Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: the multiple traditions in America. (Louis Hartz, Gunnar Myrdal)

Analysts of American politics since Tocqueville have seen the nation as a paradigmatic "liberal democratic" society, shaped most by the comparatively free and equal conditions and the Enlightenment ideals said to have prevailed at its founding. These accounts must be severely revised to recognize the inegalitarian ideologies and institutions of ascriptive hierarchy that defined the political status of racial and ethnic minorities and women through most of U.S. history. A study of the period 1870-1920 illustrates that American political culture is better understood as the often conflictual and contradictory product of multiple political traditions, than as the expression of hegemonic liberal or democratic political traditions.

Since the nation's inception, analysts have described American political culture as the preeminent example of modem liberal democracy, of r consent with respect for the equal rights of all. They have portrayed American political development as the working out of liberal democratic or republican principles, via both "liberalizing" and democratizing" socioeconomic changes and political efforts to cope with tensions inherent in these principles. Illiberal, undemocratic beliefs and practices have usually been seen only as expressions of ignorance and prejudice, destined to marginality by their lack of rational defenses. A distinguished fine of writers, from Hector St. John Crevecoeur in the eighteenth century and Harriet Martineau and Lord Bryce in the nineteenth century to Gunnar Myrdal and Louis Hartz in the twentieth century serves as authority for this view. Today, leading social scientists such as Samuel P. Huntington, Walter Dean Burnham, and Ira Katznelson, legal scholars, historians, and cultural analysts such as Kenneth Karst, John Diggins, and Sacvan Bercovitch, and many others still structure their accounts on these premises. Virtually all appeal to the classic analysis of American politics, Tocqueville's Democracy in America.

Tocqueville's thesis-that America has been most shaped by the unusually free and egalitarian ideas and material conditions that prevailed at its founding - captures important truths. Nonetheless, the purpose of this essay is to challenge that thesis by showing that its adherents fail to give due weight to inegalitarian ideologies and conditions that have shaped the participants and the substance of American politics just as deeply. For over 80% of U.S. history, its laws declared most of the world's population to be ineligible for full American citizenship solely because of their race, original nationality, or gender. For at least two-thirds of American history, the majority of the domestic adult population was also ineligible for full citizenship for the same reasons. Contrary to Tocquevillian views of American civic identity, it did not matter how "liberal," "demoratic," or republican" those persons' beliefs were.(1)

The Tocquevillian story is thus deceptive because it is too narrow. It is centered on relationships among a minority of Americans (white men, largely of northern European ancestry) analyzed via reference to categories derived from the hierarchy of political and economic statuses men have held in Europe: monarchs and aristocrats, commercial burghers, farmers, industrial and rural laborers, and indigents. Because most European observers and British American men have regarded these categories as politically fundamental, it is understandable that they have always found the most striking fact about the new nation to be its lack of one type of ascriptive hierarchy. There was no hereditary monarchy or nobility native to British America, and the revolutionaries rejected both the authority of the British king and aristocracy and the creation of any new American substitutes. Those features of American political life made the United States appear remarkably egalitarian by comparison with Europe.

But the comparative moral, material, and political egalitailanism that prevailed at the founding among moderately propertied white men was surrounded by an array of other fixed, ascriptive systems of unequal status, all largely unchallenged by the American revolutionaries.'(2) Men were thought naturally suited to rule over women, within both the family and the polity. White northern Europeans were thought superior culturally-and probably biologically-to black Africans, bronze Native Americans, and indeed all other races and civilizations. Many British Americans also treated religion as an inherited condition and regarded Protestants as created by God to be morally and politically, as well as theologically, superior to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and others.

These beliefs were not merely emotional prejudices or "attitudes." Over time, American intellectual and political elites elaborated distinctive justifications for these ascriptive systems, including inegalitarian scriptural readings, the scientific racism of the "American school" of ethnology, racial and sexual Darwinism, and the romantic cult of Anglo-saxonism in American historiography. All these discourses identified the true meaning of Americanism with particular forms of cultural, religious, ethnic, and especially and gender hierarchies." Many adherents of ascriptive Americanist outlooks insisted that the nation's political and economic structures should formally reflect natural and cultural inequalities, even at the cost of violating doctrines of universal rights. Although these views never entirely prevailed, their impact has been wide and deep.

