United States v. Carolene Products 304 U. S. 144 (1938).

Originally published by Constituting America, June 2, 2017. Republished with permission.

 

If you concede the constitutionality of the administrative state, where does that leave citizens’ liberties? That is, if you claim (some might say pretend) the United States Constitution authorizes unelected, tenured officials the power to frame, enforce, and adjudicate laws you grant a privilege that looks very much like the abrogation of the Constitution’s separation of powers, brushing aside Thomas Jefferson’s maxim that the accumulation of these powers in one set of hands is the definition of tyranny. Under these circumstances, how will citizens’ liberties be protected? Who will do it? This is the question addressed in the Carolene Products case—specifically, in the fourth footnote to the majority opinion, written by Justice Harlan Stone. It has been described as the most famous footnote in the history of the Court.

The decision makes no sense, however, without an understanding of the political climate in which it came about. After the 1929 stock market crash, the Great Depression caused an unprecedented economic and political crisis in the United States and around the world. What made the Great Depression ‘great’ was its sheer extent and duration. Americans had seen bank ‘panics’ and economic downturns before. But these events hadn’t lasted long, and the men who were thrown out of work as a result of them received relief from local governments, charities, and family members. The scale of the Great Depression overwhelmed these local supports.

To the astute politician, crisis means opportunity, and there was no more astute politician in the country than New York’s Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic Party nominee opposing beleaguered President Herbert Hoover in the 1932 election. Speaking to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, Roosevelt delivered the rhetorical masterstroke of the campaign. “The day of enlightened administration has come,” he announced. His cousin Theodore had tried to meet the problem of overbearing financial and industrial power by busting the trusts, FDR said, but that didn’t work. A steadier means of control was needed. In justifying his proposed new regime of “enlightened administration,” he slyly distorted the Declaration of Independence, saying, “The Declaration of Independence discusses the problem of Government in terms of a contract. Government is a relation of give and take, if we would follow the thinking out of which it grew. Under such a contract rulers were accorded power and the people consented to that power on consideration that they be accorded certain rights. The test of statesmanship has always been the redefinition of those rights in terms of a changing and growing social order.”

Notice that FDR makes no mention of the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God endowing certain unalienable rights to all men, who are created equal with respect to these rights. FDR defines rights as purely civil, arising from human agreement—consent formalized in a contract or written constitution. Government no longer secures rights we already have, as human beings; rights are “accorded” to us, by, well, ourselves by means of a contract between rulers and ruled. This implies that there is one class, the rulers, and another class, the rest of us, instead of one sovereign people, under God.

As one might suspect, Roosevelt had someone, and something, very specific in mind when it came to a statesman who would redefine Americans’ right “in terms of” social change. Given the Depression, “We must restrict the operations of the speculator, the manipulator, even the financier. I believe we must accept the restriction as needful, not to hamper individualism but to protect it.” As it happened, Herbert Hoover had published a book in 1923 title American Individualism, a statement of the ‘old individualism founded on equal, unalienable rights and the Constitutional rights which secured the property which enables us to secure our lives, fortunes, and happiness. But when “private initiative has failed,” Roosevelt now replied, the federal government should “assume the function of economic regulation as a last resort.” In his 1933 Inaugural Address, the triumphant new president called upon Congress to grant him executive powers “similar to those necessary in time of war.” With such executive powers in hand, power exercised by an administrative state lodged within the executive branch and staffed initially by Roosevelt appointees, who would enjoy lifetime tenure, the American republic could truly be said to have changed from the commercial and democratic republic of the Founders to what Aristotle and Cicero would have recognized as a ‘mixed’ regime, consisting of an elected, bicameral legislature but also an increasingly kinglike presidency and an obviously ‘aristocratic’ administrative apparatus, soon to be called a ‘meritocracy.’ Throughout his four terms in office, Roosevelt often cast his revolution as ‘conservative’—an effort to preserve individual rights, capitalism, and constitutionalism under conditions of crisis in an industrialized society which had left the agrarian way of life Jefferson loved far behind. This of course assumed that the existing regime and its constitution could not have sustained American rights.

FDR had cooperation from New-Deal Democrats in Congress, elected with him in the 1932 landslide. The centerpiece of the New Deal legislative agendum was the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which gave the President the power he’d requested to fight the economic ‘war.’ Not only did this cede legislative power to the presidency and ‘his’ bureaucracy, it also gave corporations and trade associations substantial influence over the regulations enacted by the National Recovery Administration, even as it left the enforcement of those regulations to the federal government. Although President Hoover had experimented with a much weaker version of this arrangement, the NIRA initiated the extensive collaboration among presidents, federal administrative agencies, major corporations, and labor unions seen to this day.

