The Genius of America (17 page)

Justice Hunt, newly appointed to the Supreme Court, no doubt was well acquainted with this history. So he intervened before this jury could act and ruled on his own that Anthony was guilty. Perhaps he sensed that her defense would prevail even with an all-male jury. In fact, one juror was reported to say, “Could I have spoken, I should have answered ‘not guilty' and the men in the jury box would have sustained me.”

Having imposed a verdict, the judge then imposed a fine of one hundred dollars on Anthony, only to further rule, “The Court will not order you committed until the fine is paid.” A fine, as the Court no doubt understood, she would never pay so she would never be committed to jail.

Anthony continued her crusade for suffrage. “If it is a mere question of who got the best of it,” an upstate newspaper editorialized, “Miss Anthony is still ahead; she has voted and the American Constitution has survived the shock. Fining her one hundred dollars does not rule out the facts that fourteen women voted, and went home, and the world jogged on as before.”

But the Constitution was designed so that a mere shock would not lead to a change in the Constitution. It would take much more. Suffrage was spreading at the state level. But the Congress failed around forty times to pass an amendment giving women the vote. The framers expected people to operate in their own self-interest. And what subject could possibly generate more self-interest than this one? The opponents all argued that suffrage would add an “unbearable burden on women, whose place was in the home,” or set men against women. Many actually believed this. But also hidden behind these arguments were a variety of broad and specific fears that enfranchising women would dilute men's power.

Southern Democrats did not want to add to the number of black voters. There were many economic interests who were afraid that politically empowered women might support progressive reforms such as workplace protections and child labor laws, which would undermine profitability. The brewers worried that women would tilt the balance for temperance. The animus produced by all of these self-interests would require an enormous effort to overcome. Through various tactics—from grassroots organizing to Capitol Hill lobbying, from marches to silent pickets, from protests to alliance building, women pushed the suffrage agenda.

Finally, in 1919 Congress, in a very close vote, approved and submitted to the states the Nineteenth Amendment. The battle then raged state by state. In 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth and last state necessary for ratification. The amendment was approved by one vote in the Tennessee legislature, when its youngest member, Harry Burns, switched sides after receiving a pro-amendment telegram from his mother. Burns was then reportedly chased from the Capitol by an angry mob.

So on the vote of the swift-footed Burns, the country officially completed a task set in motion 131 years earlier. The framers had argued in 1787 that broader representation would make a stronger, freer country and produce better decisions. But only in 1920 did the country finally complete the essence of this challenge. In one act, the nation enfranchised more voters than at any other time in its history. Struggles over the vote would continue, of course. The enfranchisement of African Americans was official but not yet real, and would not be for another forty years. Younger people, who were dying for the country in its wars, would eventually be allowed to vote too as a result of the pain of Vietnam.

But this moment when women were admitted to the vote was the moment the last philosophical divide was crossed. The country had recognized constitutionally that a country built on the participation of its citizens needed to allow all its citizens to participate.

Did the enfranchisement of women change the nature of government? That is a subject of endless and continuing debate. At first, women were more likely than men to vote Republican, the party more favorable to their enfranchisement. In 1928, political analysts said Herbert Hoover, a defender of Prohibition, was helped into office by women voters. What is clear is that less than a generation after women were given the vote, the nature of the federal government would be radically altered. Perhaps the participation of women played a role. Clearly, the crises of the Great Depression and World War II did.

The 1920 presidential election was the first in which women voted. Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, the Republicans, defeated James Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt by a landslide. At a time of strikes and terrorism (the worst attack on Wall Street until 9/11), Harding promised a return to normalcy.

But Roosevelt would be back. In 1932, he would defeat Herbert Hoover, whose scruples against big government restrained his actions against the Depression. The stage was being set for both the nation's greatest success and for its current challenge.

Part Three

THE CHALLENGE

If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.

—R
ONALD
R
EAGAN
, 1989

6

A MANDATE FOR VIGOROUS ACTION

You cannot extend the mastery of government over the daily life of a people without somewhere making it master of people's souls and thoughts.

—H
ERBERT
H
OOVER
, 1932

Ours has become—as it continues to be, and should remain—a society of large expectations. Government helped to generate these expectations. It undertook to meet them.

—R
ICHARD
N
IXON
, 1970

F
ROM
1789
TO
the start of the twentieth century, American government changed in many ways within the constitutional system. Sometimes, as with the invention of an independent judiciary, the change occurred with no rewording of the Constitution. At other times, as with the enfranchisement of African Americans and women, a long and painful struggle was required to amend the Constitution. Yet none of this changed a basic truth about America in its first 140 years: The federal government played a small role in our lives.

That was about to change to an extraordinary degree. The Great Depression brought on a constitutional crisis much more menacing than most Americans in our time truly understand. From economic disintegration, authoritarian governments were rising around the world. Some Americans thought the same changes were needed in the United States. For years after, Eleanor Roosevelt remembered the chill she felt at her husband's first inaugural when he said he might have to assume extraordinary powers and received his strongest ovation.

