Like their compatriots in Just for Oil, who threw tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers two years earlier, they surely did not doubt their moral righteousness or question that they were following in the honored footsteps of their eco-terrorist predecessors.

In his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey tells the story of four disparate eco-warriors who load their Jeep with the tools of destruction and attack billboards, road-building machinery, and bridges in Utah and Arizona. Their ultimate aim—pondered but never planned—is to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam. As their violence increases, the forces of economic development step up their efforts to stop the group, and eventually do, at least for a while. The gang reunites in Abbey’s posthumous sequel, Hayduke Lives!

A misanthropic provocateur, Abbey surely would have scoffed at the indirect action of hurling the contents of a can of Campbell’s at an unoffending picture. Abbey was a proponent of what he euphemistically called “direct-action environmentalism,” by which he meant the violent destruction of the tools of development—bulldozers, surveyor’s stakes, the Glen Canyon Dam.

The soup throwers were practicing anything but direct action. Blowing up dams is just too hard. Let’s spill lunch at the Louvre.

In life, Abbey always had a hard time fitting in with his erstwhile allies in the environmental movement. A half century after the publication of his seminal novel on eco-terrorism and 36 years after his death, he still does. 

His writing is suffused with anti-government rhetoric that at first blush might be appealing to some on the right. But his preference for “direct action”—violence—to achieve his political goals is now being wholeheartedly endorsed by sizable factions of the political left.

The Province of the Outlaw

The Monkey Wrench Gang got mixed reviews. Sales grew mostly through word-of-mouth among like-minded activists. The New York Times didn’t get around to reviewing the book until almost a year after publication.

“The book is not a gem of literature,” wrote reviewer Kenneth C. Caldwell in Landscape Architecture Magazine, who also doubted any potential to inspire real-life violence. “I doubt if the book will kindle fires of unquenchable rage in our hearts, causing us to cast down T-squares and take up cases of Dupont dynamite.”

Others saw something else in the book. William Marling, an author and literature professor, credits Abbey, possessor of two degrees in philosophy, with being “set apart from those who toy with the ‘conquest of nature’ paradox from a great philosophic height by his ability to distinguish not only between Camus and Cocteau but between columbine and penstemon as well. When the ingredients coalesce correctly, he is a powerful writer.”

Perhaps too powerful. “This book counsels insurrection and sabotage,” Marling asserts. “It contains explicit descriptions of procedures for dynamiting bridges and destroying earth-moving machinery. Reading it, one cannot help but feel that Abbey intended the information to be of practical use.”

Abbey always tried to maintain a strategic ambiguity on this point. But he once told an interviewer, “I write in a deliberately outrageous or provocative manner because I like to startle people.” In that, at least, he was successful. In his introduction to the 25th anniversary edition, Douglas Brinkley called The Monkey Wrench Gang “revolutionary, anarchic, seditious, and, in the wrong hands, dangerous.”

How, then, did the book become a popular success and a touchstone for the modern environmental movement?

For one thing, it made environmentalists cool, “the province of the outlaw,” in the words of Abbey biographer David Gessner. Abbey put on the page what thousands were thinking but were not yet prepared to do. Reading about it in a comic yet serious novel allowed people who would never in real life set ablaze a billboard or pour sand into a bulldozer crankcase a sense that they, too, were participants in the revolution.

Another Abbey biographer, James Bishop Jr., wrote that while the theme of The Monkey Wrench Gang was “environmental hooliganism,” it nevertheless came “closest to reaching that place of Abbey’s most steadfast convictions: a romantically idealized world in which the Industrial Revolution has been aborted, and society has reached a steady-state equilibrium where man and the land can exist in harmony.”

That, perhaps, explains why Abbey has a deeply devoted cult following, but has not emerged beyond that. 

Abbey’s rants against “industrial tourism” and his insistence that we’d all be happier without air conditioning, roads, automobiles, antibiotics, or many other conveniences of modern life amount to a platform that tells voters: all you have to do is agree to be poorer, and we can save these rocks. As much as we all love rocks, that’s a tough sell.

A Direct Descendant of Abbey’s Writings

In a post-9/11 world, Abbey’s dalliance with eco-terrorism has made him an even tougher sell in some quarters, while elevating him to icon in others. During one of his many appearances on college campuses, Abbey was asked if he really wanted to blow up Glen Canyon Dam. “No,” he told the students. “But if someone else wanted to do it, I’d be there holding the flashlight.”

Writer Doug Peacock, a friend of Abbey and the primary inspiration for the novel’s lead character, George Washington Hayduke, does not hem and haw about Abbey’s role in inspiring eco-terrorists. “The radical environmental group Earth First! Was a direct descendant of Abbey’s writings,” he wrote.”

