Freedom in America

William Ker Muir

• Editorial: CQ Press
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781483305264
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Gouvernement américain

If you want students to really understand the concept of power, moving beyond a survey book's quick discussion of Laswell's "who gets what and how," Muir's thoughtful Freedom in America might be the book for you. Exploring the words and ideas of such thinkers as Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Tocqueville, Muir discusses the nature and limits of three types of power—coercive, reciprocal, and moral—and then uses this framework to explain how American political institutions work.

If looking for an alternative to a long survey text—or itching to get students grappling with The Federalist Papers or Democracy in America with more of a payoff—Muir's meditation on power and personal freedom is a gateway for students to take their study of politics to the next level. His inductive style, engaging students with well-chosen and masterfully written stories, lets him draw out and distill key lessons without being preachy. Read a chapter and decide if this page turner is for you.

PART I

FREEDOM AND POWER

1

ANARCHY

[I]n such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)

Chaos in Marysville

Consider Marysville, California, as it existed mid-January of the year 1850, a year after the discovery of gold in the Sierras. Marysville sat at the confluence of the Feather and Yuba Rivers in northern California. Located on a navigable river and only a few overland miles from the Sierra gold fields, Marysville was the closest river port available to the prospectors. It promised to become a prosperous commercial hub, functioning as the outfitter and banking center for the gold country. Countless newcomers, from every walk of life and virtually every region of the country, came to Marysville, hoping for riches and personal fulfillment.

But in January 1850, there was no law in Marysville. There was only chaos. When Mexico ceded California to the United States in 1848 as a result of its defeat in the Mexican-American War, its jurisdiction ceased. In theory, the U.S. War Department was to establish civil order throughout California until a constitution for the state could be ratified and a government established. But Marysville, more than a hundred miles from San Francisco, was too remote for the military to extend its presence there. In Marysville there were no police, no jails, no courthouses, no government.

Even in this legal vacuum, many of the newcomers behaved well, conducting themselves according to neighborly habits they brought from the civilization back east. But there were others around Marysville who acted unscrupulously, once they found there was no punishment to fear. Speculators sold land they did not own. Squatters sat on properties they had no claim to and cut down timber that wasn’t theirs. Thieves stole the cattle of ranchers and the gold of prospectors. Anarchy—the rule of thugs—reigned.

And so, in this land of seeming promise, anyone who sought to create wealth became the easy prey of scoundrels. As a result, it was foolish to build a decent house, cultivate a farm, or lay out a road. There were no stores, no financial institutions, no schools, no hospitals, no churches—not even embankments to keep the rivers from flooding the town in spring. Worst of all, disputes were left unsettled and grew into deadly vendettas, and lawless criminality led to lawless self-defense and a general erosion of self-restraint among the settlers.

Into this no man’s land came a young lawyer from New England named Stephen J. Field. A son of a minister, raised in peaceful and orderly Connecticut, Field arrived in Marysville hoping to establish a practice there and was dismayed by the thuggish state of things. Determined to bring order out of the chaos, he convinced the townsfolk to establish a rule of law and a government to enforce it—and, further, that in order to secure their personal safety, they should elect him the alcalde, an office that combined the powers of judge, mayor, tax collector, registrar of deeds, and police chief.

In the ensuing weeks, he created a rudimentary legal system. Reminiscing some years later about the actions he took to create a system of criminal justice in Marysville, Field wrote, “As a judicial officer, I tried many cases. … In civil cases, I always called a jury, if the parties desired one; and in criminal cases, when the offence was of a high grade, I went through the form of calling a grand jury, and having an indictment found; and in all cases I appointed an attorney to represent the people, and also the accused, when necessary.”¹

At first, his decisive actions had widespread support from the citizenry. According to his reminiscences, “The Americans in the country had a general notion of what was required for the preservation of order and the due administration of justice; and as I endeavored to administer justice promptly, but upon a due consideration of the rights of every one, and not rashly, I was sustained with great unanimity by the community.”

