Garry Wills: Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. New York: Touchstone, 1992.

 

At Gettysburg, Garry Wills writes, Lincoln “revolutionized the [American] Revolution by “one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight-of-hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting” (38). In so doing, he substituted a “new constitution” for the old one. More than a mere rebirth, the new birth of freedom fundamentally transformed American politics.

Lincoln effected this revolution by treating the Declaration as if it were “founding law,” and not simply a declaration (145). By doing so, he constitutionalized the principle of equality, which appears nowhere in the 1787 Constitution itself. Union, which had preceded that constitution, became a legal reality for the first time, no longer only a “mystical hope” (145), as limned in Lincoln’s “mystic chords of memory” speech on the eve of the war. These United States became this United States; we became one, by law.

Wills recognizes that some of the Framers and some of the most prominent constitutional lawyers all along has asserted such a conception of constitutional union founded upon the sovereignty of Americans as one people. But by winning the Civil War and speaking so persuasively at Gettysburg, Lincoln made that theory a political reality. He won the consent of the governed for the idea of national unity.

Well in advance of Garry Wills, Lincoln’s opposite number, President Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America, agreed with Wills’s characterization of Lincoln’s accomplishment, although he cannot be said to have shared Wills’s evaluation of it. Unlike Calhoun, who called the equality of unalienable rights a self-evident lie, thereby dismissing the authority of the Declaration of Independence altogether, Davis refused to concede an inch of principled ground to the North. The Declaration of Independence, he said, declared the self-government of the American people as states—i.e., as thirteen sovereign peoples. The 1787 Constitution does not refer back to the Declaration at all. “Unlike the governments of the States, which find their origin deep in the nature of man”—in certain unalienable rights—the federal government “sprang from certain circumstances which existed in the course of human affairs, lacking any authority but the ratification of the sovereign [peoples or] States.” The peoples instituted their State governments in order to secure the unalienable rights of man; the federal government, by contrast, was instituted only to secure the objects enumerated in the Constitution, objects delegated to that government by the states, the peoples. Therefore, no sovereign people can be “disloyal” to the United States government. The sovereignty of the peoples implies the right to secede from the Union. In denying this right, and in enforcing that denial, the United States government effected an “entire subversion of those principles on which the American Union was founded” because “the alternative to secession is coercion,” the abrogation of consent. The dress rehearsal, so to speak, for this subversive drama played out in the North itself during the Civil War, when Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, ordered warrantless arrests, and otherwise abridged “personal liberty” by “military domination” of “the northern peoples.” [1]

To Davis, then, Lincoln is a revolutionary subversive, an Illinois Cromwell leading a fanatical band of abolitionist neo-Roundheads on a tyrannical adventure of death and destruction. The legal entrenchment of equality in a powerful national government will bring Americans to their knees before a new Moloch, the State, which will replace the States, thereby destroying the very equality it pretends to vindicate.

This is no mean argument in either the benign formulation of Wills or the jaundiced view of Davis. The line of succession goes from Calhoun to the Confederates to Willmoore Kendall to Wills, who knew Kendall at Yale, and retains the Kendallian interpretation of the relation between the Declaration and the ‘old,’ pre-Lincolnian, Constitution with respect to the status of the States. Back in his ‘conservative’ years, Wills was an unabashed Calhounian. [2]  Pats of the Lincoln-as-revolutionary argument closely resemble the truth. In considering the argument I shall first look more closely at the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. I shall then compare Lincoln’s claims not with those of such commentaries as Joseph Story and Daniel Webster but with those of Jefferson and Madison, close colleagues known for their decisive involvement in the events of 1776 and of 1787, respectively.

In declaring their independence, Lincoln said, “our fathers,” the Founders, “brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Conceived, brought forth, created: this is the language of childbirth. It is a paradoxical childbirth, associated with fathers, not mothers. “Conceived” and “brought forth” are from Numbers 11. Moses asks his angry God, “Was it I who conceived this people? Was it I who brought them forth, that thou shouldest say to me, ‘Carry them in thy bosom as a nursing father beareth the suckling child, unto the land which thou swearest unto their fathers?'” Americans, the new Israelites, were brought forth from Egypt/the British Empire and the tyranny of Pharaoh/George III. Moses/Washington cannot bear this burden alone. God tells him to gather the elders, and say to the people, “Consecrate yourselves for tomorrow, and you shall eat meat, for you have wept in the ears of the Lord….” The Lord’s Spirit will now be upon not Moses alone, but upon the elders. Moses wishes that the Spirit of prophesy were upon the whole people (Numbers 11.28).

