A Search for America
‘America’ ‒ commonplace references in A Whirld of Words
Excerpted from A Whirld of Words: A Reader's Commonplace Dictionary. Find the LINK to the Introduction and WORKS CITED below.
America
the name 'America', from Amerigo Vespucci, first appeared in 1507 in a work preparatory to an edition of Ptolemy by Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann. In this work the name is applied to South America, but is clearly intended to apply to the whole hemisphere
(Bedini and Buisseret 1998) p. 569
America the golden fleece
That yearly stuffs old Philip's treasury
The golden bowels of America
(Marlowe 1986) p. 270, 570
the cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind
(Paine 1961) p. 3
a noble object
(E. Burke 1963) p. 156
the American constitutions were to liberty what a grammar is to language: they define its parts of speech, and practically construct them into syntax
(Paine 1961) p. 117
it is in mandates relating to public education that, from the outset, the original character of American civilization is revealed in the clearest light
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 53
I sometimes think I’ll go to America, that huge freedom-stall inhabited by churls who believe in equality
(Heine and Branscombe 1986) p. 193
America as a place of new settlement presents no new elements; it is a further development of Protestant Europe, set free from its historic past, and brought into different conditions of life. The grand idea developed by the Northern States is purely Anglo-Saxon, the idea of self-government, that is of a strong people with a weak government, the home rule of each scrap of land without centralization, without bureaucracy, held together by an inner moral unity. What attitude America will take up to socialist aspirations is hard to say; the spirit of comradeship, of association, of enterprise in common is highly developed there, but there is no common ownership, nor our artel, nor the village community; the individual combines with others only for a certain transaction, outside which he jealously guards his complete independence
(Herzen et al. 1968) p. 1566
a poem
The Poet (Emerson 2000) p. 304
at about two o'clock in the morning, he became so deeply despondent again as to talk of buying a rifle and going to America, with a general purpose of compelling buffaloes to make his fortune
(Dickens 1989) p. 259
the crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead
(Du Bois 1996) p. 150
the paradise of the masses
(Ortega y Gasset 1961) p. 89
America is like a fruit rotting before it has ripened
(Miller 1969) p. 251
why did the refugees feel about us, America, as they did in the years before Dien Bien Phu? It should be remembered that every rumbling tank that overran the villages of the Tonkin, every blazing napalm bomb that seared the huts of the natives, every gun and jeep and truck and uniform that brought havoc upon the people in what they considered a ‘colonial’ war – all these were ‘made in the U.S.A.’ The people of North Viet Nam considered the United States as a vast warehouse and supply depot for France’s colonialism, as indeed we were
(Dooley 1964) p. 207
In a thousand years, if there's History
America will be remembered as a nasty little country
full of Pricks
(Ginsberg 1972) p. 147
America. The country is proud of its dead poets. It takes terrific satisfaction in the poets’ testimony that the USA is too tough, too big, too much, too rugged, that American reality is overpowering. And to be a poet is a school thing, a skirt thing, a church thing. The weakness of the spiritual powers is proved in the childishness, madness, drunkenness, and despair of these martyrs. Orpheus moved stones and trees. But a poet can’t perform a hysterectomy or send a vehicle out of the solar system. Miracle and power no longer belong to him. So poets are loved, but loved because they just can’t make it here
(Bellow 1976) p. 113
what ails us most is not what we have done with America, but what we have substituted for America. We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in place of reality
(Boorstin and Will 1992) p. 6
American
the American state has developed two of its institutions to a degree never before attained – the capitalist form of business enterprise and the judicial power. At first sight the combination seems paradoxical, joining in a single pattern an exploitative type of economic behavior with the objectivity of the judicial process. Judicial power – or, more exactly, judicial supremacy – is a uniquely American institution. The core of judicial supremacy is, of course, the power of judicial review over legislative acts and administrative decisions
(Lerner and Cummings 2017) p. 7, 8
D.H. Lawrence in one of his harsh, luminous hyperboles, [said] that the essential American soul is ‘hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer’
(Hofstadter 1963) p. 49
on a radio broadcast from Hanoi [1954], now the Communist capital, there was a nightly program called Voice of Viet Nam. I remember one broadcast. It was on a so-called ‘Art and Literary Program,’ for the rice peasants of the delta. The subject was, ‘This is an American.’ I quote its text word for word: ‘His head is a blockhouse. His beard is barbed wire. His eyes are bombs. His teeth are dum-dum bullets. His two arms are guns and from his nose flames shoot out. A vampire, he sucks the blood of little children. His forehead is a nest of artillery and his body is an airfield. His fingers are bayonets, his feet tanks. He puts his fangs out in order to threaten, but in his hideous mouth he can only chew scrap iron because he has against him the powerful forces of our people of Viet Nam, who are valiantly fighting. All things considered, the American is a paper giant’
(Dooley 1964) p. 125
American Eagle
if I was a painter and called upon to paint the American Eagle, how should I do it? I should want to draw it like a bat for its short-sightedness, like a bantam for its bragging, like a magpie for its honesty, like a peacock for its vanity, like a [sic] ostrich for its putting its head in the mud and thinking nobody sees it – and like a phoenix for its power of springing from the ashes of its faults and vices and soaring up anew into the sky!
(Dickens 1991) p. 547
American Revolution
probably no single event, before fighting actually began, left so deep a scar as the Boston massacre; and many years later John Adams gave it as his deliberate opinion that, on the night of the fifth of March, 1770, ‘the foundation of American independence was laid’
(B. Adams 1887) p. 362
the American Revolution broke out. The doctrine of the sovereignty of the people came out from the townships and took over the government. All classes of society committed themselves to its cause. Battles were fought and victories won in its name until it became the law of laws. Revolution in the United States was the result of a mature and thoughtful taste for freedom and not of a vague and ill-defined feeling for independence. It was not based upon the passions of disorder but on the contrary love of order and the law directed its course
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 69, 85
a conservative restoration of colonial prerogatives; 'a revolution not made, but prevented' as Burke puts it
(Kirk 1954) p. 71
the American Revolution was not a Revolution in the sense of transfer of power from one class to another. The pillar left untouched was the long line of privileges and precedents established by a powerful feudal aristocracy, and maintained by the courts since the reign of Richard II of England, and even before. These precedents had been established for the twofold purpose of justifying the maraudings, thefts and summary frauds by which the dukes, lords and barons had appropriated the British soil, and with the object of holding the working class in complete subjection
(Myers 1968) p. 136
the American Revolution of 1776 did not proceed from any intrinsic popular impetus for national independence. On the part of the intelligent elements of the working class, conscious of the oppression to which they were subjected, there had long been a smoldering sense of revolt; but it was a revolt against the tyranny of the manorial lords and other masters. At times it had broken out into spasmodic and abortive uprisings, which, necessarily local in their scope, had been speedily put down, and the leaders imprisoned or executed. The Revolution was declared by a combination of powerful men of the day – even then styled in official proclamations as capitalists – controlling much of the valuable natural resources and their products. Some of these dissatisfied militant personages were owners of vast estates; others were disgruntled shippers or merchants united, and with very good reason, by a common economic interest in seeking to secure control of a political state by means of which they could assist the development of trade and manufacture unshackled by the paralyzing laws ordained by the British trading class. These various groups were more or less interrelated by property interest and often by marriage; and all were agreed upon the distinct aim of vesting in themselves the power to acquire unlimited areas of the public domain unhampered by restrictive British laws and regulations. That the Revolution was essentially and definitely a traders’ rebellion for liberty of trade to get what they wanted, make what they will, and sell where they could no small proportion of the workers were fully sensible. The Revolution proved to be an auspicious time for the consummation of the boldest plans in acquiring property and power
(Myers 1968) p. 73, 84, 97
Americans
Americans – if not the most self-critical, at least the most anxiously self-conscious people in the world, forever concerned about the inadequacy of something or other – their national morality, their national culture, their national purpose
(Hofstadter 1963) p. vii
BERNARD: Americans are a very modern people, of course. They are a very open people too. They wear their hearts on their sleeves. They don't stand on ceremony. They take people as they are. They make no distinction about a man's background, his parentage, his education. They say what they mean and there is a vivid muscularity about the way they say it. They admire everything about them without reserve or pretence of scholarship. They are always the first to put their hands in their pockets. They press you to visit them in their own home the moment they meet you, and are irrepressibly goodhumoured, ambitious, and brimming with self-confidence in any company. Apart from all that I've got nothing against them
(Stoppard 1996) p. 123
the legendary duality – the congenital Split Personality and polarized instincts – that almost everybody except Americans has long since taken for granted as the key to our National Character
(Thompson 2012) p. 391
Americans, more often than not, choose mediocre Presidents, but require of them a decorum foreign to other aspects of their political life
(Foner 2002) p. 265
barbarians
we shall never be rid of antiquity as long as we do not become barbarians again. Barbarians and modern American men of culture live without consciousness of history
(Burckhardt 1958) p. 2
Beats
the early beats weighed America by its words and deeds, and found it pennyweight. They took upon themselves the role of conscience for the machine. They rejected all values and when, in attempting to carve a new creative force, they told America to ‘go fuck itself’, America reacted, predictably, with an obscenity trial
(Hinckle 2018) p. 164
becoming
becoming was beginning to come out of my ears. Enough! Enough! Time to have Become. Time to Be! Burst the spirit's sleep. Wake up, America!
