American Academy of Political and Social Science

National Unity and National Ethics Author(s): Walter G. Muelder Reviewed work(s): Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 244, Controlling Group Prejudice (Mar., 1946), pp. 10-18 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social Science Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1024560 . Accessed: 06/02/2012 15:59
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National Unity and National Ethics

By WALTER G. MUELDER

HE sense of national unity is a natural accompaniment of patriotic zeal in wartime. Slogans of solidarity are freighted with ethical valuations reflecting the social ideals of the people. In America these ideals have a deep rootage in the past. They constitute what has been called the American creed and make up the ethical voice of the Nation in its heroic moments. Religious sanctions are readily marshaled to support the ideals of national unity. After the storm of battle the democratic dream tends to fade in the light of common day, leaving the people without great dramatic national objectives, and revealing the conflicts of social purpose in the social will. The great need of the Nation is to affirm a unity of democratic values which will canalize the social energy in constructive procedures and which will resolve group conflict and overcome group prejudice.

THE

ON FOCUS

NATIONAL UNITY IN WARTIME

The prosecution of the war effort in response to the external threat to the national community solidified the people to a marked degree in a temporary unity. There were many appeals to unity: laying aside partisan politics; finding the common "I am an American" principle amid the numerous minority elements of the Nation; forgetting the class struggle on the production lines and submitting to a "no-strike pledge"; accepting the egalitarian procedures of rationing and priorities; working side by side with persons of other races in new places and new jobs; building a united morale in the armed forces; and establishing interfaith community among Jews, Protestants, and Catholics. The rallying cry was the
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common social purpose and the dominant American ideals. Ethically they expressed their worthiness to be chosen and the acceptance of citizen responsibility for their execution. "To win the war" meant everything from the munitions plant and the war-bond counter to Civilian Defense and the beachheads of Iwo Jima and Normandy. Psychologically and ethically the basis of cooperation was the common perception of interdependence,of mutual need, of sharing a common danger and a common hope. Patriotic zeal was organized into a positive psychological and ethical attack on the enemies of American ideals. Hitler and Hirohito were the symbols and the very embodimentsof racism, of antidemocracy, of hatred for personal rights, of subjugation of religious and cultural liberty, of suppression of free labor, of militarism-in short, of all totalitarian threats to individuality and common humanity. War against the Axis served to place behind the ethics of the "Americandream" the propulsive power of nationalism. The uttermost in human self-sacrifice was linked to consciousness of the highest social values. But the unity movements and slogans of the "duration"were not only stimulated by catastrophic threats from abroad, they were stimulated by crises and divisions at home. "Total" war heightens and exaggerates all social problemsand tensions, makes for stereotyped thinking and scapegoating, and tempts men to exalt the procedures of violence in attempts to overcome conflict. More than a hundred thousand were deported from Japanese-Americans their homes and relocated; there were serious race riots.in many parts of the Nation; there were innumerableclashes

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among white and non-Caucasian workers; there were countless minor scrapes in schools and on playgrounds; there was a rising tide of anti-Semitism; bigotry was accentuated; anti-Catholicism was promoted; discriminationwas practiced in the armed forces; labor felt that it was hamstrung by a no-strike pledge, and waited for the termination of war to renew its demands; black-market practices stirred divisive resentments; and soldiers were propagandizedagainst organized labor with its high wages. Thus the war abroad had its counterpart in the civil struggle at home. To meet the crisis, civic and national unity movements were promoted on every side. The unity programs were heavily weighted with ethical judgments. America fights her wars with a moral passion which makes her patriotism almost indistinguishable from religion. As in the last war America fought "to make the world safe for democracy," so in this war she fought to make the Four Freedoms secure everywhere in the world. Statesmen affirmed the following: to give "to decent people everywhere a better chance to live and prosper in security and in freedom and in faith"; "to uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God"; "to destroy the world-wide force of ruthless conquest and brutal enslavement"; to preserve "this new world love of education and dignity of the common man"; to abolish "discrimination between peoples because of their race, creed or color"; to repudiate the "monstrous philosophy of superior race and conquest by force"; to embrace "loyally the basic principles of peaceful processes"; to defend "free schools"; and to realize "faith in life, liberty, independence and religious freedom." These ideals were generally summarizedin the Four Freedoms, as the President formulated them: "not only freedomof speech,

