Our Divided Political Heart (27 page)

There were limits to what Hamilton’s
Report on Manufactures
achieved during his time as Treasury secretary, as Gordon Wood has noted. Nonetheless, his
Report
was prophetic. It was a guide for policy makers in the Whig Party and among Republicans before the Great Depression. Both Progressives and New Dealers looked back to Hamilton’s methods with approval, even if their ends were different—and even if Democrats such as FDR continued to proclaim themselves heirs to Jefferson. And our first Treasury Secretary was right on his central points: turning the United States into a manufacturing giant did ultimately turn the nation into a power with global influence; and government action was essential to securing this end.

Hamilton’s experience makes clear that arguments over the federal government’s role in our national development did not suddenly break out in the 1910s, 1930s, or 1960s. Government economic intervention on behalf of a common or national good has long been viewed as legitimate, even if it has almost always been contested. It’s instructive that within just a few years of the adoption of the Constitution, its very authors were engaged in a high-stakes contest over what its words actually meant. It might be said that the originators of the Constitution were not themselves originalists, since they did not pretend to share a common understanding of what all of its provisions implied.

What Hamilton started, Henry Clay continued. Clay, the three-time presidential candidate, Speaker of the House, secretary of state, and United
States senator, graced American politics for forty-nine years, winning his first election, to the Kentucky state legislature, at age twenty-six. He was controversial in his day. Andrew Jackson called his main adversary “
the Judas of the West
” and a “
profligate demagogue
.” John Quincy Adams, his ally at many moments, called Clay “
essentially a gamester
” in his political and private lives. But Abraham Lincoln revered him as a political idol. When he eulogized the man in 1852, Lincoln saw in Clay virtues he hoped Americans would later see in him. Clay’s lack of formal education, Lincoln said, “
teaches that in this country, one can scarcely be so poor
, but that, if he
will
, he
can
acquire sufficient education to get through the world respectably.” Clay died at 11:17 A.M. on June 29, 1853. “
The telegraph made the news of Clay’s death instant
and therefore indelible,” wrote his biographers David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler. “Only hours passed before cities from Maine to Missouri began draping themselves in crepe and men from Savannah to St. Louis began pulling on black armbands. Washington, already slowed by summer’s heat, came to a halt. President Millard Fill-more shut down the government, and Congress immediately adjourned.”

Clay’s importance, so obvious in 1853, is largely lost to us. Only recently have we begun paying attention to him again. Robert V. Remini, the great chronicler of the age of Jackson, noted that his
Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union
, published in 1991, was the first “
modern, scholarly biography
” of Clay in fifty years. Clay also received recognition
in Merrill D. Peterson’s
The Great Triumvirate
, a collective biography of Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun, published in 1987. The Heidlers’ biography came out in 2010, to considerable acclaim.

This contemporary rediscovery of Clay may speak to our moment’s longing for politicians capable of reaching compromises. The 1820 Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850 both postponed—though could not permanently forestall—the nation’s day of reckoning over slavery. But Clay’s confidence in the federal government’s capacity to bind and build the nation is also a tonic at this moment of doubt about collective action.

Many politicians have offered programs with catchy titles. We have seen New, Fair, and Square Deals, a New Frontier, a New Freedom, and a Great Society. Only Clay had the audacity to name his program the
American
System. It offered, Remini wrote, “
a vision of progress
,” and “a bold reformulation of the relationship between government and society.” The American System, Peterson wrote, “
was not so much a philosophy seeking embodiment
in public policy as it was a set of policies, with distinct interests behind them, seeking the dignity of a philosophy.” He added:

Yet the ideas, whatever their sources
, were important. Viewed as a theory of political economy, the American System disputed the fundamental “free market” premises of the classical school. It believed that a youthful economy, like the American, required the fostering hand of government; it believed a republican government responsive to the interests of the people ought to promote employment, productivity, and wealth; it believed that national government, in particular, should assume a positive role in opening up promising lines of economic growth in advance of market forces. . . . In the philosophy of the American System, national wealth was an aggregate interest, paramount to the interests of individuals or of other nations; and in the United States its prospects were wonderful to behold.

