Regionalism and Nationalism in the United States

The Attack on "Leviathan"

Donald Davidson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351494045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

A quarter of a century before Lyndon B. Johnson popularized the slogan ""The Great Society, "" Donald Davidson wrote his critique of Leviathan, the omnipotent nation-state, in terms that only recently have come to be appreciated. ""Leviathan is the idea of the Great Society, organized under a single, complex, but strong and highly centralized national government, motivated ultimately by men's desire for economic welfare of a specific kind rather than their desire for personal liberty. "" Originally published as The Attack on Leviathan, this eloquent volume is an attack on state centralism and an affirmation of regional identity.Davidson's work is a special sort of intellectual as well as social history. It reveals an extraordinary mastery of the literature on regionalism in the United States, with special emphasis on the work on Rupert Vance and Howard Odum in the social sciences. Davidson looks at regionalism in arts, literature, and education. He favors agriculture over industrialization, and ""the hinterland"" over cities, examining along the way varying historical memories, the dilemma of Southern liberals, and the choice of expedience or principles. His book is a forceful and commanding challenge to those who would push for central authority at the sacrifice of individual and regional identity. Davidson concludes with a devastating critique of nationalism leading to a supra-nationalism. Ultimately, the heterogeneity of human desires comes up against the uniformity of world systems and world states. Davidson offers instead a broad world of intellectual history and commentary in which individualism allies itself with communities as a means for stemming the tide of collectivism and its base in a world state. For Davidson, Leviathan, the monstrous state, is a devourer, not a savior. As several peoples rise to strike down their own Leviathans, this courageous book may be better understood now than it was in 1938.Donald Davidson

THE NATION WE ARE

I. THE DIVERSITY OF AMERICA

IN CHARLES A. BEARD’S popular history, The Rise of American Civilization, are frequent bits of irony and sarcasm that remind us of another great historian, one of the first who chose to make history the study of a social organism rather than a mere chronology. Gibbon’s way, Byron said, was to sap a solemn creed with a solemn sneer. Beard’s irony is not solemn; rather it is a confident levity, that breaks out into covert witticism whenever the formal professions of statesmen and parties are seen, in the brazen after-light of economic determinism, to be in patent conflict with supposed realities. Writing of the early debates over strict and liberal interpretations of the Constitution, Beard says:

If some of the minor politicians thought their linguistic pattern flowered inexorably from unanswerable premises, there is no doubt that the first thinkers who sat at the loom weaving the texture of constitutional theory, knew what and how they were designing. It remained for smaller men to treat Federal jurisprudence as one of America’s Eleusinian mysteries.

Linguistic pattern! It is one of Beard’s favorite metaphors, and he returns to it again and again, always with the implication that the purpose of a linguistic pattern in the mouth of an American politician or even in a document of state is to disguise reality.

Let the historian have his moment of jocosity. We can join in the laughter until we reflect that there are all kinds of linguistic patterns and that some, not to be despised, reveal truths which the formal historian has been too prone to pass by. If Beard had looked a little further, he might have discovered that certain other realities of American history are not hidden but are rather openly and honestly disclosed in the familiar vocabulary, or linguistic pattern, of the American people.

There is, for example, the unrecognized reality of sectionalism—or, as some would have it, regionalism—and its actual role in the national being of the American people. If the vocabulary of the people rather than the solemn protestations and documentations of statesmen be consulted as evidence, there has never been a time in the history of the Republic when Americans were unwilling to acknowledge sectionalism as an effective reality, amounting almost to a commonplace, to be accepted and dealt with entirely aside from its status as a political and social problem.

Common speech is vocal where the Constitution is silent. For tendencies that assume a living form definite enough to be encountered in ordinary life must be dealt with, and, to be dealt with, must be named. So there have always been familiar designations for those roughly outlined geographic divisions that interlock within the national arrangement and overlap the state arrangement. The habitat and manners of the Yankee, the Southerner, and of all the varieties of Westerner have been known and named at all periods in our history. We have a big medicine for the nation, by which, gravely passing the calumet from hand to hand, we assure ourselves that there is no North, no South, no East, no West, except as compass or winds may indicate; and we have a little medicine for the states, performed with assurances that require nowadays a more anxious and forcible puffing than of old. But no sooner is the mystical rite performed than we resume our usual characters, and are again Americans, certainly, but with equal certainty also Americans of this or that geographic division. The definition of the American is never quite complete until the qualification is added: And from what section of the country?

