Expanding the American Union
HINDUS, MILTON
THINKING ALOUD Expanding the American Union By Milton Hindus In 1940, WHEN FRANCE was in the last throes of its agony under the shock of the German invasion, Prime Minister Churchill and the...
...Here, it seems to me, is a possible alternative to "foreign aid," which so many people have for SO' long been openly tired of...
...There will be daily electric communication with every part of the globe...
...But there is such a thing as being too downto-earth and materialistic in our approach...
...Some very extensive kind of reorganization must take place on our side of the line in the struggle against Communism, and I have briefly indicated the general kind of reorganization which seems to me to hold out the greatest hope for the pacification of the world without either enslavement or such extensive destruction as to be unimaginable...
...In brief, my proposal is that the people of the United States and its constitutional officers and Congressional representatives begin to think in terms of widening our present political system to embrace many more states than the 50 we now have in it...
...By simply letting it be known that we are prepared to put our gates ajar, we might encourage applications for membership in our union...
...The dream of Emma Lazarus, recorded in her verses on the Statue of Liberty, might still come true, not in the sense of the large-scale immigration she envisaged but in the sense that oppressed or endangered peoples the world over might seek the protection in our country's power and political institutions...
...I have urged that we build political institutions...
...In other words, if we are ever to get anything approximating world government, is it not far more likely that it will grow out of existing, attractive and successful social compacts, such as the U.S...
...President Eisenhower, shortly before leaving office, dramatically challenged the Soviets to a world-wide election that would show people's preference for the system we had to offer as against the one they bad to offer...
...He was astounded by the sight and something came over him, something very like a vision: "It was a thought grander than the remembrance of our invisible citizen soldiery, of our boundless material resources...
...THINKING ALOUD Expanding the American Union By Milton Hindus In 1940, WHEN FRANCE was in the last throes of its agony under the shock of the German invasion, Prime Minister Churchill and the British government tried to keep this ally in the War by holding out to its political leaders an offer of complete political and economic union with the British Empire...
...But we are being asked for sacrifices now, we have been asked for them in the past, and the prospects are that we will be asked for them in the future...
...the Soviet system might be defined, indeed, as one specifically designed to prevent such a free election...
...Philosophers and poets have long dreamed of perpetual peace and of a world state which would make that vision possible, not merely Utopian...
...Can there be any doubt who the leader ought to be...
...No wonder their lack of common sense was punished by failure...
...We can no longer think in such terms, lest we become a desert ourselves...
...Our constitutional system would be violated neither in letter nor in spirit even if the number of states in our union eventually numbered as many as 100...
...The answer may lie in the fact that the Soviets are compelled to hold on to their gains in territory and population desperately, by force of arms or the threat of such force, whereas the advantages of our own system are manifest...
...Those who hoped, for example, that the Common Market would become a United States of Europe, have been disappointed and probably will remain disappointed...
...The Pacific will be ours, and the Atlantic mainly ours...
...from the bottom up rather than from the top down, and plan the expansion of going concerns like the government of the United States rather than attempt the imposition of arbitrary forms, or of ones that have proved inadequate, such as that of the United Nations...
...In Locksley Hall, Tennyson envisioned a "Parliament of Man" and a federation of the world...
...We must think of political alternatives which are at the same time realistic and so attractive that, instead of threatening to make deserts where none have existed, they will bring peace and flowering to the desert itself...
...Our own Walt Whitman, in his pamphlet Democratic Vistas written soon after the Civil War...
...Constitution and the institutions that have developed from it, than from the arbitrary and untried plans, however plausible, of any thinker, however gifted...
...What is needed, clearly, is some means of enabling the nations of the world to express their preference without any help from the Soviets...
...predicted: "Long ere the second centennial arrive, there will be some 40 to 50 great States, among them Canada and Cuba...
...Tacitus said that the Romans would "make a desert and call it peace...
...And one remembers, too, other weighty political and economic considerations which were adduced against their entry...
...In short, we have got to find an approach which lies somewhere between the cloudy metaphysical one and the overly materialistic one...
...One recalls the fears expressed because they were not contiguous to the rest of the states, as were all those previously adMILTON HINDUS, a Professor of English at Brandeis University, is the author of The Proustian Vision, and edited Leaves of Grass: One Hundred Years After...
...And one may grant that they do so with reason...
...On Swift's flying island of Laputa in Gulliver's Travels we are told of some doctrinaire architects who proposed building houses from the top down "after the manner of those prudent insects, the bees and the spiders...
...A century more has passed, and the hope still lives...
...One cannot help but wonder if some such daring method as I have suggested is not an absolute necessity if periodic crises such as those in Korea and Vietnam are to be contained or possibly entirely avoided...
...What an age...
...In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust prophesies that "the ancients were no less strongly attached to the group of humanity to which they devoted themselves because it did not exceed the limits of their city, nor are the men of today to their country than will be those who in the future love The United States of the World...
...The Soviets prevented it in Russia itself when Lenin and the Bolsheviks ruthlessly broke up the meeting of the Constituent Assembly in 1918 for which they, in common with all other parties in Russia, had been clamoring because they were a minority within it...
...I am confident, though, that we can develop a practical plan for expanding the American republic...
...Is it not reasonable, therefore, to think today in terms of encouraging the entry of other states, some of them further from our shores perhaps than Hawaii...
...Where, elsewhere, one so great...
...It was an imaginative though desperate effort after the last fatal hour had struck, and it failed as defeated France broke in two: Vichy and the Free French...
