Storybook truths about America

Studies in American Political Development

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 216-226

  Morone, James A ^a  

^a BROWN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33644895477     PISSN: 0898588X     EISSN: 14698692     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0898588X05000143     Document Type: Article

References (69)

1. Rogan Kersh reports that. Louis Hartz remains a Standard work in most classes in American Political Development. See "The Growth of American Political Development," Perspectives on Politics, 3 (2005): 335-45.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, de la Democratie en Amerique (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1981), 11:130;
3. for English version, see Democracy in America, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 11:2.3: 509.
4. For Hartz's quotations of and references to the passage, see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955) 5, 35, 68-69, 89, 146.
5. Hartz, Liberal Tradition, chap. 5;
6. Carol Nackenoff, "Locke, Alger, and Atomistic Individualism Fifty Years Later: Revisiting Louis Hartz's Liberal, Tradition in America," Studies in American Political Development 19 (2005).
7. Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 12
8. See James A. Morone and Lawrence Jacobs, ed., Healthy Wealthy and Fair: Health Care for a Good Society (New York: Oxford, 2005).
9. Truman, in particular, was inundated with letters from both organized lobbies and ordinary citizens. As one letter writer put the common theme: "We, the people of the United States should put back on the robe of Americanism and do away with the saying 'Let the Government do it,' or in other words, 'Let Communism and Socialism do it.'. . . Let us do away with government-controlled Power Education and Health bills. . .. These bills are pure Socialism." (O.J. Zollars, letter to President Truman, 17Jun. 1949. Harry Truman archives, 286-A, Vertical File: Health Care Policy).
10. For a fine range of views on the Clinton plan arid its failure, see the symposium in Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 20 (1995).
11. For a quite dramatic analysis of this phenomenon, see Jennifer Hochschild, Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995),esp. chap. 4.
12. Data from Fox Butterfield, "U.S Correctional Population Hits New High," New York Times, 26 Jul. 2004;
13. and Connie Cass, "1 in 75 men were in prison or jail in 2003," Associated Press 26 Jul. 2004.
14. For discussion, see James Marone, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003): 455-64.
15. Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 10-12.
16. The outstanding statement of multiple traditions comes from Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). Here I point beyond his difference - liberal versus illiberal ascriptive - and look toward entirely different cultural axes - notably, religion and morality - for the American constructions of us and them. For further discussion, see
17. James Morone, "The Other's America: Reflections on Rogers Smith's Civic Ideals," Studies in American Political Development 13 (1999): 186-97.
18. James T. Kloppenber, "From Hartz to Tocqueville: Shifting the Focus from Liberalism to Democracy in America," in The Democratic Expermiment, ed. Meg Jacobs, William Novack, and Julian Zelizar (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Universeity Press, 2003), 352-53.
19. For a fine version of the institutional argument in action, see T. R. Marmor, "The Politics of Medicare" (New York: Aldine, 2000), chaps. 2-4. For an elegant account, of the significance of ideas versus institutions,
20. see Brian Gleriri, "God and the Red Umbrella, Connecticut Insurance Law Journal 10 (2004): 277-307.
21. develop the point of this paragraph in The Democratic Wish (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), chap. 8.
22. The c lassic statement remains Sven Steinmo and Jon Watts, "It's the Institutions Stupid, "Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 20 (1995): 329-72.
23. J. David Greenstone, "Political Culture and American Political Development: Liberty, Union and the Liberal bipolarity," Studies in American Political Development 1 (1986): 1-49, qtd. 17.
24. For my analysis of the consensus tradition, see Morone, Democratic Wish, 19-23.
25. Emerson quoted in Scott Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1-2.
26. Tocqueville, Democratie en Amerique, II:57 (Democracy in America, 462);
27. Gustave de Beaumont, Marie: or Slavery in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 108.
28. Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 62.
