AMERICAN VIRTUE
Narrative Table of Contents
Introduction
FOUNDERS — providing the basics for the pursuit of virtue
Chapter 1: Ben Franklin and Economy
Ben Franklin is the archetypal American success story; he attributed his success largely to his efforts to systematically cultivate virtue, or moral excellence. This chapter asks what Franklin meant by virtue and how he pursued it, looking both at episodes from his life and selections from his writings, particularly his account of his “arduous attempt to achieve moral perfection” as a young man. Franklin’s appealing mixture of moral earnestness and ironic humor provides an ideal introduction to the pursuit of virtue. He lays out a plausible account of the necessary foundations for a happy and useful life. One key is the right personal economy, in which virtues such as industry and frugality are means to higher achievements than mere wealth.
While Franklin pursued personal success and cultivated self-development, he worked just as hard to create a society that furthered the happiness of all. Franklin’s political activities—from his early philanthropic projects in Philadelphia to his key contributions to the American Revolution—were grounded in a strong ethics of community service. This chapter argues that public spirit is the necessary complement to personal striving. Ideally, these two components of virtue will support and enrich each other, and in Franklin’s case they actually did.
Chapter 2: Jonathan Edwards and Faith
Franklin’s contemporary Jonathan Edwards, theologian and evangelical minister, represents the strong religious strand in Americans’ conception of virtue. Edwards’ youthful devotional writings exhibit an appealing yearning for God and goodness; his mature treatise, The Nature of True Virtue, makes the case that faith and submission to God are cardinal virtues in a truly Christian life. These writings well illustrate the beauty and grandeur of a God-centered view of the world and its ability to make human life meaningful. In bringing this forward, I will help my more secular readers appreciate these aspects of a religious conception of virtue. I also discuss several sermons Edwards preached on the duty of charity to the poor, to show how compassion and social concern are key Christian virtues that task believers to create more just societies.
At the same time, I will challenge my Christian readers to answer whether helping others or personal purity is the essence of Christianity. My vehicle for doing this will be the story of Edwards’ dismissal from his congregation (after twenty years service) over two issues: his insistence that only church members who could vouch for their conversions should be allowed to receive the sacraments; and his handling of a sex scandal involving several young members of the congregation. To Edwards’ detractors, these affairs showed an authoritarian temperament that ill-befitted a community leader. Edwards believed he was doing his duty by upholding necessary standards. Obviously, the issues of exclusive versus inclusive Christian fellowship, the moral authority of ministers and sexual permissiveness are alive and well in contemporary America. Conservatives insist that virtue demands strict standards and a willingness to separate “the sheep from the goats,” but these episodes suggest that humility, tolerance and even a sense of humor may also be necessary for a return to virtue.
Chapter 3: Thomas Jefferson and Freedom
Thomas Jefferson was America’s greatest proponent of human rights; this chapter explores his views on the nature and purpose of rights, as expressed in his revolutionary writings. Jefferson spoke of rights in a variety of ways: as God-given, as grounded in human nature, as “evident to reason” and as mere common sense. But his core view seems to have been that rights help secure the conditions necessary to the pursuit of happiness and self-development. That is the point of rights and of justice, the cardinal virtue of institutions. I explore Jefferson’s insight, and argue that Americans today should extend rights as far as necessary to maximize the happiness and flourishing of our citizens.
Jefferson was America’s greatest prophet of freedom—yet he owned slaves. He did so with a bad conscience, writing in his Notes on Virginia that he trembled for his country when he remembered that God is just. Yet unlike Washington and several other revolutionary leaders he never freed any of his slaves, nor did he take significant steps to ameliorate their condition while President, or speak out publicly against slavery. I explore this contradiction and argue, against much recent historical commentary, that it wasn’t primarily racism that led Jefferson astray, but luxury. Jefferson knew slavery was unjust, whatever doubts he may have had about blacks being fully equal to whites. But he was caught up in his perennial building plans for Monticello, stocking its wine cellar and playing the squire by lending money he did not have to unreliable spendthrifts. Jefferson was unable or unwilling to rein in these expenses to give himself the freedom to treat his slaves justly. In all this there is a message for us, today, about how luxurious living can undermine our own attempts to live up to our highest ideals.
