A Camelot Minute

Writing almost in parallel, Schlesinger and Viereck staked out positions in which a philosophical conservatism based on a sense of man’s fallen nature was used to leverage a modulated political optimism grounded in a prudent empiricism. Together, Schlesinger and Viereck, generally men of almost Erasmian balance, feared the impact on democracy of the “anxieties” induced by freedom. Writing in the wake of the mass movements that had convulsed Europe, they were disdainful of laissez-faire capitalism and of the Babbitry they associated with business leaders, even as they looked to elites to contain democracy’s rawer tendencies. But today Viereck’s book is all but forgotten, while The Vital Center continues to be discussed by liberals almost as if it were written by a contemporary.

What accounts for the eclipse of one and the continued allure of the other? Some significance should be attached to the way they made their arguments. Neither man was sensitive to the ethnic and religious dimensions of American life. But in a short book, Viereck spent, as he later acknowledged, far too much time explicating the virtues of Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian architect of the long post-Napoleonic peace in Europe. America’s postwar alliance system, as well as the still-promising United Nations, were, it was true, influenced by the way Metternich had tried to contain the earlier ideological scourge of Jacobinism. But Americans had a hard time connecting with Metternich, an aristocrat who insisted on “deference” from his social inferiors.

Schlesinger’s heroes were more accessible. In The Vital Center he argued that Franklin Roosevelt was continuing the course embarked on by Andrew Jackson, who fought the privileged power of the Bank of the United States in the name of popular aspirations, just as FDR championed the average American when he took on the “economic royalists.” This tack grounded the New Deal’s state-brokered compromises between free market capitalism and the claims of “community” in homegrown traditions.

Schlesinger’s critics, such as historian Marvin Meyers, insisted that he had gotten Jackson all wrong. The Jacksonians, Meyers argued with considerable skill and evidence, looked to free markets as a bulwark against the privileges they associated with political arrangements. But Meyers and other critics had little popular impact. Schlesinger succeeded in persuading most liberals that the New Deal was far more than just a temporary bargain to meet the emergency of the Great Depression. Rather, liberals became convinced, and many remained convinced, that the New Deal arrangements not only reflected, but culminated for all time, the ceaseless struggle between business and the people that defined American history.

Viereck’s Burkean gradualism was a partisan dead end. In 1952, much to the dismay of other conservatives, he supported the Democrat Adlai Stevenson for president. By the mid-1950s he was being bypassed by an alternative strand of conservatism more attuned to America’s vigorously capitalist past and far less burdened by the fear of populism as a harbinger of totalitarianism. In his 1962 introduction for a new edition of The New Conservatism, an overwrought Viereck denounced the political populism of the William Buckley/Barry Goldwater brand of conservatism as “a façade for either plutocratic profiteering or fascist style thought control nationalism.” This populist or “street corner” conservatism, as it was known in the cities, marked the beginning of a political break with both Viereck’s focus on the madness of the 1930s and the Republicans’ residual stick-in-the-mud pre-New Deal politics.

Schlesinger’s resolutely partisan approach to politics and policy endured–though, by the early 1950s, Viereck and the liberal historian Eric Goldman were already pointing out that liberalism was increasingly small-“c” conservative in its defense of New Deal policies, which might or might not stand the test of time.

A great deal of ink has been wasted over whether Schlesinger got communism and the Cold War right. He did. Writing before the publication of George Orwell’s 1984, or Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism or Jacob Talmon’s even more substantial The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, he argued that “the totalitarian left and the totalitarian right meet at last . . . on the grounds of terror and tyranny.” Schlesinger, who anticipated the Sino-Soviet split, saw that communism was “if anything a passing stage . . . a disease” that may afflict some “in the quest for modernity.” The rebarbative attacks–from the New Left which blamed him for McCarthyism and Vietnam, and from the right which dismissed him as a timid professor unwilling to confront evil in the world–are best forgotten.

In retrospect, Schlesinger relied far too heavily on Eric Fromm’s now-forgotten, then-fashionable ideas about the anxiety of individuality. But much of The Vital Center is a fount of common sense for liberals. He dismissed the left-wing hysterics who warn of impending American fascism. He mocked the neurotic “wailers” who used “liberalism as an outlet for private grievances and frustrations,” as compared with the “doers” who commit themselves to the “tedious study of detail” in order “to assume the burden of civic responsibility.” And he was contemptuous of the “doughfaces,” a term which originally applied to Northern men of Southern principles during the Civil War, but which he applied to Henry Wallace and the fellow travelers who were “democratic men with totalitarian principles.” Although the term never caught on, the contemporary parallels are all too obvious.

The Vital Center has obvious weaknesses. Schlesinger, as he would later admit, had vastly underestimated the dynamism of American capitalism, and he had almost nothing to say about the problem of state-brokered interest groups. Eric Goldman’s paean to the New Deal, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform, published three years later, ends pessimistically but presciently, noting that “the process of the atomization of ‘the people’ into special interest groups” posed a threat to the viability of liberalism.

