american liberalism and the democratic dream: transcending the american dream

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Policy Studies Review Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 69-102 AMERICAN LIBERALISM AND THE DEMOCRATIC DREAM: John E Manley Stanford University TRANSCENDING THE AMERICAN DREAM Three dreams run through American history: the democratic dream, the elitist dream, and the American dream. The embryo of the democratic dream was on the boats that brought the Pilgrims here in 1620. William Bradford, leader of Plymouth Colony, attributes the Mayflower Compact, America's first constitution, to the "discontented and mutinous" speeches of some passengers who said that when they "came ashore they would use their own liberty, for none had power to command them, the [charter] they had being for Virginia and not for New England ..." (1953, pp. 76-77). The Mayflower Compact sought to quiet such rumblings, but from the early demands for liberty on the Mayflower, and similar resistance to elite control in Massachusetts Bay, evolved the democratic dream of a society of generally equal, independent, free, and prosperous people. The democratic dream, which is far less well-known than its conservative and liberal rivals, does not say all people are equal in abilities or talents; rather it says no society sharply divided between rich and poor, privileged elite and mass, can be democratic because, in a society where nearly everything has a price, equality is a necessary condition of independence and freedom. Democracy respects the will of the majority, and some economic inequality may be tolerated, but the general social objective is a dominant middle class. This saves the democratic dream from the charge of mindless leveling, while putting popular limits on the degree of inequality thought compatible with democratic society. The elitist dream also came over on the Mayflower. Bradford recounts with horror the story of Thomas Morton who enticed indentured servants in Massachusetts into rebellion, helped them set up their own free community, which then fell into "great licentiousness": drinking, setting up a maypole, taking Indian women as consorts, and dancing like fairies (1953, p. 206). Bradford's Massachusetts counterpart, Governor John Winthrop, thought democracy the worst of all forms of government, and the Reverend John Cotton wondered out loud, "If all the people be Governors, who shall be Governed?" (Adams, 1921, Blacks were sold in Virginia the year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth.' Lord Baltimore established a feudal order in Maryland with full manorial rights, and similar fiefdoms were created in New York. Indentured servants and women were less than second-class citizens, with the notable difference that male servants could in time attain full freedom. To many newcomers, the new world's attraction was the opportunity for domination, not pp. 143-44). 89

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Page 1: AMERICAN LIBERALISM AND THE DEMOCRATIC DREAM: TRANSCENDING THE AMERICAN DREAM

Policy Studies Review Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 69-102

AMERICAN LIBERALISM AND THE DEMOCRATIC DREAM:

John E Manley Stanford University

TRANSCENDING THE AMERICAN DREAM

Three dreams run through American history: the democratic dream, the elitist dream, and the American dream. The embryo of the democratic dream was on the boats that brought the Pilgrims here in 1620. William Bradford, leader of Plymouth Colony, attributes the Mayflower Compact, America's first constitution, to the "discontented and mutinous" speeches of some passengers who said that when they "came ashore they would use their own liberty, for none had power to command them, the [charter] they had being for Virginia and not for New England ..." (1953, pp. 76-77). The Mayflower Compact sought to quiet such rumblings, but from the early demands for liberty on the Mayflower, and similar resistance to elite control in Massachusetts Bay, evolved the democratic dream of a society of generally equal, independent, free, and prosperous people.

The democratic dream, which is far less well-known than its conservative and liberal rivals, does not say all people are equal in abilities or talents; rather it says no society sharply divided between rich and poor, privileged elite and mass, can be democratic because, in a society where nearly everything has a price, equality is a necessary condition of independence and freedom. Democracy respects the will of the majority, and some economic inequality may be tolerated, but the general social objective is a dominant middle class. This saves the democratic dream from the charge of mindless leveling, while putting popular limits on the degree of inequality thought compatible with democratic society.