freedom to worship God each in his own way, but freedom from want and freedom from fear as well." These war ideals were presented not only as lofty traditions,but as realizable now and as having the immemorialsanction of the Christian faith. And if the churches did not agree that the war was "holy," they emphasized that it was "just." After detailing the Four Freedoms the President added: "That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation." "There must be no compromise between justice and injustice; no yielding to expediency; no swerving from the great human rights and liberties established by the Atlantic Charter itself." All these freedoms are "a part of the whole freedom for which we strive." Other leaders said that we are "one in the prayer for the victory of the principles of Christian civilization." Before us lies "the great constructive task of building human freedom and Christian morality on firmer and broader foundations than ever before." In this task the voice of the United States is to express the aspirations of mankind as it goes forward to its destiny. "The soul of that destiny is a maximum freedom of the human spirit."
ETHICALASPECTS OF AMERICAN NATIONALISM

There could not have been so powerful a social fusion in national ideals had they not already been rooted in the American conscience. From its inception, the national democraticideals have been a secular religion for the masses. Gunnar Myrdal in An American Dilemma has presented a recent and very persuasive outline of the unity of American ideals and the diversity of American backgroundsand the conflicts of interests, classes, and races. "There is evidently a strong unity in this nation

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THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

and a basic homogeneity and stability in its valuations." 1 Comparedto every other country in Western civilization, the United States "has the most explicitly expressed system of general ideals in reference to human interrelations." 2 This system may be called the American creed; its proportions constitute a group of principles which "ought" to rule. The American creed has been stated in innumerable formulations in clubs, churches, schools, courts, unions, and newspapers. The utterances of World War II leaders, as noted above, assume them-the essential dignity of man, the fundamental equality of all men, their inalienable rights of freedom, justice, opportunity,and self-development. The American creed is a faith in democracy, where democracy expresses an affirmation of an unlimited right of personality to develop a social order for its own realization. The Americannational conscience has engrained in it as one of its basic constituents (along with others not so noble) the divine sanction for the struggle to achieve a positive freedom for all men. Myrdal notes, significantly, that while Americans have been materialistic and property-minded, though many democratic experiments have failed and others are badly compromised, though conservatism has often been in the saddle, "with few exceptions, only the liberals have gone down in history as national heroes."3 In the same way we may note that the Constitution, a conservative document, was acceptable to the states only on condition of a Bill of Rights.
THE AMERICAN CREED

The American social ethos is com1 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper and Bros., 1944), p. 3. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., p. 7.

pounded of elements taken from the French Enlightenment, the English common-law tradition, sectarian Protestantism, the medieval social ethic, Judaism, and the American frontier. This ethos is not precise and easily captured in constitutional law and social institutions; it is essentially dynamic, like religious prophetism. Its spirit is that of a universal democracy, though the very conception of democracy was abhorrent to most of the leaders of the Americanconstitutional period. It is at once a substantive doctrine, a philosophy of procedure, and an ethical aspiration. Because of its rich complexity of motifs, few authors have agreed on an exact formulation of the American creed. The leading principles are human equality, personal equality, free kinship, familial autonomy, equality of opportunity, and social freedom. The chief rights which these principles assure include: food and shelter, growth, health, and reason, conscience and responsibility, private worship and moral decision, social intercourse and leisure, familial life and freedom, justice, education, free inquiry, work, and membership in an all-inclusive community. Not all of these have been explicitly held in all decades since the Revolution, but have come to the fore from time to time as the social conditions evoked their formulation. As a political theory, the democratic philosophy has persistently fostered extension of the suffrage, open political discussion, frequent elections, secret ballots, and representative or parliamentarygovernments. The social rights are peculiarly twentieth-century in their applications. The crux of the democratic problem has often allegedly been the idea of liberty. This has constituted a rather vague ideal, and its meaning has shifted depending on whose liberty is emphasized, the extent of the liberty, and the direction of the liberty. Proponents of

