1.4 Two Sides of the Coin: Merit and Ambition
Supplement to Endnotes
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On the one hand, George Cole’s aspirations connect him to a nearly universal history of the intoxicating lure of money and status. The frenzy of ambitions that ate at Cole and so many of his contemporaries was more than some universal impulse, unshaped by place or time; all actions and emotions are historically bound, and all desire, like politics, is local.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the keen-eyed French observer of American culture, who toured across America in the days of Cole’s childhood (1831-1832), wrote that “the first thing that strikes one in the United States is the innumerable crowd of those striving to escape from their original social condition.” They did not long for legendary powers, he noted. They seemed instead to merely desire a station higher than that of their fathers. “Every American,” he continued, was “eaten up with the longing to rise.”[1]
Tocqueville spent more time in New York than any other state, including a visit through the Finger Lakes just miles away from the Cole farm. He rightly perceived the Revolution lurking behind much of what he witnessed in America, especially behind its citizens’ ambitiousness. “Every Revolution increases men’s ambition,” he wrote.
Perhaps the new nation’s most alluring promise was that individuals might advance in life through their own talent and work -- by merit and capacity alone. The “false” aristocracy, as it was called in the revolutionary era, would be replaced with a natural one. Defenders of this bold experiment believed, as Plato had taught over two thousand years before, that nature distributed its talents within and throughout all households, regardless of privilege or poverty. (Few, however, were willing to consider Plato’s reasoning that females too shared in these widely dispersed talents.)
The leading visionaries from Jefferson’s generation had no intention of leveling society but instead hoped to create unassailable distinctions based on talent -- a stable order where men joined the ranks of the elite, not because of bloodline or patronage, but because they were anointed by nature. Jefferson advocated publicly funded education to reduce the ignorance of ordinary citizens while plucking the excellent few from the unremarkable many. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, he speculated that public education would not only diffuse general knowledge among the masses, but recruit fresh blood into the “natural” aristocracy. “The best geniuses,” he argued, “will be raked from the rubbish….”[2]
Ambition needed to be widely dispersed among citizens -- like water upon a field of wind casted seeds -- so that the most talented young men, wherever they might arise, would grow to govern and lead. In this way, universal ambition -- and desires for recognition and power -- were necessities for an excellent society.
Running beneath this search for the deserving, and vital to it, was a new view of human nature. The young republic’s theorists, inspired by Enlightenment optimism about human potential, believed in a more promising human condition in which traditionally harmful traits like ambition, or the appetite for fame, or the love of material gain, could not only be checked and controlled, but harnessed and put to use for the good of the public.[3] The original and most renowned “self-made” American, Benjamin Franklin, taught that honest industry and directed passions provided the surest “Way to Wealth.” In his extraordinarily popular writings (which gained a wider and wider readership in the decades following Independence) Franklin taught that though honesty was a commandment from heaven, more importantly, it was “the best policy” for making money. The love of money, if governed by prudence, would bring a merchant to see that honesty, over time, made for lucrative business. It was not essential for a merchant to believe that greed for money would canker his heart. Instead, with prudence, greed could lead to honesty.
Leading lights of the Revolution sought to harness the passions, not unleash them. They believed that just as the sail converted cross and headwinds into a ship’s forward motion, good governments could exploit the gusts of human nature, propelling men toward moral behavior and human progress. Largely ignoring the biblical account of the Fall of humanity, they came to believe that the surest way to subdue a man’s devilish inclinations was to strategically place him in a ring of fellows similarly gadded by demons.
George’s dear schoolmate, who became a Methodist minister, wrote to George in 1848 that there was “nothing better calculated” than the transformative power of education “to elevate all our desires far above the pleasures of sense, and place them more earnestly upon our present and future interests.” That is, education taught men their true interests. It shaped a man’s will and desire, and gave him elevated purpose. It all boiled down to the will. “You know,” he wrote George, “[society] only needs the will to make the humblest instrument truly efficient in arresting the torrent of vice, and substituting in its place virtue & happiness. Never in my life did I ever have a more intense desire to live to purpose.”[4]
This language about “interests” and eradicating vice through the will emerged downriver from the same Enlightenment currents that had shaped the Founding Fathers’ thinking about passions and interests.
Many founders, like Jefferson, worried that America would be swallowed up by centralized
power and commercial wealth. Others bet, instead, that they were constructing a government in which interests countered interests, and power neutralized power. Demons would contain one another-- it was hoped -- and not combine forces and overwhelm men’s moral inclinations.[5]
[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America. Translated by George Lawrence. J.P. Mayer, editor (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1969) p. 627 (Volume 2, Chapter 19).
Tocqueville speculated that equal conditions and democracy provided Americans an open road to improvement, yet one so long and tedious, so fraught with process -- elections, committees, the “petty” tests of merit -- that citizens learned to lower their sights a little. “For the most part life is spent in eagerly coveting small prizes within reach.” In a sense, he was articulating what -- as I explain in this chapter -- Alexander Hamilton and others believed would happen in an open field for talent, where ambition checked ambition.
[2]Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, October 28, 1813, in Jefferson, Crusade Against Ignorance, pp. 161-67.
[3] For ages the Christian church had taught that a man’s greed (often called cupidity) would injure his soul. But, according to a new principle of “countervailing passions,” greed could be put to good use. If a merchant lusted after wealth, his true interest would eventually teach him that honesty, over time, would bring him more customers who in turn would line his pockets. Passions and desires, if only rationally understood, could direct men into virtuous habits. What some called interest others called “prudence.” Moral philosophers from the Scottish wing of the Enlightenment called this drive toward self-preservation “prudence” (roughly what others meant by one’s true “interest”). And prudence, like interest, could guide a man or woman toward a virtuous life. As the new logic went a coquette, who was at core longing for companionship and financial stability, would see that her true interests of finding a wealthy man could best be obtained through modesty that would, in the end, attract the better suitor. Her ruling passion, or “interest” of wanting wealth, sex or power through men, then, could actually be used to suppress her coquetry. Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, pp. 12-13, 28; Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph, esp. 20-31. Early popular biographies about George Washington emphasized that the Father of the nation obtained his “godlike virtues” only after an internal struggle with his passions. Only then did the first president overcome his passions by, as one of Washington’s eulogists put it, a “sublime adjustment of powers and virtues.” See: Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age, pp. 38-41.; Douglass Adair, Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair, edited by Trevor Colbourn (New York: WW Norton & Co., 1974), pp. 3-26.
[4] James S. Griffing to “Dearest Friend Augusta,” November 9, 1849. In this same letter Griffing writes about the marvel of visiting a monument for the Wyoming massacre that helped spark the Sullivan Expedition during the Revolution. See: http://www.griffingweb.com/give_me_an_education.htm
[5] Albert Hirschman argued that if the philosophes could have seen the unchecked growth of avarice and other passions, they would have shuddered -- and revised their thinking.” Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph, 4-5. The statement by Benjamin Franklin reflects intellectual currents in Europe that held that the pursuit of money would mitigate private passions while also cultivating class of middling sorts who would keep monarchs and officials in check. In short, some believed that the collective desire for money and fame was somehow good for the union. For examples of how the desire for immortal fame was construed as a way to promote virtuous actions, and how Lincoln reasoned that otherwise dangerous passions could be channeled and purified by something like the revolutionary cause, see: Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age, pp. 57-62.
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