But the key problem at the emotional and political heart of the book has gone virtually unnoticed. The political and cultural snobbery that informs The Vital Center has proved the undoing of American liberalism. Schlesinger’s politics were driven less by a concern for the well-being of most Americans than a burning hostility toward business, despite its crucial role in winning World War II. Writing about The Vital Center in his memoirs, he acknowledged that he had been “captivated by [Joseph] Schumpeter’s aristocratic scorn for merchants, as I had been by George Sorel’s contempt for the cowardice of the bourgeoisie.” The second, overlooked chapter of The Vital Center on “The Failure of the Right” reproduces in tone and content the warrior critique of business civilization adopted by Theodore Roosevelt, who disdained capitalists as people with the “ideals . . . [of] pawnbrokers.”

Drawing on the resentful writings of Brooke, Charles, and Henry Adams, Schlesinger insisted that “the normal American businessman is insecure and confused. . . . Tear away the veil of Rotarian self-congratulation or Marxist demonology, and you are likely to find the irresolute and hesitating figure of George F. Babbitt.” He reveled in Charles Francis Adams’s statement that “I have known and tolerably well a good many ‘successful’ men–‘big’ financially–and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter.” But even more important, while he acknowledges the necessity of a leadership class even in a democracy, he insists that “timid” business people are incapable of joining that governing stratum.

“The capitalists,” he insisted, quoting Henry Cabot Lodge, “have not been, in the political sense, an effective governing class.” What we needed, he said, was “the advantage of an intelligent aristocracy,” referring to Winston Churchill. But he never specified where that aristocracy was to come from, although he obviously thought that Harvard-educated men such as himself should be at the heart of it.

Franklin Roosevelt temporarily reconciled elitism and majoritarianism. The New Deal’s Brain Trust was seen and understood by most Americans to be acting on behalf, in FDR’s words, “of the will of the great majority of the people as distinguished from the judgment of a small minority.” New Deal liberalism had been erected on the understanding that it was the job of a self-effacing elite, acting on behalf of the government, to protect the virtuous people from rapacious business interests. But it was an unstable arrangement.

The Vital Center was written in the wake of Harry Truman’s come-from-behind victory in the 1948 election, which seemed to be a vindication for the politics Schlesinger advanced. Truman had triumphed over not only Republicans and business, but also over Henry Wallace and the supporters of the Soviet Union on the left and Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrat segregationists on the right, in the name of advancing the Fair Deal’s extensions of the New Deal. But Schlesinger could barely bring himself to mention the Missouri haberdasher’s name in the book. Earlier, he had written that “not only is [Truman] himself a man of mediocre and limited capacity . . . [but] he has managed to surround himself with his intellectual equals.” Truman was so socially unacceptable that Schlesinger had briefly joined the movement to draft the stately Dwight D. Eisenhower for president in 1948, although he later admitted that he had no idea of the general’s political views. Truman reciprocated in kind: He quipped that “there should be a real liberal party in this country, and I don’t mean a crackpot professional one.”

John F. Kennedy’s Camelot of the “best and the brightest” was able to, once again, temporarily reconcile the tension between enlightened elite leadership (as Schlesinger saw it) and popular sentiment. But in the wake of Vietnam and the urban riots of the 1960s, the New Left liberals of the post-Kennedy era saw, and continue to see, the people themselves and the American culture they embody as the problem that demands government action. By 1968, the Schlesinger who had once totemized Jacksonian working men and 1930s American nationalists described Americans “as the most frightening people on this planet.” At times, he has referred to the tension between what he described as “the educated few and the uneducated many,” as when he warned that the Eugene McCarthy presidential campaign was turning the Democratic party into a “semiprecious rally of the illuminati.” But by 1972 Schlesinger was supporting George McGovern, the candidate of the illuminati. In the aftermath of McGovern’s landslide defeat, AFL-CIO operative Al Barkan swore, “We aren’t going to let those Harvard-Berkeley Camelots take over the party.” But they did.

In the new liberalism that emerged out of the political cauldron of the 1960s, professionals such as lawyers and social workers protected victimized groups from a supposedly virulent majority. But too often, professionals have a vested interest in inflating their own worth at the expense of those they look to instruct. “Uncertain . . . of the nature of their constituency,” wrote James Nuechterlein in 1977, “many liberals tend to cover their confusion with an intense if generally unfocused moralism.”

Today, Schlesinger’s “educated few” have become a multitude in their own right. In England, they have their own party, the Liberal Democrats; in the United States they are stuck in an uneasy cohabitation with representatives of the unwashed. No longer self-effacing servants of working America, as in the 1930s, or of victims’ groups, as in the 1970s and ’80s, they are increasingly, as in the Howard Dean campaign, looking for power in their own right.

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a Bourbon liberal who proudly states in his memoirs that he has the same views now that he did when he wrote The Vital Center in 1949, has little to say about this dilemma. But the attitudes he advanced in The Vital Center live on in the aristocratic snobbery of professional liberals, in both senses of the term, who expect, given their putative expertise, to be obeyed. Faced with a disobedient public, as in recent elections, their impotence has expressed itself in the same disdain for Middle America that Schlesinger once reserved for businessmen.

Fred Siegel is the author, most recently, of The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life.