Why have ‘states’ in the Union, anyway? True, the colonies predated the United States, the colonies became states, the states formed the Articles of Confederation, and ratification of the United States Constitution proceeded on a state-by-state basis. But many municipalities preceded the states; some existed before the British wrested control of them from the French. Yet courts in most states regard all or many of the municipalities to be creatures of the state for legal purposes, even if historians beg to differ. Why not treat states the same way, considering their relation to the national government analogous to the municipalities’ relation to them? Whatever practical barriers to this there may be, what is wrong with it in principle? After all, many countries around the world have commercial-republic regimes while nonetheless treating the provinces as, well, provincial. Why shouldn’t we do the same?

If the distinctive human characteristic is the ability to speak and to reason, then what is good for such a being must not only allow but encourage it to exercise that ability, just as it must be good for a horse to have room to run. To live in societies ruled by tyrants terrorizing their subjects with brute force must be bad for human beings, somehow beneath their real nature—hence the adjective ‘brute.’ By nature, human beings belong in civil societies, societies in which they may speak and reason together, deliberate with one another on what they should do, how they should act. Old-fashioned mothers would tell unruly children to ‘be civil,’ to ‘keep a civil tongue in your head.’ A civil tongue is one indirectly but closely attached to a reasoning brain, a brain more fully developed in accordance with its nature than the brain of a madman or a dolt, to say nothing of a barking pit bull or a chorusing frog.

Civil society begins in the home. Parents command children, ‘for their own good.’ But father and mother themselves properly form a civil partnership, ruling one another by mutual consent, sharing responsibilities, authority, and obligations. Outside the home, what we call civil associations work in somewhat the same way, as fellow citizens form businesses, churches, clubs, and schools. Families and civil associations alike govern themselves deliberately, reasonably—insofar as they are genuinely civil, institutions fitted for mature human beings. Children learn to do the same thing, choosing up sides for games, ‘ganging up’ (for better or for worse), imitating the adults (also for better or for worse). You learn to be civil in small groups.

The earliest political societies were small—outgrowths of extended families or clans which united with one another for convenience and protection, and generally for a better life than families alone could provide. The polis or city-state rules itself, perhaps as a democracy, more often as an oligarchy, sometimes as a monarchy. Whatever its regime, the city-state occupies a small territory and consists of a small population; in ancient Greece, such communities seldom consisted of more than 30,000 souls. Given this small size, political life mattered. There was nowhere to hide from whomever ruled; whether it was the one, the few, or the many, whether he or they were good or bad, the ruler(s) could and did reach out and in many respects determine your way of life. No adult could be indifferent to politics because everyone felt the effects of political rule.

City-states faced a serious, ultimately fatal threat. If children and adults like to ‘gang up,’ what is to prevent the most ambitious, if perhaps the less reasonable, among them from gathering together not merely to tyrannize the city-state but to conquer other city-states? If, say, a tyrant gains control of Macedonia, masters the nearby dity-states, and sets sail for Greece, what is to prevent him from conquering it? In the event, nothing, as Alexander the Great proved not only in Greece but throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, and beyond. As did many others: The Old Testament chronicles the empires of Egyptians, Ethiopians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians; the New Testament is full of Romans. A small people could retain its self-government among the empires only if God chose to protect it. It couldn’t go it alone.

What is more, small places foster political passions as much as they foster rational deliberation. If I care intensely about who rules me, because whoever that is he will make me feel his rule, I may gang up with others to make sure that we are the hammers, not the nails. In The Federalist, Publius remarks that small republics were often as short in their lives as they were violent in their deaths. When no ruined by foreign conquerors, they succumbed to suicide-by-faction. Although human beings may be rational by nature, they often fail to live up to their nature. “Why has government been instituted at all?” Publius asks. “Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.”

