THE EXPLORING SPIRIT

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THE REITH LECTURES 1975

THE

EXPLORING

SPIRIT

AMERICA AND THE WORLD

EXPERIENCE

DANIEL I BOORSTIN

BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is a revision of the Reith Lectures which I recorded for

the BBC at Broadcasting House in London during the week of October

23, 1975, and which were broadcast on BBC radio weekly beginning

on November 12,1975. I want to thank the governors of the British

Broadcasting Corporation for the opportunity to deliver these

lectures to an audience in the country which I consider my second

home, for the incentive they have given me to bring these thoughts

together, and for their delightful hospitality to my wife and me

during our week in London. I want espcially to thank my friends

George Fischer and Philip French for their patience, wise advice

and guidance.

Readers of my earlier books, The Americans: The Colonial

Experience (Penguin, 1965) and The Image, or What happened to the

American Dream (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961), will find that I

have drawn from those books a few examples for new purposes.

This book, like all my others, owes more than I can explain to my

wife, Ruth F. Boorstin, who has not only made it possible, but has

made the quest for these ideas and for their precise statement a

happy voyage of exploring in tandem.

THE BIRTH

OF EXPLORATION

When Columbus started out on his famous voyage, we are told, he

didn't know where he was going, when he reached his destination he

didn't know where he was, and when he got back he didn't know

where he had been. Perhaps this quip has been popular because of a

widespread suspicion, outside the United States, that it may

describe us Americans during the whole two centuries of our

national existence. But, like many other Old World

characterizations of the relation between the Old World and the

New, this gives the Old World hero too much credit.

For this suggests that Columbus really was an explorer. Actually,

he was only a discoverer, although a very great one. The American

experience stirred mankind from discolvery to exploration. From

the cautious quest for what they knew (or thought they knew) was

out there, into an enthusiastic reach ing to the unknown. These

are two substantially different kinds of human enterprise.

FROM DISCOVERING TO EXPLORING

When we say that men climb the highest mountain "simply because

it's there," we think we are describing changeless human nature.

In fact, we are expressing a peculiarly modern point of view.

Mountain-climbing is emphatically a modern sport. For most of

human history, men not only feared the unknown, they shunned it.

For millennia, people stood in awe of mountain peaks, glaciers,

and all remote fastnesses The English Historiographer Royal in the

seventeenth century described the Alps as "high and hideous"

"uncout huge monstrous excrescences of nature." A characteri9ti

piece of mountain literature in the early eighteenth centuy was J.

J. Scheuchzer's Treatise on Alpine Dragons, whic discussed such

interesting questions as whether the wingle dragons found in

mountains were females of a specie or we a species all their own.

The prevailing view of the unexplored mountain landscape was

expressed by Shelley:

This wall of eagle-bafping mountain, Black, wintry, dead,

unmeasured; without herb, Insect, or beast, or shape or sound of

life.

The unknown and the forbidden were thought to be the same.

Not until the late eighteenth century did Europeans begin to make

a popular adventure of the effort to scale their mountains, The

first recorded ascent of Mont Blanc the highest mountain in

Western Europe, was not until 1786. Climbing the mountain simply

because it is there, is not an idea as old as the hills.

Mankind was slow to reach into the unknown. The unknown"the

undiscovered country from whose born no traveller returns"was the

realm of death and devils. Sensible mcn would plot their

adventures on maps of the familiar.

A glance at the best world maps of the late Middle Ages will

instantly show us the meaning that America was destincd to haw for

man's attitute toward his own knowledge. The great map of Fra

Mauro (1459), now in thc Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, commonly

regarded as the climax of pro-Columbian cartography, shows the

earth substantially covered by the continents, with only a thin

fringe of water. l~c thra "known" continentsAfrica, Asia, Europe-

are closely connected into "the island of the earth." Fra Mauro's

map documented the dogma of the Book of Esdras (II, 6) in the

Apocrypha, according to which the planet was covered six-sevenths

by land and only one-seventh by water. In order to cover thc

sphere of the planet with so much land, it was necessary to extend

Asia beyond its actual bounds and, at the ulme time, to reducc thc

oceansall of which made the water distance from the Iberian

peninsula westward to Asia seem conveniently short. It was such

orthodox miscalculationl as these that encouraged Columbus.

Fra Mauro's map, like other mappae mundi, was meant lo bc

completc, a kind of wall atlas. Every city of considerablc siu was

noted on it, with a tiny bird's-eye view of the characteristic

architecture, and the appropriate animals round about on the

landscape. On Fra Mauro=D4s map were no terrae incognitae. Any

supposed world" had no right to exist. There was no place yo put

it.

All this helps us understand why Colun erer and not an explorer.

The crucial di these two roles we can see in the origir words. The

etymology of the word "discov primary meaning is to uncover, or to

disc discoverer, then, is a finder. He shows us knew was there.

Columbus set out to "discc westward oceanic route to Asia. Of

course he knew the ocean, and he knew of Asia. He set out to fi

word "explore" has quite different connotal ately, too, it has a

disputed etymology. Sor from ex (out) and plorare (to cry out), on

"deplore." The better view appears to be tha ex (out) and plorare

(from pluere, to flow). Either etymology reminds us that the

explorer is one who surprises (and so makes people cry out) or one

who makes n flow out.

The discoverer simply uncovers, but the explorer opens. The

discoverer concludes a search; he is a finder. the explorer

begins a search; he is a seeker. And he opens the way for other

seekers. The discoverer is the expe known to be there. The

explorer is willing to take chances. He is the adventurer who

risks uncertain paths to the unknown. Every age is inclined to

give its la discoverers, those who finally arrive at the Ic

inaccessible known destination. But posterity human communityowes

its laurels to the happener upon dark continents of the earth and

of the mind. The corageous wanderer in worlds never known to be

there is the explorer.

It is plain that Columbus had the skills and the cast of mind of a

discoverer. By the standards of his day, he was (as Samuel Eliot

Morison has shown) a navigator of high expertise and wide

experience. He was an able organizer, an effective commander. He

thought he knew where he was going, he was convinced that he knew

what he was looking for, and he believedeven insistedthat he had

found what he went to discover. Columbus required members of his

crew, under penalties, to swear that the land they reached was no

mere island, but the "mainland" of Asia. According to his best

biographers, he went to his death unaware (and unwilling to

imagine) that the transatlantic lands he had touched were a New

World. A great discovererwe might even say an obstinate

discovererbut hardly a prophet of the exploring spirit.

Until someone seriously entertained the possibility of a new

figmenta "fourth part of the world" in addition to Asia, Africa,

and EuropeEuropeans would continue to waste their ingenuity

trying to make the Americas fit onto their crude cartography of

Asia. Few other subjects have recently excited such scholarly

passions as this question of who really "invented" America. The

notorious odium theologicum has been matched by this odium

geographicum. It was troublesome enough to have to revise Fra

Mauro's map to find a place for whole new continents. But if the

best maps of the world actually had left out so many lands, what

did this mean for all the rest of knowledge? Perhaps it was not

merely the maps of the planet that needed revising, but the whole

map of knowledge.

The maps of the new age of exploration would bear a new legend:

"All the world which has been discovered up to this time. " "Up to

this time!" These few words at the head of Diogo Ribeiro's world

chart of 1529, a classic of the new geography, proclaimed the

exploring spirit, the spirit of voyagers into the unknown, in

search of they knew not what. This was the telltale clue that the

imagination of Europe was about to be Americanized. Less by the

land and treasure of the Western Hemisphere than by the simple

discovery of the unknown. More's Utopia (1516), published only

twenty-five years after Columbus' first voyage, was the imaginary

report of a young man who had traveled to the New World with

Amerigo Vespucci. As Edmund Spenser in The Faerie Queene (IS89)

observed:

But let that man with better sence advize.

That of the world least part to us is red:

And dayly how through hardy enterprize,

Many great Regions are discovered,

Which to late age were never mentioned.

Who ever heard of th 'Indian Peru?

Or who in venturous vessell measured

The Amazons huge river noW found trew7

Orfruitfullest Virginia who did ever vew?

Yet all these were, when no man did them know;

Yet havefrom wisest ages hidden beene:

And later times things more unknowne shall show.

Why then should witlesse man so much misweene

That nothing is, but that which he hath seene?

THE AMERICAN VOID

When British colonists settled in North America in the early

seventeenth century, there were probably not more than three

million Indians scattered over an area twice the size of Europe

which then had a population estimated at about one hundred

million. Across the three-thousand-mile-wide continent, this

indigenous population was spread thinly and sporadically. Within

the area of the British seaboard colonies, American Indians had

not developed an urban culture nor had they created large settled

communities with which the English latecomers had to compete. The

whole present area of the United States, compared to any other

place where considerable numbers of Britons had settled, was a

Void. "We can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun,"

Thomas Jefferson wrote to Joseph Priestley in 1801. "For this

whole chapter in the history of man is new. The great extent of

our republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new."

By contrast with North America, the other places to which European

seafarers went at the beginning of the Age of the Sea (and the

places toward which Columbus himself was aiming) were settled,

even congested, communities. Vasco da Gama's first voyage to India

was carefully planned to reach the very place where he arrived. He

hoped to secure the well-known prized products available therq.

Laden with trade goodsstriped cloth, scarlet hoods, hats, strings

of coral, hand washbowls, sugar, oil, and honeyhe finally reached

his destination, Calicut, on the southwestern coast of the Indian

peninsula. There he offered this merchandise to the Zamorin, the

Hindu ruler of the place, who at first laughed, and then was

insulted by such shoddy stuff. One of the most important pieces of

information that da Gama brought back to Portugal was that futur=8E

voyager-traders had better bring a quite different stock,

preferably gold.

The piously repeated missionary purpose of the Portuguese- to

convert the Muslimwould make sense only in populated places. This

motive, too, led them to distant metropolises, with stops at

cities on the way.

>From this perspective, the Portuguese could hardly have seen the

American Void as a desirable destination. Strange, then, that the

vacancy of North America should prove to be its peculiar promise

to the world. But emptiness was America's special fertility. This

made it possiblc- and even necessaryfor English settlers to

organize their own communities, to transplant their institutions,

and so start life afresh.

The great innovation in English philosophy in that first age of

American settlement was John Locke's appeal to experience. His

interesting suggestion could be summed up in the notion that at

birth every man's mind was an America. The human mind, he said,

was a tabula rasaa blank sheeton which the facts of life could

inscribe their record, so making e%perience into knowledge. "In

the Beginning," he observed, "all the world was America." He

seized the American opportunity himself when he wrote his own

constitution for the newly settled Carolinas.

By accident, the British came first upon an area where the native

settlements were even sparser, less developed, and more shallow-

rooted than those of some other parts of North America. But the

Spanish first dominated areas to the west and south where the

indigenous people had a more highly developed, focused, urban

culture. Spanish missionary priests used the institutions that

they found ready-made as their framework of control of control.

