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Historical Cycling and Recycling.  Back to the Future in the Age of Trump.  Social Democracy v. Social Darwinism.  The Golden Rule v. The Rule of Gold.  A Fascist Resurgence? A Socialist Revival?

Historical Cycling and Recycling.

Back to the Future in the Age of Trump.

Social Democracy v. Social Darwinism.

The Golden Rule v. The Rule of Gold.

A Fascist Resurgence? A Socialist Revival?

Burton Weltman

“The past isn’t dead.  It isn’t even past.”

William Faulkner.

Gilded Age Redux: Déjà vu all over again.  The Golden Rule v. the Rule of Gold.

I am writing this missive in early February, 2025.  We are currently rushing past the first quarter of the twenty-first century while significant efforts are being made to hurl us back to the last quarter of the nineteenth century by right-wing reactionaries who want to Make America Great Again (MAGA) by destroying all of the progress that was made during the twentieth century.

The late nineteenth century was a Gilded Age of plutocracy and political cronyism, blatant demagoguery and government corruption, rampant racial bigotry and religious prejudice, widespread poverty and homelessness, plagues of virulent diseases, and a host of other societal ills.  Many of these ills have been ameliorated by progressive reforms during the twentieth century.  Social Security.  Medicaid.  Medicare.  Civil Rights Laws. Civil Liberties Rulings. The list goes on.  The fabric of American society has become more humane thereby.      

The repeal of these reforms and a return to the state of things that prevailed during the Gilded Age seems to be the goals of self-styled MAGA populists who have very little in common with the original populists of the late nineteenth century.  The original populists were reformers who promoted the progressive social changes that the MAGA movement is against.  MAGA supporters seem to think that America was greatest when it was most nasty, corrupt, and brutish.  It is a fascistic, might-makes-right conception of greatness.  Currently led and misled by Donald Trump, MAGA has momentum and we are in the midst of a MAGA moment in history.

It is a difficult moment for progressives.  We are experiencing a historical cycling and recycling that we could do without, the return of an atavism that we thought was being overcome and gradually done away with.  It is discouraging but it does not have to be disheartening.  There may be a silver lining or sliver of hope in the fact that the Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era and then the New Deal, which initiated most of the liberal social changes that the MAGA mob hate. 

The evils of the Gilded Age provoked a historic social reform movement which was, in turn, largely inspired by socialist ideas.  Socialism was a mainstream ideology during the Progressive and New Deal eras of the first half of the twentieth century, competing with liberal and conservative ideologies in the political arena.  While socialists hoped to gradually replace the capitalist system, liberals adopted many socialist ideas in the hope of reinforcing the existing system.  Working in cooperation with liberals, socialists and the Socialist Party of the early twentieth century were the source of many of the progressive reforms that eventuated during the century.  Almost all of the Socialist Party platform for the 1912 election was, for example, subsequently enacted into law. 

Channeling socialist ideals, liberal and socialist progressives adopted a mantra of “The Golden Rule instead of the Rule of Gold.”  Likewise, the socialist ideal of working cooperatively with others, instead of the capitalist idea of working competitively against them, was a main progressive idea.  Socialist ideas permeated the progressive reform movements.  Socialists also held many important positions in local and state governments and the federal government during the first half of the twentieth century.  That changed after World War II.  Socialism became a taboo word during the Cold War when conservatives successfully equated democratic socialism with totalitarian Communism in the media and the public mind.    

But that, too, seems now to be changing.  Despite the present-day reign of Donald Trump and his minions, or maybe because of it, the idea and ideals of socialism have been revived in recent years.  This revival has included the emergence of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization that largely functions as a left-wing of the Democratic Party, and the election of DSA members and other social democrats to Congress and to local government offices.

Since socialism seems to be back on the political agenda, it may be useful to try to define and discuss what socialism actually is.  And that is the purpose of this essay.       

Democratic Socialism Redux: It’s back on the agenda.  Individuality v. Individualism. 

The word socialism was first used as a political term around 1830.  From its inception, the term has denoted more of a moral message than a political or economic system.  Socialism is an ideology which holds that “the self-development of each is the basis for the self-development of all” (Karl Marx), that one should act according to the maxim of “all for one, and one for all” (The Three Musketeers), and that one should “love thy neighbor as thyself” (Jesus Christ).  It is an ideology that promotes individuality through mutualism and cooperation.

Socialism is a pro-social philosophy.  When you add “ism” to a word, you identify an ideology or a cause that promotes what the word represents.  Socialism asserts that individual freedom is a result of social interaction.  Individuality means freely cultivating your talents within a social context, and finding a place in which you can make your unique contribution to society.  Individuality is not merely freedom from the oppression of others, but also freedom to participate equally with others.  It is the idea that my freedom depends on yours, and we are nothing without each other.  That’s the ideal of socialism.

Socialism arose in opposition to capitalism and individualism.  Capitalism can be defined as an economic system that is based on the presumption that businesses will be privately owned and operated without government interference, unless that presumption is overcome by conclusive evidence that government involvement is necessary to preserve the capitalist system.  In a capitalist system, the goal of businesses is to make profits, based on the assumption that maximizing profits will result in maximum benefits to the public.  Capitalism as an economic system is supported by individualism as a social theory.

Individualism is an ideology that promotes a cult of the individual, and that describes the individual as in constant opposition to society.  Individualism asserts “me” and “mine” over “we” and “ours.”  It promotes the individual over society, for fear that society will suppress the individual.  And it promotes competition among people rather than cooperation.  This premise is based on two key premises.  First, the idea that competition makes people stronger and more productive.  And second, that competition keeps people isolated from each other so that they cannot form social coalitions that might suppress individuals.  Society is to be mistrusted.   

Individualism is, therefore, an ideology of liberation, but also of insecurity.  It encourages people to be themselves, free from the constraints of others, and be all that they can individually be.  But it bases that self-fulfillment on competing for supremacy against others.  In an individualist world, people can never be sure whether their positions are strong enough to withstand the whims of lady luck or the winds of change. 

A down-side of individualism is that it can function as an ideological rationalization for the selfish and self-centered bully, who climbs over others in a vain attempt to be king of the hill, vain because there is inevitably someone stronger or smarter coming up that hill.  Individualism reinforces the free enterprise capitalist economic system that has predominated in the United States since the early nineteenth century.  Individualism gradually became the dominant ideology in the country during the nineteenth century and, despite inroads from socialist ideas, has largely reigned as such since. 

Unlike individualism, socialism asserts the compatibility and indivisibility of the individual and society.  Socialism claims that individuals and individuality stem from interacting with other people and with society.  For socialists, “One for all and all for one” is a fact, not merely an aspiration.  You are nothing without others, and you are what you do with others. 

Likewise, “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is, for socialists, a fact and not merely an aspiration.  If you think well of yourself, you will likely treat others well.  If you treat others poorly, competing to defeat and dominate them, you will likely think poorly of yourself.  Socialism opposes individualism, but not individuality, as self-defeating.  Individualism comes from working against others, ultimately a losing proposition, individuality from working with them.

Individualism promotes the Social Darwinian zero-sum idea that if you get more, I will get less, and that the only way for me to get and keep mine is to keep you from getting yours.  It is an ideology that promotes distrust and fear of others. 

Although few right-wingers today acknowledge Social Darwinism as a source of their ideology, Social Darwinism is the principle that underscores most of the thinking of Donald Trump and the political right-wing in the United States today.  Unlike conservatives who oppose dramatic social change and big government, but are generally willing to accept small reforms and government programs when necessary to avoid disaster, right-wingers are radicals who want to dramatically change society and virtually eliminate government and the public sector.  It is a view that hinges on mobocracy instead of democracy. 

Unlike right wing ideology, socialism is not a radical idea.  By definition, radicals want to get to the roots of what they see as a wicked society, tear up those roots, and plant something entirely new.  Socialism does not reject the foundations of American society.  The idea of socialism builds on the social ideals that most Americans already hold, and on social instincts that most Americans already display.  Socialists do not have to start from scratch.  They can build on the democratic institutions and ideas that already exist in capitalist America, and thereby move gradually toward a socialist political, economic and social system.  

A socialist political democracy could be described as a system of majority rule with minority rights, the most important of which is the right of the minority to possibly become the majority someday.  That last clause is the most important in the definition.  Implicit in the definition are freedoms of speech, assembly, and political organization; the rule of law along with due process and equal protection under the law; and all of the other political rights guaranteed by the Constitution.  But the definition also requires social equality and economic equity so that individuals and minority groups can effectively exercise their political rights.  That is where the socialism comes in.  Political democracy is effective only to the extent that social equality and economic equity prevail.   

In economics, the idea of socialism is economic democracy.  The economic goal of most socialists could be summarized as a system based on the presumption of public ownership or control of businesses, unless it is in the public interest for businesses to be privately owned and/or controlled, and with an assumption that small businesses would be privately owned and operated.  A mixed economy of public and private business is the idea of socialism, with government involvement to ensure economic equity.

Implicit in that definition are such things as a public health system along with health and safety regulations, a public insurance system along with a social safety net, minimum and maximum wage regulations along with a progressive income tax, and other provisions to make for a cooperative, stable, and relatively egalitarian economy.  Socialism promotes the public interest in economics, and opposes a capitalism in which everyone and everything is valued in monetary rather than human terms.  It builds on American ideals of fairness and practices of generosity.

In social relations, the idea of socialism is social democracy.  Socialism promotes the dignity of all people, and opposes discrimination against people based on invidious prejudices.  A socialist conception of personal relations could be summarized as support for everyone who respects others, and opposition to anyone to the extent the person disrespects others.  Implicit in that idea is opposition to racism, misogyny, ethnocentrism, homophobia, and bigotry in all its forms, and support for diversity coupled with cooperation.  That is the American ideal of E pluribus unum.       

Back to the Future: Democratic Socialism v. Social Darwinism.  The choice is ours to make.

The idea of socialism held by most socialists is very different than that held by opponents of socialism.  As part of their political liturgy, conservatives and right-wingers have tried to make socialism a dirty word, and to represent socialism as the enemy of individuality and freedom.  The idea of socialism is often mischaracterized by opponents, and even by some self-styled socialists, mostly those who identify as Communists, as promoting government ownership or control over all businesses and, maybe, even over everything else.  The idea of socialism is also misidentified with oppressive Communist regimes that have existed in some countries.  But, neither of these is consistent with the idea of socialism nor what most socialists believe. 

This misconception is based on a claim that socialists worship society over-and-above the individual, and to which the individual can be sacrificed.  This is a core idea of totalitarianism.  It is anathema to individualists and is the basis of their seeing society as the enemy of the individual.  But reifying and idolizing society is also contrary to the idea of socialism.  Most socialists see society as an association of individuals which can and should be a vehicle for individuality, and oppose the totalitarianism implied in seeing society as a hegemonic entity.

Socialists are often portrayed as violent revolutionaries, but the overwhelming majority of socialists from the early nineteenth century to the present day have favored peaceful evolution toward socialism.  Socialists have generally tried to establish islands of socialism within the existing capitalist society that would island-by-island gradually move society toward the socialist goal. 

They have, for example, established communes, like those of the nineteenth century utopian socialists and the twentieth century hippies, some of which have been successful.  Socialists have also encouraged the establishment of cooperatives, which have been more successful.  Farming co-ops, housing co-ops, shopping co-ops, and co-ops of all sorts have flourished over the last one hundred years.  The hope is that the cooperative idea will catch on with ever more people, so that communes and co-ops will gradually become the norm. 

At the same time, socialists have developed ideas for social reforms and social programs that have been adopted over the years.  Most of the social programs proposed in the 1912 platform of the Socialist Party have, in fact, become law in the United States.  The hope is that by adopting regulations that promote the health and safety of the public, promote economic equity and efficiency, protect the environment, and care for those who need help, the country will gradually become more socialized. 

