Making Americans: An Essay on Individualism and Money. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1992 by Jonathan Rowe

How did it happen that, of all recent presidents, it was Ronald Reagan who sounded at times like Henry David Thoreau? "This government never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the alacrity with which it got out of the way," Thoreau wrote in his famous essay Civil Disobedience. It could just as easily have been Reagan.

Yet they were utterly opposite in almost every way. Thoreau was writing in protest of the Mexican War, the kind of imperial skirmish that Reagan would have gloried in. He lived (more or less) in a hut, and wrote with dismay about the commercial culture that, a century later, Reagan shilled for as TV spokesman for G.E. "I think there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed . . . to life itself," Thoreau wrote, "than this incessant business." Reagan, by contrast, thought the market--business--was synonymous with life itself. Yet for all this, the two could sound so much the same.

The paradox has a pointed relevance for Democrats, as Bill Clinton takes office with an opportunity to change the party's gestalt for a generation. National Democrats foundered during the seventies and eighties in part because they lost touch with the language of American individualism--aspiration, enterprise and responsibility for one's lot. Reagan meanwhile turned these into poetry, even though his policies often promoted corporate rather than individual endeavor, and even though he often exempted the very rich from the rigors of the market. Now Clinton has begun to claim the language back, and it behooves Democrats to re-examine the roots of the individualist tradition, both to inform their policies and prepare themselves for the assaults that Republicans are already preparing for 1996.

I thought this book would help. It comes with a tantalizing subtitle, "An Essay on Individualism and Money," and a list of literary subjects that cranks anticipation into high gear. At last, we are going to get past the wearisome invocations of the "Greed Decade" and start to place this epoch --which Reagan hosted rather than invented--within the deeper currents of American thought and life.

The author, a retired Columbia professor, does touch upon these themes. But regrettably, his frame of reference is almost entirely literary, and his book falls into a genteel literary version of the trap that has bedeviled the liberal mind for decades. Recoiling from the individualism of the corporate capitalist, liberals tend to lose contact with a larger part of the American psyche: the urge toward individual enterprise, the dislike of regulation and bureaucracy, and the spiritual/religious drama of redemption and reform, all of which provide much of the subtext of America's political discourse.

To be sure, liberals generally do embrace the individualist ethos in such realms as sexual preference and artistic expression. (Anderson doesn't dwell on such subjects.) But neither gay rights nor Karen Finley's performance art helps bridge the gap to mainstream voters. This left a large realm of emotive discourse to be dominated by the Reagans in the name of financial gain, to the exclusion of the other directions in which it can be channeled.

That's the sad part. Individualism isn't something liberals need to fear. Social reformers like Martin Luther King and environmental prophets like John Muir drew from the great individualist tradition that Thoreau helped define. Ralph Nader could capture the imagination of mainstream America with a radically anti-corporate message because he was the plucky individual who took on General Motors. In other words, because he was so American.

Anderson starts out with a premise that is promising enough, if not especially original. The Industrial Revolution came at a time when America was socially still a blank slate. Europe had centuries of tradition and culture to serve as ballast against the new commercial juggernaut. But in Jacksonian America, there was little to restrain the market and the kind of man it created. Money increasingly defined both who you were and the way you related to others.

As America's folkways gave way to the factory, the railroad, and the surging forces of acquisition, protest writers had little to harken to by way of alternative tradition. So, beginning with Emerson and Thoreau, they harkened instead to themselves. They began, Anderson argues, a literary retreat into the private precincts of self-discovery and self-expression. This continued, in divergent ways, in such writers as Walt Whitman and John Dewey, on up through the Beats and the counterculture of the sixties.

The result, he suggests, is much as when a child, rebelling against a parent, turns out just like that parent. Instead of offering a real alternative to commercial man, these writers lapsed into "an individualism that apes the impersonality of what it opposes and attenuates our ties to human others." (As opposed to what other kind of "others," he doesn't say.) This is why Thoreau and Reagan could meet at the point on the circle at which they were furthest apart. "Both for those absorbed in the pursuit of money and for those with visionary claims for the self, the term |future' refers to acquisition--more profit or broader visionary claims."