Robert Nisbet: Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Partnership. Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1988.

Originally published in The Washington Times, March 20, 1989.

 

Erstwhile Republican Party presidential candidate Wendell Willkie visited Stalin during World War II. “Stalin likes a pretty heavy turnover of young people in his immediate entourage,” Willkie perceived. “It is his way, I think, of keeping his ear to the ground.”

To smile at such ineffable naivete smacks somewhat of Oscar Wilde laughing at the death of Little Nell: It is an altogether better response to a work of fiction than to events in the real world. Too-Olympian gaiety may land one in jail, or bring on some other severe test of good humor. Although Socrates triumphed at this, purchasing a sort of intellectual immortality at the cost of his physical demise, moderns (like Wilde) typically bring fewer spiritual resources to the test, ending pitiably.

In political extremities, laughter makes sense only for philosophers and tyrants. Stalin understood this, and held up the tyrants’ end. When American First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy met Charles de Gaulle at the French embassy in Washington, she asked, “General, of all the great men you have met, which one had the best sense of humor?” “Stalin, madame,” the General intoned. Willkie found that out, too: “Once I was telling him of the Soviet schools and libraries I had seen—how good they had seemed to me. And I added, ‘But if you continue to educate the Russian people, Mr. Stalin, the first thing you know you’ll educate yourself out of a job.’ He threw back his head and laughed. Nothing I said to him, or heard anyone else say to him, through two long evenings, seemed to amuse him so much.”

Still, there were limits even to Stalinist mirth. De Gaulle remembered, “Stalin said only one serious thing to me: ‘In the end, death is the only winner.'” Like any serious political man, Stalin wanted to win, so he made himself into an angel of death, a transfiguration that may account for the turnover of young people in his immediate entourage.

“Stalin was an unnatural man,” Winston Churchill said. Why did Churchill and de Gaulle see this, while Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not? ‘American innocence,’ Europeans will answer, forgetting that Stalin (and Hitler) duped more Europeans than Americans, and as a result killed more of them, too.

Name one 18th- or 19th-century American statesman who would not have recognized Stalin for what he was. The old republicans suspected political power, jealously guarded themselves against usurpations of their rights. Many 20th-century democrats trust, almost worship state power. They fawn over tyrants, not merely hoping to overcome the will-to-death with the will-to-love (Christian hope centers on that possibility) not only hoping (much less plausibly) to make Christian love politically successful, but actually mistaking the tyrannical will-to-death for a vigorous program of social improvement.

Noted conservative author Robert Nisbet brings out this tragicomic theme of unrequited love, calling Roosevelt’s policy toward Stalin a “failed courtship.” Why was it even attempted?

Nisbet narrates the matter concisely. “The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939,” Nisbet writes, “was a jolt to the White House and the liberal mind in America.” Peace between the world’s arch-‘reactionary’ regime and the Fatherland of the Revolution, at the expense of European democracy, was supposed to have been the stuff of red-baiters hallucinations.

Less than two years later Hitler ended the embarrassment by betraying Stalin (who, like all con artists, couldn’t believe anyone would make a sucker out of him). This caused a new dilemma, one more amenable to a purely rhetorical solution. “The war,” Nisbet writes, “could no longer be called one of ‘democracy’ vs. totalitarianism.'” It was decided to call Leftist totalitarianism protodemocracy. FDR’s most trusted advisor, Harry Hopkins, “regretted that the Soviet Union tended toward totalitarianism, but he was hopeful for its future, given its egalitarian philosophy.” So was Roosevelt.

After fulsomely welcoming Stalin to the alliance, Roosevelt “fought hard to offset, to root out, American—especially religious—dislike of the Soviets.” At one memorable press conference, he cited Article 124 of the “Constitution of Russia” (as he called it), which guaranteed “freedom of religion.” Nisbet rightly identifies this as a deliberate lie by a rhetorician who assumed the American people would never fight unless they imagined some stark contrast between Nazis and Communists. Predictably, it didn’t take too long for the rhetorician to start listening to himself. After the notorious Yalta Conference in February 1945, Roosevelt baptized Stalin (who had studied for the priesthood) as something of a “Christian gentleman” in behavior if not conviction.

