According to John T. Stuart, his first law partner, Lincoln ''went further against Christian beliefs . . . than any man I ever heard.
BLAH BLAH
Friday, March 27, 2009
LINCOLN'S EDUCATION.. blah blah blah blah...
The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln
By DOUGLAS L. WILSON
Alfred A. Knopf
RIGHT. HE WANTED TO BE A LAWYER OR WRITER. BACK THEN, THAT WAS A LOT HARDER TO DO. WHY IS ALL THIS WRITTEN DOWN. WHAT A WASTE OF TIME. IT ALWAYS BOILS DOWN. BACK THEN A BRILLIANT POOR BOY PROBABLY HAD NO WAY TO BE NOTICED. NOW THING ARE BETTER.
A FIFTEEN WORD BOOK. I HATE THIS SHIT.
Abraham Lincoln's childhood education, conducted almost entirely by himself, with only a modicum of schooling, is one of the most familiar stories in American history. According to the legend, the young backwoods farm boy educated himself by a determined program of nightly reading after the day's work was done, systematically consuming all the books in the sparsely inhabited neighborhood where he grew up. His determination and youthful quest for enlightenment, the distinctive inner qualities that set him apart, have long been symbolized by the indelible image of the boy reading alone by firelight.
Legends, by their nature, are not so much factual accounts as symbolic embodiments or expressions of what the facts represent. America's attraction to the image of the boy reading alone by firelight is thus the tribute paid to the humble origins and noble attributes of a great national hero, but the Lincoln of history, insofar as can be determined from the testimony of those who knew him, proves in many respects worthy of the legend. Most of his Indiana friends and neighbors who were questioned by William H. Herndon, and William M. Thayer before him, remembered the young Lincoln as an ardent reader. His cousin John Hanks, who lived for a time with the Lincolns, called him "a Constant and voracious reader." His near neighbor and close friend David Turnham told Herndon, "We had but few books at that time and our opportunities were poor," but "what [Lincoln] read he read well and thoroughly -- Never forgetting what he read." These same witnesses confirmed Lincoln's own testimony that he attended the primitive schools of the period only briefly and intermittently, and they further suggested that he eventually outstripped his teachers. "The Schools we went to taught Spelling -- reading -- writing and Ciphering to single rule of 3 -- no further," reported one of his schoolmates. "Lincoln got ahead of his masters -- Could do him no further good: he went to school no more."
His stepmother, who came into his life when he was ten years old and to whom he remained devoted, described for Herndon the young man's unusual commitment to his studies: "Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on -- and when he came across a passage that Struck him he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there till he did get paper -- then he would re-write it -- look at it -- repeat it -- He had a copy book -- a kind of scrap book in which he put down all things and this preserved them." His stepmother's evident pride in Lincoln's educational efforts contrasted with his father's attitude, which was apparently less than approving. Herndon may have asked about a scene in William M. Thayer's The Pioneer Boy and How He Became President (1863), which depicted the young Lincoln resisting his father's command that he quit reading and go back to work. Sarah Bush Lincoln spoke protectively of her husband's behavior, which she tried to put in a positive light, telling Herndon: "As a usual thing Mr Lincoln never made Abe quit reading to do anything if he could avoid it. He would do it himself first. Mr. Lincoln could read a little & could scarcely write his name: hence he wanted, as he himself felt the uses & necessities of Education his boy Abraham to learn & he Encouraged him to do it in all ways he could." But one senses a defensiveness in her description, particularly when she says that her husband never made the boy quit reading "if he could avoid it."
Lincoln's cousin Dennis Hanks, who lived with them, spotlighted the tension between Lincoln and his father in characterizing the boy's reading habits: "He was a Constant and I m[a]y Say Stubborn reader, his father having Sometimes to slash him for neglecting his work by reading." That this was a continuing problem rather than an isolated incident is further suggested by a saying of Thomas Lincoln that Dennis remembered in this connection. "Mr Lincoln -- Abs father -- often said [I] had to pull the old sow up to the trough -- when speaking of Abes reading & how he got to it, then and now he had to pull her away." In other words, he had to force his son to take up reading, but once the boy became a reader, only force could get him stopped.
Sarah Bush Lincoln's testimony laid great stress on her stepson's devotion to reading and study, but she also told things that are at odds with the picture presented by the time- honored legend. "He read diligently -- studied in the day time -- didn't after night much -- went to bed Early -- got up Early and then read -- Eat his breakfast -- go to work in the field with the men." If he didn't read at night, what about the boy reading by firelight? Implicit in this image of nighttime reading is an understanding that daytime had to be given to farm work or other chores, but his stepmother's testimony that he rarely read at night suggests otherwise.
Reading during the day raises the specter of the boy shirking his chores and stealing time from work for reading, something that is confirmed by Thayer's anecdote and by Dennis Hanks's recollection of Lincoln's father "slashing" him for neglecting his work by reading. There was difficulty between Lincoln and his father that, while probably quite important in his development, is hard to get at, for there are many clues but few concrete details.
Thomas Lincoln is reported to have told William G. Greene a few years after Lincoln left home, "I suppose that Abe is still fooling hisself with eddication. I tried to stop it, but he has got that fool idea in his head, and it can't be got out." If Thomas Lincoln was as antagonistic to education as this suggests, we can be sure that the difficulty between them was serious. The symbolic boy reading by firelight has done his part and is at peace with his father; the actual boy was probably something of a rebel.
Not part of the popular image, for obvious reasons, is that Lincoln's studiousness, which he apparently indulged at the expense of his duties, was roundly judged by his contemporaries as an indication of his laziness. A neighbor and former employer, John Romine, told Herndon: "Abe was awful lazy: he worked for me -- was always reading & thinking -- used to get mad at him." Dennis Hanks admitted, "Lincoln was lazy -- a very lazy man -- He was always reading -- scribbling -- writing -- Ciphering -- writing Poetry &c. &c." That Lincoln did not like physical labor was apparently never disputed, for even his adoring stepmother admitted it. In this sense, judged by the standards of his contemporaries, he clearly was lazy, where laziness was regarded as something between a character fault and a cardinal sin.
But Sarah Bush Lincoln saw in the situation, at least retrospectively, something that the neighbors and even Dennis Hanks did not: that the young Lincoln, while lazy about farm work, had been industrious in another direction. She told Herndon that "he didn't like physical labor -- was diligent for Knowledge -- wished to Know & if pains & Labor would get it he was sure to get it." Her daughter, Lincoln's stepsister, gave the situation another positive spin: "Abe was not Energetic Except in one thing -- he was active & persistant in learning -- read Everything he Could." With historical hindsight, we have little trouble rationalizing Lincoln's youthful reading as a form of striving, as it surely was, but we miss an element in the equation if we fail to take into account the construction his father and most others put on his dislike of farm work and his appetite for reading. For them it was avoiding work; for him it was a way of asserting his individuality and his aspirations.
While growing up in Indiana, the young Abraham Lincoln was, by all indications, an inveterate reader or, as Dennis Hanks put it, "a Constant and I may Say Stubborn reader." The more one looks at the evidence behind the familiar legend, the more meaning Hanks's carefully chosen word "stubborn" seems to have. For Lincoln paid a price for being a habitual reader as a boy in Indiana. Not only was he occasionally "slashed" by his father, but he was judged "lazy" by his friends and neighbors. His persistence in these circumstances was, indeed, an act of youthful stubbornness; it was carried on in defiance of the opinions of family and community. Looking back on these events in the light of what happened subsequently, we can see that Lincoln was a reader in his youthful days in Indiana, in part as a way of escaping farm work, but more important, he was reading because he had decided very early that he didn't want to be a farmer.
e think we know him. But what do we really know, especially about the private man whom we all suspect to be somehow crucially tied to the public one? ''Historians are forever doomed to ignorance about the early life of Abraham Lincoln,'' began ''The Last Best Hope of Earth'' (1993), a brief volume that summed up more than 20 years of learning about Lincoln by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark E. Neely Jr. Now comes Douglas L. Wilson with ''Honor's Voice,'' a solid new portrait of the private Lincoln between the ages of 22 and 33, during the years 1831-42, that puts him in a strikingly fresh light.
The book starts not from the President's legendary greatness but from his actual beginnings. Wilson, the Saunders Director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, focuses with careful intensity on otherwise antiquarian oral reminiscences that help illuminate Lincoln's rise. Wilson tells a story about a search for identity and self-definition, and follows Lincoln's very exacting road of self-education, his finding of a vocation in law and politics, and the partial resolution of his painfully difficult relations with women.
The evolution of his religious outlook might illustrate his education. Raised a Baptist, Lincoln never outgrew a sense of fatalism, even ''a nameless sense of . . . doom.'' But he had the strength to go against the grain, and he quickly found the skeptics. He read in Thomas Paine about ''a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost'': it is the story of the Virgin Mary.
The law student, while teaching himself the rules of evidence, wrote two manuscripts of religious skepticism, long lost but also long remembered by his contemporaries. According to John T. Stuart, his first law partner, Lincoln ''went further against Christian beliefs . . . than any man I ever heard.'' As he advanced in politics, Lincoln muted his heathenish talk, but even during this early period he learned to present himself, when necessary, ''as an unfortunate victim of unbelief.'' A hypocrite? Wilson's readers can decide; but Lincoln was certainly someone with a sense of self-preservation. And someone at this time a very long way from the Second Inaugural.
In politics and law Lincoln rose from successful frontier fighter to peacemaker who fought with words. At times the words were not honest, and relied on smear and innuendo. Yet Lincoln carried a ''compulsion'' to help the helpless, and learned, to quote the Shakespeare he had come to love, that the best of men ''have pow'r to hurt and will do none.''
His most troublesome problem was women. The young man who had lost his mother at the age of 9 always felt awkward around them -- except for older women. He loved Ann Rutledge, she died and he fell apart. Friends and, in time, work helped Lincoln back from a perhaps suicidal mental breakdown. The depth of his grief suggests to Wilson that Ann's death challenged the core of his being. His central goal in life, his wish to rise, ''to shape and even to control events,'' now seemed ''nothing but foolish vanity.''
Ambivalence characterized his later courtships and various marriage proposals. A possible reason for this, at least for a period of time, may have been a fear of syphilis -- not an unknown disease in his world. Wilson does not credit stories of Lincoln's possible love children but notes two episodes with prostitutes. If once or twice, why not more often? His longtime law partner, William H. Herndon, thought that ''Lincoln had a strong if not a terrible passion for women: he could hardly keep his hands off.'' Nor would he get married until he was 33.
As Lincoln the outsider learned to be an insider, deep anxieties beset him about his ability to make a living, about success in law, about polite society. His journey led him from country to village to town, where he found the exciting, highborn Mary Todd. A superficial courtship was followed by a commitment to marry. In a brief diversion, he became smitten by another woman, but Mary did not let go. As his brother-in-law put it, ''Lincoln in his conflicts of duty-honor and his love went as crazy as a Loon.'' In time he recovered the ability to rule himself, strengthening his self-respect by getting married. Love, Wilson suggests, seems to have had ''very little to do with it.''
Lincoln's road, therefore, was both harder and ''swampier'' than legend -- or scholars -- have allowed: the difficulties and temptations wider, the fears and depressions deeper. By 34 he appeared to have overcome his troubles, but not many signs of future greatness had yet turned up.
After 130-some years of Lincoln appraisals, how can a scholar, especially one as extraordinarily careful and fair as Wilson, create a startlingly new Lincoln? Wilson's achievement stems in part from the respect the culture has acquired for oral history (which often gives voice to the voiceless) and from his having put together, with his colleague Rodney O. Davis, the Szold Professor of History at Knox College, the definitive edition of the reminiscences of about 250 people who knew Lincoln: ''Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements About Abraham Lincoln'' (1998). The two men have also been assembling, but have not yet published, the similarly massive recollections of Herndon himself -- the person who knew Lincoln better than anyone but Mary Todd. Historians have long used these oft-conflicting, difficult-to-read manuscripts, but Wilson's familiarity with them is unsurpassed.
The bulk of the reminiscences collected by Herndon were from 1865-66 and, as Wilson explains, emphasize the ''honorable, or at least unobjectionable.'' But ''Honor's voice,'' as Wilson calls them, ''can tell us a great deal, and sometimes tells us much more than it intended.''
This book establishes Wilson as the leading historian of the young and private Lincoln. Still, others sifting through the same sources may reach somewhat different conclusions, or take matters further. Consider the story about Lincoln's visiting a prostitute and, after undressing, realizing that he is $2 short of the needed $5 fee. He is offered credit but he departs, leaving the woman astonished at his integrity. Wilson knows that this sounds like ''a deliberate parody of the Honest Abe Lincoln legend,'' yet he accepts it. But might not a less cautious biographer venture an additional step, teasing out of this story and other evidence the possibility of a homosexual young man, even if observers and participants failed to speak of such?
Focusing on the private Lincoln while mostly ignoring the public one can obscure the private, too. For example, to prevent a quorum at a session of the Illinois State Legislature in 1840, Representative Lincoln jumped out of a window of the building where the members were meeting. Wilson sees this as a sign of private distress. That the leap was intended to influence important financial legislation during a debilitating economic depression is largely lost. Biographers, then, will have to use ''Honor's Voice'' with both admiration and a critical eye.
IT is profitable to divide the Lincoln literature roughly into two schools: ''Lincoln the man'' and ''Lincoln the god.'' Both have their uses. Wilson's book, with its understated, even prose, falls plainly into the first camp, and it makes a fine counterpoint to Garry Wills's ''Lincoln at Gettysburg,'' with its portrait of a President who ''remade America'' with a brief speech. Had Wilson claimed to be showing all of Lincoln, he might be criticized for missing some of the elements that make his subject great. As it is, he makes a very important start toward a new understanding of the greatest of Americans.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
Writing about Lincoln is not something to be brushed off as simply a scholarly exercise. In our multicultural age, he remains a man of world-historic significance, the very symbol of what is best about the United States. During the Iranian revolution, a reporter saw a big painted slogan in Teheran: ''Government of the people, by the people, for the people.'' During Jiang Zemin's recent visit to the United States, the Chinese President conjured up Lincoln's memory. So has Pope John Paul II. When Colin Powell announced his refusal to run for the Presidency, he held up but one name. The Lincoln scholar's responsibilities are large. ''Honor's Voice'' gives Americans reason to be grateful that the field continues to attract students of ability and integrity.
By DOUGLAS L. WILSON
Alfred A. Knopf
RIGHT. HE WANTED TO BE A LAWYER OR WRITER. BACK THEN, THAT WAS A LOT HARDER TO DO. WHY IS ALL THIS WRITTEN DOWN. WHAT A WASTE OF TIME. IT ALWAYS BOILS DOWN. BACK THEN A BRILLIANT POOR BOY PROBABLY HAD NO WAY TO BE NOTICED. NOW THING ARE BETTER.
A FIFTEEN WORD BOOK. I HATE THIS SHIT.
Abraham Lincoln's childhood education, conducted almost entirely by himself, with only a modicum of schooling, is one of the most familiar stories in American history. According to the legend, the young backwoods farm boy educated himself by a determined program of nightly reading after the day's work was done, systematically consuming all the books in the sparsely inhabited neighborhood where he grew up. His determination and youthful quest for enlightenment, the distinctive inner qualities that set him apart, have long been symbolized by the indelible image of the boy reading alone by firelight.
