Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story

by Wilfred M. McClay

Few great leaders have been more comprehensively disdained or loathed or underestimated. A low Southern view of him, of course, was to be expected, but it was widely shared north of the Mason–Dixon line. As the Lincoln biographer David Donald put it, Lincoln’s own associates thought him “a simple Susan, a baboon, an aimless punster, a smutty joker”; he was, in the view of the abolitionist Wendell Phillips, a “huckster in politics” and “a first-rate second-rate man.” McClellan openly disdained him as a “well-meaning baboon.”

It is perhaps still surprising, even today, to see those luminous words “with malice toward none, with charity for all” uttered during the worst and most murderous war in American history. It should take nothing away from the generosity of those words to observe that Lincoln’s use of them was also a sign that he knew the war was won, because only a victor can afford to be so generous. But it should also not escape our appreciation that Lincoln had never lost his clarity, even amid the turbulence of the preceding four years, about the chief purpose of the war. It was not to punish all wickedness and establish a realm of perfect justice. It was first and foremost to restore the Union. Lincoln remained clear that the perpetuation of the Union and of the constitutional order that upheld it was an essential prerequisite to the success of the liberty agenda that was on the verge of abolishing slavery. A postwar settlement dominated by malice and score settling, and lacking in the spirit of charity and forgiveness, could not ultimately succeed. The Christian virtues he was espousing in his speech were not only morally right but also practically right and politically wise.

This war was, and remains to this day, America’s bloodiest conflict, having generated at least a million and a half casualties on the two sides combined: 620,000 deaths, the equivalent of six million men in today’s American population. One in four soldiers who went to war never returned home. One in thirteen returned home with one or more missing limbs. For decades to come, in every village and town in the land, one could see men bearing such scars and mutilations, a lingering reminder of the price they and others had paid.

And like the biblical Moses, Lincoln was cruelly denied entry into the promised land of a restored Union, denied the satisfaction of seeing that new birth of freedom he had labored so long and hard to achieve.

As early as December 1863, he had formulated a plan whereby pardons would be offered to those who agreed to swear an oath of loyalty to the Union and Constitution and who pledged to accept the abolition of slavery; then, under the Lincoln plan, states would be readmitted if 10 percent of the voters in that state had taken that loyalty oath. High officials and ranking military officers would be excluded from the pardon, but otherwise the offer was quite sweeping.

Never in history has a true-believing fanatic committed a heinous act that proved more injurious to his own cause. The South could not have had a better friend than Lincoln in enduring the arduous postwar years that lay ahead. True, the man from Illinois might or might not have been able to prevail in implementing his plans for a generous, mild peace between North and South. He was already facing stiff opposition to his 10 percent plan from his own party, and that might have intensified. But he also was experiencing a surge of popularity in the wake of the Union’s final victory, and it is possible that he could have summoned the political support to overcome such opposition. It is also possible that his plan would have proved unworkable, even with him implementing it. We shall never know.

Thus the Fourteenth Amendment began a process, culminating in the 1920s, called incorporation, which refers to the extension of the protections of the Bill of Rights to the state constitutions and governments.

Over the next three decades, though, the protection of black civil rights in the South was crushed by the white “redeemer” governments’ rise to power. The progress that had been made was soon forgotten. It gave way to a deep bitterness whose provenance seemed to stretch back to time immemorial, as if things had always been this way and should never have been disturbed.

Because of their size and complexity, and the sheer magnitude of their financial needs, the railroads burst the form of the individual- or family-owned business, and similar forms of business partnership, and instead adopted the form of the modern business corporation.

In the year 1913 alone, there were twenty-five thousand workplace fatalities in the United States and thirty times that number of serious employment-related injuries. The use of child labor was common; in 1880, one out of every six children in the nation, some of them as young as eight, was working full-time.

And John Adams of Massachusetts, like Jefferson a zealous advocate for the American republican experiment, found much to be hopeful about in the new nation’s dispersed cultural geography: In the present state of society and manners in America, with a people living chiefly by agriculture, in small numbers, sprinkled over large tracts of land, they are not subject to those panics and transports, those contagions of madness and folly, which are seen in countries where large numbers live in small places, in daily fear of perishing for want.

