The Determinants of a Voluntary Society
Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?
—Paul Gauguin, 1897
IN BOSTON’S MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, not far from the place where English Puritans splashed ashore in 1630, there is a decidedly unpuritanical painting of bare-breasted Polynesian women by Paul Gauguin. The painting is set on a wooded riverbank. In the background is the ocean, and the shadowy outline of a distant land. The canvas is crowded with brooding figures in every condition of life—old and young, dark and fair. They are seen in a forest of symbols, as if part of a dream. In the corner, the artist has added an inscription: “D’ou venons nous? Qui sommes nous? Ou allons nous?”
That painting haunts the mind of this historian. He wonders how a Polynesian allegory found its way to a Puritan town which itself was set on a wooded riverbank, with the ocean in the background and the shadow of another land in the far distance. He observes the crowd of museumgoers who gather before the painting. They are Americans in every condition of life, young and old, dark and fair. Suddenly the great questions leap to life. Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?
The answers to these questions grow more puzzling the more one thinks about them. We Americans are a bundle of paradoxes. We are mixed in our origins, and yet we are one people. Nearly all of us support our republican system, but we argue passionately (sometimes violently) among ourselves about its meaning. Most of us subscribe to what Gunnar Myrdal called the American Creed, but that idea is a paradox in political theory. As Myrdal observed in 1942, America is “conservative in fundamental principles … but the principles conserved are liberal and some, indeed, are radical.”1
We live in an open society which is organized on the principle of voluntary action, but the determinants of that system are exceptionally constraining. Our society is dynamic, changing profoundly in every period of American history; but it is also remarkably stable. The search for the origins of this system is the central problem in American history. It is also the subject of this book.
The Question Framed
The organizing question here is about what might be called the determinants of a voluntary society. The problem is to explain the origins and stability of a social system which for two centuries has remained stubbornly democratic in its politics, capitalist in its economy, libertarian in its laws, individualist in its society and pluralistic in its culture.
Much has been written on this subject—more than anyone can possibly read. But a very large outpouring of books and articles contains a remarkably small number of seminal ideas. Most historians have tried to explain the determinants of a voluntary society in one of three ways: by reference to the European culture that was transmitted to America, or to the American environment itself, or to something in the process of transmission.
During the nineteenth century the first of these explanations was very much in fashion. Historians believed that the American system had evolved from what one scholar called “Teutonic germs” of free institutions, which were supposedly carried from the forests of Germany to Britain and then to America. This idea was taken up by a generation of historians who tended to be Anglo-Saxon in their origins, Atlantic in their attitudes and Whiggish in their politics. Most had been trained in the idealist and institutional traditions of the German historical school.2
For a time this Teutonic thesis became very popular—in Boston and Baltimore. But in Kansas and Wisconsin it was unkindly called the “germ theory” of American history and laughed into oblivion. In the early twentieth century it yielded to the Turner thesis, which looked to the American environment and especially to the western frontier as a way of explaining the growth of free institutions in America. This idea appealed to scholars who were middle western in their origins, progressive in their politics, and materialist in their philosophy.3
In the mid-twentieth century the Turner thesis also passed out of fashion. Yet another generation of American historians became deeply interested in processes of immigration and ethnic pluralism as determinants of a voluntary society. This third approach was specially attractive to scholars who were not themselves of Anglo-Saxon stock. Many were central European in their origin, urban in their residence, and Jewish in their religion. This pluralistic “migration model” is presently the conventional interpretation.4
Other explanations have also been put forward from time to time, but three ideas have held the field: the germ theory, the frontier thesis, and the migration model.
This book returns to the first of those explanations, within the framework of the second and third. It argues a modified “germ thesis” about the importance for the United States of having been British in its cultural origins. The argument is complex, and for the sake of clarity might be summarized in advance. It runs more or less as follows.
The Argument Stated
During the very long period from 1629 to 1775, the present area of the United States was settled by at least four large waves of English-speaking immigrants. The first was an exodus of Puritans from the east of England to Massachusetts during a period of eleven years from 1629 to 1640. The second was the migration of a small Royalist elite and large numbers of indentured servants from the south of England to Virginia (ca. 1642-75). The third was a movement from the North Midlands of England and Wales to the Delaware Valley (ca. 1675-1725). The fourth was a flow of English-speaking people from the borders of North Britain and northern Ireland to the Appalachian backcountry mostly during the half-century from 1718 to 1775.
These four groups shared many qualities in common. All of them spoke the English language. Nearly all were British Protestants. Most lived under British laws and took pride in possessing British liberties. At the same time, they also differed from one another in many other ways: in their religious denominations, social ranks, historical generations, and also in the British regions from whence they came. They carried across the Atlantic four different sets of British folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the New World.
By the year 1775 these four cultures were fully established in British America. They spoke distinctive dialects of English, built their houses in diverse ways, and had different methods of doing much of the ordinary business of life. Most important for the political history of the United States, they also had four different conceptions of order, power and freedom which became the cornerstones of a voluntary society in British America.
Today less than 20 percent of the American population have any British ancestors at all. But in a cultural sense most Americans are Albion’s seed, no matter who their own forebears may have been.5 Strong echoes of four British folkways may still be heard in the major dialects of American speech, in the regional patterns of American life, in the complex dynamics of American politics, and in the continuing conflict between four different ideas of freedom in the United States. The interplay of four “freedom ways” has created an expansive pluralism which is more libertarian than any unitary culture alone could be. That is the central thesis of this book: the legacy of four British folkways in early America remains the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States today.
