AMERICA - VOL. 1

All of this was considered "Christian" because the understanding was that such a hierarchical system was something that God himself had ordained ... from the aristocratic few at the top of this Christian social order down to the many common laborers, even the permanently indentured (ultimately officially enslaved) workers at the bottom of this same order.  The key function of the Christian Church was to morally/spiritually authorize and protect exactly this strict social order against all forces attempting to disintegrate it.

Protestant-reformist New England.  On the other hand, New England was deeply reflective of the rising urban-industrial society that had been emerging along Europe's Mediterranean, Atlantic and Baltic coastlines ... whose ambitious commercial/industrial spirit posed a profound challenge to Europe’s older rural feudal system.  Largely siding with the Protestant religious reformers in the internal battle raging in Europe in the early 1600s, the New England colonists had decided to relocate to America, profoundly motivated by a deep religious quest for the right to live as God directed – not as man, not even kings or bishops, directed.

This all started with the plantation (1620s) of the Separatists (the Pilgrims) at Plymouth and then soon thereafter (1630) the migration to America led by America's first Founding Father John Winthrop, who established the settlement in the Boston area of a huge Puritan settlement (ultimately some 20,000 English over the next dozen years).

In John Winthrop's famous "City on a Hill" sermon (actually entitled by Winthrop himself as "A Modell of Christian Charity.")  Winthrop explained to the English settlers, who were about to embark to the New World, how this covenant – on which their new settlement was to be based – actually worked.  He detailed both the good that would come from observing the exact terms of the covenant ... and the bad that would result if the covenant was not followed by the settlers – social rules derived from the example of ancient Israel ... and its wanderings.  Now it was the Puritans' opportunity in Massachusetts to be a "New Israel" – a "Light to the Nations" ... a very visible example to the world of how God expected human life to operate.

In line with Winthrop's vision, the new arrivals were carefully placed in numerous villages in the region, everyone receiving roughly equal property allotments in order to emphasize the basic equality of all in New England, because they were most importantly equal before the Lord.  Indeed, this was done purposefully in order to create a "Light to the Nations" which would show others the way to this same egalitarian or "democratic" existence, mandated and supported by none other than God himself.

Thus the key distinguishing features of this new social order were 1) the deep sense of equality of all members of society, 2) the responsibility of all in assuming the toil (hard work) in God’s vineyard necessary to make this Godly society succeed, and 3) that those who took the responsibility to guide this society (its religious and civil officers) were servants – not owners – of this society, regularly elected to office by its members – and recalled by them if need be – and did not constitute some permanently privileged social group.

Politics.  Being so new, this grand social experiment of course would draw opinions even from the settlers themselves as to how all of this was supposed to work.  In a few cases (detailed in this study) voices of dissent arose from especially active egos, some quite disruptive of the quite fragile social harmony (those of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, for instance) which ultimately led to their invitation to go elsewhere before they collapsed the colony's social order.  Others such as Connecticut's Thomas Hooker, however, left of his own desire to go a different way socially and politically – yet did so with the blessings of the Boston authorities.  And anyway, in the end, Winthrop, Williams and Hooker found that working closely together nonetheless was the very best strategy for them all.

Other colonies and their founders.  The narrative then turns to the establishment of the other American colonies: Maryland, the Carolinas, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and finally Georgia.  It pays close attention to the particular individuals who played the leading roles in the establishment of these colonies (the Carterets, Shaftesbury, James Duke of York, William Penn, James Oglethorpe, and others).

Problems in social-moral development.  It then turns to the matter of how these colonies matured, especially the Puritan communities in New England, noting that it did not take long before worldly success brought the generations that followed the original Puritan settlers (the high-risk and deeply dedicated Christian "First Generation") to be of a much less impressive character (something akin to the "Fourth Generation" as explained in the preface).  Thus it was that in the 1690s, a huge panic over the intrusion of witchcraft into the life of a supposedly Christian New England turned very ugly – although the panic blew over fairly quickly.

The coming of the Human Enlightenment.  But there were other problems as well.  It was the Age of the Human Enlightenment (late 1600s / early 1700s).  Discoveries were being made suggesting that the world operated entirely along mechanical lines (17th century Secularism), and that human rational inquiry into these mechanics would soon remove life's great mysteries and indeed bring life under full human mastery (17th century Humanism).  At least that was the hope.  And thus Secular-Humanism was set loose as a huge cultural-spiritual force, already challenging deeply as early as the late 1600s the traditional beliefs of Christians that the world, the universe itself even, was under God's full sovereignty.

The new powers that the Enlightenment promised the "man of reason" seemed to put that same sovereignty into man's own hands.  This new worldview (religion) was powerful stuff for human egos to navigate through!

Thus churches were emptying out by the early 1700s, despite efforts of "enlightened" theologians to amend the Christian faith in order to put it more closely in line with the new doctrines of the Enlightenment.  In fact the emptying of churches was greatly enhanced by exactly that effort to "update" Christianity.

The Christian "Great Awakening."  Then seemingly out of nowhere, a deep earth-shaking Christian revival began to move through the colonies, drawing huge crowds out onto the open fields and city streets (what? not properly located inside a church?), this revival gaining force as it went.  Importantly, George Whitefield personally brought much of this spirit of Christian revival from England where revivalists (John Wesley and the Methodists) were involved in the same process of bringing revival to that country.  But there were individuals locally (Edwards, Freylinghuisen, and many others) who were also stirring the same fires in America, first in New England and in the Middle Colonies – then eventually across the full Anglo-American spectrum, especially resulting from the dynamic energy of Whitefield.  Even the "common-sense" American philosopher Ben Franklin was drawn in by Whitefield's preaching.  In short, America was experiencing a "Great Awakening" – starting in the mid-1730s and running all the way into the 1760s, though the height of the movement occurred in the 1740s.

Moral strength to protect the American experiment.  This was a very good thing for the American colonials, because they would need that faith in a presiding God to face the dangers that a new (1760) King of England, George III, would pose to the enormous social freedoms they enjoyed in America.  The American colonials were long used to taking care of themselves – completely.  And American self-rule had been merely deepened in having the two previous English kings (George I and II) of the early and mid-1700s not only unable to speak English (they were actually German) but preferring to spend their times focused on European, not American, affairs – when not out also hunting and sporting.  But George II's grandson, George III, intended to correct this negligence of his predecessors.  Troubles thus brewed for the colonies.

In the mid-1770s the explosion finally occurred in the colonies when George III tried to break this American spirit with heavy taxation, the posting of his soldiers in private homes, and the shutting down of Boston when that city refused to bend to his will.  But to rise up against a sitting King was unprecedented – at least unprecedented in actually succeeding in such an endeavor.  Indeed, should the rebels, who now gathered in New England in full rebellion, fail in that rebellion (as was historically always the case) they would all be put to death for their treason.  Such rebellion was an incredibly brave thing for these colonial Patriots (or "Whigs") to undertake. So dangerous was such an enterprise that actually only about 40% of the population actively supported the rebellion.  About 30% supported the King (thus labeled Loyalists or "Tories") and the rest were merely neutral, most of them going with whichever side seemed to be in the lead at the moment.

Washington's all-critical leadership.  But the Patriots were led by the Virginian, George Washington, whose close reliance on God and not fellow man (many of whom among the other American commanding officers were a constant problem) made him the leader he was, able to keep going through the darkest of days – and keep his men staying with him in the process.  Such persistence caused the English finally to tire of this game (1783), especially after the humiliating British defeat at Yorktown by the American troops led by Washington and his ever-faithful Alexander Hamilton ... and also with the major contribution of America's French allies (led by Lafayette and Admiral de Grasse).

Basing the Constitution on American tradition – and God's support (1787).  But the same bold spirit was found elsewhere among many of America's leaders who after the war gathered in Philadelphia to put together a Constitution defining a new political union among the thirteen newly independent states.  But they were having trouble in peacetime finding the pressure to continue to "reason together" – and had to be reminded by Franklin that instead of arguing constantly over their "reasonable" but unresolvable differences (as lawyers are skilled at doing) they should remember how they got through the recent war with Britain when they went before God for help.  So he invited the group to go daily before the Lord in prayer for guidance, a much better guidance than merely trying to build their new society on human reason (which clearly wasn't working at that point)!

