The Pity Party (16 page)

Let me say something about the tone of these questions. . . . You are the privileged ones here. It's easy to sit back and say it's the fault of the federal government, but it's our responsibility too. It's our society, not just our government, that spends twice as much on pets as on the poverty program. It's the poor who carry the major burden in Vietnam. You sit here as white medical students, while black people carry the burden of fighting in Vietnam.

Leaving that campaign appearance, “shaking his head incredulously,” according to Schlesinger, Kennedy said to a reporter, “They were so comfortable, so comfortable. Didn't you think they were comfortable?” Three days later, at Valparaiso University, Kennedy challenged students again: “You tell me something now. How many of you spend time over the summer, or on vacations, working in a black ghetto, or in Eastern Kentucky, or on an Indian reservation.” (Of Kennedy's undergraduate years, Schlesinger notes briefly, “His Harvard life was the football field, the training table, the Varsity Club.”)
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This new outlook was, in both senses of the term, radically different from the way liberalism had presented itself from the New Deal through the early 1960s. In that older conception, the purpose of the liberal enterprise was to enable America to fulfill its historic and global potential. In characterizing that mission, liberal politicians and intellectuals appealed to the national pride of citizens who regarded America as fundamentally and even singularly decent. By the late 1960s, however, liberals declared, often stridently, that America now stood revealed as a nation fundamentally and even singularly depraved.

Nicholas Lemann wrote in 1998 that every president from Truman to Carter “felt a twinge of terror” at the possibility of receiving Arthur Schlesinger's disapproval, since he so powerfully shaped and expressed “the good opinion of the centrist-liberal establishment.”
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In 1968 Schlesinger gave a commencement address in which he called Americans “the most frightening people on this planet . . . because the atrocities we commit trouble so little our official self-righteousness, our invincible conviction of our moral infallibility.” “It is almost as if a primal curse has been fixed on our nation,” he said, “perhaps when we first began the practice of killing and enslaving those whom we deemed our inferiors because their skin was another color.” As a result, “we can no longer regard hatred and violence as accidents, as nightmares, which will pass away when we awake. We must see them as organic in our national past. . . .” Schlesinger informed the graduates and their proud parents that Americans could begin to atone for their wickedness only by recognizing “that the evil is in us, that it springs from some dark, intolerable tension in our history and our institutions.”
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The speech was, admittedly, given under great duress. Robert Kennedy, Schlesinger's friend, had been shot the night before in Los Angeles, hours after winning California's Democratic presidential primary, and lay mortally wounded in a hospital as Schlesinger stepped to the podium. But the fact that Schlesinger turned the speech into a magazine article later that year, then included it in a collection of his writings published in 1969,
The Crisis of Confidence
, suggests he did not regard the circumstances of its delivery as particularly extenuating. (Schlesinger had published a collection in 1962 titled
The Politics of Hope
.) Nor did the fact that Sirhan Sirhan's politics had no more to do with American race relations than did Lee Harvey Oswald's with right-wing Texans affect Schlesinger's interpretation of the tragedy's meaning.

The jeremiad, in any case, had become liberalism's preferred mode of expression by 1968. And with the change in tone had come a change in substance, altering how liberals characterized the victimhood of America's victims. The defining feature of America's empathizees, as interpreted by its most committed empathizers, was no longer that they were the victims of happenstance, such as a natural disaster. They were not even, as Eleanor Roosevelt liberals would have thought, victims of social conditions that a good society was earnestly striving to reform, ones it had not yet but would presently improve. Rather, America's victims were victims
of
America, of the crimes and depredations that were its defining characteristics, and with which a smug, deluded nation had never begun to reckon until disenthralled liberals and New Leftists insisted on this searing honesty. Under these radically reinterpreted circumstances, the helpers had no moral leverage to exert against the helpless. It was, instead, the victims who possessed all the moral leverage against the victimizers: only massively intensified empathy could begin to atone for and repay the debt owed by the “privileged ones” to the underprivileged ones. The moral logic of compassion gave way to the moral fervor of guilt and redemption.

Liberal guilt was, above all, white liberal guilt because, as the remarks by Robert Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger indicate, whites' treatment of blacks came to be considered America's original sin. The moral power of this argument was quickly discerned by feminists, Hispanics, American Indians, homosexuals, and the physically disabled, whose movements rested on arguments that their constituents suffered from oppression fundamentally similar to white racism.

The passionate commitment to this idea makes its difficult to recall there was an earlier epoch, now highly embarrassing, when the liberal conscience was not particularly troubled by racial disparities and injustices. The progressives of a century ago, influenced by Darwin, were strongly inclined to ascribe disparities among racial and ethnic groups to innate differences. One of the most important progressive intellectuals, Richard T. Ely, founder of the American Economic Association, wrote in 1898 that blacks are “for the most part grown-up children, and should be treated as such.” Regarding, more generally, classes of people he considered inferior, Ely wrote in 1922, “We must give to the most hopeless classes left behind in our social progress custodial care with the highest possible development and with segregation of the sexes and confinement to prevent reproduction.”
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American whites who sincerely believed they had blacks' best interests at heart did not have to traffic in eugenics to take positions that astound today. The feminist and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for example, wrote “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem” for the
American Journal of Sociology
in 1904. It asks, “What can we do to promote the development of the backward race so that it may become an advantageous element in the community?” The urgency of that problem derives from “the unavoidable presence of a large body of aliens, of a race widely dissimilar and in many respects inferior, whose present status is to us a social injury. If we had left them alone in their own country this dissimilarity and inferiority would be, so to speak, none of our business.” But we didn't, and so must make the best of the situation created by slavery, the subsequent decision that slavery was morally and practically untenable, followed by the “consummate mishandling” of the integration of freed slaves and their descendants into American society.

