Reappraisals (repost from 2011)

And the price of this reappraisal is the revolutionary content of the American Revolution. There could have been no Reconstruction without the belief that all men are crated equal and endowed with inalienable rights. To remained US history as a tragedy of eternal racism rather then a revolution betrayed is to conceed the immutability of our present circumstances.

Today’s new narrative is suspicious of the possibility of freedom and equality, viewing racism as eternal.

@1 Yes. As our increasingly crazy conservative faction in the US continues to develop a picture of the Revolution as a reactionary movement, run by religious maniacs and believers in liberty after the fashion of the barons at Runnymede, demanding freedom for the local squirearchy from regulatory regimes imposed from the remote capital.

I don’t care that much what happens to Jefferson, to say nothing of Woodrow Wilson, but I want my concept of revolutionary progressiveness back, and of a nation founded in Enlightenment ideals.

Defeating Wilhelmine militarism was as much a moral imperative as World War II, so insofar as Wilson ‘lied us into war’ he deserves as much credit as Roosevelt did for aiding the British, declaring the Atlantic Neutrality Zone, etc. If you are going to ding Wilson do so for dragging his feet so that we didn’t get in until 1917.

I’m not going to write a brief for Wilson (the racism etc.), but this sentiment has always seemed odd to me:

… along with his proposal for the League of Nations, where he comprehensively screwed up the domestic politics, leading the US to stay out of the League.

Again, not defending Wilson’s strategy vis a vis the Senate, but surely it counts that (a) the president and the Democrats who followed him supported the treaty and (b) the Lodge’s Republicans opposed it? Unless I’m missing something, isn’t this criticism precisely analogous to the “Green Lantern theory” so despised by online lefties, the idea that if only Obama were more persuasive he could get the congressional GOP to accede to his agenda?

John Quiggin @6, I believe the U.S. entered the war after Russia was no longer a Czarist nation. Not saying belief in Kerensky’s democratic potential wasn’t hopelessly naive.

Thought that the Zimmermann telegram was a good enough reason without lying?

“So, I’m fascinated by the US activity of ranking presidents and other political leaders, and eager to try my hand.”

More fool you! I don’t see much point in it, though the context is interesting in every case. US presidents are not all-powerful and have to deal with a vast array of vested interests; how do you rank the ones who tried and were out-manoeuvred? Was Carter right to tell Americans that they had to reduce energy consumption, or stupid because that message was a red rag to a bull for powerful vested interests who could prevent his re-election?

geo @10
For nearly a century, Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy has been universally (in mainstream media and academia) held up as idealistic, as prime evidence of American exceptionalism. This is pernicious nonsense.

Sorry to be blunt, but I think this is about eighty percent B.S. At best, it’s quite misleading.

First, you’re confusing “idealism” as an analytical category with “idealism” as meaning something like “actionable belief in the ideals that leftists (or even liberals) have held for the last 150 or 250 [or whatever] years.” Wilson was opposed to what he (and some others) saw as ‘the Old Diplomacy’, the balance-of-power politics that he blamed, correctly or incorrectly, for leading to WW1. He wanted to replace it with an intl system based on some measure of self-determination for natl minorities and also on some form of ‘collective security’. (Unfortunately Wilson wasn’t willing to agree to a real enforcement mechanism for the League, but that’s another issue.)

Taken together, these attitudes distinguish Wilson from, say, Bismarck (or insert one of many other possible examples). “Idealism” here simply denotes that fact, plus Wilson’s rhetoric about democracy and making the world safe for it. Was that rhetoric hypocritical? In significant respects (cf the Latin American interventions, his actions on race, etc.), certainly. But that doesn’t mean that the sort of quasi-messianic ‘internationalism’ it represented was simply fake in its entirety; it did represent a different approach to the world than some other strains in US foreign policy thinking, but (as mentioned later) to call it “prime evidence” of US exceptionalism may be too strong. It also doesn’t mean incidentally that Wilson conducted what we wd consider a “moral” foreign policy. One can learn much from Randolph Bourne and other critics of Wilson’s decision to enter WW1. (But again, this doesn’t mean Wilson had the same attitudes as, say, TR, who was an unabashed, overt imperialist; rhetoric matters in certain respects.)

Now to ‘American exceptionalism’ and related matters. First, Chomsky is wrong to call “Wilsonian idealism” a “leading principle of US foreign policy.” It’s not a principle, at most it’s a set of attitudes, a worldview (and sometimes, to be sure, just used as a cover for typical nasty power plays). Second, it’s not completely unique to the U.S.

Since the founding, there’s a been a strain of messianism or quasi-millennialism in American thought about foreign policy (and other things) — the US was supposed to be an implicitly transformative example to the world (Winthrop’s ‘city on a hill’) and, in some versions, it was supposed to go beyond being an example and spread the putative benefits of its institutions to the rest of the world. These two impulses — the first largely separationist or ‘isolationist’ w/r/t the rest of the world at least outside the Western hemisphere, the second more activist — both represent strains of American ‘exceptionalism’. It long predates Wilson and goes back pretty much to the early republic. This is largely uncontroversial stuff and even a leftist like Perry Anderson signs on to this interpretation in his writing about the history of US foreign policy.