(Bellow 1968) p. 136
Berkeley
Westward the course of Empire takes its way;
The four first acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day:
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.
These lines were written by George Berkeley (later bishop of Cloyne), probably in about 1725; with reference to the final extension of learning westward to America – hence the name of the Californian city
(Southern 1995) p. 209
blowback
the term ‘blowback’, which officials of the Central Intelligence Agency first invented for their own internal use, is starting to circulate among students of international relations. It refers to the unintended consequences of policies that were kept secret from the American people. What the daily press reports as the malign acts of ‘terrorists’ or ‘drug lords’ or ‘rogue states’ or ‘illegal arms merchants’ often turn out to be blowback from earlier American operations. Even an empire cannot control the long-term effects of its policies. That is the essence of blowback. In a sense, blowback is simply another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows
(C. Johnson 2001) p. 8, 13, 17
‘blowback’ does not mean just revenge but rather retaliation for covert, illegal violence that our government has carried out abroad that it kept totally secret from the American public (even though such acts are seldom secret among the people on the receiving end). It was a term invented by the Central Intelligence Agency and first used in its ‘after-action report’ about the 1953 overthrow of the elected government of Premier Mohammad Mossadeq in Iran. This coup brought to power the U.S.-supported Shah of Iran, who would in 1979 be overthrown by Iranian revolutionaries and Islamic fundamentalists. The Ayatollah Khomeini replaced the Shah and installed the predecessors of the current, anti-American government in Iran. Imperialism means one nation imposing its will on others through the threat or actual use of force. Imperialism is a root cause of blowback. Our global garrisons provide that threat and are a cause of blowback
(C. Johnson 2006) p. 1, 7
the term ‘blowback’ first appeared in a classified CIA post action report on the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, carried out in the interests of British Petroleum. When the Central Intelligence Agency helped overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh as Iran’s prime minister in 1953, the CIA was already figuring its first effort to topple a foreign government would not be its last. The CIA, then just six years old and deeply committed to winning the Cold War, viewed its covert action in Iran as a blueprint for coup plots elsewhere around the world, and so commissioned a secret history to detail for future generations of CIA operatives how it had been done. ‘Blowback’ does not refer simply to reactions to historical events, but more specifically to reactions to operations carried out by the U.S. government that are kept secret from the American public and from most of their representatives in Congress. There is a direct line between the attacks on September 11, 2001 – the most significant instance of blowback in the history of the CIA – and the events of 1979
(C. Johnson 2010) p. 13, 14
books
in the United States until about 1830 books were sturdily made, but expensive to manufacture. The cheap book came in the 1840’s. It had been made possible by the new paper-making machines and cylinder presses, which could turn out large quantities at low cost. Well before the Civil War book publishing and book selling in the United States had become a highly profitable, highly organized business, offering its wares through retail bookshops, subscription agents, peddlers, and auctioneers. Apart from improvements in paper making and printing, the industrialization of bookbinding was perhaps the most important step in the democratization of the book in America. The crucial change was the departure from the old hand binding method, by which each book and its own binding were made together. By the new ‘casing-in’ method, the printed sheets were sown in one operation and then attached to a standard binding that had been made separately. This method came into the United States about 1832. Another important innovation was the introduction of cloth for binding
(Boorstin and Will 1992) p. 122, 123
boondocks
[1898 et seq. when a new phase of the American conquest of the Philippines was turned into guerrilla warfare by the Filipino resistance.] American soldiers chasing guerrillas were pulled ever deeper into the hinterlands. Along the way, they picked up local words. Bundók – Tagalog for ‘mountain’ – was given an American twang and made intoslang for any wild and remote place. It was only by going to the ‘boondocks’, the soldiers learned, that you could get the measure of a country
(Katz 2022) p. 89
bourgeoisie
the American elite entered modern history as a virtually unopposed bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie has monopolized not only wealth but prestige and power as well. In America the bourgeoisie has been predominant from its beginning – in class, in status, and in power
(Mills 1969) p. 12, 329
business
the spirit of American business is a spirit of quietism, caution, compromise, collusion, and chicane
(Veblen 1948) p. 514
businessmen
businessmen – Americans generally honor them for having gotten away with it
(Mills 1969) p. 347
capitalism
American capitalism is now in considerable part a military capitalism
(Mills 1969) p. 276
casuistic
the casuistic stretching to be noted in the judicial interpretations by which the American Constitution has been expanded to permit a freedom for corporations not foreseen at the time of its adoption
(K. Burke 1959) p. 23
Christian
Mark Twain rightly answered Andrew Carnegie's boast that America is a Christian country by saying that 'so is hell'
(Wills 2013) p. 220
Civil War
the Civil War is, for the American imagination, the great single event of our history. Without too much wrenching, it may, in fact, be said to be American history. Before the Civil War we had no history in the deepest and most inward sense. The Revolution did not create a nation except on paper. We became a nation only with the Civil War
(Warren 1964) p. 3, 4
the Civil War was the crucible in which slavery was destroyed and the American Union tested and preserved. These two great questions – slavery and the survival of the Union – continue to mark the war’s centrality in American history
(Blight 1989) p. 1
[Frederick] Douglass ultimately appropriated a common American language to capture the meaning of the war: ‘We have heard much in other days of manifest destiny. I don’t go all the lengths to which such theories are pressed, but I do believe that it is the manifest destiny of this war to unify and reorganize the institutions of this country – and that herein is the secret of the strength, the fortitude, the persistent energy, in a word the sacred significance of this war’. In a line that challenges us still in our moral imagination, Douglass said that without the destruction of slavery, the world might view the Civil War as only ‘little better than a gigantic enterprise for shedding human blood’
(Blight 2018) p. 420
class
in America the printed word ceased to be the property of a literary class and began to belong to the public
(Boorstin 1964) p. 267
the people of the higher circles are more or less aware of themselves as a social class and they behave toward one another differently from the way they do toward members of other classes. They accept one another, understand one another, marry one another, tend to work and to think if not together at least alike. Class consciousness is not equally characteristic of all levels of American society: it is most apparent in the upper class. Those of the upper strata, if only because they are fewer in number, are able with much more ease to know more about one another, to maintain among themselves a common tradition, and thus to be conscious of their own kind. They have the money and the time required to uphold their common standards. The American upper-class is merely an enriched bourgeoisie
(Mills 1969) p. 11, 30, 31, 50
the 'rise of the middle class': This group has been found rising most remarkably in every period from the twelfth century to the twentieth. It has been used to explain the Renaissance and the Reformation, absolutism and liberalism, monarchy and republicanism, conservatism and radicalism, nationalism and internationalism, romanticism and rationalism, fascism and communism, the commercial revolution, the managerial revolution, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the Puritan revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, etc., etc.
