Caffeine in the American Bloodstream: The Politics of Disharmony

...the gap will remain hidden-this is hypocm'sy...

...In Arthur Miller's American Clock, we find unemployed Depression-era workers emasculated because each feels personally responsible for his failure to find remunerative work, and only gradually does he realize that his problem is social, not personal, and is shared by millions of others...

...Despite this difference, a conspiracy theory is also anti-teleological, and hence prima facie American...

...Suddenly, there is a knock on the door...

...The anguish, the moralism, the reform conscience, the exhilaration of that revolution were manifested again and again on American soil . . . E a r l i e r , to enhance his picture of the American reformer, Huntington quotes Richard Maxwell Brown: The reformer was a man who distrusted, exposed, and overturned every usage of power, a man "not content to let sleeping dogs lie...

...This is a view not of the mainstream, but of the American reformer and the American extremist, those two long-time commentators who share-so much, from the belief that to expose evil is to destroy it to its corollary that evil results from bad men, not bad logicians...

...At the very moment the old fellow enters the room, a look of strain washes over George's face...

...If only Americans judged, certified, or reformed history according to ideologies arising from their interests, or if only Americans possessed a teleology which would legitimate growing governmental power as serving our national destiny in the manner of nineteenthcentury European state-building, then we would have no disharmony...

...Nor, it might be added, could the era to which the feudal lord was so crucial have summoned him into existence had he not already organically sprung from history...

...Paradoxically, then, while Americans live their history according to their own (venal, biased) interests, they judge their history according to a telos...

...In an intriguing way, the American mode of judging history hearkens back to the European way of explaining history...

...The European image is, by and large, just the reverse...

...We find two phenomena strikingly absent from American renditions of U.S...

...In the Gilded Age, arch-gonL r Roscoe Conkling sneered at the Puritan-style reformer, accusing him of fraudulently affecting altruism when in reality he was a graspy man (just like Conkling, Roscoe was big enough to concede) with his own interests, like everybody else...

...If he is a programmatic ideologue, not a passionate firebrand, if he is eager to create a new future, not nostalgic for an increasingly impossible past, then he will blend much more harmoniously with the ubiquitous politics of interest, and progress and history can commence a modest rapprochement...

...In our higher intellectual circles, however, the struggle to suppress, or salvage, America's sense of honor is still continuing...

...The other is suggested by the very root of the word in Greek--telos--which means goal or end...

...Huntington's subject matter is the kinetics of American reform...

...We have not usually thought of ourselves as caught up in large impersonal forces sweeping us along to destinies we have not chosen...

...Robert's account wins over George and Jane, a decaffeinated coffee is quickly substituted for the villain, Robert comes by the next day to check in, George does not evince nausea upon Robert's arrival or at any other time...

...They did not intend to bring about the feudal lord...

...There is of course another quintessentially American view of history...

...H u n t i n g t o n ' s explanation is a " c o n - sciousness cycle" in American history...

...In each eruption, Huntington notices, discontent and moral indignation were unhesitatingly expressed...

...Most important, however, is that both teleology and ideology share the beLief that men are the children of history and that history is not the child of men...

...he is seething, rash, and impetuous, not practical...

...But when the ubiquitous politics of interest is on the rise, the aroma wafting from history is very different...

...But is this unavailability of teleology and ideology in any way the source of American disharmony...

...But if teleology is the " e x p l a n a t o r y closure" between cause and function, then ideology is the " e x p l a n a t o r y c l o s u r e " between cause and judgment...

...Yet just as Americans cannot indefinitely remain at fever pitch, neither can they indefinitely postpone a r e a f f i r m a t i o n of t h e i r political values...

...And, of course, one man's teleology is another man's ideology...

...The interval during which Americans believe most fervently in the Creed and perceive most clearly the gap between its ideals and the reality is a period of reform moralism...

...And neatly enough, Huntington's four periods are spaced at sixty-year intervals...

...If this is so, then, though the American reformer be Puritan, his particular brand of Puritanism is the sort which blends harmoniously with a politics of interest, increasingly approves of and uses government, and cools and crystallizes factions and interests...

...history which are at the heart of the greatest European national histories: teleology and ideology...

...Walzer's Puritan preaches obedience and practicalTHE AMER1CAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 15 ity...

...To understand why Americans have done without these is to discover the sources of America's singular disharmony...

