Matt Van Hook Archives - Constituting America

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

In Justin Smith Morrill, historian Coy Cross ends his biography with a simple truth: “If Justin Morrill had done nothing else, the Land-Grant College Act would have assured his place in history.”

With at least one land-grant institution in every state in the U.S. today, Morrill’s lasting legislative legacy launched educational opportunities for millions of students and invaluably advanced American agricultural and technical knowledge and leadership for over a century and a half. As the hero of this national deed, Justin Morrill exemplifies a distinctive virtue necessary for a thriving republic: sacrificial service aimed at creating opportunities for others.

Like Alexander Hamilton a few short generations before him, Justin Morrill had a natural affinity toward accounting and financial planning. His early business and commercial financial successes in New England could have led him to use his considerable talents and energy for a lifetime of private gain and personal philanthropy in his home state of Vermont. Instead, he chose a lifetime of public service, first serving in 1854 in the U.S. House of Representatives at age 44 for six terms, followed by 32 years as a U.S. senator until his death in 1898.

While the Land-Grant Act bears his name, he was better known in Congress for his work managing the challenging financial situation of the United States in the 1850s through tariff policies designed to build and protect American industry against a European-dominated economy. The economic situation only worsened as the Civil War came. Although his work as chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee was important and exhausting, Morrill saw even deeper stakes for the prosperity of the republic. He recognized that America was not a giant machine, but rather a nation of equal citizens whose ingenuity and affinity toward hard work could outshine all of Europe. Such a goal, however, required an abundance of available and affordable education—especially education that elevated the reputation for the agricultural and mechanical arts, establishing a long line of respected Americans entering these indispensable vocations as practitioners, researchers, and teachers.

Morrill risked his reputation but got his land-grant bill passed in 1862 after a five-year fight. On April 20, 1858, Morrill had invoked public sentiment that demanded higher education not only for those entering the life of law and letters but also for the future leaders in the fields of agriculture and engineering. Morrill viewed this as an absolute practical necessity, but the land-grant colleges would also be dignified in their own right as first-class institutions. Morrill simply argued, “Young Americans should have some chance to study agriculture as a profession and be attracted to it as a learned, liberal, and intellectual pursuit.” By no means would this education be solely technical training. It was also an entryway to a life of reading great texts and strategic thinking, just as Morrill had personally pursued his whole life. He had given the land-grant colleges a noble founding prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. His second act in 1890 was an extension of this same nobility to those citizens of all races whom these institutions, including the historically black colleges and universities, now serve.

Morrill worked for nearly thirty more years establishing and securing grants for colleges across the U.S. During this time, he corresponded with luminaries like Frederick Douglass, who called upon him to lead the charge to expand education for everyone regardless of color or creed. Morrill gladly picked up the mantle. Originally, his new 1890 Morrill Act simply denied funds for “maintenance of a college where a distinction of race or color is made in the admission of students.” However, the bill was politically untenable without a concession for the establishment of equally funded separate colleges for white and Black students. When faced with the choice of a political compromise that allowed southern segregated land-grant colleges or losing out altogether on educational access for freedmen and their descendants, Morrill chose the former. For a statesman who came into his political career as part of the new Republican Party, he worked closely with Abraham Lincoln and stood for free soil and free labor his entire political career. Morrill recognized that education would ultimately bring together a country where the citizens—all citizens—would one day share in self-rule.

On the hundredth anniversary of the Land-Grant Act, poet laureate Robert Frost declared, “For me there is no greater name in American education than that of Senator Justin Smith Morrill.” As a dedicated public servant who fought tirelessly to change the entire American concept of who should be considered “college-bound,” Morrill’s heroism and virtue emerge from his selflessness and personal devotion to the good of others. He undertook the daunting project that now rightly ranks among the greatest legislative accomplishments of the 19th century.

Matthew Van Hook received his doctoral degree in political science from the University of Notre Dame with a focus on political theory, constitutional studies and American political thought. He also holds a master’s degree in security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Prior to joining the Torrey Honors College faculty, Van Hook served on active duty as an Air Force pilot and political science professor at his alma mater, the US Air Force Academy. His research and published work ranges from the statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln to politics and law in the novels of Harper Lee.

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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 458 – 469 (stop at Chp. 20 heading) of this edition of Democracy in America.

Democracy in America, Vol II, Part II, Chapter I – “Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Ardent and more Lasting Love for Equality than for Freedom”
By the time De Tocqueville’s readers arrive at his chapter on the sources of poetry in democratic nations, he has already passed his preliminary judgment that “Up to the present, America has had only a very few remarkable writers; it has not had great historians and does not count one poet.” The few American writers known to Europeans, such as Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, were read because they stoked fascination for those trying to understand America and its revolution. The “poems of democracy” might hold similar explanatory power and purpose, but they fall short of De Tocqueville’s definition of true poetry as “the search for and depiction of the ideal.” In America he searches for the poetic instead of true poetry.

Poetry aimed at the ideal “will not have for its goal to represent the true, but to adorn it, and to offer a superior image to the mind.” In democratic social states, however, the true and ideal are wrapped up together in “material enjoyments” that spark only a certain kind of limited imagination—Gatsby’s fabulous and conspicuous wealth, the savvy monopolists’ conquering of a system from railroads to software, the investigative journalists’ takedown of these sorts. They represent only the “ideal” of real people doing practical things well without the assistance of aristocratic position, divine intervention, or magic. Democratic social states pull the poets’ imaginations down from the clouds and confine them to “the visible and real world.” So it should not surprise De Tocqueville’s readers then or now that, like the relentless sun over the great American desert, equality has dried up the old sources of poetry. New sources of poetry must emerge from a world entirely new, and De Tocqueville describes this occurring in two phases.

When estates that span centuries no longer survive a single generational split, and names and titles are scarcely known even as historical artifacts, the democratic poets first turned toward “inanimate nature” to fill the void. The Mississippi River and Appalachian Mountains replaced the lost objects of aristocratic imagination. This temporary turn, however, was only the brief transition to the true democratic turn inward. De Tocqueville is “convinced that in the long term democracy turns the imagination away from all that is external to man to fix it only on man.” This inward turn toward the human race has great potential for the poetic, but only if it can be made to think of humanity’s shape and future. Can such a turn be expected from Americans living in a social state of equality? As De Tocqueville explains, “One can conceive of nothing so small, so dull, so filled with miserable interests, in a word, so antipoetic, as the life of a man in the United States.” Enter Emily Dickinson stage left. One can almost imagine a ten-year-old Dickinson picking up the newly released second volume of Democracy in America, reading this chapter, and determining to fulfill the author’s expectations for distinctively American poems. These examinations of small souls are not poetry proper but there is still something poetic to be found in them.

While De Tocqueville seems to predict the arrival of Dickinson, Whitman, Frost and other democratic poets willing to mine the mundane for transcendent ideas, he fears a more extreme future. He expects that the bombastic language, already so prevalent in American writing, will saturate poetry as well, and “the works of democratic poets will often offer immense and incoherent images, overloaded depictions, and bizarre composites in imaginations that depart from reality rather than adorn the ideal.” He finds this already taking place in the theaters where spectacle rules, though admittedly still bounded in his time by a remnant of Puritan cultural restraints and township laws. De Tocqueville’s theater chapter provides a fitting bookend to his discussion of poetry because his readers can imagine the democratic poetry of America combining spectacle, passions, and ideas with the smallness of a single democratic soul longing for achievable human greatness. When searching for the democratic poetry of the present, one need only look to the spoken word poetry, music of the blues, and other distinctly American sources that come together on stage in Lin Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton!

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