The Roots of the Republic

Unearthing the Reality

Annin Flag Co., Verona, N.J. Marjory Collins/OWI, March 1943.

I recall two parts of American history that I didn't learn much about in school - the time before the Revolution, and the decades after the Civil War.

After I got out of school I made a few stabs at filling some of the gaps that any education contains - there is, after all, only so much time.

I did read William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation (my copy is from the sixteenth printing of Samuel Eliot Morison's 1952 edition, which I bought in Plymouth, Massachusetts). Bradford served quite a few years as governor of the Plymouth colony; when he wrote he had not only his personal experience but also access to documents. 

I was stunned by his description of the Pequot War, and particularly of the Mystic massacre in 1637, which involved the burning of a fortified Pequot village near the Mystic River in what is now the state of Connecticut. 

"It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire," writes Bradford, who adds, "and horrible was the stink and scent thereof" (Bradford, p. 296). 

What had the Pequot Indians done to deserve this wholesale slaughter? It's a complicated story, but basically the Pequots and the English were neighbors, and they kept stepping on one another's toes. This led to violence, and in time the English decided they had had enough. The ensuing war led to the virtual destruction of the Pequot tribe; those who were not killed were incorporated into other tribes or enslaved, with a number apparently being sent to Bermuda. 

All of this doesn't exactly square with my childhood images of the first Thanksgiving. Which is probably why it is one of the many lacunae in our school books. 

Another thing I recall from my childhood exposure to American history is the occasional abrupt transition. Where, for instance, did the doctrine of Manifest Destiny come from? As I recall, it was presented to me as a last-minute cobbling together of novel ideas coupled with some brilliant phrase making. But what if there was nothing last-minute about it? What if Manifest Destiny - the term was coined in 1845, just before the war with Mexico - has firm roots dating back to the beginning of the English colonies, shortly after 1600? 

Gaps and twists can be signs that facts are being adjusted to fit a theory. But my thinking about the flaws in our national narrative didn't go much beyond Hey, I think there's a problem here. And then my son gave me Aziz Rana's The Two Faces of American Freedom (2010). Rana thinks American society has two basic issues that are tying us in knots today, and they have their roots, in North American soil, in the early seventeenth century. 

Our two problems are tension between an ingroup and several outgroups, and an insatiable lust for land, which has, over time, manifested itself in various ways. They are related problems, and Rana, who is a professor at Cornell's law school, brings them together in the term settler empire. (Rana, pp. 3, 12-14, 109-111. I think this term is basically a koan. The more I think about it, the more I see in it.) 

Rana traces the development of these two ideas in American history from the seventeenth century up to today. 

I'd like to suggest these two cultural constructs are not unique to America, but in fact occur spontaneously in human society. One has to do with defining a group, and the other has to do with defining the space from which the group gets its food.

Ingroups, Outgroups

Sociologists have been studying ingroups and outgroups for decades. Perhaps the most famous early experiment is known as Robbers Cave, from 1954. And the most vivid description of the ingroup-outgroup dynamic that I know of is the 1954 Lord of the Flies, which William Golding apparently wrote independently of the research literature. (For my understanding of ingroups and outgroups I rely heavily on Lilliana Mason and her 2018 book Uncivil Agreement, which was another eye-opener for me. Here's a link to the story I wrote in 2018.) 

Ingroups and outgroups are a complicated subject. For an example from American history, let's look south for a minute, to Virginia, where the first English arrived in 1607. Like the Puritans up north they immediately encountered their first outgroup, the Indians. And then, in 1619, a new outgroup showed up, the Africans. 

And here is where it gets interesting. The outcome for the Africans - centuries of slavery and oppression - was not foreordained. The social situation in Virginia in its early days was actually rather fluid. Many of the whites in the colony were also in an unfree status as indentured servants. These whites had an advantage over the black slaves in that their servitude came to an end after a defined number of years. It became an accepted practice to do the same with the Africans, freeing a slave after a number of years of service. 

And the former slaves had rights. Notes Rana, "In Virginia, free blacks were able to acquire property, vote, hold minor office, take legal action against Anglo settlers, and even own their own white indentured servants." They could also own slaves, and sometimes did. 

And those free blacks could and did marry whites. However, the most famous case of interracial marriage in early Virginia was between an Indian, Pocahontas, and a white man, John Rolfe, in 1614. When it comes to early Virginia, that was the main thing that I learned in school. 