Our devotions to the Great White Father have not, after all, stirred the Rockies from their base, or unchannelled the Mississippi, or removed the plains, the lakes, the climate itself. Nor have any devotions, aspirations, or mechanisms changed the American past, though they may have altered much else. It still remains a fact that the Puritans settled in New England and men of a different persuasion in Virginia; the Scandinavians went one way, the Scotch-Irish, the Huguenots, the African slave went another way. Gold was discovered in California, not in Tennessee. The Hartford Convention, the Texan Revolution, the War Between the States, the march of the Robber Barons, the growth of Wall Street are all realities which have taken a sectional form. If all the diverse elements that went into the peopling and making of America had been diffused more uniformly, or had spread over a more uniform physiographic area, or even had concentrated within bounds as narrow as England or France, the tale might have been different. But it did not happen so. There is no escape from the fact that the American nation is spread over a continental area, and that in the spreading process it has established local concentrations which have geographic bounds.

At this point we come upon a contradiction which has not always been welcome company to those who would make a party platform, or advocate a Federal statute, or vend a commodity, or carry a religious doctrine, or plan a national economy, or perform any act claiming to have merit and application throughout the whole area of the United States. How does one legislate for the nation as a whole? What is the whole nation? What is the national interest? The government which is supposed to be national and which is charged with administering to the benefit of all citizens equally is an exceedingly abstract device. Its principle, defined in a written instrument which at points is more negative than positive, has to do with the federation of states, and the states themselves are likewise abstractly conceived, and are laid out, to a remarkable degree, in geometric rather than geographic patterns. The states and the Federal government represent conceptions or organizations rather than organisms. The government (or governments) cannot take formal notice, is in fact specifically forbidden in certain instances to take formal notice, of the actual geographic divisions—the sections or regions. The real and concrete thing does not express itself overtly in the abstract conception. The organizations do not coincide with the organisms. We are a federation of states; but we are a nation of sections. The unwritten constitution of that nation is a sectional constitution as apparent in folkways and political predilections as it is not apparent in the written document.

In all the 160-odd years of our history as a Republic this contradiction has existed without our ever drawing up a single really practical device for dealing with the problems which it created. We have, in fact, never really attempted to deal with it. The whole subject has long been taboo, among historians and statesmen alike, as if the existence of sections constituted a skeleton in the closet, which could not be brought to view without the most scandalous and violent results. There have been good reasons for this avoidance of an important issue, and there have been some reasons, effective enough, which cannot be called good. Of the various good reasons for public avoidance of the issue it is necessary for the moment to mention only one—an obvious reason. In the early days of the Republic the establishment and preservation of the national government was the sine qua non of all policies, whether domestic or foreign. To have a national government working practically at home and to present a united front abroad to European powers waiting for any favorable opportunity to dismember and devour the bantling Independence—those were concerns that necessarily took precedence over all else. Although, even before the turn of the nineteenth century, there were definitely established sections—a New England, a Middle States, a South, and the first indications of a West—the considerations that they forced upon national attention were a matter to be hushed up and managed behind the scenes. From such original circumstances, sectionalism received a stigma which has never been erased. And so, even in dictionaries of the year 1936, the term sectionalism is defined, with a Johnsonian fillip, as “devotion, especially disproportionate, to the interests peculiar to a section of the country; sectional feeling, prejudice, etc.” Then the dictionary notes, more realistically and appropriately, that the word is peculiar to the United States. It is not an Anglicism.