Abbey rejected the notion that he was endorsing terrorism, drawing a distinction between sabotage and terrorism. “If the wilderness is our true home, and if it is threatened with invasion, pillage, and destruction—as it certainly is—then we have the right to defend that home, as we would our private quarters, by whatever means are necessary,” Abbey wrote in the essay, “Eco-Defense.”

“Whatever means are necessary” seems pretty clear, especially when standing next to his invitation to suicide bombers to take a lunge at Glen Canyon Dam.

Abbey’s defenders like to draw a distinction between damaging property and killing people. 

In his essay “One Man’s Terrorist,” Michael Branch, a professor of environmental literature, justifies the destruction of earth-moving machinery, billboards, and surveyor’s stakes—prime targets of the Monkey Wrench Gang—as doing no person any harm.

“Using a chainsaw to fell a billboard is no more violent than using a welding machine to construct one,” Branch writes. 

The contention that if no human is harmed, then it can’t be terrorism is faulty on its face. If you blow up a synagogue because you hate Jews, it’s an act of terrorism, whether there are any Jews inside or not.

Abbey was not unaware of the way the book could be, and was, perceived. He worried that he would be “accused of rash crimes … every time some Boy Scout sugars a bulldozer, or shellacs an earth-mover.” He was right to worry. A collection of terrorism biographies published two years after 9/11 profiled “twenty-six people who figure prominently in the story and history of terrorism,” including Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, and Ted Kaczynski. Abbey is right there at the front, his smiling, bearded countenance first alphabetically, followed by Gerry Adams and Yasir Arafat.

Am I a Racist?

Still, it is not his role as mad prophet of eco-terrorism that makes Abbey something of an untouchable among more conventional environmentalists.

Abbey’s friend and fellow environmental icon Wendell Berry summed up the case best in his essay, “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey.” Abbey, writes Berry, is “seen as a problem by people who are, or who think they are, on his side.” These erstwhile defenders “have an uncontrollable itch to apologize for him.”

The central problem, according to Berry, is that many of his critics “assume that Mr. Abbey is an environmentalist—and hence that they, as other environmentalists, have a right to expect him to perform as their tool.” But, Berry writes, “he is not a conservationist or an environmentalist or a boxable ist of any other kind.” 

Brinkley compared Abbey to Don Quixote, and “the windmill Abbey wanted to tear down most was the Glen Canyon Dam.” Others have suggested Harriet Beecher Stowe or Upton Sinclair. He is more often compared to Henry David Thoreau, but biographer James Bishop Jr. astutely notes that The Monkey Wrench Gang is “more Orwellian than Thoreauvian.” Abbey’s vision is in many ways bleak—the alternative futures amount to a choice between a darkscape of industrial wasteland or a post-industrial anarchy shorn of every modern convenience. 

But in this age of intersectionality, the real challenge is Abbey’s views on non-environmental issues. Abbey opposed immigration, wrote and said untoward things about racial minorities, called welfare “a subsidy for baby production,” was proudly sexist (“To the editors of Ms. Magazine, NY: “‘Dear Sirs …’”), called the Peace Corps “an act of cultural arrogance,” and owned guns (“I load my own ammo”).

Abbey considered his essay “Immigration and Liberal Taboos” among his personal favorites. Solicited and then rejected in 1982 by The New York Times, it was subsequently rejected by Harper’s, Atlantic, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and Mother Jones. The left’s intolerance for dissenting opinions is not a new thing. 

The piece was eventually published in 1983 by Phoenix New Times. 

Abbey argued that “it might be wise for us as American citizens to consider calling a halt to the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-generically impoverished people. … How many of us, truthfully, would prefer to be submerged in the Caribbean-Latin version of civilization? … Harsh words: but somebody has to say them.” And Abbey very cheerfully did, while pondering the criticism.

“Am I a racist?” he asked himself in his journal. “I guess I am. I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals. Look at Africa, at Mexico, at Asia.” At the same time, Abbey believed it was never fair “to evaluate the quality of any individual by reason of race. You cannot judge the worth of a man by his skin color, bone structure, I.Q., body chemistry or genetic inheritance. … However, there are significant differences among the various races, both in character and in achievement. It is intellectually dishonest and socially condescending to pretend otherwise.”

As the editor of his published journals wrote, a sanitized, politically correct Abbey “would be—well, no Edward Abbey at all.”

Abbey, Jefferson, and Lincoln

Fifty years on, The Monkey Wrench Gang endures. 