The problem only intensified in the modern world, the world of Machiavelli. As an official of the Italian city-state of Florence, Machiavelli became impatient with smallness, with petty states which squabbled with one another, incapable of extending their power beyond their own small territories, as the Romans had done. He conceived not so much of another empire but of lo stato, a governing body extending over the whole of the Italian nation. Lo stato might be governed by one or many, be a principality or a republic, but whichever regime it had, it would be able to extract substantial numbers of soldiers and impressive amounts of revenue from all parts of Italy. Even the larger nations of Europe—the French, the Turks—did not have lo stato; they were feudal societies, in which monarchs reigned but found themselves constrained by ‘the few,’ by titled aristocrats, by churches or mosques—by elites of various descriptions, all bent on aggrandizing themselves at the expense of the central government. Machiavelli recommended what we would now call a strategy of ‘state-building’—of bringing ‘the few’ to heel, extending the ruling apparatus of the central government into the provinces and subordinating those provinces to it. Once a few rulers took the advice he preserved in his books (he died powerless), once the Tudors in England and the Bourbons in France began to put an end to feudalism in their own countries, all European nations needed their own states, if they were to avoid conquest On that continent, the Hohenzollern-Bismarck-Prussian forging of the many small German states into one nation-state proved the most salient political and military fact of the nineteenth century, and the most ominous fact of the first half of the twentieth century. Without states of their own, European nations would have fallen under German rule, as Germans aimed at reconstituted a new and much more malevolent form of the Holy Roman Empire, no more holy or Roman than the original, but very much more imperial.

Having felt the pinch of rule within an empire by a would-be absolute monarchy wielding the powers of the modern state, Americans needed to solve two problems at once. Armed, they could depict themselves as a rattlesnake telling the world, “Don’t tread on me.” Disunited, severed into thirteen pieces, as depicted in an equally famous illustration of the period, they would die, prey to one or more of the surrounding empires. Americans needed a modern state to defend themselves against other modern states. Divided, they would be conquered, even as the American Indian nations and tribes had been, and would continue to be conquered, whenever they attempted to resist ‘modernity’ as practiced by the surging Americans.

At the same time, Americans had won their independence in resistance to tyranny, in resistance to an overbearing modern state that denied them their rights not only as Englishmen but as human beings. The natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness require self-government, including civil society. Civil or genuinely political life, the association of citizens who share rule with one another, requires small associations—families, towns, city-states. How can civil society exist in a large, centralized, modern state, the very thing needed for self-defense in a world dominated by such states—a ‘Eurocentric’ world in which men armed with the instruments of modern science, very much including the new, Machiavellian science of politics, of statism, was already extending its tentacles into every continent? Europeans ruled not only with gunpowder-propelling projectiles but with a new form of ruling organization, one sufficient to divide, conquer, and perhaps most crucially rule even  a vast empire like China, or a subcontinent of such staggering diversity as India.

Statism and self-government at the same time: That sounds very much like a circle never to be squared. The Framers found their answer in another institutional device: federalism.

Writing only a few decades before the American founding, Montesquieu had written, “If a republic is small, it is destroyed by a foreign force; if it is large, it is destroyed by an internal vice”—typically, corruption. What is needed is a “constitution that has all the internal advantages of republican government and the external force of a monarchy,” namely, the constitution of a “federal republic.” Each element of this republic should itself be commercial-republican—peaceful and moderate, not a military republic like ancient Rome, much less a military monarchy like that of Alexander the Great. Each element should have liberty, which “in no way consists in doing what one wants” but rather in having “the power to do what one should want to do and in no way being constrained to do what one should not want to do.” What one should want to do is to observe “the law of nature, which makes everything tend toward the preservation of species,” the “law of natural enlightenment, which wants us to do to others what we would want to have done to us,” and “the law that forms political societies,” which aims at the perpetuation of those societies. Certain moral virtues inhere in liberty itself. Republicanism consists of citizens who rule one another reciprocally, doing to one another as they would have done to themselves; federation enables republics to follow the political law of self-perpetuation.

