Essay 67: The Use Americans Make For Public Associations In Civil Life (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 5)

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

The essays in our study reference the following edition of Democracy In America: University of Chicago Press – 1st edition translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Today’s essay references pages 489 – 492 of this edition of Democracy in America.

This is the part where De Tocqueville famously argued that Americans of all types voluntarily associated to carry on “commercial and industrial” enterprises and also a “thousand” other types of endeavors “religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small.” Over twenty years ago, I set out to put quantitative bones on his insight and concluded that he did not exaggerate.

A decade ago, I published in Corporation Nation detailed data regarding the formation of for-profit corporations in each of the U.S. states, territories, and District of Columbia from the formation of the nation until the outbreak of the Civil War. The “commercial and industrial” enterprises given legal life by special act of incorporation numbered over 23,000 and included banks, bridges, canals, ditch drainage companies, insurers, lumber companies, manufacturers, mining companies, railroads, telegraphs, tunnels, and turnpikes. Many thousands more chartered under general incorporation laws but could not be counted as comprehensively due to records destruction and bureaucratic barriers to access in states like New York and Michigan.

Last year, I published in Liberty Lost detailed data regarding the formation of nonprofit corporations in each of the U.S. states, territories, and District of Columbia from the formation of the nation until the outbreak of the Civil War. Those “religious, moral, grave” organizations given legal life by special act of incorporation numbered over 14,000 and included abolition societies, asylums of various types, charities, churches, fraternal, maternal, and sororal organizations, lyceums, militias, missionary societies, museums, musical institutions, schools of many types, and various social reform movements from socialist communes to temperance societies, among many other endeavors. Many thousands of additional associations chartered under general incorporation laws but, as with for-profit corporations, extant records proved too costly to access, fragmentary, and scattered to review as systematically as the special charters printed in state statute books.

Moreover, only the largest organizations obtained formal charters. Many other voluntary associations, from for-profit partnerships to nonprofit social clubs, formed by means of personal agreements, trusts, or informal articles of association without the imprimatur of any district, state, or territorial government. Many general references to them, in addition to De Tocqueville’s, point to their existence but even when every extant source, including every letter and diary entry, is machine readable, the names and purposes of many of America’s “very small” early voluntary associations will remain forever hidden from our view.

What those voluntary associations did for America, however, endured long after the organizations themselves disbanded, with results globally palpable. America came to be seen as a “free country” because it relied largely on voluntary efforts. As De Tocqueville argues in this section, Americans learned to cooperate without coercion, following the lead not of government officials, as in France, or rich aristocrats, as in Britain, but of anyone with commitment, verve, and a good idea or two about how to improve society and the people composing it.

De Tocqueville was also quite right to note that “Americans of all ages, all conditions” involved themselves in voluntary associations. Although men of European ancestry dominated the leadership of for-profit corporations, women were often shareholders and free blacks were not excluded from share ownership either. Moreover, women and free blacks often chartered their own nonprofit organizations. Some have been written about, but I discovered hundreds of others neglected by historians more interested in making politically motivated gross generalizations than in studying what America was once really like, not a perfect meritocracy but also not a place where social or commercial innovation was suffered to be stymied by class, gender, or government strictures.

De Tocqueville ends this part with the warning that civilization itself requires perfection of “the art of associating … in the same ratio as equality of conditions increases.” That prediction led me to call my book on nonprofits Liberty Lost because it seems that as Americans push for greater “equality of conditions” today, they look too much to the government for it, and not enough to voluntary association. The diminution of voluntarism portends a cultural communism in which the government mishandles social policies as poorly as it commands economies. As De Tocqueville put it, “a government can no more suffice on its own to maintain and renew the circulation of sentiments and ideas in a great people than to conduct all its industrial undertakings.”

The billions currently spent on politicking to control the government, De Tocqueville thus suggests, might better be spent directly ameliorating undesirable social conditions, not via grandiose top-down “programs” and “plans” designed to garner votes, but by means of grassroots organizations led by able volunteers with intimate knowledge of local conditions and needs.

Robert E. Wright is a lecturer in economics at Central Michigan University. He previously taught economics at the University of Virginia, New York University, and Augustana University. He is the (co)author of 25 books, including, most recently, FDR’s Long New Deal: A Public Choice Perspective (Palgrave, 2024) and Liberty Lost: The Rise and Demise of Voluntary Association in America Since Its Founding (AIER, 2023)

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