The elitist dream also came over on the Mayflower. Bradford recounts with horror the story of Thomas Morton who enticed indentured servants in Massachusetts into rebellion, helped them set up their own free community, which then fell into "great licentiousness": drinking, setting up a maypole, taking Indian women as consorts, and dancing like fairies (1953, p. 206). Bradford's Massachusetts counterpart, Governor John Winthrop, thought democracy the worst of all forms of government, and the Reverend John Cotton wondered out loud, "If all the people be Governors, who shall be Governed?" (Adams, 1921,

Blacks were sold in Virginia the year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth.' Lord Baltimore established a feudal order in Maryland with full manorial rights, and similar fiefdoms were created in New York. Indentured servants and women were less than second-class citizens, with the notable difference that male servants could in time attain full freedom. To many newcomers, the new world's attraction was the opportunity for domination, not

pp. 143-44).

89

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democracy, but throughout the colonies democratic resistance is evident from the beginning.

The elitist dream envisions an America of the superior few and inferior many. It denies that America stands for mass equality, independence, freedom, and emancipation from the curse of poverty. Such rewards go disproportiona- tely to the winners of a competition in which all (allegedly) have an equal opportunity to compete, and losers have no fair complaint against w h e n 2 Elitist beliefs have either accommodated or supported slavery, subjugated women, justified displacement and even annihilation of Native Americans, legitimated capitalism over the egalitarian society of independent producers preferred by Jefferson, and permeate American life today.

The American dream--which critic Maxwell Geismar calls our "ruling myth" (1970, p. 45)3--is a compromise of the democratic and elitist dreams. On economic equaliv, the American dream is elitist: The United States promises the equal opportunity to become unequal, not social and economic equality. What purportedly saves the American dream's claim to be democratic is support for legal and political equality; independence, freedom, and real equality are reserved for the successful. For most people, the American dream means marginal economic improvement; democracy, in all but the formal or legalistic sense, is essentially dropped from the promise of American life.

This essay argues that neither conservatism nor liberalism, the two poles between which American politics normally swings, can be expected to advance democracy in America. The conservative elitist dream makes no pretension of concern for social democracy, and a revived liberal version of the American dream offers at best a less oppressive social order than that envisioned in the conservative dream. An earlier dream of America--Thomas Jefferson's radical democratic dream--must be rediscovered and adapted to contemporary American life.

VITAL CENTER LIBERALISM

A quarter century after Lyndon Johnson's Great Society perished in Vietnam, and the "end of liberalism" was declared (Lowi, 1969), the question frequently occurs: If Johnson had resisted war, would liberalism have success- fully established the Great Society at home? Johnson himself explained the Great Society's failure in terms of "guns vs. butter." "I knew from the start," he told Doris Kearns, "that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. If I left the woman I really loved--the Great Society--in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes ..." (1976, p. 251). War spending surely drained money from the Great Society. Indeed, in the 20th century the domestic programs of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Johnson were all sacrificed to war. But the "guns vs. butter" theory deflects attention from the hard anti-communist line that was one of the pillars of 20th century liberalism, and it conveniently suggests there is nothing wrong with liberalism that a return of liberals to power and more money for social programs cannot solve. The theory also fails to explain why, decades after the end of the Vietnam war, liberalism still had a bad name, and the American people repeatedly shut liberal Democrats out of the White House:

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Manley: American Liberalism and the American Dream 91

It was not progressivism that failed in the 1960s, but a particular kind of liberalism: "vital center" liberalism.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.'s theory of vital center liberalism was institution- alized in the anti-communist Americans for Democratic Action in 1946, and codified in his book, The vital Center (1949). The postwar red scare, Harry Truman's loyalty program for federal employees, the red-baiting of unions and of Henry Wallace, conservative attacks on the "socialistic" New and Fair Deals, and the plague bacillus of McCarthyism all undermined progressivism and heightened interest in a new liberal alternative. Advocates of vital center (or cold war) liberalism captured the Democratic party after World War I1 and purged it of progressives who were said to be soft on communism. In this context, Schlesinger tried to reconcile New Deal liberalism and capitalism, and to distinguish militantly anti-communist liberalism from the progressive--and allegedly tainted--liberalism of the past.

