Essay 74: Why Americans Are So Restless In The Midst Of Their Prosperity (Vol. 2 Pt. 2 Ch. 13)

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Guest Essayist: Wilfred M. McClay

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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 511 (start at chapter 13 heading) – 514 (stop at chapter 14 heading) of this edition of Democracy in America.

Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) was a Frenchman, and one of the most important European social and political thinkers of the nineteenth century. Yet his most famous work was about America, which he visited for nine months in 1831, and then analyzed in his book Democracy in America (1835-40). He saw the United States as a pioneering nation moving in the front ranks of human history. In America, one could gaze upon “the image of democracy itself, of its penchants, its character, its prejudices, its passions”—and having so gazed, could perhaps take away lessons that would allow leaders in his own country to deal more intelligently and effectively with the democratic changes coming to Europe. 

He was firmly convinced that the movement toward greater social equality—which is what he meant by the word “democracy”—represented an inescapable feature of the modern age. And he was in favor of it. There would be no going back. But he also saw some downsides to democracy and insisted on pointing them out. His chapter on “Why the Americans Show Themselves so Restive in the Midst of Their Well-Being” is a perfect illustration of his position. 

The chapter revolves around De Tocqueville’s contrast between aristocratic societies and democratic societies. For De Tocqueville, an aristocratic society was one governed by inequality, with a small, privileged class at the top of the social pyramid. It was a society in which one’s social status was assigned at birth and kept for life, a status bound up in the place of one’s family. 

In the democratic society, however, matters were quite different. There was a general “spirit” of equality; the people are sovereign, and the right to vote is widely extended; hierarchies are abolished, and any legal status or privilege extended to the well-born few is abolished; rights are universal, or tending toward universality, as is literacy and access to education; families are comparatively weak and changeable, even ephemeral; there a constant pressure toward the scattering of inherited wealth, with the breaking-up of large estates and large fortunes; and a resulting tendency toward social and economic fluidity, the fading of class distinctions, leading to universal sameness. 

It would be our natural tendency, wouldn’t it, to choose the democratic society over the aristocratic one. We like the idea of individual opportunity, of going our own way. But De Tocqueville opens this chapter with a paradox that might cause us to think twice. 

In remote parts of the Old World, he observes, there were ignorant and impoverished people who were nevertheless happy and contented. But in America, where prosperity and liberty were widely enjoyed, there was unhappiness. “It seemed to me,” he says, “that a sort of cloud habitually covered [the Americans’] features; they appeared to me grave and almost sad.”

Why the difference? He has an explanation. The residents of the Old World are locked into an unchanging social structure, so one’s standing in the world is unlikely to change. 

Families remained in the same place for centuries, every man remembered his ancestors and anticipated his descendants, and strove to do his duty to both. The individual person was so enmeshed in the fabric of society that it was impossible to imagine him or her apart from it—as implausible as swimming in the air, or breathing beneath the waves. 

In democratic societies, however, it was completely different. The principle of equality reigned, such duties and fixities were lost. Aristocracy had made of all citizens a long chain that went from the peasant up to the king; democracy breaks the chain and sets each link apart. The word for the latter condition is “individualism.” 

We greatly prize individualism, don’t we? Is it possible, though, that our individualism is a source of the restlessness that De Tocqueville describes? That’s what De Tocqueville thought. The reason the isolated peasants are more content is because they accept the negative aspects of their lives, since they can’t imagine anything better would be possible for them. But the democratic souls do not accept inequality. They are ambitious, and “dream constantly of the goods they do not have.” 

But here comes the downside: “men will never find an equality that is enough for them.” And this: “When inequality is the common law of a society, the strongest inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on a level, the least of them wound it. That is why the desire for equality always becomes more insatiable as equality is greater.” 

Which is why, he says, the Americans are restless in the midst of their prosperity. It seems that there is a price to be paid for any social system, including ours. Much of the rest of De Tocqueville’s great book is devoted to considering how we can lessen that price, and keep the pursuit of equality from crowding out all other values, including the spirit of liberty. 

Does De Tocqueville’s analysis ring true to you? Many scholars and thinkers believe that it does, even though Democracy in America was written almost two centuries ago. 