A theme running through retrospective essays on Abbey and his work is speculation on his reaction to climate change. All conclude, naturally, that he’d be on their side. But none wonder about his response to the destruction of habitat wrought by acres devoted to the production of “clean” energy.

It’s difficult to imagine the Don Quixote who ranted about paved roads, visitors’ centers, and flushable toilets on public lands would get behind the idea of deploying solar panels or windmills across his beloved desert.

Abbey wrote that “a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government,” sounding suspiciously like Thomas Jefferson justifying the need for rebellion every 20 years. If “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” Abbey seemed to be saying, so must the pinions and junipers of Utah’s slickrock country. 

It’s a dangerous philosophy. When each man decides for himself how much violence is justified to achieve political ends, the most violent tend to come out on top. 

Abraham Lincoln, an admirer of Jefferson, said, “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”

If, in reading The Monkey Wrench Gang, conservatives are enticed by Abbey’s anti-government rhetoric, they should heed the words of Lincoln and remember that, eventually, like the left turning on Abbey over immigration, the revolution always devours its own.

The post Eco-Terrorists Aren’t What They Used to Be appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Serious people are writing serious books and articles about the possibility of secession. In 1876, most Americans had personal experience with secession, coloring how they viewed the kind of talk that arose during and after the election. No one alive today has had such an experience, so secession talk is bandied about with less respect for the potential consequences.

Election night is supposed to be the end of the process. In 2020 as in 1876, the voting will end but the counting will just be getting started, and nobody knows how long it will take to finish. What happens in the days and weeks that follow will determine whether the Trump-Biden contest was, as politicians endlessly predict, the most important election of our lifetime.

Then as now, the country was evenly divided politically. There was frequent turnover in party control of Congress. People were all too willing to commit violence to achieve their political ends.

Perhaps the similarity most visible to voters will be that the candidate leading on election night is not necessarily going to be the one ultimately declared the winner.

That’s where the problems started in 1876, and where the danger lurks in 2020.

“Annual, autumnal outbreaks in the South“

In 1876, the Civil War had been over for only 11 years. The wounds were so raw that several Southern states refused to participate in the centennial celebration that opened in May in Philadelphia.

The country was also still in a touchy economic position, suffering from the lingering effects of the economic depression that grew out of the Panic of 1873.

Hanging over the entire process was the Southern question.

Andrew Johnson had declared in 1866 that “peace, order, tranquility, and civil authority” reigned in the South. But it wasn’t true, and to the extent order did prevail, it was not the order that congressional Republicans wanted to see.

Freedmen were being denied their civil rights. Violence was rampant. In defiance of Johnson, Republicans enacted the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which disenfranchised thousands of former Confederates, expanded military occupation of Southern states, and barred readmission to any state that failed to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. These steps were intended to punish rebels, protect the lives and property of freed blacks, and—not incidentally—ensure that black Republican men could vote while ex-Confederate, white Democrats could not.

But violence and intimidation persisted and many in the North began to grow weary of the Southern problem. “The whole public are tired out with these annual, autumnal outbreaks in the South,” President Ulysses S. Grant said in the wake of the 1874 midterm elections, which went badly for his party.

By 1876, only the governments of Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina had not been “redeemed” by Democrats.

It all added up to an inescapable conclusion: Reconstruction was doomed no matter who was elected president. Republicans were weary from the fight and Democrats had opposed the enterprise from the beginning.

There were genuine fears among Union veterans and other Northern patriots about turning the government back over to the Democrats who, only the decade before, had rent it asunder. Ohio Senator John Sherman, brother of Civil War hero William Tecumseh Sherman, spoke for them when he declared that “election of a Democratic president means a restoration to full power in the government of the worst elements of the rebel Democracy.” Waving the bloody shirt still worked.

The self-interested desire of those in office to cling to power should never be discounted. Republicans had held the reins for 16 years; patronage jobs depended on it; livelihoods were at stake. For many, that outweighed any policy concern.

Democrats were just as eager to get back into power after so long an absence as Republicans were to hold on. That didn’t mean their concerns about a Grant administration awash in corruption were not genuine.

But however real the concerns were about the rights of Southern blacks or corruption in the White House, the significance of the election of 1876 and its aftermath did not rest on policy outcomes. What put the country at risk was the careless indifference to constitutional process.

“Corruptions, failures, and disappointments“

Democratic nominee Samuel Tilden won the popular vote by more than 250,000 votes over Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in an election in which 82 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot, the highest turnout ever.

On election night, it also appeared Tilden had a victory in the Electoral College. But the outcome was disputed in three states: Florida, with four electoral votes; Louisiana with eight; and South Carolina with seven. One electoral vote in Oregon would also be challenged.