...A good place to start is with Huntington's description of American history as the "ubiquitous politics of interest...

...His essay on Robert Nozick appears in the Spring 1982 issue of the Antioch Review...

...And in fact, Americans do forbear from making use of teleology and ideology...

...That is, these periods of housecleaning occur not as a result of politics as usual, nor do they automatically spring forth from exogenous, underlying social and economic changes such as a wave of prosperity that allows the idle mind to turn to thoughts of political reform, or the r e l a t i v e deprivation and sudden decline of a major social group, which then begins to demand satisfaction...

...if he is kvetching because he is late for the theater, we may want to do something expeditious to get him there on time...

...And this is not surprising since in some ways our history has been both teleological and conspiratorial...

...Neither teleology nor ideology manages to escape the suspicion that it has malodorous origins...

...By now, fifty-five years or so have passed, and we are at the dawn of a new period of moralism...

...authority, hierarchy, and specialization were traduced and questioned...

...To illustrate, consider Marx's statement that "the handmill gives you the feudal lord...

...Americans can sustain a high level of moral indignation and earnestness for only so long...

...they spun the myth that it was in fact functional...

...Our politics is in the present, but our reform motif is in the past and the future (Huntington's moral cycles...

...In this way, an event with a distant cause came not to serve a function in a later era, but to be justified and judged favorably nonetheless...

...Perhaps the reality is that over the past two hundred years, Huntington's Puritan has evolved into Walzer's Puritan...

...Regardless of one's political sympathies with the New Deal and the women's movement, they are emblematic of American reform movements in their evocation of the flowering sense of power that accompanies the self-consciousness of a social movement...

...The Creed is not a perfect mirror of American social aspiration, it is more like a prism which provides a spectrum of meanings conforming to the perceptions of the political spectrum...

...These reform periods are not, in other words, motivated by the politics of interest or the sociology of groups, but by the dynamics of history...

...It conjures up the entropy and diffusion of estates, and images not of the mobilized but of the disbanded soldier, not of the enclosed but the uprooted peasant, not of the bound but the discharged rentier, as Michael Walzer suggested with one such age in mind...

...On the absence of teleology in America, we have a recent offering from Gordon Wood: We Americans, unlike many Europeans, have tended to see our history as the product of conscious intentions and political leadership...

...America created a Puritan society without enduring a Puritan revolution . . . . The Puritan Revolution was a unique event in English history, but it was also a prototypical event for American history...

...and each reform was suffused with an anti-governmental spirit...

...much caffeine in his coffee...

...The connotation is quite distinct from that of a teleological history, suggestive as the latter is of the congealment and demarcation and locked horns of e s t a t e s and classes, and the clockwork aggrandizement and mobilization of nations and armies...

...If America is ever to recover its world position, one crucial first step will be to come to terms with the moral truth about Vietnam...

...Although George has plainly explained that he is late, both Jane and Robert refuse to accept that as the cause of George's irritability...

...Ideology, if we had it, would serve a further purpose, to coagulate interests and cool down history...

...But the same cycle, described as varying disagreement about the meaning of the Creed accompanied by a sensible appreciation of the changeability of reality (and hence the efficacy of action), is--a cycle of pragmatism ! Pragmatism, that combination of meaning and action, is every bit as deserving as moralism, that combination of feeling and illusion, of the title Huntington bestows on moralism--"the most positive American political response...

...Huntington writes: England had a Puritan revolution without creating a Puritan society...

...What can one expect in a political system one of whose Founding Fathers, John Adams, could at one moment swear his faith in the abiiity of men to discover "principles of political architecture" and at another without fanfare sadly remark on what a fool Condorcet was for thinking that Americans were high-powered social engineers...

...rather, the men who built the railroad acted for reasons of their own-avarice, rapaciousness, cupidity, to name but three...

...American reform, as Tom Bottomore has observed, is at the same time log cabins and tenement clearing, parish democracy and big government...

...Surely, Huntington's prognosis contains a good deal of truth, but there is more, and there are contradictory signals, Cacophony, yes...

...The real moral premise of the radical antiwar position is that the crime would have been greater if we had succeeded...