EXTENDERS — advocating a full conception of virtue, with opportunity for all
Chapter 4: Henry David Thoreau and Self-Culture
Thoreau was a premier American exponent of Bildung—the romantic ideal of self-culture—which he helped make an enduring part of the American conception of virtue. This chapter shows how Thoreau’s Walden proposes an ideal of fully cultivating all our human capabilities, particularly those intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual qualities that tend to be slighted in everyday life. To a traditional focus on the social duties and virtues, Thoreau adds a new stress on individuality, authenticity, and creativity. Critics then and now criticized this ideal as selfish; I argue that this is a real danger, which is why the ideal of self-development must be coupled with a concern for justice and the flourishing of all members of society. Thoreau’s anti-slavery activism (he wrote and lectured against slavery and hid escaped slaves on their way to Canada) well illustrates this necessary balance. Against critics who see concern for “self-actualization” as evidence of moral decline, I argue that it completes and ennobles the American ideal of the right to pursue happiness—provided it does not obscure the social virtues that make such self-actualization possible in the first place.
Readers know Thoreau primarily as a nature lover. This chapter will show them how Thoreau’s explorations of nature were integrally tied to his quest for self-knowledge and personal development. It will also discuss his pioneering call for the creation of national parks to preserve opportunities for Americans to experience wild nature and further our scientific, aesthetic and spiritual development. Making these connections gives us powerful self-interested reasons for protecting nature, to supplement the altruistic concern we should feel for nature itself.
Chapter 5: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Equality
This chapter begins by describing the Women’s Rights Convention of 1848 and its historic Declaration of Sentiments: the first well-publicized, comprehensive demand for political rights for women in America. Coupling this with an account of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s struggles to raise a large family while remaining politically and intellectually active, I argue from yet another perspective that the purpose of rights is to further human flourishing. Stanton, who wrote that women were too prone to “self-denial, rather than self-development,” always insisted on this view of rights and on the need for women to develop their full capabilities.
But do women and men follow similar or different paths to happiness and self-fulfillment? Then as now, this was an important issue with very practical implications for family roles, career choices, education, and other areas of life. Stanton came down squarely on the side of an essential similarity between the sexes, and her debates with “domestic feminists” who took a more traditional view of gender roles throw considerable light on similar debates today. This chapter also explores Stanton’s interesting, conflicted relationship to American moral traditions by considering her work on the Woman’s Bible, which challenged Biblical justifications for women’s subordination. Nearly a hundred years earlier, Thomas Jefferson had performed even more radical editorial work on the New Testament, with a pair of scissors, keeping Jesus’ moral teachings but deleting all the “superstitions.” The proper attitude toward tradition remains a key issue for progressives and traditionalists alike. I argue, following Jefferson and Stanton, that a willingness to intelligently question all traditions and even eliminate pernicious ones is an important American tradition.
Chapter 6: Walt Whitman and Creativity
A common mistake people make in thinking about virtue—human excellence—is to ignore those qualities that facilitate the creation and appreciation of great art, literature, science and other products of human ingenuity. Considering Walt Whitman’s career will allow me to explore the creative virtues, since he exemplifies and explicitly celebrates them in his poetry. Curiosity, imagination, intelligence, expressiveness and sensitivity to beauty are real virtues, making our lives more enjoyable and meaningful. Contemporary moralists act as if appreciating beauty or pursuing truth were optional concerns. On the contrary, they are essential to our humanity and happiness, as Whitman well shows.
Whitman is America’s great poet of democracy and I use several of his early poems to celebrate his inclusive conception of democracy. I complement these with his gilded-age essay Democratic Vistas, which argues that respecting “the people” means challenging them to cease worshipping mammon and live up to their full capabilities. Patriotism is often defined as support for “my country, right or wrong” and Whitman is sometimes seen as an unreflective American booster: Babbitt with a flair for blank verse. On the contrary, Whitman points us toward a patriotism that is truly a virtue, where we can acknowledge our faults yet celebrate our ideals and achievements.
