McKeown on Kazin

Elizabeth McKeown, “Kazin on Bryan”
Tocqueville Forum, Georgetown University
October 26, 2006

First, a word about our sponsor. As I understand it, Georgetown’s new Tocqueville Forum “seeks to advance the study of America's founding principles and their roots in the Western philosophical and religious traditions. Named for Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French observer of America, the Forum endeavors to emulate Tocqueville's sympathetic and penetrating exploration of the origins of and prospects for American constitutional democracy” and religion.

Tocqueville was indeed interested in religion in America. In 1831, as he and his friend Gustav Beaumont toured the United States, he sent made a preliminary assessment of American Protestant Christianity in a letter home:

“Sunday is rigorously observed [in the United States],” he wrote. “I have seen streets barred off in front of churches during divine service. The law commands these things imperiously, and public opinion, which is much stronger than the law, obliges every one to show himself at a church and to abstain from all diversion.”

But he also saw a considerable distance between the appearance of the thing and the reality. “And yet, unless I am much mistaken, there is a great depth of doubt and indifference hidden under these external forms. Political passion and irreligion don’t mix here as they do with us, but for all that, religion has no more power.” Tocqueville recognized that Protestant tradition had provided “a very strong impulsion” to the American project, but it was a legacy which, he said, “is now diminishing every day. Faith is evidently inert. Go to the churches (I mean the Protestant ones) and you will hear morality preached. Of dogma, not a word.” And he found the moral instruction of the churches entirely conventional. It contained “Nothing which can at all shock the neighbor; nothing which can arouse the idea of dissent.... [In America] one follows a religion as our fathers took medicine in the month of May. If it doesn’t do any good, one seems to say, at least it can do no harm.”1

So it seems useful for members of the Tocqueville Forum Roundtable to ask: Did Tocqueville get it wrong? Was he in the country too short a time to recognize the enduring elements of revival and reform that had swept the country in the twenty-five years since Timothy Dwight urged the young members of the Holy Club at Yale to go West to win America for Christ? Did his Catholic sensibilities cause him to overlook the powerful engine of social formation represented in the Protestant attention to public morals.

The answer is “No.” Tocqueville caught on very quickly. By the time he published the second volume of Democracy in America in 1840, he had come to much more expansive prescriptions for religion and politics in America. His keystones were dogma and a good delivery system.

First, dogma. “There is hardly any human action, however private it may be, which does not result from some very general conception men have of God, of his relations with the human race, of the nature of their soul, and of their duties to their fellows.... It is therefore of immense importance to men to have fixed ideas about God, their souls, and their duties toward their Creator and their fellows, for doubt about these first principles would leave all their actions to chance and condemn them, more or less, to anarchy and impotence.”

And then the delivery system. Tocqueville argued that these indispensable “fixed ideas about God and human nature” ought to be withdrawn from the “habitual action of private judgment.” The chief object of religion is to “provide answers...” These answers “must be clear, precise, intelligible to the crowd, and very durable.”2

Now let’s imagine Tocqueville in the press box at the Chicago Coliseum in 1896. Maybe he’s reporting for Le Monde. What does he make of William Jennings Bryan and his devoted followers? Is he heartened to see the public work that evangelical Protestants are doing? Does he wonder at Bryan’s “strange composite voice”? How does he report the character of his following?

Fortunately, we have a Tocqueville stand-in this afternoon to help us advance these questions. Michael Kazin has spent years trying to understand the religious roots of American political culture, and he has worked hard to induce others from the secular left to pay attention also. He thinks that an opening toward religion can reanimate the Democratic party and revitalize progressive liberalism in the United States.

In this book, Kazin presents the fruits of his labor in the form of a layered biography. He brings us Bryan–a character perhaps more interesting in Kazin’s retrospect than in real life–a simple character, a character who spent very little time in New York or LA and who asked very few questions. But Bryan had answers, and those answers were “clear, precise, intelligible to the crowd, and very durable.” He preached a plain recipe for religion and politics: the Bible provided clear and distinct ideas; (white) bible readers provided the muscle for a movement of Social Gospel reform, aimed at taking power from the plutocrats and returning it to the people. Bryan’s people.

Gifted with a voice, a pen and notable political skills, Bryan won party nominations and lost presidential elections in legendary fashion, as he went about helping to change the way the nation conducts itself under God. His list of credits is extensive: he was a leading proponent of three constitutional amendments; he supported the rights of labor and women’s suffrage; he promoted the regulation of big business, the reform of campaign finance, progressive taxation, pacifism... and so much more. In the end, he also became a fierce opponent of Darwinism, giving his full voice to a well-founded popular fear that those who supported evolution would also support eugenics and “misuse science as a weapon against the weak.”3 Bryan also consistently refused to support equal rights for African Americans and cheerfully overlooked the enduring racism of his own practice and that of millions of his followers.

Those followers–the “common people”–form the second level of this layered biography. Kazin makes a special effort to bring Bryan’s supporters to the front of the stage in this story and to watch them form and re-form and wear away in the course of The Great Commoner’s thirty-five years of public life. Kazin thinks that critics have “failed to appreciate what drew millions of American to Bryan–the yearning for a society run by and for ordinary people who lead virtuous lives.... Bryan made significant public issues sound urgent, dramatic and clear, and he encouraged citizens to challenge the motives and interests of the most powerful people in the land.” Kazin’s own voice resonates here when he observes that Bryan’s ability to set a progressive course is “a quality absent among our recent leaders, for all their promises to leave no man, woman or child behind.”

It seems evident that Kazin’s biography of Bryan is also a biographical sketch of the Democratic Party, as struggled to gain and keep national power between Reconstruction and the New Deal. And beyond. Kazin’s effort to create space in public memory for Bryan’s bible-centered reform politics is also an altar call. Contemporary liberals should come forward and do likewise, imitating not Bryan, but Kazin himself. To reanimate social democracy in America, secular liberals and progressives should learn from the successes and failures of Bryan’s Democracy. They should learn, in particular, to reconsider their habit of dismissing the role of religion in politics, and of withholding hospitality from religiously-grounded reformers.4

So beneath the layers of political biography and party history in this engaging palimpsest, there is also a trace of Kazin’s own biography–and he is not a simple character. His pilgrimage from ‘60s student radical–Harvard SDS, Weatherman, Oregon communard–to history professor and public intellectual has been marked by his own efforts to sustain a concern for social democracy in America. He believes that the movement can still benefit from the energy and commitment that religion can bring to the table. William Jennings Bryan is his bellwether. His book is a call to action. It’s easy to see why progressives might want to talk to evangelicals. The next question, then, is why evangelicals will want to join the conversation that progressives like Kazin want to foster. What’s in it for them? Will Rick Warren write progressives like Barack Obama into The Purpose Driven Life? Tocqueville would not be surprised to see it happen in America.

1 George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America.
2 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835/1850): II:5; Mayer edition, 442-43.
3 Jackson Lears, “When Jesus Was a Democrat,” The New Republic (April 10, 2006).
4 See, e.g., Michael Kazin, “Life of the Party: Democrats Need to Get Their Act Together,” MotherJones (January/February, 2005): “They should start acting more like the people’s party they once were–and less like a traveling road show that packs up after each election.”