The American Democracy (Works of Harold J. Laski)

A Commentary and an Interpretation

Harold J. Laski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317586463
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is Laski's most important book after A Grammar of Politics. It discusses, on a grand scale, every aspect of American public life. Laski surveys American traditions and the American spirit, political institutions, the entire educational, religious, economic and social scene, America as a world power, and Americanism as a principle of civilisation. Laski's unsurpassed knowledge of American constitutional, social and cultural history is set in the perspective of his deep study of comparative constitutional history and political theory. He was one of very few people to see U.S. politics from the inside, as a result of his friendships with Roosevelt, Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

HAROLD J. LASKI

The American Democracy

A Commentary and an Interpretation

London

GEORGE ALLEN AND UNWIN LTD

FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN IN 1949

SECOND IMPRESSION 1953

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1911, no portion may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiry should be made to the publishers.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

UNWIN BROTHERS LIMITED, WOKING AND LONDON

For Frida with my love and devotion

The Contents

• Preface
• I The Traditions of America
• II The Spirit of America
• III American Political Institutions: Federal
• IV American Political Institutions: State and Local
• V American Business Enterprise
• VI American Labour
• VII Religion in America
• VIII American Education
• IX American Culture
• X America and Its Minority Problems
• XI America as a World Power
• XII The Professions in America
• XIII Press, Cinema, and Radio in America
• XIV Americanism as a Principle of Civilization
• Index

Preface

In a sense this book has been a generation in the making; for when I first began to teach at Harvard thirty years ago, I realized that, as a European, I had entered upon an experience wholly different in character from anything I had known. I first began to think about writing it when I was in America in 1937; and, three years later, during the Battle of Britain, I began to try and put it into organized form. No one, I venture to believe, knows its defects more fully than I do. As it has got written, I have realized more and more how disproportionate is the fulfilment to the task I had set myself. There is so much more in America than any one man can know. There is so much in it, both of beauty and ugliness, of good and evil, that he cannot put into words. I can plead only two things in defence of the result; first, that this book is written out of deep love of America, and, second, that I have done my best to make intelligible to Europeans, and, above all, to Englishmen, why America arouses that deep love.

America is in large part Americans; and my debts to them are quite beyond repayment. First of all, I owe much to my friends, Mr. Justice Frankfurter and Dr. Alfred E. Cohn, with whom I have discussed these matters for more than half my life; and, in a younger generation, to Max Lerner, from whom I have learned much. I do not know how to express the thanks I feel that a happy fortune gave me the high privilege of in-timacy with those great judges, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis; nor can I forget the magnanimity with which the late Franklin D. Roosevelt allowed me to see the working of the presidential system from within. I know, too, that I have been, in a real sense, the pupil of Pro-fessor Morris R. Cohen, and that I owe many insights to the fact that I taught at Harvard when Turner and Channing and S. E. Morison were interpreting for me, in their different ways, what I myself was experi-encing. I owe much, too, to the first of my American friends, B. W. Huebsch, to Max Lowenthal, Roger Baldwin, Harlow Shapley, E. R. Murrow, Robert and Helen Lynd, Samuel Berger, Frank Buxton, Merle Curti, Thomas Reed Powell, and Charles and Mary Beard, and, far from least, to the care and generosity of Miss J. R. Heringman of the Viking Press. I wish I could recall the countless others, students, taxi-drivers, railroad conductors, lawyers and doctors, engineers and business men, who have helped me to form the generalizations I have ventured to make here. But a book of this kind is always the product, really, of many people’s thinking, and I can only hope that I have not omitted anyone whose name ought to be here. For the result, of course, I only am responsible; most of whatever merit it has it owes to those who, consciously or un?consciously, have helped me to shape it.

I owe debts, also, to English friends, above all to my colleague H. L. Beales, and to my former colleague, Professor D. W. Brogan of Cam-bridge, upon whose unique fund of Americana I have been able to rely for years. From Sydney Herbert of University College, Aberystwyth, I have had much assistance by discussion; and, though I knew him only in his last years, from talk with Lord Bryce about his hopes of America in the eighties of the last century, and his fears for it after the First World War. My gratitude to R. T. Clark and C. A. Furth is very great, not least for their infinite patience.

I have been much helped, also, by books; and I must especially empha-size what I owe to the writings of Professor Schlesinger of Harvard Uni-versity, to Professor Commons and his colleagues for their Documentary History of American Industrial Society, to Professor E. S. Corwin, Pro-fessor Perry Miller, Professor C. E. Merriam, to Professor R. B. Perry for his great work on William James, to Professor Bernhard J. Stern for his remarkable writings on American technology and medicine, to Dr. W. E. B. DuBois and to Professor G. Myrdal, and to Professor M. L. Hansen. I must record, too, my gratitude to Professor M. Rostovtzev whose monumental Social and Economic History oj the Hellenistic World has been a continuous source of illumination. Like all students of American history, I have learned a great deal from the writings of the great Adams dynasty, above all from that unique Diary of John Quincy Adams of which a modern reprint is so badly needed. I owe many insights, especially on the American Revolution, to the writings of my friend Louis B. Hacker, and, on American Literature, to Professor F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance. Other debts, I have, I hope, sufficiently acknowledged in the notes to this work.

I add that the dedication of this book means far more than its words imply. But there is gratitude too intimate even to search for expression.

Little Bardfield, Essex.

