Opportunity and Welfare in the First New Nation

Affiliation: Professor of government and sociology at Harvard University and vice president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Venue: Henry Ford Museum, Greenfield Village, Dearborn, MI

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Note from Author:

This lecture leans heavily on my earlier related writings. See S. M. Lipset, The First New Nation, The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1967); Group Life in America (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1972); and “Education and Equality: Israel and the United States Compared,” Society, vol. 11 (March/ April 1974), pp. 56-66.

Excerpt:

Some years ago I suggested that the United States should be properly regarded as the first new nation. The Declaration of Independence, whose bicentennial we are now celebrating, was the first successful proclamation by a major colony in modern times of its intent to secede from the mother country. It presaged comparable actions within half a century by most of the Spanish colonies in Central and South America. More recently, a variety of colonies in Africa and Asia have proclaimed their independence, often in words drawn directly from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration.

Born in a prolonged struggle for independence, the United States defined itself from its beginning in ideological terms. As many writers have noted, Americanism is an ideology, a set of integrated beliefs defining the good society. Some, such as Leon Samson and Sidney Hook, have even seen a close resemblance to those advocated by socialists. Thus in the 1930s Samson, seeking to explain “why no socialism in the U.S.” argued that the basic reason was that the values of socialism and Americanism, property relations apart, were quite similar. To demonstrate the point, he quoted copiously, comparing the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin with those of leading American figures. Instead of
citing such well-known advocates of the egalitarian ideal as Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he took his representative citations from John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. And as he indicated, their ideas of desirable goals in human relations-namely, equality of opportunity regardless of social origins and equal treatment regardless of social role-are much like those of the leading Marxists.1

Note:

1. Leon Samson, Towards a United Front (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1933), pp. 1-90; Sidney Hook, “The Philosophical Basis of Socialism in the United States,” in D. D. Egbert and S. Persons, eds., Socialism and American Life, vol. I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 450-451. For a condensation of Samson’s analysis and recent discussions, see John Laslett and S. M. Lipset, eds., Failure of a Dream? Essays in the History of American Socialism (Garden City: Doubleday-Anchor Books, 1974), pp. 426-462.