This Noble Land (26 page)

The deplorably and dangerously pervasive character of the two Contracts is that they favor the rich to the detriment of the poor,
the already fortunate rather than the aspiring, and the Christian conservative as opposed to the Jewish/Muslim/Native American freethinker. Indeed, the second contract, the Contract with the American Family, is the official voice of the Christian Coalition, the extreme right wing of the Christian faiths and of the new Republican Party. Do we really want to invite these reactionaries to dictate what the moral values of our society shall be? Looking at the day-to-day programs of these very conservative bodies—the agenda they are reluctant to reveal in their formal contract—I am frightened, for I have observed that when men and women of such mean spirit start to dictate national policy, moderate men like me are sooner or later outlawed too. The fire-burning puritan preacher will, in the end, turn his blaze on me, so my personal interest in the great debate now under way is not abstract. It cuts to the heart of my being, and it imperils all other moderates.

When I charge that the two contracts, taken together, reek of meanness, I do not mean this in any trivial sense. I believe the revolution of the young colonels threatens the long-established social contract that has operated in the United States since our Constitution came into being. It is that solemn agreement forged by the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who argued that society is held together by an often unspoken or unwritten agreement that the very poor will refrain from revolution if the very rich will allow even a modicum of their wealth to trickle down to the lower levels. Under this sensible agreement the rich pay taxes to ensure domestic tranquillity. Any large movement that imperils the ancient modus vivendi endangers the democracy.

I find it cynical that now both the political right and the religious archconservatives borrow this almost sacred word
contract
to mask their intentions. Instead of meaning, as it did, a high-minded agreement among classes in the eighteenth century, the
term now identifies a slick device to fracture the agreement. The results could prove disastrous in the decades ahead. It is for that ominous reason that although I can see merit in some of the provisions of the contracts, I am frightened by the overall impact of the proposals. The noble contract engineered by Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson must be protected and preserved, for from it stems the greatness of our nation.

Having watched at close quarters the operation of several state legislatures, I shiver when I hear that the new Republican agenda includes closing many operations now supervised by knowledgeable men and women in Washington, with the budgets and the responsibilities being shuffled off to the states. I am not heartened by this prospect of allowing fifty different state legislatures to determine what food, if any, should go into the school lunch for deprived children. Nor do I like the scenario of the state legislatures’ trying to decide how to discipline fourteen-year-old girls who have had illegitimate babies.

My assessment of state legislatures was accurately voiced by an unnamed comedian when he or she said: ‘No man’s life, liberty or property is safe while the Legislature is in session.’ And a paraphrase of a political cartoon I saw recently exemplifies a dangerous trend that portends ominous consequences for our nation: ‘The young colonels want to give the poor back to the states, and all the rest of America to the big corporations.’

Americans forget that our nation has already experimented—unsuccessfully—with a loose confederation of sovereign states not bound by any superior central authority. When the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Great Britain on July 2, 1776 (not July 4, as popularly believed), some form of government was required, and the ineffective Articles of Confederation were instituted and governed our fledgling nation during the
years 1781–89. Patriots quickly saw that the Articles were a toothless form of government, since the central agency lacked the power to collect taxes from the individual states, enforce tariffs or pay for an army. A movement was launched by the leaders of the thirteen confederated states, and in May 1787 delegates assembled in Philadelphia, where they labored until September 1787 on the drafting of the Constitution as we know it today. The first Congress convened in 1789, the birthday of our present government, and one of its first acts was to begin developing the Bill of Rights.

Government by a loosely bound collection of states was thus tried and it failed, but even so the Confederation did manage to pass a few bills of considerable benefit to the nation as a whole. The laws governing the distribution of national lands were exemplary; the rules laid down whereby a territory could graduate into statehood served the nation well in the next hundred years. Nevertheless, the Fathers of our country bade farewell to the Confederation and welcomed with opened arms the establishment of a strong central government endowed with extraordinary powers, and it is the assaults on that basic concept of government by the young colonels that should be sounding warning bells to us all. Over two hundred years ago America found a form of government ideally suited to the character of the people; let us not at this late date alter or imperil that proven form at the whim of young radicals.

I am personally affected and greatly agitated by one of the stated philosophies of the new young colonels’ regime. When its leader said repeatedly, during his battle to win votes for his party, that members of the other party could not be considered to be in the mainstream of American life and that liberals generally could not be trusted to behave like responsible Americans, and when he even questioned the patriotism of Democrats and liberals, his
arrows of contempt struck me with ugly force. Was my Americanism truly in question? Was it possible that I was little better than a Communist? Was it right for him to read me out of the mainstream, and was my patriotism faulty?

