The Crisis of Americanism:

The Destructive Tradition of  Spiritual and Political Individualism — Part 3

by Juergen Gebhardt

Dr. Gebhardt is emeritus Professor at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nürenberg. He is editor of the final volume of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1924-1949. We feature here Chapter 5 from his Americanism: Revolutionary Order and Societal Self-Interpretation in the American Republic, Louisiana State University Press, 1993. This is the first part of a muti-part article. It is reproduced here with permission.

      

The Dynamics of the Expanding Self  (concluded)

 

In terms of world history, the imperial republic understood itself pri­marily as the new Rome, destined to spread throughout the world the novus ordo seclorum, that is, the republican order. The expansion not of imperial power but of republican order, whether in the form of a republic encompassing the entire continent or in the form of a republican fed­eration of states, was the primary objective of the Founders, and in this they cleverly combined the power-political continental claim with clear economic-political interests.²⁶

 

But the Roman model and the Fathers' own theoretical insight similarly planted the seeds for justified doubts about the possibility of combining imperial politics and republican order. This contradiction intensified in the latent psychic crisis at the end of the nineteenth century, when increasingly libidinously motivated apocalypses were substituted for the original consciousness-shaping spiritual-political experiences of order, and when Manifest Destiny treated other people and nations as objects of one's own libido dominandi. So, on one hand, imperial foreign policy was always tied to the mental, political, and eco­nomic crisis within the country, thus also the crisis of Americanism. On the other hand, time and again, foreign affairs dealings by the political leadership and the majority that supported it showed that the various strands of motivation were intertwined: republican pathos, the modes of imperial apocalyptics, and the power-political and economic-political pragmatism of dominant social interests.

 

But what is crucial is the fact that all the actors moved in the conti­nuity of the symbolic cosmos of Americanism and perceived the struc­tures of the global civilized world only in the context of their own sym­bolic universe, where even the individual American always derives his point of view within his world. On this point the latent contradiction between imperial politics and republican order deepens into the contra­diction between the American world and the competing symbolic worlds of contemporary humanity to the point at which regularly, to the present day, the search for a finite world order in the sense of the perfection of the founding in the world proves useless. The thoroughly reasonable in­sight into the vanity of imperial efforts, however, turns just as often into an attempt to retreat from the inevitable international entanglements into its own closed universe.²⁷

 

Objectifying national expansionism into an imperial operation merely served to make very clear to sensitive Americans the progressive loss of republican humanity by which their own existence was measured. Before long this experience of frustration was critically captured only in Ameri­can literature — given its social standing, a marginal product to this day. Washington Irving, Johnson J. Hooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Joseph G. Bald­win, George W. Harris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain alone were sensitive enough to measure the pathos of civil theology against the American reality. They somehow subjected the cities of the East, the plantations of the South, and he camps of the West to harsh criticism and, as Miller noted in speaking of Melville, offered "a long farewell to national greatness."²⁸

 

Not until the 1890s did the aware­ness of crisis spread until it produced an extensive literature of American self-criticism that reached its apex in the middle of the twentieth century.

 

Our observations so far make it seem understandable that the litera­ture of crisis is invariably linked to the symbolism of Americanism, so that it operates in the medium of the dominant social field of organized society's consciousness. Underlying its premises there is, thanks to the transparency of social and political processes in American democracy, highly developed pragmatic criticism, by which I mean the detailed analy­sis of specific social phenomena and the investigation of singular circum­stances, followed by proposals for reform.

 

A splendid example of such pragmatic criticism grew out of the collaboration of the progressive poli­tician Robert La Follette with the University of Wisconsin, where social analysis was converted into reform politics. But behind the pragmatic criticism — which, as will be shown, transformed American society from Wilson's New Freedom through Roosevelt's New Deal to Kennedy's New Frontier under the horizon of Americanism — there gradually arose doubt in its substance. The doubts were expressed both in a stiffened patriotism and in criticism of the established understanding of history. But criticism could not achieve any genuine theoretical dimension, remaining linked to the American beginnings and mired in historical reinterpretation.

 

Turner claimed that the American spirit, character, and politics are the result of a pioneer culture unique in history. Having proclaimed the end of the frontier, he insisted staunchly on the unbroken shaping force of the "American spirit" and the "American ideals"; "However profound the economic changes, we shall not give up our American ideals and our hopes for man, which had their origin in our own pioneering expe­rience . . . . We shall continue to present to our sister continent of Europe the underlying ideas of America as a better way of solving difficulties. We shall point to the Pax Americana, and seek the path of peace on earth to men of good will."²⁹

 

Turner's thesis of the frontier merely gives new form to monumental history; he and his time did not yet doubt its substance; only its material substratum strays into the zone of doubt. Consequently criticism, in a Protestant manner, addresses itself to the fictional elements in the cult of the hero and monumental history. The reception of the critical methods of Continental European historians between 1890 and 1915 led to a de-mythologizing of American salvational history.

 

Sydney G. Fisher examined the Legendary and Myth-Making Process in Histories of the American Revolution and learned that the apotheosis of the Revolution and its heroes hardly presented a picture of historical reality. He suggested that what was needed was "to substitute truth and actuality for the mawkish sentimentality and nonsense with which we have been so long nauseated."³⁰ Searching for the truth, he composed a True History of the American Revolution (1902), a True Benjamin Franklin (1900), and a True William Penn (1900). As early as 1897, Paul L. Ford had written The True George Washington; in the book the apotheosis was recanted, and Washington was humanized so as to turn a historical figure into a man."

 

Turner, Fisher, Ford, and their fellow writers were interested not merely in historical accuracy; along with such figures as Henry Adams, Thorstein Veblen, Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, William James, H. L. Mencken, Brooks Adams, and Charles Beard, they were part of a broad intellectual movement that articulated a crisis of American society in order to find a new connection with reality on the far side of the symbolism apparatus of orthodox Americanism.

 

The problem of the search for reality becomes clear in the concept of debunking, a term coined by the writer William E. Woodward in 1923 to designate the critical abolition of the cult of the hero: "Why, debunk­ing means simply taking the bunk out of things . . . . You've heard of deflation — of prices, wages, and so on — taking the fictitious values out of merchandise. Well, debunking is an intellectual deflation. It's the sci­ence of reality."³² Debunking alone, however, was no substitute for the critical history that, according to Nietzsche, corrects and destroys the past.³³ Woodward himself proved, in his George Washington (1916), that debunking leads not to reality but, at best, to banality.³⁴           

 

[This is part 3 of a multi-part article. Part 4 may be read HERE.]

 

 

NOTES   

(for fuller citations see the bibliography in Professor Gebhardt's book)

26. Compare R. W. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (New York, 1960), 78-79.

27. For this complex in general, compare besides Van Alstyne, Rising American Empire, and W. A. Williams, Contours of American History, in particular W. A. Williams, The Roots of the Modern American Empire (New York, 1969); W. La Feber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1963); F. Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York, 1963); E. R. May, Ameri­can Imperialism (New York, 1968); Nagel, Sacred Trust, 247-324; H.U. Wehler, "Der Amerikanische Imperialismus vor 1914," in Der Moderne Imperialismus, ed. W. J. Mommsen (Stuttgart, 1971), 171-92; H.U. Wehler, Aufstieg des Amerikanischen Imperialismus (Göttingen, 1974).

28. Quoted in K. S. Lynn, The Comic Tradition in America (Garden City, N.Y., 1958), 109.

29. F. J. Turner, The United States, 1810-1850: The Nation and Its Sections, 152f.

30. Fisher, "Legendary and Myth-Making Process," 54.

31. P. L. Ford, The True George Washington (Philadelphia, 1897), 6.32. Quoted in Craven, Legend of the Founding Fathers, 188.

33. Nietzsche, Werke, I, 229.

34. Craven, Legend of the Founding Fathers, 196.