The original Library of Congress building celebrates its centennial this year. When I mention the Jefferson Building, as it is now called, to people who have done research there, they smile at the memory of it. There’s something about the place that seems to inspire affection.
In fact, the building just overpowers you with its exuberance and grandeur. The interior is unabashedly ornate and infinitely decorated. You may cross into the main reading room in a sober mood to get some serious work done, but then this great dome opens up above you. It’s covered by a thousand floral medallions and a complex weave of terra cotta figures. You’re surrounded by warm amber marbles, bronze sculptures, and a collection of frescoes, columns, and pediments without end.
But the Jefferson Building is more than just a giant Faberge egg. When you get down to looking at the details, you find that the craftsmanship is actually mediocre: You can travel around Europe and find a hundred buildings with better paintings and better sculpture. Nonetheless, there is something about the energy of the building that makes it more than the sum of its parts, that makes it not so much an artistic wonder as a spiritual artifact. How did any group of builders muster so much vitality?
The answer is that this is an American building. For all its classical and Renaissance style, this 1897 building speaks to us in American. It embodies the optimism and brassy aspirations of Americans in the Gilded Age, their faith in the power of beauty to elevate, their confidence in America, their brash assertion that America was emerging as a world-historical force.
What a melancholy thing to compare today’s Washington with the Washington in which there was such enthusiasm for grand American projects. The congressmen who appropriated the funds for this building wanted to make sure it was the most expensive and most glorious library on the face of the earth (some even toured Europe to check out the competition). Its architects chose the Renaissance style to invite comparison to that golden age — to suggest that America was making contributions to world culture equal to it or any other epoch. The librarian of Congress at the time, Ainsworth Spofford, gave pride of place to American heroes like Benjamin Franklin and Robert Fulton in the pantheon of historical likenesses that covers the walls. Spofford and his colleagues saw the building as a statement of American greatness — and as a way to elevate America to greatness.
It is worth noting that for all its aspirations, the Library of Congress was not completed at a moment of giddy prosperity. In the 1890s, Americans endured a depression during which unemployment peaked at 17 percent (it hovered above 12 percent when the library opened). A quarter of the nation’s railroads had become insolvent. America was under strain on other fronts, too. During the 23 years it took to design and build the library, more people immigrated to America than in the previous 250 years combined. The nation’s population almost doubled, and white Americans settled more land in these years than in the preceding three centuries. Cities grew exponentially. Slums spread. It was a period of labor unrest.
But menaced by these threats to national cohesion, Americans redoubled their devotion to American nationalism. Hit by economic blows to their confidence, they reasserted their faith in themselves. Faced by anxiety and intellectual uncertainty, they did not succumb to malaise or cynicism. Instead they counter-attacked, with big projects like the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the Library of Congress.
At their worst, Gilded Age Americans reacted to anxiety with dogmatism — ponderous chest-thumping about the “superior races.” But at their best, they asked big questions: How can America produce a culture it can be proud of? How will the inhabitants of some future world power look back on American achievement during its moment of supremacy? What are the steps that a nation can take to preserve the virtues that lead to greatness in the first place?
For all that our current politicians take advantage of the library — J. C. Watts delivered the Republican response to the State of the Union there, Bill Clinton signed the telecommunications bill there — present-day leaders possess none of the library’s confidence and sureness of purpose. American politicians show little evidence of the great national vigor that animates this building. They don’t dare to make great plans or issue large challenges to themselves and their country. At a moment of world supremacy unlike any other, Americans are not asking big questions about their civilization, nor are they being asked anything but the sorts of things pollsters and marketers want to know. And so our politics has become degrading and boring. Political conflict appears trivial, vicious for no good reason.
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The Elevation of America
The designers of the Library of Congress had a view of history that is now deeply unfashionable. They saw civilization as a chain of achievement in which each generation is the grateful inheritor of a precious legacy and is called upon as a matter of highest duty to add to and continue the great transmission. Around the Jefferson Building’s central dome is a mural that epitomizes this idea. It features 12 seated, monumental figures representing the nations or epochs that, in the words of the building’s original catalogue, “have contributed most to the development of present-day civilization in this country.”
