John Bach McMaster (1852—1932) was an American historian, best known for his eight volume History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War (1883-1913).
(CALGARY, Alberta) - American Exceptionalism is a term that has been considerably bruited about on the Salem-News site over the last couple of weeks. Some readers have been critical of my viewpoint as an outsider who can never understand what it means to believe in AE.
Not having grown up with the mythology, this is true. What no one seems to have noticed, however, is that my viewpoint is an echo of what actual Americans themselves say. My arguments have been built up on the knowledge of American thinkers.
Specifically, I don’t quote non-Americans in supporting my arguments.
For example, Stephen Kinzer, who wrote Overthrow, describing in detail how since 1893, American governments have overthrown fourteen sovereign governments, starting with Hawaii in 1893. One poster to a piece by Ersun Warnke said: “In fact, for example, Hawaii was NOT overthrown by the U.S. This is an issue that is debated with fervor in Hawaii.” This anonymous individual needs to take up his dispute with Kinzer, a veteran New York Times reporter and bureau chief who now teaches foreign policy at Northwestern University. Wikipedia gives more information as well as links to his personal website. Ask Stephen yourself. But before you contact him, you'd better have read his book. He might answer your objections beforehand. I, myself, don’t have the answers, but just report my findings.
I’ve been a critic of American culture and policy since 1972 when I first read Ferdinand Lundberg’s 1968 best seller The Rich and the Super-Rich. Despite being a best seller and densely packed with information about how America had gone bad in many ways, his book seems to have had no impact on the direction of The Republic. In fact, I used Lundberg to support a verbal argument I was having with an American living in Calgary just last year. He said he had read the book and dismissed it as a “rant”.
But I am not a critic of the American people per se other than the ignorant, arrogant and wilfully stupid—which is the majority of Americans.
In 1925 H. L. Mencken published an article, “Homo Neanderthalensis” where he wrote:
“The inferior man’s reasons for hating knowledge are not hard to discern. He hates it because it is complex—because it puts an unbearable strain upon his meagre capacity for taking in ideas. Thus his search is always for short cuts. All superstitions are such short cuts. Their aim is to make the unintelligible simple, and even obvious. So on what seem to be higher levels. No man who has not had a long and arduous education can understand even the most elementary concepts of modern pathology. But even a hind at the plough can grasp the theory of chiropractic in two lessons. Hence the vast popularity of chiropractic among the submerged—and of osteopathy, Christian Science and other such quackeries with it. They are idiotic, but they are simple—and every man prefers what he can understand to what puzzles and dismays him.”
“The popularity of fundamentalism among the inferior orders of men is explicable in exactly the same way. The cosmogonies that educated men toy with are all inordinately complex. To comprehend their veriest outlines requires an immense stock of knowledge, and a habit of thought. It would be as vain to try to teach to peasants or the city proletariat as it would be to try to teach them to streptococci. But the cosmogony of Genesis is so simple that even a yokel can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers, to an ignorant man, the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. So he accepts it with loud hosannas, and has one more excuse for hating his betters.”
But: I like the minority of Americans. I like and admire them and, while still a minority—they nonetheless number in the millions They are the people of goodwillto whom I feel connected and, with whom, over the years, I have developed meaningful relationships, such as here, now, at Salem-News.
John Bach McMaster
John Bach McMaster (1852—1932) was an American historian, best known for his eight volume History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War (1883-1913).
In 1883, after the publication of the first volume, he was appointed a professor at the Wharton School of Finance and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he remained until his retirement in 1919.
In 1896 McMaster published With the Fathers, which was republished in 1964 by Noonday Press, with the new title The Political Depravity of the Founding Fathers: studies in the history of the United States .
This is a rare book, long out of print. If you wish to read it and your public library doesn’t have it, a college or university library accessible to you is likely to have one available.
The milieu of the Founding Fathers
My argument, which many of my American readers don’t seem to understand, is that the United States at its founding has little in common with the United States of today. It was then an almost entirely rural culture; the Industrial Revolution hadn’t really begun, and, as McMaster wrote:
“In times like the present [the 1890s], when the boss is everywhere, and when the high places of many State and municipal governments are filled by men who have secured them by methods greatly to be condemned, it may afford the honest citizen some consolation to know that these evils have always existed.”