Thus to approach a truer picture of America's political culture and its characteristic conflicts, we must consider more than the familiar categories of (absent) feudalism and socialism and (pervasive) bourgeois liberalism and republicanism. The nation has also been deeply constituted by the ideologies and practices that defined the relationships of the white male minority with subordinate groups, and the relationships of these groups with each other. When these elements are kept in view, the flat plain of American egalitarianism mapped by Tocqueville and others suddenly looks quite different. We instead perceive America's initial conditions as exhibiting only a rather small, recently leveled valley of relative equality nestled amid steep mountains of hierarchy. and though we can see forces working to erode those mountains over time, broadening the valley, many of the peaks also prove to be volcanic, frequently responding to seismic pressures with outbursts that harden into substantial peaks once again.

To be sure, America's ascriptive, unequal statuses, and the ideologies by which they have been defended have always been heavily conditioned and constrained by the presence of liberal democratic values and institutions. The reverse, however, is also true. Although liberal democratic ideas and practices have been more potent in America than elsewhere, American politics is best seen as expressing the interaction of multiple political traditions, including liberalism, republicanism, and ascriptive forms of Americanism, which have collectively comprised American political culture, without any constituting it as a whole.(4) Though Americans have often struggled over contradictions among these traditions, almost all have tried to embrace what they saw as the best features of each.

Ascriptive outlooks have had such a hold in America because they have provided something that neither liberalism nor republicanism has done so well. They have offered creditable intellectual and psychological reasons for many Americans to believe that their social roles and personal characteristics express an identity that has inherent and transcendant worth, thanks to nature, history, and God. Those rationales have obviously aided those who sat atop the nation's political, economic, and social hierarchies. But many Americans besides elites have felt that they have gained meaning, as well as material and political benefits, from their nation's traditional structures of ascribed places and destinies.

Conventional narratives, preoccupied with the absence of aristocracy and socialism, usually stress the liberal and democratic elements in the rhetoric of even America's dissenters (Hartog 1987). These accounts fail to explain how and why liberalizing efforts have frequently lost to forces favoring new forms of racial and gender hierarchy. Those forces have sometimes negated major liberal victories, especially in the half-century following Reconstruction; and the fate of that era may be finding echoes today.

My chief aim here is to persuade readers that many leading accounts of American political culture are inadequate. I will also suggest briefly how analyses with greater descriptive and explanatory power can be achieved by replacing the Tocquevillian thesis with a multiple-traditions view of America. This argument is relevant to contemporary politics in two ways. First, it raises the possibility that novel intellectual, political, and legal systems reinforcing racial, ethnic, and gender inequalities might be rebuilt in America in the years ahead. That prospect does not seem plausible if the United States has always been essentially liberal democratic, with all exceptions marginal and steadily eliminated. It seems quite real, however, if liberal democratic traditions have been but contested parts of American culture, with inegalitarian ideologies and practices often resurging even after major enhancements of liberal democracy. Second, the political implications of the view that America has never been completely liberal, and that changes have come only through difficult struggles and then have often not been sustained, are very different from the complacency-sometimes despair - engendered by beliefs that liberal democracy has always been hegemonic.

I shall review and critique Tocqueville's account of the sources and dynamics shaping democracy in America, along with two of the most influential extensions of Tocquevillian analysis in modem social science, Gunnar Myrdays (1944) American Dilemma and Louis Hartz's (1955) Liberal Tradition in America. I argue that Tocqueville himself was much more perceptive than his modem Tocquevillian" followers, though not free from the problems identified here. I shall note how Tocquevillian premises continue to flaw recent scholarship especially general works on American political identity and citizenship. Finally, I shall illustrate the merits of a multiple-traditions approach by showing how it offers more insight into the qualified but extensive creation of new systems of ascriptive inequality during the post-reconstruction and Progressive eras.

THE TOCQUEVILLIAN THESIS

Tocqueville began Democracy in America by calling attention to the immense influence of one "basic fact" that was the creative element from which each particular fact-and, indeed, the whole course - of American society is derived, namely, "the equality of conditions." This fact" absorbed Tocqueville's interest because he saw a democratic revolution taking place in Europe, especially in France, breaking down the power of nobles and kings. In the United States this revolution seemed "almost to have reached its natural limits." Thus, by studying America, Toqueville could draw lessons for the future of his own nation and all of European culture (1969, 9-12, 18).

