Announcer: The American Enterprise Institute presents the Distinguished Lecture Series on the Bicentennial
of the United States. Our host for this thought-provoking series is Vermont Royster, Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist with "The Wall Street Journal" and Professor of Journalism and Public Affairs
at the University of North Carolina.
Vermont Royster: I'm Vermont Royster with another in the American Enterprise Institute's Distinguished
Lecture Series on the American Bicentennial. To help celebrate the 200th Anniversary of
our nation, the AEI has gathered some of our country's leading scholars and educators to
share with us their views on the American Revolution and how it still affects us all
today. Distinguished Lecture Series is a part of AEI's continuing effort to open the major
issues of our times to serious discussion from several points of view. The AEI is a
nonprofit institution located in Washington, DC. Tonight's lecture takes place in the Benjamin
Franklin Room of the State Department Building located in this section of Washington known
as Foggy Bottom.
The State Department is a fitting location for our lecture which is entitled "Foreign
Policy as a Dimension of the American Revolution." It will be delivered by Charles Burton Marshall
of John Hopkins University who once worked at the State Department as a member of the
Policy Planning Staff. The State Department is one of the most important of all our government's
operation. It is in this building that the men and women who shape our foreign policy
and our relations with other countries ply their trade, the delicate business known as
diplomacy.
In the main lobby of the State Department fly the flags of some 127 nations. Each flag
represents a country with which the United States has diplomatic relations and at times,
each flag can also represent a major headache for the professionals who guide our
foreign affairs. Also of interest in the State Department lobby is this huge relief globe
of the world, often used as a backdrop for national television correspondence when reporting
from the State Department. In the courtyard of the State Department stands a sculpture
by artist Marshall Fredericks, entitled "Man and the Expanding Universe." The sculpture
is dedicated to all members of the Armed Forces and the Foreign Service who have given their
lives in service to the United States.
The State Department stands in an area filled with monuments to America and Great America.
Just across the Potomac's Tidal Basin is one of the most spectacular, the Jefferson Memorial.
And just a few blocks away from the State Department is that favorite of Americans everywhere,
the Lincoln Memorial. The towering Washington monument can be seen from almost anywhere
in the downtown section of the nation's capital and from there, the view extends to the Capitol
building itself. Now, the State Department must concern itself with people not with monuments.
The embassies of dozens of nations are clustered nearby in a section of Washington known as
Embassy Row.
When you see an automobile in Washington with license plates labeled DTL, you know immediately
that the owner is one of the flying diplomats with whom our State Department experts must
deal. The embassies here range from huge residences that were once the private homes of Washington's
elite to modern glass and steel buildings like this one built by Brazil to hastily acquired
temporary headquarters like this hotel recently taken over by the People's Republic of China.
Inside many of the embassies, great native art treasuries are proudly displayed. Here
in the Iranian embassy, the Persian room symbolizes Islamic architecture and provides excellent
examples of the 16th-century craftsmanship of the area. The beautiful mural- and tilework
were handcrafted by Iranian artists and took several years to complete.
The room displays both old and new Iranian art and is viewed as an after-dinner reception
area for guests at the embassy party.
Many of the diplomats who attend those parties are part of the night's audience of the State
Department where they are gathered to hear Dr. Charles Burton Marshall discuss American
Foreign Policy as a Dimension of the Revolution. Dr. Marshall is introduced by Ambassador Carol
C. Laise, Assistant Secretary of State of Public Affairs.
Ms. Laise: It is for me a particular pleasure to introduce Professor Charles Burton Marshall
who, besides being an old friend and colleague, is a professor of international politics at
the School for Advanced International Studies in the John's Hopkins University. His most
important works have been "The Limits of Foreign Policy" and "The Exercise of Sovereignty"
as well as a book on the Cold War and a concise history of the Cold War. Dr. Marshall, when
he finished his education at Harvard, taught at Harvard and then he came to Washington
and served on the House of Representative's Committee of Foreign Affairs for quite some
time and we were fortunate enough to have him join us then in the Department of State
in the Policy Planning Section.