Many conservatives have denounced Yalta as the place where Roosevelt sacrificed Eastern Europe; Nisbet sees that substantial concessions had already occurred in Teheran in November 1943, where, “in less than an hour the President had given [Stalin] what he wanted in Poland and the Baltic States.” In return, Roosevelt demanded a “plebiscite” in those countries to determine their rulers; Stalin quickly agreed, stipulation that elections would be held “in accordance with the Soviet constitution.” The two men further agreed in disliking France generally, de Gaulle in particular, and the British Empire—all bulwarks against any future Soviet expansion, not so incidentally. Yalta performed the different yet “invaluable service of giving moral legitimation to what Stalin had acquired by sheer force,” compelling East Europeans to abandon democracy and sovereignty in the name of democracy and sovereignty. “Of one thing I am certain,” FDR concluded. “Stalin is not an imperialist.”

Churchill was an imperialist. Imperialism was ‘reactionary.’ Therefore, FDR deduced, Soviet communism must offer a greater potential for democracy than the British Empire. Churchill replied, “British imperialism has spread, and is spreading democracy more widely than any other system of government since the beginning of time.” FDR failed to see things that way, telling his son (in an incident Nisbet does not mention) that the end of British and French imperialism would bring unheard-of wealth to the United States and the democracies generally.

Nisbet finds the “intellectual roots” of Rooseveltian illusions regarding Leftist totalitarianism in the thought of Woodrow Wilson, whom FDR had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the First World War. “Making the world safe for democracy” meant making it safe from the old empires whose ambitions had ignited that war. “It never occurred to Roosevelt to see the structure of Soviet society as being close to that of Nazi Germany, as, in other words, totalitarian in both cases.” The new liberalism of Wilson and Roosevelt was a boneless liberalism. It admired not stability under prudently designed institutions but forward flow, resolute ‘progress,’ a secular equivalent of the Holy Spirit called ‘History.’

Without the resistance of stable institutions or individuals who claim unalienable, natural rights, progressivism seeks discipline from ‘leaders.’ For the new statesmen, leadership replaces governing. Nisbet remarks that FDR’s unconstitutional “National Recovery Act” would have further empowered the president. When the Supreme Court struck it down, Roosevelt made one of his few unpopular domestic moves, trying to add to the number of justices in order to pack the Court with progressives. FDR wanted constitutions, American or ‘Russian,’ to mean what he said they meant, the better to lead Americans where he wanted them to go.

De Gaulle considered Roosevelt a man whose idealism cloaked ambition, first of all from Roosevelt’s own eyes. Roosevelt never saw the dangers of Marxist ideology because his own ideology resembled it. Marxism and progressivist liberalism share a genealogy—not simply “socialism, populism, nationalism, and the whole idea of ‘redemptive revolution,'” as Nisbet writes, and not only a dreamed-of egalitarian society, but an underlying commitment to the Left-Hegelian current of German historicism. In the highest sense, Germany had already conquered Russia’s and America’s ‘Left’ elites before a shot was fired—in World War I, let alone World War II.

Hegel had responded philosophically to the Christian critique of both classical and modern rationalism. Reason—thought animated by the principle of non-contradiction—appears too rigid, in Hegel’s view, to account for the Holy Spirit that blows where it listeth, giving eternal life as surely as the breath of God animated clay on the sixth day of Creation. Replacing the Holy Spirit of the providential, Creator-God who rules the course of events from a position ‘above’ it, with the ‘Absolute Spirit’ he held to be immanent in all things, Hegel invents a logic that eschews the principle of non-contradiction in the classical sense. ‘History’ becomes the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit. In Hegelian or ‘historical’ logic, contradictory forces and things at first clash but then combine or ‘synthesize’ to produce new and higher forms of life, including human beliefs, thoughts, customs, and institutions. The stable structure or forms of nature as conceived by previous philosophers give way to movement, fluidity, a series of historical changes that will eventuate in the ‘end of history,’ the culmination of all previous events into one coherent and stable whole.