But not without initial resistance from the Supreme Court, which ruled the NIRA unconstitutional on the grounds that executive power must not expand by legislative-branch delegation of lawmaking power to presidents or administrative boards. To FDR’s dismay, even the progressive-liberal justices Benjamin Cardozo, Louis Brandeis, and Harlan F. Stone concurred. In prefaces to the several volumes of his collected papers, published a few years later, Roosevelt told his side of the story. “Commencing in 1935, and running down to the election of 1936, there came a line of decisions from the Supreme Court (and from the lower Federal Courts) which so limited the powers of the Federal Government and the powers of the State Governments to obtain the legitimate objectives for which the people voted at the polls in 1932 and 1934, that all real progress toward those objectives began to appear impossible.” “Legitimate” means “lawful,” but of course that was the point in question. Since the Supreme Court says what the law is, Roosevelt moved to change the Court in order to change how it defined the supreme law of the land. In this, he and his fellow-Democrats were quick to decry “government by judiciary,” and a Depression-weary electorate responded by returning Roosevelt and his allies to power in 1936 in an even bigger landslide than the one which had brought them into office four years earlier.

Thus fortified, in his 1937 Message to Congress Roosevelt pounced. “The vital need is not an alteration of our fundamental law”—Constitutional amendment might be time-consuming and politically risky—”but an increasingly enlightened view with reference to it”—that is, “a liberal interpretation” or “broad interpretation” of the law itself. Or, as he put it rather more boldly in the 1941 preface to the sixth volume of his collected papers, “For two decades [that is, beginning in the second term of the
Wilson Administration] the Supreme Court of the United States had been successfully thwarting the common will of the overwhelming majority of the American people; and had been diverting the functions and philosophy of government into channels which run counter to the thought of progressive opinion throughout the modern civilized world,” laying its “dead hand” on the “whole program of progress,” and indeed acting like a “super-legislature.” To fight back on behalf of American public opinion and progressive world opinion, FDR proposed his soon-to-be-notorious ‘Court-packing’ plan, which would have empowered the president to appoint an additional Justice (up to six) for every member of the Court aged 70 or older. This would have given him the new appointments he needed to uphold New Deal legislation. Comparing the three branches of the federal government to a three-horse team, one of which stubbornly pulled in the wrong direction, he took his case to the people in a March 1937 Fireside Chat.

He lost. Having waved away the Founders’ idea that the separation of powers presupposes not a team of horses all going in the same direction, but a system of checks and balances designed to moderate the actions of any one branch, or any two branches acting in coordination, FDR didn’t anticipate how sharply even an economically beleaguered American public might turn against a president who, effectively having acquired substantial legislative powers from a docile Congress, also proposed to take control of the judicial branch. Constituent mail to Congress ran 8-1 against the proposal, and even many of the old Progressives, allies of Wilson from two decades back, deserted him on this one. In desperation, Roosevelt struck a deal with John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers, obtaining his support for Court-packing legislation in exchange for an agreement to tolerate strikers who illegally occupied the property of mine owners against whom they were striking. Even this support wasn’t enough; the legislation failed to pass Congress.

But, as it happened, it was enough, substantially if not formally. A few weeks after the Fireside Chat, the Court upheld a Washington State minimum wage law in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish. Decisions sustaining the National Labor Relations Act followed. New Dealers happily recalled a turn-of-the-century quip by the Irish-American humorist Peter Finley Dunne, who’d written, “The Supreme Court follows the election returns.” Even more famously, they alleged, “A switch in time saves nine,” although the Court-packing plan had hurt them more than it had helped in the ‘court’ of public opinion. For himself, several years later FDR exulted, “The Court began interpreting the Constitution instead of torturing it.” Unless they had changed their tune “there is grave doubt whether [our democracy] could have survived the crisis which was bearing down upon it from within, to say nothing of the present [1941] threat from abroad.” Whereas freedom of contract’s “old unrealistic meaning” had stifled New Deal progressivism, its new and supposedly realistic meaning was that “liberty in a social organization which requires the protection of law against the evils which menace the health, safety, morale, and welfare of the people.”

The Court had legitimated presidential and administrative lawmaking over the head of Congress, a legitimacy earlier granted by Congress itself. From now on, the United States had what amounted to a new regime.

