T H E   S U P E R F L U O U S   M E N

Introduction

As with so many aspects of modern life, the end of the twentieth century all but demands a new assessment of American conservatism. At various times during these past hundred years, it has seemed to be a triumphant business ethic, an invalid capitalism in need of government life supports, an elitist posture vainly waving ideals at materialistic liberals, and finally a hegemonic discourse, outspending the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union into bankruptcy, in the process generating economic growth beyond the wildest dreams even of its supporters. The implicit irony was largely lost on an unironic age: pragmatic liberals happily adopted whatever seemed to be working. Other countries did the same, as England led much of Europe into accepting conservative reinvigoration to the point where nominal socialists began regaining public office.

Such a muddying of the middle of the road produced an armful of books, most of which focused on economic and governmental policy. As such, they implicitly accepted the liberal assumption that these were the proper areas of concern for journalist and academic alike. In the process, and largely unaware of what they were doing, many conservatives abandoned their proper focus: the worlds of religion, of education, of philosophy, of literature, and of whatever manners and customs seemed to constitute the "good life." The book in your hand represents a small effort to recapture a portion of that more traditional focus.

The book starts from the premise that conservatism in America has through special circumstances often been very different from its counterparts in Europe and Asia. Conservatism traditionally has been based on prescriptive rights, on the assumption of political power by religious authorities, on a hereditary aristocracy, on immutable philosophical principles, or most basically, on the right of "what has been" to continue largely unchanged into "what ought to be": "whatever is, is right" has seemed as much as visceral preference of human nature as a striking poetic aperçu, as valid for political science as for religion. Being liberals at heart, many Americans have assumed that such distinctions were largely meaningless anyway, because the liberal "is," the government which the Revolution established, had become the conservative past which the present must maintain. Since America began liberal, it could conserve this liberalism and have the best of both worlds. This view has a certain validity, but it tends to fog over important distinctions and impede analysis. Politics works best that way, but thought does not.

The period from 1900 to 1945 provides an excellent laboratory for testing some of the assumptions analysts have made about the nature of conservatism and its opponents. On the surface of public life, creativity in the conservative camp has seemed to be nonexistent. Activists who thought of themselves as "progressives" sought to remoralize, bureaucratize, and professionalize a nation that seemed in danger of succumbing to the pressures of capitalist consolidation. They dominated politics throughout the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, enforcing antitrust laws, lowering the protective tariff, strengthening the fiscal system, spreading democratic control through use of the initiative, referendum, and recall, and then intervening in World War I to force its values on a feuding world. But over time, this list of presumptive achievements has seemed one more of advertising than of accomplishment. Progressives also instituted Prohibition, a grotesque effort at social control that produced a new social approval of illegal behavior and allowed gangster elements a foothold which they have never relinquished. They instigated a Red Scare which harassed and sometimes tortured ethnic minorities and those with dissenting political views. They instituted the Mann Act, ostensibly to regulate sexual behavior, which in practice granted police the right to illegal searches and seizures in matters having nothing to do with purchased sex. Even giving women the right to vote backfired: women went out and by large majorities helped elect Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, all by then unexceptionably conservative. The worst results came in foreign policy, as progressives abandoned more than a century of noninterventionism, only to bargain victory away in a Peace of Versailles so mindlessly vengeful as to invite the rise of Adolf Hitler.

The New Deal of the 1930s largely abandoned overt moral goals for secular collectivism. Reacting opportunistically to one crisis after another, Franklin D. Roosevelt knew no better than anyone else what would work, but on the whole he felt in his bones that federal intervention, regulation of business, and income redistribution would help in the long run. His administration encouraged the formation of business cartels as well as labor unions. It instituted social security. It reorganized agriculture, banking, and the securities business. It insisted that all local problems were also national problems, most especially those having a financial impact on the poor. It outlasted several long-lived Supreme Court Justices to take effective control of the court system. As the world edged closer to another world war, it pretended to neutrality while surreptitiously supporting the British and the French against the Axis Powers. Through a relentless public relations campaign, it stigmatized those who disagreed as "isolationists," parochial, selfish, and lacking in vision; it lauded "interventionists" as internationally aware, selfless visionaries, only wishing to free good people everywhere to enjoy benefits comparable to those of American democracy. On the whole they were successful, and the forces of centralization and regulation at home, and those of military and diplomatic intervention abroad, have dominated most American policymakers ever since.