Liberalism and capitalism needed reconciliation after World War 11, because capitalism's legitimacy was weakened in the 1930s when the economy failed. As millions of people sought work that capitalists could not provide, the New Deal moved left, embraced the welfare state, and took considerable responsibility from capitalists for managing economic recovery. If Franklin Roosevelt's description of himself as a "little to the left of center" is accurate, and if he took capitalism as much for granted as his family (Perkins, 1946, pp. 328-33), one may ask, why did many capitalists fear him? Partly, it was style and rhetoric. FDR obviously enjoyed venting popular unrest and shaking members of his class with such 1936 campaign statements as: "I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match .... I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master" (Leuchtenburg, 1963, p. 184). Those who thought he was talking about them could hardly be expected to appreciate such remarks. Partly, it was policy. FDR was prepared, as he put it, to "throw to the wolves" the 46 men with incomes over $1 million if this were necessary to save capitalism. William Randolph Hearst attributed Roosevelt's 1935 "soak the rich tax bill to a composite personality: Stalin Delano Roosevelt (Schlesinger, 1966, pp. 325-29). But mainly it was the emergency. Historian William Leuchtenburg (1967, pp. 53-54) captures it well:

As the 1936 campaign got underway, the note of class conflict sometimes reached a high pitch. At an excited night meeting at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, a stern-faced Danton, State Senator Warren Roberts, spat out the names of the Republican oligarchs: Mellon, Grundy, Pew, Rockefeller. The crowd greeted each name with a resounding "boo." "You could almost hear the swish of the guillotine blade," wrote one reporter afterwards. Then came Gover- nor George Earle, their handsome Mirabeau, and he too churned up the crowd against the enemies of their class. 'There are the Mellons, who have grown fabulously wealthy from the toil of men of iron and steel ... Grundy, whose sweatshop operators have been the shame and

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disgrace of Pennsylvania for a generation; Pew, who strives to build a political and economic empire with himself as dictator; the duPonts, whose dollars were earned with the blood of American soldiers; Morgan, financier of war." As he sounded each name, the crowd interrupted him with a chorus of jeers against the business leaders. Then the gates opened at a far corner of the park; a motor-cycle convoy put-putted its way into the field, followed by an open car in which rode Franklin Delano Roosevelt, grinning and waving his hat, and the crowd whipped to a frenzy, roared its welcome to their champion.

As it turned out, FDR was in a mood to steal the left's thunder (especially Huey Long's) not dip deeply into the pockets of the rich or uproot capitalism. But relations between liberal Democrats and business were strained in the 1930s; in the 1940s, repairs began. Schlesinger emphasized liberalism's and capitalism's shared values, especially the belief in a free society; he praised the "prodigious accomplishments" of capitalism, and extolled the "confidence, intelli- gence, and [even] ruthlessness of the businessmen." Kind words were found for robber barons Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Capitalists extracted a heavy price in human terms for progress, he admits, but not as heavy as that paid for industrializing the Soviet economy. For all their contributions, capital- ists still cannot be relied on for effective governance. Governance requires the noblesse oblige and concern for the national interest of the vital center's hero, Franklin Roosevelt. With such leadership, capitalism and vital center liberalism together promise freedom, a healthy economy, and the American dream (Schlesinger, 1949, p. x, pp. 12-14, pp. 43-44).

Schlesinger's praise for business was matched by his contempt for progres- sives. Henry Wallace was the immediate target, but Schlesinger's indictment embraces the entire progressive tradition in America. Progressives are attacked ad hominem as "soft" and "sentimental"; they are said to have a "shallow conception of human nature" because they believe in the essential goodness of humans, and in the inevitability of progress; ultimately, they believe in the dream of communism.