And then things changed. It appears that the people at the top found their situation a little bit wobbly, and they found it convenient, among other measures, to develop a program of racial discrimination. Rana observes, "Perhaps the very first such law was passed in 1670 and denied free blacks in Virginia the right to own white indentured servants." Virginia's ship of state had changed course, and the Africans were excluded from the ingroup. It didn't have to be that way. 

In the seventeenth century, decisions were made by a small group of white men in Virginia that have dramatically affected the course of American history to this day. (For the situation in early Virginia, see Rana, pp. 43-45, 47-48.) 

Expansion

When it comes to both outgroups and the impulse to push boundaries, the Puritans would have had a ready-made roadmap for their journey - the story of Moses and Joshua leading the chosen people to the promised land. (For more on this, see Abortion and the Bible.)

And all the English colonists had pretty much a free hand defining and pushing around outgroups and expanding their territory as they saw fit for about a century and a half. Then, in the 1760s, things began to change. 

What changed was not the colonists, but the central government in London, which was facing what is sometimes called a problem of success. During the worldwide struggle known as the Seven Years' War (1756-1763, known as the French and Indian War in North America), the English beat the tar out of the French. The war cost France Canada and effectively ended French power in India, where the English began the slow process of absorbing the entire subcontinent. 

Until the Seven Years' War, the British Empire had been largely focused on the North American colonies and a number of islands in the Caribbean that produced sugar cane and rum. All of a sudden London no longer had an empire composed of colonies run by people whose roots lay in England. Instead it had the immediate challenge of figuring out how to incorporate some truly exotic societies into its empire.  

In the aftermath of the Seven Years' War the two places of greatest concern were Bengal and Quebec. Quebec was populated almost entirely by French Catholics, who were unlikely to become Protestants and who would certainly resist switching out their laws for the English common law. (There were an estimated 75,000 French and 400 Anglo-Protestants.) In Bengal the situation was, of course, even more extreme. Turning Bengalis into Englishmen was recognized as a non-starter. As Professor Rana puts it, "sheer demographics required the English use of local authorities and practices." (See Rana, pp. 72-74.) 

In their planning, the British were informed by their experience in Ireland. The English (and their Norman rulers) first showed up in 1169. Talk about a slow-moving train wreck. Anyway, by the sixteenth century, English control had largely been limited to the Pale - Dublin and its immediate surroundings. In 1565 England started to move out from the Pale, attempting to reestablish control over the whole island. Once again, things didn't go very well, but the English did use the occasion to refine their approach to the problem. 

In particular they evolved techniques and rationales for the expropriation and removal of indigenous populations. This approach reached its apogee in Ulster, the northern part of the island, in 1609 - two years after the English arrived in Virginia. In that year King James I reserved 80 percent of Ulster's land for English and Scottish settlers, thereby setting a precedent as the colonial project moved to the New World. (For Ireland, see Rana, pp. 28-30.) 

Working with this background, London in 1763 set about reorganizing its imperial apparatus to handle "a massive and culturally diverse empire," as Professor Rana puts it on page 72.  This involved a balancing act, because some of these populations had conflicting interests. Whether it wanted them or not, London found itself with 100,000 American Indians who were living in the territory of the empire, and it had to find a way to keep the English settlers and the Indians from squabbling with one another. Removing the Indians would be difficult and expensive, and so, in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, London drew a line at the Appalachian Mountains, reserved the land west of the line to the Indians, and told the English settlers not even to think of moving across the line. (See Rana, pp. 65-69.) 

(There's an interesting parallel here with Teddy Roosevelt, who is sometimes called the conservation president. He established 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, and five national parks, along with a number of other things like game preserves and national monuments, protecting more than 230 million acres and creating a conflict with settlers like Cliven and Ammon Bundy that persists to this day.) 

The ban on western migration enraged the English colonists. The poor people wanted to move west so they could get land of their own. And the wealthy, including people like George Washington (p. 69), saw a great deal of money to be made by speculating in western land. On a deeper level, London's move ran against the two basic beliefs in the concept of settler empire. First, the settlers were no longer being viewed as an ingroup. Instead they were being treated as an outgroup, relatively equal to the Indians and the French Catholics in Quebec and even the people in Bengal. Second, since their founding, the colonies had taken continuous territorial expansion as an article of faith. Not only was it important economically. It was also a big part of their identity. (Remember Moses and Joshua in the Bible.) 