The first great Spanish exploit in the Americas was Cort=8Es'

conquest of Mexico (1519), his notorious subjugation and betrayal

of Montezuma to secure his treasure-a feat that was rivaled only

thirteen years later by Pizarro=ABs hijacking hij~ing of the Emperor

of the Incas of Peru. The Spanish, by the luck of the draw, which

they had the courage and the ruthlessness to make the most of,

became conquistadores. =09The English became colonists and

settlers. The Spanish conquered the Aztecs and the Incas, the

English conquered the land.

A contempt for the Indians would continue to mar the lhistory of

British settlements in North America. And it survived the

centuries. =09While the Spanish and the Portuguese generally viewed

the American Indians as peoples to be conquered, converted and

assimilated, the English and their heirs commonly viewed the

Indians as another hostile fixture of a wild landscape. Like the

forests, they had to be cleared away.

EXPLORING IN COMMUNITY

The age that came upon a surprising "fourth part of the b

world=ACalso saw what J. H. Parry has called "the Discovery of the

sea.=AC And the era of Columbus witnessed "the victory of the

caravel over the camel.~~ The unpredicted revelation of so much

more land on this planet was paralleled by an equally fertile

revelation that the oceans were much vaster ben imagin=C7l. In fact,

to everybody's amazement, the planet was covered by a single

planetary Ocean Sea, and the oceans were interconnected, so that a

good seaman with a proper ship could sail from any shore of any

ocean to any other.

The modern maps would be charts of ocean highways, of the watery

paths from anyplace to anyplace else. Medieval maps based on

Ptolemy, whose Africa curved eastward, merging into China, had

shown the Indian Ocean as a vast lake, a kind of Asiatic

Mediterranean. If these maps had been correct, it would have been

impossible to reach India by sailing around Africa. But =8Even

before Columbus, the oceans had begun to merge and open up. Fra

Mauro's map modified Ptolemy to show the Indian Ocean as an open

sea flowing round the tip of Africa.

As the voyages of Columbus and his followers enlarged men's vision

of the land, so other voyages enlarged their vision of the sea.

Magellan's "Discovery of the Sea," besides revealing that the

earth was larger than had been imagined, also discovered a third

ocean. This was, of course, what we now call the Pacific

stretching between Asia and America and bigger than either of the

others.

When Magellan and his crew left the Atlantic and entered the

Pacific going westward round Cape Horn at the tip of South

America, they expected that the Pacificthen known to them only as

the Great Gulfcould be crossed in a few weeks. They were taught

their error in the most painful and persuasive way. At sea for

nearly four months before they reached Guam, they kept alive by

eating rats, chewing sawdust, gnawing leather, and scraping the

barrels for powdered wormy biscuits. The Pacific Ocean, to their

astonishment, covered one-third the area of the globe, and was

equal to all the land masses of the world combined.

Still, the most importantif least celebratedof the geographic

discoveries of that age was that the oceans of the world were all

connected. This meant, inevitably, that henceforth vast areas of

European mappae mundi now would have to be left blank. Terrae

incognitaeand maria incognita which before had not even existed,

now became enormous.

The British settlements in North America, as it happened, were the

converging product of the revelation of twin unknowns: unknown

continents and an unknown ocean. The Europeans who went to settle

in America naturally profited from the new techniques of the Age

of the Sea. "There is no sea innavigable," boasted Robert Thorne

in 1527, "no land uninhabitable." The whole human destiny was

being newshaped by the great seagoing vessels. Ships were bigge~

and better. Mariners now used new instrumentsthe quadrant, the

sea-astrolabe and the cross-staffto get their bearings by sun and

stars, and could carry hundreds of passengers thousands of miles

out of sight of land.

While the earlier traders to known places had carried merchants,

sailors and soldiers, along with trading goods and a few

missionary-priests, the first ships to the new "Plantations" in

the American Void actually carried communities. Whole communities~

Now, for the first time, whole communities could go as explorers

seeking into the unknown. While da Gama~s fleet, the Sao Gabriel,

the Sao Rafael, the Berrio, and their accompanying store-ship

carried merchandise as their main cargo, the Mayflower carried

people, together with all their tools for living. Among the

Mayflower's incidental undeclared cargo were such items as the

Magna Charta, the Bible, and the unwritten traditions of the

English constitution.

But the exploring communities did not end at the Atlantic

seaboard. The whole remainder of the North American continentmuch

of it even into the nineteenth century still a Voidwas an arena

for American communities on the move. For at least two centuries,

such communities could keep moving into new unknowns, enjoying the

promise and the risks of exploration.

A simple way of explaining what made this new kind of community

adventure possible was that Englishmen now had the Power to Leap.

The sea was their floating medium, and the sizable vessels of the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were their flying machines.

Crossing the sea had become a vastly different excprience from

crossing the land.

Until the sixteenth century, the land was the common path that men

followed even to the greatest distances. European travelers to the

East in Marco Polo's day and the generation following usually went

most of the way by land. Outside the Mediterranean, the main paths

of long-distance trade, like the Silk Route across Western Asia

into China, went overland. Land travel, too, tended to limit what

could be carried to articles that were not bulky and yet were of

high intrinsic value in other words, luxury goods.

Now the sea opened all sorts of new possibilities, not only of

what could be carried, but of who could go, and how far, and in

what numbers. This new Power to Leap on the sea was not as

melodramatic as the power~ to fly through the air which would come

half a millennium later. But it was, in its own way, a power of

flighta power to go straight to raw and strange and distant

places without passing through others in between.

The sea was wonderfully empty. That cultural emptiness (like the

American Void) would help explain much that would be possible in

America. The enormous unpeopled Ocean Vacuum would become a

precondition for revealing ncw possibilities in English

institutions, for allowing whole communities to become explorers

of an American unknown. Obviously, the colonists who came on

shipboard at Plymouth in England would arrive at Plymouth in New

England in the same cultural condition in which they had left. A

prolonged community life on shipboard might bring them closer

together, but gave no opening for extraneous cultural forces.

Since there were no strange peoples, institutions, cultures,

landscapes, or merchandise on the way, their six weel~s' voyage of

three thousand miles left them uncontaminated.

A trek of comparable length across any landscape would have been

incomparably more enriching or contaminating. The English

Crusaders who finally reached the Holy Land after encounters with

new products, new ideas, new languages, new religionsreturned as

quite different persons from those who had left. Such travels of

Englishmen on land were important for the ideas or objects or ways

of doing things that were picked up, lost, or exchanged on the way

there and back. The newly charted Atlantic Ocean provided a medium

through which English traditions, culture, and in~titutions could

be carried securely ship-packagedher-metically sealed for weeks

to be opened and tested at a trange destination.

The English settlements in America were not only outts of empire,

they were outposts of history. There the communities of Europeans

who had leaped the ocean also leaped the centuries. In those whom

they called "Indians" they saw how their primitive ancestors had

lived in the primeval millennia. The "colonist" (the word had only

latel~ come into the language in this sense) discovered that tht

centuries of progress had actually obscured many features of

mankind, many possibilities of human community. He gradually

awakened to unsuspected talents in himself and in his neighbors.

He awakened to new ways for people to clustel together, new

institutions to help men lean on one another. The opportunity

which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle conceived in his Lost World had

become an everyday experience fol Americanswith the roles of

dinosaur and brontosaurus having been played by rattlesnake and

raccoon, bison and wapiti.

Modern European civilization, possessed of the achieve ments of

Christendom, the liberalizing influence of Protestantism, the

innovating spirit of the Renaissance, and the exploring vision of

modern science, found itself in America suddenly on a scene of

prehistory. When before had there been so intimate, so extensive,

so vivid a confrontation of twc such disparate stages in human

development? When before had there been such communities of

explorers, men joined together to discover new possibilities in

the unknown?

This encounter between disparate epochs and disparate

civilizations was an example of a Fertile Verge. For a verge, in

my vocabulary of world history, is a boundary betweel anything and

anything else including, of course, the boundary between the known

and the unknown, the familiar and the strange. This is a place

where new ideas and new institutions grow, where new opportunities

appear, where commerce in products and in thought can flourish. A

verge is a kind of landscaDeof the earth or of the mindthat

makes every man and woman willy-nilly into an explorer.

The so-called "frontier"that place of encounter between the

westward-moving settlements of modern Europeans and the

wilderness, which some historians call the secret of American

vitality and the incubator of American democracy is only one

example.

America was a whole continent of verges, of edges between the

known and the ulfknown, of innumerable surprising encounters.

During its first centuries, our country would experience more

different kinds of verges than any other great modern nation. The

long Atlantic coast where the early colonial settlements

flourished was, of course, a verge between land and sea. Every

step inland was a new verge between the European and the American

Indian, between people and wilderness. As cities grew and were

sprinkled around the continent, each new Nashville, Denver, or

Tulsa was another verge between urban ways and those of a raw

countryside. Immigration from without was a creator of countless

vergesfor peoples from Europe, Africa, and Asia. The vastness and

variety of the continent created verges with new opportunities for

immigrants within. As the numbers and kinds of immigrants

multiplied, verges multiDlied in geometric progression.

FROM PILGRIM

FATHERS TO

FOUNDING FATHERS

The great awakening of modern man was his finding out that life

was not really as repetitious as it had always seemed. This provod

to bc one of the most difficult steps in human development. It was

not easy to grasp the fact that exprience was not merely a series

of similar events, but an unfolding scene of exploration. America

was to play a crucial role in this awakening.

Archaic man lived in the Age of Again-and-Again. "The thing that

hath been," says the Book of Ecclesiastes, "it is t which shall

be; and that which is done is that which shall done: and there is

no new thing under the sun." When men Subsisted by their crops and

their flocks, the return of the familiar was another name for

security. The daily rising of the sun and the seasonal falling of

the rain ensured grain for bread, and wool and skins for clothing.

The good and the familiar seemed one. The unfamiliar, the strange,

the out of the ordinary, was thought to be a miracle or a

catastrophe.

In the world of biology, it was not until the late nineteenth

century that learned men of Western Europe began to believe that

novelty was really possible. More radical than the idea of the

survival of the fittest was the notion that new species might

emerge as time passed, that the existing world of plants and

animals could be and was constantly being enriched. Until then,

biology had described a world of rebirths. Each species created by

God in the beginning was fruitful and multiplied "after his kind."

But the idea of evolution changed biology into a world of

revolutions. Older species were constantly being crowded out and

extinguished. Nature was always in process of being dominated by

the emerging new.

In the world of human community, the idea that novelty was

possible and might be good had appeared even before Darwin. But

its popularization, its laboratory demonstration, waited upon the

American experience. How did America, and especially the United

States, help mankind grasp this dangerous idea?