Burdened with a social analysis that consisted of "dry and broken plati- tudes," Schlesinger argues that progressives easily became apologists for Soviet Union. He charged progressives with acting as if Dostoevski, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sorel, and Freud never charted the possibilities of depravity, and as if Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini never transformed depravity into a way of life. Romantic notions about the working class, formed before capitalism raised mass living standards, and misplaced faith in the radical potential of unions, rounded out Schlesinger's critique. History has passed progressives by, Schlesinger concluded, which is just as well because realpolitik was too serious a matter to be left to impotent romantics (Schlesinger, 1949, pp. 36-41).

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Manley: American Liberalism and the American Dream 93

PROGRESSIVE LIBERALISM

Vital center liberalism was a product of the cold war and had its day; can anything of progressive liberalism be salvaged from the liberal wreckage? No one familiar with the turbulent history of progressivism in America will answer this question confidently, but if progressivism is to enjoy a resurgence it must offer a superior democratic vision of America than the "interest group liberalism" of the New Deal; help Americans rediscover their progressive roots in the democratic dream of Thomas Jefferson; reject the deepening social and economic inequality of capitalism; and help free America from the remnants of cold war anti-socialism. The remainder of this essay focuses on the first three concerns, leaving foreign policy for separate attention.

Progressivism in the early part of the 20th century, as John Chamberlain noted on the eve of the New Deal, cut across many philosophical lines:

It looked back to Jefferson and Jackson; it looked across the ocean to the primitive communism of Tolstoy. It dallied with DeLeonism, an intransi- gent brand of socialism that had gone its own fiery way when Debs and Victor Berger and Morris Hillquist commenced to think in terms of immediate objectives, such as shorter hours of work. It even looked forward to no government at all, following Kropotkin and the anarchists. Altogether, discontent at the opening of the new century made a crazy- quilt pattern (Chamberlain, 1965, p. 42).

With such a crazy-quilt it is perhaps understandable that Richard Hof- stadter, author of one of the most influential histories of progressivism, would have difficulty defining it. For Hofstadter, progressivism "was not nearly so much the movement of any social class, or coalition of classes, against a particular class or group as it was a rather widespread and remarkably good- natured effort on the greater part of society to achieve some not very clearly specified self-reformation. The general theme was the effort to restore a type of economic individualism and political democracy that was widely believed to have existed earlier in America and to have been destroyed by the great corporation and the corrupt political machine ..." (Hofstadter, 1954, p. 5).

Yet, for all its diversity, progressivism was clearly a reaction to changes in nineteenth century capitalism. As long as the American population was small and frontier opportunities vast, the United States was the promised land for millions of people. The economic history of the nineteenth century was marred by periodic recessions, but toward the end of the century most of the best frontier land was taken, more people worked for others than for themselves, large cities and factories radically transformed the country Jefferson knew, studies of poverty began to appear, and huge concentrations of wealth and power caused great popular concern. The creation of a dependent working class and the outbreak of violent labor-capital conflict stirred interest in reform. By 1912, Walter E. Weyl could write without much fear of contradiction,

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"Today, more than ever before in American history, dire prophecies gain credence" (1912, p. 3).

Out of this turmoil emerged two leading progressive tendencies. One looked to Alexander Hamilton, was associated with the Republican party of Theodore Roosevelt and (less so) Senator Robert M. LaFollette, and found classic expression in Herbert Croly's The Promise of American Life (1909). The other looked to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson's democratic "invasion" of Washington, was associated with the Democratic party of Woodrow Wilson, and was well-expressed in Weyl's The New Democmcy?

Croly put the issue best (1909, pp. 22-23):

The conception [of the American promise] implies ... an Old World, in which the ordinary man cannot become independent and prosperous, and, on the other hand, a New World in which economic opportunities are much more abundant and accessible. America has been peopled by Europeans primarily because they expected in that country to make more money more easily. To the European immigrant--that is, to the aliens who have been converted into Americans by the advantages of American life--the Promise of America has consisted largely in the opportunity which it offered of economic independence and prosperity. Whatever else the better future ... may contain, these converts will consider themselves cheated unless they are in a measure relieved of the curse of poverty.

