Herbert Croly

“ A genuine American national democracy was coming into existence in that part of the country—a democracy which was as democratic as it knew how to be, while at the same time loyal and devoted to the national government. ”

“ It is no wonder, consequently, that the pioneer Democracy viewed with distrust and aversion the man with a special vocation and high standards of achievement. Such a man did insist upon being in certain respects better than the average; and under the prevalent economic social conditions he did impair the consistency of feeling upon which the pioneers rightly placed such a high value. Consequently they half unconsciously sought to suppress men with special vocations. ”

“ While the only people the pioneer was obliged to consult were his neighbors, all his surroundings tended to make his neighbors like himself—to bind them together by common interests, feelings, and ideas. These surroundings called for practical, able, flexible, alert, energetic, and resolute men, and men of a different type had no opportunity of coming to the surface. The successful pioneer Democrat was not a pleasant type in many respects, but he was saved from many of the worst aspects of his limited experience and ideas by a certain innocence, generosity, and kindliness of spirit. ”

“ In their opposition to the consolidation of the national organization, the pioneers believed that they were defending the citadel of their democratic creed. Democracy meant to them, not only equal opportunities secured by law, but an approximately equal standing among individual citizens, and an approximately equal division of the social and economic fruits. They realized vaguely that national consolidation brought with it organization, and organization depended for its efficiency upon a classification of individual citizens according to ability, knowledge, and competence. ”

“ The public offices constituted the tangible political patrimony of the American people. It was not enough that they were open to everybody. They must actually be shared by almost everybody. The terms of all elected officials must be short, so that as many good democrats as possible could occupy an easy chair in the house of government; and officials must for similar reasons be appointed for only short terms. Traditional practice at Washington disregarded these obvious inferences from the principles of true democracy. ”

“ The substantially equal distribution of wealth, which was characteristic of the American society of their own day, was far more fundamental in their system of political and social ideas than was the machinery of liberty whereby it was to be secured. ”

“ Public opinion must be taught to approve of the average man as the representative type of the American democracy, so that the man with a special vocation may be deprived of any interest or share in the American democratic tradition; and this attempt to make the average man the representative American democrat has persisted to the present day—that is, to a time when the average man is no longer, as in 1830, the dominant economic factor. ”

“ It is in this way, most unfortunately, that one of the leading articles in the American popular creed has tended to impair American moral and intellectual integrity. If the man with special standards and a special vocation interfered with democratic consistency of feeling, it was chiefly because this consistency of feeling had been obtained at too great a sacrifice—at the sacrifice of a higher to a lower type of individuality. In all civilized communities the great individualizing force is the resolute, efficient, and intense pursuit of special ideals, standards, and occupations ”

“ The Western Democracy is important, not only because it played the leading part in our political history down to 1850, but precisely because it does offer, in a primitive but significant form, a combination of the two ideas, which, when united, constitute the formative principle in American political and social development. ”

“ I have already remarked that the Western pioneers were the first large body of Americans who were genuinely national in feeling. They were also the first large body of Americans who were genuinely democratic in feeling. Consequently they imparted a certain emotional consistency to the American democracy, and they thereby performed a social service which was in its way quite as valuable as their political service. ”

“ It is to the credit of the American people that they have instinctively recognized this fact, and have estimated at their true value the tirades which men no better than Henry Clay level against men no worse than Andrew Jackson.
The reason for the failure of the Whigs was that their opponents embodied more completely the living forces of contemporary American life. Jackson and his followers prevailed because they were simple, energetic, efficient, and strong. ”

“ We adapt our ideals of individuality to its local examples. When orators of the Jacksonian Democratic tradition begin to glorify the superlative individuals developed by the freedom of American life, what they mean by individuality is an unusual amount of individual energy successfully spent in popular and remunerative occupations. Of the individuality which may reside in the gallant and exclusive devotion to some disinterested, and perhaps unpopular moral, intellectual, or technical purpose, they have not the remotest conception ”

“ Almost everybody was something of a politician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in his time was astonishingly large. Andrew Jackson was successively a lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman; and he played most of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a society a man who persisted in one job, and who applied the most rigorous and exacting standards to his work, was out of place and was really inefficient. ”

“ Under their guidance the national policy became a policy of conciliation and compromise at any cost, and the national idea was deprived of consistency and dignity. It became equivalent to a hodge-podge of policies and purposes, the incompatibility of whose ingredients was concealed behind a smooth crust of constitutional legality and popular acquiescence. ”

“ No doubt it would be neither possible nor desirable to reproduce a precisely similar consistency of feeling over a social area in which there was a greater diversity of manners, standards, and occupations; but it remains true that the American democracy will lose its most valuable and promising characteristic in case it loses the homogeneity of feeling which the pioneers were the first to embody. ”

“ It is true that the regeneration of the Hamiltonian spirit belongs rather to the history of the Whigs than to the history of the Democrats. It is true, also, that the attempted revival at once brought out the inadequacy of the pioneer's conceptions both of the national and the democratic ideas. ”

“ THE DEMOCRATS AND THE WHIGS The first phase of American political history was characterized by the conflict between the Federalists and the Republicans, and it resulted in the complete triumph of the latter. ”

