The theme begins with no less a potentate than Alexander Hamilton.
To his conviction of the essential wisdom of the wealthy classes, he added a deep skepticism as to the capacity of the masses for self-government. “All communities,” he told the men gathered in Philadelphia to ponder a constitution for the thirteen states, “divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people. … The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.” The formula for government was simple. “Give, therefore, to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and, as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government.”
Schlesinger describes a Hamilton who first tries to enshrine this permanent share of the government for the moneyed-class in the Constitution itself, but who, failing that, turns to a different strategy.
Then, as Secretary of the Treasury, he saw his chance and proposed a financial program which not only was a statesmanlike solution of pressing financial difficulties, but was brilliantly designed to give the business community its enduring stake in the government. He offered as immediate bait the assumption of the state debts and the funding system. He projected, as the keystone of a durable alliance, the Bank of the United States -- a profit-making institution to be privately owned and to enjoy special access to the public funds -- which, as he had earlier observed, would link “the interest of the State in an intimate connection with those of the rich individuals belonging to it.”
The Bank of the United States. For any history in which Andrew Jackson is to figure prominently, it is important to establish the Bank of the United States, which will become Jackson’s nemesis as he seeks to expand the vote for his own political purposes. But here it is set first as the place where the representatives of American industry -- the capitalists -- will exercise their power and influence over the United States government.
And, forty years later, when Andrew Jackson vetoes the bill that would provide it with a new charter, and especially in the message Jackson pens to accompany his veto, these lines are explicitly drawn.
Its main emphasis fell, first, on the case against the Bank as unconstitutional, and then on the political argument that the Bank represented too great a centralization of power under private control. … The distinction between “the humble members of society” and “the rich and powerful” drew quick reactions from both classes. The common man through the land responded enthusiastically to his leader’s appeal. … But men who believed that the political power of the business community should increase with its wealth were deeply alarmed. When Jackson said, “It is not conceivable how the present stockholders can have any claim to the special favor of the Government,” did he mean that the common man had the same rights as the rich and wellborn to control of the state? The Bank of the United States, according to the plan of Hamilton, would serve as the indispensable make-weight for property against the sway of numbers. Did not the veto message attack the very premises of Federalism, rejecting its axioms, destroying its keystone and rallying the groups in society bent on its annihilation?
Yes. That is generally how it was seen.
…it was becoming a battle between antagonistic philosophies of government: one declaring … that property should control the state; the other denying that property had a superior claim to governmental privileges and benefits.
Marxism Before Marx
One thing to always remember is that this battle -- between property and people, between capital and labor, between rich and poor -- is older than time itself.
Late in 1833 Samuel Clesson Allen rejected overtures to become the National Republican nominee for Governor with an able statement of his grounds for backing Jackson:
“There are two great classes in the community founded in the relation they respectively bear to the subject of its wealth. The one is the producer, and the other the accumulator. The whole products are divided between them. Has not one an interest to retain as much as it can, and the other an interest to get as much as it can? … The administration of every government, whether it is seen or not, will be guided and controlled by one or the other of these interests. … It is in the nature of things that government will always adapt its policy, be the theory of its constitution what it may, to the interests and aims of the predominating class. … I ask if labor has ever had a predominating influence in any government? … I should be glad to see an experiment of one administration, of which the interests of this class should be the guiding star. … I am encouraged in my hopes of an economical reform by the course which the President has taken in regard to the United States Bank. … What government in these days has been able to stand against the power of associated wealth? It is the real dynasty of modern states.”
The New England Association promptly endorsed Allen’s letter, and a few days later a committee of Charlestown Workingmen invited him to be their candidate for Governor.
It’s like Marxism before Marx -- manifest in something they called the Workingmen’s Party, or “Working-Menism.” What we today might call “Democratic Socialism.”
And it was Andrew Jackson and his political supporters and successors that were its standard bearers; advancing the interests and winning the support of the “workingmen” in their politics, in their legislation, and in their use of executive power.
