DEALING WITH IDEALS

 

The founders of the United States, as exemplified, first, by the Declaration of Independence, and through the ratification of the Bill of Rights, followed a federalist model for defining individual rights.  Americans today, as the inheritors of that founding commitment as expressed in those documents, are bound by a living oath:  a commitment which is the basis of the nation’s communal ownership of what was created and includes a defined bond within the citizenry.

          That national federal commitment is built upon layers of covenantal agreements from local municipalities to the nation’s constitutional union.  As Professor Daniel Elazar points out, the nation is thoroughly federal in the operation of the government.  As such, the nation’s citizens have responsibilities.  The theory encourages citizens to participate, not merely receive the benefits of society and its government. 

It is in relation to these elements that a distinctive type of rights and liberties should be delineated.  Federal liberty emphasizes freedom to meet the responsibility one has to the community in which one lives:

 

Americans early became socialized into a kind of federalistic [sic] individualism, that is to say, not the anarchistic individualism of Latin countries, but an individualism that recognized the subtle bonds of partnership linking individuals even as they preserve their individual integrities … American society becomes a web of individual and communal partnership in which people link with one another to accomplish common purposes or to create a common environment … without falling into collectivism or allowing individualism to degenerate into anarchy.[1]

 

The purpose, therefore, is to engage the individual in a non-central, national matrix of partnership, i.e., a national arrangement in which there is no single locus of power, but one in which there are multiple loci of power.

          Michael Sandel, in his historical analysis of national development up until the late New Deal era,[2] emphasizes the concerns of American leaders and how they recurrently argued for social policy that was conducive to locally defined self-governance.  As in healthy partnerships, the individual obliges him/herself to the explicit commitment entailed with shared ownership or self-governance while maintaining his/her personal integrity and self-defined personage.

          But such descriptions might lead the reader to think this blog portrays earlier Americans as model citizens always disposed to meet their responsibilities of upholding the common good.  And beyond that, since federalism no longer dominates American idealistic thinking, they currently are people who care little for that common good. 

Both claims are false.  As for current day Americans, as these words are written, reports of the devasted areas in Kentucky and the surrounding states, have shown an outpouring of help.  This type of response is usually the case when such calamities as the recent chain of tornados occur.

          As for the nation’s forebears, total commitment toward others is also an overstatement – one should remember, what this blog is reporting and promoting are espoused values, not necessarily values-in-use.  To begin with, the common good has taken various definitional guises.  And the nation’s history provides countless accounts reflecting that diversity.

Louis Menand,[3] in his account of pragmatism during the 1800s, tells of an insightful story – one that demonstrates how racial attitudes and slavery challenged federal values in those years.  The account demonstrates an intertwined set of challenges facing Americans in the antebellum years.

          The story, in part, is about three blacks in 1853 who sought admission to Harvard’s medical program.  Two were sponsored by an organized group that was working for blacks to be emigrated back to Liberia – where many early slave traders acquired the original Africans who became slaves in America. 

Their plan was to emigrate educated blacks to Africa so that they could help modernize (ala 1800s standards) Liberia.  Two of these blacks promised they would voluntarily leave to go to Africa.  The third made it clear he intended to practice medicine in the US.  There was also, at the same time, the first woman to be admitted to the medical program.

          Objecting to the admissions, the students of Harvard protested – seemingly more upset that a woman was being admitted – and proceeded to ostracize the black students.  This revolt intensified and eventually led to all four students not continuing their matriculation at Harvard.  The admitting official of these students was none other than Oliver Wendall Holmes, who would become a renowned jurist. 

Initially, not seeing anything wrong with the admissions but then confronted with the resistance, Holmes went along with the student body’s wishes and allowed the exclusion of these students.  All that is known about his thinking was that he personally didn’t see anything wrong with their admission but deferred to the objections of the student body.

One of the black students went to Dartmouth where he earned his degree, one went to a hospital to get his training, and one stayed in the Boston area thinking the abolitionist advocates would provide enough protection – the woman withdrew her application upon the advice of the professors.  But at that time, there was another development in Boston, and it affected other blacks in that area.

The local abolitionist group was also actively trying to protect a married couple of escaped slaves.  They were being hunted by federal agents authorized by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.[4]  The abolitionists ushered two agents out of Boston who were actively trying to capture the married couple.  These were organized private citizens protecting these blacks.

