The Place of Europe in American History: Twentieth

Transcription

nova americana in english
edited by M.Vaudagna
The Place of Europe in American History:
Twentieth-Century Perspectives
Tiziano Bonazzi, Daria Frezza, Claudio
Zambianchi, Giuliana Muscio, Giuliana
Gemelli and Antonella Cardellicchio,
Jörn Leonhard, Raffaella
Baritono, Marco Mariano, Mario
Del Pero, Jennifer Klein,
Elisabetta Vezzosi, Maurizio
Vaudagna, Manuel Plana,
Alessandra Lorini, Simone Cinotto
nova americana in english
THE PLACE OF EUROPE IN AMERICAN HISTORY:
TWENTIETHCENTURY PERSPECTIVES
edited by M. Vaudagna
The Place of Europe in American History: Twentieth-Century Perspectives
Edited by M. Vaudagna
Collana Nova Americana in English
Comitato scientifico:
Marco Bellingeri, Marcello Carmagnani, Maurizio Vaudagna
Prima edizione gennaio 2007
©2007, OTTO editore – Torino
[email protected]
http://www.otto.to.it
ISBN 88-95285-03-4
ISBN 978-88-95285-03-0
è vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, con qualsiasi mezzo effettuato, compresa la
fotocopia, anche ad uso interno o didattico, non autorizzato.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
1
intellectual exchanges
Tiziano Bonazzi
Constructing and Reconstructing Europe: Torture of an American Prometheus or
Punishment of a New World Sisyphus?
11
Daria Frezza
The Language of Race: The Discourse of American Social Scientists from the Progressive
Era to World War Two from a Transatlantic Perspective
27
Claudio Zambianchi
“We Need a Closer Contact with Paris:” The Presence of Europe in American Art
from the Ashcan School to Abstract Expressionism
49
Giuliana Muscio
European Actors in Classical Hollywood Cinema: From the Extras to the Stars
65
Giuliana Gemelli and Antonella Cardellicchio
The Making of the New Encyclopaedia Britannica and the “Golden Age” of
European Culture in the U.S. (1940’s-1960’s)
91
political perspectives
Jörn Leonhard
Progressive Politics and the Dilemma of Reform: German and American Liberalism in
Comparison, 1880-1920
115
Raffaella Baritono
The British Labour Model in the American Political and Intellectual Debate of the 1920s
133
Marco Mariano
The U.S. Discovers Europe. Life Magazine and the Invention of the
“Atlantic Community” in the 1940s
161
Mario Del Pero
“Europeanizing” U.S. Foreign Policy: Henry Kissinger and the Domestic Challenge
to Détente
187
the place of europe in american history
interactions in social policy
Jennifer Klein
Welfare and Security in the Aftermath of World War Two: How Europe Influenced
America’s Divided Welfare State
215
Elisabetta Vezzosi
Why Is There No Maternity Leave in the United States? European Models for
a Law That Was Never Passed
243
Maurizio Vaudagna
Conservative Critics of the New Deal in the 1930s:
Towards Authoritarian Europeanization?
267
multidirectional emigrations
Manuel Plana
Exiles and Refugees During the Mexican Revolution
325
Alessandra Lorini
Atlantic Crossings: Race, Nation and Late Nineteenth-Century Cuba Libre
Between Italy and the United States
341
Simone Cinotto
“I Won’t Be Satisfied Until I’ve Travelled the Entire World:” The Transnational
Imagination of an Italian Immigrant in the United States, 1905-1942
371
INTRODUCTION
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For the last thirty years or so, the place of Europe in twentieth-century American
history has been significantly marginalized by more predominant currents in the fields
of history, political science, and social science in the United States. Studies on the multidimensional impact of European events on American historical developments and the
ways this has been perceived by both United States and European observers have been
reduced to a meager stream. Yet the impact of the United States on European life since the
mid-nineteenth century, conversely, has been creatively reflected upon by historians and
social scientists who have analyzed the country’s international role, its economic weight,
its managerial methods, its models of consumption and mass culture, its intellectual presence, its mode of social analysis, and its political and institutional models. Strengthened
by recent works on the “American Century,” studies on the “Americanization” of Europe,
despite the rather controversial nature of that term, have blossomed, and have in turn
achieved a notable scholarly excellence.
In terms of the interaction between history writing and public life, it is easy to guess
the reasons for such a trend. The United States’ role as a superpower during the postwar
years, and its multidimensional presence in western Europe, in contrast with the division
and decline of the latter in the global arena, has modified the balance of the transatlantic
relationship in favor of the “New World’s” influence on the “Old.”
However, a historiographical explanation for the success of the “Americanizing” interpretation of the European-American relationship seems less obvious. The most important
issue is that, since the seventies, the kind of American history writing prevalent in teaching, in professional associations, and in their reviews in the United States has debunked
the traditional portrait of the American experience as “invented” by Europeans and their
heirs in America. The notion that North America was basically a fundamental phase of the
“European diaspora,” to use a wording that has become fashionable in the last few years,
has held the upper hand for more than three hundred years of writing on the American
experience. It is a notion whereby the foundations of American history must be traced
back to the “Old World,” be it through contrast or comparison, and its last season of predominance coincided with the so-called “consensus history” school of the forties and fifties,
whose representatives thought of Europe as the original fountainhead of the American
experience and a fundamental motivating force in its development afterwards.
From the sixties onwards, however, the so-called “new historians” have debunked
the old Eurocentric “victory tale” of American history, which they have interpreted as the
historical legitimization of the leading white, male and Anglo-Saxon elites. These scholars
1
introduction
have “de-centered” Europe in fundamental moments of the history of North America.
In this way, for example, the peopling of the early colonies is considered the result of
a conflict-ridden merging between Pilgrim Fathers and European immigrants on the
one hand and native populations and enslaved African groups on the other, rather than
just the consequence of the arrival of the Europeans alone. The American Revolution is
no longer just a peripheral facet of the “age of revolutions” led by the French, and the
Civil War is more than just a part of the nation-building process that characterizes the
European nineteenth century.
Since the 1970s, a social history has prevailed in the United States that has tended
to revisit, in multicultural, pluralist terms, the national-popular legacy of the so-called
“progressive historiography” that had dominated American universities, textbooks, and
reviews during the interwar years. According to this interpretation, the history of the
United States was essentially the result of the interaction between the “American people”
and national institutions, the presidency first and foremost. In its more recent version,
however, the “American people” was no longer seen as the “common man” of New Deal
progressivism, represented by the large, white middle and lower-middle class that was
considered to be the backbone of American democracy. In multicultural, populist terms,
it was instead a very diverse variety of groups, ethnicities, races, genders, behavioral preferences, and social positions, unified by a common longing for democratic participation
as well as subjective and collective dignity.
The interpretative innovation, in both methodology and themes, of the “new history” in the United States is monumental, and it makes the American historical scene
one of the most vibrant and interesting to be found. Still, there was a price to be paid
for this new approach, the most important being its predominantly national focus, while
at the same time the country’s global role as a fundamental actor in large, transnational
developments of historical, social, political, and economic change was significantly underestimated. As one insightful reader has observed, not only were the sections devoted
to international relations usually the weakest in new, innovative textbooks on American
history, but the transnational dimension as a source of causation for many historical
aspects of the American nation was often overlooked. As a result, not only has Europe’s
pretentious claim of being the main original source for the American experience been appropriately denied, but all the “Atlantic crossings” from Europe to the United States have
been overlooked by this “new history” approach. This has been particularly true for the
twentieth century as it coincided with the rise of America to superpower status as well as
with a century of European decline. While the word “Americanization” has come to loom
larger since it emerged in the nineteenth century, its polar opposite, “Europeanization,”
has met a different fate. As current as it was in both public and scholarly language until
World War Two to indicate American participation in worldwide, secular trends such as
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the interventionist state, industrial conflict, collective action, or social security, the term
has since rapidly declined to the point of being practically unheard of nowadays.
Significant developments of American life in the last thirty years have contributed
to an interpretative shift away from the Atlantic. The westward transfer of the socio-economic balance of the country and the renewed relevance of the trans-Pacific thrust have
made for the revival of a sort of neo-frontier thesis, no longer based on agrarian virtues,
but on productive, technological, and communicative factors. They stress the central role
of the Southwest and the West Coast, as well as the distancing of America’s “heart” away
from the eastern seaboard, which was traditionally the heir of the European origins and
was seen to be closely connected with the “Old World” in an “Atlantic Community.”
Since the 1970s, the huge migrations from East and Southeast Asia and from Central
America have shifted attention away from the European demographic legacy. Moreover,
the value orientation of the “new history” often goes back to the anti-European feelings
of the American populist tradition, which saw the “Old World” as the site of despotism,
elitism, colonialism, and weak and unstable democratic principles. As tragic and contradictory as European history may be, the image of it that often filters through the lines
of otherwise innovative textbooks on American history often remind one more of old
populist stereotypes than any widespread familiarity with the latest results of European
history writing.
With the beginning of the 1990s, the trend toward cultural globalism, which tends
to attenuate the national nature of American cultural traits, made some of the leading
protagonists of the Americanist historical profession in the United States keenly aware
of the need to reformulate the history of the United States from a transnational perspective. Initiatives aimed at “internationalizing American history” have been inaugurated
by both of the field’s major professional associations, while several issues of their reviews
have been devoted to the supranational dimension of American history.
The effects of this new globalist awareness on transatlantic history have been contradictory. In the first place, the presence of the latter has always been stronger in studies
on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the American colonies were clearly
part of a process of European expansion and cultural circulation. After the Civil War,
when the United States ceased to be peripheral to Europe’s industrial and international
centrality, the new transnational awareness of American historians in the United States
still only had a partial effect in revitalizing transatlantic history in a “Europeanizing” vein.
However, certain traditional analytic dimensions of European-American relations never
actually disappeared: studies on international relations (even though its American practitioners have long been lamenting what they see as their marginalization in the historical
profession), and migration history (which, until the recent success of diasporic studies,
was mainly dealt with as part of the domestic events of the host country). As far as new
areas of interest are concerned, the most important result of the new internationalist
3
introduction
awareness is the blossoming of “Americanization studies,” which analyze the expansion of
American media, consumerism, and mass culture within twentieth-century Europe and
their acceptance and transformation, or the resistance they have encountered, following
the transatlantic crossing.
As Richard Pells has stressed, “Americans are as affected by European products and
fashions as Europeans are influenced by American technology and mass entertainment.”1
However, when it comes to the twentieth century, there has yet to emerge a significant
variety of studies on the many ways in which Europe has influenced the American historical process: as a source, a cause, a component, and a structural and intellectual reference.
Perhaps the multicultural interest of the new transnational historiography tends to focus
the attention, as George Frederickson’s comparative study of the apartheid in the United
States and South Africa has shown, away from the “white” European civilization.2
In the last few decades, a number of historians have attempted to take the field in a
new direction. While their studies have been highly praised, they often remain isolated,
despite the fact that they deal with some of the most important issues regarding the
European presence in modern American history. Their efforts to end the marginalization
of the transatlantic history of “Europeanization” have taken two main approaches. The first
has been that of comparative history, in which the historian has looked at a wide-ranging
global process and has compared the ways in which the macro-trend, whose analytical
tools have often been borrowed from the social sciences, has been applied in the United
States and in one or more European countries.
This comparative dimension is central to the book written by Jurgen Kocka, for example, which discusses the political and ideological affiliations of white-collar Americans
and Germans as a fundamental component of the authoritarian development in 1930s
Germany and its democratic counterpart in New Deal America.3 Kocka’s contrast of the
two nations touches upon one of the most important and dramatic themes of the European
presence in twentieth-century American history: the great systemic competition between
fascism, communism, and democracy that held center stage for most of the century. In
turn, the United States has defined its domestic and international attitudes, the perception of its national identity, and the trends of its intellectual life in this light.
The tension between democratic liberalism and dictatorial authoritarianism as a
fundamental aspect of the “Europeanizing” transatlantic history of the twentieth century
has been recently revisited in an important book by Italian historian Daria Frezza, who
focused her attention on the ways in which American social thought dealt with issues
of leadership and mass democracy between the 1890s and World War Two.4 Dictatorial
developments in European political history, especially during the interwar years, as Frezza
stressed, represented a contrasting reference against which American scholars analyzed
and assessed their own national public life. Of equal relevance is the “pathology,” to adopt
the term proposed by Charles S. Maier, of European political history of the early twentieth century with regards to American events after World War Two: from the triumph
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of Cold War internationalism in defining the United States’ role in the world vis-à-vis
the Soviet “threat” and the latter’s weight in domestic McCarthyism; to the relevance of
totalitarianism and the tragedy of the Holocaust in defining the domestic arena; to the
issues of American public life in the fifties and sixties and the attitudes of U.S. intellectuals towards their own polity and country.
A different but complementary approach has been adopted by Daniel Rodgers who
has studied the interest that European policies of social protection held for American
observers, as well as their conscious transfers to the United States and the major influence
these “Atlantic crossings” had on the framing of American public policies.5 His is a relational analysis that takes into account the concepts, the social and political practices, and
the models of institutional building which travelled across the Atlantic, focusing attention
on those who transferred, announced and shaped such influences in the United States.
Rodgers’ book deals with another issue of great weight in the context of the European
presence in modern American historical events: the growth of the American government
within the so-called “century of the state,” that is, the emerging American version of the
interventionist, welfare state, the relationship between public and private consumption,
and the economic tension between public regulation and the free market. From the time
of federal legislation on canals and railways in the nineteenth century, through the “statist”
reforms of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society of the 1960s, the
word “Europeanization” has been echoed by commentators on both sides of the ocean.
It was used to indicate the trend being witnessed in the United States at the time away
from Jeffersonian localism and the self-regulation of civil society in favor of an increasingly centralized state rule, of which Europe was both an admired and tragic example.
Rodgers’ thesis runs directly counter to the opinion of other distinguished scholars, such
as the historical sociologist Theda Skocpol, whose studies of pensions for war widows
and veterans aim to identify a different American type of protective state development,
in contrast with that of Europe whose institutional fulcrum has been industrial work and
whose main agents have been socialist-leaning working-class parties and unions.6
Finally, the renewal of emigration history is most important among studies that
stress the relational connection between Europe and the United States. In his prized book
Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Matthew
Frye Jacobson has written a history of the way in which European immigrants have been
categorized and perceived, both by themselves and by former immigrants, especially
of Anglo-Saxon stock.7 Jacobson has stressed that events which happened in the old
countries have often influenced the social and political behaviors of immigrants in the
United States, as well as their impact on American society and the ways in which other
social groups have looked at them and assessed their presence. In addition, a series of
categories defined in either biological or cultural terms have imported different ways of
defining and perceiving the immigrants’ presence into American public life, including
5
introduction
the notion that there was a tradition of “European values” of which immigrants were the
spokespersons, albeit often in a conflicting way.
The present volume analyzes some of the multiple ways in which Europe has been
present in the history of the United States from the late nineteenth century through the
years following World War Two. It stresses the diverse social, political, intellectual, and
institutional dimensions through which the European presence has been felt, for better
or for worse, on the North American continent throughout the twentieth century.
In summary, the purpose of this publication is to innovate the prevailing trend
in transatlantic history by focusing on “Atlantic crossings” that move from Europe to
America, a direction that is rarely contemplated in the existing literature. This approach
also allows us to explore an important dimension of transnational European history: the
presence of the “Old World” in a strategic area of the contemporary global scene. The
book in no way pursues a restoration of the old Eurocentric rationale of the American
experience. That it appears to have vanished for good, in fact, marks a distinct progress
in American history studies. It is the belief of the authors, however, that the eclipse of
interest in the place of Europe in twentieth-century American history has deprived the
field of a significant aspect of its own historical process, and that European Americanists
are especially well equipped to fill that gap.
The essays included in this book fall into four main areas of research that have been
deemed of fundamental importance for the “Europeanizing” side of the transatlantic
relationship: cultural and intellectual exchange, from the artistic to the political, welfare
state developments, transatlantic migrations, and European-American foreign policy.
This book is the scholarly result of a national research project supported by the Italian
Ministry of Research, Universities, and Education during the period of 2002-2005, which
encompassed four groups of researchers from various Italian universities. The original
proponents of the program were convinced that the theme of “the place of Europe in
the history of the United States” could define a scholarly subject especially fitting for
Italian Americanists, one that could help them overcome the disadvantages in research
and visibility that often plague the work of European American historians vis-à-vis their
counterparts in the U.S.
The research program had an institutional purpose as well. On the one hand, it sought
to strengthen further the habit of cooperation that had already developed throughout
the years among the scholars and universities represented in this collection. On the other
hand, it was hoped that the translation of such joint undertakings in an official, visible
research polarity could gather together a coordinated pool of Italian Americanists with
a potentially significant impact, not only on European American studies, but also with
regards to the most distinguished American academic institutions. With the official
founding in 2005 of CISPEA, the Interuniversity Center of European-American History
and Politics, on behalf of the universities and scholars involved in this book, that goal
appears to have been achieved.
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1. Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since
World War II (New York: Basic, 1997).
2. George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); same, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies
in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
3. Jurgen Kocka White Collar Workers in America 1890-1940: A Social-political History in International
Perspective (London: Sage, 1980).
4. Daria Frezza, Il leader, la folla, la democrazia nel discorso pubblico americano. 1880-1941 (Roma: Carocci,
2001).
5. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 1998).
6. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
7. Matthew F. Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
7
INTELLECTUAL EXCHANGES
CONSTRUCTING AND RECONSTRUCTING EUROPE:
TORTURE OF AN AMERICAN PROMETHEUS OR
PUNISHMENT OF A NEW WORLD SISYPHUS?
tiziano bonazzi
.
The title of this paper is not what one would generally expect for a scholarly essay.
It is instead rather tortured and, I might add, was a punishment to fashion. The fact is
that Prometheus and Sisyphus were the first images that came to mind when I thought
of the subject of the conference, even though the two mythical figures, while united by
the theme of divine punishment, are mutually opposed. Prometheus is not human, he is
a Titan who loves humans and despises the gods, which is why he is punished by Zeus.
Prometheus is a positive figure who understands the future (his name means “predictor”
and “foreseeing” in ancient Greek), makes the gift of fire to mankind, and is considered
the originator of civilization and progress. In the end, Zeus pardons and frees him in
exchange for a prediction with which to thwart being dethroned by a conspiracy. We
might say that if Prometheus is America, Europe is the vulture feeding on his liver, and
liver is for the Greeks the repository of courage and the soul. Sisyphus, on the contrary,
is human; the most cunning and devious of humans, a thief and a robber. So artful is he
that when Zeus sends Death to visit him he manages to enchain her in his royal palace
in Corinth. Sisyphus is also a protector of trade and progress, but in his own interests.
He is such a sinner that nobody will ever come and free him from his punishment. In
this case, Europe can be seen as the rock that America/Sisyphus fails to carry to the top
of the mountain where it could be laid to rest. And the eternal labor of constructing and
reconstructing Europe would be America’s punishment for her greediness, her all-toohuman desire for aggrandizement.
Two Americas and two Europes face each other in these two myths. However, my
love of Greek mythology notwithstanding, it is true that America cannot really be understood through these myths. Rome, not Greece, has appealed the most to American
political culture from revolutionary times up to the contemporary neo-conservatives.
And Romans do not have the Greeks’ tragic sense of life. The Greek ideal of beauty and
harmony is a fragile barrier against the lurking forces of tragedy and Fate. Pax Romana,
Roman peace, is the forceful, at times necessarily cruel, and pacifying word of the ruler,
imperfect, but necessary. Greeks expect tragedy. Romans look for greatness. A second
motive for not making use of Greek mythology is the fact that Prometheus and Sisyphus
are punished for reasons that cannot be inscribed in a teleology or in a theodicy. For the
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constructing and reconstructing europe
Greeks, punishment can be retribution for immorality, or disobedience to a capricious
god in the name of an otherwise worthy goal. It can even come as a consequence of love,
as in the case of Orpheus attempting to rescue his beloved wife Eurydice from Hades.
Instead, America, steeped in Christianity, is incomprehensible outside a divine plan
for the world, a teleology, and without God’s justice, a theodicy. America, in American
mythology, is a cog in God’s overarching plan of salvation. She is steeped in sin, but can
always be pardoned, as Sacvan Bercovich taught us,1 because she needs to fulfill her role
in God’s plan. America, whether republican or imperial, must be a Christian Rome,
otherwise Pax Americana, whether ruthless or not, at home or abroad, would not be
right and could not last.
.
I have used mythology and metaphor because I am speaking of a mythological being
called “America” whose nature is supposed to be contained in a cluster of metaphors arranged around a pivotal symbol, freedom. Although I have mentioned Christianity and
classical Rome as two of the main sources of that cluster (others come easily to mind)
I have begun with Greek mythology, in order to keep the hagiography of America at bay
without abandoning the realm of myth that I consider worth maintaining as a fundamental originator of meaning. Thus I can think of the myth of America as a construction: an arena where social and cultural actors battle for the meaning of the nation, and
at the same time the outcome of those battles, a persona ficta, a personified image called
America with a biography and psychology of her own.
Readers will immediately object, saying that this personified image of America is
merely an ideological creation, and, even if we accept this for argument’s sake, it is surely
not the only one to emerge from over two centuries of American history. I have no problem agreeing with either proposition. It is true, America-as-myth is an often ideological
construct, while there are also other Americas, other Americas-as-myths.
“We, the Other People,” is the title of a 1976 collection of documents by Philip
S. Foner in which he brings together, as the subtitle of his book says: “Alternative
Declarations of Independence by Labor Groups, Farmers, Woman’s Rights Advocates,
Socialists, and Blacks, 1829-1975.”2 The goal of the anthology, in Foner’s words, is to
demonstrate that, “Notwithstanding the fact that there were periods when it was discarded by radicals, the Declaration of Independence has served for two hundred years
as a model whenever changes in American society were deemed necessary.” Foner’s anthology is a small monument to the Declaration of Independence, the document that
set the Cartesian lines of political debate in the United States, giving shape, with the
Constitution, to the public arena wherein the meaning of America as a nation has been,
and continues to be, debated.
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Not only does the Declaration of Independence represent, therefore, the legal foundation of a new sovereign state, but it has also become the document that sets the rules
of the debate over the meaning of the American nation, as well as the mythomoteur, the
originator of the myth of America. To complicate matters further, the Declaration of
Independence, along with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, is
one of the founding documents of western political modernity. Its appeal to popular sovereignty, government by consent, the right to revolution, equality, and the natural rights
of the individual permeates our present wherever we, “westerners” by birth, by chance,
or by choice, happen to be. A heavy burden indeed for such a short document.
It should come as no surprise that these different meanings hide contradictions.
The most glaring one is that while the Declaration is now considered a document that
links the history of both sides of the Atlantic, historians have great difficulty building
a common historical framework in which both the European nations and the United
States may fit. Battered and tattered as they are, the old traditions of American exceptionalism and nationalistic Eurocentrism among the various European nations are still
strong enough to prevent any interest in such a framework from becoming pressing.
Attempts at a transnational approach to Euro-American history are in fact important,
but limited in number.3 Thus, the main models that we have to encompass both Europe
and America are either ideological or policy-oriented: the Atlantic community, western
civilization, the West.
The Declaration of Independence suffers from the lack of a Euro-American analytical historical framework. As a consequence, its promotion to parity with the texts of the
French Revolution as a founding document of western political modernity has been a
consequence of the reversal of power relations between Europe and the United States,
rather than a reconsideration of its role in a common Euro-American history. The problem
of whether the Declaration is a sign of continuity or discontinuity between the two sides
of the Atlantic remains unsolved.
What can be said is that the Declaration has the role of a foundation myth in
American political culture and is accepted as a cornerstone of the, often ideological, vision of western political culture. My purpose is to build on that mythical role without
accepting it at face value or deconstructing it. I will follow the teachings of authors as
far apart as Roland Barthes and Anthony D. Smith4 who maintain that myths institute
origins, but are not the origins of things. Myths come at the end, and behind them,
hidden in their narration, looms the “noise” of history that gave them life. My plan is to
probe tentatively the relationship between the two.
The path from myth to history begins with the story narrated by the myth. In the
Declaration Jefferson gave this story the structure of a syllogism.5 The first part, cast
in philosophical language, puts forward the thesis; the second, written as a legal brief,
13
constitutes the antithesis; the last part, declaring the birth of the United States, is the
synthesis.
The thesis constitutes the sovereign people or, better, in the thesis the people constitute themselves as sovereign. The transformation of the sovereign people into a political
community is performed in the third part, the synthesis, through a mutual pledge that
follows old medieval forms, as in the birth of the Italian city-states, the Comuni. What
gives the pact a legal basis is the antithesis, wherein the rebels, with Jefferson as their attorney, prove that the king forfeited his feudal right to rule by breaking the covenant with
his subjects, again a medieval practice. It is the first part of the document, the thesis, that
opens up the doors of modernity. There, in fact, the colonists constitute themselves as
people, as an auto-nomos, in the ancient Greek sense of the word, that is, as a self-ruling
community, which means, as Jean Bodin theorized in the sixteenth century, a sovereign
one. The way they do so makes the Declaration an innovating and creatively ambiguous document. The colonists become Americans by building political obligation on a
contract based on the acceptance of reciprocal equality, not as pre-existing Americans
but as rational human beings. Thus, a new people is created which is separate and has
an equal station among the powers of the earth. A people, however, who, by assuming
natural, universal principles as its building blocs, is at the same time a particular people
and the representative of universal human nature, a universal people: “the people,” the
embodiment in history of divine, universal reason. Thus, the Declaration presents us
with a sacral, numinous situation, marking the birth of a people at once particular and
universal. However sacred it is, this situation has all the trappings of the Enlightenment,
a true philosophe’s dream. It is a political act that Voltaire would have loved to see his
enlightened despot, Frederick II to perform. But in America, it is performed by a different
agent, the people, more despotic even than the king of Prussia, thanks to its inherent,
creative universality.
.
Here is the mythopoeic basis of the Declaration of Independence, and from here
history follows; or better, history is already there, hidden in the text of the Declaration
itself. The purpose of the second part of the document, the antithesis, is to demonstrate
and show “the candid world” that the king broke the covenant with his subjects, thus
putting an end to the pactum subiectionis binding them to him. Enveloped in the charges
against the king and in the paragraph addressed to the Americans’ British brethren, we can
find markers which, like subconscious declarations, show the actual historical mechanism
through which the American people was formed. What such markers do is proceed by
exclusion to create invisible borders that give historical substance to the universal people
and shape the American one. The British, “deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity”
because they have not helped their American brethren to fight the tyrant, are outside the
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compact; so are “the merciless Indian savages” who do not fight by the rules of civilized
warfare and kill people of “all ages, sexes, and conditions.” Fighting by the rules is the
bottom line of civilized, that is, truly human or universal, people. Those who do not
respect them do not belong. Blacks are not even mentioned, because the already contorted
paragraph Jefferson devoted to them was struck out by Congress. By neglecting to name
them, the Declaration fails to bring them to political life. Women are not mentioned either.
They simply cannot be in the picture for reasons that run deeper than those concerning
blacks. Both inclusion and exclusion are engendered by the Declaration.
Thus the subtext of the second part of the Declaration falsifies the main premise of
the first: the American people is not universal in practice. This, however, does not void
the meta-political sketch of America as a universal nation because of the third part of
the Declaration, where the people “declares” independence and “pledges” life, fortune,
and honor in its support of the Declaration. Declaring and pledging imply free will,
that same free will that makes individuals recognize and accept the principles of natural
reason. Not everybody can perform this act, according to the Founding Fathers. The
absence of all such individuals from the sacred land of the polis does not make the polis
any less universal. In our early modernity steeped in Christianity, political salvation is
akin to eternal salvation: not everybody will obtain it. America is universal because, like
paradise, its plenitude is qualitative, not quantitative.
.
Paradoxically, then, the American “circle of the we,” to use David Hollinger’s well
known expression,6 can be universal only at the cost of creating an exclusionary “us/them”
dichotomy. American domestic and foreign politics are influenced by the paradox found
in the Declaration, shaped as they are by the consequences of a discourse that does not
admit exclusion, yet at the same time builds upon it.
Europe looms large and ambiguous in the history of this paradox. At the end of
the nineteenth century, for instance, evolutionary thought, so-called social Darwinism,
became a powerful tool in the definition of the nation. It allowed for a new, more secular
explanation for American superiority, because the United States was seen as being at the
top of an evolutionary chain that had begun with the nomadic tribes and had reached its
civilizational peak in the modern industrial nations. Moreover, evolutionary thought was
a sort of traffic light when it came to racial matters. It allowed for a scientific gradation of
national membership that turned blacks into second-class citizens, without endangering
the universal nature of the “circle of the we.” The Declaration did not bring blacks to life
as citizens because they, as slaves, had no will of their own and could not choose to be
Americans. Evolutionism allowed them only a partially autonomous will and segregation
became their natural, scientifically based lot. It also permitted keeping racially inferior
people like the Chinese out. Then, there was Europe; but Europe was not one. History,
15
that is evolution, had left the heirs of Rome destitute and prey to papal religious corruption, while eastern Europeans had never known freedom. However, there was no doubt
they all belonged to the European civilization, the cradle from which American liberty
had sprung. Even Jews, although racially different and non-Christian, were culturally
Europeans. All these people, inferior and therefore dangerous as they were, could neither
be kept out of America, nor be definitely ranked as second rate members of the American
community. They had to be given a chance. The natural process described by Frederick
J. Turner,7 whereby in the American forests, on the frontier, Europeans were brought back
to a virginal state of origins and turned into American freemen, could be repeated in
industrial America with southern and eastern Europeans, using the scientific methods of
Americanization programs and exposing immigrants to an already established American
“way of life” which worked like Turner’s nature. The universal space of citizenship, then,
could be preserved through conscious practices of non-discriminatory discrimination
based, in accordance with the sub-text of the Declaration of Independence, on the possibility and willingness to be free.
Europe, then, has a double status in the episode sketched above. It belongs without
completely belonging to the realm of freedom. It is the parent of and at the same time
a menace to America. Continuity and discontinuity, recognition and opposition are
both present. Europe’s image is dual-faceted and corresponds exactly to what Cushing
Strout told us forty years ago: “For much of their history Americans have defined themselves through a deeply felt sense of conflict with Europe. …Whether they condemned
Europe’s vices or yearned for its virtues, Americans agreed that it was a polar opposite of
the New World,” and again: “ ‘Europe’ for Americans has meant not so much a specific
geographic place as it has projected contrast in ideas, values, and institutions to their
own ‘New World’.”8
Cushing Strout refers to “Europe” in quotation marks because he understands that
Europe in American culture is an American construction, a persona ficta, a personified
image that does not exist. We might say that Americans “imagined” Europe as one, when
nobody in the Old World felt any need for it.
Throughout most of American history, Europe, as so many scholars have shown,
has been an American construction with no identity of its own, its use being that of a
negative mirror image that filled American identity needs. In the history of mainstream
American culture, America and Europe face each other in a series of obsessive remakes of
High Noon. Shooting Europe, America evidently shoots its own evils: there is no killing
in the duel, but ritual purification. Europe, constructed as a scapegoat, creates America
in the fashion of André Girard’s ancestral homicide.9
Constructing and reconstructing the image of Europe in order to fight it, then, is
a toil that America cannot escape from. It may seem contradictory, but exceptionalism
cannot exist alone, it needs a sacred enemy.
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.
We do not need exceptionalism,10 I believe, but we cannot explain it away or it will
always reappear, as it actually does. The survival of exceptionalism in our own times,
whether as myth or ideology, compels me to further interrogate the Declaration, not as
a text, but as an event.
As a historical event, the Declaration of Independence participates in three basic moments of political modernity, the battle for reform of the modern state in the direction of
more participatory, consensual institutions, the political universalism of the Enlightenment
and the birth of the modern nation. If this is true, nothing can be more European than
the United States. And if we wish to put this hypothesis to the test, we must look for an
interpretation of European political history capable of encompassing both sides of the
Atlantic, or we will be endlessly trapped in the contrast between an a-historical America
and a reified Europe. That such a possibility is real can be hinted at from the fact that
reified Europe is not an American product only.
Until the Second World War, each European country experienced the construction
of an exceptionalist image of “Europe,” whose uniqueness and historic positivism were
exalted through a carefully selected genealogy of ideas, values and institutions. Here too,
we find ourselves confronting a persona ficta who, however, unlike the one constructed by
American culture, dominated history and gave rise to an extreme form of Eurocentrism
that served to legitimize the power wielded by European countries worldwide. However,
the ideal history of Europe thus founded always culminated in that of a single European
nation who believed itself to embody this legacy and bring it to full fruition. Hegelian
Prussia is one case in point; free, protestant England a second; revolutionary, republican
France a third. Within this perspective, American exceptionalism, which is counterpoised
to “Europe” while assuming and reviving its ideals, looks less exceptional and more like
a form of Eurocentric European nationalism.11
What is needed in order to give some order to the hints and signs that I have mentioned, is a hypothesis that allows us to speak of the political history of Europe neither as
a single identifiable object, nor as the comparative history of discreet entities. Historians
like Immanuel Wallerstein and Fernand Braudel12 offer us more than one cue in this
direction. Regardless of the many possible criticisms of Wallerstein’s work, it remains too
interesting a thesis to be passed over. It is true that Wallerstein’s Marxist economicism
leads him to underestimate the political aspects of the concept that he sets at the centre
of his work, the European world-economy, which he defined as “a kind of social system…
which is the distinctive feature of the modern world-system. It is an economic, but not
a political entity, unlike empires, city-states, and nation-states.” During the course of his
work, however, Wallerstein is obliged to speak of political entities, states, and statism, as
well as of their ideology, in spite of affirming that “The states do not develop and cannot
be understood except within the context of the development of the world-system” of
17
capitalism. States, even if seen mainly as elements of the international division of labor,
are, however, at the centre of his analysis, since the European world-economy, or European
world-system, takes the form of a dynamic system of states, in which a more advanced
“core” is flanked by an increasingly backward semi-periphery and periphery. Within
this system, it is the states that organize and unify markets, and it is also the states that,
subsequent to the various phases of capitalist modernization, continually move from the
periphery to the core of the system or viceversa. In fact, Wallerstein writes that capitalism
“has been able to flourish precisely because the world-economy has had within its bounds
not one but a multiplicity of political systems.”13 In an essay on political history such as
this, I believe that to consider Europe as a system of states is not only empirically valid,
but also analytically very useful. It is a question of applying thoroughly a model adopted
by scholars of international relations for European politics starting from the end of the
religious war, which is strengthened by Wallerstein’s theses.
Thus, European states constitute a system, that is to say, an assemblage of related,
autonomous elements comprising a whole, such that each element may be seen as a part
of that whole insofar as it interfaces with at least some of the other elements. The system of European states is therefore composed of differentiated units, each with its own,
autonomous history, but which are at the same time necessarily bound together by their
membership to the same world economic system, as well as by equally binding ties of war
and peace, dynastic alliances and enmities, religion and religious battles, intellectual and
cultural exchange. It is a balanced system, in which no unit has ever been able to dominate
and create a European empire. A diverse system too or, better, a system built on diversity,
which resulted in a continuous, ever more rapid process of change. A dynamic system,
then, whose dynamics were at the same time internal and external. From the internal
viewpoint, as underlined by Wallerstein, the economy and, we may say, the processes
of modernization created a continuous flux of states from the core to the periphery of
the system and viceversa, as exemplified by the opposing cases of Spain and England.
Simultaneously, the core states made the system expand beyond its frontiers, both through
trade and by means of territorial conquest: eastward, with the complex process of Russia’s
Europeanization and her push toward Siberia and the Caucasus; to the southeast, with
the pressure exerted against the Turkish empire by Russia along the Black Sea, and by the
Austrian Hapsburgs in the Balkans; or west, into the ocean and the Americas.
In America, colonies were created for commerce, as Adam Smith wrote contrasting
them to Roman colonies,14 but for population as well. The colonies changed the structure
of the European system by creating societies that breathed life into a fourth ring in the
system, beyond the core, the semi-periphery and periphery. As colonies, these societies
did not have sovereignty, and were dominated by a creole population that tried in every
way to reproduce mimetically the structures of the respective metropolis. However, they
never represented mere replicas or extensions of their mother country. The vast distance
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and local conditions prevented this. Colonial societies, in fact, in subjugating and often
destroying local peoples and cultures, also gave rise to complex interactions with them.
Together with the conditions of development in an environment that was separate and
different from that of the metropolis, this caused them to become original societies with
their own autonomous history: a fourth ring, which not only extended the frontiers of
the Europe-system, but also endowed it with an even greater diversity than before.
The outer ring of Europe in America belonged without fully belonging, because its
European population was supreme in the colonies and depended on the respective mother
countries. They lived in an interstice between dominance and dependence, as both Jack
P. Greene and Edward Countryman15 have said of the English colonies in America. It is
therefore possible to speak of an American difference that rendered the outer ring of the
system increasingly specific. This difference could be and was managed by the European
powers up to the point in history when it clashed with the imperial interests of the metropolis. In the British colonies this occurred with the Seven Year War, which showed how
the “Old Empire,” the “extended empire” with its political structure clustering around the
figure of the king, had to be substituted by a territorial-type empire organized hierarchically under the power of Parliament.16 After 1776 a series of revolutions burst out all over
the continent, turning most of the former colonies into sovereign states, and giving life
to a system that encompassed both Europe and America: a “Greater Europe.”
Within this framework the specific trajectory of the United States can be better
understood without loosing anything of its specificity. The birth of the United States as
the first sovereign state of “Greater Europe” arrived at a pivotal historical moment, when
the political universalism of the Enlightenment was gaining momentum everywhere and
nationalism was taking its first steps – in Great Britain of all places, as many historians
maintain.17 The American patriots, if they wanted to be patriots, needed a patria, that is,
a common heritage and common ideals and interests upon which to build a new loyalty.
They had them; but unfortunately they were mostly British. The task of turning an antiBritish Britishness, or an anti-British British resentment into loyalty to a new polity was
solved in different ways at different levels.
The right to independence was mainly built out of medieval, feudal pactitious traditions of protection and obedience that King George III was judged to have forfeited.
Hence, the legitimacy of the new polity, in the absence of a royal pretender that could
take the felon king’s place or an ancient tradition of independence to vindicate, was
based on the notion of contract. Contractualism of the Lockean variety, however, implied
the presence of an already existing, common civil society in which rational individuals
lived. In practice, neither such a society, nor its individual members existed in America
or anywhere else. Contractualism would have been dead in theory, as David Hume
maintained,18 and in practice as well, had something else not been brewing in Europe
at the time: the idea of a national people. It was an entity entirely different from what
19
John Locke calls people. The American and French revolutions, and the birth of German
nationalism under Napoleon’s occupation, prove this point.
A national people, as so many studies have shown, is a cultural and political construction, which is exactly what happened in the British colonies. In 1776 an American
people did not exist. What existed were communities and groups loyal to their colony,
place, and ethnic or religious group, united mainly by a still ambiguous anti-British
resentment. In the years immediately preceding the Revolution, leaders like Thomas
Jefferson, James Wilson, and John Adams tried to identify Americans as one people
through a common history of escape in search of freedom and of daily toil and suffering
endured in order to build a civilization in the American desert.19 Religious leaders often
tried the same tack, referring to independence as another chapter in the fight against the
Beast. All these were potent threads which, however, failed to come together fully and at
times actually proved divisive.
In 1776 Thomas Jefferson’s vision found the right solution. He built on the transformation undergone by the idea of British liberties during the decade-long debate with
Britain, when the colonists stopped seeing liberty as linked to English history and soil,
and thought of it as more of a general entitlement. Jefferson’s coup de theatre was to brush
every existing local colonial loyalty aside, allowing him to imagine the people as a body
of a-historical universal individuals and, as a consequence, to make use of contractualism
to build a legitimate polity. His coup de theatre worked: his Declaration was accepted by
the Continental Congress, adopted by the rebels, and became a potent instrument in the
cultural and political developments that turned them rapidly into Americans.20
The story that I have sketched is a specific, individual story that could not have happened anywhere else; but is not an exceptional story. The textual analysis of the Declaration
that I advanced above, in fact, proves this through its exclusionary mechanisms. The
subtext that turns the universal people into the American people reveals the necessity of
an us/them dynamics at work both within and without the new polity. The fact that the
“British brethren” are excluded from it because they have proven unable to oppose tyranny
thus stands as the model for the subsequent construction of “Europe” as anti-America.
The irony is that, while we are at the origins of American exceptionalism, we also face the
more general oppositional process that generates nations everywhere in Greater Europe.21
The United States, a European country, grew into a nation by using concepts of European
political culture, as well as through a political mechanism of opposition to an external
cultural enemy used everywhere in Europe to “imagine” the nation. What was specific
to America was that it did not identify that enemy with any one nation, as the British or
Germans did with France, or the Italians with the Austrian Empire, but with an image,
a persona ficta that they called Europe. In order to be Europeans away from Europe, the
revolutionaries of 1776 and their descendants had to set themselves against an imagined
Europe. The Greater Europe system rang true on both sides of the Atlantic.
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.
For almost two centuries Americans lived in Greater Europe and their all too
European nationalism prevented them from perceiving it. Europeans from the Old World
experienced the same difficulties vis-à-vis the American continent. Few in Europe were
able to grasp that already in the colonial period and, even more so, after independence,
America had in fact become a fully-fledged member of the Europe-system. At the end
of the fifteenth century America came into existence in a place where nothing should
have been. It was the materialization of an absence, not something that was “other” but
already present and catalogued in the European mind, as was the case of the Islamic
world or the Chinese Empire. She was therefore “imagined,” filling that void with all the
hopes and anxieties of Europeans, from the cannibals to the awesome power of the wild,
from Thomas More’s Utopia to the debate over whether or not the Indios were human,
from the quest for Eldorado to John Winthrop’s City on the Hill. At the same time, the
Europeans of the Old World took advantage of America to bolster their Eurocentrism
through the elaboration of a line of thought theorizing the inferiority of everything found
there – suffice it to think of the well-known “dispute over the New World”22 – and to
consult it like the Oracle on the destiny and nature of Europe. It is enough to refer to
Adam Smith, who saw in the discovery of America the beginning of a new age in human
history, the age of trade, of which Great Britain was the maximum expression. Or we can
think of the concours of the Académie Francaise of 1792 in which the historical influence
of such a discovery was discussed as part of the dispute over the decadence of European
customs caused by the advancement of luxury and civilization.23
After 1776 it was the United States that assumed the role previously fulfilled by the
entire continent, becoming the great mirror in which the Europeans sought their own
image, the “mirage in the West” of which Durand Echeverria spoke.24 A castle of mirrors, a Labyrinth, as I have written on other occasions,25 was thus created in which both
Americans and Europeans lost themselves. Such a Labyrinth is an integral part of the
history of something that has alternately been called Europe or the West or the Atlantic
World. Now that a debate rages over the historical and cultural “roots” of the European
Union, it is important to regard the fact that the American continent, and the United
States in particular, are counted among those roots; and that not only does the U.S.
belong to our recent past and our present as a hegemonic power, but it is also an integral
part of Europe’s history.
The history of Greater Europe ended with the Second World War, the culmination
of that long European civil war that destroyed her and paved the way to the bi-polar
system of the Cold War. So too ended the history of the Labyrinth of Euro-American
relations, at least as far as the United States was concerned. During the Second World
War, the relationship of love-hate, belonging-aloofness vis-à-vis “Europe,” which had
marked American nationalism, changed into an American awareness of having created
21
an autonomous civilization, able to redeem not only its own sins but those of Europe as
well. During the Cold War, which for the Americans stressed the need to rebuild Europe
on American lines and thus save western civilization from Europe’s historical malady, this
awareness became definitively accepted. Once it was no longer part of Greater Europe but
dominated it as a superpower, the United States finally emerged from the Labyrinth of
Euro-American relations with full consciousness of itself, and was able to stop constructing
and reconstructing Europe. Real exceptionalism – theorized by “consensus” historians in
the 1950s and by Seymour M. Lipset in the early 1960s26 – belongs to this last part of
our story, when Europe ceased to be an, albeit imaginary, presence and became America’s
past: a museum to visit during a holiday trip, as Richard H. Pells writes.27
This last chapter is also the history of most of us; but I do not believe that it can be
understood if not in the light of a previous and different history. In concrete terms, this
implies identifying a means that allows us to speak of today’s American unipolarism, while
resisting the temptation to see it as a product of some spiritual category or in terms of
providential destiny: without, that is, turning the United States into the Statue of Liberty
(or its opposite). If we set the United States within the history of Greater Europe, that
is to say, within the history of a system whose members have developed a series of interrelated historical processes that we call modernization, through which they dominated
the world, then we find empirically valid instruments with which to review American
national history from the Pilgrim Fathers to unipolarism, without explaining the latter in
terms of the former, or the former in terms of the latter. We can thus discard the “grand
narrative” of American history referred to by Joyce Appleby.28
Common European modernization assumed different forms in the different states
of the system. However, a substantial compatibility reigned among types of state, nation
and nationalism, freedom and democracy, economic development, Christianity and religious freedom, high and popular culture; but also in forms of exploitation, dominion
and exclusion. Not even totalitarian states can be excluded from the system, in that they,
too, can be traced back to common social and cultural dynamics. With regard to the
United States, the real issue is not therefore one of exceptionalism; the question is rather
why the specific type of European modernization implemented by the U.S. has allowed
it to save itself from the catastrophe of the European civil war. Ultimately, this implies an
inversion of Tocqueville’s thesis which saw Europe’s future in the present of the United
States. It implies interpreting American democracy as the outcome of a systemic process
that was under development in Greater Europe. Tocqueville’s thesis is actually not so
far off from the exceptionalist one, and fully conforms to the Old World’s tendency to
interrogate the New World as an oracle, that is, to consider it as something extraneous
and numinous.
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.
Things changed again, and more dramatically, after 1989. During the Cold War,
in fact, Europe, being the past of both the United States and the Soviet Union, had a
pivotal role that kept it at the gravitational center of ideological battles and international
politics. The fight for the hearts and minds of Europeans was so important because one
way or another “Europe” also meant the United States (and the Soviet Union). Paradoxical
though it may seem, Americans unconsciously admitted to being Europeans by fighting
for Europe. With the Cold War over, Europe has even stopped being America’s past, and
Americans can forget Europe. We have entered a new and different historical period,
one that allows us to add something further to the above comments on the Cold War.
For, if the United States has truly substituted the system of states of Greater Europe, in
one sense at least it is also its continuation, since the Cold War constituted the supreme
moment of Eurocentrism, the ultimate attempt to impose political forms and ideologies
of European mould on the entire world. In the bipolar order of the Cold War all nations
were called upon to take one side or the other, ideally if not in practice, for a third option
was not available. The end of the Cold War was caused not only by the collapse of the
Soviet Union, but also because the Eurocentric model of the Cold War had failed, and
people and cultures extraneous to the West and its European tradition appropriated the
winning economic system, that of the market, without abandoning their autonomous
cultures.
The United States now presides over a globalizing multicultural and multipolitical
economy of which Old Europe is neither Muse, nor ideal model nor even ideal enemy:
it is a “new West,” still undefined and uncharted. Americans might think of their nation
as the “one world”29 that their ancestors envisaged as the desired outcome of the Second
World War or, more daringly, they might see the United States on the verge of fashioning
again a “new order of the ages,” this time truly universal. One thing that is clear is that
the new West is not the old western civilization, and it is no longer implanted across the
Atlantic.
I do not have the slightest idea whether this new West will actually materialize. As a
skeptical European, I doubt it. Therefore, I retreat into mythology. Europe as the vulture
eating Prometheus alive can be read as a reminder of an American innocence that Zeus
finally rewards by granting America freedom and writing the vulture off; but, like the
rock that Sisyphus is forever uselessly compelled to carry up the mountain, Europe stands
as the accuser of the ideological nature of that same innocence. Taken together the two
myths stand for the Labyrinth of Euro-American relations, that compulsive necessity to
make and remake a distorted image of the other in order to create an ideal image of self.
All that is now over. In reality, Old Europe still wanders the Labyrinth looking for the
Minotaur, either to kill or be killed; but it is a blind alley, for the Labyrinth no longer
exists and no one cares about what happens to Europe. She really has to find another
23
myth against which to measure herself. The United States has perhaps found one: that
of the Titans scaling Olympus to cast out Jupiter and the gods. It is a myth of origins,
before humans existed. It is a myth whose purpose is to warn humans not to get above
themselves. I do not know if it is advisable for Americans to abandon ancient Greek
wisdom and attempt to usurp the place of God in Christian justice. As for historians, to
whom myths are valuable but not their stock-in-trade, they can dig up the Labyrinth and
investigate whether Greater Europe – that now “Old West” – constitutes a hypothesis
that gives meaning to the Euro-American historical experience.
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1. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, Madison, Wisconsin UP, 1978.
2. Philip S. Foner, ed., We, the Other People, Urbana, Illinois UP, 1976.
3. Among the better known examples, see James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory. Social Democracy and
Progressivism in European and American Thought. 1870-1920, New York - Oxford, Oxford UP, 1986; Daniel
T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard UP, 1998.
4. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1957; A.D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations,
Oxford, Blackwell, 1986; Myths and Memories of the Nation, Oxford, Oxford UP, 1999.
5. The remarks on the Declaration of Independence are based on my Introduction to the Italian edition of
the Declaration, Tiziano Bonazzi, ed., La Dichiarazione di Indipendenza degli Stati Uniti d’America, Marsilio,
Venice, 1999.
6. David A. Hollinger, “How Wide the Circle of the ‘We’? Intellectuals and the Problem of the Ethnos
since World War II,” American Historical Review, April 1993, pp. 317-337.
7. Frederick J. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Proceedings of the State
Historical Society of Wisconsin,” December 14, 1893.
8. Cushing Strout, The American Image of the Old World, New York, Harper & Row, 1963, pp. IX-X.
9. André Girard, La violence et le sacré, Paris, Grasset, 1972.
10. D.T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” in Anthony Mohlo – Gordon S. Wood, eds., Imagined Histories. American
Historians Interpret the Past, Princeton, Princeton UP., 1998, pp. 21-40; Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism
in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review, October 1991, pp. 1031-1055.
11. Joyce Appleby writes that exceptionalism is “America’s peculiar form of Eurocentrism;” see “Recovering
America’s Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism,” Journal of American History, September 1992,
pp. 419-431.
12. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 2 vols., New York, Academic Press, 1974 and 1980;
Fernand Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP,
1977.
13. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European
World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century., New York, Academic Press, 1976, pp. 51 and 230.
14. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, book IV, ch. 7, “On colonies.”
15. Jack P. Greene, Interpreting Early America, Charlottesville – London, Virginia UP, 1996; Edward
Countryman, Americans. A Collision of Histories, London – New York, Tauris, 1997.
16. James Abercromby, Magna Charta for America, Jack P. Greene et alii eds., Philadelphia, American
Philosophical Society; 1986; Tiziano Bonazzi, “ ‘Men like Flowers or Roots, Being transplanted take after
the Soil wherein they grow’. Reflections on alterity and politics regarding the origins of the United States
of America,” in P. Savard and B. Vigezzi eds., Multiculturalism and the History of International Relations,
Commission d’histoire des relations internationales, Milan – Ottawa, Unicopli – Les Presses de l’Université
d’Ottawa, 1999, pp. 11-30.
17. Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism. A Cultural History, 1740-1830, New York, St. Martin’s
Press, 1997.
18. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1777, Section III.
19. Benjamin Franklin, On the Tenure of the Manor of East Greenwich, 1766; James Wilson, Considerations on
the Nature and Extent of Legislative Authority of the British Parliament, 1774; Thomas Jefferson, A Summary
View of the Rights of British America, 1774. Also A Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms,
approved by the Continental Congress in 1775.
25
20. Pauline Maier, American Scripture. Making the Declaration of Independence, New York, Knopf, 1997.
21. Louis Dumont, L’idéologie Allemande. France-Allemagne et retour, Paris, Gallimard, 1991.
22. Antonello Gerbi, La disputa del nuovo mondo. Storia di una polemica, 1750-1900, Napoli, Ricciardi,
1945.
23. J.H. Elliott, The Old World in the New, 1492-1650, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1970, p. 1.
24. Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West, New York, Octagon Books, 1966.
25. Tiziano Bonazzi, “Europea, Zeus e Minosse, ovvero il Labirinto dei rapporti euro-americani,” Ricerche
di storia politica, 7, 2004, n. 1, pp. 3-24.
26. Seymour M. Lipset, The First New Nation. The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective,
New York, Basic Books, 1963, also Exceptionalism. A Double-Edged Sword, New York, Norton, 1996.
27. Richard H. Pells, Not Like Us. How Europeans Have Loved, Hated and Transformed American Culture since
World War II, New York, basic Books, 1997.
28. Joyce Appleby, “Recovering America’s Historic Diversity,” quoted, p. 426.
29. Wendell L. Willkie, One World, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1943.
26
THE LANGUAGE OF RACE: THE DISCOURSE OF AMERICAN SOCIAL
SCIENTISTS FROM THE PROGRESSIVE ERA TO WORLD WAR TWO
FROM A TRANSATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE
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the transatlantic language of race
This paper will focus on the debate among American social scientists, which took
place from the Progressive Era to the 1930s, over the issue of exclusion/inclusion within
the circle of American citizenship and the redefinition of American nationalism, in
contrast to the nazi and fascist regimes of Europe. The scholars in question came from
various scientific fields: eugenics, new statistical studies, social psychology, and anthropology. Moreover, the development of these sciences occurred within a complex network
of transatlantic scientific exchanges, and the language of race constituted the rhetorical
context in which the issue of exclusion/inclusion was debated.
When W.E.B. Du Bois, at the beginning of the twentieth century, significantly
remarked that the problem of the coming century would be one of race, the author projected on the future a problem that was already at the core of public discourse. Indeed,
social scientists were debating this crucial issue on both sides of the Atlantic. Sociologist
Edward A. Ross, who is well known for having introduced the theories of European social
scientists to America, remarked on this point:
The anthropologists now put Europeans into two great races, the tall long skulled blonds and the
short broad skulled brunets. This distinction corresponds roughly to the old divisions of Aryan
and Celto-Slav or Germanic and Latin peoples. It is agreed that the former are more enterprising
and variative than the latter. They conquer and constitute the upper castes in most countries. They
are colonists, roamers and path finders.1
The concept of race, however, implied a broad and indefinite meaning that could
comprehend different areas, from not only a geographical but also a semantic point
of view, including anthropological characteristics and cultural, religious, and national
origins. Within such a weak framework, the different theories could therefore coexist or
even overlap.
The idea that Americans could draw not only distinctive anthropological features
but also moral characteristics such as individualism, love of freedom, self-control, and
self-government from the common origins of northern European people was widespread
throughout the nineteenth century among historians, jurists, and political scientists, including scholars such as Hans B. Adams and John W. Burgess who were educated in some
27
the language of race
of the most important German universities.2 Moreover, the majority of social scientists
born in and around the 1860s came from the same Anglo-Saxon cultural milieu in which
liberal professions were practiced alongside a strong social conscience. The European experience represented a constant point of reference for them from a cultural point of view,
although within different contexts.3 The German cultural tradition in particular had a
significant influence on the field of social science through its political theories about the
teutonic origins of the civil and political structures of society, and also through a direct
apprenticeship in the German universities of Berlin, Leipzig, and Heidelberg on the part
of eminent American scholars such as John W. Burgess, Franklin H. Giddings, Albion
W. Small, and Robert E. Park. As far as the division of labor and the condition of the
individual in a modern and complex urban-industrial society were concerned, American
scholars were primarily influenced by Emile Durkheim and George Simmel.
The problem of citizenship remained central to public discourse during the Progressive
Era. Social scientists used both crowd and racial theories as analytical tools to redraw the
boundaries of democratic society. In fact, the constituency of a democratic “public” had
specific racial, gender, and class characteristics. While they referred to Ludwig Gumplowitz
and Gustav Ratzenhofer for theories of race and the social behavior of groups within
modern society, social scientists elaborated these theories in an original way within the
American cultural context. From this point of view, the United States represented a kind
of grand laboratory for European social theories.
In the 1920s, political scientist Arthur Bentley – the most original scholar to come
from the school of Albion Small at the University of Chicago – wrote an interesting
article concerning the thought of Durkheim, Simmel, and Ratzenhofer.4 In describing
the analytical methodology of European social scientists in relation to “social facts,” he
refused on the one hand the term “objectivity” as too “one sided,” and on the other hand
the term “positivity” as “too vague.” He stressed instead an “observational coherence in
the material observation of the social facts,” permitting “a unified study of it in its own
right.”5 Leaving aside the notion of subjectivity and individuality and at the same time
any metaphysical explanation, Bentley analyzed social processes, what he defined as “social
facts” – including those of the institutions of state and church – simply by studying their
social features such as they were perceivable in their external characteristics.
For these social scientists, the scientific method represented the analytical tool through
which they could understand the real structure of a complex society in depth. The difference between the American cultural environment and the European was particularly
evident here. While in the United States, faith in the scientific method for promoting
social progress represented one of the key points upon which American social scientists
had built their theories, in Europe one of the leitmotifs of the so-called “crisis of the
turn of the century”6 was mainly due to a critical debate over the notion of the crédit
de la science which had been at the basis of the current of thought known as positivisme.
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According to the latter it would have been possible, as Ernest Renan had stressed, to
“organiser scientifiquement l’humanité.”7
With the well known “frontier thesis” formulated by Frederick J. Turner, the peculiar
characteristics of American institutions and history were brought back to American soil.
The roots of its historical evolution, and also its exceptionalism, were to be found in the
interaction with the environment, leaving aside a more direct European genealogy and
also a more strict determinism included in the notion of race. The two cultural assumptions of the frontier and race, however, were not so clearly contrasted once theoreticians
believed that the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race was responsible for the frontier
experience.
The racial element was at the core of an elitist conception that could express itself on
an international level, according to the Darwinian theories of European scholars such as
Gumplowitz and Ratzenhofer regarding the competition between nations, and also on a
national level, stressing the superiority of the original Anglo-Saxon stock in view of the
new migratory waves. In 1894, in fact, the Immigration Restriction League was established in Boston.8 In the same period, the eugenics theories of Sir Francis Galton were
also starting to be widely diffused and debated in America. Sociologist Edward A. Ross
referred to the notion of the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race as a bulwark against the
harm produced by industrializing processes in the social environment. At the same time,
social psychologist Charles Cooley tried to remove the risks of the popular movements of
crowds, considered to be a typical European phenomenon, from American society.
Within this rhetorical framework, writers such as Jack London and Frank Norris,
social scientists such as Edward A. Ross and Charles Cooley, popular writers such as
Reverend J. Fiske and Madison Grant, and philosophers such as Josiah Royce outlined
the characteristics of Anglo-Saxonism, which was able to combine “finesse with force,”
according to Ross.9 Anglo-Saxonism was inscribed in a hierarchy of races that was very
popular among social scientists at the time. French scientist Vacher De Lapouge and
the German Otto Ammon had based their research on detailed statistical data drawn
from a wide area within Europe. They stressed a hierarchy of races in which the “Homo
Europeus,” which came from the “Aryan” stock, was on the top; under that came the “Homo
Alpinus” from the “Celtic” stock, and below that came the inferior “Mediterranean.” The
characteristics related to these three races were defined by parameters from anthropology
and biology, somatic features and the dimensions and shape of the skull, psychological
and cultural traits, and the social stratification of the three races. Among the distinctive
characteristics of the Homo Europeus were the form of the head, height, and skin color.
It is important, moreover, to stress how anthropological distinctions were scientifically
based on economical-statistical analyses.10
In a study of the distribution of wealth in northern France, based on an analysis of tax
distribution, Georges Vacher De Lapouge concluded that “the dolicocefalic then appears to
29
have a tax paying capacity almost double that of the brachicefalic.”11 Swiss social scientist
Jean Luc Chalumeau, who analyzed social stratifications on the basis of Swiss military
statistics related to the height of the recruits, reached the same conclusion. The results
of these studies were published in such important American reviews as The American
Journal of Sociology and The American Anthropologist. As far as the Mediterranean race
was concerned, anthropologist Franz Boas referred to the research of Italian psychiatrist
Rodolfo Livi that was based on military statistics.12 Through these data, it was possible
to relate the social condition of the recruits to anthropological characteristics such as the
form of the head and height. Another important aspect characterizing the “dolico-aryan”
group was entrepreneurship and the willingness to migrate. On this point it is interesting
to remark how strong the racial prejudice must have been if it could not be shattered by
the experience of the great migratory waves which, at that time, came not from northern
Europe but from the Mediterranean and drastically changed American society.
The theories of Cesare Lombroso relating to the hereditary transmission of criminal
characteristics were also followed with great interest, though were critically scrutinized13
within the great nature/nurture debate. American novelist Frank Norris dedicated a short
story to Lombroso’s ideas entitled “A Case for Lombroso” which centered on the ill-fated
consequences that the inherited traits recognizable in a female figure of Mediterranean
origin could provoke in an encounter with a representative of the superior Anglo-Saxon
race. The personality of the woman with Spanish blood in her veins, incapable of exercising self-control, has a completely negative influence on the character of her fiancé. The
reference to the celebrated Italian criminologist in the title of the story was not merely
formal, but rather exemplified a widely accepted viewpoint that considered the process of
miscegenation as a form of pollution and deterioration to the detriment of the superior
race. As an example, Frank Norris held up Aesop’s tale of the two jars floating in a cistern
that bump and break when they hit each other.14
The social scientists who envisioned a society scientifically organized according to
pragmatic theories maintained their enlightened positions in a contradictory way, believing
at the same time that the racial question could not be modified by history. In fact, one
of the many paradoxes of American society at the beginning of the century, marked as
it was by social conflicts and profound contradictions, is related to the great diversity of
analytical tools that social scientists were able to create. While, as we have seen, they were
mainly interested in mobility and the diverse forms in which a complex urban-industrial
society was articulated, at the same time they were confronting an extremely static and
rigid conception of the relations between social groups, and the conception of a hierarchy
of races so widely prevalent in public discourse in those years.
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the universal races congress and the forum on race friction
between blacks and whites
The first Universal Races Congress was held in London in 1911. During the years of
the colonial conquests, when a redefinition of the superiority of the white race reached
a worldwide scale, all the different points of view dealing with the contact of races
throughout the world were represented in this arena. According to the participants,
the main problem was that of evaluating one of the most relevant questions of the new
century since, according to Gabriel Tarde, “the chief practical elements of civilization
are becoming planetary and world standards are supplanting parochial and national
standards.”15 When the term ‘race’ was used to signify a mixture of cultural traits of a
specific social group, the participants adopted the language of education in a very broad
sense and through that, the language of assimilation. When the debate was articulated in
anthropological and biological terms however, the focus was on analogies with the animal
world. The notions of disharmonious crossing or miscegenation, that is, the disadvantage
of a superior race crossbreeding with an inferior one, were at the center of the arena.
The so-called “millenniumists” who embraced the cultural position were considered too
optimistic and sentimental by those who embraced the theory of racial hierarchies. While
Professor Ranke asserted that it was unscientific to speak of races, Brajendranath Seal of
India questioned the superiority or inferiority of races in relation to the environment.
They were looking for unifying tools such as language, for example Esperanto, in order to
overcome the barriers opposed by the different groups. Ferdinand Toënnies suggested the
revival of Latin instead of Esperanto. However, those who embraced the most pessimistic
vision, which considered it impossible to cross the borders between different races, used
the stern language of science.
The risks declared by Mrs. Mac Fayden of Cape Colony, South Africa regarding “The
Negro Problem in Relation to White Women” were very similar to those that existed in the
south of the United States at the time. Du Bois’ point of view regarding this question was
evidenced by his uncompromising and clear-cut positions at the Congress. He stressed the
importance of the situation in the southern United States and saw it as a possible laboratory for the relationships between different races, which he clearly foresaw to be one of
the great problems of the forthcoming century. However, Du Bois was completely alone
in his point of view because the assumption of race equality as stated in the Constitution
was greatly questioned, as were the similar values of Reconstruction.
In a forum promoted by the American Journal of Sociology on the theme, “Is Race
Friction Between Blacks and Whites Growing and Inevitable?”16 Du Bois spoke of the
“raising of the Negro in America to full rights and citizenship, no half measures, full and
fear equality.” The author clearly stood counter to those who blamed abolitionism and
reconstruction and at the same time gave an idyllic version of slavery as a “harmonious
relationship between races” only possible when the “superior race” dominates the “inferior.”
31
With the historical failure of slavery acknowledged, Du Bois did not think the political
measures to keep the two races apart would hold in the long run: “Race segregation for
the future is going to be impossible.” He placed the problem of the South in relation to
the new international role of the United States:
If the United States expects to take her place among the new nations beside England and France,
the nations which first are going to solve this race contact then certainly she has got right here in
her own land to find how to live in peace and prosperity with her black citizens.17
On the opposite side, within the same forum, sociologist Edward A. Ross declared,
“The superiority of a race cannot be preserved without pride of blood and an uncompromising attitude toward the lower races.”18 He therefore totally denied the values of
Radical Reconstruction together with the causes of the Civil War:
The theory that races are virtually equal in capacity leads to such monumental follies as lining
the valleys of the South with the bones of half a million picked whites in order to improve the
conditions of four million unpicked blacks.19
One of the most often cited examples of a good relationship between different races
was that of Jamaica. This example had often been presented in the International Races
Congress and was stressed again by such authors as John Mecklin, Royce, and Park, the
famous adviser of Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Regarding this subject and the great value that Royce gave to the Jamaican example, Mecklin
remarked that the domination of 15,000 white people was never questioned by the
700,000 blacks on the Caribbean island, excluding the Gordon Riots of 1865. Mecklin
concluded from this experience that where the color line, which granted white supremacy,
was stable, there was no race friction: “the natural antipathy which regulates the relations of all widely separated peoples, is the sentinel which keeps watch and ward over the
purity of highly developed races.”20 From this point of view, since “racial antipathy” was
irreconcilable, slavery was considered to be the type of social organization that allowed
for a better relationship between the two races.
the restrictionist movement and race suicide
The notion of race intersected the most relevant questions of the time, from the restriction of migratory waves and the Americanization of new immigrants, to suffrage for
women and civil rights for African Americans. With the scientific help of anthropology
and biology, race constituted a more rigid boundary line between the newcomers and the
old immigrant groups. The dissenters were few: Edward Clark among the economists,
Albion Small among the sociologists, and the increasingly more authoritative voice of Franz
Boas among the anthropologists. Beyond these was the significant group of intellectuals
and social activists who gathered around the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) from 1910 on, formed by white and black Progressives,
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under the direction of W.E.B. Du Bois and the review The Crisis.21 Within the NAACP,
however, Du Bois maintained an isolated position that was grounded on the assumption
of the equality of both races granted by the constitutional rights of the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments.22
Sociologist Edward A. Ross used the most dramatic rhetorical metaphor when he
referred to the consequences of immigration from southern Europe for the Anglo-Saxon
people: he spoke, in fact, of “race suicide.”23 The issue was emphasized by the eminent
sociologist in the annual speech that he delivered as president of the American Social
Science Association in 1901.24 The subject had a great impact on the American public,
turning the statistical data of the last years of the century related to the falling demographic
birthrates of the Anglo-Saxon stock into a highly dramatic image. Ross became convinced
about race hierarchies during one of his trips to Europe, in Paris, when he was already one
of the most famous sociologists in the country and known for his progressive ideas.
The first person to formulate the hypothesis of “race suicide” was General Francis
A. Walker, a professor of history and political economy at Yale University and formerly the
director of the Bureau of Statistics and superintendent of the Census of the Government
of the United States. With the help of statistical sources, Walker compared data referring
to the reduction of Anglo-Saxon stock birthrates and the growing rate of new immigrants.
According to the author, the reason for this disconcerting phenomenon was to be found
in the refusal of the original inhabitants of the country to breed children who would one
day compete with the children of aliens.25 From this came the idea of race suicide.
Even President Theodore Roosevelt, although avoiding the term Anglo-Saxon in
order not to offend other ethnic groups, defined them as the American race in his book
The Strenuous Life, calling them “stern men with empires in their brain,”26 “combining
the traits of virility, bravery, with the ethos of a strong masculinity reinvigorated by the
wilderness of the frontier.” For Ross, “finesse” and “force”27 would be the two elements
necessary to offer an ideal to the whole generation of progressive scientists: “a society of
men that does not look backwards into the past, nor outwards towards their fellow men,
but looks inwards (the in-look) on reason and conscience.”28
Upon closer analysis, this stress on “reason and conscience” as universal features
that govern human action reveals precise racial traits, namely those of the Anglo-Saxon
stock. In his famous book Social Control, Ross defined this group as the most advanced
from a cultural and political point of view when compared to all other immigrant groups
landing on American soil.29
Speaking from a private and domestic point of observation, feminists such as
Charlotte P. Gilman and Mary R.S. Coolidge sharply criticized men’s public position on
the birthrate problem. Gilman did not share Ross’ faith in the positive aspects of imperialist
wars. In fact, she reversed this very subject of war in order to argue against “race suicide”
33
and female responsibility in the decline of the birthrate. According to Gilman, men and
public political strategies of war had to be held responsible for this phenomenon. Public
involvement in military life and war, where young men died in large numbers, was the
real cause of the race suicide, as men were removed from their families and private lives
and women were left alone with the task of caring for the children and the elderly.30
It was not, however, because of Gilman’s arguments that the issue of “race suicide” was
gradually left out of public discourse. As Mary R.S. Coolidge among others has stressed,
reflections of a more general nature on the domestic consequences of industrial development in lowering the birthrate became the subject of public debates in later years.31
During the years of its wider audience, the issue of a declining birthrate was not limited to the United States: according to William Ripley, an economics professor at Harvard,
it was spread throughout many European countries, including France and Ireland, and
also reached the Australian colonies and New Zealand. While the danger was not so
great for the countries inhabited by a homogeneous population, in the United States
“the hordes of European immigrants (coming from the Mediterranean regions therefore
from the lowest step of the hierarchic scale of races) has continued to reproduce at very
high birth rate.”32 The decline of the race, or even race suicide, was due then to the mass
immigration of a population of illiterate peasants from southern Europe.
It is interesting to stress how this same race anxiety was projected on a global scale
after the colonial expansion. As Ross remarks:
The Monroe doctrine enables a million and a third persons mostly Indian in blood to possess
Ecuador which we are assured could easily sustain fifty millions of people. In the hands of European
power Ecuador would provide room for expansion of the white race and the home birth-rate
would not fall so rapidly.33
The decline of the birthrate in the homeland was perceived by the author as related
to global balance and colonial expansion:
Much of the globe lies underdeveloped … For some time yet overflow currents may well stream
out from the seats of the white race to occupy and develop the backward lands. If these dry up
now the void will assuredly be filled with the children of the black brown and yellow peoples and
the type that has achieved the most will contribute less than it might to the blood of the ultimate
race that is to fill the globe.34
In this perspective, the necessity of colonial expansion on a global scale was seen as
crucial for the consolidation of the white race, while on the national scene the adoption
of restrictionist policies would counter the mass immigration from southern Europe.
34
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eugenics
The restrictionist movement had a further argument at its disposal. From the beginning of the century, the movement in favor of eugenics had in fact gained considerable
attention in the United States. Initially named “stirpiculture” by its founder and Charles
Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, eugenics proposed applying Darwinian theories of
evolution to the human race itself. To counter an a priori determination in terms of race,
eugenics advocated a knowing, enlightened intervention for the purpose of planning
and raising the psychosomatic traits of the population to a higher level. In presenting
his views to the American Sociological Society, Galton remarked that natural evolution,
“in continuous flux and constant change,” even while apparently maintaining its forms
unaltered, can be likened to “a stream of wind-swept clouds that sometimes clings to
a mountain, whose parts change unceasingly, even if its overall aspect rarely changes.”
The comparison taken from the natural world was meant to make the aspect of rational
awareness stand out in sharp relief: “Evolution is in any case a great phantasmagoria,
but it assumes an infinitely more interesting aspect once it is realized that the intelligent
action of human will can somehow shape its course.”35
What was involved in the author’s intentions, therefore, was a “manly creed full
of hope and one that appeals to many of the most noble aspects of our nature.” The
increase in “health, energy, manliness, skill, disposition to courtesy,” would, according
to the author, lead to the formation of an individual “more suited to our vast imperial
opportunities.” This new science could be defined as “positive eugenics,” inasmuch as it
aimed at the improvement of the race through a sagacious marriage policy, not imposed
from above but, still according to Galton, elaborated “in the national conscience like a
new religion.”36
The cognitive investigations into the laws of heredity, together with the gathering
of statistical data concerning the psychophysical conditions of the population, were in
turn to lead to “negative eugenics.” The aim of negative eugenics was to discourage marriage between persons affected by physical and/or mental defects as a preventive measure
against a possible overall increase in the number of individuals affected by psychophysical
deficiencies.
Interest in this line of research on the hereditary transmission of somatic traits fell
within a current of studies in the field of criminal anthropology, widely known in America,
and it included both the Italian school of Enrico Ferri and Lombroso and the French
school of Leonce Pierre Manouvrier and Antoine Lacassagne. One of the most frequent
rhetorical arguments associated with the eugenics movement looked to the animal and
plant world for analogies favorable to its theories. Such was the point of view assumed by
Paul Popenoe, editor of the Journal of Heredity. With the authority lent by his scientific
background, Popenoe maintained that, from the standpoint of mental capacity, miscegenation actually represented an advantage for the inferior race, though a disadvantage for the
35
superior race.37 His arguments had many points in common with the question of African
Americans. Moreover, these issues were very popular among a wider audience through
the spread of such magazines as Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. According to
those who upheld these theories, the risk run by the superior race consisted of a general
decline in intelligence and personal rectitude.
In American reformist and progressive circles aspects of the new discipline that
were well-received included the eugenicists’ idea which advocated mating on the basis of
positive hereditary characteristics in order to improve the race, if not to create persons of
genius; as well as the policy of discouraging reproduction, even to the point of sterilizing
the weak and unfit. A center for the gathering and study of data relating to the transmission of hereditary factors known as the Eugenics Records Office was set up in New York
State at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. The director, Charles B. Davenport, organized
the office’s first research project, which regarded a small rural community and involved
an analysis of clinical data pertaining to the local population over five generations. The
findings revealed the hereditary transmission of mental feebleness, offering to those promoting the research the opportunity to proselytize in favor of a policy of the prevention
of reproduction by such individuals as an important component of social policy.38
In 1912, the first Eugenics Congress was held in London, while in 1913 in the United
States a sub-section of the American Breeders’ Association was named the American
Genetic Association. As historian Richard Hofstadter has remarked, “the National
Conference on the Improvement of the Race held in 1914 had demonstrated the extent
of the inroads made by eugenics theories in medical schools, among those involved in
providing social assistance and in charitable organizations.”39 Following the lead of the
state of Indiana with its approval in 1907 of a law allowing the sterilization of the mentally
handicapped, twelve other states adopted similar measures prior to 1915.
In addition to finding a direct application in the legislation of these states, eugenics
aroused considerable interest among social scientists. Long before it came to constitute
one of the scientific underpinnings in the debate over restrictive immigration laws in
the 1920s, eugenics had been a matter of heated theoretical debate at the beginning of
the century. According to the new science, evolutionist theories could not be applied to
the human races inasmuch as no possibility existed of altering race-related, geneticallytransmitted traits, much less any possibility that the surrounding environment might be
able to influence such traits in any significant way. However, this represented only one
aspect of the question in that the new science advocated a progressive improvement of
the somatic and psychic traits of the human species, by counteracting the blind workings
of nature with conscious, carefully aimed intervention.
Among scholars, there were those such as Lester Ward who deemed it opportune
to make some distinctions in relation to this cultural orientation. Although maintaining
a very strict racial prejudice in relation to African Americans, Ward stressed his interest
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in the modifiability of the environment, even going so far as to coin new expressions. In
Ward’s opinion, the efforts of the legislators and of all those who devoted their energies
to achieving improved social conditions had to turn to “euthenics,” the science for the
human control of the environment, as opposed to “eugenics.” In view of the fact that
control over human heredity was beyond the reach of individuals, Ward argued, interest
and social research ought to focus on environmental factors. Discounting the unjustified
fears related to the behavior of the lower classes of society, Ward considered the well-being
of the masses crucial to the development of the nation. He even coined a new term for
the concept: “eudemics.” The popular classes in fact provided the work force for society.
It was necessary to look to them, as Ward emphasized, instead of to the elite, inasmuch
as they represented the “corner-stone” upon which “the gilded pinnacles of the social
temple” rested.40
Biologists, physicians, and social scientists were puzzled about the possibility of selecting the best traits in terms of character and intelligence of select individuals with an
eye to producing so-called “genial” figures, owing to the fact that data based on real life
experience seemed to contradict, or at least complicate, the terms of the problem. What
appeared much more feasible than “positive eugenics” – which, in the opinion of Judge
Herbert G. Wells, was not to be encouraged because it conflicted with the principle of
individuality – was the possibility of putting “negative eugenics” into practice, meaning
the policy of discouraging unions among the feeble and unfit, even to the extent of a true
and proper sterilization campaign.41
A distinction that was considered just as fundamental for a more punctual, detailed
analysis of the problem focused on the division between “inborn traits” and “acquired
traits”resulting from changes in the environment. An analysis of the transmission of these
latter traits over many generations could demonstrate the great extent to which the influence exercised by the environment was capable of modifying both the somatic and psychic
traits of individuals over an extended period. The most illustrious example concerned the
research project organized by anthropologist Franz Boas in 1911 on the anthropometric
variations present in Italian immigrants.42 The evident modifications that could be found
in the second generation should lead, according to the author, to a conclusion regarding
an “increasing” adaptation of individuals to the environment. The different viewpoints
were in turn intertwined with the different positions then being tested in the great debate
over immigration, as well as the question of whether or not it was possible to assimilate
races whose characters were so distant from those of the Anglo-Saxons.
The racist premise underlying eugenics resulted in its positions being defended by
all those who were fighting for restrictions on immigration, in some cases joining racism
with the most advanced progressive positions, as was the case with John Commons and
Edward Ross. The figure of Henry P. Fairchild must also be added to these. A professor
of sociology and the president of the American Eugenics Society, Fairchild was active in
37
progressive causes and believed in socialist principles, while at the same time he maintained
his deep-seated racist convictions. He substituted the term “racism” with “consciousness of
kind,” an expression introduced by sociologist Franklin Giddings. He indicated the ties of
the members of the so-called “in-group,” defining its boundaries and those living outside
of it, the so-called “out-group.” Faced with the consequences caused by immigration on
salary levels, pauperism, criminality, and the mental health of the population, according
to Fairchild, it was impossible to assume a laissez-faire attitude.43
During the war years, racial theories gained credibility as never before. The foremost
of the popular racist authors during World War One and the immediate post-war years
was Madison Grant. His best-known book, The Passing of the Great Race, published in
1916, enjoyed a great success with sales ranging between twenty and thirty thousand
copies. Contrary to every assimilationist idea, he renewed the alarm for the risk of the
disappearance of the Anglo-Saxon stock in the event that “the melting pot” was allowed
to boil out of control.
On the scientific level, the most authoritative scholar of eugenics was Harry Laughlin.
Head of the Eugenics Record Office and director of the Carnegie Institute in Washington,
Laughlin was also counsel to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization
and it was in this role that he played an important part in providing a scientific underpinning for the Quota Act of 1924.
the problem of assimilation
In the following years, the accent gradually shifted on the crucial role of the environment in modifying groups of population and on the different processes of assimilation.
Among social scientists, Ross remained one of the most strenuous supporters of the hierarchy-of-races theory according to which every race, including the peoples of southern
Europe, had specific somatic and behavioral characteristics. It is interesting to analyze
what Ross had to say about this:
There is an imposing stock of facts which seem to prove that the Negro has a fiercer sex appetite
than other men, that the South Italian has a bent for murder, the Jew for money making.44
About the emotional instability of southern Italians, he noted furthermore:
Before the immigration board of inquiry, they gesticulate too much and usually have tears stand
in their eyes. When two witnesses are being examined, both talk at once. Their glances flit quickly
from one questioner to the other and their eyes are the restless uncomprehending eyes of the
desert Beduin between walls.45
Giving the most plausible answer for such uneasiness clearly due to the ignorance
of the English language, Ross explained it as a further handicap: “Yet for all this eager
attention they are slow to catch the meaning of a single question.”46
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John R. Commons, who had also been in favor of a restrictionist policy for immigration focused mainly on the basic problem of political rights for those already living
and working in America:
…our democratic theories and forms of government were fashioned by the one of the many races
… The so called Anglo-Saxons developed them out of its own insular experience… other races
and peoples accustomed to despotism and even savagery and wholly unused to self-government
have been thrust into the delicate fabric in America.47
An aspect of the universal rights of the republic – citizenship and the right to
vote – was racially defined here, and therefore could not be extended to those who did
not share the same racial characteristics. On this subject, he remarked:
The true foundations of democracy are in the character of the people themselves that is of individuals who constitute the democracy. These are intelligence, manliness that which the Romans call
virility …self control the capacity for cooperation to work together for a common interest.48
He concluded on this point that if these qualities “were lacking, democracy is
futile.”49
The right of suffrage had to be granted from above, not just gained from the bottom
up. The problem was related in particular to those workers who came from “the inferior
races accustomed to despotism and even savagery … The great political questions of today
are concerning those who are out of the ‘citizenship of the manual laborers,’ the former
serfs.” He concluded then, “It is in the wide extension of the suffrage that we find the
underlying cause of the ‘machine’ and the ‘boss’.”50 The term “citizenship” through which
Commons defined the workers of the American Federation of Labor has a significant
meaning in its description of an ideal circle, outside of which came those laborers from
abroad, “the former serfs.” For the assimilation of the new immigrants in the long run,
he stressed the importance of focusing on the cultural aspects rather than the biological:
“to be great a nation need not to be of one blood, it must be of one mind.”51
Along with language, the means for assimilation came from education, from habits,
according to John Dewey, and from social imitation, according to Gabriel Tarde’s theories that were well known in America. In the search for common social constraints in a
complex industrial metropolitan environment, and in order to encourage the processes
of assimilation, social scientists emphasized the rational characters of human behavior
within the framework of technocratic modernization by excluding those elements of social
reality they considered irrational. While the concept of “public” was defined within a
democratic paradigm by the rational acquisition of information through the mass media,
“mobs” were mostly defined as impulsive and irrational and were compared in public
discourse to women, children, and savages.52
Social imitation would also become an important tool for assimilation. Sociologist
Albert Jenks of the University of Minnesota used the case of a foreign-born woman living
39
in Minnesota as an example. She advised a friend abroad who was about to migrate from
Europe to America: “Buy yourself a hat in New York. Don’t you dare get off the train in
Minneapolis with a shawl over your head!”
The means for assimilation of different races within American society could also be
extended to far away territories such as the recently conquered Philippines, but according
to Jenks, it would take at least two generations for the process to be accomplished.
The imitative mechanism based on instinctive urges such as suggestion should be
corrected, according to Ross, with the rational verification of results actually attained,
emancipating the masses from the “blind imitation” that rendered individuals easy prey
to waves of irrational excitement or consumer trends. Likewise, in the political domain,
he hoped for the diffusion of “rational imitation” as a way of educating the individual to
the public life of citizenship. While steadfastly holding to the idea of universal suffrage, he
stressed the influence of the expert on public opinion, as it would be “slander to declare
that universal suffrage puts Socrates on the same level as Sambo.”53
In the same vein, although without sharing this same criticism of mass democracy,
John Dewey emphasized the importance of the concept of “habit.” He stressed the importance of the social character of man, for whom “habits” constituted the way of access
to social life.54 It was on this concept of human conduct as a flexible and pliable predisposition towards the social environment that he based his educational theories. Denying
the distinction between the elite and the masses that we found in Ross, Dewey did not
foresee the reproduction of a standardized behavior in the masses, like a mechanical chain
of stimulus-response, according to the new industry of consumption and the school of
behaviorism. Instead, he envisioned a democracy in which citizens would be educated
towards the use of intelligence and critical analysis as a democratic habit. According to
the philosopher, American democracy was facing two opposite directions with respect to
the “construction of habits.” On the one hand, there was the tendency to “multiply the
occasions for imitation” or routine behavior, and on the other, the tendency to “stimulate the impulses and habits that as experience has proved, render us more sensitive and
generous … the habit of intelligence.”55
racism in nazi germany and in the united states
With the rise of the nazi regime, the leading actors of the cultural and political
confrontation that took place in the thirties were once again, as in the years preceding
the immigration laws, Franz Boas on one side, and Harry Laughlin on the other.56 In
this case as well the relations between the promoters of eugenics in the United States and
Germany were working within a complex network of international relations. In their
analyses of nazi Germany, American social scientists were particularly interested in the
issue of racism. There were three different fields of research: eugenics, a compared analysis
40
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of mass-persuasion techniques in the two different societies, and an analysis of primitive
and symbolic nazi rituals.
According to sociologist Robert Park, the similarities were to be found in the special
relationship between the leader and the group that may be established on the one hand
in wars or emergencies or, on the other hand, in authoritarian regimes. In these cases,
the restoration of group-morale, according to Park, could be explained by resorting to
anthropological concepts such as the use of magic. Following Bronislaw Malinowski’s
studies, he explained “the essence of magic” as “the effects brought about by words and
symbols.”57 More often, though, sociologists or social psychologists turned to anthropological concepts in order to explain the relationship between Hitler and the masses in
the nazi regime. Hitler was very often perceived as the modern Genghis Khan or “the
medicine man” with his “hypnotic” capacities over the masses.58 Park himself referred
to ceremonies and rituals in the Nuremberg rallies as kinds of “religious revivals” where
every rational faculty of the individual was inhibited.
Eugenics was the field more directly bound to racist issues. In 1925, new relationships
were undertaken between the two countries with the scientific help of Harry Laughlin and
the Rockefeller Foundation. The International Congress for the Science of the Population
held in Berlin in 1935 (where the vice-presidents were the two Americans Laughlin and
Campbell) received great support from the international scientific community.
In 1935-36 there was however an important shift in American public opinion. The
Rockefeller Foundation had in fact stopped financing Laughlin and the American eugenic
movement. At the International Conference of the Population held in Paris in 1936, a
group of eminent scholars organized a committee to promote international activities
against racism. The American exponent of the group was Franz Boas. He spent the last
years of his life preceding World War Two struggling against racist theories that were still
very much in vogue in the scientific community.59
The issue of racism stimulated interesting analogies between the two countries.
Sociologist Clifford Kirkpatrick, in his book on women and family life in nazi Germany,
stressed the necessity of considering the theme of racism as crucial to American society:
“Gasping with horror at Nazi repression helps the average American to forget the 5000
lynchings in his own country. It is more pleasant to protest against the persecution of
Jews in Germany than to reconcile American race relationships with the principles of
democracy.”60
In his short visit to Germany in the summer of 1936, Dubois – although aware of
the special privilege of being an official visitor with an American passport – remarked
how, notwithstanding the official racial politics, “Germans behaved far more correctly in
public when encountered well-bred gentlemen of a different color than white Americans.”
He explained to The Courier how anti-Semitism could have some points in common
with American color prejudices. In the summer of 1936, in fact, Propaganda Minister
41
Goebbels had forbidden all public anti-Semitic demonstrations on the occasion of the
Olympic Games. As David Lewis has remarked,
Given what Du Bois knew of Nazi discrimination against Jews and when he knew it, it was entirely
reasonable for him to equate German anti-Semitism with American Jim Crow: with the denial of
the franchise to Negro-Americans, the restriction by law and practice upon access to public accommodations and places of entertainment, the rigid application of a one drop rule of racial classification, confinement to ghettos in the North, de facto exclusion from universities and professions,
the ban on intermarriage and vulnerability to insult and assault. In an editorial on “The Crisis” he
sarcastically suggested that Hitler ought to be invited to lecture at a few white universities: “They
might not understand his German but his race nonsense would fit beautifully.”61
Among social scientists, Hadley Cantril was particularly attentive to social movements
with prevailing irrational elements. He worked with the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration beginning in 1939 as the director of the Institute of Public Opinion Research. In
1941, he published a book on The Psychology of Social Movements 62 in which he analyzed,
among other movements, the rise of the Nazi Party and lynching mobs occurring in the
South. In both cases, he stressed the importance of the racial myth that bound together
nazi Germany on the one hand, and white southern society on the other. It must be
remarked that the book had been written in 1940 when nazi Germany had not yet suffered any military defeats. Active consensus to the nazi regime had to be understood,
beyond unemployment policies, as a moral and political legitimization of the regime
after the post-World War One crisis. Consensus, though, was also reached with terrorist
instruments. As far as the southern states of America were concerned, racial superiority
also implied lynching, when necessary. Reversing the current phrase that “niggers must
keep their place,” Cantril remarked on how white people actively sought to maintain
their place in a hierarchical society.
Nazi propaganda methods had raised a great deal of interest among social scientists
from the early 1930s on. Social psychologists such as Leonard Doob and Hadley Cantril,
as well as anthropologists, carefully studied nazi methods of mass persuasion, finding
analogies with American techniques. Max Lerner’s remarks in 1933, at the rise of the
nazi regime, are particularly significant: “The most damning blow the dictatorships have
struck at democracy has been … in taking over and perfecting our most prized techniques
of persuasion and our underlying contempt for the credulity of the masses.”63
Social scientists started to realize that democratic societies should also learn how to
use public ceremonies as “a source of strength” for their own system from authoritarian
regimes, as had been remarked by many, including the famous economist John Maynard
Keynes.64 From this perspective, David Riesman saw the use of German mass meetings
in a different democratic context, as a possible way of nurturing “a critical democratic
spirit” in the average American citizen.65
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In comparison with dictatorships, where the majority passively obeys their leader,
the specific relationship between the leader and the majority in a democratic society
was based, according to social scientists, on the art of persuasion, i.e., of arousing active
consent on the part of the people. Democratic cultural patterns, or symbols, needed to
be strongly reaffirmed or, according to Eric Hobsbawm’s well known concept, reinvented.
A definition of democracy included not only a specific form of government but also “a
feeling in the mind and heart.”66
In conclusion, it is worth noting that in the Atlantic crossing of ideas in the 1930s,
almost following a circular movement, the themes of crowd psychology – the “irrationality” of crowds versus the “rational” public, the leader-masses relationship, and the
themes of “suggestion” and “imitation” – were projected onto the European scene where,
in a different context, they had first been formulated at the beginning of the century. In
fact, these themes constituted one of the principal interpretative canons that American
scholars adopted, contrasting a passive conformism of the masses prone to propaganda
and dictatorships with the formation of an active and participative American democratic
public.
At the same time, the language of race acquired a double meaning. The race issue
became crucial in the international construction of the democratic discourse opposing
nazi Germany and fascist countries. However, this offered the opportunity to progressive
associations and single intellectuals inside the country to denounce how far American
democratic and egalitarian principles were from the racist exclusionary practices confronting the most disadvantaged groups in American society.
43
1. E.A. Ross, Social Control (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 439.
2. C. Merriam, American Political Theories (New York: McMillan, 1918), 305-333. On the importance of
German culture in American universities, see A.M. Martellone, “Il modello tedesco nelle università americane,
H.B. Adams, J.W. Burgess,” in Potere e nuova razionalità. Alle origini delle scienze della società e dello stato in
Germania e negli Stati Uniti, ed. T. Bonazzi (Bologna: CLUEB, 1982).
3. See R. Baritono, Oltre la Politica. La crisi politico istituzionale negli Stati Uniti tra Otto e Novecento
(Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), 59-81.
4. A.F. Bentley, “Simmel, Durkheim and Ratzenhofer,” The American Journal of Sociology 35 (July 1925-May
1926): 251.
5. Ibid.
6. L. Mangoni, Una crisi di fine secolo. La cultura italiana e la Francia tra Otto e Novecento (Torino: Einaudi,
1985).
7. Ibid., 3-17.
8. H.P. Fairchild, “The Paradox of Immigration,” The American Journal of Sociology 18 (July 1912-May
1913): 324-32; Id., The Melting Pot Mistake (Boston: Little Brown, 1926).
9. E.A. Ross, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 18 (July 1901): 80.
10. A.M. Martellone, “Ideologia di un’appartenenza: ‘anglosassonismo’ e ‘Anglo-saxondom’ nel discorso
pubblico angloamericano (1895-1917),” Passato e Presente 31 (1994): 41; See, among others: T. Gossett,
Race: The History of an Idea in America (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963); J. Higham,
Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,
1955); R. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1981); S.J. Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,
1981), published in Italian as Intelligenza e pregiudizio. Contro i fondamenti scientifici del razzismo. (Milano:
Il Saggiatore, 1996); M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge,
1986); H. Winant, Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994); F. Anthias, “Race and Class Revisited: Conceptualising Race and Racisms,” Sociological Review
38 (February 1990): 19-42; D.T. Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (New York: Routledge,
1997).
11. C.C. Closson, “The Hierarchy of European Races,” The American Journal of Sociology 3 (July 1897-May
1898): 314-17; G.L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (London: Dent-Fertig,
1979).
12. F. Boas and H.M. Boas, “The Head-Forms of Italians as Influenced by Heredity and Environment,”
American Anthropologist (April 1913).
13. For an example of a study based on strict genetic theories, see G. Davenport, “Hereditary Crime,” The
American Journal of Sociology 17 (July 11-May 12): 403-9; on the opposite side, see: I.A. Hourwhich (Bureau
of the Census), “Immigration and Crime,” The American Journal of Sociology 17 (July 1911-May 1912):
478-90; Mrs. A.D. Sheffield, “The So-called Criminal Type,” The American Journal of Sociology 18 (July 1912May 1913): 381-90; F.A. Kellor, “Criminal Anthropology in Its Relation to Criminal Jurisprudence,” The
American Journal of Sociology 4 (1899): 515-27.
14. F. Norris, A Case for Lombroso: Collected Writings (New York: Scribner’s, 1928), 35-42.
15. U. Weatherly, “The First Universal Races Congress,” The American Journal of Sociology 17 (1912):
315-328.
16. W.E.B. Du Bois, “Is Race Friction between Blacks and Whites Growing and Inevitable?” The American
Journal of Sociology 13 (1907-8): 676-97, 820-40.
44
daria frezza
17. Ibid., 838.
18. Ibid., 696.
19. E.A. Ross, “Western Civilization and the Birth Rate,” The American Journal of Sociology 12 (July 1906May 1907): 715.
20. J. Mecklin, “The Philosophy of the Color Line,” The American Journal of Sociology 18 (1913): 346.
21. A. Lorini, Rituals of Race, American Public Culture and the Search for Racial Democracy (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1999), 117-150; R.L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade Against Lynching,
1909-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).
22. W.E.B. Du Bois, Discussion of the Paper of A. Stone, “Is Race Friction Between Blacks and Whites in The
United States Growing and Inevitable?” 834-837.
23. For an analysis of this subject in a different version, see D. Frezza, “The Public Boundaries of the Private
Sphere,” in Public and Private in American History. State, Family, Subjectivity in the Twentieth Century,
R. Baritono, D. Frezza et al. eds. (Torino: Otto Editore, 2003), 165-84.
24. E.A. Ross, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” 88.
25. F.A. Walker, Restriction to Immigration. A Publication of The American Restriction League, 33 (New
York, 1897).
26. T. Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life (New York, 1901), 9.
27. E.A. Ross, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” 80.
28. E.A. Ross, “The Mob Mind,” Popular Science Monthly (1897): 395, 397.
29. E.A. Ross, Social Control (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 440. According to the theory of sociologist
Lester Ward, the role of women was crucial in the transmission of racial hereditary traits; see, L. Ward, “Our
Better Halves,” Forum 6 (1888): 266-75.
30. C.P. Gilman, The Man-Made World or, Our Androcentric Culture (New York, 1911), 217.
31. M.R.S. Coolidge, Why Women Are So (New York, 1912).
32. W.Z. Ripley Race, “Progress and Immigration,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 18 (July-December 1909): 134.
33. E.A. Ross, The Foundations of Sociology (New York: Mcmillan, 1905), 65.
34. E.A. Ross, “Western Civilization and the Birth Rate,” American Journal of Sociology 12 (July 6-May 7): 617.
35. F. Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aim,” The American Journal of Sociology 10 (July 1904): 24.
36. Ibid., 25.
37. T. Gosset, Race: The History of an Idea (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963), 381.
38. F.H. Danielson and C.B. Davenport, The Hill Folk: Report on a Rural Community of Hereditary Defectives,
Eugenics Record Office, Memoir N. 1, New York, Long Island, Cold Spring Harbor, 1908.
39. R. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 162.
40. L. Ward, “Eugenics, Euthenics, Eudemics,” The American Journal of Sociology 18 (May 1913): 754.
41. F. Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aim,” 6-25.
42. F. Boas, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants, U.S. Immigration Commission, 1907-1910,
Washington Government Printing Office, 1911.
43. T. Gosset, Race: The History of an Idea, 388.
45
44. E.A. Ross, The Foundations of Sociology, 60.
45. E.A. Ross, The Foundations of Sociology, 61.
46. Ibid.
47. J.R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America, (New York: McMillan, 1916), 5.
48. Ibid., 6-7.
49. Ibid., 7.
50. J.R. Commons, Representative Democracy (New York: Bureau of Economic Research, 1900), 31-33.
51. J.R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America, 20.
52. D. Noble, The Paradox of Progressive Thought (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1958); D. Noble,
The Progressive Mind 1890-1917 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970); G. Gerstle, “The Protean Character
of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99 (October 1994): 1043-73; G. Gerstle, American
Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).
53. E.A. Ross, Social Control, 286, 351.
54. Dewey took issue with McDougall’s instinct theory, so popular in America, and Watson’s concept of
behaviorism in which every stimulus had to correspond to a response. He was also critical of the Freudian
theory of instinctive drives conceived as the profound and unconscious elements of human nature.
55. J. Dewey, “Human Nature and Conduct,” in The Middle Works 1899-1924, vol. 14, ed. Jo Ann Boydston
(Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 31-32, 144-145.
56. D. Frezza, Il leader, la folla, la democrazia nel discorso pubblico americano. 1880-41 (Roma: Carocci,
2001), 69.
57. R.E. Park, “Morale and the News,” The American Journal of Sociology 47 (November 1941): 366.
58. D. Frezza, “Hitlerism Abracadabra. Le scienze sociali americane e la crisi della democrazia 1920-41,”
Passato e Presente 13 (1995): 56-60.
59. S. Kühl, The Nazi Connection, Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1994); E. Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in
Britain and in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). On the measure of eugenics in Nazi Germany, see A. Ricciardi Von Platten, Il Nazismo e l’eutanasia dei malati di mente (Firenze: Le
Lettere, 2000).
60. C. Kirkpatrick, Nazi Germany: Its Women and Family Life (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1938), 21.
61. D.L. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, vol. 2 (New York: H. Holt
and Co., 2000), 398-400. For more on Du Bois and the Jewish problem, see D.L. Lewis, “The Negro and the
Warsaw Ghetto,” Jewish Life (April 1952): 14-15, translated together with other essays by the same author
in Studi Culturali 2 (2004): 298-370 (edited by P. Capuzzo and S. Mezzadra).
62. H. Cantril, The Psychology of Social Movements (New York: J. Jiley and Sons, 1963), originally published
in 1941.
63. M. Lerner, “The Pattern of Dictatorship,” in Ideas Are Weapons (New York: Viking Press, 1938), 512.
64. J.M. Keynes, “Art and the State,” in The Collected Writings of J.M. Keynes, vol. 28 (New York and London:
Mcmillan, 1982), 341-49, originally published August 26, 1936 in The Listener; on the whole subject, see
G.L. Mosse, “L’autorappresentazione nazionale negli anni Trenta negli Stati Uniti e in Europa,” in L’estetica
della politica, ed. M. Vaudagna (Bari: Laterza, 1987): 3-43.
46
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65. D. Riesman, “Government Education for Democracy,” Public Opinion Quarterly 5, no. 2 (June 1941):
195-210.
66. F.L. Burdette, “Education for Citizenship,” Public Opinion Quarterly (Summer 1942): 271.
47
“WE NEED A CLOSER CONTACT WITH PARIS:”
THE PRESENCE OF EUROPE IN AMERICAN ART FROM
THE ASHCAN SCHOOL TO ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM*
claudio zambianchi
“If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished – dead – and that
America is the country of the art of the future, instead of trying to base everything she
does on European Tradition!”1 So said Marcel Duchamp to an interviewer in 1915, less
than three months after he first arrived to New York. Duchamp may have been too hard
on Europe, but he was right about American art. Up until the beginning of the 1940s,
art in the United States was deeply imbued with European influences, and one of the
major paradoxes of American art of the first four decades of the twentieth century is that,
in their quest for a national style, Americans stumbled over European sources again and
again. Until at least the end of the thirties, it was Europe that provided the models and
the modern language with which to interpret American subject matters.
Before providing a short overview of the European presence in American art in the
second part of this paper, I will give some specific examples of the interaction. When the
Ashcan School arose in New York during the first decade of the twentieth century, one of
its main objectives was the creation of a truly American school. The core of the group was
formed by Robert Henri and some of his pupils from the Pennsylvania Academy of the
Fine Arts in the 1890s: William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, and John Sloan.
The latter four artists – who followed Henri to New York at the beginning of the new
century – all started their careers as newspaper illustrators and shifted to painting under
Henri’s impulse as soon as they reached New York. Henri and his followers were the first
to claim an American art in the new century, but their style was greatly influenced by
French painting of modern life. Henri had been to France three times and he mainly
admired the work of Manet, though through his work he also came to appreciate the
painting of old masters like Frans Hals and Diego Velázquez. Henri’s followers Glackens
and Shinn, on the other hand, looked to the work of Edgar Degas. In general, the main
source for the painting of the Ashcan School was French art of the 1870s and 1880s.
