Archives for September 2018

Malcolm Gaskill: Between Two Worlds: How the English Became Americans. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Originally published in Law and Liberty, November 25, 2015. Republished with permission.

 

English settlers in America might have intended to transmit the traditions of the mother country to subsequent generations. This didn’t exactly happen—partly because the settlers disagreed amongst themselves about which of those traditions deserved preservation, and partly because the experience of life in North America challenged many of the traditions they did want to preserve. The disagreement and the adaptation together led, eventually, to a political revolution.

Malcolm Gaskill puts it bluntly: “Migrants did have one thing in common: they were no longer in England, and they had to get used to it.” His new book tracks what happened to the English in their three (very different) principal areas of settlement: Virginia, New England, and the Caribbean. He also keeps an eye on what the English who stayed at home—financing these expeditions and attempting to rule them from afar—thought and did, especially in competition with the Spanish, who had settled large swaths of the New World a long time before their geopolitical rivals in London really got started. This gives Between Two Worlds a lot to do, but the author, a professor of early modern history at the University of East Anglia, manages his unruly topic by considering each of the first three settler generations in turn.

Gaskill deals in his prologue with the inauspicious sixteenth-century beginnings of the project, remarking that the English understandably modeled their efforts on the recent conquest of Ireland, the wild tribes of which reminded them of their own pre-Roman-conquest ancestors and of the North American peoples. the first settlement, at Roanoke, “Virginia” in 1585—named for Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, of course—vanished from the earth like Prospero’s insubstantial pageant. To this day, we don’t know what happened to its more than 100 inhabitants.

The years 1607 to 1640 mark Gaskill’s first generation of permanent settlers. Of the four million English in 1600, thousands would journey to the New World during this period, Half of them went to the West Indies, slightly more than a third to the Virginia/Chesapeake area, only fifteen percent to New England. Motives varied, but as the ‘southerly’ movement of the new arrivals suggests, the prospect of a mild climate fit for rich plantations and an interest in “resisting Spanish Catholics—the dark lords of an American empire”—figured prominently in English ambitions. To wrest land from the infidels of Spain and from pagan indigenes—better still, while converting the latter to Protestant Christianity—reconciled, at least to the satisfaction of the English, desires for both liberty and empire. (Two centuries later, Thomas Jefferson’s formula, ‘the empire of liberty,” would address the same paradox, albeit in very different terms.)

Upon ascending to the throne in 1603, James I followed a two-track strategy regarding Spain. He made peace while endorsing some New World plantations. King James’ restraint in New World settlement bespoke not only diplomatic caution but also the worry (prescient, as it would happen) that large English settlements in the New world might upset England’s place “in the hierarchy of nations.” The New World tail might someday wag the Old World dog. He took care not to use the Crown’s money for investment, leaving colonization to private speculators who nonetheless remained under royal control. Hence the Virginia company and the Plymouth Adventurers, both established in 1606.

The former reached the Chesapeake Bay under the command of Captain John Smith the following year, founding Jamestown and meeting resistance above all from the Indian chiefs or Paw-Paws, who recognized a rival form of worship when they saw one. As Gaskill puts it, “Indian suspicion on one side, and a haughty sense of entitlement on the other, guaranteed an Anglo-Indian future steeped in misery and bloodshed.” And this notwithstanding the marriage of the entrepreneur John Rolfe to “Pocahontas” (her real name, Mataoka, concealed from the English), optimistically renamed “Rebecca,” after the Biblical mother of two nations. She died less than a decade later, after a publicity tour of England, taking the rather faint hope of peaceful intermarriage and Christina conversion of the Indians with her.

The real answer to lasting English settlement in America was found in political thought—specifically, in what political scientists now call ‘comparative politics.’ “Adventurers had to learn that merely installing English settlements in America was not enough,” Gaskill writes. “They had to identify things that made England work socially, politically, and economically and reproduce them. Peopling the land was the key.” If ever a people were, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous phrase, forced to be free, it was the English in North America. More specifically, they were force to think, and to think politically. It was a habit that would eventuate in independence and republicanism, early two centuries later.