Therefore, it is a particular pleasure for me to be here tonight to welcome you and more
particularly to introduce our speaker, Professor Marshall, to tell us about the American Foreign
Policy as a Dimension of the American Revolution. Professor Marshall.
Charles Marshall: The ship Lively brought to Boston in early May of 1774 details that the British
Parliament's response to the Boston Tea Party, five months past. Boston was to be devitalized—stripped
of status as a colonial capital, its customs house removed, its commerce interdicted. The
news spread posthaste, by this time of the month 200 years ago, was known from New Hampshire
to Georgia. Through a dire spring and summer, retribution would be compounded. Massachusetts
would be reduced to a royal satrapy—its colonial charter rescinded, elections and
town meetings deauthorized, quartering of troops on the municipalities renewed, venue
shifted to the Crown's advantage in criminal cases linked to civil resistance. Parliament
in London—in unison with an adamant King George III—meant business. To work their
will, both would not scruple about overturning any recalcitrant colony's internal arrangements.
That was the message conveyed.
Those events of 1774 are recalled for commemorative purposes in part but also, and more to the
point, for their significance in great developments pertinent to our topic. They marked a stage
on what John Adams called the real "American Revolution," a revolution not to be pinpointed
in time, a revolution, as Adam said, "effected before the war commenced," consisting of a
radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people.
The recounted events signified a beginning to the end of illusions under which the restive
colonists had been pressing their grievances. As one sees in retrospect, though this point
was not yet apparent to the colonists, the spring and summer of 1774 prefigured eventual
and inevitable repudiation of British rule—the Revolution registered and explained to "a
candid World" in the Declaration of Independence on July 4 two years later.
The roots of confrontation lay in a multiplicity of circumstances, but the clash, when it came,
was rationalized in terms of the two irreconcilable sets of constitutional propositions. The word
"constitution" and what it meant were, as Bernard Bailyn has observed, centrally important
to the colonists' position, "Their entire understanding of the crisis rested upon it,"
he says. "So strategically located was this idea in the minds of both English and Americans,
and so great was the pressure placed upon it, that in the end it was forced apart, along
with the seam of a basic ambiguity, to form the two contrasting concepts of constitutionalism
that have remained characteristic of England and America ever since."
Theoretically—a point made by Charles Howard McIlwain a half-century ago—the American
rebellion might be backdated to 1648. In fact, the clash remained latent and revolutionary
resistance was out of mind, so long as Parliament's asserted supremacy over and within the colonies
was only declaratory and ritual. The occasion for division and the stimulus for rebellion
grew out of the Seven Years' War and the operative changes which it brought in respect of the
British governing role in America.
The 18th century's most pervasive and costliest conflict entailed large deployments of British
forces to save the colonies from extinction. The mother country's power became as never
before a palpable presence on the American scene. The operations of war incurred great
expense. Constitutional theorizing aside, sharing of the resulting financial burden
was not unreasonable, and the portion allocated to the colonies was equitable. Should the
king's subjects everywhere get the benefits but only those in Britain pay the bill for
security? The tax resister answered first with an elusive distinction between external
and internal taxes—the one sort legitimately assessed, the second wholly unacceptable—and
then with a denial altogether of Parliament's authority to levy taxes.
Both sides seem to have argued from a misplaced tradition. Each strove for something new in
a guise of vindicating something established—the British for an imperial commonwealth centrally
dominated as never before except in ritual forms, the resisters for a league of equals
beyond experience and even beyond their articulation. As Randolph G. Adams has written, "America,
after the French and Indian War, was a nation which had outgrown its old political garments.
To its clamor for new institutions, necessary to fit the new conditions, the restrictive
policy of the old colonial system brought only more swaddling clothes."