FROM RITUAL TO HISTORY

There is a hidden precision in the reverent clich=8E which describes

the earliest New England settlers as Pilgrims. For a pilgrim is a

religious devotee who journeys to a shrine or a sacred place.

Pilgrimage-- the characteristic popular travel-institution of the

Age of Again-and-Againis, of course, one of mankind's most

ancient and most familiar rituals. In the late fourteenth century,

Chaucer drew his wide sicial panorama describing the Canterbury

pilgrims. These ulcluded all sorts and conditions of men and

womena miller, a knight, a nun, a sailor, a lawyer, a doctorj a

merchant, a country gentleman, a cook, a carpenter, a haberdasher,

and a miscellaneous dozen others. When such pilgrims traveled to a

sacred place, they walked in the well-worn paths of the

generations. The pilgrim went to rcinforce his faith. Even though

the trip to Mecca, to Benares, to Compostella, or to Canterbury

often brought enture, it was primarily not an exploration but a

ritual.

When the first Puritans and Separatists came to New Enghnd, they

too saw themselves going on a pilgrimage. Al tbough the landscape

would be unfamiliar, their mission ~Ivould be familiar enough. New

England would be their Zion. Their "City upon a Hill" would

rebuild Jerusalem. l~e emptiness of America made it all the better

for their ~image. For when they had tried to rebuild Zion in the

Neth=C0rlands, as Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Colony in

New England reported, they found their children corrupted by "the

great licentiousnegs of youth in that countrie, and the manifold

temptations of the place . . . drawne away by evill examples into

extravagante and dangerous courses, Betting the raines off their

neks, and departing from thdr parents."

In the American emptiness, they hoped, there could be no contagion

from neighboring prodigals or heretics. Here the Pilgrim Fathers

could keep their people pure. "Proclaime to the world, in the name

of our Colony, that all Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists. and

other Enthusiasts. shall have free Liberty to keep away from us,

and such as will come to be gone as fast as they can, the sooner

the better."

The Pilgrim Fathers, then, did not see the New World as an

opportunity to new-fashion society. Rather to old-fashion it to

the perfect Biblical model. Wary of all newfangledness, they aimed

not to "make history," but to fulfill theology. They hoped to

repeat, more literally and more faithfully than anyone had ever

done before, the ritual rebuilding of Zion. For them, city-

building was not an enterprise in social science, but a religious

rite.

Puritan theology had actually made social novelties impossible.

God in the beginning had issued His catalogue of all life's

possibilities. For the Bible was a catalogue of "types" (the

modern sociologist would call them "models"). All later experience

consisted only of the latter-day counterparts of those "types,"

which the Puritans called "antitypes." The plots of all possible

human dramas had thus been revealed by God in the beginning.

According to the Puritans' Biblical theology of Again-and-Again,

men could play no roles except those which the Lord had long ago

written in. When Samuel Sewall's infant son hid shamefacedly for

some naughtiness he had committed, this was an antitype to Adam

hiding himself after he had committed the original sin. Since

their Puritan City upon a Hill was to be an antitype of ancient

Jerusalem, the Bible was the only necessary textbook of religion

and ethics, of sociology, anthropology, and political science.

The shapers of American civilization and the makers of America's

influence on the World Experience would not long continue to view

their American mission in this way. New World experience and New

World opportunities would effect a modern transformation. This was

the transformation of a world of typology into a world of history.

The archaic universe in which nothing could happen for the first

time became one where unique events, new institutions, and

unheard-of experiences were constantly emerging. In the

unwittingly precise parlance of American patriotic clich=8Es, this

was the advance from a world of Pilgrim Fathers to a world of

Founding Fathers. From Old World pilgrimage to New World

enterprise.

In the earlier age to which the Pilgrim Fathers were heirs, the

word "revolution" itself still had its original literal meaning.

"Revolution" still meant a revolvinga turning cycle, a return of

the familiar. Astronomers talked about the "revolutions of the

spheres." Only later did "Revolution" begin to have its common

modern meaning which emphasized not a cyclical return of the

familiar, but a sudden turning to the new. The first recorded use

of "Revolution" for an event in English history was in that now

obsolete sense. It referred to the overthrow of the Rump

Parliament in 1660, which resulted in the restoration of the

monarchy. Then, after 1688, "revolution" was used to describe the

expulsion of the Stuart dynasty of James II, and the transfer of

sovereignty to William and Mary.

Yet this was only a mild and tentative approach to the new usage.

The events of 1688 and 1689 which, with conspicuously un-English

overstatement, came to be called "the Glorious Revolution," had

occurred within the constitutional framework. Those events changed

the powers of existing .constitutional bodies, but did not bring

into being new political entities.

"The American Revolution," by contrast, was cataclysmic. Two years

before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787,

David Ramsay had published his History of the Revolution in South

Carolina. By 1789, Americans generally were referring to the

recent war for Independence as a "Revolution."

Before that Revolution, in the very age when Americans were

demonstrating the possibility of new beginnings, the English

language was already faithfully recording the novelties entering

the experience of all Western Europe. The word "explore," which

had first appeared in its general meaning of "investigate" in the

seventeenth century, came to mean "to search into or examine a

country by going through it, to go into or range over for the

purpose of discovery." About the same time, we find that the word

"colony" which originally (from the Latin coloniadrawn from

colonus, meaning a farmer) had simply meant a farm or an estate in

the countryside, was coming to denote a settlement in a new

country. This use of the word provided Samuel Purchas with his

delightful pun about Cofumbus (in Spanish, Crist=97bal Col=97n), the

discoverer of America: "O name Col=97n . . . which to the worlds end

hast conducted Colonies." Appropriate new meanings of "colonize"

and "colonist" soon followed. It was not until mid-eighteenth

century that the English language brought into common use other

words needed to chronicle the American experience: "emigrant" and

"emigration." Their companion, "immigrant," came soon after.

Within the next centuries, American experience would flood the

language with new words, and would fill old words with new

meanings.

America would be a place where the change in man's attitude to his

past was dramatized for all to see. The stage: thc "fourth part of

the world" which, until the early sixteenth century, Europeans had

not even imagined to exist. The actors: the millions of people

using unprecedented resources of the Age of the Sea, the Age of

Ocean-Faring, to transplant themselves across thousands of miles.

The theme: the building of new communities on a rich continental

emptiness.

Was there anywhere on earth any conceivable set of circumstances

(short of voyages to outer space) better suited to revise and

enlarge man's view of all human experience? Not to relive Biblical

"types," but to create unique modern forms? Any experience better

designed than the American to p~suade man that his destiny on this

planet was not ritual, but history?

Needless to say, the instruments for modern man's escape from the

archaic world of Again-and-Again were not invented in America. The

Renaissance (as historians Peter Bwke and Ricardo J. Quinones have

lately shown) brought Ewope to a revised sense of time. The past

would no longer be a landscape of repeated undulations and relived

cycles, but would be revealed as ever-changing. The lessons would

be overshadowed by the pageant. The human chronicle would not be a

catalogue of the familiar, but a kaleidoscope of wnpredictables.

This simple notion that experience was full of the unique and the

unprecedented would be one of the most drastic of modern

inventions. History (in both senses of the word) had to be

invented. A galaxy of European artists, poets, and thinkers from

Petrarch, Vasari, and ShakesDeare to Harrington, Clarendon, and

Locke prepared people for the shock. America, notably the United

States of America, was a proving ground for this world-shaking

ldea

VISIBLE BEGINNINGS

Before the founding of the United States, cities and nations had

been born in the mists of mythology. Romulus and Remus, twin sons

of the vestal virgin Rhea Silvia and the god Mars, were suckled by

a she-wolf until they were adopted by a shepherd. After Romulus

was chosen by an omen to found the new city (753 B.C.), he brought

fugitives there as the first settlers and secured wives for thern

by leading the Rape of the Sabine Women. Finally, after a long

reign, he disappeared in a thunderstorm, to be worshiped ever

after as the god Quirinus. King Arthur, a mighty Welsh warrior

first mentioned in epics of the seventh century, fought a dozen

battles against Saxon invaders, and by the twelfth century was

reputed to have been the conqueror of Western Europe, even before

he became the central figure in the legendary quest for the Holy

Grail.

In those days, whatever was lacking in facts was wonderfully

repaired by imaginationthen reported and immortalized by epic

poets. The chronicle of Rome's new beginnings became Virgil's

Aeneid, and Britain's Arthurian legend was repeatedly enriched for

over a thousand yearsfrom the Welsh poem Gododdin and Geoffrey of

Monmouth to Sir Thomas Malory and Lord Tennyson.

To all this mythic wealth the United States, which reached its two

hundredth birthdaY in 1976. has offered a striking contrast- Our

nation was founded in the bright light of history. During the

whole nineteenth century, what was considered most remarkable

about the birth of the United States was that it was so recent.

Even from the late twentieth century perspective, we can describe

the United States, in Seymour Martin Lipset's phrase, as "the

First New Nation."

In our time, when the conceiving of new nations (for which there

is no contraceptive) overpopulates the councils of the United

Nations, we are apt to forget how novel the new United States must

have seemed back in the late eighteenth century.

The United States was not merely the first New Nation.

It would also be the first prosaic nation, the first nation

which, strictly speaking, was both conceived and born within

history. By contrast with the mysterious poetic gestation, the

divinely performed Caesarean births of others, the United Sates

was a plainly human product. There were already plenty of examples

in recent times of the death or suppression of ancient "nations."

In the British Isles alone there were three examples of Scotland,

Wales, and Ireland. But the birth or perhaps more properly, the

fabricationof a nationthat was another story. It was a stunning

novelty. T he idea that a new nation could be made at all sent out

shock waves that reached over the world and into later centuries.

Its impact was both negative and positive. On the negative side,

the founding of the United States revealed that a functioning

nation (normal in all other respects) did not need an ancient

pedigree nor require the midwifery of a Mars, a Siegfried, or a

King Arthur. On the positive side, the founding of the United

States revealed that nations could be brought into being expressly

to serve the convenience, the needs, and the ambitions of living

men and women. The living were no longer at the mercy of the dead.

By forethought, collaboration, courage, and hard work, they could

create a nation for themselves and their contemporaries, and for

their posterity.

The essentially new American idea for political theorists was not

the idea of representative government. Britain, not America, was

the Mother of Parliaments, and republican institutions had deep

roots elsewhere in Europe. In the English language, a century

before the American Revolution, there was already an extensive,

profound, and respectable literature of self-government. The

Americans plainly and repeatedly declared their loyalty to this

republican tradition. The Constitution of the United States of

America, unlike basic legal documents before it, was announced not

in the name of any divinity or any divinely appointed King, but in

the name of "We, the People."