In addition, in 1851, private citizens overwhelmed marshals who were holding an escaped slave who was a waiter in a local eatery and, in effect, freed him.  At the same time, it took a force of 300-armed people to escort a seventeen-year-old escaped slave to a ship in Boston harbor to transport him back to his slave owner.  Despite all these developments among the abolitionists, none of them protested the treatment of the black medical students or that of the woman (it took until 1945 for a woman to be admitted to Harvard medical school).

Menand points out,

 

 

… Delany [one of the black medical students] concluded that antislavery activists were more offended by the notion of Southerners presuming to send their agents into Northern cities to retrieve their “property” than they were by discrimination against any particular black in their midst.  And he was not wrong.  For the politics of slavery in antebellum Boston was a complicated business.[5]

 

And how does the individual fit into such a complicated landscape?  What this seems to indicate is that as one delves into the particulars of historical events, they evade grand descriptors of an age.  They are usually convoluted and often demonstrate conflicting values concerning individualism, individual rights, and local engagement.  All are central concerns of federal theory.

          With these developments that took place years after the founding of the nation’s government, one should consider the dilemma posed by Charles-Louis Montesquieu.  That is, how does one maintain and foster a supportive citizenry in a republic as the republic becomes larger?  According to Montesquieu, as a republic becomes larger with its inherent freedom, it would find it more difficult to socialize its people to be loyal to a republic.[6] 

For example, how republican were the motives of the engaged Bostonians in protecting or attempting to protect the individual rights of those students and other blacks from being enslaved or being subject to other discriminating practices?  Do those cases exemplify the concerns of the French philosopher, or do they reflect James Madison’s prediction relating to “bigness?”

In Federalist No. 10, Madison argued that only through a larger, extended republic does a society create the necessary number of factions in a system of competition to offset the detrimental effects of a single or a limited number of interest groups.  But Madison never addressed the issue of socialization, i.e., how the society, committed to self-rule, imparts to the younger generation the zeal for federalist or republican values as the polity grows and decision-making becomes further remote from the governed.

How familiar, for example, were Congressional decision makers of Bostonians’ dispositions in passing the Fugitive Slave Act.  It can be hypothesized here that the countervailing force which can maintain a large republic and at the same time encourage the socialization of supportive values is a general adherence to federalist values.

But those values must be genuinely felt and viable within the populous.  That perspective encourages among the citizenry a local, communal orientation and is expressed through the nation’s social discourse and action.  It seems that Boston, among certain segments of its population in those antebellum years, had a strong sense of a communal orientation.  Within that view a strong sense of individualism – as defined by federalism, not natural rights[7] – held sway.

It bolsters what Robert Putnam calls “social capital.”[8]  As such, federalism should, in a realistic fashion, become the paradigm organizing the questions and content presented in the nation’s dealing with government and politics and it should be the basis for promoting communal ideals in the nation’s public-school classrooms and within their curricula.

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[1] Daniel J. Elazar, “Federal Models of (Civil) Authority,” Journal of Church and State, 33, (Spring, 1991), 10-11.

[2] Michael J. Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996).

[3] Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club:  A Story of Ideas in America (New York, NY:  Farrar, Status, and Giroux, 2001).

[4] This law required that people in free states had to return escaped slaves to their owners.  Those responsible to capture and return the slaves were federal agents.

[5] Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 9.

[6] See Martin Diamond, “The Ends of Federalism,” in The Reluctant Pillar, ed. Stephen L. Schechter (Troy, NY:  Russell Sage College, 1985), 16-23.

[7] As regular readers of this blog can describe, natural rights view defines individualism as divorced from communal needs or demands.  See Charles Taylor, “Atomism,” in Communitarianism and Individualism, eds. Shlomo Avineri and Avner de-Shalit (New York, NY:  Oxford University Press, 1992), 29-50 AND Jeffrey Reiman, “Liberalism and Its Critics,” in The Liberalism-Communitarianism Debate, ed. C. F. Delaney (Lanhan, MD:  Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1994), 19-37.

[8] As used and defined by the political scientist, Robert Putnam, who defines social capital as a societal quality characterized by having an active, public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a social environment of trust and cooperation; it speaks to communal bonds and cooperative interactions.  See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2000).