In an ironical reversal of arguments of a sort recurrent in politics, it fell to successive
Parliaments preponderantly of Tory stripe, and to a king of similar outlook, to apply,
in trying to enforce taxation within America, the Whig postulate of Parliament's pervasive
supremacy. The tax resisters, Whig in persuasion and adopted name, relied on old Tory themes
of royal prerogative. No diminution of prerogative was wished, as the Continental Congress—assembled
to coordinate resistance in face of the coercive acts of 1774—sought to assure George III.
That "best of Kings," as he was called, was inaccessible to arguments based on distinctions
between kingly office and parliamentary scope. For the time being, tension between throne
and Parliament was minimal. In form, the king was subservient to a parliamentary majority,
while in substance dominating it through manipulative patronage.
Four years later, resistance would make its point. The king would declare "fit for Bedlam"
anyone upholding taxation for America. Besides retreating on taxes, Britain would offer the
colonies representation in Parliament and promise amnesty for rebellion. Too late, for
by then the fighting began in 1775 as constitutional resistance to assertedly unconstitutional
acts had become, as perhaps it had to become, irreversibly a revolutionary war, and the
rebelling colonists had contracted with Britain's inveterate enemy, France, to persevere until
British acknowledgment of the independence of the United States of America.
Vermont Royster: We're listening to Dr. Charles Burton Marshall discussing American Foreign
Policy as a Dimension of the American Revolution. In just one moment, Dr. Marshall will continue.
Although it probably would come as a surprise to many of our founding fathers, the largest
and the friendliest of all foreign diplomatic headquarters in Washington belongs to Great
Britain. Planning in a characteristically in the setting, the Embassy with this red
brick wall trimmed with white stone and steep roof and towering chimneys recalls an English
manor of the Queen Anne period. The building was completed to the cost of about a million
dollars. Outside the embassy stands a statue of Sir Winston Churchill. He flashes his familiar
World War II V for victory salute to the passersby on busy Massachusetts Avenue. The statue was
erected after Congress voted Churchill American citizenship.
Back to the State Department, Dr. Charles Burton Marshall is discussing a quite different
attitude between England and the United States that existed some 200 years ago.
Charles Marshall: The standard ingredients of war were already at hand in mid-1776. The
Declaration illuminated rather than established that circumstance. It defined the issue at
stake—not a mere matter of tax jurisdiction, constitutional procedure, or proper allocation
of authority, but the prizes of statehood and sovereignty. The Americans assumed "among
the powers of the Earth" a "separate and equal station." No longer would London be the determiner
and medium of their relations with the great globe. They claimed "full power to levy war,
conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things
which independent states may of right do." The vicarious, inequalitarian devices of the
empire must be shed. In their own way and own right, the Americans thenceforth must
participate in the nexus of diplomacy—a word, by the way, not yet in usage at that
time and therefore not explicitly in the Declaration. To acquiesce in the settlement of the war
providing anything less with the amount to defeat.
The Declaration was an exercise in psychological warfare, though that key word "psychological"
also had not yet entered the language. As such, it aimed for preemption of the moral
high ground in hope thereby to generate resolution on the patriot side and to rally support wherever
else possible and to contribute to discomposing civil will within the adversary establishment.
Terms of sublime innocence were chosen to depict every premise, interest, purpose, and
mode of conduct on the patriot side. The "British Brethren" were appealed to in the name of
"their native Justice and Magnanimity" and "the Ties of our common Kindred." With a bill
of 28 accusatory particulars, which took up about half of its 1,337 words, the document
portrayed George III—so recently "the best of Kings"—as an agent of "Cruelty and Perfidy,
scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy of the Head of
a civilized Nation, a Prince, whose Character is thus marked by every Act which may define
a Tyrant, unfit to be the Ruler of a free People." Hitler in the dock at Nuremberg could
scarcely have been more vigorously arraigned.
