History

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

FDR

Like John F. Kennedy later, Franklin Roosevelt was more than an American politician and statesman. Something in his demeanor and what he was thought to stand for caught people’s imagination. They invested hope in him. When he died, the crowds in England stood stunned, or wept, and felt as bereaved as if they had lost a member of their own family – and this was before television brought moving, talking images into the home. If they felt they knew Roosevelt, it was from the movie newsreels, and from the newspapers and radios, and from the feeling that they had that he had been the friend of the things they believed in, and had, therefore, been a friend to them. Wilson, as we shall see, was popular for a while, and the common people put their trust in him. But Roosevelt caught their imagination and their affection and their trust as no American had done since Lincoln, and none would do again until Kennedy, and perhaps Eisenhower.

For one thing, there was the spectacle of his fighting the good fight against the forces of reaction, as he set Congress to restructuring the American political landscape. Regulation of the stock market, of the banking industry, of monopolies, of so many aspects of what had been until then a comfortable club making its own rules to suit itself. And there was his personal struggle to overcome the polio that had struck him down before he was 40, turning a tall, athletic, vigorous young patrician into a wheelchair-bound cripple. He had fought his way back from paralysis, finding and developing Warm Springs, Georgia, as a hospital for the similarly afflicted. (Remember the March of Dimes? That was a Roosevelt conception, organized not only for research into the cure of polio but specifically to support Warm Springs.)

And, more than anything else, perhaps, Roosevelt was revered as the linchpin of American assistance to those fighting the Axis powers. Though he dared not intervene in Spain, he was soon intervening to the edge of the law and beyond it, to weaken Hitler and strengthen the Allies. Lend-Lease, American patrols of the Western Atlantic, the Atlantic Charter, and always his encouragement of coalitions of powers against the Nazis. No less than Churchill – and even more important, because leading the only country that could defeat Germany – he was the father figure many a European leaned on.

Another American icon appeared in the years before the war, before Roosevelt, before the Great Depression, while the twenties were still roaring. He was a shy, modest 25-year-old boy, and he electrified the world with one 33-hour-long feat of skill, luck and endurance.

 

Lindbergh

A few months after the end of World War I, a man named Orteig had offered $25,000 to the first person to fly nonstop from New York to Paris. Eight years later, the Orteig prize remained unclaimed, but several people were racing to be the first. They were all well known except the boy.

In September, 1926, a three-engine biplane carrying a three-men team led by French World War I ace Rene Fonck crashed and burned on takeoff, killing the two crewmen. The following April, two famed U.S. Naval aviators, testing another three-engine biplane, died when their plane, too, crashed on takeoff. In early May, French war heroes Charles Nungesser and Francois Coli disappeared at sea on a westward flight from Paris in a seaplane.

Two weeks later, three more airplanes were preparing to fly east from Long Island. One was a two-man team led by American air racer Clarence Chamberlin, and the other was a four-man team led by Commander (later Rear Admiral) Richard Byrd. The third was not a team but a lone 25-year-old pilot who, the year before, had been flying the air mail route between St. Louis and Chicago, and his airplane was a single-engine overhead-wing monoplane whose design and construction he had overseen during the winter.

He had much less flying experience than any of the others, none of it over water. He was financing the flight on a $15,000 bank loan, a $1,000 donation from his employer at Lambert Field, St. Louis, and his own small savings. He had had to teach himself great-circle navigation, because he was afraid that if he asked the military to teach him, he would be forbidden to make the attempt. In order to keep down inessential weight, he was flying without a radio. That meant that from eight a.m. May 20, 1927, all through the day and the long night and a good part of the next day, there was no way for the world to know if he was still alive and in the air, or had joined the six who had been killed in the weeks just past.

After that long night, he was spotted over the coast of Ireland, then over England, and then, at nearly 10:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 21, he landed at Le Bourget field in Paris, and he and his frail craft were overrun by a hysterically welcoming mob estimated at 150,000 people. The effect his successful flight produced was perhaps proportional to the anxiety caused by the long night – and the dead airmen who had preceded him.

The French Foreign Office flew the American flag for him, President Coolidge sent a Navy cruiser to bring him and his airplane home. The Post Office issued an Air Mail stamp in his honor. He was given a ticker-tape parade in New York City. He was Time magazine’s first “Man of the Year.” His book We, published within months, sold 650,000 copies within a year, earning him a quarter of a million dollars. The boy his friends had always called Slim was being called Lucky Lindy, and The Lone Eagle.

His influence on aviation was phenomenal. Applications for pilot’s licenses in the U.S. tripled. The number of licensed aircraft quadrupled. The number of airline passengers grew 3,000%, to 173,405 in 1929, from 5,782 in 1926. Aviatrix Elinor Smith Sullivan later said that Lindbergh’s flight changed aviation forever because “after Lindbergh, suddenly everyone wanted to fly, and there weren’t enough planes to carry them.”

For more – much more — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lindbergh

Oh, and those other two teams that we left on Long Island waiting to fly? Chamberlain made it from New York to Germany in a 43 hour flight two weeks later. Byrd and his team left on June 29, reached Paris on July 1, and, being unable to land there due to weather conditions, wound up ditching in the ocean off Normandy. They both succeeded in making the crossing, and they did it within weeks of Lindbergh’s solo flight. But it didn’t matter. That flight – and something in his winning personality — made Charles A. Lindbergh into an icon, not only in his own country but all through Europe and around the world. And that fame lasted. More than 25 years later, he won a Pulitzer Price with The Spirit of St. Louis, which, among other things, told of his out-of-body experience and spiritual contacts during that long night over the North Atlantic.

