A Student of the American Character

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A Student of the American Character

Jackson Lears upholds a type of liberalism no longer found on today’s left.

Credit: Reinhold Leitner

Conjurers, Cranks, Provincials, and Antediluvians: The Off-Modern in American History, Jackson Lears. Yale University Press, 456 pages

The Rutgers professor T.J. Jackson Lears is one of the most original historians of our time—so original, in fact, that it is hard to say exactly what he is a historian of. American thought and culture are his subject. His period is Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, the Great War … that cascade of political battles that make up the two long generations between 1865 and 1932, when the United States was re-founded by moneymen on the broken promises of the Civil War. Lears edits Raritan, a prestigious literary/cultural quarterly. Year-in, year-out, for decades, he was a star reviewer in the book pages of the New Republic and the Wilson Quarterly. There his commanding and highly readable essays often dealt with canonical American writers and thinkers—Henry Adams, William James, Van Wyck Brooks. 

But his life’s work, pursued in half a dozen book-length studies, has been to discover something more elusive—the history of American moods and inclinations, even of American character. “All history,” begins his Rebirth of a Nation (2009), “is the history of longing.” What Americans are longing for at any given minute is shaped by the wisdom of the country’s best thinkers, but also by historical accidents, coercive institutions, and plutocratic bullying, not to mention revivals, superstitions, fashions, and propaganda. In turn, the public mood constitutes an iron outer limit on the mischief of energetic and innovative elites. Lears’s heroes are often commoners who assert that limit—however crudely and ungraciously—against the ruling interests of the day. His newest book collects two dozen of his historical and political essays under the title Conjurers, Cranks, Provincials and Antediluvians. 

It was the Vietnam war that radicalized Lears. He did not spend it at Woodstock. An autobiographical introduction describes a crisis of conscience he suffered in 1969. As a young man of conservative Catholic background who had grown up down the street from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, he found himself serving as a signals officer with a top-secret security clearance on the Navy cruiser Chicago. The ship carried tactical nuclear missiles, official denials to the contrary notwithstanding. He had figured out a couple of things on board—first, that modern wars kill civilians systematically; second, that in the event of a nuclear attack, he himself would be decrypting the launch codes. Lears’s quest for conscientious-objector status and an honorable discharge was complicated. Military secrecy meant he could not reveal that the ship was nuclear-armed. 

These complications influenced his choice of career. “It was not only what happened to civilians that concerned me,” he writes. “It was what happened in the minds of the men who attacked them—including, potentially, myself.” The entire process was subject to manipulation from above. “I learned then that the most dangerous purveyors of disinformation are not wacked-out conspiracy theorists on the margins of public discourse, but the military and its allies in the national security state, as well as their stenographers in the mainstream media.” Certain of Lears’s liberal readers who applauded his message in the aftermath of the Vietnam war have lately been taken aback to find him writing in the same vein about the elites managing the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

The essays in this new collection concern money, advertising, energy (in the sense of imperialist élan, not of megawattage), surveillance, civil war (and the Civil War), populism, machismo, family life, careerism (particularly among intellectuals), and charlatanry (ditto). Beyond an impressively well-thought-out opposition to militarism and empire, Lears is not really an ideologue about any of these things. This might make his work sound like a collection of Andy Rooney–ish gripes or aperçus. It is not. It is always a multi-disciplinary attempt to say something rigorous and profound about the deep structures of American society, which arise from deep structures of American character. 

Consider the Americans’ schizophrenic views of gambling, the subject of Lears’s 1995 essay “Playing with Money,” reprinted here. Americans are of two minds on the subject. In the heyday of the Baltimore Colts  half a century ago, Lears notes, the highest compliment the team’s play-by-play men could pay the team’s thrilling and beloved quarterback Johnny Unitas was to call him a “riverboat gambler”—this while state legislators were moving to shut down every slot machine in Maryland. The Puritans thought that games of chance were a wicked claim to peer into the mind of God. Yet Tocqueville noted that Americans liked risk, and even needed it. In a rough-and-tumble democratic social order without fixed classes, a belief in luck helps reconcile have-nots and failures to their lot. So is the gambler a cool cat who knows when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em? Or is he a pathetic addict? Americans careen wildly from one view to the other. In the century after the Civil War, games of chance, at least legal ones, were confined to the dog track and the horse track. But in 1967, New York, facing deficits, introduced a state lottery; in 1971, off-track betting returned; and later that decade Atlantic City opened casinos. Today, 45 states have lotteries, 44 have casinos, and gambling syndicates have captured professional sports.

