Past and Present

The Challenges of Modernity, from the Pre-Victorians to the Postmodernists

Gertrude Himmelfarb

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781594039263
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Past and Present brings together almost two dozen newly collected essays by the distinguished American historian and cultural critic, Gertrude Himmelfarb. Their common theme is the intriguing, often unexpected ways in which the past illuminates the present. The novelist William Faulkner wrote that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In these essays, Himmelfarb shows the truth of this statement. She helps us find a new perspective on contemporary issues by bringing to bear a trenchant analysis of debates and thinkers of the past. She allowsthe past to inform the present without distorting either past or present. The essays, unified by the common theme of present and past, are varied. The topics range from the disorders of modern democracy to the challenges of postmodernism, from the Victorian ethos to the Jewish question. The thinkers range from Edmund Burke to Leo Strauss, from Cardinal Newman to Lionel Trilling. The political figures range from Benjamin Disraeli to Winston Churchill, from the American founders to Queen Elizabeth II. The underlying premise and principle of the essays is the conviction that the pursuit of knowledge and truth, however difficult or discomforting, eminently matters, in the "practical life,"as Trilling put it,as in the "moral life." Past and Present is a notable contribution to this endeavor—to understanding where we have been, where we are now, and where we may be—or should be—going.

Of This Time, Of That Place

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

American Democracy and Its European Critics

WHEN DICKENS visited America in 1842, he heard an American refer to England as “that unnat’ral old parent.” Today it is more often the Englishman who is heard to complain of America as an unnatural offspring. Filial relations are difficult in any case, but the cultural hostility that seems at present to exist between America and England (between America and all Europe, in fact) is such as to require special explanation.

In the mid-nineteenth century, with the memory of the revolutionary struggle still fresh, recriminations and counter-recriminations between the old country and the new played a large part in international discourse. Exulting in its democratic institutions and pioneer vigor, America taunted the old monarchies of Europe for their decadent aristocracies and effete cultures. Europe, in return, was contemptuous of the primitiveness and crudity of the erstwhile colony.

For every American who thought the Declaration of Independence was a new dispensation in the history of Western civilization, there were several Europeans who echoed Sydney Smith’s famous derisive inquiry: “Who reads an American book?” A Frenchman writing of America in the 1850s was congratulated for his resourcefulness when he announced a chapter on the beaux arts in America and followed it with a blank leaf. Matthew Arnold’s attitude to American statesmen was typical of European opinion: Lincoln – shrewd, sagacious, humorous, honest, courageous – all the qualities deserving of the most sincere esteem and praise, but he had not, Arnold regretted, “distinction.” Washington, who admittedly had distinction, Arnold persisted in regarding as an Englishman who accidentally happened to reside in America. “America is not interesting,” Arnold decided, and Europe concurred.

To make matters worse, this lowliness of the American culture and character was taken as a measure of the ignobility of American politics. That democracy was an “aristocracy of blackguards” was a sentiment variously attributed to Talleyrand and Byron, and mouthed by generations of Europeans. Macaulay was not the first to warn that liberty and civilization would be destroyed in the chaos of American democracy: “Either the poor would plunder the rich and civilization would perish, or order and prosperity would be saved by a strong military government and liberty would perish.” Tocqueville’s memorable work, Democracy in America, gave currency to the expression “the tyranny of the majority,” and not until the appearance of Lord Bryce’s American Commonwealth, exactly half a century later, did anyone seriously challenge the justice or the relevance of the bon mot. It was Matthew Arnold who declared, “States are saved by their righteous remnant,” and thereby pronounced sentence of death on America, for in America, most Europeans were assured, there was no saving remnant, no enlightened minority, only an ignorant and omnipotent majority.

But these, American patriots consoled themselves, were the views of Europe’s benighted conservatives and Whigs. The harassed and oppressed radicals in Europe, they were confident, would approve of America’s glorious experiment in democracy. Dickens, for example, who in England seemed to be playing the part of an American, a breaker of ancestral images, was expected to lend his prestige to the American cause. Dickens himself eagerly looked forward to his visit to America in 1842. He was prepared to believe that all Americans were free men and that freedom was a precious thing. Yet, while in England he had been amused by the vulgarities of the lower classes, he found that in America he was repelled by the spitting, tobacco-chewing boors who did not know the proper use of the pocket handkerchief or the rules governing the dining table. He was distressed that American tradesmen sometimes neglected to remove their hats in the presence of their betters, that the White House was periodically desecrated by the hordes of people who were indiscriminately shown through it, that the barrister’s wig and gown had been discarded, and that all social barriers were let down until the very word “gentleman” no longer existed. Although his plebeian soul waxed indignant at the thought of slavery and he resolved not to accept tributes from the South, he was so taken with Southern gentility that he found himself attending public dinners there. It was, in the end, not slavery so much as spitting that offended him. “I tremble for a radical coming here,” Dickens later remarked, fearing that unless he was a staunch radical indeed he would “return home a Tory.”