The question was whether or not America's Constitution and the Constitutional Conscience we had created around it would be supple enough to accommodate the needs of a nation in crisis. Roosevelt rallied the country to answer yes and set in motion a period of remarkable change. For close to forty years, starting with Roosevelt's inaugural promise of economic security and lasting into Nixon's support for the environment, the federal government grew enormously in both size and power. A broad consensus in the country supported this greater federal government involvement in our lives. That consensus brought with it a subtle, but very significant, change in our expectations of government. The framers had given us a system whose primary purpose was to resolve our conflicts and then stay out of the way of our activities. What we created in the twentieth century was a massive administrative state that we expected would directly solve our problems. So long as we agreed in a broad way which problems we wanted solved and how we wanted them solved, this worked well enough. But by the 1970s, that broad agreement was disintegrating. “There is no consensus,” the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote in 1974. “There is less harmony in our society, to my mind, than at any time, say, since Reconstruction.” We were left with high expectations for what government could do and little agreement about what government should do. With so many interests pushing the government in different directions, it could do little or nothing. This is exactly what the framers designed the system to do when consensus was lacking. We coined a phrase to describe this result: g
overnmental gridlock.

A D
IM
B
ODY

Except in times of war, American government from 1787 through the election of FDR in 1932 had played little role in the lives of most Americans, particularly when measured against today's standards. It managed the postal system, established some roads and other internal improvements, enforced a few criminal laws and collected some taxes. There was little government bureaucracy. There were few or no safety nets, little protection for women, minorities, workers or consumers. Things began to change in the late 1800s and then in the era of Theodore Roosevelt, although not nearly as fast as proponents wanted.

Twice during this era the Constitution was amended in a way it had never been amended before, to expand the federal role in a policy area—the first to allow taxation of income (1913) and the second to bar distribution of alcohol (1920).

Even so, by the early 1920s the federal government remained such a “distant, dim, and motionless body in the political firmament” that Republican president Coolidge could with some truth observe that “if the Federal Government should go out of existence, the common run of people would not detect a difference in the affairs of their daily life for a considerable length of time.”

Thomas Jefferson had described the government's purpose as solely to “restrain men from injuring one another,” leaving them “otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” Jefferson was a profound romantic. He needed Madison, Hamilton and others to tether him to the reality of the world. Yet his portrait of minimalist government was not far off, and it captured something about the limited expectations citizens held of their federal government for most of the country's first century or more. Americans did not ask for much. If they had a problem, their first instinct was not to petition the federal government for relief. They shared Jefferson's romanticized vision of self-reliant Americans who could in a land of abundance house and feed themselves and could, if things really became difficult, move west.

Jefferson viewed America as an Eden.

Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our own industry, to honor and confidence from our fellow-citizens, resulting not from birth, but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practiced in various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter—with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and a prosperous people?

A
NOTHER
N
EW
W
ORLD

Things were never, of course, so idyllic. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, America had become a far different country. Settlement and industrialization had dramatically changed its landscape and its social organization. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt observed, “The age of machinery, of railroads; of steam and electricity; the telegraph and the radio; mass production, mass distribution—all of these combined to bring forward a new civilization and with it a new problem for those who sought to remain free.”

The new civilization was one of cities and factories. The new problem was whether America's constitutional democracy, established in an agricultural America, could function in an industrialized, urbanized one. America had been built on the notion of the “free, self-reliant, unencumbered” pioneer, who was able to carve a life for himself and his family from a country of “virtually unlimited” resources with “room and wealth for all.” But as Americans rushed from their farms and rural community life for this new modern pot of gold, they left behind their independence and self-reliance. In this new America, you could not go it alone, as much as you might want to. Americans raised on a somewhat overstated vision of self-reliance were feeling and actually becoming much more dependent on large industrial enterprises for their well-being.

To protect themselves, Americans began to organize. Americans had always been joiners of a myriad of religious, social and political clubs, but now their focus was on “groupings which centered around economic interests—labor unions, industrial combines, farmers' organizations, occupations associations.” They organized because they understood that through numbers they could exercise political power in America's representative democracy and through political power they could demand laws that would accomplish their goals. “Self-reliance gave way to ‘social justice through community action.' ” Through groups, Americans would amplify their individual voices and then turn to the political processes and their government to demand “position and power in society.”

For the early part of the twentieth century, change was evolutionary.

The government's role in regulating business expanded, through, for example, the antitrust laws. But World War I and subsequent national prosperity tamped Americans' enthusiasm for change.

Then the bottom fell out of the economy.

The Great Depression came as an enormous shock to America's political sense of itself. A nation built on a belief that anyone could rise to be anything was suddenly “bursting with class conflict.” As the noted psychiatrist Erik Erikson would reflect, “Here was a great and wealthy country having undergone a traumatic economic depression which, as I can now see, must have seemed to paralyze that very self-made identity and put into question its eternal renewal.”