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liberty have not always recognized that liberty is a polar term whose opposite is restraint. Liberty is not the mere absence of restraint, but every liberty involves some restraint on someone and in some regard. Liberty lives on restraint as well as existing in resistance to it. The problem of freedom becomes: What combination of restraints and liberties constitute the end and the means of true personal living? The notion of liberty in America has consistently been referred to the notion of egalitarian justice, so that it has always been enlivened at the heart of its ethos (though constantly violated in practice) by ethical universalism. Today, official American Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism support social democracy. The Judaeo-Christian ethic from the most ancient times contained elements of humanitarianism and equalitarianism which have reappeared in American national culture. In New England it fell to the Federal Theologians to work out a cosmic constitutionalism which formed the background of political theory. In all the colonies, lower-class Protestant sects supplied the proximate causes for much democratic ideology. As one writer says, "Democracy was envisaged in religious terms long before it assumed a political terminology."" To be sure, religious leaders and institutions have often been reactionary and antidemocratic in the course of the Nation's life; and yet there has been an overwhelming conviction among the masses of Jews and Christians that democracy is the only real political expression of Christianity. It is of the greatest significance that each outstanding form of religion in America today wishes to prove that our democratic ethos has roots in its tradition or at least has similarities to its highest form
4 E. S. Bates, American Faith (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1940), p. 9.

of social ethic. Today, on many of the great social issues-race relations, collective bargaining, civil liberties, social security, the poll tax, and world orderthe great faiths stand shoulder to shoulder. Despite serious sectarian differences, despite widespread bigotry and anti-Semitism, despite much anti-Catholicism, there is a growing moral community and a mutually enriching fellowship among Christians and Jews. Thus the American creed has religious roots and religious sanction. The great impression given to the outside world in the nineteenth century was that America was nationally dedicated to be the asylum of the world's needy and oppressed. However much her internal life may have contradicted the sentiment in detail, it was an accurate ascription which was engraved on the Statue of Liberty when it was presented to the United States by France: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses Yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore Send these, the homeless,tempest-tostto me I lift my lamp beside the goldendoor.
NATIONALISM AS AN AID AND A THREAT TO SPIRITUAL UNITY

It is generally recognized that nationalism may represent a constructive force in the social process moving towards unity, or a destructive force making for social disintegration by repressive measures at home and by inhibiting growth towards normal internationalism. Nationalism tends to subordinate all subgroups within the nation to the unity of the whole by an appeal to loyalty and by canalizing social energy around a national ideal. The drive for conformity may destroy the civil, social, and economic rights of

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THE. ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

minorities. Nationalism tends also to subordinate the universal international goal to itself. Domestically, nationalism presents the possible threat of totalitarian statism. Internationally, the exaltation of national sovereignty may entail cultural and economic isolationism and the erection of great barriers to world political co-operation and world government. Such foreign policies determine the quality of internal national ethics. When the nation saturates its citizens with the ideology that it possesses superlative comparative merit among nations, it prevents the pursuit of the good both at home and abroad. But further, when special interests in the state identify their particular aims with the national goal, and are able to delude the general public into thinking that a so-called "American way" is the nation's and hence the world's superlative good, then nationalism has become dangerous indeed. Constructively, national loyalty may mean an enlargement of conscience and a vision of greater social good than a narrowerview would provide. Localism, provincialism, sectionalism, are often successfully transcended by an appeal to the nation. An enlarged area of responsibility is thus achieved. Ultimate sacrifices for the general good mean oftentimes a genuine expansion of personality. Action on the national level for the total group gives the ordinary American an opportunity to follow higher ideals and to practice more responsible democracy than individual action permits. Acting alone, a person, a business, or a union finds it difficult to withstand the pressuresof economic and social forces making for segregation and discrimination on the basis of race, creed, or national origin; but by attacking the problem everywhere at once, it is possible to minimize the difficulties involved in trying to eliminate discrimination piecemeal. One way of ap-