“ While the Whigs were less national in feeling and purpose than their ideas demanded, the Democrats were more national than they knew. From 1830 to 1850 American nationality was being attenuated as a conscious idea, but the great unconscious forces of American life were working powerfully and decisively in its favor.
Most assuredly the failure of the Whigs is susceptible of abundant explanation. Prevailing conditions were inimical to men whose strength lay more in their intelligence than in their will. ”

“ They were to love their country, but they were to work for themselves; and nothing wrong could happen to their country, provided they preserved its institutions and continued to enjoy its opportunities. Their failure to grasp the idea that the Federal Union would not take care of itself, prevented them from taking disunionist ideas seriously, and encouraged them to provoke a crisis, which, subsequently, their fundamental loyalty to the Union prevented from becoming disastrous. ”

“ They were men of national ideas but of something less than national feeling. Their interests, temperament, and manner of life prevented them from instinctively sympathizing with the most vital social and political movement of their day. If they wanted popularity, they had to purchase it by compromises, whereas Andrew Jackson obtained a much larger popular following by acting strictly in accordance with the dictates of his temperament and ideas. ”

“ Whatever the alliance between nationality and democracy, represented by the pioneers, lacked in fruitful understanding of the correlative ideas, at least it was solid alliance. The Western Democrats were suspicious of any increase of the national organization in power and scope, but they were even more determined that it should be neither shattered nor vitally injured. ”

“ All the industrial, political, and social rewards went to the man who pursued his business, professional, or political career along regular lines; and in this way an ordinary task and an interested motive were often imposed on men who were better qualified for special tasks undertaken from disinterested motives. But it was not enough to suppress the man with a special vocation by depriving him of social and pecuniary rewards. ”

“ All the contemporary conditions worked in favor of the strong narrow man with prodigious force of will like Andrew Jackson, and against men like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster who had more intelligence, but were deficient in force of character and singleness of purpose. ”

“ Their consistency of feeling and their mutual loyalty enabled them to form a much more effective partisan organization than that of the Whigs. It is one of those interesting paradoxes, not uncommon in American history, that the party which represented official organization and leadership was loosely organized and unwisely led, while the party which distrusted official organization and surrounded official leadership with rigid restraints was most efficiently organized and was for many years absolutely dominated by a single man. ”

“ Such familiar intercourse is impossible, not only in a society with aristocratic institutions, but it can with difficulty be attained in a society that has once had aristocratic institutions. A century more or less of political democracy has not introduced it into France, and in 1830 it did not exist along the Atlantic seaboard at all to the same extent that it did in the newer states of the West. ”

“ It is equally important to remember, however, that the social consistency of the pioneer communities should under different conditions undergo a radical transformation. Neither the pioneers themselves nor their admirers and their critics have sufficiently understood how much individual independence was sacrificed in order to obtain this consistency of feeling, or how completely it was the product, in the form it assumed, of temporary economic conditions. ”

“ They discovered in the fiscal and administrative organization the presence of discrimination against the average man. The National Bank was an example of special economic privileges. The office-holding clique was an example of special political privileges. Jackson and his followers declared war on these sacrilegious anomalies in the temple of democracy. Thus the only innovations which the pioneers sought to impose on our national political system were by way of being destructive. They uprooted a national institution which had existed, with but one brief interruption, for more than forty years ”

“ The years between 1800 and 1825 were distinguished, so far as our domestic development was concerned, by the growth of the Western pioneer Democracy in power and self-consciousness. ”

“ Their crusade against the "Money Power" meant that in their opinion money must not become a power in a democratic state. They had no objection, of course, to certain inequalities in the distribution of wealth; but they fiercely resented the idea that such inequalities should give a group of men any special advantages which were inaccessible to their fellow-countrymen. ”

“ Our legislatures were and still are the strongholds of special and local interests, and anything which undermines executive authority in this country seriously threatens our national integrity and balance. ”

“ It is a significant fact that the majority of Americans of intelligence during the Jacksonian epoch were opponents of Jackson, just as the majority of educated Americans of intelligence have always protested against the national political irresponsibility and the social equalitarianism characteristic of our democratic tradition ”

“ Closely connected with their perverted ideas and their narrow view of life, we may discern a leaven of new and useful democratic experience. The new and useful experience which they contributed to our national stock was that of homogeneous social intercourse. ”

“ Our country was thereby saved from the consequences of its distracting individualistic conception of democracy, and its merely legal conception of nationality. It was because the followers of Jackson and Douglas did fight for it, that the Union was preserved. ”

“ In that country it was sheer waste to spend much energy upon tasks which demanded skill, prolonged experience, high technical standards, or exclusive devotion. The cheaply and easily made instrument was the efficient instrument, because it was adapted to a year or two of use and then for supersession by a better instrument; and for the service of such tools one man was as likely to be good as another. ”

“ In a nationalized state, it is the man of exceptional position, power, responsibility, and training who is most likely to be representative and efficient, whereas in a thoroughly democratic state, as they conceived it, the average man was the representative citizen and the fruitful type. ”