Legends, by their nature, are not so much factual accounts as symbolic embodiments or expressions of what the facts represent. America's attraction to the image of the boy reading alone by firelight is thus the tribute paid to the humble origins and noble attributes of a great national hero, but the Lincoln of history, insofar as can be determined from the testimony of those who knew him, proves in many respects worthy of the legend. Most of his Indiana friends and neighbors who were questioned by William H. Herndon, and William M. Thayer before him, remembered the young Lincoln as an ardent reader. His cousin John Hanks, who lived for a time with the Lincolns, called him "a Constant and voracious reader." His near neighbor and close friend David Turnham told Herndon, "We had but few books at that time and our opportunities were poor," but "what [Lincoln] read he read well and thoroughly -- Never forgetting what he read." These same witnesses confirmed Lincoln's own testimony that he attended the primitive schools of the period only briefly and intermittently, and they further suggested that he eventually outstripped his teachers. "The Schools we went to taught Spelling -- reading -- writing and Ciphering to single rule of 3 -- no further," reported one of his schoolmates. "Lincoln got ahead of his masters -- Could do him no further good: he went to school no more."
His stepmother, who came into his life when he was ten years old and to whom he remained devoted, described for Herndon the young man's unusual commitment to his studies: "Abe read all the books he could lay his hands on -- and when he came across a passage that Struck him he would write it down on boards if he had no paper & keep it there till he did get paper -- then he would re-write it -- look at it -- repeat it -- He had a copy book -- a kind of scrap book in which he put down all things and this preserved them." His stepmother's evident pride in Lincoln's educational efforts contrasted with his father's attitude, which was apparently less than approving. Herndon may have asked about a scene in William M. Thayer's The Pioneer Boy and How He Became President (1863), which depicted the young Lincoln resisting his father's command that he quit reading and go back to work. Sarah Bush Lincoln spoke protectively of her husband's behavior, which she tried to put in a positive light, telling Herndon: "As a usual thing Mr Lincoln never made Abe quit reading to do anything if he could avoid it. He would do it himself first. Mr. Lincoln could read a little & could scarcely write his name: hence he wanted, as he himself felt the uses & necessities of Education his boy Abraham to learn & he Encouraged him to do it in all ways he could." But one senses a defensiveness in her description, particularly when she says that her husband never made the boy quit reading "if he could avoid it."
Lincoln's cousin Dennis Hanks, who lived with them, spotlighted the tension between Lincoln and his father in characterizing the boy's reading habits: "He was a Constant and I m[a]y Say Stubborn reader, his father having Sometimes to slash him for neglecting his work by reading." That this was a continuing problem rather than an isolated incident is further suggested by a saying of Thomas Lincoln that Dennis remembered in this connection. "Mr Lincoln -- Abs father -- often said [I] had to pull the old sow up to the trough -- when speaking of Abes reading & how he got to it, then and now he had to pull her away." In other words, he had to force his son to take up reading, but once the boy became a reader, only force could get him stopped.
Sarah Bush Lincoln's testimony laid great stress on her stepson's devotion to reading and study, but she also told things that are at odds with the picture presented by the time- honored legend. "He read diligently -- studied in the day time -- didn't after night much -- went to bed Early -- got up Early and then read -- Eat his breakfast -- go to work in the field with the men." If he didn't read at night, what about the boy reading by firelight? Implicit in this image of nighttime reading is an understanding that daytime had to be given to farm work or other chores, but his stepmother's testimony that he rarely read at night suggests otherwise.
Reading during the day raises the specter of the boy shirking his chores and stealing time from work for reading, something that is confirmed by Thayer's anecdote and by Dennis Hanks's recollection of Lincoln's father "slashing" him for neglecting his work by reading. There was difficulty between Lincoln and his father that, while probably quite important in his development, is hard to get at, for there are many clues but few concrete details.
Thomas Lincoln is reported to have told William G. Greene a few years after Lincoln left home, "I suppose that Abe is still fooling hisself with eddication. I tried to stop it, but he has got that fool idea in his head, and it can't be got out." If Thomas Lincoln was as antagonistic to education as this suggests, we can be sure that the difficulty between them was serious. The symbolic boy reading by firelight has done his part and is at peace with his father; the actual boy was probably something of a rebel.
Not part of the popular image, for obvious reasons, is that Lincoln's studiousness, which he apparently indulged at the expense of his duties, was roundly judged by his contemporaries as an indication of his laziness. A neighbor and former employer, John Romine, told Herndon: "Abe was awful lazy: he worked for me -- was always reading & thinking -- used to get mad at him." Dennis Hanks admitted, "Lincoln was lazy -- a very lazy man -- He was always reading -- scribbling -- writing -- Ciphering -- writing Poetry &c. &c." That Lincoln did not like physical labor was apparently never disputed, for even his adoring stepmother admitted it. In this sense, judged by the standards of his contemporaries, he clearly was lazy, where laziness was regarded as something between a character fault and a cardinal sin.
But Sarah Bush Lincoln saw in the situation, at least retrospectively, something that the neighbors and even Dennis Hanks did not: that the young Lincoln, while lazy about farm work, had been industrious in another direction. She told Herndon that "he didn't like physical labor -- was diligent for Knowledge -- wished to Know & if pains & Labor would get it he was sure to get it." Her daughter, Lincoln's stepsister, gave the situation another positive spin: "Abe was not Energetic Except in one thing -- he was active & persistant in learning -- read Everything he Could." With historical hindsight, we have little trouble rationalizing Lincoln's youthful reading as a form of striving, as it surely was, but we miss an element in the equation if we fail to take into account the construction his father and most others put on his dislike of farm work and his appetite for reading. For them it was avoiding work; for him it was a way of asserting his individuality and his aspirations.
While growing up in Indiana, the young Abraham Lincoln was, by all indications, an inveterate reader or, as Dennis Hanks put it, "a Constant and I may Say Stubborn reader." The more one looks at the evidence behind the familiar legend, the more meaning Hanks's carefully chosen word "stubborn" seems to have. For Lincoln paid a price for being a habitual reader as a boy in Indiana. Not only was he occasionally "slashed" by his father, but he was judged "lazy" by his friends and neighbors. His persistence in these circumstances was, indeed, an act of youthful stubbornness; it was carried on in defiance of the opinions of family and community. Looking back on these events in the light of what happened subsequently, we can see that Lincoln was a reader in his youthful days in Indiana, in part as a way of escaping farm work, but more important, he was reading because he had decided very early that he didn't want to be a farmer.
e think we know him. But what do we really know, especially about the private man whom we all suspect to be somehow crucially tied to the public one? ''Historians are forever doomed to ignorance about the early life of Abraham Lincoln,'' began ''The Last Best Hope of Earth'' (1993), a brief volume that summed up more than 20 years of learning about Lincoln by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Mark E. Neely Jr. Now comes Douglas L. Wilson with ''Honor's Voice,'' a solid new portrait of the private Lincoln between the ages of 22 and 33, during the years 1831-42, that puts him in a strikingly fresh light.
The book starts not from the President's legendary greatness but from his actual beginnings. Wilson, the Saunders Director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, focuses with careful intensity on otherwise antiquarian oral reminiscences that help illuminate Lincoln's rise. Wilson tells a story about a search for identity and self-definition, and follows Lincoln's very exacting road of self-education, his finding of a vocation in law and politics, and the partial resolution of his painfully difficult relations with women.
The evolution of his religious outlook might illustrate his education. Raised a Baptist, Lincoln never outgrew a sense of fatalism, even ''a nameless sense of . . . doom.'' But he had the strength to go against the grain, and he quickly found the skeptics. He read in Thomas Paine about ''a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost'': it is the story of the Virgin Mary.
The law student, while teaching himself the rules of evidence, wrote two manuscripts of religious skepticism, long lost but also long remembered by his contemporaries. According to John T. Stuart, his first law partner, Lincoln ''went further against Christian beliefs . . . than any man I ever heard.'' As he advanced in politics, Lincoln muted his heathenish talk, but even during this early period he learned to present himself, when necessary, ''as an unfortunate victim of unbelief.'' A hypocrite? Wilson's readers can decide; but Lincoln was certainly someone with a sense of self-preservation. And someone at this time a very long way from the Second Inaugural.
In politics and law Lincoln rose from successful frontier fighter to peacemaker who fought with words. At times the words were not honest, and relied on smear and innuendo. Yet Lincoln carried a ''compulsion'' to help the helpless, and learned, to quote the Shakespeare he had come to love, that the best of men ''have pow'r to hurt and will do none.''
His most troublesome problem was women. The young man who had lost his mother at the age of 9 always felt awkward around them -- except for older women. He loved Ann Rutledge, she died and he fell apart. Friends and, in time, work helped Lincoln back from a perhaps suicidal mental breakdown. The depth of his grief suggests to Wilson that Ann's death challenged the core of his being. His central goal in life, his wish to rise, ''to shape and even to control events,'' now seemed ''nothing but foolish vanity.''
Ambivalence characterized his later courtships and various marriage proposals. A possible reason for this, at least for a period of time, may have been a fear of syphilis -- not an unknown disease in his world. Wilson does not credit stories of Lincoln's possible love children but notes two episodes with prostitutes. If once or twice, why not more often? His longtime law partner, William H. Herndon, thought that ''Lincoln had a strong if not a terrible passion for women: he could hardly keep his hands off.'' Nor would he get married until he was 33.
As Lincoln the outsider learned to be an insider, deep anxieties beset him about his ability to make a living, about success in law, about polite society. His journey led him from country to village to town, where he found the exciting, highborn Mary Todd. A superficial courtship was followed by a commitment to marry. In a brief diversion, he became smitten by another woman, but Mary did not let go. As his brother-in-law put it, ''Lincoln in his conflicts of duty-honor and his love went as crazy as a Loon.'' In time he recovered the ability to rule himself, strengthening his self-respect by getting married. Love, Wilson suggests, seems to have had ''very little to do with it.''
Lincoln's road, therefore, was both harder and ''swampier'' than legend -- or scholars -- have allowed: the difficulties and temptations wider, the fears and depressions deeper. By 34 he appeared to have overcome his troubles, but not many signs of future greatness had yet turned up.
After 130-some years of Lincoln appraisals, how can a scholar, especially one as extraordinarily careful and fair as Wilson, create a startlingly new Lincoln? Wilson's achievement stems in part from the respect the culture has acquired for oral history (which often gives voice to the voiceless) and from his having put together, with his colleague Rodney O. Davis, the Szold Professor of History at Knox College, the definitive edition of the reminiscences of about 250 people who knew Lincoln: ''Herndon's Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements About Abraham Lincoln'' (1998). The two men have also been assembling, but have not yet published, the similarly massive recollections of Herndon himself -- the person who knew Lincoln better than anyone but Mary Todd. Historians have long used these oft-conflicting, difficult-to-read manuscripts, but Wilson's familiarity with them is unsurpassed.
The bulk of the reminiscences collected by Herndon were from 1865-66 and, as Wilson explains, emphasize the ''honorable, or at least unobjectionable.'' But ''Honor's voice,'' as Wilson calls them, ''can tell us a great deal, and sometimes tells us much more than it intended.''
This book establishes Wilson as the leading historian of the young and private Lincoln. Still, others sifting through the same sources may reach somewhat different conclusions, or take matters further. Consider the story about Lincoln's visiting a prostitute and, after undressing, realizing that he is $2 short of the needed $5 fee. He is offered credit but he departs, leaving the woman astonished at his integrity. Wilson knows that this sounds like ''a deliberate parody of the Honest Abe Lincoln legend,'' yet he accepts it. But might not a less cautious biographer venture an additional step, teasing out of this story and other evidence the possibility of a homosexual young man, even if observers and participants failed to speak of such?
Focusing on the private Lincoln while mostly ignoring the public one can obscure the private, too. For example, to prevent a quorum at a session of the Illinois State Legislature in 1840, Representative Lincoln jumped out of a window of the building where the members were meeting. Wilson sees this as a sign of private distress. That the leap was intended to influence important financial legislation during a debilitating economic depression is largely lost. Biographers, then, will have to use ''Honor's Voice'' with both admiration and a critical eye.
IT is profitable to divide the Lincoln literature roughly into two schools: ''Lincoln the man'' and ''Lincoln the god.'' Both have their uses. Wilson's book, with its understated, even prose, falls plainly into the first camp, and it makes a fine counterpoint to Garry Wills's ''Lincoln at Gettysburg,'' with its portrait of a President who ''remade America'' with a brief speech. Had Wilson claimed to be showing all of Lincoln, he might be criticized for missing some of the elements that make his subject great. As it is, he makes a very important start toward a new understanding of the greatest of Americans.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
Writing about Lincoln is not something to be brushed off as simply a scholarly exercise. In our multicultural age, he remains a man of world-historic significance, the very symbol of what is best about the United States. During the Iranian revolution, a reporter saw a big painted slogan in Teheran: ''Government of the people, by the people, for the people.'' During Jiang Zemin's recent visit to the United States, the Chinese President conjured up Lincoln's memory. So has Pope John Paul II. When Colin Powell announced his refusal to run for the Presidency, he held up but one name. The Lincoln scholar's responsibilities are large. ''Honor's Voice'' gives Americans reason to be grateful that the field continues to attract students of ability and integrity.
TWIN STUDIES AND JOSEF MENGELE...
t one point in his discussion of Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor who performed unspeakably savage experiments on identical twins, Lawrence Wright poses an interesting question: Given the Nazi attachment to genetic predeterminism, could Mengele have been ''a good scientist and a decent human being in another political environment? Was he born to be a monster? Or did he simply adapt to a monstrous situation?'' My first impulse was to reply with a resounding, ''Monster!,'' to think Mengele was pure, irremediable evil -- genotypically, phenotypically, embryonically evil, whatever it takes to keep him down there, in the primal swamp of taxonomy, among the mutants and grotesques and evolutionary dead ends.
But if you're skeptical of the principle that there is such a thing as innate evil, or innate genius, or innate neuroticism, or innate any particular, meaningful trait at all -- and I count myself among the skeptics -- then you're stuck having to do the detestable, and give Mengele the benefit of the doubt, and imagine a time when he could have been a decent scientist, a reasonable human being and a positive force in society.
Lawrence Wright doesn't tell us where he stands on the Mengele-as-Monster issue, and the omission is just as well. ''Twins'' is a slender, cleanly written and easygoing book, an extended essay with a lengthy bibliographical appendix. It's not likely to change anybody's mind about how much genes do or don't matter to the creation of self and temperament, and that failure, oddly enough, is one of its strengths. Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of ''Remembering Satan,'' clearly is in the camp of those who believe, along with the famed twins researcher Thomas J. Bouchard, that intelligence and personality are largely if not exclusively inherited. He states plainly that ''we don't become. . . . We are'' and that ''there is finally no escape from being the people we were born to be.'' His tone is never smug or strident, though, and so one is never tempted to toss the book across the room, as I have done with several recent biobehavioral and Darwinesque books that informed me of the universal truthfulness of every male-female stereotype I have ever heard.