In the meantime [President Martin] Van Buren performed by executive order the second great service of his administration. On March 31 he declared that no person should labor more than ten hours a day on federal public works, and that this should go into effect without a reduction of wages. This measure was an unmistakable declaration that the people’s government would act on behalf of the people as freely as in the past the capitalists’ government had acted on behalf of the capitalists. The Whigs promptly cried that Van Buren was infringing on the right to work and demanded that pay be reduced correspondingly. Said Horace Greely, the great alleged friend of labor: “We do not regard this measure as promising any great benefit.” The length of a day’s labor should be left to “mutual agreement. … What have Governments and Presidents to do with it?”
Sound familiar? This is the story, told again and again throughout American history. Capital versus labor. Conservatism versus populism. Tyranny of the elites versus tyranny of the masses. Can it be a coincidence that I just finished watching a restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, in which the central message is “the mediator between Head and Hands must be the Heart”? Who is the Heart in America’s story? We know who the Head and the Hands are, but who is the Heart?
The Increasing Flabbiness of Conservative Thought
To those accustomed to regard the vocabulary of Federalism as absolutely descriptive of society, its disappearance meant the end of a world. Old-school conservatives exchanged lamentations, looked darkly into the future and sank into ever blacker gloom. “I think that our experiment of self government approaches to a total failure,” observed William Sullivan of Massachusetts. “My opinion is,” said Chancellor Kent, “that the admission of universal suffrage and a licentious press are incompatible with government and security to property, and that the government and character of this country are going to ruin.” In 1837 Kent, drinking the waters of Saratoga in company with gentlemen of like mind, reported that all the talk was on the “sad hopes of self-governing democracies.” “We are going to destruction,” he summed it up with a kind of mournful relish, “--all checks and balances and institutions in this country are threatened with destruction from the ascendancy of the democracy of numbers and radicalism and the horrible doctrine and influence of Jacksonism.”
When the United States started as a country, there were two political parties: the Federalist and the Republicans, sometimes called the Democratic Republicans, to distinguish it from the party that would be started later with Abraham Lincoln at the helm.
Here, in the 1830s, the Federalist party is dying, its core tenet, conservatism for the protection of private property, falling out of favor with the rising populism stoked by Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Republicans, now, pretty much called the Democrats.
The same year the aged conservative publicist Noah Webster set forth a plan to halt the disintegration and reconstruct society according to Federalist principles. While the American people, he said, were not divided into orders, like the nobility and commoners of Britain, “the distinction of rich and poor does exist, and must always exist; no human power or device can prevent it.” Would it not be sensible, then, to recognize this distinction in the structure of government? After all, “the man who has half a million of dollars in property … has a much higher interest in government, than the man who has little or no property.” Let us therefore end the popular election of Presidents, for the “great mass of people are and always must be very incompetent judges.” Let us destroy the theory that the rich exploit the poor, and that corporations are “aristocratic in their tendency”; these are among the “most pernicious doctrines that ever cursed a nation.” Let us divide the electorate into two classes, “the qualifications of one of which shall be superior age, and the possession of a certain amount of property,” and let each class choose one house of Congress. Thus the supremacy of property may be assured, and America yet saved from democracy.
This proposal was the last gasp of Federalism. The mere act of stating such a program, after eight years of General Jackson, showed how unreal Federalism had become. No politician could espouse such ideas. No populace would submit to them. Not only were they dead, but the corpses were fatal to the touch.
It is startling to read those words. And although the Federalist party did cease to exist, those words did not, since we still hear them today, said by the same kind of people and for the same reasons. For out of the ashes of the Federalist party came the Whigs, and then out of their ashes came the Republicans, and then, now, out of their ashes are coming the Trumpers.
But in that journey, the core message had to be tempered with populist rhetoric in order to find success with each new generation.
