 45 (Table 61).

[Numbers of religious bodies and membership]: ibid., pp. 51-52 (Table 74); Leo Rosten, ed., Religions in America (Simon and Schuster, 1963), esp. pp. 220-48, 318-24.

595 [Church attendance, 1940s-1970s]: Hadley Cantril, ed., Public Opinion 1935-1946 (Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 699-701 (early polling data may be only approximations); Theodore Caplow et al., All Faithful People: Change and Continuity in Middletown’s Religion (University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 27.

[Polls on religious influence]: Gallup Opinion Index Question quoted in Caplow et al., p. 28.

[Ratio of church membership to population]: ibid., pp. 28-29,

[Declining membership of “mainline” Protestant churches]: Newsweek, vol. 108, no. 25 (December 22, 1986), pp. 54-56.

[“Language genuinely able”]: Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (University of California Press, 1985), p. 237; see also Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (Seabury Press, 1975).

595-6 [Thoreau on telegraph between Maine and Texas]: Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Walden; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod, Robert F. Sayre, ed. (Library of America, 1985), p. 364.

596 [Projected enrollments early 1990s]: Statistical Abstract, p. 117 (Table 189).

[Enrollment in private secondary schools after Brown]: Jeffrey A. Raffel, The Politics of School Desegregation: The Metropolitan Remedy in Delaware (Temple University Press, 1980), pp. 175-88, esp. pp. 178-80.

[Public education in modern America]: Robert B. Everhart, ed., The Public School Monopoly: A Critical Analysis of Education and the State in American Society (Ballinger Publishing, 1982), part 3; Benjamin D. Stickney and Laurence R. Marcus, The Great Education Debate: Washington and the Schools (Charles C. Thomas, 1984), chs. 1, 5, and passim.

596-7 [Typical public school classroom]: Kenneth A. Sirotnik, “What You See Is What You Get—Consistency, Persistency, and Mediocrity in Classrooms,” Harvard Educational Review, vol. 53, no. 1 (February 1983), pp. 16-31.

597 [Toffler on learning]: quoted in ibid., p. 29.

[Merelman on education]: Merelman, Making Something of Ourselves (University of California Press, 1984), pp. 195-99.

[Schools as supermarkets]: Arthur G. Powell, Eleanor Tartar, and David K. Cohen, The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace (Houghton Mifflin, 1985), esp. ch. 1.

[Higher education in modern America]: Ernest L. Boyer and Fred M. Hechinger, Higher Learning in the Nation’s Service (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1981); Barry M. Richman and Richard N. Farmer, Leadership, Goals, and Power in Higher Education (Jossey-Bass, 1974); Derek Bok, Beyond the Ivory Tower: Social Responsibilities of the Modern University (Harvard University Press, 1982). [Institutions, teachers, students in higher education]: Statistical Abstract, p. 138 (Table 233).

[Bowen on missing ingredient]: Bowen, The State of the Nation and the Agenda for Higher Education (Jossey-Bass, 1982), pp. 76-78; see also Philip E. Jacob, Changing Values in College: An Exploratory Study of the Impact of College Teaching (Harper, 1957); Richard L. Morrill, Teaching Values in College: Facilitating Development of Ethical, Moral, and Value Awareness in Students (Jossey-Bass, 1980).

[Boyer and Hechinger on higher education]: Boyer and Hechinger, esp. p. 3.

598 [“American liberal approach”]: Walzer, “Teaching Morality,” New Republic, vol. 178, no. 23 (June 10, 1978), pp. 12-14, quoted at p. 13; see also Roger L. Shinn, “Education in Values: Acculturation and Exploration,” in Douglas Sloan, ed., Education and Values (Teachers College Press, 1980), pp. 111-22.

[Debates over values]: James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (Harper, 1978), pp. 74-75; see also Milton Rokeach, Beliefs, Altitudes, and Values: A Theory of Organization and Change (Jossey-Bass, 1969); Burns, Uncommon Sense (Harper, 1972), ch. 6.

[“The most resonant”]: Bellah et al., Habits, p. 23.

598-9 [“Decline of church”]: Merelman, pp. 1-2.

599 [“May have grown cancerous”]: Bellah et al., Habits, p. viii.

[Yuppies]: “The Year of the Yuppie,” Newsweek, vol. 104, no. 28 (December 31, 1984), pp. 14-20; “Life of a Yuppie Takes a Psychic Toll,” U.S. News & World Report, vol. 98, no. 16 (April 29, 1985), pp.73-74; “That Word,” New Yorker, vol.61. no.10 (April 29, 1985), pp. 30-31.

[Sheila]: Bellah et al., Habits, pp. 220-21, quoted at p. 221.

[“Management of personal impressions”]: Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (Norton, 1978), p. 44; see also Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (Norton, 1984).

600 [Individualism]: Crawford B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford University Press, 1962): A. D. Lindsay, “Individualism,” in Edwin R. A. Seligman, ed., Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Macmillan, 1930-34), vol. 7, pp. 674-80; Steven Lukes, Individualism (Basil Blackwell, 1973); Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 118-72; Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton University Press, 1950); Bellah et al., Habits, esp. chs. 2, 6.

601 “Nation that was proud”]: Carter Public Papers, vol. 3, part 2, p. 1237.

Kinesis: The Southern Californians

[Hollywood’s beginnings]: Carey McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land (Peregrine Smith, 1979), ch. 16; Lary Linden May, “Reforming Leisure: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry, 1896-1920,” (doctoral dissertation; University of California, Los Angeles, 1977); Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Social History of the American Movies (Random House, 1975), chs. 2-3; W. H. Hutchinson, California: The Golden Shore by the Sundown Sea (Star Publishing, 1980), pp. 247-54; see also Hortense Powdermaker, Hollywood, the Dream Factory (Little, Brown, 1950), chs. 1, 15.

[Selznick’s wire to the Czar]: Walton Bean, California: An Interpretive History, 2nd ed. (McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 384.

602 [“Monopolistic non-seasonal industry”]: McWilliams, Southern California, pp. 339-40, quoted at p. 340.

[Southern California’s migrants]: McWilliams, Southern California, chs. 3, 5, 7-9, 15 passim; see also Robert F. Heifer and Alan F. Almquist, The Other Californians (University of California Press, 1971).

[Birth of a Nation]: McWilliams, Southern California, pp. 332-33; Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie, and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (University of California Press, 1987), pp. 190-235; Sklar, ch. 4: Charles Higham, The Art of the American film, 1900-1971 (Doubleday, 1973), pp. 10-12.

[Labor strife in Los Angeles]: Andrew F. Rolle, California (Crowell,1964), ch. 31. 602-3 [“Kiss-Kiss” and “bang-bang”]: Powdermaker, p. 14.

603 [Priestley on Los Angeles]: quoted in McWilliams, Southern California, p. 328; see also Robert Kirsch, “The Cultural Scene,” in Carey McWilliams, ed., The California Revolution (Grossman, 1968), p. 205.

[Esoteric religions in southern California]: Carey McWilliams, “California: Mecca of the Miraculous,” in Dennis Hale and Jonathan Eisen, eds., The California Dream (Collier Books, 1968), pp. 279-92; Michael Davie, California: The Vanishing Dream (Dodd, Mead, 1972), ch. 8; McWilliams, Southern California, ch. 13; Lately Thomas, Storming Heaven (Morrow, 1970).

603-4 [Left-wing California politics]: Dorothy Healey, “Tradition’s Chains Have Bound Us” (1982), Oral History, Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles; Carey McWilliams, “The Economics of Extremism,” in Hale and Eisen, pp. 83-95.

604 [Olson]: Robert E. Burke, Olson’s New Deal for California (University of Califomia Press, 1953), esp. chs. 3, 5.

[California political culture]: Luther Whiteman and Samuel L. Lewis, “EPIC, or Politics for Use,” in Hale and Eisen, pp. 63-71; McWilliams, Southern California, ch. 14; Gladwin Hill, “California Politics,” in McWilliams, California Revolution, pp. 172-84; Davie, chs. 6-7; James Q. Wilson, “The Political Culture of Southern California,” in Hale and Eisen, pp. 215-33.

[Young Nixon]: Fawn M. Brodie, Richard Nixon: The Shaping of His Character (Norton, 1981), chs. 2-8; Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (Houghton Mifflin, 1970), pp. 150-86; Davie, pp. 88-90.

[Wills on Nixon]: Wills, Nixon Agonistes, p. 184.

[“Old-fashioned kind of lawyer”]: quoted in Bruce Mazlish, In Search of Nixon (Basic Books, 1972), p. 28.

[Hollywood in 1930s and 1940s]: Otto Friedrich, City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s (Harper, 1986); Higham, parts 2-3 passim; Tino Balio, ed., The American Film Industry, rev. ed. (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), part 3; Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, Hollywood in the Forties (Tantivy Press, 1968); Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960 (University of California Press, 1983).

605 [Writers in Hollywood]: Walter Goodman, “Why Some Novelists Cast Hollywood as the Heavy,” New York Times, August 17, 1986, sect. 2, pp. 19-20; Friedrich, pp. 228-46, esp. pp. 237-40; Harry M. Geduld, ed., Authors on Film (Indiana University Press, 1972), esp. parts 3-4; Morris Beja, Film and Literature (Longman, 1979), part 1.

[“Puke-green phantasmagoria”]: quoted in Goodman, “Why Some Novelists,” p. 20.

[Gable-Faulkner exchange]: quoted in Friedrich, p. 240.

[Hollywood and television]: Tino Balio, “Retrenchment, Reappraisal, and Reorganization, 1948,” in Balio, pp. 422-38; David J. Londoner, “The Changing Economics of Entertainment,” in ibid., pp. 603-30; Andrew Dowdy, The Films of the Fifties: The American State of Mind (Morrow, 1973), ch. 1 passim; Douglas Gomery, “Brian’s Song: Television, Hollywood, and the Evolution of the Movie Made for Television,” in John E. O’Connor, ed., American History of American Television (Frederick Ungar, 1983), ch. 9. [Movie admissions]: Douglas Gomery, “Hollywood’s Business,” Wilson Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 3 (Summer 1986), p. 53.

606 [Reagan’s youth): Ronald Reagan and Richard G. Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me? The Autobiography of Ronald Reagan (Karz Publishers, 1981), chs. 1-4; Anne Edwards, Early Reagan: The Rise to Power (Morrow, 1987), chs. 2-7; Garry Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (Doubleday, 1987), parts 1-3.

[Reagan in Hollywood]: Reagan and Hubler, pp. 71-243; Edwards, chs. 8-21; Wills, Reagan’s America, part 4; Rogin, ch. 1.

[Powdermaker on Hollywood escapism]: Powdermaker, pp. 12-14, quoted at pp. 12-13.

[Production Code Administration and censorship]: Powdermaker, ch. 3 passim; see also Richard S. Randall, Censorship of the Movies: The Social and Political Control of a Mass Medium (University of Wisconsin Press, 1968).

607 [“A scoop for you!”]: quoted in Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 159.

[“So much that is right”]: ibid., p. 161,

[Reagan, SAG, and MCA]: ibid., chs. 23-29, esp. pp. 249-50, 272-74; Edwards, chs. 14-17, 21 passim; Reagan and Hubler, pp. 222-30, 275-88.

[Reagan’s movement across political spectrum]: Wills, Reagan’s America, esp. pp. 257-58, 283-84; Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 23-28; Lou Cannon, Reagan (Putnam, 1982), chs. 7-8 passim.

[Cannon on income tax and Reagan’s new conservatism]: Cannon, p. 91.

607-8 [Hollywood in the 1960s-1980s]: Gomery, pp. 56-57; Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (Columbia University Press, 1986); Balio, “Retrenchment.”

608 [Development of southern California]: Charles Lockwood and Christopher B. Leinberger, “Los Angeles Comes of Age,” Atlantic, vol. 261, no. 1 (January 1988), pp. 31-56; B. Marchand, The Emergence of Los Angeles: Population and Homing in the City of Dreams, 1940-1970 (Pion Limited, 1986); McWilliams, California Revolution; Davie, chs. 3-4.

608 [The auto in southern California]: Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1987, part 1, pp. 1, 20-22, and part 6, pp. 1, 6; Richard G. Lillard, “Revolution by Internal Combustion,” in McWilliams, California Revolution, pp. 84-99; Samuel E. Wood, “The Freeway Revolt and What It Means,” in ibid., pp. 100-9; New York Times, August 21, 1987, p. A8; Davie, pp. 53-62.

[“A movable home”]: quoted in Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1987, part 6, p. 6.

Superspectatorship

[Hagler-Leonard]: Sports Illustrated, vol. 66, no. 13 (March 30, 1987), pp. 58-78; ibid., vol. 66, no. 16 (April 13, 1987), pp. 18-25; New York Times, April 6, 1987, pp. C1, C6.

610 [Sportswatching]: Statistical Abstract, p. 216 (Table 375); see also Allen Guttmann, Sports Spectators (Columbia University Press, 1986]: passim; Dick Schaap, “Sports and Television: The Perfect Marriage,” in Marvin Barrett, ed., The Politics of Broadcasting (Crowell, 1973), pp. 197-202.

[Podell on sportswatching]: Podell, “Preface,” in Podell, ed., Sports in America (H. W. Wilson Co., 1986), pp. 5-6, quoted at p. 5.

[“Wholly intelligible”]: Larry Gerlach, “Telecommunications and Sports,” in Podell, pp. 66-74, quoted at p. 73.

[Lipsky on sports]: Lipsky, How We Play the Game: Why Sports Dominate American Life (Beacon Press, 1981), p. 63.

611 [“Agitate a bag of wind”]: quoted in Gerlach, p. 72.

[Advertising rate for 1988 football championship]: New York Times, January 25, 1988, p. C7.

[Football and baseball TV contracts]: Robert Kilborn. Jr., “Trying to Limit Out-of-the-Ballpark Salaries in Professional Sports,” in Podell, pp. 74-77, esp. p. 75. [1984 Olympics’ economic impact]: Roger Rosenblatt, “Why We Play These Games,” in ibid, pp. 135-43, esp. p. 35.

[Bird’s worth]: Kilborn, p. 76.

[TV advertising]: W. Russell Neuman, The Paradox of Mass Politics (Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 145; see Todd Gitlin, “Car Commercials and Miami Vice: ‘We Build Excitement,’“ in Gitlin, ed., Watching Television (Pantheon, 1986), pp. 136-61; Statistical Abstract, pp. 538 (Table 926), 539 (Tables 928-30).

[“Economics of television”]: Neuman, p. 135.

612 [Wall Street Journal circulation]: James MacGregor Burns, J. W. Peltason, and Thomas E. Cronin, Government By the People, 13th ed. (Prentice-Hall, 1987), p. 244 (table).

[USA Today]: Peter Prichard, The Making of McPaper: The Inside Story of USA Today (Andrews, McMeel & Parker, 1987).

[Media concentration]: Michael Parenti, Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media (St. Martin’s Press, 1986), pp. 27-32, esp. p. 27; see also Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly (Beacon Press, 1983).

[Broder on the press]: Broder, Behind the Front Page: A Candid Look at How the News Is Made (Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 12.

[Television watching]: Morris Janowitz, The Last Half-Century: Societal Change and Politics in America (University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 337-38, quoted at p. 337; Statistical Abstract, p. 531 (Table 907); see also Benjamin Stein, “This Is Not Your Life: Television as the Third Parent,” Public Opinion, vol. 9, no. 4 (November-December 1986), pp. 4 1-42; Joshua Meyrowitz, “The 19-Inch Neighborhood,” Newsweek, vol. 106, no. 4 (July 22, 1985), p. 8.

[TV in the workplace]: Newsweek, vol. 111, no. 1 (January 4, 1988), pp. 34-35.

613 [Politicians and the electronic media]: Edwin Diamond and Stephen Bates, The Spot: The Rise of Political Advertising on Television (MIT Press, 1984); Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency (Oxford University Press, 1984); Austin Ranney, Channels of Power: The Impact of Television on American Politics (Basic Books, 1983); Ronald Berkman and Laura W. Kilch, Politics in the Media Age (McGraw-Hill, 1986); Timothy E. Cook, “Marketing the Members: Evolving Media Strategies in the House of Representatives,” unpublished typescript, presented at the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 18-20, 1985; Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Viking, 1985), ch. 9; Broder, passim; Keith Blume, The Presidential Election Show (Bergin & Garvey, 1985); Anne Haskell, “Congress Exploits the New Media,” Proceedings (Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 1981-82), pp. 56-59.

613 [“It is irresponsible”]: quoted in Haskell, p. 58.

[“I saw President Ford bump his head”]: quoted in Parenti, p. 15.

[TV and opinion formation]: Janowitz, ch. 9 passim; Ronald E. Frank and Marshall G. Greenbury, The Public’s Use of Television (Sage Publications, 1980); Joshua Meyrowitz, Na Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (Oxford University Press, 1985); Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People’s Choice, 2nd ed. (Columbia University Press, 1948), ch. 16 and passim; Elihu Katz and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications (Free Press, 1955).

[TV and political cynicism]: Michael J. Robinson, “Public Affairs Television and the Growth of Political Malaise: The Case of ‘The Selling of the Pentagon,’” American Political Science. Review, vol. 70, no. 2 (June 1976), pp. 409-32; Burns, Peltason, and Cronin, p. 247 (table).

614 [Political bias in the media]: Burns, Peltason, and Cronin, pp. 253-55 and sources cited therein; Michael J. Robinson, “Just How Liberal Is the News? 1980 Revisited,” Public Opinion, vol. 6, no. 1 (February-March 1983), pp. 55-60; Nick Thimmesch, ed., A Liberal Media Elite? (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1985); Sally Bedell Smith, “Conservatism Finds Its TV Voice,” New York Times, May 19, 1985, sect. 2, p. 32; Parenti, ch. 6 and passim; Broder, ch. 9; Ranney, ch. 2; Peter Stoler, The War Against the Press: Politics, Pressure and Intimidation in the 80s (Dodd, Mead, 1986), chs. 8, 12 and passim.

[Decline of mass-circulation magazines]: Loudon Wainwright, The Great American Magazine: An Inside History of Life (Knopf, 1986), esp. chs. 15, 20; James K. Classman, “One Life to Live” (review of Wainwright), New Republic, vol. 196, no. 6 (February 9, 1987), pp. 36-40; Otto Friedrich, Decline and Fall (Harper, 1970), ch. 23.

[Specialized and alternative periodicals]: Abe Peck, Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press (Pantheon, 1985); Robert K. Glessing, The Underground Press in America (Indiana University Press, 1970); David Owen, “The Fifth Estate,” Atlantic, vol. 256, no. 1 (July 1985), pp. 80-85; see also Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (University of Illinois Press, 1964), ch. 13.

[Decline of independent local newspapers]: see Philip Weiss, “Invasion of the Gannettoids,” New Republic, vol. 196, no. 5 (February 2, 1987), pp. 18-22.

The New Yorkers

615 [State of black literature]: see Nathan A. Scott, Jr., “Black Literature,” in Daniel Hoff man, ed., Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), ch. 7; C. W. E. Bigsby, The Second Black Renaissance: Essays in Black Literature (Greenwood Press, 1980); Herbert Hill, ed., Anger, and Beyond: The Negro Writer in the United States (Harper, 1966); Mari Evans, ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984).

[State of southern literature]: see Lewis P. Simpson, “Southern Fiction,” in Hoffman, ch. 4; Louis D. Rubin, Jr., et al., eds., The History of Southern Literature (Louisiana State University Press, 1985), parts 3-4; Rubin and Robert D. Jacobs, eds., Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South (Johns Hopkins Press, 1953); Richard Gray, The Literature of Memory: Modern Writers of the American South (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).

[“Terrible loss of moral energy”]: Doctorow, “It’s a Cold War Out There, Class of ’83,” Nation, vol. 237, no. 1 (July 2, 1983), pp. 6-7, quoted at pp. 6, 7; see also Doctorow, “Living in the House of Fiction,” ibid., vol. 226, no. 15 (April 22, 1978), pp. 459-60, 462.

615 [Bellow on “publicity intellectuals”]: Mark Christhilf, “Saul Bellow and the American Intellectual Community,” Modern Age, vol. 28, no. 1 (Winter 1984), pp. 55-67, esp. pp. 59-61. 615-16 [“Million-dollar advances”]: Kazin, “American Writing Now,” New Republic, vol. 183, no. 16 (October 18, 1980), pp. 27-30, quoted at p. 28.

616 [Kostelanetz on the literary marketplace]: Kostelanetz, The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America (Sheed & Ward, 1974), passim; see also Joan Simpson Burns, The Awkward Embrace: The Creative Artist and the Institution in America (Knopf, 1975), esp. ch. 22; led Solotaroff, “The Literary-Industrial Complex,” New Republic, vol. 196, no. 23 (June 8, 1987), pp. 28-45.

[Aldridge on the modern novel]: Aldridge, “The State of the Novel,” Commentary, vol. 64, no. 4 (October 1977), pp. 44-52, esp. pp. 45-47, quoted at p. 46; see also Warner Berthoff, “The Novel in a Time of Troubles,” in Berthoff, Fictions and Events (E. P. Dutton, 1971), pp. 102-17; Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction” (1960), in Roth, Reading Myself and Others (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,1975), pp. 117-35; Janet Groth, “Fiction vs. anti-fiction revisited,” Commonweal, vol. 106, no. 9 (May 11, 1979), pp. 269-71; Joseph Epstein, “A Conspiracy of Silence,” Harper’s, vol. 255, no. 1530 (November 1977), pp. 77-92.

[New York intellectuals]: Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (Oxford University Press, 1986); Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Goldstein, eds., Creators and Disturbers: Reminiscences by Jewish Intellectuals of New York (Columbia University Press, 1982); Kostelanetz; James B. Gilbert, Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (Wiley, 1968); Irving Howe, “The New York Intellectuals,” in Howe, Decline of the New (Harcourt, 1970), pp. 211-68; Richard H. King, “Up from Radicalism,” American Jewish History, vol. 75, no. 1 (September 1985), pp. 61-85. [“Gutter-worldliness”]: Frank Kermode, “A Herd of Independent Minds” (review of Bloom), New York Times Book Review, April 27, 1986, pp. 12-13, Howe quoted at p. 12.

617 [Kostelanetz on “literary mob”]: Kostelanetz, p. 75 and part 1 passim.

[PEN Congress]: Rhoda Koenig, “At Play in the Fields of the Word,” New York, vol. 19, no. 5 (February 3, 1986), pp. 40-47; Edward Rothstein, “Lead Me Not into PEN Station,” Ne?? Republic, vol. 194, no. 8 (February 24, 1986), pp. 20-23; “A Rampancy of Writers,” Time, vol. 127, no. 2 (January 13, 1986), p. 22; “Independent States of Mind,” ibid., vol. 127, no. 4 (January 27, 1986), pp. 74-77; “Mightier Than the Sword,” Newsweek, vol. 107, no. 4 (January 27, 1986), pp. 60-61; see also William H. Gass, “East vs. West in Lithuania: Rising Tempers at a Writers’ Meeting,” New York Times Book Review, February 2, 1986, pp. 3, 29, 31.

[“Your Administration”]; text of letter in Nation, vol. 242, no. 4 (February 1, 1986), p. 117; see also Maria Margaronis and Elizabeth Pochoda, “Bad Manners & Bad Faith,” ibid., pp. 116-19; Koenig, pp. 40-4 1; “Independent States,” pp. 74-75; Walter Goodman, “Shultz Faces Critics in Speech Opening 48th PEN Assembly,” New York Times, January 13, 1986, pp. 1, C11.

[“Most ideologically right-wing”]: Doctorow, “Why Invite Shultz?,” New York Times, January 11, 1986, p. 23.

[“Catatonic left”]: quoted in “Mightier Than the Sword,” p. 60.

[Shultz’s address]: excerpts in New York Times, January 19, 1986, sect. 4, p. 6.

618 [“With you all the way”]: quoted in Koenig, p. 41.

[“First thing I get”]: quoted in New York Times, January 14, 1986, p. G12.

[“Even if you say”]: quoted in Koenig, p. 42.

[“In the eyes of foreigners”]: quoted in Walter Goodman, “Norman Mailer Offers a PEN Post-mortem,” New York Times, January 27, 1986, p. C24.

[Mailer on Congress “friendships and feuds”]: ibid.

[Women’s protest]: Paley quoted in Koenig, p. 47; Mailer and Jong in “Independent States,” p. 77; Macdonald in “Mightier Than the Sword,” p. 61; Edwin McDowell, “Women at PEN Caucus Demand a Greater Role,” New York Times, January 17, 1986, p. C26; McDowell, “PEN Congress Ends with a Protest,” ibid., January 18, 1986, p. 11.

618 [“Failure of the ruling ideologies”]: excerpts from remarks in New York Times, January 19, 1986, sect. 4, p. 6.

[“Ring of romantic anarchism”]: quoted in “Independent States,” p. 77; see also Amos Oz, “A Writer’s Guide,” New Republic, vol. 194, no. 8 (February 24, 1986), p. 28.

618-19 [“Fully clawed”]: Ozick, “Literature Lost,” New York Times, January 22, 1986, p. A23; see also Ozick, “Innovation and Redemption: What Literature Means,” in Ozick, Art & Ardor (Knopf, 1983), pp. 238-48.

619 [Bellow-Grass debate]: Bellow quoted in “Independent States,” p. 77; Koenig, pp. 44-45; see also Leon Wieseltier, “A Fable,” New Republic, vol. 194, no. 8 (February 24, 1986), pp. 26-29; Günter Grass, “The Artist’s Freedom of Opinion in Our Society,” in Grass, On Writing and Politics, 1967-1983, Ralph Manheim, trans. (Harcourt, 1985), pp. 127-36.

[“Censorship in the U.S.A. ”]: “Mightier Than the Sword,” p. 61; New York Times, January 16, 1986, p. G17; see also Eli M. Oboler, ed., Censorship and Education (H. W. Wilson Co., 1981).

[Updike on postal service]: quoted in “Independent States,” p. 75; see also Updike, “One Writer’s Testimony,” National Review, vol. 30, no. 21 (May 26, 1978), p. 641.

620 [Jameson “thinness” of American life]: James, The American Scene (Scribner, 1946), pp. 44, 54, and passim; see also James, Hawthorne (Harper, 1880), pp. 41-43.

[“Absence of a desire”]: Bellow, “The Writer as Moralist,” Atlantic, vol. 211, no. 3 (March 1963), pp. 58-62, quoted at p. 62; see also Bellow, “Where Do We Go from Here: The Future of Fiction,” in Irving Mallow, ed., Saul Bellow and the Critics (New York University Press, 1967), pp. 211-20; Bellow, “The Nobel Lecture,” American Scholar, vol. 46, no. 3 (1977), pp. 316-25; Bellow, “Literature in the Age of Technology,” in Technology and the Frontiers of Knowledge (Doubleday, 1975), pp. 3-22.

[Foreign authors on contemporary American willing]: quoted in “Where’s the New Faulkner?,” U.S. News & World Report, vol. 100, no. 3 (January 27, 1986), p. 65; see also Aleksandr Mulyarchik, “The New American Literature,” World Press Review, vol. 30, no. 4 (April 1983), p. 51; Edward Hoagland, “Americans Exclude the Globe,” New York Times, January 11, 1986, p. 23.

621 [“Independent, self-generating”]: John Russell, The Meanings of Modern Art (Harper, 1981), p. 291.

[Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American art]: ibid., pp. 291-96; Meyer Schapiro, Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries (George Braziller, 1982), pp. 135-78; Arthur Frank Wertheim, The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture, 1908-1917 (New York University Press, 1976); Peter Selz, Art in Our Times: A Pictorial History, 1890-1980 (Harry N. Abrams, 1981), chs. 1-3 passim; Peter Conrad, The Art of the City: Views and Versions of New York (Oxford University Press, 1984).

[Abstract Expressionism]: Harry F. Gaugh, “Reappraising the New York School,” in Sam Hunter, ed., An American Renaissance: Painting and Sculpture since 1940 (Abbeville Press, 1986), pp. 27-61; Charles Harrison, “Abstract Expressionism,” in Nikos Stangos, ed., Concepts of Modern Art, 2nd. ed. (Harper, 1981), pp. 169-211; Maurice Tuchman, ed., New York School: The First Generation (New York Graphic Society, 1972); Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (Praeger, 1970); Russell, pp. 302-27 passim; see also Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford University Press, 1972), chs. 10, 11.

[Russell on Frankenthaler]: Russell, p. 357.

[“Drowning Girl”]: reproduced in ibid., p. 348.

[“New, Newer, Newest”]: John Simon, “New, Newer, Newest,” New York Times, September 21, 1969, sect. 2, pp. 1, 7; see also Burns, Awkward Embrace, ch. 13 passim.

[“Most difficult, embattled”]: Suzi Gablik, “Minimalism,” in Stangos, pp. 244-55, quoted at p. 248; see also Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in Howard Singerman, ed., Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945-1986 (Abbeville Press, 1986), pp. 162-83.

622 [Merging of High and Mass Culture]: Herbert J. Gans, “American Popular Culture and High Culture in a Changing Glass Structure,” in Judith H. Balfe and Margaret Jane Wyszomirski, eds., Art, Ideology, and Politics (Praeger, 1985), pp. 40-57, quoted at p. 49; Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” in Bernard Rosenberg and David M. White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Free Press, 1957), pp. 59-73; Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, John O’Brian, ed. (University of Chicago Press, 1986), vol. 1, pp. 5-22; “Culture and the Present Moment: A Round-Table Discussion,” Commentary, vol. 58, no. 6 (December 1974), pp. 31-50; Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Sontag, Against lnterpretation and Other Essays (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1966), pp. 275-92.

622 [Hughes on Kramer]: Robert Hughes, “Kramer vs. Kramer” (review of Hilton Kramer, The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture 1972-1984 [Free Press, 1985]: New Republic, vol. 194, no. 15 (April 14, 1986), pp. 28-33, quoted at p. 32.

[“Free-market capitalism”]: ibid., p. 32; see also Kramer, “Postmodern: Art and Culture in the 1980s,” in Kramer, pp. 1-11.

[Free market in art]: John Bernard Myers, “The Art Biz,” New York Review of Books, vol. 30, no. 15 (October 13, 1983), pp. 32-34, quoted at p. 32; see also Steven W. Naifeh, Culture Making: Money, Success, and the New York Art World (Princeton University Undergraduate Studies in History: 2, 1976); Harold Rosenberg, Art on the Edge: Creators and Situations (Macmillan, 1975), ch. 26; Laura de Coppet and Alan Jones, The Art Dealers (Clarkson N. Potter, 1984).

[“Radically wrong”]: Russell, p. 381. [“Two Women” sale]: Myers, p. 32.

[Artists and politics]: Corinne Robins, The Pluralistic Era: American Art,*1968-1981 (Harper, 1984), ch. 3; Balfe and Wyszomirski: Hilton Kramer, “Turning Back the Clock: Art and Politics in 1984,” in Kramer, pp. 386-94; Paul Von Blum, The Art of Social Conscience (Universe Books, 1976), ch. 9.

622-3 [New York Art Strike]: Robins, pp. 2-3, 39.

623 [Kennedy’s proposed legislation for the resale of art]: see “U.S. Bill on Artists’ Rights Is Debated,” New York Times, November 19, 1986, p. C33; see also Franklin Feldman, “Reflections on Art and the Law: Old Concepts. New Values,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 131, no. 2 (June 1987), pp. 141-47.

[Sontag on “art today”]: Susan Sontag, “One Culture and the New Sensibility,” in Sontag, pp. 293-304, quoted at p. 290.

[Attacks on tradition, 1960s-1980s]: Gregory Baltcock and Robert Nickas, eds., The Art of Performance (E. P. Dutton, 1984); Robert Smith, “Conceptual Art,” in Stangos, pp. 256-70; Edward Lucie-Smith, “Pop Art,” in ibid., pp. 225-38: Lucy Lippard et al.. Pop Art (Oxford University Press, 1966); Carla Gottlieb, Beyond Modern Art (E. P. Dutton, 1976); Robins, esp. chs. 2, 4, 8; Robert C. Morgan, “Beyond Formalism: Language Models, Conceptual Art, and Environmental Art,” in Hunter, pp. 147-75; Machineworks: Vito Accona, Alice Aycock, Dennis Oppenheim, catalogue (Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1981); Moira Roth, ed., The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art, 1970-1980 (Astro Artz, 1983); see also Arthur C. Danlo, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Harvard University Press, 1981).

[Influence of Duchamp]: John Tancock, “The Influence of Marcel Duchamp,” in Anne d’Harnoncourt and Kynaston McShine, eds., Marcel Duchamp (Museum of Modern Art, 1973), pp. 159-78; Rosenberg, ch. 1; Calvin Tomkins, The World of Marcel Duchamp, 1887 (Time Inc., 1966), chs. 7-8.

[Neo-Expressiomsm]: 1985 Whitney Biennial Exhibition, catalogue (Whitney Museum of Modern Art, 1985); Arthur C. Danto, “Julian Schnabel,” in Danto, The State of the Art (Prentice-Hall, 1987), pp. 43-47; Howard N. Fox, Avant-Garde in the Eighties, catalogue (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1987); Kim Levin, “Appropriating the Past: Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Primitivism, and the Revival of Abstraction,” in Hunter, pp. 215-53; John Russell, “American Art Gains New Energies,” New York Times, August 19, 1984, sect. 2, pp. 1, 18; Kramer, pp. 366-86.

[Postindustrial technologies and art]: John G. Hanhardt, ed., Video Culture (Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986); Cynthia Goodman, Digital Visions: Computers and Art (Harry N. Abrams, 1987); see also J. David Bolter, Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

[“When anything is allowed”]: Danto, “Approaching the End of Art,” in Danto, State of the Art, pp. 202-18, quoted at p. 204.

624 [Structuralism and Deconstruction]: see Jonathan D. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Cornell University Press, 1981); Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Cornell University Press, 1982); Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (Columbia University Press, 1983.)

[Postmodernism]: Charles Newman, “The Post-Modern Aura: The Act of Fiction in an Age of Inflation,” Salmagundi, nos. 63-64 (Spring-Summer 1984), pp. 3-199; Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, trans. (University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Bay Press, 1983); Kramer, “Postmodern”; Heinrich Klotz, ed., Postmodern Visions (Abbeville Press, 1985); Charles Jencks, The Language of Past-Modern Architecture, 4th ed. (Rizzoli, 1984).

[Broadway in the 1970s-1980s]: Barbara Gelb, “O’Neill’s ‘Iceman’ Sprang from the Ashes of His Youth,” New York Times, September 29, 1985, sect. 2, pp. 1, 4; Mel Gussow, “Arthur Miller: Stirred by Memory,” ibid., February 1, 1987, sect. 2, pp. 1, 30; D. J. R. Bruckner, “Playwrights Rediscover the Uses of Politics,” ibid., September 22, 1985, sect. 2, p. 3.

[Advances in the technology of music]: Irwin Shainman, “Those Golden Sounds of Yesteryear Have Gone High-Tech,” Berkshire Eagle, December 27, 1986, p. B4.

The Conservative Mall

[AEI celebration]: Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power (Times Books, 1986), pp. 32-34, quoted at pp. 32, 33.

625 [Dinner at Delmonico’s]: James MacGregor Burns, The Workshop of Democracy (Knopf, 1985), pp. 161-62, and sources cited therein.

[Fifty-year conservative eclipse]: see Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Houghton Mifflin, 1986), ch. 2; Michael W. Miles, The Odyssey of the American Right (Oxford University Press, 1980).

626 [“Hitch-hike along”]: quoted in Jonathan Martin Kolkey, The New Right, 1960-1968: With Epilogue, 1969-1980 (University Press of America, 1983), p. 248.

[Liberal establishment]: quoted in Blumenthal, p. 4.

[Rossiter on conservatism]: Rossiter, Conservatism in America (Knopf, 1955), pp. 224-35 and passim.

[Hartz on conservatism]: Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (Harcourt, 1955).

[Hofstadter on conservatism]: Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (Knopf 1965), chs. 3, 4.

[Crawford’s exposé of the New Right]: Crawford, Thunder on the Right (Pantheon, 1980), Viereck quoted on “rabble-rousing populism” on jacket.

[Explanations for rise of consevative movement]: George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Basic Books, 1976), chs. 9-11; Blumenthal, ch 12 and passim: Crawford, pp. 30-41; Kolkey, esp. chs. 13-15; Peter Steinfels, The Neo Conservatives (Simon and Schuster, 1979), ch. 2 and passim.

627 [Ideas as weapons]: Max Lerner, Ideas Are Weapons: The History and Uses of Ideas (Viking, 1939); Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Universitv of Chicago Press, 1948).

[“Massive public education”]: quoted in Kolkey, p. 250.

[Conservative journals]: Crawford, pp. 30-32, 181-207; Steinfels, pp. 4-12. [Conservative factions]: see Blumenthal, ch. 13 passim; Miles, esp. part 3; Steinfels; Kolkey, ch. 1 and pp. 334-39; Crawford; Richard Striner, “Can Conservatism Survive Laissez Faire?,” American Politics (December 1986), pp. 19-21; George F. Will, “The Soul of Conservatism,” Newsweek, vol. 106, no. 20 (November 11, 1985), p. 92; Will, Statecraft As Soulcraft: What Government Does (Simon and Schuster, 1983).

627-8 [New Christian right]: Robert C. Liebman and Robert Wuthnow, eds., The New Christian Right: Mobilization and Legitimation (Aldine, 1983); George Marsden, ed., Evangelicalism and Modern America (William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1984); James D. Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (University of Chicago Press, 1987); A. James Reichley, Religion in American Public Life (Brookings Institution, 1985), pp. 311-31.

628 [Buckley and Eastman]: John Patrick Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (Harper, 1975), p. 346.

[Reagan and the conservative movement]: Blumenthal, ch. 9; Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Harvard University Press, 1984), ch. 2.

629 [Blumenthal on Reaganism]: Blumenthal, p. 241.

[Liberalism’s successes]: see John E. Schwarz, America’s Hidden Success: A Reassessment of Twenty Years of Public Policy (Norton, 1983); see also Walter R. Mead, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition (Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

[Trilling on liberalism]: quoted in Wall Street Journal, April 15, 1986, p. 64.

[“New Public Philosophy”]: Robert B. Reich, “Toward a New Public Philosophy,” Atlantic, vol. 255, no. 5 (May 1985), pp. 68-79; see also Reich, “An Industrial Policy of the Right,” The Public Interest, vol. 73 (Fall 1983), pp. 3-17; Reich, Tales of a New America (Times Books, 1987); commencement address of Senator Gary Hart at Talladega College, Talladega, Ala., May 19, 1985.

[“Seriously underestimated”]: quoted in Walter Goodman, “Dr. Kenneth B. Clark: Bewilderment Replaces ‘Wishful Thinking’ on Race,” New York Times, December 27, 1984, p. A14.

[“Not God-ordained”]: ibid.

[“Greatest wave of social reform”]: Irving Howe, Socialism and America (Harcourt, 1985), p. 84.

632 [Possibilities of socialist-liberal coalition]: see ibid., pp. 147-75; see also Samuel P. Huntington, “The Visions of the Democratic Party,” The Public Interest, vol. 79 (Spring 1985), pp. 63-78.

15. The Decline of Leadership

633 [Gorbachev’s leadership]: Robert C. Tucker, Political Culture and Leadership in Soviet Russia: From Lenin to Gorbachev (Norton, 1988); Michael Mandelbaum and Strobe Talbott, Reagan and Gorbachev (Vintage, 1987); Jerry Hough, Russia and the West: Gorbachev and the Politics of Reform (Simon and Schuster, 1988); Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroïka: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (Harper, 1987).

[“Being colonized”]: Rohatyn, “On the Brink,” New York Review of Books, vol. 34, no. 10 (June 11, 1987), pp. 3-6, quoted at p. 3.

634 [Reactions to proposals to amend the Constitution]: see Richard Lacayo, “Is It Broke? Should We Fix It?,” Time, vol. 130, no. 1 (July 6, 1987), pp. 54-55; Arthur M. Schlesinger. Jr., “Leave the Constitution Alone,” in Donald L. Robinson, ed., Reforming American Government: The Bicentennial Papers of the Committee on the Constitutional System (Westview Press, 1985), pp. 50-54; Hendrik Hertzberg, “Let’s Get Representative,” New Republic, vol. 196, no. 26 June 29, 1987), pp. 15-18; “Move Over, James Madison,” ibid., pp. 19-21.

[Liberty Weekend]: Time, vol. 128, no. 2 (July 14, 1986), pp. 10-20.

635 [Liberty Weekend conference]: Richard D. Heftner, ed., “Summary of Proceedings,” New York Marriott Marquis, July 5-6, 1986; Waller Goodman, “Liberty Panel Ponders Wherefores of Freedom,” New York Times, July 7, 1986, p. B4.

Republicans: Waiting for Mr. Right

636 [Harding’s mind]: James MacGregor Burns, The Workshop of Democracy (Knopf, 1985), p. 471.

[Trudeau on Reagan]: G. B. Trudeau, In Search of Reagan’s Brain (Henry Holt, 1981).

[“Barely above a whisper”]: quoted in Paul D. Trickson, Reagan Speaks: The Making of an American Myth (New York University Press, 1985), p. 14.

[Reagan’s misstatements]: Mark Green and Gail MacColl, eds., There He Goes Again: Ronald Reagan’s Reign of Error (Pantheon, 1983).

[White on Reagan]: White, America in Search of Itself: The Making of the President, 1956-1980 (Harper, 1982), p. 419.

637 [GOP in 1960s and 1970s]: Jonathan Martin Kolkey, The New Right, 1960-1968: With Epilogue, 1969-1980 (University Press of America, 1983); Kevin P. Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority (Anchor, 1970); John F. Bibby, “Party Renewal in the National Republican Party,” in Gerald M. Pomper, ed., Party Renewal in America: Theory and Practice (Praeger, 1981), pp. 102-15; Alan Crawford, Thunder on the Right (Pantheon, 1980).

637 [Mayflower conference]: Frank van der Linden, The Real Reagan (Morrow, 1981), pp. 111-12, Reagan quoted at p. 112.

[Reagan’s meeting with conservative leaders]: ibid., pp. 112-16, quoted at pp. 115, 116.

[1980 election]: Elizabeth Drew, Portrait of an Election: The 1980 Presidential Campaign (Simon and Schuster, 1981); Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, Blue Smoke and Mirrors (Viking, 1981); Marlene Michels Pomper, ed., The Election of 1980: Reports and Interpretations (Chatham House, 1981); Hamilton Jordan, Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Administration (Putnam, 1982); Walter J. Stone and Alan I. Abramowitz, “Winning May Not Be Everything, But It’s More than We Thought: Presidential Party Activists in 1980,” American Political Science Review, vol. 77 (1983), pp. 945-56.

[Tax and budget cuts]: David A. Stockman, The Triumph of Politics: How the Reagan Revolution Failed (Harper, 1986), chs. 3-6; Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 65-72; Paul Craig Roberts, The Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1984), chs. 4-5; Isabel Sawhill and John L. Palmer, eds., The Reagan Experiment (Urban Institute Press, 1982), part 1; Laurence I. Barrett, Gambling with History: Ronald Reagan in the White House (Doubleday, 1983), chs. 8-9; Martin Anderson, Revolution (Harcourt, 1988), esp. chs. 11-12.

[Supply-side economic]: Stockman, pp. 39-42, 64-66, quoted at p. 40; Roberts, chs. 1-3 passim; Robert Lekachman, Reaganomics: Greed Is Not Enough (Pantheon, 1982); Anderson, ch. 13.

639-40 [House vote on budget]: New York Times, May 8, 1981, pp. A1, A18.

640 [“So much of such magnitude”]: Time, vol. 118, no. 6 (August 10, 1981), p. 12.

[Recession]: Dallek, ch. 4 passim.

[Reagan’s rigidity in recession]: Stockman, chs. 11-12; Dallek, ch. 4; Roberts, chs. 7-8.

[“Damn it, Pete”]: quoted in Stockman, p. 351.

[“Real bullets”]: ibid., p. 354.

641 [“Attitudes, ideologies”]: Ralph Nader, “Introduction,” in Ronald Brownstein and Nina Eastoti, Reagan’s Ruling Class (Pantheon, 1983), pp. xv-xxvi, quoted at p. xvi.

[1984 election]: Ellis Sandoz and Cecil V. Crabb, eds., Election 84: Landslide Without a Mandate? (Mentor, 1985); Gerald Pomper et al., The Election of 1984: Reports and Interpretations (Chatham House, 1985); William A. Henry III, Visions of America: How We Saw the 1981 Election (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1985); Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, Wake Us When It’s Over (Macmillan, 1985); Elizabeth Drew, Campaign Journal: The Political Events of 1983-1984 (Macmillan, 1985).

[Tax reform]: Joseph A. Pechman, ed., Tax Reform and the U.S. Economy (Brookings Institution, 1987); Eugene Steuerle, “The New Tax Law,” in Phillip Cagan, ed., Deficits, Taxes, and Economic Adjustments (American Enterprise Institute, 1987), pp. 275-303; New York Times, September 26, 1986, pp. A1, D17; Eric D. Adelstein, “Reagan and the New Possibilities of Presidential Power,” unpublished thesis, Williams College, Williamstown, Mass., May 1987, pp. 89-138.

[“Let us move together”]: “Transcript of President’s State of Union Address,” New York Times, February 7, 1985, p. B8.

642 [Poll on tax simplification and tax system]: Everett Carll Ladd, “Tax Attitudes,” Public Opinion, vol. 8, no. 1 (February-March 1985), pp. 8-10; and ibid., pp. 19-27.

[“Couldn’t do it”]: Lynn Martin, quoted in New York Times, September 26, 1986, p. 19-27.

[Reagan and foreign policy]: Dallek, part 3; Barrett, chs. 13-17; Strobe Talbott, The Russians and Reagan (Vintage, 1984); Betty Glad, “Black and White Thinking: Ronald Reagan’s Approach to Foreign Policy,” paper prepared for presentation at the 50th Anniversary Program of the Institute For Psychoanalysis, n.d.; William D. Anderson and Sterling J. Kernek, “How 'Realistic’ Is Reagan’s Diplomacy?,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 100, no. 3 (Fall 1985), pp. 389-409; Jett McMahan, Reagan and the World: Imperial Polity in the New Cold War (Monthly Review Press, 1985); Kenneth A. Oye et al., eds, Eagle Defiant: United States Foreign Policy in the 1980s (Little, Brown, 1983); some passages have been drawn from my earlier work, The Power to Lead: The Crisis of the American Presidency (Simon and Schuster, 1984), esp. pp. 64-66.

[Reagan on communism and communists]: quoted in Burns, Power to Lead, p. 64.

643 [“Terrible beast”]: June 9, 1982, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982), vol. 2, part 1, pp. 754-59, quoted at p. 757.

[“Extinction of mankind”]: June 8, 1982, in ibid., vol. 2, part 1, pp. 742-48, quoted at p. 743.

[Smith on Reagan]: Smith, “Events Force a Clearer Outline of Foreign Policy,” New York Times, May 20, 1982, p. A28.

[Reagan’s address to evangelists]: March 8, 1983, in Reagan Public Papers, vol. 3, part 1, pp. 359-64, quoted on “evil empire” at p. 364.

[Glad on Reagan]: quoted in Burns, Power to Lead, p. 65.

644 [Reagan-Gorbachev summit, 1988]: Fred Barnes, “In the Evil Empire,” New Republic, vol. 198, no. 25 (June 20, 1988), pp. 8-9.

[Conservative criticisms of Reagan]: Norman Podhoretz, “The Reagan Road to Detente,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 63, no. 3 (1985), pp. 447-64, Will’s quip at p. 459; William F. Buckley, Jr., “The Blandification of Ronald Reagan,” National Review, vol. 36, no. 6 (April 6, 1984), p. 62.

[Iran-Contra]: Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987); President’s Special Review Board, Report (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987); see also Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987); Theodore Draper, “An Autopsy,” New York Review of Books, vol. 34, no. 20 (December 17, 1987), pp. 67-77.

645 [“Restore unity”]: Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy (Macmillan, 1984), p. 312.

The Structure of Disarray

[“The true Reagan Revolution”]: Stockman, p. 9.

[Committee on the Constitutional System diagnosis]: Committee on the Constitutional System (co-chairs Nancy Landon Kassebaum, C. Douglas Dillon, Lloyd N. Cutler), A Bicentennial Analysis of the American Political Structure: Report and Recommendations (January 1987), quoted on “institutional contest of wills” at p. 3; see Kassebaum, “Statement on Campaign Finance,” in Robinson, pp. 30-32; Dillon, “The Challenge of Modern Governance,” in ibid., pp. 24-29; Cutler, “To Form a Government,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 59, no. 1 (1980), pp. 126-43.

646 [Framers’ Constitution and parties]: Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System (University of California Press, 1969), esp. ch. 2; Roy F. Nichols, The Invention of the American Political Parties (Macmillan, 1967); John F. Hoadley, Origins of American Political Parties, 1789-1803 (University Press of Kentucky, 1986).

[Marshall’s nationalist decisions]: see McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheaton 315 (1819); Gibbons v. Ogden, 9 Wheaton 1 (1824).

648 [Proposals for constitutional reform]: “Bicentennial Analysis,” pp. 8-18; James L. Sundquist, Constitutional Reform and Effective Government (Brookings Institution, 1986); Charles M. Hardin, Presidential Power and Accountability: Toward a New Constitution (University of Chicago Press, 1974); Robinson, passim: Stephen Horn, The Cabinet and Congress (Columbia University Press, 1960); Thomas K. Finletter, Can Representative Government Do the Job? (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945).

[“Two fundamental arguments”]: Wilson, “Does the Separation of Powers Still Work?,” The Public Interest, no. 86 (Winter 1987), pp. 36-52, quoted at p. 49. [Scholars on party renewal]: Committee on Political Parties. American Political Science Association, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” American Political Science Review, vol. 44, no. 3 (September 1950), supplement; Austin Ranney, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System: A Commentary,” American Political Science Review, vol. 45, no. 2 (June 1951), pp. 488-99; William J. Crotty, “The Philosophies of Party Reform,” in Pomper, Party Renewal, pp. 31-50.

649 [Critical reactions to scholars’ report]: Evron M. Kirkpatrick, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System: Political Science, Policy Science, or Pseudo-Science?,” American Political Science Review, vol. 65, no. 4 (December 1971), pp. 965-90; T. William Goodman, “How Much Political Party Centralization Do We Want?”Journal of Politics, vol. 13, no. 4 (November 1951), pp. 536-61; Murray S. Stedman, Jr., and Herbert Sonthoff, “Party Responsibility—A Critical Inquiry,” Western Political Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 3 (September 1951), pp. 454-68; Gerald M. Pomper, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System? What, Again?,” Journal of Politics, vol. 33 (1971), pp. 916-40; see also David S. Broder, The Party’s Over: The failure of Politics in America (Harper, 1972), ch. to and pp. 244-47.

649 [Party reform and renewal, 1960s -1970s]: see Nelson W. Polsby, Consequences of Party Reform (Oxford University Press, 1983); Pomper, Party Renewal, passim; Austin Ranney, “The Political Parties; Reform and Decline,” in Anthony King, ed., The New American Political System (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1978), pp. 213-47; Ranney, “Changing the Rules of the Nominating Game,” in James David Barber, ed., Choosing the President (Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 71-93; Xandra Kayden and Eddie Mahe, Jr., The Party Goes On: The Persistence of the Two-Party System in the United States (Basic Books, 1985), ch. 3; see also Party Line, an occasional publication of the Committee on Party Renewal.

[Judicial review]: Jesse H. Choper, Judicial Review and the National Political Process: A Functional Reconsideration of the Role of the Supreme Court (University of Chicago Press, 1980); Raoul Berger, Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment (Harvard University Press, 1977); see also Gary J. Jacobsohn, The Supreme Court and the Decline of Constitutional Aspiration (Rowman & Littlefield, 1986].

652 [Eisenhower on his Warren appointment]: Bernard Schwartz, Super Chief: Earl Warren and His Supreme Court (New York University Press, 1983), p. 173.

[Burger Court]: Vincent Blasi, ed., The Burger’s Court: The Counter-Revolution That Wasn’t (Yale University Press, 1983); Herman Schwartz, ed.. The Burger Years: Rights and Wrongs in the Supreme Court, 1969-1986 (Viking, 1987); Richard Y. Funston, Constitutional Counter-Revolution: (Schenkman Publishing, 1977), ch. 9 and passim.

653 [Court and Denver schools]: Keyes v. School District No, 1, Denver, Colorado, 413 U.S. 189 (1973).

[Detroit integration plan]: Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974); see also Alfred H. Kelly, Winfred A. Harbison, and Herman Belz, The American Constitution: Its Origins and Development, 6th ed. (Norton, 1983), pp. 710-11.

[Pasadena desegregation plan]: Pasadena City Board of Education v. Spangler, 427 U.S. 424 (1976).

[Bakke]: 438 U.S. 265 (1978), quoted at 319, 307, respectively; see also Kelly, Harbison, and Belz, pp. 711-15; Paul Brest, “Race Discrimination,” in Blasi, pp. 124-31; Timothy J. O’Neill, Bakke & The Politics of Equality (Wesleyan University Press, 1985); Laurence H. Tribe, Constitutional Choices (Harvard University Press, 1985), ch. 14. [Women’s discrimination and the Burger Court]: Kelly, Harbison, and Belz, pp. 715-18; Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “The Burger Court’s Grappling with Sex Discrimination,” in Blasi, pp. 132-57.

[Burger Court and the Fourth Amendment]: Kelly, Harbison, and Belz, pp. 645-48, 718-21; Funston, ch. 4; Yale Kamisar, “The Warren Court (Was It Really So Defense-Minded?), the Burger Court (Is It Really So Prosecution-Oriented?), and Police Investigatory Practices,” in Blasi, pp. 62-91; Schwartz, Burger Years, part 4. [“Justices gave state police”]: Kelly, Harbison, and Belz, p. 719.

654 [“Jurisprudence of Original lntention”]: Mecse address before the American Bar Association, July 9, 1985, Washington, D.C. (Department of Justice, 1985); “Excerpts of Brennan’s Speech on Constitution,” New York Times, October 13, 1985, p. 36; “Excerpts from Stevens’s Rebuttal of Meese,” ibid., October 26, 1985, p. 11; see also ibid., October 17, 1985, p. B10.

[Bork]: Ronald Dworkin, “The Bork Nomination,” New York Review of Books, vol. 34, no. 13 (August 13, 1987), pp. 3-10; Dworkin, “From Bork to Kennedy,” ibid., vol. 34, no. 20 (December 17, 1987), pp. 36-42.

Realignment?: Waiting for Lefty

655 [Realignment and realigning eras]: V. O. Key, Jr., “A Theory of Critical Elections,” Journal of Politics, vol. 17, no. 1 (February 1955), pp. 3-18; Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (Norton, 1970); James L. Sundquist, Dynamics of the Party System: Alignment and Realignment of Political Parties in the United States (Brookings Institution, 1973); Bruce A. Campbell and Richard J. Trilling, eds., Realignment in American Politics: Toward a Theory (University of Texas Press, 1980); Kristi Andersen, The Creation of a Democratic Majority, 1928-1936 (University of Chicago Press, 1979); Stanley Kelley, Jr., “Democracy and the New Deal Party System,” Working Paper 10: Democratic Values (Project on the Federal Social Role of National Conference on Social Welfare, 1986); Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848-1876 (University of North Carolina Press, 1984).

655 [A 1980s realignment?]: Nelson W. Polsby, “Did the 1984 Election Signal Major Party Realignment?,” Key Reporter, vol. 50, no. 3 (Spring 1985), pp. 1-4; Walter Dean Burnham, “The 1984 Elections and the Future of American Politics,” in Sandoz and Crabb, pp. 204-60; Kevin P. Phillips, “A G.O.P. Majority?,” New York Times, April 19, 1984, p. A19; Jerome M. Clubb, William U. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, Partisan Realignment: Voters, Parties, and Government in American History (Sage Publications,1980), pp. 273-98; Paul R. Abramson, John H. Aldrich, and David W. Rohde, Change and Continuity in the 1984 Elections (Congressional Quarterly Press, 1986), ch. 11; Martin P. Wallenberg, “The Hollow Realignment: Partisan Change in a Candidate-Centered Era,” Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 1 (Spring 1987), pp. 58-74; Robert S. McElvaine, The End of the Conservative Era: Liberalism After Reagan (uncorrected proofs: Arbor House, 1987), ch. 1; Public Opinion, vol. 8, no. 9 (October-November 1985). pp. 8-17, 21-40.