The Declaration calls Americans a people, a people who existed before and after independence. Lincoln describes the bringing forth of “a new nation”; a nation must be an independent people. This independent people was conceived in liberty; long before independence, before George III and parliament designed to reduce them to slavery, Americans had enjoyed civil liberty. The new nation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men were created equal.” In part because Britain had required some colonies to permit slavery and, as recently as 1769, had vetoed a colonial enactment to suppress the slave trade, Americans had not secured the God-endowed unalienable right of equality; the slaves obviously had not, but neither had the free, precisely because the violation of your natural equality potentially threatens mine, even if mine seems secure. Americans rejected the principle of slavery even as they tolerated its practice; this Lincoln had demonstrated unanswerably in his address at the Cooper Institute in New York City in February 1960.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” in their “unalienable rights” of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The truth of the Declaration has become a proposition in Lincoln’s language, but is no less true therefore; he means that equality is the premise of a syllogism (the Declaration is an extended syllogism) or an axiom of a proof. The nursing fathers of the Declaration had held the truth of human equality to be self-evident. But Americans since then, like the Israelites, had disregarded the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. “When we were the political slaves of King George, and wanted to be free, we called the maxim, ‘all men are created equal,’ a self-evident truth; but now when we are grown fat, and have lost all dread of being slaves ourselves, we have become so greedy to be masters that we call the same maxim ‘a self-evident lie.'” [3] The loss of the dread of tyrants leads a selfish and stiff-necked people to insufferable pride, bespeaking a less of the fear of God, who created men and endowed them with unalienable rights, and who allows tyrants to serve as the scourge of the wicked (Romans 13).

The Civil War—the judgment of God upon the new Israelites—tests “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated”—Israel old and new are particular nations with universal significance—”can long endure.” In his Independence Day message to Congress two years earlier, Lincoln asked if all republics had the “inherent, fatal weakness” of needing a government too strong for the liberties of the people or else of having  a government too weak to defend itself. A republic, a nation dedicated to natural equality, requires popular sovereignty to secure it. Its government, popular self-government, must find a way to survive an appeal from lawful ballots—the election of Lincoln—to unlawful bullets. As labor is prior to capital, the people are prior to government; only a government that oppresses its people, attacks the people’s own laws, can justly be overthrown by force. The people of Israel left Egypt, the tyrannical rule of Pharaoh, but did not thereby release themselves from the law of God. Just the opposite: to survive, they must bind themselves all the more closely to the life-giving, right-giving God, as “the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon the definition of liberty” (Sanitary Fair Speech, April 18, 1864). What is self-evident to the sheep is not self-evident to the wolf, a predator who would take the product of labor from others, up to and including their liberty and their lives—destroying political freedom on the same principle.

The consecration by the people of the Gettysburg cemetery, their dedication to “the unfinished work” of the nursing fathers who brought them forth from Egypt but did not see them enter the Promised Land, will mean that the Spirit of the Lord—for the new Israelites, the truths of the Declaration—will be upon not only the nursing fathers but upon all the people. The new birth of freedom means the emancipation of the slaves and the full emancipation of the free, including the former slave-masters, who have contradicted their own right to rule by claiming a universal truth as a particular entitlement for themselves. Contrary to Wills, the Gettysburg Address does not entrench equality in the Constitution; the Address never mentions the Constitution at all. Lincoln never suggests that the Constitution contradicted the Declaration; as Lincoln had argued at the Cooper Institute, the directly unmentioned institution of slavery is acknowledged only in the sense that it is the scaffolding of the Framers’ political construction, intended to be removed once the edifice is completed.

The new emancipation required a new political ‘testament,’ which is the Second Inaugural Address. “Woe unto the world because of its offences! For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh!” Those are the words of Jesus of Nazareth, not Moses, of the New Testament, not the Old. They comprise a threat to the proud and a guarantee to the humble. Moses, the humblest man of his time, governed a prideful, stiff-necked people, swollen with new-won liberty. As God starved the Israelites out of their pride, in fourscore wilderness years, so God has punished Americans, slave-masters and non-slaveholders alike, with “this terrible war,” retribution for slavery and for the toleration of slavery. Psalm 19, singing of the perfect law of the Lord, His judgments true and righteous altogether, and of his servants who pray not to commit “presumptuous sins” or transgressions against that law, stands against the self-righteousness of the old, and now the new, Israelites. Lincoln would guard against the continued arrogance of the victorious, not only the Thaddeus Stevenses of the world but any Northerner who might preen himself on victory over the South. A just and lasting peace among Americans, and other nations, eschewing the malice and hard-heartedness of the proud, must proceed with charity and firmness in the right, “as God gives us to see the right.” Truths are truths, whether self-evident or not, but few truths are self-evident to the same people at all times. A people must humble itself to see clearly, to enable itself to hold the truth of equality to be self-evident. In the Second Inaugural, Lincoln seeks to make certain truths self-evident, again, by pointing to the horrors of war as punishment for slavery. Self-government means self-limitation, involving humility in power as well as self-assertion when confronted with tyrannical power. The principle of equality requires the highest degree of self-government in a people and its representatives. Otherwise, God will do harshly what His people should do themselves, gently.

No more than in the Gettysburg Address does Lincoln mention the Constitution in the Second Inaugural. He mentions the nation and the Union. The Declaration did not need to be entrenched in American law because it already was. Madison had held that the Declaration was “the fundamental act of union” of the States (G. Hunt, ed.: The Writings of James Madison, 219-221). The Declaration was placed at the head of the statutes-at-large of the United States Code, and was described as one of the organic laws of the United States. The Declaration and the Union precede the Constitution, which is designed to for a more perfect Union than the one which had existed between 1776 and 1787. Unless a more perfect Union can somehow be claimed to mean one that explicitly supersedes the principles of the Declaration—a claim that could only be sustained by claiming that the Constitution’s indirect acknowledgment of slavery is such a supersession—then the Wills argument collapses and Lincoln must be admitted to be right. That is, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural is to the Constitution what the New Testament is to the Old Testament in the eyes of the Protestant Christians who prepared and used the King James Bible, Lincoln’s Bible. To such readers, the New Testament affirms the Old while extending it beyond the Jewish people to all peoples. Similarly, the Constitution secured equal rights for some Americans; the Second Inaugural points to the constitutional amendments that Lincoln recognized to be necessary in order to entrench that universalization in law.