Michael F. Holt, the author of the most comprehensive recent history of the Whig Party, described the party’s program in words that applied precisely to Clay, the party’s chief ideologist. The Whigs achieved their greatest political success, Holt wrote, when they invoked “
the commonwealth tradition of using the state actively
for the benefit of the people.” Holt also rescues Clay from the claim of his enemies (and some of his friends) that he was merely trying to revive the old elitist Federalist Party. On the contrary, Holt insists, Clay married Jeffersonian Republican principles to a nationalist economic agenda.

“
Of all major figures in American political history
,” wrote Daniel Walker Howe in
The Political Culture of the American Whigs
, “Clay had the most systematic and multifaceted program. If he had been able to implement it (that is, if he had been as capable a politician as he was an ideologist) he would have changed the course of United States history in the nineteenth century.” Adoption of Clay’s program would have created
“
much more precedent for government intervention
in the economy and for planned response to social problems in general.”

The very name “American System,” Howe notes, was designed to distinguish “
Clay’s economic nationalism from the ‘British system
’ of laissez-faire.” There is an irony here in light of the United States’ present-day association with laissez-faire, particularly as it is seen from developing countries. Third World nations often bridle at American free-market prescriptions as they seek their own paths for development, just as Clay did for the United States.

The American System’s first plank involved federal spending for “internal improvements,” the roads and canals the new nation required to bind it together. In January 1824, Clay rose in the House to defend a bill appropriating $30,000 for a survey of those roads and canals the president might deem militarily or commercially essential. At issue then, as it had been earlier with Hamilton and the Bank of the United States, was whether such a proposal was constitutional. Clay argued that the constitutional mandate authorizing the creation of the post office was enough to justify spending on roads. As Remini nicely summarized his argument: “
Mails imply roads; roads imply their preservation
; their preservation implies the power to repair them.”

Clay also insisted that if the Constitution’s grant of power to the federal government to regulate commerce had “any meaning,” it surely implied “the power to foster it, to promote it, to bestow on it facilities similar to those which have been conceded to our foreign trade . . . All the powers of this government should be interpreted in reference to its first, its best, its greatest object, the union of these States.”

Clay even anticipated an innovation that Richard Nixon was to sponsor more than a century later—and that Barack Obama would make part of his stimulus plan. “
Before long
,” writes Howe, “Clay figured out how to circumvent the scruples of the strict constructionists. He hit upon the device of revenue-sharing, or, as he called it, ‘distribution’ of federal money to the states for specified purposes. This would have the added benefit of forestalling the state bankruptcies and repudiation of bonds that were playing havoc with investors at the time.”

A second part of Clay’s system was a protective tariff to spur the development
of American industry. As Remini noted, its purpose was “
not simply the protection of specific items
to assist certain industries or particular raw materials. For Clay the tariff was a means of assisting all sections and classes through the dynamics of increased national wealth and power benefiting all Americans and uniting them in a common purpose and identity.” Remini saw Clay as offering nothing short of “
a planned national economy responsive
to the new industrial age that had just begun to emerge within the United States.”

Clay echoed Hamilton on the impact of Europe’s policies on the United States, Speaking in 1824, he declared: “
The policy of Europe refuses to receive from us
any thing but those raw materials of smaller value, essential to their manufactures, to which they can give a higher value, with the exception of tobacco and rice, which they cannot produce.” And he was reproachful of those who insisted that the government lacked the authority to do what he saw as necessary:

Is there no remedy within the reach of the government?
Are we doomed to behold our industry languish and decay yet more and more? But there is a remedy, and that remedy consists in modifying our foreign policy, and in adopting a genuine AMERICAN SYSTEM. We must naturalize the arts in our country, and we must naturalize them by the only means which the wisdom of nations has yet discovered to be effective—by adequate protection against the otherwise overwhelming influence of foreigners.