657 [“In a bind”]: Alexander P. Lamis, “Mississippi,” in Robert P. Steed, Laurence W. Moreland, and Tod A. Baker, eds., The 1984 Presidential Election in the South: Patients of Southern Party Politics (Praeger, 1986), pp. 45-73, Lott quoted at p. 50. [Realignment in the South]: Alexander P. Lamis, The Two-Party South (Oxford University Press, 1984); Harold W. Stanley, “The 1984 Presidential Election in the South: Race and Realignment,” in Steed, Moreland and Baker, 1984 Presidential Election, pp. 303- 35; Robert P. Steed, Laurence W. Moreland and Tod A. Baker, eds., Party Politics in the South (Praeger, 1980), part 2.

[White southern Republican identification]: Everett Carll Ladd, “Alignment and Realignment: Where Are All the Voters Going?,” The Ladd Report #3 (Norton, 1986), p. 8.

658 [Democrats and liberals, late 1980s]: Randall Rothenberg, The Neo-liberals: Creating the New American Politics (Simon and Schuster, 1984); Robert Kultner, The Life of the Party: Democratic Prospects in 1988 and Beyond (Viking, 1987), chs. 1, 5, and passim; Robert Lekachman, Visions and Nightmares: America After Reagan (Macmillan, 1987), ch. 6; McElvaine, esp. ch. 2; William Schneider. “The Democrats in ’88,” Atlantic, vol. 259, no. 4 (April 1987), pp. 37-59; see also Henry Fairlie, “Jackson’s Moment: What Jesse Can Teach the Democrats,” New Republic, vol. 190, no. 8 (February 27, 1984), pp. 11-14; Lucius J. Barker, “Black Americans and the Politics of Inclusion: The Significance of Jesse Jackson’s Presidential Campaigns,” paper prepared for presentation at the American Politics Workshop, Nankai University, China, November 19, 1988.

[“If American voters”]: Arthur M. Schlesinger. Jr., “For Democrats, Me-Too Reaganism Will Spell Disaster,” New York Times, July 6, 1986, sect. 4, p. 13. [“Pragmatic in all things”]: Schneider, p. 38.

[“Democratic Code word”]: ibid., p. 37.

659 [Democratic midterm conferences]: Leon D. Epstein, Political Parties in the American Mold (University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), pp. 213-14; New York Times, June 26, 1985, p. B8.

[Democratic Leadership Council]: see Schneider, pp. 44, 46; Kuttner, pp. 28-29, 203-4.

660 [The young in the 1980s]: McElvaine, ch. 8: Crocker Coulson, “Lost Generation: The Politics of Youth,” New Republic, vol. 195, no. 22 (December 1, 1986), pp. 21-22.

[McElvaine on babyboomers]: McElvaine, p. 210.

[“Springsteen Coalition”]: ibid., pp. 215-16, 228-31, quoted at p. 216.

661 [“Black Monday”]: Newsweek, vol. 110, no. 18 (November 2, 1987), pp. 14-53. [Voter alienation]: Walter Dean Burnham, “The Turnout Problem,” in A. James Reich- ley, ed., Elections American Style (Brookings Institution, 1987), pp. 97-133; Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde, ch. 4 passim; Martin P. Wattenberg, The Decline of American Political Parties, 1952-1980 (Harvard University Press, 1984); Curtis B. Cans, “The Empty Ballot Box: Reflections on Nonvoters in America,” Public Opinion, vol. 1, no. 4 (September-October 1978), pp. 54-57; Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Why Americans Don’t Vote (Pantheon, 1988), esp. chs. 4, 7, Appendix A.

661 [1984 voting percentage]: Thomas E. Cronin, “The Presidential Election of 1984,” in Sandoz and Crabb, pp. 30-31.

661-2 [Movements, nonvoters, and their transforming potential]: Richard A. Cloward and Frances Fox Piven. “Toward a Class-Based Realignment of American Politics: A Movement Strategy,” Social Policy, vol. 13, no. 3 (Winter 1983), pp. 3-14; press report; Human Service Employees Registration & Voter Education Campaign, New York, N.Y., June 15, 1987.

A Rebirth of Leadership?

662 [Cuomo’s decision]: New York Times, February 20, 1987, pp. 1, B5; ibid., February 21, 1981, pp. 1, 6-7.

663 [“Extensive program of political education”]: Bibby, p. 110.

[Transactional and transforming leadership]: see James MacGregor Burns, Leadership (Harper, 1978).

[Demands for education reform]: National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon and Schuster, 1987); William J. Johnston, ed., Education on Trial: Strategies for the Future (ICS Press, 1985); Beatrice Gross and Ronald Gross, eds., The Great School Debate: Which Way for American Education? (Touchstone, 1985); and sources cited in ch. 14, supra, in section titled “Habits of Individualism.”

664 [Phi Beta Kappa and Rhodes scholar survey]: Bowen and Schuster, “The Changing Career Interests of the Nation’s Intellectual Elite,” The Key Reporter, vol. 51, no. 1 (Autumn 1985), pp. 1-4; see also Bowen and Schuster, American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled (Oxford University Press, 1986); Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (Basic Books, 1987).

[“Less and less attractive”]: Bowen and Schuster, “Changing Career Interests,” p. 3. [“Working conditions for faculty”]: ibid., p. 4.

665 [“Heap or jumble”]: Bloom, p. 371.

[“Straight and short road”]: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Knopf, 1945), vol. 2, pp. 41, 42.

[“What lies between”]: ibid., vol. 2, p. 77.

[“Men are born”]: quoted in James MacGregor Burns, Uncommon Sense (Harper, 1972), p. 98. In this section I have borrowed concepts and phraseology from ibid., ch. 6.

[“Battle cry of freedom”]: Irwin Silber, ed., Songs of the Civil War (Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 17-20, 26.

666 [“Basic choices available”]: Frankel, “The Relation of Theory to Practice: Some Standard Views,” in Herman D. Stein, ed., Social Theory and Social Invention (Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968), pp. 3-21, quoted at p. 20.

[Lincoln on liberty]: quoted in The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Samuel I. Rosenman, comp. (Random House, 1938-50), vol. 9, p. 484. [“Second Bill of Rights”]: Message to the Congress on the State of the Union, January 11, 1944, in ibid., vol. 13, pp. 32-44, quoted at p. 41.

667 [Judiciary and civil liberties]: M. Glenn Abernathy, Civil Liberties Under the Constitution, 2nd ed. (Dodd, Mead, 1972); Zechariah Chaffee. Jr., Free Speech in the United States (Harvard University Press, 1941); Schwartz, Burger Years, part 2; Kelly, Harbison, and Belz, pp. 722-27.

[Court and Louisiana creationism statute]: Edwards, Governor of Louisiana v. Auillard, 482 U.S. (1987).

668 [“Pastoral Letter”]: excerpts in New York Times, November 12, 1984, p. B10; see also Victor Ferkiss, “The Bishops’ Letter and the Future,” in R. Bruce Douglass, ed., The Deeper Meaning of Economic Life (Georgetown University Press, 1986), pp. 139-55; John Langan, The American Context of the U.S. Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on the Economy,” in ibid., pp. 1-19.

669 [American distribution of wealth]: Jim Hightower, “Where Greed, Unofficially Blessed by Reagan, Has Led,” New York Times, June 21, 1987, sect. 4, p. 25; see also Frank Levy, Dollars and Dreams: The Changing American Income Distribution (Russell Sage Foundation/Basic Books, 1987).

670 [Early fall 1988 poll on sense of economic well-being]: Everett C. Ladd, The Ladd 1988 Election Update, vol. 9 (October 1988), p. 5.

[August 1988 poll on Reagan Administration’s conservatism]: ibid.

[Voter turnout, 1988 election]: New York Times, November 10, 1988, p. B7 (table).

671 [Maccoby on James]: “A Symposium: Some Issues of Technology,” Daedalus, vol. 19, no. 1 (Winter 1980), pp. 3-24, quoted at p. 21.

[“Politics in the United States”]: Brinkley, “What Hart’s Fall Says About America,” New York Times, May 21, 1987, p. A31.

[“Makes the role of leadership”]: “Some Issues of Technology,” p. 21.

[Pendulum theory of politics]: McElvaine, pp. 4-10 and passim; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Cycles of American History (Houghton Mifflin, 1986), esp. ch. 2.

672 [“The line it is drawn”]: “The times they are a-changin’,” recorded by Bob Dylan, words and music by Bob Dylan, copyright 1963, Columbia Records.

Memories of the Future: A Personal Epilogue

673 [“Memories of the Future”]: the name of a pulquería I saw as a boy on the outskirts of Mexico City.

[Williamstown and the Berkshires]: Robert R. R. Brooks, ed., Williamstown: The First Two Hundred Years, 1753-1953, and Twenty Years Later, 1953-1973, 2nd ed. (Williamstown Historical Commission, 1974); Arthur Latham Perry, Origins in Williamstown, 3rd ed. (privately printed, 1904); Bliss Perry, Colonel Benjamin Simonds, 1726-1807 (privately printed, 1944); Theodore M. Hammett, “The Revolutionary Ideology in Its Social Context: Berkshire County, Massachusetts, 1725-1785 (doctoral dissertation: Brandeis University, 1976).

[Thoreau in the Berkshires]: Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Carl F. Hovde et al., eds. (Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 180-90, quoted at pp. 184, 188.

[“A sort of sea-feeling”]: letter to Evert Duyckinck, December 13, 1850, in Jay Leyda, ed., The Melville Log (Harcourt, 1951), p. 401.

[Roosevelt in Williamstown]: Brooks, pp. 352-54, party chieftain quoted at p. 353.

[“To evolve a new order”]: New York Times, June 10, 1934, sect. 4, pp. 1, 6, quoted at p. 6.

[“Next frontier”]: Stevenson, “Liberalism,” address at Los Angeles, May 31, 1956, in Stevenson, The New America, Seymour E. Harris et al., eds. (Harper, 1957), pp. 256-61, quoted at p. 260.

[My views of JFK, 1960]: James MacGregor Burns, John Kennedy: A Political Profile (Harcourt, 1960).

[Jacqueline Kennedy on her husband]: letter of Jacqueline Kennedy (in Hyannisport) to the author, n.d. [late 1959]. 681 [“ Things fall apart”]: Yeats, “The Second Coming,” in The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (Macmillan, 1959), pp. 184-85.

Acknowledgments

IN THIS FINAL VOLUME of my trilogy in American political and intellectual history I have continued to stress the role of leadership—but of the second and third cadres of leadership, and not merely of a few notables at the top. This emphasis has centrally influenced my treatment of American presidents. I have given much attention to FDR and his four successors— Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy in his third year in office, and Lyndon Johnson during his first two years in the White House—because these men in their diverse ways markedly influenced the course of history. I have played down the influence of LBJ in his last three years and of his four successors—Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan during most of his two terms—because they appear to me as far more the victims than the makers of events.

Victims of events—but those events were not impersonal happenings like an ice age but the work of other men and women. The last three decades have brought extraordinary leadership from second-cadre figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, as well as from third-cadre rank-and-file activists who influenced them. I regret that even three substantial volumes cannot do justice to all the leaders of causes and movements who variously stimulate, sustain, challenge, and obstruct presidents. And if, on the other hand, second-cadre officials in the White House fail their president, as happened most direly in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, presidents are brought down by events for which they must take responsibility.

This volume, even more than the first two, is the product of a collective effort. Two collaborators had indispensable roles. Stewart Burns, deeply immersed in the peace and environmental struggles of recent decades, served as chief co-author with me of Part III (chapters 8-10), critiqued major portions of the manuscript, and directly influenced the coverage of ideas and events elsewhere in the work. Milton Djuric shared much of the burden of research, cast a critical eye on successive drafts of the manuscript, and made important contributions in the realms of both ideas and facts, demonstrating throughout creativity and versatility, whether in conceptualizing, in drafting, in critiquing, or in editing.

Historians Alan Brinkley and David Burner reviewed the entire manuscript and made numerous suggestions for its improvement, as did two longtime friends and colleagues at Williams, historians Russell H. Bostert and Robert C. L. Scott. Physicist David A. Park, astronomer-physicist Jay M. Pasachoff, and musician and music critic Irwin Shainman counseled me expertly in their respective spheres of scholarship. I thank these critics for the time and thought they so generously gave to the manuscript. Others at Williams who gave invaluable help were Kurt Tauber and Rosemarie Tong, and two students, Nicholas King and David F. Wagner. My friends in the Faculty Secretarial Office were as cheerfully efficient as ever.

Deborah Burns, author, editor, and illustrator, provided the admirable endpapers for this volume as she did for the first two. My longtime friend and editor Ashbel Green supplied the solid and consistent counsel necessary for such a long-term writing project, while Melvin Rosenthal, also at Knopf, provided his special kind of meticulous editing. Jeffrey Trout thoroughly critiqued the manuscript on the basis of both his historical and his legal knowledge. Wendy Severinghaus reviewed the early chapters. Maurice Greenbaum continued to contribute in significant ways. My fellow author Joan Simpson Burns offered useful advice and criticism. Gisela Knight compiled the painstakingly comprehensive index.

I wish to thank the archivists and librarians at institutions where I conducted research: Baker Library of the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard; the Columbia University Oral History Program; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library; Jimmy Carter Library; John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library; House of Lords Records Office, London; Language Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley; Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division; Louisiana State University Library; Lyndon Baines Johnson Library; the Martin Luther King, Jr., Library and Archives; the New York Historical Society; the New York Public Library; Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles; the Stanford University libraries; University of Kentucky Library; University of Oklahoma Western History Collections; and the Williams College Library, whose staff was invariably helpful and resourceful.

I conducted research and writing also at Bellagio under the Rockefeller Foundation; the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace; and the University of California at Los Angeles. I should state here, as I have done in a number of places in this work, that I have borrowed from earlier writings of mine in an effort to make some of my imperishable prose still more imperishable.

Any errors or deficiencies are solely my responsibility, and I would appreciate being informed of them at Williams College, Williamstown, MA 01267. I wish to thank those who sent in corrections for the second volume, The Workshop of Democracy. Those corrections are: (p. 189) the number of Populist newspapers was nearer several hundred than 100; (p. 218) General George Custer chased Crazy Horse’s warriors for about six weeks, not six months; (p. 231) Tom Watson’s position at the 1896 Populist convention should be identified as anti-fusionist; (p. 234) Dingell should be Dingley; (ch. 5) the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance should be mentioned as an important black organization that was parallel in its work and activities to the National Farmers’ Alliance, which in the South refused to admit black farmers to membership.

J.M.B.

INDEX

A  |  B  |  C  |  D  |  E

F  |  G  |  H  |  I  |  J

K  |  L  |  M  |  N  |  O

P  |  Q  |  R  |  S  |  T

U  |  V  |  W  |  Y  |  Z

Aaron, Daniel, 145

Abbott, Grace, 103

Abernathy, Ralph, 349, 351, 356, 362-3, 367, 369, 382

abolitionism, 646, 655

abortion issue, 439, 440, 447-9, 452, 458, 628, 654

Abrams, Gen. Creighton, 475

Abstract Expressionism, 621, 622

Abzug, Bella, 439, 452, 457-8

Acconci, Vito, 623

Acheson, Dean, 28, 37, 80, 229, 276, 285, 334-412, 593

as Secretary of State, 240, 243-4, 252, 253, 289, 342, 402, 468

Adam, Margie, 451

Adams, John, 626, 634

Addams, Jane, 10, 121

affirmative action, 651

Afghanistan, 529, 531, 626, 644

AFL-CIO, 371, 457

Africa, 304, 338, 644

poverty in, 303

see also North Africa

Agent Orange, 406

Agnew, Spiro T., 460, 474, 488, 505, 558

Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War (1973), 485-6

Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), 25, 30, 34, 42, 49, 64-6, 77, 122

Supreme Court invalidation of, 72, 82, 91

Aiken, Conrad, 140

Aiken, George, 484

aircraft industry, 183, 188, 189, 268

air pollution, 574

control, legislation, 389, 466

Alabama:

black voter registration in, 382-4

condition of blacks in, 1950s, 313-14, 322

see also Birmingham

Albert, Carl, 389

Aldrich, Winthrop, 71

Aldridge, John W., 616

Aldrin, Edwin, 581-2

Alexander, Charles, 138

alienation, in age of technology, 275

1960s youth, 394, 396

Alinsky, Saul, 566, 570

Allen, Pamela, 443

Allende, Salvador, 524

Alliance for Progress, 328, 331, 336

Allies, World War II, 182, 199-202, 210-11, 223-4

conferences, 195-9, 205-9, 224-226

Council of foreign Ministers, 226, 229

munitions edge over Axis, 183, 199, 200

second front discussions, 177-8, 180-1, 196-201, 207, 221-2

suspicions and differences, 197, 206-8, 210-11, 218, 220-2

Altgeld, John Peter, 249

Amalgamated Clothing Workers, 46, 55

Ambrose, Stephen, 255, 258, 262

“America Firsters,” 154

American Civil Liberties Union, 50, 310, 667

American Conservative Union, 637

American Dilemma, An (Myrdal), 359

American Enterprise Institute, 624-5, 658

American Farm Bureau Federation, 49, 65

American Federation of Labor (AFL), 33, 45-6, 53, 54-6, 79, 97, 107-8, 157, 205, 603 see also AFL-CIO

American Guide Series, FWP, 139-40

American Independent party (1968), 415-16

American Labor party, 111

American League Against War and Fascism, 53

American Legion, 41

American Liberty League, 42-3, 45, 50, 63, 77, 81, 96

American Medical Association, 389

American Mercury, The (magazine), 252

American Political Science Association, 457

American Progress (monthly), 62

Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), 236, 293, 310, 324, 326, 408, 607

American Telephone & Telegraph, 268, 439

American Writers’ Congress, 53

American Youth Congress, 53

Anderson, Marian, 113

anomie, 275, 285, 600

Anthony, Susan K., 452

antiballistic missiles, 478, 479

anticommunism, 230-2, 242-6, 282-3

in Congress, 230, 231-2, 233, 258-9

of Dulles under Eisenhower, 254

McCarthy, 244-6, 251-3, 258

of Nixon, 230, 232, 244, 418, 468, 480

of Reagan, 607, 642-4

in Truman Administration, 228-34, 238, 239, 243, 245

as unifier of conservative factions, 629

anti-nuclear movement, 391-2, 544, 546

churches involved in, 537-8

anti-Semitism, 45, 85, 218-19, 353

in Congress, 169, 219

anti-trust policies, 32, 214, 215, 563

anti-Vietnam War movement, 401, 407-10, 412-13, 418, 420-6, 431, 460-1, 536-7, 623

Apollo, Project, 581-2, 584-5

Appalachia, poverty in, 316

appeasement, 497

charged by anti-arms-control hawks, 333

LBJ’s fear in case of Vietnam, 401-2

Munich 1938, 158, 159

Appel, John, 308

Aptheker, Bellina, 395-6

Arab nations, 486-7, 525, 527, 558

oil, 255, 641, 644; embargo (1973), 574

Arendt, Hannah, 593

Argentina, 328, 329

arms:

exports, 155-6; to Middle East, 487; prewar embargo on, 158-9, 160

technology, 268

World War II production, 182-4

see also nuclear weapons

arms control, 333, 476-9, 488, 586

ABM Treaty (1972), 479

Eisenhower and, 256-7

Kennedy Test Ban Treaty (1963), 390, 392

SALT: I, 477-9; II, 523, 528-9, 645

arms race, 264, 333, 335, 396, 478, 527, 538, 552, 586-7

US superiority, 259, 264, 265, 333-4, 335

Armstrong, Neil, 581-2

Arnold, Gen. Henry “Hap,” 196

Aron, Raymond, 277

Arthur, Chester A., 625

art, artists, 138-9, 296, 615, 620-4, 664-5

New Deal programs for, 132-5, 138

New York School of, 621, 664

and red-baiting, 132, 134, 138, 231

Artists’ and Writers’ Union, 134

Ashmore, Harry S., 353, 355

Asia, 303, 304, 337-8

colonialism in, 338-9, 341-2

communism in, 342, 343

see also specific regions and countries

Asquith, Herbert, 90

astronomy, astrophysics, 541-2, 587

Atkinson, Brooks, 137

Atkinson. Ti-Grace, 444

Atlantic, Battle of the, 169-70, 171-2, 173, 175, 180, 197, 217, 403

Atlantic Charter, 171, 192, 338

atom bomb, 223, 224-6, 227, 465, 545, 548-9

Soviets in possession of, 239-40

atomic energy, 229, 256, 273, 548, 549, 552

Atomic Energy Commission, 391, 549

“Atoms for Peace,” 256

Attica prison (New York), 520

Attlee, Clement, 224

Auden, W. H., 159

Australia, 176, 265

Austria, German annexation of, 158

auto industry, 98, 572-8

foreign competition, 578,

production, 101, 182-3; postwar, 573

strikes, 187; 1930s, 49, 97-9; 1970, 573

automation, 272-4, 279, 285, 396, 543, 550

in printing, 281-2

Axis, Berlin-Rome-Tokyo, 157, 159, 166, 173, 177, 223-4

Allied munitions edge over, 183, 199, 200

Aycock, Alice, 623

baby-boomers, 279, 517, 660

Bachrach, Elinor, 577

Baez, Joan, 371, 396, 407, 427, 428

Bailey, Josiah W., 94

Bailyn, Bernard, 125

Baker, Ella, 357-8, 375, 379, 384

Baker, George Pierce, 136

Baker, Howard, 504

Baker, Newton D., 11

Bakke, Allan, 653

Baldwin, James, 369, 615, 620

Baldwin, Roger, 54

Balkans, 206, 211

Soviet domination of, 226, 229, 232

Ball, George, 334, 343, 410, 499

bank holiday of 1933, 24

Banking Act of 1935, 75

bankruptcies, 1980s, 640

banks and banking:

failures: Depression, 21; 1980s, 640

FDR policies, 75, 127, 213

regulation, 16, 40, 41

Baptist churches, 355, 594

Baran, Paul, 564

Barber, James David, 466

Barber, Philip, 136

Barkley, Alben, 76, 110-11, 164, 192, 203, 319

Barnett, Ross, 365

Baruch, Bernard, 10, 13, 45

bases, US, 239, 264-5

Russia encircled by, 265, 286, 334, 337

Batista, Fulgencio, 331

battered women and children, 449, 534

Bay of Pigs fiasco, 331-7, 343, 524

Beard, Charles A., 169

Beard, Mary, 29

Beatles, 429-30, 431, 432

Beat subculture, 394, 426-32

Begin, Menachem, 525-6

Belafonte, Harry, 369

Belfrage, Sally, 381

Belgium, 162, 295

Bell, Daniel, 274, 277, 278

Bellah, Robert, 595, 598-9

Bell Laboratories, 550

Bellow, Saul, 297, 300, 408, 615, 619-20

Benes, Eduard, 158

Ben-Gurion, David, 546

Bennett, Harry, 573

Benny, Jack, 193-4

Benson, Elmer, 111, 114

Bentham, Jeremy, 600

Benton, Thomas Hart, 133

Benton, William, 287

Bentsen, Lloyd, 658, 659

Berkeley student rebellion, 394-6, 432

Berkshire County, Mass., 673-6, 682-3

Berle, Adolf, 13, 17, 28, 37, 64, 74, 101, 129, 213, 564

Berlin, Irving, 194

Berlin, Isaiah, 213, 219

Berlin crises, 238, 239, 240, 261, 333

Berman, Larry, 511

Bernstein, Barton, 127, 224

Bernstein, Carl, 501

Bernstein, Irving, 50, 55

Berrigan, Daniel and Philip, 421, 537

Berry, George L., 55

Bethlehem Steel, 100

Bethune, Mary McLeod, 113, 434

Bevel, James, 356, 380, 383

Bibby, John F., 663

Biddle, Francis, 190

Biddle, George, 133

Bigelow, Albert, 361

Bill of Rights, 131, 277, 281, 296, 309, 375, 539, 540, 634-640, 667, 679, 680

English, 539

Bird, Larry, 611

Birmingham, Ala., 361-2, 366-9, 372, 375

Black, Hugo, 321, 365, 667

black culture, 399-400

Blackmun, Harry A., 506, 653

Black Muslims, 386, 398, 401

black nationalism, 398-9, 401

Black Panthers, 386, 399, 401

Black Power movement, 387-8, 398-401

blacks, 120, 122, 347, 460-1, 539, 610, 667 see also civil rights movement; racial

discrimination; segregation education and income, 571

FDR and, 113, 117, 321, 359, 371

loss of unity, 388, 400-1

middle class, 314, 316

migration of, 315, 385

and New Deal, 39, 81, 358-9

one-parent families and welfare, 631

and poverty, 313-16, 385, 570-1

radical leaders, 385-8

rural South, 313-16

stereotypical attitudes toward, 353

urban North, 385-6, 388, 397-401

versus the federal government, under Kennedy, 358-72, 374-5

violence against, 352, 357, 361-2, 365, 368-9, 372, 380, 382-4, 386

violent action by, 383, 388, 399, 413; race riots, 398, 400

voting rights for, 321-3, 357, 366, 371, 378-84; registration drives, 356, 378-81, 382-4

voting Democratic, 87, 237, 382, 657, 660

as wartime labor, 188-9, 358

women, 189, 315, 434, 439-40, 451-4, 570

black separatism, 398-9

Blair, Thomas L., 399

Blinder, Alan S., 562

Blitzstein, Marc, 138-9

Bloodworth, Dennis, 470

Bloom, Allan, 665

Blum, John, 195

Blumenthal, Sidney, 629

“boat people,” 489, 494

Bohlen, Charles, 252-3

Boland Amendment, 644

Bolivar, Simon, 331

Boiling, Richard, 389

book publishing, 612, 615-17, 620

Boone, Buford, 353

Boorstin, Daniel, 278

Borah, William, 154, 158, 160

Bork, Robert IL, 505, 654, 669

Born, Max, 547

Bosch, Juan, 404

Boston Irish, 306-9, 314

Bowen, Howard R., 597, 664

Bowles, Chester, 286, 287, 340, 343, 344

Bowles, Samuel, 564

Boyer, Ernest, 597

Bozell, L. Brent, 627

Brademas, John, 559

Bradley, Bill, 641

brain trusters, 13-14, 28

Brandeis, Louis D., 13, 45, 71, 73, 89, 91, 95, 112, 122, 667

decentralization advocate, 28, 64, 74, 77, 128

Brauer, Carl, 364

Braun, Ernest, 543

Brazil, 329, 330

Brecht, Bertold, 605

Breech, Ernest R., 573

Breines, Wini, 393

Brennan, William L., 652

Breslin, Jimmy, 409

Brett, George, 610

Breytenbach, Breyten, 620

Brezhnev, Leonid, 476-7, 485-8, 523, 529

Bricker, John, 111, 191, 203, 204

Bridges, Harry, 47, 48

Brinkley, Alan, 60, 671

“brinkmanship” in foreign policy, 286, 288

Broder, David, 414, 416, 612

Brokaw, Tom, 613

Brookhaven National Laboratory, 542

Brooks, Robert R. R., 48

Broun, Heywood, 15

Browder, Earl, 53, 137, 188, 204

Brown, Harold, 524

Brownmiller, Susan, 449

Brown v. Board of Education, 321-2, 347, 354-5, 596, 651

Brubeck, Dave, 593

Bryan, William Jennings, 600, 655

Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 522, 523, 527-9

Buckley, William F., Jr., 246, 626-7, 628

Budenz, Louis, 243

Bundy, McGeorge, 343, 403, 412

Burger, Warren E., 505-6, 652-4

Burke, Edmund, 626

Burma, 176, 201, 341, 495

Burns, Arthur F., 467, 556-7

Burns, James MacGregor, 513

Bush, George, 638, 639, 670

Bush, Vannevar, 549

business, 86, 101-2, 462, 600, 646

mergers and acquisitions, 267

1930s: Depression effects, 18, 19; NRA provisions, 32-3, 41; opposition to New Deal, 41-5, 63, 71-3, 102-3

postwar, 267, 575-8; federal bailouts, 577-8; white-collar crime in, 514-15

small: New Deal and, 71, 103; wartime, 186

US enterprise abroad, 295, 329, 330-1

wartime gains of, 185-6

Business Advisory Council, 103

Business Week (magazine), 185

bus segregation, 315, 348-52, 361

Butler, Hugh, 244

Butler, M. Caldwell, 507

Butler, Samuel, 274

Byrd, Harry F., 30, 119, 126

Byrd, Robert C., 378

Byrnes, James F., 24, 203, 226, 229-30, 235, 244

cable television, 607, 610, 611, 612, 613

Cadmus, Paul, 134

Cahill, Holger, 134-5

Cairo conferences (1943), 195, 198

Caldwell, Erskine, 49, 298

California, Southern, 601-4, 608-9

farm labor, 50

Calvinism, 276, 533, 600

Cambodia, 342, 418, 424-5, 527

Camp, Lawrence, 110

campaigns, political, see elections and campaigns

Camp David accord, 526

campus movement, 394-7, 413-14, 421-3, 425, 460, 532, 548

Camus, Albert, 298, 394

Cannon, Lou, 607

Cantwell, Robert, 140

capitalism, capitalists, 16, 52, 58, 101, 121, 200-1, 228, 292, 444, 517, 543, 563-5, 618, 608

ex-colonialist revolts against, 305

Khrushchev quoted on, 302

Marxist view not valid for US, 48

and New Deal, 41, 44, 45, 50-1, 72, 122-3, 131

capital punishment, 519

Cardozo, Benjamin N., 71, 89, 112

Carey, James B., 273, 287

Caribbean, 264, 328

see also Cuba; Dominican Republic

Carmichael, Stokely, 386-8, 399, 409, 442

Carnegie, Andrew, 99, 100, 543, 625

Caro, Robert, 552

car searches, 653-4

Carson, Rachel, 389

Carter, Hodding, 353

Carter, Jimmy, 521, 522, 629

and civil rights, 522, 524

as President, 521, 522-31; economic policy, 558-60, 562, 639, 641;

evaluation, 529-31; foreign policy, 522-9, 531, 644; human rights policy, 522-4, 526, 528, 539; “malaise” speech, 529-30, 591-3, 601, 638; self-evaluation, 530

presidential candidacies: 1976, 521, 558, 613, 625; 1980, 530, 559, 638

Carter, Rosalyn, 522

Casablanca Conference (1943), 195-7, 206

“cash and carry” exports, 160, 161

Castro, Fidel, 331-2, 336

Cater, Douglass, 283

Cather, Willa, 605

Catonsville Nine, the, 421

CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System), 59, 285, 530

censorship, 449, 534-5, 619, 635, 654

Central America, 626

US interventionism in, 328, 330-2, 490, 524, 527, 633, 644 see also Latin America

centralization vs. decentralization debate, 28-9, 66, 74, 77, 103-4, 122, 128, 560

