Andre Archie: The Virtue of Color-Blindness. Washington: Regnery Gateway, 2024.

With the United States at “a crossroads when it comes to race relations,” its citizens hesitating about whether to adhere to its longtime defense of the natural rights of individuals or to endorse “anti-racism” in the form of group rights, Professor Archie urges conservatives to “join me in reclaiming a noble racial tradition: color blindness.” As a scholar whose work has centered on classical political philosophy (he has published a monograph of Plato’s Greater Hippias), he knows that virtue “comes through practice and habit;” “we become morally good by performing actions that embody moral qualities.” “Natural, sympathetic relations among Americans” can develop if we guide our practice and habituation by the principle of color-blindness, conserving “the hard-won gains achieved on the racial front by reminding ourselves of the spirit of 1776 and 1863.” The emancipation of slaves followed from the color-blind principle of the American Revolution, that all men are created equal in their natural rights, as individuals of one species, one kind, regardless of skin color. So did the gains made by the civil rights movement, two generations ago.

Yet “I cannot think of any contemporary author on the Left or Right who doesn’t think the color-blind approach is at least outdated and probably naive.” (I can think of several but let the claim pass as generally true.) Beyond the chattering classes, “the false accusation of systemic racism has now been embraced by titans of the tech and financial industries,” while “color-blindness, a once commonplace approach to race relations, is now considered heresy.” Accordingly, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts caused a stir in a 2007 opinion in which he ventured to suggest, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” by means of ‘affirmative action.’ As Archie elaborates, “To be color-blind is to understand that an individual’s or a group’s racial membership should be irrelevant when choices are made or attitudes formed.” But for a long time, American conservatives have “failed to see just how corrosive and revolutionary the anti-color-blind pedagogy is.”

On the Supreme Court, Justice John Marshall Harlan called the Constitution “color-blind” in his dissent in the wrongly decided 1896 case, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld laws enforcing racial segregation. The Constitution, Harlan wrote, “neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” who “are equal before the law” when it comes to civil rights because “the law regards man as man.” But, as Archie writes, “racial segregation has returned in full, ugly force” via “the diversity training industry,” a “Trojan horse for far more insidious racial doctrines like Critical Race Theory and ‘Antiracism.'” The “true intention” of this industry is “to promote intimidation and psychological control over concerned, but racially passive white Americans.” That is, diversity training, affirmative action, and the like are instruments of rule, rule by a new ruling class in alliance with existing business and academic elites playing divide-and-rule against Americans by “encourag[ing] racial balkanization on the part of blacks and whites,” thereby undermining a hitherto republican regime animated by “a sense of American identity.” Archie sets as his goal “to reacquaint Americans” with the tradition of color-blindness “and to fight against modern-day segregationists.”

The false anti-racists of the ‘Woke’ ideology charge that Western civilization has been racist from the start. A classicist has no difficulty batting that down, citing Frank M. Snowden Jr.’s scholarship concluding “that classical antiquity was familiar with black people through black-skinned Ethiopians and Nubians, and that neither the Greeks nor the Romans expressed racial animosity toward either.” Classical moralists centered on character, the ethos of individuals and peoples, asking what is the best way to live, not what complexion one might have. Their moral theory was “person-centered.” Modern moral theory has emphasized not virtue but “criteria for selecting the best action,” whether those criteria were ‘deontological’ (e.g., Kant’s categorical imperative) utilitarian. Utilitarianism is especially “susceptible to attributing moral status to ascriptive qualities like race” because the principle of utility cannot “prevent race or racial characteristic from being used as a criterion in deciding whether or not an action produces the greatest amount of utility, happiness, or well-being.” When the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wanted to be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin, he appealed to the principle of classical morality, not that of the moderns, as that personalism has been affirmed by Christianity, whose Founder commands, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” “Character is everything. It’s all you really have at the end of the day.”

Frederick Douglass had already articulated decisive arguments against the claim that American racism is “systemic” in principle. As a former slave, he could have no doubt that “in the nineteenth century, discrimination against African Americans was factually systemic. Even after the abolition of slavery, “emancipation and reconstruction promised very little in the face of organized violence, political and economic marginalization, and segregation that blacks experienced.” Nevertheless, Douglass never conceded that the United States Constitution and the philosophic principles behind it were anything less than color-blind. In this, he opposed the claims of the prominent Abolitionist agitator, William Lloyd Garrison, who stigmatized the Constitution as a “covenant with death” and the American founding as designed to perpetuate slavery. “Garrison believ[ed] that the Founding documents were anti-black through and through.” Douglass believed no such thing.

“Garrison’s constitutional beliefs were, fundamentally, informed by his acceptance of perfectionism,” the belief that human beings can be purged of their sins and that, “through will and faith, man can achieve perfection on earth” through obedience to Christ. Renouncing human government as an unnecessary hierarchy, Garrison also rejected the warfare governments undertake, advocating “nonresistant pacifism.” Garrison’s analysis of law was, accordingly, positivist; laws express only the ruling opinion of the regime that sets it down—in the United States, majority opinion. Human law has no real underpinning in the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Unsurprisingly, then, the Constitution should be regarded as a pro-slavery document because it includes the ‘three-fifths’ and fugitive slave clauses. And before it, the Articles of Confederation had relegated slavery to the status of an issue to be decided by the states, a feature the Constitution did not eliminate. In the 1850s, Garrison pushed for secession—secession of the Northern states from union with the slaveholding South. This was in keeping with his moral perfectionism; secession would have done nothing to put slavery on the road to extinction, but it would have made Abolitionists feel purer.