proaching this problem is through noting the effort to bring the American creed as recorded in the Bill of Rights up to date.
EVOLUTION OF THE AMERICAN OF RIGHTS BILL

The term "Bill of Rights" refers here not only to the first ten amendments to the Constitution but also to those rights which as time has elapsed have been emphasized as of basic importance. This conception is in harmony with the Ninth Amendment, which recognizes that the Constitution does not list all individual rights: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." In the early development of the American Nation the conception of natural rights, was very influential, and, under the influence of the cosmopolitanism of the age of the Enlightenment, extended the rights guaranteed in the Constitution to all persons within the state's jurisdiction. These included freedom of religion, speech, and the press, the right of assembly and petition, security of persons and property, due process of law, impartial jury trial, freedom from excessive bail and punishment, and the like. As the nineteenth century developed, Americans gave themselves to much individual freedom. They took freedom of enterprise for granted, and regarded laissez faire individualism as a natural right. The state was regarded as the guardian of individual liberty, the policeman of the market place of self-interest and free contract. But with the advent of industrial cities and the closing of the frontier, the so-called economic or social rights have gradually become componentparts of what is held to be the American standard of living, itself regarded as a right. Such ideals

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include minimum educational, recreational, social security, and labor standards. To clarify this body of ideals is one of the primary tasks of contemporary America. Actually, there is an intense rivalry among the plural "American ways," with a corresponding confusion among economic ideals. But from out of the ideological confusion there is gradually emerging a new canon of the American way. This new canon identifies "liberty" less with "rugged individualism" and more with the demand for freedom from want and fear. There is a social-welfare notion of our "inalienable rights" coming into general acceptation. Surrounded as it is by tension and conflict, resistance and militancy, vituperation and class consciousness, the emergence of the new canon can hardly be regarded as stated in its final form. The essence of the creed, however, is well illustrated in the "New Bill of Rights" formulatedby the National Resources Planning Board, which this board regarded as a guide to postwar national policies: 1. The right to work,usefully and creayears; tively throughthe productive 2. The right to fair pay, adequate to commandthe necessitiesand amenitiesof life in exchangefor work,ideas, thrift and other socially valuableservice; 3. The right to adequatefood, clothing, shelter and medicalcare; 4. The right to security, with freedom from fear of old age, want, dependency, and accident; sickness,unemployment 5. The right to live in a system of free labor, irenterprise,free from compulsory public responsible private power, arbitrary monopolies; authorityand unregulated 6. The right to come and go, to speak or to be silent, free from the spyings of secret politicalpolice; 7. The right to equalitybefore the law, with equal access to justice in fact; 8. The right to education,for work, for

citizenshipand for personal growth and happiness; 9. The right to rest, recreationand adto enjoy life and venture,the opportunity take part in an advancingcivilization.
NATIONAL ETHICS AND ECONOMICS

The "New Bill of Rights" just listed has had wide appeal. In it the "American dream" has become a determination to make a mass-productioneconomy the servant of all the people. "The responsibility with which we are all charged," says one leader, "requires that we plan for broad economic and social development." Another has held that complete victory would not be won until "there is a full and increasing use of the world's resources to lift living standards from one end of this planet
to the other. .
.