Fortunately, there are reasons to be encouraged. “The African race, with the advantage of contact with our more advanced stage of evolution, has made more progress in a few generations than any other race has ever done in the same time, except the Japanese.” To accelerate this progress, Gilman proposes to “carefully organize in every county and township an enlisted body of all negroes below a certain grade of citizenship,” so that “the whole body of negroes who do not progress, who are not self-supporting, who are degenerating into an increasing percentage of social burdens or actual criminals should be taken hold of by the state.” The men, women, and children enlisted in this “new army” will take pride in “its uniforms, its decorations, its titles, its careful system of grading, its music and banners and impressive ceremonies.”

The “army's” goal would be to render itself unnecessary, but only, it seems, after first being rendered mandatory: “As fast as any individuals proved themselves capable of working on their own initiative they would be graduated with honor. This institution should be compulsory at the bottom, perfectly free at the top.” Ultimately, “Every negro graduated would be better fitted to take his place in the community,” while “[e]very negro unable to graduate would remain under wise supervision. . . .” Blacks, in short, would be treated as wards of the state as they served a kind of apprentice citizenship. While awaiting clearance for full participation in the nation's civic and economic life, they would be given “proper food, suitable hours of work, rest, and amusement; without the strain of personal initiative and responsibility to which so many have proved unequal. . . .”
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Gilman's rationale is that of the colonialist: the more civilized have a duty to uplift the less civilized, and therefore a right to protect them from the consequences of their barbarism. Arguments like hers and Ely's show the perils of recommending compassionate policies on the basis of sufferers' helplessness. In particular, empathizers who generalize from children's needs and limitations can wind up infantilizing empathizees. The helpless, by virtue
of
their helplessness, don't know how to get
beyond
their helplessness. The helpers do, though, and through solicitous feelings and actions will spare the helpless “the strain of personal initiative and responsibility.”

Such sentiments have not disqualified Gilman from becoming a hero to modern feminists—in 1994 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, located in Seneca Falls, New York. Gilman expressed the consensus of her time and peers, as did liberals in subsequent decades who betrayed no evidence of thinking that racial justice required anything more from whites than the social reformer's noblesse oblige and “wise supervision.” According to historian David Kennedy, President Franklin Roosevelt did “precious little . . . to improve the lot of black Americans,” preferring to spend political capital on establishing the New Deal, and then on winning World War II.
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Civil rights gained new salience after the war, prompting Strom Thurmond's “Dixiecrats” to walk out of the 1948 Democratic convention. But the Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson, was decidedly lukewarm about the issue, not just as a matter of political calculation but out of personal preference. He selected an Alabama segregationist, John Sparkman, to be his running mate in 1952, and gave a speech that denounced “the reckless assertions that the South is a prison, in which half the people are prisoners and the other half are wardens.” In private communications, write historians Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, “Stevenson worried about the ‘extremism' of ‘Negro leaders' and fumed about ‘NAACP stubbornness.'”
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What's striking is that such attitudes did nothing to prevent Stevenson from being the liberal hero of the same decade that also saw
Brown v. Board of Education
and the Montgomery bus boycott. Instead, “He became the favorite of, and drew into Democratic volunteer efforts, cadres of youngish, highly educated professionals and intellectuals,” in the words of Michael Barone.
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A dispassionate approach marked liberal thinking about race into the early 1960s, when the “tough, pragmatic tendency” inside the Democratic Party held sway against a more urgent concern with social justice. Nicholas Lemann notes that Senator John Kennedy, anticipating a presidential campaign, “voted with his Southern colleagues to put an amendment into the Civil Rights Act of 1957 that guaranteed jury trials (that is, certain acquittal) to people accused of violating blacks' voting rights.” As for the growing number of blacks who had left the South for northern cities, the 1960 Kennedy campaign treated them as just one more ethnic voting bloc, “not people with special problems and a unique moral claim on the government's help.”
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President Kennedy continued to engage the civil rights issue warily during his brief presidency. When he gave a televised address on the subject in June 1963, he appealed to racially neutral criteria of justice. “The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.” JFK explicitly stipulated the importance of reciprocity. “We have a right to expect that the Negro community will be responsible, will uphold the law, but they have a right to expect that the law will be fair, that the Constitution will be color blind. . . .”
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Within three years, Vice President Hubert Humphrey would say of the slums and riots, “If I lived in such conditions, I could lead a mighty good revolt myself.”
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Others went farther. When whites' sins of commission and omission were reckoned to be so horrific as to preclude atonement, so damaging as to dwarf any possible reconciliation, liberal compassion turned into liberal guilt, and then into self-contempt. In 1967 the literary critic Susan Sontag wrote, “Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets,
et al.
don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world.” Taking that era's condemnation of America's policies in Vietnam jungles and inner-city slums to its logical conclusion, she argued:

The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. What the Mongol hordes threaten is far less frightening than the damage that Western “Faustian” man, with his idealism, his magnificent art, his sense of intellectual adventure, his world-devouring energies for conquest, has already done, and further threatens to do.
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