It is important to note why this author does not follow the general trend of referring to this war they had just gone through as the "Revolutionary War" – but instead always refers to it as the "War of Independence."  America itself did not change in character.  In that all-important way America itself underwent no "revolution."  It simply fought to preserve the very political and social character that had been long-established in America, a political-social quality that Americans refused to give up to George III.  Certainly independence was achieved in this very bloody struggle.  But nothing "revolutionary" happened to the way America went about its usual social business, either before or after the war!

For instance, the Americans did not newly invent Constitutional government ... all the colonies having been run according to very precise legal principles outlined in their founding charters laid out a century and a half earlier (but updated as the need arose).  They planned to continue as independent "states" in exactly the same manner.  Thus upon their move to independence in 1776, each of the colonies had worked quickly to draft up new charters or state constitutions.  In short, such self-government was by no means a "revolutionary" development for Americans.  They were well-practiced in self-government according to well-established legal principles.

The wisdom of the "Framers" of the Constitution.  Anyway, after a long hot summer, the Constitutional "Framers" finally put the finishing touches on their political union, drawn up as a contract, providing for a new Congress, a President, and a Supreme Court to guide the Union ... in a tightly defined and tightly restricted realm of political operation (mostly in the area of foreign affairs, where these thirteen new states were indeed weakest in their operations).

Also a Bill of Rights was passed in accompaniment to the new Constitution, guaranteeing that the new Union government would not ever be able to accumulate powers (as power tends to want to do by its very nature) so that America would end up being governed no longer by the states and their people but instead by an autocratic authority that attempted to dominate American life the way King George had tried to do.

But just as history (including their own) had so clearly revealed to those gentlemen who put this new government together, they could have never succeeded in getting to this point (in other words, freed from royal tyranny) if God had not been with them.  By the same token, there was also little likelihood that they would be able to keep their personal freedoms from any government they might have set up if it too did not ultimately remain under the supervision of God Almighty.

History revealed no example of any political system that ultimately did not fall into some form of human tyranny – because of the very nature of power-hungry man himself ... and his well-developed ability to rationalize legally and morally his accumulation of ever-widening personal and social power.

And thus when Franklin was questioned upon the completion of the work of the Constitutional Convention as to what exact form of government these gentlemen had come up with, he replied, "A Republic ... if you can keep it."

Again, without God (not man) as the ultimate guarantor of the integrity of this political experiment, these wise ones who put that Constitution together knew quite well that their new Republic would not last long before it too fell into the hands of the Enlightened Ones – in the same way that the "enlightened" despots of Europe (the various European kings) stepped forward during the height of the so-called Human Enlightenment to justify their absolute power over their subject peoples.

Human Enlightenment and human tyranny seemed so easily to go hand-in-hand.

The French Revolution by way of contrast.  Tragically, the same year that the American Constitution received the requisite number of state ratifications, thus taking full effect (1789), a horrible Revolution broke out in France – and was truly a Revolution ... because the enlightened ones directing its course intended to "change" everything possible about the very character of French society.

But disaster merely resulted because, unlike the Framers of the American constitution, the leaders of the French Revolution had only bright ideas – and no practical or deeply tested experience in guiding and directing a society.  Nor did the French people themselves have any understanding of what their role was to be in this new Revolutionary society.

Very quickly the Revolution collapsed into a murderous chaos, with not only the ruling class of the Ancien Régime (France's king and queen, its barons and aristocrats, its bishops and clergy, etc.) being beheaded at the guillotine – but then also (especially during the years 1793-1794, a period known today as the French "Reign of Terror") the "enlightened ones" themselves. The leading revolutionary groups, the Girondins and Jacobins, savagely turned on each other over points of differences in their "pure" thinking!  It finally took the military-based dictatorship of Napoleon to put France back together again!

How very different the American and French political dynamics proved to be.  Human Reason had no known well-established moral restraints functioning in France at this point, moral restraints necessary to keep such "enlightenment" from the typically self-destructive behavior that results when human egos find clever ways to justify their insatiable quest for power.

On the other hand, America's leaders were well aware of the dangers of trusting to merely self-justifying Human Reason to direct them.  They were quite aware that God – whose rules for human behavior were as eternal as the laws of physics and chemistry – had to stay sovereign over these United States, or they too would drift down the "creative" or "progressive" path of Human Reason that the French Revolutionaries had foolishly followed.

Washington's presidency (1789-1797).  Everyone knew all along who the union's first president was supposed to be.  Washington accepted the responsibility, certainly preferring instead to go home to his Mount Vernon home.  But duty called, and he cautiously said yes.

He formed a cabinet to support his office, appointing Hamilton to head Treasury and Jefferson to head his foreign office as Secretary of State.  Hamilton faced the enormous challenge of putting the government's credit rating (based on the reputation of its dollar currency) back on firm footing, which at the time was a total disaster.  And Jefferson was faced with the issue of the American response to the on-going war between France and Britain that America was having a very hard time keeping it away from its door.

In meeting these challenges, Hamilton was highly successful – and Jefferson was not.  Hamilton took up very unpopular, but very necessary, actions to strengthen America's financial foundations (key to any nation's power).  But Jefferson was so enamored with things French that he found himself lined up against Hamilton who understood that the British served American interests at the time much better than France – and that the forces driving France were destined ultimately to lead that country to ruin ... which Jefferson could not (or just would not) see coming.  And Washington agreed with Hamilton, infuriating Jefferson.  Jefferson thus resigned in anger from the cabinet (1793) ... and then had his friend Madison also pull back as a Federalist and become an anti-Federalist (like Jefferson) – and in fact form a new political party that would oppose the Federalists (importantly Washington and Hamilton) by whatever means available.  Thus America's two-party system got off and running!

People barely got Washington to accept a second 4-year term as President.  And when that term was up, Washington refused to serve further.  He was fed up with all the political back-stabbing going on at the time (welcome, Mr. Washington, to the world of politics!)

Thus in so many ways Washington personally put the final touches on how the American presidency was to take shape – including the rule that a president should serve no more than two terms (which Franklin Roosevelt later ignored, thus forcing the adoption of the 22nd Amendment in 1951).

John Adams.  John Adams then stepped up as president.  The French-British turmoil constantly troubled his presidency, ultimately destining him to a single term when he refused to follow the impulse of his fellow Federalists, who wanted him to declare war against France, which would have been disastrous for America – a very brave act on Adams's part.

John Marshall's Supreme Court.  But Adams did something that would have a huge impact on the way the young Republic would go forward constitutionally ... when in his last days in office he appointed John Marshall to the position of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  Although he was a Virginian, Marshall did not follow the other Virginians into Jefferson's political camp, but remained a resolved Federalist.  In fact, in his 34 years of Supreme Court service (1801-1835), he turned this panel of judges into something more akin to true legislators, revising the law of the land at will.  Not only did his court pass judgment on legal contests that inevitably arise from applying the law in particular cases (the traditional role of English judges) ... he actually went well beyond that in deciding how such laws should be interpreted or even be reinterpreted ... or even be set aside as "unconstitutional" – according to his own personal Federalist political instincts.  But these could be almost anything he deemed as "reasonable."  Thus slowly he was reshaping Constitutional Law so as to make it conform to the logic or reason of a small group of jurists who happened to be sitting on the bench – actually only a simple majority among them being required for a wide-sweeping decision.

And there was no built-in "check" on such enormous power.  Justices, once appointed, served for life – not subject to any subsequent elections or renewals of their appointments by the world other than their deaths (or voluntary retirement) itself.  Tragically, the Framers of the Constitution did not see this power-expansion coming.  No such power as the Supreme Court assumed for itself was actually ever assigned by the Constitution.  And the English political tradition that the Framers thought they were working with had no such grants of political power assigned to their judges.  This political expansion was all a result of Marshall's personal creativity.

Wow!  Lawyers in black robes!  But what else did anyone think was likely to occur if nothing was said or noticed at the time.