Century Group, 164

Century of the Common Man, The (Wallace), 237, 277

Challenger space shuttle tragedy, 583-4

Chamberlain, Neville, 158, 161, 402

Chambers, Whittaker, 231-2

Chandler, A. B. “Happy,” 110-11

Chappaquiddick, 499, 511

checks and balances, see Constitution, US

chemistry, 268, 541, 553

Chevalier, Maurice, 429

Chiang Kai-shek, 171, 195, 198, 201, 208, 240, 254, 255, 337, 338, 341, 470, 473

Chiang Kai-shek, Madame 198, 240

Chicago, 19, 100, 400

Chicago Tribune. 31, 169, 202, 230, 283

child care services, 112, 440, 668

child labor, 32, 33, 667

children’s rights, 668

Chile, 330, 524

China, 218, 240, 469-70

Communist, 240, 254; bombardment of Quemoy and Matsu, 255; and India, 340, 472; in Korean War, 241-3, 418; Nixon/Kissinger policy, 468-9, 470-5, 488; nuclear weapons of, 485; Soviet estrangement, 260, 265, 469, 472, 474-6, 485-6, 488, 526-9; in triangular policy, 469, 474-6, 488, 496, 526-9; and Vietnam, 405, 472, 476, 529

Japanese aggression, 158, 170-1, 173, 470

“loss” of, 241, 243, 247, 342, 402, 404, 468

Nationalist, 240, 243, 254, 472, 578; US break with, 474, 529, 644; Western Allies and, 197, 198, 201, 470

Open Door policy, 170, 470

Stimson Doctrine, 170, 470

views in the US of, 469-70

views of the US in, 337-8, 470

“China card,” 528

China Lobby, 243, 468, 475

Chisholm, Shirley, 439, 457-8, 499

Chou En-lai, 405, 472-5

Christian, Meg, 451

Christian Voices, 627-8

Chrysler Corporation, 99, 577-8

churches, 594-6

as civil rights battle base, 355-6

degendering of, 457-8

membership statistics, 594-5

peace stance of, 536-8

Churchill, Sir Winston, 7, 122, 158, 161, 232, 255, 592

FDR and, 38, 161, 171, 177, 195, 217, 338-9, 341-2

“iron curtain” speech of, 229

prime minister, wartime, 162, 167-9, 171, 172-3, 175, 177-8, 182, 195-9, 211, 222, 224, 495; at Casablanca, 195, 196; and India, 178, 208, 338-9; at Teheran, 195, 198-9; at Yalta, 159, 205-8

and United Nations, 178, 208

visits to US, 177-8, 195, 228-9

Church of Christ, 594

CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 261-2, 277, 331-2, 343, 499, 501, 524

civil defense, 193, 333, 391

civil disobedience:

civil rights struggle, 352, 366, 367-8

peace movement, 391, 409-10, 421

Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 25, 29, 34, 104, 191, 214

civil liberty, 131, 393

see also liberty

civil rights, 466, 538-9, 629, 657

Congress and, 321-3, 360, 365, 370-1, 375-8, 383

Eisenhower and, 322-3, 352, 359

as election issue: 1948 Democratic plank, 237; in 1952, 250; 1960 Democratic plank, 325, 359; in 1968, 415, 416

Johnson and, 322-3, 324, 375, 377-8, 381-2, 383-4

Kennedy and, 323-4, 326, 359-60, 362, 365-6, 367-72, 374-5, 376

Supreme Court decisions, 321-2, 347, 352, 365, 596, 651, 652, 653

Truman’s stand for, 236, 249, 321, 359

Civil Rights Act of 1957, 322, 376

Civil Rights Act of 1960, 323-4

Civil Rights Act of 1964, 375-8, 437, 651

civil rights movement, 401, 460-1

Big Six, 371

Black Power, 387-8, 398-401

leadership split, 386-8, 398-9

nonviolence, 352, 357, 363, 364, 366-8, 383, 400; abandoned, 386, 388, 398, 400

in North, 384, 385-6, 388, 397-401

and peace movement, 401, 408, 418

sexism in, 441-3

in South, 321-3, 347-72, 375-84, 386-8; Freedom Summer, 380, 384, 395; group-centered vs. charismatic leadership debate, 356-8, 364, 384, 388; vs. the Kennedy Administration, 359-72, 374-5; murders, 352, 372, 380, 382-3, 384; strategy debate on desegregation vs. pursuit of political clout, 321-2, 359, 363-4, 366, 371, 378-8.

Civil War, 175, 313, 646, 665

Civil Works Administration (CWA), 34

Clark, Bennett Champ, 83, 94, 155

Clark, Kenneth B., 369, 385, 571, 631

class relationships, 189, 443-5, 564, 600-1

conflict engendered by New Deal, 41-54

Clean Air Acts:

of 1963 and 1965, 389

of 1970, 466

Cleveland, Grover, 655, 657

Clifford, Clark, 411-12

Coburn, Charles, 136

Cocker, Joe, 427

Coffin, William Sloane, 513

Cohen, Ben, 45, 74

Cohen, Jacob, 127

Cohn, Nik, 428

Cohn, Roy, 251

Colby, Bainbridge, 122

cold war, 225-9, 232-4, 239, 253-4, 286, 288, 332-5, 340, 526-9, 536, 546

Berlin crises, 238, 239, 240, 261, 333

intellectual critics of US policies of, 288-94

newspaper reporting on, 282-3, 286

seeds of, 218, 220-2

Soviet and US mutual perceptions and misperceptions, 220-2, 227-8, 229, 233-4, 241-2, 254, 262, 301-2, 526-8

see also Afghanistan; arms race; Cuban missile crisis; détente; Korean War

Cole, Wayne S., 154

collective bargaining right, 33, 46-8, 70, 75, 90

colleges, 597-8, 622, 663

Collier’s magazine, 284

Collins, Judy, 407

Collins, Michael, 581

colonialism, 208, 218, 304-5, 338-9, 341-2, 470

Colson, Charles, 426, 499, 513

Columbia University, student unrest, 413-14

Cominform (Communist Information Bureau), 233

Comintern (Communist International), 52, 123

Commentary (journal), 627

Commission on the Status of Women, 433, 434, 438

Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), 79, 97, 99-100, 107

see also Congress of Industrial Organizations

Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA), 391-2, 407

Committee on Administrative Management, 115

Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, 370

Committee on the Constitutional System, 645

Committee to Reelect the President (CRP, CREEP), 500-1, 503

communism, communists, 220-1, 532, 538, 618

American, 42, 50, 51, 52-4, 79, 84-5, 123, 142, 165, 408, 603

American fears of, 45, 47, 48-9, 112, 220, 230-2, 243-6, 252, 254, 258-9, 266, 353, 401-4, 546; blacklisting, 231; see also anticommunism

American intellectuals and, 277

doctrinal disputes within, 336

FDR charged with, 43, 44-5, 81-2, 85, 112, 204-5

global: Soviet promotion of, 221, 227-8, 242; Soviet-Chinese split, 265, 469, 474, 476, 485-6, 488, 526-9

imputed to artists, actors, writers, 132, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141-2, 231, 607

in North Korea, 240-1

in Poland, 206-7, 214, 224, 644

State Department charged with, 231-2, 243-5, 252

Third World, 305, 404; Cuba, 336;

Indochina, 342, 343, 401-4, 481-2

Communist Control Act, 258-9

Communist party, US, 52-3, 123, 243, 258-9

community action programs, 569, 570-1

computer-related crime, 515

computers, 543, 550-1

Conant, James B., 270, 549

conformity, 280, 285

in newspaper world, 282

Congress, US, 116, 126, 647

and civil rights measures, 321-3, 360, 365, 370-1, 375-8, 383

cross-party coalitions in, 87, 109, 119, 132, 191, 466, 638, 640, 645

and ERA, 439, 458

FDR and, after 1936, 93-6, 104-7, 108-11, 112-13, 116, 126, 132, 135, 191-2; in foreign affairs, 155-6, 158-9, 162, 210, 491, 494-5

and Great Society legislation, 389, 566

isolationism in, 154, 155-6, 158-9

and Marshall Plan, 233

and New Deal: arts programs killed, 132, 135, 138; First Hundred Days, 23, 24-7, 30; obstructionism and opposition, 104-5, 106, 108, 112-13, 135, 191, 215, 376; Second Hundred Days, 75-6

Reagan and, 633, 639-40, 642

seniority system, 116, 126, 321

special-interest pressures on, 107, 192, 642, 647-8

Tonkin Gulf Resolution of, 403-4

and World War II, 160, 167, 169-70

see also elections and campaigns: congressional; House of Representatives; Senate

Congress for Cultural Freedom, 277, 296

“congressional” parties, Democratic and Republican, 119, 126, 236

and civil rights legislation, 321-2, 376-8

Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 107-8, 186-7, 603

see also AFL-CIO; Committee for Industrial Organization

Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 189, 356, 361, 369, 371, 387-8, 394, 399

Congress to Unite Women, 450

Conkin, Paul, 127

Connally, John, 657

Connally, Thomas, 94

Connor, Eugene “Bull,” 367-9

consciousness-raising, 445, 454-6

conservation, 25, 26, 40, 76, 213, 214

conservatism, conservatives, 123, 540, 624-9, 652, 655, 667

agenda of, 627-9

anti-abortionism of, 448, 628

anticommunism of, 629

coalitions across party lines, 87, 109, 132, 191, 466, 638, 640

definition of freedom by, 42, 123, 667, 672

Democrats, 30, 42, 73, 108-9, 117-19, 191, 320; Reagan and, 638; Southern, 80, 112, 118-19, 236-7, 248-9, 250, 320, 466, 640

doctrinal factions, 627-9

economic views of, 42, 560, 562, 627

FDR denounced by, 41-5, 71

journals, think tanks, etc., 627, 630

Nixon as disappointment to, 557, 625

populists, 626, 627-8, 629

Reagan as disappointment to, 642-4

Reagan as unifier of, 628-9, 636-8

Republicans, 42, 109, 119, 120, 466, 560, 636-8; anti-New Deal, 43, 83 (see also Republican party)

resurgence of, 462, 558, 624-6; and

capture of GOP, 636-8

views on crime, 516, 519

see also right wing

Constitution, US, 42, 88, 95, 115-16, 126, 277, 294, 507, 532-3, 633-4, 642, 645-50, 654-5, 665, 680

checks and balances problems, 42, 88, 115, 491, 632, 633, 645-9

interstate commerce clause, 73-4

majority rule vs. minority rights, 42, 88

progressive era democratization of, 646-7

reform proposals, 648, 649-50

see also Bill of Rights

Consumer Advisory Board, 33

consumer protection, 5, 33, 236

consumption trends, 184-5, 601, 668

containment policy, 239, 286-7, 290, 491, 496

Contras, 633, 644

Cook, Bruce, 427

Coolidge, Calvin, 20, 27, 71, 152, 328, 329, 466

Cooper, Gary, 231

Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms, 377

Coors, Joseph, 637

Copland, Aaron, 593

Coral Sea, battle of, 179

Corbett, Jim, 307

Corcoran, Thomas G., 74

corporate taxes, 72, 191, 554, 558, 639

Corwin, Edward S., 92

Costigan, Edward Prentiss, 73

Coughlin, Fr. Charles E., 57-60, 63, 70, 73, 79, 80, 84, 85-6, 105

isolationism of, 154, 160, 169

Council on United Civil Rights Leadership, 371

counterculture of 1960s, 431-2

Country Joe and the Fish (rock group), 430-1

Court-packing plan, FDR, 93-6, 105, 118

Cousins, Norman, 392

Cowan, Ruth S., 551

Cowley, Malcolm, 299

Cox, Archibald, 505, 512

Cox, Edward E., 106

Cox, Harvey, 293

Cox, James, 24, 152

Cradle Will Rock, The (FTP production), 138-9

Crankshaw, Edward, 220

Crawford, Alan, 626

creationist theory, 667

credit, sex discrimination in, 439

Creel, George, 69, 195

crime, 514-17, 594

control, 466

poverty and, 516, 518, 568-9, 571

statistics, 516, 517

white-collar, 514-16, 517

criminal justice system, 517-20, 651, 653-4

Croly, Herbert, 122

Cronin, Thomas E., 510

Cronkite, Walter, 411

Crosby, Bing, 194

Crucible, The (Miller), 297, 300

Cuba, 330-1, 333, 336

Soviet military in, 333-4, 526, 527

US policy toward, 328, 331, 336; Bay of Pigs invasion, 331-2, 333, 336-7, 524

Cuban missile crisis, 333-5, 336, 337, 528

Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace (1949), 277

cultural programs of Roosevelt Administration, 132-41

Cummings, Homer S., 24, 90-2, 112

Cuomo, Mario, 662

Curley, James Michael, 311, 312

Currie, Lauchlin, 102

Curry, John Steuart, 138

Czechoslovakia, 149, 158, 159

Soviet control over, 233, 469, 527

Daily Worker, 52, 243, 252

Daley, Richard, 400, 414-15, 477

Dallek, Robert, 156, 217

Dallin, David, 260

Daniels, Josephus, 48, 329

Danto, Arthur, 623

Dark Ghetto (Clark), 385

Darlan, Jean, 181, 217

Darwin, Charles, 269

Daughters of the American Revolution, 113

Daughters of Bilitis, 450

Davis, Chester, 66

Davis, Elmer, 193

Davis, Jefferson, 384

Davis, John W., 43, 81

Davis, Kenneth S., 465

D-Day, World War II, 200

Dean, John, 499-504, 510

Death of a Salesman (Miller), 297, 300-1

de Beauvoir, Simone, 298, 444, 447, 454

Debray, Régis, 336

Debs, Eugene, 53, 631

Declaration of Independence, 277, 341, 665

Declaration of Rights of Man, 539, 540, 665

Declaration of the United Nations, 178

Deconstruction, 624

Deeter, Jasper, 136

Defense Mediation Board, 186

defense spending:

Eisenhower and, 255, 256, 262

Reagan increases in, 639, 640

deficit spending, see federal budget

de Gaulle, Charles, 195, 208, 217, 294, 332

Degler, Carl, 353

de Kooning, Willem, 135, 621, 622

Delano, Laura, 212

Delors, Jacques, 538

democracy, 88, 347-8, 600, 619, 645-7, 661

Lippmann’s pessimism, 289-90, 294

Democratic Advisory Committee (later Council, DAC), 287

Democratic Leadership Council, 659

Democratic National Committee, 29, 42, 80, 458, 499-500, 511

Democratic party, 116-18, 629, 632, 649, 655-60 (see also elections and campaigns)

centrists, 658-9, 662

congressional majorities of, 126; 1935-36, 37; 1937-38, 87; 1939-40,111; 1949-50, 238; 1951-52, 245; 1955-56, Senate, 320; 1965-66, 389-90; 1973-74, 461; 1981-82. House, 639

“congressional” vs. “presidential,” 119, 126, 236, 287; and civil rights legislation, 321-2, 376-8

conservative wing, 80, 112, 117-19, 191, 320, 466; and FDR’s New Deal, 30, 42, 73, 108-9, 112; Reagan and, 638

conventions of: 1924, 11-12; 1932, 3, 4-6, 10-12, 15, 42, 61; 1936, 83-4; 1940, 164; 1944, 203; 1948, 236-7; 1952, 249; 1956, 287-8; 1960, 325; 1964, 381-2; 1968, 414-15, 458; 1972, 458; minority representation in, 381-2, 648; two-thirds rule for nomination, 10-11, 83; women’s representation in, 458, 648

FDR as leader of, 108-11, 116-18, 666; his liberalization goal, 109-11, 118-20

fragmentation of, 426, 639-40; in civil rights issues, 236-7, 249, 250, 321-2; in New Deal era, 236-7, 247; in foreign policy of cold war, 236, 285-8; hawks vs. doves, 236, 285-6, 334, 404; in 1920s, 10-11; in 1932, 10-13, 15, 20; in 1930s New Deal era, 42-3, 64, 73, 79, 81-2, 106-7, 108-11, 116-19; in 1930s foreign policy, 154; in 1960, 323-6; in 1968, 412, 414-15

liberalism, 13, 15, 64, 73-4, 87, 109, 319, 320, 322, 324, 326, 359, 389-90, 414, 466, 629-30, 661-2; liberal-labor-left coalition, 118-20, 390, 399, 632

midterm policy conference, 659

New Deal coalition of voters for, 80, 238, 656-7

1980s constituency search, 658-60, 661-2

overlap with Republican party, 119, 126, 320, 466

reconstruction of, 656-7, 670-1

Southern wing of, 11, 80, 112, 118-19, 320-2, 354, 360; and civil rights, 236-7, 248-9, 250, 321-2, 325, 354, 360, 365, 376-8; coalition with Republicans, 132, 191, 466, 640; defections of 1980s, 657

Dempsey, Jack, 609

Deng Xiaoping, 529

Denmark, Nazi invasion of, 161

Dennis, Eugene, 243

Denver school desegregation case, 653

Depression, Great, 18-19, 31, 52, 58, 313, 648

literature, 141-6

see also New Deal

destroyers-for-bases deal, 164

Derrida, Jacques, 624

détente, 265, 286, 287, 461, 488-9, 490-1, 496

Carter efforts, 528-9

Eisenhower attempts, 256-7, 259-62

Nixon years, 476-9, 485-7

Detroit, 292

Depression effects in, 58

race riots: of 1943, 189; of 1967, 574

school busing case, 653

Dewey, John, 121, 124-5, 135, 292, 593, 658

Dewey, Thomas, 111, 163, 190-1, 236, 246, 248

as presidential candidate: in 1944, 203-5, 237; in 1948, 236-8, 239, 286

Dewson, Molly, 29, 64, 83, 103, 434

Dialectic of Sex, The (Firestone), 445

Diem, Ngo Dinh, 342, 343-4, 419, 504

Dien Bien Phu, 342, 465

Dies, Martin, 112

Diggins, John P., 534

direct action:

civil rights movement, 356-8, 366, 371, 379

student movement, 396

women’s movement, 445-7, 449

Dirksen, Everett, 245, 248, 253, 320, 377, 499

disarmament, 392

see also arms control

discrimination:

“double,” against minority women, 189, 452

economic cost of, 385

outlawed, 378

“reverse,” 653

see also education; employment; public facilities and transport; racial discrimination; sex discrimination; voting rights

Divine, Robert A., 286

“Dixiecrats” (1948), 237, 238

Djilas, Milovan, 227

Dobrynin, Anatoly, 476, 485-6, 523

Doctorow, E. L., 615, 617

Dohrn, Bernadine, 421

dollar, 555-6, 557

Dollfuss, Engelbert, 54

Domenici, Pete, 640

Dominican Republic, 329-30, 404, 524, 527

domino theory, 232, 342

Doolittle, James, 179

Dos Passos, John, 12, 277, 298, 605

Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 468

Douglas, Lewis, 28, 35, 37, 80

Douglas, Paul, 319-20

Douglas, William O., 112, 203, 227, 321, 667

Douglass, Frederick, 395, 399

Dow Chemical, 409, 421

Dowling, Eddie, 136

Dozier, Bishop Carroll T., 537

draft, 287, 461

Vietnam War: card-burning, 408, 410, 513; evasion, 420-1, 522

World War II, 165

Dred Scott decision, 652

Dreiser, Theodore, 299

Drew, Elizabeth, 487, 512

drug abuse, 466, 552, 569, 571, 594

and crime, 517

Dubinsky, David, 46, 54, 55-6, 84, 243

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 675

Duchamp, Marcel, 621, 623

Dukakis, Michael, 658, 659

Dulles, John Foster, 253-4, 255, 257, 259, 265, 286, 289, 342, 473, 643

Dunne, Edward F., 249

Dunne, Finley Peter, 54

Dunne, Ray, 47-8

Du Pont family and capitalism, 39, 42-3, 81, 98, 155, 592

Durant, William Crapo, 572

Durkheim, Emile, 275, 600

Duvalier, François, 330

Dworkin, Andrea, 535

Dylan, Bob, 421, 428-9, 671

Eagleton, Thomas, 458

“Eastern Establishment,” 246-8, 250, 522

Eastern Europe:

anti-Soviet unrest, 257-8

“liberation of captive peoples” goal of US, 256, 257-8

Soviet domination over, 210-11, 221, 226, 229, 258, 469

Yalta discussion on, 206-7, 211

Eastland, James, 319-20, 323

Eastman, Max, 202, 628

Eccles, Marriner, 75, 102, 287

“economic bill of rights” of FDR, 16, 202-3, 276-7, 344, 666

economic equality, 77, 84, 538, 637, 667

see also equality of opportunity

Economic Opportunity Act, 566, 567

economic planning, 77, 102-3, 560, 563-5

corporate, 563, 573

“democratic,” 565

New Deal era failures, 130-1, 214-15

economics, 553-4, 560-5, 571-2

Chicago School of, 562

Galbraith, 562-3

Hayek, 560

Keynesian, 102, 103, 130, 561-2

laissez-faire views, 42, 560-1

Marxist, neo-Marxist, 564-5

monetarism, 562, 564

supply-side, 639-40, 641

economic security, 16, 41, 75, 122, 202-3, 213, 538-9, 560, 666

economy:

Carter policies, 558-60, 562, 639, 641

centralization vs. decentralization debate of 1930s, 28, 74, 77, 103-4, 128

Great Depression, 18-19, 31, 39-41

interventionism in, 554-7, 560-1 (see also economic planning)

New Deal programs, 23-7, 30-5, 37, 40-1, 62, 63-6, 75-6, 214-15 (see also New Deal)

in 1950s, 264, 267, 555

Nixon/Ford policies, 554-8

Reagan years, 633, 638, 639-42;

recession, 562, 640-1

Roosevelt recession of 1937-39, 101-4, 114, 128, 130, 214

rural South, 314, 315

stagflation, 557-8, 559, 639

wartime, 182-4, 186, 215

see also banking; business; industry; inflation; unemployment

Eden, Anthony, 195, 206, 255, 341, 405

Edison, Thomas, 270, 542

Editor & Publisher, 282

education, 553, 594, 596-8, 663-5, 681-2

federal role in, 553, 629;

Eisenhower measures, 285, 320;

Great Society (LBJ) measures, 389, 566; K

ennedy measures, 370, 566;

Reagan cuts, 639

racial discrimination in, 236, 314, 321-3, 365, 370, 378 (see also schools)

sex discrimination in, 433, 439

trivializalion of, 597-8, 601

Egypt, 257, 486-7, 574

Camp David accord, 525-6

Ehrenburg, Ilya, 295

Ehrlichman, John, 467, 503-5, 513

Einstein, Albert, 269, 544-7

Eisenhower, David, 510

Eisenhower, Dwight D,, 236, 246, 263, 266, 289, 448, 543, 593, 607

and McCarthy, 249-50, 252-3, 258

and Nixon, 250, 326

as President, 252-63, 267, 277, 285, 418, 466, 467, 560-1, 573, 630; “Atoms for Peace” plan, 256; and civil rights issue, 322-3, 352, 359; domestic measures, 285, 320, 321, 322-3; evaluation and criticism, 255-6; foreign policy, 253-63, 285-7, 331, 340, 342, 490; and Korea, 254, 255, 418; military spending, 255, 256, 262; recession, 555; rejects atomic strikes and foreign adventurism, 255; and space program, 259, 579, 584, 585; Supreme Court appointments, 322, 652; U-2 incident, 261-3, 476

presidential candidacies, 460, 479, 637; 1952, 246-8, 249-51, 253, 286, 312; 1956, 257, 286

in World War II, 180, 198; as ETO commander, 199-201, 205, 206

elderly, Townsend proposals for, 67

elections and campaigns, 646-7

congressional: 1918, 190, 191; 1932, 19; 1934, 37, 63, 70; 1936, 87; 1938, 108-11, 117-18; 1942, 190-1; 1946, 230; 1948, 238; 1950, 245; 1952, 253, 285; 1964, 390, 404; 1972, 461, 479; 1980, 629, 632, 639

media use in, 312, 324, 613

presidential, 1860 and 1896, 655-6; 1912, 118-19, 236; 1924, 11-12, 46, 416, 656; 1928, 656; 1932, 3-6, 10-18, 42, 61, 656, 662; 1936, 79-86, 87, 91, 117-18, 656; 1940, 161, 163-5, 656; 1944, 203-5; 1948, 235-9; 1952, 246-51, 253, 625, 637; 1956, 257, 286, 287, 637; 1960, 262, 323-6, 331, 512, 555, 625, 637: 1964, 380-2, 625, 637; 1968, 412-16, 555-625, 637: 1972, 458, 460-2, 469, 479, 481, 511, 557; 1976, 521, 558, 613, 625, 637-8, 656; 1980, 530, 559, 638, 649, 656; 1984, 641, 644, 649, 661; 1988, 657-8, 659, 661-2, 668, 669-70; primary system, 117, 647, 662; reform proposals, 650

state: 1972, 53; 1934 (Wisconsin), 68; 1936, 87; 1938, 111; 1942, 190-1

voter turnout decrease, 646, 661

electric power, 13, 14, 264

New Deal programs, 26, 76, 191, 214

electronics industry, 268, 273, 542-3, 550-1, 572

Eliot, T. S. 136, 233

Ellison, Ralph, 297, 408, 615, 620

Ellsberg, Daniel, 425-6, 499, 504, 513

Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, 546

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 142, 338

employment:

discrimination in: ethnic, 308; outlawed, 378, 437; racial, 188-9, 315; sex, 81, 188, 433, 437, 439, 446-7, 457

fair, 1948 and 1952 proposals, 236, 250

full, inflationary effect of, 561

wartime, 184, 188, 453, 648

women in, 188, 453

see also job programs

End Poverty in California (EPIC), 69, 603, 604

energy crisis, 1970s, 530, 574-5, 591

Engels, Friedrich, 567

entitlement programs, 41, 218, 641

environmental pollution, 552, 574, 575

environmental protection, 466, 629, 651

Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974), 439

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), 437, 439, 446

equality, 124-5, 635, 667-9

of condition, 124, 668

economic, 77, 84, 538, 635, 667

and liberty, 125, 267, 635, 679-80; as

competing values, 631, 679

of opportunity, 77, 122, 124-5, 278, 440, 454, 668, 679; FDR on, 16, 84, 203; JFK on, 370

equal pay for equal work, 188, 538

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), 434, 438-9, 452, 457, 458-9, 628

Erikson, Erik, 348

Ervin, Sam, 502, 503-5

Escape from Freedom (Fromm), 279

estate tax, 76, 191, 639

Ethiopia, 63, 79, 156, 527

Europe:

1939 war danger, 149-51, 153, 155-9

postwar, 260, 294-6; goals of Eisenhower Administration for, 254, 256, 257-8; Marshall Plan aid to, 233, 265, 295, 496, 555; and NATO, 265; reaction to American literature in, 297-301; Soviet military buildup in, 528; Soviet sphere of domination, 210-11; Yalta discussions on, 206-7, 211

World War II in, 159-64, 166-70, 177, 180, 182, 196, 199-201, 206, 211, 223-4; cross-Channel attack, 177-8, 180-1, 196-201, 207

see also Eastern Europe; Western Europe

European Economic Community, 538

Evans, M. Stanton, 626

Evers, Medgar, 372, 380

executive branch (federal), 114-15, 647-8

FDR’s reorganization bill, 105-6, 115, 131

executive privilege, doctrine of, 505-6

existentialism, 394

Ezekiel, Mordecai, 102

Fairbank, John K., 469

Fair Deal, 236, 239, 320, 359, 461, 629, 639, 652

fair employment, 1948 and 1952

proposals for, 236, 250

Fair Employment Practices Committee, 321

Family Assistance Plan (FAP), 567

Fanon, Frantz, 388

Faraday, Michael, 269, 542, 547

Farley, James, 4, 11, 14, 15, 23, 80, 82, 102, 110-11, 117, 164, 243

Farmer, James, 356, 361-3, 371

Farmer-Labor party, 68

Farmers’ Alliance, 655

farming, farmers, 16, 49, 64-6, 81, 114, 122, 656

Depression effects on, 19

FDR’s goals for, 5, 16, 35, 64

foreclosures: 1930s, 19, 25; 1980s, 640

New Deal programs for, 25, 40-1, 64-6, 81, 107, 213

production increases, 268

as special interest group, 107

subsidies and price controls, 629; Eisenhower Administration, 285, 320; Fair Deal, 236; Nixon Administration, 466

surpluses, 16, 64-5

technological advances in, 268

farm labor, 40, 54, 66, 81, 141, 268-9

strikes, 49-50, 452

Farm Security Administration, 104, 191

Farrell, James T., 144

fascism, 20, 54, 101, 137, 220, 279

FDR charged with, 43

Niebuhr and, 292-3

Faulkner, William, 297, 298-9, 593, 605, 615, 620

Fay, James H., 111

FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 230, 361, 514, 546

in Watergate affair, 499-500, 501, 508

Federal Art Project (FAP), 134-5

federal budget, 559, 639

balancing, 13, 79, 560; Carter’s problems, 559; FDR’s dilemma, 19, 21, 35, 64, 101, 103, 214-15, 374; Ford and, 558; Kennedy and, 374; Reagan and, 639, 640, 641; supply-side theory, 639

deficit, 102, 103, 130, 215, 333, 555, 562; Reagan years, 633, 640, 645 see also federal spending

Federal Employee Loyalty Program, 230

federal regulation, see government regulation

Federal Reserve Board, 75, 102, 555, 556, 562, 647

federal revenue sharing, 466-7, 556

federal spending, 466, 554-5, 558, 561-2

Keynesian arguments, 102, 103, 130, 215, 561-2

New Deal, 30, 64, 104, 107, 128, 214, 561

Reagan cuts, 639

special interest pressure for, 107, 641

Roosevelt cuts and recession, 101 see also defense spending; federal budget

Federal Theatre Project (FTP), 135-8

Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), 139-41

Federation of American Scientists, 549

Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 436

feminism, 436-60, 534-5, 618 (see also women’s liberation movement)

Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT), 535

feminist publications, 439, 447

Feminists (group), 444

Field, Marshall, III, 283

Fields, Gracie, 184

filibuster, 321, 322, 323, 360, 376-7, 647

film industry, 601-3, 604-8, 612, 620

Finland, 160-1, 221

Firestone, Shulamith, 443-5

Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, 515

First Amendment rights, 281, 395, 426, 534-5, 651, 654, 667

fiscal policy:

FDR’s lack of strategy, 130-1, 214-15

Keynesian, 102-3, 130, 561-2

Nixon, 555

see also federal spending

Fish, Hamilton, 41, 165, 169, 190, 507

Fish, Hamilton, Jr., 507

FitzGerald, Frances, 406

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 296, 298, 568, 605, 608

Fitzgerald, John “Honey Fitz,” 309-10

Flacks, Richard, 422

Flanagan, Hallie, 136-8

Fletcher, Rear Adm. Frank Jack, 179

Flink, James, 574

folk music, 428-9

Fonda, Jane, 499

food stamp program, 639

Ford, Gerald R., 488, 521

as President, 557-8, 560, 586, 625, 630, 637; foreign policy, 488-9, 523, 524; pardon of Nixon, 498, 522, 558

as presidential candidate, 613, 625, 637-8

Ford, Henry, 21, 32, 543, 573, 576, 578

Ford, Henry, II, 271, 573, 575, 576-7

Ford Foundation, 296

Ford Motor Company, 56, 99, 183, 187, 188, 485, 515, 572-3, 576-7

as leader in automation, 272, 273, 274

Foreign Affairs (journal), 229

foreign affairs and policy, 489-96, 535-40

bipartisanship in, 204, 235, 285-6, 493, 494, 497

brinkmanship in, 286, 288

Carter Administration, 522-9, 531, 644

containment, 239, 286-7, 290, 491, 496

economics, 555-6

Eisenhower Administration, 253-63, 285-7, 331, 340, 342, 490

Ford Administration, 488-9, 523, 524

human rights, 496, 538-40, 638

intellectual critics of cold war policies, 288-94

Johnson Administration, 391, 401-6, 410-13, 467, 491, 524 (see also Vietnam War)

Kennedy Administration, 328-9, 331-7, 339-44, 390, 491, 495-6, 524

massive retaliation policy, 254, 286

national interest and, 291-2

Nixon Administration, 417-20, 422-6, 467-88, 491, 492-4, 496, 524

power exercised in, 291-2, 496

Reagan Administration, 537, 538, 624-5

realist thinking in, 290-2, 293-4

Realpolitik, 159, 216, 217, 223, 465, 488

Roosevelt Administration, 35-7, 149-57, 158-74, 205-12, 234, 290, 328 (see also World War II)

sphere-of-interest, balance-of-power policy, 232, 234, 239-40

triangular diplomacy, 469, 474-6, 488, 496, 527

Truman Administration, 229-30, 232-5, 239-43, 285-6, 289, 290, 340, 342, 402, 468, 490

see also arms control; cold war; détente; internationalism; interventionism; isolationism; summit meetings; unilateralism

foreign aid, 339-40, 669

foreign trade, 35-6, 264, 555-6

deficit, 557

tariffs, 17, 36, 490, 556

Forman, James, 371, 379, 384, 386

Forrestal, James, 229

Forsythe, David, 540

Fortune magazine, 55, 98, 108, 273, 276, 280, 563

Foster, William Z, 18

Four Freedoms, 203, 266, 276, 281, 666, 672

four-party politics, 119, 126, 236, 491

Fourteenth Amendment, 321, 438, 653

Fourth Amendment, 653

Fox, Richard W., 293

Frady, Marshall, 415

France, 126, 295, 296

Allied D-Day invasion, 199-201; deliberations on, 177-8, 180-1, 196-9, 207

American writers celebrated in, 297-8

appeasement of Hitler by, 157-8

in Indochina, 171, 178, 208, 255, 341-2

nuclear weapons of, 257

in Suez crisis, 257

in World War II, 159, 162-3; Vichy government, 171, 181

Franco, Francisco, 149, 156, 181

Frank, Anne, diary of, 619

Frank, Jerome, 66

Frankel, Charles, 666

Frankel, Max, 497

Frankenthaler, Helen, 621

Frankfurter, Felix, 13, 28-9, 45, 73, 74, 77, 95, 112, 231, 321, 667

Franklin, Benjamin, 593

Frazier, E. Franklin, 355

“freed intelligence,” 124

freedom, 266-7, 275-81, 337-8, 532, 538-40, 598, 665-7, 679

American literary treatment of, 299-301

Atlantic Charier, 192, 338

Bill of Rights, 281, 296, 375, 667

civil-political vs. economic-social, 124, 303, 538-40, 666

Declaration of the United Nations, 178

definition, problems of, 121, 124, 276, 281, 539-40, 665-6, 672

economic intervention and, 42, 560

FDR’s achievements for, 131, 202-3, 213, 216, 218, 666; Four Freedoms, 203, 266, 276, 281, 666, 672

Hitler’s perversion of, 202, 666

as ideology, 276-8

Kennedy’s concept and inaugural words, 326-7, 335, 370, 375

Lippmann’s concept of, 289-90

meaning for blacks, 371-2, 375, 401

middle classes and, 278-9

PEN Congress debate on, 617-20

technology of, 266-75

Third World demands for, 305-6, 337-44, 404, 407, 539

Western tradition and sources, 539-40

Freedom Democratic Party, Mississippi, 380-2

“Freedom Summer,” 380, 384, 395

Freeman, Jo, 443, 453, 455-6

Freeman, Orville, 325

free-marketers, 267, 627-9

see also laissez-faire

Free Speech Movement (FSM), 395-6, 397

Freidel, Frank, 16, 24

Freud, Sigmund, 274, 276, 436

Frey, John, 55

Frick, Henry Clay, 99, 100

Friedan, Betty, 436-8, 439-41, 450, 454-5, 618

Friedman, Milton, 562, 627

Fromm, Erich, 279, 599

Frost, Robert, 297, 299-300, 593, 615, 674

Fulbright. J. William, 291

fundamentalism, 448, 458, 534, 627-8

Gable, Clark, 166, 605, 606

Gaddis, John Lewis, 496

Gagarin, Yuri A., 580, 581, 584

Gagey, Edmond, 137

Gaither, H. Rowan, Jr., 259

Galbraith, John Kenneth, 287, 340, 343, 510, 562-3, 573

Galenson, Walter, 98

Gandhi, Mohandas, 338, 339, 348, 352, 357, 364, 409, 421, 461, 546

Gannett, Frank, 105

Gans, Herbert, 622

GAP Communications, 613

Garfield, James R., 122

Garner, John, 11, 14, 22, 37, 93, 96, 110, 126, 159, 164

Garthoff, Raymond, 487

Garvey, Marcus, 385

gays, see homosexuals; lesbians

Gaza Strip, 482, 525-6

Gemini, Project, 582

General Electric Company, 268, 607

General Motors Corporation, 42, 43, 56, 98, 557, 572, 575-6

strikes: 1937, 98-9; 1970, 573

General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (Keynes), 130

genetic experimentation, 552

Geneva Accords on Vietnam (1954), 342, 405

Geneva summit meeting (1955), 257

George, Walter, 110-11, 116, 118, 119, 126, 285, 319

George VI, King, 199

Gephardt, Richard, 641

Germany, 150, 219

Nazi regime, 20, 149-51, 166, 207; acts of aggression, 149, 157-8, 159; Axis member, 157, 159, 167, 173, 176; Holocaust, 218-19, 267; pact with Soviet Union, 151, 159, 197; in World War II, 159, 161-4, 166, 168, 175-6, 177-8, 180-1, 197, 200, 206, 211, 223-4

postwar, 224, 240; reunification issue, 256, 332 (see also West Germany)

Giap, Vo Nguyen, 419, 480

Gibbs, Josiah Willard, 269, 270, 542

Gide, André, 298

Gilford, Walter, 71

gift tax, 76, 191, 639

Gilder, George F., 627

Ginsberg, Allen, 394, 430

Ginzburg, Aleksandr, 523

Giraud, Henri, 195

Girdler, Thomas, 100

Gitlin, Todd, 431, 432

Glad, Betty, 521, 559, 643

Glass, Carter, 24, 30, 75, 110, 118

Glenn, John, 580-1, 586

Goebbels, Joseph, 224

Golan Heights, 486-7

Gold Clause cases, Supreme Court, 72, 89

Golden, Harry, 353

gold policy:

FDR, 35, 36, 37, 72

Nixon, 555-6

Goldwater, Barry, 378, 381, 382, 390, 404, 491, 508, 566, 625-6, 637, 638, 656

Gompers, Samuel, 45, 54

Gomulka, Wladyslaw, 258

Goodman, Paul, 394

Good Neighbor League, 83, 117

Good Neighbor Policy, 328, 524

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 633, 644

Gordimer, Nadine, 620

Gordon, Kermit, 561

Göring, Hermann, 150

Gorky, Arshile, 621

government:

American system: conditions of, 115, 120, 125-6, 129, 491, 632, 645-8, 655, 663; democratization of progressive era, 646-7; reform proposals, 648-50 (see also party system)

federal: centralization of, 16, 29-30, 42, 74, 646; centralization vs. decentralization debate, under FDR, 28-9, 66, 74, 77, 122; invigorated by FDR, 213; prolabor, divergence from Marxist model, 48; reorganization bill (1937), 105-6, 115, 131

Lippmann’s concept of, 289-90

press as fourth branch of, 283

government planning, see economic

planning; planning, comprehensive government regulation, 466, 560

New Deal, 42, 121, 122

Reagan reversal, 639

Graham, Billy, 465

Graham, Martha, 593

Graham, Otis, 122

Grahn, Judy, 451

grain deals, US-USSR, 476, 478, 644

Grange, 49, 65

Grant, Ulysses S., 178, 505

Grass, Günter, 618-19

Graubard, Stephen, 553

Great Britain, 125, 295, 296

appeasement of Hitler by, 157-8

colonialism, 208, 338-9

nuclear weapons of, 257

in Suez crisis, 257

in World War II, 159, 161-4, 175-6, 177-8, 180-1, 196-7, 199-200, 211, 222, 223-4; Battle of Britain, 164, 167; US aid, 161, 162, 164, 166-70

“Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,” 201

Great Society, 390, 401, 516, 629, 630, 639

Greece, 149, 169, 211, 229, 232-3, 239, 265

Green, Theodore, 48

Green, William, 33, 55-7, 105

Greenberg, Daniel, 549-50

Greenfield, Jeff, 428

Greenstein, Fred I., 255

Griffin, Susan, 449

Griffith, D. W., 602

Grissom, Gus, 580

Gromyko, Andrei, 206, 211, 477, 486, 491

Gross, Chaim, 135

gross national product (GNP): US, 1950s, 264

Western vs. communist bloc vs. Third World nations, 304

Group, the (experimental theater), 145-6

Grove Press, 447

Gruening, Ernest, 403, 407

Guadalcanal, battle of, 179

Guantánamo Naval Base, 330, 337

Guatemala, 331, 524

Guevara, Ché, 336

Guffey Bituminous Coal Act, 72, 90

Gumbleton, Bishop Thomas J., 537

Guthrie, Woody, 142-3, 428

Haber, Al, 392

Hagler, “Marvelous Marvin,” 609

Hague, Frank, 16

Haig, Alexander, 480, 482, 638, 645

Haight-Ashbury culture, 430

Haile Selassie, emperor of Ethiopia, 79, 137

Haiti, 329-30

Haldeman, H. R. “Bob,” 418, 473, 479, 503-4, 505, 513, 554, 557

Hall, Gus, 243

Hamer, Fannie Lou, 379-82

Hamilton, Alexander, 507, 646, 648

Hand, Learned, 667

Hansen, Alvin, 561

Harding, Warren G., 466, 505, 636

Hargrove, Erwin C, 531

Harlem, New York City, 385

Harriman, W. Averell, 103, 206, 285, 287-8, 343

Harris, David, 426

Hart, Gary, 658

Hartz, Louis, 122, 626

Harvard Educational Review, 596-7

Harvard University, 271, 519, 532, 538

Havens, Richie, 427

Hawaii, 176, 264

Hawks, Howard, 605

Hawley, Ellis, 214

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 299, 674

Hayden, Casey, 442

Hayden, Tom, 392

Hayek, Friedrich August von, 560, 627

Healey, Dorothy, 603

health programs, 112, 389, 466, 559, 639

Hearst, William Randolph, 10, 11, 31, 35, 82, 154, 282

Hearst newspapers, 10, 31, 41, 46, 82, 105, 123, 205, 243, 282, 606

Hechinger, Fred, 597

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 281, 461

Height, Dorothy, 371

Heisenberg, Werner, 269

Heller, Walter, 287, 561

Helsinki Accords, 488-9, 523

Hemingway, Ernest, 297, 298-9, 593, 605, 615, 620

Henderson, Leon, 102

Hendrix, Jimi, 427

Henry, Patrick, 634

Herblock cartoons, 465, 624

Hernandez, Aileen, 437, 440

Herring, George, 406

Hersey, John, 195, 311

Hersh, Seymour M., 498, 500

Hicks, Granville, 300

High, Stanley, 68

High Culture, 622, 623-4

Hillman, Sidney, 46, 55-6, 84, 107, 204, 287

hippie culture of 1960s, 394, 426-32

Hiroshima, 225, 234, 391, 408

Hiss, Alger, 231-2, 244, 252, 426, 468, 625

Hitler, Adolf, 7, 20, 63, 105, 149-52, 221, 222, 260, 545

acts of aggression, 149, 157-8, 159

perversion of meaning of freedom, 202, 666

Roosevelt and, 149-52, 173, 176, 202, 210

and war declaration on US, 172, 175-6

in World War II, 161-2, 164, 166-7, 169-72, 175-6, 180-1, 200

Hobbes, Thomas, 600

Ho Chi Minh, 341, 402, 406, 418

Hoffman, Abbie, 432

Hofstadter, Richard, 44, 288, 626

Hollywood, 194, 601-3, 604-8, 620

alleged communism in, 231

Khrushchev’s visit to, 260, 301

Hollywood Production Code, 606

Hollywood Ten, 231

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 112, 216, 231

Holocaust, 218-19, 267, 525

home foreclosures, Depression years, 26, 41

homelessness, Reagan years, 540

homosexuality, 450, 533

Hook, Sidney, 276, 277, 278

Hoover, Herbert, 22, 58, 62, 123, 600, 625

as enlightened conservative, 668

1932 presidential candidate, 3, 14, 15, 16, 17-18, 55, 521

in 1936 campaign, 83, 85

as President, 20-1, 35, 101, 170, 253; and Latin America, 328, 329; and Supreme Court, 71, 93

Hoover, J. Edgar, 462, 499

Hoover Administration, 25, 40, 45-6

Hopkins, Harry, 34, 102, 112, 114, 163, 168, 174-5, 196, 206, 223, 566, 570

as WPA director, 76; cultural projects, 133, 134, 136, 140

Hopkins, Jerry, 430

Home, Lena, 369

Horner, Henry, 249

hostage crisis of 1979-80, 530, 531, 638

Houghton Mifflin, 139, 140

House Committee on Un-American Activities, 112, 132, 230-2, 395, 546

Houseman, John, 136

House of Representatives, US, 647-8, 655

arts bills of 1938-39, killed by, 132

and civil rights measures, 321, 375-6

Democratic majorities in, 37, 87, 111, 238, 245, 390, 479, 555, 558, 639

four-year term proposal, 650

1937 reorganization bill killed, 106, 107

Reagan coalition majorities in, 639-40

Republican gains in, 1938, 111; 1942, 191

Republican majorities in: 1947-48, 230; 1953-54; 253, 285

House Judiciary Committee, 498, 506-7

House Rules Committee, 106, 111, 321, 375-6

House Un-American Activities Committee, see House Committee on Un-American Activities

House Ways and Means Committee, 192

housing problems, 540, 570, 633

housing programs:

Eisenhower Administration, 285, 320

Fair Deal, 236

Great Society (LBJ), 389

New Deal, 26, 214, 648

Reagan cuts, 639

Howe, Irving, 409, 616, 631

Howe, Louis, 3-4, 11, 13, 14, 15, 18, 64

Howells, William Dean, 299

HUAC, see House Committee on Un-American Activities

Hubble Space Telescope, 587

Hudson, Marion, 434, 441

Hughes, Charles Evans, 22, 71, 72, 88, 89, 90, 92, 119, 593

and Court-packing plan, 93, 94-5

Hughes, Howard, 504

Hughes, Robert, 622

Hull, Cordell, 13, 17, 23, 35-6, 151, 154, 158-9, 163, 164, 166, 203, 219, 328

human rights, 496, 522-3

Helsinki Accords, 488-9, 523

UN Declaration of, 523, 538-40

US policy, 538-40; Carter, 522-4, 526, 528, 539; Reagan, 540, 638

Humphrey, Hubert, 237, 259, 325, 381, 412

as presidential candidate: in 1960, 324; in 1968, 415-16, 417, 461, 555

as Senator, 319-20, 376-7

as Vice President, 389

Hungary, 158

1956 revolt in, 258, 286, 288, 527

Hunt-Perry, Patricia, 537

Hurd, Peter, 135

Huston Plan, 499

Hutcheson, William “Big Bill,” 55, 56

Hutchins, Robert, 594

hydrogen bomb, 240, 256-7, 287, 391, 546, 549

Soviets in possession of, 256

Iacocca, Lee, 573, 577

Ickes, Harold, 23, 29, 34, 37, 71, 73, 93, 102, 113, 114, 118, 133, 165, 216, 593

opposes internment of Japanese, 190

“soft on communism” charges against, 112

as unilateralist, 154

illiteracy, 566, 594

immigration laws, 389

impeachment, 506-7, 511, 648, 650

imperialism, 208, 218, 338, 419, 444, 470

American, 264-5, 397, 524;

economic and cultural, 295-6

“imperial presidency,” 510, 511, 646

income:

family: black vs. white, 314, 571; 1950-60s vs. 1970-80s increase, 660; rich vs. poor, 669; wartime increase, 184

per capita, 266

see also wages

income tax, 76, 191, 554-5, 639

India, 176, 208, 218, 338-9, 348, 472

Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to, 339

Jacqueline Kennedy’s visit to, 340-1

Kennedy policy toward, 339-41

living conditions, 303, 305, 339

question of independence for, 178, 208, 338, 341

individualism, individual rights, 16, 42, 121, 123, 124, 213, 267, 275, 280-1, 296, 338, 539, 598-601, 672

equality as competing value, 631

of libertarians, 534, 627

of New Left, 393

vs. other-directedness and conformity, 279-80

and self-indulgence, 600-1

see also liberty, individual

Individualism Reconsidered (Riesman), 280

Indochina, 338, 341, 424

French colonialism in, 178, 208, 255, 341-2

Geneva Accords of 1954, 342, 405

Japanese designs on, 171, 172

“loss” of, 342, 401-2, 404

US involvement: Eisenhower and, 255, 342; under Johnson, 401-2; Kennedy

and, 342-4 (see also Vietnam War)

industrial revolution, 57, 273, 274, 279

industry, 31, 268-9

automation in, 272-3, 274, 279, 543

“human engineering” and “human relations” in, 271

New Deal revival of, 30-1

production, 266; mid-1930s, 101;

postwar, 264; wartime, 182-4, 186, 199

inflation:

1970s, 531, 554-62 passim, 591

postwar, 230,

World War II, 187

information revolution, 550-1, 552

Ingersoll, Ralph, 283, 593

initiative, referendum, recall, 647

Institute for Advanced Study, 296, 545

intellectualism, intellectuals, 15, 276-81, 298, 546-8

critique of cold war policies by, 288-94

left wing, 394, 409, 462, 565, 625, 629-32

of 1960s movements, 394, 401, 409, 459-60, 461-2

right wing, 625-8

“New York,” 616-17

intellectual leadership, 671-2

gap, 35, 129-30, 214-16, 344, 667, 671

Tocquevillian void in, 125, 214, 294, 518-19, 548, 593, 595, 665, 667-8, 671

Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (1947), 265

interest rates, 1970-80s, 531, 555, 562, 638

Interim Agreement, US-USSR, 478

internationalism, 36, 152-5, 165, 208

postwar, 236, 247, 253

of Roosevelt, 152, 155

Wilsonian, 11, 35, 152

International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 46, 55, 138

International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA), 46-7

International Monetary and Economic Conference (London, 1933), 35-6

International Union of Electrical Workers, 273

International Women’s Year Commission, 452

interstate highway system, 285, 573-4

interventionism, interventionists, 497

1930s and World War II, 154, 155, 157, 165, 167, 169

in Latin America, 328, 330-2, 490, 524

investment tax credit, 556

Iowa, U.S.S., 198

Iran, 229, 266

US relations with, 255, 643; hostage crisis, 530, 531, 638; secret dealings of Reagan White House, 495, 633

Iran-Contra affair, 633, 644, 645, 647, 651, 655

Irish immigrants, 305, 306-9, 313, 387

“iron curtain,” 228

IRS (Internal Revenue Service), 499

isolationism, isolationists, 219

postwar, 234, 236, 247, 286

prewar, 36, 151, 153-7, 158, 160, 161, 163, 165, 167; and Lend-Lease, 169

Israel, 546

Camp David accord, 525-6

Six-Day War, 486

in Suez crisis, 257

Yom Kippur War, 487, 574

Italian-Americans, 387

Italy, 295, 337

fascist, 20, 149; as Axis member, 157, 159, 176; invasion of Albania, 149, 158; invasion of Ethiopia, 79, 156; in World War II, 163, 177, 196, 197-8, 211, 217