Having been engaged in fierce geopolitical struggles amongst themselves for centuries, the Indian nations and tribes quickly saw the danger of any substantial territorial encroachments by the newcomers. At best, the white strangers might be deployed against traditional enemies. Incidentally, one of the merits of Between Two Worlds is its treatment of the Indians—a treatment free of the American triumphalism of the old accounts, and also of the condescending sympathy for ‘Native Americans’ fashionable in the past half-century. Gaskill describes but makes no attempt to justify the sudden attack on Jamestown masterminded by the apparently friendly Powhatan chief Opechancanough, whose men murdered 387 unsuspecting settlers in March 1622, then mangled the carcasses. After that, “Throughout the Atlantic world, men decided that Indians could not be trusted.” Settler eminences now began to speak not of intermarriage, peaceful trade, and conversion but of the right of war and the law of nations exercised against savages. This means that one should be cautious with the term ‘racism’ when thinking about the settlers. There was no trace of biologically-based racism in them. Their suspicion of ‘the Indians’ rather arose from what logicians would call a ‘hasty generalization,’ imputing the savagery exhibited by the Powhatan chief to all Indians or, at a minimum (and this would be more reasonable), keeping their guard up when dealing with any Indian group. The latter policy was already well in place among European nations in dealing with one another.

As for the Plymouth Adventurers and their descendants, the New Englanders faced analogous circumstances but with a different set of Indian nations, in a harsher climate; and they arrived with more intense religious aspirations. A band of Protestant dissidents landed at “New Plymouth” in 1620, settling in territory where the local tribe had been eradicated by disease. Gaskill notes that the Mayflower Compact was no “democratic constitution but a company contract to bind the strangers to order upon landing, a quick fix before formal authority was established.” (Many of the Pilgrims were Dutch, with no habitual allegiance to English ‘bosses.’) In the same vein, he points out that this and similar settlements in New England didn’t establish beachheads for political liberty; John Winthrop’s 1630 Salem founding was a theocracy supervised by God’s vicegerent, Mr. Winthrop. The settlements were democratic only in Tocqueville’s social sense: No titled aristocrats made the trip. By ‘liberty’ the settlers meant, in the frank words of one, a world free of bishops.

As for the West Indies, settlers worried less about Indians than about the heat, the hurricanes, and the disease-carrying mosquitoes. There, a new aristocracy began to take shape, based on slaves who were imported from Africa to work in a climate Europeans could not bear to work in. By the 1630s the Virginia settlers were beginning to do the same thing. The portentous social distinction between South and North had begun to take shape.

Having made his peace with Spain, James I faced increasingly sharp resistance to his rule from Protestants at home, their suspicions roused especially by the king’s attempts to marry his eldest son to one Catholic princess after another (success came in 1625, when the future Charles I wedded Henrietta Maria of France). By the time the second generation of English Americans took charge, relations with Indians had become foreign relations, slavery was giving rise to a set of New World aristocrats, and civil war loomed in England itself.

With the war, second-generation colonists “were forced to examine their consciences and allegiances to decide what being English meant” and what it meant to belong physically and spiritually to America. The First English Civil War—which pitted a new and more absolutist monarch, Charles I, against Oliver Cromwell and his Puritan “Roundheads”—stirred existing factions in North America, engaging them not only in the political thought forced upon the first generation but in regime-changing political thought. Passions associated with political revolution and religious conflict mixed with passions aroused by the already worsening settler-Indian relations.

Puritan victory in England meant that it became, briefly, more like New England. A new Reformation was imposed, this one described as a “Reformation of manners,” including capital punishment for adultery and what Gaskill calls “a united front against popery.” (The draconian law against adultery never saw rigorous enforcement—probably a good thing for the sake of continued English population growth. One emigrant to Virginia wrote that the deer in his new country were as numerous as cuckolds in England.) Puritan victory did not bring dismantlement of the king’s wartime bureaucracy, which the Puritans simply took over, continuing extralegal absolutism but in clerical garb. The new republic saw the abolition of the House of Lords, the established church, and the monarchy, but the empowered Cromwell and Parliament had no more intention to frame a liberal republic than had the Puritan fathers of New England. Although a bit lax in enforcing the adultery laws, both England and New England went after suspected witches, with England initiating the attacks and (surprisingly, given subsequent accounts) surpassing the New England courts in handing down convictions. At least New England magistrates “insisted on proof of a satanic pact,” unlike their more ardent English-Puritan counterparts.