Douglass initially concurred. But in 1851, having read the arguments of abolitionists Gerrit Smith, Lysander Spooner, and William Goodell, he began to see the Preamble to the Constitution as the link between the supreme law of the land and the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God cited in the Declaration. Congressman Smith had turned his hometown of Peterboro, New York into a center of anti-slavery activity, particularly the Underground Railroad; Douglass dedicated My Bondage and My Freedom to him. Spooner, and ally of Smith, was an Abolitionist anarchist, opposed to the Constitution because opposed to governments generally, but still moved to write The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, a book on the Constitution as an anti-slavery document. Goodell, a New York publisher and 1852 Liberty Party candidate for the presidency, held similar convictions. “Their racial advocacy and intellectual focus on behalf of helping black Americans achieve equality before the law were quite remarkable,” and Archie doubts “that the Frederick Douglass we revere so much today would have achieved the status he presently occupies without having been shaped by the ideas he inherited from these men.” They, in turn, had consulted the writings of the great English jurist, William Blackstone, who considered the law of nature as the foundation of English common law. “Unlike positive law, the law of nature is unhistorical,” valid everywhere human beings exist, and so long as they do. The law of nature “exists objectively both as a norm for individuals, communities, and the state, and as a limiting principle in the political arena where objective right could be repudiated by the legislator.” Blackstone in turn derived his natural law principles from John Locke, who argues that the natural law supports the individual’s natural rights to life, liberty, and property.

As one of the greatest orators of his time, Douglass understood that those opposed to slavery and to the racism of its advocates (notably, Senator John C. Calhoun and his disciples, including then-Senator and future Confederate States of America president Jefferson Davis) would best win hearts as well as minds by showing Americans that their country was founded upon the anti-slavery principles of natural law. Nor was this a mere rhetorical ploy. In the 1805 case, United States v. Fisher, Chief Justice John Marshall had written, “Where rights are infringed, where fundamental principle are overthrown, where the general system of the law is departed from, the legislative intention must be expressed with irresistible clearness, to induce a court of justice to suppose a design to affect such objects.” As a member of the founding generation, Marshall understood the fundamental principle of the Constitution he was interpreting to be the natural law; in Archie’s words, if a law under review by the Court is “ambiguous or simply unclear, and can be interpreted in line with natural rights or in opposition to natural rights, the interpretation consistent with natural rights is the meaning that should be given to the words under consideration.” Smith, Spooner, and Goodell were in good legal company, and by 1851 Douglass had joined them.

Their most distinguished ally at the time was the Free-Soil Party United States Senator from Ohio, Salmon P. Chase. “Chase held two political beliefs that especially appealed to Douglass: that slavery “perverted the idea of labor” by “pitting slave labor against free labor” and thereby diverting the government from its rightful task of securing unalienable natural rights; and that slavery’s extension into western territories “posed a mortal threat to republican government” by bringing the anti-republican, oligarchic regime of slaveholders to the western states, which would then ally themselves with the Southern state oligarchs. But, as the Northwest Ordinance had shown, “the Federal government has the power to outlaw slavery in all Federal territories” and thus to defend American republicanism against its enemies. As a founder of the Republican Party, a few years later, Chase helped to insert these Constitutional arguments against slavery into the 1856 and 1860 platforms. 

Concluding his refutation of claims that the United States has always exhibited “systemic” racism, racism valorized by the principles of the regime, Archie endorses Douglass’s approach. “For right-thinking African Americans what America is and what it stands for has never been the issue: the issue has been to get America to stand by the principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the constitution and the Constitution itself.”

In the second third of his book, Archie turns, with more than a touch of distaste, to what he rightly terms the “sophistry” of the principal publicists for pseudo-anti-racism, whose arguments pervade the African-American Studies programs in American universities and colleges. “A narrative of separateness has been their constant refrain from the beginning: The United States and its history is irredeemably racist and exploitative. Slavery is America’s original sin.” Not only African-American Studies departments, but ethnic studies generally “have played an influential role both in academia and in undermining an American identity that is grounded in color-blind principles and transcends race.” For a professor of classical philosophy, a certain impatience with the flyweight intellectuals of Wokeness is understandable and, sure enough, Archie quotes Socrates in Plato, dissing the poets: “the more poetic they are, the less they should be heard.” And Socrates was talking about the likes of Homer and Aristophanes, not Derrick Bell, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibran X. Kendi, or Robin Di Angelo. So, to the critic who might chide, “Archie, you are no Socrates,” the professor might reply, “and the likes of these are no Aeschyluses.”

The late Professor Bell wrote Race, Racism, and American Law and Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. A law professor, he replaced the Founders’ principle of natural right and the Progressive’s principle of historical growth with Critical Race Theory. As a short story writer (as it were on the side), he sought to dramatize that theory. Bell claims that racism is permanent in American because “it serves the material and psychic interests of both white elites and working-class whites,” an argument that Douglass had already rejected on the materialist side and worked to correct on the personal side by pointing to the repeatedly expressed opinions of the American Founders and their latter-day allies in the Abolitionist and Free-Soil movements. But, as Archie remarks, Bell prefers a “politically motivated, results oriented, and anti-color blind” use of law “to practice positive discrimination,” i.e., discrimination on the basis of skin color, now for the benefit of people of color. He has the practical sense to understand that African Americans will only make real advances “if white America sees its interest as also advancing at the same time”—a “power dynamic” Bell calls “Interest Convergence,” not unlike the ‘Convergence Theory’ left-wing Americans proposed during the Cold War, in their (futile) attempt to reconcile the United States and the Soviet Union. But whereas the color-blind approach brings ‘whites’ to frame their mutual self-interest with ‘black’ and ‘brown’ Americans within the framework of natural rights, and thereby the dignity of persons, the anti-color-blind approach works to reduce ‘whites’ to shameful and silent acquiescence. “The abolitionist movement alone is a counter narrative to Bell’s Interest Convergence thesis and its assumption that African Americans lack agency to improve their own well-being in America, but “Bell has no interest in historical facts, nor is he interested in racial fraternity.” Bell prefers to tell “subjective and preachy” stories of Caucasian oppression. “For no other group in America, except for white Americans, would we tolerate the wholesale racial demonization of a group.”

