The 16th-century Spanish explorer and conquistador Hernando de Soto c. A decade later, he was serving as governor of the eastern province of Hispaniola when he decided to explore a nearby island, which became In December , French officer Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of treason by a military court-martial and sentenced to life in prison for his alleged crime of passing military secrets to the Germans.
The Jewish artillery captain, convicted on flimsy evidence in a highly irregular In , while leading an expedition in search of gold, he sighted Live TV. This Day In History.
History Vault. Recommended for you. How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland. He divided the land into counties, and rudely began that communal organization which has survived in our local and county government.
It was the Celt who first applied the Roman military idea in local government. He was the first to apply the administrative principles in the modern state, and his experience, chiefly military, bred in him slight respect for the form of government in the state. A king is as dear to him by any other name; but he prefers the other name. His idea of the administration of government is military: the citizen is first a soldier. The rude and individualistic Teuton saw in the Roman corporation not merely a legal fiction; it was a civil opportunity.
Why not view that burdensome but necessary relation between individual and individual, between one and many in the state, as a compact? Why not conceive of the state as a civil resultant of these two factors, — make the many a corporation, a state-man, and yet not diminish the rights of individuals, the states-men? Between these legal parties a contract could be made, or could be conceived as made. By the terms of this contract civil rights should be guaranteed; the soldier should first be a citizen.
Rome gave the world order without liberty. The Celt administers government with occasional sacrifice of order to license. The Teuton conserves liberty and order. Democracy in America is the resultant of Roman, Celtic, and Teutonic ideas. It is a civil composite. Its evolution is recorded in a series of political adjustments. Political adjustment is the administration of government. It is that of which Franklin frequently speaks. It is a practical affair. It is the other half of the apple of civil discord, as the theory of the state was for ages the first half.
Democracy in America is but slightly original. It was latent in European life long before the colonization of America. But the adjustment of local and general interests in the state has developed before our eyes in this country, and therefore it seems new and peculiarly our own. Each wrought in sincerity; but the seed was before flower or fruit. In the search after the genesis of government in America, there is no doubt that justice has not been done to English and to Dutch influence.
It is time present that is hard to see. No new theory of the state distinguishes the political philosophy of our century. Philosophically, it has been a century with a backward look. It has explored the past to as great a distance as it has anticipated the future. It has set in order the genesis of our civil institutions, and has resolved us all into heirs-at-law.
We have applied the past while working in the present. The style of the tool changes; but frost and rain and earth are, and weeds grow in spite of botany. But the apple on the tree is larger, fairer, and pleasanter to the taste than the wild apple; the flower on the stalk is the history of generations of gardeners. Flower and fruit are come from fruit and flower, and the changes during that time register an evolution hastened by intelligent culture.
The free man is a part of the system. At one time he was of opinion that he was at the centre of the universe, but a bit of glass and the fall of a Newtonian apple dislodged him. He has his place in nature, not in the worst rank. But he is a means of adjustment rather than a creator. Democracy in America is another chapter in the history of that adjustment. There is no break in the continuity.
Roman, Celt, Teuton, American, comes each in his time. No American colony broke wholly with the past. The necessity for unrestricted labor compelled a democracy. Had the vast area now comprised within the United States been occupied, at the time of its discovery by Europeans, by a wealth-accumulating people, however civilized, who permitted European conquest, the conquerors would not have set up a democracy.
The story of Mexico and Peru would have been repeated of the Mississippi Valley. Had gold or silver abounded in New England, Pennsylvania, or Virginia, the evolution of democracy on the Atlantic seaboard would have been retarded for centuries.
Had the mechanical devices familiar now in lumbering, in mining, in manufacturing, and in agriculture been familiar to the world at the opening of the seventeenth century, democracy in America would still be a matter of political speculation.
It was the necessity for labor that dethroned the king, and enthroned the people, in America. But the king is not dead. He never dies. We believe that we have crowned ourselves. We are Celtic yet. But our democracy is not wholly of our own having. It is our political weather. It does not give universal satisfaction. We have had it long enough to tire of some of its virtues, and, if not acquainted with some of its vices, to be suspicious of their existence.
The foundation of democracy is the necessity for free labor. If that ceases or is circumscribed, democracy will cease or will be circumscribed. The fate of democracy hangs on free labor.
As long as the free man can labor to the satisfaction of his wants in this country, democracy is a condition as well as a consequence of his labor.
Remove the field or the rewards of his labor, and democracy will disappear. It will be named despotism, and it will go the way of other despotisms. Its fall will be hastened by its complexity. Democracy is not so simple as monarchy. It was long ago pointed out by Montesquieu that in a democracy there is need of more virtue than in a monarchy; for a democracy depends upon the virtue of its citizens, while a monarchy depends upon the virtue of its ruling house. There is essentially the same requisite in both: those who rule must be virtuous.
But virtue in a democracy lies close to industry. The state cannot get away from the soil, from the mine, from the factory. The crises in the history of democracy turn on industrial adjustment. The American Revolution was a war for free labor; its political purposes and effects were secondary. They also look upon the power of politicians and governments with a jealous eye. Government structured by the good blood of monarchs is anathema.