Another American noveltyin a world not yet quite accustomed to

novelty in political institutionscame along quite naturally with

the belief that a living generation could create a new nation.

This was the special meaning which the Americans would attach to

"the People." To this peculiar overtone Thomas Jefferson gave

eloquent and prophetic expression. "We may consider each

generation as a distinct nation," he observed, "with a right, by

the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the

succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another

country." And Jefferson spelled out the consequences:

No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual

law. The earth belongs always to the living generation: they may

manage it, then, and what proceeds from it, as they please....

They are masters, too, of their own persons, and consequently may

govern them as they please.... The constitution and the laws of

their predecessors are extinguished then, in their natural course,

with those whose will gave them being.... If it be enforced

longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.

Of course, political thinkers and revolutionaries had repeatedly

asserted the right of the living to liberate themselves from

inherited abuses. Here was something elsenot merely an outcry

against the tyranny of the past, but a declaration of the

Sovereignty of the Present.

More than that, here would be a living example of how a new nation

could be built by the present generation. Paradoxically, the

Founding Fathers' hopes that this nation would last far into the

future rested on their faith in the fluidity of its foundationsin

its capacity to be reshaped continually to the changing will of

each future generation. The United States, then, rested on the

shockingly simple notion that nation-building was not the monopoly

of gods and ancestors, that it could be a do-it-yourself activity.

To secularize and de-mystify the origins of nations would have a

profound effect on the world. American thinking, too, not only

about politics but about nearly everything else, was overcast by

this reality: the Visible Beginnings of countless institutions~

technologies, ways of life, and communities of transplanted

peoples.

The making of the United States was both historic and historicaL

America was to be the land not merely of the new, but of the

recorded, visible new. Was man's power to innovate somehow rooted

in his ability and his desire to keep an accurate record of his

experience? People here would be newly aware of what they were

doing that had not been done before. Man's capacity to bring

novelty into his experience thus grew right along with his

capacity to see and to record what he was doing. The making of the

United States witnessed a signal expansion of human self-

consciousness.

A symbol of this was James Madison, who is often called "the

Father of the Constitution." For Madison was both the principal

architect of the Constitution and the principal recorder of the

acts of its creation. Madison's eyewitness record of the

Constitutional Convention was the first such laboratory notebook

of an experiment in nation-making. To this day, his Notes remain

the best single source for our knowledge of the historic events in

Independence Hall in Philadelphia in 1787.

The special features of the American Visible Beginning have become

so familiar that it is hard for us to realize their innovative

power at the time of the birth of the United States.

Controversy and Debate. The framework of this new nation (despite

the enthusiastic hyperbole of superpatriots) was not given from on

high. It emerged from the conversation and debates of men whose

names and lives we know, and from their outspoken disagreement.

The meetings in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 were the

product of earlier meetings, and were to provide the occasion for

still other controversial meetings up and down the Atlantic

seaboard. Those prudent and thoughtful men, not in the habit of

wasting their breath, found it worthwhile to prepare lengthy

speeches, to marshal facts and answer objections. Parliamentary

debate was no novelty in 1787, and had reached a high art in

England in the speeches of William Pitt, Edmund Burke, and others.

But these Americans now were not simply choosing among alternative

measures for an established government. They were debating the

very shape of government, the essential character of their new

nation.

Compromise as an Institution. Another vivid American proof that

governments need not be the work of gods or mythical heroes, but

could be the work of self-governing inventive people, was the

prominence of compromise. The crucial events of the Convention

were not classic statements of theory or of dogma, but a certain

number of compromises. The Constitutional Convention in fact

elevated compromise into an American institution, which would

remain the main instrument of American political creativity. The

struggles in the Convention were for the most part not clashes of

ideoloies, but conflicts of interests. The best textbook histories

of American constitution-making rightly describe the compromises

as the main themes of the Convention. Compromises embodied in a

constitutionanother name for the federal systemcould make

everything else possible.

Amendment as an Institution. The amending process was itself a

compromise. And it was an embodied declaration of the Sovereignty

of the Present (not just the present Present, but the future

Present). The Founding Fathers (in another crucial compromise)

devised machinery to enable each generation to be sovereign over

its own constitution. That the so-called "Bill of Rights" was

itself a kind of compromise was revealed when it appeared in the

form of the first ten amendments. Since that time, several of the

sixteen later amendments to the Constitution have had a character

less than constitutionalfor example, the so-called "Prohibition

Amendment," wkich aimed to outlaw the saloon and instead created

the speakeasy and helped finance organized crime. But, by and

large, the amendments that have been adopted have been basic. The

Founding Fathers did not try to restrict the scope of Amendment

except to delay the possibility of certain amendments for twenty

years (till 1808), and to forbid any change in the equal

representation of the States in the Senate. But even this

qualification was needed to preserve the Federal framework, which

was the very machinery of compromises. Had the authors of the

Constitution circumscribed the amending power of future

generations, we later generations might have been left with no

constitution to amend.

This Visible Beginning of the new nation dramatized as seldom

before the power of a living generation over its institutions. The

fluidity of the new government expressed the Founding Fathers'

wholesome awareness of the limits of their power over the future.

If they had lacked this vivid modern sense of either the extent or

the limits of their power, it is doubtful that the Constitution

which created the United States of America could have survived for

two centuries, to outlive all other written constitutions. This is

another way of saying that the Founding Fathers possessed a lively

sense of history. The modern spirit was emphatically history-

conscious. A changing present had liberated mankind from the world

of Again-and-Again.

A CONTINENT-WIDE LABORATORY

The creating of this new nation by the Federal Constitution

dramatized modern man's capacity to make history. Then the filling

out of the continent by the self-conscious new fashioning of

States would show that institution-founding was not the monopoly

of a Founding Generation. Across the continent, men whose talents

were surely no match for those of Franklin and Madison and James

Wilson would dare to new-fashion their own States. The United

States of America grew and took shape from just such acts of

creation. In each new State, from Ohio to California, and from

Florida to Oregon, there was new proof that people could make

their own institutions. Novelty became an American tradition.

In England, the origins of cities were shrouded in prehistoric

mist. But as Americans spread west, they casually founded new

cities with enthusiasm, optimism, and ingenuity. Even when they

borrowed past glory by calling their settlements Cairo, Athens,

Rome, or London, they affirmed that by transplanting metropolitan

grandeur they could do what earlier generations had not done.

English institutions of higher learning had foundations deep in

ancient charters, reaching back to the Middle Ages. By the time of

the American Revolution there were still only two degree-granting

institutions in England, but there were already nine in the United

States, where the energy of a living generation made medieval

charters superfluous.

Not only constitution-making but law-making flourished in the

United States. While England somehow has managed With a single

Parliament. the United States eventually provided itself with

fifty-one legislative bodies, each making laws to serve its

current purposes. The idea of law-making itself, we too easily

forget, was not ancient. In England, even into the seventeenth

century, it was the "High Court of Parliament." Parliament had

remained primarily a law-declaring, not a law-making body. Its

duty was just dicere, not jus dare. From that archaic world of

Again-and-Again came the sanctity of the fundamental law, which

was nothing more or less than custom "to which the mind of man

runneth not to the contrary." The law was what you could prove had

been done by the appropriate authority again and again. While

England came only gradually to the possibilities of legislation,

of new fashioning laws to serve present needs, the American nation

was actually born in that discovery. And the United States would

become perhaps the most legislated nation on earth.

THE THERAPY

OF DISTANCE

With the settlement of the colonies in North America, for the

first time in history the English "provinces" became

transatlantic. The story of American civilization gives us an

opportunity to see what happens when a prospering old culture

detaches a piece of itself to a great distance. On the other side

of a broad ocean, the civilization of Englishmen became something

it never could have become within their little island. "Not a

place upon earth might be so happy as America"," Thomas Paine

observed in 1776. "Her situation is remote from all the wrangling

world, and she has nothing to do but to trade with them." But that

was not the whole story.

SELF-GOVERNMENT FROM NECESSITY

The American colonies were not, of course, the first settlements

of Englishmen outside of England. There was an ancient distinction

in constitutional law, as Charles H. McIlwain has shown, between

the realm of England (England itself) and the dominions (other

lands "belonging to" England). The American colonies were not the

first testing ground of the capacity of the English Constitution

to provide machinery for self-government beyond the island.

In the seventeenth century, while Englishmen in America were

building colonies, the Irish, separated by only a few miles of

water, were trying without success to assert their right to

legislate for themselves. The English Commonwealth Parliament of

1649, with the arrogance of a parvenu, declared that the English

Parliament alone ("the People . . . without any King or House of

Lords") should have the power to govern England and "all the

Dominions and Territories thereunto belonging." The very same

Declaration which proclaimed England "to be a Commonwealth and

Free-State" thus silently declared that Ireland had no right to

govern itself. Free Englishmen asserted their right to make laws

for all those whom they "possessed." For the first time there

emerged into constitutional parlance the notion of "British

Possessions." The irony of this situation, which escaped most

English statesmen, was vivid enough to the dyspeptic Irishman

Jonathan Swift, who called "government without the consent of the

governed . . . the very definition of slavery." The Irish, Swift

noted, were well enough equipped with arguments, "but the love and

torrent of power prevailed. . . in fact, eleven men well armed

will certainly subdue one single man in his shirt."

Ireland was too close to England, and the stakes of the Irish

Empire too great, for the Irish prophets of Revolution to prevail.

The Irish proponents of self-government lost. Before the

settlement of the American colonies, the only place in the English

dominions (i.e., outside England) where the right to self-

government was successfully asserted was in the tiny Channel

Islands, which neither threatened nor promised enough to justify a

battle. The doughty Channel Islanders had the gall to argue that

if anyone was dependent on anyone else, the English were dependent

on them. since they were the remaining fragment of the Dukedom of

Normandy, whose William had conquered England.

While Cromwell's Army could master next-door Ireland, neither he

nor his successors could preserve the power of the English

Parliament over these thirteen colonies of transatlantic

Americans. Three thousand miles of ocean accomplished what could

not be accomplished by a thousand years of history. The Atlantic

Ocean proved a more effective advocate than all the constitutional

lawyers of Ireland.

The significance of sheer distance appears from the earliest

settlement of Englishmen in the New World. Here is how William

Bradford describes what happened in mid-November, 1620, when he

and the other Pilgrim Fathers had their first view of the American

coast:

. . . after long beating at sea they fell with that land which

is called Cape Cod; the which being made and certainly known to be

it, they were not a little joyful. After some deliberation had

amongst them selves and with the master of the ship, they tacked

about and resolved to stande for the southward (the wind and

weather being faire) to finde some place aboute Hudsons river for

their habitation. But after they had sailed that course aboute

halfe the day, they fell amongst deangerous shoulds and roring

breakers, and they were so farr intangled ther with as they

conceived them selves in great danger; and the wind shrinking upon

them withall, they resolved to beare up againe for the Cape, and

thought them selves hapy to gett out of those dangers before night

overtooke them, as by Gods providence they did. And the next day

they gott into the Cape-harbor wher they ridd in saftie.