Having tacitly conceded its power to pronounce on the constitutionality of a substantial swath of cases—those relating to contracts and other property rights—the Court needed to find a new role for itself. What would it do in the new (indeed New-Deal) administrative state? The answer came in 1938 with its decision in United States v. Carolene Products. A 1923 federal law had banned “filled milk”—a substance consisting of skimmed milk thickened with vegetable oil to make it seem like whole milk or cream. The Filled Milk Act of 1923 had been enacted at the behest of dairy farmers who objected to prices for their product being undercut with a cheaper and, as they claimed, adulterated product. Carolene Products, a producer of filled milk, sued the federal government, charging that Congress had gone beyond the power of the interstate commerce clause in regulating the content of an item sold commercially, rather than regulating the processes of commerce itself.

The Court ruled that the interstate commerce clause should be interpreted broadly, allowing federal regulation of interstate commerce so long as there was a “rational basis” for such law—for example, the protection of the public health. Up to then, public health issues had been the province of the state governments, their powers in this area taken to be covered by the Tenth Amendment. No longer.

But more significantly, in the fourth footnote to the opinion, Justice Stone served notice that the clauses in the Constitution which entailed “a specific prohibition” against government interference—as for example the First Amendment’s stipulation that Congress shall make no law restricting freedom of speech or religion—would be protected by the Court. This protection would extend to the protection of “discrete and insular minorities”—religious, national, or racial—against any law which “tends seriously to curtail the political processes ordinarily to be relied upon to protect minorities.”

The Court thus ceded very broad powers over property to the president, the administrative state, and the Congress via a “broad” or “liberal” interpretation of the interstate commerce clause, as FDR had urged. It reserved for itself cases in which this much more powerful and centralized state might infringe on the political and civil rights of the citizens it ruled and more, over the populations within each state in the American federation. The Court would thus carved out a way in which it could continue to exercise some check-and-balance power against the executive branch and its much more massive administrative arm while also participating fully in that newly-empowered federal government. In decades to come, especially after the Second World War (which saw a serious breach of the civil rights of Japanese Americans upheld by the Court), civil rights cases increasingly preoccupied the justices, as they attempted to protect those rights against encroachment by the large and ever-expanding New-Deal state. At the same time, the Court availed itself of the power FDR had himself urged upon it—the power to interpret the Constitution broadly—to each states’ powers regarding civil rights, consumer protection, and a plethora of matters not directly involving property rights. The third horse of the governmental team now (usually) pulled in tandem with its partners in the direction of what the Founders would have regarded as an oxymoron or contradiction in terms: liberal statism. When FDR and a compliant Congress established it, eventually with Supreme Court approval, administrative offices were packed with officers sympathetic with that president and that Congress. There was a firm connection between popular opinion and those who ran the agencies. As years and then decades passed, however, the tenured ‘civil servants’ inevitably became somewhat detached from elective officeholders. The top administrators are appointed by the president, and Congress exercises its ‘oversight,’ but the ‘wartime’ atmosphere of the 1930s and 1940s receded long ago, despite the attempts of subsequent presidents to gin it up again by declaring ‘wars’ on poverty, disease, addictive drugs, terrorism, and a variety of other ills. The oligarchy survives and thrives.

James L. Nolan, Jr.: What They Saw in America: Alexis de Tocqueville, Max Weber, G. K. Chesterton, and Sayyid Qutb. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 54, Number 2, March/April 2017. Republished with permission.

 

To achieve a degree of self-knowledge, as individuals, families, or nations, we find it helpful to ‘see ourselves as others see us.’ As a student of comparative sociology, James L. Nolan brings together a French liberal who retained a profound appreciation for Christianity and especially Catholic Christianity; a German sociologist fascinated by the interplay of Protestant Christianity and capitalism in particular, and by secularization generally; an English Catholic journalist and man of letters; and a fundamentalist Muslim now regarded as a founder of ‘Islamism,’ the form of Islam which attempts to adapt the Prophet Muhammad’s politics of tribe and empire to the modern world of nation-states. The diverse writers in question all shared the experience of having visited the United States. Although he conveys the uniqueness of each man’s insights, Nolan most wants to identify American characteristics noticed by all four writers. In part that’s the sociologist in him; in part it bespeaks his moral-political intention of improving American self-knowledge and our capacity to “more fully empathize with the values of other cultures.” Given the current tensions between the United States and certain Muslim regimes and would-be regimes, he seeks parallels between the observations of the earlier writers and Qutb, the only one who visited America after the Second World War—that is to say, after the United States became ‘first among equals’ of the powers of the earth.