Dickens was the first of a long procession of visitors whose radicalism seemed to desert them upon disembarking on America’s shores. English reformers who spent their lives trying to abolish the degrading institution of the debtor’s prison, who were full of compassion for the starved wrecks of human beings inhabiting the London slums, and who despised the gross inequities of English society that made of one class the lackey of another, came to America and promptly fell to criticizing the American masses for their materialism, their wealth, and their love of comforts. “It would be well,” Dickens wrote, “for the American people as a whole, if they loved the Real less and the Ideal somewhat more.” Yet it is interesting to notice that the burden of Dickens’s lectures and conversations revolved about the gross reality of the American copyright laws, which permitted the circulation of pirated editions of his work and so deprived him of his royalties.

Given to their own peculiar variety of idealism, Americans, in turn, were offended by the exhibition of a writer – and a prosperous one at that – laboring so tiresomely the issue of money. However, they soon forgave him the cruel portrait of America in Martin Chuzzlewit and welcomed him enthusiastically on his second tour of America twenty-five years later. A net profit of over $100,000 on that occasion may have helped reconcile Dickens to America and determined him to have a postscript added to all future editions of Martin Chuzzlewit and American Notes testifying to “the changes in the graces and amenities of life” in America.

Tobacco-chewing has given way in our time to gum-chewing, and spitting is disappearing, while handkerchiefs have made their appearance and other minor improvements have been effected in American manners. On the other hand, the giant Coca-Cola dispenser is as conspicuous an eyesore as was the cuspidor; and the question “Who reads an American book?” has been replaced by “Who sees an American movie?” – with an answer even more disturbing to the European of taste and culture. Once it was only visitors to America who were affronted by the visible evidence of the American common man. Today, with American culture becoming a universal phenomenon, all of Europe’s self-designated guardians of civilization profess anxiety and dismay.

When a Tory clergyman or schoolmaster addresses the editor of The Times to denounce America because of its insidious corruption of the English language, or when a French Catholic conservative, in Le Figaro, anathematizes America for the heresy of confounding human progress with material progress, no one need be surprised. It is the privilege of the conservative to be wary of cultural and social innovations. But when these voices are joined by those of professed radicals writing in the New Statesman and Nation and Les Temps Modernes, the American has reason to be annoyed. He is reminded of Dickens, who was full of love for the common people until he came to meet them as rulers in their native habitat.

Like Dickens, most European radical intellectuals have not had much opportunity to appreciate how common the common man can be if he is given his head. The fact is that their own countries are democracies only on the surface. In France and England democracy came as an afterthought, as a political veneer covering the social and cultural accretions of many generations of aristocracy.

In England particularly, where socialists pride themselves on their “advanced” institutions, most of the symbols of class distinction persist: ways of speech recalling the playing fields of Eton or the streets of the East End of London, the worker’s cap and the gentleman’s hat, the peculiar manners and morals associated with each social class. The House of Lords may be divested of political power, the aristocracy weaned away from the luxurious habits of a more affluent age, and ancient estates converted into national museums for the edification and satisfaction of the lower classes. But culturally, England remains as it always was – Disraeli’s “two nations.” (A good case can be made for the existence of three: when the middle class finally learned to say “port” instead of “port wine,” the aristocracy promptly shifted from “port” to “port wine.”) Professor D. W. Brogan observed that while in America all the resources of snob-appeal advertising have perpetually to be engaged in the creation and repair of the social fences, in England the social fences are wild hedges that grow even when left alone. And among the most important social fences that are native to England, but not to America, are the cultural barriers separating the social classes.

The English radical intellectual, himself generally a product of one of the respectable “public” schools, is effectively confined within those cultural barriers. He is a firm believer in the right of the people to determine public legislation, control industry, and administer the state in their own interests. But he is also firmly convinced that the popular press is despicable and that in matters of culture there must be no pampering of the common, vulgar mind. When it comes to books, the cinema, radio, and television, he insists upon giving the people what is good for them rather than what they may happen to want. And he knows what is good. When it was the fashion to do so, he denounced the classical, aristocratic, High Church traditions of English society; but he is still, as the saying goes, living off the capital of an earlier age. Nothing pleases a Labour MP more than to expose the faulty Latin of the honorable gentleman on the opposite bench. And no feature of the New Statesman and Nation is more scintillating than the “weekend competitions” in which good radicals vie with each other in producing mock-heroic verse in iambic pentameter or elegies in the Greek manner.

