George Washington`s “Farewell Address,” 1796.

George Washington’s “Farewell Address,” 1796. George Washington’s “Farewell Address”—actually an open letter to the nation rather than a speech—was written in 1796, as Washington prepared to step down after two terms as America’s first president. The most famous section of the address concerns foreign policy: Washington counsels the American people to avoid foreign alliances or entanglements, trading freely with the world but taking advantage of America’s isolated geographical position to remain apart from international conflicts. Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great Nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. … In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular Nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The Nation which indulges towards another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. … Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow‐citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake; since history and experience prove, that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government. The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connexion as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests, which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities. Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people, under an efficient government, the period is not far off, when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality, we may at any time resolve upon, to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel. Why forego the advantages of so peculiar a situation? Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground? Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice? It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world; so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it; for let me not be understood as capable of patronizing infidelity to existing engagements. I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is always the best policy. I repeat it, therefore, let those engagements be observed in their genuine sense. But, in my opinion, it is unnecessary and would be unwise to extend them. … Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing. … There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion, which experience must cure, which a just pride ought to discard. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893. Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” presented in this essay, has been celebrated, attacked, modified, misunderstood, embraced, and discarded again and again over the years. For all its flaws, it remains one of the most famous and influential pieces of writing by an American historian. It seemed at the time to offer a compelling explanation as to why the United States and American people were so different from their European counterparts. It also sounded an alarming note about the future. In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. … American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. Even the slavery struggle … occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion. In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected. … But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti‐social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax‐gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression. … Frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution, where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all effective government. The same conditions aid in explaining the difficulty of instituting a strong government in the period of the confederacy. The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy. The frontier States that came into the Union in the first quarter of a century of its existence came in with democratic suffrage provisions, and had reactive effects of the highest importance upon the older States whose peoples were being attracted there. An extension of the franchise became essential. It was western New York that forced an extension of suffrage in the constitutional convention of that State in 1821; and it was western Virginia that compelled the tide‐water region to put a more liberal suffrage provision in the constitution framed in 1830, and to give to the frontier region a more nearly proportionate representation with the tide‐water aristocracy. The rise of democracy as an effective force in the nation came in with western preponderance under Jackson and William Henry Harrison, and it meant the triumph of the frontier—with all of its good and with all of its evil elements. … So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly developed civic spirit. In this connection may be noted also the influence of frontier conditions in permitting lax business honor, inflated paper currency and wild‐cat banking. … The recent Populist agitation is a case in point. Many a State that now declines any connection with the tenets of the Populists, itself adhered to such ideas in an earlier stage of the development of the State. A primitive society can hardly be expected to show the intelligent appreciation of the complexity of business interests in a developed society. … The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it. … But the attempts to limit the boundaries, to restrict land sales and settlement, and to deprive the West of its share of political power were all in vain. Steadily the frontier of settlement advanced and carried with it individualism, democracy, and nationalism, and powerfully affected the East and the Old World. … From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history. Werner Sombart, “Why is there No Socialism in the United States?” 