...It is an attractive thesis, made more plaasible if Huntington is c o r r e c t in observing that corruption, depredation, and abuse always exist at a more or less constant level (George is always late for something, but he doesn't get all lathered about it every time) and that some explanation must be made for the periodic tizzy such commonplaces arouse (George is always drinking his evening coffee just before he explodes...

...Emile Durkheim once defined historical teleology as the "explanatory closure" between function and cause...

...The coming of the handmill, we presume, was prior to the feudal lord, and whether it filled an important technological function in its own time is beside the point...

...The second lesson is that if these events are perpetual reoccurrences, then American reform takes its tenor not from the particular events to which it reacts, but from the first American revolution--no, not the one in the colonies of the 1770s, but the one in England in the 1640s--the Puritan Revolution...

...For Puritanism, trussed as it was by both conscience and work, was both revolutionary and ideological...

...12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 and social affairs...

...the hallmark of an absence of teleology is the falling apart, not the coming together, of classes...

...Or do we accept that American power is the source of evil and American paralysis the last best hope of mankind...

...And, if so, what do Americans put in their place...

...The "steam engine did not give you the Credit Mobilier...

...agitation, commotion, and excitement were aroused...

...And it maintains that what men do is not necessarily in any way "functional" for history, though sometimes a historical function is served after the fact...

...Huntington's cycle, as we have seen, is unsociological--it doesn't divide Americans up into groups--because it is historical...

...if the disharmony of American politics has ebbed even slightly, we had better check the foundations...

...Ideology arises in the case not of small print, but of conflict of interest--when an event, however pernicious to the interest of a nation as a whole, is adjudged by one class to be in its own i n t e r e s t . If it is a powerful class, then it may successfully con an entire age into passing favorable judgment on the event...

...We can see this by looking at Europe itself during those rare times when teleology loses its grip...

...Jane declares that George's outburst is only accountable by other factors--his workload at the office and mortgage payments coming due...

...Huntington answered this question: They do so within the tradition of the Puritan Revolution of the seventeenth century...

...Not only would ideology serve to moderate the combustion of reform in credal passion periods, it would also serve to keep the embers of reform aglow in the chilly off-season...

...and an absolutist of the first magnitude--slavery has to be abolished here and now and that's all there is to it...

...It is beside the point because the purpose of the handmill was to give rise t o - - t o cause--a crucial personality in the march of history--the feudal lord...

...But first we must understand what they've meant in European history...

...True, this may be hypocrisy, but at least it is hypocrisy unexposed and hence somewhat effective in reaching its ostensible goal...

...It posits that men come together and act for reasons of their own, not to play out distant historical "causes...

...And yet, there is in the final analysis something more appealing about the premises of Huntington's moralism cycle...

...American democracy rests partially on the "Tocquevillean" observation that Americans believe their future is a blank slate, and that the ability of the American people to control their destiny apart from the obligation to satisfy historical laws is unburdened...

...a true zealot and a hater of hypocrisy, a public spokesman for social change and a sworn enemy of insincerity...

...It might also be said that what is at issue is not so much the degree to which we perceive the gap between the Creed and political reality, but the sense we have of our own power to overcome it...

...A teleological history is one in which the past serves the future...

...Finally, how do we account for the cycle Huntington has so ingeniously detected...

...an ideological history is anti-epistemological, it denies the ability of the mind to form a true'picture of reality undistorted by social prejudices, personal intrigues, class biases...

...It is this latter form of politics which constitutes the very marrow of American history...

...Huntington captures the American case strikingly when he writes that in America, history and progress are taking us further and further apart: The politics of interest, and, indeed, of the national interest in a dangerous world, requires government to imbibe more and more social authority in both senses of the word--as ruler and as expert...

...In contrast to the teleological view, Schump e t e r holds t h a t imperialism served no function, social or historical...

...its principal elements are constitutionalism, liberalism, democracy, egalitarianism, and individualism...

...At times, we have shared our interpretations of the Creed more than at others...

...Nevertheless, certain of its contemporaries judged imperialism favorably, because though it served no social or historical design, they deemed its perpetuation to be in their interest...

...Bereft of the calmness of methodical program, beset by the zeal of idealism, individuals leapt during such times from cause to cause, from petitions against flogging in the Navy (a pet peeve of Herman Melville's) to women's suffrage, without seeing any one through to the end...

...As George rarely barks, Jane and Robert, concerned, immediately come toward him, and a curious thing then happens...