Yet the gentle style can't entirely compensate for the problems of content. The problems are not so much the author's as they are inherent to the field of behavioral genetics, which simultaneously equivocates on its findings and exaggerates its accomplishments. On the one hand, for example, Wright claims that the ''most surprising and important discovery'' of behavioral genetics is that one's family environment has ''essentially no effect on the development of personality,'' and that other aspects of the environment, like interactions with peers, birth order and accidents have a far greater impact on personality than the family does. On the other hand, he concedes that the family makes a big difference in a child's level of ''positive emotionality,'' and that ''the one thing a good family can do is to make a child happy.'' Elsewhere, we are told that parents also influence a child's level of self-esteem and motivation. Hence, the degree to which you are persuaded that the ''family makes no difference'' in personality formation hinges on the degree to which you think happiness and self-confidence are core features of personality or mere bells and whistles.
And though we learn that identical twins who were reared apart turn out to be shockingly similar in many features of their lives and selves -- including their favorite colors, their gesticulations, their I.Q. scores -- we also learn that they are almost never attracted to the same people. If one's love life and mate choice are not under some degree of ''genetic control,'' then how can we confidently declare that we don't ''become'' but ''are''? Are we not defined in a profound sense by the relationships we forge with others, by whom we love and whom we ignore?
Still, ''Twins'' has its allure. It offers a good discussion of the curious and still mysterious biology of twinning, and a pithy history of the eugenics movement, a legacy of Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton. At the heart of the book is a discussion of contemporary behavioral genetics, a field based largely on twin research from Bouchard's lab at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere. The premise of twin research is that because identical, or monozygotic, twins have all their genes in common, while fraternal, or dizygotic, twins share an average of only 50 percent of their genes, a comparison of the two groups of twins can help us disentangle the influence of heredity from the impact of upbringing on any trait we choose to examine. Most prized to scientists have been the identical twins reared apart, who, by virtue of their separate upbringing, supposedly are free of the confounding fact that parents may treat identical twins alike and thus muddy the meaning of any commonalities the twins display.
By comparing identical twins reared apart with fraternal twins reared apart, and with twins and non-twins reared together in varying combinations, researchers have come up with an array of ''heritability correlations,'' numbers signifying the degree to which the differences in a trait observed between two sets of people can be ascribed to genetic, as opposed to environmental, factors. They have concluded that ''tough-mindedness'' is 54 percent heritable, for example, while radicalism is 65 percent heritable. On the question of I.Q. scores, statistical swords have clashed long and angrily. Figures generally have ranged from 40 percent heritable to 70 percent heritable; Bouchard recently declared the consensus figure for the various studies to be a heritability of 66 percent.
What are we to make of these data? Critics of twin research have complained that identical twins reared apart were not always as separate as advertised -- that they were rarely adopted away from their natal homes at birth, but instead often spent their infancy together, and that many of the twins met periodically throughout their lives, thus calling into doubt their ostensible lack of mutual influence on each other. Critics also have complained that Bouchard keeps his data close to his vest and will not share it freely and in unprocessed form, though it's only fair to Bouchard to note that scientists rarely disseminate raw data from their notebooks.
There are other reasons for a drachma of skepticism. How alike, after all, are these identical twins reared apart? The stories fed to a fascinated public are rife with tales of reunited twins, like the famous case of James Lewis and James Springer, who had each married and divorced women named Linda and then remarried women named Betty; who named their dogs Toy and their firstborn sons James Alan or James Allen. What the public doesn't hear of are the many discrepancies between the twins. I know of two cases in which television producers tried to do documentaries about identical twins reared apart, but then found the twins so distinctive in personal style -- one talky and outgoing, the other shy and insecure -- that the shows collapsed of their own unpersuasiveness. In addition, we must wonder about the multiple-choice tests that purport to measure personality traits and on which so much of behavioral genetics work relies. Many of these ''personality inventories'' read remarkably like quizzes from Cosmopolitan magazine and could well be as unreliable as, say, I.Q. tests.
Wright notes that ''there has simply been nothing on the environmental side to counter the power of twin and adoption studies,'' and the complaint is accurate enough. Until Einstein came along, nobody had a good alternative to cosmic ether, either. Sometimes a confession of ignorance is the only defensible stand.
By LAWRENCE WRIGHT
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Read the Review
TWO LIVES-- ONE PERSONALITY?
A pair of identical twin girls were surrendered to an adoption agency in New York City in the late 1960s. The twins, who are known in psychological literature as Amy and Beth, might have gone through life in obscurity had they not come to the attention of Dr. Peter Neubauer, a prominent psychiatrist at New York University's Psychoanalytic Institute and a director of the Freud Archives. Neubauer believed at the time that twins posed such a burden to parents, and to themselves in the form of certain developmental hazards, that adopted twins were better off being raised separately, with no knowledge of their twinship.
Neubauer also recognized the exceptional research possibilities such a separation offered. Studies of twins reared apart are one of the most powerful tools that scholars have to analyze the relative contributions of heredity and environment to the makeup of individual human natures. Identical twins are rare, however, and twins who have been separated and brought up in different families are particularly unusual. Neubauer was aware of a mere handful of studies examining twins reared apart, and in most cases the twins being studied had been separated for only part of their childhoods and were reunited at some point long before the study began. Here was an opportunity to look at twins from the moment they were separated, and to trace them through childhood, observing at each stage of development the parallel or diverging courses of their lives. Because the sisters shared the same genetic makeup, one could evaluate the environmental effects on the twins' personalities, their behavior, their health, their intelligence. Such a study might not set to rest the ancient quarrel over the relative importance of nature versus nurture, but there were few other experiments one could imagine that would be more pertinent to an understanding of the human condition.
Neubauer sought out other instances in which newborn twins were being placed for adoption, eventually adding three other pairs of identical twins and a set of identical triplets to his project. The complete study has never been published, and Neubauer is reluctant to discuss the details of how he enlisted twins into the project. Indeed, much of the history of the study has been kept secret. In any case, by the time that Amy and Beth were sent to their adoptive homes, there was already an extensive team of psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, observers, and testers waiting to follow them as they moved from infancy to adolescence. Every step of childhood would be documented through psychological and ability tests, school records, parental and sibling interviews, films, and the minutes of nearly 1,000 weekly conferences. Not surprisingly, the study was slanted toward psychoanalytical concerns. "In particular, we were looking for the psychological variables which influence developmental processes," says Neubauer. One would expect identical children placed in separate environments to be formed by different family dynamics. Broadly speaking, the personality differences between the girls as they grew older would measure the validity of the most fundamental assumption of clinical psychology, which is that experience--and, in particular, our family background--shapes us into the people we become.
The agency that placed the children shortly after their birth informed the potential adoptive parents that the girls were already involved in a study of child development, and the parents were strongly urged to continue it; however, neither the parents nor the girls themselves would ever be told that they were twins.
The sisters were fair-skinned blondes with small oval faces, blue-gray eyes, and slightly snub noses. Amy was three ounces heavier and half an inch taller than Beth at birth, an advantage in weight and height that persisted throughout their childhood. The girls were adopted into families that were, in certain respects, quite similar. They were placed in Jewish homes in New York State. The mothers stayed at home, and in each family there was a son almost exactly seven years older than the twin. (In Beth's family, there was an older sister as well.) In other respects, the environments were profoundly different: notably, Amy's family was lower class and Beth's was well off. Amy's mother was overweight and socially awkward. Her personality was flat and her self-esteem was low. Although she had a compassionate side to her nature, she was an insecure mother who felt threatened by her daughter's attractiveness. Beth's mother, on the other hand, doted on her daughter and for the entire ten years of the study spoke positively of Beth's personality and her place in the family. The team described Beth's mother as pleasant, youthful, slim, chic, poised, self-confident, dynamic, and cheerful. Whereas Amy's mother seemed to regard Amy as a problem, a stubborn outsider, Beth's mother treated her daughter as "the fun child." Instead of separating Beth from other members of the family, Beth's mother went out of her way to minimize the differences, to the extent of dyeing her own hair to emphasize their similarities. The girls' fathers were very much like each other--confident, relaxed, at ease with themselves--but different in their treatment of the girls. Amy's father came to agree with his wife that Amy was a disappointment, whereas Beth's father was more available and supportive. Amy's brother was a handsome academic star, the golden boy of the family. Beth's brother, however, was a disturbed child who suffered from learning disabilities and uncontrolled behavior that got him expelled from several schools and in trouble with the law. All in all, the research team characterized Amy's family as a well-knit threesome--mother, father, and son--plus an alienated Amy. It was a family that placed a high value on academic success, simplicity, tradition, and emotional restraint. Beth's family, on the other hand, was sophisticated, full of energy--"frenetic" at times--and it tended to put more emphasis on materialism than on education. Clearly, Beth was more at the center of her home than Amy was in hers.
And how did these identical twins in such contrasting environments turn out? As might be expected, Amy's problems began early and progressed in a disturbing direction. As an infant, she was tense and demanding. She sucked her thumb; she bit her nails; she clung to her blanket; she cried when left alone. She wet her bed until she was four and continued to have "accidents" for several years more. She was prone to nightmares and full of fears. By the age of ten, when the study concluded, she had developed a kind of artificial quality that manifested itself in role-playing, gender confusion, and invented illnesses. Shy, indifferent, suffering from a serious learning disorder, pathologically immature, she was a stereotypical picture of a rejected child. The team proposed that if only Amy had had a mother who had been more empathetic, more tolerant of her limitations, more open and forthcoming (like Beth's mother), then Amy's life might have turned out far better. If only her father had been more consistently available and affectionate (like Beth's father), then she might have been better able to negotiate the oedipal dramas of childhood and achieve a clearer picture of her own sexual role. If only her brother had been less strongly favored (like Beth's brother), Amy would have been spared the mortifying comparisons that were openly drawn in her family. In theory, if Amy had been raised in Beth's family, the sources of her crippling immaturity would have been erased, and she would have been another kind of person--happier, one presumes, and more nearly whole.
In nearly every respect, however, Beth's personality followed in lockstep with Amy's dismal development. Thumb-sucking, nail-biting, blanket-clenching, and bed-wetting characterized her infancy and early childhood. She became a hypochondriac and, like Amy, was afraid of the dark and of being left alone. She, too, became lost in role-playing, and the artificial nature of her personality was, if anything, more pronounced than that of Amy's. She had similar problems in school and with her peers. On the surface, she had a far closer relationship with her mother than Amy did with hers, but on psychological tests she gave vent to a longing for maternal affection that was eerily the same as her identical sister's. Beth did seem to be more successful with her friends and less confused than Amy, but she was also less connected to her feelings.
The differences between the girls seemed merely stylistic; despite the differences in their environments, their pathology was fundamentally the same. Did their family lives mean so little? Were they destined to become the people they turned out to be because of some inherent genetic predisposition toward sadness and unreality? And what would psychologists have made of either girl if they had not known that she was a twin? Wouldn't they have blamed the symptoms of her neurosis on the parenting styles of the family she grew up in? What does that say about the presumptions of psychology?
Twins pose questions we might not think to ask if we lived in a world without them. They are both an unsettling presence, because they undermine our sense of individual uniqueness, and a score-settling presence, because their mere existence allows us to test certain ideas about how we are the way we are. Every culture has had to confront the twin phenomenon and come to its own response. Often that response has been to kill the children and to ostracize or kill the mother as well--an implicit acknowledgment of the threat twins can pose to the presumptions of an established order. From ancient times men have been known to cut off one of their testicles in the mistaken belief that it would eliminate the possibility of twin conceptions. Other cultures worship twins as a divine gift; for instance, the voodoo practitioners of West Africa and Haiti exalt twins as supernatural beings with a single soul, who are to be revered and feared. Once a year anyone connected to twins, living or dead, is obligated to make offerings at a ceremonial feast in their honor to avoid "chastisement." In our own culture, we tend to dote on twins and mythologize their specialness through daytime talk shows, which turn them into freaks but which also, to be fair, provide a forum to marvel at the wonder and the mystery of the twin event. Perhaps all these responses are ways of holding twins at bay, since too close a study of twinship might lead to discoveries about ourselves that we are unwilling to make.
In the mid-sixties, when Neubauer began his enquiry into the lives of separated twins, there were no major U.S. twin registries; now the University of Minnesota keeps track of more than 8,000 twin pairs; Virginia Commonwealth University operates the "Virginia 30,000," which follows 15,000 twin pairs plus their siblings, spouses, and parents; there are major registries in Kansas, California, and Kentucky, and smaller ones all over the country. The Veterans Administration maintains records of all twins who served in the Second World War and Vietnam. Pennsylvania State University, with several other institutions, oversees the Black Elderly Twin Study, which uses Medicare records to track down black twins throughout the United States. It is the only large-scale ethnic study in the country, but it may also become the largest study of genetics and aging among women in the world. In Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Australia nearly every twin in the country has been identified. Moreover, in recent years, the technical analysis of twin studies has become increasingly sophisticated and subtle, often taking into account multiple environmental factors, non-twin relatives, and long-term observations. As a result of the variety and complexity of twin studies, along with powerful tools for analysis, the field of behavioral genetics has caused a revolution in the universities that has spilled into political life, reshaping the way our society views human nature and changing the terms of the debate about what government can and should do to improve the lives of its citizens.
Much of the argument over individual differences in intelligence, for instance, arises from the variation between IQ test scores of identical and fraternal twins, the difference being a measure of how much of what we call intelligence is inherited. The field of psychology has been shaken by separated-twin studies, such as the one of Amy and Beth, suggesting that the development of an individual's personality is guided by his genes, with little regard for the family in which he is raised. Matters that instinctively seem to be a reflection of one's personal experience, such as political orientation or the degree of religious commitment, have been shown by various twin studies to be partly under genetic control. Because of the growth of twin studies, and also adoption studies, which examine unrelated individuals reared together (and which complement the study of twins reared apart), the field of behavioral genetics has been able to study traits such as criminality, alcoholism, smoking, homosexuality, marriage and divorce, job satisfaction, hobbies, fears; the results suggest that there are significant genetic contributions in all cases. Even disciplines such as linguistics and economics have seized upon twins as a way of understanding language formation (by looking at twins who create a private idiom), or of calculating the additional earning potential of higher education (by comparing twins who go to college versus twins who don't). There is an air of irrefutability about such studies that make them so appealing. When Linus Pauling proposed that vitamin C could cure the common cold, for instance, twin pairs were separated into two groups, one of which received vitamin C and the other a placebo. Both caught colds, which effectively destroyed Pauling's theory. There are now so many scientists seeking to study twins that the annual festival of twins in Twinsburg, Ohio, allows researchers to set up carnival tents, where browsing twins can stop to take stress tests or fill out questionnaires about their sex lives. Festival organizers even sponsor a prize for the best research project. Last year 90,000 people--most of them twins--attended the event.
All this comes after several decades of heightened political struggle between those, on the one hand, who believe that people are largely the same and that differences are imposed upon them by their environment, and those, on the other hand, who conclude that people differ mainly because of their genes, and that the environments they find themselves in are largely of their own making or choosing. Obviously, the roots of liberal versus conservative views are buried in such presumptions about human nature.
This argument has been raging for centuries, with science entering evidence on either side and public opinion shifting in response. Using twins, and also data derived from adoption studies, scientists can now estimate what proportion of the variation in our intelligence, our personality, our behavior, and even seemingly random life events such as bankruptcy or the death of a spouse, might be caused by inherited tendencies. The broad movement from environmentalism to genetic determinism that has occurred in psychology over the last thirty years has foreshadowed the increasingly popular belief that people are genetically programmed to become the way they are, and therefore little can be done, in the way of changing the environment, that will make an appreciable difference in improving test scores or lowering crime rates or reducing poverty, to name several conspicuous examples.