But what did the American Founders themselves think? Lincoln had canvassed their views in his 1859 speech to the Cooper Institute in New York, finding that they opposed slavery in principle. I shall consider briefly the exchange between Jefferson and Madison on Jefferson’s proposed text for law students at the University of Virginia. The anthology was to include writings by John Locke and Algernon Sidney, the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, and the Virginia Report of 1799. Madison reviewed these suggestions and agreed with Jefferson’s intent: “It is certainly very material that the true doctrines of liberty, as exemplified in our Political System, should be inculcated on those who sustain and may administer it.” For this purpose, Locke and Sydney “are admirably calculated to impress on young minds the right of Nations to establish their own Governments, and to inspire the love of free ones.” The Declaration is also “rich in fundamental principles.” But such principles “afford no aid in guarding our Republican Charters against constructive violations”—that is, against misconstruing, misinterpretations innocent or malicious. For such aid, the students need to study The Federalist, along with Washington’s First Inaugural and Farewell Address. Law students need to understand the legal, institutional structure that secures rights, as well as the rights themselves. (See Madison’s letter to Jefferson, February 8, 1825.) As both men knew, The Federalist in its central essay links the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution by referring to the transcendent law of nature and of nature’s God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions should aim and to which they must be sacrifice. There is simply no suggestion, by any of the principal American Founders, that the natural rights enunciated in the Declaration are contradicted—as distinguished from qualified—by the Constitution. To put it in Lockean terms, the laws of the social compact, of civil society, will differ from the rights of the state of nature. But those laws are intended to secure those rights; they will inevitably do so imperfectly, but unless their overall effect is such security, they are not legitimate. Neither Jefferson, Madison, nor Lincoln disputed the overall security of rights under the Constitution, even as all three men also regarded slavery as a specific contradiction of natural rights.

What, then, of Jefferson Davis’s claim that the Constitution only addresses the relations among States, not the rights of individuals within the States? This is partly true; the Constitution after all constitutes a federal government, under which the States preserve many rights of self-government. But the claim is also partly false. The Constitution does operate on individuals, not only on States; in this it differs from the Articles of Confederation. Publius calls the new governmental system, “party national, partly federal.” Davis and Wills claim that it was wholly federal, against the words of The Federalist. They are antifederalists in disguise—Davis in a thoroughgoing way, Wills (since his turn leftward) only insofar as he interprets the intentions of the Founders. The phrase, “the people of the United States” makes sense as both the peoples of the States and the peoples of all the States collectively. If not, then such phrases as that from The Federalist quoted above, and such a document as the Northwest Ordinance (which prohibits slavery in the territories) simply do not make sense. Otherwise, there is no Union, only an alliance. But the Constitution constitutes a government, not an alliance.

The Federalist shows how the federal government can operate by means of popular consent without the violations of civil and natural rights that undiluted ‘democracy’ in the original Greek sense permitted. The old democracy rested upon pure popular sovereignty; no natural rights were reserved against popular opinion. Tellingly, the Greek democracies also rested upon slavery and religious intolerance. And why not? If justice is what the majority of citizens say it is, and then majority says that slavery and religious intolerance are just—’positive goods,’ so to speak—then there can be no problem. The American Founders resisted pure or ‘majoritarian’ democracy as a threat to the security of rights government is designed by the people to effect. In this, Lincoln follows them, extending the protection of civil rights to Southern blacks by emancipating many of them during the war and by advocating the adoption of antislavery constitutional amendments. This is not a constitutional revolution, but rather a continuation and legitimate extension of the Founders’ enterprise.

As for Will’s claim that Lincoln caused ‘us’ to read the Constitution differently, I think it can be given short shrift. How many constitutional law scholars today connect the Declaration with the Constitution at all? Wills mentions none. Does the general public connect the two document? Perhaps vaguely: But has that changed at any time since the 1780s? Lincoln does not effect a revolution so much as he prevented one: a revolution which would have sundered the principles of the Declaration from constitutional government, by means of Douglasite ‘popular sovereignty’ in the North and in all remaining territories, and/or by means of Calhounite States’ sovereignty in the South. These were doctrines of nineteenth-century white-supremacist nationalism; the only thing to be disputed between them was the size and number of the nations. Lincoln prevented a revolution against natural rights.

Alexander Hamilton sees that impeachment poses a special problem for elective government. In Federalist 65, he writes that impeachment is designed to punish political offenses, that is, “the misconduct of public men,” their “abuse or violation of some public trust”—”injuries done to the society itself.” In a popularly-elected government, “the prosecution of [such crimes]… will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused. In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of the parties than by the real demonstration of innocence or guilt.” The Framers lodged the power of impeachment in the House, but lodged the power of conviction in the Senate, precisely so that the popular will could be registered, but at the same time would ultimately be expressed by that elective branch farthest removed from the passions of the moment. Thus the prosecutor (the House) is not also the judge. Thus also, the unelected Supreme Court does not make the decision, but its Chief Justice does preside over the Senate trial.