There is also a vernacular aspect to their realism, due to their former careers as newspaper
illustrators. The taste for the anecdotal and the narrative in Sloan’s Chinese Restaurant
(1909; University of Rochester, Memorial Art Gallery; www.otto.to.it), for example,
owes much to that experience. Nevertheless, the main influence on the Ashcan School’s
penchant for the depiction of urban modern life was the French Nouvelle Peinture. Such
a penchant casts a long shadow over the American art of the first half of the twentieth
century. The social realism of the thirties, for example, practiced by painters such as
49
FIGURE 1
“we need a closer contact with paris”
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 3
Reginald Marsh, Isabel Bishop, and the Soyer brothers during the Depression, is rooted
in the American Realism of the first decade of the century. If we look to another moment
of twentieth-century American painting, specifically the work of Grant Wood, creator of
one of the most famous icons of American art – American Gothic (1930; The Art Institute
of Chicago; www.otto.to.it) – we find a similar hiatus between the American subject matter and a style that was drawn from Europe. During the twenties Wood studied in Paris
and Germany, where a form of magic realism was developing. The lack of atmospheric
quality and hard edges in Wood’s The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (1931; New York,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art; www.otto.to.it) recall the paintings of Franz Radziwill
and Georg Scholz, among others, and the sharp focus with which Wood depicted the
farmers’ faces in American Gothic is similar in style to the portraits of Christian Schad.2
In terms of subject matter, Wood’s painting is American to the point of being nationalistic, while in terms of style it depends heavily on European prototypes. The stress on
subject matter as a means to define a specific American quality in painting is evident in
the words of the most vociferous of the Regionalists, Thomas Hart Benton. When he
looked in retrospect to the Regionalist art of the thirties in his book of memoirs, he saw
Regionalism as a reaction to Parisian models in order to draw inspiration from “American
life and American life as known and felt by ordinary Americans. We believed,” he added
“that only by our own participation in the reality of American life, and that definitely
included the folk patterns which sparked it and largely directed its assumptions, could
we come to forms in which Americans would find the opportunity for genuine spectator
participation.”3 While it is clear that Benton contrasted an art that was based on the life
of the American people with the dehumanization of Modernist art, the question concerning the definition of an authentic American art specifically in terms of style does not go
beyond a generic plea for realism and remains substantially unanswered.
If, paradoxically, the influence of Europe provided painters of the Ashcan School
and Regionalism with the means to address issues of national identity, the tradition
of modern European art guided Arshile Gorky on the difficult path towards personal
identity.4 Gorky was born in Turkish Armenia in 1904 and landed in the U.S. in 1920
with his sister, after their mother had died from the strain of fleeing the Turkish army.
When he started painting, he relied heavily on European sources, to the point of almost
copying the works of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, even Ingres, almost as though such a
pedigree could protect him from the sense of loss, deprivation, and rootlessness that he
experienced in the U.S. It was only in the mid-thirties that Gorky finally managed to
break away from a direct European influence and start producing original work.
The European influence on American art may also follow a more tortuous path,
as is shown in a case that will be considered in some detail. A Eurocentric attitude also
seems to characterize the outlook of African American intellectuals on the plastic arts, in
a very specific way. Pivoting on the inspiration that African art provided to the European
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avant-garde of the early twentieth century, African American intellectuals believed that
African roots, which could lead to the creation of an African American art of the future,
could be rediscovered and reclaimed through those modern prototypes. In the anthology
that is to be considered a “manifesto of [African American] cultural independence”5 and
one of the key documents of the “Harlem Renaissance” – The New Negro: An Interpretation,
edited in 1925 by Alain Locke – the attention is mostly focused on African American
poetry and music. Even the famous art collector Albert C. Barnes, who contributed to the
anthology with a paper about “Negro Art and America,” discussed the achievements of
both black popular music, particularly the spiritual, and black poetry at length. Although
the attention devoted by Barnes to African American plastic arts was comparatively scarce,
the author nevertheless “considered African art as a starting point for the development
of a Negro art idiom.”6 Black intellectuals such as Alain Locke, however, wanted modern
African American art to be part of an advanced American culture, without any further
specification. As Locke wrote to Paul Kellogg in 1926: “I don’t see any more reason for
holding the Negro mind and spirit down to the crudeness of its forebears than for lamenting that the silly Celts became Irish, or the Goths, Germans, or the Franks, French,
or the Angles, English.”7 The legacy of African art was therefore to be “transformed”8 in
order to become one of the means towards the creation of new forms of modern artistic
expression, as well as a clue to a reached “cultural maturity”9 of black art. That is why
Locke’s preferences ran to cultured young African American artists who were influenced
by modern European art. One such artist was Aaron Douglas who, together with the
German-born artist Winold Reiss, provided some of the drawings that illustrated the
anthology.10 Harlem intellectuals were trying to mediate between two different and, in
some respects, opposite needs: on the one hand, they wanted to use the materials of
black folklore and African heritage, beyond and counter to white stereotypes of a tame
African American culture; on the other hand, they claimed a role in modern American
culture. One viable way to negotiate these issues was the invitation to filter African and
folk sources through models of modern European art: “There would be little hope of an
influence of African art upon the western African descendants,” Locke stated, “if there
were not at present a growing influence of African art upon European art in general.
But led by these tendencies, there is the possibility that the sensitive artistic mind of the
American Negro, stimulated by a cultural pride and interest, will receive from African art
profound and galvanizing influence.”11 However, the greatest African American artist of
the succeeding generation, Jacob Lawrence, was more influenced by European modernist
sources than he was by African art. His great cycles about the life and history of his people
show – as Dorothy Adlow wrote in 1947 – “features of pictorial presentation that have
evolved in the modern school… There is abstraction, some primitivistic mannerism, and
much expressionist vigor.”12
From the above-mentioned examples, chosen somewhat randomly, it may seem
that the presence of Europe in American art during the first three decades of the
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twentieth century was overwhelming. In the epilogue of his book Port of New York,
Paul Rosenfeld, one of the art critics closer to Alfred Stieglitz, stated, “something has
happened in New York.”13 He was referring to the fact that at about that time (1924),
after decades of reliance on European art, American artists could begin to feel confident
about their own means and be “content to remain in New York …” He went on to say,
“Perhaps the tradition of life imported over the Atlantic has commenced expressing itself
in terms of the new environment, giving the Port of New York [chosen as the symbol
of cultural exchange between Europe and the U. S.] a sense at last, and the entire land
the sense of the Port of New York.”14 Rosenfeld’s prophetic tone notwithstanding, the
language of European art was actually used to articulate the meanings of national art in
the U.S. through the end of the thirties. Only when the Port of New York opened its
gates, not to American artists leaving for Europe but to artists escaping from Europe in
the late thirties and early forties because of dictatorship and war, things changed, and
Rosenfeld’s words materialized.
There are only a few cases in which the influence of Europe on early-twentieth-century American art is not so prominent. One of them, perhaps the most typical, is that of
Edward Hopper. Although Hopper went to Paris and experienced the art of the Parisian
avant-garde in the first decade of the century, in the second half of the twenties, when he
started to produce the images he is most known for, he did what he could to rid himself
of any European influence. And, characteristically, he did so by way of subtraction, to the
point that the critic Peter Schjeldahl once wrote: “A Hopper has no style, properly speaking.”15 It is as if this very conservative artist, captivated by provincial courthouses, small
town main streets, and uninhabited Victorian buildings, in other words, by an America
eaten up piece by piece by modernity, found the only way to talk about this by eliminating
any reference to modern styles and going back to a sort of primitive, native, vernacular
mode of expression. Georgia O’Keeffe’s immaculate presentations of skulls and flowers in
the twenties and thirties also show a similar attempt to be rid of all European influence in
terms of both style and subject matter, even if she had been influenced in the first phase
of her career by European trends such as Cubism and Kandinsky’s abstraction.16
These, however, are the exceptions in an entirely different outline. Until the end
of the 1930s, American art depended heavily on European art for its development.
Many American artists moved to Paris, while some important avant-garde European
artists, such as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, went from Paris to New York. The
Armory Show gave an enormous impulse to the American-European exchange in the
arts: in the years before 1913, when the show was held in New York, one could only see
modern European art in a few elitist galleries, especially that of Alfred Stieglitz. After
that time, all of the New York art world (galleries, collections, museums of modern art)
began to center around modern European art. The big shows put together by the great
American institutions, for example the Museum of Modern Art in New York (founded
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in 1929), were mostly devoted to French art, and American artists strongly opposed this
state of affairs. The great collections of modern art were also based mainly on European
art, not to speak of the Stein brothers’ collections, put together in Paris with the work of
the Fauves and the Cubists and, among others, the collection of Albert Gallatin that, for
the most part, included Cubist and Abstract art of the teens and twenties. Gallatin also
owned De Chirico’s Temple Fatal (1914; Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art), a
painting which was studied by De Kooning and Gorky in the late twenties. It also provided
the compositional basis and some literal elements for one of Gorky’s first independent
cycles, Nighttime, Enigma and Nostalgia, 17 the theme of which he pursued in several
drawings and paintings of the late twenties and early thirties. Katherine Dreier’s collection, Societé Anonyme Ltd., was begun in 1920 with the help of Marcel Duchamp and
included mostly European works of art. The story of Europe’s presence in the American
art of the first half of the twentieth century is, therefore, at the core of the development of
Modern American art. To trace even a short story of that exchange would be to epitomize
nearly the entire history of American art in these decades. This is why for this paper I
have chosen to single out only some of the phases of the American-European interaction,
in order to show how things changed from the beginning to the end of the period under
scrutiny, roughly from 1900 to 1950.
From the beginning of the century, American artists went to Europe, mostly to Paris,
to learn about modern art, following a path that had already been typical of the nineteenth
century. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins, followed
by American Impressionists such as William Merritt Chase and John Singer Sargent, all
went to Paris in order to learn painting techniques and were influenced by modern French
art. Roughly speaking, American art at the beginning of the century was dominated by
two trends: an academic, classical one, which spoke the international language of the
academies of fine arts, still alive and powerful in the art worlds of both Europe and the
U.S.; and a tame, impressionistic style that had spread from France throughout Europe and
the U.S. in the 1880s and 1890s. When the Ashcan School mixed those French sources
with vernacular elements from newspaper illustration and insisted on truly American
subjects, it seemed so revolutionary that in 1907 the paintings of Henri and his followers were refused by the jury of the exhibition of the National Academy of Design, even
though Henri himself was one of the jurors. Henri and his friends therefore decided to
start an independent exhibiting body, called “The Eight,” following a pattern started in
France by the Impressionists and widely adopted by modern European artists.18 Five of
the Eight were Ashcan painters – Henri, Glackens, Luks, Shinn, and Sloan – while the
other three belonged to different trends: Ernest Lawson was an American impressionist;
Maurice Prendergast was a Post-Impressionist deeply influenced by the French Nabis,
originally developing a taste for richly textured surfaces; and Arthur B. Davies was a somewhat belated Symbolist painter. The Eight held their first and only exhibition in 1908 at
the Macbeth Gallery in New York. Two years later, in 1910, a much larger Exhibition of
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Independent Artists was held, modeled on the shows of the French Salon des Indépendants,
with all the artists paying a fee for the right to exhibit their work. The aim of groups like
the Eight and the Independents was to reform the art world, but they were not directly
meant to support a specific trend of American modern art. Furthermore, the issue of
the Americanness of American art in the thought of some of the main characters of the
Eight has some generally spiritualistic, Whitmanesque overtones that render it difficult
to define in a specific way. Robert Henri stated, for example, that the truly American
artist of the future would not be the one who paints American subjects, or “a man who
has never been abroad;” rather, he or she “will not be a typical American at all, but will
be heir to the world instead of a part of it.”19 To Henri, the creation of an American art
meant, “to build our own projection on the art of the past, wherever it may be,”20 while
the aim of future American art should be to bring “the art spirit … into the very life of
the people.”21 John Sloan is more specific about the sources in French art upon which he
and the other painters of the Ashcan School relied: “The French school,” he wrote, “is the
only one that has survived in a healthy way during the past two hundred years.”22 What
Sloan saw as the excesses of “individualism” of the French school were to be tempered,23
and in order to dispense with artistry Sloan suggested that younger artists “have a plastic
illustrative point of view about life.”24 This could be achieved by doing “illustration for
a while” as he himself and some of his colleagues did for work, first in Philadelphia and
then in New York. “Get out of the school and studio. Go out into the streets and look
for life.”25 In Sloan’s words, one can see the two recent traditions that the Ashcan painters
relied upon intermingled: French painting of modern life and newspaper illustration, providing together the grounds for a realistic, democratic art, based upon direct observation.
However, compared with the Fauves and the Cubists, the realism of the Ashcan School,
although scandalous in the U.S. at the time, looks timid and belated, especially if one
considers that New York artists could see French avant-garde art from 1908 in the small
gallery that photographer Alfred Stieglitz opened at 291 (then 293) Fifth Avenue. He had
started by exhibiting only photographic works of the Photosecession, but with the 1908
show of Auguste Rodin’s drawings, he began to exhibit the work of modern European
artists such as Matisse, Picasso, Cézanne, and so on. A small group of artists and collectors
in touch with the current developments of modern European art gathered around 291.
Stieglitz’s patronage extended to financing the stay of American artists in Paris,26 where
a large colony of U.S. painters had gone in the first fifteen years of the century. Among
them were the main figures of would-be Early American Modernism: Marsden Hartley,
Patrick Henry Bruce, Max Weber, Joseph Stella, and Arthur Dove.
The newly discovered organizational capabilities of the American independent artists, and the keen interest in Parisian and, more generally, European avant-garde induced
by Stieglitz and the American go-betweens on both sides of the Atlantic form the background of the Armory Show, the greatest exhibition of modern art ever put together on
American soil.27 In 1912, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, founded
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at the end of 1911, decided to organize a large exhibition of American modern art. They
also planned to show a smaller quantity of modern European works; at the end of the
summer of 1912, Arthur B. Davies, the president of the Association, got news of the
Cologne Sonderbund, a great exhibition of modern art organized in the German city.
Walt Kuhn, the secretary of the Association, managed to sail to Germany to make it in
time for the last day of the exhibition, and arranged for many of the works to be loaned to
the Armory Show. He then moved on to Munich, Berlin, and Holland, where – through
the heirs of Vincent Van Gogh – he secured the loan of many of Van Gogh’s paintings.
While in Paris he was joined by Davies and they toured the studios there with the help of
American artist Walter Pach, choosing many paintings of the Parisian avant-garde, including the three most controversial works of the exhibition, namely Constantin Brancusi’s
M.lle Pogany (1912), Henri Matisse’s Blue Nude (1907; Baltimore Museum of Art), and
Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, no. 2 (1912; Philadelphia, Philadelphia
Museum of Art; www.otto.to.it). The latter was probably the most criticized work of the
entire exhibition in New York (when the show moved to Chicago, Matisse was instead
the main target of conservative criticism.)28 Kuhn and Davies then went to London
where the second Post-Impressionist exhibition was still open at the Grafton Galleries.
The show, organized by Roger Fry, included important paintings by Cézanne, Van Gogh,
Gauguin, Matisse, and the Cubists, and Pach and Davies secured the loan of some of
these paintings for the Armory Show. Moreover, Fry’s formalism, expressed in his theory
of the “significant form,” provided important critical groundwork for the understanding
of modern art in the U.S. Even if the European works of art only made up a fourth of the
works in the Armory Show, they received much more attention than the remaining three
fourths, which mostly showed how American painting was reliant on European models.
Not all of the early American modernists who gathered around Stieglitz were included in
the American selection at the Armory Show, but the general aspect of their work at that
time was European. Weber’s Chinese Restaurant of 1915 (New York, Whitney Museum of
American Art; www.otto.to.it), Battle of Lights, Coney Island of 1913-14 by Joseph Stella
(Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden, University of Nebraska Lincoln;
www.otto.to.it) (an Italian immigrant aware of Futurism), very different and much
more modern than, respectively, Sloan’s painting bearing the same title,29 and an urban
landscape such as Glackens’s Italo-American Celebration, c.1912 (Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, www.otto.to.it) all depended on Cubistic or Futuristic prototypes. Moreover, in
1914, one year after the Armory Show, Marius de Zayas, the caricaturist who traveled
to France on Stieglitz’s behalf in order to keep abreast of the new artistic trends, wrote
to the photographer: “I am working hard in making these people understand the convenience of a commerce of ideas with America. And I want to absorb the spirit of what they
are doing to bring it to ‘291’. We need a closer contact with Paris, there is no question
about that.”30 Even the abstract work of the Synchromists, Morgan Russell and Stanton
McDonald Wright, is an American version of Robert Delaunay’s Orphism.
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FIGURE 4
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 6
FIGURE 7
FIGURE 8
There were three main consequences of the Armory Show on American Art. Firstly,
after the closing of the exhibition, the American general public had a broader idea of
what modern European art was. Secondly, American modernist artists – mainly based in
New York – had better opportunities for their work to be seen and bought, thanks to the
flourishing of new galleries and the interest roused among important collectors. Thirdly,
since the Armory Show had been an overall success, and not just a succès de scandale,
some of the more adventurous and controversial European artists decided to leave Paris
for New York at the outbreak of the First World War. Among them was the anti-hero of
the Armory Show, Marcel Duchamp. The success of the Armory Show demonstrated that
there were better opportunities for modern artists in the U.S. than in countries like France
where the art world was dominated by stronger traditional forces. As Robert Lebel has
pointed out, there is a paradox in the situation induced by the Armory Show: while the
exhibition was meant to promote modern American art, it actually favored avant-garde
European art at the expense of the autochthones.31 As soon as they reached the U.S.,
artists like Duchamp and Picabia took the lead among the advanced milieu of American
art. Picabia had already been to New York in 1913, when the Armory Show was still
on, and was repeatedly interviewed by the press regarding modern art. In 1915, he went
again, this time for a longer stay together with his wife Gabrielle Buffet, and he was
joined by Marcel Duchamp. While during his first stay Picabia had moved in Stieglitz’s
circle, in 1915 both he and Duchamp befriended Walter Arensberg. A rich intellectual
and collector, Arensberg had recently converted to modern art and had gathered around
him a circle of artists and intellectuals that gave life to what became known as New York
Dada around 1920, right before Arensberg and his wife moved to California in 1921.
What had struck the Americans at the Armory Show, that is, pictures like Duchamp’s
Nude Descending a Staircase and Picabia’s The Procession, Seville (1912; www.otto.to.it),
was already superseded by the works that both artists, especially Duchamp, began to
produce right after their landing in the States. Duchamp invented the “ready made” in
New York. Although the Bicycle Wheel and the Bottle Rack had been made respectively in
1913 and 1914 when he was still in Paris, the idea to build a consistent artistic practice
upon these works began in the U.S. The practice began in New York when Duchamp
chose a snow shovel and gave it the title In Advance of the Broken Arm in 1915. The most
notorious of the ready-mades was Fountain. To make a long story short, in 1917 when
a revived Independent Society of American Artists was in the process of organizing its
first exhibition, the committee received a urinal, signed by R. Mutt, to be installed flat
on a podium. The rules of the Society provided that each artist member had the right
to exhibit what he or she wanted. However, the submission of the urinal – bought
ready-made by Marcel Duchamp at a plumber’s store, with the help of Walter Arensberg
and Joseph Stella – was too much. George Bellows, one of the Ashcan School artists,
strongly opposed the exposition of the urinal, but Arensberg, playing the observant of
the rules, simply said that the committee could do nothing but allow the Fountain into
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the exhibition. Duchamp, who was a member of the hanging committee, was delighted.
Eventually, the work was rejected, probably destroyed, and the only record we have of
the original work is a photograph taken by the “amused” Alfred Stieglitz, who played
with light and shadow in order to create a sort of spiritual, mysterious image out of a
urinal (www.otto.to.it).32 The meaning of the work in terms of the displacement of an
everyday object and the importance of idea over facture in a work of art was articulated
by Duchamp himself, his friend Beatrice Wood, and Louise Norton in The Blind Man, a
little magazine that lived on Arensberg’s money.33 The direct influence of the ready-made
on American art of the late teens was not so widespread. Morton Schamberg’s and Elsa
von Freytag Loringhoven’s God, of 1917, and Man Ray’s New York (1917; New York,
Whitney Museum of American Art) are among the early examples to show its impact.
Duchamp’s mental conception of art, however, was much more influential on the American
art of the late fifties and sixties. Nevertheless, the mock idolatry of the “machine,” even
a “bachelor machine,” that we can see in both Duchamp’s and Picabia’s work, was very
influential on American art at the time. In Duchamp’s most famous American work,
The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of
Art; www.otto.to.it), begun in New York in 1915 and abandoned unfinished in 1923,
the idea of an impossible relationship between male and female is conveyed through a
complicated machine-like device; while Picabia’s Ici, c’est ici Stieglitz Foi et Amour (1915)
has been considered by scholars as a sort of sexual pun that metaphorically alludes to the
increasingly marginal position of the photographer in the New York avant-garde world,
with the bellows of the camera actually recalling a flaccid penis.34 In Young American
Girl in a State of Nudity (1915), the girl is portrayed as an automobile sparkplug. In
the work of both Picabia and Duchamp there is an ironic notion of the machine that
Americans, for the most part, did not share. Many of the American artists who were
members of Arensberg’s circle also described the machine with the same exactitude as
Picabia’s sparkplug, but the former actually took it seriously. What Duchamp repeatedly
said tongue-in-cheek about the machine being the greatest American contribution to the
twentieth century was taken literally: Charles Sheeler even said, “our factories are our
substitutes for religious expression.”35 Many American intellectuals were indeed convinced
that a specifically American culture could be built upon the machine. An entire trend
of American Modernist art portrayed the machine as quintessentially American subject
matter. Even if this process had started before World War One (a feeling of awe is conveyed, for example, by John Marin’s depictions of the Woolworth Building of the early
teens)36, it was only after the war that a large number of American artists started to deal
consistently with machine-related subjects. This course of events culminated in the great
1927 Machine Age exhibition. Joseph Stella’s depictions of the Brooklyn Bridge, Georgia
O’Keeffe’s skyscrapers, Charles Sheeler’s Ford Rouge River Plant paintings, and Stuart
Davis’s eggbeaters all demonstrate the fact that skyscrapers, bridges, industrial plants,
powerhouses, dams, and modern household appliances had become significant aspects
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FIGURE 9
FIGURE 10
of the American landscape and homes. Signs of industrial development and advanced
technology were considered to be the answer to the quest for a national style.37 Many
European intellectuals – especially the ones who praised “utilitarian structures”38 – were
also convinced that America was the land of the machine. This point of view may either
be tinged with irony and amusement, as in the case of Duchamp, or taken quite seriously,
as in the case of Le Corbusier. Europeans also provided the sources for the most famous
painters of the American industrial landscape of the twenties and thirties. Milton Brown,
in one of the first art historical papers on Precisionism, or Cubist-Realism as he called it,
stressed the links of this trend with European Modernism (especially Cubism, Purism,
and Futurism), even if he was convinced that he was dealing with “a recognizable and
influential American style.”39
FIGURE 11
FIGURE 12
Most of the so-called Immaculates, or Precisionists, were part of Arensberg’s circle:
for example, Charles Sheeler who, together with Charles Demuth, was the most important
painter of this trend. Precisionism made a deep impact on the American art of the twenties and early thirties and it is a curious mix of idealization of the machine, a hard-edge
quality of painting drawn from photography (Sheeler actually started as a photographer
and only later shifted to painting), and Ozenfant’s and Jeanneret’s Purism, another French
source. Sheeler’s crystal-like depiction of Ford’s automobile River Rouge Plant of 1931
is a hymn to American industry, as if the “mathematical structure” 40 that characterized
nineteenth-century luminist landscape painting and meant to suggest the hidden order
of nature was now applied to the American industrial scene. A title such as Classic Landscape
(1931; Washington, National Gallery of Art, www.otto.to.it) is only a further clue of the
awe with which technology was looked at by the painter. There is more than a hint of
Synthetic Cubism in one of the famous New England scenes by Charles Demuth, Aucassin
and Nicolette (1921; Columbus Museum of Art), where two of the characters from the
famous medieval French fabliaux are transformed into industrial buildings. Demuth drew
from Picabia his way of portraying people through objects (“portrait posters”). His The
Figure 5 in Gold (1928; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, www.otto.to.it),
for example, may be considered a portrait of his poet-friend William Carlos Williams
through the visual quotation of some of his verses.41 A Cubist root is also evident in the
work of other Modernist American artists working in the twenties and thirties, for example
Stuart Davis and Gerald Murphy. Davis had begun as a follower of the Ashcan School,
and Murphy was a member of the famous group of American expatriates known as “the
lost generation.” They were both fascinated by the world of mass-produced goods and
advertisements presented in the flat surfaces and fragmentariness of Synthetic Cubism.
Cubism, in actuality, casts a longer shadow over Modernist American art than any other
European style. Cubism and Mondrian’s NeoPlasticism are actually the main influences
behind the painting of the American Abstract Artists (A.A.A.), an association founded
in November 1936 to promote American abstraction in a context dominated, after 1929,
by various trends of figuration: Regionalism, American Scene, and Social Realism.
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The artists of the A.A.A. complained that the great exhibitions of modern art in the U.S.
only included European art, as is evident for example in one of the big shows put together
by the then-director of the MoMA, Alfred Barr, Jr., in 1936: Cubism and Abstract Art.42
They were also convinced that in a time of crisis like the Depression art could, or rather
should, be abstract, because modern language in the arts went hand-in-hand with progressive ideals. George L.K. Morris, one of the leaders of the group, was also one of the
financial backers of the Partisan Review.43 It was in this periodical, in 1939, that the
then-unknown Clement Greenberg published his first and epoch-making essay
“Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Centering on a European notion of avant-garde and examining it from a Marxist point of view, Greenberg maintained that after the industrial revolution, the only means to oppose a fake culture produced by industry for the masses and
liable to be exploited by dictatorships were avant-garde practices, that is to say, small
groups of intellectuals, producing difficult art, linked to small sections of the advanced
middle class. These avant-garde groups had to produce a self-conscious art, one that
turned its “attention away from subject matter of common experience” and directed it
“upon the medium of the craft.”44 Delving deeply into the artists’ specific medium was
considered to be the only way “to keep culture moving,”45 the main historical purpose of
the avant-garde from Greenberg’s perspective. “Art for art’s sake” had become an historical
necessity.46 What is ironic is that Greenberg was to become, in just a few years, the major
supporter of Abstract Expressionism, an art that, far from abandoning subject matter in
order to get to the rarefied realm of pure form, insisted on the importance of content.
“There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”47 So wrote two of the Abstract
Expressionists, Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, in 1943 with the help of Barnett
Newman, in a famous letter to the New York Times, considered to be the first manifesto
of the new American painting. Once again, this new interest in content within abstraction is due to a European influence, especially that of the Surrealists who migrated en masse
from Europe between 1938 and 1942 because of the progressive nazi occupation of
Europe and the beginning of the war.48 This was part of what Rosamund Frost described
in 1942 as “the biggest intellectual migration since the fall of Constantinople.”49 The
migration was dramatically accelerated by the fall of Paris in June 1940: Kurt Seligmann
was the first to get to New York, in 1939, and the last one was Max Ernst, in 1941, when
it became almost impossible to leave France. Along with the Surrealist immigrants there
were other important painters, all of whom worked in Paris before the nazi invasion of
the north of France. These included André Masson and Yves Tanguy, for example, as well
as the Chilean Roberto Sebastian Matta, who was instrumental in familiarizing the
American painters with automatism (among the first to experiment with automatism
were Pollock, William Baziotes, Peter Busa, and Gerome Kamrowski).50 Automatism
went against the received opinion that Americans had about Surrealism, known in the
States primarily through Dali’s figurative version of the thirties.51 After the first automatic
experiments, stress began to fall not on the incongruous association of objects, but on
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the sign itself. An entire generation of American painters, who were looking for the means
to express the tragedy of their times and despised both an abstraction without content
and an outmoded figuration, found an answer to their needs in the Surrealist notion of
an art which came directly from the unconscious. The connection established by the
Surrealists between the individual and the collective unconscious was especially important
for the young generation of American painters. Through it they were able to scrutinize
myth and so-called primitive art as expressions of the collective unconscious of the human species. From this perspective, phylogeny was equal to ontogenesis, and the search
for a historical tradition became less important than the recognition of the common roots
of the human being. André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, together with Claude
Lévi-Strauss, eventually got to New York in 1941. In December 1941, Max Ernst married
Peggy Guggenheim, who had moved her important collection of modern art from Europe
to New York. In the fall of 1942, she opened the gallery Art of This Century with the intention of exhibiting mostly European art, but she soon realized that some space should
be given to young American painters as well. She was therefore the first person to hold
one-man shows for Jackson Pollock, in 1943, and then for Mark Rothko and Clyfford
Still. Marcel Duchamp, who for twenty-five years had been traveling back and forth from
France to the United States, was in charge of installing the first show of the European
Surrealist immigrants in 1942, The First Papers of Surrealism. This famous exhibition was
characterized by a string that ran throughout the gallery space and hindered the view of
the works: such a labyrinthine display has recently been interpreted by T.J. Demos as an
allusion to the “dislocation” of the entire group, and, in this respect, “part of an insistent
homeless aesthetic that negotiated geopolitical displacement.”52 This installation, much
more than the organic space created by Frederick Kiesler for the Surrealist room in the
Art of This Century gallery,53 pointed to a new situation for European intellectuals in the
U.S.: the pattern of influence had changed. In the first four decades of the twentieth
century, the influence had gone one way, from Europe to the United States, and the artists who moved to New York did so out of free choice. Now they were forced to leave
Europe and stay in the States, even though they did not know English (Breton, for example, refused to learn it). The idea of Surrealist automatism was probably the single
most important influence in the shaping of some of the Abstract Expressionist artistic
practices – on Pollock’s dripping, just to mention the most famous example. Furthermore,
the anthropological interests of the Surrealists were among the main agents in the new
attention given to Native American art on the part of young American painters – as
shown, for example, by Adolph Gottlieb’s pictographs. From the late thirties to the early
forties, however, European art was stuck and American art was moving, and it was moving fast. It is only with the generation of the Abstract Expressionists that the Americanness
of American art starts to be consistently discussed in terms not only of style but also of
subject matter. Among the artists and critics of that time are significant differences as to
what was considered American about Abstract Expressionist painting. Barnett Newman,
60
claudio zambianchi
for example, believed that what distinguished his and his fellows’ art was the quest for a
sublime quality that was quintessentially American, while the main trait of European art
had always been the pursuit of beauty and voluptuousness.54 Newman saw therefore a
hiatus between modern American art and modern European art: “I believe,” he stated,
“that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding
the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty
and where to find it.”55 Clement Greenberg, instead, saw the American avant-garde of
his days as the culmination of Modernist art, which he interpreted as art’s search for its
own means. While Greenberg stressed the continuity between European and American
avant-garde, he nevertheless pointed out how Abstract Expressionism was the first movement in American art to have a claim to maturity and originality in the international
context: “The abstract expressionists started out in the ‘40s with a diffidence they could
not help feeling as American artists. They were much aware of the provincial fate around
them. This country had had good painters in the past, but none with enough sustained
originality or power to enter the mainstream of Western art.”56 Notwithstanding the
many European sources, Abstract Expressionism developed such a new sensibility for
surface, brushwork, pictorial space, and large canvases that an “American-type” painting
could be said to be born. For both Newman and Greenberg formal qualities, rather than
subject matter, were the basis upon which to judge the specific American aspects of
American art.
On the basis of European discoveries, the new generation of American artists started
something new and original that they felt to be specifically American. It was widely
circulated in Europe after the war, together with the money for reconstruction, and promoted by the federal government and important institutions such as the Art Institute of
Chicago and the New York MoMA as the epitome of a free art in a free country. Many
art historians actually think that in the early fifties, Abstract Expressionism had become
a “weapon of the Cold War.”57 By the late fifties, Europeans had to look to American art
for inspiration and, with few exceptions, the pattern of influence had been reversed. In
the second half of the twentieth century, the art historian needs to look for the American
presence in European art, rather than the opposite.
61
* Claudio Zambianchi (b. 1958) is Associate Professor of the history of contemporary art at the University
“La Sapienza,” Rome. The author wishes to thank Maurizio Vaudagna for the invitation to the Vercelli
Conference and all the participants for asking stimulating questions in the discussion following the presentation: it is on that basis that parts of the paper have been rewritten and further material has been added.
Lida Patrizia (Lulù) Cancrini’s revision of the English text has been extremely helpful. The quotation in the
title comes from a letter from Marius De Zayas to Alfred Stieglitz, July 9, 1914, quoted in Bram Dijkstra,
Cubism, Stieglitz and the Early Poems of William Carlos Williams (Princeton, 1969), 18.
1. “The Nude-Descending-a-Staircase Man Surveys Us,” The New York Tribune (September 12, 1915):
22; quoted in Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art (Oxford and New York, 2002), 70; Doss’s book,
Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity 1915-1935 (Berkeley, Los Angeles
and London, 1999), and Barbara Haskell, The American Century: Art and Culture 1990-1950 (New York,
1999) have all been of invaluable help in the writing of this paper.
2. For Wood’s relationships with the Neue Sachlichkeit see for example Doss, Twentieth-Century American
Art, 111.
3. Thomas Hart Benton, An Artist in America (1951); excerpt in John W. McCoubrey, American Art
1700-1960 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1965), 205.
4. For an interpretation of Gorky’s art in terms of individual meanings and as a quest for personal identity, see
Harry Rand, Arshile Gorky: The Implications of Symbols (1981; Berkeley, Los Angeles and Oxford, 1991).
5. Allan H. Spear, “Introduction” in The New Negro: An Interpretation, ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York
and London, 1968), V.
6. Lizzetta Le Falle-Collins, The Critical Context of Jacob Lawrence’s Early Works, 1938-1952 in Over the
Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence, eds. Peter T. Nesbett and Michelle DuBois (Seattle and London,
2000), 122; see also note 10, 135.
7. Letter from Locke to Paul Kellogg, February 23, 1926, quoted in Spear, “Introduction,” XVIII.
8. See Richard J. Powell, Re/Birth of a Nation, in Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, eds.
Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1997), 23.
9. Alain Locke, “Negro Youth Speaks” in The New Negro, ed. Locke, 47.
10. Alain Locke, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” in The New Negro, ed. Locke, 266.
11. Ibid., 256
12. Dorothy Adlow, “Jacob Lawrence’s War Pictures,” Christian Science Monitor (December 6, 1947): 18,
quoted in Le Falle-Collins, Critical Context, 125.
13. Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York (1924; Urbana, 1961), 290; for the importance of Rosenfeld and of this
particular book to the definition of an American cultural identity see Corn, Great American Thing, 4-11.
14. Rosenfeld, Port of New York, 292, 294-95.
15. Peter Schjeldahl, “Hopperesque” (1988) in The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings of Peter Schjeldahl
1978-1990, ed. MaLin Wilson (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1991), 294.
FIGURE 13
16. For an interpretation of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Cow’s Skull – Red, White and Blue, 1931 (New York,
The Metropolitan Museum, www.otto.to.it) in terms of national identity see Corn, Great American Thing,
239-91.
17. Rand, Arshile Gorky, 68-69
18. For a story of The Eight see Elizabeth Milroy, ed., Painters of a New Century: The Eight (Milwaukee,
1991), 21-28.
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claudio zambianchi
19. Robert Henri, The Art Spirit (1923; New York, 1984), 128.
20. Ibid., 132.
21. Ibid., 188.
22. John Sloan, Gist of Art (1939; New York, 1977), 22.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 81.
25. Ibid.
26. Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art, 61.
27. For a detailed account of the Armory Show see, Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (1963;
New York, 1988).
28. See ibid., 210.
29. For the comparison between these paintings by Sloan and Weber, see, Doss, Twentieth-Century American
Art, 55.
30. Letter from De Zayas to Stieglitz, July 9, 1914, quoted in Dijkstra, Cubism, Stieglitz, 18.
31. Robert Lebel, “Paris – New York et retour avec Marcel Duchamp, dada et le surréalisme” (Paris – New
York and Back with Marcel Duchamp, Dada and Surrealism), in Paris – New York, ed. Pontus Hulten (1977;
Paris, 1991), 104.
32. Beatrice Wood, I Shock Myself: The Autobiography of Beatrice Wood, (Ojai, Calif., 1985), 30, quoted in
Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York, 1996), 183.
33. Because of its importance to the history of modern art, the story of Fountain has been told many times
by several authors; my main sources are the entry on the work in Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of
Marcel Duchamp (New York, 2000), 648-650 (see also 199-200), and Tomkins, Duchamp, 181-186.
34. See Corn, Great American Thing, 23.
35. See Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler: Artist in the American Tradition (New York, 1939), 137, quoted
in Richard Guy Wilson, “America and the Machine Age” in The Machine Age in America 1918-1941, eds.
Richard Guy Wilson, Diane H. Pilgrim, and Dickran Tashjian (New York, 1986), 24.
36. See for example Marin’s Woolworth Building, No. 28 (1912; Washington, The National Gallery of Art;
www.otto.to.it).
37. On these topics, see Wilson, Pilgrim, and Tashjian, The Machine Age.
38. Corn, Great American Thing, 218
39. Milton Brown, “Cubist-Realism: An American Style,” Marsyas 3 (1943-1945): 139-160; quotation from
146.
40. Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1979), 135.
41. Corn, Great American Thing, 201.
42. On these events, see for example Melinda A. Lorenz, George L. K. Morris: Artist and Critic (Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1982), 37-52.
43. Ibid., 72.
44. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
Criticism, vol. I: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London, 1986), 9.
63
FIGURE 14
45. Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” 8.
46. Ibid.
47. Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko, “Letter to the Editor,” The New York Times, June 13, 1943; in Abstract
Expressionism: Creators and Critics: An Anthology, ed. Clifford Ross (New York, 1990), 206.
48. On these events see Martica Sawin, Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School,
(Cambridge, Mass., 1995).
49. Rosamund Frost, “First Fruits of Exile,” Art News 41 (March 15, 1942), quoted in Sawin, Surrealism in
Exile, 196.
50. On automatism and the beginning of Abstract Expressionism, see Sawin, Surrealism in Exile, 84-88,
168-69, 239-42.
51. See Sawin, Surrealism in Exile, 78-79; and Dickran Tashjian, A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the
American Avant-Garde 1920-1950 (New York, 1995), 36, 50-65.
52. T.J. Demos, “Duchamp’s Labyrinth: First Papers of Surrealism, 1942,” October, n. 97 (2001): 108,
118.
53. Ibid., 102-105.
54. Barnett Newman, “The Sublime is Now” (1948), in Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews,
ed. John P. O’Neill (New York, 1990), 170-173.
55. Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” 173.
56. Clement Greenberg, “‘American Type’ Painting” (1955), in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and
Criticism, vol. III: Affirmations and Refusals, 1950-1956, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London, 1993),
234.
57. I draw this definition from Eva Cockcroft’s article “Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War”
(1974), in Pollock and After: The Critical Debate, ed. Francis Frascina (London and New York, 2000), 147-54;
for other contributions to the topic see the second part of Frascina’s book and Serge Guilbaut, How New York
Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(Chicago and London, 1983).
64
EUROPEAN ACTORS IN CLASSICAL HOLLYWOOD CINEMA:
FROM THE EXTRAS TO THE STARS
giuliana muscio
The study of actors as cultural mediators is just beginning. Very little attention has
been paid as yet to the crucial role that actors play by embodying characters on the screen,
not just in terms of physical appearance, but also manners, physiognomy, and other traits
that can signify cultural and ethnic characteristics. To be more specific, European actors have always populated American cinema, but it is only recently that their work has
started to receive a systematic approach within a European research project.1 European
actors inhabit American cinema as assimilated (and thus less evident) presences and as
exhibitions of cultural difference at the same time – a contradiction that is worthwhile
exploring in its multifaceted implications.
Considering these different cultural connotations, four typologies of presence for
European actors in Hollywood cinema are proposed: 1. European actors utilized as an
instrument of cultural legitimization; 2. the vogue of foreign stars in the mature silent
period, with the myth of Rodolfo Valentino and the arrival of Greta Garbo and Marlene
Dietrich to Hollywood; 3. the emigration of actors from German Expressionism (such as
Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt) and their influence on the development of specific popular
film genres such as film noir and horror cinema; 4. Italian-American character actors and
their contribution in terms of (naturalistic) performance style and ethnic representation.
While the first three typologies have already received some historical consideration, the
study of Italian-American performers is quite new, and thus it will receive a more extensive treatment here.
Cinema needs to be “international” for obvious commercial reasons, rooted in its high
cost of production and the consequent necessity to reach the widest possible audience.
Classical American cinema was cosmopolitan both because of its mode of production,
with the co-optation of professionals from potential European competitors and the consequent absorption of their cultural influences, and because of the global “international
audiences” it was designed to address. The different national and ethnic identities of the
actors cast in Hollywood films constitute a very visible evidence of this international
objective. For many decades, American cinema maintained a privileged interaction with
European actors and filmmakers, and even if representatives of Asian cinema have acquired
more visibility today, the long-lasting relationship with the Old Continent has not yet
been substituted. This relationship implies a persistent penetration of European culture
and theatrical traditions within classical Hollywood cinema.
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european actors in classical hollywood cinema
Between World War One and the Cold War, for both commercial and ideological
reasons, American cinema was cosmopolitan;2 and yet the dominant axis of the cultural
sphere was transatlantic. Analyzing the interaction between Europe and American cinema
in the visible and audible evidence of the actors allows for a more articulated understanding of its cultural implications, expressed in different ways by the four modalities of
involvement that are proposed.
The study of actors requires a complex approach because of the variety of functions
and elements at play. According to Richard De Cordova, “the various levels at which
one could seize the identity of those appearing in films – as character, as actor, as picture personality, and as star” are always constructed entities, determined by a variety of
practices within the film industry.3 While this paradigm is commonly applied to stars
– a special output of the studio system, carefully constructed through casting, direction,
and publicity – it could be applied just as productively to all performers in film. In fact,
we could even argue that the positioning of the actor and his use within the functioning
of the studio system is an accurate rendition of the film industry’s historical context and
mode of production in that phase.
1. european actors as instruments of cultural legitimization
A little-known fact outside the area of film studies is the relevance of the distribution
of French (and Italian) cinema in the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century, that
is, during the nickelodeon era, a time in North America when movies cost five cents and
were seen mostly by the lower classes, constituting a very popular type of entertainment.
Whereas American films were produced both cheaply and “industrially” by the (WASP)
entrepreneurs of The Trust, European cinema catered to all social classes and was often
produced by enlightened businessmen and aristocrats, aspiring to a popular yet culturally
dignified product. As Richard Abel points out, not only could early French and Italian
films be counted on for better quality of production, but they were also “both more
numerous and more popular than those of domestic manufacture” in North America,
which stimulated the competitive development of an “Americanized” film industry.4
The important interaction between the development of the American film industry and competition with the European product has only been documented recently.
Moreover, traditional film historiography argues that it was the distribution of movies
made by the French company Film d’Art 5 that encouraged the formation of the American
star system, introducing an element of qualitative diversification to the otherwise quantitative output of the American film industry. In 1909, the French film Assassinat de Duc
de Guise, featuring famous performers from the Comedie Francaise and produced by Film
d’Art, was distributed in the U.S. as a prestigious cultural product and stimulated the
attention of American film producers towards their own stage professionals.
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In 1911, Film d’Art hired Sarah Bernhardt in order to make a film adaptation of
Dumas’ La dame aux Camélias, which achieved both critical and popular success all over
the world. In the following year in England, the famous actress played the leading role
in Queen Elizabeth, a high-quality production. It was precisely the hugely successful distribution of this film in North America that supplied entrepreneur Adolph Zukor with
the financing necessary to start his own film production company, Famous Players (later
known as Paramount). The impact of this event – a film with Sarah Bernhardt in the
role of Queen Elizabeth - is much larger than it appears, for it constitutes the watershed
between the production of cheap and popular short films, such as the two-reelers made by
the American companies of The Trust, and the development of the feature film, the longer
and narratively more sophisticated product, already distributed by European companies
and imitated in North America by the so-called independent producers. These same producers were the ones who developed the star system, deciding to give more relevance to
the performers whose names were not even credited in the films produced by The Trust.
Better and longer films also encouraged the growth of a more comfortable outlet, the film
theatre, which could cater to the middle classes, with relevant socio-cultural (and ethnic)
implications. Historian Robert Sklar emphasizes the immigrant origins of the independent
producers, who undertook this transformation and promoted the star system.6 In fact,
inspired by the European model of film as a quality product, and encouraged by the success of the distribution of Bernhardt’s film in America, Jewish-Hungarian Adolph Zukor
developed the project of making use of the “famous players” in the films made by his
company. Called, in fact, “Famous Players-Lasky,” Zukor’s company exploited the added
value of a preexistent theatrical or musical celebrity through the hiring of performers
such as James O’Neill, father of Eugene, James Hackett, or any stage star represented by
impresario Daniel Frohman.
Zukor introduced other “big names” of the international stage to American audiences,
including Italian opera stars Enrico Caruso and Lina Cavalieri, so that the sophistication
of Italian music stardom could add cultural prestige to his films.7 This association between
opera and cinema was made when the movies were still silent, and therefore there was
no other reason to employ these types of performers other than their value in terms of
cultural legitimization. The legitimizing power of Caruso’s popularity had already been
experienced in the record industry, where his voice was promoted in order to encourage
the sales of the new technology – the gramophone - with the middle class, anxious to
acquire cultural legitimacy, at a time when going to the opera was still restricted to the
upper classes in metropolitan areas.8 Given the historical context – the teens, characterized
by strong xenophobic and anti-Italian attitudes9 – it seems quite ironic that American
cinema would recruit two Italians in its search for cultural legitimacy. But opera is obviously an area in which Italian excellence is undisputed, to the point that some American
singers chose Italian names as their alias even in those years.
67
The same held true for stage traditions. At the end of the nineteenth century,
Tommaso Salvini and Eleonora Duse toured the United States, performing Shakespeare
or classical drama in Italian: the American middle classes were still looking to European
theatre as a high cultural model, and probably considered the quality of the performance
more important than the linguistic understanding of the text – just as in opera. William
Uricchio and Roberta Pearson have already emphasized the significant impact of Italian
show culture on early American cinema, at the very moment in which the film industry
started fighting for its cultural legitimacy.10
One unknown example of American culture’s contradictory attitude towards Italian
performers in the teens is the casting of the first film that “American sweetheart” Mary
Pickford produced on her own – Poor Little Peppina (1916). To appear as a camorra kidnapper in a story set between the Amalfi Coast and New York, she hired Antonio Maiori,
the most famous Italian Shakespearean actor, who was working in New York at that time.
Maiori was a Sicilian performer, who had immigrated to the U.S. after touring Europe
with the famous Italian actor Ermete Zacconi. He specialized in the traditional repertoire
of Shakespeare, Dumas, and D’Annunzio, as well as realist drama, performing in Italian
(or in Sicilian) but not in English. Yet he had become so popular with the New York upper classes that he was reviewed by important American critics, including Henry James.11
For the American filmmakers he was therefore both a celebrity and a representative of the
prestigious world of the stage. In fact, his participation in Little Peppina is promotionally credited in the titles of the film – a detail that confirms his prestige. His acting in
the film maintains traits of the traditional theatricality of the Italian realist school, but
also a precise, almost anthropological use of vernacular gesturing, which adds a touch of
authenticity, otherwise totally absent in the representation of Italians in American silent
films of the time.12
After World War One, that is, after American cinema had successfully invaded the
world and attempted to conquer the global middle class, Hollywood imported famous
stage actors from Europe, such as Emil Jannings. Jannings had worked with Max Reinhardt
in Berlin and was one of the first important stage actors to be employed in German
cinema, mostly under the direction of Ernst Lubitsch. It was for his roles in Friedrich
Murnau’s The Last Laugh and Dupont’s Variety, however, that he was “widely acclaimed
as the world’s greatest film actor.”13 In 1927, Paramount (the “heir” of Famous Players)
offered him a contract. His Hollywood films (The Last Command, The Way of All Flesh)
immediately earned him an Oscar – in fact, the first one to be awarded. And yet he was
criticized for being too theatrical in his performances. He was therefore more valued in
Hollywood as a cultural figure than as a performer.
With the coming of sound, his heavy German accent made him less employable in
American films. This handicap, added to his unruly lifestyle and bad relations with the
Hollywood press, provoked his return to Germany. Here he made Der blaue Engel with
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Marlene Dietrich – probably his best performance ever. In fact, Hollywood was rarely
the best place for a performing talent to grow and express itself, as the careers of many
Europeans actors can confirm.
Compared to Bernhardt’s Queen Elizabeth or the film roles of Caruso and Cavalieri,
Jannings’ experience in Hollywood belongs to a different cultural phase of the history of
American cinema. While in the teens the aspiration to cultural legitimacy was a need,
a necessary step in order to reach middle-class audiences, in the twenties and thirties
it became a luxury, a special bonus, for this powerful industry to be able to invest in
quality projects, unrelated to the run-of-the-mill products. Yet both experiences point
to an identification of the European stage as a higher cultural form – one that bestowed
legitimacy upon its users.
In the same typology of recruitment, we could inscribe the later presence in American
films of both Charles Laughton and Lawrence Olivier, two prestigious names of the
British theatre who made several films in Hollywood. And today the same mechanism
can apply to Kenneth Branagh’s or Emma Thompson’s work in American cinema. The
role of the European stage actor in legitimizing Hollywood cinema is therefore a continuing trait of the interaction between Europe and Hollywood, which stresses the cultural
prestige still attached to traditional forms of European culture, such as the stage, within
the American film industry.
ii. the vogue of foreign stars in the mature silents and
the eroticization of hollywood films
During the twenties American films witnessed the ascent of the European stars.
The cultural explanations for this phenomenon are related again to a deep-seated vision
of “Europeanness:” sophistication seen as looser sexual behavior. “Europeans were more
sensual, decadent, emotional, sinful than Americans, and also more calculating, rational
and willful,” notes Sklar. “They dared what the innocent American flirts in a De Mille
movie would never dare – to be direct and clear in their intentions, to express themselves
emotionally, to seek fulfillment of their desires. They were charming, fascinating, beguiling,
dangerous and possibly evil. They could do so many things forbidden to Americans!”14
The arrival of Pola Negri and later Greta Garbo, but most of all the appearance
of Rodolfo Valentino on the screens, radically changed the profile of Hollywood stars,
adding an erotic dimension to them that was evidently lacking in dynamic all-American
heroes such as Douglas Fairbanks.
Valentino was a presence the silver screen had never seen before. He had passion; he
loved, openly and fully; his love was strong but could be tragic weakness too, as in Blood
and Sand… Valentino demonstrated skills in horsemanship, sufficient athletic prowess
– and a surprising capacity for wit and self-irony in his semicomic role as a Russian Robin
69
Hood. The telling difference between the two men was that Valentino always projected
himself in a way that Fairbanks, the smiling, clean-cut, genteel American hero, rarely
did, if ever – as a sexual being.15
Valentino’s icon has received a good deal of attention in recent film scholarship. In
the illuminating work of Miriam Hansen, for example, he is even proposed as the object
of a “dramatic-erotic fashion show” for the obsessive “emphasis on costumes and disguises,
on ritual of dressing and undressing” typical of his films, in addition to his being associated with a series of “self-consciously sadomasochistic rituals.”16 The publicity governing
Valentino’s image was indeed centered on two interconnected issues: his ethnic otherness
and the question of his masculinity. According to Hansen, the importance of Valentino
as a star resides in the key role that he played in the construction of American female
spectatorship. In fact, “[h]e came to personify an alternative form of male identity at a time
when ‘beauty’ and ‘force’ were still considered an irreconcilable dichotomy.” Yet the contradiction between his identification with Latinity (and thus, a lower European ethnicity)
and his undisputed sexual charisma produced a highly charged tension around his sexual
identity. If we consider that “[b]y supposedly all-American standards of ruggedness and
authenticity, European manners, taste, and high culture were traditionally charged with
connotations of effeminacy,” it is easy to understand the interplay of defensive strategies,
unconscious reception, and complex reaction that surround his screen persona and his
sensuality.17 Valentino was the first powerful creation of the new medium of film, as he was
able to personify different and even contradictory desires for his viewers by representing
a form of “otherness” which allowed for these complex spectatorial positions.
American cinema of the twenties valorized sensuality not only in the obvious bearers
of this cultural stereotype – that is, dark-haired southern Europeans – but also in blond,
Nordic types.
The equation Europe = passion was … a time-honored theme of American fiction, in the works of,
among others, Henry James … [T]he list of the Europeans who came to Hollywood reads like the
guest list of Gatsby’s parties. Lubitsch, Negri and Jannings… Hungary gave the American movies
director Paul Fejos and actress Vilma Banky, whose blond beauty made an attractive contrast to
Valentino’s dark good looks when she played opposite him in The Eagle and Son of the Sheik. …
[W]ith Stiller to Hollywood came his protégé Greta Garbo, who became the new embodiment
of European passion in the same year Valentino died.18
This montage of Sklar’s writings on the phenomenon identifies the important contribution that European actors offered to American cinema: sensuality. The Polish Pola
Negri, the Swedish Greta Garbo, and the German Marlene Dietrich all participated in the
creation of the erotic-sentimental imaginary for the world – exotic, and thus “foreign,”
by its very nature. These actresses gave new life to the stereotype of the vamp, which was
both sexy and dangerously destructive. Juxtaposed with fair, blond Victorian angels like
Lillian Gish or Mary Pickford, the vamps represented the “idols of perversity,” as Bram
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Djkstra writes, for an American society attracted but also terrified after the great wave
of immigration, rationalizing these fears into narratives, metaphors, and eugenics.19 The
vamp was a European creation from the start, beginning with the nordic Asta Nielsen’s
intense as well as destructive sensuality, which in American cinema was reinvented (and
immersed in kitsch) by Theda Bara, that is, Theodosia Goodman from Cincinnati. (The
significance of names to a star’s image, and therefore the vogue of Italian-sounding names,
that is, of last names ending in a vowel – which actually precedes Valentino’s popularity – needs to be investigated further).20
In different moments of film history and even recently, Italian and French performers
have supplied Hollywood with a reservoir of sensual and/or romantic presences. Italian
female performers such as Isa Miranda in the late 1930s, and later Anna Magnani, Sophia
Loren, and Gina Lollobrigida, all made movies in Hollywood, proposing a more mature
sensuality than their American female counterparts, but always representing “otherness”
– cultural difference in a charming body. Actors such as Maurice Chevalier, Charles Boyer,
and Rossano Brazzi also played seductive characters in many American movies, both as
romantic leading men and destructive latin lovers. Nowadays this contradictory task is
performed by Antonio Banderas, Monica Bellucci, and Penelope Cruz, confirming again
the deeply rooted cultural implications of this casting choice. As in the previous variant,
this injection of European talent into American cinema appears to be more of a constant
than an occasional vogue, in this case motivated by a specific cultural representation of
Europe as a more “experienced,” less innocent companion.
iii. actors from german expressionism
Another interesting chapter in this cultural history of American stardom is represented
by the immigration of German film personalities to Hollywood, for various reasons, from
the post-World War One period on.21 There are several factors that motivated this. First
of all, the German film industry had an international impact with both its expressionist
films and its industrial organization, which was able to create commercially successful
yet “artistic” masterpieces such as those authored by Fritz Lang and Wilhelm Murnau; it
was therefore identified with professionalism, and courted by American film producers.
German cinema also had direct industrial connections with Hollywood, which made
mobility between the two systems easier.22 Several professionals in art decor, set design,
cinematography, directing, and acting came to Hollywood from prestigious German
cinema such as expressionist films, as well as popular comedies and spectacular productions such as those authored by Lubitsch. Germans emigrated because of the crisis of
their national film industry at the end of the twenties, and because of Nazism (for both
political and racial reasons).
The specific influence of German filmmakers on the development of film noir and
horror cinema through their expressionist sensitivity is a common argument in film
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history. In fact, even a superficial study of filmographies could easily demonstrate that
German cinematographers participated in the development of the shadowy traits of this
genre, for example Karl Freund, who appeared in the credits of so many horror films.
But little attention has been paid to the casts of these same films, which would evidence
a similar presence, and influence. Let us consider for instance the American work of two
important “German” actors, Peter Lorre and Conrad Veidt.
Peter Lorre was born in Hungary, acted on the stage in Vienna, and did some films
in central Europe, but was still virtually unknown when Fritz Lang chose him to play
the title role in M (1931). His portrayal of a psychopathic child murderer in this film is
quite memorable. “His melancholy expression, at once pathetic and sinister, his globular
eyes bulging in fear as he is hunted down by the police and the underworld, give the
character almost clinical authenticity.”23 After the Nazis came to power in Germany,
Lorre exiled himself, first to Paris, then to London, and ended up in Hollywood in 1935.
In America he did Mad Love (a remake of the popular gothic work The Hands of Orlac)
with cinematographer Karl Freund and was a great Raskolnikov in Josef von Sternberg’s
Crime and Punishment – two prestigious adaptations, both gothic and noir, and strongly
German-influenced. His career continued with lesser roles: he was Mr. Moto, the oriental
detective protagonist of a b-serial, and was often cast as a foreigner, a mysterious as well
as menacing presence. His roles in Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, and The Mask of
Dimitrios, that is, in early noir movies, are also memorable. In his subsequent career, he
was again associated with gothic horror films such as The Beast with Five Fingers, Tales
of Terror, and The Raven. His disturbing features, disquieting eyes, and unctuous manners made him an ideal performer of disturbed criminals who were not entirely evil,
but terrifying for their instability. His popularity however as a character actor in horror
films depended both on his physiognomy and on his expressionist (that is, highly antinaturalistic) acting style.
Conrad Veidt was also one of Reinhardt’s actors, and worked in the Deutsches Theater
in Berlin. He entered the movies in Germany in 1917, specializing in tormented and
demoniacal roles, notably as Cesare the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari and
the protagonist of The Student of Prague, two of the most outstanding expressionist texts.
Invited to Hollywood because of his popularity, in the silent period he did The Man Who
Laughs, an adaptation of the novel by Victor Hugo, directed by fellow expressionist Paul
Leni, where he played the deformed character, and The Last Performance, directed by
Hungarian Paul Fejos, a story of magicians and hypnotism. Both films are characterized
by strong gothic elements, foggy atmospheres, and the monstrous characters associated
with the later development of the horror genre. In fact, horror films only became a clearly
characterized formula, a specific genre in commercial and aesthetic terms, in the early
1930s with the making of Dracula and Frankenstein at Universal. At the time, the studio
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was more heavily inhabited by German immigrants – a presence that, historians have
argued, explains the inclination to this kind of product.24
Like Emil Jannings, at the onset of sound Conrad Veidt returned to Germany, but
nazism drove him out of Berlin again. He first immigrated to England with his Jewish
wife, but in 1940, he returned to Hollywood where he appeared, ironically enough, in
the famous role of the elegant nazi officer in Casablanca. He mostly played the “heavy”
in various titles such as A Woman’s Face with Joan Crawford and Whistling in the Dark;
he was also a fifth columnist or nazi spy in Nazi Agent (a bravura piece in which he
performs as twins – one good American and the other the nazi agent), All Through the
Night, and Above Suspicion. His elegant posture, “arian” face, and sense of rigidity and
repressed violence made him the ideal interpreter of the nazi officer in action films. If
one compares the roles he and other German émigrés such as Paul Henreid and Helmut
Dantine played in their American film careers, it is evident that physiognomy plays a key
role in the casting of a Hollywood film, even though nationality is also a relevant factor.
Interestingly (and obviously) enough, it was the task of these anti-nazi actors to play nazi
roles in American cinema. (And it is probably precisely their actual detachment from a
psychological identification with a nazi character that communicates the stereotypical
excess of their performances on screen.)
Bela Lugosi too was Hungarian. As an actor, he had participated in the communist
revolution of 1918; when the revolt was defeated, he immigrated to Germany, where
he appeared in several films. In 1921, he immigrated to the U.S. and initially worked
mostly on the stage, though he did not disdain a few film roles. He enjoyed a huge success playing Dracula on stage; this is why he was called to play the role on film, in Tod
Browning’s version of 1931. Even if his was not the first vampire to appear on screen, for
this creature was already a nordic classic (Nosferatu, 1922), he was the first filmic Count
Dracula. However he was not selective enough in his later film roles, and ended up as
a caricature of himself as the main figure of horror cinema in the 1930s, interpreting a
long series of mad scientists and demented megalomaniacs.
In a special type of cultural and expressive typecasting, these German performers
with their expressionist ascendencies have been associated in Hollywood with the gothic
atmospheres of both film noir and horror cinema. Their previous experiences with monstrous personalities and demented figures, but also with aristocratic mannerisms, made
them particularly efficient in representing these typologies of characters in Hollywood.
(We leave aside the identification of German nationals with monstrosity and dementia,
but it is evident that the historical role of the Germans as the evil enemy in World War
One, and later the rise of Hitler, favored this possible identification.)
If the relationship between German Expressionism and gothic American cinema is
almost commonplace, little attention has been paid insofar to the crucial role that several
British actors actually played in the development of horror cinema, as in the case of Boris
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Karloff, Claude Rains, Basil Rathbone, and Vincent Price. While Karloff is in line with
the use of physiognomy practiced in this genre, the elegance of the other figures is turned
against them, as a sign of decadence, ambiguity, and a disquieting continental air, which
has deep literary roots (in the work of James, for example) and projects American fears
and cultural complexes onto British culture.
iv. italian-american character actors and their performance style
The German and British examples indicate that character actors represent a special
instrument of (international) communication in Hollywood cinema, given their more or
less implicit function in the construction of ethnic and national stereotypes.
For various historical reasons, having to do with the anti-Italian prejudice in the U.S.
and the anti-emigrationist attitudes of the Italian political and cultural establishment,
Italian(-American) character actors working in Hollywood have not yet been identified
as a national group – a collective performer, characterized by a distinctive acting style.25
While performance is commonly associated with individuality, it could be advantageous
to study this “collective performer” – the Italian-American actor – as a group, also investigating the relationship between acting style and the traditions of the immigrant stage
and Italian theatre, as well as the practices of the American film industry with reference
to casting. Their roles and the style of direction, emphasizing body, voice, and gesturing,
exploit both their physiognomy and their versatility, as well as their ability to improvise
and work in both tragic and comic roles. These qualities of the Italian actors can be
traced back to the traditions of the Commedia dell’arte, gained through their training on
the immigrant stage as singers, comedians, and actors at once – performers in the most
complete sense of the word.
American cinema used these versatile actors not only in the construction of the Italian
stereotype, but also in the negation-diffusion of ethnic and national stereotyping, typical
of the classical period, often by employing them also as Latins or Europeans in general.
This doubly contradictory function points to both their versatility and their “otherness”
at a time in America before World War Two when Italians were perceived as an ethnic
group, in fact a lower race, not even a nationality.26 In classical Hollywood cinema, these
actors physically embodied non-American characters and were at times oxymoronically
transformed into a stereotype through their voices, but most of all through their acting
style, versatility, and “naturalness.” Thus, the study of their presence in American cinema
opens up interesting cultural questions about the dialectic between the cultural history
of their work and their quite visible bodies, that is, their physical presence, emphasized
by gesturing and physiognomy that would appear to be natural (and possibly racial – as
apparent physical manifestations of a specific collective “other”). This dialectic confirms
the anti-Italian prejudice, typical of American culture in reaction to the great wave of
immigration, but also the respect for Italian theatrical traditions, associated not only with
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high culture (as with Duse), but also with naturalness.27 Thus, this ideal “Italian actor”
in American films bridges Italian stage and film traditions from Commedia dell’arte to
neorealism.
Before going to Hollywood, these performers worked on the immigrant stage, which
was a peculiar cultural formation that maintained the traits of its Italian theatrical origins
at least until World War Two. The Italian-American stage had several variants: from the
classics and Shakespeare performed in Italian for the upper classes, to vaudeville; from
dialect to English; from opera to Neapolitan songs. A musical background was common
among these performers, or at least they often presented themselves as musicians (or actors)
to immigration authorities, in order to avoid the restrictions of the quota system. In fact,
the Italian performer constituted the motivation for an exception to be made in immigration rules, because he was recognized as a valued presence – even at Ellis Island.
The Italian immigrant theatre had its centre in New York; it included both high and
low forms of culture, both in terms of repertoire and venue, from cafe chantant to opera,
from vernacular plays to classical drama, performed in a plurality of languages (dialects,
Italian, and English).28 It was dominated by southern Italian traditions, yet it showed
strong multicultural and intermedia traits, exchanging spaces and productions with the
Yiddish theatre, or interacting with both radio and Italian-American film production.29
The performances of these character actors who came from the immigrant stage
contributed to American film through an articulation of their native culture, which was
not yet assimilated – still Italian, or even southern Italian, they interpreted “the other” on
screen. When the anti-Italian prejudice was at its peak, in the teens, they did not appear
at all in American films, which used American stars to perform as Italian characters: as
with black and native protagonists, Italians could not be interpreted by a member of their
own “race,” but only by an established American performer, masquerading as an Italian.30
While Italian actors started inhabiting the American screens as exotic Europeans after
World War One, it was only in the 1930s that they evolved into an ethnic stereotype.
However, they were not necessarily cast as Italians, but portrayed instead various racial
and national stereotypes, and in all film genres.
Italian performers were mainly appreciated for their versatility. In fact, in his history
of the Italian stage in San Francisco, Lawrence Estevan argued:
The whole weight of the performance in the Italian theatre was on acting, and the Italian tradition of improvisation, and of the Commedia dell’arte, still flourished. The actor who must plunge
into a different role every night cannot operate like a machine - as does the typical American
performer who plays the same role night after night for months/years. Such a phenomenon as
personal acting - the actor playing a variation of himself – could not possibly affect the Italian
actor. He made rapid adjustments, every night entering into the spirit of a different character. For
this reason he never memorized his lines… Because the Italian actor was generally extroverted and
expressive, it was not difficult for him to enter into another character every night… the popular
Italian theatre… had richness, variety, spontaneity, and vitality.31
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Indeed the terms “expressive,” “spontaneity,” “variety,” and “vitality” all recur in the
discussions of these actors’ work, both in stage and film reviews.
By studying some of the members of this group of performers working in American
films with reference to their acting style, the typology of characters they play, and their
representation in the press, one can explore the practices adopted by the American film
industry in relation to the complex operation of representing national and ethnic identities to an international audience, along with the specific role that Italian actors played in
this strategy, because of their naturalness and versatility.
Neapolitan musician Cesare Gravina emigrated at the outbreak of World War One
and performed on the immigrant stage in both North and South America. American
biographies of him from that time present him as the “orchestra conductor of the Scala ”
or “Caruso’s personal secretary” – two legendary accounts of his profession which were
taken quite seriously by American filmmakers who cast him in important roles with
musical references. In fact, Gravina started acting in a Mary Pickford film, which was
the adaptation of an opera, Madame Butterfly (1915). He appeared again with Pickford
in Poor Little Peppina (1916) in which he was paired with the aforementioned Antonio
Maiori.32 While Maiori, who had a traditional stage background, only appeared in this
one film, Gravina, who had a lower and less specialized professional profile, enjoyed a
notable career on screen. In fact, he soon became a favorite actor of Eric von Stroheim.
His versatility and naturalistic acting were the assets the director most appreciated in
him. As Koszarski notes, “Von Stroheim felt that such actors would have few dramatic
mannerisms to unlearn and would be more malleable vehicles for his ideas.”33 In Von
Stroheim’s harshly realistic cinema, Gravina has a crucial role: often a victim of injustice
and mistreatment, only rarely an executioner, he always functions as a catalyst to the
protagonist’s actions and performance. He plays Ventucci, the man who kills Count
Karamzin in Foolish Wives (1922); the puppeteer in The Merry Go-Round (1923); the vicious Zerkov in Greed (1924); and the father of poor Mitzi in The Wedding March (1928);
he also appears in lesser roles in all of Von Stroheim’s other films.
In the twenties Gravina appeared in about thirty films, including two with Chaplin’s
“kid” Jackie Coogan (Circus Days and Daddy, 1923), fathering the little orphan in a circus
or teaching him to play the violin. In the American “expressionist” film The Man Who
Laughs (1927) with the previously mentioned Conrad Veidt, he is Ursus, the man who
takes care of the deformed boy. In other titles Gravina worked with important stars such
as Lon Chaney, Pola Negri, Gloria Swanson, Ramon Novarro, and Greta Garbo, playing
mostly pathetic characters, such as fathers defending daughters or protecting children,
a sentimental stereotype in line with the “good” image of the Italian in American silent
melodrama. Yet he performed as an Italian character in very few of his films, representing
mostly Latins, Frenchmen, or other Europeans.34
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While Gravina’s style of acting, his peculiar use of physiognomy and gestures, and
his special ability to move from pathos to tragedy can be ascribed to the (realist) southern
Italian theatrical traditions of verismo – the vernacular, naturalistic school of drama of
Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana – he was quite successful with American audiences
and critics. Even The New York Times regularly devoted at least a few lines to his work
in its film reviews. In the August 1924 edition of Picture Play one writer commented:
[O]rchestra conductor at La Scala… [t]oday he is playing pathetic old fellows, life-beaten but
happy-spirited failures in the movies… In “Merry-Go-Round,” he gave the screen one of its finest
moments.35 You surely remember him as the old clown who, dying, kept right on smiling for the
children, and doing his funny tricks so they wouldn’t see his suffering. Such a polite, odd little
fellow, Cesare Gravina… Always smiling, always bowing, always saying, “Sì, sì,” it is only in his
expressive pantomime that he tells you things – a hint of sorrow, somehow, even if he laughs, and
perhaps a vague suggestion of adventure behind that veil that never lifts. But to nobody here he
has told why he gave up his beloved music to start all over again in the movies.
The writer tries to evoke the special ineffable quality of his performance, while supplying biographical information that strongly associates him with music and high Italian
culture (by mentioning La Scala), and refers to the pathetic characters he often played on
screen. As De Cordova argued, this is a typical discoursive practice of American cinema
that transforms an actor into a character-type, suggesting psychological traits attributed
to the person, the actor, and the characters he has played at the same time. Even though
Gravina did not often play Italian characters, his name is obviously Italian, and his frequent
on- and off-screen association with music (and with the circus) encouraged American
audiences to identify him as an Italian. Thus, his cultural identity depended upon a
combination of the characters he played and such discoursive practices as the reference
to his musical background and his Italianness in the press, along with his performance
style. It is a complex cultural operation that activates different (and contradictory) images
and perceptions of Italianness, but stands firmly on his acting abilities.
Sicilian Henry Armetta came to the U.S. as an illegal immigrant when he was still
a boy. He went on to perform on Broadway, on the immigrant stage and in vaudeville,
before becoming a very popular character actor in Hollywood - probably the actor most
frequently associated as Italian. His extensive filmography, beginning in silent cinema,
includes three hundred more or less notable roles, such as a moustached waiter, a restaurant owner, a music performer, and a barber, in such titles as Scarface, Fra Diavolo, A
Farewell to Arms, One Night of Love, Viva Villa!, Black Cat, Imitation of Life, The Merry
Widow, and Magnificent Obsession.
Critic Frank Nugent evoked a lively portrait of Armetta in his obituary:
Few comedians have drawn more laughs from moving picture audiences than did Henry Armetta.
He usually appeared as an explosive Italian with an ample waistline, a list to starboard when he
walks, a ferocious grin, an amazing scowl, a habit of thwacking himself on the forehead with an
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open hand and of biting his moustache in moments of stress and strain-- which are almost constant… As a bit player he would appear in just a scene or two, generally when the picture needed
a laugh - as a porter struggling with a heavy trunk, as a cab driver being bilked of his fare, or as a
street sweeper assigned to follow a circus parade. Whatever the part Mr. Armetta knew he would
be required to lose his temper, gnaw his moustache and thwack himself on the head. He knew it
and the audience knew it. It was just a matter of how long before he got the signal to blow up.
The response from the patrons was an unvarying howl of delight.36
Nugent even tried to describe “Armetta’s amble,” narrating its origins:
At last Frank Borzage, about to film the Janet Gaynor-Charles Farrell film, “Street Angel,” called
Mr. Armetta to his office and asked him to “get up” an eccentric Italian character. “I went home
and I stand before the mirror” - Mr. Armetta recalled, “Then I see a little cushion and I shove it
under my vest. You see, I was not fat then. So I walk and I say to myself, ‘With a stomach like
that I would have trouble to walk.’ So I go like this and here I am.” And with that Mr. Armetta
suddenly assumed his off-balance waddle, with both arms carefully out from his sides. This characteristic walk was the beginning of his new success.37
Armetta is therefore described in his physical appearance and a series of gestures, as
if he were not acting but just offering his body to the creation of a type - an “eccentric
Italian.” This falls in line with the tradition of the Commedia dell’arte where the maschere
- the types - implied both physical and psychological traits, as well as regional differences.
While this evocation of a type is not an uncommon or incorrect discourse regarding a
character actor, it stresses physicality more than usual when applied to Italian performers.
Another reviewer defines Armetta as a “natural” actor, identifying him with spontaneity,
closeness to nature, and instinct, which were in themselves characteristics often associated with Italians in general.38 The same journalist appreciated him for being “inimitable,
comical and yet pathetic” – again the special gift of versatility often attributed to Italian
actors.
In the 1930s, socio-culturally marked by the New Deal and the “re-inventing of
America,”39 classical Hollywood cinema helped forge a stronger American identity, while
also fixing a variety of ethnic and national stereotypes with its diversified use of European
(and Italian) actors. In a sense American cinema was forced to address the issue of national
identity on its own, in the early 1930s, when it confronted the technological, commercial,
and cultural questions involved in the introduction of sound. Armetta and other ItalianAmerican actors started being cast both as nationals and as Latins. In fact, film ethnicity
now elaborated a generic “otherness” that was not only visible (based on physiognomy
and ethnic characteristics) but also audible in accents and languages.
In the case of Italian-American actors, their “otherness” could be restricted to the
regional identity of the southern Italian immigrant or widened to include darker skin
tones of all latitudes, from India to Africa. However, this procedure associated Italians with
“impure blood” and racial difference, in contrast with the idealizations made in reference
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to the “Italians abroad” that were encouraged by fascist nationalism and its ideological
project in these same years.40 The casting pattern of classical Hollywood cinema should
therefore be analyzed within the historical context of the New Deal and its reformulations of Americanism. Moreover, in this specific case, special attention should be paid
to the fascist reactions to filmic representations of Italianness. It was in these years, for
example, that the Hays Office was inundated by the protests of Italian authorities, upset
over Hollywood’s depiction of Italians as gangsters or lower class.41
Italian characters are actually more common in these years, but also more stereotypical. Armetta was quite busy in all the genres and studios, in his small yet visible parts, and
even became Papà Gambini, the protagonist of a series of films set in situations of sport
competition at Fox in which he also began to articulate dreams of social mobility for
Italian-Americans. But his numerous roles as characters in servile positions instigated the
aversion towards him on the part of the fascist regime, which singled him out in reviews
as the prototype for the negative representation of the Italian abroad.42
The articulation of the stereotype of the Italian-American was not an easy task, pushed
and pulled as it were by the ideological tensions between the New Deal’s multicultural
attention and the conflict with fascism on the one hand, and an old, deeply rooted,
anti-Italian prejudice on the other. Armetta literally embodied these contradictory tensions, using diverse tones and styles, and playing different characters, such as the paternal
bartender assisting John Garfield in Dust Be My Destiny (1939) or the comic waiter in
Fra Diavolo, clumsily trying to imitate Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy playing with their
fingers, yet competing on screen with their gags.
Functional to both comedy and drama, Armetta proposed a bittersweet mix, peculiar
to the contradictory stereotype of the Italian in American sound cinema. His corpulence
evoked wine flasks and spaghetti on a checkered tablecloth, favorably acknowledged by
Americans, but highly disturbing for Italian film critics. He was incredibly versatile and
had great skills as a performer, including the special ability, noted by Nugent, of stealing
the scene from his more famous colleagues. Yet this was often reduced to physiognomy
and “naturalness” because of his Italian roots.
By the 1930s, American media had become both the evidence of and instrument
for a complex process of Americanization, which entertained a contradictory relationship
with ethnicity. Lary May and Ian Jarvie have argued that Hollywood tried to present an
efficient melting pot, playing down or hiding ethnicity, while Robert Sklar in his book
City Boys has emphasized the ethnic matrix of some of the male stars of the 1930s and
1940s.43 This was particularly evident in the gangster films produced by Warner Bros.,
but at times it functioned interchangeably: the European Paul Muni played “Scarface”
Toni Camonte, Edward G. Robinson was “little Caesar,” and Eduardo Ciannelli Johnny
Vanning. This casting pattern confirms the lasting American prejudice that associates
the evils of its society as coming from the outside – through foreigners – but it also gave
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a new visibility to ethnic culture. It was during this phase that Italian-American actors
such as George Raft, Jack La Rue, and Eduardo Ciannelli would sometimes perform as
“ethnic” gangsters.
Born into an Italian family in Hell’s Kitchen, George Raft forged his own social
mobility first as a boxer and later on the dance floor – two activities strongly associated
with Italian-Americans and not at all incompatible, as confirmed by the filmic rendition
of Raft’s persona as Joe Massaro in Little Caesar.44 Raft was also familiar with the Mob:
not only was he a childhood friend of gangster Bugsy Siegel, but, according to a typical
Hollywood legend, he actually worked for the mob in film-related businesses at the same
time that he was hired to play a gangster in both Queen of the Night Clubs (1929) and
Quick Millions (1931).45
Slim, dressed with the kind of flashy elegance that American cinema connotes of
ambiguity, with a flat imperturbable voice, Raft was the ideal interpreter of cold-blooded
criminals such as Rinaldo, flipping his coin in Scarface. Launched as a star, he was normally the protagonist in his films of the 1930s. According to the pattern identified by De
Cordova, his public image and experiences as a dancer, a boxer, and a gangster emerged
in his filmography, which was polarized between musicals and gangster films.46 After
World War Two, he went into decline because of both his unwise choice of roles and
his entrepreneurial misfortunes. However with a good dose of self-irony in Some Like It
Hot (1959) he played gangster Spats Colombo, irritated by some mobsters continuously
flipping coins in a citation of his famous gesture in Scarface, and did a cameo in Ocean’s
Eleven (1960) with Sinatra’s “Rat Pack.”
Together with LaRue and Ciannelli, he is the only Italian-American actor to play a
criminal on screen so often. With the protection of a name that did not end in vowel,
Raft bypassed the cautious strategies of the majors, which were under the continuous
scrutiny of fascist diplomacy in reference to the representation of gangsters as Italians (or
by Italians). Raft embodies the rare occurrence of an Italian who performed roles that
were both related to his real life and connected with the Hollywood image of the Italian
as gangster, boxer, and dancer 47 – at that time not assigned to any other Italian actor,
especially as a protagonist.
Raft proposed an image of the Italian gangster as a cold and elegant, implosively
violent character, which represented a striking exception within the gallery of flamboyant,
extroverted, and overemotional gangsters of the thirties, with their excessive gesturing and
acting, who were supposed to be “Italian,” but were played by Jewish actors. This seems to
contradict the expectation that Italians and Italian actors would be closest to instinct and
nature, more primitive and violent – an evident revelation of how deeply rooted cultural
stereotyping could be. In the case of Raft, this unique performance could be explained
by the fact that in film criticism he is not usually considered much of an actor.48 And
perhaps his less passionately charged interpretation of a gangster, his cold blood, and his
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elegant detachment derive precisely from his limits, and not from his performing abilities. However his (self-)irony, enhanced by the metacommunicative moments of several
of his films, along with his struggle over his image, especially over the casting in relation
to Humphrey Bogart, alert us to the awareness he might have had regarding the tension
between his real persona and his performance.
This distinctive, compressed representation of the gangster is confirmed by the work
of another Italian-American actor, Jack LaRue. Gaspare Biondolillo, born in New York
to a Sicilian family, worked on Broadway in the 1920s; most of his film career (which
includes about 120 titles) spans the 1930s and 1940s. Thin, with dark eyes and hair, his
face reminded one of a younger and more handsome Humphrey Bogart. Again protected
by his French-sounding name, LaRue was often cast as a menacing or sadist criminal,
in a dark suit and lowered hat, even in musicals such as 42nd Street (1933) or The Gay
Desperado (1936), a choice that might be an indication of ironic casting. An anomaly
for the period preceding World War Two, he also played, in significant films, important
Italian or Italian-American characters such as the football player Joe Fiore in The All
American (1932), Louis de Marco in Blessed Event (1932), the Italian chaplain of Farewell
to Arms (1932), the seductive Carlo in Christopher Strong (1933), and the bad guy Scarfi
in East of the River (1940). In fact, in the 1930s and 1940s, like Raft, LaRue was often
the protagonist or co-protagonist of the films he was cast in, but he was undoubtedly a
more versatile performer and a more complete actor than his colleague was.
His best role was in The Story of Temple Drake (1933), an interesting film adaptation of the scandalous novel Sanctuary by William Faulkner, where he played Trigger,
the impotent rapist. In the film, Trigger is actually the synthesis of two characters from
the novel: Popeye, the rapist, and Red, the kidnapper. His indifferent sadism masked his
unavowed lack, but his brutality provoked the masochist and perverse sensual submission
of the girl, played by Miriam Hopkins. The compressed violence of the first part of the
film is reduced to automatic, almost mechanical movements – a coercion to be as evil
and destructive, as well as unaware, as a Frankenstein. Like the Popeye of the novel, he
has an incredible ability to keep a lit cigarette between his lips, whatever he is doing; he
moves in total silence and always wears a dark suit, with his hat lowered over his eyes.
LaRue’s acting becomes more naturalistic towards the melodramatic ending, and yet it
is very sober.
Italian film critic Gianni Puccini has emphasized the fact that “LaRue has the nasty
face of a Bogart, but lost in an atony which makes him more sinister, even though the
film always hid the reasons for his sanguinary despair.”49 Not only was LaRue able to
create this complex character on the screen, but he demonstrated a particular bravura
in changing registers when he is killed by the girl, who has just kissed him. However,
LaRue did not have the chance to play as many interesting characters in the 1930s, perhaps because the Hays Code of self-censorship 50 drastically reduced the space for such
81
complex figures, allowing only for stereotypically “bad” gangsters. Furthermore, this consideration (self-censorship) points to a possible institutional motivation for the evolution
of the performance of the gangster into a blatant stereotype later in the 1930s. As with
Raft, LaRue’s career coincides with the golden age of classical Hollywood cinema, genre
pictures, and crime stories that still lacked naturalistic psychologies. It is a pity indeed
that postwar American cinema did not offer him more interesting parts, because LaRue
was the most modern among these Italian-American actors, and able to play gangsters
without reducing characters to types.
The major picture personality in the trio was however Eduardo Ciannelli. His obituary in the New York Times (October 10, 1969) read:
[His] craggy, lined face, his jutting chin, and seemingly malevolent eyes were familiar to thousands
of movie fans, who could count on him to portray criminal masterminds with great professional
flair. He had a suave manner, but when he spoke, it was with an air of menace. One critic said
that Mr. Ciannelli ‘talks as if he bites tenpenny nails in half for a pastime.’
Mixing elegance with perversity and sadism, he could always guarantee great acting, as
well as the versatility traditionally associated with these Italian-American performers.
Ciannelli made his American debut as a singer in the musical Rose Marie in 1924
and had an important career in Broadway.51 He was a cultivated person who maintained
contact with the Italian theatre; for instance, together with the baron (and actor) Gennaro
Curci, he wrote Foolscap, a play in which Bernard Shaw and Pirandello wander around
a madhouse; he played Pirandello. His career on the stage had a high profile, and while
it was not directly associated with the immigrant stage, his film debut on the other hand
was. In 1931, he participated in the production of an Italian-American film shot in New
York, Così è la vita (Eugene Roder, 1931).52
Ciannelli’s stage performance in the difficult role of Trock Estrella, the bad guy in
Winterset – written by Maxwell Anderson and loosely based on the Sacco and Vanzetti
case – was highly regarded by American theatre critics. Brooks Atkinson wrote in The
Times, “His cruel, sneering Trock is a vigorous portrait of malevolence.” In fact, because
of his effective rendition of Trock on stage, Ciannelli was called to play the part on screen
in 1935, with Atkinson defining his work in the film as “the most compelling characterization… He is fear-ridden yet assured: cringing yet ruthless; distrusting and hating
everybody but himself.”53
His filmography included one hundred titles, at six films a year – quite a remarkable
endeavor in the sound period.54 Compared to the other performers, from the point of
view of the substance of his film roles, Ciannelli was also exceptional in that he was cast
as a major character in several films, usually as an antagonist, often a criminal, at times
Italian. His role as a gangster in Marked Woman (1937), which he modeled after Lucky
Luciano, is unforgettable: the elegant Johnny Vanning, cold and sadistic, who orders
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poor Bette Davis to be beaten and scarred (off screen). In this film the Americanized
name of the gangster did not allow for an immediate identification of the character with
the real Lucky Luciano, but the plot was a documented reconstruction of the actual investigation and trial conducted by Thomas Dewey (played by Humphrey Bogart), who
attacked the prostitution racket managed by Luciano. Given the direct references to real
events, it was not surprising that Warner Bros. would trust this role to an Italian actor,
who had already created other brutal characters related to actuality, but the case implied
a serious diplomatic risk, given the sensitivity of the fascist regime towards the depiction
of Italian gangsters in American cinema. Thus, Luciano was de-nationalized by being
transformed into Johnny Vanning. However, his national identity was changed only at
the level of character, for it was confirmed through the use of an (obviously) Italian actor
– a sophisticated discoursive practice that confirms the contradictory yet conscious strategies that Hollywood adopted in reference to ethnic and national identity.55 In Marked
Woman Ciannelli proposed an original interpretation of the Italian gangster, quite distant
from the beast of primitive violence created by Paul Muni in Scarface or the neurotic
and melodramatic Little Ceasar played by Edward G. Robinson. Ciannelli maintained
a strong control of the scene, moving with a stiff but elegant rigidity, which masked a
compressed violence, avoiding any connotation of Italianity.
Ciannelli displays the best example of the kind of compressed violence that characterized the (rare) performances of Italian actors when playing gangsters in the 1930s.
Even though the other two Italian-American performers – Raft and LaRue – were unrecognizable as such because of their names, the trio seemed to work in an analogous way:
they specialized in cruel but understated hoodlums, with a romantic inclination. They
never showed traits of the passionate violence associated with the Italian bandit of silent
cinema, at that time often motivated by jealousy and vendetta - a stereotype reinforced
by Muni in Scarface, and closer today to Scorsese’s “goodfellas” or the television series The
Sopranos. Their image of the Italian-American gangster, more sober and less mannered,
differed greatly from later bloodthirsty and fat gangsters - an important variation which
offered potential correctives to the repertoire. And it might have been their very condition
as Italian-Americans that restrained them in their performance of the gangster, making
them more metropolitan and modern, less “Sicilian” than later stereotypes.
After World War Two, Ciannelli returned to Italy, working in both Italian films and
American productions shot on location, such as Prince of Foxes (1949) with Tyrone Power
and Orson Welles, Vulcano (1949) with Anna Magnani, Attila (1953) with Sophia Loren
and Anthony Quinn, La mano dello straniero (1954) with Richard Basehart, Alida Valli,
and Trevor Howard, and Mambo (1954) with Silvana Mangano and the couple Shelley
Winters and Vittorio Gassman.56
Thus, Ciannelli’s film career covered more than thirty years of activity in cinema,
television, and theatre, prevalently in the United States but also in Italy. In the thirties
83
and forties, his intense and hollow face, his impeccable bearing, and his contemptuous
lips made him the ideal interpreter of cruel but detached criminals. However, his work
in Italian cinema hints at another critical issue raised by his performance: the consonance
with neorealist acting, as in Vulcano, in his natural interaction with Magnani and her acting
style. We can in fact argue that Italian-American theatrical experiences predisposed these
performers to an acting style that amalgamated well with neorealism, or that could evoke
it on the American screens, as in the case of Marty (1955) - a film characterized by the
presence of several actors from the Italian-American immigrant stage.57 The transatlantic
exchanges of the 1950s (both American films shot in Italy, and Italian actors working in
American cinema) made use of these Italian-American performers, not simply for linguistic
factors, but also because of this acting culture which had common roots. The admiration
for Italian neorealist cinema encouraged the discovery of this autochthonous patrimony
of interpreters, who had been trained on a stage of realist tradition and versatility, not
too dissimilar from the Italian one. (Anna Magnani came from a type of vaudeville that
included singing and acting both in comic and tragic roles, very similar to the traditions
of the Italian immigrant stage in New York.) It was only after World War Two that it
was possible to establish equipollency between the Italian-American performer and the
Italian actor, fusing them in this realist vocation, when their work “naturally” merged
with the influence of neorealism within American “social cinema,” using a naturalistic
performing style quite antithetic to the Actor’s Studio approach.
Implosive gangsters like Eduardo Ciannelli, Jack La Rue and George Raft, moustached waiters like Armetta, or realist performers like Gravina: these Italian actors have
given body to the stereotype of the Italian-American figure in classical Hollywood cinema,
but they also extended their “otherness” to a variety of ethnic roles. Their cultural difference was contained in formulaic genres and acting styles, in a game that made them too
American to be recognized in their Italianity by Italian audiences, and too different from
Americans everywhere else, and therefore still suspended in an unjust historiographic
limbo. They embodied a hidden Italian presence in classical Hollywood cinema, bearer
of a theatrical tradition which today constitutes the unrecognized background to the
work of a Vincent Gardenia or a Nicolas Cage, both direct descendents of old Italian
theatrical families in the United States.
Italian-American character actors could count on ancient traditions, with an apparent simplicity that made their acting so natural that it did not appear as a technique but
rather a spontaneous ability to work through the body and voice. The stage that was part
of their lives seemed to disappear in their work, as modest as it was efficient, perfectly in
synch with the use that American cinema planned for them, in between stereotype and
the representation of (ethnic) diversity.
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conclusions
American cinema gave an international flavor to its products because of its need
for extensive markets. It co-opted film professionals and actors from potential European
competitors because of commercial considerations (Europe was a key market), but also
for more complex cultural reasons, related to different historical contexts, attempting
to exploit their special European qualities in terms of legitimization, eroticism, cultural
influence, and versatility.
Actors offer their body to the characters on the screen. Narrative and generic conventions referring to the political and ideological relationship between the U.S. and
Europe in that period undoubtedly play a role in this representation. In fact, the actors’
body could take on the physical traits of the “other” in either negative, stereotypical,
offensive ways, or in the attractive connotations of a Valentino or European stars such
as Garbo, Dietrich, Sophia Loren, and Penelope Cruz.
Acting styles depend on cultural roots, which can penetrate the filmic representation in articulated ways, as in the case of German performers in horror films, though,
as we see in the case of Italian-American performers, not without contradictions.
To consider the work of European actors it is also necessary to take into account
the discoursive practices adopted by the American film industry in this respect. There
are critical discourses about these performers in the specialized press and in film reviews.
Cultural implications are also at play in the roles they are given, in the typecasting and
the construction of the audience’s perception of them. American cinema uses European
actors to exploit their previous celebrity on the continent, and/or their training both
on the classical stage, for a reflected legitimacy, and on the popular stage, for their
versatility.
While legitimization is associated more generally with the stage, European culture and European cinema have always represented high standards of quality in North
America. Expressionist cinema and nouvelle vague films have impressed American filmmakers, critics, and audiences, encouraging the invitation of European directors and stars
to Hollywood. In fact, classical Hollywood cinema entertained a complex relationship
with European culture and its theatrical traditions. In a very broad and not uncontestable statement, it is often argued that the transatlantic cultures have common origins;
however, the diachronic axis of this factor should also be taken into account. In the
melting pot of American culture, Europeans are generally assimilated, but the traces of
their “otherness” can be valued or despised, according to socio-political contexts and
international relations, as well as the institutional history of cinema, as the history of
the representation of Italians clearly demonstrates.
In its early years, American cinema attracted European stars and foreign idols in
its search for legitimization, absorbing their specific contributions in order to reinforce
85
its own market position. Later on, the conquest of global markets encouraged a cosmopolitan use of European performers in order to both mark their difference, and co-opt
them as a natural continuation of a cultural heritage.
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1. The first outcome of this project on Europeans in Hollywood is Irène Bessière, Roger Odin (eds.), Les
Européens dans le cinéma américain: émigration et exil, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, 2004; a more specific
volume on European actors in American cinema is forthcoming at BFI, with the title Journeys of Desire,
edited by Ginette Vincendau and Alastair Phillips.
2. For the concept of cosmopolitanism, see Ulrich Beck, La società cosmopolita, Il Mulino, Bologna
2003.
3. Richard De Cordova, Picture Personalities. The Emergence of the Star System in America, University of
Illinois Press, Urbana, 1990.
4. Richard Abel, Red Rooster Scare. Making Cinema American 1900-1910, University of California Press,
Berkeley, 1999, XI.
5. Film d’Art was a French film production company, which had an important Italian affiliate by the same
name, both distributed in North America by Pathé. Its output was often constituted by quality adaptations
of famous dramas and literary works.
6. As Robert Sklar argues, the Trust embodied WASP culture and business strategies while the studio system,
“the house that Adolph Zukor built,” was constituted by a generation of mostly immigrant entrepreneurs.
(Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America. A Cultural History of American Movies, Vintage Books, New York, 1994,
141-160).
7. Zukor produced Caruso’s My Cousin (1918) and The Splendid Romance (1919), and Cavalieri’s The Eternal
Temptress (1917), Love’s Conquest (1918), and The Two Brides (1919).
8. See, Marsha Shifert, Aesthetics, Technology, and the Capitalization of Culture: How the Talking Machine
Became a Musical Instrument, “Science in Context” v. 8, n. 2, summer 1995, 417-449.
9. On the cultural history of Italian immigration to America see Piero Bevilacqua, Andreina De Clementi,
Emilio Franzina (eds.), Storia dell’emigrazione italiana, v. 1 Partenze, v. 2 Arrivi, Donzelli, Roma, 2001/2;
Jerre Mangione, Ben Morreale, La Storia. Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience, Harper Perennial,
New York, 1992; Philip Cannistraro (ed.), The Italians of New York. Five Centuries of Struggle and Achievement,
The New York Historical Society, New York, 1999; and Giorgio Bertellini, Southern Crossings: Italians,
Cinema and Modernity (Italy, 1861-New York, 1920), Phd diss., New York Univ., 2001. More recent work on
Italian-American culture can be found in David Lavery (ed.), This Thing of Ours. Investigating The Sopranos,
Wallflower, London, 2002, and Regina Barreca (ed.), A Sitdown with The Sopranos, Palgrave Macmillan,
New York, 2002.
10. See Marvin Carlson, The Italian Shakespearians: Performances by Ristori, Salvini and Rossi in England
and America, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, 1985, and William Uricchio, Roberta Pearson,
Dante’s Inferno and Caesar’s Ghost: Intertextuality and Conditions of Reception in Early American Cinema, in
Richard Abel (ed.), Silent Film, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1996, 217-233.
11. Emelise Aleandri, The Italian-American Immigrant Theatre of New York City, Arcadia, Charleston, 1999,
35.
12. On the representation of Italian-Americans in Hollywood films, see David Richards, Italian-American. The
Racializing of an Ethnic Identity, New York University Press, New York, 1999; Peter Bondanella, Hollywood
Italians. Dagos, Palookas, Romeos, Wise Guys, and Sopranos. Continuum, New York 2004; and the forthcoming
Giorgio Bertellini, Black Hands and White Hearts: Italian Immigrants’ Racial Dissonance in Early TwentiethCentury American Cinema.
13. Ephraim Katz, The Film Encyclopedia, Crowell, New York, 612.
14. Sklar, 96.
15. Ibid., 99-100.
87
16. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1991, 257, 267-8. “One
strategy of disassociating Valentino’s foreignness from an ethnicity tainted with racial difference – and working-class origins- was to depict him as a European aristocrat, at least in appearance, manners, and taste…
Another strategy … was to emphasize his immigrant experience, to hail him as a living proof of the American
dream… Both strategies, besides potentially undermining each other, played into the other major stigma of
Valentino’s career: the question of his masculinity.” (Hansen, 257-9).
17. See Gaylyn Studlar, Discourses of Gender and Ethnicity: The Construction and De(con)struction of Rudolph
Valentino as Other, “Film Criticism,” v. 13, n. 2, 1989. Bill Uricchio has discussed the question of Valentino’s
Italianity in L’Italia americana. L’America di Valentino, in Paola Cristalli (ed.), Valentino. Lo schermo della passione, Cinegrafie, Bologna, 1996. There are interesting remarks also in Stephen Gundle, Film Stars and Society
in Fascist Italy, in Piero Garofalo, Jacqueline Reich (eds.), Re-viewing Fascism. Italian Cinema, 1922-1943,
Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2002, 323.
18. Sklar, 100.
19. Bram Djkstra, Evil Sisters. The Threat of Female Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Culture, Henry Holt, New
York, 1996.
20. The case of American Nita Naldi has recently been studied by Diane Negra in The Fictionalized Ethnic
Biography. Nita Naldi and the Crisis of Assimilation, in Gregg Bachman, Thomas Slater (eds.), American Silent
Film. Discovering Marginalized Voices, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, 2002.
21. John Baxter, The Hollywood Exiles, Taplinger, New York, 1976; James K. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America,
Princeton University Press, Princeton 1980; John Russell Taylor, Strangers in Paradise, Holt, Reinhart and
Winston, New York, 1983; Graham Petrie, Hollywood Destinies: European Directors in America 1922-1931,
Routledge and Keagan, London, 1985; James Morrison, Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European
Directors, SUNY Press, Albany, 1998; Gene Philips, Exiles in Hollywood, Leigh University Press, Bethlehem,
1998; Saverio Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism. Film and Politics in the Age of the New Deal, Temple
University Press, Philadelphia, 2001.
22. Thomas Saunders, Hollywood in Berlin, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994.
23. Katz, 734.
24. Ethan Mordden, The Hollywood Studios, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1989.
25. See Giuliana Muscio, Piccole Italie, grandi schermi, Bulzoni, Roma, 2004. Among the other actors
included in the study are Tina Modotti, Bull Montana, Mario Carillo, Mimì Aguglia, William Ricciardi,
Albert Conti, Guido Trento, Paul Porcasi, Frank Puglia, Rafaela Ottiano, Silvio and Esther Minciotti, Ines
Palange, Frank Corsaro, Luisa Caselotti, and Francesca Braggiotti.
26. Francesca Canadé Sautman, Ombre grige, toni neri. Gli italo-americani, razza e razzismo nel cinema
americano, in Anna Camaiti Hostert, Anthony Julian Tamburri (eds.), Scene italoamericane. Rappresentazioni
cinematografiche degli italiani d’America, Luca Sossella Editore, Roma, 2002; Tom Guglielmo, White on
Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1945, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005.
27. Giovanni Grasso and Angelo Musco toured the States with their companies as well.
28. Lawrence Estavan, The Italian Theatre in San Francisco, Borgo Press, San Bernardino, 1991; Emelise
Aleandri, The Italian-American Immigrant Theatre of New York City, Arcadia, Charleston, 1999; Anna Maria
Martellone, Il teatro delle Little Italy: La costruzione di un’identità italo-americana, “Rivista di Studi AngloAmericani” (RSA) v. X n. 12, 2000, 240-248.
29. Stefano Luconi, Not Only “A Tavola:” Radio Broadcasting and Patterns of Ethnic Consumption Among
Italian Americans in the Interwar Years, in Edvige Giunta and Samuel J.Patti, A Tavola. Food, Tradition and
Community Among Italian Americans, American Italian Historical Association, Staten Island, 1998; on the
production of Italian-American films, see Muscio, Piccole Italie, grandi schermi, 247-268.
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30. Valentino, for instance, played only one Italian character in the most significant part of his career: the
count Torriani in the minor film Cobra.
31. Estavan, 29.
32. Since Maiori and Gravina have relevant roles in the film, even though as mafiosi who kidnap “poor little”
Mary for revenge, they are often seen in very close shots, which allow us a clear view of their physiognomy
and their acting style. Maiori is more traditionally “theatrical,” raising his highbrow and grinning, or gesturing very “vernacularly,” as when he curses Mary/Peppina’s father, with his thumb between index and middle
finger. Gravina exploits instead the irregular features of his face in order to characterize his scheming mafioso,
winking at his crony during the trial, and silencing him with a menacing look: they are minimal gestures
but quite effective.
33. Richard Koszarski, Von. The Life of Eric Von Stroheim, Limelight, New York, 2001, 142.
34. He is an Italian in The Man in Blue (1925) set in Little Italy, in The Blonde Saint (1926) which includes
a storm on the Sicilian coast, and in The Magic Garden (1927), partially set in a musical environment in
Venice.
35. The film is actually Circus Days, a very “Chaplinian” text.
36. Frank Nugent, Obituary, October 22, 1945.
37. Frank Nugent, Notes on a Minor Comic, in “The New York Times,” undated item (in Clipping Files,
Rose Library).
38. The Boston Globe, undated item in the Clipping Files at the Academy Library in Los Angeles.
39. Giuliana Muscio, Hollywood’s New Deal, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1996, and Lizabeth
Cohen, Making a New Deal, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990.
40. Philip Cannistraro, Blackshirts in Little Italy, 1921-1929, Bordighera, Lafayette, IN 1999; Stefano Luconi,
Guido Tintori, L’ombra lunga del fascio, MB, Milano 2004.
41. Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939, University of Exeter, Exeter, 1997.
42. Giulio Cesare Castello, Alfabeto Minore di Hollywood, in “Cinema,” n. 72, 1951.
43. Lary May, Making the American Way, in “Prospects” n. 12, 1987; Ian Jarvie, Stars and Ethnicity: Hollywood
and the United States, 1932-51, in Lester Friedman (ed.), Unspeakable Images. Ethnicity and the American
Cinema, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1991, and Robert Sklar, City Boys, Princeton University Press,
1992.
44. K. Hanson (ed.) The AFI Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States, Feature Films, 1931-1941,
Film Entries, A-L, v. 1, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993, 1205.
45. Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon, Dell, New York, 1975, 241-5.
46. Raft is even more famous for the roles he refused, which were also responsible for Bogart’s success, such
as High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca.
47. Boxer Primo Carnera and Luigi Montagna (Bull Montana) made films in Hollywood. The Italian
boxer as a fictional character was prominent in American cinema from the thirties right up to Raging Bull
and Stallone’s Rocky. The Italian dancer is a stereotype that started with Rodolfo Valentino and his tango,
continued with comedian (and dancer) Monty Banks/Mario Bianchi, and ballroom dancer George Raft, all
the way to John Travolta.
48. “Few people in or out of the movie industry considered Raft much of an actor. He had, however, an
undeniable aura of authority…” (Robert Sklar, City Boys, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1992,
95-96).
89
49. Gianni Puccini, Italiani nel mondo del cinema, in “Cinema” n. 25, 1937.
50. On self-censorship, see Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin, The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1991,
and Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono, Anchor Books, New York 1990.
51. On the stage, he attracted critical attention with his roles as Diamond Louie in Front Page by Hecht and
MacArthur, in Cecov’s Zio Vania, and in Reunion in Vienna by R.E. Sherwood, performed by Alfred Lunt
and Lynn Fontanne’s company.
52. On the Italian-American films produced in New York between 1930 and 1932 see, Giuliana Muscio,
Piccole Italie, grandi schermi. Bulzoni, Roma, 2004.
53. Cited in the obituary of The New York Times (Oct. 10, 1969).
54. His filmography includes Gunga Din (1939) as an Indian guru, Risky Business (1939) as the ruthless
Decarno, Foreign Correspondent (1940) as Mr. Krug, and Giono in Kitty Foyle (1940). He was also in Passage
to Marseille (1944), The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), and Dillinger (1944).
55. Luciano’s rise has actually been defined as the “Americanization of the mobs:” in fact, the majority of his
gang was not Italian-American. As we know today, the relations between Hollywood and gangsterism were
not limited to fiction, because the majors used mobsters (including Raft) to take care of union problems or
internal conflicts. It is however interesting to notice the different levels of reality and fiction that come into
play in the work of these three actors in their gangster films. In Marked Woman Warner Bros. was audacious
enough to cast one of the real gangsters from Luciano’s mob, Hymie Marks. On the connections between
Hollywood and the Mob, see Denise Hartsough Crime Pays: The Studios’ Labor Deals in the 1930s in “Velvet
Light Trap” n. 23, March 1989, 49-63.
56. In Italy Ciannelli did diverse films such as Patto col diavolo (1949) with Isa Miranda, Processo alla città
(1952), Antonioni’s I vinti (1953), La nave delle donne maledette (1953), and Monicelli’s Proibito (1955),
and the co-productions La voce del silenzio (Wilhelm Pabst, 1953) and Helen of Troy (Robert Wise, 1956). In
1957, he returned to the States; he was the orchestra conductor and father of the protagonist in Houseboat
(1958) with Sophia Loren and Cary Grant, he appeared in Penn’s The Chase (1966), and he even did an
American imitation of a spaghetti western, Mackenna’s Gold (1968). Among his last roles were those in The
Secret of Santa Victoria (1968) set in Italy with Anthony Quinn and Anna Magnani and, last but not least, a
spaghetti western, La collina degli stivali (1969) with Terence Hill and Bud Spencer. On TV he was in several
series, from Johnny Staccato to I love Lucy and Mission Impossible.
57. Marty included Italian-Americans Ernest Borgnine, Esther Minciotti, and Augusta Ciolli.
90
THE MAKING OF THE NEW ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA AND THE
“GOLDEN AGE” OF EUROPEAN CULTURE IN THE U.S. 1940’s  1960’s
giuliana gemelli and antonella cardellicchio
an obstructed path: the ford foundation and
the search for a new humanism in the early ’s
During the early fifties, the Ford Foundation entered onto the stage of American
foundations as a new and powerful actor. In its first years of activity, it appeared to be
oriented toward containing the increasing development of applied social and economic
research, which had been dominant during World War Two. Apparently, a search for a
“new humanism” was at work, particularly when it came to the roles played by Mortimer
Adler, the highly respected advisor of one of the Ford Foundation’s associate directors, and
Robert M. Hutchins, the chancellor of the University of Chicago. In a letter to Hutchins
– dated January 1951 – Adler stated that:
If the Ford Foundation is going to proceed autonomously […] that is to conceive or invent and
devise the means for carrying out original ideas and plans in the fields of its basic objectives, then
much more than administration is involved. A great deal of theoretical thinking is required as
well as a great deal of inventiveness and practical imagination.1
This orientation, however, vanished rapidly when Paul Hoffmann left the Ford
Foundation to become a trustee of the University of Chicago and the chairman of the
board of the Studebaker Corporation, and there followed a shift from the cultural approach supported by Hutchins to the foreign policy approach of the Foundation’s new
president, Milton Katz. One should recall that Hutchins had been one of the leading
personalities of the “Fund for the Republic,” a Ford Foundation program whose aim was
to explore the mental, social, and cultural attitudes of Americans vis-à-vis communism.
He was also implicated during the recrudescence of McCarthyism against foundations
by the famous Reece Committee, whose records represent an interesting chapter of the
anticommunist hysteria of the period.
Significantly, this was the period of the crisis of the liberal mind, particularly when it
came to the policies of American foundations, for reasons related to internal organization
as well as external factors connected to the political climate of the period, as mentioned
above. One of the effects of this shift, concerning Europe and Italy in particular, was the
abandonment of the project of 1953-54 to support, with a conspicuous grant, Adriano
Olivetti’s Movimento Comunità, which was aimed at strengthening the development of
democracy through the infusion and diffusion of reformist thought in Italian society. At
91
the making of the new encyclopaedia britannica
the same time, as Francis Sutton has demonstrated,2 pressures to create an autonomous
European program within the Ford Foundation’s international affairs division met with
ambivalent reactions and serious obstacles, at least until the mid-fifties. Only after 1956
did the officers who supported the idea, Shepard Stone and Joseph Slater, succeed in
promoting an articulated program that would strengthen an Atlantic partnership through
the support of European integration. The role of the social and economic sciences, as
well as large-scale cultural programs, was crucial to the definition of the blueprint of
the European program. However, the role of Atlantic policies and strategic partnership
was also at the core of the definition of a new philosophy based on the strengthening of
humanistic values in these fields. Likewise, the fundamental goal of supporting research
in the natural sciences was the dissemination of “free world values” within the scientific
world, rather than the strengthening of European science.3
While this orientation may not have contrasted with the goals of the liberal-minded
scholars at the University of Chicago collaborating with the Ford Foundation, it was
certainly shaped differently than the Foundation’s own orientation with respect to its
international affairs policy. In a re-conceptualization of western tradition, this small but
powerful intellectual community continued to support the idea that foundation work
should be based on a new – global – moral philosophy, particularly scholasticism. The
scholars also believed it should address the strategic issues related to the articulation of
the values of American liberalism and European moral philosophy, with a specific focus
on Jacques Maritain’s “humanisme integral.” They did not believe, however, that an
Atlantic partnership alone could complete and fulfill the ‘universalistic’ task implied in
the construction of a new moral philosophy, which demanded profound intellectual and
theoretical cooperation in the West, particularly with regards to a coordination between
European and American philosophical thought.
william benton: an entrepreneur at the university of chicago
The Chicago network, which was central to the creation of the New Encyclopaedia
Britannica, was formed under the impulse of three outstanding personalities: Senator
William Benton, who came to the University of Chicago as vice-president in 1937, after
writing a book on the university’s public relations and retiring from Benton & Bowles,
the advertising agency he had founded;4 the moral philosopher Mortimer Adler; and the
university’s chancellor, Robert M. Hutchins. Benton and Adler were the architects of the
Britannica’s fifteenth edition (1974-1978) and acted, respectively, as “Mr. Outside” and
“Mr. Inside” with regards to the definition of its intellectual blueprint and the setting up
of its financial and organizational structures.
The history of the Encyclopaedia Britannica has deep roots, both in Europe and in
the U.S., and it is characterized by the various patterns of relations that existed between
the two sides of the Atlantic. For its first five editions, beginning with the Edinburgh
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edition of 1768-1771, the editors made no effort to enlist contributors from outside the
U.K. Archibald Constable was the first editor to break that pattern when he solicited
outside contributions to his six-volume supplement to the fifth edition. By the time of
the Encyclopaedia’s fourteenth edition in 1929, the process of internationalization was
complete and there was a clear attempt to avoid insularity. This process was marked
by a crucial shift in the Britannica’s history when the enterprise was transplanted from
London to New York City in 1901, following many decades of clandestine circulation
of single parts of the Encyclopaedia within the American market,5 under the initiative of
the Hooper & Jackson Limited Society, which was controlled by the (London) Times.
In 1911, the rights and stores of the Encyclopaedia were acquired by the Sears, Roebuck
& Company, a retail corporation based in Chicago and owned by the philanthropist Julius
Rosenwald. In 1917, Rosenwald created a foundation in his name to support various
social programs, particularly in education, with a special focus on black communities
in the southern United States. Because of his foundation’s difficulty in managing the
autonomous enterprise, Rosenwald later decided to offer the rights of the Encyclopaedia
to the University of Chicago. The stores were acquired by an independent company, at
no additional cost to the university. Schools, libraries, and encyclopaedias formed the
core of Rosenwald’s mission during the last part of his long life and the donation of the
Encyclopaedia came out of his visionary perception of the need for profound educational
reform. A matching program, which coordinated relations between his foundation and
the university, became Rosenwald’s legacy.
While the intellectual aims of the Britannica were progressively adapted to the
American audience and the international dimension of its collaborative networks increased
as a result, there was a strong ambivalence towards defining the theoretical framework of
the three editions published in the early twentieth century (eleventh in 1902-03, twelvth
in 1910-11, and thirteenth in 1922). A fluctuation between the British national matrix
and the American international aim was at work until the fourteenth edition of 1926-29,
when a process of internationalization finally began.6 However, it was only with the
blueprint for the fifteenth edition, which was originally conceived in 1941-1943, that
the intention of giving the Encyclopaedia a clear and strategically oriented international
purpose and structure was declared. While the project of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Inc. began as an autonomous enterprise in 1941, it was not officially presented under
William Benton’s ownership until 1943. Benton led the company until his death in
1973, after which time his wife, Helen Hemingway Benton, took over before she died
one year later, the same year that the first volumes of the New Encyclopaedia Britannica
were finally published. During its long gestational phase, from 1941 until 1974, Benton
acted as the entrepreneurial driver of the new Britannica edition – in collaboration with
academic and business networks in Chicago – while Mortimer Adler, who coordinated
the entire project, was the brains behind the operation, as we shall see.7
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This long-term process was characterized by two paradoxes. On the one hand, the deliberate abandonment of the British imprint on the intellectual matrix of the Encyclopaedia
actually spurred a process of increasingly articulated dialogue with European cultural and
philosophical matrixes. On the other hand, a process of internationalization, begun with
the fourteenth edition, was coupled with a search for a new universalism, largely based
on the intersection between business and ethics as a framework from which to approach
the developing phase of an emerging “global civilization.”
In the first part of this essay, we will focus primarily on the preliminary phase of the
making of the New Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is crucial to understanding its entrepreneurial, conceptual, and institutional framework, as well as the original configuration
of its relations with European cultural patterns and scientific networks. In the second
and final part of the essay, we will analyze how these relations were shaped over the time
period that covered the Cold War, the crisis of the American mind in the mid-sixties,
and the reconsolidation of U.S. cultural isolationism in the early seventies, which was
supported by the crystallization of scientism as a universalistic paradigm as well as the
increasing role of a formalistic approach and the construction of models in the social and
life sciences. Concerning this latter period, moreover, it is important to recall that the
scientific paradigm was also at work in the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences,
published in the late sixties, which had completely abandoned the multidisciplinary and
humanistic approach of its first edition, published in the early thirties.
The Britannica’s donation to the University of Chicago came under the impulse of
William Benton, who bought stocks of the fourteenth edition in order to collect the
money necessary to make the gift possible. He put his own fundraising abilities and
personal resources into what could have been a very risky business, considering the fact
that the university had no experience in managing such an enterprise, along with the fact
that a war was on at the time the acquisition occurred. By putting his own money into
the Encyclopaedia, Benton acted as a venture capitalist ante litteram. He saw the venture
as far more than the attainment of what an executive of the Rockefeller Foundation had
called “a commercial printing project.” In a memo to Robert Hutchins, dated January
26, 1942, Benton admitted that “frankly … the hope for profit from the Encyclopaedia
tempts me. I see no other such hope for revenue for the University which will enable
us to make the kind of faculty appointments we sorely need.” In response to those who
argued that it is difficult to sell an encyclopaedia during wartime, Benton’s justification
was both optimistic and naive: “When people can’t buy automobiles and refrigerators,
they may buy the encyclopaedia they have always wanted.”8
Benton began his fundraising campaign on this basis, addressing the most important
personalities in the worlds of business, publishing, and communications in the country,
though he was met with refusal and skepticism. Henry and Clare Boothe Luce, as well
as Albert D. Lasker, the advertising guru of the time, all reacted negatively, saying it was
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impossible to support such an “unusual and surprising proposal.” This was also the case
with the Rockefeller Foundation, which had supported the making of the Encyclopaedia of
the Social Sciences in the thirties, but found the timing for a merger between the Britannica
and the University of Chicago inappropriate.
Facing increasing difficulties in reaching the conditions of the donation through his
fundraising, Benton decided, with the full agreement of Robert Hutchins, to invest his
own money. After further negotiations with the company that owned the Encyclopedia
– which reduced the requested amount to cover inventory expenses and capital advances
and assured the donation process – Benton put up $100,000 in capital, personally assuming all risks and management responsibilities, and insuring that the university would not
be required to make any investment. A public announcement of the university’s acquisition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was made on January 20, 1943, and Benton was
appointed chairman of its board. From that time onward, he became the Encyclopaedia’s
driving force, not only in making the gift pay off by transforming the Encyclopaedia
Britannica Corporation and the university into harmonious and beneficial partners, but
also in selecting the intellectuals that would guide the Encyclopaedia’s revision and reconstruction, ultimately leading to the production of its fifteenth edition.
The intellectual brainpower behind the encyclopaedic institution was Mortimer
Adler, a professor of moral philosophy who was also responsible for the ambitious program of publishing the Great Books of the Western World, beginning in the late forties. The
institutional, organizational, and theoretical background of the Encyclopaedia Britannica
Corporation was developed within a finely articulated framework, one that included
Adler’s publishing program and a very complex and reflexive construction of editorial
plans, based on a profound conceptualization of liberal education.
mortimer j. adler: the european roots of ethics for liberal education
Mortimer Jerome Adler was born in New York City, the son of an immigrant jewelry
salesman. He dropped out of school at fourteen and went to work as a secretary and
copy boy at the New York Sun, with the hopes of becoming a journalist. After a year,
he started taking night classes at Columbia University to improve his writing. It was
during this time, after reading the autobiography of the great English philosopher John
Stuart Mill, that he became interested in studying the great philosophers and thinkers of
western civilization. In the 1920s, Adler became an instructor at Columbia and continued to participate in the honors program that had been started there by John Erskine.
The program consisted of seminars that focused on reading the classics and was open to
both students and the general public. This emphasis on continuing education would later
inform the process in which the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica would
be reviewed and published in 1974. Adler’s tenure at Columbia included studies with
such eminent thinkers as John Erskine, as mentioned above, and John Dewey. Adler’s
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perspective, which fell in line with Benton’s vision, was dominated by anti-relativism and
a search for an educational matrix based on theoretical and metaphysical content. Not
only did it correspond with Dewey’s intellectual pragmatism, but it was also grounded
on Dewey’s democratic principles. In fact, by developing a critical vision of Jeffersonian
statements about education, which called upon the Virginia legislature to give three years
of common schooling to all children of the state and advocated dividing children into
those destined for labor and those destined for leisure and learning (therefore sending
only the latter to college), Adler pointed out that:
In our twentieth-century understanding of the term ‘democracy’, Jefferson’s educational program
was thoroughly antidemocratic, but it still exists in the United States today… The quality of
schooling given the non college-bound does not prepare them for citizenship or for a life enriched
by continued learning; nor, I should add, does the quality of education given the college-bound
when they get to college. It is still a fundamentally antidemocratic system of schooling with a
sharp differentiation between two tracks, one for those of inferior ability and one for their betters.
The first real departure from Jefferson’s antidemocratic policy (dominating American education
from 1817 to the present day) occurred in this century with startling pronouncements by John
Dewey and Robert Hutchins. The ‘Paideia Proposal’ in 1982 was dedicated to them because of
their commitment to a democratic system of education. In 1900, John Dewey said that the kind
of schooling that the best and wisest parents would want for their own children is precisely the
kind of schooling that the community should want for all its children. Any other policy if acted
upon, he said, would defeat democracy. In his epoch-making book, ‘Democracy and Education’
(1916), Dewey enunciated a position the opposite of Jefferson’s. He said all the children in our
nation, now that it was on its way to becoming democratic, had the same destiny – to lead lives
in which they would earn a living, act as intelligent citizens of the republic, and make an effort
to lead a decent and enriched human life.9
Adler and Benton did not reject pragmatism as a moral philosophy but rather the
excessive application of scientific knowledge that was at work in American educational
institutions both during and after War World Two. This concern was crucial to the critical
vision that Benton developed in the early sixties regarding business education in the U.S.
and in particular the fact that it had been introduced and extended at the undergraduate level with the effect of enhancing specialization and application as the only pattern
of knowledge for the early stages of professional education. Because of this, young students were completely deprived of the necessary infusion of a general education. Other
major players in educational policy shared this concern. James Killian, for example, the
president of MIT, undertook a significant restructuring of the university’s educational
mandate, through the support of the Ford Foundation, by implementing courses and
educational programs based on the human and social sciences as the basic background
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for an engineer’s training.10 The director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s social science
division, Joseph Willits, who also shared this vision, stressed that:
Every department, every bureau, every section maintains a statistical staff… Under the impulse
of that start, an immense enthusiasm for the new ‘tool’ developed… Figures are assembled from
whatever source they derived, by persons who have no idea of their meaning; are put into elaborate
combinations, and then presented to the public and to responsible officials as the basic element
of decision.11
Significantly, the economist Simon Kuznets strongly endorsed these statements in
a letter to Willits in 1942:
It does seem that if we are to recover properly after this emergency is over, it should be our foremost concern to see to it that plans are made to counteract this trend, a trend which is likely to
become more pronounced as the war effort grows longer. The Foundation can play a crucial part
in this direction, because unlike the universities it has not been hit by the war emergency and still
has resources to apply where they count most.12
It was this intellectual orientation that inspired Adler’s early interest in developing
the project of publishing the Great Books of Western Civilization – which in turn created
the framework for the emergence of the institutional and intellectual community of the
fifteenth edition of the Britannica at the University of Chicago. Adler himself recalls the
main steps that were required for a long-term, intellectually deep-rooted program:
In 1928 a grant from the Carnegie Corporation enabled Scott Buchanan – a future member of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica’s community – and me to organize fifteen great books seminars for adults
in New York. This, so far as I know, was the first attempt to employ the reading and discussion of
great books as a major form of continued learning for adults, later to become a national program
under the auspices of the Great Books Foundations… Before Hutchins went to Chicago, he and I
discussed the Erskine list of Great Books that I had been teaching at Columbia… [Hutchins] asked
me to come to Chicago mainly for the purpose of teaching a Great Books seminar for entering
freshmen that he and I would conduct and Mark Van Doren and I had done at Columbia. We
did so from 1930 until 1948. From that, many other achievements followed.13
Erskine’s model was in fact reformulated from an epistemological point of view and
a process of institutionalization began; one that involved a strategic vision of educational
reform, for the first time, and was based on the “great books seminars.”14
The following step was the creation, in 1936, of the Committee of the Liberal Arts
under the initiative of Robert Hutchins. As Adler recalls:
Hutchins invited Stringfellow Barr and Scott Buchanan of the University of Virginia to join us
in planning an ideal, completely required curriculum for a liberal arts college. The reading and
seminar discussion of great books for four years were central to that curriculum. This resulted in
a greatly expanded list of great books, including works in mathematics and the natural sciences
that had been for the most part absent from the original Erskine list.15
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Out of this perspective, Adler promoted the idea that philosophy should be integrated
with science, literature, and religion and that the educational program should be related
to this specific background:
My serious study of philosophy began when, at Columbia University in the early twenties, I took a
course in the history of philosophy taught by Professor F. J. E. Woodbridge. Just before Christmas
in 1921, I received as a Christmas gift, a copy of the Oxford translation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics,
with an inscription from Professor Woodbridge that read as follows: ‘To Mortimer Adler who has
already begun to make good use of this book’. I owe to Professor Woodbridge, for whom, as for
Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle was ‘the Philosopher’, my early sense of Aristotle’s works, as well as a
recognition of the soundness of Aristotle’s approach to philosophical problems and his method of
philosophising. But I owe to Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica I discovered a few years
later, the instructive example of a powerful use of that method, together with the direction and
guidance one needs not only in the study of Aristotelian philosophy, but also in the application
of it to all problems not faced by Aristotle himself. With one or two exceptions, all fundamental
philosophical truths that I have learned in more than fifty years, to which I am now firmly committed, I have learned from Aristotle, from Aquinas as a student of Aristotle, and from Jacques
Maritain as a student of them both. I have searched my mind thoroughly and I cannot, with a
few exceptions in political theory, find a single truth, that I have learned from work in modern
philosophy written since the beginning of the seventeenth century.16
In fact, Adler’s earliest work resulted in the publication of a contemporary version
of Aquinas’ Dialectic in 1927, which focused on a summa of the greatest philosophical
and religious ideas that characterized the cultural and educational roots of western civilization. His ideas were influenced by his fascination with medieval thought and moral
vision and were particularly inspired by the differentiation between “authority” and
“autocracy,” on the one hand, and “individual” and “person,” on the other. For Adler,
the former pair corresponded to the “voice of reason” and the latter pair to the effects of
“violent imposition:”17
I am not thinking in terms of the utilitarian formula of ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’
– Adler wrote – I am distinguishing between the individual, whose private and idiosyncratic interests are always subordinate to the common good, and the person, constituted by that essential
and spiritual nature in which all men equally share.18
This articulation of concepts, with its strategic focus on education, formed the background to Adler’s activities in teaching and research at the University of Chicago and the
University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), as well as private institutions created with the
support of the Ford Foundation, such as the Institute for Philosophical Research (1942)
and the Aspen Institute (1950). Along with William Benton, Adler was a driving force in
developing the appropriate funding for these institutions. At the Aspen Institute, he taught
the classics to business leaders for more than forty years, with the dedicated participation
of students that included extraordinary personalities from the world of culture as well
as business. “In the Great Books seminars that Hutchins and I conducted for Chicago’s
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civic leaders at the University Club, were Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke. Their growing
interest in the Great Books as an educational instrument for adults led in 1950 to the
establishment of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies.”19 The emerging pattern of
“continuing education” as a vital means for strengthening civilization was at work.
Adler was appointed full professor to the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of
Chicago in 1930. However, the faculty was openly against the innovations he planned
to introduce to the curriculum, which made his academic life there rather difficult. The
changes he proposed would redefine the program of studies through the development of
an integrated philosophical approach. Adler’s purpose was to enhance the perception and
contents of the classics through readings, discussions, and essays, with the ultimate aim
of generating a common background for the study of separate and specialized academic
disciplines.
Subjectivism and relativism about value judgments on the part of students – Adler asserted – emanated from the same stance on the part of their teachers, especially their professors in philosophy
and in the social sciences. At that time, the reign of philosophical positivism among Anglo-American
professors gave rise to the doctrine of non-cognitive ethics. This meant that moral philosophy was
not knowledge, a body of valid truths. Some went so far as to say that judgments that contained
the words ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ were neither true nor false. There were no prescriptive truths.
At the same time, what was known to sociologists and cultural anthropologists – that the tribal
or ethnic mores differed from tribe to tribe, from culture to culture, and from time to time – led
them to the dogmatic denial that there were any objectively valid moral judgments. As the positivists among the philosophers dismissed ethics as non cognitive, so the social scientists denied
ethics objectivity and universality by putting the members of one tribe, culture or ethnic group
into what they called ‘the ethnocentric predicament’, which meant they were unable to make
objective judgments about values espoused in other tribes and cultures.20
Unfortunately, these conflicts with the faculty led him to resign in 1931. He consequently obtained a chair at the law school, as professor of philosophy of law, where
he was able to consolidate his philosophical and pedagogical vision in his teaching and
research. By the time Benton co-opted Adler to the board of the Encyclopaedia, his innovative vision of education in a liberal society was well established, and his project to
publish the great books of the western world became the basis upon which the Britannica
entered its new evolutionary phase.21
It is therefore important to focus on Adler’s gestation in terms of the path that his life
took up to this moment. A self-described pagan for the majority of his life, Adler converted
to Christianity in 1984 and then to Roman Catholicism in December of 1999, when he
was baptized by an Episcopalian priest. The influence of contemporary European Catholic
thinkers – such as Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson – was extremely relevant, both
to his background and to the making of the Britannica, and it was largely defined at the
beginning of the Second World War when Maritain left France for the U.S. to become
a resident scholar at Princeton. In 1940, Maritain and Adler wrote a book together,
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Scholasticism and Politics, published by the Macmillan Company. The book generated
the theoretical and intellectual background for the debates that would later be animated
by Adler himself regarding the fundamental ideas behind the creation of the Institute
for Philosophical Research in Chicago in 1942. The institute was crucial in enhancing
Adler’s leading intellectual position, which in turn enabled him to give editorial direction to the fifteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and to develop, edit, write,
and promote the Great Books of the Western World. On the surface, the latter represented
a collection of classics. In reality, it was an attempt to revolutionize American education
by developing an articulated and interdisciplinary debate over the role of traditionalism
and modernism through the selection and reconsideration of philosophical thought in
western culture and society. The Great Books project was based on the definition of the
Syntopicon as an “instrument of liberal education.” As Adler stated:
The unity of the set does not consist merely in the fact that each member of it is a Great Book
worth reading. A deeper unity exists in the relation of all the books to one tradition, a unity shown
by the continuity of the discussion of common themes and problems. All the works in the Great
Books are significantly related to one another and, taken together, they adequately present the
ideas and issues, the terms and topics that have made the western tradition what it is. More than
a collection of books, then, the Great Books is a certain kind of whole that can and should be
read as such […]. The aim of this ‘syntopical reading’ was to discover the unity and continuity of
western thought in the discussion of common themes and problems from one end of the tradition
to the other […]. The lines along which a syntopical reading of the Great Books can and should
be done are the main lines of the continuous discussion that runs through the thirty centuries of
western civilization. This great conversation across the ages is a living organism whose structure
the Syntopicon tries to articulate. It tries to show the many strands of this conversation between the
greatest minds of western civilization on the themes which have concerned men in every epoch,
and which cover the whole range of man’s speculative inquiries and practical interests […]. Hence
the Syntopicon is organized, first, by a listing of the ideas that are the important common terms
of discussion; and, then, by an enumeration of the topics that are the various particular points
about which the discussion of each of these ideas revolves.”22
The theoretical framework of the Syntopicon was built along the lines of Maritain’s
philosophical thought. More specifically, it was based on the refusal of empiricism as
the only philosophical orientation of western philosophy, in increasing contrast with
the research model supported by the Ford Foundation in the fifties and early sixties.
In their critique of empiricism and positivism, Adler and Maritain identified the most
constructive framework within which to strengthen intellectual relations between the
U.S. and Europe.
It is interesting to recall a quotation from the speech given by Maritain in the early
fifties, at Adler’s invitation, regarding the publication of the Great Books:
In looking at the program of this monumental publication […] one cannot help being struck by
the fact that a number of the most representative works of the European heritage have been col100
lected here by the diligent care of the American mind and the American zeal for the advance of
civilization […]. You will allow me as a European to stress the significance of that great testimony
to the gratitude and faithful attention of the country to the European tradition it has inherited. It
seems remarkable to me that the notion of tradition, in its living and genuine sense, is now being
rehabilitated and the task of saving and promoting the best of this very tradition taken over by the
pioneering spirit itself of America […]. Yet this intellectual and spiritual struggle remain universal
in nature and the European mind is involved in it as deeply as the American mind. As a matter
of fact, the Atlantic is now becoming that which the Mediterranean was for thirty centuries – the
domestic sea of western civilization.23
Maritain basically agreed with the idea of correcting a model of knowledge based on
encyclopaedic knowledge through a selective approach that “restricts as much as possible
the extent of the essentials of humanistic knowledge.”24 Maritain then concurred with
Adler and Benton that the remaking of the Britannica needed a more systematic approach
to the articulation between basic education and specialized knowledge, which could not
be reduced to the writing of new entries in the Encyclopaedia or the re-writing of existing
ones. “The Syntopicon – Maritain observed – is much more […] than an instrument for
scholarly research. It is also an instrument for, and a harbinger of, that new endeavour
of critical examination and creative synthesis through which alone the tradition of the
western world can survive, and advance.”25
Etienne Gilson also gave a positive evaluation of the cultural identity of the Great
Books project in terms of U.S.-European relations by arguing that the Syntopicon was
“a typically ‘American’ Masterpiece’.” There was no trace of irony in calling it “American,”
he said. “Even metaphysical reflection,” he pointed out, “can be helped in a material way;
and if not by means of a calculating machine, then by a machine collecting the data of
thought. The Syntopicon is precisely such a machine.”
The most fascinating aspects of this intellectual venture were its patterns of correlation with the activities of the editorial board of the Britannica, which, in a very delicate
period for American society, were also ways of addressing the argument for the intersection between democracy and education, and the production of knowledge that could
strengthen this link:
The Syntopicon – Adler stated – helps to liberate its users from partial or partisan views of the
western tradition. Most of us tend to be, in one way or another, particularistic rather than universal
in our allegiance to and understanding of our intellectual tradition. We have sectarian or parochial
or epochal limitations of vision or interest. We see the part as the whole or regardless of the whole.
By keeping the whole always in full view, the Syntopicon may help to cure such intellectual blindness as is represented by modernism or medievalism or antiquarianism; or any of countless other
isms that are besetting ills of the human mind. At this moment in our national life, the Syntopicon
may help in the fight for freedom of thought and discussion. It is, therefore, singularly appropriate
that Senator William Benton should be its publisher. He made a distinguished and noble effort
to stem the tide of McCarthyism which, in government and in mass action, threatened freedom
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of speech and discussion in this country. But even the McCarthy’s of this world cannot choke
freedom of thought by lies and intimidation or by the coercive force of fear and mass hysteria.
Freedom of thought is an inner, and inviolable freedom. It can be impaired, even destroyed, but
only by ignorance, not by fear or force; for we exercise freedom in thinking only when we are in
a position to choose among the possible intellectual alternatives.
Another relevant issue was the increasing intersection between the claim for freedom
of thought and the commercial aim of a double-edged profitable enterprise (the Great
Books and the Britannica). This became evident when, after several attempts to produce
the ‘mise à jour’ of the fourteenth edition with the publication of an introductory volume,
a new edition of the entire Encyclopaedia proved unavoidable.
In this process, in the early sixties, relations with Europe and particularly with
European encyclopaedias became vital once again. John V. Dodge, who had spent part of
his youth studying in Europe during the interwar period and was head of the Britannica’s
international relations, played a key role when, in a climate of increasing cultural cooperation with Europe and particularly France, an articulated “encyclopedic diplomacy” was set
up. In this period, several projects were envisaged and discussed, including a translation
of the Britannica, a merger between the Britannica and the Encyclopaedia Universalis – a
new French encyclopaedia “under construction” at the time – and a collaboration at a
distance, which finally led to the creation of a new encyclopaedia that included translated
entries from the Britannica.
The main result of this long period of complex negotiations was the creation of a
framework of discussion in which differentiated visions of encyclopedic networks, on
opposite sides of the Atlantic, were shaped into two specific historical periods: the midsixties, which witnessed the crisis of the American mind, particularly with respect to
French cultural and theoretical issues; and the early seventies, which saw the first crisis
in European-American relations and the publication of two major encyclopedic ventures,
the fifteenth edition of the Britannica in the U.S. (1974) and the Encyclopaedia Universalis
in France (1968 and 1975).26
the making of the “new” encyclopaedia
It was in 195027 that the Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. began to formulate its project
to create a new edition of the Britannica, with a plan to publish it in 1968, the 200th anniversary of the first edition. The editors’ initial plan was to produce a partial integration
of the Encyclopaedia, called Out-of-Classification Revision of Britannica, on the suggestion
of William Dodge in a meeting of its board of editors:
Mr. Dodge reported that the major part of the FBB (1951) printing of Britannica
will be devoted to “out-of-classification” revisions. He said that of the 41,000 articles
in Britannica, some 1,400 are in constant need of revision. About half the 1,400, in all
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classifications, are in serious need of revision. These 700 form the nucleus of the “outof-classification” revision scheduled for 1951 and perhaps 1952.28
Despite the fact that several voices argued for a systematic revision of the Encyclopaedia,
the idea was abandoned, both for economic reasons and because of internal dynamics
within the institutional framework of the Britannica. During the fifties, the board agreed
to involve a larger number of English-speaking scholars and academic institutions in the
making of the Encyclopaedia, in order to consolidate its relationships with the University of
Chicago, the British scientific and intellectual university community, and other academic
networks. They came up with the new aim of producing a profound and consistent revision
of the Encyclopaedia by strengthening the roles of the best English-speaking scholars and
experts. From this point of view, the synergy with the University of Chicago represented
for the Britannica the opportunity to recruit outstanding personalities, while reducing
the expenses for the translation and revision of articles in foreign languages. This strategy
also represented an added value for the university because it offered the possibility of
inviting scholars with a strong reputation to give lectures, attend seminars, and promote
research while they were in Chicago contributing to the Encyclopaedia.
The current plan for steady and permanent revision of ‘fluid’ articles in EB – Adler pointed
out – is summarized in Mr. Gorman’s memorandum […]. This plan calls for full supervision by
the University of Chicago faculties and may demand more time from individual faculty members
than has been the case in the past. The central problem therefore seems to be a proper method
of compensating them, either by money or by released time from teaching and other duties.
Mr. Hutchins said that the plan should have advantages other than the obvious editorial improvement of EB: it would give the working faculty members a stronger sense of participation in the
editorial work and thus be good for the company’s internal public relations; it would give them
an opportunity to advise the Board and the editorial department on controversial articles.29
From this long-term perspective, considering the strategic position in which both
the Britannica and the University of Chicago were operating, the production of the
Encyclopaedia’s new edition was to be more consistent than a simple revision of certain
entries. It would also be the starting-point for a process of reconfiguration for two different
institutions – the publishing company and the university – whose goal was to reformulate
an intellectual and institutional “blueprint” by developing a process of mutual cross-fertilization. The university would benefit from the new “American” edition, by capitalizing
on intellectual resources, and the publisher would benefit from the “American” university,
by attracting scholars of considerable reputation. Both institutions, in the meantime,
worked at redefining a new “American style” in educational policies and for this reason it
became necessary to establish synergies, define responsibilities, and articulate the division
of labor.30 The main paradox – with respect to the subject of this paper – is that while the
vehicle of this process was the assimilation of the English language, the strategic intel103
lectual goal was the assimilation of European culture and philosophical thought through
an identification of the deep roots of western civilization.
The process of revising the Britannica required more than just a simple editorial adjustment and the mobilization of additional financial resources: an extraordinary amount
of money was needed to fund the project. Economic and financial concerns were not
the only reasons to reject the project of revision, however. The board also perceived the
need to reformulate the structural configuration, the epistemological conceptualization,
and the editorial plans of the entire work. After a consistent number of editions and the
publication of so many encyclopaedias in most of the countries in the western world, it
appeared impossible to make a revision just by adding articles or information. It would
be necessary, rather, to formulate and consolidate an entirely new style of thinking, one
that would correspond to a new educational paradigm.
Before the late fifties, the Britannica’s board, in collaboration with the University
of Chicago’s academic staff and administrators, had not in fact completely abandoned
the idea of a revision. They had simply tried to transform it into a more strategic path
with the aim of undertaking a profound revision – one that would include a new set of
twenty-four volumes. In order to develop this revision, the editors had come up with a
two-part plan. For the first phase, they had decided to produce the first, second, and third
volumes – a new set that would serve as an introduction to the other twenty-one – no
later than 1963. The second phase entailed the printing and diffusion of the volumes
already published, as well as those that were to be published by 1968, the year of the
Britannica’s bi-centenary celebration. Yet the board soon encountered problems with this
schedule, as we can see from a letter written by Robert Hutchins to the president of the
Britannica, Maurice B. Mitchell in August 1953:
We have to recognize that we cannot complete Phase I as originally projected and make significant
changes in the organization of the set in time for the anniversary edition. It was assumed that
most of the Phase I editorial work would be completed a year ago, and the staffs in Chicago and
London released for work on Phase II projects.31
How did the editors arrive at this point? The answer lies in the fact that their strategy
for revision had been conceived out of two different perspectives: they had intended to
analyze both the topic and the sequence of each article – in other words, to review both
the contents and the skeleton of the Britannica. Initially, the plan had been to work only
on single contributions and not to intervene on the general conception. The epistemological conceptualization, as well as the institutional structure, was to remain basically the
same. However, work related to the new introductory section, with its three completely
new volumes, a reformulation of certain roof articles as well as the general perspective,
and a more intensive reconsideration of the Encyclopaedia’s design appeared progressively
unavoidable. In a memorandum added to the above letter, Hutchins wrote:
104
As a result of the development of the Roof Articles, and the special studies associated with the
project, the next editor should be in position to make a far more comprehensive and useful design
for the ultimate re-working of the body of the set than any EB as known in many years. Some of
the studies now under way are most revealing.”
Finally, in the early sixties, the strategic plan – and all its phases – was entirely renewed. The endeavor was so significant that more time would be needed to reformulate
the epistemological and institutional plan of the Britannica. Yet the risk was that the new
plan would fail to make a strong impact on the public and the market would not legitimize
the product, with obvious negative economic consequences that both the board and the
university wished to avoid. The editorial board had devised this initial plan, whereas Adler
himself came up with a “Plan B” when he entered the operating phase in 1965 – the core
phase of the European partnership between the Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. and the
French Encyclopaedia Universalis, which would publish its first volume in 1968.
Plan B abandoned the idea of publishing the new Encyclopaedia in 1968 and postponed the date to 1975, giving the staff ten additional years to finalize the production of
the new volumes. Indeed, the fifteenth edition was finally published between 1975 and
1978. It was composed of thirty volumes divided into four sections: the introductory
section, the Propaedia (Outline of Knowledge – Guide to Britannica); the Macropaedia,
whose volumes contain the “roof articles;” the Micropaedia, which presented a systematic
set of detailed concepts; and the Index, which illustrated the entire work with tables of
entries, complete with indications to other related entries.
In Adler’s opinion, two of the most important issues to be resolved in the planning
phase were the definition of the encyclopaedic style and the identification of the ideal
reader. He believed the two were interconnected, for a number of reasons. He considered
encyclopaedias to be educational matrixes and referred to books as educational tools. He
also believed this pattern of education demanded a new kind of reader, and he considered the new Britannica’s ideal reader to be a liberal minded person who saw continuing
education as a permanent goal, for institutions as well as individuals.
Concerning the encyclopaedic style, Adler thought alphabetical order was the most
pluralistic way to represent knowledge. It should be noted that he believed the pluralistic approach to knowledge was an integral aspect of encyclopaedic design. Towards this
end, the definition of a well-established conceptual framework was crucial to moral and
political concerns, in order to contrast the increasing diffusion of empirical and applied
approaches that, in Adler’s view, could not be substitutes for moral or political choices,
with respect to individual responsibility in social and governmental institutions. However,
because he considered the encyclopaedia to be an educational matrix, it was necessary to
integrate the alphabetical order with a heuristic approach to human knowledge, based on
a conceptualization of the contents. He called this plane the “Table of Contents:”
105
The very idea of a Table of Contents […for an encyclopaedia…], constructed as a reference book
on alphabetical principles, is paradoxical … The Table of Contents for a book normally sets forth
the author’s order of writing, chapter by chapter, which he recommends to the reader as an order
of reading. The sequence of page numbers in the right-hand column never deviates from this.
Hence a Table of Contents, constructed for an alphabetical encyclopaedia, which tries to suggest a
non-alphabetical order of reading must have a queer looking, disorderly sequence of page numbers
in the right-hand column. This plainly reveals the character of the problem to be solved. Once the
nature of the problem is formally recognized, a formal solution of it immediately recommends
itself. That solution, here stated only formally and in principle, is the adoption of multiple Tables
of Contents; or, in other words, a pluralistically constructed set of Tables of Contents.32
Adler suggested integrating the alphabetical order with thematic propositions, which
the reader could consider as possible paths in the evolutionary process of human knowledge, having the possibility to choose among them the path most adapted to his personal
needs, vision, and intellectual goals. From this point of view, one can understand the proximity between Adler’s encyclopaedic design and the conceptualization of the Encyclopedie
Française produced in the thirties by Lucien Febvre and Anatole de Monzie. Likewise,
one can understand why the reference to the Encyclopaedia Universalis was not considered
relevant, and why its intellectual and editorial community, based in Paris, was not considered, in the end, as a potential collaborative partner. The substantial distance vis-à-vis
the Universalis, which did not use a thematic configuration as its main feature (but rather
an exclusively alphabetical order) can be measured by reading the entry “Encyclopaedia”
in volume VI of the Britannica. The entry, published when the Universalis was already
well known and established among the international public, was written by Robert L.
Collison, professor of Library Service at the University of California in Los Angeles. Only
a few lines are devoted to the Encyclopaedia Universalis, in which the author states that
the Britannica’s “index” could be likened to the “thesaurus” of the Universalis – but not
at all to the organon, a sort of guide to the Universalis that its director, Claude Grégory,
considered the most important volume of the entire work. It is interesting to recall that
the organon was not included in the second edition of the Universalis, once the French
owners abandoned the company and it became an international enterprise. It is also interesting to note that the patterns of analogy between the Britannica and the Encylopédie
Française were related not only to a pre-thematic approach but also to a valorization of
the experimental method. In fact, particular reference is made to Bacon’s methodological
approach in the Novum Organum within the Britannica’s entry for “Encyclopaedia.”33
The integration of alphabetical and thematic orders was related, finally, to the perception of the Encyclopaedia as an instrument. Adler wanted to achieve “the first truly
encyclopaedic encyclopaedia in the English language.”34 This position is clear in the preparatory documents, from as far back as the planning stage of the Britannica’s fifteenth
edition, as is a specific definition of the ideal reader. In the documents, along with a list
106
of possible “types of reader” (related to different “tables of contents” being defined at the
time), we find the following profile:
Finally, there would be probably Mr. E, who says that he would not have had any particular focus
of interest, had he gone to the university. He would have gone there in order to get the broadest,
most general, and thoroughly liberal education he could get for himself. The task of preparing a
Table of Contents for this gentleman would, in my judgment, be most difficult of all, principally
because many of the articles we ought to recommend to such a reader to not read now exist in
Britannica.35
Who was, then, the ideal reader? He was basically someone who was able to exploit
the cultural and technical tools of the contemporary western world in order to acquire a
profound knowledge of its philosophical and theoretical roots. He was a lifetime lerner
who selectively appropriated the products of several centuries of western civilization.
Significantly, the practice of selective appropriation as a way of properly orienting the
citizen in the contemporary world, according to the intellectual, cultural, and technological civilization of his/her time, was also at work in the Encyclopédie Française through the
systematic application of the concept of “outillage mental:”
A genuine great books program – Adler argued – does not aim at historical knowledge of cultural
antiquities or at achieving at thin veneer of cultural literacy. On the contrary, it aims only at the
general enlightenment of its participants, an essential ingredient in their initial liberal education
and something to be continued throughout a lifetime of learning. Its objective is to develop basic
intellectual skills – the skills of critical reading, attentive listening, precise speech, and, above all,
reflective thought. Through the use of these skills, the reading and seminar discussion of the great
books seeks to help students pass from less to greater understanding of the basic ideas in the western
intellectual tradition and of controversial issues with which those great ideas abound.36
Adler shared the view expressed by William Benton, regarding business education,
that an excess of specialization impeded the creation of a mental habitus oriented towards
strengthening an articulate model of continuing education. Integral humanism would be
the most important effect of self-education, which generally avoided an excess of either
applied empiricism or specialization:
No one ever becomes a generally educated person in school, college or university, for youth itself
is an insuperable obstacle to becoming generally educated. This is why the very best thing that
our educational institutions can do, so far as general education is concerned (not the training of
specialists), is to afford preparation for continued learning by their students after they leave these
institutions behind them.37
A third issue of relevance in the planning stage was the definition of the contents.
Adler believed that education needed to address the contents, vision, and normative
aspects of moral and political behavior, in addition to formal and methodological con107
cerns. Here again Adler’s vision, in terms of a cognitive approach, was not so different
from that of Lucien Febvre when he came up with a plan for the Encyclopédie Fançaise. In
Adler’s view, a modern encyclopaedia should not only give citizens the tools with which
to understand the process of knowledge, the production of scientific innovation, and
the substance of intellectual life, but it should also give them the normative framework
within which to choose, select, and participate in the making of contemporary civilization. As Adler asserted:
The basic problems of education are normative. This means, positively, that they are problems in
moral and political philosophy; and, negatively, that they cannot, they have not and never will
be, solved by the methods of empirical science, by what is called educational research. The reason
for the unalterable inadequacy of science is not far to seek. Science can measure and observe,
can collect facts of all sorts and generalize from such collections, but neither the facts nor the
generalizations can by themselves answer questions about what should be done in education. Such
questions require us to consider what is good and bad, to define the ideals or norms of human life
and human society, and this is the work of the moral and political philosopher.38
conclusions
In the fifteenth edition of the Britannica, the entry “Education” is actually larger, and
much more consistent and detailed, than the entry “Encyclopaedia” itself. The making of
the new “American” version of the Britannica, despite the structural role of English as the
basic linguistic framework, is deeply rooted in the long-term process of reconsidering the
role of encyclopaedias produced by European intellectuals, and particularly French social
scientists, during the interwar period. It was, furthermore, the crucial leverage needed
to usher in the “new citizen” of the technological civilization. Significantly, this vision
was also at work in the policies of the large American foundations during the New Deal
period. A call for a new humanism was the main subject of a little book published in the
early thirties by the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Raymond B. Fosdick. The
title of the book, which remained almost unknown to the larger public, is quite evocative
vis-à-vis the intellectual roots of the Britannica: Wanted: A New Aristotle. It is not surprising that the selection of the foundations’ officers, who were to direct its intellectual and
cultural policy after World War Two, was deeply inspired by this approach. As Fosdick
stated towards the end of the war:
Personnel should be composed of men able to deal as equals with their peers in Europe. They
should be men of unusual scholarly imagination and well endowed with inventive statesmanship.
The routine-minded person won’t get to first base in post-war Europe.39
108
It is interesting to observe how often the words ‘humanism’ and ‘humanistic’ recurred
in the action plans of the officers, particularly those who operated in Europe, such as the
modern historian Frederic C. Lane, who wrote:
Humanistic sociology … is a sociology sufficiently broad to embrace much social psychology, on
the one hand, and much social and economic history on the other. The European tradition also
includes in sociology much that we would call philosophy of history, political and social philosophy and even political science… I think the European tradition is right: they are essential to
understanding society.40
109
1. Mortimer J. Adler, Letter to Robert H. Hutchins, January 1st 1951, University of Chicago, Joseph
Regenstein Library, The University of Chicago, Department of Special Collections, Mortimer Adler Papers,
box 8, for the Ford Foundation’s support of the AFSC; also published in Robert M. Hutchins, The Academic
Idea – The Center for Contemporary Thought, FFA Report n. 010611.
2. Francis X. Sutton, “The Ford Foundation and Europe: Ambitions and Ambivalences,” in G. Gemelli
(ed.), The Ford Foundation and Europe (1950s-1970s): Cross-Fertilization of Learning in Social Sciences and
Management, Brussels, PIE, 1998.
3. John Krige, “The Ford Foundation and Scientific Training in Europe in the late 1950s,” in G. Gemelli
(ed.), American Foundations and Large-scale Research: Construction and Transfer of Knowledge, Bologna,
CLUEB, 2001.
4. In 1945, Benton left the university to join the U.S. State Department, until he was appointed to a vacant
U.S. Senate seat in 1949. He finished his public service as a member of the executive board of UNESCO
(United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), which he joined in 1963. Benton was
born in Minneapolis, the descendant of Connecticut farmers, educators, and ministers. After a year at Carleton
College in Northfield, Minnesota, Benton transferred to Yale University, where he excelled academically,
becoming chairman of the Yale Record and graduating in 1921. For the next eight years, Benton worked
in New York and Chicago advertising agencies, striking out on his own with Chester Bowles in 1929. His
life thereafter was a series of successful accomplishments. By 1935, he had turned Benton & Bowles into
the sixth largest advertising agency in the world, mostly by writing innovative advertisements for the radio
entertainment programs so popular during the Great Depression of the 1930s. When he moved to the
University of Chicago, he used his advertising and radio background to develop the “University of Chicago
Round Table” into an extremely popular national radio forum. When Benton was Secretary of State for
Public Affairs, he converted for peacetime use the U.S. Information Service, the cultural exchange programs,
and the Voice of America. He also lobbied the Fulbright Scholarship Act and the Foreign Service Act of 1946
through Congress, and succeeded in organizing U.S. participation in the establishment of UNESCO, on
whose board he would later serve. While in the Senate, Benton supported Truman’s foreign aid and Point
Four programs and was active on behalf of civil rights. He was also among the first to decry the tactics for
which Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin was eventually censured.
5. See Robert D. Arner, Dobson’s Encyclopaedia: The Publisher, Text, and Publication of America’s First
Britannica, 1789-1803, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.
6. See Herman Kogan, The Great EB: The Story of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1958; James M. Wells, The Circle of Knowledge, Chicago, The Newberry Library, 1968.
7. In 1981, the William Benton Foundation was created, with the mission to support the University of
Chicago. With this purpose, the Foundation acquired and donated the Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. to
the university. After a long period of crisis, Jacob Safra acquired the publishing company of the Britannica
in 1996. Safra is based in Geneva and is a member of the Lebanese family that owns the Bank Jacob Safra
Switzerland; the publishing company is still based in Chicago.
8. Benton to Hutchins, January 26, 1942, University of Chicago, Department of Special Collection, The
Joseph Regenstein Library, William Benton Papers, Box 42.
9. Mortimer J. Adler, “Prologue. Great Books, Democracy and Truth,” in Reforming Education: the Opening
of the American Mind, Geraldine Van Doren (ed.), New York, Macmillan, 1988, p. 25.
10. Giuliana Gemelli, Western Alliance and Scientific Diplomacy in the Early 1960s. The Rise and Failure of the
Project to Create a European M.I.T., in R. Laurence Moore and M. Vaudagna (eds.), The American Century
in Europe, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2003, pp. 171-194.
11. Correspondence Willits-Warren, RAC, R.G. 3, Series. 910, Box 1, Folder 4 (1942).
12. Simon Kuznets, Letter to Joseph H. Willits, October 6, 1942, Correspondence Willits-Warren, RAC,
R.G. 3, Series 910, Box 1, Folder 6 (1942).
110
13. Adler, Reforming Education, “Prologue,” p. XXI.
14. It should be noted that, in the same period, Adler published the book The Higher Learning in America
(1936) and a few years later his best-selling volume How to Read a Book, (New York, Simon and Schuster,
1940).
15. Adler, Reforming Education, “Prologue,” p. XXI.
16. Adler, “Aristotle, Aquinas, and Modern Philosophy,” 1987.
17. Adler, Reforming Education, “Liberalism and Liberal Education,” p. 49.
18. Adler, Reforming Education, “Liberalism and Liberal Education,” p. 43.
19. Adler, Reforming Education, “Prologue,” p. XXII.
20. Adler, Reforming Education, “Prologue,” p. XXIX.
21. Throughout his career as a philosopher and educator, Adler has written voluminously, consistently
focusing on a multi-disciplinary and integrated approach to philosophy, politics, religion, law, and education. Such works as The Common Sense of Politics (1971), Six Great Ideas (1981), and The Paideia Program:
An Educational Syllabus (1977), Adler published an autobiography entitled Philosopher at Large, which was
followed later by another autobiographical account entitled A Second Look in the Review Mirror: Further
Autobiographical Reflections of a Philosopher at Large (1992).
22. Mortimer J. Adler, The Syntopicon as an Instrument of Liberal Education, University of Chicago,
Department of Special Collections, The Joseph Regenstein Library, Mortimer J. Adler Papers, Box 37.
23. Address by Jacques Maritain at Great Books Dinner, Waldorf Astoria, New York City, April 15, 1952,
p. 2, University of Chicago, Department of Special Collections, The Joseph Regenstein Library, Mortimer
J. Adler Papers, Box 61 – Folder 1952 Address.
24. J. Maritain to Mortimer J. Adler, February 25,1952, University of Chicago, Department of Special
Collections, The Joseph Regenstein Library, Mortimer J. Adler Papers, Box 61, Folder Jacques Maritain,
1952, Letter.
25. Address by Jacques Maritain at Great Books Dinner, cit., p. 3.
26. A. Cardellicchio, “Uomini, idée e capitali di un’impresa internazionale: l’Encyclopaedia Universalis,” in
G. Gemelli (ed.), Enciclopedie e scienze sociali nel XX secolo, Roma, Franco Angeli, 1999, pp. 96-132.
27. Two years before the publication of the first volume of Mortimer Adler’s special collection of Great Books
of the Western World, Chicago, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952.
28. Report of the 20th meeting – Britannica Board of Editors, July 13, 1950, p. 2.
29. Report of the 22nd meeting – Britannica Board of Editors, January 25, 1951, p. 1.
30. Report of the 22nd meeting – Britannica Board of Editors, January 25, 1951, p. 2 “A proposal for university representation on the Board was rejected by Mr. Hutchins (he and Senator Benton had previously
agreed that all members should be directly responsible to management of the company).”
31. Report of the 24th meeting – Britannica Board of Editors, August 28, 1953.
32. Adler, “Aide-Memoir from RMH and CPF concerning a pluralistic table of contents for EB,” January
10, 1964, p. 1.
33. W. Benton, “Fact sheet concerning the new Britannica,” December 30, 1971, p. 2.
34. Adler, “Prolegomena to the reformation of Britannica in the next ten years, 1965-1975,” March 7, 1965,
p. 7.
111
35. Adler, “Aide-Memoire from RMH and CPF concerning a pluralistic table of contents for EB,” January
10, 1964, p. 3.
36. Adler, “Reforming Education,” “Prologue,” p. XXXI.
37. Adler, “Reforming Education,” “Prologue,” p. XXXI.
38. Adler, “Reforming Education,” “Liberalism and Liberal Education,” p. 40.
39. Raymond B. Fosdick, Memorandum to Joseph H. Willitts, November 18, 1943, RAC, R.G. 3, Series
910, Box 1, Folder 6.
40. Frederic C. Lane, Concentration in the DSS program in Europe, Memorandum to Joseph H. Willits, RAC,
RG. 1.2, Series 700S – Europe, 1951-54, Box 19, Folder 158, pp. 1-2.
112
POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES
PROGRESSIVE POLITICS AND THE DILEMMA OF REFORM:
GERMAN AND AMERICAN LIBERALISM IN COMPARISON, 18801920
jörn leonhard
. introduction: liberalism as an exhausted political concept after 
Speaking at a conference of German liberals in December 1948, which led to the
foundation of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in West Germany, Theodor Heuss, later
the president of the Federal Republic, asked his audience whether the label “liberal”
could still be used to identify a political party that regarded itself as part of the tradition of political liberalism. The fact that the conference members voted in favor of the
Free Democratic Party instead of the Liberal Democratic Party as its official party name
indicated a widespread skepticism. The very concept of liberalism, representing the ambivalent experiences of the nineteenth century, seemed too closely tied to the German
liberals’ Kulturkampf of the 1870s and the capitalist Manchester School. In the eyes of
so many, this had prevented liberals from exercising a more progressive social policy that
in turn could have bridged the gap between bourgeois liberalism and social democracy
before 1914, and especially after 1918.1
In 1950, Thomas Mann, one of the most prominent representatives of the Germaneducated bourgeoisie and its impact on the political culture of the German middle classes,
went even further. Reflecting upon the fate of liberalism after the experience of European
fascism from his position as American exile, Mann pointed out that the very term “liberal”
had become void and meaningless. Against the background of the fascist challenge and
European liberals’ inability to prevent its rise, Mann demanded a redefinition of how
liberty and equality could be reconciled. In contrast to what he regarded as a liberal
primacy of liberty, Mann pointed to equality as the “leading idea of the current epoch.”
What the postwar period needed, in Mann’s eyes, was a social emancipation distinct from
the totalitarian model. But while liberalism seemed to represent political emancipation,
constitutions, and political institutions as the bourgeois legacy of the nineteenth century,
“social emancipation” could no longer be defined by a simple reference to a concept that
seemed semantically exhausted. In the same context, Mann pointed to the necessity to
transform the paradigm of bourgeois revolution into “social democracy.” If Goethe, at the
end of his life, had declared that every reasonable individual was actually a liberal, Mann
underlined that at present every reasonable human being was to be a socialist.2
How are we to explain the obvious exhaustion of the semantics of liberalism, reflecting the exhaustion of liberal political agendas after 1945? Was it a particularly German
115
progressive politics and the dilemma of reform
response to the experience of liberals’ electoral decline and their failure to prevent the
rise of fascism? Or was it a general European and transatlantic trend that needs careful
explanation? Either way, the answer lies in a comparative understanding of the challenges and transformations of European and American liberalisms from the end of the
nineteenth century. In contrast to approaches which define liberalism as a universal
set of more or less unchanging ideas which appear to have proved their validity under
changing circumstances,3 this paper first concentrates on a comparative analysis of how
liberals in different historical contexts, in Germany and the United States, responded to
a rapidly transforming society and political world, beginning in the 1870s.4 Secondly, the
interaction between liberal discourses in Germany and the United States, the dialogue
and transfer, is given particular attention in order to contribute to an analysis of Europe’s
place in American political culture at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The starting point of this examination is the apparent triumph of liberalism in nearly
all western European societies of the 1870s. Had Matthew Arnold, in his Culture and
Anarchy of 1869, not defined the success of the English liberal idea as “the legislation
of middle-class parliaments … the local self-government of middle-class vestries … the
unrestricted competition of middle-class industrialists … the dissidence of middle-class
Dissent and the Protestantism of middle-class Protestant religion?”5 Towards the end of
the century, it appeared that Gladstonian liberalism was already a symbol of the British
nation as the most progressive power in the world, as well as a personalized style of politics.
Benjamin Jowett, vice-chancellor of Oxford University, thus commented on Gladstone’s
role in the home-rule debate by pointing to the apparent triumph of an evolutionary
reform strategy by which liberals seemed to have stimulated even their conservative
counterpart for the good of the country: “Liberals have, to a great extent, removed the
impression they had created in England that they were the friends of disorder. Do you
know, I cannot help feeling that I have more of the Liberal element in me than of the
Conservative? This rivalry between the parties, each surprising the other by their liberality, has done a great deal of good to the people of England.”6
The same triumph of liberal principles could be observed in other contexts. The
Gilded Age and the open frontier in North America seemed to offer unrestricted possibilities for the future of individual liberty.7 In Germany, liberals achieved what they had been
seeking from the early nineteenth century on. The unified German nation-state of 1870,
although excluding Austria, was regarded by most contemporaries not just as Bismarck’s
creation but also as a success of German liberalism. Together, progressive and national
liberals won an impressive majority of 52% of the seats in the first general elections of the
new Reichstag in 1872. Given the democratic franchise, this was a remarkable political
success.8 The new nation-state provided a stable framework for further political and constitutional reforms, as the successful coalition between Bismarck and the national liberals
seemed to indicate. Germany’s economic strength, together with the rise of bourgeois
116
jörn leonhard
culture and the successful implementation of a Rechtsstaat – a state founded on the rule
of law, as the completion of the Civil Code in 1900 illustrated – reflected a silent yet very
successful bourgeois revolution, indicating an impressive learning process from the days
of the 1848 revolution on.9 This triumph of liberal Realpolitik, to use Ludwig August
von Rochau’s famous phrase from the 1850s,10 seemed to mark the essence of Germany’s
modernity as both a successful industrial society and a strong nation-state.
How are we to explain the difference between the perception of liberal successes in
the 1870s and the fact that, after 1918, liberalism had already become an ideology in
defense? Or that, after 1945, most political parties in Europe and certainly in the U.S.,
despite incorporating many traditions of liberalism, avoided identifying too closely with
the nineteenth-century semantics of liberalism? In other words, how are we to understand the ideological and programmatic crisis of an ideology that had shaped the “long”
nineteenth century more than any other contemporary political movement?
In order to approach this question from a comparative angle, this paper looks at liberals’ responses to particular challenges as they developed in Europe and the United States
starting in the last third of the nineteenth century. These multiple challenges characterized a structural transformation that developed gradually, just around the period when
the triumph of liberalism seemed so obvious. What liberals had to respond to was the
outcome of modernization made possible by their constant fight for political participation, as well as social and economic emancipation, from the start of the dual revolution
during the last third of the eighteenth century. However, from the mid-1870s onwards,
a whole set of complex challenges began to overlap:11 the changing meaning of nationstate and nationalism in Germany after 1871 and the emergence of empire-politics in the
United States and Germany; the emergence of a new market of mass politics with new
forms of ideological communication and political mobilization; the fundamental impact
of highly-intensified industrialization, rationalization, and urbanization on societies; the
First World War as a fundamental challenge to the traditional architecture of state, nation,
and society; and the post-1918 period with its political and ideological polarization in a
period of social tension, economic crisis, and political destabilization.
This paper concentrates on attempts made to reformulate liberal agendas after 1880
in Germany and the United States against the background of distinct political traditions
and connotations of liberalism. Given Thomas Mann’s remark about the antagonism
between liberalism on the one hand and social emancipation and social democracy on
the other, the presence, or absence, of a distinct social liberalism in the two societies as
an attempt to respond to new social conditions seems fundamental. It is with regard to
these problems that liberals had to define their position towards the meaning of state and
society in an age of mass democracy. An analysis of this problem may also contribute to
an understanding of the erosion of European liberalisms and their crisis in the context
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of rising fascism on the European continent and the very different development in the
United States.
. germany: the limits of social liberalism in an age of
fragmented socio-cultural milieus
From the 1880s onwards discussions over a necessary reformulation of liberal
positions intensified among German liberals. Confronted with the consequences of
dynamic industrial development and the emergence of an independent and strong party
representing the working classes’ interests, the circle around Friedrich Naumann and his
Nationalsozialer Verein sought to bridge the ideological gap between liberalism and the
Social Democratic Party. Naumann openly criticized German liberals who, because of
their primary focus on constitutional and legal agendas, had never really developed a positive response to a modern industrial society and the emergence of a strong working class.
In Naumann’s eyes that also explained the crisis of liberalism’s political legitimacy that
became obvious around 1900 with continuously decreasing electoral support in general
elections. A merely political, constitutional, or legal definition of progress, which had
dominated the liberal paradigm of the pre- and post-1848 period, would not gain liberalism any popularity.12 Naumann’s premise was derived from his experiences of Christian
socialism, which, under the sway of Germany’s dynamic industrial development in the
1870s and 1880s, had sought reconciliation between social classes. As a young theologian
under the influence of Johann Adolf Wichern and later as a protestant minister, Naumann
had observed the social consequences of rapid industrialization. His initial response was
not to attack the concept of private property, but rather a vague anti-capitalism, which
sought both to go beyond traditional paternalism and to respond positively to the rise
of the SPD after the end of the anti-socialist legislation.13
Given the agenda of German national liberalism and progressive liberalism under
Eugen Richter in Wilhelmine Germany, there was not much common ground between
Naumann’s position and that of organized party liberalism. For Naumann, German
liberalism in general and Eugen Richter’s party in particular represented an inflexible and
old-fashioned liberalism of notables (Honoratiorenliberalismus), staunchly opposed to any
idea of social or economic state intervention. The contemporary criticism of German
“Manchester” liberals referred to the fact that the social expectation of most German
liberals, be they national or progressive, was still that of the early nineteenth century: the
bourgeois model of a harmonious middle class in which all members would sooner or
later, and as the result of a natural process, become property owners and hence be qualified
for active political participation.14 This model ruled out even modest attempts at social
reform, not to mention the implementation of compulsory social insurance schemes.
Despite certain tendencies from the 1890s onwards, which indicated at least the start
of a reorientation of progressive liberalism, intellectually stimulated by Lujo Brentano
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and politically fostered by Theodor Barth,15 social liberalism still provoked widespread
resistance among many progressive liberals in Germany. In 1896, Ludwig Bamberger
could still not see any fundamental difference between the regulation of working hours
in bakeries and a state’s trade monopoly, as they seemed to stand for the same mistaken
principle.16
Confronted with the intransigent position of the Protestant churches in Germany,
Naumann gave up his Christian socialist beliefs and began to focus more on party politics.
His Nationalsozialer Verein, modeled after the Nationalverein of the late 1850s, was meant
to function as a political storm trooper, balancing between the political representatives
of the working classes and the established parties of Germany’s political spectrum. At
the same time, Naumann supported Max Weber’s nationalist and imperialist position,
as formulated in Weber’s Freiburg inauguration lecture.17 Naumann linked the idea of a
necessary German expansion to the concept of social reform. Liberal imperialism could
therefore be directed against the contemporary anti-socialist integration policy, the socalled Sammlungspolitik. The result was a very ambivalent program which entailed support
of navy armaments, demands for the unrestricted right of workers to form coalitions,
an aggressive colonial policy against Britain, and a democratic franchise in all regional
and local elections. However, in terms of party politics, this progressively oriented social
imperialism had no chance. Naumann’s Nationalsozialer Verein remained without major
influence among the liberal electorate.18
On the other hand, Naumann’s political program, the introduction of plebiscitary
elements in order to make a German monarchy more popular and to change it into a
bulwark against the vested interests of conservative elites, did not convince many social
democrats. It was only after the Daily Telegraph Affair that Naumann gave up the idea
of a social monarchy and began to support the British parliamentarian model. But more
importantly, Naumann’s political ideas reflected problematic aspects of the liberal concept
of parliamentarianism in Germany. Both in Naumann’s ideal of social monarchy and in
Max Weber’s concept of a plebiscitary Führerdemokratie, the assumption dominated that
highly developed industrial societies could not rely entirely on a representative parliamentarian principle, but needed additional plebiscitary elements and a charismatic ruler like
Gladstone in Britain in order to achieve a minimum of social cohesion.19
Regarding the liberal concept of society and the necessary political responses to its
transformation, Naumann did more than just criticize the traditional assumptions of
German liberalism which he regarded as stagnant and characterized by a retrospective
ideal of social harmonization. In clear contrast to the early bourgeois concept of a society of equal state citizens, forming a homogeneous middle class, he also recognized the
existence of distinct class interests in any modern society. However Naumann’s concept
of Gesamtliberalismus, a movement encompassing the progressive middle and working
classes and opposing traditional conservative elites, remained a theory. Although a political
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coalition, according to the model of a block “from Bassermann to Bebel” from national
liberals to social democrats, developed in the regional state of Baden under exceptional
circumstances, Naumann’s expectation that such a program would enlarge the liberal
electorate in the Reichstag elections was never fulfilled. The agrarian middle classes could
not be won over to the liberal camp and continued to vote for conservative candidates,
and representatives of the old Mittelstand continued to insist on socio-economic protection. Progressive social liberalism as a reformulation of the liberal agenda was confronted
with more and more cemented socio-cultural milieus that characterized not only German
political parties but also Germany’s political culture in general. This proved to be a major
burden already before 1914, but even more so after 1918.20
Despite the intellectually significant influence of middle class reform associations
in Wilhelmine Germany – from the school of new political economists in the 1870s
around Gustav Schmoller and Lujo Brentano to the Nationalsozialer Verein, the Verein für
Sozialpolitik, the Gesellschaft für Soziale Reform, and the Evangelisch-Sozialer Kongreß – liberal revisionism never became a political program that could mobilize much popular support.21 Despite integrating the liberal revisionists, the Fortschrittliche Volkspartei did not
become a spearhead of social liberalism. Cooperation with the social democrats remained
exceptional and reflected strategic rather than programmatic common features. Furthermore, the progressive liberal party’s electorate remained small and regionally fragmented.
The political mass market with its new forms of communication and its mobilization of
voters continued to be a major problem that all liberal parties found difficult to respond
to, particularly in comparison with the more stable socio-cultural milieu parties of the
social democrats and the catholic Center.22
Nowhere did the German liberals’ dilemma become more obvious than in local
politics. On the one hand, liberals were still strongly represented in municipal councils
and could, as illustrated by numerous examples from the 1870s, make cities places for
successful liberal politics, especially in implementing social politics. On the other hand,
however, this relatively strong position was only guaranteed by restricted franchises,
which provided liberals with comfortable majorities and secured the survival of a political style that continued to be dominated by municipal notables. Progressive liberals who
demanded the end of undemocratic franchises in regional and local elections questioned
at the same time the very basis of successful liberal politics.23
From this perspective it was no accident that progressive liberals, and in particular
the supporters of social liberalism around Naumann, utilized nationalist and imperialist
agendas to present themselves as a convincing political alternative, encompassing the
dynamic forces of the new German nation-state. In fact, it revealed that German liberals,
experiencing the limits of domestic power and the pressure from more successful political competitors on both the left and the right, had to look for compensatory discourses
in order to appear as a popular and progressive movement. But in stark contrast to the
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progressive nationalism of German liberals between the mid-1860s and the early 1870s,
which had been regarded as an essentially modernizing force providing the framework
for further political, constitutional, legal, and economic reforms after 1871, liberal nationalism in the era of Wilhelmine Weltpolitik reflected a defensive position of liberalism,
unable to compete with the nationalist agenda of the right.24 It was this constellation that
limited German liberals’ freedom of political action even more. In combination with the
revolutionary connotations that many liberals still associated with social democracy, it
postponed the development of a proactive concept of social liberalism, and it became
a major obstacle when progressive liberals and social democrats were forced to cooperate in order to provide a more stable basis for Germany’s first democratic republic after
1917/18.
The legacy of German liberalism before 1914 thus reflected the ambivalence of modernity: first, a progressive analytical framework, as Max Weber and Friedrich Naumann
demonstrated, which conceptualized the complex relations between state and society;
secondly, a restricted political influence in the federal state before 1914; thirdly, a serious polarization of the socio-cultural milieus by which the liberals became “sandwiched”
between the catholic Center Party and the social democrats; and fourthly, a tendency of
many liberals of a younger generation to develop compensatory discourses, focusing on
both imperialist and social reform agendas in order to demonstrate the German Empire’s
ability to respond to both the need for integration at home and increasing international
competition.
. the united states: the transformation of the united states towards the end
of the century and the limits of hegemonic liberalism
Any comparison between European and American liberal agendas has to take into
account fundamental historical differences. It was this contrast between Europe and the
United States that gave transatlantic liberalism its particular character.25 Three factors,
which had marked essential lines of conflict and shaped the emergence of European
liberalism from the last third of the eighteenth century on, were missing in the U.S.26
First, there was no Ancien Régime and no aristocracy of a European kind, which meant an
absence of a reactionary, legitimist, or restorative conservatism as existed for example in
Germany and France after 1789, challenging the political and social consequences of the
French Revolution and thereby catalyzing the emergence of a liberal movement. Secondly,
the lack of conservatism also contributed to the lack of socialism, and was thus part of
the answer to Werner Sombart’s famous question of 1906 “Why is there no socialism in
the United States?”27 There was no such clearly defined ideological enemy against which
a strongly organized and self-confident workers’ movement could have developed in the
way it did in European societies. Thirdly, and this aspect is often overlooked, there was
no conflict between church and state in the United States which had done so much to
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promote the rise of European liberalisms. British reform-liberalism after 1815 is difficult to
imagine without the program for catholic emancipation and, later in the century, against
the traditional church establishment. French liberals from 1815 onwards and especially
in the Third Republic derived their political identity not least from the fight for a clear
separation between church and state.28 In Germany, the Kulturkampf of Prussian liberals
against the supposed Romish principles and the Catholic Church’s influence on state and
society generated a strong anti-catholic identity for liberalism.29
The absence of these three lines of conflict led, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s words, to a
certain emptiness in the American political landscape, consisting of economically active
individuals without the sharp ideological conflicts so characteristic of European societies
in the nineteenth century. Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish sociologist who has become in
many ways a Tocqueville of twentieth-century America, remarked that the “American
Creed,” as one of the foundations of American liberalism, was essentially a political
culture of consensus.30 As James Fenimore Cooper wrote in 1828, Americans seemed to
share a basic Weltanschauung, a consensual set of values, which had been derived from
the founding history of the republic and stood in stark contrast to European societies
with their ever-renewed post-revolutionary conflicts over the past and future of state,
church, and society.31
This is not to deny conflicts in American society, but it stresses an important point of
comparison: in the United States, political and social conflicts did not ultimately challenge
the belief in the universal equality of men and their equal rights, although there was a
long and painful debate over who exactly counted as men - a debate which reflected the
long-term dominance of an anglo-saxon white male political culture and became more
intensive, in both the course of the Civil War in the 1860s and in confrontation with
mass immigration towards the end of the century. In other words, the long absence of
ideological conflicts typical of Europe in the United States meant that debates and conflicts
took place within a basically liberal framework, as it had evolved from the revolutionary
period and the political culture of the founding fathers. This marked a fundamental difference between American and continental European societies.32
Against this background, the last third of the nineteenth century marked a fundamental watershed for liberals both in European societies and across the Atlantic. From the
last third of the nineteenth century onward, and especially around 1900, a general impression of crisis and transformation developed. For the United States, this meant that
the individualistic and egalitarian promise of the American dream – “equal rights for
all, special privileges for none” – came to be challenged.33 With the frontier closed and
the United States on their way to an imperial power, dollar diplomacy and the end of
traditional agrarian capitalism led to a critical moment. The traditional value concepts of
the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Jefferson’s ideal of an autarkic, democratic republic of virtues based on a religious concept of work ethic, and the localism of
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democratic institutions and the geopolitical isolation of the United States came under
severe pressure. Large cities, the building of railways, monopolies, and economic trusts
led to a transcontinental incorporation, which seemed to leave behind both the agrarian
ideal of the epoch of 1776 and the laissez-faire liberalism of the Gilded Age. Politics, as
Max Weber observed while traveling in North America, was made a business with a new
management-type of a politician.34
The social challenges of industrialization, rapid urbanization, and mass poverty forced
liberals in very different contexts to explain how the classical liberal agenda of individual
freedom could be preserved under dramatically changing circumstances. Although the
traditional focus of British liberals on free trade and unrestricted market forces continued
to be a major point of orientation in the United States, there also developed a critical
school of social liberals. But in contrast to Britain, American social liberals at least concentrated on a theoretical discussion of socialist premises. These American reform discourses
took place primarily in universities and scientific communities and thus represented a
phenomenon of an intellectual elite.35
Basically, one can identify two different generations of these progressive American
liberals. By attempting to reformulate liberalism on the basis of a critical evaluation of
American society, John Commons, Richard Ely, Edward Ross and an older generation
remained within the framework of key liberal values such as individual liberty, equality
of opportunities, and social fairness. But in contrast to traditional liberals with their
strong anti-state orientation, they already advocated a proactive and interventionist state.
Distancing themselves from socialist theories of class-warfare, they felt a much closer
affinity to intellectual and social liberals in contemporary Germany, who came to be
known as Kathedersozialisten. Here the transfer of contemporary interpretative knowledge
from Germany to the United States became an important catalyst for the development
of American liberalism. Men like Adolph Wagner, Gustav Schmoller, and Ludwig von
Brentano, as well as the Verein für Sozialpolitik, founded in 1872, served as models for
pragmatic and scientifically based social politics.36 The influence of this new school of
national economists in Germany, who not only insisted on economic consequences
but also an ethical foundation for social politics, on American liberals around Ely can
hardly be overestimated. Ely stressed the importance of social Christianity as a means to
overcome classical premises of economic liberalism in Germany: “Professors of political
economy finding themselves forced to abandon every hope of reconciling adverse interests
of society without a moral and religious regeneration of the various social classes, turn to
Christianity, and appeal to it for co-operation in their endeavors to bring about an era
of peace and harmony.”37
The generation of Ely and Ross, in accordance with the new school of political
economists in Germany, advocated social reform, moderate state intervention, and economic regulation. At the same time, they tried to amalgamate this program with the value
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concepts of a particular American tradition, such as the ideas of social Christianity and
organic republicanism. By distancing themselves from socialist premises, this generation
contributed to the absence of socialism as a possible political alternative in the United
States. Reform discourses in American society could not develop within a socialist framework, and the possibility of a cooperating with the social democratic workers’ movement
was ruled out - a clear contrast to developments in Germany before 1914. Rather, it followed the model of the early Fabians in Britain with their middle class ideals.38
The efforts of the second generation of American liberals, who concentrated on a
reformulation of liberalism between 1901, the year President Roosevelt was inaugurated,
and 1918, came to be known as the Progressive Movement. It was based on a reform
movement, rather than particular party ties as in European societies, and, in accordance
with Alexander Hamilton’s concepts, it regarded the United States as an industrial nation with imperial ambitions, no longer in terms of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian republic.
Progressivism as an urban intellectual movement of the East Coast meant the “confident,
purposeful and successful effort of a new middle class of ambitious professional and scientific experts to bring system and rationality to a society suffering from the evils – even
if democratic – of disorder, inefficiency and localism.”39 The consequence was a program
of centralized executive power, a proactive foreign policy, and cultural reconstruction of
American society. For the first time, a new elite of intellectuals and scientists, managers
and administrators, who emerged as a result of educational and university reforms and a
professionalization of research, production, and management, became more influential
in American politics after 1910.40
That America needed a new balance between state and society was also a basic premise
for Herbert Croly, spokesman for a group of progressive intellectuals, among them Walter
Lippman and Walter Weyl, who in 1914 founded the weekly New Republic as an organ
of progressive liberalism against agrarian radicalism.41 Croly identified a fundamental
crisis which was about to challenge the American promise of individual liberty and economic wealth: “During the past generation, the increased efficiency of organisation and
politics, the enormous growth of an individual irresponsible money power, the much
more definite division of the American people into possibly antagonistic classes … [have
questioned] American national cohesion … These changes … have brought out a serious
and a glaring contradiction between the demands of a constructive democratic ideal and
the machinery of methods and institutions which have been considered sufficient for its
realization.”42 From the beginning, Croly regarded the weakness of the American executive, in particular the presidency, as a major obstacle for reform. For him, the American
Constitution with its focus on decentralization, localism, and anti-statism prevented the
development of a truly democratic state, capable of fulfilling its moral and educational
functions. Against the tradition of individual liberty and equality, Croly favored a political and social elite of experts and charismatic citizens. For him, the average American
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needed “the sincere and enthusiastic imitation of heroes and saints.”43 It was no accident
that President Theodore Roosevelt took up this argument and used it to coin the political
motto of “New Nationalism.”44
In his attempt to achieve an improvement of the social situation of the masses,
Croly was deeply influenced by his perception of Bismarckian Germany. The German
chancellor, in his historical function to organize the new nation-state of 1871, could not
follow a laissez-faire policy. His attempt to win the support of the industrial workers by
state-led social insurance legislation alienated him from theories of strictly individualistic
liberalism. The framework of an empire could not work according to a democracy with
unrestricted market forces. Thus, Bismarck’s role had been to translate a program “of
responsible administrative activity into a comprehensive national policy.” Bismarck, in
Croly’s eyes, had succeeded in bringing about “the all-round development of Germany
as an independent national economic unit.” Prussia, with her educational system and as
the nucleus of the empire of 1871, became a model of a state in which skilled scientific
experts and industrial efficiency went hand in hand. Croly was full of enthusiasm when
commenting on the German model: “In every direction German activity was organised
and was placed under skilled professional leadership, while at the same time each of these
special lines of work was subordinated to its particular place in a comprehensive scheme
of national economy.”45
Croly’s concept of “reconstruction,” developed through the perception of contemporary Germany and its modernity, was at the same time a critique of anti-state, laissez-faire
liberalism in the United States. In contrast, Croly favored a stronger federal government
and state planning as a means of social and moral progress, as well as a new expert role
for American intellectuals. Without advocating socialist positions, he also argued for the
implementation of a general scheme of social security. The ideal of the regulatory state
became reality, at least partly, during the First World War through wartime economy and
the mobilization as well as the organization of national resources by the state, such as the
War Industries Board, the National War Labor Board, and the Food Administration.46
From this perspective, Woodrow Wilson’s wartime executive represented a prototype of
rational and organized political planning, anticipating many elements of Franklin D.
Roosevelt’s New Deal efforts in the 1930s.47 It generated, in the eyes of the progressives,
a new type of expert-manager politician with all the qualities of a charismatic national
leader. America’s entry into the war seemed to mark the beginning of an era of a new
“conscious social ideal,” as Croly remarked.48 The writer for the New Republic commented
on America’s entry into the war: “Never was a war fought so far from the battlefields for
purposes so distinct from the battlefield.”49 However, the end of the war also brought the
end of wartime statism, “war time socialism,” and the failure of Wilson’s internationalist
concept of the role of the United States in the postwar world. The far-reaching hopes of
many progressive liberals turned into disillusions.50
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.
conclusion: european and transatlantic liberalisms
and the dilemma of democratic modernity
(1) The dynamic social and economic transformation of European societies from the
last third of the nineteenth century on was mirrored by American experiences.
Whereas liberals in European societies had to reformulate the concept of progress in
an age of rapid social disintegration, American liberals had to respond to the end of
the Jeffersonian ideal of an economically independent republic shaped by localism,
agrarian production, and foreign political isolation. They also reacted to the legacy of
the Gilded Age with its unrestricted market forces and to America’s transcontinental
incorporation on the basis of economic trusts and monopolies. The apparent triumph
of liberal successes from the 1870s on provoked a critical evaluation of the liberal paradigm. Responding to a dramatically changing environment, liberals in both Europe
and North America from the 1880s on began to reformulate the agenda of liberalism
by shifting their focus from political emancipation, constitutional achievements, and
economic liberty to a new balance between state and society, the social question, and
a new meaning for the interventionist and regulatory state.
(2) In stark contrast to Hobson’s and Hobhouse’s New Liberalism in Britain, which was
essentially anti-imperialist - imperialism was opposed because a democratic society
could not agree to the imperial practice in the colonies - German social liberals
around 1900 strongly advocated a German Weltpolitik. Friedrich Naumann’s and
Max Weber’s position, which linked social reforms to an active imperial policy of the
new nation state, was much closer to liberal imperialism than the New Liberalism
of Britain.51 The nationalist discourse about social liberalism in Germany reflected a
search for popularity while liberalism itself was under increasing pressure from more
successful parties with more stable milieus, such as the Catholic Center and the Social
Democratic Party. Whenever progressive liberals tried to integrate the concept of social
democracy, for instance through a reform of the franchise, giving workers an equal
vote in regional and local elections, they also put the last remaining strongholds of
liberal politics at risk.
In contrast to the practical limitations in facing modernity, the contemporary
German analysis of the liberal dilemma proved to be adequate and influential well beyond
Germany, as demonstrated by the stimulating perception of Germany among American
progressive liberals from the 1870s on. Basically, two periods of intensive perception can
be distinguished: an earlier generation, represented by Ely and his contemporaries, was
influenced by German political economists of the 1870s; a later generation after 1900
looked rather towards Max Weber’s analytical framework of rationality, the organizational
state, and the function of charismatic rule in democratic societies. If one looks carefully at
the conceptual paradigms, then Max Weber’s analysis of the dilemma of liberalism seems
to be much more modern compared with the writings of the New Liberals in Britain.
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American progressive intellectuals like Croly came close to Weber’s analytical concept
of the modern state. Concerned with the prospect of democracy in a modern state and
in an industrialized as well as rationalized society, Weber tried to find an answer to the
question of how, under the conditions of a modern, highly fragmented but inevitably
organizational society (Organisationsgesellschaft) liberty could still be maintained. These
questions pointed to the modern challenge to traditional liberalism, with its focus on
a classless ideal of social harmony rooted in Germany’s pre-industrial era. Even if one
is to admit that Weber was prepared to concede too much too early to the importance
and power of the modern organization of state and society, as his concept of a plebiscitary Führerdemokratie revealed, his analysis nevertheless revealed problems which New
Liberalism in Britain, with its traditional focus on the moral betterment of society, had
not yet discovered.52 Its reform agenda, despite all its intellectual stimulation, had much
of a noble reformulation of a classical liberal tradition. It certainly revived the humanist
potential of liberalism, but it remained essentially an ideological paradigm of the nineteenth century.
American progressive intellectuals’ perception of Germany was extremely selective:
whereas the modernist aspects seemed to stimulate American discourses about social
reform, the practical complexities, programmatic ambivalences, and political as well as
socio-cultural limitations of German liberalism before 1914 were neglected. As so often
occurs, the perception told more about the motives of those looking for intellectual and
analytical stimuli abroad than about the reality of the object of perception itself.
(3) In their attempts to respond to new political and social challenges, American progressive liberals were, at least before 1914, looking particularly to Germany, to the new
school of political economists or, as in Croly’s case, to the modernity of Bismarck’s
politics. Before 1914, Germany, and not just Britain, served as a stimulating impulse
to reformulate the balance between state and society in the United States. In particular, the new meaning of the regulatory and interventionist state with a centralized
executive became a prominent feature. However, the hopes associated with the state’s
role during the First World War and the prospect of a new era of proactive planning
and regulation were not fulfilled, as the post-1918 era demonstrated. Yet they did
not simply vanish: many elements of the New Deal legislation mirrored premises
that had been conventionalized by progressive intellectuals.
(4) The difficulties and limitations, which liberals experienced when they had to react
to the challenge of transformation, point to a more fundamental problem, namely
how liberals responded to the consequences of modernity in all its political and social complexities. Paradoxically, what liberals were confronted with from the 1870s
onwards was in itself the result of their earlier achievements. To a certain degree, after
the 1880s European liberals became victims of their own previous successes, which
limited their ability to present themselves convincingly as a movement that was still
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progressive, a spearhead of progress, even though they were able to stimulate reform
discourses temporarily before 1914.
In all European societies, the belated or limited success of liberals in conceptualizing
social liberalism and implementing it as a means to bridge the gap between liberalism and
social democracy became a major cause for the erosion of liberalism in the early twentieth
century. This seems to be a common European feature rather than just an isolated German
experience. In the United States, on the other hand, the New Deal period showed how
influential the progressive movement could be as a major watershed for American political culture and reform discourse in the long term. In Germany, the consequences of the
erosion of liberalism for the survival of civil society were fundamentally different, as the
history of the 1920s and 1930s demonstrated. In stark contrast to the United States,
the presence of deeply rooted ideological conflicts and the socio-cultural polarization of
society reduced the freedom of liberal politics in post-1918 Germany. Both analytical
and conceptual modernity, as well as political erosion, marked but two sides of the same
coin of German liberalism in the early twentieth century.
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1. Theodor Heuss, “Speech at the Party Founding Conference, 10th/11th December 1948,” in
Bundesvorstand der Freien Demokratischen Partei, ed., Zeugnisse liberaler Politik. 25 Jahre F.D.P. (Bonn,
1973) 13-15, see H. Kaack, Zur Geschichte und Programmatik der Freien Demokratischen Partei, 3rd edn.
(Meisenheim, 1979), 12.
2. Thomas Mann, “Meine Zeit” (1950), in id., Gesammelte Werke, vol. 11: Reden und Aufsätze, part 3
(Frankfurt/Main, 1990), 322-23.
3. See Guido De Ruggiero, Storia del liberalismo europeo (Napoli, 1925); “Liberalism,” in: International
Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 9 (New York, 1957), 435-42; Harold Laski, The Rise of European
Liberalism (London, 1936); Anthony Arblaster, The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism (Oxford, 1984);
see also the main text collections: E. K. Bramsted, K. J. Melhuish, eds., Western Liberalism. A History in
Documents from Locke to Croce (London, 1978); Lothar Gall, Rainer Koch, eds., Der europäische Liberalismus
im 19. Jahrhundert. Texte zu seiner Entwicklung, 4 vols. (Frankfurt/Main, 1981); Pierre Manent, ed., Les
libéraux. Textes choisis, 2 vols. (Paris, 1986).
4. For a detailed analysis of contemporary political language and the place of liberalism in France, Germany,
Italy, and Britain see Jörn Leonhard, Liberalismus. Zur historischen Semantik eines europäischen Deutungsmusters
(Munich, 2001).
5. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), ed. J. Dover Wilson (Cambridge, 1971), 63; see also
Matthew Arnold, “Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism,” in Fortnightly Review 30 (1878): 26-45; id., “The
Future of Liberalism,” in Nineteenth Century 8 (1880): 1-18; id., “The Nadir of Liberalism,” in: Nineteenth
Century 19 (1886): 645-63.
6. Benjamin Jowett, quoted in M. Asquith, Autobiography (London, 1936), 110-111.
7. See Hans Vorländer, Hegemonialer Liberalismus. Politisches Denken und politische Kultur in den USA
1776-1920 (Frankfurt/Main, 1997), 137-165.
8. Dieter Langewiesche, Liberalismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt/Main, 1988), 135.
9. See David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Pecularities of German History. Bourgeois Society and Politics
in Nineteenth Century Germany (London, 1984); Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 128-232.
10. Ludwig August von Rochau, Grundsätze der Realpolitik, angewendet auf die staatlichen Zustände
Deutschlands (Stuttgart, 1859).
11. James J. Sheehan, Der deutsche Liberalismus (Munich, 1983), 213-258; Heinrich August Winkler, “Vom
linken zum rechten Nationalismus: Der deutsche Liberalismus in der Krise von 1878/79,” in id., Liberalismus
und Antiliberalismus. Studien zur politischen Sozialgeschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen, 1979),
36-51; Lothar Gall, Europa auf dem Weg in die Moderne 1850-1890, 3rd edn. (Munich, 1997), 72-80;
Vorländer, Liberalismus, 167-175.
12. Friedrich Naumann, “Der Niedergang des Liberalismus. Vortrag auf der 6. Vertretertagung des
Nationalsozialen Vereins zu Frankfurt am Main 1901,” in id., Politische Schriften, ed. Theodor Schieder,
vol. 4: Schriften zum Parteiwesen und zum Mitteleuropaproblem (Cologne, 1964), 215-36.
13. Peter Theiner, “Friedrich Naumann und der soziale Liberalismus im Kaiserreich,” in: Karl Holl, Günter
Trautmann and Hans Vorländer, eds., Sozialer Liberalismus (Göttingen, 1986), 72-83; Peter Theiner, Sozialer
Liberalismus und deutsche Weltpolitik. Friedrich Naumann im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Baden-Baden,
1983).
14. Lothar Gall, “Liberalismus und ‘bürgerliche Gesellschaft’. Zu Charakter und Entwicklung der liberalen
Bewegung in Deutschland,” in Historische Zeitschrift 220 (1975): 324-356; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Der
deutsche Liberalismus zwischen‚ ‘klassenloser Bürgergesellschaft’ und Organisertem Kapitalismus’. Zu einigen
neueren Liberalismusinterpretationen,” in Geschichte und Gesellschaft 4 (1978): 77-90.
129
15. Lujo Brentano, “Die liberale Partei und die Arbeiter,” in Preußische Jahrbücher 40 (1877): 112-23;
I. Jastrow, Sozialliberal. Die Aufgaben des Liberalismus in Preußen, 2nd edn. (Berlin, 1894); Theodor Barth,
Neue Aufgaben des Liberalismus. Nach einer in München am 28. Januar 1904 gehaltenen Rede über Liberalen
Revisionismus (Berlin, 1904); id., Was ist Liberalismus? Eine Gegenwartsfrage! (Berlin, 1905); L. Haas, Die
Einigung des Liberalismus und der Demokratie (Frankfurt/Main, 1905); Der Liberalismus und die Arbeiter.
Seinen Arbeitskollegen gewidmet von einem Arbeiter (Berlin, 1906); Friedrich Naumann, Gegenwart und
Zukunft des Liberalismus (Munich, 1911).
16. Theiner, “Naumann,” 73, and Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 195-98.
17. Max Weber, “Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik” (1895), in: id., Gesammelte Politische
Schriften, ed. J. Winckelmann, 3rd edn. (Tübingen, 1971): 2-25; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber und
die deutsche Politik 1890-1920, 2nd edn. (Tübingen, 1974).
18. Dieter Düding, Der Nationalsoziale Verein. Der gescheiterte Versuch einer parteipolitischen Synthese von
Nationalismus, Sozialismus und Liberalismus (Munich, 1972), 47-52; Theiner, “Naumann,” 73-74.
19. Friedrich Naumann, Demokratie und Kaisertum, in: id., Werke, vol. 2 (Cologne, 1964); Mommsen,
Weber, 416; Theiner, “Naumann,” 74-75.
20. Friedrich Naumann, “Der Niedergang des Liberalismus,” in id., Werke, vol. 4 (Cologne, 1964) 215,
Friedrich Naumann, “Klassenpolitik des Liberalismus,” in ibid., vol. 4, 255-57; Heinrich August Winkler,
“Der rückversicherte Mittelstand. Die Interessenverbände von Handwerk und Kleinhandel im deutschen
Kaiserreich,” in id., Liberalismus, 83-98; Theiner, “Naumann,” 76.
21. Rüdiger vom Bruch, ed., “Weder Kommunismus noch Kapitalismus.” Bürgerliche Sozialreform in Deutschland
bis zur Ära Adenauer (Munich, 1985).
22. Theiner, “Naumann,” 80-81.
23. Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 200-211; James J. Sheehan, “Liberalism and the City in Nineteenth-Century
Germany,” in Past and Present 51 (1971): 116-137.
24. James J. Sheehan, “Deutscher Liberalismus im postliberalen Zeitalter 1890-1914,” in Geschichte und
Gesellschaft 4 (1978): 29-48; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, “Wandlungen der liberalen Idee im Zeitalter des
Liberalismus,” in Karl Holl and G. List, eds., Liberalismus und imperialistischer Staat (Göttingen, 1975),
109-147; Langewiesche, Liberalismus, 216-222.
25. Lore Blanke, “Liberalismus in den USA 1776-1996. Ein Überblick im Spiegel der deutschen und
amerikanischen Historiographie,” in Jahrbuch zur Liberalismus-Forschung 8 (1996): 43-67.
26. James J. Sheehan, “Vorbildliche Ausnahme: Liberalismus in Amerika und Europa,” in Jürgen Kocka,
Hans-Jürgen Puhle and Klaus Tenfelde, eds., Von der Arbeiterbewegung zum modernen Sozialstaat. Festschrift
für Gerhard A. Ritter zum 65. Geburtstag (Munich, 1994), 236-248.
27. Werner Sombart, Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? (1906), new edn.
(Darmstadt, 1969).
28. Sheehan, “Ausnahme,” 237-238.
29. Karl-Egon Lönne, Politischer Katholizismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/M., 1986), 151-92.
30. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma. The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), new edn. (New
York, 1962); Walter Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America‘s Conscience (Chapel Hill, 1990), and Sheehan,
“Ausnahme,” 239.
31. James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor (1828), quoted in
Sheehan, “Ausnahme,” 239.
32. Sheehan, “Ausnahme,” 242.
130
jörn leonhard
33. Quoted in Vorländer, Liberalismus, 169.
34. See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber. Gesellschaft, Politik und Geschichte (Frankfurt/M., 1974),
88-89.
35. Vorländer, Liberalismus, 172-174.
36. Jürgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the Transfer of Culture
(Ithaca, 1965).
37. Richard T. Ely, French and German Socialism in Modern Times (New York, 1883), 244-245; Vorländer,
Liberalismus, 161-162.
38. A. M. McBriar, Fabian Socialism and English Politics 1884-1918 (Cambridge, 1966), 119-121, 307-309;
Vorländer, Liberalismus, 163.
39. David M. Kennedy, “Overview: The Progressive Era,” in The Historian 37 (1975): 453-468, 460; Robert
H. Wiebe, The Search for Order 1877-1920 (New York, 1967); Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism:
1885-1914 (Chicago, 1957); David F. Noble, America by Design. Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate
Capitalism (Oxford, 1977); Vorländer, Liberalismus, 187-188.
40. Vorländer, Liberalismus, 187-188, Paul F. Bourke, Culture and the Status of Politics, 1909-1917. Studies
in the Social Criticism of Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, Randolph Bourne, and Van Wyck Brooks (Ph.D.
Wisconsin, 1967); Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism. Croly, Weyl, Lippmann and the Progressive
Era, 1900-1925 (London, 1961), 121-217; Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New
York, 1962), 408-420.
41. Paul F. Bourke, “The Status of Politics. The New Republic, Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks,”
in Journal of American Studies 8 (1974): 171-202; Vorländer, Liberalismus, 192.
42. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York, 1909), new edn. by Arthur M. Schlesinger
(Cambridge, 1965), 269-270; Vorländer, Liberalismus, 193.
43. Croly; Promise, quoted in Hans Petersen, “Liberal” im Amerikanischen. Eine Studie zur historischen
Semantik im gesellschaftlichen Kontext (Kassel, 1992), 55.
44. Croly, Promise, 265-267, 286-288; Vorländer, Liberalismus, 195.
45. Croly, Promise, quoted in Petersen, Liberal, 58.
46. Robert D. Cuff, The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations During World War I (Baltimore,
1973); James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900-1918 (Boston, 1968), 214-254;
Vorländer, Liberalismus, 197.
47. William Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” in John Braeman, Robert Bremner
and Everett Walters, eds., Change and Continuity in Twentieth Century America (Columbus/Ohio, 1964),
81-143.
48. Croly, Promise, 139.
49. New Republic, 21 April 1917, 337; Vorländer, Liberalismus, 205; Jörn Leonhard, “Vom Nationalkrieg
zum Kriegsnationalismus - Projektion und Grenze nationaler Integrationsvorstellungen in Deutschland,
Großbritannien und den Vereinigten Staaten im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Ulrike v. Hirschhausen und Jörn
Leonhard, eds., Nationalismen in Europa. West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich (Göttingen, 2001), 204-240.
50. Sidney Kaplan, “Social Engineers as Saviors: Effects of World War I on Some American Liberals,” in The
Journal of the History of Ideas 17 (1956): 347-369; Vorländer, Liberalismus, 204.
51. Karl Rohe, “Sozialer Liberalismus in Großbritannien in komparativer Perspektive. Zur Gesellschaftstheorie
des New Liberalism 1880-1914,” in Holl, Trautmann and Vorländer, eds., Liberalismus, 110-125; Michael
131
Freeden, The New Liberalism. An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978); id., “The New Liberalism Revisited,”
in Karl Rohe, ed., Englischer Liberalismus im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Bochum, 1987), 133-154.
52. Rohe, “Liberalismus,” 120-122.
132
THE BRITISH LABOUR MODEL IN THE AMERICAN POLITICAL AND
INTELLECTUAL DEBATE OF THE 1920s∗
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The aim of this contribution is to elucidate a theme that is only marginally addressed
by studies which, even recently, have dealt with the relationship between American
and British intellectuals and reformers (including James Kloppenberg, Daniel Rodgers,
Kenneth Morgan, Marc Stears). Most of the efforts made during the first half of the
1920s to establish a labor party in the United States took the British Labour Party as a
model. The history of political parties in the United States, above all at the level of single
states, abounds in examples of party formations conforming to this typology. The cases
of the Farmer-Labor Party of 1919-20 and 1924, which are the subject of my analysis,
fall within this tradition, and have been studied as part of a broader analysis centering
on third parties or the reformist tradition in general. In my opinion, however, these attempts stand out from previous (and subsequent) ones, at least as far as the Progressive
Movement is concerned. For, while they cannot be placed within the category of “political
transfer” (there having been no real transfer of organisational methods and formulas),1
the reference to the British experience, as a model and example to emulate, was indeed
very strong. Such relations were not limited to questions of mere rhetoric, given the fact
that exponents of the Labour Party actually participated in American conventions, and
close ties were forged between American intellectuals and politicians and members of
the British Labour Party.
Bearing in mind these links, the hypothesis I wish to formulate is that the political
debate of the period 1919-1925 on the constitution of a labor party provides a crucial
litmus test in analyzing the central problematic issues of U.S. political and intellectual
development in the twentieth century: the motivations underlying the crisis of progressive liberalism and of the transatlantic project that was strictly bound to it. My aim
is to focus on the interweaving of political culture and public intellectual debate, in
an endeavour to trace the origins of a redefinition of the concept of liberalism, which
would end up constituting a stronger, but more flexible “binder” than the one offered
by “Anglo-Saxonism,”2 for the construction not so much of an Anglo-American “special
relationship,” as of a “western” political model which, in the post-World-War-One period, was destined to assert its superiority precisely in its adhesion to Anglo-American
(democratic and liberal) political values.
I consider the failed attempt to transplant the British Labour Party model in the U.S.
of the 1920s to bring into better focus the more general debate on new liberalism and
progressivism (terms seen as synonymous at the time). I try to understand how important
133
the british labour model
the laborite movement was, as a reference for progressive intellectuals seeking a way out
of a political and intellectual crisis marked by the Red Scare of 1919-20, the election of
conservative republican Warren Harding, and much more. My contribution will therefore
examine the debate as articulated in such reviews as The New Republic and The Nation,
The World Tomorrow and The American Review of Reviews, those with socialist leanings, like The Socialist Review and Labor Age, or in the pamphlets of the Intercollegiate
Socialist Student League first, followed by the League for Industrial Democracy, as well
as in British journals, like The New Statesmen and The Nation.