Most people would describe these reforms positively in humanistic terms, and see them as a means of stabilizing the existing capitalist society.  Right-wingers, however, decry them as “creeping socialism.”  Socialists hope they are right.

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Brief Bibliography.

Eric Foner. “Why is there no socialism in the United States?” In Who Owns History? New York: Hill and Wang, 2002. Pp. 110-145.

Micheal Harrington. Socialism. Past & Future. New York: Arcade Publishing. 1989.

George Lichtheim. The Origins of Socialism. New York: Frederick A. Praeger. 1969.

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In the Beginning: The Choices and the Choice. The Utopian Impulse in American History. The Golden Age of Utopianism, 1820’s to 1850’s: In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union. Part II.

In the Beginning: The Choices and the Choice.

The Utopian Impulse in American History.

The Golden Age of Utopianism, 1820’s to 1850’s:

In Pursuit of a More Perfect Union. Part II.

Burton Weltman

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Tom Paine

The Utopian Origins of European Americans.

The utopian impulse in American history began with some of the first European immigrants to America.[1]  John Winthrop, in what can be considered his founding speech for the Puritan colony in Massachusetts in 1630, called upon his comrades to build a cooperative community that would reflect the glory of God and be “A modell of Christian charity” for all the world to follow.  He said that “we must be knitt together in this worke as one man” and “must entertain each other in brotherly affection.” 

Fleeing, the Puritans developed utopian proposals and sought to establish an ideal community in America. The Puritans were not socialists, but they were communitarians, that is, devotees of the common good over individual success.  Those, Winthrop said, who were fortunate enough to be rich must share their wealth with the poor and give up their luxuries “for the supply of others’ necessities.”  The rich must help the poor in their material need and, in turn, the poor must help the rich in their spiritual need.[2] 

Although Winthrop’s vision promoted the communitarian idea of one for all and all for one, there were inherent tensions within his ideal between the individual and the community that eventually undermined his goal.  In Puritan ideology, the goal of saving oneself in the eyes of the Lord was supposed to be consistent with the obligation of serving the Lord’s community, and the economic success of an individual was supposed to support the spiritual success of the community.  Theoretically and theologically, economic success would come to those individuals who were best serving the community and, in turn, an individual’s success would be a sign that the person was doing the Lord’s work. 

But things did not always work out that way.  The Puritan commonwealth was economically so successful that it attracted outsiders who did not share the community’s spiritual or collectivist goals.  When many of these outsiders became economically successful individuals, which was supposedly a sign they were doing the Lord’s work, the Puritans’ spiritual and communitarian ideals were undermined. 

Although the utopian goals with which the colony was founded were an essential ingredient in the success of the community — their ideals sustained colonists through hard times and provided them with the cooperative attitude that was essential in building the colony — the utopian spirit waned during the course of the seventeenth century.  In a sense, the community failed through success.[3]

The Utopian Origins of the American Revolutionaries.

The American revolutionaries who founded the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had utopian aspirations similar to those of the Puritans.  The historian Gordon Wood has called the American Revolution “one of the great utopian movements in American history”[4] and it was seen as such by the Founders themselves.  Expressing the sentiments of most revolutionaries following the Declaration of Independence, Tom Paine exclaimed in utopian terms that “The birthday of a new world is at hand” and that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”[5] 

According to Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and other Founders, the Revolution would unleash the virtue of the American people so that they could build a republican society that would be a model for the world.  Their republican vision of politics and government was to a large extent a secular version of Winthrop’s model of Christian charity.  It encompassed both a commitment to shared and sharing community institutions — the res publica or public thing — and an emphasis on the individual’s role in serving the community — the virtuous man as a public servant.  All for one and one for all would benefit one and all. 

But there were tensions within the Founders’ republicanism as there had been within the Puritans’ ideals, tensions exemplified by the motto that the Founders chose for their new country: E Pluribus Unum — out of many comes one and out of one comes many.  In the Founders’ view, communalism was supposed to foster individualism and individualism was supposed to foster communalism.  That, however, is easier to say than to do and almost from the founding of the republic, there developed an intense debate between those who would emphasize individualism over the community and those who would emphasize cooperation over individualism.         

The Founders were both utopians and self-styled realists who saw themselves as trying to establish the most perfect government they could imagine for what they believed was inevitably an imperfect society made up of imperfect people, including themselves.  Theirs was an open-ended utopia rather than a fixed and rigid plan for society.  This pragmatic utopianism is reflected in the Constitution, which allows for endless amendments and continually changing interpretations as society evolves.

Perfection was for the Founders not something that could ever be achieved in substance but could be approximated in the processes they had established in the Constitution.  Perfection was for them the subject of an endless quest, the eternal “pursuit of happiness” promised in the Declaration of Independence.  And it required a social theory and a social structure that “would forever remain free and open,” flexible and ecumenical.[6] 

Things did not turn out exactly as the Founders expected in the wake of winning the Revolution and establishing the Constitution.  Instead of cooperation and unity among citizens, there developed partisan politics and regional conflicts.  But the country expanded enormously in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and this expansion encouraged and enabled the emergence of new utopian visions of America. 

American history during the second quarter of the nineteenth century can, in fact, be described as a battle between the proponents of three different utopian visions, that of a mercantilist commonwealth, a communal socialism, and a free enterprise capitalism.  It was the highpoint of utopian theory and practice in the United States, and the struggle among these visions left a permanent imprint on the country.  And the struggle between these three visions is the focus of this second part of “The Utopian Impulse in American History.”

Utopian Visions: Mercantilism, Socialism, Individualism.

Each of the three utopian visions – mercantilist, socialist and individualist – shared aspects of the Founders’ ideals but took them in different directions.

Mercantilist Republicanism.  The vision of a mercantilist commonwealth was based on the Founders’ traditional republican ideals, especially their pursuit of virtue.  This was a vision of a centrally controlled society with a government-controlled economy, governed by a natural aristocracy of the best and the brightest, and aiming toward the general welfare of one and all.  This was the view of both Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian republicans.  Their republican descendants, such as John Quincy Adams, emphasized the Founders’ belief that virtue was its own reward, and that a virtuous elite could and would rule in the interests of the common good.   

The key to this vision, and what made it utopian, was its dependence on the emergence of an elite leadership of the best and brightest Americans who would rule the country based on a consensus among themselves as to what was best for the country and a consensus of support from the populace.  This republican view of top-down social control and evolutionary social change derived in large part from the Whig tradition in England.  Like English Whigs, American Whigs such as John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay promoted a centrally controlled capitalist economy similar to the mercantilism that England had practiced during the eighteenth century.  Clay’s “American System” of national improvements and support for a national bank exemplified this program. 

Clay’s stated goal was “to secure the independence of the country, to augment its wealth, and to diffuse the comforts of civilization throughout the society” and to do this “by blending and connecting together all its parts in creating an interest with each in the prosperity of the whole.”[7]  Clay and other traditional republicans emphasized the responsibility of the central government to promote the public welfare and of the natural elite to care for the general populace.

Communal Socialism.  The vision of a communal socialism had as its foundation the fact that most Americans lived in small communities in which cooperation among citizens was essential for their survival.  This was a vision of a decentralized society of small cooperative communities in which members would share the work and the produce, and would engage in exchange with other similar communities to the mutual advantage of all.  Utopian socialists, such as Albert Brisbane, emphasized the Founders’ republican commitment to e pluribus unum and one for all, all for one.

Utopian socialism is a model of social change that seeks to combine an immediate revolution in the lives of people who join a cooperative community with a gradual evolution in the structure of society as more and more people voluntarily join such communities and these communities proliferate.  Utopian socialists generally hope to combine a cooperative economic system within each community with a market relationship between different communities.

Utopian socialism is ostensibly a means of peaceful revolution in the lives of community members and peaceful evolution of society.  Unlike militant revolutionaries, utopian socialists reject violence.  Unlike social reformers whose incremental changes only gradually improve people’s lives, utopian socialists immediately live the intended good life in their cooperative communities.  Whereas for revolutionaries the end justifies the means, and for reformers the means are everything and there is no end, for utopians the end is in the means.  The thrust of utopian socialism is to build model communities that others will emulate when they see how well these communities can work.[8]

The key to this vision and what makes it utopian is its dependence on people reigning in their egos and genuinely cooperating with each other.  And like the Puritan colony, most utopian communes in America have historically been plagued with conflicts between individualism and communalism, dictatorship and democracy, creativity and conformity, which have led to the demise of most of them.[9]  

Utopian socialist communities were, however, a highly visible part of colonial America and were considered a viable option in colonial society.  Most of the socialist communities founded during the colonial period were based on religion.  Prominent among them were the Bohemian Manor in Maryland that lasted from 1683 to 1727, the Ephrata Cloister in Pennsylvania that lasted from 1732 to 1814, and the various Shaker communities in the Northeast and Midwest that began in the 1770’s and lasted into the early 1900’s.  These were substantial communities that lasted for substantial periods of time. 

Religious communes continued to proliferate after the Revolution and throughout the nineteenth century — the Mormons, for example, began as a socialist community.[10]  Secular socialist communities proliferated as well, especially in the period from the 1820’s through the 1850’s.  The English industrialist Robert Owen and the French thinkers Joseph Fourier and Etienne Cabet were the most popular utopian theorists of that time.  The most famous of the secular socialist utopias were New Harmony established by Owen in Indiana, Brook Farm established by George Ripley in Massachusetts based on Fourier’s ideas, and Icaria established by Cabet in Texas.[11]   

Utopian socialism was not considered an outlandish or unrealistic option during the early nineteenth century, and it was taken seriously by elite leaders and ordinary people alike.  When Robert Owen visited the United States during 1824 and 1825 to promote his utopian socialist vision and establish the New Harmony community, he was well received personally by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams and John Calhoun, and he twice delivered speeches outlining his plans to the House of Representatives. 

In a speech to Congress on February 25, 1825, Owen argued that “Man, through ignorance, has been, hitherto, the tormenter of man,” even in the relatively enlightened United States.  The cause of this evil, he claimed, was what he called “the trading system” of individualist competition in which everyone tries to get the better of everyone else.  Economic competition, Owen complained, breeds anger, hate, irrationality, ignorance and war.  And it brings “a surplus of wealth and power to the few, and poverty and subjection to the many.”  Cooperation, he claimed, brings greater liberty, equality, efficiency, harmony and happiness to all.  Owen concluded with the hope that his new community would be a model for the United States.[12] 

Utopian socialism had wide popular appeal and attracted considerable popular attention during this time.  The influence of utopian socialist thinking in America is exemplified by the more than one hundred utopian novels published in the United States during the nineteenth century, many of them best sellers.  Most of these novels portrayed societies that were not impossible to establish and some were the basis of utopian experiments.[13]  Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New York Tribune, the preeminent newspaper in ante-bellum America, was a convert to the utopian socialist ideas of Fourier.  Greeley employed Albert Brisbane, Fourier’s most prominent American disciple, to write a regular front page column on Fourierism in the Tribune, and Greeley supported the founding by Brisbane of some thirty socialist communes around the United States.[14]

Fourierist communities, which made up the biggest number of secular utopian communes during the second quarter of the nineteenth century, were based on the general principle of from each according to his/her abilities, to each according to his/her needs.[15]  This principle meant that everyone would be treated with equal consideration but not exactly the same.  People with different abilities and skills would be given different tasks and different levels of responsibility.  Every person would play a dignified role in society of his/her own choice that fit with his/her interests and abilities and that contributed to the common good, but with some people having more decision-making power than others. 

In this respect, Fourier’s ideas were similar to the Founding Fathers’ ideal of a natural aristocracy or what we today might call a meritocracy.  For this reason, Brisbane claimed, Fourier’s ideas epitomized the American way of life and were “the culmination and expression of all those social ideals that had built the American Republic.”[16]  Properly implemented, according to Brisbane, Fourier’s plan would resolve the conflict between the individual and the community that had plagued the Puritans and American social reformers ever since.  But proper implementation required a large number of people with a variety of skills, more people and resources than the fledgling Fourierist communities could ever muster.          