Given these safeguards, it is not surprising that serious impeachment attempts against presidents have been rare: Andrew Johnson in 1868, Richard Nixon in 1974, Bill Clinton in 1998. But it should be noted that impeachment has become a more likely event in the past 25 years, especially when it is remembered that the Iran-Contra investigation might have spun into an impeachment procedure, had not President Reagan’s alibi—’I didn’t know what was going on’—seemed plausible if one believed his enemies’ own ridicule-Reagan rhetoric for the previous six years. From what we now know about Reagan, it is likely that he cinched them into that very bind, but in any event they stepped right into a snare of their own making.

Despite these safeguard, the U. S. Constitution makes impeachment more likely than it is under, for example, the English Constitution, where the Prime Minister must head the majority party in the legislature, because America can have the presidency and the Congress controlled by opposite parties. As a sort of benchmark, it’s therefore worthwhile to see how impeachment played out in 1868, a time well removed from current political passions.

At that time Congress reaffirmed the Hamiltonian principle that impeachment is intended to check “abuse of power and public trust” for “defined, indictable offenses” (see Kelly et al. II. 342). Johnson allegedly had violated the tenure of Office Act, a statute Congress passed, many historians contend, precisely in order to force Johnson to violate it; defense maintained that the Act was unconstitutional, and therefore it could not be an impeachable offense to disobey, as (they admitted) Johnson had done. Although political in this broad sense, Johnson’s attorneys argued and won the point that the defendant could not be tried merely as the political opponent of the Republican Congressional majority; if solemnized, this standard would of course in effect turn the American federal government into a parliamentary system. Johnson was indeed being tried as the political opponent of the Republicans—or, not to trivialize it, as a very serious policy opponent. But it makes a difference if that can be openly admitted or not. If it can be openly admitted, then the evidence needed for conviction need only be: ‘He disagrees with us.’ If it cannot be openly admitted, then the impeachment proponents must prove that the president has committed high crimes and misdemeanors, and their motives for essaying that proof are legally irrelevant. This in turns feeds into the politics of the situation, inasmuch as voters who may not be quite so partisan as Congressmen will frown upon a too-nakedly-partisan trial.

House managers argued that Congress had as much right as Johnson did to say whether the Tenure of Office Act was unconstitutional. This was actually consistent with the longstanding Jeffersonian-Democrat claim that each branch of the federal government is entitled to interpret the Constitution within its own jurisdiction, so to speak. Johnson was saved not because the constitutional issues were settled, but because a sufficient number of conservative Senate Republicans did not want Johnson removed. As Kelly recounts, “they opposed the political and economic views of radical senator Ben Wade of Ohio, president pro tempore of the Senate, who would become president if Johnson were removed” (II. 345).

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the one nineteenth-century impeachment was an anomaly, the product of the unusually high political passions engendered by the Civil War. Although divided government was possible then as now, it was uncommon. Divided government occurred only four times in the century, and on two of those occasions it occurred in the last years of the president’s term (Hayes in 1879-80, Cleveland in 1895-96), when it scarcely would have been worth the effort to impeach the fellow, anyway.

By the time of the Nixon contretemps, the divided character of the federal government had become much more pronounced than it usually was in the nineteenth century. Post-World War II presidents frequently endured long periods of majority opposition in Congress: Truman in the last two years of his first term; Eisenhower in the last two terms of his first term and throughout his second term; all six years of the Nixon Administration; all of Ford’s brief administration; all of George W. Bush’s administration; the last two years of Clinton’s first administration and all of his second.

Eisenhower and (for the first three years) Bush were much too popular to be impeached. Congressional Democrats contented themselves with growling about the Iran-Contra transaction and caviling about Sherman Adams’s vicuna coat. Ford was a weak president, slated for electoral defeat. But Nixon and Clinton, though popular generally for most of their terms, were viscerally disliked by core constituencies within the opposition parties, and that is what made the difference.

The Democrats were vastly helped in 1974 because Nixon really had committed impeachable offenses. Buoyed by his landslide victory over George McGovern in 1972, Nixon decided that he had a ‘mandate’ in effect to govern as he pleased—the so-called “plebiscitary presidency” (Kelly et al. II. 665). It is of course true that Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had thought pretty much the same way, but he had the luck to have a Congress controlled by his own party. Additionally, Johnson had the ill luck to enmesh himself in the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, which provided all the hook his Democratic Party opponents needed to get rid of him electorally, without legal action; a supremely astute politician when it came to anticipating electoral outcomes, Johnson spared himself considerable embarrassment by bowing out of the Democratic primary elections. At any rate, the political will to attack Nixon and reverse the results of the 1972 election was there, and the only real challenge was to find the decisive evidence against him. This was provided by the famous ‘smoking gun’ section of the White House tapes, in which Nixon specifically instructed his underlings to obstruct justice by lying under oath. Although Nixon resigned before being impeached, he did so because he knew he would be impeached and convicted; in effect, he was the second president to be impeached and the first to be convicted, although, again, neither of these things happened in fact or in law.

Clinton was equally despised by the opposition core. What liberal Democrats were to Nixon the conservative, the conservative wing of the Republican Party was to Clinton. With the examples of Watergate and Iran-Contra before them (the latter, while not resulting in impeachment, effectively hamstrung the second Reagan Administration, and so was an effective piece of political maneuvering), conservative Republicans had not only the motive and the means (a majority in both houses of Congress, beginning in 1995), they also had evidence of wrongdoing that hit the most impassionating ‘hot button’ on their constituents’ dial: passion itself, a sex scandal during the course of which the president committed what were arguable impeachable offenses, namely, perjury and obstruction of justice in a civil lawsuit.