Iwo Jima, 206, 211, 224, 675

Jackson, Andrew, 88, 90, 218, 648, 679

Jackson, George, 520

Jackson, Henry M., 521

Jackson, Jesse, 658, 661, 662

Jackson, Jimmie Lee, 382-3

Jackson State College, 425

Jagger, Mick, 430

James, Henry, 620

James, William, 125, 217, 292, 671

Janowitz, Morris, 612

Japan, 341

as Axis member, 157, 159, 167-8, 173, 176

invasion of China, 157-8, 170-1, 173, 470

postwar, 472, 548;

economic competition, 556, 578, 633; US defense partner, 265

prewar US relations with, 170-1, 172-4

views of the US in, 337-8

in World War II, 173-80, 201-2, 207-8, 210, 211, 224; capitulation, 225, 226

Japanese-Americans, wartime “relocation” of, 189-90, 218

Jaworski, Leon, 505

Jefferson, Thomas, 88, 137, 142, 213, 218, 337, 341, 549, 634, 648

Jefferson Airplane (rock group), 427, 430, 431

Jeffersonians, 11, 13, 23, 42, 116, 679

Jenner, William, 230, 249

Jennings, Peter, 613

Jews, 353, 387, 525, 595, 601

Nazi persecution of, 218-19

New York intellectuals, 616-17

in Soviet Union, 488

Jim Crow laws, 313, 355

Job Corps, 390

job discrimination, see employment: discrimination in

job programs, 556

New Deal, 25, 27, 34, 76, 81, 104

training, 370, 566

War on Poverty, 566

John XXIII, Pope, 536

Johnson, Andrew, 506

Johnson, Hiram, 14, 16, 24, 36, 73, 94, 151

Johnson, Gen. Hugh, 13, 32-3, 55, 77, 114

Johnson, Lyndon B., 306, 317-20, 584

background and education of, 317-18, 323

and civil rights issue, 322-3, 324, 375, 377-8, 381-2, 383-4, 657

as Congressman, 110-11, 318-19, 323

exposure to poverty, 317-18, 323

as a politician, 318-20

populist compassion of, 319

as President, 375-8, 382, 409, 496, 499, 549, 561, 651, 656-7; domestic program of, 375, 377-8, 383-4, 389-90, 439, 461; foreign policy, 467, 524; tax policy, 554-5; and Vietnam War, 391, 401-7, 410-13, 417-19, 491, 593; War on Poverty, 516, 566-7, 568, 570-1

as presidential candidate: in 1960, 323-5; in 1964, 381-2, 637

and Robert Kennedy, 325, 402, 413

as Senator, 319-20; Majority Leader, 313, 320, 322-3, 578-9

vice-presidential candidacy of, 325, 360, 373

Johnson, Rebekah Baines, 317

Johnson, Sam Ealy, 317

Johnston, Eric, 267

Jones, Jesse, 28, 48, 318-19

Jong, Erica, 618

Joplin, Janis, 430, 431

Jordan, 486, 526

Jordan, Barbara, 507

Jordan, Hamilton, 530

journalism, 282-3, 612

see also newspapers

Journal of Philosophy, The, 121

Judaism, 57, 536

judiciary, 116, 646, 651-2, 667

see also Supreme Court, US Justice Department, and Watergate, 500, 505

juvenile delinquency, 569

Kalmbach, Herbert, 501

Kant, Immanuel, 276, 600

Katzenbach, Nicholas, 370

Kazin, Alfred, 131, 139, 141, 409, 615-16

Kearns, Doris, 319, 401, 403, 413

Kefauver, Estes, 248, 286, 287, 319

Kehler, Randy, 425-6

Keller, Kent, 107

Kemp, Jack, 641

Kempton, Murray, 99

Kennan, George, 288, 290, 293, 294, 538

“long telegram” of, and X article, 227-8, 229, 234, 290

Kennedy, Edward, 412, 499, 623

1980 presidential candidacy, 530, 531, 559

Kennedy, Jacqueline, 332, 340-1, 677-8

Kennedy, John F., 306, 309-13, 377, 378, 382, 414, 521, 656-7, 677-8

ancestry and background of, 309-10, 323

assassination of, 373-4, 382, 460

and civil rights issue, 323-4, 326, 359-60, 362, 365-6, 367-72, 374-5, 376

as Congressman, 311-12, 323, 339

King and, 326, 360

personality of, 310-11, 323

as President, 326-44, 359-60, 362, 365-6, 367-75, 461, 466, 504, 549, 561, 581, 584, 632, 651; Bay of Pigs fiasco, 331-2, 334-5, 336-7, 343, 524; and civil rights legislation, 360, 369, 370-1; in Cuban Missile Crisis, 334-5, 337, 495-6; domestic program, 360, 369, 370-1, 390, 554, 566-7; evaluation of, 342-4, 374-5, 677, 681; foreign policy, 328-9, 331-7, 339-44, 390-1, 491; “hawk” vs. “dove” advisers, 334-5, 343; inaugural address, 326-8, 335, 342, 566; steel price rollback, 651; and Vietnam, 342-4, 390-1, 402; women’s issues and, 433, 434, 437, 438

presidential candidacy of, 323-6, 331, 413, 468, 512, 555

as Senator, 313, 323, 339

Kennedy, Joseph Patrick, 59, 89, 160, 309-10, 311, 312, 324

Kennedy, Joseph Patrick, Jr., 310, 311

Kennedy, Patrick, 309

Kennedy, Patrick Joseph, 309-10

Kennedy, Robert F., 251, 461, 530, 593, 678

assassination of, 414, 460

and civil rights issue, 360, 362-3, 365-6, 369-70, 374

in Cuban missile crisis, 334-5

Johnson and, 325, 402, 413

as presidential candidate, 412-13, 414, 426

and programs for the poor, 566, 569

Kennedy, Rose Fitzgerald, 309, 312

Kennedy Administration, 389

Kennedy family, 309

Kent, Rockwell, 134

Kent State University tragedy, 425

Kenyon, Dorothy, 440

Kerouac, Jack, 394

Kerr, Clark, 396-7

Kesey, Ken, 430

Kevles, Daniel J., 549

Key, V. O., Jr., 354, 593

Keynes, John Maynard, 130, 131, 561, 677

Keynesianism, 102, 103, 130, 561-2, 570-1

wartime, 215, 561

Keyserling, Leon, 287

Khrushchev, Nikita, 241, 259-62, 265-6, 288, 335-6, 340, 362

on capitalism, 301-2

in Cuban missile crisis, 333-5

at Vienna summit, 332-3, 335

visit to US, 260-1, 301-2

Kilpatrick, James J., 627

Kilrain, Jack, 307

Kim Il Sung, 240-1

King, Coretta Scott, 326, 350, 359, 360, 367, 372

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 349-52, 356, 357-8, 362-4, 366-9, 375, 381, 382-4, 461-2, 571, 593, 661, 672, 678

assassination of, 413, 414, 460

intellectual acumen of, 350, 461, 571

jailing of, 326, 359, 364, 367-8, 382

Kennedy brothers and, 326, 360, 363

“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 367-8

1963 Washington Freedom Rally, 371-2

and Peace Movement, 401, 407, 409

King, Martin Luther, Sr., 350, 360

King, Mary, 442

Kingston Frio, 428

Kinsey, Alfred, 436, 533-4

Kirk, Grayson, 413-14

Kirkendall, Richard, 238

Kissinger, Henry, 417-18, 422, 424, 468, 470-7, 479-87, 492-4, 523

and China, 470-5, 625

and Russia, 476-7, 485-7

in Vietnam peace talks, 480-4

Klehr, Harvey, 85

Klein, Joe, 142

Kleindienst, Richard, 501, 505

Knights of Labor, 45

Knopf, Alfred A., 593

Knowland newspapers, 46

Knox, Frank, 83, 163, 169, 175

Knudsen, William, 98, 575

Kobler, John, 284

Koch, Edward, 635

Koestler, Arthur, 277, 295

Kopkind, Andrew, 432

Koppes, Clayton R., 578

Korea, 240-1

see also North Korea; South Korea

Korean War, 241-3, 247, 250, 255, 418, 497, 527

as consequence of mutual US-Soviet misperceptions, 241-2, 254, 260, 262

Kostelanetz, Richard, 616-17

Kosygin, Aleksei, 477

Kramer, Hilton, 622

Kristol, Irving, 628

Kuchel, Thomas H., 376

Ku Klux Klan, 45, 353, 354, 361, 367, 369, 384, 386

Kunstler, William, 520

labor, 27, 33, 45-57, 96-100, 165, 213, 637

and antiwar movement, 408

on the assembly line, 271-2

and automation, 273, 274

and civil rights movement, 371, 377

Fair Deal measures for, 236

cool to left radicalism, 52-3

labor-liberal-left coalition, 118-20, 390, 399, 462, 632

participation in management, 565, 578

Southern California, 50, 603

as special interest group, 107

wartime, 184, 186-9, 453

women, 188, 453, 457

see also farm labor; strikes; unions Ladd, Everett Carll, 657

Ladies’ Home Journal, 447

La Follette, Philip, 68, 111, 114

La Follette, Robert, Sr., 14, 46, 68, 236, 416, 656

La Follette, Robert, Jr., 14, 68, 73, 94, 108, 117, 244

Laird, Melvin, 467

laissez-faire, 42, 560-1

Landon, Alfred M., 83, 84-5, 119, 126, 165

Langdon, Samuel, 532

Laning, Edward, 133

Laos, 342, 343, 418

Larson, Sheila, 599

Lasch, Christopher, 599

Lash, Joseph P., 9

Lasswell, Harold D., 7, 593

Latin America, 265, 328-32

Alliance for Progress, 328, 331, 336

poverty in, 303-4, 329, 330, 336

US interventionism in, 328, 330-2, 524

see also Central America; Monroe Doctrine

Lawrence, David, 107

leadership:

decline, 660-3, 671-2, 680-1

group-oriented participatory, in

movement politics, 358, 384, 395-6, 443-4, 455-6

see also intellectual leadership; moral leadership

League for Industrial Democracy, 392, 408

League of Nations, 10, 150, 152, 157, 170, 490, 545

League of Universal Brotherhood, 536

League of Women Voters, 433, 438, 659

Leahy, Adm. William, 206, 208

Leavitt, Helen, 573

Lebanon, 255, 525

Lee, Herbert, 380

Leff, Mark, 77

left wing, 51-4, 122-3, 408-9, 625-6, 628-32, 661-2

in elections: 1936, 84-5; 1972, 460-2

FDR and, 41, 42, 45, 70, 74, 117-18, 120

intellectuals, 394, 409, 462, 565, 625, 629-32

labor-liberal-left coalition, 118-20, 390, 399, 462, 632

see also liberalism; New Left; socialism

LeHand, “Missy,” 3

Lehman, Herbert, 21, 111, 287

Lekachman, Robert, 561

LeMay, Curtis E., 415

Lemke, William, 84, 85, 87

Lend-Lease program, 168-9, 496, 555

Lenin, Vladimir I., 51-2, 221, 565, 642

Leninism, Third World, 305, 336, 343, 421

Lennon, John, 432

Leo XIII, Pope, 57

Leonard, “Sugar Ray,” 609

Lerner, Max, 265, 269, 279, 282, 408, 533-4, 627

lesbianism, 450-1

Lessing, Doris, 454

Leuchtenburg, William E., 213

Levine, Meldon E., 532

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 624

Lewis, John (SNCC organizer), 361, 371

Lewis, John L. (labor leader), 33, 46, 55-6, 82, 107, 165, 187-8, 191, 661

and sit-down strikes of 1930s, 97-100

Lewis, Oscar, 569

Lewis, Sinclair, 137, 297

liberalism, liberals, 347, 371, 390, 408, 454, 625-6, 629-32, 652

accomplishments of, 629-30

coalitions across party lines, 70, 109

definition of freedom by, 666, 672

Democrats, 13, 15, 64, 73-4, 87, 109, 118-19, 319, 320, 322, 324, 326, 359, 389-90, 414, 466, 625, 629-30, 661-2; FDR, 5, 10, 13, 45, 73, 77-8, 111, 118-20; JFK, 374; in 1972 election, 460-2

divisions of 1980s among, 630-1

economic (Keynesian), 562

exhaustion of agenda of, 626, 630-2

intellectual weaknesses of, 120-4, 461-2, 531, 630, 679-80

labor-liberal-left coalition, 118-20, 390, 399, 462, 632

of Niebuhr, 293-4

Republicans, 70, 87, 109, 119, 466, 636

views on crime, 516, 519

liberation movements, 305, 342-4, 527

libertarianism, 88, 534, 627-9, 667, 671

liberty, individual, 88, 120-4, 131, 231, 266-7, 275, 296, 393, 635, 665-7

and equality, 125, 267, 637, 679-80; as competing values, 631, 679

feminist definitions of, 454

positive vs. negative, 121, 124, 666-7

right-wing definition of, 42, 123, 667, 672

Western tradition and sources of, 539-40

see also freedom; individualism

Liberty ships, 183-4

Libya, 574

Lichtenstein, Roy, 621

Liddy, G. Gordon, 500-1, 513

Life magazine, 276, 284, 427, 441, 579, 614

Lilienthal, David, 593

Lincoln, Abraham, 33, 87, 88, 196, 212, 213, 218, 251, 337, 348, 657, 666

shadow of, in civil rights struggle, 358, 371, 374, 376

Lindbergh, Charles A., 160, 165, 169

Lin Piao, 405, 475

Lippmann, Walter, 12, 19, 55, 123, 131, 190, 205, 283, 288-90, 291, 294, 593

and FDR, 20-1, 41

internationalism of, 165

and Johnson, 407, 412

on Nixon, 417

and Truman Doctrine, 234, 289

writings, 289-90

Lipsky, Richard, 610

Literary Digest, 55

literature, 141-6, 296-301, 615-20, 624

see also writers, writing

Little Rock, Ark., 322, 352

Litvinov, Maxim, 159, 178

Liuzzo, Viola, 384

Living Newspaper, FTP, 137

Livingston, Mary, 193-4

Lloyd George, David, 90

Lockheed bailout, 578

Lodge, Henry Cabot, Jr., 236, 246, 248

defeat by Kennedy, 312-13

Loeb, William, Jr., 377

Logsdon, John M., 585, 586

Lombard, Carole, 166

London:

Council of Foreign Ministers meetings, 226

Economic Conference (1933), 35-6, 153

Polish exile government, 206-7, 224

Lonely Crowd, The (Riesman), 279-80

Long, Breckinridge, 90

Long, Huey, 15-16, 20, 59-63, 70, 73, 78, 80, 84, 319

Long, Russell, 319

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, 251

Look magazine, 284, 454, 614

Lorde, Audre, 451, 453

Lorre, Peter, 194

Los Angeles, 602-3, 608

race riots: 1943, 189; 1965 (Watts), 397-8

Los Angeles Times, 398, 602, 608, 612

Lou, Trent, 657

Louis, Joe, 609

Lowell, Robert, 409

Lowndes County Freedom Organization, 386

loyalty program, 230-1, 239

Lubin, Isador, 287

Lublin government, 206-7

Luce, Clare Boothe, 243

Luce, Henry, 165, 276-7, 284, 593

Luce magazines, 243, 276, 284, 563

Lukas, J. Anthony, 500, 506

Luker, Kristin, 448

lunch counter sit-ins, 356-7, 366

Luther, Martin, 600

Lynd, Staughton, 407

Lyttle, Bradford, 391-2

McAdoo, William G., 11-12

McAlister, Elizabeth, 537

MacArthur, Douglas, 16, 203

in Korea, 241-2, 243

in World War II, 176, 198, 201, 205, 206, 225

McCarthy, Eugene, 412, 414, 530

McCarthy, Joseph R., 230, 244-6, 249-50, 251-3, 258, 296, 313

McCarthyism, 246, 296, 301, 313, 324, 391, 393, 395, 549

McCloy, John, 412

Maccoby, Michael, 550, 671

McCord, James, 500-1

McCormack, John, 389

McCormick, Robert R., 31, 154, 165

MacDonald, Allan J., 583

Macdonald, Cynthia, 618

McDonald, David J., 287

MacDonald, Ramsay, 36

Macdonald, Stuart, 543

MacDougall, Curtis, 283

MacDougall, Malcolm, 613

McElvaine, Robert, 660

McGill, Ralph, 353

McGovern, George, 415, 458, 461, 479, 481-2, 511, 530, 557

McGrory, Mary, 373

machine tool industry, 268

McKinley, William, 374

MacKinnon, Catherine, 535

McKissick, Floyd, 387

MacLeish, Archibald, 193, 289

McMahon, Audrey, 135

McNamara, Robert, 333, 343, 403, 408, 409, 410, 411, 425-6, 573, 577

McNary-Haugen bill (1927), 16, 64

McPherson, Aimee Semple, 603

McReynolds, James C, 72, 89, 92

McWilliams, Carey, 602

Madison, James, 633, 634, 646, 648

magazines, 284, 612, 614-15

black culture and politics, 399

feminist, 447

Magruder, Jeb Stuart, 500-1, 503, 510, 512-13

Mailer, Norman, 297, 300, 409, 617-18, 620

majority rule, 42, 88

Malamud, Bernard, 620

Malcolm X, 385-6, 388, 398, 399, 462

Malraux, André, 277

Manchester, William, 413

Manchester Union leader, 377

Manchuria, 170, 208, 225, 226, 240, 470

Manion, Clarence, 627

Mann, Thomas, 605

Mannheim, Karl, 275

Mansfield, Mike, 291, 389

Mantle, Burns, 136

Mao Tse-tung, 240, 241, 260, 337, 405, 454, 469, 470, 472, 473-4

Marcuse, Herbert, 275-6, 281, 599

Markham, Edwin, 304

Marlowe, Christopher, 132

Marsh, Reginald, 133, 138

Marshall, George C., 233, 240, 249-50, 593

Army Chief of Staff, 174, 178, 180, 206

Marshall, John, 88, 646, 651-2

Marshall Plan, 233, 235, 239, 265, 283, 295, 347, 496, 555

Marx, Groucho, 310

Marx, Karl, 269, 274, 275, 281, 350, 461, 564-5, 567

Marxism, 221, 277, 296, 454, 564-5, 616, 631

New Left, 409, 421

Niebuhr and, 292-3

Third World, 305, 336, 341, 343, 419

view of capitalism not valid for US, 48

Maslow, Abraham, 436, 455

Mass Culture, 622, 624

massive retaliation, policy of, 254, 286

materialism, 274, 275, 350, 431

New Left rejection of, 393

Mattachine Society, 450

Matthews, J. B., 252

Mauldin, Bill, 195

Maurois, André, 298

Maverick, Maury, 110-11

Maxwell, James Clerk, 542, 547

Mayer, Louis B., 605

May-Johnson bill, 548, 549

Mazlish, Bruce, 466

Medea, Andrea, 449

media, 281-5, 611-15, 646

coverage of feminists by, 441, 446

in election campaigns, 312, 324, 613

manipulation of, 246

Nixon and, 472-3, 495, 510-11

presidential use of, 495

as talent drain, 615

see also magazines; newspapers; press; radio; television

Medicare, 389

medicine, 541, 543

Mediterranean, World War II in, 196-8

Meese, Edwin, III, 654

Melville, Herman, 299, 673-4

Mencken, Henry L., 12, 17, 60, 99, 145

Mendel, Gregor, 269

Mendès-France, Pierre, 405

Menjou, Adolphe, 231

Mercer, Lucy, 9, 212

Mercury, Project, 579-81, 582

Meredith, James, 365, 370, 386-7, 398, 400

Merelman, Richard M., 597, 599

Merriam, Frank, 69

Merton, Robert K., 275

Mesta, Perle, 251

Methodist churches, 355, 594

Mexican-Americans, 306

Mexican American Women’s Association, 452

Mexico, 329-30

Meyer, Frank S., 627

middle class, 57, 278-9, 286

black, 314, 316

women, 436, 453, 459

Middle East, 265, 486-8, 526-7

Carter policy and Camp David, 525-6

Eisenhower policy, 255, 257

Six-Day War (1967), 486

Soviet policy, 265, 284-7, 488, 526-7

Yom Kippur War (1973), 487

Midway, battle of, 179-80, 182

migrant farm workers, 40, 49, 81, 141, 269, 315

migration, of poor peoples, 305-6

US blacks, 315, 385

military-industrial complex warning, 262

Mill, John Stuart, 600

Miller, Arthur, 297, 300-1, 624

Miller, David, 408

Miller, Jim, 421

Millet, Jean François, 304

Millett, Kate, 444-5, 450, 456

Mills, C. Wright, 394

Minimalism, 621, 623

minimum wage, 107, 559, 570, 639

state laws, 95

for women, 82

mining industry, 187-8, 264

Minneapolis, 1934

strike, 47-8

minority rights, 88

Miranda doctrine, 654

Miss America Pageant, 445-6

“missile gap,” 333-4

missiles, ballistic, 264, 334, 478, 529, 537

ICBMs, 259, 335, 478, 579

Mississippi, civil rights struggle in, 365

black voter registration, 378-80, 382

Freedom Democratic Party (1964), 380-2

“Freedom Summer,” 380, 384, 395

Mitchell, John, 479, 500-1, 513

Mitsuo, Fuchida, 174

Modernism, 623

“Mohawk Valley formula,” 100

Moley, Raymond, 13, 14, 17, 28, 35-6, 64, 74, 83, 110, 154

Molotov, Vyacheslav, 159, 206, 208, 211, 226, 260, 405

Mondale, Walter, 641

Mondrian, Piet, 621

monetarism, 562, 564

monetary policy, 35, 36, 72, 555

Monroe Doctrine, 150, 154, 172, 332

Montgomery bus boycott, 348-52

Montgomery Improvement Association, 350-1

Monthly Review, 564

Montoya, Joseph, 503-4

Moody, Anne, 372

moon landings, Apollo program, 581-2, 584-5

moral leadership, 293-4, 512, 522, 672

of FDR, 323-4, 648; exception, 218-19

JFK’s development of, 360, 374-5

Moral Majority, 627-8

Moreno, Luisa, 603

Morgan, Robin, 446

Morgan family and capitalism, 39-40, 60, 155

Morgenthau, Hans, 287, 288, 291-2, 294, 402, 499, 547-8, 551

Morgenthau, Henry, 28, 36, 45, 72, 101-2, 104, 112, 114, 133, 191, 214, 216, 219

internment of Japanese, 190

Morgenthau, Robert, 499

Morris, Aldon, 356

Morris, Robert, 623

Morris, William, 274

Morrison, Jim, 431

Morrow, Dwight, 329

Morse, Wayne, 291, 319, 403

Morion Thiokol, 550, 583

Moscow summit meetings:

Summit I (1972), 476-9, 485, 488

Summit III (1974), 488

Moses, Bob (SNCC), 379-80, 384, 407

Moses, Robert, 552

Mossadegh, Muhammad, 255

Motion Picture Association, 608

Movement for a Democratic Society, 432

Moyers, Bill, 410

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 373, 467, 567, 569

Ms. magazine, 439, 447, 615

Muhammad, Elijah, 385-6, 388, 398, 401

Mulder, Ronald, 77

Muller, Hermann Joseph, 269

Mumford, Lewis, 274, 574

Municipal Bankruptcy Act, 72

Murphy, Frank, 59, 99, 111, 112, 114

Murray, “Alfalfa Bill,” 11

Murray, Philip, 99-100, 107, 187

Murrow, Edward R., 285, 594

Music Corporation of America (MCA), 607

Muskie, Edmund, 461, 499

Mussolini, Benito, 7, 63, 79, 105, 137, 149-50, 157-8, 162, 198, 223

Muste, A. J., 391

MX missile, 529, 537

My Lai massacre, 420

Myrdal, Gunnar, 359, 360

Nader, Ralph, 575, 641

Nagasaki, 225, 408

Naked and the Dead, The (Mailer), 297, 617

NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 579-80, 583-6

Nash, Diane, 363, 380

Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 257

Nation, The, 114, 124, 409

National Abortion Rights League, 448

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 189, 321, 349-50, 357, 365, 371, 387-8, 399

National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), 102, 272-3

National Black Feminist Organization, 451

National Citizens Political Action Committee, 234

National Coalition of American Nuns, 458

National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, 105

National Conference for a New Politics, 443

National Conference of Puerto Rican Women, 452

National Conference on Black Power, 399

National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam, 408

National Council of Churches, 594

National Council of Negro Women, 371

national debt, 72, 89, 191, 633

National Emergency Council, 115

National Farmers’ Holiday Association, 65

National Football League, 611

National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities, 389, 639

National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)

and Administration (NRA), 27, 32-4, 37, 39-42, 62, 75, 77, 122, 213-14

Section 7(a) union provisions, 33, 46, 48, 55, 75, 96

Supreme Court invalidation of, 72, 73, 74, 89, 215

wages-and-hours provisions of, 32

nationalism, Third World, 255, 304-5

nationalization, 127, 560, 564-5

National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act (1935), 75, 90, 95-5, 107

National Labor Relations Board, 112

national liberation movements, 305, 342-7, 527

Vietnam, 342, 403, 419

National Mobilization Committee (Mobe), 417

New Mobe, 423

National Organization for Women (NOW), 437-41, 443, 448, 449, 450, 454-5, 457

National Progressive League for Roosevelt, 73

National Republic (journal), 132

National Resources Planning Board, 130-1, 191, 214

National Review (journal), 627, 628

National Science Foundation, 553

national security, 154, 158, 333, 666

National Union for Social Justice, 59, 79

National War Labor Board (NWLB), 186-7, 188

National Welfare Rights Organization, 570

National Women’s Conference (1977), 452

National Women’s Party, 376, 438

National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC), 439, 457-8

National Youth Administration (NYA), 104, 214, 318, 390

Nation of Islam, 385-6, 398

Native Son (Wright), 144-5

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 246, 265, 289, 488

Nazism, see fascism; Germany, Nazi

NBC (National Broadcasting Company), 60, 63, 285

Near, Holly, 451

Nehru, Jawaharlal, 338, 339-41

Neighborhood Youth Corps, 566

Nelson, Donald, 185

Neo-Expressionism, 623

Netherlands, 162, 295

Neuman, W. Russell, 611

neutrality legislation, 1930s, 154, 156

New Deal, 21, 23-7, 30-5, 37, 58, 62, 70, 107-8, 121, 238, 320, 347, 570, 629, 631, 656

banking reforms, 26, 40, 41, 75, 213

business opposition to, 41-5, 64, 71-3, 102-3; and “class war,” 41-54

blacks and, 39, 81, 358-9

Congress and, see Congress, US conservation programs, 25, 26, 40, 76, 213, 214

cultural programs, 132-41

dismantled by Reagan policies, 639

as election issue: 1936, 80-6, 91; 1938, 108-11

evaluation of, 128-31, 213-15, 648

Fair Deal as extension of, 236

farm legislation, 25, 34, 40-1, 49, 64-6, 72, 76, 81, 82, 107, 122, 213

“First,” 23-7, 30, 32, 62, 214

“fourth,” 215

industrial and labor measures, 27, 32-4, 37, 39-40, 41-2, 72, 76, 89, 95-6, 106-7, 122, 213

intellectual incongruities, 120-5, 129

job procurement, 25, 27, 34, 76, 81

misperceived as socialism, 43, 45, 102, 123, 128

mortgage and housing subsidies, 25, 26, 72, 214

problems of, 39-41, 63-6, 68, 112-13, 114-16, 125

public utilities legislation, 26, 34, 40, 76, 213-14

public works, 34, 37, 81, 214

railroad legislation, 26-7, 72, 73

relief programs, 25, 34, 37, 40, 76, 81, 134, 213-14, 568

right-wing conservative reaction to, 41-3, 45, 71-3, 105, 132

“Second,” 70, 75-8, 214

securities legislation, 25-6, 40, 122

Social Security, 75, 77, 78, 191

success prevented by American system of government, 115, 120, 125-6, 129

Supreme Court invalidations of, 72-3, 74, 82, 89-90, 91, 652

“third,” 214

youth programs, 76, 104, 214

Newfield, Jack, 414, 429

New Freedom, 122, 127

New Frontier, 374, 461, 629

Newhouse, Samuel I., 282

New Left, 393-4, 408-9, 421-2, 426, 431-2, 441-3, 455, 456, 460

Newman, Barnett, 621

New Nationalism, 127

New Republic, The (journal), 12, 140

New Right, 448, 626

Newspaper Guild, 137

newspapers, 281-3, 611-12

conformity of 1950s, 282-3

consolidation of, 282, 612

partisan political influences, 282, 614

production of, 281-2

Newsweek magazine, 110, 446, 612

Newton, Huey P., 399

Newton, Sir Isaac, 544-5

New York American, 31

New York Art Strike (1970), 622-3

New York City, 552, 578, 617-20, 634

arts and artists, 620-4, 664-5

book publishing, 615-17, 620

Federal Theatre Project, 136-8

New Yorker, The, 512

New York Herald Tribune, 93, 96, 202, 614

“New York intellectuals,” 616-17

New York magazine, 614

New York Review of Books, 409

New York Times, The, 9, 49, 237, 262, 331, 478, 497, 546, 584, 612, 614, 617, 622, 643

Book Review, 616

and Pentagon Papers, 425-6

Nicaragua, 328, 330, 633, 644

Niebuhr, Reinhold, 124-5, 205-277, 288, 292-4, 350, 401, 522, 536, 593

Nimitz, Adm. Chester, 180, 198, 201, 205, 206, 211

Nixon, E. D., 349-50

Nixon, Patricia, 473, 476, 485

Nixon, Richard M., 492-3, 624, 644, 681

anticommunism of, 230, 244, 418, 468, 480; Hiss case, 232, 468

background of, 604

character contradictions in, 465-6, 494, 508; the “new” Nixon, 417, 469, 637

Checkers speech of, 250, 252, 511

income-tax fraud allegation, 504

penchant for secrecy, 467, 471, 476, 492

post-resignation life of, 513-14

as President, 416-20, 422-6, 462, 466-88, 560-1, 625, 630, 651; China policy, 468-9, 470-5, 488; decision leaps, 559-60, 561; a disappointment to conservatives, 557, 625; domestic programs, 466-7, 479, 567; economic policy, 554-7, 561, 571; “enemies list,” 499, 504; foreign policy, 467-88, 491, 492-4, 496, 524; and the media, 472-3, 495, 510-11; and minority rights issues, 466; resignation, 488, 508-9, 558; Russian policy, 476-9, 485-8, 493; second inaugural, 484; siege mentality, 499, 503; Supreme Court appointments, 506, 652-3; and Vietnam War, 417-20, 422-6, 475-6, 478-84, 493-4

presidential candidacies: 1960, 262, 326, 331, 360, 468, 555, 637; 1968, 415-16, 555, 637; 1972. 460-1, 479, 511, 557

as Vice President, 255, 257, 313; urges A-bomb at Dien Bien Phu, 255, 342, 465; urges invasion of Cuba, 331

vice-presidential candidacy, 250, 252

and Watergate, 500-14, 593; impeachment, 503, 506-7, 511; pardon, 498, 513-14, 522, 558 (see also Watergate affair)

Nobel Prizes, 541, 572, 643

Noble, David F., 264, 551

Noble, Robert, 604

Nol, Lon, 424

nonviolence, 396, 421, 536

in civil rights movement, 352, 357, 363, 364, 366-8, 383, 400; abandoned, 386, 388, 398, 400

see also civil disobedience

Normandy, 1944

invasion of, 200-1

Norris, George W., 14, 26, 61, 73, 91, 190-1

North:

black migration to, 315, 385

civil rights battle in, 384, 385-6, 388, 397-401

race riots, 397-8, 400

North Africa, World War II in, 180, 196-7

Allied invasion of 1943, 178, 181

North Korea, 240-2

see also Korean War

North Vietnam, 402-6, 410-11, 418-19, 422-5, 472, 475, 479-84, 488, 489, 493-4, 642