So, in short, Wilsonian “idealism” (1) is not synonymous with American exceptionalism, which long antedates it, and it’s ‘prime evidence’ only in that it partly embodies one rhetorical strand of American exceptionalism, (2) it’s not a ‘principle’ of US foreign policy but a set of (partly rhetorical) attitudes, (3) it therefore doesn’t really mean what you and Chomsky think, and (4) it’s not and never has been completely unique to the U.S.

Bloix @14
And his passionate outburst against slavery, censored out of the Declaration by the Continental Congress for fear of losing Southern votes:

He has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most sacred Rights of Life and Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere, or to incur miserable Death, in their Transportation thither. This piratical Warfare, the opprobrium of infidel Powers, is the Warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.

He clearly felt this, even as he ran a slave plantation himself!

Which means that people are extremely complicated, and the analysis of politics by personalities, while fascinating, doesn’t give good results.

Or what Guano @13 said. Carter is an elegant example of that. On the other side are truly powerful presidents like Johnson, who was really titanic, and has to be put on both ends of the list, for the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts and Medicare on the one hand and the catastrophe of Vietnam on the other,

Placeholder @17 on the second point, no. There’s a difference between 1778, when the slave trade was legal everywhere in the world, and 1860, when it was banned in most places and the ban was enforced by the British navy. The Confederate ban–only on international (basically Translantic) slave trading and not on internal trade, including with the Northern states–was probably necessary to attain recognition from Europe, especially Britain, which seemed likely to favor the Confederacy for its raw cotton supplies, but could not tolerate flouting of one of its biggest international commitments.

#21 – Jefferson did indeed live in mortal terror of slave revolts. But he did not for a moment believe that slaveowners were innocent victims. From Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781:

“The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal… The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labour for another… And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.”

American slavery was an evil that was exceedingly complex and emotionally fraught, not least for the people who lived it. It is a mistake for a person without deep and intimate knowledge of their experience to condescend to them.

LFC@15: you’re confusing “idealism” as an analytical category with “idealism” as meaning something like “actionable belief in the ideals that leftists (or even liberals) have held for the last 150 or 250 [or whatever] years.”

“Ideal” and “idealism” have a number of shades of meaning. According to my dictionary (American Heritage, 2nd ed.), the essential meanings of “idealism” is “the practice of conceiving things in ideal terms” and “the pursuit of one’s ideals.” Which leaves the meaning of “idealism” dependent on the meaning of “ideal.” The essential meaning of “ideal,” according to the same source, is “a goal of perfection in the form of a person or thing, sometimes imaginary.” I don’t see anything in these definitions that correspond to your “analytic category.” What do you mean by that phrase? (I assume you don’t mean “philosophical idealism,” which is neither here nor there.)

The everyday, most common meaning of “idealism” is “belief in and pursuit of an unselfish goal.” As applied to US foreign policy, it generally means the goal of fostering democracy and self-determination for other nations and people, even at the expense of the US “national interest.” This is the sense in which I was using it, in which Chomsky was using it, and in which virtually everyone uses it.

What you describe, accurately, as Wilson’s foreign policy, is accurately described as “liberal internationalism”: the attempt to achieve foreign-policy goals through international organizations, agreements, and other forms of cooperation. That is also a common, and accurate, description for US foreign policy (with the proviso that the US will usually pursue its goals unilaterally if international cooperation is unlikely).

“Idealism” and “liberal internationalism” are different categories. One can pursue an idealistic (ie, unselfish) policy unilaterally or cooperatively. Conversely, liberal internationalism can be the form in which one pursues either selfish or unselfish goals. In the real world, the US has pursued selfish goals (roughly, global economic integration) through liberal internationalism (ie, professed allegiance to, and occasional compliance with, international law and organizations). In the world of mainstream media and academic scholarship, the US has pursued unselfish goals (democracy, human rights, and self-determination everywhere) through liberal internationalism. This latter, illusory view is “American exceptionalism,” called “exceptional” because all other nations are supposed to have pursued primarily selfish goals, ie, their “national interest.” (I keep putting that phrase in scare quotes because it’s a mystification, for reasons I’ve argued at enormous length elsewhere on CT.)

That the real goal of American policy is a world open to economic penetration and control by (preferably, American) corporate and financial elites is the burden of Chomsky’s 50 or 60 books. That “American exceptionalism” means, in standard usage, the unique unselfishness of American foreign policy and international behavior seems to me too obvious to need demonstration. (In any case, I have to go offline for several hours.)

I’m not sure exactly where we disagree, but if you think any of the above is mistaken, please have at it.

John Quiggin @21
The part of the Declaration draft I left out wasn’t about slave revolts, but the attempt in 1775 on the part of the governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, to recruit slaves and servants into the British army, with a promise of future freedom. Washington retaliated the next month by starting his own black recruitment drive. Jefferson wasn’t weeping for slaveholders but screaming treachery, and as usual making no attempt at all to be morally consistent.

I feel very stupid sitting here as a witness for the defense in Jefferson’s case, which is not what I meant. He is certainly my least favorite Founding Father, for the reasons everybody here understands and also for his total lack of a sense of humor. What I want to defend is not Jefferson the violently self-contradictory man but the ideas of the Revolution in which he played an important part; that’s where the understanding that slavery must be ended grew from, and Jefferson’s words (often) captured it.

People forget Woodrow Wilson’s Marxist phase. Read pages 12-13 of his Division and Reunion. It’s available on google books.