Few but the most naïve partisans believed that Clinton was not a serial adulterer and inveterate liar, but character flaws typically are addressed electorally, not legally, and Clinton had been reelected easily in 1996. These character flaws were precisely the kind that animated the conservative constituency, however, so what was needed was proof that Clinton had committed illegal acts that were public in character, according to the Hamiltonian definition. Such proof eventually came in the forms of telephone tapes and the celebrated DNA dress, lovingly preserved by a former Clinton inamorata. Because in Clinton v. Jones the Supreme Court had ruled that a sitting president can be sued for private actions unconnected to his public duties, Clinton had been forced to testify in the Paula Jones lawsuit case; instead of ‘taking the Fifth,’ his most prudent available move, he decided, as usual, to brazen his way out and to deny everything. Some of ‘everything’ turned out to be true; Clinton was caught in perjury and obstruction of justice, and arguable grounds for impeachment were handed to his political enemies.

In arguments before the House, representatives Inglis and Canady observed that high crimes and misdemeanors are “offenses against public justice, against the public peace, against public trade, and against the public police or economy”; they include perjury and obstruction of justice. Clinton could not consistently respond that he was guilty of merely private wrongdoing (although his handlers did, anyway) because in addition to lying he had invoked executive privilege during the months-long investigation by the Special Prosecutor, in yet another series of attempts to delay the process. The Democrats in Congress were reduced to arguing that, yes, Clinton had indeed perjured himself and obstructed justice, but he had done so in matters that themselves had nothing much to do with his official duties—private liaisons dangereuses, albeit some committed in the president’s offices at the White House. Although admittedly not all ‘private’ crimes could be so waved aside—murder and rape presumably would be off-limits—lying under oath about mere adulterous friskiness shouldn’t count. Democrats could then use words like “reprehensible” and “immoral” to describe Clinton’s behavior, but could also say his crimes did not “rise to the level of impeachable offenses.” That is to say, while Republicans stuck to the rigors of exact legality, Democrats proposed a sort of balancing test.

With 95% of House Republicans voting ‘yes’ and 95% of House Democrats voting ‘no,’ Clinton was impeached. The Senate, whose role ostensibly was to judge innocence or guilt of the crimes as defined rather than to undermine the House’s definition, predictably went ahead nd did what it wanted to do, which was exactly what the majority of their constituents wanted them to do: Let the guy off the hook and get on with other issues. There were the expected rhetorical gymnastics by the senators. My favorite was Olympia Snowe’s “Acquittal is not exoneration,” although Senator Breaux’s “[the President] is not innocent”—though presumably not guilty, either—ran a close second.

The inclination to paralyze rivals by means of Congressional investigations and sometimes impeachment has come to the surface mostly in the post-World War II period. Part of this may have to do with television, which is concurrent with the inclination: TV makes show trials more showy, whether it be McCarthy going after the Truman Administration, Sam Ervin reading from the Constitution during the Watergate hearings, or Bob Livingston immolating himself during Monica Madness Days.

More telling, perhaps, was the tendency of American voters to want two things. First, they have wanted to continue the basic New Deal apparatus of limited social provision. That means they have usually wanted Democrats running Congress, where so much domestic policy gets made. Recently, that has meant that they wanted Republicans running Congress; if the social-provision apparatus gets too extensive or burdensome, and if the people running it are seen as too corrupt, out Democrats will go and in will Republicans come.

Second, American voters have also wanted strong military defense, having decided that the Second World War resulted from the weakness of the democratic republics, and also having decided that communists were no better than fascists. For this stern task they have preferred Republicans, the party that has remained consistently ‘nationalist’ since its beginnings in the 1850s, and which never had a Henry Wallace/George McGovern wing that could be accused of harboring ‘no enemies on the Left’ sentiments.

With long-term partisan splits between the executive and legislative branches brought about by these dual policy goals of the American people, it is no surprise that infighting gets nasty. As always, politicians will be punished when the overreach, as Congressional Republicans were (mildly) in the 1998 midterm elections, and also as Vice President Albert Gore was punished in his attempt to succeed Clinton, a slightly creepy president he’d defended too-loyally. With the Cold War over, and with the Clinton fiasco in recent memory, will voters prefer undivided government for a time? They might have assumed this would cure the impeachment/investigate-to-death syndrome, but as it may happen with President Donald Trump, all you may need is a hostile fourth ‘branch’ of government, the federal bureaucracy, with allies in the ‘fifth estate,’ journalism, to roil the waters.

 

Work Cited

Kelly, Alfred H.; Harbison, Winfred A.; Belz, Herman: The American Constitution: Its Origin and Development. 2 volumes. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1991.

Gaddis, John Lewis: Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Leffler, Melvyn P.: A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

Marable, Manning: Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction of Black America, 1945-1990. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984.

