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by Alan Brinkley
Reprinted with permission of author
In times of national emergency, Americans have always—almost
instinctively—turned to their government. So it should not
be surprising that in the weeks since the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon there has been a striking rise in the popularity
of the public sector. Our heroes of the moment are not corporate
executives or sports stars or popular-culture icons, but firemen,
policemen, and the mayor of New York City. A president barely and
controversially elected less than a year ago and whose public-opinion
ratings had hovered for months at about the same level as his minority
of the popular votes is suddenly widely admired—less for what
he has done so far than for what he represents: the authority of
the national state. But we are now only in the first moments of
what is likely to be a prolonged national struggle, one in which
we will have no choice but to rely on our leaders and public institutions.
Given what lies behind us and also what lies before us, it is worth
asking how well prepared we are to do so.
What lies behind us is nearly 30 years during which the American
people have steadily and relentlessly lost faith in government.
In much of the intellectual world, free-market ideas triumphed—inviting
invidious comparisons between the seemingly miraculous performance
of the private economy and the sometimes stumbling performance of
state institutions. In ordinary public discourse, heaping scorn
on government became so common as to be almost trite. A year after
he proposed and failed to enact the biggest new-government program
in 60 years, Bill Clinton told Congress that "the era of big
government is over." In the 2000 presidential election, the
two major-party candidates often seemed to be in competition with
each other over who could distance himself further from the great
public ambitions of the past. And in perhaps the most frequently
cited public-opinion survey of our time—which asks the question
"Do you trust government to do the right thing most of the
time?"—about two-thirds of the respondents in recent years
consistently answered "no." When pollsters first asked
that question in 1964, two-thirds of the respondents answered yes.
We may be entering this new and difficult period in our history
with a suddenly renewed faith in government; two-thirds of Americans
sampled in recent weeks have again claimed that they trust their
government. But we enter it also with a substantial, perhaps unprecedented
legacy of antigovernment sentiment, which we have to assume—despite
the new enthusiasms of the moment—has not disappeared forever.
What lies ahead is so clouded in uncertainty as to defy useful predictions.
But some things do seem likely. First, in contrast to the wars of
our past and domestic emergencies such as the Great Depression,
the struggle against terrorism will be long and open-ended, will
have few clear victories, and will have no obvious conclusion. Second,
unlike other wars, this one will probably not produce substantial
economic growth and, indeed, has the capacity to do the American
economy substantial harm. And third, the character of our present
struggle—in which anyone is potentially a terrorist—raises
the possibility of recreating some of the worst abuses of state
power in our history: the racial oppression and arbitrary violations
of civil liberties that accompanied many of the national emergencies
of our past.
What we must hope for in the difficult period ahead of us is for
government to remain a trusted, valuable, and well-regarded ally
of its citizens and not—as it so recently was—a widely
reviled and repudiated force in our national life. What we do in
the next months and years will determine not only how well we defend
ourselves against adversaries but how well we equip ourselves to
remain a strong and cohesive nation. Without an effective government,
we will fail in both tasks.
The greatest tests of the capacity of our government in the twentieth
century were the two world wars. In both cases, the United States
overcame a lack of institutional capacity and experience to mobilize
both militarily and economically and to contribute to the Allied
victories. But there were major differences between the two wartime
experiences that reflected at least in part the varying levels of
confidence that the federal government had managed to inspire in
the years prior to war.
When America entered World War I in 1917, the federal government—although
it had grown significantly in importance over the preceding 15 years—was
still small, weak, and underdeveloped both by our own later standards
and by the standards of other industrial nations of the early twentieth
century. Few Americans expected very much from Washington, and few
had any instinctive sense of loyalty to or faith in the national
state. So when Woodrow Wilson led Americans into war, he had reason
to wonder how many citizens would follow him. And indeed, many did
not—socialists, pacifists, labor leaders, Irish Americans,
German Americans, and others, many of whom dismissed the war as
a conspiracy of capitalists abetted by the government. During the
18 months in which the United States was at war, therefore, creating
popular enthusiasm for the combat required harsh, coercive measures
both by the government itself and by private organizations encouraged
by the government.