Croly blamed the "Jeffersonian" assumption, following Adam Smith, that America's promise could be attained through unrestrained individual competi- tion and laissez faire government. This resulted in a "morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth," requiring a government that would use its power a la Hamilton to promote democratic ends.

It is true that Jefferson feared central government and favored local government, but with such elites as Hamilton in control at the national level, Jefferson's preference is understandable. It is not true that Jefferson was a classical liberal who favored unrestrained market competition. Jefferson admired Smith's Wealth of Nations, but he was not a slavish devotee of laissez- faire. To blame Jefferson for the growth of capitalist inequality in nineteenth century America grossly distorts Jefferson's views.

Jefferson favored a democratic society of generally equal, free, indepen- dent producers. He deplored industrial capitalism with its dependent working class, inequality, and degradation, and he was a vehement opponent of finance capital. Croly missed the distinction between the democratic dream and the American dream. While Jefferson supported the former, Hamilton favored the latter. If anyone is to be blamed, it is more accurate to place the responsibility for growing inequality on Hamilton, an outright defender of elitism, than Jefferson, who defended popular government and equality!

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With this said, the concern of Croly and other progressives with equality and capitalism is echoed today in the work of such writers as Edsall(l984) and Kuttner (1987), and in debates over the future direction of the Democratic party (Wattenberg, 1984). Thomas Jefferson, whom Democrats claim as the founder of their party, had much to say on these issues, and it goes beyond what contemporary liberalism offers.

JEFFERSON'S DEMOCRATIC DREAM

So many crazy ideas were labelled "Marxist" during Marx's day that he once denied being a Marxist. The same fate befell Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, a great radical thinker of a radical age, is portrayed as a conservative thinker by Richard Hofstadter (1954, ch. 2).' The author of a standard biography of Jefferson says Jefferson was no "prophet of class warfare" (Malone, 1951, xvii). Yet, Jefferson's writings make it clear that he was very much a prophet of class warfare, or more precisely, of how class conflict can be avoided only in an egalitarian society. One of the most jarring interpretations makes Jefferson an advocate of capitalism. This interpretation appeared in the 1830s and found "its ironic fulfillment after the Civil War when Jefferson was linked to Spencerian laissez faire philosophy and the Supreme Court invoked the Declaration of Independence to put property rights beyond the reach of the people's sovereignty" (Peterson, 1962, p. 81). Croly, as we have seen, shared this view. More recently, Joyce Appleby (1978) presents a pro-capitalist Jefferson?

Perhaps the unkindest cut of all dismisses Jefferson as irrelevant in an urban, industrial, capitalist society. As long ago as 1915, the historian Charles Beard asked, "What message has the Sage of Monticello for us?" His answer was none (Peterson, 1962, p. 320).

Such liberal Democrats as FDR claimed identity with Thomas Jefferson, but Jefferson's theory of democracy, his intense distrust of the rich, his insistence on mass economic equality and independence, and his class-based political theory are down-played or absent from vital center liberalism. Although Jefferson is generally enshrined by liberals in marble, and frequently invoked, he is often ignored.

This is unfortunate because Jefferson was unusually well aware of the anti- democratic forces that threatened progressive democracy, and throughout his life opposed them. Ten years before his death he wrote wistfully of the country's future (Lipscomb, XV, p. 31):

... a government regulating itself by what is wise and just for the many, uninfluenced by the local and selfish views of the few who direct their affairs, has not been seen, perhaps, on earth. Or if it existed, for a moment, at the birth of ours, it would not be easy to fix the term of its continuance. Still, I believe it does exist here in a greater degree than anywhere else; and for its growth ... I offer sincere prayers.

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A few days before he died he left one of the most eloquent and optimistic democratic statements we have (Ford, 1896, X, pp. 391-92):

All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.