It seems paradoxical to find that this attempt to do justice to life would itself ‘evolve’ into the most malignant, death-dealing political ‘movements,’ Nazism and communism. This happened because what gives human life its movement is usually not reason but passion. In becoming ‘dialectical’ in the evolutionary, Hegelian way, thinking became impassioned. In politics, where the spirited passions of indignation, ambition, and rage predominate, this can easily lead to death, and on a mass scale. The spirited passions blinded and used the reasoning powers which might have corrected them. Reason in effect blinded itself by imitating passions, by denying itself the very power of abstraction which enables human beings to detach themselves from their passions and to judge. This is why historicists of all varieties denounce ‘abstraction,’ make a fetish of ‘concrete’ thinking and, even more resolute action guided only be ‘concrete,’ i.e., immanent thought. In the end, death is the only winner. With neither a Creator-God nor rational human minds capable of rising above the course of events to judge them, whatever ‘is’ is right.

Under the aegis of certain forms of historicism, fatality animated modern tyranny or totalitarianism. I mean by this fatality both in the sense of something held to be inevitable, irresistible, and something that ends in death. Churchill and de Gaulle knew this, or at least sensed it, and they resisted it, in both its Leftist and Rightist forms. In alliance with Roosevelt, they defeated the Rightist form. They lacked the power to block Roosevelt’s immediate designs in misjudged alliance with the Leftist form. They did succeed in delaying those designs and in limiting their effects. Today we live on the political and strategic margin provided by statesmen who understood totalitarianism better than progressives can. Statesmen can widen that margin only if they attend to the lasting structures of regimes, to whether and how those structures actually secure the rights of individual human beings.

Alf J. Mapp: Thomas Jefferson: A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity. Lanham: Madison Books, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, January 13, 1988.

 

In Professor Mapp’s estimation, contemporary liberals have too easily appropriated Thomas Jefferson as one of their own. They “begin with the assumption that Jefferson was a liberal and then either… exclude from consideration or treat as an anomaly at of his words and actions inconsistent with the liberal image.” Mapp calls this error, not mendacity: After all, “most biographies of Jefferson in recent years have come from either academe or journalism at a time when the bias of both professions has been distinctly liberal.”

It is a generous and probably accurate judgment by a generous and scrupulous historian. Mapp’s generosity comes as the overflow of a sort of filial affection, a love of ‘his own.’ A Virginian to the bone, he honors the Old Dominion’s most celebrated son. If this love occasionally makes him too generous to Jefferson (“America’s philosopher-king”), it also animates his research—undertaken with diligence and presented with warmth.

Mapp tells Jefferson’s story up to his election to the presidency in 1800, with a few glances ahead at his term in office. At William and Mary College, his anti-clerical mathematics professor, William Small, “enlisted Jefferson in the Enlightenment,” introducing him to the writings of Bacon, Newton, and Locke. Jefferson in his maturity would call these the three greatest men in the history of the world. That includes Moses (Mapp imagines Jefferson’s classification of the Old Testament under “ancient history” as a sign of piety) and Jesus (whom Jefferson regarded as human, simply). Throughout his life, Jefferson remained “extremely reticent in matters of faith even when… his silence cost him politically,” perhaps because speech would have cost him more. In swearing eternal opposition “to every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” Jefferson very much had religion in mind.

On morality and politics, Jefferson was not reticent at all. Mapp successfully defends his man against the standard charges. Yes, Jefferson opposed slavery while holding slaves. But no major Virginia landowner of the day could sustain himself, along with an uncorrupt political career, without them, given the economic conditions of that time and place. Jefferson advocated not immediate but gradual abolition, the only kind that might have been enacted. In his early career he consistently charged that the king of England had foiled attempts by Virginia to outlaw importation of slaves, and he tried to insert an antislavery clause into the Declaration of Independence. Congress later defeated his proposal to bar slavery from new states after 1800, a law that probably would have averted the Civil War.