If the Pilgrim Fathers had been closer to home or more accurate in

their navigation or luckier in their weather, it is most unlikely

that there ever would have been any need for the "Mayflower

Compact." That document, which Bradford called "the first

foundation of their government in this place," was to be the

primary document of self-government in the British colonies in

North America.

The legal right of these English separatists to settle in the New

World came from a patent which they had received from the Virginia

Company of London, who authorized them to establish "a particular

plantation" wherever they wished within the domain of the Company.

The Pilgrims had intended to settle at the mouth of the Hudson

River, which was still well within the Virginia Company's northern

boundaries. If they had landed there, their patent from the

Virginia Company would have sufficed, and they would have had no

need for a fundamental instrument of government.

But Cape Cod, where the Pilgrims actually found themselves. was

too far north and so outside the Virginia Company's domain. By

settling at Plymouth they put themselves in a state of nature.

Their patent was not valid there. They were now within the

jurisdiction of the Northern Virginia Company (at that time being

reorganized into the Council for New England), from whom they had

no patent. They would have to create their own government. This

they did with the Mayflower Compact, written on board their vessel

and signed on November II, 1620, by forty-one men, including every

head of a family, every adult bachelor, and most of the

menservants. The only males who did not affix their names were two

sailors who had signed on the voyage for a single year, and the

other passengers who happened to be mder the legal age of

discretion.

The accident of misnavigation, as Bradford reported, had ; been

noticed by some of the more legalistic and libertarian Mayflower

passengers and became an urgent reason for hasty creating some

document of self-government. The Compact which they wrote so

quickly was "occasioned partly by the discontented and mutinous

speeches that some of the strangers amongst them had let fall from

them in the ship; Thate when they came a shore they would use

their owne libertie; for none had power to command them, the

patente they had being for Virginia, and not for New-england,

which belonged to an other Goverment, with which the Virginia

Company had nothing to doe."

The government which the Mayflower colonists created by E~heir

Compact was, according to Bradford, "as firme as any patent, and

in some respects more sure." They wrote a new chapter in the

history of self-government. For in other places the roots of civil

government had been buried deep under the debris of time. America

laid bare the birth of government where it would be plain for all

to see. In 1802 at Plymouth, in an often reprinted oration, John

Quincy Adams extolled the Mayflower document as "perhaps the only

instance, in human history, of that positive, original social

compact, which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only

legitimate source of government."

It was appropriate that the occasion for the primeval document of

American self-government should have come not from ideology but

from a simple fact of life. That was what New England historians

have straightforwardly called "the missing of the place.'~ In

America, need and opportunity upstaged ideology.

In their American remoteness the New Englanders created simple new

forms of self-government. The New England town meetings had an

uncertain precedent in the vestry meetings of rural England, but

American circumstances gave town meetings comprehensive powers and

a new vitality. Once again, Americans relived the mythic

prehistory of government. Tacitus had sketched that prehistory in

his account of popular assemblies among the Germanic tribes. It

also could be glimpsed in the direct democracy of the Swiss

Landsgemeinde (the popular assembly of the self-governing canton)

which flourished from the thirteenth till the seventeenth century.

Even as the direct democracy of the Swiss cantons was declining,

it was being reborn in New England.

>From the beginning, New England facts transcended Old English

forms. The New England town meetings, which met first weekly, then

monthly, came to include all the men who had settled the town. At

first, the meetings seem to have been confined to so-called

"freemen," those who satisfied the legal requirements for voting

in the colony. Soon the towns developed their own sort of

"freemen"a group larger than those whom the General Court of the

colony recognized as grantees of the land. While the town meetings

proved to be lively and sometimes acrimonious debating societies,

they were more than that. They distributed town lands, they levied

local taxes, they made crucial decisions on schools, roads, and

bridges, and they elected the selectmen, constables, and others to

conduct town affairs between the meetings.

The laws of Massachusetts Bay Colony gradually gave form to the

town meetings. A law of 1692 required that meetings be held

annually in March and enumerated the offlcers to be elected. A law

of 1715 required the selection of moderators, gave them the power

to impose fines on those who spoke without permission during

meetings, and authorized any ten or more freeholders to put items

on the agenda. But as the movement for Independence gathered

momentum, Britain's Parliamentary Act of 1774 decreed that no town

meeting should be held to discuss affairs of government without

written permission from the royal Governor.

The transatlantic distance had given to these transplanted

Englishmen their opportunity and their need to govern themselves.

The tradition of self-government, which had been established in

England by the weight of hundreds of years, was being established

in America by the force of hundreds of miles.

What the Mayflower Compact and the town meetings did for the

earliest New England settlers, the State constitutions and

numerous State legislatures accomplished for later Americans

spreading across the continent. The United States would have its

Civil War, its war for secession. But, significantly, that war was

fought between segments of the original seaboard colonies, and was

involved with deep moral issues and the conflict of economic

interests. Of the more remote States, only Utahthe Mormon

communitywould offer any substantial threat of secession.

In the growing United States, paradoxically, distance itself had

nourished institutional safeguards against rebellion. Because the

States grew in the American Void, as they grew they were free to

develop and had to develop their own forms of self-government. The

American Add-a-State plan was not confused by ancient imperial

ties. The government of each new unit was shaped by and for the

new settlers. The main sufferers from this system were the

American Indians, who were already there and whom the new settlers

treated as mere obstacles to be removed. The "mother country"

headquartered in Washington speedily abandoned efforts to impose

its will on remote parts. Paradoxically, the American federal

system, and especially the equality of States in the United States

Senate, made it possible for these western "colonies" gradually to

dominate the politics of the Eastern Seaboard "mother country."

ANTIDOTES TO MONOPOLY

Just as the American remoteness dissolved the powers of the

imperial bureaucrats in London over the lives of transplanted

Englishmen, so too it dissolved numerous petty bureaucracies.

Daily life in the English homeland was a domain of specialized

monopolies. The nation labored under the burden of privileged

guilds and chartered companies which had divided all the subjects'

needs into profitable satrapies.

In seventeenth-century England, the command of armies had become

an aristocratic monopoly. While the private soldiers tended to be

the social dregs drawn from jails and taverns, the officers were

usually aristocratic gentlemen who had bought or inherited their

commands. This feature of European armies had certain wholesome

and even pleasant consequences. It helped produce an Age of

Limited Warfare that might equally have been called an Age of

Ceremonial Warfare. Members of an international aristocracy were

versed in the "rules" of war for civilized nations which were

recorded in the writings of Grotius and Vattel. The conduct of

battles was a real-life version of chess. "Now it is frequent,"

Daniel Defoe observed in 1697, "to have armies of fifty thousand

men of a side stand at bay within view of one another, and spend a

whole campaign in dodging, or, as it is genteelly called,

observing one another, and then march off into winter quarters.

The difference is in the maxims of war, which now differ as much

from what they were formerly as long perukes do from piqued

beards, or as the habits of the people do now from what they then

were. The present maxims of war are-

Never fight without a manifest advantage,

And Always encamp so as not to be forced to it.

And if two opposite generals nicely observe both these rules, it

is impossible they should ever come to fight." It is not

surprising that between engagementS the officers of opposing sides

entertained one another with balls, concerts, and dinner parties.

In America, the profession of arms was being dissolved into

communities of citizen-soldiersnot through force of dogma, but

through force of circumstances. Firearms were a daily necessity

both for gathering food and skins, and for defense against the

Indians. "A well grown boy at the age of twelve or thirteen

years," a settler observed in the Valley of Virginia in the

1760's, "was furnished with a small rifle and shot-pouch. He then

became a fort soldier, and had his porthole assigned him. Hunting

squirrels, turkeys and raccoons, soon made him expert in the use

of his gun."

Of course, the American Indians had never read Grotius or Vattel

and were ignorant of European military etiquette. They were

skilled, courageous, and ruthless guerrilla fighters, and the

colonists had to follow their example. Backwoods warfare was

nothing like the polite game of military chess described by Defoe.

It was individualistic warfare, warfare without rules, which

dissolved all sorts of distinctions between officer and private,

and even between soldier and civilian.

The military profession was only one of the monopolies that

dissolved in the American remoteness. "Besides the hopes of being

safe from Persecution in this Retreat," William Byrd wrote in

1728, "the New Proprietors [of New Jersey] inveigled many over by

this tempting account of the Country: that it was a Place free

from those 3 great Scourges of Mankind, Priests, Lawyers, and

Physicians. Nor did they tell a word of a Lye, for the People were

as yet too poor to maintain these Learned Gentlemen." But as

important as their poverty was the sheer distance of the colonists

from the Old World citade!s of privilege.

In religion, the remoteness of America and the vast spaces in

America made it impossible to preserve the monopoly of the

Established Church. The Puritans in New England were not noted for

their toleration. They warned away all heretics and they harried

the Quakers from their midst. Meanwhile, Rhode Island,

Connecticut, and Pennsylvania gladly welcomed refugees. And the

American backwoods proved to be a boundlessly tolerating

landscape. There was room enough for everybody. "If New England be

called a Receptacle of Dissenters, and an Amsterdam of Religion,"

the Reverend Hugh Jones of Virginia wrote in 1724, "Pennsylvania

the Nursery of Quakers, Maryland the Retirement of Roman

Catholicks, North Carolina the Delight of Buccaneers and Pyrates,

Virginia may be justly esteemed the happy Retreat of true Britons

and true Churchmen for the most part...." But even in Virginia, as

Jones observed, "the Parishes being of great Extent, Every

Minister is a kind of Independent in his own Parish." Commonly,

there was no nearby church where the prescribed ceremonies could

be performed. "In Houses also there is Occasion, from Humour,

Custom sometimes, from Necessity most frequently, to baptize

Children and church Women, otherwise some would go without it. In

Houses also they most commonly marry, without Regard to the Time

of the Day or Season of the Year." The wonderful independence and

variety of American religions never ceased to amaze the visitors

from abroad. In 1828, Mrs. Trollope found the churchgoing

Americans "insisting upon having each a little separate banner,

embroidered with a device of their own imagining." She wrote, "The

whole people appear to be divided into an almost endless variety

of religious factions:"

In England, the higher learning as well as religion had been a

monopoly of the Established Church. Nonconformists had difficulty

securing admission to Oxford or Cambridge (the only English

universities till the early nineteenth century), while Catholics

and Jews were absolutely excluded. The dissenting academies, which

set high scholarly standards, had no power to grant degrees. In

America, by contrast, at the time of the Revolution, nearly every

major Christian sect had a degree-granting institution of its own.