In place of the class-conflict doctrines of Federalism, conservatism began to dwell on various theories of the identity of class interests. “Never was an error more pernicious,” exclaimed Dr. Robert Hare, the eminent Philadelphia scientist, “than that of supposing that any separation could be practicable between the interests of the rich and the working classes. However selfish may be the disposition of the wealthy, they cannot benefit themselves without serving the labourer.” (The moral was plain enough: “If the labouring classes are desirous of having the prosperity of the country restored, they must sanction all measures tending to reinstate our commercial credit, without which the wealthy will be impoverished.”)
It sounds like the birth of trickle-down economics. If the poor wants the prosperity of “the country” restored, “the country” has to give more of its money to the wealthy. But this period of rhetorical subterfuge was not just the birth of that Big Lie.
Not only were the interests of the classes identical, but there were, come to think of it, no classes at all in America. … [And,] If there were no class distinctions, then there were two possibilities: everyone might be a workingman, or everyone might be a capitalist. The conservatives adopted both theories. Edward Everett unabashedly told a hard-handed audience from Charlestown in 1830 that he was a workingman as well as they; and the New-England Magazine exploded angrily at those who got up the cry of workeyism, “as if, forsooth, every man in New-England did not work.”
But the other view was in the long run more popular. As Edward Everett remarked in 1838, the paths of wealth are open to all; “the wheel of fortune is in constant operation, and the poor in one generation furnish the rich of the next.” “Every American laborer,” wrote Calvin Colton, “can stand up proudly, and say, I AM THE AMERICAN CAPITALIST, which is not a metaphor but literal truth.” And the conclusion? “The blow aimed at the moneyed capitalist strikes over on the head of the laborer, and is sure to hurt the latter more than the former.”
Yes. Protect the rich, because you, too, might be rich one day. As I continued to read this section, it began to seem very much like every populist argument in favor of property that we wrestle with today was hatched by the Whigs in the 1830s as they tried to resurrect conservatism in the trappings of liberty and freedom.
Conservatism was not content simply with pressing conciliatory alternatives to Democratic theories of class conflict. It went on the offensive itself, and when the radicals charged that conservatives favored the rule of an aristocracy, the conservatives began to answer that the Democrats favored the rule of a despot. The issue, they said, was not class tyranny but executive tyranny. The basic conflict was not between exploiters and exploited, but between the governors and the governed. The main threat to liberty came, not from a propertied class, but from a bureaucratic class. The people should rise and rebuke the pretensions, not of wealth, but of government.
Yes. Do you want some faceless bureaucrat making your health care decisions for you?
From Federalist days, furthermore, the traditional conservative position had been to distrust the legislative and aggrandize the executive. Alexander Hamilton had favored a President chosen for life; it was John Taylor of Caroline [a Democratic Republican] who set forth the arguments against executive despotism. But the actualities of the eighteen-thirties were simply that the Democrats possessed the executive; and it looked very much as if the greatest potentialities for democratic action might continue to reside in the executive rather than in the legislative. Accordingly conservatism abandoned its historic position and emerged as the champion of congressional prerogative -- a role it has tended to play ever since.
Well, I guess that depends on just who that faceless bureaucrat is. Because in the false rhetoric of this conservatism, it was not executive power, per se, that was the threat to liberty, it was the Democrats, wherever they happened to sit in the government.
It was the beginning of the intellectual bankruptcy of the conservative movement -- and it started in the 1830s, not, as the readers of Rick Perlstein may think, in the 1960s.
The metamorphosis of conservatism revived it politically but ruined it intellectually. The Federalists had thought about society in an intelligent and hard-boiled way. Their ideas had considerable relevance to the conflicts and tensions of the life around them. But the Whigs, in scuttling Federalism, replaced it by a social philosophy founded, not on ideas, but on subterfuges and sentimentalities. As Henry Adams observed, “Of all the parties that have existed in the United States, the famous Whig party was the most feeble in ideas.”