29. See, for example, Mark Landler's provocatively titled, "Slaves for Vacation: Europe Ponders the Meaning of Life" New York Times, 15 Aug. 2004, 4.1.
30. The call out captures the heart of the story: "Well remember the time between 1950 and 2000 as a kind of paradise." A summary of the mid summer news in The Week includes, among its dispatches from foreign capitals: "Anger over Blair Vacation" ('he was taking a whole month while "most Britons take a more modest week or two") and the French "anti-work ethic" (the average French worker works about 300 hours less each year than the average American worker") (The Week, 3 Sep. 2004, 8).
31. Lawrence Jacobs and James Morone, "Prospering in the Age of Global Markets,"James Morone and Lawrence Jacobs, eds., Healthy, Wealthy and Fair.
32. Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 129;
33. James Madison, Federalist 10;
34. Ian Shapiro and Michael Graetz, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
35. This section is drawn from Morone, Hellfire Nation, chap. 6.
36. James H enry Hammond, "Hammond's Letters on Slavery," in the The Pro-Slavery Argument; As Maintained by the Most Distinguished Writers of the Southern States (Richmond, VA: Walker Richards, 1852), 109-10.
37. This was die best-known collection of "respectable" proslavery literature - aimed at genteel audience. An entirely different, far more bare knuckled racialist, republican "Herrenvolk" literature also developed (although Hartz largely ignores it). W. Gilmore Simms, "The Morals of Slavery," The Pro-slavery Argument, 251;
38. George Fitzhugh, Cannibals All! 135 [dangerous];
39. William Harper, "Memoir on Slavery," The Pro-slavery Argument, 5-8;
40. See, also, John Calhoun, Works, 6 vols. (New York: Appleton, 1860), 1:55-57.
41. Calhouri, Works, 2:630;
42. J. H. Van Evrie, M.D. Negroes and Negro "Slavery": The First an Inferior Race - The Later, its Normal Condition (Baltimore, MD: John D Toy, 1853) 30;
43. even in this crowd, Van Evrie stands out in his tooth-rattling racism. For an analysis of the moral steward theme, see Drew Gilpin Faust, Southern Stories; Slaveholders in Peace and War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), chap. 1.
44. William Gilmore Simms, "The Morals of Slavery," The Pro-Slavery Argument, 274 [emphasis in the original].
45. Simms, "Morals of Slavery," 269-70;
46. the piece originally appeared in The Southern Literary Messenger III (1837): 641-57. Simms was elected to Congress in 1844.
47. Josiah Nott, Biblical and Physical History of Man (Mobile, AL: Bartlett and Welford, 1849), 13, 41;
48. J. H. Van Evrie, Negroes and Negro Slavery, 2 (strip), 10 (oran outan), 30-31.
49. Hartz, Liberal Tradition, 154.
50. Dew, "Thomas Dew on Slavery;"
51. Hammond, "Letters on Slavery"; both in Pro-Slavery Argument, 436, 110-11.
52. Pro-Slavery Argument Ibid., 462, 110-11.
53. Hammond "Letter on Slavery," 111.
54. Harper, "Memoir on Slavery," 40-41;
55. Simms, "Morals of Slavery, 230.
56. Political scientists and historians-although far more sensitive today - still fall into the same trap as Hartz. Contemporary scholars now privilege race, yet taking black voices seriously would mean thinking hard about religion as both a repressing and a liberating political force.
57. On the black faith, see Morone, Hellfire Nation, 131-43; the quotation is from Lincoln's second inaugural (214-15), which, I argue, melds the Puritan and African American jeremiads.
58. Tocqueville, de la Democratie en Amerique, 1:382. (Democracy in America, 278);
59. Thomas Shepherd, "The Parable of the Ten Virgins" [orig. 1636], in The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology, eel. Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 172.
60. Sacvan Berkovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 11.
61. Pippa Norris, Ronald Iglehart, arid David Leege, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
62. Morone, Hellfire Nation, chap. 1.
63. Reported in The American Prospect, July 2004, 33.
64. For an illustration of the range, see Peter Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999)
65. John Tomasi, Liberalism beyond Justice: Citizens, Society, and the Boundaries of Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University press, 2001);
66. Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990);
67. Amy Guttman, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996);
68. Nancy Rosenblum, Membership and Morals: The Personal Uses of Pluralism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998);
69. and Robert Horwitz, The Moral Foundations of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1986).