Fleeing in defeat, Royalists went to the West Indies, sometimes to Virginia. When Parliament threatened to pursue them across the water, they allied themselves with local champions of self-government as putative advocates of—what else, if not the tradition of the English common law (for which the Stuarts and their allies had previously shown little regard). Meanwhile, Cromwell’s designation as “Emperor of the West Indies” put English republicanism, such as it was, on the side of statist centralization. Because the monarchy had sold off most of its lands under the Tudors, the new statists had no choice but to obtain revenues through taxation. Back along the Chesapeake, Catholics and Protestants fought each other in Maryland, with Protestants from as far away as Massachusetts joining the fight, which the Protestants eventually won at the Battle of Severn (near Annapolis) in 1655.

By the time of Cromwell’s assassination in 1658, New England and Virginia had established themselves economically. Trade began to eclipse religiosity in both places. As it did in England: Charles II, crowned in 1660, proved considerably more latitudinarian in doctrine and in morals than were the Puritans. Increased trade also brought greater demand for slaves, especially in the West Indies; not only Africans but English prisoners, Scottish rebels, and the ever-beleaguered Irish were “barbadosed.” Charles II did prove disappointing to merchants in one important respect: Needing revenues as much as his father and as much as Cromwell, he renewed the stiff regulation of trade. As Gaskill observes, the English civil/revolutionary wars proved to Americans that their difficulties with the mother country arose not simply as a result of defective regimes—monarchs and parliaments alike exacted revenues and demanded obedience—but as a result of the empowerment of the modern state, quite apart from its regime form. A century later, their descendants’ Declaration of Independence excoriated not only the monarch/tyrant but also the Parliament for, among other things, sending tax collectors to eat out their substance.

Increased trade also spelled trouble for the Indians The more prosperous the American English became, the more numerous they were; the more numerous they were, the more land they wanted. In Virginia, especially, where plantation owners locked up the best land, new settlers pressed westward. The British Empire set down its own grander, imperial policy. In the words of diarist John Evelyn, “Whoeover Commands the Ocean Commands the Trade of the World, and whoever Commands the Trade of the World Commands the Riches of the World, and whoever is Master of that Commands the World it self.” Charles II resumed the strategy that had been set down decades earlier by the disgraced Francis Bacon, that of “merg[ing] politics, profit, and natural philosophy”—the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, and particularly the British estate.

By now, about 60,000 English settlers lived in New England. Metacom, or “King Philip” of the Wampanoags, began a major war against them. “This was for the second generation what sea crossings and scratch-building had been for the first: a hardening, defining experience.” Using what we now call guerrilla tactics, the coalition of Indian tribes fought through the bitter winter of 1675-76, taunting their captives with the question, “Where is your God now?” Gaskill describes the “extravagant cruelty” of Indian and Englishman alike: “Indians tortured because martial ritual required it, the English to obtain intelligence.” Two thousand settlers died before the Indian coalition surrendered in July 1677. Sporadic Indian raids continued, and the colonists duly noted that their British brethren had offered no protective aid aside from parish collections, “which were mere gestures.” Nor did the British prove any more helpful to Maryland, where settlers put down a similar uprising.

By the third generation, writes Gaskill, “experience set the colonists apart, creating opposition internally and with England.” Struggles with Indians continued; in the north the tribes began to ally with the French, another Catholic enemy. Catholic James II ascended the throne in 1685; after Charles II died, intensifying the worries of Anglo-American Protestants. West Indian and Virginian settlers added to their slave populations and simultaneously to their worries about slave rebellions. Along the Chesapeake, in the 1680s alone the slave population rose from 4,500 to 12,000. This increase also decreased incidences of manumission; a people engaged in demographically-based dominance of the Indians had no intention of being overwhelmed by emancipated African slaves.