It was in analyzing solutions to the political, economic and social crisis following
the First World War – when, despite certain differences, the U.S. and Great Britain
had much in common – that American and British intellectuals and politicians became
involved in an exchange of ideas. Relations were already in place just prior to the war,
when American reformers looked to Britain, far more than Germany, as a social laboratory
for trying out and observing new techniques of political and social intervention. Lloyd
George’s Britain, above all, demonstrated that “liberal reform was compatible with active
democratic control as well as with centralized paternalism;”3 i.e. that liberal democracy
could go hand in hand with social reform. Mobilization for war had strengthened this
incipient bond between American intellectuals and the British political and intellectual
establishment. In both countries many intellectuals summoned to think-tanks on politics
and the economy (John Dewey, Walter Lippmann and Felix Frankfurter in the United
States, the Webbs in Great Britain, to mention but a few) saw the war as an opportunity
to implement those ideals of social justice, efficiency and rationality which they had long
seen as pillars of any substantial, and not just formal, idea of democracy, since these alone
could combine democracy with social justice and economic development. As has been
pointed out, during the war British intellectuals, journalists and politicians fed their
American counterparts with plans and information, intended as British propaganda to
swing American public opinion in favour of joining the war alongside Great Britain and
her allies. The immediate objective was, obviously, to pose a rapid and victorious end to
war. However, the type of discourse and the values appealed to contributed to intensifying a sentiment of political and intellectual affinity. In a letter to Albert Dicey in 1918,
James Bryce ironically commented: “It is proposed to celebrate the 4th of July here …
A Meeting to celebrate Independence Day under Governmental auspices, at which I have
to preside, and speeches are to be made by W. Churchill and others, is also to be held.
A curious turn of the wheel when we are celebrating an act denounced in 1776, and a
Revolt whose consequences we long deplored as a terrible blow to British power!”4
Instrumental in setting up an “Atlantic community” on political reform, social
justice and political-economic rationalization was the progressive review, The New
Republic, which published articles by the chief exponents of British progressivism.5 In
1918 the journal published Labour and the New Social Order,6 the Labour Party policy
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statement that had such an important impact on American progressives and formed
the main reference point in the U.S. debate on industrial democracy.7 A month or so
earlier, it had printed a long article by Sidney Webb, setting out the reasons why the
Labour Party had to be reorganized.8 Both The New Republic and The Nation took a
close interest in the affairs of the British Labour Party, featuring articles by British labour
leaders and intellectuals, like Harold Laski. The latter was a regular contributor to both
journals, personifying better than anyone the closeness of the bond with counterparts
across the Atlantic.9
The same issue that published Labour and the New Social Order also contained an
editorial entitled “British and American Labor,” which spelled out the differences between
the British and American scenes, and also highlighted the need for the American worker
movement to review its strategies and structure in the light of the British example:
“during the past six months, chiefly as a result of the courageous and intelligent handling of war
problems as they affected the wage-earners, organized labor has suddenly emerged as a political
power of the first magnitude in the British commonwealth. … its strength does not rest as yet on
any increase in the amount of its parliamentary representation … It rests chiefly upon the power
which a modern war necessarily placed in the hands of the wage-earning class … The British
trade unions have used the strength of their strategic position to increase wages, improve working
conditions and to introduce the beginning of constitutionalism into industry, but they have not
abused their great opportunity … By adopting such a course they have done more to improve
their status … The more they proved themselves willing and able to negotiate in a spirit of liveand-let-live, the readier the government was to recognize them as an independent principality …
British labour became conscious of its opportunities and of its collective strength … It has sought
the cooperation for political purposes of workers of both sexes, of all trades and of all degrees of
skill. It has opened its ranks to associations of consumers as well as those who produce and to
middle class sympathizers.”10
What lesson might the Americans draw?
“In our country the Republican and Democratic parties are as lacking in vitality of conviction
and in economic political resourcefulness as are the Liberal and Conservative parties in Great
Britain, but, unfortunately, the American workers as a body are not prepared to take advantage
of the superannuation and ineptitude of the old political association. The war has only increased
the pre-existing confusion of counsel and purpose in the ranks of American labor. … American
unionism will have to undergo many changes … Its leaders are not politically minded … They
are still thinking in terms of a craft unionism, which divides the skilled from the unskilled and
the salaried worker, and which is indifferent to the political possibilities of an alliance between
labor unionism and the farmers’ cooperative movement … It would be fatal for organized labor
in America not to adjust its policy to the improved social status and the promising political opportunities which are looming up as a result of the war.”
135
Hence,
“The indispensable domestic political task of liberal Americans in the near future is that of promoting the organization of American workers for the capable exercise of political power. … The
most effective safeguard against such a deplorable class warfare lies in the course already suggested.
It consists in the formation of a party of workers, whose programme would be as radical as the
proposed programme of the British Labor Party published elsewhere in this issue, but which in
the attempt to realize that policy would combine political agitation with direct trade union action. The core of such a party would have to consist of organized labor and no effort should be
spared to convince organized labor of the truth of this contention and of its enormously important
implications.” 11
I quote this article at length for the clarity with which it sums up the main points of
the debate: 1) the economic question was central to any political redefining of relations
between state and society. That is to say, it recognized that working men and women
were the central feature in what would otherwise be an uncontrolled and unbalanced
capitalist development. Hence the “class” structure of American society, to which I shall be
returning; 2) since the worker movement had become part of the redefined political order,
any action on its part was bound to be political. What the British Labour Party taught
was an ability to grasp the common good. Implicit in this was also the conviction that
the American two-party system failed to represent a complex society made up of groups
and interests, rather than individual, self-reliant, independent moral agents; 3) for the
progressives who had launched the so-called “revolt against formalism”12 – leading to the
development of the social sciences in the U.S. – the British model was the most concrete
example of how theory and praxis might both at last be implemented at a political level; in
short, a close partnership between hand workers and brain workers. This was trenchantly
expressed by John Dewey in a 1918 article on the development of a new social science able
“to take hold of affairs and direct the movement of massed details.” According to Dewey,
“the social situation creates a demand for such a science if the intelligence to be brought
to bear on social reconstruction is not to be lamed and confused. A happy presentiment
is displayed in the fact that the English Labor programme terminates with a demand
for science and yet more science, and in the fact that the hand worker and brain worker
are everywhere coupled.”13 Still more explicit was an article in The Nation: “The epochmaking programme of the British Labor Party contains nothing more inspiring than the
inclusion within the scope of its interests of those who work with their brains, as well as
those who labor with their hands.”14 By implication, the British Labour Party, led among
others by intellectuals like Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Harold Laski, Richard H. Tawney
and (more marginally) by Graham Wallas, exemplified the possibility to create a coalition
of intellectuals and workers in which progressive intellectuals could exercise real political
leadership without the trammels of traditional party political machinery.
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These issues featured more or less comprehensively in the political debate waged by
the two journals. They were the underlying reasons for the two most concrete attempts of
the 1920s to set up a third party bearing some reference to the Labour Party: the FarmerLabor Party which ran in the 1920 elections, and above all the movement that backed
Robert La Follette for the presidency in 1924. The 1924 defeat of the strongest ever bid
to form a real alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties marked the end of
many progressives’ hopes of ever setting up an American Labor Party.
To return to the above-mentioned article dealing with the parallels between American
and British labour, its contents hint at the factors that led to the débacle, and the reasons
underlying the failure of the bid to adopt the British model: 1) the American political
system, its federal structure and the close-knit relations between parties and political institutions; 2) the farrago that made up the progressive galaxy with its diversified political
backgrounds (from New England intellectual efficiency to the radical populism of the
mid-west farmers and La Follette himself ); 3) splits within the workers movement, and
the strongly trade-unionist line of the American Federation of Labour which emerged as
distrust of any “political” option, including the British model itself. In the early post-war
years, relations between the American delegation and their British Labour counterparts
were not particularly cordial. One need only think of the quarrel that flared up in 1919
surrounding the constitution of the International Labour Organization and relations with
German socialists, to whom the Americans were implacably hostile. Another factor was
the bitter repression of 1919-20, when intransigent American entrepreneurs scoffed at
the workers’ claims, favoured the so-called “American Plan,” forced an open-shop policy
on most industries and supported the formation of so-called “company unions.” What
is not made clear by the aforementioned article in The New Republic or in those that
followed is what impact the explosion of racial conflict had on the incipient progressive coalition. The period was marked by race riots in many American cities (East Saint
Louis, Chicago, Tulsa) causing hundreds of deaths, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan
and the phenomenon of lynching, especially in the South, as well as by discrimination
against immigrant labor from south-eastern Europe (nativism). It will be seen how the
racial question constituted one of the unresolved issues of progressive theoretical and
political thought.
On the problem of repression, Alan Dawley points out how Great Britain and the
United States of the day differed in their response to social conflict. In Great Britain
“capital had learned to accept a degree of labour’s power and a modicum of social welfare
had found its way into government policy, with the result that Britain had left industrial
violence behind.” 15
In the face of brewing social tension, the British government replied with compromise and mediation, the Whitley Councils being the most significant examples. Although
Dawley’s position probably understates the degree of opposition to social conflict, along
137
with the degree of repression by the British government, it does succeed in grasping what
was a real perception in American intellectual and political circles.
The novelty and importance of the Whitley Councils16 – consultative boards, made
up of workers and owners, for the settlement of labor disputes – was in fact immediately
seized upon by American reformers. By way of example, their interest was reflected in
the speeches delivered at the symposium organised by The World Tomorrow to discuss
the British Industrial Council for the Building Industry, which, albeit with some differences, strongly supported the adoption of a “constitutional” model for the solution of
industrial conflicts also in the United States. 17
By contrast, American entrepreneurs, far from adhering to the British model, upheld
an attitude of closure and intransigence in response to social discontent. Faced with the
businessmen’s rigid stance, the politicians, especially democrats, changed their view. Once
the war was over, Wilson dismantled the War Labor Board and all bodies appointed to
preside over industrial disputes by collective bargaining. Thus, “while in Britain liberals
accepted a greater role for the state, American liberals still kowtowed to the oligarchs of
the marketplace.”18 The problem was not primarily one of more pay. As various industrialists informed an emissary from the secretary of state, namely Lansing, “It is not chiefly
wages the workmen want, but a new order of social and economic relations.”19 Against
such a challenge the entrepreneurs were not prepared to trust Washington, but took up
cudgels for their own behalf. Just how they did so was seen at the great steelworkers’
strike, involving the U.S. Steel Corporation in particular. Corporation managements
resorted to employing company-loyal “American“ labor, strike-breakers, and AfricanAmerican newcomers from the South, protected by private security corps, meanwhile
fomenting anti-union espionage in the name of anti-bolshevism. They managed to enlist
the services of the army and National Guard (by a tradition going back to the 1870s) to
disperse strikers attacking blackleggers.20 Nor was that all: in a climate of “red scare” (the
American Communist Party was founded in 1919), the American federal government
unleashed the so-called White Plan – a secret plan drawn up by military intelligence at
the Army War College, to be put in force in the event of a revolutionary attack.21 Here
again, a difference between the British and American attitudes is revealed. To the British
authorities, who had similar plans in reserve, such disorder was “industrial unrest;” to
the Americans it was a revolutionary threat to the Constitution. But as Dawley points
out, still more surprising is the fact that “the White Plan construed the enemy in much
broader terms: not only the predictable political opponents, but also whole segments of
society defined by class and ethnicity. Presumed enemies22 included the entire population of immigrant Italians, Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, other east European ‘racial
groups’, and indeed, the bulk of the population beyond the pale of white, Anglo-Saxon
Protestant.”23 Potential enemies of the Constitution included the unreliable blacks, since
“their class consciousness, racial instincts, poverty, instinctive hostility to the white race
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and susceptibility to propaganda, makes [sic] this group a fruitful recruiting field for radical agitation.”24 Despite the scanty number of real communist militants, anticommunist
ideology eventually broadened the gulf between political and economic élites and the
poorer classes. It is thus no accident that the class structure of American society played a
major role in creating a new political entity. This meant that the recognition of the “class”
character of American society was at the centre of the analysis of American progressive
intellectuals, Herbert Croly in particular.
In 1919 the task of transplanting the Labour Party experience on American soil was
undertaken by two organizations that had formed separately and came together on this
issue: the Committee of Forty-Eight and the National Labor Party stemming from the
Chicago Federation of Labor. The Committee of Forty-Eight comprised liberal intellectuals and reformers, some of whom had taken part in Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive
Party venture in 1912, while others had supported Wilson’s brand of progressivism and
sought to combine the claims of social justice with the defence of civil rights, jeopardized
as these were by the anticommunist climate. Although this group thought that the political crisis was due to economic causes and inequalities of class representation (although
their approach was not a class analysis in true Marxist terms), it was they who made the
strongest bid to graft the Labour model onto the American political system. In reality,
this was hardly surprising: among its members were the editors of The New Republic and
The Nation – Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl (but not Walter Lippmann, who had taken
his distance from the group), and Oswald G. Villard – and progressive intellectuals, like
Horace Kallen and Frederic C. Howe, as well as progressive politicians like Johns A.H.
Hopkins, Amos Pinchot and George L. Record. Their platform included issues such as
rights for women and tightening up the anti-lynching laws, though also a restriction on
immigration, which shows how the Committee itself was divided. Its radical wing, bent
on creating a labor party and promoting forms of industrial democracy, approved of local
labor parties being set up by militants disillusioned with AFL leadership and policies of
the Wilson administration.25
The most significant case, which would spearhead the whole national movement,
was the Chicago Federation of Labor headed by John Fitzpatrick, a radical strongly
connected with the socialist movement. The Chicago Federation of Labor published its
own version of Labour and the New Social Order, thanks to the efforts of Basil M. Manly,
who had been research director for the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations and
co-chairman of the War Labor Board. “Labour’s Fourteen Points” (in explicit response
to Wilson’s Fourteen) claimed the right to collective organization and bargaining, an
eight-hour working day, life and health insurance, equal rights for all, nationalization of
resources (railroads and public utilities), democratic control inside industry, but also a
minimum wage, full employment, income tax, etc. A significant feature of the manifesto
lay precisely in its awareness of internationalism. The last point, in fact, called for “a
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league of the workers of all nations pledged and organized to enforce the destruction of
autocracy, militarism, and economic imperialism throughout the world.” This declaration set the Chicago Federation of Labor in open contrast with the rejection of Samuel
Gompers, and might have yielded important fruits had it not been overturned by the
conflicts of 1919-20.26
This manifesto became the symbol of the radical movement and the drive to form
a national labor party in August 1919.
In order to survive, however, the new party depended on the political and financial
support of a variety of groupings, including among others the middle-class reformers of
the Committee of Forty-Eight, the agrarian radicals of the Non-Partisan League, present in the mid-western and western states, and Socialist Party militants. These last were
divided among those who believed in the value of exploring the Labor hypothesis, and
those who did not understand the necessity of joining a labor party, since its objectives
were the same as those of the Socialist Party.27
The difficulty of keeping such divergent political groups together became clear at the
national convention held in Chicago in November 1919. The account of events given by
The New Republic stresses the grass roots origin of the party, remarking upon the host
of delegations from many states and trades union organizations, the inclusive policy of
the fledgling party – “not the trade unions alone, or any other special ‘classes’ alone, but
‘all’ hand and brain workers in support of the principles of ‘political, social and industrial
democracy’” – and the need to give substantial, if not formal, recognition to equal representation for women. It does, however, mention the difficulty of harmonizing differing
claims and objectives. Ignoring the advice of the British Labour Party representative to
keep the manifesto short and to the point, given that the party being set up was new and
experimental (and gaining a consensus would thus be easier), the delegates “had ears for
every voice crying in the wilderness” (in the caustic words of a newspaper correspondent).
The final document contained thirty points instead of the initial three – free speech,
nationalization of public utilities and natural resources, and taxing uncultivated land.
As the correspondent wryly noted: “There is no attempt, in it, to build the structure of a
new social order, as the British Labor Party built. Rather it consists of importations from
Great Britain, legacies from the Bull Moose Party, and reforms for which the American
Federation of Labor has long stood and never voted.” Nonetheless, he admits that, for
all its limits, the manifesto was “politically honest” in raising concrete policy issues that
“the old parties have kept out of American politics.” 28
I cannot here go into the complex debate between forty-eighters, laborites, intellectuals and reformers who clashed over the various options: a class or non-class image for the
movement, nationalization, free competition, civil rights. On top of the divisions, even
within the various factions there was always the leadership issue. None of the forces in
play could come up with a leader able to bind a disparate coalition, though in the end
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all agreed they should run for the 1920 election, since the campaign would focus public
attention on the crucial topics of labour and social justice.29
The choice of the unknown Parley Parker Christensen, a radical lawyer of Utah, as
the candidate of the new Farmer-Labor Party certainly contributed to the poor result of
the election of November 1920. Christensen mustered only 290.000, against the almost
16 million votes for the republican Harding, who thus obtained a landslide victory.
That the climate was unfavourable had already been announced by Herbert Croly
in what proved a key article for the debate over progressivism, published in The New
Republic on October 27, 1920: “The Eclipse of Progressivism.” Croly’s analysis described
how the Republican Party was reverting to the past in nominating a conservative like
Harding, noting that Wilson and the democrats were on the brink of failure (although
he glossed over Theodore Roosevelt’s shift to the right), and the attempt at forming a
third party was plagued by faction. Nonetheless, Croly went on, the problem was the
liberals’ inability to make a proper assessment of the social reality. The progressives’ main
mistake was to have seen America as a classless society where progress would only come
through virtuous action by the individual citizen. What needed to be grasped, was that
“our existing institutions are, it is plain, actually provoking class divisions and conflicts
similar to those which have existed in undemocratic societies.” Consequently, he went
on, “political democracy must call to its assistance social and industrial democracy in
order to regain its health. … The one effective way of repudiating it is to call in another
class to redress the balance.” Once more, the British example should be enlisted as a spur
to American progressivism: “The progressives will testify to the possibility of creating a
political democracy superior to class by themselves rising above class misunderstanding
and prejudice. A large fraction of the English liberals have already assumed this attitude
towards the labor movement. They have joined the Labor Party and so created a fighting organization, which is the conscious political instrument of the social and industrial
enfranchisement of the wage-earning and salaried worker. The American progressive is
under a heavier obligation to adopt this course than the English liberal. For while the
British Commonwealth has frankly recognized class discriminations, the complacent
acceptance of such discriminations is peculiarly abhorrent to the American national
consciousness.”30
Defeat in 1920 did not of course sweep away the reasons that had led to the founding of a Farmer-Labor Party. The “new social order” was still a goal to pursue. Besides,
events bore out the correctness of the analysis: one could hardly return to “business as
normal” if that meant reverting to a nineteenth-century vision of state-society relations;
one could not dodge the question of the worker movement. The transformation in
1921 of the Intercollegiate Socialist Student League (founded in 1905 with ambition
of becoming the American answer to the Fabian Society) into the League for Industrial
Democracy bears witness to this, even if it remained a marginal reality.31 Croly had al141
ready sided with them in his 1914 Progressive Democracy, where he called for a system of
self-government as the only way to give the wage-earner representation and set him free.
In addition, introducing forms of recognition of and democratic participation by the
workers, was the only alternative to revolution. This was asserted most emphatically by
Harold Laski from the pages of The Nation: “The old liberalism is dead in any creative
sense. Unquestionably, the Bolshevik revolution had great appeal for the worker masses.”
However, Laski maintained, “the answer to Moscow is not the bayonet, but the proof
that the present order is capable of adaptation to new hopes and new demands.”32 Laski
was speaking of England, but addressing the American public and in 1921, following
the “red scare,” the message was clear.
This time the British model was followed. The scheme to build a political alliance
between hand and brain stemmed from the trade-union organizations, especially the
railroad workers smarting under the defeat of the Plumb Plan and, unlike Gompers’
AFL, more and more bent on political action. A further impulse came from the farmers of the Non Partisan League who were very strong in the Midwest. One cannot here
plot the stages that led to the Progressive Party forming in 1924 what Daniel Rodgers
called “the closest thing on the American scene yet to the British Labour Party model.”33
Suffice it to say that in 1921, at the instigation of the railroad workers’ union, the People’s
Reconstruction League was set up, bringing together farmers, workers and middleclass progressive groups under the banner of economic democracy; above all, the 1922
Conference for Progressive Political Action took place, inspired by William H. Johnston,
president of the International Association of Machinists, a union leader diametrically
opposed to Gompers, who pressed for industrial unions and independent political action by the worker movement. The three hundred men and women who attended the
Conference held at Chicago on 21 February, 1922 were once again a mixed turn-out from
the progressive movement. But the mid-term election results in November 1922 seemed
to support those who felt that at last the climate was ripe for a third party. As The Nation
said: “The impossible has happened. The farmers and labor have got together, and a new
party has been born.”34 In actual fact, the new party was not yet born, and some of its
factions were not yet ready for such a step (for example, certain railroad brotherhoods).35
Moreover, the mid-west and western electorate had given their vote to politicians who
shared the progressive ticket and could act transversally, without reference to parties. In
Minnesota, however, a senator was returned to Congress as Farmer-Labor Party representative and the party won three of the main towns in the state. It was, therefore, a real
situation which could act as a model for all the other states in the West where farmer
and worker unrest was growing.
The wind was changing, supported by events across the ocean, again in The Nation’s
words: “Britain in 1922 … showed something of the adventuresome independence
which characterized our American elections in the Middle West this year. She made the
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Labor Party the second party in Parliament.” How had the Labour Party achieved that
position? “Years of unremitting hard work lie behind it.” Above all, “one of the most
significant things about this great party has been its readiness to use the intellectuals to
help it formulate its program. It has absorbed the truly Liberals who were willing to learn
the lessons of the war,” along with a broad and comprehensive notion of “worker.” That
is the lesson the fledgling third American party had to learn: not to get tied to alleged
progressives or politicians pursuing their own ends. Its true strength lay in the union
of workers and farmers. “The time is at last ripe for a national movement in this country which would be our American parallel – with more emphasis upon an agricultural
program – to the British Labor Party movement. For such a movement to succeed, the
liberal political leaders of today, like the true-blue Liberals in England, must be ready to
give up the prestige of the old parties and frankly throw in their lot with the new alliance
of the producing classes.”36 In reality, The Nation omitted to say that Labour’s victory
had only been made possible by the division of the Liberal Party. What counted was the
realisation of an aspiration.
When the first Labour government formed, progressive opinion was fired. This was
concrete evidence that the dream could come true, though there was no hiding the fears
for American shortcomings: “For us in America the experiment we are to witness must be
of the greatest value, besides giving ground for boundless envy. Where in England men
are coming to rule who have risen by sheer merit, integrity, and courage, and because
they had a program and constructive ideas, we Americans seem destined for a presidential
campaign offering no hope for advance or reform … Between the two groups there is no
difference; they are alike as twins; they both have the same characteristics and neither has
a program worthy of a moment’s serious considerations. We are destitute of leadership; in
England men have come from laboratories, libraries, mines … forges, shipyards, mills, and
factories, who have something to give, within whom there are the stirrings of leadership
based upon the common belief that England will go down to ruin if the present order of
selfishness and self-seeking is not ended.”37
The lack of the winning qualities of the British Labour Party – leadership, organization, theoretical consistency, ability to form alliances and gain consensus – seemed no
less the Achilles heel of its American counterpart. In the end it was in such terms that
Henry W. Massingham described the British Labour Party in 1924: “The British Labor
Party resembles the Catholic church in at least two particulars. It has a faith and an
organization, and it is the union of these two characteristics that produces the effect of
disciplined enthusiasm of which these central assemblies are the evidence.”38
Of course no one doubted that the future party was being erected on somewhat
insecure foundations: poor organization, lack of sedimentation, and a deficit of militant
activities and gradual education of intellectuals and workers.39 As for the leadership, again
Robert La Follette seemed the most natural and sole feasible choice. La Follette was the
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only leader with the necessary experience (plus the cachet of Wisconsin – his own progressive political laboratory) to reconcile factions that, even in 1924, still occupied opposing
positions. He was perhaps the only man able to check the growing taint of communism,
which could be cast against the movement, and was one of the main bones of contention
among pre-World War One progressives, and the Farmer-Labor movement – though the
latter was more open to radical leaders and members of the communist movement, like
William Z. Foster, leader of the Workers Party. It was just such divisions that prompted
La Follette to stand as an independent and not as a new Progressive Party candidate.
La Follette proved to be a sick leader (he would die a few months after the 1924
elections), who had no organization of his own to fall back on, except in the state of
Wisconsin, and certainly could not handle the situation in the other states. The electoral
campaign was fought generously, though without funds to support it. There was little
involvement by state-wide progressive groups, while the railroad unions and the AFL
virtually opted out (even though for the first time, in August, the leadership had come
out in favour of direct political commitment). Furthermore a fierce political campaign
was mounted by the republicans who, despite La Follette’s patent weaknesses and the nonexistence of a democrat party, saw him as a vote-draining opponent. La Follette gained
16.5% of the popular ballot, thirteen seats and 4.8 million votes. No mean achievement
for an independent.
Post-electoral comments highlighted the weaknesses of the recent progressive campaign, the difficulties that any new party must face, the problem of electors’ habits. While
these points justified the defeat, they hardly explained why potential supporters (workers,
farmers and others) had not been moved to vote for La Follette. There may have been a
number of reasons. On the one hand, “they were restrained by a desire for jobs, wages,
profits, which they feared might possibly be endangered by the election of Progressives
or the throwing of the choice into Congress;” on the other, “many were attuned to the
low emotional vibration of Coolidge and the Republican idea of administration. They
distrusted political government and wanted it removed as far as possible from their lives
and their attention. They liked the idea of an executive who is colorless, silent, cautious,
inactive, penurious.” The financial scandals and cases of bribery that had surfaced at that
time – for many commentators, likely to attract discontents to the cause of La Follette – actually ended up by increasing distrust of the national government and its executive arm:
“Many people no longer look to the government to accomplish any positive purpose. To
those in such a state of mind, the scandals of the recent administration were a reason,
not for voting in support of a higher governmental morality, but for voting against the
extension of government.”40 Against such a background no moral indignation by the
progressives could have opened a breach. As had emerged in 1920 and again in the runup debate, the problem was that of educating the electorate (education being a central
theme in progressive ideology). For only “education … would furnish the habit of mind
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to overcome such cynism about government and its responsibilities, and to penetrate
the mental fog screens emitted in clouds during campaigns.” Once again, the British
example showed the truth of such an approach: “What may be done by these slower but
more sure methods has been exemplified by the British Labor Party, whose leaders now
say that in most cases they can carry new districts as fast as they can afford the necessary
resources to organize them.”41
Despite resolutions to learn the lesson and set about more incisive plans for education and organization, the 1924 defeat actually set the seal on the last real attempt to
destroy the rigid bi-party system, and with it the utopia of a British-style labour party
in the U.S. By a strange parallelism, La Follette’s defeat was also analysed in the light
of the simultaneous fall of the first McDonald government, and the victory of the Tory
Party under the clarion call for a return to “tranquillity,” a term reminiscent of Harding’s
“normalcy.” But the parallel ended there. What transpired from the analysis was that the
labour government had fallen by the mechanics of alternation in power, without detracting in any way from its legitimacy within the British political system.42 Such was not the
case with the American Progressive Party.
Among the reasons for the defeat, some were purely political: lack of organization,
first and foremost, as all the analysts hastened to point out. It was no coincidence that,
wherever a local organization existed, as was the case of the Farmer-Labor Party in the
north-western states, the result was by no means unrespectable. In North-Dakota, for
instance, La Follette gained 88,000 votes against Coolidge’s 93,000.43 Other reasons
included shortage of funds, internal strife, and the unions’ inability to rise above tradeunionism. Even the choice of La Follette failed to fit the idea of building a labour party
on British lines. La Follette was a politician whose political culture was rooted in midwestern progressivism, which had had more than a few links with the agrarian populism
of the late-nineteenth century, and whose entire political growth had been within the
Republican Party.44 But as Croly, for all his overt siding with progressivism, remarked in
an article on the eve of the presidential elections, “The old Wisconsin program is allied to
the present program of the Progressives, but it was a program of middle-class legislative
reform, such as one of the existing parties could conceivably frame and carry out … The
re-organization of American railroads, finance, industry and agriculture in the interest
of improved production, diminished waste and of increased participation in the control
and conduct of economic processes by the workers is a very different matter from the
task which Mr. La Follette faced in Wisconsin.”45 There, his political activities had the
sole aim of struggling against monopolies. In 1924, however, in a phase of economic
expansion, salary increases, and of greater public acknowledgement of the “central” role
of industrial organisation, there was a lack of consensus surrounding this issue.
The progressive intellectuals believed that the Labour model provided an answer to
any lurking doubts over the functioning of the progressive movement, as well as to the
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future of liberalism itself which, to survive, would have to reform itself and take stock
of the changing social conditions. The individual as a cell in the social hive had given
place to groups, associations, organized interests. Conflict was the dynamic factor behind
society – though it could turn destructive – and the main conflict was between capital
and labor. New forms of control needed to be found, but, equally, new room for the new
bodies of social representation.
However, as Laski had pointed out back in 1919, the Labour Party had arisen in a
precise historical context and could not be exported. All attempts to apply it to the U.S.
situation must be fraught with disaster.46
The political background of the farmers in the West, the worker unions and the
progressive intellectuals were in some respects antithetical: they rested on quite different
visions of what America was or should be. How could one reconcile the idea of a democratic, almost Jeffersonian, America, based on the image of a (white, male) property-owning individual, with the technocratic vision of Croly, the pluralism of John Dewey and
social workers like Francis Kelley? The history of the agrarian and the worker movements
is one of misunderstanding and divergent goals, as the 1896 defeat of the People’s Party
had shown. This does not mean that no common strategies existed. Elizabeth Sanders has
shown how many of the progressive reforms were outcomes of the action of farmers and
workers and, indeed, that “the farmer-labor political alliance did succeed in constructing
a rudimentary interventionist state that limited corporate prerogative in ways that seemed
genuinely frightening to capitalists at the time.”47 In her opinion: “Here, then, lies the
paradox of Progressive Era state expansion: driven by social movements deeply hostile to
bureaucracy, it produced a great bureaucratic expansion.”48 However, Sanders observes
how the diverse strategies and objectives, different modes of organization and degrees of
internal cohesion, along with the rigidity of the political system, all generated technical
difficulties in assertion on the national level. For her, “The farmer-labor alliance could and
did flourish within states in the periphery and diverse regions, but it could not sustain
an effective cross-regional alliance in national politics. Labor was caught in a political
economy that produced and sustained a two-party system, with one party dominated by
core capital and the other by periphery farmers. Workers could not comfortably ally with
either, and this realization was the major reason for labor’s apolitical, voluntarist strategy.”
It is not by chance that the activity of one of the strongest local parties, the Minnesota
Farmer-Labor Party, continued throughout the 1940s.49
Moreover, one feature of the worker movement was to play a crucial role. The
American worker movement had a history of inner conflict based quite as much on racial
and ethnic tension as on skilled versus unskilled workers. Against a background of high
social mobility, the relaxing of hierarchies and ongoing waves of immigration, “‘the making of the American working class’ was a process that occurred many times, rather than
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once.” According to Foner, “The constant redefinition and traditions had to be rebuilt
and battles refought over and over again.”50
Fairly clearly, the more structural kind of explanation of why the Labour Party bid
failed – without making recourse to an exceptionalist interpretation – is not far removed
from those of American and European scholars, in particular Eric Foner and Arnaldo
Testi.51 Keeping to the issues most closely connected to the period under examination,
it is useful to explore certain factors that may explain how part of the progressive movement failed to redefine a model of liberalism on lines more sensitive to social justice and
economic redistribution. Here, I can only refer to them briefly, given the complexity of
each issue.
The first factor involves redefining the American political system with its two main
parties. In some respects, the progressive intellectuals were right in claiming that one could
not rely on a federal and state “progressive block” or the formation of a transversal force:
a party needed to be set up, since there was less and less space inside the republican and
democratic Parties.52 However, this conviction clashed with the strong anti-party sentiment
that had distinguished many members of the progressive camp. An anti-party culture
had led to the launching of some progressive electoral reforms (registration, primaries,
etc.) whose outcomes were different from those expected. The case of the primaries is
emblematic in this respect: some reformers were sceptical of the need to found a third
party since the progressive movement could already exploit the instrument provided by
the primaries to influence the majority parties. In the debate organised by the League for
Industrial Democracy, for example, this was the main bone of contention between Morris
Hillquit, who favoured the Labor Party, and Edward Keating, who opposed it because, in
his view, a strong movement would in any case be able to impose a “pro-labor”candidature
within the Republican Party, without running the risk of dispersing votes.53 Instead, the
reforms in question ended up reinforcing the institutional monopolization of the two
main parties and the gradual loss of space for eventual third parties, especially on the
local and state levels, as well as constituting a factor determining the downward curve of
electoral participation, which, unsurprisingly, was becoming evident in the early 1920s.54
The vote for women also tended to militate in a negative direction, in spite of the strong
participation and important role played by several well known female reformers and social
workers. Once again, efforts were undermined by the female political tradition that had
grown up and flourished mainly outside of the party system. In this context, moreover,
it is worth noting how the founding principles on which the party culture was built
were themselves undergoing modification, as highlighted by John Gerring. Within the
Republican Party, the national and “statist” vision, had been based on the principles of
the work ethic and the call for national harmony that, in turn, invoked harmony between
capitalists and workers. This was giving way to an “anti-state” vision, centred upon the
assertion of the concept of liberty against all forms of state interference and organised
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interests (including special interest groups like trade unions) and of equality of opportunities. The new vision was sustained by a populist rhetoric increasingly invoking figures
such as the “average man,” “small man,” “small farmers,” forms of civil life (community,
participation, voluntary associations, the family), or making recourse to religion as the
bulwark of civil society against state power and the temptations of communism.55 In the
period between 1896 and 1948, the Democratic Party had in fact experienced an increasing adhesion to a “populist” vision which, while favouring government regulation and a
redistribution of wealth, was essentially anti-monopolistic in character and rhetorically
centered on the people’s struggle to defend their rights against political and economic
élites56 (even if New Deal agencies, like the National Recovery Agency and Agricultural
Adjustment Agency, ended up favoring processes of economic centralization).
Against such a background it is now obvious that La Follette’s progressive rhetoric
against the monopolies, invoking the common people’s struggle against “special interests”
in particular, differed hardly at all from the two main parties’ slogans.
To counter the problem, as underlined also by comments published in the progressive magazines, The New Republic and The Nation, it was necessary to increase the
emphasis on the party’s attributes of opposition and “class interest,” making reference to
a series of principles, values and concepts that would foreground the project’s “alternative” character, albeit within the democratic framework. The failure to do so was due to
two main factors. Firstly, except for the labor leaders closest to the socialist movement,
many political exponents supporting a labor party were figures who were born into and
fully shared the party-based political culture, in particular that of the Republican Party.
Secondly, the concept of class, even when invoked by progressive intellectuals like Croly,
was unable to function as a suitable binder in the political and economic context of the
American post-war scenario.
It could hardly be otherwise. After the “red scare” – another factor in the defeat – anticommunism was used as the touchstone for deciding who was in and who out of the
democratic order – who was American and who could be called “un-American,” quite
apart from their political allegiance.57 It was no accident that La Follette himself had
immediately to declare his anti-communist stance.58 At the same time, in the American
Review of Reviews, the labour leader Arthur Hendersen was described as a politician
who “is in appearance, manner, and habit of thought a typical bourgeois. ‘Respectable
middle class’ is the label which exactly suits him, despite the fact that he began life as a
youth in an iron foundry.”59
In fact, even as early as 1919, one of the reasons favouring the creation of a labor
party, also supported by part of the trade union sector, was that of avoiding the accusations of being “a foreign thing,” or worse as an “anti-american” thing, to use the terms of
the Supreme Court with regard to the AFL.60 John F. McNamara of the Brotherhood of
Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen’s Magazine affirmed: “The term ‘Socialist’ … has
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been obnoxious to certain working class elements, who eagerly accept public ownership
of public utilities, and natural resources, cooperative production… It seems to me …
that the thing to do would be to inaugurate a general political and economic movement,
under a new name …” Stuart Chase, founder of the Fabian Club of Chicago, agreed: “the
radicals should come in to the Labor Party – as in England. Socialism under any other
name would smell as sweet.”61 A labor party, one that aspired not to control of workers
but to the establishment of an “industrial democracy” and “self-government in the workshop,” appealed to American “values,” was expression to a “working-class Americanism,”
as defined by Gary Gerstle.62 Paradoxically, however, this negated any hypothesis based
on a concept of “class” that was not generally understood as an ensemble of “productive
orders,” in the populist sense or in the tradition of the Knights of Labor.
Neither is it a coincidence that the Cleveland Convention of 1924, like many others,
opened with the chairman announcing a reading of the Declaration of Independence and
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.63 In the same year, the Harvard professor, Robert De C.
Ward, in a letter to President Calvin Coolidge on the implementation of the restrictive
immigration law, the Johnson-Reed Act, wrote: “in signing the immigration bill you have
approved one of the most important measures which has ever been put upon our statute
book. You have lived up to the words of your Message of last December, that America
must be kept American.”64
The palpable and intense patriotic hysteria of the war years – which led to the inclusion of the “philo-bolshevik” Jane Addams and American suffragette Carrie Chapmat
Catt on a sort of blacklist (the so-called “Spider Web Chart”)65 – still held considerable
sway, and the proof of patriotic fealty continued to be a pre-requisite in order to obtain
the seal of political legitimation. Once again, the contrast between the American and
British contexts is revealing. It was not that Great Britain was immune to the effects of
the war, or to an ensuing climate that was similar to the “red scare” (as shown by the
case of Zinoviev’s letters). Nonetheless, American observers could not help but wonder
that McDonald, accused only a few years previously of being a cowardly traitor and proGerman pacifist, could now be found occupying the place that had formerly belonged to
Lloyd George and Bonar Law, a fact that was perceived as a sign of British “difference” and
“superiority.”66 Neither was it by chance that British observers, including those of labour
sympathies, who might therefore have viewed the American experiment in a favourable
light, in reality focused their comments much more on the political and cultural climate
and on tendencies that they interpreted with growing concern.67
“Good-bye to the land where Liberals are thought dangerous, and Radicals show
red! Where Mr. Gomper is called a Socialist, and Mr. Asquith would seem advanced!,”
announced Britain’s The Nation in an article of 4 March 192268. It was an ironic statement that served to demonstrate the Englishman’s profound incomprehension of what
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he saw as the entirely unfounded American fear of radicalism. It leads us into our final
remarks on the failure of the progressive movement and its results.
The period of lapse between the First World War and the years of the “red scare” saw
the soldering of the nexus between patriotism/loyalty to the anti-communist constitution
that would operate as the cornerstone for the construction of the American model, whose
expression was to attain its culmination during the Cold War.
The British intellectual and keen observer, John A. Hobson, provided a sharp exposition of the situation in a series of articles published in Britain’s The Nation in 1920.
There is no doubt that his analysis of America’s political, social and cultural climate was
influenced by the sociological thought of Graham Wallas and others: precisely in those
years, they had adopted Gustave Le Bon’s negative and distorted concept of the “crowd,”
in order to analyse phenomena that militated so strongly against liberal rationalism. For
them it was the only concept that was able to explain the phenomena of intolerance, the
questioning of civil liberties and “nativism,” and the only one that could explain why
America was, yes, “the land of liberty,” although “not because everyone is free to think
and speak and do as he likes, but because he is free to conform to the accepted standards
of thought, expression and conduct.”69
On patriotism in particular, Hobson continues: “America is not the only country
where the war has helped patriotism to take over the discarded vestments and ritual of a
faded supernaturalism, and to turn on to the fields of political and economic conservatism
the sentiments of piety and intolerance. But a certain naive abandon in all emotional
expressions makes America the best exponent of this patriotism. I use this name because
the gathering of conservative and reactionary forces, whose chief objective is the retention of economic power in the hands of the present owning and controlling classes,
represents to others and to themselves a loyalty to the constitution and government of
their country.” For Hobson, the problem did not so much reside in the proliferation of
intolerance or in the criminalization of any form of opposition, but in the fact that all
this was widely accepted or borne with resignation. In his opinion, the reasons for such
attitudes stemmed, on the one hand, from a sort of impatience towards “disturbing elements,” so strong as to turn a deaf ear to the rights of expression of minorities or of dissents, and on the other, from what he saw as “the transfer of religious spirit of reverence
and intolerance from theology into the field of politics.” It was this spirit that impelled
the chairman of Republican National Committee to declare: “There is in this country
a religious faith which believes in the divine origin of the Constitution of the United
States.” However, as demonstrated by Beard, the Constitution was not only a political
document, but also an economic document invested with the duty to defend the principles of private property considered a right antecedent to the state. Therefore, Hobson
concluded: “Here is a key to the ‘divine origin’ of the Constitution, and to the feeling of
‘good Americans’ that anybody who disturbs what they regard as ‘fundamental private
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rights of property’ is a traitor and a sacrilegious person. … Hence the necessity to include
under the category of Red, Radical, Bolshevik, the entire Labor movement of America.”
And, finally, “Everywhere to-day Labor is challenging the capitalist control of industry.
In America the attempt is being made to identify patriotism with capitalism. This is no
private interpretation of my own. Here is the definition of Americanism recently given
by the editor of ‘The Metropolitan’ – ‘You cannot be against the Capitalist system and
stand for America: you cannot apologise for that system or feel ashamed of it and still be
a good American. You cannot indeed be a good American, in the sense of being loyal to
American tradition, unless you are proud of the Capitalistic system.’”70
It was the political and intellectual trap of American identity from which the progressive exponents were unable to free themselves, or which they sought to foil by shifting
the terrain of conflict resolution from the political and social sphere to the technocratic
and managerial one.
The aforementioned concept of class, which comes up in the articles of Croly and
others, was intended as a means of analysing social conflict, making it an element of the
social dynamic, but it too had to be immediately exorcised in order to bring the analysis
from the category of class back within the sphere of the rational individual intrinsic to
liberal ideology. Such was the destiny of the class analysis which, according to American
progressives, should have resolved class conflict itself. This was the knife-edge along which
progressive intellectuals inched their way in trying to combine the reality of conflict with
the target of integrating it into the participatory workings of democracy. Thus it was with
John Dewey and Mary Parker Follett, for example.
It was a way of re-affirming the American “exception,” with its separate and diverse
identity from that of Europe. However, such efforts were unable to resist the entrepreneurial strategies of great American capital. In fact, once the post-war crisis was resolved, the
forces of U.S. capitalism moved along lines that, together with a real repression of social
conflict, opened up new forms of social control and power. Thanks to new techniques
of communications and persuasion harnessed from advertising by the big corporations,
the final goal was now to “build public sympathy for the whole gamut of big manufacturers as promoters of welfare and progress in evolving democratic society.”71 At the
same time to convert workers from citizens (or potential citizens) into consumers. Was
not consumption already claimed to be “the best antidote to ‘revolution’, the ‘school of
liberty’, a ‘way of participating in industrial government’ by the masses, ‘voting’ for such
and such a product?”72
Moreover, in construing the concept of class and class solidarity in the United States,
one could hardly miss the connection with race, ethnicity and gender. Failing to make
this very close connection, the progressive ideal and its cherished new forms of social
cooperation foundered. In the American context the labour target of joining up hand and
brain could not be anything like as strong a bond for the alternative political identity.73
151
The conflicts were not just economic, as American progressive intellectuals loved to think:
they were seen from and stoked by a cultural matrix.
Though workers and immigrants from Europe could gain political citizenship quite
early on, unlike the situation in Europe, their political identity as wage-earners and/or
immigrant citizens was always being tested on the touchstone of race and ethnic background, their degree of “whiteness.” This happened to the Irish half-way through the
nineteenth century,74 and above all to immigrants from south-eastern Europe, seen as
“whites” by the courts and hence entitled to political citizenship, but continually called
on by politicians, the press, reformers and scientists to prove “their racial fitness and their
ability to function as Americans,”75
It is interesting to note how British observers, particularly those close to the Labour
Party, were most keenly aware of such issues, as revealed in commentaries on the 1924
elections, for example, where they warned of the role of the Ku Klux Klan in determining
the political equilibrium, especially within the Democratic Party.76
Wartime and after were a period not only of social conflict, but one when anticommunism combined with nativism and racism in a bid to demarcate citizenship
and redefine the “internal others” inside the political and constitutional framework.77
Paradoxically, by embracing the principles of “industrial democracy,” the progressives
managed to avoid facing up to conflicts that their intellectual brethren, who proclaimed
the values of rationality, efficiency and control, were incapable of tackling. Hopes of a
new political and social order had foundered as nationalistic conflict broke out abroad,
following the botched Versailles Conference, and at home in the form of flaring race
riots, prohibitionism and nativism. While the cultural arena was stocked with irrational
actors – ethnic and racial groups, religious sects run more on lines of passion and instinct
than interest – the economic scene had rational actors – the state, capital, labour – cultivating interests that could be studied, analyzed and hence controlled.78 It was here that
the progressive intellectuals were able to deploy their armaments, on the assumption, as
Frederic Howe put it, that “the problem of immigration, like the problem of America,
is the re-establishment of economic democracy.”79
The only voice raised on the subject of race and ethnicity as a millstone round the
American political system’s neck, thereby crushing the hopes of a third party finding any
elbow-room, was that of the black intellectual, W.E.B. Du Bois. This of course was no
mere coincidence. Du Bois pointed out how the fact that 90% of those legally entitled
in the South were deprived of the right to vote had a pernicious effect on the whole
system of representation, as well as on the political balance among various sections of
the country.80
His article was not picked up by any correspondent of the two journals. Quite the
reverse: an article dated November 5th 1924 analyzing the Democratic Party crisis, which
was partly due to tensions caused by connections with the Ku Klux Klan (“a distracting
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battle”), claimed: “A federal party of the Democratic type … is bound to over-emphasize
conflicts over such issues as the Ku Klux Klan, the personal ambitions of candidates, and
remote foreign policies. A truly Progressive party, formed by a coalition of economic
rather than local groups, would tend to suppress the minor and transitory issues and seeks
its unity in broad economic policies.”81 After the 1924 elections, Croly wrote that the
success of efforts by American and British progressives could only be measured by “their
ability to precipitate issues and start ferments in Britain and American public opinion
which will broaden and intensify the present limited demand for intellectual honesty,
moral integrity and humane ideals in politics.” A pedagogic task, therefore, designed to
prevent liberalism from rising to that ideal of democracy and social justice which so many
of its adherents aspired to.
The failure of the progressive attempt to set up a Labour Party was thus part and
parcel of a greater defeat: the failure of American progressive liberalism to break down the
visible and invisible barriers of citizenship. It is not possible here to extend the analysis
to the period after the 1920s, but this inability to overcome the barriers of ethnicity and
race was also to characterise the progressive liberal revival of the 1930s. As Gary Gerstle
observes, “the way in which liberal intellectuals and reformers defined membership in
the American ‘folk’ reveals the marginality of ethnicity and race in 1930s discourse. The
1930s concept of the ‘folk’ or the ‘people’ referred to Americans … whose freedom from
capitalist contamination endowed them with the strength to endure the Depression and
to inspire the fight for cultural and political renewal. Liberals might have found such
‘folk’ in ethnic communities … But liberals rarely thought in these terms. Their ‘folk’
were usually native-born Yankees or white southerners whose families, over the course
of generations, had sunk deep roots into American soil.”82
The defeat of progressive liberalism in the 1920s also affected the will to maintain a
dialogue with Europe that had characterised progressive intellectuals prior to the war, a
dialogue that the constant reference to the Labour model tried to keep open. Both immediately before the war as well as after, the reciprocal perspectives of the United States
and Great Britain had tended to accentuate the open-mindedness and greater attention
towards world affairs of the United States, as opposed to the blinkered view of an imperial
power, like Great Britain, which looked upon the rest of the world with complacency,
entrenched within the sense of its own moral and cultural superiority. The comments
of a sharp intellectual like Randolph Bourne offer important testimony of this state of
affairs:83 “we get a very much idealized picture of England from sentimentalists like F.C.
Howe with their picture of England advancing to State Socialism of rapid strides, of an
honest, wise, capable nation, making itself over in the modern spirit as a model to all nations. As a matter of fact, the Liberals seem to be the most casual collection of divergent
views, society is split up into all sorts of fantastic little intellectual groups, who make no
attempt to understand each other; a country more than ordinarily destitute of imagina153
tion it seems to me.”84 Along with Bourne, Albert Shaw, editor of the American Review
of Reviews, also observed that “In a single week there is more British and European news
in the New York Times, to name one typical American newspaper, than there is American
news in many British newspapers during six months, if not an entire year.”85
Other more worrying considerations were instead raised by British intellectuals in the
months leading up to the presidential election of 1924. In an article appearing in British
review, The Nation, entitled “The American Intelligentsia,” the philosopher Bertrand
Russell homed in on two tendencies that distinguished the America of 1924 from the one
he had observed ten years before. The first regarded the world of academia and research,
caught in a twin-vice between a process of bureaucratization and professionalization, and
increasingly under the thumb of financiers, which meant not only economic, but also
political control: “In the South and in some parts of the Middle West, Protestantism is
as fierce as in Belfast, and the whole intellectual atmosphere is reminiscent of the seventeenth century… Hence the all but successful attempts to make it illegal to teach evolution in certain States. In the East, in some States, the Catholics are sufficiently powerful
to enforce an Inquisition on State teachers.” The second related to an economic growth
that was destined, however, to translate into a new form of tyranny. In this context, the
American intelligentsia, which enjoyed so much freedom on the private and social levels,
was subjected to “complete public enslavement.” There existed no hope of a revolution
in America: paradoxically, the only revolutionary movement was the Ku Klux Klan. Like
Russia, the United States was a society of “pious peasants,” which had never engendered
those communities and groups, like those of Europe’s medieval anarchy, who, in the
struggle between papacy and empire, between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, had managed
to carve out spaces of autonomy and independence. The United States was a country in
which the individual was no more than a citizen obliged to obey the will of the majority, and where the community itself paradoxically became an element of oppression of
individualism.86 Russell’s analysis is in some ways ruthless; in others it tends to be subject
to prejudices that actually prevent him from grasping the reality of what was a complex
process. The cult of administration vilified by the British philosopher was in reality
functional to the project of the construction of a mass society and to the technocratic
resolution of conflicts. That the sum result was a deficit in democracy was the subject of
denouncement among American reformers and intellectuals, like John Dewey.
Russell’s reference to the emergence of the fundamentalist phenomenon (the Scopes
Trial was held in 1925) and to the nativism and racism of the Ku Klux Klan refers to
symptoms of America’s turning in on herself, and of a split in the trans-Atlantic community that was difficult to reverse. If Russell may be considered an occasional observer, the
same cannot be said of Harold Laski, who represented by definition the trait d’union of
the two shores of the Atlantic. Yet, in an article of 1924, the tones adopted by Laski are
no less concerned: “a foreigner observer … finds that where a century and a half, even a
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century ago, liberal-minded Europe looked to America for inspiration, today the Europe
most concerned with the acceptance of American ideals represents all that is most narrow and reactionary. Where, even fifty years ago, the characteristic of American life was
its amazing variety, what is outstanding today is the deliberate effort of the forces of law
and order to frame whatever there is of a variety in a fixed and predetermined pattern.
There has been invented a system of dogmas, narrow and ignorant and crude, preached
with all the fierce intensity of a medieval superstition.” 87
It was not that there had been a lack of warnings: La Follette, in the political sphere,
the Faculty of Law (Oliver W. Holmes, Felix Frankfurter) in the academic sphere; but
industrialists were still to become convinced “that the necessary result of democratic
control in politics is democratic control in industry.” Undoubtedly, the United States
had a clear potential to assume the role of world leadership, but this could only occur
providing there were profound modifications of its political and social system.
In Russell one perceives the deep-seated conviction of Britain’s spiritual and moral
superiority. He would probably have convened with the conclusions of the American correspondent of The Nation, Nevinson, who in 1922 proclaimed: “Good bye Americans! I
am going to a land very much like yours. I am going to your spiritual home.”88 In Laski,
however, one confronts the sensation of a parting of ways that was inexorably reproducing
itself. In any case, the theoretical bonds between British and American liberals were more
tenuous than apparent on the surface, and the differences regarded precisely the nexus
between equality and freedom. In the interwar years, for many British liberals, the concept
of equality eventually prevailed over that of freedom; especially for left-leaning liberals,
only equality supplied the means for expressing the individual’s personality, allowing his
growth along with that of the community, and strengthening the harmony between the
two.89 Conversely, in American progressive thought, the concept of equality maintained
the meaning of equality of opportunities. It was an instrumental conception of equality,
defined by Freeden as minimalist and “limited,” which explains its uncertain position in
American development.90 It was also at the origin of the different interpretations of the
concept of “welfare state” in Great Britain and the United States – more universalistic, in
the British case, linked to a sense of “collective morality;” more tied in with the “ethical
chain of work-provision-security,” in the American version.91
In this perspective, the years 1924-25 effectively represent a watershed in transAtlantic relations, even if, rather than marking the rise of Christian fundamentalism in
the U.S., they signalled the commencement of the liberal and technocratic experiment.
They were, nonetheless, the years that paved the way for the reversal of Atlantic relations
and laid the foundations for the construction of what in U.S. political thought ended up
becoming a true western liberal model, in which the concept of “western” replaced that
of “Anglo-Americanism” or “Anglo-Saxonism,” casting off their trans-Atlantic dialectic
connotations, to assume a hegemonic meaning modelled on the American experience.
155
Neither Great Britain, nor certainly Europe, would any longer be perceived as the
“spiritual home” of the United States, while liberalism had to take care of itself, primarily by securing its ties with the deep roots of the American political tradition, even if it
involved the risk of condemning itself to an obligatory renegotiation of its own legitimacy
in order to avoid its exclusion from the “circle of we.”
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∗ I wish to thank for their suggestions and comments: Tiziano Bonazzi, Ferdinando Fasce, Ronald P.
Formisano, Michael Freeden, Robert Garson, Anna Maria Martellone, Lord Kenneth O. Morgan. I am also
very grateful to both co-researchers in the network, and foreign and Italian participants in the final conference
for their enriching remarks on this work. All responsibility for the content of this contribution is nonetheless
my own.
1. On the category of political transfer, see the important conference held at Groningen, which represents
a first attempt to define this category: Political Transfer. The Use of Foreign Examples in Politics, c. 1789-1960,
International Conference in Groningen, The Netherlands, 14-16 January 2004. See also, Henk te Velde,
Political Transfer - An Introduction, “European Review of History,” 12, 2 (July 2005), 205-221. A part of the
contributions presented at the conference are currently in print. I presented the preliminary results of this
research at the Groningen conference, Why is there no Labour Party in the U.S.A.? The American Political and
Intellectual Debate in the 1920s.
2. On the concept of Anglo-Saxonism see Anna Maria Martellone, “Ideologia di un’appartenenza: ‘anglosassonismo’ and ‘Anglo-Saxondom’ nel discorso pubblico angloamericano (1895-1917),” Passato e Presente,
XII, 31 (1994), 41-59.
3. Kenneth O. Morgan, “The Future at Work: Anglo-American Progressivism 1890-1917,” in Contrast and
Connection. Bicentennial Essays in Anglo-American History, eds. H.C. Allen and Roger Thompson (London,
1976), 256.
4. Bryce to Dicey, June 28, 1918 in J. Bryce Papers, Ms Bryce 4 (8/2 mic.), Bodleian Library Archives,
Oxford, U.K.
5. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings. Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1998),
276; Charles Forcey, The Crossroad of Liberalism. Croly, Weyl, Lippmann and the Progressive Era 1900-1925
(New York, 1961).
6. Labor and the New Social Order. A Report on Reconstruction by the Sub-Committee of the British Labor
Party, “The New Republic,” XIV, 172 (February 16th, 1918).
7. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 315.
8. Sidney Webb, The Re-Organization of the British Labor Party, “The New Republic,” 13-14 (Dec. 8, 1917),
149-152.
9. On Laski, see: Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, Harold Laski. A Life on the Left (London, 1993).
See, also, Raffaella Baritono, “Un intellettuale di fronte alla crisi di legittimazione degli anni Venti: Harold
Laski fra ‘body politic’ e modello federale americano,” in Crisi, legittimazione, consenso, ed. Paolo Pombeni
(Bologna, 2003), 183-234.
10. British and American Labor, “The New Republic,” 13-14 (Feb. 16, 1918), 69-70.
11. Ibid., 71.
12. See among others, Morton White, Social Thought in America. The Revolt Against Formalism (New York,
1952); Christopher Lasch, True and Only Heaven. Progress and Its Critics (New York, 1991); Louis Menand,
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York, 2002).
13. John Dewey, A New Social Science, “The New Republic,” 13-14 (April 6, 1918), 292-294.
14. A United Labor Party, “The Nation,” 107, 2776 (1918), 284.
15. Alan Dawley, Changing the World. American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton and Oxford,
2003), 262.
16. The Whitley Councils, industrial advisory boards that could be either national or local, were so named
because they were set up on the recommendations of a report drawn up by the Member of Parliament,
J.H. Whitley in 1917. See Adrian Room, Dictionary of Britain (Oxford, 1986), 331.
157
17. How Would Such a Scheme Work in America? A Symposium, comment on an article by Malcom Sparkes,
Planning the New Industrial Order. What the Building Trades Parliament of Britain is Doing, “The World
Tomorrow,” 11, 12, (December 1919), 320-326.
18. Dawley, Changing the World, 263.
19. Cited in Ibid., 263.
20. Ibid., 264.
21. Ibid., 272.
22. On the concept of enemy in American history, see: Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase and Ursula Lehmkuhl,
eds., Enemy Images in American History (Providence-Oxford, 1997).
23. Dawley, Changing the World, 274
24. Emergency Plans White, cit. in Ibid., p. 275.
25. Eugene M. Tobin, Organize or Perish. America’s Independent Progressives, 1913-1933 (New York, 1986),
101-102 ff.
26. Cit. in Nathan Fine, Labor and Farmers Parties in the United States 1828-1928 (New York, 1928) 379.
27. See for example Harry W. Laidler, The American Labor and Socialist Parties. Competition or Cooperation?,
“The Intercollegiate Socialist,” VII, 4 (April-May 1919), 7-15, reprinted in “Labor Age,” 6-7 (1917-19)
(New York, 1968).
28. Charles Merz, Enter: The Labor Party, “The New Republic,” 21-22 (Dec. 10, 1919), 53-55.
29. Tobin, Organize or Perish, 111.
30. Herbert Croly, The Eclipse of Progressivism, “The New Republic,” 24-25 (October 27, 1920), 210-216.
31. League for Industrial Democracy, News-Bulletin, I, 1 (Dec. 1922) reprinted in L.I.D. Monthly, League
for Industrial Democracy, 1-10 (1922-1932) (Westport, Conn., 1970); George Soule, The Intellectual and
the Labor Movement (New York, 1923), reprinted in The League for Industrial Democracy. A Documentary
History, eds. Bernard K. Johnpoll, Mark R. Yerburgh (Westport, Conn.-London, England, 1980), 165-187.
See also, Kenneth Campbell, The Progressive Movement of 1924 (New York, 1966, 1947); Rose L. Martin,
Fabian Freeway. High Road to Socialism in the USA 1884-1966 (Chicago, 1966).
32. Harold Laski, The Alternative to Revolution in England, “The Nation,” 112 (Feb. 9, 1921), 205.
34. The Third Party Is Born, “The Nation,” 115 (Nov. 22, 1922), 541.
35. In “The Nation” a brief chronology of events was given in an article in two parts: Benjamin Stolberg,
Third Party Chances, I. Backgrounds, 1918-1922, “The Nation,” 118, 3065 (April 2, 1923), 364-367 and
Id., Third Party Chances. II 1923, Now – and After, “The Nation,” 118, 3067 (April 16, 1923), 422-424.
36. The Lesson of the British Elections, “The Nation,” 115, Nov. 29, 1922, p. 568.
37. His Majesty’s Labor Government, “The Nation,” 118 (Jan. 9, 1924), 24.
38. Henry W. Massingham, British Labor Celebrates Victory, “The Nation,” 118 (Feb. 6, 1924), 135.
39. La Follette, Dictator, “The Nation,” 118 (April 2, 1924), 360.
40. Can There be a New Party?, “The New Republic,” 41 (Nov. 26, 1924), 3-5.
41. Ibid., p. 4.
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42. R.H. Tawney, The British Election and After, “The New Republic,” 40 (Nov. 5, 1924), 249; The British
Elections, “The New Republic,” 40 (Nov. 12, 1924), 264-65; England’s Choice, “The Nation,” 119 (Nov. 12,
1924), 511. See also Frank H. Simonds, Elections in Europe and at Home, “The American Review of Reviews,”
70, 6 (December 1924), 611-620.
43. Election Results in the Northwest, “The New Republic,” 41 (Nov. 26, 1924), 13-14.
44. David P. Thelen, Robert La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit (Madison, 1976).
45. Herbert Croly, Why I shall vote for La Follette, “The New Republic,” 40 (Oct. 29, 1924), 221-224.
46. Marc Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State. Ideologies of Reform in the United States
and Britain, 1909-1926 (Oxford, 2002), 165.
47. Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform. Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (Chicago &
London, 1999), 5.
48. Ibid., 390.
49. Ibid., 413-14.
50. Eric Foner, Why Is There no Socialism in the United States?, in Why Is There no Socialism in the United
States/Pourquoi n’y a-t-il pas de socialisme aux Etats-Unis, eds. Jean Heffer & Jeanine Rovet (Paris, 1988), 60.
51. Foner, Why Is There no Socialism in the United States?; Arnaldo Testi, Perchè negli Stati Uniti non c’è
il socialismo?, in A. Testi, Trionfo e declino dei partiti politici negli Stati Uniti, 1860-1930 (Turin, 2000),
137-198.
52. Herbert Croly, The Outlook for Progressivism in Politics, “The New Republic,” 41 (Dec. 10, 1924), 60-64;
The Sickness of American Politics, “The New Republic,” 38-39 (July 23, 1924), 222-224.
53. Morris Hillquit-Edward Keating, Shall a Labor Party Be Formed? “The New republic,” (15 April 1923).
54. See for example Arthur M. Schlesinger, Erik McKinley Eriksson, The Vanishing Voter, “The New Republic,”
40 (Oct. 15, 1924), 162-167. There is a considerable bibliography on these themes, see among other Martin
Shefter, Political Parties and the State. The American Historical Experience (Princeton, 1994); John Bibby and
L. Sandy Maisel, Two Parties- or More? The American Party System (Boulder, Co., 2003, 1998).
55. John Gerring, Party Ideologies in America, 1828-1996 (Cambridge, 1998), 125-158.
56. Ibid., 189.
57. Jonathan Hansen, The Lost Promise of Patriotism. Debating American Identity, 1890-1920 (Chicago,
2003).
58. The history of anti-communism in the United States really dates back to the 1870s, when “The Paris
Commune of 1870-71 and the great railroad strikes of 1877 had turned vague fears of working-class revolution into reality.” See Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes. McCarthyism in America (Princeton, 1999), 48.
59. Frank Dilton, Labor’s Leadership in Britain, “The American Review of Reviews,” 63, 5 (May 1921),
505-508.
60. Louis F. Budenz, La Follette’s Victory, “Labor Age,” XIII, 9 (December 1924), 3.
61. The American Labor and Socialist Parties, 9 and 14.
62. Gary Gerstle, Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (Cambridge,
1989). See also Joseph A. McCartin, Labor’s Great War. The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins
of Modern American Labor Relations, 1912-1921 (Chapel Hill and London, 1997), 7 ff.
63. Louis F. Budenz, The Challenge Accepted, “Labor Age,” XIII, 7 (August 1924), 1-9.
159
64. Quoted in Desmond King, In the Name of Liberalism. Illiberal Social Policy in the United States and Britain
(Oxford-New York, 1999), 129. On the issues of immigration and nativism after 1924, see: Mae M. Ngai,
Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, 2004).
65. Quoted in Marina Tesoro, “La partecipazione italiana all’ ‘International Woman Suffrage Alliance’,”
in Salvatore Morelli (1824-1880): emancipazionismo e democrazia nell’Ottocento europeo, ed. Ginevra Conti
Odorisio (Roma, 1990) 409 and Hansen, The Lost Promise.
66. Maurice H. Dobb, His Majesty’s Government, “Labor Age,” 13, 8 (October 1924), 5-7.
67. Attention for the American attempt to set up a Labor Party on the British model is more pronounced
in the years 1919-20 than in the subsequent period. La Follette’s effort is commented purely in terms of the
possibility of creating a breach in the American bi-partisan system. See for 1919 Labour in America, “The
New Statesman,” 13 (May 17, 1919), 160-161; Labour in America II., “The New Statesman,” 13 (May 24,
1919), 182-183.
68. Henry W. Nevinson, Farewell to America, “The Nation & The Athenaum,” 30 (March 4, 1922), 821.
69. John A. Hobson, The Good American. I. The American Attitude towards Liberty, “The Nation,” 26 (Feb. 7,
1920), 633-635.
70. John A. Hobson, The Good American. III. He Sees Red, “The Nation,” 26 (Feb. 21, 1920), 698-700.
71. Daria Frezza, La fragilità della democrazia americana, “Parolechiave,” 29 (2003), 78-79. See also Daria
Frezza, Il leader, la folla, la democrazia nel discorso pubblico americano, 1880-1941 (Rome, 2001).
72. Ferdinando Fasce, La democrazia degli affari. Comunicazione aziendale e discorso pubblico negli Stati Uniti
1900-1940 (Rome, 2000), 122.
73. For the years in question the most comprehensive analysis of relations between intellectuals and the workers’ movement is George Soule, The Intellectual and the Labor Movement, “League for Industrial Democracy,”
3 (New York, 1923).
74. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York-London, 1995).
75. Gary Gerstle, Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans, “The Journal of American History,” 84, 2
(1997), 552.
76. The American Presidency, “The New Statesman,” 24 (Oct. 11, 1924), 8-9; Coolidge, Davis and La
Follette, “The New Statesman,” 24 (Nov. 1, 1924), 104-105; The Choosing of Mr. Davis, “The Nation & the
Athenaeum,” 35 (Aug. 2, 1924), 556-557.
77. Alessandra Lorini, Ai confini della libertà. Saggi di storia americana (Rome, 2001), 163 ff.
78. Gary Gerstle, The Protean Character of American Liberalism, “The American Historical Review,” 99, 4
(1994), 1043-1073.
79. Quoted in Gerstle, The Protean Character, 1055.
80. Du Bois highlighted how in the 1920 election the southern states had a right to 94 deputies for a total
of 2.175.007 votes, while western states had 24 deputies for 1.945.604 votes). W.E.B. Du Bois, The South
and a Third Party, “The New Republic,” 32-33 (Jan. 3, 1923), 138-141.
81. Barriers to Progressivism, “The New Republic,” 40 (Nov. 5, 1924), 240-242.
82. Gerstle, The Protean Character, 1068.
83. Randolph Bourne to McMahon, Dec. 23, 1913 in Bourne Papers, Columbia University Archive.
84. Randolph Bourne to Henry Elsasser, Bourne Papers, reel n. 1 correspondence A-C, Columbia University
Archive.
160
THE U.S. DISCOVERS EUROPE: LIFE MAGAZINE AND THE INVENTION
OF THE “ATLANTIC COMMUNITY” IN THE 1940s
marco mariano
In its July 19, 1943 issue, Life magazine carried an ad for Consolidated Vultee
Aircraft Corporation, popularly known as Convair, one of the major American producers of military aircrafts during World War Two. The ad was centered on a map, a northpolar projection of the world that strongly emphasized the northern hemisphere and
focused on the position of North America amid the other five continents. Shadows cast
by airplanes hovering over the earth visually suggested to Life readers that the progress
in aviation was the key to a new global era, and the text stressed that “maps like this
show us the world as it really is – a world without fences or protective barriers, a world
in which nations once remote are now clustered together in one global community …
No matter whether it fits in with our idea of geography or not, this startling truth cannot
be brushed aside: Today, because of the plane, no spot on earth is more than 60 hours flying
time from your local airport.” The ad also made it clear to the American public that this
new scenario entailed geo-political challenges and military dangers as well as economic
and cultural opportunities: “Our new maps, if they are honest maps, will clearly tell us
we can no longer cling to the old-fashioned ‘two-hemisphere’ idea of geography. For now
we know that was the kind of thinking which lulled us into a sense of security before
Pearl Harbor.” Finally, while the polar projection and the planes introduced a sense of
proximity between America and the world which explicitly evoked Wendell Willkie’s
“one-worldism,” the comment made it clear that some places were still much closer than
others from a U.S.-based vantage point: “such maps as this emphasize that the broad
Atlantic – formerly a 6-day ocean voyage – has become a millpond. ‘Breakfast in New
York, dinner in London’ is no longer the fantastic idea that it used to be.”1
Ads like this were quite common in large-circulation American magazines of the
early 1940s. They show how the war literally and metaphorically recast the place of the
United States within the world by putting an end to its hemispheric isolation and relative lack of responsibility in the world order. They also point to the sudden rise of elite
as well as popular interest in geography and cartography in wartime America, which has
been oddly underestimated by scholars of diplomatic history and U.S. foreign policy.2
Finally, the Convair ad exemplifies what geographer and historian Neil Smith has defined
as the paradox of the American Century, that is, the contradiction between “a spaceless
and a spatially constituted American globalism.” Especially in wartime, “geography was
profoundly important to the methodical construction of an American Empire that did
indeed [see] itself beyond geography.”3
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the u.s. discovers europe
I believe that the current emphasis on the American global reach, both among
historians and in the public arena, has obscured, to borrow again from Smith, “the lost
geography of the American Century.” If the network of American interests and influence across the twentieth century acquired a truly global dimension, borders separating
America from the Other, the West from the rest, still informed America’s vision of itself
and the world. This is especially true of the 1940s, a decade in which two key moments
that marked the unprecedented U.S. commitment in the international arena – the
Atlantic Charter (1941) and the Atlantic Alliance (1949) – were defined in geographical, as opposed to historical or abstract, terms. While it is obvious that World War Two
and the beginning of the Cold War accelerated the advent of an era of American global
influence, the emphasis on globalization should not lead us to downplay the fact that the
cultural, political, and strategic recasting of the U.S. in an Atlantic context during this
decade was a major turning point in twentieth-century American history. At that time,
the U.S. became part of an “entangling alliance” with western European countries, and
Americans further developed a dense network of economic and intellectual exchanges
with Europeans. More importantly, America redefined itself as the leader of “the West,”
a metageographical entity which was re-conceptualized as a transatlantic, Christian, and
white world whose appeal was supposed to be universal but whose membership was
restricted to what Walter Lippmann defined as the “Atlantic Community.”4 Such recasting of the U.S. in a transatlantic space had obvious consequences regarding the place of
Europe in American history.
. henry luce, life, and the atlantic “imagined community”
This essay focuses on the role that Life Magazine played in the invention, or cultural
construction, of the Atlantic Community as the ideological framework for the U.S.’s rise
to global dominance in the 1940s. “Ideology” is meant here in value-free terms as “an
interrelated set of convictions or assumptions that reduces the complexities of a particular
slice of reality to easily comprehensible terms and suggests appropriate ways of dealing
with that reality.”5 The transformation of the international setting that was underway in
the 1940s made ideological synthesis and simplification necessary: the rise of the U.S. to
global power had to be framed and sold to the American public in accessible, if not familiar,
terms. While Atlanticism was only one of the competing geo-historical assumptions in
the foreign policy establishment during the war, and gradually emerged as set of policies
due to the challenges posed by the postwar world, the idea of an Atlantic Community
was crucial, I argue, to make the full involvement of the U.S. in world affairs understandable and acceptable to the American public from the outset of the Second World War in
Europe. The Atlantic Community framework situated the U.S. on the world map as the
leader of a transatlantic space that included North America, western European countries,
and the dominions of the southern hemisphere of the “white settlers.” This was because
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they all supposedly shared political and economic principles and institutions (liberal
democracy, individual rights and the rule of law, free market and free trade), cultural
traditions (Christianity and, more generally, the legacy of “western civilization”) and,
consequently, national interests. Such a framework, in the end, provided the Atlantic
Alliance with respectable cultural foundations; however, it is studied here as a reflection
of deeper shifts in the historic and geographic imagination of Americans.
Several reasons account for my choice of Life Magazine as a major vehicle for the
construction and popularization of the Atlantic Community. Life was founded in 1936,
as the third pillar of Time Inc., the publishing empire of Henry Luce. Unlike the sober
newsmagazine Time, started in 1923, and the business monthly Fortune, started in 1930,
it was meant to be an all-around popular magazine providing news and amusement, history
and science, and self-conscious editorials and pictures of Hollywood starlets to a mostly
middle-class and overwhelmingly white readership. Within a few years, it came to be by
far the best selling of the Time Inc. publications. Its circulation grew dramatically in the
war years and after, from 2.86 million in 1940 to 5.45 million in 1948; as the magazine
with the highest “pass-along factor”6 in the late 1940s, it reached more than twenty-two
million people – around twenty-one percent of the American population over ten years
old. However, these remarkable numbers were hardly extraordinary; in the 1940s and
1950s, the golden age of popular magazines, rivals like Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post,
and especially Reader’s Digest equaled or surpassed Life’s circulation.
Other factors made Life unique at that time and make it now a revealing source for
a study of the ideology of U.S. foreign policy. “America’s favorite magazine” was first and
foremost a picture magazine. Its editors believed that pictures had the power to inform,
entertain, impress, and convey to the American public the new sense of direction that
they deemed necessary in times of national crisis and international turmoil. In 1936,
Luce envisioned the mission of the forthcoming magazine in his characteristic highsounding prose:
To see life, to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the
gestures of the proud; to see strange things – machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle
and on the moon; to see man’s work – his paintings, towers, and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come
to; the women that men love and many children; to see and take pleasure in seeing; to see and be
amazed; to see and be instructed.7
The quality of the photographs was one of the major concerns of publisher-editor Luce
and his staff. In a September 1946 memo calling for an improvement of the magazine,
Luce wrote: “The basic point of LIFE is pictures … The first rule of reform is that the
quality of the pictures must be stepped up … LIFE has got to have the best pictures. LIFE
has got to have a certain number of great pictures.”8 Other Life editors saw photographs
as “the most effective and direct way of getting something from the printed page into
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the mind of a reader”9 and cameras as “a powerful instrument for teaching.”10 They were
probably naïve in their assumptions about the straightforward, univocal messages that
images conveyed to the readers, as well as the readers’ response to them. As Erika Doss
points out, “they tended to assume that the magazine’s photographs could be quickly
and easily understood, and that they demonstrated a single point of view. The diverse
responses each week in the ‘Letters to the editor’ should have persuaded them otherwise.
[They] recognized … their instructive potential, but they ignored their ambiguities and
seemed unaware of the individual agency of its own readers.”11 However, both Time
Inc. and its readers shared the assumption that photographs were to be considered as
truthful and objective depictions of reality – a legacy established in previous decades by
government agencies and social reformers who relied on photography as “evidence” for
purposes of documentation.12
Although Life editors were not trained experts in photography, they believed that
pictures were the core while the text played an auxiliary, if relevant, role in photojournalism: “The picture became the main matter of the publication,” said Daniel Longwell,
one of the founding editors of Life, as he recalled the inception and early years of the
magazine, “the words ‘illuminated’ the pictures.”13 Such an emphasis on visual imagery came to influence the very definition of news: the magazine, as Luce wrote in his
“Prospectus” for Life in 1936, “is not obligated to report on all the significant news: its
obligation is to report in pictures all the significant news which the camera has succeeded
in making a pictorial record of.”14 In a few years, Time Inc. would assemble an all-star
staff of photographers composed of, among others, Margareth Bourke-White, Eugene
Smith, Alfred Eisenstaedt, and Robert Capa. Thanks to the quality of its photo-essays
and the accuracy of its print, Life acquired a unique cultural prestige and iconic status in
American newsstands and households, and set the blueprint for other successful picture
magazines like Look (1937).
With the outbreak of the war in Europe, “to see the world” became a priority for
many Americans and Life added another dimension to its visual impact through the
publication of maps aimed at familiarizing its readers with the remote places that Time
Inc. pro-war agenda was suddenly turning into crucial spots for American security. At a
time when the popular interest in geography greatly increased, magazines were among
the major suppliers of maps and atlases that, while claiming to be “true” and “honest,”
deliberately sought to distance themselves from the aura of objectivity associated with
academic and official cartography. “I try to dramatize the news of the week, not just
produce a reference map like those in an atlas,” said a Time Inc. mapmaker.15 While
such dramatization responded to the publishers’ need to captivate the readers, and the
advertisers’ need for simplification, it also allowed magazines to convey specific visions
of the place of the U.S. in the world war and to shape a new “geographic imagination”
among the American public. On the contrary, the radio obviously lacked the visual ap164
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peal of the popular press, while the daily press still relied mostly on text and was unable
to match the quality of the visual material available in magazines.
Furthermore, virtually all major American newspapers also lacked the truly national
readership of popular weeklies. I believe that the ability of mass circulation weeklies like
Life to reach a nation-wide audience is all the more significant in a study of the 1940s,
a decade that, in the words of Alan Brinkley, witnessed the effort of American leaders
– among them Henry Luce – “to redefine the nation’s relationship to the world and,
in the process, to redefine America’s sense of itself.”16 In his work on national identity
Benedict Anderson argues that print capitalism – the novel, the newspaper – “provided
the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation.” The photojournalism of the 1940s and 1950s, due to its emotionally charged visual
impact, seems to provide a powerful instrument with which to construct the national
community as a “deep, horizontal comradeship.” While photographs are widely regarded
as a guarantee of detached, factual objectivity, their success in journalism, and especially
the popular press, from the early twentieth century on is in fact largely due to their ability
to satisfy the emotional needs of a significant sector of the public opinion displaced by
the decline of traditional community ties, challenged by modernization and, from the
late 1930s, puzzled by the sudden advent of international issues in the domestic realm.
As Wendy Kozol points out in her study of Life as a vehicle of patriotism in post-war
America, “visual media have even greater capacities to visualize social norms and ideals
that form national identities … They construct an imagined community of the ‘free’ and
‘Western’ world with shared concerns about the cold war.”17
In his own way, Luce was extremely confident about the ability of Time Inc. to
provide its readership with a sense of identity and direction. The media mogul and
Presbyterian layman sought to restore through his publications a shared view of the mission
of America, which in the late 1930s he saw as endangered first by Roosevelt’s anti-business orientation and later by the events on the European front. His search for national
cohesion originated from his organic view of society, and was made more urgent by the
crisis of liberal democracy in Europe, which he interpreted as a sign of the more general
crisis of “western civilization.” To rescue and lead the West was now America’s mission; in
the process, American interests and the American model of free enterprise would expand
overseas as never before but, “despite the ostensible universalism of his global pronouncements, any reader during this period would have understood Luce’s … defense of the
civilizing project of the ‘West’ as constituting a distinct political identity.”18
Life came to be a major tool in the pursuit of this ambitious agenda, a fact alone that
sets it apart as an engaged proponent of a specific, coherent vision of the U.S.’s place in
the world from other successful periodicals like George H. Lorimer’s Saturday Evening
Post, John and Gardner Cowles’ Look, or DeWitt Wallace’s Reader’s Digest. However, it
was still primarily a publication that had to compete with its rivals to increase its share of
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readers and advertising. Luce the businessman firmly believed that “an editor’s job is to
stay ahead of his readers by three weeks, not ten years,” as he told William Schlamm, one
of his foreign policy advisers, in 1944 about the U.S. attitude toward the Soviet Union.19
Moreover, the magazine as an instrument of hegemony aimed at a broad national consensus put forth not a systematic doctrine, but a wide array of different voices that shared
the basic view of the U.S. as the coming global power and leader of the West. Walter
Lippmann’s advocacy for American activism within the framework of what he defined as
the “Atlantic Community” was the most effective of these voices because, I argue, he was
able to articulate the quest for a new place for the U.S. in the world, and for an assertive
American foreign policy, by relying on widely shared beliefs about national interest, as
well as history, geography, religion, and race.
. new jerusalem or new rome? walter lippmann’s atlantic vision
In April 1941, one month after Congress had passed the Lend-Lease Act to support
Great Britain, Life published “The Atlantic … and America,”20 a long article in which
Lippmann analyzed the growing American involvement in the ongoing European war in
light of the precedent of World War One. He presented the American “second intervention” as a fact: America was now at war for the same reason that brought her to enter the
war in 1917, that is, to counter the threat posed by Germany to security in the Atlantic
Ocean. Just like during World War One, American security was now in peril if Britain
was unable to control “the other shore.” In essence, events in Europe were crucial to
U.S. interests.
Lippmann credited Woodrow Wilson for acting under the assumption that “the
control of the Atlantic Ocean is vital to the defense of the United States and of the
whole Western Hemisphere” – a reality that “the great majority of Americans know by
instinct and by reason.” Interestingly, the New York Herald Tribune columnist and reigning pundit chose an article that he himself had written for the New Republic in 1917
to argue that hard-nosed realism, as opposed to naïve idealism, was Wilson’s original
inspiration. In that article, Lippmann articulated the idea of an “Atlantic Community”
for the first time and accused Germany of disrupting the “Atlantic highway” connecting
“Pan-America” to the European side of the “Western world,” thus making American
intervention inevitable: “Now that [Germany] is seeking to cut the vital highways of our
world we can no longer stand by. We cannot betray the Atlantic community by submitting. If not civilization, at least our civilization is at stake.”21 Now, by referring to his old
New Republic piece, Lippmann indicted not only commentators and historians who had
misled the American public about the supposedly true spirit of Wilsonianism, but also
Wilson himself, who in his public addresses became so fascinated by his vision of future
peace that he neglected to explain why America had intervened in the war. He talked of
American ideals to the exclusion of American interests and thus led the country to regard
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as a philanthropic crusade what was in fact a defensive intervention for the preservation
of American security.
Indeed, this interpretation of American intervention in World War One tells less
about Wilson’s motives than about Lippmann’s move from Wilsonianism to realpolitik after
the mid-1930s.22 His aim was to make the war in Europe understandable and American
mobilization in favor of Britain acceptable to Life readers by abandoning the abstract and
unpopular jargon of Wilsonianism, as well as by rooting American internationalism in
time and space, in history and geography: “for a century the nations, from Scandinavia
to Argentine, which face the Atlantic Ocean have had an unparalleled opportunity to
develop in freedom. Under the protection of sea power in the hand of free governments the
shores and the waters of the Atlantic have been the geographic center of human liberty.”
Now that liberty was again under attack, “the English-speaking peoples” had to take the
lead to stop nazi Germany, “the leader of the East against the West, the leader ultimately
of a German-Russian-Japanese coalition against the Atlantic world.”
This article was part of Lippmann’s effort to educate the American public to the
challenges and responsibilities of world affairs that he had been carrying on for years in
his Herald Tribune column “Today and Tomorrow,” which was syndicated to as many as
two hundred newspapers with a combined readership of more than ten million.23 After
1939, his efforts found another outlet in Life, another major foe of isolationism, whose
large circulation and visual appeal he greatly valued. Back in 1924, he had written to
Isaiah Bowman, the influential dean of American geographers, “I think my association
with you infected me with an incurable desire to look at a map before writing an editorial.
The trouble is that very often the maps aren’t ready in time, and I wish some way could be
found by which a graphic method of explaining political and economic questions could
be brought into use by newspapers.”24 Fifteen years later he would find an answer in Life,
as he wrote a staff member that the magazine “had given the most useful and original
treatment to the war news of any periodical. Your strategic maps and your articles about
tactics have been immensely clarifying to me and, I imagine, to many others who had
found these things difficult to visualize through their own imaginations.”25
Lippmann articulated his vision of the internal and international issues facing the
U.S. for Life readers from 1939 on. His article on “The American Destiny” was an exposé
on what he saw as the lack of direction of Americans in dealing with unsolved economic
problems at home and looming dangers abroad. It was also a restatement of the turn-ofthe-century view of America as the “new Rome” – the latest stage in the historical development of western civilization – put forward by Herbert Croly and Theodore Roosevelt, as
opposed to Wilson’s view of America as the “new Jerusalem,” destined to redeem Europe
from its sins.26 “What Rome was to the ancient world, what Great Britain has been to
the modern world, America is to be to the world of tomorrow … the geographic and
the economic and the political center of the Occident,” he wrote in order to summon
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the readers to fulfill America’s “mission,” thus paving the way, in many respects, for the
nationalist outlook and the very prose of Luce’s manifesto.27
Exactly one year later, Life featured yet another of Lippmann’s articles meant as a
contribution to the shaping of an internationalist and realist consensus among Americans.
“America and the World” was an all-out attack against the isolationist-hemispheric assumption that geography had guaranteed American security and would continue to do
so. Peace, he argued, had not been secured by the natural barriers provided by the oceans,
because oceans “are not a barrier. They are a highway.” The Monroe Doctrine had been
effective because “though not an alliance with Great Britain, [it] was a joint parallel policy,”
based on Anglo-American “common interest.” World War Two was now confirming that
the two shores of the Atlantic were inextricably bound together: “it is manifest that in
seeking to separate ourselves from the great wars of Europe, we cannot rely upon the
Atlantic Ocean. It has never been a barrier in the involvement in wars. Our geography
books are as misleading as our history books,”28 wrote Lippmann, thus contributing to
the ongoing controversies about and fascination with geography and geopolitics.
Finally, he would fully articulate his vision of an Atlantic community in U.S. Foreign
Policy: Shield of the Republic (1943), a successful pamphlet in which he reiterated the
familiar arguments about the key role to be played by the wartime alliance between the
U.S., Canada, and Great Britain. He also listed the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal,
Belgium, Denmark, and Norway as members of the Atlantic Community in continental
Europe. Such a “system of security” was based on solid historical grounds, as well as shared
strategic interests: “The nations of the New World are still vitally related to precisely those
nations of the Old World from which they originated … The original geographic and
historic connections across the Atlantic have persisted. The Atlantic Ocean is not the
frontier between Europe and the Americas. It is the inland sea of a community of nations
allied with one another by geography, history, and vital necessity.”29
Lippmann’s Atlantic outlook was part of a wider discussion regarding the reorientation of Americans’ mental maps that involved commentators, businessmen, policymakers,
and sectors of the public opinion. The Council on Foreign Relations, as the institution
embodying the typically north-eastern and pro-British “American foreign policy establishment,”30 was arguably the most authoritative actor in this discussion, with the journal
Foreign Affairs as its voice. In July 1941, it carried an article by the organizational director
of the Council and Rhodes scholar Francis Pickens Miller, later an agent of the Office of
Strategic Services and a State Department official, calling for the rejection of hemispherism and a new approach centered on the control of the “Atlantic area.” Geography was
essential to his argument: “A glance at the map will show the location of control points in
this area … the controlling forces must be in possession of Greenland, Iceland, the British
Isles, Gibraltar, the Azores, Cape Verde Islands, and either Dakar or some nearby point on
the West Coast of Africa … Most important of them all, of course, are the British Isles.”
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However, the Atlantic world, far from being just a physical entity, was a community of
nations that shared values and a common history: “The North Atlantic area,” Miller wrote
one month before the signing of the Atlantic Charter, “is the cradle of our civilization,
and the survival of the American way of life depends upon the survival of this civilization.
For more than a thousand years, our fathers have been building a common society around
the shores of the North Atlantic. They built it by labor, by faith, and, when necessary, by
arms. It is a civilization based upon a belief in the essential dignity of man, as expressed
through representative government, limited by a Bill of Rights. The Atlantic Ocean has
become the ocean of freedom.”31 Finally, a map provided by the American Geographical
Society visualized this Atlantic space. The editor’s note explained that it was different
from the “more familiar” maps based on the classic equator-based Mercator projection:
“the center of the projection is at latitude 20 degrees N., longitude 30 degrees W. By
using this center the cartographer has been able to show the entire north polar area with
comparatively little distortion.” The emphasis on the North Pole illustrated the proximity between North America and Eurasia, and the correction of the Mercator projection’s
emphasis on the oceans as barriers separating the continents strengthened the physical
proximity between the two shores of the Atlantic.32
The great British geographer Halford Mackinder expressed a commonly held view
in the circles of the Anglo-American foreign-policy elite when he referred to the Atlantic
as the “Midland Ocean” in a Foreign Affairs article of July 1943. However, the consensus
on Lippmann’s Atlantic perspective was far from unanimous. The critique of hemispherism, the elite and popular interest in geography and geopolitics, and the advent of “air
power” and technological progress as an argument against isolation and in favor of interdependence fuelled different views of the world and, specifically, the relevance of Europe
to the U.S. Roosevelt loved to display his geographic erudition, and one of his most
celebrated radio-broadcast “fireside chats” explained the Anglo-American war strategy
to the American people by constantly asking them to “look at the map,” in what turned
out to be an unprecedented presidential lesson in geography.33 However, he was certainly
no anglophile; he shared some of the “Europhobic-cum-hemispheric” tendencies of men
like Adolf Berle and Sumner Welles,34 and his global perspective made him impatient
with those who still had the Old World at the center of their strategic and cultural mental
maps: “the old term ‘Western civilization’ no longer applies. World events and the common ends of all humanity are joining the culture of Asia with the culture of Europe and
of the Americas to form, for the first time, a real world civilization.”35
Especially after the German invasion of the Soviet Union turned the LondonWashington partnership between the “English-speaking peoples” into a tripartite, EastWest alliance, a stream of global humanitarian internationalism ensued. Welles’ Time for
Decision (1944), which called for the establishment of a new League of Nations in order
to guarantee the principles of the Atlantic Charter “to the world as a whole – in all the
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oceans and all the continents,” was an instant success. Republican rising star and Luce’s
protégée Wendell Willkie, upon his return from a trip to China and the Soviet Union,
further popularized this brand of Wilsonian universalism in One World (1943), a plea for
an inspirational internationalism crossing national and racial barriers and unifying “the
people of the earth in the human quest for freedom and justice” that sold one million
copies.36 Finally, Luce himself was attuned to the globalist notion of a borderless world,
although with distinctive nationalist and imperialist undertones that did not go unnoticed
among his contemporaries. Critics like Norman Thomas and Freda Kirchwey denounced
his “American Century” editorial for bringing Kipling’s “white man’s burden”37 back
to life, only with reversed roles between the U.S. and Britain, while on the other hand
New York Herald Tribune star columnist Dorothy Thompson praised him for “outlining new Anglo-Saxon free world order.”38 Lippmann’s Atlantic outlook, on the contrary,
combined on the one hand an update and a rather significant revision of Americans’
reassuring, deep-rooted assumptions about themselves and the world – reminiscent of
what Michael Hunt has defined as “the ideology of U.S. foreign policy”39 – with on the
other hand the quest for a realistic and spatially limited involvement in world affairs. In
the words of Robert Divine, “Lippmann had helped clarify the debate on the post-war
world. Americans who wanted to abandon isolationism yet were not attracted by the
Wilsonian slogans now had a respectable program to embrace.”40 This combination was
particularly influential at specific junctures, such as the campaign to support the British
war effort before Pearl Harbor and, after the war, the process that led to the founding of
the Atlantic Alliance. However, the contribution of the Atlantic Community framework
in shaping a consensus around American internationalism is not solely contingent upon
either the political and military twists and turns of the 1940s or Lippmann’s influence
in Washington, which soon declined when he turned into a “Cold War critic,”41 opposing containment and the Truman doctrine. Its ability to reduce complex international
issues to understandable, somewhat familiar terms made it a useful instrument for the
reorientation of the worldview of the American public throughout the 1940s. Once this
reorientation was completed, the Russian atomic bomb and the “loss” of China led to a
truly global national security state.
. an english-speaking atlanticism?
American views of and relations with Britain played a crucial role in the discovery of Europe entailed in the rise of the Atlantic Community framework. Life’s early
interventionism and support of military aid to Britain triggered a constant interest in
and coverage of things British, ranging from history and political affairs to entertainment and everyday life throughout the 1940s. Starting after the war, Luce tried to lure
Winston Churchill into being added to the all-star list of contributors to the magazine
with extremely generous offers, and his efforts finally led to the publication of excerpts
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of Churchill’s war memoirs from 1948 to 1953 and his History of the English-Speaking
Peoples from 1956 to 1958.42
A January 1945 photo-essay featured an “Anglo American Romance,” where the
encounter between an American soldier and a young British woman is re-enacted by Life
photographer Ralph Morse. The first, full-page photograph showed a couple walking
hand in hand in a park, with the man wearing a uniform; the caption provided more
information to the American readers: “Hand in hand America’s Sgt. Kenneth Nahan and
Scotland’s Jean Angus stroll down the famed 2 ¾ mile ‘long walk’ at Windsor castle on
their honey moon.”43 Stories appealing to the readers’ interest in inspirational romance
were a fixture of picture magazines. In wartime, the private sphere of sentiments and
the public sphere of international politics merged easily, and images made this interaction more compelling. Whether or not and to what extent images can be considered a
language comparable to written text and studied as such remains an open question. In
photojournalism, however, photographs have a high degree of intentionality: they are
deliberately aimed at conveying a message to the public unlike, for example, photographs
destined for family albums, whose main functions (personal memory, the strengthening
of family ties) are limited to the private sphere. From the 1960s on, semiologists like
Roland Barthes have studied photography in journalism and advertising as a form of
communication that utilizes the same rhetorical mechanisms as the written text. Barthes
has emphasized that, for all the autonomous communicative power of visual sources,
the understanding of the relation between image and text is vital: “at the level of mass
communications it appears that the linguistic message is indeed present in every image:
as title, caption, accompanying press article, film dialogue, comic strip balloon. Which
shows that it is not very accurate to talk of a civilization of the image – we are still, and
more than ever, a civilization of writing … the text directs the reader through the signifiers of the image, causing him to avoid some and receive others.”44
According to Barthes’ semiotic approach, the text guides the reader through both
the denotative, or descriptive, and the connotative, or symbolic, meaning of the image.
Here, as is often the case in picture magazines, the relationship between the text and the
image is one of anchorage, directing the viewer toward one of the many possible meanings
of the photograph: the couple is composed of an American soldier and a British civilian;
American readers, who might not recognize the majestic setting, are also informed that
the couple is strolling along the “famed long walk” at Windsor castle.
In the following two pages, the photo-essay re-enacts the couple’s romance: “how it
all began” in an Edinburgh cafeteria, their honeymoon in London, and finally their new
life in Millville, New Jersey, “a home in the U.S.” Here Jean “coos at a baby encountered
while shopping … She ate the first steak of her life in the U.S.” In another picture, she
makes breakfast while Kenneth sits at the kitchen table reading the morning paper. Finally, she is shown wearing a black gown – “her first sophisticated evening dress” – while
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her husband is gazing at her; she “can’t wait for a chance to wear it to a party. She thinks
America is wonderful.”
This photo-essay offers a poignant metaphor of the relationships between the U.S.
and Britain by the end of the war, as it evokes natural family ties between the two nations
and, at the same time, it makes it clear that the hierarchy between “the English speaking
peoples” in the international arena had changed. Scholars have pointed out that the power
of photography in shaping ideology lies exactly in its ability to naturalize what is indeed
historical, to construct as inevitable what is artificially created within a given social and
political context. The mechanical nature of photography seems to provide a guarantee
of objectivity; “the photograph,” Barthes wrote, “by virtue of its absolutely analogical
nature, seems to constitute a message without a code … Of all kinds of images only the
photograph is able to transmit the (literal) information without forming it by means
of discontinuous signs and rules of transformation.” The consequence is “the myth of
photographic naturalness,”45 which in this specific case acts through the reference to traditional gender roles: America, the new world power, is coded as male, while the subtitle
– “A Yank sergeant woos a lassie in Edinburgh, weds her near London and settles in New
Jersey, U.S.A.” – emphasizes male/American agency, and the accompanying photographs
announce the post-war model of suburban, affluent life and female domesticity.
Life’s “Anglo-American Romance” photo-essay has to be situated in a context in
which family metaphors were common currency among members of the foreign policy
establishment of the two countries. Dean Acheson, the “Victorian for all seasons,” who
was often accused by his detractors of being “an imitation Englishman” and was one of
the most influential members of the “ultra-British party” which championed U.S. aid to
Britain starting in 1940, often resorted to such images. He compared Anglo-American
relations to a “common law marriage;” in August 1949, he described the upcoming
Anglo-American-Canadian talks in Washington as “the rare, inevitable and very difficult
evenings when husband and wife had to go into their mutual way of life and after about
three hours one felt that it was too dreadful for anything. Nevertheless it had to be done.”46
On the other shore of the Atlantic, British statesmen were even more eager to play on an
Anglo-American, Burkean, and organic kinship because they saw it as a foundation of
the “special relationship” which they hoped would limit international British decline.
If Winston Churchill was, as John Harper put it, “the pontiff” of the creed of AngloSaxonism and Acheson a faithful disciple, Luce was certainly no atheist. Born in China,
he grew up in the white, Christian enclaves of walled American and British missionary
compounds, with virtually no contacts with Chinese people47 – an experience which
arguably contributed to his view of the civilizing mission of “the West.” After he left
China, he graduated from Yale, where he had been admitted to the exclusive Skulls and
Bones Club, and later studied at Oxford.
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While not a typical member of the patrician north-eastern elite, his mother Elizabeth
Middleton Root was a descendant of Elihu Root, the revered mentor of the American
foreign policy establishment, and since his days at Yale had voiced his support for an activist
American foreign policy. Twenty years later, he became a member of the Century Group,
a small organization coordinated by Francis Pickens Miller of the Council on Foreign
Relations. That, together with William Allen White’s Committee to Defend America by
Aiding the Allies, turned out to be among the most effective in the interventionist camp
as a pressure group on the White House. The “Centurions” were especially active in their
favor of the notorious “bases for destroyers deal” of the summer of 1940. After the fall
of France, Britain intensified its diplomatic efforts to obtain military aid from the U.S.,
and talks between British ambassador Lord Lothian and Lippmann worked out this quid
pro quo aimed at providing Britain with fifty rather obsolete warships in exchange for
British bases in the western hemisphere – a solution which allowed Roosevelt to support
Britain with weaponry, just short of blatantly violating the neutrality laws and further
reinforcing the anti-interventionist front.48
Luce urged Lippmann to release a public statement supporting the deal and promised to mobilize Time Inc. publications: “I believe this would be front-paged on nearly
every newspaper … Incidentally, if you were to issue this week, LIFE would be only too
delighted to republish it in full next week – and TIME would carry an extensive story
on it.” He also reminded him that “incidentally, again, TIME on August 1st and LIFE
on August 2nd both carry fairly strong references to this subject.”49 Indeed, the weekly
news overview for that issue of Life focused on the “widely overlooked problem of British
defense” in the eventuality of a German attack and called Roosevelt to action: “Many
responsible and informed Americans believe that fifty of those destroyers sent to Britain
now might tip the balance against German invasion … Yet Americans at large have heard
almost nothing about it. In a matter that may so vitally affect their national future, they
should hear, and from the one man equipped to tell them with authority: the Commander
in Chief of the U.S. Navy & President of the U.S.”50
Finally, Luce’s pro-British stance was not limited to the contingency of the interventionist campaign before Pearl Harbor. What is often missed in accounts of his
nationalist foreign policy outlook emphasizing American leadership vis-à-vis the decline
of the Old World is that Britain and its empire played a crucial role in his vision of the
American Century. In an essay that he wrote after his return from England in March
1942 and confidentially circulated among Time Inc. editors, he reaffirmed his vision of
world affairs as follows: “A victorious America, counter-thrusting against the enemies of
mankind, must inevitably seek to establish a world wide influence. In effect America will
be inviting England to validate the supremacy of an international law based on AngloAmerican power and ideas of justice.” To this end England was still an indispensable ally
to the U.S.: “Her supremacy is over but she may largely determine what and who comes
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after … Just as it was at the beginning of England’s triumphal centuries, so it is at the
end – England holds the balance of power.”
More specifically, Henry Luce admired the British Empire as the major instrument
for the expansion of “civilization,” and blamed his “distant cousins … the Englishmen”
for not being “proud” of its achievements: “In particular they are not proud of India as
they ought to be … If there has been dishonor in India, so also there has been honor
– great honor, none greater in the dealings of one triumphant civilization with a civilization decayed and rotten.” Luce especially valued the Empire as the major outpost of white
civilization in the nonwhite world, as he critized Britain for placing too much emphasis
on its “European connection” and overlooking “the white-man’s countries:” Rhodesia,
Australia, and Canada. While the days of the British Empire might be counted, he believed that “what happens to it … will largely determine what ‘Empires’ and what kind
of ‘Empires’ shall come after.”51
It comes as no surprise, then, that Life featured several stories introducing to its
readers, and casting in a favorable light, either single British dominions like Australia
and South Africa, or the Empire as such. In early December 1942, Daniel Longwell
drafted a letter to Thomas Lamont of J.P. Morgan for Luce, asking him to approach the
prime minister of South Africa, Jan Smuts, and have him write an article that “should
explain the modern political composition of the British Empire” to Americans, who
“may fail to realize what a very great and powerful ally we have” in the Empire-turnedCommonwealth-of-Nations, both in wartime and in the coming international order.52
In “The British Colonial Empire,” Smuts – introduced as “Soldier, Scholar, Statesman”
– pointed out that the term ‘Empire’ was now misleading considering that its goal was
“full freedom for all;” “British Commonwealth” was more appropriate, as “it consisted
of a vast congeries of states and territories in all stages of development, some free and
fully self-governing, some in the process of attaining full freedom and others in various
stages along the road to freedom.”53
However, the ideological underpinnings of this imperial outlook were more evident
in less ambitious articles. A brief photo-essay on Australian preparedness of March 1941
featured four photographs showing, respectively: Australian women marching and wearing an unspecified uniform; a veteran nurse with decorations from World War One; a
statue of Bellona, the goddess of war; and a World War One memorial with Kipling’s
inscription “Lest We Forget.” The accompanying text described the Australians in familiar,
sympathetic terms – “big consumers … the Australians have developed into a race of
self-respecting, unaffected, brawny believers in direct action,” living in a white outpost
in the far eastern and Pacific front, they are the “sole lords of a continent far from other
white continents … these faraway people were last week in the hot spot of being the
nearest white men to the scene of Japanese expansion toward Singapore.”54 One month
later the magazine reported on how U.S. sailors in Sidney got “an amazing welcome
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from lonely white men of Australia.”55 Strategic and racial considerations reinforced each
other in these seemingly casual remarks, which indeed contributed to popularizing the
discussion underway in elite circles about the Anglo-American partnership in the Pacific.