If one were to draw a diagram representing the modern state, it might look like a wagon wheel: a solid border or rim; a central government or hub; strong but limited lines of control or spokes extending from the center to the border, reinforcing the border but emanating from the rim. But if civil society consisting of local associations and institutions exists in the spaces between the spokes, how can this state be republican, as association of self-governing citizens, not of mere subjects? A return to feudalism would solidify the spaces but reduce the importance of the hub.

Federalism solves the problem by retaining the integrity of both the central state and the constituent, smaller states. In the United States Constitution, the central government gains certain enumerated powers, including the power to raise revenues from within the territories of the states without the consent of the state legislatures and governors and the power to regulate interstate commerce. The states retain all powers not enumerated, although these powers must be limited by their character as republican regimes, in accordance with Article IV, section iv, the republican guarantee clause.

State governments were assured a voice in the councils of the central government by their power of electing two representatives each to the United States Senate. The peoples of those states had their voice in the House of Representatives, elected by popular vote within voting districts located within the boundaries of each state. Additionally, of course, the people also elected their representatives to the legislatures which chose the United States senators, making the entire system republican either directly or indirectly. Neither the state governments nor the central government exercise sovereignty over the people. To emphasize this point, James Monroe titled his book The People the Sovereigns.

To return to the image of the wheel, in a federal-republican country we see the powers of the central government as strong filaments running through the spokes, which are the constituent states of the federation. If one shifts the image from a wheel to the more dynamic example of a power grid, the power of the sovereign people run through the intertwined, mutually strengthening wires. One wire depicts the government of you state; the other depicts the government of your country as a whole—the central government. Both derive their energy from the same source, the people, united through the political union of their states, each itself a political union encompassing smaller ‘unions’ from families to civil associations to municipalities and counties.

The sovereign people in a republican regime will rule and be ruled, therefore more likely to do as they would be done by. Their way of life will be genuinely political, civic, fostering habits of mind and heart that incline toward civility because each citizen knows he needs the others and wants to do harm to none of them. At the same time, such a people will have the strength to defend themselves against other sovereign states and empires, far more centralized and far more ambitious for conquest.

For more than a century, the constitutional republicanism established by the Founders increasingly has given way to administrative government at the national, state, county, and even the local levels. As a result, Americans have needed to deliberate together less. The decline of civility in what remains of American political conversation may well originate in the decline of genuine civic life, genuine self-government, as part of the American way of life.

For one hundred years—roughly between the ratification of the United States Constitution and 1890—the “extended republic” James Madison described in The Federalist did indeed extend, from sea to shining sea. As American settlers populated each new swath of territory they sought and received recognition as states of the Union, equal to all states that preceded them, including the original thirteen. This great period of American empire-building far exceeded anything done subsequently (for example, the acquisition of territories from Spain in the late 1890s) and proved far more lasting than the ‘scramble for empire’ undertaken by the European states during that time. America became what Jefferson wanted it to be: an “empire of liberty,” that is, a union of free and equal states, with republican regimes securing the natural rights of all its citizens in principle and of most if not all in practice.

The question of the exact terms and conditions of American federalism, especially of the status of the states within it, was answered in principle by Publius and by George Washington in his Farewell Address. It was answered in principle and in practice by Andrew Jackson during the nullification crisis. It was answered most eloquently in principle and most forcefully in practice by Abraham Lincoln and the Union armies, respectively, in the Civil War. The pseudo-republican oligarchies of the states that formed the Confederacy were defeated, although they reconstituted themselves to a substantial degree, in different form, after Reconstruction ended. States’ rights could no longer serve as a carapace for slavery, although it would so serve for legal re-segregation for much of the next century. But the Union had survived.