Journalist Ta-Nehesi Coates’s Between the World and Me taps “the thrill of militancy.” Coates writes in the line of James Baldwin’s polemic, The Fire Next Time, a work in what Archie calls “the exhortative tradition” of black American literary production. The book consists of a series of letters to Coates’s adolescent son, calling ‘white’ people (as Coates himself puts it) “destroyers” who enforce “the whims of our country.” These whims extend to putatively rational enterprises: “You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the aggression all land, with great violence, upon the body.” Take that, Margaret Mead. “Here we see Coates’s tendency to exaggerate for literary effect,” Archie observes, understatedly. Although addressing his son, Coates keeps a careful eye on his ‘white’ readers, “speak[ing] to a deep vulnerability in the national psyche of Americans, especially elite white Americans,” hoping that they will behave rather as a previous generation of rich Manhattanites were persuaded to fund The Nation —the sort of behavior Tom Wolfe satirized in Radical Chic. By tapping into such sentiments, Coates hopes to sucker ‘whites’ into paying ‘reparations’ to ‘people of color,’ the least they can do to redress past and present abuses. Reparations are the obvious consequence of group rights (and of group wrongs). Archie brings a bit of sanity to the fore, recognizing that while “the majority of African Americans were introduced to America through slavery…they were not permanently scarred by the experience of slavery” and so “are not in need of constant moral cheerleading from their betters,” to say nothing of constant monetary restitution. 

History professor Ibrahim X. Kendi explains How to Be an Antiracist, not a mere non-racist, which simply won’t do, in his eyes. “His ideology and the political movement it represents are, on the most basic level, antithetical to individual autonomy and the individual right enshrined in the Bill of Rights”; the practical upshot of his pseudo-anti-racism entails denial of freedom of conscience and civil liberties to “blatant racists.” In Kendi’s words, “if discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.” The problem, Archie remarks, is that racially discriminative laws, however well-intended (and that is questionable), contribute to “the modern segregationist trends we see today in any parts of our society,” the valorization of “affinity groups” that “foster divisiveness, mainly along the lines of race, gender, and sexuality.” As an academic, Archie deplores the policy of requiring college and university employees and students to sign “diversity statements,” even before they are allowed to enter academia. Such statements are the contemporary equivalent to the confessions of faith churches and church-related institutions once required of prospective members. The articles of the new faith are simple: “systematically racist” America, ruled by ‘whites,’ aims at exploiting ‘peoples of color. Such injustice can only be remedied by “various schemes to socially engineer desired outcomes” under the assumption that “if it weren’t for discrimination, the achievements and outcomes of various racial groups would be random or even.” Against this claim, Archie points to the research of the economist Thomas Sowell, who attributes economic and social differences among various ethnic groups to their “cultural traits,” their habits of mind and heart, especially those that either encourage or discourage adaptation to changes in demand for certain types of labor and for the skills required to perform them. 

Robin Di Angelo, a professor of “multicultural education” at Westfield State University, wrote White Fragility: The Challenges of Talking to White People About Racism. “White fragility,” a term she coined, adroitly bathes ‘whiteness’ in the waters of condescension, putting her fellow Caucasians firmly in their place. It serves as a rhetorical expression of her “abiding disdain for enlightenment concepts such as neutrality, objectivity, impartiality equality, individualism, and formalism”—the whole roster of ‘postmodernist’ bugbears. Bathwater, baby, Archie replies: “Despite the fact that the European Enlightenment as a political movement had some drawbacks”—you know, the Jacobin Terror during the French Revolution—such concepts as “objectivity and impartiality, mostly in the context of law, were crucial to the modern era’s efforts at extending the notion of equality to broader segments of the population in Western societies,” as seen in the Declaration of Independence and indeed in the earliest phase of the French Revolution. In her book, and in her work as a “diversity trainer,” Di Angelo exhibits “the ugliest aspects of tribalism and racial atavism” as “good and necessary in the quest to heighten the racial consciousness”—a.k.a. ‘wokeness’—of “her intended audience: the white middle upper class.” She dislikes individualism, and rights held by individuals, on the basis of the age-old structuralist argument that says the naive among us believe that their actions are due to their own efforts, and that the ascriptive qualities that define them socially—race, class, gender—have very little sway over how they exercise their capacities to express themselves, to express their characters, as they see fit as individuals.” On the contrary, human beings “belong to groups first and foremost,” groups that “define how we see ourselves, as individuals, in relation to other groups.” This supposed fact is supposed to make “the relations between white Americans and people of color, particularly black Americans, as a zero-sum contest for economic and political power,” with ‘whites’ having taken most of the marbles, so far. ‘Whites’ are “biased,” given their superior economic, social, and political position, which imposes the wrong moral and intellectual perspective upon them. This is where the classicist Archie might recall the work of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (no democrat, he), who described in his book, The Ancient City, the way in which the small, closed poleis of antiquity assiduously framed a nearly airtight set of civil-religious beliefs upon their citizens, before those naughty philosophers arose to subvert the laws. ‘Whites’ are analogous to such citizens, Di Angelo in effect argues, and she is the subversive philosopher. But the hemlock will be served to her fellow ‘whites,’ who will be required to call it ambrosia. 

Whatever the differences between the classical political philosophers and the Enlightenment philosophes —and they are considerable—they share an interest in setting “epistemic standards that govern the relationships between groups” in ‘the city,’ the political community. “Rational discourse” requires that “we put aside, or bracket, our differences in order to be impartial or neutral with regard to our own biases and predilection” in order to “rise above” them—a more modest version of the Socratic-Platonic ascent from the cave. In contemporary America, “relationships are fraught with confusion, tension, and posturing when they are governed by irrational standards that essentialize individuals based upon their racial characteristics,” but those are the standards “the diversity training industry operates under.” With those standards in hand, the legerdemain begins, as the diversity trainer frames “questions or issues in a specific way to enhance the chances of achieving a desired end,” very much in the manner of the slightly older techniques deployed in ‘values clarification’ school exercises. [1] Despite the pretense of dialectical questioning, “the diversity trainer’s main goal is to quiet white people by conducting the session under the assumptions that all black people experience racism, whether they know or not, and that white people just can’t relate to such experiences.” (In this, diversity training mimics feminist ‘sensitivity training,’ with its assumption that men, renamed ‘males’ for the occasion, are insensitive brutes which, like brutes, better not open their snouts.) Meanwhile, “skeptical blacks”—Professor Archie may have been one of them?—are “shamed into not speaking out in disagreement with the trainer or the racial victimhood narrative that’s told, and, most important, white attendees now feel duty bound to remain quiet or they will be ostracized and called out.” It is as if John Locke’s “law of opinion” has been redeployed for decidedly un-Lockean ends. Lockean-liberal toleration has no place in the new illiberalism, which permits “no tolerance for alternative points of view, nor tolerance for any point of view other than the official racial line.” Jim Crow redivivus, with the bottom rail on top, this time. 