Somewhat less plausibly, Mapp tries to reconcile Jefferson’s preference for ‘strict construction’ of the United States Constitution with the Louisiana Purchase, a move that document doesn’t explicitly permit, and one that Jefferson himself admitted, in private correspondence, to have been beyond the letter of the law. Here Mapp cites what he calls Jefferson’s “pragmatic idealism”; “though preferring strict construction,” Jefferson “had been unwilling to let it stand in the way of important opportunities for his country” before the Purchase, and would continue to think that way thereafter. Jefferson was no ideologue, despite some tendencies in that direction. One might say that the Sage of Monticello required strict construction most consistently of his enemies, the Federalists, whom he sincerely suspected of oligarchic and even monarchic ambitions. For himself and his political friends, he unbent a little, and the republic was better (undeniably bigger) for his prudent (if somewhat self-indulgent and partisan) flexibility.

On education, Jefferson most assuredly practiced what he recommended to others. His daughter Patsy received an education equivalent to that of a young gentleman, thanks to her father’s shrewd application of Lockean liberalism: “The chance that in marriage she will draw a blockhead I calculate about fourteen to one,” he wrote to a friend, “and of course [I conclude] that the education of her family will probably rest on her own ideas and direction without assistance.” It would be interesting to know the basis of that Jeffersonian estimate—whether, for instance, he was surveying the population of eligible young men in his neighborhood, his state, his country, or the world at large. No dogmatic egalitarian he, no matter what population sample he had in mind.

Perhaps to improve the odds for his prospective granddaughters, Jefferson worked to educate his countrymen, as well. While Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, he wrote his Notes on the State of Virginia, a pioneering work on New World biology, linguistics, and anthropology. Mapp rightly associates such activities with Jefferson’s commitment to religious toleration, which he considered conducive to unhindered scientific studies.

This notwithstanding, Mapp emphasizes Jefferson’s ‘romantic’ side, writing extensively and well on Jefferson’s sensitivity to art and nature, and his susceptibility to intelligent women. In the Dialogue Between the Head and the Heart, Jefferson’s farewell love letter to Maria Cosway, the Heart wins, even as it relinquishes its beloved. Mapp mistakes this for divergence from the Enlightenment, overlooking the strong moral sentimentalism of that movement, from which Romanticism came, after rejecting rationalism. Mapp’s own romantic streak gets the better of him here, and his prose turns lush in describing Jefferson’s last hour with Mrs. Cosway as “encapsulated in the awareness of impending frustration, and made the sweeter for it like grapes nestled in their sour skins.” There’s a lot of “must have” speculation about Jefferson’s feelings and thoughts in the book; added to Mapp’s weakness for merely decorative literary quotations and allusions, the thing flirts with melodrama and occasionally succumbs.

Does it all make the portrait of a man as conservative as he was liberal? Not really: But Mapp does portray an undeniably great liberal, never quite too doctrinaire to forget that liberty is about liberty as much as equality, and to defend liberty against tyrants with an aristocrat’s spirit. This is what our contemporary progressives, calling themselves liberals, seldom think or do any longer.

 

Ralph Lerner: The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, February 10, 1988.

 

Among the dozens of books timed for release during the Constitutional bicentennial, surely there must be a few really good ones? As last year wound down, this polite hope had begun to dim, as your reviewer scanned a landscape dotted with ideological sinks, hacked shrubbery, and little mounds of pedantry. But here at last stands an impressive, steep hill, the view it affords worth the climb.

Professor Lerner notes that contemporary scholars leave the American Founders “strangely bereft of revolutionary intent, or conviction, or clarity, or significance.” Reducing these statesmen to creatures of their ‘time’—of economic, social, and/or ‘cultural’ forces—”recent students of the American past still have not faced up to what, from our present-day point of view, is perhaps the most incredible assumption of the Revolutionary generation: that their highest and deepest motives derived from their reasoned understanding.”