 Brook Farm was a Fourierist community of intellectuals founded by George Ripley during the 1840’s “to ensure a more natural union between intellectual and manual labor than now exists; to combine the thinker and the worker as far as possible in the same individual.”  Ripley and his colleagues hoped that their experiment would be a model of how to do away with social class distinctions, “opening the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all,” so as  to “permit a more wholesome and simple life than can be led amidst the pressures of our competitive institutions.”[17] 

In The Blithedale Romance, Nathaniel Hawthorne reflected in fictional form on his experience as a member of Brook Farm, and complained that “The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail in becoming practical agriculturalists, but that we should probably cease to be anything else.”  Hawthorne claimed that mixing manual labor with mental labor worked to the detriment of intellectual life, and he concluded that farmers and intellectuals “are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance.”[18] 

His was a common conclusion among intellectuals at the time, but it is called into question by the fact that the most successful projects at Brook Farm and at Owen’s New Harmony were their schools.  These utopian schools were models of progressive education for their time and provided creative alternatives to the common schooling model that was becoming the norm in American education during the middle of the nineteenth century.  With schools that stressed thinking and creating over drilling and memorizing, intellectual life was fostered in these and other communities.[19]

Some one hundred utopian socialist communes were established in all parts of the United States during the second quarter of the nineteenth century.  Many of these communities lasted for decades.  Some were economically so successful that, like the Puritans’ Massachusetts Bay colony, they lost their utopian purpose along the way.  The Amana Society, for example, was founded as a religious commune during the mid-1840’s and became very successful as a cooperative commercial enterprise. 

This commercial success eventually led to conflicts between old-time members and newly recruited members over whether all should share equally in the wealth of the community or whether old-timers should get extra financial credit for the efforts they had initially put into making the community a success.  Members of Amana were eventually given shares in the community proportionate to their input into the business, and the commune was thereby transformed into a manufacturing corporation that has been producing high quality appliances from the nineteenth century to the present day.[20]  In a similar vein, the Mormons started as a radical, abolitionist, communitarian sect but eventually became a conservative, pro-capitalist community.

Utopian socialism flourished during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in large part because it fitted in well with the way most Europeans settled in America.  Contrary to the impression that is usually created in conventional narratives, the decision to come to America during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not typically made by an individual who wanted merely to better his or her own social and economic position, but by a group of people who wanted to build a new and better community for themselves and for posterity. 

From the Pilgrims and Puritans on through the early twentieth century, most immigrants came from Europe to America as groups of people who had lived in the same locality in their old country and then settled together in the new country.  They came as a community with the intention of maintaining their community.  Likewise, when European-Americans moved westward across the continent, they generally moved in groups, first setting up new towns and community institutions before attempting to attract more people.  It took cooperation among a village of people in order for anyone to survive in newly settled lands. 

So, the community came first, individual people came after.  Communalism and cooperation formed the primary pattern of immigration to the United States and migration within the country through the nineteenth century, and this provided plausibility and opportunity for the development of utopian socialist communities. 

 Capitalist Individualism.  The vision of an entrepreneurial capitalism was based on the prevalence and success of small farmers and manufacturers in America.  Entrepreneurial individualists, such as Andrew Jackson, envisioned a society of small farms and businesses that would compete with each other in a market place free of government interference.  The actions of entrepreneurs would be governed by the “hidden hand” of the free market to produce the best possible results for each individual and for the society as a whole. 

This vision picked up on the Founders’ republican ideal of the heroic individual but largely dismissed the Founders’ concerns for the community.  Laissez-faire individualism was a new development in early nineteenth century America.  While traditional histories, in an ex post facto line of reasoning, try to portray laissez-faire capitalist individualism as stemming from settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it wasn’t so.

Capitalist individualism developed in large part out of opposition by Jacksonian Democrats to the mercantilist economic policies being promoted by President John Quincy Adams, Senator Henry Clay, and Nicholas Biddle, who was the director of the Bank of the United States (BUS).  Jackson and his followers demonized the BUS as a “monster” and claimed that Biddle was using his influence over the country’s banking system to strangle small farmers and businessmen in favor of the rich.[21]  Its goal was what the historian James Willard Hurst has called “a release of energy,” that is, to unleash the latent entrepreneurial energies of ordinary Americans.[22]  

Utopian individualism is an anti-communitarian prescription for social development in which each person is responsible for making a revolution in his own life.  In its extreme form, it even denies the existence of society as a collective entity — what we call society is just a collection of individuals.  It is the ideal of the self-made man.  In this vision, society exists in a state of perpetual upheaval as individuals compete with each other and defeat one another, with the better man winning and thereby contributing to social progress. 

Utopian individualism is supported by a simplistic form of egalitarian theory which swept the country during the early nineteenth century, and which maintained that anyone could become anything he wanted — and this was a “he” ideology.  This moral theory was derived in large part from the philosophy of John Locke.  Locke taught that humans found happiness through exercising their talents in collecting property.  He claimed that society existed to further the “life, liberty and property” of individuals, goals which could be best obtained through a limited government that protected private property and encouraged competition among people.[23]

Utopian individualism is also bolstered by a simplistic laissez-faire economic theory which became popular during the mid nineteenth century.  This theory maintains that anyone should be able to do anything he wants and that it is every man for himself to succeed or fail on his own.  Utopian individualism promises that with everyone doing anything and everything he wants, a productive competition among people will ensue and this competition will be guided by an “invisible hand” (often equated with God) toward an ideal outcome.  A key to this vision was, and is, its dependence on the magic of the marketplace and the deus ex machina of competition. 

Economic individualism has historically been supported by a misreading of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations that has interpreted Smith as favoring a weak government and a laissez-faire economy.  While Smith objected to mercantilism as a system that was inherently corrupt and that stifled both creativity and cooperation, he, in fact, supported a strong government and a cooperative community, something that many of his self-styled followers have missed in using his name to support their laissez-faire individualistic ideas.[24]  As the ideology of individualism developed during the nineteenth century, American individualists cited Smith in rejecting both the mercantilism and the communalism that had largely prevailed in America during the colonial period.  And what began as opposition to government controls that were considered oppressive to ordinary people developed into opposition to almost any government intervention in the economy.

The rise of laissez-faire individualism in the United States was aided by social, economic and demographic developments.  Enormous opportunities for individual advancement were made possible by the territorial expansion of the country during the first half of the nineteenth century (the Louisiana Purchase and the conquest and purchase of Florida during the first quarter, then the annexation of Texas and the conquest of Mexican territories during the second quarter), and by the economic expansion of the country that resulted from the beginnings of the industrial revolution.  Despite the institution of slavery and slave plantations in the South, the United States was overwhelmingly a country of small-scale farmers and businessmen who operated in large part on their own initiatives, and whose activities made an individualistic ideology plausible.[25]

Utopian individualism was also bolstered by the transformation of the typical American farm during the mid nineteenth century from a neighborly endeavor to an isolated enterprise.  During the colonial period, most farmers lived with other farmers in a close-knit village.  In the nineteenth century, as farmers spread into the vast spaces of the Midwest, many came to live on solitary farms at a considerable distance from their neighbors.[26]  This isolation gave support to the myth of the self-made, self-sufficient man that became a predominant ideal for Americans during the later nineteenth century, and continues as such with many people to the present day.[27] 

Utopian individualism became the political ideology of the Jacksonian Democrats who dominated American government for most of the second quarter of the nineteenth century and who used the ideal of the self-sufficient, freedom-loving individual to beat down their Whiggish opponents.[28]  President Martin Van Buren summarized this view when he defined the goal of Jacksonian Democrats as “a system founded on private interest, enterprise, and competition, without the aid of legislative grants or regulation by law.”[29] 

Utopian individualism was a self-contradictory vision that confuses freedom – a free-for-all in which everyone does whatever they want – with liberty – in which people make choices within limits that are set by the community and that are in the best interests of individuals and the community.  Liberty is the promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not freedom which is a self-contradiction.  It is a contradiction that we are still struggling with today. 

This is the second of three parts to this essay on utopianism.  “Part I: Historical Cycles” was posted in 9/24.  “Part III: Individualism Triumphant” is intended to be posted in 11/24.                                                                                                                                              BW  10/24

[1] The gist of the essay is taken from a chapter of a book that I published some years ago called Was the American Revolution a Mistake, Reaching Students and Reinforcing Patriotism through Teaching History as Choice (2013).  The book looks at historical turning points in which people had to consider their feasible options, make what they decided were their best choices, and then evaluate the consequences of their actions.  

[2]  Primary Source: John Winthrop. “John Winthrop: “A Modell of Christian Charity (1630)” American History. ABC-CLIO, 2011.

[3]  Secondary Source: Perry Miller. Errand into the Wilderness. (New York: Harper & Row, 1956), 1-15.

[4]  Gordon Wood. The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 54.

[5]  Quoted in William Goetzmann. Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism. (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 3.

[6]  William Goetzmann.  Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism. (New York: Basic Books, 2009), xi.

[7]  Quoted in William Appleman Williams. The Contours of American History. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966), 264.

[8]  Arthur Bestor, Jr. Backwoods Utopias. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), 4, 10-16.

[9]  Robert Sutton. Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Religious Communities, 1732-2000. (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2003), x, 1-11, 17-31. 

[10]  Thomas O’Dea. The Mormons. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 18, 186-197.

[11]  Robert Sutton. Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Secular Communities, 1824-2000. (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2004), 7-16, 37-44, 53-70.

[12]  Primary Document: Robert Owen. “Speech to Congress.” American History Online. Facts on File, Inc., 2011.

[13]  Ellene Ransom. Utopus Discovers America or Critical Realism in American Utopian Fiction, 1798-1900. (Nashville, TN: Joint Universities Libraries, 1947), 3-4.

[14]  Robert Sutton. Communal Utopias and the American Experience: Secular Communities, 1824-2000. (Westport, CN: Praeger, 2004), 5-6, 23-25.  William Goetzmann. Beyond the Revolution: A History of American Thought from Paine to Pragmatism. (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 365.

[15]  Brett Barney & Lisa Paddock. “Fourierism.” American History Online. Facts on File, Inc., 2011.

[16]  Arthur Bestor, Jr. “Albert Brisbane – Propagandist for Socialism in the 1840’s .” New York History, Vol. XXVIII. (April, 1947), 146.

[17]  Quoted in Alice Felt Tyler. Freedom’s Ferment. (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), 177.

[18]  Fiction: Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Blithedale Romance. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1961), 7. 81-82.

[19]  Arthur Bestor, Jr. Education and Reform at New Harmony. (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana Historical Society, 1948), 399.  Arthur Bestor, Jr. “American Phalanxes: A Study of Fourierist Socialism in the United States.” Doctoral Dissertation, Yale University. (University Microfilms No. 70-23, 045, 1938), 230.

[20]  Alice Felt Tyler. Freedom’s Ferment. (New York: Harper & Row, 1944), 131.

[21]  Secondary Source: Edward Pessen. Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, Politics. (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1969), 146-148.

[22]  James Willard Hurst. Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), 32.

[23]  John Locke. The Second Treatise of Government. (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1952), 48, 70-71.  C.B. MacPherson. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 194-262.

[24]  James Buchan. The Authentic Adam Smith: His Life and Ideas. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006).  Garry Wills. Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 232, 254.

[25]  James Willard Hurst. Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), 8.

[26]  David Hawke. Everyday Life in Early America. (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 153.

[27]  James Willard Hurst. Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956), 7.

[28]  Edward Pessen. Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, Politics. (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1969), 227, 296.

[29]  Quoted in William Appleman Williams. The Contours of American History. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966), 246.

