the discussions in the Reichstag concerning the miners’ strike in the basin of the Ruhr (1905), the deputy Hue spoke of the maximum program of the party as “utopian,” and in the socialist press there was manifested no single symptom of revolt. On the first occasion on which the party departed from its principle of unconditional opposition to all military expenditure, contenting itself with simple abstention when the first credit of 1,500,000 marks was voted for the war against the Hereros, this remarkable innovation, which in every other socialist party would have unquestionably evoked a storm from one section of the members … aroused among the German socialists no more than a few dispersed and timid protests.
Such searching histories of radical movements can deter the tendency to make absolutes of those instruments—party, leaders, platforms—which should be constantly subject to examination.
That revolutionaries themselves are burdened by tradition, and cannot completely break from thinking in old ways, was seen by Marx in the remarkable passage opening The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:
Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language …
How to use the past to change the world, and yet not be encumbered by it—both skills can be sharpened by a judicious culling of past experience. But the delicate balance between them cannot come from historical data alone—only from a clearly focused vision of the human ends which history should serve.
History is not inevitably useful. It can bind us or free us. It can destroy compassion by showing us the world through the eyes of the comfortable (“the slaves are happy, just listen to them”—leading to “the poor are content, just look at them”). It can oppress any resolve to act by mountains of trivia, by diverting us into intellectual games, by pretentious “interpretations” which spur contemplation rather than action, by limiting our vision to an endless story of disaster and thus promoting cynical withdrawal, by befogging us with the encyclopedic eclecticism of the standard textbook.
But history can untie our minds, our bodies, our disposition to move—to engage life rather than contemplating it as an outsider. It can do this by widening our view to include the silent voices of the past, so that we look behind the silence of the present. It can illustrate the foolishness of depending on others to solve the problems of the world—whether the state, the church, or other self-proclaimed benefactors. It can reveal how ideas are stuffed into us by the powers of our time, and so lead us to stretch our minds beyond what is given. It can inspire us by recalling those few moments in the past when men did behave like human beings, to prove it is possible. And it can sharpen our critical faculties so that even while we act, we think about the dangers created by our own desperation.
These criteria I have discussed are not conclusive. They are a rough guide. I assume that history is not a well-ordered city (despite the neat stacks of the library) but a jungle. I would be foolish to claim my guidance is infallible. The only thing I am really sure of is that we who plunge into the jungle need to think about what we are doing, because there is somewhere we want to go.
Somehow, the notion of American uniqueness persists. It is “God’s Country and Mine,” Jacques Barzun has said.1 There is a common belief that our country has from birth been favored, by Providence or by Circumstance, in being unencumbered with harsh class lines, with solidified privilege, with a stubborn aristocracy, with a mass of illiterate peasantry, with all those things that plagued Europe until the dawn of modern times. A naked continent, rare idealism and courage among settlers weeded out by hardship and three thousand miles of ocean, the equalitarian demands of the frontier—these combined, we are often told, for a physically crude but socially immaculate conception.
Our birth, therefore, was of a new civilization, truly new, not a copy of the Old World. In Tocqueville’s words, we were “born free.”
A Whig preacher named Calvin Colton in 1844 summed up a belief about America that still represents the dominant self-image: 2
Ours is a country where men start from an humble origin … and where they can attain to the most elevated positions, or acquire a large amount of wealth, according to the pursuits they elect for themselves. No exclusive privileges of birth, no entailment of estates, no civil or political disqualifications stand in their path, but one has as good a chance as another, according to his talents, prudence or personal exertions. This is a country of self-made men, than which nothing better could be said of any state of society.
The self-deception of Colton (there was slavery in the South, and in the North the factory system had a brutal grip on many Americans) applies to every period of this country’s history, from our colonial origins to our imperial present. The fact is, we were born far from free, and far from equal, and through centuries of enormous growth in territory, resources, population, that initial inequality continued.
Why, then, does the myth persist?
Judgments depend on the criteria we use. Americans, evaluating their own country, generally use as their base other places in the world. In all the harping on the special equalitarianism of America, what is really implied, and only occasionally stated, is not that we were really free or really equal but that we were more free and equal than Europe. A new society, physically open and structurally loose, does have—for a time, in some of its parts, to a certain degree—more opportunities for changing one’s status than an old, encrusted society.
Even this comparative statement about American equality depends for its truth on one enormous premise: that we not count the black slaves in America (20 percent of the population on the eve of the American revolution). It started early—the bland assessment of this country after putting the slaves aside. This is one of the unchanging aspects of our self-evaluation—that we mention the Negro with proper lamentation, and then put him in brackets while we make our total judgment of American civilization. Both slavery and segregation have always been treated as special phenomena, to be mentioned then forgotten, because they spoil all estimates about democracy, freedom, and equality in this country.
But even aside from this dishonesty, there is something wrong with the use of other countries—Europe, or Asia to make the contrast even more dramatic—as a basis for evaluation. Why not use as our norm the ideal society, that which has never existed on earth, that mythic society which has eliminated (to use Jacques
Barzun’s phrase) “irrational privilege.” I would call irrational that privilege which comes from the distorted distribution of abundant resources.
The distinction between these two criteria (Europe’s rigid class