1906 American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States is somehow qualitatively different than all other nations, is an old idea, running back to the American Revolution. But the term “American exceptionalism” was actually coined by 20th century Marxists, grappling with the apparent failure of socialism or communism to take hold in the United States. One of the most famous examinations of this question was a 1906 essay by the German socialist Werner Sombart, “Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus?” (It is not really true that there is no socialism in the United States but certainly European‐style socialist movements have had much less success in America than in other comparable countries.) If modern socialism follows as a necessary reaction to capitalism, the country with the most advanced capitalist development, namely the United States, should at the same time be the one providing the classic case of socialism, and its working class should be the supporters of the most radical of socialist movements. However, one hears just the opposite of this asserted from all sides and in all sorts of tones—of complaint by socialists, of exultation by their opponents. It is said there is absolutely no socialism among the American working class and that those who in America pass as socialists are a few broken‐down Germans without any following. … The doctrine of the inevitable socialist future is refuted by the facts. For the social theorist as well as for the social legislator nothing can be more important than to get at the root of this phenomenon. … How the Worker Lives This much is certain: the American worker lives in comfortable circumstances. By and large, he does not know the oppression of miserable housing. … He can indulge fully in the “egotistical selfishness” which a comfortable domestic life tends to develop. He is well fed, and he does not know the miseries which result in the long run from a diet of potatoes and alcohol. He dresses like a gentleman, and the working woman like a lady, so that his outward appearance tends to make him unaware of the gap that separates him from the ruling class. It is no wonder if, in these circumstances, dissatisfaction with the existing social order is established with difficulty in the mind of the American worker, particularly if his tolerable, even comfortable, standard of living appears safe in the long run. For we must never forget what steady progress, save for short periods, the economic upswing in the United States has made during the last two generations—during which time socialism should actually have taken root. And evidently this prosperity was not in spite of capitalism, but because of it. And as the material condition of the wage worker has improved—and the increasing comfort of his way of life has enabled him to savor the corrupting effects of material wealth—so he has been impelled to love the economic system which has shaped his fate, and to adapt his spirit to the characteristic operations of the capitalist economy. He has fallen under the spell which rapid change and the increasing scale of modern production exert irresistibly on almost everybody in this wondrous age. A dose of patriotism—of the proud consciousness that the United States has led all other peoples along the road of capitalist “progress”—has confirmed the businesslike character of his mind, and has made the American worker into the sober, calculating, down‐to‐earth “businessman” that we know today. All socialist utopias come to grief on roast beef and apple pie. … Employees and Workers Even English workers today are astonished at the respectful tone which American employers and foremen adopt towards their workers, at the lack of restraints placed on the American worker even at his place of work; and at the absence of what one might call annoying supervision. They are surprised that he can take a day or two off, that he can go out to smoke a cigar—indeed, that he smokes while working—and that there is even an automated cigar‐vending machine for his use in the factory. It is also a peculiarity of American factory owners that while they do not introduce even the simplest safety precautions into their plants and do not worry in the least about the proper layout of their workshops—which are often overcrowded, etc.—on the other hand they are most willing to do everything they can to provide what the workers regard as comforts, such as bathtubs, showers, lockers, and temperature controls in the workrooms, which are cooled by fans in the summer and heated in the winter. Certainly, these are trivialities, but the truth here is that “it’s the little things that count.” I will try to show later that, seen objectively, the worker in the United States is more exploited by capitalism than in any other country in the world—in no other country is he rubbed so bloody by the harness of capitalism or worked to death so quickly. But that is not the important thing when it comes to explaining the feelings of the proletariat. For the only thing which really determines these feelings is what the individual worker does or does not value, or likes or does not like for himself. And it is one of the most brilliant diplomatic feats of the American employer (just like the professional politician in his way) that he understands how to keep the worker in a contented mood in spite of all the actual exploitation, so that workers never become conscious of their actual position. And being generous in little things has significantly contributed to that. There is another factor that has a similar effect; the worker has been influenced into thinking that he is not an enemy of the capitalist system but even an active supporter of it. American employers understand brilliantly how to interest the worker in the success of their enterprise, how to identify his interests—up to a point at least—
