The Conservative Sensibility Page 10
It is not a mere coincidence that modernism in literature and art grew as the speed of transportation and communication accelerated. This bombardment of the senses by new stimuli—this blitzkrieg by the social environment—left many people feeling that the sense of one’s self was becoming derivative, attenuated, and brittle. Neither is it a coincidence that the politics of consciousness has engulfed America’s college campuses, where progressivism uses its hegemony to control speech, lest unprogressive social promptings impede the engineering of better consciousnesses. All of this is, in a sense, a lingering reverberation of what moved Dewey. He had imbibed the core scientific proposition of the first half of the twentieth century, the proposition that the essence of life is matter in motion. Hence any idea of fixity, including a fixed human nature, was considered scientifically retrograde and, potentially at least, politically reactionary.57 The entire progressive edifice depends on denying fixity—the stubborn fact of a human nature that is not malleable.
Fixity circumscribes the potency of politics, draining politics of some of its excitement. On the other hand, the larger the sphere of things considered to be mere “social constructs,” the more majestic is the jurisdiction of politics, and the greater is the dignity attaching to its practitioners. It is, therefore, understandable that the leakage of postmodernism’s assumptions and vocabulary into society has been welcomed by progressives, for whom politics, the supposed driver of progress, is supremely important.
Because progressivism had such high hopes for power, and because progressives had an urgent desire to free power from institutional circumscriptions, this desire translated into impatience with the constitutional architecture through which Founders codified their prudence about power and human nature. With remarkable thoroughness, this impatience produced the enormous political achievement that would be a necessary precondition for all other progressive achievements. The achievement was the creation of the modern presidency—and the constitutional disequilibrium that this has produced. The causes and consequences of this are still unfolding.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT: HEGEL ON HORSEBACK
The twentieth century began for America with a bang, that of the assassin’s bullet that in 1901 put the boisterous Theodore Roosevelt, just forty-two, in the presidential chair that had been occupied by a notably sedentary man, William McKinley, who in 1896 had campaigned seated on his front porch in Canton, Ohio. Roosevelt was, as a contemporary said, “a steam engine in trousers.” This Harvard-educated patrician cowboy from Manhattan galloped into the Dakota Badlands wearing spurs and a pearl-handled revolver from Tiffany, and charged up San Juan Hill in a uniform from Brooks Brothers. He was the first president born in a big city, and the first known to the nation as an intimate—by his initials. A toothy grin crinkled his entire face as he lived life as “one long campaign.”58 Author of thirty-six books and 100,000 letters, the most intellectual president since John Quincy Adams sometimes read two books a day—some in Italian, Portuguese, Latin, Greek, or other languages he knew, and he could recite the entire “Song of Roland.” Just as he transformed himself from a frail asthmatic child too starved for breath to blow out his bedside candle, he transformed the presidency.
When, in The Strenuous Life, Theodore Roosevelt wrote about men capable of “feeling the mighty lift that thrills ‘stern men with empires in their brains,’” he was quoting a James Russell Lowell poem from 1862, a grim year when the nation needed many stern men.59 Lowell’s trope was echoed in bumptious post–Civil War America by Sam Walter Foss’ poem “The Coming American,” written in 1894, when Roosevelt was very much a coming man:
Bring me men to match my mountains;
Bring me men to match my plains,—
Men with empires in their purpose,
And new eras in their brains.
Roosevelt vibrated like a tuning fork to Foss’ call for “men whose thought shall pave a highway up to ampler destinies.”60 Roosevelt, who then was just four years away from his charge up Cuba’s San Juan Hill and to the pinnacle of American politics, had thoughts that were grounded in progressive premises and that would justify an imperial destiny. With his progressive penchant for seeing in the sweep of history an ascent to higher stages, Roosevelt’s thinking echoed a letter Jefferson wrote in 1824:
Let a philosophic observer commence a journey from the savages of the Rocky Mountains, eastwardly towards our sea-coast. These he would observe in the earliest stage of association living under no law but that of nature, subscribing and covering themselves with the flesh and skins of wild beasts. He would next find those on our frontiers in the pastoral state, raising domestic animals to supply the defects of hunting. Then succeed our own semi-barbarous citizens, the pioneers of the advance of civilization, and so in his progress he would meet the gradual shades of improving man until he would reach his, as yet, most improved state in our seaport towns. This, in fact, is equivalent to a survey, in time of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present day.61
The crucible of Franklin Roosevelt’s post-polio agony, physical and psychological, made him into one of the four presidents who were larger than the government into which they entered as officials. Washington established the central government’s authority. Lincoln preserved that authority. TR fueled executive supremacy. FDR settled the central government’s supremacy and the sufficiency of its powers for national purposes. Something, however, was missing in FDR. What he lacked, however, made him great. He lacked the capacity even to imagine that things might turn out badly. He had a Christian’s faith that the universe is well constituted and an American’s faith that history is a rising road. In this, FDR was very like his cousin Teddy. TR contrasted what he called people with a disreputable appetite for “milk-and-water cosmopolitanism” with the hardier types of “great expanding peoples” who eat “roast beef” and can “make their blows felt in the world.”62 Woodrow Wilson, the professor in politics, had a persona that would, in time, set Teddy Roosevelt’s gleaming teeth on edge.