In any case, this single judicial appointment would establish a political path that would slowly make the Supreme Court, not Congress, the supreme legislative body of the land.

Jefferson's presidency (1801-1809).  Jefferson and his Republican Party (no connection with the modern Republican Party) now had a chance to shift the political dynamic away from the growing industrial-financial power of Hamilton's Federalists (located heavily in coastal New England and the central states) and move power in favor of the Southerners and also the Western farmers and frontiersmen.

Jefferson was a hard figure to pin down because he lived so much in the world of his own making.  He got the bright idea to reduce the size of the U.S. military and navy – yet at the same time ordered a fairly successful naval and land attack on the Barbary pirates of North Africa, who had been harassing American shipping and kidnapping American sailors (for ransom payments or slavery).

And he did initiate what would turn out in 1803 to double the land size of America when his agents in France agreed to purchase not only the strategic city of New Orleans (their original plan was to purchase that site for up to $10 million) but for a mere $5 million more the entire Louisiana region of the American West.  Ironically it was Hamilton's tough financial policies, the very ones that Jefferson had hated so much, that gave the American dollar the creditworthiness needed to make this purchase feasible in the first place!

But Jefferson also most arrogantly (and stupidly) decided that the way to defend the American nation in the all-consuming British-French struggle (the Brits were grabbing American sailors from American ships and dragging them into British naval service) was to block American shipping to Britain, convinced that this loss of American input would bring Britain to its knees in repentance.  But instead it simply gave the appearance to the British that America was aligning itself with France in Napoleon's similar effort to blockade Britain and bring its economy to defeat.  Thus the British responded in ever-greater fury, not repentance.  Then to make things "fairer," Jefferson decided to extend the same restriction against trade with France as well, shutting down pretty much all of America's export business – and nearly collapsing the American economy.

For one who had been so loud about protecting "states' rights" against the assumption of autocratic power by an uncontrolled government in Washington, Jefferson had no problems personally acting in such an autocratic fashion when he himself was president.  But of course he was among the most "enlightened" of Americans, and that justified his autocracy (as "enlightenment" always does!).

Finally in his last days in office, he lifted his restrictions ... and the American economy began to recover.

The War of 1812 (actually 1812-1815).  When Jefferson's understudy Madison stepped up to be president, American politics was beginning to make another shift.  A younger generation of Republicans had come into Jefferson's party, much more nationalistic (thus less "states rightist") in temperament than Jefferson's traditionally Virginia gentlemen-led organization.  In fact, John Adams's son, John Quincy Adams would join the new Republicans – an indicator of how badly the Federalists were losing political support among the rising generation of Americans.

But a big part of this changing political dynamic was the growing question of how the battle between France and Britain impacted the political alignment of Americans.  The American national spirit was coming alive, outpacing American loyalties to Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, etc.

A big part of this growing nationalist mood was the treatment that America was still receiving at the hands of the European powers, most notably Britain – driving the Americans to such anger that finally in 1812 they declared war on Britain.  With not much of a navy (thanks to Jefferson) and really only state militias to work with, this was not a good time to be taking on the mighty British Empire.  In fact things did not initially go all that well for America.  Americans did succeed in burning down the Canadian capital at York (Toronto) – but would pay for that when the British did the same to Washington, D.C.

But America got some help with a naval victory on the Great Lakes and the failure of the British to move further inland into America when they found themselves unable to get past the American defenses at Baltimore (giving America its national anthem: The Star-Spangled Banner).  Besides, Napoleon was (apparently) defeated by that time (late 1814), and anyway the British were tired of all the fighting that had been going on for so long.  America and Britain thus signed a treaty in Belgium, pretty much recognizing the status quo prior to the war.  Thus the war was officially over.

But the news did not reach America before General Andrew Jackson's men made a stand at New Orleans against a huge British assault there – in which the British were absolutely devastated!

Ultimately it made no difference in terms of the peace agreement.  But it definitely gave America a new hero to worship and adore: Jackson himself!

Indeed by the close of the 1800s the warriors found no other option but to return to their reservations and await developments.  The Anglo-Indian war was finally over.

America's ongoing Industrial Revolution.  The industrial revolution pushed forward by the Civil War did not subside after the war but merely gained momentum as America headed into the last decades of the 1800s.  Driving it forward was a small group of very energetic individuals, known often as either the "Captains of Industry" or the "Industrial Robber Barons" (depending on your view of them), whose capacity for taking on huge financial risks was enormous: the shipping and railroad monopolist Cornelius Vanderbilt, the steel industry giant Andrew Carnegie, the New York financier J.P. Morgan and oil industry monopolist John D. Rockefeller.  These men stood at the top of a huge mountain of wealth that they personally commanded.

Indeed, of the wealthiest 1 percent of the population that shockingly owned 50 percent of the nation's wealth (in contrast to the poorest 44 percent of the population which earned only about 1 percent of that total), these few individuals made most of the money of that top 1 percent.

True, America was making huge strides forward. Thanks to the leadership of such capitalist giants as Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan, and Rockefeller, America's growth rate exceeded enormously even Europe's growth rate – a fact of which Europeans seemed totally unaware, believing that America was still basically a nation of cowboys!  Railroads crisscrossed the country; telegraphs, soon joined by telephones, also connected the country East and West; cities were lighted by gas lamps, soon replaced by electric lights; and the coal, steel and oil industries were growing at phenomenal rates.  Inventions – such as those cranked out by Thomas Edison – were changing the very way that people went about their lives, even in their homes.  The change impacting America was awesome to behold.

At the same time, there was something very, very wrong about how America's "progress" seemed to advantage financially only a handful of Americans.  This was not the America of fundamentally equal citizens that the Puritans had laid out.  This most unequal distribution of the nation's wealth (and thus social power) made even the old Southern plantation owners and their workforce of slaves look small-time by comparison.  In fact, there was much talk about the "wage slavery" of the American industrial working class ... which caused people to wonder what exactly it was that the Civil War had achieved – a war that so recently had come at such a high cost to its citizens of merely ordinary ranking.

Washington D.C.'s minimal role in this development.  Today we might expect the people to look to the Washington government to step in to correct such inequalities [actually most Americans are unaware that such skewing of the distribution of American wealth has been moving in the same direction since the entry of the country into the 21 century].  But the Washington government played basically just a backup role at the time.  Indeed, since the end of the Civil War, Washington's political importance seemed to have declined dramatically.  New York City, for instance, played a much bigger role in directing the development of the country.  America's presidents were certainly quite capable individuals.  But the nation really did not expect them to "lead" the country.  Such leadership belonged to others, even just local political figures, as America's politics seemed to be largely a local or regional matter at the time.

True, presidents were called on to step into the country's economic affairs when some of the financial crises hit the economy from time to time, such as the panic of 1893 – crises often brought on by changing policies of the government itself: such as the ongoing dispute over what exactly the value of the nation's currency ought to be based on ... whether on widely available silver (a policy favored by America's huge rural community) or on scarce gold (a policy favored by America's up-East banking and investment community).  The country would suffer during the later 1800s from waves of growth and depression ... due to the inability to decide exactly how to go at this matter.  For instance, this problem would ultimately force President Grover Cleveland in 1895 to turn to J.P. Morgan to come up with 3.5 million ounces of gold to put the nation's finances back in order as a result of the 1893 crisis. Then too there was the question of tariffs, which protected one industry at a heavy cost to other sectors of society.  And there was always the ongoing question of what to do about the corruption that seemed always to accompany positions of governmental power.

Into the 20th century.  Heading into the 20th century, material progress continued to unfold – with the invention of the automobile and the virtually simultaneous invention of the airplane.  But now much of the development played more to the advantage of the average American, such as the Model T Fords which Henry Ford, using the streamlined process of the moving assembly line, was able to drop the price on ... putting it in the hands of millions of Americans – willing also at the same time to pay his industrial workers such salaries that they too were able to own these same cars.