Nolan approaches his writers through both their writings and their lives, following C. Wright Mills’s assertion “that the essence of the sociological imagination is recognizing the interplay between biography, history, and society.” The advantage to this approach consists of its lively sense of what’s now called ‘context’: These writers visited particular places in America at particular times, bringing their own preoccupations with them. The disadvantage is that it almost necessarily scants the nuances of the arguments presented in their books. This is especially true of a really great work, like Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which, with its two volumes of densely-packed exposition and interpretation, each the length of a good-sized book, requires close attention for a long time. Also, the moral-sociological imperative to find common grounds among such distinctive writers runs the risk of downplaying the very differences among them that might vitiate empathy. After all, if we are simply looking at four sets of values different from ours, why should we empathize? And if we are seeking to empathize, how can we overlook the sharp differences not only between each of them and us but among the writers themselves?

An example of the not-so-close reading that Nolan’s approach almost necessarily entails comes early in his discussion of Tocqueville. He remarks the interest of the young Frenchman and his friend and traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, in “America’s experiment with democracy, a political system they viewed as inevitable, in some form, to Europe’s future.” But “democracy” for Tocqueville isn’t a regime or political system, except in the small, New England townships; it is a form of society that has no aristocratic class. America’s political system is republican. Democracy or (rough) social equality can as easily support despotism, as Tocqueville’s own France had so bloodily proved. Nolan himself quite rightly mentions that Tocqueville’s journey “can be characterized as a sociological project of the most exemplary importance,” and that “the two young Frenchmen were sociologists before their day”—meaning sociology as a distinct field of study which was founded later in their century. He points to Tocqueville’s “notable sense of wonder, discovery, and adventure” in America, a quality (it might be added) shared by Weber and Chesterton but not so much by Qutb.

Tocqueville argues that the democratic character of America results in what might be described as a sort of vulgar greatness. American religiosity, American self-government, and the sheer scope of the American territory lend themselves to the greatness; commerce and what Tocqueville calls “fatuous national pride” (latterly called ‘exceptionalism’) contribute to the vulgarity. Nolan also highlights Americans’ “imperialistic inclinations,” although Tocqueville himself is more precise. He had no quarrel with imperialism as such; he defended the French empire in Algeria, while criticizing the way the French ran it. He rather criticized the pace of American expansion and its attendant “spirit of conquest, and even plunder.” He worried not so much that America was building an empire but that it was building it too rapidly to assimilate thoroughly its vast territories into what Jefferson had called an empire of liberty—an empire in which every new state was populated by genuinely self-governing citizens, men and women worthy of the equal status guaranteed under the Constitution. A good empire needs a mission civilisatrice, but Americans were becoming increasingly uncivil—animated by a sort of spirit that might lead to the supreme incivility of civil war.

This is not to say that Tocqueville viewed the Indians uncritically. Nolan correctly cites both Tocqueville’s uneasiness with the degraded condition of Indians around Buffalo, New York—they had “a penchant for alcohol abuse and had largely been reduced to begging”—and his respect for the Indians he met in Michigan, whom he and Beaumont found to be honest traders and not at all to be calumniated as ‘savages.’ But he overlooks Tocqueville’s underlying concern: Even the noble non-savages of Michigan reminded him of European aristocrats. They disdained work. They derided the white farmer for being little better than the ox behind which he plodded. But this was why aristocrats as a class were finished, whether in the salons of Paris or the woods of Saginaw. Democracy brings human nature to the surface, ruinously undermining the magnificent artifices of aristocracy. Democracy in America exhibits nature’s revenge; driven out by the aristocratic pitchfork, it has returned.

Nolan is very good on Tocqueville’s account of religion in America. Ministers there are entrepreneurs, like all non-slaveholding men. They are commercially-minded, restless and unrooted. He makes Tocqueville a bit one-dimensional on this, however. Tocqueville observes the tendency of Americans to explain their moral actions in terms of personal advantage, all right, but he doesn’t quite believe them, having seen Americans who mad genuine sacrifices for no personal gain at all. Some Americans are better than they say they are, and American ministers could still call their flocks to bridle their self-interest, rightly or wrongly understood. It was crucially important for Tocqueville to have seen this; otherwise, his analysis simply could not have accounted for the ‘crisis of the house divided,’ which he lived to see, if not to see its conclusion.