. A world at work at

decent wages is a world of economic stability. Idleness is the greatest of all threats to confidence." In discussing this task, passing reference has usually been made to the belief that our system of "free" or "private enterprise" could be made to accomplish these great objectives. Professional industrial leaders are always certain to insist that what America was fighting for was the "fifth" freedom, free enterprise. However, in many quarters it is recognized that government may have to enter fields where private finance cannot adequately meet the problems. Although men keep on repeating that "a system of free enterprise is more effective than an 'order' of concentration camps," and although they affirm faith that "the vitality, strength, and adaptability of a social order built on freedom and individual responsibility will again triumph," it would seem that the evolution of American social purposes has now reached a place where extensive modifications in the free enterprisesystem are inevitable. The determination to meet basic human

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needs is bound to transcend any defense which the "few" make against submitting to the "many." There is a serious clash of ideals in the socioeconomic order involving conflicts in social purposes and social procedures. The national objectives of the American Federation of Labor, the National Association of Manufacturers, the farm bloc, the Farmers Union, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the taxpayers' associations, and the Socialist Party, are exceedingly diverse. On every hand, the national unity is threatened by pressure groups who either do not think in terms of the total social good or who identify the national cause with their special interests. Group co-operation for national ends in a growing democracy would seem to require social changes in the direction of greater equality in the distribution of wealth and income, reducing the barriers to equal educational opportunity, exercising social control to the extent of keeping the "game open to all," developing a process of continuous education for a system of common ideas in line with the democratic dream, and improving the technique and methods of reconciling sharp differences of opinion. The Nation is in desperate need to shift its attention from values the pursuit of which is divisive to values the pursuit of which is communitarian. In the midst of the complexity of technical interrelatedness and in the midst of diversity of ethical standards and interests, it now appears almost obvious that the social order must major in democratic planning. There can be no unity unless a majority, at least, are loyal to methods devoted to the social welfare of the whole. Education for the modificationof centrifugal ideals must be replaced by education concretely emphasizing unifying values. The preponderance of social discus-

sion and public debate leads to the conclusion that in the twentieth century the idea of liberty has become a philosophy of positive social freedom, with the state exercising a constructive responsibility in the achievement of the common welfare.
DEMOCRACY AND RACIAL MINORITIES

Rightly conceived, democracyis made to order to solve the problems of minorities. No state is truly democratic if it pretends to reconcile any oppression of. minorities under a democratic constitution and government. American democracy received a devastating blow through its treatment of JapaneseAmericansduring the war. The idea of punishment only for individual behavior, which is basic to all systems of civilized law, was lost in a terribly casual manner. The Supreme Court seems to have expanded military discretion far beyond the limit of tolerance in a democratic society. Professor Eugene V. Rostov says: rests on The Japaneseexclusion program five propositionsof the utmost potential menace: (1) protectivecustody,extending over three or four years, is a permitted in the UnitedStates; form of imprisonment (2) political opinions, not criminalacts, may containenoughclearand presentdan(3) men, ger to justify suchimprisonment; women, and children of a given ethnic and residentaliens, group,both Americans can be presumedto possess the kind of dangerousideas which require their imprisonment;(4) in time of war or emergency the military . . . can decide what po-

liticalopinions require imprisonment ... ; and (5) the decisionof the militarycan be carried on without indictment, trial, examinationjury, the confrontationof witnesses, counsel for defense, the privilege or any of the against self-incrimination, safeguardsof the Bill of Rights.5
5 Eugene V. Rostov, "The Japanese-American Cases-A Disaster," Yale Law Review, 54 (June 1945), 532.