 

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

Computers

We tend to forget that before the world was changed by personal computers, the world was changed by mainframes. Computers were invented for gunnery control (if you were going to aim your cannons in fast-moving situations, or from fast-moving platforms, you had to make too many computations too fast to do it by hand). Like other things – like air conditioning, like airplanes, like so many other things, as we’ll see — the technology matured rapidly as money was poured into development, and as it moved from the military to the civilian sphere.

The first computers were electronic, but they were also mechanical. The computations themselves took place as fast as the electrons could hustle, but which paths they followed – what operations they performed, in what order, depended upon hard-wired boards that had to be switched out, one after another, in the correct order, to get the job done. It was a big breakthrough, the day someone figured out how to tell the machine to (in effect) change its own wiring, task by task. Enter the programmable computer. Now all the figuring out was done in advance. Instructions were fed into the machine via decks of punched IBM cards the size of the pre-war dollar bill. The machine read the deck card by card, executed each instruction one by one, and, if the programming was right, went from operation to operation at electronic, rather than at manual, speed.

Initially the machines were so expensive, that IBM president Thomas Watson estimated that worldwide demand for computers might be as high as six, an estimate that wasn’t spectacularly accurate.

At first they were programmed in what is called machine language, a binary digital language consisting of groups of zeros and ones. Machine language is also called microcode:  hence, Microcode Software – Microsoft. You can imagine how difficult it is to program. Then someone invented Assembler, which made matters easier. (If you’re interested, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembler_language). Then came FORmula TRANslation (FORTRAN) for scientific and mathematical calculations, and COBOL (COmmon Business-Oriented Language) for the relatively simple manipulation of massive amounts of data. These languages turned the computer into a practical way to automate many more real-world applications. COBOL for instance started to replace payroll calculations and bank statements.

This created a huge market, and IBM and other companies learned how to fill it. The IBM 360 and 370, particularly, poured into the business world in great numbers, creating large profits which could be, and were, poured back into further research and development.

By the 1960s, they were everywhere in business and government. (The space race wouldn’t have gone very far without them.) Less visibly, they were transforming military applications, as well. But the mainframe computer was never going to make its way into the home or small office, so the personal computer was a revolution built upon a revolution, which is practically shorthand for the story of technology in the 20^th century.

 

The atom in war and peace

I think it’s safe to say that we mostly look upon the atom as a curse, but there was a time when it looked like the bright shining hope for a better future for everybody, and a time before that when it looked like our one great hope for survival, and a time before that when we were in a deadly race, or thought we were, to create an atomic bomb before the Nazis did.

To work our way backward. Eisenhower in the 1950s announced Atoms For Peace, an attempt to harness the phenomenal power of atomic fission (and, perhaps one day,  the even more phenomenal power of atomic fusion) for peaceful purposes. At the time it was fantasized that atomic plants would provide clean electric power “too cheap to meter,” freeing industrial countries from dependence upon foreign oil and offering the possibility that underdeveloped countries could leapfrog the entire development cycle, beginning where we were winding up. among the unintended results was that of giving access to nuclear materials and know-how to countries that might have had a more difficult time, otherwise, developing their own bombs. Not England, Russia, France, or China, and not Israel, but perhaps India and Pakistan, anyway. And if it had not been for the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, one shudders to think how much farther the plague would have spread, because it became ever easier, ever cheaper, to develop atomic bombs. What cost the United States a terrific effort could now be done by dime-store countries with spare change. Lucky us.

Before Atoms for Peace came the balance of terror, in which the United States and then the Soviet Union raced to further develop the damned things, building more and more of them, testing them, deploying them, and finding ever more efficient delivery systems, so that what started out as a single bomb in the desert in June, 1945, then two bombs delivered in August by B-29s,  became collections of bombs, with entire fleet wings devoted to their delivery at a moment’s notice; became fleets of bombers some of which were in the air at all times, lest a sneak attack take out the fleets on the ground. (The fliers were required to wear a black patch over one eye at all times when in the air, in case they happened to be facing a blinding nuclear blast. The idea was that they would then switch the patch to the now-blinded eye and proceed with their mission. To quote Dave Barry: I am not making this up.)

The fleets of bombers were joined by missile-carrying submarines, and eventually by surface ships carrying nuclear-warhead-tipped cruise missiles. And these were joined by groupings of Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) deployed around the Russian heartland, and by Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) which could destroy the Soviet Union from bases in our country on the other side of the world.

It got to the point that the Soviets and the Americans between them had deployed so much megatonnage that if a war actually had erupted, we know for sure who would have lost the war. Everybody. Maybe the earth would have survived. Maybe humanity would have survived. It is impossible to see how civilization would have. Albert Einstein once said, he didn’t know the weapons World War III would be fought with, but World War IV would be fought with rocks.

Well, it didn’t happen, though it did nearly happen, by accident, at least three times that we know of, as automated systems malfunctioned, or people’s judgment wavered. For all we know, it was only the nuclear balance of terror that kept us from fighting World War III, just as some games theorists said. But that still doesn’t tell us how to get the genie back into the bottle.

The genie got out because of the Manhattan Project, and the project was undertaken because several émigré physicists feared that Nazi Germany was trying to develop an atomic bomb. (And so it was, but it was on hopelessly the wrong path.) The physicists got Albert Einstein to write a letter to President Roosevelt, outlining what they thought could be done. Einstein’s immense scientific prestige was enough to carry the day. The Manhattan Project resulted, a totally top secret project involving thousands of people in many states, a project proving once for all that governments can indeed keep a secret when they are motivated to do so.

In those war years, Senator Harry Truman ran a commission investigating waste and fraud in wartime industrial contracts. His staffers saw all this money going into this project and nothing coming out, and he determined to find out what was what. The White House told him, hands off, and he loyally kept hands off, and only found out what was going on when he himself became president in April, 1945, three months before the first and only test, and four months before the first two times (so far, the only time) they were used in anger.