Although he misses the aristocratic character of the Indians, Nolan readily notices Tocqueville’s critiques of democratic America’s other two aristocracies. The older of them, the Southern plantation class, yields economic weakness, as seen in the contrast Tocqueville draws between the free state of Ohio and the slave state, Kentucky—prosperity on one side of the river, poverty and somnolence on the other. The newer aristocracy, the class of industrial oligarchs, in some respects worried Tocqueville more because they worked for a living, although not with their hands. This was the kind of aristocracy that could issue from democracy, and therefore might prove fatal to it. Another aristocracy, the administrators of the centralized state, were not in Tocqueville’s America; he would write extensively about them years later in The Old Regime and the Revolution. Tocqueville does describe the “soft despotism” of such a state, but Nolan does not make much of that dimension of his argument.

Max Weber, Nolan’s second foreign observer of America, knew all about the administrative state, sharing some of Tocqueville’s qualms about it in his anticipation of a world populated by specialists without spirit and sensualists without heart. Weber is also the one true sociologist among the four writers here, and Nolan seems intellectually very much at home with him.

Weber’s introduction to America came from Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, given him by a well-meaning uncle at the age of eleven. The book got the boy interested in American history, and his brief lecture tour in the America of 1904 brought a fascinated visitor to the now-industrialized world power. Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism “very much with America in mind,” originally publishing it as a pair of articles which appeared within a year of his return to Germany. Nolan brings out the connection Weber makes not only between Protestantism and capitalism but between both of those things and the German aristocracy. A dozen years earlier, Weber had begun a comparative study of peasants in the Rhine Valley and those living east of the Elbe River. The Catholic Rhinelanders “were thriving as independent farmers supplying goods to local urban centers.” They had no reason to move away. But in East Elbe, the “Junker lords,” under economic pressure from capitalism, had begun to organize their farms along “commercial principles.” The old estate system, which combined aristocratic authority with a degree of peasant independence and ownership, was replaced by the more impersonal principles of production and profit; now treated as wage laborers, their communal ties to the estates and the aristocracy severed, the peasants of that region were leaving for the German cities or for the New World. The Junkers hired Catholic peasants from Poland to farm the estates. Here, Protestant peasants, “with longings for more freedom and aspirations to pursue a higher cultured life therefore departed the region, while Catholic Polish peasants were content to live in small villages and farm land viewed by others as undesirable.”

Weber traced the differences between Protestant and Catholic peasants to first principles. Whereas the Puritan Richard Baxter interpreted St. Paul’s warning, “He who will not work shall not eat” as an indication that those who refuse to work lack divine grace, Thomas Aquinas understood it in a more down-to-earth sense: Those who won’t work don’t support  their community, and therefore are not entitled to the support of their community. The Puritan/Protestant association of work with grace spurred Protestants to prove that they were real Christians by working. In America, he saw, Catholic and Lutheran farmers “resisted capitalistic tendencies in agriculture,” whereas Protestants in the Calvinist line embodied such tendencies. Tocqueville would have added that democratization meant that emigrants to America didn’t need to worry about an aristocratic ruling class on the land, thus further encouraging property ownership among the predominantly Calvinist/Protestant settlers in the northern colonies. While Weber attends to the principles of production and economy (“Capitalism asks: How can I produce as many crops as possible for the markets from this given soil with as few men as possible?”), a sociologist armed with Tocqueville’s insistence on the importance of democracy would have added that capitalists also ask: How can I produce crops people actually want to buy?

Weber’s treatment of the American Indians was similarly economistic. In Oklahoma he met with Cherokee leader Robert Latham Owen, who later became a United States Senator, learning that the Indians had objected to American property law, which would replace the traditional “agrarian communism” practiced by their nations when the Indian Territory formally joined the United States a few years after Weber’s visit. Weber was reminded of the German peasants of East Elbe. Weber “thus observed the final chapter of a process that began at the time of Tocqueville’s visit,” and although he didn’t see the political-aristocratic (as distinguished from the economic-communitarian) dimension of the Indians’ way of life, he did see that “The next time I come here, the last remnant of ‘romanticism’ will be gone” from Oklahoma.

Nolan usefully relates Weber’s critique of the German ‘race theorist’ Alfred Ploetz with Tocqueville’s critique of Arthur de Gobineau’s similar notions. Weber had met W. E. B. DuBois in St. Louis, and that alone was enough to disabuse him of the supposition that persons of African heritage were innately inferior intellectually to Europeans. He concluded that “antipathy between races had nothing to do with anthropological differences, but rather were culturally and historically determined.”