(Fischer 1970) p. 150
concentration camp
[The sinking of the Maine in Cuba in 1898.] In their attempts to push the United States into the fight for Cuban independence, the war caucus had spent years selling stories of Spanish cruelty. One Spanish colonial governor in particular, Don Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, had become a villain at American dinner tables for killing noncombatants, burning homes and farms, and his forces taste for rape and torture. ‘Butcher’ Weyler’s most notorious innovation was aimed at starving the insurgency of public support. He had ordered hundreds of thousands of Cuban civilians rounded up into squalid garrison towns, behind barbed wire and guarded by soldiers with machine guns. The Spanish called it reconcentratión, U.S. newspapers translated it into a newly coined term: concentration camps
(Katz 2022) p. 16
conscience
the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker Jr., speaking in 1853 about the prospects of abolishing slavery, said, ‘I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice’. In 1950, at the end of the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. condensed the idea in a speech about the prospect of equality of all Americans. ‘How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice’
(Ward 2022) p. 149
corporate power
organized irresponsibility is the most important characteristic of the American system of corporate power
(Mills 1969) p. 342
corporation
not great fortunes, but great corporations are the important units of wealth, to which individuals of property are variously attached. The corporation is the source of wealth, and the basis of the continued power and privilege of wealth. All the men and the families of great wealth are now identified with large corporations in which their property is seated. A managerial revolution transformed the very meaning of property. The corporations are the organized centers of the private property system: the chief executives are the organizers of that system. As economic men, they are at once creatures and creators of the corporate revolution, which, in brief, has transformed property from a tool of the workman into an elaborate instrument by which his work is controlled and a profit extracted from it. The story of the American economy since the Civil War is thus the story of the creation and consolidation of this corporate world of centralized property. The top corporations are not a set of splendidly isolated giants. They have been knit together by explicit associations: the consolidation of the corporate world into an elaborate network of interlocking directorships; a sociological anchor of the community of interest, the unification of outlook and policy, that prevails among the propertied class. The scale of the modern corporation is usually due more to financial and managerial amalgamations than to technical efficiency
(Mills 1969) p. 116, 119, 120, 122, 124
democracy
until recently we have been justified in believing Abraham Lincoln’s familiar maxim: ‘You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time’. This has been the foundation-belief of American democracy. The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original
(Boorstin and Will 1992) p. 36, 37
dictionary
Noah Webster's first dictionary – 1806. Noah Webster was seventy years old when his great two-volume quarto work, An American Dictionary of the English Language, was published in 1828. It contained about seventy thousand words. Webster's Dictionary was not a great commercial success
(Landau 1984) 60, 61
Noah Webster was born at West Hartford, Connecticut, in 1758. A teacher and journalist by profession, he published his pioneer A grammatical institute of the English language in 1783-85. Its great success – sales had reached more than 1 million copies annually by 1850 – enabled him to undertake the compilation of A compendious dictionary of the English language, published in 1806, from which developed his great two-volume American dictionary of the English language, whose first edition appeared in two quarto volumes in 1828. This was in fact an encyclopedic dictionary, for Webster's work was noted for its clear and comprehensive definitions. A two-volume and larger second edition was published by George and Charles Merriam in 1841. Webster died in 1843
(Collison 1966) p. 183
the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary appeared in 1934 and takes the prize as the largest lexicon in English, with 600,000 vocabulary entries. Its pronunciations retained Webster's Eastern, conservative bias. Its coverage of both current and obsolete and rare terms was immense, and the second edition still figures in the minds of many middle-aged and elderly Americans as the dictionary par excellence
(Landau 1984) p. 64
in 1953, Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language appeared. Edited by David B. Guralnik and Joseph H. Friend, it simplified its technical definitions to make them more understandable to the layman, gave full etymologies, and used no undefined (or 'run on'), derivatives, a policy changed in later editions
(Landau 1984) p. 73
dollar diplomacy
the Monroe Doctrine assumed ever-new opportunistic forms. In December 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt enunciated the Roosevelt Corollary to it, calling for intervention throughout the Americas to support political movements that might interfere with the payment of Latin American debts. Theodore Roosevelt’s successor as president, William Howard Taft, the former governor of the Philippines, proclaimed something he called ‘dollar diplomacy’ – another euphemism for imperialism – and invoked Roosevelt’s Corollary to promote and protect American business interests overseas, particularly in the Caribbean and Central America. Between 1898 and 1934, the United States sent marines to Cuba four times, Honduras seven times, the Dominican Republic four times, Haiti twice, Guatemala once, Panama twice, Mexico three times, Columbia four times, and Nicaragua five times (where they built bases and maintained an uninterrupted presence for twenty-one years except for a short period in 1925). The Roosevelt Corollary was supplanted only in 1934 by President Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy
(C. Johnson 2004) p. 192
egghead
Louis Bromfield, a popular novelist of right-wing political persuasion, suggested that the word might some day find its way into dictionaries as follows: Egghead. A person of spurious intellectual pretensions, often a professor or the protégé of a professor. Fundamentally superficial. Over-emotional and feminine in reactions to any problem. Supercilious and surfeited with conceit and contempt for the experience of more sound and able men. Essentially confused in thought and immersed in mixture of sentimentality and violent evangelism. A doctrinaire supporter of Middle-European socialism as opposed to Greco-French-American ideas of democracy and liberalism. Subject to the old-fashioned philosophical morality of Nietzsche which frequently leads him into jail or disgrace. A self-conscious prig, so given to examining all sides of a question that he becomes thoroughly addled while remaining always in the same spot. An anemic bleeding heart
(Hofstadter 1963) p. 9
Eighteenth Century
John Locke was concerned to vindicate Whig principles against the Stuarts and their supporters. In doing so he founded the liberal tradition of political thought which dominated the eighteenth century, and inspired both the American and the French Revolutions. For the eighteenth century Locke was the philosopher, just as Newton was the physicist and Milton the poet
(Willey 1964) p. 186, 189
our historians miss the true point of view in describing the eighteenth century. They do not perceive that in that century the history of England is not in England but in America and Asia
(Seeley 1971) p. 13
elected
it is not the elected official who produces the prosperity of American democracy but the fact that the official is elected
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 594
elite
the higher immorality is a systematic feature of the American elite
(Mills 1969) p. 343
empire
after an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the Union, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world
Federalist, No. 1 (Hamilton et al. 2000) p. 3
the fabric of American empire ought to rest on the solid basis of the consent of the people. The streams of national power ought to flow immediately from that pure, original fountain of all legitimate authority
Federalist, No. 22 (Hamilton et al. 2000) p. 139
the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the United States encompasses thirteen years and three presidents. From 1989 to 2002, there was a revolution in America’s relations with the rest of the world. At the beginning of that period, the conduct of foreign policy was still largely a civilian operation, carried out by men and women steeped in diplomacy, accustomed to defending American actions in terms of international law, and based on long-standing alliances with other democratic nations. By 2002, all this had changed. The United States no longer had a ‘foreign policy’. Instead it had a military empire. In more modern times, unlike many other empires, we did not annex territories acts all. Instead we took (or sometimes merely leased) exclusive military zones within territories creating not an empire of colonies but an empire of bases. These bases, linked through a chain of command and supervised by the Pentagon without any significant civilian oversight, were tied into our developing military-industrial complex and deeply affected the surrounding indigenous cultures, almost invariably for the worse. They have helped turn us into a new kind of military empire – a consumerist Sparta
(C. Johnson 2004) p. 22, 23
the American empire was not built primarily to acquire territory (like the empire of Alexander the Great), or financial tribute (like that of Athens), or resources and trade goods (like that of the British) – it was more like the Venetian empire, which was meant to secure safe harbors and emporia for its trading fleet
(Wills 2010) p. 176
behind the ‘unexamined nostalgia for the ‘Golden Days’ of American intelligence’ lay a much more devastating truth: the same people who read Dante and went to Yale and were educated in civic virtue recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of democratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, overthrew governments, supported dictatorships, plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster. ‘In the name of what?’ asked one critic. ‘Not civic virtue, but empire’ [Henwood, ‘Spooks in Blue’]
(Saunders 2013) p. 359
Enlightenment
we can date the Old World Enlightenment from the founding of the Royal Society in 1661, or perhaps from the publication of Newton's Principia in 1687. It died in the Terror. The American Enlightenment came half a century later – we can date it with some assurance from the founding of the American Philosophical Society in 1741. It lasted until the dramatic deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson in 1826
(Commager 1982) p. 242
equality
of all the novel things which attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more forcibly than the equality of social conditions. I had no difficulty in discovering the extraordinary influence this fundamental fact exerts upon the progress of society; it sets up a particular direction to public attitudes, a certain style to the laws, fresh guidelines to governing authorities, and individual habits to those governed. Soon I came to recognize that this very fact extends its influence well beyond political customs and laws; it exercises no less power over civil society than it does over the government. It forms opinion, creates feelings, proposes ways of acting, and transforms anything it does not directly instigate itself. Consequently, as I studied American society, I increasingly viewed this equality of social conditions as the factor which generated all the others and I discovered that it represented a central focus in which all my observations constantly ended
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 11
Fascism
the susceptibility of a confused and frightened business community to fascism is a source of danger to free society. But, up to now, fascism has come to power in countries like Germany and Italy, Spain and Argentina, where the bourgeois triumph was never complete enough to eradicate other elements who believe in what the business community fears more than anything else – violence, and who then use violence to ‘protect’ the business community. One source of hope for the United States today lies in the fact that our social situation makes the rise of fascism unlikely. A thoroughly middle-class country, we have no organized resources of violence – whether Junker, militarist, caudillo, feudal or proletarian – which an ambitious demagogue can offer to a terrified business community. Some writers discern in the growing importance of the Army the missing element in the pattern of American fascism. If we do move toward a fascist society, it will undoubtedly be as a result of an alliance between big business and the Army. Only the South has the tradition of violence to sustain even an appearance of fascism; and it is doubtful whether even Huey Long could have organized that appearance into a nationwide reality
(Schlesinger 1949) p. 33
Ford, Heinrich
On 22 May 1920 [Henry] Ford’s recently acquired newspaper, the weekly Dearborn Independent, featured an unsigned lead article entitled ‘The International Jew, the World’s Problem’. For ninety-one successive weeks, the newspaper featured articles on the universally corrupting influence of Jewry upon American life – from jazz, short skirts, and bobbed hair to the total control of finance and the press. Subsequently, the collected articles appeared as a four-volume book, The International Jew. The International Jew, eventually translated into sixteen languages, cost twenty-five cents per volume. Five hundred thousand copies were in circulation in the United States alone. Still, by 1928 Ford had lost nearly five million dollars in these publishing ventures. Among his sincerest admirers was Adolf Hitler, who kept a photograph of the ‘heroic American, Heinrich Ford’
(Segel and Levy 1995) p. 25, 27
fortunes
FDR's blunt 1935 proclamation that ‘the transmission from generation to generation of vast fortunes by will, inheritance, or gift is not consistent with the ideals and sentiments of the American people’
(Phillips 2004) p. 65
Frontier Thesis
the transforming influence of the American wilderness. From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. The rise of democracy as an effective force in the nation came in with Western preponderance under Jackson and William Henry Harrison, and it meant the triumph of the frontier
(Turner 1996) p. ii, 31, 37
much of the Turner thesis boils down to the understanding that the United States was a rural society before it became an urban one, and that many of its traits were shaped by the requirements of a fast-developing capitalistic agriculture expanding into a rich terrain. The underlying dynamic of the frontier idea, its drive toward the conviction that America is wholly original, uniquely virtuous, and self-sustaining, its suggestion that America had not just made a contribution to or forged a variation on democracy, but rather had a monopoly of it
(Hofstadter 1968) p. 125, 149
about 1900 there was a shift. The development of what one might call 'concept' history: the most obvious and best-known example of this being Turner and his concept of the moving frontier as a factor in American history. The historian's new aim was to discern the dynamic processes controlling social change. The proliferation of specialized fields of historical study, the growth of learned journals, the rapid expansion of graduate schools of history (again in some ways Turner was a pioneer) soon made 'concept' history the dominant scholastic form of historical study
(Plumb 1973) p. 114
Franklin [Delano Roosevelt] was intellectually prepared for a life in imperialism ‒ in his last year at Harvard, he had taken History 10-B: Development of the American West, taught by Prof. Frederick Jackson Turner
(Katz 2022) p. 239
Sun Yat-sen, the intellectual architect of Chinese nationalism, declared the birth of the Republic of China, with himself as its first president. Sun Yat-sen admired the United States. He had spent years living in Hawai’i, before and after the annexation. He wore Western suits, sported a cowboy mustache, and converted to Christianity. He envisioned a scheme of ‘cultivation and colonization’ that drew explicitly on American ideas of the frontier – and thus, indirectly, on Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis – in which landless peasants and soldiers of China’s ethnic Han majority would ‘civilize’ those on the periphery, including the Manchus and Tibetans, and Muslim ethnic groups
(Katz 2022) p. 284
the word the Nazis used to justify their planned colonization of Eastern Europe, Lebensraum, or living space, was an analogue to Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘free land’, coined by Turner’s German colleague and mutual admirer Friedrich Ratzel
(Katz 2022) p. 317
the frontier thesis became America's declaration of historiographical independence from Europe. The vast, empty continent offered free land aplenty, but the price of its mastery was a life of self-reliance, simplicity, and practicality, as well as some coarseness and cupidity. Democracy was 'shaped in ceaseless struggle with the environment'
(Breisach 1994) p. 314
fundamentalist
the actual term ‘fundamentalist’ is connected directly with the American Biblical Congress held at Niagara, New York, in 1895. At this meeting, conservative Protestant exegetes defined ‘five points of fundamentalism’: the verbal inerrancy of Scripture, the divinity of Christ, his virginal birth, the doctrine of vicarious expiation and the bodily resurrection at the time of the second coming of Christ. The fundamentalist approach is dangerous, for it is attractive to people who look to the Bible for ready answers to the problems of life. It can deceive these people, offering them interpretations that are pious but illusory, instead of telling them that the Bible does not necessarily contain an immediate answer to each and every problem. Without saying as much in so many words, fundamentalism actually invites people to a kind of intellectual suicide. It injects into life a false certitude, for it unwittingly confuses the divine substance of the biblical message with what are in fact its human limitations
(Fitzmyer 1995) p. 103, 108
greatness
in 1841, the prominent German political economist Friedrich List (who had immigrated to America) wrote in his masterpiece, The National System of Political Economy, ‘It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him’. Much of modern Anglo-American economics and all of the theory of globalization are attempts to disguise this kicking away of the ladder
(C. Johnson 2004) p. 262
hippie
to comprehend the psychosis of America in the computer age, you have to know what’s with the hippies. Hippies have a clear vision of the ideal community – a psychedelic community, to be sure – where everyone is turned on and beautiful and loving and happy and floating free. But it is a vision that, despite the Alice in Wonderland phraseology hippies usually breathlessly employ to describe it, necessarily embodies a radical political philosophy: communal life, drastic restriction of private property, rejection of violence, creativity before consumption, freedom before authority, and de-emphasis of government and traditional forms of leadership. Despite a disturbing tendency to quietism, all hippies ipso facto have a political posture – one of unremitting opposition to the Establishment which insists on branding them criminals because they take LSD and marijuana, and hating them, anyway, because they enjoy sleeping nine in a room and three to a bed, seem to have free sex and guiltless minds, and can raise healthy children in dirty clothes
(Hinckle 2018) p. 154, 155
historiography
history, Henry Adams thought, had always been 'the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated'. The volumes he produced have been acclaimed – rightly, I think – as the summit of American achievement in historical writing. He said, 'history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance'
(Hofstadter 1968) p. 11, 32, 33
idealism
of all presidents, Abraham Lincoln has been considered the most typical representative of American society, chiefly because his mind, with all its practical qualities, also inclined, in certain directions, to idealism
(H. Adams 1986) p. 117
idols
America as a national public is indeed possessed of a strange set of idols
(Mills 1969) p. 360
imperial zenith
interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large and medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe in 2005 – mostly air and naval bases for our bombers and fleets – almost exactly equals Britain’s thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons at its imperial zenith in 1898. The Roman Empire at height in 117 AD required thirty-seven major bases to police its realm from Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to Armenia. Perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-five and forty
(C. Johnson 2006) p. 138
imperialism
ethical imperialism, an imperialism whose ethos it is to put the world into order according to American ideas
Joseph Schumpeter (McCraw 2007) p. 324