To restore the virtue of color-blindness, Archie appropriates a phrase of Roger Scruton’s, “oikophobia” or fear of one’s own, giving it a new application. Classical political philosophy and Enlightenment rationalism both moderated inordinate love of one’s own. (In the case of some Enlighteners, they moved to suppress it altogether, leading to the reaction of nationalism.) In contemporary politics, we now see the opposite of the love of one’s own. The Oikophobe or, abbreviatedly, the Oik, has unmoored himself, or has been unmoored from, his “native soil, home, community, and country.” “Think of it as an imperious attitude toward his compatriots, coupled with a radicalization of the spirit of democracy,” extreme egalitarianism. He prefers the foreign enemy to his fellow-citizen, as when the Left sympathizes with Islamist terrorists who would line them up for a throat-cutting, given the opportunity. “The Oik has a deep disdain for America, its way of life, and its institutions”—its regime. To put it in Platonic terms, as Archie is happily wont to do, the ‘identity politics’ of the Left subordinates the economics-based analyses of the Old Left, its emphasis on the needs of the body and the cravings of the appetites, for the spirited passions of the thymotic aspect of the human soul. For this reason, “it’s no longer enough” for Americans “to appeal to a creedal identity in the way Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement did,” although it is necessary to continue to do so. “The other part of the American identity is cultural,” a matter of families, neighborhoods, and local “associations,” as Tocqueville calls them. Abraham Lincoln understood that, citing the principles of the Declaration of Independence in the Gettysburg Address but also the “mystic cords of memory” in his First Inaugural Address because “the principles and way of life animated by the spirit of 1776 is both felt and believed in,” felt especially in “a particular geographic location, among a particular culture, and among a particular people.” Conservatives have long admired Edmund Burke’s invocation of the “little platoons” that foster humane sentiments, sociality without ‘socialism” and indeed without any ‘ism,’ any ideology (very much including racism) that abstracts from the humanity of humans. Such little platoons need to be tempered by reasoned thought, both prudential and theoretical, if they are not to become thoughtless. Americans have reasoned together in the past, and they are capable of doing so again.

Note

1. On ‘values clarification’ and its ideological uses, see Paul Eidelberg and Will Morrisey: Our Culture, ‘Left’ or ‘Right’: Litterateurs Confront Nihilism (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), chapter 5, “Self-Made Moralism: John Dewey and ‘Values Clarification.'” The main difference between values clarification and diversity training is that values clarifiers assumed a pose of moral relativism or neutrality, as befit latter-day heirs of modern rationalism, while diversity trainers wear no such mask, as befits ‘postmodernism.’

Everett Kimball: State and Municipal Government in the United States. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1922.

Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Volume I, Part 1, Chapter 5. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2000.

In the United States, Tocqueville remarks, the people are the rulers, and it is local government that gives Americans the political experience to make their rule reasonable—unlike the circumstances of France after its revolution, where a centralized state under a monarchic regime had foreclosed such experience, leading to catastrophe when the people attempted to rule. Even more fundamentally, local government matters because it embodies political life itself. “The township is the sole association that is so much in nature that everywhere men are gathered a township forms by itself—so much so, that the township “appears to issue directly from the hands of God.” With Aristotle, Tocqueville regards human beings as political by nature.

Nevertheless, freedom in a township is “rare and fragile.” The township is coarse, not entirely civilized, less based on reason than on experience. It “develops almost secretly in the bosom of a half-barbaric society.” It may well begin as a regime not of the people but of a chieftain, or of a warrior-oligarchy. Still, it is “in the township that the force of free peoples resides,” since township institutions “are to freedom what primary schools are to science,” schools of “political education.” It is small enough (in America, usually about 2,000 in population) for the people to rule it directly, thereby “habituat[ing] them to making use” of freedom,” to cultivate “the spirit of freedom.” True, the people are “the source of social powers” everywhere; even in an empire ruled by a tyrant, they might rise up and overthrow their tormentor. “But nowhere do they exercise their power more immediately,” nowhere else are they “a master.” 

New England townships exemplify this direct rule by the people. No municipal council, no elected representatives, legislate for the township; the people do, in the annual town meeting. The representatives or “selectmen” elected at the meeting administer the laws without enjoying any authority to set policy or to impose taxes. They are personally responsible to the people for their conduct in office. A township may have fewer than twenty selectmen, including parish commissioners (who make expenditures for worship services), a constable, a clerk, a cashier or treasurer, an overseer of the poor, and a road inspector. None of these men receives a salary, only commissions. Residents obey them because they are necessary and useful to the maintenance of the township—matters involving personal injury or the need for cooperation—but they otherwise rule themselves in the many matters concerning only themselves. In New England, “political life was born in the very bosom of the townships; one could almost say that each of them at its origin was an independent nation”—rather like the poleis or ‘city-states’ of antiquity. And they remain independent in relation to the states, except when the need for cooperation arises; to meet such needs, the state can require townships to collect taxes for its legitimate purposes. That is, the township’s relation to the states parallels the individual’s relation to the township. “It acts, it is true, in a circle that it cannot leave, but its movements within [that circle] are free.” It is “a free and strong corporation that one is a part of and that is worth his trouble to seek to direct”; it conduces to political rule. Americans are citizens, not subjects of the state. 