Ironically, if the United States had not proved that it could be done, probably no one ever would have, because of  the immense scientific and industrial and monetary resources that had to be invested without any guarantees of success. And the bomb was developed not primarily because some scientists thought it could be done, but because they thought it could be done and Germany was doing it. For the next 40 years, the world lived on the edge of destruction. Hitler’s last legacy.

 

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

JFK

After he was killed, this American president’s photograph could be found in people’s homes all over the world. This gringo president created wild enthusiasm in a brief tour of Central America in the summer of 1963, when only a few years earlier, then-vice president Richard Nixon had nearly been attacked by a hostile mob in Caracas. Yes, part of it may have been that for the first time ever, an American president shared their Roman Catholicism, but that wouldn’t explain the Kennedy-mania that swept Europe and other countries.

This rich man’s son found his way into hearts all around the globe, as people reacted to his image, his intelligence, his charm, and – not least – his policies and promise. At first he was seen (by the West, at least) as another defender of freedom, in the tradition of Wilson, FDR, Truman and Eisenhower. But in the last year of his short presidency, he transcended that role as it became clear that he was a man of reason who hoped to bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion. The world was dreadfully tired of being terrified, and bored by the pretenses of each ideology to be the only possible way forward. Kennedy was seen as a firm, if belated, defender of human rights at home, and as a forward-looking proponent of intelligent compromise abroad, an optimist without illusions, as his wife once termed him. In those qualities, I think the world saw America at its best.

After he was murdered, his successor represented less a continuation of Kennedy’s path-breaking new approaches than a reversion to FDR’s New Deal domestically and to reflexive Cold War policies internationally. Lyndon Johnson probably meant well – don’t most people? – but there was never a time when you would have found his photograph hanging on people’s walls.

Of course, when you say Kennedy, you think television, for it was television that allowed him to have his terrific impact. From the days of his presidential campaign in 1960 through the ghastly days of his assassination and funeral, the world responded to his telegenic presence, and that of his wife and even their little children. In 1960, those who heard the first Nixon-Kennedy presidential debates on radio thought Nixon had the better of the exchange, but television made it a Kennedy victory, indeed a turning-point, because the image that came across people’s TV tubes was not of a callow inexperienced junior Senator, as his opponents wanted to portray him, but as a relaxed, confident, authoritative statesman, as he wanted to be seen. It was television that allowed him to speak directly to the nation and the world to appeal to reason, whether the subject was civil rights or Soviet missiles in Cuba or the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. And it was television that turned the world into participants in his final tragic moments and their aftermath. So let us turn, as did the world, to the invention that some saw as the world’s greatest communication tool and others saw only as the “boob tube.”

Television

They were both right. This American invention of the 1920s, not put into commercial production until after the second world war had ended, had a totally transformative impact on world culture, but with distinctly mixed effects. Like most American technology of the 20^th century, it was technically superb and was continually improved upon, as it went from small black-and-white kinescopes with nine-inch screens to full-color sets with screens that stretched several feet in height and width. But, also like most American technology of the 20^th century, the uses it was put to were often trivial or even harmful.

In 1962, a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, Newton Minnow by name, criticized commercial television as “a vast wasteland” of mediocre programming, repetitive, imitative, and unimaginative. He was so right. In television’s earliest years, unless you lived in one of the largest cities, your TV fare was restricted to a choice among three national commercial networks, perhaps augmented by an anemic public-television channel. Even the coming of cable TV (which came, at first, to areas that could not receive good broadcast quality) did little to expand the choice.

Communications-satellite links, and the installation of high-capacity fiber-optic cable in much of the urbanized part of the nation, broke the monopoly of the three networks. Now you could receive hundreds of channels. This transformed the situation, because now a single channel could specialize on one subject, day in and (increasingly) day out. Thus, news channels, sports channels, movie channels, shopping channels (!) etc. If you really wanted to watch Star Trek re-runs 24 hours a day, and you owned a TV remote, you could.

You could, and so could the world, and so American television flooded the world, just as American movies had done, beginning in the 1930s. in effect, perpetual free advertising for a certain version of the American way of life. It had an incalculable effect, but a big one. Some came to hate the “Coca Cola Culture,” others fell in love with a vision of a way of life they never otherwise would have dreamed of, and of course many people were pulled two ways. The one indisputable thing about television is that it changed everything it touched, and it touched everything.

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

World cultural power

Our final survey of America in the 20^th century deals with the century’s cultural impact on America, and America’s cultural impact on the world. When the 20^th century began, American culture was peripheral to Europe. By mid-century it had become dominant and in the final half it was overwhelming, and if (as in economics) the future of America’s cultural predominance had come into question, still it was only a question. As in economics, only time would tell. Now, note that cultural preeminence doesn’t necessarily mean popularity. For a couple of decades it was popular in certain European circles to decry what they called “the Coca Cola culture.” Preeminence doesn’t mean popularity; it means, you can’t be ignored.

Internet

There could be no more appropriate place to start than the internet, that really began to come into its own in the century’s final few years. This American-conceived and -executed project, begun and continued for strictly American reasons and designed to serve American purposes, seems destined to transform the mental globe, perhaps ultimately pulling us into one global community, certainly in the meantime enlarging the effective community of every far-flung language group. (And what language extends to more peoples than English? English seems fated to become humanity’s common language, if only a universally shared second language.)

