As we are possibly just a little too fond of saying, our nation draws its greatest strength from the ancient traditions of American democracy. These traditions embody certain lofty standards of thought and of behavior, and we like to believe that in time of crisis we can rely upon them. Occasionally it almost seems as if we do so automatically, fondly trusting that some built-in nobility of aspiration and conduct will rescue us either from the results of our own folly or from the evils created by fellow citizens in whom, unaccountably, the traditions never took root.
Like most of our accepted beliefs, this one contains a good substratum of truth. Yet sometimes it pays to see just what these saving traditions are and where they can be found. Who are their guardians, anyway? How do the best of these traditions take shape in action? What are we called upon to do about them, and how do we know when we are actually doing it? Democracy’s traditions, although noble, can be vague; what happens when we need to make them concrete?
We can begin by studying what has already happened, and at times the record is somewhat surprising. For an illustration, consider Herbert Mitgang’s excellent new biography, The Man Who Rode the Tiger, which contains a first-rate object lesson.
Mr. Mitgang is telling the story of the late Judge Samuel Seabury, who fought long, tenaciously, and with much success to provide decent government for the people of New York City. He happily describes Judge Seabury as a twentieth-century man with eighteenth-century manners; and indeed if ever a man was fitted by birth and family background to be a guardian of the best American traditions it was this same Seabury—he was the great-great grandson, and namesake, of the first Episcopal bishop in the United States, and his ancestry ran back to John and Priscilla Alden, and altogether he was It. He was fully conscious of his family heritage—as Mr. Mitgang says, he “bore the Protestant ethic and the Anglo-Saxon legal traditions of his ancestors, not as a burden but as an escutcheon.” He was born in 1873, of a family which had very little money but which was rich in tradition, and toward the end of the nineteenth century he became a New York lawyer and set out to see what he could do.
He was a very good lawyer. In the end, he made a great deal of money, and he enjoyed the things you can do when you have a great deal of money. But making money was not his chief objective. He began as a devout single-tax man, a fighter for decent living conditions for men who have to work with their hands, a dedicated enemy of Tammany Hall. He served as unpaid counsel for various lowly folk who had got caught in the legal machinery of a heedless city; he became a judge, and made a reputation for fair dealing and plain speaking; he ran unsuccessfully for governor, and he had trouble getting along with two Roosevelts, Theodore and Franklin, whose own family wrapped up a certain amount of the great democratic tradition in America. Finally, in the early iggo’s, he was made the spearhead for the investigation that tried to find out what was wrong with New York City’s government. It was here, of course, that his own capacity to speak for one of the noblest of our democratic traditions came into full flower.
The Man Who Rode the Tiger: the Life and Times of Judge Samuel Seabury, by Herbert Mitgang. J. B. Lippincott Co. 380 pp. $6.95.
What Seabury spoke for was the simple belief that public office is a public trust—the notion that a city’s government ought to represent the people rather than a set of special interests, the old-fashioned idea that it is wrong to cheat and lie and steal, the sturdy belief that if people are clearly shown what is wrong with their government they will find a way to do something about it. Judge Seabury got Mayor James Walker on the hook, and when he finished with him New York City also was finished with him, and Walker was a discredited ex-mayor.
Be it noted that Seabury brought to this task something more than a simple, old-fashioned desire to see justice done. He was uncommonly thorough. He put together a staff of expert investigators, kept telling them “Educate me,” and assembled such an immense and convincing array of facts that in the end his case proved itself. His dedication to his task was accompanied by a vast capacity for hard work and by a canny intelligence. He was not merely a quiet aristocrat with a New England conscience; he was also a skillful lawyer who knew precisely how to expose the wrongs that had gone unpunished so long.
So far the story follows a familiar pattern. A man of good family, born and bred to the highest democratic tradition, becomes indignant when he sees his native city being stolen blind by crooked politicians and devotes himself to the job of getting the crooks thrown out, jailed, or at least publicly discredited. But the long story of American politics proves clearly that this by itself is not enough. To “throw the rascals out” is good, but what happens after the rascals have been ousted is even more important. Too many reformers have rested on their oars, once that part of the hard pull was finished. Judge Seabury wanted to keep going, to help bring about the election of someone with both the will and the political savvy to provide good government.
And here comes the interesting switch in Mr. Mitgang’s story—that is, in the story of what actually happened in America’s biggest city.
Samuel Seabury found the ideal man, helped to get him elected as mayor of New York, and saw him give the metropolis the best government it has ever had … and the man who so completely embodied the virtues of the democratic tradition which Judge Seabury served was not an American of ancient lineage, born and bred to the noblest civic tradition, but the son of immigrants, a man of mixed Italian and Jewish descent, Fiorello La Guardia. It was precisely this flamboyant, tough, nonconformist fighter, who had come up from nowhere at all, who could strike hands with the descendant of John Alden to bring New York redemption from the scaly corruptionists who had so long had the city in their grip. La Guardia justified Seabury’s faith; the two of them together—as unlikely a combination as the story of American politics can display—justified the faith of millions.