The hallmark of liberalism is that changes in the social environment produce corresponding changes in human development. But if people's destinies are written in their genes, why waste money on social programs? Such thinking has led to a profound conservative shift in the last thirty years. This can be demonstrated by comparing the shifting climate of opinion in the United States, which in 1965 produced the Great Society--a vast number of social programs designed to improve the health and welfare of the poor, the elderly, and the minority populations--and in 1995 brought about the Contract with America, which generated cutbacks in many of those same programs and marked a change in attitude about what government can be expected to do for its citizens. These changes have taken place not only in the West but in many other countries as well. Indeed, the widespread retreat of communism as a force in world politics is doubtlessly linked to the collapse of faith in social engineering, caused by the failure of communism to create the positive changes expected of it.
The genetic idea has had a tumultuous passage through the twentieth century, but the prevailing view of human nature at the end of the century resembles in many ways the view we had at the beginning. That is that people are largely responsible for their station in life, and that circumstances do not so much dictate the outcome of a person's life as they reflect the inner nature of the person living it. Twins have been used to prove a point, and the point is that we don't become. We are.
But if you're skeptical of the principle that there is such a thing as innate evil, or innate genius, or innate neuroticism, or innate any particular, meaningful trait at all -- and I count myself among the skeptics -- then you're stuck having to do the detestable, and give Mengele the benefit of the doubt, and imagine a time when he could have been a decent scientist, a reasonable human being and a positive force in society.
Lawrence Wright doesn't tell us where he stands on the Mengele-as-Monster issue, and the omission is just as well. ''Twins'' is a slender, cleanly written and easygoing book, an extended essay with a lengthy bibliographical appendix. It's not likely to change anybody's mind about how much genes do or don't matter to the creation of self and temperament, and that failure, oddly enough, is one of its strengths. Wright, a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of ''Remembering Satan,'' clearly is in the camp of those who believe, along with the famed twins researcher Thomas J. Bouchard, that intelligence and personality are largely if not exclusively inherited. He states plainly that ''we don't become. . . . We are'' and that ''there is finally no escape from being the people we were born to be.'' His tone is never smug or strident, though, and so one is never tempted to toss the book across the room, as I have done with several recent biobehavioral and Darwinesque books that informed me of the universal truthfulness of every male-female stereotype I have ever heard.
Yet the gentle style can't entirely compensate for the problems of content. The problems are not so much the author's as they are inherent to the field of behavioral genetics, which simultaneously equivocates on its findings and exaggerates its accomplishments. On the one hand, for example, Wright claims that the ''most surprising and important discovery'' of behavioral genetics is that one's family environment has ''essentially no effect on the development of personality,'' and that other aspects of the environment, like interactions with peers, birth order and accidents have a far greater impact on personality than the family does. On the other hand, he concedes that the family makes a big difference in a child's level of ''positive emotionality,'' and that ''the one thing a good family can do is to make a child happy.'' Elsewhere, we are told that parents also influence a child's level of self-esteem and motivation. Hence, the degree to which you are persuaded that the ''family makes no difference'' in personality formation hinges on the degree to which you think happiness and self-confidence are core features of personality or mere bells and whistles.
And though we learn that identical twins who were reared apart turn out to be shockingly similar in many features of their lives and selves -- including their favorite colors, their gesticulations, their I.Q. scores -- we also learn that they are almost never attracted to the same people. If one's love life and mate choice are not under some degree of ''genetic control,'' then how can we confidently declare that we don't ''become'' but ''are''? Are we not defined in a profound sense by the relationships we forge with others, by whom we love and whom we ignore?
Still, ''Twins'' has its allure. It offers a good discussion of the curious and still mysterious biology of twinning, and a pithy history of the eugenics movement, a legacy of Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton. At the heart of the book is a discussion of contemporary behavioral genetics, a field based largely on twin research from Bouchard's lab at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere. The premise of twin research is that because identical, or monozygotic, twins have all their genes in common, while fraternal, or dizygotic, twins share an average of only 50 percent of their genes, a comparison of the two groups of twins can help us disentangle the influence of heredity from the impact of upbringing on any trait we choose to examine. Most prized to scientists have been the identical twins reared apart, who, by virtue of their separate upbringing, supposedly are free of the confounding fact that parents may treat identical twins alike and thus muddy the meaning of any commonalities the twins display.
By comparing identical twins reared apart with fraternal twins reared apart, and with twins and non-twins reared together in varying combinations, researchers have come up with an array of ''heritability correlations,'' numbers signifying the degree to which the differences in a trait observed between two sets of people can be ascribed to genetic, as opposed to environmental, factors. They have concluded that ''tough-mindedness'' is 54 percent heritable, for example, while radicalism is 65 percent heritable. On the question of I.Q. scores, statistical swords have clashed long and angrily. Figures generally have ranged from 40 percent heritable to 70 percent heritable; Bouchard recently declared the consensus figure for the various studies to be a heritability of 66 percent.
What are we to make of these data? Critics of twin research have complained that identical twins reared apart were not always as separate as advertised -- that they were rarely adopted away from their natal homes at birth, but instead often spent their infancy together, and that many of the twins met periodically throughout their lives, thus calling into doubt their ostensible lack of mutual influence on each other. Critics also have complained that Bouchard keeps his data close to his vest and will not share it freely and in unprocessed form, though it's only fair to Bouchard to note that scientists rarely disseminate raw data from their notebooks.
There are other reasons for a drachma of skepticism. How alike, after all, are these identical twins reared apart? The stories fed to a fascinated public are rife with tales of reunited twins, like the famous case of James Lewis and James Springer, who had each married and divorced women named Linda and then remarried women named Betty; who named their dogs Toy and their firstborn sons James Alan or James Allen. What the public doesn't hear of are the many discrepancies between the twins. I know of two cases in which television producers tried to do documentaries about identical twins reared apart, but then found the twins so distinctive in personal style -- one talky and outgoing, the other shy and insecure -- that the shows collapsed of their own unpersuasiveness. In addition, we must wonder about the multiple-choice tests that purport to measure personality traits and on which so much of behavioral genetics work relies. Many of these ''personality inventories'' read remarkably like quizzes from Cosmopolitan magazine and could well be as unreliable as, say, I.Q. tests.
Wright notes that ''there has simply been nothing on the environmental side to counter the power of twin and adoption studies,'' and the complaint is accurate enough. Until Einstein came along, nobody had a good alternative to cosmic ether, either. Sometimes a confession of ignorance is the only defensible stand.
By LAWRENCE WRIGHT
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Read the Review
TWO LIVES-- ONE PERSONALITY?
A pair of identical twin girls were surrendered to an adoption agency in New York City in the late 1960s. The twins, who are known in psychological literature as Amy and Beth, might have gone through life in obscurity had they not come to the attention of Dr. Peter Neubauer, a prominent psychiatrist at New York University's Psychoanalytic Institute and a director of the Freud Archives. Neubauer believed at the time that twins posed such a burden to parents, and to themselves in the form of certain developmental hazards, that adopted twins were better off being raised separately, with no knowledge of their twinship.
Neubauer also recognized the exceptional research possibilities such a separation offered. Studies of twins reared apart are one of the most powerful tools that scholars have to analyze the relative contributions of heredity and environment to the makeup of individual human natures. Identical twins are rare, however, and twins who have been separated and brought up in different families are particularly unusual. Neubauer was aware of a mere handful of studies examining twins reared apart, and in most cases the twins being studied had been separated for only part of their childhoods and were reunited at some point long before the study began. Here was an opportunity to look at twins from the moment they were separated, and to trace them through childhood, observing at each stage of development the parallel or diverging courses of their lives. Because the sisters shared the same genetic makeup, one could evaluate the environmental effects on the twins' personalities, their behavior, their health, their intelligence. Such a study might not set to rest the ancient quarrel over the relative importance of nature versus nurture, but there were few other experiments one could imagine that would be more pertinent to an understanding of the human condition.
Neubauer sought out other instances in which newborn twins were being placed for adoption, eventually adding three other pairs of identical twins and a set of identical triplets to his project. The complete study has never been published, and Neubauer is reluctant to discuss the details of how he enlisted twins into the project. Indeed, much of the history of the study has been kept secret. In any case, by the time that Amy and Beth were sent to their adoptive homes, there was already an extensive team of psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, observers, and testers waiting to follow them as they moved from infancy to adolescence. Every step of childhood would be documented through psychological and ability tests, school records, parental and sibling interviews, films, and the minutes of nearly 1,000 weekly conferences. Not surprisingly, the study was slanted toward psychoanalytical concerns. "In particular, we were looking for the psychological variables which influence developmental processes," says Neubauer. One would expect identical children placed in separate environments to be formed by different family dynamics. Broadly speaking, the personality differences between the girls as they grew older would measure the validity of the most fundamental assumption of clinical psychology, which is that experience--and, in particular, our family background--shapes us into the people we become.
The agency that placed the children shortly after their birth informed the potential adoptive parents that the girls were already involved in a study of child development, and the parents were strongly urged to continue it; however, neither the parents nor the girls themselves would ever be told that they were twins.
The sisters were fair-skinned blondes with small oval faces, blue-gray eyes, and slightly snub noses. Amy was three ounces heavier and half an inch taller than Beth at birth, an advantage in weight and height that persisted throughout their childhood. The girls were adopted into families that were, in certain respects, quite similar. They were placed in Jewish homes in New York State. The mothers stayed at home, and in each family there was a son almost exactly seven years older than the twin. (In Beth's family, there was an older sister as well.) In other respects, the environments were profoundly different: notably, Amy's family was lower class and Beth's was well off. Amy's mother was overweight and socially awkward. Her personality was flat and her self-esteem was low. Although she had a compassionate side to her nature, she was an insecure mother who felt threatened by her daughter's attractiveness. Beth's mother, on the other hand, doted on her daughter and for the entire ten years of the study spoke positively of Beth's personality and her place in the family. The team described Beth's mother as pleasant, youthful, slim, chic, poised, self-confident, dynamic, and cheerful. Whereas Amy's mother seemed to regard Amy as a problem, a stubborn outsider, Beth's mother treated her daughter as "the fun child." Instead of separating Beth from other members of the family, Beth's mother went out of her way to minimize the differences, to the extent of dyeing her own hair to emphasize their similarities. The girls' fathers were very much like each other--confident, relaxed, at ease with themselves--but different in their treatment of the girls. Amy's father came to agree with his wife that Amy was a disappointment, whereas Beth's father was more available and supportive. Amy's brother was a handsome academic star, the golden boy of the family. Beth's brother, however, was a disturbed child who suffered from learning disabilities and uncontrolled behavior that got him expelled from several schools and in trouble with the law. All in all, the research team characterized Amy's family as a well-knit threesome--mother, father, and son--plus an alienated Amy. It was a family that placed a high value on academic success, simplicity, tradition, and emotional restraint. Beth's family, on the other hand, was sophisticated, full of energy--"frenetic" at times--and it tended to put more emphasis on materialism than on education. Clearly, Beth was more at the center of her home than Amy was in hers.
And how did these identical twins in such contrasting environments turn out? As might be expected, Amy's problems began early and progressed in a disturbing direction. As an infant, she was tense and demanding. She sucked her thumb; she bit her nails; she clung to her blanket; she cried when left alone. She wet her bed until she was four and continued to have "accidents" for several years more. She was prone to nightmares and full of fears. By the age of ten, when the study concluded, she had developed a kind of artificial quality that manifested itself in role-playing, gender confusion, and invented illnesses. Shy, indifferent, suffering from a serious learning disorder, pathologically immature, she was a stereotypical picture of a rejected child. The team proposed that if only Amy had had a mother who had been more empathetic, more tolerant of her limitations, more open and forthcoming (like Beth's mother), then Amy's life might have turned out far better. If only her father had been more consistently available and affectionate (like Beth's father), then she might have been better able to negotiate the oedipal dramas of childhood and achieve a clearer picture of her own sexual role. If only her brother had been less strongly favored (like Beth's brother), Amy would have been spared the mortifying comparisons that were openly drawn in her family. In theory, if Amy had been raised in Beth's family, the sources of her crippling immaturity would have been erased, and she would have been another kind of person--happier, one presumes, and more nearly whole.
In nearly every respect, however, Beth's personality followed in lockstep with Amy's dismal development. Thumb-sucking, nail-biting, blanket-clenching, and bed-wetting characterized her infancy and early childhood. She became a hypochondriac and, like Amy, was afraid of the dark and of being left alone. She, too, became lost in role-playing, and the artificial nature of her personality was, if anything, more pronounced than that of Amy's. She had similar problems in school and with her peers. On the surface, she had a far closer relationship with her mother than Amy did with hers, but on psychological tests she gave vent to a longing for maternal affection that was eerily the same as her identical sister's. Beth did seem to be more successful with her friends and less confused than Amy, but she was also less connected to her feelings.
The differences between the girls seemed merely stylistic; despite the differences in their environments, their pathology was fundamentally the same. Did their family lives mean so little? Were they destined to become the people they turned out to be because of some inherent genetic predisposition toward sadness and unreality? And what would psychologists have made of either girl if they had not known that she was a twin? Wouldn't they have blamed the symptoms of her neurosis on the parenting styles of the family she grew up in? What does that say about the presumptions of psychology?
Twins pose questions we might not think to ask if we lived in a world without them. They are both an unsettling presence, because they undermine our sense of individual uniqueness, and a score-settling presence, because their mere existence allows us to test certain ideas about how we are the way we are. Every culture has had to confront the twin phenomenon and come to its own response. Often that response has been to kill the children and to ostracize or kill the mother as well--an implicit acknowledgment of the threat twins can pose to the presumptions of an established order. From ancient times men have been known to cut off one of their testicles in the mistaken belief that it would eliminate the possibility of twin conceptions. Other cultures worship twins as a divine gift; for instance, the voodoo practitioners of West Africa and Haiti exalt twins as supernatural beings with a single soul, who are to be revered and feared. Once a year anyone connected to twins, living or dead, is obligated to make offerings at a ceremonial feast in their honor to avoid "chastisement." In our own culture, we tend to dote on twins and mythologize their specialness through daytime talk shows, which turn them into freaks but which also, to be fair, provide a forum to marvel at the wonder and the mystery of the twin event. Perhaps all these responses are ways of holding twins at bay, since too close a study of twinship might lead to discoveries about ourselves that we are unwilling to make.
In the mid-sixties, when Neubauer began his enquiry into the lives of separated twins, there were no major U.S. twin registries; now the University of Minnesota keeps track of more than 8,000 twin pairs; Virginia Commonwealth University operates the "Virginia 30,000," which follows 15,000 twin pairs plus their siblings, spouses, and parents; there are major registries in Kansas, California, and Kentucky, and smaller ones all over the country. The Veterans Administration maintains records of all twins who served in the Second World War and Vietnam. Pennsylvania State University, with several other institutions, oversees the Black Elderly Twin Study, which uses Medicare records to track down black twins throughout the United States. It is the only large-scale ethnic study in the country, but it may also become the largest study of genetics and aging among women in the world. In Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Australia nearly every twin in the country has been identified. Moreover, in recent years, the technical analysis of twin studies has become increasingly sophisticated and subtle, often taking into account multiple environmental factors, non-twin relatives, and long-term observations. As a result of the variety and complexity of twin studies, along with powerful tools for analysis, the field of behavioral genetics has caused a revolution in the universities that has spilled into political life, reshaping the way our society views human nature and changing the terms of the debate about what government can and should do to improve the lives of its citizens.