...Many of us are by now familiar with the following vignette of American life--a man, let us call him George, and his wife, say, Jane, are drinking coffee and chatting amiably about the little things which make up their daily existence...

...Andy Stark CAFFEINE IN THE AMERICAN BLOODSTREAM: THE POLITICS OF DISHARMONY Samuel P. Huntington on America's recurring moods...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR |ULY 1982 13 Thus, the inventors of the handmill could not possibly have f o r e s e e n the historical force t h e i r creation was to unleash...

...Small print and conflict of interest are the white-collar misdemeanors committed by nations when they look at history, misdemeanors which are supposed to impel professional historians to blow their whistles...

...The American perspective is not hard to u n d e r s t a n d . American liberalism r e s t s partially on the "Lockean" presumption that the human mind is a blank slate and that the ability of the individual to come independently to a correct political or social judgment is unimpaired...

...This lack of human control over historical events is one of teleology's two cardinal characteristics...

...It is a time when the ubiquitous politics of interest is on the rise...

...As Tocqueville wrote: No longer [in America] do ideas, but interests only, form the links between men, and it would seem that human opinions were . o more than a sort of mental dust open to the wind on every s i d e and u n a b l e to come t o g e t h e r and take shape...

...an ideological history is one about which men exercise no independent critical judgment, their views are determined by their social berths...

...Teleology seems to arise when someone places small p r i n t between the lines of history, and then comes running to call our attention to the grand scheme he has discovered...

...in Europe, history connects past and future, but is judged according to the interests of the present...

...And this, of course, is the source of American political disharmony...

...This brings us to the end...

...American individualism is in fact a bipartite canon, holding that individuals are flexible enough to belong to many interest groups --religious, economic, political--yet strong enough not to have need of continual collaboration with others in order to realize their interests...

...American history is thus seen by Americans as an interlocking helix of interests, not as the slow grinding of teleology...

...But we may wish to note a peculiar outcome of their confluence, an outcome which is as American as moralism...

...In this case, too, a modern " event" - - l e t us say Joseph Schumpeter's version of late-nineteenthcentury i m p e r i a l i s m - - h a s a cause in a d i s t a n t e r a - - t h e age of intense rivalry between powerful European monarchs...

...Huntington has identified as a cycle of moralism what I have suggested could be called a cycle of pragmatism, but the choice to describe American political development in moralistic or pragmatic terms may lead to radically divergent political conclusions...

...Perhaps, then, if American politics is disharmonious, as Huntington argues, it is because the bedrock of the liberal democratic vision remains in place...

...A teleological history is metaphysical, it transposes a pattern to history which the mere artifacts of history do not provide...

...Soon enough, however, a weariness sets in...

...this is a period of cynicism...

...If George is kvetching because he is drinking too much caffeine, we may wish to give him a sedative...

...The cycle I have suggested is much more sociological, focusing on the degree to which groups are aware of the abiding differences in their interpretations of the Creed (vaguely redolent of class awareness ~ la Marx) and the metamorphosis of individual conscience (guilt about personal inadequacy) into collective conscience (a group's awareness of its own power and of the contingent fetters of civilization, vaguely Freudian...

...There are two lessons to be drawn from this analysis...

...Thus an American version of American history will have to do without teleology and ideology because both demean the ability of men to make and understand their own history...

...In the writings of Betty Friedan, we find overworked 1950s housewives feminized because each feels personally guilty for her hatred of housework, and only slowly does she realize her problem is cultural, not psychological, and is also shared by millions...

...By contrast, a moralistic revolutionary form of judgmentalism, when it crops up during the sixty-year intervals, is often scorned as hypocrisy exposed...

...Jane answers it, and in strides Robert, a sunnily comported older man and a figure held in obvious regard by George and Jane, come to check Oh the state of their domesticity...

...In the process their patriotism will revive a belief that American institutions not only ought to be, but in fact are, the f r e e s t , most democratic imaginable...

...And since this disharmony is unique in world politics, a good point of departure might be the ways in which Americans think their politics, their history, to be one of a kind...

...A teleological history is one in which men exercise no conscious control, things work without them...

...the intensity of belief wanes, but the perception of the gap remains lucid...

...Judging by the response to Podhoretz's book, I am not optimistic...

...in particular the four most noteworthy reform periods in American history: the Revolution, the Jacksonian era, the Progressive era, and the 1960s...