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achieved in theory and in practice while America was still a colonial region. Even so, sectarian passions were reflected in the American doctrine of the separation of church and state and in the separation (for all practical purposes) of religion and the public school. Despite great improvementin interfaith and interdenominational relations, the fundamental religious diversities are still rampant in local communities throughout the land. The local disunity and the sectarian rivalry stand in sharp contrast to the solidarity and mutual understanding at the solution is not effectuated. . ... This the national level among the great anachronism constitutesthe contemporary faiths. In facing the problems of naboth to Negroesand to whites.6 "problem" tionalism, racism, labor-managementreTo meet this problem the Nation lations, minorities' rights, and civil libmust make an all-out or total effort in- erty, the Jews, the Catholics, and the volving a thoroughgoing educational Protestants have prepared official moral program, a comprehensive program of pronouncementswhich are entirely conFederal protection of jobs as in the sistent and coherent with one another. Committee on Fair Employment Prac- There exists a growing moral commutice, a basic housing reform movement, nity among the leadership, prompted a vigorous political or civil rights pro- into expressionby the threat of the comgram, and an intensive social and re- mon enemies of totalitarianism and ligious program. Since the problems racism. The problem today is to overare so complex, the solution must be come prejudice and misunderstandingin the local parish. comprehensive and fundamental. How action by the Federal GovernA healthy national unity has much to ment can implement individual ethical gain from the growing ecumenicity in ideals has been described above. the Protestant churches and from the gradual acceptance of a social creed. NATIONAL UNITY AND RELIGIOUS Protestantism is a special example in TOLERATION religion of the dilemma which all AmeriWe have rapidly surveyed several cans experience on the racial question, areas of group tension within the nathe dilemma of having solved a probtion from an ethical perspective. One lem in principle but violating it in instiof the greatest sources of prejudice and tutional practice and folkways. Protgroup conflict still to be mentioned and estantism is fundamentally beset by a appraised is religion. Fortunately for guilty conscience over its sectarianism. American life, the great wars of re- The "broken Body of Christ" is an ligion had already worn themselves out obvious spiritual scandal. Christ is the before the period of the formation of symbol of unity and reconciliation, not our national state. Some degree of of division and hatred. On its conreligious toleration had already been structive side, the sense of guilt and 6 G. Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New shame is making for humility and toleraYork: Harper and Bros., 1944), Vol. I, p. 24. tion. It is making for the quest for

This is a threat to society and to all men. What the Japanese-Americans have had to endure has become in many respects the common lot of innumerable Negroes in the United States. Gunnar Myrdal notes the terrible gap which exists between ideal and practice with respect to Negroes: From the point of view of the American Creed the status accordedthe Negro in America represents nothing more and nothing less than a century-longlag in public morals. In principle the Negro problemwas settled long ago; in practice

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unity amid the anarchy of particularism. What is now a problem of concrete spiritual unity for Protestants is also becoming a problem for all faiths which adhere to an ethical mponotheism. From the standpoint of importance for national unity, the emergence of official social creeds in the various denominations and in the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America is hard to overestimate. Since 1908 the American creed in its social and economic aspects has become official in the greater denominations of the United States. The social creeds of Protestants, like those of Catholics and Jews, provide today a substantial base on which to build bridges from group to group who are in conflict. But what we have described as an emergent social creed is not yet char-

acteristic of popular American Christianity. The clash of absolute claims, universal and unchangeable, has made for skepticism. Much of the moral confusion of American life and much of the ethical relativism roots in the mutual cancellation of contradictory "divine" commands. Where a possible integral human experience,mature and balanced, has been voided by religious bigotry, a spiritual vacuum is created and the excesses of secularism,nationalism,racism, and class antagonisms enter in. Today the public school attempts, with indifferent application and success, to bring a unity under the banner of Americanism, where it cannot do so on religious grounds. The American creed of the public school tends to be a secular version of Judaeo-Christiansocial ideals in terms of an emerging national culture.

Walter G. Muelder, Ph.D., is dean and professor of social ethics at Boston University School of Theology. He has taught philosophy at Berea College and was professor of Christian theology and Christian ethics at the Graduate School of Religion of the University of Southern California from 1940 to 1945. During the war he was active in community service in behalf of civil liberties, interracial justice, civic unity, and interfaith understanding. With Laurence Sears he is co-author of The Development of American Philosophy, and is a contributor to numerous philosophical and theological journals.