Immediately, the Beardian objection may be heard: Jefferson was a partisan of small farmers; the United States is unlikely to return to agrarianism; exit Jefferson.

It is true that Jefferson in his famous Notes on Virginia saw farmers as the chosen people of God, but since most white men were independent farmers, this was just another way of praising the potential of democracy. It is true that Jefferson saw cities with their poor, dependent working class as pestilential. It is true that Jefferson advised that as long as the United States had land to labor we should let our work-shops remain in Europe. But it is also true that he later revised these oft-quoted views. In light of the debate surrounding this issue Jefferson should be heard directly (Lipscomb, 1904, p. 55, emphasis mine):

I had under my eye, when writing, the manufacturers of the cities in the old countries ... with whom the want of food and clothing necessary to sustain life has begotten a depravity of morals, a dependence and corruption, which renders them an undesirable accession to a country whose morals are sound. My expression looked forward to the time when our own great cities would get into the same state. But they have been quoted as if meant for the present time here. As yet our manufacturers are as much at their ease, as independent and moral as our agricultural inhabitants, and they will continue so as long as there are vacant lands for them to resort to; because whenever it shall be attempted by the other classes to reduce them to the minimum of subsistence, they will quit their trades and go to laboring the earth.

More important, Jefferson was primarily concerned with the social relations of production, not perpetuating agrarianism. He preferred a society of independent farmers because independence and equality were essential to freedom and to democracy. His objection was not so much to manufacturers or cities per se, but to capitalism, with its poor and debased people. As early as the 1790s he advised the United States to turn to manufacture, and in 1816 he wrote (Lipscomb, 1904, XIV, pp. 391-92):

We must now place the manufacturer by the side of the agricultur- ist .... Shall we make our own comforts, or go without them, at the will of a foreign nation? He, therefore, who is now against domestic

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manufacture, must be for reducing us either to dependence on that foreign nation, or to be clothed in skins, and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns. I am not one of these; experience has taught me that manufacturers are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort ....

Such comments should not be read as an endorsement of capitalism. Jefferson did not support capitalism; he supported independent production. As he put it in 1814 (Lipscomb, XIV, pp. 182-83):

The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families .... The wealthy, on the other hand, and those at their ease, know nothing of what Europeans call luxury. They have only somewhat more of the comforts and decencies of life than those who furnish them. Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?

As noted above, as long as workers had vacant lands to resort to, they could remain independent by fleeing capitalists who attempted to exploit them (Lipscomb, XI, p. 55).

The fundamental Jeffersonian proposition is that "widespread poverty and concentrated wealth cannot exist side by side in a democracy."' This proposi- tion is dismissed by liberals making peace with the rich and coming to terms with inequality, but Jefferson perceived basic contradictions between democracy and capitalism. In general, men's honesty, Jefferson drolly observes, does not increase with their riches (Ford, 1896, VII, p. 454).

Regarding commerce, "Money, and not morality, is the principle of commerce and commercial nations" (Lipscomb, 1904, XII, p. 376). Banks may have their uses, but labor is the only true source of wealth. In 1817 he complained that the banks' mania "is raising up a monied aristocracy in our country which has already set the government at defiance ..." (Lipscomb, 1904, XV, p. 112). A year earlier he said he hoped the United States would reject the British example and "crush in it's [sic] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country" (Ford, 1896, X, p. 69). America rejected corporate infanticide, and took the road of European capitalism, thereby exacerbating the dilemma Jefferson saw so clearly: How can inequality and democracy be reconciled under capitalism? And, if they cannot, how can the United States call itself democratic?

In sharp contrast with Adam Smith's market individualism and laissez-faire philosophy, poverty so repelled Jefferson he endorsed progressive taxation as

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one way of reducing it. After an impromptu stroll with a poor French woman, who cried as he gave her 24 sous on parting, he wrote James Madison (Lipscomb, 1904, XIX, pp. 17-18):''

The property of this country is absolutely concentrated in a very few hands ... These employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not laboring. They employ also a great number of manufacturers and tradesmen, and lastly the class of laboring husbandmen. But after all these comes the most numerous of all the classes, that is, the poor who cannot find work. I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable, but the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivi- sions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefor to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree, is a politic measure and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.