No need to spell out the genesis and nature of the internet. Suffice it to say that it began in the 1960s with the military. It’s hard to explain this without it sounding insane, but military planners were concerned that an atomic war would destroy telephone links. That is, they feared that critical telephone exchanges would get destroyed, resulting in the surviving forces being unable to communicate with each other. So they invented a way to pass messages between computers by having the messages themselves search out the best available route. As happened in so many areas, what began as a military need was developed by way of the academic world, which adapted it for its own uses. Thus a military communications system became a network of military and academic sites, and certain governmental agencies, and …

Starting in about 1990, the internet began going mainstream. Its number of users doubling every few months, by the end of the century it already seemed universal, and quickly became indispensible to many businesses, researchers, curious individuals and, eventually, people who really, really wanted to see lots of photos and cartoons featuring cats.

The global effect was probably unanticipated, but it was pervasive. The “global village” that Marshall McLuhan had predicted, and had described in its early stages, was where we now began to live. Villages share rumors, gossip, and backbiting no less than information, common tasks and a certain world-view, and here we are.

Personal computers

And all of this intercommunication is possible only because of the rise of personal computers, another American innovation that transformed the world. Like all technology, it left home and changed as it grew, so that by the turn of the century people were inventing variations and applications suited to their own particular needs. (Some were of little use in developed countries but were revolutionary in third-world countries. For instance, solar recharge stations for laptops where there was no reliable electric grid.) America’s vast domestic market, its educated middle class, and its businesses with sufficient capital to reorganize around the availability of this new way of doing certain things provided the market that allowed the computers to be developed. Apple revolutionized the graphics-design industry, because it allowed things to be done in an instant that previously would not have been done at all, because they would have required too much time and labor. Thus, if you want to change fonts, tinge artwork with another color, insert special effects such as bending the type or inverting the picture, or mirroring it – all of these things could be done without computers, but only with great disproportionate effort, so, in practice, they weren’t done, or weren’t done much.

Apple introduced the first personal computer in 1975. It made a big enough impact that IBM introduced the Personal Computer, or IBM PC, in 1983. Apples far outperformed PCs in every way, but PCs were far cheaper, and were more than adequate for most business uses. Besides, they were safer for corporate purchasing agents to recommend. As someone said, “no one ever got fired for buying PCs instead of Apples.” Apple in those days was seen as quirky, arty, and, in a way, not quite respectable. Apple would not fully come into its own until the beginning of the next century. But it had helped transform the final quarter of the 20^th.

Communications satellites

It is safe to say that there could have been no internet without communications satellites. Those old enough to remember the first 15-minute Telstar broadcast in 1962 will remember it as the start of a new age. America broadcasting images to Europe; Europe broadcasting images to America, and it was all live! Until that moment, images got transported from one side of the North Atlantic to the other only be being physically carried. From that moment, things changed. Within a few years a network of communications satellites had been launched, and for the first time the world was linked electronically. Telephones, televisions, computers – they could all communicate faster and cheaper, and in many cases for the first time, because they removed the need for expensive ground links such as undersea cables.

As the century progressed, this emerging satellite web was put to new use. In the third world, it was a great destroyer of the effects of isolation. Now villages in the middle of Africa or India or Greater Nowhere were within reach of the entire world’s culture as soon as they had a laptop, a satellite link, and a source of electricity. In the developed world, the contents of the world’s print and pictorial libraries were soon being digitized, bringing the vision of a day when all the world’s cultural heritage would be shared, and thus would feed into a truly global culture. And all of this, in turn, depended on the prior invention of television, but before we discuss television, we need to discuss one of the century’s cultural icons, one of the men who captured the world’s imagination.

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

Trusts and anti-trust

Domestically, the beginning of the century was when Theodore Roosevelt began to attack the influence on the national economy of trusts. While he didn’t actually do much about them (his one-term successor William Howard Taft, later to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, did far more), he did put what he called the “bully pulpit” of the presidency behind attacks that until then had been confined to the “muckrakers” – crusading journalists such as Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, etc. (And even this had its ironic aspects, for it was TR who first called them muckrakers, cribbing from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and meaning it in no complimentary way.)

Trusts had come into existence after the Civil War, and the nation was slow to appreciate how great a change they made in the nation’s economic life. Their net effect was to consolidate control (regardless of ownership) of various industries in ever fewer hands. Standard Oil, to give one famous or infamous example, was a trust, and that structure allowed it to put its tentacles everywhere. In 1890, as we will see, Congress had passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. (No, not General Sherman; this was his brother John, for an entire generation one of the Senators most respected for his economic understanding.) But for a long time the Sherman act was used, not against the corporate combinations it had been designed to curb, but against labor unions, seeing them as combinations in restraint of trade!

Now, a trust in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. We employ them all the time, as for instance when a parent established a bank account for a minor child and holds it in trust. And it isn’t necessarily a bad thing on a corporate level, either, but its effects certainly can be anti-competitive. In effect, a group of companies held in trust are no longer independent; their activities can and will be controlled by the company holding them in trust. Thus, if you control the Standard Oil trust, you can determine the economic actions of every company whose shares you control. You dictate what they charge, where they sell, everything.

John D. Rockefeller consolidated the oil industry that way. Andrew Carnegie did the same for steel. In their own eyes, they were rationalizing and standardizing what had been a chaos, and it may well be that they were right. But the result was the creation of a class of merchant princes. Could any republic survive that kind of concentration of economic power in so few hands?

The danger of the situation was illustrated, to those few who understood what was going on, when banker J.P. Morgan was able to dictate the terms of his agreement to do the things needed to end the Panic of 1907. Morgan wasn’t a bad man, and what he dictated simply seemed to him to be what needed to be done. But here was a private merchant prince conferring with the head of the government as one prince to another. Anybody could see it was dangerous. But seeing that a situation is undesirable is not the same as knowing what to do about it.