“A very little study of long forgotten policies will suffice to show that in filibustering and gerrymandering, in stealing governorships and legislatures, in using force at the polls, in colonizing and distributing patronage to whom patronage is due, in all the frauds and tricks that go to make up the worst form of practical politics, the men who founded our State and national governments were always our equals, and often our masters. Yet they lived in times when universal suffrage did not exist, and when the franchise was everywhere guarded by property and religious qualifications of the strictest kind.” (pp. 71f)
“From the standpoint of those who, in our day, disapprove of universal suffrage, this ought to have been a time of great political purity. The voters were taxpayers, Christians, and owners of property. The officeholders were men of substance, while the qualifications for holding office increased with the dignity of the place. Yet it was, in truth, a period of great political depravity.” (p. 73)
The Canadian connection
The astute reader may wonder why I, a Canadian, would be reading a book like this. Here’s how it happened. In 1981 Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority were in the White House.
In 1940 science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote a short story, which he expanded to a novella in 1953, If This Goes On, about a future America that sounds very much like contemporary Iran or Afghanistan under the Taliban. I read this book as a teenager in the early 1960s.
In his story, Nehemiah Scudder, a backwoods preacher, was first elected to the presidency in 2012. There were no elections after 2016. (This novella is discussed in Wikipedia.) I saw the rise of Reagan and the MM as a similar, nascent theocracy in the United States.
Could it actually happen? Yes. In 1947 Albert Einstein accompanied his best friend, logician Kurt Gödel to his U.S. citizenship exam, where he was one of the witnesses. Gödel had told him, and others, that he had discovered an inconsistency in the U.S. Constitution, one that would allow the U.S. to become a dictatorship. Gödel was held back from raising the issue when talking with the judge, so what the inconsistency is, I don’t know. It may never even have been made public.
Journalist Alexander Cockburn was born in Ireland, but has lived and worked in the U. S. since 1972. Writing in The Nation (May 21, 1988) Cockburn said Ronald Reagan was a fair representative of mainstream America. “The United States retains, unusually for an advanced industrial society, about the same per capita level of religious superstition as Bangladesh. What one of Jimmy Carter’s aides once referred to as the ‘abracadabra vote’ is ample…[Reagan] has been nurtured in the same rich loam of folk ignorance, historical figment and paranormal intellectual constructs as millions of his fellow citizens.”
Is there an inconsistency? Kurt Gödel was a logican of the first rank, and one of the best logicians that has ever lived; he is famous in mathematics and science for his Incompleteness Theorem. I have no doubt that if Gödel said there was an inconsistency, there was (and may still be).
On this point, said McMaster:
“The fears which tormented the founders of the Republic have long since vanished. We do not believe that our domestic institutions can ever be subverted by any occupant of the White House. We stand in no dread that the day will come when some successful general or some unscrupulous politicians will first seize the presidency and then use its great power to set up a life-long dictatorship, or establish a kingdom, on the ruins of the Republic.” (p. 69)
Gödel believed it was possible and the loaded gun may still be lying around to be picked up by someone with power and a plan.
In 1983 I worked on a radio proposal arguing for an impending American theocracy. In the end, the radio producers I was working with were not quite as sure as I was (and I was incorrect, at least so far), so my proposal never saw completion. The only result was a published article “The Fall of America” which I republished on this site November 6, 2009. McMaster’s book was part of the research I did for my proposal.
The Political Depravity of the Founding Fathers
What follows are unedited quotations from the book. If you have any disputes or disagreements, take them up with a contemporary American historian. While McMaster had his critics, I accept him as a legitimate authority in forming and supporting my own arguments and viewpoints. If you wish to explore further yourself and verify what I quote, I include page numbers for your convenience.