Again, it was Lippmann who weaved that discussion in his Atlantic outlook, when he
wrote in U.S. Foreign Policy that it was “undeniable that American commitments in the
Atlantic and the Pacific dictate the need for an alliance with the British Commonwealth
of Nations and with the Empire.”56
. “western civilization” goes atlantic
The Atlantic Community framework, however, was not limited to the reformulation
of old assumptions concerning Anglo-American common interests in world affairs and
Anglo-Saxon historical, cultural, and racial homogeneity. Its influence, I argue, lies in its
ability to combine such orientations with a discourse on the leadership and contours of
“western civilization.” Such a discourse again implied a reconsideration of the cultural
and political significance of Europe to the U.S.
Life’s discovery of Britain was part of the process of the American rediscovery of a
western legacy originating in classical Greece and Rome, moving through the centuries
from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic, and now crossing the ocean to the United
States. British policy makers like Harold Macmillan often utilized the analogy of Britain
acting as Greeks to America’s Romans in an attempt to provide a historical background to
the “special relationship” and revive their hopes for a “non-European home” for Britain.57
In American hands, however, these analogies – the Atlantic as the new Mediterranean, the
British and Americans as the Greeks and Romans of the twentieth century – acquired a
different meaning. After the war, when tensions with the Soviet Union and British decline
led to the long-term U.S. overall involvement in Europe, many feared that anti-communist
sentiments alone would not guarantee a solid Cold War consensus at home and abroad.
Packaging America as the new leader and full embodiment of western civilization would
provide a positive rationale behind internationalism and, consequently, ease the worries
of American taxpayers and sustain the battle for the heart and minds of Europeans.
For all his exceptionalism, Luce was sensitive to the idea of America as the leader,
benefactor, prophet, and warrior of “the West.” “In addition to ideals and notions which
are especially American,” he wrote in “The American Century,” “we are the inheritors of
all the great principles of western civilization – above all Justice, the love of Truth, the
ideal of Charity.” These ideals were often presented in Life as a common legacy shared
by Americans and western Europeans through lavishly illustrated, serialized histories of
European history and art. A few days before the announcement of the Truman doctrine
in March 1947, the magazine launched an ambitious series on “The History of Western
Culture” carried on under the supervision of Columbia historian Jacques Barzun. Its
introduction stated that:
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the spirit of this series will be the spirit which has moved American universities more and more to
teach history not in narrow courses but in comprehensive surveys of civilization … Our modern
civilization, which owes much to classical Greece and Rome, had its roots in the Middle Ages
and grew most directly out of the Renaissance … In this way LIFE will try to give Americans
a perspective on History. Americans need perspective on their past so that they can determine
their future.58
Here, as in several Life editorials and articles, (western) European history, far from
being just the object of American tourists’ gaze, is meant as a pillar of a new, transatlantic national identity. The reference to the teaching of history in higher education is not
accidental, as these were the years when the idea of an Atlantic Community became, as
Peter Novick put it, “the appropriate framework for both North American and western
European history.” On the teaching side, the massive introduction of “western civilization” courses in American colleges and universities – again in the words of Peter Novick
– was supposed to trace, to some extent, “the prehistory of the Free World,” and “bring
Americans and their European allies closer together.” Allan Nevins saw a “nationalist”
view of United States history replaced by an “international view, treating America as part
of a great historical civilization with the Atlantic its center, as the Mediterranean was the
center of the ancient world.”59 In early 1950, Henry Steele Commager and Lippmann
began to work on a joint project on “The Formation of the Atlantic Community,” which
was aborted in the end mostly due to different approaches to research and writing.60
American Europeanists were particularly inclined to frame U.S. history in a “western”
context. Charles H. Haskins, president of the American Historical Association (AHA)
for 1921, had warned against the rising tide of Europhobia by stating that “Whether we
look at Europe genetically as a source of our civilization, or pragmatically as a large part
of the world in which we live, we cannot ignore the vital connections between Europe
and America, their histories ultimately being one.”61
In the aftermath of World War Two the historian who most forcefully advocated
an Atlantic outlook on U.S. history was Columbia Europeanist Carlton J.H. Hayes. A
Catholic convert, Hayes had been elected AHA president for 1945 after a bitter controversy concerning his supposedly pro-Franco line during his tenure as U.S. ambassador
to Spain, from spring 1942 to January 1945. In his presidential address, Hayes called for
an Atlantic approach to American history as a much-needed remedy vis-à-vis the “intellectual isolationism” which he saw as “the result of ignorance, of self-centered absorption
in local or sectional concerns, and of nationalist propaganda.” U.S. history was to be
studied as part of “western civilization, which, taking its rise around the Mediterranean,
has long since embraced the Atlantic.” In Hayes’ view, Lippmann’s Atlantic Community
framework provided a solution to the opposing dangers of “myopic nationalism” and
“starry-eyed universalism.”62
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Hayes’ formulation of “western civilization” had a particularly strong religious tinge.
Among its constitutive elements, along with the “Greco-Roman tradition” and the Judeo-Christian tradition,” he mentioned “a Christian tradition … of expansiveness, of
missionary and crusading zeal, which has inspired not merely a spasmodic but a steady
pushing outward of European frontiers.” Such a connotation might have been controversial among sectors of academia, but it certainly anticipated the religious overtones that
public discourse would soon acquire when it constructed the Cold War as a feud between
western Christianity and godless communism.
From its earliest years, Life had extensively covered religious events and characters.
Religion struck a deep chord in Luce, a committed Presbyterian who firmly believed that
a “spiritual re-birth” was crucial to the restoration of Americans’ confidence in the mission of their country at home and abroad. Furthermore, the rituals of religious pageantry
provided excellent material for the visual spectacle that the magazine assembled each week:
Catholic ceremonies in particular had an exotic twist that fit very well with Life editors’
goal to explain the world to its readers through captivating images.63 During and after
World War Two the treatment of religion acquired a more tangible political connotation,
as it was frequently associated with patriotism and singled out as the moral foundation
of America and the West, with Protestantism mostly treated in a national context and
Catholicism, opposing nazi-fascism and communism in Europe, usually framed in an
international setting.
Again, the magazine reflected and at the same time strengthened broader tendencies already underway in the public arena. Lippmann himself, certainly not a champion
of zealotry, defined the Atlantic Community in 1944 as “the extension of Western or
Latin Christendom from the Western Mediterranean into the whole basin of the Atlantic
Ocean … Beyond the Atlantic Community lies a world which is still the heir of Byzantium.
Beyond them both lie the Moslem, the Hindu, and the Chinese communities.”64 Among
frequent Life contributors, a strong advocate for an American “spiritual revival” was John
Foster Dulles, the chairman of the Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable
Peace, set up by the Federal Council of Churches in 1941 and, like Luce, a republican,
an internationalist, and a fervent Presbyterian. During the war, Dulles, notwithstanding
his exceptionalist faith in America’s peculiar political and moral mission, came to see
Christianity in a transatlantic perspective as the ultimate foundation for the international
“leadership” exerted by France, Britain, and later the U.S. from the eighteenth century
on: “We were great because our three people were imbued with and radiated great faiths,”
he wrote in an essay for the Christmas 1942 issue.65
At a time when Europe was a crucial military and ideological battleground, the
Roman Catholic Church emerged in Life as one of the pillars of the Atlantic world. At
the diplomatic level, an unprecedented shift in the relations between America and the
Catholic world had been underway since 1939 when Roosevelt appointed Myron Taylor as
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his “personal representative” in the Vatican, thus putting an end to the long-lasting, deep
distrust between Washington and Rome.66 Roosevelt’s move, which caused widespread
outcry in the U.S., was basically aimed at securing a source of information in a sensitive
listening post for international diplomacy. When Allied victory was approaching and it
gradually became clear that the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union would soon come
to an end, cooperative relations with the Vatican became an asset for American foreign
policy and post-war planning, while the mobilization of religious organizations and the
use of Christian symbols and rhetoric came to be part and parcel of Cold War ideological
warfare at home and abroad. Christianity came to be regularly associated with democracy,
and American Catholics would turn out to be enthusiastic participants in the anti-communist crusade, thus partially overcoming decades of religious, and ethnic, prejudice.67
Life was among the early advocates of Christian unity against “the scandal of divided
Christendom” vis-à-vis the threat that atheism posed to western civilization. An editorial
for the Christmas issue of 1943 stated that “Of all the institutions of Europe, [the Catholic
and Protestant Churches] alone have survived unamended and uncompromised.”68 Three
years later the magazine published a report on “organized Christianity abroad” by Paul
Hutchinson, editor of the leading Protestant magazine, The Christian Century, which
emphasized the crucial role of Christian socialist parties in Europe as anti-communist
bulwarks and bearers of fundamental values “which must be preserved at all costs if
western civilization is not to lapse into slavery.”69
Since the war years Life had regularly featured Pope Pious XII as a spokesman for
traditional values and an ally in world politics. The pompous ceremonies in St. Peter’s
were featured in photo-essays that magnified the Vatican’s grandeur as well as its increasing openness to America and the Anglo-Saxon world. Margaret Bourke-White was assigned to cover the 1944 Christmas mass in St. Peter’s basilica; in March 1946, a story
on the creation of new cardinals opened with a picture of Pious XII hearing “the pleas
to canonize new saints, including Mother Cabrini of Chicago,” while the text informed
that the ceremony “was given modern staging amid Renaissance grandeur” through a
“triple microphone” and “dazzling floodlight.” A frequent protagonist of Life stories was
Cardinal Spellman of New York, a key figure in the shaping of an ethnic/ideological Cold
War coalition in post-war America.70
The liberation of Rome in June 1944 provided the American media with an ideal
opportunity to celebrate the definitive reconciliation between America and the Catholic
world, notwithstanding the obvious differences between the two regarding individual
rights, capitalism, and representative democracy, let alone the Vatican’s all-out, enduring
opposition to the penetration of a secularized, consumer-oriented American way of life
in Europe and especially Italy. It also disclosed a unique repository of symbols in which
the myths of Christianity and ancient Rome blended in a powerful visual experience
that a picture magazine like Life was ready to capture. A photo-essay on “The Taking of
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Rome” is a telling example of such juxtaposition: the front page featured a photograph of
General Clark in a jeep with St. Peter’s in the background, while the accompanying text
described “the strange sight of the Americans capturing the city that was once the center
of the world, the Caput Mundi.” In the following pages, pictures by Life photographers
John Phillips, Carl Mydans, and George Silk showed, respectively, the Colosseum looming over “the new conquerors,” and finally, on the same page, American soldiers entering
the city through the Greater Gate along the Via Casilina, and Sherman tanks in front of
St. Paul-Outside-the-Walls.71
In the same issue, the editorial made the connection between Roman past and
American present explicit. After pointing out that “the Rome that speaks more clearly
to Americans today is the golden age of the ancient republic,” a chapter of the editorial
under the title “Roman Law and American Freedom” singled out “the ideas of justice
under the law” as Rome’s most precious legacy. Americans, “heirs of the Roman law,”
had to build on that legacy in order to secure for all mankind “the idea of freedom as a
natural right of all men.” This was the aim that now inspired the American leadership
of the western world: just as Caesar’s Rome had ruled the Mediterranean world, after
World War Two “the ‘Atlantic Community’ may be similarly united under the sway of
Great Britain and the U.S., which are at least as akin as Greece and Rome. As Rome
transmitted Greek culture to the barbarians of Europe, so may America be destined to
be the bridge between Europe and the emerging civilizations of Asia.”72
Finally, in September 1944 Luce’s picture magazine published “The World from
Rome,” a long article by William Bullitt, former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union
and France and a long-time critic of U.S. cooperation with Stalin. The article purportedly outlined the unofficial views of the Catholic hierarchy – although Bullitt referred
to them as “the Romans” – on the unfolding of the war, and was a major all-out attack
against Roosevelt, as it denounced Soviet expansionism and American naiveté.73 Pious
XII emerged here as the only leader Italians could count on in order to escape the fate of
Russian domination, that is, the same domination that would extend to eastern Europe
if the U.S. continued to be soft with Moscow. Appealing to deep-rooted western fears
regarding the barbarian Orient, Bullitt wrote that “Today, when the moral unity of western
civilization has been shattered by the crimes of the Germans … Rome sees again approaching from the East a wave of conquerors.” The influence of the Catholic Church was
clearly not limited to the Italian situation; as the Cold War reconfigured and dramatized
the centuries-old East/West divide, “Rome” – whatever that meant – was hailed again as
a constitutive element of “the West,” except that the latter was now a transatlantic entity
under American leadership.
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. conclusions
The U.S. has long constructed its relationship with Europe in oppositional terms.
From the colonial era to Wilsonianism, which aimed at redeeming the Old World from
its self-destructive balance of power politics, transatlantic relations were based on dichotomies: liberty vs. tyranny, prosperity vs. poverty etc. By the end of the nineteenth century,
this scenario came to be questioned because of two factors that gradually concurred to
define what Daniel Rodgers has called an “Atlantic landscape:” the discovery of European
culture by American intellectuals and scions of patrician families through, among other
things, the literary experience of the Grand Tour, and, more importantly, the development of a close-knit network of commercial and financial exchanges across the Atlantic
following the industrial growth which took place in the U.S. after the civil war.74
The 1940s brought about a turnaround, after the premonitions of the “first intervention” of World War One. World War Two and the Cold War led to an American
discovery of Europe, as the Old World came to be not only the ideological battleground
where “the West” and its enemies faced each other, but also an arsenal of myths, traditions, and symbols to be used in the domestic and global war for “the hearts and minds”
of the western public opinion. Such a war required the ability to exert hegemonic power
as well as military force, and could hardly be won by relying exclusively on the negative
appeal of anti-communism.
Many scholars agree that at this point in time, Europe and America ceased to see
and define each other according to the old oppositional pattern. Now the Old and
the New World embodied different stages in the genealogy of western civilization, the
former being simply the past, that “foreign country,” while the latter was finally free to
exert its global leadership. However, I argue that an excessive emphasis on the American
“romanticization” of Europe as an historical theme park readily available for Americans’
leisure ends up conveying a limitative picture of the cultural and political transatlantic
relations of the 1940s.
If every nation is, to some extent, an “imagined community,” the U.S. is the quintessential imagined community, that is, a nation whose identity heavily depends on practices
of cultural representation.75 The media are of course major producers of such practices.
In this essay, I have tried to outline how the Atlantic Community framework – a loose,
heterogeneous, at times even contradictory vision of the place of America in the global
arena – took shape and was popularized through Life, a medium whose influence rested
on its massive circulation, the personal influence and forceful foreign policy outlook of
its editor-publisher, and finally its visual impact on readers.
By relying heavily on photographs and maps, “America’s favorite magazine” was
especially equipped to be an active player in the discussion over the role and place of
America in the world during the 1940s, a decade which marked the end of the illusion
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of America’s security as a natural consequence of its physical separation from the world.
Such a discussion, especially in its popularized form, entailed considerations pertaining to history and geography, as well as national interest, and it necessarily affected not
only Americans’ attitudes toward the Other, but also their self-image and their idea of
national identity.
The construction of the Atlantic Community framework reveals both the ability
and the power of the U.S. to construct an idea of Europe that was consistent with and
instrumental to its pursuit of global primacy. According to Edward Said, “ideas, cultures,
and histories cannot seriously be understood or studied without their force, or more
precisely their configurations of power, also being studied.”76 Ideas are generated and
circulated in civil society, where they compete for influence and consent; Life, as a voice
of civil society with deep connections to economic and political power, is an intriguing
source for a study in cultural hegemony.
Just as “the Orient [had] helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting
image, idea, personality, experience,”77 so had Europe helped the U.S. to define itself as
the senior partner of a “community” rooted in shared political institutions, economic
practices, religion, and race at the specific juncture of the 1940s. Life’s maps and pictures, mediated by and anchored to captions and accompanying texts, contributed to
the shaping of Americans’ “geographical imagination,” that is, “the mechanism by which
people come to know the world and situate themselves in space and time.”78 At a time
of swift transition from “isolation” and “innocence” to global power and responsibilities
for the U.S., many Americans found it comfortable to imagine themselves physically and
ideologically within an Atlantic space. The Atlantic Community framework as a truly
hegemonic discourse was able to reformulate pre-existing assumptions about America’s
mission of world leadership and Anglo-American kinship, reflect mainstream views on
race and religion, and express a genuine commitment to liberalism and democracy. In
the process, it led to a discovery of Europe percolating from elite circles to the public
opinion which, although limited in time and depth, should not be dismissed as a mere
epiphenomenon of NATO.
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1. Life (July 19, 1943): 8-9.
2. Notable exceptions are Alan K. Henrickson, “The Map as an ‘Idea’: The Role of Cartographic Imagery during the Second World War,” The American Cartographer 2 (1975): 19-53; Mark Polelle, Raising
Cartographic Consciousness: The Social and Foreign Policy Vision of Geopolitics in the Twentieth Century (Lanham:
Lexington Books, 1999); Joanne P. Sharp, Condensing the Cold War: Reader’s Digest and American Identity
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); and Susan Scuhlten, The Geographical Imagination in
America, 1880-1950 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001).
3. Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley-Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2003), 7, 4.
4. Martin Lewis, Karen Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley-Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1997), 49-51.
5. Michael Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), xi.
6. The pass-along rate indicates the number of people who browsed a single copy of the magazine in addition
to the subscriber; see Erika Doss, “Looking at Life: Rethinking America’s Favourite Magazine, 1936-1972”
in Doss, ed., Looking at Life Magazine (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 2-3. On Life
readership, see James L. Baughman, “Who Read Life? The Circulation of America’s Favourite Magazine,” in
the same volume.
7. Quoted in Doss, “Looking at Life,” 2 (emphasis added).
8. Luce to Heiskell, September 25, 1946, Daniel Longwell Papers (DL), Butler Library, Columbia University,
Time-Life file, box 29.
9. Longwell to Luce, July 1, 1948, DL, Time-Life file, box 29.
10. Undated memo, DL, Time-Life file, box 26.
11. Doss, “Looking at Life,” 16.
12. Wendy Kozol, Life’s America. Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1994), 23.
13. Longwell to Billings, February 7, 1946, DL, Time-Life file, box 27.
14. Quoted in Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001) (1987), 90.
15. Robert T. Elson, The World of Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise. Vol II 1941-1960
(New York: Athenaeum, 1973), 51-52.
16. Alan Brinkley, “The Concept of an American Century,” in R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna,
eds, The American Century in Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 13.
17. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso, 1991), 25; Kozol, Life’s America, 55.
18. Nikhil Pal Singh, “Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy,” American Quarterly 50
(September 1998): 479-480.
19. Quoted in Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News Media, 146.
20. Walter Lippmann, “The Atlantic… and America: The Why and When of Intervention,” Life (April 7,
1941).
21. Walter Lippmann, “The Defense of the Atlantic World,” The New Republic (February 17, 1917).
22. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 404-17.
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23. Ibid., 279-80.
24. Lippmann to Bowman, April 7, 1924, Walter Lippmann Papers (WL), Sterling Library, Yale University,
Correspondence, 1906-1930, box 4. Lippmann and Bowman had worked together in Colonel House’s
Inquiry during World War One.
25. Lippmann to Rachel Albertson, November 2, 1939; quoted in Baughman, Henry Luce and the Rise of
the American Newsmedia, 133.
26. Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1995), 114-15.
27. Walter Lippmann, “The American Destiny,” Life (June 5, 1939).
28. Walter Lippmann, “America in the World,” Life (June 3, 1940).
29. Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), 134-35.
30. On this very notion and the literature on the topic, see, Priscilla Roberts, “‘All the Right People’: The
Historiography of the American Foreign Policy Establishment,” Journal of American Studies 26 (1992):
409-34. The Council on Foreign Relations was founded in 1921 as a counterpart to the British Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatam House). The original plan of British and American diplomats at the
Versailles Conference of 1919 called for a private Anglo-American research organization aimed at leading
public opinion in foreign affairs; see Robert Schulzinger, The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: The History of the
Council on Foreign Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), chapter 1.
31. Francis Pickens Miller, “The Atlantic Area,” Foreign Affairs 19 (July 1941): 727-28.
32. See Schulten, The Geographical Imagination in America, chapter 9, on the eclipse of Mercator’s traditional
projection in the early 1940s.
33. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “On Progress of the War,” February 23, 1942, available at the Franklin D.
Roosevelt Library website http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/022342.html.
34. John Harper, American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G Acheson
(Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
35. Quoted in Singh, “Culture Wars,” 481.
36. Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 404.
37. W.A. Swamberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Scribner’s, 1972), 182.
38. DL, Time-Life file, box 29.
39. Hunt, Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy.
40. Robert A. Divine, Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War II (New
York: Atheneum, 1967), 126.
41. Barton J. Bernstein, “Walter Lippmann and the Early Cold War,” in Thomas G. Paterson, ed., Cold War
Critics: Alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971).
42. Elson, The World of Time Inc., chapters 11, 14.
43. “Life Records an Anglo American Romance,” Life (January 1, 1945).
44. Roland Barthes, “Rethoric of the Image,” in Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall, eds., Visual Culture: the Reader
(London: Sage, 1999), 37-38.
45. Barthes, “Rethoric of the Image,” 39-40.
46. Harper, American Visions of Europe, 285-86.
183
47. Brinkley, “The Concept of an American Century,” 10.
48. Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 384-86. A photograph of one of these warships crossing the ocean by Life photographer Hans Wild opened Lippmann’s article “The Atlantic… and America,”
with a caption that specified: “former American destroyer goes to fight for Britain.”
49. Luce to Lippmann, July 29, 1940, WL, Correspondence 1931-1974, box 87.
50. “LIFE on the Newsfront of the World,” Life (August 5, 1940).
51. Henry Luce, “England Revisited,” DL, Time-Life file, box 29.
52. Longwell to Luce, 12.1.1942, DL, box 29.
53. Jan Christiaan Smuts, “The British Colonial Empire,” Life (December 28, 1942). Smuts, a Boer by
birth, had fought against the British during the Boer war. He had been an active supporter of the League of
Nations at the end of World War One; he was also very close to Winston Churchill and during the Second
World War again emerged as a major figure in fostering Anglo-American cooperation and, later, the United
Nations. He was Prime Minister of South Africa from 1939 to 1948.
54. “The Australians Are Ready for the Test,” Life (March 3, 1941).
55. Life (April 21, 1941). See also “The Australian Way of Life,” Life (February 1, 1943), by Minister of
External Affairs Herbert V. Evatt.
56. Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy, 127.
57. John Dumbrell, A Special Relationship: Anglo-American Relations in the Cold War and After (London:
St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 13-14. See also the works of David Reynolds on Anglo-American relations during
World War Two.
58. “LIFE Announces a Series of Articles on the History of Western Culture,” Life (March 3, 1947).
59. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 311.
60. For the details of this joint effort see the correspondence between Commager and Lippmann see WL,
Correspondence 1931-1974, box 63.
61. Quoted in Volker Berghahn and Charles Maier, “Modern Europe,” in Anthony Molho and Gordon S.
Wood (eds.), Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1998), 395-96. See also the essays by Daniel Rodgers on “Exceptionalism” and Eugen Weber on “Western
Civilization” in the same volume.
62. Carlton J.H. Hayes, “The American Frontier-Frontier of What?” American Historical Review 51 (January
1946): 199-216. See also John Higham, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 20 (1996): 19-44.
63. David Morgan, “The Image of Religion in American Life, 1936-1951,” in Doss, ed., Looking at Life,
140.
64. Walter Lippmann, U.S. War Aims (Boston: Little, Brown, 1944), 86-87.
65. John Foster Dulles, “A Righteous Faith,” Life (December 28, 1942). On Luce and Dulles, see Swanberg,
Luce and His Empire, especially 316-18.
66. Ennio Di Nolfo, Vaticano e Stati Uniti (1939-1952). Dalle carte di Myron Taylor (Milano: Franco Angeli,
1978).
67. On American Catholics and the cold war see among others, Alfred Hero, American Religious Groups
View Foreign Policy: Trends in Rank-and-File Opinion, 1937-1969 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1973),
and Leo Ribuffo, “Religion and American Foreign Policy,” The National Interest (Summer 1998).
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68. Life, “Christmas,” December 27, 1943.
69. Quoted in Morgan, “The Image of Religion,” 150.
70. “Papal Christmas,” Life (January 15, 1945); and “The Pope Creates New Cardinals,” Life (March 11,
1946). On Spellman, see “Archibishop’s Travels,” Life (September 20, 1943); and “The Concistory,” Life (May
13, 1946). See Vicki Goldberg, Margareth Bourke-White: A Biography (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1987),
chapter 24 on her experience on the Italian front.
71. “The Taking of Rome,” Life (June 19, 1944).
72. “The Fall of Rome,” Life (June 19, 1944).
73. William Bullitt, “The World from Rome,” Life, (September 4, 1944). For the controversies ignited by this
article within Time Inc. and in the American public opinion, see Elson, The World of Time Inc., 98-101 and
John Lewis L. Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1972), 54-55. On Bullitt’s “proto-containment” tendencies see, Harper, American Visions
of Europe, 51-54.
74. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1998).
75. David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1992).
76. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 6-7. See also, Andrew J. Rotter, “Saidism
without Said: Orientalism and U.S. Diplomatic History,” American Historical Review 105 (October 2000):
1205-217, for penetrating remarks on the relative lack of interest in Said’s work among historians of American
foreign policy.
77. Said, Orientalism, 1-2.
78. Joan M. Schwartz, James R. Ryan, eds., Picturing Place: Photography and the Geographical Imagination
(London-New York: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 6. On the concept of “geographic imagination,” see David Harvey,
“Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 80 (September 1990): 418-34.
185
“EUROPEANIZING” U.S. FOREIGN POLICY:
HENRY KISSINGER AND THE DOMESTIC CHALLENGE TO DÉTENTE
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In this essay, I will examine the effort of Henry Kissinger to modify the basic practices
and discourse of United States foreign policy, and the domestic reaction this attempt
generated. My argument will be based upon two general assumptions. The first is that the
policy toward world affairs pursued by the U.S. in the early 1970s, and epitomized by
détente with the Soviet Union, represented in many ways a compulsory path. As such, it
would have been sought even by a Democratic administration, or by a different National
Security Adviser and Secretary of State. The second assumption is that Kissinger found it
convenient and politically expedient to couch the new approach in realist terms; to present
it, that is, as an un-American and very European form of realpolitik, whose a-historical
rules and norms America, finally coming of age, had to learn and adopt.
The essay is divided into three parts. In the first part, I will illustrate the fundamental
matrixes of the crisis that U.S. Cold War liberalism and the strategy of “containment”
had to face in the late 1960s. In the second part, I will rapidly describe the main achievements of Kissinger’s foreign policy and the way his approach was presented (and sold)
to the American public. Finally, in the last, longer part of the essay I will examine the
successful domestic attack on Kissinger and détente. This attack was mounted primarily
by neoconservatives, who denounced Kissinger’s foreign policy as a very defeatist and
amoral form of appeasement of the Soviet totalitarian challenge. In other words (and this
is the main conclusion of the essay), Kissinger was successfully criticized for trying to
contaminate U.S. foreign policy with methods and logic supposedly alien to its political
culture, that is, for his counterproductive and ineffective attempt to make Europe out
of America. The idea that America could finally move out of perennial adolescence and
be initiated into the harsh realities of world politics was indeed very popular in the early
1970s. For a short span of time, Kissinger was able to exploit it effectively. At the end,
however, the idea that America was not (and ought not to be) Europe was destined to
prove much more popular and enduring.
the crisis of containment
During the first twenty years of the Cold War, the United States promoted a coherent, though not always successful, foreign policy. Washington’s main objective was the
creation of an “international liberal order,” expressing America’s proclaimed values but
also guaranteeing the protection and expansion of its interests. However, such a global
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“europeanizing” u.s. foreign policy
and universalistic vision was challenged, ab origine, by a powerful counter-universalism,
and by an alternative teleology to the one projected by the United States and the West,
the one embodied (and projected) by the Soviet Union and the international communist
movement.1
The Soviet challenge immediately limited the global scope of the U.S.-centered liberal international regime built and institutionalized after the Second World War. To face
such a challenge, and to consolidate and extend its hegemony and dominance within its
sphere of influence, the United States adopted a strategy of global “containment” of the
USSR and of communism. The strategy was not implemented monolithically. There were
several “strategies of containment,” oscillating between symmetrical and asymmetrical
approaches, as Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis underlined more than twenty
years ago.2 Many factors contributed to the discontinuities in the way containment was
put into practice: the shifting structural conditions of the international system in which
the U.S. was operating; the political differences of the different administrations (witness the contrast between Eisenhower’s fiscal conservatism and Kennedy’s and Johnson’s
expansive Keynesianism); and the domestic constraints, budgetary in primis, that each
administration had to face.3
The ultimate goal, the general method, and the basic preconditions of containment were, however, consistently the same during this first phase of the Cold War
(ca. 1947-1968). The stated goal was, very simply, to impede any further expansion of
the Soviet Union and communism. What the various “strategies of containment” aimed
at was nevertheless much more ambitious: to contain the Soviet Union meant also to
preserve the freedom to project U.S. power where Moscow and its allies had not yet put
their flags. The world was still filled with not yet “bipolarized” areas, particularly outside
Europe. These were areas that were up for grabs in the bipolar competition. Confining
the Soviet and communist perimeter within the limits it had reached in 1947 (or 1949,
if we include communist China) was functional to the expansion of American power and
preponderance. Containment was not a symmetrical strategy aimed at accepting equivalence and preserving parity. On the contrary, it was an approach designed to strengthen
and expand U.S. superiority. By limiting the Soviet Union and reinforcing the United
States, it aspired to create an “asymmetrical balance of power,” that is, an “imbalance of
power” in favor of Washington. Such growing imbalance could moderate and restrain
Soviet behavior in the short run. More importantly, over time it could weaken the Soviet
Union, putting her in a structurally subordinate position, which proved impossible to
overcome. Through containment, it would be possible to pressure the Soviet Union,
thus contributing to exacerbate its weaknesses and intrinsic contradictions. Soviet power
– diplomat and strategist George Kennan maintained in 1947 – “like the capitalist world
of its conception, bears within it the seeds of its own decay.” Through containment it
would be possible to “increase enormously the strains under which Soviet policy must
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operate, to force upon the Kremlin a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection … and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet
in either the break-up or gradual mellowing of Soviet power.”4
If this was the ultimate goal, the method followed logically. While different strategies could be implemented, and different means could be employed, containment rested
upon one unitary methodological premise: the refusal of any interaction or dialogue with
the enemy, indeed, the negation of any legitimacy of the enemy. Containment, however
implemented, was based upon “a non-dialectical rejection” of the counterpart; a fact that
shrewd observers, such as Walter Lippmann, did not fail to notice at the time.5
As historian Anders Stephanson has aptly synthesized “for the United States … there
could be no real peace … with the Soviet Union, indeed no real peace in the world as
such, unless the Soviet Union ceased being the Soviet Union and Communism ended.”6
Containment did not therefore foresee a future “peaceful coexistence” between the United
States and the Soviet Union. Instead, it represented from the beginning a maximalist
strategy. It was designed to provide U.S. leaders with the tools to put an end to the Cold
War, and not just those necessary to live with it.
Like every maximalist and ambitious strategy, containment proved to be very costly.
High military investments, global commitments, and perennial mobilization inevitably
followed. Four preconditions were necessary to make such costs tolerable, domestically
and internationally.
First: superiority and invulnerability
A global and expansionist foreign policy could be promoted as long as there were no
checks and counter-pressures capable of deterring it, and as long as there were no serious risks, save those the United States would incur if it tried to touch the vital sphere of
security built by the Soviet Union in central and eastern Europe. Superiority and power
preponderance were the obvious ends of containment. But they were also its primary
means. Ambitiousness rested upon the possibility of taking risks without the serious
possibility of suffering retaliation. And this was possible as long as the Soviet Union was
no military match for the U.S.7
Second: domestic consensus
A large and unchallengeable support for both the objectives and the instruments of
U.S. Cold War foreign policy was necessary to make its high costs acceptable. During
the first twenty years of the Cold War, the various administrations easily obtained such
indispensable support. They were certainly helped in this by Soviet behavior, and by the
brutal forms of control and dominance, that Moscow came to exercise within its sphere
of influence. Alternatives to containment were thus easily marginalized, and ended up
often being presented – then and retrospectively – as fancy, bizarre and utopian (but also
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dangerous) visions of the role the U.S. should play in world affairs, unconnected to (and
unconscious of ) the harsh realities of the Cold War. This was the fate of Henry Wallace’s
attempted preservation of the anti-fascist coalition, Robert Taft’s hemispheric separatism,
and also Barry Goldwater’s trigger-happy radicalism.8
Third: U.S. uncontested primacy within its sphere of influence
America’s predominance within “Transatlantia” was obviously uncontestable. After
the Second World War (and as a consequence of it), the United States found itself with
an unprecedented condition of superiority vis-à-vis allies and enemies. Containment implied preserving and extending this supremacy. Consolidating a unitary transatlantic bloc,
and strengthening U.S. hegemony within it, was part of the strategy of preponderancebuilding adopted by Washington in the early years of the Cold War. The United States
skillfully pursued this goal, often accommodating the needs and requests of its partners
and of the elites that came to guide them. America’s preeminence within its European
sphere of influence was based upon hegemony (a “consensual hegemony,” according to
Charles Maier) and not just outright domination and coercion, as was mostly the case
with the Soviet Union in eastern Europe. America’s empire – if there ever was one – was
not an “empire by invitation,” in historian Geir Lundestad’s fortunate, albeit simplistic
words. It was, instead, an empire based upon an unusual degree of negotiation between
the center and the periphery, and upon the frequent concessions that the latter was able
to extract from the former. This concurred in making the Atlantic bloc more solid and
cohesive than its Eastern counterpart, determining an additional element of asymmetry
in the bipolar “imbalance of power.”9
Fourth: resources and means
An ambitious and global strategy, as containment was, could be implemented only
if the available means allowed it, that is, if it was possible, when necessary, to outspend
– militarily, technologically, economically – the adversaries. Moreover, in the early Cold
War years, the U.S. either had these means (its superiority, at that historical juncture, was
clear and indisputable), worked to amplify them (through an effective strategy of preponderance-building) or believed it had found the way to increase them in the foreseeable
future (through a policy of deficit spending that allowed it to have them all – butter and
guns – as stated in NSC-68). As former Undersecretary of State and Wall Street banker
Robert Lovett said in 1950: “there was practically nothing that the country could not
do it if it wanted to.”10
Containment was a strategy based upon a significant amount of optimism. By the
late 1960s this optimism, and the ensuing hubris, had been badly (though not irreversibly)
shaken. The U.S. was undergoing a profound crisis that just a few years earlier would
have been completely unthinkable. American difficulties had several matrixes: political,
economic, military. The crisis they concurred to catalyze therefore had multiple faces
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and challenged several assumptions upon which the Cold War optimistic globalism,
embodied in the various strategies of containment, had been based: “In 1968 – historian
Jussi Hanhimäki recently maintained – it seemed that few of the certainties of American
Cold War policy remained intact.”11 Each of the four basic preconditions of containment
previously mentioned had been challenged and badly shaken.
America’s uncontested strategic superiority had rapidly evaporated. The intense
rearmament undertaken by the post- Khrushchevian leadership had allowed the Soviet
Union to partially fill the nuclear gap between the two superpowers. There was not yet
a situation of nuclear parity: U.S. technological superiority made that unfeasible, both
then and afterwards. But the age of America’s global spectrum dominance had come to
an end. Retaliation was now possible. The U.S. suddenly found itself vulnerable and
insecure. The age of “free security” had ended with World War Two, but for twenty more
years America had preserved its invulnerability by buying security at a very high price.
Now even expensive and “unfree” security seemed out of reach.12
The domestic consensus upon which containment had rested simply disintegrated.
The universalist assumptions of Cold War liberalism were now rejected outright by important sectors of American public opinion. The human and economic costs of the war in
Vietnam proved to be unbearable, politically and socially. The demonstrations against the
Vietnam war overlapped with other radical forms of protest that were lacerating American
social fabric. American policymakers had to face an unprecedented sense of disorder and
anarchy. The disciplinary code provided by anti-communism – the “evangelism of fear”
of the previous two decades – was not operating anymore. Rigid dichotomies, like those
offered by Cold War discourse, imposed a straightjacket on the complexity of a domestic
and international situation that was characterized by multiple centrifugal tendencies, and
no longer reducible to the binary categories of the Cold War.13
U.S. difficulties also reverberated throughout the Atlantic alliance. U.S. “hegemonic capacity” in the western bloc had drastically diminished. The alliance had seen
one important defection, that of Gaullist France. Most importantly, several other U.S.
allies where trying to pursue an autonomous and independent foreign policy, within
the systemic limits and constraints the Cold War still imposed. The “invitation” to the
United States had now become extremely selective. American military guarantee was still
welcome and talks of reducing U.S. troops generated much anxiety in western Europe.
However, the exportation of the costs of the Vietnam war – primarily via U.S. inflation
– and the necessity to face domestic public opinions highly critical of American actions
in South-East Asia led many western European governments to assume a critical stance
toward their senior partner. The economic superiority of the United States was now
contested by its partners, Germany and Japan above all. Bipolarity, the presence of only
two powers “which [had] the potential to become poles for the international system” was
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not automatically producing bipolarization, “the extent to which actors are clustered into
[two] mutually exclusive camps.”14
Finally, the resources available to the United States proved to be neither unlimited
nor infinitely multipliable. The costs of the Vietnam war combined with those of Lyndon
Johnson’s ambitious domestic programs. The gradual transition to a post-Keynesian society
put into question the applicability of old economic recipes upon which the optimism
of the Cold War consensus had largely been based. The U.S. “imperious economy” was
slowing down vis-à-vis most of its dynamic partners. Choices were no longer escapable:
guns could not promise to multiply butter anymore. A limitation of the investments in
nuclear weapons and ambitious defense programs, unthinkable in the previous years, was
presented as a wise and necessary choice. This opened the dim perspective of a possible
Soviet strategic catch-up. The end of America’s superiority (and uniqueness) suddenly
appeared on the horizon.15
the search for an alternative: kissingerism as an exit strategy
from america’s crisis
U.S. political debate offered various exit strategies from the abrupt disappearance
of those moral and political certainties that had provided the pillars of U.S. Cold War
policies and discourse. Old cold warriors – on the Right and on the Left - reaffirmed the
validity of traditional Cold War precepts, urging the nation to patiently await the end of
the storm. “An imperial power is not allowed to resign,” proclaimed James Burnham in the
National Review. For democratic senator Henry Jackson from the state of Washington,
“A great power inescapably [bore] the responsibility of great power:” some people in
the United States were “suffering from a case of combat fatigue,” but the conflict with
the Soviet Union was “not made to disappear” and the preservation of an advantageous
“relationship of forces” vis-à-vis the Soviet Union was therefore still needed.16
In the short term, the attempted reaffirmation of the values, rhetoric and policies of
original containment had little success. Global containment was under assault and there
was little one could do aside from defending it, and hoping for better times, which would
arrive sooner than expected. Before long, conservative and liberal Cold Warriors would
join forces, politically and ideologically. Their challenge would lead to the resurgence of
those Cold War topoi that had looked discredited for good in the late 1960s and early
1970s. However, what would become known as the “neoconservative vision” had not
yet appeared when Nixon was elected president and Henry Kissinger was surprisingly
appointed National Security Adviser. As we will see, the neoconservative project was articulated primarily in opposition to the policies and strategies pursued by Kissinger. But
in 1968, it was still impossible to accuse Nixon credibly of being soft on communism
and of promoting a passive policy of appeasement of the Soviet Union.17
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At first, Nixon and Kissinger had more trouble with other exit strategies from the
crisis, such as those embodied by the cultural relativism and the third worldism of the
New Left, or by the emphasis laid by many liberal scholars and politicians on both the
intrinsic interdependence of the international system, and the impossibility to pursue
unilateral security strategies in the nuclear age.18
What Kissinger (and Nixon via Kissinger) articulated was in itself (or at least aimed
to be) an alternative response to the difficulties the country was facing. While obviously
a product of such difficulties, it also aspired to provide a solution for them. Lacking the
basic preconditions that had permitted global containment, a new strategy and a new
foreign policy were in fact needed: to face the international challenge; to preserve America’s
pre-eminence; and most of all, to placate domestic turmoil and build a new and lasting
consensus around a redesigned United States foreign policy.
Kissinger’s strategy, designed to supersede containment, was based upon a few basic
assumptions. The first was that the country had to operate within limits and constraints
to which it had not been accustomed. Resources were limited and diminishing. Domestic
consensus was shattered and was not to return in the monolithic forms known in the
previous twenty years. American bureaucracy and the political system were proving unfit
for the promotion of a coherent and effective foreign policy (to this last aspect Kissinger
had indeed dedicated much of his intellectual meditation).19
The second assumption was that the arms race had so increased the destructive
capability of the U.S. and the USSR as to render a major war between the two both
meaningless and intolerable. Meaningless because there was no way one of the two sides
could avoid immense devastation and emerge as victor in a conflict. Intolerable, because
war could destroy civilization itself, and leave nothing behind. Kissinger realized this over
time and not without difficulty. He had enjoyed playing Dr. Strangelove in the past, to
the point of dedicating one of his first works to the possible use of tactical nuclear war
in a limited conflict (thus anticipating one of the main features of Kennedy’s flexible
response). Nevertheless, the risks ran in October 1962 and massive Soviet rearmament
induced a change of attitude in Nixon’s national security czar. His change of view was
later epitomized by Kissinger’s eruption during a press conference just before Nixon’s
resignation; on that occasion, Kissinger was once again questioned as to the possibility
that the U.S. could find itself in a position of strategic inferiority vis-à-vis the Soviet
Union: “what in the name of God is strategic superiority” – Kissinger retorted – “What
is the significance of it, politically militarily, operationally, at these levels of numbers?
What do you do with it?”20
The third assumption followed logically from the second. Since Moscow and
Washington were the only two countries that disposed of such unlimited power (i.e. to
blow themselves up along with the rest of the planet), willingly or not they shared a
set of common interests and goals that no ideological divide could forever obfuscate.
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Avoiding war was the most obvious one. Preserving stability was the logical precondition. Preventing nuclear proliferation – i.e. containing the possible spread of the risk
outside the original duo – was the unavoidable result. But all this – to maintain stability
and reduce the risk of war – also implied freezing the bipolar status quo at a time when
bipolarism was structurally challenged. The United States and the Soviet Union appear
to have had at the time a mutual interest in avoiding a distribution of power that might
bring into question their hegemonic condominium, particularly in Europe. This added
one extra commonality between the two superpowers, one that was greatly appreciated
by Kissinger, although much disliked by his domestic and international critics.21
Such assumptions reflected an awareness (and a rationalization) of the structural
alteration of the international environment. Whoever had run U.S. foreign policy at the
time – democrat or republican, liberal or conservative – would have had to face such a
change. The most famous and celebrated diplomatic achievements of Nixon and Kissinger
had in fact been initiated by their predecessors.
Negotiations with the North Vietnamese had been attempted well before Nixon’s
election. Up to the last minute, Johnson and Humphrey had hoped to sign a silver-bullet
agreement with Hanoi that might have helped them at the polls (curiously enough, Henry
Kissinger, not yet co-opted by Nixon’s camp, had been involved in these negotiations to the
point of often being accused of having sabotaged them out of political convenience).22
The possibility of an opening to China had also been explored in previous years.
Several foreign policy advisers of Lyndon Johnson explicitly advocated the utilization of
the “China card” in dealing with the Soviets. The mayhem produced by the Cultural
Revolution contributed to hinder and defer a U.S.-Chinese rapprochement. It is difficult, however, to believe that a Humphrey administration would not have moved toward
reconciliation with China, exploiting the favorable situation created by the Sino-Soviet
border clashes on the Ussuri river of March 1969. If anything, the Nixon administration
– and Kissinger in particular – was quite slow to grasp the new situation and react accordingly. Kissinger’s very Eurocentric view of international affairs and of U.S. national
interest induced him to underestimate the importance of building a new relationship
with communist China. According to former diplomat William Bundy, the China policy
of the new administration was initially “halting, uncertain, and indecisive. A new relationship with China was far from being a top priority from the start, as both Nixon and
Kissinger later tried to suggest.”23
Analogously, détente with the Soviet Union had been intermittently sought by
Washington for several years. The Cuban Missile Crisis and, even more, the July 1963 Test
Ban Treaty had proved that the two superpowers shared a common, indeed vital, strategic
interest: avoiding war, preventing proliferation, and preserving a nuclear quasi-duopoly
(the Sino-Soviet rift made this interest all the more pressing for Moscow). One can therefore identify 1963 as constituting a crucial turning point in the Cold War, providing the
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real “institutional beginning of détente.”24 Détente with the Soviets had been pursued
both strategically and economically. The Soviets had already been convinced to start a
round of negotiations on nuclear issues by Johnson’s ambassador to Moscow, Llewellyn
Thompson. Nuclear diplomacy had been hindered by the repression of the Prague Spring,
but might well have been resumed also with a democratic administration. An economic
dètente – putting an end to the limits still posed to the non-military trade with the USSR
– had been advocated for many years by democratic analysts and policymakers. Indeed,
many democratic senators, who called for a significant liberalization of East-West trade,
had supported the Export Administration Act (EAA), which provided a crucial tool for
Nixon’s policy of economic détente with Moscow.25
“Those on the Right can do what those on the Left can only talk about,” Richard
Nixon allegedly declared after his trip to China. However, the opening to China, détente
and nuclear diplomacy with the Soviet Union, and a much-needed solution to the Vietnam
imbroglio would have been pursued, and probably achieved, even by a democratic administration. They were necessities more than choices, obligatory paths more than selected
options. In terms of content, the foreign policy of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger
was thus much less innovative and original than was thought at the time, and than has
often been claimed retrospectively.
Nevertheless, Kissinger’s approach, his foreign policy philosophy, and the discourse
through which it was conveyed to the American public represented a major departure
from the past and from U.S. foreign policy traditions. Kissinger couched his strategy,
and sold it to the domestic and international public opinion, in amoral and realist terms,
strikingly dissimilar from the rhetoric and discourse adopted until then to justify America’s
international behavior. In doing so, he embraced a supposedly continental-European way
of conducting foreign affairs, an approach that was claimed to have no precedents in the
United States. According to a recent, popular reconstruction of the traditions of U.S.
foreign policy, “the influence of Continental realism did not peak until the Nixon and
Ford administrations, when, as national security adviser and secretary of state, Henry
Kissinger placed American foreign policy on solidly Continental grounds … the NixonKissinger approach also took the moral element out of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. It was as if
the United States and the Soviet Union were two great powers like Prussia and Austria, and
could reach a détente based on common interests while setting aside their philosophical
differences, just as Catholic Austria and Protestant Prussia had done.”26
Walter Russel Mead’s is a very stereotyped and caricatured description of Kissinger’s
foreign policy. It is, however, a caricature that Kissinger liked and worked hard to cultivate.
Kissinger proudly presented his strategy – and détente overall – as the coherent adoption of a realistic foreign policy and a very European way of dealing with world affairs.
According to Kissinger, his was a realpolitik to which even the United States, after much
juvenile wandering, had finally to adhere. The end of preponderance had made global
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crusades impossible and counterproductive. The lack of consensus had drastically limited
resources and possibilities. The passage from uni/bi-polarity to some sort of multipolarity – as Kissinger liked to claim publicly (but not privately) – obliged the U.S. to abide
by the traditional balance of power rules. It imposed a much more sophisticated way
of implementing foreign policy and pursuing the national interest, which liberated the
action of the “creative statesman” from the rigidity of a bipolar system, which by nature,
Kissinger once claimed, “loses the perspective for nuance.”27
It is a matter of discussion whether Kissinger was truly a Bismarck-like realpolitiker
of the nuclear age; whether he was a creative and disenchanted statesman who pursued
a consistently realist foreign policy, thus rescuing the United States from its adolescence
and its childish tendency to embrace idealist and global missions. Much indicates the
opposite is true. Before joining the government, Kissinger had been the quintessential
product of the peculiarly Cold War national security culture. During the twenty years
preceding his tenure as National Security Adviser, he had followed, in a timely as much
as opportunistic fashion, the various grand-strategic vogues that had come to shape
and dominate U.S. foreign policy discourse. Often resorting to an esoteric and almost
impenetrable prose that only initiates to the arcana of international affairs were able to
decrypt, he was in turn the theorist of limited nuclear war and gradual and symmetrical
responses, analyst of structural transatlantic crises, and, finally, a-ideological and prodétente realpolitiker. Developing scant interest in International Relations and the great
American tradition in the field, he preferred history and Bismarck to Morgenthau and
theory. His much-broadcasted realism was presented as the product of his way of studying and interpreting the history of diplomacy, of his attempt to apply “historical lessons
to the realm of diplomacy.”28
The point here is not to solve the puzzling dilemma of whether and how much
Kissinger was a “real” realist. Nor am I concerned with the even more problematic relationship between realism and United States foreign policy.29 The point I want to stress
here is that, as National Security Adviser and later Secretary of State, Kissinger found it
immensely helpful to present his strategy and his vision of world politics as a much-needed
realist turn of U.S. foreign policy. It was highly convenient to represent himself as the
“European mind in American policy,” as one contemporary commentator called him;30
as the erudite statesman, with a crispy “Strangelovian” German accent, who was finally
teaching immature Americans how to behave in the world arena, providing them with a
fast-forward introduction to the impenetrable as much as perennial and immutable laws
of geopolitics and international relations.
To a country disillusioned with Cold War liberalism, and no longer prone to acritically accept its basic axioms or believe its many promises, Kissinger’s realpolitik – real or
fictitious – seemed to offer a way out: an exit strategy from the crisis the country was
undergoing, whose basic contours were either less problematic and complex, or more easily
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understandable than those of the other exit strategies offered up by the interdependent
globalism of many liberals or the anti-imperial third worldism of the New Left.31
The new hegemonic geopolitical jargon, widely adopted by most of the press at the
time, paradigmatically expressed this change. The universalistic slogans of the previous
two decades were replaced by particularistic formulas that had often been on the fringes
of U.S. political discourse. During the era of détente, there was much less talk about
freedom, liberty, and universal values than about equilibrium, stability, and power. Claims
to moral and civilizational superiority suddenly (though briefly) appeared ridiculous and
outmoded. Kissinger often associated morality with sanctimoniousness and, ultimately,
weakness. National interest was dissociated from national values, while foreign policy was
detached from domestic policy and the unhealthy influence that domestic constituencies
and parochial interests aimed at exerting on Washington’s external relations.
Most of all, the binary and rigid certainties of the Cold War discourse were presented
as relics of a different age. One would struggle to find traditional anti-communist and
anti-Soviet comments, not only (and understandably) in Kissinger’s public speeches, but
also in his private correspondence and in the copious transcripts of the meetings of his
staff.32 The Soviet Union formally remained the primary adversary (but not the enemy)
of the United States. However, this was due not to its ideology, but to its sheer power,
which made it the only possible match for the U.S. International communism was a threat
either because it constituted a subservient (and often non-ideological) tool of Soviet power
strategy or, when genuinely independent, because it could threaten a status quo and an
equilibrium that the United States intended to preserve and consolidate, particularly
within the European continent. Kissinger, for instance, did not dismiss the possibility
that eurocommunism could be a genuinely autonomous phenomenon, and that western
European communists were operating independently from Moscow. This, however, made
them all the more dangerous for the United States because they could threaten the bipolar
condominium that Kissinger wanted to consolidate, at least in Europe.
When you imagine what Communist Governments will do inside NATO – Kissinger maintained
during a meeting of his staff – it doesn’t make any difference whether they’re controlled by Moscow
or not. It will unravel NATO and the European community into a neutralist instrument. And that
is the essence of it. Whether or not these parties are controlled from Moscow – that’s a subsidiary
issue … we keep saying that there’s no conclusive evidence that they are not under the control of
Moscow, implying that if we could show they were not under the control of Moscow we could
find them acceptable … A Western Europe with the participation of Communist parties is going to change the basis of NATO … to bring the Communist into power in Western Europe …
would totally reorient the map of postwar Europe.33
Neutrality had often been courted by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations,
which saw in it a potential intermediate stage toward modernity and western democracy.
With Kissinger, it was by contrast explicitly rejected. Salazarist Portugal, to take one of
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the most famous cases, was rapidly re-embraced as a sort of prodigal son, after one decade
of tense relations, caused primarily by the 1961 American embargo on the sale of arms
that could be used in the conflicts in the Portuguese colonies (Angola, Mozambique,
and Guinea-Bissau).34 After the 1974 revolution, Kissinger took a stance against the new
government and, even more, against the new foreign minister, Mario Soares, whom he
labeled, with scant historical inventiveness, the “Portuguese Kerensky.” He never derogated
from this line, even after the harsh defeat of the Portuguese communists at the polls, and
despite the fact that he recognized (and stressed with his advisers) the cautiousness with
which Moscow was following the Portuguese events. Again, neutrality and the potential
erosion of the bipolar status quo in Europe was what mattered to him most. Speaking with
his staff after the April 1975 elections, which saw the clear defeat of Alvaro Cunhal’s PCP,
Kissinger once more claimed that the main problem for the United States was:
…the impact on NATO of a revolutionary government, in which the Communists are in the
key role of pursuing essentially neutralist policies … the impact of that on other European countries: that’s the key issue. And that has not, in any remote way, been affected by this election …
A Soviet-allied dictatorship is a better outcome for us … than a Communist-dominated NATO
ally, because that one – the heavily Communist influence on our major allies – has a major impact
on other countries.35
But Europe, and the effort to stabilize the geopolitical status quo there, freezing political changes and containing centrifugal tendencies, was not the only theater in which this
realist and amoral turn of U.S. foreign policy was set on display. It was also true of the
way détente with the Soviet Union, rapprochement with China, and negotiations with
North Vietnam were implemented and presented to American public opinion.
Bipolar détente would lead to the SALT agreements on the limitation of nuclear
weapons and a host of other trade and cultural agreements. Unlike the liberal supporters of détente, Kissinger did not present these agreements as the products (and means)
of a structural interdependence that would unify the globe and create a shared global
common interest. Nixon’s National Security Adviser was obviously conscious of how the
arms race and deterrence had modified the bipolar antagonism. He recognized strategic
interdependence and the impracticality of a unilateral quest for security. However, and
due also to his deep ignorance of basic economics, he was much less prone to believe in
interdependence, globalization and liberal “one-worldism.” Negotiating with the Soviet
Union, apart from expressing recognition of its power, was not part of a process of convergence, which Kissinger neither recognized nor believed in. Cultural relativism was a
mark not only of the New Left, but also of a true realist. The States had to recognize their
limits and mortality, but they also continued to represent the basic units of an anarchic
international system, and could not therefore surrender their sovereignty. For Kissinger,
promoting dialogue and reaching accords with the Soviets were functional to the achievement of other objectives. The most important of them was of course the stabilization of
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the European status quo and the “disciplinization” of the centrifugal tendencies shaking
the two blocs and putting their survival at risk (neutralism, Eurocommunism and autonomous European détente in the West; dissidence and human rights campaigns in the East).
Kissinger often denounced western European attempts (and Ostpolitik in particular) to
move independently and outside the bipolar East/West framework: “with respect to the
Europeans” - Kissinger told his staff in late 1973 – “the basic problem is … the attempt
to organize Europe, to unify Europe on an anti-American basis, or at least on a basis in
which criticism of the United States becomes the organizing principle.” All the problems
were “traceable to one fundamental cause, which is the cooperation between the French
and the British to split off Europe in a manner in which the organizing principle for
European unity becomes their capability of resisting us: and in which they want us out
of any structural arrangement in which we might predominate.”36
A realist and Eurocentric perspective also justified and explained Nixon’s and
Kissinger’s policies toward China and the Vietnamese situation. The opening to China
was read and presented through strict bipolar lenses: not as an instrument to engage
China in a web of constraining interdependences, but as a tool to exert more pressure
on the Soviet Union. Establishing a relationship with China was from this perspective
the logical result of a strategic interest that Washington had come to share with Beijing:
that of containing the Soviet Union, and avoiding a Soviet predominance in East Asia.
China could indeed help the United States, regionally balancing the Soviet Union and
permitting the U.S. to limit expenditures and commitments. Hardly surprisingly, the
U.S.-China-Soviet triangle was unbalanced from the beginning. It was based – as William
Bundy has emphasized – “not on equal treatment of the Communist powers but on a
pronounced favoring of China.”37
As for Vietnam, in the late 1960s and early 1970s no one in the White House still
feared a regional domino in South-East Asia. The public strategic rationale for going to
Vietnam, if there ever was one, was widely discredited. Pulling out rapidly was the only
logical option. However, the crucial issue of credibility – again a realist concept, expressing once more Kissinger’s Eurocentric view of international relations – prevented that
from happening. A meaningful peace had to be a “peace with honor:” the United States,
Henry Kissinger claimed, “may have exaggerated the significance of Vietnam in the early
stages of its involvement,” but nevertheless “the confidence in American promises” was
still at stake.38 The extension of the war to Cambodia, periodical resumption of the dramatic aerial bombing of North Vietnam, the mining of Haiphong port, and a long and
bloody prolongation of the war logically ensued. That the Vietnamese had no breaking
point was simply impossible to believe for Kissinger, who would often call for “a savage,
decisive blow against North Vietnam:” “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power
like Vietnam does not have a breaking point,” he once famously told his advisers.39
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kissingerism as the un-american betrayal of u.s. venerable foreign policy traditions:
the neoconservative critique of détente and of kissinger’s realism
Kissinger’s alleged realism was based first and foremost upon recognition of the
limits that the situation imposed on U.S. foreign policy and freedom of action. Scant
and decreasing resources, diminishing domestic support, relative economic and strategic
decline vis-à-vis allies and enemies, all seemed to oblige the U.S. to embark upon a different path. Kissinger himself never stopped lecturing the country on this: “for the first
time in our history – he once proclaimed – we face the stark reality that the … challenge
is unending … We must learn to conduct foreign policy as other nations have had to
conduct it for so many centuries – without escape and without respite … this condition
will not go away.”40
Arms controls, delegating responsibility to third parties (which was the essential
element of the so-called Nixon Doctrine, but also of the project of Vietnamization), and
reducing and eventually ending the U.S. presence in Vietnam all aimed at finding a way
to operate within these new structural and contingent constraints. Realpolitik was (or had
to be) much cheaper than Cold War liberal globalism. Via power politics, it was possible
to preserve, and possibly extend, U.S. influence without putting its solvency at risk. And
some results were indeed achieved: defense expenditures as a percentage of GNP declined
from 8.2% in fiscal 1970 to 5.2% in fiscal 1977; and indexed to inflation, American
defense outlays declined at an annual rate of 4.5% between 1970 and 1975.41
More importantly, Kissinger’s realist turn appeared to be the most successful and
effective response to the isolationist impulse to which many Americans had fallen prey.
It was a way to build a new and lasting consensus around a reformulated and revised
foreign policy. Vietnam and the difficulties the country underwent during the sixties
seemed to have discredited Cold War liberalism and its moral (and geopolitical) certainties for good. A new foreign policy doctrine was needed. Initially, Kissinger’s realpolitik
seemed the winning ticket. What it offered was a clear set of a-historical precepts that
each great power had to follow. In them there was no room for morality, messianism
or, even, generosity. America was no longer asked to go out “in search of monsters to
destroy,” to quote John Quincy Adams. Kissinger would reaffirm this necessity until the
end of his time in government (typically, he would afterwards reverse many of his positions, in the vain attempt to legitimate himself with the New Right of Ronald Reagan).
The world – Kissinger claimed in 1976, under heavy domestic attack – was still a place
“where power remains the ultimate arbiter.” While the nation “must be true to its own
beliefs,” it must also “survive in a world of sovereign nations and competing wills … truth
compels a recognition of our limits … to what extent are we able to affect the internal
policies of other countries and to what extent is it desirable?”42
Realpolitik was, thus, also the main discursive medium of this effort of consensusbuilding. For some time it seemed to work. Détente was widely appreciated by the
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American public. Despite the president’s initial misgivings, his opening to China reasoned well with a large majority of Americans, who supported it enthusiastically. Much
to Nixon’s despair, the popularity of Kissinger, which he carefully cultivated, increased
accordingly. In 1972, a Gallup poll ranked Kissinger fourth among the most admired
Americans, after Nixon, Truman, and Billy Graham. The same poll ranked him first the
following year. The mainstream press, which Kissinger cajoled and flattered incessantly,
ran out of hyperbole to describe Kissinger’s achievements and the successes of détente.
Joseph Kraft, in a column entitled “The Virtuoso at Fifty,” compared Kissinger’s diplomatic
accomplishments to those of the great statesman of the past. The balance created with
China and the Soviet Union – Kraft maintained – was “a diplomatic accomplishment
comparable in magnitude to the feats of Castlereagh and Bismarck.”43
Quite paradoxically, Kissinger’s popularity reached a new peak with the Watergate
scandal, which coincided with his appointment as Secretary of State and with the inevitable decline of presidential authority. Kissinger appeared (and in many ways was) completely in charge of United States foreign policy. His reaction to the October 1973 war
in the Middle East and, even more, his shuttle diplomacy were presented as the apogee
of the solo-virtuoso performance that had come to qualify Kissinger’s realpolitik. All in
all, shuttle diplomacy was also demonstrating that détente was not a defeatist one-way
road to inferiority, and could well serve the traditional U.S. objective to reduce Soviet
influence in a crucial strategic theatre.44
Kissinger’s actions in the Middle East were revealing the real face of détente. For the
U.S. it was a strategy aimed at crystallizing the status quo in Europe in order to relaunch
the bipolar competition elsewhere. Quite ironically, however, in the same period détente
began to be challenged domestically as an ineffective and fatalistic way of dealing with
the Soviet threat. Kissinger’s until then mesmerizing (and very popular) “Europeanness”
ceased to be an asset. His critics, who were able to exploit it effectively, harshly rebuked
it. One National Review commentator went so far as to describe Kissinger as an “unassimilated outsider … a European by heritage and cultural choice, a cosmopolitan by
circumstance, an American by deliberate (and hazardous) calculation” who “revealed the
derivative nature of his national identity in almost pathetic fashion.”45
Many old-style conservatives denounced the intrinsic contradictions of détente and
the much broadcasted realist metamorphosis of U.S. foreign policy. According to James
Burnham, “Secretary Kissinger scolds Senator Jackson for lousing up a friendly trade agreement with the No. 1 Communist power by quibbling over the right to emigrate; Secretary
Kissinger then scolds the congressional leadership for refusing to vote military aid to be
used fighting Communists in Southeast Asia; President Nixon exchange fulsome toasts
with the Communist chiefs at Peking and Moscow; President Nixon authorizes the CIA
to destabilize a Chilean regime on the finding that it would end up under Communist
domination … the Cold War model was … comprehensible to ordinary citizens. It gave
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the reassuring impression that the government knew at least what it was trying to do …
the citizens have lost confidence because they feel their government doesn’t know where
it is going. And they are right.”46
Even more effective, however, was the critique directed toward détente by the socalled neoconservatives: a group of Cold War liberals who intended to reaffirm the moral
certainties and the unchallengeable values of Cold War liberalism, along with the vision
and political project that stemmed from them.47 Neoconservatives led by senator Henry
Jackson began to effectively challenge Kissinger, hindering (and ultimately bringing to
an end) détente with the Soviets. One of the main problems Kissinger had to face was
in fact an amendment to the 1973 Trade Reform Act, sponsored by Jackson and Senator
Charles Vanik (a democrat from Ohio). The Jackson-Vanik amendment tied the granting of most-favored nation status to the Soviet Union – a crucial element of the set of
agreements achieved by Washington and Moscow – to the lifting of restrictions on the
emigration of Soviet Jews. The amendment represented an obvious interference in Soviet
domestic affairs and contributed to the successive deterioration of U.S.-Soviet relations.
In addition, Jackson worked hard to tack an amendment to the first SALT agreement,
which imposed the (meaningless) principle of quantitative parity (the so-called “equal
aggregates”) on any future discussion. Finally, neoconservatives – and Jackson overall –
passionately embraced the cause of Soviet dissidents, thus contributing to creating an
additional element of tension with the Soviets.48
Neocons objected to several aspects of détente and Kissinger’s realpolitik. Before
dealing with each one of them, I would like to emphasize that – ab origine – there was
one more general justification of the neoconservative rejection of détente, one which in
many ways contained (and predated) all the others: the condemnation of the very unAmericanness of Kissinger’s foreign policy and of the decision to open a dialogue with
the Soviets; or better yet, the denunciation of the very un-Americanness (and Europeanness) of realism itself.49 As American Enterprise Institute scholars Tom Donnelly and
Vance Serchuk recently put it, for neoconservatives realism has always been “deeply at
odds with both American political principles and American national interests;” it reflects
“a dogmatic, inflexible, even reactionary ideology” that “stand[s] opposed to the great
liberal tradition of American strategic culture.” Such a tradition, oddly enough, would
include “Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill
Clinton, and George W. Bush.”50
What were – according to the neoconservative critique – the main elements that
revealed the unacceptable and un-American “Europeanness” of Kissinger’s approach? I
will briefly mention four possible categories.
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I: Détente as a form of (very European) neo-appeasement
Over the years, its detractors presented détente more and more as a new and updated
incarnation of Europe’s (and U.S. “Europeanizers’”) traditional penchant for appeasing
totalitarian dictators. Not by chance, there was a progressive rediscovery among disaffected
liberals of the “intellectual anchor of the Cold War:” the politically and intellectually
ubiquitous category of totalitarianism.51 This concept, an analytical tool and a rhetorical
device that had been widely employed during the early post-World War Two years, had
faded progressively from the Cold War discourse, particularly after the season of détente
had begun.
Appeasement and the evergreen “lesson of Munich” were therefore the analogical
models employed successfully by neoconservatives to attack Kissinger and the European and realist turn he had allegedly imposed on U.S. foreign policy. Détente – they
claimed – placed the U.S. in grave danger, just as it did with Britain in the 1930s: as Henry
Jackson’s sympathetic biographer Robert Kaufman wrote, “Jackson’s admirers and the
senator himself saw a parallel between his relentless campaign against détente during the
1970s and Winston Churchill’s campaign against appeasement during the 1930s.”52
References to appeasement flourished in those years and were widely used by opponents of détente. According to historian of the Soviet Union Richard Pipes, “wishful
thinking, reinforced by the fear of the alternative” was draining “the will to face realities.”
“Mutatis mutandis” – Pipes maintained in 1973 – “the mood behind the present attitude
is not unlike that of Britain during the appeasement era of the 1930’s: a combination of a
dread of a repetition of a world war (only intensified today because of the nature of new
weapons), plus admiration for the Germans as a technologically advanced “young” nation
combined with some disgust over Britain as a “decadent” country. For Henry Jackson
“the greatest mistake of the western world” had been “the failure of Britain and France
and America to heed the warnings of Winston Churchill and to stand, firm and early,
for the defense of individual liberty – not merely for territorial security, which proved
illusive and nearly catastrophic, but for the spiritual security of the individual.” “I would
like to hope” Jackson stated – that what was “true of Germany in the 1930’s will not turn
out to be true of the Soviet Union in the 1970’s. But I am bound to say that I share the
apprehensions of those who remain doubtful.”53
II: Détente as the renunciation of the U.S. traditional search for primacy
In order to present détente as a neo-appeasement it was, however, indispensable to
stress the Soviets’ innate aggressiveness and expansionist design. It was – in other words
– necessary to emphasize the continuity in Soviet actions and goals. From this perspective,
the intense and accelerated rearmament undertaken by Moscow in the previous decade
seemed to offer compelling evidence. The Soviet Union – Kissinger’s critics claimed – was
intent on achieving a military (and nuclear) superiority, which could then be used to
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blackmail the West. This critique was based upon an assumption that neoconservatives
were never willing to abandon: the idea that nuclear superiority still mattered. As strategist Paul Nitze would later put it, “to have an advantage at the utmost level of violence
helps play at every lesser level.”54 What followed, quite logically, was not just an exhortation to prevent the Soviet Union from achieving superiority, but also a demand that the
United States rapidly regain the unchallengeable power preponderance it had had in the
past. Indeed, parity and MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) had always been difficult
to swallow for many Americans, including neoconservatives, for whom they amounted
again to a form of appeasement. Security based upon deterrence was in fact security based
primarily, if not exclusively, upon fear; and fear could paralyze will, inhibit courage, blind
judgment, and lead to inevitable defeat.
Strategic interdependence was thus presented as unacceptable: because it undermined U.S. credibility vis-à-vis allies and enemies; because it tied American hands and
constrained (and sometimes annulled) its freedom of action; and because it was immoral
to build peace upon the certainty of global destruction in the case of war. With the rejection of strategic interdependence came the invitation to regain and extend superiority.
“Strategic parity with the Soviet adversary is not good enough” Henry Jackson claimed.
“There is no excuse for any American to ignore the first priority of American policy. And
the first priority in this uncertain and dangerous world is to maintain a greater nuclear
power and strength than the Soviet Union … the survival of our nation and our allies’
freedom depends not on a parity of nuclear power but on a margin of advantage in nuclear
power for the peace-keepers over the peace-upsetters … Our policy should be to create
and maintain a relationship of nuclear forces favourable to deterrence of adventurism
and aggression.”55 Parity and nuclear sufficiency were thus presented as a one-way trip
towards inferiority. This explains the loud call for a return to the safer and more acceptable principle of superiority. Even more, it explains the rise of a dream that is still very
much with us: the creation of a defensive shield, capable of defending the republic and
making it, once more, unassailable. A shield that would allow the country to regain its
lost sovereignty and, with it, its freedom of action; to reacquire its independence; to
remake the U.S. as an exceptional nation, exempt from those laws of history that the
other nations had instead to abide by.56
III: Détente as a Machiavellian (and European) form of amoral politics
Originally, neoconservatism was the response to the rise of the New Left and its
growing influence in the Democratic Party. It was the sudden emergence of a radical
critique of everything Americans had stood for during the Cold War that catalyzed the
emergence of neoconservatism. In its first, embryonic stages, neoconservatism was, in fact,
primarily a reaction to the political, cultural, and moral revisionism of the mid and late
1960s. Such revisionism was hardly monolithic and consistent. Its sources of inspiration
were multiple and often contradictory. However, to its enemies (and not just to them),
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it was based upon a premise that was very difficult to accept: the outright rejection of
the moral certainties and unchallengeable values of Cold War liberalism, along with
the vision and political project that stemmed from them. Cold War liberals (and soonto-be neoconservatives) incessantly denounced New Left cultural, moral, and political
relativism and the way it was contaminating mainstream liberalism and the Democratic
Party.57 For neoconservatives, the New Left was first and foremost “Un-American.” It
was a culturally, politically, intellectually, and morally alien phenomenon. Under attack,
as Jeane Kirkpatrick claimed, was the belief that the U.S., despite everything, was a “decent and successful – though imperfect – society.” Irving Kristol asserted that American
“young radicals” were “far less dismayed at America’s failure to become what it ought
to be than they [were] contemptuous of what it thinks it ought to be. For them as for
Oscar Wilde, it [was] not the average American who [was] disgusting; it [was] the ideal
American.”58 Eugene Rostow denounced “the crisis of the American spirit.” What was
required – Rostow claimed – was “old testament fire, eloquence and passion, and some
old fashioned patriotism as well … People like us cannot allow our party to be taken over
by mush heads. We don’t want to vote for Nixon next year.”59
However, through a curious transfer, the same kind of accusation (i.e. cultural
relativism and moral agnosticism) could be also directed against Kissinger’s realpolitik.
Indeed, a basic staple of realism had been the necessity to separate morality from politics
and power. And Kissinger had frequently, and conveniently, reminded the American
public that the time of a moral and messianic foreign policy had finally passed. However,
such an approach was producing several consequences, which were unacceptable both
to neoconservatives and to a growing majority of the American public. Stripping U.S.
foreign policy of its uniquely moral dimension (that is, again, “Europeanizing” it) meant
normalizing the U.S. itself, making it just one country among many. Amoral great power
politics and acceptance of nuclear parity implied – surreptitiously but unmistakably
– also moral (or amoral) equivalence between the two superpowers. It was in these years
– Donnelly and Serchuck maintain – that “‘moral equivalence’ between East and West
slipped into the mainstream of U.S. strategic thought, and so a critique advanced by
left-wing dissenters during the Vietnam years was adopted by a right-wing administration in the White House.”60
The quintessential products of the insidious consequences of an amoral (and ultimately immoral) foreign policy were deterrence and nuclear sufficiency themselves. Accepting deterrence meant putting the safety of the United States into the hands of others.
Or, better, into the hands of the very “other” Cold War absolute and, up until a few years
earlier, illegitimate enemy of the United States. It meant, as Henry Jackson claimed, to
place faith “in nothing more tangible than a dream of Soviet self-restraint.”61
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IV: Détente as the attempt to separate domestic from foreign policy
The immoral and counterproductive amorality of Kissinger’s realpolitik was even
more evident in the attitude Kissinger had towards dissidence in the Soviet bloc. The
cause of Soviet dissidents was embraced with enthusiasm by neoconservatives, and was
one of the crucial factors that concurred to derail the American-Soviet rapprochement
of the early 1970s. To Kissinger, Soviet dissidents (just like Eurocommunists) were a
nuisance to the great power diplomacy that the U.S. and the USSR had finally agreed
to play. To his domestic critics, instead, the repression of dissidence in the Soviet bloc
was not only proof that the Soviet Union had not changed, but also dramatic evidence
of a shameful moral abdication on the part of the United States, which had been the
only country capable until then of standing up to the Soviet ideological and civilizational challenge. American foreign policy – neoconservatives Robert Kagan and William
Kristol had recently proclaimed – had to “be informed with a clear moral purpose, based
on the understanding that its moral goals and its fundamental national interests” were
“always in harmony.” A “remoralization of America at home” requires “remoralization
of American foreign policy. For both follow from Americans’ belief that the principles
of the Declaration of Independence [are] not merely the choices of a particular culture,”
but “universal, enduring, ‘self-evident’ truths’.” “For conservatives” - Kristol and Kagan
maintained – “to preach the importance of upholding the core elements of the western
tradition at home, but to profess indifference to the fate of American principles abroad”
is “an inconsistency that cannot help but gnaw at the heart of conservatism.”62 The lack
of moral purpose in foreign policy – AFL-CIO leader George Meany claimed – also
undermined “moral purpose at home.”63 Similarly, Henry Jackson, criticizing Kissinger
and Nixon, reaffirmed the impossibility of separating domestic and foreign policy, and
rejected outright the idea that the U.S. should not interfere in the internal affairs of
other countries: “indeed even the term ‘domestic’ when applied to our priorities can be
misleading” – he maintained – “for nothing could be more ‘domestic’ than the survival
of the American people and the freedom of our people to choose their way of life free
from outside domination. My parents came from Norway, and it had one of the highest
standards of living and the cleanest environments in the world. But this wasn’t a help to
the Norwegian people when the Nazis crossed the frontier and overran the country.”64
New appeasement. Passive acceptance of weakness and inferiority. Immoral amorality. Expression of an old style and a pre-modern tendency to separate external from
internal, foreign from domestic. The opponents of détente presented (and often caricatured) Kissinger’s realpolitik in many different ways. The common denominator in these
criticisms was that Kissinger’s represented a very unhealthy attempt to hybridize U.S.
foreign policy traditions with European concepts and practices. Whether or not it was
really so is not of interest here. Suffice it to say that Kissinger thought it was politically
convenient and expedient to pretend so.
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What is certain is that Kissinger (and Nixon with him) underestimated the strength
and persistence of America’s most august political tradition. They took too lightly the
peculiarly U.S. brand of exceptionalist nationalism and the impact it had historically on
the way the United States represented itself and its role in the international system. Of
such nationalism, neoconservatism was just the latest incarnation.65
Building upon America’s belief in its exceptional and unique role, the neoconservatives
were indeed able to construct a new and lasting consensus on a foreign policy approach
(and a foreign policy ideology and discourse) which proved to be much more resilient
and appealing than Kissinger’s “Europeanizing” realpolitik. They did so by relaunching
old moral and ideological dichotomies; by reaffirming the necessity to seek military
primacy and preponderance; and by rejecting the idea that the U.S. could be equivalent
– in morality and might – to any other country.
Kissinger’s realism formally adhered to a gloomy and pessimistic philosophy very
much alien to America’s traditions. By contrast, neoconservatives attempted a syncretic
amalgamation of traditional conservatism and globalistic Cold War liberalism. Of the latter, they retained not just the faith in U.S. intrinsic superiority, but also the conviction that
superiority could be used as a force for good in international politics: anti-Kissingeresque
optimism soon became the distinctive mark of neoconservatism. Neoconservatism was
thus unmistakably American and optimistic: “the first variant of American conservatism in
the past century that is in the American grain,” according to the intellectual father of the
movement, Irving Kristol. It was, therefore, “hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking,
not nostalgic,” its general tone was “cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its twentieth century
heroes” were “TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies
as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater” were
“politely overlooked.” A Cold War liberal – Henry Jackson proclaimed – is “essentially
an optimist:” “if there is a lesson in our remarkable history, it is that the genius of the
American people is best revealed in times of adversity. I cannot accept the conclusion that
events like Watergate, Vietnam or recession signal the decline of America. Our capacity
for continued greatness as a nation is undiminished; if there is any doubt, it can only
be of our will to stay the course … certainly there is no other country in the world that
has our human, cultural and spiritual resources … for Americans, whose basic values are
shared by so much of mankind, the problems of the present are but opportunities for
new achievements.”66
All in all, this optimism proved to be much more in tune with the mood of the
country. As a consequence, Kissinger’s realism ended up being nothing more than a significant parenthesis in the history of United States foreign policy traditions.
207
1. Robert Latham, The Liberal Moment. Modernity, Security, and the Making of Postwar International Order,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1997; Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The Passing
of Mass Utopia in East and West, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001.
2. See John L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment. A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security
Policy, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, and The Long Peace. Inquiries Into the History of the Cold
War, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
3. On how budgetary constraints influenced U.S. overall strategy of containment during the early Cold
War years, see the useful considerations in Michael S. Sherry, In the Shadow of War. The United States since the
1930s, New Haven/London, Yale University Press, 1995; Michael Hogan, A Cross of Iron. Harry S. Truman
and the Origins of the National Security State, Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998,
and Aaron L. Friedberg, In the Shadow of the Garrison State: America’s Anti-Statism and its Cold War Grand
Strategy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
4. George Kennan, The Sources of Soviet Conduct, “Foreign Affairs,” 25, July 1947, pp. 566-82. On Kennan,
see Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989;
Wilson Miscamble, George Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 1994, and John L. Harper, American Visions of Europe, Franklin D. Roosevelt,
George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
5. Walter Lippmann, The Cold War, New York: Harper, 1947; historian Anders Stephanson defined containment as a “non-dialectical rejection” in “The Cold War as US Project” in Federico Romero and Silvio Pons
(eds.), Reinterpreting the Cold War. Issues, Interpretations, Periodizations, London: Frank Cass, 2005.
6. Anders Stephanson, Fourteen Notes on the Very Concept of the Cold War, in Gearóid Ó Thuatail and Simon
Dalby (eds.), Rethinking Geopolitics, London/New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 82.
7. As we will see, an unchallengeable military superiority lasted at least until the mid 1960s. See, Marc
Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace. The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999, and History and Strategy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
8. Thomas G. Paterson (ed.), Cold War Critics: Alternatives to American Foreign Policy in the Truman Years,
Chicago: Quandrangle Books, 1971; J. Samuel Walker, Henry A. Wallace and American Foreign Policy, Westport:
Greenwood Press, 1976. On Taft, see the perceptive and useful reflections of Hogan, A Cross of Iron. See also
the considerations in Logevall, A Critique of Containment. Goldwater’s foreign policy manifesto was Why not
Victory? A Fresh Look at American Foreign Policy, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962.
9. Geir Lundestad, Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945-52, “Journal of Peace
Research,” 23, 2 (1986), pp. 263-277, and The American Empire, Oslo/Oxford: Oxford University Press/
Norwegian University Press, 1990. Charles Maier in Alliance and Autonomy: European Identity and United
States Foreign Policy Objectives in the Truman years, in Michael J. Lacey (ed.), The Truman Presidency, New
York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 273-298.
10. Quoted in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, 94. See also Leffler, Preponderance of Power; Hogan, Cross
of Iron. According to the NSC-68 “one of the most significant lessons” of World War Two was “that the
American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources
for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a higher standard of living.”
NSC-68, “United States Objectives and Program for National Security,” April 14 1950, Foreign Relations of
the United States (hereinafter FRUS), I: National Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy, Washington DC,
Government Printing Office, 1977, p. 264.
11. Jussi Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect. Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, Oxford/New York:
Oxford University Press, 2004, 30; see also, Dana H. Allin, Cold War Illusions. America, Europe, and Soviet
Power, 1969-1989, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.
12. On the notion of free-security, see Campbell Craig, The Not-So-Strange Career of Charles Beard,
“Diplomatic History,” 2, Spring 2001, pp. 251-274. See also Lawrence Freedman, The Evolution of Nuclear
208
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Strategy, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983; McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival. Choices about the Bomb
in the First Fifty Years, New York: Random House, 1988; David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms
Race, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983.
13. The expression «evangelism of fear» is frequently used in David Campbell, Writing Security. United States
Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998, 2nd ed. See also
the ambitious, but often hastily superficial research of Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest. Global Revolution and
the Rise of Detente, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
14. David A. Rapkin, William R. Thompson, Jon A. Cristopherson, Bipolarity and Bipolarization in the
Cold War Era, “The Journal of Conflict Resolution,” (23, 2, June 1979), p. 264; see also Thomas Schwartz,
Lyndon Johnson and Europe: in the Shadow of Vietnam, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
15. David Calleo, The Imperious Economy, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982; Charles Maier,
Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era, “American Historical
Review,” 105, 3 (June 2000), pp. 807-831.
16. James Burnham, Finlandization?, “The National Review,” (May 19, 1970), p. 506; Henry Jackson,
“Perspectives on the Atlantic Alliance,” speech at the Fifth International Conference in Chicago, March
23, 1968, Henry M. Jackson Papers, University of Washington Libraries, Manuscripts Collections, Seattle
(hereinafter HJP-UWL-MC), Speeches and Writings, Box 6.
17. Disaffected liberal cold warriors would later provide the backbone of the so-called “neoconservative movement,” which would effectively challenge the foreign policies promoted by the administrations of Richard
Nixon (1968-74) and Gerald Ford (1974-1976). See, John Ehrmann, The Rise of Neoconservatism. Intellectual
and Foreign Affairs, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1995, and Mario Del Pero, “A Balance of Power
that Favors Freedom.” The Historical and Ideological Roots of the Neo-Conservative Persuasion, Working Paper,
March 2005, Robert Schuman Center, European University Institute, Florence; and Da Henry Kissinger ai
neoconservatori. Alle radici della politica estera statunitense, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 2006.
18. Caleb Carr and James Chace, America Invulnerable: the Quest for Absolute Security from 1812 to Star Wars,
New York: Summit Books, 1988; John Gaddis, The Long Peace; Paul Buhle and James MacMillian (eds.),
The New Left Revisited, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.
19. Henry Kissinger, American Foreign Policy, New York: Norton, 3rd ed., 1979; and Does America Need a
Foreign Policy? Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001.
20. Quoted in Allin, Cold War Illusions, 58. The book I referred to in the text is Henry Kissinger, Nuclear
Weapons and Foreign Policy, New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1957.
21. I have argued elsewhere that Kissinger’s vision of world affairs was distinctly bipolar. See, Mario Del Pero,
Kissinger e la politica estera americana nel Mediterraneo: Il caso portoghese, “Studi Storici,” October-December
2001, pp. 973-988, and Da Henry Kissinger ai neoconservatori, cit.. A different interpretation can be found
in Argyris Adrianopoulos, Western Europe in Kissinger’s Global Strategy, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988;
John Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 274-344 and Rescuing Choice From Circumstances: the Statecraft
of Henry Kissinger, in Gordon Graig e Francis Loewenheim (eds.), The Diplomats, 1919-1979, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 564-592.
22. Robert Brigham, Guerrilla Diplomacy: the NFL’s Foreign Relations and the Vietnam War, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1998; William Bundy, Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency,
New York: Hill & Wang, 1998.
23. William Bundy, Tangled Web, p. 100. William Burr, The Kissinger Transcripts, New York, Free Press,
1998.
24. Rodolfo Mosca, La distensione come modello di diplomazia reazionaria, “Affari Esteri,” 30, Aprile
1976, pp. 209-228. On 1963 as a crucial turning point, see Anders Stephanson, Fourteen Notes and Marc
Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace.
209
25. The EAA conferred on the President’s discretionary powers to liberalize trade with another country, thus
strengthening executive authority in a crucial field. Michael Mastanduno, Economic Containment: CoCom
and the Politics of East-West Trade, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992, pp. 135-145.
26. Walter Russel Mead, Special Providence. American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World, New York
Routledge, 2002, p. 72.
27. Quoted in John Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 281. Gaddis (also in Rescuing Choice from
Circumstances) claims that Kissinger’s approach was indeed multipolar, and not dissimilar from that supported in the early Cold War years by George Kennan. I disagree with both assumptions: Kennan’s multipolar
vision of the international system developed slowly and was indeed tripolar in its belief that a unified and
de-bipolarized Europe should play a role in the international system. Kissinger had instead a strict bipolar
view of the international distribution of power, and, as we will see, worked actively (and often in agreement
with the Soviets) to preserve a bipolar status quo in Europe.
28. John Gaddis, Rescuing Choice from Circumstances, p. 576.
29. For a classical realist perspective on this, see Kenneth N. Waltz, Foreign Policy and Democratic Politics:
The American and British Experience, Boston: Little Brown, 1967.
30. Bruce Mazlish, Kissinger: the European Mind in American Policy, New York: Basic Books, 1976.
31. I tried to deal with these issues in “A Balance of Power that Favors Freedom.”
32. Among the many collections of documents pertaining to Kissinger’s tenures as National Security Adviser
and Secretary of State recently declassified at the U.S. National Archives and at the Gerald Ford Presidential
Library, one of the richest and most fascinating is certainly represented by the transcripts of the meetings
of Kissinger’s staff after he was appointed Secretary of State in September 1973. See, Meetings of Secretary
of State’s Staff, National Archives and Record Administration (hereinafter NARA), General Record of the
Department of State, RG 59, Lot File 78D443 (Transcripts of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s Staff
Meetings, 1973-1977).
33. Meeting of Secretary of State’s Staff, January 12, 1975 and July 1, 1976, NARA, RG59, Lot File 78D443,
Box 6 and Box 10.
34. I dealt with Kissinger’s policy toward the Portuguese regime and his reaction to the Portuguese revolution in The Limits of Détente: the United States and the Crisis of the Portuguese Regime in Wilfried Loth (ed.),
Eastern Europe and Western Europe in the Cold War, forthcoming.
35. Meeting of Secretary of State’s Staff, April 26, 1975, NARA, RG 59, Lot File 78D443, Box 3.
36. Meeting of Secretary of State’s Staff, December 26 1973, NARA, RG 59, Lot File 78D443, Box 1. In
this sense (from a geopolitical perspective), détente was indeed a very conservative strategy, at least in Europe.
For a different analysis of the intrinsic conservatism of détente, see Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest.
37. William Bundy, Tangled Web, p. 238. See also Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, China Confidential: American
Diplomats and Sino-American Relations, 1945-1996, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, pp. 226-227.
Kissinger’s initial scepticism toward an opening to China was also due to his strong Eurocentric perspective
and to his tendency to downplay the strategic importance of a Sino-American rapprochement. See, Jussi
Hanhimäki, Flawed Architect, pp. 32-35.
38. Quoted in Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century. U.S. Foreign Policy since 1900, Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1999, p. 228.
39. Quoted in Jussi Hanhimäki, Flawed Architect, p. 62. But on this issue see also George Herring, America’s
Longest War, New York: Wiley, 1979; Marilyn Young, The Vietnam Wars, 1945-1990, New York: HarperCollins,
1991, and, more recently, Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1998.
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40. Quoted in Frank Ninkovich, The Wilsonian Century, p. 234. Many scholars have seen in this a proof of
Kissinger’s Spenglerian pessimism. According to Dana Allin, “one cannot help but observe Kissinger’s pessimistic conservatism – a sense that the western forces of order and stability were at odds with a disintegrating
tendency as fundamental as entropy;” Kissinger’s was “a conservative gloom.” Dana Allin, Cold War Illusions,
p. 30. Kissinger’s biographers have always accepted this interpretation (see Jussi Hanhimäki, Flawed Architect
and Walter Isaacson, Kissinger, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992). However, Kissinger’s action while in
power, and some of his most obvious mistakes, seem to have been caused by an excessive optimism over the
possibility to reverse a certain course of action.
41. Data taken from John Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, p. 321.
42. The speech, entitled “The Moral Foundations of Foreign Policy,” was a reply to his domestic neoconservative critics. It is reprinted in Henry Kissinger, American Foreign Policy.
43. Quoted in Walter Isaacson, Kissinger, p. 501.
44. William Bundy, Tangled Web, pp. 429-472; Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation. AmericanSoviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, Washington DC: Brookings Institutions, 1985, pp. 360-408; William
Quandt, Peace Process: American Policy Toward the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984, pp. 162-163.
45. Quoted in Walter Laqueur, Kissinger and the Politics of Détente, “Commentary,” 56, pp. 46-52.
46. James Burnham, Detente Contradiction, “The National Review,” March 28, 1975.
47. John Ehrmann, The Rise of Neoconservatism. According to Tod Lindberg “The conservation of liberalism,”
and the reaffirmation of its intrinsic “expansionist … character” defined, ab origine, neoconservatism and
what it stood for. See Tod Lindberg, Neoconservatism’s Liberal Legacy, “Policy Review,” 127, 2004; Online.
Available HTTP: http://www.policyreview.org/oct04/lindberg.html.
48. George Kennan and Henry Kissinger concurred in criticizing Soviet dissidents and their American supporters. According to Kennan it was not “right for a great government such as ours to try to adjust its foreign
policy in order to work internal changes in another country” (“then” – added Kissinger caustically – “you know
what would have happened to them under Stalin”). See Telephone Call George Kennan/Henry Kissinger,
September 14, 1973, 8.55 pm, NARA, Nixon Presidential Material Project (hereinafter NPMP), Henry A.
Kissinger Telephone Conversations Transcripts (hereinafter Telcons), Chronological File, Box 22.
49. I have argued elsewhere that, when it first appeared, neoconservatism was a quintessential manifestation of
a typically American “exceptionalist nationalism.” See, Mario Del Pero, Da Henry Kissinger ai neoconservatori,
cit. and, A “Balance of Power that Favors Freedom.” The Historical and Ideological Roots of the Neoconservative
Persuasion, cit.
50. Tom Donnelly and Vance Serchuk, John Kerry, Reactionary, “The Weekly Standard on-line,” July 19,
2004, Online. Available at HTTP: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/
306spzzf.asp, and “Unrealistic Realism,” AEI online, July 9, 2004. Online. Available at HTTP: http://www.
aei.org/publications/pubID.20875/pub_detail.asp. In the pantheon of pre-neoconservatives suggested by the
two authors, one surprising omission is Harry Truman, whom many neocons continue to revere. The absence
of the militarily, fiscally, and socially conservative Dwight Eisenhower, and that of traditional conservative
George Bush Sr. is instead emblematic.
51. N. Pal Singh, Cold War Redux: on the ‘New Totalitarianism’, “Radical History Review,” 2003,
pp. 171-181; Abbot Totalitarianism. The Inner History of the Cold War, Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1995, pp. 190-95.
52. Robert Kaufman, Henry Jackson. A Life in Politics, Seattle: Washington University Press, 2000, p. 243.
Conveniently enough, Jackson tended to forget that Churchill himself had attempted to promote an early
détente with the Soviets in the 1950s. See, Fred Logevall, A Critique of Containment. On the “lesson of
211
Munich” see, Ernest May, “Lessons of the Past:” the Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy, New
York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973.
53. Richard Pipes to Henry Jackson, February 26, 1972; HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Speeches
and Writing, Others, Box 25. Henry Jackson, “Détente and Human Rights,” Commencement, Yeshiva
University, New York,” June 4 1973, HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Speeches and Writings, Box
11.
54. Quoted in Dana Allin, Cold War Illusions, p. 65; see also Strobe Talbott, The Masters of the Game: Paul
Nitze and Nuclear Peace, New York: Knopf, 1988.
55. Henry Jackson “No Time for Rest,” September 24, 1968, Draft speech at the Senate, HJP-UWL-MC,
Accession No. 3560-6, Speeches and Writing, Box 6.
56. Francis Fitzgerald, Way Out there in the Blue. Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War, New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2000.
57. Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and its Discontents, pp. 222-236; Paul Buhle and James MacMillian (eds.), The
New Left Revisited, Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 2003.
58. Jeane Kirkpatrick, The Revolt of the Masses, “Commentary,” 55, 1973, pp. 58-62; Irving Kristol, When
Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness – Some Reflections on Capitalism and the Free Society, “The Public Interest,” 21,
1970, pp. 3-16.
59. Eugene Rostow to Henry Jackson, January 27 1971, HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Subject
File, Box 85.
60. Donnelly and Serchuk, John Kerry, Reactionary.
61. Henry Jackson, “The Strategic Balance and the Future of Freedom,” American Society of Newspapers
Editors. April 14 1971, HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Speeches and Writings, Box 8. Simon Dalby,
Geopolitical Discourse: the Soviet Union as Other, “Alternatives,” 13, 1988, pp. 415-42; Anders Stephanson,
Fourteen Notes.
62. William Kristol and Robert Kagan, Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy, “Foreign Affairs,” 75, 1996,
pp. 18-32.
63. George Meany, “Foreign Policy Choices for the 1970s and 80s,” Statement before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, December 8, 1975, HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Speeches and Writings
Others, Box 23.
64. Henry Jackson, “Power and Responsibility,” February 14 1971, Annual Women’s Forum on National
Security, Washington, HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Speeches and Writings, Box 8.
65. See for instance, Anatol Lieven, America. Right or Wrong. An Anatomy of American Nationalism, Oxford/
New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.
66. Irving Kristol, The Neoconservative Persuasion, “The Weekly Standard,” 47, 2003; Henry Jackson, “What
it Means to be a Liberal,” August 14 1970, Commencement address, University of Puget Sound and Henry
Jackson “Is the U.S. still number 1?,” undated (ca. 1975), HJP-UWL-MC, Accession No. 3560-6, Speeches
and Writings, Boxes 7 and 11.
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INTERACTIONS IN SOCIAL POLICY
WELFARE AND SECURITY IN THE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR TWO:
HOW EUROPE INFLUENCED AMERICA’S DIVIDED WELFARE STATE
jennifer klein
Social security must be achieved by co-operation between the state and the
individual. The state should offer security for service and contribution.
Sir William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services, 1942
The business community has in the past committed the error of permitting
the government to assume the role of sole protector of the employee, the
sole guardian of his rights…[B]usiness allowed Mr. Roosevelt to step into
that heroic role… It is now time for the business community to show that
corporate action, which is still private action, and which emanates from
individuals, can achieve the same result.
Russell Davenport, Fortune, 19491
When Delphi Corporation, America’s largest auto parts manufacturer, filed for bankruptcy in October 2005, CEO Robert S. Miller asserted that “we simply cannot afford
to be encumbered by high legacy issues.”2 By legacy issues, he meant employee health
care and pension benefits. American media, reporting on Delphi’s bankruptcy and the
woes of numerous other major corporations, quickly absorbed the language of “legacy
costs.” Indeed, the media have talked more about legacy costs than about economic security. General Motors owes 89 billion dollars in health insurance and pension benefits
to current and future retirees. The bankruptcy of Delphi, its chief supplies and former
GM subsidiary, adds another six billion to GM’s retiree tab. The four major American
airlines, regularly referred to as “legacy carriers” by financial analysts and journalists, have
pension plans that together face a shortfall of thirteen billion dollars. United Airlines,
with the help of bankruptcy court, defaulted on its pension plans and handed them over
to the government at cut rate. No doubt the others will follow. A few years ago, steel
industry executives cried that the industry itself couldn’t go on, owing to the “significant
problem” of “retiree legacy costs” and they looked to the government for some form of
rescue.3 The word on Wall Street is that unless workers accept big cuts in benefits, these
corporations will be broken up. The implication of the legacy rhetoric is that these are
unwanted burdens foisted upon management long ago by greedy, reckless unions.
The very word legacy, of course, begs that we ask an historical question – what is
the exact nature of this legacy? Is it the legacy of “overly generous” union contracts, as
financial analysts suggest, or is the legacy of a persistent corporate strategy? Since the late
nineteenth century, American employers have relied on a program of welfare capitalism
215
welfare and security in the aftermath of world war two
to deflect incursions into the workplace from the regulatory state or organized workers.
Welfare capitalism encompasses social welfare benefits and health, safety, or leisure programs offered through the workplace – programs established and directed by the employer.
In periods of labor upheaval and political social reform, American firms have relied on
work-place social welfare as a private, managerial response to political pressure from the
state and workers – particularly when workers sought to use the state to improve working
conditions and guarantee economic security. Where or when employers no longer faced
these threats, managers reasserted their control over the terms of work, compensation,
and security. Out of this conflict emerged a public-private welfare regime, heavily tilted
toward private sources and based on the exclusion of those who most needed economic
assistance. Any narrative of the American welfare state, therefore, belongs within the
century-long story of welfare capitalism.
The story of the U.S. post-war development of private welfare benefits is often told
as a particularly internal story – the failure of liberals in Congress, red-baiting by interest
groups, pursuit of self-interest by unions. Yet we might also think about how economic
and business elites were reading broader political economy developments in Europe and
the emerging terms of social democracy. The heirs to the New Deal in the U.S., as well
as corporate elites, were well aware that the post-war challenge of linking liberal democracy and economic security held center stage on both sides of the Atlantic. For corporate
elites, the reconstruction of western European economies to meet this challenge was not
to become an occasion for reconstruction at home.
The relationships between business, labor, and the state have determined social
welfare regimes and labor’s compensation. In order to explain the passage or defeat of
social policies and the structure of particular public and private social welfare benefits, it
is necessary to examine the balance of power in the political economy and further, to consider the international impact of the politics of security. The politics of industrial relations
and state planning which took shape from Germany to Scandinavia to Great Britain in
the late 1940s laid the foundation for divergent developments of the welfare state across
the Atlantic a decade later. In the 1940s, the American federal government played an
essential role in labor-management bargaining; state power made possible the presumptive post-war “labor-management accord.” For the same reason, from the moment of the
“accord’s” inception, American corporations fought aggressively to sever the links between
the state and workers. Moreover, business elites used the state to insulate matters related
to levels of employment, capital investment, and production relocation. By containing
the political scope of labor-management bargaining, bottling it up at the level of the
singular company or plant, and straining the war-time labor-liberal alliance, employers
and insurance companies winnowed away the broad class challenge once embodied in the
politics of security. Welfare capitalism fragmented the notions of security and social risk.
It created self-contained islands of security that left non-traditional families, women, and
216
jennifer klein
racial ethnic minorities adrift and labor without the political power to mount a challenge
to numerous structures of power and economic relationships that increasingly shut them
out too. Where private issues were merged into public ones in Europe’s social democracies, public issues were blurred into the private realm in to the U.S., turning questions of
social distribution into private managerial issues, insulated from public oversight, public
discussion, and political challenge.
The New Deal, of course, drew on the long tradition of Atlantic exchange between
social reformers in the U.S. and Europe, in which social investigators and charity workers,
social scientists and trade unionists, religious leaders and progressive business leaders had
sought to address the “social question:” the various forms of risk and impoverishment
that resulted from rapid industrialization and aggressive market capitalism and the social
consequences. In each nation, of course, the determinative question would be how far
the government’s role in ensuring the welfare of its citizens and workers would extend
into the private market place. By the time of the Great Depression, proponents of social
reform in western Europe and North America had before them similar policy proposals
and programmatic experiments. And certainly, the United States was not too much of
an outlier. The U.S. Social Security Act was pegged to occupational structure and wages.
Yet this was the case in other nations as well, even those welfare states we now hold up
as comprehensive and universalist models. Sweden’s pension legislation of 1935 left out
farm workers and discriminated against other groups in unemployment insurance. It used
means-testing. No universal pension proposal came onto the agenda until 1946. Like
many European nations, the workplace would be the key access point to social security
and social service benefits. And the U.S. as well accepted the family wage assumptions of
a male breadwinner and a dependent wife; risk pooling would protect the former.4
Some American reformers emboldened by the passage of the Social Security Act in
1935, quickly began planning for “the next steps in social security.” This time they invoked
European models as too limited because health plans, originally passed as cash sickness
– replacement of wages – were designed solely for poor and low-wage workers. As Harry
Hopkin’s mentor, John Kingsbury put it, “we want no poor man’s system in America”…
“our primary problem is not how to furnish assistance to the poor but to enable those
who cannot buy medical care as individuals to buy it as groups.”5 These New Dealers,
and the members of the newly created Social Security Board, were still open to European
ideas about social risk and protection, yet they were confident they could push social
insurance even further in progressive new directions.
