Why America Failed by Morris Berman

Author:Morris Berman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2011-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

The Rebuke of History

The past is always a rebuke to the present . . . it’s a better rebuke than any dream of the future.

—Robert Penn Warren

Since 1865 an agrarian Union has been changed into an industrial empire bent on conquest of the earth’s goods and ports to sell them in. This means warfare, a struggle over markets, leading, in the end, to actual military conflict between nations. . . . [This] has brought upon the social body a more deadly conflict, one which promises to deprive it, not of life, but of living; take the concept of liberty from the political consciousness; and turn the pursuit of happiness into a nervous running-around which is without the logic, even, of a dog chasing its tail.

—Andrew Nelson Lytle, “The Hind Tit”

[The Southern heritage] is far more closely in line with the common lot of mankind than the national legends of opulence and success and innocence. The South once thought of itself as a “peculiar people,” set apart by its eccentricities, but in many ways modern America better deserves that description.

—C. Vann Woodward, “The Search for Southern Identity”

There is, then, an illusion created by progress—which includes technology and the hustling way of life—that problems can be solved, and our situation dramatically improved, by just a little more of the same. More economic expansion, more technological innovation—perhaps just one more technological “fix”—and we’ll be on the right track, have the type of society we really want. As a belief system, it’s quite mesmerizing; except that there was one section of the country that did not buy into it: the South. As already noted, the American South is the one example we have of an opponent of this ideology that had real political teeth, and for this reason, in the mind of the North, it had to be vanquished.

When you think about it, nearly everything in modern American history turns on the Civil War, because the ideology I have been describing (which can be more accurately described as a mythology, or grand narrative) requires us to “fix” traditional societies and eliminate obstacles to progress. With the Civil War these two goals converged, making it the paradigm case of how we carry out, or attempt to carry out, these two projects. What the North did to the South is really the model of what America in general did and does to “backward” (i.e., traditional) societies, if it can. You wipe out almost the entire indigenous population of North America; you steal half of Mexico; you literally vaporize a large chunk of the Japanese population; you bomb Vietnam “back to the Stone Age” (in the immortal words of Curtis LeMay); you “shock and awe” Iraqi civilians, and so on. In what follows, then, I want to look at the War Between the States in a completely different way than the one found in the typical American history textbook. This is not to justify slavery, which I don’t believe can be justified; but rather to say that the conflict was a lot more “cosmic” than most of us realize.

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