Wilfred M. McClay is Professor of History at Hillsdale College, and the author of Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story. He served for eleven years on the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is currently is a member of the U.S. Commission on the Semiquincentennial, which has been charged with planning the celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education, and received the Bradley Prize in 2022. He is a graduate of St. John’s College (Annapolis) and received his Ph.D. in History from the Johns Hopkins University.

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Introduction – Recovering Our Legacy: The Many Uses of the American Past

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Guest Essayist: Wilfred M. McClay

We Americans need to know our history. And we need to know it far better than we have in the past. We are not a people bound together primarily by blood and soil. Instead we are people with our origins in many bloods and many soils, linked by shared principles embodied in shared institutions, and embedded in a shared history, with its shared triumphs and shared sufferings. There is a growing danger that we have been failing to pass along that flame to our posterity, with untold consequences. We have neglected an essential element in the formation of good citizens when we fail to provide the young with an accurate, responsible, and inspiring account of their own country – an account that will inform and deepen their sense of identification with the land they inhabit and equip them for the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship.

“Citizenship” here encompasses something larger than the civics-class meaning. It means a vivid and enduring sense of one’s full membership in one of the greatest enterprises in human history: the astonishing, perilous, and immensely consequential story of one’s own country. That’s what the study of American history should provide.

We need this knowledge for the deepest of all reasons. For the human animal, meaning is not a luxury; it is a necessity. Without it, we perish. Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Without memory, and without the stories by which our memories are carried forward, we cannot say who, or what, we are. A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous and easily tyrannized, even if it is technologically advanced. The incessant waves of daily events will occupy all our attention and defeat all our efforts to connect past, present, and future, thereby diverting us from an understanding of the human things that unfold in time, including the paths of our own lives. The stakes were beautifully expressed in the words of the great Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer: “When a day passes it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren’t told or books weren’t written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day. The whole world, all human life, is one long story.”

Singer was right. As individuals, as communities, as countries: we are nothing more than flotsam and jetsam without the stories in which we find our lives’ meaning. These are stories of which we are already a part, whether we know it or not. They are the basis of our common life, the webs of meaning in which our shared identities are suspended. Just as we need meaning, so we need a sense of belonging. Without them we cannot flourish. The pathologies that we see creeping steadily into our national life—rise in suicides, youth depression, alcoholism, drug abuse, and astonishingly an overall decline in life expectancy—how can these not be related to a catastrophic loss of meaning, a sense of disconnected from others, and from the great story to which, by all rights, every American belongs?

I wrote the book Land of Hope to try to begin to redress this problem, to be a fresh invitation to the American story. It does not pretend to be a complete and definitive telling of that story. Such an undertaking would be impossible in any event, because the story is ongoing and far from being concluded. But what it does try to do is present the skeleton of the story, its indispensable underlying structure, in a form particularly appropriate for the education of American citizens living under a republican form of government. There are other ways of telling the story, and my own choice of emphasis should not be taken to imply that the other aspects of our history are not worth studying. On the contrary, they contain immense riches that historians have only begun to explore. But one cannot do everything all at once. One must begin at the beginning, with the most fundamental structures, before one can proceed to other topics. The skeleton is not the whole of the body – but there cannot be a functional body without it.

Permit, in concluding to say a word about my choice of title, Land of Hope, which forms one of the guiding and recurrent themes of the book. As the book argues from the very outset, the western hemisphere was largely inhabited by people who had come from elsewhere, unwilling to settle for the conditions into which they were born and drawn by the prospect of a new beginning, the lure of freedom, and the space to pursue their ambitions in ways their respective Old Worlds did not permit. Hope has both theological and secular meanings, spiritual ones as well as material ones. Both these sets of meanings exist in abundance in America. In fact, nothing about America better defines its distinctive character than the ubiquity of hope, a sense that the way things are initially given to us cannot be the final word about them, that we can never settle for that. Even those who are exceptions to this rule, those who were brought to America in chains, have turned out to be some of its greatest poets of hope.

Of course, hope and opportunity are not synonymous with success. Being a land of hope will also sometimes mean being a land of dashed hopes, of disappointment. That is unavoidable. A nation that professes high ideals makes itself vulnerable to searing criticism when it falls short of them – sometimes far short indeed, as America often has. We should not be surprised by that, however; nor should we be surprised to discover that many of our heroes turn out to be deeply flawed human beings. All human beings are flawed, as are all human enterprises.