Omega @22
Indeed, it wasn’t any concession at all, since it had been illegal since 1809 and it wouldn’t have been easy to start up again. Also, I read one allegation that Virginia and Maryland had a surplus of slaves they wanted to sell southwards and they wanted the clause in order to avoid competition in the market. While South Carolina, ever advantaged in races to the bottom, protested against the clause on states’ rights grounds.

I feel like I’m not seeing enough “fuck Calhoun sideways with a lawnmower blade” sentiments here. And every third or fourth thing in the whole South is named after the bastard! What’s not named after Strom Thurmond, that is. Or McClellan; my family has old friends in and great love for McClennanville, S.C., a little shrimping village outside of Charleston with maybe 500 people in it, and all of them related to/intimately known by each other. Not to say you don’t see a lot of Jeff Davis and General Lee (one of my brothers best friends of youth was named Jefferson Lee H——-h, for a twofer). In honor of my sister, daughter of Edmund Kirby-Smith (great-grandson of same), I’m sort of duty bound to say everything in Sewanee should still be named after him, but I’ll concede it’s not a principled stand. Now that I come to think of it I think a focused national campaign to ensure nothing at all in our fair nation is named after Nathan Bedford Forrest would be pretty sellable, even in the South. People would grumble, but coming right out to represent the Klan isn’t cool unless you’re RZA. One can only get so much “the high school band played Dixieland while they tore our tattered flags and banners down” going for Forrest IMO. It could be the thin edge of the wedge.

@34 – it might be small-scale, but a lot of county Democratic Party Central Committees have been changing the name of those dinners for a couple years now in California. My county changed ours to Roosevelt/Hamer, I know there’s a JFK/RFK dinner in LA, there’s an Eleanor Roosevelt Dinner somewhere in Norcal, etc.

Idealism:

Idealism has two main modern senses: (i) its original philosophical sense, in which, though with many variations of definition, ideas are held to underlie or to form all reality; (ii) its wider modern sense of a way of thinking in which some higher or better state is projected as a way of judging conduct or of indicating action. One of the critical difficulties of sense (ii) is that, especially in some of its derived words, it is used, often loosely, for both praise and blame.

…

There is idealism contrasted with MATERIALISM (q.v.): basically a philosophical opposition but in C20 especially extended, by the broadening of each term, to a distinction which is really that between altruism and selfishness: a distinction which whatever its other merits has nothing to do with the philosophical argument though it is often, in social
polemic, confused with it. Then there is idealism contrasted with realism:again originally a philosophical distinction, and having some related development to describe types and processes of art, but in common use, from 1C19 and especially in our own time, to indicate a contrast which is really that between impractical and practical, especially in the derived
idealistic and REALISTIC (q.v.). Then there is also idealism as a positive social or moral sense contrasted either with self-seeking or indifference or with a general narrowness of outlook. Since all these current uses coexist with a continuing and important philosophical argument, itself now quite exceptionally complicated, idealism is obviously a word which needs the closest scrutiny whenever it is used.

geo @27
The everyday, most common meaning of “idealism” is “belief in and pursuit of an unselfish goal.” As applied to US foreign policy, it generally means the goal of fostering democracy and self-determination for other nations and people, even at the expense of the US “national interest.” This is the sense in which I was using it, in which Chomsky was using it, and in which virtually everyone uses it.

In a word, no. That’s not how *everyone* uses it. The word has a particular meaning in IR discourse, where it means, or used to mean, not “unselfish” but something fairly close to “liberal internationalism,” esp. if/as the latter is opposed to “realism.” Obviously Wilson thought democracy promotion abroad was in the US “national interest.” Altruism v ‘selfishness’ is not the right frame here.

If you meant to say Wilson’s foreign policy was not “unselfish,” I’d probably agree, but I don’t think that’s what most people mean when they talk about Wilson’s “idealism” in foreign policy. As someone who went through (for better or worse, prob. worse) a graduate program in IR, I certainly don’t think “unselfish” when I hear someone refer to Wilson’s “idealism.”

I can’t address the American exceptionalism and Chomsky points right now, sorry.

Three Myths @28
Balance of power was a fundamental principle of international law designed to prevent the emergence of a hegemonic state capable of unilaterally dictating what was legal. Wilson objected to this principle because it constrained his ability to dictate the terms of world politics. International law clashed with his authoritarian and reactionary approach to politics.

If you mean to say the above is a myth, then I pretty much agree with you. E.g., balance of power was not really “a fundamental principle of intl law”, but something that wd take much longer to characterize properly. I’m sorry I got into this Wilson thing here. It seems to me there was a mix of hypocrisy and sincerity there, and geo was only emphasizing the former.

@F Foundling
Amusing. I like the Garibaldi-being-executed-by-redcoats touch at the end.

Of course the ‘balance of power’ can be and has been practiced/embraced by both non-democratic and democratic (more or less) regimes, even though the latter usu. don’t go out of their way to crow about it. Yeah, Friedrich von Gentz, Metternich, and Bismarck were not democrats, but that’s sort of irrelevant in this particular context.

My understanding (I stand open to correction on this) is that Wilson opposed the balance of power as he thought it was being practiced in Europe bec. he thought it led to war (not b.c it was undemocratic). Wilson was basically wrong in that belief (in skillful hands, balance-of-power politics can have the effect of preserving great-power peace), but that Wilson was largely wrong as an empirical matter is irrelevant to the question of what ‘label’ to put on Wilson’s beliefs.