In the day of the nation’s maturity, that definition can be altered without danger to the Republic. There is, in fact, more danger in leaving it unaltered than in seeking the way by which the fatal qualifications “disproportionate” and “prejudiced” may be removed. Those who held, sincerely or not, that sectionalism necessarily involved a dangerous or even treacherous devotion and a narrow prejudice looked forward to a time when all sectional differences, or at least all troublesome sectional differences, would be removed by some welding and unifying process that would work complete harmony where there had once been frequent and annoying discord. If nothing else would do the job, the industrial revolution, in its massiveness and energy, would certainly do it, perhaps in less time than older Americans could have conceived, perhaps in that glorious twinkling of an eye which the Saints of the Church promised as the final transformation of the most corrupt sinner. Almost the contrary has happened. By one of those paradoxes that are common in all history, and nowhere more common than in American history, the moment when American uniformity was supposed to have been finally achieved through the standardizing processes was also the moment when the sectional issue came into the light in a form that could be openly and fully discussed.

By an irony that ought to please Charles A. Beard, the identical economic forces that seemed to be making America an area of unvarying uniformity also devoted some of the fruits of their labor to the endowment of historical research. A zeal for a slow and orderly form of retrospect became a by-product of the zeal for rapid technological advance. The act may ultimately prove as important in its consequences as the preservation of Greek culture by the Roman conqueror. At any rate, the American past is being systematically probed and analyzed as no immediate past has ever been probed before. The realistically exact history of America is now being superimposed upon the partisan and heroical tale of an earlier day. It was inevitable that the neglected function of the sections should be looked into by men who should have no interest in discrediting them or in ignoring their existence. The result is that we now have a fairly well-shaped historical theory of the place of the sections in American national life.

No doubt the emergence of this theory owes much to the accumulated labors of many minds; and above all it derives from the temper and method of a new school of historians, who are prone to make the “processes of social development” under special American conditions the guiding principle of their studies, and so are ready to consider evidence of a sort neglected by earlier schools. The complete formulation of the theory of the sections and their integral place in national history was, nevertheless, mainly the work of one man, the late Frederick Jackson Turner.¹ He stated, what many had felt, that the sections are not vestiges from an older time, archaic and negligible, but have been and still are functions of the national life. They are real entities, not sentimental fictions: they have a place in the making of events, along with the Federal government and the state governments, although their place and power are not yet fully recognized or understood.

In Turner’s theory, sectionalism is thus organic in the American establishment, but in a creative rather than a negative and destructive sense. It has grown out of the accidents and purposes that have attended the adaptation of a people, democratically inclined and originally of diverse but not unrelated European stocks and traditions, to life upon the North American continent. The history of the sections as sections has been long unwritten, and their place in the national order unexplored, because historians have fixed attention too exclusively upon the growth of the Federal organism, which they picture as dwarfing gradually the power of the states as it draws power into itself. But this bias must be altered when the historian begins, as Turner did, with the extensions of the frontier and sees how the people gather into geographic provinces, differentiated separately and fairly homogeneous within themselves, until these provinces form sections “which equal great European nations” and make the United States “a union of potential nations.”

This is of course not only a new theory of American history but also suggests, by implication, a new function for the historian. The modern historian, through his natural affiliations with the sociologist, the economist, the political scientist, becomes in effect a statesman, or at least an adviser to the state in one form or another. The new conception of sectionalism has quickly found its way into the discussions and plans of the corps of experts, on the stage or behind the scenes of government, whom the modern state seems to need in the administration of its complex affairs. Who can tell what will come from such discussions and such plans? Certainly Turner’s thesis is not acceptable to all who think they know what the United States ought to become. There are other theories of the national being and advocates ready to push these theories to the limit. But while a forecast of the future waits undecided, it is still true that now, for the first time, when America has its strongest central government and its most centralized economics, the problem of sectionalism is unabated and yet moves toward solution in so far as it is actually studied and not ignored. While in Europe the totalitarian state perfects a technique for controlling every action, if not every thought, of its citizens, the American government commits itself, through studies made by bureaus and committees, of how diversity may be tolerated and even encouraged. The social scientists, in solemn assembly, investigate “extra-regional controls.” Regional planning commissions, for cities, states, and larger areas, are set up and begin to take on official life. The old taboo has been lifted; open and respectful consideration of sectionalism is actually under way.