Yet in addition to the extensive burst of national legislation of the New Deal, what also
characterized the period, especially in terms of health care, were the attempts to construct
local social democratic, social welfare sites or programs. From midwestern cities to southern
towns, to West Coast industrial and construction sites, doctors, unions, employers, and
consumers began developing health care programs in the 1930s that would enable patients
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to pool the risks and costs of sickness and injury, thus bringing medical care within the
reach of more people. Labor activists, as new supporters and constituents of the welfare
state, actively participated in the movement for health security. Women were key activists
in the movement for health security in this phase, working through female institutions
such as women’s labor auxiliaries, consumer groups, socialist organizations, and farm
clubs. Many of the programs that community activists hoped to build stressed provision
of services for all who needed them, over cash indemnification for costs incurred by the
worker. Unions and other organized groups in cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland,
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and New York launched a process of education, experimentation,
even enrollment in local health plans.
Health security and social security defined a relationship between citizens and the
New Deal, not employees and employers. During this period of ferment and experimentation in the late 1930s, unions and employee groups decided, independently of
employers, to subscribe to a health plan or develop a disability retirement plan. On the
whole, they were not part of a process of collective bargaining. Unions decided health
security, rehabilitation, disability and old age support were services they wanted to obtain for their membership. Setting up “social security committees,” they researched the
available options, established contacts with local plans, and signed contracts directly with
the local health plan. At both the local and national level, AFL and CIO activists, and
New Deal health activists urged unions to participate in a particular type of pre-paid
health plan – service plans or group practice plans – and to seek out plans that gave the
union a voice in administration, or at least in the structure of benefits. Labor, New Deal,
and leftist health activists supported community rating: every one in the community who
belonged to a medical service plan paid the same rate, a community rate, so that those
who were healthier helped subsidize those who needed services more often. Community
members shared the costs of sickness. Other group plans relied on progressive, graduated
membership fees, with dues based on percentage of family income. In this historical moment, the politics of security was based on a set of relationships between a wide range of
community activists, community organizations, and an activist state.6
These types of programs continued to germinate as America shifted its focus to
war. Thus before and during World War Two, community groups were engaged in local
experimentation – in building citizen-based, or citizen-responsive, institutions at the local or even regional level. By picking up the story of private employee benefits during or
after World War Two, the breadth and vitality of these earlier experiments has been lost,
as has their connection to the social security politics of the New Deal. Instead, the more
accurate question to ask is how the evolution of New Deal political economic relationships and the fashioning of a more permanent industrial relations regime during the war
had an impact on the politics of security.
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A key institution in the construction of the post-war collective bargaining regime
was the National War Labor Board (NWLB). This new war agency, comprised of business, labor, and public representatives, had far more power than the National Labor
Relations Board to intervene directly and settle disputes. It has become a truism that
the War Labor Board instigated the spread of pecuniary fringe benefits, such as group
insurance and pensions, but this is not really an accurate reading of the Board’s actions.
Between 1942 and 1945, the NWLB issued a mixed bag of rulings on employee welfare
benefits. The Board’s over-riding imperatives were to limit strikes, keep war production
running smoothly, and contain inflation. In general, the WLB took a rather conservative
position regarding insurance benefits, contending that it would not order something that
“would be a distinct innovation in the industry.” In a 1942 case involving employees of
the Strand Baking Company, the Board also indicated that it would not endorse health
insurance where “the work is not characterized by extraordinary hazards…” Yet even when
petitioning employees subsequently made the case that they worked under particularly
hazardous conditions, as in the case of munitions workers at U.S. Cartridge Company,
the Board denied their request for a compulsory insurance plan. These cases set a precedent that the Board adhered to throughout the war: it would not order establishment
of an insurance or other benefit plan in a dispute case. The Board frankly reaffirmed this
position in the Basic Steel Cases in 1944 and the U.S. Rubber Case 1945.7 Nor would
the Board take on the role of the union’s heavy in forcing employers to liberalize existing
group insurance plans. When employees of the Philadelphia Transportation Company
petitioned the Board to improve an already existing company pension plan, the Board
ruled that it would not order changes in existing pension plans.8
There was, however, a second group of cases in which the WLB consistently ruled in
labor’s favor: compelling management to guarantee already existing benefits. The Board
was willing to order companies that did provide insurance benefits to maintain them for
the duration of the war. From 1943 on, the Board ruled that companies could neither
alter nor abolish their existing insurance, sick leave, or pension plans. Late in the war,
the NWLB went a step further ordering employers to include sick leave, disability wage
plans, and group insurance in labor-management contracts, arguing that these aspects
of the employment relation belonged in written contracts.9
These types of cases had several rationales. New Deal ideology supported the notion
of industrial rights and economic security as components of citizenship. New Deal legislation, from the Wagner Act to the Social Security Act to the Fair Labor Standards Act,
had conferred rights on American workers, as well as corresponding duties on employers
to participate in the new framework constructed to promote workers’ security. Within
this milieu, the Board on some level enforced the New Deal right to security – even if it
took a rather circumscribed form. On the one hand, the Board declared that “employers
have no greater legal or moral obligation to pay insurance premiums for their employees
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than to pay their food, rent, or clothing bills.” If, however, employers had made the decision to provide such benefits, they would have to follow through on their promises – at
least in making sure the plan continued to exist. Arbitrary managerial power in this case
was no more acceptable than spontaneous job actions by workers. At the same time, the
Board’s first priority was to keep war production going. On the most basic level, Board
members sought to preserve the status quo in a workplace so that employees would not
get disgruntled, walk out on strike, and interrupt production. In return for workers’
subordinating their interests to the imperatives of unlimited production, the state would
enforce their rights; unions would not have to do so through self-help.10
For the legal theorists and industrial relations experts who sat on the NWLB, workers’
rights would be based upon the specific language in a contract, and the contract would
function as a “constitution” or “ ‘a basic statute for the government of an industry or
plant…’” An over-riding faith in contractual procedures infused the War Labor Board’s
rulings on welfare benefits (as well as many other issues) – an ideology that would gain
coherence after the war as “industrial pluralism.” Board members believed that by routinizing interactions between management and workers through collective bargaining
contracts and through bureaucratic grievance procedures established therein, they would
construct a dependable, rational system of industrial jurisprudence, hence eliminating
labor-management strife. With a collective bargaining contract in place, Archibald Cox
wrote, “the rule of law would be substituted for absolute authority.”11
This emphasis on contract as a marker of equality between labor and capital is the
most important legacy of the NWLB. By sending unions the message that disputes should
be settled by establishing contractual features, rather than through workplace activism,
the War Labor Board encouraged an increasing reliance upon collective bargaining.
As unions began to focus on getting social security demands included in a labor-management contract, as a demand extracted from management, the labor movement began to
move away from the independent health projects initiated prior to the war. Labor-liberal
support for social security through community projects and national policy aimed to
compensate for the uncertainties of the employment relationship, as well as the arbitrary
control over security exerted by employers prior to the New Deal era. The emphasis on
social security benefits obtained through collective bargaining would, in the long run,
refocus health security, and to some extent old age security, on the employer and what
the employer was willing to provide.
The second idea American liberals, trade unionists, and Keynesian oriented business leaders took out of the war was the emphasis on production, output and growth as
the solution to the old “social question” or “labor question” – a faith that these priorities could subsume class conflict by ensuring through administrative means the better
distribution of a growing surplus. With this ideology of productivity and production,
as Charles Maier has called it,12 Americans would become far less receptive to European
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ideas about social welfare, social democracy, or corporatism after the war. Indeed, for
American business leaders, now was the time to reverse the balance of power tipped by
the New Deal and war-time corporatism.
As the war came to an end, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) cast
the corporatist War Labor Board as having imposed radical changes under the guise of
a wartime emergency. In summarizing the impact of the WLB on the “rights and responsibilities of management” and reviewing the cases on fringe benefits specifically, the
NAM asserted “with the termination of the War and the dissolution of the War Labor
Board, the trend towards limitations of such rights must be changed…” Calling for labor
problems to be brought back to “the local level,” business leaders interviewed by Factory
Management and Maintenance lamented that “government freely uses its powers to make
management comply.”13
While post-war American policy in Europe would also promote the politics of
growth, efficiency, and production as the antidote to class conflict, the war’s experiences
had actually reinforced corporatist patterns of social bargaining on the continent and
in Great Britain. As in the U.S., war-time controls created institutions of industry-state
collaboration. But trade unions were brought into administration of war programs, such
as wage controls and manpower planning and distribution. Where American labor leaders like Walter Reuther of the UAW failed to establish such corporatist collaboration at
the plant level, directly engaged with production, in Britain and elsewhere plant-level
co-determination between unions and management became a fact of life.14 More broadly,
labor and the Left had shifted the entire political spectrum to the left from Britain to
Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, and Sweden. In France, labor militancy and leftist
power surged immediately after the war ended. Although the communists would be purged
from the governing coalition after 1947, and even the leftist Confederation Generale du
Travail (CGT) would be increasingly marginalized, for a significant moment, organized
labor, the CGT, and the Left held considerable political power just as Europe and America
began the process of post-war reconstruction. Following an insurrectional strike wave in
1944, labor won two major gains that could tip class power in France toward workers:
works councils, incorporating labor representatives in economic decision making, and a
new social security system, including coverage for health care, retirement, and work accidents. With the enactment of the 1945 social security program, unions became the key
participants managing the public pension scheme. Business representatives, moreover, were
not invited to join them on the public pension boards. For labor, particularly the leftist
CGT, la securite sociale was explicitly a working-class victory (conquete ouvriere).15
Across western Europe, bureaucrats and political leaders intended to promote
reconstruction through the state mechanisms developed during the war. The state planning and economic controls of the war economy were viewed favorably from England
to Sweden. Promises of social reform and social protection abounded. The state’s role
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rested on two imperatives: full employment and inclusive social policies.16 According to
Victoria De Grazia, the Beveridge Report, published in England in 1942, carried tremendous cultural and ideological weight, even well beyond the British Isles. Containing
a “powerful statement of the well-being that the Allied victory would bring to Europe,”
writes De Grazia, its inspiration seeped through Italian, French, German, and American
politics.17 Its central premise held that without a decent minimum of security against the
“five giant social ills” of “illness, ignorance, disease, squalor, and want,” individuals could
never be free citizens and genuine participants in society. Security and equality were too
important to be left to the market, especially since after the war, food shortages, hunger,
and scarcity of all kind persisted for some years. Governments, then, would guarantee
higher standards of living and more equitable distribution as “social rights,” including
public provision of medical care for all, full employment, universal secondary education,
subsidized housing, and income support during sickness, unemployment, and old age.
Economic growth strategies had to have social fairness at the center.18
Prominent American trade unionists from the CIO thought they could push for
the same corporatist models and an expansion of New Deal social rights after the war.
Union activists and workers saw the rights of the National Labor Relations Act, social
security, and the international struggle for democracy as inseparable: “the broad problems
of world security and the personal problems of individual security seem to merge.”19 The
struggle for security had been catapulted to even higher levels of legitimacy with the new
commitment to international protocols of rights and democracy. In 1944, Roosevelt had
given a speech proposing a Second Bill of Rights, protecting opportunity and security in
the realms of shelter, education, recreation, medical care, food and clothing, echoing the
Beveridge Report and its five social ills. The Beveridge Report and Roosevelt’s formulation had such influence internationally, they became part of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights in 1948. The Universal Declaration included social and economic
guarantees that were subsequently incorporated in dozens of constitutions throughout the
world: the right to education, the right to social security, the right to join a trade union
for protection, the right to work and “just and favorable remuneration.” The authors of
the Universal Declaration insisted that political and economic rights were integrated as
a whole, although in 1951, the human rights protocols were split into two different conventions, one for civil and political rights and another for economic, social, and cultural
rights. Western Europe’s nations signed; the U.S. never did.20
American employers certainly recognized the social and political premium placed on
security as vividly as did the Democratic Party, the labor movement, and the proponents
of national social security. While they were willing to accede to workers’ demands for
security, American business leaders intended to separate security from shared economic
governance and working-class political power. The meaning of security would have to be
reframed to suit management’s goals in industrial relations. After World War Two, the
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National Association of Manufacturers called on business leaders to enlist in “the competition for leadership in a welfare economy.” As one business executive proclaimed in 1949,
“Now it is high time for business leaders of the United States to get back into the act and
enter this competition in a big way for the greatest of all stakes.”21 American business
firms and commercial insurance companies became partners in creating and expanding
private alternatives to public social insurance and community-controlled social welfare
institutions. “The American working man must look to management,” Ford Motors’ vice
president John Bugas told the American Management Association.22
After the war, the links between security, industrial relations, and government policy
that were an essential part of New Deal liberalism became increasingly attenuated. Security
instead became part of a resurgent welfare capitalism, as employers sought to check the
growing assertiveness of labor, the intrusion of the state into labor relations, and what
manufacturers perceived as “politicized bargaining.” The American labor movement, like
its European counterparts, emerged from the war with economic power that also was
explicitly political. Basic employment decisions from wages to time shifts to compensation
had been decided in public venues with the participation of state actors. The question
was: how, or to what extent, could labor use New Deal and war-time political structures
to transform economic relationships and realize labor’s broader economic security goals?
While American policymakers may have had to accept such terms in war-torn Europe
in order to sustain non-communist governments, American business had no intention
of accepting such a dramatic restructuring of production and power at home. Whether
a redistributive social policy would be realized through social insurance or the Wagner
National Labor Relations Act or other corporatist means, it had to be stopped.
The first bold, comprehensive, and visible move in the U.S. was taken by the United
Mine Workers (UMW). During the first post-war bargaining round, John L. Lewis demanded that coal operators finance a union health and welfare plan for all miners. When
the Coal Operators balked, Lewis took the bituminous coal miners out on strike on
April 1, 1946. Invoking the War Labor Disputes Act, President Truman seized the mines
after six weeks of work stoppage. With the mines now officially under the jurisdiction
of the Interior Department, the Secretary of the Interior took a seat at the negotiating
table. The federal government would now be responsible for settling each of the demands
presented by the union, including a health and welfare fund.23
Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug was ready to make a deal where the mine owners were not. Truman and Krug consulted with the Social Security Administration on
the issue of a union-run health and welfare fund. The Social Security Administration’s
Bureau of Research and Statistics provided technical assistance in designing the unionrun welfare program. On May 29, Krug and Lewis signed a contract, which included a
medical and hospital plan, a retirement fund, and provisions for coordinating the two.24
With pressure from the Truman administration, the mine owners would pay for a union
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Welfare and Retirement Fund, financed by a royalty assessed on the amount of coal
extracted by union workers. The union would control the Fund by controlling two of
the three plan trustees.25
The UMW’s success, then, owed a great deal to the intervention of the state and
sympathetic government officials. The Social Security Administration and the Public
Health Service recruited staff for the UMW program. Physicians, public health experts,
and industrial health experts came from the Public Health Service and the Farm Security
Administration, which had run rural medical programs during the 1930s and World
War Two.26 The settlement also included the stipulation that the federal government
would conduct a comprehensive survey of the available medical services and health care
needs of miners and their families, investigating mining camps and the company doctor
system and testing coal operators’ claims that they took care of their employees. Here was
a direct and threatening intervention of the state into the employment relation.27
Although the UMW programs would not dispense benefits until the end of the
1940s, and wrangling over the details continued for several years, labor leaders were
impressed by what Lewis and the UMW had done. CIO leaders perceived it as a victory
on union terms. It appeared that the UMW had extracted resources from the coal operators that would be shifted into a comprehensive workers’ security program. Moreover,
the settlement was industry-wide. Neither CIO nor AFL unionists intended to abandon
their support for an expanded welfare state, but they had the sense that Lewis had shown
a way in which labor could build on the collective bargaining regime fashioned by the
NWLB and make it part of the broader politics of security.
Labor’s health experts maintained a vision of health security linked to communities,
not employers. According to this model, they envisioned a not-for-profit community
plan in which a board of trustees, or a non-profit foundation, contracted out for services.
Public members and labor representatives would have representation on the board, as
well as health professionals. As presented in the United Auto Workers’ model in the late
1940s, groups of physicians, working in cooperation with hospitals, would sign a contract with a UAW/community board of trustees. The payment scheme would be based
on capitation. The board of trustees would also run other social security programs, such
as rehabilitation, unemployment compensation, and old age benefits. This was no mere
insurance contract.28
The initial set of post-war demands for health and pension plans, then, were envisioned as independent programs that took a percentage of payroll and put them in to
union-run, or union determined, social service programs. This strategy did, in an important sense, attempt to shift power relations within the industry; it was intended to take
security out of the realm of personnel policy, out of the realm of welfare capitalism.
Structured in this way, employers and the National Association of Manufacturers
(NAM) interpreted the demands of the UMW and UAW as a fundamental challenge to
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managerial prerogatives. As the NAM charged, “Not only do these plans represent a heavy
payroll burden, but they go right to the heart of management’s relations with employees by
driving a wedge which tends to make the employee feel that his bargaining agent is more
sympathetically concerned with his well-being than is his employer.” Further, to business,
this strategy smacked of European-style corporatism and “politicized bargaining.” The
link between union power and the federal government would have to be severed. They
invoked the most alarmist framing, again linking the New Deal and Europe’s post-war
development: “the domestic trend is toward creation of a Welfare state; the world trend
is toward a Welfare World; the slogan of the hour is a Fair Deal for all.”29
Such rhetoric exaggerated what American representatives were promoting for Europe,
even once the Marshall Plan was in place, but a fair deal for all was on the minds of Europe’s
planners. The American emissaries of the Marshall Plan offered the politics of productivity.
Conceived originally as a strategy to boost European production to overcome the dollar gap, the Marshall Plan sought a restructuring western capitalism in which economic
growth would depoliticize issues of political economy into technocratically-managed
output efficiency and modernization. Productive abundance, the American experience
suggested, displaced the need for radical distribution of economic power. “United States
spokesmen,” Charles Maier argues, “came to emphasize economic productivity as a
principle of political settlement in its own right.” If this vision reflected “the stalemate of
New Deal reform” at home,30 Europeans faced their own political imperatives and wartime legacies. For European administrators, boosting productivity was an insufficient end
in itself. As six years of war and destruction laid bare, neither right-wing totalitarianism
nor liberal rule had brought their citizens economic or political security. Now the state
would set economic goals and ensure fair distribution, even if it meant wage restraint
and deferred consumption for several years. War-time price controls were continued;
in Great Britain and the Netherlands, price controls and rationing of goods lasted well
into the 1950s. Even the American occupation in Germany had to keep them in place,
given the disarray of its economy. National social policy would ensure collective access
to social services or family allowances.31
The Marshall Plan helped split European labor movements along communist and
anti-communist lines, but it did not eliminate statist economic policies. Most elected
governments experimented with planning of one sort or another. Post-war legislation in
Sweden made permanent the state’s role in retraining and directing workers to priority
industries. In 1947, legislation gave the Board of Trade authority to set up permanent
industrial planning councils, corporatist in nature, in designated industries. Although these
structures ultimately did not succeed, in 1947, it would have looked like a threatening
road to socialism from the American vantage point. France went even further, drafting
a national plan for production and investment targets, and indeed, continuing with
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indicative planning throughout the 1950s, as French economic growth surged. Under
post-war planning, boundaries between public and private blurred.32
With wide-scale nationalization of industry and utilities across Europe, the boundary
was erased altogether. Between August 1945 and August 1948, the Labour government
in Britain nationalized the coal industry, electricity, gas, communications, railroads,
waterways, aviation, parts of road transportation, and the Bank of England – all with
rather little controversy. Health care came under the National Health Service Act of 1946.
The French government nationalized not only mines, utilities, banks, and insurance
companies but Renault Auto. The icon of the mass-production consumer economy in
America – the auto industry – was now a state industry! And even once the communists
were clearly expelled from power, the commitment to nationalization and state planning
would be continued by governments across the political spectrum.33
For American policymakers, social democracy now seemed to occupy the safe political
center – in Europe that is. To keep their communist parties out, Americans accepted the
emerging terms of social democracy. Likewise, to keep a threatening right-wing, fascist
remnants, or industrial oligarchy at bay, Americans abroad found themselves promoting
labor organizing and encouraging corporatism. In Germany, where American administrators had the most direct impact, occupation authorities insisted on a depoliticized
labor movement with no official connections to political parties. Yet, they also wanted
labor to be a bulwark against the danger of cartelized industrial political power. In exchange for legalization of trade unions and organizing rights, the new German trade
union movement, DGB, would accede to the politics of productivity, peaceful collective
bargaining, and the promises of economic growth. By 1950, unions were still waiting,
and as their participation and reward remained unresolved, they threatened strikes and
social conflict. The U.S. finally intervened in 1951 and ensured new legislation enforcing
co-determination.34
An interesting shift then occurred in how American business leaders and economic
writers talked about Europe. The rhetorical “red flags” and warning flares sent up by
business interests in their political maneuvering focused more on Britain, than the Soviet
Union, as the more plausible threat to class power in the U.S. came not from MarxismLeninism or Soviet communism but the mixed economies of democratic western Europe.
When the Congress of American Industry met at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in
December. 1949, Business Week reported that “British Socialism seems a closer threat
than Russian communism.”35 By that point, America’s chief goal in Europe was to limit
Soviet expansion. In the U.S., Europe’s influence – as business elites and conservatives
saw it – could threaten to radicalize or expand the New Deal. As one American executive
put it, “England reminds us that a great conflagration can spread suddenly.”36
Russell Davenport, a prominent business writer for Fortune magazine, agreed, seeing in the U.S. “a trend that runs parallel with the socialist trend in Britain and Europe”
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and “carried further by Harry Truman’s Fair Deal and its program for a ‘welfare state.’”
Yet he recognized what workers had gained as a result of fifteen years of depression, political reform, and war. “Is the demand of the American people for ‘welfare’ a justifiable
demand?… there can be no doubt that it is,” wrote Davenport. In a slightly different
variation from the British Thomas H. Marshall’s post-war trinity of citizenship rights,
Davenport argued that there were new kinds of rights in modern American life, which
he identified as spiritual rights, political rights, and economic rights. Contrasting with
the more shrill and self-serving jeremiads of corporate leaders, Davenport attempted to
offer serious intellectual underpinning for political economic alternatives to the welfare
state economies of post-war Europe, and yet at the same time acknowledge the role of
security. As he carefully explained in Fortune:
For the economic rights of man cannot be escaped. And if it is true that business has no business
in this field, then it follows that these rights must continuously be implemented by the state…
[T]here is only one escape from this answer, namely, that businessmen and industrialists must
concern themselves with economic rights. They must take responsibility for them… Rather, it is
by conscious and concerted voluntary action, to transfer the primary responsibility and therefore
the initiative, from the government to private hands.37
Throughout this piece, Davenport’s main point of reference was British social
democracy, not Soviet communism. As he laid out his antidote to British “socialism”
– including stable employment, guaranteed annual wage, indeed the traditional, gendered family wage, medical and hospital insurance, and pensions – Davenport insisted
that the front line in this battle was literally the point of production: “where worker
and employer come together for the production of wealth.” His definitions of economic
rights and security still adhered to the patriarchal assumptions that had always under
girded welfare capitalism: protect the male breadwinner. Davenport therefore was certain that the American business had the alternative solution: “It is to be found at their
very doorstep, in that unsettled area of modern society known as ‘employee relations’ or
‘management-labor relations.’”38 The development of European welfare statism hinged
on the realm of industrial relations.
It was an astute observation. As labor, socialist, and social democratic parties pushed
for more centralized labor-management bargaining, the range of issues on the table extended beyond wages and working conditions. Social welfare, unemployment, inflation,
and economic growth, notes Bruce Western, were also at stake.39 Industry-wide bargaining
emerged in Britain, Germany, Belgium, and Austria, while national level bargaining took
shape in the Netherlands and nordic countries of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In
Belgium and the Netherlands, union leadership eventually became fully integrated into
the process of social and economic policymaking. Industry-wide or multi-industry settlements boosted wages across the board; often centralized collective bargaining extended
union wages to unorganized workers, forcing employers to pay higher scale whether or
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not their workers were union members. It brought in retraining and redeployment of
workers to new industries and locales. Such bargaining might also be tied to national
industrial policies and wage or incomes policies. In Sweden, the Swedish Employers’
Confederation encouraged strong centralized bargaining, since it played a regulatory
function keeping all their members in line and preventing competitive undercutting
among them. Swedish employers advanced their own agenda through a collective system of labor governance; it gave them more control of each other, something that made
American employers equally wary.40
So facing John L. Lewis and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal on one side, and European
social democracy on the other, American employer associations sought to accommodate
these dual threats by developing a more sophisticated form of welfare capitalism to compete
with the state and the unions. For business elites like General Motors’ president Charles
Wilson, it was not only that “the monopolistic power of industry-wide bargaining must
be broken up,” but that industrialists would have to “work out an American solution
for the relations of labor and industry and not attempt to adopt the philosophy of class
conflict from Europe.”41 (Or perhaps, he meant the European philosophy of class settlement). The more America became involved in the world, the more it desperately sought
to distinguish itself.42
The NAM agreed “that management should not surrender its initiative in this matter
to the union.”43 To maintain full control over benefit plans, employers turned to public
and private strategies to defuse state-backed collective bargaining. On the legislative
front, business interests had been circulating blueprints for revising the Wagner National
Labor Relations Act (NLRA) throughout the first half of the 1940s. Their proposals focused on prohibiting unionization of foremen and supervisory employees, industry-wide
bargaining, the closed shop, and boycotts. After the United Mine Workers’ won their
union health and retirement program, revisions of the NLRA (what would become the
Taft-Hartley Act) came to include restrictions on union trust funds and welfare funds.
Additionally, corporate leaders called for a provision explicitly excluding welfare and pension benefits from collective bargaining. Given that collective bargaining was supposed
to offer the sure road to industrial peace, as well as a critical element of the politics of
productivity, Congress was not about to pass such outright bans. Congress did, however,
include in the Taft-Hartley law a requirement that employers had to share equally in the
administration of any welfare or retirement plans. Unions could not run them independently. Preventing union control of social security for American workers clearly became
an essential component of curbing union power. This measure would help forestall the
development of anything like the Ghent system of union-run unemployment benefit
schemes, which had spread through Europe even before World War Two. After the war,
Ghent system continued primarily in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Belgium, where
they gave unions power not only over benefits but access to the unemployed, control
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over labor exchanges, and the ability to direct unemployed persons to unionized jobs.
With the Taft-Hartley Act, employers had improved the climate within which they could
restore welfare capitalism.44
In the wake of the Taft-Hartley Act, the role of the New Deal state in collective
bargaining began to change. The CIO still waited for Congress to increase the social
security pension. When the United Steelworkers prepared to strike in 1949 to compel
bargaining on pensions, President Truman convened a Presidential Steel Industry Board
to hold hearings and make recommendations. The Board adopted the supplementation
argument insurers had been advancing since the late 1930s – employers should supplement
public social security to ensure employees earned an adequate pension. It recommended
a 100 dollar month pension that could be integrated with social security. Steel industry
leaders were furious; once again, it seemed, the state had foisted upon them “mandatory
bargaining.” One U.S. Steel executive referred to this corporatist-type outcome as “the
virus of big unionism.” The parties were sent back to the bargaining table. With this
ruling, the Truman administration believed it had established equilibrium and therefore
the state no longer had a role.45
Formally, the NAM dropped its public position that “no legal obligation” existed
to negotiation collective agreements over health insurance, pensions, and welfare. Yet in
order to insulate the realm of bargaining from just corporatist power, what employers
now touted as “free collective bargaining,” managers created an alternative set of institutional arrangements to tip the balance of power. First, negotiations would be at the level
of the individual company, subsidiary, or in many cases, a singular plant. The threat of
industry-wide bargaining was seen as a political one: “the ultimate result,” insisted GM’s
Charles Wilson, is “we come out with the union leaders really running the economy of
the country.”46 American corporations organized to make sure they did not face the national level labor-management bargaining taking shape in Sweden or Norway, nor even
the industry level bargaining of Germany or Great Britain.
The second strategy was the defined-benefit pension and company control of welfare
funds. Employers would secure a monopoly on information by subscribing to commercial
group insurance contracts. Under a group insurance contract, the employer was the only
legal policyholder, and thus for the most part unions had little access to the exact terms
of the insurance plan – especially premiums, costs per person, and dividends. Insurance
companies sold policies that management could dominate – firm by firm, even plant by
plant. Insurers expanded the range of group hospital insurance policies employers purchased by offering to “tailor” policies to meet the particular needs of each employer. The
purchaser of a group plan could pick and choose exactly which services it did and did
not want included and the amount of an employee’s contribution.47 Because the insurer
dealt directly with the employer, unions or employee representation councils were further
disadvantaged because they never knew just how much the premiums actually cost. Thus
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unions did not know just what wage or fringe benefits had been sacrificed for the pension and health benefits. The channeling of dividends earned on the policies held with
major insurers like Metropolitan Life and Equitable obscured the true costs and benefits
as well. Since the corporation was the legal policyholder, dividends officially belonged
to management. Companies like Westinghouse explicitly stated in their social insurance
contracts that dividends would be used to reduce the company’s (not the workers’) contribution to the insurance plan.48
Business concern about labor power leveraged through pensions reached the level of
hysteria with the emergence of the area-wide “Toledo Plan” in the fall of 1949. NLRB
and court rulings, plus the Steel Industry Board, had made it clear that management
would have to bargain over pensions, but these cases were modeled on the large firm,
one that dominated its local or regional landscape, if the not the industry as a whole.
The decision to offer the defined-benefit plan was made by the country’s most dominant
corporations, such as Ford Motors and U.S. Steel. For those in industrial cities that were
more like Bridgeport, Buffalo, or Toledo, where unionized workers labored in hundreds
of smaller shops, it was not clear that the trends of 1949 offered a viable path for them.
Richard Gosser, the scrappy but formidable leader of the UAW in Toledo, shrewdly offered
something completely different in the fall of 1949. Gosser notified 125 automotive, accessory, and other plants that UAW Local 12 would seek their participation in an area-wide
social security plan covering all workers under UAW contracts in and around Toledo.
Each company would pay ten cents an hour per worker into a jointly administered fund
and would permit workers who changed jobs among these plants to continue building
pension credits and seniority. Local 12, an amalgamated local, represented 50,000 workers in auto parts, electrical appliance shops, plastics, scales, even biscuit factories. Most
of these workers changed jobs every three or four years. Why not come up with some
other means of enabling a worker to accrue credit wherever he or she worked in Toledo,
asked Gosser? From Gosser’s point of view, the area plan would enable small and large
businesses to pool risk, not just workers’ pooling their risk.49
The response of the business class in Toledo was swift, strident, and unified. Led by
the publisher of the daily Toledo Blade, Paul Block, Jr., employers quickly organized the
“Committee to Save Toledo’s Payrolls” whose immediate aim was “to keep management
solidly lined up against area pensions.” Comprised of manufacturers and leading bankers,
the Committee to Save Toledo’s Payrolls launched a campaign of newspaper ads, radio
programs, streetcar placards, library and community talks. As one of the co-chairs of the
Committee argued, “no action more damaging to Toledo’s reputation and to everyone’s
welfare could have been imagined.”50 It accused the labor of “reckless labor leadership
which seeks to apply a pension on the completely unsound and immediately harmful
basis of geography and irresponsible whim.” The Committee insisted on business unity:
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“we ask you… to oppose this scheme in every way you can. It is not just this Committee’s
fight – it is YOUR FIGHT.”51
The rapid escalation of the attack was, on the surface, surprising. Industrial relations in Toledo, where union density was estimated at 95 percent, had been on a rather
even keel. Toledo had not experienced a major strike in more than a decade. It had a
Labor Management-Citizens Committee, funded by the city budget, that promoted an
industrial peace envied by other cities. Since the end of the war, Toledo had followed the
wage settlements won in Detroit. Below the surface, Toledo’s employers “chafed under
the union agreements,” high wages, and shop floor control of a local UAW that was
larger than any single employer in town. The brash pension proposal suddenly released
the dyspeptic vitriol, including the shot fired in a front-page Blade editorial, proclaiming “…the time has come… for Toledo to let Mr. Gosser know that it is sick to death of
the blight which he casts on this industrial community and no longer intends to jump
whenever he cracks the whip.”52
Gosser, for the most part, was left to fight this battle on his own. Focused on negotiations with Chrysler and General Motors, neither Reuther nor the UAW International
staff paid too much attention to Toledo’s struggle for an area-wide social welfare pool.
The same could not be said for business. Locally and nationally business representatives
saw this proposal as “more than a local matter.” The national business press agreed that
organized labor had made Toledo the “guinea pig” for regionally based pensions. It was
a signal of what labor wanted in the next bargaining round, a “master plan” that would
lead to a slew of other outcomes – “industry-wide bargaining, national security, blanket
contracts.”53 For Factory Management and Maintenance, the fear was real. “Scared because
labor is so strong in Toledo that it has a better chance of getting what it wants than it
would almost anywhere else – so strong that, if it won an area pension plan, probably it
would soon gain full control over the vast sums of money that would pile up.”54 Moreover, FMM warned that this model could easily spread to other cities with an industrial
structure resembling Toledo’s.
And yet, it tacitly acknowledged several premises of the Toledo plan made sense.
“In theory, the area plan is an especially good method of getting around technical difficulties the union would otherwise face in trying to get the small firms in line on pensions,”
the magazine noted. As bargaining proceeded on the single-firm plans, benefits might
be increased, retirement age lowered, or disability clauses liberalized. “But none of these
is of much use if a worker has to lose them every time he changes jobs. Social Security
is the ideal in this respect – a nationwide version of the area plan idea.” Nor would the
industry-wide pension – as achieved by garment workers, for example – be the best answer
for big industrial unions, since in places like Toledo, such unions “commonly cross over
many industry lines in organizing.” Given the “national trend toward decentralization
of plants,” FMM suggested that there was a certain rationality to a union strategy that
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would “enable workers to build up pension equities that will continue to grow regardless
of where they work.”55
Even Fortune concluded, “while the economic difficulties may be real, the underlying
story is a political fight for power.”56 The opposition was at root ideological and political.
Labor must not be allowed to have that sort of collective power over a pool of capital’s
resources. To avoid that outcome, each company began individually to offer a defined
benefit pension plan for its own employees. The larger employers, such as Willys-Overland
and Auto-Lite, cut their own deals fairly quickly: offering an individual plan, with a
defined benefit that management figured it could keep a lid on, much like the Big Three
had decided to do in Detroit. In the late spring of 1950, most of Toledo’s other manufacturers followed. As the United Automobile Worker described it, “pension agreements
began to gush like a slot machine gone wild.”57 In the end, the pool was attractive only
to a small group of firms; nineteen small shops – mostly from outside the city boundaries
of Toledo – signed on to the area-wide pension covering 2,000 workers.
While the biggest players in the national economy worked to stymie industry-wide
bargaining, a locally organized capitalist class beat back any possibility of regional bargaining and regional welfare pooling. They had ensured that state support for negotiated
pension and welfare plans from employers stayed within the realm of personnel management, anchored to the company. In fact, these owners of middling companies were the
same group who would soon go on the offensive with the open-shop and right to work
movement in the mid-1950s. They would become the national supporters of the rising
anti-New Deal politicians in Congress, giving new senators such as Barry Goldwater a
base of class support beyond his own state. By the end of the decade, even Ohio would
have a right-to-work initiative on the ballot.58
Instead, the Treaty of Detroit, the landmark contract signed between General Motors
and the UAW in May 1950, became the UAW’s model – the crown jewel it soon held
out for others to admire and imitate. The five-year Treaty of Detroit provided an annual
improvement factor wage increase, COLA, disability insurance, Blue Cross and Blue Shield
benefits for hospital and medical care, and a pension of 125 dollars a month. GM topped
Ford’s offer of 100 dollars month once it knew the Social Security Act amendments would
go through, raising the government pension, and proportionally lowering the company’s.59
But the UAW’s comprehensive Workers’ Security Program was shelved – permanently.
GM and the other large oligopolistic firms refused to hand over a percentage of payroll to
union-run social welfare programs. The social welfare provisions represented a significant
retreat from labor’s vision of security just a few years earlier.
Most of the labor movement, moreover, could not follow in the UAW’s footsteps.
In most sectors, such as electrical manufacturing, unions could not penetrate the links
between their employers and commercial insurance companies. Employers unilaterally
chose the carrier, perpetuating the same group insurance policies that they had had since
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before World War Two, in some cases since before the New Deal, but offering some new
benefits each year. From plant to plant or town to town, benefits ended up being widely
divergent, especially where local unions were weak.60
As with health insurance, the labor movement at first sought entirely independent
pension funds. After losing on this issue, they often supported the idea of a jointly-run
board of trustees, equally staffed by management and labor. Most corporations managed
to block even this goal, for as management saw it, pensions involved the investment of
company assets (not workers’ compensation) over an extended period of time. Even the
UAW had to make significant concessions and accommodations to managerial control.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s union demands for access to pension plan information and control were fiercely resisted and denied by management. Unions or workers’
representatives usually had to depend on employer-provided cost estimates, budget and
forecasting, and benefits formulas. The ground rules of welfare capitalism remained in
place: employers maintained control over benefits formulas, final eligibility rules, longterm service requirements for vesting, and how the pension would be funded. Employers’
discretion in pensions extended not only to benefits but to investment of the pensions
reserves as well.61
Not only could collective bargaining not substitute for national social policy, a
Beveridge Plan; it could not succeed in meeting most of its immediate goals without the
real, active backing of the New Deal state.62 The private benefits system would reinforce
the family wage biases of the public social welfare system. Finally, in this completely
decentralized industrial relations regime, key capitalists who did not want to participate
in the post-war wage bargaining could begin to exploit regional differentials again, relocating to areas without union strength. There was no institutional mechanism that could
discipline “cheaters” and bring them back into the fold. The politics of security now lay
vulnerable to both centrifugal tendencies in American capitalism and an organized assault
by a rising group of anti-New Deal, anti-labor corporations.
In the late 1950s, Congress put the final stamp of ratification on the private, employment-based insurance system. Government policy would allow employers unilateral
control of private security, with little regulatory oversight.63 Public insurance programs
would simply aim to supplement the gaps in private coverage. And public tax policy would
subsidize the private system, even though plenty of gaps in coverage remained. The postwar tax system supported private benefits by allowing employers to deduct contributions
to pension plans and pension trusts to be exempt from income tax.
It was thus in the latter part of the 1950s that the divergence from Europe, with
respect to the welfare state, widened. For it was finally in the late 1950s and 1960s that
the comprehensive, universalist European welfare states really took shape. While numerous countries did have social insurance systems in place, or instituted new ones in 1946,
private welfare benefits also had begun to spread and political checks blocked universalism.
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But the post-war labor relations structures, various forms of co-determination, restraints
on capital’s political power and prerogative, and merging of public and private interests
opened the way for the social market economy to emerge. Certainly, these countries
needed rejuvenated economies and sustained economic growth to move ahead on the
fullest visions of security that had followed the war. By the mid-1950s, productivity surged
rapidly, wages rose, high employment levels generated more purchasing power, and social
inequality declined. Economic historian Barry Eichengreen has concluded, labor-management relations were central to the exceptional levels of economic growth in western
Europe – sustained for the next quarter century.64 Governments boosted the social wage
– “the share of the nation’s resources that is distributed according to social rather than
strict market criteria” – through rent control, housing, health care, family allowances,
and pensions.65 In the late 1950s, several countries were poised to move even further to
marginalize the market and expand collective services and social solidarity. In Sweden,
the movement toward the comprehensive social democratic welfare state was two fold.
After several years of bargaining, both the employers’ and labor confederations turned to
the welfare state and the landmark “active labor market policy” in 1956. Second, Sweden
enacted comprehensive health insurance, which included free hospitalization, medical
benefits, and guaranteed sick pay, and a new pension system guaranteeing all workers a
standard of living in retirement that matched that of their last working years.66
The government went even further at the end of the decade, initiating an aggressive
series of political steps that constrained and marginalized the private market in health
care. Sweden removed private beds from public hospitals, required all hospitals to provide
public outpatient care, started constructing new public health centers, and eventually
put all doctors on salaries. France moved in a parallel direction. It was finally during the
Fifth Republic that the French government moved decisively in 1959 and 1960 toward
a rationalized public hospital system and full-time, salaried hospital practice for doctors.
Private practice was to be phased out completely. Maximum fees would be set by the
Ministers of Labor, Health, and Finances, with public system patients receiving more
favorable rates. In both cases, state policy increasingly limited the space that private
providers could inhabit and public services eventually crowded them out.67 In the midst
of unprecedented economic growth and rising new consumerism, these states extended
their commitment to collective goods and services.
As Peter Swenson has persuasively argued, these cannot be seen as only labor victories
resulting simply from labor power. Capitalist interests found they had reasons too for
collaborating with state planning, economic management, and social security provision.
But what the French or Swedish government did was permanently hitch business to the
public security project. They succeeded in making a full claim for security upon private
employers, drawing business into politicized bargaining with labor and the state over
workers’ compensation and families’ standard of living. 68
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This is precisely what American employers were determined to avoid. Welfare capitalism once again proved an effective strategy – a way of checking the expansion of the
state and the unions. Through private insurance and pensions, American business could
concede to the political imperative of security but keep themselves sufficiently outside the
bounds of the state. By the mid-1950s, elite business interests could even use the state to
sustain an increasingly insular, private, firm-centered definition of security.
By pursuing a strategy of bargaining decentralization, employers had a significant
impact on the terms of both private and public welfare. Under the post-war industrial
relations system, management maintained the balance of power at the firm level. Collective
bargaining did not even the balance of power; it reflected the imbalance of power. Welfare
capitalism was aimed at preserving power relations between owners and workers. For two
generations, the private welfare system in the U.S. grew steadily, offering a growing level
of benefits to millions of Americans. By 1979, the private pension system had reached its
peak, covering half the American workforce. But then it began a reversal that has yet to
abate. Private health insurance never covered more than 69.6 percent of the nonelderly
population, and that coverage primarily applied to hospitalization.
While the term “welfare state” was spawned by the politics of reconstruction in the
wake of the Great Depression and World War Two, many of its constituent concepts
and strategies originated in the previous century. Most fundamentally, the function of a
welfare state is to protect its citizens from the risks of economic insecurity – which may
include lack of food, shelter, medical care, industrial safety, protection in childhood,
and support in old age. In the late nineteenth century, all industrializing nations saw
these various forms of impoverishment and insecurity as the social consequences of rapid
industrialization and aggressive market capitalism. Citizens, workers, religious leaders,
college educated bourgeois women and men, newly emerging social scientists and social
investigators further began asking whether there were not only effects on individuals but
also social costs of such unprecedented industrial growth. To deal with this question,
what many at the time called “the social question,” required more than simple charity
or isolated hand-outs of relief. It required studying, investigating, knowing the system
of wage work, demographic upheaval, and fluctuating markets that constituted the new
industrial economy, especially since its booms and busts, its instabilities seemed to be so
consistent and regular. Thus more than simply standardizing or centralizing pre-capitalist
poor relief, the welfare state would involve a set of political strategies for responding to
industrial capitalism.69 By the 1930s, it also meant that workers, or their various organizations, would have a political voice in shaping these strategies – in the workplace and
the larger polity.
After World War Two, the Labour government in Great Britain advanced the idea of
a “national minimum of protection for all citizens” – protection against the vicissitudes of
an industrial capitalist economy. In contrast to the horrific nazi “warfare state,” the nation
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would construct a beneficent “welfare state” to guarantee a standard of living and wellbeing above subsistence, through means that promoted democratic rights and processes
and enhanced citizenship.70 Since the 1940s, then, the term welfare state described the
complex of policies and institutions that maintain health, safety, employment, shelter, and
income. For western European nations and Scandinavia, it is clear that this promotion of
social well-being entailed a mix of labor laws, employment policies, social insurance, and
public social services. In the United States, however, the term welfare state has primarily
been used to refer to the social insurance programs of American social security: old age
pensions, disability and unemployment compensation, and Medicare and Medicaid health
benefits. Yet focusing solely on social insurance and risk pooling, as studies of the U.S.
welfare state often do, leaves out issues of employment, wages, and the various ways in
which states try to mitigate the impact of market forces on individuals or households.
This split was both structural and ideological. It reflects the political offensive of
American business after World War Two and the attempt to appropriate the meaning
of security and shift its emphasis away from the state to private, individual economic
relationships. Once outflanked, liberals and unions accommodated the new system
of employer-provided benefits, even adopting management’s slogan of “free collective
bargaining.”
Since the 1960s, a new generation of American conservatives, opponents of the
New Deal, have consistently assaulted the idea of security, insisting that freedom and
security were mutually exclusive. “Security does not equal freedom,” wrote William F.
Buckley.71 Gradually, they substituted a rhetoric of “personal responsibility,” “opportunity,”
and personal investment accounts. In the 1980s, led by Ronald Reagan, this previously
marginal position began to achieve political dominance. Subsequently, the first democratic
president in a generation, Bill Clinton, participated in the roll back of New Deal protections, including replacing the public welfare section of social security with the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.
In the wake of the attacks of September 11, security seems to have lost entirely its
social or economic meaning. The only security in American political discourse now is
security from terrorists. Homeland security has been infused with one single meaning:
security against threat of armed attack. The policy prescription is the Patriot Act: expanded
surveillance of American citizens. Outside our borders, our security necessitates the brutal
coercion and abuse of whoever gets caught in our “safety net.” Security has become a
concept of fear and repression, crowding out its beneficial meanings. Yet with stagnant
wages, unaffordable health insurance, shriveling or collapsing private pensions, job flight,
desperate pressures of long-term care, and Enron-type corporate scandals, Americans more
than ever need to retrieve and revivify the other meanings of security.
Instead, President Bush’s “ownership society” is the perfect analogue to his homeland
security. The high security alerts signal an atomizing security imperative: stay home, lock
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your family inside, seal yourself off. The ownership society is the same concept. It harkens
back to a mythic, pre-industrial yeoman farmer – the only worthy citizen because of his
solitary virtue and property ownership. Re-establishing antique notions of worthy and
unworthy citizens that social security mostly did away with, it throws risk back onto
the fortunes of the individual. The ideological posturing of the ownership society is a
fundamental assault on the idea of social security. President Bush’s proposal for private
retirement accounts cuts benefits, costs more, and leaves us all dependent on speculators,
removing not only the “social” from social security but the “security” as well.
Historically, public and private security – family security and national security –
expanded in tandem; in our current era, they’ve also been shrinking and unraveling in
tandem. As in Europe, security flourished as a political value in America when it germinated in the soil of shared social responsibilty.
237
1. Epigraph: Sir William Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services, (the Beveridge Report), Nov. 1942,
www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1942beveridge.html accessed 18 Nov. 2005; Russell Davenport, “The Greatest
Opportunity on Earth,” Fortune, Oct. 1949, 204, 208.
2. Danny Hakim, “Auto Supplier Delphi Files for Bankruptcy,” New York Times, 9 Oct. 2005, 28.
3. New York Times, 20 Jan. 2002, sec. 3, 7; “U.S. Steel Chairman Thomas J. Usher Thanks President Bush,”
U.S. Steel Press Release, http://www.ussteel.com; http://prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/micro_stories, accessed 17
Dec. 2002; Steven Jones, “All Sorts of Companies Face Pension Shortfalls,” Wall Street Journal, 6 July 2005;
Ellen E. Schultz, “GM Wins Ground in U.S. Pension Suit,” Wall Street Journal, 6 July 2005.
4. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998);
Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
5. Alan Derickson, Health Security For All: Dreams of Universal Health Care in America (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 62.
6. Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare
State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), chp. 4.
7. Strand Baking Company Case No. 3107-AR (Nov. 17, 1942). The first set of WLB decisions involving
employee benefits did not pertain to the wage stabilization issue. U.S. Cartridge Company Case No. 1111445-D (Nov. 30, 1943); Basic Steel Cases, Carnegie-Illinois Steel Corporation et al Case No. 111-6230-D
(Nov. 25, 1944), as reported in National War Labor Board, Termination Report of the National War Labor
Board, Jan. 12, 1942-Dec. 31, 1945,3 vols. (Washington D.C. Government Printing Office, 1947), vol. 1,
chp. 33, “Insurance Plans.” Clarence O. Skinner, Alternate Industry Member, “The Fringe Issues,” in Trends
in Union Demands (NY: American Management Association, 1945). Concerning insurance plans, Skinner
stated that “Some have been negotiated with unions, but most have been established by unilateral application. The Board has never ordered a sick-leave or insurance plan when one did not exist.”
8. Philadelphia Transportation Company Case No. 3056-AR (Feb. 11, 1943), in National War Labor Board,
Termination Report, p. 384; On labor trying to use the state to obtain collective bargaining demands, see
James Atleson, Labor and the Wartime State (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1998), 72.
9. Western Union Company Case No. 2516-CS-D (Jan. 18, 1943); West Coast Airframe Cases No. 2301-CS-D
(March 3, 1943); Tidewater Oil Company Case No. 111-5206-D (Jan. 24, 1945); Davis Engineering Corporation Case No. 111-7172-HO (Feb, 7, 1945); Edison Sault Electric Company Case No. 111-7549-D (March 6,
1945), all in Termination Report, vol. 1: 384; vol. 2: 1190-92.
10. Atleson, Labor and the Wartime State, p. 59; Despite the official no-strike pledge, thousands of job actions
erupted during the war. Between 1942 and 1945, seven million workers took part in over 14,000 strikes.
Robert H. Zieger, The CIO, 1935-1955 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 150.
11. Archibald Cox quoted in Katherine Van Wezel Stone, “The Post-War Paradigm in American Labor Law,”
The Yale Law Journal, 90 (June 1981): 1514; Atleson, 55-59; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Most Dangerous Man
in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 181-82.
12. Charles S. Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), chps. 3-4.
13. NAM News, Section 3: Industrial Relations, Aug. 25, 1945, folder: Industrial Relations Dept, box 3;
Statement of NWLB=s Industry Members With Reference to Wage Report of Public Members, March 10,
1945, NAM – IR. Dept, Box 19; Minutes, Subcommittee of NAM Labor Negotiations Committee on the
Subject of Union Encroachment, Hotel Biltmore, New York, New York, Oct. 22, 1945, box 3; Summary
of War Labor Board Action in Cases Involving Rights and Responsibilities of Management, n.d., NAM
– Industrial Relations Dept., box 19, all in Acc. 1412, NAM Records, Hagley Museum and Library (HML);
“We’ve Got to Solve Labor Problems at the Local Level,” Factory Management and Maintenance, Oct. 1945,
86.
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14. Jytte Klausen, War and Welfare: Europe and the United States, 1945-Present (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
1998), 40-43; 75-99.
15. Herrick Chapman, Mark Kesselman, and Martin A. Schain, eds., A Century of Organized Labor in France:
A Union Movement for the Twenty-First Century? (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), Intro, 10-12; Daniel
Beland, “Does Labor Matter? Institutions, Labor Unions, and Pension Reform in France and the U.S.,”
Journal of Public Policy, 21: 2 (2001), 159.
16. Lucrezia Reichlin, “The Marshall Plan Reconsidered,” in Europe’s Post-War Recovery, ed. Barry Eichengreen
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 45; Klausen, War and Welfare, 3, 50.
17. Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through 20th Century Europe (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 339-340.
18. DeGrazia, Irresistible Empire, 339-340; Klausen, War and Welfare, 3.
19. CIO Conference on Wages, Full Employment, and Political Action Pamphlet, file 15, box 2, Saul Mills
Papers, W 75, ser. 2, Robert Wagner Labor Archives, Tamiment Library, NYU.
20. Cass R. Sunstein, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than
Ever (New York: Basic Books 2004). The International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights
was ratified by 142 nations, excluding Haiti, Mozambique, South Africa, and the United States. On Beveridge
Report and Declaration of Human Rights, see DeGrazia, Irresistible Empire, 339.
21. Thomas Spates, “The Competition for Leadership in a Welfare Economy,” address before American
Management Association, Chicago, Ill, 15 Feb. 1949, box 18, acc. 1412, NAM Records, HML.
22. John S. Bugas, “Labor Relations and Productivity,” Delivered To American Management Association,
New York, Oct. 2, 1947, reprinted in Vital Speeches of the Day (New York: City News Publishing Co., 1947),
56.
23. Alan Derickson, “Health Security for All?” Journal of American History, 80 (March 1994), 1345; Lewis
quoted in Steven Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sydney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free
Press, 1991), p. 563; Raymond Munts, Bargaining for Health (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1967), 30-41; Edward Berkowitz, “Growth of the U.S. Social Welfare System in the Post-World War II Era:
The UMW, Rehabilitation, and the Federal Government,” Research in Economic History, vol. 5 (1980), 236;
Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Quadrangle/New York
Times Book Co., 1977), 458-468.
24. Berkowitz, “Growth of the U.S. Social Welfare System,” 236.
25. Ivana Krajcinovic, From Company Doctors to Managed Care: The United Mine Workers Noble Experiment
(Ithaca: ILR Press, Cornell University, 1997), 29-38.
26. Berkowitz, “Growth of the U.S. Social Welfare System,” 236-237; Krajcinovic, From Company Doctors
to Managed Care, 54; Paul Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982),
315-318; Moreover, Berkowitz writes that “the UMW sought to shift the financial burden of caring for
disabled miners from the private to the public sector by referring all applicants for cash disability benefits
and all recipients of emergency medical care to the public program. The greater a miner’s disability, the more
eager the fund was to have the public program pay for his rehabilitation counseling and training,” p. 240.
27. Krajcinovic, From Company Doctor to Managed Care, 33-37; 51-54.
28. National Ford Negotiating Committee, Ford UAW-CIO Workers Security Program, Part II: Health
Security Program, July 1949, file 5, box 60, Acc. 317, UAW Social Security Department Collection, Walter
P. Reuther Library (WPR); Nelson Cruikshank, “Labor Looks at the Problem of Health Services,” Statement to the President’s Commission on Health Insurance Needs of the Nation, Oct. 7-8, 1952, file: Pres.
Commission, box 11, M66-15, Nelson Cruikshank Papers, State Historical Society of Wisconsin; for the
United Steelworkers version of this ideal model plan, see Alan Derickson, “The United Steelworkers of America
239
and Health Insurance, 1937-1962,” in American Labor in the Era of World War II, ed. Sally M. Miller and
Daniel A. Cornford (Wesport, CT: Praeger, 1995), 75; Munts, Bargaining for Health, 64-66.
29. Walter Chamblin, National Industrial Council Speech, NAM Papers, Acc. 1411, 100-yy, box 226;
National Association of Manufacturers, “Suggested Resolution on Employee Benefit Programs,” 30 Nov.
1948, box 105, Acc. 1411, NAM Records, HML; Business Week, 13 May 1950; National Association of
Manufacturers, “Employee Benefit Programs” (New York: NAM, Industrial Relations Department, 1947),
HML; R.T. Compton to National Industrial Council, 15 Feb. 1949, box 226, Acc. 1411-100yy, NAM
Records – NIC, Acc. 1411, HML; Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington D.C.:
Brookings Institution, 1979), 245.
30. Maier, In Search of Stability, 123, 125.
31. DeGrazia, Irresistible Empire, 341; Reichlin, “The Marshall Plan Reconsidered,” 46-48.
32. Klausen, War and Welfare; Reichlin, 47; Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, The Commanding Heights:
The Battle for the World Economy (New York: Free Press, 1998), 29-32
33. Klausen, 61.
34. Klausen, 190-92; Geir Lundestad, The United States and Western Europe Since 1945: From ‘Empire’ by
Invitation to Transatlantic Drift (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 103-06.
35. “NAM and the Welfare State,” Business Week, Dec. 1949, 26.
36. Ibid. 26; on US wanting to limit Soviet expansion as chief goal, see Lundestad, 63.
37. Russell W. Davenport, “The Greatest Opportunity on Earth,” Fortune (October 1949), 67-68.
38. Davenport, “The Greatest Opportunity…” 69.
39. Bruce Western, Between Class and Market: Post-War Unionization in the Capitalist Democracies (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 30; Gosta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), ch/s. 5-6.
40. Western, Between Class and Market, 30-41, 11; Peter Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets: The Making
of Labor Markets and Welfare States in the United States and Sweden (New York: Oxford University Press,
2002), 15-16; 43; 123.
41. Anthony Leviero, “Wilson, Green Say Labor is Bending Toward Socialism,” New York Times, 22 Jan. 1947;
“U.S. System is Best Wilson Declares,” New York Times, 24 Mar. 1948; Charles E. Wilson, “The American
Way,” Factory Management and Maintenance, 1948, p. 128; C.E. Wilson, “Five Years of Industrial Peace: An
American Pattern for Labor-Management Relations,” delivered to National Press Club, Washington D.C.,
8 June 1950, reprinted in Vital Speeches of the Day (NY: City News Publishing Co, 1950), 608.
42. Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, “Where in the World is America? The History of the United States
in the Global Age,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, Thomas Bender ed. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2002), 66-67.
43. National Association of Manufacturers, “Minutes of the NAM Labor-Management Relations Committee,”
March 20, 1947, New York City, NAM Papers, Industrial Relations Division, Acc. 1412. Box 3, HML.
44. Harry A. Millis and Emily Clark Brown, From the Wagner Act to Taft-Hartley: A Study of National Labor
Policy and Labor Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950), 561-568. Taft and Ball quoted from
Supplemental Views, Taft Report, and Congressional Record, 93: 4805, in Millis and Brown, 564-65; Jacob
Perlman to Wilbur Cohen, “Growth and Characteristics of Union-Management Health and Welfare Plans,”
15 June 1948, file 2, box 46, MSS 789, Cohen Papers. On Taft-Hartley impact on welfare capitalism, see
also Sanford Jacoby, Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism Since the New Deal (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997), 200. On Ghent system, see Bruce Western, Between Class and Market, 9-11, chp. 4.
240
jennifer klein
45. Steven Sass, The Promise of Private Pensions: The First Hundred Years (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1997), 133; Seth Widgerson, “How the CIO Saved Social Security,” Labor History, 44: 4 (2003),
498-99; Statement, Enders M. Voorhees, U.S. Steel Corporation, Before the Presidential Steel Board, 22
Aug. 1949; Text of the Presidential Steel Fact Finding Board’s “Findings and Recommendations: General
Summary,” Sept. 1949, both in box 202, Acc. 1411, NAM Records.
46. “U.S. System is Best Wilson Declares,” New York Times, 24 Mar. 1948, 18.
47. “Claims Expense Limitation,” n.d., box 3, Acc 1984-050, Equitable Life Assurance Society Archives;
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, Tailored to Fit: A Group Insurance Plan Designed for the Employees of
Your Company, (New York: 1953), box 19 06 04, Group Insurance, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company
Archives; MLIC, Employee Security Founded On Group Insurance Safeguards Employee Morale and Loyalty,
(New York: 1952), ibid.
48. Klein, For All These Rights, chp. 6.
49. “Toledo UAW Asks for Area Pension Plan,” New York Times, 26 Oct. 1949, 20; “LABOR: Toledo in a
Storm,” Fortune, Jan. 1950, 144-150.
50. “What You Need to Know About Pensions: Area Pensions – The Lesson of Toledo,” Factory Management
and Maintenance, Feb. 1950, 120-124; “Newspapers Drum Up Opposition to Toledo Area-Wide Pension
Plan,” United Automobile Worker, Nov. 1949, 11.
51. “Committee to Save Our Payrolls” Pamphlet, reprinted in, “Pension Troubles: Just Starting,” BusinessWeek,
19 Nov. 1949, 19.
52. “LABOR: Toledo in a Storm,” Fortune, Jan. 1950, 145-46.
53. “Areawide Pensions Up Again,” Business Week, Feb. 4, 1950; 19 Nov. 1949, 20; “NAM Urges Congress
to Keep Unions From Bargaining on Company Pensions,” New York Times, 17 Mar. 1950, 13; Walter Ruch,
“UAW Set to Test Area Pension Plan,” New York Times, 14 May 1950, 63; “Area Plan Set,” New York Times,
19 May 1950, 13.
54. FMM, Feb. 1950, 120.
55. ibid., 122.
56. “Toledo in a Storm,” Fortune, Jan. 1950, 146.
57. “Toledo Workers Defeat Lawyers, Press, Industry; Win 1st Class Contracts,” United Automobile Worker,
Aug. 1950, 4.
58. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York:
Hill and Wang, 2001), chp. 2
59. J. E. McMahon, “Pension Problems May Be Complicated If General Motors Plan Is Widely Adopted,”
New York Times, 28 May 1950, 81; Widgerson, “How the CIO Saved Social Security.”
60. Jennifer Klein, “The Business of Health Security: Health Insurance, Commercial Insurers, and the
Reconstruction of Welfare Capitalism, 1945-1960,” International Labor and Working-Class History, 58 (Fall
2000).
61. Klein, For All These Rights, chp. 6; Teresa Ghilarducci, Labor’s Capital: The Economics and Politics of Private
Pensions (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1992).
62. Ghilarducci, Labor’s Capital, 23-24, 29-30; Sass, The Promise of Private Pensions, 130.
63. Even when the U.S. Senate turned an investigative eye on the “private social security system” in the
mid-1950s, employers maintained that “the costs of these benefits are private business costs, have no relations to employee compensation, and are therefore of no concern to employees or others.” The Welfare and
Pension Plans Disclosure Act of 1958, mild remedial legislation, mostly confirmed that position. See U.S.
241
Congress, Senate, Committee on Labor and Pubic Welfare, Welfare and Pension Plans Investigation: Final
Report Submitted to the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare By Its Subcommittee on Welfare and Pension
Funds Pursuant to S. Res. 40, 84th Cong., 2d sess, 16 Apr. 1956, 7, 158-159.
64. Barry Eichengreen, “Mainsprings of Economic Recovery in Post-War Europe,” in Europe’s Post-War
Recovery, 11-31; DeGrazia 357-59.
65. Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, 115.
66. Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets, 268-75.
67. Ellen Immergut, “Political Arenas: The Effects of Representation on National Health Insurance Policies
in Sweden, Switzerland, and France,” Center for European Studies Working Paper Series (Harvard University,
Feb. 1990), 37-40; 15-16.
68. Swenson, Capitalists Against Markets, part I and part III.
69. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings; Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1995); Michael Katz, The Price of Citizenship: Redefining the American Welfare State
(Metropolitan Books, 2001).
70. Edwin Amenta and Theda Skocpol, “Redefining the New Deal: World War II and the Development of
Social Provision in the United States,” in The Politics of Social Policy in the United States, Margaret Weir, Ann
Shola Orloff, and Theda Skocpol, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 82
71. William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959), 187.
242
WHY IS THERE NO MATERNITY LEAVE IN THE UNITED STATES?
EUROPEAN MODELS FOR A LAW THAT WAS NEVER PASSED
elisabetta vezzosi
maternalism and maternity leave: a u.s. incompatibility?
Provisions for maternity leave are common among industrialized countries, but their
institutional design varies distinctly. The aim of this essay is to investigate if and how
the different historical origins affect contemporary policies, and to try to identify the
mutual influences of the different models for protecting working mothers on both sides
of the Atlantic. The discussion that led up to the implementation of maternity leave in
the United States will be analysed, together with the Italian National Maternity Fund
(Cassa Nazionale di Maternità) and the activities of the National Organisation for the
Protection of Motherhood and Infancy (Opera Nazionale Maternità e Infanzia - ONMI),
which was founded in Italy during the fascist regime (1925).
In the first two decades of the century, more so than in the thirties, the United States
followed the example of Europe (including Italy) when constructing its social insurance
programs. The context we are dealing with in this period, which is the main focus of
my work (with particular attention on the Italian experience), is especially complex and
contradictory. It is my aim to place this essay within the context of the current debate
over the New Deal among Italian historiographers. One of the key issues therein is the
attempt to relate certain aspects of New Deal socio-economic policies to similar orientations in fascist politics, not only through an analysis of corporativism, but also by studying
public works and assistance policies.
The participation of women in the labor force, both full and part-time, grew significantly after World War Two. In the United States, today, about two-thirds of mothers
with children are employed, despite the relative lack of public child-care provisions and
limited maternity and parental leaves. The United States has been distinctly laggard on
these matters. In fact, it took a major struggle before a national parental leave policy
was enacted. Not until February 1993 did the Clinton administration sign the modest
Family and Medical Leave Act, the first law of the new presidency, according to which
both parents are entitled to a twelve-week unpaid leave of absence for family reasons,
including pregnancy and childbirth, “to promote national interests by preserving family
integrity;” the law covers only about 60 percent of workers.1
The lively public debate surrounding such issues has emphasized the role of the United
States as a “latecomer” in the implementation of support policies for working mothers.2
243
why is there no maternity leave in the united states?
Although to date the campaign for the preservation of the family institution is gaining in
intensity, especially in the republican camp, the United States – alone among industrialized countries – is without a set of policies geared toward family needs that acknowledges
the social responsibility of the state in this area. In fact, there is a complete lack of the
basic components of an adequate maternity policy: health insurance, job protection, and
supplementary income during pregnancy. While in the seventies some companies began
to allow brief periods of leave, in the early eighties such forms of maternity insurance
were provided only by medium and large companies (about 75 percent), and over the
past decade 9 percent of women between the ages of fifteen and fifty-four with private
insurance have not been covered for childbirth. In general, therefore, the provisions for
maternity leave in the United States are inconsistent, poorly regulated and, by and large,
unpaid. In 2005, a report of the National Partnership for Women & Families defined
the U.S. parental leave policies as “among the worst of the world.”3 Quoting a 2004
Harvard University study on 168 countries, of which 163 guarantee paid leave to women
in connection with childbirth and forty-five guarantee paid paternity or parental leave,
the report concluded that the United States was one of the few countries in the world
with no guaranteed paid leave at all to new parents.
For supporters of maternity insurance, Europe continues to be a model of reference. Even in the second half of the eighties, in fact, the economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett
noted how Europe had been better able to provide social policies in support of working
mothers,4 because of its recognition of the social function of maternity, at the same time
denouncing the hostility of American feminists towards policies of this kind. While her
vision is certainly excessive and partially misleading, it is undoubtedly true that the U.S.
women’s movement - part of which remains influenced by the early-twentieth-century
“maternalist” ideology - has proved very hesitant in its will to import European-style
welfare policies. Indeed, the “maternalist” reformers of the Progressive Era Children’s
Bureau had sought to limit the access of women to the paid workforce, whether they were
just mothers, or mothers and primary breadwinners at once. To reconstruct the tortuous
route that has failed to lead to a federal legislation on maternity leave in the United States,
one has to take into account the heritage of “maternalist” thought that has undermined
its paradigm. It is therefore necessary to integrate the instruments of labor history with
those of the history of welfare in order to reconsider the work of both women and men
in terms of family economics, so as to emphasize the points of intersection between labor,
caregiving work, and public policy.5
244
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a backward glance: the early-twentieth century
In 1915, Lee K. Frankel, vice-president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance
Company wrote:
The need for sickness insurance can no longer be denied. The next decade will probably see, in the
United States, the development of a comprehensive system which will protect the worker against the
contingencies of sickness and invalidity due to sickness. It would be quite simple, if it were found
necessary, to incorporate in such plans of sickness insurance the necessary provisions under which
all women, whether employed or not, could be made beneficiaries at the time of maternity.6
In fact, maternity leave in the United States continues to be an unsolved problem today.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, several European countries developed
social welfare policies that provided support to working mothers and were extremely
comprehensive by U.S. standards. Germany was the first to introduce such policies in
the 1880s, and later, in 1911, it instituted paid maternity leave. In France, female teachers and postal workers obtained it in 1910, and in subsequent years, it was extended to
other categories of female workers. In 1919, the First International Labor Organization
(ILO) Conference in Washington, D.C., adopted the first series of measures aimed at
protecting working mothers: a six-week leave period after childbirth and the possibility to
leave six weeks before confinement upon producing a medical certificate stating that she
will probably be confined within that period; free medical care; job protection guarantee
during the period of rest (an extension of which was provided in national laws); daily
suspension from work for feeding; and cash and medical benefits frequently regulated
by compulsory health insurance laws. These provisions were not applied to agricultural
employment. Subsequently, the need to protect the health and rights of women workers
found expression in many national legislations, and was incorporated in general terms
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (art. 25, par. 2).7 In most countries, the
benefits were paid from sickness insurance funds to which the state, the employers, and
the workers contributed. There were two principal kinds of cash benefits, a lump sum
payable when the child is born, or an allowance for as long as the woman is incapacitated
for work. In the last case, the amount varies from half to full, or nearly full, wages. Following the ILO Conference of 1919, many countries ratified legislation for the protection
of women before and after childbirth, though the conference also had an influence in
countries where the legislation was not ratified.8
The European emphasis on the protection of maternity and future generations
variously permeated American ideology of the period (see the case of Muller v. Oregon,
1908, on wage and hours laws, in which the Supreme Court sustained the need to safeguard “the mothers of the race”). However, the idea that it should be the state to assume
responsibility for it remained a purely European characteristic. The Maternity Protection
245
Convention of the ILO served as an international standard for maternity insurance policies until its revision in 1952. It was then amended to extend coverage to the categories
of women excluded up to that time, including agricultural and domestic workers. While
in the early decades of the twentieth century, European countries enacted extensive social
programs for working mothers, the United States did not ratify the Maternity Protection
Convention of 1919, and instead developed half-hearted policies for maternity protection characterized by strong racial preferences. In spite of the period’s rhetoric glorifying
motherhood, “whiteness” ended up constituting a very powerful criterion for exclusion.
While in Europe a “maternalist” ideology has led to a universalistic concept of social
welfare, strengthened and expanded over time, the United States policies have rarely
been inclusive.
In 1919, the same year of the approval of the Maternity Protection Convention, Julia
Lathrop, chief of the Children’s Bureau of the Department of Labor, sent a report drawn
up by Henry J. Harris, chief of the document division of the Library of Congress and
former statistical expert of the Bureau of Labor, to the Secretary of Labor, W. B. Wilson.
The report concerned the systems of maternity aid available in other countries and
Lathrop expressed her hope that “it might prove useful to the people of one of the few
great countries which as yet have no system of state or national assistance in maternity
– the United States.” 9 Lathrop thought that it would be useful for the facts regarding
the scope, organization, and experience of these foreign systems of maternity aid to be
made available to American readers. In addition to Australia and New Zealand, various European countries were included: Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Austria,
Denmark, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and The Netherlands. In
those countries, wrote Harris, the maternity benefit systems were not an experiment, they
were designed to protect the health of mothers and children by providing adequate medical
and nursing care in childbirth, and by so lessening the financial burden of childbearing
that mothers may be insured a reasonable period free from excessive labor. Maternity
plans varied from systems under which every woman, regardless of her financial status,
received a fixed sum upon the birth of a child (Great Britain and Australia), to systems
under which voluntary insurance funds – membership of which was open only to wageearning women in certain industries and receiving certain minimum wages – received
subsidies from the state. In some systems the benefit consisted primarily of a payment
(from 50 to 75 percent of the wages), in others it consisted mainly of medical and nursing services.10 In Harris’s report, the largest amount of space was devoted to the British
system, partly because industrial conditions in Great Britain more closely resembled
conditions in the United States than those in other foreign countries, and partly because
the benefit paid on account of maternity directed attention to the needs of the wageearning mother at the time of childbirth “in a most striking manner.”11 The maternity aid
was included as part of the health insurance system in all but three countries. Italy, with
its separate system of compulsory maternity insurance for women wage earners, France,
246
elisabetta vezzosi
with its maternity allowance for those dependent on their earnings, and Australia, with
its maternity allowance for its citizens, had no systems of health insurance. In 1914, the
Australian government sustained maternity allowance with $3,000,000, a sign of how
“the governments are willing to assume financial burdens to relieve the financial strain
on the wage earning population caused by childbearing.”12 Julia Lathrop, who considered
the provision ineffective, was skeptical about the Australian maternity allowance of five
pounds.
As far as Italy was concerned, the focal point was the National Maternity Fund.13
This Fund was set up in July 1910 (Law n. 520) and began operating in 1912, after a
thirty-year long struggle on the part of the Italian women’s movement over “the issue of
the relationship between motherhood, the state and women’s citizenship,”14 and after a
long, complicated trek to win parliamentary approval. It provided maternity insurance
to wage earners in the manufacturing industries, as well as women employed in the ricefields, but many categories were also excluded (such as domestic, agricultural, and seasonal
workers). Despite pressure from the women’s movement, the fund was insufficient and
rarely applied. Nevertheless, the United States singled out the Italian program at the time
because, as Harris stressed, Italy had no health insurance system and its compulsory maternity insurance for women wage earners was a separate system. The restrictions of the
program were usually attributed to the difficulty in providing administrative machinery
to meet special conditions, for instance, in the home-working industries, in the case of
casual workers who change employers frequently, or in the case of agricultural workers
who were scattered thinly over wide areas. Although the Italian program was considered
an important example of public social welfare for maternity and childhood, the Italian
model was evaluated as too limited and not applicable to the United States, where it was
considered more appropriate for any maternity leave system to be part of a more broadly
based health insurance system:
It should be noted in passing that in Italy, the maternity scheme is a more narrow one, membership being limited to women between ages fifteen and fifty years. Doubtless the Italian maternity
insurance organization was created because of the lack of a sickness insurance system, with which
maternity insurance could be articulated. Whether such a maternity insurance can be made practicable and economical is an open question. It is as yet too early to make any definite statement
with regard to the results obtained in Italy. The dubious efficiency of this plan is pointed out now
for the reason that, if any scheme of maternity insurance is developed in the United States, the
probability is that it will have to be a phase of a larger scheme of sickness insurance.15
During those same years in Italy, those in favor of a system of maternity benefits
did not look to the United States, but to European models of maternity protection: the
experiences of Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Belgium, Norway, England,16
and above all, the French Mutualité Maternelle. The best forms of legislation were considered those which provided not only payments after the child was born, but also cash
247
benefits during pregnancy and bonuses for breastfeeding, because this was seen as a way
of ensuring the health of future workers.17 Although lacking in any compulsory health
insurance system, Italy was considered to have a pioneering role in maternity welfare
legislation: “Italy has the honor (and the accompanying responsibility) of being among
the first to experiment with this new form of social legislation. The present solution of
the problem in Italy is therefore of great international importance,” said Enrico Scodnik
at the International Congress of Social Insurances in Rome in October 1908.18
Notwithstanding the measures in favor of working mothers approved in Washington
in 1919,19 many of the women reformers close to the Children’s Bureau were still too
attached to the male breadwinner model to support forms of assistance for working mothers. As Alice Kessler Harris says, predominant “maternalist” thinking in the United States
made it impossible to even consider many of the strategies which might have improved
women’s lives for fear that they might encourage an increase in women’s participation
in the workforce:
In practice, protective labor legislation reflected a discourse of male prerogative and female dependence that participated in, and perpetuated, a range of public policies that reaffirmed racialized and
gendered claims to jobs and citizenship. If all women came before the laws as potential mothers,
and motherhood vitiated the last vestiges of women’s rights to work, then wage work for women
appeared as a privilege for the well-off and an obligation for the destitute.20
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, indirect provision for the protection
of motherhood is found in the statutes of various states in the U.S. Specific regulations
forbidding work during and after pregnancy, however, appeared only in a few of the
most densely settled manufacturing states in the East. Women were forbidden to engage
in certain occupations. Work in mines was forbidden to women in most of the mining
states (Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, New
York, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin,
and Wyoming), as well as work in saloons, except by members of the proprietor’s family,
in fourteen states (Connecticut, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri,
Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Texas, Utah, and Vermont).
Louisiana, Minnesota, and West Virginia forbade the employment of women in cleaning and moving machinery, Arizona forbade the work of women “in any capacity” in
which they must remain standing constantly, and New York and Ohio forbade women
to operate certain kinds of emery and other polishing wheels. These laws, as well as many
others which protected the woman wage earner, while not primarily designed to protect
working mothers, had the indirect effect of protecting children. Another group of more
general laws than those limiting occupation, though perhaps with the same indirect intent
and effect, were those specifying the maximum working day. California and Washington
limited work to eight hours a day, while South Carolina had a maximum of twelve
hours a day and sixty hours a week. Minimum-wage legislation – although not specifi248
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cally directed toward the protection of mothers but aimed very definitely at providing
women with a sufficient salary so that their health and morals could be preserved – was
enacted in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah,
Washington, and Wisconsin.21
Whereas in Europe laws forbidding employers to allow women to work for a certain
period prior or subsequent to maternity were widespread, in the United Stated (where a
large number of married women were entering the workforce) laws regulating rest periods
before and after confinement were enacted only in Connecticut (1913), Massachusetts
(1911), New York (1912), Vermont (1913), and Missouri (1919). In Connecticut a
compulsory rest period of four weeks before and four weeks after childbirth was established, while in Massachusetts there was a compulsory rest period of six weeks, two
weeks of which were before childbirth. New York did not provide for a rest period before
childbirth, but the employment of women was forbidden for four weeks after the birth.
The requirements of the Vermont statute were the same as those of Massachusetts, while
the Missouri law prohibited employment for pregnant woman for three weeks before
and three weeks after childbirth. According to the American Labor Legislation Review,
these provisions saved the mothers from overstrain but lowered the already small family
income and increased the evil effects of poverty at a critical time.
The few states that adopted these requirements in their statutes had no provision of
pay for the mothers that would prevent them from working. The subject was the focus
of considerable debate on the part of the American Association for Labor Legislation
(AALL), one of the reform organizations created during the Progressive Era, founded by
academics and upper-middle-class social reformers. Although the Association’s reformers
also looked to Europe as their model, they believed that maternity insurance could not
be run as an isolated program, but that it should be part of a broader scheme of compulsory health insurance sustained by the AALL.22 For this reason, they had included it
in their proposal for a law on compulsory health insurance that by 1917 was introduced
in fourteen state legislatures, but only the states of New York and California took it
into consideration. The bill provided all necessary medical, surgical, and obstetrical
aid, materials, and appliances to the wives of men insured for nine months during the
preceding year, and to women insured for the same period. The insured woman had the
right to receive, in addition to medical care, a cash benefit equal to two-thirds of her
wages during the two weeks preceding and the six weeks following confinement, on the
condition that she abstain from employment during that period. The benefit had to be
provided out of mutual funds to which the employer ordinarily contributes two-fifths,
the employee two-fifths, and the state one-fifth. If the wage was below 9 dollars a week,
the contribution of the employee was decreased and that of the employer proportionately
increased.23 The provision was supported by such women as Mary Beard, president of
the National Organization for Public Health Nursing, Alice Stone Blackwell, editor of
249
the Woman’s Journal, and Pauline Newman of the Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union – the
union that championed the AALL bill together with the United Mine Workers – but it
did not win the favor of Florence Kelley, one of the nation’s most prominent advocates
of protective legislation for women. Covering married working women and wives of
insured men would impose disadvantages on unmarried working women, which Kelley
seems to have regarded as the only legitimate members of the female workforce. Kelley’s
position turned out to be devastating, since the AALL, to avoid controversy, rejected the
inclusion of maternity insurance in its proposal, even while continuing to proclaim the
necessity of adapting to a continually changing labor market, in which the numbers of
married women and mothers continued to increase.24 In the United States of the 1910s,
legislation aimed at protecting working mothers at the time of childbirth was in its infancy,
“due perhaps to a belief that ‘married wage-earning women are not as yet an American
tradition’ – a belief that overlooks the economic forces which are driving married women
as well as young girls to seek gainful employment.”25
The AALL’s proposal was defeated, ending the Progressive Era campaign for compulsory health insurance, but it initiated a public debate on the theme. In 1920, the state of
Massachusetts set up a Commission to Investigate Maternity Benefits, designed to create
a maternity benefit system dedicated to pregnant women with insufficient means to pay
for their subsistence and the medical care needed at the time of confinement, as well as
to those women who, because of the unfitness of their homes or physical complications,
needed hospital care but were unable to pay for it.26 Once again, attention was directed
towards the experience of other countries, including Italy, which were criticized for the
fact that compulsory maternity insurance was only for women wage earners. That same
year, a book titled The Endowment of Motherhood 27 was published in the United States,
with an introduction by the editor, Katharine Anthony. Here, taking certain European
experiences as her starting-point, she argued the case for universal maternity benefits
for new mothers of all social classes with children under five to enable them to devote
themselves to child rearing. The plan was based on the declared necessity for women to be
financially independent even if they were not wage earners, and proposed that all mothers
should receive a weekly allowance for the period from eight weeks prior to giving birth
until the time when one or more of the children was five years old. In order to receive the
allowance, the mothers would have to present a birth certificate, while visits to the home
to make sure that the money was being spent properly on the right things were not to be
too frequent or inquisitorial. The allowance would also be paid to unmarried mothers.
Despite the undoubted interest in maternity leave generated in various circles, as
well as the serious concern of those interested in child welfare about the fact that a measure containing maternity benefits for wage-earning women was regarded as practically
impossible to enact, the proposal of paid maternity leave for women workers supported
by part of the women’s movement in Europe28 failed to gain much of a following in the
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United States, where traditional family models were rarely called into question.29 The
mothers’ pensions, which so many women’s organizations connected to “maternalist
feminism” were in favor of, were designed to provide a substitute for the wage earner so
that children may have the home care of the mother; the idea was to provide adequate
protection for children, rather than to protect women or women workers. Lathrop herself
was ambiguous about the question of women’s work. The way she perceived the systems
existing in other countries reflected her own background and upbringing. After studying
at Vassar College, she resided at Hull House from 1899 onwards, playing an active part
in numerous reform movements, carrying out research into the treatment of mental illnesses and laws on juvenile crime, and making numerous journeys to foreign countries
to observe and study different systems of social welfare.30 Lathrop’s wish to understand
foreign maternity insurance systems is also reflected in her brief correspondence with
Alexandra Kollontay of January 1917. Kollontay requested a copy of Laws Relating
to Mothers Pensions in the U.S., published in 1914 by the Children’s Bureau, offering
Lathrop her own work in return. Society and Motherhood contained a summary of existing laws on maternity leave, and was a gift in which Lathrop expressed great interest.31
Nonetheless, in the course of a discussion about maternity leave that took place at the
Conference on Social Insurance in 1916, she had been very cautious about taking a position on the issue. In her opinion, there was a more general question involved. Nobody
knew how many mothers were at work in shops and factories, nor did they know how to
estimate the proportion of working mothers on farms and ranches. In the same discussion, Mary Conyngton, representative of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics,
had stressed that the main objections to approving maternity benefit legislation as part
of a scheme of social insurance were based on two controversial suggestions: firstly, that
no exact statistics existed on married women in industry, and secondly, that the work of
married women was not consistent with American standards, and so the government did
not want to do anything to encourage it. According to the figures available to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, there were between one and two million gainfully employed married
women, and this number was certainly not diminishing, on the contrary, it was in all
probability increasing. For that reason, she emphasized the need for maternity benefit
legislation in the United States:
Refusing the maternity benefit may make the situation much harder for the individual woman,
may help to maintain the present high mortality among mothers at the time of confinement, may
increase suffering and invalidity among mothers who do not die, may help to perpetuate a long
train of harmful consequences, but will not lessen by a single iota the conditions which now drive
married women into industry nor return a single one to her home.32
In January 1917, Lathrop remained uncertain in her reply when requested for
clarification on the question of maternity insurance by a member of the Committee
on Industrial and Social Conditions of Columbus, Ohio: “The question of maternity
251
insurance is a very complicated one, and it will be necessary to study it carefully in this
country. It is really only one aspect of the question of the public protection of maternity.”33 The same position was expressed in the 1920s by the new chief of the Children’s
Bureau, Grace Abbott:
We have not felt in this country that maternity benefits were very important in the program for
reducing maternal family and infant mortality. The employment of married women is nothing like
so general in this country as in Europe, and the wage scale and standard of living is sufficiently high
to render benefits unnecessary in most lines of work. What we feel is needed is general provision
of the necessary agencies for education of women as to what constitutes good prenatal, natal and
infant care, conference centers, hospitals and nursing supervision. The amount of money made
available by a benefit system takes care of none of these items. The greatest gains in the reduction
of infant mortality have come in New Zealand where service instead of the benefit system has
been highly developed.34
By 1929, five states had laws limiting the employment of pregnant women before
and after the birth of their child but, as Grace Abbott pointed out, without any maternity
benefit system, this legislation “is mostly just words in the statute book.”35 In the same
year, defending the Children’s Bureau from the accusation that it supported the “communist” model of maternity benefits, Abbott concluded:
I think I should add that the Children’s Bureau has never recommended or advocated the Russian
nor any other system of maternity benefits. Indeed, the facts presented in this report in our opinion indicate quite clearly that a system of maternity benefits is not the means best calculated to
promote maternity and infant hygiene.36
Again in 1932, Katharine Lenroot – the future chief of the Children’s Bureau – wrote
to the secretary of the American Association for Labor Legislation, John B. Andrews, on
the subject of the laws prohibiting the employment of working mothers: “Personally, I feel
that they are not of very much value unless they are tied up with a rather comprehensive
plan of maternity insurance or otherwise getting help to mothers who need it.”37
the italian situation between fascism and the postwar period
By the beginning of the twentieth century, a strong interest in different national
experiences was expressed by certain federal bureaus, such as the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics.38 From the thirties onwards, when the interest in fascism of certain New Deal
exponents focused principally on its social policies, the National Organization for the
Protection of Motherhood and Infancy and protective legislation for women workers
were part of a more widespread interest in the fascist social experiment. In 1938, William
G. Welk, a professor of economics at St. Thomas College in St. Paul, Minnesota, wrote
that “with regard to the idea of building a stable social and economic organization,
three especially interesting attempts at a solution had been made during the last two
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decades: one by Russian Communism, another by Italian and German Fascism, and the
third by the New Deal. Despite differing greatly in their general creed and philosophy,
these three attempts at reform nevertheless had one fundamental aim in common: the
creation of a better social order and the realization of a new scheme for the social and
economic advancement of the people.”39 In these terms, the America of the New Deal
paid great attention to the programs of social insurance and social welfare set up by the
fascist regime: the welfare provisions included in collective labor agreements and the
social welfare institutions maintained by the state.40 Welk emphasized the importance
of the role of the National Organization for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy
and the principles of social insurance present in Declarations XXVI and XXVII of the
Charter of Labor, containing among other things provisions for the improvement and
extension of maternity insurance. In Italy, through the activities of women’s fascist party
groups and the ONMI, the fascist state attempted to place motherhood and women’s
caregiving duties within the sphere of the state, thereby transforming a common social
practice into a type of “obligation of female citizenship.”41
The ONMI is an example of how Italian women tried to turn the fascist regime’s
emphasis on motherhood to their own advantage. In fact, they combined maternalist and pro-natalist policies - of which ONMI was a clear expression - to obtain social
rights as working and non-working mothers; to acquire a new sense of entitlement to
assistance; and to create new female professions in the field of social assistance. I would
argue that the special form of “maternalism” in fascist Italy (and especially the nascent
professionalization of women’s jobs in the field of social work) provided an opportunity
for women’s empowerment. Definitions of “maternalism” implying vigorous activism on
the part of civil society cannot really be applied to fascist Italy because civil liberties were
greatly restricted and, in the public sphere, women were largely regimented into fascist
organizations. A broader definition of “maternalism,” however, by which it is taken to
mean the outcome of mothers’ expression of their needs; the indirect influence exercised
by recipients in the shaping of welfare policy; and a form of non-organized resistance to
the regime’s pro-natalist policies, sheds considerable light on how Italian women used
Fascist “maternalism:” theirs was a “top-down” approach.
In 1925, the ONMI was created by the fascist regime (which had been in power
since October 1922) and it became the keystone of the demographic campaign. Its roots
are to be found among the assistance programs developed in the time between the last
liberal governments and the advent of Fascism, when upper-class Roman women from
the National Association of Women (Associazione Nazionale della Donna) began to take
interest in the plight of poor and single mothers. One of their projects was Mother’s Aid
for Illegitimate Children and Unwed Mothers (Assistenza Materna per gli Illegittimi e le
Madri Nubili), set up in 1918. In some ways, then, the ONMI duplicated the activities
of Mother’s Aid and other similar programs established at the insistence of Italian orga253
nizations for female emancipation after World War One. In addition, fascist legislation
regarding the protection of female workers was clearly a continuation of prior provisions,
most notably the National Maternity Fund. Since the American model “necessitated
the formation of a big bureaucracy and a huge increase in federal spending,” it was the
Belgian National Childhood Institute, established in 1919 with considerable success,
which provided the model for the far-reaching aims of the ONMI.42
At its founding, Italy’s institute was designed as a state-controlled body for the
coordination of all public and private institutions offering assistance to mothers and
children. In some cases, pre-existing structures were completely incorporated into the
ONMI. A great deal of resources was devoted to distributing information about scientific norms and methods of prenatal and infant hygiene. This information was spread
through a variety of means to both medical practitioners and the public. It included
the setting-up of classes on pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood for doctors and
midwives; the establishment of practical schools for visiting home health care workers;
the organization of public seminars and conferences on hygiene and child-rearing; and
the launching of mobile classrooms in rural areas for public education on maternity,
childbirth, and child-rearing. Beyond public education, the tasks of the organization
also included direct assistance, such as the creation of obstetric and pediatric clinics; the
provision of mothers’ kitchens (refettori) for women from their sixth month of pregnancy
up to their seventh month of breastfeeding; mother’s homes to shelter unmarried women
during their pregnancies, deliveries, and nursing periods; crèches for infants up to three
years of age for women working outside the home; food subsidies; and home visits. Indirect services included the provision of wet-nurses, foster care, admission to education
and training schools, and admission to summer camps and anti-tuberculosis colonies.
The ONMI also exercised “moral” guidance, providing assistance with job placement,
convincing single fathers to recognize their children, and offering bonuses to cohabiting
couples who legalized their ‘illegitimate’ unions. Finally, the ONMI served to regulate
and ensure the effective application of all the laws and regulations concerning the protection of mothers and children.
One of the tasks that the ONMI was meant to take on was that of making sure that
the labor laws protecting working mothers were applied. In order to understand how
the ONMI encouraged “maternalist” policies, it is necessary to describe the protective
legislation for working mothers. Here is a brief description of the principle stages and
main provisions of each type of legislation.
With the approval of the Consolidated Act (Testo Unico) of September 24, 1923 (Law
n. 2157), which coordinated the pre-fascist legislation concerning maternity insurance for
female workers, the subsidy was extended from 40 to 100 liras. The total allowance was
enough to cover the missed wages, but was too low to include any type of health assistance.
Coverage was extended to women who were between the ages of fifteen and fifty years
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and worked in private businesses or in companies that were subject to child and female
labor laws. These included companies in manufacturing, the building trades, craftwork,
and the mining industries. Once again, domestic servants, farmhands, and seasonal workers were excluded. Maternity insurance was improved and extended through the Labor
Charter (Carta del Lavoro) of April 1927, and two years later, the laws for the protection
and assistance of motherhood and childhood were supplemented with female labor laws
by the Royal Legislative Decree (RDL) n. 850 of May 13, 1929. At this point, insurance
was extended to all female blue-collar workers and all female office workers employed in
industry and trade who earned less than 800 liras a month. State and public employees
also received the benefit unless they were already entitled through special regulations to
an indemnity that exceeded the value of the one guaranteed through the RDL n. 850.
Every insured woman was granted a lump sum of 150 liras upon the birth of her child
or in the case of miscarriage. Factory workers were allowed to stop work during the last
month of pregnancy, and could extend their leave for a month after the birth on the understanding that their job would be kept for them until they came back. In addition, the
decree provided for the extension of maternity insurance to some categories of agricultural
workers. While still not applying all the principles laid down in the 1919 Washington
Convention for the Protection of Women before and after childbirth, Italian legislation
was considered fairly advanced for the time.43 Law n. 653 of April 26, 1934 prohibited
night-work for women of all ages and for children less than sixteen years of age. It also
limited the working day to eleven hours for women and ten hours for children. Finally,
it stipulated that workers be certified as capable for work either by the health office or
(with the permission of the Ministry of Corporations) by physicians from the ONMI or
other welfare organizations. In the early 1930s, the debate over the protection of working mothers centered around increases in the maternity leave grant and its extension to
other categories of workers such as rice pickers and female seasonal workers,44 whose
discontinuous employment patterns made it impossible for them to accumulate the
working time and contributions required to qualify for maternity insurance. Law n. 654
of March 22, 1934 encompassed all of these concerns, addressing above all the physical
and moral protection of women working in sectors that posed increased risks to future
and new mothers, or that offered fewer guarantees regarding the women’s right to return
to their same job after a maternity absence. The law also extended the length of the compulsory maternity leave from the last month of pregnancy until six weeks after the birth.
Factories employing more than fifty women had to provide special “nursing rooms” where
mothers could feed their babies, and the mothers were guaranteed two daily rest periods
for this purpose. Finally, the decree ratified the maternity allowance, which increased to
300 liras upon the birth of a child, or 100 liras in the case of miscarriage. There were still
no norms that protected against firing or that guaranteed the right of female workers to
receive wages equal to that of men for the same kinds of work. At that time, women’s
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wages were typically fixed at fifty percent of men’s wages for the same work, a disparity
accepted by fascist trade unions.45
Despite its limits, this legislation was a notable improvement on that produced by
the pre-fascist liberal governments. However, the significance of this type of legislation
was radically transformed by the fascist objective of discouraging extra-domestic employment. Indeed, domestic helpers, home workers, and many categories of workers in the
agricultural sector were excluded from protection. It was only in 1936 with the RDL
n. 1502 of August 7 that maternity insurance would be extended to certain categories of
agricultural workers. Fascist legislation was thus considered rather advanced in comparison
to other nations’ provisions, which were almost always cited in disparaging terms, and
the United States was strongly criticized for its fragmented system of provision, mainly
due to the great autonomy of the individual states,46 and for the absence of a federal law
on maternity leave.
The increased protection for working mothers offered by the fascist government
seemed to be somewhat in contradiction with the growing tendency to expel women
from the labor market, also through legislative means. One example of this, the RDL
n. 1514 of September 5, 1938, went even further than the repeated (and for the most
part ineffectual) efforts to invite women to leave the labor market. This decree limited
the presence of women in public and private enterprises to ten percent of the company’s
personnel.47 It would seem that the ONMI made no efforts to keep women engaged in
the labor market, and little is known about its aforementioned functions as a job placement agency. In addition, the mandate to create crèches in or nearby factories amounted
to very little. These should have been created as a service to blue-collar women, as a
replacement for the unhygienic “nursing rooms” (camere di allattamento) provided for
but rarely enforced by the law of November 10, 1907. There is also little documentation
detailing the degree to which the ONMI was effective in protecting working women from
dismissal in the weeks prior to their delivery dates, or in the succeeding months. The two
most important measures for working-class women were probably the establishment of
mothers’ kitchens in the nation’s cities and towns (84,502 in 1935) and the creation by
the ONMI, the Fasci Femminili and other fascist institutions, of women’s workshops
in depressed urban areas to facilitate women’s employment. Concern for the health of
pregnant female workers was certainly high, especially because of the risk of miscarriage.
Indeed, references to the “plague” of miscarriages are frequent.48
In the writings of fascist theorists of social policy, constant reference is made to
the United States and to the trend towards rationalizing systems of social assistance.
“Before the 1925 law, in most European countries and American states, and even in
some countries of South America and Oceania there had already been intense legislative
activity designed to protect children and the necessary services for prevention and assistance had been organized,” wrote Sileno Fabbri, an official of the ONMI, in 1933.49
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Despite this, legislation enacted elsewhere was described in almost negative terms and the
frequent references to the United States did nothing to prevent the American legislation
from being considered “over-ambitious.”50 It was criticized for being too decentralized,
disorganized, and ineffective and the entire American experience prior to the approval
of the New Deal Social Security Act and Aid to Dependent Children Act of 1935 was
dismissed in a few sentences:
Basically, rather than real laws which establish the obligation of the state authorities to provide
measures protecting maternity and infancy, in the United States there are numerous public and
private bodies, moved by a humanitarian and philanthropic spirit, which exist to alleviate the
suffering of whoever is in need for one reason or another, irrespective of their sex or their age.
According to the American way of looking at things, the question of assistance is a general one,
and includes anyone who happens to be in need. In other words, the North American mentality
does not yet seem to have conceived of the ethical concept of the protection of motherhood and
infancy as a means of moral regeneration and social improvement.51
In spite of this evaluation, Sileno Fabbri was a firm believer in rationalizing social
assistance along the lines of the American model. He insisted on the importance of
women being appointed as leaders of the ONMI committees (after careful training), and
he recalled that in the United States, the training schools for social work had been set
up on the initiative of women such as Anna Dawes, Mary Richmond, and Julia Lathrop
(responsible for the creation of Chicago University’s School of Social Work). For Fabbri,
social work in general could be identified with that American-born approach to the scientific organization of work, given its finishing touch by Italian “genius:” “Perhaps no
other Nation more than our own will be able to take such inestimable advantage of the
scientific organization of work, or of rationally organized work, because no other Nation
has more inventiveness and more genius than Italy.”52
The limits of the ONMI were clear to those concerned with it: the distribution of
services was concentrated in urban areas and the inexpert health personnel made the
maternal and pediatric clinics highly ineffective; the infant mortality rate fell by just
one-fifth between 1925 and 1940. Furthermore, the measures supporting motherhood
and infancy were not designed to provide a permanent level of minimum assistance, but
rather to be employed as emergency interventions. The circumscribed nature of their
application left room for the introduction of family allowances in 1936, and the later
establishment of fertility prizes in 1939, both of which obfuscated the centrality of women’s
role in the assistance programs. The war further hampered the activity of the organization, for which “civil mobilization” was declared. In the end, the ONMI was subject to
ever-greater burdens, not least an increase in the risk factors for infant mortality, which
rose from ninety-seven deaths per thousand live births in the first year of life in 1939, to
a horrifying 202.6 deaths per thousand live births in 1940.53
257
While the protection of single mothers was not a priority in the United States during
this period, unmarried mothers in Italy were prime targets for fascist assistance policies,
and the citizenship rights they acquired through this aid cost them much more dearly
than married women in terms of the loss of privacy that they suffered. Along with the
benefits came the state’s invasion of their private lives, and their morals were placed under
vigilant observation. Of course, this enthusiasm for social control was not the exclusive
preserve of fascist assistance policies. The morality of mothers in general and of single
mothers in particular was even supervised in the context of a “maternalist” welfare state,
as in the United States, where widows received the most assistance from the state and
national governments through the Mothers’ Pensions program in the 1910s and 1920s,
and the Aid to Dependent Children program from the mid-1930s on.54
In the fascist social policy system, it was only through biological reproduction that
women became legitimate producers of social value, and it was this function above every
other that had to be protected. As a consequence, working mothers were for the most
part deprived of legitimation. As Anna Rossi Doria55 has mentioned, it was precisely in
the context of employment that the maternalist policies of the regime failed to untangle
the difficult relationship between citizenship and maternity. The very fact that working
women received better protection from the fascist visitors of the ONMI than from their
own trade unions is revealing of the regime’s ambiguous stance on female employment,
and also of the fact that the protective legislation was primarily designed with pro-natalist
objectives in mind.56 When the ONMI became engaged in the supervision and control
of female workers through its social policies, the organization’s attention was above all
directed towards workers in the industrial plants. The ONMI generally limited its activity to the urban sphere and, despite the entreaties of the regime’s propaganda, only
occasionally occupied itself with the needs of female agricultural and seasonal workers,
such as the rice pickers. The same applied in the United States where domestic workers
and agricultural workers (and thus African-American women workers in particular) were
excluded from the provisions of the Social Security Act.
While it is true, as De Grazia writes, that there was an enormous difference in fascist
Italy “between the propaganda’s emphasis on the importance of promoting modern motherhood, and the low quality of the services and administration,”57 there were undeniable
attempts to rationalize the system of assistance. Furthermore, the innovative training
programs for nurses, obstetricians, social workers, and health assistants introduced during
that period and based on the American experience, though marred by constraints and
ambiguities, set in motion a process of professionalization for women working in many
sectors of maternal and child welfare that would see further development immediately
after the Second World War. Thus, there were signs, however weak, of a future that went
well beyond the regime’s original intentions.
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conclusions
In the United States, it was the massive entrance of women into the workforce during the Second World War that imposed an increasingly urgent need for a redefinition
of social policies that concerned them. In the 1940s a new generation of female union
leaders promoted government and employer policies that were friendly to working mothers, such as day-care programs and paid maternity leave.58 In July 1942, however, the
Women’s Bureau, in collaboration with the Children’s Bureau, published the Standards
for Maternity Care and Employment of Mothers in Industry, whose recommendations did
not include a proposal of paid maternity leave.59 In the same year, maternity insurance
protected some three million working women in Italy.60
Although a study of the Children’s Bureau of 1942-1943 had highlighted the
widespread practice of firing pregnant women or of asking them to take unpaid leave
(employers were eager to point out that it was “not nice” for pregnant women to work
in a factory), the only federal law giving industry-wide benefits to pregnant employees
was a 1946 amendment to the Federal Railroad Unemployment Insurance Act of 1938,
which provided insurance for sickness and specifically included pregnancy and maternity
disabilities. Otherwise, the only maternity benefits that existed were received by women
workers under health insurance plans established by union-management agreement.61
From July 1945, the closing period of the war, until January 1946, the number of women
in the labor force declined by nearly four million, though over 30 percent of the adult
women in the country could still be counted as workers. According to the studies of
the Women’s Bureau on the economic responsibilities and postwar employment plans
of women in ten different war-congested areas, about nine-tenths of the single women
(including the widowed and divorced) and three-fifths of the married women planned to
continue in the labor force.62 In 1949, showing a strong interest in the issue, the Federal
Security Agency of the Social Security Administration prepared a summary of the legislation relating to social security in the world in which health and maternity Insurance
was included.63
In 1952 the Maternity Protection Convention adopted by the International Labor
Organization enlarged provisions with respect to the 1919 Convention, whose influence
had undoubtedly been much greater than the number of ratifications around the world
would imply.64 Before the revision of 1952, the ILO had asked that governments observe
the Maternity Protection Convention. The United States government had responded
that several factors, starting with the increase, “in geometric ratio,” of women’s employment, had contributed to the need for restudying the Convention. The report pointed
out that little progress had been made by legislation since 1919: six states (Connecticut,
Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, Vermont, and Washington) prohibited women’s
employment before and after childbirth, but made no accompanying provision for job
security, and only two states (California and Rhode Island) included a provision for
259
maternity benefits. In spite of this situation, the United States government suggested a
broader coverage as far as possible to all employed women, including domestic workers,
farm workers and employees of non-profit organizations, and stressed that standards for
maternity leave developed jointly by the Women’s Bureau and the Children’s Bureau in
consultation with medical advisers called for a total of fourteen weeks’ leave, including
six weeks’ optional leave before delivery and eight weeks leave after delivery. The report
concluded: “Widespread interest continues, however, in the adoption of a national health
insurance system which would include maternity.”65
In 1958, according to estimates of the Census Bureau, 11.8 million out of a total
of twenty-two million women in the U.S. workforce were married and lived with their
husbands; yet maternity leave policy has been generally left to employers in the private
sector and to the private fringe benefits system.66 In 1963, the Commission on the Status
of Women, appointed by President Kennedy in 1961, made an extensive study on the
situation of working women in order to identify their protection requirements. Its final
recommendations included the implementation of paid maternity leave with the guarantee of job protection. For the first time, a national government report gave expression to
this need, but its recommendation went unheeded. The lasting interest in the subject is
demonstrated by the response of the United States government to the ILO questionnaire
on Employment of Women with Family Responsabilities of 1963:
The increasing employment of married women in the United States particularly women of childbearing age, focuses new attention on the need for development of comprehensive standards covering the employment of women who become pregnant while working in paid employment. The
problem is a complex one, involving the health of the prospective mother and her child, the woman
workers need for wages or other income, the employer’s legal responsibility for accidents which
befall workers in his employ, and many other factors. A generous allotment of leave will safeguard
the health of mother and child and may also increase the mother’s efficiency as a worker.