Once released, they were likely to connect with family or friends clustered into ethnic neighborhoods, hence the ubiquity in the older American cities of Little Italy, Chinatown, Greektown, and other ethnic neighborhoods made up of Poles, Czechs, and Russian Jews. These neighborhoods were like beachheads and staging areas, or mediating zones between the world they had come from and the bewildering new world they were encountering. In them, they could preserve the old ways – the language, the foods, the religion, the family life – while shielding newcomers from culture shock and helping them reorient to life in a speeded up, hyperpowered land of towering buildings, clattering streetcars, blazing electric lights, and crowds of transient strangers.

And so it was all over, just like that. It had indeed been splendid, if you weren’t Spanish, and it had been short. It had produced a wave of American patriotic feeling that furthered reconciliation and healing between North and South, particularly since two of the principal generals involved in the war were Confederate veterans.

Fortunately, McKinley made an excellent choice when he appointed Judge William Howard Taft as the civil governor of the Philippines, a position for which the ebullient and likable Taft had just the right touch. He insisted on treating the Filipinos as partners and as social equals and rejected the racial assumptions that had consigned them to second-order status. He worked to improve the lot of Filipino farmers, even visiting the Vatican in the hope of persuading Pope Leo XIII to free up ecclesiastical lands for their use. These efforts would make a significant difference in the political climate, and very quickly. For his own part, Taft genuinely loved the Filipino people and turned down a much-coveted Supreme Court appointment out of a desire to stay with them a little longer and finish his work. By 1917, Congress would pass the Jones Act, which affirmed the American intention to grant the Philippines eventual independence in the foreseeable future. That would finally happen on July 4, 1946.

Edward Bellamy’s fabulously best-selling 1888 fantasy Looking Backward, an effort to imagine a perfected postindustrial Boston, reconstituted as a socialist cooperative commonwealth in the year 2000. Far from celebrating individualism, Bellamy openly reviled it, proposing in its place a quasi-Christian “religion of solidarity” that would radically deemphasize the self and instead promote social bonds over individual liberty. The huge popularity of Bellamy’s book – it was second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the best-selling book of the nineteenth century, and it gave rise to innumerable “Bellamy clubs” across the nation, where the reform-minded gathered and dreamed together – showed how many Americans were hungry for such alternative ideas.

The Progressive view of human nature saw humans as fundamentally good, and evil as a function of bad social systems and corrupted institutions, not something irremediably wrong or sinful deep in the souls of individual persons. There was no inherent limit to the improvability of the world. No problem was beyond solution.

But what one would find to be consistent is the sense that Progressivism was an outlook that cared deeply about the common people and knew, far better than they did, what was best for them. Who after all would determine when “the dominant energies of community life” had been properly “incorporated to form their minds”? Who would have the authority to say that the “reconstruction of the self” had succeeded in meeting “the realities of present social life”? Some superior person would have to be available to certify such things.

First Austria avenged itself on Serbia; then Russia as leader of the Slavic world came to the aid of the Serbians by opposing the Austrians; then Germany fulfilled its obligations to Austria by declaring war on Russia and France; then Britain declared war on Germany and Austria, Japan joined the alliance against Germany, and Turkey joined up with the Triple Alliance, now known as the Central Powers. (Italy managed to stay aloof and later joined up with the Allied powers, as the Triple Entente would become known.)

German Americans found themselves under siege, irrespective of their views or their sympathies. Sauerkraut became “liberty cabbage,” and symphonies refused to perform the music of German composers, such as Johann Sebastian Bach or Ludwig van Beethoven.

Perhaps most fateful of all was the treaty’s Article 231, often known as the War Guilt Clause, which served as the legal basis for the reparations: The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies. Nothing in the treaty would gall the Germans for years to come more than that clause.