The year 1890 saw another, less stark but still unsettling crisis. For the past century, the migration of Americans to the West had relieved the older states of the need to address the worst economic and social tensions modern industrial societies had faced. Now, however, the United States effectively had become an island, bordered by oceans on each side, the Caribbean in the south, and to some extent the Great Lakes in the north. It was a gigantic island, but an island nonetheless. With immigrants still coming in from Europe, with industrialism and urbanization intensifying in the east and Midwest, what would become of the country? Could the regime of commercial republicanism sustain itself against populist and socialist ideologue who sought to exploit these pressures? Could federalism withstand pressures to ‘nationalize’ everything—that is, bring it under the rule of the central government to the diminution of the state governments?

The historian Frederick Jackson Turner formulated perhaps the most high-level expression of this anxiety. In his 1893 paper presented to the American Historical Assocition’ annual meeting in Chicago, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner argued that it was the settlement of the frontier, fostering the character of Americans as independent, self-governing yeoman farmers, which had (to coin a phrase) made American great. Not so much Christianity, not the principles of the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution, and surely not any biologically-based racial superiority over the American Indians, but the frontier itself, the virtues the cultivators cultivated along with their crops, gave Americans the moral strength needed to make them a free and united people. With the closing of the frontier, the elimination of the conditions of this character-building way of life, would Americans not succumb to moral decline, and ultimately lose both their empire and their republicanism? The ‘Turner thesis,’ as it came to be called, galvanized academic and even journalistic discussion for decades thereafter.

Not only professors and pundits saw this problem. As it happened, an ambitious young politician named Theodore Roosevelt had published two volumes of his book The Winning of the West in the years immediately preceding the appearance of Turner’s study. The young civil service reformer from New York City, who had ‘gone West’ himself, to the Dakotas, after his beloved wife’s death in 1884, also argued for the importance of the frontier way of life in forming the American ethos. Roosevelt understood the West not so much as a land for peaceful if hard cattle ranching and farming but as an arena for warfare, pitting semi-civilized Americans against uncivilized Indians. The West built not only the steady, yeoman virtues of Jeffersonian agrarianism but also and above all the martial virtues of George Washington. Europeans (so long as they stayed in Europe) could only exercise those virtues against other civilized nations, putting themselves at risk of succumbing to the vices attendant (most spectacularly) in Napoleonic despotism; if they abandoned such ambitions, as proposed in projects for “perpetual peace” such as that proposed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, they risked a softening of spirit, moral decay. Americans had solved the problem by advancing civilization without colonization —that is, without keeping newly-won territories in political subservience to the ‘Mother Country.’

Whether one argued for Turner’s yeomanry or Roosevelt’s militias and posses, or some combination of them, as inspiriting conditions of American courage and self-government, the dilemma of the 1890s remained the same: How will Americans perpetuate their republican regime and their empire of liberty, now that the frontier has closed?

Roosevelt also saw another danger, outlined in the 1890s by the American naval strategist, Alfred Thayer Mahan. As far back as 1787, in The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton had argued that oceans are as much highways as they are barriers; as a Caribbean-born transplant the the port city of New York, he needed no book to teach him that. By 1890, technology had made this obvious to everyone, as steam-powered vessels replaced the old sailing ships and telegraphs made ‘messaging’ nearly instantaneous. These improved means of transportation and of communications had strengthened European empires; by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, Britannia not only ruled the waves but about one-fourth of the land on earth and about one-fifth of its population while France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and even Belgium had substantial holdings as well.

Such radically changed circumstances, which would lead to the world wars of the next century, presented American strategists with a set of problems noticeably different from those seen by Washington and his successors. Would the strengthening empires block American trade? Would they again threaten American shores, as they hadn’t done since 1812? Further, having fought a devastating civil war, we were less likely than ever to invite the prospect of another war on our own territory—especially given the increasingly devastating power of modern weapons wielded by the well-organized and trained mass armies raised by modern states. Americans needed to re-think the question of strategic depth, a question they thought they’d answered by turning the middle part of North America into the American Union. We also needed to re-think our policies regarding international commerce. All without eradicating the constitutionally legitimate powers of the state governments.

