Our Divided Political Heart (11 page)

Foner has been as close as anyone to the center of this interpretative struggle, and his coda about his own role is delightfully revealing:

There is a certain irony in the fact that a Columbia historian
produced this new history of Reconstruction, exemplified by the fact that my research expenses were partly covered by the department’s
Dunning Fund and much of my reading took place in Burgess Library. For it was at Columbia at the turn of the century that William A. Dunning and John W. Burgess had established the traditional school of Reconstruction politics, teaching that blacks were “children” incapable of appreciating the freedom that had been thrust upon them, and that the North did a “monstrous” thing in granting them suffrage. There is no better illustration than Reconstruction of how historical interpretation both reflects and helps to shape current policies. The views of the Dunning School helped freeze the white South for generations in unalterable opposition to any change in race relations, and justified decades of Northern indifference to Southern nullification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The civil rights revolution, in turn, produced an outpouring of revisionist literature, far more favorable to the aspirations of former slaves.

Foner shared with Dunning and Burgess a Columbia connection, a deep engagement with the same period in American history, and a passion to interpret it. Substantively, he disagreed with his Morningside Heights forebears on almost everything that mattered.

The battle over Reconstruction history has another lesson for this moment. The 1870s revolt against Reconstruction, accompanied as it was by an increasingly reactionary view of African Americans, provides an object lesson in how the energies of reform eras dissipate. The idealism of one period can congeal into a sour view of those who undertake the difficult and visionary work of change. Note how Reconstruction’s advocates, who were motivated by a desire to achieve equality across the color line and revolutionize social and economic relations in the South, were reduced by later historians to power-hungry and corrupt politicians merely using African Americans for their own selfish purposes. African Americans who saw themselves as the subjects of history during Reconstruction were reduced to being mere objects for political schemers. A project of
community transformation was recast as a series of plots for individual self-aggrandizement.

Such rewrites of the past are very much with us again. The activists of the Progressive Era and the New Deal saw themselves as social reformers battling against an unjust and outmoded economic system on behalf of working- and middle-class Americans. But the struggles of those eras are being repainted as selfish efforts on the part of liberal politicians, government bureaucrats, labor bosses, and anti-business intellectuals who sought to gain control over the economic system. The reforms of the Great Society are being denigrated in a similar way. The successes of the period—among them Medicare, Medicaid, civil rights, and voting rights—are ignored in an effort to pronounce the entire effort a failure. The best way to discredit today’s social reformers is to tear down those who came before them, to ignore their successes and belittle their achievements.

An even more daring approach involves rewriting our national self-understanding from the very beginning. This is at once bold and subtle. Our understandings of Reconstruction, after all, went through a sharp, open process of revision. Our views of the larger trajectory of our story have been changed by taking propositions we broadly agree on—our love of liberty, our devotion to individual achievement, and our belief in limits on government—and using them to push aside all competing, supplementary, or complementary visions of the American character and national philosophy.

Our current polarization arises in part because liberals and Democrats—notably our last two Democratic presidents—have become more open to a communitarian view of our national story at the very moment when conservatives have been casting aside their own strong communitarian traditions and denying the robust role played by the federal government in the nation’s growth and development from the earliest days of our republic. This conflict is fed by the very complexity of our national character.

We Americans are a confusing people, perhaps especially to ourselves. The self-portraits we offer the world are contradictory. Our movies include such gloriously communitarian films as
It’s a Wonderful Life
,
Witness
, and
The Last Hurrah
—and the powerfully individualistic characters of
Dirty Harry
,
High Noon, Scarface
, and
Rebel Without a Cause
. The novels of John Steinbeck, John Sayles, and Toni Morrison call for community and speak of the limits of individualism. Our popular fiction also celebrates loners: Jack Kerouac as Sal Paradise took us
On the Road
while Sam Spade, Travis McGee, Lew Archer, and Kinsey Millhone disdain interference from anyone in their private efforts to create pockets of order in a chaotic world. And then there is Spenser, the late Robert B. Parker’s splendidly self-contained and iconoclastic hero. Is he a pure individualist, as he so often presents himself? Or was his entire fictional life a celebration of the Boston communities in which he remained so unapologetically embedded?

Our confusion arises not from misperceptions about ourselves, but from an awareness of our twin longings. As I have been suggesting, one of our country’s peculiar achievements has been to nurture communitarian individualists—and individualistic communitarians. At our worst, this can make us seem schizophrenic. At our best, we approach a sensible equilibrium. And at a moment of so much fruitless and angry political polarization, the homely idea of restoring the balance between our two sides may be the most radical option on offer. For a people no less than for individuals,
asserting one aspect of our character at the cost of obliterating another is an act of self-destruction.

Understanding the duality of the American character has been a national pastime (and a passion of foreign observers) since at least the time of Tocqueville.
Democracy in America
brims with examples of how Americans in the Jacksonian era tempered their individualistic spirit with a regard for the community. “
When an American needs the assistance of his fellows
, it is very rare for that to be refused,” Tocqueville wrote. “When some unexpected disaster strikes a family, a thousand strangers willingly open their purses.” Beyond his gift for aphorism and for striking observations that seem timelessly relevant to the American experience—one of my favorites: “
The great privilege of the Americans
does not simply consist in their being more enlightened than other nations, but in their being able to repair the faults they may commit”—Tocqueville understood American tensions and contradictions as clearly as any other student of our nation’s life. He was one of the first to use the very word “individualism,” and he knew how much a hunger for private property drove us. “
In no other country in the world is the love of property keener
or more alert than in the United States,” he declared, “and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.”