But such consideration could hardly have been prompted by the issue of a single historical work, distinguished though it be. The new importance of sectionalism and regionalism in social science is only a part of a larger movement of ideas and emotions called forth by the exigencies of the times. In their most general aspect, the sectionalism and regionalism of the twentieth century are an American expression of dissatisfaction with the culture, or pseudo-culture that has accompanied the diffusion of industrialism. We begin to see that applied science has failed as a sovereign organizing principle in American life. It has not only failed to bring order and balance into the economic and political arrangements, but it has awakened a genuine discontent with the various forms of standardization that it seems to enforce. Above all—and this is the root of the matter—it has created doubt as to the authority and fitness of science to be an arbiter of values. Americans once debated the question of how much of civil liberty they must yield to the state in the common interest; they now raise the equally important question of how much of their preferred way of life they are obliged to sacrifice in order to secure economic provision and technological efficiency. Here too are liberties which will not lightly be yielded. Democracy assumes a cultural as well as a political meaning, and the old diversity of American patterns takes on a new significance which in turn sheds a new light upon old tendencies in art and letters.

In its most selfconscious aspect this new form of sectionalism appears as a movement of artists, uncovering what politicians and economists have ignored. It is a revolt against the excessive centralism of the machine age, a tendency running counter to the cosmopolitanism that for many years uprooted and abstracted art. The artists have been among the first to realize that some of the dilemmas of an industrial civilization may be downed or avoided by reaffirming the ties, local and native, which were once only shackles to be cast off. In its undeniable nostalgia this sectionalism contains a realistic answer to the question: Whom shall my soul believe? Worn out with abstraction and novelty, plagued with divided counsels, some Americans have said: I will believe the old folks at home, who have kept alive through many treacherous outmodings some good secret of life. Such moderns prefer to grasp the particular. They want something to engage both their reason and their love. They distrust the advice of John Dewey to “use the foresight of the future to refine and expand present activities.” The future is not yet; it is unknowable, intangible. But the past was, the present is; of that much they can be sure. So they attach themselves—or re-attach themselves—to a home-section, one of the sections, great or small, defined in the long conquest of our continental area. They seek spiritual and cultural autonomy.

This temper, or this movement, has somehow acquired the name of regionalism. It is really sectionalism under another name. One does not obtain spiritual and cultural autonomy simply by moving into grandfather’s house. Inevitably the artist is driven, or at least the critical student of art is driven, into social and economic questions. Soon regionalism becomes a criticism of a false conception of American life and treads the ground of sectional issues. On that ground the phase of the arts temporarily called regionalism blends with the more general movement in which the physiographer, the sociologist, the economist, the folklorist, the historian, and the philosopher unite their studies. What all are seeking is a definition of the terms on which America may have both the diversity and the unity that give soundness to a tradition. They seek to define the nation in terms of its real and permanent rather than its superficial and temporary qualities. They are learning how to meet the subtlest and most dangerous foe of humanity—the tyranny that wears the mask of humanitarianism and benevolence. They are attacking Leviathan.

¹ William E. Dodd early dealt with sectionalism much as Turner did, and gave a somewhat definitive statement of the problem in such books as Expansion and Conflict (1911). Dodd’s early writings about sectionalism antedate some of Turner’s. Others, especially in the South and West, were thinking along the same lines.

II. TWO INTERPRETATIONS OF AMERICAN HISTORY

F. J. TURNER’S original statement, in 1893, of the importance of the frontier has been called “the most famous and influential paper in American historiography.” “The existence of an area of free land,” said Turner, “its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development…. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic Coast, it is the great West.”

The thesis was bold in its challenge to the parochialism of Eastern historians who had neglected the frontier or had studied it with little attempt to estimate the fundamental importance of the various migrations through which America had been peopled. It was so obvious a thesis, too, and it was so brilliantly and persuasively argued that it gained ready currency, even in the startled East. To the rising school of historians, especially the energetic Westerners, it seemed to offer the key to American history: what was most peculiar, most American, what was indeed unique in American development—all grew out of the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• The Nation We Are
• Immovable Bodies and Irresistible Forces
• Southern Essays
• The World State