The Declaration—a more important point—was a bid to make victory a plausible outcome
by attracting allies and encouraging a benign tilt on the part of governments standing aside
as neutrals. These aims went hand in hand with the aspiration for independence. Without
drawing in allies, the aspirants could scarcely expect to escape the eventuality of having
to settle for an accommodation within the British system. For any purpose less than
detachment from the Crown, with corollary effects of damaging British power and prestige
and of opening up market opportunities through abolishing Britain's monopolistic control
over their external commerce, the Americans could scarcely hope to induce third-party
interposition by Britain's strategic rivals or even benevolence on the part of Britain's
competitors in trade.
Beyond making a case for severing old political associations and for making war, the Declaration
also articulated an array of assumptions and precepts concerning the nature, norms, and
values of political existence. In these respects, too, it had—and it still has—a bearing
on international affairs, though that word "international" was not in the text, for indeed
the word in 1776 was still a dozen years short of becoming invented.
In these respects, the Declaration looks at the conditions of peace. Before examining
the relevant thoughts, it is pertinent to say just something about the style and sources
of the document. George Santayana called the Declaration a "salad of illusions." Gilbert
Chinard's appraisal of a half-century ago the Declaration—with its "sentences so balanced
and so rhythmic that no artist in style could improve upon them"—it rated as "the first
and to this day the most outstanding monument in American literature." Yet John Adams likened
the Declaration to "a juvenile declamation." Late in life, Thomas Jefferson, the principal
author, found "heavenly comfort" in its abiding appeal to his countrymen, whereas Timothy
Pickering, a reluctant third in the succession of United States secretaries of state, wished
it to be consigned "to utter oblivion" for its polemical excesses.
On balance, the ayes have it. Moses Tyler's estimate written in the late nineteenth century
is a representative judgment. Jefferson, he said, "gathered up the thoughts and emotions
and even the characteristic phrases of the people for whom he wrote, and these he perfectly
incorporated with what was already in his own mind, and then to the music of his own
keen, rich, passionate and enkindling style, he mustered them into that stately and triumphant
procession wherein, as some of us still think, they will go marching on to the world's end."
Amid the plethoric triviality of contemporary political discourse, one reads the document
with envy for a time when statesmanship was capable of elegant language and knew how to
unite history with literature.
Jefferson "turned to neither book nor pamphlet" while drafting the Declaration. That is what
he said—we should believe him—in recalling the rush job a half-century later. He named
Aristotle, Cicero, John Locke, and Sir Philip Sidney as sources of ideas in his mind, adding
an "etc." to the list. Expositors who have analyzed the text with a thoroughness befitting
exegetes of Holy Writ have found hints of the Baron de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau,
James Wilson, George Mason, Tom Paine, and dozens more in its nuances. Jefferson surely
had read them all. His "sensitized mind" in Carl Becker's words, "picked up and transmitted
every novel vibration in the intellectual air." Jefferson had internalized that great
age's multifarious literature of reason, felicity, harmony of interest, moral order, natural
liberty, progress, and vaulting confidence in the clarity of moral principles and in
the making of new starts. The Declaration was and is resonant with ideas from the Enlightenment.
Conceivably, the claim of independence could have been based on simple pragmatic considerations.
The outworn British imperial system simply was not working with the Americans out rather
than in it would be better for all concerned. Such a case invoking practical particulars
would not have been in the style of the times. Instead, the argument must be founded on universal
abstractions as inalienable rights and the Law of Nature and of Nature's God. The focus
of principles and abstractions deduced was self-determination. The main reliance was
on a concept of social contract in line with Locke's late 17th century Whig theory perceiving
government as an instrument to ensure people's preexisting rights and preconceived purposes,
empowered by people's consent only for those ends and subject to overturn for failing or
exceeding them. The case to be made must be large enough to engross all humanity. Thus
premises were mentioned as truths held to be self-evident. We think, therefore it is.
More forthright Cartesian self-assertiveness would be hard to imagine.
The U. S. Constitution, then still a dozen years in the offing, would be of a different
order. The national leadership echoed in the Constitution would have become less hortatory.