Under each figure is a plaque naming that culture’s great achievement. Egypt is first, given credit for “Written Records.” Then come Judea (religion) , Greece (philosophy), Rome (administration), Islam (physics), the Middle Ages (modern languages), Italy (the fine arts), Germany (printing), Spain (discovery), England (literature), and France (emancipation). The list ends with America, which is credited with “science.” The American figure in the mural, based on the young Abraham Lincoln, is dressed as an engineer, sitting in a machine shop, contemplating an electric dynamo.
The theory of history depicted in this mural balanced change and continuity. It demanded that people march forward by looking backward. It gave America impressive historical roots, a spiritual connection to the centuries at a time when Americans like Henry James felt their civilization was “thin.” And it assigned a specific historic role to America as the latest successor to Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. In the procession of civilization, certain nations rise up to make extraordinary contributions. Their golden ages, it was believed, are to be revered and studied. The designers of the Library of Congress, like so many of their countrymen, thought America was on the verge of its own golden age. At the dawn of the 20th century, America was to take its turn at global supremacy. It was America’s task to take the grandeur of past civilizations, modernize it, and democratize it. This common destiny would unify diverse Americans and give them a great national purpose.
The designers must have felt in their bones what Tocqueville observed: Democracy has a tendency to slide into nihilistic mediocrity if its citizens are not inspired by some larger national goal. If they think of nothing but their narrow self-interest, of their commercial activities, they lose a sense of grand aspiration and noble purpose. “What frightens me most,” Tocqueville writes, “is the danger that, amid all the constant trivial preoccupations of private life, ambition may lose both its force and its greatness, that human passions may grow gentler and at the same time baser, with the result that the progress of the body social may become daily quieter and less aspiring.”
The whole purpose of the library’s grand interiors — and those of the Chicago Columbian Exposition, four years before the library was dedicated — was to lift Americans above the petty concerns of bourgeois life and put them in touch with aristocratic virtues and transcendent truth. The aim was not to renounce elitism, magnificence, and the aristocratic virtues, but to allow every citizen the chance to become an aristocrat through work, study, and merit. The building’s artists and designers had enormous faith in human willpower, in its ability to master the passions and enable the individual to overcome social obstacles. For them, heroic individualism complemented heroic nationalism. They built this elaborate edifice to raise the stakes, to make life in America a more demanding and a more heroic enterprise.
So America was to strive upward. But toward what? Toward more wealth? Greater scientific achievement? Bigger buildings? No, these were just steps along the way. America’s mission was to advance civilization itself. Americans and Britons of the late 19th century believed that, transcending human affairs, there is a universal order created by God. Man’s duty is to strive toward that order, which precedes and controls politics, morals, history, economics, and art. A phrase from Tennyson, selected by Harvard president Charles W. Eliot and inscribed in the library, captures the message: “One God, one law, one element and one far-off divine event, to which the whole creation moves.”
The library’s artists broke that cosmic order down into its constituent parts. There are murals depicting each of the virtues, each of the occupations, each of the arts and sciences, each of the races. And the murals celebrate the great men and women — artists and scientists and thinkers — who were able to rise up and glimpse this universal order.
The library represents a coherent system of belief: A divine order created by God. A view of history in which man makes long progress toward that order. A series of great nations which contribute to that progress. And for Americans, a remarkable opportunity to join the great chain and participate in a heroic enterprise.
This form of American nationalism served as a foundation for the political ideas of people like Theodore Roosevelt, who believed in limited but energetic government, full-bore Americanism, active foreign policy, big national projects (such as the Panama Canal and the national parks), and efforts to smash cozy arrangements (like the trusts) that retarded dynamic meritocracy.
But now, on the verge of the 21st century, Americans have discarded their pursuit of national greatness in just about every particular.
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Post- Greatness America
Our culture no longer speaks of a unified and coherent order. The post- modernist view emphasizes fragmentation and disorder. Philosophers talk about contingency and irony and the ever-shifting meanings of words. Since Hemingway, our intellectuals have perceived hypocrisy, not transcendence, when words like “honor” and “glory” are used.
Our official culture disdains the idea that history is a story of progress unfolding. We think it naive. Maybe it was World War I that made the idea unpopular, or the Holocaust, or a thousand other events in our pessimism- inducing century. We no longer look at history as a succession of golden ages. Instead, history is something of a chaos; cultures bubble about in a relativistic stew. Historians do not measure cultures by their contribution to one central world civilization.