ZM @38
Per Wikipedia, Theodore Roosevelt was a still bigger Webster fan than Wilson:

In June 1915, Glenn Ford McKinney was granted a divorce, and he and Webster were married in a quiet ceremony in September in Washington, Connecticut. They honeymooned at McKinney’s camp near Quebec City, Canada and were visited by former president Theodore Roosevelt,[4] who invited himself, saying: “I’ve always wanted to meet Jean Webster. We can put up a partition in the cabin.”

The article doesn’t mention Wilson, in contrast, at all.

Also, I learn that at the end of “Dear Enemy” the heroine concludes, “Privately, I don’t believe there’s one thing in heredity”, instancing a child at the institution where she works whose disposition is placid and sunny, though her mother, uncle, and aunt all died insane; so it may be that if you read the book from front to back instead of back to front it seems less pro-eugenics than it seemed to you.

@LFC 11.23.15 at 4:11 am
Well, it seemed natural to conclude that balance of power must have been democratic, progressive and libertarian, if it was the legal antithesis of Wilson’s ‘authoritarian and reactionary’ policies.

More seriously, I think it’s fairly clear that having something like a League of Nations / the United Nations is *both* far more democratic and far better for world peace than not having it. In this, I think Wilson was right. However hypocritical Wilson might have been and however imperfect his initial achievement, I think that this was, objectively, a very important positive contribution of his, which shouldn’t be forgotten because of the now-topical racist stuff.

Done for a while.

LFC: I guess we don’t agree on the meaning (ie, the standard journalistic and academic usage) of “American exceptionalism.” Here’s a long excerpt from something I once wrote on the topic:

“The academic and journalistic mainstream has no trouble making sense of American foreign policy. All other nations, they tell us, act out of self-interest; America alone acts out of idealism. We may have made mistakes, but our purpose has always been to support freedom, democracy, and human rights wherever they are endangered. Here are a few typical specimens of this view, which is often called “American exceptionalism.”
First, a column in the New York Times from September 1974 by a liberal commentator, William Shannon, reflecting on the Vietnam War: “For a quarter century, the United States has been trying to do good, encourage political liberty, and promote social justice in the Third World. But in Latin America, where we have traditionally been a friend and protector, and in Asia, where we have made the most painful sacrifices of our young men and our wealth, our relationships have mostly proved to be a recurring source of sorrow, waste, and tragedy. … Our benevolence, intelligence, and hard work have proved not to be enough.”
Here’s a very influential columnist, Joseph Kraft, a few years later: “The debacle in Vietnam showed that the United States has broken with its traditional policy of selflessly supporting the good guys.”
“For a more recent example, here is the first sentence of a scholarly article on the Bush Doctrine in the prestigious academic journal International Security: “The promotion of democracy is central to the George W. Bush administration’s prosecution of both the war on terror and its overall grand strategy.” The New Yorker writer George Packer characterizes the history of American foreign policy in these terms: “America has always swung feverishly between its individualism and its moralism – between periods of business dominance, when the rest of the world can go to hell, and bursts of reformist zeal, when America shines a light unto the nations.” In other words, we sometimes ignore the rest of the world, but when we pay attention, we always try to do good.
“Given a few days, one could find a hundred more examples. Even when it’s not stated explicitly, it’s taken for granted that American intentions are always good, American purposes always idealistic. Sometimes we screw up, because we’re so innocent and naïve, or maybe arrogant and incompetent. But even when, as in Vietnam, we have to drop millions of tons of bombs on people for their own good, it’s not a crime, it’s a tragedy. It can’t be a crime, because our intentions are so good.
“Before dismissing any opinion, no matter how foolish it seems, one should of course ask: “What’s the evidence for it?” Usually the reply includes one or more of the following examples. The first is Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was supposedly a noble, almost saintly idealist, who called for the self-determination of all peoples, though the crafty Europeans outmaneuvered him at Versailles, which doomed the world to another global war.
“But Wilson’s idealism was highly selective. Where the United States had no territorial ambitions, as in Eastern and Southern Europe, Wilson could be generous, at least rhetorically. But over here in our own back yard, in Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, when popular protests arose, Wilson sent in American troops, who devastated those countries and installed investor-friendly governments.”

As I noted here, I think that, given a few days, I really could find another hundred examples of “American exceptionalism” used in this sense.

I fear we may be straying off-thread with this little disagreement, so why don’t you take the last word?

geo @53
I was too sweeping @48 and I acknowledge that ‘American exceptionalism’ can be used in different ways. Moreover, there’s some overlap among the different usages, which complicates things further. One fairly common meaning, and the one I prefer, has to do with what one author calls the American “mythology of mission.”[*] The emphasis in this usage falls less on unselfishness and more on the U.S. as beacon/exemplar, etc.

*The phrase is from John Kane (an Australian, as it happens), and I’ll quote a passage from him a bit later when I have a couple more minutes, b.c I think he gives a pretty good, lucid summary.

Gah, I didn’t erase the explicit link after embedding it. Sorry about that.

Andrew@56: “our distributions of honours today should judge people by the context of our own day.” Are you then in favour of ceasing to name the US capital, and a US state, after a slaveholder?