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The relevance of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath Today. A History of Hostility and Hysteria Toward Immigrants. Is culture a Smelting Pot, Melting Pot or Stew Pot? We have much to Fear from the Fear of Fear Itself.

The relevance of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath Today. A History of Hostility and Hysteria Toward Immigrants. Is culture a Smelting Pot, Melting Pot or Stew Pot? We have much to Fear from the Fear of Fear Itself.

Burton Weltman

“Well, you and me got sense.  Them goddamn Okies got no sense and no feeling.  They ain’t human.  A human being wouldn’t live like they do.  A human being couldn’t stand it to be so dirty and miserable.  They ain’t a hell of a lot better than gorillas.” 

A gas station attendant in The Grapes of Wrath to his colleague, commenting on the nature of Dust Bowl migrants.

Precis: A Fear of Heterogeneity – Difference as Potentially Dangerous.

How is it that in a nation of immigrants – except for Native Americans, everyone or their ancestors came here from somewhere else – so many people are so susceptible to anti-immigrant sentiment?  I think that an expectation of cultural homogeneity is a big part of the answer.  The belief that the mantra e pluribus unum, our national motto for most of American history, means that diversity will give way to uniformity and differences will be swallowed up in conformity.  I think that belief is wrong, both as an interpretation of the motto and as social policy.  I think the motto means that we can be both one and many, unified and diverse, at the same time, what could be called a stew pot culture.  And I think that an insistence on cultural homogeneity is a big part of our current political problems.

As I am writing this in April, 2024, the country is in an uproar over immigrants coming from Central America, with xenophobes and racists like Donald Trump and his MAGA followers howling about an invasion of murderous aliens.  Vile as this anti-immigrant bigotry is, it is not really new.  Hostility to immigrants and fear of alien influences have been recurrent themes in American history.  This seems strange for a nation of immigrants but it is, nonetheless, true. 

Conventional explanations of anti-immigrant sentiment focus on competition for jobs and cultural conflicts.  Historically, businesses have imported low-wage workers from other parts of the world to replace native-born workers and thereby lower their costs.  And historically, there have been cultural conflicts between newcomers and native-born Americans, often revolving around religious differences. 

But these factors cannot explain anti-immigrant hostility when jobs and religion are not at issue, which has often been the case, and they are not at issue in the present-day case.  Central American immigrants today are taking jobs that native-born Americans aren’t filling.  We have a labor shortage in this country.  In addition, like most Americans, they are mostly Christians.  As such, they do not represent any clear and present threat to native-born Americans or American culture.  To the contrary, they are needed to fill empty jobs and for the economy to function. 

But immigration anxiety persists among many Americans, and it presents an opportunity for Trump and his MAGA gang to stir things up, to make something big out of virtually nothing.  What is to be done?  The key problem, in my opinion, is not the existence of MAGA bigots.  Bigots there have always been and probably always will be.  The key problem is the anxiety that persists among ordinary people who are not for the most part bigots but whose anxiety can be played upon by Trump and his cohort.

There is a susceptibility to anti-immigrant sentiment among Americans that exists even without conflicts over jobs or culture.  It is seemingly a hostility to newcomers based mainly on their newness.  Newness is threatening because it raises the possibility that the new people may turn out to be different, and difference is deemed dangerous if you think that we all must be the same in order to be safe.  It is a preemptive fear that immigrants may turn out to be fearful.     

The Grapes of Wrath is a story that can both help us understand anti-immigrant hostility and point a way to overcoming it.  It is a story of WASP American migrants from Oklahoma being rejected during the 1930’s by the WASP inhabitants of California.  WASPs rejecting WASPs.  And jobs were not at issue.  The Grapes of Wrath is a demonstration, fictional but based on reality, that the mere newness of newcomers may trigger anxiety and hostility.

The United States is currently in the throes of high anxiety about immigrants and immigration.  Much of this anxiety is the result of an unreasonable expectation that everyone should be culturally homogeneous, something that has never appertained in the country and never reasonably could.  Given this expectation of cultural uniformity, people become anxious any time anyone new comes into the country, even if the newcomers pose no threat to the existing population.  It is nuts, but it has happened over and over again in the course of American history.

High Anxiety: Fear of Fear itself.

President Franklin Roosevelt famously said of the Great Depression during the 1930’s that “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”  A corollary to that adage is that we need to be afraid of fear.  Fear can lead to distorted decision-making and debilitating defeatism.  But it also follows that we have much to fear from the fear of fear.  Trying to rid yourself of fear can itself lead to fearful consequences, including unhinged hostility toward the supposed source of your fear.  

Fear is a fearsome thing.  It can tinge your life with anxiety.  Fear of fear can be even worse.  It can envelope your life with what could be called high anxiety.  Being afraid of being afraid.  And high anxiety can leave you susceptible to all sorts of angry feelings, ugly ideas and inhumane influences.  We live in an era which is rife with high anxiety, especially with regard to immigrants.  We are bombarded with a fear of the fear that immigrants might be fearful.

High anxiety is a contorted but powerful feeling.  Fear times fear – irrationality squared – equals high anxiety.  As applied to immigrants, it has left many otherwise decent people susceptible to the fearmongering of demagogues like Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters who try to stir up anti-immigrant sentiment for political and financial purposes.  How can this be? 

I think that John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath can help us understand what may seem like an unfathomable phenomenon.  It is a novel about the high anxiety that Californians felt during the 1930’s when an influx of Dust Bowl refugees moved there from Oklahoma.  It was not fear of the immigrants per se, but fear of the fear that the immigrants might become fearful.  They were afraid they would find cause to become afraid of the immigrants.  It was a case of high anxiety. 

Like Californians in the 1930’s, we live at a time in which many Americans are not merely afraid of people who are harmful, they are also afraid of people they think might become harmful.  It is a preemptive and presumably preventive fear.  If you are not one of us, you might be against us.  If you are unfamiliar, you might become fearful.  It is an expectation of cultural conformity and ethnic homogenization as opposed to an expectation of the diversity that actually pertains in American society. 

It is a formula for fear that applies to many sorts of people.   Americans are afraid of almost anyone who is different than they are, including most fellow Americans – but since immigrants are inherently unfamiliar, it leads to a presumption of fearfulness about them.  Rooted in a fear of difference as dangerous and diversity as divisive, high anxiety is aimed today at immigrants.  But it affects and harms us all.  We have much to fear from the fear of fear itself.       

High Anxiety and The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath is a story about immigrants being viciously vilified and rejected by the residents of an area in which they seek to settle.  This is an all-too-common situation in the world today and a recurrent scenario in American history.  Native-born Americans have repeatedly been opposed to the immigration of new people, even when their own families came from elsewhere.  The present-day hysteria about Central American immigrants is reminiscent of similar anti-immigrant outbursts in the past.  Only this one threatens to upend and undermine our democratic system.  That makes it a particularly serious state of affairs.

The Grapes of Wrath was written in 1939 in the midst of the migration of Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma to California.  It is a historical novel.  A movie of the book was made in 1940.  The novel is widely regarded as one of the best in American history.  The movie is similarly regarded.  What makes the story and the history in the novelparticularly interesting is that the immigrants in the book are not from a foreign country.  And their treatment, or rather mistreatment, flies in the face of most explanations of anti-immigrant hostility. 

The conventional explanations of anti-immigrant sentiment generally stress economic factors, such as competition for jobs, and cultural factors, such as racism, chauvinism, nationalism and other cultural differences between the newcomers and their persecutors.  But the immigrants in The Grapes of Wrath were not taking jobs away from the residents of California, and they were not ethnically, linguistically, religiously or otherwise culturally different in significant ways from the Californians who were reviling and rejecting them. 

The immigrants in The Grapes of Wrath were moving to California to take vacant jobs that Californians weren’t occupying and to do farm work that Californians weren’t doing.  They were white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, native-born Americans, that is WASPs, just like most of the Californians.  Nonetheless, the newcomers were repulsed by the inhabitants.  WASPs being rejected by WASPs.  Without jobs at issue. That doesn’t fit the usual matrix.  So, why all the hostility?  There must be something involved here that doesn’t fit the usual explanations but that may, in fact, underlie the usual explanations.   

I think that something may be high anxiety, the fear of fear itself.  As it is portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath, anti-immigrant hostility seems largely to be a product of the fear of newcomers just because they were new.  The Okie immigrants were unfamiliar, literally not part of the family, and that made them a potential source of fear.  A high anxiety.

The Grapes of Wrath: The Story.

The Grapes of Wrath is a heartrending story of Americans brutalizing Americans because they were from a different part of the United States.  It is in its essentials a true story.  Steinbeck traveled and lived with Okie immigrants.  He portrayed what he saw.  Migrants traveling some fifteen hundred miles on short rations in ramshackle vehicles, taking with them all they could pack into a car or pickup truck.  

As such, the book is first and foremost a brilliant and moving account of the migration, looking at events from the Okies’ point of view.  It is dramatic without being melodramatic, and detailed without being boring.  The descriptions of how the migrants maintained their rickety motor vehicles and sustained themselves physically and emotionally are captivating.  As readers, we feel as though we are undertaking the migration ourselves.

The storyfollows the Joad family as they lose their farm in Oklahoma and move to California to try to find work and land.  As the story begins, the family consists of twelve people, with a thirteenth on the way.  Three generations with a fourth in embryo.  In addition, an ex-preacher joins the family in their migration.  They lose two aged grandparents to death on the way and two adult males to desertion.  And the baby is born but then dies. 

Ma Joad is the emotional center of the family and the story.  She keeps the family together and keeps their hopes alive, and ours as well.  The ex-preacher Casy is the moral center of the book and personally lives the “one for all and all for one” ethic that he conceives to be a universal rule and that is the main message of Steinbeck’s novel.  Tom Joad is the center of the action in the story and represents a model of pragmatic strength through humility. 

The story of the Joads is interwoven with chapters that describe the social and economic situation in the United States during the 1930’s, and especially in Oklahoma and California.  The book proceeds in a hopscotch pattern with chapters that describe the social and economic conditions of the time alternating with chapters that portray the doings of the Joad family as they make their way through those conditions.

The book is usually read as a harsh critique of the capitalist economy of the times and as a testament to the courage and strength of people who suffered under it.  Which it is. But it is also a book about immigration and Americans’ reactions to immigrants.  It illustrates the hostility with which many Americans have responded to newcomers just because they were new.  The book portrays what it was like for local people to have immigrants move into their midst.  It speaks to us as local people faced with immigrants today. 

Immigration History and Hysteria: Déjà vu all over again.

A typical riff on immigrants: They are indigent, indolent, illiterate, ignorant and, worst of all, violent.  They are an invasion that threatens public safety, undermines workers’ wages, and degrades American culture.  Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, it does.  It is the sort of hysterical rant against immigrants, and especially Latin American immigrants, that you hear these days from Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.  Trump has recently (I am writing this in early April, 2024) even used near genocidal rhetoric while viciously haranguing against immigrants.  Given that the United States is a land of immigrants – everyone except for Native Americans has their roots somewhere else – it might seem strange, even perverse, that this sort of anti-immigrant virulence would be so widespread

It is perverse, but not strange.  Complaints that immigrants constitute a blight on the United States have historically been common, even if Trump’s rhetoric today is especially vicious and vile.  It was a complaint that native-born colonial Americans made in the eighteenth century against the immigration of Germans to the colonies.  It was the same complaint that native-born Americans, including the descendants of those now integrated German immigrants, made against Irish immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century. 

The same complaint was made by native-born Americans, including the descendants of those Irish immigrants, against Eastern and Southern European immigrants in the late-nineteenth century.  The same complaint was made by northern Whites against Blacks migrating from the South during the early twentieth century. 

And in The Grapes of Wrath, we see the same complaint being made against migrants moving from Oklahoma to California during the 1930’s.  Several hundred thousand Okies sought jobs and land in California after having been evicted from their homes and farms in Oklahoma.  And then they were rejected in California by people most of whose families had immigrated there since the mid-nineteenth century, who were relative newcomers themselves.