The content showing recognition of a need for more than abstract good ideas in order
to maintain a going concern would be matched to the needs of a nation in Alexander Hamilton's
phrase "likely to experience a common portion of the vicissitudes and calamities which have
fallen to the lot of other nation." An important lesson regarding the linkage between independence
and capacity and will to meet obligations would be mirrored. Keeping attuned to a supposed
harmony of interest was not enough. The nation must put itself in position to attend to its
own concerns more effectively. No language implicit of a world mission would be offered
in the Constitution. The Constitution would be intent to perfect the union of states.
It would be concerned with justice within—not as a spontaneous abstraction, but justice
as a function of authority. The tranquility asserted as an aim would be domestic tranquility.
The common defense to be worked at would pertain to security for a national base. The welfare
postulated as an end for policy would be that of the generality of Americans. Liberty's
blessings would be coveted for "ourselves and our posterity." Domestic concerns they
all would be.
Vermont Royster: Dr. Charles Burton Marshall has been discussing this nation's foreign policy
at the time of the American Revolution. In just a moment, he will continue.
But going to those who concern themselves with such things, the French ambassador's
residence is considered to be the most elegant in Washington. The French residence is a rambling
stone in brick building of Neo-Tudor design. In the rear, an oversized garden commands
one of the most spectacular views of the nation's capital. Even before France bought the building
in 1936, the mansion was famous as the home of multimillionaire John Hays Hammond, who
had interest in some of the world's richest gold and diamond mines. The leading figures
of Europe and America were often guests in Hammond's mansion, and when the French bought
the building, the tradition was continued. France has long been a major concern of American's
foreign policy, the topic on the discussion today by AEI distinguished lecturer, Dr. Charles
Burton Marshall.
Charles Marshall: Now, of the two founding documents, the Declaration—forming part of the poetry,
as distinguished from the logic, of politics—has proved to be the one of greater effective
appeal pertinent to the conduct of foreign policy. As Dexter Perkins has observed, "American
statesmen have believed, and have acted on the belief, that the best way to rally American
opinion behind their purposes is to assert a moral principle. In doing so, they have
often gone beyond the boundaries of expediency." The Declaration has offered a ready catalog
of relevant apothegms and analogies. The practice of invoking them has not been a matter of
mere rhetoric or propaganda, of humoring preconceptions, of guessing what will go over with the public.
Ideas explicit or implicit in the Declaration have endured as legitimizing concepts in the
national psyche. Presidents, their spokesmen, and their principal advisers have been wont
to return to such ideas as a way of validating policy undertakings in their own minds. Thus,
in a manner unparalleled, our 20th-century conduct in world affairs has been accounted
for in 18th-century frames of thought. Similarly, a proclivity for "galloping abstractions"—in
Charles Frankel's phrase—has been stimulated within what are known as intellectual circles.
Yet little of analysis about international politics and foreign relations is to be found
in the Declaration. The lack is consistent with Locke's philosophy, which, though full
of ideas about harnessing government domestically, recognized the great role of contingency in
handling externalities. "What is to be," I quote Locke, "in reference to foreigners depending
much upon their actions, and the variation of designs and interests, must be left in
great part to the prudence of those who have this power committed to them, to be managed
by the best of their skill for the advantage of the commonwealth."
The pertinence of the Declaration inheres mainly in the fact of the nation's coming
into existence on the basis of a concept of self-determination asserted to be universally
applicable. That concept itself could scarcely be said to have been subject to much analysis
in the Declaration.