...Daniel Boorstin has written that the custodians of Puritanism in America gradually substituted pride for providence, " i s " for "ought," and experience for absolutism, as their hands slowly grasped the helm of state...

...Now we must ask: How do Americans judge their history in a land of no ideology...

...Indeed, it may require government to take over authority in a third sense--as the author of history...

...Samuel P. Huntington has recently published a stimulating and original volume, American Politics: The Politics of Disharmony," in which he essentially takes Robert's position, though on a different subject matter...

...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982...

...However unwittingly, these individuals--the bashaws of the military and business w o r l d s - - weaved an ideology that justifies imperialism...

...The President will behave unconstitutionally, bureaucracies will pur6e our rights, machines and parties will never be democratic from tip to toe, universities r e q u i r e loci of a u t h o r i t y and hence can never be egalitarian, corporations trample individualism and nonconformity, and none of this can be averted...

...For the American people to accept that the effort there had a morally defensible purpose is to preserve their faith in the continuing validity of their country's role as defender of democracy and opponent of Communist tyranny...

...By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when imperialism matured, it was unnecessary for economic growth, useless for blowing off national aggression, totally without point for the great powers which indulged in it...

...In speaking of our perception of the gap between ideals and institutions, Huntington insists neither that our perceptions and awareness of politics are sociologically determined, nor does he suggest that we choose what to believe for utilitarian, perverse, personal reasons...

...a man permitted to lust only in his heart for social change, and taught to brook no public displays of discontent, hence an insincere man...

...The common characteristics of the four epochs, as well as their historical reoccurrence, lead Huntington to speculate that the process of reform in American politics is a historical dynamic, not a rational response to the corruption, depredation, and abuse which arise willy-nilly in political "H arvard University Press, $15.00...

...In other words, it is the caffeine in the American bloodstream, not the e l e v e n t h - h o u r need to set a r i g h t political malfeasance, which gives rise to the national irritability...

...hypocrisy, insincerity, and power were exposed and scorned...

...Indeed, it seems exceedingly difficult to pick one or the other Puritan as a model of the American reformer...

...Whether they are in fact absent is neither here nor there, the point is that Americans think them to be absent from their own history...

...Borrowing a metaphor from Walter Lippmann, Huntington asks, "What happens at work to cause the husband to fly into a rage because his slippers are in the wrong place...

...As Constant ~rote, ideology-or opinion--forces individuals to rise above their own interests to embrace it...

...From the Angola debate in 1975 to the Central America debate of 1981-82, the cry of "another Vietnam" has stifled serious public discourse, paralyzing the American response and proving these predictions devastatingly correct...

...We now have an ambiguity: If the American reformer is rooted in Puritan England, what does that say about his character...

...it compels men, if they wish to collude or ally politically, to give an account of their interests that will satisfy a public program...

...it was indeed the caffeine...

...Put this way, it is not surprising that although teleology and ideology have a monumental place in perspectives on European history, they are monumentally absent from perspectives on American history...

...And on the topic of ideology and undistorted political vision in America, we have the following testimonial from Daniel Boorstin: _9 . . the winds of dogma . . . which during the last century and a half have blown violently over western Europe . . . have not ruffled our political climate . . . . While European politics has become a kaleidoscope, political life in the United States has seemed to remain a window through which we can look at the life envisaged by our patriarchs_9 The perpetual unavailability of teleology and ideology to American history is often said to be the crux of "American uniqueness," the name given to our bewitching dissimilarity to European nations...

...cynics cannot help but associate George's sudden nausea with the contemporaneous arrival of the old man, but George quickly gives the lie to that diagnosis, barking with inappropriate irritability that he is late for the theater...

...and an incrementalist, not an absolutist--if usury cannot be abolished, we'll just have to do the best we can...

...In Schumpeter's view, imperialism was an atavism, an event that hung around too long, an affair which led not to the furore but to a historical dead end (how unteleological can you get...

...The reformer and the extremist see not a kaleidoscope of recombinant interests, but a roving band of conspirators...

...These are very liberal, democratic presumptions...

...Now at any given time, Huntington writes, we can believe more or less intensely in the tenets of the Creed, and perceive more or less clearly the inevitable gap between the ideals of the Creed and the performance of the institutions which are supposed to embody them...