The standard of maternity leave recommended jointly by the Women’s Bureau and the Children’s
Bureau recognizes that for a certain period of time before and after childbirth it is not advisable
for any woman to be employed. Accordingly, it calls for maternity leave without loss of job or
seniority rights; a minimum of six weeks leave before and two months leave after confinement,
with extension of either period on advice of the worker’s physician.67
These statements remained a dead letter and the American feminist movement of the
1960s and 1970s, which emphasized gender equality in the workplace and concentrated
its activities on eliminating practices that excluded women because they were different,
gave little support to federal maternity leave legislation.68
In the United States, the tradition of “maternalist feminism,” with its primacy of
the “male breadwinner” model, made the lack of universal maternity leave and childcare protection possible. It also increased differences among women, especially between
wealthier and less privileged mothers.69 In Italy, the imperfect modernization of the system
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of social protection for mothers and children implemented during the fascist period, and
the role that women played therein as either beneficiaries or professional service providers,
opened up post-war opportunities and scenarios for a new kind of female citizenship.
Thus, whereas Italy saw the enactment of a very advanced maternity leave legislation in
1950, with Law n. 860 on The Physical and Economic Protection of Working Mothers, the
U. S. Women’s Bureau complained in 1952 that, although more than half of women in
the American labor force were married, the United States was the only industrial country
that did not promote maternity protection for employed women through general national legislation, and almost half its states disqualified pregnant women from receiving
unemployment insurance.70
In the absence of a national health insurance system, the modest and limited Family
and Medical Leave Act signed by President Clinton in 1993 did not represent a solution
to the problems of American working mothers, and this makes Lee Frankel’s words in
1915 (with which this paper opened) even more urgently topical:
If we assume that, under our ideal condition, mothers shall not work, the great need of a scheme
for maternity insurance immediately disappears. If, however, it is nevertheless deemed essential to
develop a scheme of insurance under which maternity benefits may be paid to working mothers,
attention should be called at this time to the desirability of extending the benefits of such a scheme
to other women as well. To do this most effectively it would be advisable, as has been suggested,
not to attempt to organize a special maternity insurance, but to incorporate this into a general
sickness insurance plan. The need for sickness insurance can no longer be denied.71
The strong tendency to include maternity leave in a broader plan of national health
insurance is probably an important factor in the failure of a specific federal legislation, so
today Unites States family leave policy lags well behind that of most other nations. As the
2005 report by the National Partnership for Women and Families concludes:
For most working parents in America today, paid maternity and paternity leave is nothing more
than a dream. Instead, families shoulder the economic burden of caring for a newborn alone. For
some, the result is financial hardship or ruin.72
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1. See Ronald D. Elving, Conflict and Compromise. How Congress Makes the Law (New York, 1995).
2. Lise Vogel maintains that a family and maternity policy has distant, albeit heterogeneous and uncodified roots. It is contained in state legislations, court opinions, government regulations, and in the practices
of entrepreneurs concerning pregnancy, confinement, and family, but is not included in a comprehensive
maternity policy. See Lise Vogel, Mothers on the Job. Maternity Policy in the U.S. Workplace (New Brunswick,
N.J., 1993).
3. National Partnership for Women & Families, Expecting Better: A State-by-State Analysis of Parental Leave
Programs (Washington, D.C., 2005).
4. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, A Lesser Life. The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America (New York, 1986).
5. Eileen Boris and Jay S. Kleinberg, Mothers and Other Workers (Re)Conceiving Labor, Maternalism, and
the State, “Journal of Women’s History,” 15, 3 (Autumn 2003), 90-116.
6. Lee K. Frankel, Maternity Insurance (A.R. Elliot Publishing Company, 1915 - Reprinted from the
New York Medical Journal for December 18, 1915), 27.
7. International Labour Office, Maternity Protection. A World Survey of National Law and Practice, (Geneva,
1965).
8. See in this sense, Women in Industry, “Monthly Labor Review,” 30, 3 (March 1930), 50-57.
9. Harry J. Harris, Maternity Benefit Systems in Certain Foreign Countries, U.S. Department of Labor,
Children’s Bureau, Publication n. 57 (Washington, D.C., 1919), 10. See also Legislation for Women in
Industry, “American Labor Legislation Review,” 6, 4 (1916), 407-409, and Charles R. Henderson, Infant
Welfare in Germany and Belgium. General Conclusions, in “The American Journal of Sociology,” 17, 6, (1912),
800-803.
10. Harris, Maternity Benefit Systems in Certain Foreign Countries, 9.
11. Ibid., 16.
12. Harry J. Harris, “speech,” U.S. Department of Labor. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Proceedings of the
Conference on Social Insurance (Washington, D.C., 1917), 782.
13. On the Italian National Maternity Fund, see Annarita Buttafuoco, Questioni di cittadinanza. Donne e
diritti sociali nell’Italia liberale (Siena, 1993), 159-95.
14. Annarita Buttafuoco, “Motherhood as A Political Strategy: The Role of the Italian Women’s Movement
in the Creation of the Cassa Nazionale di Maternità,” in Maternity and Gender Policies. Women and the Rise
of the European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s, eds. Gisela Bock and Pat Thane (London and New York, 1991),
178-195.
15. Frankel, Maternity Insurance, 25.
16. See Luigi Bernacchi, La tutela legale e l’assicurazione per la maternità in Italia e all’estero, Abstract by the
journal L’attualità medica (Milan, 1910).
17. Ibid., 22.
18. Enrico Scodnik, L’assicurazione materna e le casse per la maternità (Naples, 1909), 8.
19. League of Nations, International Labour Conference, Draft Conventions and Recommendations Adopted
by the Conference at its First Annual Meeting, 29 October-29 November 1919, His Majesty’s Stationery Office
(London, 1920).
20. Alice Kessler-Harris. In Pursuit of Equity. Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20thCentury America (New York, 2001), 34.
262
elisabetta vezzosi
21. Frankel, Maternity Insurance, 6-7. For a comparative approach to women’s protective legislation see: Ulla
Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris, Jane Lewis, Protecting Women. Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States,
and Australia, 1880-1920 (Urbana and Chicago, 1995).
22. Jill Quadagno, One Nation Uninsured. Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance (Oxford, 2005),
18-21.
23. Legislation for Women in Industry, 409.
24. See David A. Moss, Socializing Security. Progressive-Era Economists and the Origins of American Social
Policy (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1996).
25. Legislation for Women in Industry, 402.
26. Report of the Special Commission to Investigate Maternity Benefits, December 1920, (Boston, 1920).
27. Katharine Anthony ed., The Endowment of Motherhood (New York, 1920).
28. See Bock, Thane eds., Maternity & Gender Policies, 29. Frankel, Maternity Insurance. Frankel argued
that in the United States, the European principle according to which the wife’s earnings made up part of the
family budget, and that maternity benefits should thus be part of a general sickness insurance plan, had still
not been accepted.
30. See Albert N. Marquis ed., Who’s Who in America, vol. 15, 1928-1929 (Chicago, 1928), 1261-2. From
1925 onwards, Lathrop was given responsibilities with the Child Welfare Committee of the League of
Nations.
31. Mrs. Alexandra Kollontay to Julia C. Lathrop, January 10, 1917, National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA), R.G. 102, Box 122, File 10.471 Maternity Laws (General).
32. Mary Conyngton’s speech in U. S. Department of Labor. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Proceedings of the
Conference on Social Insurance (Washington, D.C., 1917), 792.
33. Julia Lathrop to Mrs. Chas D. Cussins, January 22, 1917, NARA, R.G. 102, Box 122, File 10.470.1.
34. Grace Abbott to Mrs. Horace Parsons, November 30, 1926, NARA, R.G. 102, Central File 1925-1928,
Box 275, File 4-10-5.
35. Grace Abbott to L. Cottrell, April 15, 1931, NARA, R. G. 102, Box 413, File 10-4-3-5. See. also
G. Abbott to L. Davidson, August 27, 1929, NARA, R. G. 102, Box 419, File 10-4-3-6.
36. Grace Abbott a Hon. Holden Tinkham, May 27, 1929, NARA, R.G. 102, Box 380, Central File 1929-32,
File 4-7-1-1-2 Maternity Benefits.
37. Katharine F. Lenroot to Mr. John B. Andrews, August 12, 1932, NARA, R.G. 102, Box 413, File
10-4-3-6.
38. See Women in Industry, “Monthly Labor Review,” 30, 3 (March 1930), 50-57; Workmen’s Compensation
and Social Insurance, “Monthly Labor Review,” 31, 2 (August 1930), 63-71.
39. William G. Welk, Fascist Economic Policy. An Analysis of Italy’s Economic Experiment, (Cambridge, Mass.,
1938).
40. Ibid., 96.
41. Robin Pickering–Iazzi ed., Mothers of Invention. Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture (MinneapolisLondon, 1995).
42. Maria S. Quine, Italy’s Social Revolution. Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism (New York, 2002), 136.
43. League of Nations, International Labour Conference. Fifth Session (Geneva, 1930).
263
44. See, Il coordinamento delle disposizioni sull’assicurazione di maternità nello schema proposto dalla Commissione
per la revisione della legislazione del lavoro, “Bollettino del lavoro e della previdenza sociale,” 6 (1931),
895-901.
45. Maria Vittoria Ballestrero, Dalla tutela alla parità. La legislazione italiana sul lavoro delle donne (Bologna,
1979), 70.
46. Luisa Riva Sanseverino, “La legislazione fascista sul lavoro femminile,” in La donna e la famiglia nella
legislazione fascista (Naples, 1933), 119.
47. Ornello Vitali, Aspetti dello sviluppo economico italiano alla luce della ricostruzione della popolazione attiva
(Rome, 1970).
48. Antonio Bonora, Alcuni problemi sociali considerati soprattutto dal punto di vista ostetrico riguardanti l’Opera
Nazionale per la Protezione della Maternità e dell’Infanzia. Relazione compilata per incarico della federazione
Provinciale Forlivese dell’Opera Nazionale per la Protezione della Maternità e dell’Infanzia (Pesaro, 1928),
9-10; A. Masciotta, L’operaia, donna e madre. Rassegna e considerazioni generali con contributo statistico, “La
Ginecologia,” 6, 12 (1940), 619-638.
49. See Sileno Fabbri, L’Opera Nazionale per la Protezione della Maternità e dell’Infanzia (Milan, 1933), 33;
Lina Furlan, “La protezione e l’assistenza della maternità e dell’infanzia in Italia,” in La donna e la famiglia
nella legislazione fascista, 33-57.
50. Riva Sanseverino, La legislazione fascista sul lavoro femminile, 119.
51. Ibid., 121.
52. Sileno Fabbri, L’Assistenza della maternità e dell’infanzia in Italia (Problemi vecchi e nuovi) (Napoli, 1993), 35.
53. Statistics quoted in Letter of the Interior Department to the Presidence of the Ministers Council, March
23, 1942, Archivio Centrale dello Stato – Rome (ACS), Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri (PCM), Box
II.10.1001, File 6.187, 1940-41. Lettera del Ministero dell’Interno alla Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri,
23 March 1942.
54. See among others, Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled. Single Mothers and the History of Welfare,
1890-1935 (New York, 1994); Elisabetta Vezzosi, Madri e stato. Politiche sociali negli Stati Uniti del Novecento
(Rome, 2002).
55. Anna Rossi-Doria, Maternità e cittadinanza femminile, “Passato e presente,” 13, 34 (1995), 171-177;
Victoria De Grazia, Le donne nel regime fascista (Venice, 1993), 245.
56. Italo Piva and Giuseppe Maddalena, La tutela delle lavoratrici madri nel periodo 1923-1943, in Salute
e classi lavoratrici in Italia dall’Unità al Fascismo, eds. Maria Luisa Betri and Ada Gigli Marchetti (Milano,
1982), 841.
57. Victoria De Grazia, Le donne nel regime fascista, 95.
58. Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America
(Princeton, N.J., 2004).
59. Sheila B. Kamerman, Alfred J. Kahan and Paul Kingston, Maternity Policy and Working Women (New York,
1983), 34.
60. Emilio Pampana, La protezione della madre e del fanciullo (Rome, 1942), 5.
61. See Jennie Mohr, Maternity Benefits under Union Contract. Health Insurance Plans, U.S. Department of
Labor, Women’s Bureau, Bulletin 214 (Washington D.C., 1947).
62. Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon, Employment of Women in the Early Postwar Period, U.S. Department of Labor,
Women’s Bureau, Bulletin 211 (Washington, D.C., 1946); Sylvia R. Weissbrodt, Women Workers in Ten War
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Production Areas and their Postwar Employment Plans, U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Burea, Bulletin
n. 209, (Washington D.C., 1946).
63. Carl H. Farman and Veronica Marren Hale eds., Social Security Legislation Throughout The World, Federal
Security Agency, Social Security Administration, (Washington, D.C., 1949).
64. Sylvia S. Beyer, Maternity Benefit Provisions for Employed Women, U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s
Bureau, Bulletin 272, (Washington D.C., 1960).
65. International Labour Conference, Revision of the Maternity Protection Convention, 1919 (N° 3), (Geneva,
1952), 14.
66. Pregnancy and Employment: The Complete Handbook on Discrimination, Maternity Leave, and Health and
Safety, A BNA Special Report (Washington D.C., 1987).
67. Reply of the United States Government to ILO Questionnaire on Employment of Women with Family Responsibilities, August 27, 1963, NARA, R.G. 102, Box 1002, Central File 1963-66, File 4-7-1-1-1,
Employment of Mothers Outside of Home, 12.
68. Vogel, Mothers on the Job, 3.
69. Louise A. Tilly, Women, Work, and Citizenship, “International Labor and Working-Class History,” 52,
(Fall 1997), 21.
70. Ethel Erickson, Maternity Protection of Employed Women, U.S. Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau,
(Washington D.C., 1952).
71. Frankel, Maternity Insurance, 27.
72. National Partnership for Women & Families, Expecting Better, 3.
265
CONSERVATIVE CRITICS OF THE NEW DEAL IN THE 1930s:
TOWARDS AUTHORITARIAN EUROPEANIZATION?
maurizio vaudagna
the new deal, dictatorship, and welfare in the s
In 1942 William H. Beveridge, the intellectual father of the postwar British welfare
state, published a report that would become a watershed in the relationship between the
social security state and liberal democracy entitled Full Employment in a Free Society. Since
the compatibility between the social security state and democratic liberties is now a given,
the latter half of Beveridge’s title may appear to be little more than a rhetorical ornament.
When he wrote the report, however, that was certainly not the case. In fact, references
to a free society are made repeatedly throughout the book. The fourth paragraph of the
introductory section bears the title “Preservation of essential liberties,” whose purpose,
as Beveridge explains, is not only to conquer full employment “to make Britain again a
land of opportunity for all,” but that “it is concerned with the necessity, possibility and
methods of achieving full employment in a free society, that is to say, subject to the proviso
that all essential citizen liberties are preserved.” He went on the stress that “the proviso
excludes the totalitarian solution of full employment in a society completely planned and
regimented by an irremovable dictator.”1
On the opposite side of the intellectual alignment was Austrian economist Friedrich
von Hayek, who moved to United States in 1950. In 1944, while still a refugee in
Great Britain, he published The Road to Serfdom, a book that was bound to become a
banner for the individualist conservatism being revived at the time and consisted of a
criticism of the economic practice of social democracy in favor of a liberal economy.2
When he wrote his book, Hayek imagined that he was addressing an audience made up of
European social democrats and laborites, especially in Britain. However, the book reached
America almost immediately and encountered such success there that it was published
in abridged form in the Readers’ Digest. It was also sharply criticized by such outstanding
American intellectuals as Charles Merriam at the American Political Science Association
and Herman Finer, who wrote a drastic rebuttal entitled The Road to Reaction. Reinvigorated by renewed prosperity and in search of a new manifesto for traditional economic
orthodoxy, American business associations bought thousands of copies of the book, playing no small role in decreeing its success.3 In the same years, another Austrian refugee
economist, Ludwig von Mises, who had reached American shores in 1940, was equally
concerned with what appeared to be a triumphant nazi march. In 1940, he wrote a manuscript that was to appear only much later entitled Interventionism: An Economic Analysis.
267
conservative critics of the new deal in the s
Among other case studies, the book also dealt with the New Deal, a subject he would
focus on more specifically in 1944 in his book Bureaucracy. Von Mises stressed that in
the 1930s, the American Congress had relinquished many powers of political leadership
to the new bureaucracy, and that the emergency powers delegated by the legislative to
the executive represented the avenue toward modern dictatorship. The New Deal had
therefore enacted a legislation that ran counter to the long-term, deep-rooted trends of
American public life.4
Contrary to Beveridge, the Austrian economists held that individual, political liberty
was only compatible with the private right to manage and the freedom of market competition, while government interference in economic affairs ran counter to it. Hayek and
Von Mises were deeply concerned by the Austrian and central European experience that
had witnessed the emergence of the all-powerful nazi state, the cancellation of individual
liberties, the wide-ranging control of the economy, and the submission of Austria, as its
citizens enthusiastically hailed their new dictator. In the 1930s, Nazis and Fascists had appeared to be at the forefront of the new social and economic policies and had often gained
access to national power via established liberal procedures. As a consequence, the Austrian
refugees were deeply concerned by the possibility that the new activist state would move
in a totalitarian direction and that a socially conscious democracy could hide dictatorial
potential. In their opinion, communism and nazism had triumphed in the wake of the
new economic state, and the anticommunist liberalism of the 1930s and 1940s could
bear the germs of a totalitarian development. The warning was also directed to the United
States, as the Austrian economists thought that New Deal statism had basically been an
un-American program, a derogatory critique that in the 1930s had mostly been expressed
by political invectives and that now acquired a new intellectual respectability.
Throughout the war years, plans and platforms regarding the postwar period stressed
that an enlarged system of social rights, in the language that had first been publicized by
the Weimar Constitution of 1919, would be one of the main purposes of the victorious
liberal democracies. During World War Two, as historian Peter Baldwin has said, “the
social contract [was] reformulated.” The pressure to increase social rights after the end of
the hostilities was a consequence of the deep sacrifices that had been asked of both the
soldiers and the population during wartime. In Great Britain, the political willingness to
share egalitarian, universalist social services emerged out of the common dangers of the
war. When the Beveridge Report was published at the end of 1942, right after El Alamein,
it represented a powerful message that was meant to uplift the public spirit at a difficult
time, and an important step in the propaganda competition between the enemy camps,
as it countered the project of a nazi “new united Europe” advanced by Goebbels and von
Ribbentrop in 1942-1943. The liberal promise of a new social security appeared in the
Atlantic Charter of 1941, in which it is defined as an essential component of human liberty,
in the Philadelphia Congress of the International Labor Office in 1944, and in various
268
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national plans, all of which culminated in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of
Human Rights in 1948. According to Gaston Rimlinger, an early student of comparative
welfare states, wide-ranging social rights were clearly the purpose of the liberties that were
recovered by all countries after the war. At the end of World War Two, the leadership of
the Bismarckian tradition of social security came to a close and was replaced by one that
was universalist and democratic.5
The watershed in the concept and the place of social rights during the war was also
at the root of the intense controversy that raged throughout the 1930s over whether the
social, interventionist state was compatible with political and civil liberty. In his analysis
of the economic and social policies of the 1930s and their “breaking with orthodoxy,”
Peter Gourevitch held that Germany was the most innovative, if dictatorial, of the recent
departures, and that the fascist powers appeared to be at the forefront of new state-centered modes of political practice. Hitler’s Volksstaat, the Italian Corporative State, and
the Russian Five-Year Plan all seemed to weather the depression much better than the
more timid, traditionalist liberal democracies.6 The widening divide and hostility between
democracies and fascist dictatorships intensified the heat of the controversy over whether
the activist state and public social rights were compatible with a liberal order, or whether
they were bound to carry the seeds of the kind of authoritarianism for which fascism and
communism acted as the standard-bearers. “The New Dealers, [Hayek] claimed, offered
fervent assurances that it was possible to increase the economic power of the State without infringing on personal liberty, but the totalitarian experience of Germany and the
Soviet Union illustrated the impossibility of maintaining that balance.” The difference of
opinion reached a “shameful” polarization when Hayek stressed that “it is necessary now
to state the unpalatable truth that it is Germany whose fate [the United States is] in some
danger of repeating,” and hinted at a New-Deal path towards German-like dictatorship
against which the United States was conducting a mortal struggle.7
The controversy over political liberties and democratic statism is revisited in this essay
from the standpoint of the 1930s, and it is easy to verify the fact that former President
of the United States Herbert Hoover shared both Hayek’s question and his conclusion
during that time because of the book he wrote in 1934 called The Challenge to Liberty,
which is both an anti-New Deal tract and an exercise in political thinking:
Not only in the United States but throughout the world, the whole philosophy of individual
liberty is under attack. In haste to bring under control the sweeping political and social forces
unleashed by the political and economic dislocations of the World War, by the tremendous advances in the production technology during the last quarter-century, by the failure to march with
a growing sense of justice, peoples and governments are blindly wounding, even destroying those
fundamental human liberties which have been the foundation and the inspiration of progress
since the Middle Ages.”
269
In the context of the great problems of twentieth-century modernity, “the issue of
human liberty” and its dangers had as much to do with the United States as it did with
other countries:
The great question before the American people is not whether these dislocations and abuses can
be mastered and these new and powerful forces organized and directed to human welfare, but
whether they can be organized by free men. We have to determine now, whether, under the pressures of the hour, we must cripple or abandon the heritage of liberty for some new philosophy
which must mark the passing of freedom.8
the expanding dictatorships of the s
As American historian Alonzo L. Hamby stated,
The Depression dealt a severe blow to democratic capitalism everywhere and relegated a traditional
liberal faith in free markets to the ash heap of history. Demanding state solutions to economic
catastrophe and stoking nationalistic emotions, it strengthened varieties of totalitarianism that
threatened to make liberal democracy an endangered species.
When Roosevelt, in accepting the re-nomination for the presidency of the United
States in June 1936, said that the New Deal was not “alone a war against want and
destitution and economic demoralization; it is a war for the survival of democracy,”9
he portrayed the international competition between contrasting political systems with
sinister accuracy.
The Soviet Union of the 1920s and 1930s was widely admired by European intellectuals, and visitors saw in it an industrious and willing factory that had eliminated, in
spite of utter poverty, the economic insecurity that plagued liberal polities during the
Depression. The five-year plans, the great public works, and the sense that Russia had
managed to avoid the worldwide Depression because it had given a job to every worker
and had engaged in an industrial revolution with unprecedented speed, all gave great
visibility to Soviet Russia and caused its appeal to be widespread until the great purges
of 1936-1937, and sometimes even afterwards. With the stabilization of the bolshevik
government and the onset of the Five-Year Plan in 1928, “the New Russia, which many
Americans had viewed as a site of social chaos, was slowly re-imagined as a great social
experiment.”10
In the 1930s, however, international attention centered even more on the fascist
expansion. By the end of the twenties, fascism stopped being just a healthy measure of
law and order imposed upon an unruly, politically immature Mediterranean people, as
it was understood at the time by many admiring international liberals. Instead, it turned
into a wave that invaded central-eastern Europe and the Balkans, threatening to convert
France in 1934 and reaching all the way to Japan and Latin America. As a result, Mussolini
appeared to be the hero of a rapidly growing authoritarian order, claiming to be the way
270
maurizio vaudagna
of the future. His pretense was convincingly vindicated when fascism installed itself in
the German heart of Europe in 1933, announced the building of a new racist, imperialist European order, launched massive plans of re-employment based on extensive public
works and social services, and claimed to be able to eliminate class conflict thanks to
authoritarian, harmonious social measures. Moderate, traditionally minded governments
in France and Great Britain were unable to advance an alternative model, in spite of the
important but brief episode of the Popular Front in France, which could compete with
or check the ascending dictatorships. Scandinavian countries and their social measures,
while well known, were not central enough in the international arena and the way they
were perceived to provide a solid alternative. Fascist regimes were expanding, they were
increasingly militaristic and aggressive, and they scored blatant international victories such
as the unchecked German destruction of the European order born out of the Versailles
Conference, while Italy successfully challenged Great Britain and the Society of Nations
with its invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Around the middle of the decade, American newspapers talked of Europe as a continent solidly bound toward general war.
In the 1930s, the systemic competition between fascism, communism, and democracy
was uneven. The authoritarian countries were on the ideological and political offensive,
albeit in different ways, and, until the outbreak of World War Two, international public
opinion felt that Europe could become a fascist ocean from Spain and Portugal to the
Russian border. As Italian historian Paolo Viola has emphasized, “Fascism expanded… and
showed a way that was to be defeated in World War Two, but that up until then came close
to prevailing and wiping out the nineteenth-century liberal-democratic tradition.”11
The principle of national liberalism that had triumphed over autocratic empires
in World War One and had been sanctioned at the Versailles Conference was increasingly eroded by the growth of a warmongering nationalism that had joined hands with
the dictatorial fuehrerprinzip rooted in large masses of people debased by the war. First
the liberal elites in Italy, which could boast of having unified the country and set the
industrial revolution in motion, were uprooted from power by the polarization which
went along with both the intervention of World War One and the unsatisfied demand
for a more comprehensive democratic order that came in the wake of it. Then the weak
democracies of the successor states were overturned, with the same thing happening in
the Balkans, while national socialism planted itself in the terrain of the Weimar Republic
only to overwhelm it with dramatic intensity after the Depression hit Germany. Vocal
fascist movements grew in such bulwarks of democratic and socialist tradition as France,
Scandinavia, and Great Britain, with Sir Oswald Mosley being perhaps the best known
of the leaders. Between 1933 and the end of the decade, the question of whether the
rules of democracy in liberal countries could be first used and then violated to install
dictatorial regimes was no abstraction whatsoever. In the meantime, American social
scientists were wondering whether liberal democracy would be able to manage a mass
271
society. Italian historian Daria Frezza has stressed that “Parallel to the debate over democracy and its manifestations, a strong interest in European authoritarian societies was
growing, which was considered to be one of the potential responses to the economic
but also cultural and social problems that had given birth to the devastating economic
depression.”12 As Walter Lippmann stated at the beginning of 1935, “Only a short time
ago the minds of men were dominated by the notion that their social order had collapsed
and that in Russia or in the borderlands of Central Europe they were witnessing the birth
of the civilization of the future.”13
the danger of despotism in depression america
“Politically the Old World has often been seen not as a model, but as a warning, a
sign of what could happen to the United States if it were somehow to stumble,” historian
Benjamin L. Alpers has said.14 The potential for a totalitarian, probably fascist, regime
to expand into newly liberal countries and adapt to local conditions is something that
affected the United States as well. This was accompanied, furthermore, by the notion
that democracy was in a deep crisis, as the British laborite leader Harold J. Laski, who
was very popular in the United States, wrote in 1935. The United States would certainly
be the last liberal bastion against the authoritarian wave, and most Americans hoped for
the same defense and counteroffensive of democracies that Lippmann had started to spot
in the middle of the decade. Yet, fearing that the fascist threat was actually worldwide,
political leaders, columnists, public intellectuals, and segments of the American public
started looking for signs that the emergence of a domestic despotism, more likely a sort
of national fascism than a socialist arrangement, was a distinct possibility.
Historian William E. Leuchtenburg has recalled that fascist features could be found
in the segregated society of the American South, in company towns where unionization
was vehemently forbidden, and in the radical chauvinism of the mayor of Jersey City,
Frank Hague, who denied freedom of speech in his city. Fascist organizations of a certain
weight, such as the Silver Shirts and the German-American Bund, came to light and
helped to foment a distinct increase in anti-Semitic sentiment well beyond their ranks.
Various cities witnessed ugly episodes of Jews being beaten by bands of hooligans and
thugs, and anti-Semitism was directed against Jewish administrators in the government,
which was promptly re-christened the “Jew Deal.”15
The fear of right-wing authoritarianism was augmented by the success of populist
movements headed by Senator Huey Long, “the Louisiana dictator,”16 the “radio priest”
Father Coughlin in Chicago (who later became an active member of the openly antiSemitic Christian Front which was active among Irish Catholics), and Francis Townsend
in California, who had designed a national old-age pension plan and had started a successful mobilization of the aged at the national level. Together they were able to reach
such nationwide notoriety that the chance for a third party to enter the 1936 presidential
272
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elections became likely. Their movements combined projects of economic redistribution,
social protection, and state interventionism with authoritarian political styles, charismatic
leadership, and emotional speech. All of it recalled the radical, “socialist” origins of the
fascist movements in Italy and Germany (for which some of the American populist
leaders expressed their sympathy), only to be promptly moderated when they decided to
reach an agreement with the old-school elite as a step towards securing national power.
American populism had been a distinctly democratic force in the past; yet there was still
the fear that in the 1930s, under the spell of the Depression and the international scene,
it might match social protection with an ugly, authoritarian turn.17
Novels about fantastic or realistic totalitarian orders were numerous in the thirties
and forties. In 1932, Aldous Huxley published Brave New World, while the last in the long
line was 1984 by George Orwell published in 1949. As the debate over fascist “germs”
was raging in the United States, two novels on America going dictatorial appeared within
a short span of time: one was Nathaniel West’s A Cool Million published in 1934, and
the other was It Can’t Happen Here by Nobel Prize winning author Harry Sinclair Lewis
in 1935. Both novels tell of a vernacular American fascism that seizes national government. In the former, the would-be dictator is a dishonest banker and former president
who comes to power thanks to a sort of grotesque violence and is somewhat based on
the character of former president Calvin Coolidge. In Sinclair Lewis’ novel, instead,
Roosevelt is defeated at the polls by a Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip. A demagogue
inspired by both Huey P. Long and William Randolph Hearst, he is supported by bands
of thugs called the “Minute Men” and hysterically denounces the degradation of the
country and the threat of Communism. Furthermore, the 1933 film Gabriel Over the
White House, based on a novel written by Thomas F. Tweed of the same title, portrayed
the White House conquered by a dictator.18
A brand of American fascism characterized by personalized demagoguery, vigilante
violence, radical patriotism, and mass manipulation, rooted in American right-wing extremism, was not the only kind that was envisioned. Left-liberal or socialist writers and
journalists, such as Paul Y. Anderson of The Nation, feared the possibility of authoritarian social control encouraged by big business, justified by the economic emergency, and
aimed at consolidating a cartelized control of the economy under a business leadership
in order to weather the crisis of capitalism and the tensions that emerged as a result.
When the business journal Barron’s asked for a “semi-dictator” and swift political action in February 1933, that fear seemed to materialize. More importantly, in the eyes of
third-period American communists, as well as western progressives and anti-monopolists,
it was confirmed by the so-called “self-government in industry” of the National Recovery
Administration of 1933-1934, whose codes of production control where dominated by
the larger corporations and trade associations. Sometimes the fear of both vigilante and
black-tie-style American fascism would merge. When the American Liberty League was
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created in the summer of 1934 by dissident democrats and prominent business interests,
an insistent rumor circulated that the League had a paramilitary side to it, because business leaders had enlisted cadres from the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign
Wars. The prominent names of the founders “became associated with fascism,” explained
Wall-Street historian Charles R. Geisst, “in the same way that Roosevelt became associated with socialism.”19
The international expansion of dictatorship and its potential penetration of the
United States made its mark on the American public conversation, and framed one of
the criteria by which domestic events could be assessed. The sense that Mussolini, who
had been quite popular in the United States until 1935, might have been right when he
proclaimed the “fascist millennium,” and the idea that totalitarianism could triumph and
sweep across the world, involving the fate of the United States as well, was very much on
the American agenda in the 1930s. In the early part of the decade, the word “dictator”
was not nearly as widely discredited as it would be later in the decade. “Even Eleanor
Roosevelt, more liberal than her husband,” as historian Jonathan Alter wrote recently,
“privately suggested that a ‘benevolent dictator’ might be what the country needed.”20
Others felt that the fascist tide could also wash over the United States, destroying the last
bulwark of liberal democracy. Herbert Hoover, for example, proclaimed that “liberalism is now under beleaguered attack even in the great countries of its origins.”21 Alfred
Landon, who had been a republican presidential candidate in 1936, published a letter in
the New York Times in April 1938 supporting the socialist leader Norman Thomas who
had been barred from speaking in public and had been expelled from Jersey City by the
fans of Mayor Frank Hague. He said that denying Thomas his freedom of speech “is not
a fancied threat at democracy. It is shocking evidence that even America is not isolated
from the rising tide of hate and intolerance. It only illustrates that the oppression and
injustice that is so much in evidence under the tyrants of Germany, Italy, and Russia is
contagious. It is time we recognize our danger.”22 Progressive Harvard historian Arthur
M. Schlesinger Sr. tried to imagine the future of American politics in the light of its
historic tides, unless “a form of totalitarian government should replace our democratic
system sometime in the future.”23
William E. Leuchtenburg stressed that Americans had exaggerated the potential risk
of a domestic despotism, and that inflating the danger was mostly a matter of political
expediency. Lippmann, on his part, was critical of many New Deal measures. Yet when
Roosevelt announced that the purpose of the New Deal program was to restore what
people had always cherished – home, livelihood and personal security – Lippmann still
insisted that one had to “take that declaration as a criterion by which to judge the purposes
of the New Deal and one can interpret the actions of the past year far more intelligibly
than by seeking to see in them a movement toward Communism or Fascism.”24 Still, the
nature of the international situation and its domestic aftershocks partially explained why
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republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg, in 1938, said that “we are dreadfully sensitive
these days to symbols-whether they be fasces or swastikas or hammers and cycles (sic)
or new blue eagles over the White House.”25 In the public conversation, reference to the
international competition between different socio-economic systems was frequent and
intense, not only in terms of political invectives but also as a fundamental conceptual
framework within which to interpret current events and their meaning. In addition to
the interest expressed by specialists, social scientists, and legislators in the European social
programs, reference to the different political orders on the international scene afforded
one of the contexts within which the public controversy over the New Deal, its reform
program, and its interventionist state took place. The international reference was certainly
inflated by the political conveniences of conservatives. Still, the discussion was not only
a polemical stereotype but was somehow made obligatory by the international situation
and the sense that democracy and peace were in a state of emergency.26
The impact of the dictatorial orders on American domestic discourse was all the more
relevant in the area of social security. Richard Tittmus, distinguished historian of the British
welfare state, thought that up until the thirties the social policies of liberal democracies
were mainly a reaction to domestic pressure as well as to that stemming from authoritarian models.27 In Europe, modern social protection and political liberty had often been at
odds. Bismarck’s “social monarchy” already had an authoritarian tinge to it that caused
some embarrassment for admiring British and French reformers on study visits to the
new Germany. In the United States John Commons had parted ways with Germanophile
progressives because of the statist and coercive features of Bismarckian social protection.
In spite of the social programs enacted by Lloyd George in Britain around 1910 and the
Scandinavian welfare states that grew between the 1880s and World War Two, especially
in the interwar years, social security has been more identified with and agitated by the
European dictatorships than the liberal democracies, as part of the widespread sense that
dictatorial orders were rapidly expanding in the world at the time. The early repressive
feature of the young bolshevik government in Russia, which claimed to be the champion
of the social conquests of the working class, and the new fascist regime in Italy with its
dictatorial turn in 1925-1926, in the name of a nationalist, social statism, all made the
connection between social policy and authoritarian orders increasingly troublesome for
the liberal elite. Socialists and nationalists before World War One, and communists and
fascists afterwards, all accused liberal democracy of being socially indifferent and criticized
liberalism as a nineteenth-century political order that was unable to address the social
and security issues that were central to the twentieth century. Mussolini vindicated his
social policy as being the most forward-looking in the world. His new fertility-oriented
institutions to protect families and mothers, along with his aim of increasing the number
of soldiers and augmenting the military might of the nation, were at the center of the selfimage of the regime. Swamp reclamation in Italy and highway construction in Germany
represented wide-ranging plans for public works in order to create jobs and send people
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(meaning men) back to work.28 “Two days after being appointed chancellor,” wrote
American historian Daniel Levine, “[Hitler] had promised to eliminate unemployment
within four years. He kept his promise, more or less, with a massive program of public
works, as the nazis had been proposing for years.”29 In the 1930s, the focus of the alleged
interdependence between authoritarianism and social protection moved to nazi Germany
where Hitler was building the racial welfare state, “a state in other words,” as historian
Mark Mazower clarified, “where police measures to repress ‘racial undesirables’ represented
the obverse of policies to safeguard the vigor of the Volksgemeinschaft.”30 Instead of the
“degenerate welfare,” the “welfare for the inferior” of the Weimar Republic, as the nazi
language went, “that accelerated the process of negative selection and the dysgenic effect
inherent in all individualistic welfare,” nazism created, with much fanfare, a racially “pure”
welfare for the strong: “social and welfare policies to benefit productive, racially valuable,
and politically reliable members of the national community cannot be separated from
either genocidal policies designed to segregate and ultimately annihilate those persons
regarded as racially inferior, socially deviant, and politically unreliable community aliens
or wars of conquest designed to create the political and economic foundations for their
racial reconstruction of civil society.”31 When the Beveridge Report appeared in 1942, nazi
propaganda analysts commented that it was “especially obvious proof that our enemies
are taking over national-socialistic ideas.”32
When Franklin Roosevelt embarked on his program of federally supported social
security, especially in 1935-1936, there were few canonized principles in the United States
regarding the management of an activist, liberal welfare state. When asked to explain the
enormous success of his book in the United States compared to Britain immediately after
World War Two, Hayek stressed that Britons had grown calmer on this matter because
of their long experience with social liberalism, while Americans were still passionate
and embattled because no interpretation of the relationship between the activist state
and political liberty had yet been canonized and generally accepted there. The lack of
established principles was cause for concern over the political effects of the New Deal,
especially when combined with other worrying developments: the dictators who were
rapidly expanding on the international scene and seemingly weathering the Depression
better than the leaders of liberal countries; the great divide between totalitarianism and
democracy, which became a cleavage in the domestic political competition of the 1930s;
the dictators seemingly acting as the standard bearers of social security; and the American
public being concerned about the possibility that authoritarian “germs” could creep into
the country from abroad.
As a consequence, it is not so surprising that the danger of an emerging dictatorship
evidenced by alleged similarities with socialist, communist, or fascist European social
policies was frequently and insistently objected to the New Deal attempt at building a
network of social security and national measures against the Depression. Observers of
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comparative fascist and New Deal social policies were not necessarily critical of their
alleged resemblances: Anne O’Hare McCormick, prominent foreign correspondent for
the New York Times in Europe who had been raised in the atmosphere of the Catholic
social doctrine, could enthusiastically support both Roosevelt and Mussolini (and even
justify Hitler to some extent) because she thought that they were both busy building
a policy of social protection which was badly needed to rescue the stability of western
society and stifle the threat of communism. She was not alone in her view and the issue
of parallels in the dictatorial and democratic social security has remained an embattled
historical terrain ever since.33
The focus of this essay is on the public attack that was waged against the government
by the anti-New Deal Right (following Rossiter’s definition)34: the Republican Party, the
anti-Roosevelt press, the Liberty League, the trade associations and business groups, and
laissez-faire populism in the central years of the reform legislation from 1934 to 1937.
They all objected to the so-called un-American “foreign isms,” communism, fascism, and
socialism, that the New Deal had supposedly infiltrated into the nation without warrant,
as well as the despotic consequences that would necessarily follow the attempt of the
government to build a social state.
The New Deal was therefore burdened of a comparative, constitutional constraint
that acted as one of the brakes, not the only one to be sure, but one that was significant
nonetheless, to the scope and breadth of its reforms. Unable to stop the New Deal
program and drastically rejected at the polls, the conservatives’ insistent critique tried
to substantiate the notion that the New Deal was foreign to American traditions and
therefore unconstitutional, and they found welcome support in the pronouncements of
the Supreme Court in 1934-1936. Those responsible for framing New Deal social bills
were besieged by issues of constitutionality, and accusations of un-Americanism and a
leaning toward foreign-inspired “regimentation” resonated throughout the public arena.
Government administrators therefore became more cautious in deciding the scope and
nature of governmental social policy, and in the later thirties, this line of criticism contributed to the standstill of New Deal reform. In a nutshell, the question is, how did
the “European pathology” of the interwar years, when many twentieth-century welfare
states were born, impact on the birth of the American social, activist state during the
New Deal?35
changing views of american conservatism
“Twentieth-Century American conservatism has been something of an orphan in
historical scholarship,”36 stated eminent liberal historian Alan Brinkley. In 1994, in the
distinguished American Historical Review, he asked the historical profession to direct
its scholarly focus to American conservatism, which had received little attention in the
postwar years and throughout the century in general. Studies of anti-New Deal conserva277
tives have played almost no role in the historical debate over the years of the Depression.
Except for individual biographies, almost no historian has felt the need to thoroughly
re-examine the anti-New Deal conservatives of the 1930s, and almost every one of them
has shared the opinion advanced by George H. Mayer, historian of the Republican Party,
who entitled his chapter on the party during the years of the Depression “The Long Years
of Frustration.”37 Because of the pro-Roosevelt historical interpretation of the 1930s that
has prevailed even after the end of the “New Deal Order,”38 anti-New Deal conservatives
have basically been portrayed in the terms advanced at the end of the fifties by Arthur
M. Schlesinger Jr. in his noted biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt: a fundamentally reactionary and opportunistic opposition, aimed at maintaining established privilege and
vested interests through instrumental patriotic appeals, insensitive to widespread suffering,
and deaf to the imperatives of modernity. As a consequence, until Dwight Eisenhower’s
“Modern Republicanism,” conservatives were unable to rethink their place in the overall
redefinition of American public space achieved by the New Deal. In the final analysis,
they were a sort of a relic of the past that merited little attention.
The state of history writing is now changing, not only because a less enthusiastic
interpretation of New Deal reform has diminished its impact on twentieth-century
America, but for a more substantial reason as well. When Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was
writing his biography at the end of the fifties, it appeared that Eisenhower’s moderate
conservatism was the future of republicans and conservatives in a polity that had been
defined by the New Deal and was dominated by liberals. In a famous line written in 1950,
Lionel Trilling said that conservatism was celebrating “its last rites” and that “there are
no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation.”39 The result was a moderate,
albeit vocal, anti-communist republicanism, aimed at containing public spending but
adapting itself to the social, activist state, and trying, as Clinton Rossiter has stressed
in his famous 1955 book on American conservatism, “to be a brake, but certainly not
to reverse, our movements toward welfare and regulation at home and toward aid and
alliance abroad.”40 In the end, conservative republicanism was a secondary actor in the
“New Deal Order.”
By now, it has become clear that Einsenhower-style republicanism has had a shorter,
more meager life than was expected at the peak of the liberal decades. In the presidential
elections of 1964, republican candidate Barry Goldwater was crushed in an annihilating
defeat. At the time, he was seen as somewhat of a grotesque paradox by historian Richard
Hofstadter, a sort of bizarre incident totally foreign to the mainstream of American public
life. However, Goldwater had managed to merge the legacy of the moderate, electoral
republicanism, characterized by an attitude of commonsensical conservatism, with a
revived radical, laissez-faire, traditionalist conservatism, and brought them both to the
forefront of the republican stage with a self-conscious intellectual heat that responded
to what Rossiter had defined as the “fundamentalist” American Right: a political actor
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that was both outside and against the New Deal-inspired public arena, rather than a part
of it. As he explained:
The contemporary Right, in my opinion, includes those who now admit to distaste the dominant political theory and practice of the twenty years between Hoover and Eisenhower, for New
Deal and Fair Deal, Roosevelt and Truman, service state and welfare state, reform at home and
adventure abroad… The modern Right is essentially…a many-sided yet integral reaction to the
New Deal, its leader and his political heirs…there is today in Congress and among the people an
“anti-Roosevelt coalition,” and it might be labeled for what it is: the American Right.41
The result was neoconservatism, which Ronald Reagan brought to the White House
in 1980, and has remained a fundamental actor in American life ever since.
It is unsurprising that in the wake of the conservative political revival a new scholarly interest in the history of conservatism has come to light. To understand present-day
America, as Alan Brinkley has stressed, “requires…a recognition of political traditions
on the right.” This is a fact that runs counter to the prevalent opinion among postwar
historians that the whole of American society had been characterized by the prevalence
of the values of “modern rationalism, free inquiry, scientific discoveries and above all
progress,” in the tradition of the Enlightenment and liberal democracy.42
However, new sympathetic narrators of the history of twentieth-century conservatism have always dated its revival to around 1950. Annihilated by the triumphs of the
New Deal, conservatism in the 1930s was allegedly an impulse with no intellectual coherence, lacking a common language, isolated in impotent, unheeded protest, disconnected
from the people and the needs of the day. For intellectual historian George A. Nash the
conservative revival began in 1944 with The Road to Serfdom, which was not born out of
the European drama of the interwar years by chance.43 Reconstructing the conservative
criticism of the New Deal in the 1930s in the context of the international situation also
means looking at whether the anti-New Deal conservatives of the Depression years can
be somehow reinstated in the American conservative tradition, and whether the issues
they focused on, especially that of the relationship between public liberty and the activist state, were relevant for conservatism as a whole or simply the result of the blind and
defeated defense of privilege and the old order.44
different kinds of conservatives in the s
Historians of conservatism usually have trouble defining it. They point to a frame
of mind that stresses continuity and slow change, that cherishes tradition and proven
institutions, is skeptical of human rationality, and is pessimistic about “human nature.”
According to historians Charles W. Dunn and J. David Woodard,
Industrialization following the Civil War brought a major change in American conservatism.
Conservatives embraced laissez-faire economics, believing that an economic system that operated
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free of government control was the only suitable alternative for America. In short conservatism
became the ideology of the nation’s business class, and its views were dominant during the 1920s.
But the Great Depression of the 1930s ended America’s romance with conservatism.”45
The 1930s turned out to be a watershed in the history of American conservatism.
Each of its streams met the emergence of the activist state with different reactions and
frames of mind. First of all, there is a distinction to be drawn between conservatives and
radical right-wing extremists, those who Rossiter has defined as “the authoritarians of
the Right.” While they may share some of the criticisms of modernity, they are however
divided by a different mental framework, the former cherishing continuity and slow pace,
the latter the hurried, drastic action typical of radicalism.
In the 1930s, “the authoritarians of the Right” were anti-Semitic more often than
not, sometimes attracted by direct action, and combined racism, radical individualism,
anti-intellectualism, and anti-statism. They were often sensitive to the sirens of European
fascism. William Dudley Pelley was the leader of the American nazi organization of
the Silver Shirts and his newspaper Liberation proclaimed Roosevelt as the “Kosher
President.” The Christian Nationalist Crusade, inspired by the third party candidate
of 1936, Gerald L.K. Smith, a former lieutenant of the populist “Louisiana dictator”
Huey Long, stressed that “Every Christian and Loyal American will fight the campaign
of Leftists, Communists, Jews and Internationalists to return the Roosevelt dynasty to
power.”46 Lawrence Dennis, a self-defined libertarian, was the intellectual leader of the
radical Right and published The Coming American Fascism in 1936 and The Dynamics of
War and Revolution in 1940, in which he announced “the inevitability and necessity of
government by an irresponsible elite.”47
The most influential conservative elite in the 1930s (together with the conservative
wing of the Democratic Party, which came to play a very important role in slowing down
reform after 1937) were the federal and local leaderships of the Republican Party and
the business community that had forged an alliance back in the 1870s. To understand
the nature and the development of republican conservatism in the 1930s we must take
into account the shock they faced as they moved from being the dominant party of
American public life to being the minority party of the opposition. If republicans, especially the so-called conservative “Old Guard” of the eastern seaboard states, had painted
the election of Warren G. Harding in 1920 as the “return to normalcy,” the 1930s, in
contrast, meant the “end of normalcy.” What was “normalcy” in the worldview of the
republicans who came to face the onset of the New Deal? Normalcy meant that, in the
first place, republicans were the party in power. They had controlled the White House and
Congress for almost two generations, a hold that had been lost only under exceptional
circumstances of division and internal strife. As they had grown accustomed to winning
elections, a rule the 1920s had triumphantly confirmed, the row of electoral defeats
from 1930 to 1936 took the party leadership by surprise. The blunders of republican
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strategists in forecasting the elections of 1934 and, even more, 1936, when on the eve
of the gravest electoral disaster in the party’s history they thought that a Landon victory was a distinct possibility, are significant of a republican “victory tale” that refused
to surrender to the new reality. Being the government party also meant having a public
style, a consensual, moderate way of relating to the press and the public. The party had
seen flamboyant personalities like Theodore Roosevelt rise to fame, but the typical Old
Guard eastern republicans, like Andrew Mellon, Charles Evans Hughes, Rufus Dawes,
and Ogden Mills, were solid, self-assured, no-nonsense friends of business, if they were
not businessmen themselves. Their worldview was that of the ones in charge, not the
polemical, adversarial style of the opposition, a job it appeared they were unaccustomed,
unable, and unfit to do in the 1930s.
The republican self-image was also based on the belief, and this was the second
shock of the end of “normalcy,” that their economic conservatism was naturally wise.
If in the 1920s Herbert Hoover came to represent a self-conscious, modernizing, business-friendly public vision, Calvin Coolidge was even more representative of the frame
of mind held by many republican leaders of the 1920s. “Silent Cal” believed in limited
government, economic self-reliance, a balanced budget, and anti-radicalism, famously
saying that, except for some marginal government activities, “most everything else will
take care of itself.”48 Coolidge, who had been raised in rural Vermont, was frugal and
honest (important factors after the scandals of the Harding administration). He managed
to impersonate a sort of conservative commonsense with little theoretical pretension or
sophistication and stressed a dry, virtuous, traditional middle-class lifestyle against the
various social revolutions in manners and morals being ignited by the first consumer
society. It was an image that he cultivated with the press and the radio with considerable
skill, and he became quite popular as a result. The 1936 republican candidate, Governor
Alf Landon, the “Kansas Coolidge,” tried to recreate this public style rather than embrace
the intellectual refinement of a Herbert Hoover.49
The unpretentious conservatism of Calvin Coolidge was however successful because
it was supported by the third “normalcy” that came abruptly to an end in the 1930s:
prosperity. By the 1920s, republicans had grown accustomed to having their rule, and
that of the business community, legitimized by the brilliant performance of the economy,
which allowed friendly voices to say that the American businessman was probably the most
important person in the world. As long as the country was growing, and consumer goods
became affordable for a larger set of buyers, even the close identification of the majority
leadership of the party with the business community was justified. A significant part of the
Democratic Party’s electoral success after 1930 was due to the fact that working and lower
class votes moved away from their former republican allegiance. Hoover’s proclamations
that prosperity was just around the corner were not only addressed to strengthen business
confidence but were also significant of the fact that until at least 1931 the republican
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leadership refused to think that the economic downturn was anything more than one of
the temporary fluctuations that had occurred in the twenties. Any measure of economic
recovery would surely bring fugitive voters back to the republican fold.50
The republican descent to minority status and their need to confront the New Deal
program and its popular leader reshuffled those traditional divisions – between the eastern
congressional Old Guard, the western and midwestern republicans who often spoke for
farming interests, and the western insurgents – that the party had successfully bridged in
the 1920s. Now, following a succession of electoral defeats and unprecedented government
action, one’s attitude towards the New Deal became what defined one’s particular brand
of conservatism. Some thought that government expansion and its interference in private
economic discretion put American principles in jeopardy, fostered authoritarianism and
collectivism, and required an all-out ideological attack. Others stressed that widespread
suffering and increasing poverty required a more compromising attitude that would
reaffirm constitutional principles, de-emphasize the confrontation with the New Deal,
and allow for some ground of social assistance. The former view became a brand of antiRoosevelt republicanism that considered the New Deal regulation of private economic
discretion, the so-called “business dictation,” to be a threat to the economic wealth and
the political liberties and rights of the country. Former president Herbert Hoover was
its intellectual and political leader, publicly asking the Republican Party to come to the
defense of his former administration and privately seeking to be nominated for the second
time as the republican presidential candidate in the elections of 1936.
By the end of 1934, the business community had abandoned the hopes raised by
Roosevelt’s rather conservative campaign of 1932, which stressed a balanced budget and
business self-government, and was revolting against what it understood to be government interference, excess regulation, and support of labor unions. The largest business
association, the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, had favored a business-led
cartelization of the economy and had severed ties with Herbert Hoover in 1932 because
of a disagreement over the so-called “business self-government.” Several members of the
national leadership, including President Henry I. Harriman, had voted for Roosevelt,
believing that the National Recovery Administration was very close to what business was
demanding. Disenchantment with the government grew in 1934-1935 when the national
leadership, which tried to avoid an all-out confrontation with the New Deal, was toppled
by the revolt of the national convention delegates, who turned down the oppositional
but somewhat milder resolutions advanced by the leaders and voted for a new national
direction. As a result, new resolutions were voted on that used strong language to object
that the New Deal was violating the Constitution, abandoning American principles, and
fostering a dictatorship. The same was true, with less internal turmoil, of the National
Association of Manufacturers, a smaller, purely industrial business association that was
identified with anti-labor right-wing conservatism and nicknamed “the shock troops of
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business.” The chemical colossus Dupont de Nemours, together with business leaders
from General Motors and the Morgan financial interests, was the initiator and the primary
financial source of the American Liberty League, the anti-Roosevelt association founded
in 1934 by conservative democrats such as former presidential candidates Al Smith and
John W. Davis and former leaders of the Democratic National Committee Newton Baker
and John J. Raskob. Republicans thought that their help was of the utmost relevance
to build the anti-New Deal coalition in 1936 and seriously considered nominating a
former democrat as the republican candidate (which actually happened in 1940 when
Wendell Willkie was nominated). In the presidential campaign of 1936, the American
Liberty League played a primary role and added a vocal, counterproductive note of
right-wing radicalism to the more centrist attitude adopted by the republican candidate
and the party majority. The same stereotypical, radical style was adopted by most of the
anti-Roosevelt press, which included some two-thirds of American newspapers and was
led by such dailies as the Los Angeles Times of the Chandler family, the Chicago Tribune
of the giant McCormick farm machinery company, the Chicago Daily News, owned by
Frank Knox, republican vice-presidential candidate in 1936, and the Hearst chain. They
all hosted very aggressive anti-New Deal columnists, notable among whom were the
“three Musketeers” and the “Four Knights of the Apocalypse” of anti-Roosevelt tirades
in print. Richard Hostadter stressed that the traditional ideological divide between liberals and conservatives was reversed during the New Deal and the “creedal passion” was,
unusually enough, on the conservative side, not on that of the reformers. As Hofstadter
has stressed
If one looks for utopianism in the 1930’s, for an exalted faith in the intangibles of morals and
character and for moral indignation of the kind that had been once chiefly the prerogative of the
reformers, one will find it more readily in the editorials of the great conservative newspapers than
in the literature of the New Deal.51
There were important contrasts between Hoover, who was definitely a political
leader with significant intellectual strength, even if he was perceived as a business voice
because of his long tenure at the Department of Commerce, and these radicalized, antiintellectual business, press, and political circles. Hoover indignantly turned down the
offer of membership by the American Liberty League and said that the Wall Street model
of liberty was no more convincing than that of Pennsylvania Avenue. Yet their attitude
towards the government defined their brand of conservatism: Hoover and the radicalizing
conservatives shared the fundamental belief that Roosevelt was violating the American
way and opening the door to foreign dictatorial threats. The radical anti-Roosevelt critique continuously used Hooverian language and his definition of opposition. His word
“regimentation,” meaning an increase in government dictation that caused American
society to become more despotic and to display worrying similarities with the European
authoritarian governments, came up repeatedly in the daily attacks of conservative report283
ers, businessmen, and politicians. While distant in style, and to some extent in program,
Hoover and the radical opposition of the Liberty League and the anti-Roosevelt press
still complemented one another: the former gave the latter an intellectual legitimacy
and the latter expounded Hoover’s criticism in a popularized and vulgarized style. For a
time, radical anti-New Deal-ism seemed to pay politically. The National Association of
Manufacturers, which had declined in the 1920s, was revived and its business membership was enlarged, as it was perceived to be a determined, radical opponent of the new
order. In electoral politics, radicalized republicans fared better on the whole than their
more mediating fellows, and republican delegations in Congress were both shrinking
and moving to the right. Still, the weakness of these anti-Roosevelt radicals showed in
their apparent indifference to the vast suffering and economic want that were plaguing
American life, in addition to the fact that they made no secret of being the spokesmen
for highly unpopular big business.
The more flexible section of the anti-New Deal conservative opposition consisted of
the majority of the Republican Party leadership that nominated Kansas Governor Alfred
M. Landon as the republican presidential candidate at the convention of June 1936. The
party had just gone through the disabling electoral defeats of 1932 and 1934, but had
however performed relatively well in a series of off-year elections in New York, Ohio,
Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. By 1935, the majority of the party leadership, including
the Senate Minority Leader Charles McNary and the shrinking republican delegation
in Congress, was worried about re-election and believed that a campaign based on the
negativistic opposition to socially beneficial government programs alone would be political suicide. As a former president, Herbert Hoover was the official leader of the party but
his attempt to regain the republican nomination on a radical anti-government platform
centering on the danger to American liberties and the infiltration of European despotisms
was unacceptable. Because the Republican Party was the opposition in Congress, the
leadership was quite explicit in criticizing the administration, though the appeal to the
defense of American liberties was toned down. There were frequent calls to “liberalize
the party,” along with a search for fresh faces, and the 1936 party platform turned out to
be, according to party historian George H. Mayer, “a capitulation to a new order.”52 It
implicitly accepted some of the new governmental responsibilities, especially in the area
of social relief, but promised more respect for the Constitution, and a balanced budget.
It denounced the bureaucratization, the corruption, the political use of public funds,
and the radical wave that ran the country, infiltrated government agencies, and characterized the populist appeals of the president. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Henry
P. Fletcher, president of the Republican National Committee and a staunch Hooverite,
stressed that the Republican Party would mend the social imbalances of the country but
would do so in observance of the constitutional procedure and with a “sound political,
economic, and financial method.”53 The republican leadership was aware of being seen as
the spokesman of big business, which most of public opinion considered responsible for
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the Depression, and of “property rights” against what were then called “human rights,”
especially the right to economic security. It knew that being identified with the business
world was its most serious political liability. In 1936, the notion held by “laissez-faire
conservatism” that American freedom was mainly that of private initiative and private
enterprise was extremely damaging electorally. Representative Hamilton Fish III, a leading Republican congressman, stressed on August 17, 1935 that the party platform must
“liberalize the Republican Party by reaffirming our faith in its early principle enunciated
by Abraham Lincoln that human rights are superior to property rights and that labor
is prior to capital…” and also proclaimed “economic justice within the confines of the
Constitution.”54 These principles, which were foreign to the majority of the party’s rank
and file, emphasized the attempt to compete with the administration regarding the
social issue on the part of the party leaders, who came to be contemptuously called the
“New Deal republicans.”
The more thoughtful sections of the business world and the press supported the
majority line. Because of his new face and the moderate platform that he shared with the
“middling conservatives” and the “practical liberals,” as they were nicknamed, Kansan
Alfred Landon quickly rose to the top of the Republican National Convention of 1936.
A small, independent oilman, with a significant but not grandiose personal fortune,
Landon had been the only republican that was re-elected governor in the adverse election of 1932 and was known for his careful handling of the state budget. “In looks
and action,” explained Mayer, “he was an honest small-town citizen with considerable
common sense.”55 He came from the midwest, the section of the country whose old republican alliance with the conservative northeast needed to be restored. His father had
been a local leader of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, and he was less identified
as a voice of big business. “What our Nation really needs today,” Landon stressed in the
campaign, using the popular metaphor of the good father and mother and appealing
to women voters, “is better house-keeping. Our women could show the way. They have
had more successful experience than any political spend-thrift in getting full abundance
out of living and in managing to put by something for a rainy day.”56 His sympathetic
biographer, who had the uneasy task of praising a presidential candidate who suffered
the second largest electoral defeat in American history, said that Landon represented the
beginning of the Republican Party’s adaptation to the “New Deal Order,” which would
fully emerge with Eisenhower’s “modern republicanism.” In the 1930s, the leadership of
the party’s majority continued to be pressured, politically and intellectually, from different sides, and its conduct was ambiguous and contradictory. Not only was it required to
contain the electorally damaging anti-Roosevelt radicals, but it also wanted to reinstate
the republican economic orthodoxy, and, furthermore, it needed to appear sensitive to
the hardships of many Americans. One example of such an effort is the widely popular
Social Security Act, which republicans in Congress tried to stop and resubmit to committee examination, utilizing the technicalities of congressional procedure. When this
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strategy failed and the bill came to the floor for the decisive vote, a large majority of
republicans voted in its favor.
The centrist effort of the republican leadership and the party candidate was however
frustrated by the prevailing climate that characterized the republican opposition. Many
local leaders, whatever their standing among the party factions, voiced a radical dislike
of “that man in the White House.” Their stance was shared by frustrated militants who
demanded and applauded strong words and shared the notion that American liberty
meant private economic discretion and the sanctity of private property. When at the
Republican Convention of 1936, much to the dismay of the majority of the party national
leaders fearing to be stampeded by the delegates, Hoover launched his indictment of the
administration as despotic and un-American, he was awarded with a roar of applause and
an aborted movement of “draft Hoover for president” appearing in the hall. An equal
ovation welcomed the savage invective voiced by Frank Knox, vice-presidential candidate
and the representative of the anti-New Deal radicals on the republican ticket, attacking
Roosevelt for crowding government agencies with communist agents in disguise. The
Liberty League was very much at the forefront of the campaign for its duration. The
rationale of the electoral and press competition, together with the political polarization, made the republican campaign sound more radical and negativistic than the party
leaders would have liked. In turn, the New Dealers stressed that their own program was
compassionate, patriotic, and constitutional, using strong words to paint republicans as
indifferent to suffering, and as the friends of vested interests, Tories, economic royalists,
and backward-looking reactionaries whose privileges and wealth they defended. As a result,
the electoral climate during the campaign of the moderate Landon reverberated with the
oppositional language and principles of the radical anti-Roosevelt wing of the party.
In examining the discourses of these various conservatives, this essay forms an attempt
to understand whether the denunciation of the authoritarian danger coming from Europe
was just another chapter of the eternal conservative red-baiting and red witch-hunting
that was used as a dike against reform, or whether the international situation made the
argument more serious, even if still mistaken, for at least some of its expounders. Amidst
a prevailing anti-democratic climate, did the fascist expansion, together with its claim
of being on the vanguard of social progress, revive the still-unresolved controversy over
whether the interventionist state, federal social benefits, and individual liberties could
coexist without mutual damage? And, in developing such an argument, did leading
anti-New Dealers of the thirties place themselves in a tradition of conservative thought
and leadership that, via Hayek and Goldwater, would merge with the neo-conservatives
of the 1980s? Finally, the question is whether the insistent objection of a growing unAmerican despotism based on the “foreign isms” acted as one of the concerns that limited
the political ground available to the administration, and to some extent conditioned the
New Deal legislation in terms of who would benefit from it and how much, which social
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duties would fall on the federal and the local governments, which bills would be sent to
Congress, and which ones would be left aside, even before 1937 and the decline of the
reform effort, when the New Deal still enjoyed a strong wind in its sails in 1935-1936.
roosvelt’s dictatorship
As Hoover concluded in The Challenge to Liberty in 1934,
We have in our lifetime seen the subjection of Liberty in one nation after another. It has been
defeated by the untruth that some form of dictation of government alone can overcome immediate difficulties and can assure entry into economic perfection. America must not and will not
succumb to that lure.57
The citation is a summary of the republican opposition’s anti-New Deal argument:
traditional anti-statism, a damaging interference of government in economic practice,
an international landscape witnessing the retreat of liberty throughout the world, and
the risk that the despotic wave might reach American shores.
If the big, overall question in the 1930s was whether democratic liberalism would
be able to govern the forces of modernity and the Depression, then there were two issues
whose relevance was shared by both conservatives and progressives and were the core
themes around which public controversy had come to center in the United States: firstly,
a “new economic order” was being created, based on a different relationship between
state, society, and economy; and secondly, the fact that the American situation was part
of a worldwide trend toward change that had common traits and responded to shared
demands of security and equity, even if in practice each country was to follow its own
tradition and preference. “We have undertaken a new order of things,” said Roosevelt, “yet
we progress towards it under the framework and in the spirit and intent of the American
Constitution.”58 Roosevelt made the point again in his State of the Union Address of
January 5, 1935, when he announced the Social Security Act. According to W.B. Francis
of the Los Angeles Times, it redefined the New Deal “in terms of social security and work
relief.” Under the title “Changes Throughout the World, Order of Day,” the journalist
reported on the crux of the “presidential message” in which Roosevelt stressed the global
nature of the need for change:
In every nation economic problems, long in the making, have brought crisis of many kinds for
which the masters of old practice and theory were unprepared. In most nations social justice, no
longer a distant ideal, has become a definite goal, and ancient governments are beginning to heed
the call. Thus the American people do not stand alone in the world in their desire for change.59
However, references to the larger world could bear political risks, especially because
the dictators were perceived as being at the forefront of social and economic innovation.
What historian Benjamin Alpers has called the “dictatorial moment in American political
culture,” a time when citing Mussolini or even Stalin in the United States elicited little
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negative response, ended with Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and the sinister turn of
his rule. As a result, Roosevelt rushed to draw a line between liberal and dictatorial concerns for social protection. As reported by the aforementioned journalist, the president
called attention to
the world-wide demand for ‘a new economic order’…with the assertion that the American people,
in company with other nations, desire basic changes. Mr. Roosevelt promised that the new system
will be developed ‘through tested liberal traditions, through processes which will take all of the
deep essentials of the republican form of representative government first given to a troubled world
by the United States.’60
Roosevelt also underlined that the search for equity and economic security was
worldwide and blurred the distinction between democratic and dictatorial countries.
Moreover, he argued that social and security concerns could not just be ascribed to the
political and ideal patrimony of the liberal democracies, for a number of reasons. Not
only were the dictatorships vocal in claiming their social commitment, they also applied
drastic remedies to cure the Depression, and stressed that the authoritarian concentration
of power was a precondition for constructing socio-economic security within the complex conditions of modern life. Roosevelt vindicated the liberal-democratic path towards
to the “new order.” Though he saw it as the “American Way” (or at any rate that of the
English-speaking world), he thought that security needs should also be addressed by other
political orders. On the other hand, the inevitability of the “new order” allowed moderate
republican leaders to distance themselves from the discredited Hooverite precedent. To
this effect, the republican presidential candidate Alf Landon said:
The choice ahead of the American people is not whether to keep on with the mistakes of the
so-called New Deal or return to the mistakes of the old order. The old order belongs to the past
but sound American principles persist. The hands of the clock of political destiny look forward,
not backward.61
Even though republicans and democrats shared the notion of a worldwide desire
for change, they parted ways because many of the former mainly saw “dictatorship,”
“regimentation,” and “coercion” in Roosevelt’s “new order.” John Seeberg, Jr., former
Attorney General in Pennsylvania, called it “a virtual dictatorship with governmental
bureaucratic regimentation and control of industry and farming…”62 Henry P. Fletcher,
president of the Republican National Committee, gave the Los Angeles Times a long
interview in January 1935 and stressed that the Republican Party would solve the difficult situation of the country,
but it will do so consistent with the processes of representative government, without resort to the
arbitrary and uncontrolled methods, of a dictatorship…The Republican Party is consecrated by
the task of driving from the seats of authority those who would use temporary power, rising from
economic depression, to change our form of government from a democracy to a dictatorship.”63
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The emergency caused by the Depression provided the avenue through which despotic developments might infiltrate America. The emergency had been the cradle of the
communist victory in 1917 in defeated, prostrated Russia, of Mussolini’s rise to power
in 1922 in embattled Italy, and of Hitler’s becoming Chancellor in 1933 in unemployment-ridden, radicalized Germany. In the minds of anti-New Deal conservatives, the
American economic emergency, which had been vindicated as the legal foundation for
the exceptional powers delegated to the executive as though in wartime, was the cradle of
despotism, of concentrated, centralized power that claimed to be justified by the urgent
need to rescue the nation and the people. The distinguished progressive sociologist Robert
A. Brady observed at the time that “It is practically certain that if a coup d’état ever comes
in America from the right it will be advertised as a defense of democratic freedoms and a
blow at Fascism.”64 The interaction between emergency, reform, and rescuing the people
and the nation had the potential to feed despotism and dictation.
The interdependence between emergency powers and authoritarianism was not
only the interpretation of American conservatives. Mussolini, for one, thought that the
wide-ranging delegation of power in the New Deal emergency legislation, together with
the economic cartels in the National Industrial Recovery Administration, made the
“Roosevelt experiment” a sort of primitive, dawning fascism that had eventually come
to realize that the monolithic centralization of power was a precondition for successfully
managing twentieth-century society. The parallel between Roosevelt and Mussolini was far
from unusual and was reiterated by non-partisan witnesses. Back from the United States
in 1936, Carl Jung told reporters: “Make no mistake, [Roosevelt] has the most amazing
power complex, the Mussolini substance, the stuff of a dictator absolutely.”65 The Los
Angeles Times substantiated his indictment of the “communist” New Deal, reporting
that in the Soviet Union many thought of the merging of centralized powers and socioeconomic policies as a step toward a quasi-Soviet regime. “I have no inclination to be a
dictator; I have none of the qualifications which would make me a successful dictator,”66
said Roosevelt, as a new wave of attacks blaming the importation of foreign dictatorship marked the political season of the Supreme Court reform bill and the government
reorganization plan in 1937-1938. The president spent a significant amount of time
denying accusations that he was building up an excess of centralized power, a concern
that, together with that of formulating legislation which would pass the scrutiny of the
Supreme Court, could be detected throughout the New Deal years.
Republican accusations reflected the ongoing changes in the notions of political
leadership and the presidential office, which were put to political use, in a confusing
way. Leading social scientists of the 1930s were redesigning the nature of democratic
leadership, certifying the worldwide trend towards a stronger executive, and redrawing
the boundaries with the dictators. Sociologists William F. Whyte and Ronald Lippitt
compared the different types of political leaders: authoritarian, democratic laissez-faire,
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etc., and, not surprisingly, they concluded that the democratic was the most efficient.
It had a low level of social control compared to the authoritarian, and social groups were
therefore left ample ground for self-creativity, while at the same time it could be deeply
affected by the personality of a dynamic leader.67
What would a Rooseveltian dictatorship involve? Hamilton Fish III summarized
the indictment:
I hold President Roosevelt responsible for attempting to set up a new social and economic order based on a crushing bureaucracy, regimentation, collectivism and State Socialism and for
appointing numerous radicals, Socialists and near-Communists to important positions in the
government service who have done more to cause labor unrest, numerous and unprecedented
strikes and to promote more class hatred in two years than any other administration since the
birth of the Republic.68
The Rooseveltian dictatorship was predominantly one with a “vast centralization of
power in the Executive,”69 which allegedly entailed three authoritarian consequences: the
erosion of the individual autonomy that was the foundation of democratic citizenship; the
deviation of the pluralist circulation of ideas by which political preferences were framed;
and finally, foremost in the conservative criticism, “business dictation” as “economic
regimentation” in violation of individual economic liberty.
On the autonomy of the individual, republicans resumed the nineteenth-century
liberal objection against the “paternalism” of a protective government that guaranteed the
security but created a “helpless dependence upon Washington” and mortified “traditional
self-reliance.” Fletcher denounced “the paternalistic and bureaucratic form of government which seems popular in some foreign countries today and which is being rushed
on the American people by an experimental administration often more socialistic than
American.”70 The protective state required a broad delegation of duties and tasks to a
dormant, vast, wasteful, and irresponsible “tax-eating bureaucracy,”71 which worshipped
paperwork and developed an institutional interest of its own, different from economic and
democratic efficiency. A monstrous dissemination of government bureaus were multiplying
in the New Deal agencies and were coercing the citizen and the businessman into subservience to the organizational state. “The American conservative,” stressed Rossiter, “remains
fundamentally anti-statist in mood and philosophy,” and is openly against the “swelling
of government” in terms of both duties and number of government employees. “The
swelling of government in America today,” said conservative publicist Clarence Manion,
“merely evidences the moral sickness of the people under it. Big government is for little
people. The better the people, the less necessity there is for government.”72 However, in
the 1930s, what Rossiter has called “laissez-faire conservatism” was political suicide, as
it epitomized an attitude of social indifference in the midst of unemployment and want.
This is the reason why in his electoral campaign of 1936 Landon contradicted a central
principle of the Grand Old Party tradition when he said that “history and experience
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alike teach us that ‘government is protection’. When it ceases to protect, it ceases to be
government.”73
According to anti-New Deal conservatives, the “Roosevelt dictatorship” was deviating in two major ways from the proper procedure by which political preferences were
framed. In the first place, there was the “Santa Claus principle,” a nickname publicized
by William Allen White, the distinguished publicist from Kansas who was very close to
the republican candidate of 1936. This terminology referred to the political use of public
funds to enlarge the consensus to the New Deal with rich, corrupting donations to political
allies and local democratic machines. The second source of democratic distortion, according to Roosevelt’s conservative opponents, was the increase in government propaganda
constantly hammering public opinion and suggesting that criticism of the government
was unpatriotic during a time of emergency such as war and was to be moderated and
suspended. European dictatorial examples were continuously referred to in terms of both
the climbing political corruption in regimes where large public funds were mobilized,
and the despotic management of propaganda in totalitarian orders.
Republicans avoided searching more deeply for the root causes of the chain of electoral
defeats they suffered between 1932 and 1938. In 1932, they thought the reason was a
temporary shift of public favor away from the Grand Old Party because of the “Hoover
Depression.” When no electoral comeback appeared in 1934, they started blaming the
“relief vote” engendered by the wide distribution of public money. Fletcher, for example,
denounced “a sovietized precept, administered by Tammany Hall methods, to assure
the perpetuation of political power.”74 The great appropriations of the Works Progress
Administration and its director, Harry Hopkins, were indicted as a source of political
corruption and the purchase of votes. Conservatives were inflating the issue out of proportion; however, historians have found that the administration addressed relief and public
works funds for states and cities in such a way as to prize supporters, as for example with
the powerful, corrupt democratic machine in Chicago, or to punish those who opposed
it. The latter was the case in Huey Long’s Louisiana where the government largesse was
first measured in drops, whereas the so-called “Second Louisiana Purchase” flooded the
state and his new administrators with government money after Kingfish was assassinated.
Similarly, public funds helped uncertain or independent political organizations to make
up their minds and join the ranks of the New Deal supporters, or they contributed to
republican progressive organizations, favorably inclined toward the administration such
as that led by Senator Hiram Johnson in California.
The New Deal effected a communicative revolution in government which had already started in the radio politics of the 1920s but was multiplied and systematized in
the Depression decade. Press bureaus were installed in most administrations and agencies, and a policy of news management was inaugurated that quietly supported friendly
newspapers and tried to keep opponents in check. Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” on the
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radio formulated a direct relationship between the chief executive and public opinion;
large publicity campaigns were launched to stimulate support for the recovery program,
which culminated in the “Blue Eagle ballyhoo,” as republicans would denounce it, to
encourage businesses to sign the voluntary codes of production of the National Industrial
Recovery Administration; the economic emergency was repeatedly cited to appeal to a
united country and to moderate the heat of political dispute. Personally, Roosevelt was
first-rate when it came to framing the public image of government and was portrayed
by Los Angeles Times reporter Mark Sullivan as a “Master of Modern Political Art” …
“with personality apt and diligent at using press, radio; he is administration’s mightiest
publicity machine.”75 Roosevelt’s communicative abilities were of great relevance in the
“nationalization of the masses,” to use a term suggested by George Mosse,76 that aimed
to reconcile the vast crowds of American public life to the spirit of democratic cohesion
in times of stress and estrangement via the means of symbolic politics. Something the
European dictators were doing as well, though under an illiberal polity. It was a role
republicans did not appreciate. Their presidential candidate of 1936 denounced the alleged abuses of the administration, which would “take the undemocratic attitude that all
criticism is abuse and all who do not agree have base motives and selfish purposes. They
seem to forget that true democracy thrives on honest criticism.”77
The relationship between propaganda and democracy was central to the American
social sciences in the 1930s and to their strong interest in European dictatorial orders.
Parallel to the research on leadership, the issue was where the line was to be drawn between
persuasive strategies in a democratic context, which had grown to be central to political communication, and dictatorial propaganda, especially vis-à-vis the new emotional,
charismatic styles of European leaders. The relationship between propaganda and public
education was often identified with the analysis of rational and irrational components of
the public discourse. Nazi propaganda showed the inroad of a type of irrationalism on
the political scene that responded to symbolic needs. Hitler’s public rendering amounted
to a politics of emotionalism based on social and psychological insecurities that seemed
to debase the democratic confidence in a mature, self-aware individual citizen in favor
of uncertain, deprived, and fluctuating masses. The increase in the personal, charismatic
dimensions of Roosevelt’s leadership showed that the issue had also to do with the United
States where, according to many students, the strategies of commercial persuasion later
adopted in the political realm had originated. The parallel with the dictators seemed to
give Landon’s denunciation more substance: “The hysterical tone of government must
be eliminated. Our high officials must think with their minds rather than with their
emotions.”78
In the 1930s, American progressive social scientists began to postulate that the
differences between dictatorial and liberal political propaganda were to be identified on
two terrains. Firstly, democratic public discourse placed itself on the borderline between
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persuasive and educational language and utilized a warm emotional level of speech that
avoided the extreme intensity of the dictators’ addresses and the prophetic or militaristic
style of fascist public rending. In the second place, democratic propaganda showed a persistent confidence in the plurality of persuasive messages and shunned the authoritarian
temptation to build, in Goebbels’ words, “one unified public opinion.” In light of the
European examples and their notoriety in the United States, republican leaders could
not help but be concerned by the First New Deal’s appeals to patriotic conformity and
discipline in an emergency, or to the populist criticism of the Second New Deal against
the self-centered, privileged foes of the common recovery effort. In turn, republican
campaigners increased the emotional heat of their invectives to the point of inspiring
Roosevelt, in the final campaign speech at Madison Square Gardens in New York, to
make the famous comment that businessmen and conservatives are “unanimous in their
hatred for me-and I welcome their hatred.”79 In turn, Roosevelt also used the polemical
interaction between domestic foes and foreign authoritarianism. One of the reasons he
was particularly successful on the radio, historian Douglas B. Craig has stressed, was “by
identifying a small group such as ‘chiselers’ or the European dictators against whom he
and his listeners had to struggle.”80
Finally, and very importantly, republicans were dismayed and angered by another
“normalcy” that was coming to an end: the national press almost unanimously expounding the conservative common sense of the republican core. Their hold over the press was
certainly not completely over in the 1930s, as we can see in 1936 when the New Deal was
at the peak of its popularity and two thirds of the newspapers were openly anti-Roosevelt,
and often viciously so. Yet some of the papers had moved to the other side, and the government had found a way of addressing the public independently. Furthermore, the new
political voice of the radio was much more favorably inclined towards the administration
than the press was. Instead of a consensual environment for moderately conservative
ideas, political communication with the public at large had become a battleground, and
republicans reacted angrily to what one might call their loss of “cultural hegemony.”
With respect to the communicational policy of the government, there was a deeper
concern among republicans: the fear that society as a whole would be characterized by
unstable, manipulated masses, as the huge, adoring crowds mobilized by the charismatic
politics of the European dictators seemed to show, instead of by a liberal citizenry. “Crowds
are old,” said Adams, “but the huge modern masses are new….The masses now demand.
Can they command, and govern? Or will they have to be governed despotically, as a dozen
countries of Europe have asserted; and are we all to loose our fundamental liberties of
action, speech, and press, in an effort by dictators to bind down the waves that the mass
storms raise?” At the heart of the matter was the fear that Mussolini might have been
right when he claimed that the nineteenth century had been characterized by liberalism
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and democracy, while the mass foundation of modern society would make the twentieth
century one of authoritarianism.
The concern for the “confused voices of the masses” also pointed to the potential
despotism emerging from the new media as manipulators of the public mind, which
European dictators had skillfully utilized. So Adams continued:
These human masses have become since the war subject to manipulation on a grand scale by
small groups seizing control of news reel and radio-forces like winds over the ocean which can in
a moment turn placid calm into tumultuous waves…Liberals everywhere will have to keep up a
stiff fight in the next few years to prevent these wholesale means of communication from falling
more and more into the hands of dictatorial leaders on the Right or the Left.81
The republican, conservative critique of the administration was marked with lamentations over the manipulative, despotic, one-sided use of the media that carried the risk
of walking in the footsteps of the European dictators. “Under the present law the radio
is serf of the administration,”82 said the Los Angeles Times. In the republican critique,
the alleged special favor accorded to the president by the networks was part of his “personal government” and was vocally protested against by Chairman Fletcher. An attitude
of “vituperative impatience,” Hoover added “… has already developed a vast ramifying
propaganda subtly designed to control thought and opinion. The constant use of the
radio, the platform, and the press, by device of exposition, news, and attack with one
point of view, becomes a powerful force in transforming the nation’s mentality and in
destroying its independent judgment.”83
In an attempt to carve a larger place in the national news media for themselves, the
young radio networks had repeatedly offered broadcasting time to the republican presidents of the 1920s with the promise of a more intimate vocal contact with the public.
The notion of the president potentially sitting “by the fireside” in each American living
room via a radio broadcast was already circulating in the 1920s, before Roosevelt adopted
it for his radio addresses. At the end of 1929, William Paly of CBS had invited Hoover
to address the public because “radio’s intimate relationship with the home provides the
President an opportunity to feel the Nation’s pulse.”84
As he examined American conservatism between Roosevelt and Eisenhower, Rossiter
remarked that “The contemporary Right remains remarkably steadfast in its devotion to
laissez-faire conservatism.”85 For most republicans and conservatives of the 1930s, liberty was first and foremost associated with property and individual contract: it was the
government’s job to protect both, while not interfering with the conduct of economic life.
Since property, albeit in modern terms, was still considered the foundation of independent
citizenship, this definition of liberty still lent itself to the criticism of being aimed at protecting the “haves.” Out of this frame of mind came one of the most cherished slogans of
the anti-Roosevelt conservatives of the 1930s: “business dictation,” to substantiate the cry
of a “Roosevelt dictatorship,” that is, government interference in business and the market
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via regulation and management of public resources for both the national interest and
social security. That is what Hoover meant when he spoke of “Economic Regimentation,”
meaning that the new economic powers had been delegated to the administration, which
had framed a vast “dictation” amounting to “Regimented Industry and Commerce,
Regimented Agriculture, Government in Competitive Business, Managed Currency
and Credit, and Managed Foreign Trade.” What conservative republicans saw as unjust
economic powers basically amounted to the dumping of the whole New Deal program:
regulation of currency and the stock exchange; expansion of taxes and levies; creation
of public companies which produced and sold goods and services in competition with
private business, especially the Tennessee Valley Authority; price manipulation; regulation of commercial and economic procedures; cartel-style fixing of production quotas in
the National Recovery Administration; regulation of the labor market and legislation of
collective bargaining as in the Wagner Act; abrogating the antitrust legislation; and manipulating tariffs and rules of international trade.86 Only emergency relief was spared by
Hoover’s blank damnation, which amounted to saying that it was the very principle of the
activist government that produced regimentation and despotism in business. As Rossiter
explained, “The American conservative remains fundamentally anti-statist in mood and
philosophy. He believes that the real danger to liberty lies in abuse of political authority;
that regulation, even when plainly necessary, has a deadening effect on the initiative and
energy of free men.” For the conservative, the government, “in contrast to that of business
enterprise,” is inevitably bound to be “incompetent, inadequate and unintelligent;” …
“He therefore hopes that government will be consigned to the hands of men who have
made a success in business.”87 Alfred Landon also belonged to the same realm of laissezfaire conservatism, in spite of the differences between the two most prominent republican
leaders. The presidential candidate defined Keynesianism as “an amazing theory,” and
attacked “government dictation” in the Los Angeles electoral address of October 21,
1936. “The administration,” he said, “was basically hostile to the business community;”
it resented any criticism that recalled what American initiative and free enterprise had
done for the country. New Deal administrators
tried to tell our farmers how much they could plant and how much they could not plant. They
tried to tell our businessmen how much they could produce and under what conditions they
could run their business; they tried to tell labor who could and who could not represent them in
negotiations with their employers. Was this an undermining of our liberties? I think so.
As he referred to the voluntary codes of the NRA and implicitly saluted the cooperative initiatives of the former Hoover administration, Landon continued, “Former attempts
at voluntary cooperation between government and business have been quickly dumped and
the government has unleashed its legal and administrative powers to bring in line those
businessmen who had refused ‘to be led like sheep’.”88 Conservatives clung to the old idea
of “ordered liberty” associated with property and contract that went back to revolutionary
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times. Moreover, they had matured and operated at a time when, “between about 1884
and 1934 the U.S. Supreme Court broadened the concept of property, broadened the
concept of liberty in such a way that ‘property’ could be folded into it, and then applied
what amounted to extraconstitutional guarantees of both,” as historian Michael Kammen
explained.89 Discretion in the possession, use, and enjoyment of property and its income
against “government interference” and regulation of labor relations peaked in 1923 when,
in Adkins vs. Children’s Hospital, the Supreme Court sentenced that a minimum wage
law for women was unconstitutional. “Liberty and property became the dominant slogan
for a distinctive era in the history of American enterprise.”90
The conservative critique sometimes showed a mirror-like contrast with what the
majority of public opinion at the time and most historians afterwards ascribed to the
merit of the New Deal. For example, republican and business leaders as well as leading
columnists reiterated the notion that among the sources that led despotism to creep into
America, there was the kind of governmental experimentalism that has frequently been
identified as the anti-ideological, pragmatic virtue of the New Deal. As one republican
economic conservative said, putting in place unprecedented, coercive socio-economic
experiments, which forced business confidence down, was in itself an attack on American
democracy and was responsible for the poor recovery. Landon’s campaign had framed
a series of rhetorical questions addressed to the president, whose ritual response was
always: “no one can be sure.” It was a campaign stratagem to try and get the president to
respond at a time when Roosevelt felt strong enough to be able to avoid openly crossing
fire with his republican opponent. Still, his response was symptomatic of the sense of
uncertainty and lack of direction in government policy. Against the unproven experiments
of the administration, Landon insisted that it was the traditional principles of American
economic activity that would lift business confidence and allow the recovery to succeed
at last. As Landon maintained, the correct traditional economic practices “guarantee the
perpetuity of our American system of democracy and under that guarantee will come a
flood tide of recovery.”91
Unlike in Europe, there was no statist wing in American conservatism, so when
it came to the New Deal, its members were confronted by a new situation with which
they were basically unfamiliar and that they did not like at all. It had to do with the
emergence of what has been called the “mixed system” of mass democracy, characterized
by the merging of state and market, which has been a central feature of industrialized
countries in the twentieth century. Precedents can be found in Theodore Roosevelt’s
and Woodrow Wilson’s progressive programs as well as in the economic management
during World War One. To an extent, even the associative cooperation of the republican
1920s can be cited as a forerunner. Yet it was up to the New Deal to systematize mass
politics in America, to establish the guidelines of the American system of social security,
to define the government tools in order to try and control the economic cycle, and to
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restructure the powers of the executive vis-à-vis the legislative and the judiciary. It was an
achievement of primary importance. It opened uncharted terrain with an experimental
attitude that took the opposition by surprise and appeared to them to be a risky jump
into the unknown. In any case, the direction of change in the society of the welfare state
ran counter to American conservative and republican traditions, and they never really
made peace with it. In the 1950s, “modern republicanism” seemed to triumph and to
adapt itself to the “New Deal Order.” In a way, Alfred Landon, who can be seen as a
forerunner of the republicanism of the 1950s, was vindicated when he stressed that, as
far as the government program was concerned, “the good wheat must be separated from
the great stack of New Deal chaff.”92 The fact that Landon, an agrarian conservative from
the rural midwest, used a farm metaphor to make his point reveals that certain 1930s
republicans had adapted to Roosevelt’s predominance. In 1955, Rossiter said that the
change that had occurred among conservatives of the 1950s compared to their brethren
in the Depression years was a marginal reconciliation with the new government duties
and the need for public support in a situation of utter deprivation. Yet, in spite of their
enthusiasm for winning back the White House and living through a “pacified” decade,
conservatives of the 1950s were still operating in the context of a public agenda that had
basically been defined by the democratic liberal tradition inaugurated by the New Deal in
the 1930s. The concern of many republicans, from Landon to Eisenhower, to “liberalize
the party” and share in the all-inclusive “liberal” principle of American politics, signified
their inferior standing. The “middling conservatives” who accepted the “mixed system”
and preached their own brand of liberalism made of “better housekeeping” were not the
ones who framed the neo-conservative mind that would debase the Eisenhower understanding of republicanism and American conservatism. Those responsible were, rather,
characters like Strom Thurmond and Barry Goldwater, who revived the old laissez-faire
conservatism and looked for precedents more in the anti-Roosevelt ideologue Herbert
Hoover than in the centrist Alfred Landon. In 1964, as Hoover’s biographer Joan Hoff
Wilson recounted, “Senator Barry Goldwater became the first Republican ideologue to
be nominated since Hoover in 1928.”93
The intellectual and political sources of the “Roosevelt dictatorship” critique that
was leveled against the New Deal-inspired American welfare state were many. First of all,
conservative criticism refreshed the old, tired stereotypes of red-baiting. This was born
together with a “cold war” that, in this respect, began in 1917 with the Russian revolution,
when radical conservatives tried to attach the derogatory labels of “un-American” and
“communist” to whatever step of the government might threaten the interests or principles
that were so dear to republicans and conservatives. Secondly, the American “mixed system,”
with its power shifts in favor of the federal government and the executive, took place at a
time when dictatorial regimes were expanding in Europe. Since American conservatives
had no novel intellectual tools with which to analyze the new democracy of mass society,
they looked abroad to the troubling international scene and thought that the common
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issues and needs that were on the agenda of all industrialized countries independently
of their different political orders would end up with the same political outcomes. The
international scene gave republicans reasons for both opportunistic tirades and genuine
concern. As conservative historian James Truslow Adams has illustrated,
We try experiments gambling on the future, but there must be few in any country who have
genuine confidence, as before the war, that the world or their own nation, is certainly passing in
any near future into a phase in which peace and happiness and the welfare of the individual will
be more assured than the old. There is scarcely an individual who feels reasonable security for the
material basis of his private life.94
The result, Adams added, was fear:
The predominant feeling is, I think, fear. It is fear of the complete disintegration of society, fear of
economic debacle, fear of the insufficiency of the old forms which have so easily and so generally
allowed dictators to slip into power. We have seen whole nations, like children in the dark, clutch
at the hand which promises to protect them.95
The path to be taken was uncertain and, therefore, threatening, which was true of
the government as well, even if there were intellectual and legislative precedents and the
New Deal produced an enormous amount of thought about the new order. The searching and the enacting took place at the same time and neither the government nor the
opposition could count on a canonized, generally shared set of principles. In the 1930s,
in spite of the precedent of Lloyd George social liberalism in Britain, there was no solidified, shared understanding of what a liberal welfare state was supposed to be. The
controversy over unemployment insurance had been a fundamental cause of the decline
and fall of the Weimar Republic; the demands of Italian workers in the “red years” of
1919-1920 seemed to have nourished a contrasting polarity that had moved the country
into the fascist dictatorship. The framing of the liberal social policy in the United States
took place amidst the offensive of European dictatorships that claimed to be the avenues
towards building social security, and occupied the center of the international stage with
what appeared to be bold political and social innovations. American communists, then
at the peak of their fortunes, together with socialists and African-American associations,
supported a social security policy that was even bolder than that of the administration.
In 1934, for example, they wanted Congress to approve the Lundeen Bill, named after
Minnesota Congressman Ernest Lundeen, which provided for an unemployment insurance
that did not discriminate against race, gender, or the type of work, so as to cover the great
majority of the adult population.96 Conservatives interpreted the contrast between the
social policy of the New Deal and these more comprehensive projects of social protection
not as evidence that the New Deal could be a barrier against radicalism, as the president
was telling the American public, but as proof that the administration was trailing on the
coattails of a despotic radicalism to which it was bound to be increasingly subservient.
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American social scientists of the 1930s mounted a major, often pessimistic, effort in
order to understand the nature of organized democracy and to draw the difference between
democracy and dictatorship. The attempt to understand the new world was a symptom
that the comparison between liberalism, fascism, and communism and their reciprocal
influences was not only a polemical strategy but also a major issue on the agenda of the
Depression years in liberal countries. Progressive intellectual Joseph Wood Krutch, saying
that capitalism might well be doomed, observed that the closer the change came, “the
less anyone seems to know what it will be like…I for one, should prefer to form some
definite idea of just what it is that I am in for.”97 Many prominent figures of Depressionera America were at a loss when it came to the need for vigorous leadership in times of
trouble, on the one hand, and the values of liberty and pluralism, on the other. The idea
of what Clinton Rossiter would call “constitutional dictatorship” in his book of 1948,
meaning the temporary use of dictatorial powers by leaders of liberal orders in times of
emergency, was not advanced in critical terms alone. Roosevelt stressed that, if he failed,
his presidency might very well be the last one. In 1931, Nicholas Murray Butler, winner
of the Noble Peace Prize and president of Columbia University, said that totalitarian
regimes were led by “men of far greater intelligence, far stronger character and far more
courage than the system of elections.” Even Walter Lippmann suggested to Roosevelt that
he vest himself of temporary dictatorial power to overcome the emergency.98
Symptomatic of the fact that conservative republicans lacked an analytical framework
with which to approach the “mixed systems” of liberal democracies was their controversy
over the New Deal’s appropriation of the term “liberal” as a positive political concept on
the American public scene. The progressives of the 1930s understood liberalism to mean
an active federal government involved in guaranteeing security and socio-economic rights
through vast programs of public spending, an interpretation that was unprecedented at
the time. Laissez-faire conservatives thought of this strategy as dangerous and Landon said
that “This administration wields the same axe which has destroyed the liberties of much
of the Old World: an unbalanced budget, inflation of the currency, delegation of power to
the chief executive, destruction of local self government…”99 Ogden L. Mills entitled his
polemical tract of 1936 Liberalism Fights On, and republicans actually fought against the
term “liberal” being appropriated by New Deal democrats. They wanted instead to keep
its traditional, canonized meaning, centered on the worship of individual rights and the
setting of limits to government discretion and interference. This was, said Hoover, true
liberalism; and in turn Landon added in his Kansas Day Address on January 30, 1935
that “Unfortunately, now as always, there are people today calling themselves “liberal”
who regard any suggestion of economy as reactionary.”100 However, public spending was
a heavy burden on family and company budgets. “Those in power responsible for this
reckless extravagance are not liberals. They are more nearly benighted reactionaries.” Frank
R. Kent, the radical anti-New Deal columnist for the Los Angeles Times, signified the
semantic battle being waged around the word “liberal” and its uncertain borderlines in
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the 1930s when he emphasized that self-defined “liberals” encompassed a diverse crowd
including everyone from Huey Long to Rexford Tugwell to Senator Borah. Wanting to
“liberalize” the Republican Party, they were, according to Kent, a mixed bunch of happy
spenders of government money, strong in abstract ideologies and weak in limitations
stemming from the hard facts of the economy.101
However, conservatives were unable to frame a different notion, even a critical one,
of mass society. They did not accept Roosevelt’s definition of “liberalism,” which for
democrats had come to mean the building of the social state and the politics of mass
democracy, yet they held no new one of their own with which to analyze the democratic
“mixed system.” While the fact that they looked to the “foreign isms” of communism,
socialism, and fascism was certainly due to political expediency and immobile traditionalism, it was also a way to find new, if frightening, categories, in order to understand the
domestic situation on the basis of on an international one that was changing so rapidly
it legitimized the belief that the United States might be involved in the change too.
the “foreign isms” and the critics of the new deal
In the United States, “red-baiting,” that is, pointing to the “communist” danger as
a barrier against change and to keep traditional hierarchies in place, went back to the
Russian revolution. It also went hand-in-hand with what an Italian sociologist has called
“strategies of social alarm,” by announcing anxiety-raising threats to the American way of
life, represented in turn by anarchists, blacks, papists, Jews, women, immigrants, and wets.
In the 1920s, all of these categories were still competing successfully with communists to
rank high on the list of un-American villains, according to the rationale of the Right. In
the course of the 1930s however, as would later be the case in the Cold War years, “redbaiting” had to confront the profound changes that affected its mythical “evil empires,”
which caused it to reframe its tirades in partially new terms. As a consequence, the negative reference to red-baiting in order to discredit the New Deal could not just be limited
to Lenin’s Russia, the bolshevik revolution to be exported, and the expropriations and
repressions of the young soviet government of the early twenties. The conservative invective
also needed to take into account the great systemic competition of the Depression years.
Soviet Russia had not been wiped out by the military and social crises of the early years
after the revolution, nor had it been able to export it, and the expansive soviet thrust of
the twenties had been replaced by the Stalinist “socialism in one country.” Russia was still
a gigantic presence on the international stage, both fascinating and repellent; it seemed to
have been able to achieve total control of the economy and the society through rational
instrumentalities. It was building the fastest industrial revolution in human history in
a country of immense distances, and at the cost of deporting and assassinating millions
among its leaders, its informed public, and its population at large.
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In the 1930s on the other hand, the red threat had been superseded by the black
alternative, equally dictatorial, that had spread from Latin America to Japan via many
European countries. The centrality of communist and fascist dictatorship on the world
scene, where “democracy [is] on trail throughout the world today,”102 according to Arthur
M. Schlesinger Sr., marginalized and decreased the relevance of many of the villains of
the twenties in the right-wing invective. It also demanded a rethinking of the red peril
in light of the new international situation, whether the purpose was to find arguments
against derogatory invectives or whether it indicated a genuine concern for the dangers
threatening American liberty.
How did the conservative world respond to the challenge to traditional red-baiting?
Historian Daniel T. Rodgers has shown that as the decade went on, the more difficult and
politically dangerous it became to refer to European precedents in the United States:
never again in the twentieth century would the agenda of American politics be so deeply stocked
with imported policy ideas as it was in the 1930s. And yet, between act and word a rift widened
in the 1930s… ever since doctors and insurance companies had shown how effectively the economics of medical care could be swept behind a spiked helmet and a “made in Germany” charge,
there could be no doubt of cosmopolitan progressive politics’ vulnerability to the objection that
its schemes were unpatriotic, foreign to the distinctive genius of American politics.103
At the beginning of the thirties, mentioning European examples was a way of reassuring the public and the politicians that the new reforms had already been found to
work elsewhere. With the passing of the decade, however, the European reference became
a critical weapon in the hands of the anti-New Deal opponents, while the New Dealers
tried to stress the 100% American pedigree of the measures they were trying to enact. The
reasons for the changing political function of European examples were not to be found
in the new difficulties of the German and British systems of social insurance vis-à-vis the
great increase in the number of the needy because of the Depression, nor were they only a
“tactical retreat”104 by American cosmopolitan reformers due to political expediency. The
roots of the change were to be found instead in the embarrassment caused in the United
States by the frequent combination of forward-looking social measures and authoritarian political orders on European soil, and all the more so in the 1930s. The relevance of
the international stage as a source of critical domestic themes to be launched against the
administration was confirmed by Rodgers when he said that “by the 1930s, …[the] cry
[that the New Deal was un-American) was everywhere.”105 Arguing that the administration was unpatriotic and outside the American mould because it was importing despotic
“foreign isms” into the country and imitating them in its programs was a major line of
the anti-Roosevelt conservative campaign. To some extent, it conditioned how the New
Deal reforms were framed and was utterly defeated at the presidential elections of 1936,
which sanctioned nation’s favor for the “New Deal Order.” However, it was revived in
1937-1938 and fed into the “fear of dictatorship,”106 as Arthur Schlesinger Sr. said, that
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contributed to the slowing down of reform at the time of the Supreme Court Reform
Bill and the Government Reorganization Bill. In 1938, these fears helped to establish
the Dies Congressional Committee for Un-American Activities, which started investigating communist and radical infiltrations in government agencies like the Works Progress
Administration, and was a direct precedent of the McCarthy witch-hunting campaign
of the Cold War years.