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The conservative response to these regimes thus depended on what liberals were doing. While no group is ever monolithic, the most educated and culturally aware conservatives had little interest in remoralizing anyone. Being aware of the long course of history, they felt a sense of fatigue at ostentatious public virtue. Business and professional leaders seemed to be doing a decent job of it, life in America had its problems but seemed more stable and rewarding than life in most other countries, trusts and tariffs protected the jobs of workers as well as the dividends of owners, and alcohol was a necessary component of civilized life: Only twits questioned the right of a worker to his beer, a lady to her wine, or a clubman to his whiskey. Sex was better left alone, unmentioned and unregulated; it had always been there and always would be, so why pretend otherwise? As for the Red Scare, well, a good many eminent folks in America were descended from German, Jewish or other stocks from Central Europe, and not much prone to tormenting those not all that different from themselves.

The New Deal offered more of a threat. Conservatives valued the local, the eccentric, the idiosyncratic. They regarded Washington, D. C. as a barely civilized swamp, into which tax dollars seemed to disappear, leaving only noxious bubbles that did not bear close examination. They did not like the idea of bank or securities regulators peering over their shoulders. Being consumers like everyone else, they disliked cartels among businesses as much as unions among workers; both just raised prices, expanded bureaucracies, and created public discord. They liked to see a court system that regularly told legislatures what they could do with the silly results of majority whim. Although divided over the issues posed by foreign intervention, conservatives knew that the best of motives often led to the worst of results, and that to send troops abroad might well lead to unforeseen consequences both at home and abroad.

Many of these positions remained essentially unarticulated. They might be the subject of private conversations, or at most a part of the semipublic world: the sermons, legal briefs, editorials in professional journals. Conservatives the world over had often found precise, logical discourse unappealing when it came to broad, human values. They were in favor. They thought values a good thing, whatever they were. People should go to church, but not to any particular one. They should be kind to each other. They should obey the law and respect the past. Beyond that, conservatives tended to go mute. They did not feel comfortable discussing values in public, nor did they think such matters appropriate for government action. Clear, logical, rational discussions were a liberal, even a radical habit. They might be nice in a secluded setting, but in newspapers or over the radio they only stirred up passions best left undisturbed.

Such feelings have large implications for the study of history in general and certain definitions in particular. The habit of many analysts, who enjoy making lists of "conservative" or "liberal" or "progressive" positions, is a bad one. Few who felt that they belonged in one of these groups agreed for very long with many of the opinions of others in the group. Conservatives, for example, were sometimes devoted to the church, but just as often were religious skeptics. They were respectful of tradition, but often broke it when circumstances required. They believed in continuity of place but often themselves moved far away from their places of origin. They loved the country but found cities more convenient. They supported education but mistrusted the effect it seemed to have. They respected American democracy without having much respect either for the voters they knew personally or the politicians who got elected. Indeed, they preferred their politicians to be safely dead. A firmly placed tombstone made them statesmen, and of course all sound conservatives thought statesmen a good thing. And so on.

American conservatism needs redefinition without resort to concrete, time-bound programs. In fact, this is not difficult. For the group in this book, the unspoken assumption that bound them all was the belief that the important things in life were private, and not properly subject to governmental intervention. The government of the United States of America should protect the property of men and the virtue of women, as the famous saying went, and then stop. It should not prefer one religion to another. It should not regulate working conditions beyond matters of public health and safety. It should not redistribute income or bureaucratize welfare. It should not interfere with agricultural production at the start of the food chain, nor regulate prices at the end. It should not impose any false unity on a diverse country; it should allow local districts to run themselves in peaceful provincialism. This was a conservatism different in many respects from earlier American conservatism, Metternich's Austrian conservatism, the oriental conservatisms of China, Japan or India. Each of these had other priorities.