From here, the path to the American Revolution is familiar - estrangement, attempts at reconciliation, and finally a lengthy divorce proceeding from 1775 to 1783. 

Fast Forward

Now let's fast forward to today. ... Wow, that was a tumultuous trip, which Professor Rana describes in detail (this is a very rich book, brimming with remarkable insights).

On 6 January 2021 a lynch mob stormed the Capitol looking, among other things, to hang Vice President Mike Pence by the neck until he was dead. They even set up a gallows outside the Capitol. 

Why did this happen? The seeds of 6 January were planted before the Revolution.

The people who say that we are a white Christian country aren't entirely wrong. Our founders saw their country as one that was ruled by white Protestant English men. In time, because there was a shortage of English men - George Orwell worked as a police officer in Burma, for God's sake - we became a country where the ingroup was white Christian men. And since then other groups have achieved at least formal membership in the ingroup through such devices as legislation and Constitutional amendments. It's possible that some of these admissions have been provisional, or notional.

And it is certainly true that some people refuse to accept any revision of the original setup, except of course for the first revision - the one that expanded Protestant to Christian and English to white.

Here's the nub of the issue: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Is it possible that Jefferson, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, was feeling his way to a future he did not see clearly? I think so. I'd say the same of Lincoln.

History is a dynamic process. That's why it's so important to have a north star to steer by. And good charts, so we know where the reefs and shoals are. Professor Rana has helped me greatly by providing a roadmap to America's colonial history. 

One footnote: Yes, the whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville's Moby Dick is named after the Pequot tribe: "Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts Indians; now extinct as the ancient Medes." (Chapter 16.)

See also Rugged Individualism, Mr. Piketty's Book, Jim Crow Was a Failed State, On Demagogues.

Is It a Park, or Is It a Traffic Sewer?

Arm-Wrestling Over MLK Drive

The Philadelphia Art Commission had a hearing yesterday on the planned reconstruction of the MLK Drive bridge, which is near the Art Museum at the beginning of Martin Luther King Drive. And the Commission basically told the Streets Department to go back to the drawing boards. 

This was the Streets Department's second appearance before the Art Commission on this project. Streets has designed a sidepath that, at the first hearing, was ten feet wide. At the second hearing, it was 10.5 feet wide. This is for a two-way path for both bicyclists and pedestrians. The current bridge design still reflects the existing three lanes for motor-vehicle traffic - one bound upriver, and two inbound, heading towards the Eakins Oval in front of the Art Museum.

There have been proposals for nearly a decade to remove that second inbound lane, and at the hearing Streets conceded that they might well drop a lane after further study. But they asked for approval of the 10.5 foot sidepath. 

The Art Commission did not do that. Instead it approved  the basic design for widening the bridge deck, and told Streets to come back with a new design that paid more attention to the needs of pedestrians and bicyclists.

This is a big win for pedestrians and bicyclists. As you probably know, MLK has been closed to motor vehicles during the pandemic, and usage of the space by pedestrians and bicyclists has skyrocketed during that time. There has been concern for a while that the City was planning to revert to the status quo ante when the pandemic went away, and it appears that those concerns are justified.

There are further proposals for more space devoted to bikes and peds along the full length of MLK Drive, up to the Falls Bridge, but they were not part of yesterday's proposal, which focused solely on the bridge.

Here's a story the Bicycle Coalition posted on yesterday's hearing.

And here's a story I wrote in 2017 that gives more background on the design history for MLK Drive.

See also My Life in Fairmount Park.

On Demagogues

Francis Bacon and Max Weber Weigh In

Lewis C. Levin, by Rembrandt Peale (1834).

Demagogues have been around for quite a while. We owe the word, which translates pretty well as "rabble rouser," to the ancient Greeks, who had their share. One of them was named Alcibiades. He will always be remembered as the fellow who talked the Athenians into something called the Sicilian Expedition, which turned out to be kind of the ancient Greek version of America's Vietnam war. 