Federalism and Whiggery represented the same interests in society, the same aspirations for power, the same essential economic policies; but Federalism spoke of these interests, aspirations and policies in a tone of candor, Whiggery, of evasion. The vocabulary of Federalism had something to do with actualities; it was useful as a scheme of analysis; it aided one’s understanding of society. The vocabulary of Whiggery had nothing to do with actualities; it was useful mainly as a disguise; its object was to promote confusion rather than comprehension. Both intended to serve the business class, but the revolution in political values forced the Whigs to talk as if they intended primarily to serve the common man.
But all of this made sense to the Whigs (and to their successors in the Republican and Trumper parties) because they believed themselves to be protecting the constitution, and by extension, the country as it was originally designed and enshrined. As they saw it, they were lying in the service of truth -- a kind of growing secret truth that only they possessed and which could no longer be discussed in mixed company.
The dilemma of those who tried to maintain their private convictions and live an intellectual double life was exhibited in the case of Calvin Colton. The close friend and official biographer of Henry Clay, a Whig pamphleteer and general party handy man, Colton was a Yale graduate who left a successful career in the ministry for an even more successful career as editor and propagandist. The series of political tracts he wrote under the name of Junius present the most complete and forceful statement of all the new Whig positions -- pastoralism, class harmony, the struggle against executive despotism, the essential democracy of the Whig party. Yet, they were very far from expressing Colton’s secret views. Evidently unable to rest in silence, but unwilling to jeopardize his party, he published anonymously in London in 1839 a book called A Voice from America to England and signed By an American Gentleman.
A Voice from America was a frank, thoughtful and intelligent book. American Society, Colton argued, had manifested two opposite tendencies, “one towards the lowest level of democracy, and the other towards a spiritual supremacy.” The Constitution was “framed by men who foresaw the tendency of the public mind towards democracy, and who purposely constructed this instrument to arrest the downward progress.” Since 1788 “the great struggle in America, and that on which the fate of the Republic is suspended, is between the Constitution and the Democracy.” On one side is a conservative party which desires “a return of the people to the good sense which characterized the framers,” on the other a radical party “which threatens a dissolution and overthrow of the republic.” The advantage in this struggle lay with the radicals because of their resort to opportunistic and demagogic tactics.
There it is. We should rule -- and the Constitution is the very instrument of that rule. Those who oppose it, who wish to extend the suffrage to those we should be ruling, are the radicals, who are seeking to overthrow the republic.
I’ve gone on at great length in this section on really just one chapter in this book, titled “The Whig Counterreformation,” because it is just so damn prescient for the times we now find ourselves living in. Schlesinger ends this remarkable chapter like this:
The widening chasm between private belief and public profession took all seriousness out of Whiggery as a social philosophy, turning it into a miscellaneous collection of stock political appeals, consistent only in a steady but muted enmity to change. It may be argued, of course, that the intellectual collapse of conservatism was unimportant, since the first criterion of a political creed is its success and not its profundity. Yet it may be speculated whether the repeated failure of conservatism in this country to govern effectively may not be related to the increasing flabbiness of conservative thought. Individuals might continue thinking in Federalist terms, reserving the Whig phrases for public consumption; but such a thoroughly Machiavellian position is difficult to sustain. When a party starts out by deceiving the people, it is likely to finish by deceiving itself.
Welcome to the 2020s. Conservatism, bereft of its intellectual foundation, cannot govern effectively, because after a century or more of speaking in falsehoods, it has come to deny essential elements of reality.
The Growing Ineffectiveness of Private Conscience
Another thought-provoking chapter is the one called “Jacksonian Democracy and Industrialism,” as it also describes the birth of another perennial dilemma of the nation and its understanding of liberty: the corporation.
Economic life before the corporation, at least according to the prevalent conceptions, was more or less controlled by a feeling of mutual responsibility among the persons concerned. Economic relationships were generally personal -- between master and workman laboring together in the same shop, between buyer and seller living together in the same village. The very character of this relation produced some restraints on the tendency of the master to exploit the workman, or of the seller to cheat the buyer. Reciprocal confidence was necessarily the keynote of a system so much dominated by personal relations. Business and private affairs were governed by much the same ethical code.
A feeling of mutual responsibility. Mark that. Business and private affairs governed by the same ethical code.