The United States has from the start been a country of immigrants and anti-immigrants.  In almost every generation, there has been a major immigration of people to America or across America from somewhere else.  And each of those cohorts of immigrants has been met with widespread scorn and opposition, even from the previous generation of immigrants now integrated as native-born citizens.

Invading Hordes of Indigent Immigrants?  Some facts might help.

We are surrounded today with hysterical fears of invading hordes of immigrants.  These fears have repeatedly echoed down the halls of American history to the present day.  They are nonsense.  In fact, there has never been an invasion of immigrants either in the past or in the present day, and despite the frenzied rhetoric of the anti-immigrants today, the United States is not currently overwhelmed with immigrants. 

What is overwhelmed is the inadequate governmental systems for processing immigrants.  Understaffed and underfunded, they are badly malfunctioning, albeit not much worse than many times in the past.  In any case, the immigrant population today is not particularly large.  Immigrants currently make up around 14% of the population of the United States, which is pretty much what it has been for the last one hundred years and considerably less than in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hysterical fears of immigrants failing to fit in as Americans and wrecking American society have also invariably been false.  Each of the maligned immigrant cohorts has eventually been integrated into American society, and the newcomers have made major contributions to the economy and the culture of the country.[1]  And that has continued to the present day. 

Hysterical fears of immigrants ending up on welfare are also false. Immigrants are not indolent and are, instead, a boon to our economy, not a drag.[2]  They come for jobs, not handouts.  There is good reason for this.  Emigrants from elsewhere are generally among the most active people in their native populations, which is generally why and how they left their homelands.  Emigrating has never been easy, and it is usually easier to stay put and endure difficult existing conditions than to strike out to someplace new to start over with your life.  Emigrants are literally movers and shakers.  Their energy and ambition are reasons that the United States has historically been so successful. 

Immigrants to the United States are also generally enthusiastic about democracy.  It is one of the attractions of the country.  They are often more enthusiastic than native-born Americans who tend to take democracy for granted or even reject democratic principles, as we seem to be seeing in Donald Trump and his MAGA followers.

Contrary to the fearmongering of Trump and the MAGA movement, crime rates for immigrants, particularly for violent crimes, are lower than for native-born Americans, and employment rates among immigrants are higher.  Unemployment in the United States is currently at near record lows.  American farms and businesses want more workers.  They need immigrants. 

In turn, immigrants do not require more social services than native-born Americans and they pay their fair share of taxes.  Historically, immigrants who have not succeeded here have generally returned to their original countries, about one-third of all immigrants.  They have not become an indigent burden on American society. 

Logically, Americans should be welcoming immigrants.  But as we see in The Grapes of Wrath, logic can fail in the face of high anxiety.[3]

The Grapes of Wrath and the Oklahoma to California Migration System.

The Grapes of Wrath is the story of a family caught up in what could be characterized as an Oklahoma to California immigration system.  It was a system that provided large-scale corporate farms in California with cheap and submissive labor during the 1930’s.  It was very similar to the systems organized by American manufacturers for recruiting Irish and Eastern and Southern European immigrants during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The goal was abundant cheap and submissive labor.  It can also be compared to the immigration system that funnels Latin American immigrants to the Southwestern United States today. 

As described in The Grapes of Wrath, the system during the 1930’s began with the eviction of small farmers from their lands and homes in Oklahoma and ended with the former farmers desperately looking for work as fruit and cotton pickers on large corporate farms in California.  Not a happy ending for the hardworking and formerly independent farmers.

Oklahoma was settled by small farmers in the latter part of the nineteenth century.  In retrospect, it was probably an economic and environmental mistake.  Much of the land was only marginally fertile, better suited to bison than farmers, and when rainfall began to decrease, the soil became depleted and crop yields fell short.  Eventually the dry soil erupted into huge dust storms that gave the area the name of Dust Bowl.  Farmers weren’t able to grow enough to pay their mortgages or sharecropping fees.  As a result, they were evicted from their lands and homes.  The lands were subsequently combined into large-scale corporate farms that were mechanized and needed few workers, which left the displaced farmers without land or jobs.  The fictional Joads among them.

Meanwhile, large corporate farms in California needed workers to pick and plant crops.  So, as detailed in The Grapes of Wrath, they advertised that need throughout the Midwest, attracting to California hundreds of thousands of displaced farmers like the Joads looking for work.  The corporate farm owners deliberately lured many more workers to California than they needed so that the workers would compete with each other for work and would accept ever lower wages.

The corporate farm owners conspired to keep the workers submissive by denying them any sort of job security, and pitting them against each other so that they wouldn’t organize labor unions.  Steinbeck describes heartrending situations in which hungry striking workers are pitted against starving strike breakers so that the owners can lower workers’ wages.  The owners also stirred up hostility to the Okie immigrants among local Californians so that the immigrants could not join with local people to improve wages and conditions for the workers which would result in more sales in town stores and redound to the economic benefit of town folks.

Being denied long-term employment contracts and long-term housing, the Okies had to move around the state every few weeks looking for work, essentially becoming permanent migrant workers.  It was a desperate situation for most of the immigrants.  The Joads, for example, were repeatedly faced with the choice of spending their meagre earnings on food or on gas to get to the next place where they hoped to find work.  It was a vicious cycle and a lose/lose situation.

As a consequence of making so little money, the workers could not afford regular housing and had to set up temporary homeless camps on the outskirts of towns, living in tents, makeshift shelters, cardboard boxes, and their cars.  Keeping the workers homeless was encouraged by the corporate farm owners.  They did not want workers to settle together in permanent housing because that might facilitate their organizing labor unions and otherwise demanding higher wages and better working and living conditions.     

Logically, local citizens might have welcomed the immigrants if the workers had been paid decent wages, because that would mean more shoppers with more money to spend at local stores.  But local citizens were encouraged to fear the immigrants by the mass media and demagogic politicians who were controlled by the corporate farm owners.  Steinbeck describes how the media and politicians spread false rumors that immigrants were going to compete for work with native Californians so that wages would drop and the newcomers would eventually replace the natives, leaving them as homeless migrants in their own state.  This scenario was a 1930’s version of what is today called “Replacement Theory” when applied by MAGA demagogues to Latin Americans.

Meanwhile, local townspeople resented having their nice neighborhoods invaded by homeless and penniless immigrants.  The net result was that fearful and angry local people, egged on by agents of the corporate farm owners, physically attacked the immigrants and wrecked and burned down their migrant camps.  That happened repeatedly to the Joads in the book.

Constantly on the move, camping in unsanitary quarters and living on below-starvation wages, immigrant workers and their families were often chronically hungry and sick.  Many did not survive, dying from malnutrition and illnesses brought on or exacerbated by malnutrition.  But there were always more immigrants where the dying workers came from.  

This was the system of immigration and immiseration, exploitation and brutalization in which the fictional Joads and their fellow real-life Okies were trapped and in which they seemed to be doomed to die.  Not too different from the immigration system of today?

The Grapes of Wrath: A Migration of People but also Ideas. 

Immigrants like the Joads were recruited for their bodies – they were going to be hired hands – but they also brought their ideas.  Fear of the ideas that immigrants might bring with them has been a consistent theme in the history of anti-immigrant hostility.  In the early nineteenth century, there was widespread fear of the Catholicism of Irish immigrants among the predominantly Protestant Americans.  In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was fear among capitalistic conservatives of the socialistic ideas that European immigrants carried with them. 

In the present-day, it is clear that one of the main reasons that Donald Trump and his MAGA colleagues are so opposed to Latin American immigrants is their fear that the immigrants will support the Democratic Party if they become citizens.  It is a source of high anxiety for political right-wingers.

The Grapes of Wrath takes place at a time that in retrospect we can see was a changing of political orientations in Oklahoma and California, a change that was helped along by the migration of the Okies.  Oklahoma was going from politically progressive to regressive.  California was going from conservative to progressive. 

During the early twentieth century, Oklahoma was home to the largest percentage of Socialist Party members and voters of any state in the country.  Large numbers of hard-up small farmers favored the socialists’ theories and practices of cooperative farming, banking and marketing, along with government control of banks, constraints on foreclosure, and regulation of railroad shipping rates.  The Dust Bowl emigrants carried these progressive ideas and a generally progressive ethos with them. 

You can see these ideas and ethos in practice in The Grapes of Wrath as the migrants form cooperative associations in the camps they set up along their way to California and as they traveled around looking for work in the state.  Most of the migrants in the book seemed to adopt a cooperative attitude toward their emigration, an ethos of “we are all in this together.” 

It is an attitude that could be described as socialism of the heart, a cooperative sentiment, which the immigrants in the book carried with them even if they did not all identify as card-carrying Socialists.  Hard-up migrants frequentlyhelped each other on the road west, sharing scarce food and other resources, and fixing each other’s cars. 

This sort of activity worried the corporate farm owners and the book depicts how they sought to counter the cooperative efforts of the immigrants by keeping them constantly on the move and stirring up the local population against them.  With red-baiting and black-listing immigrant leaders, and even murdering the progressive preacher Casey who was traveling with the Joads, the corporate farm owners denounced cooperation as un-American.      

But despite the best and worst efforts of defenders of the status quo, emigration and immigration have almost invariably had political effects.  In this respect, the migration of Okies during the 1930’s seemingly had a long-term political effect on both Oklahoma and California. Some 500,000 emigrants left Oklahoma, which soon became the economic backwater and politically regressive state that it largely remains today.  Meanwhile, Okie immigrants soon made up some 15% of California’s population, and the state’s political orientation went from conservative to progressive, as it remains today.

Demonizing Immigrants: Exclusion and Segregation.

Facts don’t faze fanatics.  That immigrants are in fact a win-win proposition for the country can’t alleviate the high anxiety of hard-core haters.  They still insist on segregating and excluding immigrants so that they won’t infect our society with baleful influences. 

Infection is a key word among anti-immigrants.  Speaking of immigrants as though they are diseased or are vermin is common.  Donald Trump has recently said that at least some of the immigrants aren’t even human.  This is extremely irresponsible and dangerously ominous rhetoric.  It sounds as though not merely the exclusion of immigrants but their extermination could be on Trump’s mind, or could be taken as such by some of his violent followers.

Immigrants were subject to exclusion and segregation at various times in American history.  Chinese laborers during the mid-nineteenth century, for example, were recruited to work on building railroads in the West, segregated into camps while they were here, and then shipped back to China when the work was done.  Likewise, Mexican laborers were recruited during the mid-twentieth century to work on farms and railroad construction, were segregated into camps, and then sent back to Mexico when their work ended.

We can see both the exclusion and segregation of immigrants in The Grapes of Wrath.  Okie immigrants were stopped at the California border by state troopers and turned back if they looked too needy or unable to work.  California did not want newcomers who might end up as public charges.  This was a form of selective exclusion.  In turn, those immigrants who were allowed across the border were channeled into migrant labor camps and kept from settling with the native population in the cities, which is a form of segregation. 

Excluding and segregating immigrants are literally inhumane practices as they deny our common humanity.  They are also costly practices in lives and liberty and are ultimately unsuccessful. The United States is a big country with a border of some four thousand miles, much of it in uninhabited areas.  Trying to completely stop immigrants from getting in to the country m would entail enormous resources and require militarizing the country.  The same is true of segregation, as we have regrettably seen in American history.  That sort of repressive regime is seemingly what Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters want, but it is not what the Founders of the United States wanted or what the Constitution envisions.  It is flatly un-American.

Racism and chauvinism from Trump and his MAGA followers are reprehensible but predictable.  Bigots are bigots.  It is also reprehensible but predictable that demagogic politicians, sensation-seeking mass media and greedy business people might want to stir up and take advantage of anti-immigrant hostility.  There are voters, viewers and profits in bigotry.   But I don’t think that it is the inveterate haters and their facilitators who are the real danger to this country.  The real danger is the otherwise decent people who the demagogues can influence.