Lerner’s task is scholarly, and more than scholarly: If human beings cannot really think beyond their contemporary circumstances, what good is having a republic, or keeping it? Our very ideas of the good itself will shift meaninglessly with the breezes of fashion. We will have not a public philosophy but a string of ideologies, one as empty as the next. What serious man or woman would fight for a myth known to be a myth? Lerner undertakes to “recover the Revolution” both for scholars and for citizens.

Beginning with John Adams, “the very model of a thinking revolutionary,” Lerner proves that the Founders balanced their revolutionary fervor—unmitigated, it would have led to the utopian terror of 1790s France—with a prudence made of equal parts moderation, intelligence, and experience. The Founders saw greater possibilities in human nature than had most previous statesmen, but unlike so many of their successors in this country and others, they also saw “the mixed motives of man.” They devised institutions to mitigate the worst effects of those motives and to encourage the best.

Even the most ‘optimistic’ of the Founders, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, never quite lost sight of these realities. Franklin “wishes to be a great mover of men, but all things considered, he would prefer they did not know it at the time.” His powerful curiosity limited his utilitarianism, and vice-versa. Jefferson’s revolutionary recasting of Virginia’s legal system “was to take place within certain legal constraints”—existing English and colonial legislation—combining “a sense of open possibilities and cherished constraints.” The “politics of reason” turns out to have been, of all things, reasonable.

Even the early Supreme Court justices sought to educate citizens in republicanism, doing so with a “mixed spirit of high hope and sober sense, equally removed from the doctrinaire and from cold legalism.” They insisted upon “the close connection between self-restraint and true liberty,” carefully “appealing to fairly narrow calculations of self-interest” at first, then “broadening the range of considerations as the argument moved from self to nation to type of regime.” Their arguments consistently aimed at “making the republicans safe for the republic.”

A republic of reasonable citizens faces many problems, given the human propensity for lapses into unreason. In America the presence of three races tested the Founders’ claim to secure natural rights, rights belonging to man as man. Visible differences of skin color betokened even more serious differences of custom. Lerner devotes a fascinating chapter to the Founders’ policy with respect to American Indians. Such men as Jefferson, Washington, and Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall believed none of the convenient fictions about the white man’s providential obligation to conquer the red man. But they saw that “Indians had for the most part little or no use for the Europeans’ economics, politics, or god,” and for their part most whites felt much the same way about the Indians’ customs. The federal government had insufficient power to halt the white settlers’ predation against the Indians, but attempts were made to convert these societies of hunters and gatherers to agriculture. Usefully enough, this policy would have required them to use much less land.

As Tocqueville writes, and as Lerner observes, the American Indians’ habits recalled nothing so much as the medieval aristocracy, with its warrior spirit, its pride, and its contempt for physical labor. The custom of chattel slavery brought out the same traits in white Southerners. Tocqueville also saw that aristocracy was giving way to democratic man—in North America, the practical if unimaginative Yankee. Red men and Southern gentry were “hopeless anachronisms in an age on the make.” Tocqueville hoped that a few remaining aristocratic virtues might at least temper democrats, as they exerted heroic efforts for “unheroic objectives.”

Lerner agrees with Tocqueville, who teaches that the modern alternative to ‘America’—that is, to commercial republicanism—is not aristocracy but ‘Russia’—a despotism based upon a sort of egalitarianism, the Hobbesian equality of shared oppression. Had Tocqueville lived to see Marxism-Leninism, he might have rewarded himself with a grim smile or (more likely) the sterner pleasure of indignation. He did indeed see both Hegelianism and socialism, detesting both.

Only the spirit of liberty counteracts egalitarianism, Tocqueville argues. And liberty requires certain virtues in order to defend itself. Lerner’s book shows how the American Founders understood the relationship of equality and liberty, governed by balance institutions and civic virtues. Their work remains timely, here and throughout the world, because these revolutionaries thought as well as they acted.