But industrialism brought the growing depersonalization of economic life. With the increase in size of the labor force, the master was further and further removed from his workmen, till the head of a factory could have only the most tenuous community of feeling with his men. With the development of manufacturing and improved means of distribution, the seller lost all contact with the buyer, and feelings of responsibility to the consumer inevitably diminished. The expansion of investment tended to bring on absentee ownership, with the divorce of ownership and management; and the rise of cities enfeebled the paternal sentiments with which many capitalists had regarded their workers in towns and villages. Slowly the vital economic relationships were becoming impersonal, passing out of the control of a personal moral code. Slowly private morality and business morality grew apart. Slowly the commercial community developed a collection of devices and ceremonials which enabled businessmen to set aside the ethic which ruled their private life and personal relations.
And among these devices? These devices that allowed businessmen to separate personal and business ethics?
Of the devices the most dramatic and generally intelligible was the corporation. For a people still yearning for an economy dominated by individual responsibility, still under the spell of the Jeffersonian dream, the corporation had one outstanding characteristic: its moral irresponsibility. “Corporations have neither bodies to be kicked, nor souls to be damned,” went a favorite aphorism. Beyond good and evil, insensible to argument or appeal, they symbolized the mounting independence of the new economy from the restraints and scruples of personal life.
One thing worth noting is that among those who tout and promote personal responsibility as a cure-all for the lethargy and moral degradation of our age, the corporation, and its utter lack of personal responsibility, is seldom the target of their attacks. Curious.
“As directors of a company,” wrote William M. Gogue, “men will sanction actions of which they would scorn to be guilty in their private capacity. A crime which would press heavily on the conscience of one man, becomes quite endurable when divided among many.” Even businessmen could not deny the accusation. “Corporations will do what individuals would not dare to do,” exclaimed Peter C. Brooks, the wealthiest man in Boston. “--Where the dishonesty is the work of all the Members, every one can say with Macbeth in the murder of Banquo ‘thou canst not say I did it.’” It is difficult to exaggerate the frequency with which the corporation was condemned as a technique for the stilling of conscience. “These artificial creatures,” said a committee of the Massachusetts legislature, “...unlike individual employers, are not chastened and restrained in their dealing with the laborers, by human sympathy and direct personal responsibility to conscience and to the bar of public opinion.”
I find it an interesting take on that old libertarian canard about the power of the government to do what is illegal for the individual. Why doesn’t the same libertarian logic apply to the corporation? Why is it permissible for the corporation to what restrains by law or morality the individual?
In 1840 Amos Kendall urged the inculcation of the belief that “there is but one code of morals for private and public affairs.” His very concern was a confession that two codes existed. The new economy had burst the bonds of the old personal morality, and the consequences were fundamental for the whole Jeffersonian tradition.
As long as individual responsibility existed in the economic system, as long as a single code more or less governed business and personal life, the Jeffersonians were right, and that government was best which governed least. But these were the moral characteristics of a society of small freeholds, as Jefferson well understood. When the economy became too complex to admit of much personal responsibility, when ownership became attenuated and liability limited and diffused, when impersonality began to dominate the system and produce irresponsibility, when, in short, economic life began to throw off the control of personal scruple, then government had to extend its function in order to preserve the ties which hold society together. The history of government intervention is thus a history of the growing ineffectiveness of private conscience as a means of social control. With private conscience powerless, the only alternative to tyranny or anarchy was the growth of the public conscience, and the natural expression of the public conscience was the democratic government.
This is the larger point. Individual liberty only works in a society where people are responsible to one another. When that responsibility is removed, as it was through the invention of the corporation, there is the tendency for the individual liberty of the corporation to morph into tyranny. In that world, there must be restraints on corporate liberty, and if those restraints can’t be effected by individuals, then it has to be by their government.
But why are those most passionately devoted to individual liberty also most passionately opposed to government restraint? Many, probably, fail to see this point, or perhaps see it but still want to have it both ways.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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