The real danger is the people, including many who are not otherwise racists or chauvinists, who may even sympathize with the plight of immigrants escaping from troubled lands, and who may have initially been in favor of integrating immigrants, who end up supporting the anti-immigrant bigotry of Trump and his supporters.  How can this be and what can we do about it?

Integrating Immigrants: Smelting Pot, Melting Pot, Stew Pot.

I think that the underlying problem, the root of most high anxiety about immigrants in this country, is an expectation, even an insistence, that the integration of immigrants should lead to homogenization.  Different people have different ideas as to what the standardized American should be like, largely a function of their political orientation.  At the extreme end of the spectrum, there is the MAGA crowd who exude paranoia that people like them – white, Christian, English-speaking – will be wiped out and replaced by aliens.  Their goal is to make America safe for gun-toting archconservative Christians.  Freedom, in their view, means the right to carry assault weapons and worship Evangelical Christianity in public schools, and that means anyone who doesn’t fit or support that goal is unfit to be an American. 

More liberal groups have more liberal ideas about what is an American, but most Americans still have an idea that we should all be basically the same, irrespective of our backgrounds.  Most Americans feel – and it seems to be more of a feeling than a rational belief – that everyone should end up the same, and that no ethnic groups or ethnicities should stand out.  As the history and sociology of America show, this is ultimately an unreasonable and unreachable expectation.  The problem is that the failure of that expectation can lead to antagonism toward immigrants and high anxiety about immigration.  And it leaves people susceptible to the rantings of the extremists.   

Even as successive cohorts of immigrants have been acculturated, remnants of ancestral cultures invariably remain.  Most Americans still identify with the cultures of their ancestral homelands and adhere to at least some ancestral ideas and customs.  Some of these ideas and customs stand out and raise the perennial question of whether the members of a given ethnic group owe more loyalty to their ancestral homeland than to the United States.  As a result, many otherwise well-intentioned people founder on an expectation of cultural homogeneity, and end up turning against immigrants when the immigrants don’t just completely blend in with everyone else. 

The rantings of xenophobes, racists and chauvinists notwithstanding, cultural homogeneity is not feasible now and never has been.  And the ravings of Donald Trump and his MAGA gang notwithstanding, the United States did not begin as a so-called Christian nation or with a homogeneous population.  Chauvinists have historically opposed each wave of immigrants on the grounds that the original purity of our society was being polluted, just as Trump and his supporters are doing today with respect to Central American immigrants. 

Their claims are false in every respect.  America has been a conglomeration of cultures from the landing of the Mayflower – which carried a diverse population and not just Pilgrims – to the present day.  It is, however, an unfortunate fact of public life that when demagogues say something loud enough and long enough, their lies can sink into the public consciousness and, even more important, into the public’s unconsciousness. 

People end up with preconceptions they aren’t even aware of.  And a failure to arrive at cultural homogeneity may lead some people to think that the resulting heterogeneity is a problem, that integration has been a failure, then blame immigrants for that supposed problem, and turn against immigration and integration.  This is something we have to get past.  The expectation of homogenization has got to be overcome. Our models of integration have to include diversity. 

Integration with diversity is not a contradiction in terms.  Among the different models of integration, three types can be characterized by the three metaphors of “smelting pot,” “melting pot” and “stew pot.”  The first two have cultural homogenization as their goal, and they cannot ultimately succeed.  The third aims at pluralism and diversity, and it can work. 

“Smelting pot” integration is premised on the idea that the cultural differences and the distinctive characteristics that immigrants bring with them are disruptive.  They should for the most part be eliminated so that the newcomers end up becoming the same as the existing population.  Intense pressure should be placed on them – turning up the heat so to speak – so that their differences from the existing population will be smelted away.

For most of the period from the founding of the first European colonies in the 1600’s through the early 1900’s, the predominant approach to cultural integration in this country was the smelting pot view.  Harkening back to the English origins of the first colonies, this view has generally portrayed White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, or WASPs, as the ideal Americans.  Immigrants are welcome, but they have to give up their ancestral cultures and adopt, whole cloth, a WASP culture.  

Smelting pot integration was official policy in many places in this country up through the first half of the twentieth century.  It was considered a compliment to immigrants that they were deemed capable of adopting all-American ways.  But it was a coercive compliment.  Early twentieth century immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe and their American-born children, my father and his father included, were, for example, prohibited from speaking their native languages in school or on the job.  Only English was allowed.  And immigrants like my grandfather were repeatedly exhorted to Americanize themselves.

There is an oppressive chauvinism built into the smelting pot approach to integration.  The expectation of conformity is stifling and prone to provoke violence against recalcitrant immigrants.  It was expected of the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath who, despite being WASPs moving in among WASPs, were taunted for their Midwestern accent, clothing and manners.

This smelting pot view is still widely held by people who consider themselves politically and socially conservative.  It is not as extreme as the right-wing, hate-filled approach of Donald Trump and his followers, but in its emphasis on cultural homogeneity, it is a view that can warp into anti-immigrant sentiment and spiral into high anxiety if its goals are not met.  Which, almost inevitably, they won’t be. 

“Melting pot” integration is premised on the idea that most of the distinctive characteristics of immigrants are either helpful or harmless and, in any case, should be mixed in with the mainstream culture of the existing population to make for a new and better homogenized culture.  It is a metaphor that was seemingly first used in 1782 by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur to describe the United States.  The melting pot view was later popularized during the 1910’s in a play called “The Melting Pot” by Israel Zangweel, a Russian Jewish immigrant. 

Melting pot integration is a more tolerant approach to the differences that immigrants bring with them.  In this view, most cultural differences don’t make a difference.  And they should be either ignored or blended into the existing cultural mix to make a slightly new and better culture.  It is a progressive view of differences among people in which social evolution is seen as a good thing.  Melting pot integration gradually became the predominant view of self-styled liberals during the course of the twentieth century and especially after World War II.

But it is an approach that is more superficial than substantive.  It mainly deals in celebrations rather than ideas and practices of cultural significance. It is the approach that was taken by most schools when I was young.  We had, for example, “International Days” in which we would dress in quaint clothes and bring in foods that were characteristic of our ancestral homelands.  There were similar community-wide celebrations of people’s ancestral homelands that were open to everyone to join in the fun.  In this view, difference was fun for all to enjoy.  Everyone, for example, was expected to identify as Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.  And Christmas became more of a national celebration than a religious holy day. 

But the only acceptable differences were those in which everyone could share and which were fun for everyone.  And these differences did not make much of a difference.  Bagels versus baguettes was a big competition in my school.  The problem with melting pot acculturation is that every time some new peoples show up, you cannot be sure that their differences will be superficial and that they will blend in.  Their differences may be too great or too significant.

Given that the melting pot model starts with an expectation of homogenization, there is almost inevitably going to be anxiety about new people.  Even if every previous cohort of immigrants fitted in, maybe this new group won’t.  Natives will almost inevitably feel anxiety about the anxiety generated by the newcomers.  And with anti-immigrant demagogues stirring the pot, tolerance among ordinary people could spiral into high anxiety and anti-immigrant intolerance.  This is the situation we are seemingly witnessing today in this country.         

What could be called the “stew pot” model of integration was promulgated in the early twentieth century by Horace Kallen, another Russian Jewish immigrant.  Stew pot integration is premised on the idea that many important cultural differences among people should not, and in any case cannot, be completely eliminated.  Different groups should be expected to retain some of their distinctive ways, blending together enough with the general population and sharing enough important things in common – most importantly a commitment to democracy and the Constitution – so that they can participate in a pluralistic culture. 

In the stew pot model, there is an expectation of diversity so that newcomers don’t automatically trigger an anxiety reaction.  The expectation of cultural homogeneity that underlies both the smelting pot and melting pot approaches to integration leads them to the brink of anti-immigrant sentiment and high anxiety.  The stew pot approach avoids this problem.  In this view, a commitment to democracy and the Constitution are the chief commonalities that make all of us Americans.  Given that a desire for democracy is one of the things that motivates most immigrants, we have good reason to presume good things from them rather than fearfulness.   

A respect for diversity is, in fact, one of the key underpinnings of democracy and our Constitutional system.  Democracy can be defined as majority rule with minority rights, the most important of which is the right of a minority to become a majority.  It’s the welcoming of diversity that makes democracy.  Democracy thus entails tolerance toward the tolerant and intolerance for intolerance.  A presumption of heterogeneity, rather than a presumption of homogeneity, is a basic principle of a democratic culture.

Diversity also should be recognized as not only fair but efficient.  It provides a variety of resources and perspectives to help solve the social problems we all face together.   It derives from a world view in which people are seen as able to recognize and negotiate their differences.  The stew pot model has become the view of the multicultural and diversity movement among liberals in recent decades.  Respect for diversity was represented by the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath and promoted by Steinbeck in the book.

Finally, diversity should be recognized as not only fair and efficient but inevitable.  The stew pot model is not merely an ideal, it is a reality.  Despite the best and worst efforts of the proponents of cultural homogeneity, historically the United States has been a cultural stew pot.  The country has never even approximated the homogeneity that the smelting pot and melting pot approaches to integration seek to achieve.  And yet the country has survived and thrived.  Homogeneity is clearly not necessary for the country to flourish. 

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, at least a score of different languages were spoken in the country.  Within whole neighborhoods of big cities, whole towns and agricultural areas, people would speak only some language other than English.  Not merely immigrants just off the boat, but their children and grandchildren for several subsequent generations.  And the same went for other customs and practices that immigrants brought with them.  Where diversity flourished within the democratic and Constitutional system, the country thrived.  Where diversity was stifled or enslavement was practiced, those areas degenerated.  There never was anything to fear from diversity and no good reason for high anxiety.

The United States is less diverse today.  English is almost universal.  The mass media and the internet have broadcast a common culture.  The educational system has propagated a core cultural curriculum.  But for better and for worse, cultural differences exist in different parts of the country.  And the worst differences, battles over race and religion, stem mainly from conflicts between WASPs in the North and WASPs in the South.  Immigrants are not the problem.

Immigrants are, instead, responsible for most of the best cultural developments over the last century.  Blacks migrating from the South have been the major source of jazz, blues and other musical forms that define American music.  Jews from Eastern Europe are largely responsible for developing the movie industry and distinctly American comedy.  American food tastes are largely a result of Italian influences.  And so forth.  Cultural diversity is a fact and not a fault in the country.  It is probably about time that we Americans learned to live with the situation.  And to accept the diversity that already exists and that new immigrants will bring to us.

Based on statistics and my own experience as a professor of young people since the 1960’s, it seems to me that every generation of young people, at least since the 1960’s, has become more open-minded than the last.  And not merely more tolerant but more welcoming of diversity.  That may be one of the reasons that Donald Trump and his MAGA gang of mainly older people have become so vile and violent in what we can only hope is a spasm of their last gasp desperation.  If we survive this wave of old timers’ hate and high anxiety, the country’s future may be brighter.

The title of Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath comes from the Biblical Book of Revelations, Chapter 14, Verse 19 through Julia Ward Howe’s Civil War song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”  Both the Bible and the song refer to God crushing grapes, a symbol of the luxury of the rich, in the course of making people free.  In the novel, a senile Grandpa Joad fantasizes about crushing grapes all over his body when they get to California, which he imagines as a Promised Land.  Grandpa dies before they get to California, which turns out to be anything but a Promised Land for the Joads and the other Dust Bowl immigrants.  No grapes for them.