Even as the Treaty of Versailles was being concluded, it was widely regarded, in Europe and America alike, as a self-evident mistake, bearing within itself the potential for even greater catastrophes than the one it was being created to settle. “They won the war, but lost the peace”; never was that adage more applicable, as a description of what the Allies had accomplished, and failed to accomplish, in their months of deliberations and machinations in Paris.

The economist John Maynard Keynes observed it all with sour resignation from his ringside seat as a British delegate to the Paris Conference. He firmly believed that the treaty’s demands for German reparations had been set impossibly high and would almost certainly be counterproductive to the kind of general economic recovery needed to keep the peace and set a path for enduring recovery. In fact, he all but predicted that the burdens set by those reparations would lead to another and far worse war, “before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation.”

The prospect that Keynes saw lying ahead was unnerving: In this autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes. The reaction from the exertions, the fears, and the sufferings of the past five years is at its height. Our power of feeling or caring beyond the immediate questions of our own material well-being is temporarily eclipsed. The greatest events outside our own direct experience and the most dreadful anticipations cannot move us…. We have been moved already beyond endurance, and need rest. Never in the lifetime of men now living has the universal element in the soul of man burnt so dimly.

Automobiles became to the economy of the 1920s, and much of the twentieth century, what textiles had been early in the previous century and what railroads had been after the Civil War: a centrally important industry that was not only a big business in its own right but also a powerful economic multiplier that gave rise to important by-products, including additional big businesses, subsidiary industries, and various other ripple effects through the economy. In the case of automobiles, the by-products were items like rubber, tires, spark plugs, glass, paint, and, of course, the various petroleum products needed to operate an internal combustion engine – not to mention the extensive highway construction, some three hundred thousand miles of it between 1921 and 1929, to provide surfaces for those twenty-six million cars to travel on. And along with those new highways, there would be battalions of service stations, roadside restaurants, tourist attractions, and other businesses that would spring up like flowers after a summer rain, catering to travelers and commuters. The automobile was quickly beginning to transform the American landscape, changing the relationship between cities and suburbs and countryside and empowering individuals and families to move easily between and among them.

Recent historians of the trial, such as Edward Larson, have noted a complicating factor, however, in the textbook Scopes used in his class. George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology was indeed an openly and unapologetically racist text, in line with Bryan’s claims. It argued that “the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America” were the “highest race type of all” and that eugenics should be used to improve “the future generations of men and women on the earth,” which meant the elimination of such forms of “parasitism” as “feeblemindedness” and other features of a “low and degenerate race.” The Scopes trial does not yield today the same easy lessons that an educated observer might have drawn from it at the time.

Second, it was a Progressive measure through and through, evincing most of the salient characteristics of such reforms. It concerned itself with improving the moral fabric of society; it was strongly supported by the middle classes; and it was aimed at controlling the “interests” (i.e., the manufacturers of alcoholic beverages) and their connections with venal and corrupt politicians in city, state, and national governments, seeking instead to establish the primacy of the public interest.

Indeed, Prohibition pairs up nicely with the Nineteenth Amendment, ratified in 1920, which gave women the right to vote, since temperance had, ever since the antebellum period, been a “women’s issue,” championed by women for the sake of women and their families.

In short, Prohibition may have had noble intentions, but it turned out to be a disastrously unsuccessful experiment. It has been argued that Prohibition gave organized crime a foothold in American culture that it would never otherwise have attained. Such an assessment is impossible to prove or disprove, but it surely contains a fair portion of truth. What is perhaps worse, though, was the damage done in creating laws that a significant minority of Americans would be disinclined to obey, laws which moreover could never be seriously enforced. In doing so, the architects of Prohibition had seriously undermined respect for the law itself.

Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it well when he said that FDR possessed “a second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament.”

The problem is easy to understand. Raise the price of oil, for example, and one also raises the cost of transportation, the cost of food, and the cost of almost everything else in the economy, while diminishing disposable income available to consumers, which in turn diminishes the sales of many items, including manufactured goods such as automobiles and radios, which otherwise depresses those portions of the economy, possibly leading to layoffs and unemployment, and so on. Multiply that example by several hundredfold more examples, of prices and wages alike, with each one producing chains of effects drawn out as far as one can take them, and there you have the problem the NRA faced.

