A native of Ohio and a graduate of Ohio State, ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER was appointed to his professorship at Harvard in 1924. As a teacher and author he is internationally respected for his knowledge of American history.
Paper on U.S. Contributions to Civilization, MARCH 1959
Since the United States has now become the leader of the free world, our allies are asking, and we ourselves should be asking, what this means for the future of civilization. The key to the answer, he suggested, lies in what America’s contributions of the past.
THE RIGHT OF REVOLUTION
First and foremost stands the concept of the inherent and universal right of revolution proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence: the doctrine that “all men are created equal” possessing “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness,” with the addition that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed” and that therefore the people have the right to supplant a government “destructive of these ends” with one which they believe “most likely to affect their safety and happiness.
True, the history of England provided precedents for the men of 1776, and the Age of Enlightenment supplied intellectual support; but the declaration, followed by its vindication on the battlefield, made the doctrine ever afterward an irrepressible part in “the course of human events.”
Europe was the first to respond. In 1789 the great French Revolution began, the forerunner of two later ones of the French people during the nineteenth century; and neighboring countries were not slow to follow.
A series of revolts, centering in 1830 and 1848, drove the Turks from Greece, overturned corrupt governments through most of the rest of the Continent of Europe, and hurried political reforms in other lands to head off popular upheavals.
In every instance the leaders derived inspiration from America’s achievement of popular rule as well as from its freely expressed interest in their similar goals.
Presidents, Congresses, and civic gatherings applauded the uprisings.
The doctrine of revolution, however, had still broader implications.
The American Revolution was the first of the great colonial insurrections, an example, all the more powerful because Washington’s rag tag army defeated the mightiest nation in the world.
The Spanish dependencies to the south watched this happen, and early in the nineteenth century won their freedom.
Then, oddly enough, came a setback to the trend as a large part of Asia and Africa and many islands of the Pacific fell under the control of Old World powers. And after a time even the United States, forgetful of its own once colonial status, followed suit. (Boxer Rebellion 1899)
But in the twentieth century the two world wars radically changed the situation, recalling the United States to its historic heritage, crippling the military strength of the European imperialist countries, and awakening subject peoples everywhere to their right of self-determination.
THE PRINCIPLE OF FEDERALISM
Because of the difficulties experienced under the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution of 1787 established a partnership of self-governing commonwealths with an overall elective government powerful enough to protect and promote their joint concerns and — what was no less important — with a provision for admitting later states on a plane of full equality.
This was something new in history; Alexander DeTocqueville called it “a great discovery in modern political science,” for no other people had ever devised a federal structure over so large an area or with a central government chosen by popular vote or on such generous terms for future members. It offered mankind a key to the age–old problem of reconciling legitimate local interests with the general good.
Mexico, Argentina, and other Latin American countries adopted variants of the plan, and so did Germany and Austria-Hungary. Britain applied it to two of its largest colonies, Canada and Australia, and in the twentieth century recast most of its empire into a Commonwealth of Nations on the same basis. More dramatically, the principle caused men to conceive of some sort of federation of the world, first in the League of Nations and then in the United Nations, both sponsored by American Presidents.
THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED
Neither the doctrine of revolution nor the principle of federalism necessarily ensured that the government so established would rest on the consent of the governed.
But, as we have seen, it was a basic tenet of the founders of the United States.
The framers of the Constitution spurned European tradition by rejecting a monarchy, a nobility, or a hereditary legislative chamber, placing their trust in a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, one which should rule by counting heads instead of breaking them.
Starting with a somewhat limited number of voters but in better proportion than in any other country, the suffrage was broadened generation by generation until it came to include all adults of both sexes; and at every point America set the pace for the Old World.
The underlying philosophy was not that the common man is all-wise, but only that he can govern himself better than anyone else can do it for him.
EQUALITY
Feeling this is an important part of our current situation, I added this section with information from the editors of History.com
In 1787, the word people “People” really only meant “Free Persons,” and “Free Persons” meant white men. And, at the time, white women were considered the property of their husbands and certainly unfit for public duty.
Fortunately, our Constitution created a system of government that was bigger than the privileged white men who wrote it, allowing our nation to correct its limited view of humanity through Constitutional amendments and other means.
President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, applied only to the slaves in Confederate states, but Lincoln made it clear in his historic Gettysburg Address that the Union now fought to provide a “new birth of freedom”.
Passage of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 abolished the institution of slavery, and granted liberty to more than 4 million black men, women and children formerly held in bondage.
In 1963, as civil rights activists protested segregation and voting restriction across the South, and hundreds of thousands of people marched on Washington to demand “Jobs and Freedom,” President John F. Kennedy introduced the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction.
After JFK’s assassination that November, his successor Lyndon B. Johnson took up the cause, doggedly pushing the bill through stiff Democratic, yes, I said Democratic, opposition in Congress.
On June 2, 1964, Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act, which ended the segregation of public and many private facilities, and outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
Now back to Arthur Schlesinger’s paper.
THE STATUS OF WOMEN
Women played a man’s part as well as a woman’s in taming the wilderness and creating our country.
From early times foreign observers marveled at the unusual educational opportunities open to them, their immunity from molestation when traveling alone, their freedom to go out of the home to agitate for temperance, antislavery, and other reforms.
“From the captain of a western steamboat to the roughest miner in California,” wrote one visitor, “from north, south, east, and west, we hear but one voice. Women are to be protected, respected, and supported”.
The organized feminist movement arose earlier in the United States than in any other nation not because American women enjoyed so few privileges but because they had so many that they demanded more — in short, all those exercised by their husbands and brothers, including that of the right to vote.