By the early eighteenth century, New England Puritans and their

secessionists had set up Harvard and Yale, while Virginia

conformists of the Church of England had their College of William

and Mary. The flourishing variety of sects nourished a variety of

institutions. New-Side Presbyterians founded Princeton University;

revivalist Baptists founded Brown University in Rhode Island;

Dutch Reformed revivalists founded Queen's College (later Rutgers

University) in New Jersey; a Congregational minister transformed

an Indian missionary school into Dartmouth College in New

Hampshire; Anglicans and Presbyterians joined in founding King's

College (later Columbia University) in New York City and the

College of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania).

Americans were happily distant from the metropolitan headquarters

in London of the monopolies of the medical and the legal

professions. That was where professional guilds guarded their

antique silver, displayed their charters, and organized to keep

out competitors. And where they preserved pedantic distinctions

among their several branches. The aristocrats of the legal

profession were the "barristers" fortified in their London Inns of

Court which held the power to admit to the bar, and the monopoly

of practice before the High Courts. "Attorneys," while not

authorized to plead in court, set the machinery of the court in

motion. Then there were the "solicitors," private legal agents

whose province it was to look after routine legal matters. Besides

these there were "notaries" (organized in their Scriveners'

Company) who prepared the documents that required a notarial seal,

in addition to patent agents, and still other specialists. Their

English citadel was Londonbut there was no American London.

In America, legal specialties dissolved and there were citizen-

lawyers. When the young John Adams in 1758 sought the advice of a

leading Boston lawyer on the requirements for the practice, he was

advised that "a lawyer in this country must study common law, and

civil law, and natural law, and admiralty law; and must do the

duty of a counsellor [barrister], a lawyer, an attorney, a

solicitor, and even of a scrivener." As the standard of technical

competence was lower than in England, even the distinction between

lawyer and layman was blurred. Of the nine Chief Justices of

Massachusetts between 1692 and the Revolution, only three had

specialized legal training. American businessmen were more

inclined to be their own lawyers. Land, which in England was an

heirloom and the most metaphysical of legal subjects, in America

became a commodity. When landownership was widely diffused, its

mysteries seemed less arcane.

Few expressed the American suspicion of professional monopolists

better than Samuel Livermore, who was Chief Justice of the New

Hampshire Supreme Court in the late eighteenth century. He lacked

legal learning himself, and as a contemporary reported he "did not

like to be pestered with it in his courts." "When [counsel]

attempted to read law books in a law argument, the Chief Justice

asked him why he read them; 'if he thought that he and his

brethren did not know as much as those musty old worm-eaten

books?' " One of Livermore's brethren on the bench (himself a

farmer and trader by occupation) charged a jury "to do justice

between the parties not by any quirks of the law out of Coke or

Blackstone- books that I never read and never willbut by common

sense as between man and man."

We must keep all this in mind when we recall that of the fifty-six

signers of the Declaration of Independence twenty-five were self-

styled "lawyers," and of the fifty-five members of the

Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia thirty-one were lawyers.

These facts were not so much evidence of the peculiar importance

of legal learning as they were symptoms of the decline of

monopolies in America. "In no country perhaps in the world,"

Edmund Burke observed in his speech On Conciliation with the

American Colonies (1775), "is the law so general a study . . . all

who read, and most do read, endeavor to obtain some smattering in

that science." The multiplying American legislatures, enough to

provide a seat for nearly any citizen who was so inclined, helped

bring into being the citizen-lawyer.

=09A similar American catharsis occurred in the medical

professions. The eighteenth-century English patient suffered from

the doctors' many sub-monopolies. At the top of the social scale,

corresponding to the barrister, was the "Doctor of Physick," who

enjoyed the privileges of the Royal College of Physicians

chartered by Henry VIII back in 1518. But his professional ethics,

rooted in the clerical tradition of the two English Universities,

forbade him to shed blood or handle the human body. The "barber-

surgeons," who had been organized in 1540, were later split by the

distinction between the "barbers," who had a monopoly on cutting

hair, shaving beards, and extracting teeth, and the "surgeons,"

who performed other operations. Besides these were the

"apothecaries," who until 1617 had been the members of the

grocers' guild, but thereafter had a monopoly on selling drugs.

And in addition, there were the "midwives," who till the end of

the seventeenth century were generally women and who had to be

licensed by their bishop.

In colonial America, where distances were great and specialists

scarce, all such monopolists gave way to the general practitioner.

"I make use of the English word doctor," wrote the observant

Marquis de Chastellux, who traveled the colonies in 1781, "because

the distinction of physician is as little known in the army of

Washington as in that of Agamemnon. We read in Homer, that the

physician Macaon himself dressed the wounds.... The Americans

conform to the ancient custom and it answers very well."

The therapy of distance worked in countless other ways.

Distinctions of social classes, which in Europe had been

reinforced by all these other distinctions, did not survive intact

in the New World. Since the witty drawing rooms, learned

libraries, genteel academies, and grand councilchambers of the Old

World were an ocean away, Americans could not escape some

provincial crudity and naivet=8E. But the ocean also separated them

from the irrelevancies of a filigreed society, from Old World

pomposity and pride and priggishness, from traditional conceits

and familial arrogance. Americans would discover for themselves

the wisdom in Jonathan Swift's ironic Irish view, "If a man makes

me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same

time." And American experience would show the world what a purging

could do for ancient institutions.

IV

THE DARK CONTINENT

OF TECHNOLOGY:

THE POWER TO LEAP

The conduct of daily life for Americans in the later twentieth

century would not follow the rules which had governed experience

at the time of our nation's founding. Technology would tend to

neutralize or destroy some peculiar American opportunities. For

those had arisen out of the special situation of the North

American continent in space, and the special situation of the

birth of the United States in time. In our later age, the therapy

of distance, the shock of visible beginnings, the very meaning and

potency of history would be diluted or dissipated.

The meaning of physical distance was transformed. The new

technology was the conscious product of imaginative and energetic

individual men and women, and of potent new institutions. But its

consequences extended beyond the ken of the inventors. These

seeping, pervasive, interstitial, unexpected consequences would

become the daily problems and opportunities of twentieth-century

Americans and eventually might become those of all mankind.

THE DISTANT NO LONGER REMOTE

Back in 1748, the pioneer French sociologist Baron de Montesquieu,

whose works were well known to the authors of the Declaration of

Independence, had argued that a republic could endure only if

confined to a small territory. Only then, he said, would the

public interest be simple enough to be comprehend=8Ed by the people.

Many of the Founding Fathers of the American republic agreed. When

Patrick Henry argued against ratifying the federal constitution in

the Virginia Convention, on June 9, 1788, he challenged the

Federalists to produce "a single example" of a great extent of

country governed by one Congress. "One government," he insisted,

"cannot reign over so extensive a country as this is, without

absolute despotism." The War for American Independence had been

fought against government-at-a-distance from abroad. Would

government-at-a-distance on the American continent be any more

tolerable?

Even those, like James Madison, who championed the new

Constitution, noted dangers in the large reach of the new

confederacy. But in The Federalist they argued that American

geography could provide a built-in safeguard against the threat of

centralized government. That safeguard was the variety of

interests to be found in the wide extent of the American colonies.

If a large nation would offer the danger of government-at-a-

distance, it mignt also offer the salutary checks and balances of

a heterogeneous continent. Thomas Jefferson made precisely this

point after his party won the election of 1800. "Had our territory

been even a third of what it is," he observed, "we were gone. But

while frenzy and delusion like an epidemic, gained certain parts,

the residue remained sound and untouched and held on till their

brethren could recover from the temporary delusion; and that

circumstance has given me great comfort."

The importance of sheer distance in shaping American political

thought appeared again and again and in obvious ways. This federal

republic assigned all the "police powers" the lion's share of

legislation and administrationto the political unit which was

closer to the citizen. For a citizen's concern and his knowledge

of affairs were supposed to be directly proportionate to his

closeness to the problem. The Constitution therefore gave to the

central government only certain specified powers, and left all the

rest to the States. In foreign policy, too, the force of distance

became an axiom that was soon translated into policy. In 1823, the

Monroe Doctrine declared the American determination to preserve

the oceans as a moat-protective, to enforce quarantine from the

many ills "on that side of the Atlantic."

By the twentieth century, technology in the United States had done

much to destroy the power of distance. Of course, the twin

technologies of transportation and communication played the

largest role. The most influential American successes in these

areas have been (for transportation) the automobile and the

airplane, and (for communication) the radio and television.

Nothing was more obvious. But some of the indirect consequences of

the American conquest of distance were less obvious. Perhaps the

most important social byproduct was a fantastic increase in man's

Power to Leap.

To understand this we must recall how, five centuries earlier,

seafaring Europeans had first acquired a Power to Leap. In the Age

of the Sea the progress of technology and of geographic,

astronomic, and scientific knowledgc man's newly amplified Power

to Leaphad made possible the "discovery" and then the settlement

of America. By the early sixteenth century Europeans had developed

the means to carry communities through the cultural vacuum of

thousands of ocean-miles, by-passing everything in between. These

communities arrived on American shores uninfluenced and

unadulterated by all the ages and stages between the North

American Indian and the post-Renaissance European.

Five centuries later, in the Age of the Air, the twentiethcentury

Americans' Power to Leap was still more unprecedented. Aeronautics

and electronics extended the reach of man's leap all over the

earth and into the heavens. The time required to send a message

across the planet was abbreviated until it became practically

instantaneous. This was a quantum jump in technological progress.

Aeronautics and electronics obviously brought Americans much

closer to the moon, but not any closer to their nextdoor

neighbors. In surprising ways, the Power to Leap now tended to

isolate and segregate each citizen from those nearby. This is an

example of what I would call the Law of Inverted Distance:

Advancing technology tends to have a proportionately much greater

effect on large quantities than on smalL The longer the distance

to be covered, the greater the power of technology to reduce the

required time. This means that within the short distances

circumscribing man's everyday community, the distances that

measure his neighborhood, the powers of this technology are

negligible.

It is misleading, then, simply to say that when the "Space Age"

came, space was "conquered." It would be more accurate to say that

physical distance became an everyday conunf drum. The electronic

impulses which penetrated walls and hastened over thousands of

miles also made a puzzle of everyday experience.

This new Power to Leap would have a profound effect on daily

life, on the citizen's consciousness, on his relation to

government and to nearly everything else. Suddenly every citizen

was catapulted into a ringside seat in the national capital.

