Thomas’s roughly hour-long speech on Wednesday at the University of Texas at Austin Law School began with a lengthy reflection on the Declaration of Independence and its importance in American history. The Declaration is not a legal text per se, Thomas argued, but it is an important testament to the nation’s founding ideals. “It did not establish a form of government; that was the work of the Constitution that followed,” he explained. “But it stated the purpose of government.”
“Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, I now realize, matters without that final sentence,” he wrote. “Without that sentence, the rest of the declaration is but mere words on parchment paper—nice words, but nonetheless just words. What changed the world was not the words, but the commitment and spirit of the people who were willing to labor, sacrifice, and even give their lives—what Lincoln at Gettysburg called ‘the last full measure of devotion’—for the Declaration’s principles.”
“They told us, ‘We don’t have no education and no chance, but you boys are going to have a chance, [and] we going to devote the rest of our lives to you boys,’” he recalled. “It was their devotion, their love, their dedication to raising us right that has made the difference, not the words, though the words expressed as best they could what they intended to do, their devotion is what mattered.”
Without that devotion, Thomas claimed, these people “become petrified by criticisms” and “fearful of negative attention,” or they “fall prey to the enchanting siren songs of flattery,” or “enticed by access to things that were previously unavailable to them.” The result is a personal shift away from their principles. “They recast themselves as institutionalists, pragmatists, or thoughtful moderates, all as a way of justifying their failures to themselves, their consciences and their country,” Thomas claimed. It is hard not to read this line as a jab at some of his Supreme Court colleagues over the years, as well as a strong dose of self-promotion.
“Since Wilson’s presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life,” Thomas continued. “It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”
In reality, the Progressive era emerged in the 1890s from the corruption and excesses of the Gilded Age. A broad range of activists, journalists, legislators, and judges challenged the societal ills that had emerged from the nation’s rapid industrialization. Arrayed against them were corrupt party machines in the big cities and corporate tycoons that had concentrated wealth in the form of trusts and monopolies. Progressivism consisted of multiple movements, some overlapping and some not. To say that progressives in general sought to lay out a “new set of first principles” that would replace the Declaration’s principles is baseless.
So why is Thomas so fixated on Wilson? The early-twentieth-century president is an omnipresent target for criticism by modern conservatives. An elitist academic from the Northeast, he oversaw the creation of the Federal Reserve system and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as the passage of stronger antitrust laws and the first federal ban on child labor. His progressive platform played a major role in developing the administrative and regulatory structures that many conservatives despise.
I bring all of this up not to defend Wilson himself, but to point out the importance of getting history correct. From Thomas’s flawed Wilsonian premise, his errors only compound upon themselves. Here, for example, is how the justice describes the origins of progressivism:
This is pure nonsense in multiple ways. American progressivism emerged organically from social movements that targeted the ills of late-nineteenth-century American life. Good-government activists like Robert LaFollette and Lincoln Steffens exposed local corruption and promoted the secret ballot and primary elections. Ida Tarbell, William Hard, and other muckrakers exposed the oligarchical abuses of monopolies like Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. Trustbusters ranged from Louis Brandeis and William Jennings Bryan to William Howard Taft.
No; American writers have hitherto taken no very important part in the advancement of this science. It has found its doctors in Europe. It is not of our making; it is a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle. It employs only foreign tongues; it utters none but what are to our minds alien ideas. Its aims, its examples, its conditions, are almost exclusively grounded in the histories of foreign races, in the precedents of foreign systems, in the lessons of foreign revolutions. It has been developed by French and German professors, and is consequently in all parts adapted to the needs of a compact state, and made to fit highly centralized forms of government; whereas, to answer our purposes, it must be adapted, not to a simple and compact, but to a complex and multiform state, and made to fit highly decentralized forms of government.
I point this out to defend neither Wilson’s elitism nor his overall character. I do so because textual accuracy and historical fidelity are important qualities in any public official. They are especially important for a Supreme Court justice who claims to be able to infer the original public meaning of the Constitution from a broad range of historical sources. If this is Thomas’s attempt at historical analysis, it is woefully lacking.
It must also be emphasized that people’s views change over time. (The justice is well aware of this phenomenon, since he was a leftist in college.) Thomas chided Wilson for describing the Prussian system of administration as “nearly perfect,” using that comment to link progressivism to the European world wars. What he conveniently omitted is that Wilson went to war with that Prussian system in 1917 and ultimately sought to overthrow it. In his joint address to Congress on the eve of war, Wilson declared that “Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our friend.” Wilson instead called, somewhat aspirationally, “for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included.”
These linkages are achieved by conflating any European-based political movement as “progressivism,” no matter its intellectual origins, ideological stances, or practical workings. I suspect that he may have wanted to use socialism as the buzzword, but even he could not reconcile Wilson’s worldview with Marxism. “Fascism—which, after all, was a national socialism—triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions,” Thomas nonetheless claimed. In reality, fascism was avowedly anti-Marxist and anti-socialist, and the Nazi Party’s claims to “national socialism” were a branding strategy, not one of its bona fide ideological tenet. (To attribute “socialism” to the Nazis in this fashion is the hallmark of the uninformed or the mendacious.)
In the real world, people are capable of drawing upon the Declaration for inspiration without veering into reductive hagiography. One can embrace the notion that “all men are created equal” and draw upon some of the Declaration’s ideals while disagreeing with some of its complaints—for example, that King George III was trying to incite slave revolts. Even the Framers did not claim to get everything right from the start. When they scrapped the Articles of Confederation in favor of the Constitution, they explained in the preamble that it was to bring about a “more perfect union,” not a “perfect one.” By forbidding slavery’s expansion in the Northwest Territories and setting an expiration date for the slave trade, they originally intended for the institution to fade away. They had faith, in other words, in future generations’ ability to grow and improve—or, one might say, to progress.
The only ones who really lost out were America’s wealthiest citizens, who had to give up their plutocratic control over government. In our current revival of the Gilded Age, they now hope to restore it with Thomas’s help. I found it almost amusing when Thomas castigated others for “fall[ing] prey to the enchanting siren songs of flattery” and being “enticed by access to things that were previously unavailable to them” when arriving in Washington, D.C.
“My wife Virginia and I have many wonderful friends and acquaintances here, and it is so special to have our dear friends Harlan and Kathy Crow join us today,” Thomas had told the audience at the start of his speech, referring to the GOP megadonor who spent the last 20 years gracing Thomas with fancy vacations, personal gifts, and other forms of largesse that went unreported on public-disclosure forms. Among them were luxury yacht trips, more than $100,000 for a portrait of Thomas at Yale Law School, starting funds for Ginni Thomas’s political organization, and much more. No wonder the justice prefers the Gilded Age.
Hence then, the article about clarence thomas can t get american history right was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Clarence Thomas Can’t Get American History Right )
Also on site :