Under the British Empire, the American colonies partook not of aristocratic freedom—full political life for the few—but of what Tocqueville calls bourgeois and democratic freedom. The people exercised the right to vote, including the right to vote for or against the taxes they paid; the authority to impose responsibility on those who governed them; individual freedom; the right to be policed by persons selected by the residents; the right to trial by a jury of their peers. To borrow the title of James Monroe’s book, the people were the sovereigns. [1] From 1650 on, townships were organized before the counties, counties before the colonies (the eventual states), and colonies-states before the Union. Unlike the colonial governments, they were always democratic and republican. But the people are far from unruly democrats. The existence of locally ruled parishes shows how the people transmit moral principles from one generation to the next. “In America, it is religion that leads to enlightenment, it is the observance of divine laws that guides man to freedom.” The eminent New England clergyman, Cotton Mather, defined freedom as Aristotle did, not as doing as one likes but in doing what is just and good. The spirit of religion comports with the spirit of individual and political freedom, with “Heaven in the other world and well-being and freedom in this one.” Political life in America is a “field left by the Creator to the efforts of intelligence.”

As a result, with the American Revolution, “the dogma of the sovereignty of the people came out of the township and took hold of the government” of the states and the federal government. And the sovereign people were well thus prepared for self-government at the state and federal levels.

Writing more than eighty years after Tocqueville, looking back over the Civil War and the subsequent Constitutional amendments (especially the Fourteenth), the municipal reform movement, and Progressivism, Smith College political historian Everett Kimball describes municipal institutions as they were in New England and throughout the country in the early years of the regime and as politicians altered them in subsequent decades. Evidently in light of those events, unlike Tocqueville, he regards the states as “all-important in determining the powers and responsibilities of the smaller units of local government”; the right of popular sovereignty has shifted its locus to the state and national populations. Perhaps as a result of this partial centralization of government, “all constitutions have grown longer” and professionalized civil service has partly replaced government by political party appointees. (In 1890s New York City, he shudders, not only did Tammany Hall receive substantial monetary contributions from business corporations but it established “regular tariffs” for “saloons, gambling-houses, and houses of ill-fame. Pickpockets actually “paid for the privilege of operating unmolested in certain localities”—an arrangement, one suspects, that may prevail to this day in languorous New Orleans.) The United States has seen a “changed spirit” of the laws. “Rightly or wrongly, the demand has been made upon the state that greater and increasing care should be given for the public safety, the health of the community, the poor, and the defective, as well as for the conservation of the public resources and improvement of public comfort and well-being.” [2] Institutionally, this has led states to establish “a constantly increasing number of new boards and commissions.” Operating under “a changed conception of the function of government,” officials staffing these new ruling offices “perform the multitudinous functions which the modern state undertakes,” along with substantially more numerous (and almost always unelected) administrators within the several departments of the executive branch. State government functions now include law enforcement, education, public charity, prisons, public health, agriculture, labor law, and corporate law (“the regulation of industrial relations and the whole law of labor is a modern development,” superseding “the doctrine of noninterference” that prevailed for most of the nineteenth century). “The most striking and alarming feature of state finance is the rapid increase of state expenditures.” At the time Kimball wrote, revenues for these efforts came primarily from property taxes, but states were also taxing income, inheritances, and corporate profits. 

How have county and municipal governments adapted themselves, and how have they been adapted by the states, given the accumulation of ruling authority within the state and federal governments? Kimball begins his history of local government in the United States with the Saxon shire. With the fifth-century Anglo-Saxon settlement in Wessex and the subsequent spread of Anglo-Saxon rule throughout England, shires were governed by royally appointed “shire reeves” or sheriffs, complete with courts, pervaded the country. The counties (which “grew out of the shire”) “retained a large degree of administrative control” of the royal subjects, thanks to 20 to 60 “justices of the peace” who tried civil but not criminal cases and oversaw roads, bridges, county property, and levied taxes. The counties wielded no legislative powers, however. As Tocqueville saw in America, parishes served as parallel ruling institutions, eventually (when Henry VIII established the Anglican Church against Rome), assuming “care of the poor” but also recruiting armed men for the crown, thus illustrating the Machiavellian-statist propensities of the Tudor dynasty. Parish officials were elected by local landholders, and while in England such local control of local government declined with state centralization in the seventeenth century, in the American colonies it remained as before.

In those colonies, county governments settled into three patterns corresponding to the three geographical regions. In the South, freeholders elected delegates to the general colonial assembly, which “took no part directly in the management of the affairs of the county,” which was administered by a lord lieutenant, a sheriff, and justices of the peace, as in England. “In theory and practice the government of the counties was undemocratic and oligarchical,” since the courts “became almost self-perpetuating corporations” and the judges “suggested to the [royal] governor the candidates for lord lieutenant, sheriff, and their fellow justices.” Such regimes made sense in the absence of large towns and the consequent inconsequence of a middle class; “the plantations were large and scattered, and each planter on his estate assumed many of the duties which were ordinarily performed by agents of local government.” That is, plantation oligarchs resembled, and often thought of themselves as the equivalents of, feudal lords. The parishes “had few duties other than ecclesiastical and were overshadowed in local administration by the powers of the county.” In New England, by contrast, towns rather than counties predominated, governed by the people in the meetings Tocqueville admired and administered by the selectmen, constables, and town clerks Tocqueville describes, a few decades after Americans won their independence. Kimball observes a similar civic effect, as well, deeming discussions at the meetings of his own time to be “have great educative value in self-government,” with participants exhibiting “great native shrewdness and often considerable skill in debate.” For their part, the Middle Colonies saw “a mixed system of local government,” with “the towns [being] more important than the parishes in the South” and enjoying “a considerable degree of autonomy.” Kimball focuses on New York, where elected county boards of town supervisors consisting of one freeholder elected from each town in the county “supervis[ed] the levy and assessment of the local taxes for country purposes.” The county elected the colonial legislators. The Middle Colonies also saw the formation of boroughs “chartered by the colonial governor as the crown’s representative.” The borough’s charter “prescribed the form of government”—typically consisting of a mayor appointed by the governor, borough councilmen elected by the freeholders, and aldermen appointed by the councilmen, all meeting in a borough council. In New Jersey to this time, many local municipalities are called ‘boroughs’ and are governed by borough councils.

