America 3.0 by James C. Bennett

Author:James C. Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2013-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

THE STRESS AND STRAIN OF TRANSITION

To many thoughtful observers, the original successful structure of the Constitution seemed inadequate as America began facing unanticipated problems and situations under the pressure of industrialization, mass immigration from novel sources, and unprecedented urban growth and densities. By the time New Mexico and Arizona had completed the conversion of the contiguous continental land to statehood, the Industrial Revolution led many concerned Americans to believe that the old formula for America was no longer working.

The Civil War and emancipation resolved the contradiction between an individualistic American ideology and the alien system of chattel slavery and large plantations, which had spread to North America from the original Spanish system of the Caribbean. In the process, however, many more Northerners went into the factories to build the munitions of war, many experienced conscription for the first time in American history and the regimentation of military life, and all experienced the income tax, federal paper money, soaring public debt and inflation, and other centralizing and bureaucratizing measures. These were tolerated as a war necessity, and were quickly abandoned in peacetime. Yet a generation of intellectuals was permanently marked by the idealism and shared purpose of wartime, and awed by the ease with which collective action could accomplish great tasks.

At the same time, new problems caused Americans to worry that the old political mechanisms of the Republic were inadequate to handle the needs of the new era. As we saw, massive cities arose, with sprawling quarters of slum housing breeding crime, disease, vice, and corruption of a type and on a scale never known before in the small, familiar seaports of the old republic. The elected sheriffs and handful of deputies and constables who had kept the peace in the past were entirely overwhelmed by the challenge of large immigrant gangs speaking impenetrable languages and bound by exotic cultural practices such as the oath of silence. Immigrants from clan-based societies with no concept of public loyalty or civil society looted public treasuries and ran the already-inadequate public services into the ground. The crony-based legislatures were highly amenable to bribery, so a generation of railroad-builders and other capitalists learned to turn bribery into protection from competition, and thus gain and keep massive fortunes. Soon, both domestic and immigrant workers began organizing militant unions and engaging in pitched battles with state militias. These militias were often composed of farm boys with no sympathy for the immigrant hordes they faced, and no training in crowd control or urban warfare. From the great national railroad strike of 1877, which saw dozens killed and sections of cities burned to the ground, through the passage of the Wagner Act in 1936, labor violence, often with an ethnic component, created what was effectively a low-grade, endemic civil war in America’s industrial cities and mineral districts.

Against this background, intellectuals and public reformers believed the old structures and the old constraints of the Constitution had become obstacles to the successful rebuilding of America along lines that could address its obvious problems.

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