The American government with its Constitution and 10 amendments went into effect on March 1, 1781. “The government that went into effect on that day was bad from beginning to end.” (p. 107)
“Bad as the articles were, they were made worse by the provision that to amend them required the consent of each one of the thirteen members of the Union.”
“The evils of this system were not slow to appear. Acting on States, and not on individuals, Congress never secured a hold on the people, was always looked on as a revolutionary body, and was treated, first with indifference, and then with contempt.”
“The large vote required to pass a weighty measure often made it impossible to legislate at all.” (p. 108)
“The duty of the Convention was not to frame such a government as might be best in theory, but such as the people expected and would approve.” (p. 124)
“The clause fixing representation at one to forty thousand was recommitted, and reported back with the provision that in the first House of Representatives there should be fifty-six members, and that for the future, representation should be based on wealth and population. The provision of one representative for forty thousand inhabitants was dropped as too unsafe. It would enable the West in time to outvote the East. By making a general and not a specific rule, the East would keep the government in its own hands, take care of its own interests, and deal out representation in safe proportion to the West.” (p. 130)
Slavery was essential to keep the Union together
At the Convention “Little debate was provoked until the fourth and sixth sections of the seventh article were reached.”
“These sections forbade Congress to lay a tax on articles exported from any State, or to tax slaves imported, or to hinder the importation of slaves in any way whatsoever, or pass a navigation act, unless two thirds of the members present in each House were willing…So much as related to taxing and hindering the importation of slaves had been put in to please South Carolina and Georgia. Except these two, every State was willing and eager to stop the importation of slaves. But the Convention was reminded that the staples of South Carolina and Georgia were indigo and rice; that these two could not be raised without slave labor; that the toil in the rice swamp and the indigo field was more than even the brawniest Negro could long endure; that, if they could not bring in Negroes from abroad, their industry and their property were gone; and that sooner than submit to this, they would quit the Union.” (p. 138)
The founders as fallible men
“The Constitution,” said [George] Mason, “had been formed without the knowledge of the people. It was not right to say to them, Take this or nothing. A second convention would know their wishes.” Benjamin Franklin spoke out against this, saying that they should all accept the reality of fallibility and not expect the best. He urged the delegates to doubt their own infallibility and sign, either as individual or delegates from their states. (pp. 142)
Restrictions on suffrage
“The choice of representatives was left with the people. By the Constitution, any man who could vote for a lower member of the lower branch of his State Legislature could vote for a member of Congress. But not every man on election day could write a ballot and take it to the polls, or stand in a crowd and shout ‘Aye’ when the name of his candidate was called. Suffrage was far from universal. The elective franchise belonged to the rich and well-to-do, not to the poor.” (p. 163)
In 1811 “seventeen states then formed the Union. The assent of thirteen was therefore to amend the Constitution. But as eight states tolerated slavery, no amendment could pass without the assent of at least four slave States; and to suppose that four slave States would consent to cut down their representation at the request of Massachusetts was never seriously thought of for a moment.” (p. 195)
Congress as fundamentally powerless
“Hundreds of anti-slavery societies had sprung into existence, and from these petitions, signed, it is said by thirty-four thousand names, praying for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, came pouring in. Once more the interests of a section were attacked. Once more expediency produced the charge of unconstitutionality. Congress had no power to abolish slavery anywhere. To ask it to abolish slavery was to ask it to do an unconstitutional act, and petitions making such requests were themselves unconstitutional and ought not to be received…In May 1836 came a report that Congress had no power to interfere with slavery in any of the States; that it out not to interfere with it in the District of Columbia; and that ‘all petitions, memorials, resolutions, or papers, relating in any way or to any extent to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery, shall, without being either printed or referred, be laid upon the table, and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon’.” (p. 209)
Slavery
The Free-soilers held “two definite theories of the status of slavery under the Constitution. Slavery in the State was, they held, a purely domestic institution. State laws created it. State laws protected it, and these laws the Federal Government could not repeal. For slavery in the States, therefore, the Federal Government was not to blame. But the existence of slavery in the Territories the States had no authority and the Congress all authority. But the Constitution expressly denied to Congress to deprive any man of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Congress had, therefore, no more power to make a slave than to make a king; no more power to set up slavery than to set up monarchy. The Congress must prohibit slavery in the Territories, in the District of Columbia, and wherever else its authority was supreme.”