American strategists proposed several policy choices. The first, advocated by German immigrant and old Republican Party ally of Abraham Lincoln, Carl Schurz, was simply to continue Washington’s policy: to eschew not only empire beyond our own continent (“overseas empire”) but even to avoid any major strengthening of the military—this, on  the traditional grounds that big military establishments threaten republican regimes. By far the most distinguished American statesman to advocate this policy in the next century was Herbert Hoover, whose “magnum opus” (as he called it), Freedom Betrayed, lays out an argument for staying out of the Second World War, and for what critics called ‘isolationism’ generally. Whatever one thinks of this as a realistic foreign policy for the modern world, it would surely have helped to keep American federalism intact.

The second, opposite, policy was advocated by the young Indiana Republican Senator Albert J. Beveridge, who called for a vast imperial project based upon the alleged superiority of the white race, a notion itself based upon the ‘race science’ that formed part of early Progressivism. The most famous of Beveridge’s speeches remains “The March of the Flag,” delivered at a Republican party convention in Indiana. In it, Beveridge called for American conquest of the rest of the Americas and their incorporation into the United States—not, to be sure, as equal states, but as colonial territories. At the time, theories of racial superiority were very much a part of the Progressive movement, and Beveridge might be described as the most vocal representative of the militarist wing of Progressivism, which ranged from the militarism of Beveridge to the pacifism of Jane Addams. This policy would have ended the American practice of considering newly-acquired territories as future states, instead turning the New World into a facsimile of European empires. American federalism and American republicanism would have been seriously compromised.

Roosevelt found a more realistic solution to the problem, the one that has prevailed for more than a century. TR advocated the use of a greatly-expanded navy, which he eventually succeeded in obtaining, and peacetime military conscription for the army, which he hinted at but never formally proposed. These forces, but especially the navy, would be used no so much for imperial expansion but for obtaining naval bases throughout the world, usually but not always with the consent of foreign governments. These bases would counterbalance the much more expensive (and, as it turned out, untenable) imperialism of the Europeans. While happy to seize Cuba and the Philippines form the Spanish, he had no interest in retaining them, but he very much liked the idea of of establishing naval bases at Guantanamo and Subic Bay. As for permanent acquisitions, he intended to hold on to Hawaii and Puerto Rico as outpasts complicating foreign naval attack on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts.

To reinforce America’s opposition to European imperialism in the New World, and to answer Beveridge, Roosevelt also propounded his well-known “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, stipulating an American right to intervene in Latin American countries if they fell down on their debt payments to European nations. Such refusal to repay loans, if it became “chronic” (as TR put it), would invite European military intervention int the Western Hemisphere—exactly the thing the original Monroe Doctrine was intended to discourage. This policy soon provoked anger from the peoples it was intended to protect, and Franklin Roosevelt replaced it with his “Good Neighbor” policy in the 1930s.

From this perspective, TR’s foreign policy becomes quite coherent: Drive the weakened Spanish imperialists out of the Caribbean and the Philippines while blocking other empires (especially the Brits and the Germans) from seizing them; then spur the peoples of the newly-acquired countries to govern themselves. This meant recurring to the old American policy of regime change (first used by the Washington Administration in the southeaster states in its dealings with the Cherokee and other nations in that area), while obviating the need to (quite implausibly) make these conquests into American states and at the same time avoiding their (un-American) use as permanent colonies of our own. Add the Panama Canal, linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for both trading and military purposes, and you see that TR aimed at recovering America’s strategic depth under the circumstances caused by the new technologies of war.

Such a policy held out the prospect of retaining American federal republicanism while countering ‘containment’ strategies Great Britain and other regimes, then and in the future, would deploy against us. American federalism was compromised in any event, by Wilson, FDR, Lyndon Johnson and their many allies. This was usually done for domestic reasons, however, although sometimes it proceeded under the cover of the quite different policy of liberal internationalism, which looks forward to the weakening not only of American federalism but of American sovereignty altogether.