H. J. L.

The American Democracy

I The Traditions of America

DOI: 10.4324/9781315742557-1

1

Most of the heritage of past civilizations has gone into the making of American democracy. Europe and the Far East have alike nourished its rise and development; it has strains from the African continent which lie deep in its foundations. In the four and a half centuries since it emerged into the historic consciousness, it has passed from the epoch in which it was an object of colonial ambition to the epoch where it stands, independent, at the summit of political power. And in that momentous period there can be no sort of doubt but that its impact has changed the outlook of mankind wherever there has been the power to reflect on the meaning of human affairs. No state, until our own day, has done so much to make the idea of progress a part of the mental make-up of man. No state, either, has done more to make freedom a dream which overcame the claims both of birth and of wealth. It has been, in an impressive way, a refuge for the oppressed, alike in the political and in the religious field, for at least the period since the Pilgrim Fathers landed on the rocky shores of New England. It has offered to the common man an opportunity of self-advancement such as he has never known elsewhere until the Russian Revolution of 1917. Few countries have ever developed material resources on so vast a scale. Few countries have ever been able to move so swiftly from the circumference to the centre in their impact upon civilization. If it has often been hated and even more often envied, there has always been a perception, even in the hatred and the envy, that it occupied a unique position among the nations of the world. Now it stands close to the zenith of its fortunes. For something like the next generation it is difficult to doubt that world politics will be set in the context of American purposes. Upon the use it decides to make of its overwhelming productive power, no small part of the fate of Europe and Asia, perhaps of Africa as well, is bound overwhelmingly to depend.

There is hardly a type of European humanity which has not contributed its quota to the shaping of American tradition. The Spaniard made his mark on California; the Dutchman on New York; the Englishman on the Atlantic coast; the German in Pennsylvania; the Swedes in the Northwest; the Irish in New York and Chicago; the French in Louisiana and, for a period, in the Mississippi Valley. And as America developed economically, the call of the West and the endless spaces which craved for settlement brought Poles and Ruthenians, Serbs and Croats, Italians and Greeks. Already, by the time that independence had been won in 1783, the United States was a microcosm to which almost every European adventurer contributed his quota; after independence it was like a vast pit into which was poured whatever there was in Europe of the spirit of enterprise and adventure. Possibly it is true that until some such time as the Civil War the predominant mould into which this immense variety was poured in endless succession was shaped by the English tradition. The way of thought, in institutions, in religion, in science, and in literature, was perhaps more fully English than any other outlook. The language made for that primacy; so, also, did the pattern of the political framework.

But it was always English with a difference. Even the first generation of emigrants from the British Isles wore their Englishry with a difference. That is obvious in the case of men like Tom Paine, and it is still more obvious when the American is native-born. If it be true that it is not very difficult to think of George Washington as in temperament and habit a wealthy English squire, no one can doubt that Samuel Adams and Jefferson, Franklin and John Jay, are Americans in a sense which makes their English inheritance an element only in the final character they displayed. No one can read the literature of America, even up to the outbreak of the War of Independence, without seeing that a new national type has emerged upon the historic stage. He has an experimentalism in temper, a passion for making his own way in life, a zeal for self-assertion which were all of a world removed from the England he had defeated. The environment in which he functions breaks the cake of custom, which, had the English connection remained, he would doubtless have been eager to preserve. The conservatism of Alexander Hamilton was probably as profound as that of Lord Eldon in England; but it is very obviously an American conservatism. The radicalism of Thomas Jefferson goes back to foundations which Charles James Fox would have been proud to accept; but it is already a radicalism which has grown in a very different direction from any which Fox would have found it easy to follow. Chief Justice Marshall defended the claims of property with a zeal that must have made the members of the English bench feel that here was a spiritual partner in their legal effort; but there are elements in the method by which he defends his approach which would have been hardly intelligible to an English judge of his time. John Adams may analyse the weaknesses of democracy with a zeal that William Windham would have applauded had he been aware of it; but it is difficult to think that he would have grasped the basis upon which Adams approached his problems.

And if, by 1783, the peaks of the mountain ranges have already become so different, it is natural that the valleys are even more different. What is outstanding in the ordinary American, by the time the Peace of Versailles was signed in that year, is that he does not assume the duty to remain in the position in which he was born. Most English radicals of the time look backwards for their inspiration; as late even as Dickens it is goodwill and generosity that will solve the social problem. The English thinker who desires to reorganize the foundations of his community upon a new basis, like Robert Owen, or his disciple William Thompson, is not only rare; it is even suspected that he is a little mad. The average radical, O’Connor, Hunt, or Cobbett, is not only a man whose ideals are of the pre-Industrial Revolution; he is tempted to think that the ideal England means a recovery of the past rather than a search for the future.

That is in no sense true of the analogous American type. He is confident that he is in himself a person of social significance. He is rarely interested in his past because he is so certain that his future will bear no relation to it. The tradition that he has inherited is that of a dynamic civilization in which he is assured that whatever was yesterday, it will be different again tomorrow. He assumes as a part of his inheritance that he will have the right continually to go forward. He does not accept the postulates of a society where, as in the Europe from which he largely came, birth or inherited wealth may make all the difference to the hopes he may venture to form. No doubt it is true that there has been in American history that craving for the recognition of a special status, the desire to possess the inherent right to command, of which the remains lingered on in the South until they were broken to pieces in the Civil War. No doubt, also, the formulation of hope has been different in the level towards which it might reach in special groups like the Negroes and the American citizens of Oriental origin, in the Jews, and, to some degree and in some places, the Roman...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page 1
• Frontmatter 1
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Frontmatter 2
• I The Traditions of America
• II The Spirit of America
• III American Political Institutions: Federal
• IV American Political Institutions: State and Local
• V American Business Enterprise
• VI American Labour
• VII Religion in America
• VIII American Education
• IX American Culture
• X America and Its Minority Problems
• XI America as a World Power
• XII The Professions in America
• XIII Press, Cinema, and Radio in America
• XIV Americanism as a Principle of Civilization
• Index