Because Field had no jail in which to incarcerate the worst offenders, he resorted to punishments that he hoped would put an end to the vicious cycle of threat and retaliation. For example, without a jail in which to secure one defendant who had been convicted of robbery, he decided, “There was but one course to pursue, and, however repugnant it was to my feelings to adopt it, I believed it was the only thing that saved the man’s life. I ordered him to be publicly whipped with fifty lashes, and added that if he were found, within the next two years, in the vicinity of Marysville, he should be again whipped.”

In other words, knowing that the townspeople were ready to turn into a mob and lynch the robber, he acted without any legal authority, partially satisfying the cry for vengeance by conducting a public whipping. Then he ordered the defendant to get out of Marysville forever, before the crowd changed its mind.

The Effect of Judge Turner

But despite Field’s initial success in bringing order to Marysville, the town was so remote that, even after a state legislature was established and began to pass legislation, the official law was of little consequence, for there were no police to enforce it. In fact, the new state government made things worse by sending to Marysville a judge named William R. Turner, who was a violent scoundrel himself. Turner walked the streets, cowing peaceful folks with threats to do them harm.

Turner particularly reviled Field and tried to run him out of town. Field recalled that Turner “frequented the gambling saloons, associated with disreputable characters, and was addicted to habits of the most disgusting intoxication. Besides being abusive in his language, he threatened violence, and gave out that he intended to insult me publicly the first time we met, and that, if I resented his conduct, he would shoot me down on the spot.”

Fearful for his life, Field traveled to San Francisco to get the advice of Judge Nathaniel Bennett, a man used to western ways and esteemed for his wisdom. “Judge Bennett asked if I were certain that he had made such a threat,” Field wrote. “I replied I was. ‘Well,’ said the Judge, ‘I will not give you any advice; but if it were my case, I think I should get a shot-gun and stand on the street, and see that I had the first shot.’ I replied that ‘I could not do that; that I would act only in self-defence.’ He replied, ‘That would be acting in self-defence.’”

Judge Bennett’s counsel alarmed Field, but caused him to reflect on the difference in the courteous, forgiving behavior appropriate in an orderly civilization and the brutish vindictiveness required to survive anarchy. “When I came to California,” he later remembered, “I came with all those notions, in respect to acts of violence, which are instilled into New England youth; if a man were rude, I would turn away from him. But I soon found that men in California were likely to take very great liberties with a person who acted in such a manner, and that the only way to get along was to hold every man responsible, and resent every trespass upon one’s rights.”

From San Francisco he returned to Marysville and, in his words, “purchase[d] a pair of revolvers and had a sack-coat made with pockets in which the barrels could lie, and be discharged; and I began to practice firing the pistols from the pockets. In time I acquired considerable skill, and was able to hit a small object across the street. An object so large as a man I could have hit without difficulty.”

Field committed himself to confront Turner: “I had come to the conclusion that if I had to give up my independence; if I had to avoid a man because I was afraid he would attack me; if I had to cross the street every time I saw him coming, life itself was not worth having.”

He devised a strategy to cow Turner and his drunken cronies. He publicly announced that he would take preemptive action if Turner continued to make violent threats:

Having determined neither to seek him nor to shun him, I asked a friend to carry a message to him, and to make sure that it would reach him, I told different parties what I had sent, and I was confident that they would repeat it to him. “Tell him from me,” I said, “that I do not want any collision with him; that I desire to avoid all personal difficulties; but that I shall not attempt to avoid him; that I shall not cross the street on his account, nor go a step out of my way for him; that I have heard of his threats, and that if he attacks me or comes at me in a threatening manner I will kill him.” I acted on my plan. I often met him in the streets and in saloons, and whenever I drew near him I dropped my hand into my pocket and cocked my pistols to be ready for any emergency. People warned me to look out for him; to beware of being taken at a disadvantage; and I was constantly on my guard. I felt that I was in great danger; but after awhile this sense of danger had a sort of fascination, and I often went to places where he was, to which I would not otherwise have gone. Whenever I met him I kept my eye on him, and whenever I passed him on the street I turned around and narrowly watched him until he had gone some distance.