Shall we also rename the White House? It was probably named for the plantation house Martha Washington held from her first husband Custis — I say “held” because I assume that her sons by Custis actually stood to inherit it after her death. Shall we get into some gender issues? Yes, we should, them, too. (Women were not “owned” by anyone or absolutely barred from owning, but their rights to owning property were certainly limited.)

Some renaming is certainly in order (Calhoun everywhere is an affront, for obvious instance — especially in the North! but we’re talking southern NJ with Princeton, maybe not really the North, then or now), but more important is promoting a serious conversation with and about our past. This dialogue and set of dialogues are what matter — they constitute the “we” and “our.” It will take real work. The kind Bloix advocates and exemplifies in her comments here.

When I read JQ’s post, before reading comments, what most struck me (as it did some others above) was his lack of understanding of/feel for our Revolution, how it really did grow out of us and then form us — we are not of the royal Commonwealth (as admirable as that institution may have become — thanks in part to the work we American did in revolting). And how slavery formed us — us including the slaves and our descendants of slaves.

As for Henry Clay: I have been struck how the name Henry suddenly appears in my family in the 1840’s. In fact, Henry Clay ___. The simple Henry appears among northern abolitionist types, the full Henry Clay + surname with Baltimore family who moved to NYC in the late 1850’s. The extended Baltimore family are especially interesting. They will be very divided: in the combat, not so much brother against brother as cousin against cousin (and, I surmise, very conflicted brothers and sisters: my sons are fighting against my brothers and my brother’s sons!). Clay’s appeal lay (in part) in offering (so it seemed) a way out of the potential for those family divides. White family divides, yes.

Which makes me think about how many white people who opposed slavery in the 1840’s and 1850’s, whether avidly or not (“it will take time” — cf. MLK from the Birmingham Jail), also worried mostly about the Union. There is a reason the North was called “the Union” and its army the “Grand Army of the Republic.” Lately, I have been wondering if, while the revisionist South’s “state’s rights” argument is bogus, the North’s interest really was less, on the whole, in abolition (limiting slavery, yes, but that’s different from abolition) and more in the Union — see Clay.

It seems to me that what these reappraisals do is chip away at nationalist mythology. Where’s this going to end? With a new and revised nationalist mythology, or is the whole idea of nationalist mythology going to be discredited? If the latter, what then?

Meanwhile Tyler Cowen recently posted a link to a very interesting article, Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore, What’s Happening to the Number and Size of Nations? Opening lines: “Since the end of the Second World War, the number of independent states has nearly tripled. In the last thirty years, over thirty new states have become members of the United Nations. Separatist movements routinely receive strong support in regional and national elections.” And these new nations are smaller. Is the nation form collapsing or simply contracting to more ethnically and culturally homogenous states?

Or maybe even both?

And a couple of years ago I noticed a spate of books arguing that cities are where the action is. Nations are too unwieldy and a bit far from “the street”.

Is 19th C. style nationalism on the wane?

A lot of people getting very het up about the American revolution and I was wondering what people made of Gerald Horne’s new book?

“The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then residing in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with London. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne complements his earlier celebrated Negro Comrades of the Crown, by showing that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. In the prelude to 1776, more and more Africans were joining the British military, and anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain. And in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were chasing Europeans to the mainland. Unlike their counterparts in London, the European colonists overwhelmingly associated enslaved Africans with subversion and hostility to the status quo. For European colonists, the major threat to security in North America was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. And as 1776 approached, London-imposed abolition throughout the colonies was a very real and threatening possibility—a possibility the founding fathers feared could bring the slave rebellions of Jamaica and Antigua to the thirteen colonies. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in large part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their liberty to enslave others—and which today takes the form of a racialized conservatism and a persistent racism targeting the descendants of the enslaved. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 drives us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.”

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Counter-Revolution-1776-Resistance-Origins/dp/1479893404

“There is a reason the North was called “the Union” and its army the “Grand Army of the Republic.””

The Grand Army of the Republic was a veterans’ organization formed after the civil war was over.

yelps, not wheels

In practice, remembering the words while eschewing memorials isn’t very easy. I suspect far more children actively read the second inaugural on the walls of the Lincoln memorial than a textbook, if textbooks have the second inaugural at all. As for the Cooper Union address? Akhil Reed Amar in his book on the unwritten constitution would rather include the Northwest Ordinance as on a par with The Federalist. Doing away with the visible memorials would almost always hasten the forgetting of everything, good and bad I think.

The notion that Princeton is one of the schools intended to train the ruling class I think confuses management with ownership. I suspect the socialization process relies very heavily on prep schools and clubs and weddings and whatever institutions serve the same functions as the Social Register. And I’m sure legacies are part of the machinery of class reproduction. But until the notion of a gentlemen’s C has disappeared I’m uncertain reforms in higher education can do so much as intimated. The scholar gentry have some power but, really, is it even reasonable to call them the ruling class?

As for Gerald Horne and the case that 1776 and all that was a counter-revolution? I doubt that imperial abolition of slavery was as unlikely as a Stuart restoration, but even after any concerns with keeping order in the American colonies had disappeared with their independence, the planter interest in the Caribbean alone kept slavery alive til 1833. Even the abolition of the slave trade, despite the usefulness of slave trade suppression as a legal weapon against Spain and Africans, had to wait til 1807.