No solution, even in theory, to any of these ethno-political or religio-political dilemmas was available to Americans until a writer of the time, John Locke, began publishing. A political regime founded upon the principle of equal natural rights could form the basis of racial and religious peace in a political community that actually framed laws to conform to that principle. Gaskill mentions Locke in passing but mistakes his natural rights philosophy for “pragmatism.” What made the third generation of Americans react against the excesses of the last witch-hunting spasm, in 1690s Salem, was not pragmatism but an understanding of Christianity that Americans in New England were the first to begin to integrate into their laws.

As Gaskill describes it, “Boston’s Brattle Street Church was founded in 1698 not upon scriptural literalism, the ‘New England way,’ or a covenant, but upon nature, reason, and inclusiveness”—in other words, upon a combination of Christianity and Lockean philosophy. What remained of the older generations, he concludes was a legacy of “extraordinary courage.” The commercial republic of the future would prove battle-ready, to the dismay of its enemies for centuries to come.

 

 

Greg Weiner: American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2015.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 52, Number 4, July/August 2015.

 

An American Burke sounds like a paradoxical fellow. America’s most prominent recent Burkean, Russell Kirk, enjoyed some success insofar as he espoused a traditionalism he judged prudent. But of course Burke’s traditionalism was European, not American, and therefore aristocratic. One may repair to the countryside and a rambling old home, essay the squire’s life, inveigh against all encroaching vulgarity, and yet not ever achieve what the United States denies one: aristocracy itself, with its lineages that stretch forward into the future, its servants, its governing responsibilities. In America, the aristocratic pose will never shake a wilting touch of twee—quite unlike the real thing, the man himself.

Although colorful and by Washington standards even eccentric, Daniel Patrick Moynihan had nothing twee about him, and thus resembled the real Burke more than any literary/academic imitator could do. Like Burke himself, Moynihan was simply too Irish for twee-ness. The American Burke was a scholar and statesman, too, but he placed himself in the line of American liberalism, a line to which the well-born do not belong by right. Moynihan thought like an American; he figured he had the same rights as anybody else. A democrat and indeed a Democrat, his traditionalism came in with liberalism itself, which has as much of a pedigree as anything else in this country—even if this may not be saying much, as pedigrees go.

The character of American liberalism in Moynihan’s lifetime raises a different problem for a Burkean sensibility. While its advocates often trace their lineage back to Lincoln, to Jefferson, and even to Locke, they are inclined to esteem such worthies only insofar as their thoughts and actions can be made to appear to anticipate their own. Liberals of the twentieth-century or progressive stripe praise Lincoln as a strong president who ended slavery, Jefferson as a democrat (needing a good dose of Hamiltonianism to stiffen his spine), Locke as a man of enlightened modernity, and so on. More, they see themselves as representing one more step in this upward climb toward still greater social, political, and economic equality on the one hand, and maximal personal freedom on the other. But unlike traditionalists, who incline to look to origins, to the past, for moral and political authority, liberal progressives look to the future. And in so doing they mean to use the modern, centralized state as an indispensable trailblazer for getting there Burke didn’t do either of those things. Did Moynihan?

Here Professor Weiner steps in to help. He begins by observing that Moynihan endorsed the liberal-progressive aspiration for equality along with progressivism’s esteem for the modern state as a means for achieving a greater measure of equality than economic liberty alone seems likely to afford. However, Moynihan distinguished between a redistributionist state—seen, for example, in such New Deal programs as Social Security and unemployment relief—and a service-providing state that absorbed the traditional roles of family, church, neighbors, and the rich variety of civil associations so memorably described by Tocqueville (who, along with Burke, emerges as a Moynihanian hero). The state can encourage such personal relationships with tax policy and a variety of other strategies, but if the state itself provides services by employing paid professional social workers then it tends to transfer money not so much to the poor as to the middle-class service providers themselves, who have every reason to want to maintain and even expand their list of clients. In Moynihan’s thinking on this matter, Tocqueville meets the Catholic Church—specifically, its principle of subsidiarity, “the belief that a social problem should be addressed by the closest competent institution to it.” Burke is here, too—Moynihan loved his phrase, “the little platoons” within which we fight the battles of life.