At this point also (the beginning of the 20th century) Washington finally became much more active in looking after the country's development.  This was due in great part to the personal dynamism of President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt, his successor William Howard Taft.  Both presidents went after the big monopolies that had captured so much of the country's economic capacity, using the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, originally designed to break up large workers' organizations, to break up instead the huge corporate and financial trusts ("trust-busting" as it was termed at the time) – such as when the Supreme Court in 1911 ordered the breaking up of Rockefeller's Standard Oil into 34 smaller companies.

The Progressivist Movement.  In great part this attack on the industrial trusts was a result of the spirited growth of what came to be termed the Progressivist Movement, drawing not just activist politicians, but vigilant journalists and just concerned citizens – such as Jane Addams, founder of the huge Hull House complex in Chicago designed to bring the Chicago poor into America's social mainstream ... or the activist lecturer (and Democratic Party presidential candidate three different times) William Jennings Bryan, who tried to stir ordinary Americans to take up more active ways politically in defense of the nation's traditional but declining Christian social-moral order.

Also, Americans were being mobilized to action around such issues as the quality and healthfulness of America's food industry; the problem of rampant alcoholism among the depressed working class (and elsewhere for that matter); the protection of the natural environment (being ravaged by both the industrial revolution and also by just the huge human push into the countryside); and ultimately the ongoing problem of the corrupt city and state political machines – resolved in part by creating the political party primary system, letting the American voter and not just the local party bosses decide who got to run for the country's various electoral offices.

And ultimately, through the 17th Amendment (ratified in 1913), the Progressivists produced the "democratizing" of the U.S. Senate, by taking the selecting of the states' representatives to the Senate away from the state legislatures and placing that election in the hands of the citizens themselves.  The presumption was that this would clean up the Senate by bypassing the power of the state political machines.  At the same time Washington's power was enhanced with the 16th Amendment (also ratified in 1913) by giving Washington the power to tax directly the people, also thus cutting back on Washington's dependency on financial support from the state governments.

Of course transferring power from the state capitals to the national capital did not clean up political corruption ... but served instead to move much of that corruption to Washington – because corruption naturally locates itself where power is to be found!  This was well illustrated in the vast corruption of the Warren G. Harding presidency that came to power only eight years later.  Also ... by undercutting the states' power vested in the U.S. Senate, it would reduce greatly one of the federal checks and balances against centralized authority – so wisely put in place by the Framers of the Constitution.  But the growing Humanism of the Progressivist movement did not see that coming.

The impact of European philosophy on America at this time.  Despite its geographic isolation from Europe, America never ceased being strongly impacted by the thinking of Europe's great philosophers.  Certainly America itself, from its very founding, was shaped deeply by just such a European intellectual heritage (from Geneva's Calvin, for instance).  And America would continue through its own cultural-intellectual (and spiritual) development to be deeply impacted by European intellectual developments – especially when it came to the tendency of European philosophers to want to elevate Human Reason above the Christian faith.

Already in the early 1600s, René Descartes tried to show the way Human Reason could serve humanity better than all the religious infighting going on between Catholic and Protestant armies at the time.  Towards the latter part of that same century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Isaac Newton and John Locke added considerably to the idea that mankind was on the brink of bringing a very mechanically-operating universe under human understanding and control.  But pure mechanical rationalism did not reach deep into the European soul.  Something more "Romantic" caught the attention of Europeans instead, especially as a result of the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who made human progress to be more a matter of going back to the natural, pre-civilized, instincts of primitive man.  So ... deep human instinct joined higher reason as the instruments that European philosophers believed could, under the right conditions, bring the world even to great human progress.

The British however, led by such social and economic scholars as David Hume and Adam Smith – being the pragmatists that they were by social nature – tended to be skeptical of such idealizations of social dynamics.  They preferred to stay with actual historical experience itself, as imperfect as that might be.  But at least long-standing social traditions were time-tested and thus proven empirically to work.

Then this British tendency was strengthened even further by the way that the efforts of French idealists to put their social theories to work in their French Revolution blew up in their faces.  The British were shocked at the level of violence that this revolution was able to reach ... although not by the way the French effort itself ultimately turned out.  Revolution in France had led to nothing more than complete social breakdown ... and bloody slaughter.  That came as no surprise to British observers (such as Edmund Burke) ... although, back in America, Jefferson had a very difficult time acknowledging the failure of the French Revolution.

The Germans were next to step up to answer the question of what was real and meaningful and what was not.  They too, like Rousseau, tended to go down the road of Romanticism, caught up in the dream of a possible instinctive rise of the German people as a true nation ... out of the chaos of Germany itself being made up of multitudes of small German kingdoms and principalities. As long as this divisive condition persisted, Germany would never be a real power in Europe.

In answer to this sad German social dynamic, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his friend Johann Gottfried Herder looked to the power of struggle itself (Sturm und Drang) against life's tough circumstances to bring the German nation to glory ... although more as a spiritual rather than a military or industrial enterprise.  Then Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel picked up on this idea, seeing human progress itself resulting from the struggle of societies in the face of ever-changing challenges.  He theorized that challenges brought on by the dynamic of a society's own development would automatically bring into being an opposing social force, one that would inevitably produce a clash, which in turn would birth yet a higher social form.  Hegel termed this a "dialectical" process of growth through conflict.  This Hegelian theory was very attractive to the European world of the 1800s ... and of course, especially to Germans.  It was not only convenient to European ambitions, it was highly compelling because it supposedly was based on a "scientific" rather than just a romantic basis ... although Hegel did claim that there was a Weltgeist or World Spirit driving this dialectical dynamic forward.

But by the mid-1800s the American spotlight was back on Britain, where Charles Darwin shook the moral foundations of the Christian world with his Origin of Species (1859) – demonstrating "scientifically" how the present biological picture of the world would likely have emerged through a Hegelian-like dialectic, that is, through growth or evolution of all the biological species from simpler forms of long ago ... through what his friend Thomas Huxley termed "survival of the fittest."  With the help of another Englishman, Herbert Spencer, this "Darwinian" dynamic was even applied to social theory, demonstrating how social progress through struggle occurred.  It was all very mechanical, very "scientific."  In Darwinism, there was not even any Weltgeist ... no God to play any role at all in any of the processes of life on this planet.

Karl Marx took this dialectic, and applied it to an economic theory of his own, that showed how social progress was achieved through a struggle, step by step, involving society's various economic classes, particularly a struggle between the owners of what was considered at one time or another of all "property" rights, and the property-less subject workers whose toil put society's wealth in the hands of these exploiting property owners.  But each economic phase in history emerged through social revolution – when the impoverished classes, through a natural process of gradually outnumbering the social exploiters, finally were able to rise up and overthrow their exploiters.  This in turn produced a whole new class system based on new rules of property ownership.  But, according to Marx, mankind was approaching the end of the historical process because given the social profile of the next revolution, that of the industrial workers against the industrial owners (members of the capitalist class), the whole matter of competing economic classes would come to an end.  This is because under Communism, all property would be held communally – not privately – thus eliminating all possibility of social exploitation.

Liberalism as a rising Humanist Religion in America.  Meanwhile, across the Atlantic in America, there was also growing ideological activity taking place ... such that would impact America greatly.  For instance there was the democratic idealist or highly Humanist John Dewey, who advocated the special training (or early indoctrination) of America's youth along more "Liberal" lines.  And there was the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who felt that the Supreme Court should take a more interventionist role in "bringing up to date" (in other words changing according to Holmes's own personal political inclinations) America's supposedly ever-evolving Constitutional foundations.

And Christianity, which had formerly formed the moral-spiritual foundations of that constitutional realm, now had to decide where the faith itself stood in relation to these new intellectual challenges.  Needless to say, it would divide the faith deeply.

The rising spirit of nationalism ... and Western imperialism.  Given the economic stress that the industrial revolution was creating as an exploding population faced with very limited opportunity for property ownership (as the West was closing up), one might have believed that Marxism or Communism would have become very popular in America.  But there was another factor at play here – even in Europe (perhaps even more importantly in Europe).  And that was a rising spirit of nationalism – a primitive tribal call to social-cultural glory.  This call to national glory appealed to the commoners more than Marx's call to industrial-class revolution.  Not surprisingly, Marx detested this nationalist spirit growing around him in Europe!