It took the women many years to achieve that goal, but in time they succeeded, and every victory spurred their sisters in other lands to similar endeavors.
THE MELTING POT
Another contribution of the United States has been the fusing of many different nationalities in a single society. America has been in the best sense the term a melting pot, every ingredient adding its particular element of strength.
The constant infusion of new blood has enriched our cultural life, speeded our material growth, and produced some of our ablest statesmen. Over 17 million immigrants arrived in the single period from -the Civil War to World War I — more than America’s total population in 1840.
This American achievement stands alone in the scale, thoroughness, and rapidity of the process and, above all, in the fact that it has been the outcome not of forcible incorporation but of peaceful absorption.
Significantly, the very nationalities which had habitually warred with one another in the Old World have lived together in harmony in the New. America has demonstrated for everyone with eyes to see that those things which unite peoples are greater than those which divide them, that war is not the inevitable fate of mankind.
FREEDOM OF WORSHIP
The recognition that the relations between man and his Creator are a private affair into which government must not intrude broke the age-long European practice of uniting church and state and imposing harsh restrictions on dissenters.
Rhode Island, Maryland, and Pennsylvania in the persons of Roger Williams, Lord Baltimore, and William Penn set the pattern to which the Bill of Rights of the federal Constitution gave nationwide approval.
Religion by choice was the natural counterpart of government by consent, and, contrary to Old World belief, the separation of church and state did not in fact weaken either but strengthened both.
PUBLIC EDUCATION
The principle of government by consent made it imperative that the people be literate and well informed if they were to vote intelligently. To ensure this essential condition, our forefathers agreed that society must at its own initiative and expense supply the means of schooling.
This, too, broke drastically with the Old World concept that education should be a privately financed undertaking for the upper classes, the rank and file supposedly having little need for any in what was deemed to be their permanently inferior station.
New England inaugurated the practice in colonial days; then, it was adopted throughout the North and later in the South. Free public education thus became the article of American faith it has continued to be ever since.
From the United States the plan spread in modified form around the world.
VOLUNTARY GIVING
Foreigners have always criticized the American for its pursuit of the almighty dollar but have seldom gone on to note that we have, in unparalleled degree, returned the fruits of our labors to society.
This constitutes the American version of the Old World concept of noble obligation, carried to a point the Old World had never approached.
Even long before Carnegie and Rockefeller amassed their colossal fortunes, men and women of modest means gave freely to schools, churches, foreign missions, colleges, hospitals, charities, and other projects for social betterment.
In the twentieth century this same concern has led men of wealth to set up some four thousand philanthropic foundations staffed with experts to administer the funds with maximum usefulness and for nearly every conceivable object of human benefit.
And, increasingly, Americans have extended their beneficence to foreign peoples.
Over a century ago American donations helped relieve Irish suffering during the terrible potato famines of the 1840s and later aided with equal generosity the victims of natural catastrophes in other lands.
And, besides the work of the Red Cross in peace and war, the great foundations have in our own day improved health, educational, and agricultural conditions in many countries.
In the same tradition the private organization known as CARE has, since World War II, channeled gifts of food, clothing, medicine, and the like to the needy of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Thanks to this ingrained trait of the national character, the government found it easy to mobilize our people behind the Marshall Plan, a costly tax-supported program for repairing the war-sticken economies of Western Europe.
Though these official undertakings were in part designed to halt the spread of Communism, they arose from deeper thoughts of human compassion and have no parallel in history.
TECHNOLOGY
Mechanical ingenuity, or what today is called technological know-how, contrary to common belief is by no means a new development in America.
From the mid-eighteenth century on, the people, confronted with a chronic shortage of labor and the problems arising from huge distances and poor communications, devised means to overcome these handicaps as well as to improve other conditions of life. The record is truly remarkable.
Before the end of the nineteenth century Benjamin Franklin, Eli Whitney, and their successors produced such remarkable inventions as the lightning rod, the cotton gin, the steamboat, the metal plow, the harvester, vulcanized rubber, the sewing machine, the telegraph, the telephone, and the electric light, among others.
The upshot was not only to transform American life but that of peoples everywhere. President Truman therefore was not occupying wholly new ground when in 1949 he proposed his Point Four Program to make “the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas” and thus “help them realize their aspirations for a better life.”
The Truman administration came up with the idea for the program as a means to win the “hearts and minds” of the developing world after countries from the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and Africa had complained about the emphasis on European aid by the U.S. after WWII.
Under this program the United States sent experts in industry, engineering, and agriculture to many lands; built roads and bridges in Iran, irrigation works in India, and fertilizer plants in Korea; and endeavored in countless other ways to remove the obstacles that barred less enterprising countries from the advantages of modern civilization.
Viewed as a whole, the contributions of America to civilization will be seen to have been to release men from political and religious disabilities, from ignorance and poverty, from backbreaking toil.
They have opened the doors of opportunity for the many while still assuring them to the few, in the belief that everyone should have an equal chance to be as unequal as he can without denying the same right to others.
The consequence has been a general leveling of society upward instead of downward.
So, what does the future hold? For an American historian, the answer is clear.
The true measure of our past contributions lies in the very fact that they have become so woven into the life of mankind that people worldwide are unaware of them. That was the purpose of today’s show.
So, there you have it folks. I am proud of our heritage. And I am proud to be an American. I could care less what the “Woke “people say. If they don’t like it here, I challenge them to move to any other country on earth and tell me they are better off. To them, all I can say is, safe travels!
What about you? Are you proud to be an American?