Reform

TR began jawboning. Taft instituted lawsuits. Woodrow Wilson, when he was elected in 1912 promising the New Freedom, passed legislation aimed at correcting the situation.  Maybe later I’ll come back and fill in the legislation Wilson got through in the first half of his first term, before the coming of war in Europe in 1914 put an end to reform. One of the things we should examine is the Federal Reserve Act of 1914 which tried to free capital from the control of a few banks, but didn’t work out that way. Another is the Income Tax amendment, which attempted to address the effects of extreme inequality and, again, didn’t quite work out as planned.

Reforms rarely do. First comes the reform, then comes the vested interest, tweaking the reform to make it more comfortable for those it tries to reform. That’s just the way of the world. Only with time do people learn that although reform is necessary from time to time, reform is never going to lead to utopia. The problem is, many would-be followers won’t follow any reformer promising anything less than the impossible.

Another problem is that after a while the reformer is likely to start to believe that s/he is just the one to deliver the impossible, and anyone in the opposite camp must be, by definition, stupid and/or evil. And yet another problem is, maybe they are! Or maybe there’s something to be said for their side of things too. Plato to the contrary, philosophers would make terrible kings – not that anybody is likely to give them the chance.

Nonetheless, evils arise and have to be faced. The burst of reform that was Wilson’s New Freedom was the result of pressure that had been building at least since the Civil War changed everything. After the war put an end to reform, another 20 years went by until the New Deal brought forth another spate of legislation designed not only to complete the New Freedom but to deal with the problems that had sprung up since, problems unimagined in Wilson’s day. Then came war once again, and again reform was shelved. The limited reforms proposed and backed after the war by Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy met savage, intractable resistance, particularly in the area of race relations. In the emotional aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and the consequent Johnson landslide of 1964, the country underwent a third burst of reform, extensive enough to be traumatizing to large numbers, causing or exacerbating a cultural divide which the rest of the century could not transcend. After the Great Society legislation of 1965-1967, reform gave way to retrenchment, and the initiative went to forces calling for retrenchment in all areas of government other than military and police.

CHAPTER 4 — THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY

Self-purification and self-discovery may be either aided or hindered by a man’s relations with others: Thoreau placed his relations with society in this perspective and thus derived his attitudes from his values.

While selected quotations from his Journal could be used to “prove” that he was desperately lonely, that he despised all human conduct, or that he loved his fellow man and wished to serve him, each of these interpretations would include only a part of the truth, — insistence that any part was the whole would distort the truth into falsity.

Put simply, he rejected those relationships which threatened to interfere with his quest for self-fulfillment, but eagerly sought those which might help him become a greater person. He appreciated the advantages organized society offered, but wished to see those advantages put to a greater use, and Wished to see the disadvantages eliminated.

At base, he recognized, we are each alone: no one can ever really understand the important facts of another’s existence.⁷⁹ Genius especially is solitary.⁸⁰ But it was also he who said, simply, “Society is fragrant.”⁸¹ (As he used the word, society could mean the social order, the company of friends, or any gathering of people which did not include himself). In human intercourse he found many aids to growth.

The society of others served to focus the thoughts of his solitary hours by giving them expression.⁸² At its best, it encouraged its members: Each was treated as though he were better than he knew himself to be.⁸³ At best, offering a man his complement, rather than his mirror image, it was “additive and he1pfu1.⁸⁴

It could serve as inspiration to awaken the divine potential in a sleeping individual;⁸⁵ could free one from petty concern with himself;⁸⁶ could ennoble the recipient of another’s good opinion.⁸⁷

But not all society is worth courting or continuing.⁸⁸ Its worth depends on what if offers : “I do not judge men by anything they can do. Their greatest deed is the impression they make on me.”⁸⁹ It is not so much who composes the society as ,what that is important: “Our intercourse with the best grows soon shallow and trivial. They no longer inspire us. After enthusiasm comes insipidity and blankness.”⁹⁰

———-

79 “’Must not our whole lives go unexplained, without regard to us, notwithstanding a few flourishes of ours, which themselves need explanation?” J, p. 440.

80 “[The reader] will discover that, like every genius, [Aeschylus] was a solitary liver and worker in his day.” J, p. 93.

81 Miller, p. 148.

82 “In society all the inspirations of my lonely hours seem to flow back on me, and then first have expression.” J., p. 129.

83 “It is the charm and greatness of all Society, from friendship to the drawing-room, that it takes place on a level slightly higher that the actual characters of the parties would warrant; it is an expression of faith.” J, p. 323.

84 “When we ask for society — we do not want the double of ourselves– but the complement rather. Society should be additive and helpful, we would be reinforced by its alliance.” Miller, p. 216.

85 “There are in each the seeds of a heroic ardor, which need only to be stirred in with the soil where they lie, by an inspired voice or pen, to bear fruit of a divine flavor. J., p. 52.

86 “We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we devote of care elsewhere.” J., p. 437.

87 “So far as we respond to our ideal estimate of each other do we have profitable intercourse.” J, p. 205.

88  “There is a terra firma in society as well as in geography, some whose ports you may make by dead reckoning in all weather. All the rest are but floating Atlantides which sometimes skirt the western horizon of our intercourse.” J., p. 77.