For the most part, Lears takes the moralistic side of the argument. Gambling, at least as the corporations have reestablished it, can be “an addiction or a destructive compulsion—an anxious, desperate perversion of the spirit of play … one need only saunter by the casino in the early-morning hours and watch the hollow-eyed habitués pump up their Visa card indebtedness on the ubiquitous cash machines to be persuaded that the problem is real.” And he goes further than that. Attitudes towards gambling at the blackjack table tend to track attitudes towards gambling on the trading floor. In his essay “The Magicians of Money” (2005), Lears notes how cycles of free-wheeling financial speculation are followed by decades of regulatory crackdown. For a long time the American middle class distrusted Wall Street, feeling “systematically excluded from a trough where only a handful of overfed hogs could fit.” The crash of 1929 confirmed their fears—not just because their shares lost money but because the wheelers and dealers of Wall Street behaved appallingly (and acted illegally) to recoup their own losses. Richard Whitney, chair of the New York Stock Exchange, was jailed for embezzlement.

The great boom years of the mid-twentieth century were sleepy years on Wall Street. Not until 1961 did volume of shares traded match 1929. After a brief and illusory effervescence in the 1960s, the markets returned to “stagnation and obscurity” in the 1970s, when Ronald Reagan began running for president on a program of slashing taxes. So Lears’s examination of American attitudes towards gambling reveal a fact of capital importance. The United States embarked on its adventure of tax-cutting and free-trading at a moment when financial scamming was a distant memory and the public’s ordinary vigilance against wheeling-and-dealing had never been more relaxed.

While no one would ever mistake Lears for a fan of capitalism, he is not simply engaged in ideological piling on, either. He will sometimes take the gamblers’ side against the moralizers. He has written a lot about Walter Lippmann, a towering intellectual of early 20th century progressivism who early in his career published a book called Drift and Mastery. Lears is fascinated by this binary. Presumably, the title was meant to pose an implicit rhetorical question that is easily answered, like Good and Evil or Civilization and Barbarity. Lears, though, chooses not to see it as a rhetorical question at all. In some ways, he thinks, a healthy society should prefer drift. The gambler who enters the game with open eyes, recognizes he can lose, and holds money to be a mere symbol, is imprudent, yes, but he is also striking a blow against Promethean arrogance. “It is a worldview profoundly at odds with one based on rational self-interest,” Lears writes. “It also sounds a little like Christianity.”

Lears is not a religious writer, nor is he a moralist, but he writes with an unsettling Christian sense of paradox. It is hard to seek truth in the presence of power. There is a problem with elites of all kinds from the get-go. Being at the top of an order, they tend to see it as a just order. Winners cast themselves as visionaries, dismiss the losers as “cranks,” and recast their own political, economic, or academic ascendancy as the only possible outcome consistent with basic decency. Democracy doesn’t reliably correct this problem. In fact, the mass of people may assent to elite verdicts without really believing them, because they favor stability. But the line between visionaries and cranks is always drawn by an interested party, and is often arbitrary.

In “The Usefulness of Cranks” (2009), mostly about John Muir and the early ecological movement, Lears baits an interesting trap for his progressive readers. He mentions Madison Grant, the heroic naturalist and founder of the American Museum of Natural History who helped save California’s redwoods and the Yosemite. Grant was also the most prominent Anglo-Saxon race theorist of the second decade of the last century, the author of The Passing of the Great Race, a fictionalized version of which Tom Buchanan recommends in The Great Gatsby. Lears notes that Grant’s biographer considers these two roles incongruous—but he begs to differ. “Starting out with a hunter’s desire to protect endangered game,” Lears writes of Grant, “he soon realized that when protected creatures proliferated, they threatened their own habitat.” And it was a Darwinian age. “It was only a short step, for Grant, from culling inferior elks to culling inferior humans.” The environment, in its undisturbed state, is about drift more than mastery. Ideologies of mastery tend to be contingent, not eternal, and so does their moral luster. Objectively, environmentalism is no more “progressive” than race science.

Where Lears shows antipathy, it is towards the ideologically overconfident. His contempt for Theodore Roosevelt is practically bottomless, as becomes evident in “A Boy’s Own Story” (2011), a review of Edmund Morris’s three-volume biography of TR. Three decades separated the first and the last of Morris’s series. Lears can use them to illustrate how the American reception of a macho, martial, imperialist leader like TR soured over the years: rapturous when the first volume appeared in 1979, in the feckless depths of the Carter administration, hostile when the third volume appeared after the débâcle of George W. Bush’s wars. This should not be surprising. A favorite theme of Lears is the changing American idea of manliness, from something holistic into something more specialized. As he writes elsewhere:

“For most of the nineteenth century, the achievement of manhood required acceptance of larger public responsibilities and commitments to family and community. Only toward the end of the century, as members of the post–Civil War generation came of age in the shadow of their heroic predecessors, was manhood recast in the language of physical toughness and military violence.”

Roosevelt was “a pivotal figure in this transition,” Lears argues, but just as important is that his anxieties about “energy” and “action” and “vitality” had been shared by American intellectuals and artists. “Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential,” wrote Emerson in 1837. “Without it, he is not yet man.” And with this we reach a problem that has preoccupied Lears over the last few years: You would think that intellectuals, faced with the truth that power biases those who hold it, would have a standing counter-bias, or at least a hardened neutrality. That is how Lears remembers it was in the 1960s. Today, intellectuals rally to power’s side.

