Seven Events That Made America America (26 page)

Little difference existed between the 1980s rockers’ visits to the Eastern bloc and Louis Armstrong’s jazz tours of the 1950s (denigrated as “mud music”), except that Armstrong’s were sponsored directly by the U.S. government, while the rockers’ were the equivalent of volunteer missions. If, however, the lyrics themselves didn’t send the youths to the barricades, the music form introduced them to individuality in a much different way. In both cases—the jazz of the 1950s and the rock of the 1980s—the essential, unique character of Western free societies was on display within the music: the very structure of most rock and jazz features a verse or two played/sung by the entire band, followed by solo breaks, before eventually (sometimes after tortuously long solo interregnums) the entire band reunites to finish the piece together. Western music, then, showed that individuals can and do work well together voluntarily, but unlike in “socialist” music, individuals had freedom to stand out, even if it meant baldly outshining the rest of the band. Or, as Timothy Ryback observed, “the triumph of rock and roll [behind the Iron Curtain] has been the realization of a democratic process.”
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Rock and roll’s contribution to the collapse of communism provides one more piece of evidence that the human soul longs for freedom in all areas. It was a principle the Founders understood when they limited government’s ability to intrude on the arts, speech, and business. In later years, they would differ over the wisdom of founding a national university, for example, with George Washington calling for the establishment of such a college in his final address to Congress in 1796.
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But virtually all support for such a university—as well as for such “big government” projects as the large internal improvements measure that Thomas Jefferson supported (but which Congress failed to pass)—sprang from concerns about maintaining national defense. Alexander Hamilton, likewise, had based much of his advocacy of protective tariffs on the need to ensure the supply of muskets and uniforms for the American military, not as a sop to business.

More than a few expressed misgivings about Congress involving itself in any way in the arts. Many objected to the government’s purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s personal book collection after the British burned much of Washington, D.C., in 1814; and four years later critics decried the government’s paying John Trumbull $32,000 for four paintings about the American Revolution (including his masterpiece, the
Declaration of Independence
).

Overall, though, the Founders were cautious in their support for government aid to any kind of art or entertainment, aware that with money came strings, and with strings, political agendas. With a few exceptions, they favored keeping government out of human affairs whenever possible. They certainly understood that the arts (as well as business or education) could have its seamier side; people were not angels, but rather humans who would abuse liberty from time to time, and government’s purpose was to limit their ability to do this. But deciding when art was harming people always bordered on censorship, and with censorship came political control. Thus the Founders would have recoiled at Andres Serrano’s
Piss Christ
on several levels, most obviously its disgusting disrespect for Christianity, but also, more significantly, on the grounds that taxpayers were forced to fund such denigration of their fellow Americans’ religion.

It is essential to recognize that, just as the Founders never imagined the government would interfere with its citizens’ diet, they never imagined it would try to control the arts. As a consequence, they never felt the need to comment on or expressly prohibit what they felt was much too ridiculous to consider. When John Adams wrote to Abigail in 1780, “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have the liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy . . . in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine,” he meant to establish a prioritized list of that which was necessary to enable that which was desirable. He did not intend that government fund “Tapestry and Porcelaine.” Washington, likewise, insisted, “The arts and sciences essential to the prosperity of the state and to the ornament and happiness of human life have a primary claim to the encouragement of every lover of his country and mankind,” but he meant individuals should “encourage,” not the state. Jefferson, who once said, “I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts,” never once attempted to make it the government’s job to support them or fund them.
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The Founders’ vision of keeping speech and the arts free of government control and money has largely been abandoned. If Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda campaigns of World War I didn’t permanently link the two (though one can argue that, in wartime, propaganda and censorship are necessary), certainly Franklin Roosevelt’s public works programs did. During the Great Depression, the federal government paid artists and writers to engage in myriad projects—some admirable, most of them make-work, but none of which were judged by the private sector to be valuable prior to the New Deal. Rock music’s rebellion, therefore, in an ironic way, constituted a grand act of defiance against government control over the arts. After all, the BBC refused to even play the Beatles at first, which led them to American shores!

Had the Founders been alive to see the Beatles’ arrival in 1964, they most likely would not have joined in singing choruses of “Yeah, yeah, yeah” or screamed in delight. (For that matter, I don’t think a record exists of George Washington ever even letting out a “Yahoo!”) But the Founders’ intuitive appreciation for liberty as a self-regulating force would have led them to smile benignly at Beatlemania and shake their heads at the marvel of youth and the genius of those lads from Britain. George Washington, James Madison, and even Thomas Jefferson likely would have grudgingly signed on to federal funding of Louis Armstrong’s Cold War tours as necessary for national defense. They certainly would have approved of Radio Free Europe. And while they would have been horrified by the “devil music” of rockers such as Ronnie James Dio, or the nihilistic death metal of Metallica, one can’t imagine them backing legislation—like the kind Tipper Gore championed in the 1980s—to stop it.

Nor can one seriously entertain visions of James Madison or Alexander Hamilton (who always struck me as opera types, anyway) throwing stacks of Led Zeppelin records onto a bonfire. These same Founders danced jigs that originated in rebellious Irish glens, enjoyed Mozart and the Psalms put to music, sang songs of freedom that were handed down by recalcitrant Scots, and solemnly joined in fervent hymns from the English Puritan heritage. (It is worth noting that Mozart, in his day, embodied the term “revolutionary,” so here were revolutionaries listening to a revolutionary!)