 

The ‘Cold War’ pitting the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union and its allies and satellites disputed the same territory—the world itself—in circumstances that made a ‘hot’ war too dangerous for either side to undertake. The Cold War profoundly influenced American politics in the two decades after it began helping to consolidate the New Deal state in many ways—not least by giving the Republican Party a major stake in that state. Although the Cold War consolidated the New Deal state, it eventually weakened the Democratic Party’s dominance in the regime which founded that state. The Democratic Party overextended U. S. power in southeast Asia, alienating many of the children of builders of the New Deal state.

I. Cold War Causes
There were four kinds of causes of the Cold War. In descending order of generality, they were: ideas, postwar historical circumstances, strategy, and particular events and judgments ‘on the spot.’ The Cold War instances what Melvyn Leffler calls the classical security dilemma, in which every move I make to enhance my security threatens or seems to threaten yours, and vice-versa. The rival regimes had many reasons to regard each other as threats, starting with the ideas that animated those regimes. Americans and Soviets both had a sharper interest in political ideas than many other peoples—both nations’ mindsets were the opposite of the British inclination toward ‘muddling through.’ Heresy hunting had characterized both regimes from their beginning. Both regimes also tended toward a view of ideational enemies as conspirers, and therefore shared strong motives for policies of pre-emption. The Marxist-Leninist suspicions of the international bourgeoisie need no rehearsal; as for Americans, their Declaration of Independence decries not only despotism but a design to reduce Americans to slavery. Inasmuch as Marxism-Leninism targets the international bourgeoisie, and America had been a leading commercial republican regime, rivalry was inevitable. In 1919, with the invasion of the Soviet Union by an alliance of commercial republics, the rivalry briefly became an actual war.

Rivalry does not, however, necessarily mean war, hot or cold, and this early, weak effort at strangling the baby Bolshevism in its cradle quickly subsided. To ideational rivalry geopolitical strategic considerations were added, twenty-five years later. Governing elites on both sides had studied Halford Mackinder’s writings. [1] Mackinder’s view of the world as a “closed system” (with Germany and Russia struggling for domination of the “Heartland” of the “World Island” and of the “crossroads” of that island around Suez) clearly called for an international politics of global power projection. In 1919, Mackinder himself warned that Bolshevism would end either in world anarchy or world tyranny (203); in 1943 he wrote, more moderately, that if the Soviet Union emerged from the war “as conqueror of Germany, she must rank as the greatest land power of the globe,” and as the “power in the strategically strongest defensive position” (272-273). Leffler describes the American response to the Soviet in Mackinderian terms: “No one could dispute that in the heartland of Eurasia a brutal totalitarian state existed with the capacity to take advantage of the manifold opportunities presented by the postwar world” (497). Soviet ideology and Mackinderian strategy coalesced in the Soviet imposition or encouragement of Communist and pro-Communist regimes wherever feasible, with non-Communist allies as a second-best choice. For their part, beginning in the 1940s, U. S. policymakers “never doubted that U. S. security interests existed almost everywhere” (Leffler 180). Like the Soviets, Americans preferred to deal with regimes of their own kind, but had no hesitation in seeking support of non-republican regimes–military dictatorships in Latin America, monarchies in the Middle East—when no republicans seemed likely to rule.

The worldwide character of the conflict was accentuated by the Europeans’ need for the productive power of their colonies, which “appeared better able to close the [postwar] dollar gap than did European countries themselves” (Leffler 164). This gave the Soviets a weakness to target, and they revived Lenin’s anti-imperialist rhetoric, applying it vigorously to everyone but themselves. Americans had a more difficult problem. They had to resist the strengthening of European imperialism, fearing a return to pre-war mercantilism and economic autarky (Leffler 35). Free trade or worldwide capitalism required an anti-imperial policy. But the newly independent nations must also be kept from the Soviet orbit, and the Europeans must find some way to prosper economically without their colonies, lest even they become gulls to Soviet blandishments.

I shall examine how these strategies played out at the beginning of the Cold War on each side, starting with the Soviets.

a. Soviet Actions and Reactions
The Soviets formulated an imperial network of more-or-less subservient local Communist parties, using them to undermine non-communists regimes by whatever means Moscow deemed useful (Gaddis 42). Playing from an unusual position which combined military and political extension with military weakness owing to the devastation of the world war, Stalin moved to consolidate power in eastern and central Europe. Leffler contends that he “acted defensively” (186); it is worth noting that for Stalin, acting defensively meant purges and militarily-enforced domination of what were quickly described as the Soviets’ ‘satellite states.’ Stalin was indeed cautious beyond his own (noticeably expanded) sphere; that is very likely because he was quite weak beyond his own sphere. Leffler observes that the Communist parties in France and Italy wanted not immediately to overthrow but to reenter postwar governments; again, this is a function of weakness, Gramscianism being Marxism weakly endowed. De Gaulle, for one, was hardly deceived by Maurice Thorez’s seeming meekness. For their own part, the Soviets overplayed their hand in demanding war reparations in the form of products from the Ruhr Valley, products Germany and Europe generally needed for economic and political stabilization. As usual, Soviet demands for ‘justice’ dovetailed nicely with grand policy considerations, doubtless yet another instance of the Marxist claim to synthesize theory and practice.