In “Roads Not Taken” (2012), an attempt to lay out an ethics of American empire, Lears applauded the Cold War diplomat George Kennan for writing that “there is … no power, individual or collective, without some associated guilt”—a sentiment that Kennan attributed to the clergyman Reinhold Niebuhr. By contrast, the more typical American “secular providentialism,” as Lears calls it, assumes that power and virtue are aligned. 

For those who subscribed to this understanding of secular providentialism in the twentieth century, there was no salvation outside the Progressive church. During World War I, during which Woodrow Wilson imposed the strictest speech limitations in American history before those of our own age, many intellectuals who despised the war in private found excuses for backing it in public. The progressive activist Randolph Bourne, whom Lears admires in other contexts, wrote:

“If we obstruct, we surrender all power for influence. If we responsibly approve, we then retain our power for guiding. We will be listened to as responsible thinkers, while those who obstructed the coming of war have committed intellectual suicide and shall be cast into outer darkness. Criticism by the ruling powers will only be accepted from those intellectuals who are in sympathy with the general tendency of the war.”

Lears, as noted, considers Teddy Roosevelt lazy, self-important, and irresponsible. While he does not resent Morris and other historians who hold a contrary opinion, he does expect a modicum of curiosity about “the cultural atmosphere that created and sustained Roosevelt’s political career—an atmosphere pervaded by longings for social and political regeneration.” This is worth remembering in the age of Donald Trump. As a citizen, Lears deplores Trump, with his “grotesque incapacity to govern.” As a historian, he expects an account of what shifted in the culture to convince voters that Donald Trump was a fit man to become president. 

But no such account is forthcoming from those intellectuals who might seem to have the most interest in providing one. In an essay on the work of historian Anne Applebaum, called “Orthodoxy of the Elites” (2021), Lears views Applebaum as a handmaiden of power, not only oblivious but outright incurious about why Brexit passed in the U.K., Trump was elected in the U.S., and the gilets jaunes went into the streets in France—or, as she puts it, “why, at that exact moment, everybody got very angry.” To suggest reasons that the public might back movements alleging establishment corruption would be to risk self-incrimination.

Lears’s article “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk about Russian Hacking” (2018) came out before the report of special counsel Robert Mueller into allegations that foreign interference had brought Trump to power. Yet already Lears could predict that there would be nothing there. “So far, after months of ‘bombshells’ that turn out to be duds,” he wrote, “there is still no actual evidence for the claim that the Kremlin ordered interference in the American election.” What there was was the same sort of cynical misdirection from government agencies that Lears remembered from the Vietnam war. When former director of national intelligence James Clapper said that Russians were “almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever,” the effect was not to inform but to intimidate. Anyone who disagrees, he notes, is cast as a “wing-nut” or a “conspiracy theorist.” Lears writes: “Whether we call this hegemony, conspiracy, or merely special privilege hardly matters,” Lears writes. “What does matter is the power to create what Gramsci called the ‘common sense’ of an entire society.” 

There were a few journalists who wrote well about Russiagate and continued to break news. (Lears singles out Aaron Maté and Matt Taibbi.) But there were no truth-tellers anywhere in the Democratic party establishment where Lears would once have expected them. “Today, in a major historical irony,” Lears writes, “the dream of impeaching Trump has driven much of the Democratic Party into an uncritical embrace of the FBI and the CIA.” He quotes a Daily Kos post mocking coal miners who have lost their health insurance. They are mockable because they voted for Trump. “Being a liberal Democrat no longer means what it once meant,” he observes.

Nobody in our time writes about American culture and character with the authority Lears does. He remains hard to categorize, especially ideologically. The attempt of this volume’s editor to describe Lears as “off-modern,” a borrowed term that means neither progressive nor reactionary, is too recherché and cute, though one can see what he is getting at. 

The writer with whom Lears has the closest affinity is the late historian Christopher Lasch. The two have the same frame of historical reference—broad, but with its focal point at the turn of the twentieth century—and the same inclination to embed intellectual history in social history. Lears apparently senses this, too, because one of the most probing essays in this book is “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1995), a long study of Lasch’s work published the year after he died. Like Lears, Lasch was a hopeful liberal who, in mid-career, found liberals’ interest in the common man to be on the wane. Unlike Lears, Lasch veered sharply to what one would then have called the left, immersing himself in Freud and Marx, before emerging with a populist vision of American life that defended the family against the state and struck a lot of intellectuals at the time as right-wing. Lears was one of these. When Lasch wrote, “We have become far too accommodating and tolerant for our own good,” Lears confessed that it “makes me wonder if we lived on the same planet.”

“In an intellectual climate dominated by dogmas and formulas, no one knew what to make of him,” Lears writes of Lasch, “He seemed to stand, above all, for clarity of thought amid a cloud of murky evasions and pseudo-revolutionary slogans. It was not always clear what else he stood for, but it was worth staying tuned to find out.” It is a description that is true, down to the last word, of Lears himself.

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