(Alcibiades may also have been involved in something called the Desecration of the Herms.  Herms were statues to the god Hermes, the messenger of the gods. He also protected travelers, and Athens had set up many roadside Herms. These fellows invariably were blessed with impressive erect penises. One night, shortly before the Sicilian Expedition began, some person or persons went around and cut off almost all the penises. Alcibiades was suspected of involvement, but not charged.  Eventually he was charged with a related crime and called home from the war zone in Sicily to stand trial, at which point Alcibiades defected to Sparta, which would be a bit like an American general defecting to Russia during the height of the Cold War. Who actually did the crime remains a mystery. A 2,400-year-old mystery. Talk about a cold case.)  

At any rate, demagogues seem to be a regular feature of democracies, something like a car radio - you don't really need it, but it always seems to be there, ready to blab in your ear. And, after their careers are over, demagogues almost always wind up with a very bad press. Indeed, demagogues as a group are generally viewed as a very poor sort of people. 

Bacon and Weber

Recently I was browsing through John Aubrey's Brief Lives, something I had been intending to do for thirty or forty years, but never quite gotten to. As I leafed through the pages, I came across the entry for Francis Bacon (1561-1626). It turned out that Bacon had written an essay on the greatness of cities. I had never heard of it.  I thought it sounded interesting, and I found it under the title "Of True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates." Here's what he has to say about demagogues.

"The speech of Themistocles the Athenian, which was haughty and arrogant, in taking so much to himself, had been a grave and wise observation and censure, applied at large to others. Desired at a feast to touch a lute, he said, He could not fiddle, but yet he could make a small town, a great city. These words (holpen a little with a metaphor) may express two differing abilities, in those that deal in business of estate. For if a true survey be taken of counsellors and statesmen, there may be found (though rarely) those which can make a small state great, and yet cannot fiddle; as on the other side, there will be found a great many, that can fiddle very cunningly, but yet are so far from being able to make a small state great, as their gift lieth the other way; to bring a great and flourishing estate, to ruin and decay. And certainly whose degenerate arts and shifts, whereby many counsellors and governors gain both favor with their masters, and estimation with the vulgar, deserve no better name than fiddling; being things rather pleasing for the time, and graceful to themselves only, than tending to the weal and advancement of the state which they serve."

Around the time I was leafing through John Aubrey, my son sent me an essay by the great German historian and sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920). It's called "Politics as a Vocation" and was originally delivered as a speech in 1918. In it Weber gives his view of the demagogue. 

"For ultimately there are only two kinds of deadly sins in the field of politics: lack of objectivity and—often but not always identical with it—irresponsibility. Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as clearly as possible, strongly tempts the politician to commit one or both of these sins. This is more truly the case as the demagogue is compelled to count upon ‘effect.’ He therefore is constantly in danger of becoming an actor as well as taking lightly the responsibility for the outcome of his actions and of being concerned merely with the ‘impression’ he makes. His lack of objectivity tempts him to strive for the glamorous semblance of power rather than for actual power. His irresponsibility, however, suggests that he enjoy power merely for power’s sake without a substantive purpose. Although, or rather just because, power is the unavoidable means, and striving for power is one of the driving forces of all politics, there is no more harmful distortion of political force than the parvenu-like braggart with power, and the vain self-reflection in the feeling of power, and in general every worship of power per se. The mere ‘power politician’ may get strong effects, but actually his work leads nowhere and is senseless."

On one issue, I'm afraid I have to part company with these two august gentlemen (Bacon was Lord Chancellor of England and, in his spare time, one of the founders of the modern scientific method; Weber was a founder of the discipline of sociology).

The Tools of Rhetoric

Both Bacon and Weber appear to set up a dichotomy between demagogues and statesmen. I don't think there is a clean dichotomy; I think there's more a spectrum, and in a democracy any politician is somewhere on that spectrum. 

Think about it this way. In a democracy the people need to be convinced, and great orators such as Demosthenes or Cicero used the same rhetorical tools as the demagogues. Aristotle wrote a book on rhetoric, where he defined the basic tasks of the speaker as ethos, pathos, and logos. Underlying this structure was an important insight, which may sound obvious: Aristotle thought that people were more emotional than rational. So he counseled the speaker to enlist his listeners' emotions as a primary task. This is called pathos. Of course, many people like to think of themselves as primarily rational, and so Aristotle also counseled the speaker to lay out a cogent decision tree, one that would allow a listener to say to himself that he was deciding the matter at hand in a logical, objective way. This is called logos. Finally, or really first of all, Aristotle said the speaker's bedrock task was to get listeners to like him and to trust him, so they would be comfortable and receptive to his emotional and rational appeals, and inclined to do what he said. This is called ethos. 