“The colonists were fairly well satisfied with their system of local government; they had as much control over their affairs as did the people of England, and in New England it was even greater…. Consequently, after the Declaration of Independence and the formation of the state governments, few changes were made in these institutions.” As Americans pushed westward to the Mississippi, they took their local government institutions with them, “following the parallels of latitude”: settlers in the Northwest Territory (including Abraham Lincoln’s and Stephen Douglas’s Illinois) saw democracy in the form of town meetings; Indiana and Ohio “adopted the mixed form of local government”; Kentucky and Tennessee “took over the Virginia system of country government.” However, event in the ‘middle’ and southerly territories and states, “the principle of popular election was emphasized, and the governments were far more democratic,” with “the choice of the local officials” firmly placed “in the hands of the whole people rather than in those of the taxpayers.” The regional factions that eventuated in civil war may be seen in these local regime differences of northeastern, middle, southern, and western states, with the latter providing the military and political ‘tipping point’ during the war and the decade prior to the war.

Although by Kimball’s 1920s, “centralizing tendencies are everywhere seen,” with “state control or supervision [making] great headway,” a substantial degree of decentralization remains, more so “than [in] any other country.” Urbanization concentrates populations, leading to levels of disease and poverty difficult for cities to address by themselves; corruption also sparks demands for outside assistance from higher authorities. “In the South the presence of large negro populations has led the state authorities to exercise closer supervision and greater control in the interests of efficient administration of law and justice.”

Within each state, the county remains “the largest district for local administration.” Counties are established by the states “and may be erected without the consent of the inhabitants”; they are in effect agents of the state, local but not locally controlled. Their primary duties are judicial, but they also have the power to tax, and they bear responsibility for organizing and supervising elections. Although they do have elected boards of directors, their legislative functions “are rather closely restricted” by state statute. Outside of the northeastern states, they often run poorhouses, although state institutions are beginning to replace those. When it comes to law enforcement, “the sheriff is an agent of the state” but enjoys substantial scope of action, a power Kimball deplores. “In criminal cases the sheriff as keeper of the county jail has custody of the prisoners confined there and guards and delivers prisoners sentenced to other institutions.” He is aided by the county coroner, “the oldest of all elective country officers.” His duties “involve technical knowledge of two sorts: he needs to be both a lawyer and a physician, able to make a correct diagnosis weigh evidence, and preside over his jury.” Since “a man of these abilities is seldom chosen, and coroners’ inquests have traditionally been subjects of derision,” the state of Massachusetts has instituted a system of medical examiners; they report the cause of death to county prosecutors when they detect signs of foul play. In the South, counties are divided into school districts and precincts; the latter elect members of the county board. That is, Southern counties “have wider functions than those in New England,” taking up some of the responsibilities municipalities undertake elsewhere. This is due to the more dispersed populations in the South and also to “the presence of the negro population, which is generally debarred from the privileges of taking part in government,” a circumstance which “prevents the development of the active local governments found in the North.”

Moving to the municipalities, Kimball defines villages or boroughs as “small, compactly built districts possessing charters of incorporation” established by a popular vote and recognized either by the county court, the county board, or the township supervisor. Some of these are actual municipalities, independent of township. Boroughs are governed by elected councils, which pass ordinances within the confines set down by state statutes, construct and maintain roads and public works, funded by property taxes. American cities are much bigger municipal corporations; they nonetheless “derive all [their] powers” from the state. Although many of the early cities were associated with forts, which protected them from hostile Amerindians and any European imperial holdings nearby, most “have been founded and developed as the result of trade or industry,” facilitated by such transportation routes as seas, rivers, and lakes. “The growth of cities is a modern phenomenon,” especially in the United States, “where the rapid growth of cities has surpassed that in all other counties.” Between 1880 and 1920, urban populations here had more than tripled (thanks mostly to migration and to improved sanitary conditions), now accounting for more than half the national population. Most urban residents live in the smaller cities, those with populations less than 25,000. Most of those who have moved into the cities are unskilled workers looking for jobs, especially in factories. European, Asian, and African-American migrants have “complicated” governance of the cities. “Reformers have frequently found it impossible to gain the combined support of different groups of foreign-born citizens because of their unwillingness to unite with other nationalities and their fear that some cherished custom might be interfered with by a political change.” In addition to overcrowding and the hazards of factory work, “the general wear and tear of urban life tend[s] to increase the death rate,” although this has been more than counterbalanced by in-migration. And while crime rates in the cities exceed those in rural areas, so do charitable and humanitarian efforts. Thus, “the cities present the most violent contrasts; in them extremes meet.” All this costs money: government expenditures have “more than doubled between 1903 and 1919,” the last period for which Kimball could obtain statistics.

Municipal government has changed substantially since English settlers arrived. The first boroughs in the colonies were established in Maine in the 1640s. Then and subsequently, the charters were granted by governors, not by popularly elected assemblies. Mayors were also appointed by the colonial governor and councils were self-perpetuating, not elected by popular vote. Boroughs were judicial, not so much administrative organizations; indeed, “few of the modern municipal functions were performed.” They did govern markets and streets, water supply almost never, inasmuch as most water came from wells. “There were no public schools in any of the boroughs, no parks, no libraries, no administration of charitable relief,” and, accordingly, no taxes, revenues being “derived mostly from fines, licenses, and fees for the markets, ferries, and docks.” 