The days in which Europe's politics was a game played only by monarchs and their hired armies were coming to an end.  Since Napoleon had brought the "little people" into Europe's political games and unleashed their French fury on France's enemies, European monarchs had to look to their own little people to save their thrones from the French.  But this merely stirred deeply the tribal fires of nationalism in their lands, fires that would be very, very hard to control by the old royal authorities.

But by turning those fires away from Europe itself, sending the fire and storm of European nationalist passions abroad, to India, to China, to the Middle East, to Africa – nationalism was kept from tearing up Europe itself.  And so, thus was born the Age of Imperialism.

In some areas this dynamic had been going on for a long time.  The Portuguese and then the Spanish had planted colonies in America in the late 1400s and early 1500s ... and the English, of course, had done so in America at Virginia and New England in the early 1600s.  Then there were the Dutch, who took over a small Portuguese colony at the very southern tip of Africa (the Cape) and planted a growing community there – at about the same time they were doing so at what eventually would become New York (thus around the mid-1600s).  The Portuguese meanwhile held on to other positions in Africa established in the 1400s-1500s, and managed to plant trading colonies in India (Goa), southern China (Macao), and in what is today Indonesia – the latter also taken from the Portuguese by the Dutch in the 1600s.  And the Spanish had put in place a strongly Hispanic colony in the Philippines (the 1500s).  The British came along later on the Asian scene (the 1700s), through the work of the commercial company (but itself a huge political player in the imperial game) – the British East India Company – focused mostly on the subcontinent of India and its many different societies and languages.

By the 1800s the primary urge of European imperialism took on a number of new dimensions.  One was aimed at the position of a dying European power itself, Spain.  In this America joined in by simply seized much of the northern portion of Mexico (which itself had just broken away from Spain's control) ... meanwhile joining with Britain in putting economic and political "protection" (a favorite tactic involved in the not-so-subtle imperialist game) over the rest of newly independent Hispanic America.  And by this same instinct America completed the job at the end of the 1800s by "liberating" the Philippines and Cuba – and placing American "protection" over those lands as well.

Another focal point was the Far East, notably China (but also Japan and Indochina as well as the Philippines).  In China, America joined newly rising Germany, plus veteran imperialists Britain and France, in taking over a collapsing Chinese dynasty (and putting down anti-Western rebellions) – in order to bring Western cultural "enlightenment" (plus heroin) to a society that once thought of itself as the cultural center of the civilized world!

The third point of interest was the rest of the African continent (mostly south of the Sahara Desert), when the European powers (America played a role in Africa only in Liberia) gathered in Berlin in the 1880s and assigned this area and that area of Sub-Saharan Africa to Britain, France, Germany and Belgium (letting Portugal hang onto its older African colonies).  South Africa remained Afrikaner-Dutch and independent – in the face even of a British effort to take it over in the Anglo-Boer War at the end of the century.

And finally there was the "Sick Man of Europe," the Ottoman Turkish Empire, stretching across Southeastern Europe, the Near East (the Levant) and North Africa.  The French grabbed most of Ottoman North Africa, the British took over strategic Egypt, and a number of smaller but rising countries (Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece, principally) moved to seize portions of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkan Peninsula (Southeastern Europe).

The "Great War" (World War One - 1914-1918).  Several factors finally spun all this expansive energy against the Europeans themselves in what would turn out to be not a only totally pointless war of nation against nation, but such a savage enterprise that it would bleed Europe so badly that it left Europe merely to decline rapidly from its dominating position globally.  Besides the tempting decline of the Ottoman Empire and the ambitions this stirred in the Balkans, there was the factor of newly assembled Germany (finally unified into a single state through the leadership of Bismarck) and also a landlocked Austrian Empire, an empire that had been left out of the imperialist game ... and was also looking for its own expansion into the Balkan region.  And then there was Russia, a society that in the 1800s decided that rather than being invaded by Western interests, it wanted to get into the European power game ... as a player rather than as a constant victim.

Soon the players were choosing sides in a growing contest for dominance in Europe itself, until basically there were two opposing sides – ready to prove their national greatness at the slightest challenge.  And indeed it took only a couple of bullets to take down the Austrian royals that started the two sides to march against each other in August of 1914 – along basically two fronts.  One was primarily in Northern France, which quickly entrenched itself so deeply in the land that it barely changed lines over the next four years of the war, despite the millions of young Europeans sent in to slaughter other young Europeans.

The other front was in East Europe, along a line that flowed back and forth, and – like the front in the West – merely exhausting the European contenders to no great purpose.  Except that it did, finally in early 1917, collapse the Russian government ... which had come to find itself way, way in over its head, involved in a military commitment it had no way of meeting (sending multitudes of poorly armed Russian troops into German guns was stupidly suicidal).  Then, unsurprisingly, bloody revolution broke out in Russia with this political collapse.

And at that point, three years into this pointless war, American President (highly idealistic and personally quite authoritarian) Woodrow Wilson got the brilliant idea that America should join in this game of mutual slaughter ... "to make the world safe for democracy."  This was a clear case of an American president also getting in way over his head in terms of understanding what was actually going on in the world (not the last time this would happen to America, unfortunately).  Wilson got the bright idea that the fighting was actually about the good guys versus the bad guys, and if America were to join in, America could help the good guys win.  He claimed that the bad guys were led by the undemocratic ("autocratic" was the term he actually used) Germany and its allies against the "democracies" Britain and France – and now, thanks to the collapse of the Tsarist Government – newly "democratic" Russia as well.

Actually Britain and Germany had pretty much the same type of Government.  In fact Germany had proved itself to be much more "progressive" than Britain in terms of its social legislation.  And what Russia was at that point was hardly decided.  And it certainly had absolutely no democratic instincts, despite how Wilson glowed over "Russian democracy" as he stood before Congress in April of 1917 to call the nation to war.  Wow!  What dangerous ignorance.

But at least American entry (not really up and running until the Spring of 1918) helped to break the brutal stalemate and speed up German exhaustion.  Thus in November of 1918, the Germans (under Wilson's own terms) met to discuss the terms of peace, minus their experienced Emperor Wilhelm, but instead represented by political newbies who themselves were supported only by a newly confused Weimar Republic.  Thus the "democracies" Britain and France jumped at the chance to take revenge on a politically humbled Germany – despite Wilson's recognition of the very unfairness of it all (but politically he took no action to stop this destructive behavior of his "democratic" allies).  Indeed then the "democracies" grabbed what was left of the Ottoman Empire in the Levant (Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Jordan), awarding themselves "protective" rights over those lands.  But, but ... democracies were not supposed to be imperialistic.  They were supposed to be nice – lovers of peace and social justice.

Wilson returned to the States, heartbroken (and soon physically broken as well – although America was never let in on that fact).  And America – sickened by the deep betrayal of their lofty war goals (which had cost them plenty of young American lives) – vowed never, never to get involved in the schemes of the European Old World ever again!

Actually, we have to be careful about labeling the next period the "Roaring Twenties" because only part of the country "roared."  That would be urban America.  But rural America did not roar.  It moaned.

During the war itself rural America had boomed.  Europe (with its farmers in the trenches as soldiers) hungered for American food products.  Thus American farmers had taken out huge loans from their local banks to buy more land and new equipment to meet this huge market for their goods.  But with the end of the war and the return of the European soldiers to their farms, that market quickly dropped away ... to a point where the price of agricultural goods dropped to such a point that there was almost no profit to be had in the farming business.  Yet those loans had to be paid off.  Soon not only were farms in trouble, but so were their over-extended banks, which began to fail right along with the farms.  From rural America's perspective, the Great Depression had already begun (10 years earlier than it hit urban-industrial America).

Meanwhile urban America partied on – trying to put the awful memory of the recent war behind it.  Not only did urban Americans have a whole new range of material goodies to surround themselves with – cars, radios, telephones, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, etc. – they had whole new attitudes to go at life with – jazz, dance, clothing and hairstyles, and above all booze, speakeasies and nightclubs.  And because rural America was so disapproving of that lifestyle, urban America's drinking of booze actually increased ... in rather deliberate defiance of conservative America's 18th Amendment, which had made the drinking of alcoholic beverages totally illegal.