Congress passed several of the most repressive pieces of legislation
in the nation's history; they restricted speech and political activity
by anyone who opposed the war or was critical of the president.
Government propaganda exhorted the public to seek out and report
pessimists and pacifists. Private organizations engaged in vigilantism,
often violently, against those who openly opposed the war, those
who seemed to be evading the draft, and those whose loyalty was
suspect because of their ethnic origins. The "100 percent Americanism"
that the war years taught many citizens to demand helped create
the postwar climate that supported first the great Red Scare of
1919–1920 and then the immigration-restriction laws of the
1920s. When the war ended, peace brought with it a period of savage
reaction and a rapid retreat from both the sense of national purpose
and the idealistic internationalism of the war years.
When America entered World War II in 1941, it did so under a government
that had established itself as a central force in American life
through the broad and sustained federal effort to fight the Depression
and reform the economy of the previous eight years. The New Deal,
whatever its successes or failures, had persuaded many Americans
to think of Washington—not the private sector, not state or
local governments, not the unfettered individual—as the principal
focus of their hopes for social and economic improvement. Franklin
D. Roosevelt, largely because of the aggressiveness with which he
had used his authority in peacetime, led the nation to war with
a strong reservoir of confidence and loyalty from much of the public.
The American experience in World War II was not without repression
and injustice. Japanese Americans on the West Coast were interned
in one of the greatest violations of American civil liberties in
our history, and racist images of the Japanese people abounded in
American propaganda and culture. There was racial violence within
the segregated armed forces and popular violence against minorities
who seemed somehow threatening. (During the "zoot suit"
riots in 1943, for example, rampaging servicemen in Los Angeles
attacked Mexican Americans.) But there was no generalized campaign
of repression as there had been in World War I; the nation saw few
legal or popular efforts to censor speech or root out dissenters,
and (with the exception of the small, powerless Japanese-American
community), there was little ethnic hostility. In fact, historians
regard World War II as a pivotal moment in the birth of ethnic pluralism
in modern America. Entering the war with a strong bond of loyalty
to an active and energetic federal government, Americans had fewer
anxieties about their ability to unite and mobilize for war than
they'd had in 1917. And while the immediate aftermath of the conflict
brought a period of increasing conservatism, it produced nothing
like the harsh reaction—or the retreat from internationalism—of
1919 and 1920.
The differences between the two world wars were not simply or even
primarily the result of the government's shift in stature between
1917 and 1941. But the increased legitimacy of government in 1941
surely had a significant impact on the nation's ability to meet
a great crisis with reasonable unity and substantial popular faith.
Weak governments with feeble public support create many problems
for modern, industrial nations even during times of peace and prosperity.
But they can be positively dangerous when a society must mobilize
to confront a serious national crisis.
As we enter a new and most likely prolonged period of national emergency,
we have the advantage of a government that, however unpopular it
has been over recent decades, continues to possess vast institutional
capacity and tremendous power. But many reminders survive of the
neglect and indifference of the recent antigovernment era: an intelligence
community unequipped for the tremendous challenges now facing it;
privatized security procedures in airports and many other public
facilities that have manifestly failed to provide acceptable levels
of safety; an immigration service that has deteriorated steadily
for generations; a weakened public-health service that has lost
favor at the expense of federal subsidies for the private biotech
industry; and an eroding network of links between the government
and vital research institutions on which it must rely for much of
its technological and political knowledge. As we face the possibility
of a severe recession, we inherit a tattered social safety net and
a new welfare system that has never been tested by large-scale unemployment.
As we ponder the necessity of greatly increasing our knowledge of
languages, cultures, and histories that we have mostly ignored,
we inherit a depleted and underfunded system of public education.
As we confront a period of heightened personal insecurity, we inherit
Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid systems whose long-term
future requires serious attention and has received almost none.
A healthy skepticism about government—something too often lacking
among those who defend it—is a valuable thing and will remain
so in the new and uncharted waters we are now entering. But a recognition
of the indispensability of government and a commitment to strengthening
both its capacities and legitimacy suddenly loom as an essential
part of the difficult and dangerous task ahead of us.
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