China and, 405, 472, 476, 529

Norway, Nazi invasion of, 161

NSC-68 memorandum, 222

nuclear submarines, 264, 268, 391, 478

nuclear war danger, 256, 486-7

Prevention Agreement, 1973, 485-6

nuclear weapons, 222, 239-40, 256-7, 264, 391, 477-8

China in possession of, 485

Reagan on, 643

Test Ban Treaty (1963), 390, 392

US superiority, 259, 264, 265, 333-4

US-USSR parity, 527

see also arms control; arms race; atom bomb; hydrogen bomb

Nye, Gerald P., 33, 155

occupational safety and health, 466

Ochs, Phil, 428

O’Connell, William, Cardinal, 58

O’Connor, John, 111, 118

O’Daniel, “Pappy,” 319

Odets, Clifford, 146

Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), 566

Office of Facts and Figures, 193

Office of Price Administration, 556, 562

Office of War Information (OWI), 193-4

off our backs (newspaper), 447

Oglesby, Carl, 421

oil, 255, 319, 329, 330-1, 574-5, 644

prices, 558, 574, 641

Okies, 49, 141-3

Okinawa, 206, 211, 224, 675

Okun, Arthur, 561

Oldenburg, Claes, 621

Oliphant, Herman, 102

Olivier, Laurence, 285

Olson, Culbert L., 604

Olson, Floyd, 48, 68

Omaha Action, 391

O’Mahoney, Joseph, 94

Omnibus Housing Act (1965), 389

O’Neill, Eugene, 624

O’Neill, Thomas P. “Tip,” 559, 640

O’Neill, William L., 431

OPEC (Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries), 558, 574

“Open Skies” proposal, 257

Oppenheim, Dennis, 623

Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 269, 270, 288-9, 290, 549

Organization of Afro-American Unity, 386

Ormandy, Eugene, 484

Orwell, George, 418

Oshinsky, David, 251

Our Bodies, Ourselves (handbook), 447

Oz, Amos, 618, 619, 620

Ozick, Cynthia, 619

Pacem in Terris (encyclical), 536

Pacific Ocean:

US bases in, 264-5

war danger in, 168, 170-1, 172-4

war in, 174-80, 196, 198, 201-2, 206, 207, 224-5; island hopping, 201, 206, 211

pacifists, 536

1930s, 154, 156

postwar, 234-5, 391-2, 408, 545-6

Paine, Thomas, 296, 634

Pakistan, 265, 340, 471

Palestine Liberation Organization, 592

Palestinians, 525

Paley, Grace, 618

Panama, 330

Panama Canal Treaty, 524-5, 526-7

Paris:

American writers celebrated in, 297-8

summit plan aborted (1960), 261-2

Vietnam peace talks, 481-4

Parks, Rosa, 348-9, 351-2, 375

Parsons, Talcott, 67

Parsons, Louella, 606-7

Partisan Review (journal), 409

party system, 116-18, 125-6, 491, 646-7, 655-7

four-party actuality within, 119, 126, 236; and civil rights legislation, 321-2, 376-8

overlapping of interests and groups, 119, 126, 320, 376

party shifts and reconstitution, 656-7

reform proposals, 648-9, 650

see also third parties

Pasadena school desegregation case, 653

“Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teachings and the U.S. Economy,” 537-8, 668-9

Patterson, James, 109

Patterson, John, 362

Patterson, Robert “Tut,” 354

Patton, Gen. George, 216

Paul VI, Pope, 484

Pauling, Linus, 392, 543

Pavese, Cesare, 298

Peace Corps, 390

peaceful coexistence, 260

peace movement, 391-2, 401, 418, 443, 460, 536, 659

self-immolations, 408

sexism protested in, 442, 443

see also anti-nuclear movement; anti-Vietnam War movement Peale, Norman Vincent, 326

Pearl Harbor, 174-6, 177, 179, 192, 304, 338

Peck, Jim, 361

Peck, George N., 154

Pegler, Westbrook, 123

Peirce, Charles, 125, 658

Peirce, Neal, 318, 558

Pells, Richard, 278

PEN International Congress (1986), 617-20

Penn Central Railroad, 555

Pentagon Papers, 425-6

Pepper, Claude, 106

Percy, Walker, 615

Perkins, Frances, 23, 28, 29, 31, 34, 83, 101, 102, 112, 114, 130, 434, 593

and strikes, 47, 99

Perón, Juan and Evita, 328

Pershing, Gen. John Joseph, 543

Persian Gulf, 644

Peru, 329, 330

Pélain, Henri Philippe, 163

Peter, Paul and Mary (rock group), 428

Phantom Public, The (Lippmann), 289

Philippines, 265

World War II: US loss of, 176-7, 178; US recapture of, 202, 206

Phillips, Clarence, 520

Phillips, Kevin, 637

Phillips, William, 154

physics, 268, 541, 544-7, 549, 553

Pickering, William, 578

Piehl, Mel, 536

Pioneer planetary probes, 582

Pittman, Key, 36, 158

Planned Parenthood-World Population, 448

planning, comprehensive national and regional, 130-1, 214-15

social, Dewey on, 121

TVA as example of, 131, 316-17

see also economic planning

plea bargaining, 517-18, 519

Plessy v. Ferguson, 314, 322

“Plumbers” operation, 499, 504

PM (newspaper), 283

Podell, Janet, 610

Podgorny, Nikolai, 477

Poland, 149, 151, 217, 404

Nazi and Soviet invasion of, 159, 160

postwar, 206, 223, 224, 257-8, 476; Solidarity, 644; Soviet domination, 210-11, 221, 226, 229; Yalta discussions on, 206-7, 208, 211

Polenberg, Richard, 193

Pollock, Jackson, 621

Poor, Henry Varnum, 133

population increase, global, 304, 329

populism, 63, 655

conservative, 626, 627-8, 629

of Father Coughlin, 58-9

of Huey Long, 59-63

pornography, 449, 534-5, 635, 654

Port Huron Statement, 393, 394, 397, 462

Postmodernism, 624

Potsdam Conference (1945), 224-5, 226

Potter, Paul, 407

poverty, 122, 539-40, 565-71, 629, 668-9

of blacks, 570-1; in South, 313-16; in urban North, 385

and crime, 516, 518, 568-9, 571

cultural view (subculture), 568-9, 571

definition of, 567-8

Depression, 19, 31, 39-41, 58, 648; New Deal programs, 25, 27, 34-5, 40-1, 76, 81; 1937-39

recession, 103-4

intellectual failure in understanding, 567-71, 668-9

1930s literature of, 141-5

of 1980s, 633, 641

reduced in wartime, 184-5, 188-9

in South, 354, 567; among blacks, 313-16; among whites, 316-18

structural/environmental view, 569, 570

Third World, 303-5, 669; India, 303, 305, 339; Latin America, 303-4, 329, 330, 336

War on (LBJ), 516, 566-7, 568

Powdermaker, Hortense, 603, 606

Powell, Lewis F., Jr., 506, 653

power:

as exercised in foreign policy, 291-2, 496

vs. moral leadership, 512, 522

Niebuhrian realism, 125, 292-3, 522

presidential use and abuse of, 495-6, 503, 510-12

Powers, Francis Gary, 261

Powers, John A., 580-1

pragmatism, 125, 278, 292, 548, 559, 661, 671

as self-serving doctrine, 658

Pravda, 229, 491, 523

Presbyterian Church, 594

presidency, 647-8, 651, 655

executive privilege, 505-6

“imperial,” 510, 511, 646

veto, 646, 647

“presidential” parties, Democratic and

Republican, 119, 126

and civil rights legislation, 321

press, 281, 283, 611

prior restraint, 426

see also media; newspapers

prices:

controls, 560; Nixon freeze, 556;

postwar, 230; World War II, 556

inflation: 1970s, 531, 554-5, 1980s, 638; postwar, 230; World War II, 187

New Deal manipulation of, 35, 36

Priestley, J. B., 603

primary system, 117, 647, 662

Princeton University, 290, 545

printing innovations, 281-2

prior restraint, 426

prisons, 519-20

Pritchett, Laurie, 364

“pro-choice” groups, 448

production, 271

agricultural, 268

industrial, 266; during Depression, 30-1; postwar, 264; wartime, 182-4, 186, 199

Profiles in Courage (Kennedy), 343, 677

Progressive Labor party, 421

Progressive party (T. Roosevelt’s), 46, 118-19, 236, 416, 656

Wisconsin, 1934, 68, 108, 117

Progressive party (Wallace’s), 235-7, 238

progressivism, 7, 13, 14, 16, 41, 68, 122, 236, 646-7

Prohibition, 5, 10, 16, 25

property rights, 43, 88, 90, 97, 667

Protestantism, 57, 279, 594-5

in Boston, anti-Irish, 307, 308

China missionaries, 470

peace movement, 536

Protestant magazine, 282

Proxmire, William, 577

public facilities and transport,

desegregation of, 315, 321, 348-52, 356-8, 361, 364, 370, 378

Public Interest, The (journal), 627, 628

Public Opinion (Lippmann), 289

public-opinion polling, 153, 291, 511

Public Philosophy, The (Lippmann), 289-90, 294

Public Utility Holding Company Act, 76, 214

public works, 130, 566

art programs, New Deal, 134, 135

Depression era, 34, 37, 81, 214

Public Works Administration (PWA), 34, 81

Pyle, Ernie, 194-5

Quakers, 391, 396, 536

Quebec meeting of FDR and Churchill (1943), 198, 206

Quemoy and Matsu islands, 255, 468

quota systems, 653

Rabi, Isador Isaac, 269

race riots, 189, 397-8, 400, 554, 574

racial discrimination:

against blacks, 313-16, 321-3, 348-58, 378-84, 439, 610; in education, 236, 314, 321-3, 365, 370, 278, 653; in employment, 188-9, 315; outlawed, 378; pay, 189; public facilities, 315, 321, 348-52, 356-8, 361, 364, 370; voting, 321-3, 355, 357, 366, 371, 378-84; wartime, 188-9, 371; women, 189, 452

against Japanese, wartime, 189-90

racism, 94, 111, 113, 319, 353-5, 358-9, 367, 444, 631

Radical Women (Feminists), 443-4, 449

radio, 59, 63, 285, 303, 612, 614

FDR’s use of, 31, 63, 82, 86

Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, 523

Rafferty, Max, 627

Railroad Pension Act, 72, 73

railroads, 16, 26-7, 555

Rainbow Coalition (FDR term), 199, 211, 217, 220

Rand, Ayn, 600

Randolph, A. Philip, 371

Random House, 139

rape, 449, 534

Raskob, John J., 10, 14, 42-3, 81

Rather, Dan, 614

Rauh, Joseph, 381

Rauschenberg, Robert, 621

Rauschenbusch, Walter, 292, 350, 352, 461

Rayburn, Sam, 26, 76, 203, 325, 376

Reader’s Digest, 202, 284, 311, 627, 628

Reagan, Nancy Davis, 607

Reagan, Ronald, 430, 474, 558, 624, 636, 638, 656

anticommunism of, 607, 642-4

background and career, 606-7, 636, 643

as ideologue, 636, 643-4

as President, 513, 540, 618, 636, 638-45, 655, 672; budget deficits, 633, 640; defense buildup, 639, 640; domestic policy, 639-42; economic policy, 639-41; foreign policy, 537, 538, 642-5; and Iran-Contra affair, 644-5; personal popularity, 641; speeches, 600, 636, 642, 644; Star Wars, 585-6; Supreme Court appointments, 654, 667; tax policy, 639, 640, 641-2

as President-elect, 624-5

presidential candidacies: 1976, 524, 625, 637-8; 1980, 529, 530, 638; 1984, 641, 644

as unifier of conservatives, 628-9, 636-8

Reagan Administration, 535, 537, 585

loss of internal control, 633, 644-5, 651

Reagan Revolution, 630, 639, 645

Reagon, Bernice, 364

Realpolitik, 159, 216, 217, 223, 465, 488

recessions, economic:

1937-39, Roosevelt, 101-4, 114, 128, 130, 214

1950s, Eisenhower, 555

1980s, Reagan, 562, 640-1

Reconstruction, 88, 313, 355, 646

Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), 28, 48, 318

Red Menace (Red Scare), 47, 50

see also anticommunism; communism, fears of

Redstockings, 444

Reed, James A., 122

Reedy, George F., 246, 510

Refregier, Anton, 135

Regents of University of California v. Bakke, 653

Rehnquist, William H., 652, 654

Reich, Robert B., 630

Reinhardt, Ad, 621

religion, 594-6, 601

degendering of, 457-8

freedom of, 178, 281, 666

see also churches

reorganization bill of 1937, 105-7, 115, 131

Republican party, 358, 462, 629-30, 636-8, 646, 655-6, 663

anti-New Deal, 43, 83, 132

“compact majorities” of, 87, 120

congressional gains: 1938, 111; 1942, 191

congressional majorities of: 1947-48, 230; 1953-4, 253, 285; 1981-82

in Senate, 629, 639

“congressional” vs. “presidential,” 119, 126, 236, 238, 247, 320, 558, 678; and civil rights legislation, 321, 376-8

conventions of: 1936, 83; 1940, 163-4; 1944, 203; 1948, 236; 1952, 247-8; 1960, 326; 1964, 381; 1968, 415

cracking of Solid South, 250-1, 382, 460

economic laissez-faire policies, 42, 560

influence in newspaper industry, 282, 284

liberalization of processes, 649

moderates, liberals, progressives in, 14, 70, 87, 109, 119, 320, 466, 636, 637, 641; overlap with Democratic party, 119, 126, 320, 466

Old Guard-moderate split in, 109, 119, 126, 236, 245, 246-8, 250, 253, 286

Reagan and, 636-8

reconstitution of, 657

right-wing conservatives of, 119, 120, 258, 320, 466, 558, 560, 636-8, 641, 657

Southern Democrats’ coalition with, 132, 191, 466, 638, 640

see also elections and campaigns Republic Steel Corporation, 100

research and development (R&D), 267-8, 269-70, 542-3

Reston, James, 262

Reuther, Victor, 573

Reuther, Walter, 187, 273, 287, 301, 381, 573, 661

Revenue Acts:

of 1935 (wealth tax), 76, 77, 78, 128

of 1942, 191-2

Review of Radical Political Economy, 564

revolution, 337-8, 348

civil rights struggle as, 361-6, 386-8

Kennedy’s inaugural words on, 326-7, 328, 335

Third World movements, 305, 335-6, 337-44, 419, 527

Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), 421-2

Revolution in the Revolution? (Debray), 336

Reynaud, Paul, 162

Reynolds, Quentin, 202

Reza Pahlevi, Shah of Iran, 255, 530

Rhee, Syngman, 240-1, 254

Rhodes, Cecil, 277

Rhodes, John J., 508

rhythm and blues (R&B), 427

Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 159, 176

Ribicoff, Abraham, 415

Rice, Elmer, 136, 137

Rich, Adrienne, 451

Richardson, Elliot L., 505, 512

Riesman, David, 279-81, 599

“right-to-lifers,” 448

right wing, 123, 132, 466, 625-9, 656

Christian, 628

credo and values of, 42

economic laissez-faire, 42, 560, 627-9

FDR denounced by, 41-5, 71-3

intellectualism, 625-8

Reagan and, 636-8, 642-4

resurgence, 462, 558, 624-6

and women’s issues: abortion, 448; ERA, 458

see also conservatism; New Right

Ritchie, Albert, 11

Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 560

Roberts, Owen J., 95

Robeson, Paul, 231, 594

Robinson, Joe, 20, 24, 94-5

Robinson, Ruby Doris Smith, 386

Roche, John P., 408, 409

Rockefeller, John D., 140

Rockefeller, Nelson A., 326, 415, 468, 520, 558, 625, 637, 657

rock ’n’ roll, 427-8, 429-32

Rodino, Peter, 506-7

Roe v. Wade, 448, 653, 654

Rogers, Will, 31, 78

Rogers, William P., 467, 471, 473, 476-7

Rohatyn, Felix, 633

Rolling Stones (rock group), 430

Roman Catholicism, 57, 123, 205, 536-8, 594

and abortion, 448

bishops’ “Pastoral Letter,” 537-8, 668-9

Boston Irish, 306-9

as 1960 election issue, 324, 325

peace stance of, 484, 536-7

Rommel, Gen. Erwin, 180, 181, 200

Roosevelt, Anna, 4, 205, 212

Roosevelt, Eleanor, 3-4, 7-10, 11-12, 13, 23, 83, 113, 210, 214, 219, 234-5, 333, 433-4, 593, 676, 677, 678

and FDR’s death, 212, 222

influence in FDR’s presidency, 29, 34, 36, 338, 546; as spokesperson, 64, 164

postwar role of, 235, 236, 238, 277, 286; as leader and conscience of Democrats, 287-8, 325-6; at UN, 235, 339; in women’s issues, 433-4, 438

social conscience of, 8, 10, 28, 113

support for the arts, 133, 135, 136, 13, 139

trip to Asia, 339

Roosevelt, Elliott, 3-4

Roosevelt, Franklin D., 21, 593, 606, 656

background and education.6-8, 44, 152

brain trust of, 13-14, 28

charges of communism and fascism against, 43, 44-5, 81-2, 85, 112, 204-5

charges of dictatorship against, 43, 105-6

and Churchill, 38, 161, 171, 177-8, 195, 217, 338-9, 341-2

death of, 212

early political career of, 8-10, 152, 271

Governor of New York, 10, 19-20, 662

Huey Long and, 15-16, 60, 61-2, 78, 80

humanitarianism of, 29, 215

ill health of, 204-5, 208-9, 210

inaugurations of: 1933, 22-3; 1937, 92

an internationalist, 152, 155

leadership of, 12, 27-8, 55, 70-1, 73-5, 115-16, 120, 216, 222, 648, 661; intellectual failings in, 28, 29-30, 35, 63-4, 129-30, 216; lacking in foreign policy of 1930s, 154-7

as party leader, 116-19, 656; fails in pro-New Deal realignment in 1938 elections, 108-11, 117; goal of truly progressive party, 118-19

personality of, 3, 215-16, 217-18

political touch and timing of, 28, 30-2, 63, 86, 126, 165, 215-16, 217

as President, 293, 314, 318-19, 329, 347, 466, 641, 651; administrative style, 114-16, 120; and atom bomb, 223, 224, 545-6; and blacks, 113, 117, 321, 359, 371; cabinet of, 23-4, 112, 163, 223, 234, 318; and Congress (after 1936), 93-6, 104-7, 108-11, 112-13, 116, 126, 132, 135, 155-6, 158-9, 162, 191-2, 210; decision-making style, 27-30, 34-5, 75; domestic policy, see New Deal; economic and fiscal planning, 130-1, 214-15, 561; “economic bill of rights,” 16, 202-3, 276-7, 344, 666; evaluation and criticism, 126-31, 212-19; federal spending vs. budget balancing dilemma, 35, 64, 79, 102-3, 112, 130, 215, 374; fireside chats, 31, 104, 109, 176, 216; “First Hundred Days,” 23-7, 30, 32, 62; first term, 23-45, 47, 48, 63-79, 86, 214; foreign policy, 35-7, 149-57, 158-74, 205-12, 234, 290, 328, 338-9, 341-2, 490, 524; Four Freedoms, 203, 266, 276, 281, 666; fourth term, 205-9, 210-12; and independence for India and Indochina, 178, 208, 338-9, 341-2; moral failure in Nisei relocation and Holocaust, 218-19; 1938 spending bill, 104, 128, 214; and the press, 31-2, 82, 283; press conferences, 31-2, 43, 73, 93; quoted on “dole,” 568; Realpolitik, 159, 216, 217, 223; reorganization bill, 105-6, 115, 131; right-wing business community critics of, 41-5, 71-3, 101-3; and “Roosevelt recession” of 1937-39, 101-4, 114, 128, 130, 214; “Second Hundred Days,” 70, 75-8; second term, 87-96, 99-120, 130-1, 132, 149-65, 214, 632; support for the arts, 132-3, 135, 139; and Supreme Court, 71-4, 87-96, 321; Supreme Court packing plan, 93-6, 105, 118; third term, 165-78, 180-2, 185-6, 190-3, 195-200, 202-5, 215; “turn to the left,” 70, 77, 118, 218; and union strikes, 47, 48-9, 99-100, 107; views of Asian leaders on, 337-8; wages-and-hours bill, 106, 107; war leader, 216-17, 495 (see also subentry below: and World War II)

as President-elect, 19-21, 26

presidential candidacies, 661; 1932, 3-6, 10-18, 662, 676; 1936, 79-86, 87, 91, 117-18; 1940, 161, 163, 164-5; 1944, 203-5

public opinion of, 37, 58-9, 63, 81, 108

and Stalin, 198, 207-8, 210-11, 217

and Truman, 204, 223

and World War II, 174-8, 180-2, 185-6, 190, 195-200, 216-17, 222, 402-3; aid to Britain, 161, 162, 164, 166-70; at Casablanca, 195, 196; pledge to stay out, 160, 161, 162, 166-7, 170 prewar policy in Pacific, 170-1, 172-4; at Teheran, 195, 198-9; at Yalta, 205-9, 252-3

Roosevelt, Franklin D., Jr., 4, 24

Roosevelt, James, 4, 22, 165

Roosevelt, John, 3-4, 24

Roosevelt, Sara Delano, 6, 7, 9, 18, 166

Roosevelt, Theodore, 7-8, 9, 40, 72, 87, 88, 127, 217, 218, 219, 330, 600

and foreign affairs, 330, 490, 642-3

progressivism of, 14, 41, 646; and

desertion of his party (1912), 73, 118-19, 236, 247

Square Deal, 7, 152, 359

Roosevelt, Theodore, Jr., 20

Roper, Daniel C, 82, 101, 112

Rosenberg, Nathan, 267

Rosenblatt, Roger, 636

Rosenman, Samuel, 3-4, 11, 157, 192

Rosie the Riveter myth, 188

Rossiter, Clinton, 123, 626

Rostow, Walt W., 343, 403, 426

Rothko, Mark, 621

Rovere, Richard, 244

Rowan, Carl, 314-15

rubber industry, 1930s, 49, 97, 98, 188

Ruckelshaus, William D., 505

Rudolph, Frederick, 397

Rural Electrification Administration, 191

Rusk, Dean, 343, 403

Russell, Bertrand, 546

Russell, John, 621

Russell, Richard, 250, 319-20, 325, 376-7

Russian Revolution, 221

Rustin, Bayard, 352, 381

Rutherford, Lucy Mercer, 9, 212

Ryan, Paddy, 307

Sabin, Albert, 543

Sacco-Vanzetti case, 140

Sadat, Anwar el-, 525-6

Safire, William, 470

Sakharov, Andrei D., 523

Sale, Kirkpatrick, 421

Salinger, J. D., 297, 300

Salk, Jonas F., 543

SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), 477-9

SALT II, 523, 528-9, 645

Saltonstall, Leverett, 111

Samuelson, Paul, 561

Sandino, Augusto, 328

SANE (National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), 392

San Francisco, 430

Coit Tower mural, 134

general strike of 1934, 46-7

UN organizing conference, 209, 211, 223

Santana (rock group), 427

Sargent, James, 35

Saroyan, William, 605

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 298, 394

Saturday Evening Post, The, 284, 614

“Saturday Night Massacre,” 505, 507

Saturday Review of Literature, 21

Saudi Arabia, 574

Savio, Mario, 395-6, 397

Schaar, John, 396

Scherman, Harry, 594

Schine, David, 251

Schlafly, Phyllis, 458, 627

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 278, 287, 328, 340, 366, 369-70, 495, 658

cited: on FDR, 11, 114; on John Kennedy, 360, 370; on Norman Thomas, 53 Schlesinger, James R., 489

Schneider, William, 658

Schoenberg, Arnold, 605

school busing, 653

school prayer, 628

schools, 596-7, 663-5

curriculum, 597, 628, 663

desegregation of, 236, 321-3, 370, 378; Brown v. Board of Ed., 321-2, 347, 596, 651; Little Rock, 322, 352; 1970s Supreme Court decisions, 653; Plessy v. Ferguson (separate but equal), 314, 322

Schulberg, Budd, 605

Schuman, Frederick L., 513

Schumpeter, Joseph, 267, 347-8

Schurz, Carl, 625

Schuster, Jack H., 664

science, 267-8, 541-7, 551, 572

education and literacy, 553

political fragmentation of, 546, 547-50

pure vs. applied, 269-70, 542

Science: Servant or Master? (Morgenthau), 547-8

scientific management, 271, 280, 550

Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Morgenthau), 291

Scott, Hugh, 508-9

Screen Actors Guild (SAG), 605, 607

Seale, Bobby George, 399

Securities and Exchange Commission, 77, 89

securities regulation, 25-6, 40, 122

Seeger, Pete, 428

Seeman, Melvin, 275

segregation and desegregation, 348, 370-1

Kennedy measures, 370-1

public facilities and transportation, 315, 321, 348-52, 356-8, 361, 364, 370

rural South, 313-16

Southern post-Brown racist laws, 354-5 see also schools

Selective Service Act, 165

Sellers, Cleveland, 384

Selma, Ala., civil rights march, 382-4

Selznick, Lewis J., 601

semiconductor electronics, 542-3

Senate, US, 647, 654, 655

Army-McCarthy hearings, 251-2, 258

and court-packing plan of FDR, 93-6

Democratic majorities in: 1935-36, 37; 1937-38, 87; 1939-40, 111; 1949-50, 238; 1951-52, 245; 1955-56, 320; 1965-66, 389; Nixon/Ford years, 479, 555, 558

direct election amendment, 646-7

8-year term proposal, 650

filibuster rule, 321, 322, 323, 360, 376-7, 647

investigation of munitions industry, 155

isolationism in, 154, 155-6, 158-9

Republican gains in: 1938, 111; 1942, 191

Republican majorities in: 1947-48, 230; 1953-54, 253, 285; 1981-82,629, 639, 641

treaty ratification power, 491, 495, 645-6, 648, 650; Panama Treaty, 525; SALT II abandoned, 529, 645

Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 291

Senate Judiciary Committee, 323

Senate Watergate Committee, 502, 503-5

Seventeenth Amendment, 646

sex discrimination, 433, 439-43, 454, 459, 618, 635, 646

against black women, 189, 452

civil rights bill of 1964, 376, 378, 437

in credit, 439

in education, 433, 439

in employment, 81, 188, 433, 437, 439, 446-7, 457

outlawed, 378, 437

in pay, 81, 82, 188

sexual customs and mores, 533-5, 569, 628

Sexual Politics (Millett), 456

Shanghai Communiqué (1972), 474

Shapley, Harlow, 269

sharecropping, 40, 49, 66, 81, 314

Share Our Wealth plan, 60, 62

Shaw, George Bernard, 301

Shays’s rebellion, 88, 673

Shcharansky, Anatoly, 523

Shepard, Alan B., Jr., 579-80

Sherrod, Charles, 364

Sherwood, Robert, 21

Shils, Edward, 278

Shimabukuro, Stanley, 189-90

shipbuilding, wartime, 183-4

Shirer, William, 150, 594

Short, Dewey, 132

Shouse, Jouett, 42-3

Shriver, Sargent, 390, 458, 461, 521, 566

Shultz, George, 617-18

Shuttlesworth, Fred, 356, 367-8

Sicily, Allied invasion of, 197-8

Sidey, Hugh, 560

Sihanouk, Prince Norodom, 424

Silent Spring (Carson), 389

Silk, Leonard, 555

Silone, Ignazio, 277

Simon, John, 621

Simon, William E., 627

Simon and Garfunkel, 430

Simonds, Benjamin, 675

Simpson, George Gaylord, 269

Sinai Peninsula, 486-7, 526

Sinclair, Upton, 69-70, 80, 117, 603, 604

Sirica, John J., 501, 503, 505, 512

sit-down strikes, 1930s, 96, 97-100, 107

sit-in demonstrations, 189, 356-7, 395-6

Sivachev, Nikolai, 131

Six-Day War (1967), 486

Skylab missions, 582

slavery, 121, 353, 357, 358, 646, 655, 666

FWP narratives on, 139

Sloan, Alfred P., Jr., 98-9, 572, 575, 578

Sly and the Family Stone (rock group), 427

Small War Plants Corporation, 186

Small War Plants Division, 186

Smeal, Eleanor, 635

Smith, Al, 4, 10-11, 42-3, 58, 79, 81-2, 119, 137, 656

Smith, Alice Kimball, 549

Smith, “Cotton Ed,” 110-11

Smith, Gaddis, 524, 528

Smith, Gerald L.K., 80, 84, 85, 169

Smith, Hedrick, 642

Smith, Howard W., 106, 112, 126, 375-6, 437

Smith, Jerome, 369

Smith, Margaret Chase, 245

Smith, Mike, 583

Smith, Miranda, 603

Smith Act (1940), 243

Smith-Connally bill, 191

Smucker, Tom, 431, 432

Snow, C. P., 547-8

social change:

avenues of, 124-5, 631

for Boston Irish, 308-9

for Southern blacks, 315-16

wartime, 184-5, 188-90

social criticism, 275-81

Social Darwinism, 42, 308

Social Democratic Federation party (1936), 84

socialism, socialists, 564-5

American, 42, 51, 53-4, 79, 122-3, 165, 631-2

New Deal misconceived as, 43, 45, 102, 123, 128

Niebuhr and, 292-3

public schools as experiment in, 596

Third World nations, 305; India, 339-40

Socialist party, 14, 49, 53, 84-5, 122-3, 128

social protest movements, 347-8, 460-2, 655-6, 659-61

group-oriented participatory leadership, 358, 384, 395-6, 443-4, 455-6

see also campus movement; civil rights movement; peace movement; women’s liberation movement