Much of the argument over individual differences in intelligence, for instance, arises from the variation between IQ test scores of identical and fraternal twins, the difference being a measure of how much of what we call intelligence is inherited. The field of psychology has been shaken by separated-twin studies, such as the one of Amy and Beth, suggesting that the development of an individual's personality is guided by his genes, with little regard for the family in which he is raised. Matters that instinctively seem to be a reflection of one's personal experience, such as political orientation or the degree of religious commitment, have been shown by various twin studies to be partly under genetic control. Because of the growth of twin studies, and also adoption studies, which examine unrelated individuals reared together (and which complement the study of twins reared apart), the field of behavioral genetics has been able to study traits such as criminality, alcoholism, smoking, homosexuality, marriage and divorce, job satisfaction, hobbies, fears; the results suggest that there are significant genetic contributions in all cases. Even disciplines such as linguistics and economics have seized upon twins as a way of understanding language formation (by looking at twins who create a private idiom), or of calculating the additional earning potential of higher education (by comparing twins who go to college versus twins who don't). There is an air of irrefutability about such studies that make them so appealing. When Linus Pauling proposed that vitamin C could cure the common cold, for instance, twin pairs were separated into two groups, one of which received vitamin C and the other a placebo. Both caught colds, which effectively destroyed Pauling's theory. There are now so many scientists seeking to study twins that the annual festival of twins in Twinsburg, Ohio, allows researchers to set up carnival tents, where browsing twins can stop to take stress tests or fill out questionnaires about their sex lives. Festival organizers even sponsor a prize for the best research project. Last year 90,000 people--most of them twins--attended the event.
All this comes after several decades of heightened political struggle between those, on the one hand, who believe that people are largely the same and that differences are imposed upon them by their environment, and those, on the other hand, who conclude that people differ mainly because of their genes, and that the environments they find themselves in are largely of their own making or choosing. Obviously, the roots of liberal versus conservative views are buried in such presumptions about human nature.
This argument has been raging for centuries, with science entering evidence on either side and public opinion shifting in response. Using twins, and also data derived from adoption studies, scientists can now estimate what proportion of the variation in our intelligence, our personality, our behavior, and even seemingly random life events such as bankruptcy or the death of a spouse, might be caused by inherited tendencies. The broad movement from environmentalism to genetic determinism that has occurred in psychology over the last thirty years has foreshadowed the increasingly popular belief that people are genetically programmed to become the way they are, and therefore little can be done, in the way of changing the environment, that will make an appreciable difference in improving test scores or lowering crime rates or reducing poverty, to name several conspicuous examples.
The hallmark of liberalism is that changes in the social environment produce corresponding changes in human development. But if people's destinies are written in their genes, why waste money on social programs? Such thinking has led to a profound conservative shift in the last thirty years. This can be demonstrated by comparing the shifting climate of opinion in the United States, which in 1965 produced the Great Society--a vast number of social programs designed to improve the health and welfare of the poor, the elderly, and the minority populations--and in 1995 brought about the Contract with America, which generated cutbacks in many of those same programs and marked a change in attitude about what government can be expected to do for its citizens. These changes have taken place not only in the West but in many other countries as well. Indeed, the widespread retreat of communism as a force in world politics is doubtlessly linked to the collapse of faith in social engineering, caused by the failure of communism to create the positive changes expected of it.
The genetic idea has had a tumultuous passage through the twentieth century, but the prevailing view of human nature at the end of the century resembles in many ways the view we had at the beginning. That is that people are largely responsible for their station in life, and that circumstances do not so much dictate the outcome of a person's life as they reflect the inner nature of the person living it. Twins have been used to prove a point, and the point is that we don't become. We are.
EVERY CHILD SHOULD GO TO COLLEGE? FUCK THAT SHIT
Our attempt to understand the origins of America's world role turns now to the themes of the elements and balance of power. We will first examine the various reasons for the balance of power that contemporaries set forth according to their rational beliefs about the world. Our work, as the study progresses, is to analyze these explanations and to weigh them for significance against the world with which contemporaries dealt
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
Realism entered the plane of government and diplomacy. Influential among the realists who applied theory to policy was George Kennan, a student of history, diplomat, policy analyst, and expert on Soviet affairs. Kennan believed that the most serious fault of American policy was what he called the "legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems." That approach he labeled idealistic, for it projected the common concepts of American law and politics into international relations--as in the Hague conferences on disarmament, the Kellogg Pact to make war illegal, and the League of Nations. Remarkably, Kennan asserted that realism would free foreign affairs from concepts of right and wrong, and correct the "assumption that state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment.... It is a curious thing, but it is true, that the legalistic approach to world affairs, rooted as it unquestionably is in a desire to do away with war and violence, makes violence more enduring, more terrible, and more destructive to political stability than did the older motives of national interest." Kennan pleaded in the early 1950s for the realism of power politics--or, as he wrote, for whatever "is realistic in concept, and founded in an endeavor to see both ourselves and others as we really are." In his cabled dispatches from Moscow to the State Department, Kennan urged--as strongly as in his later writings, including Realities of American Foreign Policy--that relations with Russia be placed entirely on a "realistic and matter-of-fact basis," guided not by morality or altruism, but by the strengths and weaknesses of nations.
The nation's rise in the world, from the perspective of the realists, rested on power and its elements, which included geography, natural resources, population, industrial development, military ability, and national morale. The balance of power enabled the United States in the mid-twentieth century to pursue interests in remote regions of the earth through trade, cultural activity, and war. Opposed as it was to moralism, realism nevertheless reflected not merely a concern for fact or reality but also a regard for elemental power as force and influence. Realism was a way of looking at the world, comprehended as power politics. For our purposes, power is defined as the qualities or properties that make possible the national exertion of influence or force in the world. Power, in this sense, means essentially capability rather than actual force or influence, though we may find that the ways influence was exerted might indeed eventually enhance or weaken the power that supported it.
The nation's rise in the world, from the perspective of the realists, rested on power and its elements, which included geography, natural resources, population, industrial development, military ability, and national morale. The balance of power enabled the United States in the mid-twentieth century to pursue interests in remote regions of the earth through trade, cultural activity, and war. Opposed as it was to moralism, realism nevertheless reflected not merely a concern for fact or reality but also a regard for elemental power as force and influence. Realism was a way of looking at the world, comprehended as power politics. For our purposes, power is defined as the qualities or properties that make possible the national exertion of influence or force in the world. Power, in this sense, means essentially capability rather than actual force or influence, though we may find that the ways influence was exerted might indeed eventually enhance or weaken the power that supported it.
Hans J. Morgenthau...Don't even try to read this article.
The political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau did more than any other figure to establish the realist interpretation of international affairs. In 1948 he published his classic treatise Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, which argued that struggle for power was the essence of international affairs. Born in Germany in 1904, Morgenthau fled to Switzerland to escape Hitler and in 1937 emigrated to the United States, where he found the study of international affairs disorganized. While teaching at Brooklyn College, later at the University of Kansas and, beginning in 1943--the year he became a citizen--at the University of Chicago, he criticized the writing in his field by historians and international lawyers as overly legalistic and idealistic. Morgenthau brought from the Old World a pessimism about man's nature and the state of the world, while his scholarly work led him to believe that objective truths about politics could be discovered by human reason. His wealth of knowledge enabled him to lecture to his classes on world politics without a text; one of his students took a stenographic transcript of what he said, which became the draft of his book.
Morgenthau directly related his power theories to the observation that "the United States is at the moment of this writing the most powerful nation on earth." He was intrigued with the problems and rivalries this power created. "International politics," he wrote, "like all politics, is a struggle for power." Power was more than brutal force, it was the central aim of national interest. He proposed that the pursuit of power was the source of state behavior. No matter what the ultimate aims of nations, whether freedom, security, or prosperity, their immediate goal was power. Power was the means to national ends. Political power meant "man's control over the minds and actions of other men." It followed that power was also "a psychological relationship between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised," enabling some people to control the actions of others through orders, threats, persuasion, or a combination of these. Since he had traced the struggle for power back through history, he believed the contest for power must be ever-present.
Morgenthau, impatient with moral sentiment or wishful idealism, believed that the pursuit of power was not necessarily immoral. "To act successfully," he wrote in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics in 1946," ... is political wisdom. To know with despair that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act nevertheless, is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions the least evil one is moral judgment. In the combination of political wisdom, moral courage, and moral judgment, man reconciles his political nature with his moral destiny."
The chief opponents of the realists were the humanitarian moralists who saw the world from a different, ethical perspective. Of a longstanding tradition in the nineteenth century, the moralists included philosophers and writers who attributed America's rising world influence not to external force but to the internal example of a society. They opposed the power politics and imperialism of Europe. One of the early, clearsighted moralists was Albert Gallatin, who wrote "The Mission of the United States" at the time of the Mexican War. "Your mission was, to be a model for all other governments" and "to apply all your faculties to the gradual improvement of your own institutions" and, "by your example, to exert a moral influence most beneficial to mankind at large. Instead of this, an appeal has been made to your worst passions; to cupidity, to the thirst of unjust aggrandizement by brutal force; to the love of military fame and of false glory." Aware that the world powers of the past had been empires and monarchies, the moralists argued that the United States should not act imperially in emulation of them but rather show the way to reform by exhibiting the success of its democratic society. Morgenthau pointed to John C. Calhoun and William Graham Sumner as worthy representatives of this world perspective, the latter writing during the Spanish-American War that "expansionism and imperialism are at war with the best traditions, principles, and interests of the American people."
The realists responded that in the past the moralists could afford to advocate that their nation be small and inconsequential but virtuous. After all, they had lived on a continent insulated from the outside. But their legacy threatened to damage the national interest, which required growing world involvement. Even when leaders made decisions for "realistic" actions, the realists contended, they had been perverted by irrelevant moralistic justifications. A case in point was President McKinley's defense of colonizing the Philippines: after prayer in the wee hours of the morning, he revealed, he had heard the voice of God tell him to annex the islands.
Morgenthau directly related his power theories to the observation that "the United States is at the moment of this writing the most powerful nation on earth." He was intrigued with the problems and rivalries this power created. "International politics," he wrote, "like all politics, is a struggle for power." Power was more than brutal force, it was the central aim of national interest. He proposed that the pursuit of power was the source of state behavior. No matter what the ultimate aims of nations, whether freedom, security, or prosperity, their immediate goal was power. Power was the means to national ends. Political power meant "man's control over the minds and actions of other men." It followed that power was also "a psychological relationship between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised," enabling some people to control the actions of others through orders, threats, persuasion, or a combination of these. Since he had traced the struggle for power back through history, he believed the contest for power must be ever-present.
Morgenthau, impatient with moral sentiment or wishful idealism, believed that the pursuit of power was not necessarily immoral. "To act successfully," he wrote in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics in 1946," ... is political wisdom. To know with despair that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act nevertheless, is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions the least evil one is moral judgment. In the combination of political wisdom, moral courage, and moral judgment, man reconciles his political nature with his moral destiny."
The chief opponents of the realists were the humanitarian moralists who saw the world from a different, ethical perspective. Of a longstanding tradition in the nineteenth century, the moralists included philosophers and writers who attributed America's rising world influence not to external force but to the internal example of a society. They opposed the power politics and imperialism of Europe. One of the early, clearsighted moralists was Albert Gallatin, who wrote "The Mission of the United States" at the time of the Mexican War. "Your mission was, to be a model for all other governments" and "to apply all your faculties to the gradual improvement of your own institutions" and, "by your example, to exert a moral influence most beneficial to mankind at large. Instead of this, an appeal has been made to your worst passions; to cupidity, to the thirst of unjust aggrandizement by brutal force; to the love of military fame and of false glory." Aware that the world powers of the past had been empires and monarchies, the moralists argued that the United States should not act imperially in emulation of them but rather show the way to reform by exhibiting the success of its democratic society. Morgenthau pointed to John C. Calhoun and William Graham Sumner as worthy representatives of this world perspective, the latter writing during the Spanish-American War that "expansionism and imperialism are at war with the best traditions, principles, and interests of the American people."
The realists responded that in the past the moralists could afford to advocate that their nation be small and inconsequential but virtuous. After all, they had lived on a continent insulated from the outside. But their legacy threatened to damage the national interest, which required growing world involvement. Even when leaders made decisions for "realistic" actions, the realists contended, they had been perverted by irrelevant moralistic justifications. A case in point was President McKinley's defense of colonizing the Philippines: after prayer in the wee hours of the morning, he revealed, he had heard the voice of God tell him to annex the islands.
The American Century
The Rise and Decline of the United States as a World Power
By DONALD W. WHITE
Yale University Press
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The Frontiers
At mid-twentieth century, when the second great world war ended, the United States enjoyed wealth and prosperity unknown in foreign lands and rose to a summit of power. The interests and influence of Americans extended far from home. Their commerce was carried by merchant ships and aircraft to distant cities. The dollar was the standard of international finance and the credits of American banks flowed everywhere. Food, clothing, movies, machines, and science made the American name known throughout the world. The people shared their fortune by distributing charitable aid abroad in quantities without precedent. As after earlier wars in their history, their citizen-soldiers were disbanded and sent home. Yet the government pledged to defend friendly states and kept units of its undefeated army in strategic outposts, sea power that patrolled the oceans, and an air force that guarded the sky. It was a time of general peace and faraway local conflicts; no third world war erupted. The United States kept an order favorable to its allies and demonstrated its art of trade and ways of culture and modern living to aged societies.
The frontiers of American interest that came to gird the world began with the first colonial settlements huddled along the Atlantic coast. At independence in 1783, the United States took possession of forest and lake lands westward to the Mississippi River. In 1803 it expanded across the Great Plains of the Louisiana Territory as far as the Rocky Mountains. In 1819 it gained the Florida peninsula. The flatlands of Texas were incorporated into the Union in 1846, as were the forests of Oregon. At the conclusion of the war with Mexico in 1848, the United States won the southwestern desert regions, the Rocky Mountains, and the western coastal slopes all the way to the Pacific Ocean, leaving only minor adjustments, such as the wedge-shaped Gadsden Purchase in the Southwest, to fill out its linear boundaries.
Through treaties, commitments, and unilateral declarations, the United States made allies with far-flung countries in areas where the interests of American trade, philanthropy, culture, and security were often greater than those of any other power, and the boundaries of some distant lands became the frontiers of these interests. These foreign affiliations first covered the Western Hemisphere. As early as 1823 President James Monroe proclaimed influence over both North and South America by opposing European control or meddling. Here the frontiers stood, for the most part, until around the end of the nineteenth century, when in a burst of expansive energy the United States consolidated its hemispheric interests by taking colonies in the West Indies: Puerto Rico, occupied by troops in the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the Virgin Islands, purchased from Denmark in World War I. The Panama Canal Zone came under the jurisdiction of the United States in 1903. To the west the United States extended its possessions deep into the Pacific Ocean, from Alaska, owned since 1867, to the Hawaiian islands and the Philippines in 1898. To connect the American mainland with the Far East, the United States quickly gained as outposts the islands of Guam and Samoa.