Tocqueville worried that American individualism, untempered, might lead to the isolation of Americans from each other and thereby undermine the very freedom they celebrated. Yet Americans had other tendencies to which Tocqueville was highly attentive. “
I have already shown, in several parts of this work, by what means the inhabitants
of the United States almost always manage to combine their own advantage with that of their fellow citizens,” Tocqueville wrote in
Democracy in America
. “In the United States hardly anybody talks of the beauty of virtue, but they maintain that virtue is useful and prove it every day. The American moralists do not profess that men ought to sacrifice themselves for their fellow creatures because it is noble to make such sacrifices, but they boldly aver that such sacrifices are as necessary to him who imposes them upon himself as to him for whose sake they are made.”

Bill Clinton liked to illustrate America’s twin commitments by calling attention to our most unassuming piece of currency. “
Take a penny from your pocket
,”
Clinton said. “On one side, next to Lincoln’s portrait is a single word: ‘Liberty.’ On the other side is our national motto. It says ‘E Pluribus Unum’—‘Out of Many, One.’ It does not say ‘Every man for himself.’

“
That humble penny
,” he would continue, “is an explicit declaration—one you can carry around in your pocket—that America is about both individual liberty and community obligation. These two commitments—to protect personal freedom and to seek common ground—are the coin of our realm, the measure of our worth.”

We may carry in our pockets the lesson the penny teaches, but we often resist it. Overwhelmingly, our public language about who we are and what we believe emphasizes liberty, individual rights, freedom of conscience, and personal autonomy. All are of infinite value, but the communitarian slogan on the other side of the penny is invoked only rarely, and not just because it’s in Latin. Except when it’s used in the most bland and anodyne sense, the word “community” regularly provokes controversy in a way the word “liberty” does not.

Applying “community standards” to the availability of pornography immediately implies censorship. The “community action” program was the most controversial aspect of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, seen as utopian, impractical, open to corruption, and disruptive of the usual ways in which local governments did business. “Community schools” are typically praised, yet the term has also been seen as a vehicle for defending segregation and exclusion by people in one community at the expense of those in another. While “community policing” now enjoys widespread support, it aroused suspicion on both the left and the right. There were civil libertarians who feared that giving police officers too much discretion would undermine individual rights, and there were conservatives who worried that the program would reduce the forces of order to social workers, diminishing their attention to law enforcement. In health insurance, the use of “community rating” to create large pools of customers by way of lowering overall rates is criticized by those who say the practice unfairly raises costs for the younger and the healthier, and especially for those who are more responsible than others in their exercise and eating habits. And it’s hard to forget the controversy during the 2008 campaign over Barack
Obama’s first professional role as a “community organizer,” including Sarah Palin’s memorable comment at the Republican National Convention: “
I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’
except that you have actual responsibilities.”

That “community” inspires admiration in the abstract but suspicion in many of its concrete uses speaks to the power of individualistic assumptions about our country and its history. The central idea of “
the political philosophy by which we live
,” the philosopher Michael Sandel has written, “is that government should be neutral toward the moral and religious views its citizens espouse . . . it should provide a framework of rights that respects persons as free and independent selves, capable of choosing their own values and ends . . . So familiar is this vision of freedom that it seems a permanent feature of the American political and constitutional tradition.”

The vision is familiar in part because the idea that individualism is central to the American creed was dominant in the academy for decades, expressed most forcefully by Louis Hartz in his hugely influential 1955 book,
The Liberal Tradition in America
. Hartz argued that individualistic liberalism is the United States’
only
authentic political tradition. In explaining the failure of strong socialist and conservative movements to find a footing in American politics, Hartz pointed to a “
moral unanimity
” in America behind a “
fixed, dogmatic liberalism
,” which he defined as “
the reality of atomistic social freedom
.” In Hartz’s view, John Locke was our master philosopher. As the historian James T. Kloppenberg has argued, Hartz used Locke “
as a shorthand for the self-interested, profit-maximizing behaviors of liberal capitalism
, against which he counterposed, on the one hand, the revolutionary egalitarian fervor of Jacobins and Marxian socialists and, on the other, the traditional hierarchical values of church elites and aristocrats under various European ancien régimes.”

Hartz’s work was certainly “
elegant and dazzling
,” as Kloppenberg conceded. But Kloppenberg is right to argue that Hartz should be understood not as offering “timeless truths about America” but as himself the product of history. Hartz was writing, after all, in a very particular period after World War II when the Cold War consensus reigned in politics. Hartz was, in essence, reading the consensus of his moment back into the
American story.
Daniel Bell’s
The End of Ideology
, a brilliant book that defined the era, referred in its subtitle to “the exhaustion of political ideas in the fifties.” The “middle way” that British prime minister Harold Macmillan announced and that Dwight Eisenhower followed in the United States militated against both socialist and right-wing politics. Hartz turned the exhaustion of political ideas in the fifties into a shortage of political ideas in American history altogether. This led him to wonder whether American history was even worth the time, a remarkable assertion from one of our great historical commentators. As Kloppenberg pointed out, Hartz acknowledged that his approach “
seems suddenly to shrink our domestic struggles to insignificance
, robbing them of their glamour, challenging even the worth of their historical study.” It was very hard to square this view with our long struggles over slavery, government’s role in the economy during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and the dueling domestic legacies of Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan.