Our Divided Political Heart (25 page)

Lincoln is every Republican’s hero, of course, and Javits quoted him extensively on the evils of slavery and the imperative of saving the Union. He stressed Lincoln’s moderation in trying to balance these two objectives, noting that in trying to keep the Union together, Lincoln demanded that slavery not be extended to new territories even as he avoided calls for its immediate abolition in states where it already existed. Above all, Javits highlighted Lincoln’s Clay-inspired commitment to national action in a host of areas. As Obama would often do more than four decades later, Javits cited Lincoln’s classic defense of public action: “
The legitimate object of government
is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done,
but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do for themselves, in their separate and individual capacities.” Javits went on to praise Lincoln’s innovative uses of federal power through the Homestead Act, to provide free land for would-be farmers; the Morrill Act, which granted federal land to the states for the establishment of “
agricultural and mechanical colleges
”; and the creation of the National Academy of Sciences under a federal charter. Javits also noted approvingly the 1860 Republican Party platform’s continuing commitment to internal improvements—which, the platform insisted, “
are authorized by the Constitution
”—and its pledge to “
immediate and efficient aid
” from the federal government to build a transcontinental railroad.

As for Theodore Roosevelt, he was the natural hero to liberal Republicans as the politician who embraced and popularized the word “progressive” while endorsing a far more expansive federal role in controlling monopolies, regulating the trusts, protecting the nation’s natural resources, and conserving the environment. Javits noted both TR’s critique of corporations (“
artificial individuals called corporations
, become so very big that the ordinary individual . . . cannot deal with them on terms of equality”) and his relative sympathy for labor unions. He also cited, approvingly and at length, Roosevelt’s 1910 “New Nationalism” speech, in many ways TR’s most radical public address. Again, Obama would echo Javits in drawing on Roosevelt’s example and inspiration in a December 2011 speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, the site of the original New Nationalism speech. “
The citizens of the United States must effectively control
the mighty commercial forces which they themselves called into being,” Roosevelt had declared. “This, I know, implies a policy of far more active government interference with social and economic conditions in the country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary.”

It’s worth remembering that
Order of Battle
, while on the whole genially written, was a shot fired in the war for the future of the Republican Party—a war Javits’s side would lose within months of his book’s publication. At the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco’s Cow Palace, the conservative forces gathered behind Barry Goldwater routed the moderate and liberal wings of the party and began the party’s long march toward the anti-government right. Its culmination was reflected on
that 2011 debate stage in New Hampshire—and on many more stages in the coming months—where there was no room for ideas even remotely approximating those Javits had championed nearly fifty years before.

At the very end of his book, Javits took Goldwater on directly, declaring that the conservatives’ hero “
tends to disconnect himself from
, and would have others disconnect themselves from, the traditions of the Republican Party and its historic role in American life.” Goldwater, he argued, had backed away from the “internal improvements” tradition of Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, and TR by proposing to sell off the Tennessee Valley Authority (one of the New Deal’s most extensive public planning endeavors), to make Social Security voluntary, and to weaken labor unions. Goldwater, he noted, also called the progressive income tax into question and opposed civil rights laws. And Javits was scalding when it came to the “Radical Right” in general and the John Birch Society in particular. The far right’s political approach, he said, was “extremist” and not authentically conservative. “
It is the rancorous enemy of the politics of civility
that marks the authentic conservative temperament.”

Goldwater would have none of this. When he finally secured the nomination, the likable but steely Arizonan did nothing to conciliate the wing of the party he had just defeated. On the contrary, in his acceptance speech on July 16, Goldwater signaled that the likes of Javits could just take a walk (an invitation, it turned out, that many of the more liberal Republicans, including Javits, were happy to accept). “
Anyone who joins us in all sincerity, we welcome
,” Goldwater said. “Those who do not care for our cause, we don’t expect to enter our ranks in any case.”

Then, just to make things unambiguous, Goldwater took his famous stand on “extremism” and “moderation” by declaring: “
And let our Republicanism, so focused and so dedicated
, not be made fuzzy and futile by unthinking and stupid labels. I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The John Birch Society members who found themselves among Goldwater’s delegates cheered wildly. The moderates and liberals sat in stunned, stony silence.

There was an odd affirmation later that night of Javits’s sense of history and his fear that the Republican Party was abandoning the Hamilton-Clay-Lincoln
tradition of national action in favor of states’ rights doctrines that had been advanced by Lincoln’s enemies in the Deep South. Theodore H. White, the legendary chronicler of presidential elections, ended his account of the evening by recalling his last memory of a momentous day. “
This reporter went to sleep in the darkness
of the early morning after Goldwater’s nomination, bothered by the victorious singing beneath his windows,” White wrote in
The Making of the President 1964
. “The strains were familiar but cacophonous until he separated them. Some of the Goldwater jubilants were singing the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and others were singing ‘Dixie.’” The song of Lincoln’s enemies threatened to drown out the anthem of his friends.

The revolution in Republican thinking that Goldwater began that night in the Cow Palace continued apace. In the coming years, Republicans of Javits’s persuasion would either leave the party or be purged by conservatives in primaries. Javits’s turn came in 1980, when Ronald Reagan’s election sealed the victory of the Goldwater revolution. Just two months before Reagan’s triumph, Javits was defeated in a Republican primary by a conservative county official named Alphonse D’Amato, who went on to serve eighteen years in the Senate. Even in New York, the putative citadel of liberalism, a progressive Republican claiming the lineage of Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt could not survive.

The great transformation of the Republicans from the party of national action to the party of states’ rights and a restricted view of what the Constitution allows the federal government to achieve is simultaneously well known and underappreciated.