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A cranky lot on the whole; as Ezra Pound was known to remark, with clear reference to himself as well as his friends, anyone worth a damn was bound to be irascible. Even the Southern Agrarians, who seemed so united in place of residence, university of employment, and literary views, squabbled constantly among themselves and barely managed to stay on speaking terms long enough to publish their manifesto. But, toward the end of the period, the pattern seemed to emerge with the publication of Albert Jay Nock's The Diary- of a Superfluous Man (1943). Nock himself would have denied that he spoke for anyone else, but the book took a position that many felt they could repair to, and it has remained in print almost continuously for well over half a century, influencing a good many people who would probably not have been comfortable being in the same room with Nock or each other.

That is not the point. Taking his inspiration from those Russians who seemed superfluous to their autocratic nineteenth-century society and sought inspiration in the private sphere, even to the point of writing largely for their desk drawers, Nock made the essential point: ransack the past for your values, establish a coherent worldview, depend neither on society nor on government insofar as circumstances permitted, keep your tastes simple and inexpensive, and do what you have to do to remain true to yourself. He borrowed from ancient Greece, Thomas Jefferson, Matthew Arnold, and especially from Rabelais, but not from banks. He voted for Marcus Aurelius and Charles Dickens, but not for Franklin D. Roosevelt. He felt that as far as society was concerned, he was superfluous; no one had the slightest use for the intellectual goods he had to offer. He felt society on the whole superfluous to his needs. It wallowed in materialist values, intellectually irresponsible hypotheses, and political nostrums. Vote for Voltaire: cultivate your garden and allow democratic citizens to go to hell in ways best suited to themselves.

Given such a focus for the essence of conservatism, the essence of liberalism becomes obvious: liberals, whether progressives, collectivists or simply generic reformers, were those who believed that the good things in life were largely public and material; government could foster them. They saw trusts growing too large and powerful, so they wanted to split them up and restore competition. They saw that tariffs led to high consumer prices, so they wanted to lower tariffs. They knew food and drugs were often impure or ineffective, so they wanted to enforce public health minima and demand honesty of labeling. They saw excessive alcohol consumption, so they wanted to prohibit its sale and consumption. They found the school curricula dull, so they wanted new ones. They found philosophy irrelevant, so they would pragmatize it. And if the world got itself into a mess, they would send in a uniformed sanitation crew to clean it up. The basic position was consistent. Use the political means to make for a better world. This too did not reflect assumptions about the world "liberal" around the world. It was supposed to mean freedom of thought and action, especially in the face of governmental despotism. Liberals were famous for demanding freedom from religious tyranny, from vested property interests, from arbitrary searches and seizures. But America had started in a fit of liberalism; since its government had begun from different principles, expanding its scope did not seem unreasonable. You could not get too much of a good thing.

Radicalism followed logically. Radicals were those who wished to institute major changes in society; the implication was that they could obtain most of the good things life had to offer through a great deal of governmental activity, supplemented as needed by strong interventions by other groups, such as labor unions. In this period the term covered a wild variety of differing views, ranging from the anarchism of an Emma Goldman to the communism of an Earl Browder, with a great many well-known figures lurking indecisively on the borderlands between liberalism and radicalism, usually depending on the state of the economy—1932-33 being probably the most radical years, emotionally speaking, in the history of the country. Radicals worked for laws to protect labor unions, to pay unemployment compensation, to protect anyone poor or disabled. But for many, that was not enough; they adopted the Soviet Union as a model toward which to work; as conditions improved, they might compromise along with Sweden. But they scorned the satisfactions of religion, of detachment, of solitary self-enrichment. Radicals never thought of themselves as superfluous.

With these three divisions clear, earlier periods of American history take on a rather different aspect from the programmatic outline of views that most books doggedly insist upon. Conservatism in the colonial period became the right of every male citizen to rise and prosper in ways all but unknown in England or other country of family origin. A man could be poor but could get land, marry, work hard, produce children, establish a small business, and not face the regulations and exploitations of the old country. Only when an absent-minded Parliament far away in London tried to institute a more European-style set of controls did the colonists rebel: they rebelled to conserve what they had, to fend off excess government, to continue the pursuit of private goals.