In addition to the intrinsic difficulty of resting such a huge argument on a shaky counterfactual, there is the question of what best explains elite hostility. The Proclamation of 1765 closing the frontier has long been cited. Here we have an actual offense against speculators’ interests, instead of a prospective one. Somehow I too am inclined to grant something real more weight than a threat.

Further, there is the question of mass involvement in a mere elite struggle such as local American elites versus imperial elites. I’m sorry but I don’t think the masses start rebelling just because some rabble rouser wants to use them in an elite struggle. That may be the standard theory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, but I believe people go to the streets and woods when they hope for something better for themselves, not their masters. You’re saying that New England, Samuel Adams the proto-Lenin manipulated the people by the vanguard party of the Committees of Correspondence (and their military wing, the Sons of Liberty.) And in Pennsylvania Benjamin Franklin cunningly devised one back room deal after another to lead the colony out of the empire, all to avenge his humiliation in the Cockpit in London. This is the great villain idea of history, which suffers all the defects of the great man idea, adding only cheap cynicism.

Worse yet, it is in the South, the region that has the greatest likelihood of resisting the supposedly anti-slavery crown, which had the most bitterly fought revolutionary struggles. The popular image of a bloodless American Revolution, one like the so-called Glorious Revolution, so unlike the English Civil War or the Great French Revolution, is false. Internecine strife between neighbors, bushwhacking, murders, atrocities, murderous petty fights prevailed in the South because it was the South where the loyalists had their greatest strength. (And New York City, the great southern entrepot that honored its long connections with the Draft Riots.)

Further, the meaning of historical events is to be found in outcomes, early and late. Slavery was a national institution before the American Revolution. And established churches were accepted nationally as well. Limited franchises were a norm too. Not so quickly as we today would like, but within living memory, universal suffrage for while males as the national norm. (Propertied women tended to lose their franchise, but there suffrage was not a right for women, but for their property. You cannot reasonably claim women as an estate lost status.) There were no established churches. And slavery was reduced to a section. It is a poor counter-revolution that can’t replace the chains of the past!

To be sure, the new republic was committed to redistributing American Indians lands to its citizens. I’m not quite sure who really thought that a bourgeois revolution would create an non-imperialist, pacifist state, except people terminally committed to the proposition that constitutionalism and individual rights and democratic elections are the essence of human liberation. The Empire was never committed to American Indian sovereignty, as the ghost of Tecumsh can testify.

And to top it all off, the old thesis was that the counter-revolutionary moment wasn’t 1776 but the ratification of the Constitution! Perhaps if Charles Beard had a statue somewhere people would remember his word? Perhaps celluloid could at least revive Gore Vidal’s words, Homage to Daniel Shays especially? Horne, I’m sorry but he’s not available by library loan, and I can’t see him as anything but a crackpot not even worth the Kindle price. The new Republic as the equivalent of the end of Reconstruction, a dirty deal that condemns masses of people to permanent inferiority is at least a defensible thesis.

Yet, even this needs a certain qualification I think. As a military tactic, the imperials set slaves free. The new Republic was of course instructed by the planters to seek redress, that is, the return of the slaves. It’s true I’ve not read the archives myself, but no historian I’ve read could cite anything to show that Washington and Hamilton were every seriously interested in pursuing this point. (Unlike that runaway Washington pursued, this wasn’t his pocket at stake.) Nor was it particularly important for their man Jay (who was deliberately made autonomous of slavery’s greatest defender…in the sense of being effective, that is…Thomas Jefferson, the titular Secretary of State.) Even the hyperlegalistic Lincoln, whose notion of democracy was an autodidact lawyer’s, could do so much.

Lastly, as for the notion that the Union was not worth fighting for? This is the same as saying the majority rule is not worth fighting for. There are constitutionalist, legalist, individualist arguments that true democracy rejects majority rule. I believe they are defective, and more importantly, deeply reactionary.

Historical narrative, quite apart from its mythological functions in the culture, necessarily involves heroic compression. Squeezing vast and alien doings into a nutshell affords every new generation of ignoramuses examining the nutshell, endless opportunities to “discover” the past by inventing new ways of unpacking the clichés with which we summarize our heritage. Of course, new myth challenging old myth (in the present, of course, not the past) will generate the most heat and the least light.

The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in large part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their liberty to enslave others—and which today takes the form of a racialized conservatism and a persistent racism targeting the descendants of the enslaved.

If you are going to construct a new myth, with as little bother as possible with actual history, there’s no more convenient method than a counterfactual teleology.

Gerald Horne complements his earlier celebrated Negro Comrades of the Crown, by showing that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt.

All historians, as the wag has it, remember the future and imagine the past. Using the “dénouement” of the story to select what to remember in retrospectively constructing the plot is a common method of compression. Taking it too far, which is easy to do and therefore often done, erases all traces of contingency from the past, leaving only an inevitable path of development, excusing all agency, responsibility and consequence. Combined artfully (or even hackishly) with the tropes of dramatic narrative, it can be quite persuasive, as dramatic narrative is a (if not “the”) form of moral discourse for the construction of myth.

Do we need myth? Do we need history? Do we need history to be myth? I guess maybe there’s something unsatisfying about always countering with some variation of, “it depends” or “it’s complicated”.