Clay underscored this point by distinguishing between political and economic freedom. “
The truth is, and it is in vain to disguise it
, that we are a sort of independent colonies of England—politically free, commercially slaves.” And Clay was disdainful of those who said the Constitution did not authorize protective tariffs. “
This constitution must be a singular instrument!
” he declared. “It seems to be made for any other people than our own.”

Two other components rounded out the Clay program: the sale of government-held western lands to settlers to finance his internal improvement plans, and the maintenance of a strong Bank of the United States. As
Sean Wilentz points out in his monumental political history
The Rise of American Democracy
, Clay, like other “
commercially oriented Republicans
,” had “opposed recharter” of Hamilton’s bank in 1811 “on the grounds that the national bank unfairly constrained the operations of state banks, which had proliferated throughout the country.” Clay later became its champion. The Bank of the United States was consistent with Clay’s national vision, but there was also political opportunism in Clay’s decision to pick a fight with Jackson over rechartering the bank in the presidential election year of 1832, when Clay was Jackson’s main opponent. Clay was confident he had a winning issue. “
Should Jackson veto it
,” Clay proclaimed, “I shall veto him!” As Remini noted, Clay’s move “
was a blatant act of political self-interest
.”

And it misfired badly. Jackson swept the election, crushing Clay in the Electoral College 219–49. Clay had one more try at the presidency, in 1844, when he lost narrowly to James K. Polk. He would die disappointed in his failure to achieve his larger political ambition. Yet he and the Whig Party, of which he was the foremost figure, bequeathed the country a powerful political legacy. Daniel Walker Howe offered this epitaph to the Whigs:

The common characterization of this period
as “the age of Jackson” has obscured the contribution of the Whigs. Yet, as economic modernizers, as supporters of strong national government, and as humanitarians more receptive than their rivals to talent regardless of race or gender, the Whigs deserve to be remembered. They facilitated the transformation of the United States from a collection of parochial agricultural communities into a cosmopolitan nation integrated by commerce, industry, information, and voluntary associations as well as by political ties. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we can see that the Whigs, though not the dominant party of their own time, were the party of America’s future.

My account here, though sympathetic in large part, is not intended as a “vote” for Hamilton or Clay, for the Federalists or the Whigs. Writing about
history that way is foolish in any event. “I don’t believe that historians should take sides with contestants of the past, whether Anti-Federalists versus Federalists or Republicans versus Federalists,” Gordon Wood argued in introducing his recent book
The Idea of America
. “
The responsibility of the historian
, it seems to me, is not to decide who in the past was right or who was wrong but to explain why the different contestants thought and behaved as they did.”

Indeed, a twenty-first-century progressive choosing to side unreservedly with Hamilton and Clay would be required to ignore fundamental issues at stake in the republic’s early years. Within both Federalism and the more conservative wing of Whiggery lurked a profound resistance to the democratization of society and powerful strains of elitism. It fell to their opponents among the Anti-Federalists, the Jeffersonians, and the Jacksonians to make America more democratic—and the democrats largely won. Over time, as Wood notes, the Federalists were required to abandon aristocratic ideas in favor of “
popular and democratic rhetoric
.” This rhetorical shift became a substantive concession to a far more democratic approach to politics.

Similarly, the political energy behind the Jacksonian movement came in large part from the energy of the middle classes, the yeoman, and a rising working class opposed to economic dominance by the financiers and merchants of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. As is usually the case in elections, such class dynamics do not explain everything. Howe has noted sharp differences in party support along religious lines, with a rising, reformist evangelical movement in the North being central to the rise of Whiggery. (“
If the Church of England was the Tory party at prayer
,” he wrote, “the Whig party in the United States was in many ways the evangelical united front at the polling place.”) And revisionist historians have argued that both the Jacksonians and the Whigs were at heart parties of capitalism representing different wings of the business class.