And where did Christian America fit into all of this post-war cultural development?  It certainly was not supportive of the great popularity of Sigmund Freud's new psychological theories (supposedly very "scientific") – demonstrating how religion was just a form of neurosis or emotional escapism that came to people when they could not manage their lives.  And there was the battle that raged in America over Darwinism – the Darwinists claiming that the Bible was simply a superstitious account of life's origins put forward by unenlightened ancients.  Indeed, such a battle over Darwinism did actually take place – in the form of a lawsuit (the Scopes Monkey Trial) in Tennessee in 1925, in which Clarence Darrow represented the "enlightened" urban attitude and William Jennings Bryan once again represented still deeply Christian small-town / rural America.  What the trial ultimately proved was a matter of which side people found themselves supporting going into the event.  It changed nothing.  Instead, it merely clarified and thus deepened a spiritual divide tearing at America.

On the foreign relations front, America's retreat into "isolationism" did not mean an end in America's involvement in the affairs of the larger world.  It just meant that such involvement would be very selective.  Thus America did not join Wilson's pet project, the League of Nations, which virtually every other major nation at the time joined as full members.  The inflexible, "always-right" Wilson would not yield an inch in the Senate's understandable concern about where exactly membership in the organization would leave Congress's own powers to decide when and where to go to war.  The Senate was not willing to leave that decision to others making up some kind of a majority in the League of Nations.  But beyond that, America did engage in peace conferences, even sponsored one of its own (the Washington Naval Conference, 1921-1922) focused on limiting the size of the navies of the major powers America, Britain and Japan (among others).  America even sponsored an agreement among the nations (the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928) not to ever go to war – except clear cases of the need for self-defense.  These were odd terms, as virtually all wars are undertaken with the idea of a society acting in self-defense ... thus making the agreement nice, but ultimately pointless.  But that was pretty characteristic of the Idealism of the times.

Politically speaking on the domestic front, a big development was the 19th Amendment, allowing women the right to vote in all the states of the Union.  The presumption was that not only was this the right thing to do, it would help clear up political corruption (women supposedly were exempt from the kind of political corruption typical of the male specie).  This political right went into force just in time for all American women to vote into power what is probably America's most corrupt presidency in American history!  But Harding's presidency was brief (1921-1923) and in his Vice President Calvin Coolidge taking over the White House, a very Puritan sense of political morality was put in place, which cut back on Washington's power (and thus its susceptibility to corruption) with the old adage, "that government is best that governs least."

  Warren G. Harding            Calvin Coolidge   

16. THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Then suddenly, with seemingly no warning, the music in urban America stopped.  The Wall Street stock market came crashing down in late 1929 – and with it so did also the fortunes and prosperity of Americans – and Europeans – as well.

Market saturation.  The mechanics of the depression were simple enough.  It's termed "market saturation."  By the end of the 1920s, most everyone had their cars, their radios, their home appliances.  True, there were always new consumers entering the market (the youth as they attained adulthood) – but far, far from the numbers that filled the market in the earlier 1920s.  It was something akin to what happened to rural America ten years earlier: product oversupply in a world of consumer reduction.  This forced businesses to have to cut back on their production and staff size if they were going to stay in operation, thus increasing the unemployment rate of the working class.  This in turn cut back even further consumer power among the Americans themselves.  The whole thing was a circle of cause and effect slowly, then more rapidly, taking down the entire national economy.

And then it took down also many European economies – most notably the German economy – deeply in debt to American banks, the latter who were forced to call in their loans to European banks (national and private), which of course themselves were in no position to pay off quickly.  Thus down, down, down did things go ... everywhere.

Of course the president in power at the time, Herbert Hoover, received the wrath of a confused and angry America, though he had little to do with the causes of the depression.  There was the possibility of his updating for immediate payout (even at a reduced rate) a pension due those who had served in the recent war.  But payments were not due to begin until 1945.  And Hoover foolishly would not back down on this issue ... and sent the army in to clear out the veteran protesters who had come intending to stay in Washington until their desperate demands were met.  This put Hoover in an even worse light in the thinking of the American people.

Otherwise, there was actually little Hoover could do. The market needed consumers, not government programs, although he attempted finally to put some government spending into action – and then was accused by his Democratic Party opponents of introducing hated "Socialism" into the American political system ... ironic, because this is exactly what the Democrats would do once in power in 1933!

Roosevelt's "New Deal."  In any case Hoover lost big in the 1932 elections to another Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who promised America a "New Deal" (details missing because very likely Roosevelt himself had no good idea of what to do at the time).

Roosevelt's great power came in his personal charisma.  He could charm a goat.  But great power was also found in his ability to get intelligent counsel (in the particular direction he chose personally to go) in his operations.  And once in power he decided to go down exactly the Socialist road that Hoover had started down.  Except that Roosevelt went big down that road.  The socio-economic programs that rolled out in his first "100 days" were phenomenal: pledges drawn from companies not to cut back on their business employment (they got to display a sticker on their shop window to show their support), new stock market rules, banking insurance, pensions for the citizens, and other rules designed to guide the way America was henceforth to go about its business.  But above all the New Deal put into place huge government infrastructure projects that employed hundreds of thousands of otherwise unemployed Americans: national parks, national highways, dams and huge hydroelectric projects (bringing electricity to regions of the country up until that time out of the loop) – but also local / municipal swimming pools, museums, town hall makeovers.  In short, jobs, jobs, jobs.

Ah ... but the problem of an unsettling socio-economic dynamic remained in place: market saturation.  Except this time it was market saturation for government projects.  Once the national parks were up and running, the highways and hydroelectric projects in place, and all the small projects they could think of completed, what was Roosevelt to do next to keep all these government workers employed?  By 1937 America seemed to be slipping back economically.  And things did not improve the next year or the next.  His projects had not brought the private consumer back to the marketplace that America's private economy depended on.  People did not eat more or buy yet another car or radio.  They put their money "under their mattresses" – so that they added nothing to an expanding economy.  And of course no new consumer products were hitting the market place either.  So the economy continued to stall.

Thus the intellectual, moral and spiritual confusion tended to continue through the 1930s.  Simple solutions were proposed by various individuals to complex problems – because they were psychologically satisfying.  They also brought enormous political support to those hungering for political importance.

The easiest formula was simply to blame capitalism as a system for having brought on this terrible catastrophe.  Humiliated capitalists were put forward for public blame ... even strangely for having caused not only the depression but also for the Great War (World War One) that they had benefited from financially as "Daddy Warbucks" (a character out of the popular newspaper comic strip series, "Orphan Annie.")  Capitalism thus became the hated social formula of the 1930s... much as Fascism and Communism would soon become (and are still used even today as simplistic labels of evil ... aimed at one's political opponents).

Socialism and Humanism.  Socialism seemed to be a much more effective answer to society's challenges – especially after Hitler put into place a highly energized German economy after taking control of his nation in the name of German national-socialism (Nazism).  And Stalin seemed to be performing the same miracle in Russia in the name of workers' Socialism (or Communism) – as Russia was industrializing at a breakneck speed (and a lot of Russian necks were indeed being broken, except that the enormous blood-price paid by the Russian and Ukrainian people was completely hidden from international view).  Although eventually Hitler's socialism was identified as being located on the Right Wing of the political spectrum and Stalin's socialism on the Left, they actually together had much more in common than they did with American capitalism.

Joseph Stalin            Adolf Hitler

Ultimately this brought out the enlightened ones of America to come up with a new vision for the country, when Unitarian pastors and Liberal professors and journalists gathered to put together the Humanist Manifesto in 1933.  They claimed that Humanism offered the world a vastly improved religion.  Indeed ... they described their goal as bringing "religious Humanism" (their own term) forward to save American society from its failed former traditional and superstitious Christian religion.  Religious Humanism was destined to bring both science and socialism to its proper place of glory in the new age unfolding before it.  Of course this was written in the same year that Roosevelt was putting into play his guaranteed solution to the depression – and was an expression of the same optimism that the failed old ways were about to be put away definitively in the face of a newly unfolding world that the socially scientific New Deal and its intellectual "Brain Trust" were determined to bring forth.