And, save in the speeches of politicians who usually have no clue what they are talking about, America is assigned no special role as the vanguard of civilization. Nobody talks of America as a New Jerusalem; that would be ethnocentric. Nor do we engage in grandiose hero-worship; indeed, we are more adept at debunking than idolizing. We are suspicious of hierarchies, of the idea that one art form is higher than another, that one way of living is superior to another. On the contrary, as Denis de Rougemont says, “It is whatever is lower that we take to be more real.”
America is a more dominant power in the world than Americans a century ago could ever have imagined. Yet we have almost none of the sense of global purpose that Americans had when they only dreamed of enjoying the stature we possess today. Domestically, we have a president and a Congress whose major common purpose is . . . balancing the budget.
For much of this century, liberals possessed high aspirations and a spirit of historical purpose. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the New Deal, John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier — these were efforts to aim high, to accomplish some grand national endeavor. Liberals tried to use American preeminence as a way to shape the world, fight communism, put a man on the moon. But then came the 1970s, and suddenly liberalism became a creed emphasizing limits. Small became beautiful. A radical egalitarianism transformed liberalism, destroying hierarchies and discrediting elitist aspirations. An easygoing nihilism swept through academia, carrying away any sense of a transcendent order. The civil- rights era turned into the affirmative-action era, and what had been a great national crusade for justice devolved into a series of petty squabbles over spoils.
Worse, under the influence of the New Left, the personal became political. Private concerns came to eclipse the larger public realm. At a time when a teenager’s haircut was a political statement to be adjudicated by the Supreme Court, all the issues of the private realm — smoking, methods of raising children, sexual preferences — began to overshadow the traditional subjects of the public realm: subjects like order, justice, and the distribution of wealth. Americans have almost forgotten what the public realm is and how it differs from the sum of private concerns.
Thus has our America neglected the sphere of issues that transcends the desires of a single generation. As a nation, we have realized Tocqueville’s worst fears; we have replaced high public aspiration with the narrower concerns of private life. These days in politics it is more important to be seen possessing the private virtues — compassion and caring — than it is to be seen possessing the public virtues like courage and integrity.
Consider Bill Clinton. He longs to be a great leader, but cultural liberalism has robbed him of any way to realize his dream. The national- greatness ideal of the 19th century was based first on the vigorous virtues, but cultural liberalism mistakes virility for sexism and the oppression of women.
The national-greatness ideal was also based on reticence, the idea that people should present a more austere and noble face to the world and reserve their less austere side for private life. Publicly, Theodore Roosevelt was unforgiving of his brother Elliott’s adultery; privately, he tried to help Elliott through his ensuing despair. But cultural liberalism has smashed reticence, mistaking it for hypocrisy. Finally, the national-greatness ideal was based on iron discipline over the passions. But cultural liberalism mistook self-control for unhealthy repression.
And so, at the end of liberalism, we find Bill Clinton. Longing to personify greatness but too easy on himself, trained to discard the qualities that comprise it, he is the opposite of vigorous, the opposite of reticent, the opposite of self-disciplined.
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Post-National America
But it is primarily the fault of conservatives that America has lost a sense of national mission and national greatness. After all, this is a conservative era, and one shouldn’t expect the Democrats to come up with the energy that animates a conservative era. But since Ronald Reagan returned to California, conservatism has shrunk.
The fact is, if liberals choke on the “greatness” part of national greatness, conservatives choke on the “national” part. Most conservatives have come to confuse “national” with “federal.” When they hear of a national effort, they think “big government program.” Conservatives have taken two sensible ideas and ballooned them to the point of elephantiasis. The first is anti-statism. They took a truth — that government often causes suffering when it interferes in the free market — and stretched it into a blanket hostility to government. Instead of arguing that government should be limited but energetic, slender but strong, they have often argued that government is itself evil.
In so doing, conservatives have introduced their own version of the liberal sin by allowing the private to eclipse the public. Many conservatives argue simply that the private realm is good and the public realm is bad, that private endeavor is moral and public endeavor is corrupt. They saw that many of the public policies that emerged during the 60 years of liberal dominance had nightmarish consequences. Now many can’t conceive of a public realm that would affirm any of the virtues they hold dear. Instead, they have concluded that the public policy issuing from the public realm is the problem. They want to free the private sector from big government, which is a worthy goal, but you can’t lead a great nation if you don’t have an affirmative view of the public realm.