This sensitivity to the strengths but also the limitations of government action explains Moynihan’s esteem for the New Deal but not the Great Society. “The New Deal offered amelioration, at which the government was good because government was good at raising revenue and cutting checks. The Great Society [by contrast] offered programs around which constituencies—often professional, middle-class groups with interests distinct from those of the people the programs were intended to help—accreted. They micromanaged; they agitated; they were envious of nonstate actors.”

And they were less than competent because trained as social scientists. A distinguished social scientist himself, Moynihan understood the limitations of his discipline. Social scientists know how to compile and ‘crunch’ numbers; neither they nor the social workers they train are adequate substitutes for parents, friends, pastors, or the guy at the bar who knows a good car repair shop. And the numbers social scientists compile and crunch tell them what worked, not what will work; they are retrospective, not prospective. They help us to cope, not to prophesy. Moynihan learned this the hard way, by experience, “arriv[ing] in John F. Kennedy’s Washington a political idealist and [leaving] Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration a chastened man”—among other things, ready for work in the Nixon administration and later as a United States Senator from New York. War on poverty, yes: but a guerrilla war, not a world war. “There were limits to the capacity of human beings to manipulate infinitely intricate social systems and limits to the ability of reason fully to comprehend them.” At this writing, in 2015, we’ve mapped the human genome but we still can’t cure diabetes or cancer; nature itself is a more complicated beast than the adepts of mechanistic science had supposed, and Moynihan would smile to see this acknowledged by practitioners of science ‘hard’ and ‘soft.’

So, for example, social scientists can use statistics to show that family is the main—perhaps only—relevant ‘variable’ in educational ‘outcomes.’ It cannot show your mother how to read to you after dinner. Another Tocqueville apercu surfaces, here: In trying to persuade politicians and social scientists of this home truth, “the problem was the tendency of democratic peoples to insist on simplicity and to be willing to pay a high price to retain the illusion of it.” Moynihan admired what had become the old, but once had been the new science of politics, the political science of The Federalist, which stuck to the adaptation of social realities in securing our rights and, true to its name, structured a governmental system respectful of local self-government while strengthening central authority for well-defined purposes of self-defense and the regulation of interstate commerce. As a federalist, Publius turns out to be an advocate of the Protestant and Lockean form of Catholicism’s subsidiarity principle. Like Publius, and unlike contemporary libertarians and neo-Confederates, Moynihan did not propose federalism as a disguise for weaker government, but rather for more effective government at all levels.

Moynihan also doubted the progressives’ faith in the march of progress. Not only did he dislike the regimentation such a metaphor implies; he also doubted that something called ‘History’ is necessarily going anywhere in accordance with laws discernible by social scientists or anyone else on this earth. “He believed a high and sustained measure of happiness was possible, just not inevitable.” What human beings can do is to structure their environment better, from better constitutions (as Publius showed us) to better public architecture. Both political institutions and public spaces guide our movements without denying our liberty to think and to act; they channel human energies without stifling them. Pierre L’Enfant’s Washington—with the Capital Building, not the White House, as its center—reflected what Moynihan called “a certain political literacy” which that architect shared with the political architects of the United States Constitution.

Only the spirit of those sorts of architecture could address the socio-economic condition of poverty in a fair and intelligent way. Moynihan wanted the federal government to spend more money to alleviate poverty; only such a national policy would short-circuit the states’ practice of underbidding one another with respect to benefits in order to get rid of the poor. Going beyond material benefits, however, he emphasized that “the unit of analysis” in any discussion of poverty must be the family, not the individual, and that poor families need money not services. Without an adequate income for the “male bread-winner,” the family will disintegrate. But as experience accumulated, Moynihan saw that family disintegration among the poor, and especially among poor blacks, continued to rise even as unemployment fell. “We have lost a family structure capable of disciplining young males,” Moynihan wrote in 1965. Under the Nixon Administration he advocated the Family Assistance Plan, which would have guaranteed an annual income for poor families, but it didn’t survive Congressional scrutiny. Worse, local experiments with the guaranteed income showed that family breakup actually increased when families received this benefit. Years later toward the end of his Senate career, he wondered, plaintively, “Who indeed can tell us what happened to the American family?”