They are prone to suspect or curse those who wield power, and thereby they are impatient with arbitrary rule. They come to be regarded as simply expedient for this or that purpose, and as properly based on the voluntary consent of citizens endowed with equal civil and political rights.
The spell of absolute monarchy is forever broken. Political rights are extended gradually from the lucky privileged few to those who once suffered discrimination; and government policies and laws are subject constantly to public grumbling, legal challenges and alteration. Thanks to democracy, something similar happens in the field of social life, or so Tocqueville proposed.
It becomes subject to something like a permanent democratisation. This is how: if certain social groups defend their privileges, of property or income, for instance, then pressure grows for extending those privileges to other social groups. Eventually the point is reached where the social privileges enjoyed by a few are re-distributed, in the form of universal social entitlements. That at least was the theory. On the basis of his travels and observations, Tocqueville predicted that American democracy would in future have to confront a fundamental dilemma.
Democratic mechanisms, said Tocqueville, stimulate a passion for social and political equality that they cannot easily satisfy. He thought there was much truth in the view of Jean-Jacques Rousseau that democratic perfection is reserved for the deities. The earthly struggle for equalisation is never fully attainable. It is always unfinished. Democracy lives forever in the future. There is no such thing as a pure democracy and there never will be a pure democracy.
Democracy as Jacques Derrida later put things is always to come. The less powerful ranks of society, including those without the vote, are especially caught in the grip of this levelling dynamic, or so Tocqueville thought. Irritated by the fact of their subordination, agitated by the possibility of overcoming their condition, they rather easily grow frustrated by the uncertainty of achieving equality. Their initial enthusiasm and hope give way to disappointment, but at some point the frustration they experience renews their commitment to the struggle for equality.
America found itself caught up in a democratic maelstrom. Nothing is certain or inviolable, except the passionate, dizzying struggle for social and political equality. He was not the first to use the term in its modern sense see my earliest works Democracy and Civil Society and Civil Society and the State , but he did find the new American republic brimming with many different forms of civil association, and he therefore pondered their importance for consolidating democracy.
Tocqueville was the first political writer to bring together the newly-invented modern understanding of civil society with the old Greek category of democracy; and he was the first to say that a healthy democracy makes room for civil associations that function as schools of public spirit, permanently open to all, within which citizens become acquainted with others, learn their rights and duties as equals, and press home their concerns, sometimes in opposition to government, so preventing the tyranny of minorities by herd-like majorities through the ballot box.
Through their participation in civil associations, they come to feel themselves to be citizens. Tocqueville called upon his readers to understand democracy as a brand new type of self-government defined not just by elections, parties and government by representatives, but also by the extensive use of civil society institutions that prevent political despotism by placing a limit, in the name of equality, upon the scope and power of government itself.
Tocqueville also pointed out that these civil associations had radical social implications. Under democratic conditions, civil society never stands still. It is a sphere of restlessness, civic agitation, refusals to cooperate, struggles for improved conditions, the incubator of visions of a more equal society. Readers of Democracy in America often brush aside this point. While they admit that Tocqueville was well aware that democracy is prone to self-contradiction and self-destruction, they note that he tended to exaggerate the momentum and geographic extent of the busy levelling process that was underway in America.
According to this view, Tocqueville, who was blessed with a remarkable sixth sense of probing the difference between appearances and realities, sometimes, when looking at life in the United States, swallowed whole its own best self-image. Consider the Italian fashion of visiting the new democratic republic, to see what it was like. The same visitor was struck by the way American citizens casually wore caps and hats, how they spurned moustaches, chewed tobacco, and liked to chew the fat, hands in pockets.
Truth, always truth. No prejudices, no red tape. Tocqueville was much less sanguine about the fledgling American democracy. Many of his observations were both astute and prescient, for instance concerning the grave political problem of slavery. Tocqueville was perhaps the first writer to show at length why modern representative democracy could not live with slavery, as classical assembly-based democracy had managed to do, admittedly with some discomfort.
Black people in America were neither in nor of civil society. They were objects of gross incivility. Legal and informal penalties against racial intermarriage were severe. In those states where slavery had been abolished, black people who dared to vote, or to serve on juries, were threatened with murder.
There was segregation and deep inequality in education. Lurking within these racist customs was a disturbing paradox, Tocqueville observed. The prejudice directed at black people, he noted, increases in proportion to their formal emancipation. Slavery in America was in this sense much worse than in ancient Greece, where the emancipation of slaves for military purposes was encouraged by the fact that their skin colour was often the same as that of their masters.
By the act of the master, or by the will of the slave, it will cease; and in either case great calamities may be expected to ensue. If liberty be refused to the Negroes of the South, they will in the end forcibly seize it for themselves; if it be given, they will long abuse it.
He was right as well to be anxious about the magnitude of the problem. By , at least ten million African slaves had arrived in the New World.
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