“The establishment of independence of the United States brought about significant changes in municipal government,” as charters were now granted by state legislatures and charters were amended to guarantee governance by councils elected by the people. By the 1790s, “the influence of the national Constitution was clearly felt, and the forms of national government were bodily transferred to the cities.” These forms included separation of legislative and executive powers and, in Baltimore, a bicameral city legislature. Cities were small, with only thirteen having more than 8,000 residents; the urban population made up only about five percent of the U. S. population. The next thirty years—the years of Tocqueville—saw further democratization of municipal politics, with popular election of mayors, the elimination of property requirements for voting and for serving in office, the development of the spoils system by well-organized political parties. Municipal governments took on functions demanded by their ever-increasing constituencies, including control of the water supply, fire protection, and general power to tax. The two decades after this saw the institution of paid police and firemen, improved care of the streets, and poor relief. Such increased responsibilities diminished local control because “many cities were forced to appeal to the legislature for additional powers in order to perform the functions which were necessary and particularly, to finance these functions.” This reinforced the already existing tendency of state legislatures to regard “the cities as merely subordinate areas of administration and the city charters as mere statutes subject to amendment at any time.” Indeed, “a municipal corporation, like all other corporations is the creation of the legislature of the state,” “entirely subordinate” to the state legislature, owing its legitimacy to a state-granted charter. States also established special commissions or boards appointed by themselves, such as the state park commission in New York city and state police boards in New York, Baltimore, and Chicago. In New York, such commissions “went so far as to control five-sixths of the municipal expenditures.” Within the municipalities, and particularly the cities, government became bigger and more complicated, with new departments, “independent of the municipal council,” whose heads might be chosen by popular vote. 

Kimball applauds the commissions because, in his judgment, the political parties that controlled municipal governments under the mayor and council system were inefficient, often corrupt, and unstable inasmuch as they were prey to the vagaries of the election cycle. “The spoils system was pretty thoroughly fastened upon the cities before the beginning of this period” and “the patronage of a large city was a prize which both parties were anxious to obtain.” The civil service reform movement of the nineteenth century’s last three decades derived from this, and from the increased complexity of urban municipal government, which made the professionalization of civil service more attractive. “Certain cities appealed to the legislature for protection against their own government.” More immediately, however, city charters were altered to give mayors more power, particularly the power to appoint. “This opened the door to trading and logrolling, but on the whole it was an advance over the system either of popular election” [of administrative offices] or of state-appointed officers.” At the same time, “state after state passed civil-service laws and established commissions for the supervision of municipal appointments,” appointments obtained by competitive examination. This practice was not instituted in the majority of states by the end of the nineteenth century, however.

Overall, municipal reforms until 1900 “were aimed at special abuses or tendencies, rather than any radical change in the form of government.” On the verge of bankruptcy caused by a disastrous flood, Galveston, Texas introduced the first “commission form of government,” whereby lawmaking and administration were combined in one body, as seen in corporate boards; the reasoning was that a ‘business model’ would be more efficient and honest than a ‘political’ one.  (This distinction between ‘business’ or ‘administration’ and ‘politics’ only holds if ‘politics’ means government in accordance with the institution of separated powers. It is sometimes extended to a distinction between ‘administration’ and government by elected representatives, but in America the commissioners that governed cities in Kimball’s time were usually elected officials.) At that time, about 350 cities in the United States, many of them in the Midwest, had adopted this system. In a similar move, about 200 cities had adopted a city manager form of government, again on the grounds that a professional chief executive would be more efficient and honest than an elected one, especially given the need for “vast waterworks and sewage-disposal systems” along with complex transportation networks and increased public charity—all consequences of the sharp increases in population caused by mass immigration. The children of immigrants needed education, beginning with education in English and culminating in job training; this, too, increased the responsibilities of local government while simultaneously interesting state governments in education. Although “no legislature can hope to foresee all the wants of all the cities,” it can “lay down simple and comprehensive rules vesting in administrative authorities the power to apply these rules with such variations as the needs of the cities require.” This “idea of administrative control originated in Europe, and much of the success of municipal government in Prussia is due to the relative absence of legislative control and the prevalence of administrative control.” Kimball applauds: “Although administrative control has not developed to the same extent in this country that it has in England or in Europe, yet the results are generally excellent.” That is, although Kimball isn’t a Progressive ‘all the way down,’ in terms of the practices he recommends he might as well be.

One governmental response to urban size and complexity has been city planning. “Up to about 1910 city planning was of the most casual character”; the first permanent planning commission had only been established in 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut. Such commissions “face many difficulties.” The United States Constitution and the state constitutions limit ‘takings’—government seizure of private property for public purposes. Further, “city planning is expensive; particularly is this true in the reconstruction of streets and the remedying of mistakes made by previous administrations.” Since “streets are the most important portions of the city’s territory and its most valuable property,” “bear[ing] the traffic and business of the city” and covering water, sewers, and gas mains, “the life of the city depends upon” them, inasmuch as “there would be no access to private property, no means of communication, no method of providing light and air for the buildings” without them.” Under contemporary conditions, city planning is both much needed and much vexed. [3] 

So is public education. In Massachusetts, it predated independence by more than a century, as the Great and General Court decreed that any township with more than fifty householders must establish an elementary school and that any township with more than a hundred families must establish a grammar school, both kinds to be funded by taxation. But it wasn’t until after the Civil War that the policy became universal, with school boards independent of the overall municipal governments, their members usually chosen in at-large elections. “Experts have no place on the school board,” which should represent ordinary citizens. A school superintendent, analogous to a city manager, selects the teachers with the approval of the board, “frames the course of study,” which is submitted to the school board for criticism and approval, and oversees “the discipline and promotion of the teachers,” again with board approval, which is usually pro forma. Although the superintendent may well “make himself a powerful influence in the community,” he should scrupulously refrain from undertaking “political or partisan action”—again, meaning participation in election campaigns. “The backbone of the school system is the body of teachers,” often “the most permanent of the city employees.” Professionalization of teachers has increased, with many school boards now requiring that job candidates pass qualifying examinations. Some of these are competitive, with only those with the best scores eligible for hiring. “The tenure of the teacher is practically during good behavior, and dismissals are extremely rare.” 