Social Security, 75, 77, 78, 86, 90, 112, 566

threats of cuts, 559, 640

Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill, 191

Sofaer, Abraham, 495

Solidarity movement, 644

“Solid South,” 251, 382, 460, 657

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., 489, 532, 538

Sombart, Werner, 542

Somoza, Anastasio, 330

Sontag, Susan, 409, 623

Sorensen, Theodore, 324, 332, 334, 374, 412

South:

black migration, 315, 385

black voter registration, 356, 378-81, 382-4

Democratic party in, 118, 354, 382, 460 (see also Democratic party, Southern wing) Democratic-Republican balance-shifting, 250-1, 382, 460, 640, 657

“Other South,” 353

poverty in, 313-18, 354, 567

racial tension, 315-16, 321-3, 348-58, 361-9, 378-85; white anti-black violence, 352, 357, 361-2, 365, 368-9, 372, 380, 382-4, 386

union organization lagging in, 48-9

state government, 354

white domination, 354-5

Southeast Asia, 265, 337-8, 339, 341 (see also Indochina; Vietnam)

Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, 265

Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, 189

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 356, 357-8, 366-9, 371, 379, 382-3, 399

Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, 49

South Korea, 240-2, 265, 578

South of Freedom (Rowan), 314

South Vietnam, 401-3, 411, 417-20, 480-4, 489, 493-4

see also Vietnam War

Souvestre, Marie, 8

Soviet Union, 220, 265

American perceptions and misperceptions of, 220-2, 227-8, 229, 233-4, 241-2, 254, 262, 526-8

and Communist China, 260, 265, 405, 469, 472, 474-6, 485-6, 488, 526-9

dissidents, 489, 523, 526, 539

domination of Eastern Europe, 210-11, 221, 226, 229, 258, 469

encircled with US bases, 265, 286, 334-5, 337, 527

expansionism, 221, 228, 293

5-year plans, 131, 227

and India, 340

invasion of Afghanistan, 529, 531, 626

Jews in, 488

Korean War blunder of, 241-2, 260

and Middle East, 265, 486-7, 488, 526-7

misperceptions of America in, 220-1, 233-4, 241-2, 260, 262, 301-2, 491, 527

1939 pact with Nazi Germany, 151, 159, 197, 260

nuclear weapons of, 259, 264, 333-5, 527; A-bomb, 239-40; H-bomb, 256

postwar territorial gains, 206, 207-8

space program, 259, 578-80, 581, 582, 584, 586

Stalinism, 20, 202, 221; denounced, 260

US recognition of, 36, 153

US relations with, 202, 218, 220-2, 225-9, 232-4, 253-4, 476-9, 485-9, 523, 526-9, 643 (see also Allies, World War II; arms control; arms race; cold war; détente; human rights; summit meetings)

and Vietnam, 405, 418, 476, 478, 488

in World War II, 167, 175, 177-8, 180, 196-7, 206, 211, 223-4; as ally, 202; against Japan, 207-8, 225, 226

space exploration:

Soviet, 259, 278-80, 581, 582, 584, 586

US, 259, 268, 542, 579-87; Reagan militarization of, 585-6

space shuttle program, 582-4, 585

Spain, Spanish Civil War, 149, 156

Sparkman, John, 250

special interest politics, 80, 126, 552, 592, 646

Congress and, 107, 192, 642, 647-8

special prosecutor, 505

speech, freedom of, 281, 395-6, 654, 666

Spencer, Herbert, 42, 560, 562, 625

Spock, Benjamin, 409

sports, 307, 609-11

Springsteen, Bruce, 660

Sputnik, 259, 391, 553, 578-9

Square Deal, 7, 152, 359

stagflation, 557-8, 559, 639

Stalin, Josef, 7, 52, 105, 123, 151, 159, 160, 202, 259

death of, 242, 253

denunciation of, 260

FDR and, 198, 207-8, 210-11, 217, 341

and Korean War, 241-2, 260

postwar stance toward West, 227, 229, 232, 233, 238

purges, 20, 202, 221, 267

and United Nations, 178, 208, 211, 223in World War II, 196-7, 207, 211, 222; at Potsdam, 224-5, 226; at Teheran, 195, 198-9; at Yalta, 159, 206-8

Stalingrad, battle of, 182, 199

Stanford University, 542

Stars and Stripes (services journal), 188

Stassen, Harold, 111, 191, 236

State Department, 471

charges of communism against, 231-2, 243-5, 252, 471

states’ rights, 10, 11, 13, 43, 236, 562

civil rights issues and, 352

States’ Rights (Dixiecrat) party, 237, 238

Steagall, Henry B., 24

steel industry:

Big Steel, 97, 99-100, 651

JFK price rollback, 651

labor unrest, 49, 97, 99-100

Little Steel, 100, 187-8

production, 101, 264; wartime, 183

wartime female labor, 188

Steel Workers Organizing Committee, 99-100

Stegner, Wallace, 58

Steichen, Edward, 593

Stein, Herbert, 214, 554-5, 557

Steinbeck, John, 141-2, 298

Steinem, Gloria, 439

Stennis, John, 376

Stevenson, Adlai F., 249, 286-7, 289, 324, 325-6, 373, 494, 677

in Cuban missile crisis, 334, 337

presidential candidate: 1952, 249-51, 252; 1956, 257, 286, 287

Stieglitz, Alfred, 593

Stilwell, General Joseph W., 201, 470, 495

Stimson, Henry L., 17, 41, 163, 169, 170, 180, 186, 216, 224, 236, 328, 593

Stimson Doctrine, 170, 470

Stockman, David, 639-40, 645

stock market, 669

Black Monday of 1987, 661

Black Tuesday of 1937, 101

1937-38 recession, 104

1970s, 555, 556, 557

Stokowski, Leopold, 605

Stone, Harlan, F., 71, 82, 95, 130, 667

Stone, I. F., 407

Strategic Defense Initiative, 586

strikes, 273

air controllers (1981), 638-9

farm labor, 49-50, 452

1930s, 46-50, 97-100

postwar, 230, 236; 1970 UAW, 573

sit-down, 96, 97-100, 107

wartime, 187-8

Structuralism, 624

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 358, 361-3, 364, 366, 379-80, 383, 384, 392

and Black Power, 386-8, 399

Women’s Liberation Workshop, 442

students:

in civil rights work in South, 380; lunch-counter sit-ins, 356-7: SNCC, 358, 361-3, 364

1960s to early 1970s unrest, 394-7, 413-14, 421-3, 425, 460, 532, 548

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 392-3, 407, 409-10, 417, 421-2, 442

Studs Lonigan (Farrell), 143-4

Styron, William, 620

suburbia, 278-9, 280, 285, 436, 453, 573-4

Suckley, Margaret, 212

Suez crisis of 1956, 257, 286, 288

Sullivan, Ed, 430

Sullivan, John L., 307

summit meetings, postwar, 488

1955, Geneva, 257

1959, Washington, 260-1

1960, Paris, aborted, 261-2, 476

1961, Vienna, 332-3, 335

1972, Moscow, 476-9, 485, 488

1973, Washington, 485-6, 488

1974, Moscow and Vladivostok, 488, 523

1979, Vienna, 529

Sumner, William Graham, 42, 560, 625

Sumners, Hatton, 93

Sundquist, James, 321

Sun Yat-sen, 337

supply-side economics, 639-40, 641

Supreme Court, US, 87-96, 116, 321, 646, 651-5, 667

Bakke quota system case, 653

Burger Court, 505-6, 652-4

court-packing plan of FDR, 93-6, 105, 118; alternatives to, 89-92

Curtiss-Wright case, 156

Dred Scott decision, 652

free speech cases, 535, 654

Gold Clause cases, 72, 89

invalidation of New Deal legislation, 72-3, 74, 82, 89-90, 91, 652

makeup of, 652-4; in 1935, 71-2, 87; in 1954, 321

Miranda doctrine, 654

Nixon tapes case, 505-6, 507-8

“preferred position” doctrine of, 667

prior restraint overturned by, 426

Rehnquist Court, 654, 667

Roe v. Wade, 448, 653, 654

Roosevelt Court, 652

and search of vehicles, 653-4

segregation and civil rights cases, 352, 365, 596, 651, 652, 653; Brown v. Board of Education, 321-2, 347, 651; Plessy v. Ferguson, 314, 322

Warren Court, 322, 652, 654

women’s rights cases, 653, 654

Sweden, 571-2

Sweezy, Paul, 564

Symington, Stuart, 325

Syria, 486-7, 574

Szilard, Leo, 545-6

Taft, Robert A., 111, 163, 169, 190, 203, 233, 234, 236, 243, 245, 253, 625

in 1952 campaign, 246-8, 249-50

Taft, William Howard, 236, 247, 466

Taft-Hartley Act, 320

Taiwan, 240, 254, 265, 472, 474, 578

US break with, 529, 644

Talmadge, Eugene, 65

Talmadge, Herman, 503

Tamiris, Helen, 138

Tammany Hall, 8, 10

Taney, Roger, 652

Tarbell, Ida, 122

tariffs, foreign trade, 17, 36, 490

Tawney, R. H., 461

taxation, 559

1960s, 554-5

Nixon/Ford policies, 556, 558

Reagan policies, 639, 641-2

redistributionist, 76, 215

Revenue Acts: 1935 “wealth tax,” 76, 77, 78, 128; of 1942, 191-2

Taylor, Frederick W., 271

Taylor, Myron C, 19, 71, 100

teachers, 597-8, 663-4

Teamsters Union, 46, 188, 573

Technics and Civilization (Mumford), 274

technology, 266, 267-9, 394, 541, 542-3, 550-3, 572

automation, 272-3, 274-5, 543, 550

socio-psychological impacts of, 274-6

space, 584-7

Teheran Conference (1943), 195, 198-9, 206

telecommunications satellites, 582, 585, 611

television, 284-5, 605-6, 607, 610, 611, 612-14, 615, 620

Nixon and, 472-3, 495, 511

presidential campaign coverage by, 324, 613; debates, 326

presidential use of, 495

Teller, Edward, 549, 578

Temporary National Economic Committee, 104

tenant farmers, 49, 66, 81, 314

Tenant Farmers’ Union, 49, 65

Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 26, 34, 40, 77, 131, 213, 316-17

as socialist experiment, 123, 128

Test Ban Treaty (1963), 390, 392

Tet offensive, 411, 412

textile industry, 1934 general strike, 48-9

Thatcher, Margaret, 633

theater, 615, 620, 624

charges of communism against, 132, 138, 231

Depression era, 138-9, 145-6

New Deal programs, 135-8

Theatre Guild, 136

Thieu, Nguyen Van, 419, 480-4

third parties, 108, 118, 655-7

bias of American system against, 238

1912, Progressive party, 118-19, 236

1924, Progressive party, 46, 416

1936, Union party, 84, 85

1948, Progressive party, 235-7, 238; States Rights’ Dixiecrats, 237, 238

1968, American Independent party, 415

1970s conservative debate on, 637-8

Third World, 296, 306, 328-32, 325-44, 451-2, 539

GNP statistics, 304

liberation movements and revolutions, 338, 341-4

poverty, 303-5, 669

This Is War! (radio program), 193

Tho, Le Duc, 481-2, 484

Thomas, Norman, 14, 18, 53-4, 84, 122, 154, 293, 631

Thomas Aquinas, 57, 537

Thompson, Dorothy, 93, 165

Thompson, Kathleen, 449

Thompson, Kenneth, 536

Thomson, Virgil, 593

Thoreau, Henry David, 338, 352, 368, 595, 673

Thurmond, Strom, 376, 644, 657

Dixiecrat candidate in 1948, 237, 238

Till, Emmett, 352, 378

Time magazine, 68, 202, 276, 284, 456, 560, 612, 622, 640

Titov, Gherman, 580

Tobin, Dan, 55

Tobin, James, 461

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 125, 294, 519, 548, 593, 595, 599, 600, 665, 667, 671, 679

Tocquevillian void, 125, 214, 294, 518-19, 548, 593, 595, 665, 667-8, 671

Toffler, Alvin, 597

Tojo, Hideki, 175, 201

Tokyo, bombing of, 179, 225

Toledano, Ralph de, 627

Tong, Rosemarie, 535

Tonkin Gulf incident and Resolution, 403

Townsend, Francis, 66-8, 79, 80, 84, 85, 604, 661

trade deficit, 557

Trento, Joseph, 584

triangular diplomacy, 469, 474-6, 488, 496, 527-9

Trilling, Lionel, 629

Trudeau, Garry, 624, 636

Trujillo, Rafael, 329

Truman, Harry S, 219, 222-3, 287-8, 293, 319, 448, 593

and Kennedy, 324, 325, 333

as President, 212, 230, 246, 248-9, 253, 277, 466, 561, 656; and A-bomb, 224-6, 288; cabinet of, 223; and civil rights, 236, 249, 321, 359, 657; Fair Deal of, 236, 239, 359; foreign policy, 229-30, 232-5, 239-43, 285-6, 289, 290, 340, 342, 347, 402, 468, 490; Korean War, 241-3, 651; loyalty program, 230, 232, 239, 245; at Potsdam, 224-5, 226

presidential candidacy in 1948, 236-8

quoted, on Nazis vs. Soviets, 221

as Senator, 185-6

as Vice President, 223; candidacy, 203-4

Truman Doctrine, 232-3, 234, 235, 239, 289, 347

Tubman, Harriet, 451

Tugwell, Rexford, 13, 14-15, 17, 24, 28, 30, 33-35, 64, 74, 118-19

Tully, Grace, 3, 212

Tunney, Gene, 609

Turkey, 229, 232-3, 239, 265

US missile bases, 334-5, 337

Turner, Nat, 355

Twain, Mark, 299

two-party system, see party system

Tydings, Millard, 110-11, 119, 164, 245-6

Udall, Morris, 521

Ulam, Adam, 242

“ultra-conservatives,” 123

unemployment:

of blacks, 571

counter-measures, 561-2

of Depression years, 5, 18-19, 31, 39, 40, 47, 58, 81, 215, 648; 1937-39 recession, 101, 104, 113, 214

New Deal programs, 26, 27, 31, 34, 568

1970s, 555, 557-8, 559

1980s, 640, 641

unemployment benefits, 75

unilateralism, 154, 234, 494, 496

Union party (1936), 84, 85

unions, labor, 27, 33, 45, 54-7, 96-101

and automation, 273

and civil rights movement, 371, 377

company, 45, 100

craft, 33, 54-6, 97

and ERA, 439, 457

federal, 55

fight for recognition, 46-50, 55, 97-100; recognition by GM, 99; recognition by U.S. Steel, 100

industrial, 33, 53, 54-6, 97-100

membership statistics, 186

open vs. closed shop, 186-7

racial and sex discrimination by, 188-9, 457

“red,” 53

wartime problems, 186-7

women’s, 457

see also AFL-CIO; American Federation of Labor; Congress of Industrial Organizations United Automobile Workers (UAW), 187, 273, 392, 573, 577-8

United Farm Workers, 452

United Mine Workers, 46, 54, 187-8

United Nations, 208, 209, 210, 211, 223, 227, 229, 235, 256, 386, 523, 584, 586

Communist China admitted, 469

Declaration of Human Rights, 523, 536-40

Declaration of 1942, 178

Human Rights Commission, 339

and Israel, 525

Khrushchev at, 260

Soviet use of, 228

United Textile Workers of America, 46

Universal Negro Improvement Association, 385

universities, 270, 553, 597-8, 622, 663

University of Alabama, 370

University of California, 396, 542, 653

at Berkeley, 394-5

University of Chicago, 291, 409, 560, 562

University of Michigan, 407

University of Mississippi, 365

Updike, John, 619

upper classes, 50-1, 669

FDR and, 42-5

war against labor, 45-51

women, 436, 453, 459

urbanization, 453

of Southern blacks, 315, 385

Urban League, 371, 387, 571

Uruguay, 330

USA Today, 612

US Chamber of Commerce, 71

United States Information Agency (USIA), 296

U.S. Steel Corporation, 56, 99-100

Utley, Freda, 123

U-2 plane, 261-3, 334, 476

Valenti, Jack, 608

values (core, modal, instrumental), 598, 682

Van Buren, Martin, 117, 648

Vance, Cyrus, 412, 522-3, 524-5, 528, 539

Vandenberg, Arthur H., 155, 163, 235, 285

Van Devanter, Willis, 91, 93, 96

Van Dyke, Vernon, 539

Variety magazine, 194

Venezuela, 330

Versailles Treaty, 150, 151, 157, 253, 632

veto power, 646, 647

House, Senate over each other, 647, 655

Vienna, 332-3, 335, 529

Viereck, Peter, 626

Vietcong, 342, 484

Vietminh, 255

Vietnam, 401-6, 474

French colonialism, 341-2

Geneva Accords of 1954, 342, 405

see also North Vietnam; South Vietnam

Vietnam War, 342-4, 390-1, 397, 401-7, 410, 417-20, 422-6, 475-6, 478-84, 493-4, 497, 538, 675

bombing, 403, 405-6, 410, 412-13, 418, 422, 475-6, 479-80, 483-4, 527

casualties, 391

election issue: in 1968, 412-16; in 1972, 460-1, 479, 481-2

genesis of, 342-4

Paris peace talks and cease-fire, 481-4

Tet offensive, 411, 412

troop statistics, 343, 390, 410, 418

Vietnamization, 417, 419-20, 422-4

withdrawal, 480-4

see also anti-Vietnam War movement

Viguerie, Richard, 637, 638, 641

Village Voice, 429, 614

Vishinsky, Andrei, 206

Vladivostok summit (1974), 488, 523

Voice of America, 523

Volcker, Paul, 562

Volstead Act, 25

Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), 566

von Braun, Wernher, 579

Voorhis, Jerry, 468

voter registration drives, 661-2, 670

South, 356, 378-81, 382-4

voter turnout, decline in, 646, 661, 670

voting rights:

for blacks, 357, 366, 371, 378-84; discrimination, 355, 379-80; legislation, 321-3, 378, 383, 384, 389

for women, 433, 440, 646-7

Voting Rights Act (1965), 383, 384, 389, 397, 651

wages, 669

autoworkers, 573

Carter restrictions, 559

Depression, 19, 32, 40, 47, 48, 49-50

discrimination: racial, 189; sex, 81, 82, 188

New Deal measures, 32, 90, 106, 107

Nixon freeze, 556

union gains, 100, 187-8

wartime increase, 184, 187, 648

Waggoner, Hyatt, 299

Wagner, Robert, 70, 75, 96, 112

Wagner (National Labor Relations) Act (1935), 75, 90, 95-6, 107, 603

Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill, 191

Wald, Lillian, 122

Wallace, George C., 367, 369, 370, 383-4, 415-16, 460, 637-8, 644, 656

Wallace, Henry, 23, 65, 73, 102, 114, 118, 208, 234, 277, 337-8

presidential candidacy, 234-7, 238, 286

as Vice President, 164, 203, 234

Wall Street Journal, The, 41, 612, 627

Walsh, David I., 162, 312

Walzer, Michael, 540, 598

Ward, Benjamin, 565

Warhol, Andy, 621, 623

war-making powers, 495

“War on Poverty,” 516, 566-7, 568, 570-1

War Production Board (WPB), 185, 186

War Refugee Board, 219

Warren, Karl, 322, 506, 652, 654, 667

as Governor, 191, 604

Washington, Booker T., 352, 675

Washington, George, 153, 218, 337, 507, 593

Washington, D.C.:

Civil Rights Rally of 1963, 371-2

summit meetings: 1959, Khrushchev, 260-1; 1973, Brezhnev, 485-6, 488

Washington Naval Conference and Treaty (1921-22), 152, 170

Washington Post, 12, 465, 500-1, 612, 614

Pentagon Papers, 425-6

Watergate Affair, 498, 499, 510-14, 651

cover-up of, 500-6, 508, 510, 512

hush money, 501, 502

sentences, 512-13

smoking gun, 508, 509, 511-12

tapes, 505-6, 507-8, 509, 511, 557

water quality control, 389, 466

Watson, James, 544

Watson, Thomas J., 71

Walls race riots, 397-8, 554

Waxman, Chaim, 568

wealth, distribution of, 17, 60, 128, 215, 566, 668-9

Coughlin and, 58-9

Huey Long on, 60, 62

“wealth tax” of 1935, 76, 77, 78, 128

Weatherman, 422

Weaver, Richard, 627

Weinberg, Jack, 394-5

Weinreb, Lloyd, 519

Weisberger, Bernard, 478

Welch, Joseph, 251, 258

welfare programs, federal, 466, 554, 556, 558, 560-1, 567, 630-1, 641

Fair Deal, 236

New Deal, 25, 34, 37, 40, 76, 81, 134, 213-14, 568, 570; 1937-39 recession, 104

War on Poverty, 566-7, 568

Welles, Orson, 136, 139

Welles, Sumner, 154

Wells, H. G., 13, 131

Welty, Eudora, 615

West, Nathanael, 605, 608

West Bank, 486, 525-6

Western Europe, 254, 294-6, 565

Marshall Plan aid, 233, 265, 295

US defense partnership, 265, 488

West Germany, 233, 238, 476

economic competition by, 556

Westmoreland, General William, 406, 411

Westwood, Jean, 458

Wheeler, Burton, 61-2, 73, 76, 77, 94, 95

isolationism of, 154, 169

Wheeler-Rayburn (Public Utility Holding Company) Act (1935), 76, 214

White, Andrew D., 611

White, Byron, 362

White, Ralph K., 234

White, T. H., 603

White, Theodore, 284, 636

White, Walter, 113

White, William Allen, 20, 122, 614

White Citizens’ Councils, 351, 354-5, 365, 367, 379

white-collar crime, 514-16, 517

Whitman, Walt, 6, 142

Whyte, William H., Jr., 280-1, 599

Wicker, Tom, 520

Wiener, Norbert, 274-5

Wiesel, Elie, 635

Wiggins, Charles, 508

Wiley, George A., 570

Wilford, John Noble, 584, 585

Wilkins, Roy, 371, 372, 381, 387

Will, George, 644

Williams, G. Mennen, 28, 325

Williams, Hosea, 356

Williams, Tennessee, 277, 297, 300

Williamson, Kris, 451

Willis, Ellen, 430, 444

Willkie, Wendell, 76, 163-4, 165, 202, 203, 208, 236, 593

Wills, Garry, 466, 604

Wilson, Charles E., 236, 575

Wilson, Edmund, 19

Wilson, James Q., 516, 518, 648

Wilson, Woodrow, 5, 23-4, 41, 71, 72, 75, 87, 117, 127, 218, 312, 600, 632, 646, 657

idealism of, 152, 217, 465, 522

internationalism of, 11, 12, 465

and 1918 congressional election, 190-1

and World War 1, 490

Wilson Administration, 92, 152

Winfield, Dave, 610

Winner, Langdon, 552

Winthrop, Diana, 613

wiretapping, in Nixon administration, 499

Wisconsin, progressivism in, 68, 108

Wolin, Sheldon, 396

women, 551, 667

and New Deal, 120, 122

in party politics, 458, 648

support for FDR, 83

as wartime labor, 188, 453

Women Against Daddy Warbucks, 421

Women: A Journal of Liberation, 447

Women’s Bureau, 438

Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL), 439

Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH), 446

women’s issues and rights, 40, 81, 376, 433-4, 436-60, 466, 551, 646

abortion, 439, 440, 447-9, 452, 458, 628, 654

battery, 449, 534

Eleanor Roosevelt and, 10, 29, 113, 433-4

ERA, 434, 438-9, 452, 457, 458-9

legislation of 1960s and 1970s, 378, 439

pornography, 449, 534-5

rape, 449

suffrage, 433, 440, 646-7

Supreme Court decisions, 651, 653, 654

see also sex discrimination

women’s liberation movement, 436-60, 659

blacks in, 451-3

dualisms in, 441-9, 451, 454

genesis and growth of, 453-4

and lesbianism, 450-1

national coalition of groups, 440-1

question of electoral and lobbying politics, 456-8, 460-1

radical groups, 443-9, 454, 455-6

younger vs. older branch, 441-3, 454-5, 457-8, 460-1

Women’s Political Council, 349-50

Women’s Trade Union League, 10

Women Strike for Peace, 392

Wood, Grant, 138

Woodin, William, 23-4

Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 155

Woodstock festival, 426-7, 431, 432

Woodward, Bob, 501

Wooley, Mary, 122

worker participation in management, 565, 578

Workers’ Alliance of America, 132, 570

working class, 45, 52, 57, 564

see also labor

working conditions, 46, 48

hours, 32, 90, 100, 106

NRA reforms, 32, 33, 106

Works Progress Administration (WPA), 76, 104, 191, 213

Federal Art Project, 134-5

Federal Theatre Project, 135-8

Federal Writers’ Project, 139-41

World Court, 63, 70

World War I, 177, 193, 219

World War II, 337-8, 402-3, 453, 497

Allied conferences, 195-9, 205-9, 224-5, 226

battle of Atlantic, 169-70, 171-2, 173, 175, 180, 197, 217

danger in Europe, 149-51, 153, 155-9

danger in Pacific, 168, 170-1, 172-4

in Europe, 159-64, 166-70, 177, 180, 182, 196, 199-201, 206, 211, 223-4; cross-Channel attack, 177-8, 180-1, 196-201, 207

North African operations, 178, 181, 197

in Pacific, 174-80, 196, 198, 201-2, 206, 207, 211, 224, 225

Pearl Harbor, 174-6

question of second front, 180-1, 196-9, 202, 207, 221-2

unconditional surrender requirement, 211, 217, 224, 225

US and, 174-90, 192-5; aid to Britain, 161, 162, 164, 166-70; FDR pledge to stay out, 160, 161, 162, 166-7, 170; growing US intervention, 167-74; war production and labor, 182-4, 186-9, 199, 268, 272, 648

V-E day, 224

V-J day, 225, 226

Worsley, Peter, 304

Wright, Frank Lloyd, 593

Wright, Richard, 145, 615

writers, writing, 605, 665

Depression era, 141-6

New Deal programs, 139-40

1970s, 615-20

postwar, 296-301

and red-baiting, 132, 139, 140, 141-2

and the State (PEN Congress), 617-20

Wyman, Jane, 606-7

Yale University, 270, 542

Yalta Conference and agreement, 159, 205-9, 210-11, 226, 252-3

Yamamoto, Adm. Isoroku, 180

Yasgur, Max, 427

Yeager, Charles E., 268

Yeats, William Butler, 681, 682

Yom Kippur War (1973), 487, 574

Yorktown, U.S.S., 179, 180

Young, Andrew, 352, 592

Young, Neil, 587

Young, Owen D., 15

Young, Whitney, 371, 387

Young Americans for Freedom, 637

Young Communist League, 603

youth culture of 1960s, 394, 426-32

Youth International Party (Yippies), 414-15

youth programs:

New Deal, 76, 104, 113

War on Poverty, 566

see also Civilian Conservation Corps Yugoslavia, 149, 169, 260

“yuppies,” 599, 660

Zangara, Joseph, 21

Zappa, Frank, 427

Zhdanov, Andrei, 227, 229

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The Vineyard of Liberty copyright © 1982 by James MacGregor Burns

The Workshop of Democracy copyright © 1985 by James MacGregor Burns

The Crosswinds of Freedom copyright © 1989 by James MacGregor Burns

Cover design by Andy Ross

ISBN: 978-1-4804-3020-4

Published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

180 Maiden Lane

New York, NY 10038

www.openroadmedia.com

THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA

Find a full list of our authors and

titles at www.openroadmedia.com

FOLLOW US

@OpenRoadMedia