At the turn of the century, the area Americans had committed themselves to defend covered the Western Hemisphere and far beyond: on the Atlantic side, from Greenland to Brazil to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America; and on the Pacific side, across the world's largest ocean from Alaska to the Philippines. This area of security, Walter Lippmann calculated in 1943, comprised nearly 40 percent of the land surface of the earth. There it remained until World War II.
The outer reach of American interest grew into distant zones once dominated by the empires of the Old World. The frontiers were never precisely defined, though they could be seen in the country's overseas wars and the visible remnants of its military bases, airstrips, and patrol roads. Other evidence of the frontiers was invisible: trade, cultural diffusion, and diplomatic commitments. After World War I, American interest in Britain, France, and Germany dwelled more on the export of products and investment than on political order or military force. Early in World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt denied reports that he had said the American frontier ran along the Rhine River. But he made no secret of his belief that American interests lay along the German border, for he feared that if the lands adjacent to the Rhine, which flowed through the industrial heart of Western Europe, came under the domination of a hostile totalitarian power, American trade and security would be weakened. The Western Hemisphere would be a besieged island.
After victory in the European war, the United States quickly established occupation bases in Germany, and its frontier of interest penetrated deep into Europe. In March 1946, former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, accompanied by President Harry Truman, delivered a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, that defined the new area within which the United States was obliged to assert its power. This area came up against regions held by Soviet Russia, which had brought down a communist "iron curtain" running from the Baltic Sea across the Eurasian plain to the Adriatic.
A year later Truman in effect extended this frontier of interest from the Adriatic across the Balkan peninsula, beyond the straits of the Dardanelles linking Europe with Asia, nearly to the edge of the Caucasus Mountains. American financial grants supported the borderlands of Greece and Turkey, and credits and aid flowed throughout Western Europe, even to the British Empire, so recently the major world power. In the Atlantic, where Europeans had once dominated exploration and trade, the American merchant marine and navy had become triumphant.
In the Pacific, a defensive perimeter drawn up in January 1950 by Secretary of State Dean Acheson established a line of security running from near the tip of Alaska, southwest along the Aleutian Islands, across the sea to the islands of Japan, along the chain of the Ryukyu Islands, the largest of which was Okinawa, to the Philippines. The commitments to the East were at first not so strong, nor so well defined, as those to Europe. As an ally in the war against Japan, China had received American backing until its 1949 revolution made it a communist cohort of the Soviet Union. China then fell from favor, while the former enemy, Japan, under occupation for years by the American army, became a friend. Taiwan was not included behind this original perimeter, and it was uncertain for a time whether the lower part of Korea, south of China, was behind the line or a no-man's-land. But within the year of Acheson's expansion of the frontiers of American protection, the line fell across Korea, and American forces rushed to defend a front in the south against communist Koreans invading from the north. Far to the south lay the island continent of Australia, which, despite its distance, maintained close ties with America.
These frontiers of influence were strengthened with the formation of a military alliance system in Western Europe in 1949 and in eastern Asia in the early 1950s. But the frontiers on opposite sides of the world did not yet connect. To complete the circle, the United States gained allies in the 1950s among the nations of southern Asia, where political frontiers or perimeters were intermittently broken or lacked firmness. The line of influence extended through Southeast Asia, including South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It continued along the northern boundaries of divided Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey, though India and Burma declared neutrality after gaining independence from Great Britain. The frontier was buttressed by rugged natural barriers that ran the length of the Himalaya range from the Khyber Pass, past the gates of India, to the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, around the great deserts above the Persian Gulf, to, once again, the Caucasus, the Dardanelles, and Europe.
Such was the state of the frontiers of American interest as they developed from World War II into the 1950s. They were not the borders of an empire that held territory under a single sovereign authority. The United States was a republic and its principal means of establishing influence were aid, commerce, and diplomacy, though it came to offer protection against belligerents. It assumed the role of a primary power for which no other could substitute. Along the frontiers of this defensive area, the Americans confronted a revolutionary and mighty adversary, the Russians, and their massive nation with adjacent satellites.
To the allied states along this frontier, the promise of American aid and defense reached, and from those lands this influence was never to retreat under coercion of aggressors. On the European frontier the American pledge had no foreseeable end: "continuous," declared the treaty that united under American protection the Western European empires of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark. In the Pacific, to the Philippines, and later to Australia and New Zealand, the American commitments would remain in force "indefinitely." As for Japan, no change in its deference to the United States for its defense or to America's exclusive right to bases could take place without American consultation. In Southeast Asia, too, the Americans promised not to yield, and again the term "indefinitely" applied. American treaties were open to review by sovereign nations, but those commitments implied, no less than respect for the sovereignty of the allies, that the Americans intended never to surrender a foot of territory to aggressor nations. The Americans had never lost a war; the United States would not retreat. Where the strategic frontier lay at its farthest extent, in Southeast Asia, President Dwight Eisenhower compared the borderland to "a leaky dike, and with leaky dikes it's sometimes better to put a finger in than to let the whole structure be washed away."
It is these dimensions of space and time that provide a context in which the trade, cultural exchange, and battles fought in defense of American influence took place. Let us now continue not by reciting these events but rather by seeking to explain how and why a seaboard nation swelled into a world state. What are the origins of America's world role?
The Problem of the Rise to World Power
Americans at midcentury dealt with the glories and problems of power as the people of every preceding age had done, but their global power was distinguished by its magnitude. As World War II was drawing to a close, in late 1944 President Roosevelt reflected, "At the end of this war this country will have the greatest material power of any Nation in the world. It will be a clean, shining America." He attributed America's rise to an expanding economy of peaceful production, richer than any other in skilled workers, and advanced in engineering, farming, business, and technological knowhow.
Government officials envisioned the same exceptional rise to power. Explanations of it varied, however. Harry Hopkins, an intimate adviser to the president, agreed. "We will emerge from this war the richest and most powerful people in the world." The United States alone, of all the great powers, would possess lands unscarred, a people well nourished, and a breadbasket filled to overflowing. "We will have the largest navy and merchant fleet on the seven seas, more airplanes than any other nation. Already a technological people before the war, we will find ourselves, as the result of our work in munitions factories, with the largest army of skilled workers in history. Our industrial production capacity, vaster than the combined capacity of our Allies, will be sufficient, once converted to the uses of peace, to fill consumer needs at home and, at the same time, to supply ... heavy goods ... for rehabilitation abroad. Our raw materials and natural resources ... will be sufficient, with wise stewardship, to last for generations. But, above all, we will emerge with our democratic institutions intact, a people free to shape our destiny as we see fit."
Soon after succeeding to the presidency, Truman made an even more ambitious claim for America's rise. "We tell ourselves that we have emerged from this war," he remarked in a radio address in August 1945, "the most powerful nation in the world--the most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history. That is true, but not in the sense some of us believe it to be true." The war had shown Truman that the United States had tremendous material resources, skilled workers, managers, able generals, and a brave people capable of bearing arms. "The new thing--the thing which we had not known--the thing we have learned now and should never forget, is this: that a society of self-governing men is more powerful, more enduring, more creative than any other kind of society, however disciplined, however centralized."
Campaigning for the presidency in his own right in 1948, Truman barnstormed the country to convey to citizens the world-changing importance of their power. He hammered away at this theme from the back platform of the presidential train and in big-city convention halls and stadiums:
Salem, Oregon, June 11: "This is the greatest Nation on earth, I think. The greatest Nation in history, let's put it that way. We have done things that no other nation in the history of the world has done."
Trenton, Missouri, September 18: "this country will continue for another thousand years as the greatest country in the world."
Dayton, Ohio, October 11: "Now, this great Republic--the greatest in history, the greatest that the sun has ever shone upon--is charged with leadership in the world for the welfare of the whole world as well as our own welfare."
Not only political leaders but also editors, columnists, and writers proclaimed America's extraordinary rise. In early 1941 Henry Luce had decided to throw the weight of his publishing empire behind an effort to explain the emergence of the United States as a dominant power. Neil MacNeil, an editor of the New York Times, stating in 1944 that for a time "the United States must remain the most powerful of world powers," listed American assets in a particular order: the "most powerful navy that has ever sailed the five oceans"; the "biggest and hardest hitting air force that the world has ever known"; the greatest national industrial output on earth; the largest merchant marine at sea; the largest number of transport and commercial airplanes in the sky; an agricultural plant capable of feeding Americans and contributing more than any other to feeding hungry peoples; the "greatest national production of steel, petroleum, cotton and other vital products"; a domain located in the Western Hemisphere; and vast holdings of monetary gold and silver. Writing in Reader's Digest, Harry Scherman, a popular journalist, called America simply "the most powerful nation in history."
Government policy analysts examined in secret the status of national power. Following a request in 1948 by Secretary of Defense James Forrestal for a study of "the proportion of our resources which should be devoted to military purposes," the National Security Council produced a series of reports. The most comprehensive consideration of America's possession of "superior overall power," the document numbered NSC 68, which Truman approved in 1950, cited as vital components "a unique degree of unity" in society, "the capability of the American economy," and "military strength," including atomic armaments. The NSC subsequently sent a report to President Eisenhower, advising again that the American position as the "leader of the free world" was sustained by a "strong military posture," a "sound, strong and growing economy," and a high "morale and free institutions," to which were added "sufficient atomic weapons and effective means of delivery." The implication of the national security papers, even those of different administrations, was that to maintain superiority over the Soviet Union, the United States had to develop its assets to their maximum potential.
These ideas were not entirely new. Leaders had been assessing America's rise in the world from the beginning of the Republic. In 1780 John Adams told the French foreign minister, comte de Vergennes, that the "United States of America are a great and powerful people, whatever European statesmen may think of them." The country, Adams asserted, had unbounded possibilities for the future because of its enormous territorial expanse, embracing rich soil, mild climate, and incalculably plentiful natural resources, and because of the American people, rapidly expanding in numbers, and their production of agricultural goods for trade abroad.
Yet only in the late nineteenth century did the nation become widely recognized as a world power. William McKinley was the first modern president to claim that American power was the greatest in the world. In 1892, before assuming office, he quoted from an article written fourteen years earlier by the British statesman William Gladstone in the North American Review. England and America, Gladstone said, were then "the two strongest nations in the world, but there can hardly be a doubt as between the America and the England of the future that the daughter, at some no very distant time, whether fairer or less fair, will be unquestionably yet stronger than the mother." To McKinley that "no very distant time" suddenly arrived in the early 1890s. "America," he said, "`whether fairer or less fair'--certainly freer--is now `stronger than the mother.'" America had become the strongest nation in the world because "her power lies in a free and intelligent and progressive people," as well as in a strong, expanding economy and in social well-being. The Spanish-American War, a quick triumph resulting in the acquisition of an overseas empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific, dramatically confirmed for McKinley America's rise to world-power status.
Victory in World War I revealed the enormous strength and potential of the industrialized continental nation. At the close of the conflict, President Woodrow Wilson stated that the United States was "a nation as powerful as any in the world," yet it alone had achieved "the primacy of the world." If America joined the League of Nations, Wilson declared, the country would be "partners" with the other powers. But, he added, "let me predict we will be the senior partner. The financial leadership will be ours. The industrial primacy will be ours. The commercial advantage will be ours. The other countries of the world are looking to us for leadership and direction." Through the "growth of our power," Wilson said, "we have become a determining factor in the history of mankind." Industry and capital continued to grow through the 1920s, and so did the nation's economic prowess. Advances in education, science, invention, efficiency, and production were among the factors that led Herbert Hoover to claim that America had attained a "position of transcendent power."
The attributes contemporaries accorded to this progress in each period were largely unanalyzed. They made lists of divergent factors--material and psychological, human and technological, peaceful and military--but these lists did not adequately distinguish one item from another. Enumerations did not indicate what was a significant development and what was not. We seek some structure of thought and analysis in an effort to understand why the United States became capable of exercising world influence.
The Analysis of Power
An extensive attempt to comprehend the rise and decline of nations came in a new school in international politics that emerged around the theory of power politics. Under the impetus of world war, political scientists and strategists developed this theory in the 1930s and made it popular in the 1940s, believing that it was the only realistic way to see the world; hence their common name, "realists." They were direct about pursuing the national interest: a nation that abandoned self-preservation as the chief motive of its policy risked its very survival.
One of the ablest of the early realists was Nicholas John Spykman, a political scientist at Yale, who stressed in 1942 that all civilized life rested "in the last instance on power." Without power, he believed, no social progress was possible. Mechanical power--the ability to move mass--was the product of technology, and political power--the ability to move people--put technology at the service of society.
Spykman was baffled as to why power had a "bad name." He argued that Americans were wrong to condemn power as connoting evil, because power was only a means to an end. Sometimes the end was worthy, and in any case people were pursuing power with whole-hearted devotion. In ladies' sewing circles, he gathered, no less than in struggles between nations, power was a fact of life. A sound and practical foreign policy, Spykman stressed, should be designed "in terms of the realities of international relations, in terms of power politics." Already supposed to be in possession of unquestioned hegemony over a large part of the New World, the United States, Spykman predicted, should be expected in the post-World War II era to exercise its power in all parts of the world in pursuit of its interests.
A year before the close of the war, William T. R. Fox, a research associate at the Yale Institute of International Studies, gave currency to the idea of a new status to which squirrels and elephants. He was quick to explain that the Soviet Union and the Dominican Republic were not both elephants, nor were they both squirrels; and he wanted to make clear that "we are not fighting to make them both squirrels." For Fox, the elephants mattered most in keeping the postwar peace. Differences in power would continue to exist among nations, he said, and the problems of the world would not be solved by endeavors to create a world of "no-power politics." Fox, like Spykman, insisted that power itself was ethically neutral. He urged Americans to recognize that power was a basic feature of political life and that it made "the most enormous difference in whose hands predominant power rests." After the war, he predicted, the United States would be rated as greater than a regional power restricted to a single area. As a superpower, it would have interests and influence from the East to the West. "'Great power plus great mobility of power' describes the super-power," he claimed.
The political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau did more than any other figure to establish the realist interpretation of international affairs. In 1948 he published his classic treatise Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, which argued that struggle for power was the essence of international affairs. Born in Germany in 1904, Morgenthau fled to Switzerland to escape Hitler and in 1937 emigrated to the United States, where he found the study of international affairs disorganized. While teaching at Brooklyn College, later at the University of Kansas and, beginning in 1943--the year he became a citizen--at the University of Chicago, he criticized the writing in his field by historians and international lawyers as overly legalistic and idealistic. Morgenthau brought from the Old World a pessimism about man's nature and the state of the world, while his scholarly work led him to believe that objective truths about politics could be discovered by human reason. His wealth of knowledge enabled him to lecture to his classes on world politics without a text; one of his students took a stenographic transcript of what he said, which became the draft of his book.
Morgenthau directly related his power theories to the observation that "the United States is at the moment of this writing the most powerful nation on earth." He was intrigued with the problems and rivalries this power created. "International politics," he wrote, "like all politics, is a struggle for power." Power was more than brutal force, it was the central aim of national interest. He proposed that the pursuit of power was the source of state behavior. No matter what the ultimate aims of nations, whether freedom, security, or prosperity, their immediate goal was power. Power was the means to national ends. Political power meant "man's control over the minds and actions of other men." It followed that power was also "a psychological relationship between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised," enabling some people to control the actions of others through orders, threats, persuasion, or a combination of these. Since he had traced the struggle for power back through history, he believed the contest for power must be ever-present.