The Problem of Folkways
Before we study this subject in detail, several conceptual problems require attention. All are embedded in the word “folkways.” This term was coined by American sociologist William Graham Sumner to describe habitual “usages, manners, customs, mores and morals” which he believed to be practiced more or less unconsciously in every culture. Sumner thought that folkways arose from biological instincts. “Men begin with acts,” he wrote, “not with thoughts.”6
In this work “folkway” will have a different meaning. It is defined here as the normative structure of values, customs and meanings that exist in any culture. This complex is not many things but one thing, with many interlocking parts. It is not primarily biological or instinctual in its origins, as Sumner believed, but social and intellectual. Folkways do not rise from the unconscious in even a symbolic sense—though most people do many social things without reflecting very much about them. In the modern world a folkway is apt to be a cultural artifact—the conscious instrument of human will and purpose. Often (and increasingly today) it is also the deliberate contrivance of a cultural elite.
A folkway should not be thought of in Sumner’s sense as something ancient and primitive which has been inherited from the distant past. Folkways are often highly persistent, but they are never static. Even where they have acquired the status of a tradition they are not necessarily very old. Folkways are constantly in process of creation, even in our own time.7
Folkways in this normative sense exist in advanced civilizations as well as in primitive societies. They are functioning systems of high complexity which have actually grown stronger rather than weaker in the modern world. In any given culture, they always include the following things:
—Speech ways, conventional patterns of written and spoken language: pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax and grammar.
—Building ways, prevailing forms of vernacular architecture and high architecture, which tend to be related to one another.
—Family ways, the structure and function of the household and family, both in ideal and actuality.
—Marriage ways, ideas of the marriage-bond, and cultural processes of courtship, marriage and divorce.
—Gender ways, customs that regulate social relations between men and women.
—Sex ways, conventional sexual attitudes and acts, and the treatment of sexual deviance.
—Child-rearing ways, ideas of child nature and customs of child nurture.
—Naming ways, onomastic customs including favored forenames and the descent of names within the family.
—Age ways, attitudes toward age, experiences of aging, and age relationships.
—Death ways, attitudes toward death, mortality rituals, mortuary customs and mourning practices.
—Religious ways, patterns of religious worship, theology, ecclesiology and church architecture.
—Magic ways, normative beliefs and practices concerning the supernatural.
—Learning ways, attitudes toward literacy and learning, and conventional patterns of education.
—Food ways, patterns of diet, nutrition, cooking, eating, feasting and fasting.
—Dress ways, customs of dress, demeanor, and personal adornment.
—Sport ways, attitudes toward recreation and leisure; folk games and forms of organized sport.
—Work ways, work ethics and work experiences; attitudes toward work and the nature of work.
—Time ways, attitudes toward the use of time, customary methods of time keeping, and the conventional rhythms of life.
—Wealth ways, attitudes toward wealth and patterns of its distribution.
—Rank ways, the rules by which rank is assigned, the roles which rank entails, and relations between different ranks.
—Social ways, conventional patterns of migration, settlement, association and affiliation.
—Order ways, ideas of order, ordering institutions, forms of disorder, and treatment of the disorderly.
—Power ways, attitudes toward authority and power; patterns of political participation.
—Freedom ways, prevailing ideas of liberty and restraint, and libertarian customs and institutions.
Every major culture in the modern world has its own distinctive customs in these many areas. Their persistent power might be illustrated by an example. Consider the case of wealth distribution. Most social scientists believe that the distribution of wealth is determined primarily by material conditions. For Marxists the prime mover is thought to be the means of production; for Keynesians it is the process of economic growth; for disciples of Adam Smith it is the market mechanism. But to study this subject in a comparative way is to discover that the distribution of wealth has varied from one culture to another in ways that cannot possibly be explained by material processes alone. Another powerful determinant is the inherited structure of values and customs which might be called the “wealth ways” of a culture.
These wealth ways are communicated from one generation to the next by many interlocking mechanisms—child-rearing processes, institutional structures, cultural ethics, and codes of law—which create ethical imperatives of great power in advanced societies as well as primitive cultures. Indeed, the more advanced a society becomes in material terms, the stronger is the determinant power of its folkways, for modern technologies act as amplifiers, and modern institutions as stabilizers, and modern elites as organizers of these complex cultural processes.8
The purpose of this book is to examine those processes at work in what is now the United States, where at least four British folk cultures were introduced at an early date. Their variety makes them unusually accessible for study, as William Graham Sumner himself was one of the first to observe. He found his leading example of folkways not in primitive tribes but in the regional culture of New England. Sumner wrote:
The mores of New England, however, still show deep traces of the Puritan temper and world philosophy. Perhaps nowhere else in the world can so strong an illustration be seen, both of the persistency of the spirit of mores, and their variability and adaptability. The mores of New England have extended to a large immigrant population, and have won control over them. They have also been carried to the new states by emigrants, and their perpetuation there is an often-noticed phenomenon.9
The same historical pattern appears in the American south. However different that region may be from New England, it also has preserved its own distinctive folkways through many generations. Something similar also happened in the American midlands, and in the American west. Throughout all four of these broad areas we find the same processes of cultural persistence, variability and adaptability that William Graham Sumner observed in New England. Even as the ethnic composition of these various regions of the United States has changed profoundly, regional cultures themselves have persisted, and are still very powerful even in our own time. All of them derive from folkways that were planted in the American colonies more than two centuries ago.
If these folkways are to be understood truly, they must be described empirically—that is, by reference to evidence which can be verified or falsified. In this work, descriptive examples are presented in the text for illustrative purposes, and empirical indicators are summarized in the notes.10 Not all of these folkways can be treated empirically, but the work of many scholars has produced a broad range of historical evidence for each of the four major cultures in British America. Let us begin with Puritan New England, which was founded by the first great migration, and take up the others in chronological order.