The plan worked, and Field was convinced that no other form of resistance would have succeeded. “I am persuaded,” he wrote, “if I had taken any other course, I should have been killed. I do not say Turner would have deliberately shot me down, or that he would have attempted anything against me in his sober moments; but when excited with drink, and particularly in the presence of the lawless crowds who heard his threats, it would have taken but little to urge him on. As it turned out, however, he never interfered with me, perhaps because he knew I was armed and believed that, if I were attacked, somebody, and perhaps more than one, would be badly hurt.”

The point is that a “reasonable,” conciliatory response would have emboldened Turner to even greater insolence. It was the convincing use of coercive counterthreats that put an end to Turner’s bullying. Or, at least, that was the way observers at the time saw it. “I have been often assured by citizens of Marysville,” Field related, “that it was only the seeming recklessness of my conduct, and the determination I showed not to avoid him or go out of his way, that saved me.”

No doubt, Field took pride in vanquishing anarchy in Marysville, but his account of how he brought order and safety there concluded on this rueful note: “But at the same time my business was ruined. I lost nearly all I had acquired and became involved in debt.” Even one as skillful at coping with bullies as Field had become ultimately was “ruined” by the effort. (By way of epilogue to this story, when law and order eventually did come to California, Stephen Field prospered as a lawyer, and twelve years after his arrival in Marysville, President Abraham Lincoln appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he served for the next thirty-four years.)

Disorder in Today’s Inner Cities

Marysville’s kind of intimidating, miserable disorder is not some quirk of a remote past. Today, in some of America’s most notorious urban neighborhoods, there exist conditions resembling the anarchy of Field’s day. Law is absent, police stay clear, and too many lives are wasted as a consequence. Alex Kotlowitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter, hung out in one of Chicago’s most notorious public housing projects for two years. He befriended two youngsters, aged eleven and thirteen. In the time he observed them, thugs killed nine of their schoolmates and acquaintances. The only business done in the neighborhood was lawless drug dealing, and terror was the instrument of the drug dealers.

In his book There Are No Children Here, Kotlowitz described the effects of the anarchy present in what we now euphemistically call our “inner cities”:

[T]he neighborhood had become a black hole. [One] could more easily recite what wasn’t there than what was. There were no banks, only currency exchanges, which charged customers up to $8.00 for every welfare check cashed. There were no public libraries, movie theaters, skating rinks, or bowling alleys to entertain the neighborhood’s children. For the infirm, there were two neighborhood clinics, the Mary Thompson Hospital and the Miles Square Health Center, both of which teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and would close by the end of 1989. Yet the death rate of newborn babies exceeded infancy mortality rates in a number of Third World countries, including Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, and Turkey. And there was no rehabilitation center, though drug use was rampant.²

The feelings of aloneness that haunted the neighborhood—and the despair of individuals resulting from their isolation—overwhelmed Kotlowitz: “[N]early half of the families in [the public housing project] had no telephone. Residents also felt disconnected from one another; there was little sense of community … and there was even less trust. Some who didn’t have a phone, for instance, didn’t know any others in their building who would let them use theirs. Some neighbors wouldn’t allow their children to go outside to play. One mother moved aside her living room furniture to make an open and safe place where her children could frolic.”

Those who dwelled in the housing project were not free to do what they wanted to do—to walk outdoors, talk with their neighbors, rely on strangers, or get assistance when they needed it. The irony, of course, was that this anarchy—this terrifying, intimidating presence of unsuppressed coercion—went on in so-called “public housing”: government housing. Government was too weak to repel this tyranny of thugs.

NOTES

1. Stephen J. Field, Californ...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I. Freedom and Power
• Part II. Institutions of Freedom
• Part III. American Society
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: The Eleven Paradoxes of Politics
• Appendix B: The Constitution of the United States
• Appendix C: Federalist Nos. 10, 51, and 70
• Index