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The Civil War was the crucible of definitions as well as nations. History had saddled the South with slavery, giving most conservatively minded white males a vested interest in a system that violated all principles such men applied to themselves as citizens or as Christians. Under increasingly violent attack for such hereditary sins, they naturally hunkered down and refused to face the issue. Defeated, they proved all but incapable of serious thought about the results until the Agrarians in this volume surfaced after World War I. Defeating slavery, the North first danced on its grave and then permitted itself an orgy of free, liberal industrial expansion. It is important to underline the ideological basis of thought after 1865: British liberalism of the sort identified with John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, and William Gladstone, eager to get rid of an England that protected agriculture, tolerated rotten boroughs, and colonized the world for the glories of British economic growth. Freedom meant especially economic freedom, and few indeed were those of any orientation who foresaw the worst consequences of what might result.

Articulate cultural conservatives were often as horrified at the results as the liberals who appeared complicitous with them. Adamses had long been at the core of conservatism: from within the business community, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., found the results fully as dangerous and boring as his more famous brother, Henry Adams. Other critics fled to universities, with Harvard alone harboring its Barrett Wendells and Charles Eliot Nortons, and eventually its George Santayanas, Irving Babbitts, and T. S. Eliots—if pluralizing such singular figures is even rhetorically conceivable. None found Harvard an ideal place, merely a tolerable oasis in a vast desert of public corruption. They studied the religions of the Orient, the art of Italy, and the literature of England. They even found good things to say about the Puritans—a meddlesome lot to be sure, but at least they took ideas seriously. Implications of superfluity were dawning; minds appalled by the present naturally sought refuge in the past, often the distant past; and sometimes in the geographically distant. So many took refuge in London that they have gone into the books as the London Yankees, not to mention the films that masquerade as the perceptions of Henry James. Others settled for years in Paris or Florence, or took long trips to the Orient. The superfluous men of this volume thus were, appropriately enough, part of a long tradition. The business and political life of their country of birth had deserted them; they were merely returning the slight.

The Depression and World War II very nearly proved fatal to American conservatism. The New Deal seemed increasingly an exercise in deceptive public relations and bureaucratic expansion, but its leader proved popular and his opponents bungled every opportunity to replace him. The war forced dissenters into an impossible position: if the country were truly in danger, of course they had to fight for it; but that meant risking their lives as well for a president they detested and a party most of them distrusted. They needn't have worried in one sense, since Roosevelt eagerly sought out business allies essential to the economic demands of war. Making money while saving democracy was an unbeatable theme, and the national union government that evolved effectively made liberalism into the only option for most intellectuals. Liberals stopped taking conservatives seriously; in the often quoted words of Lionel Trilling in The Liberal Imagination (1950), American conservatives could no longer think at all. Having no ideas, they could only express themselves "in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas."

This was perilously close to being true, at least in terms of new ideas. But conservatism had been gaining converts, most obviously disillusioned radicals at home and refugees from abroad. Max Eastman, once a leading Trotskyist, was already finding an audience in the relentlessly middlebrow Reader's Digest; John Dos Passos had left many of his radical principles in Spain, appalled at Communist behavior during its civil war. The Hitler-Stalin Pact had pushed a good many more radicals to the right, often the far right, and while this infused new blood into the ranks it also brought with it a new style of thought and discourse. A James Burnham or a Sidney Hook had grown up in collectivist polemics, and were disinclined for a life superfluous to society. They were relevant, and more than able to explain why if anyone looked even slightly interested. A Whittaker Chambers could use his life to dramatize the alternatives. At the same time, a John Lukacs might arrive with European historical ideas, or Ludwig von Mises with an Austrian version of unfettered capitalism.

The history of the postwar revival of conservative thought is now getting attention, although too many of the works are secretly trying to explain the Ronald Reagan phenomenon, or the resurgence of the religious right, or the various misperceptions of the Pentagon or the Central Intelligence Agency. Liberal journalism is not the best way to approach serious conservatism, and conservative journalism is not much better. Both sides need the perspective of history and some sense of the validity of feelings of superfluity. In particular, they need to note two developments during the years from the 1960s to the 1990s.