The election hinged on the outcome in those three unreconstructed states. Tilden led narrowly in two, Hayes in one. The apparatus of power in all three remained in the hands of Republicans.

“In the contest for the electoral votes of these states, all that slithered through the corruption, failures, and disappointments of American politics during the previous decade rose to the surface,” historian Richard White wrote.

In each of the contested states, the process was marked by violence, intimidation, and abuse of power.

A divided Congress was stalemated. Republicans wanted the president of the Senate to determine which of the multiple electors’ votes submitted by various officials in the disputed states were valid, count them, and declare Hayes the winner. Democrats wanted the House to declare that neither candidate had an electoral vote majority, leaving the House to decide the winner, which would have been Tilden.

Instead, lawmakers created an electoral commission, against the wishes of both Hayes and Tilden. The commission comprised five members from each chamber, evenly divided between the parties, four Supreme Court justices evenly divided between the parties, and a fifth justice chosen by the other four. That was expected to be David Davis of Illinois, an independent who hadn’t even voted in the 1876 election. But Davis was elected to the Senate, so Associate Justice Joseph Bradley, a Republican, was selected.

On party line votes, the commission endorsed the state vote totals certified by Republican election officials and voted 8-7 to award the disputed electoral votes to Hayes.

When it became clear to congressional Democrats that every decision was going to fall Hayes’ way, they used procedural methods to stall a final vote count. But Southern Democrats struck a deal with Republicans—they would oppose delay in return for a commitment to withdraw remaining federal troops from the South. They also got a promise to appoint a Southern Democrat to the cabinet (Senator David M. Key of Tennessee would be named postmaster general, a prime patronage position).

Deals were part of the fabric of politics. Because Reconstruction was on its last legs anyway, this deal was less than met the eye.

But even less-than-meets-the-eye deals can backfire, and in Hayes’ case, the result was predictable. He became “His Fraudulency.” Half the country considered his presidency illegitimate. There was much talk, mostly in the North, of raising an army and marching on Washington. In the end, the talk came to nothing. “We have just emerged from one civil war,” Tilden said. “It will never do to engage in another.”

Civil war was avoided but cries of “fraud of the century”—the title Morris chose for his one-sided book—have echoed down the years. Historian Michael Holt took another view. “Had blacks been allowed to vote freely, Hayes easily would have carried all three states in dispute, Mississippi, and perhaps Alabama as well,” he wrote in the best book about the election of 1876. Without that “force, intimidation, and fraud,” the sorry circus that followed would never have been necessary.

“The republic will live“

While some today are voicing loud concerns about voter fraud, today’s problems are more likely to arise from confusion and incompetence. With tens of millions of people voting by mail for the first time in a system not designed to handle that kind of load, delays and disputes are certain as results change and victories are converted into defeats.

Though the possibility of outright fraud shouldn’t be dismissed, the 21st century can’t hold a candle on that score to the 19th, when fraud was practiced widely and well by all sides. An army of lawyers deployed southward in 1877 couldn’t prevent it. An even larger legal army will likely be on the march this week.

The most damning aspect of the 1876 election, though, was the ad hoc electoral commission, an extra-constitutional creation that “functioned as a quasi-judicial body,” in the words of historian Sidney J. Pomerantz.

Disappointed Democrats called the Supreme Court’s decision that settled the 2000 election “unprecedented.” But in 1876, virtually all parties insisted that the Court play a role in settling the dispute. “What bothered them most,” Holt wrote, “was the idea that Congress itself, without any explicit constitutional authorization, should attempt to do so.”

We are not likely to see such a commission this time around. The courts, not a congressionally appointed commission, will settle any outstanding questions related to the 2020 election, lending a legitimate finality to the outcome for most Americans. As we’ve just gotten through one fight about the future of the Supreme Court, dissatisfied partisans can be counted on to add fuel to the fire by questioning the legitimacy of any decision they don’t like.

One can always take historical comparisons too far. The stakes are different and the issues unique in this election. But 1876 is an example of what can happen when political opponents are portrayed not simply as wrong, but as evil. To stop evil, anything is permissible. And partisan media were eager to sew the wind.

Those dynamics exist today, compounded by the excessive demands and expectations we place on government. The bitterness is so deep because the stakes are so high. One of the motivations of 19th-century civil service reform was to lower the stakes by curtailing the spoils system. While a permanent bureaucracy has its own problems, a mad scramble to fill government clerkships every four or eight years is not among them. One of the motivations of modern conservatism is to make elections less important by lessening the role government plays in our lives. The trend has been running the other way for almost 100 years, which helps explain the all-consuming nature of politics in today’s culture.