BUILDERS — addressing and not addressing American gigantism
Chapter 7: Andrew Carnegie and Industry
“A workingman is a more useful citizen and ought to be more respected than an idle prince,” wrote a young, working-class Andrew Carnegie, years before he himself became a “prince of industry.” Like Ben Franklin before him, Carnegie cultivated business-like virtues to get ahead, and held on to a conception of public service that demanded that he use his wealth for the common good. Eventually the philanthropic Carnegie did just that, but not before he had stunted the lives of many workingmen and their families, most spectacularly by driving wages below subsistence levels and crushing the Homestead steelworkers strike of 1893. This chapter explores these contradictions, focusing on key moments in Carnegie’s career (his vow at age thirty-three to retire from business and devote himself to self-improvement; Homestead) and his essays on labor issues and philanthropy. It shows how Carnegie’s embrace of social Darwinism undermined his early egalitarianism and discusses how similar theories are used to justify increasing income disparities in America today.
Carnegie helped build industrial America. This chapter and the two that follow grapple with the challenges of bigness—a crucial issue largely unexplored by contemporary moralists. Is the creation of immense personal fortunes something to be celebrated or deplored? Would a virtuous nation place a cap on individual wealth, as many ancient republics did? Would it aggressively redistribute wealth to the poor, who arguably can put it to more immediate use to improve their lives? Carnegie argued that individual philanthropy would do the most long-term public good; not surprisingly, many of his employees disagreed.
Chapter 8: Teddy Roosevelt and Strength
Teddy Roosevelt’s career allows me to explore notions of virtue as power, strength and “manliness” that are out of fashion today, at least among academics and professional moralists, but which have some merit nevertheless. Roosevelt’s emphasis on “the strenuous life”—illustrated so memorably by his youthful efforts to build up his puny physique to counteract life-threatening asthma—resonates with many people, because we know that physical well-being is an important part of living a good life. We cheer his western adventures and his charge up San Juan Hill, because we believe that physical courage, an adventurous spirit and forcefulness are virtues. Roosevelt’s life thus allows me to further flesh out a comprehensive conception of virtue. Returning to an earlier discussion of the alleged difference between male and female virtue, I make a plea that we recognize these aspects of virtue without restricting them to one sex. I also argue that these more forceful, even aggressive aspects of virtue must be balanced by the virtues of justice and humility if they are to remain virtues, and that TR achieved a decent (but not perfect) balance among them in his own life.
In his approach to bigness in the public policy realm, Roosevelt represents a mixed bag; I discuss this by focusing on his conservation record, a central concern of his presidency. TR, America’s greatest conservationist president, set aside many parks and wildlife refuges from a genuine love of wild nature. He also promoted huge, wilderness destroying public works projects. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Americans could support both conservation and rapid economic growth; I argue that one hundred years later, this stance no longer makes sense. If we want to preserve a remnant of what Teddy Roosevelt saw galloping across the North Dakota prairies or canoeing down uncharted Amazonian rivers, contemporary Americans must get clearer on the difference between bigness and greatness, and decisively choose the later.
Chapter 9: Jane Addams and Compassion
Jane Addams, like Andrew Carnegie, made philanthropy a guiding principle in her life, but she understood this virtue very differently. In her view, brilliantly developed during forty years of “settlement work” at Hull House, true philanthropy involved creating “genuine relations” with the poor immigrants she was trying to help adjust to industrial life. It involved honestly recognizing their failures and weaknesses (when her neighbors stank, she said so, and installed public baths in the Hull House basement) but also celebrating the positive cultural contributions they could make to America. Addams and her colleagues not only ministered to individuals in distress, they also studied the political and economic conditions that kept them poor and miserable. They experimented with various efforts to help them take control and improve their lives, including municipal reforms and union organizing. All this represented an important attempt to reinvigorate civic life under the new conditions of an urbanized, industrialized America.