The first was the establishment of concrete policy proposals. Conservatives had been saying No! to proposals from the left for so long that they had seemed unable to say Yes! to much of anything in the political sphere. Using precedents from Austrian economic thought, for example, an American like Milton Friedman could formulate new fiscal policies designed to free the economy from needless government interventions. A utilities expert (even an ex-liberal Democrat) like Alfred E. Kahn could point out the counterproductive ways in which legislative interventions overburdened industries from electricity to trucking to airlines and help engineer conservative reforms that subsequent generations happily took for granted, saving money and lessening environmental damage. A platoon of educational reformers documented the scientific, mathematical, and linguistical failures of that oxymoronic concept, "progressive education," and insisted on new (or sometimes very old) teaching techniques. They sponsored legislation that enabled parents to choose private or religious schools with at least some public expense, even though such schools threatened those perpetual friends of liberal politicians, public school teachers unions.

In some cases, history seemed to be voting conservative. Once the "bad guys" for overtly or covertly acquiescing in segregation, conservatives profited more than liberals from the legal end of segregation between 1954 and 1965. With the incubus off their backs, conservatives found that large majorities of white voters rejected further liberal interventions of the type usually referred to as "affirmative action." Equality was one thing, but preferring any racial or linguistic group over another seemed to violate many of the most basic principles upon which the country was based, and upon which liberalism had rested for much of its history. A significant amount of the support for Ronald Reagan was at heart an expression of aversion to racial preferences in school admissions, in the awarding of scholarship funds, in the granting of government job contracts, in the appointment of cabinet members or Supreme Court Justices, and the general liberal stress on having all the colors of the rainbow represented proportionately in every public activity.

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An even more cosmic joke came in 1991, with the second development, the breakup of the Soviet Union. Conservatives crowed, assuming that their leaders' intransigence and a big military had essentially bankrupted Moscow. They had a point, although not a decisive one; but it came only at the end of a two-edged sword. If the Soviet Union had become Russia once again, if it were clearly unable to pay its bills or finance a credible military sector, then the whole military-industrial complex that supported so many American jobs was largely redundant. Supporters of Israel had plenty of enemies to worry themselves about, and both Iran and Iraq seemed eager to substitute as the chief American enemy in the world, but neither could possibly justify a vast American force. Something would have to give.

The Reagan-Bush years, 1981-93, were thus not so much the triumph of conservative values as the place where many of them changed their means of expression. Many conservative policies concerning taxation and utility regulation proved popular and successful; others, as in the school system, ran into a stonewall of opposition from vested interests. New issues, most notably concerning abortion and public expression of religious beliefs, stirred up passions without finding any consensus. But from a great distance, one truth slowly dawned on an increasing number of people: nothing much changed, and it did not change because government activity was not the answer to most important questions. Conservatives did not even enjoy the process of governing, the way they would have in England or Germany or most other industrialized nations. Governing was for liberals, who believed in government. Now that the Soviets were an unpleasant memory, the justification for big government seemed less and less relevant: we really didn't need all that big a Pentagon; we certainly didn't need all those interventions that resulted from "affirmative action." The schools still needed a phased withdrawal from government oversight, the state still needed a police and prison system, the country could certainly use better maintenance of roadways, and so on: but now that racial matters were largely historical rather than contemporary, such matters could return to local control or even be placed in private hands, letting the market do its regulatory thing.

All of which make for a revival of interest in those who once had felt themselves "superfluous." As the century turns, the values of religion, of education, of history, of law, seem to be returning to public awareness. Books on virtue and literacy have been hitting the bestseller list, to nestle uncomfortably next to those detailing the personal failings of liberals from Kennedy to Clinton. The utility of useless knowledge; the relevance of the superfluous: Life under late capitalism was capable of generating ironies beyond the liberal and radical imaginations.

Lest the selections that follow seem entirely untouched by current cultural circumstances, a few strategic points need stressing. At the outset of the project, an editor suggested to me the value of a book that brought together conservative ideas and achievements in a period in which few students knew they existed. I agreed, and originally planned to include creative works, many of them by women such as Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, and Caroline Gordon. The preliminary compilation proved to be more than double the length of the volume you are holding. The press could see no market for such a volume, and the expense of reprint rights made it prohibitive anyway. As reality produced shrinkage, women as well as T. S. Eliot disappeared, and I chose to focus on only a few issues and controversies to give coherence to the final work. The fact remains that most women who produced polemical work of merit in this period were disproportionately liberal and radical. The same holds true for the black community. An occasional maverick like George Schuyler aside, most blacks understandably thought they needed government help. An anthology dealing with the last thirty years of the century would yield very different results.

Austin, Texas
April 1998

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