“On the other hand were the Democrats, resisting the Wilmot proviso, resisting the exclusion of slavery from the Territories; demanding the fulfillment by the North of the constitutional obligation to return fugitive slaves; asserting the doctrines of popular sovereignty and non-interference, and threatening disunion if every demand were not conceded. Non-interference meant the constitutional right of every slave holder to take slaves to any State or Territory and be secure in their possession, and the constitutional duty of Congress to do nothing tending directly or indirectly to hurt slavery even ‘in its incipient stages’. Popular sovereignty meant the right of the people in a Territory to determine for themselves when they framed their State Constitution whether they would or would not have slavery.” (pp. 215f)
The travails of Congress
“During the twenty-eight years which have passed since 1861, three hundred and seventy-seven amendments have been offered. Many of these, it is true, have in one form or another tormented Congress for ninety years; but among them are others which indicate nothing so plainly as the belief that the Government is now a great national Government and that its duty is to provide in the broadest sense for the ‘general welfare’ of the people. To Congress, therefore, have come repeated calls for constitutional amendments, forbidding special legislation; forbidding bigamy and polygamy; forbidding the repeal of the pension laws; giving Congress power to pass uniform marriage and divorce laws and power to limit the hours of labor; giving women the right to vote; giving the States power to tax corporations; and for amendments abolishing and prohibiting the convict-labor system and acknowledging the existence of a God.” (pp. 220f)
The seeds of future corruption were sown at the outset
“John Adams was a native of New England, and this was given out by some as good and sufficient reason why southern Federalists should oppose him. He lived long abroad, and was declared by others to have come home less of a Republican than when he went out. He had, his enemies admitted, written a book called A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. But it ought, they said, to be called an insidious attack.”
“Could any man read such stuff as this—‘The rich, the well-born, and the able will acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense in a House of Representatives’—and call it Republican? Was the author of such nonsense a fit man to rule over a free people.” (pp. 160f)
The European Pressure
“But the task in which so many had failed was made possible toward the close of the sixteenth century by the pressure of economic and religious distress. The increase of population; the rise in the price of food; the rapid conversion of great quantities of arable land to pasturage; the destruction of monasteries, which threw on the communities the tramps these houses had so long supported; the crowds of disbanded soldiers from the low countries that filled the cities—produced in time a class so distressed that emigration even to the New World was gladly welcomed by them. When, therefore, the merchants of London and Plymouth formed their companies, in 1606, they found a class ready at hand on which to draw for settlers. What economic distress did for Virginia, religious intolerance did a few years later for Massachusetts; and by the end of the first quarter of the 17th century the English colonization of what is now the United States was fairly under way.” (pp. 238f)
The Nineteenth Century
“As we have grown more intelligent, so we have grown more liberal, more tolerant, more humane. When this century opened there was not a blind asylum, nor a deaf and dumb asylum, nor a lunatic asylum, nor a house of refuge in all our land. We have turned our prisons from stews and brothels and seminaries of crime into reformatories of crime. We have cut down the number of crimes punishable with death from fifteen to two. We have ceased using the branding iron and the treadmill; we have abolished imprisonment for debt; we have exterminated slavery, and raised the laborer from a vassal to a man. We have covered our country with free schools and free libraries, and set up institutions for the protection not only of children but of dumb brutes. In the face of these facts it is wicked to talk of degeneration and decay.” (p. 245)
“The religious underpinning of America’s culture and Constitution”
I listened to a talk recently by Andrew Bacevich, who has most recently published The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008). Bacevich is a Vietnam veteran and retired Army colonel who is now a professor of international relations at Boston University.
He made a point that I half-knew, but he connected the dots for me.