with their own. This is done not so much by profit‐sharing (although this does occur in the United States in various forms) but rather by a system of small measures which, taken together, achieve miraculous results. In the first place, all American employers are praised … for not attempting to cut back on the exceptionally high wages which workers occasionally earn as a result of previously agreed‐on piece rates, as European employers usually do. As a result of this liberal practice, the worker constantly remains in a fever of activity, and is, moreover, kept in a good mood by the possibility of very high gains. A second widespread custom of the American employer is to interest the worker directly in technical progress by gladly entertaining every suggestion for improving the machinery, etc., and by letting the worker profit directly or indirectly from the suggestion if it is adopted and proves successful. Thus the worker comes to see the firm as “his own,” in which he shares the ups and downs. This habit of accepting “suggestions” and “complaints” from workers and of always taking them seriously is found in all branches of American industry. … In most American factories there is a so‐called “suggestion box,” which is a container into which the workers cast their “suggestions” and “proposals.”... Finally, capitalists seek to buy off the workers by granting them a proportion of their profits, through offering them stock on advantageous terms. In this way, the capitalists kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, they draw the worker into the hurly‐burly of running the business and arouse in him the base instincts of acquisitiveness and the morbid excitement of speculation, thus binding him to the system of production that they represent. Secondly, they dispose of their bad stocks, averting sudden drops in prices and perhaps influencing the stock market in such a way as to secure some extra profits for themselves. … As a result of all this, it is clear that the attitude of the proletariat toward future economic developments has of necessity become something very peculiar: the possibility of choosing between capitalism and non‐capitalism transforms every budding opposition to the economic system from an active to a passive role, and takes the sting out of all anti‐capitalist agitation. Woodrow Wilson, “Fighting is the Slow Way to Peace,” 1916. In July 1916, while the First World War raged in Europe, but before the United States entered the conflict, President Woodrow Wilson gave this speech to a convention of salesmen in Detroit, Michigan. Wilson had staked his presidency on preserving American neutrality—his slogan that election year was “he kept us out of war”—but he called for the United States to take a newly assertive, active role in world affairs. These are days of incalculable change, my fellow citizens. It is impossible for anybody to predict anything that is certain, in detail, with regard either to the future of this country or of the world in the large movements of business; but one thing is perfectly clear, and that is that the United States will play a new part, and that it will be a part of unprecedented opportunity and of greatly increased responsibilities. The United States has had a very singular history in respect of its business relationships with the rest of the world. I have always believed, and I think you have always believed, that there is more business genius in the United States than anywhere else in the world; and yet America has apparently been afraid of touching too intimately the great processes of international exchange. America, of all countries in the world, has been timid; has not until recently, has not until within the last two or three years, provided itself with the fundamental instrumentalities for playing a large part in the trade of the world. America, which ought to have had the broadest vision of any nation, has raised up an extraordinary number of provincial thinkers, men who thought provincially about business, men who thought that the United States was not ready to take her competitive part in the struggle for the peaceful conquest of the world. For anybody who reflects philosophically upon the history of this country, that is the most amazing fact about it. But the time for provincial thinkers has gone by. We must play a great part in the world whether we choose it or not. Do you know the significance of this single fact, that within the last year or two we have, speaking in large terms, ceased to be a debtor nation and become a creditor nation? We have more of the surplus gold of the world than we ever had before, and our business hereafter is to be to lend and to help and to promote the great peaceful enterprises of the world. We have got to finance the world in some important degree, and those who finance the world must understand it and rule it with their spirits and with their minds. We cannot cabin and confine ourselves any longer … There have been two ways of doing business in the world outside of the lands in which the great manufactures have been made. One has been to try to force the tastes of the manufacturing country on the country in which the markets were being sought, and the other way has been to study the tastes and needs of the countries where the markets were being sought and suit your goods to those tastes and needs; and the latter method has beaten the former method. If you are going to sell carpets, for example, in India, you have got to have as good taste as the Indians in the patterns of the carpets, and that is going some. … Your manufactured goods must be the manufactured goods which they desire, not those which other markets have desired. That is statesmanship, because that is relating your international activities to the conditions which exist in other countries. … Charles Lamb, the English writer, made a very delightful remark that I have long treasured in my memory. … He said of someone, “I hate that man,” and someone said, “why, Charles, I didn’t know you knew him.” “Oh,” he said, “I don’t. I can’t hate a man I know.” That is a profound human remark. You cannot hate a man you know. … This, then, my friends, is the simple message that I bring you. Lift your eyes to the horizons of business; do not look too close at the little processes with which you are concerned, but let your thoughts and your imagination run abroad throughout the whole world, and with the inspiration of the thought that you are Americans and are meant to carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity wherever you go, go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and more happy, and convert them to the principles of America.