...Asia, and even Europe, it is likely to have a 20 quite favorable effect upon political union with the U.S...
...This would surely involve some sacrifices on our part...
...But none of the fears raised have been realized...
...What I am urging is that it may be worthwhile to make the trial, under the supervision of our deliberative political bodies, and that the Congress put forward political and economic conditions so attractive to those permitted association with us that there would be no shortage of applicants...
...Is it not possible that if the Cuban people were given a choice between Castro and full-fledged membership in an American Union, we might find ourselves with little to fear from Communist penetration of the Western Hemisphere...
...The alternatives must be weighed reasonably against each other...
...In seeing that economic cooperation by itself is insufficient to guarantee the growth of political union, however, I do not wish to minimize the importance of economic factors...
...it was the simple and sacred fact that to millions in all lands who are humble and heavy-laden, this word AMERICA means all that is meant by the word HOPE...
...Welcoming newcomers to our union, we would undoubtedly be accused of imperialism by our enemies, but since they accuse us of this in any case, I do not see that we have anything to lose in this direction...
...When the present century closes, our population will be 60 or 70 millions...
...Some of us remember how long and, at times, how heatedly the notion of permitting the entry of Alaska and Hawaii was debated in and out of the Congress...
...For he understood the priority of political solutions even (perhaps especially) over economic problems...
...should this be held out as a practical possibility...
...Moses Coit Tyler, the author of a most famous pioneering work in the history of early American literature, once described how shortly after the Civil War, he found himself one day in Cardiff in Wales and saw crowds of poverty-stricken immigrants waiting like cattle before the American consulate there...
...mitted...
...I dare say that social institutions, which according to Emerson are "the lengthened shadows" of individual men, are not entirely different from houses, and that methods of building them which are silly in one case are no less silly in another...
...Is it sensible, after all, for us to go on indefinitely carrying large populations of the world as dependents, clients, beggars or mercenaries instead of making them our fellow citizens with the opportunity to give us as much as they might expect to get in return...
...But despite that failure of an historic offer almost lost to world attention in the rush of cataclysmic events, the political instinct which prompted it seems to me to have been basically sound...
...It seems to me that the U.S...
...In Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov thinks to himself: "It would be interesting to know what it is men are most afraid of...
...From Kant through Tennyson to Marcel Proust, they have spoken eloquently of it...
...The genius that has brought us from 13 states to 50 in the past 176 years can be employed in doubling our size in the space of the next generation...
...Congress has already implicitly recognized this to be so in admitting Alaska and Hawaii...
...We could regard the comparatively recent entry into the Union of Alaska and Hawaii as pilot projects for the incorporation of other states not now included...
...The trouble with the schemes for world government that have so far appeared, whether these have merely remained in the outline stage or have actually come to life in bodies like the League of Nations and the present United Nations, is that they have all been more idealistic than practicable...
...Yet knowing all this and sharing in large measure the impulse to opt for stability and retrenchment, it seems to me that it is necessary more than ever today to think boldly and courageously...
...The reason for this is that they attempt to build institutions from the top down rather than from the bottom up...
...And the idea itself, adapted to an altered world situation at this time, may be worth reconsideration now, while the military pressures are relatively few and we are able to reason sensibly without the presence of some desperate crisis, comparable to that which beset the Allies in 1940, threatening the world...
...If, as another modern writer has said, unoriginality is regarded as a virtue in politics, it is because so much of the danger, destruction and suffering of our time have been bound up with novelty in ideas...
...True, and even if our gates were flung open wide, I would not expect "The United States of the World" to quickly attract a great number of new states...
...If that is our weakness, it is also our strength...
...Politics does not follow economics in the simplistic fashion that some have predicted...
...Of course, Congress would have to guard against our delicate political and economic balances (our twoparty and free enterprise systems) being seriously disturbed in the process of change...
...Such statements may have sounded megalomaniacal a century ago, but do they seem so far-fetched today...
...Man is neither a creature of heaven nor of mud, but of ideals compounded of common clay...
...Even in the case of Whitman's specific predictions for the future of Cuba and Canada, it is by no means certain that he will be proved wrong...
...The individuality of one nation must then, as always, lead the world...
...No one expected a positive answer to his proposal...
...It will be argued, too, that the force of fragmenting nationalism is such in our world today that many states would prefer to remain powerless but independent, whatever the advantages of entering into indissoluble union with us...
...In the long run-and possibly sooner than some think-the new morale injected into our polity by a new idea, and the enthusiasm it engenders both at home and abroad, could bring us profits and privileges greater than any Americans have ever enjoyed...
...I am not suggesting withdrawal from the United Nations, but rather consideration of another, perhaps more efficacious approach to the solutions of the pressing problems which the UN, like the League before it, was brought into existence to cope with, but which thus far have not been solved...
...The problem is to translate its meaning here and now into all languages, to show men everywhere that it is not only they who reach out in their dreams but America that reaches out to them too with the single purpose of helping them find their way to the free and good life we are all seeking...
...In many places where American economic penetration has taken place, in Africa...
...Never before in history has the world depended so much not only on the generosity but on the wisdom of a single people as it does today on the United States of America...
...What a land...
...Whitman, who said that "political liberty is the animus of all liberty," knew better...
...We are daily discovering that among ourselves, and we are demonstrating that to the nations of the world...
...Instead, prospects could open up where the enemies of the United States would be the ones worrying, for a change, about defections to our side...
...Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what they fear most...
Vol. 48 • October 1965 • No. 21