89 J. p. 215.

90 J, p. 355.

———-

Society, to be used to best advantage, must be alternated with a solitary disregard for it,⁹¹ lest the individual lose the direction of his life to those around him. He sharply criticized those men he saw that lived always in society, because he felt that each, beneath however unpromising an exterior, were no leas divine than he yet they had forgotten their own divinity.⁹² He intended to remember his. His divine core would furnish him with certain knowledge of right and wrong — and he, even if unrequested, would furnish that knowledge to society :

It is wholesome advice, — “to be a man amongst folks.” Go into society if you will, or if you are unwilling, and take a human interest in its affairs. If you mistake Messiers and Mesdames for so many men and women, it is but erring on the safe side, — or, rather, it is their error and not yours. Armed with a manly sincerity, you shall not be trifled with, but drive this business of life. It matters not how many men are to be addressed — rebuked, — provided one man rebuke them.⁹³

This passage, written when he was twenty, is hardly the formula for attaining popularity, but it is consistent with his expressed determination to aid his fellow man by advice and by example. Too often, even among the best of men, the conventions stood in the way of a real meeting of minds:⁹⁴ he wished, intensely, to break this routine, to both offer more to and extract more from society: “I would have men make a greater use of me.”⁹⁵

———-

91 “Let not society be the element in which you swim or are tossed about at the mercy of the waves, but be rather a strip of firm land running out into the sea, whose base is daily washed by the tide, but whose summit only the spring tide can reach.” J, p. 40.

92 “I would not forget that I deal with infinite and divine qualities in my fellow. All men, indeed, are divine in their core of light, but that is indistinct and distant to me , like the stars of the least magnitude, or the galaxy itself, but my kindred planets show their round disks and even their attendant moons to my eye.

“Even the tired laborers I meet on the road, I really meet as travelling gods, but it is as yet, and must be for a long season, without speech.” J, pp. 382-3.

93 J, p. 98.

94 “Men do not after all meet on the ground of their real acquaintance and actual understanding of one another, but degrade themselves immediately into the puppets of convention. They do as if, in given circumstances, they had agreed to know each other only so well.” J, p. 355.

95 J, p. 205.

———-

Believing that all men are divine in their cores, he wrote : “We must securely love each other as we love God, with no more danger that our love be unregulated or illbestowed.⁹⁶ He valued love above intellect,⁹⁷ preferring, or saying he preferred, “ignorance and bungling with love” to “wisdom and skill without.”⁹⁸

(Love, in his writings, tends to shade off into what we today would likely liable affection; his word is nearer his meaning than is ours).

What human relationships at best could — or should — offer is well indicated in the following entry, which may have been written with one person in mind but which offers us Thoreau’s idea of love:

I thought that the sun of our love should have risen as noiselessly as the sun out of the sea and we sailors have found ourselves steering between the tropics as if the broad day had lasted forever. You know how the sun comes up from the sea when you stand on the cliff, and doesn’t startle you, but every thing, and you too are helping it.⁹⁹

Thinking of some friend — unnamed , though each may take his guess, — he wrote of those benefits discovered in solitude, which were received, unnoticed in society:

Thou hast loved me for what I was not, but for what I aspired to be. We shudder to think of the kindness of our friend which has fallen on us cold, though in some true but tardy hour we have awakened. There has just reached me the kindness of some acts, not to be forgotten, not to be remembered. I wipe off these scores at midnight, at rare intervals in moments of insight and gratitude.¹⁰⁰

———-

96 J, р. 288.

97 “The only way to speak the truth is to speak lovingly; only the lover’s words are heard. The intellect should never speak; it is not a natural sound.” J, p. 332.

98 “Ignorance and bungling with love are better than wisdom and skill without.” J, p. 348.

99 Miller, p. 178.

100 J, p. 456.

———-

Yet he took care to preserve his bristling independence, regardless of his inner feelings. “If my world is not sufficient without thee, my friend, I will wait till it is and then call thee. You shall come to a palace, not to an almhouse.”¹⁰¹ He wished to add, not to subtract; to remember that other individuals too, were divine — that their society could aid his quest and he could aid theirs. Observing society at large, he envisioned great things to be done through cooperation in a worthy cause, — but saw little being done that was worthwhile, and found little evidence of cooperation even in what was being done.

In large part he tended to blame this on men’s tendency to uphold whatever already existed, “though its insufficiency is manifest enough.”¹⁰² For example, he decried the disparity between talk of cooperation and the practice:

Men talk much of cooperation nowadays, of working together to some worthy end; but what little cooperation there is, is as if it were not, being a simple result of which the means are hidden, a harmony inaudible to men… To cooperate thoroughly implies to get your living together.¹⁰³

Despite all their rhetoric about it, and despite the close proximity in which they live, men “have not associated, they have only assembled, and society has signified only a convention of men.”¹⁰⁴ Of course the pun on convention is designed to drive the point home twice.

———-

101 J, p. 223.

102 “There is always a present and extant life which all combine to uphold, though its insufficiency is manifest enough.” J, p. 115.

103 J, p. 488.

104 J, p. 39.

———-

The process itself of civilization he found essentially benign– even, occasionally, found valorous¹⁰⁵ — alteration though it was of nature.¹⁰⁶ It was not life in society he opposed, but rather the unnatural, superficial life that society too often encouraged. He wanted freedom from its luxuries and time-schedules;¹⁰⁷ He wished to concern himself with living, and not with getting a living.¹⁰⁸ His career was internal.

But around him he saw men letting the finest part of life slip by unnoticed, being too concerned with material life to heed the spiritual.¹⁰⁹ They distracted themselves with foolish transiencies to add novelty to lives devoid of interest.¹¹⁰ They lived in the present, — therefore lived without perspective on their 1ives;¹¹¹ without any special hope.¹¹²

———-

105 “Some interests have got a footing on the earth which I have not made sufficient allowance for. That which built these barns and cleared the land thus had some valor.” J, p 250.

106 Occasionally he conceded that man’s works could fit into nature. “The cabins of the settlers are the points whence radiate these rays of green and yellow and russet over the landscape; out of these go the axes and spades with which the landscape is painted. How much is the Indian summer and the budding of spring related to the cottage? Have not the flight of the crow and the gyrations of the hawk a reference to that roof?” J, p. 128.