At the end of the story, as all seems lost, Tom is having to light out to escape arrest, and the rest of his family are literally starving, Ma Joad gives Tom a pep talk to try keep hope in him alive, and not let their persecutors get him down.  It’s a pep talk that Steinbeck seemed to want give to us readers to help us carry on in whatever may be our desperate times.  “Why, Tom,” she says, “us people will go on livin’ when all them people is gone.  Why, Tom, we are the people that live.  They ain’t gonna wipe us out.  Why, we’re the people – we go on.”

                                                                                                                                    BW 4/24

[1] The Uprooted. Oscar Handlin. Grosset & Dunlap Publishers: New York, 1951.

[2] “The Economy is roaring.  Immigration is a key reason.”  Rachel Siegel, Lauren Kaori Gurley & Meryl Kornfield. The Washington Post. 2/27/24.

“The U.S. Economy Is Surpassing Expectations. Immigration Is One Reason.” Lydia DePillis. The New York Times, 2/27/24.

[3] Keys to Successful Immigration. Thomas Espenshade, ed.  The Urban Institute Press: Washington, D.C. 1997.

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What goes around comes around and around… The Fetish, Farce and Fraud of Constitutional Originalism.

What goes around comes around and around…

The Fetish, Farce and Fraud of Constitutional Originalism.

Burton Weltman

Braggart Big-Game Hunter: “I once shot an elephant in my shorts.”

Groucho Marx: “What was an elephant doing in your shorts?”

Apology:  There is no shortage of essays on the theory of Constitutional Originalism.  It is a silly theory that is being seriously espoused these days by several justices on the United States Supreme Court and that threatens to overthrow some two hundred years of pragmatic Constitutional interpretation.  The response by reasonable jurists and lawyers has been prolific.  My justification for adding to this plethora of responses is that I have personal experience which might be useful in making the case against the theory.  In that vein, I hope this essay might help to clarify some of the issues and amplify some of the reasons for rejecting the ideas of self-styled Constitutional Originalists, particularly their hypocritical approach to the Second Amendment.    

The Supreme Court Not-So-Merry-Go-Round.

People of my baby boom generation grew up in the midst of what was perhaps the most liberal Supreme Court in American history, the Warren Court of the 1950’s and 1960’s.  From the early 1950’s to the early 1970’s, the Supreme Court issued a host of decisions expanding the rights of minorities, women and criminal defendants, including the seminal Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954 that promoted civil rights for African Americans.  The Court also recognized a constitutional right of privacy and prepared the way for the historic 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion decision in favor of women’s rights.

As a result, people of my generation generally regarded the Supreme Court as a liberal-leaning institution.  It was an orientation that was rued by conservatives who attacked the Court for its supposed left-wing political bias, even to the point of accusing Justices of being Communists.  It was an orientation that was applauded by liberals who claimed the Court was merely helping to democratize American society.  And liberals happily expected the Court to continue to be a guarantor of social reforms and civil rights for historically oppressed groups.  As, much to their chagrin, did conservatives.  Both sides were wrong.    

The Supreme Court has not historically been a liberal-leaning institution.  Historically, the Court has swung back and forth between conservative and liberal tendencies but has been conservative, and even extremely conservative, most of the time.  Protecting the perquisites of private property and capitalist businesses, and limiting the powers of government, have generally been the priorities of conservatives who have generally controlled the Court.  Theirs has been a narrow interpretation of the reach of the Constitution and the government to aid and protect people.[1] 

Liberal Courts have generally focused on government’s responsibilities toward ordinary citizens, and, toward that end, have recognized an expansive and expanding role for federal and state governments.  Theirs has been called a “Living Constitution” approach to the law, the idea being that the principles outlined in the Constitution should be broadly interpreted in consonant with the changing circumstances of the country. 

Spurts of liberalism by the Court have been preceded and followed by longer periods of conservatism.  The Court has generally lagged behind popular opinion and public officials in permitting progressive government action.   As a result, the arc of justice at the Supreme Court has most often bent toward conservatism, but not always and not always in the same ways.  Despite claiming to reflect a straight and narrow interpretation of the Constitution, judicial conservatism has taken different forms depending on the circumstances of the time. 

During the first half of the nineteenth century, for example, as the federal and state governments in the newly formed United States were developing their respective jurisdictions, the Supreme Court was concerned with adjusting the respective roles of the state and federal governments and developing appropriate protections for private property.  The Court headed by Chief Justice John Marshall during the early years allowed for a wider federal authority as against what were the more liberal state governments of the time.  The following Court headed by Chief Justice Roger Taney allowed conservative state governments wider authority as against the more liberal federal government.  Both allowed only limited governmental incursion on private property rights. 

Justice Taney spoke for most Justices of the Supreme Court during his era when he said in the case of Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837) that “the rights of private property are sacred,” albeit they are not without limits.  In a conflict of priorities between private interests and public interests, Taney seemed to believe that the presumption should be in favor of the private interest unless it can be shown that the public interest clearly took precedence.  A liberal Justice might reverse that equation, insisting that the public interest should prevail unless it can be clearly shown that the private interest should take precedence.  

These efforts of the Supreme Court to protect private property and limit governmental authority culminated with the dreadful decision in the Dred Scott case. In this case, Justice Taney, speaking for the Court, held that since slaves were property and the interstate travel clause of the Constitution allowed people to take their property from one state to another, no state could prohibit slaves or slavery within its borders.  A case of the tail wagging the dog, this decision effectively put an end to the freedom in so-called free states where slavery was prohibited, and essentially forced the whole country to accept slavery because southern states considered enslaved people to be property.    

The Taney Court’s regime of favoring property rights over human rights, and of narrowly limiting the power of the federal government, came to a crashing end with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War.  Using the President’s Constitutional war powers as his justification, Lincoln freed millions of slaves in one stroke even before the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery.  It was the longest reach of the federal government and the largest confiscation of private property in history.  Thereafter, the federal government became increasingly active in managing land and defining property rights in the country.[2]

Another turn toward judicial conservativism came during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the Supreme Court, strongly influenced by the Malthusian views of Justice Stephen Field, essentially read free enterprise and laissez-faire capitalism into the Constitution.  In the name of protecting what Justices saw as the right of every individual to sell his or her labor as they wished, the Court came down on labor unions and against government regulation of wages and hours of work as infringements on the freedom of workers and business owners.  In this same vein, the Court protected the rights of capitalists by invalidating state and federal government efforts at social and economic reforms and regulations.[3]

In the case of Lochner v. New York (1905), for example, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law that limited the number of hours a person could be made to work in a bakery.  The Court held that the law was a violation of workers’ rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to sell their labor for as many hours as they wished.  In his dissent in this case, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously complained that“The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”  Spencer was a social theorist who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and whose book Social Statics was an argument for laissez-faire capitalism that was influential among late nineteenth-century conservatives, including Supreme Court Justices.

From the late nineteenth century to the mid-1930’s, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court struck down a host of state and federal statutes and regulations that attempted to moderate the ups and downs of the capitalist business cycle, make the economic system fairer to workers and small businesses, and otherwise reform and humanize the economic system.  This trend continued into the Great Depression during the early 1930’s, when the Court struck down President Roosevelt’s first attempt at a New Deal.  

But then, seemingly under the pressure of economic disaster, the Court turned around in the mid-1930’s and upheld Roosevelt’s second New Deal, which was by far the most ambitious effort to regulate the economy in American history.  Constitutional restrictions by the Court on the federal government’s regulation of the economy have been minimal ever since.  Until now.    

Originalism and the Constitution: A Farce.

In recent years, conservative jurists and lawyers have developed a Constitutional theory they call Originalism.  In their view, the Constitution should be applied as it was originally intended and understood by the authors of it.  If the Founders did not specifically intend something, or even could not have intended it given the times in which they lived, the Constitution cannot be applied to that thing.  Originalists see the Constitution as a rigid set of rules cast in stone, or what liberals would complain is a Procrustean bed that squeezes the life out of the document. 

Liberals, in contrast, generally support a Living Constitution theory that insists the Constitution mainly consists of a broad outline of principles that can be applied in different ways as American society changes.  It is a document, liberals claim, that invites revision through amendments but also through reinterpretation and interpolation as circumstances change.  It is a charter for reform and reformers.  Originalists demur. 

Originalist theory is important because several Justices on the United States Supreme Court, possibly a majority, claim to be Originalists and have predicated their decisions about important issues upon this theory.  The spread of this doctrine could have a major effect on Constitutional interpretation.  In so doing, proponents of the theory generally call themselves conservatives, as does the mass media.  But I believe that this is a significant mischaracterization and that they and their theory are best described as “radical right-wing” rather than “conservative.”   The reason is simple.  Originalists are not in favor of conserving anything. 

Conservatives have historically been primarily concerned with the unintended consequences of social change.  They are afraid that the good intended by a social change will be overwhelmed by evils that were unforeseen and unintended.  So, they are in favor of either no social change or go-slow change.  They want to make sure that we conserve the good in the present society and don’t ruin it in the process of trying to make it better.  And this has generally been the gist of Supreme Court conservatism in the past.  Conservative justices have generally aimed to preserve the status quo and put a stop to new laws and new programs that aimed to revise and reform society 

Originalists, in contrast, are all for radical and extensive social change.  Rather than being conservative, they are, in fact, revolutionaries, albeit reactionary revolutionaries who want to overthrow most of present-day American society and return to some imagined past.  The present Supreme Court has already overturned Roe v. Wade which had been considered legally settled law for fifty years.  This reversal of Roe was essentially predicatedon Originalist grounds in which the supposed intentions of the Founders override any questions of precedents, stare decisis, past practice or judicial decorum. 

Nor do Originalists seem to consider or care about the social and political upheaval that might follow an Originalist reversal of what had been considered settled law.  And several right-wing Justices have threatened more to come.  Some have hinted that the whole regime of social and economic reforms from the New Deal onward could be ripe for reversal.  They insist that what is unconstitutional is unconstitutional, no matter how long it has been accepted law.  This is, of course, radicalism and not conservatism.

It is also nonsense and it is, frankly, hard to believe that presumably intelligent jurists and lawyers could seriously advance this theory.  The Originalist interpretation of the Constitution is a farce on its face and on the facts.  Let me count the ways.

First, Originalism places an impossible burden on judges.  The theory requires judges to plumb the minds of the various authors of the Constitution’s various provisions to discover their specific intentions.  This includes the eighteenth-century Founders of the Constitution and framers of the Bill of Rights, the nineteenth-century authors of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the authors of the many other Constitutional Amendments.  It requires judges to be capable of discovering the beliefs of the various authors of the Constitution and its Amendments, and to interpret those beliefs within the intellectual culture of the authors’ times.  It thereby requires judges to possess the knowledge and skills of intellectual historians, an expertise that very few judges have.    

I am an intellectual historian.  I spent three years in graduate school training to be an intellectual historian and then taught history for several decades.  I have also written extensively on intellectual history.  While I make no claims for the quality of my work, I can attest that working at intellectual history requires specialized knowledge and training.  Very few judges, who may have extensive knowledge and experience in law, have that knowledge and training in history. 

In justifying their rejection of the Living Constitution theory, Originalists claim that the theory is too loose and leaves too much room for judges to introduce political biases into their decisions.  But this is a “do as I say not as I do” double standard.  Originalist interpretations depend on how judges read history, which is a notoriously variable thing and will invariably reflect the judges’ political biases.  In addition, while the Living Constitution theory requires judges to back their decisions with detailed evidence and reasoning about the circumstances that justify their conclusions, Originalists don’t have to justify theirs other than by claiming that they are following the Founders’ intentions.  That’s a pretty loose method.

Second, the Constitution and most of the Amendments thereafter were the products of committee deliberations and compromise decisions which make it almost impossible to determine what were the authors’ specific intentions.  The Constitutional Convention was itself a big committee and the Convention was broken down into smaller committees to deal with various subjects.  The members of the Convention and the various committees had many different ideas about what should be in the Constitution.  The product was the outcome of vigorous debate and compromise.  Anyone who has any experience with committees knows that while the members may come to some agreement on the outcome, their reasons and reasonings will often be quite different. 