Messages and images from Washington reached the citizen just as

readily whether he was in San Francisco, Salt - Lake City, or

Miami Beach, on shipboard in the Great Lakes, or off Cape Cod. The

large investment by the broadcasting networks in Washington and in

New York made the programs from such centers superior both

technically and in personnel to local broadcasts. Now every

American, however far from Washington, could feel present at the

Inauguration of a President, at the histrionics of Congressional

Hearings, at the Press Conferences in the State Department or the

White House.

Of course, the State Capitols and City Halls, too, were scenes of

broadcasts. But the most important new influence ~, of television

on the American political consciousness was to give immediacy and

intimacy to events and personalities at a great distance. Citizens

who could not even name, much less recognize, their representative

in the State legislature now had a casual familiarity with the

voice, facial expressions and intimidating gestures of a Senator

Joe McCarthy, or the twitching eyebrows and affable smile of a

Senator Sam Ervin. Nightly network newscasters Howard K. Smith and

Walter Cronkite became a new type of folk hero.

All over the country, Americans were still troubled as much as

ever by the impurity of their local water supply, by the

irregularity of the collection of their garbage, by the

overcrowding of their schools, by the risks of robbery and mayhem

on the streets. But the vistas of everyday life were not what they

used to be. Distant events and distant leaders seemed so much

nearer and more vivid than many closer, more neighborly events.

BY-PRODUCTS

This power to conquer distance tended to revise or abolish the

circumstances on which Franklin and Jefferson and Madison had

based their political wisdom. The conditions which had supported

the Founding Fathers' hopes for the future of the Republic were

transformed.

Technology homogenizes. The very same forces which abridged the

continental distances also tended to dissolve the continental

variety. As people all over the United States came closer to one

another, they became less different from one another. When

businessmen and labor leaders flew halfway across the continent

for a few hours' conference and returned home the same day, the

whole nation's ways of doing business were assimilated. National

advertising and national television programming brought the same

sales slogans and the same entertainment celebrities

simultaneously to everybody. Powerful homogenizing forces produced

new reasons to share Thoreau's mid-nineteenth-century doubts. "We

are in great haste," he noted in Walden in 1854, "to construct a

magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it

may be, have nothing important to communicate." The more alike

became the economy, the standard of living, the spoken language,

the folklore, the music, and the literary culture of the nation's

distant parts, the less was added to any American's experience by

bringing him words and music and images from remote parts of the

nation. What had happened to the variety in which Jefferson had

such confidence, and which gave him such comfort that "while

frenzy and delusion like an epidemic, gained certain parts, the

residue remained sound and untouched"? Was any part of the nation

still immune to these powerful homogenizers?

Technology centralizes The new technology required great

investments of capital and new kinds of specialized know-how. The

high cost and the homogenizing reach of the media put a premium on

the celebrity-everythingthe celebrity product, the celebrity

entertainer, the celebrity newscaster. The celebrity was a person

who was well known for his well-knownness. To judge political

candidates or commercial products by the "recognition factor"

meant that candidates, products, and broadcasters would be valued

quantitatively. The cost of commercial advertising announcements

and the salaries of television entertainers and newscasters

depended on how many people they reached and hQw many they managed

to keep listening. These high costs could be borne only by high-

powered, centralized institutions, the best-financed political

candidates, and the most widely used soaps and soups and

automobiles and deodorants. Every advance in technology seemed to

increase tbe power of the broadcasting networks. The three great

networks headquartered in New York employed the best technology

and the best talent. An incumbent President who could command them

all at will had a new advantage. News now tended to become

afferent and efferentno longer mostly dispersed near where it was

gathered but attracted to centers from which it was dispersed

everywhere.

Technology isolates. When Alexander Graham Bell exhibited his

telephone in 1876, the popular imagination was excited by its

fantastic possibilities. The author of a popular song, "The

Wondrous Telephone," then unwittingly forecast the consequences of

radio and television:

You stay at home and listen

To the lecture in the hall,

And hear the strains of music

>From a fascinating balll

In the following century, every new advance of electronic

technologyfrom the telephone to the radio to television tended

increasingly to isolate individual Americans and keep them at

home. This was perhaps the most momentous unpredicted consequence

of the new Power to Leap. The telephone made it possible to have a

conversation with a person without seeing his face or being in his

physical presence. Television finally made it possible to join

others in experiencing almost anything while remaining physically

separated from them. All by yourself in your own home, while you

were lolling in your favorite armchair smoking a cigarette and

drinking a can of beer, you could attend a political rally, hear a

concert, observe a funeral or some other public ritual, or be

present at a parade. Relaxed in your pajamas or nightgown as you

lay in bed, you were free from the old rules of decorum. You were

free from the need to stay silent, you could applaud or hiss, walk

in late or walk out in the middle.

Why risk the traffic or endure the crowds for what would come home

to you on your TV screen? Television thus brought a new personal

isolation and spelled the decline of congregation.

Of course, millions of Americans still attended amateur school or

church performances, patronized live theater or concerts, or paid

their money to enjoy the living threedimensional excitement of the

baseball stands, the football stadium, or the hockey rink. But

many more millions preferred the close-ups and the replays offered

free-of-charge on the TV screen. Some of the best views of

national political conventions were those that reached the

citizens who had stayed home. As the evening audiences for

downtown theaters declined, so too did all the other once-

appealing features of "downtown." And "downtown" was diffused into

indistinguishable shopping centers where branches of national

retail chains were selling the same brands. The consumer went to

the nearest one. For politics and entertainment, Americans tended

to go out less than ever before, yet they were witnessing events

occurring at a farther distance than ever before. The more

Americans stayed at home, the more they found their attention

focused on the faraway.

Television became a form of transportation. In fact, it was better

than any earlier form of transportation. For it brought

preselected, well-focused, telephoto versions of the most

interesting aspects of any experience instantaneously from

everywhere. The old technology took the person to the experience;

the new technology brought the experience to the person.

No longer was it necessary to go out into the presence of numerous

of your fellowmen to witness the most costly performances.

Formerly the lavish extravaganzas brought out the biggest crowds,

and even had to bring out the crowds to support the events. Now

these were the very programs most likely to go direct to the

greatest number of individuals, each at his receiver, each

witnessing the performance in privacy. The biggest and best events

tended to be witnessed-at-adistance. The bigger and better the

event, the greater the distance!

Television, then, produced a new segregation. And every advance in

technology, every reduction in the cost of sets, every improvement

in the quality of reception tended to increase the physical

segregation of the individuals who shared an experience. When

color television appeared, Americans did not dispose of their old

black-and-white sets in order to bring the family together again

before the color screen. Instead, the black-and-white set was

given to the children for their room, while the color set moved

into the adults' living room. Small, inexpensive sets made it

possible for more members of the family to have their very own

screen and watch their favorite programs all by themselves. More

Americans could buy portable sets and take the screen with themto

the beach, the mountains, or the campsite and so isolate

themselves from the landscape they had gone to see.

A similar tendency to isolation came along with the advancing

technology of transportation. The Pilgrim Fathers on their voyage

across the ocean had been packaged together in a shipboard

community, and as they lived in forced intimacy for weeks, they

grew into a seagoing village. Contrast this with the experience of

the twentieth-century transatlantic traveler, who is urged to keep

his seat belt constantly fastened. He is saved from the need to

converse with fellow passengers by the headset which brings him a

private concert or a humorous monologuist. For most of that few

hours' voyage he need not see his fellow passengers, since the

lights are dimmed for better viewing of the motion-picture screen.

Even before the airplane, the automobile had a similar atomizing

effect. Traveling by train had been a social experience. In the

nineteenth century, the characteristic open design of American

railroad carsunlike the closed compartments of the British or the

continental carsdeveloped out of the Americans' desire to move

about and mix with fellow passengers. The Pullman smoking room

became a fertile source of American folklore. Those Americans who

still commuted by train continued to have the friendly experience

of waiting with their neighbors on the station platform, of

conversing or playing cards, or even drinking a cocktail en route.

=09But the automobile was isolating and encapsulating. The

American traveling to work by car was apt to be traveling alone,

probably listening to his radio for music or news from some

distant center. Car pools made little headway even in an age of

gas shortages. The improved American highway system ~till further

isolated the American-in-transit. On his speedwayidentified only

by a highway number, graded, landscaped, and fenced, with not so

much as a stoplight to interrupt his passage he had no contact

with the towns which he by-passed. If he stopped for food or gas,

he was served no local fare or local fuel, but had.one of Howard

Johnson's nationally branded ice cream flavors, and so many

gallons of Exxon. This vast ocean of superhighways was nearly as

free of culture as the sea traversed by the Mayflower Pilgrims.

Just as television now tended to keep every man by himself at

home, the automobile meant every man for himseU on the road.

Meanwhile, technology tended to clog the short-distance channels.

Americans found it difficult to accommodate traditional

neighborhoods to the needs of the new machines. The automobile,

which had the capacity to cruise at sixty miles an hour, seemed at

first to give man a new Power to Leap on land. But around cities,

where short-distance transportation was crucial, automobile

passengers were often confined in traffic jams where they could

not even progress at a walking pace. The shorter the distance, the

larger the Parking Problem. In fact, parking began to rank with

the dilemmas of sex and politics, death and taxes as the common

lot of humankindthe most modern symbol of the Fall of Man. The

automobile proved to be an effective time-saver only for longer

distances, where it did not block the channels of its own passage.

=09The airplane would provide another example. It had made

Daedalus' dream into an everyday reality. Habits and institutions

changed as the airplane abridged large distances. Businessmen

headquartered in Chicago transacted daily business in Los Angeles

or New York. Baseball leagues no longer had to be concentrated in

one part of the countrythe Brooklyn Dodl!erc mrlved to Calif~rnia

to become the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the American League spread

across the continent.

DISTANCE LOSES ITS FORCE

In this curious upside-down world, men could leap the long

distances in speed and comfort, yet they were more than ever

cursed by the perils and congestions of short distances. Wha. did

this do to the therapy of remoteness? In the founding era~ many of

the special opportunities of American civilization had arisen from

the fact that the long distancesbetween the Old World and the

New, between one end of the colonies and the other, between one

side of the continent and the other were still intractable and

still appeared unconquerable by any speedy means. This helped

explain why Americans who were so far from the British Isles had

established self-government, while the inhabitants of nearby

Ireland had not, and why London monopolists could not enforce

their privileges across the Atlantic. Simple remoteness explained

countless American opportunities.

But those twentieth-century successes of American technology which

brought people all over the United States closer to one another

also made them less different from one another. New problems and

new confusions came along with new benefits and opportunities. The

tendency of modern industry to congregate workers in ever-larger

factories had long been noted. In the early nineteenth century,

Karl Marx shrewdly predicted that this fact might give a new self-

consciousness, a new sense of community, and a new power to those

who worked together. What Marx could not foresee (and what few

Americans in the twentieth century noted) was that the ever-wider

diffusion of the products of American factories tended toward the

increasing isolation of consumers from one another. It was not

just that Rebecca no longer went to the villagc well for her

waterand her gossip. She no longer needed to go outside her

kitchenette apartment to have her hot and cold running water, her

hot and cold running entertainment. Even her garbage no longer had

to be carried out, for the waste food went into the Disposall,

while papers, cans, and bottles went into the trash compactor.