A sharp recession in 1937, caused partly by Roosevelt’s own policies of budget cutting and by the assessment of $2 billion in Social Security payroll taxes (with the attendant loss of disposable income for workers), and partly by business fears of the cumulative effects of the Wagner Act, minimum wage laws, and who knew whatever future changes might come with Roosevelt in such exclusive command – these led the economy down even below the depths of the early 1930s. It was fairly labeled the “Roosevelt recession,” which was a way not only of identifying it but also of assigning blame for it. Not only did it reverse the gains that had been made since 1933 but it took the bloom off the rose with regard to the public’s trust in Roosevelt’s economic wizardry. It gave ample reason for economists to wonder, then and since, whether the Depression itself had in large measure been a policymade disaster, a product of well-meaning but bumbling and counterproductive initiatives which prolonged rather than relived the misery. Might Andrew Mellon have been right all along?

Congress even came very close to approving a constitutional amendment, known as the Ludlow Amendment, which would have required a national referendum to confirm or overturn any declaration of war by Congress, except in cases in which the United States had been attacked first.

The world also could see Hitler forcing the French to accept his surrender terms in the same railroad car in which the defeated Germans had surrendered to the Allies in 1918. The bitter defeat, and the humiliation of Versailles, had now been fully avenged.

After the U.S. Navy destroyer Greer had been attacked on September 4 by a German U-boat, Roosevelt gave an order for American naval vessels thenceforth to “shoot on sight” any German or Italian raiders that they came across and to arm merchant ships traveling into dangerous zones. He did not disclose to the American people that the Greer had been shadowing the German Uboat and was reporting its position to the British – that it had, in a word, been actively helping the British war effort.

Japan remained dependent on American oil, however, and when the Japanese occupied French Indochina in July 1941, Roosevelt retaliated by freezing Japanese assets in the United States and embargoing shipments of U.S. oil to Japan. This was a potentially debilitating move, because the Japanese had only very limited reserves, and it was a provocation that Japan was not likely to stand for.

Meanwhile, the United States intelligence services had broken the Japanese diplomatic code and knew that this change of policy had occurred. They knew in advance that a war was imminent. By November, they were certain that a surprise attack was in the offing, but they were not able to detect where it would occur. Perhaps it would be in the Dutch East Indies, perhaps the Philippines, perhaps Thailand.

They caught Pearl Harbor completely unaware and battered it for two hours, leaving the Pacific Fleet in shambles. All eight U.S. battleships were either sunk or heavily damaged, while a dozen other vessels were put out of operational order, 188 planes were destroyed, and twenty-four hundred servicemen were killed. It was a shocking blow, and yet only a part of the vast Japanese plan, which over the course of seven hours included roughly simultaneous attacks on the United States in the Philippines, Guam, and Wake Island and on the British in Malaya, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

It was an ambitious and well-executed plan. But it would emerge in due course that the Japanese had overlooked some important things. For one thing, the U.S. Navy was supremely fortunate that its three Pacific-based aircraft carriers were all at sea at the time of the attack and were thus unscathed. As the Pearl Harbor attack itself illustrated, aircraft carriers were becoming the capital ships of the fleet, far more valuable and important than battleships for purposes of projecting power at a distance. In addition, the attacking planes neglected to destroy the oil tanks and support facilities that served the fleet, an omission that made it possible for the remnants of the fleet to stay in Hawaii rather than retreating to the West Coast and to recover far more quickly than would otherwise have been the case.

In addition, a million young African American men joined the armed forces. The seeds of the postwar civil rights movement were planted by their experiences of discrimination endured at home while fighting for liberty and equality abroad. Civil rights leaders urged veterans to adopt the double-V slogan: one V for victory in Europe, and another V for victory in the struggle for equality at home.

Like the Germans, they found the air of victory to be intoxicating and lost any sense of when to stop or where their limits lay. Flush with success, they made the decision to push into the South Pacific, seeking to cut off Australia and prepare the way for a second strike at Hawaii to finish off the American Pacific Fleet before it had time to recover.