To preserve hope, partisans need to remember that no loss in American politics is final.

No matter who wins this year, an election in 2022 will give voters an opportunity to rein in whatever excesses they feel have been perpetrated by the winners of 2020. It happened in 2006, 2010, 2014, and 2018. There is no reason to believe it can’t happen again. And in 2024 there’s another presidential election. There will always be another election.

The danger comes not from an election loss, but from believing that the fear of losing justifies any action to prevent a loss or even violence in response to a loss. More than a third of respondents in a recent survey said violence is justified when their side loses. That’s how we ended up in a civil war to begin with.

“The republic will live,” Tilden said in the summer of 1877. “The institutions of our fathers are not to expire in shame.” But, as in 1876-77, there is talk of violence. If the leaders of either party, their followers, or the media repeat in 2020-21 the mistakes of 1876-77, focusing on short-term advantage at the expense of preserving constitutional norms and respect for core principles, there is no guarantee that Tilden’s confident prediction will come to pass.

May the losers of the 2020 election, whoever they are and whenever they are determined, follow his example.

The post Is the Spirit of (18)76 Alive? appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Two days after Christmas 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont were traveling down the Mississippi River when they made the acquaintance of Sam Houston, the former governor of Tennessee and future president of the Republic of Texas. As Tocqueville noted in his memoirs, Houston had “left his wife” and “took refuge with the Indians” and “became one of their chiefs.” How was it, the well-bred Frenchman wondered, could such a man have been the choice of the people of Tennessee in the first place?

“That he came from them, I was told, and had risen by his own exertions,” Tocqueville recorded as Houston’s answer.

“I was again assured today that in the new States of the West the people generally make very bad choices,” he wrote. But Tocqueville doesn’t seem to believe it. He did worry about the tyranny of the majority—in fact, that seems to have been his primary concern about democracy in America—but he trusted the expanding electorate of white males, the deplorables of their day, to act rationally in the collective, if not individually.

Ten years later, Charles Dickens had a very different response to democracy in America, one we might recognize today. Everything, to Dickens, was better in the big cities of the East—especially Boston and New York—while the rubes out in the hinterlands were little better than savages.

And not just the people. While the land around New York was “surpassingly and exquisitely pictueresque,” the Western prairie was a “disappointment,” and “oppressive in its barren monotony.” It would be another 61 years before the Wright Brothers conquered the air at Kitty Hawk, but Dickens was already anticipating the derisive term “flyover country.”

The visions of America described almost two centuries ago by Charles Dickens and Alexis de Tocqueville continue to frame the debate about what kind of country the United States is and ought to be.

Americans’ Virtues and Vices

In writing of their travels—Tocqueville in 1831-32, Dickens a decade later in 1842—it sometimes seems they hadn’t visited the same country that Tocqueville described in his memoirs and Democracy in America and that Dickens wrote so caustically about in American Notes, Martin Chuzzlewit and in reams of acerbic letters to friends back in Britain.

Tocqueville, a classical liberal and virtual unknown, traveled in obscurity. He went further and saw more than Dickens, with a more open mind and an embrace of American exceptionalism, while worrying about a rising tyranny of the majority. Dickens, already famous as an author, social reformer and supporter of republican government, was blinkered, narrow and predisposed to dislike anyone or anything that didn’t celebrate Charles Dickens, and quite a few who did. Tocqueville asked questions, gathered information and took the long view. Dickens campaigned for his pet cause of copyright protection—pirated American editions of his and other British writers’ works were costing their creators a fortune—and made elitist assumptions while issuing snap judgments. The child of French aristocracy had a better grasp of the new nation than did the tribune of England’s destitute.

Dickens credited the people with a nature that was “frank, brave, cordial, hospitable, and affectionate.” But he believed these traits were on the wane, likely to disappear, “sadly sapped and blighted in their growth among the mass,” with forces at work “which endanger them still more, and give but little present promise of their healthy restoration.” History has proven Dickens fantastically wrong in his prediction.

As each traveled thousands of miles on their separate grand tours, Tocqueville, the Frenchman, took America on its own terms and viewed Americans in all their flaws while perceiving their great opportunity, while Dickens, like the snobbish Englishmen he derided in his fiction, viewed America and Americans through the lens of his own prejudices and bemoaned the absence of “the republic of my imagination.” Tocqueville believed that the American was the Englishman left alone. Dickens didn’t believe in leaving people alone. He was a constant scold and believed that America was doomed (unless it changed in the ways he wanted it to).