When I first heard this charge I was taken aback. This political leader of the young colonels in the House of Representatives was speaking of me, and I had to review my record to see where my failure to be a good American lay. When our nation was threatened by Adolf Hitler and the Japanese militarists, I joined the navy even though I could claim exemption from military duty because of my age (thirty-six) and my religion (Quaker). I served two long tours of duty in the South Pacific, and during the Korean War I participated at one time or another with all four branches of our armed forces: army, marines, air force and navy. I went along on patrols probing enemy lines. While serving aboard our great aircraft carriers, I flew as a passenger in our dive-bombers as they operated against Communist rail networks. I survived three airplane crashes, the last in the middle of the Pacific, and when I returned to civilian life I ran five times for political office, lost but was successively appointed to seven major government boards, including the one that supervised NASA and the International Broadcasting Board in Munich, which managed our radio broadcasts to nations behind the iron curtain.

Instead of the Speaker’s questioning my patriotism, I think I have a great deal more right to question his—although of draft age, he evaded service in the armed forces. No, I shall give him the benefit of the doubt and alter the word
evaded
to the possibly more gentle
avoided; evaded
carries a sense of his having taken specific steps to escape a duty, and he has explained several times that he was excused under the same legal exemptions that allowed so many other leading Republicans of our generation to
remain at home. I accept his excuses. But the fact remains that I went to war and he didn’t, and I get angry when he presumes to read me out of the mainstream of American life, as if he were now the sole arbiter determining what behavior is now acceptable in America.

The dangers created by the young colonels are not limited to their revolutionary behavior in the 1995 Congress. They represent a real shift in American attitudes, and I expect to see their Speaker eventually running for the presidency. But if the voters of Virginia were brave enough to reject Colonel Ollie North’s bid for the Senate in 1994—and he the beau ideal of the typical young colonel—the nation as a whole might also reject this Speaker for the young colonels.

In an age when we have wisely become aware of some of the weaknesses of our present government, we must also be aware that rash overcorrections could threaten the miracle that the early patriots achieved when they devised our unique system of government. Meeting in Philadelphia during that hot spring and summer of 1787, they were a choice selection of political geniuses. Many had attended colleges in both Europe and the American colonies. They were widely read; they understood the lessons of history and the grim conditions that could engulf a country ruled by tyrants or ambitious kings. When I read of their prolonged debates and discussions concerning what a good government should be, I am amazed by what a wide body of historical reference they drew upon: Greek history, Roman, medieval times and recent events in their European homelands. They were as brilliant a group of men as could have been gathered at that time by any nation of the world.

I have been immensely impressed by the fact that of all the world’s governments that were functioning then or thereafter, ours has been the longest-lived and the most successful. All others
have been forced or have elected to modify their systems. Great lands like Russia and China have changed spectacularly while smaller nations like Switzerland and Sweden have altered their forms of government. If some would suggest that Great Britain has existed longer with one unchanging governmental structure than we have, I would point out that the individual states that constitute Britain have undergone striking changes, such as transforming their kings and queens into useful figureheads and altering enormously the relative powers of the two branches of Parliament, with the House of Lords becoming more or less a figurehead while the Commons really controls the government.

No, we in the United States have the most successful form of government the world has ever known, and since it has proved so worthy and storm-tested, I look with dismay at attempts to alter it overnight by dictate from untried young colonels whose breadth of experience cannot begin to match the philosophical and political wisdom of our Founding Fathers. The victorious young colonels are not free to nullify our social contract and ride roughshod over our historic traditions.

T
he basic structures of the United States are so firmly rooted that they can absorb the radical changes signaled by the 1994 elections. We have seen that at least half of the twenty alterations proposed by the contracts of the nation’s new congressional leaders were sensible and in many cases overdue. They can be installed without danger to the republic.

But I am worried about the other half, for they are the blueprints for a ‘leaner, meaner’ nation, as if some powerful person swinging a broadax were chopping his way through a leafy grove, indifferent to the harm he was doing and the changes he was making in the landscape.

Leaner, meaner nations do not prosper. They lack the resilience that enables them to adjust to change. They abuse their citizens to the point that rebellion becomes inevitable. They halt the orderly movement of workmen regardless of where they are on the economic ladder, and they bedevil their lands with a cramped vision lacking breadth and inspiration.