In 1890, the US Census Bureau declared the American frontier closed. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner cast a retrospective glance in one of the most influential essays in American historiography, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Later that year, he looked ahead. With remarkable prescience, he suggested that the nation’s growth need not end when the frontier did: The “energies of expansion” hitherto invested in taming the continent could find new outlets if a “popular hero” directed them into foreign policy goals such as “an interoceanic canal” and “revival of our power upon the seas.” Turner had imagined the essence of the agenda of the man who would be president eight years later.63
To the question “Who among all the presidents would you most like to be seated next to at a dinner party?” the answer is surely Theodore Roosevelt. He had an infectious talent for happiness, he overflowed with enthusiasms, and he was a Roman candle of ideas. However, what he did not have, and this lack was related to his boundless energy, was a constitutional temperament. In September 1895, when he was thirty-seven, Roosevelt exhorted a Buffalo audience to “Read The Federalist—it is one of the greatest—I hardly know whether it would not be right to say that it is on the whole the greatest book dealing with applied politics there has ever been.”64 Six years later, as president, he began an era of executive exuberance that expressed his ever-intensifying exasperation with the constitutional architecture that The Federalist essays were written to justify. And by the time he campaigned in 1912 for a return to the presidency, he was full cry against the political philosophy that produced this architecture. There were three reasons for this.
First, it is an old axiom that where you stand often depends on where you sit. When Roosevelt sat at the presidential desk, he naturally thought, as even less egocentric presidents have thought, that the president should be the sun in the constitutional solar system. Roosevelt took to heart what Madison said in Federalist 51: “The interest of the man must be connected with th
e constitutional rights of the place.”65 Roosevelt’s interest was in maximizing presidential powers. Second, in politics, even more than in life generally, temperament is telling. Henry Adams called Roosevelt “pure act.” He would have filled any office he occupied with overflowing energy. The third and most interesting reason for Roosevelt’s presidential and post-presidency impatience with the Founders’ handiwork is an idea, or a constellation of closely related ideas, concerning the basic mechanics of social development. As Jean M. Yarbrough writes, “Roosevelt was far more interested in the growth and expansion of America than in its ‘founding.’” For the authors of the Federalist Papers, nature supplied what Yarbrough calls “the moral ground against which political action must be judged.”66 For Roosevelt, history supplied that ground.
Of the foreign languages that Roosevelt mastered, the most important was German, the subject in which he received his best grades as a Harvard undergraduate. His interest in things German was congruent with a strong inclination of the American intelligentsia in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century. It was German philosophy, and particularly a philosophy of history, that seized the imaginations of many American intellectuals. This philosophy implied an understanding of progress that was, as Yarbrough says, “at odds with the political principles the Exposition was at least nominally celebrating.” Roosevelt’s intellectually formative years coincided with what Yarbrough calls “the Hegelian moment in American politics.” Before the Civil War, Europe had been a beacon to Southerners seeking intellectual armament against the natural rights philosophy that pitted the American creed against their region’s distinguishing institution. After the war, Northerner intellectuals looked to Germany for inspiration. Yarbrough says that Hegel, who taught “the progressive unfolding of freedom in history,” and who presented the state as “the embodiment of the ethical life of the nation,” spoke powerfully to a generation of scholars seeking to find meaning in the Civil War trauma that their nation had endured.67 Many of them found in Hegel two other things. One was the idealization of the bureaucratic state administered by supposedly disinterested experts. Second, this ideal justified the conclusion that the separation of powers was an anachronism, no longer necessary or even tolerable.
The recent cobbling together of a great German nation from a congeries of rival principalities had made unity in the regime a supreme value. The doctrine of the separation of powers, Hegel wrote, implies that government cannot be “a living unity.”68 Once a nation has progressed to be such a living unity, it can be administered by a disinterested state. Then the doctrine of separation of powers becomes pointless. This doctrine’s premise is that institutions necessarily have their own institutional interests, appetites, and constituencies that arise from, and reflect, society’s pluralism of factions, interests, and ideologies. But because progress—the ascent to an ever richer and broader consensus—brings social homogenization, the separation of powers serves only to impede the efficiency of the modern state. Applied to the United States, this theory justified a greatly enlarged presidency, to which TR felt suited.