What we should remember, though, is that the history of the United States includes the activity of searching self-criticism as part of its foundational makeup. There is immense hope implicit in that process, if we go about it in the right way. That means approaching the work of criticism with constructive intentions and a certain generosity that flows from the mature awareness that none of us is perfect and that we should therefore judge others as we would ourselves wish to be judged, blending justice and mercy. One of the worst sins of the present – not just ours but any present – is its tendency to condescend toward the past, which is much easier to do when one doesn’t trouble to know the full context of that past or try to grasp the nature of its challenges as they presented themselves at the time. My small book is an effort to counteract that condescension and remind us of how remarkable were the achievements of those who came before us, how much we are indebted to them.

But there is another value to the study of American history. Many Americans, including perhaps a majority of young people, believe that the present is so different from the past that the past no longer has anything to teach us. This could not be more wrong. As I say in the book’s epigraph, borrowing from the words of John Dos Passos:

In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking. That is why, in times like ours, when old institutions are caving in and being replaced by new institutions not necessarily in accord with most men’s preconceived hopes, political thought has to look backwards as well as forwards.

With the grounding provided by a sense of history, we need never feel imprisoned by the “idiot delusion of the exceptional Now,” or feel alone and adrift in a world without precedents, without ancestors, without guidelines. But we cannot have that grounding unless it is passed along to us by others. We must redouble our efforts to make that past our own, and then be about the business of passing it on.

This year’s Constituting America study is going to be particularly valuable in this regard, since it revolves around the study of particular moments in the American past when something highly consequential was decided. Dates, you say? What could be more boring? Ah, but we sometimes forget, to our detriment, that nothing in history is predetermined, and no outcome is pre-assured. History can turn on a dime, in a single moment, on a single date, and that’s why dates matter.

History is all about contingency, about the way that our positive outcomes depend not only on our big ideas but on our actions, our character, our courage, our determination—and on our good fortune, on forces beyond our control that somehow have seemed to work together for our good. Some people call this “good fortune” Providence. The American Founders certainly did. See if you don’t agree that they were on to something, when you hear the stories to come. They will make you think twice when you hear about “the blessings of Liberty” which our Constitution was designed to secure.

Wilfred M. McClay is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and the Director of the Center for the History of Liberty. In the 2019-20 academic year he is serving as the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. He served from 2002 to 2013 on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is currently serving on the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which is planning for the 250th anniversary of the United States, to be observed in 2026. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education, among others. His book The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America won the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history. Among his other books are The Student’s Guide to U.S. History, Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Public Life in Modern America, and most recently Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story. He was educated at St. John’s College (Annapolis) and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1987.

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Oklahoma, November 16, 1907: Forty-Sixth Admitted to the United States

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Guest Essayist: Wilfred M. McClay

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The area of North America that we now call Oklahoma had a lengthy prehistory.  Its aboriginal inhabitants, known collectively as the First People, probably came to the Western Hemisphere from Asia some twenty to forty thousand years ago, crossing over into the unsettled continent over a land bridge between Russia and Alaska. They went on to establish themselves on the land thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans, settling in villages along the Arkansas, Canadian, Washita, and Red rivers, and engaging in farming, hunting, and trade. After Columbus’s voyages the region drew the interest of Europeans, particularly wandering Spanish explorers who were driven by the hope of discovering fabulous gold wealth comparable to what had been found by the Spanish soldier Hernán Cortés in his conquest of the Aztec Empire in Mexico. These adventurers merely passed through quickly, though, and did not stay and settle. Neither did the French, who were primarily interested in the riches to be derived from fur trading with the native inhabitants, and had little interest in establishing permanent settlements.

Matters changed dramatically with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, when Oklahoma became a possession of the newly independent and rapidly growing United States, under the leadership of its third President, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson and other leaders hoped the Purchase could provide room for an “Indian colonization zone” to solve the endemic problem of conflicts between the Native populations and the pressures exerted by expansion-minded European settlers. The concept of such a zone gradually gained favor, and a region thought of as “the Indian country” was specified in 1825 as all the land lying west of the Mississippi. Eventually, the Indian country or Indian Territory would encompass the present states of Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and part of Iowa.