Was it any wonder that the troubles of American cities multiplied

beyond measure? American city-dwellers were not backward in

complaining of crime on the streets, of the inadequacy of

municipal services and of public transportation. Yet they seemed

unable to bring their energies and ingenuities to bear on these

problems which harassed them every day and every night, right

where they lived.

Was it possible to restore the therapy of distance? Were there

antidotes for the technological segregation of individuals? What

could be done to prevent splendid technology from breeding a

menacing personal isolationism? Was there any way of using the new

Power to Leap so as to restore the neighborliness of the near?

THE DARK CONTINENT

OF TECHNOLOGY:

THE ENLARGED

CONTEMPORARY

Thomas Jefferson is best known for the Declaration of

Independence, in which he announced the separation of the thirteen

British Colonies in North Americathe right of Americans in these

places to govern themselves. He should also be known for declaring

another kind of Independence, the sovereignty of the people living

at any one time over their own affairs. We have seen that he urged

Americans to "consider each generation as a distinct nation, with

a right, by the will of its majority, to bind themselves, but none

to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of

another country." And he added: "The dead have no rights. They are

nothing; and nothing cannot own something.... This corporeal

globe, and everything upon it, belongs to its present corDoreal

inhabitants, during their generation." This way of thinking gave

Jefferson's generation the courage to do the unprecedentedto

found a new nation.

In our time we have had revealed to us a new and wider meaning for

Jefferson's principle of the sovereignty of the present

generation. The sovereign present has become the imperial present,

dominating our knowledge and our concerns, reaching out with

menacing power over vast areas of our consciousness.

We have seen how aeronautics and electronics gave to spatial

dimensions a disorienting new irrelevance. Americans, unsure

whether what they viewed on television was actually happening in

Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York, or in a nearby studio, were

newly uncertain about the where of events. They would be no less

confused about the when. Candid photography, the hand-held motion-

picture camera, the novel powers of kinescoping and videotaping

all these would affect the viewer's sense of time with a new

ambiguity. Was what you watched actually happening while you

watched, had it been filmed an houra week, or a year before, or

was it a "rerun" of something made last season? A new

chronological fog enshrouded the television experience, which, of

course, became an ever-increasing, ever more dominant proportion

of everyone's experience. By the mid1970's, the best estimates

suggested that an American spent, on the average, six hours a day

at the television screen. The dimensions of this confusion were

betrayed in a new meaning attached to "life" itself, when

Americans commonly asked themselves, "This thing that I'm

watchingis it 'live'?"

THE ISTHMUS OF THE PRESENT

While philosophers describe the "present" as nothing more than a

fleeting moment, in common experience we cannot help feeling that

the present has dimensions. As the Irish poet Thomas Moore

observed, the present is

A narrow isthmus 'twixt two boundless seas,

The past, thefuture, two eternities.

Many facts of lifc including our technologymake the isthmus of

the present seem either narrow or wide. How we see the dimensions

of the present depends on the reach and sharpness and vividness of

our vision.

In our vision of items extended through space, we Americans have

developed a kind of far-sightedness. An ophthalmologist might say

that we suffer from Hyperopia, a pathological condition in which

vision is better for distant than for near objects. In our

chronological vision, our sense of time, we Americans have come to

suffer from an opposite disorder, a kind of near-sightedness. This

is a form of Myopia, a pathological condition in which the nearby

is clear but the distant is blurred and hard to discern.

In other words, we have enlarged our sense of the contemporary. We

are overwhelmed by our sense of where we, and our contemporaries

all over the world, are at this moment. Improved communications

are obviously the most potent of the forces that overwhelm us with

impressions of the now. And there are many others.

More and more of what we Americans wear, buy, live in,and display

on our persons and in our houses are recently produced. Of course,

we still have our wealthy collectors of Old Masters and a lively

cult of antique buffs. But for most Americans the heirloom has

become a disappearing phenomenon. Objects that elsewhere might be

valued as antique we are inclined to call secondhand. In other

times and places, the most valuable inheritance was the ancestral

home. But, in the United States, who wants to live in his

father'smuch less his grandfather'shouse? Upward-mobile

Americans might not even want to live in that neighborhood! In the

late twentieth century, in fashionable magazines like The New

Yorker, advertisements for diamonds which once had promised

"Diamonds are for Ever" have been revised to read, "Diamonds are

for Now."

For two centuries, American mobility has required a willingness

sometimes it has been an eagernessto leave things behind. Moving

westward, across the Atlantic or across the continent, meant

learning to travel light. And that meant separating yourself from

the treasures, as well as the land, of your ancestors. In the

diaries of the early nineteenthcentury wagon trains, we hear a

common refrain: the housewife's lament at what could not be

brought along.

Our technology, oddly enough, has made it more difficult than ever

to transport objects through the expanses of time. The contagion

of the annual model infects almost everything we wear or use. I

happen to possess a gold pocket-watch which was given to my father

when he became Worshipful Master of his Masonic Lodge in 1913. It

was intended to become an heirloom, like the proverbial gold-watch

award for the man who has given fifty years of service to his

firm. But the awarding of such watches has become increasingly

rare and not only because fewer people nowadays spend , fifty

years with the same company.

In the United States, our watcheslike everything else express an

annual-model technology. The gold case of my father's watch must

be opened to set the hands, and there is a prominent stem for

winding. I am no connoisseur of timepieces and yet in recent years

I have moved up from an old-fashioned self-winder to an

electronic Accutron, and finally to a digital quartzomatic. Timex,

an American firm and reputedly the world's largest maker of

watches, and other American manufacturers have persuaded us to buy

watches to go with this year's frock, and hopefully to go out of

fashion just as quickly. We have sports watches, watches for

business wear or for dinner wear, with changeable bands and

changeable faces. In textiles, too, where for centuries people had

to choose among cotton, linen, wool, and silk, our products have

become kaleidoscopic. When we buy this . year's cut of the collar,

we must decide whether to take it in nylon, dacron, viyella,

lycra, acetate, quiana, or some other fabric that may not even be

available next year.

The corruption of obsolescence has actually given novel appeal to

works of art as items of investment. An item bought as a cold-

blooded investment is not apt to become an heirloom. We might

emend the Biblical caution to read, "Lay not up for yourselves

treasures upon earth, where everything becomes obsolete."

The high cost of labor and the constant development of new

plastics has led to the "disposable" everything. Each time we

throw away a paper napkin or a plastic coffee cup, we discard

another tiny link from today to yesterday.

The new perfections of communication which have climaxed in

twentieth-century America do not succeed in conquering time,

however successful they have been in conquering space. The

telegraph, the telephone, radio, and television take messages and

images across the continent but they cannot cross the centuries.

This simple obvious fact, momentous for our American sense of

time, helps account for our enlarged sense of the contemporary.

Even before our day of electronics, the improved American

technology of communication had shown the same tendency, and the

same limitations. The mass-circulating newspaper (facilitated by

the telegraph and the telephone) after the middle of the

nineteenth century was to become the overwhelming new force in the

American public consciousness. Now Chicagoans at their breakfast

tables could be informed of events of the last few hours, whether

these had occurred in Washington or New York, Los Angeles or San

Francisco, London or Tokyo.

The multiplying daily papers were intended to be a report and not

a record. Today's newspaper had to become obsolete to clear the

market for tomorrow's. All over the world, newspapers multiplied.

In Britain, for example, after the newspaper tax was repealed in

1855, the number of newspapers trebled in forty years. In the

United States, this increase was astronomical, expanding from a

daily newspaper circulation of 758,000 in 1850 to 15,102,000 in

1900. The increased demand for paper could no longer be satisfied

by linen and cotton rags and straw, the main raw materials until

then in use. This demand was met through new techniques for making

paper by boiling wood chips with soda or sulfite solutions. By

1890, most of the world's paper was being made in this way. Wood

pulp provided endless quantities of paper in rolls two miles long

to feed the speed presses which brought today's news from

everywhere to everybody.

By a malign providence, this very technology which succeeded in

keeping the avenues of communication open through space has

clogged the highways of time. Within a few decades, it was

discovered that the abundant new woodpulp paper would not survive

the passage of years. By midtwentieth century, the billions of

wood-pulp pages were turning brown and brittle. The books of the

modern world were falling apart. To be preserved to posterity they

would have to be put in some other form. The paper-making

technology which had been improved to inform a literate democracy

became a menace. Unless librarians and publishers acted promptly,

the literary culture of modern times, along with the spoken words

of earlier generations, would be gone-withthe-wind. In a single

recent year (1970), the Library of Congress microfilmed some

2,200,658 disintegrating pages of modern books. Yet this was less

than one quarter of one percent of the volumes in its collections

which were known to be turning to dust. In addition to the cost,

there was the troublesome necessity for librarians to play God.

They had to decide which of the past century's books ought to

command the attention of the future.

A similar malign providence seemed to preside over the birth of

motion pictures. The nitrate film on which early American motion

pictures were recorded was not only inflammable but explosive.

This required another costly and complicated effort (again at the

Library of Congress, and under the auspices of the American Film

Institute)-to transfer the works of Douglas Fairbanks, Mary

Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and countless others from the dangerous

nitrate film to safety film. Otherwise, many of the first classics

of our great democratic art would be lost to the next generation.

Our television networks film brilliant reports of the exciting

events of our time, but most such films and kinescope tapes are

erased or destroyed. Unless someone takes the initiative for their

preservation, they will not become records for the future.

In our age, then, communication seldom means the transmission of

messages from one time to another. Although there has never before

been a generation that sent so many messages to itself, we are

tragically inept at receiving messages from our ancestors or

sending messages to our posterity. Much of what passes for

"communication" has become simply another way of reminding us of

the here-and-now. Every day we are flooded with disposable

memoranda from us to ourselves.

THE THERAPY OF DELAY

So long as the only vehicle for diflfusing news was the printed

page, there was always a gap of at least several hours between

when something happened and when people far from the scene got the

word. It took time to prepare a report and get it from the site of

the event to the waiting citizens. On the countryside or off the

beaten track, they might have to wait days or weeks, depending on

the state of the roads and the efficiency of delivery.

American history is full of instances of how the considerable time

required to transmit a message from one place to another shaped

the course of events. The nation itself was vast, and an ocean

separated it from the capitals of Europe where crucial history-

making decisions had to be made.

For example, if in 1803 there had been speedy communications

between Paris and Washington, the Louisiana Purchase (which

doubled the size of the nation and extended the United States