Historical determinism entered into Weber’s thought in a manner quite un-Tocquevillian. Tocqueville understood social egalitarianism as a manifestation of human nature. Weber regarded the secularization of Christian and particularly Protestant religiosity as historically inevitable. In Weber’s opinion, Benjamin Franklin necessarily follows from Jonathan Edwards, as the Puritan understanding of work as a manifestation of grace led to a sort of asceticism of accumulation—denying oneself the material benefits of the stuff one accumulates by hard work, investing that stuff in one’s business, literally in one’s busy-ness—and gradually transferring all of one’s time and attention toward work and away from prayer. Paradoxically, this process reduced human freedom as the desire to exhibit one’s ‘gracefulness’ gave way to the “iron cage” confining workers and capitalists alike, both trapped in the ‘need’ to be busier and busier, more and more productive.

Weber saw how this played out in the life of the mind. Nolan remarks that Tocqueville “did not visit a single college” in America, but Weber did—partly because there were actual universities in America by 1904; there was more to see. American universities mostly began as colleges training young men for the pulpit and the bar, but they were now “going through a process of secularization” in parallel with the rest of American society. Weber ascribed this change not only to socio-economic processes but to the influx of German immigrants to America. Not only had German scholars accelerated the “utilitarian turn” of American intellectuals away from Christianity; they had begun to turn the universities toward “religious indifference”—an indifference seen, for example, in the historical school of Biblical exegesis that had taken root in the German universities several generations earlier. Nonetheless, American universities still resisted German models in one important respect. While German students “craved a leader who would give them a Weltanschauung, rather than a teacher who would dispassionately pass along knowledge,” American students thought of their professors as men who sell knowledge and methods “just as the greengrocer sells my mother cabbage.” Even the by-then-entrenched love of sports served “a rational purpose,” namely, the development of “physical efficiency,” even as capitalism required productive efficiency in its workers.

Nolan points to Weber’s increased disapproval of American in his last years, seen in his 1918 Heidelberg lecture with the Tocquevillian title, “Democracy and Aristocracy in American Life.” By the end of the Great War he had become more alert to the existence of a burgeoning American oligarchy. In addition to scoring the persistence of racial bias in America and its consequent serious dilution of democracy there, he also criticized the “highly peculiar combination of fundamental religious ideology with a mercantilist business economy,” a combination yielding “a new aristocracy.” (He would have been thinking of the religiously observant, philanthropic corporation men, Andrew Carnegie in the lead.) In this, he bore witness to features of American life already seen by Tocqueville. But, obviously registering antagonisms generated by the war, Weber went on to complain that the American soldier “doesn’t even know for what he is dying,” whereas the “majestic” vision of the “German warrior” partakes of the “destiny of history”—a sense of which Americans sadly lack. It is hard to resist the suspicion that Calvinist predestinarianism had found its way—in, as Weber would put it, secularized form—into German thought generally and Weber’s thought in particular. He never wrote a book titled The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Historicism.

Nolan’s third observer, G. K. Chesterton, had little use for the ponderosities of Germany theory. He made two visits to America: three months in 1921 and six months in 1930-31., writing What I Saw in America at the beginning of the Jazz Age and Sidelights on New London and Newer York in 1932. Combining a journalist’s eye, a profoundly Catholic sensibility, and a ready with expressed in writing that seems incapable of producing a dull sentence, Chesterton never attempted the systematic treatment of American themes that Tocqueville and Weber bring off but he’s a lot more fun than they are and most assuredly no less intelligent. He was also the only one of Nolan’s four visitors who was famous when he arrived, providing his readers with a few glimpses of the ‘celebrity’ obsessions that were beginning to characterize American democracy, wherein mass markets and mass publicity now intersected.

While Nolan notices Chesterton’s Catholicism (it would be hard to miss), he does not appreciate how pervasive it is in his thought, how all of his observations and animadversions relate to it. From his anti-imperialism to his agrarianism to his detestation of Prohibition, Chesterton defends the Church with unshakable fidelity and brio. “Your country began with the Declaration of Independence and ends with prohibition,” he told an interviewer with the New York Times. Unlike Tocqueville or Weber, Chesterton grounds his understanding of America squarely on the Declaration, which he approvingly describes as a creed. It is a catholic if not Catholic creed, and for Chesterton that’s close enough for government work; he vigorously points to the passages on the origin of unalienable human rights in the Creator. Prohibition of alcoholic drinks violates the natural right of liberty, and additionally reflects the creedal errors of Calvinism, a doctrine he flatly calls “a mistake.” He also regards this prohibition as an instrument of capitalism, whereby the upper classes (who cheerfully ignore the law, as did Chesterton when in their company) attempt to keep industrial workers sober enough to show up for their hours of factory labor.