...And when speaking of the intensity of our feelings for the Creed, Huntington does not discriminate on the basis of social divisions among alternative meanings of the Creed, holding that all are equally legitimate, all equally patriotic...

...Such an ideology was known variously as "the white man's burden" or "modernization...

...H u n t i n g t o n ' s Puritan, we recall, is civilly disobedient...

...to the extent that he is a zealot, he is a man of "hypocrkical zeal...

...Teleology ties events and glues individuals 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1982 together...

...At this point, Robert demurs, offering a third explanation: George has barked because there is t o o Andy Stark is Cambridge editor o f The American Spectator...

...Indeed, this may have been one reason why the more radical elements of the antiwar movement pressed for a tota/debacle in Indochina, even after the Paris Agreement: If the enterprise were totally discredited, if the American people could salvage no shred of pride or achievement from the ordeal, then American policy would be paralyzed for a generation...

...There is only one way to c h a r a c t e r i z e a polity in which every sixty years or so men not only fly into a rage at their wives for misplacing their bedroom slippers, but also kick their sleeping dogs: American politics is the politics of domestic intranquility, it is the politics of disharmony...

...A varying fervency of belief in the Creed, coupled with a self-delusion about the perfectibility of reality, is a cycle of moralism...

...Do we still care about the fate of freedom in the world...

...But progress--reform--in America is ineradicably rooted in Puritan opposition to government, hierarchy, expertise, secrecy, in short, in all those things of which our politics of interest is coming to demand more and more from government...

...But there is an opposite image of the Puritan, cast up in Michael Walzer's Revolution of the Saints, a beautifully written book on Calvinism whose historical understanding Huntington sometimes marshals for his own case...

...Now Freud and Marx have never quite bitten in America, and there are good reasons for that...

...one we have already touched on, and that is the historical, as opposed to sociological or political, impetus of American reform movements...

...But the cycle of moralism is also unsociological in another way: It is psychological...

...Necessity is not the mother of historical invention...

...disharmony, hard to say as yet for all the noise...

...It is a time when men bereft of any class or group allegiance form a protean whirligig of interests and desires, colluding one minute and competing the next, as Burke and Tocqueville wrote with another such age in mind...

...after a spell, they will patriotically resurrect their passion...

...It might well be that instead of a periodic variation in the intensity of our belief in the Creed, what varies is the extent to which we agree on its interpretations...

...Political and social reality being the recalcitrant it has always been, none of these institutions will ever succumb completely to the charms of the Creed...

...This is not surprising, since the politics of interest sits astride that central American canon, individualism...

...Rather, our political vision screens resemble the Lockean tabula rasa, albeit blank slates which are periodically beclouded...

...But cynicism too cannot be maintained-the dissonance between ideals and reality eventually becomes so psychologically debilitating that a fog mercifully descends over the clarity of American political p e r c e p t i o n . When combined with the already low level of feeling for the Creed, it turns Americans away from politics and toward complacency...

...And, as Robert Fogel has argued, the railroad was emphatically not "functional' '--cost-effective--when built, it simply had a fortuitously functional byproduct: It allowed midwestern industry to take off...

...Americans also have a set of political i n s t i t u t i o n s - - a President, a Congress, parties, bureaucracies, and political machines, but also corporations, universities, churches, hospitals, banks...

...The debate over the morality of Vietnam is therefore not a debate over America's past but over America's future...

...Conversely, while the feudal lord eminently served a historical function in the feudal world in which he thrived, his cause is to be found in a past era--the era of the invention of the handmill...

...The argument as presented invites us to undertake an odyssey to the source of our congenital disharmony...

...Huntington's cycle of moralism is historical, it focuses on cycles in national conscientiousness about ideals and acceptance of reality...

...I have enough confidence in the American public to believe that they never accepted the canard of American immorality...

...Huntington calls such a time a " c r e d a l passion period...

...There may be lessons to be learned from failure, but there need not be shame...

...Whigs and Democrats, abolitionists and oppressors, holders of personalty and holders of realty, McCarthy and his enemies, each adhered to a view of the American Creed glimpsed from a particular spot on the social terrain...

...It works like this: Americans have a political creed...

...The men who created the Union Pacific Railroad are illustrative...

...If only the Puritan reformer were a little more ideological and a little less revolutionary, American history would be a little more even-keeled...