The (apparent, to judge from above) Gerald Horne thesis that fear of the imminent abolition of slavery, via order from London, sparked the Am. Rev. strikes me as near-total rubbish (near-total, like 90 percent). But hey, whatever sells books. I’m sure he has a gas bill, water bill, maybe kids he has to put through school, etc.

@80
That splendid old Tory Dr. Johnson was deploying a very National Review kind of rhetoric there against the revolutionaries (“you guys are the real liberty-haters”). I believe anti-slavery sentiment was a transatlantic phenomenon, most prominently of the “left”–Quakers, libertines and Freemasons, radical Whigs like Wilkes in England and Paine in America. It is certain that the northern states-colonies were where slavery was eradicated first, not England. Britain wouldn’t have abolished Caribbean slavery if not for terror at Sharpe’s rebellion in Jamaica 1832, the whole idea of England as an anti-slavery haven is silly.

Somerset v Stewart 1772 1772

“Even this reading meant that certain property rights in chattel slaves were unsupported by common law. It is one of the most significant milestones in the abolitionist campaign.

Some historians believe the case contributed to increasing colonial support for separatism in the Thirteen Colonies, by parties on both sides of the slavery question who wanted to establish independent government and law.[2] The southern colonies wanted to protect slavery and expanded its territory dramatically in the decades after independence was won.”

@Meriedith: Sorry about the link. Here’s the right one: Dizzy Gillespie speech: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2012/08/election-special-blues-house.html

“Dunmore is noted for Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation, also known as Lord Dunmore’s Offer of Emancipation. Dated 7 November 1775, but proclaimed a week later, Dunmore thereby formally offered freedom to slaves who abandoned their Patriot masters to join the British. Dunmore had previously withheld his signature from a bill against the slave trade.” …Wiki, led here by David Brion Davis

How could this be legally possible for Dunmore? How was it possible for Lincoln?

The point of the Somerset and Scottish cases is that they said slavery had no basis in common law, and therefore without recompense or litigation or need for legislation the Crown and its representatives could legally and instantly emancipate all the slaves at the stroke of a pen. However improbable, it was an intolerable threat and danger.

The Revolution freed the Colonies from British courts. The Constitution essentially legalized slavery.

Slavery at Common Law is pretty nuanced.

“Sir William Blackstone was in no doubt that “the spirit of liberty is so deeply ingrained in our constitution” that a slave, the moment he lands in England, is free”

“In the American colonies, it was widely assumed that positive law was needed to make slavery lawful, and various royal colonies passed laws to this effect.”

I have DBD’s Problem of Slavery In the Age of Revolution open at my desktop, and Davis is not a lawyer, and the law of Slavery was not really his primary focus. The lawyers possibly should be listened to here.

@84
That’s fair. And I shouldn’t have suggested Johnson was in any way insincere. I love Johnson (I use the Reynolds portrait as my gravatar) as a writer and man, without regard to his politics.

I certainly don’t include Jefferson in the “pantheon”, if that’s what you mean, as I tried to say above @29. I care about Northern Whiggery, not Jefferson’s hypocritical agrarian utopianism. He was a terrific writer, though–obviously far from being in Johnson’s class (or John Adams’s, for that matter), and he did recognize that slavery would have to end, and his writings and actions did in some important ways contribute to the end of slavery in spite of his total moral failure as a human being, and Bloix @14 was right, historically speaking.

Can’t stand Woodrow Wilson either, but that doesn’t make me want to give up the Fed or the income tax or stop wishing the Senate would have ratified the Versailles treaty.

@89
Also Wikipedia, on Stewart v. Someset:

In Massachusetts, several slaves filed freedom suits in 1773–1774 based on Mansfield’s ruling; these were supported by the General Court (for freedom of the slaves) but vetoed by successive Royal Governors. As a result, some individuals in pro-slavery and anti-slavery colonies, for opposite reasons, desired a distinct break from English law in order to achieve their goals with regard to slavery

The Massachusetts cases illustrate what the Northern revolutionaries regarded rightly as tyranny, and fought against (as does Dunmore’s 1775 veto, on which more here. Vermont and Pennsylvania abolished slavery before the war was over, in 1777 and 1780 respectively, and Massachusetts and New Hampshire in 1783, Connecticut in 1784, and laggard New York and New Jersey in 1799 and 1804. (Canada, in contrast, took until 1819.) To the citizens of these states, the Revolution, far from consecrating slavery, was what made abolition possible.

Nor did Lincoln have any idea that “slavery had no basis in common law”; to the contrary, he believed the federal government had no constitutional authority to emancipate slaves as late as the First Inaugural, when he said so for the last time. What changed his mind is probably a pretty complicated question; it certainly wasn’t a rereading of Stewart v. Somerset.

I have a little saying for my children and for foreign visitors I occasionally show around Washington: if there’s anything you don’t understand about America, the answer is “slavery.”

The answer is property, and slavery as a form of property preceded slavery as racial hierarchy. Suggest Domenico Losurdo on a counter-history of liberalism and C.B. MacPherson on Possessive Individualism as places to start.

#98- to be more blunt, before the Civil War, most people in the Northern states wanted to rid their states of slavery without creating a population of free blacks, and the way to do that was to tell slaveholders to move south or sell their slaves south. “Gradual emancipation” was an announcement that slaveholders had up to a certain date to get their property out of the jurisdiction.