Industrial capitalism warrants a much less merry scorn. Then as now, the Church rejected it, preferring the cooperation of labor and capital under the rubric of ‘corporatism.’ Chesterton himself, along with other prominent English Catholics including Hilaire Belloc, advocated “distributivism,” whereby private property would remain but would be redistributed so that no large concentrations of it would develop. The distributivists tied this proposal to agrarianism, which Chesterton in turn tied back to the yeoman farmer beloved of the author of America’s Declaration of Independence. He deplored the overpraised novels of Sinclair Lewis, particularly Main Street, for ridiculing the small-town ethos that served to counterbalance industrial urbanization. As Nolan puts it, “The small agrarian town, characterized by personal relationships of cooperation and service, fostered a sort of democratic order that Chesterton idealized.” In that America, Chesterton wrote, “it is as if people took for granted that they were really created equal”—living out Jefferson’s creed in Jefferson’s way.

Comfortable with Americans’ generosity, courage, hospitality, and friendliness, Chesterton did set his teeth at their “hustle and uplift”; Nolan perceptively associates this with Tocqueville’s earlier observation of American “restlessness.” This “passionate worship of energy for its own sake” seemed to Chesterton the “chief fault of the American people.” Self-promotion, advertising: Chesterton quipped when viewing the lights of Broadway at night that all this would seem a perfect wonder to someone who could not read. “The clamor of the multitude,” the unfettered reign of popular opinion also remarked by Tocqueville contrasted unpleasantly with the meditative calm esteemed by a spirit formed in the Church. Like Weber, Chesterton blamed capitalism not democracy for this, and in his analysis Tocqueville strikes me (but not Nolan) as the more thoughtful of the three men, democracy having preceded industrial capitalism in America.

Chesterton’s ardent anti-imperialism (he sided with the Irish, the Boers, the Indians, and after-the-fact with the Americans against the English) and also his anti-internationalism dovetailed perfectly with his Catholicism. He regarded H. G. Well’s notion of a “United States of the World” as a monstrous conception—an “aristocracy of globetrotters,” a ‘Davoisie’ avant la lettre. Both imperialism and internationalism inclined to wipe out nations, but genuine democracy requires popular government, and that can only be “founded on local knowledge.” It has been the genius of Catholic Christianity to frame an international organization that adapts itself to local customs, while avoiding tyranny by respecting the doctrine of powers spiritual held distinct from powers temporal. The modern state, especially the imperial modern state, arose against the Church, and not seldom as a carapace protecting such things as Lutheranism and Calvinism. An international super-state would prove even more malignant. Both aim as fusing spirituality of a sort (calling itself ‘pragmatic,’ ‘scientific’) with temporal power. What Chesterton wanted was a world of nations with small, limited governments. Nolan quotes a representative passage: “So far as… democracy becomes or remains Catholic and Christian, that democracy will remain democratic. In so far as it does not, it will become wildly and wickedly undemocratic”—prey for tyrants as unrestrained by the fear of God as their hapless subjects will need to become in order to submit to them. Chesterton sees and applauds the end of the old aristocracies—no partisan of the ‘Old Regime,’ he—perhaps because he sees that the aristocracy too often inclined to infidelism, in contrast to the steadfast peasantry.

The last of Nolan’s travelers, Sayyid Qutb, equally preferred religiosity to modern statism and secularism. He stayed in America the longest, disliked it the most, and although officially here as an employee of the Egyptian Ministry of Education, came to it with the least curiosity, finding little of value in the country or its people except technical-scientific virtuosity and a magnificent natural beauty (he spent much of his time in Colorado) unappreciated by Americans themselves, preoccupied as they were alternatively by commerce and debauchery.