Christianity responds.  And where was Christianity in the midst of all this cultural-spiritual turmoil?  Sadly the split between Conservatives and Liberals within the church itself merely intensified under the pressure brought on by the Depression.  And it seemed that the trend in Liberal Christianity was to follow the "optimism" of the New Deal world and push out of the way the "old thinking" of Christian Conservatives.  For instance the theological conservative J. Gresham Machen was not only kicked out of Princeton Seminary in order to make way for a more progressive instinct to now guide that venerable institution, leading him to then set up Westminster Seminary in nearby Philadelphia, but then the increasingly "progressive" Presbyterians went all the way and had him kicked out of the denomination!  This kind of stress would of course affect other denominations as well.  They all faced the same issues.  Ultimately the outstanding H. Richard Niebuhr termed the message of the "new" look of Christianity as "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross " (The Kingdom of God in America - 1937).  Once again Humanistic Unitarianism was advancing its way through Christian circles.

J. Gresham Machen           H. Richard Niebuhr   

Actually, two very important developments were starting up at the same time, ones which would not only help America get through the Depression but also the coming World War ... and the Cold War beyond that!  One was action taken by Congregationalist pastor James W. Fifield, Jr.  The same year that Roosevelt was putting into play his highly programmatic (and thus "scientific") solution to the depression, Fifield birthed his Spiritual Mobilization movement, dedicated to getting the gospel of personal independence out to the nation ... through a sermon series preached from the pulpits of the movement’s extensive pastoral membership.  The other development was Methodist pastor Abraham Vereide's City Chapel program, which brought together America's leaders of local organizations (political and industrial/financial) at "prayer breakfasts" designed to keep their courage up as they tried to find ways to bring Americans back under full employment.  Indeed, Fifield's prayer breakfasts would establish a leadership dynamic all across America, almost as important as church attendance itself.

James W. Fifield, Jr.              Abraham Vereide 

So indeed there was a Christian voice to be heard, offering comfort to a confused America.  And ultimately its advice was for the faithful to toughen up and know that somehow "God's got it."  And thankfully that's what a lot of America did – toughen up and look to God for guidance.  They would need that toughness – not the silliness they had indulged themselves in during the Roaring Twenties – to face effectively the challenges that were building off in Asia and Europe.

---

Excerpts from Volume 1

Washington – the warrior (excerpt from page 122-125).

George Washington’s appointment by the Continental Congress as commander of the newly authorized Continental Army proved to be a very Providential (as in Godly) choice.  Whereas a number of experienced Patriot officers (having also previously served as officers in the British Army) coveted that position, Washington had not.  He accepted the responsibility only because he understood that he was simply answering the call to duty – a call that came not just from men but also from God.  He was living out his destiny.

[Footnote:  It was also a wise human choice, because he was a Virginian and his appointment made this more than just a New England rebellion, as it was up to that point.]

Washington, as sensitive as any of us to the opinion of others, had taught himself at an early age to discipline his feelings and move forward toward his calling regardless of the obstacles (usually human) thrown before him.  But he also knew there was a special hand on his life, a special place in the affairs of Providence (the term for God frequently used at that time) that not only protected him, but opened the way for him to move ahead in life.  He thus combined faith and personal discipline in a way that inspired others.  He sought honor by seeking first of all to be honorable.  He was highly demanding of integrity in himself – to be a man of honor.

As events were soon to demonstrate, he could be rather forgiving of the lack of honor in his associates (such as his colleagues Lee and Gates) who had given him little reason to expect much from them anyway.  But he could be quite demanding of integrity of character and action when it came to those on whom he had come to confer his trust (like Arnold).  Washington was unbending in his expectation of excellent behavior on the part of the men under his command.  But these expectations were always accompanied by his equally strong sense of trust in these same men.  This conferral of his trust was a powerful instrument that succeeded in getting the very best from others.  The soldiers under his command seemed always to try eagerly and sacrificially to live up to that trust.

This was leadership, true leadership, and a real blessing to a new nation trying to make its way forward into an unknown future.  Washington would not need to bark orders to those around him to get them moving in the right direction.  A simple word would be enough to get things moving.  People would be moved to right behavior sometimes simply by his mere presence in their midst.  This power of his almost wordless presence (which happened daily as he moved among his soldiers in the icy fields of Valley Forge) would prove in fact to be one of his greatest contributions to the American cause, not only in war but also in peace (such as his daily almost wordless contribution as chairman of the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia the summer of 1787 to write the new American Constitution).

From where then did Washington draw such inner strength of character if it clearly was not the approval of others?  In part it was almost something he seemed born with – a burning desire to succeed.  But the success he sought was both social as well as personal: he was a man of incredible concern for the welfare of others.  And he seemed to have some well-cultivated instinct for doing things right – right not only as social convention demanded, but at an even deeper level, what he understood God or Providence required of him.  Washington was faithful in his time spent quietly in private prayer with God and in his attendance in Sunday worship (although not necessarily regular in this latter matter), fully convinced that there was no other way to secure goodness and Truth for his world, personally and socially.  His sense of personal responsibility arose greatly from that powerful sense of divine appointment.  He lived and served, as he saw things, fully in service to God and country – by God's will.

How that special relationship he had with God in the midst of this crushing responsibility is well illustrated in the Diary and Remembrances of a Presbyterian Minister Rev. Nathaniel Randolph Snowden who recorded a conversation he had with Isaac Potts of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania (at whose home Washington was residing that winter):

I was riding with him (Mr. Potts) near Valley Forge, where the army lay during the war of the Revolution.  Mr. Potts was a Senator in our state and a Whig. I told him I was agreeably surprised to find him a friend to his country as the Quakers were mostly Tories.  He said, It was so and I was a rank Tory once, for I never believed that America could proceed against Great Britain whose fleets and armies covered the land and ocean. But something very extraordinary converted me to the good faith.  What was that? I inquired.  Do you see that woods, and that plain?  It was about a quarter of a mile from the place we were riding.  There, said he, laid the army of Washington.  It was a most distressing time of ye war, and all were for giving up the ship but that one good man.  In that woods, pointing to a close in view, I heard a plaintive sound, as of a man at prayer.  I tied my horse to a sapling and went quietly into the woods and to my astonishment I saw the great George Washington on his knees alone, with his sword on one side and his cocked hat on the other.  He was at Prayer to the God of the Armies, beseeching to interpose with his Divine aid, as it was ye Crisis and the cause of the country, of humanity, and of the world.

Such a prayer I never heard from the lips of man.  I left him alone praying.  I went home and told my wife, I saw a sight and heard today what I never saw or heard before, and just related to her what I had seen and heard and observed.  We never thought a man could be a soldier and a Christian, but if there is one in the world, it is Washington.  We thought it was the cause of God, and America could prevail.

Washington's understanding of the challenge before him.  Indeed the appointment of Washington as the commander of the Continental Army was a Providential choice also because he understood the way that Americans would have to fight the huge English military machine better than anyone else around him.  He understood two things: 1) to engage the huge English army not directly, but indirectly, using the element of surprise (Indian style) and 2) remember that wars are not won in one great battle, but instead through the staying power of one side willing to fight on longer than the enemy.

Battles bring the victor immediate glory.  And a great number of the men, especially other generals in the American army, were eager to attain that glory.  They were primarily focused on the next battle, eager to get a chance to gain glory. Victory was not only extremely thrilling in its moment of arrival (a kind of military high), it gave the victors greatly enhanced status with others.  However, Washington well understood that while victory in battle may bring glory, it does not necessarily win wars.  And his sense of duty always made very clear to him that he was called to win a war, not gain impressive victories in battle.

This may seem puzzling to many even today.  Aren't the victories in battle what ultimately win wars?  Maybe – and maybe not.  What actually wins wars is a breaking of the enemy's desire, for whatever reason, to continue the conflict.  Wars are won when one side or the other is ready to call it quits.

