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Show "Insecurit v" An American Tradition Editor's Note: This is the eleventh in a series of 18 u-ticles exploring issues of the American Issues Forum. This series has been written especially espec-ially for the second segment of the Bicentennial program of Courses by Newspaper. COURSES BY NEWSPAPER NEWSPAP-ER was developed by the University of California Extension, Exten-sion, San Diego, and funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Humani-ties. By Walter LaFeber President's Ford's First Annual An-nual Message, one newspaper reported in January 1975, "was the gloomiest delivered by a President since the m depression of the nineteen-thirties." nineteen-thirties." Unemployment, inflation, in-flation, and threats of war in the Middle East overshadowed the few bright spots in the President's survey. It seemed quite unlike Dwight Eisenhower's soothing messages of the 1950s or John Kennedy's call-to-the ramparts ram-parts appeals of the early 1960s. Memories of those supposedly happier times made Americans nostalgic for the good old days of charismatic charisma-tic leadership in the White House, record car sales, and stable prices. Americans with those memories mem-ories should treasure them, for such times are rare in our history. The 1780s was more typical, and the mood of crisis pervading those years more prophetic of decades to come. That mood was caught in James Madison's letter of late 1787 to Thomas Jefferson, " describing the work of the Constitutional Convention: "We are in a wilderness, without a single footstep to guide us." If the "Father of the Constitution" harbored such doubts, one can only imagine the fears of such opponents of the new Constitution as Patrick Henry. He was convinced con-vinced the new nation would soon become enslaved to an all-powerful central government. govern-ment. "The tyranny of Philadelphia," Phila-delphia," roared Henry, "may be like the tyranny of George III," for "it squints toward monarchy." Henry, as usual, over-dramatized, over-dramatized, yet his pessimism and Madison's worry reflected a deep national insecurity. The rivers might teem with fish, the land abound with crops, the churches burst with church-goers. All the same, Americans nervously watched for signs of God's disfavor. After all, as the Puritan ministers emphasized, God often put the most faithful and successful to the greatest test. Burden of Righteousness As early as 1629 John Winthrop had warned the settlers of Massachusetts Bay, recently escaped from the problems of the Old World, that fresh dangers awaited them in the New. In one of the most famous American speeches, spee-ches, he reminded them that the whole world was waiting for the great Christian experiment experi-ment to fail: "We shall be as a City upon a Hill," Winthrop announced, "the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and by-word through the world." This long-held idea of America as the "Chosen Nation" helps account for our national habit of equating success with divine favor. It also may provide a hint why the Watergate break-in, which, as Professor John Higham pointed out in an earlier article, aroused only a cynical response in Europe, caused such soul-searching in the United States. This burden of righteousness righteous-ness has caused us to feel insecure since the time when Puritan magistrates called for days of public humiliation to appease God's anger. The , signers of the Declaration of Independence determined to . separate themselves from a ' British society. so corrupt that it shocked even the worldly'" Benjamin Franklin. They escaped es-caped the contagion, however, only to enter into a decade of revolution and economic pain. The Republic in Danger , , The new form of government govern-ment created in 1789 by the Constitutional Convention did not quiet earlier anxieties. Madison and Henry were not alone in questioning whether the experiment would work. Crusty old Federalist, Fisher Ames, offered only slight hope when he noted: "A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well, but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom: a republic is a raft which will never sink, but then your feet are always in water." But the raft nearly sank during the Constitution's first ten years a period when the nation feared for the survival of its political institutions. The 1790s were torn by political , party divisions, rebellion in Pennsylvania, and near-war with France. Panicked Federalists Fed-eralists tried to restore domestic domes-tic peace by destroying their opponents' right of free speech. When a peaceful : transition of government occurred oc-curred with the Republic-Democratic Republic-Democratic Jefferson's presidential presi-dential triumph, the nation was so relieved that the event has been tagged "the ,revolu- r tiqn of 1800." Hardly had Jefferson, moved into the' new capital of Washington City when the country faced a new threat: Napoleon moved to occupy the Mississippi Valley. Hurried maneuvers resulted in the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and the French danger subsid- . ed. Immediately thereafter, the British, fighting for survival sur-vival in the Napoleonic wars, posed another challenge. Determined De-termined to stop American trade with France, the British preyed on United States ships and encouraged Indian attacks on American settlements a-long a-long the Great Lakes. The two nations finally fought to a draw in the war of 1812, but the British scored a moral victory by burning Washington City. In 1815 the wars ended and Americans turned inward to develop their immense continent. contin-ent. They would not fight Europeans during the next 80 years. That fact, however, did not mean they would enjoy an era 'of security. Americans made the 19th century into the most dynamic and expansive in their 300-year history. In doing so they killed and were killed by Indians, Mexicans, and-in 1898-Spaniards and Filipinos. During four years of civil war they slaughtered each other. In all they fought three wars and went to the brink of conflict with England, Canada, Russia, and even China. Crisis Over Slavery Black slavery, of course, constituted the greatest threat to national security. Northerners Northern-ers feared the loss of western lands to free labor unless the slave-holding expansionists were checked. Southerners predicted the stagnation of their economy if slavery were banned in the territories. Slave revolts in 1822 and 1831, along with rumors of many others, obsessed southern society and intensified the sense of crisis. The Civil War ended slavery, slav-ery, but the nation was then torn by a quarter-century economic depression that worsened wor-sened until by the 1890s Secretary of State Walter Q Gresham could detect "sym toms of revolution." Massesof Iff unemployed marched 0n pi"1 Washinton during that depres. sion decade, and the U 5 1 f Army was called out to break v ' paralyzing strikes. A younR ' political science professor ''jfe Woodrow Wilson, was one of ' V many-Theodore Roosevelt ''V was another-who warned that ' d the United States stood on the te brink of violent class warfare iSJ As a President, Wiisoj $ ' would later help avert that warfare by championing social is'1 and economic reform pro. 'i grams. But he also led us into World War 1, where we C watched civilization (as F ' Scott Fitzgerald wrote "walking very slowly back' jj' ward a few inches a day c leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. " The glow of the 1920s was dimmed by the memory of this horror, then finally snuffed out by depres-sion depres-sion and another world war. ln its wake came cold war McCarthyism, and Vietnam. . Even during the complacent '.' '1f! Eisenhower years the Presi-dent Presi-dent gravely warned that a 't sudden worldwide rebellion H against injustice and poverty was testing "the fitness of (f$ political systems and the ,1 validity of political philoso- ' 1 phies." Few paid sufficient . (lb attention, but the man with the ' ' infectious grin was reminding Americans that they could not take the security of their instututions for granted. It was a fitting introduction to the 1960s and 1970s when, as we " shall see in the next article, , . '.ji the American people searched fl vainly for stability and security , in a world of revolution. flj Such insecurity, therefore, I" is hardly a new fact of life for this country. It is as American as James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson--.and Gerald Ford. SrS |