Kimball turns to a description of the aforementioned three varieties of municipal government prevalent in the United States: mayor-and-council, commission, and city-manager. The mayor-and-council, generally with a weak mayor and a strong council, was “the English type of government” imported by the colonists. Administrative functions were undertaken by committees of the council, which either oversaw professional administrators or administered departmental affairs directly. “As a rule the American municipal government as evidenced by the city council is not to be condemned so much for its corruption as for its stupidity and inefficiency.” After protests to state legislatures against the spoils system resulted in stronger state ‘oversight’ of city governments, which in turn resulted in what many city residents regarded as overbearing state interference in local affairs, the countervailing movement toward ‘home rule’ did not return full powers to the councils but instead increased the powers of the mayors. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, “the powers of the mayor have steadily grown at the expense of the city council.” At the same time, what amounts to a de facto elective monarchy must itself become overburdened in a large and complex city. Decentralization of powers by dividing the city and its government into wards addresses this problem but causes another: overall city interests may not be served when there is a strong ward system—hence the pejorative term, ‘ward politician.’ 

This led to the adoption of the mayor-and-commission system in many small and medium-sized cities. Under this system, the mayor is elected by popular vote and therefore is not usually a professional administrator. The mayor wields not only the power of appointment but often the power of veto over ordinances passed by the council. But insofar as a new city charter empowers a commission, the executive powers wielded by the mayor give way to the combined executive and legislative powers of the commission, which consists of three to seven members. Each commission member, elected at-large in nonpartisan fashion, supervises one administrative department. Commissioners are not expected to be experts in the areas ‘their’ departments govern, but they “are expected to be intelligent executives who are able to see that their departments run.” The mayor merely presides over commission meetings, although there is a tendency to enhance his powers, given the need to coordinate the activities of the departments. “Government by commission is a radical departure from the time-honored form of municipal government,” with its separation of powers. This has led to the enactment of such safeguards as initiative, referendum, and recall as democratic controls over what amounts to an elective oligarchy. Given the combination of legislative and administrative powers that characterizes the commission system (the commission is “all-powerful to act for better or for worse”), “it is not unreasonable that an opportunity should be given the voters to correct the errors which perhaps were made at the original election.” Overall, Kimball writes, “the open and undisguised responsibility which each member of the commission bears may frequently prevent the secret and sinister influence which interested parties formerly exerted upon individual councilmen and may cause the commissioners to act for the good of the city rather than at the dictates of a special interest.” 

But if the concentration of responsibility for city governance is the goal, why not go still farther, from quasi-oligarchy to quasi-monarchy? This is the point of the city-manager form of municipal government. Under this form, a council or commission sets general policy but “the administrative functions are concentrated in a single executive chosen by the commission [or the council] and designated as the city manager,” who takes over the power of appointing department heads. This rids the city of “the friction and delay which might result from the majority of the commission overruling the action of the commissioner in charge of a special department,” carrying “the form of commission government to its logical conclusion” by providing for “a small policy-determining body and a professional, expert administrator.” Although having no vote in determining policy, “the city manager exercises great influence in his advisory capacity,” inasmuch as he knows the workings of the city better than any other one person. Staunton, Virginia was the first municipality to institute the city-manager system, and “the movement has spread rapidly,” although again “largely confined to the smaller cities.” Kimball regards this as “a logical development of the attempt to place the government of our cities upon a business basis.” 

In the United States, then, “the general tendency is toward self-contained administrative departments, which, to a large degree, are beyond the immediate control of the city council,” in contrast with mayor-and-council government but similar to the strong-mayor system. This notwithstanding, “the city council under every form of government should control the policies of the various departments,” especially given its power to set taxes; “it is ridiculous to expect that an elected body endowed with these powers will surrender them entirely to appointive officials.” “The real problem is how this control can best be exercised so that the council shall freely exercise the policy-determining power, and the administrative departments be equally free in carrying out this already determined policy and in conducting their affairs without interference on the part of the council.” Although “theoretically, administration by council committees has much in its favor, practically, it has failed to work satisfactorily in the United States” due to amateurish incompetence in the face of novel governmental complexity. But it remains true that “it is a legitimate function of politics to control both the lawmaking and law-executing bodies of the state or city,” determining “what the law shall be” and keeping “the administrative officers in harmony with the lawmaking officers.” The division of power Kimball endorses, then, is a division not exactly between legislative and executive powers as between legislative and administrative powers; the struggle in the commission and city-manager governments will be between the council, which may want to push administrators into granting special favors to their constituents or friends, and administrators, who may want to seize control of policy, de facto if not de jure. “The city-manager type of government attempts a radical divorce of administration from politics,” a divorce Kimball would sanction, while continuing to worry that the political branch of the government will not exert, or attempt to exert, “improper political influence” over administration. It does not occur to him that corruption might also seep into the administrative branch, or that political and administrative officials might collaborate in order to corrupt the citizens, offering them ‘spoils’ in the form of substantial government ‘programs’—in effect, a new form of vote-buying, one that denatures citizenship and fosters habits of mind conducive not to popular sovereignty but to popular subjection, not very far removed from what Tocqueville called “soft despotism.”

Notes

1. See James Monroe: The People, the Sovereigns, reviewed on this website under the title, “Monroe’s Understanding of the Sovereignty of the American People” under the category, “American Politics.”
2. Although sympathetic with reformers, Kimball does not share the Progressives’ historicism, retaining the Founders’ idea of natural rights: “the right of personal security is the right to life which is recognized as the natural right of every man unless his existence has become a menace to the state or unless his life is needed for the protection of the state. This right is the most fundamental one.” “Personal liberty” (including not only “mere freedom of movement” but “freedom of thought, speech, and the right to pursue any lawful calling”) and “the pursuit of happiness” are “moral rights,” not necessarily legal rights. So, for example, “in a state where slavery exists…by law,” legal personal liberty might coexist with it among non-slaves. For Kimball, then, ‘History’ is not the source of right. 
3. For further consideration of city planning and zoning, see “Municipal Planning and Zoning in the United States,” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”