The countries that the U.S. is at war with—Afghanistan and Iraq—are Islamic cultures. What this means is that religion overlaps with politics and is actually at the centre of their political consciousness. How can we possibly relate to and help people with such an alien viewpoint? This is not a criticism of Islam, but a criticism of those of us from the West who try help them from a secular orientation. They find us as politically alien as we do them. In their view, the individual is politically irrelevant.
America has a theoreticalseparation of church and state but not an actual separation. Neither the Constitution nor its Bill of Rights contains the oft-repeated phrase, "separation of church and state." Repetition of this phrase encourages people to believe that the Constitution uses the phrase, "freedom from religion," which it does not. The phrase is actually "freedom of religion," meaning a guarantee of the right to absolute freedom of religious expression. Unless Agnosticism and Atheism are considered religions then the idea that the U.S. is a Christian nation has logical merit.
America is one of the few, if not the only, Western nation that uses religion, specifically the Christian religion as a political (and otherwise) litmus test. Using this litmus test, there were those who opposed Einstein's becoming an American citizen in 1940. In a book titled The Fifth Column in our Schools one article said:
“If Albert Einstein is right and there is no personal God, then America is founded on fable and falsehood. If there is no God then the citizen has no God-given rights. Then all the rights set forth in the Constitution are sham and delusion. If man has no Creator, then our fathers fought for a lie; then the rights of citizenship are based on a lie. Then Professor Einstein has subscribed to a lie, in the very act of pledging allegiance to a form of government which-according to his philosophy is founded on a lie.”
Who could ever have imagined that I could find common cause with a religious fundamentalist.
American Exceptionalism—the myth
The roots of the term AE are attributed to the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville, who claimed in his two volume Democracy in America (1835, 1840) that the then-50-year-old United States held a special place among nations, because it was a country of immigrants and the first modern democracy. The tem has only been incresingly used since the Second World War.
Writer Martin Sellevold wrote in The Australian Rationalist:
"It has been said that the US does not have an ideology, it is an ideology. One needs only to look at the ubiquitous American flag to realise that there might be some truth in this. US culture is riddled with patriotism, and too often it is not a ‘clean’ patriotism, in that pride is felt about the United States in and of itself, but rather a ‘dirty’ patriotism wherein everything that is not American is actively put down, ‘dumbified’ or ridiculed.”
AE is to me, largely about American belligerence, based on a denied feeling of decline and inferiority. A bully who becomes insecure, tends to bully more. In 1982 the British people were feeling economically and psychologically depressed. Margaret Thatcher gave the country a boost by declaring war on Argentina. America, being a larger and more powerful nation under psychological stress, a larger scapegoat was required, hence Iraq.
I first noticed the decline of America in 1981 when I did a study of the largest corporations of the world in the Fortune 500 and 1,000. Towards the end of the 1970s the relative size of the American corporate world was shrinking. It’s not that Corporate America was not growing—it was. But so were the foreign corporations in the rest of the world. The result, which I published in Maclean’s magazine, was that on a world scale. the U.S. was shrinking. The U.S. still had a massive economy and was militarily powerful, but it was no longer what it had been.
The neocons who have adopted the phrase in the last few decades, have come to use it as a bullying tool. Roger Cohen wrote about Sarah Palin in the New York Times during the 2008 election and said
“exceptionalism has taken an ugly twist of late. It's become the angry refuge of the America that wants to deny the real state of the world.” He went on to say “The damn-the-world, God-chose-us rage of that America has sharpened as U.S. exceptionalism has become harder to square with the 21st-century world's interconnectedness. How exceptional can you be when every major problem you face, from terrorism to nuclear proliferation to gas prices, requires joint action?” He wrote this on September 24, 2008, even before the meltdown.
From all the evidence I have gathered, and all the experience I have had, I think it is undeniable that American Exceptionalism is a myth and, no pun intended, an exceptionally ugly myth at that.
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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which is why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue. From 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman, Canada’s top business writer (notably a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting. He gave up journalism in the early 1980s because he had no interest in being a hack writer for the mainstream media and became a software developer and programmer. He retired from computers last year and is now back to doing what he loves—writing and trying to make the world a better place
The Political Depravity of the Founding Fathers
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