Counter-Attack
On Democracy
By standards of the time, America was Utopia
already. No grinding poverty, no dangerous national enemies, no indigenous tradition beyond a general
spirit of exuberant optimism, a
belief the land had been touched by destiny, a conviction Americans could
accomplish anything. John Jay
wrote to Jefferson in
1787, "The enterprise of our country is inconceivable" — inconceivable, that is, to the British, Germans, and French, who were accustomed to keeping the common population on a leash. Our colonial government was the creation of the Crown, of course, but soon a fantastic idea began to circulate, a belief that people might create or destroy governments at their will.
1787, "The enterprise of our country is inconceivable" — inconceivable, that is, to the British, Germans, and French, who were accustomed to keeping the common population on a leash. Our colonial government was the creation of the Crown, of course, but soon a fantastic idea began to circulate, a belief that people might create or destroy governments at their will.
The empty slate of
the new republic made it vulnerable to advanced Utopian thinking. While in England and Germany,
temptation was great to develop and use Oriental social machinery to bend mass population into
an instrument of elite will, in America there was no hereditary order or traditional
direction. We were a nation awash in literate, self- reliant men and women, the vast majority with an independent
livelihood or ambitions toward
getting one. Americans were inventors and technicians without precedent, entrepreneurs unlocked from traditional
controls, dreamers, confidence men, flim-flam artists. There never was a social stew quite like it.
The practical difficulties these
circumstances posed to Utopian governing would have been insuperable except for one seemingly strange source of
enthusiasm for such an endeavor in
the business community. That puzzle can be solved by considering how the promise of democracy was a frightening
terra incognita to men of substance. To look to men like Sam Adams or Tom Paine as directors of the future
was like looking down the barrel
of a loaded gun, at least to people of means. So the men who had begun the Revolution were eased out by the men
who ended it.
As early as 1784, a
concerted effort was made by the Boston business community to overthrow town meetings, replacing them
with a professionally managed corporation. Joseph Barrell, a wealthy merchant, claimed that citizen
safety could be enhanced this way
— and besides, "a great number of very respectable gentlemen" wished
it. Timothy Dwight, longtime
president of Yale after 1795, and a pioneer in modern education (advocating science as the center of
curriculum), fought a mighty battle against advancing democracy. Democracy was hardly the sort of
experiment men of affairs would
willingly submit their lives and fortunes to for very long.
This tension explains
much about how our romance with forced schooling came about; it was a way to stop democracy aborning as
Germany had done. Much ingenuity was
expended on this problem in the early republic, particularly by so-called
liberal Christian sects like
Unitarians and Universalists. If you read relics of their debates preserved
from select lyceums, private
meetings at which minutes were kept, journals, recollections of drawing room conversations and club
discussions, you see that what was shaping up was an attempt to square the circle, to give the appearance that
the new society was true to its
founding promise, while at the same time a sound basis could be
established for the meritorious to
run things. Once again, the spirit of Sparta was alive with its ephors and
its reliance on forced
instruction. In discussions, speeches, sermons, editorials, experimental legislation, letters, diaries, and
elsewhere, the ancient idea of mass forced schooling was called forth and mused upon.
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