Today’s congressional conservatives couldn’t conceivably sponsor a daring statement of American greatness like the Jefferson Building. They would refuse to pay for the artists to construct such a work on the grounds that the federal government should have no role in such cultural action. They would balk at anything public that was so conspicuously lavish. They don’t have the self-confidence to put forth a cultural vision that is so clear and striking. Few conservatives could even conceive of a federal arts program that would reflect glory on America.
The other idea that conservatives have stretched to elephantiasis is populism. They have taken a healthy distrust of elites and turned it into a blanket hostility to establishments. The men who built the Jefferson Building hoped every person would have the chance to work his way into the elite, into a natural aristocracy. But many of today’s conservatives use the language of populist resentment more than of meritocratic aspiration. They use phrases like “inside the Beltway” to condemn those who have risen to high positions in public life. They support term limits on the grounds that experience in government is corrupting, rather than a form of public service.
They have become besotted with localism, local communities, and the devolution of power to the localities. By contrast, those who preached national greatness were not believers in the superior virtue of the simple folk, as today’s populists are. They believed in effort, cultivation, and mastery. They believed in cities and urbanity. They believed in capitals, in monuments, in grandeur.
In their passion for devolution, conservatives have neglected the need for a strong national government. Certain government services may be delivered more efficiently from Albany, Harrisburg, or Sacramento, but ultimately, American purpose can find its voice only in Washington.
The best conservative thought knows that without a sense of national community, we balkanize. We become acutely aware of the different needs of our national subcultures: black, white, Hispanic, gay, feminist. But we are not reminded of any common mission that unites us. It becomes easier for demagogues to pit us against one another because there are no countervailing leaders offering common national tasks. We begin to turn on outsiders and immigrants.
Without vigorous national vision, we are plagued by anxiety and disquiet. The great questions of the age are, Why do we feel so bad when we are doing so well materially? And why do we feel the nation is doing so badly if we ourselves are doing so well? The common answer is that we don’t have a clear sense of what America is for, what we, as a nation, should achieve with all our wealth. As our public realm collapses into the private, our public morality becomes confused with matters of public health, from smoking to the distribution of free needles. We try to curb bad behavior by scolding and political correctness, but we have no way to inspire good behavior by holding up lofty goals.
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Restoring American Greatness
Can we create a 21st-century version of the national-greatness ideal and so recapture the confidence manifest in the Library of Congress? What is needed is a process of pruning — cutting government’s forays into private life while strengthening its public role. This is not the anti-statism of recent conservative vintage, nor is it a proposal to reinvent government along neoliberal lines. It’s a more fundamental change that requires a transformation in the way we think about the federal government’s role.
Currently, American political philosophy has divided itself into the opposing principles of “order” and “freedom.” Now, when liberals stand for one, conservatives stand for the other. Liberals want economic order; conservatives want economic freedom. Conservatives want social order; liberals want social freedom.
This has forced the national government to engage in a pervasive balancing act. It is forever invading the private sphere in an effort to strengthen community here, or strengthen individual freedoms there. Washington becomes the battleground on which the fine distinctions between individual rights and community prerogatives are fought out. The national-greatness ideal assigns the federal government another role: It should accomplish national missions. And in so doing, it will set the national tone.
The national mission can be carried out only by individuals and families — not by collectives, as in socialism and communism. Instead, individual ambition and willpower are channeled into the cause of national greatness. And by making the nation great, individuals are able to join their narrow concerns to a larger national project.
Historically, national missions have included settling the West, building the highway system, creating the post-war science faculties, exploring space, waging the Cold War, and disseminating American culture throughout the world.
The most successful missions have set physical goals, rather than abstract ones: America in 1897 constructed the world’s finest library. The library has had an important impact on culture, but its impact is the byproduct of a physical project. Sometimes the federal government has funded these efforts. Sometimes it has merely identified the new national cause. Sometimes it has eliminated barriers to ambition.
It almost doesn’t matter what great task government sets for itself, as long as it does some tangible thing with energy and effectiveness. The first task of government is to convey a spirit of confidence and vigor that can then spill across the life of the nation. Stagnant government drains national morale. A government that fails to offer any vision merely feeds public cynicism and disenchantment.
But energetic government is good for its own sake. It raises the sights of the individual. It strengthens common bonds. It boosts national pride. It continues the great national project. It allows each generation to join the work of their parents. The quest for national greatness defines the word ” American” and makes it new for every generation.
David Brooks is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