Washington was entertained by string quartets, when popular songs of the day were “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes” and “The President’s March” by Philip Phile. Both Jefferson and Washington enjoyed Haydn, but the Squire of Monticello could also be heard humming Scotch songs and Italian hymns, and Jefferson family sheet music included “Draw the Sword, Scotland,” “The Jolly British Tar,” and “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye
.
”
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For the record, Washington could not carry a tune in a bucket, though his household was musical. Later, it’s been said, Abraham Lincoln particularly enjoyed the songs of Stephen Foster and, remarkably, his all-time favorite was “Dixie”!
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It was all the music of revolution, perhaps to a different beat, but revolution nonetheless. When a Christian rock group, the Elms, in 2006 sang “Who Puts Rock and Roll in Your Blood?” they clearly answered, “God.” The Founders would answer the question slightly differently. “Who puts rock and roll in your blood?” Not the State!

THOMAS PAINE, THE CRISIS, 1777

 

 

 

 

E
ven if Ronald Reagan had done nothing but end the Cold War, his place in history still would have been assured. But by simultaneously rescuing the American economy from a decades-long death spiral, and by touching off a boom that spawned 14 million new jobs and almost twenty-five years of prosperity, Reagan ensured his place next to Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts as one of the most influential presidents in America’s history. His sunny optimism, unrelenting faith in America’s virtues and foundations, and relentless determination to make the American dream a reality for the citizens has elevated him to the highest echelons of our leaders. By liberating millions, Reagan’s place in the
world
aligns him with the greatest champions of human freedom who ever lived.

Yet Reagan had shortcomings. His own admitted failing was that he was unable to change the culture in Washington, D.C., in such a way as to reduce the size of government. For that, while he may have been naive—
no
administration, including some of the earliest small-government advocates such as Thomas Jefferson, had successfully controlled the growth of government for long—he nevertheless fell in line with virtually every one of his predecessors, liberal or conservative. Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, and Calvin Coolidge, all of them dedicated to containing the size of the federal government, all watched per capita spending increase during their tenure. The Gipper fully understood the threat posed by an ever-growing federal bureaucracy, in terms of both weights placed on the nation’s enterprise and, more important, infringements of the freedoms of its people.

If Reagan’s greatest and most timeless triumph was in foreign policy, so was his greatest error, and, in the latter case, it was a two-fold error. First, he deployed the U.S. Marines in Lebanon as part of a “peacekeeping” mission that not only lacked an attainable goal, but also did not employ rules of engagement sufficient to allow the Marines to protect themselves. Such missions, unfortunately, were common during the Cold War in both Republican and Democratic administrations. After a suicide bomber attacked the Marine barracks in Lebanon, however, Reagan—after attempting to stay the course—finally withdrew the forces. By doing so, he indeed took the prudent military action, and, most likely, made the wisest political choice. Had the marines stayed, there is little evidence that they could have made much of a difference. Unfortunately, the withdrawal of the U.S. forces constituted a second edge of that troubled blade, for it displayed a lack of appreciation for the longer-term threat: the growing danger posed by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

Certainly Ronald Reagan knew radical Islam existed. In
An American Life
, he wrote:

He had seen the shah of Iran toppled and Anwar Sadat assassinated by Muslim radicals; he was supremely sensitive to the need to ensure Israel’s survival; and he appreciated the crumbling political situation in Lebanon, with the disputes between its Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Maronite Christians. At least four separate crises would emerge from the Middle East in Reagan’s first term: the ongoing destruction and chaos in Lebanon; the Iran-Iraq War; Israel’s ongoing struggle for security (including the attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor); and the attempt by Reagan to reach out to Arab “moderates” through such overtures as the sale of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft to Saudi Arabia in 1981. In his second term, Reagan’s compassion and flawed assessment of the Iranian regime as reasonable parties with whom the United States could deal would provide a final ironic reaction from militant Islam in the form of the Iran-Contra affair.

One of Reagan’s mistakes in dealing with the Islamic world was that he (and virtually everyone else in government at the time) believed a large number of “moderate Muslims” existed in such hard-core Islamic nations as Saudi Arabia. Operating under this misconception, Reagan approved the AWACS sale, which originated in the Carter administration, to Saudi Arabia. “I was told,” he said, “the planes would not materially change the balance of power in the Arab-Israeli conflict [and] I thought the Arab world would regard it as a gesture showing that we desired to be evenhanded in the Middle East.”
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Reagan saw the AWACS sale as a palliative to the Saudis, tied in part to reducing “the threat of a Soviet move in that direction.”
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Invoking the language of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, Reagan argued for “stability” and “peace between Israel & the Arab nations.”
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During a meeting with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, Reagan argued again that the sale would “bring the Saudis into the peace making process.”
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Begin was not persuaded, and it “annoyed” Reagan that he lobbied Congress hard against the sale, despite indications to the president that he wouldn’t. Reagan signaled his displeasure through the State Department, noting that he “didn’t like having representatives of any foreign country . . . trying to interfere with . . . our domestic political process and our setting of foreign policy.”
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The AWACS sale, however, was supported overwhelmingly by former national security staffers, twenty-eight of whom came out on October 5, 1981, to support the deal. Reagan came to consider the sale of the AWACS as “a donnybrook” and a fight “we could not afford to lose. I believed it was a battle that
had
to be won to advance the cause of peace in the Middle East.”
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