Paradoxically, the fact that the Constitution vests the presidency with few explicit powers—the powers to veto legislation, to make appointments (including those contingent on Senate approval), to make treaties with Senate approval, and to command such armed forces as Congress creates—has actually helped to make the office especially powerful. The Constitution’s silence about other presidential powers has encouraged the belief—the Rooseveltian belief—that whatever presidents are not forbidden to do they can do with a tranquil constitutional conscience. About half of Article II’s little more than 1,000 words pertain to the selection, compensation, and means of removing presidents. The very parsimony of Article II’s language about presidential power has facilitated the growth of that power. Political nature abhors a vacuum, and into Article II’s vacuum came an elementary force of nature named Roosevelt, with his “stewardship” theory of the presidency. Writing eleven years after, and regarding, his 1902 threat to seize Pennsylvania coal mines during a miners’ strike, Roosevelt wrote that “a genuine democracy of desire to serve the plain people” explained and justified his “theory that the executive power was limited only by specific restrictions and prohibitions appearing in the Constitution or imposed by the Congress under its Constitutional powers.”69 His “democracy of desire” demanded, and deserved, vast scope:
My view was that every executive officer, and above all every executive officer in high position, was a steward of the people bound actively and affirmatively to do all he could for the people, and not to content himself with the negative merit of keeping his talents undamaged in a napkin. I declined to adopt the view that what was imperatively necessary for the Nation could not be done by the President unless he could find some specific authorization to do it. My belief was that it was not only his right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the Nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws.… I did not usurp power, but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power.70
In his 1910 speech unveiling the “New Nationalism,” former (and, he hoped, future) president Roosevelt took aim at “special interests” who “twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will.” His proposed solution was “a policy of far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had.” Large combinations of wealth were here to stay but could be tamed by “completely controlling them in the interest of the public welfare.” This was sensible if one believed, as he did, that “the danger to American democracy lies not in the least in the concentration of administrative power in responsible and accountable hands. It lies in having the power insufficiently concentrated, so that no one can be held responsible to the people for its use.”71
More than a century later, having had abundant experience with the administrative state, Americans should be skeptical that concentrating ever more power in this state is a recipe for accountability and responsibility. Roosevelt, however, began America’s long march to the present. America now has what Yale law professor Alexander Bickel termed “a Gaullist presidency…needing no excuse for aggregating power to itself besides the excuse that it could do more effectively what other institutions, particularly Congress, did not do very rapidly or very well, or under particular political circumstances would not do at all.”72
TR, who a critic said “keeps a pulpit concealed on his person,”73 was an individualist who considered the individualism of others an impediment to the social unity he thought was a prerequisite for national greatness. He advocated what one scholar has called “warrior republicanism.”74 TR saw virtue emerging from struggle, especially violent struggle, between nations, with human nature evolving toward improvement through conflict. The dark vision of potentially unlimited progress through unending strife caused him to advocate the concentration of power in the federal government as an efficient instrument of his vision. His agenda was radically more ambitious than the Founders’ project of limited government maintaining order, protecting property, and otherwise staying largely out of the way of individual striving. TR welcomed “an age of combination,” meaning vast interlocking economic entities.75 Big was, he thought, beautiful and, besides, it was inevitable. So government, and especially the presidency, must become commensurate to the task of breaking American individualism to the saddle of collective purposes. He wanted the state to rescue America from the danger, as he saw it, that a commercial republic breeds effeminacy. Government as moral tutor must pull chaotic individualists up from private preoccupations and put these elevated people in harness for redemptive collective action. The purest such action was, TR thought, war.
TR’s Harvard teacher William James spoke of a “moral equivalent of war.” TR’s idea was: Accept no substitutes. TR wanted the body politic to really be one body, with the president as the head. He gave short shrift to civil society—the institutions that
mediate between individuals and the state, insulating them from dependence and coercion. He had a Rousseauian notion that the individual could only attain real freedom through immersion in the collective. Above all, he was a great precursor, a man whose career was a prerequisite for that of the man he came to loathe, Woodrow Wilson.
WOODROW WILSON: THE PROFESSOR IN POLITICS
There was something in the social atmosphere of the early twentieth century that made some people who were intelligent enough to know better have extravagant thoughts. “On or about December 1910,” Virginia Woolf said in a 1924 essay, “human character changed.” (She was referring to a Postimpressionist art exhibit. Really.)76 In 1912, Woodrow Wilson, campaigning for the presidency, had been similarly excited: “We are in the presence of a new organization of society.” He added: “A new social age, a new era of human relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life.” Hence it was time to put away childish things, such as the political formulations of the Founders, from “the old-fashioned days when life was very simple.” As Princeton’s president, Wilson had endeavored “to make the young gentlemen of the rising generation as unlike their fathers as possible.” It is not surprising that their fathers, who Wilson said “were out of sympathy with the creative, formative and progressive forces of society,” were emphatically out of sympathy with Wilson and glad to see him gone from Princeton.77 Nevertheless, Wilson correctly thought that the advent of mechanical transportation and communication changed the nature of the nation. Before such transportation, no one had moved faster than Julius Caesar had. Before the telegraph, no one had communicated over a distance greater than a human voice can carry or without physically transporting something tangible from here to there. New modes of transportation and communication—and energy and manufacturing—made many changes in the nation. The pertinent question, however, was and is: How did these changes alter the relevance and meaning of what the Founders had wrought?