history tells us that one of the most unstable combinations is a country – like the United States today – that tries to be a domestic democracy and a foreign imperialist. We are on the brink of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation starts down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of local and global forces opposed to imperialism, and in the and bankruptcy. History is instructive on this dilemma. If we choose to keep our empire, as the Roman republic did, we will certainly lose our democracy and grimly await the eventual blowback that imperialism generates. As a form of government, imperialism does not seek or require the consent of the governed. It is a pure form of tyranny. The American attempt to combine domestic democracy with such tyrannical control over foreigners is hopelessly contradictory and hypocritical. A country can be democratic or it can be imperialistic, but it cannot be both
(C. Johnson 2010) p. 29, 33, 34
important
in the phrase of the American news papers, 'important if true'
(Macaulay 1888) v., p. 473
Jefferson, Thomas
the greatest democrat to emerge from American democracy; the most powerful apostle democracy has ever had
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 236, 305
judges
in practice, very few laws can long escape the searching analysis of the judges for there are very few which do not injure some private interest and which advocates cannot or should not bring before the courts. Within its restricted limits, the power granted to American courts to pronounce on the constitutionality of laws remains still one of the most powerful barriers ever erected against the tyranny of political assemblies
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 120, 122
jury
the jury, the most energetic method of asserting the people’s rule, is also the most effective method of teaching them how to rule. Juries, especially civil juries, help to instill into the minds of all the citizens something of the mental habits of judges, which are exactly those which best prepare the people to be free. They spread respect for the courts’ decisions and the concept of right throughout all classes. They teach men the practice of equity. Each man, in judging his neighbor, believes he may be judged in his turn. That is especially true of juries in civil cases. Juries teach all men not to shirk responsibility for their own actions; without that manly attitude no political virtue can exist. They invest each citizen with a sort of magistracy; they make all men feel that they have duties towards society and that they are part of their government. By forcing men to concern themselves with something outside their own affairs, they challenge that personal selfishness which rusts the workings of societies. Juries have an exceptional success in shaping people’s judgment and improving their natural wisdom. That, in my view, is their main advantage. They must be looked upon as a free and ever-open classroom in which each juror learns his rights, and is taught the law in a manner both practical and within his intellectual grasp by the efforts of advocates, the opinions of judges and the very passions of the litigants. I believe one must attribute the practical intelligence and good political sense of Americans primarily to their long experience of jury service in civil cases. I do not know whether juries are much use to litigants but I am sure that they are of great use to those who judge the case. They are, in my view, one of the most effective means available to society for educating the people. It is civil juries which really did save the liberties of England
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 320, 321, 322
suppose the President of the United States has committed high treason. The House of Representatives impeaches him, the Senate pronounces his dismissal. Then he appears before a jury which alone can remove his freedom or his life. It is true that the Senate’s decision is judicial in form because, in delivering it, senators are duty bound to conform to the solemn formalities of procedure. Yet again, it is judicial in the motives upon which it is based because the Senate is generally duty bound to pivot its decisions upon a common law offense. Nevertheless, its objective is administrative. The main aim of political jurisdiction in the United States is then to withdraw power from the man who wishes to misuse it and to prevent this same citizen from acquiring it in the future. As can be seen, it is an administrative act which has been granted the solemn gloss of a judgment. In this matter, Americans have thus created something ambiguous
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 126, 127
law
the Roman law which was later revived in medieval Europe, and which became the basis of all subsequent codes of 'civil' law in western Europe and the Americas, as well as the basis of the imperial law of Russia up to 1917, was not a direct legacy of ancient Rome. It all came from Justinian
(Brown 2003) p. 178
in ‘a common law court’, Senator Jacob M.Howard of Michigan declared during the Civil War, the idea of equality before the law was ‘not known at all’. Inequality was built into the common law. Reconstruction was a key moment in the process by which a hierarchical, locally based legal culture was transformed into one committed, at least ostensibly, to the equality of all Americans, protected by the national government
(Foner 2019) p. 6, 8
lawyers
on visiting Americans and studying their laws, one realizes that the power given to lawyers and the influence permitted to them in government today form the most potent barrier against the excesses of democracy. The men who have made the law their special study have learned habits of orderliness from this legal work, a certain taste for formalities, a sort of instinctive love for a logical sequence of ideas. The specialized knowledge and study of the law acquired by lawyers guarantee them a position apart in society and make them into a sort of privileged intellectual class. In the exercise of their profession, they daily encounter the idea of superiority; they are experts in a vital area of knowledge which is not widely available; they arbitrate between citizens and the habit of guiding the blind passions of litigants toward an outcome gives them a certain scorn for the judgment of the crowd. Lawyers contributed to an unusual degree to the overthrow of the French monarchy in 1789. In all free governments, whatever their makeup, lawyers will appear in the leading ranks of all parties
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 307, 308, 309
literature
all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn
Ernest Hemingway (Trilling 1976) p. 117
there are clear signs that intellectuals in what American universities called the humanities are trying to appropriate literature for themselves, taking it away from writers. These intellectuals are like the British princess who said to her husband during the honeymoon, 'Do the servants do this too? Much too good for them.' Literature is too good for contemporary novelists, those poor untutored drudges
(Bellow 2015) p. 208
lynching
lynching was an American institution – it went back to the 1780s, to the last phase of the Revolutionary War, when Colonel Charles Lynch used ‘lynch law’ against British Loyalists in Virginia Piedmont
(P. Johnson 1991) p. 317
Machiavellian
the United States of America may be said to be the only country in the world which was founded in explicit opposition to Machiavellian principles
(Strauss 1969) p. 13
Magellan, Ferdinand
news of the successful circumnavigation of the globe was quickly relayed to the rest of Europe by several participants in the voyage, by excited Spanish writers, and by foreign diplomats in Spain. The Latin report by Maximilian of Transylvania was the first to be published; it appeared at Cologne and Rome in 1523. The return of the 'Victoria' should have produced much more of a revolution in Europe's view of the world than it actually did. The Magellan adventure did serve to remove all remaining doubts about the sphericity of the earth. It corrected the Ptolemaic proportions of water to land on the earth's surface and proved that the land far exceeded the water area. The vast width of the Pacific ocean was established and the knowledge began to spread that Asia and America, at least in their southern reaches, were very far apart. The Magellan voyage contributed also to a growing belief in the unity and independence of the Americas as the New World. It dispelled forever all the ideas that Asia could be reached by a relatively brief westward voyage. Magellan's passage around America secured an access to the Pacific by sea. But it still left open the question of a land connection between North America and northeastern Asia, an issue that would not be resolved until the time of Bering in the eighteenth century
(Lach 1977) p. 457, 459
metaphysic
in the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, uninformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant
(Trilling 1976) p. 13
Middle East
the term ‘Middle East’ was coined in 1902 by a leading American imperialist, the U.S. naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan, to name the geographical space between India and the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire in an article he wrote about the interests of the Great Powers in the region. In the past, terms such as ‘Western Asia’ or ‘Turkish Asia’ had been used. With the collapse of the Ottoman empire after World War I and the popularizing of the term ‘Middle East’ by the London Times, it caught on, and we seem now to be stuck with it
(West 2004) p. 109
modern
the discovery of America is the capital event in the history of the modern world
(Rowse 1945) p. 41
three great events stand at the threshold of the modern age and determine its character: the discovery of America and the ensuing exploration of the whole earth; the Reformation, which by expropriating ecclesiastical and monastic possessions started the two-fold process of individual expropriation and the accumulation of social wealth; the invention of the telescope and the development of a new science that considers the nature of the earth from the viewpoint of the universe
(Arendt 1958) p. 248
the new level of creative synergy generated by linking the two largest world zones – Afro-Eurasia and the Americas – was and remains perhaps the most powerful single lever of change in the modern world
(Christian 2004) p. 364
molasses
the first and most famous triangle of trade linked Britain to Africa and to the New World. The second triangle functioned in a manner contradictory to the mercantilist ideal. From New England went rum to Africa, whence slaves to the West Indies, whence molasses back to New England (with which to make rum). A curious blend of slavery and the expanding world market for plantation commodities – what the Trinidadian historian Eric Williams once called a system combining the sins of feudalism with those of capitalism, and without the virtues of either. 'I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence,' wrote John Adams in 1775
(Mintz 1986) p. 43, 60, 256
money