America, so wealthy in other respects, has no cultural or social capital to fall back on. It must create resources as it goes along, and the resulting improvisation is often painfully obvious. There has been no leisure class to build up a fund of classical learning, graceful living, pleasant manners, and high thoughts. Its culture has had to be hastily assembled from the only natural resources available to it – from the democratic, egalitarian, commercial spirit. “High culture” in America does exist and is probably the equal of the upper-class Englishman’s culture, but it is not a significant social fact. It exists in the interstices of society; it is the idiosyncrasy of an individual rather than the accepted feature of a class. The only culture of any significance in America is “popular culture,” which is all too fittingly named. The book of the month, the movie of the week, and the current issue of Life magazine are the cultural staples of all Americans. They are as much a part of the typical American’s equipment (and “typical” is a more meaningful concept in this country than elsewhere) as the current slang expression, popular song, or fashion craze.

The European intellectual, radical or otherwise, has little sympathy or patience with this popular culture, particularly when it threatens to invade his own domain. The radical, however, has the obligation of accounting for it in such a way, preferably, as not to reflect upon the virtues of democracy, to which he is politically committed. He then has two possible lines of argument open to him. He can argue, in the fashion of the eighteenth-century radical, that there is an integral relationship between democracy on the one hand and science, intelligence, and public enlightenment on the other. The democracy par excellence in this view is the Republic of Letters, the rationally organized and rational-thinking society that would inevitably arise once the oppressive institutions of authoritarian church and despotic state were abolished. If America can hardly aspire to the title of a Republic of Letters, it is only because its democracy is faulty. And since it is patently neither a monarchy nor a theocracy – the latter having been effectively disposed of and the remaining influential priests being occupied in preaching the unecclesiastical gospel of happiness – it can only be an oligarchy.

Another possible line of argument ends at the same point, although it starts a century later with the Marxist doctrine. To the Marxist, democracy is not a respectable analytic concept. The fact that a country is or is not democratic cannot be taken as an adequate explanation of any social or cultural situation. The explanation must be in terms of the economic structure of society. The nature of American culture, then, can be accounted for only by the nature of American capitalism. Whether the European radical derives from the tradition of the Enlightenment or from the tradition of Marxism, his conclusion is the same: American popular culture is the product of American capitalism.

To accept the image of America as reflected in the pages of the New Statesman and Les Temps Modernes is to believe not only that American culture is depraved and vicious but that it is part of a conspiracy deliberately to degrade the American people. Hollywood is not merely dedicated to the ignoble purpose of making a lot of money quickly. It is dedicated to the still more unworthy object of propping up the sinking foundations of capitalism. It has been given the job, by the agents of Big Business, of manufacturing soporifics designed to dull the minds of the dissatisfied masses, and stimulants to brutalize them so as to direct their aggressions against each other instead of against their overlords. United in conspiracy with Hollywood are the other instruments of popular culture: the sensation-seeking press, the bare-bosomed heroines and gun-toting heroes of fiction, the women’s magazines with their multicolored pictures of domestic felicity in the form of shiny kitchen sinks, the radio soap operas able to induce catharsis on a mass scale and at small cost.

This conception of America is developed at great length in the writings of Harold Laski, and especially in The American Democracy (1948). Laski posed the question all Europeans ask: Why is there in America such a depressing uniformity of values, a single species of Babbittry that defies geographical and historical variations, and that makes of Robert Lynd’s Middletown a portrait in miniature of any American metropolis? His answer is typical of European radicals: the incubus of Big Business lies heavily upon the whole country, stifling individual expression and corrupting individual tastes. Why do the three great media of public communications – the press, the cinema, and the radio – frequently distort the truth and almost always refrain from telling the whole truth? Because they are interested not in the truth but in profits, and they will say only what it is profitable to say. And, since profits in the long run depend upon the continuation of the profit system, it is the virtues of the system that must be sold as well as the virtues of the actual commodities advertised.

Europeans have not always answered the question thus. Tocqueville, whose great work Democracy in America appeared more than a century before Laski’s effort, is still a more reliable guide to America than his successor. If American society is standardized, he reasoned, it is not because society is dominated by the entrepreneur scheming to direct all of society for his ulterior ends, but because it is dominated by the common man, to whom the values of Babbittry ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• The Past and the Present
• The Past versus the Present
• Visionaries and Provocateurs
• Of This Time, Of That Place
• Original Publication Credits
• Index
• A Note on the Type