With that concept, as an Englishman what's remarked, the United States wrote, if not
the death sentence, then at least the epitaph of empire. Self-determination has become and
[distorted audio 00:31:27] the political absolute of our time, a development for which the American
instance has served as precedent if not the cause. The concept was ambiguous at the moment
of origin. It remains so still. The Declaration uttered the notion as a justification for
war and a condition for peace, as a claim to national autonomy and as an invitation
to intervention. When Woodrow Wilson at Versailles invoked self-determination as a basis for
universal peace-making, his secretary of state, Robert Lansing, warned that he was establishing
a rationale for innumerable wars to come. It was a prophetic judgment. Both sides in
every conflict since World War II, as I recall, have championed the idea. Its ambiguity, as
between an interventionist and a non-interventionist doctrine has perhaps never been better demonstrated
than it was unconsciously by the late President Lyndon Johnson in his State of the Union Message
eight years ago. He described "support of national independence—the right of each
people to govern themselves and to shape their own institutions" as "the most important principle
of our foreign policy." He added, "For a peaceful world order will be possible only when each
country walks the way that it has chosen to walk itself." Then he summed up: "We follow
this principle abroad by continued hostility to the rule of the many by the few."
A few auxiliary elements to the Declaration may also be cited, for an analytic reader
might wish for more prescient care in the wording of some of the aphorisms. For example,
I wish more explication had been supplied for the keyword "rights" invoked in support
of a number of desiderata. Something said by Oswald Spengler is pertinent: "Rights result
from obligations. An obligation is the right of another against me." I am skeptical of
a tendency, prevalent in our times, to apply the word "right" as a label for every preference
in national or international affairs, for where every goal becomes expressible as a
right, then the extent and tightness of the pattern of obligation becomes total, grace
and counterpart gratitude are obviated, and civil existence takes on a tribal sort of
rigidity.
I wish Jefferson had rethought his stipulation of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness"
as natural rights. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, "The most fundamental of
the supposed preexisting rights—the right to life—is sacrificed without a scruple
not only in war but whenever the interest of society, that is, of the predominant power
in the community, is thought to demand it." Every law abridges liberty. As for the pursuit
of happiness, was realization or merely endless quest assured? I remembered H. Rap Brown's
statement made in the paper once that he was tired of the pursuit of happiness. As far
as he was concerned, it was up to the government to take it prisoner and turn it over to him.
Now, we go on, was happiness meant in the sense of good luck, pleasure, or spiritual
composure? Whatever the meaning of the word in that context of natural rights is anomalous.
Here, too, Spengler is relevant. "Happiness," he said, "is unexpected, rare, unlikely, brief
and blindly appreciated. The less men have brooded about the nature of happiness, or
their right to it, the happier they have been."
I should prefer some exposition of the word "equal" in a clause alleging the condition
into which all men—meaning a species rather than a gender—are created. In logic, such
a term needs a referent. One must ask, equal in what respect? Implicitly, according to
the Declaration in respect to civil capacity. Yet that thought seems blight by a later reference
to "merciless savage Indians," for could so invidious a phrase be used if all were civilly
equal? The text does not articulate the distinction between equality as "a concept for dealing
out justice between incommensurable human beings"—to use Jacques Barzun's apt phrase—and
equality taken as a circumstance bestowed by nature so that any demonstrable disparity
becomes proof of deviancy and injustice. I wish also the document had been more precise
about the linkage between equality and liberty, both terms occurring in the same sentence.
Obviously, in logic, neither abstraction can be considered absolute in coexistence with
the other. I just wish the Declaration had more to say about the tension between these
two right is.
My last such point concerns an appeal in the Declaration for support among people of informed
judgment in certain other lands. Jefferson dressed up the idea in words about "a decent
Respect to the Opinions of Mankind." The new etiquette, of course, would require "person-kind."
I shall let that point pass. A significant shade of distinction obtains between judgment
and opinion. "Mankind" in such a context is a phantom notion. In Spengler's words again:
"'Mankind' has no more goal, purpose, or plan than the species butterfly or orchid. 'Mankind'
is either a zoological concept or an empty word." The phrase in the Declaration humors
illusions about finding wisdom in amorphous aggregates and contributes to a fallacy—if
I may quote the late Dean Acheson—of feeling obligated, to turn on a wind machine because
others about to whip up a cyclone. I deplore it, as I deplore the other loose phrases,
for the encouragement given to sentimentality in international affairs.