America was so advanced in this democratic revolution, Tocqueville argued, because of several elements that conspired to produce its egalitarian point of departure. The vast stretches of land "inhabited only by wandering tribes who had not thought of exploiting" the soil enabled European immigrants to spread out and make their fortune-as opposed to nations where most lands formed parts of large hereditary estates. Settlers came chiefly from England, where they had unusual "acquaintance with notions of rights and principles of true liberty," reinforced in New England particularly by "democratic and republican" Protestant beliefs. They also came without any "idea of any superiority of some over others," because great lords did not relocate to the colonies and because the large landowners who did lacked aristocratic privileges. Instead, a middle-class and democratic freedom" flourished almost from the outset. This combination of comparatively equal and open economic and social conditions and an ideological legacy conductive to republicanism and personal liberties made America the perfect laboratory to study the tendencies of a society that from the start was decisively free, egalitarian, and democratic in theory and practice 1969, 33-36, 50-51, 280-81).

The impact of Tocqueville's thesis on modem American scholarship was magnified by two among many works applying his ideas to twentieth-century politics, though in ways that compounded his deficiencies.(5) Each stressed one aspect of Tocqueville's account of America's point of departure. First, Gunnar Myrdals (1944) study of American race relations emphasized the ideals of Enlightenment "humanistic liberalism." Elaborated by revolutionary leaders to define and justify their cause, these beliefs became, in Myrdal's view, the tenets of the American Creed and represented to Americans the essential meaning of their struggle for independence. It thus served as the cement of the nation, written into all the basic documents comprising the highest law of the land. This democratic creed proclaimed the worth and moral equality of all individual human beings and their" inilienable rights to freedom, justice, and a fair opportunity." It also denounced "differences made on account of 'race, creed or color"' (pp. 3-4, 7-8, 25, 52).

Since Myrdal's subject was the "Negro problem," he knew that Americans' fidelity to such beliefs was questionable. But he explained that the creed represented valuations preserved on the general plane," which Americans knew to be morally higher than their discriminatory valuations. The latter were merely expressions of interests, jealousies, prejudices-impulses known to be "irrational" even by many who harbored them. Discriminations were defended, if at all, only "in terms of tradition, expediency, or utility." In Myrdal's account, then, it was this ideological inheritance, the equalitarian creed forming the national ethos, that drove American development. There was a dynamic tension between creedal values of equality and liberty, but with evident approval, Myrdal saw egalitarian values as having triumphed" in most respects. The persistent refusal to follow American egalitarian ideals in matters of race was, he thought, most characteristic of "poor and uneducated white" people in "isolated and backward rural" areas of the deep South. Thus, his analysis offered hope that these inequalities, too, would in the end be dissolved Myrdal's (1944) American Dilemma 1990, 199 and Southern 1987, 295).

If Myrdal stressed Tocqueviue's argument that early Americans were shaped by egalitarian Enlightemnent ideals, Louis Hartz (1955) emphasized Tocqueville's account of America's relatively egalitarian and free economic and conditions. Americans' lack of feudal institutions, classes, and their lived experience of atomistic social freedmd' made the U.S. a fiberal society. Hartz viewed the presence of "the liberal idea" among early Americans as important, but he did not think it was consciousness of a specific ideological heritage that made Americans liberal. Most were instinctive-even irrational"- Lockeans, all the more so because they had no real awareness of any alternatives. Their comparatively nonascriptive, nonhierarchical conditions led most Americans to regard liberal beliefs in individual rights and liberties, petit bourgeois democracy, and Horatio Alger myths of economic mobility as self-evident. Far more than Myrdal and even more than Tocqueville, Hartz bemoaned the fixed, dogmatic character of this liberalism born "of a liberal way of life," seeing it as a tyranny of unanimity that went much deeper than mere tyranny of the majority. He believed the absence of any real sense of class and the wide regard of middle-class values as natural supported McCarthyite antisocialist policies in domestic and foreign affairs in the early 1950s (pp. 6-23, 35-36, 46, 51, 58, 62-63, 66, 284-309).

Hartz saw conflicts in American history, but in his view they were all conflicts within liberal boundaries-between majority rule and individual or minority rights and specifically between democracy and property rights. Slavery (not true feudalism) also had to be eliminated. Yet to Hartz, these conflicts were never as deeply problematic as the stifling consensus born of have experience from which they stemmed, "the secret root" of all that was most distinctive and …