Jefferson frequently contrasted Europe and America. His opinion of monarchy was devastating (European monarchs, with few exceptions, were animals, fools, idiots, hogs, and lunatics) (Lipscomb, 1904, XII, pp. 377-78), but he reserved special contempt for capitalist England where commercial wars and debt reduced the people to such wretchedness that, after taxes, they labored 16 hours a day and still could not afford bread--just to feed the avidity of a few millionaire merchants and keep up a thousand ships of war (Lipscomb, 1904, p. 29). This was in keeping with the general European practice of keeping the people down by "hard labor, poverty and ignorance, and to take from them, as from bees, so much of their earnings ... barely to sustain a scanty and miserable life" (Lipscomb, 1904, p. 440).

Jefferson associated such practices with the plans of Alexander Hamilton, and saw democracy or republican government as the antidote to elitist excess. At the beginning of the republic, he notes, they imagined everything "republican which was not monarchy." We had not yet penetrated to the mother principle, that "governments are republican only in proportion as they embody the will of their people, and execute it" (Lipscomb, 1904, XV, p. 33). Direct democracy is the only pure republic, and Jefferson favored it in small territories, but, for larger units, as he wrote John Taylor, "governments are more or less republican, as they have more or less of the element of popular election and control in their composition; and believing, as I do, that the mass of citizens is the safest depository of their own rights ... I am a friend to that composition of government which has in it the most of this ingredient" (Lipscomb, 1904, XV, p. 23).

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Such statements may be seen as naive but Jefferson actually had a deep appreciation of the social conditions necessary for democracy. His faith in American democracy was causally linked to the fact that Americans were not the canaille of Europe. A free, equal, independent, and educated populace was an essential condition of Jeffersonian democracy. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be" (Lipscomb, 1904, XIV, p. 384). Jefferson understood that Democracy was problematic. But the alternatives were rule by the rich, or a despot. "I am not among those who fear the people,'' he writes. "They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom" (Lipscomb, 1904, XV, p. 39). As for government by the elite, "If experience be called for, appeal to that of our fifteen or twenty governments for forty years, and show me where the people have done half the mischief in these forty years, that a single despot would have done in a single year; or show half the riots and rebellions, the crimes and the punishments ..." (Lipscomb, 1904, XV, pp. 35-36). Cherish the spirit of the people, he advised in 1787, for once the people become inattentive to public affairs "you and I... shall become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature ... and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor" (Lipscomb, 1904, VI, p. 58).

CONCLUSION

Nothing is less fashionable in contemporary American politics than discussing basic questions of democracy. The consensus limiting democracy to political and legal rights, not economic rights, goes unchallenged while political participation and social harmony decline, and the influence of the affluent ascends. Jefferson reminds us that democracy is impossible without a large measure of social and economic equality, which, in an age of growing inequality, may help explain why he is currently so out of favor.

During the 1930s, liberalism came to mean opening government to disadvantaged groups, and passing federal or federal-state programs to help them. Many programs were welcome assists to people in need, but "interest group liberalism" was a poor substitute for Jeffersonian democracy, Liberals were vulnerable, as Ronald Reagan showed, to the conservative charge that the New Deal was pork barrel politics on a grand scale, that federal financial resources were insufficient unless the state were willing to impose unacceptably high levels of taxation, and that, even if taxes were raised, merely throwing money and bureaucrats at problems was unlikely to work. Such arguments tapped longstanding American skepticism about the efficacy of central government, as well as latent preferences for Jeffersonian government close enough to the people for popular control.