Mr. Rosyter: From the Benjamin Franklin Auditorium in the State Department, Dr. Charles Burton
Marshall has been discussing the historical development of America's foreign policy. He
continues in one moment.
One of the most beautiful of all Washington's embassies is that of Japan. The embassy itself
was built in 1932 in a modified American colonial style but you can't tell an embassy by its
exterior. The grounds of the embassy are authentic and traditional reproductions of Japan. Most
spectacular is the Japanese Tea House. All the structural and decorating materials used
in the Tea House and its grounds were brought here from Japan, even the fine gravel in the
sand garden. The gardens are landscaped in true oriental tradition with the vegetation
and artifacts designed to induce a mood of solitude and meditation. More colorful is
the beautiful fishpond. The pond is stocked with $10,000 worth of Koi especially bred
for their colors. The rocks surrounding the pond are lava formations imported from Japan.
The low point in Japanese-American relations, the period of World War II, is one of the
matters that Dr. Charles Burton Marshall will discuss as he continues his lecture from the
State Department.
Charles Marshall: In successive seminars in recent years I have had my students, as one assignment,
scan the Declaration, single out the postulates, precepts, and nuances bearing on the nature
of public life and the good of the state, and see what ones they accept as plausible.
In surprising proportions, the students prove never to have read the document before, profess
to finding it fascinating, surprising, and express skepticism about the assumptions and
expectations reflected in it. Well, it's not necessary to go so far back as the Declaration
to find a point of reference for making a modest test of altered mood. A similar process
applied to President John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, which impress so many with its elan
and affirmativeness only 13 years ago, has produced like results. It sounds like something
from another century ,was one student's judgment.
One sees implicit here a retreat from a certainty—a phenomenon which Allen Wheelis ponders in
his book, "The End of the Modern Age." "At the beginning of the Modern Age, science did,
indeed, promise certainty," Wheelis writes. "It does no longer." Sir John Squire has expressed
the same thought. He quotes from Alexander Pope, "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in
night. God said 'Let Newton be!' and all was light." He adds, "It did not last, the Devil
howling, 'Ho, Let Einstein be,' restored the status quo." Wheelis sums up the difference.
"Certainty," he says, "leads us to attack evil; being less sure we would but resist
it."
My closing remarks are personal observations appropriate for a time of doubt. I do not
share the current mood mainly because I have never participated ennui hopes for the finite,
fallible aspect of existence called policy. As far back as I can remember I would have
concurred with Herbert Butterfield's thought. I quote him, "And we of the 20th century have
been particularly spoiled; for the men of the Old Testament, the ancient Greeks, and
all our ancestors down to the 17th century betray in their philosophy and their outlook
a terrible awareness of the chanciness of human life, and the precarious nature of man's
existence in this risky universe. These things—though they are part of the fundamental experience
of mankind—have been greatly concealed from recent generations because modern science
and organization enabled us to build up such a tremendous barrier against fire, famine,
plague, and violence. The modern world created so vast a system of insurance against the
contingencies and accidents of time, that we imagined all the risk eliminated—imagined
that it was normal to have a smooth going on, and that the uncertainties of life in
the past had been due to mere inefficiency."
Like Othello, I can say, "I have done the state some service." He could add,"...and
they know it." Mine was obscure.
In that spirit—had I been alive in Revolutionary times—I probably would have regarded the
more buoyant asseverations in the Declaration as skeptically as, in my own time, I have
regarded the promissory frills with which our magistrates wont to bedeck their initiatives
in foreign policy. Rather than Jeffersonian enthusiasms, I fancy I would have shared John
Adams' pessimism along with his grasp of the essence of independence to which he was devoted
no less than his more sanguine compatriots and also his love for country.