money – sheer, naked, vulgar money – has with few exceptions won its possessors entrance anywhere and everywhere into American society
(Mills 1969) p. 50
money is the one unambiguous criterion of success, and such success is still the sovereign American value. Whenever standards of the moneyed life prevail, the man with money, no matter how he got it, will eventually be respected. It is not only that men want money; it is that there very standards are pecuniary
(Mills 1969) p. 346
Monroe Doctrine
the opening of the Eighteenth Congress was a memorable one. On its second day, December 2, 1823, the senators and representatives received the most important presidential message in many years, in which President Monroe spelled out the farsighted principles of the Monroe Doctrine. The doctrine, largely the work of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, was specifically aimed at Russia’s expansionist designs on the Pacific Northwest and at threats by the Holy Alliance to appropriate Spanish possessions in Latin America
(Byrd et al. 1989) p. 80
Mormon
by 26 March 1830 the Book of Mormon was put on sale in the Palmyra bookstore. On April 2 the Rochester Daily Advertiser published the first review: 'the Book of Mormon has been placed in our hands. A viler imposition was never practiced. It is an evidence of fraud, blasphemy, and credulity, shocking both to Christians and moralists'. The Book of Mormon lacked subtlety, wit, and style. The characters were pale, humorless stereotypes. There was plenty of bloodshed and slaughter to make up for the lack of gaiety and the stuff of humanity. Mark Twain's ejaculation – the book was 'chloroform in print'. The phrase 'and it came to pass' appeared at least two thousand times. The Book of Mormon was a mutation in the evolution of American literature, a curious sport, at once sterile and potent. It brought several hundred thousand immigrants to America in the nineteenth century. It is one of the earliest examples of frontier fiction, an obscure compound of folklore, moral platitude, mysticism, and millennialism. Its matter is drawn directly from the American frontier, from the impassioned revivalist sermons, the popular fallacies about Indian origin, and the current political crusades. In the speeches of the Nephite prophets one may find the religious conflicts that were splitting the churches in the 1820s
(Brodie 1995) p. 62, 67, 69, 82
nativism
American politics as a system of rationalized hatreds
(Quinn 1994) p. 163
New World
Simon Bolívar considered Alexander von Humboldt to be 'the true discoverer of the New World, who contributed more to America by his studies than all the conquistadores'
(Meyer-Abich 1969) p. 72
America began as a sobering experience. The colonies were a disproving ground for utopias. A new civilization was being born less out of plans and purposes than out of the unsettlement which the New World brought to the ways of the Old. The flavor of American life was compounded of risk, spontaneity, independence, initiative, drift, mobility, and opportunity
(Boorstin 1964) p. 1, 85
whatever else the Lewis and Clark party thought they were accomplishing, they unwittingly garnered the linguistic wealth of a new world in their intimate record of the simultaneous processes of geographic discovery and linguistic invention. Nearly two thousand terms in their vocabulary were in one way or another American novelties; of these at least a thousand words appeared in these journals for the first time
(Boorstin 1965) p. 283
Nigger Vote
Ron Dellums, the black Congressman from Berkeley, called it ‘the Nigger vote’. But he wasn’t talking about skin pigment. ‘It’s time for somebody to lead all of America’s Niggers’, he said at the Capitol Hill press conference when Shirley Chisholm announced she was running for President. ‘And by this I mean the Young, the Black, the Brown, the Women, the Poor – all the people who feel left out of the political process. If we can put the Nigger vote together, we can bring about some real change in this country’
(Thompson 2012) p. 57
Nineteenth Century
the ‘liberation’ of Spanish America (except for Cuba) was one of the central events of the early 19th century, bringing into existence an entire continent of Independent states, the greatest nativity of nations in world history until the mass decolonization of the 1960s
(P. Johnson 1991) p. 628
novel
novels ought to have hope; at least, American novels ought to have hope. French novels don't need to
(Lamott 1995) p. 41
nullification
the whole doctrine of nullification is summed up in a sentence uttered in 1833 before the United States Senate by Mr Calhoun, the acknowledged leader of the southern nullifiers, who said: ‘The Constitution is a contract in which the states appear as sovereigns. Now, every time a contract is drawn up between parties with no common arbitrator, each of them retains the right to judge the scope of its obligation by itself.’ It is clear that such a doctrine destroys the federal tie in principle and restores anarchy in fact, from which the 1789 Constitution had delivered Americans
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 459
Oothoon
the [imaginary] soft soul of America
(Blake 1979) p. 71
Pangaea
two hundred and fifty million years ago the world contained a single landmass known to scientists as Pangaea. Geological forces broke up this vast expanse, splitting Eurasia and the Americas. Colón's signal accomplishment was, in the phrase of historian Alfred W Crosby, to reknit the seams of Pangaea
(Mann 2011) p. 6
peace
in 1935, the editors of Fortune wrote: ‘It is generally supposed that the American military ideal is peace. But unfortunately for this high-school classic, the US Army, since 1776, has filched more square miles of the earth by sheer military conquest than any army in the world, except only that of Great Britain’
(Mills 1969) p. 177
philosophy
I think that in the civilized world there is no country less interested in philosophy than the United States. However, it is easy to see that the minds of almost all the inhabitants of the United States move in the same direction and are guided according to the same rules; that is to say, they possess, without ever having gone to the trouble of defining the rules, a certain philosophic methodology common to all of them. To escape the spirit of systems, the yoke of habit, the precepts of family, the opinions of class, and, to a certain extent, the prejudices of nation; to adopt tradition simply as information and present facts simply as a useful study in order to act differently and better; to search by oneself and in oneself alone for the reason of things; to strive for the ends without being enslaved by the means and to aim for the essence via the form: such are the main features which characterize what I shall call the American philosophic method
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 493
plutocracy
the Whigs were the first party of the American plutocracy. For all the splendor of the Websters and the Clays, the Whig Party was essentially an incarnation of opportunism and platitude. After the Whigs came the Republicans. The Republican Party, born of the union between Free Soil Democrats and Conscience Whigs, came to power in a great cause and under a great leader. But it soon resumed the Whig tradition. The forces of business, in the main opposed to Lincoln and Republicanism in 1860, captured the party after Lincoln’s death. They speedily converted it into a political auxiliary for the business community, drove out its ablest leaders and drained from it most of the energy to govern
(Schlesinger 1949) p. 17, 18
politics
ever since Capt. Samuel Argall, a deputy governor of early colonial Virginia, took advantage of the opportunity to ‘make hay whilst the sunne doth shine, however it may fare with the generality’, bribery, fraud, and influence peddling have been endemic to American politics
(Foner 2002) p. 384
power elite
the power elite is composed of men [1969] whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences. Hierarchies of state and corporation and army constitute the means of power. Within American society, major national power now resides in the economic, the political, and the military domains: the big three. The warlords, the corporation chieftains, the political directorate – tend to come together, to form the power elite of America. Their members possess a greater share than other people of the things and experiences that are most highly valued. The elite are simply those who have the most of what there is to have, which is generally held to include money, power, and prestige – as well as all the ways of life to which these lead. By the power elite, we refer to those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences
(Mills 1969) p. 3, 5, 6, 9, 18
Prairie School
inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s article ‘A Home in a Prairie Town’, published in a 1901 Ladies’ Home Journal, the term Prairie Houses or Prairie School has been applied to a certain style of dwelling mainly built in midwestern America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Prairie Houses emphasize horizontal lines, with single storeys, low-pitched roofs and overhanging eaves, long bands of casement windows, central chimneys, open-plan interiors and minimal ornamentation
(Hodge 2016) p. 290
reading
it is not characteristic of American executives to read books, except books on ‘management’ and mysteries. Avoidance of words being rather general, they are very much of the age of the ‘briefing’, of the digest, of the two-paragraph memo. Such reading as they do, they often delegate to others, who clip and summarize for them. They are talkers and listeners rather than readers or writers. They pick up much of what they know at the conference table and from friends in other fields
(Mills 1969) p. 130
republic
when I compare the Greek and Roman republics with that of America and the former’s libraries full of manuscripts and their rude population with the latter’s thousand newspapers and its educated people, when I think of all the efforts made to judge the latter in the light of the former and to anticipate what will happen today by studying what happened two thousand years ago, I am tempted to burn my books in order to apply only brand-new ideas in such a newly formed society
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 353
Roman Empire
there are certain things you can't avoid as being important whether you like them or not. What's happening to modern America, maybe the modern world, is something that is appalling and inspiriting, I suppose, at the same time. My guess is that nothing has happened like this since the rise of Christianity – a fundamental change. Human sensibility, human instinct for value, is changing. Now to what, nobody knows yet. It's the world of the Roman empire again
(Warren et al. 1980) p. 192
Rome
it was Rome that commanded the admiration of the Americans