Moynihan became a senator largely on the strength not of his reputation on domestic policy but because he became an eloquent defender of the United States as ambassador to the United Nations during the late 1970s—the post-Vietnam War period when many Americans felt not only disheartened by the bitterness of domestic politics but much-abused by foreign spokesmen in the General Assembly. The ‘East-West’ confrontation had crystallized at the same time British and French imperialism had lost its grip. Consequently, the Cold War saw a ‘North-South’ struggle in addition to the struggle of ‘East and West,’ with each of the rival ‘super-power’ regimes competing for influence in the poverty-stricken, highly nationalistic ‘Third World.’ By the time Moynihan got to the U. N. the United States held what amounted to the position of a minority party in Congress. He implemented “a vigorous ideological and political defense of liberty,” “refus[ing] to indulge the self-flagellating rhetoric of the 1960s American Left”—still heard in his own Democratic Party. Arguing that many of the rulers of ex-colonial countries formed their political opinions under the auspices of democratic-socialist professors in the European universities they’d attended years ago, “he assumed a posture not unlike Burke’s in response to the French Revolution: one man standing before the seemingly inevitable tide of history and, in the very name of prudence and armed with ideas, insisting on heroic resistance.” In defending liberal as distinguished from social democracy, in refusing to concede any ground to Leftish demands, and in generally eschewing the unreciprocated courtesies previously extended by the United States to its adversaries, Moynihan demanded that member nations adhere to the Charter of the organization they had joined and abide by international law.

Moynihan’s rhetorical defense of liberal principle did not entail his abandonment of good judgment. He never got carried away with his own Irish eloquence, but coldly assessed the prospects of the Soviet Union and found them bleak. Although the Soviets seemed to be gaining on the battle-weary and uncertain Americans, as early as the late 1970s Moynihan saw that the Soviet empire was weakening. As a specialist in ethnicity, he saw the way many captive nations within the empire had begun to push against their captors; although Moynihan does not seem to have said so, he evidently regarded Russia as a new version of Austria-Hungary: the unwanted ruler of a polyglot empire without the economic resources to hold on. Needless to say, he hoped that it would not take a world war to push it into its collapse. This is why, as a senator, he opposed the Reagan Administration’s ‘rollback’ strategy—the attempt to accelerate Soviet decline. Rather than a too-precipitous imperial collapse he hoped that a gradual (thus Burkean) replacement of Soviet rule with international law and international institutions could be worked out. he worried that the Reagan administration’s impatience with international law—seen, for example, in the invasion of Grenada—would add fuel to a smoldering fire. He went so far as to define political right as international law—a move never countenance by another of his intellectual heroes, Hugo Grotius, who looked to natural law as the foundation of political rights and of the law of nations.

He did not object to the use of force to buttress international law. The 1990 military alliance against Iraq—which had violated international law by invading Kuwait—was justified because Saddam Hussein had committed a crime. Moynihan voted against Congressional authorization of the war nonetheless because he objected to President George H. W. Bush’s Kennedyesque language about no price being too heavy to pay for punishing that crime. Here is a feature of Moynihan’s thought and practice derived not so much from Burke or Tocqueville, or even Grotius, but from Lord Halifax, “The Trimmer.” Moynihan like to lean against the wind because he wanted to keep his country balanced, morally and intellectually capable of prudential reasoning. Even if his personality could be described as extravagant, larger-than-life, he tried very hard not to speak or act that way, and he kept to that resolution.

Like Burke, then, Moynihan emerges from Weiner’s fine study as a reasonable man unimpressed with the grander ambitions of Enlightenment rationalism. He had no truck with Burke’s regret for the lost aristocracy, and indeed became skeptical of what Tocqueville identified as a new aristocracy that had embedded itself into the modern state and entertained too-high esteem for its administrative expertise. His challenge to conservatives was to show how a dismantling of the contemporary American state would not severely disrupt civil society in its very attempt to revive it. His challenge to liberal progressives and conservatives alike was to point out, as Weiner phrases it, that moralizing—if “untethered to experience”—”may be especially prone to abuse.” For Moynihan, morality appears to have derived from Catholic principles which (he would have ben the first to say) are not everyone’s principles. But the core (as it were Noachide) moral principles shared by most Americans and indeed most people wherever they are, provide firm guidance, if our minds remain open to the lessons of experience.