107 “Can the Walhalla be warmed by steam and go by clock and bell?” J, p. 289.

108 “It has not been my design to live cheaply, but only to live as I could, not devoting much time to getting a living. I made the most of what means were already got.” J, p. 485.

109 “Most men are so taken up with the cares and rude practice of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Literally, the laboring man has not leisure for a strict and lofty integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the fairest and noblest relations. His labor will depreciate in the market. …

“How can he remember well his ignorance who has so often to use his knowledge.” J, p. 381-2

110 “In case of an embargo there will be found to be old clothes enough in everybody’s garret to last till the millennium. We are fond of news, novelties, new things….

“A man who has at length found out something important to do will not have to get a new suit to do it in.” J, pp. 418-419

111 “The present is the instant work and near process of living, and will be found in the last analysis to be nothing more nor less than digestion. Sometimes, it is true, it is indigestion.” J., p. 466.

112 “Most men have forgotten that it was ever morning; but a few serene memories, healthy and wakeful natures, there are who assure us that the sun rose clear, heralded by the singing of birds,– this very day’s sun, which rose before Memnon was ready to greet it.” J, p. 386.

———-

Was it necessary? He thought not. A man did not need money to be great;¹¹³ all this concern for possessions was unwarranted and undesirable, serving as it did to stifle any incipient nobleness in a man’s character by subordinating it to the economies implied in “getting ahead.”¹¹⁴

This preoccupation with the things of the world men will put behind them individually as they grow in understanding, — as their spiritual life comes to dominate the material.¹¹⁵ Seen in the perspective of eternity, the present will not loom so large;¹¹⁶ they will come to see that there are more important things to be done with life than to fritter it away absent-mindedly, piece-meal.¹¹⁷

 

———-

113 “All true greatness runs as level a course, and is as unaspiring, as the plow in the furrow. It wears the homiliest dress and speaks the homeliest language…. Heaven is the inmost place. The good have not to travel far.” J, p. 301.

114 “Be generous in your poverty, if you would be rich. To make up a great action there are no subordinate mean ones. We can never afford to postpone a true life to-day to any future and anticipated nobleness. We think if by tight economy we can manage to arrive at independence, then indeed we will begin to be generous without stay. We sacrifice all nobleness to a little present meanness.” J, p. 241.

115 “To our nearsightedness this mere outward life seems a constituent part of us, and we do not realize that as our soul expands it will cast off the shell of routine and convention, which afterward will only be an object for the cabinets of the curious.” J, p. 277.

116 “The sudden revolutions of these times and this generation have acquired a very exaggerated importance. They do not interest me much, for they are not in harmony with the longer periods of nature. The present, in any aspect in which it can be presented to the smallest audience, is always mean. God does not sympathize with the popular movements.” J., p. 315.

117 “Why let our lives be a cheap and broken hour, which should be an affluent eternity?” Miller, p. 39. Also, “Our task is not such a piece of day labor that a [man] must be thinking what he shall do next for a livelihood, but such that as it began in endeavor, so will it end only when nothing in heaven or on earth, remains to be endeavored.” Miller, p. 142.

———-

When the realization comes, they will remember that only by giving constant expression to their virtue may they increase it;¹¹⁸ they will feed the body without starving the spirit. They will each help bring closer that society of individuals united by love and respect of which Thoreau dreamed:

History tells of Orestes and Pylades, Damon and Pythias, but why should we not put to shame those reserved old worthies by a community of such?¹¹⁹

But he proposed no specific, institutional changes. Nor did he set forth a plan to actively push for “reform” of society. He did not propose to do more than describe his vision, and to set an example in his own life. Certainly he did not propose to attempt to bring the ideal closer to reality by joining, or founding, a “reform” organization. During these years, at least, he consistently rejected all such societies, for reasons which follow logically from his belief that every man carries within himself, however deeply hidden, divine knowledge and goodness.

Most social reform groups are based on the assumption — implicit or explicit — that reforming the social conditions and institutions around the individual produces better, faster, results than does “uplifting” individuals. Obviously no one who viewed his own soul as the ultimate authority, and every other man’s soul as that man’ authority, could subscribe to this theory, — and Thoreau did not. Self-reform was his quest, and as he would not accept the possibility of reform from without, he could not agree that it could be imposed successfully by whatever combination of persuasion and environmental change.

One looks in vain for a favorable mention of the word “reformer” in the Journal of these years.¹²⁰ As late as 1845 he called those reformers “frivolous almost” who concentrated on attacking Negro slavery before trying to free their own hearts and intellects from their own “keen and subtle masters.”¹²¹

For much the same reason he rejected communities dedicated to collective improvement, such as Brook Farm and Bronson Alcott’s short-lived Fruitlands. “Do you think your virtue will go to board with you?” he asked. “The boarder has no home.”¹²² He could not believe that individuals could better improve themselves in company than alone. Reform was an internal matter: The true reform “calls no convention.”¹²³

Similarly, he rejected that “charity,” organized or private, which consisted of giving material rather than moral and spiritual aid. “We can render men the best assistance, by letting them see how sore a thing it is to need any assistance. I am not in haste to help men more than God is. If they will not help themselves, shall I become their abettor?”¹²⁴

The assumption unstated is that he who will improve his internal condition will find himself able to improve his external condition as well. More explicitly, he wrote:

What is called charity is no charity, but the interference of a third person. Shall I interfere with fate? Shall I defraud man of the opportunities which God gave him, and so take away his life? … I will not stay to cobble and patch God’s rents, but do clean, new work when he has given me my hands full. This almshouse charity is like putting new wine into old bottles . . . We go about mending the times, when we should be building the eternity.¹²⁵

———-

118 “Are we not reminded in our better moments that we have been needlessly husbanding somewhat, perchance, our God-derived capital, or title to capital, guarding it by methods we know? But the most diffuse prodigality a better wisdom teaches, — that we hold nothing. We are not what we were. By usurer’s craft … we strive to retain and increase the divinity in us, when infinitely the greater part of divinity is out of us.” J., p. 386.