Although Qutb had begun his career as a secularized literary scholar and poet, he had long resented European imperialism in the Middle East. The Truman Administration’s recognition of Israel after the Second World War turned him against America, too, and he had already begun to move back to the Islamic convictions of his home village. The Egyptian regime of King Farouk (no stranger to debauchery, himself) had sent Qutb to America “with the hope that time in the United States would moderate his hostile attitude toward the West. It did just the opposite.” Nolan does not appreciate the vehemence of Qutb’s hatred of Jews, giving the impression that he was merely an anti-Zionist. But given the character of international politics in the 1940s, separating anti-Zionism from anti-Judaism would have been difficult to do, especially since a substantial number of Muslims in the Middle East rather sympathized with Hitler’s attack on, first, liberal democracies, second, Jews, and third, the British and French empires which ruled much of the region under the League of Nations mandate system. And Qutb did write a virulently anti-Jewish tract, “Our Struggle with the Jews,” published in the 1950s, which does not appear in Nolan’s bibliography. Nolan does observe that Qutb wrote his first Islamist book in 1948, before he left for the United States.

Nolan identifies two main Islamist concepts Qutb enunciated at this time: jahiliyya or ignorance and jihad or struggle. The Koranic term jahiliyya initially “referred to the barbaric condition of Arabs in the early seventh century prior to the mission of the Prophet Muhammad.” Qutb charged the modern West and also apostate, secularized Muslims with such ignorant barbarism. Among apostate Muslims such ignorance led to servility, an aping of Western secularist vulgarity that left them passive slaves of Western imperialism. Jihad consists of true belief (jihad of the heart), correct doctrine and teaching (jihad of the tongue), social service (jihad of the hand), and finally “militant combat” (jihad of the sword). Jihad of the sword did not include attacks on civilians, terrorism, but did include insurgency and of course war against Israel.

Like Tocqueville and Chesterton before him, Qutb found American and particularly New York restlessness rather jarring. More, “the agitated, confused herd… knew no purpose except for money and pleasure,” and gave itself no time for “spiritual longings” or “poetic feelings.” Unlike Tocqueville or Chesterton, Qutb never betrayed the slightest hint of a sense of humor at any of this, railing that “America is the biggest lie known to the world.” “All moral values are subject of ridicule for Americans,” he averred. Eventually, the country would succumb to communism, he prophesied.

In a courageous attempt at empathy, Nolan quickly swoops in to remind his readers that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also delivered himself of some sharp criticisms of “the decadence and materialism of the West” in his 1978 Harvard University commencement speech. Nolan does allow that the Catholic Christian Chesterton and the Orthodox Christian Solzhenitsyn “no doubt would not agree with Qutb that Islam was the proper remedy,” a judgment with which all his readers and theirs will likely concur. Like all Nolan’s travelers, Qutb deplored the racism he saw in America, finding it un-Islamic. But he also described jazz as “the music the negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other”—a sentiment not entirely free of racial bias, Nolan observes.

Qutb blamed Western ignorance and barbarism on the Western Christian ‘privatization’ of religion. As a Muslim accustomed to a religion that is also a comprehensive legal code, he found in the distinction between temporal and eternal, especially in its modern ‘liberal’ variant, the separation of Church and State, a dehumanizing schizophrenia that must be halted and reversed. It would be, he wrote, “a disaster for humanity if the world became America.”

Nolan concludes with a summary, listing seven criticisms of America shared by his four visitors. They found America to be violent, racist, materialistic, exploitive of its land, individualistic yet conformist, secularist, and imperialist. Except for Qutb, they praised Americans’ habit of voluntary civic association; Qutb noticed this habit but condemned its manifestation in the form of such sexualized affronts to decent sensibilities as school dances and church socials. Nolan offers, “The fact that his analysis of America lines up in certain respects with assessments made by other Westerners, including those considered in this study, suggests that perhaps he is pointing to certain truths—however entangled with exaggeration and vitriol they may be—that, in Tocqueville’s words, only a foreigner can make reach the ears of Americans.”

I think rather the opposite. Each one of these travelers wrote primarily for his fellow countrymen and also (in the cases of Chesterton and Qutb) for his fellow religionists. Tocqueville and Chesterton sought, first of all, to teach the French and the English about Americans and also themselves. Tocqueville’s book focuses primarily not on America at all, but on democracy, the social form of which America happened to be the purest example. Weber in his later years and Qutb from the beginning reinforced unfavorable judgments many among their peoples had already made. As for Americans, their own writers have served up ample supplies of ‘critique’ very much along the lines we see here. I guess that Americans, like all peoples, are more likely to sit still for criticisms that come from ‘their own’ than those that come from foreigners. (That ‘entrepeneurial’ preacher, Billy Graham, probably pulled more Americans away from their vices than all foreign critics combined.)

What remains interesting about these four travelers, Tocqueville more than any, is their description and analysis of democratic modernity in America. But pointing us to their writings, Nolan provides an excellent encouragement to join them in that study.