What have been the rhetorical re-conceptualizations through which the anti-New
Deal campaign was conducted? The most stereotyped, anti-intellectual section of the
opposition, encompassing the Hearst press, the Liberty League, the most ferocious ranks
of the Republican Party, and the most demonizing business spokesmen and reporters,
remained solidly anchored to the traditional red-baiting and spotted the “red menace”
around every corner. In 1935, for example, the Los Angeles Times reported that Ingall
W. Bull, the chairman of the Los Angeles County Republican Central Committee and a
leader of the Republican Party of no minor standing, accused Roosevelt in the following
terms: “the President of the United States is deliberately attempting to wreck our system
of government and set up a communistic dictatorship based on the Stalin regime in
Russia.”107 In these instances, the critique of the administration was mainly an attempt
to use a notion of liberty in order to defend entrenched privilege and traditional habits
which the radical Right felt were threatened by a more egalitarian, socially-conscious
public rationale that came from the left-of-center side of American politics. The target
of the invective was quite openly the brake placed on “free enterprise” and the fight was
conducted through the kind of moralistic discourse typical of reactionary populism:
bad faith, moral depravation, conspiracy, dementia, and the thirst of leaders for power
and rewards. The fascist side of the threat was rarely focused upon; more often than
not, speakers of the radical Right expressed open or veiled sympathy for the right-wing
European dictatorships that had managed to impose law and order in their countries.
A famous line by William Randolph Hearst read: “when you hear a prominent American
called a ‘Fascist’, you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a loyal
citizen who stands for Americanism.”108 In spite of their vulgarized repository of political ideas, it was mainly these areas of anti-Roosevelt conservatism that characterized the
public climate of the anti-New Deal discourse, as their radicalized shouting obscured
more thoughtful criticism. While the country was prey to many attempted subversions
ignited by infiltrated communist agents, the “president [was] fomenting class prejudice”
and “hate-rousing,”109 vented Jouett Shouse, president of the American Liberty League
and former president of the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee.
In the California harbor strike of 1934, the Los Angeles Times repeatedly denounced
the “red” conspiracy for causing trouble with the longshoremen, based on the notion
that industrial conflict was by definition subversive if a strike was called. The newspaper
fumed with outrage because the Attorney General had not sent troops to the rescue. It
also accused New Deal agencies of fomenting riots, such as protests staged by people on
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relief, and reported that “reds dominate relief projects, jury charges,” and “Farm Mob
Beats Federal Officers to Block Auction. Communist-Organized Band Blamed as 300
Invade Missouri Town.”110
The threat of the “foreign isms” and the infiltration of agitators and subversive ideas
from abroad was older than red-baiting itself. It went back to the period after the 1870s
when socialism and anarchism were allegedly flourishing among new immigrants and in
the burgeoning industrial cities. The fear of alien ideologies was to be found again in the
republican platform of 1936, as illustrated by Representative Hamilton Fish III’s address
to the Los Angeles County Republicans. It promised to
enact deportation laws against all aliens who seek to spread class hatred, promote strikes, riots
and industrial unrest and to undermine and tear down our free institutions, and give their jobs
to industrious and loyal American citizens now walking the streets and who have faith in our
American system.111
On December 27, 1935, on the prominent front page of the second section, the Los
Angeles Times published the conference speech of one Carveth Wells, “Lecturer,” that had
taken place at a luncheon of the American Women Inc. His talk as reported by the newspaper exemplified the myths, the strategies of fear, and the outright lies that were typical
of this kind of pre-packaged, stereotyped discourse. It had a sort of dramatic, amusing
vigor that calls to mind the paradoxical Ladies’ Night Dinner for the Fort Beulah Rotary
Club in Vermont that opens Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here. Communists would
take hold of the United States and call a national strike that would result in a generalized
social uprising. “But they cannot do this until they break down the present ideals of our
Police, Army and Navy.” The lecturer said that on a trip to Russia in 1932, he had seen
many fine pictures of Presidential Candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt with the caption “The
next Communist President of the United States.” “The minute Russia was recognized,”
added the speaker, “it sent diplomatic representatives to provide nuclei of communist
activity and its representatives are everyone pledged to the overthrow of our government
by force.”112 It is quite significant of the intense polarization of the American public scene
and of the vulgarized quality of many conservative attacks that the Los Angeles Times,
which was after all one of the major dailies in the nation, would grant so much visibility
to a piece of reactionary discourse with such a low level of tragic ridicule.
“If we extend Federal power indefinitely,” said Senator Robert A. Taft in 1938, “if
we concentrate power over the courts and congress in the executive, it will not be long
before we have an American fascism.”113 Among the more moderate representatives of
United States conservatism in the 1930s, the change in the conceptual foundations of
red-baiting and the “foreign isms” critique amounted to equalizing the fascist and communist despotisms, stressing insights that would later contribute to the notion of totalitarianism in the postwar years. Walter Lippmann defined both fascism and bolshevism
as “an idea that is alien to western civilization.” They were both born on the faraway
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margins of the West where it borders with eastern despotism. “They are two sprouts from
the same stem. Though they employ some of the apparatus of western civilization, in
their essence they are nothing but another manifestation of the ancient despotism of the
east.” The success of the dictators was due to the “idea that the security and happiness
of the individual man are to be found in surrendering to the compulsion of mass feeling
and the dominion of the omnipotent states.” The all-powerful state and the denial of a
citizen’s right to criticize his leaders are common features of both black and red despotism.114 In general, for American conservatives, the common traits of all dictatorships of
whatever political color included the denial of individual liberties; the all-encompassing
state; the prevailing notion that the masses cannot be governed but by absolute power;
and the humiliation of citizens who become subjects in exchange for a passive security
dependent on the government. Hoover concurred and said that all authoritarian orders
“have some features in common. All these various forms of the collectivist philosophy
merely differ in degree and kinds of servitude.”115 In his Challenge to Liberty, he paid
special attention to anti-liberal political philosophies and developed a vision that was the
most attentive to international developments and the most stubborn in thinking that
they could infiltrate the American scene among all serious American conservatives. All
authoritarianisms, he said, “have in common the idea of the servitude of the individual
to the state, and the denial of liberties unassailable by the state.”116 Hoover’s definition
was somewhat distant from Lippmann’s. Because the issue of security was rather marginal
for Hoover, he believed that the legacy of World War One was much more instrumental
in generating the despotic wave than the Depression. On the other hand, Hoover’s list
of despotic philosophies was larger than just communism and fascism, as was often the
case with the conservative critique. Instead, it also came to encompass socialism, that is,
the British and Scandinavian welfare states, and “National Regimentation,” the new word
that became a badge of the former president’s attack on the New Deal.
In 1934, Senator Taft, “Mr. Republican,” reiterated that:
The measures undertaken by the democratic administration are alarming. Whatever may be said
for them as emergency measures, their permanent incorporation into our system would practically
abandon the whole theory of American government, and inaugurate what is in fact socialism.117
Special cases of un-American political orders were normally indicated with the term
“socialism” or “state socialism,” and were often accompanied by other kinds of despotisms,
according to Henry P. Fletcher who denounced “the everyday infectious dose of Socialism
and Communism that is being injected into our American bloodstream under the pretence
of emergency.”118 The objection that the Roosevelt administration was “socialist” was
frequently vented in attacks against the New Deal and, in a way, was the most credible
of them all. New Dealers were not the only ones to respond dynamically to the dictators’
pretense of being the only ones who had “the courage to undertake great experiments
of social and political transformation”119 in the 1930s, as Mussolini vindicated for the
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European fascisms. Their response was also echoed by the Scandinavian social democrats
and, for a short time, the French Popular Front, as well as the Labour Party in Britain,
whose government experience was already well known in America. In the language of
American conservatives, the word “socialism” referred to the social democratic/laborite
tradition of the European left and the welfare state these parties were building; “socialism” or, sometimes, the version “state socialism,” to be distinguished from the traditions
of municipal socialism which abounded in the English-speaking world, was another
“foreign ism” discredited in conservative eyes by its preference for government action
and the possibility of its creeping into the United States because of the New Deal’s social
statism.
In the case of “socialism,” the parallel rested on somewhat firmer ground: the notion
that the New Deal has been the American functional substitute of European social democracy in building the American social state has been advanced frequently in the historical
and social science literature. According to this interpretation, New Deal democrats were
quite close to European social democrats when it came to the central role played by the
unions and an insistence on social services and risk protection for the weak, the poor,
the aged, and the unemployed. In his book on the departures in socio-economic policies
of the 1930s, Peter Gourevitch has stressed that:
the American pattern most resembles that of Sweden. The classical policy of deflation crumbled
early in the Depression, giving way to the political and policy experimentation of the New Deal
in its several phases… producing a result less formal than Saltsjobaden [the name of the social
compromise upon which the social democratic welfare agreement was based], less expensive in its
welfare state provisions, and weaker in labor’s power- but nonetheless a result roughly similar to what
emerged from Sweden’s efforts to strike a new balance among business, labor and agriculture… In
the second New Deal … we see the pragmatic working out of the postwar social democratic model:
an open foreign economic policy, full-employment, fiscal policy, social insurance transfer payments,
trade-union rights in collective bargaining, high wages, and stable monetary policy.120
The proximity between the New Deal and “socialism” could also be spotted on the
domestic American scene. Many conservative critics said that the New Deal program had
been tailored after that of the American Socialist Party. After Roosevelt’s “turn to the left”
in 1934-1935, socialist leaders, and Norman Thomas first and foremost, fought hard to
keep a socialist identity alive in the American electoral market, an attempt which met
with little success as the relative strength the party had gained in 1932 was nullified by
the landslide of the New Deal democrats in 1936. “One reason people confused the New
Deal with socialism,” Thomas said, “was because they had been told it was socialism in
various accounts by Mr. David Lawrence, Mr. Alfred Emanuel Smith, and Mr James P.
Warburg.” “The identification of socialism and the Roosevelt program,” stressed historians
George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson, “was perhaps one of the reasons Socialists found
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it necessary to attack the New Deal so vigorously.”121 Thomas even joined the left-wing
crowd by saying that the Roosevelt program showed many of the symptoms of fascism.
However, the objection that the New Deal was as similar to “socialism” as any of the
“foreign isms” were required an argument that was too complicated to be promptly leveled
against the administration. Much more efficient were the impassioned cries that the New
Deal was moving the country toward Moscow or Berlin. The government was aware that
the parallel with socialism was dangerous and Roosevelt avoided making too many public
expressions of sympathy, let alone public parallels, with what the Scandinavian social
democrats or the British laborites had been doing. Even more dangerous was any reference to the Weimar Republic, in spite of it having formulated the most precise definition
of social rights in international history up to that time in its 1919 Constitution. By the
mid-thirties, however, Weimar Germany had become a symbol of political instability and
the shift from democracy to dictatorship, which was exactly what many conservatives
considered the doom of socialist orders: “Germany once had a good government,” said
Representative Bert Lord of New York, discussing the Reorganization Bill of 1938, “but
little by little they gave all power and authority to their president. If we pass this bill,
Roosevelt will have powers to correspond to the powers given to President Hindenburg.
Hindenburg did not become a dictator, but Hitler did.”122
Yet the activist state in European socialisms did not imply the denial of political
liberties, even if this issue was at the center of a huge international debate. The interdependence of the two main targets of the conservative attacks, statism in the socioeconomic program on the one hand, and political dictatorship on the other, did not go
together in the case of European socialism. When the anti-New Dealers tried to define
what socialism was, they mainly saw, as Frank R. Kent summarized in the Los Angeles
Times, nationalizations of industry and transport, public spending, and a central role for
the unions. In Hoover’s opinion, socialism, which for him was mainly tied the British
Labour Party, meant state ownership of the means of production in natural resources and
capital goods, their public management “through a democratic political organization,” and
the abolition of the wage system to be substituted by a different way to allocate income.
It was an extreme description of the socialist principles, but Hoover added that there
existed some milder versions of it, “parading the cloak of Liberalism,” whose members
would not even accept being labeled socialists. Socialists, Hoover agreed, were centrist
and moderate and they “claim they would maintain democratic institutions and all other
freedoms except economic freedom.”123 Hoover was thinking of British social liberals
and reformist, libertarian laborites among whose intellectual leaders, including G.D.H.
Cole, Harold J. Laski, John Maynard Keynes, the Webbs, and William Beveridge, among
others, an intense conversation was taking place, from the mid-thirties well into the war
years, regarding what proportions of coercion and discretion were to be envisioned as a
condition to enact a wide-ranging, universalist, egalitarian reform of the British welfare
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state. The controversy raged among the faculty of the London School of Economics where
Friedrich von Hayek and Lionel Robbins were the champions of the anti-statist point of
view, which was after all not so far from the one held by Herbert Hoover and the more
thoughtful American conservatives. In the United States, republicans were certainly
looking for political dividends when they accused Roosevelt of being a foreign-style
dictator in the making. For some of them, however, the objection was not just a scare
tactic. It was the political, old school, liberal version of a supranational conversation that
affected various intellectual and political quarters regarding the nature of planning, the
activist government, and the welfare state in a liberal-democratic context, according to
principles of liberty and governmental supremacy, and vis-à-vis the all-powerful states of
the European dictatorships. When Beveridge triumphantly traveled to the United States
in the spring of 1943 to illustrate his Report to the American public, British diplomats
urged him to stress with Americans that the project was in no way “totalitarian” and
entailed no excessive statism. The glorious welcome he met in the United States was
only slightly diminished by critical voices from the American right against the allegedly
anti-liberal features of his social ideas.124
From the point of view of “true” liberalism, how could conservatives square the claim
of a “foreign ism” to foster the activist state, build national social rights, and regulate the
market with the maintenance of vast areas of economic activity for private hands and
democratic liberties in their entirety? American conservatives argued that, in principle,
there were profound differences. They would never accept the socialist notion of “equality of rewards” and the demoralization of individual initiative that would follow in the
wake, as citizens would depend on the state for their welfare and their well-being. Yet it
was a rather weak point if one compared it with the abrupt strength of the notion that
the activist, socially conscious government could not but go together with a despotic
political order. What ideological conservatives mainly believed, then, was rationalized
by Herbert Hoover in the notion of the “slide toward Fascism.”125 The socialist welfare
state was untenable because it was structurally unstable and gradually but necessarily
bound to move into a situation of total nationalization and the end of individual liberties. Government access to industrial property ignited a process that would make such
property increasingly sizable. The reason was that, among other things, businessmen
would grow accustomed to dealing with the government in their economic activity and
would prepare themselves to be bought out by the state as soon as the business climate
became stormy. Under the same conditions, having grown accustomed to governmental
economic activism, people would ask for even more action when things went wrong at
the expense of their spirit of initiative and self-reliance. At the political level, said Hoover,
as he rationalized what many American conservatives thought, the leadership of the state
could only conflict with the pluralist principle of democratic liberalism. To be successful, socialism had to limit and suppress the variety of political groups and demands that
characterized a liberal polity, and was therefore compelled to take the path leading down
307
into authoritarianism. As in the other brands of dictatorial philosophy, socialism could
not help but become despotic.
Many conservatives had been profoundly struck by the legal procedure that fascist
leaders and movements had utilized at least in part to gain access to national power, only
to promptly abrogate those very liberal rules that had contributed to their success. In 1922,
Mussolini had summoned a coalition government after being properly designated by the
King; in 1933, Hitler had been asked to be Chancellor by President Hindenburg after a
major electoral victory. No adult American conservative thought that the revolution would
come to the United States via proletarian barricades in the streets or a military putsch.
In Sinclair Lewis’ novel, Senator Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip rose to despotic power while
proclaiming the eternity of American values, together with the help of raiding bands of his
vigilantes. All Americans, whatever their political affiliations, thought that the aggressive
dictatorships that were expanding throughout the world in the 1930s were powerfully
supported by the Depression. The American path to authoritarianism would be made
possible through the occurrence of multiple emergencies that would delegate increasing
amounts of exceptional powers to the executive that were never to be returned, as had
happened in 1933. As Hoover, who thought that fascism was a revolt of the middle classes
and therefore all the more likely in a middle-class country like the United States, claimed,
“In the United States the reaction from such chaos [engendered by the Depression] will
not be more Socialism but will be toward Fascism.” And in his incendiary speech at the
Cleveland Republican Convention of 1936, he added:
In Central Europe the march of fascist dictatorships and their destruction of liberty did not set out
with guns and arms…Dictatorships began their ascent to the seats of power through the elections
provided by liberal institutions. The 1932 campaign – Hoover stressed almost in self-defense – was
a pretty good imitation of this first stage of European tactics.126
Landon thought that public spending in excess would move the country toward financial insolvency and economic-financial crises that bore with them fundamental political
dangers, as postwar Germany had shown. “The lesson of national bankruptcy,” he said in
Philadelphia on October 26, 1936, “is clear for all to read. We have seen what happens in
nation after nation of the modern world. We have seen democracies fall and dictatorships
rise. We have seen societies planned and liberties destroyed. And we have seen hard-won
constitutions first ridiculed and then section by section discarded and thrown away.”127
Hoover in turn added that the rise of fascist dictatorship was the response to trying to
build a socialist order: “The attempt to foist Socialism onto democratic institutions was
a large part of the cause of the collapse of these institutions in Italy, Germany, Austria,
Poland, and in other places, with the inevitable leap of dictatorship.”128
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american conservatives and the supreme court
On the morning of May 28, 1935, the Los Angeles Times made a triumphant announcement: “Supreme Court Rules NRA Codes Invalid.”129 The headline was a huge,
spanning several columns, no smaller than that which had recently announced the
kidnapping of Baby Lindbergh. The commentary comprised a long article announcing
“the end of the dictatorship” which consisted of the “Roosevelt administration vesting in
itself arbitrary control of business and industry in the name of ‘National Emergency.’”130
The unanimous decision of the Supreme Court had outlawed “national regimentation”
and had therefore shown that Roosevelt’s new powers were despotic in two different
ways: one, because of the executive discretion they had legislated, and two, because of
the unconstitutional procedure based on an emergency that caused them to be delegated
to the president in the first place. If Roosevelt had any coherence, he would now seek a
constitutional amendment, stated the republican New York Herald Tribune, to legalize
“a socialization and regimentation of industry.”131 Many anti-Roosevelt commentators
argued that the anti-NRA pronunciation of the Supreme Court would doom the whole
New Deal program, as the government legislation was fundamentally based on the
same legal principle. On May 31, 1935, Frank R. Kent, one of the “four knights of the
Apocalypse,” listed the New Deal reforms that were bound to fall under the axe of the
Court “by which the plug was pulled on practically the whole New Deal game-to use a
Tugwellian phrase- of ‘making America over’.”132 The sentence of the court was hailed as
having totally disgraced Roosevelt’s leadership and shown that the road that the New Deal
had walked had been utterly wrong. The court seemed to have confirmed and substantiated all the objections that conservatives had leveled against the administration.
The pronunciation of the Supreme Court did not come as a surprise for conservatives, but it was a decision that had been longed for and invoked for quite some time.
The conservatives’ political resources were in big trouble: the Republican Party had
been annihilated under two crushing electoral defeats, and it was divided between the
Hooverites and the pragmatic “practical liberals.” Business and finance were discredited
and subject to congressional enquiries into their wrongdoings in industrial relations
and stock exchange practices. According to the dominant opinion among historians, no
solid ground in terms of ideas and political initiative would be recovered by American
conservatives before the end of World War Two. Historian of conservatism George Nash
has highlighted the fact that until 1945, “no articulate, coordinate, self-consciously,
conservative intellectual force existed in the United States. There were, at most, scattered
voices of protest, profoundly pessimistic about the future of their country.”133
Due to the weakness of other avenues of conservative influence, the Supreme Court
and its interpretation of the Constitution as the legitimate definition of what was and
what was not “in the American grain” was the terrain upon which conservatives could
mount an efficient attack to weaken the government program. The principle, reiter309
ated again and again in the Los Angeles Times, that “the Constitution is a safeguard
of our liberties”134 was not only the slogan of a radicalized opposition, but was also the
catchphrase of one of the combatants in the institutional conflict that characterized the
public scene throughout the central years of the New Deal. “The only effective opposition to Roosevelt in 1935-1936,” said Mayer, “was provided by the Supreme Court.”135
Roosevelt was to see fundamental sections of his program nullified by the pronunciations
of the Court and he filled his legislative committees with experts in constitutional law
who would condition the language and the subject matter of the New Deal bills to make
them compatible with the prevalent constitutional interpretations. The contrast between
the rule of law, embodied in the jurisprudence of the court on the one hand, and popular
sovereignty, represented by Roosevelt’s electoral landslides on the other, represented a
central cleavage of the mid-1930s. The conflict would be resolved thanks to the constitutional revolution of 1937, when the court concurred with the vision of the American
Constitution that was written in the New Deal legislation. However, the political cost of
this “victory” would be extremely high and is considered one of the major reasons that
reform was almost brought to a halt after 1937-1938. The point is that the New Deal
represented a real constitutional watershed and the earlier constitutional status quo gave
critics of the new principles embodied in the reform legislation strong arguments with
which to oppose the new order.
From the very beginning of the Roosevelt administration, opponents had argued
that the New Deal was unconstitutional and had invoked the Supreme Court to intervene. When that happened, the reaction on the conservative side was “The Expected
Happens,”136 and the Portland Oregonian reported that the conservative slogan “back
to the Constitution,” had been vindicated. As the news that the Supreme Court had invalidated the NRA was made public, a veritable cry of joy emerged from the conservative
ranks as they felt they had found a way to return to the center stage of the political scene
after much vocal but impotent isolation. “It is unsafe to predict what historians will pick
out as worthy of note,” wrote an anonymous commentator in the Los Angeles Times, “but
from present indications they will say that its brightest day dawned on May 27 when the
United States Supreme Court upset the National Industrial Recovery Act and regimentation…coercion and bureaucratic interference began to pass away like a bad dream. That
decision was epoch-making.”137 If the Supreme Court was the seat upon which the basic
principles of American public life were defined and it managed to dismantle huge chunks
of the government program, then it showed, according to the conservative interpretation, that the anti-New Deal critique was solidly founded and that the New Deal was,
as Landon said, “an un-American doctrine of division and classes.”138 It also confirmed,
as James Truslow Adams added, that “in the unparalleled concentration of power in the
Executive, in the partial abdication of its constitutional duties by Congress, in the efforts
to ‘get passed’ the Supreme Court, many Americans feel a weakening of democracy here
at home as in most countries in Europe.”139 A thoughtful article in the Boston Transcript
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neatly summarized the attitude of the more mature and less self-centered section of
American conservatism regarding the relationship between democracy and dictatorship
in the United States and the possibility of a quasi-legal slide into despotism in the light
of the international scene. Many of those who are worshipping the Constitution, as the
article recounts, are not against judicious change. Yet,
what they do possess and others lack is a keen appreciation of the faith which has overtaken the
people of every country which has permitted the party in power to bend the constitution for its
own purposes. In Russia, Communism; in Italy, Fascism; in Germany, National Socialism. Here
are three nations whose greater freedom for rulers and governing bodies -as is often suggested for
the United States- has been followed almost immediately by virtual enslavement of the population. It is undoubtedly an exaggeration to say that any danger of so upsetting a nature threatens
the United States forthwith. Yet he must be singularly unobservant [the] man who does not see
forces moving in that direction and endeavoring to take the whole nation along with them. There
is hardly a day that someone in authority does not declare that Congress should have the authority
to overrule the Supreme Court…So the peril exists even if it is not instantly upon us.”140
conclusion: american conservatives and
the redefinition of liberty in the s
In the context of the great competition between communism, fascism, and liberal
democracy, the 1930s witnessed a lively debate over the nature of freedom that was only
put to rest when the postwar reconstruction of democracy took place under the guise of
the “mixed system.” The controversy aligned the laissez-faire liberals who stressed freedom
as lack of impediment, order, and economic discretion on one side, and reformers who
discussed new definitions of liberty vis-à-vis the need for planning, security, justice, and the
activist state on the other. In 1935, the distinguished German sociologist Karl Mannheim
had published his groundbreaking Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction141
(translated into English in 1940), in which he defined the new notion of liberty. Perhaps
laissez-faire freedom was conceivable in a world of individuals and small units, but modern
society was one of major political, economic, and social actors with powerful technologies
that could distort and imbalance social life. Rational planning was therefore inevitable,
and liberty could exist as long as it was embodied in the planning itself. In a later essay
of 1937, Mannheim clearly defined what he meant by freedom in planning:
Planning…means planning for freedom. This means to control those fields of social growth on
the security of which depends the smooth functioning of the apparatus of society, but at the
same time consciously to leave free those areas that contain the greatest opportunity for creative
development and individualization. This freedom, however, is not the freedom of laissez-faire,
laissez-aller, which can no longer exist today. It is the freedom of a society which, disposing of
the entire coordinated social technology, has itself under control, guarding itself by its own free
will against the dictatorial suppression of certain areas of life, and incorporating the guarantees
of these free areas into its structure and constitution.142
311
The interaction between freedom and regulation was the guarantee of liberty, not its
suppression, and was a precondition for a notion of freedom that would be defined as a
condition that empowered people to pursue their life projects with success. In modern
society, especially one that was under the spell of the Depression, liberty went hand-inhand with the notion of justice, rather than property.
These understandings of freedom resonated in unison with similar ideas advanced by
progressives in the United States. In 1935, John Dewey, the most distinguished American
philosopher of the new notion of liberty, said that “today, [freedom] signifies liberation
from material insecurity,”143 while in the same year, according to a survey conducted by
the economic magazine Fortune, 90% of the poor favored a job guaranteed by the state.
The entry of “Liberty” in The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, initiated in 1933, written by the Englishman Harold J. Laski, amounted to a sort of intellectual banner for
American progressive thinking in the Depression years. Laski, a frequent intermediary
between European and American new ideas, defined “negative liberty” as freedom from
impediment, maintaining that liberty could only be obtained “in concert with others
similarly placed in the society” and according to the idea of justice, especially economic
justice, of which the state is the facilitator and the guarantor. Equality was the great
forward-looking value of modern life and “liberty is unattainable until the passion for
equality has been satisfied.”144 By 1935, Walter Lippmann held no enthusiasm for the new
duties of the state. However he wrote to his friend John W. Davis, democratic presidential
candidate in 1924 and now one of the pillars of the anti-New Deal Liberty League, that
the “responsibility for the successful operation of a nation’s economy is now just as much
a function of government as is the national defense…,” a trend Lippmann confessed he
did not like, but, he added, “the tendency seems to me world-wide, cumulative and irresistible.”145 As opposed to what even the most thoughtful conservatives thought, it was
perfectly clear to Lippmann, in spite of his reservations about the new order, that the
competition between liberty and despotism would be decided on the basis of security:
“The issue [in recent times],” he said, “has turned upon whether the western democracies, adhering to their way of life, could demonstrate that they were better able than the
eastern despotisms to restore security to the people.”146
“Viewed with the help of hindsight,” wrote historian Michael Kammen, “American
conceptions of liberty clearly underwent a transformation between 1932 and 1937.”147
In the 1930s, American conservatives did not see that the Depression required traditional
notions of liberty to be transformed away from its laissez-faire understanding as it had
been defined in the fifty years between the 1870’s and the 1920’s: freedom from the government, “ordered freedom,” freedom and property, freedom of contract, and economic
freedom. Herbert Hoover continued to define freedom as lack of impediment from the
government. He envisioned “the substitution of freedom for force of government…
men possessed [of ] fundamental liberties apart from the state.”148 Like most American
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conservatives, he never acceded to the notion that freedom should be supported and
encouraged by a democratic government.
As conservatives found themselves at the crossroads between a revival of democracy
based on policies of social support, market regulation, the activist state, and public protection against modern risks to jobs and incomes, on the one hand, and traditional definitions
of economic liberty on the other, they chose the latter. In so doing, they confirmed the
opinion that, faced by an inescapable choice, private economic liberty was what really
mattered to them and the interests they were representing. Historian Clyde P. Weed has
stressed that “The existence of a ‘middle way’ seemed increasingly remote to a wide variety
of observers during the period from 1930 to 1936 and republican campaign appeals often
reflected this.”149 However many embraced the anti-authoritarian critique of the New
Deal on the sole ground of defending vested interests, the historic failure of the conservatives was their inability to comprehend the watershed in modern history represented by
the worldwide Depression. American conservatism did not die in the 1930s, nor was it
a desert of politics and thought, as the postwar liberal interpretation has often claimed.
It adhered rather to a set of principles and visions that were part of an international
controversy over the place of liberty, the activist state, social rights, regulation, market
competition, and economic freedom that was circulating in democratic countries and
aiming to repel the double assault of depression and dictatorship. Via the conservative
revival of the late 1940s and 1950s, these principles would re-emerge in new terms with
notable strength at the end of the 1970s when the “New Deal Order” came to an end.
Still, during the latter period and especially in the 1930s, conservatism confined itself to
a minority status that was not prepared to tackle, intellectually or politically, the great
issues of the day on the public agenda. Because many of them believed that any kind of
“mixed system” was bound to become some sort of despotism, possibly not so different
from that which was prevalent in Europe, they cut themselves off from understanding
and trying to resolve the problems of the Depression years in America, and were therefore
condemned to intellectual inferiority and political impotence.
313
1. William H. Beveridge, Full Employment in a Free Society (London: Allen and Unwin, 1944), 21; in early
1940 Beveridge wrote to Beatrice Webb, “would very much like to see Communism tried under democratic
conditions” in Josè Harris. William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 354.
2. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London: Routledge, 1944); first American edition: Chicago
University of Chicago Press, 1944.
3. Herman Finer, The Road to Reaction (Boston: Little Brown, 1945). See also his Mussolini’s Italy (London:
Gollancz, 1935).
4. Ludwig von Mises, Interventionism: An Economic Analysis (New York: The Foundation for Economic
Education, 1998); idem, Bureaucracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944). On the role of the Austrian
economists in the revival of postwar American conservatism, see Antonio Donno, In nome della libertà.
Conservatorismo americano e Guerra Fredda (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2004), 106-107.
5. Peter Baldwin, The Politics of Solidarity: Class Bases of the European Welfare State, 1875-1975 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 1990), 107-109; Gaston Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and Industrialisation in Europe,
America and Russia (New York: Wiley, 1971), 137; see also Luisa Passerini, Identità culturale europea. Idee,
sentimenti, relazioni (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1998), 2.
6. Peter Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times: Comparative Responses to International Economic Crises (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1986),147-148. On the German situation, see David F., Crew (ed.), Nazism and
German Society 1933-1945 (London: Routledge, 1944); Tim Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Christian Leitz (ed.), The Third Reich (Oxford: Blackwell,
1999); Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian (eds.), Pain and Prosperity. Reconsidering Twentieth-Century German
History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
7. Both citations are in Alan Brinkley, Liberalism and its Discontents (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1998), 284.
8. Both citations are from Herbert Hoover, The Challenge to Liberty (New York: Scribner’s, 1934; 1973
ed.), 1-2.
9. Both citations are in Alonzo H. Hamby, For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World
Crisis of the 1930s (New York: Free Press, 2004), XI. Roosevelt’s line appears in the title and the dedication
of the book.
10. Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 21.
11. Paolo Viola, Il Novecento (Torino, Einaudi 2000), 83. On the fascist expansion in Europe, see Robert
O. Paxton, Europe in the 20th Century (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965), especially ch. 12, “The Spread of
Fascism: The Authoritarian 1930s,” 351-381; also, Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York:
Knopf, 2004) and its Italian version that stresses the fascist expansionist thrust in its title, Robert O. Paxton,
Il fascismo in azione. Che cosa hanno veramente fatto i movimenti fascisti per affermarsi in Europa (Milano:
Mondadori, 2005).
12. Daria Frezza, Il leader, la folla, la democrazia nel discorso pubblico americano. 1880-1941 (Roma: Carocci,
2001), 238.
13. Walter Lippmann, “Watchman: What of the Night,” Los Angeles Times (from now on LAT), January 2,
1935, part 2, 4. On the attraction of the Soviet Union, see Marcello Flores, L’immagine dell’URSS. L’occidente
e la Russia di Stalin (1927-1956) (Milano: Saggiatore, 1990).
14. Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy and American Public Culture, 2.
15. William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper and Row, 1963),
275-77. See also, Harold Laski, Democracy in Crisis (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1933); Laski’s popularity with the New Dealers is discussed in a conservative vein in Gary Dean Best,
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The Retreat from Liberalism: Collectivists versus Progressives in the New Deal Years (Westport, CT: Praeger,
2002), 48-49; quasi-fascists, anti-Semites and populist right wingers are discussed in, among other books,
Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1983).
16. “The Louisiana Dictator,” LAT, June 2, 1935, part 1, 1A.
17. For a different interpretation, see Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin and the
Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982), IX-XII.
18. Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here (New York: Signet, 1970; first edition 1935); Aldous Huxley, Brave
New World (New York: Modern Library, 1946, orig. 1932); George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel
(London: Secker and Warburg, 1989, orig. 1949); Nathaniel West, A Cool Million in Novels and Other Writings
(New York: Library of America, 1997, orig. 1934); Thomas F. Tweed, Gabriel Over the White House: A Novel
of the Presidency (Garden City: NY, Farrar and Rinehart, 1933).
19. Charles R. Geisst, Wall Street. A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 239; Alpers, Dictators,
Democracy and American Public Culture, 26.
20. Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2006), 5.
21. Hoover, The Challenge, 14.
22. Donald R. McCoy, Landon of Kansas (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 388.
23. Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Tides of American Politics,” The Yale Review, 29, 2, December 1939, 223.
24. Walter Lippmann, “On Making Things Too Complicated,” LAT, June 16, 1934, part 2, 4.
25. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 278.
26. Among the large harvest of books published in the 1930s, the 1940s, and afterwards on the three competing socio-political systems, see, for example, Calvin B. Hoover, Dictators and Democracies (New York:
Macmillan, 1937); Joseph A. Leighton, Social Philosophies in Conflict: Fascism and Nazism, Communism,
Liberal Democracy (New York: Appleton Century, 1937); Carl Frederick Wittke, Democracy Is Different:
Democracy Over Against Communism, Fascism and Nazism (New York: Harper, 1941); Michael J. Oakeshott,
Social and Political Doctrines of Contemporary Europe (Cambridge, Engl: The University Press, and New
York: Macmillan, 1942); Carl Cohen, Communism, Fascism and Democracy: The Theoretical Foundations
(New York: Random House, 1962); David E. Ingersoll, Communism, Fascism and Democracy: The Origins
and Development of Three Ideologies (Columbus, OH: Merrill, 1971).
27. Richard Morris Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1950); Richard
Morris Titmuss, Essays on the “Welfare State” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959).
28. See Maurizio Vaudagna, “A Checkered History: The New Deal, Democracy and Totalitarianism in
Transatlantic Welfare States,” in R. Laurence Moore and Maurizio Vaudagna (eds.), The American Century
in Europe (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2003), 219-242. On fascist social policy, see Victoria
De Grazia, Culture of Consent. Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1981); Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy 1922-1945 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992).
29. Daniel. Levine, Poverty and Society. The Growth of the American Welfare State in International Comparison
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 197.
30. Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Knopf, 1999), 158; see also Greg
Eghigian, Making Social Security: Disability, Insurance, and the Birth of the Social Entitlement State in Germany
(Ann Arbor, MIC: The University of Michigan Press, 2000), 271-278; a recent book stressing that racist
social protection was a fundamental tool to win the consensus of Germans to Nazism has recently caused
considerable debate in Germany; see Goetz Aly, Hitlers Volksstaat. Raub, Rassenkrieg und Nationale Sozialismus
315
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2005); the Nazi policy of Arian family support even caused some nostalgia in
postwar Germany; see, Robert G. Moeller, Protecting Motherhood. Women and the Family in the Politics of
Postwar West Germany (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 14-15.
31. Young-Sun Hong, Welfare Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919-1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1998), 271-274.
32. Harris, William Beveridge, 415.
33. See, Federica Pinelli and Marco Mariano, Europa e Stati Uniti secondo il New York Times. La corrispondenza
estera di Anne O’Hare McCormick, 1920-1954 (Torino: Otto, 2000); John A. Garraty, “The New Deal,
National Socialism and the Great Depression,” American Historical Review, 78 (October 1973), 907-944;
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Entfernte Verwandschaft. Faschismus, Nationalismus, New Deal, 1933-1939 (Berlin:
Hanser, 2005).
34. Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion (New York: Knopf, 1962; first ed.
1955), 173.
35. On the New Deal, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court, see William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme
Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995);
Barry Cushman, Rethinking the New Deal Court: The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998); G. Edward White, The Constitution and the New Deal (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000); constitutional concerns continuously reemerge in the shaping of the Social
Security Act, among other bills; see Edwin E. Witte, The Development of the Social Security Act (Madison,
WISC: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1962) and the interview with Thomas H. Eliot, one of the legal
consultants of the Act, in Katie Louchheim, ed., The Making of the New Deal: The Insiders Speak (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 159-168.
36. Now in Alan Brinkley, Liberalism, ch. 16, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” 277.
37. George H. Mayer, The Republican Party, 1854-1966 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964),428-474.
The main exception to the lack of historical interest in the conservatives of the 1930s is Clyde P. Weed, The
Nemesis of Reform: The Republican Party during the New Deal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
Herbert Hoover has been reevaluated by a group of distinguished historians, who have however mainly ignored his role in the New Deal 1930s. See Joan Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Forgotten Progressive (Boston:
Little Brown, 1975); Herbert Hoover and the Crisis of American Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman,
1973); Ellis W. Hawley, The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1966).
38. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (eds.), The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
39. Lionel Trilling is cited in Charles W. Dunn and J. David Woodard, The Conservative Tradition in America
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 2, and Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing: The
Rise of Modern American Conservatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 14.
40. Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 173.
41. Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 165. The intellectual and mental attitudes of the different
types of conservatism are discussed in Jonathan M. Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing, 4 and Charles W.
Dunn and J. David Woodard, American Conservatism from Burke to Bush: An Introduction (Lanham, MD:
Machison Books, 1991), 43-44.
42. Brinkley, “The Problem of American Conservatism,” 295-296.
43. George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (New York: Basic, 1976), XIII, 3;
also Schoenwald, A Time for Choosing, 17.
316
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44. The sources consulted for this essay include the relevant historical literature as well as a short survey of
the daily newspaper Los Angeles Times, an example of anti-New Deal press in terms of both style and subject
matter.
45. Dunn and Woodard, The Conservative Tradition in America, 102.
46. George Wolfskill and John A. Hudson, All but the People: Franklin D. Roosevelt and His Critics, 1933-1939
(London: Macmillan, 1966), 68.
47. Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 167. Lawrence Dennis, Is Capitalism Doomed (New York: Harper,
1932); Lawrence Dennis, The Coming American Fascism: The Crisis of Capitalism (New York: Harper 1936);
Lawrence Dennis, Dynamics of War and Revolution: A Study of the Hidden Economic Origins of Conflict
(New York: The Weekly Foreign Letter, 1940).
48. Lewis L. Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans (New York: Random, 2003), 237. On
the Republicans, see also Robert Allen Rutland, The Republicans from Lincoln to Bush (Columbia, MO:
University of Missouri Press, 1966); David W. Reinhard, The Republican Right Since 1945 (Lexington, KY:
The University Press of Kentucky, 1983); Malcolm Moos, The Republicans: A History of Their Party (New York:
Random, 1956).
49. A sense of the style and aesthetics of these characters can be drawn from Morris B. Schnapper, Grand Old
Party: The First Hundred Years of the Republican Party, A Pictorial History (Washington, DC: Public Affairs
Press, 1955), 347-452.
50. See Clyde P. Weed, The Nemesis of Reform, 11-24, 77-81.
51. Hofstadter is cited in Weed, The Nemesis of Reform, 83. On business and the New Deal, see Robert M.
Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929-1964 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 23-52;
Albert Fried, FDR and His Enemies (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), especially the sections dealing with Al
Smith.
52. George H. Mayer, The Republican Party, 440.
53. LAT, January 26, 1936, part 2, 1.
54. LAT, 17 August 1935, part 2, 3. See also Edward W. Ryan, Liberty, Virtue and Happines: The Story of
Economic Freedom in America (Huntington, NY: Nova Science, 2000).
55. Mayer, The Republican Party, 438. On Alfred Landon, see also Frederick Palmer, This Man Landon: The
Record and Career of Governor Alfred M. Landon of Kansas (New York: Dodd Mead, 1936), a celebratory
book written for the 1936 presidential campaign; Donald R. McCoy, Landon of Kansas (Lincoln, NEB:
University of Nebraska Press, 1966), especially ch. 13 on the 1936 campaign, “Sunflowers Do Not Bloom
in November,” 313-339; Richard B. Fowler, Deeds not Deficits: The Story of Alfred M. Landon (Kansas City,
MO: Punton Printing Co., 1936).
56. Palmer, This Man Landon, 242.
57. Herbert Hoover, The Challenge, 205. On Herbert Hoover in the 1930s, see Gary Dean Best, Herbert
Hoover: The Post-Presidential Years, 1933-1964, vol. 1, 1933-1964 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press,
1983), in particular ch. 1, “Titular Leader,” and ch. 2, “Campaigning,” 1-73.
58. LAT, January 5, 1935, part. 1, 1.
59. Ibidem, 11.
60. Ibidem. See also Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy and American Public Culture, 24.
62. John Seeberg Jr., “What do you Know about the New Deal?” LAT, January 2, 1935, part. 1, 6-7. See
also Gerald W. Johnson, Roosevelt: Dictator or Democrat, (New York: Harper and Bros, 1941).
317
63. LAT, January 13, 1935, part 1, 26.
64. Cited in Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 167.
65. Cited in Wolfskill and Hudson, All but the People, 154. The notion of a Roosevelt personality bent on
gaining power from crisis situations lingered on in the conservative opinion of the postwar years. In 1948,
Clinton Rossiter wrote that “In Roosevelt the voters had chosen the most crisis-minded public figure in
American history, a man who thrived on crises, emergencies, dangers, perils and panics.” Clinton Rossiter,
Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in the Modern Democracies, (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1948), 256. On the parallels between the New Deal and fascism in the 1930s, see Maurizio
Vaudagna, Corporativismo e New Deal (Torino: Rosenberg e Sellier, 1981); Maurizio Vaudagna, “Mussolini
and Franklin D. Roosevelt,” in Cornelis A. Van Minnen e John F. Sears (eds.), FDR and his Contemporaries:
Foreign Perceptions of an American President (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 157-170.
66. Ibidem, 310.
67. Frezza, Il leader, la folla, 211.
68. LAT, August 17, 1935, part 2, p. 1.
70. LAT, January 13, 1935, part 1, 26.
72. Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 189, 191.
73. McCoy, Landon of Kansas, 236. On the “relief vote,” see Weed, The Nemesis of Reform, 73.
74. LAT, January 13, 1935, part 1, 26.
75. Mark Sullivan, “Roosevelt Master of Modern Political Art,” LAT, June 13, 1935, part 2, 5; the style of
wording is due to the fact that the citation was drawn from a subtitle.
76. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany
from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich (New York: Fertig, 1975).
77. McCoy, Landon of Kansas, 235.
78. Palmer, This Man Landon, 244. The insights on propaganda studies are from Frezza, Il leader, la folla,
238-248.
79. Cited in Lewis L. Gould, Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans (New York: Random House,
2003), 274.
80. Douglas B. Craig, Fireside Politics: Radio and the Political Culture of the United States (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2000), 155.
81. Adams, “The Unfinished Business,” 59.
82. Sullivan, “Roosevelt Master of Modern Political Art,” 5.
83. Hoover, The Challenge, 135-136.
84. Craig, Fireside Politics, 151, 145-150.
85. Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 183.
86. Hoover, The Challenge, 76-79. Each of these issues is treated more extensively in Herbert Hoover, The
Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Great Depression, 1929-1941 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), especially part 3,
“The Aftermath,” 351-485.
87. Rossiter, Conservatism in America, 189-190.
318
maurizio vaudagna
89. Michael Kammen, Spheres of Liberty: Changing Perceptions of Liberty in American Culture (Madison:
The University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 102.
90. Ibidem, 105.
91. Palmer, This Man Landon, 243. On rhetorical questions, see McCoy, Landon of Kansas, 334.
92. Ibidem.
93. Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive, 223.
94. James Truslow Adams, “The Unfinished Business,” Yale Review, 35, 1, September 1935, 57-58. On J.T.
Adams, see Arthur A. Ekirch Jr., Ideologies and Utopias: The Impact of the New Deal on American Thought
(Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969), 7-11.
95. Ibidem, 57.
96. Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in the 20th
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 78-79.
97. Ekirch, Ideologies and Utopias, 196-197.
98. Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 2006), 6, 82, 187.
100. Palmer, This Man Landon, 241; Ogden L. Mills, Liberalism Fights On (New York: Macmillan, 1936).
101. Frank R. Kent, “The Great Game of Politics,” LAT, May 31, 1935, part 1, 4.
102. Schlesinger, “The Unfinished Business,” 230.
104. Ibidem, 480.
105. Ibidem, 479.
106. Schlesinger, “The Unfinished Business,” 224.
107. “Roosevelt Condemned,” LAT, August 13, 1935, part 2, 2.
108. Cited in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 117.
109. “Shouse Wraps President,” LAT, December 24, 1935, part 1, 4.
110. “No Aid from New Deal,” LAT, December 25, 1935, 3; LAT, December 30, 1935, part 2, 5; “Farm
Mob Beats Federal Officers to Block Auction,” LAT, August 16, 1935, part 1, 1.
111. LAT, August 17, 1935, part 2, 3.
112. “New Deal Called Red,” LAT, December 27, 1935, part 2,1.
113. Gould, Grand Old Party, 277.
114. Walter Lippmann, “Watchman: What of the Night,” LAT, January 2, 1935, part 2, 4.
116. Ibidem, 49.
319
117. Gould, Grand Old Party, 268. The nickname “Mr. Republican” is in the title of Taft’s biography: James
T. Patterson, Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972).
118. “Republican Leaders Give Views on Reorganization,” LAT, January 13, 1935, part 1, 26.
119. Mussolini is cited in Hoover, The Challenge, 66.
120. Gourevitch, Politics in Hard Times, 147-148, 153.
121. Wolfskill and Hudson, All but the People, 134.
122. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt, 278.
123. Hoover, The Challenge, 55-60.
124. Harris, William Beveridge, 415-435.
125. Ibidem, 73.
126. Hoover, The Challenge, 58, and cited in John Calvin Batchelor, “Aren’t You Glad You Joined the Republicans:”
A Short History of the GOP (New York: Holt, 1996), 230.
129. “Supreme Court Rules NRA Codes Invalid,” LAT, May 28, 1935, part 1, 1.
130. Ibidem, part 2, 4.
131. Cited in ibidem, part 1, 3.
132. Frank R. Kent, “The Great Game of Politics,” part 1, 4.
133. Brinkley, Liberalism, 281.
134. “Supreme Court Rules NRA Codes Invalid,” LAT, May 28, 1935, part 1, 3. “The Court Nullifies the
New Deal” is the title that Justice Robert H. Jackson, Attorney General in 1940 and a staunch supporter
of the New Deal, gave to the chapter dealing with judicial events of 1935 in his study of the relationship
between the judiciary and the executive in the thirties; Robert H. Jackson, The Struggle for Judicial Supremacy
(New York: Random, 1941), 86-123.
135. Mayer, The Republican Party, 435.
136. Ibidem; “The Expected Happens,” LAT, December 24, 1935, part 2, 4.
137. “Hail the New Year,” LAT, January 1, 1936, part 2, 4.
139. James Truslow Adams, “The Unfinished Business,” 56.
140. Reported in the column “Current Comment” in LAT, January 2, 1936, part 2, 4. On May 28, 1935,
the Los Angeles Times reported the opinion of Rep. Monaghan from Montana who doubted that the nine
Supreme Court justices could overturn the popular will expressed through the New Deal; LAT. May 28,
1935, part 1, 3.
141. Karl Mannheim, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction: Studies in Modern Social Structure (London:
Routledge, 1940).
142. Karl Mannheim, “On the Diagnosis of Our Time,” in Kurt H. Wolff (ed.), From Karl Mannheim
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 364. See also Alberto Castelli, “Pianificazione e libertà. Il dibattito tra Hayek e Barbara Wootton,” Il Politico, 66, 3 (2001), 403-404.
143. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998), 198.
320
maurizio vaudagna
144. Harold Laski, “Liberty” in Edwin R. A. Seligman, Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York:
Macmillan, 1948; first edition 1933), 445-446. Harold Laski had written Liberty in the Modern State in
1930, one of many books of the 1930s addressed to the notion of liberty in a government-led society; see,
Isaac Kramnick and Barry Sheerman, Harold Laski: A Life on the Left (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1993),
285-286, 380-381.
145. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (London: Bodley, 1980), 311.
146. Walter Lippmann, “Watchman,” 4.
147. Kammen, Spheres of Liberty, 129.
148. Hoff Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Forgotten Progressive, 215.
149. Weed, The Nemesis of Reform, 83.
321
MULTIDIRECTIONAL EMIGRATIONS
EXILES AND REFUGEES DURING THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION
manuel plana
In 1926-1927, on behalf of the Social Research Council, Manuel Gamio (1883-1960)
– a Columbia University educated anthropologist specialized in native Mexican
civilization – undertook a study of Mexican migratory flows to the United States, mostly
temporary movements with annual returns. Unlike his American colleagues that dealt
with Mexican migration at the time, Gamio singled out the relationship between Mexican
migration and the revolution, premising with a few general remarks:
Excepting Argentina, Uruguay and perhaps Chile, the Latin-American countries are much alike
in social, ethnic, and cultural structure, and their historic antecedents and traditions are more or
less the same… Mexico, however, is an exception in so far as no other Latin-American country has
had so many, such severe, and such almost continuous revolutions, especially in the last quarter
of a century. Fundamentally, these revolutions, in Mexico as well as in similar Latin-American
countries, are caused by the heterogeneous nature of these countries, economically, racially, culturally, socially, and linguistically. This heterogeneity is a characteristic of such nations, made up of
Indians, mestizos, and whites, each with different needs and aspirations, divergent and sometimes
antagonistic to each other…
In the case of Mexico, an immediate and direct cause of revolution is also to be found on the states
on the border, both Mexican and American. Owing to the cultural contact between Mexicans
and Americans the immigrant resident Mexicans in the United States are generally involuntary
but effective agents of such revolutions. This statement does not have reference to the revolutions
stirred up by Mexicans more or less supported by discontented American interests, nor to those
created by Mexican politicians, immigrants in the Unites States - that is, professional conspirators
or exiled political losers. Such uprisings are temporary and artificial, whereas those caused by the
factors we just mentioned have had the character of continuous, real, and inevitable social movements… When there were no railroads, and only desert lay between Mexico and the United States,
revolution was purely domestic product, for the echoes of great social movement elsewhere were
faint in Mexico and scarcely reached the people. When the railroads joined these two countries,
however, and the people entered upon a period of more intimate contact, Mexican immigrants
came to the United States and returned with ideas and memories of a better way of living… Then
followed demands for better living conditions, and since the officials – eternally unaware of social
phenomena – did not satisfy these demands, the revolutions which have torn Mexico almost from
the beginning of this century broke out.
This is proved by the fact that since the time of President Madero to the present date, the route
of revolution has been from north to south, and the presidents and many of the ministers and
high military powers have been born in the border states, and some of them have been educated
in the United States or have lived in that country.”1
325
exiles and refugees during the mexican revolution
The proximity of the border nourished a flow of temporary Mexican refugees and
illegal immigrants to American cities along the international border between 1910 and
1920. This contributed to the creation of a network that increased trade with revolutionary groups. Official data collected by American authorities do not show the entity of the
migratory phenomenon because only the number of legal immigrants and temporary
workers was recorded at the time.2 Later inquiries, based on other statistical figures, have
shown that refugees were not registered, and when more restrictive measures were adopted
in 1917, they were regarded as illegal residents. Estimates drawn from these studies indicate that a million and a half people arrived in the United States illegally (and stayed for
different periods of time) – as opposed to the slightly more than two hundred thousand
legal immigrants.3 The main distinction to be drawn is between the annual immigration
for economic reasons (obtained through censuses), and that of refugees caused by revolutions – from 1911 and especially from 1913 among the civilian population – as well
as political exiles that did not intend to move permanently. The latter group comprised
representatives of various political orientations and factions (civilians, military, clergy,
etc.) and included dissidents of the predominant revolutionary groups. In 1911, northern
Mexico became the center of the armed revolution, thus nourishing both legal commerce
and contraband. Political tensions arose between the local authorities that wanted to
secure the borders, and the federal government that pursued first a neutral foreign policy
during the administration of William A. Taft, and then a prudent policy of “watchful
waiting” under Woodrow Wilson.4 The increase of commercial relations and American
investments in Mexico at the end of the nineteenth century had caused the formation of
a dense network of American consulates that provided almost daily information during
the revolution. These sources have often been used in historiography to reconstruct the
various events concerning the two countries at both the local, and the diplomatic level,
and are still indispensable documents today.5
The summer of 1914 was a crucial moment that helped determine some changes in
Euro-Atlantic relations in Latin America. The start of World War One, along with the
opening of the Panama Canal, caused a reduction in European influence – especially commercial influence – in Latin America, with the consequent strengthening of the United
States on the continental level. This change was sudden in Mexico, not only as a consequence of the trade limitations with Germany, but also because the counterrevolutionary
coup initiated in February, 1913 by General Victoriano Huerta against the constitutional
government of Francisco I. Madero came to an end. On July 15, 1914, the fall of Huerta
brought about the dissolution of the Mexican state and opened a convulsive era of civil
war that lasted until the passing of a new Constitution in 1917 and the establishment
of the constitutional government of Venustiano Carranza.6 U.S. policy is summed up in
the following remarks by Friedrich Katz:
326
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When the second phase of the Mexican Revolution erupted in the spring of 1913, profound
differences emerged between the European powers and the newly inaugurated U.S. president,
Woodrow Wilson. This time the Europeans realized they were dealing with a social revolution and
they wanted to crush it with Huerta’s military government, which they had helped to install. By
contrast, Woodrow Wilson, after some hesitation, wanted to use the revolution to mold Mexico
into a model for Latin America and perhaps for all underdeveloped countries; he wanted Mexico to
have a parliamentary democracy with free elections and an orderly transfer of government. Wilson
opposed social upheavals, which might threaten the system of free enterprise, but he advocated
some kind of agrarian reform, never specifying at whose expense and in what way it should take
place. He wanted the holdings of American investors to be guaranteed and for Mexico to limit
the influence of European governments and European business interests, which he considered
imperialistic. Wilson wanted Mexico to turn to the United States for guidance and counseling.
The European powers in Mexico were so inhibited by the fear of antagonizing the United States
and by their increasing mutual rivalries that their policies failed completely. After the outbreak of
World War One in July 1914, the policies of all great powers in Mexico became subordinated to
the imperatives of the war. At that point a profound change in the attitudes of European powers
toward revolutionary movements began to occur.”7
Unlike the United States, most European countries had recognized Huerta’s government in the spring of 1913, laying the groundwork for a reciprocal diplomatic crisis with
Mexico and the U.S. that proved unsolvable until the end of the First World War. The
various European communities in Mexico that had commercial, industrial, and financial
interests in the country had lobbied their own governments for the recognition of Huerta
in the hopes of protecting their interests from the threat of the revolution. Spaniards made
up the largest foreign community (29,541 people among the 117,119 foreign residents in
Mexico, according to the 1910 census; the American community was equally important,
along with smaller groups of European, Asian, Middle-Eastern, and Central American
citizens). They were well integrated for historical reasons, better integrated than other
communities were, and they strongly supported Huerta’s counterrevolution. The pressure
of revolutionaries in northern Mexico targeted local oligarchies (like Luis Terrazas’ clan in
Chihuahua), as well as the wealthy Spanish community.8 British and German efforts to
influence Mexican events in an attempt to defend their own interests in the continent or
to establish an anti-American cooperation with other European powers (namely France)
proved unfeasible and caused friction.9 Unlike other European countries with interests
in Mexico, Germany took the initiative, especially from mid-1914 on, considering the
possibility of an American intervention in Mexico, thus binding the U.S. to a continental policy to stop its cooperation with allies in Europe.10 With the aid of conservative
Mexican exiles in Texas, and of German agents in the United States, General Huerta
became the protagonist of a vast conspiracy against the revolutionaries. Huerta left his
exile in Barcelona, Spain, and moved to New York in the spring of 1915. From there he
went to Texas where he was arrested and jailed in Fort Bliss. At that point, he was already
327
sick and he died in early January 1916. This failed conspiracy dealt a sweeping blow to
the efforts of organizing a counterrevolution on American soil.11
The 1910 uprising of Francisco I. Madero against the latest reelection of Porfirio
Díaz to the presidency was organized in San Antonio, Texas, where Madero was rather
popular in the Mexican community. The insurrection involved rural areas of northern
Mexican states, especially Chihuahua, where Madero relocated in mid-February 1911
in order to coordinate the movement. The attack on Ciudad Juárez by popular fighters
from the north districts of Chihuahua and Madero supporters in early May 1911 led to
the resignation of Porfirio Díaz and the formation of a provisional government with the
task of convening new presidential elections (won by Madero in the fall of that year).12
The presence of anti-reelection exiles – with juntas formed in San Antonio, Laredo,
El Paso, and other smaller towns along the border – was well received by the majority
of the Mexican-American community in light of the desire to promote democracy in
Mexico. Madero and the anti-reelection exiles acted discreetly, respecting all U.S. laws
to obtain weapons and proving capable of moving in the vast geographical space of the
Big Ben.13 The various demonstrations of political opposition to Porfirio Díaz’s regime
had been promoted by the liberal circles of the early years of the twentieth century.
Governmental repression had forced some exponents, mainly Ricardo Flores Magón,
to flee to the United States and start a movement with small groups in San Antonio,
St. Louis, and Los Angeles. With a peak between 1906 and 1908, they organized a series
of uprisings in the border regions of Mexico, drawing upon a radical ideological platform
oriented around the theme of social revolution. Antagonists of Madero, these groups took
autonomous initiatives in Baja California in 1911.14
The fear that the ongoing military confrontation between the revolutionary groups
supporting Madero and the Mexican federal army (protracted around Ciudad Juárez
until the truce and agreements of May 21, 1911 that ended Porfirio Díaz’s regime) might
involve the American population in El Paso forced cooperation between local and federal
American authorities. Hence, the Taft administration formed a “Maneuver Division”
of the U.S. Army based in Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, displacing a quarter of
American forces in Texas until the summer of 1911.15 The local press and American
consuls in border cities have left us numerous accounts and testimonies of these events.
The rise of Madero to the presidency in Mexico (1911-1913) caused the exile to France
of a relatively small group of men (aging ministers and advisors) tied to Porfirio Díaz.16
The first contrasts among Madero’s supporters (members of the upper-middle
classes) occurred at the end of 1911: some dissidents – such as Bernardo Reyes, former
governor of Nuevo León, and Emilio Vázquez Gómez, home secretary of the provisional
government – moved to San Antonio and El Paso (which quickly became the destination
of most exiles), as well as to New Orleans, New York, and California. Various attempts
to use American territory to oppose Madero’s government failed because they were not
328
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supported by Mexican-Americans (most of whom welcomed the political change), and
because they openly organized their armed purposes, thus breaking neutrality laws. In
fact, some of the most notorious anti-Madero militants were temporarily arrested as
a consequence.17 In March 1912, the rebellion against Madero by Pascual Orozco – a
protagonist of the previous year’s uprising, and now a promoter of a radical program – attracted lower classes and anarchists. The rebellion was quickly defeated by the federal
army and its supporters fled to American border regions. Orozco’s rebellion concerned
the strengthened surveillance along the border on the part of local American authorities.18
With Ciudad Júarez changing political administrations seven times between 1911 and
1919, the problem would resurface several times.19
During 1913 the fighting between revolutionary groups in Mexican border cities
and the federal army loyal to Huerta (who had not been purged and represented the
conservative social bloc) caused the transfer of Mexican soldiers, customs officials, and
civilians into American territory, creating problems for local U.S. authorities. The problem
surfaced immediately in the state of Coahuila, where Governor Venustiano Carranza tried
to organize a movement against Huerta (starting in February-March, 1913) and established
his own government in Piedras Negras for six months (the city had been called Ciudad
Porfirio Díaz from December 1, 1888, and is referred to thus in the accounts of American
consuls). On the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, connected to the twin city of Eagle
Pass, Texas, by an international bridge, Piedras Negras was an important railroad hub on
the Ferrocarril Internacional Mexicano. From El Paso to Brownsville, on the mouths of the
Rio Grande, Texas borders with important states of northern Mexico – from Chihuahua
to Tamaulipas. Piedras Negras became the critical location because of the centrality of
the railroad branch that linked important economic regions of northern Mexico between
Torreón and Monterrey, but also because of Governor Carranza’s political courage long
before he became the national leader of the revolutionary front.20 According to 1913
estimates by American federal agents, the Mexican population in the border counties of
Texas numbered around ninety-eight thousand residents – as opposed to 103 thousand
Americans – and some of the towns with slightly more than a thousand inhabitants, from
Rio Grande City to Mission, had a Mexican majority. Like many other border towns,
Piedras Negras, in the state of Coahuila, changed administrations so often as to worry
local Texan authorities; Mexican refugees in American territory, however, provided a
network for commercial activities.21 Democratic Governor Oscar B. Colquitt of Texas – a
conservative lawyer and journalist – had won reelection in January 1913. After Madero’s
assassination and the beginning of the second revolution, he had worked at preserving
security along the border, although such a duty, as well as the management of customs,
was actually a federal responsibility. With the difficulties of 1911-1912 in mind, Colquitt
tried to enhance the role of the state militia with federal aid, thus sparking continuous
controversy: he advocated an assertive intervention by the American government, which
329
was not always in accordance with the general direction of U.S. policy toward Mexico
because of the local repercussions in terms of border security.22
On February 26, 1913, Jesús Carranza – brother of Coahuila Governor Venustiano –
seized Piedras Negras (a city with 12,000 inhabitants, according to the 1910 census)
after the withdrawal of the federal garrison a few days earlier, and took control of the
post office and customs headquarters. In his letters and telegrams, American Consul
Luther T. Ellsworth informed the Department of State that Jesús Carranza supported
his brother’s decision to fight Huerta’s government, and that some Mexican families had
moved to Eagle Pass. However, the situation was not alarming – except for the Spanish
residents (mostly tradesmen) who feared arrest over the refusal to contribute to a forced
loan imposed to support the volunteer corps.23 Unlike in other border areas, the situation
came to be stabilized in this northern part of Coahuila because the supporters of Governor
Venustiano Carranza stopped Huerta’s federal forces – those that had occupied Saltillo,
the capital, on March 8 – in the central regions of the state; while surveillance on the
American side helped relieve fears that Mexican refugees might attack Piedras Negras.24
Ellsworth reported, however, that American residents in cities along the railroad line
from Monclova to Piedras Negras moved to Eagle Pass and other Texan cities immediately.25 In early April 1913, Sergeant M.W. Hines of the Texas Ranger Force stated in a
telegram that about 1,800 Mexicans “who are strong partisans and represent practically
every faction from Mexico” were in Eagle Pass and its vicinity, and that “the Mexican
element of [Ciudad Porfirio] Díaz, across the river from Eagle Pass are over here in large
numbers, most of them seem to be in favor of the Huerta government, while the American
Mexicans who live here are strongly against the Huerta government.” At the same time,
the informer underscored the daily smuggling of weapons in the various points east of
Eagle Pass out to Laredo, denouncing the difficulties experienced by local authorities
because the enforcement of neutrality laws was under the jurisdiction of federal forces
who did not always seek their cooperation.26
The border between Sonora and Arizona (a territory that joined the Union in February
1914, becoming its forty-eight state) was not subject to particular tension. Only in March
and April 1913, when Sonora’s revolutionaries seized the cities of Nogales, Naco, and
Agua Prieta, did worries arise because of the region’s strategic importance for international
trade and state finances. A few hundred Mexican federal soldiers were stationed in these
towns with patrol duties and little combat preparedness. The ease of crossing the border
with the United States induced constant emigration.27 At dawn on March 13, 1913,
revolutionary troops led by Alvaro Obregón occupied the small town of Nogales after
carefully informing U.S. officials of the maneuvers to avoid conflicts. After only some
minor battles, Mexican federal troops led by General Emilio Kosterlitzky surrendered and
moved to the American side of Nogales, handing over their weapons.28 Between March
16 and 18, 209 Yaqui soldiers recruited by the federal troops of General Pedro Ojeda
330
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(who commanded the Naco and Cananea divisions from Agua Prieta) had deserted and
crossed the border – they asked not to be repatriated to avoid possible retaliation. The
commander of the Ninth Cavalry Division in Naco stated, “I think it bad policy to hold
such prisoners longer than absolutely necessary.”29 Another 216 men from Ojeda’s federal
army had deserted in Naco on March 19.30 Besides, a group of 150 women and children
following the federal army along (an old practice to avoid desertion among recruits) had
been transferred to Naco a few days earlier in anticipation of the clash between Obregón’s
revolutionaries and Ojeda’s federal forces.31 Ojeda’s division – 260 officers and enlisted
men that had left Agua Prieta and Cananea for Naco after a few days of siege – crossed
the border on April 13, when Mexican revolutionaries (or “constitutionalists,” sometimes
referred to as “revolutionists” by American consuls) occupied Naco.32 At the time, according to a War Department telegram, more than 300 feds had set up camp in the American
town along with the Yaqui soldiers that had arrived a month earlier.33 American officials
envisioned the possibility of guaranteeing immediate assistance followed by repatriation via Ciudad Juárez, which was still controlled by Huerta’s federal troops. American
supporters of the revolutionary efforts complained that repatriation would be a form of
aid to Huerta’s government: among the many possible solutions – including that of the
soldiers’ repatriation in areas not under governmental control – was Wilson’s decision to
host them in internment camps on American soil.34 At the end of April 1913, the firm
control of towns bordering with Sonora relieved tensions in the entire region.
The most complex situation was still in northern Coahuila – securely controlled by
Carranza’s supporters with the federal army’s pressure centered on Saltillo and Monclova.
Consul Ellsworth was informed from Piedras Negras of their contacts in San Antonio
and Austin, as well as the situation around Monclova in July, when the fighting spread
to the entire northern region of the state, and refugees and wounded men escaped to the
north. The mayor of Eagle Pass, himself a friend and supporter of Carranza, worked to
facilitate care of the wounded in the city hospital.35 The disruption of work in the Sabinas
coalmines, north of Monclova – the most important carboniferous region in the country – caused the transfer of the two thousand Japanese workers that had been employed
there since the beginning of the century to the safer area of Piedras Negras. According
to Ellsworth’s information, Carranza agreed to deploy them as fighters through the mediation of Seichi Segatani, a military expert that lived in Piedras Negras and cooperated
with a San Francisco-based Japanese newspaper.36 Reports from the local press informed
the governor of Texas of the rising number of refugees and the growing apprehension
of the American population.37 In early September 1913, the federal army division in
Coahuila carried out an offensive into the northern part of the state under the command
of General Joaquín Maas, Jr. On September 8, it occupied Las Vacas (Ciudad Acuña),
west of Piedras Negras, scaring the local population away and across the river to the
Texan town of Del Rio.38 At the end of September, the federal army launched a massive
offensive to occupy Piedras Negras. On October 1, Carranza’s supporters abandoned
331
the city without damaging property or harming people and left an official to maintain
public order until the feds’ arrival, while the population tried to cross the international
bridge.39 General Maas’ troops entered Piedras Negras peacefully in the early afternoon
of October 7, 1913,40 but the civilian population had already moved to U.S. territory in
the previous days. Telegrams from local officials drew a picture that concerned civilian
as well as military authorities. On October 3, information received by the Secretary of
State described the situation as follows:
Owing to the fact that a panic exists in Piedras Negras and the people of that section have been
to fear personal danger upon the coming of the federals rush been created to this side and the
immigration department has let the bars down permitting every person to enter. At the present
time there are something like eight thousand refugees on this side and rush has just commenced.
Probably six thousand of those here are destitute and sick and in a deplorable condition. The
weather is cold and wet and these people are laying around on the streets and always helpless.
The City of Eagle Pass and the County of Maverick are unable to take care of them. There is no
reason for the exodus to this side; no danger to them should they remain in their own country.
If something is not done immediately to stop this influx thousands of destitute and sick from a
radium of seventy-five miles of Piedras Negras will be added to those now here.41
The civilian population tried to reach Eagle Pass until the eve of the federals’ arrival
to the degree that on October 6, American Vice Consul William P. Blocker reported that
about four thousand refugees were trying to enter American territory.42 Department of
Labor agencies reported that they were trying to assist refugees in such difficult conditions
by setting up emergency relief camps: days later, there were still seven thousand people
that did not want to return to Mexico fearing recruitment by the federal army.43
After Madero’s assassination, the revolutionary front in Chihuahua was fragmented:
local popular groups proliferated after March 1913, and Pancho Villa distinguished
himself by a number of actions, occupying large estates and distributing goods to the
population. Villa also proved his natural disposition to maintaining order among revolutionary fighters. Huerta’s federal army had enhanced its presence in the state capital,
launching several offensives against the revolutionaries between July and August 1913, and
also controlling Ciudad Juárez, the most important connection with the United States.
Revolutionary leaders in Chihuahua, Durango, and La Laguna grasped the importance
of establishing a unified command: at the end of September, they assigned Pancho Villa
the task of engaging against the federal army in Torreón, the center of the rich cotton
region of La Laguna and also a strategic railway hub. The city was seized on October 1, but
remained under the revolutionaries’ control for only two months.44 At first, Villa thought
he could accomplish a similar exploit to conquer Chihuahua – when he was forced to give
up the project he occupied Ciudad Juárez with a surprise move on November 15, 1913.45
The city was controlled by Villa’s troops and, as American consul Thomas D. Edwards
recalls, there were no relevant cases of exodus.46 On November 23, the federal army was
defeated by Villa’s men south of Ciudad Juárez. Salvador Mercado, commander of the
332
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federal forces, chose to abandon Chihuahua and pull back to Ojinaga, the only city on
the American border still under federal control.47 The evacuation of federal troops and
Huerta’s civilian supporters from Chihuahua began on December 3 along the railroad
line to Ojinaga – in the meantime, two American cavalry regiments departed Marfa
for Presidio to control Mexican troops as they prepared to transfer to Ojinaga, where a
thousand feds had already settled by December 10.48
On December 8, Pancho Villa arrived in Chihuahua and was elected military governor
of the state by acclamation, thus having to deal with the economic and political problems,
as well as the military issues of the general fight against Huerta. Villa immediately organized the revolutionary administration and sanctioned the confiscation of all possessions
of landlords (the powerful local oligarchy), creating a specific commission to manage this
confiscated estate. In an effort to gain the benevolence of the Wilson administration, the
provision did not apply to American citizens, nor did it apply to American companies
that operated in the state and Mormon communities in the north.49 One of Villa’s first
provisions, enacted on December 9, ordered the confiscation of property and the ejection
of all Spaniards, who were considered comparable to the Mexican ruling class for historical reasons. Spaniards were widely unpopular in northern Mexico because they managed
rural estates and were active in important commercial sectors, such as Spanish Consul
Federico Sisniega, who was a textile entrepreneur and owned shares of banks and food
industries.50 Despite efforts by consular officials to have the provisions pulled or postponed,
on December 12 all Spaniards left Chihuahua (about 500 people, including relatives)
aboard special trains en route to El Paso and Torreón – although in other cities (such as
Parral) they were not targeted due to their small number.51 The Spanish communities of
Mexico City, Veracruz, and Orizaba activated in order to help their fellow countrymen
(even through political propaganda) and quickly raised funds to support them.52
In early 1914, federal troops pulled back toward Ojinaga under pressure from Pancho
Villa’s popular army: expecting their defeat, American authorities had already prepared to
authorize their crossover and internment. In the first days of January 1914, some of the
women and children that followed the federal army’s soldiers along were authorized to
cross over in Presidio (on the American side), and some of the wounded were assisted in
the local church with aid from the Red Cross.53 The battle to occupy Ojinaga lasted from
the 9th to the 13th of January, when federal forces eventually crossed the border. When
they surrendered, soldiers crossed the border with horses, rifles, and other military equipment, thus causing problems relevant to American officials: the garrison was composed
of 3,357 men (officers and enlisted men), 1,256 women, and 554 children.54
In the spring of 1914, once Villa controlled the state of Chihuahua and revolutionary
groups mobilized against Huerta in Sonora, mid-northern Coahuila, Nuevo León, and
Tamaulipas, the federal army strengthened its presence in Torreón, a region considered
crucial to stop the advance of the northern revolutionaries toward the center of the country.
333
On April 2, after a few days of fierce battle, Villa’s División del Norte occupied the city
of Torreón and the cotton region. The area – which remained under Villa’s control until
September 1915 – was governed like Chihuahua, with a local commission in charge of
managing confiscated land to guarantee its production.55 The rich Spanish community in
the region had identified itself with Huerta’s policies: Villa imposed forced loans on the
Spaniards and confiscated their properties. American consul George Carothers reported
that Spaniards had gathered in their consular facilities and that on April 3 Villa had accused them of morally and materially supporting Huerta’s government and the federal
army. Villa had been irremovable with the Spaniards: on the evening of April 6, a train
was provided that took them from Torreón to Piedras Negras, from where – documents
and the press show – they left for various destinations in the United States.56 In this case,
however, due to the inactivity of Spanish diplomacy, Spaniards tried to organize themselves
autonomously and pressured the officials of Villa who were interested in the cotton trade
for self-financing purposes. Besides, the Spanish community took advantage of its prestige
to obtain financial aid from other Spaniards in Mexico and from the powerful Hispanic
community in Cuba. These funds were essential to their repatriation, to the point that
around three thousand Spaniards residing in Mexico had managed to return to Spain by
May 1914.57 Rafael Arocena, a great landlord of Basque origin in La Laguna, moved to
New York instead, where he became an active cotton merchant.58
In April 1914, when revolutionaries controlled the border regions, Texas governor
Oscar B. Colquitt stated that between twenty and thirty thousand refugees lived in cities
along the border and caused social unrest with the local population.59 San Antonio became
a common destination for Mexicans: in early 1914, six to eight thousand Mexicans lived
in the suburbs of the city, a thousand of whom could be considered refugees. In January
1915, the main San Antonio newspaper summed up the situation by stating that two or
three thousand members of the higher classes (i.e., Madero’s extended family) lived in the
city, along with five to eight thousand of the middle class, and about twenty thousand
workers.60 The month of April 1914, simultaneous to the constitutional front’s initiatives
in the north, was marked by contrasts between the United States and Huerta’s government
in the oil region of Tampico and northern Veracruz – to the degree that on April 21,
President Wilson decided to deploy a naval taskforce to occupy the port of Veracruz
in an attempt to force its fall and break the stall. The event and its domestic, as well as
international, repercussions have been accurately reconstructed by historiography.61
In December 1913, Venustiano Carranza had issued a provision against Huerta and
his supporters in the name of the constitutionalist movement. The decree targeted wide
sectors of the middle class, as well as journalists, intellectuals, and university students.62 In
September 1914 – after the federal army’s defeat and quick dissolution in the battle of Zacatecas (June 1914) and the revolutionaries’ entrance into Mexico City – Huerta’s civilian
cooperators, officials at various levels of the administration, army officers, and ecclesiastical
334
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hierarchies, along with representatives of regional elites, left the country. It was a massive
exile of the conservative block, also known as the reacción mexicana. Between the 24th and
the 27th of September, for example, four ships left Veracruz for Havana, Galveston, and
ports on the Texan coast. In the summer of 1914, Huerta’s secretary of education, Nemesio
García Naranjo moved to San Antonio, where he founded the weekly Revista Mexicana,
the most important journal of the opposition to the constitutional movement. In early
1915, Huerta’s foreign minister Federico Gamboa established the Asamblea Pacificadora
Mexicana and was expelled at the beginning of 1915 (he went to Havana).63 Many of
these political exiles went to Guatemala or Cuba – some even went to Europe for brief
periods (though the war made this a more difficult destination). Most, however, went
to the United States to seek better economic opportunities or to organize opposition to
the revolutionary groups. The exodus was caused mainly by fear of the revolutionaries’
victory and possible retaliation.64
Villa’s civilian cooperators fled to the United States following his defeat in the fall
of 1915. Numerous attempts had been launched that year to avoid consolidation of
Venustiano Carranza’s government, which had already been recognized de facto by the
Wilson administration on October 19. Hoping to spoil the political relationship between
Wilson and Carranza, Pancho Villa attacked the town of Columbus, New Mexico on
March 9, 1916, causing an American reaction that culminated in the “punitive expedition”
to Chihuahua. The American presence in northern Mexico from February 1917, and the
later engagement in the Great War, determined a closer control of border areas.65
For eight months, from August 1915 until March 1916, a new wave of exiles and
refugees – mainly individuals and small groups – took their place among Villa’s cooperators. Victoria Lerner has divided these exiles into three main categories: first of all,
Villa’s diplomatic representatives and financial agents who were in the United States
when Carranza was recognized by the American government and thus lost their political
functions; Villa’s cooperators in Sonora and Chihuahua; and, finally, the revolutionary
leaders that had fought against Carranza’s forces moving toward American border cities.66 After the occupation of Columbus, American authorities increased surveillance
of these exiles – including Huerta’s sustainers that had initially operated in American
territory – also arresting some of them; from this moment on, more controls occurred
in the border areas (especially in El Paso) with a significant Mexican population where,
according to the estimates, seven thousand exiles were stationed.67 The life of Mexican
exiles in the United States – starting from the reconstruction of profiles of single important
characters – has been the object of a collective study currently in preparation under the
supervision of Victoria Lerner (Seminario “Exiliados de la Revolución Mexican,” Istituto
de Investigaciones Históricas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2000-2001).68
In general, they experienced difficulties adapting,69 but the exiles’ main difference, compared with refugees and immigrants for economic reasons, lies in the fact that they tried
335
to act on the political level during their stay in the United States, in order to influence
the Mexican situation until Carranza’s death in 1920. Such behavior did not help their
integration into American society, yet it had a political and cultural role in the Mexican
community in the United States, prompting them to return to Mexico as soon as political
conditions became favorable.70
336
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1. M. Gamio, Mexican Immigration to the United States: A Study of Human Migration and Adjustment. The
American Immigration Collection, New York, Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969. [1st ed.: Chicago,
The University of Chicago Press, 1930], 159-160; M. Gamio, The Mexican Immigrant, His Life-Story (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1931).
2. According to American censuses, the Mexican immigrant population was: 103,393 (1900), 221,915
(1910), 486,418 (1920), and 890,746 (1926, estimate): M. Gamio, The Mexican Immigrant, 2.
3. L. Hall and D.M. Coerver, Revolución en la frontera (México: Conaculta, 1995), 202.
4. See F. Katz, The Secret War in Mexico: Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981).
5. See B. Ulloa, La Revolución más allá del Bravo. Guía de documentos relativos a México en archivos de Estados
Unidos, 1900-1948 (México: El Colegio de México, 1991); Diplomacia y Revolución. Homenaje a Berta Ulloa
(México: El Colegio de México, 2000).
6. See B. Ulloa, “La lucha armada (1911-1920),” Historia general de México (México: El Colegio de México,
1977), v. 4, pp. 3 ss.
7. F. Katz, The Secret War in Mexico, 551.
8. Estadísticas Históricas de México, México Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática,
1985, t. I, 43; M. Cerutti and O. Flores, Españoles en el Norte de México. Propietarios, empresarios y diplomacia
(1850-1920) (Monterrey: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, 1997); A. Delgado Larios, La Revolución
Mexicana en la España de Alfonso XIII (1910-1931) (Salamanca: Junta de Castilla y León, 1993).
9. P. Py, Francia y la Revolución Mexicana, 1910-1920, o la desaparición de una potencia mediana (México:
FCE, 1991).
10. F. Katz, The Secret War in Mexico, 210 ss.
11. M.C. Meyer, Huerta. Un retrato político (México: Editorial Domés, 1983), 235 ss.; D.M. Coerver and
L.B. Hall, Texas and the Mexican Revolution: A Study in State and National Border Policy, 1910-1920, San
Antonio, Trinity University Press, 1984, pp. 109-116.
12. See A. Knight, The Mexican Revolution, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, v. I.
13. P.V.N. Henderson, Mexican Exiles in the Borderlands 1910-1913 (El Paso: The University of Texas at El
Paso, 1979), 11-16.
14. See W.D. Raat, Revoltosos. Mexico’s Rebels in the United States, 1903-1923 (College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 1981).
15. D.M. Coerver and L.B. Hall, Texas and the Mexican Revolution, 23-27.
16. See C. Tello Díaz, El exilio: Un relato de familia (México: Cal y Arena, 1993).
17. P.V.N. Henderson, Mexican Exiles in the Borderlands, 1910-1913, 20-26.
18. Ibid., 26-29.
19. D.M. Coerver and L.B. Hall, Texas and the Mexican Revolution, 3.
20. D. Richmond, La lucha nacionalista de Venustiano Carranza (1893-1920) (México: FCE, 1986);
M.E. Santoscoy et al., Breve historia de Coahuila (México: FCE, 2000).
21. M. Plana, “Las finanzas de la Revolución Mexicana,” Cuadernos de Investigación, Saltillo, Universidad
Autónoma de Coahuila, n. 6, (1992): 39-40.
22. D.M. Coerver and L.B. Hall, Texas and the Mexican Revolution, 81-82.
337
23. National Archives Washington. Record Group 59. Microfilm 274. Records of the Department of State
Relating to Internal Affairs of Mexico, 1910-1929: NAW, 812.00/6475, L.T. Ellsworth to the Secretary of
State, Ciudad Porfirio Diaz, February 26, 1913; 812.00/6400, L.T. Ellsworth to the Department of State,
Eagle Pass, February 27, 1913.
24. NAW, 812.00/6665, L.T. Ellsworth to the Secretary of State, Ciudad Porfirio Diaz, March 13, 1913.
25. NAW, 812.00/6752, L.T. Ellsworth to the Secretary of State, Ciudad Porfirio Diaz, March 12, 1913.
26. NAW, 812.00/7100, Governor’s Office to the Secretary of State, Austin, April 7, 1913.
27. H. Aguilar Camín, La frontera nómada: Sonora y la revolución mexicana (México: Siglo XXI, 1977), 296;
L.B. Hall and D.M. Coerver, Revolución en la frontiera, 56.
28. NAW, 812.00/6675, F. Simpich to the Secretary of State, Nogales, March 13, 1913; 812.00/677, T.D.
Bowman to the Secretary of State, Nogales, March 13, 1913.
29. NAW, 812.00/6773, War Department to the Secretary of State, Washington, March 19, 1913.
30. NAW, 812.00/6775, T.D. Bowman to the Secretary of State, Nogales, March 19, 1913.
31. NAW, 812.00/6829, F. Simpich to the Secretary of State, Naco, March 22, 1913.
32. NAW, 812.00/7117, F. Simpich to the Secretary of State, Naco, April 13, 1913.
33. NAW, 812.00/7135, War Department to the Secretary of State, Washington, April 15, 1913.
34. B. Ulloa, La Revolución intervenida. Relaciones diplomáticas entre México y Estados Unidos (1910-1914)
(México: El Colegio de México, 1976), 144-146.
35. NAW, 812.00/7611, L.T. Ellsworth to the Secretary of State, Ciudad Porfirio Diaz, May 22, 1913;
812.00/8039, L.T. Ellsworth to the Secretary of State, Ciudad Porfirio Diaz, July 11, 1913; 812.00/8034, L.T.
Ellsworth to the Secretary of State, Eagle Pass, July 14, 1913; 812.00/8191, L.T. Ellsworth to the Secretary
of State, Ciudad Porfirio Diaz, July 26, 1913.
36. NAW, 812.00/8046, L.T. Ellsworth to the Secretary of State, Ciudad Porfirio Diaz, July 9, 1913; see M.E. Ota
Mishima, Siete migraciones japonesas en México, 1890-1978 (México: El Colegio de México, 1982), 53.
37. NAW, 812.00/8208, Governor’s Office to the President, Austin, July 25, 1913.
38. NAW, 812.00/9230, W.P. Blocker to the Secretary of State, Ciudad Porfirio Diaz, October 11, 1913.
39. NAW, 812.00/9037, W.P. Blocker to the Secretary of State, Eagle Pass, October 1, 1913; 812.00/9119,
W.P. Blocker to the Secretary of State, Eagle Pass, October 1, 1913.
40. NAW, 812.00/9110, W.P. Blocker to the Secretary of State, San Antonio, October 7, 1913.
41. NAW, 812.00/9062, War Department to the Secretary of State, Washington, October 3, 1913.
42. NAW, 812.00/9096, W.P. Blocker to the Secretary of State, Eagle Pass, October 6, 1913.
43. NAW, 812.00/9133, Department of Labor, Office of the Secretary to the Secretary of State, Washington,
October 7, 1913; 812.00/8126, War Department to the Secretary of State, Washington, October 9, 1913.
44. F. Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 215-218.
45. Ibid., 222 ss.
46. NAW, 812.00/9749, T.D. Edwards to the Secretary of State, El Paso, November 15, 1913; 812.00/9851,
T.D. Edwards to the Secretary of State, El Paso, November 20, 1913.
47. F. Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, 228.
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48. NAW, 812.00/10021, T.D. Edwards to the Secretary of State, El Paso, December 3, 1913; 812.00/10043,
War Department to the Secretary of State, Washington, December 4, 1913; 812.00/10119, War Department
to the Secretary of State, Washington, December 10, 1913.
49. F. Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, 236-237.
50. Ibid., 242-244; M. Cerutti-O. Flores, Españoles en el norte de México, 88-90.
51. NAW, 812.00/11043, M. Letcher to the Secretary of State, Chihuahua, February 21, 1914.
52. M. Cerutti-O. Flores, Españoles en el norte de México, 163-165.
53. NAW, 812.00/10390, War Department to the Secretary of State, Washington, January 2, 1914;
812.00/10421, War Department to the Secretary of State, Washington, January 3, 1914.
54. NAW, 812.00/10511, T.D. Edwards to the Secretary of State, El Paso, January 11, 1914; 812.00/10560,
Treasury Department to the Secretary of State, Washington, January 14, 1914; F. Katz, The Life and Times
of Pancho Villa, 290.
55. M. Plana, “La cuestión agraria en La Laguna durante la Revolución,” Historia Mexicana, México, El
Colegio de México, a. L, n. 1, (2000): 57-90.
56. NAW, 812.00/11419, G.C. Carothers to the Secretary of State, El Paso, April 6, 1914; 812.00/11706,
T.C. Hamm to the Secretary of State, Durango, April 13, 1914, Enclosure No. 1, f. 4.
57. M. Cerutti-O. Flores, Españoles en el norte de México, 165-171.
58. Vascos, agricoltura y empresa en México. Rafael Arocena: la siembra comenzó en La Laguna (México:
Universidad Iberoamericana Laguna-Miguel Angel Porrúa, 1999), 110-115.
59. D.M. Coerver and L.B. Hall, Texas and the Mexican Revolution, 77, 106-107.
60. L.B. Hall-D.M. Coerver, Revolución en la frontera, 207-208.
61. See B. Ulloa, La Revolución intervenida, 243 ss.; F. Katz, The Secret War, 156 ss.
62. J. Garciadiego, Rudos contra científicos. La Universidad Nacional durante la revolución mexicana (México:
El Colegio de México, 1996), 195 ss.
63. M. Ramírez Rancaño, La reacción mexicana y su exilio durante la Revolución de 1910 (México: Miguel
Angel Porrúa, 2002), 135-142, 405.
64. Ibid., 53-54; Appendix, 397-439.
65. F. Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa, 560 ss.; J. A., Stout, jr., Border Conflict: Villistas, carrancistas
and The Punitive Expedition, 1915-1920 (Forth Worth, Texas: Christian University Press, 1999).
66. V. Lerner, “Exiliados de la Revolución mexicana: El caso de los villistas (1915-1921),” Mexican Studies,
University of California, v. 17, n. 1, (Winter 2001): 111-112.
67. Ibid., 129-131.
68. V. Lerner, “Los exiliados de la revolución mexicana en Estados Unidos,” F.S. Alanís Inciso (coord.), La
comunidad mexicana en Estados Unidos. Aspectos de su historia (México: El Colegio de San Luis-Conaculta,
2004), 81; 117.
69. Ibid., 85-92.
70. Ibid., 93-101; 113-115.
339
ATLANTIC CROSSINGS: RACE, NATION, AND LATE NINETEENTH
CENTURY CUBA LIBRE BETWEEN ITALY AND THE UNITED STATES
alessandra lorini
On May 7, 1898, a group of Italian men embarked from Paris in a ship of the Lloyd
Germanico for New York, with Cuba as their ultimate destination. Once they arrived
in New York, they were enthusiastically received as the representatives of Democratic
Italy in Cuba by the Italian community there. President McKinley welcomed the Italian
volunteers from Washington, giving them his total support for the expedition, and the
governor of New York promised to give the volunteers whatever they needed. A couple
of months went by, however, and the men were kept anxiously waiting to leave for Cuba.
Then, suddenly, something changed: the American government declined to endorse the
expedition, and the Italian group was dismantled. According to Il Futuro Sociale – an
Italian weekly paper inspired by the ideals of Giuseppe Mazzini – “once more the needs of
international diplomacy have defeated the good will of men of actions.” The volunteers,
inspired by the spirit of Giuseppe Garibaldi, decided to return to Italy; on the eve of their
departure, they passed a memorable evening with the Italian community of New York.1
But what had happened exactly? In April of that year, while anti-Spanish sentiment and
pro-war public opinion had been mounting in the United States, the Italian Corriere della
Sera reported the rumor that the U.S. government had offered Ricciotti Garibaldi – the
son of “The Two Worlds’ Hero” – a large sum of money to prepare a group of volunteers
to go to Cuba and lead a division of the U.S. army. Apparently, Ricciotti Garibaldi declined this offer on the grounds that “the cause of Latin independence would not allow
him to fight under the Anglo-Saxon flag against Latin brothers;” he also said that “he
could have fought on the side of the Cubans only if this would not have produced a
benefit for the United States.”2
From 1895 to 1898, Cubans fought a terribly destructive war in which they defeated their Spanish enemies but ruined themselves in the process and lost hundreds of
thousands of lives. According to the 1899 Census, Cubans numbered 1.5 million in that
year, 300,000 less than in 1895 when the war had begun. Having already employed all
available resources in the cause of Cuba Libre, Cubans were left with nothing with which
to confront the U.S. military occupation that would eventually end with the attachment
of the Platt Amendment to the Cuban Constitution in 1902. The amendment, which
preserved the appearance of Cuban independence and granted self-government, in reality,
blocked any possibility of Cuban self-determination by giving the United States the right
to intervene on the internal affairs of the island in order to preserve Cuban independence
341
atlantic crossing
and to protect “life, property, and individual liberty.”3 Thus, Americans left in 1902,
retaining the power to return when they deemed it appropriate.
The question is, why did a movement for Cuba Libre grow in Italy, a country that,
unlike the United States, did not have any direct interest in the future of Cuba? Perhaps
the answer lies in the fact that an Italian committee to support Cuban independence was
founded in Rome on April 6, 1896, only thirty-five days after the Italian defeat at Adwa,
Ethiopia, which ended the second government of Francesco Crispi and its colonial policies, marking the beginning of a period of social unrest in the Kingdom of Italy.
an antidote to adwa: the birth of the italian CUBA LIBRE
On March 1, 1896, at Adwa, Ethiopia, an Italian military body of 20,000 men was
defeated by the Ethiopian imperial troops of Ras Makomen. The Italian prime minister
Francesco Crispi had strongly encouraged a colonial adventure in Abyssinia, convinced
that it would be easy to take the land and resources of a “savage” people who lived, he
believed, at the “state of nature,” lacking progress, language, literature, and arts, and having very primitive laws.4 He was wrong. The last of the European powers to participate
in the African scramble, Italy went to Ethiopia with commonly held nineteenth-century
racial prejudices against the inferior “African race,” and no real anthropological knowledge
of the strength of Emperor Menelik II. Yet taking revenge for the Italian defeat at Adwa
became the founding myth of twentieth-century Italian colonialism and justified any
cruel colonial adventure.5 As is the case with other colonial powers, Italian politicians
supported colonial adventures by using the language of evolutionary positivist science,
constructing a myth of “national honor” with stereotypical images of white supremacy:
“the gradual substitution of superior races to inferior ones is the natural and necessary
continuation of the general evolution of organisms, according to which the most perfect
have, without predetermined knowledge, taken the place of the less perfect ones.”6
In the aftermath of Adwa, one French writer observed that the news of the Italian
defeat had spread through the “dark continent at unbelievable speed,” noting further that
indigenous peoples had become aware that “Ethiopians [had] won over white Europeans”
and no longer perceived the “White Man” as a superior and invincible creature whose
power was to be feared. For these reasons, this observer considered the battle of Adwa to
be an extremely important event, “representing for Africa the beginning of a new era.”7
In fact, the Ethiopian victory at Adwa had far-reaching ramifications in Africa, Europe,
the Middle East, Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States. News of the victory reached
Somalia and Yemen where crowds cheered over the defeat of the Italians, leading the
colonizers to fear that Adwa could inspire the colonized to rise up. In the United States,
Adwa became a beacon of hope to African Americans; in Haiti, the first black republic
in the western hemisphere, African pride was once more regenerated.8 In the aftermath
of Adwa, political turmoil also galvanized Italian cities and the parliament. On March 7,
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1896, the New York Times reported that “Italy’s wrathful mobs” were “smashing windows
and resisting the police and soldiers” and “radicals shouted Menelik’s praise.” News of the
Ethiopian victory could be found in the Times of London, and was also reported by the
Chicago Associated Press, as well as the Washington Post. On March 8, 1896, one New York
Times writer speculated as to how the Ethiopian victory might influence European politics:
“For months international affairs have been growing more unsettled here in Europe, and
now Italy’s tragic misadventure has thrown them altogether out of balance.”9
Although the British were defeated in Afghanistan and in Zululand, these defeats did
not decrease the strength of the British Empire. In the national collective memory of the
Italians, however, the defeat at Adwa became a haunting ghost, at least until 1911 when
the liberal government of Giovanni Giolitti attempted to take Libya. In 1935, Mussolini
invaded Abyssinia, and the idea of taking revenge on Adwa became the core of fascist propaganda. This myth persisted for over sixty years and helped to erase a shameful memory
from Italian history by creating the public image of a “benign” Italian colonialism. In
the aftermath of Adwa, however, the failure of Italian colonial politics stirred a popular
anti-colonialist movement to organize anti-government demonstrations, in which many
pro-Menelik slogans could easily be heard, in various Italian cities. Far from building
popular patriotism, as Crispi had hoped, the Italian colonial adventure turned into a
dangerous boomerang for both domestic and international politics.10
Pro-Menelik popular demonstrations displayed a variety of anti-Crispi social and
political motivations. Crispi’s type of colonialism had transformed his own Garibaldian
past into a dream of masses of heroic Italian volunteers ready to leave for Africa: “national
temperament,” he argued, “is finally fed, and the enthusiasm of those memorable days of
independence wars seems to be back.”11 But Adwa put an end to Crispi’s dream: instead
of rekindling the patriotic spirit, the African colonial defeat caused the loss of Italy’s
prestige on the international scene and failed to subdue internal social unrest. Some
4,000 Italian soldiers had died, and Menelik held over 2,000 prisoners whose survival
was due more to the kindness of the Ethiopian people than to Italian aid. It is in this
context that radical republican and socialist actors attempted to re-establish Italian national pride by firmly rejecting colonialism and building a movement upon the ashes of
a colonial defeat, in support of other peoples’ cause of freedom from colonial oppression.
It was decided that Italian volunteers would go to Cuba to give their life in the struggle
for Cuban independence.
In 1896, Il Futuro Sociale published two appeals to the Italian people, urging them
to side with the Cuban insurgents. The first was an appeal to “the friends of freedom,”
signed by young physician Francesco Federico Falco and a few members of the Italian
parliament, including philosopher Giovanni Bovio and mathematician Antonio Fratti;
the second was “an appeal to women of heart,” promoting a fundraising campaign to
support the Cuban cause, signed by eminent Italian women like Adele Tondi Albani and
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the famous pedagogue Maria Montessori, known for their support of women’s rights and
progressive ideas. This second appeal, in the language of late-nineteenth-century women’s
“public maternalism,” was addressed to “Saragozza’s mothers, sisters, and wives” who
protested against the gathering of new Spanish troops to be sent to Cuba, reminding
them of “the duty that all women, given the fact that their consciousness is led by their
heart, feel.” Referring emphatically to both the aim for which those young lives were to
meet their death, and the side on which civilization, justice, and the welfare of people
stood, the appeal reminded Italians that Cuba fought to end Spanish tyranny and establish self-government: “The ancient Spaniards are fighting for their independence, in the
name of all sacrifices they made to colonize that wild island,” together with “the ancient
slaves who had become free by spilling their blood for ten years, and with all that mixed
Cuban population, now homogeneous and mature in terms of freedom and civilization
to take their place among other countries.”12
From then on, the events related to the fundraising campaign that attracted so many
women from various Italian regions were regularly reported on in Il Futuro Sociale, under
the heading “The Lonely Star.”13 In Genoa, at the ceremony for the launching of the
ship Cristobal Colon, a crowd shouted “Cuba Libre!” before Spanish journalists, causing
riots that ended with the arrest of all the protesters. In Livorno, the Tuscan committee of
the Republican Party signed a document of solidarity with Cuban insurgents and raised
money for their cause. In Rome, a women’s association deplored the fact that bourgeois
European governments had not yet given belligerent status to “those valorous on the
other side of the Ocean” who kept the flag of the “highest human goals” raised high and
fought against the “barbarous Spanish government.” In various cities, several Garibaldian
societies also promoted similar initiatives.14
As it appears from the scattered sources available, the Italian movement for Cuba
Libre was an expression of radical and socialist republicanism within the democratic,
nationalist, and internationalist traditions of Mazzini and Garibaldi. Inspired by a feeling of Latin brotherhood that Spanish colonial brutality had betrayed, Italian patriots
saw in the Cuban insurrection a possible re-awakening of the republican ideal in Italy.
They promoted an intense campaign that managed to attract, at a time when political
tensions and labor strikes ran high, a long list of people from different social classes and
political orientations.15
On April 6, 1896, the Comitato Centrale Italiano per la Libertà di Cuba was founded
in Rome. In December, when news of the death of the Cuban mulatto general Antonio
Maceo reached Italy, a memorial was held in that city.16 Descriptions of Maceo’s memorial particularly impressed the Cuban poet Diego Vicente Tejera, given the attraction the
“Bronze Titan” could exert on such a large and mixed crowd: “The Rome of Caesars and
Popes, the city that conquered and dominated the world, now glorified the humble name
of a general who rebelled against tyranny, the son of a race only recently emerged from
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slavery, and a people’s liberator.”17 The Italian paper Il Messaggero reported that in Rome
on February 28, 1897, a crowd of 2,000 had already filled the elegant Esquiline Theater
by 2 pm. 18 Keynote speaker and member of the Italian parliament Antonio Fratti portrayed Maceo as the “prophet in arms” of republicanism. Comparing the Cuban general
to the martyrs of the Italian Risorgimento, Fratti said that republicanism was “the highest
synthesis of all human desires,” and concluded that Maceo’s sacrifice was “Cuba’s moral
victory,” which announced other political and social victories around the world.19 A man
of action, Maceo was portrayed as the Cuban Garibaldi – while José Martì, although
less known in Italy, became the Cuban Mazzini. In his speech at Maceo’s memorial in
Rome, the Honorable Giovanni Bovio compared the struggle for Cuban independence
to that against the Turkish oppression of the island of Crete, proposing for the latter
the solution indicated by Mazzini: a federation of independent states in the Balkans, a
Hellenic union, and freedom for the city of Constantinople. All this was to be done in
the name of “modernity,” which in Bovio’s view was the synthesis of the principles of
contemporary civic consciousness: independence of nations, freedom as redemption of
the populace, and humanism as a federation of peoples. None of these principles could
be separated.20
An editorial of the Corriere della Sera elaborated on this intriguing comparison between the insurrections of the islands of Crete and Cuba. In this editorial, which defined
north-American jingoism as the “younger brother of Pan-Hellenism,” the imperial power
of Spain became the equivalent of Turkey’s, with poor and small Greece resembling the
rich and great United States. Except for the highest commercial value of Cuba – the
“pearl of Antilles” – the Corriere editorial emphasized a peculiar similarity between the
two islands, from the point of view of political tyranny, commercial exploitation, and tax
imposition. However, in Crete, a strong religious hatred shaped the territorial question,
while in Cuba, all conflicts took the form of “irreducible racial differences” that did not
manifest “in a conventional difference of language, but in the more characteristic difference of color.” While two antagonistic religions inflamed the Mediterranean island, all
Cuban people were Catholic, yet racially mixed: “a mixture of blood, a crossing of races,
physiological incompatibilities much more serious than those artificial ones deriving
from caste or rank like in Europe and China.” Furthermore, the editorial stressed the
point that Cuban whites were the last descendants of the conquistadores; yet, even if they
spoke Castilian, they no longer felt Iberian: “their proud islander feeling leads them to
crave for one free country.” The island of Crete, on the other hand, “feeling Greek in her
soul, traditions and hopes,” wanted to be annexed to Greece. But as language constituted
Cuba’s only attachment to Spain, the island wished to be completely independent and
free. In 1868, both islands revolted and in both countries the struggle went on for many
years. Thus, Cuba and Crete were “two antitheses of the modern world:” Cuba, “one of
the last relishes of the greatest transoceanic empire,” and Crete, “the extreme avantpost of
the Mediterranean sea to the greatest Asiatic invasion that Europe ever suffered.” Turkey
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and Spain, “both appealing to the same historical right, made strong by their warlike
pride, are both obstinately claiming their absolute domination, and are both degenerating in their passive hunger of possession.” Unlike Britain when she lost her best northAmerican colonies, both Turkey and Spain seemed unable to yield to “self-government.”
The advantage of Cuba over Crete, however, was that while the latter only had Greece on
her side, the former could count on “the United States more united than ever.”21
This debate over Cuban events in the Itali

The Place of Europe in American History: Twentieth

Transcription

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