(Commager 1982) p. 63
science
as American civilization became increasingly permeated by its technology, it lay increasingly at the mercy of the internal logic of advancing knowledge. Science and technology had a momentum of their own: each next step was commanded by its predecessor. To fail to take that next step was to waste all of the earlier efforts. Once the nation had embarked on the brightly illuminated path of science, it had somehow ventured into a world of mystery where the direction and speed would be dictated by the instruments that cut the path and by the vehicles that carried man ahead. The autonomy of science, the freedom of the scientist to go where knowledge and discovery led him, spelled the unfreedom of the society to choose its way for other reasons
(Boorstin 1973) p. 597
Second Amendment
the Second Amendment was designed and has consistently been constructed to keep African Americans powerless and vulnerable. The Second Amendment was not some hallowed ground but rather a bribe, paid again with Black bodies. It was the result of Madison’s determination to salve Patrick Henry’s obsession about Virginia’s vulnerability to slave revolts, seduce enough anti-Federalists to get the Constitution ratified, and stifle the demonstrated willingness of the South to scuttle the United States if slavery were not protected. James Madison, the Virginian, knew ‘that the militia’s prime function in his state, and throughout the South, was slave control’. As the years after the Civil War would make clear, ‘the core of white supremacy was not chattel slavery, but antiblackness’. And that is the foundational root of the Second Amendment. The underlying centuries-old rationale for the Second – a well-regulated militia to keep Black people in a state of rightlessness. During the drafting of the Bill of Rights and ratification of the Constitution, the Southern distrust of Northern states’ commitment to uphold slavery merged with the Anti-Federalists’ heightened fear of a strong central government that would control the militia, and led to the extortionist hardball that had already inserted the three-fifths clause into the nation’s founding document. Virginians Patrick Henry and George Mason had made clear to James Madison that the protection of slavery was the sine qua non for ratification of the U.S. Constitution. What Madison had already done with the fugitive slave clause, the extension of the Atlantic slave trade for twenty years, and the three-fifths clause was not enough. The concerns Henry and Mason raised about local control of the militia and how essential it was to put down slave revolts and protect plantation owners had to be addressed. The Second Amendment served that purpose. Thus, in the Bill of Rights, emerged an amendment rooted in fear of Black people, to deny them rights, to keep them from tasting liberty. The Second became the Faustian bargain made to weaken Anti-Federalists’ and Southern opposition to the Constitution. The Second is lethal; steeped in anti-Blackness, is the loaded weapon laying around just waiting for the hand of some authority to put it to use
(Anderson 2021) p. 7, 32, 35, 83, 127, 164, 165
selfishness
Americans have, so to speak, reduced selfishness to a social and philosophic theory
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 653
Seventeenth Century
the immigrants settling in America at the start of the seventeenth century somehow unlocked the democratic from all those other principles it had to contend with in the old communities of Europe and they transplanted that alone to the New World, where it has been able to grow freely and develop its legislation peacefully by moving in harmony with the country’s customs. The general principles upon which modern constitutions are founded were hardly grasped by the majority of seventeenth-century Europeans; they were not completely established even in Great Britain, yet were accepted and settled by the laws of New England. On the continent of Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century, absolute monarchy every where stood triumphant on the ruins of the oligarchic and feudal liberty of the Middle Ages. At the heart of this splendor and literary excellence, the idea of rights had perhaps never been more entirely neglected. Never had nations enjoyed less political activity. Never had ideas of true liberty less preoccupied people’s minds. It was at that very time that these same principles, unknown or neglected by European nations, were being proclaimed in the deserts of the New World to become the future symbol of a great nation
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 23, 51, 54
slavery
slavery was the foundational institution of the modern Americas. Between 1680 and 1700, the number of slaves suddenly exploded. Virginia's slave population rose in those years from three thousand to more than sixteen thousand – and kept soaring thereafter. In the same period the tally of indentured servants shrank dramatically. It was a pivot in world history, the time when English America became a slave society and England became the dominant player in the slave trade
(Mann 2011) p. 92, 287
the horrific incubus of slavery. The revolutionary clause was helped, at least in the South, by the historic judgment that Lord Mansfield handed down in the Court of King’s Bench in London on 22 June 1772, in the case of Sommersett v Steuart. The slave James Sommersett, who had been bought by Charles Steuart in Boston, escaped when the two men visited London, and was freed by Mansfield on the basis, supported by William Blackstone, that slavery was contrary to English common law and precluded by Magna Carta, despite the fact that Britain was a slave-trading nation. ‘The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law’, Mansfield stated. ‘It is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England’. James Sommersett was freed. Although Mansfield did not extend his famous judgment to British territories overseas, the political effect in America was, as J.C.D. Clark said, that ‘Colonial slave-owners therefore joined colonial merchant smugglers, colonial Dissenters, colonial debtors, and colonial land speculators as powerful groups with an interest in emancipation from British policy’
(Roberts 2021) p. 108, 222
the burden of a continent – according to the census of 1800, the United States of America contained 5,308,483 persons. Nearly one fifth of the American people were slaves
(H. Adams 1986) p. 5
nearly two and a half centuries had passed since twenty black men and women were landed in Virginia from a Dutch ship. From this tiny seed had grown the poisoned fruit of plantation slavery, which, in profound and contradictory ways, shaped the course of American development. Even as slavery mocked the ideals of a nation supposedly dedicated to liberty and equality, slave labor played an indispensable part in its rapid growth, expanding westward with the young republic, producing the cotton that fueled the early industrial revolution. In the South, slavery spawned a distinctive regional ruling class (an ‘aristocracy without nobility’ one Southern-born writer called it) and powerfully shaped the economy, race relations, politics, religion, and the law
(Foner 2002) p. 2
sorrows
if present trends continue, four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative impact guarantees that the United States will cease to bear any resemblance to the country once outlined in our Constitution. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a growing reliance on weapons of mass destruction among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second, there will be a loss of democracy and constitutional rights as the presidency fully eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from an ‘executive branch’ of government into something more like a Pentagonized presidency. Third, an already well-shredded principle of truthfulness will increasingly be replaced by a system of propaganda, disinformation, and glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there will be bankruptcy, as we pour our economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and short-change the education, health, and safety of our fellow citizens. The future, of course, is as yet unmade. All these trends can be resisted and other – better – futures can certainly be imagined
(C. Johnson 2004) p. 285
soul
surely the greatest image in the history of American preaching was Jonathan Edwards’s image of the soul as a spider held over the fire in the kitchen stove, suspended by a silken thread at the mercy of God
(Hofstadter 1963) p. 113
although the desire to obtain the good things of this world is the dominant passion of Americans, there are moments of respite when their souls appear suddenly to break the physical ties which hold them back and to rush impetuously toward heaven. It is not man who has inspired in himself the taste for infinite things and the love of what is everlasting. These lofty instincts are not the offspring of some whimsical desire; they have their firm foundations in human nature and exist despite man’s efforts. Man can impede and disfigure them but he cannot destroy them. The soul has needs which must be satisfied. Whatever efforts are expended upon diverting it from itself, it soon grows weary, anxious, and restless amid the pleasures of the senses
(Tocqueville 2003) p. 621
style
Benjamin Franklin in his autobiography – that first great American ‘success story’– tells the process through which he went in acquiring an effective style. He would read a passage from some great master of English, then lay the book aside and attempt to reproduce the thought in his own words. Comparing his version with the original, he discovered wherein he had obscured the thought, or wasted words, or failed in driving straight to the point. Every advertising man ought to study the parables of Jesus in the same fashion, schooling himself in their language and learning these four big elements of their power. (i) First of all they are marvelously condensed, as all good advertising must be. Jesus had no introductions. A single sentence grabs your attention; three or four more tell the story; one or two more and the application is driven home. (ii) His language was marvelously simple – a second great essential. There is hardly a sentence in his teaching which a child can not understand. The absence of adjectives is striking. Henry Ward Beecher said once that ‘to a large extent adjectives are like leaves on a switch; they may make it look pretty, as a branch, but they prevent it striking tinglingly when you use it’. Jesus used few qualifying words and no long ones. Not a single three-syllable word; hardly any two-syllable words. All the greatest things in human life are one-syllable things – love, joy, hope, home, child, wife, trust, faith, God – and the great advertisements generally speaking, are those in which the most small words are found.(iii) Sincerity glistened like sunshine through every sentence he uttered; sincerity is the third essential. It was the way Jesus looked at men, and the life he led among them that gave his words transforming power. What he was and what he said were one and the same thing. Nobody could stand at his side for even a minute without being persuaded that here was a man who loved people and considered even the humblest of them worthy of the best he had to give. (iv) Finally he knew the necessity for repetition and practiced it
