Unfinished Republic: Though the United States' crimes against democracy are legion, most Americans are blissfully unaware of them. The brutal realities of American life: the officially sanctioned violence; the refusal to hold racists accountable for their actions; the seemingly endless tragedy of African-American suffering; of which White America is the ever-resourceful author; are routinely disremembered. While the democratic ambitions of Jefferson, Lincoln and Wilson remain the stuff of school-children’s class projects to this day. (Image by Filip Bunkens.)
“IT’S COMING TO America first, the cradle of the best and
the worst.” Writes Leonard Cohen in his classic 1992 anthem Democracy.
As is so often the case with Cohen’s lyrics, Democracy is jam-packed
with meaning. That he writes about democracy as something that has yet to
happen is only the first of the song’s many challenges. The second – and
certainly the most contentious – is that when (or should that be “if”?) the
people do finally seize power, it will be on American soil.
Most Americans would, of course, take strong exception to
the claim that the United States has been anything other than a democracy since
4 July 1776, when Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence avowed that:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among
these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Those who, not unreasonably, object that the Declaration’s
“all men” excluded women, slaves, and the continent’s indigenous peoples, will
be invited to consider another great document of American democracy, Abraham
Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”. Especially its concluding pledge that
“Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from
the earth.”
So enamoured were enfranchised Americans with their
“government of the people” that just 53 years after Lincoln’s famous speech, his
successor in the White House, President Woodrow Wilson, was urging his fellow citizens
to enter the First World War to “make the world safe for democracy”.
It is one of History’s many ironies that the same president
who proclaimed America’s determination to establish democracy abroad, unleashed
an unrelenting assault on American citizen’s civil liberties at home. Reducing
the Bill of Rights to confetti, the Sedition and Espionage Acts made it a crime
to oppose – or even question – the USA’s participation in the War.
The job of “selling” that war to the American people fell to
a young “progressive” journalist, George Creel. His formidable “Committee on
Public Information” pioneered propaganda and public relations techniques that
would become increasingly familiar to humanity as the Twentieth Century
unfolded. To the delight of America’s ruling elites, the CPI demonstrated just
how easily “the people’s” consent could be manufactured.
The most glaring and tragic discrepancy between America’s
loftily proclaimed ideals and the actual beliefs and behaviour of her citizens
was revealed in the dreadful “Red Summer” of 1919.
Hoping that their commitment to the cause of establishing
democracy abroad would finally secure for them the long-promised blessings of
democracy at home, African-Americans signed-up in their thousands for military
service in France. Returning home after the Armistice, however, in the winter
and spring of 1918-19, these Black soldiers became instant targets for angry
mobs of White Americans, outraged and terrified in equal measure by the very
thought of Black Americans in arms. Between June and August 1919, murderous
race riots flared in 25 American cities, leaving hundreds of African-Americans
dead and many thousands homeless.
Of the awful deeds of his fellow citizens: the beatings,
shootings, lynchings, and destruction by fire of unprotected Black neighbourhoods,
churches and businesses; the eloquent and visionary President Wilson, hailed by
millions as the world’s saviour when he arrived in Paris for the peace talks,
said not one word.
Though these horrors occurred barely 100 years ago in the
United States, most Americans are blissfully unaware of them. The brutal
realities of American life: the officially sanctioned violence; the refusal to
hold racists accountable for their actions; the seemingly endless tragedy of
African-American suffering; of which White America is the ever-resourceful
author; are routinely disremembered. While the democratic ambitions of
Jefferson, Lincoln and Wilson remain the stuff of school-children’s class
projects to this day.
Small wonder, then, that Cohen celebrates America’s
contradictions by admitting that “I love the country, but can’t stand the scene”.
In Democracy’s final lines, Cohen – ever the prophet – even anticipates
the emergence of those disillusioned working-class Americans who, no longer
identifying with either the Left or the Right, immure themselves in an
increasingly decrepit domesticity, desperate for a saviour to emerge from “that
hopeless little screen”.
Never quitting, because “like those garbage bags that time
cannot decay” they’re stubborn. Choked with tears, but refusing to let go of
the hope that, one day:
“Democracy is coming to the U. S. A.”
This essay was originally published in The Otago
Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 17 January 2020.