In the meantime, the process of removing the Native population from the eastern woodland areas began, and accelerated with the passage in 1830 of the Indian Removal Act. A European traveler, the great French writer Alexis de Tocqueville witnessed the effects of the removal firsthand, as he happened by chance upon a westward-bound group of Choctaws crossing the Mississippi River at Memphis in December 1831. “One cannot imagine the frightful evils that accompany these forced migrations,” he remarked, and he went on to describe in compelling detail the frigid winter scene, the ground hardened with snow and enormous pieces of ice drifting down the river, as the Indian families gathered in silent and sorrowful resignation on the east bank of the river, proceeding without tears or complaints to cross over into what they knew to be an erasure of their past. It was, Tocqueville said, a “solemn spectacle that will never leave my memory.” Most of these migrants in that “Trail of Tears,” those who survived, would end up living in Oklahoma.

Eventually even this designated Indian “zone” could not withstand the pressures of land-hungry expansionists. Area after area was opened to non-Native settlement, the territory moved inexorably toward statehood. There was considerable sentiment favoring the creation of a separate “Indian” state of Sequoyah, but in the end that effort would fail, and a single state would be formed in 1907, combining Native and non-Native elements.

Even so, as the forty-sixth state in the Union, Oklahoma possesses a name that is derived from the Choctaw words okla and humma, meaning “red people,” and that name fittingly signifies the uniquely enduring importance of the Native population to the state’s identity. In no other state of the Union is the Native presence more important, more indelible, more enduring—and arguably, more honored in the state’s politics and culture. Yet the achievement of that relatively harmonious state of affairs was bitter and difficult, particularly for the Native population, which had to accept betrayals and abrogation of agreements at every step of the way.

Once a state, though, Oklahoma quickly took its place as an important center of the burgeoning petroleum industry, with the city of Tulsa being labeled “The Oil Capital of the World,” and the oil industry serving as a primary driver of the entire state’s booming economy. From the moment that Oklahoma had become part of the United States in 1803, growth had become its byword. It had gone in just a few years from being a raw and forbidding frontier to being a leading force in the growth of the world’s economy, a force now moving into higher and higher gear.

For better or worse, and despite the state’s deep commitment to agriculture as a component of its economy, the state’s general economic fortunes have generally turned upon the rising and falling fortunes of the oil industry. That is its strength, and its weakness. Its well-being in the future, particular that phases out or dramatically deemphasizes the use of fossil fuels, will hinge on its ability to develop a more diversified economy.

One factor that many observers believe holds Oklahoma back in the quest for self-improvement is its massive and antiquated state constitution. At the time of its adoption in 1907, it was the lengthiest state constitution ever written, over 250,000 words long. Strongly influenced in its drafting by the leadership of fiery populist William “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, the document went into obsessive detail, spelling out regulations, safeguards, rights, obligations, and precise instructions in ways that were more appropriate to statutory law than the freer generalities of constitutional law.

Such specificity is a sure path to obsolescence. A great many of the Oklahoma constitution’s provisions are the product of a bygone era, the Progressivism of a hundred years ago encased in constitutional amber, relevant to the past but no longer relevant to the present day. Such a hidebound constitution stands in ironic contrast to the wide-open and pioneering spirit of the state whose political life it seeks to organize. Accordingly, some of the state’s most far-sighted individuals have argued for the necessity of adopting a new state constitution. But that is easier said than done, and the chances are very good that the current constitution will remain in place for the foreseeable future.

Wilfred M. McClay is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and the Director of the Center for the History of Liberty. In the 2019-20 academic year he is serving as the Ronald Reagan Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. He served from 2002 to 2013 on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is currently serving on the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which is planning for the 250th anniversary of the United States, to be observed in 2026. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education, among others. His book The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America won the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history. Among his other books are The Student’s Guide to U.S. History, Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America, Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past, Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Public Life in Modern America, and most recently Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story. He was educated at St. John’s College (Annapolis) and received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1987.

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For Additional Reading:

W. David Baird and Danney Goble, Oklahoma: A History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.

David R. Morgan, et al., Oklahoma Politics and Policies: Governing the Sooner State. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.

The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, Oklahoma Historical Society, accessible online at https://www.okhistory.org/publications/encyclopediaonline.php.

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