Ethos, pathos, logos. Remember that, and think about it the next time you're listening to a speech, or a lecture, or a sermon.

Many people, including many intellectuals, are repelled by the classical rhetorical model, and I think this leads to a generalized contempt for people who practice the craft of politics. Ideas should sell themselves. Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door. 

Well, no. That's not the way it works. 

The difference between a demagogue and a statesman is not the tools, it is the ends to which the tools are put. Perhaps it's time to offer a definition of the term demagogue: An orator who uses his powers for evil. 

Controlling Outcomes - Or Not

Of course, this being politics, even the best intentions can lead to a bad end. Demosthenes urged the Athenians to oppose the power of Macedon, and a fellow named Alexander the Great. It seems fair to say things didn't go very well, either for Athens or for Demosthenes, who wound up taking poison to avoid being executed. 

Cicero wound up on the losing side in the civil wars that turned Rome from a republic into an empire. The Second Triumvirate proscribed him and sent a squad of soldiers, headed by a tribune and a centurion, to arrest him at one of his summer houses. Cicero almost escaped, but his pursuers caught up with him. The centurion cut off his head and his hands; these were brought back to Rome, where they were displayed on the rostra, or speaker's platform, in the forum. 

Politics ain't beanbag.

American Demagogues

So neither demagogues nor statesmen are necessarily able to control outcomes. And they use the same tools. And, as I suggested earlier, they exist on a spectrum. Here's another thought: That spectrum may look different depending on who is looking at it.

For instance, what was Tom Paine? It may depend on your perspective. I wonder what the British thought of him.

To my mind, the recently departed occupant of the White House is an extreme example of a demagogue. These pure demagogues are actually rather rare - most politicians at least have a smidgen of interest in the common weal. But while he is extreme, he is not unique, even in America.

In the twentieth century, just to look at the headliners, we had Huey Long, Joe McCarthy, and George Wallace. They each had their moment in the sun, but in the end the road was rocky for them. Long was assassinated, and McCarthy drank himself to death. 

Things went a bit better for Wallace. An assassin's bullet put him in a wheelchair in 1972, but he continued to serve as governor of Alabama, off and on, until 1987. When he died in 1998, the Washington Post ran an obituary that ended this way: "The sad fact is that from first to last, despite the sound and the fury of Wallace's campaigning, little changed for the good in Alabama with his help. Throughout all his years in office, Alabama rated near the bottom of the states in per capita income, welfare, and spending on schools and pupils." 

Inciting Riots in Philadelphia

My favorite American demagogue hails from the nineteenth century. He is the little-known Lewis Levin (1808-1860), America's first Jewish Congressman. (The basic documentation on Levin may be found in a journal article from 1960. For a recent story, see this one in Salon.)

Levin was born and grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and, after an itinerant period, he wound up in Philadelphia, where he became a leader of what would be known as the Know-Nothings. He proved quite adept at inciting riots during 1844, a hard year in Philly, and rode the anti-immigrant tide into Congress (1845-1851). As time passed, his behavior became increasingly erratic, and eventually he was committed to Philadelphia's insane asylum, where he died in 1860. 

My friend Greg Cukor suggested I look into Levin back in 2013, and I did so. [ went to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. I went to Laurel Hill Cemetery and reviewed the file related to the plot where he is buried. In the end I decided I did not have very much in the way of new information, and I did have a number of questions that I was unable to answer. (Example: Several people are buried in the plot, which is rather large. Why are they there?)

So I set Lewis Levin aside, but I remained fascinated by him. And I'm glad he found a home in this story.

A note about terminology. I don't like the words orator and statesman. I've searched for a gender-neutral term to replace statesman, and not found one. And orator strikes me as pompous, and almost archaic. Rhetor, meaning a practitioner of rhetoric, strikes me as obsolete. I do have a personal favorite - englottogastor. I wrote a story about it back in 2013. Just about nobody has heard of this word, which cuts into its usefulness in communications.

See also A Cure for Anger and Greed Is Not Good. It Is a Mortal Sin.