You never quite know where you are going to find it. The oldest and simplest of the democratic traditions—that the people deserve decent government and that they will insist on getting it once qualified people show them how to do it—was abundantly justified here; and it found its embodiment in two strangely contrasting persons—the old-family civic aristocrat, and the no-family scrapper from Harlem who shared in his vision, his courage, and his dedication. Out of this blend comes America’s greatest strength.
The Call of Duty
By BRUCE CATTON
But it is easy to become very fuzzy-minded about American traditions. They deal with what the American people do when they are doing their best, and they can bring together a descendant of John Alden and an heir of Ellis Island to the benefit of everyone concerned, but they can also be unformulated until what one lone man has in his heart becomes expressed in action. The things that make democracy work are uncatalogued and various, and now and then they arise from the faith of the individual citizen.
There was the case of Robert E. Lee …
Only insolent ignorance would present Lee as an exemplar of the democratic tradition. Lee was an aristocrat who had very little use for democracy, and he devoted immense talents to the task of destroying the government that the democracy had established. In the end he failed, a great soldier brought down by forces that opposed everything he stood for; but finally, after the defeat, he rendered an immense service both to the people he had fought for and the people he had fought against, and became a great exemplar of one of the traditions without which democracy could not exist.
Lee’s military career has been studied in detail, by experts, most notably and recently by Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman and Dr. Clifford Dowdey, and nothing of any consequence that has not already been said remains to be presented about his achievements as a soldier. But what he did after the Civil War ended has a peculiar and often unrecognized importance, and this part of his career is presented now in Lee After the War by Marshall W. Fishwick.
In a foreword Mr. Fishwick remarks that “It is not the story of Lee, but the meaning of Lee, that I am writing about,” and the meaning of Lee goes beyond the warrior and the legendary hero and comes down to something basic.
Appomattox was a beginning rather than an ending. The two sections of a broken country had fought for four years, and they had fought hard, leaving dreadful scars; Appomattox had determined that they were going to be joined together again, but it had said nothing about how this was to be done, and an objective appraisal of the situation in the spring of 1865 would have concluded that the job ahead was going to be extremely difficult if not altogether impossible. As Mr. Fishwick says, “The spirit of rebellion would smolder for years to come. Violence would continue and spread. For every American as magnanimous as Lee or Lincoln, there would be ten filled with vengeance and hatred.”
Lee After the War, by Marshall W. Fishwick. Dodd, Mead & Co. 242 pp. $4.00.
The simple fact is that the problem could easily have become insoluble. The defeated South could have become another Ireland or another Poland, a permanently indigestible lump that could never be dissolved. The peoples who had made war so long had, to be sure, an underlying desire to get along together, to let the deep wounds heal and to work out a harmonious way of life; but they also had much suspicion, many war-born hatreds and angers, and deep desires for vengeance, and the big question was which set of sentiments would be most quickly and powerfully evoked. The thing could have gone either way. The Union could have broken up in fact, even after the war to break it up had failed.
Here General Lee made his great contribution, to his own section and to the nation as a whole.
As far as he was concerned, the war was over. He had done his best, and he had lost, and it was necessary to think about the future. He wrote once that it was above everything else necessary for a gentleman to cultivate “that nobleness of self and mildness of character which impart sufficient strength to let the past be but the past.” A few days before Appomattox one of his generals urged him to take to the hills with what was left of his army and carry on guerrilla warfare, and Lee rejected the advice with the quiet statement: “We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from.” He would let the past be the past, and work for the future. It was unquestionably the hardest part of his life, and in many ways it was the noblest part, because in a quiet, wholly unostentatious way he helped to make it possible for the country to become genuinely reunited.
In the fall of 1865 Lee became President of Washington College, in Lexington, Virginia. Washington College then had four teachers, forty students, and no prospects whatever. For one of the great captains of history to come down to this was something not called for in the script. In all the defeated, resentful, tragically unhappy Southland he was the one man to whom everybody would listen, and he found his pulpit in a broken-down college whose influence hardly reached beyond its own county. Because of its occupant, this pulpit commanded a great deal of attention.
