Looking Forwards By Looking Backwards

For the last three months now, I have basically written about nothing other than the situation in Gaza and the impact that situation is having (and continues to have) on daily life in Israel. As a result, I haven’t focused overly on the slow deterioration of things on this side of the ocean as our own nation grapples with issues that, each in its own way, could end up proving just as fateful for our nation as the effort to decimate Hamas will surely be for Israel.

It's hard to know even where to start. The shocking image of the presidents of three of America’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning all (including the Jewish one) being unable to bring themselves unequivocally to condemn calls for genocide directed against Jewish people as outside the limits of bona fide free speech on campus was bad enough. But that dismal spectacle has focused the nation’s headlights on our university campuses in general, which experience has been infinitely more upsetting. And the picture that has emerged is both terrifying and sickening: a portrait of schools, including some of our most respected institutions of higher learning, that have lost their moral compass entirely, that have descended into an Orwellian mirrorscape of reality in which traditional values are ignored, only radical extremists are granted a voice, and racism directed directly against Jewish students is considered both legitimate and, when dressed up smartly enough in anti-Israel vitriol, even virtuous. And then there is the rising tide of anti-Semitism outside the academy in all fifty states, a phenomenon that will feel eerily and deeply disconcertingly familiar to anyone possessed of even a passing acquaintanceship with Jewish history. And then, on top of all that, we are about to plunge full-bore into a presidential election in which the winner will undoubtedly be a member of a party that has room in its Congressional ranks for overt anti-Semites and/or Israel-haters. So I apologize for not writing more about our American situation lately. I do want to keep writing about Israel, but I will also try to find time to write about these United States and the future of the American enterprise as we move into 2024.

I wanted to begin writing in a positive vein, if possible even optimistically. And so I thought we might begin, in that traditional Jewish way, by looking forwards by looking backwards and focusing on a time in our nation when the citizenry was united, when respect for our leader was basically universal, and when coin of the realm was optimism, confidence in the nation’s destiny, and hope in the future. Yes, it’s been a while. But, speaking candidly, what’s two hundred years between friends?

As we exit the time machine, the president of the United States is James Monroe. Later on, he would become a high school in the Bronx (the one from which my mother graduated in 1933) and a housing project. But, in 1820, James Monroe was a man, a politician. And his story is beyond instructive.

In those days, we had Election Month rather than Election Day: in a predigital world that was also pre-electric and pre-electronic, voting took place in 1820 from November 1 to December 6. All alone on the ballot was James Monroe, the incumbent candidate of the Democratic-Republican Party. Because his was the only name on the ballot, Monroe won in all twenty-two states. It’s true that Monroe was not the first to run for president unopposed (that would have been George Washington, who ran unopposed both in 1789 and in 1793), but Monroe was the first to do so after the passage of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which set in place the rules for presidential elections that we more or less still follow. He was also the last American President to run unopposed. Can you imagine the nation fully behind its elected leader? The man didn’t come out of the blue, however.

In his own way, Monroe personally embodied the American past such as it was in 1820. He served as a soldier in the Continental Army under Washington. He studied law under Thomas Jefferson. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress that ratified the Constitution. He had been our ambassador to France and he served as governor of Virginia. Then he decided to aim higher and he ran for president in 1816 and won. And then he ran again in 1820 and this time not only won, but received every electoral vote cast but one—and that naysayer, one William Plumer, was actually a so-called “faithless elector” who defied the election results in his state of  New Hampshire because he apparently wished to ensure that Washington would forever be the sole American President to be elected unanimously by the Electoral College.

So we had at the helm a leader who had won the confidence, more or less, of the entire American people. As noted, this was Monroe’s second term of office. In 1816, he beat Rufus King, the Federalist candidate, and he beat him soundly, getting more than double the votes King got. And now that he had proven himself in office, he put himself forward as candidate for a second term. No one chose to run against him. The split of the Democratic-Republican Party into the parties we know today was still in the future. The nation was at peace. And it was fully unified behind a proven leader.

At the time and since, these years were and are called the “Era of Good Feeling.” The War of 1812 had been won. The nation was prosperous and at peace. The great debate about slavery that led eventually to war had yet to begin in earnest. (Indeed, the nation had formally outlawed the slave trade in 1807 and this was widely thought of—at least by abolitionists—as a first step towards eradicating slavery totally. That that didn’t happen—and would probably never have happened other than in the way it did happen—was, of course, unknown to American voters at the time.) There seemed to be endless possibilities for expansion to the West.

I first became interested in this stretch of American history several years ago when I read Daniel Walker Howe’s masterful What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815–1848, for which the author won the Pulitzer Prize in History. It’s a doorstopper of a book, coming in at just over 900 pages. But it is truly fascinating, a work of history distinguished (this is so rare) both by its author’s mastery of his subject and also by his great skill as an engaging author able to keep readers’ interest as they wade through material that the author surely understood would be unfamiliar to most. He paints a complex picture of a nation in its adolescence, one reminiscent in many ways of the nation today but with the huge difference that the native optimism that once characterized American culture was in its fullest flower in the 1820s. The belief that the Revolution had not solely ended with an independent United States, but had actually transformed the world by demonstrating the possibility of living free, of citizens living lives unencumbered by the will of despots and fully able to chart their own course into the future by using their own hands to wield their own tools, thus to fashion their own destiny—that distillation of the American ethos as freedom resting on a bedrock of decency, morality, and purposefulness was enough to bring the entire nation to support the man who, in the minds of all, served as the physical embodiment of that ideal. And that is how James Monroe came to run unopposed and to be elected by the entire electorate speaking as one.

How bizarre that all sounds now! Most people in the throes of crochety old age tend to idealize their adolescent years. Nations do that too. But there’s more to that thought than pathos alone. The hallmark of adolescence is fantasy unencumbered by restrictive reality—and that is true of nations as well as individuals. Nobody told the citizenry in the 1820s that they were “just” dreamers, that it could never work out as planned. And, yes, they were blind to many social issues that we now find it hard to believe they passed so blithely by—the slavery issue first and foremost, but also the harsh and terrible treatment of native Indian peoples, the degree to which women were denied a place in public life, the restrictive higher educational system to which only white males (and, generally speaking, only wealthy ones at that) were admitted. Yes, that’s all true. But the nation was also possessed of a deep, abiding sense of its own destiny. And, in the end, that’s what mattered.

It didn’t last. The nation grew up. The forced dislocation of countless thousands of native Indians from the lands they had farmed and occupied for centuries, the ongoing nightmare of slavery, the inability of the nation to keep from splitting in two and the unimaginable amount of blood that was spilt to put it back together—the resolution of all those issues was in the future when James Monroe was in the White House. And the foundation upon which his administration rested—the good feelings of the so-called “Age of Good Feelings”—was sturdy enough to support the weight of a nation.

As we embark on the 2024 Presidential election, this all seems so far away, so foreign, so unattainable. Maybe it is. Or maybe the right national leader, ideally one who has waded through Daniel Walker Howe’s giant book, is waiting in the wings to rescue us from ourselves. I suppose we’ll all find out soon enough!