Morgenthau, impatient with moral sentiment or wishful idealism, believed that the pursuit of power was not necessarily immoral. "To act successfully," he wrote in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics in 1946," ... is political wisdom. To know with despair that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act nevertheless, is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions the least evil one is moral judgment. In the combination of political wisdom, moral courage, and moral judgment, man reconciles his political nature with his moral destiny."
The chief opponents of the realists were the humanitarian moralists who saw the world from a different, ethical perspective. Of a longstanding tradition in the nineteenth century, the moralists included philosophers and writers who attributed America's rising world influence not to external force but to the internal example of a society. They opposed the power politics and imperialism of Europe. One of the early, clearsighted moralists was Albert Gallatin, who wrote "The Mission of the United States" at the time of the Mexican War. "Your mission was, to be a model for all other governments" and "to apply all your faculties to the gradual improvement of your own institutions" and, "by your example, to exert a moral influence most beneficial to mankind at large. Instead of this, an appeal has been made to your worst passions; to cupidity, to the thirst of unjust aggrandizement by brutal force; to the love of military fame and of false glory." Aware that the world powers of the past had been empires and monarchies, the moralists argued that the United States should not act imperially in emulation of them but rather show the way to reform by exhibiting the success of its democratic society. Morgenthau pointed to John C. Calhoun and William Graham Sumner as worthy representatives of this world perspective, the latter writing during the Spanish-American War that "expansionism and imperialism are at war with the best traditions, principles, and interests of the American people."
The realists responded that in the past the moralists could afford to advocate that their nation be small and inconsequential but virtuous. After all, they had lived on a continent insulated from the outside. But their legacy threatened to damage the national interest, which required growing world involvement. Even when leaders made decisions for "realistic" actions, the realists contended, they had been perverted by irrelevant moralistic justifications. A case in point was President McKinley's defense of colonizing the Philippines: after prayer in the wee hours of the morning, he revealed, he had heard the voice of God tell him to annex the islands.
Of all the spokesmen of the moralistic point of view, Woodrow Wilson was the most eloquent and his thought the most far-reaching. His conviction, well founded in nineteenth-century liberal thought and the ethical standards of Christian and Calvinistic theology, was that democracy and constitutional government would temper the maneuvers of the big powers. "It is a very perilous thing," he said in an address in Mobile, Alabama, in October 1913, "to determine the foreign policy of a nation in the terms of material interest. It not only is unfair to those with whom you are dealing, but it is degrading as regards your own actions.... We dare not turn from the principle that morality and not expediency is the thing that must guide us."
The realists countered that however much Wilson had wanted to "make the world safe for democracy," he had relied on the American army to achieve his ends. Wilson had fully recognized the historical implications of America's economic rise. But he wanted to help shape the peace at Versailles on the moral principles of democracy. After his return in 1919, he declared in Los Angeles: "The day we have left behind us ... was a day of balances of power. It was a day of `every nation take care of itself or make a partnership with some other nation or group of nations to hold the peace of the world steady or to dominate the weaker portions of the world.' Those were the days of alliances. This project of the League of Nations is a great process of disentanglement." The league was supposed to be a democratic organization of the world's nations, America's contribution to a general world order.
Congress, however, rejected the Treaty of Versailles. When Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge introduced a series of reservations restricting the league's jurisdiction, Wilson, fearing the destruction of the democratic intent of the league, refused to accept them. In the end, the moral example of democratic aspiration in isolation at home failed to reconcile foreign nationalistic demands voiced around the world. The league, which had no other power than that of its member states, was helpless to prevent Japanese expansion in Manchuria and China, Italy's conquest of Ethiopia, and Hitler's repudiation of the Versailles settlement.
These crises threw American thought about the world in turmoil, and World War II gave impetus to the intellectual tradition of the realists. After the war Morgenthau's Politics among Nations became probably the most influential textbook of its time, read by specialists and students for the framework it offered in the field of world affairs. By mid-century the preoccupation with power politics and the struggle for political and military power had largely replaced the economic doctrines that Lenin and Charles Beard had expounded as the basis of world affairs in earlier days.
Realism entered the plane of government and diplomacy. Influential among the realists who applied theory to policy was George Kennan, a student of history, diplomat, policy analyst, and expert on Soviet affairs. Kennan believed that the most serious fault of American policy was what he called the "legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems." That approach he labeled idealistic, for it projected the common concepts of American law and politics into international relations--as in the Hague conferences on disarmament, the Kellogg Pact to make war illegal, and the League of Nations. Remarkably, Kennan asserted that realism would free foreign affairs from concepts of right and wrong, and correct the "assumption that state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment.... It is a curious thing, but it is true, that the legalistic approach to world affairs, rooted as it unquestionably is in a desire to do away with war and violence, makes violence more enduring, more terrible, and more destructive to political stability than did the older motives of national interest." Kennan pleaded in the early 1950s for the realism of power politics--or, as he wrote, for whatever "is realistic in concept, and founded in an endeavor to see both ourselves and others as we really are." In his cabled dispatches from Moscow to the State Department, Kennan urged--as strongly as in his later writings, including Realities of American Foreign Policy--that relations with Russia be placed entirely on a "realistic and matter-of-fact basis," guided not by morality or altruism, but by the strengths and weaknesses of nations.
The nation's rise in the world, from the perspective of the realists, rested on power and its elements, which included geography, natural resources, population, industrial development, military ability, and national morale. The balance of power enabled the United States in the mid-twentieth century to pursue interests in remote regions of the earth through trade, cultural activity, and war. Opposed as it was to moralism, realism nevertheless reflected not merely a concern for fact or reality but also a regard for elemental power as force and influence. Realism was a way of looking at the world, comprehended as power politics. For our purposes, power is defined as the qualities or properties that make possible the national exertion of influence or force in the world. Power, in this sense, means essentially capability rather than actual force or influence, though we may find that the ways influence was exerted might indeed eventually enhance or weaken the power that supported it.
Our attempt to understand the origins of America's world role turns now to the themes of the elements and balance of power. We will first examine the various reasons for the balance of power that contemporaries set forth according to their rational beliefs about the world. Our work, as the study progresses, is to analyze these explanations and to weigh them for significance against the world with which contemporaries dealt.
By DONALD W. WHITE
Yale University Press
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The Frontiers
At mid-twentieth century, when the second great world war ended, the United States enjoyed wealth and prosperity unknown in foreign lands and rose to a summit of power. The interests and influence of Americans extended far from home. Their commerce was carried by merchant ships and aircraft to distant cities. The dollar was the standard of international finance and the credits of American banks flowed everywhere. Food, clothing, movies, machines, and science made the American name known throughout the world. The people shared their fortune by distributing charitable aid abroad in quantities without precedent. As after earlier wars in their history, their citizen-soldiers were disbanded and sent home. Yet the government pledged to defend friendly states and kept units of its undefeated army in strategic outposts, sea power that patrolled the oceans, and an air force that guarded the sky. It was a time of general peace and faraway local conflicts; no third world war erupted. The United States kept an order favorable to its allies and demonstrated its art of trade and ways of culture and modern living to aged societies.
The frontiers of American interest that came to gird the world began with the first colonial settlements huddled along the Atlantic coast. At independence in 1783, the United States took possession of forest and lake lands westward to the Mississippi River. In 1803 it expanded across the Great Plains of the Louisiana Territory as far as the Rocky Mountains. In 1819 it gained the Florida peninsula. The flatlands of Texas were incorporated into the Union in 1846, as were the forests of Oregon. At the conclusion of the war with Mexico in 1848, the United States won the southwestern desert regions, the Rocky Mountains, and the western coastal slopes all the way to the Pacific Ocean, leaving only minor adjustments, such as the wedge-shaped Gadsden Purchase in the Southwest, to fill out its linear boundaries.
Through treaties, commitments, and unilateral declarations, the United States made allies with far-flung countries in areas where the interests of American trade, philanthropy, culture, and security were often greater than those of any other power, and the boundaries of some distant lands became the frontiers of these interests. These foreign affiliations first covered the Western Hemisphere. As early as 1823 President James Monroe proclaimed influence over both North and South America by opposing European control or meddling. Here the frontiers stood, for the most part, until around the end of the nineteenth century, when in a burst of expansive energy the United States consolidated its hemispheric interests by taking colonies in the West Indies: Puerto Rico, occupied by troops in the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the Virgin Islands, purchased from Denmark in World War I. The Panama Canal Zone came under the jurisdiction of the United States in 1903. To the west the United States extended its possessions deep into the Pacific Ocean, from Alaska, owned since 1867, to the Hawaiian islands and the Philippines in 1898. To connect the American mainland with the Far East, the United States quickly gained as outposts the islands of Guam and Samoa.
At the turn of the century, the area Americans had committed themselves to defend covered the Western Hemisphere and far beyond: on the Atlantic side, from Greenland to Brazil to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America; and on the Pacific side, across the world's largest ocean from Alaska to the Philippines. This area of security, Walter Lippmann calculated in 1943, comprised nearly 40 percent of the land surface of the earth. There it remained until World War II.
The outer reach of American interest grew into distant zones once dominated by the empires of the Old World. The frontiers were never precisely defined, though they could be seen in the country's overseas wars and the visible remnants of its military bases, airstrips, and patrol roads. Other evidence of the frontiers was invisible: trade, cultural diffusion, and diplomatic commitments. After World War I, American interest in Britain, France, and Germany dwelled more on the export of products and investment than on political order or military force. Early in World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt denied reports that he had said the American frontier ran along the Rhine River. But he made no secret of his belief that American interests lay along the German border, for he feared that if the lands adjacent to the Rhine, which flowed through the industrial heart of Western Europe, came under the domination of a hostile totalitarian power, American trade and security would be weakened. The Western Hemisphere would be a besieged island.
After victory in the European war, the United States quickly established occupation bases in Germany, and its frontier of interest penetrated deep into Europe. In March 1946, former Prime Minister Winston Churchill, accompanied by President Harry Truman, delivered a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, that defined the new area within which the United States was obliged to assert its power. This area came up against regions held by Soviet Russia, which had brought down a communist "iron curtain" running from the Baltic Sea across the Eurasian plain to the Adriatic.
A year later Truman in effect extended this frontier of interest from the Adriatic across the Balkan peninsula, beyond the straits of the Dardanelles linking Europe with Asia, nearly to the edge of the Caucasus Mountains. American financial grants supported the borderlands of Greece and Turkey, and credits and aid flowed throughout Western Europe, even to the British Empire, so recently the major world power. In the Atlantic, where Europeans had once dominated exploration and trade, the American merchant marine and navy had become triumphant.
In the Pacific, a defensive perimeter drawn up in January 1950 by Secretary of State Dean Acheson established a line of security running from near the tip of Alaska, southwest along the Aleutian Islands, across the sea to the islands of Japan, along the chain of the Ryukyu Islands, the largest of which was Okinawa, to the Philippines. The commitments to the East were at first not so strong, nor so well defined, as those to Europe. As an ally in the war against Japan, China had received American backing until its 1949 revolution made it a communist cohort of the Soviet Union. China then fell from favor, while the former enemy, Japan, under occupation for years by the American army, became a friend. Taiwan was not included behind this original perimeter, and it was uncertain for a time whether the lower part of Korea, south of China, was behind the line or a no-man's-land. But within the year of Acheson's expansion of the frontiers of American protection, the line fell across Korea, and American forces rushed to defend a front in the south against communist Koreans invading from the north. Far to the south lay the island continent of Australia, which, despite its distance, maintained close ties with America.
These frontiers of influence were strengthened with the formation of a military alliance system in Western Europe in 1949 and in eastern Asia in the early 1950s. But the frontiers on opposite sides of the world did not yet connect. To complete the circle, the United States gained allies in the 1950s among the nations of southern Asia, where political frontiers or perimeters were intermittently broken or lacked firmness. The line of influence extended through Southeast Asia, including South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. It continued along the northern boundaries of divided Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey, though India and Burma declared neutrality after gaining independence from Great Britain. The frontier was buttressed by rugged natural barriers that ran the length of the Himalaya range from the Khyber Pass, past the gates of India, to the southern shores of the Caspian Sea, around the great deserts above the Persian Gulf, to, once again, the Caucasus, the Dardanelles, and Europe.
Such was the state of the frontiers of American interest as they developed from World War II into the 1950s. They were not the borders of an empire that held territory under a single sovereign authority. The United States was a republic and its principal means of establishing influence were aid, commerce, and diplomacy, though it came to offer protection against belligerents. It assumed the role of a primary power for which no other could substitute. Along the frontiers of this defensive area, the Americans confronted a revolutionary and mighty adversary, the Russians, and their massive nation with adjacent satellites.
To the allied states along this frontier, the promise of American aid and defense reached, and from those lands this influence was never to retreat under coercion of aggressors. On the European frontier the American pledge had no foreseeable end: "continuous," declared the treaty that united under American protection the Western European empires of Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark. In the Pacific, to the Philippines, and later to Australia and New Zealand, the American commitments would remain in force "indefinitely." As for Japan, no change in its deference to the United States for its defense or to America's exclusive right to bases could take place without American consultation. In Southeast Asia, too, the Americans promised not to yield, and again the term "indefinitely" applied. American treaties were open to review by sovereign nations, but those commitments implied, no less than respect for the sovereignty of the allies, that the Americans intended never to surrender a foot of territory to aggressor nations. The Americans had never lost a war; the United States would not retreat. Where the strategic frontier lay at its farthest extent, in Southeast Asia, President Dwight Eisenhower compared the borderland to "a leaky dike, and with leaky dikes it's sometimes better to put a finger in than to let the whole structure be washed away."
It is these dimensions of space and time that provide a context in which the trade, cultural exchange, and battles fought in defense of American influence took place. Let us now continue not by reciting these events but rather by seeking to explain how and why a seaboard nation swelled into a world state. What are the origins of America's world role?
The Problem of the Rise to World Power
Americans at midcentury dealt with the glories and problems of power as the people of every preceding age had done, but their global power was distinguished by its magnitude. As World War II was drawing to a close, in late 1944 President Roosevelt reflected, "At the end of this war this country will have the greatest material power of any Nation in the world. It will be a clean, shining America." He attributed America's rise to an expanding economy of peaceful production, richer than any other in skilled workers, and advanced in engineering, farming, business, and technological knowhow.
Government officials envisioned the same exceptional rise to power. Explanations of it varied, however. Harry Hopkins, an intimate adviser to the president, agreed. "We will emerge from this war the richest and most powerful people in the world." The United States alone, of all the great powers, would possess lands unscarred, a people well nourished, and a breadbasket filled to overflowing. "We will have the largest navy and merchant fleet on the seven seas, more airplanes than any other nation. Already a technological people before the war, we will find ourselves, as the result of our work in munitions factories, with the largest army of skilled workers in history. Our industrial production capacity, vaster than the combined capacity of our Allies, will be sufficient, once converted to the uses of peace, to fill consumer needs at home and, at the same time, to supply ... heavy goods ... for rehabilitation abroad. Our raw materials and natural resources ... will be sufficient, with wise stewardship, to last for generations. But, above all, we will emerge with our democratic institutions intact, a people free to shape our destiny as we see fit."