Their advance would be abruptly stopped, however, in two critical naval battles between carrier-based aircraft, first at the Coral Sea (May 4–8, 1942) and a month later, even more decisively, at Midway (June 4–7, 1942), which the Japanese hoped to use as a launching pad for their renewed assault against Hawaii. Once again, though, American intelligence had cracked the Japanese naval code and knew in advance what the Japanese were planning, so that when the Japanese fleet arrived near Midway, it would be met by a wellprepared American force. The resulting battle was a brilliant success for the Americans and a calamity for the Japanese, who lost four carriers – all four of which had participated in the Pearl Harbor raid – and many of their most experienced aircrews. These losses, especially the loss of so many extraordinarily skillful Japanese pilots, would prove enormously consequential. It was, wrote historian John Keegan, “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare” and must be counted one of the war’s turning points. Without any ability to contest American air superiority, the Japanese were never again able to launch a major offensive in the Pacific theater.

Such an apprehension was only reinforced by the ensuing ferocity of the eighty-two-day-long battle for Okinawa, the single bloodiest battle of the Pacific War, a “typhoon of steel” lasting from April to June 1945, which not only featured a new wave of some fifteen hundred kamikaze sorties but almost a quarter of a million deaths, many of them Okinawans used as human shields by the Japanese.

Eisenhower was shown a shed piled to the ceiling with bodies and equipped with various torture devices, as well as a butcher’s block used for smashing the mouths of the dead and extracting gold fillings from their teeth. The old soldier’s face turned white with shock at what he beheld, but he insisted on seeing the entire camp. He promptly issued an order that all American units in the area were to visit the camp. “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he was fighting for,” he stated grimly. “Now, at least he will know what he is fighting against.”

The mantle of world leadership had passed to it now, indeed had been thrust upon it, in a way it could no longer refuse. That mantle came to the United States not only because of its preeminent military and economic power but because of the generous way it had employed that power in the world’s hour of desperate need. Without the sacrifice of blood and treasure by the United States and its allies, the world would not have been able to elude the awful fate of domination by the Axis powers. No thoughtful person can contemplate that prospect without a shudder, followed by a wave of gratitude. It was certainly one of America’s finest hours.

During the economic uncertainties during the Depression years of the 1930s, and the upheaval of the war years in the 1940s, a great many young people understandably decided to hold off from parenthood, even delay marriage, since the time did not seem propitious and the future did not look bright. How was one to justify bringing children into such a troubled world?

By some estimates, as many as half of all deaths in the Second World War were of Soviet combatants and civilians. For all Stalin’s tendency toward deviousness and bad faith, some acknowledgment has to be made of the enormous extent of those concerns. It also needs to be recognized that, given Russia’s history of suffering invasions from the West, most recently at the hands of Adolf Hitler, the Soviet desire for a protective buffer zone to the West was understandable.

In fact, Stalin had no desire to see the free economies of Europe recover their strength. In the end, however, they did, and with remarkable speed. How much of this was due to the Marshall Plan and how much was due to general economic recovery is impossible to say. But a total of some $13 billion in American dollars was infused into the European economy, and it seemed to have just the effects that Truman and Marshall hoped it would. It strengthened the economies of the Western European powers so that they would not be vulnerable to seeing their democratic institutions subverted. It also helped the United States, both by furthering its foreign-policy objectives in Europe and also by creating markets for American exported goods. It thus was both a highly generous act and a very self-interested one on the part of the United States.

We know that in the case of figures like atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, secrets relating to the Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb were passed along to Soviet agents, treasonable acts that almost certainly helped to speed the development of such weapons and thereby aid a deadly enemy.

Over time, the American people have come to understand and appreciate the fact that Truman’s actions prevented another world war, whereas MacArthur’s preferred path would have embraced one, with consequences beyond imagination.

“In the councils of government,” he said, in what became the speech’s most famous sentence, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex,” by which he meant the combination of a large military establishment and a large armaments industry to supply it – neither of which had ever been a feature of peacetime American life. “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”