Now that the cold war is waning, and east-west relations are in flux, new opportunities exist for developing a theory of democracy superior to vital center liberalism. This will require, in the spirit of Jefferson, a willingness to question

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the compatibility of capitalism and democracy. Here, the Sage of Monticello has much to offer, not least his enlightenment belief that societies progress, the only question being direction and pace.

Jefferson should not, of course, be made out as more democratic than he was. For instance, his statement that 'All men are created equal" was not meant to apply to women. When General Schulyer's daughter wrote him about the Constitution he told her not to worry, "...the tender breasts of ladies were not formed for political convulsion" (Sochen, 1974, p. 73). Women, he felt, should not "mix promiscuously" with men in public meetings "to prevent depravation of morals and ambiguity of issue" (Lipscomb, 1904, XV, p. 72). He doubted that blacks were intellectually equal to whites and, although he opposed slavery, he lived off slave labor and protected his estate by emanci- pating only a few slaves at his death. He also believed the natural aristocracy of talent was a great gift to society, without reconciling that belief with the view that only an egalitarian society can be democratic.

But the nascent American democratic dream is in Jefferson. He failed personally to live up to the democratic dream, but his statement of its general principles could be invoked authoritatively by others, as indeed, it was in the fight against slavery and for women's equality (Hughes 1974, p. 294). A famous extension of Jefferson is the 1848 Seneca Falls resolution applying the Declaration of Independence to women. Contemporary seekers of democracy have in Jefferson a defense of social and economic democracy (even though individuals may be unequal in talents and abilities) and an argument for transcending the (capitalist) American dream. Far from being irrelevant today, even a passing attention to social conditions suggests that Jefferson and the radical democratic dream have perhaps never spoken more directly to America's immediate concerns.

NOTES

'Historians differ on whether they were sold as slaves or indentured servants, but in a few years slavery was well-established. 'As a contemporary formulation puts it: "Those who lack opportunity for self- advancement have a legitimate grievance against [capitalism's] promises. Those who can demonstrate unequal results have no such legitimate grievance" (Novak, 1982, p. 125, emphasis his). 3Lionel Trilling once noted that "no country but the United States prides itself upon a dream and gives its name to one" (quoted in Allen, 1969, p. 3). 4Walter Dean Burnham (1989, p. 14) calls Carter's 1976 victory almost a "fluke". For discussion of this and related issues see (Ferguson and Rogers, 1986) and (Piven and Cloward, 1988). 5"Invasion" is Weyl's (1912, p. 18) term. In the February 1913 "Fortnightly Review" Wilson wrote that there "are two theories of government that have been contending with each other ever since government began," and clearly disassociated himself from the Hamiltonian approach that makes the "masters of the government of the United States ... the combined capitalists and

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manufacturers of the United States" (quoted in Baker and Dodd, 1926, I, pp. 7-8). For an analysis of internal divisions within progressivism see, in addition to Hofstadter (1975), (Forcey, 1961). %till valuable is Griswold (1946, p. 679), who comments: "Jefferson was too shrewd a politician .... to believe that a perfectly equal division of the land was possible. It was another of those ideals that he tried to realize pragmatically. ... Yet it was an ideal." In keeping with the ideal, Jefferson supported the idea of p n g every white male 50 acres of land. For a contrasting interpretation of Jefferson see (Parrington, 1987, I, pp. 342-

56). There are many anthologies of Jefferson's writings, but outstanding is (Padover, 1961). 'For a good critique of Appleby see (Matthews, 1984, p. 14). Charles M. Wiltse (1935, p. 148) commented long ago: "What Jefferson feared above all was the growth of a capitalistic class; and he failed to realize that industry could

6 uoted by Franklin D. Roosevelt in a 1936 campaign address. See (Dolbeare 1981, p. 513). "Lipscomb identifies this letter as written to Rev. James Madison, rector of William and Mary, but it is clear from James Madison's June 19, 1786 letter to Jefferson that the letter was to him (Rutland, 1975, IX, p. 76).

roceed only by the investment of increasingly large sums of money."

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