New York Diary

The Political Song and Dance

Tonight in New York City I saw something I never once saw at Cornell University. Here, three thousand people rose up in unison, unprompted, to sing Cornell's alma mater. We did it because the CD that was playing in the background featured some Cornell group or other, and they came to singing the alma mater, and apparently the natural thing to do was to stand and sing along. It was something to behold.

But of course, we were not hanging around the Beacon Theatre to listen to mediocre piped-in music. We were, in fact, hanging around waiting for Walt LaFeber to come out and give his last public lecture. I had the insight that, with a full house and people being turned away at the door, we Americans yearn for something of the academic in our daily lives. We are not getting it. Smart professionals may know everything about stock pricing, or podiatry, or the layout of New York's pipelines, but we have very little opportunity for lifelong general education. It is a real lack in our society today.

Dr. LaFeber spoke about the spread of democracy in the early years of this country, about Woodrow Wilson's ideal of making the world safe for democracy, and about the later revival of Wilsonian rhetoric in the 60's, 70's, and 80's. He spoke well and comfortably, telling us about how Thomas "Inalienable Rights" Jefferson refused to grant the vote to New Orleans after making the Louisiana Purchase, because he feared that the region (full of foreigners and criminals from the states) didn't have the right culture and institutions to allow democracy to work yet. Jefferson instituted martial law in New Orleans instead, and said that when enough Americans moved there, it could become a territory and then a full state. This is exactly what happened.

Dr. LaFeber told us about how Wilson and his crowd of idealistic liberals set out to give self-determination to the world. It worked, for a bit, in Hungary--but then the Hungarians voted in a communist, and Wilson realized he had little choice but to go in and persuade the people (using food as a bribe) to vote in someone more amenable to our point of view. It never worked at all in Mexico, Wilson's first international relations test, leading instead to a powder keg and a narrowly averted war over California and the southwest after we sent troops into Mexico City to influence the vote (worried, you see, that the duly elected government was planning on nationalizing Mexico's oil). Exporting democracy and self-determination didn't work in Eastern Europe, after the Russian Revolution. It emphatically didn't work in China, where we let Japan invade (for very practical reasons having to do with the League of Nations); indeed, after this last debacle, many of the young Americans who had accompanied Wilson on his European tour to make the world safe for democracy resigned. Wilsonianism faded.

It came back 50 years later, though, according to Dr. LaFeber. There weren't many things Nixon and Carter agreed on, but exporting democracy was one of 'em. Wilson became everybody's favorite President, and a new rhetoric of republicanism took root in American civil discourse.

And that is where LaFeber's story leaves off. He never once mentioned Bush, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, of Afghanistan, or 9/11. He didn't talk about the price of gasoline or offer moral judgments. But this is, nonetheless, the story he was telling us: the founding fathers didn't think democracy was easily exportable, Wilson proved the fact, and from the 60's onwards we've been diligently ignoring the lessons of history.

It is convenient to be an historian. Dr. LaFeber can stand up there and tell us that we don't know how, or when, or if, to give democracy to someone else (though we did once have a codified route to statehood and democratic self-governance in this country--a thing LaFeber failed to mention but which I think may be richly suggestive). He doesn't need to have an alternative to democracy-building, though, to offer his assessment (and to offer it in fine form). Dr. LaFeber is a student of American diplomatic history; I wonder what he suggests we do when our neighbor to the south descends into chaos, or when a trading partner half the world away stops exporting to us. Does he recommend the glorious isolation advocated by Washington? But that leads to questions of moral culpability for non-intervention (consider the case of World War II), and may not be viable anyway (as in the trading-partner case, when we have a real need for the foreign goods). Does he recommend a return instead to the colonial model advocated in Wilson's time by Britain, France, and, to a lesser extent, Italy? But, while democracy may not be practicable, surely subjugation is more problematic still. Perhaps we should be explicit about installing a friendly government--but that, too, has its dark side.

This is not to say that I don't take Dr. LaFeber's point; I personally tend to privilege stable governments over democratic ones (though all else being equal I like democracy especially, both for its deference to vox populi and for its inherent stability when compared with, say, monarchy, where the whim of a single individual is enough to dramatically change things). I only want to point out the difficulties of practicing politics, and the relative ease of studying it.

Nonetheless, Dr. LaFeber is right that we rewrite history all the time--and that it's all the easier to do so when we smudge over the details, and that historians have an important role to play in trying to resurrect those details once again so that the lessons of the past are not lost to the future. After all, it's easy to call Wilson one's favorite president for theoretical reasons, and it's all the easier when never looking at the more detailed successes and failures of his administration. Or, to put it a different way, it might seem natural to stand up and sing songs from one's bright college days when one is 55, but it's worth remembering that we never would have sung them at 20 (when we were instead busy thinking about all the ways that college could be just a bit better).

posted by Skay @ 10:49 PM