Until our lifetimes, most white people held as their deepest belief that there were two choices: subjugation or separation. Perhaps most still believe it. After the Civil War the tide began to turn, but it turned back. It turned again with the civil rights movement, and it turned back again. Perhaps we are living in a third turning. The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

Yastreblyansky: whatever the legal state of slavery in England, it seems that in freedom-loving Scotland a form of enslavement (of Scots, by other Scots) was legal till 1799. Odd, that. See http://www.scottishmining.co.uk/429.html.

bloix@96: if there’s anything you don’t understand about America, the answer is “slavery.”

True up to a point. But thinking of some of the things I don’t understand about the US –
Prohibition
The War on Drugs
Prominent, well-known leaders of criminal gangs
Bizarre and popular religions
Opposition to the idea of evolution –
I’m not sure how “slavery” is really the answer. Could you enlighten me?

Anarcasie: I submit that here is a difference between saying X, who supported Y, also supported slavery: and X supported Y because X supported slavery (which is what I take Bloix to have intended)..

Also: are you arguing that religious sects, bizarre from the non-US point of view, like the Mormons or Christian Scientists or Scientologists supported or do support slavery, and that is why they hold their views?

Or that support for Prohibition came from supporters of slavery?

As for your crack at GW Bush: I have no time for him whatever, but I don’t think anyone could regard him as the leader of a criminal gang after the fashion of Al Capone or various well-known New York Dons. You are welcome to regard him as far worse, but that’s not the point: I don’t see how slavery explains his actions. Do you?

John Quiggin@102: this game of which Anglos were better and which worse re slavery, please, give it up. All Anglos were terrible. We could also play the game, which were worse re Native Americans? US Americans or Canadians? (Probably, Canadians, which wreaks havoc with the game being played here.) Let’s get the Spaniards in on the act, the French. Let’s get Australia in on the act, the Aborigenies!

What concerns actually underly this post?

Meredith,

Yes the treatment of Indigenous people has been very bad in most colonial settler countries. As well as the treatment of Indigenous people in colonial Australia, Australia also had penal colonies in the early period and also indentured labourers from Pacific countries.

Looking at the OP John Quiggin wrote “As an Australian, I’m not much accustomed to think of political leaders in heroic terms…”

This is true, but I disagree with John Quiggin’s reasoning somewhat (“something that reflects the fact that nothing our political leaders do matters that much to anybody except us, and even then most of the decisions that really mattered have always been made elsewhere”) — I think this is less to do with the global import of Australiabut more to do with Australia being settled at a later period than the USA under different conditions in the UK and in this colony from the American one so the history was different, and the history-making was different too.

For instance, I was reading about the public trust doctrine for the VCAT case here — and I read an article about its use including in America in the Revolutionary period and it was used in a grand rhetorical sort of fashion by both sides in terms of responsibilities and accountabilities of government (and indeed now it is still well utilised legally in America) — whereas there were a couple of very prosaic cases involving the public trust doctrine in Australia in the period shortly before Federation (our equivalent of the Revolution) one being about the sale of some land in Albert Park in Melbourne (still a controversial public park due to being utilised for the Grand Prix motor racing event) and one about a coal mine in Sydney where the company proposed to put the industrial plant on the North Shore (a very well heeled area even then) which some people thought was the height of modernity and North Shore residents opposed vigorously.

But at the same time, although the public trust doctrine and the responsibilities of government is not really evoked grandly in Australia, the government provides more public services than the American government does.

There are some grander moments in Australian history, but even then they tend to be taken with a grain (or more) of salt — for instance a notable and praised speech by Prime Minister Keating on the treatment of Indigenous people — the Redfern speech — afterwards became the locus for public debate about Prime Ministerial speeches and their speechwriters (while I am sure no Australian Prime Minister will ever again choose a Historian for a speechwriter, I do hope someone makes a movie of this one day like The King’s Speech).

That speech was around the time of The History Wars, which centred around the treatment of Indigenous people in Australia and how to include this in our history writing. One of the major books of this dispute was called This Whispering In Our Hearts by Henry Reynolds, which was named after a political speech by Richard Windeyer in 1842, whose speech against Aboriginal Rights was said to have “distinctly proved not only that the Blacks have no right to the soil of Australia for want of settled occupancy and cultivation; but that they have no right even to the kangaroos more than we have, the game laws of England agreeing precisely with the great law of nature, that wild animals not confined by enclosure are not, and cannot be the property of any man. (Sydney Morning Herald 12 Sept 1842)”

But at the end of that powerful speech against Aboriginal Rights, Richard Wineyer said:

“How is it that our minds are not satisfied? …What means this whispering in the bottom of our hearts?”

There was no large audience for abolitionism in the north until the Fugitive Slave Act brought Federal protection of slavery into the northern states. There was of course a very large and potentially powerful audience for abolitionism in the South, hence the censorship of the mails.

https://books.google.com/books?id=233pWF0w-WEC&pg=PA120&lpg=PA120&dq=southern+censorship+of+the+us+mails&source=bl&ots=_F3KFfsCnQ&sig=OpUEfwJkPNEk-x_wm20u4vbdO8k&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiuv9GepLTJAhVD4SYKHcvUCcEQ6AEIKjAC#v=onepage&q=southern%20censorship%20of%20the%20us%20mails&f=false