The party’s shift toward conservatism is certainly a given in our discourse. Javits himself conceded as much when he acknowledged in his book how often he was asked: “
Isn’t it illogical for you to be a Republican?
” What’s missed is how profound this shift in the Republican worldview actually was, how much of a break it represented from the party’s history, and how radically the definition of what constitutes “conservatism” had changed and narrowed. Liberal though he was in conventional terms, Javits
was not wrong to insist that the conservative’s task in politics always involves “explaining why the complexities of existence stand in the way of utopian solutions to all problems, and why in so many hard cases the best we can hope for is a succession of provisional compromises or accommodations, subject to change as circumstances change.” This is the conservatism of prudence and complexity that acknowledges human imperfection.

But I have offered Javits his say here for a larger reason. By emphasizing the ideas of Hamilton and Clay and their role in the early American story, his account underscores the flaws in currently popular historical understandings. Those understandings go something like this: The United States spent its first century or so after the Founding as a nation in which the federal government played an exceedingly limited role in public life. The Constitution was read as placing severe limits on government action. Economic life was left in the hands of individuals and entrepreneurs. Government “got out of the way” and let the market operate freely in a nation where individualism was the single, dominant American characteristic.

According to this view, it was only during the Progressive Era administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—and then, more dramatically, under Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal—that the federal government became an active player in American economic life. And it was only with the Supreme Court decisions of the later New Deal years and after that this rapid growth of government was sanctioned as constitutional. Not for nothing have judicial conservatives spoken of “the Constitution in exile,” by which they mean the Constitution as it was understood before New Deal jurisprudence opened the way for federal power to exert itself.

As in most conventional accounts, this one is based on certain important truths. The Progressive and New Deal Eras
were
breakthroughs, as I will be arguing later. Progressives signaled this when they amended the Constitution to allow for an income tax, to provide for the direct popular election of senators—overturning the system of elections by state legislatures that was both elitist and deferential to states’ rights—and also by extending the right to vote to women. The FDR years changed the country profoundly as the federal government assumed a much larger role in regulating the workings of banking and commerce and the relations between employers and employees. It also found itself being held ever more accountable
for the economy’s overall performance. Through Social Security, the federal government assumed a decisive role in protecting older Americans from poverty, and widows and orphans from penury. Unemployment insurance, public power, and rural electrification expanded government’s writ. And so, most drastically, did all the exertions required to win the vast war against Hitler’s Germany and imperial Japan. Harry Truman’s Fair Deal built on the New Deal’s achievements, notably by expanding Social Security to the program we now recognize. The Great Society went further still. Medicare and Medicaid were large down payments on Truman’s hopes for a national health system. LBJ’s War on Poverty and the civil rights bills were aimed at lifting up Americans who had not fully shared in the New Deal’s bounty.

This is all true enough. What it misses is the extent to which government—including the federal government—was deeply involved in the American economy
from the beginning of the republic.
The very idea that there is a sharp and clear divide between “public” and “private” spheres was a creation not of the Founders but of Gilded Age Supreme Courts in the 1870s and 1880s. In the country’s earlier years, the idea of mixed public-private corporations was common and taken for granted. Javits’s brief history of the initiatives undertaken by Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln is instructive precisely because it illustrates the many ways in which Americans looked to government at all levels for both economic innovation and relief from chronic social problems. The latest historical scholarship underscores how active the federal government was long before the arrival of the two Roosevelts. “
So familiar is the historical narrative that pits
America’s conversion from nineteenth-century
laissez-faire
to twentieth-century big government that the multiple, well-noted exceptions to this familiar story have been ignored,” wrote University of Virginia historian Brian Balogh in his breakthrough 2009 book,
A Government Out of Sight
.

The federal government’s involvement with health care, for example, did not begin with Medicare or even with the public health initiatives of the Progressive Era. The Federal Marine Hospital System was created under a law signed by President John Adams in 1798. As Balogh points out, it “
funded hospitals located throughout the nation
to treat seamen who fell ill or were injured on the job,” and the number of mariners treated grew
from 4,000 in 1823 to 13,000 by 1858. It might be said that the nation instituted a program of socialized medicine for seamen just a decade after the ratification of the Constitution. Federal disaster relief was a common practice from the beginning of the republic, Balogh notes, and it was resisted only when southerners began fearing that federal assistance of this sort might provide “
a precedent for national intervention
on the slavery question.” (It is a recurrent theme in American history: opposition to federal intervention on issues related to race leads to a wholesale attack on federal action in other spheres.) It is rarely noted, Balogh added, that Americans “
who supposedly feared distant government
subsidized a national postal service that dwarfed its European counterparts in its scope and capacity to carry news at bargain prices.” As the communications scholar Richard John noted, “
No other branch of the central government
penetrated so deeply into the hinterland or played such a conspicuous role in shaping the pattern of everyday life.”

Even at the peak of laissez-faire thinking during the Gilded Age, the federal government was engaged in a massive social welfare program that foreshadowed the enactment of Social Security, a fact that the historical sociologist Theda Skocpol brought to wider attention
in her 1992 book
Protecting Soldiers and Mothers
. Our long-forgotten system of Civil War pensions was established in February 1862 and grew steadily as successive Congresses expanded access. By 1910, noted Larry DeWitt, a historian of Social Security, “about 28 percent of all men age 65 and older in the country were receiving Civil War pensions—making the pension system in effect a national retirement program for at least one major cohort of citizens.” Another 300,000 widows, orphans, and other dependents “
were also on the pension rolls at that point
.” In its peak cost year, 1894, “the Civil War pension system accounted for 37 percent of all federal expenditures.” The Social Security program, by contrast, has never come close to that share. And even during the laissez-faire Gilded Age, government provided important support to railroad construction and protected private industries behind protective tariffs.