The consensus of his biographers is that Dickens had a “love-hate” relationship with America. In reality, he loved his own invented image of America, but exhibited little love for the real thing.

These ways of looking at America—as a land of hope amid flaws versus a land of hopeless flaws—continue to define our politics and culture, and today are reflected in the court v. country schism that divides the coasts and Middle America.

“The license of conscious superiority”

“An image of democracy itself,” is what Tocqueville described in his classic Democracy in America. It was a vision of possibilities. He appreciated the newness and the dynamism of the “society without roots, without memories, without prejudices, without routines, without shared ideas, without a national character, a hundred times happier than our own.”

The reality of a “commercial people” and an absence of government——“this society runs by itself,” he observed in a letter to a friend, “and lucky for it that it doesn’t meet with any obstacle; government here seems to me to be in the infancy of the art.” Instead, there was civil society, and Tocqueville marveled at the way in which Americans joined together in associations to get things done.

Dickens’ view was static, not dynamic. He could see and judge what was in front of him, but could not cast his view into the future, except to see a downward angle based on his own negative impressions.

“His mind is American—his soul is republican—his heart is democratic,” the New York Herald wrote of Dickens.

But his mind was not American, and his soul was more elitist than republican. He might have seemed like a republican in monarchical Victorian England. Traveling through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, he just seemed like another English snob. Historian J.F. Snyder was a boy when Dickens visited his hometown of Belleville, Illinois, where he displayed “the license of conscious superiority.”

While multiple Dickens biographers contend that there is no evidence he ever read Democracy in America, Dickens scholar Jerome Meckier makes a persuasive case that he did—and didn’t much like it. He saw it as his duty to correct some of the Frenchman’s mistakes.

“The letdown of 1842 was ideological, not just monetary,” Meckier wrote in Innocent Abroad: Charles Dickens’s American Engagements. “The would-be utopist suffered a more serious blow than did the commercial novelist.”

The bitterness of the frustrated idealist spewed forth not just in the pages of American Notes, the travel book that emerged from the trip, but in his fiction as well. In the novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens convicted America of putting at risk the “very progress of the human race” and “the rights of nations yet unborn.”

In the footsteps of Fanny Trollope’s abrasive Domestic Manners of the Americans, there was almost nothing in American life that Dickens did not find fault with—the prison system, the transportation system, the language, the crowds, the way cities were laid out, the newspapers, the manners of the people. In his wide-ranging dissatisfaction with nearly every aspect of American culture, he sounds like nothing so much as a 21st century woke progressive.

Of course, he also had self-interest to accompany his disappointment.

Dickens had a smorgasbord of high-sounding justifications for supporting international copyright protections, all of them legitimate—protecting authors from having their work pirated, encouraging Americans to earn a living as writers, and spreading both American and European literature more widely across the Atlantic. But the self-interest was inescapable, and it clanged when paired with his reputation as a tribune of the underclass and as a critic of American money-grubbing. One chronicler of his travels through Pennsylvania referred to “his whining about the copyright issue.” Even the full title of the book that came out of the trip—American Notes for General Circulation—was a not-very-concealed complaint that any U.S. sales would be “generally circulated” and yield him not a farthing.

David Parker, longtime curator of the Dickens House Museum, noted that it was the “deficiency of sympathy in Dickens that is most striking. He failed to make the stretch of imagination needed to grasp a different culture concealed by a common language.” He displayed “an uncharacteristic lack of generosity” that was, according to Parker, not consistent with his values as a writer.

And, like many today on both sides of the political schism, when then the facts didn’t help his case, he altered them to suit his narrative, as when he reversed the position of the setting sun from west to east while viewing the “vast expanse” of the Looking Glass Prairie in southern Illinois. “He only mentions the topography of the country he saw to misrepresent and vilify it,” Snyder wrote in 1910.

It could be written off as poetic license from a famously irascible observer—except that the negative—and incorrect—description is part and parcel of a broader interpretation of American life that Dickens dwelt on at great length, in which he was dismissive of both landscape and people.

“Mr. Dickens does not mention, in his Notes, the name of any one of the young men who took him over to Illinois to see the prairie,” Snyder wrote. “Nor did he write one word expressive of gratitude for their generosity in leaving their business and providing lavishly, free of all expense to him, everything necessary to conduce to his pleasure and satisfaction in that excursion. It seems that a sense of ordinary courtesy would have prompted him to at least return some slight public acknowledgment of that obligation.”

America the Deplorable

One can’t escape the notion that what Dickens objected to in Americans was that they were not more like Dickens, and that becoming so was the only way their deplorable selves could be redeemed in his eyes.

