Here is an example of someone who reaches a set of ideas that is substantially libertarian through history rather than political theory. This is a book review of John Harmon McElroy’s American Beliefs, published by Ivan R. Dee, Chicago, in 1999. I had never heard of McElroy, who was a professor at the University of Arizona. But his approach to political questions resonated with me, partly because living outside the United States had made me more aware of my essential American identity. My review was published in Liberty, October 1999.
Americans share certain beliefs. John Harmon McElroy believes all cultures have beliefs in common, and he is interested in exhuming the distinctively American ones.
What are they? Here’s one. When Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress in 1940 to enact Lend-Lease, whereby a neutral America would give destroyers to Britain and thereby become embroiled in a foreign war, he described it as lending a next-door neighbor a garden hose to put out a house fire. “By using that particular figure of speech,” Harmon writes, “he was able to win the support of the American people and the approval of Congress.”
Why? Because of an American frontier belief:
Helping others helps yourself.
Another example is welfare. In America, despite half a century of exhortation by social workers, a stigma attaches to welfare that does not attach to Social Security and Medicare. Part of it is because the latter have been packaged as insurance; but a greater part is because they are for old people, who have presumably done their life’s work. In America, handouts for people of working age are not respectable. They conflict with the primary beliefs of American culture:
Everyone must work.
Not everyone believes that anymore. A more accurate title of the book would be, “Traditional American Beliefs.”
McElroy is a conservative — not a tub-thumping one, but a thoughtful, historical one, a retired professor of English at the University of Arizona. He is well-read in Madison, Hamilton, Tocqueville, William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation, and many similar works.
His thesis is that every culture has some simple beliefs, philosophical one-liners. Consider that belief, “Everyone must work,” and its corollary:
Manual work is respectable.
Americans believe that, he says, because their ancestors had to believe it. Many other cultures reject it. In some Asian cultures, men grow one long fingernail as a way of bragging about their soft hands. Here a mechanic is respectable. And if fewer Americans these days make a living working with their hands, they remain the world’s champion do-it-yourselfers. Part of the reason goes back to the settlement of the country, in which everybody had to work.
Social equality is an American identifying mark. McElroy tells the story of Queen Elizabeth greeting a woman at an American housing project in 1991. The woman, Alice Frazier, 67, gave QE2 a big hug and said, “How’re you doin’!?”
It was, says McElroy, “a breach of English decorum of shocking proportions… No commoner in England…would ever have hugged Her Royal Majesty on first acquaintance — or on any subsequent acquaintance either, for that matter.”
In America, social class is based on individual success. “No one’s social status in America is ever fully assured,” McElroy writes. And status is a limited concept: The poor’s deference to the rich is limited. Americans would make the world’s worst servants, and it is probably the worst country in which to keep a servant. Writes McElroy, “The idea of ‘one’s betters’ is repugnant to an American.”
I’m reminded of H.L. Mencken’s “Declaration of Independence in American,” in which it says, “Me and you is as good as anybody else, and maybe a damn sight better.”
Another key American belief is:
Freedom of movement is needed for success.
Americans had to move to subdue a continent. The average American moves house every seven years. It was not an American who invented the motor car, but it was Americans who embraced it with gusto. Americans gave the world the truck stop, the motel, the mini-storage, the RV and the strip mall.
Most Americans don’t know how American they are. The best way is to live abroad; the next-best is to travel. McElroy said he “began to discover my Americanness” living in Spain 30 years ago, when he had to devise a series of lectures on American culture.
I recall when a Hong Kong physician prescribed me pills and his nurses told me how many of the red ones to take, and how many of the blue ones, but nobody told me what they were. When I asked the nurse, who looked at me as if I were a moron, and said, “They’re medicine.”When I looked at her as if shewere a moron, she said, “Do you want them or not?”
Confronted with something outrageous, you want to stand up and say, “Hey! This is crap.” And you realize that you are the only one who thinks that way, because you are an American.
In 1972 I was approached in Turkey, by a man who wanted to practice English. He started explaining why he hated the Greeks: because they had burned Turkish villages in 1921. He spoke of it as if it were yesterday, though he was too young to have been there. I hear the same attitudes between the Albanians and the Serbs — but not the Americans, who think they can “lend a garden hose” (B-2 bombers, and such) and “put the fire out.”
“Americans are future-oriented,” writes McElroy. “Americans do not brood over past wrongs nor allow their lives to be determined by past events.” The recent rise of identity politics contradicts that, but it also runs against a powerful American belief that what counts is the situation now.
And another powerful belief, McElroy writes: “No group in society has a moral right to claim an interest that is paramount.”
Beliefs about money and property are central to Americans, and here McElroy might be challenged. He argues, provocatively, that though Americans honor a self-made person, and that “Property was the chief outward sign in America of presumptive honesty,” that most Americans do not hope to get rich. “Success for most Americans has historically consisted of aspiring not to be poor,” he writes.
Some of the beliefs McElroy lists are more firmly grounded than others. The people are sovereign and The majority decides are indisputable, but The least government possible is best is clearly having a tough time of it.
Many would quibble over his list. A leftist would certainly have emphasized equality more than McElroy, though he did include, God gave men the same birthrights. A critic would have found some American belief that was obviously foolish.
I would have put in something in about a “right to know” certain things, such as what’s in the little red and blue pills. I would also have put something in about the family — that in America, your family does not choose your life partner, your profession, your religion or make your other major choices. In America you can get away from your family and do what you want. Many Asians, for example revere their families, and criticize Americans for putting their old folks to nursing homes. But they often come to America to get away from their families, to get some breathing space to experience life unsupervised.
The strength of McElroy’s book is to root such beliefs in the early history of the nation. Key American beliefs, he writes, “developed from the situation of civilized men and women living in a Stone Age wilderness” — an experience that is now at least a full century removed, and is beginning to fade, but in Europe is a millennium or more removed.
In the Spanish, Portuguese and French colonies, immigration was limited by number, religious affiliation or nationality. In the English colonies it wasn’t, and an American, melting-pot identity developed sooner. The English expected the colonies to create their own governments and pay for them, including the provision of their own defense. They did, and it made them self-reliant. When England started imposing rules and taxes — small taxes, at that — they rebelled.
English America was settled far later than New Spain, but it declared its independence earlier. The reason, writes McElroy, is that it had developed a culture with different beliefs.
He ends the book by proposing three “super beliefs” of Americans: individual responsibility, equal freedom and practical improvement. And in defining what is American, he tentatively and briefly defines what is un-American:
“Organizations that aim to restrict the opportunities of other people or to regulate other people’s freedom of advancement may truly be said to be un-American.”
This books reminded me of James Q. Wilson’s 1994 book The Moral Sense, which was tried to induce the essence of morality from such things as history, anthropology, psychology, child behavior and animal science. This book attempts to piece together a gut-level American ideology from classic fiction, diaries, documents, history and personal experience.
Its drawback is that it’s imprecise, and that one could always argue (as I do) that he didn’t get his list of one-liners quite right. The strength of the book is that it is a new way of taking on these things, and that however imprecise they are, the reader will look more closely and recognize a shadow of himself.
© 1999 Bruce Ramsey