Soon after succeeding to the presidency, Truman made an even more ambitious claim for America's rise. "We tell ourselves that we have emerged from this war," he remarked in a radio address in August 1945, "the most powerful nation in the world--the most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history. That is true, but not in the sense some of us believe it to be true." The war had shown Truman that the United States had tremendous material resources, skilled workers, managers, able generals, and a brave people capable of bearing arms. "The new thing--the thing which we had not known--the thing we have learned now and should never forget, is this: that a society of self-governing men is more powerful, more enduring, more creative than any other kind of society, however disciplined, however centralized."
Campaigning for the presidency in his own right in 1948, Truman barnstormed the country to convey to citizens the world-changing importance of their power. He hammered away at this theme from the back platform of the presidential train and in big-city convention halls and stadiums:
Salem, Oregon, June 11: "This is the greatest Nation on earth, I think. The greatest Nation in history, let's put it that way. We have done things that no other nation in the history of the world has done."
Trenton, Missouri, September 18: "this country will continue for another thousand years as the greatest country in the world."
Dayton, Ohio, October 11: "Now, this great Republic--the greatest in history, the greatest that the sun has ever shone upon--is charged with leadership in the world for the welfare of the whole world as well as our own welfare."
Not only political leaders but also editors, columnists, and writers proclaimed America's extraordinary rise. In early 1941 Henry Luce had decided to throw the weight of his publishing empire behind an effort to explain the emergence of the United States as a dominant power. Neil MacNeil, an editor of the New York Times, stating in 1944 that for a time "the United States must remain the most powerful of world powers," listed American assets in a particular order: the "most powerful navy that has ever sailed the five oceans"; the "biggest and hardest hitting air force that the world has ever known"; the greatest national industrial output on earth; the largest merchant marine at sea; the largest number of transport and commercial airplanes in the sky; an agricultural plant capable of feeding Americans and contributing more than any other to feeding hungry peoples; the "greatest national production of steel, petroleum, cotton and other vital products"; a domain located in the Western Hemisphere; and vast holdings of monetary gold and silver. Writing in Reader's Digest, Harry Scherman, a popular journalist, called America simply "the most powerful nation in history."
Government policy analysts examined in secret the status of national power. Following a request in 1948 by Secretary of Defense James Forrestal for a study of "the proportion of our resources which should be devoted to military purposes," the National Security Council produced a series of reports. The most comprehensive consideration of America's possession of "superior overall power," the document numbered NSC 68, which Truman approved in 1950, cited as vital components "a unique degree of unity" in society, "the capability of the American economy," and "military strength," including atomic armaments. The NSC subsequently sent a report to President Eisenhower, advising again that the American position as the "leader of the free world" was sustained by a "strong military posture," a "sound, strong and growing economy," and a high "morale and free institutions," to which were added "sufficient atomic weapons and effective means of delivery." The implication of the national security papers, even those of different administrations, was that to maintain superiority over the Soviet Union, the United States had to develop its assets to their maximum potential.
These ideas were not entirely new. Leaders had been assessing America's rise in the world from the beginning of the Republic. In 1780 John Adams told the French foreign minister, comte de Vergennes, that the "United States of America are a great and powerful people, whatever European statesmen may think of them." The country, Adams asserted, had unbounded possibilities for the future because of its enormous territorial expanse, embracing rich soil, mild climate, and incalculably plentiful natural resources, and because of the American people, rapidly expanding in numbers, and their production of agricultural goods for trade abroad.
Yet only in the late nineteenth century did the nation become widely recognized as a world power. William McKinley was the first modern president to claim that American power was the greatest in the world. In 1892, before assuming office, he quoted from an article written fourteen years earlier by the British statesman William Gladstone in the North American Review. England and America, Gladstone said, were then "the two strongest nations in the world, but there can hardly be a doubt as between the America and the England of the future that the daughter, at some no very distant time, whether fairer or less fair, will be unquestionably yet stronger than the mother." To McKinley that "no very distant time" suddenly arrived in the early 1890s. "America," he said, "`whether fairer or less fair'--certainly freer--is now `stronger than the mother.'" America had become the strongest nation in the world because "her power lies in a free and intelligent and progressive people," as well as in a strong, expanding economy and in social well-being. The Spanish-American War, a quick triumph resulting in the acquisition of an overseas empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific, dramatically confirmed for McKinley America's rise to world-power status.
Victory in World War I revealed the enormous strength and potential of the industrialized continental nation. At the close of the conflict, President Woodrow Wilson stated that the United States was "a nation as powerful as any in the world," yet it alone had achieved "the primacy of the world." If America joined the League of Nations, Wilson declared, the country would be "partners" with the other powers. But, he added, "let me predict we will be the senior partner. The financial leadership will be ours. The industrial primacy will be ours. The commercial advantage will be ours. The other countries of the world are looking to us for leadership and direction." Through the "growth of our power," Wilson said, "we have become a determining factor in the history of mankind." Industry and capital continued to grow through the 1920s, and so did the nation's economic prowess. Advances in education, science, invention, efficiency, and production were among the factors that led Herbert Hoover to claim that America had attained a "position of transcendent power."
The attributes contemporaries accorded to this progress in each period were largely unanalyzed. They made lists of divergent factors--material and psychological, human and technological, peaceful and military--but these lists did not adequately distinguish one item from another. Enumerations did not indicate what was a significant development and what was not. We seek some structure of thought and analysis in an effort to understand why the United States became capable of exercising world influence.
The Analysis of Power
An extensive attempt to comprehend the rise and decline of nations came in a new school in international politics that emerged around the theory of power politics. Under the impetus of world war, political scientists and strategists developed this theory in the 1930s and made it popular in the 1940s, believing that it was the only realistic way to see the world; hence their common name, "realists." They were direct about pursuing the national interest: a nation that abandoned self-preservation as the chief motive of its policy risked its very survival.
One of the ablest of the early realists was Nicholas John Spykman, a political scientist at Yale, who stressed in 1942 that all civilized life rested "in the last instance on power." Without power, he believed, no social progress was possible. Mechanical power--the ability to move mass--was the product of technology, and political power--the ability to move people--put technology at the service of society.
Spykman was baffled as to why power had a "bad name." He argued that Americans were wrong to condemn power as connoting evil, because power was only a means to an end. Sometimes the end was worthy, and in any case people were pursuing power with whole-hearted devotion. In ladies' sewing circles, he gathered, no less than in struggles between nations, power was a fact of life. A sound and practical foreign policy, Spykman stressed, should be designed "in terms of the realities of international relations, in terms of power politics." Already supposed to be in possession of unquestioned hegemony over a large part of the New World, the United States, Spykman predicted, should be expected in the post-World War II era to exercise its power in all parts of the world in pursuit of its interests.
A year before the close of the war, William T. R. Fox, a research associate at the Yale Institute of International Studies, gave currency to the idea of a new status to which squirrels and elephants. He was quick to explain that the Soviet Union and the Dominican Republic were not both elephants, nor were they both squirrels; and he wanted to make clear that "we are not fighting to make them both squirrels." For Fox, the elephants mattered most in keeping the postwar peace. Differences in power would continue to exist among nations, he said, and the problems of the world would not be solved by endeavors to create a world of "no-power politics." Fox, like Spykman, insisted that power itself was ethically neutral. He urged Americans to recognize that power was a basic feature of political life and that it made "the most enormous difference in whose hands predominant power rests." After the war, he predicted, the United States would be rated as greater than a regional power restricted to a single area. As a superpower, it would have interests and influence from the East to the West. "'Great power plus great mobility of power' describes the super-power," he claimed.
The political scientist Hans J. Morgenthau did more than any other figure to establish the realist interpretation of international affairs. In 1948 he published his classic treatise Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, which argued that struggle for power was the essence of international affairs. Born in Germany in 1904, Morgenthau fled to Switzerland to escape Hitler and in 1937 emigrated to the United States, where he found the study of international affairs disorganized. While teaching at Brooklyn College, later at the University of Kansas and, beginning in 1943--the year he became a citizen--at the University of Chicago, he criticized the writing in his field by historians and international lawyers as overly legalistic and idealistic. Morgenthau brought from the Old World a pessimism about man's nature and the state of the world, while his scholarly work led him to believe that objective truths about politics could be discovered by human reason. His wealth of knowledge enabled him to lecture to his classes on world politics without a text; one of his students took a stenographic transcript of what he said, which became the draft of his book.
Morgenthau directly related his power theories to the observation that "the United States is at the moment of this writing the most powerful nation on earth." He was intrigued with the problems and rivalries this power created. "International politics," he wrote, "like all politics, is a struggle for power." Power was more than brutal force, it was the central aim of national interest. He proposed that the pursuit of power was the source of state behavior. No matter what the ultimate aims of nations, whether freedom, security, or prosperity, their immediate goal was power. Power was the means to national ends. Political power meant "man's control over the minds and actions of other men." It followed that power was also "a psychological relationship between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised," enabling some people to control the actions of others through orders, threats, persuasion, or a combination of these. Since he had traced the struggle for power back through history, he believed the contest for power must be ever-present.
Morgenthau, impatient with moral sentiment or wishful idealism, believed that the pursuit of power was not necessarily immoral. "To act successfully," he wrote in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics in 1946," ... is political wisdom. To know with despair that the political act is inevitably evil, and to act nevertheless, is moral courage. To choose among several expedient actions the least evil one is moral judgment. In the combination of political wisdom, moral courage, and moral judgment, man reconciles his political nature with his moral destiny."
The chief opponents of the realists were the humanitarian moralists who saw the world from a different, ethical perspective. Of a longstanding tradition in the nineteenth century, the moralists included philosophers and writers who attributed America's rising world influence not to external force but to the internal example of a society. They opposed the power politics and imperialism of Europe. One of the early, clearsighted moralists was Albert Gallatin, who wrote "The Mission of the United States" at the time of the Mexican War. "Your mission was, to be a model for all other governments" and "to apply all your faculties to the gradual improvement of your own institutions" and, "by your example, to exert a moral influence most beneficial to mankind at large. Instead of this, an appeal has been made to your worst passions; to cupidity, to the thirst of unjust aggrandizement by brutal force; to the love of military fame and of false glory." Aware that the world powers of the past had been empires and monarchies, the moralists argued that the United States should not act imperially in emulation of them but rather show the way to reform by exhibiting the success of its democratic society. Morgenthau pointed to John C. Calhoun and William Graham Sumner as worthy representatives of this world perspective, the latter writing during the Spanish-American War that "expansionism and imperialism are at war with the best traditions, principles, and interests of the American people."
The realists responded that in the past the moralists could afford to advocate that their nation be small and inconsequential but virtuous. After all, they had lived on a continent insulated from the outside. But their legacy threatened to damage the national interest, which required growing world involvement. Even when leaders made decisions for "realistic" actions, the realists contended, they had been perverted by irrelevant moralistic justifications. A case in point was President McKinley's defense of colonizing the Philippines: after prayer in the wee hours of the morning, he revealed, he had heard the voice of God tell him to annex the islands.
Of all the spokesmen of the moralistic point of view, Woodrow Wilson was the most eloquent and his thought the most far-reaching. His conviction, well founded in nineteenth-century liberal thought and the ethical standards of Christian and Calvinistic theology, was that democracy and constitutional government would temper the maneuvers of the big powers. "It is a very perilous thing," he said in an address in Mobile, Alabama, in October 1913, "to determine the foreign policy of a nation in the terms of material interest. It not only is unfair to those with whom you are dealing, but it is degrading as regards your own actions.... We dare not turn from the principle that morality and not expediency is the thing that must guide us."
The realists countered that however much Wilson had wanted to "make the world safe for democracy," he had relied on the American army to achieve his ends. Wilson had fully recognized the historical implications of America's economic rise. But he wanted to help shape the peace at Versailles on the moral principles of democracy. After his return in 1919, he declared in Los Angeles: "The day we have left behind us ... was a day of balances of power. It was a day of `every nation take care of itself or make a partnership with some other nation or group of nations to hold the peace of the world steady or to dominate the weaker portions of the world.' Those were the days of alliances. This project of the League of Nations is a great process of disentanglement." The league was supposed to be a democratic organization of the world's nations, America's contribution to a general world order.
Congress, however, rejected the Treaty of Versailles. When Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge introduced a series of reservations restricting the league's jurisdiction, Wilson, fearing the destruction of the democratic intent of the league, refused to accept them. In the end, the moral example of democratic aspiration in isolation at home failed to reconcile foreign nationalistic demands voiced around the world. The league, which had no other power than that of its member states, was helpless to prevent Japanese expansion in Manchuria and China, Italy's conquest of Ethiopia, and Hitler's repudiation of the Versailles settlement.
These crises threw American thought about the world in turmoil, and World War II gave impetus to the intellectual tradition of the realists. After the war Morgenthau's Politics among Nations became probably the most influential textbook of its time, read by specialists and students for the framework it offered in the field of world affairs. By mid-century the preoccupation with power politics and the struggle for political and military power had largely replaced the economic doctrines that Lenin and Charles Beard had expounded as the basis of world affairs in earlier days.
Realism entered the plane of government and diplomacy. Influential among the realists who applied theory to policy was George Kennan, a student of history, diplomat, policy analyst, and expert on Soviet affairs. Kennan believed that the most serious fault of American policy was what he called the "legalistic-moralistic approach to international problems." That approach he labeled idealistic, for it projected the common concepts of American law and politics into international relations--as in the Hague conferences on disarmament, the Kellogg Pact to make war illegal, and the League of Nations. Remarkably, Kennan asserted that realism would free foreign affairs from concepts of right and wrong, and correct the "assumption that state behavior is a fit subject for moral judgment.... It is a curious thing, but it is true, that the legalistic approach to world affairs, rooted as it unquestionably is in a desire to do away with war and violence, makes violence more enduring, more terrible, and more destructive to political stability than did the older motives of national interest." Kennan pleaded in the early 1950s for the realism of power politics--or, as he wrote, for whatever "is realistic in concept, and founded in an endeavor to see both ourselves and others as we really are." In his cabled dispatches from Moscow to the State Department, Kennan urged--as strongly as in his later writings, including Realities of American Foreign Policy--that relations with Russia be placed entirely on a "realistic and matter-of-fact basis," guided not by morality or altruism, but by the strengths and weaknesses of nations.
The nation's rise in the world, from the perspective of the realists, rested on power and its elements, which included geography, natural resources, population, industrial development, military ability, and national morale. The balance of power enabled the United States in the mid-twentieth century to pursue interests in remote regions of the earth through trade, cultural activity, and war. Opposed as it was to moralism, realism nevertheless reflected not merely a concern for fact or reality but also a regard for elemental power as force and influence. Realism was a way of looking at the world, comprehended as power politics. For our purposes, power is defined as the qualities or properties that make possible the national exertion of influence or force in the world. Power, in this sense, means essentially capability rather than actual force or influence, though we may find that the ways influence was exerted might indeed eventually enhance or weaken the power that supported it.
Our attempt to understand the origins of America's world role turns now to the themes of the elements and balance of power. We will first examine the various reasons for the balance of power that contemporaries set forth according to their rational beliefs about the world. Our work, as the study progresses, is to analyze these explanations and to weigh them for significance against the world with which contemporaries dealt.
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