I have personal experience along these lines.  In addition to being a historian, I am also a lawyer and served for a time as counsel to the Judiciary, Law, Public Safety and Defense Committee of the New Jersey State Assembly.  I can personally attest to the fact that the members of the Committee frequently approved bills with various members having different ideas of what the bills did.  There was no single intention or interpretation.  And this diversity of intents and interpretations was certainly the case with the members of the Constitutional Convention.  We can see this in their sharp disagreements afterwards about what the Constitution meant.  As a result, finding a single intent for many of the Constitution’s provisions is a fool’s enterprise.

Third, there is no statement of intent for the Constitution that might explain what the Founders intended.  As a way of directing the interpretation of a constitutional provision or a statute, the framers will often include an explanatory statement of intent or a legislative history.  The statement expresses the will of the authors.  I drafted many such documents in working for the New Jersey Legislature.  The framers of the Constitution did not do this.  There is no such explanatory statement for the Constitution.  And this seems intentional.  The Founders deliberately left the document open to later interpretation and interpolation. 

Fourth, the Constitution is a relatively brief document with, for the most part, relatively broad provisions.  The constitutions of other nations are much longer and much more specific.  The United States Constitution does have some very specific provisions, such as age requirements for holding various offices.  So, it is clear that where they desired and could reach agreement, the Founders were capable of devising narrowly specific provisions.  Which leads to the inevitable conclusion that where the Constitution’s provisions are broad, and are like an outline of principles that need to be filled in with interpretations and interpolations, the Founders knew what they were doing.  If it is the Originalists’ goal to follow the Founders’ intentions, then it seems that a Living Constitution interpretation of the document is what the Founders intended.

The historian Garry Wills has well summarized the efforts of Originalists as “summoning the founders to testify against what they founded.”[4]   Which is absurd.

Originalism and the Second Amendment: A Fraud.

Interpretations of the Constitution by self-proclaimed Originalists are often nothing of the kind.  They may be original in the sense of being novel, but they have little or nothing to do with the original intentions of the Founders.  They are merely right-wing political decisions using the pretense of Originalism as a fig leaf covering.  The misinterpretation in recent years of the Second Amendment with respect to gun ownership by right-wing Justices is a clear example. 

The Second Amendment has been the law of the land since 1791 but it was not until 2008, in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, that a right-wing majority of the Supreme Court overruled previous decisions, historical evidence and common sense to proclaim that the Amendment guarantees a person’s right to carry a gun.  In the fifteen years since the Heller decision, the Court has overturned almost every kind of federal and state gun control law as violating the Second Amendment. 

Right-wing Justices have claimed that the Amendment gives individuals an almost absolute right to carry almost any kind of firearm almost anywhere they want.  And has done so on ostensibly Originalist grounds as being the intentions of the Founders.  But that conclusion just doesn’t fly.  As self-styled Originalists, the Justices ought to be sensitive to the language of the Amendment and attentive to the circumstances in which the Amendment was adopted.  They are neither.  Their Originalism is a fraud.

As to the language of the Amendment.  In order to reach their conclusion that the intent of the Framers was to guarantee the right of individuals to keep guns in their homes and carry them around in public, the Justices have to completely disregard the Amendment’s clear reference to a militia.  This is one of the places where the Founders were clear and specific.  Guns were for militias.  But the so-called Originalists on the Supreme Court just trample over the Founders’ clear intention in order to reach their politically motivated right-wing conclusion.

As to the circumstances in which the Amendment was drafted.  The right-wing Justices completely disregard the nature and extent of gun ownership in the eighteenth century.  The idea that ordinary Americans in the late eighteenth century were concerned about the right to have guns in their homes and on their persons for self-protection is just plain wrong on the facts.  Guns at that time were a particularly poor choice as a means of self-protection.  They were cumbersome, inaccurate, and dangerous to their owners.[5]

Most guns at that time were muskets that were heavy and clumsy to carry and to shoot.  They also required the bearer to carry a bag of heavy shot and gunpowder.  This was not something a person would want to carry around on a regular basis.  Muskets often misfired and were notoriously unreliable.  Because of their smooth barrels, which resulted in bullets wobbling and flying out in unpredictable directions, they could not be successfully aimed at anything smaller than the broad side of a barn.  That is why soldiers generally stood shoulder to shoulder in a broad line and shot all at once, unleashing a wall of lead that might hit some of their enemies.  Muskets were not a good weapon if you wanted to shoot at something and actually hit it. 

Professional hunters were almost the only people who could afford to own a long rifle with a grooved barrel that could be successfully aimed at a target.  Guns were hand-made individually and long rifles, with their grooved barrels, were expensive.  For hunters, a gun was a tool of the trade.  Muskets were much less expensive and were, as a result, the weapon of choice in arming a militia.  And for most ordinary citizens, a musket was merely an adjunct for militia duty.  This is something that any school kid, at least of my generation, could see in movies and TV shows about the Revolutionary era.  I remember getting that point when I was around ten years old. 

In addition, guns of that day, both long rifles and muskets, shot only one bullet and then had to be reloaded with gunpowder and another bullet.  Guns at that time were front-loading, meaning that you had to pour gun powder down the barrel and then force a bullet down the barrel each time you shot it.  This was a time-consuming process that made guns of that era impractical for personal protection.  If you missed your attacker with your first shot, you could be rushed by your enemy.  A spear or an axe was a more practical weapon and was generally preferred for self-protection.  Again, this is something any school kid could see in movies and TV shows about the Revolutionary era. 

Carrying a gun or keeping one in your home was also a dangerous thing to do because you had to store gun powder with it.  Gun powder at that time was very volatile.  A bag of gunpower could explode with a change in the barometer.  It was not something that you would ordinarily want to carry around or keep in your home.  A bag of gunpowder in your pocket could have unfortunate results.  And it could blow your home to smithereens.    

As a result, other than hunters, for whom a gun was a working tool and who were specially skilled in shooting, very few people had guns.  Despite the lies of the National Rifle Association and the hypocrisy of the so-called Originalists on the Supreme Court, there was no gun culture in early America, something any kid could see in the movies and on TV.  In turn, there was no need for a Constitutional Amendment to protect a person’s right to carry a gun that no one wanted to carry.  A militia — now, that was another thing.

Towns and states had militias.  Militias were common all over the new country but they were especially important in the southern slave states where they were used to keep the enslaved people enslaved.  One of the reasons the southern colonies supported the Revolution was that slaveowners were concerned about the English antislavery movement that had recently succeeded in getting slavery abolished in England and was aiming to get it abolished in the colonies.  Having seceded from the English empire and avoided the threat posed by English abolitionists, southern slaveowners now feared the growing anti-slavery movement in the United States that had recently succeeded in prohibiting slavery in the Northwest Territories.  The Second Amendment effectively protected the militias that protected the southern slaveowners from their slaves.

Arming a militia was the main reason for guns.  Very few individuals had guns, so towns frequently provided guns or required that citizens provide the town with a gun.  The town’s guns would, in turn, ordinarily be stored in a militia armory.  That is why the British were keen to get to Lexington and Concord in April, 1775 at the beginning of the Revolution when Paul Revere made his famous ride.  They were aiming to seize the guns and gun powder stored in the militia armories in those towns.  It’s a story that any school kid, at least in my generation, could tell you, and it gives the lie to rightwing misinterpretations of the Second Amendment.

It is also the case that, contrary to the contention of the rightwing Justices on the Supreme Court, gun control was common during most of American History, starting with the early colonists and continuing to the present day[6].  Any kid, at least of my generation, could tell you from movies and TV shows about Wyatt Earp, the famous sheriff of several Western towns in the late nineteenth century, and about the famous shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone, AZ between the Earps (the good guys) and the Clantons (the bad guys). 

Most significantly, what the shootout was about was that the Clantons refused to leave their guns at a checkpoint at the border of the town.  It was common for towns in the supposed Wild West to prohibit people from entering the town carrying guns.  The rationale and justification for those regulations was made clear by the behavior of the Clantons, who began shooting up the town before they were stopped by the Earps, who were merely enforcing the town’s gun control laws.  So-called Originalists are just plain wrong when they claim that gun control violates the theory and practice of the Founders and their descendants. 

Both on its face and on the facts, the right-wing interpretation of the Second Amendment is a fraud.  I mean, if your Constitutional theory can be given the lie by adolescents watching popular movies and TV shows, how viable is your theory?

Originalism and the First Amendment: A Travesty in the Making?

If rightwing Justices can wreak havoc on the Second Amendment, what’s to stop them from doing the same to other Constitutional provision?  Despite the clear language of the First Amendment and repeated statements from many of the Founders, there are already right-wing Justices who claim that the Amendment does not require the separation of Church and State.  These Justices, along with the current Speaker of the House of Representatives, who is second in line to the Presidency, seem to believe that there is no constitutional obstacle to declaring the United States to be a Christian nation. 

As with the Second Amendment, you would think that self-styled Originalists would be sensitive to the language and the circumstances of the First Amendment.  As to the language, the First Amendment clearly states that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”  This seems to be another instance in which the Founders were quite clear in their language.  There is no ambiguity here, and for over two hundred years the Amendment has been interpreted in a way that would foreclose declaring the United States to be a Christian Nation.  Nonetheless, there are a growing number of self-styled Originalists who seem willing to trample over the words of the Founders to achieve their rightwing political objectives.

As to the circumstances surrounding the First Amendment, right-wing Originalists are on similarly weak ground.  Many historians consider the Revolutionary War generation to be the least religious in American history.  In the wake of the mid-century turmoil of the Great Awakening, most people were tired of religious controversy and were engrossed in secular issues.  The great men of the era – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin – were neither church goers nor conventional Christians. At most, they were deists and agnostics.  Most important, there is no mention of Christianity in the Constitution.  And, of course, there is the First Amendment.   

Despite the language of the First Amendment and the attendant circumstances, rightwing Christian Originalists continue to insist that the country was founded in Christianity by traditionalist Christians and should be declared a Christian nation.  This is blatant hypocrisy on the part of self-styled Originalists.   It is also a dangerous fraud and a potential disaster in the making.

Where do we go from here?  A Free Fall or a Roller Coaster Ride?

So, where does the Supreme Court go from here.  Will this reactionary Originalist con continue to wreak havoc on the United States.  Some Justices have talked about reversing Brown v. Board just as they did Roe v. Wade, and they have even talked about overturning the New Deal and almost all of the social and economic legislation since the 1930’s.  The late Justice Scalia, one the original Originalists, was apparently once asked if he thought the New Deal should be overturned on Originalist grounds.  His response was that he was an Originalist but he wasn’t crazy.  Somc of Scalia’s successors on the Court seem to be crazy.  And there is a meanness in their philosophy which seems all too common among right-wingers today. 

The bad news is that a majority of the present-day Supreme Court seems to be wallowing in revanchism, trying to claw back the liberal reforms of the past.  The good news is that it would only take two of the right-wingers to be replaced by two liberal Justices, or at least two sane Justices, and then the balance of the Court would likely shift back to sanity and maybe even to a Living Constitution approach.  The history of the Court has been something like a roller coaster ride.  When conservatives take control, the downward slide comes fast.  When liberals take control, the upward climb comes more slowly and laboriously.  But maybe we have hit bottom and are on the verge of a liberal climb.  And hopefully in the not-too-distant future, we will be able to say to the Originalists “What was an elephant doing in your shorts?”

BW 12/23

[1] James Willard Hurst. Law and the Conditions of Freedom. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956.

[2] “William Goetzmann.  Beyond the Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

[3] Arnold Paul. Conservative Crisis and the Rule of Law. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

[4] Garry Wills. A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. P.16.

[5] Michael Bellesiles.  Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.

[6] David Freeman Hawke. Everyday Life in Early America, New York: Harper & Row, 1988.