Thus wars are fundamentally about morale, not about military mechanics.  Certainly a victory in a particular battle improves the level of morale of one or the other side in a war.  But it generally takes more than one, or even several, military victories to reshape morale to the extent that one side or the other is willing to call it quits.  Warriors usually have great staying power – and a loser in battle can put this particular defeat behind him with the hope of a possible win in the next round of the conflict.  So in the end, a war is won on the staying power of the contenders, not just the military brilliance of one or another army and its commanders.

Washington's strategy.  Thus while generals in the various armies under Washington's command seemed out to win battles – and the glory such battles earned them – Washington was doggedly committed to winning the war, regardless of the fortunes of battle.  Washington knew that his primary function was to keep his army of rebels (or Whigs or Patriots) intact and still troublesome to the English (even if it was never fully victorious on the battlefield) – until England tired of the game and was ready to call it quits and let the Americans go freely on their way again.  Washington's inability to win the big one year after year drew much criticism from others, especially other generals who coveted the dignity of Washington's top position over the Continental Army.  Consequently, they frequently lobbied with the Continental Congress behind Washington's back to have him replaced (by themselves of course).  But Washington seemed unruffled by these endeavors of some of his associates.  He was given a war to win.  And by the grace of God he was determined to fulfill his duty.

Ethical troubles behind Washington's back.  So, character and understanding combined in Washington to produce exactly the kind of leadership that the Patriots would need to get through this war successfully.  But other generals lacked that same character.  And from time to time America paid a big price for these individuals' quest for praise and honor – at the cost of true wisdom and eventually even their own success.  In their quest for glory they put themselves at the center of their devotion and lost sight of the bigger agenda, the one which Washington was clearly following.  They became like gods in their own eyes, seeking all glory and honor for themselves.  Thus they failed to grasp the higher calling on America, the one that God had placed before them, and the one that Washington was attempting to answer.  And God was with him.  But as for the others, God gave them over to the depravity of their own logic.  And they at some point self-destructed, sadly taking a lot of American morale or spirit with them.

...their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.  Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man ... (Romans 1:21-23 NIV)

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Lincoln the Christian (excerpt from pages 288-289).

There seems to have been nothing particularly remarkable about Lincoln’s religious or spiritual nature going into the White House in 1861.  As president he would attend frequently the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington.  But he was definitely not what you would call a churchy individual.  However, the four years of the presidency would have a tremendous impact on how he made his way forward through life’s many challenges.  He was a sensitive man, which made him all the more vulnerable to the criticism and personal attacks that others would aim at him.  He was called on to lead a war, which meant the deaths of countless young men, both Southern as well as Northern Americans, all of which burdened his heart deeply.  There would always be political voices claiming that he was going too slow – or too fast – in his conduct of the war.  There would be subordinates who would disappoint him deeply with their failures to live up to their responsibilities, others who because of their own political ambitions would undercut him in order to bring him down.  Even within his cabinet – even within his own home (his wife could be brutal in her sarcasm and withering criticism) – he often had to face dispiriting opposition.

What held Lincoln together was not man, not man’s opinions, not man’s advice.  What kept Lincoln going during these extremely stressful years was his growing sense of the hand of God in placing him in the presidency, and the grace of God in providing the only counsel he could depend on.

He had an ever-deepening sense that all of this tragedy was a way that God was cleansing the nation of its sins, in order to restore it to its longstanding status as a model society, a true Christian nation and thus a democratic light to the world.  As he put the matter at Gettysburg in November of 1863 in honoring those who had died for this just cause: Americans must "resolve ... that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

This attitude was brought into even higher relief in his second inaugural address in March of 1865 (just weeks before his assassination) when the entire second half of the speech focused on how the nation must answer to the righteous judgments of God, and how it is imperative at this point "with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right to finish the work, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to achieve a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." Here was truly a man of God.

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The Scopes Monkey Trial, Dayton, Tennessee – 1925 (excerpt from pages 483-485).

But undoubtedly the most dramatic confrontation of the decade between the two cultures occurred over the issue of the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution in the public schools.

In 1925 the two sides, liberal urban America and conservative rural America met for something of a showdown in Dayton, Tennessee, over the question of teaching Darwinism in Tennessee’s public schools.  The battle was over the fundamental question: was man descended, as Darwin stated, through the evolutionary process of natural selection ("survival of the fittest") from some early version of a primate (something of an early “monkey” specie)–or was he, as the Bible states, created fully as a man by God in a single event?

The confrontation came to pass when in May of 1925, a group of Dayton civic leaders met at F. E. Robinson’s Drugstore and decided to challenge Tennessee’s new statute forbidding the teaching of Darwinist evolution.  One motivation for holding the trial in Dayton was to revive the town’s flagging economy.  They knew that this would somehow put Dayton on everyone’s map (and indeed it did!).

The mastermind behind this event was George Washington Rappleyea, an engineer and geologist who managed the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company.  Rappleyea was widely credited with suggesting that Dayton challenge the new anti-evolution statute.  Cooperating in this venture was the twenty-four-year-old John Thomas Scopes.  He was teaching at the local high school, his first job after graduating from the University of Kentucky in 1924.  He taught algebra and physics, served as athletic coach, and occasionally substituted in biology classes at the Rhea County High School.  The idea was that he would teach Darwinist biology – at least once – in violation of the state’s law prohibiting the teaching of Darwinism.  This act would then set up the opportunity for the legal world in Tennessee to decide whether such a law was indeed constitutional.

During the extremely hot summer of 1925 the “Scopes Monkey Trial” riveted the attention of the nation as newspapermen from all around the country crowded into the steaming courthouse to follow the trial.

The old political warhorse, William Jennings Bryan, represented WASPish America, with its fervent dislike of Darwinism.  Representing the Darwinists was Clarence Darrow, the celebrity New York lawyer who had dazzled the nation with his clever defense of two society boys who had killed a young fourteen-year-old neighbor in order to see what it would be like to commit the ultimate crime and to prove their Darwinian superiority (Darrow blamed their actions on the extravagantly wealthy socio-economic circumstances that had distorted their moral sensitivities).  Darrow also represented the fast-rising urban, secular culture which ridiculed the superstition of the traditional Christian culture.  Backing up Darrow was the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was to become the leading voice behind a movement to replace WASPish Christianity with Secular-Humanism as America’s cultural-religious underpinning.

Darrow and Bryan

Which side actually won the 1925 contest depended on the natural sympathies of the person giving answer to the question.  From pulpits, anti-Darwinism seemed vindicated by the fact that the judge decided to support the law prohibiting the teaching of Darwinism in the Tennessee public schools.  But the up-East urban newspapers celebrated the quite obvious (obvious to them anyway) intellectual victory of the scientific Darwinists over the superstitious, backwoods fantasies of the anti- Darwinists.

Closing arguments were not allowed (defense attorney Darrow refused and thus prosecuting attorney Bryan was not permitted to do so either) and the sentence of guilty was quickly decided in matters of only minutes on July 21.  But Bryan published his proposed closing argument subsequently.  It is well worth the read because it is actually prophetic:

Science is a magnificent force, but it is not a teacher of morals.  It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine.  It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessel.  It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the ship of its compass and thus endanger its cargo.  In war, science has proven itself an evil genius; it has made war more terrible than it ever was before.  Man used to be content to slaughter his fellowmen on a single plane, the earth’s surface.  Science has taught him to go down into the water and shoot up from below and to go up into the clouds and shoot down from above, thus making the battlefield three times as bloody as it was before; but science does not teach brotherly love.  Science has made war so [brutal] that civilization was about to commit suicide; and now we are told that newly discovered instruments of destruction will make the cruelties of the late war seem trivial in comparison with the cruelties of wars that may come in the future.  If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene.  His teachings, and His teachings alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world

Five days after the verdict, Bryan–back on the speaking tour–died quietly in his sleep.  Ultimately the case itself decided nothing.  But it considerably clarified the WASPish and anti-WASPish split in American culture.