Dickens came away from his tour with a “deep enduring antipathy” toward the United States. What once he saw as the republic of his imagination, he now believed would one day deal the “heaviest blow ever dealt at Liberty’s Head.” America was, he wrote, “the ultimate failure of its example to the Earth.”

This is today’s woke leftist analysis of America. Meckier called it “protomodern.” No matter how much progress is made, it is never enough, and it is always a disappointment.

Tocqueville had come to America “with the intention of examining in detail and as scientifically as possible all the motivating forces behind this vast American society which everyone talks about and no one knows.” He might have been describing Dickens himself.

The post A Tale of Two American Journeys appeared first on Law & Liberty.

The period of a year-and-a-half that elapsed between the spring of 1786 and the late summer of 1787 was as consequential as any in American history. Near its end, the Northwest Ordinance was enacted by the Confederation Congress in New York City even as the Constitutional Convention was in Philadelphia writing a plan to replace that Congress. Near its beginning, a band of New England land speculators formed the Ohio Company.

It is this March 1786 event that sets the stage for David McCullough’s latest book, for it played nearly as crucial a role in what would become the United States. 

Emphasized by McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winner and dean of U.S. popular historians, is that the speculators hoping to settle the Ohio Country west of the Alleghenies were from New England rather than Virginia. Puritan values, rather than pro-slavery ones, would guide development of the new land. 

He celebrates the difference. And now he’s in trouble.

Answering One-Sidedness With . . . More One-Sidedness

Surveying the Twitter feeds and book reviews of historians and “woke” journalists commenting on The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, you might assume there was no difference at all between the antislavery New Englanders who made settling the Old Northwest their project and the Southerners who would lead the nation toward civil war.

This uncharitable—and ahistorical—outlook makes one wonder if these reviewers have given any thought to how different U.S. history would have been had Virginians been the guiding force of settlement.

In a series of tweets, author William Hogeland, who has written his own excellent history of the opening of the Northwest, objected to the “nice guy” version of history he sees in The Pioneers. Then, too, the “new generation of historians, scholars and activists,” as the Associated Press put it, “took to social media to accuse McCullough of romanticizing white settlement and downplaying the pain inflicted on Native Americans.”

The book does neither of these things. What it does is tell the settlers’ story from the settlers’ point of view. Every book of history has a point of view. There are no neutral observers of history. 

For a long time, writing from the settler’s point of view was routine. Then for quite a while it wasn’t. Now, apparently, it is verboten.

This is exactly the wrong way to think about history. Nothing is to be gained from simply flipping the narrative.

If the story used to be one-sided on behalf of the settlers, for the last half-century that has been reversed. Too many of McCullough’s critics are not in search of balance. It’s not that they object to only part of the story’s being told. It’s that they want the version they don’t like to be silenced.

Harvard’s Joyce E. Chaplin, reviewing the book in the New York Times, even took exception to McCullough’s description of the Ohio Territory as “unsettled,” because it had people in it. Well, yes, it did. But, until the arrival of white European Americans, it did not have any settlers; thus, it was “unsettled.” To suggest that McCullough is implying otherwise, or that he somehow indicates that the people who were already there don’t count, is not defensible. But if you’re looking for ways to be outraged, you’ll find them.

For these kinds of critics, it’s not enough to dominate the academy and have a virtual monopoly on indoctrinating students. All dissenting voices must be condemned as unworthy of consideration and hectored until they fall silent. 

McCullough, who is considered a national treasure while his critics are not, has thus far remained silent as oracles tend to do—although not out of any fear of being hectored. At 86, he has nothing to gain by engaging in a public spat with people who have resented his success for decades.

The Story of the “First West”

The story of what we could call the first West, the land beyond the Appalachians and Ohio River, is not as well-known as that of the Old West that features cowboys and Indians, prairie schooners, and mountain men. As McCullough shows, it is more an extension of the Revolutionary War period than a precursor to the mass migration of the 19th century. It is a bridge between the two.

That bridge was built by veterans of the Continental Army such as General Rufus Putnam and moral reformers such as Manasseh Cutler, a New England Puritan minister, doctor, lawyer, and educator. These men helped lead settlers and speculators across the Ohio River in the wake of the Northwest Ordinance, which organized the new territory and established a template for free labor, the free exercise of religion, and (less successfully) justice for those already inhabiting the land.

One legitimate complaint registered by a reviewer (Andrew C. Isenberg writing in the Washington Post) is that “casting the Ohio Company as a vehicle of higher ideals is a feat too difficult even for a writer as skilled as McCullough.” 