(Barton 2000) p. 69, 70, 71, 72
sugar
sugar penetrated social behavior and, in being put to new uses and taking on new meanings, was transformed from curiosity and luxury into commonplace and necessity. The Arab expansion westward marked a turning point in the European experience of sugar. Between the defeat of Heraclius in 636 and the invasion of Spain in 711, in less than a single century, the Arabs established the caliphate in Baghdad, conquered North Africa, and began their occupation of major parts of Europe itself. Sugar making, which in Egypt may have preceded the Arab conquest, spread in the Mediterranean basin after that conquest. Sugarcane was first carried to the New World by Columbus on his second voyage, in 1493; he brought it there from the Spanish Canary Islands. Cane was first grown in the New World in Spanish Santo Domingo; it was from that point that sugar was first shipped back to Europe, beginning around 1516. Spain pioneered sugar cane, sugar making, African slave labor, and the plantation form in the Americas. Sugar – or rather, the great commodity market which arose demanding it – has been one of the massive demographic forces in world history . A rarity in 1650, a luxury in 1750, a virtual necessity by 1850
(Mintz 1986) p. xxix, 23, 32, 71, 148
Supreme Court
the successive shifts of focus in American economic reality have done much to determine the large sweep of American constitutional law. They have done so in a threefold way: by setting the characteristic problems that have appeared for decision before the Supreme Court, by creating the conflicts and the clashes of interest that have made those problems important to the community, and by fashioning the ideologies that have to a large degree influenced the decisions. Put in another way, the impact of American capitalist development on the Court has been at once to pose the problems and to condition the answers. Capitalism pushes ultimately before the Court the clashes of interest that are attendant on the growth of any economic system, with the displacement in each successive phase of elements that had been useful in previous phases, with the antagonism it generates among those who are bearing its burdens and the rivalry among those who are dividing its spoils, and with the inherent contradictions that the system may possess. If it be added to this that modern capitalism is perhaps the least organic system of economic organization the world has seen – ‘often though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers’, J.M. Keynes has called it
(Lerner and Cummings 2017) p. 13, 14
the nature and extent of the Supreme Court’s power are best understood by seeing it as our basic instrument of sovereignty – an integral part of the American capitalist economic order. But the support of judicial power must be seen as the instrument of the few, although psychologically it is the symbol of the many. The Supreme Court as symbol goes hand-in-hand with the Constitution as symbol. Since the Supreme Court is popularly considered to be exercising guardianship over the Constitution, the result has been to invest the judges of the Court with the whole panoply of sanctity with which the Constitution has itself been invested. This has had an importance that can scarcely be overestimated for American history
(Lerner and Cummings 2017) p. 23, 24
very little is clearer in the American scheme than the fact that the cult of the Supreme Court is the characteristic emotional cement by which American capitalism and American democracy are held together. judicial review has not flowed merely from the will to power of individual justices; it has been the convenient channel through which the driving current of a developing business enterprise has found direction and achieved victory
(Lerner and Cummings 2017) p. 25, 54
truth
the truth has to be marketed just like everything else in America
(Hinckle 1974) p. 119
Twenty-First Century
let us not be deceived: the great dramatic battle of the twenty-first century is the dismantling of empire and the deepening of democracy. King provided Americans with our last great call to conscience about the intertwined evils of race and empire, calling on us to choose between democracy and empire, between democracy and white supremacy, between democracy and corporate plutocracy
(West 2004) p. 22, 58
tyrants
Sunday, April 9, Confederate general Robert E Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox, Virginia. And, just five days later, John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln to death in the balcony at Washington’s Ford’s Theatre, where he and his wife were watching the comedy Our American Cousin. ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ The actor declared, leaping from the president’s box and onto the stage – ‘Thus always to tyrants!’ the words attributed to Brutus on killing Julius Caesar that also happened to be the Virginia state motto
(Canellos 2021) p. 161
United States
the United States, like an avalanche torn away from its mountain, treads down everything before it; every step gained by it is a step lost by the American Indians
(Herzen et al. 1968) p. 1565
the most conformist of all countries
(Ellul 1964) p. 383
U.S. Constitution
the establishment of a Constitution, in time of profound peace, by the voluntary consent of a whole people, is a prodigy
Federalist, No. 85 (Hamilton et al. 2000) p. 565
it will at least be a recommendation to the proposed constitution, that it is provided with more checks and barriers against the introduction of tyranny, and those of a nature less liable to be surmounted, than any government hitherto instituted among mortals
George Washington (Merriam 1931) p. 256
your Constitution is all sail and no anchor
Macaulay (Kirk 1954) p. 174
the Americans, thanks to Hamilton, have erected their Constitution as a check upon democracy
Henry Maine (Brinton 1962) p. 277
of the whole Constitution the people at large were suspicious to a degree little comprehended now. They saw that it was the product of a convention composed mostly of manorial lords or their attorneys and mouthpieces. They feared that the so-called democratic representation in Congress would resolve itself into a continuation of the old rule by the great land owners and traders; and that they were right events quickly proved
(Myers 1968) p. 133
long ago Horace White observed that the Constitution of the United States 'is based upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of Calvin. It assumes that the natural state of mankind is a state of war, and that the carnal mind is at enmity with God'
(Hofstadter 1948) p. 3
the most successful conservative device in the history of the world
(Kirk 1954) p. 102
the fact is that every important decision of the Supreme Court changes the Constitution
(Lerner and Cummings 2017) p. 45
the mystical belief in the people's sovereignty
(Ellul 1973) p. 129
it is notable that the American Constitution, while at no point explicitly conferring the right to own slaves, seems implicitly to concede it. Article I speaks of ‘the whole number of free persons’ and then of ‘three-fifths of all other persons’ (that is, nonfree or slaves). It was this article which gave slave-owning states the right to consider their slaves as voting fodder (on a three-to-five basis with freemen), while denying them the right to actually vote. But more significant still was Article IV, Section 2, paragraph 3: ‘No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service of labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor be due.’ This passage not merely by implication conceded the lawfulness of slavery but bound the federal government to uphold it by preventing these mysterious persons, nowhere referred to as slaves, from ‘escaping’
(P. Johnson 1991) p. 303
I [do not] find the wisdom, foresight, and sense of justice exhibited by the Framers particularly profound. To the contrary, the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today
From an address Justice Thurgood Marshall gave at the annual seminar of the San Francisco Patent and Trademark Law Association at the University of Hawaii in Maui during the Bicentennial of the Constitution in 1987
slavery was the original sin in the New World garden, and the Constitution did more to feed the serpent than to crush it
(Amar 2005) p. 20
the Constitution, in large part, aims to protect the People from a self-dealing government
(Amar and Hirsch 1998) p. xiii
the very fact that the amendments were compromises means that they are open to what one member of Congress called ‘conflicting constructions’. But rather than lamenting this ambiguity we should, in the spirit of John A. Bingham, embrace it. Ambiguity creates possibilities. It paves the way for future struggles, while giving different groups grounds on which to conduct them. Who determines which of a range of possible meanings is implemented is very much a matter of political power. It is worth noting that no significant change in the Constitution took place during the civil rights era. The movement did not need a new Constitution; it needed the existing one enforced
(Foner 2019) p. xxvi, xxix
the framers’ solution – to call slaves “other persons” and count each of them as three-fifths of a free person for purposes of allocating representation among the states – was a mark of the moral embarrassment that later led abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison to denounce the Constitution of 1787 as ‘a covenant with death’
(Rakove 2012) p. 6
wealth
condemnation of the whole institution of great hereditary wealth was presidentially voiced by Franklin D. Roosevelt when, in a message to Congress, on 19 June 1935, he dealt with 'the disturbing effects upon our national life that come from great inheritances of wealth and power'. In his direct style he declared this as a leading principle: 'The transmission from generation to generation of vast fortunes by will, inheritance, or gift is not consistent with the ideals and sentiments of the American people'
(Myers 1939) p. 362
Whitman, Walt
for a brief period before World War I, Walt Whitman's renown spread throughout Europe. The young revolutionaries in Belgrade read him politically as a singer of democracy, of the crowd en masse, the enemy of monarchs. One of them, Gavrilo Princip, shot Archduke Ferdinand, and that is how an American poet was responsible for the outbreak of World War I
(Milosz 2001) p. 29
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