In Asia, the Soviets feared that the U. S. presence in china threatened the Trans-Siberian railroad and the eastern Soviet Union generally (Leffler 88). Stalin exploited such themes of encirclement and foreign hostility, and was “not interested in striking a deal” on nuclear weapons” (Leffler 115). With whatever mixture of fear and cynicism, the Soviets did little to assuage American feats of their aggressiveness in these key years immediately after the war. Their actions alarmed U. S. planners, and also fed back into U. S. domestic politics, where Republicans were rhetorically alert to any signs of Democratic appeasement—understandably so, in view of the New Dealers’ participation in the Popular Front movement of the mid-1930s. Republicans did not immediately grasp the need for backing up their rhetoric with serious actions in terms of military spending and the end of their longstanding isolationism.

b. American Policy Initiatives
From their position of strength, Americans quickly seized the initiative in the Cold War. Stalin had every reason to play for time. Therefore the Americans had every reason not to.

President Truman was a genuine democrat, and therefore anti-Stalinist at heart. His foreign policy advisers had already made a Mackinderian analysis of European politics in 1940, determining that Axis domination of Eurasia would jeopardize political and economic liberty in the United States. FDR foresaw the danger of tyranny in the United States in response to the pressures exerted by a Nazified Europe (Leffler 22). New Dealers understood that foreign policy had serious national security and regime implications (Leffler 24).

It was simple enough to apply this basic insight to the prospect of a Europe dominated by ‘totalitarians’ or tyrants of the Left, now that the internationalist/imperialist Right had been crushed. George F. Kennan, the most influential strategist on the National Security Council, had a more complex, pluralistic view of the world than Mackinder, identifying several world military-industrial “power centers.” However, he saw that the Soviet Union was the only one of these hostile to the United States, so the conclusions he drew were similar to Mackinder’s (Gaddis 57). In 1945, U. S. officials did not worry much about an immediate Soviet threat, nor were they initially very concerned with Soviet ideology, supposing that they might be able to cut deals with Stalin. But by 1946, Clark Clifford and George Elsey did begin to see the political heft of Soviet ideology—an analysis Leffler decries as too stark, while in effect admitting that it nonetheless WAS the analysis these men made, and therefore influential (133). At least as pertinently, Americans feared Soviet trade and military agreements in Europe, which would issue in permanent political advantage to the Soviets—who, it should never be forgotten, were in Europe, with a permanent physical presence the United States (obviously) could not match. In Asia, American fears mirrored those of the Soviets—again with the added problem that America is not physically located in Asia, whereas the Soviet Union was. Americans feared Soviet consolidation of power in Manchuria, northern China, and Korea, which would have been similar to Japanese hegemony in East Asia in the 1930s (Leffler 124).

In April 1945, Secretary of State Averill Harriman told Truman that the Soviets were ambitious but weak. The United States, he proposed, should take advantage of its financial superiority to stop further Soviet advances, starting with a threat to withdraw offers of financial aid if the soviet tried to dominate central Europe (Leffler 31). The Soviets proved more formidable opponents than Harriman supposed, refusing to be bought off. The Americans adopted a strategy of military containment (a true man of the State Department, Kennan wanted only diplomatic and political containment) coupled with efforts at political divide-and-conquer (Gaddis 70). they hoped to widen incipient divisions among Communist parties.

Truman found a bipolar world rhetorically easier to explain and defend to the public than the more complex story of intersecting forces of ideas, nationality, economics, and political ambition. A variety of events helped him: the soviet detonation of an atomic bomb, which ended America’s short-lived reliance on nuclear weapons to ensure unquestioned military superiority; the Alger Hiss trial and other reports of Soviet espionage; the British financial crisis, which sobered any lingering expectations in London of an enduring empire; Communist moves in Asia, particularly in China and Korea. All these things focused public attention on the Soviet threat. The replacement of Kennan with Paul Nitze at the NSC sharpened the hawkish profile of the Administration. Even the American Communists (apart from Hiss) inadvertently made Truman’s case for him. Their earlier Popular Front strategy, viewed retrospectively, played into fears of infiltration and espionage. David Plotke observes that only some U. S. Communists actually engaged in subversion, and that this was not sufficient reason to punish the whole organization. This overlooks the impossibility of knowing that, at the time, and of knowing how well-placed Communists were. Moreover, with fears of Nazi ‘fifth columnists’ and slogans such as ‘Loose lips sink ships’ still fresh in the public memory, and ‘No more Pearl Harbors’ a phrase to conjure with, Plotke’s cool assessment was unlikely to gain traction, regardless of its accuracy or inaccuracy.

The Marshall Plan to aid in the economic reconstruction of Europe appealed to European democratic socialists like Bevin of Great Britain, who wanted money to support his substantial domestic political agenda. NATO appealed to continental Europeans, who wanted a real, flesh-and-blood U. S. stake in European affairs, and needed strong, effective military support, lest their nations prefer to attempt some neutralist, ‘Third Way’ strategy. The Cold War, and the institutional supports that would lead to victory in it, were well in place.

II. Cold War Domestic Effects

The Cold War consolidated the New Deal in many ways. The strengthening of existing agencies such as the Department of Defense and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with the establishment of a new cluster of ‘alphabet soup’ agencies—managing not only economic matters but foreign-policy, military, and national-security matters, as well—further concentrated political power and authority in Washington. Postwar America looks much more like a European state than even FDR’s America did.

Federal budgets increased, and their proportions altered. A bureaucracy devoted almost exclusively to domestic issues was no longer possible, and various groups within the bureaucracy had to compete for tax revenues. So did domestic constituencies. The now-familiar fights between domestic-oriented interest groups and (often newly-created) military-oriented interest groups became institutionalized.