The essence of the Declaration was, and is, in the phrase about assuming "among the Powers
of the Earth the separate and equal Station." The heart of the Declaration—the action
parts—concerned power. A brilliant chapter in Professor Bailyn's book on "The Ideological
Origins of the American Revolution" delineates anxieties of power among the protagonists
of that revolution. Power nevertheless was what they sought and what they used, intrepidly,
in the seeking. I stress the point because one hears in these times so much vain counsel
to the nation about perils of power and the wisdom of shedding it.
Thrice in recent months, I have heard Lord Acton's famous aphorism invoked and inevitably
misquoted in support. Acton's phrase is not, "Powered corrupts." It is, "Power tends to
corrupt"—to which he added, "and absolute power corrupts absolutely." True, power can
be misused. The possessors may mistake means for ends, abandon perspective, and end up
done in by their own instruments. Acton, however, did not impute such perversion solely to power.
He never said only power corrupts.
Courage can be overdone to foolhardiness, pride to pridefulness, thrift to greed, generosity
to improvidence, trust to gullibility, faithfulness to folly, humility to supineness, and charity
to degradation. What virtue is immune to vice? Shakespeare wrote of a man destroyed by loving
too possessively; Goethe, of a man put in eternal peril by an excessive thirst for knowledge;
Hardy, of a man undone by overweening desire to be right; and Kipling, of a man who did
the very idea of not overdoing.
Sovereignty—though not in the text—also sums up the goal of the Declaration. How many
times over the years have I heard someone in an audience, using a tone of discovery,
suggest abandonment of sovereignty so as to abolish danger and achieve concord! Sovereignty
is merely an abstract expression for a finite government's possession of resources and faculties
for coping. It derives from having a scheme of authority capable of maintaining dependable
social order, command of the allegiance of a determining portion of the population have
gone encompassed, common recollections and expectations sufficient to form a bond of
identity among that portion, a conscious general purpose to amount to something significant
in the world's annals, capacity and will to command means and to devote them to realizing
common preferences and to enter into and effectuate external obligations, capability to affect
environing conditions also as well as to be affected by them, and a system of agency able
to represent the realm by communicating authentically and conclusively on its behalf to others beyond
its span. Which of these would any sound person wish the nation to give up? These faculties
and qualities are hard to come by. They are a no fixed reality, no inherent endowment.
We could forfeit any of them at peril. If we should ever lose them, we can only say,
quoting Spengler, "World politics destroys those countries that are not up to it."
My final thought is about the love of country. On a speaking occasion a few years ago, I
was charged by a certain publisher in the audience with advocating the principle of
"my country right or wrong." I did not deny it. I only demurred. The authentic words of
Stephen Decatur's aphorism are: "Our country, in her intercourse with other nations, may
she always be in the right, but, right or wrong, our country!" The first part is Decatur's
prayer for national perfection. The second comes to terms with the human situation. As
I told the accusatory publisher, I might say the same for my family—wishing my children
perfect, but knowing they will not be, will err, and will get into trouble. When that
happens, should I renounce them? No. Then should I do otherwise for the society of which
I have been beneficiary and the land which is the scene of my best recollections? Moreover,
one must recognize the elements of tragedy in the human situation. What constitutes tragedy
is that human being and human institutions facing an indifferent universe, indifferent
to their hopes and to their values, may get done in for their virtues as well as by their
vices. Any tragedy which besets this society, this state, this government—all of them
fallible, finite, contingent—will not spare me. In that sense, it is my country, right
or wrong.
Vermont Royster: We've been listening to Dr. Charles Burton Marshall discussing Foreign Policy
as a Dimension of the American Revolution. Dr. Marshall traced the development of America's
foreign policy from the days of the Revolution up to the present times. This lecture has
been one in a series presented by the American Enterprise Institute dealing with the American
Revolution and how it still affects us all today.
If you would like a copy of Dr. Marshall's lecture or of the entire series, write the
American Enterprise Institute, that's AEI, Post Office Box 19191, Washington, D.C. 236.
Until next time, this is Vermont Royster. Thank you for joining us.
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