119 J, p. 113

120 “… a reformer, with two soldier’s eyes and shoulders, who began to belabor the world at ten years, a ragged mountain boy, as fifer of a company, with set purpose to remould it from those first years. J, p. 262

121 “I wonder men can be so frivolous almost as to attend to the gross form of negro slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters who subject us both. Self-emancipation in the West Indies of a man’s thinking and imagining provinces, which should be more than his island territory, — one emancipated heart and intellect! It would knock the fetters from a million slaves.” J. pp. 362-3.

122 J, p. 227

123 “The true reform … calls no convention…. When an individual takes a sincere step, then all the gods attend, and his single deed is sweet.” J., p. 247.

124 Mıller, р. 217.

125 J, p. 212.

———-

Immediately thereafter he adds the underlying assumption. “I must serve a strong master, not a weak one. Help imples a sympathy of energy and efforts else no alleviation will avail.”¹²⁶ (Emphasis added). No one may be reformed without his active cooperation — and if he actively cooperates, he needs no outside aid.

Another cause that was not his was that of attempting to abolish war by means other than improving man’s nature through individual reform.

What is human warfare but just this, — an effort to make the laws of God and nature take sides with one party. Men make an arbitrary code, and because it is not right, they try to make it prevail by might. The moral law does not want any champion. Its asserters do not go to war. It was never infringed with impunity. It is inconsistent to decry war and maintain law, for if there were no need of war there would be no need of law.¹²⁷

In other words, until men govern themselves from within, they will continue to need to be governed from without, — and no “reform” can touch either the institution of war or that of law until man so changes his nature that they will be necessary no longer.

Society, then, would be improved through the self-reform of those individuals who composed it – not by tinkering with the institutions which they in their ignorance had set up. When the men changed, institutions would change.

———-

126 Ibid.

127 J, p. 334.

 

 

CONCLUSION

All men are one with God — as is all creation, — but men have forgotten. In this forgetfulness is the root of the vices and the weaknesses which prevent men from fulfilling their potential. Instead of concentrating on obeying the internal promptings which, heeded, would lead to maximum spiritual growth, most men bog themselves down in a morass of possessions and speculations. They think by feeding their bodies to save their souls — or, rather, they think to feed the body, but ignore the soul altogether. In their individuality they lose sight of the universal.

Yet, in society they not only do not regain sight of the universal, but forget even their individuality. Organized around proper priorities, society might aid each to lead a more fruitful, more spiritual, life; but as constituted, it merely adds another layer to the distractions with which they surround themselves. Cooperation in a worthy cause is a good and noble thing, — but noble causes are scarce and cooperation even more so.

This will change as the race matures — and not until. Increased wisdom will counsel an end to pre-occupation with gadgets and novelties, appliances and news, reform movements and politics. Men will learn as they grow that all reform is individual, and that the most effective aid that may be offered is example. The millennium will not appear until all men discover– and heed– their own inner wisdom.

So wrote Thoreau, in solitude, between his twentieth and thirtieth years, while following that individual path that led to Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” Life Without Principal, ” and immortality.

 

[Working backward from the year 2000 toward America’s beginnings.]

Trans-oceanic possessions

The economic transformation of the United States in the years between 1900 and its entrance into World War I in 1917 was not dramatic, but it held the seeds for many things.

For one thing, the country for the first time had overseas possessions. The War of 1898 and the events around it had brought several previously Spanish territories under the American flag. Cuba we probably could have annexed (who could have stopped us?) but domestic sugar interests did not want Cuban sugar within our tariff walls, and southern congressmen did not want a largely Negro and mestizo population added to the population. However we did hold onto Puerto Rico, as well as the splendid area for a naval base at Guantanamo Bay, on Cuba’s south coast. The treaty with the new republic of Panama, following the revolution/coup of 1903 that severed it from Columbia, had brought us the Canal Zone, a 10-mile-wide strip of land extending from coast to coast.

In the Pacific, America took the Philippines and the islands of  Guam, Wake, Midway and American Samoa, and in 1900 acquired the Hawaiian Islands by shifty dealings.

All this worked together as part of the two-ocean navy strategy that was assumed to be needed for America to take its proper place as a world power. If you were going to have a two-ocean navy, the Panama Canal would allow you to transfer armored might from one ocean to the other as the need arose. If you were going to operate in the Pacific, you would need a series of coaling stations. Hence, starting from our west coast, Hawaii, Midway, Wake, Guam, American Samoa and the Philippines. Besides coaling stations, you would need repair facilities and safe harbors – in short, navy bases. Hence Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico, defenses for the canal on each coast, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and bases on the remaining islands. It’s simple enough when you understand the logic.

Of course, an alternative course would have said, we don’t have an overseas empire, we don’t need an overseas empire, and so we don’t need to be doing all this to provide support for a two-ocean navy to defend the empire we don’t have. But anti-imperialists (there was an Anti-Imperialist League, and Mark Twain was one prominent member) didn’t get any farther then than they do now. They’re always at a disadvantage when their opponents start waving the flag. So we acquired our territories, and our bases, and new neighbors such as the Empire of Japan, which wasn’t especially happy to welcome us to the neighborhood.

In 1917, just about the time we entered the war, we bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark, as additional protection for the Atlantic approaches to the Panama Canal, and this rounded out our acquisition of overseas real estate.