The overall international economic strategy designed in part to fight the Soviets had immense domestic economic benefits. It is hard to suppose that the affluence of the next twenty years could have been possible without the release of pent-up European demand for American goods, and the means to pay for them provided by U. S. policy. Free trade enabled the United States to exploit its considerable postwar advantages: an intact and recently-expanded industrial base, a distribution network, a talent for advertising and publicity. These international economic policies might have occurred without the Cold War, but the Cold War made their implementation more urgent, and won support from interest groups that might otherwise have opposed or at least not supported them.

Consumerism, which had enjoyed a brief heyday in the 1920s. returned with this new affluence. Critics on the Left suspected the passivity of citizens living with worries about nuclear war contributed to an atmosphere of hedonism and privacy—the reconstitution of the home. Whatever its cause, the ‘consumerist’ mindset would be jarred by occasional spasms of activism, later on. Either way, the interruption and trivialization of what had been normal self-government in America—the America of courthouse and town hall—that the Depression and the world war had allowed New Dealers to effect, now became regularized. Consumer comforts even became part of the American appeal, nationally and internationally, against communism; not only Nixon’s ‘Kitchen Debate’ with Khruschev highlighted this; more lastingly, powerful glimpses of affluence purveyed by Hollywood on television and in the movies, exported worldwide, took on a political dimension that they might have lacked in other circumstances (May 158).

The Cold War also reinforced the old Progressive theme, the rule of the expert. The prestige of science and technology, enhanced by federal subsidies of science education, assured a steadier supply of ‘technocrats’ than America had seen before. The government also increased its investment in technology generally, with major domestic economic benefits resulting from ‘spinoffs’ from military research. There was a debate over whether such indirect investments in domestically-usable technology were actually cost-effective—it suffices to remember the name of Sidney Lens on the Left, and of a phalanx of libertarian economists—but the investments and the spinoffs did occur.

Manning Marable argues that the Cold War delayed the civil rights struggle for about a decade by inducing the purge of Communists who had been key workers in civil rights organizations in the 1940s. The Communists were distrusted by middle-class black leaders for seeming to have “placed the Soviet Union’s survival above the battle for black equality” (Marable 20). The heavily polemical tone of Marable’s article raises suspicions, and one might reply, with equal polemical brio, that resistance to Soviet tyranny was indispensable to defending civil rights for anyone, of any race. Returning to settled fact, the Cold War didn’t delay the civil rights movement for long (if it did) and when it reappeared it could no longer plausibly be accused of serious communist ties, although of course that didn’t stop such accusations from being leveled.

With the Cold War, foreign policy issues became for the first time consistent topics of political debate. Failure in managing a major Cold War issue had electoral consequences, as seen in the fictitious ‘missile gap’ of 1960 and, increasingly, the Vietnam War. McCarthyism had its day, raising issues of loyalty and legality that remained long after the junior senator from Wisconsin self-destructed with a well-timed push from Eisenhower. McCarthyism had a larger political significance; it was the first attack on the New Deal political order ‘from below.’ Although unsuccessful, it proved that such attacks were possible.

Isolationism—of American from the world, of Americans from world issues—was defeated. A variant of Mackinderism triumphed, not least in the Republican Party, which, after initial hesitations, became at least as ‘internationalist’ as the Democrats, and, ultimately, with far greater political profit. The Republicans could never ‘outbid’ Democrats on domestic issues on the national level. But they could outbid them on military issues and, beginning with the 1964 Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, it began to do so consistently and with increasing success. This ‘global’ perspective of Mackinderism would have profound effects not only on military and diplomatic policies, and not only on domestic policy, but also as preparation for the ‘environmentalist’ movement, which takes up Mackinder’s globalism, most probably without knowing it, for very different purposes.

The Cold War also contributed to one of the bitterest conflicts of the 1960s, the conflict engendered by the ‘New Left’ student movement. Combined with an ill-judged war on the Mackinderian periphery, conscription at first fulfilled Theodore Roosevelt’s dream of a more regimented population well adapted to industrial and corporate life. But by the latter half of the ‘Sixties, what C. Wright Mills called “liberal corporatism” spurred a rebellion whose effects have endured. The revolt against technology and bureaucracy, weakening the New Deal ethos itself, would have lost much of its urgency without the apocalyptic context of the Cold War. The Democratic Party’s political order alienated many of the sons and daughters of its progenitors. I am tempted to say that the students wanted to be good Whigs, but—having been educated by New Dealers—they didn’t quite know how. And although the anti-technological and anti-bureaucratic animus of the New Left has subsided with the end of the Cold War, the New-Left ideology has permeated much of the education system and probably has altered the course of technological and even bureaucratic efforts themselves. Before the New Left, the term ‘personal computer’ would have seemed self-contradictory, but along with portable telephones, on-demand entertainment delivery systems, and individualized services of all kinds, technology and bureaucracy have been made to seem, as the saying goes, ‘user-friendly.’

The Cold War thus consolidated the New Deal state but to some degree undermined the New Deal political order. The Cold War raised the stakes in American political life. More lives were at stake, with the proliferation of nuclear weapons; more dollars were at stake, with ever-increasing federal budgets. Decades after the Cold War’s conclusion, Americans still seem not quite sure what to do without it.