It was not easy. Lee aged rapidly in the five years after the war ended. He never apologized for what he had done, or shuffled around with his hat in his hand to make his peace with the victors, but he set himself steadfastly to lead his people back into the country which had refused to consent to a partition, and in the end he succeeded. It cost him a great deal—one of his students wrote that “I never saw a sadder expression than General Lee carried during the entire time I was at Washington College”—but he stuck to it. When he undertook his task at the college he wrote simply, “I shall devote my remaining energies to training young men to do their duty in life,” and as he saw it the duty of young southerners in the hard postwar years was to help restore peace and harmony and orderly government.
As a matter of fact the essence of the democratic tradition grows out of this simple notion about the individual citizen’s duty. This duty is self-imposed. It means nothing except that the people involved in a democratic society owe something to the society of which they are a part. They owe a duty to the state they have created, not because the state is an overpowering, impersonal monstrosity with a life of its own, possessing undefined and limitless claims upon them, but just because it is the instrument through which they are able to work together for the common good. When they understand this duty and perform it well, they do not need to be afraid of their own creation.
On the Dusty Soil
By BRUCE CATTON
Life would be a great deal simpler, of course, if people who want to do their duty by one another and by their common country could more easily see just what that duty may involve. The faith that can move mountains may be a common heritage, but the mountains will not be moved unless the faith can be put to work in the most effective way. We need to know, not merely what we want to do but how we can best go about doing it.
A brooding examination of this problem is contained in Arthur Goodfriend’s book, The Twisted Image. Mr. Goodfriend spent a good many years in India, as an official of the United States Information Service, and he remarks that our valiant attempt to present democracy’s argument to the people of the world’s new nations goes along a path that is all strewn with booby traps.
Democracy is engaged with Communism in a struggle for the minds of men all over the world—in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and elsewhere. We believe firmly that democracy has far more to offer and that its advantages will be self-evident if we just present its case fairly, openly, and thoroughly. So far we are on solid ground; the questions we have trouble answering are the simple ones—whom do we present this case to, and how do we present it?
President Eisenhower once said that what is involved is “a contest for the beliefs, the convictions, the very innermost soul of the human being,” and when he wrote the charter for the agency which was set up to carry on this contest he instructed it “to submit evidence to peoples of other nations by means of communications techniques that the objectives and policies of the United States are in harmony with and will advance their legitimate aspirations for freedom, progress, and peace.”
This says it admirably. What bothers Mr. Goodfriend is the fact that in India we too often use the wrong arguments and address them to the wrong people. One difficulty apparently has been that although we have been most anxious to open Indian minds to American viewpoints we have not always done very well at opening our own minds to Indian viewpoints. We tend, as Mr. Goodfriend sees it, to speak to the elite, to the educated, to the relatively fortunate who already know a good deal about the modern world which India is entering and who have a fair understanding of what we are all about; doing so, we risk bypassing the immense majority altogether, even though it is that majority which may eventually determine where India goes. Trying to show that American democracy means a more abundant life, we are likely to picture ourselves as a nation of gadget-worshippers, materialists whose possessions are perhaps to be coveted but whose spiritual aspirations are wholly incomprehensible.
The United States Information Service, Mr. Goodfriend says, “aimed at the pinnacle of India’s population; communism burrowed at the base. … While we dealt with those presently in power, communism aimed at the successors to the present regime.” The case in India was like that in Asia and Africa: “Everywhere we faced insurgency situations where the battlefield was the bush, the paddy field and the village, and where all the power America could muster was useless except as it applied to the peasantry on whose understanding and loyalty victory or defeat depended.”
The key, Mr. Goodfriend suggests, may be simple humility. He does not think we are going to get very far with the Indians, or with any other colonial people struggling as the Indians are struggling against ignorance, poverty, and injustice, by arguing with them or by showing them what democracy has done for us; perhaps what we need is to get down into the arena and, as friendly equals, show what democracy—and we—can do for them.
Too often, as Mr. Goodfriend remembers things, we have simply tried to dazzle them. To present exhibits of common American household appliances like dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and garbage disposals may indeed show that the happy people of America have at their service a large number of useful labor-saving devices, whose existence doubtless proves that democracy and abundance go hand in hand; the trouble is that this kind of language goes clear over the village Indian’s head. How can it fail to do so? A garbage disposal, for instance, costs more than his entire year’s income, and since he knows nothing about machinery it is incomprehensible to boot.
The Twisted Image, by Arthur Goodfriend. St. Martin’s Press. 264 pp. $5.95.
Before he left India Mr. Goodfriend asked an Indian holy man who has spent his life working with the villagers what message he ought to take back to the American people. The holy man considered, and then quoted a verse from Rabindranath Tagore:
“Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads. Whom dost thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee! He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the pathmaker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and His garment is covered with dust. Put off thy holy mantle and even like Him come down on the dusty soil!”
The holy man paused, and then said: “That is my message to America. Come down on the dusty soil.”
When you stop to think about it, this is an essential element in the democratic tradition.