It’s true that sometimes McCullough can’t separate the well-intentioned individuals he holds up as paragons of Puritan virtue from the inherent corruption of their joint endeavor. It’s also true that noble intentions and overweening self-interest often walk hand in hand. As reviewer Danny Heitman wrote in the Christian Science Monitor, McCullough’s “refusal to embrace cynicism as a form of sophistication, one gathers, is part of his popular appeal.”

Whatever unsavoriness lurks at the heart of the enterprise is far outweighed by the saving grace of the project: that it produced the Northwest Ordinance, a much-overlooked Founding document that, McCullough rightly says, “stands alongside the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence as a bold assertion of the rights of the individual.”

The Ordinance’s “utmost good faith” clause was more aspirational than practical, considering the thousands of settlers rushing in. This clause guaranteed that Indian “lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.” 

It didn’t turn out that way, and over the first two decades of the 19th century, Ohio and other lands in the Northwest Territory would be the scene of bloody confrontations between European and Native Americans. 

Remarkably, even as the tragedies proliferated on the banks of the Wabash and at Fallen Timbers, the settlers kept at bay the practice of chattel slavery. In this they were led by Ephraim Cutler, son of the Massachusetts clergyman, U.S. Representative, explorer, and Ohio Company official Manasseh Cutler. Ephraim moved beyond his father’s Marietta settlement at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers to become a leader in the territory’s military, legal, and political life. When proslavery elements attempted to overturn the Northwest Ordinance’s prohibition of slavery during the 1802 debate on statehood, an ill Ephraim Cutler made a dramatic entrance onto the floor of the constitutional convention to cast his vote in defense of liberty. The motion to include a ban on slavery in Ohio’s constitution prevailed by a single vote.

It’s a riveting story. But Isenberg calls McCullough’s treatment of the slavery debate “blinkered” because Ohio went on to impose draconian restrictions on free black residents. Perhaps. But the failure to acknowledge the difference between an Ohio settled by Virginians and one settled by New Englanders, essentially treating all alleged 19th century malefactors as indistinguishable, is truly blinkered.

Their Failings and Their Accomplishments

Historians today may lump together all pioneers, but those alive closer to their time did not. “We can hardly predict what the consequences would have been,” Cutler’s eulogist declared when he died in 1853, “had there not been a few men such as Judge Cutler to resist the insidious aggressions of the monstrous evil of slavery.” One consequence, of course, would have been slavery in Ohio, and likely across much of what we now call the Midwest.

Isenberg’s central complaint is that The Pioneers “presents American history as a grand civics lesson, in which the accomplishments of our principled forebears serve as inspirations.” He seems not to realize this is a feature, not a bug, and that the inspiration is all the more remarkable given the all-too-human failings of the pioneers. Isenberg wants to tell one story; McCullough wants to tell another. May both write for many years, and let readers enjoy the cornucopia.

To be clear, reviewers are not citing errors of fact; they just don’t like McCullough’s presuppositions. They don’t like his word choices—just look at the book’s subtitle, with its talk of a “heroic story” and of spreading “the American ideal” to new lands.” Slate’s reviewer confessed to being triggered by them. Such characterizations are anathema to those who view the settlement West as an unrelieved litany of horrors. 

Certainly, the horrors were all too real, and they are part of the story. But they are not the entire story. Like the 1619 Project over at the New York Times, it’s a monochrome theory in which everything that ever happened is viewed through a single lens. What’s the correct balance? I don’t know. But neither do those claiming that they do. 

Scholarly Revisions and Layers

From Frederick Jackson Turner to William H. Goetzmann, from Elliott West to Vine Deloria Jr., Amy Greenberg, Patricia Limerick, and countless others across the decades, the story of westward expansion has been framed and reframed. The current generation might think it has the final frame in place, but it does not.

If all this revisionism has taught us anything, it is that in history there are facts, but there is no final truth. What Deloria and Goetzmann wrote 50 years ago remains relevant today, if only their heirs would pay attention. It’s also worth remembering that Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), to cite just two of many examples, are not new books. The notion that approaching historical study of the West from the Native American’s viewpoint is somehow a 21st century improvement is simply wrong. This approach has been taken for longer than many of those complaining about McCullough have been alive.

Scholarship revises and layers; trends change; academic fads come and go. Stories remain. How these are interpreted evolves over time, as more information becomes available and different perspectives are considered and reconsidered. Each new age tries to put its spin on the events of the past. I hate to break this to the wokest of today’s “woke” McCullough critics, but a century from now, your captiousness about The Pioneers will seem as quaint to the scholars of 2119 as Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 analysis of the frontier seems to you.

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